feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 8 recommended citation fricker, miranda. 2018. “epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 8. 2018 epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation — afterword miranda fricker the graduate center, city university of new york mfricker@gc.cuny.edu fricker – epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation — afterword miranda fricker abstract the notion of recognition is an ethically potent resource for understanding human relational needs; and its negative counterpart, misrecognition, an equally potent resource for critique. axel honneth’s rich account focuses our attention on recognition’s role in securing basic self-confidence, moral self-respect, and selfesteem. with these loci of recognition in place, we are enabled to raise the intriguing question whether each of these may be extended to apply specifically to the epistemic dimension of our agency and selfhood. might we talk intelligibly— while staying in tune with honneth’s concepts and their hegelian key—of a generic idea of epistemic recognition? such an idea might itself be seen to apply at the same three levels to indicate: first, basic epistemic self-confidence; second, our status as epistemically responsible; and third, a certain epistemic self-esteem that reflects the epistemic esteem we receive from others. the papers in this volume surely sound a chord in the affirmative, and together they steer us towards a multifaceted conception of how epistemic injustice is related to epistemic misrecognition, and indeed how we might construe a positive relation of epistemic recognition. keywords: axel honneth, recognition, misrecognition, epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice the notion of recognition is a multifaceted and ethically potent resource for understanding certain psychologically and morally fundamental needs. in axel honneth’s (1996) influential and philosophically rich treatment of the notion we find recognition operating in three dimensions: it names what we need from others in our ongoing struggle to psychologically differentiate ourselves and maintain a secure and confident sense of self; it names what we need from others in order to be able to respect ourselves as moral subjects, essentially as a reflection of the moral respect we receive from others; and it names the esteem we need from others in order to sustain our self-esteem in respect of some aspect of our specific mode of self-realization. the recognition model represents human beings as feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 differentiating and valuing themselves essentially in relation to others, and when that mode of relating affirms our sense of self appropriately we have recognition. with these ideas of psychological and ethical recognition in place regarding basic self-confidence, moral self-respect, and self-esteem, we can raise the intriguing question whether each of these may be extended to apply specifically to the epistemic dimension of our agency and selfhood. might we talk intelligibly— while staying in tune with honneth’s concepts and their hegelian key—of a generic idea of epistemic recognition? such an idea might itself be seen to apply at the same three levels so that it may indicate, first, basic epistemic self-confidence; second, our status as epistemically responsible; and third, a certain epistemic self-esteem that reflects the epistemic esteem we receive from others. the papers in this issue surely sound a chord in the affirmative. but as a short epilogue to reading them, we might consider the general form of the question from, as ever, the point of view of the negative: misrecognition. might we conceive of epistemic injustice, whether testimonial or hermeneutical, as a kind of epistemic misrecognition?1 a particularly fertile patch for cultivating this general idea is chapter 6 of honneth’s (1996) the struggle for recognition, in which he characterizes the three kinds of misrecognition that correlate with the three dimensions of recognition. there we find, first, a characterization of physical abuse as causing its victim to lose trust in her very self in a manner that “affects all practical dealings with other subjects, even at a physical level” (133). second, he characterizes a lack of respect manifested, for instance, by a denial of rights or by social ostracism as causing a loss of self-respect that is centered on “the feeling of not enjoying the status of a fullfledged partner to interaction, equally endowed with moral rights” (133). and third, he presents cases of the “evaluative degradation” of a person or group’s particular “pattern of self-realization” so that they suffer a loss of self-esteem (134). the first idea would apply at the most basic level of the person’s sense of epistemic selfhood, and so the connection with epistemic injustice requires one to mine down to its deepest possible effects on the subject’s sense of her own epistemic agency, and perhaps to pay attention to those interpersonal relations that normally nurture that agency in order to see how they can fail. paul giladi (2018) has discussed epistemic misrecognition at this level, arguing it amounts to a “discursive abuse.” and in an alternative focus, bringing our attention to the nurturing behavior that builds a person’s fundamental confidence as an epistemic subject in their own right, matthew congdon (2017) has identified the kind of epistemic love that constitutes epistemic recognition of this most basic kind. the second of honneth’s forms of misrecognition is described as the “feeling of not enjoying the status of a full-fledged partner to interaction” is precisely what 1 this connection was first made by jane mcconkey (2004). fricker – epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 someone on the receiving end of a systematic testimonial injustice may experience—their word receives reduced credibility owing to a prejudice that tracks them through different regions of the social world (a “tracker” prejudice, of which perhaps the only examples are identity prejudices, such as those of gender, race, class, religion, sexuality, and so on). such a prejudicial downgrading of one’s word is precisely the sort of thing apt to give someone a palpable sense of possessing less than full-fledged epistemic status—rather, it makes clear that one possesses a baseline status well below that of fellow epistemic agent. whether such an experience triggers a serious loss of epistemic self-respect will surely depend on the circumstances; but in persistent cases where a person has repeated experiences of testimonial injustice, and especially under conditions of oppression, the result might very well be that the person experiences a catastrophic loss of epistemic selfrespect, even if she also knows how wrongfully misjudged she is. if she is a member of a community that provides solidarity, critical understanding, and forms of epistemic respect of its own, then she may be well equipped to resist internalizing the epistemic disrespect directed at her, but others less well supported may be more susceptible to the internal erosion of epistemic morale. the third dimension of misrecognition, which is the loss of self-esteem caused by evaluative degradation of who or what one is—one’s specific “pattern of self-realization”—also finds a clear epistemic counterpart in contexts of epistemic injustice. this time the clearest counterpart is a case of hermeneutical rather than testimonial injustice. imagine someone who is hermeneutically marginalized with respect to a region of their experience—an elderly person, perhaps, who is in a new romantic-sexual relationship and wants to be able to go out on dates with her partner in a normal way but lives in a social context where prevailing attitudes are that it is unbecoming for elderly people to have a sex life. such a person is thereby a member of a hermeneutically marginalized group in respect of sexuality, as members of this group under-contribute to shared concepts, meanings, and interpretive tropes regarding an important area of their experience. she therefore has experiences which, even if she and some of her friends understand them perfectly, she is prevented from rendering fully intelligible across social space to members of other groups and perhaps even some members of her own group too. this is a situation of hermeneutical injustice, and it is a situation in which the elderly person’s understanding of her own pattern of self-realization is unfairly met with disapproving or even disgusted bewilderment. in such a case, there is both misrecognition of a kind that may cause a loss of self-esteem and an epistemic misrecognition of a kind that may cause loss of epistemic self-esteem. again, this woman may be robustly independent-minded and remain entirely unaffected by the disapproving incomprehension of others, but more likely she will suffer somewhat from their failure to make proper sense of her behavior and feel unduly insecure in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 her own judgment of the situation. the lack of epistemic esteem afforded by others may corrode her epistemic self-esteem, leaving her questioning her own judgment and epistemic orientation to the world. distinctively epistemic recognition seems to have emerged from these brief reflections as a matter of one’s being neither unfairly underestimated as a giver of knowledge (no testimonial injustice) nor unfairly disadvantaged in one’s ability to share social understandings across social space (no hermeneutical injustice). all well and good, but perhaps there would be something unsatisfying about sticking to an exclusively negative approach? one of the intellectual riches of recognition theory is that it offers something positive—an account of interpersonally generated positive self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, directing our attention to the social relations and arrangements that encourage, nurture, and protect them. accordingly, one of the things we might hope for most of all from bringing ideas of epistemic injustice into conversation with recognition theory is a more positive idea of those practices and ways of relating that really support distinctively epistemic confidence, epistemic self-respect, and epistemic self-esteem. the papers in this issue offer many different insights into the phenomenology of positive epistemic esteem among other things, but i would like to highlight it here and venture a tentative outline characterization: positive epistemic self-esteem might be conceived as a way of relating that is distinctive of epistemic cooperation among people whose baseline conception of each other is that of generic epistemic equal. (i say “generic” to signal that this epistemic egalitarian attitude is entirely compatible with asymmetries of specific epistemic authority such as a knowing of b that b is an expert as regards the matter in hand and so should be deferred to.) the point is really that the spirit of epistemic cooperation generates the special ethos we might describe as that of mutual epistemic recognition. this ethos pervades the everyday interactions of people who look to each other for epistemic goods such as reasons, evidence, information, and social interpretations, and it defines the spirit in which we inquire, debate and discuss together, or simply chat together sharing simple everyday observations. the cooperative ethos of mutual epistemic recognition is a creative resource for many different kinds of epistemic enterprise, from committed factual inquiry, through epistemic playfulness and creativity, through to a person’s innermost flourishing as a matter of personal epistemic affirmation. the positive aspects of epistemic recognition are surely many, various, and precious. references congdon, matthew. 2017. “what’s wrong with epistemic injustice? harm, vice, objectification, misrecognition.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic fricker – epistemic injustice and recognition theory: a new conversation published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 243–253. new york: routledge. giladi, paul. 2018. “epistemic injustice: a role for recognition?” philosophy and social criticism 44 (2): 141–158. honneth, axel. 1996. the struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts. translated by joel anderson. cambridge, ma: mit press. mcconkey, jane. 2004. “knowledge and acknowledgement: ‘epistemic injustice’ as a problem of recognition.” politics 24 (3): 198–205. miranda fricker is presidential professor of philosophy at the graduate center, cuny. her research is primarily in ethics and social epistemology with a special interest in virtue and feminist perspectives. she is the author of epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing; coauthor of reading ethics: selected texts with interactive commentary; and coeditor of a number of edited collections, the most recent of which is the epistemic life of groups: essays in the epistemology of collectives. she was director of the mind association from 2010 to 2015; and currently serves as moral philosopher on the spoliation advisory panel, a uk government body of expert advisers that considers claims concerning loss of cultural property during the nazi era. she is an associate editor of the journal of the american philosophical association; and a fellow of the british academy. knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically: response to panelists feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 9 2016 knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically: response to panelists lorraine code phd dlitt frsc york university, codelb@yorku.ca recommended citation code, lorraine phd dlitt frsc. 2016. "knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically: response to panelists."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 9. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.9. knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically lorraine code by way of background though not by way of dissembling, i have to note that it was difficult to find a publisher for epistemic responsibility in the late 1980s. now, in retrospect, i think some of the difficulties had more to do with state-of-the-art epistemology in anglo-american philosophy than i was then able to recognize. postpositivist epistemologists, working still in the legacy of logical positivism, seem to have found the book’s aspirations to claim a place in that highly respected yet oddly unpopulated field quite simply implausible. unpopulated, i mean to say, by “real” specific knowing subjects and/or multiples thereof, not by practitioners of/in analytic epistemology: they were the puppeteers, the invisible gatekeepers. nor was there widespread tolerance for the idea that knowing could be a communal quest, a social (and latterly a political) project. the sustained abstract individualism that characterized “the knower” served to contain epistemic inquiry within a certain fixed—if tacit—set of assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity. according to the going orthodoxy then, “socializing” it would render its purposes implausibly diffuse. hence, the very idea that knowing could be both a social and an individual project brought with it a heightened fear of descent into a pernicious relativism. symptomatic in this regard is the respect karl popper’s quest for developing an “epistemology without a knowing subject” had garnered (popper 1968). although it makes no sense to offer a mono-causal explanation of its silencing, epistemic responsibility did not fare well in its early days, for reasons that are not easy to discern. they may have to do with the state of the discipline then; they may also have to do with the sex of the putatively responsible knower?1 nonetheless, the book did earn gratifying respect from ernest sosa, then professor of philosophy at brown university, where it was awarded the brown university press first book prize, together with an invitation to teach for one semester at brown. in addition to the pleasure of teaching social epistemology and being part of that department, i was able to affiliate with the pembroke center for teaching and research on women: it was a fine opportunity. now, the book and the issues it engages are claiming renewed attention and interest, to the point where i have even come to like it, and to believe in it myself. the issue now is to determine how anyone can/could respond to such thoughtful and insightful readings of her work as susan dieleman, christine koggel, 1see for example my “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” metaphilosophy 12, nos. 3 & 4 (july/october 1981): 267–276. 1 code: knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically published by scholarship@western, 2016 cathy maloney, and alexis shotwell offer of mine, especially when these readers/writers are so well known to and respected by this responder? is it epistemically irresponsible to embark on such an attempt? can objectivity figure in such an engagement? can this exercise avoid self-referentiality? if the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then does it enhance or detract from the book’s putative standing? these questions hover in the background of what i will say here. one objective truth though, infuses everything: it is that i am so honoured by the very fact of this opportunity to respond; so moved by anna mudde’s orchestration of these readings and by her part in devoting an entire session to epistemic responsibility at cswip 2015, that—among other things—it affirms the wisdom of my refusal to expunge affect from the epistemological repertoire i enlist throughout my thinking and writing. furthermore, being thus honoured restores my belief in the worthiness of a project that was long underor unacknowledged, and often severely criticized, not least by its author. but why should a writer/thinker demur? by way of a second preamble, and germane to what i say here, i borrow from a footnote in susan dieleman’s elegant contribution to this conversation. drawing attention to the putative origins, and the territoriality, of social epistemology, she names alvin goldman as one of its selfproclaimed founders who, in a stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry, does not demur. he observes that thinkers interested in, and credited as principal actors in, this positive project of developing a social epistemology include “himself, steve fuller, c. a. j. coady, edward craig, philip kitcher, margaret gilbert, himself again, himself and some co-authors, and then himself” (dieleman 2016, 2–3, emphasis mine). the citation elicits a chuckle: clearly an ironic chuckle. how could so carefully colonized an area of inquiry find space for serious, constructive readings of works so far removed from its presupposed qualifying regulations, tacit though these may be, and decked out in unisex garb by the inclusion of one woman? so many things come to mind in response to these so fine essays: oddly, for example, before reading christine koggel’s splendid analysis, i had forgotten that kant figured so prominently both in my ‘everyday’ philosophical thinking then, and in writing epistemic responsibility. but christine is right to notice it: i believe, from reading her contribution to this set of papers, that i do have him ever-watchful in the background, so to speak, of how i think. of course, depending on the situatedness of the reader, this fact/admission may push worries about relativism sharply to the fore; but it may also catch the (often silent) connections to epistemic virtue that figure more prominently, both in this book and in my subsequent writings, than i had fully realized. all of it reminds me of how naïve, how wide-eyed despite my already advanced age, i then was. where christine and i part company, perhaps, is that now i rarely think of these and other virtues as individually possessed or enacted; or rather i conceive of them as primarily social-interpersonal, 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 9 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/9 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.9 secondarily ‘individual.’ it is not, i think, a small point. whether these are just factual differences about how we each proceed, or evidence of mere whimsy on my part; or whether they separate our positions radically, i wonder. clearly they are philosophically significant. moreover, i have a certain allergic response to the very idea of “the individual” as a self-contained entity, because i cannot see—in the world even more than in philosophy—how it can function as a categorizing term, recalling as i frequently do anne seller’s statement that “as an isolated individual i often do not know what my experiences are” (seller 1988). a fortiori, so to speak, neither could i know what my responsibilities are, epistemic or other, were i a totally solitary being. as i have noted, sue’s footnote prompts me to begin with an ironic chuckle: himself, himself, himself again!! indeed. there is, it seems, no more to be said: the ramparts are well guarded. and why are (were?) we women so reluctant (many of us) to engage in such self-advertising? a rhetorical question, but not only that: i think of my own modesty, then: my near-shame about epistemic responsibility— both the idea, and the book. it met with such scant praise (and occasional vituperation) as it struggled to find a place as a book. i concluded that there were ample reasons: it just was not good enough. its continued quest for uptake seemed merely to confirm that disdain, even when it won the prize i have mentioned. now, i am gladdened by and pleased with its recent enthusiastic reception in some philosophical situations but more sanguine than i then was about matters of territoriality. there was no easy category, no obvious conceptual space where the book could fit. hence the growth of social epistemology and a fortiori of feminist2 and post-colonial epistemologies have played no small part in its revival/survival, as have renewed and constantly renewing conversations across the hitherto stark analytic/continental divide. by chance rather than by design, i had studied and respected both. yet in the early post-publication period of epistemic responsibility, a seriously troubling constraint was an overwhelming, widespread disdain of “continental” work in analytic circles, of which a serious consequence was its demonstrated power to discredit hermeneutic analyses as philosophically illegitimate contributors to knowledge and understanding. but an equally inhibiting personal-historical constraint came out of the unorthodox character of my graduate studies where, owing to my own situatedness, i was not engaged in the adversarial and other public philosophical practices that seemed to prepare others to enter a highly competitive quest for recognition. perhaps as a consequence of these circumstances, perhaps from a certain unphilosophical personal stubbornness, i was not and am not persuaded—in 2 it is worth noting that i did not write epistemic responsibility as a feminist book: i had no idea there could be such a pursuit as feminist epistemology. 3 code: knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically published by scholarship@western, 2016 response to christine koggel’s challenging response—that relativism is an inevitable consequence of the position i take in epistemic responsibility and, with variations, continue to occupy. i am grateful to christine for struggling as she does with the implications of these improbable positions, and i think now we are not so far apart in our thinking as we once were on these matters. it amounts to a rather feeble rejoinder to say, as i often do, that i mean “relative to certain circumstances, certain sets of beliefs, certain people.” such a move, for many thinkers, simply dodges the issue. does it? my stubbornness does not derive from an intransigent commitment to relativism but from a resistance to the power of absolutism. yet it is possible that my working conception of each amounts merely to a caricature of itself: i often test my philosophical intuitions by trying to imagine how it would be to live the implications of a certain way of thinking, which may make for sloppy philosophy but can, nonetheless, be enlightening. thus tricky in this exchange is our varied response to virtue ethics, and to virtue epistemology. christine is right to note that virtue disappeared (mostly) from my writing and thinking after epistemic responsibility. i have no good explanation for its vanishing: most plausible is the thought that as soon thereafter as what can she know? my thinking shifted from the implicit individualism with which i tended to think of virtues toward an increasingly social approach to most if not all epistemological issues—virtues among them. the distinction is, admittedly, stark and perhaps too swift; but it seems right. still, it is clear that virtues more or less drop out of the picture in my later work, but i think— now tentatively—that in spirit they do persist, if not in the letter. in large part, i venture, we think differently about relativism, heretical as this thought may be: in my view, the caricatures of relativism and its putative consequences in mainstream anglo-american philosophy make of it a demon from which good, responsible knowers must forever flee. for reasons such as these, i tend to distance my thinking from it. yet such distancing may well be a sham, and in this regard as in many others, these essays make me think again about some of my starker views. here i am responding, first of all, to alexis shotwell’s reference to “the possibility for practices of epistemic responsibility to create virtuous epistemic effects beyond what is known (about) or intended by particular agents” (shotwell 2016, 1–2), which i read as a noble aim. it prompts me to think anew about such responsibility’s potential, beyond or away from the backward-looking effects that have been my focus. i like the idea of its being a “generative theory” as it plays out from responsibility to ecological thinking, and i am moving, in consequence of these thoughts, toward a less defensive defense of the oft-maligned conceptual apparatus i enlisted in 1987. in this regard alexis and christine together motivate a productive revisiting of some sedimented ideas that may well have impeded thinking forwardly, so to speak, away from how it is or should have been to how it could be. consequently, i applaud 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 9 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/9 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.9 alexis’s focus on the social imaginary, which does not figure in epistemic responsibility for the too-simple reason that i did not know about it, then. as her quotation from ecological thinking attests, this conceptual resource generates possibilities for filling a conceptual lacuna that has hampered productive being and doing, down on the ground, so to speak, in relation to hiv and aids. while the idea of “changing the social imaginary” (shotwell 2016, 3) as it comes across here is too swift to capture the complexities of such an extended social-political project—it’s not like changing a shirt!—nonetheless this is the generative idea that, in my view, has to be a goal, piece by piece and together, of collective, ongoing responsible knowings across multiple and multiply diverse situations. a larger, theoretical point, then, is that my hope for epistemic responsibility—both the book and the conceptual apparatus—has been that it could contribute a certain epistemic energy to thinking about knowing, such as distanced/after-the-fact (yet indeed highly principled) interventions commonly fail to achieve. and what do these thoughts have to do with “himself”? at a 2008 social epistemology conference in edinburgh, orchestrated and chaired by alvin goldman himself, my paper, “an ecology of epistemic authority” (2011), had a strangely ambiguous, uncomfortable reception. it is not one of my best, but i still find it interesting. yet many conference participants seemed not to know what to do with it: it was in a sense enigmatic, and it sits oddly in episteme. it is unclear whether the unease derives from certain in-group standards of the ethics of writing; the appropriateness of subject matters; the irrelevance of novels, fiction, to thinking about knowledge. i am forcefully reminded of a negative review that voted (successfully) against publishing epistemic responsibility: “‘literizing’ is not theorizing,” the critic pronounced.3 perhaps such thoughts bear upon the apparent unease in edinburgh. the paper’s argument draws extensively on an episode in leo tolstoy’s novel anna karenina, and i ask myself whether this unease attests to a tacit, sedimented “rule” that elaborated examples drawn from literature can draw too much, can signal too soft an epistemic approach in taking their sources from a novel. (is it pertinent that, historically, women have been the principal novel readers; men have read more “serious” things?) i have wondered whether the gender balance on the speakers’ roster and in the episteme volume prepared the way for this odd reception. such speculations are only that; yet sue’s reference to a special feature of my work being “the role of the community in influencing what it means to act in epistemically responsible ways” prompts me to wonder whether in bona fide social epistemology circles there are still implicit limitations to how far it is respectable to stray into “the community,” beyond the sanitized anglo-american 3 i use this expression as the title of my forthcoming contribution to heidi grasswick & nancy mchugh, eds., the power of example, currently in preparation. 5 code: knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically published by scholarship@western, 2016 repertoire. thinking about susan’s speculations about how “the role of the social is different depending on whether it shows up in a reliabilist or a responsibilist framework,” i wonder whether there is an unspoken background assumption to the effect that the “social” is more appropriately evaluated from a reliabilist stance. can a person be reliable without a community? i think the answer could be yes. but can one be responsible without a community? i think not. in some intriguingly derived sense, there are strong connections here to cathy maloney’s observations about “imaginative empathy,” where she cites my conjecture that it “is less about knowing than about believing” (code 2006, 231), parsing it as an understanding across difference that “opens the possibility of advocacy.” germane to this larger argument is her affirmation that such advocacy requires “an open or willing listening of the kind that jay lampert, writing about gadamer’s hermeneutics, refers to when he says that to engage dialogically an interpreter must ‘freely invite aliens into one’s home’” (maloney 2016, 6). her observation and this citation, in large part, capture my frustration in writing epistemic responsibility with the absence, in analytic epistemology, of hermeneutic resources for understanding a wide range of presumably populated epistemic activities. to an extent, “literizing” in some of its forms proffers one such resource, and may disqualify itself as alien in so doing. as cathy rightly insists, a “person who wants to understand across difference cannot do so without opening herself to new possibilities. this involves risk to the knower’s own ways of perceiving and sense of self, but without this open belief of the other, knowledge remains only a monologic repetition of the knower’s own understanding” (maloney 2016, 6). in my view, both then (in 1987) and now, understanding may sometimes require ‘literizing’ if its consequent theorizing is to be good of its kind; if the theorizer is to move responsibly away from, or engage responsibly with, the ‘givenness’ of a stubbornly entrenched social imaginary. this thought is continuous with cathy’s reading of the risk of opening oneself to new possibilities which, in my view, is one of the most vital (indeed risky), and most often ignored or omitted, aspects of trying to know/understand across differences—especially when “a monologic repetition of the knower’s own understanding” consists largely in one-liners, instantaneously produced and rarely contested. i think it is in this regard that alexis shotwell refers to shifts in epistemic practice creating space where “new forms of scientific practice . . . and thus new ontologies” might arise (2016, 3). such, too, is my hope. and for my way of thinking, too, it is vital to bring such renewed/revised epistemic approaches to bear on complex social-political-medical situations and circumstances in their complexity. so i applaud alexis’s bringing these ponderings to bear specifically on the matter of hiv/aids activism, weaving philosophy and “real world” practices together in open spaces—spaces that it opens—removed from yet deeply informed by thinking in the 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 9 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/9 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.9 esoteric spaces to which so much philosophical inquiry continues to confine itself. more globally, if that is the right word, i applaud—as i do every day—the very fact, the existence, of feminist philosophy and of cswip, without which, i venture, epistemically responsible responses to and engagements in “life, the universe, and everything” would be seriously truncated. references code, lorraine. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2011. “an ecology of epistemic authority.” in “social cognitive ecology and its role in social epistemology.” special issue, episteme: a journal of social epistemology 8 (1): 25–37. dieleman, susan. 2016. “responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (2): article 6. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6. koggel, christine m. 2016. “the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (2): article 5. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5. maloney, cathy. 2016. “from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (2): article 7. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7. popper, karl r. 1968. “epistemology without a knowing subject.” in logic, methodology and philosophy of science iii, edited by b. van rootselaar and j. f. staal, 333–373. amsterdam: north-holland publishing. seller, anne. 1988. “realism versus relativism: toward a politically adequate epistemology.” in feminist perspectives in philosophy, edited by morwenna griffiths and margaret whitford. bloomington: indiana university press. shotwell, alexis. 2016. “fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (2): article 8. http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8. lorraine code is distinguished research professor emerita in philosophy at york university in toronto canada, and a fellow of the royal society of canada. she is the author of epistemic responsibility (1987), what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge (1991), and rhetorical spaces: essays on (gendered) locations (1995). in ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location (oxford university press, 2006) she develops an “ecological naturalism,” which draws on 7 code: knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically published by scholarship@western, 2016 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 ecological science where quineans look to cognitive science, as a place—literal and metaphorical—where knowledge is “naturally” made. she is currently working on issues of gendered subjectivity as they bear on testimony, ignorance, and vulnerability, with particular reference to climate-change scepticism. this research is funded by an insight grant from the social science and humanities research council of canada. the project’s title is “manufactured uncertainty and epistemic responsibility: implications for climate-change skepticism.” 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 9 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/9 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.9 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically: response to panelists lorraine code phd dlitt frsc recommended citation knowing responsibly, thinking ecologically: response to panelists fact/value holism, feminist philosophy, and nazi cancer research feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 7 2015 fact/value holism, feminist philosophy, and nazi cancer research sharyn clough oregon state university, sharyn.clough@oregonstate.edu recommended citation clough, sharyn. 2015. "fact/value holism, feminist philosophy, and nazi cancer research. "feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 7. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7. fact/value holism, feminist philosophy, and nazi cancer research1 sharyn clough abstract fact/value holism has become commonplace in philosophy of science, especially in feminist literature. however, that facts are bearers of empirical content, while values are not, remains a firmly-held distinction. i support a more thorough-going holism: both facts and values can function as empirical claims, related in a seamless, semantic web. i address a counterexample from kourany (2010) where facts and values seem importantly discontinuous, namely, the simultaneous support by the nazis of scientifically sound cancer research and morally unsound political policies. i conclude that even by the criteria available at the time, nazi cancer research was empirically weak, and the weaknesses in their research are continuous with their moral failures in just the ways predicted by the holism i support. keywords: fact/value holism, pragmatism, feminism, nazi science introduction fact/value holism in various forms has become an increasingly accepted tenet of philosophy of science, especially in the literature influenced by feminism (e.g., longino 1990; intemann 2001, 2005; douglas 2009; kourany 2010; rolin 2012). it seems almost a truism now to say that facts influence values, and values influence facts, and that recognizing this mutual influence makes for a more sophisticated understanding of the practice of science. however, one (at least) firmly-held distinction between facts and values remains: namely, facts are bearers of empirical content, while values (or some subset of them) are not. even supporters of fact/value holism such as helen longino maintain elements of this distinction in the form of a conceptual separation between cognitive or 1 my thanks to two anonymous referees for their invaluable advice about framing this essay; to eric reddington for his research assistance early on in the project, and the philosophy program at osu for his salary; to jonathan kaplan for comments on earlier drafts; and to alan richardson for making clear at a psa meeting in 2010 that this issue was something i needed to examine. 1 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 epistemic values on the one hand, and non-cognitive or non-epistemic values on the other. in longino’s view, the former, such as the values of accuracy and simplicity, inhabit the empirical realm, while the latter, such as political values including feminism, are relegated to the non-empirical realm (longino 1990). more recently, janet kourany has supported this kind of fact/value distinction in her philosophy of science after feminism (2010; see also kourany 2013). she discusses cases in the history of science where scientists have acquired and accurately assessed descriptive beliefs about the world, but have also held evaluative beliefs that are repugnant and immoral. the best way to address these kinds of moral problems in science she argues, is not to rethink the epistemic weaknesses concerning scientific method, for example, but to inject a new layer of political policy in our science funding, education, and practice, informed by feminist and other values guided by commitment to social justice. because the moral realm is non-empirical, responding to moral problems with fixes aimed at epistemic weaknesses in science, she argues, will miss the point. in the first part of this paper i argue instead that, while there likely are contexts where it makes sense rhetorically to split descriptive from evaluative claims in science, to base the distinction on appeals to empirical content and its presence in the former but not the latter is incoherent and, not coincidentally, antithetical to the very aims of feminist interventions in science that kourany and i share. on the pragmatist view i support and will defend in more detail below, both facts and values are importantly symmetrical at least insofar as both can be expressed as beliefs, the semantic content of which is formed through a practical engagement with the empirical world (clough 2011; 2012; 2013). the practical engagement with the empirical world that forms the semantic content of evaluative beliefs is no different from the practical engagement that forms the content of descriptive beliefs. together, all of our beliefs form and arise from within a holistic web of meaning, to use the quinean metaphor. this symmetry in the genesis of our beliefs provides a symmetry in the route we can take when assessing the accuracy of those beliefs. while all meaningful beliefs arise from some kind of engagement with the world, they do not all have the same degree of empirical support. these differences in support can be used to compare better and worse beliefs, whether sorted as descriptive or evaluative. in the second part of the paper i address one of the most dramatic examples introduced by kourany in support of her fact/value split: the case of german cancer research during the third reich. kourany appeals to the exhaustive research of historians of science like robert proctor (1999) who show that while nazi scientists were promoting unjustified, and morally horrifying evaluative claims about a number of people, including those of jewish “ancestry” (recall that hitler’s criterion for “jewishness” was not practice or confessional standpoint, but was instead traced 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 to family heritage), the nazis were also compiling groundbreaking, well-justified descriptive claims about the causes, treatment, and prevention of cancer. if my holistic view is right, it would seem odd that a group of scientists held a number of descriptive beliefs that arose from robust and reliable engagement with the empirical world, but at the same time held a group of evaluative beliefs, shown to have an extremely weak connection with that same world. while the view i defend does not require accuracy in beliefs, whether descriptive or evaluative, across the board, it does mean that errors are unlikely to be confined to those beliefs usually sorted as evaluative, or, for that matter, to those beliefs usually sorted as descriptive. instead, errors in beliefs tend to affect other nearby beliefs, and the geographical nearness does not reliably track beliefs sorted as evaluative rather than descriptive, or vice-versa. that is, if descriptive and evaluative beliefs are inextricably linked in a web-like fashion, as i think they are, then errors in one kind of belief are bound to affect other kinds of beliefs to which they are related. but this seems not to have been the case with nazi scientists researching cancer. their errors seem to have been confined to the moral realm; their descriptive claims regarding cancer science seem to have been unaffected. this case reveals an inconsistency across the factual and evaluative domain that seems not to be fully explainable by the simple acknowledgement that people are inconsistent in their beliefs, and nazis were people. after examining some of the details of cancer research in the third reich, i show that there is no serious inconsistency after all. even judged by the scientific standards of their time, nazi cancer research was not as empirically strong as it could have been, and in fact, the descriptive failures of nazi cancer research are related to the moral failures of nazis in just the ways we might expect if beliefs are interwoven in web-like fashion. far from being a counterexample to the kind of holism i support, the nazi case helps explain that and how the empirical genesis of all our beliefs, descriptive and evaluative, provides the route we can take when assessing which of those beliefs are well supported by the empirical evidence and which are not. radical fact/value holism a pragmatist reading of donald davidson’s later philosophy of language (e.g., davidson 2001, 2004) provides the inspiration for my argument that both facts and values can be expressed as empirical claims, relevant for and in particular scientific contexts (clough 2012). a pragmatist view of facts and values focuses on the ways that humans interact with each other and their worlds, in particular how we learn and use language. we develop language for expressing descriptive beliefs in the same way that we develop language for expressing evaluative beliefs, that is, by moving in and around our worlds in communication with others. 3 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 consider everyday basic descriptive beliefs expressed as claims, such as “the stove is hot,” “that kid is a biter”; or basic beliefs expressed as claims of a more evaluative sort: “this dog is so good with children,” “maple syrup on waffles is awesome”—we learn the meaning of these descriptive and evaluative claims by attending to the evidence of experience, that is, by attending to patterns in our communication with others about shared experiences in and with the world. learning the meaning of a claim is to learn the circumstances under which it is true, and there is no principled distinction to be made between the way we learn the descriptive circumstances under which it is true that “the stove is hot” and the way we learn the evaluative circumstances under which it is true that “maple syrup on waffles is awesome.” learning to deploy claims of either kind is a mark of successful engagement with and in the world. successfully describing something as hot, or evaluating it as awesome, recognizing when claims about heat and awesomeness are true, requires a broadly empirical process involving the impartial assessment of the relevant evidence. in both cases, the kinds of pattern-detection, evidence collection, and engagement with the world are importantly symmetrical. moving to more complex descriptive claims like “the earth orbits the sun” and more complex evaluative claims like “scientists should be honest about any financial interests that may influence their work,” the learning process involves the same kinds of inferential patterns. we understand the more complex claim about the importance of honesty and science, based on the connections between those complex claims and more basic claims about concrete experiences that, over time, have informed our ideas about “scientists,” “financial conflicts,” and “honesty.” we have learned, by attending to patterns in our communication with others about shared experiences in the world, when we can truthfully evaluate someone or some act as “honest,” just as we have learned when we can truthfully describe someone as a scientist. building connections from these basic claims, the truth or falsity of the evaluative features that make up more complex claims about the importance of honesty in science can be empirically assessed. this is not to claim that such assessment is always practiced, or that it is always straightforward. most adult language-users who are confident in the correct application of the terms “scientist” and “honesty” almost never bother to re-assess the evidence for their complex evaluative claims concerning who or what a scientist is, or what honesty means (though we seldom re-assess our descriptive use of complex terms such as “earth,” “orbit,” and “sun,” either). but at some point they (we) learned how to use claims containing these features by attending to some simple patterns in our communication with parents or teachers about shared experiences of and with the world. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 just as with learning about simple, concrete features of our world, we learn about more complex, abstract features such as honesty by deploying them in claims about our own relationships, with our families and friends, and building inferential associations to more complicated relationships. we improve on our understandings of these features, we fine-tune the objectivity with which we assess claims appealing to these features, as we move around our worlds, communicating with others. or at least we can make these improvements in our assessments. and insofar as this sort of empirical assessment is, in principle, available in the case of complex descriptive claims about the earth orbiting the sun, so too it is, in principle, available in the case of more complex evaluative claims about how scientists ought to be honest concerning their financial conflicts. feminist politics and philosophy of science philosophers of science influenced by feminism have documented the ubiquity of evaluative claims in science, even in our best, most empirically-robust science (e.g., douglas 2009). as longino (1990) reminds us, these evaluations are often implicit and assumed, operating as auxiliary or background assumptions. though of course various descriptions can also play an implicit, auxiliary role. if my version of fact/value holism is right, then evaluative beliefs, like descriptive beliefs, can be more or less implicit, more or less relevant, and more or less well-supported by the evidence of experience. empirically-robust research involves making explicit the auxiliary assumptions at work, both descriptive and evaluative, and making sure that the evidence brought to bear in the research is relevant and impartially assessed (clough 2008). this means that empirically-robust scientific research does not need to be “value-free,” it needs simply (simply!) to be well-supported by an impartial assessment of relevant beliefs, some of which we might sort as evaluative. the main danger to the empirical adequacy of a scientific hypothesis is not evaluative content itself, but the implicit and dogmatic role that this, or any other kind of content plays. elizabeth anderson (2004) provides an excellent account of the dangers of dogmatism in this context. while she focuses on the problem in terms of values rather than facts, cases of dogmatic rejections and affirmations of descriptive claims abound in the history of science. recall arthur eddington’s work to support einstein’s general theory of relativity. eddington set up telescopes at different locations to document any bending of light visible around the sun during the solar eclipse in 1919. only one of those telescopes gave data to support einstein’s theory, the others did not. eddington chose to publicize only the positive observations and championed einstein’s theory on the basis of those observations. though einstein’s view is now well-supported, we would not want to say that this support vindicates eddington’s dogmatism with respect to his treatment of negative results. though it is an on-going challenge, we need to be impartial rather than dogmatic in our 5 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 assessment of the evidence brought to bear on our hypotheses, and this challenge holds whether those hypotheses concern facts or values. the more radical fact/value holism i prescribe has a number of implications for philosophy of science, especially feminist philosophy of science. one is that the best prescription for feminists addressing the problems of sexist and other oppressive features of science is to (radically) expand the territory over which we conceive our scientific, empirical practices to range, with methods that are reflexive and sensitive to the contingency of any and all empirical beliefs, in contexts described as either descriptive or evaluative. empirical beliefs in evaluative contexts include value claims that are well-supported empirically, like (many) feminist claims, as well as those values poorly-supported empirically, like all sexist claims. that sexist claims are poorly supported empirically is part of what makes them sexist. (for a parallel argument concerning racist beliefs, see clough and loges 2008.) while both feminist evaluative claims and nazi evaluative claims arise from experiences in the world, they have differing levels of empirical support—more and less, respectively. this support is based, for example, on better and worse sampling from relevant data, and better and worse generalizations across instances. the empirical strength of feminist approaches, especially when compared to the massive and deadly empirical weakness in the nazi case, needs to be acknowledged. nazis, cancer, and fact/value holism kourany presents the nazi problem in chapter four of philosophy of science after feminism (2010). she begins the book with a devastating catalogue of the ways that science has participated in the oppression of people with marginalized social identities, especially those identified as women. she then proceeds to examine a variety of feminist prescriptions in the philosophy of science literature, and concludes that any responses we feminists make to the moral problems of science cannot be limited to the epistemic realm, that we need to respond by adding new moral and political standards to scientific work, in particular feminist moral and political standards (kourany 2010). according to kourany, the reason we have to add a feminist component—that is, the reason it is not enough simply to judge science according to epistemic standards—is because sometimes even when good epistemic standards are followed, the resulting science can be morally and politically horrifying. kourany offers the nazis’ cancer research programs as an example of work that, while failing on moral and political grounds, “tended… to succeed in fulfilling the epistemic requirements” of science (2010, 88). so, she argues, we need an account of science that can explain/prescribe excellence along both these (separate) axes. accounts of science that only examine epistemic issues will fail to address crucial moral/political issues. in a recent discussion of her book, matthew brown (2013), hugh lacey 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 (2013), and elizabeth potter (2013) each raise concerns, such as worries about the workability of her account for practicing scientists (brown); and about whether dogmatic adherence to values would interfere with science (potter), but, notably, each commentator accepts kourany’s separation of the epistemic from the moral/political realms. recall that for kourany, as with a number of other feminist philosophers of science, facts and values can be distinguished insofar as the former but not the latter are bearers of empirical content. so, on her account, feminist political prescriptions and their nazi rivals arise from a moral context that cannot be adequately adjudicated in the empirical sphere. their strengths and weaknesses, respectively, cannot be addressed adequately, if at all, by their relation to empirical evidence. for kourany it is not surprising, then, that we can have empirically sound science in the service of immoral ends. when one examines the details of nazi cancer research, an examination made easier thanks to proctor’s exhaustive work, two details in particular are startling to the late 20th and early 21st century reader, as both features are empirically supported by contemporary western biomedicine. the first is that the nazis favored cancer prevention and screening over basic research into cures and causes. the second is that the nazis tended to tie the causes of cancer not to genetics, but to diet, occupational hazards, and environmental factors, more generally. however, i argue that despite initial appearances, these are not examples of nazi researchers living up to sound science practices – whether judged by the epistemic standards of our time or even theirs. regarding the first practice—promoting prevention and screening, over basic research—it is worth noting that while this feature of nazi cancer research is consistent with some contemporary practices that have good empirical support, their decision to pursue this path was not the result of epistemically-strong, wellinformed engagements with the empirical world. instead, it was wrapped up in evaluative commitment to anti-semitism. for example, after the enactment of the civil service law in germany, jewish people were no longer allowed to work for the state. proctor reports that “the consequences for cancer research were profound. at berlin’s famous charite hospital cancer institute alone, twelve of thirteen cancer researchers lost their jobs” (proctor 1999, 35). he explains that in the fields of “immunology, histology, and other fields in which jews had been prominent —basic cancer research had suffered a blow from which it would never recover” (p. 36). it turns out then that an important explanation for the nazi shift away from basic cancer research and toward prevention and screening, was not that the nazis were committed to the same empirically-robust methods that (we hope) drive similar decisions today, but that their anti-semitic politics meant that the study of prevention and screening were the only fields left staffed! thus there is no 7 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 surprising inconsistency here between holding beliefs—in this case descriptive beliefs about cancer research priorities—arising from robust and reliable engagement with the empirical world, and holding evaluative beliefs—about the worth of jewish scientists—that can be shown to have an extremely weak connection with that same world. the nazi decision to pursue cancer prevention and screening over basic research into cures was not well supported by a robust and reliable engagement with the empirical world, it was instead a side effect of their anti-semitism. regarding the second case, involving the nazi focus on cancer prevention and the importance that nazis placed on changes in lifestyle, proctor identifies layers of anti-semitism here as well. he argues that the adoption of a healthy lifestyle and diet, and the embrace of nature and the outdoors, was supported by germans identified as “the romantic right,” who contrasted themselves to the “technocratic left,” viewed as jewish. the technocrats were represented by the nazis as embodying the industrialized urban lifestyle viewed to be cancer causing. so once again, anti-semitism rather than sound research methodology fueled the turn towards diet and lifestyle as cancer prevention strategies. proctor provides a similar example in his analysis of the reich anti-cancer committee’s exhaustive cancer registries and statistical analyses aimed at cancer prevention. the epistemic strength of these programs was negatively affected by anti-semitism, and this problem was recognized as a problem by some of the nazis themselves. proctor explains: in 1940, the director of the nuremburg registry noted that the july 25, 1938 ban on jewish physicians’ practicing medicine (except on other jews) had put a crimp in the collection of accurate data. roughly one in eight german physicians was of jewish ancestry, and the massive transfer of patients required by bans seems to have interfered with both patient follow-up and other aspects of statistical monitoring. the nuremburg registry director noted that it would be difficult to continue certain parts of the registry past 1938. (proctor 1999, p. 44; emphasis mine) once again, these are not examples that present problems for the fact/value holism i prescribe. they do not exemplify instances where a robust distinction can be drawn between well-supported descriptive beliefs concerning cancer treatment and prevention, on the one hand, and poorly supported evaluative beliefs concerning the moral worth of people identified as jewish on the other. the epistemic problems in level and kinds of support are inextricably intertwined in a messy web linking beliefs sorted as both descriptive and evaluative. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 the nazi case also helps illustrate that and how it is empirical content that holds the web of belief together. the nazi moral/political commitment to antisemitism itself was of a piece with an empirically unsound set of claims about people of jewish ethnic heritage, and this epistemic carelessness and deadly irresponsibility to empirical evidence in the moral/political realm could not help but negatively affect the empirical strength of all kinds of interconnected beliefs in the descriptive realm. indeed it seems clear that because the empirical weaknesses of the evaluative elements of anti-semitism are inextricably interwoven with the descriptive elements of nazi cancer research, the descriptive elements of the research are empirically weak as well: the prevention and screening programs were not as epistemically-robust as they might have been had they not been tied up in the empirical wasteland of anti-semitism. as the example about the nazi cancer registries illustrates, there was an important continuity between the empiricallyweak moral and political beliefs about the worth of entire groups of humans— identified by their membership into biological kinds for which there was no empirical support— and the empirically-weak approaches to the very descriptive statistical analyses on which nazi epidemiologists prided themselves. in turn, when nazi cancer research was at its empirically strongest, it was not tied to anti-semitism, but was instead inherited from earlier german labor unions and non-nazi socialist policies. again from proctor: the strength of german interest in cancer must be understood in light of the fact that germany by the beginning of the twentieth century was a wealthy, highly industrialized nation with one of the highest cancer rates in the world. german labor unions and socialist parties had begun to emphasize occupational health and safety in the final decades of the previous century, an era of dramatic innovations in social medicine— including the world’s most elaborate social welfare system, launched in 1883 in response to socialist demands. (p. 58) he notes also that german professional societies “were the first to establish informal standards for radiation protection,” for example germany was the first nation to identify lung cancer “as a compensable occupational disease for uranium miners—in 1926” (p. 58). here again there is no inconsistency between reprehensible politics and epistemically robust science. insofar as the science was empirically strong, it was driven by empirically well-supported political interests that remain compelling today. not surprisingly, this etiological focus on environment and lifestyle that nazi scientists inherited from an earlier progressive period sat uncomfortably alongside nazi biological determinism. nazi studies of “jewish” bodily “inferiority” produced 9 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 descriptive inconsistencies and required layers of selective reasoning (p. 61). this is just the kind of sloppy empirical reasoning we’d expect from nazis in those regions of their belief webs concerning descriptive and evaluative beliefs about biology, health, race, blood, disease, and well-being. of course, there were areas of belief about which they were not mistaken—they had practical engagements with the same empirical world in which we all live, they loved their children, they understood gravity. indeed it is their well-informed, empirically robust beliefs, both descriptive and evaluative, in these areas, that provide us with the contrast we can use to identify the areas about which they were mistaken. conclusion looking closer at the details of nazi cancer research reveals that there are important continuities in their scientific and moral failures. what looked on the surface to be surprising empirically-sound research programs involving prevention and screening, were not as empirically sound as they might have been, and important advances in basic research were stymied, all as a result of, and consistent with, empirical weaknesses with respect to descriptive and moral claims about jewish people. in contrast, where nazi cancer research was empirically sound—that is, in terms of an etiological focus on environment and occupational settings—it turns out this wasn’t so much a nazi decision, as it was a carry-over from the strong union activities of an earlier era. when the inertia of this earlier etiological focus collided with the biological determinism of nazi anti-semitism, any empirical strengths of the former were sacrificed on the altar of consistency with the latter. recall that, for kourany, the reason we need to add feminist moral and political standards to existing epistemic standards in science, is because: a) moral and political standards are importantly distinct from epistemic standards, in that only the latter have empirical content; and b) because we have examples like the case of nazi research on cancer that conforms to the epistemic standards, while violating nearly every conceivable feature of the moral/political standards. this case looks to be a violation of the fact/value holism i support. with respect to b) i have argued that a closer examination of the details of nazi cancer research shows a continuity in empirical failures across the board, from science to politics, and so the case does not present a counterexample to the holism i espouse. with respect to a) i have argued that the nazi moral/political commitment to anti-semitism does have empirical content—their anti-semitism involved an empirically unsound set of claims about people of jewish ethnic heritage—and this empirical content shows the route by which we can epistemically assess the nazi’s careless and deadly irresponsibility in the moral/political realm. indeed, the reason we need to include feminist political analyses within scientific research (and to be sure, i agree with kourany that we do), is because unlike nazi 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 politics, feminist moral and political beliefs are informed by the best empirical evidence we have, and where relevant, adding strongly supported empirical beliefs to any given science project can only make that project better. references anderson, elizabeth. 2004. “the uses of value judgments in science.” hypatia 19(1): 1-24. brown, matthew. 2013. “the source and status of values for socially responsible science.” philosophical studies 163: 67-76. davidson, donald. 2001 (1991). “three varieties of knowledge.” reprinted in subjective, intersubjective, objective. oxford: oxford university press. ___. 2004 (1995). “the objectivity of values.” reprinted in problems of rationality. oxford: oxford university press. clough, sharyn. 2013. “pragmatism and embodiment as resources for feminist interventions in science.” contemporary pragmatism 10(2): 121-134. ___. 2012. “the analytic tradition, radical (feminist) interpretation, and the hygiene hypothesis.” in out of the shadows: analytic feminist contributions to traditional philosophy, edited by sharon crasnow and anita superson, 405434. oxford: oxford university press. ___. 2011. “radical interpretation, feminism, and science.” in dialogues with davidson, edited by jeffrey malpas, 405-426. cambridge: mit press. ___. 2008. “solomon’s empirical/non-empirical distinction and the proper place of values in science.” perspectives in science 16(3): 265-279. clough, sharyn and bill loges. 2008. “racist beliefs as objectively false value judgments: a philosophical and social-psychological analysis.” the journal of social philosophy 39(1): 77–95. douglas, heather. 2009. science, policy, and the value-free ideal. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press. intemann, kristen. 2001. “science and values: are value judgments always irrelevant to the justification of scientific claims?” philosophy of science 68 (proceedings): s506-s518. ___. 2005. “feminism, underdetermination, and values in science.” philosophy of science 72(5): 1001-1012 kourany, janet. 2010. philosophy of science after feminism. oxford: oxford university press. ___. 2013. “meeting the challenges to socially responsible science. reply to brown, lacey, and potter.” philosophical studies 163: 93-103. lacey, hugh. 2013. “rehabilitating neutrality.” philosophical studies 163:77-83. 11 clough: fact/value holism published by scholarship@western, 2015 longino, helen. 1990. science as social knowledge. princeton: princeton university press. proctor, robert. 1999. the nazi war on cancer. princeton: princeton university press. rolin, kristina. 2012. “a feminist approach to values in science.” perspectives in science 20(3): 320-330. sharyn clough is a professor of philosophy at oregon state university. she teaches courses in the study of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge. her research examines the complex ways in which science and politics are interwoven, and the notions of objectivity that can be salvaged once this complexity is acknowledged. she is co-director of the phronesis lab where she and her team test philosophical hypotheses (phronesis lab: experiments in engaged ethics). she is the author of beyond epistemology: a pragmatist approach to feminist science studies, and the editor of siblings under the skin: feminism, social justice, and analytic philosophy. in addition she has written a number of essays on science and values for journals such as social science and medicine, studies in the history and philosophy of the biological and biomedical sciences, metascience, perspectives in science, and social philosophy. she is currently writing a book for a general audience on science and politics. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.7 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 fact/value holism, feminist philosophy, and nazi cancer research sharyn clough recommended citation microsoft word 451806-convertdoc.input.439280.twcq4.docx responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 6 2016 responsibilism and the analytic sociological debate in social epistemology susan dieleman university of saskatchewan, scdieleman@gmail.com recommended citation dieleman, susan. 2016. "responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology."feminist philosophy quarterly 2, (2). article 6. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6. responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology susan dieleman women and feminist philosophers (along with other philosophers who inhabit the ‘periphery’ of the discipline) are, unfortunately, quite familiar with the phenomenon of seeing their ideas go unrecognized—or unrecognized until a philosopher whose social identity places them squarely within the center of the discipline voices those same ideas. a careful look at many of the fields of philosophical inquiry is likely to reveal a similar story: the origins of an idea, when they can be traced back to a feminist philosopher or when a woman has contributed in a significant way to that idea, generally go unnoticed, and almost certainly uncited. social epistemology, in this respect, is much like other fields, and is the focus of this paper. i begin by providing an overview of the “state-of-the-field” debate between analytic social epistemology (ase), represented by alvin goldman, and what i will call sociological social epistemology (sse), represented by steve fuller.1 in response to this ongoing debate, this paper has two related and complementary objectives. the first is to show that the debate between analytic and sociological versions of social epistemology is overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account additional positions that are available and, indeed, have been available since social epistemology was (re)introduced in the mid to late 1980s. the second is to uncover and tell a story of how lorraine code’s epistemic responsibility is one such additional position.2 in other words, looking to code's epistemic responsibility reveals the artificiality of the debate between analytic and sociological social epistemologists.3 1 goldman refers to this, perhaps more accurately, as the science-and-technologystudies model (see the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy). 2 i do not want to insinuate that code’s position is the only such position. however, i do make the case that it should be read as a significant contribution to the development of social epistemology, and moreover, that there are valuable resources in epistemic responsibility that both demonstrate that the contemporary ase-sse debate is needlessly superficial, and that are worth incorporating into the ongoing development of social epistemology as a field. 3 though the concept of epistemic responsibility, and the responsibilist perspective developed in epistemic responsibility, continue to be deployed and developed by code (and others), i will focus almost exclusively on the 1989 text. this restricted 1 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 one might object to this project by suggesting that social epistemology’s neglect of women philosophers or of feminist philosophical work is hardly surprising, and that it’s a waste of time and effort to offer this correction, especially since the likely audience for this project is already assured of the feminist roots of these contributions to social epistemology. but i tend to think it is worthwhile to offer careful and detailed explanations of how exactly the stories of our own philosophical histories are mistaken, even if many of us think these mistakes are fairly obvious. one might also worry about the possibility of this project being framed as being about uncovering the feminist roots of social epistemology specifically, since, as code herself notes in rhetorical spaces (1995), she “did not, initially, see the book as feminist, but as an investigation of aspects of knowing integral to everyday cognitive experiences that mainstream epistemologies tended to ignore. [she] was not thinking about experience as gender-inflected, or otherwise politically marked” (10). however, epistemic responsibility, the text, and epistemic responsibility, the concept, have been embraced by the feminist philosophical community as a proto-feminist (if not outright-feminist) contribution to critiques of “justified true belief” orthodoxy. and, even if the text isn’t appropriately classified as feminist, it remains, clearly, an early and sophisticated contribution to the field of social epistemology that ought not to be overlooked, but has been, whatever the reason. 1. the ase-sse debate: an overview the field of social epistemology is often characterized as being divided into two camps, which disagree (to the point of what can only be characterized as “bickering”) about the point or proper object of social epistemology.4 the first camp scope is partly politically motivated; it is to show that a more nuanced position already existed before much of the ase-sse debate. 4 the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy—which, according to a recent article that was making the rounds on facebook, is a place where “the world can go to learn everything that we know to be true” (sonnad 2015)—offers a specific story about the history of the social epistemology that is illuminating here, especially as it’s written by one of its main proponents and self-proclaimed founders of the field, alvin goldman. the first section of that entry provides an historical overview of social epistemology, tracing its roots (aside from some proto-social epistemologists like david hume and thomas reid) to thinkers like thomas kuhn, michel foucault, richard rorty, and proponents of the “strong programme” in the sociology of science. thinkers interested in the positive project of developing a social epistemology include, according to goldman, himself, steve fuller, c. a. j. coady, 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 is what tends to be referred to as “analytic social epistemology” (ase), headed up by alvin goldman, who wrote knowledge in a social world in 1999 and founded the journal episteme: a journal of individual and social epistemology in 2004. goldman’s version of social epistemology is distinguished from sse by its being “veritistic.” as goldman puts it, his epistemology is a “social veritistic epistemology” (1999, 5); it asks, “which practices have a comparably favorable impact on knowledge as contrasted with error and ignorance?” (5). in other words, which social practices lead to “true belief,” where “true” is cast in terms of correspondence (10)? questions capture both the social and veritistic elements that goldman is interested in. they are social because they constitute one “social path or route to knowledge,” and they are veritistic because they are prototypical of “truth-seeking practice” (3). ase’s veritistic element means it more closely resembles traditional epistemology than does sse, but it is differentiated from traditional epistemology by its focus on the social dimensions of epistemic practices. it is social in three specific respects, outlined by goldman in the initial pages of knowledge in a social world (1999). first, it looks specifically at “social paths or routes to knowledge” (4); testimony is a prime example here. second, it “examines the spread of information or misinformation” within a group (4). third, it sometimes looks at the possibility of there being “collective or corporate entities . . . as . . . knowing agents” (4–5).5 the topics he identifies as properly within the scope of social epistemology therefore include testimony, peer disagreement, epistemic relativism, epistemic approaches to democracy, evidence in the law, the epistemology of mass collaboration, and judgment aggregation (goldman 2012). the second camp is what i will call “sociological social epistemology” (sse), headed up by steve fuller. as the author of the 1988 monograph social epistemology, and as the founder of the journal of the same name, fuller claims to be the originator of the field. in the opening lines of social epistemology, he characterizes the field by highlighting its “fundamental question”: how should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each equipped with edward craig, philip kitcher, margaret gilbert, himself again, himself and some coauthors, and then himself. somehow, in the entire entry, the words “feminist” and “feminism” never appear, even though the work of linda martin alcoff and miranda fricker, among others, are covered. i should note, however, that a substantial section of the sep entry on virtue epistemology is dedicated to code’s work on the topic. 5 it is the first of these respects that is of primary interest to goldman. 3 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one another’s activities. (fuller 1988, 3) he later defines social epistemology as a “naturalistic approach to the normative questions surrounding the organization of knowledge processes and products” (fuller 2007, 177). in very general terms, his project is to marry the descriptive work that the sociology of knowledge can do with the normative work that philosophy can do in order to look at how knowledge systems are and should be organized, and how knowledge is and should be distributed. thus, the sociological approach isn’t merely descriptive, on fuller’s account; it also aims to achieve “a kind of optimal division of cognitive labor” (fuller 1988, 3) and is therefore prescriptive as well. this is why fuller identifies a major element of his project as being the concern with “long-term research and education policy, since only these contexts provide systematic opportunities to restructure knowledge production as a whole” (fuller 2012, 270). the difference between determining “abstract definitions and criteria for knowledge” and “arriving at legislation to promote research innovation and curricular reform” is, for fuller, simply a matter of degree (270), and ase fumbles insofar as it ignores the latter to focus only on the former, thinking that the difference between these two tasks is a difference in kind rather than of degree. thus, the starting assumption of the sociological approach differs from the analytic approach in that the former assumes that existing varied knowledge production processes “function optimally to realize some purpose” (fuller 1988, 27). in other words, for the sociological (social) epistemologist, knowledge is everywhere, produced all the time, through various processes, and for various, empirically determinable ends. for the analytic (social) epistemologist, knowledge is rare indeed; and if he “were to learn that most of what passes for ‘knowledge’ was not produced in what he would consider a methodologically sound manner, he would withdraw use of the term in those cases rather than change the definition of knowledge to capture something else that the cases have in common” (fuller 1988, 27). in short, ase begins with a claim about how knowledge is produced (goldman, as we will see, thinks knowledge is produced via reliable processes), and from that claim asks whether there is knowledge, or whether any given belief counts as knowledge. sse, by contrast, begins with the claim that there is knowledge—indeed, there is a great deal of it—and from that claim asks how it was produced and whether it can be produced in better (or worse) ways. this seems to be the signal, but not the only, difference between ase and sse. another related difference between these competitor approaches is that ase largely maintains the traditional focus on individuals as epistemic subjects and interrogates how the fact of their social existence impacts what and how they know. sse rejects the focus on 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 individuals tout court to focus on systems of and policies for knowledge production and distribution instead. these two camps have made a point of distancing themselves from each other; often, their disagreements have taken the form of what one might call “caricature assassination.” for example, fuller has recently written that “the existence of analytic social epistemology shows that even the most irrelevant academic activities can survive as long as they have a critical mass of passably intelligent, self-regulating people who demand relatively few resources to flourish” (fuller 2014, 31). and in a similar vein, goldman has recently written that “if protagonists of the latter-day movements [those identified with sse] marketed their products under the guise of epistemology, they would be imposters. their products are not real epistemology” (goldman 2010, n.p.).6 whereas goldman thinks sse is “veriphobic” and therefore insufficiently epistemological, fuller thinks ase is insufficiently social; the sociological elements that practitioners of ase attend to “are introduced only on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, namely, when the ideal epistemological conditions have failed to be met in concrete cases” (fuller 2002, xvii).7 2. responsibilism and social epistemology for many, the contemporary state of social epistemology is thought to be exhausted by the ase-sse debate. to show that it is not exhausted by these two options requires demonstrating that there are positions available, rightly characterized as social epistemology, that do not commit the sins that each of these two positions accuses the other of committing. i will suggest that we find in epistemic responsibility just such a position. before i look specifically at how it does so, it is important to provide additional context to help make sense of the debate by bringing in virtue epistemology. this additional context will prove helpful in orienting code’s work in relation to the ase-sse debate. insofar as an originary moment can be identified for any field of inquiry, contemporary interest in the intellectual virtues, and in developing a “virtue 6 by way of additional context, this is the end of a larger passage that includes the following: “although these [sse] enquiries examine the social contexts of belief and thought, they generally seek to debunk or reconfigure conventional epistemic concepts rather than illuminate the nature and conditions of epistemic success or failure.” 7 the debate, described thusly, has a ring of the ideal-nonideal theory debate to it. though i think this might be worth pursuing, i cannot do so here. 5 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 epistemology,” can be traced back to the final paragraphs of ernest sosa’s 1980 paper “the raft and the pyramid: coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge.” in those paragraphs, sosa suggests that, with a virtue-based approach, “primary justification would apply to intellectual virtues, to stable dispositions for belief acquisition, through their greater contribution toward getting us to the truth. secondary justification would then attach to particular beliefs in virtue of their source in intellectual virtues or other such justified dispositions” (sosa 1980, 23). he continues—and concludes—by suggesting that “there is reason to think that the most useful and illuminating notion of intellectual virtue will prove broader than our tradition would suggest and must give due weight not only to the subject and his intrinsic nature but also to his environment and to his epistemic community” (23).8 sosa’s position represents a reliabilist approach to virtue epistemology, according to which, “a belief is epistemically justified if and only if it is produced or sustained by a cognitive process that reliably yields truth and avoids error” (sosa 1985, 240). on this account, “an intellectual virtue is a subject-grounded ability to tell truth from error infallibly or at least reliably in a correlated field. to be epistemically justified in believing is to believe out of intellectual virtue” (sosa 1985, 243). the opening paragraphs of “knowledge and intellectual virtue” (1985) make this abundantly clear. he writes, “an intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now” (227). moreover, that virtue is only a virtue insofar as it does so reliably (hence, “reliabilism,” coined by and applied to sosa’s position by code). like sosa (but unlike code), goldman is a reliabilist, and specifically, a process reliabilist, meaning that he thinks “the justificational status of a belief must somehow depend on the way the belief is caused or causally sustained” (2012, 8 it is this “call to action” that code responds to in her “toward a ‘reponsibilist’ epistemology” (1984). the paper opens with the following passage: “the foundationalist pyramid has no ultimate foundations, and the coherentist raft must inevitably find itself adrift. faced with this impasse, epistemologists might well see a potentially fruitful approach in some version of the ‘reliabilism’ proposed in a recent paper as a better route to extablishing conditions of justification for knowledge claims. this would be an account of knowledge and justification in terms of, and based upon, intellectual virtues. such an epistemology would roughly parallel an ethics based upon moral virtues: it would be analogous to such an ethics, but not derivative from it. we have only a preliminary account of the nature of this new approach; one hopes for its amplification in the near future. in the meantime i shall explore some of its implications in the context of my own attempts to develop a theory of epistemic responsibility as a potential new focal point for theory of knowledge” (29). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 n.p.).9 his hypothesis is that “the selection of virtues and vices rests, ultimately, on assessments of reliability” (goldman 1993, 279). however, as we’ve already seen, goldman also emphasizes the social dimensions of epistemology.10 he suggests that “social epistemology is a branch of traditional epistemology that studies epistemic properties of individuals that arise from their relations to others, as well as epistemic properties of groups or social systems” (248). thus, for example, a reliabilism that takes the social dimension seriously would make possible the following sort of claim: “in its simplest form, justificational reliabilism says that a belief is justified if and only if it is produced (and/or sustained) by a reliable beliefforming process or sequence of processes. for a testimonial belief to be justified it suffices that the general process of accepting the reports of others mostly yields truths” (1999, 129). whereas sosa prompted interest in and pursued a reliabilist version of virtue epistemology—a version that is developed by goldman, partly in the direction of a social epistemology—code developed and pursued a responsibilist version of virtue epistemology. guy axtell, in his introduction to knowledge, belief, and character: readings in virtue epistemology (2000), characterizes the difference between these two positions as follows: “those authors oriented towards responsibilism typically do not agree with the ‘consequential’ approach . . . [reliabilists] take to defining the virtues—that is, by their reliable success in producing true belief” (xiv).11 instead, central to responsibilism, where epistemic responsibility is “a central virtue from which other virtues radiate” (44), is the notion that responsibility is an “active, creative . . . endeavor” (51) that makes evaluation of that endeavor possible. thus, the object of praise or blame is different on these two versions of virtue epistemology. according to responsibilism, it is the endeavour itself, the manner in which the task of producing beliefs is carried out, that is evaluated, rather than the consequences of that endeavour. 9 of course, goldman’s process reliabilism has been refined and expanded over the years, typically in response to critics who provide counterexamples to his views. the account here regarding the specifics of goldman’s reliabilism is admittedly superficial, ignoring altogether these refinements and expansions, in order to emphasize the main thrust of his position and show how it differs from code’s responsibilism. 10 more recent work by sosa shows growing interest in these social dimensions. however, his views remain firmly entrenched in the individualistic, reliabilist framework. 11 see also baehr 2006; greco and turri 2015 for helpful overviews of reliabilism and/vs. responsibilism. 7 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 this shift from a focus on the consequences of a reliable belief-forming process to the activity of belief formation requires two related shifts in emphasis: from the knower as passive recorder to active agent, and from faculties for belief formation to habits of belief formation. axtell highlights these two differences between responsibilism and its reliabilist predecessor as follows: code’s book announces a primary interest in the virtues as they relate to active agency, and she defines the intellectual virtues more restrictively, as acquired habits and dispositions; only these, she points out, are the proper object of attributions of praise and blame, not the genetically-endowed ‘faculties’ that the reliabilists would include among the intellectual virtues. (2000, xvii) in short, code’s responsibilism sees knowers as active agents rather than passive subjects, whose epistemic habits and dispositions can be evaluated as virtuous or vicious. as she puts it in “toward a ‘responsibilist’ epistemology” (1984), “it is because of its active, creative nature that human knowledge-seeking endeavour requires evaluation in terms of responsibility” (40).12 though epistemic responsibility is not explicitly a work of social epistemology, the move from reliabilism to responsibilism that it endorses, and the two distinguishing features noted above in particular, bring with them a social dimension. this will mark a significant difference between goldman’s reliabilist social epistemology and code’s responsibilist social epistemology; they will be social in different ways. the specific feature of code’s work that stands out in this regard is the role of the community in influencing what it means to act in epistemically responsible ways. in chapter seven of epistemic responsibility, code draws our attention to the disparity found in the tradition between the moral agent, who is conceived of as a social being, and the epistemic agent, who is conceived of as a solitary being. code, pointing to knowledge (and belief and understanding) as a “commonable commodity”—as the sort of thing we depend on others for—makes the case for seeing human beings as “social creatures as much in knowledge seeking as in moral activity” (1987, 167). thus, the role of the social is different depending on whether it shows up in a reliabilist or a responsibilist framework. in the former, the social plays a purely epistemic role: it is another source of (justified, true) beliefs. in the latter, the social plays a much more involved role; it is a source of 12 this claim is reminiscent of debates regarding free will and moral responsibility: it is the fact that choice is possible that makes it possible to attribute (moral) responsibility. if such choice was lacking, if agents weren’t actively involved in their knowledge practices, then responsibility would be the wrong evaluative category. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 (justified, true) beliefs, but it is also the source of the intellectual virtues that make one a more or less responsible knower. in a philosophical landscape dominated by epistemological debates regarding the meaning and possibility of “justified true belief,” the horizon of which was shaped by propositional, “s knows that p,” knowledge claims, code’s emphasis on the sociality of knowers was indeed radical. thus, as heidi grasswick notes, epistemic responsibility “stood out in 1987 in its recognition of our dependence on the knowledge of others and in its claim that because of such dependence on each other, knowledge production needs to be examined in relation to our moral and political frameworks” (grasswick 2008, 151). only a responsibilist social epistemology would conceive of the social in this way; this element is not present in goldman’s account specifically because it is reliabilist. of course, code herself has advised caution in adopting the view of the knowing subject that she introduces in epistemic responsibility because, as she puts it, she was working from the assumption that subjects had “unmediated access to the ‘stuff’ of which knowledge is made . . . within the social-ecological imaginary of a liberal society where cognitive autonomy is a universal possibility, and the acknowledgment upon which knowledge depends is unfettered by constraints consequent upon asymmetrical distributions of power and privilege” (code 2006, ix). that is, epistemic responsibility was not written with an explicit recognition of the ways that assumptions regarding epistemic abilities and the availability of epistemic resources are unequally distributed, the sort of argument that we find in fricker’s 2007 text epistemic injustice. yet this isn’t entirely true. though code didn’t pay explicit attention to issues of epistemic injustice, her willingness to seriously engage with the work of michel foucault belies an (unacknowledged) appreciation of the role of power in knowledge practices, as well as the possibility of resistance as a form or enactment of epistemic responsibility. she writes, collective endeavour is, increasingly, the most effective mode of resistance in contemporary society. power-knowledge structures constitute people as categories—as homosexuals, women, blacks, mad people—defined and publicly understood according to rigid, stereotyped designations. such people do have the capacity and can develop the power either to fight back together as that category or collectively to work at repudiating the confinement of the categorization and at deconstructing its implications. collective endeavor of this kind can clearly be an exercise in epistemic responsibility. in fact, often, in mass society, it seems to be its most potentially effective manifestation. (code 1987, 244–245) 9 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 this passage reveals an early awareness of the complex interplay between the epistemic agent and her epistemic community. moreover, despite the humble remarks noted earlier, the model of epistemic agents code begins to develop in epistemic responsibility is one that takes seriously both the limitations and the responsibilities of the knowing subject in a particular knowledge context. a fairly explicit statement of this position can be found in the third chapter, "toward a responsibilist epistemology." tucked away in footnote 6, we find the following statement: i, too, advocate a departure from the individualistic tradition, whose subjects are not really selves. in its place though, i advocate an approach to epistemology that recognizes the importance of real human knowing subjects and of the commonality of cognitive endeavour, with the responsibilities that that recognition involves. (code 1987, 38) further on, code writes, "epistemological judgment is not just a matter of assessing individual conduct per se, but of assessing it as a manifestation of justifiable social practices and approaches to inquiry. it is crucial that individuals be recognized as social beings, as members of communities with all the obligations membership entails" (44). this membership is therefore relevant to determinations of epistemic responsibility. though intellectual virtues are possessed by a subject, that subject exists within an epistemic community that impacts how responsible she can be and what shape that responsibility must take. that is, the epistemic community places both constraints on what the putative knower can know (it would be ludicrous to expect someone to know something that has not yet been discovered) and requirements on what the putative knower should know (a responsible knower is virtuous only insofar as her pronouncements take under advisement "state of the art" findings, especially those relevant to her specific role). in the final chapter of epistemic responsibility, code explores the “connections between epistemic responsibility and cognitive interdependence as they are manifested in what hilary putnam aptly calls ‘the division of intellectual labor’” (227). educational systems are explored by code as a site where “the authority of epistemic community manifests itself and the power of received discourse is felt” (247). she argues, it would be unreasonable to demand that all human knowers, including all teachers, authorities, and experts, exhibit or strive to attain such extraordinary standards. efforts in this direction—mindfulness on the part of each individual knower of his or her responsibility and fallibility both in 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 seeking and in claiming knowledge—are to be urged and applauded. more cannot reasonably be asked. (251) the responsibilist approach developed by code permits evaluation of systems like education in terms of how well they meet their epistemic tasks (and obligations). it is worth noting here that code does not fall into the ase trap, as fuller identifies it, of setting the epistemic bar too high. indeed, this final chapter demonstrates that she takes seriously the sociological facts of our epistemic practices, which is what fuller worries ase altogether fails to do. recall that fuller worried that ase would inevitably find itself saying there is no (or very little) knowledge; this is because ase has necessary and sufficient criteria that most knowledge practices are unlikely to meet. sse, on the other hand, suggests that knowledge is produced all the time and all around us, and it is the job of social epistemology to describe both how that happens and how it might happen better. yet code’s taking seriously the sociological dimensions of our epistemic practices does not mean that she is a “veriphobe,” to use goldman’s term, even though, as axtell notes, “responsibilists like lorraine code . . . concede that reliability ‘maintains a closer connection with truth and warrantability than responsibility can establish’” (axtell 2000, xvii). indeed, though code relocates truth within her responsibilist approach, this does not mean that she abandons truth. in fact, it is part and parcel of code’s explicit attention to and endorsement of “normative realism.” this is an idea that is “neither startling nor new,” but that tends to be “taken for granted as an implicit goal of cognitive activity” (136). as code puts it, “implicit in normative realism is the view that to be a good knower is to have a fundamental respect for truth” (137, emphasis added). that being said, what interests the virtue epistemologist is the fact that “it is a task to come to see the world as it is” (iris murdoch, quoted in code 1987, 137). as such, one’s manner in performing this task can be evaluated; it is this manner that “determines the quality of knowledge achieved” (137). this is not a return to reliabilism, however. while both reliabilism and responsibilism are virtue epistemologies, responsibilism sees knowers as actively engaging in the task of belief formation, whereas reliabilism sees a knower as (possibly) nothing more than “an accurate, and relatively passive recorder of experience” (code 1987, 51). as code puts it, “a person can be judged responsible or irresponsible only if she/he is clearly regarded as an agent (in this case a cognitive agent) in the circumstances in question” (51). thus, knowers are evaluated as responsible or irresponsible according to how well they take up the task of arriving at the truth. that being said, by suggesting that having respect for and working toward truth is part of what it means to be a good knower, knowledge is not merely 11 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 reduced to truth, or, more precisely, to the accumulation of true facts. code suggests that a “fanatical devotion to truth” (201) can be problematic, especially when it precludes “insight and understanding,” where the latter is a process that manifests the intellectual virtues (148–149). it is possible, code thinks, to “know everything yet understand nothing” (149); “knowing well is much more than accumulating facts” (150). this final point suggests that, though code doesn’t abandon truth, it is nevertheless reconceived as just one element of a broader epistemic practice. moreover, code suggests that responsible knowers, and experts in particular, will remain epistemically open: the guiding, intellectual purpose of responsible experts will be, in the end, to achieve as realistic an ontological stance as possible. this goal does not exclude an openness to the possibility that one’s position might need to be abandoned or modified in light of wholly unexpected and, on the face of it, unlikely findings. openness is centrally involved in the claim that realism is normative. (232) she continues, “epistemic integrity is most strongly—indeed, heroically—evident in the ability to be a ‘fallibilist’ in the peircean sense, cognizant of one’s own potential fallibility even in the most painstakingly won conclusions, even in the conception of the nature of things that underlies them” (233). thus, while realism has a normative force, this normative force must be understood in the context of code’s responsibilism, as requiring and openness and fallibilism alongside a respect for the truth. conclusion taken together, these remarks show that, already in epistemic responsibility, we see the development of a position rightly called social epistemology that is neither insufficiently epistemological nor overly skeptical of the possibility of knowledge. code’s responsibilism has a more nuanced view of the truth than ase typically recommends, and a more epistemic view of the social than sse typically recommends. moreover, there are resources here that can continue to inform current and future research in social epistemology, some of which are persuasively developed by fellow contributors to this symposium. this is not to say that code’s initial presentation of the concept of epistemic responsibility provides us with the last word. however, when we tend to dichotomize positions and obscure the work of others whose positions are not neatly captured within that debate, we not only commit poor scholarship, we also miss out on the resources those additional positions make available to us. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 works cited axtell, guy. 2000. knowledge, belief, and character: readings in virtue epistemology. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. baehr, jason. 2006. “character, reliability and virtue epistemology.” the philosophical quarterly 56 (223): 193–212. code, lorraine. 1984. “toward a ‘responsibilist’ epistemology.” philosophy and phenomenological research 45 (1): 29–50. ———. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover, nh: university press of new england. ———. 1995. rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations. new york: routledge. fuller, steve. 1988. social epistemology. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press. ———. 2002. social epistemology, 2nd edition. bloomington and indianapolis: indiana university press. ———. 2007. the knowledge book: key concepts in philosophy, science and culture. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press. ———. 2012. “social epistemology: a quarter-century itinerary.” social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy 26 (3–4): 267–283. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2012.714415. ———. 2014. “social epistemology: the future of an unfulfilled promise.” social epistemology review and reply collective 3 (7): 29–37. goldman, alvin i. 1993. “epistemic folkways and scientific epistemology.” philosophical issues 3:271–285. ———. 1999. knowledge in a social world. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2012. reliabilism and contemporary epistemology: essays. oxford: oxford scholarship online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812875.001.0001. grasswick, heidi e. 2008. “from feminist thinking to ecological thinking: determining the bounds of community.” hypatia 23 (1): 150–160. greco, john and john turri. 2015. “virtue epistemology.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta. fall 2015 edition. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/epistemology-virtue/. sonnad, nikhil. 2015. “this free online encyclopedia has achieved what wikipedia can only dream of.” quartz, september 21. http://qz.com/480741/this-freeonline-encyclopedia-has-achieved-what-wikipedia-can-only-dream-of/. sosa, ernest. 1980. “the raft and the pyramid: coherence versus foundations in the theory of knowledge.” midwest studies in philosophy 5 (1): 3–26. ———. 1985. “knowledge and intellectual virtue.” the monist 68 (2): 226–245. 13 dieleman: responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate published by scholarship@western, 2016 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/epistemology-virtue/ http://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achieved-what-wikipedia-can-only-dream-of/ http://qz.com/480741/this-free-online-encyclopedia-has-achieved-what-wikipedia-can-only-dream-of/ susan dieleman is assistant professor (with term) in the department of philosophy at the university of saskatchewan in saskatoon, canada. she specializes in social and political philosophy, pragmatism, and feminist philosophy, and is currently working on a monograph that explores the connections between deliberative democracy and epistemic justice. she has published essays in hypatia, pragmatism today, the pluralist, social philosophy today, and social epistemology. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.6 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology susan dieleman recommended citation responsibilism and the analytic-sociological debate in social epistemology feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation mclennan, matthew r. “beauvoir’s concept of ‘decline.’” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (3). article 2. 2020 beauvoir’s concept of “decline” matthew r. mclennan saint paul university mmclennan@ustpaul.ca mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 beauvoir’s concept of “decline”1 matthew r. mclennan abstract this paper explicates simone de beauvoir’s concept of “decline” in ageing and assesses both its plausibility and its ethical and political promise. though i maintain that the concept is largely plausible, and that it helps us to envision social justice for the aged, i also note certain limitations, and these lead me to suggest philosophical and ethical caution as to its range of application. briefly, both in theory and in practice, beauvoir appears to questionably conflate the decline of the phenomenological subject with that of a younger adult version of the psychological self or structure of the personality. through examinations of beauvoir’s account of dementia and her paternalism towards her dying mother and the declining jeanpaul sartre, i suggest how her concept of decline may fall short, but also how her rich phenomenological descriptions point the way to a pluralistic approach to ageing as a social justice issue. keywords: beauvoir, decline, ageing, dementia, phenomenology, intersectionality, disability, social justice with certain notable exceptions, simone de beauvoir’s work on ageing has suffered scholarly neglect. this is surprising since ageing is a near-constant preoccupation in her writings. in a recent volume devoted to beauvoir’s impressive if still controversial2 1970 study la vieillesse, silvia stoller (2014) plausibly reconstructs the reasons for this neglect, opining that the time is now ripe for reassessment. 1 i would like to acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers at feminist philosophy quarterly whose wonderfully insightful comments helped to improve this paper. monique lanoix and iva apostolova also gave much appreciated comments on an earlier version. 2 martha nussbaum has recently devoted a few scathing pages to beauvoir’s study. claiming that it fails to grasp her own experience of ageing, nussbaum calls the book “worse than preposterous: i see it as an act of collaboration with social stigma and injustice” (nussbaum and levmore 2017, 20). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 in what follows, i hope to contribute to this reassessment through an interrogation of the concept of “decline” as it emerges in beauvoir’s account of ageing. showing first how it fits with her overall methodology, i argue that beauvoir’s concept of decline in general is quite plausible and politically promising, at least to the extent that it provides grist for a feminist approach to ageing—that is, one that foregrounds equity and social justice for the aged. however, i subsequently examine what i claim are some limitations or difficulties with beauvoir’s concept. in particular, i discuss the extent to which she apparently conflates, both in theory and in practice, the decline of the phenomenological subject with that of a younger adult version of the psychological self or structure of the personality. i claim that this move is contestable, and in support of this i will devote considerable space to beauvoir’s theorization of dementia. in short, while decline and its remediation as beauvoir construes them contribute to a compelling model of social justice for the aged, i urge philosophical and ethical caution as to their range of application. as limit cases, different forms of dementia remind us that the ethics and politics of remediation beg a pluralistic approach to ageing as a social justice issue. beauvoir’s methodology a key thing to note by way of beginning is that despite their vastly uneven reception, a case can be made that la vieillesse is essentially on par with the much better known the second sex (beauvoir 2011). this is certainly my view, and one reason in support of it is methodological. the two studies are admittedly distinct, in that beauvoir deploys key categories of jean-paul sartre’s later materialism in the book on ageing (such as the practico-inert, praxis, exis, and scarcity) (kruks 2014). nonetheless, they follow the same basic methodological blueprint; each treats its central category—age and sex, respectively—in a “total” way; that is, as a “situation” to be explained through minute attention to its myriad aspects. beauvoir groups these aspects under objective (“exterior”) and subjective (“interior”) headings; this is to say that age and sex are each conceived as a complex, interlocking totality of objective and subjective factors.3 more specifically, beauvoir divides la vieillesse between “the exterior point of view” and “being-in-the-world.” thus, for example, one’s being a woman or an elderly person of either sex always implies that one is so for others, that one is the “object of a knowledge” (beauvoir 1970, 16; my translation)—folk knowledge certainly, but also biology, sociology, gerontology, and the like. but being a woman or an elderly person is also always a “lived experience” (ibid.). consequently, womanhood and old age (or indeed any 3 as i will discuss below, beauvoir’s emphasis on interlocking factors is suggestive of intersectionality. i thank the anonymous reviewer who termed this beauvoir’s “proto-intersectionality,” a term i think is apt. mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 other human situation) must be grasped in a double, complementary movement of exterior (i.e., sociological, historical, economic, ethnographic) and interior (i.e., phenomenological, introspective, “physio-psychological”) analyses.4 the case for reading la vieillesse as on par with the second sex gains further support if we consider how the two studies complement each other. one’s age and one’s sex, apart from constituting a particular meeting of objective and subjective factors, also interlock with each other in complex ways on beauvoir’s view. this can be seen, for example, through various controlling myths such as that of the old maid (beauvoir 2011, 174), or in the perceived relative impotence and social uselessness of the retired male worker compared to the older woman who has managed and continues to manage the home (beauvoir 1970, 321–322). moreover, both age and sex interact with other factors composing one’s situation. though she makes certain errors on this score (for example, speaking in general of “blacks” and “women” but seemingly forgetting about black women [beauvoir 2011, 311–312]), beauvoir’s approach is remarkable for its time in grasping situations as nested in broader and increasingly complex, comprehensive situations. arguably it is to some extent suggestive of intersectionality, before the letter and in parallel with its development by african american and other marginalized women (collins and bilge 2016, 65–77; crenshaw 1989). further, and similar to intersectionality’s own status as an open, politically engaged, and critical social theory (collins and bilge 2016, 31–62; collins 2019), beauvoir draws attention in both of her major books to her own ethical and political partiality.5 she makes clear how the idea of the total nature of situations lends itself not to a static conception of the social but rather to a dynamic one that is welded to a progressive program for social change.6 4 claude lévi-strauss, whose work served as a major resource in writing of the second sex, gives an excellent overview of how the sociological, the historical, and the “physio-psychological” together constitute the situation or total social fact. as he puts it, “any interpretation [in the social sciences] has to square the objectivity of historical or comparative analysis with the subjectivity of lived experience” (2012, 24; my translation). 5 as beauvoir puts it, “every so-called objective description is set against an ethical background” (2011, 16). 6 this approach finds echoes in contemporary disability studies, which underscores how disability is a social as well as a medical problem. as sunaura taylor puts it, “what disability scholars and activists refer to as ‘the medical model of disability’ positions the disabled body as working incorrectly, as being unhealthy and abnormal, as needing a cure” (taylor 2017, 13). but this is a misleading picture, since there is also a compelling “social model of disability”; according to this view, “disability is not simply a medical problem; it is a social justice one” (ibid.). if, for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 to see how this is so, consider that for beauvoir there are many ways in which, for a given person, the objective and subjective dimensions of womanhood, ageing, or any other situation may be, or may fall, or may be pushed out of sync.7 this, then, suggests ways that one could be alienated or fail to be “at home” in one’s body and/or one’s social world. it also raises the question of whether or not remediation is possible—and if so, whether or not access to remediation could be framed as a social justice issue.8 the social totalities beauvoir describes are in any case open and dynamic, and she makes no claim to produce exhaustive knowledge of either womanhood or old age, notwithstanding her totalizing approach and the impressive array of empirical examples she provides. regarding old age in particular, she claims that neither form of analysis, exterior or interior, nor indeed the two combined, permits us to define it in general; there are rather “multiple faces of old age, each irreducible to the others” (1970, 17; my translation). nonetheless, as i will argue in the next section, beauvoir largely cleaves to a vision of ageing as decline— precisely, as a process in which objective and subjective dimensions of the person fall out of sync. with the preceding considerations in mind, i will therefore broadly affirm the philosophical importance and the social and political relevance of la vieillesse; though comparatively neglected, it has the potential, at least, to do for our understanding of ageing what the second sex did for our understanding of sex.9 it is possible, though, that the approach beauvoir uses so forcefully and convincingly in the second sex hits an impasse in la vieillesse, since some realities befalling the medical reasons, i am unable to use my legs to walk and climb stairs, this does not automatically disqualify me from attending an institution such as a university. if, however, there are no ramps and elevators at the university, then i am de facto disqualified. thus, the true measure of my disability includes an analysis of the social environment in which i function, and this facilitates both social critique and innovation. 7 the final pages of la force des choses ii are an exceptionally pained meditation on beauvoir’s own contradictory experience of growing old, which includes the strange feeling of “no longer being a body” (1963, 506; my translation). she will subsequently lighten and nuance this bleak assessment in tout compte fait (1972). 8 for example, the possibility of occupational therapy raises the question of “occupational justice” (townsend and wilcock 2004). i am indebted to kaelen bray for bringing the concept of occupational justice to my attention. 9 it is interesting to note however that the older beauvoir, having completed la vieillesse, criticized the second sex for its optimism about social evolution and underscored the need for a more materially grounded analysis and concerted political action (1972, 623–624). mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 ageing are qualitatively different than what she encounters under the more general rubric of sex. as we will see, this comes to a head in her dealings with ageing friends and family members: arguably her mother françoise de beauvoir (beauvoir 1964), but quite obviously her companion and intellectual collaborator jean-paul sartre (beauvoir 1981). in particular, the vision of decline that beauvoir privileges appears to be only one possible means of conceptualizing what happens to the person suffering from dementia, and it arguably proves restrictive or troubling in the context of her own intimate relationships. beauvoir on ageing as decline beauvoir views ageing as a process; there is no “old age” qua static state (1970, 17). nonetheless, the process she envisions invariably includes decline as one of its central aspects. what she has in mind is that the ageing person’s bodily, cognitive, and social grasp of (or their ability to interface with) the world diminishes over time.10 for the sake of discussing beauvoir’s view i will talk about decline in biomedical terms, as though body, cognition, and social interaction are separate things (a methodological point). i am actually unsure, however, as to what extent a meaningful distinction can be drawn between them (an ontological point).11 beauvoir herself is aware of the artificiality of such an approach, having been a keen reader of merleau-ponty’s (2013) phenomenology of embodiment. she states for example, in the second sex, that “if the body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects” (2011, 46; my translation, italics in original).12 beauvoir defines decline as “disadvantageous change” in the preamble to la vieillesse (1970, 17). but her definition is immediately problematized by the fact that what counts as “disadvantageous” is always relative to a given value judgment; there is only ever progress or regression according to a posited goal or criterion (ibid.). this relativity of ageing as decline accounts for why an athlete who is only in her thirties might feel that she is no longer young (1970, 17–18), or why a pregnant woman over 35 may be told by medical professionals that she is of “advanced 10 i take “cognitive” here in the broad, functional sense favored by scientists like frans de waal: “the transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment, and the application of this knowledge” (2016, 319). 11 see kontos 2012. 12 elsewhere, beauvoir claims, “doubtless, every one casts himself into [the world] on the basis of his physiological possibilities, but the body itself is not a brute fact. it expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion. and on the other hand, it determines no behavior” (1976, 41). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 maternal age” or presents a case of “geriatric pregnancy.”13 if it were possible just to consider the body on its own, decline would on beauvoir’s view be a case of disadvantageous change which outstrips the body’s own resources of adaptation and palliation; we can say unequivocally for beauvoir that there is age-related decline when “the body becomes fragile and more or less impotent” (1970, 17, 19; my translation). but beauvoir cautions us that things become more complicated when we consider the individual in her totality—that is, by adding on subjective as well as more broadly social metrics of decline (1970, 19). as i have already suggested, exterior and interior aspects of ageing may be out of sync. in my “old age,” or after some other change like acquiring a physical impairment, i may feel unchanged or undiminished. i may even feel that i have in some sense grown or improved but then discover that my society judges otherwise. moreover, “each society creates its own values: it is in the social context that the word ‘decline’ finds a precise sense” (1970, 20; my translation). this entails that beauvoir’s definition of decline is one of “disadvantageous change” within a shifting, total set of criteria for disadvantage. beauvoir on dementia: a form of decline? “dementia” names several distinct but descriptively related conditions caused by neurodegenerative diseases and associated with ageing. for reasons given above, approaching dementia from beauvoir’s point of view entails treating it as a complex and interlocking set of phenomena, resistant to any strict mental, neurophysiological, or environmental reductionism. one way to construe the irreducibility of any form of dementia could be in terms of a putative interactive dualism between its “subjective” and its “objective” aspects. such a construal is indeed encapsulated in la vieillesse and elsewhere. attention to the subjective and objective aspects of dementia does not appear, however, to shield beauvoir from reductionist thinking and overgeneralization on some points, precisely where it is a question of affirming the relative persistence or identity-over-time of the subjective factor. we saw that for beauvoir, the metric for disadvantageous change is socially relative. however, the notion that the body, cognition, and social interaction all “decline” with age—that is, that i lose my grip on the world—implies both a situation in which this happens (exterior) as well as someone or something for whom this change is disadvantageous (interior). put differently, decline is both something that happens in a total situation (according to a posited value or values) 13 such examples are highly suggestive of beauvoir’s phenomenological method. a purely “exterior” account of these women’s situations would be liable to miss a great deal of what is significant to them. mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 but also, and analytically separately, as a lived experience (which is admittedly always framed in a social context). thus, “disadvantageous change” happens to a subject14 whose body, cognitive apparatus, and social network are changing, but who remains on beauvoir’s view more or less identical over time. put differently, as i age my grasp on the world typically weakens—i can take less in and i can accomplish less—but it is nonetheless in some sense “i” who suffers this decline. i remain me; i am who i was before. according to beauvoir in one of her strongest formulations of this idea, “things change, we change: but without losing our identity. our roots, our past, our anchorage in the world are immutable” (1970, 490; my translation). this is part of what makes ageing tragic on her view; i can observe and must live through to the end a widening gap between myself and my grasp on the world in which, on account of the comparative ease with which i used to navigate it, i most likely used to feel more at home. but further, not all putative situations of decline are initially experienced as decline, until social mediation reveals (or rather imposes) the individual’s state as one of old age and impairment. this is especially the case if, as beauvoir recounts, one’s exigencies have diminished at the same pace as one’s capacities (1970, 350). thus, ageing (or rather, one’s having become old) can and usually does come as a shock. beauvoir gives multiple iterations of this idea in her works. for example, in the short story “l’âge de discretion,” the ageing narrator describes her loss of sexuality. while indifference to sexuality is not something that automatically comes with age—and beauvoir certainly recognizes this (1970, 386–440)—the narrator explicitly ties loss of libido to ageing in her own case. she recounts how she initially experienced this indifference to sex as a kind of “serenity.” she subsequently realizes however that her disinterest in sex has led her to systematically underestimate certain realities—like how the physical closeness of her son with her daughter-in-law factors into and buttresses their joint opposition to her expressed wishes. she sees “all of a sudden” that her indifference to sex is “an infirmity, a loss of sense” that blinds her to certain joys and pains that are of critical importance to others (1967, 27; my translation). decline is thus construed as something discovered (or imposed), experienced, and recounted in a narrative by the self-identical subject. note, however, that a further division could be made on the “interior” plane of analysis, between the subject and the personality. in the broadly sartrian 14 beauvoir and sartre generally favor the terms “subject” and “subjectivity” in their writings. reading subject as “mind” or even “self” would be somewhat misleading, because they are speaking of the intentional boundary of a world and the transcendental condition for personal freedom, not the structure or activities of a particular personality that would be the measurable objects of psychology (see sartre 2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 phenomenological position that beauvoir assumes,15 “i” am the active dimension of a transcendent ego—that is, the subjective boundary of the world that “i” experience. the bundle of psychological structures or properties which forms my personality, on the other hand, is comparatively passive and immanent; in other words, the personality is a feature of the world and, in some sense, may be the object of representation not only for the “i” but also for others. significantly, my memories form part of this immanent complex (that is, the memory contents themselves and their effect on me, my ability to call them up and the affects they prompt, and not the bare fact of the memories having been “mine”). an implication of this view seems to be that in a certain sense i can persist even in a situation where i am radically disoriented. but in such a situation “i” may no longer be “me,” if we assume (on a lockean view of personal identity [locke 2008]) that the survival of a given personality requires the guarantee of memory to hold it together. beauvoir comes close to recognizing this difficulty in a brief remark on what she calls “senile dementia,” apparently posited as an extreme case of ordinary agerelated forgetfulness. she grants that forgetting certain details is a necessary condition of remembrance—otherwise we would be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of sensory information we take in—and that this could account for the tendency to lose more and more as we grow older (1970, 444). further, however, in the same passage she seems to posit the healthy brain as a necessary condition for remembrance and takes for granted that neurological decline can be cashed out subjectively as mnemonic decline. but in her telling, it is always a case of my remembered history that has gaps in it when memory fails. the suggestion seems to be that the subject suffering from dementia retains some kind of link to a basic personality. but these are conceptually distinct: the subject is pure intentionality or the transcendental border of a world, whereas the personality, qua psychological structure and the mnemonic contents that would hold it together on a lockean view, is a feature of the world. to draw this distinction is to recognize that lived experience, the “interior” aspect of ageing, actually possesses its own exterior and interior aspects. that which is most interior is construed in beauvoir’s study as subject proper, as opposed to the personality. we can question, however, whether the subject and the personality do always go together, and whether a slippage between them has occurred in beauvoir’s writing. regarding the first question, the thrust of pia kontos’s reflections on dementia has been to suggest that we better construe subjectivity according to “embodied selfhood,”—that is, “a prereflective notion of agency that resides below the threshold of cognition and is manifest primarily in corporeal ways” (2012, 3). it is precisely such embodied selfhood that persists “even with severe dementia” (ibid.), 15 see sartre 2017. mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 and it arguably affords us a vision of the subject/personality distinction as a false dichotomy. beauvoir, on the other hand, operates throughout her work on the assumption that the subject, qua transcendental boundary of the world, is conceptually distinct from the immanence of psychological structures and behaviours, and is always already bound up in an intentional stance. thus she describes the case of a woman whose cognitive memory, arguably a key if not determinant component of her personality, has been destroyed, but who is at least aware that she can’t remember and otherwise displays regular personality traits and the ability to take refuge in habit, or embodied memory (1970, 568).16 though her embodied memory prevails, this way of construing the woman’s case appears to give her “interior” as opposed to her embodied selfhood priority; after all, it is capable of “taking refuge” in habit (1970, 566) and is therefore, in some sense, both distinct and free from it. this picture is borne out by the more systematic but admittedly brief section, totaling about six pages, that beauvoir devotes to “senile dementia.” addressing my second question, an apparent slippage between subject and personality indeed occurs therein. dementia figures as a case of severe cognitive decline, an extreme case of the “normal abnormality” (1970, 348) of old age (with social aspects, as per beauvoir’s methodology) (1970, 612–613). this holds up even where it is explicitly a question of personal identity in decline. and it is arguably a question for beauvoir of the subject-as-personality who forgets, who has trouble adjusting, and the like. indeed, for beauvoir it is a normal part of ageing that a person struggles to retain their sense of identity—particularly since acknowledging that one is old, that one is not what one used to be and that, in a sense, one’s life story has begun to elude one’s grasp and return in the form of the “practico-inert”17 (kruks 2014), 16 “refuge in habit” refers to the ordering of the disoriented person’s life according to simple patterns of behaviour she has retained in spite of her illness. while this certainly resonates with kontos’s concept of embodied selfhood as explored, for example, through the notion of “musical embodiment” (2014), the point about “habit” could be generalized to encompass whatever has been well-established and endures. as muireann irish (2019) points out, “there remains a vast repository of life experiences, personal history, stories and fables that endures, even late into the illness. at moderate to severe stages of dementia, activities such as art, dance and music therapy provide important nonverbal means of communicating and fostering social interaction even when, on the surface, many core capabilities might seem to be lost.” 17 the concept of the “practico-inert,” borrowed from sartre (2004), describes a person’s praxis (practical, goal-directed activity) coming back to haunt her as an feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 implies that one has become in some sense other to oneself (1970, 354–355).18 in addition to falling out of sync with past projects and corporeal aspects of her situation, an ageing person generally struggles to retain her sense of identity since she loses her social role as defined by work (and, we could add, by gender, sexuality, class, family role, and the like) (1970, 600). as linda fisher puts it, “my ‘previous identity’ and prior self-image have now been compromised, insofar as not only am i no longer what i was, but to my mind i am no longer as good as i was” (fisher 2014, 117). but while beauvoir seems to uphold a notion that personal identity changes, she ultimately cleaves to what fisher calls “a notion of a default ‘myself’” (ibid., 118). that default “myself” “seems to be my younger, more attractive, healthier, more capable self: in short, the phenomenological ‘i can’ in an all-encompassing sense, contrasted now with the ‘i cannot’ of old age” (ibid.). it appears then that beauvoir identifies the subject—the transcendent hence realest, or fundamental, or potentially most “authentic” myself—with the youthful “i can.”19 the latter is in some sense atemporal, even if the lived (empirical and phenomenological) self inert, alienated reality. in short, the things that she does escape her and will become brute realities she will need to contend with when she is older. 18 in describing old age and death, beauvoir adopts the sartrian concept of “l’irréalisable,” that which i must confront as my own innermost reality but which i am incapable of “realizing,” i.e. of bringing to fruition or harmonizing according to my life’s project (1970, 354). 19 “authentic” could be taken here in a loose sense, as synonymous with “real” or “actual” or “true.” but it also alludes to how the earlier beauvoir and sartre conceptualize authenticity, an issue germane to existentialism that lies beyond the scope of the paper. briefly, both arguably construe authenticity in terms of one’s lucidly asserting and assuming what they describe as the ambiguity at the core of the human condition. as beauvoir puts it, “in the very condition of man there enters the possibility of not fulfilling this condition. in order to fulfill it, he must assume himself as a being who ‘makes himself a lack of being so that there might be being.’ but the trick of dishonesty [i.e., sartrian “bad faith”] permits stopping at any moment whatsoever” (beauvoir 1976, 34). note the baseline of maturity this description entails; one must presumably become capable of authenticity and of constantly striving for it, and it would be fascinating to consider the theme of the default or authentic self in light of how the child in beauvoir’s picture develops into the adult self (see beauvoir 2018 for a personal memoir of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood which is highly suggestive on this score, and beauvoir 2011 [283–382] for a more general analysis foregrounding gender). for my purposes it is also noteworthy when sartre briefly describes authenticity in terms of a “selfrecovery of being which was previously corrupted” (sartre 1992, 116n). mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 changes, since assumption of the “i cannot” is, in the final analysis, impossible.20 but insofar as it is “youthful,” which is to say fixed at an early point in a temporal trajectory and unburdened by a long past, the subject on beauvoir’s picture has taken on something of an empirical cast. this speaks precisely to the tendency on her part to identify the default self with the younger adult self. such a view not only informs her concept of dementia as decline but, as we will see later, her own dealings with ageing loved ones. the question then is whether or not beauvoir, by appearing to identify the younger with the default myself, thereby conflates subject with the younger personality—thereby slipping from the transcendental to the relatively empirical, from what could be called the “interior interior” to the “exterior interior.” evidence that she avoids conflating subject and personality in general may be found in a remarkable footnote in la vieillesse, where she seems to conceive of sudden neurological accident along the lines of a precipitous decline that would cleave subject from personality, or at least seriously throw into question the link between the two. she describes how certain ageing people have no control over the circumstances of their decline, and cites the case of auguste rodin. after suffering the second of two “attacks,” he knew neither where he was nor who his life-long companion, rose beuret, was. hence, beauvoir admits (in an admittedly speculative fashion, not knowing the clinical details of rodin’s case) the conceptual possibility that a first-person point of view can persist after a drastic and sudden reorganization of the personality and its world. she goes on to state, however, that such cases, when they really occur, can teach us nothing from the point of view of the inner experience of ageing (1970, 368). put differently, it appears to be conceptually possible for beauvoir that the same subject can abruptly become a different person,21 but then she dismisses the problem by announcing that this is 20 here again the concept of “l’irréalisable” is apposite. 21 this is the thrust of catherine malabou’s writings on “destructive neuroplasticity,” which run counter to beauvoir and risk oversimplification of dementia from another angle. she relates the following about her grandmother (who, it is reasonable to assume from the description, was already in the advanced stages of alzheimer’s disease): “it seemed to me that my grandmother, or, at least, the new and ultimate version of her, was the work of the disease, its opus, its own sculpture. indeed, this was not a diminished person in front of me, the same woman weaker than she used to be, lessened, spoiled. no, this was a stranger who didn’t recognize me, who didn’t recognize herself because she had undoubtedly never met her before. behind the familiar halo of hair, the tone of her voice, the blue of her eyes: the absolutely incontestable presence of someone else” (malabou 2012, xi–xii). elsewhere, malabou contentiously describes the (presumably advanced) alzheimer’s patient as feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 not what she has in mind in her study (such cases being of interest to “geriatric medicine”) (1970, 368). there indeed appear to be clinical cases (not restricted to ageing but also occurring in various forms of trauma) where, if indeed “i” remain “i,” “i” do not remain “me.”22 someone is still home, but it is not clear who. in another remarkable passage, beauvoir will explicitly call such cases, wherein someone becomes unmoored from her own ends and alienated from those around her, “pathological cases of depersonalization” (1970, 266; my translation). although it is a clinical question how to diagnose such cases with precision, the difficulty here is that beauvoir is forced to admit that cases of dementia, in particular, can differ widely from each other.23 she can be forgiven for having written at a time when there was much less scientific information on dementia, and in any case, she was overall more interested in the typical phenomenological rather than the abnormal clinical side of ageing. but it is hard to avoid the following conclusion: that it is far from obvious that dementia is always usefully construed as a case where a subject, pictured more or less as the younger personality, grapples with steep neurological decline.24 commenting on beauvoir, stoller offers a formula that appears intuitive on first glance: “alzheimer’s and dementia, that is to say mental decline” (2014, 18). “not—or not only—someone who has ‘changed’ or been ‘modified’ but rather a subject who has become someone else” (2012, 15). 22 susan j. brison (2003) explores her own traumatic transformation after her rape and attempted murder along these lines. 23 not to mention that a single case of dementia may contain phases that differ widely from each other as well, and not necessarily in a linear process of decline. 24 in terms of the contemporary neuropsychological picture, strikwerda-brown et al. (2019) argue for a pluralistic approach to dementia that recognizes the diversity of its characteristics vis-à-vis memory and personal identity: “extant research suggests that the impoverished capacity for episodic expressions of past and future thinking in ad [alzheimer’s disease] may lead to a global decay in subjective self-continuity across temporal contexts. by contrast, the impaired recent, but spared remote, personal semantic memory in these patients may allow for a preserved, though outdated, self-narrative. sd [semantic dementia] patients, however, appear to retain subjective and narrative self-continuity for the recent past, but not the remote past or future, leading to a self defined predominantly by recent experiences. finally, bvftd [behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia] results in globally impaired subjective and narrative self-continuity, with the absence of an appropriate self-schema to guide and regulate behaviour.” here we have a remarkable expression of what beauvoir appears to recognize but has difficulty theorizing under the rubric of decline. mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 but we have just seen why it is not clear that this equivalency always holds. we have also seen that beauvoir herself, despite largely lumping dementia and the broader category of mental disorders of old age under the concept of decline, at times seems aware of this. in addition to the example of rodin, beauvoir also speaks of alterations of the personality through psychosis, wherein the latter takes on a “new structure,” and the phenomenon of “melancholia of involution” wherein the loss of ego is at issue and which closely resembles descriptions of traumatized subjectivities (1970, 602; malabou 2012; brison 2003). rather than pursue this line of thought to the end, however, beauvoir falls back into the “notion of a default myself” described by fisher (2014, 118). it interesting to see how this plays itself out in her life in two notable cases of age-related “mental decline.” first, take the case of beauvoir’s mother françoise. her hospitalization from a fall, her surgery, and her subsequent death from cancer are movingly recounted in the short 1964 book une mort très douce. arguably the book furnishes a good deal of material for the coming of age, which will appear six years later. what is important about it for our purposes is that beauvoir comes to terms with her mother’s precipitous decline and death—basically senseless, like all deaths—by reconstructing her personality through reminiscences and attempts at identification. beauvoir struggles with the fact that her mother and her mother’s body have apparently become two distinct entities, to the point that the latter overdetermines the former, rendering françoise confused, alienated, and passing in and out of lucidity. beauvoir refuses to tell françoise the truth of her condition. after françoise undergoes surgery to remove her tumor and is resuscitated, beauvoir starkly questions why she should be subjected to such suffering and denied a quicker death. on the one hand, she admits that her dying mother, here and now, clings tightly to her remaining days as if they were the most precious thing in the world; on the other, she cannot help but grasp her mother’s state as unlivable, even for françoise herself, and seeks to impose her own order on the disintegration she is witnessing. a key element in this imposition of order is a search through literary recollection for the “real” françoise, and it is far from obvious that there is any valid justification for beauvoir’s search, beyond her own need to make sense of what she is witnessing. second, consider beauvoir’s paternalism with respect to the ageing sartre. his last interviews with benny lévy caused a scandal when they were published in le nouvel observateur just before his death, in 1980. a debate arose over their authenticity, given sartre’s decline, the arguably uncharacteristic opinions he expresses, and the force and omnipresence of his secretary lévy’s personality in his life at the time. beauvoir, who had previously dissuaded sartre from publishing texts written with lévy (beauvoir 1981, 154–155), did not question the authenticity of the transcript. but she denied that these were sartre’s last words. she claimed that lévy feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 had manipulated the blind, exhausted and almost totally dependent sartre into expressing his, lévy’s, own views (beauvoir 1981, 165–167). beauvoir describes the affair as a détournement de vieillard (1981, 166), which ronald aronson renders in english as “abduction of an old man” (modeled upon détournement de mineur, i.e., “leading a young person astray”) (sartre and lévy 2007, 7). by way of responding to the publication, beauvoir released her own account of sartre’s decline in la cérémonie des adieux in 1981, which appends a series of interviews recorded in 1974. these, through beauvoir’s editorial gesture, are presented as sartre’s real last words, even though they were recorded six years before his death—that is, they are presented as a testament and therefore as most in keeping with his true thoughts and representing his previous points of view. while all of this might sound reasonable enough given beauvoir’s concerns about the role of lévy, note some of the problems it raises. sartre, who long understood his own thought to be a living, dialectical process, is frozen here by beauvoir before the worst of his decline and years before his death. the idea that he could develop his thinking to the very end, even if he was in fact “declining,” is apparently not entertained. some of his ideas are deemed uncharacteristic, therefore not his. he has become, even before his death, a monument to his past, and beauvoir appoints herself as the gatekeeper who decides upon the shape of the monument. sartre has become, in sum, un vieillard—that is, an alienated being who is less than sartre—which is ironic given beauvoir’s insistence, eleven years earlier, that the old person is primarily old because that is what others make of him. beauvoir’s responses to the “mental decline” of loved ones are telling. it seems that in the cases we have looked at, she defers to a version of the values, tastes, priorities, sensibilities, characteristics—in short, the personality—of the declining person that is no longer there, or at least that is no longer fully or in the same sense there, because the elder has changed significantly. moreover, she seems to conflate this version of the personality with the subjectivity of that person. this entails a contestable conception of the elder as in essence a younger person falling further and further out of sync with the world. but what if, finally, the philosophical inconsistency this suggests is beside the point? what if the real lessons here are phenomenological and ethical? earlier i remarked that for beauvoir there are “multiple faces of old age, each irreducible to the others” (1970, 17; my translation). how others age for me is one of those faces, and in its concreteness, it is irreducible to the demands of philosophical rigor. perhaps the putatively default or authentic selves beauvoir strives to protect through her denials and paternalism represent above all how her mother and sartre once were for her, and not as they are for themselves. if this is the case, we gain through a reading of beauvoir in terms of the phenomenological richness of her accounts. but we also find another indication that our approach to ageing should be mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 one of ethical caution, lest we reduce and crowd out the selves who are really present to us, here and now. conclusion if i have succeeded in this paper, the reader should now have a clear picture of how beauvoir’s methodology structures an account of age-related decline as a socially mediated process. while arguing that this account is powerful from the point of view of social justice for the aged, underscoring as it does a social and even “proto-intersectional” approach to age-related difficulties with functioning and flourishing, i have devoted most of the essay to unpacking why dementia in particular is troublesome for the view that beauvoir is defending. on one hand, dementia appears predominantly in her work as a form of mental decline in which the subject—problematically conflated with a younger version of the personality— loses her grasp on the world (both the “external” world and her own memories and cognitive processes, qua immanent). on the other hand, precisely where it presents as a radical rupture between the subject and any past personality—that is, where the decline model breaks down—beauvoir waves it away as a problem of geriatric pathology, taking an uncharacteristically reductionist or one-sided approach. the missed opportunity here is that beauvoir could have highlighted how dementia presents as considerably diverse and therefore confronts us with deep ethical questions about how to welcome, accommodate, and accompany persons with different clinical profiles. she can be forgiven on that score given the state of geriatric science at the time of her writing, but as we noted, her tendency, both in la vieillesse and when faced with evidence of the mental decline of her loved ones, was to privilege a contestable and arguably monolithic vision of the declining default or authentic person. beauvoir’s methodology and the richness of her phenomenological descriptions both suggest that we should guard against reductionism and overgeneralization, whatever the outcomes of her own thought process or practice. picking up the spirit if not the letter of her inquiries into dementia in particular, what remains to be thought is whether and how we may construe it in terms that overemphasize neither authenticity nor pathology, but rather highlight the challenge of welcoming changing and emergent personalities to our ageing society. references beauvoir, simone de. 1963. la force des choses ii. paris: éditions gallimard. ———. 1964. une mort très douce. paris: éditions gallimard. ———. 1967. la femme rompue. paris: éditions gallimard. ———. 1970. la vieillesse. paris: éditions gallimard. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 ———. 1972. tout compte fait. paris: éditions gallimard. ———. 1976. the ethics of ambiguity. translated by bernard frechtman. new york: citadel press. ———. 1981. la cérémonie des adieux, suivi de entretiens avec jean-paul sartre. paris: éditions gallimard. ———. 2011. the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovanychevallier. new york: vintage books. ———. 2018. mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. paris: éditions gallimard. brison, susan j. 2003. aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self. princeton, nj: princeton university press. collins, patricia hill. 2019. intersectionality as critical social theory. durham, nc: duke university press. collins, patricia hill, and sirma bilge. 2016. intersectionality. cambridge: polity press. crenshaw, kimberlé williams. 1989. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics.” the university of chicago legal forum vol. 1989: 139–167. de waal, frans. 2016. are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? new york: w. w. norton. fisher, linda. 2014. “the other without and the other within: the alterity of aging and the aged in beauvoir’s the coming of age.” in simone de beauvoir’s philosophy of age: gender, ethics, and time, edited by silvia stoller, 107– 121. berlin: de gruyter. irish, muireann. 2019. “the self in dementia is not lost, and can be reached with care.” aeon, november 13. https://aeon.co/ideas/the-self-in-dementia-isnot-lost-and-can-be-reached-with-care?fbclid= iwar2quirciakbyiebatnnmf335mfbblcx25k8z-jpcfumkd9ggpipqbk5vcg. kontos, pia c. 2012. “alzheimer expressions or expressions despite alzheimer’s? philosophical reflections on selfhood and embodiment.” occasion: interdisciplinary studies in the humanities 4 (may 31). ———. 2014. “musical embodiment, selfhood, and dementia.” in beyond loss: dementia, identity, personhood, edited by lars-christer hydén, hilde lindemann, and jens brockmeier, 107–119. oxford: oxford university press. kruks, sonia. 2014. “beauvoir’s the coming of age and sartre’s critique of dialectical reason: the material mediations of age as lived experience.” in simone de beauvoir’s philosophy of age: gender, ethics, and time, edited by silvia stoller, 89–101. berlin: de gruyter. lévi-strauss, claude. 2012. introduction à l’œuvre de marcel mauss. paris: presses universitaires de france. mclennan – beauvoir’s concept of “decline” published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 locke, john. 2008. an essay concerning human understanding. oxford: oxford university press. malabou, catherine. 2012. the new wounded: from neurosis to brain damage. translated by steven miller. new york: fordham university press. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2013. la phénoménologie de la perception. paris: gallimard. nussbaum, martha c., and saul levmore. 2017. aging thoughtfully: conversations about retirement, romance, wrinkles, and regret. oxford: oxford university press. sartre, jean-paul. 1992. being and nothingness. translated by hazel e. barnes. new york: washington square press. ———. 2004. critique of dialectical reason, volume one. translated by alan sheridan-smith, edited by jonathan rée. london: verso. ———. 2016. what is subjectivity? translated by david broder and trista selous. london: verso. ———. 2017. the transcendence of the ego. translated by andrew brown. abingdon: routledge. sartre, jean-paul, and benny lévy. 2007. hope now: the 1980 interviews. translated by adrian van den hoven. introduction by ronald aronson. chicago: university of chicago press. stoller, silvia, ed. 2014. simone de beauvoir’s philosophy of age: gender, ethics, and time. berlin: de gruyter. strikwerda-brown, cherie, matthew d. grilli, jessica andrews-hanna, and muireann irish. 2019. “‘all is not lost’: rethinking the nature of memory and the self in dementia.” ageing research reviews 54, september, article 100932. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.arr.2019.100932. taylor, sunaura. 2017. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press. townsend, elizabeth, and ann a. wilcock. 2004. “occupational justice and clientcentred practice: a dialogue in progress.” canadian journal of occupational therapy 71 (2): 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/000841740407100203. matthew r. mclennan is associate professor in the faculty of philosophy and the school of ethics, social justice and public service at saint paul university in ottawa, canada. he is the author of philosophy and vulnerability (2019) and philosophy, sophistry, antiphilosophy (2015), both published by bloomsbury academic. 7929 mclennan title page 7929 mclennan final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 introduction recommended citation giladi, paul, and nicola mcmillan. 2018. “introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). introduction. 2018 introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory paul giladi manchester metropolitan university paul.giladi@gmail.com nicola micmillan lancaster university n.mcmillan@lancaster.ac.uk giladi and mcmillan – introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory paul giladi and nicola mcmillan first, we would like to thank the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly for allowing us to guest edit a special issue of this exciting journal. the papers comprising this special issue, along with miranda fricker’s afterword, were born of an effort by us to start a much-needed conversation between two immensely rich and relevant philosophical traditions: critical social epistemology and recognition theory. we are proud that feminist philosophy quarterly is the venue for the first ever sustained collaboration of research on epistemic injustice and recognition theory. and our coedited volume, titled epistemic injustice and the philosophy of recognition, is scheduled to appear in print in 2021 with routledge. it will be the first book on the subject. an important development in contemporary anglo-american feminist epistemology has been the concept of epistemic injustice, which, as articulated for example by miranda fricker, has emerged out of and reinvigorated a rich line of work in feminist epistemology on epistemic exclusion, silencing, subordination, and motivated ignorance, including work by linda alcoff, kristie dotson, ishani maitra, josé medina, and charles mills. another important development in social philosophy, especially in the continental tradition, has been the philosophy of recognition. recognition theory has roots in the work fichte, hegel, beauvoir, and fanon. its most influential recent articulation has been by axel honneth, with increasingly complex and sophisticated debates about recognition and inclusion taken forward in feminist contexts by iris marion young and nancy fraser among others. while there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, epistemic exclusion, and silencing, we have found that current analysis and critique of these forms of injustice can be significantly improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation. recognition theory on the one hand, and contemporary work in social epistemology informed by feminism and critical race theory on the other, have developed largely separately from one another. yet, nicola and i maintain that these fields of discussion have considerable bearing on one another. from a recognition theory perspective, the failure properly to recognise and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit might be conceived as an act of recognition injustice. the aim of this special issue is to open a dialogue between discussions of epistemic injustice and in recognition theory. all of our contributing authors feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 sensitively—and on many occasions movingly—consider how far these developments can and should inform and enrich one another. matthew congdon’s contribution explores the idea that “knower” is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. he begins with the claim that “knower” is an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in wilfrid sellars. congdon then argues that one’s being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically laden recognition, and he develops this thought by arguing that honneth’s threefold typology of recognition— love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socioepistemic practice. congdon concludes by arguing that fricker’s proposed “analogy” between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. anna cook’s article focuses on epistemic injustice and recognition dynamics in relation to the canadian truth and reconciliation commission (trc). she argues that the trc provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between native and settler canadians because it both enacts an internalisation of colonial recognition and involves what cook labels “settler ignorance.” cook aims to expand mills’s articulation of white ignorance to a consideration of white settler ignorance. over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. in his contribution to the special issue, michael doan offers a critical appraisal of recent conversation concerning epistemic injustice, focusing on three characteristics of frickerian frameworks that, for doan, obscure the epistemic dimensions of political struggles. he proposes that a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of such struggles by acknowledging and centring the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, by conceptualising the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, and by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. debra l. jackson takes up the challenge of bringing epistemic injustice and recognition theory into conversation by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. she offers the #metoo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition both makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. she argues that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are both able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. giladi and mcmillan – introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 andrea lobb, in her paper, argues that by drawing on honneth’s recognition theory, it is possible to extend the account of epistemic injustice beyond fricker’s two central categories, to glimpse yet another register of serious “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” lobb defines this harm as prediscursive epistemic injury and offers two central cases to illustrate this additional form of epistemic injustice. in his paper, josé medina argues that because of dysfunctions in the normative order of recognition of a society, the groups and subjects negatively impacted by the deficient recognition order will have the intelligibility and/or credibility of their contributions to epistemic life compromised. he explores how certain dysfunctional patterns of recognition result in pathologies of public discourse that undermine the intelligibility and credibility of marginalised groups, principally those voices of protest. louise richardson-self’s article focuses on two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in australia. richardson-self argues that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialised speech, the complainants in fact harm australians of colour through these utterances. for richardson-self, these complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice, namely wilful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess. further, she argues that the complainants misrecognise themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognise others in their own marginal racial specificity. such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of australia’s dominant social imaginary. in her afterword, miranda fricker argues that bringing epistemic injustice and recognition theory into conversation has positive benefits: it helps articulate a notion of positive epistemic self-esteem that is distinctive of epistemic cooperation among people whose baseline conception of each other is that of generic epistemic peer. the development and sustaining of generic epistemic peerage amounts to the realisation of the virtues of the spirit of epistemic recognition. this ethos pervades the everyday interactions of people who look to one another for epistemic goods such as reasons, evidence, information, and social interpretations, and it defines the spirit in which our communicative practices take place—no matter how banal they may be regarding subject matter. for fricker, the inherently cooperative ethos of mutual epistemic recognition is a creative resource for many different kinds of virtuous epistemic enterprise. paul giladi is lecturer in philosophy at manchester metropolitan university, an affiliate of the ucd centre for ethics in public life, and an honorary research fellow at the university of sheffield. he has published articles in leading philosophical feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 journals and edited collections on hegel, pragmatism, critical social theory, feminism, and contemporary anglo-american philosophy. dr. giladi has three forthcoming edited volume contracts with routledge: responses to naturalism: critical perspectives from idealism and pragmatism (2019); hegel and the frankfurt school: traditions in dialogue (2020); and epistemic injustice and the philosophy of recognition (coedited with nicola mcmillan, 2021). nicola mcmillan is an honorary researcher at lancaster university, having gained her phd there in 2017. her phd thesis was awarded the 2018 political studies association ernest barker prize for political theory. her main research interests are in political, feminist, and continental philosophy. she is coeditor of epistemic injustice and the philosophy of recognition (routledge, 2021). care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 1 2015 care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility? lorraine code york university, codelb@yorku.ca recommended citation code, lorraine. 2015. "care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility?. "feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1. care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility? 1 lorraine code abstract departing from an epistemological tradition for which knowledge properly achieved must be objective, especially in eschewing affect and/or special interests; and against a backdrop of my thinking about epistemic responsibility, i focus on two situations where care informs and enables good knowing. the implicit purpose of this reclamation of care as epistemically vital is to show emphatically that standard alignments of care with femininity—the female—are simply misguided. proposing that the efficacy of epistemic practices is often enhanced when would-be knowers care about the outcomes of investigation, i suggest that epistemic responsibility need not be compromised when caring motivates and animates research. indeed, the background inspiration comes from the thought, integral to feminist and post-colonial theory and practice that, despite often-justified condemnations of research that serves "special interests," particularities do matter, epistemically. such thoughts, variously articulated, are integral to enacting a shift in epistemology away from formal abstraction and toward engaging with the specificities of real-world, situated knowledge projects. they are not unequivocally benign, for villains too care about the outcomes of their projects. hence multi-faceted engagements with epistemic practices and processes are urgently required across the social-political world. keywords: advocacy, affect, care, knowing, responsibility an expert witness? the questions about care, concern, and advocacy i address in this essay are prompted by a 12 november 2011 report in the toronto globe and mail of a controversy surrounding the ethics and politics of knowledge as they were being enacted in a canadian courtroom setting (hume 2011). under the headline, “credentials of famous medical ethics lecturer challenged in euthanasia case," the report engages with the question that occasioned the challenge: namely, 1 editors’ note: from time to time feminist philosophy quarterly publishes invited papers. this paper was invited to celebrate the inaugural issue of the journal. 1 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 whether dr. marcia angell could justifiedly qualify as an expert witness in a debate about physician-assisted suicide. dr. angell had been a senior lecturer in the department of social medicine at harvard medical school, where she “currently gives monthly lectures on ethics to faculty." she was executive editor of the new england journal of medicine from 1988 to 1999 and interim editor-in-chief from 1999-2000. author of an acclaimed book, the truth about drug companies (2005), she garnered widespread professional and public respect for her policy of refusing to publish pharmaceutical-industry-funded research in the journal while serving as a member of the editorial board. these background facts are noteworthy for their pertinence to the questions about advocacy and expertise i will consider. i am reading the report as a point of entry into this controversy not in order to take a stand for or against euthanasia or to rest my case on one small article, but to examine the rhetorical presentation of the objections to dr. angell’s testifying it details, en route to thinking about certain modalities of the care, concern, and advocacy i refer to in the title, and addressing some effects of the instituted social imaginary that holds them in place. at issue are socially entrenched yet conflicting conceptions of epistemic responsibility and agency as they shape the debate generated by this inquiry in particular, and inform an array of often-contentious views about the place of advocacy and trust in the construction and public circulation of knowledge. in addressing these issues with reference to an “instituted social imaginary," i am indebted principally to cornelius castoriadis, drawing on my elaboration of his work, in ecological thinking and elsewhere. for castoriadis, an instituted imaginary carries within it the normative social meanings, customs, expectations, assumptions, values, prohibitions, and permissions—the habitus and ethos—into which human beings are nurtured from childhood and which they internalize, affirm, challenge, or contest as they make sense of their place, options, responsibilities within a world, both social and physical whose 'nature' and meaning are also instituted within these imaginary significations. (code 2006, 30) but the consequent position need not, and likely will not, be static, dogmatic, for to it castoriadis opposes the instituting imaginary which he understands as the critical-creative activity of a society whose autonomy is evidenced in its capacity to put itself in question; to recognize that as a society, it is incongruous with itself, with scant reason for self-satisfaction (code 2006, 31). 2 this conceptual framing is integral to my thinking here. questions about epistemic responsibility rarely figured in philosophical 2 my references here are to castoriadis (1998) and castoriadis (1994). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 epistemological deliberations until, with the development of social epistemology and the new epistemologies of ignorance in the late twentiethand early twentyfirst centuries, a conceptual space opened for engaging with the issues it addresses (code 1987; code 2010a). 3 resistance to according such issues philosophical legitimacy was prompted and continues to derive from a residual positivistic reluctance to allow that there could be more than one way of knowing specific subject matters, events, objects, theories: descriptively and normatively, the assumption prevailed that knowledge worthy of the name must be univocal and definitive. from the impersonal pronouncement, “science has proved” and its analogues, it follows that properly objective knowledge will adhere to such a formal scientific standard. it will not bear the mark of its maker(s): it could be anyone’s or everyone’s, and will claim universal validity. since attributions of responsibility explicitly or implicitly invoke the figure of “the knower(s)” in her, his, or their situatedness and consequent particularity and/or fallibility, the fear is that knowledge claims will be diluted or otherwise compromised in evaluative processes that invoke responsibility judgements. they may in effect fail to merit the (honorific) label “knowledge” or to achieve certainty (smith, 1987; code 2010a). 4 claiming space and explanatory power for judgements of epistemic responsibility, whether individual or collective/communal, calls for more complex assessments of cognitive achievement than paradigmatic post-positivistic practices of verifying one knowledge claim against one item, event, or utterance in the physical-socialmaterial world could allow. yet such evaluations, i propose, are required for assessing the complexity of knowledge that eschews abstract formality to return to the world of (individual or collective) experience, experiment, and expertise, where all of these issues may figure in processes of evaluation. there are often choices about how, responsibly, to establish and implement knowledge in situations, both scientific and quotidian, that are more multi-faceted, more variably textured, than traditionally paradigmatic empiricist examples of knowing the cup is on the table, or the cat is on the mat. in the inquiry at the supreme court of british columbia where the disagreement reported in the 2011 article occurred, the lawyer for the canadian 3 epistemic responsibility has been something of a sleeper since its publication, but the conceptual apparatus it introduces is currently claiming a place in post-positivist social epistemology and the politics of knowledge. 4 pertinent is barbara herrnstein smith’s observation, “[n]o judgment is or could be objective in the classic sense of justifiable on totally contexttranscendent and subject independent grounds. … [o]bjectivist claims may operate quite negatively under certain conditions and for certain members of the community and are in the long run perilous for the community at large” (1987, 294). such is the objectivism that condemns marcia angell. 3 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 federal government reportedly maintained that dr. angell should not be recognized as an expert witness “because she is an advocate for euthanasia and because her experience and training doesn’t involve original research.” 5 alleging that dr. angell is “passionate about [advocating for] assisted suicide”—in view of having written articles in support of the practice—the government lawyer maintained that she had “sacrificed her impartiality” and was therefore incapable of providing objective testimony. the implication is that because she cared, as an advocate by definition presumably would, she could not be sufficiently objective—impartial—to present knowledgeable, well-informed testimony: her capacity to fulfill the obligations of an expert witness is thus subjected to radical contestation. advocacy as such, regardless of whose it is or how well informed, finds ready, unreflective, condemnation in this scenario, infused as it is by the presupposition that caring passionately can only be irrational, and must therefore overstep the boundaries of reason. 6 (it needs also to be observed that marcia angell is ambivalently positioned in respect to advocacy, for she had deplored and acted to block the advocacy enacted in drug-company-funded research. here she finds herself condemned and excluded for views derogatorily cast as advocacy.) the argument centres on dr. angell’s capacity, as an “eminent medical ethicist” whose “expertise [is] recognized by harvard medical school,” to serve as an expert witness in the hearing. i am parsing the report but i think not distorting it to enlist it as a way into thinking about whether caring about an outcome, even caring deeply, unequivocally damages a putative knower’s capacity to know responsibly and well, more seriously than caring “not a whit” or being utterly disinterested would do. i put the alternatives baldly, but they are integral to larger questions about advocacy which, in the remarks i cite, is cast negatively, as a reprehensible, truth-inhibiting practice, without further ado. in my view, as i argue in ecological thinking (code 2006, esp. ch. 5), advocacy often makes knowledge possible, in the strongest sense of that word: in certain circumstances it is a requirement sine qua non for the production, validation, and circulation of knowledge. in making these rather extravagant claims, i am referring not to knowledge-in-general, which to my mind is an empty category, but to knowledge pertinent to/in specific domains of inquiry and deliberation, where people who need to know perhaps cannot (again, in a strong sense of the word) be expected to know for themselves by their 5 this and all subsequent quotes pertaining to dr. angell and the controversy surrounding her ability to give expert testimony are attributable to hume, 2011. 6 my claim is not that caring is always reasonable or valuable, but that its worthy modalities are absorbed by its unacceptable associations with the putative irrationality of affect and emotion. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 independent efforts, for diverse reasons. would-be knowers may find themselves constrained not for want of intelligence, but owing to situationspecific constraints on their expertise, access, or understanding: consequences of social-historical divisions of intellectual labour and/or entrenched structures of power and privilege which circumscribe their capacities to think toward new possibilities, away from fixed, sedimented ideas and expectations. in short, often, would-be knowers can neither find nor create the requisite breaks in a putatively seamless epistemic imaginary to allow untried ideas to claim a hearing; cannot practice or produce the “critical openness” that would allow them or their interlocutors to recognize their “biases and limitations” for what they are (medina 2011). nonetheless, although the thought will not be new to feminists, science and technology studies scholars, and other contributors to “post-epistemology” projects, i am suggesting that the dogma of objectivity in its starkest positivistic all-or-nothing construal has not served “us” well. 7 the implications of this claim bear rehearsing in connection with marcia angell’s testimony, together with more wide-ranging questions about the place of care, concern, and advocacy in situations where it matters to know and act responsibly and well. such places and situations are more common, more complex, and usually more ambiguous than classical empiricist questions about how to know for certain whether the cup is on the table, or the barn facades that draw tourists to new england are fake or real. these more elaborated questions are germane to addressing the social implications and enactments of knowledge that involves, produces, or thwarts responsible social-epistemic recognition and interaction. my intention, then, is not to contest the value of objectivity in knowledge, from simple empirical claims to such convoluted questions as are at issue in the euthanasia case, but to urge more nuanced understandings of its scope and limits. the claim that angell has “sacrificed her impartiality” because she cares about, is deeply “passionate about” assisted suicide is so simplistic yet so rhetorically definitive a dismissal as to close off space for thinking more deeply about subjectivity, power, knowledge, and the place of care, responsibility, and concern in evaluating knowledge claims, expert opinion, and the ethics and politics of knowing. although i present it as a small moment in what was undoubtedly a fuller argument, such a flat refusal to accord epistemic respect to advocacy for the reasons adduced is emblematic of larger politics-of-knowledge issues that require critical-constructive attention. as i read the report, in this exchange dr. angell is being subjected to an egregious form of epistemic injustice, in a sense akin to that articulated by miranda fricker in her 2007 book. 8 she is impugned in her capacity as a knower 7 see also lorraine daston (1994). 8 fricker characterizes testimonial injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, 20; italics 5 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 and a trustworthy expert testifier on flimsy if not spurious grounds. yet the condemnation finds support in the larger social-epistemic imaginary precisely because of the entrenched and often warranted distrust of advocacy i refer to, in twentiethand twenty-first-century epistemology, scientific inquiry, and in the wider world which, as lorraine daston shows, is constitutive of current conceptions of objectivity that embrace “not only freedom from theoretical bias but also a complete elimination of the personal and of the emotional” (daston 1994, 58). still today, the conviction prevails that advocacy can make no legitimate contribution to establishing the veracity of a knowledge claim or to informing claims that are embedded in or supply the background for giving and receiving testimony. i contend that despite its frequent aptness, such distrust cannot universally be justified or indiscriminately directed toward advocacy as such. as i observe in ecological thinking (code 2006) there are good reasons to distrust advocacy, and no need to rehearse the substance of its persistently negative images. but some version of what i have called “taking subjectivity into account” (code 1995) is surely required in evaluating those reasons. it would involve investigating at a deep (genealogical) level, not a shallow, superficial level “whose advocacy is at issue, here?” (where “whose” may be singular or plural): addressing the detail of embodied “situatedness," the credentials and epistemological “record” of would-be advocates, and the social-politicalhistorical positioning, genealogy, and conduct which confer a presumption of trustworthiness or its opposite upon their putative knowing. for donna haraway, whose conception of “situated knowledges” stands as a late-twentieth-century conceptual landmark (1991), such practices could—and in contentious situations often should—be enlisted to evaluate her, his or their suitability for performing these acts of advocacy, here, in these circumstances. enlisting the conceptual resources of situated knowledges denies the possibility of a view from nowhere (which, for haraway, counts as a “god trick”), to recognize that knowing is always somewhere, and both constrained and enabled by its situation. in consequence of such a conceptual shift, inquiries often come down to dealing with particulars, but in responsibly deliberative processes they would do so without embarking on a pernicious slide into particularism (code 2010b). no definitive answer may be available in every case, but in eschewing the individualism and instantaneity of one-off, infinitely replicable propositional claims of which empirical knowledge before social epistemology allegedly was made, democratic deliberative inquiry can make room for the care in investigation that engaging such questions, ethically and epistemologically, requires. the issues cannot responsibly be judged, and dismissed, in a simplistic “s has sacrificed the objectivity required to know p” discrediting. yet the requirement is not quite so simple, for this report confirms that dr. original). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 angell’s credentials are addressed and impugned, and her ethicalepistemological record which in many quarters would be judged impeccable, is cited to discredit her. the discrediting is not definitive, but it shows that her intellectual-professional eminence is no guarantee against the egregious distortions on which advocacy’s detractors base their condemnations. the larger point is that deliberations such as these must almost by definition be engaged in media res, nor can they be conducted from or on a perfectly clean slate, a tabula rasa cleansed of all traces of an instituted epistemic imaginary that shapes the situations of their making, or a place where no preconceptions will infuse and colour the debate. and the disputes may terminate in impasse. this is the stuff of which situated, real-world epistemic disputes are made: they rarely lend themselves to the sanitized analyses formal anglo-american philosophy of science and epistemology offer and on which orthodox positivism relies. yet, the outcome need neither be a disdain for objectivity and principles of inquiry, nor a slide into epistemic, ethical, or legal-political chaos. some of these thoughts are implied in the charge that dr. angell’s concentration “on issues concerning pharmaceuticals” leaves her uninformed on matters related to euthanasia. the claim is not trivial. it attests, in this dimension, to a failure of epistemic responsibility on the part of her detractors, evident in their apparent failure to have investigated and attempted to understand well enough to determine substantive overlaps between medical ethics—her recognized area of professional expertise—and the pertinence of the questions that preoccupied her throughout her editorship of the journal to the case at hand. although there may be no good reason to expect the government lawyer, without further inquiry, to differentiate within areas of specialization that are not her own when it is a matter of disqualifying the testimony of an eminent practitioner and scholar, the public whose future choices will be influenced by the outcome has reason to expect more by way of establishing why, in this instance, trust should be conferred or withheld. such expectations are integral to ensuring that the proceedings are informed by a background commitment to just epistemic practice. my claim is emphatically not that once such an investigation has occurred, then saying makes it so even if the “sayer” is a recognized expert: this is no simplistic argument from authority. but it is a claim against invoking crude categories and mechanisms of condemnation without taking care to determine how well they “fit” the specificities of the situation. on a different level, it shows that one consequence of eschewing epistemic individualism is that patterns of verification and falsification must spread out more widely than purely individualistic, top-down inquiry has tended to presume. in a well-functioning epistemic-scientific community, these are questions for discussion and negotiation not for univocal dismissal, even in a courtroom situation where a counter-argument might be ventured to the effect that time is money! to commend advocacy as a sometimes legitimate epistemic practice and to 7 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 claim a place for care and concern in knowledge on the basis of one small newspaper article would be flimsy indeed, inviting and warranting a charge of epistemic frivolity. but marcia angell’s contested positioning in the euthanasia case is exemplary beyond the courtroom setting. it poses urgent questions about the ethics and politics of knowledge and professional expertise that indicate some directions philosophical engagement with testimony and “expert” knowing has to take when it moves away from the abstraction of positivism’s formal modalities to engage with and adjudicate real-world power-infused knowledgemaking and -circulating practices, where science, epistemology, ethics, and politics cannot be disentangled. 9 addressing such questions “in situation” requires engaging with epistemic subjectivity in a manner quite foreign to anglo-american philosophers’ image of “the knower” as a disengaged, “remote” (following val plumwood 2002), 10 interchangeable place-holder in the pursuit of knowledge, itself typically conceived as consisting of discrete facts. whether advocacy practices participate in making knowledge possible or in contesting its claims, or whether they are denied epistemic respectability, it matters who the advocates are, what credentials and justifications they supply for advocating as they do, and how their trustworthiness is established or gainsaid in deliberative processes. moreover, for purposes of this discussion and more generally, it makes sense to assume that advocates, singly or as members of an advocacy group, will care about the claims and positions for which they advocate. this is the aspect of advocacy, in some of its modalities, that elicits condemnation; and it is clear that advocacy tout court, simply as such, can be neither applauded nor deplored. yet even from a commonsensical point of view, it is hard to imagine undertaking the difficult, frequently contestable and contentious work advocacy projects require, without caring about the outcome. hence, ex hypothesi, advocates cannot routinely claim the impartiality—the principled “escape from perspective” (daston 1992)—allegedly integral to achieving objectivity “properly so called," ahistorically conceived and formally enacted, as it dominates the epistemic imaginary of the anglo-american mainstream. it is because she cares that angell faces the criticism that seeks to disqualify her, as though it were, by definition, impossible to care reasonably, rationally, and knowledgeably. the entrenched image of the dispassionate, disconnected knower works with a curiously implausible conception of subjectivity: a person detached from the world who does not care in the slightest about what he or she knows, whose affectivity is excised from her or his intellectual life, and who need not— borrowing karen barad’s (2007) apt phrase—evince any concern about “meeting 9 such is the thrust of daston's argument in “objectivity and the escape from perspective," supra. 10 remoteness, as normatively characteristic of mainstream epistemology, ethics and politics, is a theme in val plumwood (2002). see especially pp. 71-82. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 the universe halfway." how, one must ask, could such a person be or be imagined, other than between the covers of an orthodox anglo-american epistemology text? as i note in ecological thinking (2006, 208ff), such a knower would be unlikely to know things well enough to do anything with or about them, or to care about them, positively or negatively. nor does artificially separating contexts of discovery and justification offer a plausible solution, although there may be a certain wisdom in producing concentrated internal analyses of the activities and projects that shape each side. but while some messiness and chaos may be taken for granted in contexts of discovery, traditionally represented (contentiously, i suggest) as occurring prior to real epistemological analysis, the separation process presupposes a solitary “individual” knower-justifier, who need not engage in the back-and-forth of communal deliberation or discussion, and who adopts and inhabits a position immune to debate, reconsideration, collaboration, change. these thoughts are not new, but their persistence is evident throughout the instituted epistemic imaginary of the late twentiethand twenty-first-century anglo-american epistemological, ethical, scientific, and legal world. i am not proposing that all contentious testimonial or other knowledge claims require advocacy to establish their veracity, but many do, and these merit a differently elaborated kind of analysis from received, top-down, spectatorepistemology practices of validation or falsification. thinking and deliberating communally, ecologically, horizontally, across multifaceted situations and circumstances is often the best and even the only way to establish or discredit the plausibility of novel or disruptive knowledge claims that unsettle the status quo, and rely upon or test the putative reliability of their would-be advocates. this is how it is in situations where reputations of expertise are established or challenged, which call for more complex justificatory practices than one-off, punctiform claims and counter-claims do. requirements such as these are writ large in advocacy situations that engage—as the angell case does—with issues analogous to those bruno latour singles out as “matters of concern," where i propose reading his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern more expansively than its initial presentation suggests, to make space for affirming connections between concern and care. latour deplores a tacit philosophical obligation to erase from epistemological analysis “the work required in order to establish the persistent, stubborn data…. to limit ‘facts’ to the final stage in a long process of elaboration” (2004, 95 ff.). 11 such a requirement expunges genealogical traces from scientific practice, confining them to the allegedly superseded “context of discovery” which disappears in the putatively real work that happens in the “context of justification." it discounts the interactive, often conflictual labour from which 11 cited in code (2006, 101). 9 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 “factuality” is frequently achieved. for latour, by contrast, and germane to this discussion, “the only way to respect … heterogeneity and … locality is …to do a lot of philosophy. but philosophy is not about unifying factors…. [it] is a protection against the hegemony of the present sciences” (latour 1993, 218). here, as i show in ecological thinking (2006, 60-61), questions about knowledge, responsibility, and agency are inextricably intertwined with the unevenly distributed cognitive resources and moral-political-affective effects of institutional knowledge production in present-day societies. practices of advocacy participate, albeit diversely, in shaping these interconnections. very vulnerable bodies to think further about advocacy in a wider dimension, in relation to its bearing upon a related aspect of the content, inspiration, and public/local impact of scientific research, i turn now to consider advocacy issues as they figure, if implicitly, in kristin shrader-frechette’s 2007 book, taking action, saving lives: our duties to protect environmental and public health. 12 there, among numerous matters of urgent public concern, she documents the exceptional bodily vulnerability of children—for now conceived generically—to the effects of environmental pollution. she assembles scientific evidence with care and with a purpose: as an illustration of the kinds of advocacy practice my analysis applauds, hers is an over-arching, transparently caring and committed, profoundly intelligent project. questions about knowing well and advocating responsibly again, if from a different direction, are pivotal in her analyses. plainly, in this text as in her earlier works, shrader-frechette is no neutral observer: she is deeply invested in—like marcia angell, she cares passionately about—the harms she addresses. she is no impartial bystander yet, i suggest, her inquiry is objective in a strong sense with affinities to both haraway’s “situated knowledges” and sandra harding’s “strong objectivity” (harding 1986, esp. ch.5). 13 for harding, strong objectivity achieves its strength to the extent that it takes the epistemic positioning of the scientist/knower as fully as possible into account in evaluating the adequacy of her/his knowledge claims. its project is not to cleanse inquiry of materialities, commitments, interests, presuppositions, or of the constitutive effects of situation and place, but to analyse these as carefully as it analyses traditional “objects of knowledge." its strength is thus significantly attributable to its self-reflexivity, manifested in ongoing monitoring of its own processes of inquiry. analogously, i am suggesting that shraderfrechette’s work achieves the level of objectivity it does because of, not in spite 12 germane also is kristin shrader-frechette (2002), environmental justice: creating equality, reclaiming democracy. 13 here i draw on my discussion of harding in ecological thinking, pp. 6162. harding’s epistemological position departs markedly from the empiricism that informs shrader-frechette’s work. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 of her passionate commitment. one reviewer observes: “shrader-frechette’s analysis is informed not only by her wide-ranging knowledge of relevant scientific material but also by her close familiarity with ethical theory. it is enlivened by a sense of indignation, compassion, and urgency…” (lacey 2008, 761). such is the compassion that animates the advocacy that makes certain kinds of knowledge possible. as shrader-frechette’s investigations show, knowing responsibly and well is urgently required for thinking compassionately about and acting to foster social justice, in response to the ecologically outrageous situations she analyses. the contrast, at the simplest level, is between knowing situations or things “in general," and knowing them well enough in their specificity and variable detail to engage well with them—to “meet” with them (in barad’s sense)—carefully. these are matters of epistemic and ethical responsibility. yet because so few non-scientists are capable of knowing well enough without sensitively interpreted empirical data— without engaged evidence such as she offers— they/we are reliant on advocacy such as shrader-frechette produces if we/they are to doubt intelligently, or to protest plausibly against repeated statisticallyderived and authoritatively uttered public assurances that things environmental are “getting better” (whyte and crease 2010). thus, countering what she calls “the longevity objection” whose adherents argue that “people seem to be living longer and getting healthier” (shraderfrechette 2007, 32) as a way of contesting charges that pollution damage to people’s health in the usa is ubiquitous and increasingly dire, shrader-frechette responds that the objectors “forget that people would be even healthier if pollution were reduced” (33). more urgently, she observes: “regardless of longevity, environmental pollution . . . gives the most vulnerable people – children, particularly minority children – poorer health than they otherwise would have had.” (34). nonetheless, in state-of-the-art published reports of pollution levels, the specificities of children’s vulnerabilities to a range of noxious substances are frequently invisible: they vanish into the numbers to count as just one person, one statistical unit among others. people tend not to look for them or think of taking them separately into account when they are routinely “included” as one unit in a set of statistics. yet children’s small bodily size, relative fragility, and general incapacity to look after or speak for themselves perpetuates a general ignorance of their disproportionate susceptibility, which varies also across multiple forms of social marginalisation, and cannot responsibly be left unaddressed. shrader-frechette’s recognition that she and “we” need to care about them, to look behind the statistics to expose the gaps and exclusions on which they stand, is a noteworthy achievement of this investigation, whose epistemic and ethical imperatives are inseparably interconnected and reciprocally constitutive. 11 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 statistical population analyses are not well attuned to the particularities and specificities that, for many concerned/caring inquirers— among them feminist epistemologists and others who depart from the positivistic norm— require special attention. 14 thus with respect to the assurance “statistics have shown," the question is more pressingly about what statistics do not show and have not shown, what they are selected or constrained to show, what picture of social beings they work from and generate, and why “we” should care. knowing well enough to advocate well in these and analogous circumstances frequently requires reading statistical evidence “against the grain," learning to recognize when and where “there is more to be said." in short, there are many ways to read the statistics! here informed advocacy is frequently required to counter the epistemic and ethical-political injustices consequent upon the knowledge/ignorance (in shannon sullivan’s apt term (2007)) through which “facts” purporting to show that there is no danger from environmental pollution are circulated to a non-scientific public. all of this being said, however, david michaels’s insistence on the negative status and effects of advocacy demands a response. it is a tangled issue. referring to the tobacco industry’s concentrated efforts to “manufacture uncertainty” so as to destabilize the “growing consensus linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer and other adverse health effects," michaels contends: “opinions submitted to regulatory agencies by corporate scientists and, especially, the product defense industry must be taken as advocacy, primarily, not as science” (michaels 2008, 91, 102; italics added). although it will be apparent from the foregoing that i reject this stark opposition between advocacy and science, his contention both confirms and contests the position i am taking. given the rhetorical force and extensive financial backing of campaigns to encourage people to keep on smoking, of which he is deeply critical, and given the extent to which “bad science” is coopted to sustain an effective level of uncertainty about potential harms, thus promoting the agenda of the tobacco industry, michaels’s condemnation of the “opinions” is well warranted. they are, as he observes, devoted more explicitly to advocacy conducted in the service of private, corporate interests than to scientific truth. but when scientific claims from the “other side” are brought to bear on the same issue, again animated by strong interests, even when these interests run counter to the agenda of the uncertainty pedlars, they too must be acknowledged as advocacy and evaluated accordingly. here, then, is the conundrum: the contrast is less between science and advocacy simpliciter than between epistemically irresponsible science informing advocacy conducted in the service of harmful agendas, and advocacy informed 14 i am thinking of karen messing and rachel carson, whose epistemological practice i discuss in ecological thinking, and of barbara mcclintock. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 by epistemically responsible science conducted in the service of beneficial, ecologically sound agendas. the criteria need to be negotiated, deliberated, interpreted and the processes will be long and complex, but such is the way with temporally and geographically located knowing that does not conform easily to pre-existing models or presuppositions. putting the point too simplistically, practitioners in the second of these groups will undoubtedly care how their findings contribute to such presumably uncontroversial goods as human health and well-being, and to reducing, preventing, or repairing damage to the physical-natural world; while those whose relationship to knowledge is primarily opportunistic and self-serving will likely care differently. but if advocates on both sides care, then clearly, caring is not enough, is not the decisive ingredient. hence adjudication processes will have to involve intricate ethical-political deliberations, not separated from but interwoven with the over-simplified advocacy-versus-science debate, to prevent the situation descending into a crass adversarial contest between conflicting advocacy camps, with matters of social justice and scientific “truth” falling by the wayside in the process. these are live and urgent issues that resist premature closure. without doubt, “the facts” need to be established; but if achieving this end reduces to a power struggle between advocacy informed by epistemically responsible science, contrasted with advocacy funded by private-interest science, when the criteria invoked to distinguish them may also be unstable, then the issue will remain fraught, epistemologically, ethically, and politically. nor can it legitimately be assumed before the fact that private-interest research, by definition, abdicates allegiance to “the truth." nonetheless, as with the challenge to marcia angell, if somewhat differently, so advocacy on behalf of “scientific findings” tends to be discredited as dangerous because in the received epistemic imaginary it is frequently, if unjustly, identified only with condemnable modalities of private-interest science which compromise, when they do not negate, such measured objectivity as may be achievable. while there cannot be a “one size fits all” condemnation or commendation of advocacy projects, the alternative is not to leave them open to whatever interpretation may be convenient. care needs to be taken to ensure that such judgements respond to the specificities of situations and populations, horizontally and vertically, and across a range of intersecting and even contradictory values. how those specificities are to be known, and what responses they rightfully elicit, may require ongoing deliberation, which might issue in action at a point that falls short of producing definitive answers: to settle for achieving a balance between tolerating a certain degree of ambiguity—of open-endedness— while needing also to act. indirectly, outlining the impasse thus recalls daston’s astute observation: “… the most important factor in the ready acceptance of baconian facts, despite their strangeness and/or irreplicability, was trust, 13 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 extended almost carte blanche to at least a small circle of respected colleagues and informants” (1994, 49). if indeed the debate comes down to decisions about where, reasonably, to confer or withhold trust, then clearly it is as urgently a matter of ethics, responsibility, and care as it is about bare matters of (empirical) fact. returning to shrader-frechette, it would be possible to read her text as a well-documented condemnation of advocacy in the strongest sense, as she records case after case of corporate advocacy bent upon “orchestrating ignorance, ignoring consent” (2002, ch.2). yet it is itself also a work of advocacy in a positive sense: informed, eloquent, caring and fully engaged with matters of fact as they inform and animate matters of concern and vice versa; a work that makes a strongly reasoned case for deliberative democracy and intelligent activism (young 2001). it shows, unequivocally, why advocacy has been subject to the condemnation i have been discussing, as it was enlisted to discredit marcia angell, and is enlisted by public relations firms in the usa, “using selective facts and emotional appeals…to deny pollution problems… [or when] they cannot be denied… to show either that pollution produces compensating benefits, or that it cannot be stopped” (shrader-frechette 2002, 64). but it also shows, unequivocally, why advocacy may be required to make knowledge possible, and why knowledge that satisfies the highest epistemic standards and can withstand the most rigorous scrutiny is essential, if informed, justice-committed advocacy is to attain its ends. nor, again, are these questions epistemological alone: they are as ethical as they are epistemological. most urgently, i believe, they are also political and ontological: ontological in that they silently but insistently pose the question “who do we think we are? 15 although there are no easy answers, this is the most urgent question for putatively “first world” thinkers and activists, now. thus shrader-frechette asks: what ought citizens do to protect their rights [to know]? instead of condemning all private interests—interests that are essential to economic prosperity—citizens ought to . . . use the tools of deliberative democracy to educate themselves and others, to help prevent conflicts of interest, and to ensure that government regulators and oversight agencies behave as they should. (2002, 74) nonetheless, private-interest science, in her view, is “neither scientific nor ethical” (75), where these terms are to be understood both descriptively and normatively. 15 i engage more fully with this question in “ecological subjectivities, responsibilities, and agency" (forthcoming a), and in “who do we think we are?” (forthcoming b). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 advocacy and objectivity: concluding thoughts in social epistemology, where i situate my reading of the disputes about marcia angell’s testimony and of shrader-frechette’s analyses, and especially in feminist social epistemology, large overarching knowledge claims tend, more frequently than in the positivistic epistemic tradition, to begin from or draw upon specific, precisely individuated and carefully narrated “real-life” examples to establish or illuminate their position. a contrast is with punctiform one-liners and such contrived examples beloved of empiricist epistemologists as knowing that the cup is on the table, or knowing the opening times of the bank: empirical "simples" which can be paradigmatically and unequivocally true or false. yet for all its promise, the practice of drawing on elaborated examples brings with it another set of challenges, centered again around the prospect of laying inquiry open to charges of “particularism," thereby minimizing its significance and exemplary reach. such charges are more rarely warranted than the condemnation suggests, but they need to be taken seriously. more complex in the current epistemic imaginary is the alleged propensity of story-telling— narrative— to slide into the anecdotal, the fictional as contrasted with the (hard) factual; the incidental as contrasted with the necessary, universal. thus, for orthodox theories of knowledge, and a fortiori for moral knowledge, specifically situated narrative approaches tend to invite distrust; to be judged deeply flawed, epistemologically. addressing such contentions with reference to moral knowledge, cheryl misak (2008, 616-617) writes of a feeling among some moral theorists that inquiry into what is right and wrong must be a rational or pure inquiry in which subjective experience takes a backseat . . . [indeed, that] moral experience is so contestable that it makes no sense to think of ethical deliberation as being a rational enterprise or to think that there is truth and objectivity in ethics. 16 social epistemology loosens such strictures with the space it opens for addressing the epistemic significance of testimony and trust, and indeed for drawing on more fully narrated examples to illustrate their implications than formal epistemology has deemed appropriate, but the shift is gradual. yet it is from the detail of the narrative accounts that introduce her scientific examples that shrader-frechette’s statistical data claim a level of lay 16 misak (2008, 617) observes: “medicine and health policy now resolutely take themselves to be ‘evidence based’… they have turned to a narrow conception of evidence epitomized by randomized control trials…. the dominant feeling is that the bad old days of subjectivity are gone and the new day of objectivity, enabled by ebm (evidence-based medicine) has dawned.” 15 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 accessibility they might otherwise not have achieved. stories can bring damaged people and their suffering into contact with the practices of other knowers and activists: through narrative they perform an advocacy function, inviting readers to care, showing them why, in this specific situation, it matters, yet ensuring that “this situation” cannot be dismissed as an isolated instance. so for example, shrader-frechette’s book opens with the story of emily pearson, a child in a neighbourhood east of chicago, who developed brain cancer at the age of three and died when she was seven (2002, 3ff.). she traces patterns of childhood cancer through the first chapter, moving back and forth through demographic analyses and stories of the effects of emily’s dying and of other deaths, in a particularly polluted environment near the ferro chemical plant. in the telling she maintains a delicate balance between narrative detail and statistical analysis, always to advance the advocacy project that motivates her inquiry but never losing sight of its materiality, and its particular poignancy. a different story introduces each chapter, grounding the accounts situationally, affectively, and corporeally; humanizing them, and championing a responsibility to know, and to care. for many feminists and other others (from an invisible white masculine norm) in the anglo-american world, however, care is a persistently doubleedged concept and practice. its warm, feel-good aura which has tended to situate it alongside “the feminine” as a naturally nurturing modality contrasts with a darker side where women are confined as carers to enable the serious business of life to proceed, unencumbered by the onerous minutiae of domesticity involved in reproducing the work force; or where women are “cared for” in oppressive, paternalistic social structures and arrangements allegedly designed to protect them from the harsher realities of the world. implausibly, for positivist-empiricists and most practitioners of the sciences shrader-frechette draws on for the documentation she provides, a bona fide knower must approach her or his subject matter/object of inquiry dispassionately, openly, following where the evidence leads, regardless of the desirability or otherwise of the directions it takes or the conclusions to which it points: she or he should not care, even if the outcome is unpalatable. yet shrader-frechette shows how even “properly” objective inquiry can fail to take into account some of the most urgent issues peculiar to certain specifically embodied and situated subjectivities, which call for intervention in the epistemic and ethical injustices consequent upon the routine invisibility of these vulnerable bodies in conclusions available to a non-scientific public, and indeed to many scientists. my purpose is neither to critique nor to disagree with shrader-frechette’s position, but to work with it as a platform from which to engage further with questions about the place of care in knowledge, and about ignorance and/or responsible epistemic-scientific practice as they figure in feminist and other critical epistemology and moral-political theory; how they contribute to showing 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 that assumptions about the autonomy of knowledge, objectivity and epistemic agency, and the politics of knowing have to be re-thought when they start from situated, vulnerable lives rather than from misbegotten convictions about human and locational sameness, and universal pertinence. none of these thoughts are new in themselves, but they take on a new urgency when the language of care moves into evaluations of knowledge production and circulation, to perform a fundamentally constitutive epistemic function, even if the caring involved cannot fit easily into the one-on-one interpersonal framework on which, for example, carole gilligan’s (1983) and nel noddings’s (1984) work on care in the 1980s tended to rely. in the public imagination, as i have shown in my discussion of the challenge dr. marcia angell faced, advocacy practices are routinely charged with egregious epistemological violations: with a failure of objectivity where vested interests override the detachment on which such starkly conceived objectivity depends; with blatant abuses of power and of the integrity of inquiry; with initiating a pernicious slide into relativism. but grouping advocacy practices together as practices that violate standards of truth and responsibility damages the possibility of engaging in the informed, knowledgeable advocacy that is commonly, and appropriately, integral to the kind of inclusive democratic activism iris marion young was beginning to articulate in her final writings where, for example, she contends: “an appropriate conception of democratic communication should reject … [the] opposition between reason and emotion… emotional and figurative expression are important tools of reasonable persuasion and judgment” (2000, 39; 2001). 17 the apparent urgency of vrinda dalmiya’s (2002) question, “why should a knower care?” confirms how entrenched is the presumption of detachment, remoteness, consequent upon a normative and prescriptive separation of reason from affect, and derived from a conviction that affect sullies reason but with no counter assumption that reason could, intra-actively (again borrowing from karen barad), inform affect and make it wise. elsewhere i have proposed that knowing other people could serve as a model of knowledge more amenable to articulating the requirements of responsible inquiry than knowing the medium-sized material objects, 18 which are the focus of standard empirical inquiry (knowing that the cat is on the mat, for example). in revisiting these thoughts, my intention is not to follow dalmiya in seeing her question as applicable primarily to knowing other people in dyadic 17 shrader-frechette looks to iris marion young’s (2000, 2001) work on deliberative democracy for the conceptual apparatus that informs the ethical implications of her analysis. 18 see, e.g., what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge, especially ch. 2, “second persons." 17 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 one-on-one relationships, but to read it more broadly within the framework i have sketched. such a project might start by recognizing a transformative potential that is consistently thwarted in adhering to an imperative that drives scientific and more secular knowledge toward law-like conclusions and grand generalizations, aggregating particulars and blocking possibilities of knowing them in the specificities of their effects and meanings, and indeed intra-actions, which vary from place to place, and which matter. in ecological thinking and elsewhere, i have discussed such a process as it informs rachel carson’s scientific practice. acknowledging that the matters of fact shrader-frechette documents are just as significantly matters of concern, and that these concerns go to the very roots of who and what we are as social-political human beings, makes care a vital component of such inquiry. references angell, marcia. 2005. the truth about drug companies. new york: random house. barad, karen. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press. castoriadis, cornelius. 1998. the imaginary institution of society. translated by kathleen blaney. cambridge: mit press. ___. 1994. “radical imagination and the socially instituting imaginary." in rethinking imagination: culture and creativity, edited by gillian robinson and john rundell, 136-154. london: routledge. code, lorraine. forthcoming a. “ecological subjectivities, responsibilities, and agency.” in research handbook on human rights and the environment, edited by anna grear and louis kotze. cheltenham: edward elgar. ___. forthcoming b. “who do we think we are?” ___. 2010a. “testimony, advocacy, ignorance: thinking ecologically about social knowledge.” in social epistemology, edited by alan millar, adrian haddock and duncan pritchard, 29-50. oxford: oxford university press. ___. 2010b. “particularity, epistemic responsibility, and the ecological imaginary." philosophy of education archive 23-34. ___. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. new york: oxford university press. ___. 1995.“taking subjectivity into account.” in rhetorical spaces: essays on (gendered) locations. new york: routledge. ___. 1991. what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca: cornell university press. ___. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover: university press of new england. dalmiya, vrinda. 2002. “why should a knower care?” hypatia 17(1): 34-52. daston, lorraine. 1994. “baconian facts, academic civility, and the prehistory of 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 objectivity." in rethinking objectivity, edited by allan megill, 37-63. durham: duke university press. ___. 1992. “objectivity and the escape from perspective.” social studies of science 22(4): 597-618. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. gilligan, carol. 1983. in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge: harvard university press. haraway, donna. 1991. “situated knowledges." in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, 183-203. new york: routledge. hume, mark. 2011. “credentials of famous medical ethics lecturer challenged in euthanasia case,” the [toronto] globe and mail, november 12. lacey, hugh. 2008. review of kristin shrader-frechette, taking action, saving lives: our duties to protect environmental and public health. ethics 118 (4): 757-761. latour, bruno. 1993. we have never been modern. translated by catherine porter. cambridge: harvard university press. ___. 2004. the politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. translated by catherine porter. cambridge: harvard university press. medina, josé. 2011. “the relevance of credibility excess in a proportional view of epistemic dependence: differential epistemic authority and the social imaginary." social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy 25(1): 15-35. michaels, david. 2008. “manufactured uncertainty: contested science and the protection of the public’s health and environment." in agnotology: the making and unmaking of ignorance, edited by robert n. proctor and londa schiebinger, 90-107. redwood city: stanford university press. misak, cheryl. 2008. “experience, narrative, and ethical deliberation.” ethics 118(4): 614-632. noddings, nel. 1984. caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley: university of california press. plumwood, val. 2002. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. abingdon: routledge. shrader-frechette, kristin. 2007. taking action, saving lives: our duties to protect environmental and public health. new york: oxford university press. ___. 2002. environmental justice: creating equality, reclaiming democracy. new york: oxford university press. smith, barbara herrnstein. 1994. “the unquiet judge: activism without objectivism in law and politics." in rethinking objectivity, edited by allan megill, 289-311. durham: duke university press. sullivan, shannon. 2007. “white ignorance and colonial oppression: or, why do i know so little about puerto rico." in race and epistemologies of 19 code: care, concern, and advocacy published by scholarship@western, 2015 ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 153-172. albany: suny press. whyte, kyle powys and robert p. crease. 2001. “trust, expertise, and the philosophy of science." synthese 177 (3): 411-425. young, iris marion. 2001. “activist challenges to deliberative democracy.” political theory 29(5): 670-690. ___. 2000. inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. lorraine code is a distinguished research professor emerita in philosophy at york university in toronto canada, and a fellow of the royal society of canada. she is the author of epistemic responsibility (1987), what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge (1991), and rhetorical spaces: essays on (gendered) locations (1995). in ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location (2006) she develops an “ecological naturalism,” which looks to ecological science where quineans look to cognitive science, as a place—literal and metaphorical—where knowledge is “naturally” made. she is currently working on issues of gendered subjectivity as they bear on testimony, ignorance, and vulnerability, with particular reference to climate change scepticism. this research is funded by a research grant from the social science and humanities research council of canada. the project’s title is “manufactured uncertainty” and epistemic responsibility: implications for climate-change skepticism.” 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.1 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 care, concern, and advocacy: is there a place for epistemic responsibility? lorraine code recommended citation microsoft word 451789-convertdoc.input.439263.jmqaq.docx love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 1 2016 love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure barrett emerick st. mary's college of maryland, bmemerick@smcm.edu recommended citation emerick, barrett. 2016. “love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (2): article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1. love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure1 barrett emerick abstract in this paper i explore how we ought to respond to the problematic inner lives of those that we love. i argue for an understanding of love that is radical and challenging—a powerful form of resistance within the confines of everyday relationships. i argue that love, far from the platitudinous and saccharine view, does not call for our acceptance of others’ failings. instead, loving another means believing in their potential to grow and holding them to account when they fail. i argue that loving others means meeting them where they are and working to understand the role that oppressive ideologies, coupled with cognitive biases, play in generating and entrenching their problematic mental states. i then argue that we ought not disengage with our loved ones or write them off as lost causes, nor should we accept that we will simply “agree to disagree.” instead, we should stand in moral solidarity with our loved ones and press them to become better while simultaneously understanding that such moral growth is usually a slow and painful process—often, the project of a lifetime. keywords: love, solidarity, resistance, anger, disappointment, contempt, civilized oppression in the conclusion to his famous letter to his nephew, james baldwin says, “we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it” (baldwin 1962, 10). baldwin is not alone in claiming that love should play an important role in the promotion of social justice; many other scholars and activists have made similar claims. unfortunately, such appeals are easily 1 i presented an earlier version of this paper at the 32nd international social philosophy conference, sponsored by the north american society for social philosophy, where i received invaluable feedback. additionally, i am grateful to emily saari, elizabeth spelman, corwin aragon, shane gronholz, rosa terlazzo, saba fatima, rachel fredericks, and kayleigh doherty for their support and insight. i am also grateful for the very helpful feedback given by both anonymous referees and the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly. 1 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 watered down, white-washed, or co-opted by others, either intentionally or unintentionally, to maintain the unjust status quo. in the aftermath of political violence, for instance, it is dangerously easy to press survivors to forgive, to move on, to remain passive and complicit in the perpetuation of the oppressive structures that harmed them, all in the name of love. in this paper i will argue for an understanding of love that is radical and challenging—a powerful form of resistance within the confines of everyday relationships. i will argue that love, far from the platitudinous and saccharine view, does not call for us only to celebrate our loved ones’ strengths and accomplishments, nor for us to accept our loved ones’ failings. instead, part of what loving another requires is believing in their potential to grow, holding them to account when they fail, and expecting them to be better. specifically, i will focus on the role that love can play in the promotion of social justice within the context of any type of loving relationship where one party bears racist, sexist, homophobic, or other prejudicial attitudes, beliefs, or emotions. i will focus, in other words, on how we ought to respond to the problematic inner lives of those whom we love. the group to which baldwin was referring were ignorant white people who were pitiful in their failure to understand their complicity in racial injustice.2 i will later argue that pity is an inappropriate response to those that we love (though i do not necessarily disagree with baldwin’s more general claim about how we should regard others in our lives). so, though my project is inspired by baldwin’s work, and though i will return to his prescription throughout this paper, i am here taking the scope of who should be “forced to see” to be much narrower, in that i am not focusing on how we should respond to others in general, but how we should respond to those we love in particular. (hereafter i will use the more inclusive and precise ‘perceive’ or ‘recognize’ rather than ‘see.’) students of mine who have studied and become concerned with promoting social justice often hope for a “magic” argument—one that will instantly cause their prejudiced interlocutor (perhaps especially those that they love) to come to perceive things differently. of course, i would also like to discover such an argument, but in my experience they don’t exist. as sally haslanger says in the introduction to resisting reality, “social justice will never be achieved by just working to change beliefs, for the habits of body, mind, and heart are usually more powerful than argument” (haslanger 2012, 4). so, though i join my students in sometimes feeling frustrated by the failure of rational argumentation to change the mind of one’s interlocutor, i want in this paper to take seriously the whole person whose mind one is trying to change and to think about what hindrances or blocks might get in the way. one form such effort 2 for a helpful discussion of baldwin’s view, see spelman 2002 (especially p. 90-95) and spelman 2007. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 ought to take is the patient and deliberate work that occurs within loving relationships as they unfold over time. i will argue that we ought to play the long game with others in order to stand in moral solidarity with them and help them to change their oppressive mental states in a more realistic fashion. this is part of what it means to force others to perceive, with love. note that i will not give a thorough analysis of love itself, nor will i focus on any particular type of loving relationship. instead of exploring what love is, my primary project here is to explore (some of) what love requires. though there are a variety of different philosophical accounts of love, my project starts simply from the assumption that one party loves another in some meaningful way—as a parent or child, grandparent or extended family member, friend or lover. i do not commit to a particular analysis of love because i intend for my project to be useful to anyone who claims to love another who holds oppressive attitudes, beliefs, or emotions. furthermore, i will not provide an exhaustive analysis of all that love requires; in focusing on some of what love requires, i do not mean to suggest it is all that love requires. that said, it is still worthwhile to ask at the outset why we should think that love in particular generates the obligations i will explore throughout the paper. the answer is this: those that we love, even those with whom we do not feel close, play a significant role in the formation of our identity. in an important sense, who we love makes us who we are; we are identified in part by those with whom we are in loving relationship. this might sound similar to the “union” view of love defended by robert nozick (1989) and marilyn friedman (2003). indeed, i am influenced by and sympathetic to their views. however, i do not wish to commit myself here to the more robust ontological claim they make, that in loving another a new being exists—a “we”—that did not exist previously. instead, i am making the weaker claim that those whom we love are a part of who we are (haslanger 2005) in a way that strangers, mere acquaintances, and casual friends usually are not.3 i am my parents’ son, my sister’s brother, my spouse’s partner. because those roles help to identify me, when any of those that i love challenge me to grow, that challenge matters in a way that impersonal challenges from strangers, or even personal challenges from 3 this is not to say that we don’t have agency within loving relationships. i might choose not to be identified by a loved one any longer, to separate myself and refuse to have the other contribute to who i am. i again follow marilyn friedman here in recognizing the importance of autonomy in being able to leave a harmful relationship. the fact that someone might need to do so is illustrative of the fact that we are able to affect each other in the deep ways i am here describing. for more on this, see friedman 2003, chapter 5. 3 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 acquaintances or colleagues, do not. in short, loving someone brings with it special responsibility; in virtue of being able to affect and craft others more profoundly, we bear special responsibilities to help them become not just who they are, but to become better than they are. and, of course, they bear the same responsibility to us. to be clear, my argument is not grounded in the self-interested claim that because my relationships constitute a significant part of my identity, i ought to help loved ones to become better in order to make myself better. instead, my focus is other-directed; because i have the power to help shape who my loved ones become in a way that most of the others in their lives do not, i owe it to them to help them to grow. this is a special obligation that i bear to those that i love in particular, rather than an impersonal obligation that i bear to others in general, because it is within loving relationships that i can satisfy the obligation. that is not to say, however, that it is only within loving relationships that the special obligation to help others to grow can be satisfied; we might sometimes bear the same obligation to others whom we do not love. for instance, teachers4 often help their students to grow and become more than they otherwise would have been; in that way teachers often play an important role in the formation of their students’ identity. but in many senses of ‘love’ it is inappropriate or wrongful for teachers to love their students. there are other, non-loving relationships that also help to contribute to participants’ identity formation. in claiming that love generates the obligations i will explore throughout this paper, i am not claiming that it does so exclusively. nevertheless, we bear these obligations to those we love because we have the ability to affect who they become in virtue of being in loving relationships with them, and with that ability comes the responsibility to do so. hard conversations over holiday dinner to begin, consider the conversation i’ve often had with students who come to office hours in the week before they head home for the holidays. whatever class they’re taking with me, be it in environmental ethics, feminism, or philosophy and race, they ask some version of the question: what am i supposed to say at dinner? having just finished studying challenging work by philosophers like karen warren, charles mills, or alison jaggar, they are often worried how their families will react to their newfound beliefs about speciesism, racism, and sexism. it’s not, of course, that they think their families are populated by bad people. instead, my students face the challenge of confronting the attitudes and beliefs that generate what jean harvey called civilized oppression in those that they love the most. 4 thanks to an anonymous referee for this point. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 civilized oppression and the failure to perceive harvey distinguishes civilized oppression from more overt forms of oppression by arguing that it is neither formally codified by law nor violent. instead, civilized oppression is grounded in what harvey called “distorted relationships.” civilized oppression involves: a systematic and inappropriate control of people by those with more power. the oppressed are treated with disrespect, moral rights are denied or blocked, their lives are deprived of proper fulfillment, and they experience a series of frustrations and humiliations beyond all normal bounds. (harvey 1999, 37) one reason why civilized oppression is so pernicious is precisely because it is “civilized.” it often goes unnoticed or unrecognized as oppression and is thereby able to, all the more pervasively, structure and limit the lives of those it affects. otherwise well-meaning people often fail to realize that they act generally as agents of civilized oppression or to recognize particular actions that they commit as oppressive. though they know that there is injustice in the world, they fail to recognize themselves as being complicit in its production. it’s that failure to perceive with which i am concerned. next, i will explore both what makes such failure possible and likely, again, with the goal of lovingly coming to better understand our interlocutor—to meet them where they are—so as to be able to help them to come to perceive. ideology and the difficulties of perceiving one of the hallmarks of structural oppression is that it can exist even, as iris young argues, within a liberal and well-meaning society (1988, 271). unjust and oppressive social structures are propped up and maintained by otherwise kind people—neither heroes nor villains—who are complicated and messy. people are able to act inconsistently, applying kindness in some areas of life but cruelty or indifference in others, in part because they are caught in the grips of an ideology (or overlapping ideologies) that helps to justify and make sense of why that disparate treatment is appropriate or fitting. ideologies are the social stories we tell ourselves that help to frame our understanding of the world. following haslanger, an ideology “is the background cognitive and affective frame that gives actions and reactions meaning within a social system and contributes to its survival” (haslanger 2012, 447). ideologies come to colonize consciousness (2012, 467); they craft what we perceive and how we interpret it, as well as what habits of body and attitudinal responses arise in us upon that interpretation. none of this is to say that participation in an ideology is deterministic and unavoidable. instead, ideologies should be understood as the social stories we tell 5 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 ourselves—and that telling is active; it’s a thing that we collectively do and could stop doing. so, part of what haslanger’s ideology critique involves is working to tell ourselves different stories: stories that promote justice rather than oppression. system justification bias and the costs of perceiving engaging in ideology critique and changing the social story that we tell ourselves is often very difficult and personally challenging because of various forms of cognitive bias that hinder such efforts. though i will not here offer a thoroughly developed theory of the self, it seems clear that any plausible account will acknowledge that part of what it means to be you is (following miranda fricker) to be a knower (fricker 2007). in short, what you believe is part of who you are. but of course, not all beliefs are equally important—some are more central or crucial to your identity than others. your belief that today is tuesday when it turns out to be wednesday does not make up an important part of your identity. your religious or cultural beliefs might. furthermore, work in social psychology demonstrates that we need to believe that the world is basically just and that we are basically morally good agents.5 such beliefs are often deeply important to us. it is existentially threatening to face the recognition that you are complicit in unjust social structures, that you participate in and prop up unjust institutions, that you enjoy unjust privilege, or that you have practiced what harvey called moral abandonment—leaving others to suffer civilized oppression without acknowledging their situation, much less trying to help them to escape it (harvey 1999, 71–73). my point is that, since some beliefs help to identify us, challenging another’s important, identity-defining beliefs can be a threat to the other herself. it is often said that, when we argue, we should critically engage with what our interlocutor is saying but not critically engage with the person saying it. of course that’s good rhetorical advice and ad hominems are bad arguments. but saying that we ought to critically engage with the content of what someone says, rather than with the person saying it, obscures the fact that it is often the case that to challenge someone’s beliefs is to challenge the believer. the beliefs that tend to be challenged at holiday dinner are often exactly the types of beliefs with which others are likely to identify. take vegetarianism, one of the topics that gives my environmental ethics students the most concern, and one that will arise when their family members ask what they studied in class. if the students’ newfound beliefs about speciesism and environmental justice are true, then their nonvegetarian family members must confront the fact that they are complicit in 5 for a very helpful survey of these theses, see jost and hunyady 2002. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 the exploitation of factory farm workers, the domination6 of nonhuman animals, and the marginalization of the poor, who are disproportionately affected by the toxic waste produced in factory farms. 7 the realization of that complicity is deeply challenging for those whose sense of self is bound up with and partly defined by their moral innocence. it is not just that others don’t like being confronted with their wrongful actions; it is that such confrontation is likely to be experienced as a challenge to how they understand themselves and their place in the world. as another example, consider the privilege that white people enjoy in racist societies. if you are white, the suggestion that some of the things that you have accomplished are due to a stacked deck that works in your favor can challenge your sense of self, your sense of accomplishment. since our accomplishments often serve as points of pride that bolster us and help us to keep going when things are hard, being confronted with the fact of white privilege can shake the sturdy foundations on which we ground our sense of self. so, even if we grant that someone does not actively contribute to structural racism, one is still likely to feel deeply challenged when one of the forms of privilege they enjoy is named. in short, it is in our own intensely personal interest to believe both that we deserve the good things we have and are the sole causes of those impressive acts we have committed. furthermore, we often need to believe that we are morally praiseworthy, that the world is just, and that our hands are clean. agency itself can weigh heavily on someone, regardless of their social location. it is often hard just to be a person in the world, and each of these beliefs can help someone to get through the day. so it is no surprise (though it is still wrongful) that someone might respond, sometimes with linguistic, physical, or material violence, when their own sense of self is in some way threatened. how should we respond? i have so far said that what it means to lovingly force someone to perceive the world as it is and recognize themselves as they are includes understanding more fully what allows and encourages their working as agents of civilized oppression. ideology 6 here i follow karen warren who argues that humans dominate non-human animals when they treat nonhuman animals as appropriately subordinated to humans, and when this treatment is justified by what warren calls a “logic of domination,” which i take to be an unjust or oppressive ideology. for more on this, see chapter 3 of her book ecofeminist philosophy: a western perspective on what it is and why it matters (warren 2000). also helpful in understanding the domination of nonhuman animals is jason wyckoff’s paper, “linking sexism and speciesism” (wyckoff 2014). 7 because factory farms emit significant amounts of toxic waste, it is usually the poor who are most directly affected by them, as they are often unable to move away. 7 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 enables perceptual failure; existential vulnerability and cognitive bias encourage it. since different people occupy different social locations with varying forms of privilege and oppression, and since those features of their identity play a role in what type of bias they display or what part of the social story they emphasize or especially participate in telling, then meeting baldwin’s call in part requires knowing the person whom you are engaging—knowing them and their particular constitution—and meeting them where they are in order to help them to become better. the next thing to explore is what the appropriate response is, once you have come to achieve at least some degree of that understanding. first, i will explore two examples of what not to do that i hope will be illustrative of what we should do instead. disengagement is an inadequate response the first response is what i’ll call disengagement with the other party. there are two types of disengagement with which i’m concerned. the first is straightforward disconnection from a person—removing them from your life. this can take different forms, ranging from formally ending a relationship to passively dodging invitations to talk or spend time together to blocking them on social media. this approach, though often attractive, does nothing to challenge the oppressive views of the other; it does nothing to create what josé medina calls “epistemic friction,” the internal tension we feel when we encounter beliefs that are contrary to our own and that we cannot easily dismiss or reconcile (medina 2012, 27–55). if others do the same thing it promotes a type of intellectual segregation that thereby encourages the very beliefs that are oppressive. in other words, if i believe false things, but the only people who will talk with me also believe false things, then i never encounter those contradictory beliefs that are necessary for me to change my view. there are of course other methods by which i can encounter such beliefs; i could go to the library, for instance, and read some philosophy. but a major motivator for doing that type of research is direct intellectual engagement with others. as medina argues throughout the epistemology of resistance, we bear a variety of epistemic obligations, both to ourselves and to others. one of those obligations is to help others to learn and believe true things, especially when their current beliefs are themselves open to moral appraisal, or when they might lead to wrongful actions. there are various foundations that can ground such obligations, depending on the context in which you are operating. for instance, the duty to promote justice in general might ground the obligation to help a particular person who is likely to promote injustice through their actions as a result of their false beliefs. what i want to focus on here, however, is the special obligation that comes with being in a loving relationship with others. part of what it means to love someone is to care about whether they act rightly, not because of some larger, more general goal, but 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 because we care about them and their moral standing in particular. (i will return to this point in my discussion of moral solidarity, which i will argue is one of the appropriate responses to those whom we love.) the second type of disengagement i want to explore is attitudinal. it is about how i regard someone when i write them off, seeing them as a lost cause. in this case i do not disengage from them in the ways just described—i might not refuse to spend time with them any longer—i simply refuse to engage with their oppressive views. i reconcile myself to the fact that we will “agree to disagree”—that their mind is set and there’s no changing it, no matter what i say or do. i then disengage, not from the other, but from the particular parts of the other that i find objectionable. i might have good reasons to disengage in this way; it might, for instance, make for a much more pleasant holiday meal should we simply talk about things about which we agree or which don’t inspire significant emotional response. but, as in the first type, by disengaging with the other in this way and writing them off as someone whose view is set, i leave the other’s objectionable views unchallenged and thereby leave it to others, or to no one, to press them to grow. both types of disengagement, then, fail to accomplish my goal as someone committed to the promotion of social justice. by disengaging from the other, either wholly or in part, i leave their oppressive views unchallenged and do nothing to encourage the moral growth that baldwin calls for. patronizing disappointment is an inadequate response the second response that i believe we should avoid is one proposed by fricker in epistemic injustice. she suggests that the proper attitudinal response to older people from less progressive generations who hold objectionable views is not anger or blame but disappointment (fricker 2007, 106–107). for instance, when your grandfather says something racist at holiday dinner, you shouldn’t get mad, but you should be disappointed. becoming angry with him the way you might with your sister (or another contemporary) seems inappropriate, since he grew up in a time where such attitudes were the norm. this is a curious conclusion, since fricker granted that he does not suffer from what she later terms a hermeneutical lacuna; he has access to the collective interpretive resources necessary to get things right. if he didn’t have access to those resources, it might indeed be inappropriate to be angry with him. but he does, so why should you hold the bar lower for him than for others? part of what motivates fricker’s conclusion might be that it is harder or more arduous for someone from an older generation to come to perceive things the way that a member of a younger generation does. after all, members of the younger generation have only to adopt the current story; members of the older generation had to adopt one story, then reject it, and then adopt another. it requires, as she says, 9 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 exceptional moral imagination (fricker 2007, 106-107). that’s more work, and insofar as our attitudinal responses ought to track the degree of work that it takes to act rightly, it seems excessive to blame your grandfather as much as you’d blame your sister (or another contemporary). again, as with disengagement, disappointment is often (though not always) an inadequate response to others’ objectionable views. it is inadequate because we care about the regard others have for us, not just contingently as a matter of personal selfinterest, but deeply, in virtue of being largely social beings. as p. f. strawson argued in his canonical “freedom and resentment,” when you get angry with me, you adopt a personal reactive attitude (strawson 1974, 7–10) and simultaneously demonstrate your belief that i am a person rather than a thing; i’m a moral agent against whom resentment can appropriately be leveled, rather than a naturally occurring event, about which you might become angry, but with which you would not. moral anger, then, can serve as a demonstration of respect (murphy 1988, 16), both for yourself as the wronged party (frye 1983, 87), and for the other as a moral agent (strawson 1974, 6). it also conveys forward-looking expectation: born from your own sense of selfrespect, your anger conveys that you expect to be treated differently in the future (spelman 1989, 266–267). building on medina’s term, i contend that anger can serve as a valuable form of affective friction. expressions of anger tend to stay with us long after the moment has passed, and we can often recall them with painful clarity. when others are angry with us, it often stops us short, encourages us to think through our past actions or reconsider our intended actions, and scrutinize our accompanying mental states. the anger of another is a challenge; it confronts us and forces us to account for ourselves and either provide some exculpatory defense (including the claim that the other is angry with us without good reason) or to accept responsibility when we have in fact acted wrongly and offer some type of reparative response instead. or sometimes we actively choose to ignore the other’s anger, as you might with a child throwing a tantrum or an adult whose position you judge (either rightly or wrongly) not to be worth engaging (frye 1983, 89). either way, it is experienced as something that requires active response. it can serve as a fixed point in your past when you make a choice either to continue down the path you are on or adjust course. in short, anger can serve as a powerful source of pushback that affects us deeply, either for better or worse. it is predicated on our recognition that the other is a person (manne 2014) who is morally responsible for their actions rather than a thing or a naturally occurring event. it usually belies, from the beginning, the possibility that one has adopted what strawson calls the objective attitude (strawson 1974, 10), which is a way of regarding the other as someone to be managed, handled, or trained, rather than deeply engaged with as an equal. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 i do not mean to imply that all anger is valuable, healthy, or just; others are often angry with us for bad reasons, or they express their anger in morally reprehensible ways that can be deeply traumatic and painful. furthermore, when expressed in a way that is threatening, anger can often shut someone down and prevent them from engaging deeply with the moral claim being made. far from helping them to understand their own behavior as wrongful, inelegantly communicated anger can thwart such understanding by causing the other to dig in their heels and become defensive. even that fact, however, is itself illuminating. the fact that such inappropriate expressions of anger can affect us so deeply demonstrates its power and demonstrates that it can be to help others to perceive and recognize clearly their own oppressive behavior. on the other hand, disappointment often implies, not respect for the other, but a sense of patronizing superiority, perhaps also pity or haughtiness. you are disappointed when the puppy you are training soils the carpet, or when a child you are rearing fails to be honest at a point when their character is tested. neither are full moral agents, and so the attitude is not disrespectful. however, when leveled against your grandfather, your disappointment might signal that you have adopted the objective stance towards him and that you do not think very much of him or his ability to grow. since you adopt a different stance towards him than you would a contemporary, you assume some type of difference between them that is born, not from who he happens to be in particular but to “his generation” in general. generalizing in that way reduces him to a caricature of himself rather than meeting him where he is and expecting him to do the hard work that living rightly entails. though i believe that strawson and others are correct when they argue that moral anger (or resentment) is in some ways a special moral emotion, in that it usually conveys the types of value judgment named above, i do not claim that it does so necessarily or exclusively. indeed, our emotional responses are often not so rational, and sometimes in practice we really might become angry with the puppy for soiling the carpet, forgetting that it is a puppy and not a full moral agent. furthermore, it is often the case that, because of differences in power between the parties involved, anger is not possible (at least not in the short term). anger from a member of a subordinated group is a form of insubordination, and since it signals to the wrongdoer that the victim is willing to push back against wrongful treatment (spelman 1989, 267), expressing anger can often be dangerous for the less powerful party and so not felt to be a live option. in the same way, anger might not feel like a live option for a child responding to a parent’s oppressive views, even if the child is not herself a member of a subordinated group. for these reasons it is a mistake born from an overly idealized understanding of anger to claim that it is always the appropriate response to wrongdoing. under nonideal circumstances, other moral 11 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 emotions might serve the same evaluative and communicative role as anger (maclachlan 2010, 432). it is also a mistake to claim that disappointment is always inappropriate. when communicated effectively, disappointment can avoid conveying that you have written the other off; instead, it is precisely because you hold them to a high standard that you are even capable of feeling disappointment about their behavior. in that way, like anger, disappointment can serve as a form of expectation; it is a bar that you set for the other and that you insist that they work to meet. perhaps this is what fricker was after in her discussion of whether we ought to feel disappointment rather than anger towards our grandfather. if so, then we have no disagreement, though it seems very important to be explicit in communicating to the other that you do not pity them, think them less than a full moral agent, or discount their ability to grow. i therefore distinguish between patronizing and non-patronizing disappointment, where the former is an objective attitude that treats the other as someone to be managed, and the latter is a personal reactive attitude that treats the other as a full moral agent capable of growth. it may be illuminating at this point to note the ways in which moral anger differs from another moral emotion: contempt. macalester bell has argued that feminists ought to revalue contempt as they have revalued anger. on her analysis contempt entails four distinguishing features: a negative judgment concerning the status or standing of the object of contempt; a way of regarding or attending to the object of contempt accompanied by an unpleasant affective element; a comparison between the contemptuous and the object of contempt, generating positive selffeeling for the contemptuous; and psychological withdrawal or distance from the object of contempt (bell 2005, 85). importantly for my purposes, bell says that “the contemptuous person takes herself to be superior to the object of her contempt along at least one dimension of comparison” (85). in short, contempt entails distance born from a judgment of moral superiority. the contemptuous person judges oneself to be better than the object of one’s contempt, which creates psychological distance between them with the contemptuous elevated above the other. moral anger, on the other hand, entails the judgment that the wrongdoer is not superior to the wronged party, and though it does not commit the angry party to keeping the wrongdoer psychologically close in their life, it is compatible with doing so in a way that contempt is not. contempt entails disengagement from the object of your contempt as well as the comparative judgment that you are (at least in some respects) better than the object of contempt, whereas anger is engaged with and recognizes the moral agency of the other. in the next section i will argue that part of what it means to love another is to stay engaged with them and to recognize that your loved one is a fellow traveler, who like everyone else, has room to grow. for both of these reasons, then, love and contempt are incompatible (bell 2005, 90). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 in summary, the core problem with disengagement, patronizing disappointment, and contempt is that all three communicate that the other is a finished product rather than a work in progress. in holding them in such poor regard, we abandon them to their condition. we treat “the way they are” as a static, unchangeable state when we fail to engage with them, when we fail to feel anger or non-patronizing disappointment for them, or when we feel contempt for them. and when we communicate that poor regard to them, we sacrifice the opportunity to press them to grow. moral solidarity is the appropriate response instead, we ought to be in moral solidarity with others rather than what harvey called moral abandonment. she argued that part of what often makes civilized oppression harmful is that victims are alone in it, left to suffer its costs without the recognition of others in their moral community (harvey 1999, 71–73). harvey also argued that we ought to always remember that everyone is a moral work in progress. it’s just not true, she said, that once a thief, always a thief (harvey 1993, 220). combining these claims, i contend that if we abandon agents of civilized oppression to their past actions and view others as lost causes or static states of affairs (adopting permanently strawson’s objective attitude towards them), then we fail to heed baldwin’s advice. in so doing, we retreat from our general responsibility to promote justice and are thereby complicit in the perpetuation of civilized oppression. in order to create the epistemic and affective friction necessary for those that we love to be less racist, less sexist, less speciesist, etc., we must not disengage from them. however, that does not mean that we must always remain in relationships that are harmful. i believe we bear self-regarding obligations to care for ourselves, and sometimes those obligations take the form of exit from a relationship that is harmful or dangerous; sometimes we owe it to ourselves to disengage from others. yet our circumstances are often not a zero-sum game. many times we are able both to honor our own projects and care for ourselves while continuing to engage with those we love who bear oppressive mental states. it is those types of relationships with which i am concerned in this paper. i cannot explore here when exit is appropriate, except to note that determining when obligations to the self trump obligations to others is the messy and challenging work of everyday moral life that cannot be known in advance, free of context. one reason why we should create epistemic and affective friction for those that we love who hold oppressive mental states is that, should we fail to do so, we become complicit in the wrongful behavior they might later commit. that is true, but i also take it to be relatively uncontroversial; surely i am partly to blame if i know someone plans to wrongfully harm another based on a false belief and do nothing to disabuse them of it. furthermore, that general duty likely applies to those we do not 13 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 love; we might often have the obligation to confront the oppressive mental states of coworkers or acquaintances. importantly for my purposes, there is another reason why we ought to be in moral solidarity with those that we love—why we ought to stay with them rather than disengage from or abandon them and thereby work to create the epistemic and affective friction for them to grow and develop. part of what being in a loving relationship means is caring about and being invested in their moral standing. that care and investment is particular rather than general, and it crucially involves concern for them—for who they are—rather than for justice itself. that means that when i fail to try to help you act rightly, when i fail to provide the pushback that we all need to correct course, it’s not just that i might be complicit in your wrongful action, but that i fail to do what love requires. as i argued earlier, for various reasons we often fail to perceive injustice when we encounter it and fail to recognize ourselves as its agents. none of us are moral agents in isolation; we all need others in our moral community to help us to act rightly. loving another involves not just being concerned for what others will do but for who they are. in other words, it’s not just that i owe it to the world to help a loved one believe fewer racist things so that they will commit fewer racist actions, it’s that i owe it to my loved one to help them not be racist. and i need my loved ones to try to satisfy the same obligation to me. so we ought to be in moral solidarity with those people in our lives whom we love, but who hold oppressive attitudes, beliefs, or emotions. part of what that means is not writing them off by assuming them to be lost causes and simply “agreeing to disagree.” that doesn’t mean, however, that we must always actively work to come to agreement whenever the opportunity presents itself. think again about the scenario i described in the holiday dinner case. as it turns out, it might indeed be the right decision not to directly engage in controversial conversation, but to wait until later, for several reasons. returning again to the earlier point that system justification bias encourages us to perceive the world as fundamentally just and our own place in it as basically moral, it is deeply challenging to force someone to recognize that this is not the case. to do so in front of an audience (many of one’s friends and family) and to do so during what is often an already stressful time (the holidays) is not only an unkindness, but counterproductive. someone is primed to be defensive, and when threatened, to dig in to their beliefs and existing self-conception rather than being open to change and growth. challenging at every turn the oppressive views of loved ones might often work against that goal. i suggest instead that, in following baldwin’s recommendation that we lovingly force others to perceive themselves as agents of oppression, we do so slowly, over time. it involves not agreeing to disagree, but neither does it involve always looking for or seeking out active disagreement. it instead involves deep knowledge of the 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 position of vulnerability and insecurity that others demonstrate when they lash out and shut down. it involves building an argument slowly, helping others to accept small premises that build cumulatively to more significant conclusions. and perhaps most of all it involves patience – the willingness to play the long game with someone, and to be with them through their moral development—just as we need others to be with us in ours. patience, however, does not imply the absence of emotion. as i have argued, anger is both a powerful form of selfand other-respect, as well as a powerful motivator for change. part of what lovingly forcing others to perceive involves is anger: resenting their oppressive attitudes, beliefs, and emotions and communicating that anger, to the extent that doing so works to serve some useful and justifiable end. disappointment also can urge others forward; it too can serve as a challenge—a moral bar that you claim the other ought to strive to meet and that you claim they are capable of meeting. they have disappointed you and fallen short of the high expectations you hold for them, but are not themselves a disappointment. however, the fact that we should feel angry or disappointed with others does not mean we should always be as angry or disappointed as we can be, or that either emotion must always be present and felt in each moment. i can feel angry about some injustice or some past wrong, even if i do not currently, actively feel it (though a few moments’ reflection would likely summon those feelings to the surface). though loving others requires that we feel angry or disappointed with them, we should be careful not to become overwhelmed by either, or let those feelings ruin us or our relationship with those that we love, the way that sustained anger or disappointment can sometimes threaten to do. in short, we must attempt to strike a balance in which we hold on to our moral emotions as far as it is productive for us to do so, but no further (which is of course often a very hard line to detect and therefore easy to cross). does strategic thinking amount to adopting the objective attitude? one might object that thinking strategically this way is the same as adopting strawson’s objective attitude. after all, that amounts to handling someone, treating them as something to be managed or trained, the same way we might train a dog or a very young child. admittedly, the difference between the two might often seem hazy. strawson himself can be read to say that we can often switch back and forth between the two attitudinal stances, often from one moment to the next, and that doing so might be an important part of healthy interpersonal interaction (strawson 1974, 23–24). so, if you are playing host for a holiday dinner and have a big group coming over, some of whom don’t get along with each other, you might indeed think about how to 15 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 “manage” them (who should sit next to whom or what to say to change the subject in the event that an especially explosive topic is broached). there is an important difference, however, in temporarily adopting the objective stance in order to minimize harm and discomfort and attempting to adopt (though strawson doubts we ever could) the objective stance towards someone indefinitely (strawson 1974, 27). i contend instead that when i feel anger or disappointment with a loved one who holds oppressive beliefs or attitudes but refrain from expressing it in the moment (or when i am intentional about crafting how, when, and under what circumstances i express it), i do so not in an attempt to manage my loved one, like i would a dog or a very young child, but as a fellow traveler who knows that moral growth is painful, dangerous, and often very slow. i thereby attempt to meet them where they are, respect them, and care for them in their complex uniqueness, not in order to get them to do what i want, but in the hope that they will achieve the potential that i recognize in them, knowing simultaneously that i require the same patience, care, and attention from others. indeed, this journey is one that everyone (or nearly everyone) must undertake (harvey 2007, 33). we all are steeped in oppressive ideologies that shape and mold our hearts, minds, and bodies. as a result, we all have considerable moral work to do, and we cannot do it alone. remaking our inner lives so that they are free of prejudice and we may revel in liberation from oppression is an ongoing project with which we all must struggle. loving others and helping them to grow loving others involves not accepting them as they are and saying that they never need to change8; that is anathema to baldwin’s claim, and as i have argued, avoids creating the epistemic and affective friction necessary for them to grow. in practice, creating such friction can mean many things. a loved one’s anger or disappointment, when communicated effectively, can alert me to a problem. it helps me to know that someone who loves and respects me believes i have work to do; an important project lies before me. furthermore, moral solidarity, when communicated effectively, conveys to me that i am not alone and that my loved one is committed to me, both in the short term as i confront my problematic and existentially challenging 8 none of this implies that everyone must undertake exactly the same type or degree of personal growth; of course there may well be some truly extraordinary people whose inner lives are already mostly in order, who are oriented attitudinally towards others with the proper type and amount of respect and kindness, and who do not harbor any prejudices based on social location. loving such rare exemplars would then not require creating epistemic or affective friction for them. unfortunately, most of us are not such exemplars and so need the type of pushback that baldwin prescribes. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 inner life, and in the long term as i work to develop new attitudes, form new beliefs, and feel new emotions. of course, the mere expression of anger or disappointment alone is usually not enough. one must also be willing to share what they have learned, either in or outside the classroom, with their loved one. my students often feel daunted by that prospect. that feeling is justified, since doing so could come with serious costs, some of which might include the temporary or permanent severing of the relationship, ostracism from a group of friends or family, and the withdrawal of financial or material support by the one being challenged. sometimes, such challenging conversations can result in physical violence. being willing to risk those costs can require terrific courage. since loving another often requires such engagement and challenge, that means that being willing to love another can itself be a courageous act.9 furthermore, though you might hope that your efforts will be appreciated (either in the short or long term), there is no guarantee that they will be. that means that in being willing to risk incurring those costs, you do so without any assurance that your loved one will be grateful for your efforts (or even that they will succeed). doing what love requires, then, is often a risky and costly endeavor. even assuming that those serious costs are unlikely, i join my students in feeling daunted by the prospect of challenging a loved ones’ problematic views, for there are many important differences between the conversations we have in the philosophy classroom and those that we might have out in the world, without the institutional power that comes with a grade book, and without a dedicated series of weeks in which to slowly and carefully unpack those concepts and understand how they fit together. it is for that last difference—time—that i contend that moral solidarity demands that we play the long game with those we love. as i said at the outset, there are no arguments that magically change our interlocutors’ attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. instead, there is only the patient, slow work of arguing for minor premises that build, cumulatively and over time, to more significant conclusions. and often that “argumentation” won’t be recognizable as such. it will frequently take the form of conversations that do not engage directly with the topic at hand but can serve as the groundwork from which fruitful conversations can grow in the future. sometimes exploring questions together will be more important and effective than arguing for specific claims. socratic dialogue might often turn out to be a useful 9 i reiterate my earlier point that we bear self-regarding duties to care for ourselves, which often trump those that we bear to others. i stress to my students that they must, first and foremost, take care of themselves when working to promote justice, so if they genuinely believe that these types of serious harms are likely to follow any particular conversation, it might well be the case that they ought not pursue it. 17 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 method of engaging with loved ones; after all, trusting that your loved ones don’t just need to be lectured to but are thoughtful people who can think for themselves when prompted with particular questions demonstrates the respect i have argued we all ought to manifest through our attitudes and ways of engaging with others. consider, for instance, a white student who is committed to promoting racial justice and who wants to help a loved one to recognize that some of their beliefs are racist.10 instead of straightforward confrontation, where the student simply accuses their loved one of being racist, they might start a conversation in which they say that one of the things they have been thinking and learning about is whether all white people contribute to structural racism without intending to, in virtue of the unfair advantage they have over people of color. if their loved one replies that there are no such advantages, the student might reply by asking questions like, “what if you had been born black? would you now be in the same situation? would you own the same property? would you have the same job? would you have built the same amount of wealth? would you have the same types of interactions with the police?” though it is likely that, in the moment, the student’s loved one will feel defensive, when left to simmer over time such questions can be profoundly revelatory. there are a host of resources that can be brought to bear on such conversations. being in moral solidarity with a loved one and forcing them to confront their problematic inner life might come by way of shared activities like reading books or articles, watching films, or going to museums. and it will sometimes mean being willing to be vulnerable, to share your own lived experience of either the type of oppressive mental state involved (sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) or some relevantly similar type, and then making the case that, if your loved one is concerned about the type of poor treatment you have experienced, they should also be concerned about their own oppressive mental states. it can mean helping your loved one to recognize that those who accuse them of sexism, racism, or homophobia are not just being “oversensitive.” it can do so by giving your loved one epistemic access to particular experiences of those things as painful, frightening, and profoundly disrespectful, rather than experiences that simply require a thicker skin. creating such access points for others to recognize that they believe or feel oppressive things will often require deep knowledge of their inner lives: their fears and struggles, joys and successes, how they think, what experiences they have had, and what types of points resonate with them or fall flat. since we do not always have such knowledge of those we love, part of what love might then require is getting to know the other better in order to be able to build an argument whose force they might one day feel. these are but a few of the methods by which one might challenge a loved one to perceive. 10 i owe this helpful example to an anonymous referee. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 throughout such efforts it is essential to reject an attitude of self-importance or haughtiness. as harvey argues, it is likely that everyone has gaps in their awareness and perceptual abilities, including those who are committed to promoting social justice (harvey 2007, 33). furthermore, even if someone is aware of their own biases and is able to overcome them, the theory on which they operate will often itself be flawed or incomplete. indeed, a great deal of progressive and radical theory has turned out in retrospect not to be adequately inclusive, or to be subject to its own limitations, smuggled in via the background ideology within which the theory is born. and so it is crucial for my students (as well as for their teacher!) to remember that though they believe that they have good insight into the nature of social justice, and though they are right for wanting to share that insight with others, they should not view themselves as “fixing” their backward loved ones, as being superior to their loved ones for not knowing any better, or as having all the answers. love and moral solidarity leave no room for moral arrogance. in short, loving another involves meeting them where they are but expecting, urging, and insisting that they continue to grow and develop. since belief is tied to identity, what we believe is a part of who we are. pressing others to perceive the world as it is and to recognize themselves as agents of oppression can be an act of love when born from the belief and hope that they have the potential to be better. and, since we are very likely subject to similar perceptual failures, it is one of the ways in which others can love us as well. in admiring the world-changing, liberatory work of famous activists, it is easy to fail to appreciate the small points of resistance in which almost everyone will have the opportunity to engage. we are all likely to love others who hold oppressive beliefs, attitudes, or emotions. that means that we all have the opportunity to work to challenge injustice, at least insofar as it is born from and perpetuated by such problematic inner lives. though we very often should not stop with such efforts—our duties to promote justice often will require much more of us—we also should not fail to recognize and appreciate the important inner work that everyone should do, including those we love. though such points of engagement might seem small, they are not insignificant. since ideology colonizes consciousness, and since challenging ideology is a form of resistance, if loving another requires such challenge, then love itself becomes a form of resistance. works cited baldwin, james. 1962. the fire next time. new york: vintage books. bell, macalester. 2005. “a woman’s scorn: toward a feminist defense of contempt as a moral emotion.” hypatia 20 (4): 80–93. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice. oxford: oxford university press. 19 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 friedman, marilyn. 2003. autonomy, gender, politics. oxford: oxford university press. frye, marilyn. 1983. the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. new york: crossing press. harvey, jean. 1993. “forgiveness as an obligation of the moral life.” international journal of moral and social studies 8 (3): 211–222. ———. 1999. civilized oppression. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield publishers. ———. 2007. “moral solidarity and empathetic understanding: the moral value and scope of the relationship.” journal of social philosophy 38 (1): 22–37. haslanger, sally. 2005. “you mixed? racial identity without racial biology.” in adoption matters: philosophical and feminist essays, edited by sally haslanger and charlotte witt. ithaca, ny: cornell university press: 265–289. ———. 2012. resisting reality: social construction and social critique. new york: oxford university press. jost, john, and orsolya hunyady. 2002. “the psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology.” european review of social psychology 13:111–153. maclachlan, alice. 2010. “unreasonable resentments.” journal of social philosophy 41 (4): 422–441. manne, kate. 2014. “in ferguson and beyond, punishing humanity.” new york times, october 12. accessed october 15, 2016. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/in-ferguson-and-beyondpunishing-humanity/?_r=0. medina, jośe. 2012. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. murphy, jeffrie. 1988. “forgiveness and resentment.” in forgiveness and mercy, by jeffrie murphy and jean hampton. cambridge: cambridge university press. nozick, robert. 1989. the examined life. new york: simon & schuster. spelman, elizabeth v. 1989. “anger and insubordination.” in women, knowledge and reality: explorations in feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry and marilyn pearsall, 263–274. new york: routledge. ———. 2002. repair: the impulse to restore in a fragile world. boston: beacon press. ———. 2007. “managing ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 119–130. albany: ny: state university of new york press. strawson, p. f. 1974. freedom and resentment and other essays. new york: routledge. warren, karen j. 2000. ecofeminist philosophy: a western perspective on what it is and why it matters. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. wyckoff, jason. 2014. “linking sexism and speciesism.” hypatia 29 (4): 721–737. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.1 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/in-ferguson-and-beyond-punishing-humanity/?_r=0 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/in-ferguson-and-beyond-punishing-humanity/?_r=0 young, iris marion. 1988. “five faces of oppression.” the philosophical forum 16 (4): 270–90. barrett emerick is an assistant professor of philosophy at st. mary’s college of maryland. he writes and teaches about normative ethics, moral psychology, and social justice, focusing in particular on gender, racial, and restorative justice. his current work focuses on the conflicting obligations to be both compassionate with others and to care for ourselves. he is also currently co-authoring a paper in which he argues that racial profiling policies rely on flawed models of inductive reasoning that then work to reify the criminality they claim to police. www.barrettemerick.com 21 emerick: love and resistance published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure barrett emerick recommended citation love and resistance: moral solidarity in the face of perceptual failure not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 2 2017 not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy maja sidzinska san francisco state university, msidzins@mail.sfsu.edu recommended citation sidzinska, maja. 2017. "not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 2. not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy maja sidzinska abstract basic understandings of subjectivity are derived from principles of masculine embodiment such as discreteness. but pregnancy challenges such understandings because it represents a sort of splitting of the body. in the pregnant situation, a subject may experience herself as both herself and an other, as well as neither herself nor an other. this is logically untenable—an impossibility. if our discourse depends on discrete referents, then what paradigms of identity are available to the pregnant subject? what could be the pregnant subject's ontology? eric bapteste and john dupré offer the idea that organisms are processual beings. in their view, the ecological interrelationships between the organisms are defining, and render them dynamic processes, rather than stable things. does bapteste and dupré’s processual ontological account accommodate pregnant organisms, including pregnant subjects? here, i suggest some criteria for an ontology of pregnancy. i test the processual account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy. i find that a processual ontology captures a great deal about pregnant embodiment and is a significant improvement over cartesian and anti-metaphysical accounts. however, in order to accommodate pregnancy, what we still need from an ontology is the inclusion of subjectivity. keywords: ontology, feminist, gravidity, natality, pregnancy, processual, process ontology, feminist metaphysics, metaphysics, process background and introduction imagine yourself pregnant. are you still just yourself, but with an additional attribute? are you simply “adjectived” by ‘pregnant’ as the dictionary suggests? or does your pregnancy re-identify you, since there is potentially another there, within you? and if there is another there, can you still say that you are you? imogen tyler writes that her experience as a pregnant subject revealed to her the ways in which basic understandings of subjectivity are still derived from the principles of masculine embodiment such as self-containment, temporal stability, and singularity (tyler 2000, 288). but about her subjective, pregnant situation, she says: “i am both one 1 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 and the other. and i am equally neither one nor the other” (290).1 this is logically untenable—an impossibility. according to the traditional model of logic, subjects should not be able to simultaneously claim that they are x and ~x.2 however, to borrow catharine mackinnon’s articulation, this “impossibility” is the methodological expression of such a subject’s situation (mackinnon 1983, 637). the very body of the pregnant subject calls the dichotomy of the subject-object relation into question, because, as iris marion young noted, “she experiences her body as herself and not herself” (young 2005, 46). the unity of one’s subjectivity and one’s objectivity (i.e., one’s status as an object) frays because the body, in a sense, splits, or at the very least changes so fundamentally that it generates questions of identity in the pregnant subject. thus it is unclear whether the pregnant subject is even representable as such (tyler 2000, 289). after all, we take it for granted that a subject may not have two bodies, that a subject is not twice-embodied. historically, analytic philosophy has not even tried to represent pregnant organisms3—not in general, not in their capacity as subjects, and especially not in their capacity as simultaneous subjects and objects. and continental philosophy’s efforts are only very recent relative to philosophy’s long history. part of what tyler 1 in this context, “one” refers to the self, and “other” refers to the fetus. the same sentiment has been expressed by other philosophers, cited further on; i chose tyler’s words because they make the contradiction the most obvious, render its thesis and antithesis symmetrical, and show two different levels of contradiction (see footnote 2). 2 there are multiple contradictions that are suggested here, and a number of ways to represent them logically. given that t stands for tyler, and f stands for the fetus, the contradictions can be represented in the following ways. 1. [t = (t & ~t)] & [t = (~t & ~(~t))]. this logical sentence reflects tyler’s meaning in that it is saying that [(tyler is both tyler and not-tyler). and (tyler is neither tyler nor not-tyler)]. for an account of how the two conjuncts in (1) may not be equivalent, see priest 2010; 2. [t = (t & f)] & [t = (~t & ~f)]. this logical sentence presumes that f is by definition something other than t; it clarifies that [(tyler is both tyler and the fetus). and (tyler is neither tyler nor the fetus)]; 3. t = 2 and t ≠ 2. this shows a mathematical contradiction that is also suggested by tyler—that tyler cannot be two things as well as not two things. i take tyler’s sentence to reference all of these contradictions. all logical contradictions are implied when tyler describes her experience of pregnancy, and are accounted for by the criteria i offer below that ontological accounts must meet to allow for the [logical] existence of pregnancy. 3 although i often refer simply to organisms, what an ontology must allow for is [pregnancies in] self-aware organisms—organisms qua subjects. this point is elaborated below. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 wonders is how pregnantly embodied subjects and/or objects can come to exist—to be—in philosophical discourse that depends on logical-masculinist principles of reasoning. in short, what could be their ontology? we must take seriously tyler’s assertion that she is both the subject and object of her own pregnancy. although the contradiction in question may be represented as “she is both one and the other. and she is neither one nor the other,” taking tyler’s subjectivity seriously is necessary because she alone can testify to the state of her subjectivity both before and during her pregnancy, as well as compare the two. in this context, i take subjectivity to reference the state of her own cognition, her perspectivality, her [self-]consciousness—or whatever one’s term of choice is for human self-awareness itself; for instance, it is the human pregnant subject alone who can testify whether or not her consciousness has “split in two” regardless of whether her body seems to have. because of this, tyler has ultimate epistemic authority about the way the phenomenon of her pregnancy impacts her subjectivity, her person—rather than someone “objective” as a result of his or her distance from the phenomenon. this should not be taken to mean that others may not have epistemic authority over other, especially physical, aspects of her pregnancy; that is, others may have epistemic authority over the organismal aspect of her pregnancy. rather, it’s that when it comes to questions of, for instance, “how many” a thing is—and in this case “how many” a pregnant subject is—others don’t have access to the very thing that may shed light on the question, namely the subject’s very subjectivity.4 but then how can we articulate the phenomenon of a pregnant organism under a methodology that, by speaking solely in terms of self and other, either defines the mother and fetus as mutually exclusive or collapses the two, as analytic philosophy would make us do?5 how can we articulate the phenomenon of a pregnant organism under a scientific regime that doesn’t allow its objects of study to know just what about them is being studied? it seems that some other methodology is required. if traditional accounts of the subject and/or object(s) will not do, what paradigms of identity are available to the pregnant organism? how can we attempt to represent pregnant organisms in general? 4 this suggests a definition of a human subject that i don’t necessarily wish to subscribe to. it may or may not be the case that self-conscious subjectivity is what defines the human subject. but that is not what is at issue here. any definition that acknowledges that a subject has a certain type of access to its own subjective cognitive processes that other subjects that are not part of itself lack, will do. 5 this would be as a result of analytic philosophy’s reliance on the three traditional laws of thought: the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. 3 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 in “towards a processual microbial ontology,” eric bapteste and john dupré offer a theory of organisms as processes—as processual beings (bapteste and dupré 2013). in their view, the ecological interrelationships between the traditional objects of biology are defining, and render them dynamic processes, rather than stable things. the thing-based account of the objects of biology relies on referencing specific moments in the life of an organism, usually moments that represent the mature phase of its life. the apparent stability of the objects of biology is maintained by various stabilizing influences or phenomena, such as homeostatic mechanisms, and so forth—but only up to a point. does bapteste and dupré’s processual ontological account of organismal being(s) accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy and the possibility of a pregnant organism? or is something more needed? in this work, i present the two most relevant aspects of the processual account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of pregnancy. can the pregnant being be a species of a processual one? i find that the processual ontological model accommodates a great deal of ontological information about pregnancy, but that ultimately, more work must be done to provide an adequate ontological theory that can completely account for pregnancy, particularly in self-aware organisms. this work must attend to the unique features of pregnancy, for instance its generative and transient nature—points i return to in my justification of the criteria for an ontology of pregnancy, as well as in the conclusion. this paper is intended as an exploration of just one aspect of the ontological conundrum presented by tyler. i will leave aside the phenomenological aspect of tyler’s line of questioning, as phenomenology’s subject and ontology’s object are rather coextensive here.6 this approach does not collapse pregnancy’s phenomenology and ontology. rather, because of a subject’s access to her pre 6 in searching for an ontology of pregnancy, i aim to search for an ontology that is inclusive of both self-aware and non-self-aware organisms. the ontological model should be able to accommodate both. simply put, it should be inclusive of organisms and persons, as explained in later sections of this work. i introduce the problem phenomenologically, which presumes personhood on the part of an organism, as that is the term in which tyler frames the issue when she formulates the problem, as well as because the subjective awareness of pregnancy in combination with an internalized/automatic use of reason is required to give rise to or grasp the logical conundrum that a pregnant organism represents. the ontological question arises from tyler’s subjective experience of pregnancy because she suggests in her testimony that in some ways the boundaries of her subjectivity and the boundaries of her objectivity have remained the same, and in other ways they have changed. but a phenomenological exploration is reserved for another time. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 pregnant state, she can see herself rather objectively once she knows she is pregnant. put another way, her pre-pregnant state is a sort of “control” [state], to borrow a term from science, against which she can know the changes (or lack thereof) to her subjectivity relative to her embodiment, to her pregnant subjectivity relative to her pre-pregnant subjectivity, and to her pregnant embodiment relative to her pre-pregnant embodiment, rendering her impressions theoretically objective; she becomes the object of her own subjectivity in a different, perhaps deeper, sense than she was before. i can’t think of any other phenomenon that brings about such a state of affairs, which is why i suggest that the ontology of pregnancy must flow in part from its phenomenology from the top, so as to be inclusive of the pregnancies of subjects. although many phenomenological questions may arise as a result of the experience of pregnancy, not all of them have to do with issues of what one (the pregnantly embodied subject) is. those questions are bracketed off in the interests of focusing on the ontological discussion. the need to articulate pregnant being is recognized by such scholars as luce irigaray, christine battersby, iris marion young, talia welsh, elselijn kingma, and of course tyler, and is peripherally mentioned by a couple of others.7 but overall, the ontology of pregnancy is hardly discussed and represents a deeply understudied area of philosophy. as we are all the products of pregnancy, this work has universal relevance. criteria for an ontology of pregnancy in order to test whether bapteste and dupré’s processual ontology can be used as a model that accommodates pregnant being, i will first spell out the conditions that a model must meet. some of the conditions that follow are derived from feminist criticisms of traditional ontological accounts, for instance, cartesian and anti-metaphysical ones. cartesian ontologies are problematic because they pronounce reason and reality as isomorphic, where reason is the reason of a singular mind, and its material objects-to-be-known are clearly discrete (lloyd 1984). the “neatness” of the male form, its well-defined boundaries, its symbolic selfcontainment and independence8—all of these are necessary to and paradigmatic of the practice of reason, and hence to the traditional identity principle that reason relies upon. even though philosophy generally may have moved on from simplistically cartesian metaphysics of the self, for the most part, pregnancies are still thought of in cartesian terms. for instance, the conception of a pregnant organism as a single 7 in particular, see irigaray 1991a, 1991b; battersby 1998; young 2005; welsh 2013; kingma 2015; wynn 2002; and maher 2007. 8 relative to the female form. 5 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 subjectivity with two related bodies (one maternal, and the other, fetal), is often implicit in discussions of pregnancy; alternatively, we have presumptions of two organismal entities always having been independent, as in the fetal container model criticized by kingma (2015). the clean theoretical cut between body, or bodies, and subject, or subjects, betrays cartesian thinking. despite the work of leo strauss and maurice merleau-ponty, for instance, which sought to undermine dualistic thinking about subjects and their objects, that is, in this case their bodies (young 2005, 47), cartesian paradigms implicitly dominate especially in medical or scientific settings, wherein the pregnant organism is sometimes referenced in terms of a unity, at other times in terms of a duality, and is frequently unacknowledged as a full subject. cartesian ontologies flow from modes of deductive reasoning that simply cannot articulate the phenomenon of pregnancy because it represents a logical contradiction, as expressed by tyler. anti-metaphysical9 or social constructionist accounts are problematic because, although they have successfully challenged essentialism, they represent the methodology and are the terms under which pregnancy as a materially generative phenomenon is an impossibility. anti-metaphysical accounts resort to presumptions of the duality of subjects and objects, as cartesian accounts do, and again, this is the very thing that tyler disputes. social construction theory distinguishes between the construction of concepts and the construction of objects, and it does not deal with the emergence of material objects. yet material objects do emerge (birth happens!). therefore, although the meaning of pregnancy and even what constitutes pregnancy may be discussed in social constructionist terms, social construction theory cannot explain the genesis of embodied (material) subjects, which is part of what is at stake here. under western modes of reasoning, it’s impossible to point to a pregnant object as an object—it might be two! or something “in between.” notice: still a something, with its attendant masculinist ontological assumption of discreteness. a pregnant object stands outside of the set of everything, logically speaking, precisely because we can’t say “how many” it is. thus, at least in an analytical sense, “it” has no (available) ontology because “it” is not referenceable in arguments, and yet it occurs; it is real.10 the unique nature of pregnancy draws the singularity of the generative object into question. this is precisely what tyler’s subjective, phenomenological articulation of pregnancy draws out. by stating that “i am both one and the other. and i am equally neither one nor the other,” tyler expresses a 9 by anti-metaphysical, i mean anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist, and deconstructionist accounts. 10 this stands whether we take a realist or anti-realist position—whether it occurs “really” or linguistically doesn’t impact this particular point. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 subjective conundrum, yet it is one that i hope can be grasped rather universally. i speculate that one need not be pregnant and/or need not have the capacity to be so to imagine that if one was pregnant, an existential question might arise as to whether one was “one,” in terms of subjectivity and/or/relative to embodiment. i’d like to highlight the “was” in the previous sentence for a moment: this renders the question an ontological one, despite its phenomenological roots. as implied above, this question finds its analog in questions that attempt to establish the ontology of pregnant organisms in scientific terms. here, however, we must stretch any ontology that science can give us to allow for the possibility that subjectivity is a constitutive part of pregnancy, because subjects too, are sometimes pregnant. in addition to my above speculation, there are multiple philosophical accounts of pregnancy that suggest that an impression of simultaneously being both one and the other, and equally neither one nor the other, is shared. iris marion young suggests the pregnant subject is “decentered, split, or doubled,” and describes her own pregnancy in the same terms tyler does (young 2005, 46–50). christine battersby notes that, “it might be possible (when pregnant) to be both self and not-self” (1998, 46). julia kristeva writes, “within the body . . . there is an other. and no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. ‘it happens, but i’m not there.’ ‘i cannot realize it, but it goes on.’ motherhood’s impossible syllogism” (1980, 237). thus, tyler is not alone in her assertions; her statement appears to represent a shared experience. so i use her statement as a jumping off point in search of the answer. the conditions that follow are also chosen in response to tyler’s description of her subjective experience of pregnancy. ultimately, they are chosen with an eye to (collectively) resolving or avoiding the problems posed by traditional ontological accounts, as well as doing justice to pregnant organisms who are sometimes subjects. the first condition is that an ontological model must recognize mammalian organisms as not necessarily self-contained (condition 1). this condition flows from the nature of the gestational relationship between the pregnant organism and the fetus,11 wherein they are connected by an umbilical cord and wherein the fetus is 11 whether or not the fetus is an organism is up for debate. a fetus would seem to meet some but not all of the criteria of common definitions of “organism.” regardless of whether we find that a fetus is an organism or is not an organism, its genesis requires explanation, as does the fact that it has the potential to develop into an organism. if a processual ontology of organisms is found to meet this condition, which it is in a subsequent section, then this question becomes rather moot, as we are not at (so much) liberty to pick the temporal moment at which it becomes an organism, since it is defined in terms of a process. 7 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 supported by the placenta—a specialized organ that develops in the pregnant organism specifically for this purpose. the pregnant entity is defined by its physiologically interdependent maternal and fetal aspects. the second condition for an ontological model of pregnancy is that it must allow for the temporal transiency of pregnancy (condition 2), and thus for organismal identities not to be “picked out” by necessarily pointing at stable organismal states. the ontology that successfully accommodates pregnancy mustn’t be required to reflect some stable state since mammalian pregnancy is transitory relative to the organism’s life span. thirdly, the account must not treat the pregnant organism as singular, nor as dual (condition 3). singularity is ruled out because the organism begins as such prior to the pregnancy, but some fundamental change occurs that makes this organism different than before. this change is such that, in the set of organisms, it is unclear whether the pregnant organism would then count as one or two instantiations of its type. by the same token, a dual ontology is ruled out because of the bi-directional sine qua non relationship between the pregnant organism and the fetus. “both” depend on the “other” to constitute the status of pregnancy. this requirement falls in line with phenomenological accounts of pregnancy, and does justice to pregnant subjects as both subjects and objects of their own pregnancies. the fourth condition that an ontological model of pregnancy must meet is that it must allow for an explanation of organismal genesis (condition 4). organismal must be read to be inclusive of human organisms, and thus organismal genesis must be read as the genesis of potentially12 self-aware subjects. an ontology must allow for the fact that organisms may be partially generative of others, including in some cases other subjects.13 what i mean by generative in this context 12 the moment when self-awareness begins or the process by which it develops is open for debate. 13 kingma touches on this in a lecture (see kingma 2016); she suggests that if her part-whole model of pregnancy is accepted, then it may be the case that persons give rise to persons in the case of human organisms, if one accepts animalism. in this work, i presume that either animalism is true, or that something very close to it is true. ironically, some objections to animalism depend on pointing to the following inconsistency: that something may be identical to more than one thing. but this is one of the principles that is challenged here as a result of the reports of what pregnancy is like; furthermore, this “subjective” take on what pregnancy is like is affirmed by dupré’s view that the moment when one organism—or process— becomes two remains contestable. remaining objections to animalism appear to presume accounts of persons who are neither ever pregnant, nor are ever born, and don’t grapple with feminist perspectives on embodiment or with embodied 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 is that the pregnant organism must be defined as having some kind of causal relation to the organism that then may emerge from it. it’s not just that the pregnant organism partly causes the emerging organism to be what it is; it’s that the pregnant organism partly causes the emerging organism to be. the claim pertains to the very existence of the emerging organism—think of the heideggerian idea of being qua being—rather than just to organismal nature. it would be naïve to think that one short condition could capture such an explanation fully. but the explanation must allow for our latest biological understanding of organisms, as well as for the philosophical understanding of embodied subjectivity. on the biology side, such understanding involves the facts that haploid cells generated by the male and female bodies combine to form a zygote and are then implanted in the uterus of the potential mother.14 that these cells have generative powers when combined is an opaque phenomenon that is not fully understood.15 we may have sophisticated understandings of what happens on a cellular level that gives rise to new organisms, but we can’t explain the reason it happens at all. to use aristotelian terms, we can explain the phenomenon of emergence in terms of efficient causes, but not final causes; in other words, we can describe each falling domino in the causal chain, yet not know what causes the first one to fall. the generative property should be treated primarily as a property of the haploid cells. however, the potential mother’s body is a “necessary condition” for the phenomena of organismal genesis and pregnancy to occur.16 it seems to be a part of what causes the so-called first domino to fall. furthermore, the fetal environment influences genetic expression, impacting phenotype. for these cognition. a fuller refutation of animalism’s counter-arguments is saved for another time. 14 in extremely rare cases, fetuses have developed outside of the uterus, but still within the body of the potential mother. in addition, in some cases, for instance in the case of trans men, the gestating organism could be said to be a father. this, however, depends on how one slices up or connects sex versus gender, as well as social versus biological roles. it is not necessarily clear whether trans men would wish to describe their gestative roles as maternal or as paternal. furthermore, it is not clear how such a role might be described in a medical setting, or theorized in a scientific one. 15 both males and females produce haploid cells and may therefore be said to be generative. however, i am focusing here on the generative aspect of and the phenomenon of pregnancy. 16 although ivf technology is now sometimes used, the zygote must still be implanted in a uterus. this might be subject to revision if medical technology begins to facilitate ectogenesis—gestation outside of a maternal body. 9 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 reasons, an account of the pregnant organism must accommodate that the pregnant organism is also partly generative, rather than simply holding that haploid cells alone are generative. again, a detailed account is beyond the scope of this work, but what an account must capture is that the pregnant organism is not merely a container,17 as it has been conceived throughout most of history, in which organismal genesis takes place, but is, at least partially, generative of other organisms.18 importantly, in the case of human pregnant organisms, the ontological account must accommodate subjectivity. if animalism is true, then it’s not just the case that organisms generate other organisms, but also that (embodied) subjects generate other (embodied) subjects. i’ll iterate kristeva’s claim that science, as an objective discourse, is not concerned with the subject (1980, 237). yet subjects are partly generated by pregnancy; presumably without pregnancy, there would be no subjects. since one of my aims here is to suggest criteria for an ontology of pregnancy, and people—subjects—certainly are sometimes pregnant, the ontological model that accommodates pregnancy must accommodate their subjectivity. thus, accounting for generativity in this context must mean accounting for generative subjects who produce other (sometimes generative) subjects. masculine, self-contained, singular embodiment that is in perfect, coextensive sync with its subjectivity throughout its biological life has determined our ontologies and modes of reasoning thus far. but under such ontologies and modes of reasoning, generativity is an impossibility. highlighting pregnancy with its attendant phenomenology as a case study should now push us toward ontologies wherein that perfect, coextensive sync is not necessary, where generativity is possible, and where the “inconsistent” experience of splitting-yet-cohesion has ontological weight. the fifth condition that an account of pregnancy must meet is that it must take materiality seriously. an ontological account under which pregnancy is possible must be, at least in part, a material account (condition 5). anti-metaphysical objections must be discarded in the context of this inquiry because a historical look at the evolution of human being, whether defined biologically, phenomenologically, or otherwise, is not contingent on its [social] linguistic articulation.19 as even 17 see criticism of the “container model” in kingma 2016. 18 even if we contest that a fetus is an organism, it seems that upon birth we must grant that the offspring is an organism. and if that is the case, and if that organism has a genesis, then the questions regarding its genesis remain. 19 if we accept the theory of evolution, human beings were not always linguistic, and there is no particular moment when we became so, although it is possible to point to moments when we certainly weren’t and moments when we certainly were. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 deconstructionist judith butler notes, it is not that material existence itself is in dispute, but rather that its meanings are linguistically determined (butler 2011). for the purpose of this work, the meanings don’t matter so much as the fact that we are physically here to make any meanings at all. it is the phenomenon of pregnancy, whatever it means, that makes that true. pregnancy would continue to occur even if it had no meaning or no particular meaning; in fact, it does occur in mammalian organisms for which this is the case. to sum up, an ontological model must allow for organisms to be non-selfcontained (condition 1), temporally transient (condition 2), non-singular and nondual (condition 3), partially generative of others (condition 4), and material (condition 5), in order to accommodate pregnancy. other success conditions may need to be added at a later time. irigaray (1991a) and tyler both suggest that pregnancy is not graspable using traditional philosophical language and modes of argument. even in this work, the demands of argumentation require me to undermine my point: to discuss the ontological relationship in question, i must refer separately to the whole and to parts, but by doing so i invoke the very ontologies i seek to challenge. my words cannot blur, yet bodies blur; our ontological model mustn’t blur, but must somehow accommodate a blurred phenomenon. ultimately, a deeply non-analytic account may be needed, or perhaps a new method of linguistic referenceability20 that does not depend on traditional laws of logic or grammar.21 for the moment, i write within these boundaries. key elements of bapteste and dupré’s processual ontology bapteste and dupré’s work seeks to challenge the standard organismal taxonomy, which helps determine organismal ontology, and which relies on a hierarchical “tree” model. on this model, entities at each observed level are constituted by entities at a lower level. for example, molecules constitute organelles, which constitute cells, which constitute organs, which constitute organisms (bapteste and dupré 2013, 381). this model is also used to map evolutionary relationships wherein vertical genealogical inheritance is ontologically defining. bapteste and dupré find that such a model is limited in usefulness because it presumes that genetic and species ontologies run parallel to one another and are 20 our epistemology at least partially determines our metaphysics, or at least what we can know about metaphysics. see sveinsdóttir 2015. 21 non-classical logical, artistic, mythological, or theological representations may be options. 11 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 exclusive of other ontological causal factors.22 on this view, all dna xs are organism xs, and all organism xs are dna xs, to the exclusion of any other causal/ontological factors, and to the exclusion of factors that don’t occur at the time scale at which the organism is being observed. bapteste and dupré write primarily about the microbial world, which is rife with horizontal genetic transfers (hgts), the practical and symbolic importance of which will be discussed shortly. they assert that their analysis is adaptable to the ontology of organisms in general, including multicellular ones (bapteste and dupré 2013, 381). in dupré’s subsequent presentation, “pregnancy as a bifurcating process” (2015), on the topic of processual ontology and pregnancy specifically, he argues that there are a couple of different ways to understand organisms. the first way to understand an organism is as part of a cell lineage; this is the thing-based interpretation of organisms. the second way to understand an organism is as a living system; this is the processual interpretation of organisms (dupré 2015). thus, processual ontology may be examined as a model for its capacity to account for the phenomenon of pregnancy in mammals. in fact, one of the questions dupré uses to kick off his discussion of pregnancy is whether the pregnant mammal is one process or two—which is part of what is at issue here. bapteste and dupré take a decidedly ecological approach to ontology. ecological is used here in its fullest sense and designates a network of interwoven and sometimes nested processes that cause something to be what it is. according to bapteste and dupré, organisms should be defined in terms of “how they emerge, are maintained and are stabilized” (2013, 381). they recognize that pointing to a specific temporal moment in the life of an organism based on which its ontology is to be defined is creating an abstraction—one that represents the organism in question in such a way as to obscure certain fundamental features. that, along with the challenge to the genetically “vertical” ontology forced by the tree model, is their main motivation for articulating an alternate ontology. a full explication of the underpinnings and significance of the processual account is beyond the scope of this work, as is an analysis that does justice to all of its details. i will therefore draw on the two theoretical features of the processual account that significantly distinguish it from thing-based ontological accounts. the first feature is its acknowledgment that causal factors are contributed at different timescales. in bapteste and dupré’s account, the appearance of ontological stability is generated by various steadying processes such as homeostasis on the level of individual organisms, and natural selection on the population level (2013, 381). in 22 for a detailed analysis of the limitations of the tree model, see bapteste and dupré 2013. the authors define causality as something that is “making a difference to something else” (380). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 their view, what is perceived as stable (or not) depends largely on the temporal context in which it is perceived. so, for the appearance of stability, a molecular process may require only milliseconds, whereas an evolutionary process may require millennia.23 drawing attention to this difference allows for an ontology that is more temporally complex. the relevant point in regard to pregnancy is that (at least) one temporal snapshot in the life of mammalian organisms shows their gravidity—yet this snapshot is almost always erased by thing-based organismal ontologies. yet without this very snapshot, organisms are taken to appear on the scene out of nowhere, and ontological emergence—the beginning of being—is a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t proposition. the second fundamental feature with significance for a potential ontology of pregnancy is the processual account’s acknowledgment of the significance of hgts. in the microbial world, hgt occurs when dna that the organism doesn’t receive from its parent organism is assimilated by the organism and then operates within the organism. for instance, bacteria may receive, via hgt, dna that codes for the production of flagella, and the bacteria then produce flagella. thus, a fundamental genetic, ontological change to the organism may occur that is not accounted for by the tree model, since the tree model identifies its objects based solely on vertically (“parentally”) transferred dna. the ability of a processual ontology to incorporate hgt is significant because it problematizes oversimplified ontological identity models by allowing for the introduction of factors that were heretofore either invisible or seen as inadmissible as a result of the types of ontological models in use. although there is no analog to hgt in the mammalian world, except perhaps in cases of microor macrochimaerism, the phenomenon of hgts in unicellular organisms forces the expansion of ontological models to include non-vertical or epigenetic causal factors when accounting for an object’s nature, emergence, or existence. epigenetic influences, that is, non-genetic influences, can, for instance, affect mammalian genetic expression by activating or inactivating certain genes or subsets of genes at certain times.24 specifically, that non-vertical factors are now acknowledged to partly determine ontology is a function of the ecological nature of 23 the traditional view leads to the question of how to genomically define species— common objects of ontological study. under the tree model, it may be impossible to define a species’ ontology because it may be impossible to determine whether its genome was caused to exist “molecularly” in the last millisecond or evolutionarily in the last millennium. the processual view accommodates different timescales and therefore illuminates the fact that temporally disparate yet interwoven processes may be co-causal. 24 for details, see, for instance, ishino, shinkai, and whitelaw 2013. 13 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 processual ontology, in contrast to what i’d call the “anatomical” (i.e., static) nature of thing-based ontologies. discussion what does this mean to the search for an ontology of pregnancy? does a processual ontology make visible a phenomenon that other ontological models erase? does it satisfy the requirements that were set forth? the first condition (condition 1) was that an ontological model must accommodate a non-self-contained identity to account for pregnancy, and it seems that the processual account is successful in this regard. it suggests the possibility of blurring between organisms, the possibility of an ontology à la merleau-ponty’s the visible and the invisible.25 on the unicellular scale of analysis, the genetically “porous” nature of certain organisms that processual ontology highlights and accounts for challenges the oversimplified self-coherence of traditional objects of study. hgt, as well as epigenetic discoveries such as the impact of certain proteins on gene expression, undermine the idea of a crystallized dna code that fully determines an object.26 part of bapteste and dupré’s project was aimed at destabilizing the causal “players” where organismal ontology was concerned (bapteste and dupré 2013, 386). the idea that identities are not outlined in black like objects in a coloring book, but are rather more diffuse or permeable27 serves to accommodate pregnancy as it goes some way toward articulating an ontology under which there is the possibility of one individual organism being ontologically impacted—if not caused to be “what it is”—by aspects of another individual organism; if we wish to speak in terms of processes, then we may say that there is the possibility of one process being ontologically impacted by aspects of another process. dupré’s presentation of pregnancy in the context of processual ontology shows that the question of how many processes occur during pregnancy is not settled (2015). but processual ontology facilitates the theoretical possibility of pregnancy in multicellular, mammalian organisms. under a processual ontology, there is the theoretical potential for an object to split yet remain coherent as itself. 25 for how merleau-ponty’s work applies, see lachance adams 2014. 26 (1) this has obvious parallels with social ontological accounts in that the environment, biological and social, is acknowledged to impact identity. (2) while other scientific theories have challenges static biological identities before epigenetic theories had an impact, ontological models did not necessarily evolve alongside them in a way that reflected new insights. 27 again, this biological view seems to be analogous to the views of theories of social construction. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 this application of processual ontology is demonstrated in “pregnancy as a bifurcating process” (2015), wherein dupré challenges the identification of the beginning of a process (i.e., an organism on the second interpretation) with its vertical cause. the processual ontological account seems to meet the second condition (condition 2), as it proposes that a more temporally holistic view of an organism serve as the basis of a sound ontology.28 bapteste and dupré specifically challenge traditional organismal ontological accounts on the point that they use only small “time slices” of the life of an organism to determine its ontology (bapteste and dupré 2013, 381). that these time slices fail to reveal a great deal of important information may be the problem from the perspective of the life sciences; that sexist value judgments inform the selection of the time slices is the problem from a feminist perspective. these problems are not mutually exclusive, but are rather intertwined. part of what is important about mammalian organisms is the story of their emergence, as bapteste and dupré assert. i offer that another thing that is important is that many of the organisms undergo the phenomenon of pregnancy and often parturition, without which there would be no emergence, and which, in the politico-linguistic context of human beings, has serious social consequences. it seems, then, that a processual ontological account would be inclusive of the phenomenon of pregnancy since it wouldn’t pin ontological definitions to a particular (type of) snapshot of organismal life. whether the processual account meets the third condition is debatable (condition 3). a processual ontology seemingly diffuses the boundaries of the object in question in a way that illuminates an interwoven ecology. this challenges the very notion of a numerical quality to identity—the question of how many things an object “is” seemingly becomes inapplicable. so, in a sense, a processual ontology affirms numerical disputability. on the other hand, this characteristic of the account seems to enable us to sidestep the very issue in question, which is, “how many” a pregnant organism “is.” thus it may undermine our ability to define what it is, at least under a linguistic regime wherein referents are necessarily discrete. tellingly, dupré asks whether a pregnant mammal is one process or two (dupré 2015). he finds that fertilization of the ovum—the traditional “beginning” of an organism— “may result in 0, 1, or more subsequently distinguished processes” (dupré 2015, 22). thus, even if we think in processes rather than think in things, the numerical question remains; instead of asking how many things she is, someone who is pregnant may ask herself instead how many processes she is. although dupré acknowledges that there is no unequivocal answer, he notes that “there is little reason to say that a pregnant mammal is two distinct processes before birth” (dupré 28 life-cycle approaches to organismal biology may also meet this condition. 15 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 2015, 8). therefore, in regard to the third condition, the processual theory of organisms falls somewhat short. it is here that an account driven by the needs and insights of microbiology may not be particularly appropriate for mammalian organisms to which pregnancy is endemic, perhaps least of all to the self-aware subjects of pregnancy. as shown in the introduction, the pregnant subject’s experience of pregnancy includes (although is not exhausted by) a sense of duality. in a unicellular context, instances of hgt may have profound and direct impacts—impacts that lead scientists to question the very identity of the resulting organism. but while in a unicellular context, hgt suggests a theoretical possibility of becoming something else, for a mammalian object that is pregnant, the theory must suggest a possibility of becoming some number else, while remaining coherent as itself, as its same number, in order to meet the third condition. since the requirement is that the pregnant object be non-singular and non-dual, an account may be needed that is somehow trans-mathematical29 or trans-logical. to the extent that linguistic structures are bound by logic, an account may be needed that is as yet unspeakable.30 the fourth condition the processual account must meet to do justice to the phenomenon of pregnancy is that it must allow that its objects are partially generative of other, ontologically identical objects (condition 4).31 this means that the ontological model must accommodate the fact that the pregnant organism in question may also be a subject, as is the case for humans. dupré acknowledges that at some point one process becomes two (dupré 2015), and thus, his work can be interpreted as implying that genesis occurs. pregnancy takes center stage in his presentation, so it is not erased as a phenomenon. but a crucial link between the pregnant mammal and the offspring seems not to be represented: that the offspring comes from the body of the mother, 29 whether the phenomenon of pregnancy is representable using transcendental numbers remains an open question. 30 this unspeakableness is demonstrated by our inability to (logically) reference something that is non-discrete; it has led irigaray to suggest that language itself may need to be altered to accommodate “female subjectivity.” this is taken to mean that it would facilitate an ontology of pregnancy. see irigaray 1995. this sentiment is shared by tyler (2000). 31 (1) ontologically identical refers here to objects having the same ontology, not to objects that are identical to themselves. (2) objects must also be allowed to be partly generative of ontologically similar objects, if we view sexes as ontologically different from one another. this is because potential mammalian mothers may become pregnant with male, female, or intersex offspring. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 that the maternal organism precedes the fetal-cum-organismal one.32 dupré asks, “when does one process split into two?” but upon this articulation, an organism-asprocess seems to arrive on the scene out of nowhere, just as an organism-as-thing once did. no matter what moment we point to as the beginning of the second process, we are still left with the question of where—what?—the process was in the moment just preceding that one. in fact, dupré writes that in organisms conceived of as processes, reproduction “may not take place at a particular moment” (dupré 2015, 19). thus it is just as impossible to pinpoint genesis under process ontology as it is under static ontologies, particularly if accounting for subjectivity is required. processual ontology doesn’t acknowledge that it is not merely a biological process that experiences a pregnancy—it is a subject.33 while organism-as-process apparently replaces organism-as-thing, processual ontology ignores the subject in that it gives no account of the genesis or development of subjects. requiring an ontological model to do so may be an extremely tall order.34 given that process ontology hails from the discipline of biology, rather than, say, neuroscience, cognitive science, sociology, psychology, or philosophy, it is rightly concerned with biological processes. but part of what is at stake here is the ability to give an ontology of human pregnancy, and it seems that while dupré acknowledges human sociality as an apparent ontological factor for human organisms—insofar as he references society as the human organism’s ecological niche with which the organism necessarily interacts as possibly being on par, ontologically, with biological factors—the story of the genesis of subjectivity, biological or otherwise, is left out. if we take the human organismal process to involve the social environment, then why don’t we discuss the existential questioning that may arise in the pregnant subject in response to the phenomenon of pregnancy as a part of its ontology? in “towards a processual microbial ontology” (2013), bapteste and dupré write that an account must capture the phenomenon of emergence, but they make no mention of procreation (however it occurs, i.e., for unicellular organisms or for others), beyond noting that an account must include information about how organisms are “maintained.” however inclusively it is meant, “maintenance” does not seem to describe a category of behaviors specific enough to be inclusive of 32 under the usual conditions; this may not be the case in instances of oocyte cryopreservation (i.e., egg freezing). further complications to this claim may arise in cases of gestational surrogacy or other biomedical technologies. 33 although subjectivity may be conceived of as a process. 34 but this should simply highlight a gap in metaphysics in general. ontologies of subjectivity abound, but to my knowledge there is no ontology of embodied subjectivity that accounts for pregnancy. recently, kingma’s work may be leading in that direction. 17 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 procreation or pregnancy. this omission represents a latent ascription to the masculinist ontologies i am challenging because of the asymmetrical treatment of the organism that assimilates horizontally transferred dna versus the organism that provides it. it is precisely this omission i reference when i claim that sexist value judgments inform the selection of the time-slices that come to define organisms. the absence of gestating organisms from the conceptual inventory used to generate organismal ontologies is harmful because an important biological capacity is erased—perhaps the most important capacity given that without it, there would be no mammalian organisms to speak of. in bapteste and dupré’s discussion of unicellular life, when hgt occurs, it is discussed from the theoretical perspective of the organism receiving the transferred dna. that organism is explained to have been changed—even (re)created as a different object. in a mammalian context, this omission finds its analog in ontological accounts that include the birth of an organism but not parturition— accounts that acknowledge that beings are born, but not that they give birth. thus, in the microbial processual account, what is seen as noteworthy about organisms is their emergence but not their capacity to (partially) cause emergence in others. dupré’s subsequent work addresses mammalian pregnancy specifically, but there is still only one implied reference to the fact that the parental organism gives rise (in whatever way) to the offspring. overwhelmingly, organisms-as-processes are referred to as being intertwined, dynamic, having unclear boundaries, being influenced by their environment, “obligatorily symbiotic,” underdetermined, ambiguous; “consortia” of microbes are used as an example of an organism better represented by a processual ontology. this terminology doesn’t suggest that the mother is primary, which she is. it rather suggests a nonhierarchical relation between the generative and the generated organism. if at some point, one process simply becomes two, which process may be said to come from which? which process generates the other? again, in the context of unicellular organisms, this ontological relational horizontality may accurately reflect the nature of the relationships between certain organisms. but in a mammalian context, even if organisms are conceptualized as processes, they must be seen as vertically nested after all, if only in regard to their generativity. so the processual account does not quite meet the fourth condition. however, it seems that processual ontology could easily be expanded to be more inclusive of procreation from the theoretical perspective of the procreating organism. lastly, i examined whether the processual ontological account takes materiality seriously (condition 5). and, in a word: yes. bapteste and dupré are biologists, and their discussion of processual ontology occurs in terms of physical causes and effects. “discourse,” with its attendant politics, is certainly inescapable. we are engaging in (political) discourse even when we discuss unicellular organisms 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 and their genetic and epigenetic interrelationships.35 and in some contexts, discourse shapes material reality literally.36 but even this requires that there be material to be shaped. that is not to say that material is somehow primary. interestingly, bapteste and dupré’s challenge to the tree model of organismal ontology may be read as a challenge to the concept of vertical causes and effects (i.e., to reductionism) in general. this suggests that material and nonmaterial causes may be networked together in a web within which neither one is privileged. however, materiality must be included because pregnancy is not contingent on its articulation, as the reproduction of nonlinguistic mammals shows. as irigaray has pointed out, it is against the backdrop of the maternal (material!) body that discourse has the option of occurring (irigaray 1991b) since maternal bodies are the partial “causes” of linguistic subjects. subjectivity is endemic to bodies, discursively outlined or not, but the reverse is not necessarily the case. the processual ontological account certainly regards bodies, although it doesn’t regard embodied subjects, at least not yet. conclusion while the processual ontological account proposed by bapteste and dupré is a great improvement over static ontologies, more work must be done to articulate a robust ontology of pregnancy. to its credit, the account is ecological, and therefore allows for the possibility of regarding the pregnant organism as part of the environment necessary for emergence to occur. to the extent that it does so, it does not “erase” generative bodies from ontology, or from philosophy more broadly, as other ontological accounts have done. in fact, dupré specifically discusses pregnancy in terms of processual ontology in “pregnancy as a bifurcating process.” however, it would be a stretch to say that the processual account does justice to the significance of pregnancy for mammalian ontology, particularly human—subjective— 35 for a discussion of the political commitments of sciences that seem far removed from “political” discourse, see potter 1993. 36 social behaviors governed by gender norms may lead to gendered development that contradicts sexual norms. rebecca jordan-young illustrates that, for instance, the imperative for young orthodox jewish men to intensively study the talmud, while young women are tasked with household work, causes the women’s musculature to have greater average mass than that of the young men. thus a nonmaterial, i.e., social, factor, partly determines a biological feature. this is in direct contradiction to presumed sexual physical norms that dictate that men generally have larger muscles, and shows that social context impacts physical development in that it may reverse presumed sexual norms. see jordan-young 2010. 19 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 mammalian ontology. to be fair, the account wasn’t originally theorized with this purpose in mind. what we need from ontology to be inclusive of the gestating organism, including and perhaps especially self-aware gestating organisms (i.e., people), is the theoretical acknowledgment that subjects don’t “arrive on the scene” out of thin air. social construction theories seem to pick up where/when/once the embodied subject has arrived on the scene (i.e., once the subject has been born) but the details of the subject’s physical being and emergence, which are necessarily intertwined with its subjectivity, and its own potential generativity, are left unattended to.37 if we do acknowledge the phenomenon of the emergence of embodied, selfaware subjects, as well as the phenomenon of gestation and parturition in them, then we have the capacity to ask the questions whose answers should help define the emergent subjects’ ontologies. for instance, if we conceive of organisms (including organisms qua subjects) as self-contained, can there be such a phenomenon as pregnancy? if we conceive of organisms as temporally stable, can there be such a phenomenon as pregnancy? if we conceive of organisms as strictly singular or strictly dual, can there be such a phenomenon as pregnancy? if we conceive of organisms as always already “there,” can there be such a phenomenon as pregnancy? if we conceive of organisms as disembodied, can there be such a phenomenon as pregnancy? the answer to these questions is no. therefore, if we assume that the phenomenon of pregnancy is (metaphysically) real—that pregnancy is something that occurs, then an ontology must be articulated under which it is possible. the requirements i have set forth are intended to guide such an ontology. furthermore, an ontological explication is needed that is sensitive to the particularities of linguistic beings and that accounts for the phenomenological complications illustrated by tyler. as discourse is generated by interrelated subjects and in turn (partly) generates our subjects, our ontologies must take the perspectives and experiences of pregnant subjects more seriously. this is especially pressing in light of a patriarchal discursive context—a context within which it is difficult to win the position of a full subject for the pregnantly embodied, as evidenced by the profound regulation, ideologically informed, of pregnant bodies. this is one of the more obvious ways that a given ontology of pregnancy has implications for the ethics and politics of pregnancy. “the pregnant” as a social group are often faced with discrimination, beyond the extent to which they belong to other marginalized groups (e.g., potentially women, trans men, and the disabled). ontologies must be generated under the terms of which pregnancy and subjectivity is not a theoretical impossibility. we must create ontological models that can 37 again, i don’t presume that materiality is primary, simply that it’s necessary. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 capture or illustrate pregnancy, not just because they must be able to mirror the actual phenomenon of pregnancy as closely as possible for philosophy’s or science’s sake, but also because of the ethical and political consequences that they help to usher in. references bapteste, eric, and john dupré. 2013. “towards a processual microbial ontology.” biology & philosophy 28 (2): 379–404. battersby, christine. 1998. the phenomenal woman: feminist metaphysics and the patterns of identity. new york: routledge. butler, judith. 2011. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york: routledge. dupré, john. 2015. “pregnancy as a bifurcating process.” presented at the taking pregnancy seriously in metaphysics: the foetus and the maternal organism conference, southampton, uk, july 21. irigaray, luce. 1991a. “the bodily encounter with the mother.” in the irigaray reader, edited by margaret whitford. cambridge, ma: basil blackwell. ———. 1991b. “women-mothers, the silent substratum of the social order.” in the irigaray reader, edited by margaret whitford. cambridge, ma: basil blackwell. ———. 1995. i love to you. new york: routledge. ishino, fumitoshi, yoichi shinkai, and emma whitelaw. 2013. “mammalian epigenetics in biology and medicine.” philosophical transactions of the royal society (biological sciences) 368/1609. jordan-young, rebecca. 2010. brain storm: the flaws in the science of sex differences. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. kingma, elselijn. 2015. “better understanding the metaphysics of pregnancy (bump): organisms, identity, personhood and persistence.” erc starting grant 2015 research proposal (part b2). http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/contentblock/usefuldownloads_download/e13065820b804133816196d2a525e89b /kingma%20bump%20erc_stg_2015%20b2final.pdf. ———. 2016. “were you a part of your mother? the metaphysics of pregnancy.” lecture at king’s college london, october 13. http://philosophyandmedicine.org/video-archive/. kristeva, julia. 1980. “motherhood according to giovanni bellini.” in desire in language: a semiotic approach to literature and art. new york: columbia university press. 21 sidzinska: not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/e13065820b804133816196d2a525e89b/kingma%20bump%20erc_stg_2015%20b2final.pdf http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/e13065820b804133816196d2a525e89b/kingma%20bump%20erc_stg_2015%20b2final.pdf http://www.southampton.ac.uk/assets/imported/transforms/content-block/usefuldownloads_download/e13065820b804133816196d2a525e89b/kingma%20bump%20erc_stg_2015%20b2final.pdf http://philosophyandmedicine.org/video-archive/ lachance adams, sarah. 2014. “maternity as dehiscence in the flesh in the philosophy of maurice merleau-ponty.” in mad mothers, bad mothers, and what a “good” mother would do: the ethics of ambivalence. new york: columbia university press. lloyd, genevieve. 1984. the man of reason: “male” and “female” in western philosophy. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. mackinnon, catharine a. 1983. “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: toward feminist jurisprudence.” signs 8 (4): 635–658. maher, jane maree. 2007. “prone to pregnancy: orlando, virginia woolf, and sally potter represent the gestating body.” journal of medical humanities 28 (1): 19–30. potter, elizabeth. 1993. “gender and epistemic negotiation.” in feminist epistemologies, edited by elizabeth potter and linda alcoff. new york: routledge. priest, graham. 2010. “the logic of the catuskoti.” comparative philosophy 1/2:24– 54. sveinsdóttir, ásta kristjana. 2015. “social construction.” philosophy compass 10 (12): 884–892. tyler, imogen. 2000. “reframing pregnant embodiment.” in transformations: thinking through feminism, edited by sara ahmed, jane kilby, celia lury, maureen mcneil, and beverley skeggs, 288–301. london: routledge. welsh, talia. 2013. “the order of life: how phenomenologies of pregnancy revise and reject theories of the subject.” in coming to life: philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, edited by sarah lachance adams and caroline r. lundquist. new york: fordham university press. wynn, francine. 2002. “the early relationship of mother and pre-infant: merleauponty and pregnancy.” nursing philosophy 3 (1): 4–14. young, iris marion. 2005. “pregnant embodiment: subjectivity and alienation.” in on female body experience: “throwing like a girl” and other essays. oxford: oxford university press. maja sidzinska is an ma candidate and occasional instructor at san francisco state university. her primary research interest is metaphysics, especially identity and substance ontology. she also writes on topics in political philosophy, especially issues surrounding social scale and organizational theory. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/2 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy maja sidzinska recommended citation not one, not two: toward an ontology of pregnancy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation koukal, d. r. 2019. “precarious embodiment: unwanted pregnancy and bodysubject interruptus.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (3). article 2. 2019 precarious embodiment: unwanted pregnancy and bodysubject interruptus d. r. koukal university of detroit mercy koukaldr@udmercy.edu koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 precarious embodiment: unwanted pregnancy and bodysubject interruptus1 d. r. koukal abstract this essay offers a phenomenological description of unwanted pregnancy so that the central place of lived embodiment can be reinserted into the abortion debate and properly taken into account. what this description will reveal is the ontological drama of such “aversely pregnant subjectivities” at a time when ever more legislation is being passed that imposes ever more restrictions on the reproductive rights of women in the united states. this investigation is all the more pertinent in light of a new conservative majority on the us supreme court, which may well put the right to legal abortions in jeopardy. this essay’s highest ambition, however, is to convey to men the significance of these restrictions, since men by and large determine the policies that play a substantial role in shaping the bodies and lives of women. keywords: pregnancy, abortion, embodiment, phenomenology introduction: the handmaid’s tale and embodied subjectivity margaret atwood’s dystopian novel the handmaid’s tale (1985) describes a nation called gilead, a patriarchal theocracy founded on old testament christianity. this society is beset by war, riven with internal sectarian conflict, and attempting to recover from an unspecified environmental catastrophe which has resulted in unprecedented rates of reproductive sterility. any woman who has given birth to a child in the past becomes an important social commodity. she is placed among the handmaids, a caste of women who are best described as reproductive slaves 1 over and beyond the two anonymous reviewers at fpq, this essay owes much to discussions and/or correspondence with emily barone, ami harbin, hanne jacobs, matthew king, astrida neimanis, tracey nicholls, bronwyn singleton, and sharon vlahovich. i am especially indebted to my colleague beth oljar, who first put this challenge to me. nevertheless, the blame for any deficiencies in the essay falls on the author exclusively. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 compelled to be surrogate mothers. needless to say, given the animating ideology of gilead, abortion is out of the question; in fact, it is a capital offense. the bodies of handmaids are prized and pampered, cared for and coddled. socially isolated and swaddled in garb which subsumes their identities, their sole task is to submit to a monthly ritual of state-sanctioned rape. laying symbolic but inert between the spread legs of an upper-caste but sterile wife, the handmaid is penetrated and receives the ejaculation of her commander, who is married to the wife and is the man to whom the handmaid belongs. all having done their procreative duty; all wait for the results. should the seed take, the child would belong to the commander and his wife. but a grim fate awaits the handmaid who endures this ritual repeatedly but does not produce a child. she will eventually be deemed an unwoman by the regime, and condemned to die of hard labor in the nuclear wastelands of the colonies. atwood’s story highlights the phenomenon of embodied subjectivity in connection to pregnancy, maternity, and surrogacy, and their relationship to social power. the handmaids are reduced to their bodies’ procreative functions. they are regarded by the social body as mere bodies with reproductive potential. they are “free” only to ovulate, incubate, and propagate, but these are nothing more than biological imperatives. their pregnancies are coerced, their maternity is forced, their surrogacy is involuntary. to the degree that their fate is wholly determined by their bodies under the strictures of the gileadean regime, they are subjects with no social agency; they have no projects they can call their own. handmaids do not live their bodies; their bodies live them, sweeping away almost all of their subjectivity. when read in this way, the novel can be used to shine a light on a stark impoverishment within the public discourse on reproductive rights in the united states. this discourse is dominated by the abstract language of rights and obligations—the rights or obligations of the pregnant woman on the one hand and the rights of the fetus on the other, which, in turn, hinge on speculation about the metaphysical status of the fetus. what is striking about this discourse is how infrequently any reference is made to the obviously central and concrete role the human body plays in this ethical drama. when the body has received attention from more scholarly commentators, it is often quickly relegated to a kind of theoretical placeholder in the debate. for example, many feminist scholars have noted that in the presence of the fetus, the body of the woman either disappears altogether or is relegated to a mere “container” or “incubator” for the fetus (see, for example, verhage 2013, 303). again, the language is abstract, and invites a kantian analysis whereby the embodied woman is expelled from the kingdom of ends and relegated to a means only. even in judith jarvis thomson’s famous defense of abortion, where it seems the body is central, the argument quickly devolves into the question of whether or not the woman is obligated to “lend” her body to the fetus (thomson koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 1996). this in turn implicitly raises the issue of who “owns” the body of the pregnant woman. this reduces her body to a form of property, which is nothing more than a legal abstraction (mackenzie 1995, 52; gray 2013, 83–85). these are all very peculiar ways of talking about the body, because such language seems to suggest that it can be cleaved from the subject. these discussions routinely ignore this underlying ontological dimension of the body. however, in recent years, a number of feminist scholars, many elaborating on the pathbreaking work of iris marion young (2005), have turned their attention to the ontological aspects of pregnancy and natality, employing various phenomenological methods to achieve new insights into this state of embodiment. but despite this welcome attention, what is still lacking is a rigorous phenomenological account of an unwanted pregnancy.2 this essay endeavors to provide such an account, and describe at a pretheoretical level an embodied subjectivity at odds with its own state of embodiment. this investigation is particularly interested in exploring the limited agency induced by constraints that fall upon an embodied subject who is compelled to live a body it does not want to live. this description will provide a sound ontological foundation where the central place of embodiment in the abortion debate can be reasserted and properly taken into account. what this description will reveal is the ontological drama of such “aversely pregnant subjectivities” at a time when ever more legislation is being passed that imposes ever more restrictions on the reproductive rights of women in the united states (guttmacher institute 2019). this investigation is all the more pertinent in light of a new conservative majority on the us supreme court (litman 2019), which may well put the right to legal abortions in jeopardy and move the country closer to atwood’s dystopian vision. this essay’s highest ambition, however, is to convey to men the significance of these restrictions, since men by and large determine the policies that play a substantial role in shaping the bodies and lives of women. this study is built on a foundation comprised of edmund husserl’s notion of the lived body, which was first articulated in ideas ii and later elaborated on to great effect in the work of maurice merleau-ponty. this work feeds into a general 2 a representative collection of this recent scholarship can be found in coming to life: philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, edited by sarah lachance adams and caroline r. lundquist (2013). however, the only work i can find that alludes to my topic is lundquist’s earlier essay “being torn: toward a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy” (2008). in this essay, lundquist calls for a phenomenology of this bodily situation; the present essay may be considered at least a provisional answer to this call, though my reflections on this phenomenon started long before coming across lundquist’s article. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 phenomenological account of embodiment, followed by a rigorous description of pregnant embodiment that leans heavily on recent feminist scholarship. following these are descriptions of different modes of embodiment that are analogous to pregnancy, which are meant to ground husserl’s method of imaginative variation. these accounts might seem to wander far afield from the primary focus of this investigation. however, they are essential tools deployed for the purpose of “levering” male readers into the dimension of experience under investigation so they have an opportunity to grasp its sense and significance for the women who must live it. these analogous accounts are meant to build bridges of empathy by isolating certain general structures of nongendered embodied phenomenon. readers—particularly male readers—are then invited to use these bridges to focus on the constitution and meaning of aversely pregnant embodiment within an intercorporeal, social context, where the dimension of gender will become more fully apparent. all bridges share a general structure but connect different places. this suggests that while these bridges of empathy will not enable men to cross over entirely into a full experience of a female other, they can serve as vantage points that might allow glimpses into their lived worlds. it is hoped that these men will see, at least in outline, an instance of what judith butler calls “precarity,” but here understood as something that threatens the meaning of a lived world at the level of the body (butler 2009, i–ii; see also butler 1988, 2006; butler and de boever 2015). finally, this study concludes with some comments of critique drawn from this phenomenological analysis; these comments themselves are not, strictly speaking, phenomenological. 1. our bodies described in general phenomenological terms our bodies are much more than inert physical objects made of flesh and blood. rather, we as subjects “live” our bodies; they are our openings onto the world, with which they are in dialogue. animated by consciousness, they move toward beckoning horizons, gesturing toward and orienting themselves in relation to things, spaces, situations, and other subjects with bodies. the human body, then, is no mere appendage to the self (husserl 1989, 159–160, 165–167; pietersma 1997, 458; diprose 1994, 110).3 in fact, it would be more appropriate to refer to the bodysubject,4 so called because at a fundamental level there can be no cleavage 3 what is being described in this paragraph is the distinction that husserl makes between körper (a physical body situated in space and subject to causal laws) and leib (the body viewed as a living organic entity). 4 the typical rendering of merleau-ponty’s le corps propre is either “lived body” or the hyphenated phrase “body-subject.” i have no quarrel with the first phrase, but for the purposes of this essay i will eliminate the hyphen from the second phrase koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 whatsoever between a particular human body and a particular subjectivity. it is precisely this supreme lack of separation within this “near” horizon of experience that invites us to regard our bodies as so much more than mere property. our lived bodies can never be lived by another in the same way—they are at this level strictly inalienable in any absolute sense. no matter the particular situation it finds itself in, each particular lived body is the very source of the world in which it participates and from which it makes meaning in that world. our bodies are not something we each have; they are something we are (beauvoir 1974, 33; diprose 1994, 103–104; diprose 1995, 209). and yet, to live our body is to also experience a trace of the inert and “objective” material thing that is also intimately implicated with it (us!) at the same time. imagine a friend approaching us from behind and unexpectedly placing their hand on our shoulder. in such instances, we experience the “objective” dimension of our body (us!) even as this is conveyed to us “subjectively.” in this moment the body is simultaneously a sensing subject and a sensed object. this phenomenon of reversibility marks our bodysubjectivity with an irreducible ambiguity in regard to these two metaphysical categories. one way of exploring this ambiguity is to employ the image of water as a heuristic metaphor. this metaphor attempts to leave behind the dualisms of “subject/object,” “inside/outside,” and so forth, that have so infected western philosophical discourse since the advent of modernity. we contend that this metaphor will more effectively evoke the multiplicity of forces and the infinity of patterns that constitute bodysubjectivity. we can conceive of a body of water as being a singular organic entity, but within this entity, it makes no sense to speak of “sides” or borders or edges or insides or outsides. the intimate and almost invisible but strongly felt interdimensionality of water brings with it countless tropes of flow and stoppage, currents and countercurrents, depth and surface, drift and surge, flood and trickle, force and equilibrium, calm and roiled, flushed and channeled, flowing to and from, with and against, and so on, all of which much better capture the multitude of fluid interflows of lived, embodied experience. and its derivatives in order to emphasize this irreducible relationship. though i am not particularly fond of such graphical neologisms, “body-subject” carries a whiff of cartesian dualism about it; “bodysubject,” i think, better conveys the sense of the original french: “one’s own body.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 2. pregnant bodysubjectivity as a project willingly engaged, and the counterflow of corporeality5 one possible mode of embodiment that can gradually surface from the ripple of reversibility is pregnant bodysubjectivity. for our present purposes, we are assuming a desired pregnancy willingly engaged by the embodied subject, the description of which will provide a counterpoint when we turn to analyze the averse, unwanted pregnancy. pregnancy’s particular kind of corporeality emerges out of the agency of biology. often biology flows with us, and we hardly take notice of its presence. but at other times, it flows against us and makes its own demands that begin to challenge any notion that our bodies “belong” exclusively to us as “pure” subjects. in pregnancy, various corporeal changes announce to us a complex relationship of imperatives that herald the slow reconstitution of our bodysubjectivity which is the site of action, change, and creativity—but at this biological level of experience, not control (diprose 1994, 103; rodemeyer 1998, 79; verhage 2013, 301–302). this corporeal reconstitution remakes our spatial orientation towards the world. as the biological imperatives of pregnancy course through us they slowly build and then surge, and are experienced as countercurrents that at first tax our efforts to live our bodies in the ways to which we have become accustomed. depending on the physiological particulars of each pregnancy, we can grow to a comfortable fullness, or expand to such a degree that we become less comfortable in our skins and clothing. the reshaping of our viscera can contribute to a cozy sense of fecundity or may descend upon us like a weight that is suffused throughout our whole body and being (piering 2012, 185; young 2005, 49–50; bigwood 1998, 103). depending on how we “carry” the pregnancy, our altered motility may be analogous to the dance we undertake when we gingerly sidestep puddles on a rainy day. or, we may feel a drag that increases with each step we take, like wading into a large body of water. in pregnancy, our sense of boundaries escapes our corporeal contours to various degrees and changes our comportment towards our immediate environs. these shifting boundaries change not only our relationship to the surrounding world but also our relationship to our own inalienable body, our own self. we experience our body as ours but also notours; there is a felt sense of increase in volume and mass. our insides are the space of another yet also of our own body; a commingling commences, through the dynamics of intimate intraflows. the fetus’s “separateness” is neither physically well 5 the scholarly foundation for this section is iris marion young’s essay “pregnant embodiment: subjectivity and alienation” (2005), which itself serves as a kind of touchstone for so much of the more recent philosophical labor on the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. young’s analysis is here supplemented and refined by this more recent scholarship. koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 established nor felt as such by the pregnant bodysubject. because there is no clear boundary between the two, the tickles, gurgles, kicks, and other internal movements are all experienced as paradoxically without and within; they come from another place, belonging to an other, an other that is nevertheless the body of the pregnant bodysubject, two fleshes in one place. even here, our bodies are always co-present with us—as us—which in turn will reconstitute the meaning of our lived world (young 2005, 49–50; irigaray 1981, 63; mackenzie 1995, 50–51; rodemeyer 1998, 79–81; gray 2013, 72–83; welsh 2013, 287–288, 291). all of this renders fluid the boundary of what is within and intimate to the self and what is experienced as outside and separate from the self. in pregnancy we become more centered on the constantly changing factical dimensions of our embodiment, which is experienced as neither one or two. subjectivity becomes blurred and confused. we are both one and two; we are able to be and have the other and still remain ourselves (diprose 1994, 104, 109–110, 116–117; diprose 1995, 208; rodemeyer 1998, 80–81). as the body continues to spread and double, so does the “i” of the ego, which slowly flows into its new mode of embodiment. during this process, we may at times experience ourselves as tethered to an awkward body floundering through the world. but as our body gradually comes to find the new grooves worn by the currents of biology, it comes to flow back into a reconfigured world; and as it does so, it becomes more transparent, more able, as it transforms our very manner of being-in-the-world. eventually, we are able to glide with ever more ease through our aims and projects, as we navigate our world in communion with this new body (young 2005, 50–52; diprose 1994, 114, 117; little 2005, 320–321). in short, pregnancy challenges at a fundamental level the notion that our bodies are wholly “ours.” while it may be true that we are the only ones who can live our bodies at a first-person level of experience, it is manifestly the case that the physical-biological world also has a claim on them. in such instances, our corporeality displaces or shifts or morphs or diffuses—but in no way eliminates— our subjectivity. every pregnant body is lived in the most intimate way imaginable, but at the same time, it is caught in the undertow of biology, which can make us experience it as something at odds with our selves. to put it another way, a hard facticity enters into a new relationship with transcendence. in the midst of these corporeal changes, the embodied subject must approach their projects differently. at this level, our world must be lived through a kind of primal and ongoing negotiation between the two (diprose 1995, 211–212). in the pregnant bodysubject, we have a particular kind of confluence of two currents that come into contact with each other in varied ways. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 3. the counterflows of corporeality and subjective currents in different modes of bodysubjectivity but it is important to show that parts of this dynamic are essential features of bodysubjectivity in general and not just confined to the project of pregnancy. only by pointing out these similarities and thematizing them can we come to eventually appreciate what it means to live a body that is aversely pregnant—which, remember, is the prime objective of the current investigation. in order to achieve this goal, it is essential we take the time to carefully lay down this foundation of the lived structures that underlie bodysubjectivity per se, which will allow the possibility for those who have never been and never can become pregnant to see the significance of this mode of embodiment for those who are compelled to endure it.6 if we consider pregnancy as a project that a bodysubject can freely take up, we can conceive of bodysubjects freely taking up other kinds of projects. consider, for example, the competitive runner. a bodysubject freely takes up the project of running in competition and begins their training. this move from a relatively sedentary existence to a more active one is experienced as initiating a new relationship within the bodysubject that exerts a pull in connection with a particular aspect of its manner of being. as the self which is the body persists in trying to pull itself into new channels, its corporeality resists the establishment of a training routine. this continued resistance is experienced as a countercurrent within the world of the bodysubject, as it makes its way towards moving through this world differently. over time, corporeality slowly starts to flow in the same direction as the project and more fully joins this new routine. as it becomes more integrated into this new project of the bodysubject, aches and pains emerge. to the extent that they have freely chosen to take up competition, the runner embraces as an attitude both this overarching project as well as the physical ailments that accompany it (diprose 1995, 208). like the pregnant bodysubject, there may be times when they feel ambivalent about their project given the emergence of exhaustion and physical discomfort (lundquist 2008, 140). but in their commitment to this project, they move forward because competition is one way they have chosen to make meaning in their world. trained to a razor’s edge of peak performance, exhaustion and discomfort submerge again and are subsumed into this bodysubjective project. the flow of corporeality is brought into the desired ontological equilibrium. however, there are times when aches and pains grow too great and do not allow the running bodysubject to compete at the level to which they are accustomed. in the worst-case scenario, such discomforts may not allow them to 6 though it is true that many women never have been and never can become pregnant, the reader is reminded that this analysis is directed at the maledominated legal and political structures which govern women’s bodies. koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 compete at all, or even train. as the equilibrium between project and corporeality breaks down, the waters of this part of their lived world become disturbed. a sore back or a broken leg roils the world the runner has structured for themselves. as their corporeality diverges from the self, their relationship to their own body is altered because it is contrary to how they would like to experience it. in such situations, their body becomes more manifest to them and flows away from their sense of self.7 wherever they go, they must haul their broken leg around and find a place to put it, like an object alien to their body—but one that can never be left behind. they experience their sore back as something that stands between them and the simple project of bending over to pick something up, as something that will exact a toll measured in pain or discomfort. in all of these phenomena, even though their bodies will always ever remain theirs to live from their own unique and intimate perspective, they experience their bodies, or a part of their bodies, as something they desire to “be without,” though the separation they desire is impossible. in such instances the runner “has” a body rather than “is” a body. what results from this is not an alienation from their body but rather a collapse of constituted meaning that alienates them from their world (diprose 1995, 209–211). in such instances, the bodysubject can no longer maintain their runnerly integrity; they flounder, and their world becomes torpid. but this does not mean that there is no recourse available to them. in such situations, they can strike out in a new direction by readjusting their attitude to their altered state of corporeality (diprose 1995, 211–212). in the case of aches and pains, they can hunker down to wait these ripples out. in regard to more serious conditions (the broken leg, the persistently sore back, etc.), they can find the strength to tread water while trainers or medical professionals help to ease their way back into their project by bringing their project and corporeality back into equilibrium, so as to reconstitute the running bodysubject. what all this shows is that though our corporeality can be experienced as a fleshy, physical, biological vortex that has ensnared us to a greater or lesser degree, we always attempt to remerge it into our subjectivity (and vice versa) and, by extension, the world of our freely chosen projects (leder 1990, 18; also see diprose 1994, 104–107, 114). out of this complex dynamic of shifting drift, force, and confluence, another facet of our experience emerges—our temporal world, in particular our lived gestures toward the future. experience reveals to us that for some physical states— such as the ache, the pain, the broken leg—there will likely be a “beyond” when we can establish a more balanced equilibrium between our corporeality and our projects, and it is our cognition of such a beyond that shapes our attitude toward 7 more present as opposed to ready-to-hand, as heidegger (1993, 102–104) would put it. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 such corporeal states in the present. other states, such as possibly chronic pain and discomfort, render our futures more precarious because they suggest that it might take longer for this balance to be restored—if ever. different corporeal states inform the futures of competitive runners. those at the top of their training and preparation anticipate success on the track. those who are undertrained or nursing an injury will tend to expect disappointment in their performance and adjust their attitude toward their project accordingly. similarly, the futures of pregnant bodysubjects are suffused with anticipations and uncertainties pointing toward a beyond, which often points in turn to another set of futures. this focus on the temporal brings into sharp relief another facet of experience wherein we struggle to reintegrate our projects and corporeality. but another strategy of reintegration would be to refuse the project—and hence that particular future—altogether. the runner, for example, can always choose to withdraw from competition, even though it would admittedly remake the meaning of their world in a significant way. similarly, the pregnant bodysubject can in principle choose to remake the meaning of their world by withdrawing from the process that is reshaping their bodysubjectivity and their future—but in most cases only up to a certain point, and this is a vitally important stipulation. despite this stark difference, this comparison of the project of running to that of pregnancy is meant to show how our corporeality and projects move in and out of equilibrium in both instances and to varying degrees. but more importantly, it is meant to reveal, at least after a moment’s reflection, that this dynamic is present in every bodysubject. to realize this commonality is essential to the present study, as it will allow any bodysubject the possibility of identifying to some degree with a bodysubjectivity experiencing an unwanted pregnancy. 4. the crosscurrent of society, and pregnant bodyintersubjectivity the various interand counterflows thus far described are not the only forces that constitute bodysubjectivity. already running across this complex dynamic is a deep current of social and cultural norms that also exert enormous influence on our individual lived worlds. what this means is that our worlds are not wholly selfconstituted but rather co-constituted by the various accrued and sedimented meanings of the social worlds into which we are thrown. in regard to embodiment, these take the form of various “body images” that are presented to us as ideals and which shape the way we regard our bodies in terms of “health,” “ability,” “beauty,” “masculine,” “feminine,” and so on. under the sway of such ideals, we may find ourselves in congruence with them; oftentimes we struggle to live up to these norms, sometimes we reject them altogether and attempt to leave them behind. but even in this last instance, by way of rejection, they serve as a counterpoint that still exercises a pull on our self-identity (weiss 1999). this is why it is not koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 inappropriate to speak of “bodyintersubjectivity.” though cumbersome, the term denotes the fact that we are always already immersed in a social world of constituted meaning which cannot help but exert a pull on our bodysubjectivity (diprose 1994, 113–116, 119–122; mackenzie 1995, 53). when the pregnant bodysubject eventually emerges from the zones of intimacy and familial privacy, it can be publicly recognized as culturally meaningful, as the source of family, the social body, and all human life (beauvoir,1974, 540; diprose 1994, 25; gray 2013, 76). its visible fecundity presents as a difference emerging from a unity and makes it the object of social appraisal, and it is pulled into the body politic by a current of a certain kind of attentiveness (diprose 1994, 22–23, 26). queries as to due date, the sex of the fetus, possible names, reproductive history, the question of whether to use pharmaceutical pain relief during birth—all of these signify a sense of common ownership of the pregnant bodysubject, at least to some degree. implied is a casual right to know certain intimate details about the pregnant bodysubject’s situation. this intimacy sometimes has tactile and even aural dimensions. the belly of the bodysubject is often touched or listened to, almost always after asking permission but almost never with an expectation that it will be refused. it is one thing for such scrutiny to come from family members, but oftentimes it comes from strangers outside this zone of intimacy. all of this speaks to an intersubjective, communal claim on the pregnant bodysubject. this communal claim can be experienced as an embrace because of the social privilege that generally comes with this form of embodiment. the pregnant bodysubject is the advent of a new member of the community which they are making possible, and so is often the recipient of courtesy, praise, congratulation, approval, and more generally, a level of caring within which it can warmly immerse itself. the pregnant bodysubject is borne along in a community that is living the body with it by caring for it (heidegger 1993, 122; diprose 1994, 113, 119; guenther 2006, 144; piering 2012, 178–181, 186–187; fischer 2012, 191; rogers 2013, 120; verhage 2013, 318; lupton 1998, 59–85). however, there are instances in which the pregnant bodysubject is received much differently, and the waters of society run cold. sometimes the scrutiny of the pregnant bodysubject is silent, taken from a distance and tainted with disapproval if it is deemed too young, too old, too poor, too dark, too fertile, or in any way too at odds with a given society’s body image of “maternity.” looks of censure inscribe themselves on such pregnant bodysubjects, and in some cases they are even verbally reproved for these and other perceived transgressions. for example, it is not unusual that pregnant bodysubjects observed drinking alcohol are publicly accosted, even though they may be consuming moderately and in consultation with their doctors. in such instances, pregnant bodysubjects experience the current of public disapproval as flowing against them, by virtue of their perceived behavior, or feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 because of certain factical features of their embodiment or their particular place in a social order. these open up the pregnant bodysubject as a site of public judgment, wherein they are considered to be unworthy of their state or unable to care for themselves and the being within them. such judgments make such bodies “problematic,” with concern shifting from that of the bodysubject to the fetus and the fetus alone. in this, society moves in and flows past the pregnant bodysubject; it no longer cares for the bodysubject in its own being but rather cares about it in an instrumental way that invites intervention for the sake of an unborn other (piering 2012, 181–184; diprose 1994, 23–26, 60; heidegger 1993, 122). this more instrumental manifestation of care is greatly amplified once the pregnant bodysubject comes under the scrutiny of a medical establishment that routinely overestimates the risks to the fetus in the absence of hard medical evidence (lyerly et al. 2009, 35–42). earlier we noted how biology can generate a countercurrent against a pregnant bodysubject, causing them to experience a sense of “splitting” of their subjectivity even while it remains one. what we are describing here is a crosscurrent that has a similar effect, wherein the pregnant bodysubject’s corporeality presents as alien to itself by virtue of how it is regarded by the social order. when such a bodysubject becomes an object of social concern, it paradoxically emerges in one sense but submerges in another (verhage 2013, 303). this shows how social power is a mode of government that structures the possible field of actions for pregnant bodysubjects, in which bodies are made, not given. this power vigilantly scrutinizes the pregnant bodysubject as the site of reproduction of the social body, in the name of the latter’s health and welfare. here the social dimension of our lived world, even though it is at one level our lived world, comes together with the factical biological imperatives that shape our lives and pushes back. in the guise of prenatal care and broader cultural conceptions of maternity, social power literally—not metaphorically—moves through pregnant bodysubjectivities, where its influence is experienced at the ontological level as a felt duty to gestate (foucault 1982, 27; foucault 1980, 58; diprose 1995, 213–217; lupton 1998, 59–85; kukla 2005, 3–27; little 1999, 295–312).8 5. averse pregnancy, involuntary surrogacy, forced maternity, and bodysubject interruptus as we have seen, our world often demands that we engage with unexpected or unintended events that cause our aims and projects to become entangled or 8 it should be noted that very fruitful work has been done in critical disability theory on the foucauldian notion of the governability of bodies; see, for example, scully (2008), tremain (2001), and wendell (1996). koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 placed in tension with one another. in such instances, the whole of our world is no less meaningful, but it is experienced with a greater degree of precarity. an unwanted pregnancy and undesired birth might be considered instances of such highly precarious events, especially since these events are centered in a body that is on one level inalienably ours and our opening onto the world, but at another level not ours in that the world can take hold of bodies in various ways and hold them fast.9 what emerges here is how crucial the attitude of the bodysubject is towards their pregnancy and potential birthing, within this wider ontological context. this requires us to imagine a bodysubjectivity that does not want to integrate pregnancy into their lived world. we must undertake an examination of a pregnant bodysubjectivity who experiences themselves as the bodily source of, but an unwilling participant in, their own situation. this unwanted pregnancy is carried by a bodysubject that undergoes all of the same biophysical changes described in the second section of this investigation, but the assumption there was that the bodysubject had willingly taken up the project of pregnancy. in this, the pregnant bodysubject can be considered the site of an original and absolute hospitality that is being extended to a potential bodysubject. yet hospitality issues from an act of subjective generosity, which in principle may be withdrawn (verhage 2013, 316–317; gray 2013, 84–85). this means that the aversely pregnant bodysubject must experience the changes that wash over and through them differently. insofar as pregnancy is a state they do not desire, and birthing is a possibility they want to refuse, they will experience these phenomena as things that will resist integration into their lived world, and so there will be no gliding, reintegrating “flow” back into their own bodysubjectivity. there is always the chance that they may change their attitude and come to embrace their corporeal state and the future towards which it gestures. but if not, they may move to take a firmer hold on a body that on one level is only theirs to live, and to reassert their place in the making of their world by terminating the pregnancy. however, if they are prevented from reasserting their place in the making of their world in this way, then they are condemned to be an unwilling participant in a creative process that they do not plan and direct, but in which they are nevertheless intimately immersed. their world has been radically transformed, not only by a biological change in themselves, but by a social claim on their bodysubjectivity. this 9 another way of finessing this point might be the application of an adjective that heidegger often uses in connection with the various structures emanating from dasein: “one’s ownmost [eigenste] body.” we are not the exclusive “owners” of our bodies, though it seems correct to say that, in one sense, we “own” it most, in that only we can live our body corporeally. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 proscription imposes an experience of their ownmost body as alien and a burden, and as a portent of a future they wish to refuse. by way of contrast, the claims made on our bodysubjectivity by bodily ailments are experienced as something that has penetrated or interpenetrated to a greater or lesser degree the physical-biological being that we are, and which can be freely taken up in various ways. an unwanted pregnancy makes exactly the same sort of claim on a bodysubjectivity because it too has a physical-biological dimension.10 an unwanted pregnancy and a bodily ailment share one essential feature: the state of our corporeality is other than we wish it to be. yet the body can never be alienated in any absolute sense, since the body must always be corporeally lived by the subject. as noted earlier, the body is experienced as both belonging and not-belonging to the subject, but both of these modes of bodily existence are nevertheless experienced exclusively by the subject, simultaneously. but because the body and the subject are experientially correlative, the alienated body affects our very way of being-in-the-world (mackenzie 1995, 53). in other words, much more than the body is swept up in such situations; what is also swept up is subjectivity itself. in situations like these, the body loosens our hold on our lived world and shapes it in ways that are at odds with our future aims and projects. at issue is the freedom to shape a flowing, integrated bodily experience (ibid.). the bodysubject is typically free to take up bodily ailments in a variety of ways (e.g., reorienting the body in relation to the affliction, seeking medical attention, pain management, withdrawing from the activity that is aggravating one’s corporeal condition, etc.). even in instances where the social claim on the meaning of a particular medical diagnosis is strong—say, a diagnosis of hiv in the 1980s—no one would prohibit the hiv patient from seeking medical assistance, as hopeless as that might have been at the time. by way of contrast, the aversely pregnant subject is prohibited from availing themselves of medical assistance past a certain point in their pregnancy if their intention is to terminate it. this prohibition, emanating from a social claim on their bodysubjectivity, radically alters the manner in which they regard their own body. but let’s imagine that the 1980s hiv patient is legally prohibited from seeking medical relief; the ontologically salient point is not that such a person is being compelled to continue to suffer but rather that they are prohibited from freely disposing of their own bodies, which are intimately bound up with their subjectivity. in this instance, the hiv patient finds themselves in a place 10 some may object to the comparison of pregnancy to various bodily ailments, but given that both pregnancy and physical illness are grounded in the body, we should be able to see that the analogy is fairly strong. in fact, young herself implies that a pregnant body can be experienced as an illness in certain circumstances (young 2005, 52). koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 very similar to that of the aversely pregnant bodysubject, who is foreclosed from a possibility that is not permitted. since the aversely pregnant bodysubject is prohibited from ending their pregnancy, they are compelled to live a bodily state they no longer wish to live. the disposition of their body is exposing their very ownmost self to social coercion and has made of them a potential criminal. in this, the social body marginalizes those bodysubjects who would choose to reject or deny their pregnancies. on one level, their body is no longer theirs, to the extent that it is now partially possessed and shaped by legal proxy, even while their body remains theirs—only they can live it in an ownmost corporeal way. though there can be no actual split between body and subject, there is a felt sense of splitting. in this ambiguous carnality, our corporeality is experienced as alien, as if it is host to something we desire to expel, like a cancerous tumor. our body flows against our subjectivity, and we become “tossed about” in our very being; our sense of self is disrupted (lundquist 2008, 136–143). given the central place that corporeality plays in our being-in-the-world, we should be able to see how legal proscriptions against abortion can only amplify a sense of the “doubleness” of the aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity, of their own sense of both belonging and not-belonging to themselves. such a bodysubject’s manner of being is circumscribed by a social claim on the body. the social construction of the maternal and insistence on birthing overdetermines the aversely pregnant bodysubject and renders them mute, acquiescent, and docile (lundquist 2008, 140–141, 151–152; foucault 1995, 135–169; verhage 2013, 316–317). thus, like the ill person who is legally denied medical treatment, the freedom of the aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity is constrained by their own body and the law. this is to experience an ontological precarity that on one level is centered in a body, the ownmost control over which we typically take for granted in our lived world. but as was previously mentioned, this precarity is experienced at another level because it also alienates us from our world (diprose 1995, 209–211). this, like the ill person who is denied treatment, is an instance of bodysubject interruptus. what this term signifies is an intervention that amplifies the precarity of a body to such a degree that it amounts to the radical remaking of a world founded solely on the terms of an other. an aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity is compelled to live a world that is shaping a future they do not want to choose. as this future exerts its pull on them, it may draw them towards a choice that might have been forestalled had they been allowed full sway over the body that is (or was) theirs in the sense that only they can live it in a corporeally ownmost way. will their future be fitted with a parenthood they wanted to refuse or, alternatively, marked by the absence of a child they never wanted a hand in creating? each day, every week, they inspect their body for signs of transformation they do not wish to experience. eventually, their swollen belly announces their unwilling condition to a lived world feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 generated by their corporeality and the law. congratulations and innocent queries about due dates follow, ever drawing their consciousness toward a future suffused with trepidation because this future is unwanted. belly-touches are not welcomed because even as the fingers contact a body they feel at odds with, they nevertheless experience the caress as intimate, which again reminds them of a body that is at once theirs but over which they have only a highly circumscribed agency. the disquieting ontological hybridity of their pregnant body, an entity that is simultaneously in-itself and for-itself (sartre 1956, 172–179), beckons a world to inscribe its meaning onto the subjectivity which is coextensive with it, even as the two are being pulled apart by the social construct of illegality. if an aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity portends involuntary surrogacy, it is this bodysubjectivity alone which is compelled to undergo maternity, to anticipate the medical risks that accompany even a healthy pregnancy, to bear the pain of birthing, to undergo the transformation of their body afterwards, and to suffer the possible trauma of giving up their child for adoption under the auspices of this coercive arrangement. indeed, since phenomenology makes no distinction between the self and the body, in a very real experiential sense the bodysubject who signs the surrogacy contract is not the same bodysubject who is eventually asked to surrender the child they brought into the world. the self changes along with its corporeal schema, and so we might reasonably expect that when this time comes, an ordeal may well ensue (diprose 1994, 114–117). in the case of forced maternity, this bodysubjectivity must also bring a new life into a world that may well be shot through with resentment, stigma, and possibly other forms of precarity (beauvoir 1974, 540–551). this bodysubjectivity will be assigned primary responsibility for this life, which may well introduce other forms of precarity into the world of this bodysubject. when confronted with a pregnant bodysubjectivity, society demands maternity, even though the pregnant flesh is in no way maternal. despite the fact that maternal obligations only begin with birth, society inscribes the pregnant bodysubjectivity with motherhood prebirth (gray 2013, 85; mackenzie 1995, 54)—parents want a grandchild, siblings anticipate a niece or a nephew, and children await a brother or sister. but beneath all of this constituted meaning lays the meaning of the body this subjectivity reluctantly lives. both of these possible futures have their origin in the aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity, and they alone must bear the burden of this choice—though it is a choice imposed on them from without. the choice between involuntary surrogacy and forced maternity, and the futures that issue from this choice, interrupt to different degrees a lived world through the ontological abduction of not only bodies but also subjectivities. the implications of such abductions will extend far beyond the term of a pregnancy, which means that in very significant ways this lived world koukal – precarious embodiment published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 will never again fully belong to these bodysubjectivities. in being compelled to bear a child, these bodysubjectivities are reduced to their sex and set against their own substance in that they are forced into a role in which they no longer recognize themselves. this insidious reduction is parasitic on their personhood, which, understood phenomenologically, is an open-bodied project that each must undertake for themselves (guenther 2006, 144, 150; diprose 1995, 209). it is precisely this that makes aversely pregnant bodysubjectivity an instance of bodysubject interruptus. conclusion: the handmaid’s tale, revisited the similarities between atwood’s handmaids and the nonfictional aversely pregnant bodysubjects this essay has attempted to describe should be obvious. at the same time, we must note an obvious difference: abortion is a capital crime in gilead, while at this point in time abortion is legal but restricted in the united states, with individual states constantly erecting statutory barriers to the procedure. however, it must again be noted that a more conservative supreme court could very plausibly push things in a more gileadean direction (guttmacher institute 2019; litman 2019). but note that this difference is one of degree, not kind. there is another, more stark difference between the two societies worth noting: the children born in gilead have to be more highly valued than those born in the united states. given its dire situation of reproductive sterility, gilead faces an existential crisis in the literal sense. though atwood does not say a great deal about how children are cared for in her dystopia, the logic of her narrative dictates that each pregnancy producing a healthy child is one that is highly valued. the regime would take a most active role in caring for each child because each is an essential element in sustaining the social body. though not confronted with such a calamitous sterility crisis, the same could of course be said of each child born in the united states, given the ever-tightening restrictions on abortion. however, the reality of postnatal care in america could not be more different. in the american system of coerced maternity, once birth has occurred the care for the child falls almost exclusively to the birth mother and the child’s immediate family. in such a society this burden falls less heavily on the affluent. but for a significant number of aversely pregnant bodysubjects in the united states, enforced maternity stigmatizes both mothers who give up their children for adoption and unmarried mothers, who are compelled to keep children they never wanted (rogers 2013). this is especially difficult for mothers and children who live in poverty or other kinds of precarious economic circumstances (beauvoir 1974, 540–551), which in the worst cases can breed domestic resentment and violence (jasinski 2004). but perhaps most significantly, coerced maternity requires women and children to undertake medical risks to themselves (centers for disease feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 control 2018). in this respect american society erects considerable barriers to motherhood by not recognizing, at a fundamental level, the embodied needs of new mothers and children (fischer 2012, 194). while the infant mortality rate in the united states has recently dropped to historic lows (brait 2015; murphy et al. 2015), it is still the highest in the developed world (ingraham 2014). but at the same time that the infant mortality rate is falling in the us, the maternal mortality rate is rising (pbs news hour 2017; paquette 2015). black and rural women bear the brunt of this trend; they are several times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white or urban women because of their lack of access to general maternity care and obstetric services (pbs news hour 2018; mckay and overberg 2017). the purpose of pointing out these trends and data is to provide some factical ground for the world that must be lived by the aversely pregnant bodysubjects described in the body of this essay—that is, women. it is their encounter with these facts that to a large extent shapes the meaning of their existence. it is from this soil that their precarious lives grow. but here are some additional data that add another layer of meaning to these women’s social reality: females make up just over half of the population of the united states but only a quarter of the federal and state legislatures that give voice to the social body (us census bureau 2017; center for american women and politics 2018; national conference of state legislatures 2017). this disparity in representation means that the voices of men—who can never become pregnant—are amplified, while the voices of those who can become aversely pregnant bodysubjects—women—are muted. now that we have described just what the ontological stakes are for the lived worlds of women, it would be an interesting question to ask whether the men who govern the lives of women would be willing to subject themselves to the same degree of precarity. in other words, would men be willing to play by the same stakes? in this connection it was once remarked that “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”11 this claim is severe and sardonic. nevertheless, the men who craft the laws and policies that shape the bodies and lives of women should be required to rise to its cutting provocation under the harsh light of the descriptive analysis undertaken in this essay. 11 gloria steinem is often credited with this 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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-women-dyingchildbirth. pbs news hour. 2018. “why are black mothers and infants more likely to die in us from pregnancy-related causes?” april 18. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-are-black-mothers-and-infantsfar-more-likely-to-die-in-u-s-from-pregnancy-related-causes. piering, julie. 2012. “the pregnant body as a public body: an occasion for community care, instrumental coercion, and a singular collectivity.” in philosophical inquiries into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering: maternal subjects, edited by sheila lintott and maureen sander-staudt, 178–190. london: routledge. pietersma, henry. 1997. “maurice merleau-ponty.” in encyclopedia of phenomenology. edited by lester embree, et al, 457–461. dordrecht: kluwer academic publishers. rodemeyer, lanei. 1998. “dasein gets pregnant.” philosophy today 42:76–84. rogers, dorothy. 2013. “birthmothers and maternal identity.” in coming to life: philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth, and 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method and practice 5433 koukal title page 5433 koukal final format.docx feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 5 recommended citation doan, michael. 2018. “resisting structural epistemic injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 5. 2018 resisting structural epistemic injustice michael doan eastern michigan university mdoan@emich.edu doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 resisting structural epistemic injustice michael doan abstract what form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? how can such struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination that seek to improve practices of knowledge production and make lives more liveable? in this paper, i argue that currently dominant, fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the epistemic dimensions of historic and ongoing political struggles. recent work in the theory of recognition— particularly the work of critical, feminist, and decolonial theorists—can help to identify and correct the shortcomings of these approaches. i offer a critical appraisal of recent conversation concerning epistemic injustice, focusing on three characteristics of frickerian frameworks that obscure the epistemic dimensions of political struggles. i propose that a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of such struggles by acknowledging and centering the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, by conceptualizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, and by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. keywords: epistemic injustice, oppression, water, human rights, recognition, selfdetermination 1. introduction what form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? how can historical and contemporary political struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination1 that seek to 1 i understand epistemic self-determination in terms similar to ian werkheiser, who focuses on “the ability of community members to jointly determine and engage in the epistemic practices of their community, which can include methodologies for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 improve practices of knowledge production for the sake of making lives more liveable? answering these questions involves attending to the particularities of distinct places, each with their own complex histories and social dynamics. answering these questions well may lead in several directions all at once—in at least as many directions as there are distinctive harms and wrongs to be addressed. with this pluralistic orientation in mind, i begin by describing the collective struggle with which i have been involved for the past several years: a struggle in michigan to restore and deepen local democratic control and to ensure clean, safe, affordable water as a basic right for all. i argue that currently dominant, fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the epistemic dimensions of a struggle of this sort. recent work in the theory of recognition—particularly the work of critical, feminist, and decolonial theorists—can help to identify and correct the shortcomings of these approaches.2 i begin with a reflective overview of some of my own involvement in collective efforts to resist structural epistemic injustice. next, i offer a critical appraisal of recent conversation concerning epistemic injustice, focusing on three characteristics of currently dominant, frickerian frameworks that obscure the epistemic dimensions of political struggles and conflicts. drawing on a shared analysis of how community groups in detroit and flint are advancing common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right (howell, doan, and harbin 2017), i propose that one way a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of political struggles is by acknowledging and centering the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, by conceptualizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, and by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. i leave open the possibility that other theories of epistemic injustice, violence, and oppression emerging from distinct places and experiences may serve as differently illuminating lenses, with gaining knowledge as well as evaluative assumptions for accepting or rejecting knowledge” (werkheiser 2017, 158). 2 thus, my project diverges from that of paul giladi, who argues that a particular strand of recognition theory, centered on the work of axel honneth, “provides a more complex but complementary diagnosis and social cure” for the two forms of epistemic injustice described by fricker (giladi 2018, 149). i shall instead emphasize how the work of critical, feminist, and decolonial theorists of recognition serves as a helpful corrective for fricker-inspired discussions of epistemic injustice. doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 their own tactical advantages. my aim is to fashion one such lens, from where and with whom i currently stand. 2. resisting structural epistemic injustice since 2013, i have been working with grassroots coalitions in detroit to challenge an authoritarian state intervention law known as the “emergency manager law,” or public act 436. this legislation allows the governor of michigan to appoint an “emergency manager” in cities facing fiscal distress, suspending democracy at the municipal level and stripping residents of local citizenship rights with the declared purpose of balancing the books. through my involvement in collective efforts to resist emergency management—particularly in response to the role of emergency managers in creating and sustaining water crises in detroit and flint—i have grown increasingly concerned with the patterns of group-based credibility discounting i have witnessed across the state of michigan. these patterns overwhelmingly target working-class communities of color residing in deindustrialized, fiscally distressed cities. in “epistemic injustice and epistemic redlining” (doan 2017), i argue that such cognitive undermining is rooted in michigan’s legal structure. in the course of so doing, i point out that philosophers have been unduly focused on “culprit-based” forms of epistemic injustice (kwong 2015, 228) and tend to adopt approaches that preclude discussion of structural varieties. to more accurately describe the kind of epistemic injustice inflicted on the people of flint, detroit, and other fiscally distressed, majority-black cities, i develop an account of a phenomenon that i call “epistemic redlining,” which is a structural form of epistemic injustice not readily countenanced by existing, frickerian models. whereas redlining refers to the practice of denying financial services (e.g., mortgages, home-repair loans) to residents of specific neighborhoods, generally because they are people of color and/or poor, i understand epistemic redlining as the practice of denying conferrals of credibility to residents of specific municipalities, generally because those municipalities are deemed to be in a state of “financial emergency” (doan 2017, 7). contrary to the general thrust of recent fricker-inspired work on the topic, i argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice in spite of the fact that it cannot be traced straightforwardly to prejudice and cannot be remedied through the cultivation of individual virtue. since the practices of epistemic redlining and emergency management are inseparably intertwined, i suggest that the act of signing public act 436 into law can be understood as “an operation of discursive power whereby the state—and capitalist interests that deploy state violence to secure their positions—sanctioned and legitimized the misrecognition of certain geographically defined populations,” further institutionalizing the epistemic and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 political subordination of groups already relegated to surplus or disposable statuses (doan 2017, 7).3 having developed an alternative account of epistemic injustice that can accommodate structural varieties, several pressing questions remained unanswered: how can structural epistemic injustice be effectively confronted and remedied, if not (solely) through the cultivation of individual virtue? what do collective efforts to resist structural epistemic injustice actually look like, particularly in the michigan context? in “detroit to flint and back again: solidarity forever” (howell, doan, and harbin 2017), my coauthors and i address these questions while recounting how community groups in detroit and flint advanced common struggles for clean, safe, affordable water as a human right, particularly during the period of 2014 to 2016. drawing from activist archives of meeting notes, publications, broadcasts, films, and other recordings, together with our own participant perspectives on organizing efforts as we experienced them, we explore how detroit and flint activists managed to center the experiences, voices, and analyses of people whose knowledge of water contamination and shutoff practices has not mattered to emergency managers, the department of treasury, the department of environmental quality, or the governor of michigan. against the background of denigrating portrayals of city residents as ignorant, incompetent, and incapable of self-governance—portrayals which, as jamie peck astutely observes, conform to a neoliberal logic that seeks to “endogenize and localize” both the supposedly underlying causes of municipal fiscal distress and “the scope for politically acceptable remedies” (peck 2014)—sharing personal stories about water became a central part of efforts to draw attention to the crises unfolding in flint and detroit. stories of ordinary peoples’ struggles for survival were gradually woven into broader counternarratives that came to inform the framings of grassroots journalists and filmmakers, the inquiries pursued by community-based researchers, and the focal points of citizen-led policy initiatives, as well as various forms of direct action—including the act of civil disobedience in 3 reflecting on the “age of disposability,” kali akuno argues that the “correlation between capital accumulation (earning a profit) and the value of black life to the overall system have remained consistent throughout the history of the u.s. settlercolonial project, despite shifts in production regimes” (akuno 2017, 62). in the context of deindustrialized cities such as detroit and flint, in which remaining manufacturing industries have mostly replaced human labor through automation, the “lack of jobs for black people translates into a lack of need for black people, which equates into the wholesale devaluation of black life. and anything without value in the capitalist system is disposable” (65). doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 which a group of detroiters known as the “homrich 9” blocked private contractors from executing water shutoffs. we argue that the practice of sharing stories about water in public spaces has been “central to efforts to build and expand networks of solidarity, identify and process shared trauma, forge a sense of collective identity, and work collaboratively toward political transformation” (howell, doan, and harbin 2017, 5). in addition to mobilizing those most directly affected by water crises, this practice has helped counter the dehumanizing logic of neoliberal governance, “which casts non-experts as lacking the credibility to speak truthfully about the quality of the water flowing from their taps, let alone about the state of their own health and well-being” (7). as ordinary channels of democratic representation were suspended indefinitely under emergency management, grassroots organizations and communities found ways to intervene directly, opening new channels for their voices and analyses, building enabling structures to support the sharing of knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to collectively meet each other’s needs, and establishing the infrastructure required to meet those needs autonomously and sustainably over time, without relying on the state. as rev. bill wiley-kellermann of st. peter’s episcopal church in detroit put it, “in a situation where the unjust law is an emergency manager law, which takes over the entire structure of governance, the act of civil disobedience needs to be to become ungovernable” (quoted in howell, doan, and harbin 2017, 12). led by black women and other women activists of color who played significant roles in building multiracial, intergenerational coalitions within and between cities across michigan, the united states, and globally, the struggle for clean, safe, affordable water can be understood as involving an ensemble of struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination. for example, as government officials refused to acknowledge flint residents as knowers, disregarding thousands of complaints about diseases and rashes linked to the foul, discolored water flowing from their taps, local activists and organizers conducted their own water-testing campaigns and offered community-wide trainings. they also collaborated selectively with credentialed experts working in academic institutions, whose findings would more readily be recognized as legitimate—not to mention legally obliging—by those employed by state agencies. in adopting these diverse approaches to producing and sharing knowledge, flint residents demonstrated a keen critical awareness of the epistemic values and norms undergirding academic and state institutions. sometimes conforming to specific norms to secure epistemic recognition for particular purposes (e.g., working through established channels of expertise to force the state to publicly acknowledge the existence of lead and other forms of contamination), activists also challenged norms bound up with the reproduction of their collective subordination while developing alternative ways of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 relating to one another as thinkers, inquirers, and collaborators, insisting that the knowledge and ways of knowing of ordinary people matter. 3. theorizing the epistemic dimensions of political struggles 3.1. can there even be a struggle? what form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to illuminate the epistemic dimensions of such a political and structurally oriented struggle? to begin with, in order to conceptualize the statewide struggle for clean, safe, affordable water as, in part, a struggle for epistemic recognition and selfdetermination, a theory of epistemic injustice needs to at least acknowledge the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, such as relations between government officials and city residents. after all, there can be no struggle for recognition in situations where the unjustly ignored, silenced, and excluded are either unwilling or unable to participate in reshaping the epistemic relations at issue, whether by initiating and directing a process of change or by steering processes already underway. it is striking, then, that recent work on epistemic injustice leaves us sorely ill-equipped for so much as noticing ongoing struggles for epistemic recognition, let alone understanding and evaluating them. why might this be the case? consider miranda fricker’s treatment of testimonial injustice in her widely influential 2007 book, epistemic injustice. testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s credibility is unduly discounted, and their testimony is not believed, owing to a negative, identity-based prejudice in their audience. fricker offers the example of tom robinson from harper lee’s classic novel, to kill a mockingbird. robinson, a black man, has been charged with raping mayella ewell, a white woman, and must testify before an all-white jury. while it is obvious that robinson is innocent of the crime and speaks truthfully in court, the jury fails to believe his testimony, for their credibility judgments are systematically distorted by antiblack prejudice. robinson is not taken seriously in his capacity as a knower and is thereby damaged in his standing as a human being. meanwhile, having written off their only reliable informant, the jury issues an underand misinformed verdict, imprisoning robinson for a crime he did not commit. to prevent such multilayered injustices from occurring and to promote more successful testimonial exchanges, fricker recommends cultivating the virtue of testimonial justice, through which the virtuous hearer effectively “neutralizes the impact of prejudice in her credibility judgements,” rendering her perceptions of her fellow speakers “unprejudiced” (2007, 92, 93; original emphasis). since the publication of epistemic injustice, a number of philosophers working on the topic have joined fricker in accepting the following two tenets: first, credibility discounting must ultimately be traced to prejudice in order to qualify as doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 unjust; and second, there must be an individual remedy, in the form of a specific corrective virtue, for each and every variety of unjust discrediting (e.g., hookway 2010; kwong 2015; marsh 2011; may 2012; pohlhaus 2012; riggs 2012). recall that, on fricker’s view, the withholding of credibility is not necessarily unjust in and of itself, and only becomes so when a speaker’s credibility is unduly discounted because of an identity-based prejudice in their audience. the guiding thought here is that the “ethical poison of testimonial injustice must derive from some ethical poison in the judgement of the hearer,” and that identity prejudice, with its “ethically bad affective investment” and stubborn resistance to counterevidence, is an appropriately poisonous source (fricker 2007, 22, 36). prejudice is more than a cause of epistemic injustice, for fricker—it is a criterion that qualifies an instance of credibility discounting as an injustice (may 2012, 8). if this first tenet is accepted, then the second is likely to seem plausible as well; for if prejudice is an individual problem, it can probably be addressed by way of an individual remedy. in addition to focusing on individual remedies, fricker-inspired theories go a step further by placing both the responsibility and the initiative for undoing testimonial injustice in the hands of individual perpetrators. given that prejudiced hearers are the source of the problem, and they, not their victims, are the ones whose testimonial sensibilities need to change, it is reasonable to suppose that they bear responsibility for bringing about the requisite psychic changes. more specifically, on fricker’s view it is the responsibility of hearers to exercise critical awareness regarding the prejudices that are likely influencing their credibility judgments so that their testimonial sensibilities can be checked through a selfreflective, self-corrective process, guided by the ideal of neutralizing “any negative impact” (92). it is up to individual hearers to enact this responsibility by somehow coming to suspect the influence of prejudice, “shift[ing] intellectual gear out of spontaneous, unreflective mode,” and adjusting their credibility assessments upwards to compensate for any undue deficits (91). fricker suggests that there are two mechanisms that might prompt hearers to engage in such self-correction: we might either sense some dissonance between our own reasoned beliefs and perceptual judgments, or simply begin a process of critical self-reflection on that “great passive inheritance that conditions the credibility judgements we make” (41, 91, 83). either way, the impetus to self-correction comes from within, and it is up to each of us, as individuals, to take up the charge of molding ourselves into more virtuous hearers.4 4 in epistemic injustice, fricker does admit that “eradicating these injustices would ultimately take not just more virtuous hearers, but collective social political change” (fricker 2007, 7–8). however, since nowhere in her account does she explain the relationship between structures of unequal power and systemic prejudices, let alone feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 fricker’s narrow focus on the initiative and responsibilities of perpetrators is surely well-meaning. insofar as she self-consciously avoids placing the responsibility of correcting for testimonial injustice on those who have already been harmed in their capacity as knowers, her approach underscores the importance of not further burdening the victims, let alone subjecting them to what nora berenstain calls “epistemic exploitation” (berenstain 2016).5 notice, however, that fricker’s analysis of testimonial injustice focuses one-sidedly on the agency and prejudice of perpetrators, occluding the agency and resistance of victims. not only are the unjustly discredited, silenced, and excluded, given no role in initiating or guiding the work of correcting for testimonial injustice, but the question is left conspicuously unasked whether they might also take responsibility for demanding the recognition of their oppressors or find themselves moved to press for broader changes in their social and material conditions (rather than, say, going around trying to fix all the vicious hearers). in an odd twist, fricker presents the perpetrators of testimonial injustice as the chief protagonists of change, driven to mend a damaged web of epistemic relations by their own desire to become more virtuous—or, at least, so we are invited to hope.6 meanwhile, their victims are cast as the passive recipients of a form of epistemic recognition still to come and seemingly have nothing to do but wait patiently for their abusers to come around.7 address the role of political change in working to reduce such prejudices, it is difficult to grasp the meaning of her admission. 5 my thanks to ami harbin for drawing my attention to this feature of fricker’s approach. 6 if hearers begin in vice, in the grips of “active ignorance” (see mills 2007; medina 2013), how exactly would they begin to move into virtue, all on their own? how, for example, would they know how far to shift their credibility judgments upwards to correct for undue deficits? my thanks to chris cohoon for drawing my attention to these questions. 7 fricker arguably has more to say about the agency of victims in her discussion of hermeneutical injustice—see, for example, her remarks on “hermeneutical rebellion,” which she casts as “part of the mechanism of consciousness raising” (fricker 2007, 167). whether her thinking might be able to move further in the structurally oriented direction, i am suggesting, remains to be seen, though. one question is whether such meaning-making activity ought to be considered the foremost art of resistance, especially given the way fricker renders its success dependent on the uptake of perpetrators and on the incorporation of new terms into the “collective” hermeneutical resource (cf. mason 2011). another is how to understand the relationship between what fricker now calls “discriminatory epistemic injustice,” on the one hand, and “systemic riggings of the epistemic doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 compelling though it has turned out to be for many philosophers, this picture of how epistemic injustice can and ought to be remedied should give us pause. i suspect that its plausibility ultimately rests on the idea that prejudiced hearers are the source of the problem, and since only the hearers themselves can come to believe and perceive otherwise, they not only can but must perform the requisite epistemic labor on their own, out of their own good will. but even if that argument were convincing, there would still be plenty of reason to resist fricker’s conclusion that vicious hearers must be the sole initiators and protagonists of change. for one thing, linda martín alcoff and rae langton have independently interrogated fricker’s (largely unsupported) presumption that perpetrators could reliably serve in that role, emphasizing the need for structural remedies to complement and pave the way for the cultivation of individual virtue (alcoff 2010, 132–134; langton 2010, 462–463; see also anderson 2012, 167–169; medina 2013; emerick 2016, 178–181). as kristie dotson points out, we also need to be mindful of various sources of “epistemic inertia” within and among perpetrators of epistemic oppression, ranging from “the social, political, and historical landscapes of epistemic power” to “features of epistemological systems themselves” (dotson 2014, 134). the character of resistance to change is likely to vary across historical and cultural circumstances. it may include everything from an inability or reluctance to so much as recognize the need to alter one’s own epistemic sensibilities, to a lack of impetus to pursue changes one accepts as obligatory (dotson 2014, 132–133, 129). in summary, there is good reason to suspect that fricker’s account puts an inordinate amount of faith in the perpetrators of epistemic injustice. by accepting her depiction of epistemic injustice as rooted in the prejudices of individuals, philosophers following fricker’s lead run the risk of uncritically inheriting her faith in the self-redemptive initiative of perpetrators and, in so doing, occluding and treating as irrelevant the agency of victims. as a consequence, fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice prevents us from so much as noticing historic and ongoing struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination, such as those currently being waged in detroit, flint, and other cities subjected to authoritarian rule. yet it is precisely in those situations where perpetrators of epistemic injustice demonstrate an unwillingness or inability to change their ways that the need to demand and press for change becomes most urgent—not to mention in those situations where it is the perceived legitimacy of specific conventions, laws, and institutions, and not just the stubbornness of those who happen to be charged with implementing them, that is the principal source of epistemic inertia. not only does fricker’s account ignore economy,” on the other, which she characterizes as a distinct species of epistemic wrongs but does not discuss any further (fricker 2017, 53; original emphasis). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 situations where it becomes necessary to engage in struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination in the face of persistent harms—it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recognize the possibility of struggles already underway. by allowing the victims in abusive epistemic relations to recede into the background, philosophers following fricker’s lead also fail to consider the extent to which the power to inflict injury through the withholding of credibility depends on a prior history of recognitive relations and acts. thus, important questions are left unasked about how we go about investing authority in one another in and through our ongoing relationships, and how relations of power and vulnerability come to be intertwined with assessments of credibility, among other evaluative qualities. why have such questions been left unaddressed? much as recent work in the theory of recognition has been shaped by what cillian mcbride calls a “recognition deficit model” (mcbride 2013, 6, 37–38), fricker-inspired theories of epistemic injustice generally take for granted what might be called a “credibility deficit model.” the basic picture here is that of a relationship between a subject whose credibility is denied, waiting for—or, perhaps, demanding—epistemic recognition from another who has the power to remedy this deficit by conferring the credibility that is warranted by the available evidence. since the focus is on the harms done through the withholding of credibility, the solution is thought to be the granting of due or appropriate credibility by way of ameliorating the distorting influence of prejudice. the guiding ideal is that of a society of hearers who are generally unprejudiced and who skillfully hew to operative epistemic norms, managing to minimize, if not entirely eliminate, instances of unjust credibility discounting. yet as mcbride, kelly oliver, amy allen, and glen coulthard each point out, pictures of this sort divert our attention away from questions about “the way our desires for recognition from particular groups, individuals, and institutions are formed in the first place,” and whether such desires might themselves be a product of social domination, as we accommodate ourselves to structurally asymmetrical modes of recognition (mcbride 2013, 6; see also oliver 2001, 9, 26; allen 2010, 26– 31; coulthard 2014, 23–25). “sometimes we would be better off if we did not desire the recognition of some people in the first place,” adds mcbride, “because it is this desire itself which helps to render us subordinate to them” (104). suppose my selfconfidence is seriously shaken by your judgment of my epistemic competence, and you thereby harm me in my capacity as a knower. if, in light of my having been harmed in this way, i am demanding the credibility i am due, then it must be that i already recognize your authority over me, at least insofar as i have come to see you as a credible judge of my cognitive abilities (see markell 2003, 31–32; mcbride 2013, 151). i could be right in my assessment of you. but, then again, my judgment of you may well be just as vulnerable to the influence of misleading stereotypes as is yours of me, conditioned as our assessments of credibility are by the “great passive doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 inheritance” of our generation (fricker 2007, 83). i might, for example, see you as far more competent than you actually are, taken as i am by your finely tailored suit and ivy league credentials, having yet to reflect critically on this corner of the prevailing social imaginary. or, as estelle ferrarese points out, suppose i recognize your authority not because i acknowledge you as a competent judge, but only insofar as your assessment of me plays a mediating role in my gaining access to certain resources (ferrarese 2009, 611), such as gainful employment or safe drinking water. unless you acknowledge my status as a knower and are prepared to believe at least some of what i say, i will not be able to acquire whatever it is that i want or need, for you control the resources in question. you may even hold a monopoly, rendering me wholly dependent on your largesse. in situations of either sort, my vulnerability to you—that is, to the very possibility that you might deny me the credibility i am due—could very well be shaped by factors that have little to do with your actual competence and authority, some of which are entirely outside my control. insofar as i am able to alter my attitude towards you (perhaps by denying the legitimacy of your judgment in light of good reasons) without suffering serious consequences, it may turn out that your authority over me, and your power to harm me in my capacity as a knower, is rendered precarious or nonexistent in turn. so, in addition to occluding the agency of victims by focusing exclusively on the responsibilities of perpetrators, frickerinspired theories also sidestep some crucial questions of power and authority, and thereby fail to do justice to the complexities of epistemic relations—complexities that only come fully into view when considered from below. once we start raising questions about the processes through which authority and power are invested and maintained in ongoing relationships, there begin to emerge new possibilities for resisting epistemic injustice at both the interpersonal and structural levels. we can also begin to understand what struggles for epistemic recognition and selfdetermination might ultimately be about and what tends to move people into engagement in struggles of these sorts. 3.2. is struggle really necessary? in the previous section, i noted that fricker’s view ignores situations where it becomes necessary to engage in struggles for epistemic recognition and selfdetermination, particularly in the face of persistent—in some cases, institutionally embedded—epistemic inertia. i will now argue that the necessity of struggle is further obscured by the way fricker characterizes the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice. to anticipate: by conceiving of epistemic injustice in individualistic terms, fricker-inspired theories draw attention away from social relations and institutions that subordinate people and groups on epistemic grounds, precluding consideration of efforts to redress what are arguably more fundamental feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 wrongs. drawing on nancy fraser’s recent work in the theory of recognition, in what follows, i sketch out an alternative approach to characterizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice that helps explain why engaging in a struggle for epistemic recognition may sometimes be necessary to redress relevant injuries. on fricker’s view, the primary ethical harm in all cases of epistemic injustice is that “the subject is wronged in her capacity as a knower” (fricker 2007, 44). fricker discusses two main types of epistemic injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical. on the one hand, testimonial injustice wrongs a subject in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. it also tends to cause any of a number of secondary practical harms, such as making someone appear unqualified for a job; as well as secondary epistemic harms, such as shaking someone’s confidence in her own beliefs. as fricker puts it, “testimonial injustice, and the attack it makes on intellectual confidence, can change an intellectual trajectory in one fell blow, whether as a single event or, more likely, as the final straw in an ongoing experience of persistent petty intellectual underminings” (51). on the other hand, hermeneutical injustice wrongs a subject by excluding her from participating in the pooling of knowledge, insofar as it renders her unable “to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible” (162). the secondary epistemic harms of hermeneutical injustice include the erosion of a subject’s faith in “her own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world” (163), the practical side-effects of which are both serious and wide ranging. in summary, fricker conceives of the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice in terms of the damage inflicted on an individual’s cognitive capacities. when somebody suffers an injustice of this kind, the wrong inflicted on her “bears a social meaning” to the effect that she is “less than fully human,” for the degradation of her capacities qua knower symbolically degrades her qua human being (44; original emphasis). but she also suffers concretely, both as result of this symbolic degradation and from psychic injuries inflicted more directly.8 by attacking her intellectual confidence and potentially throwing her off of her intellectual trajectory, epistemic injustice threatens an individual’s capacity for autonomous thought and action. as fricker puts it, epistemic injustice is “capable of running both deep and wide in a person’s psychology and practical life,” constraining “who the person can be” (58). on fricker’s view, then, epistemic injustice is an impediment to the ethical 8 it is worth noting that fricker’s discussion of “epistemic objectification” leaves open the possibility that one might be wronged by testimonial injustice without also suffering any concrete damages (fricker 2007, 132–136). my thanks to an anonymous reviewer for clarifying this point. doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 self-realization of individuals and, hence, “presents a face of oppression” (58). since the focus is on harms done by the withholding of credibility and exclusion from hermeneutic participation, the solution is thought to be the granting of epistemic recognition and inclusion in existing practices of meaning-making. i agree that individual knowers often suffer psychic damage as a result of epistemic injustice and that the extent of the damage can be so serious as to limit their prospects for full-fledged self-direction and self-realization. my concern, though, is that by focusing on the psyches of individual victims (which mirrors how fricker locates the source of the problem, in the psyches of individual perpetrators), fricker-inspired views draw attention away from other injurious features of abusive epistemic relations that not only tend to move people into struggles for epistemic recognition, but also help them come to grips with the inadequacy of being granted credibility or included in practices of meaning-making in the absence of significant struggle or conflict. in order to illuminate the epistemic dimensions of ongoing political struggles, i think we would do better to conceptualize the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally. born of her celebrated exchange with axel honneth (fraser and honneth 2003), nancy fraser’s “status model of recognition” is particularly helpful for envisioning the type of approach needed here. the status model encourages us to reconceptualize various forms of epistemic nonrecognition and misrecognition (such as the withholding of credibility or the denial of another’s status as a knower) as institutionalized relations of status subordination—violations of justice in their own right—rather than merely as vehicles of psychic injury or impediments to self-realization.9 from the perspective of an extended status model, epistemic injustice occurs whenever “institutions structure interactions according to cultural norms that impede parity of participation” (fraser 2003, 29), preventing people from testifying and being heard, asking relevant questions, contesting claims and standards of evidence, and otherwise participating in everyday epistemic practices as peers. the status model of epistemic recognition helps us to see the withholding (and in some cases, the granting) of credibility as one of many distinctive means of subordination that, once institutionalized, serve to reproduce social hierarchies over time. for example, we might think of the subordination of factory workers to their professionalized managers and owning-class employers as partly a function of those “institutionalized patterns of cultural value” (50) that elevate largely propositional, theoretical, and technical forms of knowledge over various forms of implicit 9 although fraser’s focus is not on epistemic recognition, i am proposing that her view be extended in this direction so that it can speak to relations of epistemic subordination as well. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 knowing, including nonor potentially propositional, skill-based, and affective modes of understanding (see shotwell 2011, 2017). in the context of present-day michigan, we might also consider to what extent certain hierarchical valuations of ways of knowing have been codified into law, such that working-class black and brown communities end up systematically subordinated to the dictates of unelected technocrats. when the “fiscal responsibility” of local governments comes to be regarded as a proxy for the credibility of entire populations, what types of knowledge and ways of knowing are simultaneously elevated and degraded by the state legislature? according to what patterns of cultural value can the ability to selfgovern be reduced to the ability to meet one’s financial obligations to major banks? what norm of credibility is being reinforced or established through legislative means? the status model of epistemic recognition locates the fundamental wrong of epistemic injustice in social relations and institutions, rather than in individual or interpersonal psychology, without thereby denying the importance of healing and redressing the psychological suffering and incapacitation produced through various forms of social hierarchy and domination. it also suggests that epistemic injustice is rooted in deeply embedded patterns of cultural value on the basis of which institutional norms are constructed and enacted, and not only in identity-based prejudices, which are but one of many modes through which we invest value in one another. finally, since the existence of impediments to parity of epistemic participation can be demonstrated regardless of whether the victims suffer any significant psychic injuries or distorted self-relationships, fraser’s model also makes epistemic injustice more readily identifiable, owing to its public verifiability. of course, this is not to suggest that the status model makes the work of remedying epistemic injustice any easier. for one thing, given that the fundamental wrong of epistemic injustice lies in the character of social relations and in how these relations are structured by institutions of various kinds, fricker’s proposed solution is clearly inadequate, focused as it is on individual remedies and the self-redemptive initiative of perpetrators. as glen coulthard points out, the granting of recognition by the dominant partner in a relationship may well modify the structure of domination in certain important respects, but the subject position of the subordinated party remains unchanged (coulthard 2014, 39). this is especially the case in real-world contexts of domination, such as those of ongoing settler-colonial projects in the united states and canada, where the values and terms underwriting recognitive relations “end up being determined by and in the interests of the hegemonic partner” (23). in such contexts, coulthard argues convincingly that engaging in struggle serves as a necessary “mediating force,” holding out the promise of “fundamental self-transformation” (39). by initiating a struggle for epistemic recognition, the doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 subordinated parties at least stand a chance of shedding their current identities, altering their subject positions in and through the process of actively reshaping the terms and character of their interactions with others. “without conflict and struggle,” writes coulthard, “the terms of recognition tend to remain in the possession of those in power to bestow on their inferiors in ways they deem appropriate” (39; see also oliver 2001, 24; markell 2003, 30; laden 2007, 278–279). to reestablish themselves as “truly self-determining,” coulthard suggests that the subordinated will need to demand epistemic recognition in terms other than those prescribed by and exclusively serving the interests of those in positions of greater power, taking it upon themselves to become “creators of the terms, values, and conditions by which they are to be recognized” (39). as anthony laden emphasizes, unlike a simple demand for the credibility they are due according to current standards, the subordinated would then be demanding “that the powerful give something up: in particular, the ability to impose identities on others.” hence, “it is much less clear that the mere articulation of the demand will motivate the powerful to accede,” reinforcing the need to struggle for equal status as epistemic and political agents (laden 2007, 278–279). 3.3. over what are we struggling? in the previous section i argued that fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice obscures the necessity of engaging in struggles for epistemic recognition and selfdetermination in contexts of domination. i will now argue that her account prevents us from understanding an important aspect of what such struggles are ultimately about—that is, what the victims of abusive epistemic relations are often best positioned to collectively recognize and struggle against, and what sorts of goals, epistemic and otherwise, they are generally inclined to struggle for. i contend that, in order to more fully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of historic and ongoing political struggles, epistemic injustice ought to be understood as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions. by adopting this alternative explanatory approach, i believe we put ourselves in a much better position to understand how political struggles often come to be motivated, in part, by a desire to improve practices of knowledge production for the sake of making lives more liveable. recall that fricker conceptualizes epistemic injustice in terms of the misuse of the norm of credibility due to the distorting influence of prejudice. for example, in the case of tom robinson, it is not that the jury is simply unaware of the usual “markers” of credibility that community members rely on when assessing one another (fricker 2007, 71) and simply fail, out of sheer ignorance, to notice that robinson possesses these markers. rather, the jury’s perception of robinson is systematically distorted by their shared antiblack imaginings, such that the markers feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 of credibility they would have noticed in robinson, but for his perceived blackness, are not recognized as such. as a number of fricker’s critics have pointed out, this explanatory approach ignores the possibility that it is not always and only a lack of conformity to operative epistemic norms, but rather the skillful conformity to those norms that can result in unjust patterns of discrediting, silencing, and epistemic exclusion, regardless of whether prejudice is also in play (see dotson 2014; ayala and vasilyeva 2015; ayala 2016; doan 2017). if the principal problem is that the operative norm of credibility is itself epistemically dysfunctional in ways that predictably give rise to “pernicious ignorance” (dotson 2011, 238), contributing thereby to the epistemic marginalization of groups along lines of gender, race, class, and other dimensions of identity, then solutions focused solely on the psychological constitution of individuals will only scratch the surface of a far more complicated situation. by way of contrast, saray ayala’s approach to accounting for and remedying discursive injustice calls for “high-level interventions on the norms and conventions governing discourse” (ayala 2016, 884), whereas dotson’s approach to remedying epistemic oppression emphasizes the need for socially dominant groups to become “aware of their larger epistemological systems . . . so as to possibly change them or shift out of them entirely” (dotson 2014, 131). my proposed approach to resisting structural epistemic injustice focuses on the importance of examining the epistemic assumptions undergirding legislation at the state level, while tracking how these assumptions are gradually legitimized and normalized through the practices allowed by specific laws, and by the political distinctions these laws enact (doan 2017). each of these alternatives relies on the insight that practices of epistemic recognition need to be historicized, directing our attention to the processes through which epistemic values and norms are institutionalized—whether at the level of social imaginaries, discursive conventions, or systems of laws and legislation. in other words, these approaches resonate with the words of axel honneth, who argues that, “the distinctively human dependence on intersubjective recognition is always shaped by the particular manner in which the mutual granting of recognition is institutionalized within a society” (honneth 2003, 138). by way of contrast, fricker takes for granted the universal acceptability and applicability of a particular, largely unexamined norm of credibility, the justification for which is independent of the actual, historical practices of human communities.10 10 interestingly, this has not always been the case. in a paper published nearly ten years prior to epistemic injustice, fricker entertained the view that a norm of credibility might itself be corrupted by social pressures, rather than just distorted in its use by prejudice. there she suggests that “there is likely (at least in societies recognizably like ours) to be some social pressure on the norm of credibility to doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 here is it important to note that fricker’s disagreement with honneth, ayala, dotson, and myself is methodological as well as substantive in nature. in epistemic injustice, fricker appeals to a fictional state of nature scenario in order to argue that the virtues of accuracy and sincerity are both natural and universal, for they arise in response to epistemic needs that are “absolutely basic” in human communities (fricker 2007, 112). so, too, with the virtue of epistemic justice: this virtue is exhibited by those who manage to correct their identity-based prejudices in order to more reliably track the accuracy and sincerity of possible informants, given that these are the two universal markers of credibility (114–120). returning to the example of tom robinson: when the jurors fail to notice robinson’s accuracy and sincerity due to their antiblack prejudice, it would seem that they are failing to conform to a norm of credibility that, on fricker’s view, not only might but “must arise in human society,” alongside the two corresponding virtues of truthfulness (112; original emphasis). whereas fricker finds the state of nature construction useful in building a case for a form of universalism regarding epistemic values and norms, others are more circumspect about the costs of adopting an ahistorical approach. arguing against ahistorical accounts of recognition in particular, honneth insists that subjective expectations of recognition cannot be derived from any historically transcendent source (honneth 2003, 138). instead, we need to examine the norms embedded in actual, historical practices of recognition, which are gradually sedimented into “relatively stable expectations that we can understand as the subjective expression of social integration” (174). honneth’s historically and institutionally oriented approach leads him to endorse what he calls a moderate value realism, according to which the evaluative qualities of a person or group “represent the certainties of our life-world, whose character can be subject to historical modifications” (honneth 2007, 333). according to honneth, then, “we should understand recognition as a reaction with which we respond rationally to evaluative qualities we have learned to perceive in human subjects to the degree that we have been integrated into the second nature of our life-world” (336), rather than as a reaction to qualities presumed to be both natural and universal. one appealing feature of honneth’s approach is that it reveals prevailing epistemic values and norms as the products of past struggles for recognition, undertaken by inherently fallible and limited beings such as ourselves. honneth’s approach is also compatible with an important insight of many feminist epistemologists, that in historicizing practices of epistemic recognition we need not abandon claims to the effect that particular struggles have succeeded in improving imitate the structures of social power” (fricker 1998, 170). it not entirely clear why fricker later decided to abandon a structural analysis for a psychological one. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 our practices of knowledge-seeking, nor need we abandon a commitment to finding new ways of improving current practices. as heidi grasswick argues, “social practices of knowing are transformed in positive ways by members of communities critically reflecting on their communal commitments to current standards, theories, and methods, and determining that a shift in some of these commitments would better serve their needs, epistemic and otherwise” (grasswick 2004, 106). in order to account for the possibility of such positive transformations, we need a theory of epistemic injustice that is capable of conceptualizing the “dynamic relationship between the epistemic agents—as active reflective inquirers—and the standards and existing practices of knowing that they have access to through their communities” (97). we also need a theory that can help us chart the connections between different sets of standards, the normative statuses and relations they play a role in legitimating, and the patterns of epistemic participation to which these statuses and relations give rise. given that the victims of abusive epistemic relations are often best positioned to collectively recognize and struggle against the persistence of epistemic norms that institutionalize relations of subordination, how might a theory of epistemic injustice go about conceptualizing the goals, epistemic and otherwise, that such agents are inclined to struggle for? returning to the work of nancy fraser, i propose that her distinction between affirmative and transformative strategies for redressing injustice can help us distinguish among different approaches to understanding and remedying epistemic injustice. on fraser’s view, an affirmative strategy is one that aims to “correct inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying social structures that generate them” (fraser 2003, 74). thus, a strategy is “affirmative” insofar as it affirms the reproduction of the social structures in question—and in cases of epistemic injustice, when it affirms the epistemic norms undergirding those structures. for example, fricker’s approach to remedying testimonial and hermeneutical injustice seems to qualify as an affirmative strategy: it aims to correct credibility judgments distorted by prejudice without calling into question the underlying norm of credibility guiding our assessments of one another or the broader communal practices and social institutions in which this norm is (allegedly) embedded. insofar as fricker’s strategy aims to improve practices of knowledge production, it is by encouraging the granting of credibility to a wider range of people who truly merit it, working against the epistemic marginalization of individual members of socially disadvantaged groups by including such individuals in formerly exclusive practices of meaningmaking. as alcoff points out, fricker’s notion of justice and virtue is driven by an aim familiar to many corporate diversity campaigns: “the aim of neutrality, that is, the aim of becoming inured to either unearned privilege or undeserved demerit” (alcoff 2010, 134). since fricker takes for granted the universal acceptability and doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 applicability of a particular norm of credibility, justified independently of exiting social reality, the only remaining challenge is to ensure conformity to this norm with a view to properly sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. by way of contrast, a transformative strategy aims to “correct unjust outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework” (fraser 2003, 74). thus, a strategy is “transformative” insofar as it aims to resist the reproduction of the social structures in question while also contributing to a process of radical restructuring. in cases of epistemic injustice, a transformative strategy is one that seeks to create new terms, values, and conditions by which people are to recognize one another as thinkers, knowers, and collaborators, contributing thereby to broader processes of social, economic, and political restructuring. for example, efforts to resist emergency management in michigan can be understood as transformative in orientation, insofar as they are rooted in a critique of systematic water, housing, and education deprivation, on the one hand, and a critique of the particular manner in which the epistemic nonand misrecognition of entire populations has been institutionalized by the state legislature, on the other. by highlighting lawmakers’ roles in installing and legitimizing oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms, these efforts avoid the dangerous mistake of presuming that a norm justified independently of existing social reality must also be operative in real-world contexts of domination. instead, flint and detroit activists have demonstrated a keen critical awareness of the epistemic norms embedded in actual, historical practices of recognition and of how those norms have gradually been sedimented into the relatively stable expectations of individuals and groups. without affirming the norms undergirding academic and state institutions, they have sometimes conformed to specific norms as a way of securing recognition for particular purposes, conscious of the fact that access to tightly controlled resources, such as clean drinking water, is sometimes predicated on such performances (ferrarese 2009, 611), and that “outward conformity does not signal any real acceptance of the authority of the norms themselves” (mcbride 2013, 154). the practice of sharing personal stories about water contamination and shutoff practices in public spaces has helped to unsettle degrading expectations concerning the knowledge and ways of knowing of ordinary people, indirectly challenging the dehumanizing logic of neoliberal governance, undermining the legitimacy of state officials and their policies, and shifting public consciousness around the human right to water. by directly enacting epistemic norms that subvert the logic of authoritarian rule—and that go even further, challenging the adequacy of a return to previous structures of democratic representation—the statewide struggle for the human right to clean, safe, affordable water reveals itself as a struggle to begin anew, by listening anew. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 4. conclusion in this paper, i have argued that one way a theory of epistemic injustice can better illuminate the epistemic dimensions of political struggles is, first, by acknowledging and centering the agency of victims in abusive epistemic relations, rather than occluding them; second, by conceptualizing the harms and wrongs of epistemic injustice relationally, rather than individualistically; and third, by explaining epistemic injustice as rooted in the oppressive and dysfunctional epistemic norms undergirding actual communities and institutions, rather than focusing exclusively on the distorting influence of prejudice. while i have assumed throughout that a theory of epistemic injustice ought to be capable of illuminating the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political, i appreciate that this particular desideratum is not self-evidently desirable. in closing, then, i shall speak briefly to the advantages of the approach outlined above. attending to the epistemic dimensions of political struggles has at least two distinctive advantages. first, there is a longstanding tendency in philosophical discussions of epistemic injustice to propose remedies for specific problems without first considering how such proposals have tended to work out in practice. although the first published reviews of epistemic injustice brought this issue to the fore (alcoff 2010, langton 2010), the reception of these critiques has been mixed. by drawing attention to the epistemic labor involved in today’s transformative social movements, i hope both to invite more empirically oriented reflection on the merits and limits of proposals already on offer and to broaden the range of proposals deemed worthy of consideration. in other words, we should want to illuminate the epistemic dimensions of political struggles because we should be prepared to embrace more engaged, epistemically responsible philosophical research. second, attending to real-world struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination opens up possibilities for understanding and working to improve practices of knowledge-seeking not otherwise available to us. while checking our own prejudices is undoubtedly important, self-corrective practices need not be coupled with 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of epistemic injustice, edited by ian j. kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 53–60. new york: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 giladi, paul. 2018. “epistemic injustice: a role for recognition?” philosophy and social criticism 44 (2): 141–158. doi:10.1177/0191453717707237. gilmore, ruth wilson. 2007. “in the shadow of the shadow state.” in the revolution will not be funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex, edited by incite! women of color against violence, 41–52. cambridge, ma: south end press. grasswick, heidi. 2004. “individuals-in-communities: the search for a feminist model of epistemic subjects.” hypatia 19 (3): 85–120. honneth, axel. 2003. “redistribution as recognition: a response to nancy fraser.” in redistribution or recognition? a political-philosophical exchange, axel honneth and nancy fraser, 110–197. new york: verso. ———. 2007. “recognition as ideology.” in recognition and 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press. marsh, gerald. 2011. “trust, testimony, and prejudice in the credibility economy.” hypatia 26 (2): 280–293. mason, rebecca. 2011. “two kinds of unknowing.” hypatia 26 (2): 10–20. may, simon căbulea. 2012. “bohman on domination and epistemic injustice.” social epistemology review and reply collective 1 (8): 7–12. mcbride, cillian. 2013. recognition. cambridge: polity press. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. doan – resisting structural epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 23 mills, charles w. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemological of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 11–38. albany: state university of new york press. oliver, kelly. 2001. witnessing: beyond recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. peck, jamie. 2014. “bailing on detroit.” cities@manchester (blog). 26 january. https://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/bailing-on-detroit/. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27 (4): 715–735. riggs, wayne. 2012. “culpability for epistemic injustice: deontic or aretetic?” social epistemology 26 (2): 149–162. shotwell, alexis. 2011. knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2017. “forms of knowing and epistemic resources.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian j. kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr. new york: routledge. werkheiser, ian. 2017. “loss of epistemic self-determination in the anthropocene.” ethics, policy & environment 20 (2): 156–167. michael d. doan is an assistant professor of philosophy at eastern michigan university. his research interests are primarily in social epistemology, social and political philosophy, and moral psychology. he is the author of “collective inaction and collective epistemic agency,” in the routledge handbook of collective responsibility (forthcoming), and “responsibility for collective inaction and the knowledge condition,” in social epistemology (2016). https://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/bailing-on-detroit/ feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation rea, michael. 2019. “representational and attitudinal sexual objectification: philosophical insights from james tiptree jr.’s ‘and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side.’” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (4). article 1. 2019 representational and attitudinal sexual objectification: philosophical insights from james tiptree jr.’s “and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side” michael rea university of notre dame michael.rea2@gmail.com rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 representational and attitudinal sexual objectification: philosophical insights from james tiptree jr.’s “and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side”1 michael rea abstract “james tiptree jr.” is a pseudonym of alice b. sheldon, us air force intelligence officer, cia analyst, experimental psychologist, and one of the most important and highly acclaimed science fiction writers of the twentieth century. sheldon’s work as tiptree (both fiction and nonfiction) deals with a variety of important feminist concerns—among them, sexism, misogyny, objectification, sexual assault, the “otherness” of women, and silencing. this paper explores in a philosophical mode some of the important insights about objectification conveyed in one of tiptree’s most well-known stories, “’and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side.” these insights lead naturally to a characterization of sexual objectification that both avoids problems with standard philosophical characterizations and also sheds important light on the relationship between objectification and silencing. keywords: objectification, silencing, dehumanization, tiptree, science fiction, keats “james tiptree jr.” is a pseudonym of alice b. sheldon, us air force intelligence officer, cia analyst, experimental psychologist, and one of the most important and highly acclaimed science fiction writers of the twentieth century. sheldon’s work as tiptree (both fiction and nonfiction) deals with a variety of important feminist concerns—among them, sexism, misogyny, objectification, 1 an earlier version of this paper was presented at the “minds of our own” conference at mit in november 2018. i am indebted to the members of the audience on that occasion—especially elizabeth barnes, sara bernstein, robin dembroff, heather logue, and aleksy tarasenko-struc—for helpful comments and follow-up conversation. i am also grateful to ross cameron, michelle panchuk, callie phillips, two anonymous referees for this journal, and kathryn norlock for helpful comments on earlier drafts. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 sexual assault, the “otherness” of women, and silencing. in this paper, i explore what i take to be some of the important insights about the nature and harm of sexual objectification conveyed in one of tiptree’s (2004) most well-known stories, “’and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side.” sexual objectification is not the only kind of objectification, but it is the primary focus in this paper. more exactly, my focus will be on what we might call attitudinal and representational sexual objectification—that is, sexual objectification that is accomplished by the way we perceive, regard, or represent (by way of images, descriptions, etc.) someone rather than by the way we treat them behaviorally.2 accordingly, unless otherwise indicated, where i speak simply of “objectification” or of “sexual objectification,” it is to be understood that i mean “attitudinal or representational sexual objectification.” i do, however, think that much of what i say here applies to other forms of objectification as well. in what follows, i will provide a brief overview of both the story and the keats poem to which its title alludes—“la belle dame sans merci” (keats 1977, 334– 336)—and then draw out what i take to be its central insights about objectification. these insights lead naturally to a characterization of objectification that both avoids some of the problems with more familiar philosophical characterizations and also (as i shall explain only very briefly) sheds important light on the relationship between objectification and silencing. specifically, i argue, in light of the discussion of the two fictional texts in sections 1 and 2 and the problems with standard characterizations of sexual objectification that i discuss in section 3, that attitudinal and representational sexual objectification essentially include regarding or representing someone in a way that discourages normatively appropriate levels of empathetic attention to or identification with the interests and desires of the subject. as one might gather from the brief description just provided, the paper begins with literary analysis and only toward the end moves into more paradigmatically philosophical discussion. it is perhaps natural to wonder whether the philosophical insights are separable from the literary discussion and, if they are, what substantive work is being done by the latter. the answer is that the literary analysis sheds evidential light on the philosophical claims. typical philosophical thought experiments—for example, gettier cases or the miniature science fiction scenarios that populate the literature on personal identity—are thin fictions 2 for purposes here, i assume that how a subject is represented depends on context, so that (for example) displaying in a pornographic context a photo that was originally created for and displayed in a nonpornographic context may well result in the repurposed photo representing the subject differently from how she was originally represented. rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 constructed to elicit specific, simple intuitions that are supposed to serve as evidence for philosophical claims. more robust, literary fictions, in my view, can elicit deeper and more complex intuitions that play a similar evidential role, but literary analysis is sometimes needed to see what exactly the fiction is doing. this, in short, is the aim of the literary portion of the present paper. i submit that understanding the tiptree story in light of its allusion to the keats poem lends evidential support to some of the key claims about objectification that i will be making in the more paradigmatically philosophical parts of the paper. the claims themselves could be made in isolation from the literary discussion; but i could support them only by substituting my own, inevitably thinner, fictions contrived to do the work presently being done by my discussion of tiptree and keats. 1. “’and i awoke” is the story of a (male) journalist come to the newly built big junction spaceport to catch a glimpse of the various kinds of aliens and alien spacecraft that are beginning to show up there. on his way in, he meets an unnamed workman waiting for his wife (who shows up only briefly at the end), about to head for home. the journalist pauses to ask a question, and the two fall into conversation. as they talk, the workman speaks in an increasingly frustrated and despairing way of the damage wrought upon his psyche since he first came into contact with various alien races back on earth, in the little junction bar. the journalist first mistakes him for a xenophobe, but what shortly emerges is that the problem is (superficially, at any rate) much the opposite: aliens as such hold him completely in thrall.3 he reports wandering into little junction bar “by accident” at age eighteen, but then says: no. correct that. you don’t go into little junction by accident, any more than you first shoot skag by accident. you go into little junction because you’ve been craving it, dreaming about it, feeding on every hint and clue about it, back there in burned barn, since before you had hair in your pants. whether you know it or not. once you’re out of burned barn, you can no more help going into little junction than a sea-worm can help rising to the moon. (tiptree 2004, 35) 3 if i am right in thinking, for reasons explained below, that the workman objectifies the aliens, there may be a case to be made for thinking that the charge of xenophobia sticks. but exploring this question would take me too far afield. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 what shortly becomes clear is that the craving the workman is talking about is, at least on its surface, sexual. “little junction,” he says, “was the place the lower orders [of aliens] went, the clerks and drivers out for kicks. including, my friend, the perverts. the ones who can take humans. into their beds, that is.” (35) what is hinted at here and expressed more strongly later on is that the aliens come to the bar simply for fun and, in the case of the “perverts,” for a kind of casual, somewhat entertaining sexual tourism. the humans, by contrast (the males, anyway), are drawn to the bar by a nearly irresistible craving for sex with the aliens—not any particular alien (or even any particular race of aliens) but just aliens as such. as the story continues, what emerges is that the desire between humans and aliens is, from the workman’s point of view, one-sided: “it’s humans with aliens, right? very seldom aliens with other aliens. never aliens with humans. it’s the humans who want in.”4 (37) moreover, the apparently unreciprocated human desire rises to the level of a soul-destroying obsession. human males are abject in the presence of the aliens. the workman sees this, and laments it. misunderstanding, the journalist asks, “is that the message you want to give earth? never love an alien?” (39). but the workman demurs. in what is probably the most famous passage of the story, he says: what i’m trying to tell you, this is a trap. we’ve hit the supernormal stimulus. man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. or get impregnated by him; it works for women too. anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. that’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. for millions of years that kept the genes circulating. but now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying. . . . do you think i can touch my wife? (tiptree 2004, 40) as he sees it, the obsession with aliens—an obsession that, in the world of the story is impossible to fully satisfy because not all of the aliens who are its object are sexually compatible with humans—is not about love. in fact, it is apparently a destroyer of love, having undermined his ability to desire and connect with his wife. moreover, he insists that it is also not really about sex. “sex?” he says. “no, it’s deeper. . . . man, it's deep . . . some cargo-cult of the soul. we're built to dream outwards. they laugh at us. they don't have it.” (40) 4 perhaps it is genuinely one-sided; but, like the faery woman in “la belle dame sans merci,” the aliens have no voice of their own in this story, and so we should perhaps wonder about the reliability of the workman’s assessment. (thanks to michelle panchuk for this observation.) rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 the reference to “cargo cults” has led some commentators to interpret this story as saying something about colonialism, power, and money.5 more commonly the story is seen to be concerned primarily with sex, gender, or (in veronica hollinger’s words) the “damning nature of heterosexuality.”6 for my part, i am happy to think that tiptree may have had all of these ideas in mind in writing this story; but, as i read it, whatever else he7 may intend, tiptree also aims to say something about objectification—both about its nature and about the damage it does to the objectifier. sexual objectification features quite obviously as a theme in other tiptree stories—most notably, “the girl who was plugged in” and “with delicate mad hands.” but the key to arriving at this interpretation of “and i awoke” lies mainly in the story’s allusive title—a quotation from keats’s “la belle dame sans merci”—and in reflecting on the connection between that allusion and the idea of a cargo cult of the soul. 2. “la belle dame sans merci” is a poem about a knight held in thrall by a faery woman. the poem’s narrator begins by inquiring of the knight why he is to be found “alone and palely loitering,” and the knight replies by talking about his encounter with the faery. on his telling, he met her, was captivated by her beauty, set her on his horse, and was taken by her to an “elfin grot” where she declared her love for him and he, in turn, “shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four.” he then recounts a dream, which also gives the explanation for his being alone and loitering: and there she lullèd me asleep, and there i dreamed—ah! woe betide!— the latest dream i ever dreamt on the cold hill side. i saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all; they cried—“la belle dame sans merci thee hath in thrall!” 5 this interpretation is developed in an online article, apparently no longer available, by adam roberts entitled “james tiptree jr.'s ‘and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill's side’ as neocolonialist fable," discussed in pearson (2006). 6 see pearson (2006) and hollinger (1999). 7 following other commentators on alice sheldon and her work as tiptree, i use masculine pronouns in reference to the tiptree identity and feminine pronouns in reference to sheldon. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 i saw their starved lips in the gloam, with horrid warning gapèd wide, and i awoke and found me here, on the cold hill’s side. and this is why i sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake, and no birds sing. (stanzas 9–12) the faery woman of this poem is usually seen as a classic femme fatale.8 moreover, commentators note that, as is common with fictions that include a femme fatale, she is represented exclusively from a male viewpoint and characterized solely in terms of her relationship to the interests and experiences of a man. that she is a woman without mercy, for example, is not evidently her own selfunderstanding. rather, it is how men in the poem characterize her, and the characterization is apparently grounded entirely in the fact that she excites tremendous, psychologically incapacitating desire in them yet fails to allow for its full consummation. what tiptree seems to be saying with the allusion is that the aliens of the story’s universe are relevantly like the faery woman: they drive human beings to an obsessive desire which is never fully consummated, and then—without mercy—leave them abject, “alone and palely loitering.” multiple critics have linked the keats poem with something akin to objectification and silencing. for example, early in her book, the femme fatale: erotic icon, virginia allen (1983, 47) notes that “keats’s belle dame [embodies] central characteristics of the femme fatale,” even if she is “not yet a full-blown femme fatale.”9 then, in partial summary of her conclusions regarding femmes fatale in nineteenth century art and literature, she writes: the overall erotic meaning of the works portraying the femme fatale to their makers could hardly be more explicit. whether in paint, poetry, or novel, in art forms made primarily by men for men, the lady exists only to fulfill her sexual destiny. the end result is an “iconic” image of woman, who, in most 8 see allen (1983, 45–48), craciun (2003, 161–162), and praz (1951, ch. 4). 9 ryals (1959, 438) characterizes the belle dame as “the prototype of all nineteenthcentury fatal women.” rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 of her forms, is as immobile and silent, as utterly remote, as the sphinx she so often resembles. (1983, 186; italics mine) allen goes on to argue that the femme fatale developed as a stereotype in nineteenth century art and literature partly in reaction to feminism, reflecting male concerns about female emancipation (especially sexual independence). she ultimately concludes that “the central issue embodied in images of the femme fatale is precisely the issue of male sexual dominance” (196).10 but why, exactly, is the representation of the faery woman appropriately understood as objectifying or silencing? my own route to understanding this runs through tiptree’s allusion, together with his remark about cargo cults; and, as i will shortly explain, the path leads to some novel insights about objectification and its relationship to silencing. the term “cargo cult” has been used (both in common discourse and academic discussion) to refer to a variety of religious, or at least religiously inflected, movements that developed among people groups in the pacific islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the wake of contact with europeans, americans, and their technologies and products.11 i want to note before proceeding with this discussion that both the term itself and the concept are in various ways problematic—not least because of the fact that the term appears to have been coined either by western colonizers or by people sharing similarly demeaning views of the people groups within which these movements arose. lamont lindstrom reports that the term was first introduced in print by in 1945 by norris mervyn bird in a colonial news magazine “as a calumny” (lindstrom 2018) that reflected the “honest racism” of its author and as a more generalized replacement for another derogatory term (“vailala madness”) that had been previously used to characterize these movements (lindstrom 1993, 13–15). he notes further that, prior to bird’s encounter with it, the term had emerged “in the midst of an ongoing, tricornered struggle among expatriate planters and businessmen, christian missionaries, and colonial administrators, many of whom had the habit of cloaking their interests behind a rhetoric of doing what’s best for the native.” (lindstrom 1993, 15) nonetheless, it quickly made its way into academic discussion and, although lindstrom notes that it has now largely been abandoned by anthropologists, it does still have its defenders.12 that said, having now noted the relevant ethical concerns, i will continue to use the term in this discussion because it is the term used both by 10 see also mellor (2001, esp. 223). 11 for fuller characterizations, see lindstrom (1993, esp. 1) and worsley (1987, esp. 11–12). 12 see, e.g., otto (2009). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 tiptree and by most of the scholarly sources i have consulted (including lindstrom’s work), and because i have found no suitable replacement for it. returning, then, to the characterization of cargo cults: for purposes here, the most salient feature of these social movements is that they were characterized in part by what appeared to be the fetishization of western goods. ballpoint pens, bicycles, tape decks, coca-cola, and mickey mouse watches are the examples mentioned in the tiptree story, though more central examples of “cargo” would be certain kinds of food, tobacco, knives, and axes.13 cargo cults took various different forms, but the common element that matters for this paper and which tiptree seems to have in mind is the investment of cargo (conceived of en masse) with a value and symbolic significance that is—not only from the point of view of western culture, but also, apparently, from the point of view of the local culture—both excessive and to some extent disconnected from the true nature and purpose of the goods in question.14 no harm is done to a knife or a bit of tobacco in being treated this way; but it is easy to imagine that, if a person were treated as cargo, such treatment would be harmful. importantly, too, it seems that the fetishization of western goods was harmful to the people who fetishized them. the fetishization arose at least in part out of the subordination that the pacific islanders experienced at the hands of europeans and americans, and it disconnected them in important ways from their own native lifestyle and culture (cochrane 1970). plausibly, too, the fetishization of cargo made it harder for those involved in the cargo cult to engage the relevant goods “on their own terms,” as it were, according to their “true natures.” this is, of course, exactly the position in which the human beings— particularly the men—of tiptree’s story stand in relation to the aliens. the central idea of the story seems to be that, insofar as they are held in the grip of the desire to “fuck it or die trying,” the men of the story have stopped treating the aliens on their own terms as who and what they really are—beings with their own thoughts and interests and desires who are to be engaged on a personal level—and have instead started to fetishize them, desiring them excessively and for purposes alien to their nature. indeed, in the case of many of the aliens, the sexual purpose for which the humans desire them is deeply contrary to their nature, since they are known to be sexually incompatible with humans. furthermore, tiptree seems to be saying that just like those participating in a cargo cult, such men are abject, subordinated to the beings who possess the bodies they desire and, at the same time, disconnected from their own “native culture,” the network of friendly, loving, and erotic human relationships. accordingly, they are left “alone and palely loitering,” 13 see cochrane (1970), jarvie (1963), stanner (1958), and worsley (1987). 14 see cochrane (1970), worsley (1987), and, especially, stanner (1958). rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 vilifying as merciless the beings who will not—and in many cases cannot—satisfy their misplaced desires and, at the same time, suffering in the misery of loneliness and disconnection from others. in “la belle dame sans merci,” the viewpoint of the female is, as i have already mentioned, entirely omitted; and, we might add, she is represented in such a way as to render her viewpoint wholly irrelevant to the interests and desires of the men who are erotically obsessed with her. her sexual unavailability is not portrayed simply as a result of interest in other things; it is instead the most salient aspect of what constitutes her as dangerous and cruel. similarly, tiptree represents the attitude of the men in his story toward the aliens as roughly parallel to the knight’s attitude toward the belle dame; and, in doing this while at the same time making reference to cargo cults, he seems to be saying that people—but, in light of the direct allusion to the keats poem, most notably women—who are viewed and represented in this way are objectified. that term, of course, appears nowhere in the story; but the cargo-cult imagery brings into high relief the fact that the aliens are, in some sense, mere (sex) objects for the human beings who are obsessed with them. and, again, this fact together with the allusion to keats invites us to see keats’s faery woman in much the same light. but in what, exactly, does the objectification of the aliens and the belle dame consist? the workman insists that “it’s deeper than sex”; and the keats poem, too, suggests much the same idea. (one does not get the impression, for example, that the knight is merely sexually frustrated. the faery woman is not, after all, fungible; not just any suitably attractive and exotic partner will do for him. but she is objectified nonetheless.) this suggests, then, that as tiptree understands sexual objectification, there is something misleading about saying that it consists in the aliens being, for the workman, mere sex objects. in the final section of this paper, i will propose a characterization of objectification that both captures the sense in which the aliens of “and i awoke” and keats’s faery woman are objectified, and departs in theoretically fruitful ways from more standard characterizations. before doing so, however, i want to briefly describe the standard characterizations and then highlight several problems. 3. philosophical accounts of objectification usually characterize it as a kind of treatment that has distinctively ontological implications. the objectifier treats someone as, by nature, a kind of thing that she in fact is not. (talk of “treatment” sounds behavioral, and often in this literature it is. but for ease of discussion here i will assume that representing someone in a certain way, either in one’s attitudes toward them or in some representational medium, is also a form of “treatment.”) according to the two most well-known and widely discussed characterizations of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 objectification—catherine mackinnon’s and martha nussbaum’s—the objectifier at least denies or encourages the denial of an important reality about the objectified person.15 but mackinnon goes a step further than nussbaum, insisting that that objectification does not merely involve an ontological mistake but in fact fundamentally alters reality. mackinnon nowhere develops a full-blown theory of objectification. but a reasonably robust characterization of it can be pieced together from her remarks in various papers on both objectification and pornography, and this characterization is one of the common starting points both in surveys of the literature on objectification (e.g., the ones i cited in footnote 13) and for the development of more detailed theories than she offers. in presenting mackinnon’s view here, i simply follow haslanger (2001) whose own account of objectification (and womanhood) takes inspiration from and to a significant extent follows mackinnon’s. on mackinnon’s view (as presented by haslanger), objectification consists partly in treating someone as being for the satisfaction of one’s own desires, as something whose purpose is to be used for the objectifier’s pleasure, and as something that is appropriately dominated. furthermore, objectification involves seeing all three of these attributions as consequential upon the objectified individual’s nature: she is by nature something whose function is to satisfy the objectifier’s sexual desires and to submit to and be dominated by his pursuit of that satisfaction. but, on her view, objectification does more than this. just as the social practices whereby pieces of paper with certain attributes are treated as dollar bills define the very nature of a dollar bill, constitute those pieces of paper as dollar bills, and endow them with their value as dollars, so too the social practices whereby the people who are women are objectified partly define the very nature of womanhood, partly constitute those people as women, and lend them the (dis)value embodied in the objectifying practices.16 martha nussbaum, by contrast, simply maintains that objectification involves treating someone in a way that denies (or, we might add, presupposes or encourages the denial of) important personal attributes. on her view, objectification is “treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being” (nussbaum 1995, 257); and one is treated as an object to the extent that one is treated in the following ways: 15 see mackinnon (1987, esp. chs. 10, 13 and 14) and nussbaum (1995). cahill (2011), mikkola (2019), and papadaki (2015) offer helpful surveys of the relevant literature. 16 see haslanger (2001, 228–229) and mackinnon (1987, 118–119, 174). the analogy with dollar bills is my own. rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 • as a tool for the objectifier's purposes [instrumentality]; • as lacking in autonomy and self-determination [denial of autonomy]; • as lacking in agency [inertness] • as interchangeable with other objects [fungibility]; • as violable, or lacking in boundary-integrity [violability]; • as something owned by another [ownership] • as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account [denial of subjectivity]. (nussbaum 1995, 257) to nussbaum’s list, rae langton (2009, 228–229) adds what she takes to be three additional kinds of treatment that constitute objectification: (i) identifying someone with their body or body parts [reduction to body]; (ii) treating someone primarily in terms of how they look or appear to the senses [reduction to appearance]; and (iii) treating someone as silent, lacking the capacity to speak [silencing]. it is not clear to me that these are genuine additions to nussbaum’s list. for example, it seems to me that reduction to body may be implied by the conjunction of instrumentality, denial of autonomy, and denial of subjectivity; reduction to appearance (depending on what, exactly, that amounts to) may be implied by the conjunction of fungibility and denial of subjectivity; and silencing may be implied by the conjunction of inertness and denial of subjectivity. but we needn’t linger over these details; the differences between nussbaum’s list and langton’s, if they are indeed differences, will not much matter for the discussion that follows. unlike mackinnon, nussbaum thinks that objectification is not always problematic. the difference between acceptable and unacceptable instances of objectification, on her view, is that the former, in contrast to the latter, occur within a broader context of recognition and respect for the humanity of the objectified person. the most commonly cited example she uses to illustrate unproblematic objectification is the use of a lover’s stomach as a pillow. a natural gloss on what is going on in such a case is that, in using the stomach of one’s lover in this way, one treats them as an object—at the very least, as a tool for one’s own purposes—but not as a mere object. in drawing the distinction this way, we can see more clearly the kantian background to the contemporary philosophical discussion of objectification. in the present context, a mere object is something that is appropriately treated as a mere means, not an end in itself; and the concept of a mere object is understood in contrast to the concept of a rational agent. for both mackinnon and nussbaum, then, harmful objectification is a species of treating someone as a mere means and of disregarding their status as a rational agent. the main difference between their views, aside from the matter of whether and to what extent objectification shapes reality, is that mackinnon reserves the term “objectification” exclusively for what i have just called harmful objectification, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 whereas nussbaum is willing to allow its expansion to cases where someone is treated as an object (in the various senses she identifies) but not a mere object.17 both of the views just discussed put us in the right conceptual neighborhood to capture the commonsense notion of objectification. both resonate with and make sense of familiar glosses on that notion—for example, that objectifying representations somehow reduce women to their bodies, portray or treat them as (mere) sex objects, dehumanize them, deny their true interests or desires, and so on. they also bear obvious resonance with the modes of objectification we find in the keats poem and the tiptree story. but, to my mind, they either ignore or paper over some important complications. four are worth bringing explicitly to light. first, representational media (pictures, films, written texts) cannot possibly represent every attribute of their subjects. but not every attribute that goes unrepresented in, for example, a picture is thereby denied by the picture; nor does every picture automatically reduce its subject to being just what is represented in the picture.18 so it is initially hard to see how representations that we intuitively think of as objectifying do to their subjects what (for example) mackinnon, haslanger, langton, and others say that they do. kathleen stock (2018, 299–300, 302) has recently argued that objectifying images accomplish their effect by way of what we might characterize as a “mind-suppressing” quality: they “involve a phenomenal experience that de-emphasizes or ignores minded aspects of a person.” this is a helpful idea, and one that resonates in certain ways with my own suggestions in the next section. but, even so, it does not seem entirely correct. it is easy to imagine, for example, objectifying pornographic representations marketed specifically to individuals who are aroused in part by a particular psychological profile: emotionally needy people, cold and calculating people, people who love guns or motorcycles or long walks in the mountains, and so on. such material would naturally include information about and encourage attention to the psychological profiles of its subjects, but the inclusion of such information would not necessarily negate the objectifying quality of the representations.19 in saying this, i do not mean 17 i am inclined to side with mackinnon on this point, but will not argue the issue here. cf. papadaki (2010), bauer (2015) and stock (2015, 2018) for relevant discussion. 18 this point is made in both nussbaum (1995) and rea (2001). 19 relatedly, aleksy tarasenko-struc (2018) argues that certain sadistic behaviors both objectify their victims and essentially involve attention to the victims’ mental states. on his view, this is reason to think that one does not fully capture what is wrong with the behavior by noting that it objectifies the victim. but, as i see it, the argument goes through only on the mistaken assumption that objectification is inherently mind-suppressing, or mind-insensitive. rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 to suggest that the images remain objectifying simply because they are pornographic. pornography is typically objectifying, but it does not have to be.20 rather, my point is just that reflection on this sort of case elicits the intuition that not all objectifying representations are mind-suppressing in the sense just described, and it does not seem that we can explain what makes such representations objectifying in terms of what they deny or ignore about the subject. second, it seems clear that a person can be explicitly represented as by nature a mere sex object and an object whose purpose is to be dominated without thereby being objectified.21 imagine a sex worker writing in her diary, “i am nothing but a sex object, an object whose purpose is to be dominated for the satisfaction of men’s desires.” suppose, furthermore, that this is the only entry. in that case it seems obvious that the diary represents her as nothing but a sex object whose purpose is to be dominated for the satisfaction of men’s desires.22 but it seems equally obvious that it is not an objectifying representation. or, a bit more carefully: what is obvious is that it is not necessarily a harmfully objectifying representation. it is hard to see how such a diary entry could harm its author. but even if it can do so, it clearly does not have to. it could, for example, be the beginning of a therapeutic exercise; it could be a cathartic acknowledgment of what the sex worker takes to be the reality of her job; and so on. but if this is right, then, contrary to what both mackinnon and nussbaum would seem to agree upon, representing someone as by nature a mere sex object and one whose purpose is to be dominated is not sufficient for the representation to be harmfully objectifying. one might reply on behalf of the view that i have attributed to nussbaum and mackinnon that, if the diary entry really were (say) part of a therapeutic exercise or a cathartic acknowledgment of a perceived reality, then the context would be one that includes positive regard for the humanity, autonomy, subjectivity, and so on of the sex worker; and one might go on to insist that this fact is what explains why it is not objectifying. but i think this reply is a mistake. the reason, in short, is that the facts that comprise the context of authorship are not necessarily part of the context of reception. suppose all we have is the diary entry and our 20 see mikkola (2019, esp. chs. 5 and 7) for discussion. 21 this point, together with the example that illustrates it, is from an earlier article of mine (rea 2001). 22 it might be objected that such an entry also represents the sex worker as reflective, troubled, falling into self-hatred, and the like. this is a tempting thought, but i am inclined to reject it. granted, any suitably attentive reader would be justified in attributing any of a variety of mental states to the entry’s author, but i don’t think it follows from this that the entry represents the author as having those mental states. (thanks to callie phillips for encouraging me to address this point.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 knowledge of the author’s identity and profession; we have no further information about why it was written. we can speculate about the motives of authorship, but mere speculations do not supply us with an actual context. in this case, it seems, part of the reason why the diary entry fails to objectify its author is precisely the fact that we do not have the requisite context. but, again, it remains the case that the entry represents the author as nothing but a sex object whose purpose is to be dominated. third, critics of nussbaum and mackinnon have applied pressure to the distinction, crucial to both of their accounts and to others that have followed in their wake, between treating someone as an object and treating them as a mere object.23 the problem, in short, is that, on the dominant philosophical account of human persons, human beings are material objects, so it is hard to see what the qualifier “mere” is supposed to signal. imagine accusing someone of treating another person, x, as a mere person. what would one be saying about x, or about personhood generally, in using the qualifier “mere”? what would be the difference between treating someone as a person and treating them as a mere person? the most natural response, and the one that is most readily seen lurking in the background of our discussion thus far, is that to treat someone as a mere object is to treat them as lacking certain important attributes, most notably personhood, agency, autonomy, or some relevantly similar attribute or cluster of attributes. but this response is not entirely helpful, for it is deeply unclear what it means to treat someone as lacking an attribute, especially when the form of treatment we are most interested in is representational or attitudinal. as i have already noted in discussing my first concern about these accounts, representations that merely omit an attribute do not automatically represent a person as lacking the attribute. what it would seem to take to represent a lack is some kind of explicit or contextually implicit affirmation that the representation is complete. for example, a picture of a torso that omits the person’s head does not automatically depict the person as headless. what needs to be done is to portray the torso along with some of the empty space above the neck, so that one can see clearly that the torso is all there is. but, on the assumption that human persons are material bodies, it is not at all clear how or even that paradigmatically objectifying pictures displaying a person’s body, or paradigmatically objectifying narratives that describe the use or abuse of a person’s body, manage, one and all, to represent the absence of the relevant personal attributes.24 23 see papadaki (2015) for a helpful survey, and lemoncheck (1985) and cahill (2011) for detailed discussion. 24 i do not, of course, mean to suggest that such representations never represent the lack of at least some personal attributes. my point in this paragraph is just that it rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 not only is it hard to account for what it would mean to treat someone as a mere object, but, as various critics of nussbaum and mackinnon point out, it is also hard to account for why it would be categorically bad to treat someone as a mere object. discussing this issue in detail would take me too far afield (and unhelpfully so, since much of the relevant critique focuses on behavioral treatment rather than representational and attitudinal treatment). but one point is worth making briefly. recall again the questions we’d likely ask if one person were accused of treating another as a “mere person.” we would, among other things, wonder what the accuser thinks is so bad about personhood. in a similar vein, ann cahill argues that the very idea that there is something degrading or otherwise morally objectionable about being treated as a “mere thing” only makes sense in the context of a metaphysic that feminists typically oppose as problematic, one that privileges rationality and related attributes over materiality and embodiment. following gail weiss (1999), she argues that a full embrace of human materiality, a “theory of personhood that celebrates rather than denigrates embodiment,” undercuts the idea that there is harm in treating a person as a body and renders nonsensical the idea of being treated as a “mere” body (cahill 2011, 25–26). in light of this and related considerations, cahill recommends abandoning the notion of objectification as a tool for capturing what is problematic about the forms of representation and treatment that we commonly describe as objectifying. in its place, she offers the concept of derivatization, which she characterizes as follows: grammatically, it follows the structure of the term to be replaced; if “objectify” means to “turn into an object,” then “derivatize” means to “turn into a derivative.” to derivatize is to portray, render, understand, or approach a being solely or primarily as the reflection, projection, or expression of another being’s identity, desires, fears, etc. the derivatized subject becomes reducible in all relevant ways to the derivatizing subject’s existence—other elements of her . . . being or subjectivity are disregarded, ignored, or undervalued. (cahill 2011, 32) however, although i agree that there is merit and utility to the idea of derivatization as cahill characterizes it, i think that adopting it as a replacement for the notion of objectification is the wrong move to make in response to the problems she and others have identified. is hard to justify the claim that all paradigmatically objectifying representations represent the lack of whatever attributes are supposed to mark the distinction between mere objects and “human objects.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 cahill thinks the concept of objectification is unsalvageable because it is “closely connected with an implicit vilification . . . of the body” and other problematic associations (32). but i think this confuses the concept of objectification with existing philosophical accounts of it. as i hope the next section makes clear, it is possible to do justice to familiar glosses on the notion of objectification without falling into the problems discussed in this section. moreover, cahill’s notion of derivatization fares no better with respect to some of these problems. notably, her account of derivatization resembles standard characterizations of objectification in taking the problem with representations and behaviors that we normally think of as objectifying women to consist in a kind of “ontological mistake,” one “whereby feminine subjectivity and sexuality are constructed as wholly derivative of masculine subjectivity and sexuality” (2011, 34). but in construing the problem this way, cahill makes the notion of derivatization vulnerable to some of the same counterexamples that beset “ontological mistake” accounts of objectification. the case of the sex worker’s diary, for example, is a case wherein a representation makes precisely the ontological mistake that is supposedly constitutive of harmful objectification but, intuitively, does not objectify. but it is easy to imagine a different diary entry that makes precisely the ontological mistake supposedly constitutive of derivatization without being ethically problematic. just let the diary say something like, “i am nothing but the reflection, projection, or expression of another being’s identity, desires, and fears.” turning now to the fourth and final problem with the accounts of objectification i have so far been considering, it seems that lines of domination need not always move from the objectifier to the objectified; and, accordingly, it seems that someone need not be regarded as an appropriate (or even possible) target of domination in order to be objectified by someone else. the aliens in the tiptree story are neither dominated by the human beings nor perceived as dominable; in fact, quite the reverse seems to be true. they occupy not only the role of cargo-cult objects but also the role of supplier and controller of such objects. they are at once, as it were, the ballpoint pen and the westerner who brings it. yet they are objectified. likewise with the belle dame. she is described as taking him to the elfin grot, not the other way around (though, admittedly, he puts her on the horse that gets them there). moreover, insofar as she is characterized as a wild and magical creature holding him and others in thrall, she is presented as occupying an obvious position of autonomy and power that is both independent of and more genuine rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 than the otherwise dubious “power” she exerts simply by being the object of his erotic desire.25 yet she, too, is objectified.26 4. what, then, can be said about objectification that will do justice to these complexities? as a start, in light of the arguments of the preceding section, we should drop the idea that objectification is fundamentally a matter of affirming or presupposing some kind of ontological mistake in how one treats someone else. this is not to say that there is no merit whatsoever in the idea that objectification is a matter of treating something that is not a mere object as if it were a mere object, but i think we do better to regard this as a gloss on the notion rather than an analysis. what seems closer to the truth is that representational or attitudinal objectification most saliently involves representing or regarding someone in ways that facilitate or encourage a certain kind of treatment that we think of as more appropriate to nonsentient beings than to sentient beings, even if it does not quite rise to the level of treating the person as a nonsentient being.27 the question is just what sort of representation or attitude does this kind of thing. in the fictions by tiptree and keats, the most important element contributing to our seeing the aliens and the faery woman as objectified is the handling of their own viewpoints. for reasons already noted, their objectification cannot consist simply in the omission of their viewpoints. in fact, we might observe that the tiptree story not only omits the viewpoint of the aliens but also the viewpoint of the 25 on the power, more generally, of the femme fatale, see allen (1983, ch. 9). 26 in addition to the sources referenced in my discussion in section 2 of why the belle dame is objectified, see also lee (1996) and marsh (1985, 317) on the objectification of femmes fatales in general. craciun (2003) highlights the “feminist potential” of the femme fatale and in so doing issues a challenge to the idea that all such portrayals are objectifying, but one need not disagree with her in order to agree with (e.g.) allen’s general conclusions and their particular application to keats. that said, though, i think that allen’s explanation (in ch. 9) of why the femme fatale was such an attractive figure, even to women, goes some distance toward undermining craciun’s conclusions. 27 we might capture the distinction like this: representing someone as passive and receptive to commands encourages and maybe facilitates treating her as a slave, but it will not necessarily rise to the level of representing her as a slave. similarly, the sex worker’s diary entry (in the example from section 3) represents her as a mere object, but it does not obviously facilitate or encourage treating her as a mere object. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 workman’s wife (who also is referenced in his discourse, and briefly appears at the end). but only the aliens are objectified; the wife is not. what is the difference? in the tiptree story, the interests and desires of the aliens are not only (for the most part) omitted; they are also depicted as irrelevant to the workman’s interest in and intentions for them. whether they are interested in or even capable of sexual relations with humans is entirely irrelevant to his own interest to “fuck [them] or die trying.” in the keats poem, as i noted earlier, the belle dame’s interests are likewise irrelevant. indeed, it is only the irrelevance of her own interests and viewpoint that could possibly justify the attribution to her of mercilessness in her treatment of the knight (given what we are told about their relationship to and with each other, anyway). we might be tempted to follow cahill at this juncture and say that the reason why the interests and desires of the aliens and the faery woman are irrelevant to the males in these fictions is that the males see them as mere extensions of their own interests and desires. but that is only one among several possible explanations for what is going on; and so i think that, in diagnosing what is problematic about the males’ attitudes toward the aliens and the faery woman, we should focus more on the fact that their viewpoints are irrelevant to the males rather than on our speculations about why that fact obtains. in light of all this, i propose that attitudinal and representational sexual objectification essentially include regarding or representing someone in a way that discourages normatively appropriate levels of empathetic attention to or identification with the interests and desires of the subject. this is only a necessary condition on sexual objectification, not a sufficient condition. but it is the condition that, in the present context, i am most interested in defending and that i think is most central to the nature of objectification. we get closer to a sufficient condition if we add that (i) sexual objectification includes regarding or representing someone in a sexual way—that is, in a way that is meant to encourage sexual interest in or desire for the subject—and (ii) the sexually encouraging aspects of the representation contribute to or arise out of the ways in which the representation discourages empathy and identification with the genuine interests and desires of the subject. but arriving at a fully sufficient condition would require attention to complexities that are beyond the scope of the present article. i include the reference to normatively appropriate levels of empathetic attention to or identification with the subject’s interests and desires because not every instance of discouraging empathetic attention to or identification with someone’s interests and desires is objectifying. for example, imagine a literary character who is intentionally portrayed as having extremely perverse interests and desires, yet who is, contrary to the author’s intentions, deeply sexually interesting to a small portion of the fiction’s audience. in this case we might think that the overall portrayal is such as to discourage empathetic identification with the subject’s rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 interests and desires—by virtue of the portrayal of those desires as extremely perverse—while at the same time encouraging, in some readers anyway, sexual interest in the subject. is the character objectified? one wants to say no. this is partly because the sexual portrayal of the character is both inadvertent and relativized to a small portion of the expected audience; but it is also because, as the case is described, there is nothing normatively inappropriate about the degree to which empathetic attention to and identification with the character’s interests and desires is being discouraged.28 by contrast, one of the main problems with paradigmatically pornographic representations of women is that, even if the representations encourage some degree of engagement or identification with the subject’s interests and desires, they discourage viewers from having a normatively appropriate degree of empathetic attention to and identification with the subject’s interests and desires. this characterization of objectification does justice, i think, to familiar glosses on objectification—for example, that objectifying representations or attitudes are dehumanizing, portray the objectified subject as a mere thing, and so on. it also resonates in important ways with cahill’s notion of derivatization insofar as representations that discourage normatively appropriate levels of empathetic attention to or identification with the subject’s interests and desires will often enough also be aptly described as treating their subjects as reflections or projections of the viewer’s or creator’s interests and desires. moreover, my characterization is clearly in the neighborhood of kathleen stock’s (2018) understanding of objectification as involving “mind-suppression” or “mind-insensitive seeing-as.” to see or represent someone in a way that discourages empathetic attention to their interests and desires is to see or represent them as an individual whose interests and desires are in a certain way irrelevant or not to be engaged or otherwise taken into account. this is a kind of mind-suppression, just not quite of the sort that stock seems to envision. stock acknowledges that mind-suppression comes in degrees (2018, 302), so she is not to be understood as suggesting that objectifying representations or the “mind-insensitive seeing-as” that is encouraged by such representations are wholly mind-suppressing or mind-insensitive. but, in contrast to my characterization, the core idea underlying her discussion seems to be that objectification works by categorically discouraging attention to certain aspects of the subject’s mind. the difference between my view and stock’s, then, lies primarily in the fact that my view accommodates, in a way in which hers does not, the idea that sexual objectification sometimes works by simultaneously encouraging one kind of attention to or engagement with certain aspects of the subject’s mind while 28i am indebted to elizabeth barnes for comments that helped me to see this complication. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 at the same time discouraging another kind of attention to or engagement with those very same aspects of her mind. when this happens, the kind of attention to and engagement with relevant aspects of the subject’s mind that is encouraged is at least partly sexual, and what is simultaneously discouraged (according to my account) is empathetic attention and identification. i take it that the notion of empathetic attention to someone’s interests and desires is reasonably well understood, but the notion of identification with someone’s interests deserves brief comment. as i understand it, identifying with someone’s interests and desires is a matter of taking on those interests and desires in some way as one’s own—perhaps not to the same degree as one’s own, but at least in appropriate balance with them. this is not the same thing as treating another person, or the humanity in another person, “as an end rather than as a means.” as i understand it, the latter is primarily a matter of respecting their personhood, treating them, qua human being, as intrinsically valuable, and in some sense taking their flourishing as one of your own ends.29 but all of this can be done in ways that are wholly uninformed by—and, indeed, even at odds with—the person’s actual interests and desires (even their good interests and desires). for exactly the same reason, identifying with someone else’s interests and desires is not the same as desiring their good or working to further their good; for one might do these things, too, in ways that are wholly uninformed by or perhaps even at odds with the person’s actual interests or good. notably, my characterization of objectification nicely handles the various problem cases above. objectifying images are often mind-suppressing in precisely the sense identified by stock, discouraging even attention to, much less identification with, the interests and desires of the subject. but, on my account, the addition of captions or bios describing or in other ways encouraging attention to the subject’s interests and desires would negate the otherwise objectifying character of the images in question only if it somehow managed to negate the features of the overall context that discourage empathetic attention to and identification with those interests and desires. thus my account allows that representations might objectify even while positively encouraging certain kinds of attention to the subject’s interests and desires. by contrast, my account implies that the sex worker’s diary is not objectifying precisely because the diary context of her remarks encourages rather than discourages engagement and identification with her interests and desires. my account entirely bypasses concerns about the distinction between objects and mere objects by not relying on that distinction. and, finally, although viewing someone in a way that discourages empathetic attention to or identification with their interests and desires will often presuppose or lead to viewing them as an 29 cf. korsgaard (1986). rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 object appropriately dominated, it need not do so—as the cases of tiptree’s aliens and keats’s faery woman make clear. thus, my account explains, in a way in which rival accounts do not, how it is that the aliens and the faery woman and femmes fatale more generally can be objectified despite occupying positions of power in relation to their objectifiers. i acknowledge that the idea of a representation or attitude encouraging or discouraging some kind of attention to or engagement with a person’s interests and desires is a bit murky. but, as is evident from my discussion of kathleen stock’s views, it is an idea already present and put to substantial work in the literature on objectification. moreover, i submit that it is no less murky than the idea that representations might do any of a variety of other things that they are said to do in the literature on objectification: for example, presenting a person as being for a certain purpose, denying some aspect or other of their nature or personhood, reducing them to something or other, and so on. finally, i think my characterization sheds helpful light on the relationship between objectification and one thing that many feminists have wanted to insist that objectifying representations of women do—namely, silence them. discouraging empathetic attention to and identification with the interests of women as they appear in pornographic and other objectifying representations plausibly discourages such engagement and identification with women’s interests more generally. in doing so, it thereby discourages wonder about, inquiry into, and uptake of a certain important range of women’s mental states. such discouragement does not, of course, guarantee failure of uptake in communicative contexts, so i see no reason to go so far as to say that objectifying representations always result in the form of silencing that ishani maitra (2009) calls “communicative disablement.” but it does put up a kind of obvious communicative obstacle, in just the way that intellectual arrogance or obtuseness is an obstacle to updating one’s information about the world more generally. and it seems to me that the raising of such obstacles does plausibly deserve to be called silencing. references allen, virginia. 1983. the femme fatale: erotic icon. troy, ny: whitston publishing. bauer, nancy. 2015. “what philosophy can’t teach us about sexual objectification.” in how to do things with pornography, 21–37. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. cahill, ann j. 2011. overcoming objectification: a carnal ethics. new york: routledge. cochrane, glynn. 1970. big men and cargo cults. oxford: oxford university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 craciun, adriana. 2003. fatal women of romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press. haslanger, sally. 2001. “on being objective and being objectified.” in a mind of one’s own, edited by charlotte witt and louise antony, 2nd ed., 209–243. boulder, co: routledge. hollinger, veronica. 1999. “(re)reading queerly: science fiction, feminism, and the defamiliarization of gender.” science fiction studies 26 (1). https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/77/hollinger77.htm. jarvie, i. c. 1963. “theories of cargo cults: a critical analysis.” oceania 34 (1): 1–31. keats, john. 1977. john keats: the complete poems. 3rd ed. edited by john barnard. new york: penguin classics. korsgaard, christine m. 1986. “kant’s formula of humanity.” kant-studien 77:183– 202. langton, rae. 2009. sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. new york: oxford university press. lee, elizabeth. 1996. “the femme fatale as object.” victorian web. http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/object.html. lemoncheck, linda. 1985. dehumanizing women. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. lindstrom, lamont. 1993. cargo cult: strange stories of desire from melanesia and beyond. honolulu: university of hawaii press. ———. 2018. “cargo cults.” in cambridge encyclopedia of anthropology. doi:10.29164/18cargo. mackinnon, catharine a. 1987. feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. maitra, ishani. 2009. “silencing speech.” canadian journal of philosophy 39:309– 338. marsh, jan. 1985. the pre-raphaelite sisterhood. new york: st. martin’s press. mellor, anne. 2001. “keats and the complexities of gender.” in the cambridge companion to keats, edited by susan j. wolfson, 214–229. cambridge: cambridge university press. mikkola, mari. 2019. pornography: a philosophical introduction. new york: oxford university press. nussbaum, martha c. 1995. “objectification.” philosophy and public affairs 24 (4): 249–291. otto, ton. 2009. “what happened to cargo cults? material religions in melanesia and the west.” social analysis 53 (1): 82–102. doi:10.3167/sa.2009.530106. papadaki, evangelia (lina). 2010. “what is objectification?” journal of moral philosophy 7:16–36. rea – representational and attitudinal sexual objectification published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 ———. 2015. “feminist perspectives on objectification.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2018 edition. metaphysics research lab, stanford university. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/feminismobjectification/. pearson, wendy. 2006. “(re)reading james tiptree jr.’s ‘and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side.’” in daughters of earth: feminist science fiction in the twentieth century, edited by justine larbalestier, 160–189. middletown, ct: wesleyan. praz, mario. 1951. the romantic agony. 2nd ed. london: oxford university press. rea, michael c. 2001. “what is pornography?” noûs 35 (1): 118–145. ryals, clyde l. 1959. “the ‘fatal woman’ symbol in tennyson.” pmla 74:438–443. stanner, w. e. h. 1958. “on the interpretation of cargo cults.” oceania 29 (1): 1–25. stock, kathleen. 2015. “sexual objectification.” analysis 75:191–195. doi:10.1093/analys/anv014. ———. 2018. “sexual objectification, objectifying images, and ‘mind-insensitive seeing-as.’” in evaluative perception, edited by anna bergqvist and robert cowan, 295–309. oxford: oxford university press. aleksy tarasenko-struc, 2018. "objectification and domination." paper presented at the minds of our own conference, massachusetts institute of technology, boston, november 9–11. tiptree, james, jr. 2004. “and i awoke and found me here on the cold hill’s side.” in her smoke rose up forever, 2nd ed., edited by jeffrey d. smith, 33–42. san francisco: tachyon publications. weiss, gail. 1999. body images: embodiment as intercorporeality. new york: routledge. worsley, peter. 1987. the trumpet shall sound: a study of “cargo” cults in melanesia. 2nd ed. new york: schocken. michael rea is rev. john a. o'brien professor of philosophy at the university of notre dame and professorial fellow in the logos institute for analytic and exegetical theology at the university of st. andrews. his research focuses on topics in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. 7235 rea title page.pdf 7235 rea final format.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation ramsoomair, nicole. 2019. “uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (4). article 2. 2019 uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach nicole ramsoomair mcgill university nicole.ramsoomair@mail.mcgill.ca ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach nicole ramsoomair abstract in this paper, i derive a test for distinguishing between derogatory terms by expanding upon seana shiffrin’s recent “thinker-based approach.” protection on her account extends to many forms of speech due to a connection between speech and an individual’s development of autonomous thought. shiffrin questions whether there is protection for corporate and commercial speech. the latter have a tendency to interfere with autonomous thought processes and do not clearly serve their development. i argue that these reasons for limitation serve as a basis for making nuanced distinctions for general regulation and applying this approach to controversies surrounding derogatory team names in sport. many kinds of speech can be offensive and derogatory, yet i argue that only some may be said to be parasitic on communicative endeavors and legitimately fall outside free speech values as a result. regulation should not be concerned with the content of speech, the manner in which certain words are spoken, or even the speaker’s positive or negative intent. instead, the focus should remain on autonomous mental development of speakers and hearers. keywords: freedom of speech, autonomy, social philosophy, thinker-based approach, derogatory speech in june 2017, members of an asian american rock band won the right to trademark their seemingly disparaging name, “the slants.” the band was previously denied by the us patent and trademark office (pto) to register their name due to the lanham act that prohibited any trademark that “disparage[s] . . . or bring[s] . . . into contemp[t] or disrepute” any “persons, living or dead.”1 however, despite the name’s racist appearance, the band argued that the name itself was a form of political speech, a protest in the spirit of reclaiming a name that has been used to 1 matal, interim director, united states patent and trademark office v. tam, 582 u.s. ___ (2017). [unless otherwise indicated, citations of matal v. tam below use pagination of the freestanding pdf of the opinion of the court.] feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 belittle and denigrate those of asian ancestry. “we grew up and the notion of having slanted eyes was always considered a negative thing,” frontman simon tam explained. “kids would pull their eyes back in a slant-eyed gesture to make fun of us. . . . i wanted to change it to something that was powerful, something that was considered beautiful or a point of pride instead” (chappell 2017). the win not only heralded a victory for the band and free speech advocates but for some sports fans as well. having been long embroiled in controversy, the pto had previously denied continued registration of the name “washington redskins” football team for continued registration due to the very same clause that denied the slants their name on the grounds that it would “be disparaging to a substantial composite” of native americans.2 the redskins appealed their case and, in early 2018, the court vacated their judgment due to the ruling in tam. although a comparison between these examples will form the background of this paper, it is not about the long history of disparaging names in sport or the constitutionality of the lanham act. instead, i ask whether we can make principled distinctions between the names “washington redskins” and “the slants” for the purposes of legally protected speech. although i agree with the decision in tam, the reasons given by the court for permitting the use of the name “the slants” and the reasons i will give are quite different. in particular i will draw on seana shiffrin’s (2011a, 2011b, 2014) recent “thinker-based” approach to free speech protection to draw out a distinction. her account unites the interests underlying speech as the values associated with the “thinker.” i suggest that this unification may also generate a space for potential regulation of derogatory terms based on equality of access to these values underlying the autonomous development. my argument will develop as follows. i first analyze shiffrin’s thinker-based approach to free speech and highlight the conditions in which some speech may be regulated. on shiffrin’s view, because speech is required for the full autonomous development of one’s mental capacities, abridgements of speech become infringements on the freedom of thought itself. i will extend her argument to show that, rather than promoting autonomous mental development, derogatory speech may be detrimental to the interests of the thinker despite the fact that such speech is protected on her account. in the following sections, i will suggest that some forms of derogatory speech are excluded from protection for the same reasons that shiffrin sets out for lies and commercial speech. i will refine these reasons and introduce a two-pronged test to identify protected speech implicit in her account. i argue that regulation may be warranted if the speech not only offers little to assist autonomous mental development but also could potentially undermine that development for others and create what i call an asymmetrical burden in the access 2 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 6. ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 to discursive resources. i will then further refine shiffrin’s approach using the notion of parasitic speech as well as considerations concerning content and magnitude. both names in this analysis may be considered offensive and derogatory, yet only one could be said to be parasitic on communicative endeavors and legitimately fall outside free speech protection as a result. 1. the thinker-based approach side by side there seems to be little that differentiates the names “redskins” and “the slants.” both are derogatory terms with long histories of offense. despite the controversy, the football team’s owner, dan snyder, relentlessly markets the slur on banners and sports paraphernalia out of professed marylander fandom. many argue in favour of the social legacy of the name, but its use is nevertheless to the detriment of native americans who generally do not endorse its dissemination or profit from the images it conjures. this provides a contrast with “the slants,” whose chosen tongue-in-cheek band name allowed them to “reclaim the term and drain its denigrating force.”3 although the case was resolved on grounds of constitutionality, it nevertheless provides a prima facie reason to think that such reclamation projects are not harmful or as harmful as the “redskins” due to the positive intent behind this particular act of naming. however, when the pto denied tam a trademark on the basis of the lanham act, they did not see the reclamation project as mitigating the force of possible denigration. the pto came to this conclusion not because they thought the purpose behind the name was to demean or offend, but because it risked harming a substantial category of persons targeted by the term. i will argue in much the same manner even if i will ultimately come to a different conclusion. both terms risk fundamental harms, but with appeal to shiffrin’s thinker-based account, i will argue that tam’s case is nevertheless protected speech. the connection between free speech and autonomy is often made from the point of view of the audience in necessitating access to the facts and opinions of others. this is required in order to have the audience exercise their autonomy and decide for themselves what to think and believe. shiffrin’s ‘thinker-based approach’ is different. her concern is not necessarily for a more substantive sense of autonomy as the ability to self-govern; rather, she focuses on the processes that encourage the development of such capacities. thus, being an autonomous thinker also requires a free and unhindered ability to externalize one’s thoughts within an open discursive environment. as the thinker is both a speaker and listener, freedom of speech should protect both interests due to the connection each has to autonomous mental development. 3 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 1. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 speaking is valuable for autonomous development because it can facilitate a greater capacity to examine, criticize, and reflect, and tentative thoughts can be tested, revised, and confirmed in response to the reactions of other thinkers. shiffrin provides several concerns related to the interests of the thinker, including the “development and regulation of the self” (shiffrin 2014, 91). the “inner life” of the thinker is shaped and informed by dialogue, as “some thoughts may only be fully known to [oneself] if made linguistically or representationally explicit” (shiffrin 2011a, 292). speech may also assist moral agency insofar as this involves the “ability to take the perspective of other people and to respond to their distinctive features as individuals, including some of their mental contents” (shiffrin 2014, 91). thus, if we are “to pursue our interest in forming true beliefs about ourselves and our environment,” the abilities to speak and to receive speech are both central to the development of autonomous thought processes (shiffrin 2011a, 306). the value of expression and confirmation is central to shiffrin’s thesis as it generates the connective thread between valuing autonomy of thought and valuing freedom of speech as a result. i will refer to this mutually influential process as self-reflexive expression. i take this to be a means of expressing and confirming our nascent thoughts through verbal communication in a way that shapes one’s mind.4 shiffrin argues that forms of speech from political incendiary speech to artistic expression are all deserving of principled and foundational protection as all have value for the thinker due to promoting these diverse interests. however, she briefly mentions that while controversial forms of speech such as pornography, fighting words, or face-to-face hate speech initially remain protected under the thinker-based approach, this assertion comes with a few qualifications. she argues that such controversial speech may itself interfere with autonomous capacities because it “work[s] on us in ways that significantly obstruct or impair the exercise of responsible assessment and self-management”(shiffrin 2011b, 437). such speech would not be protected given that it works on the agent “in substantial ways that are not perceptible to them” (437). responsibility as a listener is mitigated once these controversial forms of speech “resist or stymie otherwise competent, responsible, agents’ reasonable efforts at effective methods of avoidance, reflection, assessment, and revision” (shiffrin 2011b, 437–438). yet, citing a need for a more comprehensive treatment, shiffrin nevertheless withdraws from a full commitment to these possible limitations. i hope to provide a more comprehensive 4 other interests of the thinker not mentioned here include “a capacity for practical and theoretical knowledge,” “exercising the imagination”, “becoming a distinctive individual,” “responding authentically,” “living among others,” and “appropriate recognition and treatment” (shiffrin 2011a, 289–291). ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 treatment here by both clarifying and expanding on what it means for speech to interfere with another’s autonomous processes and hinder self-reflexive expression. the focus on the autonomous development of the thinker is important because it provides a means to unify and reframe the harms associated with derogatory speech under the umbrella of thinker-based interests. it is commonly thought that the state should not interfere with speech unless it does so to prevent harm (mill 2011, 23). the harms of permitting speech are weighed against the associated costs that regulation could impose on the free marketplace of ideas. in the case of derogatory speech, these harms have included “physiological symptoms and emotional distress,” restrictions on “personal freedom” and “sense of security,” and even “attitudinal shifts” (matsuda 1993, 24–25), including the risk of “contempt, or disrepute” mentioned within the lanham act’s disparagement clause.5 these harms are important, and as the paper progresses i will extend the conditions for limitation on shiffrin’s account by connecting these harms to the interests of the thinker. derogatory speech can “stymie” one’s mental development and undermine self-reflexive expression beyond the kinds of direct encounters shiffrin briefly considers (shiffrin 2011b, 437–438). instead, it can generate wider harms for autonomous mental development in a manner not unlike her reasons for limiting corporate and commercial speech. if this argument holds, and derogatory speech can be shown to harm qua thinker in the ways i suggest, what results is a potential justification for regulation that does not require an appeal to a cost/benefit analysis invoking different values, interests, and harms. instead, some speech may be regulated in regards to equality of access to the same value. 2. corporate and commercial speech one advantage of the thinker-based account is found within its ability to “render sensible the notions that non-press business corporate speech may be different and their protection may assume a weaker form, resting on contextdependent and instrumental foundations” (shiffrin 2011a, 290). the externalization of corporate and commercial speech is not aimed at seeking confirmation and refutation through the process of self-reflexive expression but primarily functions to alter the desires of the audience and influence them for the purpose of economic gain. moreover, unlike advocacy and deliberately false speech, there is an additional concern regarding its sincerity. such speech has a greater tendency to be affected by the pressures of the competitive market, and hence any authenticity may only be incidental. the connection speaking has to autonomous development is not present. in addition, shiffrin argues that corporate and commercial speech is a corrupting force on the discursive environment and may justifiably be regulated to 5 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 6. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 prevent undue external influence on individuals’ thought processes. the autonomous capacities of an audience in receipt of such speech are not necessarily benefitted due to the fact that such speech primarily seeks to persuade and play on the desires of its targets in service of market gain. yet, as shiffrin adds, this feature is not necessarily problematic on its own. many kinds of advocacy speech, and even deliberately false speech, have similar persuasive functions while still potentially receiving foundational protection. whether speech is intended to advertise, secure financial interests, or simply promote equal rights does not necessarily speak to other ways it may be valuable for the audience. after combining the interests of the speaker and listener, we see that corporate and commercial speech is problematic not just because it does not “reliably serve the interest of the thinker qua speaker,” but because it also interferes with the interests of the “thinker qua listener as the recipient of such communications” by undermining the communicative environment (shiffrin 2014, 99). if corporate and commercial speech can be limited for these reasons, then we might generalize the permissible grounds for regulation as a twofold process. permissible regulation requires that the speech in question not only lacks value in assisting or facilitating communication as speakers qua thinkers but also “alter[s] the environment” in a way that harms and interferes with audiences qua thinkers as well (shiffrin 2014, 98). display of both of these characteristics justifies legal regulation on a thinker-based account, as the rationale for governmental abridgement would not be inconsistent with valuing the autonomous operations of the mind, but would be a means of supporting its development for all. the satisfaction of the two prongs can account for the risk of harm the slur might engender without losing sight of the value and/or danger it poses for other thinkers. it is my contention that while “washington redskins” satisfies both prongs of this two-pronged test, “the slants” arguably fails to satisfy the first prong and should not be regulated as a result. 3. first condition: lacking communicative value 3.1. the condition for corporate and commercial speech corporate and commercial speech may be limited because such speech is unlikely to contain what i would call communicative value. to have communicative value is to be valuable to the process of self-reflexive expression or at least conducive to it. this interpretation seems compatible with shiffrin even if it is not explicitly found in her work. the cautious stance towards commercial speech is warranted because market influences and other negative aspects “render more tenuous any charitable presupposition that such speech is sincere, authentic or the ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 product of autonomous thought processes” (shiffrin 2014, 99).6 such speech does not sincerely aim at communication through dialogue. it aims at general manipulation (with advertising as one example), while also employing a worrying degree of resources to accomplish this goal. thus, if we can point to aspects of derogatory speech that call the presumption of sincerity of communication into question in the same manner, there would be reason to think it could be open to regulation. one problem is that the characteristic insincerity may not be readily evident in most forms of derogatory speech. market pressures do not usually influence derogatory speech, nor does it directly aim at the kind of cognitive manipulation normally found in advertising. when someone shouts a nasty epithet, it may be the case that the speaker fully believes in and endorses his or her statements. regulation of such speech would risk supressing racist, yet sincere, speech. the interests of the thinker include the interest in testing one’s thoughts in the open discursive environment, and it is not clear why the speaker of such bigoted remarks should be denied opportunities for self-reflexive expression for themselves. thus, on the face of it, the condition of sincerity extends to protect derogatory speech. i however will offer a different interpretation, but this will not be an ad hoc attempt to include derogatory speech. i will derive this interpretation from shiffrin’s own remarks concerning the exclusion of physical acts of expression. in particular, i suggest that some sincere acts of expression lack additional values that normally render speech worthy of protection. thus, although i offer a reinterpretation of shiffrin’s condition, it is one that is at least consistent with and drawn from her account. sincerity, it would seem, is only a condition on shiffrin’s account because when speech is insincere, it no longer assists dialogue in a way that encourages selfreflexive expression. speech on the thinker-based account is meant to be tentative, exploratory, and seeking confirmation or refutation. what is important about a sincere communicative act is that it involves not just the expression of my actual beliefs but sincerity understood as some degree of willingness to engage in dialogue. not all acts of self-expression would count as sincere on this extended meaning of 6 i mention a cautious stance because the external pressure renders only a tenuous but not guaranteed lack of communicative value. for instance, shiffrin argues that “free speech doctrine in this domain should be open to and supportive of efforts by moral agents to expand the agenda of business enterprises beyond commercial profit into more morally responsive enterprises and, perhaps, to recognize exceptions to commercial speech regulation when its application would hamper morally motivated, responsive speech within the commercial domain” (shiffrin 2014, 100). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 the term, and shiffrin excludes some forms of self-expression precisely on this basis. despite casting a wide net of protection, shiffrin argues that physical acts of expression may be regulated due to lacking communicative value. she argues that they are not tentative and exploratory acts that lend themselves well to the enhancement or maintenance of self-reflexive expression. a kiss or a punch to the nose may display the contents of the mind in a direct and sincere manner, yet they are not necessarily intended to express one’s thoughts. speech holds a privileged position not only due to its expressive capacity but through its virtue in serving cooperation, dialogue, and enhancing understanding of our environment and circumstances. if these are the interests qua thinker, then speech is special, not only because it can express what is in the speaker’s mind, but because it facilitates these sorts of communicative ends. shiffrin states, “curtailments on speech represent a severe incursion on [these] interest[s] because speech provides unique modes of access to the contents of other minds” (2014, 114). sincere speech is favored because it is conducive to self-reflexive expression when other expressive acts are not. the first condition might then be tempered to require a looser understanding of sincere speech. to have communicative value, the speaker need not intentionally aim at communication as long the speech is conducive to, or at the very least not aversive to, self-reflexive expression. by extension, if derogatory speech functioned in a manner parallel to the physical and noncommunicative acts of expression, then the grounds for its protection would be provisional as well. 3.2. the condition for derogatory speech derogatory speech may lack communicative value in ways shiffrin does not consider. it would not be sincere in the extended meaning of the term. the effects such speech can have on autonomous development are consistent with her initial worry concerning the ways in which some speech may “resist or stymie” selfreflexive expression. derogatory speech often stigmatizes and makes use of nonverbal symbols of hatred or contempt in a way that affects its communicative value (brison 1998, 43). using susan j. brison’s terms, there is first the immediate impact of the speech that functions more like a “slap to the face than an invitation to dialogue” (43). so even if we allow that some tentative and exploratory communication may be intended in a slur, the victim’s negative emotional response would itself seem to bar any potential communicative gain. according to brison, such speech harms the intended victim by causing immediate emotional injury and, in some cases, “a suspension of reason” (48). brison argues that assaultive speech “can prompt an instinctive ‘fight, flee or freeze response’ which precludes the possibility of a reasoned reply” (49). it lacks communicative value as a verbal attack that cognitively and affectively injures its victim, harming both target and the ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 prospect for genuine dialogue. when understood as an assault rather than an exploratory and communicative act, the speech itself has the immediate effect of undermining self-reflexive expression in a way that initially worried shiffrin. shiffrin nevertheless includes derogatory speech under the umbrella of thinker-based protections due to the fact that speech is open to revision in a way physical harms are not. even though derogatory speech would seem to “resist or stymie” self-reflexive expression in its immediate effects, the possibility for “assessment” and “revision” would not be fully foreclosed (shiffrin 2011b, 437–438). she claims that, even when speech may immediately subordinate or humiliate, it remains a “work-shop like space” that is reversible or at least amendable and which preserves a measure of self-reflexive expression (shiffrin 2011a, 306). an apology, retraction, or clearer articulation can mitigate harm. she states, “one cannot preface one’s punch with ‘maybe’ or ‘consider the possibility’ and thereby make the assault less of a punch in the way that prefatory remarks will qualify a proposition subsequently articulated so that it becomes less than a full-blown assertion” (306). the risk of stifling potential self-reflexive expression and the possibility for revision are, for shiffrin, enough to warrant derogatory speech’s place among protected speech acts. indeed, shiffrin’s response is common in american jurisprudence. traditionally, the courts have recognized some speech, including deliberate falsehoods, as being of low “constitutional value.”7 yet, persons are only liable for such statements when specific intent or negligence can be shown. the idea is that if low-value speech was open to regulation, this could alter the discursive environment by producing a “chilling effect.”8 fearing liability, persons would be hesitant to speak when unsure of the veracity of their statements, which may result in a loss of valuable speech. thus, distinctions on the basis of intent have been thought to offer strategic protection against this potential chill and to encourage good faith, but possibly false, statements. the problem, as i will now argue, is that the traditional focus on intent to mitigate potential chill only applies to restriction and does not account for the ways in which the permitted speech might produce similar effects. the pto was correct in asserting that there are harms associated with derogatory speech that occur regardless of whether the speaker “has good intentions underlying its use of a term.”9 i will however reframe these harms that evade distinctions based on intent as specifically harms qua thinker. there are competing claims to autonomous development that follow from what alex brown calls a “nuanced principle of 7 gertz v. robert welch, inc., 418 u.s. 323, 340–341, 350 (1974). 8 wieman v. updegraff, 344 u.s. 183, 196 (1952). 9 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 6. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 autonomy,” which recognizes that “laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech can garner direct support from the goal of shielding autonomous human beings from undue influences” (brown 2015, 60). in what follows, i will show how derogatory speech might chill the discursive environment in a way that should satisfy the second prong of shiffrin’s test. it will subsequently be possible to compare potential loss of valuable speech using the same metric for comparison with or without regulation. 4. second condition: altering the environment 4.1. the condition for commercial speech in tam, the court suggested that regulations imposed by the pto ran contrary to the spirit of free speech protections by targeting a specific viewpoint. the disparagement clause of the lanham act allowed for trademarks that were either benign or positive but barred those that could be considered derogatory. in justice kennedy’s opinion, it was argued that “by mandating positivity, the law here might silence dissent and distort the marketplace of ideas.”10 regulation undermines autonomous development of audiences by unacceptably sanitizing the discursive field and “alters the environment” by limiting available viewpoints. shiffrin’s apprehensions concerning the effects of commercial speech are similar in their concern for autonomy, but broader in their reach. she is not only concerned with the deprivation of a viewpoint but with how the environment would be corrupted with the unregulated dissemination of certain kinds of harmful speech. of commercial speech shiffrin writes: of course, thinkers may have an interest to access corporate speech because corporate and commercial speech may report information about one’s given environment; but, in other circumstances, the point of corporate speech, as well as other commercial speech, is to alter the environment, e.g., to manufacture desire, not to report information. (shiffrin 2014, 98) commercial speech, she argues, has the power to subvert and destabilize the discursive environment as the central site of thought formation. such speech “scrambles and distorts the channels of communication deployed by the sincere” (shiffrin 2014, 126). indeed, much of the same can also be said of lies, on shiffrin’s account. she argues that, like commercial speech, lies also lack foundational protection because “the lie interferes with the aims and function of a free speech culture” by undermining “our ready, reliable ability to transmit our mental contents” (126). lies 10 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 3 of justice kennedy’s opinion. ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 encourage falsehoods in the discursive arena, while commercial speech, with access to a worrying degree of resources and social power, detrimentally alters the environment by flooding it with what may only be contingently true and designed to manipulate the listener. if derogatory speech can be shown to have similar debilitating effects on the discursive environment, then regulation of such speech may too be warranted by appeal to these broader interests of the thinker. 4.2. the condition for derogatory speech regulation is warranted for lies and commercial speech if the unregulated dissemination of the speech “alters the environment” in a way that substantially impedes autonomous mental development. this consideration raises the question of whether lies and commercial speech are the only forms of speech that requires regulation to maintain the communicative enterprise. to this extent, shiffrin’s conception that the full development of the mind requires “fair access to public fora for expression” (shiffrin 2011b, 418) may be too idealistic in its implicit claim that fair access. here, i depart from her account as my interpretation of what constitutes fair access will expand what forms of speech may be regulated and include what she otherwise considers protected. using speech act theory, i argue that derogatory speech encourages an environment that asymmetrically burdens autonomous mental development. i will draw on the work of mary kate mcgowan (2012), miranda fricker (2007), and rae langton (1993) to explain why derogatory speech potentially harms those targeted qua thinkers and hence “alters the environment” in a way relevant for shiffrin. i propose that when stereotypes are used and promoted through the use of slurs, they enact certain moves in the language game that result in lesser credibility for those targeted by the slur and diminished access to the “public fora” (shiffrin 2014, 98). like corporate and commercial speech, derogatory speech similarly “scramble[s]” and “distort[s]” the “channels of communication” when left unchecked (126). if these harms can be recognized with regard to lies and commercial speech, they should also be recognized for derogatory terms. names are speech acts, which constitute the act of naming or referring. but they can also constitute several speech acts simultaneously and also have numerous perlocutionary effects. epithets and slurs may offend, injure, or cause others to subordinate as the direct effect of the speech. speech can also be constitutive of certain illocutionary acts. for example, saying “i do” in a marriage ceremony may constitute the act of marrying when spoken in the right contexts by the right person. the illocutionary force (or what the speech does) in this instance concerns the act the speaker intends to do by performing the speech act or illocution. here, it is the act of marrying. following mary kate mcgowan (2012), we may argue that although feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 each name may constitute an act of naming or referencing, it also has the unintended illocutionary force to enable discrimination. according to mcgowan, some speech may alter the discursive environment by enacting detrimental “permissibility facts.” these facts establish or change the rules within a particular social practice. for example, a standard exercitive might be when an owner of a restaurant says, “employees must wear closed toes shoes.” the force of this statement is derived “via the exercising of the speaker’s authority over the realm in which the enacted permissibility facts preside” and establishes what is and what is not permissible thereafter (128). the owner is able to enact the rules within the restaurant in a way an employee uttering the same phrase cannot. the exercitive force may be implicit within a statement or indirect in the way it is phrased, but it nevertheless depends on the authority of the speaker. when certain moves are made in a particular context, they enact changes within the activity. these moves may be as formal as the rules to hockey or as informal as the exchanges within a conversation. for instance, when the puck is dropped, hockey players are now permitted to take different positions in the same way as speaking of my children makes it permissible to speak of your own in the language game (133). mcgowan proposes that there are some exercitives that deviate from this standard. what she labels “covert exercitives” are moves within a norm-governed activity that are able to achieve the same effect as a standard exercitive, yet without the standard authority (140). these exercitives can trigger “the norm-governed nature of the activity in which the utterance is a move” (141). arguably, the slur may function as a covert exercitive that not only licenses the use of associated stereotypes when the slur is spoken but also further permits the use of the slur itself. by being used as something so benign as a band name, the slur is made all the more acceptable for general use within public discourse. thus, covert exercitive might normalize and proliferate the use of derogatory stereotypes and other attached connotations.11 the way covert exercitives enact permissibility facts and license stereotypepromoting moves within social interactions is relevant to the process of selfreflexive expression because of the effect on how those targeted by the stereotype may be perceived thereafter. the thinker is seeking a good interlocutor to potentially confirm his or her beliefs. in ideal situations, we could afford lengthy observation of others to determine a trustworthy interlocutor. in practice, however, that is not always feasible. in everyday situations, trustworthiness is determined by what miranda fricker calls “working indicator properties” to judge the credibility of a speaker (fricker 2007, 114). indicator properties are linked to stereotypes, which are widely held associations between groups and particular attributes. these 11 i will say more on this sort of normalization further on in the paper. ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 stereotypes become markers of a speaker’s credibility that can have an immediate impact on how the hearer perceives the speaker. those targeted by the slur are, as a result, subject to what rae langton terms widespread “perlocutionary frustration” (langton 1993, 318). the speaker may succeed “in performing the intended illocution,” but in the cases of credibility deficits and licensed stereotypes, she often “fails to achieve the intended effect” (318). yet langton also notes that inability to achieve the intended effects of speech is “a common enough fact of life: one argues, but no one is persuaded; one invites, but nobody attends the party; one votes, hoping to oust the government, but one is outnumbered” (315). as a feature of everyday discursive interaction, it is questionable whether freedom from such frustration can rightly be requested of others. if a sympathetic ear were required, then it would seem that very few of us ever have the opportunity for such engagement, even when our credibility remains intact. the problem we encounter here is not simply that perlocutionary frustration obtains but that it does so in an unequal manner. the lack of credibility accorded to targeted persons challenges the values underlying freedom of speech by undermining equal access to the kind of mental development the right to free speech is meant to protect. this does not mean that those who are subject to such perlocutionary frustration are guaranteed to lack the tools for autonomous mental development but that they face an asymmetrical burden in its achievement. in this case, there may be subcultures that facilitate self-reflexive expression, but the access to and generation of these pockets of discursive freedom is not equally available to all thinkers, partially due to the kind of derogatory speech prevalent in the environment.12 thus the traditional worry concerning limitations on the discursive environment can be transformed into a concern over unequal access to this resource. although initially given to target commercial speech and lies, my argument shows that the thinker-based approach can extend beyond what shiffrin envisioned. regulation would be concerned with fair and equal access to participation in free speech values. the two conditions, of communicative value and altering the 12 the deficits that result from perlocutionary frustration are larger than i am focusing on one here. other effects may include epistemic injustices. fricker defines “hermeneutical injustice” as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (fricker 2007, 155). unequal relations of epistemic power may not only disregard corrective speech, but also work against its initial articulation and place a further asymmetric burden on those targeted. the lack of public voices perpetuates the cycle of such hermeneutical injustice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 environment, provide a means to balance the concerns of self-reflexive expression with those of a sanitized discursive environment. even if regulation might cause a chill, the risk would at least not be in service of speech that would otherwise undermine the same concerns for others. yet i think this point can be pushed further. in the following section, i will elaborate on ways the two-pronged test may be qualified as to mitigate the potential chilling effect of regulation. in particular, i argue for additional qualifications on the two prongs with the aim of safeguarding self-reflexive expression, while also minimizing harms to the discursive environment. 5. qualifications 5.1. first prong: essentially communicative speech shiffrin acknowledges the ways in which speech may be considered low value, but her worry is that regulation could supress the speaker’s ability to “try on an idea” in a noncommittal way (shiffrin 2014, 115). however, i would question whether regulation would necessarily suppress the speaker’s access to revision and exploration of thought if the regulated speech were merely derivative of one’s communicative purposes. that is, if shiffrin’s argument is that the value of selfreflexive expression protects derogatory speech, we can still ask whether the speech needs to be derogatory to achieve this value. if not, then we may be able to add an additional caveat to the first prong: communicative value requires that questionable speech be essentially communicative. it may be the case that the slur is merely parasitic on the whole communicative act in a way that i will now explain. consider lies and other forms of deception. on shiffrin’s account these speech acts receive little foundational protection not only due to their effects on the discursive environment but also because when a lie is told, “the responses to one’s speech that one receives do not help one hone one’s self-understanding, because they are not responses to sincere, if tentative, representations of oneself” (2014, 145). lies on this account are justifiably regulated insofar as they “do not directly participate in the values underlying freedom of speech” (153; emphasis mine). i would argue that much derogatory speech displays a similar, indirect connection to these sorts of communicative ends, which renders its value on these terms rather low. speech may provide a “unique mode of access to the contents of other minds,” yet not all forms of speech are essentially communicative expressions (113). shiffrin acknowledges that there are some regulations of “nonessentially communicative expression” that do not impede the ability to engage in self-reflexive expression (114). she states: restrictions on my ability to express my anger through violence do not preclude my transmitting my anger through communicative means: by saying ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 i’m angry, detailing my complaints, or depicting the emotional maelstrom through words, images, or sounds. (shiffrin 2014, 114) if shiffrin allows that physical acts and emotional outbursts may be restricted—because such acts are not only aversive to communicative ends (as discussed previously) but also not essential for communication—then there is reason to think the same may be said of derogatory speech. punching someone to reveal one’s anger is parasitic on the communicative act just as much as engaging in derogatory speech may not be necessary to make the speaker’s point. derogatory speech may be merely parasitic on the communicative act insofar as it does not play an essential role in achieving what the speaker intends to communicate. i believe this holds even if there are aspects of slurs and epithets that may not be as easily captured by further dialogue. perhaps the use of a slur may be the only way to directly convey racially motivated anger. while this could be true, i doubt that one’s access to reflexive expression would be thwarted entirely as regulation would require rewording instead of restriction. the concerns of the thinker involve being able to express the contents of one’s mind and, given the potential aversive effects, not necessarily the ability express those concerns elegantly and succinctly. another concern might be that refining the communicative condition to exclude parasitic speech could unfairly limit artistic works, as they may be hyperbolic and go above the bare minimum of what is communicatively necessary. yet artistic necessity may also be communicatively necessary if the speech is necessary to preserve the integrity of work as a whole.13 historical, cultural, or even character accuracy may permit the use of slurs and other derogatory terms in film or print for instance. yet i should also stress the importance of having dual conditions. that is, even if the questionable speech were considered parasitic, the impact on the discursive environment would also need to be considered prior to any demand for regulation, which may simply call for a rephrasing of the problematic material in the end. perhaps a clearer example of parasitic speech might be the use of derogatory speech within political campaigning. while speech connected to this essential element of democracy would seem to be of great communicative importance, the approach would nevertheless allow some degree of regulation. for instance, political campaigns may include arguments against immigration that affect the discursive environment dramatically. yet these arguments would need to stop short 13 a clearer example of parasitic speech beyond artistic flourish might be exploitative films and forms of violent and degrading pornography. in either case, the questionable content would be gratuitous while also posing significant harm by potentially enacting permissibility facts that license similar degradation or violence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 of the kind of denigration via slurs and epithets that have become all too common as of the last american presidential campaign. we can question the communicative necessity of portraying whole groups of people as “rapists,” “criminals,” and “animals” (davis and chokshi 2018). there may be aspects of political speech that are parasitic to what otherwise may be a highly valuable communicative enterprise as a whole. the qualification of parasitic speech then suggests a very precise regulation that would urge revision over an outright censorship. 5.2. second prong: specific alterations in the environment while the notion of parasitic speech refines the first condition of this approach, i believe we can be more specific with the second condition concerning the environment as well. here, i would like to qualify the second prong by introducing considerations of content and magnitude when considering the harm qua thinker the speech may cause the discursive environment. considerations of content would target particular identity categories—including race, gender, class, sex, and sexual orientation—due to their general pervasiveness and ability to widen an asymmetrical burden to self-reflexive expression. the stereotypes and enacted permissibility facts attached to these categories can “track” a person through all spheres of life and “social activities” (fricker 2007, 157). even if it is possible that one may be harmed by other nonsystemic identity categories, including specific regional or professional stereotypes, regulation may primarily or even exclusively target speech stigmatizing more pervasive and wide-ranging identity categories.14 speech concerning identity categories nevertheless should raise an alarm but not fully satisfy this condition until the magnitude of the impact of the speech is considered as well. on one hand, and as a practical matter, private conversations would serve as an unlikely target for regulation given the decidedly minimal impact on the discursive environment. i could angrily yell, “leave me alone!” to a friend and close off dialogue in a way that is generally aversive to communicative ends, yet my doing so would not disrupt the communicative environment to a great enough scale to raise worries about distortion.15 public speech on the other hand might more reasonably impact the environment in detrimental ways and be subject to more extensive regulation.16 thus, in applying similar principles to the two-pronged test, we can modify the claim to read as follows: if it is reasonable to assume that the 14 examples may include domain specific stereotypes such as being a continental philosopher in a department dominated by analytic philosophy. 15 this statement would also not be parasitic as its illocutionary purpose would be to have the friend leave me alone. 16 although some argue that repeated private conversations normalize the use of the slur and could in fact be more harmful in the long run (see butler 1997). ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 speech harms the autonomous mental development by targeting pervasive identity categories to a great enough magnitude and lacks features that would otherwise be valuable for this pursuit, then there is little reason for extending protection.17 overall, we see that derogatory speech may enact disadvantageous permissibility facts without adding much to the discursive arena. yet the worry concerning the potential chilling effect remains in place. for instance, this approach does not temper regulation of deliberately false speech on the basis of intent, which may lead to a speaker’s hesitancy in contributing to the discursive environment. however, this would perhaps only lead to caution involving deliberately false speech that is of considerable magnitude, pertains to particular identity categories, and is parasitic; and this strikes me as justifiable. perhaps we should be more restrained in such instances. that is, when our speech reaches a wide audience, pertains to something as important as certain identity categories, and can be said in a less detrimental way (that does not involve outright restriction), then i think a case for caution can be made and added hesitation justified. 6. putting it all together so what does this two-pronged test mean for our initial question concerning the difference between the uses of the two derogatory names? first, let us consider the reclamation claims made in tam and ask whether the name satisfies the two conditions. i will suggest that the band name, despite having good intentions behind its usage, may nevertheless enact permissibility facts that licence stereotyping and further derogation. even if the band’s name is part of a reclamation project, it remains inherently “precarious” and can result in distortion due to the audience’s expectations (herbert 17 the focus on content and magnitude might at first raise problems for speech like political “dog whistles” (seemingly innocuous speech that employs coded words or phrases that may take on additional or different meaning when spoken to a target group). there may be a question of magnitude given that the true meaning of the speech is not widely known. yet given that the concern is autonomous mental development, the issue is not simply with the kinds of words used but with how those words are used in a way that undermines such development. so if the speech impedes mental processes in the same manner as an epithet and slur, there may be room for some degree of regulation if the circumstances warrant. for instance, it may be the case that something like the “pepe the frog” meme (a meme associated with white supremacy originating out of the website 4chan) could be open to regulation if it is used only to arouse neo-nazi sentiment, if it is not artistically or communicatively necessary, and if the communication of this meme will reasonably impact autonomous mental development of others. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 2015, 136). as cassie herbert argues, this is because those seeking to reclaim slurs and epithets often do so in contexts where “hearers will not yet have the nonoppressive discursive norms to govern uptake they give the speech act” (136). any rehabilitative change in meaning would require the larger community to ensure success. there is no guarantee that the word would be taken without derogation and, even when it is, the detachment from the negative connotations may not be widespread enough to mitigate the associated harms. indeed, citing wilfrid sellar’s categorizations of moves made in certain language games, lynne tirrell (2012) identifies the act of naming as a kind of entry move that either initiates the game or establishes the participation of the speaker. for instance, when a name for a child is chosen, this process puts the name “into the game, as it were, and forges a connection between the child and what is said about her” (tirrell 2012, 209). usually the naming process allows the name to be “baptized” into a fresh usage, so why should a slur carry the baggage of the racial term? it may be true that the act of naming establishes new references, but it can also enact permissibility facts that may license derogation contained in the slur or promote the stereotypes it conjures. the fact of the matter is that the racially charged name is not just any name. the allusions drawn from these deeply socially embedded names, or even general terms, are ubiquitous and over-determine the associated meaning. if i named my son “hitler,” the negative reaction i would get from family (and nearly anyone i met) would be severe despite the naming process being considered an entry point into the language game so to speak. i would argue that the degree to which a name is embedded in social frameworks determines whether the name marks it as an entry or is simply participatory. for names that have few social connotations, there is relative freedom to create new significations, whereas others participate in an already over-determined social context. for “the slants,” the name doubles as a slur and remains embedded within a game that is already in progress despite engaging in a positive reclamation project. this is also perhaps why the traditional focus on intent in american jurisprudence is inappropriate, as it does not track these sorts of harms. the name may incur detrimental permissibility facts just as much as accidentally shooting a puck in one’s own goal would not stop the opposing team from being awarded a goal. it makes use of a term targeting a particular identity category and may reasonably be of considerable magnitude depending on the band’s success. moreover, as a name, the slur may even be particularly detrimental. a slur functioning as a name could be said to be more damaging than a slur spoken with vitriol or intent to injure because of the way it contributes to the normalcy of the term and enacts increased permissibility. names do not wear their harm on their sleeves but allow the discriminatory connotations to recede into the background when spoken. the slur as a name may help to disguise its covert exercitive force ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 without necessarily addressing the negative stereotypes it may conjure and further condition. while the reclamation project at least attempts to draw attention to the denigration, it may still advocate normalcy without any guarantee that the communities in which the name is spoken will necessarily detach the associated stereotypes and denigration. the second prong may be satisfied because there is no reason to think the reclamation project would be successful and may negatively alter the environment, creating unequal access despite the best of intentions. the above analysis shows that the pto is correct in its analysis that the fact that the “applicant may be a member of that group or has good intentions underlying its use of a term” does not mitigate potential harm.18 i have shown the use of a slur to be harmful qua thinker by how it affects the discursive environment, but i have not yet mentioned how it relates to the first condition. tam contended, even if the use of the term was not part of a reclamation project, the use of name itself as a trademark was expressive. the use of the name was neither noncommunicative in itself nor a parasitic communication. the majority opinion states that tam argued that many, if not all, trademarks have an expressive component. in other words, these trademarks do not simply identify the source of a product or service but go on to say something more, either about the product or service or some broader issue. . . . the name “the slants” not only identifies the band but expresses a view about social issues.19 thus, if we ask if the band name is essentially communicative, the answer would arguably be a ‘yes.’ it is essential to the communicative endeavour and would be fundamentally changed if a substitute were given. indeed, any substitute would need to be just as derogatory to achieve the same intended communicative end. there would be no reclamation project without the use of the particular term. due to the expressive quality of the name and the internal necessity the specific term carries in this project, the use of the name should be protected despite the potential harm it could engender. could the same argument be made for the “washington redskins?” supporters have typically argued to keep the name using reasons of sentimentality, community entitlement, and/or football tradition. yet, as we saw in tam, how the term is intended is not always how it is taken, nor does it insulate it from the negative effects. the harms concerning normalization and perpetuation of the stereotype may even be clearer in this case than in tam. indeed, one study 18 pto quoted in matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 6. 19 matal v. tam, 582 u.s. at 24. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 suggested that when those who are not the objects of stereotypic depictions were primed with exposure to a native american sports mascot, the results indicated, even if the intent of the depiction “may have been to honor and respect, the ramification of exposure to the portrayal is heightened stereotyping of racial minorities” (kim-prieto et al. 2010, 547). other studies argued that there is a significant concordance between negative biases towards native american mascots and native american people (chaney, burke, and burkley 2011). the use of such mascots may even make these matters worse because further studies showed that those with prejudiced attitudes tended to stereotype more aggressively after being exposed to such imagery (burkley et al. 2017). the name was also normalized on tshirts and chanted in stadiums without those using it being aware of the possible denigration. after all, many grew up using the term, so what could be the harm? it is just the name of a team. this degree of normalization almost fully disguises its covert exercitive force as ordinary without even the added positive intention to reclaim. indeed, the harmful effects may alter the environment in ways that may undermine equal access to self-reflexive expression of the target group. the content of the team name refers to a particular identity category while also having a rather large magnitude of persons affected due to its being a national team. the slur could lead to an asymmetrical burden in participating in the discursive environment. the second condition may be satisfied, but can the first? i would argue that the name “redskins” is not essentially communicative in a way that satisfies the first prong of the approach. perhaps for some individuals the name conjures intense feelings of fondness with memories of tailgate parties and afternoons with the family, rather than the demeaning stereotype. it is possible that the aim is to sincerely honour rather than denigrate. many fans insisted that the name was a sign of respect and even touted dubious opinion polls to suggest that most native americans were not even offended by the term (cox, clement, and vargas 2016). but if honour is indeed the purpose, could extending honour be accomplished by less damaging means? when asking whether it is essentially communicative, there seem to be many ways in which the communicative act of honour could be satisfied without partaking in destructive stereotypes. this could involve renaming the team to something that does not contain the negative associations and may even involve a collaboration of communities to achieve this end. extending honour, engaging in community pride, or feeling sentimentality do not seem dependant on the particular name. thus, the name itself may be parasitic, and regulation would not pose a great enough risk to self-reflexive expression to permit the more general, but equal, harms to self-reflexive expression associated with stereotypes. the two-pronged test is likely to be satisfied, and hence legal regulation of this speech is justified. ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 7. conclusion in the end, the legality of the redskins’ trademark followed from the decision in tam about the constitutionality of the lanham act. the two cases are nevertheless importantly different in the kinds of harms they engender qua thinker. shiffrin’s account provides a metric to compare how best to support the interests of the thinker in general by asking (i) whether the speech has essential communicative value and (ii) what effects the speech has in creating an asymmetrical burden in achieving self-reflexive expression. derogatory speech in some instances may be able to satisfy these dual criteria, yet it is unclear as to whether shiffrin would welcome this extended interpretation and whether she is fully wedded to protecting such speech as a couple of her remarks seem to suggest. perhaps the fact that we can extend her account to reach beyond the kinds of protections shiffrin envisions can be best read as a critique of her account. the extension could become a reductio that takes advantage of the exceptions she provides for lies and commercial speech. yet i would like to resist this conclusion and close this paper by suggesting why shiffrin herself should accept my proposed interpretation. the fact that regulation could extend to derogatory speech is not a problem that needs repairing. i would argue that it is instead indicative of what t. m. scanlon calls an “important strength” of her account (scanlon 2017, 140). he praises the reach of her account due to its ability to “push at the boundaries” of current free speech protection to perhaps show that other rights such as access to education and freedom of association are connected to free speech values (140). he continues, “it is a virtue in an account of the interests underlying free-speech rights that it provides a basis for pushing these rights beyond their current understanding” (140). likewise, if speech really does have this value that shiffrin attributes to it, then this should encourage looking at all avenues in which this fundamental value may be undermined, which could include the effects of derogatory speech. after all, as shiffrin argues, “explicitly making the thinker the central figure of free speech . . . may make a difference as far as what dangers and threats to free speech present themselves as salient” (shiffrin 2011a, 299). i have attempted to make the use of derogatory terms more “salient” by revealing the potential “dangers and threats” qua thinker by recognizing a more nuanced principle of autonomy that seems to be at work within her treatment of lies and corporate and commercial speech. my argument—that enacted permissibility facts and accompanying credibility deficits due to derogatory speech justify legal regulation of speech—is not an argument purely about consequential harms; rather, it is an appeal to the same “illicit” and “non-transparent” ways in which “rational processes may be circumvented” that deeply concern shiffrin (2011a, 302). the harms qua thinker in this instance may be more diffuse but not more so than seen with lies and commercial speech. limitations on derogatory speech are also thus compatible with her concern, not to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 “focus predominantly on whether regulations affect the message of an association, but on whether regulations interfere with the ability of associations to function as sites of mutual cognitive influence” (309). i have aimed to present the argument not in terms of comparable yet distinct harms and values in competition with those underlying autonomous thought formation but as an argument concerning equal access to these sites for development. i have attempted also to temper the risk to personal limitation and chill on the environment with a few qualifications that may not fully combat this worry but nevertheless restrict its reach. overall, although it is not clear whether shiffrin would welcome my proposed extension, i hope to have given reason she might want to. the argument stays true to the interests a person has qua thinker, even if it draws different conclusions as to where these interests may be undermined. the aim is not to suppress distasteful content or necessarily prevent certain effects of derogatory speech; instead, we can recognize that if such speech has these effects, then it raises a question of equality of access. regulation may thus be warranted by appeal to the same values underlying free speech protections. references brison, susan j. 1998. "speech, harm, and the mind-body problem in first amendment jurisprudence." legal theory 4 (1): 39–61. doi:10.1017/s1352325200000914. brown, alexander. 2015. hate speech law: a philosophical examination. abingdon: routledge. burkley, melissa, edward burkley, angela andrade, and angela c. bell. 2017. “symbols of pride or prejudice? examining the impact of native american sports mascots on stereotype application.” journal of social psychology 157 (2): 223–235. doi:10.1080/00224545.2016.1208142. butler, judith. 1997. excitable speech: a politics of the performative. new york: routledge. chaney, john, amanda burke, and edward burkley. 2011. “do american indian mascots = american indian people? examining implicit bias towards american indian people and american indian mascots.” american indian and alaska native mental health research: the journal of the national center. 18 (1): 42–62. doi:10.5820/aian.1801.2011.42. chappell, bill. 2017. “the slants win supreme court battle over band's name in trademark dispute.” npr, june 19. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwoway/2017/06/19/533514196/the-slants-win-supreme-court-battle-overbands-name-in-trademark-dispute. ramsoomair – uneven epithets: a case for an extension of shiffrin’s thinker-based approach published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 cox, john w., scott clement, and theresa vargas, 2016. “new poll finds 9 in 10 native americans aren’t offended by redskins name.” washington post, may 19. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-poll-finds-9-in-10native-americans-arent-offended-by-redskins-name/2016/05/18/3ea11cfa161a-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html. davis, julie. h, and niraj chokshi. 2018. “trump defends ‘animals’ remark, saying it referred to ms-13 gang members.” new york times, may 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/us/trump-animals-ms-13gangs.html. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. herbert, cassie. 2015. “precarious projects: the performative structure of reclamation.” language sciences 52:131–138. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2015.05.002. kim-prieto, chu, lizabeth a goldstein, sumie okazaki, and blake kirschner. 2010. “effect of exposure to an american indian mascot on the tendency to stereotype a different minority group.” journal of applied social psychology 40 (3): 534–553. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00586.x. langton, rae. 1993. “speech acts and unspeakable acts.” philosophy & public affairs 22 (4): 293–330. matsuda, mari j. 1993. “public response to racist speech: considering the victim’s story.” in words that wound: critical race theory, assaultive speech, and the first amendment, edited by mari j. matsuda, charles r. lawrence iii, richard delgado, and kimberlé williams crenshaw, 17–51. boulder, co: westview press. mcgowan, mary kate. 2012. “on ‘whites only’ signs and racist hate speech: verbal acts of racial discrimination.” in speech & harm: controversies over free speech, edited by ishani maitra and mary kate mcgowan. oxford: oxford university press. oxford scholarship online. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199236282.003.0006. mill, john stuart. 2011. on liberty. luton: andrews uk. scanlon, t. m. 2008. “a theory of freedom of expression.” in law and morality: readings in legal philosophy, 3rd edition, edited by david dyzenhaus, sophia reibetanz, and arthur ripstein, 838–856. toronto: university of toronto press. scanlon t.m. "thinkers, lies, and freedom of speech." legal theory 23, no. 2 (2017): 132–140. doi:10.1017/s1352325217000167. shiffrin, seana v. 2011a. “a thinker-based approach to freedom of speech.” constitutional commentary 27 (2): 283–307. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/concomm/995/. https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/scott-clement/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/theresa-vargas/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 ———. 2011b. “reply to critics.” constitutional commentary 27 (2): 417–438. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/concomm/996. ———. 2014. speech matters: on lying, morality, and the law. princeton, nj: princeton university press tirrell, lynne. 2012. “genocidal language games.” in speech & harm: controversies over free speech. edited by ishani maitra and mary kate mcgowan, 174– 221. oxford university press: oxford. nicole ramsoomair earned her phd from mcgill university in 2019. her doctoral research explores conditions of responsibility in the face of radical personality change with a focus on the intersections between personal identity, responsibility, blame, and forgiveness. her other areas of interest include political, legal, and social philosophy. 5424 ramsoomair title page.pdf 5424 ramsoomair final format.pdf the epistemic significance of #metoo feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation freedman, karyn l. “the epistemic significance of #metoo.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2). article 2. 2020 the epistemic significance of #metoo karyn l. freedman university of guelph karynf@uoguelph.ca freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 the epistemic significance of #metoo karyn l. freedman abstract in part i of this paper, i argue that #metoo testimony increases epistemic value for the survivor qua hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others; for society at large when false but dominant narratives about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women are challenged and replaced with true stories; and for the survivor qua teller when her true story is believed. in part ii, i argue that the epistemic significance of #metoo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous and often unappreciated costs to the individual tellers, and the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. keywords: testimony, #metoo, epistemic injustice, motivated ignorance, rationality, sexual violence, sexual harassment introduction1 in this paper, i explore the epistemic significance of testimony in a particular domain of storytelling, specifically, personal stories about sexual violence and sexual harassment told by individuals who are marginalized in a strictly normative sense of term; that is, individuals whose experiences may or may not be statistically peripheral but whose lack of visibility makes them appear so. i have in mind stories that reflect particular social identities and their intersections—what it is like, for instance, to be a muslim rape survivor,2 or a black trans woman who has 1 i want to thank everyone who attended the cuny conference on #metoo and epistemic injustice, in october 2018, for their generous questions and comments on an earlier version of this paper. this was an inspiring conference, and i am especially grateful to linda martín alcoff for inviting me to participate in it. 2 see, for instance, this interview with nadya ali, whose documentary film breaking silence weaves together stories of three young muslim women who are sexual assault survivors, and who talks about how #metoo made discussions about sexual violence in muslim communities a bit easier to have: “how #metoo empowered muslim women to speak out on sexual abuse,” by megan hadley, crime report, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 experienced workplace sexual harassment—like the kinds of stories we have seen in the twitter version of the pioneering activist tarana burke’s #metoo movement.3 there are important social, political, moral, and economic consequences of #metoo, but in what follows, i look at its epistemic significance, for if this hashtag activism has shown us anything it is that personal stories make tangible unpleasant truths in a way that theorizing can miss. in part i of this paper, i argue that #metoo testimony increases epistemic value, a term i use to refer to standard forms of cognitive success, including an increase in truth, knowledge, or understanding.4 first, there is an uptick in epistemic value for the survivor qua hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others, as she comes to an enhanced understanding of her own experience as a result of seeing it contextualized by others. second, there is an increase in epistemic value for society at large when false but dominant narratives about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women are challenged and replaced with true stories. and third, there is positive epistemic value for the survivor qua teller when her true story is believed, as she is rightly viewed as a credible teller and source of knowledge. in part ii of this paper, i argue that the epistemic significance of #metoo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous costs to individual tellers and the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. these costs are often radically june 5, 2018, https://thecrimereport.org/2018/06/05/breaking-silence-muslimwomen-speak-out-about-years-of-sexual-abuse/. 3 perhaps unsurprisingly, the #metoo movement has been less inclusive than one might have hoped, with far fewer trans and lgbtq+ stories than those by cisgender white women, despite the fact that statistics tell us that queer and trans women are at a disproportionately greater risk of sexual violence than cisgender and heterosexual women (james et al. 2016; bucik, 2016). this video is about the representation (and lack thereof) of trans women in #metoo stories: “trans women and femmes are shouting #metoo—but are you listening?” by meredith talusan, them, march 2, 2018, https://www.them.us/story/trans-women-me-too; and these two articles do a good job laying out some of the issues at stake here: “making space for trans people in the #metoo movement,” by gabriel arkles, aclu blog, april 13, 2018, https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/violence-againstwomen/making-space-trans-people-metoo-movement; and “she was sexually assaulted within months of coming out. she isn't alone,” by alia e. dastagir, usa today, june 19, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/06/13/sarahmcbride-gay-survivors-helped-launch-me-too-but-rates-lgbt-abuse-largelyoverlooked/692094002/. 4 the so-called “value problem,” and the question of the priority of these epistemic values (or virtues), is not my concern here; see pritchard (2007). freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 and systematically underestimated, resulting in a distorted view not just of the teller’s credibility but of her very rationality. using a standard characterization of practical rationality, i argue that in light of the importance of her testimony and the high costs she endures in giving it, when it comes to #metoo stories, hearers have more than the usual reasons to believe. part 1: representation, marginalization, and #metoo certain aspects of marginalized social identities are ours from birth, and others come to us later in life, sometimes by choice and at other times unbidden, but in all cases, marginalized identities receive representational short shrift. they are largely absent from our scholarly canons and history books and have been relegated to the fringes of mainstream media and popular culture, at least until recently.5 that is hardly surprising, since part of what it means to be marginalized is to lack the power and influence to tell one’s own story, to be denied a voice and a platform to use it, and to risk serious threats to one’s health, safety, livelihood, and community when one does.6 when it comes to testimony about sexual violence and sexual harassment, there are also very real, if less tangible, costs to one’s sense of self, since when marginalized individuals do go public with these sorts of stories, against all obstacles, they are often not properly heard. their testimony is routinely filtered through distorting prejudice and dismissed as lacking credibility, epitomizing the central case of what miranda fricker (2007) has called testimonial injustice; these individuals are wronged in their capacities as knowers in virtue of a prejudice against them, qua social type (fricker 2007, 45). the deflated credibility they receive as tellers results in an intrinsic epistemic injustice, insofar as they are degraded in their very humanity, qua knowers.7 5 in philosophy, for instance, there have been efforts to revisit the historical canon in order to include hitherto excluded women philosophers (for example, see emily thomas [2018], and broad and detlefsen [2017]); and in popular culture, we are seeing a broader representation of nonnormative identities across the arts—the recent television shows transparent, pose, atlanta, and insecure are a good illustration of this trend. 6 i refer to these harms as either risks or costs, depending on how predictable the harm or loss is. 7 and, as fricker (2007, 46–59) has elaborated, these individuals are further subject to various secondary epistemic and practical harms, which trickle down from the intrinsic harm, such as a diminished self-esteem and the loss of intellectual confidence. i discuss these (and other harms) in detail below. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 the routine diminishment faced by marginalized tellers is part and parcel of the humiliation of patriarchy; of being a woman, of being not white, of being queer, trans, or disabled. but remarkably, since october 2017, while simultaneously suffering various social and political harms as a result of a us administration led by a dangerous president, who himself has been accused of sexual misconduct by no fewer than 22 women,8 we have seen an increase in stories about sexual harassment and sexual violence. this started with the toppling of one of america’s most powerful men, the hollywood movie mogul harvey weinstein, following a new york times story by jodi kantor and megan twohey that detailed weinstein’s decades of predatory sexual behavior;9 and so began the international movement 8 many of those women went public with their accusations following the october 2016 release of the access hollywood tape, in which trump bragged about the influence of his alleged star power over women, which enabled him, as he put it, to “grab ‘em by the pussy” (“transcript: donald trump’s taped comments about women,” new york times, october 8, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08 /us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html); see also “the 25 women who have accused trump of sexual misconduct,” by eliza relman, business insider, may 1, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-misconductlist-2017-12; and “these women have accused trump of sexual harassment,” by max blau and maegan vazquez, cnn.com, june 24, 2019, https://www.cnn.com /2016/10/14/politics/trump-women-accusers/index.html. 9 just days after their article came out (kantor and twohey, “harvey weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades,” new york times, oct. 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassmentallegations.html), ronan farrow published an exposé in the new yorker (“from aggressive overtures to sexual assault: harvey weinstein’s accusers tell their stories,” oct. 10, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/fromaggressive-overtures-to-sexual-assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-theirstories), which was followed by an avalanche of stories about weinstein by actresses, many of whom had previously worked with him and had been sexually harassed, assaulted, or otherwise demeaned by him. freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 known as #metoo.10 with over 19 million tweets in the first year alone,11 we have since seen the downfall of one after another of some of america’s most powerful men, including louis c.k., bill o’reilly, kevin spacey, al franken, charlie rose, matt lauer—men who, as soraya chemaly points out, “had for decades chosen, framed, investigated, written about, and produced our culture’s stories about politics, gender, and violence” (chemaly 2018, 141–142). that some of the very men who had been controlling national narratives about gender-based violence were simultaneously guilty of perpetuating the problem induced a serious reckoning.12 “the anger window was open,” as rebecca traister put it, referring to the collective mood following weinstein’s downfall, and in the short time since then we have witnessed a global surge of rage, what traister has aptly described as a “ ‘70s-style, organic, mass radical rage, exploding in unpredictable directions” (2018, 141, 143).13 1.1 the isolation of survivors (uptick #1) i know from personal experience how important it can be for survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment to have the opportunity to hear other people’s stories and to see similar kinds of traumatic experiences represented by others. this can help us make sense of our own experience by contextualizing it, 10 even the origins of the twitter version of #metoo say something important about marginalized communities, power, and intersectionality. the “me too” campaign was started in 2007 by activist tarana burke, herself a survivor of sexual violence, as a grassroots movement to aid sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities. this origin story is often overlooked in mainstream media and popular culture, and the hashtag is mistakenly attributed to actress alyssa milano, who, a decade after burke, tweeted a call out to survivors of sexual harassment or sexual assault using “#metoo.” 11 monica anderson and skye toor, “how social media users have discussed sexual harassment since #metoo went viral,” pew research center fact tank, oct. 11, 2018, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/11/how-social-mediausers-have-discussed-sexual-harassment-since-metoo-went-viral/. 12 in many cases, these men have been publicly shamed; some have gone on to lose their jobs; but only a very few have been subject to criminal prosecution. that said, a new york times article from 2018 (“#metoo brought down 201 powerful men. nearly half of their replacements are women,” by audrey carlsen et al., oct. 29, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html) notes that of the over 200 powerful men brought down by the #metoo movement, nearly half of their replacements have been women. 13 brittney cooper’s (2018) eloquent rage rounds out this triumvirate of brilliant books by women—all published in 2018—about women’s rage. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 thereby reframing these phenomena not as personal problems—something that happened to me, for instance, because of what i was wearing, who i was with, or how much i had to drink—but rather as widespread sociological phenomena. not only can this help survivors combat the corrosive shame that is part of the aftermath of sexual violence and harassment, but more to the point here, it can help us better understand what we have been through by viewing it through a broad social and political frame of reference. in order to illustrate the epistemic value survivors gain by hearing #metoo stories, i will start by telling one of my own. this is a story about something that happened to me when i was a graduate student in philosophy, over twenty years ago. it is an experience that is a bit hard for me to remember, not because my memory is failing me, but because it is painful to recall. this is not a story about sexual harassment in the discipline of philosophy (although i have my fair share of those stories as well).14 rather, it is a story about how i was doing, back in 1996, having just moved away from home to do my phd in philosophy. this was a difficult time in my life, and not just because of the various pressures one faces when moving to a new city and entering a new university and new program, although none of that was easy. but i had other problems. six years earlier, when i was twenty-two years old, i was raped. i had been travelling at the time, having just arrived in paris to meet an ex-boyfriend. we had been invited to stay as houseguests at the apartment of his friend and mentor, along with another houseguest, a thirtyyear-old frenchman, whom i had met for the first time just that day. he seemed friendly enough, and a few hours later, when i was alone with him in the apartment, he kindly made me dinner, and then afterward, pressing a long sharp knife against my neck, proceeded to rape me.15 it was a violent sexual assault, and i was lucky to have come out of it alive, but the experience left me destabilized. in the aftermath, i found myself reeling, awash with shame, so much so that i could not bear to have others know what had happened to me. and so, like many women in similar kinds of situations, i decided to keep it a secret, telling no one outside of my family and two closest friends. i buried the trauma of the experience deep within, hoping that would make it disappear, but unfortunately the body does not process trauma that way, or at least, not properly.16 instead, it weighed me down like an anchor. i struggled with crushing anxiety, cycling through recurring panic attacks, sleep deprivation, and troubled relationships with men—each a classic symptom of ptsd, 14 i do not detail those here, but there is no shortage of stories of sexual harassment in philosophy, as the blog “what is it like to be a woman in philosophy” illustrates: https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/. 15 i tell this story in more detail in one hour in paris (freedman 2014). 16 see, for instance, van der kolk (1996, 2006). freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 although i did not know that at the time.17 one of the few places i was able to find relief from my wearing inner life was as a student in the world of thinking that philosophy offers. when immersed in my studies, i could almost ignore the debilitating consequences of being raped. over the years, i became adept at covering up any perceptible signs of distress, but by the time i started my phd, the energy required to sustain this double life was almost too much for me, and my anxiety worsened. it was in this context that i enrolled in my first year of classes, in order to fulfill the coursework component of my degree. one of the classes on offer was being taught by a distinguished professor. it was a popular class, drawing students from various cohorts, and i signed up for it. i will never forget the first day of that class. there must have been 20–25 students crammed into a room that was meant to hold fewer than that. it was set up with long tables around the perimeter, forming a rectangle. when i arrived, the professor was sitting at the front of the room, which by then was already half full. i had to make my way around the crowded outer edges in order to find an empty seat in the back corner, about as far away from the doorway as you could get, which was the start of my problems that day. as soon as i sat down, i was in trouble. i immediately felt trapped, just as i had been, six years earlier, in that apartment in paris. once again, i had failed to anticipate what was coming next, and the triggering feelings heaved through me. as the remaining students filed in, i became unable to catch a deep breath. my heart was pounding as i found myself in the familiar grip of a panic attack. i remember squeezing my hands together under the table, hoping that i wouldn’t faint, hoping that this one would pass quickly, but then the professor began to talk. he announced that we would be starting class by going around the room and introducing ourselves. at that, the feeling of being trapped intensified, and the room unspooled before me. i did not pass out, but when the introductions finally reached me, i was not able to speak. i choked out my name, my quivering voice betraying the panic within, bringing every surprised eye in the room to rest on me. solidarity stories and representation when i think about that experience now, what is most striking to me is not how mortified i had been, or how everyone in the room looked at me with a mix of pity and horror, but how truly alone i felt at the time. i was not unaware of the existence of other rape survivors, but personally, i did not know a single one. it is 17 judith herman’s groundbreaking trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence (1992) remains one of the best resources for understanding the classic symptoms of ptsd. see also van der kolk (1996, 2006), rothschild (2000), and ogden, minton, and pain (2006). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 hard to overstate how important it would have been for me, back then, to have had easy access to a multitude of stories by other survivors, by other women who had had experiences like mine; to have been able to feel that kind of solidarity, and to have been able to see my experience represented at a time when i was too vulnerable to make myself visible in the same way. that would have been integral in helping me understand this dramatic and uninvited change to my life, to my very identity; it would have saved me years of confusion, isolation, and shame. when i further reflect about that in the context of my relative privilege at the time—specifically, of being a doctoral student at a reputable university, of being cis, white, heterosexual, able bodied, and middle class, and thus checking off all the boxes which guaranteed that at least i did not look out of place (however shattered i was feeling)—i cannot help but think about the legions of women, and men too, with far fewer entitlements, who have experienced sexual harassment and sexual assault and who, for one reason or another, had been isolated and suffering in silence until #metoo. the injustice of it all is highlighted when we consider the routine silencing and lack of visibility of people on the margins. as we have seen over the past few years, representation—even in 280 characters or less—can be lifealtering, and particularly so for members of groups who have been systematically disadvantaged. although a hashtag will not heal you, seeing yourself in someone else’s story can be deeply impactful.18 not only can it help us make sense of our own experience by framing it in a broader social and political context, but having the chance to see someone come out the other side can be profound; it can set you on a path that you had never before imagined possible.19 18 tarana burke, for one, has spoken about the limits of the twitter version of #metoo, cautioning that social media cannot be used as a replacement for the serious institutional changes needed to fund resources and support survivors of sexual harassment and sexual violence. a toronto appearance of burke’s is described in “upcoming budgets must have sustained funding to combat sexual violence,” by tiffany gooch, toronto star, march 10, 2019, https://www.thestar .com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/03/10/upcoming-budgets-must-have-sustainedfunding-to-combat-sexual-violence.html. 19 which is what happened to me as i was nearing the end of my phd, in 2001, when i read susan brison’s aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self, which had just come out. this remarkable book on rape, written by a rape survivor who, like me, was also a philosopher, gave me courage and hope for what might lie ahead; brison showed me a way forward. freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 1.2 motivated ignorance and epistemic friction (uptick #2) the epistemic value survivors gain by seeing their realities represented is one significant consequence of #metoo stories, but that value extends beyond individual survivors. storytellers have a singular power to effect broad social and cultural change through their testimony, which can make unpleasant truths about sexual assault and sexual harassment tangible in a way that theorizing can miss. not everyone has an equal opportunity to make her voice heard, but those who do open up a space in the social imaginary and thereby provide a uniquely persuasive kind of evidence in support of nonnormative identities. stories thus provide epistemic friction, to borrow a phrase from josé medina (2013). they offer alternative representations that mitigate against the widespread resistance among dominantly situated knowers to acknowledge, in this case, the realities of sexual violence and sexual harassment against women. i call this resistance “male ignorance,” for it is a phenomenon that bears a distinct resemblance to what charles mills calls “white ignorance,” which is a motivated ignorance that maintains the status quo and allows for privileged groups to perpetuate dominant but false narratives about black people, thus enabling, as mills (2007, 13) puts it, “a self-representation in which differential white privilege, and the need to correct for it, does not exist.” likewise, in the case of male ignorance, the refusal to recognize and accept the truth about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women—and this includes all women: cis, trans, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming—whether brazen and willful or lazy and indifferent, provides concrete benefits for men. in cases of male ignorance and white ignorance there is an absence of knowledge, or better yet, an absence of true belief, which is not epistemically neutral but is instead motivated, and thus represents a cognitive failure, as i discuss below. just as white ignorance is perpetuated by racist individuals and also deeply embedded in our institutions and norms, such that biases are enacted even by those who aren’t straightforwardly racist (mills 2007, 21), so too male ignorance is individualistic and structural, blatant and implicit. and in the same way that white ignorance results in concrete material, social, and institutional benefits for white people in the form of jobs, wealth, opportunities, housing, upward mobility, freedom of movement, freedom from incarceration, and freedom from the expectation of incarceration,20 there are likewise material, social, and institutional benefits for men—and, it is worth emphasizing, in particular white, cis, straight 20 these systemic racial injustices have been documented in the work of today’s leading legal scholars and theorists on racial inequality and mass incarceration; see, for example, alexander (2010), stevenson (2014), and forman (2012, 2017); the idea of unearned white privilege had been previously popularized with peggy mcintosh’s (1989) “knapsack of privilege.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 men—that result from male ignorance. these men have the advantage of being viewed as inherently credible; they have the criminal justice system, with the presumption of innocence on their side; they have the freedom to remain unaware of the shortand long-term impact of trauma; and they have the benefit of receiving sympathy—or better yet, himpathy21—when they are accused, even convicted, of serious and criminal wrongdoing, as we have seen repeatedly in high-profile cases over the years.22 motivated ignorance: the new view as mills argues, in cases of motivated ignorance, these benefits provide an incentivized reason for people in positions of relative privilege to ignore facts that illuminate that privilege (2007, 31), and the same can be said when it comes to male ignorance. in both cases, the facts in question can be easily known. they do not make up the dominant narratives, but neither are they hidden, hard to find, or obscure. indeed, people have to work at remaining ignorant of patent social realities about racial injustice and sexual violence and sexual harassment against women, and their relative privilege gives them a reason to do so, which is what makes these cases of ignorance motivated.23 ignorance is often referred to as a kind of nonknowing, which it is, but the distinguishing feature of motivated ignorance is a lack of true beliefs, as opposed to, say, true beliefs that fall short of knowledge because they lack justification, or sufficient justification.24 as such, motivated cases line up with what rik peels calls the new view of ignorance.25 on this account, we can say that a subject is ignorant that p in three kinds of cases: 21 manne defines this as “the flow of sympathy away from female victims toward their male victimizers” (2017, 23). manne’s discussion of the brock turner case, from 2016, is especially illuminating on this point (2017, 196–205). 22 most recently, in the 2018 case of brett kavanaugh, who received the ultimate showing of himpathy following sexual assault allegations raised against him by christine blasey ford, with the subsequent confirmation of his supreme court nomination. 23 which is not to say that these reasons are always or necessarily first-person accessible. 24 these cases line up better with the so-called standard view; see le morvan and peels (2016). 25 peels (2010, 2011, 2012); see also le morvan and peels (2016); and van woudenberg (2009). freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 1. disbelieving ignorance: s considers that p but rejects p as false, even though p is true; 2. suspending ignorance: s considers that p but suspends judgment about p, even though p is true; or 3. deep ignorance: s does not even consider that p, in the first place, and hence neither believes, suspends judgment, nor disbelieves that p, even though p is true (le morvan and peels 2016, 26). male ignorance: not having to know a thorough analysis of epistemic culpability in cases of motivated ignorance goes beyond my purposes in this paper.26 however, i will note here that epistemic culpability is relatively easy to assess in the first two kinds of cases, wherein the subject considers the facts of the matter, but fails to believe truly. arguably, in these cases, the subject’s failure to properly assess evidence can be pinned to bad epistemic practices that are cultivated to maintain privilege, falling somewhere on a spectrum of willfulness, and thus represents a cognitive failure.27 the matter is more complicated in the case of deep ignorance, which is a particularly recalcitrant form of ignorance, and which does not, at first glance, appear willful. peels, for one, has argued that in these cases ignorance is exculpating.28 but he is not considering motivated cases of ignorance. i would argue that in these cases, there is epistemic culpability even in the absence of willfulness, insofar as the individuals in question benefit from their ignorance.29 although there is more to be said on this matter, it should be clear that whether we are talking about disbelieving ignorance, suspending ignorance, or deep ignorance, individuals who lack true beliefs about the crushing impact of racism and 26 questions of culpability are taken up by fricker (2016), medina (2013, 2016), applebaum (2008), van woudenberg (2009), and peels (2014). 27 fricker (2016) makes a similar point. in this paper, she also draws out some key connections between motivated ignorance, epistemic injustice, and hermeneutical marginalization; see also fricker and jenkins (2017). 28 peels offers the example of stephanie and rachel, who both have a presentation to give on operation valkyrie (the well-known assassination attempt on hitler). peels argues that because stephanie does not know she has access to relevant books, her ignorance gives her a full excuse for a badly prepped presentation, whereas rachel, who has knowledge of the books, has no such excuse at hand (2014, 489). 29 i am developing this position in a new paper in which i argue that, in cases of motivated ignorance, willfulness is not a necessary condition for epistemic culpability, even if it is a sufficient one. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 misogyny on black people and women are in a privileged position wherein they effectively do not need to know. these individuals are not critically alive to the ways that the epistemic situation has been distorted, as fricker (2016, 173) has put it, because, i would add, they do not need to be. these individuals have the luxury of being able to move around in the world without experiencing the everyday brutality of systemic racism and misogyny, which is something that individuals with marginalized identities will never have. i had that thought after watching barry jenkins’s stunning 2016 film moonlight,30 which tells the story of chiron, who is poor, black, and gay, and whom we meet at three critical points early on in his life. at each stage we see chiron’s strength and his vulnerability, often juxtaposed; we see a character being built and broken, and through his story we learn something about the reality of being a gay black man in america. by the time we meet chiron in act 3, he is in his twenties, having spent his teenage years being bullied before finally fighting back. this chiron has known the tenderness of romantic touch only once in his life, and he is unrecognizable from his younger self. he has layered his body so that it is no longer a target, constructed his masculinity through muscle and grills so that it has become impenetrable. yet jenkins allows the audience to see through the beefed-up body to the person within, and to his humanity. we see this chiron emerge out of his own artifice in order to reunite with the man who once showed him affection, his vulnerability now becoming his true strength, and a remarkable scene emerges. the pageantry of chiron’s masculinity in moonlight brings to mind an early passage in ta-nehisi coates’s between the world and me, in which coates unmasks the meaning behind the protective layering. in reflecting on the black baltimore of his youth, coates says, it was always right in front of me. the fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. . . . i think back on those boys now and all i see is fear, and all i see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the mississippi mob gathered ‘round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. (coates 2015, 14) coates’s book is a meditation on a question he poses early on in the narrative, “how do i live free in this black body?” (2015, 12). his story urges us to consider what it is like to be a black man (or, in the case of mccraney and jenkins’s movie, a gay black 30 moonlight is set in miami and is based on tarell alvin mccraney’s unpublished semiautobiographical play, “in moonlight black boys look blue.” freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 man) in america. engaging imaginatively with these stories of black racialized identities told by black voices helps us to see chiron’s beefed up body as stemming, at least in part, from deeply rooted intergenerational trauma. representation, empathy, and #metoo marginalized stories thrust evidence of alternative lives into the spotlight, pushing back against dominant but false narratives that are perpetuated by bad epistemic practices, which are cultivated in order to maintain privilege. they enable us to learn something about the world as experienced from social positions other than our own. and perhaps unsurprisingly, the more we know about people, the harder it is to deny their humanity. empirical studies tell us that exposure to disparate social types can minimize prejudice when certain conditions are met,31 such that getting to know members of other social types makes it harder to hold negative stereotypes about them.32 this notion that intergroup contact reduces prejudice is not uncontested, but recent research on the subject is encouraging.33 a recent study of door-to-door political canvassing, for instance, shows that you do not need intense or prolonged intervention to see change, a 10-minute face-to-face conversation can have an impact on reducing prejudice (broockman and kalla 2016; denizet-lewis 2016). this phenomenon has been explained by the idea of “affective perspective-taking,” which can be seen as one facet of empathy.34 empathy, narrowly defined, is a sensitivity to others with whom we identify, whose feelings we can also feel, in some sense. as such, empathy can result in an implicit preference for in-group members (which is why some argue it should not be used as a basis for morality),35 but affective perspective-taking can be a powerful way to bring about empathic concern for those not in one’s own social group. as decety 31 although current research on how to reduce implicit bias has yet to come up with definitive results, jenny saul (2012) offers a nice summary of much of this empirical literature. 32 that is the basic premise of the “contact hypothesis,” a social psychological theory dating back to the middle of the last century, typically credited to gordon a1lport (1954), which tells us that prejudice stems from a lack of knowledge and exposure. 33 e.g. pettigrew and tropp (2006), shook and fazio (2008), and singal (2017). 34 broockman and kalla (2016) call this “perspective-taking,” but decety and cowell’s (2014a, 2014b) term “affective perspective-taking” seems to better capture the phenomenon. in their work, decety and cowell disentangle some of the ambiguity around the concept of empathy; they distinguish “affective perspectivetaking” from emotional sharing and empathic concern, which, they argue, together comprise the three facets of empathy. 35 see, e.g., bloom (2016) and prinz (2011). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 and cowell (2014b, 526) put it, affective perspective-taking is “a strategy that can be successfully used to reduce group partiality and to expand the circle of empathic concern from the tribe to all humanity.”36 we saw an example of this in action not too long ago, in september 2018, in washington, dc, at the height of the senate judiciary committee hearings for the brett kavanaugh supreme court nomination, in a highly publicized encounter between republican senator jeff flake of arizona and ana maria archila and maria gallagher. these women, both sexual assault survivors, demanded, in a brief elevator encounter, that flake witness their pain and acknowledge the need for perpetrators of sexual violence to take responsibility for their actions.37 almost directly following this encounter, flake, reversing his previous position on the matter, demanded an investigation into the sexual assault allegations that had been brought against kavanaugh.38 in telling their stories of sexual violence and sexual harassment, women have the power to challenge dominant misconceptions, overturn rape myths, and debunk traditional victim-blaming narratives, thereby effecting broad social and cultural change through their testimony. the profusion of #metoo testimony by a diverse group of women brings to light the range of experiences suffered by survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment. the long-term consequences of this have yet to be played out, but the immediate result is a positive uptick in epistemic value for the society at large via an increase in truth, knowledge, and understanding. 36 the sheer volume of scientific research on empathy in the last couple of decades is massive, but for an especially clear account of the relationship between moral behavior and empathy, from a neuroscientific perspective, see decety and cowell (2014a). a philosophical analysis of the source and structure of moral emotions, and their connection to empathy, goes beyond the scope of this paper, but the papers in the two edited collections by maibom (2014, 2017) would be an excellent place to start; for some problems with using empathy as the basis for morality, see bloom (2016) and prinz (2011). 37 the neurobiology of storytelling helps explain this further. it tells us that stories which are personal and emotionally compelling trigger the release of oxytocin and thereby engage more of the brain than would simply stating a set of facts (zak 2015). 38 although flake never confirmed that hearing the stories of these two women influenced his reasoning on the kavanaugh hearings, because he had previously released a statement which said that he intended to vote to confirm kavanaugh, it was generally presumed that this dramatic encounter influenced his thinking on the matter. freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 1.3 the benefit to tellers (uptick #3) the third area in which #metoo stories result in a positive increase in epistemic value is with the teller herself. although in telling her story of sexual violence or harassment the survivor takes great risks (which i discuss below), if these can be alleviated there is the possibility of tremendous benefits for tellers, at least when their stories are properly heard. the epistemic gains can be significant, and there can also be emotive, therapeutic, and ethical gains for the teller. having marginalized stories recognized by a receptive audience can help survivors combat the shame and silence that all too often piggybacks on nonnormative life experiences. telling our stories can be a way of saying, this is not on me, this is not my fault, i have nothing to be ashamed of, and my truth is worth making known. for the teller, giving voice to her story can help give her life meaning, craft her identity, and maximize her self-worth and autonomy. it can be a privilege to tell one’s story. the opportunity that #metoo has created for women to speak from a place of lived experience—and in particular women from the marginalized communities, including trans women, genderqueer and gender nonconforming women, women of colour, and women who are disabled (and especially women at the intersection of these communities)—and to do so on their own terms, brings into focus the positive epistemic value which tellers derive from first-person narratives of these sorts. just imagine the boost for those women whose testimony is not dismissed due to faulty misperceptions of credibility. imagine that instead of being denied status as a knower, they are recognized as having earned that status. part 2: the high cost of survivor stories this point forces us to reflect on the individual teller, who, in making her story known, offers a salve for other survivors while disrupting the dominant narrative of male ignorance, but does so in the face of wide-ranging and largely underappreciated risks and costs to her well-being. as discussed earlier, there is the principal risk of not being believed and of having one’s credibility undermined. when it comes to personal stories of sexual violence and sexual harassment, women’s testimony is routinely ignored and denied, belittled and mocked, and distorted through entrenched myths about sexual violence and sexual harassment. these include the myths that if a woman had been sexually assaulted, then she would have reported the crime right away, not stayed in contact with her assailant, not gone on another date with him, and certainly not continued to live in the same home; and that if she had once consented to sex, then she must have wanted it again this time, as evidenced by the fact that she didn’t fight back. when it comes to sexual harassment, there is the myth that if a woman had been harassed at work, then she would have immediately reported the incident to her superior (or his superior, if her immediate superior was the harasser); she would not have continued feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 to work in the same space and certainly would not have attended work social events. if she hadn’t enjoyed the degrading and cajoling comments, then she certainly would not have dressed that way or continued to correspond or communicate in any way with her harasser. these myths are deeply embedded in social and cultural attitudes, as evidenced by the everyday trivialization of sexual violence and sexual harassment though rape jokes and run-of-the-mill victim-blaming norms. as mentioned earlier, the reliance on prejudicial myths in assessing first-person testimony by women in these instances culminates in the central case of fricker’s (2007, 35) notion of testimonial injustice, wherein a negative identity prejudice results in a deflated level of credibility. as fricker (2007, 45–49) illustrates, this form of epistemic injustice degrades women qua knowers; it diminishes their very humanity. the undermining of their credibility is one the greatest harms endured by women who go public with their stories in the aftermath of sexual violence and harassment, and this epistemic loss results in further negative consequences— practical, social, economic, and moral. women who tell their stories of sexual harassment risk their jobs, their professional stature, and their livelihood: a recent study shows, when it comes to workplace sexual harassment, most employers react punitively (mccann, tomaskovic-devey, and badgett 2018). women who tell their stories of sexual violence are often ostracized from their families and friends, and they are treated callously by their social groups and communities, and even by the authorities, should they decide to bring charges against their perpetrators.39 in speaking publicly about their experiences as targets and survivors of sexual violence and sexual harassment, women face serious misogynistic backlash that threatens their health and safety, even their lives. this is true across all populations of women, but especially hard hit are women in the lgbtq+ community, and in particular trans women and trans women of colour, who are overrepresented when it comes to sexual violence as a result of rampant transphobia and transmisogyny.40 it is hardly 39 a 20-month-long investigation by robyn doolittle, for canada’s globe and mail, looked into how police handle sexual assault allegations. the investigation gathered data from more than 870 police forces across the country in order to determine how often sexual assault cases were being closed as “unfounded,” a term used to indicate that a case had been dismissed not for legal reasons (i.e., because there was insufficient evidence to prosecute) but because the investigator did not believe that a crime had occurred (doolittle 2017). the globe found that the national average of unfounded cases was one in five. 40 although there is not a lot of data on this matter, the well-cited 2015 survey reports that a disturbingly high number of transgender people—47%, or about one freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 surprising that many women refrain from telling their stories in the first place, thereby suffering an epistemic injustice before they even open their mouths to speak, something kristie dotson has called “testimonial smothering” (2011, 244).41 these are just some of the tangible costs borne by women who give #metoo testimony, but there is a less visible side to their suffering, which is the emotional and psychological cost of this kind of testimony. i know what that can be like. i kept my rape a secret for over a decade, during which time i felt deeply ashamed, having internalized the victim-blaming norms discussed above, according to which women are responsible for the acts of violence perpetrated against them. eventually, with considerable support from others, that changed for me, but not all women are fortunate enough to have the benefit of social supports, and still others make the choice to keep the truth of what happened to them private. and really, who could blame them? the high cost of talking, along with the shame and trauma that lingers in the aftermath of sexual violence and harassment, can be too much. taken together, these factors help us understand why some women who suffer these crimes never report them to the authorities; why others speak about them only under the condition of anonymity; why it can take years, even decades, for some women to talk openly about their experiences; and why others chose to never speak about them at all.42 2.1 testimony: costs and credibility and yet, the importance of these stories to hearers, to society at large, and potentially to the teller herself compels us to consider the normative implications of this kind of testimony. on standard philosophical accounts of testimony, a teller’s word is assessed on the basis of two factors: her sincerity and her competence, in two—are sexually assaulted in their lifetime (james et al. 2016), although anecdotal reports suggest that number is even higher. 41 this can happen when the content of the testimony is unsafe or risky, as in the case of the rape survivor who decides not to bother reporting the crime to the police, knowing that she might not be believed. as dotson argues, while testimonial smothering is a form of self-silencing, it ought to be construed as a coerced one (2011, 244). see also steele (2010). 42 this also helps to explain why sexual violence and sexual harassment are notoriously underreported. in canada, for instance, fewer than 6% of all sexual assaults are reported to the police, and in the case of acquaintance or date rape, it is fewer than 2% (benoit et al. 2015). and in the united states, 99.8% of people who are harassed in the workplace never file formal charges (mccann, tomaskovicdevey, and badgett 2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 which combine to determine her overall trustworthiness, or credibility.43 in the case of first-person testimonials like #metoo, where individuals are recounting an aspect of their own lives, the question of competence usually takes a back seat to the question of sincerity. that is, the issue is not typically “how did you come to know that?” but rather, “why should we believe you?” this question about the veracity of testimony is a central one in contemporary debates and is typically framed as a question about the hearer, that is, whether the hearer has a presumptive right to believe, absent any positive evidence about the reliability of the teller.44 but in cases where there is evidence about the reliability of the teller, this question is normatively idle. in these cases, the evidence determines the reliability. so why is it that in standard cases of testimony about sexual violence or sexual harassment, the evidence is presented as split, framed as a “he said/she said” scenario? it could be because these crimes often occur behind closed doors, which means there is seldom any eye-witness testimony. but we need to ask why eyewitness testimony is privileged in these cases, since if we broaden our gaze, we can see a mountain of other evidence—specifically, the evidence of the high costs of the teller’s testimony. for even if we know no other facts about her, as is often the case in #metoo testimonials, we know that simply in virtue of telling her story, and thus coming up against the juggernaut of patriarchy, she has placed herself directly in harm’s way. and this fact bears directly on the question of what hearers ought to believe. 2.2 practical rationality the connection between truth-telling and risk-taking is underwritten by the notion of practical rationality. rationality is one of those philosophical concepts that can be unwieldy, but here i rely on a straightforward meaning of the term that, in practical matters, dictates that individuals act in ways that maximize their goals (wedgwood 2014).45 this characterization will suffice to generate a number of inferential moves, for if these tellers aim to survive and prosper, and to be treated with dignity and respect by their social groups, then on pain of rationality they would not give testimony that jeopardizes those goals—not unless they had a very good reason to do so, such as wanting the truth of what happened to them to be heard and believed. to suppose otherwise would be to attribute to this particular class of tellers a kind of cognitive dysfunction typically reserved for individuals who 43 see coady (1992). 44 i refer here to the standard debate between the credulist and the reductivist; see elizabeth fricker (1987, 2002), coady (1992), and burge (1993). 45 for an in-depth analysis, see also raz (2005). freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 suffer from serious mental illness, drug-induced altered states, or some form of extreme irrationality. it is a commonplace that people rarely put their reputations, their professional well-being, their families, and indeed their very lives at stake, to give testimony that is untrue. tamara green, the california attorney who was the first woman to come forward and publicly support andrea constand’s accusations against bill cosby, put it this way: “it was devastating” she said, “it never occurred to me no one would believe me. why would i stand up and stick my neck out and take the heat i was taking if i weren’t telling the truth?”46 if the costs to the teller were suitably appreciated in these cases, instead of radically and systematically underestimated, they would carry weight in her favour when evaluating the sincerity of her testimony. the idea that hearers ought to believe individuals whose testimony puts them in harm’s way is a courtesy routinely afforded to individuals across a range of domains. think, for instance, about whistleblowers. here we have a group of people who put their jobs, and in some cases their lives, at risk by telling stories, who are often viewed as traitors and maligned for a variety of moral reasons, and yet their honesty is seldom in doubt. and why would it be? they simply have too much to lose to lie. when it comes to high-risk testimony, we even believe individuals who are otherwise completely untrustworthy, like low-level mobsters who give testimony about the criminal activities of their mobster bosses. despite the fact that the low-level mobster is himself a criminal and thus implicitly not credible, his testimony is typically assigned a high credibility rating because of the risks he takes in giving it. unfortunately, the same respect is seldom given to women who report sexual violence or sexual harassment, which is all the more appalling given that false accusations in these cases are statistically negligible, on par with other crimes.47 but we should not have to invoke the empirical data here. the normative principle does 46 quoted in nicole weisensee egan, “bill cosby accuser tamara green is ready for her day in court: ‘it's a true story and it needed to be told,’” people, oct. 29, 2015, http://www.people.com/article/tamara-green-bill-cosby-defamation-lawsuitandrea-constand. 47 at least, when it comes to false reporting vis-à-vis sexual violence against women (which, though not specifically on #metoo cases, is relevant here); lisak et al. (2010) suggest that this number is somewhere between 2% and 10%, but the enliven project (https://sarahbeaulieu.me/the-enliven-project) registers it at 2%. the discrepancy could be due to the fact that false reporting is difficult to measure, since how data are counted varies—i.e., does the false accusation count as one that was reported to police, as opposed to filed with the judiciary? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 the work on its own and makes explicit a widely shared intuition, which is that when a speaker is undertaking more than the usual risks, hearers ought to give her more than the usual credit. the connection drawn here is not infallible; taking great risks when it comes to testimony is no guarantee of truth. to say that people rarely put everything on the line to give testimony that is untrue is not to say that they never do. this principle can be overridden in some cases by empirical counterconsiderations, to be sure. but absent those sorts of defeaters, it should be the default position. conclusion since the fall of 2017, in an impressive show of unscripted solidarity, women across the world have been speaking out in acts of defiance against prejudicial stereotypes, rape myths, and victim-blaming norms, and in doing so, putting a spotlight on male ignorance. we are witnessing a critical shift in social and cultural attitudes on sexual violence and sexual harassment against women, one that, in the face of tremendous risks, has been propelled by the power of a diverse group of women’s voices. there is positive value in each one of those voices: value for the teller, when her story is believed; value for the hearer, who has the opportunity to better understand her own experience by seeing it represented by others; and value for society at large, when dominant but false narratives are disrupted. the epistemic significance of #metoo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous costs to individual tellers, and on pain of rationality, the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. the argument here tells us that, when hearing #metoo stories, the appropriate normative stance to take is: i believe. references alexander, michelle. 2010. the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. new york: new press. allport, gordon w. 1954. the nature of prejudice. reading, ma: addison-wesley. applebaum, barbara. 2008. “white privilege/white complicity: connecting ‘benefiting from’ to ‘contributing to.’” philosophy of education yearbook, 292–300. benoit, cecilia, leah shumka, rachel phillips, mary clare kennedy, and lynne belleisle. 2015. issue brief: sexual violence against women in canada. ottawa: status of women canada. bloom, paul. 2016. against empathy: the case for rational compassion. new york: ecco. brison, susan j. 2002. aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self. princeton, nj: princeton university press. freedman – the epistemic significance of #metoo published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 broad, jacqueline, and karen detlefsen, eds. 2017. women and liberty, 1600–1800: philosophical essays. oxford: oxford university press. broockman, david, and joshua kalla. 2016. “durably reducing transphobia: a field experiment on door-to-door canvassing.” science 352 (6282): 220–225. doi:10.1126/science.aad9713. bucik, alex. 2016. canada: discrimination and violence against lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women and gender diverse and two spirit people on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. egale canada human rights trust. burge, tyler. 1993. “content preservation.” philosophical review 102 (4): 457–488. doi:10.2307/2185680. chemaly, soraya. 2018. rage becomes her: the power of women’s anger. new york: atria books. coady, c. a. j. 1992. testimony: a philosophical study. oxford: oxford university press. coates, ta-nehisi. 2015. between the world and me. new york: spiegel and grau. cooper, brittney. 2018. eloquent rage: a black feminist discovers her superpower. new york: st. martin’s press. decety, jean, and jason m. cowell. 2014a. “the complex relation between morality and empathy.” trends in cognitive sciences 18 (7): 337–339. doi:10.1016/j .tics.2014.04.008. ———. 2014b. “friends or foes: is empathy necessary for moral behavior?” perspectives on psychological science 9 (5): 525–537. doi:10.1177 /1745691614545130. denizet-lewis, benoit. 2016. “how do you change voters’ minds? 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two neglected issues.” philosophical quarterly 64 (256): 478–496. doi:10.1093/pq/pqu013. pettigrew, thomas, and linda tropp. 2006. “a meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory.” journal of personality and social psychology 90 (5): 751– 783. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.5.751. prinz, jesse. 2011. “against empathy.” in “empathy and ethics,” edited by remy debes, special issue, southern journal of philosophy 49 (s1): 214–233. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00069.x. pritchard, duncan. 2007. “recent work on epistemic value.” american philosophical quarterly 44 (2): 85–110. raz, joseph. 2005. “the myth of instrumental rationality.” journal of ethics and social philosophy 1 (1): 1–28. rothschild, babette. 2000. the body remembers: the psychophysiology of trauma and trauma treatment. new york: w. w. norton. saul, jennifer. 2012. “ranking exercises in philosophy and implicit bias.” journal of social philosophy 43 (3): 256–273. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.2012.01564.x. shook, natalie j., and russell h. fazio. 2008. “interracial roommate relationships: an experimental field test of the contact hypothesis.” psychological science 19 (7): 717–723. singal, jesse. 2017. “the contact hypothesis offers hope for the world.” new york magazine, february 10. http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/thecontact-hypothesis-offers-hope-for-the-world.html. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 24 steele, claude m. 2010. whistling vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do. new york: w.w. norton. thomas, emily, ed. 2018. early modern women on metaphysics. new york: cambridge university press. traister, rebecca. 2018. good and mad: the revolutionary power of women’s anger. new york: simon and schuster. van der kolk, bessel a. 1996. “the body keeps the score.” in traumatic stress: the effects of overwhelming experience on the mind, body, and society, edited by bessel a. van der kolk, alexander c. mcfarlane and lars weisaeth, 214– 241. new york: guilford press. ———. 2006. foreword to trauma and the body: a sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy, edited by pat ogden, kekuni minton, and claire pain. new york: w.w. norton. van woudenberg, rené. 2009. “ignorance and force: two excusing conditions for false beliefs.” american philosophical quarterly 46 (4): 373–386. wedgwood, ralph. 2014. “rationality as a virtue.” analytic philosophy 55 (4): 319– 338. doi:10.1111/phib.12055. zak, paul j. 2015. “why inspiring stories make us react: the neuroscience of narrative.” cerebrum, jan.–feb. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc /articles/pmc4445577/. karyn l. freedman is an associate professor of philosophy at the university of guelph. her research interests are in epistemology and feminist philosophy. she has published papers on a variety of subjects, including testimony, disagreement, epistemic akrasia, and psychological trauma. her book, one hour in paris: a true story of rape and recovery, won the 2015 british columbia national award for canadian non-fiction. 8030 freedman title page 8030 freedman final format using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 4 2017 using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy claire a. lockard elon university, clockard@elon.edu helen meskhidze elon university, meskhidze.helen@gmail.com sean wilson elon university, swilson30@elon.edu nim batchelor elon university, batchelo@elon.edu stephen bloch-schulman elon university, sschulman@elon.edu see next page for additional authors recommended citation lockard, claire a.; helen meskhidze; sean wilson; nim batchelor; stephen bloch-schulman; and ann j. cahill. 2017. "using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 4 mailto:sschulman@elon.edu using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female identified undergraduate students in philosophy authors claire a. lockard, helen meskhidze, sean wilson, nim batchelor, stephen bloch-schulman, and ann j. cahill using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy1 claire a. lockard, helen meskhidze, sean wilson, nim batchelor, stephen bloch-schulman, ann j. cahill abstract this paper is part of a larger project designed to examine and ameliorate the underrepresentation of female-identified students in the philosophy department at elon university. here, we provide a description and analysis of our focus group research. we ran three focus groups of female-identified undergraduate students: one group consisted of students who had taken more than one philosophy class, one consisted of students who had taken only one philosophy class, and one consisted of students who had taken no philosophy classes. we find evidence that: (1) one philosophy class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset among female-identified students of philosophy, (2) professors have the potential to ameliorate (or reinforce) students’ (mis)perceptions of philosophy; and (3) students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking as being at odds with that required by philosophy. we conclude by articulating a series of questions worthy of further study. 1 we are grateful to dr. kim fath for assisting us in developing our facilitation methodology and to dr. alexa darby and dr. aunchalee palmquist for explaining some of the best practices for coding, interpreting, and analyzing fg data. dr. palmquist was particularly helpful to us as we revised our methods. we thank our fg participants for their illuminating insights. we would also like to thank the participants of the 2014 conference for the international society for the scholarship of teaching and learning and of the 2015 conference, “exploring collaborative contestations and diversifying philosophy,” held by the american philosophical association’s committee on the status of women and hypatia, for their helpful questions and input. we are particularly thankful to hypatia for granting our research group travel funds, making it possible to present our work. we are also thankful to elon university’s philosophy department, the office of undergraduate research, and especially the center for teaching and learning, for providing consistent funding throughout our investigation. finally, thank you to the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly and our anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions. 1 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 keywords: underrepresentation, female-identified students, focus groups, philosophy introduction this paper is part of a larger project designed to examine and ameliorate the underrepresentation of female-identified students in the philosophy department at elon university.2,3 our two-year project was conducted by a research team consisting of three faculty members of our philosophy department and three undergraduate philosophy majors. elon university is a private, mid-size (approximately 5,000 students), primarily undergraduate university located near burlington, north carolina. elon’s class of 2019 is 19% nonwhite and has roughly 60% female-identified students and 40% male-identified students (elon university 2016a). elon is socioeconomically homogeneous, with only 9% of students receiving need-based federal pell grants (groves 2015a). additionally, most of the students identify as heterosexual. elon also has a high percentage of students in fraternities or sororities (about 40% of the student body, [pendulum 2015]). in our experience, elon’s student body has a very polite culture; students often hesitate to take public positions on issues, and fitting in socially is valued enormously. there is very little activism or student protest (groves 2015b); further, student activities are closely monitored by university staff—for instance, at the time of our conducting this study, all flyers must be submitted by a university-recognized student organization and then approved by university staff (elon university 2016b). our department consists of seven full-time faculty members who, despite adopting a variety of approaches, are united by their commitment to philosophy as a lived practice. we began investigating our department as conversations about the underrepresentation of women sprang up in philosophy departments worldwide (see baron, dougherty, and miller 2015; goddard et al. 2008; and beebee and saul 2011). that women have been wildly underrepresented in philosophy in the united states at every level at and above introductory classes is beyond dispute.4 paxton, 2 for more information about our project, procedures, and findings, see http://www.elon.edu/e-web/academics/elon_college/philosophy/dip.xhtml. 3 throughout this paper, we use the term “female-identified” to mean students who self-identify as female. when referencing the work of others, we adopt their terminology (often, “woman”). 4 despite being more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree (bureau of labor statistics 2016), women comprise only about 40% of the enrollment in introductory 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 figdor, and tiberius find that “the proportion of females reliably decreases as one moves through each level in the academy, from introductory courses through the faculty population” (2012, 952).5 much of the drop-off of female participation in philosophy occurs between the introductory course level and the decision to become a philosophy major. kathryn norlock, citing the work of paxton, figdor, and tiberius (2012), calls this the “intro-major cliff” (norlock 2012, 347). the elon philosophy department is no exception to this international trend of female underrepresentation. a numerical breakdown of elon’s intro-major cliff from 2011 to 2014 reveals that while our introductory classes are 48% female-identified students, only 38% of our majors identify as female. before undertaking efforts to recruit female-identified students, we wanted to ensure that our department was a space where female-identified students felt well-served and respected; without such assurance, we would run the moral risk of increasing the proportion of female-identified students in an academic context that could potentially harm them. to learn more about female-identified students’ experiences, we first surveyed a large, gender-diverse sample of elon’s student body about their perceptions of the philosophy department (cahill et al., in preparation). using the data we gathered from the survey, we then conducted focus groups (hereafter fg) with female-identified students, the results of which we discuss in this paper. with these fgs, we hoped to (1) expand upon what we learned from the survey and (2) find new, more specific, and detailed information that might explain low recruitment and retention of female-identified students that we could not have gleaned from our survey. though the literature on the underrepresentation of women in philosophy has been growing recently, much of it offers theoretical frameworks to explain the gap (antony 2012; calhoun 2009; dotson 2012; haslanger 2008) or quantitative evidence to explore the severity of the gap (baron, dougherty, and miller 2015; paxton, figdor, and tiberius 2012; thompson et al. 2016). qualitative data has only undergraduate philosophy courses and about 30% of undergraduate philosophy majors (paxton, figdor, and tiberius 2012, 952–953). further, the percentage of women in full-time postsecondary instructional positions was a mere 16.6 percent as of 2003 (us department of education 2008), and the percentage of tenure/tenure-track faculty at 98 of the top graduate programs for philosophy (as rated by the philosophical gourmet report) includes only 23 percent women as of 2015 (van camp 2015; see haslanger 2013 for further discussion on these final two statistics). 5 for a broader review of the literature on female underrepresentation in philosophy, specifically regarding the two common models for conceptualizing this problem, see antony 2012. 3 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 been gathered by one other researcher we could find: crystal nicole lilith aymelek conducted one-on-one interviews with women who were philosophy majors or had recently graduated with a philosophy major. her goal was to identify the factors that encouraged them to stick with the subject (aymelek 2015). our paper, like aymelek’s, seeks to understand the gender gap “from the perspective of the actual experiences of women in philosophy” (8). furthermore, since there is no published literature on fgs being conducted by other philosophy departments exploring female-identified students’ underrepresentation, we thought this method of investigation would be especially fruitful and helpful to other philosophy departments as they continue their investigations.6 we begin this paper with a description of our methodology, including our strategy for recruiting participants, the structure of our fgs, some of the questions we asked students, and our method for coding the data. next, we summarize the results of our coding procedure. third, we discuss our results in relation to existing literature. we find evidence that for female-identified students, (1) one philosophy class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset among female-identified students of philosophy, (2) professors have the potential to ameliorate (or reinforce) students’ (mis)perceptions of philosophy, and (3) students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking as being at odds with that required by philosophy. i. methods our fg methodology was informed by the survey we conducted, which was addressed to a gender-diverse sample of elon’s undergraduate student body. the survey data, to our surprise, did not reveal many significant differences in responses between gender groups or any reports of sexism or misogyny (cahill et al., in preparation). given this lack of significant gendered differences, we were interested to see if any new themes would emerge in student-guided conversations with female-identified students. we decided to have our fgs consist of only femaleidentified students because we were particularly interested in uncovering new insights into their experiences. moreover, we thought that female-identified students would be more likely to speak candidly and frankly regarding their gendered experiences in a setting that did not include male-identified students or facilitators. 6 although there is no published data on philosophy departments using focus groups, we know of one other department currently conducting them: allyson scott and sidney rodgers of centre college have recently presented their findings from student-led fgs with female and male undergraduates in order to gauge women’s perceptions of philosophy (scott and rodgers 2016). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 the two female-identified, undergraduate members of our research team recruited for and facilitated the fgs. the exclusion of the faculty members (including one female-identified faculty member) of our research team in this phase of our research project was also intentional: we felt that fg participants would be more likely to convey forthright opinions about philosophy and our department with female-identified researchers whom they considered as their peers.7 participants to recruit fg participants of all levels of undergraduate study, we asked instructors of general education classes if we could speak to the female-identified students in their classes. with the instructors’ approval, we asked the non-femaleidentified students in each class to exit the room before beginning to recruit for our study. we recruited: 1. five female-identified students who had taken more than one philosophy class or were currently taking their second philosophy class at elon; 2. four female-identified students who had taken only one philosophy class or were enrolled in their first philosophy class at elon; and 3. three female-identified students who had not taken a philosophy class and were not currently enrolled in a philosophy class at elon. while this is a lower participation rate than we had hoped for, the qualitative nature of this study allowed us to proceed; qualitative studies are intended to highlight participant voices, rather than draw statistically significant conclusions about a population (gibbs 1997). of course, it is possible that the samples were skewed; for instance, two students in fg 2 were in the same philosophy class and thus may have been more likely to agree with one another’s experiences than if they had not been in the class together. or students who had more positive experiences with their philosophy class may have been more likely to want to participate in the conversations. we hope to mitigate some of the effects of biased sampling by putting the fg results in conversation with extant departmental data on enrollment and grades, the survey results, and the existing literature on the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy. each method of research that our department undertook (data mining, surveying, and conducting 7 as mills argues, oppressed groups might feel compelled to appease their oppressors: “members of subordinate groups may judge it imprudent, given the power relations involved, to give an honest account of how they feel about things” (mills 1998, 29). we hoped to avoid such power imbalances (and receive honest feedback) by having female-identified students conduct the fgs. 5 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 focus groups) offers a different type of knowledge, which, when combined, form a more coherent picture of the department’s climate for female-identified students. procedure the fgs began with an introductory activity in which we asked participants to write down or draw what came to mind when they thought about philosophy, and then share their responses with the group. next, we engaged them in a “thinkpair-share” activity, where participants first respond individually on paper to a set of questions, then discuss their responses with another participant, and, finally, share their combined insights with the entire group (originally developed in lyman 1981). following these introductory activities, we facilitated a large group discussion by asking participants a number of open-ended questions about their experiences in and perceptions of philosophy. while we tried to maintain consistency across groups for comparative purposes, we tailored some questions to specific groups.8 overall, the fgs were semi-structured (longhurst 2010, 103)—though we had specific questions to address, casual conversation about these questions was encouraged. data analysis audio recordings were transcribed and then redacted of all identifying information in order to maintain confidentiality for participants. further, any identifying information that students mentioned about their professors, classes, and/or peers was redacted from the transcripts. we began our coding process by developing analysis questions (which are distinct from the questions we asked during the actual fgs; see the results section for our analysis questions). we then turned to the transcripts, searching for comments made by participants that related to our questions. to make sense of all the comments, we used in vivo coding, a qualitative data analysis technique that allows researchers to use participants’ own voices to develop codes.9 codes are short descriptions of ideas present in a single data set; in our case, a single fg transcript. codes capture the way data (that is, participants’ comments) relate to analysis questions.10 from these codes, we developed categories and themes through an iterative process involving constant comparison of data and discussion among our research team members (glaser 2002). categories consist of codes that 8 for a full list of our questions for each group, see the appendix. 9 while we acknowledge the impossibility of preventing preconceived notions from affecting our data analysis (especially because we are familiar with the literature), we followed the practice of using participants’ own words to stay closer to the viewpoints presented during the fgs. 10 for a more detailed explanation of coding, see saldaña 2009. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 appear within two data sets (two different fg transcripts, in our case) and themes consist of codes that appear within all data sets (all three fg transcripts, in our case). these unifying threads enable the researchers to interpret the data.11 ii. results we coded our transcripts for each fg (see table 1) using three analysis questions: 1. with what mindset—fixed or growth—do students approach the topic of philosophy? 2. what are students’ perceptions of the climate of a. the classroom (professors, students, coursework)? b. the major(s)? c. the department? d. philosophy in general? 3. what are factors (past and present) that influence students’ decisions to take or not take philosophy? with our first analysis question, we sought to explore the extent to which students in each fg demonstrated a fixed or growth mindset. carol dweck defines a fixed mindset as “believing that your qualities are carved in stone” (dweck 2006, 6), whereas a growth mindset is “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts” (7). that is, someone who exhibits a fixed mindset will believe that their qualities, such as doing philosophy well, are caused by genius or a given disposition toward critical thinking, as opposed to a process of learning and practice. we were curious about fixed versus growth mindset approaches to philosophy because there is some evidence in the literature to indicate that this is a gendered phenomenon (buckwalter and stich 2010, 32; dweck and gilliard 1975; leslie et al. 2015).12 that is, female-identified students are more likely to have a fixed mindset about whether they can succeed academically. 11 for further details on our methodology, see http://www.elon.edu/eweb/academics/elon_college/philosophy/dip.xhtml. 12 it is worth noting that while the literature finds that women are more likely than men to exhibit a fixed mindset, in this fg, we could not investigate these differences as we did not interview male-identified students (and the fg methodology would not allow for such comparisons even if we had). rather, here, we hope to investigate mindsets and their effects among female-identified students’ experience with philosophy. 7 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 with our second analysis question, we investigated what students thought about the climate of various aspects of philosophy/our department, broadly understood. haslanger, in a reflection on the culture of philosophy, writes that, in her experience, “it is very hard to find a place in philosophy that isn’t actively hostile toward women and minorities, or at least assumes that a successful philosopher should look and act [and talk] like a (traditional, white) man” (2008, 212). specifically, haslanger makes the point that the "schema"—that is, the common, intersubjective mental construct—of the discipline of philosophy and the figure of the philosopher align themselves against femininity (2008, 212–214). building on haslanger's work regarding schemas, calhoun (2009) argues that it is likely that undergraduates enter philosophy with conflicting woman/philosopher schemas. calhoun suggests that this conflict makes it difficult for female-identified undergraduates to envision themselves as philosophers, even if they are interested in philosophy. indeed, calhoun (2009, 220) speculates that due to this conception of philosophy, even a single, not particularly egregious experience of sexism within an introductory class might lead a female-identified student to interpret that experience as "normatively representative" of philosophy as a whole (whereas students within more "feminine" disciplines might interpret similar experiences as exceptions within the discipline). the third question gave us insight into the factors relevant in students’ choices to take, not take, or continue taking philosophy. this question interested us because it related to other studies addressing the intro-major cliff and retention rates of women in philosophy (paxton, figdor, and tiberius 2012; norlock 2012). when we considered the students who had never taken philosophy, this question gave us insight into the “pre-university effect,” described by baron, dougherty, and miller (elaborating on calhoun 2009) as an effect of many influences prior to university experience that contribute to a gender schema that makes it hard for women to see themselves as philosophy majors (2015, 468). the “pre-university” aspect of this effect is key since it highlights that even though many students do not have formal experience with philosophy prior to enrolling in their university, femaleidentified students are nevertheless likely to have a perception of themselves as incompatible with philosophy even before entering university. though this phenomenon is framed in the literature as “pre-university effects,” we will also be thinking about these effects as extra-philosophic (see discussion section below). the following analysis will be organized by analysis question. each analysis question will be subdivided by fg and will end with a cross-fg analysis. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 focus group 1 five female-identified students who had taken more than one philosophy class or were enrolled in their second philosophy class focus group 2 four female-identified students who had taken only one philosophy class or were enrolled in their first philosophy class focus group 3 three female-identified students who had taken no philosophy classes table 1: focus group demographic information question 1: with what mindset—fixed or growth—do students approach the topic of philosophy? question 1, focus group 1 the students of fg 1 frequently expressed growth mindsets; of the 30 total statements coded as mindset statements, 25 (83%) indicated a growth mindset and five (17%) indicated a fixed mindset. in many cases, these statements expressed a conception of philosophy as requiring continual learning in order to be successful. for instance, students commented that the “learning never stops really for philosophy,” that you must “continue challenging yourself,” and that if “[you keep asking questions, then] you will succeed.” students also indicated a belief that they had improved their philosophical skills, in comments such as, “[in philosophy, i] learned to defend my own positions,” and “i’ve had philosophy so i understand the reading.” likewise, students saw their personal development as connected to their study of philosophy: “[i am] more open to critique and opposing arguments [after having taken philosophy]”; “[philosophy] made me a more thoughtful person.” of the five instances in which students indicated a fixed mindset, most were oriented toward being innately good at philosophy. in one of these instances, a student mentioned her professor’s comment that she “had a knack” for philosophy and that she should keep taking philosophy classes. (we interpret “having a knack” as designating a student’s innate abilities.) in another case, a student saw her success as inevitable because she saw herself as a “curious person.” overall, however, statements such as “anyone can succeed if they put their minds to it” are characteristic of fg 1. 9 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 question 1, focus group 2 the students of fg 2 expressed a mix of statements that indicated both growth and fixed mindsets. there were 15 statements coded as mindset-related, with six (40%) statements coded as growth mindset and nine (60%) coded as fixed mindset. regarding growth mindsets, a few statements acknowledged that one could succeed in philosophy if one puts in significant effort (“maybe if i really tried [i could succeed at philosophy]”; “if you're willing to at least think more broadly, you can succeed [in philosophy]”). other statements alluded to similar sentiments, though the students suggested that their particular conditions made them not want to pursue philosophy (“if i [had] started over . . . in a lower level class [i could have seen myself continuing with philosophy]”). the majority of codes for fg 2, however, indicated a fixed mindset. two students remarked that they do not think in philosophic ways (“i’m just not a person who thinks in that way”; “i don't think in a religious or philosophical way”), whereas another said that she “just [doesn’t] tend to think as broadly or challenge critical thoughts as much.” a few statements made by fg 2 participants indicated a fixed mindset in favor of their philosophic ability. for instance, one student commented that she was “one of those people who will have discussions about [philosophy] and [who thinks] about it a lot,” indicating her predisposition towards philosophic thinking. another commented that she “can succeed in philosophy because [she does] think about big things.” lastly, a student suggested that there were insurmountable challenges to her success in her philosophy class saying, “there was no way i was going to succeed in the class i took.” on the whole, students of fg 2 conveyed a pessimistic attitude regarding their prospects for success in philosophy, even as they acknowledged that philosophy might be something that they could get better at. question 1, focus group 3 the students of fg 3 expressed both fixed and growth mindsets regarding philosophy. of the 12 statements that were coded as indicative of mindset, seven were fixed (58%) and five were growth (42%). statements coded as growth mindset generally characterized philosophy as an activity that helps one think more critically or makes one smarter. for instance, one student recalled that when her friends took philosophy, it “really raised [her friends’] critical thinking levels.” another suggested that philosophy would help her “intellectually” to be able to “understand how [other people] think and being able to . . . argue without losing.” statements that expressed a fixed mindset had varied themes. some students simply commented that they would not succeed in philosophy, noting, “i like logic well enough too, i just don’t think i could wrap my head around so many different viewpoints and argue about each one.” others believed that philosophy 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 required a type of thinking that they were simply not “capable” of. another student had the “impression that maybe [philosophy is] not the right thing” for her. an interesting distinction between “logical” and “intuitive” thinking emerged in fg 3. in particular, one statement, expressive of a fixed mindset, reads, “[my roommate] is very logical, which is why philosophy appealed to her, [whereas i am more of an intuitive thinker].” another code, characterized as growth mindset, reveals a similar distinction: “i don’t think you’d have to work very hard to [persuade me to take a philosophy class]. i mean, i’m half-convinced to take one at some point, simply because i want to be smart and be able to use logic rather than intuition” (emphasis added). question 1, cross-focus group analysis across groups, it seems that the students of fg 1 were more likely to express growth mindsets (83%) than the students of fg 2 (40%) and fg 3 (42%). in particular, there were noticeably more references made to a certain “type of person” who thinks philosophically in the latter fgs than in the first fg. question 2: what are students’ perceptions of the climate of philosophy? question 2, focus group 1 overall, perceptions of philosophy’s climate among participants of fg 1 were quite positive. students of fg 1 viewed philosophy and our department as a whole as being inclusive and welcoming, and/or taking steps toward becoming more inclusive and welcoming. for instance, when asked to give her general perceptions of philosophy during the icebreaker activity, one student thought of the words “creativity, inclusiveness, discovery, and truth,” explaining that “philosophy is very welcoming to a lot of different ideas and ways of approaching things,” while another participant thought of the words “ethics, community, challenging the norm, discussion, sharing of experience and argument.” likewise, when asked about the department, students spoke of feeling comfortable and welcome. one student said that she “never felt like anyone will judge [her],” while another mentioned that “as a first year, [she] met so many people in the philosophy department who were majors or who worked there . . . and [she] admired them.” students further commented that “the [philosophy] professors . . . are really good at being inclusive,” and that they found the classes within the department to be egalitarian and democratic. while perceptions of philosophy and the department were favorable, students reported finding the department’s curriculum and their peers in lower level classes to be unwelcoming, exclusive, and frustrating. one student said, “on a curricular level, inclusive is not a word i would choose,” and another noted that in 11 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 the many philosophy classes she had taken, aside from her feminist theory class, she had “only learned about male philosophers.” this was echoed in the icebreaker activity by one student who cited “kant, locke, descartes, hume, aristotle, plato, socrates, nietzsche, buber” as the philosophers she thought of when she thought of philosophy. students did report, however, that professors were encouraging to female-identified students, citing several times that specific professors encouraged them to pursue the topic further or asked to hear more women in the class speak. additionally, students in fg 1 reported feeling frustration in lower-level philosophy classes due to the perceived ignorance and apathy of their peers. there were four comments made to this effect, including, “there were lots of ignorant things that were said [in my lower-level class],” and “it’s really frustrating when [other students] didn’t care.” in contrast, they felt comfortable in upper-level classes and expressed dissatisfaction when they had to move from upper-level to lowerlevel classes.13 one student, agreeing with another, described this transition as “the worst situation.” lastly, students of fg 3 mentioned three times that gender dynamics were not noticeable in the classroom. they reported that the sexism they did experience was exhibited by “other students in the class [not the professor],” and that often it is those students’ first experience with philosophy. another student commented that “men tend to dominate the discussion to a point where it makes it, not purposefully, but [inadvertently] uncomfortable for other people.” additionally, students wished that gender was a topic of conversation even when the material was not explicitly about women or gender. question 2, focus group 2 in contrast to fg 1, perceptions of climate in fg 2 included positive perceptions of their peers and negative perceptions of their professors. there were nine comments made about pleasant interactions among students in the classroom, connoted by the use of words like “nice” and “respectful.” however, students also reported noticing that men dominated the class conversations “except for a selected couple [of women]” and that there were more men than women in their classes. 13 within our department, there are no prerequisites for upper-level classes. indeed, many students’ first philosophy class is upper-level. this seems to be the case with most of the students of fg 1. yet, once these students decided to major in philosophy (after taking upper-level classes), they had to fulfill the major requirements by later moving “down” to lower-level classes. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 students’ perceptions/experiences of their professors in fg 2 were either neutral or unfavorable.14 students reported seven times that professors did not allow disagreement with the professor’s own opinions (“if it wasn't [professor's] opinion, it was wrong”), four times that professors were vocally opinionated (implying this was an undesirable quality with statements such as, “[my professor] was very opinionated and wasn't afraid of showing that”), and two times that professors dominated the conversation (“[my professor] always said it was studentled [discussion, but it was not]”). there were also seven comments made about professors playing favorites. one student hypothesized that her professor’s favorites were “based on major” and made class “tough” for others. one student reported that she would not have called her professor sexist, but that she did feel that “the girls at the beginning of the semester had to have a little more weight behind what they said.” when asked about philosophy in general, students had a mix of positive and negative responses. three comments were made about philosophy being intellectually stimulating, but two comments were made about it being confusing and difficult, and two comments were made indicating that philosophy was unfamiliar to the students even though they had taken a class. when asked during the icebreaker activity about philosophy, students said philosophy was “thought provoking and open to interpretation” but that it was also “confusing and difficult.” the philosophers they cited included socrates, plato, aristotle, hume, machiavelli, descartes, and kant. no students expressed a desire to take more philosophy classes and one student even said that she had been planning to minor in philosophy, but that taking one class had dissuaded her from taking more. question 2, focus group 3 overall, participants of fg 3 made fewer comments about their perceptions of philosophy’s climate than did the participants of the previous two fgs. students were not familiar with the discipline or the department. some comments indicated that students would be open to doing philosophy in the future (one student said that you “wouldn’t have to work very hard” to persuade her to take a philosophy class), but some students felt that philosophy “wasn’t for [them].” when asked about philosophy in general, students offered a range of responses. three comments were made about philosophy being intellectually difficult and undesirable because of this difficulty (one student commented that when she thought of philosophy, she thought of “mind-screwings”). two students talked about philosophy not being welcoming to them (one said it was because philosophy is 14 there were two students from the same class, which may have fueled this topic of discussion in ways that caused more codes about professors to emerge. 13 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 intimidating, and one mentioned that she thought men could relate better to the topic). when asked to cite some philosophers they knew during the icebreaker activity, the students in this fg replied with socrates, aristotle, plato, and “those ancient greek dudes” more generally. students did not have particularly strong perceptions about the philosophy majors except to say that they were good at arguing. the knowledge students did have about philosophy classes at elon came from their friends who had taken philosophy before and had had positive experiences. question 2, cross-focus group analysis while common threads emerged throughout each individual fg, a cross-fg comparison did not yield many similar codes/code categories. inclusivity was the most prevalent code in the first group. positive perceptions of professors in the first fg contrasted with negative perceptions of professors in the second fg; and general unfamiliarity was most often mentioned in the third fg. one connection we found was that in both fgs 2 and 3, students perceived philosophy as difficult and confusing, but not in a way that was intellectually rewarding. each fg did mention that philosophy is a male-dominated field, though it is worth noting that students were primed to consider gender (see methods section). question 3: what are factors (past and present) that influence students’ decisions to take or not take philosophy? question 3, focus group 1 given recent discussion regarding pre-university factors that influence students’ decisions to take philosophy (baron, dougherty, and miller, 2015), we were interested in what, if any, prior experience women in our fgs had with philosophy before taking their first class. female-identified students of fg 1 equally reported having and not having pre-college experience with philosophy. one woman noted that she was not sure why she wanted to take philosophy, but that she “just felt it.” other participants of fg 1 enrolled in their first class to fulfill either general studies or other requirements. once in their first class, they reported being drawn to philosophy, either by the course material (one student) or the professor (three students). interestingly, two students reported being drawn in by the same professor, who encouraged them by saying things like, “you have a knack for this,” or “keep plugging away.” nearly a third of our codes for why women were drawn to philosophy from our first fg refer to the influence of a single professor. the female-identified majors of our first fg reported coming back for more philosophy because they “love it.” they found philosophy useful for their life goals, saying, “it was the only thing i felt was useful to me in many ways,” and “you come 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 back [to philosophy] when you learn why it's helpful.” two comments were made about the worth of philosophy: “i wanted to have more from a class than just a grade,” and “i like that i'm spending my money on this [philosophy class],” indicating that students found philosophy worth much more than the money they pay for the class or the grade they receive at the end. one student reported that it encourages “the other side of [her] brain,” while another said that “philosophy really encourages a much higher level of thinking and being creative.” two students related that philosophy left them with more questions “than when [they] came in and that interested [them].” one student in fg 1 spoke about the community established within the department, saying that “philosophy is kind of like a hidden gem on campus, and the people that are in it seem to be so much more like myself than anybody else on campus.” question 3, focus group 2 of the codes describing why the women of fg 2 took their first philosophy class, 33% related to fulfilling requirements. alternatively, one student reported enrolling because her friend enrolled, while another reported enrolling because she “was considering minoring in philosophy.” two reported being randomly placed in philosophy, and one student commented that she “ended up getting it because freshmen don't get good classes.” in regards to why they did not come back for more philosophy classes, nearly a third of the participants’ responses indicate being deterred from further philosophy by their first professor and/or class. they commented that their professor was “very opinionated and [was not] afraid of showing that” and that “the professor sort of played favorites, which was tough.” one further noted that had she “started at a lower level with a different professor, [she might] have taken more classes.” another third of students’ responses indicated that if philosophy overlapped with their major more, they would take more classes. lastly, one student commented that “as a communications major, i'm all for thinking differently and things like that, but i also like to have more concrete answers.” question 3, focus group 3 participants of fg 3 reported not having thought about taking philosophy (four comments, or 29% of the codes), saying, “i guess i’ve never really thought about it. it’s never been a conscious decision,” and “i didn’t consciously avoid it but i didn’t consciously seek it out either.” they otherwise noted not having time in their schedules for philosophy (six comments, or 43%). others noted that were philosophy to fulfill more requirements or more directly relate to their courses of study, they might enroll in more classes. lastly, one student noted that she has the perception that philosophy is “not the right thing for [her].” 15 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 question 3, cross-focus group analysis there was only one category of codes that came up in all three fgs: philosophy’s relation to elon’s general studies requirements. a small number of majors reported taking their first philosophy class to fulfill a requirement while some students who had never taken philosophy noted that if philosophy fulfilled more requirements, they might take a class. there were several categories of codes that appeared between two of our three fgs. the first and second fgs revealed the influence of professors in either recruiting or deterring students. many of our majors reported that they came back because a professor encouraged them to take more philosophy, while the students who had only taken one class reported that their negative experience with their professor deterred them from philosophy. philosophy majors reported liking being left with more questions than answers, while students who took one class reported not enjoying the same experience. one woman in our first fg reported just “feeling” philosophy, while another in our last fg reported knowing intuitively that it is not right for her. many participants of our second and third fgs noted that if philosophy related more directly to their major (such that they could receive credit toward their major requirements), they might have taken more philosophy. iii. discussion in the following discussion, we contextualize our fgs by positioning what participants said within the existing literature on the underrepresentation of femaleidentified students in philosophy. we find evidence that one class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset in female-identified students, that professors have the potential to ameliorate (or reinforce) extra-philosophic effects, and that students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking at odds with that required by philosophy. one class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset. many members of elon’s philosophy department adopt a growth mindsetoriented approach to doing and teaching philosophy. for example, to cultivate a growth mindset, professors often assign drafts or scaffold paper assignments, and several faculty members explicitly describe philosophy as something students can (and likely will) get better at. thus, it was our expectation (or perhaps our hope) that as students took more philosophy classes and were more exposed to this growth mindset approach to the subject, they would view philosophy as something at which they could improve. we consequently expected to encounter a few growth mindset responses from fg 3 participants, more growth mindset responses from fg 2 participants, and even more growth mindset responses from fg 1 participants. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 our data, however, showed that this was not the case. although fg 1 had almost all growth mindset responses, this pattern did not hold for fgs 2 and 3. participants of fg 3 made 42% growth mindset statements and participants of fg 2 made 40% growth mindset statements. in this case, there was not a significant mindset shift after students took a single philosophy class, suggesting that mere exposure to our philosophy classes is not enough to remedy a fixed mindset approach to philosophy. of course, we cannot know what encouraged a growth mindset in the students who continued with philosophy; perhaps those who already had a growth mindset were more likely to continue on, for example. a number of studies have discouraged the use of fixed-mindset messages (even as praise) in an effort to ensure that female-identified students do not develop a brilliance-based conception of philosophy (benétreau-dupin and beaulac 2015; haslanger 2008; leslie et al. 2015; thompson et al. 2016). however, our data suggests other possibilities. students from fg 1 reported several ways in which they were encouraged by professors to continue taking philosophy classes. one student reported a professor encouraging her with a fixed mindset approach, saying, “you have a knack for this.” another student reported a professor making comments more characteristic of a growth mindset, like “keep plugging away.” we are curious about ways in which faculty members in philosophy departments can deploy fixed or growth mindset frameworks. perhaps positive fixed mindset statements are the most effective way to encourage female-identified students since they are already more likely to think with a fixed mindset. or perhaps it is most useful to undermine their fixed mindsets as frequently as possible, consistently framing students’ successes as the result of hard work and careful thinking. all we can offer here is that faculty should be careful and strategic with how they encourage femaleidentified students to continue on with philosophy. professors have the potential to ameliorate (or reinforce) extra-philosophic effects. data from fg 3 support the claim that students who have never taken philosophy classes can nevertheless have an idea of what philosophy is. in this case, participants of fg 3 considered philosophy to be uncomfortably difficult, maledominated, and argumentative. indeed, students held these perceptions despite claiming to know very little about the particular department, the philosophy majors, or philosophy as a whole. although it is unclear whether these perceptions actually played into students’ decisions to not take philosophy classes, and whether students identify these perceived traits as masculine traits, these perceptions nevertheless affirm calhoun's (2009) argument that students enter college with what haslanger (2008) terms a "schema" of the philosopher. indeed, this hypothesis is supported by baron, dougherty, and miller (2015), who found that the comfort level of women was lower than the comfort level of men during their first philosophy lecture. 17 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 to be sure, not all students in fg 3 were first-year students, so we cannot be sure if these student’s perceptions were solely formed before entering university (as “pre-university effects” [baron, dougherty, and miller 2015]), or if they developed these perceptions in their non-philosophy classes while in college (in what would be more correctly understood as “extra-philosophic effects,” to the extent that these perceptions were not formed in philosophy classrooms).15 for this reason, we avoid using the term “pre-university effects” in the remainder of this paper, despite its usefulness as a distinction, in favor of “extra-philosophic effects.” yet, if we bridge our observation about fg 3’s schemas with data from fgs 1 and 2, a more complicated picture emerges. data from fg 1 and fg 2 suggests that students’ classroom experiences, or “classroom effects” (baron, dougherty, and miller 2015), might be a more pronounced factor in students’ overall assessments of philosophy rather than any sort of “extra-philosophic effects.” in particular, the only two “classroom effects” that participants mentioned were (1) their experiences with professors and (2) their experiences with other students in the class. we found that these “classroom effects” can either (further) push students away from the discipline or ameliorate many negative preconceptions that students might have had. for instance, students from fg 2 reported not returning to philosophy almost exclusively because of classroom effects, while students from fg 1 reported returning to philosophy almost exclusively due to classroom effects. in terms of the specific “classroom effects,” the experiences of participants of fg 1 and 2 are somewhat reversed. whereas fg 1 reported mostly positive interactions with professors, and occasionally negative interactions with other students (especially in introductory classes), fg 2 reported positive interactions with students, and negative interactions with professors. this is worth highlighting because it suggests that participants’ experiences with professors were more impactful than participants’ experiences with students.16 thus, if it is true that classroom effects may ameliorate extra-philosophic effects, our data also suggests that professors have a more significant role in determining these classroom effects 15 indeed, two students within the fgs acknowledged having read and discussed texts by philosophers in non-philosophy classes, which is no surprise—according to the open syllabus project, philosophy texts are some of most frequently assigned readings across all disciplines (see http://explorer.opensyllabusproject.org/). 16 we recognize that these mixed results could be due to the differences between the populations probed by fgs 1 and 2. further fgs are necessary to clarify these mixed results. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 than some other classroom factors. overall, this suggests professors have a significant degree of influence in mitigating extra-philosophic effects.17 female-identified students who have not taken philosophy classes see themselves as intuitive thinkers but view philosophy as a discipline for logical thinkers. as noted above, students in fg 3 maintained a distinction between “logical” and “intuitive” thinking. in at least two codes, students identified philosophy and philosophical thinking with the former, and their own mode of thinking with the latter. for instance, one code reads, “[my roommate] is very logical, which is why philosophy appealed to her, [whereas i am more of an intuitive thinker].” another code expressed a similar attitude: “i don’t think you’d have to work very hard to [persuade me to take a philosophy class]. i mean, i’m half-convinced to take one at some point, simply because i want to be smart and be able to use logic rather than intuition.” the importance of this distinction lies in how it might inform haslanger’s (2008) theory of conflicting schemas and, in particular, calhoun’s (2009) suggestion of how this schema conflict impacts female-identified undergraduates. that is, it may be that some people—in particular, female-identified people—are more likely to see themselves as “intuitive thinkers,” whereas they see philosophy as a discipline more suited for “logical thinkers.” that these students each made these assumptions about the discipline without having taken a philosophy class indicates that extra-philosophical (and possibly pre-university) effects are at play. these statements also indicate that female-identified students are at least implicitly choosing to not take philosophy classes due to a conflicting schema between the philosopher (including philosophic modes of thinking) and themselves. iv. conclusion and recommendations overall, our fgs revealed three central insights about female-identified students’ perceptions of philosophy. we found that: (1) one philosophy class alone did not cultivate a growth mindset among female-identified students of philosophy, (2) professors have the potential to ameliorate or reinforce students’ perceptions of philosophy, and (3) students who have not taken philosophy are likely to see their manner of thinking as being at odds with the kind of thinking required by 17 this finding is corroborated by research done at hamilton college that indicates that one of the most significant factors in an undergraduate’s decision to major in a field is the perceived likeability of their initial professor within that field (chambliss and takacs 2014). 19 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 philosophy. in light of these findings, we propose several action steps18 as well as some avenues for future research. action steps first, after hearing from fg 3 that students were learning about philosophy from departments across campus, our research team held a workshop with nonphilosophy faculty regarding teaching philosophic works/authors in a more inclusive fashion. it is our hope that conversations about female underrepresentation with other faculty teaching philosophical texts, philosophers, and philosophic ideas can help change how students perceive philosophy, even when they are not in a philosophy class. we recommend that other departments do the same, as this can build philosophic alliances across academic disciplines, teach faculty across the university about philosophy’s efforts at combating sexism and gender inequality, and hopefully help students encounter a more gender-just way of teaching and doing philosophy wherever they encounter it. second, our fg data indicate that professors should take seriously the impact they can make on students simply by encouraging them to take more philosophy classes. while it is true that the instructor of a class does not have complete control over how a class goes (and perhaps has less control than students often assume), it seems that since students perceive that faculty have a high amount of power/influence, this influence can be used in ways that encourage femaleidentified students to take more classes. third, since several participants in our fgs seemed to contrast their intuitive thinking with what they perceived as philosophy’s more logical methodologies, departments can work to show students that logic-based arguments or ways of thinking are not the only ways of doing philosophy. instructors (particularly those teaching introductory-level classes) could include readings by philosophers who students are less likely to perceive as using logic-based arguments. this might include readings by canonical philosophers like nietzsche and kierkegaard, chinese philosophers like lao tzu and chuang tzu, feminist phenomenologists like iris marion young or sandra bartky, or more contemporary theorists like maría lugones, sara ahmed, lisa guenther, and alexis shotwell. exposing students to various methodologies that they might classify as more intuitive could help students who consider themselves more intuitive thinkers have a more pluralistic understanding of the discipline, and their potential place within it.19 18 while we offer some general recommendations, we urge departments to investigate which strategies will work best for them based on their own departmental culture. 19 thanks to jackie scott for suggesting some of these authors. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 finally, departments wanting to address gender inequality should consider working with students. this co-investigation allows faculty to gain a more accurate understanding of how students perceive their philosophy classes, instructors, and the department as a whole (bloch-schulman et al., in preparation). in fact, the fgs could not have been conducted without the students on the research team, and conducting them has proven essential for our department as we move forward and think about how to change students’ perceptions of the department as not necessarily sexist, but also not attractive to enough female-identified students. future research the results of our study point toward several areas for further investigation. first, future research might explore the most effective ways to utilize fixedor growth-mindset approaches to encourage promising female-identified students to take more philosophy classes. a number of authors have suggested adopting growth-mindset frameworks in order to retain female-identified students. for instance, benétreau-dupin and beaulac recommend adopting a practice of “explicitly indicating to students that the quality of their study is affected by their work (incremental view) [i.e., growth-mindset approach] rather than emphasizing that their academic success depends on the inherent qualities of a person [i.e., fixed-mindset approach]” (2015). haslanger also advocates a growth mindset, arguing that to disrupt stereotype threat, philosophers can “encourage [an] incremental view of intelligence as malleable and capable of expanding with hard work” (haslanger 2008, 218). while our department does, on the whole, treat philosophy as a set of skills at which one can improve, we learned from our fgs that sometimes using more explicit fixed-mindset encouragements when talking with female-identified students can encourage them to come back to the subject. if female-identified students are more likely to approach philosophy with a fixed mindset (as benétreau-dupin and beaulac remind us they are), then perhaps departments can use this to their advantage. while we would suggest a broader study of female-identified students’ reasons for persisting with philosophy before developing a concrete set of best practices for encouraging them, we think there might be more promise in certain fixed-mindset encouragement than has been addressed in the literature, especially since our data indicate that fixed mindsets persist in students after they complete a single philosophy class. second, future research might expand upon the tension we discovered between intuitive and logical thinking: do female-identified students view themselves as intuitive thinkers, and view philosophy as a logical subject that may not be for them? if so, it might be important (particularly for logic-focused departments) to cultivate growth mindsets among female-identified students, to 21 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 emphasize that logical thinking is not a gendered ability but rather a skill one can develop, and to articulate that it is not the only method of producing knowledge. third, since some of the participants of our fgs expressed that they felt motivated by lingering questions (especially participants of fg 1) while others expressed that they felt discouraged by lingering questions (especially participants of fg 3), future research might explore this incongruity. perhaps students are more comfortable engaging in questions that can be answered with certainty (i.e., wellstructured problems) rather than those that have no definitive answer and require engaging in various points of view (i.e., ill-structured problems20. it might also be important to address the causes of these preferences and their political implications. fourth, there is an opportunity for further research on students who had a negative first experience with philosophy but continued with the subject nonetheless. in our first fg, each student who took more than one philosophy class reported a positive and encouraging first philosophy class. but it would also be helpful to know what might motivate students to keep studying philosophy when their first interaction with the discipline is not so positive. indeed, we wonder about student motivations given that there are no culturally obvious extrinsic benefits to taking philosophy classes as there are with, for example, business classes. (in fact, there are many potential costs to taking philosophy, particularly for femaleidentified students.) fifth, additional research might explore the gendered self-perceptions of students who continue with philosophy. for instance, it could be that these participants considered themselves unusual women, or felt that they had more masculine traits that made them well-suited for philosophy. we did not ask participants whether they considered themselves unusual for their gender, or if they felt that they had masculine intellectual traits, but this could be a topic for future fgs or fgs at other departments—it would be helpful to know whether students’ own understanding of their gender impacted their desire to take or continue taking philosophy.21 overall, our department found these fgs to be hugely impactful in our thinking about the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy. centering student voices has allowed us to develop initiatives we believe speak to their interests and ask new questions about ways to make our classes, pedagogy, and curriculum more inclusive and inviting to female-identified students. 20 see king and kitchener 1994. 21 thanks to our anonymous reviewers for pointing out these last two avenues of future research. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 v. references antony, louise. 2012. “different voices or perfect storm: why are there so few women in philosophy?” journal of social philosophy 43 (3): 227–255. aymelek, crystal nicole lilith. 2015. "women in philosophy: a qualitative assessment of experiences at the undergraduate level," psu mcnair scholars online journal 9 (1). doi: 10.15760/mcnair.2015.6. baron, sam, tom dougherty, and kristie miller. 2015. “why is there female underrepresentation among philosophy majors? evidence of a pre-university effect.” ergo 2 (14): 329–365. benétreau-dupin, yann, and guillaume beaulac. 2015. “fair numbers: what data can and cannot tell us about the underrepresentation of women in philosophy.” ergo 2 (3). doi: 10.3998/ergo.12405314.0002.003. beebee, helen, and jennifer saul. 2011. women in philosophy in the uk: a report by the british philosophical association and the society for women in philosophy uk. http://www.bpa.ac.uk/uploads/2011/02/bpa_report_women_in_philosoph y.pdf. bloch-schulman, stephen, nim batchelor, ann j. cahill, claire a. lockard, helen meskhidze, and sean wilson. in preparation. “an argument for radical collegiality in addressing the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy: the joint work of students and faculty as researchpartners for change.” buckwalter, wesley, and stephen stich. 2010. “gender and philosophical intuition.” available at ssrn: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1683066 or doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1683066. bureau of labor statistics. 2016. labor market activity, education, and partner status among america’s young adults at 29: results from a longitudinal survey, apr. 8. us department of labor. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsyth.pdf. cahill, ann j., nim batchelor, stephen bloch-schulman, claire a. lockard, helen meskhidze, and sean wilson. in preparation. “why so few female-identified students in undergraduate philosophy courses? identifying (and eliminating) some possible factors." calhoun, cheshire. 2009. “the undergraduate pipeline problem.” hypatia 24 (2): 216–223. chambliss, daniel f., and christopher g. takacs. 2014. how college works. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. dotson, kristie. 2012. “how is this paper philosophy?” comparative philosophy 3 (1): 3–29. 23 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://ssrn.com/abstract=1683066 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1683066 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1683066 http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsyth.pdf dweck, carol. 2006. mindset: the new psychology of success. new york: ballantine books. dweck, carol, and diane gilliard. 1975. “expectancy statements as determinants of reactions to failure: sex differences in persistence and expectancy change.” journal of personality and social psychology 32 (6): 1077–1084. elon university. 2016a. “first-year class profile.” accessed may 11. https://www.elon.edu/e/admissions/undergraduate/first-year-classprofile.html. elon university. 2016b. “moseley campus center posting policies.” accessed may 11. http://www.elon.edu/e-web/students/campuscenter/fund.xhtml. gibbs, anita. 1997. “focus groups.” social research update (19). http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru19.html. glaser, barney g. 2002. “conceptualization: on theory and theorizing using grounded theory.” international journal of qualitative methods 1 (2): 1–31. goddard, eliza, susan dodds, lynda burns, mark colyvan, frank jackson, karen jones, and catriona mackenzie. 2008. “improving the participation of women in the philosophy profession; report c: students by gender in philosophy programs in australian universities.” australasian association of philosophy. https://aap.org.au/resources/documents/publications/ipwpp/ipwpp_repo rtc_students.pdf. groves, isaac. 2015a. “report: elon university lacks economic diversity.” timesnews, april 10. http://www.thetimesnews.com/article/20150410/news/304109841. ———. 2015b. “out ahead of it.” times-news, november 28. http://www.thetimesnews.com/article/20151128/news/151129048. haslanger, sally. 2008. “changing the ideology and culture of philosophy: not by reason (alone).” hypatia 23 (2): 210–223. ———. 2013 “women in philosophy? do the math.” new york times, september 2. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/women-in-philosophydo-the-math/. king, patricia m., and karen strohm kitchener, 1994. developing reflective judgment: understanding and promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. leslie, sarah-jane, cimpian andrei, meredith meyer, and edward freeland. 2015. “expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines.” science 347 (6219): 262–265. longhurst, robyn. 2010. “semi-structured interviews and focus groups” in key methods in geography, edited by nicholas clifford, shaun french, and gill valentine, 103–115. london: sage publications. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 https://www.elon.edu/e/admissions/undergraduate/first-year-class-profile.html https://www.elon.edu/e/admissions/undergraduate/first-year-class-profile.html http://www.elon.edu/e-web/students/campuscenter/fund.xhtml http://www.thetimesnews.com/article/20150410/news/304109841 http://www.thetimesnews.com/article/20151128/news/151129048 lyman, f. t. 1981. “the responsive classroom discussion: the inclusion of all students.” in mainstreaming digest: a collection of faculty and student papers, edited by audrey anderson, 109–113. college park: university of maryland press. mills, charles. 1998. blackness visible: essays on philosophy and race. new york: cornell university press. norlock, kathryn j. 2012. “gender perception as a habit of moral perception: implications for philosophical methodology and introductory curriculum.” journal of social philosophy 43 (3): 347–362. paxton, molly, carrie figdor, and valerie tiberius. 2012. “quantifying the gender gap: an empirical study of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy.” hypatia 27 (4): 950–957. pendulum. 2015. “growing greek life culture creates pressure to conform.” february 11. http://www.elonpendulum.com/article/2015/02/growinggreek-culture-creates-pressure-conform/. saldaña, johnny. 2009. the coding manual for qualitative researchers. london: sage publications. scott, allyson, and sidney rodgers. 2016. “student perceptions outside the philosophy classroom.” presentation at the national conference on undergraduate research, asheville, nc, april 7–9. thompson, morgan, toni adleberg, sam sims, and eddy nahmias. 2016. “why do women leave philosophy? surveying students at the introductory level.” philosopher’s imprint 16 (6): 1–36. us department of education, national center for education statistics. 2008. “table 255: full-time and part-time faculty and instructional staff in degreegranting institutions, by race/ethnicity, sex, and program area: fall 1998 and fall 2003.” digest of education statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_255.asp. van camp, julie. 2015. “tenured/tenure-track faculty women at 98 u.s. doctoral programs in philosophy.” california state university at long beach website, updated jan. 1. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html. 25 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html claire a. lockard is a graduate student at loyola university chicago. she is most interested in questions about whiteness and white privilege; epistemic injustices as they relate to calls for charitable readings of texts; and the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy. helen meskhidze is a graduate student at the university of california, irvine. she is interested in the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy, philosophy of physics, and cosmology. sean wilson is a graduate student in the philosophy department at duquesne university. his research interests include social and political philosophy, environmental ethics, and phenomenology. dr. nim batchelor, associate professor of philosophy, works in the philosophy of law, and social/political philosophy. long-time director of the elon university prelaw program, president of the southern assoc. of pre-law advisors, and chair of the pre-law advisor’s national council. long standing member of the piedmont woodturners association and the alamance makers guild. stephen bloch-schulman, associate professor and chair of philosophy at elon university, works at the intersection of political philosophy and the scholarship of teaching and learning. he is the inaugural winner of prize for excellence in philosophy teaching, awarded by american philosophical association, the american association of philosophy teachers, and the teaching philosophy association (2017). he was honorably mentioned for the american association of philosophy teachers' lenssen prize in 2012 and won the award in 2014 (with ann j. cahill). ann j. cahill is professor of philosophy at elon university. her research engages with feminist philosophy and philosophy of the body; her publications include rethinking rape (2001) and overcoming objectification: a carnal ethics (2011). she was awarded the 2014 lenssen prize with her co-author, stephen bloch-schulman, for their article titled “argumentation step-by-step: learning critical thinking through deliberative practice.” 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/4 vi. appendix focus group questions key: • questions for all fgs; ṭ questions for fg 1; † questions for fg 2; ‡ questions for fg 3 1. icebreaker (word association with philosophy) 2. think-pair-share • what are your perceptions of the philosophy department/ majors on campus? • how do you think one succeeds in philosophy? do you think that you can succeed? why or why not? ṭ† how did you get into your first philosophy class? ṭ† do you think studying philosophy is helpful for your life, career, and/or intellectual goals? ṭ† what made you take more courses? why’d you come back? ‡ why haven’t you taken philosophy? do you plan to? what was your decision process like in choosing your courses? ‡ if you were to take a philosophy course, what would you hope to get out of it? 3. group activity • can you imagine yourself being a philosophy major or minor? if you are a major/minor, what made you choose to major/minor in philosophy? if not, under what conditions could you imagine yourself becoming a philosophy major or minor? ṭ† how have philosophy professors treated the students? how have other philosophy students treated one another? ṭ† what was your biggest critique of your philosophy class(es)? ṭ† what sticks? what do you remember most about your philosophy experience? ṭ† how did you see gender dynamics play out in your classroom? do you think your gender had any influence in how students were treated in your courses? ṭ tell us how your parents responded to you taking multiple philosophy courses and/or becoming a major/minor. ‡ do you think studying philosophy is helpful for your life, career, and/or intellectual goals? ‡ do you know anybody taking or having taken a philosophy class? what kind of person are they? what do they say about it? ‡ how do you think your parents would respond to you taking philosophy courses? 4. end debrief • is there anything else you’d like to share? • what would persuade you/what should we do to attract more women? 5. exit survey ṭ† how many courses have you taken and which ones? • major(s)/minor(s)? • is there anything else you’d like to share? 27 lockard et al.: female-identified students’ underrepresentation in philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy claire a. lockard helen meskhidze sean wilson nim batchelor stephen bloch-schulman see next page for additional authors recommended citation using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy authors using focus groups to explore the underrepresentation of female-identified undergraduate students in philosophy female under-representation among philosophy majors: a map of the hypotheses and a survey of the evidence feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 4 2015 female under-representation among philosophy majors: a map of the hypotheses and a survey of the evidence tom dougherty university of cambridge, tom.dou@gmail.com samuel baron university of western australia, samuel.baron@uwa.edu.au kristie miller university of sydney, kristie_miller@yahoo.co recommended citation dougherty, tom; samuel baron; and kristie miller. 2015. "female under-representation among philosophy majors: a map of the hypotheses and a survey of the evidence." feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4. female under-representation among philosophy majors: a map of the hypotheses and a survey of the evidence1 tom dougherty, samuel baron and kristie miller abstract why is there female under-representation among philosophy majors? we survey the hypotheses that have been proposed so far, grouping similar hypotheses together. we then propose a chronological taxonomy that distinguishes hypotheses according to the stage in undergraduates’ careers at which the hypotheses predict an increase in female under-representation. we then survey the empirical evidence for and against various hypotheses. we end by suggesting future avenues for research. keywords: under-representation, undergraduates, majors, female, women, philosophy 1. introduction: female under-representation in philosophy it is well understood that female under-representation is a problem in the anglophone philosophy profession, and that this phenomenon increases during students’ tertiary education. indeed, the largest and most recent empirical study of the phenomenon in the united states suggests that the gap may be mostly 1 for research assistantship, the authors would like to thank lesley wright. for helpful comments and discussion, the authors would like to thank toni adleberg, louise antony, david braddon-mitchell, rachael briggs, cheshire calhoun, mark colyvan, helena de bres, nina emery, carla fehr, paul griffiths, sally haslanger, sophie horowitz, katrina hutchison, fiona jenkins, karen jones, colin klein, rae langton, sarah-jane leslie, maureen o’malley, ned markosian, julia markovits, carla merino, sara mrsny, eddie nahmias, jenny saul, miriam schoenfield, amia srinivasan, morgan thompson, christina van dyke, participants of the 2015 “why are there so few women in philosophy, and (why) does it matter?” workshop at the university of stockholm, and two anonymous referees for feminist philosophy quarterly. the authors would like to acknowledge the funding support of australian research council discovery grant dp0987186. 1 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 explained by the drop-off at the undergraduate level. data from 32 doctoralgranting institutions and 24 liberal arts institutions yield evidence of a significant decline in the proportion of women, as one looks from the population of introductory philosophy courses to the population of philosophy majors. the proportion of women found at the major, graduate, and faculty levels...indicate no such further drop. (paxton et al. 2012, 953) the emergence of under-representation at the undergraduate level is not limited to the united states. in australia, there is statistical evidence that “whilst female students are enrolling in philosophy in larger numbers than their male counterparts at bachelor level, they are more likely to pursue one or two units in philosophy, rather than a philosophy major” (goddard 2008, 4). meanwhile, in the united kingdom, female under-representation is only slight by the end of undergraduate education, but becomes pronounced by graduate studies (beebee and saul 2011). female under-representation in philosophy education is importantly related to the broader problem of female under-representation in the profession. once the ratio of men to women studying philosophy at undergraduate or graduate level is significantly skewed towards female underrepresentation, it is inevitable that in the absence of significant affirmative action policies there will be an under-representation of women employed in academic jobs within the discipline of philosophy. what is less well understood is why philosophy has this problem. several explanatory hypotheses have been proposed, which could point to either a single cause, or several causes that combine to form a “perfect storm” (antony 2012). since there has not yet been a mapping of these hypotheses in the literature, in section 2, we will look at each in turn, grouping similar hypotheses together. then in section 3, we propose a chronological taxonomy for these hypotheses, grouping them according to the stage of students’ education when the relevant causal factors have an effect on students’ intentions to major in philosophy. finally, in section 4, we will survey the evidence for and against these hypotheses. 2. the hypotheses in this section, we aim to create a rough map of the hypotheses discussed so far, placing similar hypotheses together under five loose groups. the grouping is not perfect, since inevitably there are some similarities between hypotheses in different groups. moreover, in distinguishing some of the hypotheses we risk introducing more precise distinctions than have explicitly been drawn so far.2 2 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this concern. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 still, we think that this additional precision and these loose groups are on balance helpful for navigating what might otherwise prove unwieldy terrain. the first group that we will consider is the group of course content hypotheses. these hold that the content of philosophy courses fails to be sufficiently inclusive of women. along these lines, margaret walker claims that how welcoming the philosophy profession is to women would be ameliorated by the presence of concerns, texts, and images that acknowledge women within undergraduate classrooms, graduate training, and professional media allow women students to feel that a discipline, literally, comprehends them, that it is a space that they are free to enter and expected to enter (walker 2005, 156; see also, superson 2011). part of this lack of inclusion could be the quite literal absence of women themselves in philosophy courses. along these lines, the role model hypothesis is that female students do not choose to major in philosophy because they feel that they do not belong in philosophy as the result of lacking female philosopher role models. this could be because of an absence of female philosophy instructors to serve as role models (hall 1993; rask and bailey 2002; paxton et al. 2012). alternatively, it could be the result of an absence of female philosophers in the way that philosophy is presented to students in educational materials. for example, the images of philosophers on philosophy websites and course materials are often images of male philosophers. similarly, course syllabi are typically dominated by male authors, and this could send female students the message that they are unlike those who participate in philosophy (schouten 2015). alternatively, philosophy courses’ content could increase female underrepresentation because of the subject matter of the course. let us call this the subject matter hypothesis. it holds that, statistically, male and female students have different interests, and philosophy courses focus on topics that are of disproportionate interest to male students. an example might be an ethics course focused on ethical issues pertaining to killing and harm, which neglected ethical issues pertaining to interpersonal relationships, or reproductive ethics. what the role model hypothesis and subject matter hypothesis have in common, as course content hypotheses, is that they hold that the substance and presentation of philosophy courses either fail to interest female students or leave them feeling alienated from the discipline or both. the second group of hypotheses focuses not on the content of philosophy courses, but the manner in which they are taught. together, these are the teaching methods hypotheses. the gendered intuitions hypothesis is that there are gender differences concerning whose views are validated in the classroom. wesley buckwalter and stephen stich claim that there are statistically significant differences between the philosophical intuitions of male and female students and suggest that “male” intuitions get valorized in the classroom as the correct 3 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 ones to have (buckwalter and stich 2014). by contrast, the adversarial argumentation hypothesis is that discussion in philosophy courses is typically aggressively argumentative and that this style disproportionately puts women off (dotson 2011; friedman 2013; moulton 1989; rooney 2010; wylie 2011). the problems of this style would be exacerbated if it is implemented in the “philosophical ‘sport’ of arguing to win” (hall 1993, 30). in what is arguably its most plausible form, this hypothesis allows that substantive disagreement about content is not problematic in itself, but only becomes so when this disagreement is expressed in a particularly adversarial manner (beebee 2013). meanwhile, the learning styles hypothesis is that philosophy is taught in a way that does not suit learning styles that are statistically more favored by female students than male students. for example, it may be that female students are especially put off by the fact that philosophy is often taught in a particularly abstract way that fails to make adequate use of familiar examples (dodds and goddard 2013). in particular, it may be that the methodology of appealing to thought experiments to elicit intuitions is particularly off-putting to female students (turri and buckwalter ms). finally, the implicit bias hypothesis is that teachers and other students hold negative implicit biases about women’s ability in philosophy, and this affects how female students are treated in the classroom, and the feedback and grades that they receive (haslanger 2008; saul 2013).3 the hypothesis holds that these experiences, feedback, and grades influence students’ decisions about which subjects to major in. what all the teaching methods hypotheses have in common is that they focus on how courses are taught and hypothesize that some methods make male students more likely to major in philosophy than female students. while the previous hypotheses focused on the content and teaching methods of philosophy courses, the hostile atmosphere hypotheses focus on the social atmosphere in philosophy education.4 according to the coping methods 3 this implicit bias could be related to a stereotype or gender schema, in which case there are important connections between the implicit bias hypothesis and the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses, below. we distinguish them because the former concerns the biases of other students and teachers, and the latter concerns female students internalizing stereotypes or gender schemas themselves. moreover, given implicit bias is a form of gender discrimination, this hypothesis has an important connection to the sexist mistreatment hypothesis below. the latter focuses on how this sexist mistreatment creates a social atmosphere that is hostile to female students, and this could be separate from a mechanism whereby female students receive lower grades. 4 we acknowledge that there is not always a sharp line between this group of hypotheses and some of the others. for example, if female students find 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 hypothesis, the unfriendliness of this climate consists in a lack of social support networks that help students to cope. for example, valerie morganson, meghan jones and debra major have suggested that female students are less likely than male students to major in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) subjects because these have an impersonal atmosphere, and female students’ preferred coping method is social coping (morganson et al. 2010). a similar hypothesis could be made for philosophy. more worrisome is the sexist mistreatment hypothesis, which posits that within philosophy, female students are the victims of disrespectful, discriminatory, sexist or sexually harassing behavior by teachers or other students (beebee and saul 2011; haslanger 2008; steele et al. 2002). this mistreatment could either be targeted at a specific individual, such as when a teacher gratuitously refers to an individual student’s gender, or be targeted at women as a group, such as when a teacher implies that women are not generally good at philosophy. to illustrate the next group of hypotheses, we need to first introduce the notion of a gender schema. virginia valian defines a gender schema as “a set of implicit, or nonconscious, hypotheses about sex differences” which “are usually unarticulated” and indeed “may even be disavowed” (valian 1998, 2). these hypotheses concern the “behaviors, traits, and preferences of men and women” (valian 1998, 11). valian proposes this as a refinement and extension of the popular concept of a stereotype. building on valian’s work, sally haslanger has argued that there is a conflict between the schema for “woman” and the schema for “philosopher” (haslanger 2008). a schema for a philosopher could be directly masculine if it portrays the stereotype of a philosopher as male or portrays philosophy as a stereotypically masculine activity (calhoun 2009; haslanger 2008; lloyd 1984). alternatively, a schema for a philosopher could be indirectly masculine insofar as philosophy is associated with something else that is independently coded as masculine. for example, philosophy could be associated with autonomous, assertive, task-oriented activities that are coded as male and not with the expressions of emotions and nurturing of others that are coded as female (valian 1998, 13).5 an important recent hypothesis in this vein comes from sarah-jane leslie and andre cimpian. leslie and cimpian hypothesize that given that there is a societal stereotype of women as lacking innate brilliance, classes problematic because these classes involve aggressive argument, then there is a sense in which they are objecting to the social atmosphere of philosophy. this is one of the respects in which our map of the hypotheses is imperfect. 5 further, studies in computer science have found that female students find it hard to identify with subjects that have a “geek image”—an image that philosophy has in certain cultures (margolis and fisher 2002). 5 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 women are underrepresented in disciplines thought to require this brilliance. they call this the “field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis”: laboratory, observational, and historical evidence reveals pervasive cultural associations linking men but not women with raw intellectual talent. given these ambient stereotypes, women may be underrepresented in academic disciplines that are thought to require such inherent aptitude. (leslie et al. 2015, 262) leslie et al. apply this general hypothesis to philosophy, in light of evidence that philosophy is one of the subjects that people perceive to require raw brilliance. while leslie et al.’s hypothesis concerns general, field-wide beliefs about what success in the field requires, a related hypothesis of carol dweck focuses on individual students’ beliefs about how success is achieved. dweck distinguishes a “fixed mindset” that sees ability as a gift from a “growth mindset” that sees ability as dependent on effort (dweck 2006; dweck 2008; good et al. 2003). a fixed mindset could interact in problematic ways with a male stereotype of students with the gift. it is important to note that stereotypes and gender schemas could be invoked to explain female under-representation in two different ways. first, stereotypes and gender schemas could be held by teachers or other students, who then treat female and male students differently in a way that leads female students disproportionately not to wish to study philosophy. this would be a version of the sexist mistreatment hypothesis or the implicit bias hypothesis. second, female students’ own internalization of stereotypes and gender schemas can lead them not to major in philosophy. this is the central idea of what we will call the internalized stereotypes / gender schema hypotheses. for each type of stereotype or gender schema, one might hypothesize that it is internalized before students arrive at university (calhoun 2009), or alternatively one might hypothesize that philosophy courses themselves reinforce these schemas and stereotypes or create them where they did not exist before. in this respect, there is a potential affinity between the course content hypotheses and the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses. stereotypes and gender schemas have received significant attention in discussions of minority under-representation in various disciplines in the academy (hill et al. 2010). we can draw on this broader discussion to isolate more specific hypotheses according to the posited mechanisms by which a directly or indirectly “male” schema for philosophy may put women off philosophy. the schema affects self-conception hypothesis holds that schemas hinder women from becoming personally attached to philosophy by making it “harder for women [to] imagine themselves as philosophy majors, or at least suspect that being a philosopher and being female is a less pleasant, or less promising, option than other academic options” (calhoun 2009, 218). the 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 schema affects confidence hypothesis claims that schemas bias people into thinking that men are better at philosophy than women (haslanger 2008, 213-4; see also correll 2001), and this differentially affects men’s and women’s selfconfidence concerning philosophy. this would plausibly affect major choices since there are links between self-confidence and motivation (bandura 1977), and between self-confidence and interest (valiant 1998, 152). the schema affects interest hypothesis holds that schemas may affect students’ interests in philosophy since enacted gender roles predict the kinds of things an individual is likely to be interested in (barak et al. 1991; lupart et al. 2004; steele and barling 1996). moreover, research on the psychology of interest suggests a strong correlation between interest and the extent to which students enjoy learning, their cognitive processing, and their vocational choices (hidi 1990; krapp 1999; schiefele 1991; tobias 1994). this research suggests that interest may be a central factor guiding the attitudes of a student toward a particular area of education. the schema affects standards hypothesis is that a male schema for a subject can lead female students to hold themselves to higher standards then male students, to devalue their abilities relative to male students, and to choose academic career paths on the basis of their assessment of these abilities. for instance, shelley correll found that where participants are exposed to the belief that males are better at a task, and those participants are then asked to perform that task, “men use a more lenient standard to infer ability and assess their task competence higher than women” (correll 2004, 108). similarly, under these conditions male participants assess their abilities higher than female participants even when they receive the same score, and male participants have higher aspirations than female participants for careers requiring this task. the schema affects popularity hypothesis is that schemas may result in women who are successful at “male” activities being considered less likeable (hill et al. 2010, xvi). in turn, concerns with likability may have some effect on major choice. the stereotype threat hypothesis is that schemas can give rise to “stereotype threat” which is the threat “of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would confirm that stereotype” (hill et al. 2010, 38-39, citing steele and aronson 1995). stereotype threat could affect underrepresentation in that it can hinder students’ performances in class and on tests (saul 2013). it could also create anxiety in students, which leads them to avoid the subject (mckinnon 2014; schouten 2015). lastly, the schemas make sexism representative hypothesis is that a schema could interact with the sexist mistreatment hypothesis. for example, a schema that codes the philosophy discipline male could lead female students who experience sexism to see this as representative of the discipline, and representative sexism may be significantly more discouraging than an isolated incident of sexism (calhoun 2009). the last remaining hypothesis is what we will call the impractical subject hypothesis. according to this hypothesis, female students are disproportionately put off majoring in philosophy because they choose majors in order to pursue 7 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 certain goals, and they judge philosophy is unhelpful for pursuing these goals. these goals could include either getting a job or gaining the training that would allow them to make a difference to the world.6 there are two possible mechanisms behind this hypothesis. first, female students might tend to believe that philosophy is less useful for getting a job or achieving another type of goal than male students do. second, female and male students may have the same beliefs about how useful philosophy is for achieving various goals, but may have different goals that they are pursuing in their undergraduate education. for example, female students might have a stronger preference than male students have for pursuing an education that helps them make a difference to other people’s lives after university.7 alternatively, they may have career goals that are influenced by a gender-structured workforce (calhoun 2015). this gendered preference could be the result of gender schemas, or it could have been produced by male and female students’ having had different experiences prior to university. 3. a chronological taxonomy of the hypotheses in the last section, we created five loose groupings of the hypotheses according to salient similarities between them. we did so in the hope that this makes the overall picture of the literature more accessible. that said, we want to highlight the fact that there are other ways of carving up the hypothesis space. ultimately, we think that there is no taxonomy that is best simpliciter. rather some typologies are more or less useful for different theoretical purposes. here we wish to flag a reasonably coarse-grained chronological taxonomy that we think is helpful for some investigatory strategies that are relatively easy to carry out and that may help direct the focus of future research. the chronological taxonomy that we propose categorizes hypotheses according to their stance on (a) the stage of students’ careers at which the causes of female under-representation occur; and consequently their predictions about (b) the stage of students’ careers at which representation of women 6 this hypothesis might be combined with the hypothesis that women are less inclined than men to take unfamiliar subjects, such as philosophy. in particular, it may be that women are less inclined to major in subjects when they are unfamiliar with the criteria for success in these subjects. the unfamiliar subject hypothesis has not been proposed in the literature, and so we do not include it in our survey of the literature. but it has been suggested to us informally in conversation. by itself, it appears unpromising giving patterns of gender representation across all the disciplines in the academy. but sara mrsny has suggested to us that it might be more promising when combined with the impractical subject hypothesis. 7 thanks to cheshire calhoun for emphasizing this point. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 among intending or actual philosophy majors decreases. obviously, female under-representation among philosophy majors is the result of students’ decisions about which subjects to major in. so we can ask when, according to each hypothesis, the students would have experienced the various effects that might have influenced these decisions. in particular, we can ask whether these effects would have occurred before students arrived at university or during their time at university. moreover, hypotheses postulate various causes of these effects. we can similarly ask when these causes might have occurred, and whether they would have occurred before or after students’ arrival at university. accordingly, we can group hypotheses according to the timing of the causes and effects that they postulate. if we adopt this approach, then we should distinguish three types of hypothesis according to each hypothesis' causal structure. first, there are hypotheses that postulate (proximate8) causes that occur before students arrive at university and that lead to under-representation of women among prospective students who intend to major in philosophy before they even arrive at university. an example of such a hypothesis would be the claim that prior to university, female students internalize a gender schema that codes philosophy as male, which makes them less likely to major in philosophy before they have arrived at university. given that these hypotheses postulate causes before students arrive at university, let us call these pre-university cause(s) hypotheses. such views also hold that the relevant effect of these causes—women being less likely to major in philosophy—already occurs before entry to university. so for this reason let us categorize these as pre-university effect hypotheses. second, there are hypotheses that postulate some causes that occur before students arrive at university, and other causes that occur after students arrive at university. these hypotheses maintain that the interaction of these causes discourages women from majoring in philosophy. an example would be the hypothesis that posits the following two causes: (a) before university women and men are socialized in such a way that women tend to have a stronger dislike of aggressive argumentation than men; and (b) at university, students discover that philosophy classes involve aggressive argumentation. as a result of the interaction of these causes, women end up less inclined to major in philosophy than men—an effect that occurs during their university experience. since these 8 by focusing on proximate causes, we leave open the question of where more distal causes are located. for example, it may be that academic philosophers’ actions within universities causally contribute to a gender schema in society, which students adopt before university. if so, then the distal cause would be academics’ actions within the university, but the proximate cause would be the student’s internalization of the schema before they arrive at university. 9 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 hypotheses point to a mixture of pre-university causes and causes in the classroom, let us call these mixed causes hypotheses. because these hypotheses postulate causes that occur after students have arrived at university, these hypotheses predict an increase in female under-representation that would also occur after students have arrived at university. to capture this, let us call them classroom effect hypotheses. the third type of hypothesis postulates only causes that occur during students’ university experiences. an example would be the hypothesis that women and men similarly dislike being victims of sexual harassment (we may suppose) but that victims of sexual harassment in philosophy at university are disproportionately female. since these hypotheses posit causes that occur only after students arrive at university, let us call these the classroom cause(s) hypotheses. like hypotheses of the second type, hypotheses of the third type postulate that women’s representation in philosophy decreases during their time at university. consequently, they are also classroom effect hypotheses. we can represent this tri-partite taxonomy in table 1: table 1: tripartite taxonomy of hypotheses according to their causal structure the point of this taxonomy is of course to fit specific hypotheses into it. a complication is presented by the fact that for some of the aforementioned hypotheses, it is possible to formulate more specific versions that fit into one category 1 category 2 category 3 name of category by cause pre-university cause(s) mixed causes classroom cause(s) name of category by effect pre-university effect classroom effect stage at which proximate causes occur before university some before university; some during university during university stage at which female underrepresentation increases among intending or actual majors before university during university during university 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 category and other more specific versions that fit into another category. for example, as we noted, the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses could either claim that the schema is internalized before university or during classroom experience. consequently, variants of these hypotheses can fit into more than one column. incorporating this complexity, the resulting chronological taxonomy is as follows: table 2: locations of female under-representation hypotheses within the tripartite causal taxonomy hypothesis by cause by effect course content hypotheses the substance and presentation of philosophy courses increases female under-representation (role model hypothesis; subject matter hypothesis) classroom cause or mixed causes classroom effect teaching methods hypotheses the way philosophy courses are taught increases female underrepresentation (gendered intuitions hypothesis; learning styles hypothesis; implicit bias hypothesis) mixed causes classroom effect hostile atmosphere hypotheses the social atmosphere of philosophy education increases female under-representation (coping methods hypothesis; sexist mistreatment hypothesis) classroom cause or mixed causes classroom effect 11 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 stereotype/gender schema hypotheses female students’ internalization of gender schemas increases female under-representation (schema affects self-conception hypothesis; schema affects confidence hypothesis; schema affects interest hypothesis; schema affects standards hypothesis; schema affects popularity hypothesis; stereotype threat hypothesis; schema make sexism representative hypothesis) pre-university cause, mixed causes, or classroom cause pre-university effect or classroom effect impractical subject hypothesis female students’ judgments that philosophy is unhelpful for achieving their life goals increases female under-representation pre-university cause, or mixed causes pre-university effect, or classroom effect a key reason why the chronological taxonomy is helpful is that it facilitates the following investigatory strategy. first, it is possible to investigate students’ intentions to major at the beginning of university. only the pre-university effect hypotheses predict that there will be female under-representation at this stage. so if there is under-representation at this stage, then that would mean that one of these hypotheses posits a cause that is part of the overall explanation of under-representation. consequently, one way to test the pre-university effect hypotheses is simply to investigate students’ intentions to major at the start of university. meanwhile the classroom effect hypotheses predict that female under-representation will significantly grow during undergraduates’ careers. so if there is an increase in female under-representation among students intending to major after the start of university, then that would mean that one of the classroom effects hypotheses posits a cause that is part of the overall explanation of female under-representation. to test these hypotheses, one could investigate students’ intentions to major and their decisions to major at different points in their undergraduate careers. in the grander scheme of things, these investigations are relatively easy and cheap to conduct. these investigations would not isolate a single specific hypothesis, but the results from them would help us direct the focus of future research investigations onto a subset of all the 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 hypotheses in the literature. 4. evidence for and against the hypotheses what evidence is there for and against these hypotheses? some of the previous hypotheses have been suggested on the basis of philosophers’ personal experience as students and teachers. while this testimony is valuable for shaping inquiry into the issue, there are limits to how much light it can shine.9 sometimes, different philosophers’ testimonies conflict (e.g., about whether an aggressive argumentative style in philosophical discussion is a cause of female under-representation in philosophy). moreover, it is hard to know the degree to which any single piece of testimony is representative of women’s experience in general. relatedly, testimony does not provide much insight into how the explanatory power of different hypotheses compare. so while we consider testimony a valuable part of the inquiry into female under-representation, we suggest that where possible it should be supplemented by empirical inquiry. in what follows, we survey the evidence of which we are aware, both from other disciplines and from philosophy. 4.1 indirect evidence from other disciplines we can get indirect evidence about female under-representation in philosophy from the impressive amount of research into under-representation in other disciplines. efforts have been focused particularly on stem disciplines. this research has recently been surveyed in the american association of women’s investigation into female under-representation (hill et al. 2010). this report describes evidence that supports hypotheses that focus on stereotype threat (steele and aronson 1995), implicit bias (nosek et al. 2009), self-assessment (correll 2001; 2004), and “fixed” vs. “growth” mindsets (dweck 2006; 2008; good et al. 2003). beyond this report, morganson et al. find that social coping— seeking support from others—was a more significant predictor of majoring in stem subjects for women than for men (morganson et al. 2010). with respect to the role model hypothesis, the evidence is mixed but suggests that under certain circumstances, the role model effect can be significant (bettinger and long 2005; dee 2007; neumark and gardecki 1996; rask and bailey 2002). lastly, support for the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses can potentially be found in research that indicates that mothers’ attitudes about gender-role ideology influence female undergraduates’ vocational choices (steele and barling 1996). 9 for a collection of anecdotes see beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com https://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/. 13 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 4.2 experimental philosophy with respect to evidence that is specific to philosophy as a discipline, one source of evidence is experimental philosophy. the first piece of experimental philosophy evidence is arguably the most controversial. buckwalter and stich provide support for the gendered intuitions hypothesis by providing evidence from an investigation of theirs for their claim that female and male students have different philosophical intuitions (buckwalter and stich 2014).10 however, toni adleberg, morgan thompson and eddy nahmias argue that buckwalter’s and stich’s statistical methodology is flawed, and state that they were unable to replicate buckwalter’s and stich’s results in their own study (adleberg et al. 2014).11 similarly, hamid seyedsayamdost failed to replicate buckwalter’s and stich’s findings (seyedsayamdost forthcoming), as did yuliya chernykhovskaya in her interdisciplinary honors thesis at rutgers university (chernykhovskaya 2011).12 the second piece of experimental philosophy evidence concerns philosophical methodology. john turri and wesley buckwalter have investigated lay-persons’ preferences concerning the methodology of using thought experiments to elicit intuitions and the methodology of using empirical observation when attempting to answer certain questions that have been of interest to philosophers and psychologists (turri and buckwalter ms). turri and buckwalter found that female respondents had a significantly stronger preference than male respondents for the observational methodology over the thought experiment methodology. in addition, turri and buckwalter found that female respondents tended to view a question pursued by a team as more important than male respondents viewed such a question, while female and male respondents tended to view a question pursued by an individual no differently. turri and buckwalter note that these gender differences were statistically significant but not large, and remain neutral on how much 10 to explain the chronology of this publication and the attempts to replicate its findings: an advanced draft of buckwalter’s and stich’s manuscript had been available since at least 2010. 11 for further criticism of buckwalter’s and stich’s hypothesis, see (antony 2012). 12 while attempting to replicate the study of (weinberg et al. 2001) that found evidence of variation among ethnic groups with respect to their intuitions concerning gettier counterexamples to accounts of knowledge as justified true belief, jennifer nagel, valerie san juan and raymond mar found no evidence of variation in intuition by gender (nagel et al. 2013). with respect to ethnicity, nagel et al.’s study is one of three recent studies that fail to replicate the results of weinberg et al. (see also kim and yuan 2015; seyedsayamdost 2015). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 importance to place on this real but small difference.13 moreover, turri and buckwalter do not advance or test any formal hypotheses about underrepresentation among philosophy majors. all the same, with these caveats in place, we conclude that, given the prevalence of the thought experiment methodology in undergraduate philosophy education, this evidence provides at least some support for the learning styles hypothesis, although we admit it is hard to judge the strength of this support. 4.3 large survey of multiple philosophy departments in the us the next piece of evidence comes from data that molly paxton, carrie figdor and valerie tiberius gathered from 32 doctoral-granting institutions and 24 liberal arts institutions in the u.s. in 2011 (paxton et al. 2012). paxton et al. found that there was a positive correlation between the number of women majoring in philosophy at a university and the number of female teachers at that university. this provides some support for the role model hypothesis, which would predict that exposure to female teachers would increase female philosophy enrolments. in addition, this evidence provides some support for the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses. this is because the women teaching philosophy could have served as counter-stereotypical exemplars, which helped address certain problems facing women (e.g., concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat).14 4.4 georgia state university surveys of 2012 and 2013 the next piece of evidence concerns female under-representation at only one university, but yields data that is rich with detail. morgan thompson, toni adleberg, sam sims and eddy nahmias investigated the attitudes of philosophy undergraduate students at the end of an introductory philosophy class at georgia state university in both 2012 and 2013 (thompson et al. ms). thompson et al. found that female students were less likely than male students to intend to major. but interestingly, their results suggested that certain classroom effects were absent. they found that students typically disagreed with the claim “i felt that the classroom discussion was too combative,” with no significant gender differences in their responses to this statement—a result that provides evidence against the adversarial argumentation hypothesis. students tended to agree that students of each gender were treated with respect and that instructors attempted to involve all students in the discussion. this provides some evidence against the sexist mistreatment hypothesis. thompson et al. did, however, find many other interesting differences. 13 thanks to wesley buckwalter for emphasizing this point in personal communication. 14 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point. 15 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 thompson et al. found that although men and women received the same grades in introductory courses, women’s grades were lower relative to their overall gpa. this might suggest that female students under-performed( e.g., as the result of stereotype threat) or that they performed to their usual ability, but were under-marked (e.g., because of implicit bias of instructors). to that extent, this evidence tends to support the stereotype threat hypothesis and the implicit bias hypothesis. thompson et al. found that female students were less likely than male students to agree that they would have a lot in common with typical philosophy majors or their instructors. further, female students were less comfortable than male students when expressing their opinions, as well as when asking and answering questions. similarly, compared to male students, female students were less confident in their abilities to talk about philosophy and do well on assessments. these results support versions of the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses that predict that female students will have these experiences. moreover, thompson et al. found that women had a stronger dislike of thought experiments than men, and this partly mediated their willingness to continue studying philosophy. this supports the learning styles hypothesis. in addition, thompson et al. found that women perceived philosophy to be less useful than men but the differences were not significant when corrected for multiple comparisons. further, thompson et al. found that for women, more than men, having a field-specific ability belief negatively correlates with identification with philosophy. finally, thompson et al. found that women had less strong views than men and believed their views were more similar to other students’ views. significantly, they found that both of these effects partially mediated women’s “willingness to continue” studying philosophy.15 this is an interesting and important result, but we do not see it providing support for or against any of the extant hypotheses in the literature. this suggests that we need either to add to the current array of hypotheses or modify one so that it predicts this difference. regarding the role model hypothesis, thompson et al.’s results were mixed. they found that women were more likely to view the gender and ethnic composition of syllabi to be unfair, and that this partially mediates the effect of gender on students’ willingness to continue. however, thompson et al. also found that increasing the percentage of female authors on the syllabus from roughly 10 percent in 2012 to roughly 20-30 percent in 2013 did not significantly increase female students’ willingness to continue. moreover, thompson et al. found no correlation between the gender of the instructors and gender 15 in thompson et al.’s work, “willingness to continue” is a composite measure based on the average of students’ responses to the statements “i plan to take another philosophy course after this one” and “i would consider majoring in philosophy.” 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 differences in answers to the survey.16 in summary, we conclude that thompson et al.’s results provide evidence against the adversarial argumentation hypothesis and the sexist mistreatment hypothesis, evidence for versions of the learning styles hypotheses, implicit bias hypothesis and internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses, and mixed evidence concerning the role model hypothesis. 4.5 evidence of a pre-university effect several pieces of evidence bear on the pre-university effect hypotheses (i.e., versions of the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses and the impractical subject hypothesis). there is a large amount of evidence that a preuniversity effect widely occurs in the united states and some evidence that it occurs in australia. however, evidence from the uk suggests a pre-university effect is more limited there. we look at each piece of evidence in turn. the first piece of evidence supporting the pre-university effect hypotheses was identified by cheshire calhoun. calhoun notes that this evidence is a “sample of one,” albeit a sample that she finds “astonishing and also instructive” (calhoun 2009, 217). colby college keeps survey data on entering first-year students. over the period of 1971-2002, there were 11,394 respondents, of whom 52.1 percent were female and 47.9 percent were male. 105 students indicated that they intended to major in philosophy, and among these only 29 percent were female. this gender ratio closely tracks the gender ratio of students who do major, as 28.6 percent majors were female between 1999 and 2003. in other words, there is female under-representation at the level of students who intend to major in philosophy at the very beginning of university at colby college, and female under-representation does not grow beyond this level by the stage at which students major. the results of the aforementioned large us survey fit with calhoun’s hypothesis (paxton et al. 2012). this data indicates that women are underrepresented in introductory courses, composing roughly 43 percent of students on average. this initial under-representation is what a pre-university effect hypothesis would predict. here it is significant that calhoun hypothesizes that female students arrive at university interested in taking the odd philosophy course, but unwilling to major (calhoun 2009). calhoun’s hypothesis would predict that women are less represented among students who arrive at university intending to major in philosophy than they are represented among students who take introductory courses. if so, the percentage of incoming students intending to major in philosophy who are female might be smaller than the 43 percent of students taking introductory courses who are female. 16 when interpreting this finding, we think it is worth noting that only a small number of instructors were involved with the course. 17 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 the strongest evidence of a broad pre-university effect across the united states comes from data from the higher education research institute (heri). this is currently being analyzed by chris dobbs (dobbs ms).17 heri surveys incoming freshmen, and this survey includes a question concerning students’ intentions to major. dobbs found that these data indicate that women are already underrepresented among students who enter college intending to major in philosophy. dobbs notes that the surveys were answered by only a fraction of all incoming freshmen, and his research about how to interpret the data is still in progress.18 however, we are struck by the interesting fact that the percentage of women among the intending majors he reports—33.7 percent—is remarkably close to the percentage of women among actual philosophy majors found by paxton et al. in their survey of over 50 universities, which was 35 percent (paxton et al. 2012). this is the sort of pattern that one would expect if one of the preuniversity effect hypotheses were a significant part of the explanation of female under-representation. evidence that a similar pre-university effect is operative in australia emerges from a study that we undertook at the university of sydney in 2013 (baron et al. forthcoming; dougherty et al. 2015). we surveyed students before and after their first philosophy course. we failed to find any evidence that this course disproportionately discouraged female students from continuing in philosophy relative to male students. in addition, we failed to find any gendered changes in students’ attitudes toward philosophy. this means that we failed to find evidence that supported any of the classroom effect hypotheses. more specifically, we failed to find that the course disproportionately increased female students’ discomfort in class, contrary to what the adversarial argumentation hypothesis and the sexist discrimination hypothesis would predict. similarly, we failed to find any evidence that confirmed the sexist discrimination hypothesis’ prediction that at the last lecture, female students would disproportionately say that they had been treated in an unfair or disrespectful way. lastly, while the learning styles hypothesis predicts that female students would feel that the course suited their style of learning worse than male students, in their last lecture responses, we found no gendered difference with respect to learning styles. we are cautious about inferring too much from this failure to find evidence in support of classroom effect hypotheses. we note that it may be that a single semester is too short a time span for certain classroom effects to occur. this would particularly be the case if these effects resulted from the 17 the data come from cooperative institutional research program (2009). 18 the heri data concerned the responses of over 2 million students (55.7 percent women) enrolling in u.s. colleges and universities. of these, 4,838 men and 2,463 women declared philosophy as their intended major. we originally learned of dobbs’s research from (thompson et al. ms). 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 accumulation of multiple “micro-inequities” that are negligible in isolation but are jointly significant (brennan 2013). moreover, we note that we did not attempt to test all of these hypotheses, and it may be that our survey methodology was insufficient for finding evidence of the hypotheses that we did test. additionally, we note that the sample for the last lecture survey may not be representative of the course, since it may be that those who attend the last lecture of a course are not a random selection of course participants. we did find evidence that existing attitudes coming into tertiary education are responsible for female under-representation at the university of sydney. at the beginning of the course, disproportionately few female students intended to major, which strongly supports the claim that one of the pre-university effect hypotheses was at work. we did not find any gendered differences with respect to how useful students considered studying philosophy for achieving their goals. this means that we found no evidence to support the impractical subject hypothesis. however, we did find that at the beginning of the course female students were less interested in philosophy, were less self-confident about philosophy, were less able to imagine themselves as philosophers, and predicted they would feel more uncomfortable in philosophy classes than male students. these results supported the versions of the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses that predict gendered differences in interest, self-confidence and ability to self-conceive as a philosopher. so our data suggests that stereotypes and gender schemas may be responsible for the pre-university effect we found. the next piece of evidence supports the view that this pre-university effect pattern is not borne out to the same degree in the united kingdom. helen beebee and jennifer saul summarize the findings of a 2008–2011 british philosophical association questionnaire that was completed by 38 departments (beebee and saul 2011). the report found that of 1,397 undergraduates taking philosophy as part of a single honors degree, 44 percent were women, while of 2,368 taking it as a joint honors degree, 47 percent were women. these figures supply evidence of some female undergraduate under-representation, but less than the 29 percent reported by colby college. here it is worth bearing in mind that in the uk students choose majors before starting university, and most students stick with this pre-selected major. therefore, the patterns of representation are largely explained by pre-university preferences (along with some transfers in and out of philosophy majors during university). when comparing the results in the us and the uk, it is worth considering transatlantic differences. in conversation, it has been suggested to us that the relatively healthy representation of women at the undergraduate level in the uk may be linked to the fact that a significant number of philosophy majors have taken a “religious studies” a-level at the end of their secondary education. this would 19 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 be significant given that there appears to be female over-representation among students studying religious studies in high school.19 alternatively, it may also be that cultural differences between the uk and the us mean that, for example, a gender schema coding philosophy as male is more prevalent in the latter. 4.6 evidence for the field-specific ability belief hypothesis the last piece of evidence is the most recent, and arguably the most impressive in light of its breadth. in the us, leslie et al. conducted a nationwide survey that investigated the representation of women in 30 different disciplines, including stem disciplines and non-stem disciplines (leslie et al. 2015; see also bian et al. ms; meyer et al. ms). the survey was answered by faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students at public and private research universities across the united states. leslie et al. presented them with claims concerning what is required for success in their field (e.g., “being a top scholar of [discipline] requires a special aptitude that just can’t be taught”) and asked them to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the claim, and the extent to which they believed people in their field would agree with the claim (leslie et al. 2015, 262). these answers were averaged to produce a measure of how much the field emphasized raw talent. leslie et al. found that the more a field valued giftedness, the fewer female phds there were in the field. it is worth noting that by investigating female representation at the phd level, this research did not directly address female representation among philosophy majors, but it is at least indirectly relevant to this issue. what is particularly impressive about this research is that the hypothesis is fully general—ranging across all disciplines—and leslie et al.’s broad investigation of 30 disciplines found confirmation of its predictions. this strikes us as powerful evidence that the field-specific ability belief hypothesis is at least a significant part of the explanation of under-representation in philosophy. the field-specific ability belief hypothesis is neutral on the mechanism whereby fieldspecific ability beliefs influence under-representation. leslie et al. note that one potential mechanism is that these beliefs create biases in practitioners in the fields (e.g., teachers), and another mechanism is that female students internalize stereotypes of women as not being good at these disciplines. consequently, leslie et al.'s results lend some support to both the implicit bias hypothesis and internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses. we can summarize this evidence from both the philosophy discipline and other disciplines as follows: 19 a report by the department for education and skills found that in 2006 gcses “girls are more likely than boys to take art and design, home economics, english literature, drama and religious studies” (department for education and skills 2007, 15). in the uk, gcse exams are typically taken at age 15-16, and alevels are typically taken at age 17-18. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 table 3: evidence for and against female under-representation hypotheses in both philosophy and other disciplines. hypothesis evidence of effects on students in other disciplines absence of evidence of effects on students in other disciplines evidence of effects on students in philosophy absence of evidence of effects on students in philosophy pre-university effect calhoun 2009; baron et al. ms; dobbs ms (analyzing heri data from 2005 – 2009) beebee and saul 2011 classroom effect baron et al. forthcoming role model bettinger and long 2005; dee 2007; neumark and gardecki 1996; rask and bailey 2002 bettinger and long 2005; neumark and gardecki 1996 paxton et al. 2012; thompson et al. ms (mixed evidence for this hypothesis) thompson et al. ms (mixed evidence for this hypothesis) 21 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 gendered intuitions buckwalter and stich 2014 adleberg et al. forthcoming; chernykhovskaya 2011; seyedsayamdost forthcoming adversarial argumentation baron et al. forthcoming; thompson et al. ms learning styles thompson et al. ms; turri and buckwalter ms baron et al. forthcoming coping methods morganson et al. 2010 sexist mistreatment baron et al. forthcoming; thompson et al. ms 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 gender schema / stereotypes bian et al. ms; correll 2001; 2004; dweck 2006; 2008; margolis and fisher 2002; nosek et al. 2009; steele and aronson 1995 good et al. 2003; leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms bian et al. ms; baron et al. ms (concerning pre-university effects of schemas); leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms; thompson et al. ms field-specific ability bian et al. ms; leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms bian et al. ms; leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms implicit bias bian et al. ms; leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms bian et al. ms; leslie et al. 2015; meyer et al. ms; thomspon et al. ms impractical subject baron et al. forthcoming 23 dougherty et al.: female under-representation among philosophy majors published by scholarship@western, 2015 5. directions for future research given the narrow scope of many of these pieces of evidence, there is clearly a need for further research along these lines. for a start, we should be cautious of generalizing too far from studies focused on a few universities, in case these studies uncovered results that are idiosyncratic to these universities. so we need more data from similar studies at different universities. it would also be useful to investigate in greater detail the mechanisms by which certain causes influence major choices. once particular hypotheses have been identified as plausible, it would be helpful to gather further quantitative and qualitative data that shine light on these causal pathways. an example of such research would be the implicit association tests that jennifer saul reports that she is developing with psychologists at the university of sheffield (saul 2013). these would appear likely to provide insight into the internalized stereotype/gender schema hypotheses. along different lines, susan dodds and eliza goddard propose qualitative research of students “to analyse what they have to say about what philosophy is, who is a philosopher, how philosophy is done, and what makes for good philosophy” (dodds and goddard 2013, 158). another important avenue for future research is to investigate whether gender’s intersection with other differences between students is significant both for students’ experiences and female under-representation. the hypotheses and evidence to date have considered women in the aggregate. however, it would be important to investigate whether there are differences in the experiences and under-representation of women of color and white women, between nondisabled and disabled women, between women of different socioeconomic classes, women of different gender identities (e.g., cisgendered or transgendered), and so on. there is much room for empirical work to find out whether factors such as classroom experiences or gender schemas have different implications for different women.20 this gap in the literature seems particularly significant since intersectionality appears significant for under-representation given that, for example, women of color are under-represented in philosophy more than white women. in addition, there is a need for further research into the effectiveness of classroom interventions that may remediate either pre-university effects or classroom effects. at the moment, we have little empirical evidence that indicates which interventions may increase female students’ propensity to major in philosophy. similarly, we lack evidence about which interventions are the most effective at ameliorating any of the effects implied by the aforementioned specific hypotheses. one possible study would be a multi-university investigation into, for example, whether there are correlations between the gender ratio of 20 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the possibility of future research focused on the intersection of gender and other differences. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 syllabi and teachers, on the one hand, and the changes in the gender ratio of intending majors, before and after the course. another possible study would be to implement an intervention challenging stereotypes of philosophy (e.g., as a discipline for geniuses or men) in a class, and investigate effects on the gender ratio of intending majors before and after the course. these results could then be compared against those of a control class. the control could be the same course in a year in which the intervention was not implemented, or the control could be a subset of discussion sections of a course in a particular year. another avenue for future research involves re-framing the central explanatory questions. when asking why there is female under-representation among philosophy undergraduates, the theoretical focus has understandably been philosophy-centric. people have asked what it is about philosophy that discourages female students from wanting to study philosophy. clearly, this is an important question to ask. but it is not the only question. this is because if women do not major in philosophy, then they are majoring in other subjects instead. in light of this, it seems that the most precise question is “why do women prefer studying these subjects to philosophy?” (calhoun 2015; dougherty et al. 2015). for example, some subjects such as psychology have female over-representation. if this is connected to philosophy’s underrepresentation, then we should ask what it is about both psychology and philosophy that leads these students to choose psychology over philosophy. of course, the first step along this road is to identify which subjects female students are leaving philosophy for. the next step would be to inquire into the reasons why they are leaving. for example, it could be enlightening to conduct “exit interviews” for students who take introductory philosophy courses but do not choose to major in philosophy. 6. conclusion discussions of female under-representation among philosophy students have provided a rich set of candidate hypotheses that posit effects either in the classroom or in students’ experiences before they arrive at university. in other subjects, particularly stem subjects, there has been an impressive amount of empirical research into these effects. however, empirical research into these effects on philosophy students is still in its nascence. there have been a handful of studies that have shone light on the hypotheses. but there remains a pressing need for much more in the way of empirical research, if we are to understand better both the causes of female under-representation in philosophy and also which interventions might redress it. 25 dougherty et al.: female 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introduction.” hypatia 26(2): 374–382. sam baron is a lecturer in philosophy at the university of western australia. he works primarily in metaphysics and philosophy of science, focusing on issues concerning the nature of time, explanation and the role of mathematics in science. tom dougherty is a university lecturer in philosophy at the university of cambridge and a fellow of trinity hall. he works on issues in ethics, particularly concerning consent, ethical vagueness and the significance of temporal perspective. kristie miller is associate professor of philosophy at the university of sydney and joint director of the centre for time. she works primarily in metaphysics, particularly on the nature of time, composition, and persistence and has published widely in these areas. 30 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.4 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 female under-representation among philosophy majors: a map of the hypotheses and a survey of the evidence tom dougherty samuel baron kristie miller recommended citation microsoft word 451818-convertdoc.input.439292.8t36d.docx feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation congdon, matthew. 2018. “‘knower’ as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 2. 2018 “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition matthew congdon vanderbilt university matthew.congdon@vanderbilt.edu congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition1 matthew congdon abstract recent discussions in critical social epistemology have raised the idea that the concept “knower” is not only an epistemological concept but an ethical concept as well. though this idea plays a central role in these discussions, the theoretical underpinnings of the claim have not received extended scrutiny. this paper explores the idea that “knower” is an irreducibly ethical concept in an effort to defend its use as a critical concept. in section 1, i begin with the claim that “knower” is an irreducibly normative and social concept, drawing from some ideas in wilfrid sellars. in section 2, i argue that one’s being a knower involves demands for various sorts of ethically laden recognition. i develop this thought by arguing that axel honneth’s threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. i conclude in section 3 by arguing that miranda fricker’s proposed “analogy” between epistemic and moral perception should be modified to indicate a closer relationship than mere analogy. keywords: ethics, social epistemology, feminist epistemology, recognition, epistemic injustice what is a “knower”? there is a strand of ancient thought for which this is an essentially ethical question. the famous opening lines of aristotle’s metaphysics attribute to us a naturally arising “desire to know” (980a21–27), and book vi of the nicomachean ethics includes a discussion of intellectual virtues as a proper part of the study of ethics. if becoming a knower is ultimately a matter of shaping a certain kind of desire, and if virtue is understood as the shaping of desires in ways that constitute flourishing, then the process of becoming a knower is inseparable from the broader project of pursuing a flourishing human life. part of what this suggests is 1 i am grateful to paul giladi, karen ng, and francey russell for reading earlier drafts and providing helpful suggestions for improvement. a version of this paper was presented at the 11th international critical theory conference of rome, and i thank the participants for a lively discussion on that occasion. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 that the very idea of one’s becoming a knower is adequately grasped only against the background of a broader ethical conception of what a flourishing human life involves. more succinctly, it suggests that “knower” is an irreducibly ethical concept. though this idea has ancient precedent, it has been raised in a fresh way by recent work in the ethics and politics of epistemology, exemplified by miranda fricker’s much-discussed work, epistemic injustice (2007).2 there, the idea is developed negatively: the aim is to carve out conceptual space for a distinctive sort of injustice characterized by the fact that its victims are “wronged in their capacities as knowers” (44). this implies that one’s acquisition of epistemic capacities involves, in addition to gaining conceptual powers that allow one to relate thoughtfully to the world, a newly acquired form of vulnerability to wrongdoing. this negative thesis, in turn, implies something positive: namely, that being a knower is essentially to bear a normative status that is simultaneously epistemic and ethical: it is epistemic insofar as the label “knower” indicates the roles one may legitimately assume within practices of justification and warrant, and ethical, in the sense that being a knower implicates one within interpersonal relations of answerability that invoke notions of justice and injustice, flourishing and degradation, virtue, and vice, rightful treatment and moral injury. if we take this idea seriously, then simply in describing someone as a bearer of epistemic agency, one thereby ascribes to that person an ethical normative standing. my aim in this paper is to lend support to the thesis that “knower” is an irreducibly ethical concept by defending a particular account of what is involved in the second-personal act of recognizing another as a knower. specifically, i develop a picture of the essentially recognitive structure of the concept “knower” via three broad moves. first, i draw from wilfrid sellars’s claim that epistemological concepts—concepts like knowledge and evidence—must be understood in irreducibly social and normative terms. second, i connect this social-normative conception of epistemological concepts with some central themes in axel honneth’s neo-hegelian theory of recognition. epistemological themes arise throughout work in neo-hegelian recognition theory,3 and several authors have already noted connections between the philosophy of recognition and work on epistemic injustice (mcconkey 2004; pohlhaus 2014, 105–106; congdon 2017; giladi 2018; bratu and lepold 2018). i add to these efforts by arguing that the essentially recognitive 2 the contemporary literature on the ethics and politics of epistemology is immense and growing. see, esp., fricker 2007; the essays collected in sullivan and tuana 2007; mills 1997; medina 2013; and the essays collected in kidd, medina, and pohlhaus 2017. 3 honneth gives special attention to the “epistemology” of recognition in honneth 2001 and 2008. for a helpful analysis, see ikäheimo and laitinen 2007. congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 structure of the concept of a “knower” offers a compelling framework within which to situate the claim that “knower” is an essentially ethical concept. i develop this thought by arguing that honneth’s threefold typology of recognition—love, respect, and esteem—finds clear expression within the context of socio-epistemic practice. third, i ask what sort of perception is involved in recognizing others as knowers in this ethically robust sense, arguing that the recognition-theoretical model should be supplemented with a neo-aristotelian conception of moral perception, along the lines defended by john mcdowell and iris murdoch. in this connection, i consider an analogy that fricker proposes between epistemic and moral perception (2007, chap. 3), and argue that, in order to make good on the claim that “knower” is an ethical concept, this must go beyond mere analogy. on the view i prefer, to perceive another as a knower is already a matter of ethical perception. this brings us back to a variation of the aristotelian claim with which i began, namely, that the very idea of being or becoming a knower is only graspable against the background of an ethical conception of a flourishing human life. 1. “knower” as a normative concept in order to build up to the idea that “knower” is an ethical concept, i will start by sketching a version of the more basic claim that “knower” is a normative concept. to that end, it will be helpful to follow an approach suggested by wilfrid sellars in his famous essay, “empiricism and the philosophy of mind” (1997). a central line of thinking in sellars’s essay runs as follows. in characterizing someone or something in epistemic terms, as when we characterize someone as a knower or something as evidence, we are not just making a claim about what that person or thing is in a merely descriptive sense but ascribing a normative status to that person or thing, saying what roles that person or thing may legitimately assume within practices of giving and asking for reasons.4 consider, for example, the contrast between the following two judgments (kukla 2000, 209–210): 4 sellars (1997) sometimes puts this in terms of a logical distinction between judgments of matters of natural fact and judgments of matters of epistemic fact (§17). or, in other places, by contrasting epistemic characterizations with empirical descriptions (§36). both points of contrast can, however, be misleading, at least insofar as they suggest a strong split between the normative and the natural or empirically available world. i agree with mcdowell that sellars’s insight into the normative status of epistemic concepts can be appreciated without taking on the further commitment that “placing something in the logical space of reasons is, as such, to be contrasted with giving an empirical description of it” (mcdowell 1996, 5n4). this technical point is important in light of the form of ethical perception i defend in section 3, below. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 (a) “x is green.” (b) “x is evidence.” both judgments have normative dimensions, but in importantly different ways. judgment (a) is normative in the sense of being subject to normative assessment in its meaning and use: it can be interpreted, evaluated as correct or incorrect, and can justify other claims via logical relations of material implication and exclusion. it bears normative relations with other possible judgments, for example, “x is the same color as kermit” (material implication) and “x is colorless” (exclusion). it may also bear rational relations to practical commitments in the domain of action, for example, if x is a traffic light just ahead. the judgment is, in this fashion, embedded within a normative space that defines a set of rational relationships it has to other possible judgments and actions. but judgment (b), by contrast, is normative in deeper sense. for in addition to being susceptible to all the first-order forms of normative assessment just mentioned, it also serves the higher-order task of purporting to describe the conditions of normative assessment themselves. in this case, “x is evidence” forms part of a description of the rational relations that branch off from our judgments about x into a surrounding set of possible judgments and actions. perhaps x’s being green is the result of a chemical reaction that confirms a scientific hypothesis, and so to characterize this as “evidence” is to make explicit a role it plays within a network of rational relations between epistemic commitments (in this case, supporting a particular theory). so, while judgment (a) is a move within normative space, judgment (b) makes a claim about the layout of normative space itself. it serves to articulate some corner of the “logical space of reasons,” to borrow sellars’s well-known metaphor. the concept “knower,” like the concept “evidence,” is essentially normative in this latter sense, yet involves additional nuance owing to the fact that, unlike the concept “evidence,” it (i) ascribes agency to its target and (ii) situates that agency within social practices of giving and asking for reasons. we may understand the sort of agency at stake in terms of one’s capacity to make moves in the space of reasons that render one answerable to rational sorts of criticism (mcdowell 2009, 6). in characterizing k as a knower, we ascribe to k capacities to acknowledge the authority of, and thus move responsibly within, the rational relations that constitute the space of reasons, which in turn entails the possibility of judging k to be susceptible to various sorts of epistemic failure and dysfunction—ignorance, false belief, bad reasoning—as well as k’s vulnerability to socio-epistemic pathologies like congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 bad prejudice and ideology.5 this presupposes, on the part of those who regard k in this way, certain normative expectations concerning k’s epistemic doings: for example, that k will be rationally sensitive to relevant forms of evidence and counterevidence; that we may legitimately ask k to provide reasons for what she says and does; and, reciprocally, that she may legitimately ask the same of us. the normative and social characterization of epistemic terms has precedent extending back to influential lines of thought in kant and german idealism and has many contemporary advocates.6 our concern, however, is with the stronger thesis that “knower” is normative not only in a narrowly epistemic sense but in a broader sense that includes irreducibly ethical dimensions. there are several ways we could put this point. borrowing fricker’s language, we could express it by saying that certain judgments and inferences having to do with epistemic injustice and epistemic justice are a proper part of the conceptual content of the concept “knower,” such that a decent understanding of that concept invariably involves a grasp of our ethical relationship to those we recognize as knowers. by way of analogy the idea would be this: in the same way that certain material inferences are part of the conceptual content of the concept “green” (e.g., inferences like “if x is green, then x is not colorless,” etc.), certain material inferences concerning ethical conduct are part of the conceptual content of the concept “knower,” such that one’s recognizing k as a knower cannot be separated, even notionally, from an acknowledgment of k’s warranting certain forms of ethical treatment and regard.7 we might take either of two opposed reactions towards this stronger ethical thesis right off the bat. on the one hand, one may find this thesis fairly unsurprising, especially given the recent explosion of interest over the past decade or so in the ethics and politics of epistemology.8 for someone immersed within this body of work, for whom the idea of a “socially situated knower” is familiar and self-evident, the thought that epistemic agency has irreducibly ethical dimensions is an 5 on the idea of a “social pathology,” see honneth 2014, 86. on the role of ideology in connection with the strand of social epistemology under discussion here, see, e.g., mills 1997, 2007, and 2017. 6 for two variations on the sellarsian story just sketched, both of which foreground connections with kant and post-kantian idealism, see mcdowell 1996 and brandom 1998. 7 though i put the thesis in terms of material inference here, a point i endorse in section 3, below, is that value-laden judgments concerning knowers may also be available noninferentially via perception. 8 see note 2. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 indispensable foundational notion.9 why think we could separate, even for purposes of analysis, one’s standing as a knower from the embedded ethical-political context in which actual epistemic practice takes place, from the complex relations of power and vulnerability that shape basic epistemic features like credibility, trust, belief, and testimony? and yet, from an equally familiar philosophical point of view, one can find this thesis preposterous. surely we can formulate an abstract picture of an epistemic agent, who endorses certain true beliefs in the right ways or for the right reasons and thereby counts as a knower, without presupposing anything distinctively ethical. that, after all, is what conceptual analysis is for: it lifts basic notions like “knower” out of the murky depths of lived experience and into the light of conceptual clarity. we might even grant that “knower” is an irreducibly normative concept, implying notions of agency and answerability, while nevertheless maintaining that these notions are normative in a sense that can be grasped fully outside the perspective of an ethical outlook.10 my view is that the stronger ethical thesis can be defended against the latter reaction, but that it might not be as self-evident as the former reaction makes it seem. to defend it, some of its theoretical underpinnings need to be made explicit. in order to begin building a bridge between the sellarsian “space of reasons” and this more ethically robust claim, we may highlight two points that follow from the normative characterization of the concept “knower.” (i) first, if “knower” is a normative concept, then to conceive of oneself as a knower is a distinctive sort of positive self-relation, for it involves ascribing to oneself a normative standing in relation to others, one that denotes certain normative powers and responsibilities in the context of practices of justification and warrant. in conceiving of oneself as a knower, one assumes a complex practical identity, viewing oneself as meriting certain kinds of treatment that follow from one’s rightful inclusion within socio-epistemic practices. in this way, regarding 9 the concept of the “situated knower” has a long history, developed through a combination of marxian, feminist, and critical race theory perspectives. see, e.g., lukács 1971; harding 2004; mills 2007; and collins 2000, chap. 11. 10 for a discussion of this tendency in modern epistemology, which emphasizes the decoupling of epistemological concepts from “merely human interests,” see habermas 1971. see in particular his discussion of the “ethical neutrality” that is supposed to characterize the ideal knower (303). mills (2007, 13) suggests that the ethically and politically neutral methodological paradigm in epistemology begins with descartes. fricker suggests that the absence of ethical or political considerations in mainstream epistemology results from a “framework of individualism and compulsory rational idealization that epistemology traditionally creates for itself” (fricker 2007, 2). congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 oneself as an epistemic agent involves a basic sort of self-affirmation. “knower” is a description under which one values oneself, views oneself as leading a life worth living, and under which one can view one’s activities as worth pursuing (cf. korsgaard 1996, 101) insofar as a basic reflexive grasp of oneself as a knower is a prerequisite for epistemic agency at all (as in kant’s notion that the “i think” must be capable of accompanying all my representations [kant 1999, ak. b131–132]), one’s being a knower and one’s capacity to reflexively affirm oneself as a knower are two sides of the same coin. (ii) the second point is closely related to this. if “knower” is a normative concept in the sense sketched above, then to regard another person as a knower is a matter of adopting a particular normative attitude towards that other, one that apprehends its target as appropriately subject to distinctive sorts of criticism and as bearing the positive self-relation just described. we can push this slightly further by noting that to be judged a knower is to be regarded not only as subject to normative appraisal but as capable of subjecting other knowers to the same sorts of normative appraisal. so, a’s regarding b as a knower presupposes b’s capacity to regard a as a knower in turn. their reciprocal regard situates the pair within a shared space of reasons, one defined by the sorts of rational relations (e.g., material implications and exclusions) that are in principle sharable and equally authoritative for a and b alike. the result is a “bipolar” or two-way relation of answerability running between epistemic agents (thompson 2004). combining these two points already brings us close to the concerns of neohegelian recognition theory, for one of its central claims is the absolute dependence of one’s positive relation-to-self upon one’s standing in essentially social relations of recognition with others.11 one’s possession of a positive self-relation involves normative expectations concerning the sorts of treatment one merits from others in virtue of one’s status. recognition theory seeks to explain the normative significance of those expectations in terms of a basic need for recognition from others, such that the disappointment of those expectations typically or paradigmatically involves the perception that due recognition has been denied or withheld. in our case, viewing oneself as a knower will involve normative expectations concerning the forms of interpersonal treatment that are consistent with due recognition of that status. it is within the reciprocal normative relations of answerability just described that struggles for epistemic recognition can arise. my aim in the next section is to elaborate, with the help of honneth’s threefold typology of recognition, a 11 the general premise that one’s relation-to-self is fundamentally dependent upon relations-to-others is central for honneth (see, esp., 1995 and 2008) but is also a key feature of non-honnethian approaches to recognition, e.g., butler 2004; bernstein 2015; and brandom 2007. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 framework for theorizing what sorts of epistemic recognition might be thought of as due to persons in virtue of their normative standing as knowers. first, however, a terminological clarification about the term, “recognition.” the term is sometimes used to refer to the basic practical attitude involved in regarding another as a bearer of normative statuses at all. robert brandom uses the term in this fashion: “taking someone to be responsible or authoritative, attributing a normative deontic status to someone, is the attitude-kind that hegel (picking up a term of fichte’s) calls ‘recognition’ (anerkennung)” (2013, 70). this use of the term tracks the sort of normative attitude i was just describing in points (i) and (ii). however, “recognition” is sometimes given a more demanding interpretation, requiring on the recognizer’s part not only a practical attitude that ascribes a normative status, but also an expressive act or treatment whereby the recognizer publicly demonstrates acknowledgment of the validity of that status, for example, through concrete, communicative gestures of respect the recognizee can understand. quietly thinking to myself that you are a good chess player is not yet recognizing you as such in this more demanding sense: i need to tell you, give you a trophy, and so forth, in order for recognition to take place. axel honneth uses the term this way, emphasizing that recognition “is dependent on media that express the fact that the other person is supposed to possess social ‘validity’” (2001, 115) and involves “affective approval or encouragement” (1995, 95; cf. 2002, 505–506). in sum, what brandom calls “recognition”—that is, the attitude of ascribing a normative status to a person—is a necessary but not sufficient condition for what honneth calls “recognition,” which involves an additional expressive or communicative act of affirmation.12 i am going to use the term “recognition” in the more demanding sense. as i understand it, “recognition” is a complex phenomenon involving at least (i) a practical attitude whereby one regards a recognizee as bearing a normative status and (ii) an expressive communicative act whereby the recognizer publicly validates that status by treating the recognizee in ways appropriate to it. i’ll reserve the term “regard” for the more basic and less demanding practical attitude of ascribing to one a normative status in the first place.13 12 some accounts specify further conditions beyond these. for instance, some views hold a “mutuality requirement,” i.e., that a has not recognized b unless b is in some way receptive to, or identifies with, the form of validation that a offers. see, e.g., ikäheimo and laitinen 2007, 37–39. 13 ikäheimo and laitinen (2007) take a different view: “we argue that actions . . . are not a necessary constituent of recognition at all. rather, the recognitive attitudes that are a necessary constituent of recognition are motivators of actions” (44n17). congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 2. epistemic recognition and its failures once one has entered into the two-way normative relation implied in regarding another as a knower, one faces the question of whether and how to recognize that other, which is to say, whether and how to behave in ways that convey one’s acceptance, affirmation, and validation of the other’s normative status qua knower. my aim in this section is to provide a framework for thinking about what epistemic recognition might amount to, that is, what forms of recognition might be understood as properly merited by one’s standing as a knower. at the heart of recognition theory is the thesis that one’s positive selfrelation is bound up with, and in fundamental ways dependent upon, the receipt of certain basic types of recognition from others. according to honneth’s influential version, individuals first acquire positive understandings of themselves only thanks to a developmental process of socialization whereby others confer recognition of their worth and social standing through affirmative expressive gestures and acts (honneth 1995, chap. 5). even once a practical self-conception is more or less firmly established in adulthood, an individual’s positive self-relation remains vulnerable and dependent upon ongoing recognition from others. it is because of our dependence upon initial and ongoing relations of recognition that interpersonal interactions in which one perceives others as withholding or denying relevant sorts of recognition can be experienced as moral injuries (honneth 2007a). that is, the reason human beings are capable of experiencing distinctively moral sorts of pain— as in experiences of being insulted, humiliated, excluded, dominated, or degraded by others’ treatment, which are irreducible to nonmoral feelings of misfortune or bad luck—is that they arise from social interactions perceived as attacks upon the intersubjective preconditions for achieving a positive self-relation in the first place (2007a, 137). this, honneth urges, best accounts for what separates our typical attitudes towards accidental injuries, which we may experience as mere ill luck or constraint, from those we take towards distinctively moral injuries that seem to attack our very identity or integrity as persons, which typically give rise to negative moral emotions, like resentment and indignation (2007a, 133–134; cf. strawson 2008, 6). in serious cases, the denial or withholding of recognition can lead to the total destruction of the victim’s positive self-understanding. as honneth puts it, “because the normative self-image of each and every individual human being . . . is dependent on the possibility of being continually backed up by others, the experience of being disrespected carries with it the danger of an injury that can bring the identity of the person as a whole to the point of collapse” (1995, 131–132). this characterization strikes me as wrong, at least insofar as they purport to be analyzing the concept of recognition as it appears in honneth’s theory. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 so, according to this line of thought, a set of recognition-theoretical concepts are tightly interconnected and mutually imply one another: (a) one’s positive selfrelation, (b) the relations of recognition one needs in order to develop and uphold that self-relation, and (c) the corresponding failures of recognition (mis-, non-, or ideological recognition14) that can be experienced as a moral injury and, in extreme circumstances, contribute to the breakdown of one’s positive self-relation altogether. now i want to suggest that the basic sellarsian framework i introduced in section 1 can be transposed into these recognition-theoretical terms. regarding oneself as a knower is (a*) a form of practical self-relation that (b*) comes along with normative expectations concerning others’ recognition of that status and (c*) generates a distinctive sort of vulnerability to corresponding sorts of recognition failure, that is, one’s susceptibility to being “wronged in one’s capacity as a knower,” to put it with fricker (2007, 44). indeed, fricker echoes honneth in her claim that repeated acts of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice can threaten one’s very identity as a knower, and thus “can inhibit the very formation of self” (2007, 55). in order to give the idea of epistemic recognition some determinacy, i want to develop three basic types of epistemic recognition along with corresponding types of epistemic recognition failure. i’ll do so by following honneth’s own threefold typology of recognition. taking his cue from hegel’s identification of the family, civil society, and the state as the three fundamental social spheres constituting modern ethical life (hegel 1991, §§158–360), honneth elaborates three fundamental sorts of recognition: love, respect, and esteem.15 these correspond, in turn, to three fundamental sorts of 14 the term “misrecognition” is sometimes used as a catch-all term for all instances in which due recognition is distorted or withheld. i prefer the broader label “failures of recognition,” which includes several varieties, including: (i) nonrecognition, in which people are treated as if socially invisible or worthless, (ii) misrecognition, in which people are treated in ways that only partially or distortedly do justice to their worth, and (iii) ideological recognition, in which apparently affirmative gestures strengthen conditions of oppression. on nonrecognition (understood in terms of “social invisibility” and “reification”) see honneth 2001 and 2008. on ideological recognition, see honneth 2007b; young 2007; celikates 2009; and worsdale 2018. on the connection between misrecognition and moral injury, see bernstein 2005 and honneth 2007a. 15 see, esp., honneth 1995, chap. 5. for one of the clearest reconstructions of the three types of recognition (along with a feminist critique), see young 2007. honneth’s theory is sometimes contrasted with “one-dimensional” theories of recognition, which treat recognition without differentiating between subspecies. congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 positive self-relation they help develop and sustain: basic self-confidence, selfrespect, and self-esteem. (i) love is the form of recognition that affirms human beings in their neediness and vulnerability within the context of intimate relationships (honneth 1995, 95–107). a caretaker’s love for a young child first enables the beloved to develop the basic self-confidence involved in feeling that one’s needs merit others’ caring attention. in order to count as loving care in the sense of recognition, the caretaker must not simply ensure that the child’s needs are met, but meet those needs in a way that conveys to the child a sense that her needs deserve to be met, that she is worth caring for. it is thanks to such relations of loving care, honneth argues, that humans first come to emerge in early adulthood as individuated, autonomous, self-confident beings. (ii) respect, in contrast with the particularistic intimacy of love, is a universalistic form of recognition that affirms persons in their standing as legal and moral equals (1995, 107–121). we may think here in kantian terms of the demand to respect the humanity of all persons as endsin-themselves. respect for a person’s moral standing in this sense is dependent neither upon special relations of affection and intimacy nor upon the subject’s individual accomplishments or contributions to the social good. one is recognized as bearing a normative standing simply in virtue of one’s humanity or intrinsic dignity. the positive self-relation sustained by respect is self-respect, one’s capacity to view oneself as belonging to a community of moral equals. (iii) finally, subjects desire to be recognized not only for who they are (whether in their particular neediness or in their universal moral personhood) but for the things they do that distinguish them as individuals. esteem is the form of recognition that affirms individuals insofar as they make unique and valuable contributions within the cooperative sphere of social life (honneth 1995, 121–130). the form of practical relation-to-self developed and sustained by esteem is self-esteem, the sense that one exists within a community that values one’s contributions to it. in contrast with respect, esteem is nonegalitarian and indexed to individual achievement. esteem requires that recognizer and recognizee share a “horizon of value,” within which certain projects and pursuits are mutually regarded as meaningful, beneficial, enriching, or admirable. now, we can take honneth’s threefold conception of recognition as a guiding thread in order to articulate the way these forms are at work within the context of epistemic practice.16 see ikäheimo and laitinen, 2007, 39–42. the account of recognition offered by brandom (2013) appears to be one-dimensional in this sense. 16 i also develop a threefold schema of “epistemic recognition” based on love, respect, and esteem in congdon 2017. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 (i*) epistemic love could refer to those forms of attention, encouragement, and patience required to provide potential knowers with an initial sense of epistemic trust and self-confidence in early childhood. to provide epistemic love is to recognize the manifold ways in which epistemic agency is a fragile and socially dependent achievement. the need for epistemic love, moreover, does not end with a knower’s transition to adulthood but persists insofar as we continue to be needy and socially dependent in our capacities as knowers. if assigning a central place to love within an epistemological theory initially sounds eccentric,17 it is worth recalling that ordinary testimonial exchange between adults typically requires basic forms of sympathy and compassion: for example, showing patience with a speaker who is having difficulty finding the right words; avoiding unnecessary aggression in questioning; realizing that ordinary competent speakers make simple mistakes and skip over important premises in reasoning.18 this is more than a set of platitudes about polite epistemic conduct: the recipient of epistemic love is given a chance to view herself from the perspective of others as one whose epistemic neediness and social dependence is acknowledged as legitimate, or worth caring for.19 it also contains the important point that even the most basic testimonial exchanges require complex, socially learned exercises of emotional competence and imaginative identification with others. in this way epistemic love is, far from being an eccentric 17 though it has precedent extending as far back as ancient greek thought. for example, socrates’s conviction that education requires the inspiration and guidance of a certain kind of love (plato 1997, 201d–212c). 18 craig (1999) notes the importance of basic sorts of empathy within testimonial exchange with examples like the following. if i ask you while in a rush, “where is the bus stop?” and you respond, “it’s just around the corner. but the last bus left ten minutes ago,” your response demonstrates not only an ability to understand my explicitly voiced question, but also the purpose or importance that question has for me. thus, craig concludes, “an informant is a co-operating member of our species. that means that he can often empathize with the inquirer, and react not just to the question but to the presumed purpose of asking it, so giving the inquirer useful information that he didn’t know he had need of” (36; cf. 38). see, also, fricker on the role of empathy in testimonial exchange (2007, 79–80). 19 gaita (1998) makes a parallel point about the epistemic role played by love when a teacher demonstrates passion for a particular subject matter. beyond merely conveying information or skills, a teacher’s love for a topic may “teach students about the worth of what they—teacher and students—are doing together” (230). similar ideas are at work in efforts to extend feminist care ethics into epistemology (see dalmiya 2002). congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 philosophical postulate, a fundamental and familiar feature of everyday epistemic practice. next, (ii*) epistemic respect can refer to those egalitarian forms of recognition owed to any knower whatsoever. the very idea that we owe certain forms of recognition to all knowers universally may initially sound odd, given the evident fact we judge knowers as more or less competent, as having or lacking relevant experience, as having comparatively higher and lower degrees of credibility. all of these factors vary for each individual knower across different areas of knowledge and contexts of testimonial exchange. what might it mean, then, to respect someone qua knower irrespective of the differential strengths and weaknesses by which we typically judge knowers? though this is not an easy point to spell out in fine detail, it turns out to be possible to sketch at least a rough outline of this thought by noting some historical precedent for the idea. at one point in the doctrine of virtue, kant describes a duty we have to others that we might understand as a mixture of epistemic respect and epistemic love: [we have] a duty to respect a human being even in the logical use of his reason, a duty not to censure his errors by calling them absurdities, poor judgment, and so forth, but rather to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out, . . . to preserve his respect for his own understanding. (kant 2017, ak. 6:463) the basic principle of generosity kant is recommending here is echoed in later philosophy, for example h. p. grice’s (1975) argument in favor of a set of conversational norms derived from a “principle of cooperation” that apply to any conversation irrespective of its subject matter, or nancy daukas’s (2006) more recent defense of an “epistemic principle of charity,” which she draws out from the thought that “normal practices of epistemic interaction and cooperation require that members of an epistemic community typically extend to one another the presumption that they meet some threshold level of epistemic credibility” (110). these sorts of suggestions, though different in their details, agree at least in the notion that there is some basic form of respect owed to any knower, irrespective of differential factors like expertise. we could also add the following point in favor of a threshold form of egalitarian epistemic recognition. our discussion in section 1 already suggested that to regard another as a knower is to implicate oneself in a two-way relation of answerability vis-à-vis that other. it is difficult to grasp what this relation could consist in if it did not contain at least the inchoate normative promise that one will be held to the same fundamental rational standards as all other participants in the space of reasons. so, for example, if a particular inference made feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 by k counts as invalid, in a way that other epistemic agents may criticize, then, ceteris paribus, j’s making exactly the same inference ought not to be credited as a piece of sound reasoning but should be subject to the same sorts of criticism as k’s inference. at least in this very basic respect, k and j are equals in the space of reasons, and to fail to treat k and j this way can, in certain cases, amount not only to a logical error but to a form of epistemic disrespect, a failure to treat them in ways consistent with due recognition of their normative status as knowers in general. i say only in “certain cases” because a hearer’s failure to subject j and k’s identical inferences to the same sorts of rational criticism can be due to nonculpable contingent circumstances.20 in order to amount to epistemic disrespect, this failure must stem from morally culpable grounds. imagine, for example, that j and k are, respectively, a man and a woman lecturing on fichte at a conference. they present essentially the same reconstruction of a particular line of argument from the text. audience member a detects a crucial logical flaw in k’s line of reasoning but not j’s, despite the fact that they presented the same argument. if a’s failure to detect the same flaw in j’s argument was due to the fact that, say, a was distracted for a moment by a fire alarm, then a’s error seems nearer to the nonculpable end of the spectrum. but if a’s failure to detect the flaw in j’s reasoning has its root in, say, a sexist bias that pays undue reverence to male fichte scholars in comparison with women in the same field, then we have a case not only of logical inconsistency but epistemic disrespect. (iii*) epistemic esteem, by contrast, could refer to those forms of epistemic recognition that do take into account individual knowers’ unique strengths, epistemic accomplishments, and contributions to epistemic practice that serve to distinguish them from others. hard-won expertise in a field, practical knowledge from a lifetime of experience, or the cultivation of a trustworthy epistemic character may be grounds for epistemic esteem. good grades and academic degrees are obvious (albeit often crude) ways of conferring epistemic esteem, though we may also think of more subtle forms of epistemic esteem that manifest themselves in the course of testimonial exchange. iris marion young offers the following example: “you and i start a conversation about a philosophical problem, we exchange proposals and arguments, and we criticize one another. we esteem one another reciprocally and simultaneously just to the degree that each of us pushes the other to think harder” (young 2007, 208). the point is that epistemic esteem can involve gestures that are grand and flashy (diplomas with latin phrases specifying one’s gpa) but they can also take the form of quiet, subtle indications that one is simply finding the conversation stimulating. the form of positive self-relation this develops and sustains is epistemic self-esteem, one’s regarding oneself as having distinct and 20 cf. fricker’s discussion of epistemic and ethical culpability (2007, chaps. 1 and 4). congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 valuable contributions to make to collective epistemic practices. since epistemic esteem is nonegalitarian by definition, indexed as it is to particular valuable epistemic contributions, it is both possible and in line with the demands of epistemic justice to respect j and k as epistemic equals while esteeming k more highly than j in a particular area given k’s expertise. once we have elaborated these three sorts of epistemic recognition, we can see a set of corresponding types of epistemic recognition failures. epistemic neglect can refer to the unjust exclusion of potential knowers from educational opportunities and other forms of epistemic love in early childhood (cf. haslanger 2014). i already briefly discussed the notion of epistemic disrespect above, which i characterized as a violation of the implicit normative promise that all knowers be subjected to the same basic standards of criticism within the space of reasons. epistemic disesteem, in turn, can refer to acts that convey the notion that one’s distinctive contributions to cooperative epistemic practice are undervalued or viewed as worthless.21 in sum, extending honneth’s typology of recognition into the epistemic domain allows us to elaborate three forms of epistemic recognition and three corresponding forms of epistemic misrecognition. the twin notions that one can merit such forms of epistemic recognition and that such forms of epistemic misrecognition can be criticized presupposes that the hypothesis we raised in section 1 is true: that “knower” is an ethical concept, such that to regard adequately one as a knower implicates one within an ethical relation. 3: epistemic perception as ethical perception i proposed in section 1 to explore the claim that “knower” is not only a normative concept in a narrowly epistemic sense but an irreducibly ethical concept. my discussion of epistemic recognition in section 2 was meant to contribute to this task in a partial manner, by offering a story of the sorts of ethical contents we might view as a proper part of the concept “knower.” according to this story, to regard another as a knower is to adopt a normative attitude that involves, internal to it, an acknowledgment of an ethical status that merits particular forms of recognition. in this section, i try to lend support to the notion that what’s involved in offering due epistemic recognition to another is, in fact, a matter of rational responsiveness to 21 these are not the only ways in which epistemic recognition can fail. we should also allow for the notion that certain acts which appear to convey social validation of others’ standings as epistemic agents in fact serve to reinforce conditions of oppression. these would be instances of ideological epistemic recognition. davis 2016 provides a helpful analysis of cases that fall within this category as part of her discussion of “identity-prejudicial credibility excess.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 (or, indeed, perception of) ethically significant qualities persons possess qua knowers. i will do so by way of a comparison with fricker’s own discussion of what is involved in perceiving others as credible informants. before turning to fricker, however, we may note that there is a closely related debate within recognition theory surrounding the nature of the evaluative qualities that a potential recognizee must possess in order to merit recognition. honneth himself has proposed two competing models for addressing this issue. on the one hand is what he calls the “perception model,” according to which due recognition is understood as a matter of rational responsiveness to evaluative qualities that others objectively possess and which provide a rational ground for our distinguishing between due recognition and misrecognition. on the other hand is what he calls the “attribution model,” which holds that persons do not possess evaluative qualities in an objective sense but rather receive, or are granted, such qualities as a result of standing within relations of recognition.22 the sellarsian framework i sketched in section 1 could be taken in either direction. on the one hand, john mcdowell’s elaboration of the idea of the “space of reasons” moves in the realist direction of the perception model, which i will return to in a moment. on the other hand, robert brandom moves in different direction, one that hews closer to the attribution model. as he puts it, “someone becomes responsible only when others hold him responsible, and exercises authority only when others acknowledge that authority. . . . no one has authority over me except that which i grant by my recognitive attitudes” (2013, 70–71). receiving recognition, on this model, is a matter of being granted a normative status or evaluative significance, analogous to one’s being granted a particular legal status by a governing authority. a point that might appear to speak in favor of the attribution model is its capacity to capture the transformative power of acts of recognition and misrecognition, the fact that the recipient of recognition or misrecognition can be altered or shaped in ways that appear to conform to the positive or negative image projected onto her. indeed, fricker notes that one of the insidious effects of testimonial injustice can be to shape the speaker’s behavior and self-conception in ways that end up, to some degree, fulfilling the hearer’s prejudiced expectations of her. she gives the example of a woman who, as a result of continually being treated as “irrational” and “hysterical,” develops such self-doubt and internalized frustration that she actually comes to resemble the gender-based stereotype of the “hysterical 22 for these labels, see honneth 2002, 506–507 and honneth, 2007b, 331. for more detailed discussion, see laitinen 2002 and ikäheimo 2002. congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 woman” her hearers have unjustly foisted upon her.23 in cases like this, misrecognition has a self-fulfilling power: a diminished representation of her standing as a credible informant has succeeded in actually lowering that credibility by damaging the speaker’s epistemic self-confidence. so, it is possible that a failure to recognize certain evaluative qualities possessed by k (in this case, k’s credibility) can actually succeed in destroying or diminishing those same evaluative qualities. fricker is right, however, to caution against taking the “self-fulfilling power” of epistemic misrecognition too far. she distances herself from what she views as a foucauldian conception of power that makes no room for the realist premise that misrecognition might in fact distort “who the subject really is” (2007, 55). insofar as we are concerned to criticize the hearer’s prejudicial construction of the speaker as hysterical, we need to find a balance between the ideas that misrecognition simultaneously constructs and distorts the speaker’s identity. it should be clear that once we appeal to notions of “distortion” and notions of “who the subject really is,” we presuppose some minimally realist commitment: namely, that even when complex forms of social construction and ideological distortion are in play, there can nevertheless remain a fact of the matter about whether a failure of recognition has occurred. this helps indicate the direction we should take: the right sort of view will be able to accommodate the notion that both due recognition and failures of recognition can have transformative effects upon the recognizee’s normative status, without relinquishing the realist premise that due recognition is a matter of rational responsiveness to evaluative qualities not wholly determined by the attitudes and actions of the recognizer.24 what we need, then, is a subtle version of the perception model that can capture recognition’s simultaneously transformative and rationally responsive aspects. in order to clarify this thought, it is helpful to turn to fricker’s discussion of the role of virtuous perception in our interactions with others qua knowers. in chapter 3 of epistemic injustice, fricker defends a “virtue epistemological account of testimony,” which holds that our judgments of speakers as more or less credible can be understood as noninferential, socially trained perceptions of the 23 i am thinking of fricker’s treatment of the character marge sherwood from the talented mr. ripley (2007, 88). 24 this realist premise is debated in the context of critical social epistemology. mills (2007) and alcoff (2007) both express commitment to the idea that a critique of structural ignorance necessarily requires a critical framework that involves notions of objectivity, truth, and the world as it actually is. for attacks on these realist commitments from pragmatist directions, see cormier 2007 and dieleman 2017. i discuss these issues and defend a realist view in congdon 2015. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 prompts and cues that bear on epistemic trust. such “credibility judgments” are called for in all instances of testimonial exchange, insofar as a speaker must always be assessed, whether implicitly or explicitly, as more or less credible in order to count as a good informant. on fricker’s noninferentialist account, such judgments are not (at least not typically or exclusively) the result of inferences that apply rules to cases, but are “theory-laden” perceptions, which bring to bear on a particular instance of testimony a body of generalizations concerning human cognitive abilities and motivational states relevant to the two primary elements of epistemic credibility: competence and sincerity (2007, 66). as fricker is careful to note, she is using “theory” here in a very broad sense, referring not to a fully articulate and systematic set of principles governing what sorts of acts and behaviors count as competent and sincere, but rather, a noncodifiable, pragmatic background comprehension of the place various epistemic acts occupy within the broader context of the human form of life. so, on fricker’s view, what allows us to see others in “epistemic color,” as she puts it, is a background theory involving generalizations concerning various probabilistic factors that help determine “the probability that someone like that would (be able and willing to) tell someone like him the truth about something like this in circumstances like these” (71). the probabilistic factors consist of generalizations about the likely competences and motivations of different social types in different settings, and result in one’s ability to read the subtle cues and prompts at work in a particular discursive performance as having a particular epistemic salience. fricker’s strategy for substantiating this notion of a noninferential, theoryladen perceptual capacity for judging others’ credibility is to draw an analogy with the notion of moral perception as it appears in certain strands of neo-aristotelian virtue ethics (see, e.g., murdoch 1970; mcdowell 1998, esp. chaps. 1–3; and nussbaum 1992). she develops the analogy by articulating five points of parallel between the virtuous perception of the moral agent and the virtuous perception of an epistemic agent: in both contexts, she argues, virtuous judgment is (i) perceptual, and thus noninferential; (ii) uncodifiable, that is, not susceptible to formulation into rules from which right judgments could be deductively produced; (iii) intrinsically motivating; (iv) intrinsically reason-giving; and (v) typically involves a form of emotional attunement or affective sensitivity that is a proper part of the judgment itself (fricker 2007, 72). fricker’s elaboration of each of these five points is illuminating in many respects, yet it is not the specifics that concern us here but the more general shape of the thought. by way of a process of “moral training” in an aristotelian sense (or bildung, as mcdowell often puts it [see, e.g., 1996, 84, 87– 88]), virtuous individuals’ perceptual capacities are habituated and sharpened to the point at which a broad background understanding of various nuances of human motivation and behavior make possible noninferential judgments concerning the congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 moral and epistemic qualities of others. through one’s process of socialization or bildung, individuals’ moral sensibilities are, first of all, shaped by the form of life or “tradition” they have inherited and, second of all, subject to ongoing refinement through reflexive self-criticism. when this process goes well, a virtuous moral agent is able to see the world “in moral color,” and the virtuous epistemic agent is able to see the world “in epistemic color.” as a result, fricker concludes, we may view “testimonial sensibility as a part—indeed, an essential part—of our epistemic ‘second nature’” (fricker 2007, 85). here is how this links up with our previous discussion of epistemic recognition. we were looking for some way of substantiating the notion, presupposed above, that our regard for others as knowers involves, internal to that very regard, the potential for a rational receptivity to evaluative features that call forth ethically robust forms of recognition. the perceptual model that fricker adapts from neo-aristotelian virtue ethics and extends to the case of credibility judgments provides, i think, the right basic sort of framework for developing this perceptionbased model of epistemic recognition. however, in order for the model to work in the present context, we need modify fricker’s account in two ways.25 first, i suggest that the background theory or virtuous sensibility fricker elaborates should be seen as contributing to a form of perceptual discernment that takes place a step earlier than the sorts of credibility assessment that are her primary concern. for if we possess a perceptual capacity to discern others as more or less credible across various contexts, this in turn presupposes a more fundamental perceptual capacity to discern others as bearing epistemic significance at all. for we can raise questions of the following sort: what is it to comprehend some bit of behavior as a bit of testimony (credible or not) in the first place, as opposed to, say, a meaningless aggregate of bodily movement and noise? how is it that i perceive your nod as answering my question in the affirmative, rather than being a mere twitch or a greeting, or that i perceive a particular discursive performance on your part as an attempt to convey knowledge by telling? what sort of knowledge do we exhibit when we successfully perceive some bit of behavior as having this very basic sort of epistemic significance? the right sort of answer, i think, continues to follow the neo-aristotelian vision of virtuous perception that fricker suggests for the later case of credibility assessments: successfully apprehending some bit of behavior as epistemically significant invariably draws upon a background conception (or “theory” in fricker’s broad sense) of the place of that bit of behavior within the human form of life. by 25 the two modifications i propose are meant as friendly amendments to fricker’s view, as neither point undermines the virtue epistemological account of testimony that is her primary concern in chapter 3. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 contrast, an inferentialist or rule-based view appears less plausible. if that sort of view were correct, then the knowledge we manifest when we successfully apprehend behavior as epistemically expressive would have to be a rule-governed sort, implying that our capacity to “see the world in epistemic color” is the result of our learning a set of antecedently available principles governing what sorts of behavior correspond to what sorts of epistemic significance. this seems on the wrong track, for reasons similar to those that make it right to say that virtuous perception is “noncodifiable”: not only is human expressive behavior too variable and context-dependent for any such rules to be definitively recorded and learned in a way that would render their deductive application in all instances possible, but our epistemic competence must be capable of extending to new cases, that is, it must include the capacity to discern forms of epistemic significance we have not previously encountered. hence, our capacity to grasp others’ behavior as expressive of epistemic significance presupposes antecedent knowledge, but not in the form of a set of antecedently available rules from which epistemic significance could be simply deduced. the antecedent knowledge in question must be such as to enable a practical sensitivity to the manifold ways epistemic significance may be manifest in behavior in an indefinite range of contexts and situations. this presupposes a subtle sort of pragmatic background understanding of the way testimony is used, its purpose, and its place within the broad context of the human form of life. this leads to the second point of modification, namely, that the relationship fricker identifies between epistemic perception and moral perception should be viewed as more than a mere analogy. on mcdowell’s aristotelian conception, a virtuous person’s vision of how best to live is uncodifiable in the sense that it cannot be captured in terms that would render it suitable for playing the role of major premise in a deductively valid practical syllogism (mcdowell 1998, 57–58). the reasons for holding this thesis are, i think, deeper than the mere fact that the premises in question would be infinitely long once all possible contingent circumstances had been factored in. rather, the virtuous person’s vision is not susceptible to codification because it embodies a broad sensitivity to the ways in which various actions fit within the human form of life as a whole. it is this sort of background understanding, an ethically saturated conception of what matters in a human life, that is not, even in principle, susceptible to codification into a system of rules. the way particular exercises of perception operate for a virtuous person, then, are by placing particular bits of action and behavior against the background of this ethical conception of the life of the species. the move that i am now suggesting is that, in order to grasp some individual bit of behavior as expressive of epistemic significance, say, of testimony, that bit of behavior similarly needs to be viewed in light of its place within an ethically saturated conception of what matters in the human form of life. what speaks for congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 this is that testimony, like all epistemic activity, is a purposive activity invariably undertaken within the context of meaningful projects that constitute a life in which certain things are seen as mattering. purposive human activity is necessarily guided by some sense of goodness, simply insofar as it presupposes an aim or a goal. insofar as individual performances of purposive activity are always in principle assessable from a wider perspective concerning how they fit within or contribute to a flourishing life, even mundane and seemingly nonethical instances of testimony must somehow be understood as having a place within the broader context of a life worth living. it is in light of this that i suggest that rightly perceiving another’s behavior as epistemically significant requires a broader ethical background conception, where we can conceive of this in the aristotelian sense of a eudaimonistic vision of the human form of life.26 this goes beyond fricker’s more modest recommendation, which holds only that the relevant background “theory” contains generalizations that bear on the probability that certain social identities will be counted as trustworthy in various contexts. taken simply in those terms, it is possible to read fricker as suggesting that the kinds of generalizations in question could be grasped independently of an ethically shaped sensibility. the stronger claim i am urging could be put in broadly wittgensteinian terms. in order to regard some discursive performance on the part of a speaker as in some way epistemically significant, we as hearers must already possess a background comprehension of the sorts of things human beings do with language: give orders, describe appearances, report events, speculate about events, make up stories, sing, make jokes, guess at riddles, curse, greet, apologize, and so on (wittgenstein 2001, §23). a reasonably mature comprehension of these manifold forms can only be learned as part of a broader process of training or bildung that necessarily includes a set of practical and ethical sensibilities that allow one to place such discursive performances within the broader context of the human form of life. viewed from this perspective, it is impossible to understand the nature of epistemic concepts and performances, like “knower” and instances of testimony, by pulling them apart from their place within what makes for a flourishing human life (cf. the notion of a “life-form” in foot 2001, chap. 2; and thompson 2008). 26 in my view, a broadly aristotelian approach to ethics fits well with the sort of recognition-theoretical approach described earlier. i understand recognition theory in its best form to be a modern, explicitly intersubjective version of the sort of eudaimonism aristotle defends. the substantive difference consists in the fact that the table of virtues that together comprise a flourishing life is replaced (or supplemented) with a historicized account of fundamental forms of recognition and relation-to-self that underwrite the possibility of flourishing sittlichkeit. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 at one point, fricker does suggest that the relation between virtuous ethical perception and virtuous epistemic perception may be closer than mere analogy (2007, 76). she points out that sincerity is a feature of others to which we must exhibit a rational sensitivity in order to arrive at accurate credibility judgments. hence, a person with a virtuously trained epistemic sensibility will necessarily possess an awareness of the place of sincerity in the human form of life. insofar as sincerity is an irreducibly moral notion, it follows that one’s virtuously trained epistemic sensibility will necessarily include, at least in part, a virtuously trained moral sensibility. notice, however, that while this treats ethical and epistemic virtuous perception as having a closer relation than mere analogy—in this case, possession of the former supports the latter—they are nevertheless characterized as two different strands of perceptual sensibility. the suggestion i am making is different: namely, that our epistemic perception of others qua knowers is part of a single capacity for perceptual discernment that is inseparable from our having adopted an ethical outlook. if that is right, then we can clarify how the perception model is supposed to work. the point is not that, in addition to “ordinary perception,” we also possess special faculties of “epistemic perception” and “moral perception” that allow us to pick out the relevant evaluative qualities in others. rather, the point is that our very capacity to engage in any sort of perceptual discernment of others, moral and nonmoral, presupposes a broader background sensibility that invariably includes ethical content (cf. mcdowell 2002, 301; crary 2016, chap. 2). in other words, part of what it is to grasp that k is a knower just is to grasp k in light of a broader ethical understanding of the form of life in which k participates, and in light of which certain features of k are directly relevant to what we have reason to do. 4. conclusion my aim in this paper has been to explore the thesis that “knower” is an irreducibly ethical concept. i tried to lend support to this idea in three ways. in section 1, i tried to show that already implicit within a normative characterization of epistemic terms are implications that help bring together the concerns of critical social epistemology and recognition theory. in particular, i urged that, if “knower” is a normative concept, then regarding oneself as a knower is a distinctive sort of positive self-relation, and regarding others as knowers involves adopting intrinsically practical normative attitudes that situate knowers within reciprocal relations of answerability. my exposition of three types of epistemic recognition and misrecognition in section 2 was intended to develop a concrete picture of what it might mean to regard a knower as meriting ethical treatment. finally, in section 3, by way of a modification of fricker’s account of virtuous perception, i tried to congdon – “knower” as an ethical concept: from epistemic agency to mutual recognition published by 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pettit, samuel scheffler, and michael smith, 333–384. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2008. life and action: elementary structures of practice and practical thought. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wittgenstein, ludwig. 2001. philosophical investigations. translated by g. e. m. anscombe. oxford: blackwell. worsdale, rosie. 2018. “recognition, ideology, and the case of ‘invisible suffering.’” european journal of philosophy 26 (1): 614–629. young, iris marion. 2007. “recognition of love’s labor: considering axel honneth’s feminism,” in recognition and power: axel honneth and the tradition of critical social theory, edited by bert van den brink and david owen, 189– 212. cambridge: cambridge university press. matthew congdon teaches in the philosophy department at vanderbilt university. he works primarily in ethics and has interests in aesthetics, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and social philosophy. he is writing a book on moral and historical change. feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation aragon, corwin. 2019. “global gender justice and epistemic oppression: a response to an epistemic dilemma.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 3. 2019 global gender justice and epistemic oppression: a response to an epistemic dilemma corwin aragon california state polytechnic university, pomona corwin.aragon@gmail.com aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 global gender justice and epistemic oppression: a response to an epistemic dilemma1 corwin aragon abstract critiques of western feminists’ attempts to extend claims about gender injustice to the global context highlighted a dilemma facing western feminists, what i call the global gender justice dilemma. in response to this dilemma, alison m. jaggar argues that western feminists should turn our attention away from trying to resolve it and, instead, toward examination of our own complicity in the processes that produce injustice. i suggest that this kind of approach is helpful in responding to an additional dilemma that confronts the western feminist, namely the epistemic dilemma. western feminists can speak for women of the global south and run the risk of distorting those women’s experience and further silencing their voices, or we can refuse to speak and abdicate our responsibilities to address injustice. i argue that we should address this dilemma not by trying to resolve it but by examining our role in the reproduction of epistemically unjust practices. to explain this response, i offer a preliminary account of epistemic injustice as epistemic oppression. i conclude by claiming that our own epistemic complicity in epistemically oppressive social practices is a weighty reason for us to work to transform those practices. keywords: epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, structural injustice, structural responsibility, complicity, global gender justice 1 this paper is written to honor the work of alison m. jaggar. all of my work is deeply shaped by the philosophical gifts that alison has shared with me, and this paper is illustrative of just how influential her own work has been for me. an earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “global gender justice: new directions,” at the university of birmingham in may 2015, and i want to thank the conference participants for helpful discussion of my ideas. i also wish to acknowledge the important formative role played by the concordia college faculty writing retreat and the cal poly pomona brownbag speaker series in the development of this paper. finally, i wish to thank david adams, michael cholbi, annaleigh curtis, barrett emerick, katherine gasdaglis, alex madva, alison jaggar, peter ross, dale turner, scott wisor, and jason wyckoff for their helpful feedback on this project. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 1. introduction crisis and dilemma have confronted feminist philosophy at a number of stages. the rapid and revolutionary development of feminist philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s shaped philosophical projects that would face serious challenges to their central categories of analysis. postcolonial and postmodern feminist criticisms, in particular, questioned feminist philosophy’s ability to deliver on its promising radical aim: to utilize philosophical tools to empower women throughout the world to fight for gender justice. a series of seemingly intractable theoretical debates appeared to leave feminist philosophers little hope to develop responsible theory for understanding and working toward global gender justice. but in two insightful pieces published in 2005, alison m. jaggar, in addition to mapping the dilemma confronting western2 feminists, argued for an alternative approach to developing philosophical work on global gender justice. jaggar argued that western feminist work on global gender justice often omitted the contributory role of western social practice in shaping processes that cause the gender injustices to which western feminists were apt to pay special attention. jaggar urged western feminists to begin our theorizing by examining our own power and complicity in global processes that cause gender injustice. building globalized feminist philosophy from this methodological starting point, jaggar, iris marion young, linda martín alcoff, and a number of other feminist philosophers developed philosophical frameworks for understanding global gender injustices and western feminists’ responsibilities to work to remedy those injustices. for example, jaggar and i have argued for a conception of structural complicity as a basis of individual responsibility to work to remedy injustices involved in migrant domestic labor (aragon and jaggar 2018). but this work has paid less attention to 2 i use the term “western” here to mark out the privileged members of the affluent nations of western europe and north america (specifically, the united states of america and canada). in contrast, i use the term “global south” to mark out the subjugated members of nations primarily in sub-saharan africa, southeast asia, eastern europe, and latin america. i recognize the seeming arbitrariness to this terminology, and i also recognize the potential pitfalls in employing this terminology. however, there is no widely agreed upon set of terms to describe the various places in the world i wish to pick out, and i find my own terminology less problematic than many widely used dichotomies, such as west/east, first world/third world, and rich/poor. i also utilize the terminology of “western” and “global south” to remain consistent with the philosophical work i reference. i include myself among the group of “western feminists” to whom this paper is directed. consequently, the “we” and “us” of this paper are fellow western feminists and myself. aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 the ways in which global epistemic processes shape relationships that bridge national borders in ways that harm women of the global south as knowers. 3 in other words, recent work on responsibility for global gender justice has yet to sufficiently theorize responsibility for epistemic injustice. this paper offers a preliminary contribution to this project. to historically situate the project, i first provide a brief history of the development of a global gender justice dilemma that confronts western feminists, and, drawing on jaggar’s work, i explain this dilemma. following jaggar, i suggest that this dilemma can be avoided, to some degree, by focusing on the complicity of western feminists in processes that cause gender injustice. however, i also suggest that there is a parallel epistemic dilemma, highlighted most prominently in alcoff’s “the problem of speaking for others” (1991), that creates barriers to conceptualizing and working toward global gender justice. to address this epistemic dilemma, i argue that western feminists need to examine our epistemic relationships to the women for whom we speak, utilizing the concept of epistemic injustice to locate our own complicity in global epistemic injustices. finally, i sketch a conception of epistemic oppression as a theoretically fruitful conceptualization of epistemic injustice when working to understand what is required of western feminists to remedy epistemic injustice. 2. a global gender justice dilemma north american feminist philosophy emerged in the early 1970s out of leftist activism and liberal consciousness-raising activities with a radical aim: “to use theory to critique male dominant power relationships in order to empower all women” (ferguson 1994, 199). “first-generation feminist philosophers in the academy such as kathy addelson, alison jaggar, iris young, linda nicholson, nancy fraser, and [ann ferguson]” drew insights from marxism and radical feminism to begin to develop theories that would help in combating gender injustice (ferguson 1994, 201). jaggar’s feminist politics and human nature (1983) is one of the most important early contributions to the development of feminist philosophy. in this book, jaggar mapped the philosophical claims made by four distinct camps of feminist theories, formulated these four major (clusters of) theories as fully formed political theories, and critically analyzed each of these views. this extremely influential book exemplified the ambitious aim of early feminist philosophy by providing detailed and nuanced political worldviews for understanding women’s oppression and fighting for women’s liberation. 3 alcoff’s “the problem of speaking for others” (1991), which i discuss later in the paper, is a notable exception. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 however, this early feminist philosophy came under considerable scrutiny in the 1980s. though feminist philosophy has, from the outset, been characterized by disputes about the meaning of its central concepts (such as gender, equality, liberation, and justice) and the appropriate political means for seeking liberation, the central aim of empowering women in their fight for liberation still served to unite these divergent feminisms. but in the 1980s, the central category of analysis, “woman,” was called into question, making the uniting aim seem, at best, untenable and, at worst, oppressive. in particular, emerging anti-essentialist and intersectional critiques demonstrated that the conceptualizations of the category “woman” typically universalized the experiences and politics of a small, relatively privileged (by class, race, nationality, and so on) subset of women, further marginalizing the voices and experiences of women of color and women of the global south. these criticisms presented feminist philosophy with a seeming internal contradiction: the liberatory aim of feminist philosophy appears to require the articulation of a category whose definition must be continually contested (alcoff 1988). in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of prominent feminist philosophers took note of and responded to what they describe as an “identity crisis” (alcoff 1988), an “impasse” (ferguson 1994; fraser 1997), and a “crossroads” (ferguson 1994). postcolonial and postmodern feminist criticism specifically challenged western feminist philosophers working to theorize the character and moral demands of global gender justice by questioning their authority to make universal claims about justice for women. western feminists, in extending universalist theories to concrete issues of global gender justice, often focused on scrutinizing non-western cultural practices that were seen as exemplary cases of injustice, such as female genital cutting, dowry murder, or veiling. critics charged these attempts to globalize western feminist theory with mischaracterizing cultural practice, distorting affected women’s experience, exoticizing non-western cultures, and, ultimately, reinforcing some of the oppressive structures western feminists wished to combat (mohanty 1984, 2003; narayan 1997). many of the western feminist responses to these criticisms invoked the philosophical specters of moral relativism and false consciousness to answer charges of western feminist colonialism, imperialism, and orientalism (jaggar 2005a). jaggar (2005a) explains that a series of debates in feminist philosophy emerged among western liberal feminists, advocating universal conceptions of wellbeing that transcend culture,4 and postcolonial5 and postmodern6 feminists, who deem the impulse to transcend misguided, distortive, and possibly even oppressive. 4 see for example, cudd (2005), nussbaum (2000), and okin (1999). 5 see for example, mohanty (1984, 2003) and narayan (1997). 6 see for example, flax (1987). aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 jaggar helpfully parses these debates as rooted in disputes over four distinct philosophical issues: “essentialism, relativism, intervention, and false consciousness” (2005a, 195). these disputes leave western feminists in a tenuous position. in a candid moment, jaggar describes this position: these philosophical battles, fueled by political passions, have left some western feminists, including me, wondering which side we are on. morally and politically, i have strong sympathies with the anti-imperialist feminists, since it is clear to me that many western feminist criticisms of third world practices are objectifying, patronizing, and self-congratulatory. at the same time, i do feel responsibility to help women (indeed, all citizens) in the poorer countries of the world. is it possible to help while avoiding a colonialist stance? (2005a, 188) the disputes within feminist philosophy “often [seem] to imply that [western feminists] who are concerned about the well-being of women across the world confront a stark and unwelcome choice between colonial interference and callous indifference” (jaggar 2005a, 186). let’s call this the global gender justice dilemma. one possible response to this dilemma is to continue to develop and defend new positions within the four kinds of disputes jaggar highlights; this response tries to escape the dilemma by treading the same lines of argumentation that gave rise to the dilemma in the first place, leading us back into a seeming impasse. however, jaggar recommends for western feminists an alternative approach to theorizing global gender justice: “we need to enlarge our philosophical and political frameworks to scrutinize our own complicity and power” (2005a, 195). jaggar argues that much of the discourse around western feminist responsibility for global gender justice has “been preoccupied with the question of how westerners should respond to the perceived injustices of non-western cultural traditions” (2005a, 189). by focusing in on this question, western feminists obfuscate the many ways in which we participate in the imposition of these unjust social conditions. there are a number of ways in which this obfuscation occurs. first, western feminists often ignore or minimize the impact of western colonialism on the creation or ascension of illiberal cultural traditions and practices in the global south (jaggar 2005a, 190). second, “western philosophers who complacently contrast our ‘liberalism’ with their ‘illiberalism’” give insufficient attention to the fact that western nations have often “supported or even imposed” some of the most genderoppressive state regimes (190). third, western criticism of non-western cultural practices “often assumes a sharp opposition between tradition and modernization,” an opposition that is strongly challenged by empowerment theorists (191). fourth, the western imposition of neoliberal economic policies and practices on poor feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 nations throughout the world has increased inequality both within as well as among nations, and this “has had a devastating effect on the livelihoods of women in the global south by destroying traditional industries” (191). fifth, women have had a disproportionately difficult time gaining access to the gains in wealth afforded by globalization (192). and finally, women suffer from the “interlocking problems of sexualization, militarism, and environmental destruction” (192). jaggar makes a compelling case that: (a) we need to expand our conceptualization of the causes of global gender injustice, and (b) “expanding our understanding of the causes of women’s poverty in poor countries requires that we also expand our conception of our responsibility toward such women” (2005b, 70). jaggar claims, “once we acknowledge that we share past, present, and future connections with poor women in poor countries, we see that we inhabit with them a shared context of justice” (2005b, 70). by attending to issues of how to structure our shared context of justice through intercultural dialogue, we can shift away from narratives about western feminists “‘saving’ poor women in poor countries by proselytizing supposedly western values or raising consciousness about the injustice of non-western practices” (70–71). instead, we can address the impact of western neoliberal global economic policy, militarism, and environmental practices and begin to discuss western responsibility for past and ongoing injustice suffered by women of the global south because of those practices (70–72). in this theoretical vein, iris marion young (2003, 2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2011) offers a promising account of moral responsibility for injustice: the social connection model. young explains: the social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes. . . . all who dwell in structures must take responsibility for remedying injustices they cause, though none is specifically liable for the harm in a legal sense. responsibility in relation to injustice thus derives . . . from participating in the diverse institutional processes that produce structural injustice (2011, 105). for young, the social connection model avoids the theoretical pitfalls of the more prominent model, what she calls the liability model of moral responsibility. the liability model encourages reasoning about responsibility to seek an isolated agent or set of agents who have caused the injustice at hand. the social connection model, in contrast, does not aim to isolate individual perpetrators but, rather, morally assesses the background social conditions that influence individual action. it also conceptualizes responsibility for structural injustice as remedial and forwardlooking, as opposed to retributive and backward-looking, and this remedial aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 responsibility is shared by all who are socially connected to the injustice. consequently, the social connection model avoids humanitarian impulses to “save” or “rescue” those who suffer injustice by refocusing moral reasoning on our own participation in the social processes that cause injustice.7 following young, i have developed my own account of individual moral responsibility for structural injustice, or structural responsibility. i argue that the only theoretically adequate moral basis of one’s structural responsibilities is her structurally mediated social connection to specific injustices. when an individual is socially connected to specific injustices, she is structurally complicit in those injustices and bears weighty moral responsibilities to work toward their remedy. in our coauthored work, jaggar and i explain this idea: “people are structurally complicit when they exercise their agency in ways that reinforce the unjust structures in which they participate, regardless of their conscious intentions” (aragon and jaggar 2018, 449). we explain that structural complicity is a salient type of social connection for grounding our responsibility to remedy injustice and offer this idea as a supplement to young’s social connection model (aragon and jaggar, 2018). however, in jaggar’s call to examine our complicity in injustice, in young’s theorizing about social connection, in my own work on structural responsibility, and in my and jaggar’s coauthored work on structural complicity, the theoretical frameworks that we utilize do not adequately address the ways in which social epistemic practices systematically harm members of oppressed groups. even after we move forward the discourse on global gender justice to take account of western complicity and power, we still need to extend this discourse to examine our own complicity in social processes that systematically harm women, particularly in the global south, as knowers. 3. an epistemic dilemma to direct our focus toward epistemic injustice, i want to first take note of a parallel epistemic dilemma that accompanies the global gender justice dilemma. alcoff best captures this epistemic dilemma in her article “the problem of speaking for others.” alcoff explains that “the problem of speaking for others” comes from the growing recognition of two premises: 7 david miller (2005, 2007) also offers social connection as a moral basis of individual remedial responsibility, and articulates four forms—causal responsibility, moral responsibility, capacity, or community—this connection might take. see also brock (2014a, 2014b) and brock and russell (2015). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 premise 1: the “ritual of speaking” . . . in which an utterance is located, always bears on meaning and truth such that there is no possibility of rendering positionality, location, or context irrelevant to content. (1991, 14) and, premise 2: certain contexts and locations are allied with structures of oppression, and certain others are allied with resistance to oppression. therefore, all are not politically equal, and, given that politics is connected to truth, all are not epistemically equal. (1991, 15) because one’s social location within a discursive context affects the meaning of what one says, there is no way to speak for others without one’s positionality having an epistemic impact. moreover, since discursive contexts are embedded in systems of social power, one’s position within these contexts might lead their acts of speaking for others to further entrench oppressive social systems. alcoff’s “problem of speaking for others” identifies both epistemic and political dangers of western feminists speaking for all women. given the relative privilege afforded many western feminists, we run the risk of both falsely representing the experience of women subordinated along other axes of social difference as well as furthering some of the very same oppressive practices we are aiming to challenge with our speech. if the two premises above are true, it appears that the problem of speaking for others is inescapable. thus, it also appears to present an irresolvable dilemma for western feminists: refuse to speak for others and abdicate one’s responsibilities to address gender injustice; or speak, potentially silencing those one aims to empower and potentially doing violence to their experience. let’s call this the epistemic dilemma. there are two primary ways to respond to the epistemic dilemma. the first is what alcoff calls the “retreat” response: “to retreat from all practices of speaking for and assert that one can only know one’s own narrow individual experience and one’s ‘own truth’ and one can never make claims beyond this” (1991, 17). alcoff convincingly argues that the retreat response is both ontologically and politically mistaken. ontologically, the retreat response presumes “an ontological configuration of the discursive context that simply does not obtain,” as there is no way to retreat into one’s own experience and “truth” external to the discursive context from which she attempts to retreat (1991, 20). politically, retreat both undercuts political effectivity and allows the speaker to abdicate her political responsibilities. as alcoff puts it, avoiding speaking for others “may result in a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatsoever” (1991, 17). aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 the second way to respond is to argue that the problem is not actually a problem. for example, one might argue that the problem only results from an essentialist or reductionist epistemology—a theory of justification that reduces meaning entirely to an evaluation of one’s social location—that ought to be rejected in the first place. this response, what alcoff calls the “charge of reductionism” (1991, 16), claims that the problem only arises if we adopt the epistemological view that one’s social location determines the meaning and truth of their speech, which is an essentialist or reductionist view of individual epistemic agency. though alcoff quickly dismisses the charge of reductionism by asserting that one’s social location can influence without determining the meaning of her speech (1991, 16–17), this second kind of response appears to venture back into the same debates that arose in response to the global gender justice dilemma. the charge of reductionism exemplifies an approach to resolving the epistemic dilemma that pushes us back into debates around essentialism, relativism, western intervention, and false consciousness, though the debates will now be more explicitly epistemological. reprising these debates leads us only further into the epistemic dilemma and provides western feminists with little recourse in responding to the problem of speaking for others. alcoff argues that we cannot escape the problem of speaking for others but are still required to speak. rather than trying to avoid the problem, alcoff provides four “interrogatory practices” to help ameliorate the negative effects of speaking for others: 1. we should carefully analyze “the impetus to speak,” even fighting against it in many cases (1991, 24). specifically, we should examine whether our impetus to speak stems from a “desire for mastery and domination” or an “impulse to teach rather than listen to a less-privileged speaker” (24). 2. we should “interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what it is we are saying” (1991, 25). this interrogation works best in dialogue with others, “by which aspects of our location less highlighted in our own minds might be revealed to us” (25). 3. we should be accountable and responsible for acts of speaking for others, which requires “a serious and sincere commitment to remain open to criticism and to attempt actively, attentively, and sensitively to ‘hear’ (understand) the criticism” (1991, 26). 4. we should “analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context” in our acts of speaking for others (26). in other words, we “must look at where the speech goes and what it does there” (26). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 these practices are helpful reflexive reasoning exercises that aim to ameliorate some of the potentially oppressive effects of speaking for others. while alcoff’s interrogatory practices do not give us a clear approach to resolving the epistemic dilemma—actually, they concede that the dilemma cannot be resolved—they focus our attention on the fact that we regularly distort, marginalize, or even silence the voices of the oppressed in our attempts to call attention to and combat oppression. consequently, alcoff’s analysis of the problem of speaking for others illuminates that our common responses to the epistemic dilemma are likely to further entrench us within the confines of the dilemma. and while her interrogatory practices can help us to avoid some of this entrenchment, we might also try to find a way to address the conditions that give rise to the dilemma in the first place. i suggest that we should address the epistemic dilemma by shifting the discussion away from the consideration of responses (retreat, denial, interrogatory practices) and toward examination of the ways that we actively participate in unjust epistemic practices. this shift will allow us to look at (a) the ways we act out epistemic practices that distort, marginalize, and silence some voices while amplifying others, and (b) our complicity in the injustice of those practices. in other words, an alternative way of addressing the epistemic dilemma is to examine our complicity in global epistemic injustice. 4. “border-crossings” and “death by culture” at this point, it would be helpful to offer an example of the kind of unjust epistemic practice that i have in mind. consider uma narayan’s careful and nuanced discussion of gender violence in different cultural contexts in “cross-cultural connections, border-crossings, and ‘death by culture’” (1997). specifically, narayan analyzes the way in which the practice of dowry murder garnered the attention of western feminists, was distorted in the process of crossing over to the western feminist context, and ultimately reinforced exoticized images of the cultural other. narayan identifies “two sorts of problems that often beset the general project of ‘learning about other cultures’” within the context of agenda-setting in western feminism (1997, 84). narayan explains, “the first set of problems has to do with features of context that ‘bring’ particular issues onto feminist agendas, mold the information that is available on the issue, and shape as well as distort the ways in which they are understood when the issue ‘crosses borders’” (1997, 84). narayan argues that western feminist attention tends to focus on “the problems of women in other cultures” (1997, 100) when those problems “seem ‘different,’ ‘alien,’ and ‘other’” (100). for this reason, narayan asserts that problems that will cross borders are most likely to be those issues of gender injustice that are marked by their “otherness” (101). with respect to dowry murder, narayan highlights two features aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 of the practice that mark it out as “other,” namely dowry and burning by fire (101). when the issue of dowry murder crosses borders, the issue becomes distorted: western feminists come to understand the issue independent of the contextual information that is needed to properly understand it, recontextualize it by drawing on background assumptions about cultural “otherness,” and ultimately, transform the issue (narayan 1997, 104). these kinds of border-crossings distort the issues toward which western feminist attention is directed and undermine western feminists’ ability to actually understand the issue they are trying to address (104). the second set of problems “has to do with the ways in which ‘culture’ is invoked in explanations of forms of violence against third world women, while it is not similarly invoked in explanations of forms of violence that affect mainstream western women” (narayan 1997, 84). according to narayan, an invocation of culture to explain fatal violence against women in the global south implies that these women suffer “death by culture” (84). moreover, narayan claims that western explanations of fatal forms of gender violence often invoke a largely imagined and exoticized culture, religious views, or traditional values (1997, 112). dowry murder, for example, often gets attributed to hindu mythology, religion, and traditions, even though they provide very poor explanations of the practice (1997, 107). and narayan contends that, in the parallel case of fatal gender violence in the united states, we would not offer up a parallel “death by culture” explanation for the violence. while i cannot do full justice to narayan’s insightful analysis in the space here, i want to highlight two features for the purposes of my argument. first, the problems of border-crossing and death by culture found in the case of western feminist attention to dowry murder serve as a paradigmatic example of the problem of speaking for others. when western feminists turn our attention to issues of gender injustice that affect women in the global south, we will often misrepresent those women’s experiences by offering our own explanations and solutions to their problems. we will also often provide the kinds of simplified and exoticized cultural explanations for these issues that we would not find convincing for parallel issues in our own cultural context. second, narayan’s discussion provides a clear case of epistemic injustice and, moreover, a case of epistemic injustice that is best understood as a form of epistemic oppression. i will reference this example below to argue that, in responding to the epistemic dilemma, we should turn our attention to our own epistemic complicity in oppressive epistemic practices. 5. epistemic injustice to develop this idea, i will first introduce the concept of epistemic injustice. in epistemic injustice: power & the ethics of knowing, miranda fricker (2007) names feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 the concept of epistemic injustice.8 epistemic injustice is, according to fricker, “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, 20; emphasis in original). fricker argues that epistemic injustices are based in the exercise of identity power: “an operation of power that depends in some significant degree upon . . . shared imaginative conceptions of social identity” (2007, 14). identity power can be “agential,” exercised by some particular agent(s), or operate “purely structurally,” wholly a feature of social systems (2007, 10). fricker articulates two distinct forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience. (2007, 1) let’s take a closer look at each of these types of epistemic injustice. testimonial injustice involves a “prejudicial credibility deficit” on the part of the hearer, and the “central case” of testimonial injustice with which fricker is concerned is found when this credibility deficit is based in “identity prejudice” (2007, 27). the relevant identity prejudices, such as gender or racial prejudices, are both systematic and persistent. they are systematic insofar as they “track the subject through different dimensions of social activity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, and so on” (27). they are persistent insofar as they are “repeated frequently” (2007, 29). as fricker explains, “‘persistent’ labels the diachronic dimension of testimonial injustice’s severity and significance, whereas ‘systematic’ labels the synchronic dimension” (29). the central cases of testimonial injustice for fricker involve credibility deficits on the part of the hearer because of systematic and persistent identity prejudice. hermeneutical injustice, in contrast to testimonial injustice, “is a purely structural notion” (2007, 159). according to fricker, hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from 8 jaggar (2015) has noted that feminist philosophers have long discussed the ways in which women’s knowledge, from a wide variety of feminized social standpoints, has been dismissed, discounted, and marginalized, and, indeed, much of the work in feminist epistemology begins from or is centered around this fact. in other words, the concept of epistemic injustice has been discussed by feminist philosophers for most of the existence of academic feminist philosophy. however, fricker’s groundbreaking work gave a new name to this concept and provided a robust articulation of the epistemic character of this injustice. aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 social understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (2007, 155). the collective hermeneutical resource provides our means for interpreting and sharing our experiences to both make sense of our own experience and to share the meaning of that experience with others. identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource causes “unequal hermeneutical participation with respect to some significant area(s) of social experience,” leaving those targeted by this prejudice “hermeneutically marginalized” (2007, 153). hermeneutical marginalization disallows those who are marginalized from developing the resources to meaningfully understand and share their own experience. this is what fricker calls “a situated hermeneutical inequality,” and it is the primary wrong of hermeneutical injustice: “the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interest to be able to render intelligible” (2007, 162). fricker continues to explain, “the primary harm of (the central case of) hermeneutical injustice concerns exclusion from the pooling of knowledge owing to structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (162). fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice provides a different approach to addressing the epistemic dilemma. rather than focusing in on the parameters of the familiar debates, we should rethink our own role in perpetuating epistemic processes that systematically harm women of the global south as knowers. we should examine the ways in which western epistemic practices structure epistemically unjust interactions among citizens of affluent western nations and members of oppressed groups in the global south. focusing in on epistemic injustice avoids the problematic assumptions about the internal epistemic failures of nonwestern cultures, the autonomy of different cultural groups’ epistemic practices, and the privileging of western epistemic practices. fricker’s conceptualization of epistemic injustice, though philosophically nuanced and an important introductory step, suffers theoretical limitations for accomplishing this task of reframing.9 first, fricker’s account of epistemic injustice at times conflates injustice, which is a moral property of systems of social interaction, and interpersonal wrongdoing, which is a moral property of the interpersonal conduct of individual agents.10 second, fricker’s account, though 9 the theoretical limitations noted here are informed by recent critiques of fricker’s account by anderson (2012), dotson (2012), and medina (2013). 10 this distinction between social justice, on one hand, and interpersonal ethics, on the other, follows from john rawls’s (1999) view that social justice is about the character of the “basic structure” of social organization and not about the character feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 explicitly claiming that epistemic injustice is not of a distributive character, often utilizes distributive language that obscures the relational character of injustice.11 third, fricker’s account gives insufficient attention to nondominant testimonial and hermeneutical practices in a manner that potentially furthers the very injustice it aims to address.12 finally, fricker’s account, in focusing on the epistemic character and behavior of the hearer, undertheorizes the exercise of epistemic agency of those that suffer epistemic injustice. in mentioning each of these theoretical limitations, i do not mean to suggest that any of these are debilitating criticisms of fricker’s view, nor do i take it that i have established any kind of theoretical inadequacy or fatal flaw in her conception of epistemic injustice. instead, i offer the above limitations as methodological reasons for developing an alternative conception of epistemic injustice. the account i offer is merely a preliminary attempt to offer such an alternative. 6. epistemic oppression given these four theoretical limitations, i, following recent work by kristie dotson (2012, 2014), conceptualize epistemic injustice as epistemic oppression.13 dotson defines epistemic oppression as “epistemic exclusions afforded positions and communities that produce deficiencies in social knowledge,” where “an epistemic exclusion . . . is an infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers that reduces her or his ability to participate an epistemic community” (2012, 24). while this definition of epistemic oppression provides a strong starting point for analysis, i wish to articulate an account of epistemic oppression in a manner that comes apart from the approach to this issue found in dotson’s project. taking up the foundational ideas of epistemic oppression, i supplement them by articulating four conditions of epistemic oppression. oppression is the defining feature of structural injustice. social structures are enduring yet dynamic systems of social relationships that significantly shape the or conduct of individuals. for more on my understanding of this distinction, see aragon and jaggar (2018, 442). 11 a distributive understanding of social justice will focus on whether or not the distribution of social opportunities and resources to participants in some system of social cooperation satisfies the moral principles that should govern that distribution. in contrast, a relational account of social justice will focus on the moral character of the relationships among social groups. 12 see dotson (2012). 13 in an early article, fricker (1999) conceptualized epistemic injustice in terms of epistemic oppression, but she largely moved away from this conceptualization in her 2007 book. aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 options for building a life for all who participate in them. social structures position individual agents in relation to one another in a manner that influences the options for action open to them, their share of social resources for acting on those options, and the sets of social incentives and disincentives for acting on some options rather than others. in other words, social structures are the background social architecture within which individual agents shape their lives. even if all social structures are coercive, not all structures are unjust. rather, structural injustices occur when social structures systematically, but avoidably, harm members of some social group by positioning them within oppressive social relationships. oppressive social relationships make some people vulnerable to domination or deprivation, while at the same time enabling members of related social groups to prosper. this vulnerability is the result of one’s agency being placed under severe social constraints by social processes that are largely outside of one’s control. and these severe constraints wrongfully harm the agents who suffer them.14 young famously claimed that there are no unifying features shared by all cases of oppression, even if minimally all members of oppressed groups “suffer some inhibition of their ability to develop and exercise their capacities and express their needs, thoughts, and feelings” (1990, 40). but i disagree with young. following ann cudd (2006), 15 i identify four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that, when met, classify a structure as oppressive and thus, unjust: 1. the avoidable social harm condition: a system of social relationships avoidably harms some of the individual agents who are situated within it by placing upon them severe social constraints for the exercise of their agency. 14 my own accounts of social structure and structural injustice are heavily shaped by young’s conception of structural injustice. (see, for example, young, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2011). also, jaggar (2009) has led me to include social vulnerability in my understanding of oppression. 15 these conditions parallel those developed by cudd, who offers the harm condition, the social groups condition, the privilege condition, and the coercion condition as her four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions (2006, 25). my conditions are distinguished from hers more in the articulation of the specific character of the condition than in the general feature of oppression each condition is meant to pick out. my view of oppression, thus, is deeply informed by, and indebted to, cudd’s work but departs from her conception in the articulation of the conditions of oppression. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 2. the social group condition: the avoidable social harm is also systematic insofar as the severe social constraints are placed upon individuals because of their social group membership. 3. the social privileges condition: there is some other social group in relationship to the harmed group that enjoys a wide range of opportunities and resources to shape their own lives and even flourish. 4. the violation of equal moral respect condition: there is a violation of a basic principle of equal moral respect. on my account, oppressive social structures systematically harm some while privileging others, based on their social group memberships, in a manner that violates some general principle of equal moral respect. i offer this account to begin to map out a conception of epistemic injustice based in epistemic oppression. i contend that epistemic injustices occur when social epistemic processes systematically, yet avoidably, harm members of some social group as knowers, by positioning them in epistemically oppressive social relationships. epistemically oppressive social relationships position members of some social group to suffer vulnerability to epistemic domination or deprivation, while at the same time enabling members of related social groups through a wide range of opportunities and resources to exercise their epistemic agency. this vulnerability to epistemic domination or deprivation is the result of having one’s epistemic agency placed under severe constraints by epistemic processes that are largely out of one’s control. epistemic agency is an individual agent’s capacity to come to know things about herself and her social world and to contribute to processes of social knowledge production.16 social processes shape one’s epistemic agency by (a) influencing epistemic opportunities (personal experiences, interpersonal dialogue, public forum), resources (conceptual schemas, written and oral language, grammars, contextual clues, institutional access), and sets of social incentives and disincentives (social interest, social policing, social costs and rewards) to (b) understand one’s experience, meaningfully articulate that experience to self and others, and contribute to the social accumulation of knowledge. when an agent suffers severe constraints on the exercise of her epistemic agency, these severe constraints wrongfully harm her as a knower. 16 dotson, in contrast, defines epistemic agency as “the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources” (2012, 24). aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 from this conception of epistemic oppression, we can articulate four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a social epistemic process to be oppressive: 1. the avoidable epistemic harm condition: the epistemic process avoidably harms some of the individual agents who rely upon it to produce knowledge of self and world by placing upon them severe constraints for the exercise of their epistemic agency. 2. the social group condition: the epistemic harm is also systematic insofar as the severe constraints on epistemic agency are placed upon the individuals because of their social group membership. 3. the epistemic privileges condition: there is some other social group in relationship to the harmed group that are provided greater epistemic opportunities, resources, or sets of social incentives and disincentives to more fully exercise their epistemic agency. 4. the violation of equal epistemic respect condition: there is a violation of a basic principle of equal epistemic respect. these four conditions offer a preliminary sketch, rather than a fully articulated account, of epistemic oppression. let’s return to narayan’s discussion of border-crossings and death by culture to help illustrate these four conditions. first, the distortions and misrepresentations of dowry murder provided by western, decontextualized interpretations of that practice avoidably harm indian women by placing constraints on their ability to produce knowledge of their own experience. specifically, indian women must negotiate the distorted meanings mapped onto their own experience to attempt to render their experiences intelligible to the many others who have internalized those distorted meanings. this will make it even more difficult for indian women to convey to western feminists their own understandings of the role that gender violence plays in the indian national context. second, indian women suffer these constraints on their epistemic agency because of their social group membership. more concretely, distorted western explanations of dowry murder that explain this particular form of gender violence by appeal to culture must posit that there is a group that is targeted by these cultural forms of violence. in doing so, these explanations write cultural interpretations of gender violence onto the experience of the members of the group thought to be targeted by that violence. third, there is a co-relative group that is enabled in the exercise of their epistemic agency— namely, the group of western feminists that are provided with the epistemic resources to shape which “issues” will garner western feminist attention, whose interpretations of those issues are shared and celebrated, and who set the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 conditions for critical exchange on those issues. finally, the relationship between the western feminists that directed their attention to issues like dowry murder in a manner that distorted the issue and the indian women who had to suffer the resulting constraints on their epistemic agency is one of unequal epistemic respect. at a general level, this just means that this relationship has the character of treating one group as though they are not equally capable as knowers and thus are not worthy of the equal epistemic respect. again, this is meant to provide only a preliminary sketch of an alternative approach to epistemic injustice. but, even if only preliminary, we can draw on this account to reinterpret the two paradigmatic forms of epistemic injustice. on my account, a hearer’s giving a credibility deficit to her interlocutor because of her own identity prejudice does not, on its own, constitute an epistemic injustice, even if it is wrong. rather, the injustice of testimonial injustice is located in the epistemic processes that systematically discount the testimony of members of some social groups while privileging the testimony of members of other, related social groups. hermeneutical injustice, on my account, is not located in identity prejudice being built into the collective hermeneutical resource; rather, it is located in epistemic processes that systematically constrain members of some social group in the development and exercise of their hermeneutical capacities while at the same time privileging the hermeneutical practices of members of some other, related social group. what makes these paradigmatic cases of epistemic injustice unjust, on my account, is that they harm the individual agent as a member of a social group by positioning her in epistemic relation to others in a manner that treats her as a lessthan-equal epistemic agent. consequently, the wrongfulness of epistemic injustice, on my view, is found in the character of the epistemic relations among social groups and not merely in the harms suffered by individuals. for this reason, my conception of epistemic injustice offers an alternative, relational account of epistemic injustice. 7. conclusion: responding to the epistemic dilemma with this sketch of epistemic oppression in hand, we can now return to the epistemic dilemma i discussed above. recall, the epistemic dilemma confronting western feminists is found in the conflict between the imperative to speak out against gender injustice suffered by women throughout the world, and the inherent political and epistemic dangers involved in the act of speaking for others. i offer as a suggested alternative approach to this dilemma that we focus on our own participation in epistemic oppression. this approach begins by asking us, western feminists, to examine our epistemic relationships to the women who suffer the injustices to which we direct our attention. we should first ask ourselves if the way we currently exercise our epistemic agency—the way that we participate in social processes of knowledge production—restricts the agency of others. additionally, we aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 should ask if we derive and enjoy epistemic privileges as a consequence of the restriction of someone else’s epistemic agency. do we silence, marginalize, exploit, or render powerless the voices of women in the global south through the exercise of our epistemic agency in discussing their situations? do we enjoy greater epistemic opportunities and resources to discuss their situations by restricting their agency? or do our actions of speaking for relieve, to some extent, the constraints on their agency? the concept of epistemic oppression can help us to examine, descriptively and normatively, our epistemic relationship to differently situated women across the world. moreover, the concept of epistemic oppression helps to identify an alternative basis of western feminist moral and epistemic responsibilities to women of the global south. much of the debate in western feminism has assumed that the basis of our responsibilities to women of the global south is either (a) an abstract humanitarian or liberal cosmopolitan duty to combat gender injustice wherever we find it and have the capacity to prevent it, or (b) a kind of culpability for continuing colonial and imperial processes that cause greater injustice. these two bases of responsibility—capacity and culpability—frame, respectively, western feminists as entirely disconnected from the gender injustices they “discover” in the world or as the primary cause of those injustices. if one takes capacity as the appropriate basis of responsibility, then western feminists ought to do whatever they can to aid or assist women suffering injustice. if one takes culpability as the appropriate basis of responsibility, then western feminists ought to discontinue their actions that are thought to cause the injustice. for reasons i cannot go into here, neither of these bases of responsibility are adequate for grounding western feminist responsibility for global gender justice. but by beginning analysis of this responsibility from the perspective of epistemic oppression, we locate an alternative basis: epistemic complicity. epistemic complicity is a state of being in which our agency is bound up in unjust epistemic processes. when our agency is bound up in unjust epistemic processes, the exercise of our agency becomes implicated in the harms that those processes cause. in other words, we become accomplices to the wrongs committed by our social epistemic processes. when complicit, we are neither completely disconnected nor fully culpable for the unjust processes in which we participate; rather, we share in the wrongfulness with all those who participate. epistemic complicity generates weighty responsibilities to change—or, more precisely, transform—the unjust set of epistemic relationships in which we participate. alcoff’s sets of interrogatory practices help us to think about our motives of speaking for others and the effects of our acts of speaking for. but, while these reflexive practices are important reasoning tools for deciding when and how to speak for others, they do not identify how we can work to transform unjust feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 systems of epistemic relations. for this, we need to also examine the features of our own social location within epistemic processes to locate transformative resources— power, privilege, collective ability, interest (young 2011)—afforded us by those same processes. we need to examine our epistemic habits to change epistemic vices built into the character of our own individual epistemic processes (fricker 2007; medina 2013). we need to develop networks of epistemic solidarity to address injustices at the structural, rather than purely individual or interpersonal, level. and we need to focus less on “washing our hands” of the epistemic injustices that confront us and more on the arduous task of transforming our social world. references alcoff, linda. 1988. “cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory.” signs 13 (3): 405–436. ———. 1991. “the problem of speaking for others.” cultural critique 20: 5–32. anderson, elizabeth. 2012. “epistemic justice as a virtue of social institutions.” social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy 26 (2): 163– 173. aragon, corwin, and alison m. jaggar. 2018. “agency, complicity, and the responsibility to resist structural injustice.” journal of social philosophy 49 (3): 439–460. brock, gillian. 2014a. “global poverty, decent work, and remedial responsibilities: what the developed world owes to the developing world and why.” in poverty, agency, and human rights, edited by diana tietjens meyers, 119– 145. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2014b. “institutional integrity, corruption, and taxation.” edmond j. safra research lab working papers no. 39. brock, gillian, and hamish russell. 2015. “abusive tax avoidance and institutional corruption: the responsibilities of tax professionals.” edmond j. safra research lab working papers no. 56. cudd, ann e. 2005. “missionary positions.” hypatia 20 (4): 164–182. ———. 2006. analyzing oppression. oxford: oxford university press. dotson, kristie. 2012. “a cautionary tale on limiting epistemic oppression.” frontiers: a journal of women’s studies 33 (1): 24–47. ———. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology: a journal of knowledge, culture and policy 28 (2): 1–24. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782585. ferguson, ann. 1994. “twenty years of feminist philosophy.” hypatia 9 (3): 197– 215. aragon – global gender justice and epistemic oppression published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 flax, jane. 1987. “postmodernism and gender relations in feminist theory.” signs 12 (4): 621–643. fraser, nancy. 1997. justice interruptus: critical reflections on the “postsocialist” condition. new york: routledge. fricker, miranda. 1999. “epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege.” canadian journal of philosophy 29 (supp. 1): 191–210. ———. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. new york: oxford university press. jaggar, alison m. 1983. feminist politics and human nature. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ———. 2005a. “global responsibility and western feminism.” in feminist interventions in ethics and politics, edited by barbara s. andrew, jean keller, and lisa h. schwartzman, 185–200. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ———. 2005b. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics & international affairs 19 (3): 55–75. ———. 2009. “transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability: a prologue to a theory of global gender justice.” philosophical topics 37 (2): 33–52. ———. 2014. “gender and global justice: rethinking some basic assumptions of western political philosophy.” in gender and global justice, edited by alison m. jaggar, 1–17. cambridge: polity press. ———. 2015. “other worlds are possible—but which are gender just?” paper presented at gender and global justice: new directions conference, may 22, birmingham, uk. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. miller, david. 2005. “distributing responsibilities.” in global responsibilities: who must deliver on human rights?, edited by andrew kuper, 95–116. new york: routledge. ———. 2007. national responsibility and global justice. oxford: oxford university press. mohanty, chandra talpade. 1984. “under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3)/13 (1): 333–358. ———. 2003. feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures: identities, traditions, and third world feminism. new york: routledge. nussbaum, martha c. 2000. women and human development: the capabilities approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 okin, susan moller, (with respondents). 1999. is multiculturalism bad for women? edited by joshua cohen, matthew howard, and martha c. nussbaum. princeton, nj: princeton university press. rawls, john. 1999. a theory of justice. revised edition. cambridge, ma: the belknap press of harvard university press. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2000. inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2003. “from guilt to solidarity: sweatshops and political responsibility.” dissent 50 (2): 39–44. ———. 2004. “responsibility and global labor justice.” journal of political philosophy 12 (4): 365–388. ———. 2006a. “katrina: too much blame, not enough responsibility.” dissent 53 (1): 41–46. ———. 2006b. “responsibility and global justice: a social connection model.” social philosophy & policy 23 (1): 102–130. ———. 2007. global challenges: war, self-determination, and responsibility for justice. cambridge: polity press. ———. 2011. responsibility for justice. oxford: oxford university press. corwin aragon is assistant professor of philosophy at california state polytechnic university, pomona (cal poly pomona). his research focuses on questions of individual responsibility to remedy structural injustice, both material and epistemic, and he works primarily in the fields of contemporary social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and global justice. he has additional research interests in philosophy of humor and comedy. currently, he is preparing a book-length manuscript titled, seeking justice in an unjust world. 7294 aragon title page.pdf 7294 aragon final format.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation pascoe, jordan. 2019. “on finding yourself in a state of nature: a kantian account of abortion and voluntary motherhood.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (3). article 1. 2019 on finding yourself in a state of nature: a kantian account of abortion and voluntary motherhood jordan pascoe manhattan college jordan.pascoe@manhattan.edu pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 on finding yourself in a state of nature: a kantian account of abortion and voluntary motherhood jordan pascoe abstract in this essay, i draw on kant’s legal philosophy in order to defend the right to voluntary motherhood by way of abortion at any stage of pregnancy as an essential feature of women’s basic rights. by developing the distinction between innate and acquired right in kant’s legal philosophy, i argue that the viability standard in us law (as established in planned parenthood v. casey) misunderstands the nature of embodied right. our body is the site of innate right; it is the means through which we can set and pursue ends in the world. the law, therefore, cannot adjudicate the relationship between the will and the body: it cannot require us to allow our bodies to be used against our will. by comparing unwanted pregnancy to sexual assault, i problematize the notion that consent to pregnancy, like consent to sex, can ever be conclusive. i examine kant’s own account of unwanted pregnancy, in which he describes mother and child finding themselves “in a state of nature” in order to rethink the status of the fetus in law, and i argue that we should understand the fetus’s right to life as provisional, rather than as enforceable by law. keywords: abortion, voluntary motherhood, feminist philosophy, kant, kantian philosophy, embodied right, innate right, viability, fetus, feticide, infanticide, epistemic authority, philosophy of law, doctrine of right introduction: you may find yourself chained to a hospital bed when laura pemberton opted to deliver her second baby at home after a hospital refused her a vbac (vaginal birth after c-section), the sheriff came to her house. while she was in active labor, he put her in custody, strapping her legs together and driving her across town to the hospital, where a hearing on her right to refuse a c-section was hastily convened (paltrow and flavin 2013, 306–307). the judge ordered a c-section; later, when pemberton sued the hospital, the judge denied her claim, arguing that “whatever the scope of ms. pemberton's personal feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 constitutional rights in this situation, they clearly did not outweigh the interests of the state of florida in preserving the life of the unborn child.”1 pemberton’s story illustrates the ways in which the debate over abortion demands a broader reckoning about reproductive justice and women’s rights to their bodies. the legal framework of abortion in the united states, which organizes itself around viability, frames the right to an abortion as a “balancing test” between a woman’s right to privacy and the state’s interest in protecting the life of the fetus. viability—or the point at which a fetus might survive outside its mother—operates as the tipping point beyond which a pregnant woman’s privacy and right to her own body may be supervened by the state in a variety of ways. the legal requirement that state interventions should not create an “undue burden” 2 for a woman are undermined not only by legal restrictions to abortion access but by the emergence of fetal protection laws in a majority of us states (national conference of state legislatures 2018). these laws often extend the reach of child abuse and homicide laws, defining the fetus as a “person” within the meaning of those statutes.3 but in many cases, the law may override a woman’s choices about her own body in a myriad of ways, whether, as in the case of tamara loertscher in wisconsin, she is forcibly hospitalized because of a suspicion of drug use (glenza 2014), or in the case of samantha burton in florida, she is sentenced to court-ordered bed rest after a ruptured membrane (cantor 2012). in these cases, the state may provide an attorney for a fetus, effectively requiring women to testify against the fetus inside them (glenza 2014; paltrow and flavin 2013). even as fetal protection laws often explicitly exempt the pregnant woman from prosecution for homicide, they frame pregnant women’s bodies as terrain into which the law can and must reach in order to protect fetal life, undermining women’s basic rights in significant ways.4 1 pemberton v. tallahassee memorial regional medical, 66 f. supp. 2d 1247 (n.d. fla. 1999). 2 this legal standard was strengthened in the 2016 case whole woman’s health v. hellerstedt (579 u.s. ___ (2016)). 3e.g., code of alabama 13a.6.1: “(3) person. the term, when referring to the victim of a criminal homicide or assault, means a human being, including an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.” see http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx. 4 in pemberton’s case, the judge agreed that her first, fourth, and fourteenth amendment rights were at stake; he denied, however, her claim that the forced csection had violated her eighth amendment rights by way of “cruel and unusual punishment.” in 2009, the eighth circuit court found that shackling a woman in labor did constitute a violation of eighth amendment rights (griggs 2011, 252; nelson v. correctional medical facilities, 583 f.3d 522 (8th circuit 2009)). in a more pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 in this paper, i will defend the right to voluntary motherhood5 by way of an abortion at any stage of pregnancy as an essential feature of women’s basic rights. i argue that we need a better account of the embodied experience of pregnancy, as well as a more rigorous account of the relationship between our bodies and our exercise of rights. to do this, i propose subjecting pregnancy to the same scrutiny as other instances of embodied consent, such as the evolving legal frameworks around sexual consent. to think about pregnancy in these terms, however, we need to push back against an abortion discourse that demonizes and infantilizes pregnant women and to instead insist that pregnant women are rational, autonomous beings with epistemic authority over their own embodied experience. i will show that the tools we need to make these moves can be found in kant’s legal philosophy, where he considers a story about unwanted pregnancy that offers insight into what a kantian account of abortion might be. in drawing on kant to make this argument, i am pushing back on interpretations of kant’s legal philosophy as it pertains to abortion, which have either rigorously argued against abortion (gensler 1986; hare 1989) or offered an argument in line with the viability standard.6 i will argue that a kantian account of bodily autonomy and embodied consent requires us to defend a right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy, and that this right must be particularly rigorously defended when women find themselves in unjust circumstances, such as lack of access to reproductive freedom, coercive sexual and marital relationships, poverty, or lack of recent case, judge brett kavanaugh—now a supreme court justice—held that being forced to undergo an unwanted pregnancy or sent back to a hostile country in which abortions are illegal in order to obtain an abortion was not an “undue burden” on a 17-year-old immigrant in detention (garza v. hargan, 874 f.3d 735 (d.c. circuit 2017)). these arguments point to a consistent denial of the ways that pregnancy and birth are often used as disciplinary tactics against women—as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. 5 i build on angela davis’s (2003) use of this term. 6 the viability model has been defended by contemporary kantians, who largely accept the competing rights framework on which it is based. lina papadaki (2012, 145) draws out the difficulties of prioritizing the rights of the woman and the fetus from a kantian perspective. helga varden (2012, 44), who develops a kantian defense of the legal right to an abortion, draws the line at viability, arguing that “the state can rightfully determine the time at which the embryo/fetus acquires some legal rights.” varden argues that the state can set some point in pregnancy as the point at which the fetus is recognized as “a minimally acting human being” at that, beyond this point, legal restrictions on abortion are justified, provided that certain criteria of justice are met. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 public support for family leave, childcare, and health care. in other words, in circumstances like ours, we have a particularly strict duty to protect the right to abortion. i develop this account of the right to abortion in four moves. first, i examine how pregnant women are positioned in moral and legal debates about abortion, and develop a kantian account of bodily autonomy in order to ground pregnant women’s epistemic authority over the experience of pregnancy. second, i show that this account of bodily autonomy is consistent with a kantian account of embodied rights and embodied consent. third, i explore kant’s treatment of the infanticidal mother and draw out the parallels between this case and contemporary abortion rights in order to develop a distinctly kantian framework of reproductive rights in non-ideal conditions. finally, i explore the implications of this non-ideal approach for contemporary abortion discourse, arguing that debates about the legality of abortion should more broadly engage the barbaric conditions of reproductive injustice. i. infanticide, abortion, and reason in a curious passage in the doctrine of right, immanuel kant suggests that an unmarried woman who finds herself pregnant might be permitted to kill her baby (kant 1996, 6:335–337).7 the passage is part of kant’s famous discussion of retributive punishment, where he argues that, for murderers, the death penalty is a categorical imperative: those who commit murder must die. but he then goes on to consider two instances of killing that might not warrant this ultimate punishment: the case of military officers killed in a duel, and the case of the unwed mother who commits infanticide (6:336). in both cases, kant makes a striking claim: there is a sense in which these acts of killing take place outside the law, in a state of nature, and cannot therefore be called murder (6:336). kant’s central concern in this strange passage is the limit of law. in imagining the dueling soldiers and infanticidal mother in a kind of pop-up state of nature, kant admits that there are times when unjust social conditions place one, in a sense, beyond the justice dictated by law. the infanticidal mother, like the dueling soldiers, is caught between a barbaric social order and a rigid legal code. in this context, he’s not arguing that infanticide—or abortion, for that matter—is not awful. it is. but he recognizes that the full grappling with what’s at stake is simply not something the law can do. only the woman can know the details of the predicament she finds herself in, and only she can make the terrible choice of how to proceed. kant says 7 throughout this article, i refer to kant’s works in the prussian academie pagination. all references to the doctrine of right refer to mary gregor’s translation in kant: the metaphysics of morals (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1996). pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 that in the case of the infanticidal mother, “penal justice finds itself very much in a quandary,” so that the law must be “either cruel or indulgent” (6:336). kant’s point is not that the infanticidal mother’s action is not criminal but that her choice is forced on her by unjust circumstances: a pregnancy against her will in a social order that will punish and ostracize her and her baby. seen in this way, infanticide is not a moral problem faced by the mother alone but a problem of systemic social injustice, exacerbated by a rigid legal code. this recasting of the infanticidal woman as a victim of social injustice is, as jennifer uleman (2000, 174) has pointed out, a surprisingly compassionate twist on an old tale of demonization. kant takes the monstrous woman intent on killing her baby and asks us to consider her as a rational agent committing a monstrous act because of a lack of alternatives. in embedding this choice within an imaginary, pop-up state of nature, he asserts the moral authority of the woman in the context of an unjust social order, arguing that she, and not the penal code, must determine the fate, and status, of the unwanted child. this paper is not a defense of infanticide, and i will draw a strict distinction between the status of the fetus and the rights of the infant. rather, i note how the eighteenth-century debate about infanticide mirrors our own obsession with abortion, and how kant’s insistence on the rationality of the infanticidal mother’s choice is particularly noteworthy in the context of our contemporary debates over abortion, which frequently undermine pregnant women’s status as rational and moral agents. the trope of the irrational, evil, selfish woman, which animated eighteenth century discourse about infanticide, continues to shape twenty-first century abortion discourse; legal restrictions on abortion are often justified on the grounds that pregnant women’s presumed irrationality requires the intervention of the state. in 2007, for example, the supreme court upheld a ban on late-term abortions on the grounds that women often suffer from “abortion regret.”8 the court argued—without any evidence whatsoever—that pregnant women’s emotional states were so fragile that doctors hesitated to fully explain the abortion procedure to them. the court held that without this information, women could not make informed decisions about their medical choices. instead of requiring doctors to give women the information required to decide for themselves, the court banned the procedure. in making this argument, the court articulates the ways in which we do not consider pregnant women to be reasonable persons, capable of autonomously making informed medical decisions. the law is justified in limiting 8 “while we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained” (gonzales v. carhart, 550 u.s. 124 (2007), at 159). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 women’s choices, the argument goes, because pregnant women are incapable of making good, rational choices.9 the discourse around late-term abortion, like the eighteenth-century debate about infanticide, tends to assume that women who seek out these options do so for purely selfish reasons. in her seminal “in defense of abortion,” judith jarvis thomson (1971, 66) admits that it would be “indecent” for a woman to seek out an abortion in her seventh month of pregnancy merely to avoid postponing a trip abroad. when i have defended the right to late-term abortions, i am often offered objections that share this assumption: what about the woman in her third trimester who wants to smoke crack or commit suicide? what about the woman who plans to give up her child at birth, who has no concerns for its future well-being and who therefore drinks, smokes, and does cocaine throughout her third trimester? or the woman who wants to have a third-trimester abortion so she can wear a form-fitting dress or compete in a reality show? the women in these examples are inconstant, irrational, indecent. they illustrate the ways in which, within abortion discourse, pregnant women—like the eighteenth-century infanticidal mother—are all potentially monstrous. surely, the argument goes, there are no good reasons for carrying a pregnancy so far and then ending it. surely there are no justifiable liberty claims that allow women to endanger the well-being of future children so far into pregnancy. surely we need abortion restrictions just in case women are evil. while i will argue that the kantian framework has resources to respond to these objections,10 i am concerned first with the damage done to the discourse around abortion that our insistence on foregrounding these imagined cases. in these objections, women—and not their circumstances—are irrational and evil. they are wantonly enjoying the “perks” of pregnancy and then aborting the fetus; they are abandoning their babies at birth and so abusing them in the womb; they are criminals, sluts, drug addicts, mentally ill, child abusers.11 in this discussion, these are the cases that we get stuck on. i want to argue against privileging this kind of objection and instead follow kant’s example in his depiction of the infanticidal mother: let us assume that most women who seek abortions are responsible, rational agents choosing in morally 9 for an analysis of how these arguments operate under the trump administration, see cauterucci (2018). 10 see section ii, where i argue that a kantian account of law is concerned only with the form, and not with the end, of our choices. 11 take, for example, the rumored cases of “abortion-doping” when female olympian runners would supposedly get pregnant and secure an abortion before an important race, so that the surge of hormones would enhance performance (manninen 2014, 85). pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 complex circumstances. let us assume that they are persons, with full lives, difficult choices, and competing priorities. like kant’s infanticidal mother, women who seek abortions generally do so in difficult, if not impossible, circumstances, and the full range of complexities confronting them as they make this decision are more complex than a balancing test can incorporate. the moral questions in any given case of abortion are rarely actually about whether or not the fetus is understood to be a person or about whether the woman therefore has obligations to that fetus. to frame the issue in this way is to relegate the woman and her fetus to a false moral bubble in order to make moral equivalence easier. in reality, the majority of women (59 percent) in the us who seek abortions already have children, and nearly half of those who do live in conditions of poverty (guttmacher institute 2016). abortion is rarely a purely moral problem and is almost always embedded in a matrix of systemic social injustices, which force women to make the best possible choice in impossible circumstances. while many moral defenses of abortion recognize these complexities, they tend to create their own balancing act between the rights of the pregnant woman and the duty to recognize the humanity of the fetus. kantian moral defenses of abortion defend the pregnant woman’s right to bodily autonomy and to be treated as an end in herself rather than a means to support the fetus, while at the same time holding that the fetus deserves respect as nascent form of human life (denis 2007; feldman 1998; manninen 2014; papadaki 2012; wood 1998). in these formulations, many cases of abortion will be morally permissible, provided that the woman has the right sorts of reasons for seeking an abortion and that she does so while respecting the value of the fetus’s life.12 these accounts emphasize pregnant women’s autonomy and capacity for making moral decisions in complex circumstances, and map an account of abortions that are morally permissible, and sometimes morally required, given women’s embodied experience and moral duties to themselves.13 but they also tend to follow thomson in introducing distinctions 12 manninen (2014, 85) puts it as follows: “if a woman does choose to abort, it is a decision that should be reached with care, judiciousness, and ideally in situations where the woman has other moral obligations that parenthood would render it difficult or impossible to fulfill (for example, if having another child would compromise one’s capacity to care for existing children, or to continue in one’s educational endeavors).” ⁠ 13 susan feldman (1998) argues that if we take women—and by, extension, pregnancy—to be the normal, rather than the exceptional case, then it will often be the case that women’s duties to themselves outweigh their duties of beneficence to the fetus. i agree with feldman’s moral defense of abortion but will develop here a legal, rather than a moral, defense. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 between those abortions that are permissible and those that are “indecent.” while these are explicitly moral arguments, their assumption that some abortions are morally indecent is potential fodder for an abortion discourse eager to cast women as indecent, selfish, and immoral. they also tend to accept some variation of the viability standard, holding that at some point, the fetus deserves moral respect or legal protection, and that beyond this point, the state is justified in restricting access to abortion, regardless of the incursions on women’s embodied rights this may involve. in this paper, i will take a different approach, following kant’s legal reasoning more closely than his moral arguments. that is to say, my concern here is not to defend a moral account of abortion but to emphasize the ways in which abortion law ought to respect the moral dilemmas of pregnancy and the moral and epistemic authority of pregnant women in that domain. in making this distinction between moral and legal questions, i will follow kant in delineating a clear distinction between external freedom, which is the domain of law, and internal freedom, which is the terrain of morality. kant is explicit that the law cannot interrogate reasons but must satisfy itself with an analysis of our external actions, particularly as they impact others (6:239–241). i will argue that in taking the fetus to be amongst the “others” who can be affected by my action, us law has misconstrued the nature of external freedom in a way that is deeply invasive and distinctly gendered. by clarifying the relationship between the body and the possibility of external freedom, and drawing on both kant’s account of embodied consent and his story about the infanticidal mother and the “pop-up” state of nature, i will emphasize that respect for women’s autonomy requires that the reasons one seeks an abortion need not be intelligible from the perspective of law. ii. the limits of embodied consent the right to an abortion, in the us, is grounded on the right to privacy, which is then balanced, under the viability standard, with the state’s interest in protecting the fetus.14 i will argue that this framing misunderstands the nature of our relationship to our body and argue that there are other areas of law, like current modifications in sexual assault law, that are beginning to get a better grasp on how we should think about our relationship to our bodies, and our bodies’ relationship to our rights. in making these arguments, i will draw on kant’s account of the relationship between our basic rights and the necessity of law. in this section, i offer a general account of embodied rights in kant and show how they should apply to 14 planned parenthood v. casey, 505 u.s. 833 (1992). pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 pregnancy and abortion; in the next section, i take up a kantian argument that applies to abortion and the status of the fetus in law.15 kant’s account of the purpose and scope of law rests on the distinction between innate right and private right—a distinction that, i will argue, is collapsed in the way in which current us law understands privacy. innate right refers to the natural right to freedom we are born with (6:237–238); private right, on the other hand, refers to the acquired rights through which we are able to extend our capacity for action in the world (6:246). we can acquire property, rights against other persons (contract), and rights to other persons (as in marriage); the state is necessary to assure those possessive rights. in a state of nature, we find ourselves competing with others for rights and resources; we therefore have a duty to enter a rightful state in order to both assure our possessive rights and to subject them to principles of distributive justice that ensure that we will each have what we need to be able to enact our external freedom (6:237; varden 2010). to be a rights-bearing entity, in the kantian sense, is to be a being whose external freedom is reciprocally defined against the external freedom of others and coercively defended by law (6:231). but the law has a different relation to innate right than it does to private rights. if possessive rights are the reason we need the state, innate right is the reason we have standing in the state. our body is the site of innate right in the same way that the world is the site of private right, but the ways in which we extend our external freedom out into the world are structurally different from the way innate right relies on embodiment to make external freedom possible. thus, to say that agents must be embodied in order to enact rights is not to say that agents have rights over their bodies, as if their bodies were some kind of property they owned. to say that our bodies are our property in this way would suggest that our bodies could be sold, or leased, the way that other property can be. for kant, to give someone else rights to my body is to give them rights to my self, since my person and my body cannot be separated (6:270). as we will see, this is why there can be no right to slavery (6:359), for example, or prostitution, since i cannot sell my body without selling myself (6:279). my right to my body is an innate right, rather than a possessive right, and this produces a different set of rules governing our embodied rights. and so it is unintelligible, from a kantian perspective, to say that a pregnant woman houses a 15 i am also offering this analysis of kant as an intervention in reproductive justice frameworks, which have critiqued the privacy framework for reproductive rights in favor of a human rights framework; as my argument will show, if we take human rights frameworks to inherit the kantian distinction between innate and possessive right, they may be more useful in grounding reproductive justice. for an overview of the reproductive justice framework, see ross (2006, 2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 fetus, in the sense that she has leased out some part of herself, or even that she hosts the fetus inside her: her body is simply not a thing to be disposed of in this way (6:270). her body is the means through which she can act in the world, and therefore, part of what it means to say that she is a rights-bearing entity is that she has an absolute right to her body as an extension of her will. or, to put it differently, the law can have no jurisdiction to adjudicate the relationship between a woman and her body, since that relation is the foundation of her status as a rights-bearing agent. it is easy to see, however, why we make this category mistake with regards to pregnancy. the problem of private right arises in a state of nature only when there is more than one person competing over those rights (6:237; varden 2008, 15). as long as a state of nature is inhabited by only one person, there is no need for justice, since we have no need for adjudicating rights in such a condition: we need law only when we are assessing competing and conflicting claims. because our legal framework conceives pregnancy as such an instance of competing and conflicting claims, it assumes that those rights must be adjudicated, as in private right. but this misunderstands the kinds of rights involved: the right a woman has over her body is not a property right, a right over something to which someone can have a competing claim. it is an innate right: the right to herself. the very idea that women’s interests should be “balanced” with the state’s interest in protecting the life of the fetus fosters this category confusion, which denies women the domain of innate right. (and of course, this is easy to do, since we are used to thinking of women’s bodies as not entirely their own, given the legacies of couverture, patriarchal marriage, and women’s legal passivity.) in doing so, it denies her the innate right to external freedom, or the right to enact her will through her body. innate right has two features: equality, which means that i cannot be bound to another in ways that they cannot be bound to me, and the right to be my own master, which is the right to choose actions guided by my own will (6:237–238). both of these requirements hinge on the unity of the will and the body, on the necessity of understanding the body as the mechanism of the will. this unity has important implications for the limits of consent. the kantian model of consent is complicated in instances of consent to make use of one’s body. consent consists in granting someone else a right against me: if i consent to sell you my car, then you have a right against me, not a right to my car (6:275). if the deal goes south, then you may be able to sue me for breach of contract, but you wouldn’t automatically have a right to the car. only property right gives you a right to the car; contract merely gives you the right to expect me to fulfill my word. likewise, when i agree to paint a house for someone, or to give them a massage, what i grant them is not a right to my body, as a kind of property, but a right against me as a person. the right they acquire is a right to my labor, which unites my will and my body to fulfill the terms of the contract. if i pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 were to agree to become someone’s slave, what i would grant them is a direct right to make use of my body as their will dictates. in doing so, i would mistake my right to my body for a property right which could be transferred to another person, and i would unilaterally bind myself to their will, making myself a mere object at their disposal. such a promise, kant tells us, is incoherent and impossible: it conflicts with innate right and conflates innate right with acquired right (6:359). the nature of embodied rights is perhaps clearest, however, in kant’s account of sex, which seems to entail giving someone a right to my body rather than merely a right against my will (6:278). because sex is an embodied right in this way, kant argues that no sexual contract can be conclusive. if a prostitute sells her body for money, this can’t give her client a right to use her body against her will: if she changes her mind, he has no rights to her body, since she can’t give rights to her body to someone else in this way. the law can’t enforce this contract; it can’t adjudicate one person’s right to make use of someone else’s body against their will, since no such right exists (6:279).16 kant solves the sex problem by saying that we can only rightfully have sex in marriage, whereby we surrender ourselves wholly to each other, and we take each other’s ends as our own, so that we get to make use of each other’s bodies in the bargain (6:278). contemporary kantians have argued that this outlaws marital rape: if we have to take one another’s ends as our own, we can’t force ourselves on each other against the other’s will (varden 2006, 205). and the will is, of course, subject to change. so i may have said yes to sex twenty minutes ago, when we got started, and i may now prefer to sleep. and so, as my ends change, even if we’re already having sex, you are required to respect those ends and take them as your own. if this sounds familiar, it’s because this is indeed the reasoning that now informs much sexual assault law, from the “no means no” variety, that assumes i can rescind consent at any point in an encounter, to the affirmative consent variety, which means that i must actively consent throughout a sexual encounter. our increasingly rigorous attention to the provisional nature of sexual consent rests on an understanding of embodied rights that are strikingly similar to kant’s understanding of the relationship between the body and the will: you cannot have a right to my body that conflicts with my will.17 embodied consent is thus never conclusive: you can have a right to my body until i say otherwise. this means that the law’s relationship to these acts of consent are very different from its relationship 16 lori watson’s (2014) examination of the contradictions that arise if we treat sex work as work produces similar insights. 17 i think that this lays the groundwork for a kantian account of sexual consent that goes beyond the affirmative consent model and towards what michelle anderson (2005, 1401) calls the “negotiation model.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 to other kinds of agreements, such as those that organize possessive rights. in agreements concerning possessive rights, the law can take my consent to be conclusive and can hold me accountable in various ways for going back on my word; it can ensure that, if i rescind my consent, no one’s rights are violated. but it can play no such role when the consent in question deals with innate right, since innate right is not dictated by the law in this way. if i agree to sell you my car, and you pay me, and then i refuse to hand it over, the law can decide that the car—or the money— rightfully belongs to you. but if i agree to have sex with you and then change my mind, the law can’t decide that you have a right to my body because the law doesn’t have jurisdiction over my body in this way (6:278). my body isn’t the law’s to distribute. the right to my body can be dictated only by my will and never by the law; the law must instead assume and protect the unity of my body and will as the basis of my external freedom.18 but one of the curious features of affirmative, provisional consent is that we seem to assume that it holds for sexual use of my body but not for the repercussions of sex–namely, not for pregnancy. in other words, the law assumes that i can still say no at any point during sex, but that at some point during pregnancy, i lose the right to refuse to allow my body to be used against my will.19 under the viability standard, 18 built into this framework for embodied right is a powerful argument against the assumption that men, or the state, can be entitled to a woman’s body. for example, this account of embodied right is a useful counterargument to recent moves to argue that sex—and women’s bodies—can be redistributed by the state. see douthat (2018) and bowles (2018). 19 the court was quite explicit about this in planned parenthood v. casey (505 u.s. 833 (1992), at 870), where they argued that “in some broad sense it might be said that a woman who fails to act before viability has consented to the state’s intervention on behalf of the developing child.” the idea that the right to consent ends when sex ends shows up frequently in abortion debates, perhaps most famously in joel feinberg’s (2002) framework for determining when women are responsible for their pregnancies. there, the assumption is that any act of sexual intercourse, even with proper use of effective contraception, operates as consent to carry a child to term. even more troublingly, feinberg argues (779) that if the male partner fails to use contraception properly, the woman is on the hook for his contraceptive failure: even without knowing he was careless about birth control, she has consented to bear his child by having sex with him. but the kind of passive consent described in casey and in feinberg’s framework is very much at odds with the critique of passive consent emerging in affirmative consent law and in public discourse in the wake of the recent stanford swimmer rape case. pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 the provisional consent i grant during sex is transformed into conclusive consent to have my body made use of during pregnancy. given kant’s understanding of the relationship between the body and the will, however, no such conclusive consent is possible—at any point in pregnancy. my consent to make use of my body is always provisional. it can be rescinded, like consent during sex, at any point. this means that pregnancy, like sex, operates as an extended domain of choice. in sexual assault law, this means that sex requires a kind of heightened scrutiny in order to ensure that consent is occurring. but in sexual assault law, that domain of heightened protection need last, at most, only a few hours. in the case of pregnancy, that heightened domain of choice lasts for months.20 because embodied consent can never be conclusive, the right to abortion cannot hinge on an analysis of how one becomes pregnant. the comparison to sexual consent helps to illustrate this in some classic arguments about the permissibility of abortion. in constructing her famous violinist example, judith jarvis thomson (1971, 48–50) builds a case for the right to an abortion in cases where a woman finds herself pregnant through no fault of her own: imagine, she says, that you wake up one morning and find that the society of music lovers have kidnapped you and connected you as a life support system for a famous violinist; he requires your support for 9 months, during which time, to unplug him would be to kill him. the example is meant to generate the insight that the violinist’s right to life cannot obligate you to remain on bed rest to keep him alive, though doing so may make one a “good samaritan” (62). but in organizing itself around a kidnapping, it operates as an analogy to cases of pregnancy by rape. thomson goes on to say that there are numerous ways i can find myself pregnant against my will; i may take precautions, analogous to putting bars on the windows to deter burglars and may yet still find myself pregnant (59). if i have not consented to be pregnant, thomson asks, or if i have consented to a pregnancy but not to one that will endanger my life or health, then do i have the right to an abortion? the question is not then whether any 20 one objection to this argument is that the sexual consent and pregnancy cases are not analogous, since the sexual consent case concerns a specific other person claiming rights to my body, whereas the fetus cannot be conceived as an “assailant” in this way. this, we should note, is inconsistent with recent moves to give the fetus standing in law: if the fetus is to be construed as a “person,” subject to the protections of law, then it should be subject to the limits placed on persons’ rights to one another, as well. but the standing of the fetus is irrelevant here: whether or not we accept the idea that the fetus can have direct standing in law, the state, acting on behalf of the fetus, places itself in the position analogous to the assailant, claiming a right to the pregnant woman’s body against her will. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 woman might have the right to an abortion but whether one has the right to say no to something one did not give informed consent to. we may apply this question of consent to sexual assault cases. thomson’s article tracks cases where i have woken up to someone penetrating me—in which case i am being raped and clearly have the right to say no—and cases like emma sulkowicz’s (2014), who consented to vaginal intercourse only to find herself pinned to a bed, having anal intercourse while she protested. thomson’s cases thus treat consent as conclusive, assuming that the relevant question is whether a woman can be said to have consented to her pregnancy in the first place, not whether she has the ongoing right to protect her body from being used against her will. in another seminal paper on abortion, joel feinberg (2002, 779) ties the right to abortion to this question of culpability in pregnancy. feinberg imagines a spectrum, ranging from cases where a woman becomes pregnant through rape and is not culpable for the pregnancy, to cases where she sought out the pregnancy and is therefore responsible. in between, feinberg (780) distinguishes between cases where properly used contraception fails (in which case the woman is not responsible for the pregnancy) and cases where contraception has been improperly used (in which case she is—even if the fault is her partner’s). in framing the question in this way, he ties the right to abortion to some conception of consent but assumes both that negligence constitutes consent and that consent to pregnancy is conclusive. in the sexual consent analogy, feinberg’s argument amounts to saying that falling asleep at a party constitutes consent to sex, and that having consented to sex in this way, one no longer has the right to say no.21 i think there are several further insights generated by this comparison between sexual consent and consent to pregnancy. one is that we have come to understand sex without consent, or past the point where consent has been rescinded, as a grave violation. we should understand pregnancy without, or beyond, consent as a similar kind of visceral violation, one that subjects women to a deep sense of invasion, physical and psychological hardship, and extreme pain and trauma, to say nothing of the deep moral burden of bearing a child one does not wish to raise. and we should, likewise, reframe the experience of labor against one’s will as one of the most extreme forms of torture a person can be subjected to. a second insight is that, just as i need not give reasons to say “no” to sex— even if it is already underway—my right to say “no” to pregnancy cannot hinge on an 21 susan feldman (1998, 271) argues that we cannot treat consent to sex as consent to pregnancy, any more than we can treat smoking as consent to cancer: because c is a possible consequence of a, it does not follow that when i consent to a, i consent to c. i think feldman is right in this objection, but in making it, she assumes that consent to pregnancy is conclusive. pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 evaluation of my reasons for doing so. this does not mean, morally speaking, that i might not have better or worse reasons for terminating a sexual encounter or a pregnancy, but it does mean that these reasons are beyond the law’s jurisdiction.22 this does not preclude the possibility of something like thomson’s (1971, 62) “good samaritan” argument. i may, sometimes, continue to have sex with my partner beyond the point when doing so serves my ends, if i have taken his ends as my own. sometimes, we may have, or continue, sex for reasons of duty or compassion; this willingness to offer ourselves out of moral feeling when doing so requires little enough sacrifice is something like thomson’s good samaritan argument. we may find we have a duty to our partner to have sex we do not want for our own reasons; we may feel that we can carry a pregnancy to term at no great costs to ourselves. but the calculation of those costs in cases of embodied consent belong entirely to the person who inhabits the body in question, who is the only person in the position to determine the relationship between the body and the will, and to decide when the former is being used against the latter in a manner that constitutes a violation or triggers a duty to resist being used in this way. or, to put it differently, in respecting my right to my body as a species of innate right, rather than private right, the law must grant me epistemic authority over my body, recognizing that i am in a unique epistemic position to determine when my body is being used against my will in a manner that constitutes a violation or triggers a duty to resist being used in this way.23 thus, when the law seeks to offer protection to the fetus through feticide law, as has increasingly been the case in us law, it violates this distinction between innate and private right. in holding that viability marks the point at which women conclusively consent to pregnancy, the law creates a condition in which a woman’s body can be used against her will, which undermines her innate right to the unity of her body and her will: it undermines her right to her person.24 in doing so, it misunderstands the law’s relationship to our choices: the law should concern itself not with evaluating the end one chooses but with the form of the choice (kant 1996, 6:230). so, i may want to buy something from you in order to make a profit. the law can protect my right to make the transaction, but it cannot protect my desired end: 22 like susan feldman (1998), i think the protection of the right to make this choice is preferable to a consequentialist defense of abortion, which may open the door to arguments for outlawing abortion for consequentialist reasons. 23 cf. carol hay (2013), whose argument does not examine pregnancy but whose framework extends to many forms of embodied and reproductive oppression. 24 it is critical to note that the law, rather than the fetus, violates the woman’s innate right in these cases. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 it can’t protect my right to make a profit (6:230).25 much as the law can protect my right to consent to sex, but not—contrary to the wishes of the incel community—the right to have sex, the law can protect the form of the pregnant woman’s choice: she may continue her pregnancy or not. but it cannot protect the end of that choice, whatever it may be. a healthy baby is an end of pregnancy, but she may miscarry late in her pregnancy or have complications during birth. the state can have a duty to support fetal health, through prenatal care and labor protections for pregnant women, but when it does so, it places value on the woman’s innate right, which includes a right to choose pregnancy, rather than on its interests in protecting life.26 in protecting the form, rather than the end, of a woman’s reproductive choices, the state must recognize pregnancy, like sex, as a domain of ongoing embodied choice. the distinction is illustrated by the legislative response to a feticide case in colorado in 2015, when michelle wilkins, who was 7 months pregnant, responded to an ad on craigslist for baby clothes and went to the home of dynel lane, where lane attacked wilkins and cut out her unborn fetus (healy 2015).27 lane was charged under colorado’s violence against pregnant women act and faced up to 120 years in prison for unlawful termination of a pregnancy; the state legislature, frustrated that she could not be charged with murder, proposed a fetal personhood law that was rejected by voters. the vapw law, which explicitly offers heightened physical protection to pregnant women, identifies the woman, rather than the fetus, as the victim of violent crime, emphasizing that the protection offered by the law should not be interpreted as granting any legal status to the fetus, 25 kant argues that external freedom is concerned with the matter of choice and not with a mere wish (6:230). i think we badly misunderstand the nature of pregnancy if we frame the fetus as a mere wish: as long as she is gestating the fetus, the woman is actively pregnant, actively supporting the development of the fetus, and thus actively engaged in the question of consent to have her body used in this way. 26 understanding pregnancy and labor in terms of the form of a woman’s choice, rather than its end, also provides a better legal grounding for protecting women through the process of birth, both by prioritizing women’s right to choose their birth plan and by protecting women from obstetric assault. 27 leaving wilkins bleeding on the floor, lane took the fetus to an emergency room, claimed it as her own, and told her husband she had had a miscarriage. wilkins managed to call 911 and survived the attack; lane was charged with attempted firstdegree murder and, under colorado’s violence against pregnant women act, with first-degree unlawful termination of a pregnancy and faces up to 120 years in prison. the vapw, passed in 2013, distinguishes between harm caused to a pregnant woman by a third party, and cases of abortion, and explicitly denies that the fetus has any standing under the law. the fetal personhood bill was defeated in 2014. pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 and it explicitly protects women from being charged with harmful behavior with regards to their own pregnancy (tuerkheimer, 2015). in emphasizing that an attack on pregnancy is both an attack on the woman and on her commitment to her unborn child—rather than an attack on the unborn child itself—the vapw successfully protects the form of women’s reproductive freedom, while the defeated fetal personhood law would seek to protect the end of that choice. other feticide laws, like the one under which purvi patel was charged with manslaughter for seeking an abortion and later miscarrying, directly protect the fetus, or the end of pregnancy (bazelon 2015).28 both patel and wilkins lost their pregnancies, but in doing so, they were not equally wronged. in seeking out an abortion, patel enacted her right to her own body; in having her body and pregnancy attacked, wilkins’s right to her own body and to her pregnancy as a domain of choice were violated. a law that designates these cases as equal legal wrongs misunderstands the nature of one’s right to one’s own body, and mistakes the law’s duty to protect our right to set and pursue ends with a duty to protect those ends. thus, the state is required to provide access to prenatal care and labor protections throughout pregnancy and the right to access a safe, legal abortion at any point in pregnancy.29 iii. pregnancy and the state of nature i have defended the right to an abortion at any point in pregnancy as a necessary feature of innate right. but in doing so, i have said little about the standing of the fetus. to consider this, let us return to kant’s infanticidal mother and the state of nature in which she apparently finds herself when contemplating her unwanted child. kant offers this story as a complication to his theory of retributive punishment, wondering whether the law can duly punish the infanticidal mother or the dueling military officer, since their crimes are, in his terms, inspired by a desire to protect their own honor. 28 in july 2014, patel went to an emergency room in south bend, indiana, where she said she had had a miscarriage; not knowing what to do with the fetus, she said she had wrapped it in a bag and put it in a dumpster. the doctor at the emergency room thought that her pregnancy had been quite far along and called the police to report patel for child abuse; he later joined the police in the search for the fetus in a nearby dumpster. when texts were later discovered in which patel told a friend she was ordering abortion-inducing medication online from china, she was charged with illegally terminating her pregnancy (bazelon 2015). 29 as helga varden (2012) has argued, ensuring that women can in fact make this choice will require not only that abortions be readily accessible but that they be affordable: to protect external freedom, the state may be required to subsidize abortions just as it is required to subsidize other health care for pregnant women. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 in describing the dueling soldier and infanticidal mother as finding themselves “in a state of nature” (6:336), kant likens their cases to what he calls “the right of necessity,” or the right to protect one’s right to life even if doing so involves violence against another who has done no harm (6:235). kant argues (6:236) that “necessity has no law” because the law can impose no punishment greater than the threat to one’s own life.30 the threat faced by the dueling soldier and infanticidal mother must, kant suggests, be taken in the same spirit: these are threats to honor so severe that they constitute a threat to one’s life chances, so that killing in these cases constitutes a kind of self-defense. in making this claim, kant recognizes that most women who become pregnant with an illegitimate child do so against their will and have few choices available to them in a social order that has no place for an illegitimate child or a “fallen” woman (pascoe, 2011). bearing an illegitimate child leaves her no place in the social order and thus few means to provide for her own survival or that of her child. in these conditions, the threat to her honor constitutes a subjective limit on external freedom: the challenges facing the unwed mother are so severe as to permanently undermine her capacity to set and pursue ends in the world. this threat is so severe, on kant’s account, that it invokes the right of necessity, placing the woman and her child in a state of nature, a condition in which their respective rights to life become merely provisional. because her life chances are so threatened by this unwanted child, she will risk punishment to save herself from the conditions of poverty and abjection she would face as the mother of an illegitimate child. in this sense, kant’s infanticidal mother finds herself in a predicament akin to that faced by women who seek dangerous, illegal abortions rather than bearing a child they do not want and cannot support (stephensdavidowitz 2016). illegal abortion, like infanticide, tracks cases where coercive law cannot protect women from the threat to their life chances posed by an unwanted child. these actions, like self-defense on a sinking ship (6:235), arise because the threat to her life-chances is such that her own rights become provisional: she has found herself in a state of nature, which opens in the schism between coercive law and unjust social conditions. in this framing, it matters not whether the fetus is a person nor whether the fetus is an “innocent” person: the right of necessity grants that, in a state of nature, we are justified in defending ourselves even against innocent others. by refusing to protect women’s innate rights to their own bodies, the law treats those rights as merely provisional, and by placing those rights in 30 he says, “a penal law of this sort could not have the effect intended, since a threat of an ill that is still uncertain (death by judicial verdict) cannot outweigh the fear of an ill that is certain (drowning)” (6:235). pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 competition with those of the fetus, the state forces women into a state of nature, an unjust condition in which self-defense is necessary to protect one’s rights. but this is not the only way to understand the work that the state of nature is doing in kant’s argument. it also operates to explain the status of the fetus in law. kant is clear that the illegitimate child has no automatic standing in the state: the mother would have to “smuggle” it in, as “contraband”: to be born illegitimate is not merely to be born outside of marriage but outside the legal framework through which rights and recognition are granted (6:337; pascoe 2011). the child is, in this sense, born outside the law, in a state of nature.31 in such a condition, the child has only provisional rights, which are not subject to legal enforcement or protection. this is not, as i have said, a defense of infanticide; kant’s distinction between the legal standing of legitimate and illegitimate children must be rejected. but the framework of provisional rights offered here provides a critical intervention to contemporary debate about the legal standing of the fetus. the state exists, on a kantian account, to reciprocally enforce external freedom, grounded in innate right, protecting our respective capacities to set and pursue ends in the world (6:231). but the very idea of a fetus possessing external freedom is unintelligible on a kantian account, since a fetus cannot set or pursue ends in the external world;32 it exists not 31 kant’s emphasis on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children highlights the law’s role in determining through what means new members of a community are formally recognized by the law. since roe v. wade (410 u.s. 113 (1973)), birth has done this work in us law. this is borne out by the concrete practices of granting legal recognition to infants when they are born: the date of birth is assigned to mark the identity of this new person, and it is at this point that one becomes eligible for the various benefits and protections of the law—it is at this point that one is granted a social security number, for example, with the potential benefits that go along with it. despite the proliferation of feticide laws, there is no reasonable legal mechanism for formally recognizing a fetus as a rights-bearing person under law. the fetus’s status as a legal entity is liminal in a manner similar to kant’s illegitimate child. 32 a possible objection to my argument here is that kant already establishes that children cannot independently set and pursue ends in the world, and thus argues that parents must act on behalf of children through parental rights (6:280–282). parents must protect their children’s future external freedom by caring for and educating them and taking their children’s (future) ends as their own. one could argue that this relation already categorizes the relation between the pregnant woman and fetus, such that the woman must take their fetus’s future ends as their own, and scholars who take this position generally cite kant’s comment that “there follows from procreation a duty to preserve and care for its offspring” (6:280). in this feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 in the world but in a woman’s body. viability claims tend to obscure this distinction, confusing the claim that a fetus could be viable outside the mother’s womb with the notion that a fetus has rights as if it were outside the woman’s womb, which it is not. the fetus is by definition inside the woman’s womb; the unintelligibility of external freedom for a fetus places it outside the scope of the law. thus, the fetus exists, as it were, in a state of nature. this is not to designate a pregnant woman’s body a wild space but to underscore the degree to which the unity of the will and the body is prior to law, not subject to the adjudication of law. in this sense, the body is a state of nature. but we rarely have to think of it this way, precisely because the problems of a state of nature arise only when competitions of rights arise: as long as only one person inhabits a state of nature, we need no conception of rights, since that person could lay claim to all things. because the fetus’s survival hinges on a claim to the woman’s body, it asserts possessive rights to that body, as if in a state of nature. but like all claims to rights in a state of nature, these rights can only be provisional. so, i think we can say that the fetus has a right to life, so long as we recognize this as a provisional claim made within a state of nature. the status of this right can be determined only by the woman, who has the sole epistemic authority to determine the standing of that right within her own body. it is up to her to decide if she has a duty to herself not to bring this child into the world, in order to retain her self-respect and agency in the world, and to protect her life chances. or she may find that she has a duty to protect and provide for the child, regardless of its impact on her life. she may recognize the fetus as a beloved descendent whose ends she takes as her own. to say that this is her choice is to say that the provisional rights of the fetus are subject to the epistemic authority of the pregnant woman. case, the fetus’s future external freedom could be weighed against the mother’s embodied rights. but a passage just below this warns against this: kant says that parents “cannot destroy their child as if he were something they had made (since a being endowed with freedom cannot be a product of this kind) or as if they were his property, nor can they even just abandon him to chance, since they have brought not merely a worldly being but a citizen of the world into a condition which cannot now be indifferent to them” (6:281). this double emphasis on the child as worldly being and citizen of the world suggests that kant’s understanding of children’s rights must be tied to birth and to recognizable, embodied existence in the world. this reading, moreover, is consistent with the emphasis on external freedom throughout the passage on parental right: parents have a special duty to protect the external freedom of their children, because that external freedom is incomplete—not nonexistent, like that of the fetus. pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 to see what i mean, let us return to the feticide cases of purvi patel and michelle wilkins. even if patel and wilkins were at exactly the same stage of pregnancy33, their respective losses would be very different. the fetus inside wilkins was, to wilkins, her future child, for whom she was procuring baby clothes. wilkins’s fetus had her consent to become a baby, which means that she was already behaving as if she had the same duties to the fetus that she would have to her future child. the moment at which a woman decides to treat the fetus inside her as if it were her future child need have nothing to do with viability or the advancement of pregnancy; for some women, a sense of obligation to respect the rights of the fetus, and to treat the fetus as a beloved dependent, occurs from the moment she discovers she is pregnant. for patel, on the other hand, her unwanted pregnancy produced no such sense of obligation; she did not consent to be obligated to the fetus’s provisional rights. patel did not grant the fetus the status of a future child, and so when she miscarried the fetus, she did not—unlike wilkins—lose a future child. likewise, we can imagine a case where a woman carrying an unwanted pregnancy nevertheless has an embodied experience of the fetus as a being with rights of its own that she is bound to respect, who carries her pregnancy to term out of this sense of obligation, or who comes to feel, through embodied experience, that this unwanted fetus is indeed a beloved descendant. part of understanding pregnancy as an embodied experience is granting epistemic authority to the person having that experience and granting that the person with the most direct standing to determine the status of a fetus’s provisional rights is the woman carrying that fetus. this argument holds, i should note, only as long as the fetus remains inside the woman. an infant, unlike a fetus, has external freedom, which can be coercively protected by law. external freedom becomes coercively enforceable not when one could survive outside the womb but when one does survive outside the womb. at this point, it becomes possible for the state to coercively enforce the infant’s external freedom by ensuring that someone—the parents, the state, or some other agent—has the obligation to take its ends as their own.34 as long as the fetus is 33 they were not; wilkins was seven months pregnant while patel was between four and five months. at patel’s trial, the prosecutors used a widely discredited “float test” to argue that the fetus, whose gestational age was between 25 and 28 weeks, had been alive at birth; other forensic experts argued that the fetus was only 23 to 24 weeks along and not yet able to breathe independently. 34 the parent-child relationship is an instance of “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing” which, like marriage, involves a robust form of end-sharing. while the end-sharing of married partners is reciprocal, the end-sharing of parenting involves, as tamar schapiro (1999, 735) puts it, the duty to “make it our end to do what is in our power as adults to help children work their way out of childhood.” but feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 inside the mother, it can have no capacity to set and pursue ends in the world; its right to do so is merely provisional, not enforceable. the provisional nature of the fetus’s rights mirrors the provisional nature of embodied consent: as long as it remains inside the woman, the fetus’s rights cannot be coercively concluded by law. as long as the fetus is inside her body, the woman’s consent to this arrangement cannot be conclusive. because the law must respect, rather than adjudicate, the relationship between the will and the body, it must treat both the woman’s consent and the fetus’s right to life as merely provisional and protect the right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy. iv. the knot can be undone in envisioning a state of nature opening up around the infanticidal mother and illegitimate child, kant recognizes the impossible choice a woman faces when confronted with a pregnancy that will undermine her life chances. though he considers mercy for a woman who kills under these circumstances, he cannot square this with the retributive requirement of punishment. as kantian claims about justice go, it is decidedly muddy. “the knot can be undone in the following way,” he argues. the categorical imperative of justice remains (unlawful killing of another must be punished by death); but the legislation itself (and consequently also the civil constitution), as long as it remains barbarous and undeveloped, is responsible for the discrepancy between the incentives of honor in the people (subjectively) and the measures that are (objectively) suitable for its purpose. so the public justice arising from the state becomes an injustice from the perspective of the justice arising from the people. (6:336–337) although kant ultimately upholds the duty of the state to execute the woman found guilty of infanticide, his deeper conclusion is worthy of our attention: this sort of violence is the result of law that is “barbarous and undeveloped,” when the law and social custom are misaligned in such a way that justice is impossible. a perfectly just state would not deny women innate right in this way because the social conditions that produce poverty, unwanted pregnancies, and coerced and unwanted sex would not exist. in an actual state, which falls short of these requirements of justice, the law must tread carefully, using institutional transformation to produce conditions of this project of end-sharing presumes that these ends are separable; as long as the fetus remains inside the mother, it can have no external freedom distinct from hers. any claim of legally enforceable external freedom for a fetus inside a woman’s body denies her innate right. pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 justice.35 likewise, in a perfectly just state—one with adequate access to, and information about, contraception, as well as public policies designed to ease the burdens of child-rearing and so on—there would perhaps be no need for abortion. the injustice is not infanticide itself, nor abortion itself, but a social, legal, and economic condition in which infanticide and abortion are necessary. the problem is not that abortion is barbarous but that legislation designed to criminalize it, without taking on the broader social context that makes it necessary, is “barbarous and underdeveloped.” kant’s surprising suggestion of leniency towards the infanticidal mother offers a vision of transformative reproductive justice as an alternative to coercive policies restricting abortion. rather than seek to undermine women’s autonomy through feticide laws and restrictions on abortion, this vision of justice requires those who oppose abortion to fight for broader reproductive and gender justice, seeking access to contraception and health care, particularly for pregnant women and children, paid family leave policies, labor protections for pregnant and breastfeeding women, medical and legal protections for pregnant and laboring women, poverty relief, access to public childcare and education, as well as domestic violence, equal pay, and sex education policies that protect women from coerced sex and asymmetrical, dependent relationships. to legally restrict abortion without fighting for a broader platform of reproductive and gender justice is to heighten the discrepancy between legal justice and lived injustice, and to force women faced with these injustices into a state of nature. the implication of kant’s argument is that, were the state just, the conditions that create infanticide would no longer exist, and the law could punish it as murder. i cannot go as far as kant here. even in a perfectly just state, one with an ideal version of reproductive rights, gender justice, and childcare access, abortion might still be necessary. no social policy can change the fact that the embodied burdens of pregnancy fall exclusively on women, and that women, alone, can consent to bear those burdens. but kant’s insight is nevertheless essential to the contemporary debate about reproductive rights: abortion is not a problem to be solved by 35 my account of institutional transformation in imperfectly just states builds on helga varden’s insight (2010, 345) that the kantian state must provide unconditional poverty relief in order to ensure that all citizens have access to the material requirements necessary to enact external freedom. varden’s account identifies poverty as a feature of all existing states, and offers unconditional poverty relief as an institutional mechanism for protecting external freedom, which in turn makes possible the political legitimacy of the state. a lack of unconditional poverty relief, then, is a feature of unjust states that must be institutionally remedied in order for the possibility of justice to exist. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 restrictive legislation but by broad social and legislative change. in an unjust social and legal condition, in which women find themselves without adequate reproductive resources and support for childrearing, laws restricting abortion or protecting fetuses cannot be just. conclusion in rejecting the viability standard and its extension to feticide law, i have defended the right to an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. this right is grounded on an embodied conception of innate right, which requires us to treat our rights to our own body as structurally distinct from acquired rights. understood in this way, embodied rights require heightened legal scrutiny in order to ensure that, as my will changes, rights granted to my body change, too. in this sense, respect for women’s autonomy means respect for the form of their legal choices rather than their end. the kantian argument i outline here emphasizes women’s bodily autonomy as unassailable at any point in pregnancy and holds that the fetus can only have provisional rights granted by the mother within the unilateral jurisdiction of the woman’s embodied state of nature. this account recognizes women as autonomous beings capable of setting their own ends and argues that the law’s emphasis should be on protecting the freedom to set and pursue these ends by emphasizing the importance of informed, affirmative, and retractable consent throughout pregnancy. by drawing on kant’s account of innate right and comparing our rights in pregnancy to our rights in sexual encounters, i have argued for understanding pregnancy as an example of innate right. this move involves drawing not only on kant but on developments in one area of jurisprudence, sexual assault law, to support a transformation in another. in the wake of the #metoo moment and ongoing revisions to sexual assault laws on college campuses and at the state level, we are radically rethinking how we understand women’s rights to their own bodies, and there is good reason to extend these insights to how we think of pregnancy, as well. it is clear, however, that jurisprudence has moved too far in the opposite direction for this move to gain traction. in 2014, the supreme court ruled, in burwell v. hobby lobby, 36 that the religious freedom of for-profit corporations allowed those corporations to deny their women employees access to certain forms of birth control because of religious objections. in holding that corporations could have religious beliefs in this way, the court extended the religious freedom restoration act’s definition of persons to include corporations. by extending the legal fiction of “personhood” in this way, the court has not merely extended those rights but subtly reprioritized them: as personhood rights are increasingly granted to disembodied 36 burwell v. hobby lobby stores, inc., 573 u.s. 682 (2014). pascoe – on finding yourself in a state of nature published by scholarship@western, 2019 25 entities like corporations, the centrality of embodiment to the exercise of those rights has been systematically de-emphasized (harvard law review association 2001). if corporate entities can have rights to speech37 and religious freedom,38 as well as certain fourth and fifth amendment rights to privacy (greenfield and winkler 2015), the exercise of those rights is decoupled from the embodiment of the rights-bearing agent. and, as hobby lobby illustrates, these disembodied rights then outweigh rights to the body, since disembodied rights are then universal to this newly extended class of persons in a way that embodied rights no longer are. in this legal landscape, asserting the centrality of embodiment to the exercise of rights is a necessary and radical move, and one that, i have argued, finds a 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"kant on duties regarding nonrational nature." in aristotelian society supplementary volume 72 (1): 189–210. doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00042. jordan pascoe is associate professor of philosophy and women and gender studies at manhattan college in new york city. she is the director of the society for the philosophy of sex and love and the codirector of the lasallian women and gender resource center. her research focuses on feminist philosophy, philosophy of sex, kant’s political and legal philosophy, social epistemology, and decolonial philosophy. 6210 pascoe title page.docx 6210 pascoe final format from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 7 2016 from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community catherine maloney york university, cathy.maloney@utoronto.ca recommended citation maloney, catherine. 2016. "from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 7. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7. from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community cathy maloney lorraine code’s 1987 book epistemic responsibility connects the epistemological realm with the ethical realm and develops the idea that knowing well is possible when knowers are engaged in and can draw on the resources of an epistemic community. her work has been influential upon ensuing work in feminist epistemology and social epistemology more generally, having helped to open the way for discussions that challenge the notion of valueand context-independent epistemology. revisiting and building on the notion of epistemic responsibility in her 2006 book ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location, code suggests that while her earlier work was sound in its basic assumptions, it relied on “an excessively benign conception of community, imagined without contest to provide space for and uniform access to debate” (2006, vii). by contrast her 2006 work provides a robust account of the social imaginary—both instituted and instituting— and its connection to epistemic responsibility, and introduces advocacy as a crucial mode of knowing across difference and destabilizing epistemologies of mastery. this paper will highlight some of the common threads in the two works, as well as where they diverge. i will approach this mini-genealogy by focussing on three concepts: epistemic responsibility, which is central and common across both works; cognitive interdependence which is common to both works, but undergoes a major transformation in ecological thinking; and advocacy, which is entirely absent from the discussion in epistemic responsibility. concurrent to developing this minigenealogy of code’s thought, i will consider how her work intersects with specific aspects of the work of two other thinkers—miranda fricker’s hermeneutic injustice and mikhail bakhtin’s creative understanding—as a means of bringing out the nuances of code’s argument and delving deeper into the troublesome issues of knowing across difference, reflexive thinking, and destabilizing hegemonic ways of knowing, all of which are integral to knowing well. i will conclude that advocacy as it emerges in ecological thinking must include a dialogical process with the other that leads both to and from greater self-understanding if it is to do the work of destabilizing dominant modes of knowing; and further, i will conclude that advocacy is both necessary for, and can only happen within, epistemic community. the idea that knowers are responsible for “what and how they know” (code 2006, ix) shapes the landscape of both books. in epistemic responsibility, code introduces the idea that there is a moral element to knowing well beginning with examples suggested from legal and political situations where not being informed of 1 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 local laws or political situations is not enough to relieve a person from her burden of duty to act correctly—for example, the legal obligation to drive on the correct side of the road (1987, 1). from here code builds to the more significant claim that “knowers, or would-be knowers, come to bear as much of the onus of credibility as ‘the known’” (1987, 8–9). the shift she is effecting here is away from the predominant epistemological tradition’s focus on “products [or] end-states of cognition” (code 1987, 8) and towards the act of knowing or “cognitive activity”. as is now both well known and well understood, the import of this shift is in acknowledging the particularity and locatedness of knowers and the consequent impact this has on the construction of knowledge. what is known is no longer a static object “waiting only to be read” (haraway 1991, 198) and understood in the same way by every passing knower (who is himself interchangeable with every other generic knower), but rather is the result of a dynamic between the specific knower and the known. it is a process of making meaning that is located in specificity but still constrained by reality. this epistemological approach begun in epistemic responsibility continues right through ecological thinking. as christine koggel writes in her 2008 essay on ecological thinking, code is able to “reveal the spaces between realism and relativism” (178) and in this way allows access to previously discounted knowledges without losing the ability to make judgments about the quality of what is known. the shift in thinking that code affected in her 1987 book remains central to her work, and the work of many others, today. where the two works begin to diverge is in how community or the cognitive interdependence of knowers is construed. the inherently social nature of knowledge and the resultant impossibility of opting out of epistemic community (code 1987, 188) remains in ecological thinking as a core tenet that opposes the regulative principle that good knowing is autonomous knowing. however, whereas epistemic responsibility conceives the structure of epistemic community as a combined form of life/contract/practice model in which one knowing subject has more or less the same access to the resources of the community, ecological thinking gives much greater weight to the role of testimony and considers its epistemological weight within the context of communities of knowers who are governed by particular social imaginaries. in opposition to the image of an autonomous knower (2006, 171) code makes the strong claim that “testimony makes knowledgeable living possible” (2006, 173). the idea that each person’s knowledge base is communally built from information that we have learned from others (e.g., the location of the north and south poles) is a shift away from the possibility of autonomous knowing, but locating testimony and knowing within a social imaginary is a radical reconfiguring of the epistemic landscape. in epistemic responsibility, the knowing subject builds her understanding by experiencing the world and interacting with others, and then processing that interaction within the creative synthesis of her 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 own imagination. by contrast, in ecological thinking, the knowing subject is embedded in a relational framework of knowing that situates and shapes the limits of understanding in a way that was not at issue with the more straightforward cognitive interdependence of the earlier work—that is, in ecological thinking, understanding happens within an ecosystem of meaning making. at the end of code’s 1991 book what can she know, she outlines the framework and potential benefits of an ecological model of knowing. she writes that an ecological model can shift epistemological inquiry away from autonomyobsession toward an analysis explicitly cognizant of the fact that every cognitive act takes place at a point of intersection of innumerable relations, events, circumstances, and histories that make the knower and the known what they are, at that time. (269) this suggestion of the benefits of an ecological model of knowing announced at the end of the 1991 book is fully developed in the 2006 book and is a marked shift from the framework of epistemic responsibility. the knower is now bound to and by the limits of her community’s imaginary, complete with all its sociopolitical implications. the addition of a sociopolitical dimension to what was formerly simply an ethicoepistemological discussion adds a layer of significant complexity to the possibility of knowing across difference. having brought in the sociopolitical dimension of cognitive activity, ecological thinking diverges even further from epistemic responsibility with the introduction of the need for advocacy as an element of responsible knowing. recognising the imbalance of power between various epistemic communities and the impact that this imbalance has on the acceptance of testimony, advocacy becomes a necessary tool. code writes that advocacy practices work to get at truths operating imperceptibly, implicitly, below the surface of the assumed self-transparency of evidence. they can be strategically effective in claiming discursive space for ‘subjugated knowledges,’ putting such knowledge into circulation where it can claim acknowledgement, working to ensure informed, emancipatory moralpolitical effects. (2006, 176) advocacy becomes a means of “developing an instituting social imaginary” (2006, 170) which is capable of destabilising the instituted imaginary and making space for subjugated ways of knowing. responsible knowing takes on more aspects under this view of advocacy practices than it did in epistemic responsibility. in addition to the increased complexity of the epistemic terrain in the latter work, a responsible 3 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 knower now has a responsibility beyond her own imperative to know well. now a responsible knower has the additional duty of “putting such knowledge into circulation” (code 2006, 176). this may mean acting as an advocate under appropriate circumstances, but more importantly it means being attentive to difficult, uncomfortable, and potentially even seemingly incoherent testimony. it means listening to and taking seriously the testimony of others, even when that testimony seems at first hearing to have no merit—perhaps because it is so far outside the hearer’s own imaginary. this may be the testimony of first-hand experiencers or of second-hand advocates. code is quick to acknowledge that advocacy faces at least two legitimate obstacles: the first is a reputation that is at odds with responsible knowing, when for instance it is used to obfuscate the truth (think for example of the tobacco lobby); and the second is the very real worry that advocacy is “tantamount to paternalism” (2006, 179). while acknowledging that both are dangers, code states that neither is inevitable (2006, 178). the response to the first point is fairly straightforward. that is, yes, advocacy has been and sometimes is not epistemically responsible, but this is of course not the type of advocacy under discussion. it would be quite easy to discern between a self-interested “advocacy” that aims only to promote its own ends and one that aims to uncover truths that are uncomfortable and disruptive to dominant ways of knowing. the former is monologic and the latter dialogic. thinking through a frame that is both epistemically responsible and, now, ecologically sensitive, advocacy in this latter, dialogic form—in opposition to the autonomy ideal—would pay close attention to testimony while mapping the “interrelations, consonances, and contrasts” (code 2006, 51) involved. the second concern code raises regarding paternalism is tougher, but still not insurmountable. in contrast to a paternalistic practice that would keep the subject of its actions reliant on or beholden to a master, advocacy that is epistemically responsible should ultimately yield autonomy; an “autonomy remodelled” as code writes (2006, 195). that is, while advocacy can seem to strip those who are spoken for of their autonomy, by using whatever dialogical power the advocate has (i.e., her greater credibility) to push against “intransigent imaginaries” (code 2006, 178), advocacy can in fact bring formerly silenced voices forward for the first time. code writes that “when advocacy is effective, those advocated for may come to be well placed to claim the autonomy of acknowledged knowledgeability” (2006, 180). so for example, drawing on one of code’s examples, when the harvard women’s health watch wrote an article corroborating the experiences of women with syndrome x, the credibility of the testimony of people with this illness 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 increased (2006, 193).1 the social-political complexity that code’s articulation of autonomy, testimony and advocacy in ecological thinking adds to the concept of epistemic community in her earlier work is transformational. advocacy becomes an irreplaceable element of responsible epistemic community. but how is advocacy possible at all when knowing across difference in the first place is so difficult? that is, how does the advocate come to understand? further, how does advocacy function to destabilize an instituted imaginary when the testimony of the original experiencer was not able even to enter the ring with the dominant or centralizing imaginary, let alone unsettle it? in chapter six of ecological thinking, code brings in the concept of “imaginative empathy” (231). in contrast to the imagination’s creative synthesis in epistemic responsibility, code is here excruciatingly aware of the pitfalls and difficulty entailed in understanding across difference. she writes that “‘we’ may indeed be imaginative creatures, but prototypes and hegemonic imaginaries block responsible imaginings at least as frequently as they enable them” (2006, 229). while code concludes the chapter with 1 during the presentation of a version of this paper at cswip 2015, naomi scheman suggested that there may in fact be an additional problem to consider in relation to advocacy. that is, that those advocated for may not benefit from having their experiences made comprehensible within the dominant social imaginary. this reminded me of a woman’s testimony as recounted in the irish documentary the love that dare not speak its name, by bill hughes, which screened on the irish television station rte in 2000. in one particular scene a woman recounted her experience of living as a lesbian before and after her experience became more widely understood in her country. previously she had been able to “fly under the radar” and, for example, easily check in to b&bs and other establishments with her female lover without problem, because the social imaginary at the time she was speaking of did not include the possibility of two women being anything more than platonic friends. after a shift in public understanding, however, her relationship became visible, and she no longer had the freedom she had previously enjoyed. while i would certainly not want to trivialise the difficult and often violent eras that becoming visible can entail for individuals in newly visible groups (consider the recent and tragic events in orlando), nor would i want to suggest that remaining invisible is ultimately a desirable alternative (at least as it plays out in this example— consider that same-sex marriage is now legal in ireland). in either case however, the idea that advocacy can be problematic in this way is certainly worth pursuing further. for the purpose of this paper, please consider that advocacy practices refer to situations in which it is either clearly beneficial for the person or groups in question, as i believe it is in the example of syndrome x, or at least arguably beneficial. 5 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 the suggestion that her argument is in fact inconclusive and further that her “epistemic stance . . . enjoins skepticism about the possibility of understanding across differences” (2006, 233), she goes some way in addressing both the first and second of the questions above. starting with the first question, the advocate comes to understand across difference by engaging in at least three practices: by shifting the fulcrum of understanding, by remaining in the in-between space of commonality and particularity, and by remaining committed to contextual and relational modes of understanding. starting with the first practice, imaginative empathy of the kind that code wants to endorse “is less about knowing than about believing” (2006, 231). this means that understanding across difference, which opens the possibility of advocacy, requires open or willing listening of the kind that jay lampert, writing about gadamer’s hermeneutics, refers to when he says that to engage dialogically an interpreter must “freely invite aliens into one’s home” (1997, 359). a person who wants to understand across difference cannot do so without opening herself to new possibilities. this involves risk to the knower’s own ways of perceiving and sense of self, but without this open belief of the other, knowledge remains only a monologic repetition of the knower’s own understanding. the second practice is what code calls “the productive (thus not aporetic) tension” (2006, 228) of thinking both in particulars and in commonalities. without inhabiting this in-between space, a knower falls into one of two extremes: universal thinking that is unaccountable for its social-political location or “radical particularity” that becomes incommensurable to the point of unknowability (code, 228). finally, imaginative empathy requires a commitment to contextual and relational thinking. part of understanding ecologically means understanding the system in which an embodied subject lives and operates: “she or he has to be understood . . . as situated within the habitus or ethos of a society” (2006, 232). it is neither desirable nor possible to understand a subject stripped of context. understanding across difference requires all three of these practices in order to have a chance of succeeding. the second question about advocacy’s ability to destabilize an instituted imaginary relies in large part on the effectiveness of listening practices and willingness “to engage with the affective dimensions of lives situated outside the norms of epistemic sameness” (code 2006, 233). a knower who is committed to understanding across difference in this way is open to the extra-cognitive elements of the other’s story and by so being allows that understanding to be transformative. certain types of narratives can leave a knower “pulled up short by the text” (gadamer, 268) and, as jennifer geddes writes, help “us unlearn what we have presumed to know or to be able to imagine” (geddes, quoted in code 2006, 234). the role of the advocate in this connection is two-fold: first, she must engage in the practices that make imaginative empathy possible in the first place, and second, she must devise means of provoking particularly tenacious beliefs in the wider social 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 imaginary. this is neither a simple nor unproblematic task, but one can see potential for a way forward. one way in which code’s work is particularly salient to me is in its connection to my own paid work at the centre for international experience at the university of toronto. one of my core projects at u of t is developing programming to promote intercultural learning among university of toronto students. what this means in practice is helping students to develop (or improve) epistemically responsible practices in their thinking about their own cultural positionality and then, only in the context of self-reflexive practices, to consider the cultural positionality of others. the majority of the students i have worked with so far are undergraduates, although i am increasingly working with graduate students and sometimes staff and faculty. these students come from different years and programs of study and widely different life experiences. they are both domestic and international students; some are going out on exchanges or other mobility programs, and others are participating in internationalization at home opportunities. many of these students are very sophisticated in their thinking about understanding across differences, and i have learned quite a lot from them; for others, the idea of knowledge as socially and politically constructed is a big shift in thinking. an analogically rich metaphor like code’s ecological thinking is useful in helping students to think through the relational nature of what they know; however, the implications of relational or interdependent knowing are, unsurprisingly, not always clear. i mentioned in my introduction that i wanted to put code’s work in conversation with both miranda fricker and mikhail bakhtin’s work, as a means of bringing out the nuances of her argument and thinking through what i consider some troublesome bits of knowing across difference. to do this, i will consider the claim found in all three thinkers that an individual does not always understand her own experience. while it is common across all three, this claim does however arise differently in each of their work: in code’s work, not fully understanding one’s own experience is an implicit concomitant of understanding within the framework of a social imaginary. in fricker’s work it is an explicit component of her unpacking of hermeneutic injustice. within bakhtin’s work it is explicit in his claim that outsideness is necessary for selfunderstanding. in one way this claim is an unproblematic statement of fact, but taken another way it can seem to lead to the kind of paternalism that code was concerned to avoid in her discussion of advocacy. thinking through this claim does a few different things: (1) it complicates the idea of advocacy in an interesting way. advocacy may not only be about helping others to see what they are missing; rather, advocacy—and the dialogical process it necessitates—may also do work to help the experiencer understand herself more fully. (2) it helps to unpack the way social imaginaries both allow for understanding and limit it. for the students i work with, this can be helpful in showing more clearly the implications of relational 7 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 knowing. (3) in relation to the evolution of code’s work, it further solidifies the importance, and necessity, of advocacy for responsible epistemic community. miranda fricker’s work explicitly works through the idea that an experiencer may not fully understand her own experience due to social power structures. fricker’s “epistemic injustice” functions as what code has called a “conceptual apparatus” (2008, 32) for thinking through the link between the social imaginary and harms done to individuals in their capacity as knowers. “hermeneutic injustice”— one of the “two forms of epistemic injustice” which fricker identifies as “distinctively epistemic in kind” (2007, 1)—in particular connects gaps in the “collective hermeneutic resource” (2007, 168) to harm, and fricker further points out that inequity in social power tends to “skew shared hermeneutical resources” so that the powerful have access to shared conceptions of their experiences whereas the less powerful “are more likely to find themselves having some social experiences through a glass darkly” (2007, 148). this leaves the less socially powerful vulnerable to abuses of power and, significantly, seemingly incoherent in their expressions of meaning. the explicit link between social positionality and vulnerability to epistemic harm that fricker develops is particularly compelling and useful. one of fricker’s examples of this is the story of carmita wood, a woman who experienced sexual harassment in her workplace at a time when that concept was not part of the western social imaginary. as a result of her situation wood developed health complications, left her job, and was not able to receive any kind of compensation as she could not articulate the connection between her workplace environment and her poor health. in her memoir, susan brownmiller writes, “when the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, wood was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. she was ashamed and embarrassed. under prodding—the blank form needed to be filled in—she answered that her reasons had been personal. her claim for unemployment benefits was denied” (1999, 280– 281) while i find this a striking example of a case of hermeneutic injustice at work, i have never quite been comfortable with fricker’s claim that wood herself did not have a grip on her own experience. josé medina makes a criticism of this aspect of fricker’s argument. he points out that caution should be exercised in tying “too closely people’s hermeneutical capacities to the repertoire of available terms and coined concepts, for oppressed subjects often find ways of expressing their suffering well before such articulations are available” (2012, 208–209). indeed wood did know that something was wrong, but she couldn’t coherently express it either to herself or to others. what i find interesting and particularly useful for the current investigation is the way that wood did finally make sense of her experience. it was in dialogue with others: 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 “lin’s students had been talking in her seminar about the unwanted sexual advances they’d encountered on their summer jobs,” sauvigne relates. “and then carmita wood comes in and tells lin her story. we realized that to a person, every one of us—the women on staff, carmita, the students—had had an experience like this at some point, you know? and none of us had ever told anyone before. it was one of those click, aha! moments, a profound revelation.” . . . “we decided we had to hold a speak-out in order to break the silence about this.” the “this” they were going to break the silence about had no name. “eight of us were sitting in an office of human affairs,” sauvigne remembers, “brainstorming about what we were going to write on the posters for the speak-out. we were referring to it as ‘sexual intimidation’, ‘sexual coercion,’ ‘sexual exploitation on the job.’ none of those names seemed quite right. we wanted something that embraced a whole range of subtle and unsubtle persistent behaviours. somebody came up with ‘harassment.’ sexual harassment! instantly we agreed. that’s what it was.” (brownmiller 1999, 281) the others with whom carmita wood was in dialogue were primed to hear and work through her experiences as they could draw on similar moments from their own lives. it was only thinking through their experiences in community that they were able to achieve the transformative moment of understanding. considering this example through the lens of code’s imaginative empathy, all three elements were in place: this group had no problem believing wood’s experience in the absence of knowing what it was; they could draw on the particularity of their own experience but still see the commonality of the experience of the group; and they were sensitive to the situated or contextual nature in which these experiences were occurring. thinking back to code’s work on advocacy and the model of ecological thinking generally, i think my concern with fricker’s claim was not so much that i couldn’t imagine that someone might not fully understand their own experience in this case, but was more a worry about fricker’s “reflexive hearer” slipping into a paternalistic mode. what emerges when looking at this case through the lens of code’s concept of advocacy is a kind of mutual advocacy, enabled by dialogically working through the issues in community. in their search for understanding of wood’s situation and their own, these women acted as advocates of sorts, both for themselves and each other; they helped each other to form a coherent narrative around their experiences that could be understood within the larger social imaginary. once this internal coherence or self-understanding was achieved they could then embark upon advocacy in the usual sense. armed with a name that 9 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 seemed to fit their experiences and emboldened to draw in others with similar experiences, their formerly silenced voices were now audible. mikhail bakhtin adds an extra dimension to the discussion of advocacy, suggesting that understanding can really only occur in community. that is, others are necessary for self-understanding and also for understanding across difference. in his late essay “response to a question from the novy mir editorial staff,” bakhtin articulates a concept he calls “creative understanding.” creative understanding is both situated and requires “outsideness”: there exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. . . . if this were the only aspect of understanding it would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. in order to understand it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. for one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. (1986, 6–7) eschewing the notion that it is possible to see through the eyes of another, bakhtin indicates a commitment to situated knowing. he recognises that unsituated knowing leads only to “duplication,” or repeating the located knowledge of the one who claims to see universally. it seems curious then that at the same time as he articulates a located concept of understanding he claims that in order to understand ourselves we must gain an exterior view of ourselves. this exterior view turns out not to involve leaving one’s own epistemic location, but engaging in a dialogic encounter with others: in the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. it is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. . . . a meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and onesidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. we raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths. without one’s own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign. . . . such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched. (1986, 7) the idea that meaning can only reveal itself through dialogue removes any hint of paternalism in the suggestion that one may not understand one’s own experience fully. outsideness is necessary for all social understanding—whether that is selfunderstanding or understanding another—and achieving outsideness happens through engaging dialogically. reflexive thinking can also only happen in community as one’s own questions in dialogue with the questions of the other force reflexive thinking in a way that thinking something through on one’s own simply cannot achieve. taking this passage together with fricker’s concept of hermeneutic injustice in mind and code’s concept of advocacy as epistemically responsible and responsive to testimony, some really important points arise here which are relevant to the carmita wood situation. far from making the paternalistic claim that the socially subjugated need others to speak for them, bakhtin’s understanding of outsideness—which is clearly a located, socially positioned, outsideness—can help to clarify the process of coming to understand (whether that is one’s own experiences or someone else’s). fricker’s “reflexive hearer” must be in conversation with wood, bringing her own understandings to the conversation and considering where the disconnects and tensions in the story are. through this dialogic-creative process, the participants can potentially broaden both their own understanding and that of the wider social imaginary. this is very similar to the “critical-creative activity” (2006, 195) which code’s robust account of the decentring “instituting epistemic-moral-political imaginary” (2006, 35) accomplishes. she writes that ecology (metaphorically) draws the conclusions of situated inquiries together, maps their interrelations, consonances, and contrasts, their impoverishing or mutually sustaining consequences, from a commitment to generating a creatively interrogative, instituting social imaginary to denaturalise the instituted imaginary of mastery that represents itself as “the [only] natural way” of being and knowing. (2006, 51) ecological thinking as articulated here maintains the situated nature of knowledge, maps the variety of complementary and contrasting situated knowledges, and invokes the creativity and reflexivity required for decentering an instituted social imaginary. while the experiencer, in this case carmita wood, may not fully 11 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 understand her experience, she is a necessary part of the process of coming to understand. the advocate also would not “have a grip” on the situation without the dialogical-ecological encounter. reading code, fricker, and bakhtin together helps me to see this more clearly and reaffirms the necessary role of advocacy within epistemic community. references bakhtin, mikhail. 1986. “response to a question from the novy mir editorial staff.” in speech genres and other late essays, translated by vern w. mcgee and edited by caryl emerson and michael holquist. 1–9. austin: university of texas press. brownmiller, susan. 1999. in our time: memoir of a revolution. new york: dial press. code, lorraine. 2008. “advocacy, negotiation, and the politics of unknowing.” the southern journal of philosophy 46:32–51. ———. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. new york: oxford university press. ———. 1991. what can she know: feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover, nh: university press of new england for brown university press. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. new york: oxford university press. gadamer, hans-georg. 2004. truth and method, 2nd rev. ed., translated by joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall. new york: the continuum publishing company. haraway, donna. 1991. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” in simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. 183–201. london: free association books. koggel, christine. m. 2008. “ecological thinking and epistemic location: the local and the global.” hypatia 23 (1): 177–186. lampert, jay. 1997. “gadamer and cross-cultural hermeneutics.” philosophical forum 28 (4-1): 351–368. medina, josé. 2012. “hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities.” social epistemology 26 (2): 201–220. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 7 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/7 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.7 cathy maloney is a phd candidate in the department of philosophy at york university and the manager, intercultural initiatives and learning strategy, at the centre for international experience, university of toronto. her dissertation research focusses on dialogical models for understanding across difference. 13 maloney: from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community catherine maloney recommended citation from epistemic responsibility to ecological thinking: the importance of advocacy for epistemic community feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation tirrell, lynne. 2018. “authority and gender: flipping the f-switch.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 1. 2018 authority and gender: flipping the f-switch lynne tirrell university of connecticut, lynne.tirrell@uconn.edu tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 authority and gender: flipping the f-switch1 lynne tirrell abstract the very rules of our language games contain mechanisms of disregard. philosophy of language tends to treat speakers as peers with equal discursive authority, but this is rare in real, lived speech situations. this paper explores the mechanisms of discursive inclusion and exclusion governing our speech practices, with a special focus on the role of gender attribution in undermining women’s authority as speakers. taking seriously the metaphor of language games, we must ask who gets in the game and whose moves can score. to do this, i develop an eclectic analysis of language games using basic inferential role theory and the concept of a semantic index, and develop the distinction between positional authority and expertise authority, which often conflict for members of oppressed groups. introducing the concepts of master switches and sub-switches that attach to the index and change scorekeeping practices, i argue that women’s gender status conflicts with our status as authoritative speakers because sex marking in semantics functions as a master switch—“the f-switch”—on the semantic index, which, once thrown, changes the very game. an advantage of using inferentialism for understanding disregard of women’s discursive authority is that it locates the problem in the sanctioned moves, in the deontic structure of norms and practices of scorekeeping, and not primarily in the individual intentions of particular people. keywords: authority, gender, inferentialism, language games, scorekeeping, discursive injustice 1i am grateful to the program committee of the eastern division of the american philosophical association for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at an invited session on "feminism and philosophy of language," and to members of that session for insightful feedback. thanks also to participants of wogap at mit for their wonderful discussion of an earlier draft, and to jeremy wanderer and mary kate mcgowan for helpful comments. i am especially grateful to the fpq referees for their thoughtful and thorough suggestions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 “what speaks is not the utterance, the language, but the whole social person (this is what those who look for the ‘illocutionary force’ of language in language forget).” —pierre bourdieu (bourdieu 1977, 645) “she was warned. she was given an explanation. nevertheless, she persisted.” —senator mitch mcconnell 1. the problem if, as bourdieu urges, what speaks is “the whole social person,” then an account of mechanisms of discursive inclusion and exclusion becomes necessary. socially salient speaker-identity factors often operate as catalysts of inclusion and exclusion. since social contexts tend to be gendered, and that most contexts of power de facto authorize male participants, i take gender-based exclusion as my main focus. even amongst peers in professional and purportedly sex-neutral contexts, a speech act issued from a female body does not automatically carry the same authority as what seems to be the same speech act issued from a male body.2 furthermore, even within her area of expertise, a woman’s basic claims are often challenged, demanding justifications usually not required of similarly positioned men. this essay is a companion to the already significant discussion in social epistemology of the ways in which women’s testimony is disregarded (especially code 1991 and fricker 2007). here, i offer suggestions about the discursive mechanisms of such disregard. the status of women as authoritative speakers is related to, but distinct from, women’s status as knowers. mechanisms of disregard are found in the very rules of our language games. it can be difficult to identify sameness of game. sometimes, women who think they are playing the same game as men discover that they are not, or that within what seems to be the same game, rules and strategies for employment of the rules are distinctly gendered. from its founding in 1787 until 1922, the us senate explicitly excluded women’s participation.3 in those days, women did not even enter the practices or games of the senate. once women were legally electable, the 2 see greenwald and krieger (2006), gutiérrez y muhs et al. (2012), ridgeway and correll (2004), and steinpreis, anders, and ritzke (1999). 3 us senate, “women in the senate” web page, n.d. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/women_senators. htm. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 mechanisms required for disabling their speech acts became more complex. sometimes women are subjected to strategic deployment of rules that seem to apply to everyone, but in fact are seldom if ever used against men. for example, during the 2017 confirmation hearing for senator jeff sessions to become us attorney general, senate majority leader mitch mcconnell simultaneously shut down two women by invoking the arcane rule 19 to prevent senator elizabeth warren from reading coretta scott king’s 1986 letter against appointing sessions as a federal judge. king’s letter cost sessions that earlier appointment; she criticized sessions’s use of his position as a us attorney to intimidate elderly black voters by prosecuting them (unsuccessfully) for voting fraud, his indifference to civil rights violations, and more. for her attempt to read this letter, mcconnell charged warren with a rule violation, saying, “she was warned. she was given an explanation. nevertheless, she persisted.” and yet, later, several male senators—udall, sanders, merkley, and brown—were allowed to read the letter without facing rule 19 (firozi 2017a; kane and o’keefe 2017, lowery 2017; and wang 2017).4 mull this over: men read it, while a woman remained red-carded, cast out of the game, literally unable to participate in the rest of the hearing. once the first man read the letter, why was senator warren not reinstated? the strategic invocation of rule 19 was clearly done to exclude her from participation. prior to addressing fine-grained epistemic questions of truth, knowledge, belief, judgment, and trust, we should examine the ways that differently embodied speakers gain or lose entrance to speech situations because of their embodiment. senator warren was red-carded from the senate-hearing game, but she played social media very effectively. immediately following her ouster, senator warren read the entire letter live on facebook, from outside the senate chamber, while over four million people watched. the page was shared 221,662 times. senator warren still had a strong political voice, maintained by engaging in other practices, but the practices and moves available to a senator within the proceedings were now closed to her. she remained cast out of the very game she was elected to play. this case illustrates someone who mistakenly thought she was a full player— someone who could make all the moves of the game. the fact that men were allowed to make the very same move—reading the very letter into the record—is evidence of mcconnell’s imposition of gendered practices. language is a complex set of games and practices, sometimes distinct, often overlapping, of varying ease or intensity. speech acts constitute moves in those games. those moves enact what lewis (1979) called permissibility facts, a concept developed by brandom (1998) as inference licenses. my concern is how a listener’s 4 senator warren used the “red card” metaphor while speaking with rachel maddow (firozi 2017b). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 attributing femaleness to the speaker can reshape or even block the issuing of licenses, generating varieties of illocutionary disablement (langton 1993). people often think men and women are in the same game and women simply fail to score. noticing the power of gender attributions illuminates differences between games, even games that seem quite similar. gender attribution typically functions as a linguistic disqualifier for a woman, across all the many ways she may inhabit that category, and across so many of the discursive practices in which she seeks to engage. this is to say that gender attribution delimits and sometimes nullifies possible illocutions that a woman’s speech act might achieve.5 playing a language game requires the power to make moves. often, entering a game as female impacts one’s available moves. gender attribution often activates a mechanism that shapes the scope and force of a speaker’s capacity to make discursive moves, which is a component of authority. the mechanism functions, in some sense, prior to evaluations of the content of what the speaker says, and so is, in some sense, logically prior to epistemic considerations of merit and weight. this is tricky, because authority itself has epistemic implications. authority involves the capacity to make moves and to have those moves count in ways that generate uptake, and so, authority ultimately credits the speaker with knowledge and/or power. asking how one gets into position to exercise authority reveals mechanisms governing the complexity of the various roles and powers available in the many language games we play. understanding these active mechanisms promises to help us develop tools for a richer analysis of discursive injustices. women’s status as women undermines our discursive authority because sex marking in semantics functions as a master switch on what we say—a switch that, once thrown, changes the very game on us, whether we know it or not. let’s call this mechanism the fswitch.6 5attribution matters for the account of who gets excluded qua woman. “woman,” here, encompasses all the ways such attributions are made, including anyone to whom the status is attributed, as well as those who identify as women but to whom others do not make the gender attribution. see watson (2016). 6 maleness still seems to be the discursive norm in most professional and official contexts, and female speakers are marked as such. in some contexts, femaleness might dominate, giving women presumptive authority. then, attributions of maleness might flip an m-switch. for example: a group of women adhering to traditional gender roles who become stay-at-home moms, who de-authorize the parenting insights of a male stay-at-home parent. research on gender variation in voice-overs on political ads shows that male voices remain the norm, but women’s voices are used strategically depending on several factors (see strach et al. 2015). tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 to understand the mechanics of identity-based denial of authority, imagine an ordinary electrical box. it has rows of switches, and usually, at the bottom of each row, one or more master switches to throw the whole row. now imagine that the index attached to an utterance is like that panel, with a discursive master switch for each set. certain identity factors might trip just one switch, but some, like gender and race, usually function as master switches, simultaneously tripping a set of switches. my analysis relies on three elements to develop this idea: the core moves of language games, the governing power of a semantic index, and basic inferential role theory. each of these will be explained in turn. although our primary analogy focuses on gender, we can see how the concept of a master switch brings into simultaneous interactive play other identity factors tied to oppression. gender attributions are ever-present in the intersectional identities we each inhabit, and we should eschew abstractions from lived complexities to pure gender alone (dotson 2016; smith 1979). and yet, focusing on gender highlights the power of ascribing deontic status based on a major identity factor, while seeing gender as a master switch helps show how salient identity factors carry others in their wake. these factors map onto a speech act’s governing semantic index. although focused on gender attribution, the analysis offered here can be applied to many socially salient categories, such as race, class, sexual orientation, age, and more. for the oppressed, identity factors tend to limit uptake; the distinction between positional authority and expertise authority shapes my analysis of these limits. ultimately, on this approach, cases in which one factor seems predominant are actually cases in which flipping one switch is in fact flipping many. despite seeming to take gender in isolation, this view offers a mechanism whereby we can explain the immediate power of complex intersectionality. 1.1. roadmap having outlined the problem, i use an analogy in section 2 to develop a more rigorous account of games. girls’ basketball before 1975 illustrates a particularly glaring version of what i will explain as “flipping the f-switch.” the pre-’75 basketball analogy highlights the importance of noticing who gets into the game, whose entrance is precluded or challenged, and why. in this section, i explain sellars’s language-game triad of entrance moves, internal language-language moves, and language-exit moves and then focus on entrance moves. i introduce the distinction between neutral and nonneutral entrance moves. here i also develop the key concept of game-assigned powers, a phenomenon easily tracked in sports but often elusive in language encounters. whether one enters the game neutrally or nonneutrally and which game-assigned powers one has will carve out a range of permissible and impermissible moves. this is a crucial way that identity factors shape score, and so the next subsection explores the relation between speaker feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 identity and the semantic index governing the speech act. section 2 closes with a more general discussion of language games. my framework of neutral and nonneutral entrance moves, with distinctive game-assigned powers, explains some structural aspects of the norms of games. this paper focuses on the ways that entrances shape the other kinds of moves open to a player, and so adds depth and breadth to the sellarsian framework. section 3 turns our focus to authority—who has it, what kinds there are, and how it is tied to domain. still using the concept of game-assigned powers, i introduce and explain the distinction between positional and expertise authority, which, while neither exclusive nor exhaustive, is often a good way to track the sources of a speaker’s capacity to make moves and have them gain uptake. finally, section 4 wraps up our discussion of the f-switch. after examining both legitimate and illegitimate challenges to speaker authority, i argue that the f-switch should not be construed as a sub-switch on the speaker-item on the index, making only minor changes in play, but rather as a master switch that ranges across the entire index, changing the very game. appeal to a master-switch model better explains the widespread systematic undermining of women’s participation as equals in discursive practices. 2. basketball and other games consider basketball before 1975. if boys and men were playing, it was the same 5-on-5 game men play today. if girls or women took the court, the game changed to a 6-on-6 three-zone game. today’s nba-style rapid dribble and dunk was unthinkable. girls had to stay in tight little zones, could dribble only 3 times, and then pass or shoot. the basic moves—dribbling, passing, shooting—were the same, but the rules about who could undertake which action were radically altered depending on whether the f-switch was thrown. what counted as a move, as legal, as a foul, and so forth, all changed, and these changes made a difference to both scorekeeping and strategy.7 all these variations are set into motion when ‘girl’ is adduced. in hindsight, these gendered variations seem unjustified and stultifying, underscoring the gamey-ness of the game. it is easy to see that basketball was radically changed by flipping the f-switch, but in linguistic contexts, identifying the game-change often proves more elusive. the basketball analogy is apt for understanding how gender shapes the discursive and nondiscursive games we play. gender organizes hierarchies of power, functioning within and across lived normative practices, including discursive 7 by the late 1960s, some leagues introduced a new position: the rover, who could play in any zone, and move across zones. the dribble-pass-shoot limitation still applied (carpenter and acosta 2005). tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 practices. in everyday practices, gender often disallows many illocutionary acts women attempt, operating as a master switch. the master-switch view holds that once the f-switch is thrown, scorekeeping itself changes: some moves, for example, that are usually taken to be legal and open to all, perhaps even constitutive of the game, now become fouls when made by women. seeing gender attribution as a master switch on the semantic index highlights that male and female speakers are often, in fact, engaged in variant language games, with different rules and disparate outcomes. considering actions within language games, sellars suggests three basic kinds of moves (sellars 1954). some speech acts are entrance transitions, getting us into the game. once in a language game, we make internal moves, taking us from one position in the game to another position, usually changing the score as we go. finally, exit transitions take the speaker (and sometimes others) beyond the game. each of these types of speech act has its own requirements and its own types of challenges. sellars took entrance transitions to move from perceptions to speech, concerning the relation between seeing and saying. but whose seeing is allowed as grounds for saying? how does one enter a normative game at all—what’s the ante? can anyone play? sellars’s account assumes a neutral baseline amongst speakers and moves, but this is always open to question.8 the pre-’75 basketball analogy highlights the importance of noticing who gets into the game, whose entrance is precluded or challenged, and why. challenging a speaker’s entrance might be easier—and do more damage—than challenging a speaker’s move within a game in which she actually is participating as a peer. but there’s the rub: identifying who counts as a peer within the game. in language games, only players make the illocutionary moves they think they are making. keeping track of allowed and disallowed entrances, internal moves, and exits, helps us track the powers of each position, trends of inhabitation, and more. this went awry with senator mcconnell’s silencing of senator warren, a duly elected member of the senate, whose strong voice is often publicly influential. senator warren’s attempted move—to read a historical document on the senate floor for inclusion in the current hearing—is common enough. but this particular influential woman reading that particular powerful letter was just not a move the majority leader wanted to allow, so he twisted its interpretation to make it a foul and eject warren from the game. is she a player? can she make all the same moves as the men? 8 see wittig’s (1992) “the mark of gender” for an insightful discussion of this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 2.1. entrance moves and game-assigned powers let’s start with some concepts to clarify moves and powers. in sports and games, entrance moves may be neutral or nonneutral. neutral entrance moves create peers within the game. in monopoly, whether entering as a duck or a thimble, each player begins with the same money in the bank, and each has the same goal: to accumulate assets. no player gets special game-assigned powers. games with nonneutral entrance moves assign specific powers upon entrance. how one enters, what one enters as, shapes the range and scope of a player’s participation, allowing only some moves within the game and only some types of exits. in tennis, each player steps onto the court with the same game-assigned powers, so entrance is neutral. today’s basketball has relatively neutral entrance moves as well, for every player can play offense or defense, depending on the action required at the moment of play, field or court position, and so on. a soccer goalie’s entrance to the game is nonneutral, since the goalie has position-specific gameassigned powers (like using hands) forbidden to others. in american football, every player enters with position-specific gameassigned powers, making it a very constricted game. only certain players play offense or defense, and only at certain times within the game as determined by the unfolding action. each position assigns different powers and ranges of action; the game is constituted by players doing certain sorts of things in these ways. relative to field situation, game-assigned powers settle which internal moves are open to any particular player in any particular position. quarterbacks and receivers can score any time, but guards can only score a touchdown on recovering a fumble. american football is explicitly constrained in ways that basketball, soccer, tennis, and monopoly are not. the numbers players wear on their backs denote positions (and hence game-assigned powers); a particular player can switch, but the team must declare it explicitly to the referee and mark it by taking the appropriate field position.9 nonneutral entrances can shape internal moves as well as potential exit moves. entrances set deontic statuses which limit or enhance many other statuses within and beyond the game. consider two sorts of nonneutral entrance moves directing potential exits. the placekicker is allowed entrance only at specific moments in the game, is highly protected during the play, and exits the field promptly at the conclusion of that play. the position-specific game-assigned powers of quarterbacks and receivers allow them to make the most consistently obvious contributions to the score, leading to more glory on and off the field. (some are gracious enough to emphasize their dependence on the team.) the game-assigned 9 regularly a defensive tackle, “refrigerator” perry sometimes played fullback, even scoring in super bowl xx. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 powers of the quarterback enhance his status within the game and beyond, while the game-assigned powers of linemen are much less status-enhancing. to start out tidy, our central concern is two identically credentialed speakers issuing what should be authoritative speech acts, where both speakers meet any basic felicity conditions of the speech act, and yet only one is met with a basic preemptive challenge.10 given the power of gender to shape deontic standing, in far too many cases, a speaker’s gender is itself a felicity condition. of course, no one is just a woman; everyone lives within the overlapping and interwoven forces of sex, race, class, ethnicity, and more, and each of these forces can become more (or less) salient in particular contexts. sometimes it is useless to try to figure out which factors are most salient, but other times salience is very clear (dotson 2016; king 1988; smith 1979). the account developed here, starting with gender as if it were isolable, develops a structure that applies more broadly, to all salient identity categories, makes room for variations that depend on time, place, and practices, ultimately helping to explain why some of our lived identities are so exponentially constrained or enhanced by multiple intersecting social identities (garry 2011; gutiérrez y muhs et al. 2012; king 1988; smith 1979). the concept of a lived index, and a master switch, makes sense of an oppressed person saying, “i was silenced due to race” or “i was silenced due to gender.” neither acts alone—all racism is engendered as all sexism is enraced—but sometimes we see one factor being the master switch that throws the rest of the switches at once. 2.2 identity and index monopoly’s ducks and thimbles are gender neutral, but gender marking is ubiquitous in everyday life. feminists define gender as a set of practices that construct and maintain power along lines of sex, marking the attributes of men as dominant and attributes of women as subordinate (frye 1983; ridgeway and correll 2004; young 1990). in the game terms developed here, men tend to have greater game-assigned powers, women fewer, and the powers women do have tend to support men’s enhanced status. patriarchal practices give substance and force to the mechanisms that damage women’s authority, even over our own domains.11 10 felicity conditions are the factors in the context that make the speech act “happy,” that is, apt to work. without them, it’s a sure fail, but they don’t guarantee any outcome (austin 1962, 14–24). i focus on cases that fail due to denied positional authority. for a discussion of credibility of speaker testimony in issuing astonishing reports (jones 1993,154ff.). 11 resistance to gender binarism has enhanced liberation, but sex marking and sex announcing are still ubiquitous. as genders proliferate, entrance moves might shift with various gender-identity attributions. excluding transgender women from the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 on my account, flipping a switch, like the f-switch, is enacting a set of social norms that govern specific aspects of the game. variations in game-assigned powers might bring different games into play. in pre-’75 basketball, gender was a nonneutral entrance factor, changing the rules so dramatically that boys and girls did not play the same game. gender attribution changed the games by shaping available entrance moves and internal moves. similarly, whether someone’s speech acts count as moves within a language game also depends upon the person’s available game-assigned powers. taken as a master switch, a speaker-identity factor may shape entrance positions with special limited or enhanced game-assigned powers, or may even completely bar someone from the game. flipping a master switch has preemptive force. the resulting positions raise concerns about justice, for they enhance the prospects of some, while diminishing the prospects of others. in explaining how gender attributions can disqualify women’s discursive authority, i focus on where gender belongs on the semantic index attaching to a speech act (in a culture with a dominant culture of binary genders). i consider two alternatives: that the f-switch is a sub-switch on the speaker part of the index, making only minor local changes in play, or that it is a master switch governing the index as a whole, changing the very game. if identity factors are on a sub-switch, the rules of the game do not change—all parties are in the same game, all would enter with the same game-assigned powers. ultimately, appeal to a master switch better explains the widespread systematic undermining of women’s participation as equals in discursive practices. the master-switch view identifies a global negative positional authority that trumps positive expertise authority. if my analysis is right, it opens up new ways of thinking about illocutionary disablement and threats to discursive authority. the index enables participants to monitor the score (what’s been done, where things stand within this specific language game), and to develop strategies for play. the index should be construed as revealing a lived social and discursive reality, not as a mysterious or imagined abstraction. the index attaching to a speech act marks speaker, audience, time of utterance, place of utterance, as well as the game, context, field, or market within which the utterance occurs, and more (kaplan 1979). we note place of utterance, for example, because speech happens in real places— locations enhanced by social meanings, including a society’s many explicit and implicit behavioral norms. legal jurisdiction makes this explicit. in 2014, in massachusetts, a same-sex couple saying “i do” before an appropriately empowered official was, in fact, getting married. what seemed like the same action in 2014 in michigan women’s music festival vividly illustrates gatekeeping gender boundaries, with some women denying game-assigned powers to transgender women, saying, “no, you can’t even play with us.” tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 ohio was not, because the official lacked the game-assigned power to sanction the union due to a statewide ban on same-sex marriage.12 the time matters, because by 2017 such actions were legal in all 50 states, and nearly 20 nations. any actual (lived, normative) index contains the information needed for interpreters to understand what a particular speech act does. on my view, the index tracks game-assigned powers and moves that embody these. such tracking is crucial to scorekeeping. scorekeeping reveals the normative structure of the game itself. this echoes brandom’s view that the “norms that govern the use of linguistic expressions are implicit in these deontic scorekeeping practices” (brandom 1998, xiv). brandom does not address identity factors like gender, but his framework has ample room for it. when scorekeeping varies due to identity factors, like gender, differential norms are revealed. scorekeeping tracks conversational and other moves within a language game, noting how each move changes the moves available to other participants in the game. invoking rule 19 blatantly changed elizabeth warren’s available moves in the senate game. brandom explains discursive practice as “a kind of practical knowhow—a matter of keeping deontic score by keeping track of one's own and others' commitments and entitlements to those commitments, and altering that score in systematic ways based on the performances each practitioner produces” (xiv). by tracking the factors making the speech act do what it does, the index helps track the score. since the content of senate rule 19 did not change to enable the men to read the letter, mcconnell’s very invocation of the rule became the issue. throwing a master switch simultaneously throws many sub-switches, and so with one quick move, the game changes. any factor on an index could become a master switch in a particular context, thereby realigning the relative values and actions of the other factors (attaching to various switches). master switches tend to be highly socially entrenched. in racist societies, master switches associated with races automatically throw different sub-switches; african americans, for example, often report automatic class biases once race is adduced. flipping the race switch flips a class switch, plus many others, activating discriminatory stereotyped inferential networks. when affluent african americans report feeling a need to assertively mark their class status, they are trying to unflip the class sub-switch, overturning operating assumptions the master switch enabled. exactly which subswitches are thrown by throwing a master switch is specific to local social practices. in contrast, one might argue that identity factors attach to sub-switches for speaker or audience; each factor independently changes permitted inferential licenses. a sub-switch is thrown within a game, so it impacts internal and exit moves but not entrance moves. the sub-switch would not automatically change position 12 for up-to-date information, see freedom to marry’s “wining in the states” web page at http://www.freedomtomarry.org/states. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 specific game-assigned powers. flipping a sub-switch makes a woman’s participation like dancing backwards in high heels: she’s in the same game, but her moves are somehow realigned. like the master switch, it would change the relative weights assigned to various sorts of moves within the game. a sub-switch still matters to scorekeeping, but the sub-switch view fails to explain the power of any factor to change the very game. the f-switch is best construed as a master switch because with gender, switches tend to get thrown in clusters, not as singletons. thinking of the switches as clustering helps capture intersectionality. throwing the f-switch renders a woman’s entrance nonneutral. it limits her game-assigned powers, curtailing potential moves and shaping available strategies. at its most extreme, functioning across many games, throwing the f-switch might completely refuse recognition to a speaker because of her sex; this would be to deny a woman full normative status as a member of a particular discursive community. nonneutrality does not yet settle how widely variant the game is into which she is cast. perhaps she gets some prima facie entitlements and some entitlements associated with gender-specific domains, and limited access to the rest. this opens her to prima facie challenges that her male counterparts do not face, because their game-assigned powers are secure. this was our initial concern. by limiting her entitlements, flipping the f-switch limits her powers within the game. she doesn’t get to make all the moves. nowadays, it seems absurd to impose the three-dribbles rule in basketball, but often we are oblivious to parallel limitations in our discursive games. what are women discursively disallowed from doing within a particular game? on the master-switch view, gender is a metaposition, shaping game-assigned powers (entitlements). noting differences in positions and entitlements brings the age-old issue of double standards into the logic of discursive practice and the discursive constitution of agency. there is a complication: the discursive situation is usually less explicit than pre-’75 basketball. often multiple games are being played at once in what seems at first to be the ‘same game.’ once the f-switch is flipped, a woman’s game changes, imposing distinctive normative constraints within which to achieve her goals. case analysis should expose these alternate rules and deep normative double standards. clarifying shifts in game-assigned powers would reveal changes of game. sometimes flipping the master switch blocks admission to the game. when inventive strategies for entrance moves are required, we should assume that internal and exit moves will be compromised as well. differences in game-assigned-powers may be explicit, as, for example, when, in the 1960’s, the first women admitted to harvard’s phd program in philosophy were denied library privileges.13 this difference in library powers explicitly constrained their available internal moves within the studying 13 conversation, claudia card, amelie o. rorty, november 2009, cambridge, ma. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 game, requiring inventive strategies.14 noticing the constraints on one’s gameassigned-powers can make the difference between success and failure, opening the possibility of creative strategies. finally, we must consider that there are gender-biased universes of discourse that favor women, in which a woman speaker might have de facto greater gameassigned powers than a man. in certain arenas, members of an oppressed group may have greater authority and deontic standing than oppressors. the logical concept of a domain of discourse, linked to the concept of juris-diction, helps fill in some details of the variations of language games. to dig deeper, we must first consider some features of language games. 2.3. language games: an eclectic approach speech acts occur within rule-governed practices. understanding a speech act requires attention to conventions—lived norms and practices—and particular contexts of use. an account of speech acts should address who acts, their standing for the action, how well their standing is recognized, the kind of uptake sought, what kind it gets, and the outcomes it engenders. we saw this in the role of jurisdiction for the success or failure of same-sex marriage ceremonies. similarly, the success of a particular utterance of, for example, (a) “i hereby sentence you to 30 days in the county jail” depends on the speaker’s position, the time and place of utterance, the position of the person spoken to, conventions governing sentencing, the universe of discourse over which the utterance reigns, the community in which it is issued, and more. some of these factors may delimit a domain over which the speaker has (or is presumed to have) authority, or may mark the broader field of normative practices and material actions giving substance to the domain. a judge’s utterance of (a) is likely to be felicitous, in austin’s sense, if the judge issues such a sentence to a convicted criminal, in a courtroom, in the sentencing phase of trial. the criminal’s incarceration is compelled, because an entire institutional apparatus is set into motion by the judge’s speech act. the judge has the positional authority that gives her the power to use the force of the state, and she has the expertise authority of a jurist. there will be more to say about these forms of authority in section 3. the success of a speech act relies in part on the authority of the speaker to drive audience uptake. speaker authority and audience uptake go hand in hand, and neither occurs in a vacuum. most austinians usually construe uptake as audience 14 think of wittig: “the result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crab-like way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely” (wittig 1992, 81). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 recognition of the speaker’s illocutionary intention; instead, i take uptake to be a matter of next discursive moves, moves either depending on or disregarding the original speech act. authority is a kind of power that requires attribution of a deontic status to the speaker. authority is not primarily a matter of linguistic competence, for many more are competent than have authority, and some have authority without much competence. bourdieu (1991, 72) warns: “the linguistic relation of power is never defined solely by the relation between the linguistic competences present. and the weight of different agents depends on their symbolic capital, i.e., on the recognition, institutionalized or not, that they receive from a group.” symbolic capital, recognition of the authority and agency of others, is built into a courtroom situation, but it is found to some degree in all discursive encounters. a judge’s verdict is a particularly formal speech act, set within serious social and political rituals backed by a machinery of force. in less formal circumstances, one’s symbolic capital still crucially depends on social support for the practice and for one’s authority within it. to track authority and uptake in less formal contexts, we might, for example, notice differential patterns of responses. (here philosophy of language intersects with epistemic concerns about credibility.) discursive authority is a situational power to make felicitous speech acts and gain a range of appropriate uptakes. a speaker’s discursive authority renders her speech acts socially meaningful. except for filibustering senators, speakers want not just floor time, but engaged attention and appropriate responses. brandom’s inferentialism treats this engagement as a matter of making successful commitments, licensing others to make inferences, defending one’s own claims against challenges, and challenging claims of others (where needed). every speech act carries with it these task-responsibilities to justify identifications, defend inference licenses, meet challenges, and more. if pat says “charlie is a clever beagle,” pat licenses others to make inferences about charlie, species, breed, temperament, and more. if asked, pat’s task-responsibilities may include identifying which charlie, defending pat’s ascription of breed, and so on. if i use pat’s claim in making a new claim, i may defer justification back to pat. in this way, our claims become intertwined; the license you issue today may enable my claim but may also require future defenses from each of us. further developing inferentialism’s call-and-response aspect, kukla and lance (2009) argue that all discourse is essentially vocative, requiring audience recognition and response. any speaking-to someone is a hail, and, ipso facto, calls for attention and response. i see this call for attention and response as key to understanding discursive authority. kukla and lance emphasize the power of hails to shape our relationships, saying, tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 concrete normative relations among people are established and sustained through vocatives—that is through the yo-claims that hold us in place in social space. we become and remain the types of beings that have specific, agent-relative engagements with others through an ongoing network of hails and acknowledgements. . . . vocative discourse plays a crucial role in constituting individuals as particular, normatively positioned persons. (2009, 181) if women tend to hail and be hailed differently than men, this would shape women’s distinctive constitution as agents. there is ample anecdotal evidence for such differential hails (locke 2011). consider the case of students in a co-taught seminar who are told to call their female professor “claudia,” and their male professor “professor s,” by the professors’ choices. this practice constructs different symbolic capital for each professor: professor s accepted an institutional status-marking hail whereas claudia chose to resist the trappings of institutional and positional power. actually, their symbolic capital arose differently—claudia’s in resistance, professor s’s in participation. symbolic capital can begin with a hail and develop into something that infuses the practice.15 within language games, responses matter, because speakers aim for effects. among other things, speakers seek acknowledgment (accurate ascription of both locutionary and illocutionary acts), understanding, assent, appreciation, and, importantly, the power to engender action. the engendered action might be purely discursive and internal to the game, or it might be an exit move, perhaps a physical action like grabbing an umbrella when the forecast includes rain. taking the game metaphor seriously, lewis (1979) urges us to think of each speech act as having the potential to change the game’s score. applying lewis’s framework, my conception of discursive authority is the functional ability to generate permissibility facts (licenses) within a conversation; applying sellars’s concept of exit moves, we want these permissions and licenses to actually play a role beyond the language game. nonlinguistic (but still normatively laden) responses show that licenses and permissions can be tied to broader social and material reality, shaping not just what we say but how we live, how we treat each other, how we may oppress or liberate. nonresponses are never neutral. refusing uptake to someone’s speech undermines their standing within a game, undermining their internal moves, and—if systematic and preemptive—may even bar their very entrance to the game. widespread systematic reshaping of uptake responses on the basis of gender attribution is a mechanism of sexism. widespread systematic reshaping of uptake responses on the basis of race attribution is a mechanism of racism. oppression 15 thanks to claudia card for this true story; the analysis is mine. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 systematically denies persons authority on the basis of identity factors and so shapes who actually counts as a player in the language game. in this way, the lewis account, so fruitfully developed by some antipornography feminist philosophers, can be seen to walk alongside kukla and lance’s emphasis on the ways that hails and responses create a structure of norms that constitute our social beings. sometimes the limited construction sticks, and the imposed underlying limitation is the source of the injustice of flipping the f-switch. like basketball players who never learn to rush the basket, the oppressed can be stuck taking three steps and then passing or shooting. sometimes the mechanisms of oppression don’t “take,” and women try to play, but in that case flipping the f-switch silences a woman’s potential contributions by undermining her authority. gendered domains shape who gets to speak about what, when and where they get to speak at all, and a host of other normative assignments and restrictions. as a position in a normative order, gender influences the possibility of success for many acts, speech acts included. clearly, gender impacts positions, and thus shapes game-assigned powers. next, we must identify several varieties of discursive authority, distinguishing positional authority from expertise authority, to see how gender might enable or disable these kinds of authority (within a domain) and thus how gender might render certain speech acts possible or impossible. 3. authority authority is a normative power to engender the discursive, symbolic, physical, or material actions of others. bourdieu’s social theory of discourse reminds us that one speaks “not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished” (1977, 648). these epistemic states can be tracked through linguistic behaviors. discursive authority may engender either internal or exit moves, and the actual discursive authority of some can block the developing authority of others. authority results in uptake, and uptake further entrenches authority. there are three primary forms of authority, varying in strength and domain. theists ascribe perfect authority to god, who, as the original speaker of performative utterances, has creative as well as absolute coercive power. on this view, god’s pure ideal sovereignty is independent of any other grounding. no human has such independent authority, but people are both creative and coercive to lesser degrees. persons with authority usually have either positional or expertise authority, and sometimes both.16 16 maitra (2012) introduces a special but common kind of authority, arising simply from others licensing what a speaker says, even without any real positional or expertise grounds, so the distinction is heuristic rather than exclusive or exhaustive. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 3.1. positional authority: king, general, judge a king’s word is law, securing uptake on pain of punishment. the king might be an idiot, but the throne—a position with broad game-assigned powers—provides power to oppress, exploit, and kill with impunity. in this extreme case of positional authority, enforcement power drives audience uptake. what kind of uptake one gives the king may vary, but uptake is mandatory. a king’s subjects navigate between their own autonomy, penalties of disobedience, and probabilities of getting caught. giving uptake to positional authority need not be the same as obedience, and it does not require believing in the truth of what the authority says. as with any game, one needs to know the rules and norms, the costs and benefits of compliance. positional authority can engender wily hypocrisy, evasive maneuvers, and dampening expectations. positional authority grants the holder specific game-assigned powers, so it is relative to a game or domain in which positions are allocated. a general’s positional authority, for example, exists within the army’s strict hierarchy of power, which counts only some kinds of speech acts as authoritatively issued by the general within their “command,” that is, with their domain. institutional authority is positional; speakers gain authority (and linguistic capital) by inhabiting institutional roles that authorize certain kinds of speech acts. the ceo, health inspector, or referee all inhabit roles authorizing certain kinds of speech acts and lose the power to achieve those acts when they lose the position. these roles grant positional authority. bourdieu (1977, 657) sets a wide scope for positional authority: “what can be said and the way of saying it on a given occasion depend on the structure of the objective relationship between the positions of the sender and the receiver in the structure of distribution of linguistic capital and the other kinds of capital.” uptake of positional authority arises from participation in practices and institutions that distribute symbolic, social, and material power, governing who can say what, when, and where, and how others must attend to these sayings. when positions are backed by force, the positional power is clear. positional power may also generate enhanced status for one’s statements about the world, about values, and about all sorts of things beyond one’s domain. the third form, expertise authority, functions differently. 3.2 expertise authority: scientist, scholar, professional expertise authority derives from knowledge or skill. the use and development of this expertise benefits others through the expansion of our collective epistemic (and other) resources. we—together—know more if our experts do, so an expert’s authority is importantly generative. ideally, the expert’s authority resides in the soundness and utility of what is known. expertise tends to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 be widely valued, since the rest of us get the lessons more or less on the cheap, increasing efficiency across society (pierson 1994). mistrust of experts might arise from failing to grasp what the expert knows, but it could also arise from fear that the expert’s knowledge gives them power to harm. expertise authority is weaker than positional authority, because obedience is not required, but stronger, since resistance does not erode it so easily. we can be skeptical of the expert’s pronouncements, but if the expert is right, so much the worse for us. consider a simple case: sara the sommelier enters the wine game with special game-assigned powers and enhanced authority to recommend action (exit moves). her expertise gives her some authority over wine selection if we dine together, and in wine matters, i often defer to her judgment. despite her expertise, her judgment is nonbinding and unenforceable. i might recognize her expertise and the soundness of her advice and yet resist it, especially if the best wine choice for the meal is a wine i dislike, say riesling. my resisting sara’s advice does not overturn her authority. my respect for her authority on wine remains intact, and sara gets uptake, through my recognizing her advice as expert. she just fails to engender the action she wants me to undertake. resistance sometimes damages positional authority. in resisting the general’s order, the private chips away at the chain of command and is punished for it. my non-riesling exit move from the wine game, nevertheless allows me to make internal moves that depend upon and enhance sara’s expertise. the next time someone asks what i would suggest to accompany a delicate fish, i might say “riesling” based on sara’s prior claim. the key point is that expertise authority has different grounds than positional authority, so resistance or support may also involve distinct kinds of challenges. 3.3 derivatives some cases highlight intersections between expertise and positional authority, and require attention to whether these are independent or deferred. in each case, we see how gender undermines authority. gender traverses practices, shaping entitlements. game-assigned powers enable us to make certain moves that count in the game. sometimes getting to a position (to get the game-assigned powers) requires prior recognition of one’s expertise. this is usually the case with a judge. only the judge sitting on a particular case has the positional authority to use her expertise to issue a verdict, even though many attorneys might reach the same judgment. one particular judge is entitled to issue a sentence by one particular game-assigned positional power. entitlements, however they are derived, are crucial for the basic speech act of asserting (upon which inferentialism is built). brandom (1998, 180) says: “absent such entitlement, tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 assertion is an attempt to lend what one does not possess.” this is true in cases of all varieties of monday-morning quarterbacks, know-it-all attorneys, and ordinary back-seat drivers. if attempting to claim entitlements that have been neither granted nor earned is like writing a check with nothing in your account, gender constantly drains women’s accounts, requiring us to work harder to maintain even a minimal balance. all or nearly all speakers within a discursive community are granted a range of basic entitlements (to speak and make commitments) just in virtue of group membership. we usually accept these straightforward speech acts, no matter who speaks. call this phenomenon prima facie or default authority. everyone gets to say “the lights are on now,” since this takes no special position or expertise, and if we required people to justify every claim like this, we would get little done (brandom 1998, 177). prima facie entitlements range across so many games that they might be seen as entitlements that precede game-assigned powers. these basic speech acts and prima facie entitlements can be challenged, with justification. senator mcconnell’s invoking rule 19 not only challenged senator warren’s reading of the letter, it removed her prima facie weak entitlements as a senator, her very capacity to speak in the senate, for the entire hearing. the expertise of others provides the research upon which so many everyday practices are built. one grants authority to experts’ speech acts by taking up the licenses they issue, while deferring responsibility for justification back to them, as i did with sara’s wine recommendation. this successful parroting is a kind of derivative expertise authority. such parroting has only deferred authority, derived from the expertise of the person who ultimately bears justificatory responsibility. usually, all members of a community would get equal prima facie entitlements to such parroting, equally sharing in the derivative authority. when parroting requires earned expertise authority of one’s own, then one’s deontic status within the discursive community shapes derivative expertise authority. in such cases, flipping the f-switch might undermine even this.17 when a speaker’s utterance piggybacks on the authority of another’s utterance but moves beyond parroting to extend the claim, this mixes position and expertise, and blends deferred authority with independent authority. smith develops a theory and thereby issues licenses to others to use it as-is. if jones extends the scope of smith’s theory, jones must justify the extension, using a 17 derivative expertise authority is distinct from attachment authority, which arises from an ongoing absorption of a subordinate’s domain into a dominant’s domain, generally affording some enhanced status to the subordinate. attachment authority works, when it does, only as long as the person with the primary domain allows it, and only insofar as the secondary person is viewed as reliable. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 mixture of jones’s own work and deferrals to smith’s licenses. this derivative-plus expertise authority requires additional justification for the “plus,” calling the speaker’s own independent expertise to account. whether someone is entitled to extend smith’s theory may depend on the speaker’s positional authority (professional experience, connection to smith, etc.). again, we see flipping the fswitch might damage women’s exercise of such licenses and development of such authority. 3.4 domains speaker authority is tied to having an individual domain, a broader discursive community, and participating in normative and material fields of action. marilyn frye (1983, 87) describes claiming a domain as holding that “one is a being whose purposes and actions require and create a web of objects, spaces, attitudes, and interests that is worthy of respect.” under the fragmenting and limiting forces of oppression, a person’s quashed and misdirected agency results in a more limited domain than the domains enjoyed by those who are not oppressed. oppressed people may think that they are respected persons with respected domains, but this illusion arises from normative submission. settled into the narrowed range of what is recognized or granted (their effective domain), they accept the illusion until thwarted in trying to exercise the broader powers of legitimate domains (shafer and frye 1977). failed uptake, particularly ongoing denial of authority by multiple members of one’s community, dampens women’s attempts at authoritative speech. considering the three major kinds of authority, we can see that relations amongst domains of speaker and audience are key. the perfect authority attributed to god claims god’s absolute power over every domain. the positional authority of the general is made possible by each soldier’s relinquishing significant control over their own domain, as an institutional entry-condition. the degree of domain ceding with other forms of positional authority depends on the scope of the relevant domains. even expertise authority involves some domain ceding. in choosing a physician, one already adopts a stance of ceding some authority about health claims to that doctor, and yet the patient’s body remains central to their domain. when a physician recommends health-enhancing lifestyle changes, a patient might accept the value of the recommendation, issue no challenges, but still resist the exit transitions (lifestyle changes). a recipient of an expert recommendation might forebear challenging and not follow advice, and nevertheless the speaker’s authority remains intact. game-assigned powers help us track the domain-specific speaker authority required for successful speech acts. citing austin, bourdieu emphasizes speaker authority in explaining successful performative utterances. bourdieu says, tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 most of the conditions that have to be fulfilled in order for a performative utterance to succeed come down to the question of the appropriateness of the speaker—or, better still, his social function—and of the discourse he utters. a performative utterance is destined to fail each time that it is not pronounced by a person who has the “power” to pronounce it, or, more generally, each time that the “particular persons and circumstances in a given case” are not “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked”; in short, each time that the speaker does not have the authority to emit the words he utters. (bourdieu 1991, 111; quoting austin 1962, 26) this works well for constrained circumstances with highly articulated game-assigned powers—the discursive equivalent to american football. only the quarterback can call the play. only the judge can sentence the defendant. only the physician can authorize the patient’s treatment. successful speech acts require speaker authority and discursive action to match within an appropriate domain. that domain is defined by location in a defined normative structure. authority is largely constituted by audience uptake, which is a matter of next moves. austin holds that a speech act is not a bet, for instance, until someone says, “you’re on!” (austin 1962, 36, 126, 136). we often overlook our complicity in maintaining the authority of others, and our need for others in maintaining our own. bourdieu (1991, 116) explains: “the symbolic efficacy of words is exercised only in so far as the person subjected to it recognizes the person who exercises it as authorized to do so, or, what amounts to the same thing, only in so far as he fails to realize that, in submitting to it, he himself has contributed, through his recognition, to its establishment.” here bourdieu almost anticipates maitra’s (2012, 106) “hike organizer” case, in which andy, a peer in the hiking group simply starts assigning tasks, and others do as andy says, thereby licensing his speech. institutional settings often mask the audience’s role in successful speech acts. this helps explain how standard or ritualized speech acts develop and remain in place. even speech that feels like the exercise of pure authority nevertheless relies crucially on hearer uptake. uptake-dependence does not mean that the criminal can walk away from the judge’s sentence by simply denying the court’s authority. of course, some practices may allow individuals to opt out, and then the speech acts within the practice have no further hold upon them. hegemonic practices generally do not allow opting out, and yet still require widespread uptake for those with positional power to retain that power. that authority and uptake are intertwined is no surprise. where positions are highly constrained, like courtrooms and football fields, tracking authority by following uptake can be straightforward. it gets messy when positions shift with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 nearly every move, in practices that are more like court positions in basketball than field positions in football. such variant positional authority is part of the circumstances of many utterances, part of what lewis calls the “kinematics of score.” ben gets to say what he does because ann said what she did earlier; ann licensed ben’s utterance, granting him (at least temporary) authority to use ann’s claim. like passing the ball in basketball, passing discursive authority can succeed or fail in advancing the game’s objectives. tracking variant positional authority in unofficial language games is challenging, to say the least. failed uptake is a key to understanding why women with earned expertise nevertheless must justify their authority, answering challenges and having to claim that authority more explicitly than similarly situated men. withholding recognition of another’s authority may protect one’s own domain and weaken hers. for a full understanding of such failed uptake, we need to look at both highly constrained cases, as well as messy variant-positional cases. we must identify the circumstances under which women are appropriate speakers yet experience discursive disablement. what does the flipped f-switch do? 4. the f-switch the analogy to pre-’75 basketball helps disclose the mechanics of genderbased denials or distortions of discursive authority. i have been treating “the fswitch” as a master switch activated by gender attribution, which, once flipped, shapes the scope and force of a speaker’s discursive authority, specifically her capacity to make internal and exit moves within a language game. the f-switch makes gender a nonneutral entrance factor, and so reveals why some discursive moves women make, which seem prima facie just like moves men make, nevertheless have diminished scope and force. a woman’s nonneutral entrance limits her position-specific game-assigned powers, her positional authority, and undermines her power to exercise her expertise authority. disregarded expertise authority impedes contributing to projects about which one cares, and in so doing, thwarts one’s developing further capacities. such disregard undermines autonomy and creative effectiveness; it literally stunts one’s growth. 18 18 when a woman’s “no” is disregarded in rape, her rightful authority over the disposition of her body, expressed through her power to withhold consent, is blatantly disrespected, revealing cultural norms that rob her of an authority that is partly definitive of personhood (brison 2003; mcgowan 2009; shafer and frye 1977). given the prevalence of rape within patriarchal heterosexism, women’s legitimate domain has shrunken to a smaller effective domain (shafer and frye 1977). sexual refusal is not among her game-assigned powers. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 23 understanding what happens when the f-switch is flipped requires understanding some ways in which speakers in general can be denied effectiveness. these include challenges to position, expertise, content, or manner. the character of a challenge may reveal the degree to which one is within a game. ignoring that someone even spoke is a form of locutionary erasure; this is far more insidious than a challenge to the content of what one has said or even a challenge to one’s entitlement to say it. locutionary erasure blocks participation. when a speaker’s illocutionary moves within a game are changed through uptake, this illocutionary disablement changes the score, and so changes subsequent entitlements. challenging content may play the game straight, or it may bleed into these more destructive exclusionary moves. we have already seen that nonneutral entry to a game can undermine or enhance one’s prospects in participation. seeing how challenges and nonneutral entries work together can help us to understand the power of the f-switch. 4.1 challenges many challenges are legitimate denials of authority. certain kinds of discursive infelicities prompt challenges, as when someone usurps another’s authority or commits various violations outlined by austin or grice (austin 1962; grice 1991). according to austin, a speech act is an abuse if it is formally correct but done without the requisite intentions, as in lying promises or bigamous marriages (1962, 14–15). in the classic folktale, the boy who cried “wolf!” lost his very capacity to warn, through abusing the speech act just for the pleasure of seeing the townspeople scramble. after multiple failures, people deny him uptake, disqualifying him from undertaking such commitments in the future (see brandom 1998, esp. 180). the boy can say the words, but once people no longer count his speech acts as warnings, he just cannot warn them anymore. having abused the speech act, the boy’s future warnings (at least about wolves) are illocutionarily disabled. the boy’s loss of authority is a punishment for inappropriate linguistic behavior.19 a courtroom janitor can utter “i hereby sentence you to 30 days,” but without the necessary game-assigned powers, the janitor lacks the positional authority to make this exit move. felicitously issued speech acts may nevertheless run into justifiable challenges requiring a response. even with a judge’s positionspecific game-assigned power (positional authority) to issue a sentence, a judge’s 19 in this case, what was an abuse comes to be recognized as such by the community, which then denies the speaker discursive authority (at least over wolf warnings, but perhaps more), so uptake fails, and so does the speech act. so here, once authority is denied, an attempted abuse becomes rendered a misfire. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 24 sentence is not immune from challenges. to block the exit move (jail), a defendant’s lawyer might make any number of challenges, each specific to the content of the decision and the rules of law. a legitimate challenge might not change the sentence; for example, seeking the judge’s recusal might succeed and yet the sentence stand. some challenges require justification. imagine i say, “tom brady is a great quarterback.” my brother challenges, asking, “what do you know about football?” and i demand that he justify his challenge. claiming a prima facie authority, i say: “i’m a new englander! everyone here knows all about the pats.” not content to cast this into prima facie territory, he replies that i have never before shown any interest in any nfl team (so football is outside my domain), adding that a feminist should scorn american football. he might even quiz me on brady’s statistics to see if i can justify my claim. if i reply that brady threw for over 5,200 yards in the 2011 season, a career high, beating (rival) peyton manning’s then-career high of 4,700, then his challenge would be met and my expertise authority would be secure. my brother’s challenge gives my speech act uptake; it involves neither locutionary erasure nor illocutionary disablement. locutionary erasure, treating someone as if she never said anything at all, is pernicious. the silent treatment treats the utterance as unworthy of even a challenge. if a speaker lacks entitlement to speak in a particular context, as a member of the courtroom gallery, for example, then overlooking her utterances enforces that lack of entitlement. but if, for example, the speaker is a graduate student in a seminar, then she has entitlement, and then another’s utter lack of uptake counts as unjustly denying her legitimate status. brandom’s default-and-challenge structure makes sense within the game of giving and asking for reasons amongst social peers, all more or less equal participants in a particular game or practice. once social inequality is part of a practice, the view requires careful moderation. oppressed people often face default challenges.20 whether gender is a prima facie challenge or one requiring justification depends on the particular game, practice, and discourse. a speaker’s f-gender is often prima facie justified grounds for challenge. this supports taking the f-switch to be a global or master switch, one that governs the whole semantic index, not a local switch internal to the index, attaching to the speaker-item but leaving most of the game intact. flipping the f-switch is most obvious when it keeps women out of the game entirely. no one was fooled into thinking that girls’ and boys’ basketball was the same game before 1975. less obvious are the insidious cases in which flipping the f 20 think of lewis’s temporary master/slave situation between two speakers becoming reified across categories of social persons: this would create the categories speakers and those spoken-to (lewis 1979). tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 25 switch changes rules within what might look like the same game but is not. while the guys get to rush the net and dunk, we have to dribble three times and then pass or shoot. if flipping the f-switch makes our entrance moves nonneutral, this not only ups the ante on entrance, but also shapes how our moves within the game are scored. we think we are playing the same game by the same rules, but the score never seems to add up, because we did not start with the same entitlements and powers, and will not accrue the same points. we need to know which game we are in and which rules to respect or challenge. this sellarsian language-game approach, with my added framework of neutral and nonneutral entrance moves, with distinctive game-assigned powers, explains some structural aspects of the norms of games. whether an entrance is neutral or nonneutral is always shaped by context; context can be taken tightly (focusing on the game) or more broadly (on the social role and meaning of the game). there are no universally neutral entrances, for the salience of identity factors is always in play and highly dependent on social context. identity factors, historically entrenched in practices, often influence whether someone will even try to enter a game, whether others will try to keep her out, and how such exclusions would be achieved. the histories of sexism, racism, ethnicity, and other widespread forms of oppression govern master switches that change the very practices in which we think we are engaging. 4.2 master switch v. sub-switch as noted earlier, there are two main ways gender can be marked on the lived normative index that makes speech acts possible: it can be a global or master switch, shifting values all across the index, or a sub-switch on the speaker index with a narrower range. although a thorough account of discursive disablement probably needs both, gender marking is best seen as a master switch on the index. the master switch is a game-changer, redefining moves, strategies, and scoring. remember pre-’75 basketball. if the game itself actually changes, not just in terms of entitlements, licenses, and permissibility facts, but in terms of the broadest rules governing entrance, internal moves, scorekeeping, and exit moves, then it would be best understood as a master switch. the master switch determines what game is being played, by defining positions and game-assigned powers, so flipping the fswitch should be seen as shifting from neutral to nonneutral entry. since gender is a feature attributed to the speaker, it might seem to be a subcategory of the speaker index, rather than a game-changing master switch. seeing gender marking as attaching mainly to a sub-switch limits our grasp of its power to change games. it misrepresents the damage done to the score—to the person’s ability to make the moves and play the game. sub-switch changes cannot account for nonneutral entries. gender attribution might function as a sub-switch feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 26 when entrances truly are neutral—where the woman’s move gets uptake, but the character of the uptake is shaped by the hearer’s application of identity factors on the speaker-item. the sub-switch view works best to account for speech acts within language games that seem prima facie open to all, concerning basic assertions which do not seem to require any special expertise, and games in which speaker identity factors are somehow masked. on the sub-switch view, a speech act could come off without attention to details revealing gender and other social speaker-identity factors. it makes the category’s activation optional, where it can remain unthrown. the speaker-item on the semantic index would need to track a lot of information about the speaker: sex, age, race, class, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, abilities, and more. the speaker function would be a complex set of switches, one for each identity factor. for some types of speech acts and some instances, some of these factors may be salient. for others, they may be moot. the sub-switch view best applies to cases in which we can ascertain a speech act while overlooking all these factors. the major liability of the sub-switch view is that it fails to make sense of the gatekeeping roles that certain identity factors play and the ubiquitous demand for gender attribution. the sub-switch view overlooks that contexts of utterance and whole domains of discourse can be gendered as well, rendering some kinds of persons speakers and others not. the secretary quietly slipping papers to the board members is not herself a member of the board and lacks the standing to speak. should the secretary speak, it is unauthorized and disrupts the proceedings. the secretary’s speech act may or may not gain uptake, but it is not ‘in the game.’ it is like a bolt from the blue. women in male-dominated fields often find their participation is treated as just this sort of bolt from the blue—an aberration, even when they have earned the same credentials as their male peers. consider this real case, amongst purported peers, in a faculty meeting. people express confusion about a particular long-standing policy. the meeting’s chair acknowledges professor a, who starts explaining the policy. after a sentence or two, professor b interrupts loudly, saying, “false! we never agreed to any such thing! you’re wrong!” think of b’s speech act as a foul on a. b challenged a’s expertise (about the policy), but the rudeness and unprofessional character of the interruption also challenged a’s positional authority. why would b think it permissible to treat a colleague and peer in this way? the behavior declares a not-apeer. interestingly, two other professors, quietly, one by one, said, “i remember it just as a does.” they thereby address the content (expertise), without directly addressing b’s inappropriate manner. of these four speakers, a is the only female. b’s gender dominance, a form of positional authority, may have made b think his unprofessional conduct would be allowed. it partly was allowed, since the content tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 27 of his “foul” was overturned, but not the manner. this often happens to oppressed people in professional settings. the oppressed cope, but the impact of such attacks, minor and major, is an erosion of professional standing. the master switch view helps to explain the double standards that cast women into a restricted game, dribbling three times then passing or shooting, prohibited from the fun and status-enhancing slam dunk. sometimes we are indeed playing different games. who gets the benefit of the doubt, who carries the burden of proof, who faces more peremptory challenges to her authority? once the gender switch is thrown, scorekeeping changes. legal moves generally open to all might become fouls when made by some players. arcane rules that are rarely invoked (senate rule 19, for example) get pulled out to silence a potentially influential woman and then are cast aside for the next male speaker. changes to scorekeeping reveal changes to the normative structure of the game. the master-switch view also clarifies what is going on when authority is prized away from expertise. in particular, it shows why a woman with significant expertise nevertheless needs to prove herself again and again, as if always just breaking through. expertise is not enough; position matters too. the master-switch view makes sense of the tension between position and expertise, by highlighting the power of the f-switch to attach a global, negative positional-authority value that trumps positive expertise. position often trumps expertise, as we see when a wellpositioned lesser expert gains more attention than a poorly positioned greater expert. position, as a rank or a role in a hierarchy, confers differential power. institutional affiliation and rank can amplify or modulate one’s authority, independent of expertise. some institutions enhance opportunities for developing expertise, so having a position within their games—on those courts and fields—may actually foster greater substantive expertise. feminist philosophy of language applied to antipornography arguments (e.g., langton 1993; mcgowan 2003) and feminist social epistemology examining the role of power in ascribing testimonial credibility (e.g. daukas 2006; fricker 1998, 2007; lackey 1999, 2008), have revealed how social conceptions of gender undermine women’s authority as speakers and knowers. the account developed here is compatible with these existing views, since here the question of women’s authority focuses on a prior point in the process. setting aside rich epistemic issues, i focus on how one enters a language game, how entrances shape the kinds of powers one can have within that game, and how one can exit the game into nondiscursive arenas. lackey (1999, 471), for example, offers a picture of testimonial knowledge as being “like a chain of people passing buckets of water to put out a fire. each person must have a bucket of water in order to pass it to the next person, and moreover there must be at least one person who is ultimately acquiring the water from another source.” my project asks who gets into the line and what rules govern their potential feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 28 contributions once there. thinking about language games reveals the limits imposed by the linearity of a bucket brigade metaphor, with its emphasis on transmission. (during a fire, there will be few variations in brigade members’ game-assigned powers.) the discursive mechanisms sketched here will have implications for belief attribution, trust, and many other epistemically rich concerns, but developing those applications remains for a subsequent paper. a more accurate account of language games incorporates master switches and sub-switches, using a lewis-kaplan concept of an index within a brandomian inferentialism. an inferentialist framework reveals the normative damage to women’s discursive authority by locating the problem in sanctioning of moves, in the deontic structure of norms and practices of scorekeeping, and not primarily in the individual intentions of particular people. starting from intentions gets the story backwards (brandom 1983, 648). this is a minority view, so far, in understanding discourse, but meshes with oppression theory. frye (1983) taught us that “the locus of sexism is primarily in the system or framework, not in the particular act,” adding that individual acts count as sexist insofar as they uphold that system (19, 38). by considering the problem of the disabling of women’s discursive powers, we can see the potential of uniting these two approaches. bourdieu’s reminder echoes: “what speaks is not the utterance, the language, but the whole social person.” to this we must add: . . . and only then within a structure of norms and practices that render an utterance meaningful and make our many sorts of personhood possible. the master-switch view highlights the role of identity politics in determining who gets automatic authority within an arena and who lacks it, even with expertise. structural aspects of the position sketched here can help us keep track of the language games we play. any factors that shape social hierarchy also could be master switches. members of dominant groups, in contexts of their domination, will generally not trip such a switch, and their utterances will not be negatively skewed. utterances by members of subordinate groups will flip the relevant switch, so their entrances will be nonneutral and disadvantageous. we must be alert to game-changes. we should track how identity factors limit or enhance game-assigned powers or entitlements. certain discursive moves will be disabled. others will be unjustly activated. flipping the f-switch subverts positional authority. this in turn undermines expertise authority. no wonder women are constantly justifying our existence. flipping the f-switch changes the game, and as we have long known, changing the game for some makes losers of us all. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 29 references austin, j. l. 1962. how to do things with words. j. o. urmson and marina sbisà, editors. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bourdieu, pierre. 1977. “the economics of linguistic exchange.” social science information 16 (6): 645–668. ———. 1991. language & symbolic power. translated by gino raymond and matthew adamson. edited and introduced by john b. thompson. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. brandom, robert b. 1983. “asserting.” noûs 17 (4): 637–650. ———. 1998. making it explicit. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. brison, susan. 2003. aftermath: violence and the remaking of the self. princeton, nj: princeton university press. carpenter, linda jean, and r. vivian acosta. 2005. title ix. champaign, il: human kinetics press. code, lorraine. 1991. what can she know? 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"conversational exercitives and the force of pornography." philosophy & public affairs 31 (2): 155–189. ———. 2009. “on silencing and sexual refusal.” journal of political philosophy 17 (4): 487–494. tirrell: authority and gender: flipping the f-switch published by scholarship@western, 2018 31 pierson, robert. 1994. “the epistemic authority of expertise.” psa: proceedings of the biennial meeting of the philosophy of science association, vol. 1: 398– 405. doi:10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1994.1.193044. ridgeway, cecilia l., and shelley j. correll. 2004. “unpacking the gender system: a theoretical perspective on gender beliefs and social relations.” gender and society 18 (4): 510–531. sellars, wilfrid. 1954. “some reflections on language games.” philosophy of science 21 (3): 204–228. shafer, carolyn, and marilyn frye. 1977. “rape and respect.” in feminism and philosophy, edited by mary vetterling-braggin, frederick elliston, and jane english, 347–359. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams. smith, barbara. 1979. “notes for yet another paper on black feminism, or will the real enemy please stand up?” conditions 5:123–127. steinpreis, rhea, katie a. anders, and dawn ritzke. 1999. “the impact of gender on the review of the curricula vitae of job applicants and tenure candidates: a national empirical study.” sex roles 41(7/8): 509–528. strach, patricia, katherine zuber, erika franklin fowler, travis n. ridout, and kathleen searles. 2015. “in a different voice? explaining the use of men and women as voice-over announcers in political advertising.” political communication 32 (2): 183–205. tirrell, lynne. 2012. “genocidal language games.” in speech and harm: controversies over free speech, edited by ishani maitra and mary kate mcgowan, 174–221. oxford: oxford university press. wang, amy. 2017. “‘nevertheless, she persisted’ becomes new battle cry after mcconnell silences elizabeth warren.” washington post. february 8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/thefix/wp/2017/02/08/nevertheless-she-persisted-becomes-new-battle-cryafter-mcconnell-silences-elizabeth-warren/?utm_term=.5368539d8c0d. watson, lori. 2016. “the woman question.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly 3 (1–2): 246–253. wittig, monique. 1992. the straight mind. boston: beacon press, esp. 76–89. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. lynne tirrell is associate professor of philosophy at the university of connecticut, where she is also affiliated with the human rights institute. her research addresses the power of discursive practices to shape or damage social justice. her research on the role of linguistic practices in preparing, inciting, and executing genocide is grounded by research in rwanda and at the ictr in tanzania, and has appeared in https://doi.org/10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1994.1.193044 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 32 journals of philosophy, public policy, and edited collections. her most recent article is “toxic speech” (philosophical topics 45 (2): 139–161. doi: 10.5840/philtopics201745217). professor tirrell is an associate editor of the journal of philosophical research, on the editorial board of the journal of public philosophy, and an area editor for phil papers. she served as chair of the apa public philosophy committee. gestation and parental rights: why is good enough good enough? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 5 2015 gestation and parental rights: why is good enough good enough? lindsey porter sheffield university, l.porter@sheffield.ac.uk recommended citation porter, lindsey. 2015. "gestation and parental rights: why is good enough good enough?."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 5. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5. gestation)and)parental)rights:)why)is)good)enough)good)enough?1) lindsey(porter( ( ( ( abstract) in(this(paper(i(explore(the(question(of(whether(gestation(can(ground( parental(rights.(i(consider(anca(gheaus’s((2012)(claim(that(the(labour(and(bonding( of(gestation(give(one(the(right(to(parent(one’s(biological(child.(i(argue(that,(while( gheaus’s(gestational(account(of(parental(rights(is(the(most(successful(of(such( accounts(in(the(literature,(it(is(ultimately(unsuccessful,(because(the(concept( ‘maternalgfetal(bonding’(does(not(stand(up(to(scrutiny.(gheaus(argues(that(the( labour(expended(in(gestation(generates(parental(rights.(this(is(a(standard,(lockean( sort(of(a(move(in(parental(ethics—it(usually(relies(on(the(claim(that(i(have( proprietary(rights(over(the(products(of(my(labour.(however,(gheaus(argues(that(a( standard(labour(account(of(parental(rights(could(not(generate(parental(rights(over( one’s(own(birth(child(via(gestation(without(ownership,(since(the(labour(would( merely(afford(one(a(right(to(enjoy(the(goods(of(parenthood.(at(best,(then,(labour( alone(would(generate(a(right(to(a(child.((but,(gheaus(argues,(not(only(do( gestational(mothers(expend(labour(in(the(course(of(the(pregnancy;(they(also( develop(emotional(ties(to(the(fetus.(they(‘bond’(with(it.(this,(gheaus(argues,( coupled(with(labour,(gives(the(birth(mother(parental(rights(over(her(birth(child.( fathers,(on(her(account,(acquire(rights(over(their(birth(child(by(contributing( labour—in(the(form(of(antenatal(support—during(the(course(of(the(pregnancy.(i( argue(that(because(‘bonding’(is(not(an(appropriately(morally(salient(phenomenon,( gheaus’s(account(does(not(work(unless(it(relies(on(a(proprietary(claim,(and(this(is( prima(facie(reason(to(reject(the(account.(further,(the(fact(that(it(only(confers( parental(rights(on(fathers(by(proxy(also(gives(us(reason(to(reject(the(account.(i( then(offer(a(brief(sketch(of(a(more(promising,(positive(account(of(parental(rights.( ( keywords:(gestation,(rights,(parenthood,(gender( 1(i(would(like(to(thank(alex(barber(and(timothy(fowler;(participants(in(the( 2014(joint(meeting(of(the(canadian(society(for(women(in(philosophy((cswip)(and( the(association(for(feminist(epistemologies,(methodologies,(metaphysics(and( science(studies((femmss)(in(waterloo,(ontario;(members(of(the(school(of(politics,( international(studies,(and(philosophy(at(queen's(university,(belfast;(and(seminar( participants(at(the(institut(éthique(histoire(humanités(et(centre(interfacultaire(en( bioéthique(et(sciences(humaines(en(médecine,(centre(médical(universitaire(in( geneva(for(helpful(discussion(and(feedback.( 1 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 introduction) in(western(law,(it(is(common(to(take(the(gestational(mother—that(is,(the( woman(who(carries(the(pregnancy—to(be(the(rightful(mother(of(the(child(in(the( first(instance.(why(it(is(true(historically(is(no(big(mystery:(gestation(was(easily( proved,(where(genetic(relatedness(was(not.(why(it(is(still(true(today(stands(in( need(of(explanation.2(( in(this(paper,(i(will(explore(the(question(of(whether(it(ought(to(be:(whether( gestation(generates(a(moral(right(to(parent(that(should(be(codified(in(law.(i(will( do(this(by(examining(the(viability(of(what(i(take(to(be(the(most(successful( gestational(account(of(parental(rights(on(offer:(anca(gheaus’s(gestational( account((2012).( gheaus’s(account(is(unique((to(my(knowledge)(in(that(it(purports(to( motivate(rights(via(biology(but(without(a(proprietary(claim—without(claiming( that(biological(parents(own(their(children.(this(account(has(it(that(gestation(can( motivate(a(parental(rights(claim(in(the(absence(of(a(claim(of(ownership,(because,( first,(gestation(is(rightsgconferring(labour,(and(second,(because(in(the(course(of( gestation(women(bond(with(their(fetuses.(( i(assume—and(i(will(do(a(bit(of(work(to(motivate(the(claim(that—an( account(of(parental(rights(that(relies(on(ownership(of(the(child(is(not(one(we( ought(to(accept,(all(other(things(equal.(if(gheaus’s(account(can(both(successfully( ground(parental(rights(in(gestation,(and(do(so(without(relying(on(child(ownership,( then,(it(is(to(be(preferred(over(those(accounts(that(ground(parenthood(in( gestation(via(ownership.(so,(if(it(is(successful,(it(is(probably(the(best(gestational( account(of(parental(rights(on(offer.(( however,(i(argue(that(the(account(is(unsuccessful(without(an(ownership( claim,(because(sogcalled(‘maternalgfetal(bonding’(is(not(the(right(sort(of( phenomenon(for(gheaus’s(purposes.(maternalgfetal(bonding(is,(first(and( foremost,(a(popular(notion—a(set(of(folk(beliefs(about(pregnancy(based(loosely( around(sociallygmotivated(empirical(work(in(psychology((on(‘maternalgfetal( attachment’)(stemming,(but(deviating(broadly,(from(midg20thgcentury(theoretical( work(on(‘maternalginfant(attachment’.(it(is(an(idea(that(holds(great(sway(in(our( culture,(but(it(is(not(an(idea(that(stands(up(to(scrutiny.(it(just(is(not(a(real( phenomenon(of(the(right(sort(to(ground(a(rights(claim.(( in(section(1(of(this(paper,(i(review(the(conceptual(landscape(of(parental( rights(as(it(stands.(in(section(2,(i(lay(out(gheaus’s(gestational(account,(and(show( how(it(avoids(the(pitfalls(of(a(proprietary(account.(in(section(3,(i(present(three( initial(worries(about(gheaus’s(account—though(i(will(argue(that(probably(only( the(third(of(these,(the(worry(over(nonggestational(parental(rights,(is(a(real(worry.( 2(see,(for(example,(hfea((1987).( 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 in(section(4,(however,(i(argue(that(‘bonding’(just(can’t(do(what(gheaus(wants(it( to(do;(and(as(such,(her(nongproprietary(gestational(account(is(ultimately( unsuccessful.(given(that(gheaus’s(account(is(probably(the(best(gestational( (indeed,(biological)(account(on(offer,(i(will(suggest(that(this(should(lead(us(to( reject(gestational(accounts(of(parental(rights.(in(the(final(section,(then,(i(will( briefly(sketch(out(a(proposal(for(an(alternate(way(of(conceptualising(parental( rights:(a(deflationary(account(of(parental(rights(that(relies(on(a(general(defeasible( right(to(fulfil(one’s(moral(obligations.(( ( section)1:)parental)rights)background))) the(two(defining(features(of(the(role(parent(are,(first,(that(the(rolegfiller(has( special(responsibilities(towards(the(child,(responsibilities(that(other(members(of( the(child’s(community(do(not(have,(even(if(we(all(have(a(general(nongmalevolent( duty(towards(the(child;(and(second,(that(she(or(he(has(special(entitlements(with( respect(to(the(child.3(specifically,(parents(have(the(right(to(decisiongmake(on( behalf(of(their(child,(and(they(have(the(right(to(do(so(even(in(the(absence(of( parental(perfection.(that(is,(parents(have(the(right(to(act(in(ways(that(are(not(in( the(very(best(interest(of(the(child.(( having(the(right(to(act(in(nongoptimal(ways(with(respect(to(one’s(child( stands(in(need(of(explanation.(children(by(nature(are(vulnerable(and(unable(to( secure(what(is(in(their(own(best(interest,(and(thus,(need(care.(but(it(seems( indisputable(that(children(have(a(pro$tanto(right(to(that(which(is(in(their(own(best( interest:(all(other(things(equal,(children(ought(to(have(what(is(best(for(them.( given(this,(all(other(things(equal,(it(seems(that(the(caretaker(of(a(child(has(a(duty( to(provide(the(child(with(what(is(in(their(best(interest.(and(indeed,(for(this(reason( it(seems(like(those(who(are(best(able(to(provide(the(child(with(what(is(in(its(best( interest(should(parent(the(child.(if(a(parent(is(nongoptimal,(it(seems(then(that(we( ought(to(assign(parenthood(to(someone(else.(( but(again,(it’s(definitional(of(the(role(parent(that(the(rolegfiller(has(an( entitlement(to(decisiongmake(even(in(nongoptimal(ways.(in(the(philosophical( literature(on(parenthood,(the(usual(way(to(describe(this(entitlement(is(to(say(that( parents(have(a(right(to(parent(their(children(so(long(as(they(are(good(enough.( that(is,(so(long(as(the(care(they(provide(to(their(children(meets(a(minimum( threshold(of(respect(to(the(child’s(interests,4(the(decisions(parents(make(do(not( affect(their(parental(rights(even(in(case(of(nongoptimality.(( 3(i(am(conceptualising(parenthood(as(a(moral(role(here.(see,(for(example,( hardimon((1994)(or(porter((2012).( 4(what(we(ought(to(take(to(count(as(good(enough(is(a(relatively(underexplored( question,(but(there(is(general(agreement(that(there(is(some(good(enough,(such(that( 3 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 given(it(is(clear(that(children(have(a(pro(tanto(right(to(have(their(best( interests(catered(to,(then,(we(need(some(explanation(for(why(good(enough(is( good(enough:(we(need(to(know(what(explains(parents’(right(to(be(nongoptimal,( even(in(the(face(of(children’s(best(interest(rights,(since(otherwise(we(would(have( to(say(that(those(best(able(to(cater(to(children’s(best(interests(ought(to(be( allowed(to(decisiongmake(on(their(behalf.(we(need(an(account(of(parental(rights( in(order(for(the(moral(role(of(parent(to(float—in(order(to(justify(parenthood.(so,( there(is(important(theoretical(reason(to(give(an(account(of(parental(rights.(( on(the(practical(side(of(things,(what(we(say(about(parental(rights(matters(a( great(deal(in(a(relatively(small(minority(of(cases.(clearly,(the(rise(in(frequency(of( (often(regulatorilygmessy)(assisted(reproduction(throws(up(new(challenges(to( understanding(who(is(entitled(to(rear(a(given(child(and(why.(there(is(a(startling( lack(of(clarity,(for(example,(surrounding(parentage(and(citizenship(in(cases(of( international(surrogacy.5(furthermore,(in(cases(of(nongassisted(reproduction,( custody(disputes(are(often(settled(via(deciding(a(custody(arrangement(that( simply(maximises(the(bestginterest(of(the(child,(and(without(much(regard(for(the( rights(of(the(individual(parents.(and(while(the(child’s(best(interests(are(probably( paramount,(still(it(seems(clear(enough(that(this(simple(way(of(settling(things(is( driven(more(by(practical(necessity(than(justice:(we(simply(don’t(have(a(clear(way( if(a(parent(is(at(or(above(this(standard,(she(has(the(right(to(parent(her(child.(it(has( been(suggested(to(me(that(one(might(need(to(specify(what(counts(as(‘good(enough’( in(order(to(discuss(parental(rights,(since(we(might(think(that(one(reason(apparently( nongoptimal(parents(have(a(right(to(continue(to(parent(their(children(is(that(it’s(in( practice—or(even(in(principle—impossible(to(rank(parenting:(that(it’s(not(possible(to( say(who(is(a(better(parent(than(whom.(but(if(this(is(right,(then(the(parental(rights( question(is,(in(some(sense,(moot,(since(we(would(not,(on(this(state(of(affairs,(be(able( to(say(that(there(are(any(nongoptimal(parents:(just(that(there(are(apparently(nong optimal(parents.(what(one(wants(out(of(a(theory(of(parental(rights(is(an(account(of( why(parents(have(a(right(to(continue(to(parent(their(children(even(if(they(are(indeed( nongoptimal.(so,(the(discussion(of(the(right(can(proceed(on(the(assumption(that( there(is(some(metric(for(parenting(goodness,(even(if(we(also(have(reason(to(feel(a( certain(epistemological(or(even(conceptual(skepticism(about(this(claim.(if(it(turns( out(that(judging(some(parents(a(bit(better(than(others(doesn’t(even(make(sense,(we( can(still(talk(about(why(parents(have(a(right(that(would(hold(even(if(it(did(make( sense.(if(one(disagrees(that(parents(have(such(rights(in(principle,(then(one(would,( indeed,(need(to(say(more(about(what(counts(as(‘good(enough’.(but(in(this(paper,(i( will(proceed(on(the(assumption(that(parents(have(such(rights(in(principle.(( 5(see,(for(example,(the(hcch((2014)(report:(‘the(desirability(and(feasibility(of( further(work(on(the(parentage(/(surrogacy(project’.( 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 of(making(parental(rights(decisions(in(the(absence(of(gross(parental( incompetence.(an(account(of(how(and(why(a(given(adult(has(a(right(to(rear(a( given(child(in(the(first(instance,(then,(can(help(to(give(a(richer(and(more(accurate( picture(of(what(judges(and(arbiters(ought(to(do(in(these(situations.(even(in(simple( situations(of(parental(separation,(there(is(need(for(the(same(clarity,(if(we(are( concerned(with(respecting(the(rights(of(individuals(and(families.(so,(there(is(good( practical(reason(to(want(a(sound(account(of(parental(rights.(( (standard(accounts(of(parental(rights(tend(to(suppose(some(sort(of( biological(account(of(parenthood.(that(is,(they(tend(to(take(biological(parents(to( be(the(persons(whose(rights(stand(in(need(of(explanation.(the(reason(for(this(is( straightgforward:(in(the(case(of(adoptive(parents,(there(is(an(apparentlygclear( contractual(mechanism(for(explaining(both(duties(and(entitlements,(since((in(the( west(in(contemporary(times)(adoptive(parents(go(through(a(vetting(process,(at( the(end(of(which(a(legal(contract(is(drawn(and(signed(by(parents(and(state.( adoptive(parents(have(the(duties(and(more(importantly(the(entitlements(of( parenthood,(then,(because(those(duties(and(entitlements(have(been(accepted(by( them(by(contract,(and(have(exactly(been(granted(them(by(appropriate(authority.(( biological(parents,(on(the(other(hand,(have(simply(made(a(baby.(in(general,( biological(parents(have(not(been(vetted;(they(have(not(signed(a(contract;(there(is( no(presumption,(as(in(adoption,(that(these(people(in(particular(are(the(child’s( best(chance(of(having(her(best(interests(catered(to.(and(yet,(we(tend(to(think( that(they(have(parental(entitlement(in(the(same(way(that(adoptive(parents(do.( this(seems(to(need(an(explanation(where(adoptivegparental(rights(do(not.6(so,( the(literature(on(grounding(parental(rights(tends(to(focus(on(biological(parents,( and(the(usual(approach,(then,(is(to(give(a(biological(account(of(parental(rights:(to( ground(the(rights(in(the(biological(relatedness.(( the(trouble(with(grounding(the(rights(in(the(biological(relatedness(is(that( biological(accounts(tend(to(collapse(into(proprietary(accounts(of(one(variety(or( other:(they(tend(to(collapse(into(the(claim(that(parents(have(the(right(to(parent( their(children(because(they(own(their(children.(this(collapse(can(be(immediate,( or(mediated.(an(immediate(collapse(occurs(in(the(case(of(straight(genetic( 6(despite(this(explanation,(the(simple(truth(of(it(is(probably(that(the(real( reason(we(focus(on(biological(parents’(rights(is(that(we(tend(to(think(that(biological( parents(are(the(real(parents,(and(as(such,(are(the(ones(with(the(rights.(i(disagree( with(this((see(my((2014),(and(section(5(of(this(paper),(but(i(agree(that(parents(having( rights(in(virtue(of(being(the(biological(progenitors(stands(in(need(of(explanation:(it’s( not(obvious(why(biological(relatedness(should(be(rightsggenerating,(if(it(is;(and(it’s( nongobvious(why(giving(birth(to(a(baby(ought(to(entitle(you(to(keep(it(and(raise(it.( 5 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 accounts(of(parental(obligations.(a(mediated(account(occurs(when(labour(is( appealed(to(in(order(to(drive(the(rights(claim.( a(straight(genetic(account(says(that((genetic)(parents(have(rights(to(and( over(their(child(because(the(child(is(the(product(of(their(genetic(material((e.g.,( hall(1999).(but(the(story(can’t(end(here,(since(‘genetic(materials’(are(in(the(end( just(chemical(sequences.(chemical(sequences(are(not(the(sorts(of(things,(on(their( own,(that(can(be(morally(weighty(enough(to(drive(a(rights(claim.7(so,(in(order(to( ground(parental(rights(in(genes,(one(must(argue(not(just(that(parent(and(child( share(genetic(material,(but(that(the(genetic(material(belongs(to(the(parent,(and( thus,(so(do(the(products(of(it((i.e.(the(offspring(produced(with(it).(( this(is(an(easy(strategy(to(reach(for,(since(it(seems(quite(plausible(that(for( each(of(us,(our(bodies(belong(to(ourselves.(if(our(bodies(belong(to(us,(then(surely( our(genes(belong(to(us,(since(they(are(just(what(make(up(our(bodies.(just(as(we( have(rights(over(our(bodies((over(ourselves),(so(we(have(rights(over(other(stuffs( produced(by(and(from(our(bodies.(so,(on(this(sort(of(account,(we(can(get(easily( from(our(rights(over(ourselves(to(our(parental(rights.(but(this(belongingness(will( need(to(be(of(a(sort(that(can(generate(rights(over(the(object(of(the(belonging.(it(is( difficult(to(see(what(sort(of(belonging(could(do(so,(other(than(ownership.8(( indeed,(when(i(claim(rights(over(my(own(body,(i(do(so(via(the(claim(that(i(own(it:(i( own(my(body,(and(that(is(why(i(have(rights(over(it.(same(will(go,(then,(for(my( genetic(children.(a(straight(genetic(account(of(parental(rights,(then,(collapses( immediately(into(a(proprietary(account.(( 7(the(problem(is(worse(than(this,(since,(for(example,(we(share(the(vast( majority(of(our(genetic(code(with(all(mammals.(the(unique(sameness(between(a( parent(and(her(child(will(be(so(vanishingly(tiny(a(thin(thread(of(code,(it’s(perfectly( implausible(that(this(should,(on(its(own,(matter(morally(in(such(a(significant(way— not(to(mention(the(fact(that(siblings,(for(example,(will(share(more(in(common,( geneticallygspeaking,(than(parentgchild(pairs.(big(brother(might(have(a(greater(claim( to(parenthood(than(dad(does.( 8(it(is(not(too(difficult(to(think(of(senses(of(‘belongs(to’(that(do(not(imply( ownership.(for(example,(i(might(say(that(i(belong(to(a(gym((if(i(did).(and(clearly(i’m( not(claiming(that(the(gym(owns(me.(but(just(as(clearly,(this(sort(of(belonging(isn’t( rightsggenerating(for(the(belongee.(the(gym(does(not(have(any(rights(over(me((save( the(rights(it(always(had,(like(the(right(against(my(stealing(towels,(etc.)(in(virtue(of(my( ‘belonging(to’(it.(on(the(other(hand,(we(can(think(of(lots(of(instances(of(‘belonging( to’(that(do(generate(rights:(this(pencil(belongs(to(me;(this(idea(belongs(to(me;(this( puppy(belongs(to(me.(in(all(of(these(examples,(‘belongs(to’(seems(to(mean(is(owned( by(me.( 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 the(key(strategy(that(is(often(employed(to(avoid(the(proprietary(collapse(is( to(appeal(to(labour:(in(the(style(of(locke,(i(have(rights(over(the(products(of(my( labour.9(on(this(sort(of(account,(parental(rights(aren’t(generated(via(bodilyg(or( selfgownership,(but(rather,(via(the(bodily((and(other)(labour(involved(in( producing(progeny.10(this(sort(of(account(both(solves(the(worry(over(how(genetic( material(can(be(rightsggenerating,(and(avoids(the(immediate(collapse(in(to( proprietarianism.(but(of(course,(while(it(does(not(collapse(immediately(into(a( proprietary(account,(it(certainly(does(collapse.(one(does(not,(on(this(sort(of( account,(have(to(appeal(to(ownership(of(one’s(body,(and(thereby(ownership(of( offspring;(but(one(does(have(to(appeal,(just(as(the(nod(to(locke(implies,(to( ownership(of(the(fruits(of(one’s(labour.(so,(even(though(this(sort(of(account(is( less(directly(a(proprietary(account,(it(is(a(proprietary(account(all(the(same.(its( punchline(is(that(parents(own(their(children,(and(that(parental(rights(follow(from( this.(( i(will(claim—and(i(assume(it(is(fairly(uncontentious—that(a(proprietary( account(of(parenthood(shout(be(avoided.(that(is,(we(don’t(want(to(give(an( account(of(parenthood(that(tells(us(that(parents((or(anyone,(for(that(matter)(own( their(children.(proprietary(accounts(have(a(long(history(in(western(thinking(about( parenthood.(for(example,(aristotle(writes(that(( ( [t]here(is(no(injustice(in(an(unqualified(sense(in(relation(to(what(is(one’s( own,(and(a(chattel,(or(a(child(until(it(is(of(a(certain(age(and(becomes( independent,(is(like(a(part(of(oneself,(and(oneself(–(no(one(decides(to(harm( that.(.(.((as(cited(in(austin(2007,(13)11( ( in(the(contemporary(literature,(authors(like(edgar(page(and(others(have( offered(more(nuanced(proprietary(arguments((e.g.,(page(1984).(and(it(is(easy(to( see(why(proprietary(accounts(would(be(common:(in(the(first(instance,(it(is(just( quite(common(to(think(of(children(as(possessions,(even(if(these(days(fewer( people(are(willing(to(talk(or(think(about(them(in(this(way.(and(further,( theoreticallygspeaking,(ownership(is(a(very(good(way(to(ground(rights(over(a( thing.(but(there(are(many(reasons(why(we(ought(not(accept(such(a(view.(( michael(austin((2007),(for(example,(argues(that(because(babies(are(human( beings,(and(human(beings(cannot(be(owned,(proprietary(accounts(of(parenthood( are(incoherent((12).(such(an(objection(is(problematic(for(all(the(reasons(that( 9(though(note(that(locke(does(not(give(a(labourgbased(account(of(parental( rights.(see(brennan(and(noggle((1997,(11).( 10(see(e.g.(narveson((1988).( 11(taken(from(nicomachean$ethics(book(v,(1134b.( 7 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 speciesist(accounts(of(moral(status(are(problematic—since(babies(aren’t(moral(or( rational(agents,(etc.—but(the(objection(does(point(us(towards(clear(problems( with(baby(ownership(accounts.12(in(particular,(it’s(not(clear(how/why(it(could(be( the(case(that(i(both(own(my(child,(and(that(i(undoubtedly(own(myself.(both( biological(and(labourgbased(proprietary(accounts(need,(for(their(validity,(the( claim(that(i(own(myself;(that(every(person(is(such(that(she(or(he(owns(herself(and( her(body.(biological(accounts(need(it,(since(this(is(how(we(get(to(the(claim(that(i( own(my(gametes;(and(labour(accounts(need(it,(since(this(is(how(we(ground(the( claim(that(i(own(my(labour.(but,(if(it’s(foundational(that(i(own(myself,(how(can(it( be(that(someone(else((namely,(me)(owns(my(child?(doesn’t(she(own(herself?(we( might(tell(some(story(or(other(about(ownership(being(transferred(from(parent(s)( to(child(at(some(age(or(level(of(maturity,(but(we(would(need(to(tell(a(story,( indeed:(we(would(need(to(explain(how,(why(and(when(ownership(is(so( transferred.(13(does(it(happen(automatically,(or(must(parents(surrender( ownership?(can(parents(refuse(such(surrender?(if(so,(then(how(is(it(undoubted( that(even(every(adult(owns(herself?(mightn’t(some(adults(still(be(owned(by(their( parents?(if(parents(cannot(refuse(surrender,(then(how(does(this(sort(of( ownership—a(sort(that(must(be(relinquished,(willingly(or(unwillingly,(after(a( certain(period—relate(to(other(sorts(of(ownership?(and(why(should(we(think(it( rightsggenerating(in(the(way(that(other(sorts(of(ownership(are?(and(so(on.(( it(might(be(the(case(that(we(could(devise(a(crafty(and(nuanced(account(of( how(it(can(be(that(every(adult(owns(herself,(while(children(are(owned(by( someone(else,(but(it’s(not(clear(why(we(would(want(to(try.(it(would(not(be(a( simple(way(to(explain(parental(rights,(and,(once(we(sort(out(all(the(details,( neither(would(it(be(intuitive.(most(importantly,(there(is(simply(something( unsavoury(about(the(claim(that(parents(own(their(children.(as(samantha(brennan( and(robert(noggle((1997)(put(it,(‘[c]ounting(a(person(as(the(property(of(another( is(clearly(inconsistent(with(granting(her(equal(moral(consideration’(11).(what(it( seems(that(we(want(is(an(account(of(parental(rights(that(can(explain(why(good( enough(is(good(enough—that(is,(why(parents(have(the(right(to(rear(and(to( decisiongmake(on(behalf(of(their(children(even(if(someone(else(would(do(it( better—without(appealing(to(ownership.(( in(the(next(section,(i(will(present(anca(gheaus’s(nongproprietary(gestational( account(of(parental(rights.(gheaus(takes(her(account(to(ground(parental(rights(in( the(labour(of(gestation,(and(to(do(so(successfully(without(appealing(to( ownership.(if(it(works,(then,(it(is(just(what(we(want:(an(account(of(parental(rights( 12(see(singer((2006).( 13(and(indeed,(i(think(this(sort(of(story(will(be(very(acceptable(to(some(more( conservative(types.(( 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 that(explains(why(good(enough(is(good(enough,(using(a(clear(explanatory( mechanism(and(grounding,(that(gets(us(validly(from(the(facts(about(biological( parenthood(to(parental(rights.(( in(section(3,(i(will(canvass(three(initial(objections(one(might(raise(to( gheaus’s(account,(and(argue(that(two(of(them,(anyway,(can(be(done(away(with.( but(in(section(4,(i(will(argue(that(all(the(same(the(account(does(not(work.(because( the(account(hinges(crucially(on(an(empirical(claim—the(claim(that(pregnant( women(‘bond’(with(their(fetuses,(and(that(this(bonding(is(an(interpersonal( relationship—that(turns(out(to(be(problematic(at(best,(we(cannot(get(from(the( labour(of(gestation(to(parental(rights(in(the(way(gheaus(proposes;(it(just(doesn’t( work.(( ( section)2:)gheaus’s)nondproprietary)gestational)account) gheaus(argues(that(gestation(generates(parental(rights.(she(writes:(( ( given(that(babies(come(into(the(world(through(a(gradual,(sometimes( complicated,(approximately(ninegmonth(long(gestation(in(their(mothers’( bodies,(by(the(time(of(the(birth(the(birth(parents(will(have(already( shouldered(various(burdens(necessary(to(bring(the(child(into(existence.( (2012,(436)( ( she(points(out(that(the(physical(burdens(of(pregnancy(carry(high(cost(for( the(expectant(mother,(and(have(a(significant(effect(on(many(women’s(ability(to( ‘carry(on(with(life(as(usual’((447).(pregnant(women(often(endure(fatigue,(aches( and(pains,(nausea(and(so(on(and(for(some,(much(worse(than(this.(these(aches,( pains(and(other(troubles(interfere(with(their(ability(to(perform(tasks,(carry(on( with(paid(employment(as(usual,(and(maintain(interpersonal(relationships.(she( writes(that( (( some(of(the(most(important(burdens(of(pregnancy(result(from(the(extent( and(pace(of(change,(undergone(by(all(pregnant(women,(which(often( contributes(to(a(distinctive(sense(of(losing(control(over(one’s(life(and( diminished(ability(to(pursue(other(projects(and(interests(during(pregnancy( as(well(as(during(recovery(from(childbirth.((447)(( ( furthermore,(many(women(also(pay(behavioural(costs(during(pregnancy—such( as(limits(to(what(they(can(eat(and(drink—and(social(ones(like(patronising( behaviour(from(strangers.(( all(of(these(effects(of(pregnancy,(gheaus(argues,(should(be(understood(as( costs(borne(in(anticipation,(and(borne(precisely(because(of(anticipation,(that(the( 9 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 outcome(will(be(a(child(to(parent.(because(of(this,(she(argues(that(gestational( mothers(have(a(right(to(parent.(so(in(other(words,(because(pregnant(women( expend(labour(and(endure(hardship(towards(the(cause(of(bringing(a(child(into( existence(and(towards(the(aim(of(parenting(a(child,(they(thereby(have(a(right(to( do(so.(gheaus(does(not(argue(that(this(right(is(inalienable.(where(serious( concerns(over(the(child’s(wellbeing(would(be(warranted(were(the(child(left(with( the(birth(parent,(the(child’s(interests(can(swamp(that(of(the(birth(mother.( however,(where(the(birth(mother(is(a(good(enough(parent(to(meet(a(baseline(of( good(care,(she(has(a(right(to(do(so(in(virtue(of(gestation.(( but(this(account,(as(gheaus(rightly(acknowledges,(does(not(give(birth( mothers(a(right(to(parent(any(particular(baby.(rather,(it(seems(only(able(to(give( the(birth(mother(the(right(to(parent(a(baby.(this(right(then(would(be(consistent( with((for(example)(a(babygswapping(scheme,(whereby(all(gestators(who(have(a( right(to(parent(have(an(equal(chance(at(raising((say)(a(healthy(child;(or(a(clever( child;(or(etc.(( on(a(classical(sort(of(a(gestational(account,(this(gap(between(having(a(right( to(parent,(and(having(a(right(to(parent(one’s(own(biological(child(would(be(filled( by(ownership:(mum(owns(her(own(baby;(she(has(a(right(not(just(to(parent(a(child,( but(to(parent(her(child.(but(of(course,(as(was(said,(there(is(something(unsavoury( about(the(claim(that(babies(can(be(owned;(that(they(can(be(property.(( gheaus(agrees(that(this(is(the(wrong(account—she(assumes(that(the(idea(of( child(ownership(is(‘outgdated’—and(relies(instead(on(bonding(between(woman( and(fetus(in(the(course(of(gestation.(she(writes(that(‘during(pregnancy(many— perhaps(most—expectant(parents(form(a(poignantly(embodied,(but(also( emotional,(intimate(relationship(with(their(fetus’((gheaus(2012,(446).(because( women(bond(with(their(fetuses(in(the(course(of(gestating(them,(gheaus(argues,( they(have(a(right(to(parent(the(baby(with(which(they(have(bonded.(during(the( course(of(pregnancy,(she(argues,(women(form(a(‘highly(emotional’(relationship— ‘a(bond(that(is(both(physical(and(imaginative’—with(their(babies(that(is(‘already( quite(developed(at(birth’((449).(it(is(this(relationship,(then,(that(generates(a(right( on(the(part(of(the(gestational(mother(to(rear(her(birth(child.(she(writes(that(( ( bonding(during(pregnancy(provides(a(very(solid(reason(for(thinking(that( redistributing(babies(would(likely(destroy(already(existing(intimate( relationships(between(newborns(and(their(bearing(parents.(the(fact(that( the(relationship(with(one’s(future(child(starts(during(pregnancy(provides( the(missing(step(in(the(justification(of(a(fundamental(parental(right(to(keep( and(raise(one’s(birth(baby(and(the(answer(to(the(question(of(how(to( determine(fundamental(moral(rights(to(parent(particular(babies.((450)( ( 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 so(in(other(words,(because(a(‘bond’(forms(between(the(gestating(woman( and(the(fetus(prior(to(birth,(taking(newborns(away(from(their(birth(parents(at( birth(is(no(different(from(taking(children(away(from(their(social(parents:(it(is(a( disruption(of(a(meaningful(relationship,(against(which(the(birth(parents(have(a( right((on(the(assumption(that(their(parenting(is(good(enough).(furthermore,( gestational(‘bonding’(generates(‘additional,(childgcentred(justification’(for(the( recognition(of(such(a(right,(since(not(only(does(the(gestating(woman(bond(with( the(fetus,(but(the(fetus(also(bonds(with(the(woman:(can(recognise(her(voice(and( heartbeat,(for(example.(so,(taking(birth(mother(away(would(harm(baby(just(as(it( would(harm(mother.(((( gheaus’s(account,(then,(seems(to(motivate(biological(parental(rights( without(collapsing(into(a(proprietary(account.(since(the(right(to(parent(one’s( biological(baby,(on(this(account,(is(motivated(by(a(relationship(with(the(fetus,( coupled(with(a(right(to(enjoy(the(good(of(parenting(in(virtue(of(having(laboured( for(it,(it(seems(to(use(biology(and(labour(to(ground(the(rights(directly.(in(the(next( section,(i(will(canvass(three(initial(worries(about(this(account,(and(argue(that( gheaus(can(answer(at(least(two(if(not(all(three(of(these(worries.(however,(in( section(4,(i(will(argue(that(the(account(is(ultimately(unsuccessful,(because( ‘bonding’(simply(can’t(do(what(gheaus(needs(it(to(do.(in(section(5,(i(will(offer(a( brief(sketch(of(what(i(think(is(a(more(promising(avenue(for(grounding(parental( rights.( ( section)3:)apparent)problems)with)the)account) in(this(section,(i’ll(discuss(three(possible(worries(about(gheaus’s(account(of( parental(rights:(nonggenetic(gestation,(nongparental(gestation,(and(nong gestational(parents.(i(will(argue(that(the(first(worry(is,(in(part,(a(semantic( confusion.(the(second(two(worries,(i(argue,(can(be(resolved(by(rejecting( intuitions(we(have(about(them,(but(that((especially(in(the(case(of(nonggestational( parents)(it(is(unclear(whether(we(ought(to(do(so.( ( nondgenetic)gestation) one(might(have(the(following(worry:(gheaus’s(account(does(not(work( because,(in(cases(where(a(woman(gestates(a(fetus(that(was(not(conceived(using( her(own(gamete,(she(thereby(has(parental(rights(where(the(biological(mother( does(not.14(imagine(a(case(in(which(two(women(undergo(ivf(at(the(same(clinic( and(their(eggs(are(accidentally(switched,(such(that(woman(a(gestates(a(fetus( created(using(woman(b’s(ovum,(and(vicegversa.(in(this(case,(according(to( 14(the(basic(shape(of(this(worry(is(taken(from(comments(by(s.(matthew(liao( (2014).(( 11 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 gheaus’s(account,(woman(a(would(have(parental(rights(over(b’s(genetic( offspring,(and(woman(b(would(have(parental(rights(over(a’s(genetic(offspring.( this(seems(to(show(that(gheaus’s(account(cannot(properly(motivate(a(right(to( parent(one’s(biological(child,(since(it’s(clear(in(this(case(that(a(would(not(have(a( right(to(parent(her(biological(child((and(nor(b).(( but(of(course,(there(is(biology(and(there(is(biology.(gestation,(after(all,(is(a( biological(process(that(helps(to(bring(about(a(child(where(once(there(was(a( bundle(of(cells.(so,(it’s(not(clear(why(we(ought(not(take(the(nonggenetic(gestator( to(be(a(biological(mother((on(the(assumption(that(she(is,(at(least,(a(mother).( indeed,(it(seems(clear(to(me(that(we(should.(she(bears(a(unique(biological( relationship(to(the(child,(and(one(that(we(typically(take(to(be(definitional(of( biological(motherhood,(setting(genes(aside.(the(birth(mother(is(a(biological( mother.(she(is(not,(however,(a(genetic(mother.(and,(according(to(this(worry,( genetics(are(what(matters.(genetic(parenthood(is(rightful(parenthood;(biological( parenthood(is(just(genetic(parenthood,(according(to(this(line(of(thinking.(as(such,( gheaus’s(account(simply(does(not(explain(the(biological(parent’s(right(to(parent( her(child.(( i(suspect(that(gheaus’s(reply(to(this(worry(would(be(something(like(‘so( what?’(attributing(parental(rights(to(the(genetic(parent(fits(with(our(intuitions( about(biological(parenthood—but(so(does(attributing(them(to(gestational( parents.(indeed,(most(of(us(probably(do(not(have(intuitions(fineggrained(enough( to(sort(these(two(out,(since(the(vast(majority(of(‘biological(mothers’(we(will(come( across(in(life(are(both(genetic(and(gestational(mothers.(there’s(no(clear(reason,( in(the(first(instance,(to(go(with(genes(instead(of(gestation.(( on(reflection,(however,(the(gestational(account(just(works(better.(as(was( said(in(section(1,(it(is(unclear(how(genes,(on(their(own,(could(be(rightsg generating.(genes(are(just(chemical(sequences;(physical(stuff.(having(physical( stuff(in(common(seems(an(unlikely(way(to(acquire(rights(over(someone.( gestation,(on(the(other(hand,(is(doing(something.(there(are(lots(of(examples(in( life(of(acquiring(rights(by(doing(something.(if(i(pay(money(to(the(shopkeeper(for(a( bag(of(carrots,(i(have(a(right(that(she(give(me(the(carrots(for(which(i(paid(the( money;(if(i(write(a(masterpiece,(i(have(a(right(to(a(share(of(the(profits(when(it’s( sold;(and(so(on.(so,(it(doesn’t(seem(at(all(clear(that(there(is(any(reason(to( suppose(that(genetics(are(the(primary(element(of(biological(parenthood,(and(it( seems(there(is(reason(to(suppose(gestation(might(be.(the(worry(over(nonggenetic( parenthood,(then,(seems(little(obstacle(to(gheaus’s(account.(( ( nondparental)gestation) a(related(worry(is(the(worry(over(nongparental(gestators:(that(is,(gestators( who(we(intuitively(do(not(think(of(as(parents.(in(the(previous(worry,(we( 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 considered(a(woman(who(gestates(a(fetus((that(is(not(genetically(related(to(her( with(the(intention(of(parenting(it.(i(argued(that(there(is(no(prima(facie(reason( why(we(ought(to(suppose(that(the(genetic(progenitor(is(the(rightful(parent(in(this( case.(and(it(is(indeed(relatively(easy(to(feel(at(least(unsure(what(to(say(about(a( parent(in(such(a(situation.(but(in(the(case(of(surrogacy,(many(of(us,(anyway,(will( have(strong(intuitive(reason(to(think(in(a(way(that(seems(to(fly(in(the(face(of( gheaus’s(proposal.(in(surrogacy,(a(woman(gestates(a(child(for(another(parent— for(the(sake(of(someone(else(parenting(the(child.(and(given(the(pregnancy(only( comes(about(because(the(‘someone(else’(wants(to(parent(a(child,(and((in(many( surrogacy(arrangements)(because(the(‘someone(else’(is(actually(paying(the( gestator(for(her(services,(it(seems(like(we(want(to(say(that(the(gestator(does(not( have(a(right(to(parent(the(child;(or(anyway,(that(it(is(nothing(like(a(throwgaway( claim(to(say(that(she(does.(( that(said,(it(seems(to(me(that(gheaus’s(account(can(accommodate(the( intuition(that(surrogates(do(not(have(parental(rights((or(anyway,(that(they( mightn’t).(her(account,(again,(relies(on(labour(and(bonding.(labour(gives(one(a( right(to(parent(a(child,(while(bonding(gives(one(a(right(to(parent(this(child.(in(the( case(of(the(surrogate,(the(labour(is(often(compensated:(surrogates(are(often( paid.(in(the(uk(this(payment(is,(in(theory((and(in(law),(restricted(to(compensation( for(‘costs’.(in(the(us,(surrogates(are(outright(paid,(as(if(in(employment.(when( surrogacy(is(simply(restricted(to(compensation(for(‘costs’,(it(may(be(the(case(that( the(‘cost’(is(rather(a(lot,(if(gheaus(is(right(that(gestation(comes(with(high(physical( and(emotional(costs.(in(this(case,(it(may(be(that(surrogates(ought(to(be( compensated(for(a(lot,(and(that(if(they(are(not,(residual(entitlement(might( remain.(but(it(might(also(be(the(case(that(many(of(the(costs(borne(by(typical( gestators((i.e.(parental(gestators)(are(not(borne(by(surrogates.(surrogates,(for( example,(probably(do(not(take(on(the(emotional(weight(of(adjusting(to(life( changes,(since(for(them(the(change(is(only,(presumably,(temporary.15(either(way,( in(the(absence(of(ownership,(and(in(the(absence(of(the(aim(of(parenting(the(child,( it(seems(that(the(labour(of(surrogate(gestation(can(be(compensated(in(such(a( way(that(it(will(not(generate(parental(rights.(( as(regards(the(bonding,(gheaus(might(plausibly(argue(that(surrogates( simply(do(not(bond(with(the(fetus(in(the(same(way(that(intending(mothers(do.16( in(this(case,(even(if(the(labour(cannot(be(compensated(such(that(no(right(to( 15(i(say(‘presumably’(because(it(may(be(the(case(that(pregnancy(changes(a( person(even(if(it(is(a(surrogacy.(but(in(that(case,(we(might(need(to(rethink(the( intuition(that(parental(rights(ought(not(be(attributed(to(surrogates.(( 16(again,(i(will(say(more(about(maternalgfetal(bonding(in(the(next(section.(( 13 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 parent(arises,(still(no(right(to(parent(this(baby(would(arise.17(so,(it(seems(that( gheaus’s(account(can(accommodate(the(intuition(that(gestational(surrogates(do( not(have(parental(rights(over(the(fetuses/infants(they(gestate,(since(the(cost(of( the(pregnancy(to(them(is(presumably(less(than(that(for(the(parental(gestator;(the( costs(can(be(compensated;(and(the(surrogate(does(not((or(may(not)(bond(with( the(infant(in(the(way(that(the(intending(mother(would(do.18( ( nondgestational)parents)(parental)parity)) the(third(initial(worry(one(might(have(about(gheaus’s(account(is(that(it(is,( quite(obviously,(bettergsuited(to(grounding(the(rights(of(mothers(than(those(of( fathers.((and(indeed,(it(is(less(wellgsuited(to(grounding(the(rights(of(nong gestational(parents,(full(stop.19)(if(the(labour(and(bonding(that(take(place(in(the( 17(one(might(recall(that(gheaus(thinks(that(both(the(gestator’s(attachment(to( the(fetus(and(the(fetus’s(attachment(to(the(gestator(are(salient.(if(this(is(right,(we( might(still(worry(about(surrogacy.(however,(i(take(it(that(the(fetus’s(attachment(is,( in(some(sense,(incidental(to(the(parental(right.(that(is,(it(is(the(parent’s(attachment( that(matters(to(parental(rights.(the(fetus’s(attachment(is,(with(respect(to(parental( rights,(merely(a(happy(bonus.(( 18(gheaus(briefly(discusses(surrogacy,(writing(that(‘if(having(borne(a(baby(is(a( ground(for(a(right(to(keep(that(baby,(the(important(question(for(surrogacy(is( whether(this(right(is(alienable(and(under(what(conditions.(is(it(possible(to(wave( one’s(right(to(keep(one’s(birth(baby(before(one(knows(exactly(what(burdens(the( pregnancy(will(entail,(and(what(kind(of(relationship(one(will(establish(with(the(new( born?(in(other(words,(can(a(surrogacy(contract(pregempt(the(rights(of(the(gestating( mother(or(couple?(i(remain,(in(this(article,(agnostic(about(this’((454).(but(this,(of( course,(is(the(same(sort(of(question(that(arises(with(pregarranged(adoptions((though( of(course,(most(western(nations(now(have(laws(that(preclude(the(enforcement(of( adoption(contracts(where(the(birth(mother(has(changed(her(mind);(in(thinking(about( surrogacy(this(way,(gheaus(is(just(imagining(surrogacy(as(a(sort(of(adoption.(but(i(do( not(think(there(is(anything(about(gheaus’s(basic(account(that(commits(us(to( accepting(an(adoption(account(of(surrogacy.(( 19(i(am(hesitant(about(how(i(ought(to(handle(the(heteronormativity(of(this( objection(as(it(usually(occurs(in(the(literature.(on(the(one(hand,(heteronormativity( seems(a(bad(sort(of(normativity(to(perpetuate.(on(the(other(hand,(it(is(only(within( the(context(of(a(biological(account(of(parental(rights(that(the(worry(over(parity( arises(in(a(truly(pernicious(form:(it(is(only(when(our(goal(is(to(secure(the(rights(of( biological(parents(that(the(parity(principle(becomes(a(sticking(point.(an(alternate( strategy(for(giving(an(account(that(attributes(rights(to(nonggestational(parents(is(to( simply(claim(that,(for(want(of(a(better(way(to(put(it,(biology(isn’t(where(it’s(at.(my( 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 course(of(pregnancy(are(what(ground(parental(rights,(then(it(seems,(at(first( glance,(that(fathers(mustn’t(be(parents;(or(anyway,(that(they(mustn’t(have( parental(rights.(if(this(is(right,(then(it(seems(as(though(gheaus’s(account(is(only( half(of(an(account(of(parental(rights.(again,(what(we(want(out(of(an(account(is(an( account(that(tells(us(why(good(enough(is(good(enough,(in(the(case(of(biological( parents.(if(we(can’t(explain(why(this(is(so(for(both(mothers(and(fathers,(then(it( seems(we(are(left(saying(that(mothers(have(a(right(to(parent(their(biological( children(so(long(as(they(are(good(enough,(but(that(subgoptimal(fathers(may( rightfully(have(their(children(snatched(away.(( this(is(not(a(view(many(of(us(would(want(to(endorse.(i(take(it(that(the( prevailing(assumption,(these(days(anyway,(is(that(mothers(and(fathers(are( equally(parents;(and(that(our(theory(of(parenthood(ought(to(reflect(this(equality.( kolers(and(bayne(take(this(assumption(as(a(key(principle(in(parental(ethics,(and( call(it(the(parity(principle.(according(to(the(parity(principle,(‘being(a(mother( doesn’t(make(a(person(more(of(a(parent(than(being(a(father,(or(vice(versa((kolers( and(bayne(2001,(280).((what(we(want,(all(other(things(equal,(is(an(account(that( explains(why(both(mothers(and(fathers(are(parents.(so,(with(respect(to(the(parity( principle,(an(account(like(gheaus’s(does(not(look(like(one(that(we(ought(to( accept.((( that(said,(we(needn’t(give(a(unified(account(of(parenthood(in(order(to(give( an(account(of(parental(rights(that(adheres(to(the(parity(principle.(that(is,(it’s(at( least(conceptually(possible(that(what(accounts(for(mothers’(rights(is(not(what( accounts(for(fathers’(rights,(though(both(mothers(and(fathers(have(rights,(and( have(them(equally.(this(sort(of(separategbutgequal(approach(is(just(the(approach( gheaus(takes(to(saving(her(account(from(the(parity(worry.(she(writes(that( ( while(they(cannot(share(all([the](costs([of(pregnancy],(involved(partners( typically(can(and(do(share(many(of(them.(they(often(are(the(main(source(of( emotional,(practical(and(financial(support(of(their(pregnant(partner:(they( can(accompany(her(on(medical(visits(and(support(her(during(childbirth,( share(and(try(to(soothe(her(worries,(relieve(her(of(some(of(her(regular( work(and(serve(as(an(oftengneeded(interface(between(her(and(the( insufficiently(accommodating(outer(world.((2012,(448)( ( own(view(is(that(it(isn’t,(but(defending(that(view(is(out(of(the(scope(of(this(paper.( (see(my((2014).)(all(that(said,(we(ought(still(to(think(in(terms(of(gestational(and(nong gestational(parents—rather(than(mothers(and(fathers—since(in(principle(a(female( parent(might(easily(be(nonggestational(and(biological((the(genetic(progenitor)(and( someone(who(we(pregtheoretically(think(ought(to(count(as(a(rightful(parent.(( 15 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 and(later,(that( ( pregnant(women’s(supporting(partners(are(capable(of(being(direct( participants(in(the(process(of(creating(a(relationship(with(the(baby(during( pregnancy.(with(the(help(of(medical(technology(they(can(see(the(fetus(and( hear(its(heartbeat(as(early(as(the(bearing(mother;(during(the(last(stages(of( pregnancy(they(can(feel(the(baby,(talk(to(it(and(be(heard(by(it.(just(like(the( mother,(they(can(experience(the(fears,(hopes(and(fantasies(triggered(by( the(growing(fetus.((450)( ( so,(the(idea(is(that,(because(the(nonggestational(parent(contributes(to(the( labour(of(gestation,(and(bonds(with(the(fetus((though(in(ways(different(to(the( gestator),(he((or(she)(too(can(thereby(acquire(parental(rights,(even(though(he( (she)(does(not(actually(gestate(the(baby.(the(account,(then,(appears(to(get( around(the(parity(worry.(( but(on(closer(inspection,(it(does(so(only(at(the(expense(of(intuitive( plausibility,(since(cogparent(and(pregnancy(partner(need(not(and(often(do(not( coincide.(in(an(idealized((modern,(western)(procreative(situation(it(might(be(the( case(that(the(nonggestational(parent(is(the(primary(coglabourer(and(cogbonder( during(pregnancy;(but(surely(in(reality(this(is(not(always(so,(and(probably(it(is(not( often(so,(taking(all(pregnancies(in(all(cultures,(classes(and(circumstances(into( account.(indeed,(it(might(very(well(be(the(case(that,(even(amongst(modern,( western(middlegclass(heterosexual(procreators,(people(other(than(the(biological( father(routinely(play(a(bigger(role(in(supporting(the(pregnant(woman(than(does( the(father:(the(pregnant(woman’s(mother(or(sister(or(friends(will(very(often(be( the(primary(source(of(emotional(and(practical(support(to(her(during(her( pregnancy.(it(would(seem,(then,(that(if(labouring(and(bonding(by(proxy(are( sufficient(to(generate(parental(rights,(then(granny(and(auntie(and(so(on(have( parental(rights,(too.(( one(way(to(respond(to(this(worry(would(be(to,(first,(bite(the(bullet(on( granny(and(auntie—accept(the(consequence(that(they(too(may(have(parental( rights(if(their(labour(contributes(significantly(to(the(production(of(the(child—and( second,(to(claim(that(only(fathers(who(do(contribute(significantly(to(the(labour( thereby(acquire(parental(rights.(but(this(response(both(fails(to(cohere(with( intuition((supportive(aunties(are(aunties,(not(parents)(and(fails(to(dissolve(the( parity(worry,(since(if(this(is(right,(then(good(enough(is(after(all(not(good(enough( for(dads:(we(will(be(left(with(an(account(on(which(gestators(have(parental(rights( in(virtue(of(gestating,(no(matter(how(they(do(it,(whereas(nonggestational(parents( only(have(parental(rights(if(they(are(good(nonggestational(parents.(( 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 if(what(we(want(out(of(a(theory(of(parental(rights(is(a(grounding(for(the( rights(of(biological(parents(to(parent(their(children,(then(it(seems(gheaus’s( account(will(not(do(the(trick,(since(it(fails(to(ground(such(rights(for(the(nong gestational(biological(parent.(it(is,(of(course,(open(to(gheaus(to(bite(the(bullet(on( parental(parity:(to(reject(the(claim(that(mothers(and(fathers((or(gestational(and( nonggestational(parents)(are(equally(parents;(and(i(have(not(given(a(robust( argument(to(the(contrary.(for(this(reason,(the(nonggestational(parent(objection(is( by(no(means(a(knockgdown(objection(to(gheaus’s(account.(however,(first,( gheaus’s(account(isn’t(really(an(account(of(the(rights(of(biological(parents,(tout( court,(in(this(case.(and(further,(it(seems(to(me(that(the(parity(principle(is,(even( without(argument,(obviously(a(good(starting(point(in(crafting(an(account(of( parenthood:(it’s(the(sort(of(claim(that,(unless(there(is(compelling(theoretical( soundness(to(be(had(by(rejecting(it—or(compelling(argument(that,(despite(the( intuitions(we(have,(the(principle(is(a(bad(one—we(ought(to(accept.(( my(argument(is(that(there(is(no(such(theoretical(soundness(to(be(had(from( gheaus’s(account,(since,(even(if(we(bite(the(bullet(on(parental(parity,(the(account( still(does(not(work(as(an(account(of(the(rights(of(gestational(parents.(in(the(next( section,(i(will(argue(that(the(real(problem(for(gheaus’s(account(is(with(bonding.( the(claim(that(pregnant(women(bond(with(their(fetuses(in(a(morallygsalient,( rightsggenerating(way(simply(does(not(stand(up(to(scrutiny.(given(this,(the( account(does(not(work(for(mothers(any(better(than(it(does(for(fathers.((((( ( section)4:)maternaldfetal)bonding) gheaus’s(argument(relies(on(two(features(of(gestation:(labour(and(bonding.( labour,(according(to(the(account,(generates(a(right(to(the(goods(of(parenthood,( since(the(labour(is(sufficiently(significant(to(justify(compensation;(and(since(the( labour(is(undertaken(towards(the(aim(of(enjoying(the(goods(of(parenthood.(but( the(entitlements(that(can(be(derived(from(labour(cannot(generate(a(right(to( parent(one’s(biological(child(in(particular—cannot(generate(a(right(against(baby( redistribution—and(thus(cannot(explain(why(good(enough(parenting(is(good( enough.(for(this,(gheaus’s(account(relies(on(bonding(in(pregnancy.(( because,(gheaus(writes,(the(bonding(that(happens(between(woman(and( fetus(during(pregnancy(constitutes(a(‘highly(emotional’(relationship,(and(‘a(bond( that(is(both(physical(and(imaginative’,(that(is(‘already(quite(developed(at(birth’,( gestational(parents(have(the(right(to(retain(the(meaningful(relationship(with(their( baby(that(is(already(underway(at(birth((2012,(449).(thus,(they(have(a(right(to( parent(their(biological(child,(and(as(such,(baby(redistribution(would(violate(their( rights,(and(so(good(enough(is(good(enough.(( the(problem(with(this(step(is(that(maternalgfetal(‘bonding’(simply(doesn’t( hold(water(as(a(concept.(though(it(holds(strong(sway(in(the(popular(imagination,( 17 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 the(claim(that(pregnant(women(bond(with(their(fetuses(is(simply(a(popgclaim.(it( has(no(good(basis(in(science,(and(appears,(indeed,(to(be(primarily(normative(in( nature:(it(is(a(concept(that(serves(primarily(to(police(women’s(feelings(about( maternity,(rather(than(to(describe(healthy(fetal(development(or(indeed(to( describe(a(real(and(medically(or(socially(salient(relationship.(not(to(put(too(fine(a( point(on(it:(maternalgfetal(bonding(is(sexist(junk(science.(it’s(not(a(real(thing(that( could(generate(a(real(and(enforceable(right.(( ((((maternalgfetal(bonding(is(a(popular(notion(that(grew(out(of(research( (primarily(in(psychology(and(nursing)(into(‘maternalgfetal(attachment’((mfa).( mfa(was(proposed(as(an(extension(of(the(1950’s(developmental(theory(of( maternalginfant(attachment((miat).(20(according(to(miat,(infants(have(an( evolutionarily(selected(drive(to(both(cling(to(caregivers,(and(to(stimulate( caregiving(from(their(primary(carers.(further,(miat(hypothesized(that(the(extent( to(which(infants(exhibited(this(clinggandgsolicit(behaviour(was(a(good(indicator(of( healthy(infant(development:(infants(who(were(properly(‘attached’(were(likely(to( grow(up(to(be(wellgadjusted(adults.(brandon(et(al.((2009)(write(that( ( [john(bowlby,(the(originator(of(attachment(theory](conceptualized(human( attachment(as(a(system(of(evolutionary(behaviors(beginning(at(birth(and( persisting(through(adulthood,(motivated(by(or(toward(fear,(affection,( exploration,(and(caregiving...(regulation(of(the(dyadic(attachment( interactions(of(mother(and(infant,(bowlby(reasoned,(was(solely(biological;( he(posited(that(the(infant’s(primary(goal(was(to(maintain(a(certain(degree( of(physical(proximity(to(the(mother(for(survival.(bowlby(later(added(to(his( stance(that(attachment(would(include(psychological(goals(on(the(part(of( the(developing(child(and(mother.((.(.(.(attachment,(as(bowlby(understood( it,(was(a(reciprocal(behavioral(process(initiated(by(the(neonate(to(ensure( survival.((201)( ( measures(of(attachment,(on(this(picture,(are(both(measures(of(proper( biological(functioning(on(the(part(of(the(infant((infant(has(the(right(innate(drive( towards(attachment)(and(measures(of(biologicallyggood(parenting((mother(is( stimulated(appropriately(by(infant(cues,(thus(perpetuating(an(attachment( feedback(loop).(the(classic(measure(of(mia(is(the(strange(situation(test,(in(which( infants(are(placed(in((nongthreatening,(but)(strange(situations(on(their(own,(and( then(observed(when(they(are(reunited(with(their(mothers.(a(child(who(quickly( 20(see,(for(example,(bowlby((1958).( 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 and(unreservedly(goes(to(mother(and(clings(to(her(exhibits(what(is(taken(to(be(a( healthy(attachment.21( contrast(this(with(mfa,(which(is(pretty(straightgforwardly(a(measure(of( ‘appropriate’(parental(attitude(alone.(mfa(is(measured(through(selfgreport.( pregnant(women(are(given(a(questionnaire(asking(them(to(rate(the(strength(with( which(they(agree(or(disagree(with(statements(such(as((a)(i(have(the(room(all( ready(for(the(baby’s(arrival(and((b)(there(will(be(time(enough(after(the(birth(to( get(clothes(and(things(for(the(baby.(agreeing(strongly(with(statements(like((a)(will( get(you(a(strong,(good(attachment(score;(whereas(agreeing(strongly(with( statements(like((b)(will(get(you(a(strong,(bad(attachment(score.22(so(in(other( words,(pregnant(women(who(exhibit(the(sorts(of(attitudes(to(their(fetuses(that( we(think(‘good’(get(a(good(score.(( mfa(has(been(shown(to(correlate(‘modestly’(with(later(mia((muller(1996);( but—and(this(seems(key—only(when(the(classic(model(of(mia(investigation( (observation(of(motherginfant(interaction,(importantly(via(strange(situation)(is( replaced(with(maternal(attitudinal(selfgreport.23((in(other(words,(maternalgfetal( attachment(is(quantifiably(related(to(maternalginfant(attachment(only(when( maternal(attitudes,(and(not(motherginfant(interactions(are(measured.(so,(the( right(feelings(on(the(part(of(the(pregnant(woman(are(predictive(of(the(right( feelings(on(the(part(of(the(new(mother((and(only(modestly(so);(they(are(not( significantly(related(to(the(quality(of(the(actual(relationship(between(new(mother( and(baby.(this(is(no(surprise,(since(mfa(is(a(set(of(attitudes;(not(a(relationship(in( the(way(that(mia(is.(brandon(et(al.((2009)(write(that(( ( 21(from(brandon(et(al:(‘the(strange(situation(is(a(20gminute(procedure( composed(of(eight(episodes(of(motherginfant(separation(and(reunion.(infant( behaviors(are(evaluated(to(examine(attachment(and(exploratory(behaviors(under( conditions(of(high(and(low(stress,(resulting(in(the(classification(of(one(of(three( attachment(styles:(a,(b,(or(c((ainsworth(et(al.,(1978).(later(studies(have(given(these( categories(labels:(a(=(avoidant,(insecureg(avoidant,(or(anxiousgavoidant;(b(=(secure;( c(=(anxious,(anxiousg(ambivalent,(insecuregambivalent,(anxiousgresistant,(or( insecureg(resistant.’( 22(i.e.,(‘positive,(preoccupied’(and(‘negative,(preoccupied’;(see(cranley((1981).( 23(muller((1996)(used(the(mai((maternal(attachment(inventory),(which(asks( mothers(to(agree/disagree(with(statements(like(i(feel(love(for(my(baby(and(i(look( forward(to(being(with(my(baby;(as(well(as(the(msas((maternal(separation(anxiety( scale):(i(don’t(enjoy(myself(when(i(am(away(from(my(child;(and(the(hifbn((how(i( feel(about(my(baby(now):(i(feel(giving(towards(my(baby.(( 19 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 it(has(been(proposed(that(prenatal(attachment(is(more(appropriately( viewed(as(an(“emotional(bond”(that(bears(similarities(to(attachment(but(is( not(the(same(as(traditional(infant(and(adult(attachment(.(.(.(along(this(line( of(thinking,(it(has(been(suggested(that(prenatal(attachment(inventories(are( no(more(than(attitude(measures(that(may(be(confounded(by(social( desirability(and(adjustment.((208)24( ( in(other(words,(while(mia(describes(‘healthy’(interactions(between(mother( and(infant25—and(quantifies(a(relationship(between(them—mfa(quantifies(an( emotional(attachment(on(the(part(of(the(pregnant(woman(to(her(fetus;(and( quantifies(it(in(a(sociallygnormative(way.(it(measures(whether(pregnant(women(feel( the(‘right’fpq(1.1((x(way,(rather(than(measuring(the(extent(to(which(they(are(in(a( good(relationship.( the(raison(d’etre(of(the(literature(on(mfa(seems(to(be(a(perceived( predictive(advantage:(good(mfa(is(predictive(of(good(mia((though,(again,(only( when(mia(is(measured(by(maternal(attitudinal(selfgreport);(and(it(is(also( predictive(of(good(takegup(of(antenatal(care((lindgren(2001).(the(thinking,(then,( seems(to(be(that(by(measuring(mfa,(clinicians(can(spot(problems(early(on(in(a( woman’s(career(as(a(gestator/mother,(and(intervene.(but(even(as(a(mere( predictor(of(later(trouble,(it(isn’t(clear(what(purpose(mfa(actually(serves.(good( mfa(is(positively(correlated(with(stability(of(relationship(with(the(future(father,( and(with(high(sociogeconomic(status,(among(other(things;(and(is(negatively( correlated(with(depression(and(having(previous(children.26(since(it(is(presumably( 24(pollock(and(percy((1999)(actually(use(the(acronym(‘maea’,(rather(than( mfa—‘maternal(antenatal(emotional(attachment’—thus(removing(reference(to(the( fetus,(and(adding(explicit(reference(to(emotional(state.(( 25(though,(of(course,(there(seems(inadequate(evidence(that(‘good’(mia(really( means(anything(necessarily(for(the(future(wellbeing(of(the(child.(while(poor(mia( may(be(predictive(of(future(interpersonal(shortcoming,(there(is(no(evidence(that(it(is( inevitable.(in(metaganalysis(of(research(on(attachment(in(adopted(children,(for( example,(van(den(dries(et(al((2009)(found(that(adopted(children’s(attachment( security(‘catches(up’(as(years(pass(in(the(adoptive(home((for(children(adopted(after( the(age(of(12(months;(for(children(adopted(before(this(age,(there(was(no(statistically( significant(difference(in(attachment(quality).(it’s(not(clear,(then,(why(we(should( suppose(that(attachment(in(infancy(is(crucial,(rather(than(simply(desirable(all(other( things(equal.(( 26(for(example,(in(their(study(condon(and(corkindale((1997)(tell(us(the( following:(‘the(findings(confirmed(these(hypothesized(effects.(in(particular,(the( subgroup(of(women(having(low(attachment(was(characterized(by(high(levels(of( 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 already(known—or(anyway,(is(just(common(sense—that(an(unstable(economic,( social(or(relationship(status,(additional(children,(depression(might(go(handging hand(with(things(like(missed(antenatal(appointments,(it(is(not(clear(why(testing( whether(pregnant(women(have(good(attitudes(towards(their(fetuses(should(add( anything(to(what(is(already(known(about(them(as(patients.(nonetheless,(mfa( research(has(continued(apace,27(and(has(caught(the(popular(imagination(in(its( folk(variant,(‘maternalgfetal(bonding’.((( bonding(has(so(saturated(our(popular(discourse(on(pregnancy(and( maternity(that(it(seems(to(be(taken(as(a(given(in(contemporary(western(culture( that(pregnant(women(bond(with(their(fetuses,(and(that(this(bonding(is(either( developmentally(or(morally(important.(a(quick(scan(of(online(pregnancy( resources(reveals(a(vast(wealth(of(folk(knowledge(about(bonding.(for(example,( one(website(counsels(that(‘it's(never(too(early(or(too(late(to(start(communicating( and(bonding(with(your(baby.(parenting(is(a(journey(that(really(begins(the( moment(you(find(out(you(are(pregnant.’28(( advice(on(bonding(with(your(fetus(is(often(mixed(with(findings(from(the( empirical(literature(on(mfa.(for(example,(the(my(virtual(medical(centre(website( informs(the(reader(that(failure(to(bond(with(the(fetus(‘is(associated(with( indicators(of(sociogeconomic(status(like(income(and(level(of(education’(and( depression(and(anxiety,(low(levels(of(social(support((outside(the(partner( relationship)(and(high(levels(of(control,(domination(and(criticism(within(the(partner( relationship.’(also(pollock(and(percy((1999)(report(similarly.( 27(though(note(that(most(of(two(decades(ago,(mary(muller—a(leading(mfa( researcher—cautioned(against(excessive(focus(on(mfa.(in(her((1996)(she(writes(that( ‘until(a(conclusive(body(of(evidence(emerges(supporting(the(promotion(of(prenatal( attachment,(nurses(should(continue(to(focus(their(care(on(the(individual( circumstances(of(each(pregnant(woman.(specific(nursing(activities(include(exploring( with(the(pregnant(woman(her(experience(of(carrying(that(particular(baby,(teaching( women(to(avoid(and/or(cope(with(stress,(promoting(a(woman’s(feelings(of(selfg esteem,(reassuring(women(that(attachment(is(a(lifeglong(process,(and(providing( information(about(pregnancy(and(motherhood(that(will(help(to(relieve(fear(and( increase(a(woman’s(confidence(in(her(ability(to(be(a(good(mother’((165).(to(my( knowledge,(this(conclusive(body(of(evidence(has(not(emerged(in(the(interim.((( 28("how(to(bond(with(your(unborn(baby."( http://www.birth.com.au/pregnancy/pregnancyg29g40gweeks/emotionsgduringgtheg lastgthreegmonthsgofgpregnancy/communicatinggwithgyourgunborngbabyghowgtog bondgw#.vaxc2flviko.( 21 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 suggests(that(race(and(ethnicity(might(also(be(factors.29(many(pregnancy(and( parenting(websites(also(offer(‘tips’(for(how(to(successfully(bond(with(your(baby:( play(music(or(sing(to(your(bump;30(write(letters(to(your(unborn(child;31(take(time( out(to(reflect(on(the(person(growing(inside(you;(32(massage(or(in(other(ways(make( physical(contact(with(the(fetus;33(do(yoga;34(and(so(on.(( maternalgfetal(bonding(is(popgscience,(and(the(science(it(is(popularizing(is( not(particularly(coherent(to(begin(with.(additionally,(inasmuch(as(the(attachment( version(of(the(bonding(story(picks(out(any(real(phenomenon,(the(phenomenon(it( is(picking(out(is(attitudinal,(or(at(best(attitudinal/behavioural,(and(not(relational.( there(is(no(suggestion(in(any(of(the(literature(that(fetuses(share(in(the(good( attitude.(indeed,(beyond(the(predictive(power(of(mfa(as(regards(takegup(of( antenatal(care,(there(is(no(indication(that(mfa(has(any(causal(effect(on(the( developing(fetus.(more(importantly,(there(is(no(indication(that(the(fetus(has(any( affective(causal(effect(on(the(pregnant(woman.(given(that(the(woman’s(feelings( aren’t(affecting(the(fetus,(and(the(fetus’s(feelings(aren’t(affecting(the(woman,(it(is( implausible(to(suppose(that(the(right(way(to(characterize(mfa((or(‘bonding’)(is(as( a(relationship.(it(isn’t(a(relationship;(it’s(an(attitude.(( what(all(of(this(means(is(that(grounding(a(right(to(parent(one’s(biological( child(on(bonding(doesn’t(work.(again,(gheaus(argues(that(parents(have(a(right( against(baby(redistribution(in(the(same(way(that(parents35(have(a(right(against( their(children(being(taken(from(them(later(on,(because(at(birth(the(parents(are( already(in(a(morallygsignificant(relationship(with(the(baby,(having(bonded(with(it( antenatally.(she(writes:( 29("bonding(with(your(baby(during(pregnancy."( http://www.myvmc.com/pregnancy/bondinggwithgyourgbabygduringgpregnancy/.( 30("how(to(bond(with(your(unborn(baby."( http://www.birth.com.au/pregnancy/pregnancyg29g40gweeks/emotionsgduringgtheg lastgthreegmonthsgofgpregnancy/communicatinggwithgyourgunborngbabyghowgtog bondgw#.vaxc2flviko.(( 31("bonding(with(babygtogbe."(http://www.parents.com/pregnancy/myg life/preparinggforgbaby/bondinggwithgbabygtogbe/.( 32(ibid.( 33("bonding(with(your(baby(during(pregnancy."( http://www.myvmc.com/pregnancy/bondinggwithgyourgbabygduringgpregnancy/.( 34("how(to(bond(with(your(unborn(baby."( http://www.birth.com.au/pregnancy/pregnancyg29g40gweeks/emotionsgduringgtheg lastgthreegmonthsgofgpregnancy/communicatinggwithgyourgunborngbabyghowgtog bondgw#.vaxc2flviko.( 35(or(anyhow,(the(gestating(parent.( 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 ( other(defenders(of(fundamental(parental(rights…have(argued(that(it(is( impermissible(to(disrupt(already(established(intimate(relationships( between(birth(parents(and(children,(for(reasons(of(both(parents’(and( children’s(welfare.(but(no(reason(was(provided(for(why(such(relationships( are(permitted(to(develop(in(the(first(place(if(better(parents(are(available.(if( the(same(process(which(brings(babies(into(the(world(also(generates(their( first(intimate(relationships([with](adults,(then(relationships(between(birth( parents(and(their(babies(need(no(justification:(they(are(already(there(from( the(beginning.((451)( ( the(plausibility(of(this(claim(rests(on(the(popular(belief(that(pregnant( women(‘bond’(with(their(fetuses,(and(that(this(bonding(constitutes(an(already( existent(interpersonal(relationship.(but(the(latter(claim(does(not(stand(up(to( scrutiny.(insofar(as(pregnant(women(form(‘attachments’(with(their(fetuses,(these( attachments(are(onegway:(they(consist(in(the(woman(feeling(attached(to(the( fetus.36(while(being(in(a(relationship(with(a(child(might(plausibly(ground(a(right(to( continue(in(that(relationship,(simply(feeling(attached(to(a(child(cannot.(feeling( attached(to(something(cannot(generate(a(right(to(that(something.37(feeling( attached(to(something(that(is(one’s(own(might(plausibly(mean(having(a(right(to(it;( but(if(the(claim(is(that(a(pregnant(woman(feels(attached(to(her(fetus(and(it’s(her( own(fetus,(then(the(account(collapses(into(a(proprietary(account—just(the(sort(of( account(gheaus(set(out(to(avoid.(since(‘bonding’(is(additionally(a(socially( pernicious(construct—demanding(not(just(perfect(behaviour(from(future( mothers,(but(indeed(perfect(thoughts—there(is(just(no(good(reason(to(accept(the( claim(that(maternalgfetal(bonding(is(what(grounds(parental(rights.(( ( section)5.)should)we)abandon)parental)rights?) labour—even(gestation—cannot(ground(parental(rights(on(its(own.(as(we( saw(in(section(1,(simple(genetic(accounts(are(even(more(troubled.(it(is(difficult(to( see(how(we(can(ground(parental(rights(claims(at(all(without(claiming(that,(in( some(sense(or(other,(parents(own(their(children;(and(it(seems(that(we(shouldn’t( make(this(claim.(a(tempting(way(to(respond(to(the(problem(is(to(reject(parental( rights(altogether:(parents(just(don’t(have(rights;(parents(have(obligations,(and( nothing(more.(if(anyone(thinks(it(unfair(that(parents(labour(towards(the(end(of( 36(to(be(clear,(pregnant(women(certainly(are(physically(attached(to(their( fetuses.(something(more(than(this(is(being(claimed(in(saying(that(the(pregnant( woman(is(in(an(‘intimate(relationship’(with(her(fetus.(( 37(compare(with:(i(am(fond(of(my(neighbour’s(dog(or(i(love(switzerland.( 23 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 enjoying(the(goods(of(parenthood,(and(then(have(no(right(to(it,(well,(no(one( forced(them(to,(so(they(can(hardly(complain.38( but(this(bulletgbiting(doesn’t(answer(the(question(of(why(‘good(enough’(is( good(enough.(even(if(we(bite(the(bullet(on(baby(regdistribution—even(if(we( accept(the(claim(that(parents(rights(would(not(be(violated(by(having(their( children(redistributed(to(more(worthy(parents—we(are(still(left(with(a(question( to(answer:(why(are(we(not(violating(children’s(rights(by(not(redistributing(them?( why(is(it(okay(to(leave(children(with(nongideal(parents?(we(need(some(account( of(what(competing(considerations(are(tempering(children’s(rights(to(good(care.( otherwise,(most(of(us(are(violating(the(rights(of(our(children(daily.39(what(i( would(like(to(propose(very(briefly(in(this(closing(section,(is(that(we(would(fare( better(explaining(why(good(enough(is(good(enough(by(building(a(deflationary( account(of(parental(rights,(one(that(piggybacks(on(parental(obligation.(( a(good(starting(point(for(such(an(account(is(brennan(and(noggle’s((1997)( stewardship(account(of(parental(rights.(according(to(this(account,(parental(rights( are(‘stewardship(rights’.(‘a(stewardship(right(is(a(right(someone(has(in(virtue(of( being(a(steward—as(opposed(to(an(owner—of(someone(or(something.’(the( owner(of(a(thing(has(a(right(to(dispose(of(it,(neglect(it,(sell(it(on;(and(no(obligation( to(care(for(it.(the(steward(of(a(thing,(on(the(other(hand,(has(an(obligation(to(care( for(it,(and(those(rights(necessary(for(doing(so.(parental(rights,(then,(including(the( right(to(continue(to(parent(even(in(case(of(nongoptimality,(are(‘necessary(to(allow( the(parents(the(freedom(to(effectively(protect(and(nurture(children’,(since(the( duty(to(promote(the(interest(of(the(child(is(an(imperfect(duty,(and(as(such,(the( parent(must(have(‘the(right(to(exercise(her(own(judgment(in(carrying(it(out’( (brennan(and(noggle(1997,(12g13).40(((( it(is(not(clear,(however,(that(stewardship(rights(can(explain(why(good( enough(is(good(enough.(sometimes(it(is(perfectly(clear(that(one’s(parenting(is( nongoptimal,(and(yet(we(think(that(this(is(not(a(reason(to(reassign(parentage,(and( nor(is(it(a(violation(of(the(child’s(rights,(so(long(as(the(parenting(meets(the(‘good( enough’(standard,(whatever(that(is.(even(if(our(duties(to(our(children(are( imperfect(duties,(multiplygrealisable(and(multiplygfulfilled,(it(is(easy(enough(to( pick(out(clear(‘better’(or(‘worse’(parental(decisions.(so,(although(stewardship( 38(there(are(obvious(exceptions(to(the(claim(that(‘no(one(forced(them(to’.(( 39(while(i(certainly(have(days(when(this(feels(true,(i(hope(that(it(is(not!(( 40i(have(obviously(not(done(justice(to(the(richness(and(complexity(of(brennan( and(noggle’s(account(with(this(very(brief(rungthrough,(but(i(hope(it(is(sufficient(for( my(purposes(in(this(section.(( 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 gets(us(a(fair(way(to(explaining(nongproprietary(parental(rights,(it(alone(cannot( answer(the(goodgenough(worry.((( my(very(brief(and(speculative(answer(to(this(is(that,(in(addition(to(being(their( children’s(stewards,(parents—like(all(moral(agents—have(a((negative,(defeasible)( right(to(meet(their(moral(obligations—either(by(meeting(them(themselves,(or(by( actively(ensuring(that(they(are(met—and(this(right(competes(with(children’s(rights( to(best(care.41(because(biological(parents(are(causal(parents((when(they(are)—that( is,(because(biological(parents(make(it(the(case(that(their(children(exist(and(need(care( in(the(first(instance—biological(parents(have(an(obligation(to(make(it(the(case(that( their(children’s(lives(are(good(ones,(so(far(as(they(are(able.42(and(because(parents( have(a(right(to(ensure(the(fulfilment(of(their(obligations,(biological(parents(thereby( have(a(limited(right(to(parent(their(biological(children.(the(limit(to(this(right(is((you( guessed(it)(good(enough.( ( ( references) austin,(michael(w.(2007.(conceptions$of$parenthood:$ethics$and$the$family.( burlington:(ashgate.( bowlby,(john.(1957.("the(nature(of(the(child's(tie(to(his(mother."(the$international$ journal$of$psycho<analysis(39(5):(350g373.( brandon,(anna(r.,(sandra(pitts,(wayne(h.(denton,(c.(allen(stringer,(and(h.(m.(evans.( 2009.("a(history(of(the(theory(of(prenatal(attachment."(journal$of$prenatal$&$ perinatal$psychology$&$health:$apppah(23(4):(201g222.( brennan,(samantha,(and(robert(noggle.(1997.("the(moral(status(of(children:( children's(rights,(parents'(rights,(and(family(justice."(social$theory$and$ practice(23((1):(1g26.( 41(i(take(it(that(this(right(is(agentive.(that(is,(as(an(obligor,(i(have(a(right(to( steer(my(own(moral(ship,(so(to(speak:(taking(decision(and(acting(power,(with( respect(to(my(doing(morally(right,(away(from(me(violates(this(right.(as(the(moral( agent(with(the(obligation,(my(right(is(that(i(be(given(the(opportunity(to(do(the(job( that(is(mine(to(do.(( 42(a(causal(account(of(parental(obligation(will(not(always(coincide(with( biological(parenthood.(for(example,(when(a(couple(have(a(child(using(donor(sperm,( the(nonggestational((social)(parent(is(a(causal(parent(but(not(a(biological(parent.( however,(causal(parenthood(coincides(with(most(of(what(we(take(to(be(paradigm( biological(parenthood.(see(my((2012)(and((2014)(for(more(on(causal(parenthood.( 25 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 condon,(john(t.,(and(carolyn(corkindale.(1997.("the(correlates(of(antenatal( attachment(in(pregnant(women."(british$journal$of$medical$psychology(70(4):( 359g372.( cranley,(mecca(s.(1981.("development(of(a(tool(for(the(measurement(of(maternal( attachment(during(pregnancy."(nursing$research(30(5):(281g284.( gheaus,(anca.(2012.("the(right(to(parent(one's(biological(baby*."(journal$of$political$ philosophy(20(4):(432g455.( hall,(barbara.(1999.("the(origin(of(parental(rights."(public$affairs$quarterly(13(1):( 73g82.( hardimon,(michael(o.(1994.("role(obligations."(the$journal$of$philosophy(91(7):( 333g363.( hague(conference(on(international(private(law((hcch).(2014.("the(desirability(and( feasibility(of(further(work(on(the(parentage/surrogacy(project."(the(hague,( netherlands:(hague(permanent(bureau.( http://www.hcch.net/upload/wop/gap2014pd03b_en.pdf.( human(fertilisation(and(embryology(authority((hfea).(1987.(act(2008(uniform( parentage(act(§(3,(9b(u.l.a.(297g98.( kolers,(avery,(and(tim(bayne.(2001.("'are(you(my(mommy?'(on(the(genetic(basis(of( parenthood."(journal$of$applied$philosophy(18(3):(273g285.( liao,(s.(matthew.(2014.(“[insert(title(of(talk].”(paper(presented(at(family(ethics:( partiality(revisited,(berne,(switzerland,(january(24.( lindgren,(kelly.(2001.("relationships(among(maternal–fetal(attachment,(prenatal( depression,(and(health(practices(in(pregnancy."(research$in$nursing$&$health( 24(3):(203g217.( müller,(mary(e.(1984.("prenatal(and(postnatal(attachment:(a(modest(correlation."( journal$of$obstetric,$gynecologic,$&$neonatal$nursing(25(2):(161g166.( narveson,(jan.(2001.(the$libertarian$idea.(peterborough:(broadview(press.( page,(edgar.(1984.("parental(rights."(journal$of$applied$philosophy(1(2):(187g203.( pollock,(philip(h.,(and(andrew(percy.(1999.("maternal(antenatal(attachment(style( and(potential(fetal(abuse."(child$abuse$&$neglect(23(12):(1345g1357.( porter,(lindsey.(2012.("adoption(is(not(abortionglite."(journal$of$applied$philosophy( 29(1):(63g78.( ___.(2014.("why(and(how(to(prefer(a(causal(account(of(parenthood."$journal$of$ social$philosophy(45(2):(182g202.( singer,(peter.(1986.("all(animals(are(equal."(in(applied$ethics,(edited(by(peter(singer,( 215g228.(oxford:(oxford(university(press.(( van(den(dries,(linda,(femmie(juffer,(marinus(h.(van(ijzendoorn,(and(marian(j.( bakermansgkranenburg.(2009.("fostering(security?(a(metaganalysis(of( attachment(in(adopted(children."(children$and$youth$services$review(31(3):( 410g421.( 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.5 ( lindsey(porter(works(on(issues(in(reproductive(and(parental(ethics.(her(research( has(been(published(in(the(journal$of$social$philosophy,$the(journal$of$medical$ ethics,$and(the$journal$of$applied$philosophy.( 27 porter: gestation and parental rights published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 gestation and parental rights: why is good enough good enough? lindsey porter recommended citation gestation and parental rights: why is good enough good enough? 'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s article 3 toward a feminist theory of the state 2017 'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing susan j. brison dartmouth college, susan.j.brison@dartmouth.edu recommended citation brison, susan j.. 2017. "'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3. 'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing1 susan j. brison abstract susan j. brison’s paper illustrates, with the use of a first-person narrative, how catharine mackinnon’s work reveals the role of silencing in the construction of the disciplinary reality of philosophy. keywords: sexual violence, silencing, engaged theory, hostile environment, agency, first-person narrative preface this is a lightly edited version of a talk i gave at the apa pacific division meeting in vancouver, april 4, 2015, at a session on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of catharine mackinnon's toward a feminist theory of the state. although, in philosophy, criticism is taken to be the sincerest form of flattery—even to the extent that not engaging in it can be construed as not taking someone’s work seriously—my presentation was in the form of a grateful tribute, not that of a scholarly critique. but it wasn’t just a thank you note. in it, i attempted to illustrate, with the use of a first-person narrative, how catharine mackinnon’s work reveals the role of silencing in the construction of the disciplinary reality of philosophy. i also wanted to show how mackinnon’s work—and her personal example of a scholar-activist—enabled me to break through this silence. as mackinnon observed, in feminism unmodified, “having power means, among other things, that when someone says, ‘this is how it is,’ it is taken as being that way. when this happens in law such a person is accorded credibility. when that person is believed over another speaker what was said becomes proof. speaking socially, the beliefs of the powerful become proof, in part because the world actually arranges itself to affirm what the powerful want to see” (1987, 164). mackinnon 1 i am grateful to lori watson for inviting me to give this talk and for cajoling me into publishing it. without her encouraging advice, and that of karen jones, danielle tumminio, tom trezise, and two anonymous referees for this journal, i would not have had the nerve to publish this. 1 brison: we must find words or burn published by scholarship@western, 2017 further elaborated the metaphysical consequences of our epistemological practices in toward a feminist theory of the state by showing how “in life, ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are widely experienced as features of being, not constructs of perception, cultural interventions, or forced identities. gender, in other words, is lived as ontology, not as epistemology. law actively participates in this transformation of perspective into being” (1989, 237). so, as mackinnon has discussed, when justice potter stewart says, of legally proscribable obscenity, “i know it when i see it”—and then asserts, of the film in question, that this isn’t it—what he says goes, because he has the power to make his perspective the truth about the law, or, in other words, he has the ability to make the world conform to the way he sees it (1989, 195–214). some have criticized mackinnon for failing to adequately acknowledge women’s agency in changing the world in which we’ve been constructed as relatively powerless. but the whole point of her life’s work has been to enable women to seize power and change the world, as she herself has done through her many legal interventions. yes, mackinnon writes, “male dominance is made to seem a feature of life, not a one-sided construct imposed by force for the advantage of a dominant group. to the degree it succeeds ontologically, male dominance does not look epistemological: control over being produces control over consciousness, fusing material conditions with consciousness in a way that is inextricable short of social change” (1989, 238). but social change is possible, on mackinnon’s account, and, indeed, imperative, for “the world is not entirely the way the powerful say it is or want to believe it is. if it appears to be, it is because power constructs the appearance of reality, by silencing the voices of the powerless, by excluding them from access to authoritative discourse. powerlessness means when you say ‘this is how it is,’ it is not taken as being that way. this makes articulating silence, perceiving the presence of absence, believing those who have been socially stripped of credibility, critically contextualizing what passes for simple fact, necessary to the epistemology of a politics of the powerless” (1987, 164). i did not plan to publish this talk and was reluctant to do so, but the comments from many women philosophers afterwards confirmed that both my experiences in philosophy and mackinnon’s influence on how i dealt with them were far from unique to me. i think the sincerest form of gratitude is paying it forward, so i decided to overcome my trepidation and publish this talk in hopes that it will encourage and embolden others working to make philosophy more relevant and inclusive, including the one, identified only as “young feminist” on the daily nous blog, who thanked me for “reminding us why philosophy matters.” *** 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3 i'm honored and elated to be speaking at an apa session on the twenty-fifth anniversary of catharine mackinnon's toward a feminist theory of the state—an earthquake of a book that demolished what had been taken to be the foundations of political and legal theory, and one that then went on to construct a whole new world out of the rubble. i'm also daunted by the task, and i’m not even sure how to refer to this book's author: "mackinnon" sounds brusque and vaguely disrespectful, "professor mackinnon"—respectful, but too formal (and too many syllables), "catharine"—too breezily familiar, "kitty"—not a name i've used to refer to her and not one i'm about to start using now. plus, i don't want to speak about this author in the third person, as if she's not in the room. she is in the room, and i want to address my remarks to her (as well as to you, the audience), so i'll use the second person. my talk's title is a phrase from "artemis," the poem by olga broumas that begins chapter 5: "consciousness raising": i am a woman committed to a politics of transliteration, the methodology of a mind stunned at the suddenly possible shifts of meaning—for which like amnesiacs in a ward on fire, we must find words or burn. (broumas 1977, 24) re-reading toward a feminist theory of the state in preparation for this session, i was overwhelmed with gratitude—wild, ferocious gratitude—for the words you've given us, for the ones you've enabled us to find for ourselves, and for giving us the courage to use them—whispering them to one another, screaming them to those who never seem to hear, using them to cheer each other on and hold each other up, to remind us that we're not alone, we never were, and we never will be, using them to drown out all the voices telling us to keep quiet. i have so many of those voices in my head it can be hard to hear myself think. i sometimes wonder if my interest in the power of words to silence started when i was ten, riding in the car with my mother, after my teenaged brother had done something, yet again, to bully and frighten me—"teasing," my parents called it—and i said to her: "sometimes i wish he'd never been born." she pulled the car 3 brison: we must find words or burn published by scholarship@western, 2017 off the road, stopped, stared deeper into me than anyone had ever done before, and said "don't you ever say that again or you'll go to hell." and i never did say it, although i’ve mentioned it—to a therapist or two and, now, publicly—and perhaps that counts. but i don't care if i’m risking eternal damnation. i'm not worried about the afterlife. it's getting through this one i'm concerned about. my mother, who had a traumatic childhood, was told by her mother that she needed to be a rock. as i wrote in aftermath, “she was schooled, no doubt benevolently, in the ontology of silence, as if, without the words to say it, there wouldn't be so much pain" (2002, 117). the first time i saw her after i was raped, beaten, strangled into unconsciousness, hit in the head with a rock, and left for dead in a ravine, in 1990, i started to cry and reached out to hug her. she held me at arm’s length and fixed me with that same stare and said, "from now on we're going to be happy." "no," i said to her, for the first time in my life, at age thirty-five, "sometimes i'm going to be angry and sad, and sometimes i'll cry and maybe even yell." it took being raped and nearly murdered to realize that sometimes my perceptions of reality were correct and my words didn't deserve to be silenced. fast-forward three years, to 1993, just after i published my first scholarly article on sexual violence,2 when, still an assistant professor, i had my annual evaluation meeting with my senior colleagues. they informed me that this article didn't count as philosophy and that, if i wanted to get tenure, i should stop writing about rape. the nice one said, "i'm sure writing it was very therapeutic, but now you can put that behind you and go back to doing philosophy." don't say that again or you'll go to hell . . . or you won't get tenure or . . . what next? to be safe, just keep quiet. i had already gone against the advice of my only female colleague in the department who'd said, when i told her i was writing about rape, "just wait. you can always write about that after you get tenure." this was in the fall of 1991, during the clarence thomas hearings, and some female students asked me to speak at a rally about sexual harassment. i urged them to speak out about their experiences of harassment and assault. now. "don't wait," i said, and then i told them: "i was sexually harassed by my senior thesis advisor, and i kept quiet since i thought it was probably my fault, and, besides, i was headed to graduate school and didn't want to have a 'reputation.' then, during my first year of grad school, i was sexually harassed by one of my professors. i figured i would say something about it eventually, but first i needed to get my phd.” 2 from brison (1993). this article was translated into french by thomas trezise and published in projets féministes, no. 2, avril 1993, pp. 62–81, and has, over the years, been reprinted in several anthologies edited by philosophers. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3 when i was harassed in college and in grad school, i didn’t have the conceptual tools to recognize what had happened to me as sex discrimination. i didn’t have the words i needed to experience what happened as unjust, let alone speak out against it. it took me awhile to find those words or, rather, to learn that you had already articulated them. although your groundbreaking book, sexual harassment of working women, had come out in 1979, the year after i was sexually harassed in grad school, by then i was studying analytic philosophy of mind and language (my harasser was a husserlian, so i thought i'd gotten away from that) and i didn't read it until nearly a decade later. but by the fall of 1991, when i was speaking to dartmouth students about anita hill's testimony in the clarence thomas hearings and about the importance of speaking truth to power, i had the words "sexual harassment," and "hostile environment"—words you'd given us to describe what had formerly been just life. you'd given us, not only the words to talk about it, but a framework in which to think about it, as well as about gender-based violence against women, and, yes, pornography—in the harm-based way you and andrea dworkin had so brilliantly reconceptualized it. by 1991, i'd read sexual harassment of working women, feminism unmodified, and toward a feminist theory of the state, and i knew that waiting quietly wasn't going to give any of us any more power or credibility, and so i said to the students at the rally: "i've been told all my life to wait before speaking out about being the victim of an injustice. 'just wait till you're older, till you're more established, more respectable, more credible.' and now," i told them, "even after having been nearly murdered by misogyny, i'm being told to wait to speak out about it until after i have tenure. if i keep on following this advice, i'll be waiting till i'm dead. and"—here's what i had come to realize, what made it impossible for me not to speak out—"that could be tomorrow." speaking out about sexual violence was a matter of life or death. it certainly mattered to me more than tenure. when my senior colleagues told me that what i had written about sexual violence wasn't philosophy, they were right, in a sense. it wasn't what they had taken to be philosophy. and that's because philosophy had to change, in light of the experiences of women and others who had not been listened to in the discipline, just as you had shown that the fields of law and political science had to change. one of the many things your work taught me is how reality gets socially constructed through the mechanism of silencing, how metaphysics and epistemology are fundamentally interconnected. the reality of what “counted” as philosophy was determined by what those in power in the profession perceived it to 5 brison: we must find words or burn published by scholarship@western, 2017 be. their ability to say, with authority, “i know it when i see it” created, sustained, and policed what “it” was able to be. in the winter quarter of 1990, i team-taught a course entitled “introduction to moral philosophy” with two of my senior white male colleagues. the course had been taught in the same way for decades, focusing on a few “great books” in ethics. there were no white women or people of color on the syllabus. there never had been. (might this have had something to do with that fact that there were no white women or people of color in the department when i arrived?3) i met with my two fellow instructors the term before to discuss the syllabus, and i proposed some changes. although i was at that time using feminist ethics and critical race theory in my own research, i thought i’d start off by asking to include an article or two by philippa foot or judith jarvis thomson, analytic moral philosophers whose work was extremely influential by that time, even in mainstream departments, and widely considered to be “real” philosophy. the immediate reaction to my modest proposal was, to my astonishment, “no.” in the two-hour long debate that ensued, my arguments for the inclusion of anything by these women were met with stonewalling, including these responses: “these women have never been included before, so why start now?” and “this a course on classic texts in the history of ethics, in which we assign just a few great books, so we can’t assign any contemporary articles.” our “conversation” ended when one of my two colleagues said, “you show me a woman of the stature of aristotle and i’ll put her on the syllabus.” i gave up at that point. it was late in the afternoon, i was worn out, and i just wanted to go home. i didn’t know until later that one of the required readings on the syllabus would be an article by this very colleague.4 you emboldened me to become an activist-theorist, and your writings warned me about how my colleagues would react to attempts to change the discipline of philosophy. you wrote: "the anxiety about engaged theory is particularly marked among those whose particularities formed the prior universal. what they face from this critique is not losing a dialogue but beginning one, a more 3 there have been, to this day, no tenure-track faculty of color in the department. some of us—and, most recently, all of us—have made sincere efforts to recruit faculty of color, but we have obviously not been doing enough. one thing we need to do—and i think this is the most difficult thing—is question our own epistemic power and privilege when it comes to determining what counts as philosophy—or as the “best” philosophy. 4 i was sexually assaulted the following summer and, although i lost several years of my professional life while recovering, i gained the strength never again to acquiesce in such matters. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3 equal and larger and inclusionary one" (mackinnon 1989, xvi). but they didn't see it as an invitation to begin a dialogue. they felt threatened. i think something about your work and mine felt to them like a matter of life or death. i continued to write about sexual violence, as well as about pornography, sexual harassment, and hate speech and, although i did get tenure—fortunately, i'd written enough that somehow "counted"—two of my colleagues wanted me fired and told me that they fought their battle all the way to the level of the trustees. they lost. some years later, these two colleagues were joking around at the beginning of a junior female faculty member's tenure meeting—the meeting at which we would decide whether or not she was worthy of a permanent position in our department. one of them—the one-with-the-stature-of-aristotle—had recently published an article in playboy, and the other was saying he'd looked for it everywhere around town but hadn't been able to find it yet. they were laughing, other colleagues were chuckling, and i was fuming, silently, thinking about what schemas about young women were being activated by this banter. i complained afterwards to my associate dean and my dean, both women, who urged me to keep quiet about it since they were concerned about the word getting out and dartmouth getting bad press (which it was already getting a lot of in those days). they chastised me for speaking (privately) to some colleagues outside the department about it, since, as we all know, whatever is said during a tenure meeting is supposed to be strictly confidential. a few days after the tenure meeting, i found, in my mailbox, the playboy article that had been the subject of such merriment at the meeting. that did it. i walked into the office of my colleague who had written it and asked "did you put this in my box?" "yes.” "why?" "oh," he replied, "i didn't just put it in your box, i put it in everyone's box. i'm very proud of that article and where it was published. more people are going to read it than have read anything i've ever published before." i will leave what happened next to your imaginations. suffice it to say that, in the "discussion" that followed, the only thing greater than my outrage was his refusal to countenance that he'd done anything i could possibly be upset about. in 2001, i was offered a position as full professor in a highly regarded department that wanted to increase its graduate offerings in feminist philosophy. for personal reasons—i came to realize that the move would not make a difficult commute between my husband’s job and mine any easier, but, rather, more challenging—i didn't accept it. but i didn't ask to be promoted to full professor at dartmouth at the time, even though this was the year my book aftermath was published and even though this other department clearly thought i deserved to be promoted to full. (and they weren't the only ones to think this. as part of the process, they had to solicit letters from numerous experts in my field.) 7 brison: we must find words or burn published by scholarship@western, 2017 i didn't put myself up for promotion to full professor at dartmouth until twelve years later. why did i wait so long? i didn't want to put myself in the position of being scrutinized by those two colleagues who still hadn't come to terms with the fact that i'd gotten tenure over their protests. i told myself i'd wait until they left or died. and that's what i did. friends couldn't understand my waiting so long to get something i deserved. at first, i couldn't explain it to them—or to myself. and then i found the words. i said that to put my fate in the hands of these men, i'd have to be like the women who agreed to go on howard stern's tv show almost naked and give him the opportunity to critique and make fun of their breasts and other body parts. why would anyone do such a thing? i wouldn’t do it—or what felt to me equivalent—if my life depended on it. some things, i learned twenty-six years ago, are worse than death. i was not going to allow myself to be subjected a second time to anything like my tenure ordeal.5 your work enabled me to characterize the harm i had endured and to realize that it was rational for me to put off promotion, as a form of self-care. at the same time, your courage and persistence in the face of even greater professional abuse gave me the determination not to allow myself to be driven out of the discipline. re-reading toward a feminist theory of the state, i was struck by the many ways in which you anticipated and replied to your critics' objections—objections that got made anyway—and by the subtle and nuanced, yet incisive, at times devastating, language you used. i felt a resurgence of anger at your critics, wanting to defend you against them, while at the same time realizing there was no need. you'd already done it yourself. they just weren't listening. i'm not going to repeat your critics' misguided objections or respond to them here. i'm going to let your words speak for themselves: "the book analyzes how social power shapes the way we know and how the way we know shapes social power in terms of the social inequality between women and men. in broadest terms, it explores the significance gender hierarchy has for the relation between knowledge and politics. in other words, it engages sexual politics on the level of epistemology" (1989, ix). that most philosophers didn't realize the importance of these words at that time—and most still don't—is a discredit to our discipline. while your writing is dead serious, there is also a playfulness in it that's escaped many commentators. listen: "i began by trying to disentangle the economic from the sexual roots of women's inequality: is it sexism or capitalism? is it a box or a bag? . . . is it sex or class? is it a particle or a wave?" (1989, x). your project 5 i had also, by that time, witnessed several other women’s degrading tenure ordeals. one woman compared hers to the experience of being gang-raped. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3 became, as you wrote, "a meta-inquiry into theory itself—is it feminism or marxism? is it relativity or quantum mechanics?" (1989, xi). it became a huge and hugely significant project, yet one that you approached with an admirable humility. listen to what follows: "this book does not try to explain everything. . . . to look for the place of gender in everything is not to reduce everything to gender. for example, it is not possible to discuss sex without taking into account black women's experience of gender." and "this book does not pretend to present an even incipiently adequate analysis of race and sex, far less of race, sex, and class" (1989, xi–xii). far from claiming to do so, you, instead, refer readers to recent contributions by legal theorists kimberlé crenshaw, patricia williams, and others, giving credit and recognition where they were due. if only those who have been so profoundly influenced by you could give you the credit you so clearly deserve. (i don't know whether to go on here about jeremy waldron and some others who fail to give you credit. at least waldron gives you credit for coming up with a new approach to pornography, but he says that what he's writing about, racist hate speech, is totally different from pornography. and then he goes on to apply what is, in fact, your approach to that. i really want to stay focused on you. but, damn, it's annoying.) i was invited to meet with a class at georgetown law center a couple of years ago. it was a team-taught interdisciplinary course with law students and grad students in philosophy and they'd all read aftermath. the instructors asked them to prepare some questions for me in advance, and just yesterday i came across this one: "women are already only about twenty percent of tenured philosophy professors. are you worried about the danger of the few women philosophers we have losing legitimacy by abandoning the traditional detached form of writing? what if no one takes papers written this way seriously?" i don't recall how i responded then. what i'm tempted to say now is: who cares? and: so much the worse for philosophy. let the discipline destroy itself with its willful irrelevance. you were in an even more hostile academic environment twenty-five years ago, when you published this book. you took enormous risks and now the fields of law and politics—and the world—are better off because of it. we're told they're "only words,"6 but we live and die by them. we're born into them and made out of them. they welcome us to the world—whether harshly or warmly—and, if we're lucky, at the end of our days, they may help to ease our way as we leave it. in between, they undo and remake us, destroy and sustain us. 6 that harmful speech is so much more than this is demonstrated in mackinnon 1994. 9 brison: we must find words or burn published by scholarship@western, 2017 they are never simply the construction we choose to put on things. they are our inheritance and our legacy, our ancestors and our descendants, our past, our future, and who we are now. in my lifetime, i’ve met no one who has used them to greater effect than catharine mackinnon. and failing to find ones equal to my, to our, indebtedness, these are the only ones i have to say, but i say them now with all my heart: "thank you." works cited brison, susan j. 1993. “surviving sexual violence: a philosophical perspective.” journal of social philosophy 24 (1): 5–22. ———. 2002. aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self. princeton, nj: princeton university press. broumas, olga. 1977. beginning with o. new haven, ct: yale university press. mackinnon, catharine a. 1979. sexual harassment of working women: a case of sex discrimination. new haven, ct: yale university press. ———. 1987. feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. cambridge, ma.: harvard university press. ———. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1994. only words. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. susan j. brison is eunice and julian cohen professor for the study of ethics and human value at dartmouth college. she is the author of aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self (princeton university press, 2002), co-editor of contemporary perspectives on constitutional interpretation (westview press, 1993), and co-author of debating the ethics of pornography: sex, violence, and harm (oxford university press, forthcoming). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.3 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing susan j. brison recommended citation 'we must find words or burn': speaking out against disciplinary silencing feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 6 recommended citation cook, anna. 2018. “recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 6. 2018 recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission anna cook university of the fraser valley anna.cook@ufv.ca cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission anna cook abstract the canadian truth and reconciliation commission (trc) has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the indian residential schools system. the trc demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. i contend, however, that the trc provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between native and settler canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what i call “settler ignorance.” work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. for this task, mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. this characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. keywords: canadian trc, epistemology of ignorance, settler colonialism, politics of recognition, native feminisms how did you not know this?! —chelsea vowel, métis writer and lawyer how is it that we know nothing about this history? —paulette regan, research director of the canadian trc feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 the indian residential schools system has been referred to as “canada’s greatest national shame” (stanton 2011, 1). beginning in the 1880s, the canadian government sought to assimilate indigenous children by requiring, under the indian act of 1876, their attendance at church-run schools.1 the result was that 132 federally supported schools were set up in almost every province or territory and functioned for well over a century.2 most schools were operated as joint ventures with anglican, catholic, presbyterian, or united churches. over 150,000 children were separated from their families and communities to be sent far away to schools where they were forbidden to speak their languages, practice their spirituality, or express their cultures. physical and sexual abuse were rampant, and at least 6,000 children died while in the residential school system (vowel 2016, 171). on june 11, 2008, the (now former) prime minister of canada stephen harper made a statement of apology on behalf of the canadian government for the indian residential schools system: “the government now recognizes that the consequences of the indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on aboriginal culture, heritage and language.” the canadian government’s 2008 statement of apology for the residential school policy came in the shadow of the dissolution of the alternative dispute resolution in 2005 that unsuccessfully settled thousands of residential school survivor lawsuits.3 the settlement agreement came into effect september 1 i will use “indigenous peoples” to refer to the onkwehonwe (original people) of what is now called canada (alfred 2005). while it is a term with international connotations, i use the term “indigenous peoples” to refer to first nations, inuit, and métis people living in what is now called canada (vowel 2016, 10). i will use “indian” only in relation to a legal term in canada, for example, when referring to the indian act. the term “aboriginal” has become the most common official term used in canada to refer to first nations, inuit, and métis people since being adopted in the 1982 constitution act. 2 the last federally run facility, the gordon residential school in saskatchewan, closed in 1997. 3 starting in 1990, the violence of residential schools entered the public consciousness when phil fontaine, then grand chief of the manitoba assembly of chiefs, spoke about his experience of abuse suffered in residential school on national television. the same year fontaine publicly spoke out about his experience, the royal commission on aboriginal peoples (rcap) was formed in response to the oka crisis. the rcap held public hearings across canada, speaking to over 2,000 people and commissioning over 350 research commissions. its mandate was to develop a research plan on four theme areas— governance; land and economy; social and cultural issues; and the north. rcap’s final five-volume report was cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 19, 2007, and provided approximately $5 billion in compensation, commemoration, and the establishment of the truth and reconciliation commission (hereafter trc).4 the canadian trc has had the stated purpose of promoting public awareness about the residential school system and educating canadians about the 150-year history of residential schools, rather than bringing about legal reparations. the trc was formally established on june 1, 2008, and had a five-year mandate to focus on “a sincere indication and acknowledgement of the injustices and harms experienced by aboriginal people and the need for continued healing . . . as part of an overall holistic and comprehensive response to the indian residential school legacy” (trc 2015a, 339). as part of the truth-telling and reconciliation process, there have been seven national truth-telling events across canada that aimed to engage and educate the canadian public about the history of the residential school system through personal testimony from survivors.5 the trc aims to signal the seriousness with which the canadian government considers the violations of the residential school system. it seeks to make amends released on november 21, 1996. its findings, in short, were that past and current governmental policies towards aboriginal peoples were “unethical,” and that there is a need for a complete restructuring of the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples in canada. the rcap final report changes would have required constitutional change. the federal government’s response to the rcap report, gathering strength: canada’s aboriginal action plan, emphasized nonconstitutional approaches to strengthening aboriginal governance and established the aboriginal healing foundation (ahf) to manage a healing fund of $350 million with particular attention to the legacy of abuse in the residential schools system. this led to the creation of the federal office of indian residential schools resolution canada in 2001, tasked with managing and resolving the large number of abuse claims filed by survivors of residential schools. these class action lawsuits resulted in the indian residential schools settlement agreement (irssa). 4 at the time of the settlement agreement, 14,903 survivors had filed claims against the government. the settlement agreement set aside $1.9 billion for the approximately 80,000 living survivors of the residential schools (stanton 2011, 3–4). the monetary repayment ($10,000 for the first school year the survivor attended, and an additional $3,000 for each subsequent school year) has been met with mixed reaction. the repayment process has been criticized by some students whose compensation claims were denied, while others report that the payment was important to them as tangible recognition of the systemic harms they suffered at the schools. 5 winnipeg in 2010, inuvik in 2011, halifax in 2011, saskatoon in 2012, montreal and vancouver in 2013, and edmonton in 2014. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 for the past wrongs of governmental policies in the hope of establishing a new relationship between the state and indigenous communities. it offers the promise of communicating previously unknown information to many settler canadians.6 while truth commissions differ, they share the basic commitment to investigate and publicly disseminate information about past human rights abuses and to provide a public platform for victims to tell their stories.7 crucially, though, the trc responds to a legal situation that was invisible and unknown to most canadian citizens. unlike the south african trc or the argentinian trc, there was no public consensus that motivated the creation of the canadian trc on the indian residential schools.8 before the trc, only one in two canadians were aware of the existence of the indian residential schools system (niezen 2016, 923). a general lack of awareness of the schools, and of the experience of indigenous peoples in canada more broadly, shaped the canadian trc in specific ways. for this reason, the canadian trc has both an educational and publicity-oriented goal of raising awareness about the residential school system and the experience of victims of the schools more specifically. the trc does not have legal power, and it is primarily aimed at educating settler canadians by creating a unified counterhistory of the residential school legacy.9 6 unless specified, i will use the term “settler,” as chelsea vowel does, to refer to non-indigenous peoples living in canada or the united states who form “the european-descended sociopolitical majority” (vowel 2016, 16). for this reason, “white settler” and “settler” are meant to be synonymous. when i use sherene razack’s term “white settler,” i do so to explicitly draw attention to the intersection of settler colonialism and white supremacy, especially when this intersection has been undertheorized. 7 for this reason, teresa godwin phelps emphasizes the potential of storytelling as a nonviolent means of achieving retribution that avoids cycles of revenge. she acknowledges, though, that not all ways of sharing personal testimony will be effective. in particular, she notes the limitations of both the argentinian and salvadoran truth commissions in their general framework that perpetuated an us/them distinction between innocent civilians and guilty soldiers (2004, 97–104). she contends that the south african truth commission’s “carnival-like” approach, whereby victims shared their stories in their own ways was more effective (2004, 105–110). 8 for a comparison of the canadian and south african commissions, see nagy 2012. 9 the trc’s final report is accompanied by calls to action to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of reconciliation” (trc 2015b). these 94 calls for action include concrete steps that can be taken by the governments of canada, indigenous peoples, churches, educators, the business sector, civil society cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 it would be hard to overemphasize the cultural, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and political lasting devastation of residential schools.10 yet the schools and their former students remain “comfortably invisible” to most settler canadians (regan 2010, 5). the central question is, thus, how can settler canadians remember what former prime minister stephen harper called in his statement of apology “a sad chapter in our history,” when we settler canadians have so selectively forgotten this part of our history? the trc assumes that the testimonies will be heard and recognized by settler canadians in a politically meaningful way. i am critical of this assumption and, in response, this paper argues that this model of recognition is an inappropriate framework to challenge and transform settler identity. in this article, i argue that a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between indigenous and settler canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition but because it fails to account for what i call “settler ignorance.” i go on to explain how settler ignorance functions to discredit indigenous speakers by hearing their emotional testimonies as (i) an expression of past wrongs and (ii) evidence of individual pathology. 1. trc’s politics of recognition the language of recognition has become a dominant framework to discuss political struggles in multicultural liberal democracies. in particular, indigenous selfdetermination efforts in canada have been couched in terms of recognition, and in charles taylor’s politics of recognition more specifically.11 taylor’s identitarian model of recognition rests on a holist ontology in which the self arises dialogically through reciprocal recognition of oneself as separate and equal.12 for this reason, organizations, and others. the calls include subsections pertaining to child welfare, education, language and culture, health, and justice (2015b). insofar as the calls to action frame problems of settler-colonial violence in the present, they have a potential to bring about meaningful change. 10 aboriginal healing foundation’s reclaiming connections: understanding residential school trauma among aboriginal people: a resource manual (2005) documents the impact of humiliation and shame as tools of aggressive assimilation. 11 glen coulthard cites the 2005 policy position issued by canada’s largest aboriginal organization, the assembly of first nations (afn), in which self-determination is defined “around a vision of the relationship between first nations and canada which would lead to strengthening recognition and implementation of first nations’ governments” (coulthard 2007, 438). 12 in the liberal-communitarian debate on the nature of the self and the role of political institutions to promote the flourishing of the self, the terms of this debate feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 taylor characterizes recognition as a “vital human need,” such that nonrecognition or misrecognition is “a form of oppression by inflicting crippling self-hatred” (taylor 1994, 26). taylor argues that a politics of recognition must accommodate value pluralism and support the survival of minority cultural groups. individual identity does not occur in isolation but is formed through “dialogue with others, in agreement or struggle with their recognition of us” (1994, 45–46). cultural communication is the horizon for individuals to develop their identities. for taylor, recognition is required on both the intimate plane for acknowledgement of an original identity and on the social plane for a healthy democratic society. taylor’s liberal politics of recognition affirms that relations of recognition can have either a positive effect (when recognition is mutual or affirmative), or a negative effect (when recognition is unequal or disparaging) on “our status as free and self-determining agents” (coulthard 2014, 17). accordingly, in the context of indigenous self-determination, proponents of a liberal politics of recognition seek greater “state recognition” and “accommodation” of indigenous identity claims in order to enable more mutual indigenous-state relationships.13 it is through state recognition that indigenous culture is affirmed and legitimated.14 in practice, glen coulthard tells us that this results in “institutional accommodation by the settler state apparatus” (2014, 38). indigenous claims to nationhood are reconciled through the “accommodation of indigenous identities in some form of renewed relationship with the canadian state” (2014, 3). consider, for example, the white paper of 1969, stem from kant and hegel’s respective definitions of freedom and selfdetermination. kant’s emphasis on the respect for the equal dignity of autonomous beings gets articulated in the liberal position, whereas hegel’s recognition model of identity comes to form the basis of the communitarian position. 13 this is most often accomplished through “land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-government agreements” (coulthard 2014, 3). 14 section 35 of the 1982 constitution act provides constitutional protection of “existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of canada.” the section does not, however, define the term “aboriginal rights” or define a list of protected rights. as a result of this lack of definition, indigenous nations must attest their rights in court, such as in r v. sparrow, which defined the musqueam band’s fishing rights as recognized and affirmed. the court concluded that existing aboriginal rights are not absolute and can be encroached upon when given sufficient reason. this has led to the “sparrow test” as a way to measure how much canadian legislation can limit existing aboriginal rights. many indigenous scholars, including stó:lō author lee maracle, worry that section 35 reaffirms the authority of the canadian constitution instead of moving towards a nation-to-nation relationship (maracle 2003). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 the effort to abolish the indian act, which was framed as an attempt to turn first nations people into ethnic groups, “to be gradually absorbed into the melting pot” (manuel and derrickson 2015, 29–30).15 the limitations of the liberal model of recognition—the narrowing of recognition to cultural recognition and the overshadowing of structural and economic features of social oppression—are all the more visible and damaging in a settler-colonial context. nancy fraser, for instance, worries that, in recent years, identity politics have overshadowed the demand for economic redistribution.16 the framework of recognition as cultural recognition is all the more nefarious, however, in an explicitly settler-colonial context. for one, the narrowing of recognition to culture depoliticizes native relationships to land. as maureen konkle notes in writing indian nations, “native people’s connection to land is not just cultural (as it is usually and sentimentally understood), but it is also a political connection about governments, boundaries, authority over people and territory” (konkle 2004, 12). the effect of this narrowing of recognition means that culture becomes the sole site of indigenous identity and agency, foreclosing a legitimate politics of indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.17 cultural recognition here mischaracterizes the harm of misrecognition by failing to consider institutionalized economic inequality 15 the 1969 white paper, formally known as the statement of the government of canada on indian policy, 1969, was a canadian government policy that attempted to abolish previous legal documents pertaining to indigenous peoples, including the indian act and treaties. minister of indian affairs and northern development jean chrétien proposed the policy in order to assimilate all indian peoples under the canadian state. the proposal’s intense backlash led to its withdrawal in 1970. 16 in nancy fraser’s debate with axel honneth, she criticizes identity politics for both narrowly characterizing misrecognition “as a free-standing cultural harm” at the expense of considering institutionalized economic inequality, and also reifying “an authentic, self-affirming and self-generated” collective identity (fraser 2000, 110– 112). misrecognition, she contends, is harmful when it leads to status subordination. accordingly, the aim of recognition should not be to revalue cultural selfrepresentations but to overcome subordination by establishing a misrecognized party as a full member of society, capable of participating on a par with the rest (2000, 113). 17 following james tully’s definition of self-determination as “the right of a people to govern themselves by their own laws and exercise jurisdiction over their territories” (tully 2000, 57). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 and settler-colonial and heteropatriarchal violence. cultural recognition without political and economic redistribution will not lead to self-determination.18 coulthard has insightfully articulated how taylor’s recognition-based model of liberal pluralism perpetuates settler-colonial identification, and so reproduces, rather than transcends, a colonial structure of dominance. in red skins, white masks, coulthard (2014) forcefully rejects taylor’s liberal politics of recognition on the grounds that it actually reaffirms the configurations of colonial power that demands for recognition aim to transcend. for this, he draws on frantz fanon’s criticism of the hegelian master-slave dialectic of recognition whereby selfconsciousness arises through the process of externalization and mutual recognition, that is, through the recognition of another.19 fanon contends that the dialectic of recognition breaks down in a colonial context, which he describes in terms of both objective (political economy) and subjective (affective) levels (fanon 1967, 11–12, quoted in coulthard 2007, 444). this account of the dual structures of colonialism moves past the axel honnethnancy fraser impasse and avoids a focus on recognition at the expense of redistribution and vice-versa.20 given this description of colonialism, fanon argues that reciprocal recognition is impossible since the terms of recognition are determined by and in the interests of the colonizer. insofar as subjectivity is defined in terms of the recognition of the colonizer, the colonized’s sense of self develops through the internalization of colonial recognition. in this way, settler-colonial recognition involves the creation of “colonized subjects” through a process of internalization whereby the colonized come to accept and even identify with the limited misrecognition granted through state structures. fanon affirms that this internalization often leads to psycho-affective attachments to these “mastersanctioned forms of recognition” (fanon [1961] 2005, 148). in practice, this means that state recognition of indigenous culture through accommodation practices is in the same spirit as duncan campbell scott’s 1920 goal of solving the indian problem 18 taiaiake alfred contests that “without massive restitution, including land, financial transfers and other forms of assistance to compensate for past harms and continuing injustices committed against our peoples, reconciliation would permanently enshrine colonial injustices and is itself a further injustice” (alfred 2005, 152). 19 while taylor draws on fanon’s the wretched of the earth (1961) in articulating the role of misrecognition in relations of domination, coulthard relies on fanon’s earlier black skins, white masks (1952) to challenge taylor’s argument that colonial misrecognition can be reconciled within a liberal multicultural framework (coulthard 2007). 20 see fraser and honneth (2003). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 by ensuring that every indian has been “absorbed into the body politic and there is no indian position, and no indian department” (quoted in manuel and derrickson 2015, 29–30). in this way, coulthard contends that contemporary colonial power and hegemony work not through a process of exclusion but rather through the inclusion and shaping of indigenous peoples and perspectives by state discourses. he argues that self-determination cannot be bestowed upon by the state but must result from indigenous resurgence21 that challenges the legitimacy of the canadian settler state. recognition practices do not rectify colonial injustice but reaffirm the settler state’s legitimacy. moreover, mutual recognition in a colonial context is impossible since, for example, the canadian state does not require recognition from first nations, métis, and inuit peoples in order to exist. in sum, through the guise of recognizing the distinctness of indigenous cultures, liberal politics of recognition undermines indigenous nations’ selfdetermination. moreover, recognition makes identity intelligible only by creating “colonized subjects.” the process of recognition legitimates the canadian state’s authority of defining indigenous identity. while forced dispossession of indigenous land is no longer politically palatable (yet ongoing), settler-colonial violence continues under the guise of recognition. relations between nations must be predicated upon mutual recognition of each other’s sovereignty. insofar as recognition does not emerge from the mutual recognition of sovereignty, recognition by the canadian state cannot challenge the settler-colonial power imbalance but reasserts it.22 21 resurgence emphasizes ways to restore and regenerate indigenous nationhood (corntassel 2012), and the “repatriation of indigenous land and life” (tuck and yang 2012). kirby brown identifies indigenous resurgence theory as committed to “collective critique of and resistance to settler-state structures of politics, power, and representation, coupled with—if not motivated by—the revitalization of community-specific indigenous traditions” (brown 2015, 293). audra simpson’s politics of refusal serves the purpose of “turning away” from the legitimizing gaze of settler authority and from the “presumed ‘good’ of multicultural politics,” towards revitalized, self-generated, transformative models of self-determination (simpson 2014, 11). 22 in this respect, coulthard is suspicious of projects like dale turner’s that aim to engage with the state’s legal and political discourses. turner proposes a model of indigenous self-determination that engages with the confines of liberal recognition. he argues, in this is not a peace pipe (2006), that indigenous people need to engage the state's legal and political discourses in more effective ways in order to have their relationship with the canadian state informed by their distinct worldview. to this feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 the trc, in particular, is immersed in this recognition-talk insofar as it seeks to provide an opportunity for survivors to have their experiences recognized.23 it invites survivors of residential schools to share their personal narratives under the assumption that this will inform the canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. in this respect, the trc proposes a model of reconciliation based on the sharing of personal testimony.24 according to this view, there must be recognition of the experiences of survivors of residential schools in order to have reconciliation. it is believed that the problem of settlers’ historical amnesia is due to a lack of information, a lack of recognition, and so the remedy is more information, more recognition. as such, the trc’s underlying epistemic claim is that a collection of facts and testimonies can and will reconcile relationships between indigenous peoples and settler canadians. it assumes that settler canadians simply need to hear testimonies of residential school survivors in order to challenge our historical amnesia about the role residential schools have played in the creation of the settler-colonial nation-state now called canada. the trc, insofar as it is framed by a politics of recognition whereby the state recognizes the cultural distinctness of indigenous peoples as a group in canada, provides an opportunity to examine the limitations of recognition. these limitations play out in the trc in the particular way that settlers fail to hear testimonies of residential school survivors. the trc illustrates how recognition attempts to include diverse voices in the political sphere but simultaneously fails to challenge prevailing power relations that silence these voices. end, he affirms that certain members of the community should become what he calls “word warriors,” who are fluent in the language of rights. coulthard, however, is critical of turner’s approach insofar as it minimizes the discursive power of the state, such that turner’s proposal risks the assimilation of the word warriors (coulthard 2008, 164). 23 recognition of shared experience fulfills the canadian state’s legal responsibility of the indian residential schools settlement agreement (irssa) between the government of canada and the approximately 86,000 native canadians who were enrolled in residential schools. the five main components of the irssa are the common experience payment (cep), independent assessment process (iap), the truth and reconciliation commission (trc), commemoration, and health and healing services. 24 what reconciliation means, however, remains murky and tenuous. the final report notes the amorphous definition of reconciliation throughout the truth-telling events, yet officially defines reconciliation as “an ongoing process of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships” (trc 2015a, 16). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 2. settler ignorance the treatment of children in indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history. . . . we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country. —prime minister stephen harper, statement of apology 2008 canada has no history of colonialism. —prime minister stephen harper, g20 address 2009 a politics of recognition fails to transform settler-colonial relationships not only because it enacts the internalization of colonial recognition but because it fails to account for, or challenge, structural settler denial. as such, i contend that the liberal model of recognition cannot hear testimonies of settler-colonial violence. i argue that the denial of settler colonialism does not come from a lack of information but rather emerges from a particular kind of knowing that undermines the testimony of native peoples.25 in order to explain an account of settler ignorance, i expand charles mills’s account of white ignorance to a consideration of white settler ignorance. this characterization of settler ignorance shows that the disavowal of past and ongoing violence against indigenous peoples is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance. my explanation of white settler ignorance emerges from an engagement with social epistemology, settler-colonial studies, and native feminisms. i begin with an overview of developments in social epistemology with an emphasis on ignorance. secondly, i show how settler ignorance functions by (i) distancing present testimonies to the past and (ii) by discrediting emotional expressions as signs of individual pathology. in particular, i want to make sense of the prime minister’s 2009 g20 address, in which he proudly claimed that “canada has no history of colonialism,” in light of his 2008 official statement of apology for the indian residential school policy, which 25 by settler denial, i mean both the explicit and implicit denial of past and ongoing settler colonialism. settler denial has been explicit—in the denial of ongoing settler colonialism in the 2008 statement of apology, which positions the ills of colonialism strictly in the past and thus denies the realities of an ongoing settler-colonial present, or in the denial of past settler colonialism in harper’s 2009 g20 address, in which he proudly claimed that “canada has no history of colonialism,” or in sen. lynn beyak’s recent remarks on “the good deeds . . . and remarkable works” of the residential school officials, or in the governor general’s comments in june 2017 that indigenous people are immigrants. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 called the policy an evil that has “no place in our country.” what was this evil if not the evil of (settler) colonialism? how can we make sense of this seeming contradiction by a man supposedly educated and informed by residential school survivors? this seems, at first glance, to be a set of contradictory statements in which one of the two statements must be false. does former prime minister harper believe that (i) residential schools were part of a violent settler-colonial project, or (ii) canada has no history of colonialism? it seems that he can hold one belief, but not both. epistemology, as the study of knowledge, and propositional knowledge more specifically, uses the schema “s knows that p,” where s stands for some subject who has knowledge and p for the proposition that is known from direct observation.26 for example, “harper knows that canada has no history of colonialism” and “harper knows that residential schools were a violent settler-colonial endeavour” are contradictory propositions, in which at least one of these statements must be false. traditional epistemology tells us that this conflict must be resolved by determining which individual proposition is false by looking for correspondence with the external world. this determination will answer which statement is a justified true belief. drawing from feminist social epistemology, i argue, however, that this way of proceeding is an impoverished one. firstly, in this model of epistemology, it is reason alone, uncontaminated from the unreliability of the body, that leads to objective knowledge. in “s knows that p” epistemology, the complexity, messiness, and situatedness of life is negated in favor of analytic simplicity and an aspiration for infinite replicability. these claims to objectivity and universality have been intensely disputed in feminist standpoint theory.27 this feminist intervention eschews assumptions about generic knowers “accumulating verifiable ‘bits’ of information,” and reveals that the supposed generality is in fact a situated position, namely one of a white able-bodied man—“the ‘generic’ s does refer to a ‘standard’ white male knower or doer” (code 2014, 150–153). neutrality is not so neutral after all but is rather an expression of power and privilege (with its specific interests and values). with this intervention, the stark distinction between epistemology and ethics begins to fade as knowledge practices can no longer be taken to be ethically and politically neutral. the turn to social epistemology emerges from the recognition of the fundamentally relational aspect of knowledge production. this intervention 26 the traditional view is epitomized in thomas nagel’s a view from nowhere (1989). 27 the marxist concept of “standpoint theory” has been further developed in sandra harding’s work. see harding’s edited volume the feminist standpoint theory reader (2004), and also patricia hill collins’ black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment (1990). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 investigates the epistemic effects of social interaction and takes testimony to be central to knowledge production.28 testimony does not fall into the “s knows that p” model insofar as it is interactive; there are speakers and hearers. over and above considerations of truth and justification, a focus on testimony brings matters of “trust, credibility, responsiveness and responsibility, epistemic character and situation” to the fore in knowledge-making and knowledge-circulating practices (code 2014, 152).29 framed in terms of testimony, knowledge production is no longer described impersonally and without social location. kristie dotson puts it succinctly: “in short, to communicate we all need an audience willing and capable of hearing us” (dotson 2011, 238). with these critical interventions in mind, an investigation of harper’s statement becomes more complicated. in particular, the positionality of s, in this case former prime minister harper, matters to an evaluation of his proposition, and his evaluation of the credibility of residential school survivors emerges as an important factor. one outcome of the turn to testimony has been to seriously consider ignorance, that is, the failure of knowledge-production and knowledge-circulation, as an epistemic practice. the impulse to seriously consider ignorance as a kind of knowledge has emerged as a powerful critical intervention to traditional epistemology. the study of ignorance, and social ignorance specifically, aims to identify different forms of ignorance and examine how they are produced and sustained. it asks which epistemic practices make it such that “s does not know p.” in this way, ignorance is not taken to be a “neglectful epistemic practice” or simply a lack of knowledge but is rather considered as a “substantive epistemic practice” (sullivan and tuana 2007, 39). ignorance is not simply a result of failed inquiry or “faulty justification practices;” it is structural and is the result of “practices of ignorance” (2007, 40). the central claim of an epistemology of ignorance is that an account of knowledge is incomplete without an account of ignorance, and an account of ignorance is incomplete without an account of who benefits and who is disadvantaged by such ignorance. over and above feminist epistemologists’ claims about the situatedness of group identities that leads to particular blind spots and specific insights (exemplified 28 testimony here refers to a “range of practices from simply telling one another the time of day to the complex verbal and written reports that are the substance of knowledge-conveying exchanges between and among people in the real world” (code 2014, 152). 29 alcoff notes that testimony is broadly categorized as either inferential or noninferential (2010, 129). in the former, testimony justifies a belief by inference, whereas in the latter testimony justifies a belief directly. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 in the works of code and harding), charles mills and linda martín alcoff offer structural analyses of ignorance to show how “oppressive systems produce ignorance as one of their effects,” providing an account of ignorance in terms of structural forms of oppression (alcoff 2007, 40). ignorance is more than just the individual prejudicial blind spots according to one’s group identity. ignorance is structural, such that dominant groups not only “have less interest” in criticizing the status quo, but they “have a positive interest in ‘seeing the world wrongly’” (2007, 47). there are concrete benefits to this sustained ignorance. the formulation of an epistemology of ignorance within white supremacy is famously expressed in mills’s articulation of the “racial contract,” which prescribes for “its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (mills 1997, 18). the racial contract is an epistemological contract. an epistemology of ignorance (or an inverted epistemology) is a requirement for the racial division of the human race into “full persons and subpersons” (1997, 118–119). ignorance is here defined as a substantive epistemic practice that differentiates the dominant group. it is more than an effect of the knower’s general situatedness but is defined in terms of structures of power. mills further elaborates on the “inverted epistemology” of the racial contract by describing white ignorance as it is connected to white supremacy. for his purposes of defining white ignorance, mills uses the term “ignorance” to designate both false belief and the absence of true belief, and white ignorance specifically as the false belief and the absence of true belief about “people of color, supporting a delusion of white racial superiority that can afflict white and nonwhite people alike” (2007, 17). white ignorance is both individual and collective and, as such, impacts both individual and social memory. this actively upheld form of ignorance supports the social cognition that distorts reality shaped by white supremacy. for example, the lens shaped by white supremacy causes people suffering from white ignorance to “mis-see whites as civilized superiors and nonwhites as inferior savages" (sullivan and tuana 2007, 3). white ignorance has the result of cultivating a collective amnesia about the past that undermines the testimony and credibility of nonwhite people. under this analysis, white ignorance is naturalized as objective knowledge that rebuffs political analysis.30 in this case, the study of ignorance is primarily tasked 30 consider, for example, edward said’s account of the naturalization of orientalism (1978), whereby the orient becomes “wholly discrete, stable, and fixed, providing sharp contrast to the occident” (alcoff 2007, 56). said’s account of the naturalization of the orient is helpful in beginning to articulate an account of how white supremacy cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 with unraveling the cognitive mechanisms associated with structural racial discrimination. what would it mean to take harper’s statement that canada has no history of colonialism, in the face of testimonies that this is patently false, as belief that is reasonably held? in other words, how might we evaluate the statement “canada has no history of colonialism” not as presenting a lack of knowledge but as asserting a particular kind of knowledge. the task of considering settler denial as an epistemology of ignorance involves looking at how oppressive structures inform the epistemic practices of wilfully denying past and ongoing settler-colonial violence. an epistemology of ignorance offers both a description and explanation of how structures of domination come to inform what can and cannot be known. work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression can help give language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible (audible), and therefore challenged. for this task, mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded, i argue, to a consideration of white settler ignorance.31 i broaden an account of racial ignorance to include the particular epistemic logics of settler colonialism.32 this characterization of white settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of access to resources for knowledge and information but is rather structural ignorance. 2.1 settler-colonial elimination lorenzo veracini and patrick wolfe aim to articulate the underlying aims of settler colonialism.33 veracini contends that colonialism and settler colonialism need and settler colonialism come to naturalize settler knowledge of indigenous peoples. 31 while mills speaks to the role of the “state of nature” in the white settler state, he does explicitly thematize white settler ignorance as part of the racial contract’s epistemological contract (mills 1997, 12–19). 32 an account of white settler ignorance develops out of an appreciation of the intersection of white supremacy and settler-colonial violence. aileen moretonrobinson’s work on the logic of white possession highlights how racism is “inextricably tied to the theft and appropriation of indigenous lands in the first world” (moreton-robinson 2015, xiii). 33 in this respect, veracini affirms that settler-colonial studies aims at articulating heuristic tools rather than transformative ones. this is why settler-colonial studies is not a theory of indigenous resurgence. veracini contends that an analysis of settlercolonial studies does not prefer one form of indigenous agency over another and understands radical transformations of indigenous political structures as both feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 to be “analytically disentangled” in order to consider settler colonialism in its specificity (veracini 2011, 1).34 the dialectical relation between settler colonialism and colonialism can be understood through the identification of their underlying logics—a logic of elimination and a logic of exploitation. colonialism is exogenous domination whereby colonizers seek to maintain a permanent colonial relation, to reproduce that relation, and to use the labour power of the colonized. settler colonialism, however, aims to “supersede the conditions of its operations” (2011, 8). for wolfe, the logic of elimination manifests in both the dissolution of native societies, and in the erection of a “new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (wolfe 2006, 388). the elimination of native populations is “an organizing principal of settler-colonial society” (2006, 388). the motivation for the elimination of native populations is, first and foremost, territory: “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (2006, 388). whereas colonialism depends upon the reproduction of labour power to augment the colonial power’s wealth, settler colonialism depends upon access to land.35 crucially, wolfe explains that the invasion of native lands in north america and australia, for example, is not an event in the past but an ongoing structure that is reasserted each day of occupation (wolfe 2006, 388). importantly, the logic of elimination that underlies settler colonialism aims not only at the elimination of indigenous peoples but also at its very own extinction. as such, colonialism seeks to reproduce itself, whereas settler colonialism seeks to become invisible. veracini writes: “settler colonialism justifies its operation on the destructive and constitutive processes that are always undermined and positively shaped by indigenous agency (veracini 2015, 312). 34 this distinction arises, in part, in fanon’s writings on decolonial violence ([1961] 2005). in fanon’s analysis, colonial and settler-colonial phenomena overlap such that it was “the settler” that had “brought the native into existence” (veracini 2013, 318). 35 this contrast is exemplified in the difference of defining blackness in terms of the “one drop rule” that exponentially increased populations of labour power for the slave owner, and between the blood quantum regulations that radically decreased the native population (wolfe 2006, 388). megan bang and ananda marin trace the fundamental tenet of settler-colonial societies as “the acquisition of land as property, followed by the establishment of settler lifeways as the normative benchmark from which to measure development.” (bang and marin 2015, 532). settler lifeways are accomplished through: (i) erasure of indigenous presence, (ii) staged inheritance of indigeneity by whites, and (iii) erasure of african descendants’ humanity through the structuration of slavery and resultant reduction to and control of black bodies (2015, 532). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 basis of the expectation of its future demise” (2011, 3). in other words, settler colonialism aims to no longer be settler-colonial and to become either “settled” or “postcolonial.”36 for this reason, settler colonialism, when successful, “effectively covers its tracks” (2011, 3). this covering of its tracks, i argue, requires certain ignorance of its own operation. insofar as settler colonialism aims for complete settlement, it demands both the elimination of indigenous peoples and the ignorance of its own operations. settler colonialism aims to make itself invisible, and as such, settler ignorance is a way of furthering this invisibility. this invisibility comes to form what mark rifkin calls “settler common sense,” defined as a set of dynamics for political and legal structures that both legitimates and normalizes the elimination of indigenous peoples (rifkin 2013). the settler common sense manifests in a settler everyday in which canadian sovereignty is taken to be both obvious and natural. this settler common sense forms the affective background that legitimates both ongoing settler-colonial violence and the continued denial or forgetting of settler colonialism by settler canadians. an account of settler ignorance as a necessary outcome of a settler-colonial logic of elimination can help us better understand former prime minister harper’s two statements: “canada has no history of colonialism” and “residential school policy . . . has no place in our history.” what do these two statements made by the same person just one year apart signal about how settler-colonial power is maintained and re-legitimated? examining these two statements in conjunction allows us to better appreciate how the disavowal of colonialism reveals a particular kind of knowledge production and nation memory-making. i argue that settler canadians’ obliviousness about past and present settler-colonial violence is not accidental but is a structural feature of settler colonialism. 2.2 white settler ignorance in the following section, i give an account of structural ignorance by explaining how it functions by discrediting indigenous speakers and hearing 36 veracini cites ronald horvath’s classification of six types of colonization, with type 1 being the closest to settler colonialism: “type 1 is colonization in which the dominant relationship between the colonizers and the colonized is extermination of the latter. in the extreme sense of the word, to exterminate is to root out totally or eradicate. history provides us with relatively few examples where total extermination of the inhabitants of geographic entities occurred—among them the european occupation of tasmania and of some of the caribbean islands—but extermination of the inhabitants of vast areas of america, australia, canada, and tsarist and communist russia can also be cited here” (horvath 1972, 47). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 emotional testimonies as (i) an expression of past wrongs and (ii) evidence of individual pathology. an understanding of settler ignorance is necessary in order to explain how it is that we settlers fail to know things and remain ignorant in the face of testimonies of settler-colonial violence. in order to explain what kind of knowledge white settler ignorance is, and how it functions, kevin bruyneel’s account of settler memory is a helpful starting point. bruyneel argues that the description of the forgetfulness of settler colonialism as a form of “historical amnesia” is not a lack of memory but a particular production and presence of memory that he calls “settler memory” (bruyneel 2013, 237–240). his analysis resonates with historian ernest renan’s ([1882] 1992) understanding of the (settler) nation as constituted in moments of violence which must then be perpetually repressed and forgotten in order to effect national unity. as such, settler-colonial nation-building requires a certain kind of forgetfulness in order to function. the appearance of collective amnesia is, in fact, a result of the particular manner in which the nation remembers its “past, as facts and myths” (bruyneel 2016, 351).37 this supposed historical amnesia plays an important role in the “re-legitimation of contemporary violence, dispossession, and appropriation” (2016, 351).38 in this vein, bruyneel tells us that settler memory functions by both seamlessly distancing past injustices from those of the present, and disavowing the political relevance of this memory by refusing and absenting the presence of indigenous people as contemporary agents (2013, 236). a feature of structural settler ignorance, then, is its distancing of present testimonies of settler colonialism to the past. settler ignorance is maintained by hearing testimonies of present settler-colonial violence as an expression of past wrongs rather than as an expression of ongoing settler-colonial violence. consider, for example, the 2008 statement of apology that prompted the creation of the trc. former prime minister stephen harper considered the legacy of the residential school system to be “a sad chapter in our history [which] has no place in our country,” which frames the residential school system as both a problem in the past (thus erasing ongoing settler-colonial violence) while also diminishing the central 37 consider, for example, the settler nation myths of canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations. 38 this can be seen forcefully with the defunding of the aboriginal healing foundation (ahf), which supports indigenous healing programs in 145 communitybased projects (nagy 2012, 358). such an example of ongoing colonial legislation was the passing of bill c-45, which introduced significant changes to canada’s navigable water act, the indian act, and the environmental assessment act, among other pieces of federal legislation, and which unilaterally undermined aboriginal and treaty rights (coulthard 2014, 127). cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 role of the residential schools in settler-colonial nation-building (“it has no place in our country”). harper’s statements in the apology deny a settler-colonial present by situating the damage of settler-colonial violence in the past. his g20 statement continues this process of disavowal by denying the settler-colonial past. this is settler ignorance at work, habitually invoking settler colonialism in a manner that blurs the line between past and present, and further reinscribing the practices of present-day settler violence and dispossession. settler ignorance functions by delegitimizing testimonies by relegating these testimonies to the past. expressions of settler-colonial violence are heard as “reactive, backward and a passive orientation” (coulthard 2014, 111). expressions of ongoing settler-colonial violence are taken to be a form of negative dwelling in the past, rather than taken as an expression of the impact of the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. the distancing of the present to the past recalls mills’s “inverted epistemology,” in which the temporal distancing works to create a “consensual hallucination” of the denial of present-day settler-colonial reality, which is required for “conquest, colonization, and enslavement” (mills 1997, 19).39 a second feature of settler ignorance relates to how indigenous voices are heard as irrational and as a sign of individual pathology. this feature of settler ignorance is most forcefully articulated by a feminist native intervention, and dian million’s felt theory in particular, that describes how ignorance is maintained through pathologizing emotional expression. a native feminist intervention can more fully identify and destabilize settler ways of hearing native expressions of hurt, pain, and anger, insofar as it raises the questions of whose voices are heard as politically meaningful in a context of ongoing settler-colonial, capitalist and heteropatriarchal violence.40 million’s felt theory, with its attention to the affective intersections of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, shows us how settler ignorance functions. 39 rifkin argues that dominant settler conceptions of time and space put native peoples in a double bind: “either they are consigned to the past, or they are inserted into a present defined on non-native terms” (rifkin 2017, vii). settlers experience the world made by settler colonialism, experience its temporalities and understandings of space as natural and so, beyond questioning. 40 native feminist theory reveals the key aspect of settler colonialism to be “the consistency and thus naturalization of heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism” (arvin, tuck, and morrill 2013, 14). central to the project of settler colonialism are both the erasure of indigenous presence on land through physical and statistical elimination, as well as the imposition of gender and kin structures. settler-colonial violence occurs in the creation and violent imposition of a christian heteropatriarchal family. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 her work makes visible how settler ignorance functions by delegitimizing and pathologizing emotional expression. she invites us to recognize the way native women have born “witness to felt colonial experience” (million 2013, 75). these voices—those of maria campbell, lee maracle, ruby slipperjack, in particular—of a felt history present a powerful challenge to the social control of internalized colonialism, as well as invigorates political discourse of native self-determination with emotional knowledge. their narratives disrupt settler-colonial silencing and defy the logic of state recognition that pathologizes native expression.41 in particular, native feminists have worked on making visible the epistemic assumptions of what counts as academic scholarship. million tells us, however, that the embodied knowledge of how colonialism is felt—what she calls felt scholarship—has been denied as a legitimate form of knowledge within academia. their accounts that describe how colonialism is felt are political acts in themselves insofar as they challenge what counts as “proper” history (2013, 54). first-person narratives that describe, for example, the felt experience of being raped by a priest at ten years old, have been rejected as legitimate historical knowledge (2013, 72). rather, they have been segregated as a “feminine” experience, as a polemic, or as evidence of pathological distress—they were too “bitter” or “biased.” million’s work shows how settler ignorance is maintained by discrediting testimonies of ongoing settler-colonial violence by indigenous speakers. in other words, settlers can remain oblivious to settler-colonial violence because of indigenous women’s credit deficit (fricker 2007), such that indigenous speakers’ epistemic agency, the ability to use “shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources” is undermined (dotson 2012, 24).42 for this reason, i contend that the settler-colonial logic of elimination necessarily 41 million argues that canadian first nation women’s embodied narratives have fuelled a discursive shift in the histories of residential schooling (2013, 67). their first person and experiential narratives of past and future pain, grief, and hope create a new language for communities to reveal and analyze “the moral affective heart of capitalism and colonialism” (2013, 55). in exploring the embodied, gendered, and sexual nature of their colonization, these native women’s personal narratives “transformed the debilitating force of an old social control, shame, into a social agent in their generation” (2013, 55). 42 a knower is discredited as a knower in virtue of their social identity as a member of a socially powerless group (fricker 2007, 156). in other words, there is an epistemic injustice when a hearer deflates the credibility of a speaker by virtue of their identity. cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 leads to epistemic oppression (dotson 2012, 2014).43 settler colonialism can remain invisible when testimonies of settler-colonial violence are not heard as factually relevant or politically meaningful. conclusion the two features of settler ignorance—the relegation of present testimonies to a fixed past and the pathologization of emotional expression—are nonaccidental features of settler colonialism that come to form settler common sense. i affirm that settler colonialism as a structure mandates the ignorance of its own operations. this ignorance is structural insofar as it is a necessary outcome of the settler project of eliminating indigenous presence. former prime minister harper’s statement denying canada’s settler-colonial past makes sense according to settler common sense, which normalizes a denial of settler-colonial violence. this structural ignorance is invisible to itself and exempts itself from critique. as such, indigenous voices are necessary in order to expose these epistemic structures.44 an account of settler ignorance can better evaluate governmental attempts to “move forward” from past wrongs. furthermore, it shows us that an apparent lack of knowledge about residential schools is not a case of misrecognition or a lack of information but is a particular kind of knowing that undermines indigenous peoples’ epistemic agency. without challenging these structural epistemic assumptions, governmental apologies and truth commissions will replicate this ignorance. an account of settler ignorance reveals why a model of reconciliation through recognition, such as in the trc, is unable to challenge historical amnesia and settler denial. the epistemic presumption of the trc is that the problem of settler denial is simply a lack of information, that we only need more knowledge about the evils of the residential school system, that the government and the general public are just conveniently unaware of the violence perpetrated against native peoples in canada. but an account of settler ignorance shows us that an apparent lack of memory results from “a particular production and presence of memory” that is central to the settler-colonial logic of elimination (bruyneel 2013, 237). as such, settler canadians’ obliviousness about past and present settler 43 epistemic oppression is characterized by “a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinders one’s contributions to knowledge production” (dotson 2014, 115). 44 this point echoes work in standpoint theory and in josé medina’s definition of the epistemic virtue meta-lucidity among epistemically virtuous subjects of oppressed groups, defined as the “capacity to see the limitations of dominant ways of seeing” (medina 2012, 47). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 colonial violence is not accidental but is a structural feature of settler colonialism. the legacy of the residential schools does not merely require education in order for settlers to “fill the gaps in our history education knowledge.” the trc promotes reconciliation through the cure of remembering, but this model fails to see how discourses of forgetting a violent past and present are crucial to the justification and perpetuation of settler violence and the canadian state. insofar as state recognition does not call into question the legitimacy and prevailing power structures of the canadian state, it cannot truly acknowledge the continued violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples. works cited aboriginal affairs and northern development canada. 2008. statement of apology. june 11. modified september 15, 2010. http://www.aadncaandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100015644/1100100015649. aboriginal healing foundation. 2005. reclaiming connections: understanding residential school trauma among aboriginal people: a resource manual. ottawa: aboriginal healing foundation. alcoff, linda m. 2007. “epistemologies of ignorance: three types.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 39–58. albany: state university of new york press. ———. 2010. “epistemic 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peace pipe: towards a critical indigenous philosophy, by dale turner. university of toronto quarterly 77 (winter): 164– 166. ———. 2014. red skins, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. ———. 2012. a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression. frontiers 33 (1): 24–47. ———. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–138. fanon, frantz. (1961) 2005. the wretched of the earth. boston: grove press. ———. 1967. black skin, white masks. boston: grove press. fraser, nancy. 2000. “rethinking recognition.” new left review 3:107–120. fraser, nancy, and axel honneth. 2003. redistribution or recognition: a politicalphilosophical exchange. london: verso. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. new york: oxford university press. harding, sandra g. 2004. the feminist standpoint theory reader. new york: routledge. horvath, r. j. 1972. “a definition of colonialism.” current anthropology 13 (1): 45– 57. konkle, maureen. 2004. writing indian nations: native intellectuals and the politics of historiography, 1827–1863. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. manuel, arthur, and grand chief ronald m. derrickson. 2015. unsettling canada: a national wake-up call. toronto: between the lines. maracle, lee. 2003. “the operation was successful, but the patient died.” in box of treasures or empty box? twenty years of section 35, edited by ardith walkem and halie bruce, 309–315. vancouver: theytus. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2018 24 medina, josé. 2012. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. new york: oxford university press. million, dian. 2013. therapeutic nations: healing in an age of indigenous human rights. tucson: the university of arizona press. mills, charles w. 1997. the racial contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 13–38. albany: state university of new york press. moreton-robinson, aileen. 2015. the white possessive. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. nagel, thomas. 1986. the view from nowhere. new york: oxford up. nagy, rosemary. 2012. “truth, reconciliation and settler denial: the canada–south africa analogy.” human rights review 13:349–367. niezen, ronald. 2016. “templates and exclusions: victim centrism in canada’s truth and reconciliation commission on indian residential schools.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 22:920–938. phelps, teresa godwin. 2004. shattered voices: language, violence, and the work of truth commissions. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. razack, sherene h., ed. 2002. race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society. toronto: between the lines. regan, paulette. 2010. unsettling the settler within: indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in canada. vancouver: university of british columbia press. renan, ernest. (1882) 1992. “what is a nation?” text of a conference delivered at the sorbonne on march 11, 1882. in qu’est-ce qu’une nation? et autres essais politiques, edited by joël roman. paris: presses pocket. rifkin, mark. 2013.“settler common sense.” settler colonial studies 3 (3–4): 322– 340. ———. 2017. beyond settler time. durham, nc: duke university press. simpson, audra. 2014. mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, nc: duke university press. stanton, kim. 2011. “canada’s truth and reconciliation commission: settling the past?” international indigenous policy journal 2 (3): 1–18. sullivan, shannon, and nancy tuana. 2007. “introduction.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 1–10. albany: state university of new york press. taylor, charles. 1994. “the politics of recognition.” in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, edited by amy gutmann, 25–73. princeton, nj: princeton university press. cook – recognizing settler ignorance in the canadian truth and reconciliation commission published by scholarship@western, 2018 25 trc (truth and reconciliation commission of canada). 2015a. honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/findings/exec_summar y_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf. ———. 2015b. truth and reconciliation commission of canada: calls to action. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/findings/calls_to_actio n_english2.pdf. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. 2012. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education and society 1 (1): 1–40. tully, james. 2000. “the struggles of indigenous peoples for and of freedom.” in political theory and the rights of indigenous peoples, edited by duncan ivison, paul patton, and will sanders, 36–59. new york: cambridge university press. turner, dale. 2006. this is not a peace pipe: towards a critical indigenous philosophy. toronto: university of toronto press. veracini, lorenzo. 2011. “introducing settler colonial studies.” settler colonial studies 1 (1): 1–12. ———. 2013. “‘settler colonialism’: career of a concept.” journal of imperial and commonwealth history 41 (2): 313–333. ———. 2015. the settler colonial present. new york: palgrave macmillan. vowel, chelsea. 2016. indigenous writes: a guide to first nations, métis & inuit issues in canada. winnipeg: highwater press. wolfe, patrick. 2006. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8 (4): 387–409. anna cook is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of the fraser valley (bc). her dissertation, “unable to hear: settler ignorance and the canadian truth and reconciliation commission,” provides an epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism in terms of settlers’ disavowal of past and ongoing settler-colonial violence. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/findings/exec_summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/file/2015/findings/exec_summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf technology and narratives of continuity in transgender experiences feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 6 2015 technology and narratives of continuity in transgender experiences amy billingsley university of oregon, amyrbillingsley@gmail.com recommended citation billingsley, amy. 2015. "technology and narratives of continuity in transgender experiences. "feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 6. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6. technology and narratives of continuity in transgender experiences1 amy billingsley abstract this essay examines narratives of fundamental change, which portray a break in the continuity between a pre-transition and post-transition transgender subject, in accounts of transgender transitions. narratives of fundamental change highlight the various changes that occur during transition and its disruptive effects upon a trans subject’s continuous identity. first, this essay considers the historical appearance of fundamental change narratives in the social sciences, the media, and their use by families of trans people, partners of trans people, and trans people themselves. after this is a consideration of mark johnson’s account of narrative as a meaning-making activity that occurs in the context of social norms. johnson’s account is then applied to narratives of fundamental change to explain why these narratives occur, especially in relation to social norms and lived experience. the essay concludes by considering the trajectory of fundamental change narratives, looking at emerging transgender narratives, which stress a more integrated, complex account of transgender lives. keywords: narrative, technology, sexual reassignment surgery, gender transition, identity, mark johnson, transgender, transsexual, trans since the first documented case of sexual reassignment surgery in 1931 (stryker 2008, 39), and the mass media attention given to christine jorgensen’s transition in the 1950’s (47), gender technology has opened up the question of “sex 1 special thanks to simon ruchti, for whom i wrote the original version of this essay in 2008, and who both suggested crucial revisions and encouraged me to submit the essay for publication. thanks also to lisa ruchti, joan woolfrey, rodney mader, and brian foley, who provided feedback on the original draft. this latest version of the essay also greatly benefited from suggestions offered by the anonymous feminist philosophy quarterly reviewers, and from substantial feedback generously provided by carla fehr. 1 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 change” to a population that has been simultaneously anxious and intrigued. as susan stryker asserts, jorgensen’s appearance in the media was bolstered by an “intense attention to social gender roles” during the 1950’s (48), and the technology of surgery that seemed to allow crossing from one sex to another would be used as a key feature for harry benjamin’s definition of “the transsexual” as a distinct figure (49). this juxtaposition between anxiety over gender roles and the public’s knowledge of a technology that seemed to cross the enforced binary of sexes unsurprisingly led to questions about personal identity, including considerations of the meaning of sex reassignment surgery for the identity of those who had undergone the procedure. the question of identity is perhaps brought to its most hyperbolic heights in a 1970 docudrama loosely based on jorgensen’s life. while depicting jorgensen’s sexual reassignment surgery, the film enters a dream sequence in which the actor playing jorgensen jumps into a dark pool of water and sinks until no longer visible. the dramatized version of jorgensen concludes, “it could have only one meaning: george jorgensen was gone forever. i was somebody else now” (the christine jorgensen story 1970). this narrative of jorgensen’s surgery is a narrative of fundamental change, as it suggests that the use of transitioning technology results in the death of the pretransition subject, with the new post-transition subject emerging as a result. through this death, transition is framed as a fundamental change in identity, with the old self slipping away forever in contrast to the new emerging self that has been formed during the course of surgery. as will be shown, these narratives are a common way of depicting the identity of trans people who have transitioned, and involve disidentifying their post-transition self from their transitioning or pretransition identity. though the christine jorgensen docudrama emphasizes sexual reassignment surgery as a fount of fundamental change, instances of fundamental change narratives may also be triggered by perceived physical appearances in the absence of sexual reassignment surgery specifically. thus, in this essay i will use the blanket phrase “technologies of transition” to refer to the various medical technologies that may be accessed to alter bodies over the course of transition, such that a trans person2 may appear to have significantly changed in appearance as a result of their 2 while “trans” is often used to inclusively refer to transgender people, transsexual people, and people who identify as gender queer, this essay will primarily use the term “trans” to refer to people who transition or are planning to transition from one sex/gender to another. the reason for using “trans” in this 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 use. these technologies include medical explorations into endocrinology and surgery, such as hormone therapy, sexual reassignment surgery, chest reconstruction, facial surgeries, and/or breast augmentation in the context of transition. while this essay will often highlight the influence of technology in fundamental change narratives, it is also important to acknowledge that technologies of transition are not always necessary to trigger the use of these narratives. changes in clothing, behavior, and treatment by others in society may be enough to motivate the use of fundamental change narratives, especially when they cause observed differences between a person’s pre-transition presentation and their transitioning or post-transition presentation. as will be shown, narratives of fundamental change frequently occur in a social and relational context rather than as a reaction to purely biological changes, and thus an array of changes may be influential in causing someone to adopt a fundamental change narrative. but before we address instances of fundamental change narratives in more detail, it is important to note that the changes many trans people undergo have also caused philosophers to ask questions about identity and continuity. in her introduction to you’ve changed: sex reassignment and personal identity, laurie shrage raises this question, asking, “. . . are these circumstances in which a claim to nonidentity between two stages of once identical selves is literally true?” (shrage 2009, 3). in a different context, k. anthony appiah suggests an answer to this question by clarifying that a “sex change” does not result in a metaphysical change in identity, but it will likely be held to represent a change in the construction of life plans (appiah 1990, 499), referred to as “ethical identity” (495). whereas appiah asserts that for “us in the modern west” a change of sex is considered to be a more disruptive change for ethical identity than hypothetical changes in race (1990, 497), georgia warnke complicates this claim by pointing to the variety of changes that people may experience throughout their life beyond gender and race. warnke stresses that changes in one’s sense of self should be considered in a more contextual manner, as people may consider themselves a “new person” in relation to other factors such as motherhood and learning a language depending on how “conceptually central” these aspects are held to their identity (warnke 2009, 38-39). and in a more final answer to shrage’s question, christine overall claims that a trans person who transitions does not have their identity’s continuity severed, because they maintain a post-transition “way of being" context is because people who transition often identify themselves with a number of terms, including transgender, transsexual, and trans in the way used here. 3 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 that “grows out of the previous self” (overall 2009, 20). philosophy has thus grappled with metaphysical and social questions raised by the relationship between technologies of transition and the continuity of trans identities. while these philosophical analyses raise intriguing points about the relationships between gender, race, senses of self, and the continuity of identity, they do not analyze the particular and concrete appearances of fundamental change narratives in society, and thus do not address these narratives’ origins and lasting implications. appiah does assert that western society holds gender to be distinctly conceptually important in relation to the continuity of ethical identity, but this analysis remains abstract in relation to actual implementations of fundamental change narratives. overall also addresses the importance of narratives as a way in which people who transition weave a continuing identity (2009, 21), but this does not address the question of why such fundamental change narratives circulate to begin with, and what they mean for trans people and society. it is also worth considering the work of bernice hausman in this context, as she specifically highlights the role of narrative in understanding transition and related technologies. in changing sex: transsexualism, technology, and the idea of gender, hausman is concerned about the ways in which narratives of transition risk aligning with sexism and heterosexism under the guise of “gender identity” (hausman 1995, 137). within this broader project, hausman argues that the narratives presented in autobiographies of trans people deny sexual ambiguity in an effort to present an inborn, unchangeable, and irrefutable (153) picture of the gender one is “meant to be” (167). hausman also notes that trans autobiographies tend to treat hormones and surgery as a simple means to an end rather than acknowledging the pivotal role of technologies in sex reassignment procedures (166167). the technologies of transition are thus effaced and reduced to tangential, contingent events, regardless of the pain involved (162-163). hausman thus presents a concern that the resistance of the body to the technologies that seek to alter its materiality never reaches the surface in these autobiographies because the moment of surgery has been obscured from view. but once again we lack an explicit analysis of fundamental change narratives. though the kinds of narratives that hausman examines also frame the changes that transition involves, they deal with these changes via erasure rather than highlighting them as a focal point of identity conversion. consequently, hausman’s text is exclusively concerned with the ways in which narratives about trans people make technology invisible, but fundamental change narratives such as the death of george and the birth of christine found in the christine jorgensen docudrama instead highlight the role of technology as a tool of sensationalism and a centerpiece for depicting changes in sex. the film explicitly depicts george’s final plummet into the 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 abyssal water while showcasing scenes of christine’s dramatized surgery (the christine jorgensen story 1970). a comprehensive analysis of the fundamental change narrative would call attention to another pattern within trans narratives that contrasts with hausman’s emphasis on erased technology, explaining the features of another significant path that narratives of transition may take. this will not render hausman’s account of effacement narratives irrelevant. and while the analysis below will differ with hausman’s analysis by aligning jan morris’s narrative of transition in conundrum with narratives of fundamental change, a survey of fundamental change narratives will primarily involve review of texts and media that hausman did not consider.3 in this essay, i will contribute to this literature on transition, narratives, and personal identity by examining narratives of fundamental change. doing so will indicate that fundamental change narratives are used by both trans people and nontrans people to understand or justify transition in the context of a society that often harbors gender ideologies and institutions which risk denying lived experiences of transition. this denial is effected by a narrative strategy, which disidentifies a posttransition trans person from their experiences of transition and frequently highlights technologies of transition as a means of fundamental change. first, i will consider historical appearances of these narratives in the social sciences, the media, and their use by families of trans people, partners of trans people, and trans people themselves. second, i will refer to mark johnson’s explanation of narrative as an activity of meaning-making and justification that draws from societal norms to explain plausible sources that encourage the use of fundamental change narratives. after considering these sources in relation to societal transphobia, i will then explain some drawbacks of using fundamental change narratives, as they risk a disavowal of the work, pain, and oppression involved in transition. the essay will then conclude by considering popular emerging narratives that may indicate a movement away from fundamental change narratives and towards a more integrated account of trans lives. 3 to take this pluralism of narrative analysis further, it also seems like a false dilemma to posit that a particular text or media can only use a narrative of fundamental change or a narrative of effacement. it is possible that even the same text or media may switch between the two in different places. this essay also differs from hausman’s by approaching narratives from the perspective of trans feminism, and hence will avoid referring to trans identities as “illusions” or “simulations” (hausman 193). 5 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 narratives of fundamental change the narrative of fundamental change appears in numerous areas, including anthropology and psychology, which provide a general description and acknowledgment of its existence in the context of social rituals or therapeutic outcomes. in anne bolin’s anthropological study of transsexual rites of passage, in search of eve, she describes trans women’s genital reassignment surgeries as being “the final phase of their rebirth as women. transition has been a period of ritual births and deaths, but the rite of incorporation is itself a metaphorical summation of these into a primary ritual of rebirth” (bolin 1987, 180). in this ‘rite of passage’ narrative, the old pre-transition self dies and the new post-transition self emerges through the use of sexual reassignment surgery. hence, instead of effacing the role of technology in trans people’s lives, this narrative frames the technology of sexual reassignment as a culminating moment laden with the birth and death of a trans subject. in arlene istar lev’s transgender emergence, a book of therapeutic guidelines for trans people, lev stresses the need for transsexual people to “fully integrate themselves into their new identity” and “not deny their previous selves” (lev 2004, 266). the need to specify this approach to identity indicates that trans people may decide to frame themselves in opposition to their pre-transition way of life. while this tendency to disidentify with one’s past could arise from non-surgical elements of transition, the changes brought on by the technology of hormones and sexual reassignment surgery still stand out as especially transformative upon conceptions of self-identity. in this way, the fundamental change narratives that bolin and lev consider may highlight the role of technology in one’s transition rather than obscuring its importance from view. a consideration of actual implementations of fundamental change narratives in society, such as in the media, provides a more concrete look at how these narratives are used. while media coverage of trans people often highlights the naturalness or destiny of transition, the media has also often turned to narratives of fundamental change as a source for sensationalism. for example, this is seen in the media’s frequent insistence upon showing ‘before and after’ photos of the trans people they interview and the common practice of mentioning the legal names trans guests were initially assigned. when oprah winfrey conducted her famous interview with thomas beatie, highlighted as “the pregnant man,” her website focused on pictures of him as a miss hawaii usa contestant and employed his birth-assigned name when speaking about his past (“unprecedented pregnancy” 2008). julia serano acknowledges this trend, linking it to a similar sensationalism accorded to plastic surgeries and gastric bypasses (serano 2007, 56). serano argues that these specific changes are given so much emphasis because “the subjects cross what is normally considered an impenetrable class boundary: from unattractive to 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 beautiful, from fat to thin, and in the case of transsexuals, from male to female, or from female to male” (57). and each of these supposedly impenetrable class boundaries are related to technological advancements in surgery. ultimately, these shows often attempt to show as dissonant as possible an image from pre-transition to post-transition. continuing from the example of winfrey’s showcase of thomas beatie, winfrey’s website hosted pre-transition photos that specifically served to highlight how much technology had changed beatie’s appearance after his transition. the “before,” or pre-transition photos and the “after,” or post-transition photos attempt to construct a narrative of fundamental difference by shocking the audience into wondering how both photos could display the same person. combined with these displays of “before” and “after,” the way winfrey’s website refers to thomas beatie also reflects another example of fundamental change narratives: the separation of self in accounts. as beatie tells the story of his transition, the website refers to his pre-transition self with a different name and female pronouns, while referring to beatie in the present as thomas beatie, a man with male pronouns. when thomas describes having been a miss hawaii teen usa finalist, the website specifies that this was actually tracy, as “her father began encouraging her to be a model.” and when thomas recounts being in a relationship with a martial arts instructor, the website reports, “tracy entered into a relationship with her martial arts instructor” (“unprecedented pregnancy” 2008). this continuing frame leads the website to construct statements that refer to the same person with two different names and as two different people: during her college years, tracy began to discover her true gender identity. “that's when i found myself,” thomas says. "it was a process of self-discovery for me, and i ended up having my first girlfriend. we were together for three and a half years” (“unprecedented pregnancy” 2008). the website’s use of language frames this distinct tracy person, female pronouns and all, as separate from the male-pronouned thomas. considered in isolation, these statements could be rationalized as an attempt at navigating thomas’s temporal change of address in relation to the gendered aspects of pronouns and proper names. but combined with the pictures differentiating tracy from thomas, this framework lends itself towards a narrative of thomas’s life that effectively frames him as two distinct people, telling the story of a fundamental change from tracy to thomas for the awe of the audience. relationships between trans people and their families are another area where fundamental change narratives are concretely applied, usually as an attempt by a non-trans person to navigate their relationship with someone who is transitioning. the most direct way in which this narrative occurs is through accounts of parents who say they “lost” one gendered child to gain another. in trans forming families, for example, a mother of a trans woman writes, “as parents, we may have lost a 7 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 son, but we have gained a daughter,” (samson 2003, 48). later, the mother clarifies this loss as more about the expectations she had for the child she “lost” rather than the child herself (46). this indicates a faint undercurrent of fundamental change, but it is not full-blown. the rhetoric of “loss” is far more explicit in the writing of another mother of a trans woman who recollects, “two years later the memory of my anger has faded, as has the memory of that lost person, my eldest son, michael. the new person, kelly, has become familiar and loved” (lister 2003, 40). in this instance the mother feels that not only have her dreams and expectations ceased to exist, but also her “son.” this mother also uses the narrative of fundamental change and its link with technology to understand the rest of her family’s reaction to kelly’s transition: “it was not until a family reunion after the surgery that the structure of the family re-formed to include this new person whom they decided to christen with a more affectionate name, ‘kelly’” (38). relationships between trans people and their significant others may also involve similar narrative negotiations by non-trans people. gayle salamon considers this in the context of relationships between trans men and lesbian women in “transfeminism and the future of gender,” noting the “violence in circulation in discussions of transition” within the lesbian community (salamon 2008, 127). salamon writes, “transition is further framed as if it is akin to a death or as if the post-transition subject will, with hir emergence, enact the death of the pretransition subject” (127). gayle rubin, also addressing tensions between trans men and the lesbian community in “of catamites and kings”, describes the way “lovers of ftms often have intense feelings of loss, grief, and abandonment” (rubin 2006, 478). this grief does not mean that partners will necessarily embrace the fundamental change narrative, as these feelings could be caused by a loss of relationship expectations. however, it is also possible that, as with some parents, the partner of a trans man may decide that they have become a completely different person after transition, especially given the common fundamental change discourse in the lesbian community described by salamon. trans people themselves also sometimes express that their identity has undergone a fundamental change upon transition. sandy stone’s classic work in transgender studies, “the empire strikes back,” focuses on this aspect in jan morris’ account of transition. while hausman focuses on morris’ narrative as an account that primarily strives for a unified gendered self (hausman 1995, 163), morris also asserts that the technology of transition effected a fundamental conversion of her being. recalling the moments before her surgery, morris writes, “i went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. we would never meet again, and i wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye, a wink for luck” (stone 2006, 222). stone summarizes her account bluntly: “exit james morris, enter jan morris…,” two 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 separate selves (222). aaron h. devor explains why this separation of self occurs in his model of transsexual identity formation: transition…means the leaving behind of a way of life. this departure from the total experience that comprises living as a woman or a man can be felt as a kind of death of a huge part of oneself. thus transition also frequently brings with it a kind of grieving for the person that one once was but no longer will be. (devor 2004, 16) here, devor is describing that the self-felt differences between living as a woman versus living as a man can lead trans people to separate those two experiences completely. but it is also crucial to acknowledge the role of technology in jan morris’ account, as the moment of sexual reassignment signals the death knell for her previous self. this overview of fundamental change narratives reveals that they involve negotiations between the changes brought about by transition, the technology that allows many of these changes to occur, the relationships between trans people and non-trans people, and trans people’s own understandings of their identity and lived experiences over time. while bolin, lev, devor, and stryker call attention to the fundamental change narrative in relation to the personal identity of trans people, the use of fundamental change narratives by winfrey’s website and by non-trans family and significant others also indicates that fundamental change narratives facilitate the ways in which non-trans people understand transition. more precisely, winfrey’s website attempts to align the changes allowed by technologies of transition with a sensationalist presentation of beatie’s story as a miraculous conversion from one person to another that is marketed to broader, largely non-trans audiences. and when fundamental change narratives are evoked in the context of relationships between trans and non-trans people, this again involves an attempt by non-trans people to find a narrative that makes sense of the changes that their friends or loved ones are going through by understanding their transition as a road to a fundamentally new self. this indicates that we need to consider fundamental change narratives not only in relation to self-accounts of identity by trans people, but also as a series of narratives that often eclipse trans experiences and facilitate the ways that non-trans people attempt to understand both trans people and the effects of transition upon identity. to do this, we require a theory of narratives that allows us to understand both individual negotiations of personal identity and social influences that may transcend the individuals who refer to them. 9 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 narratives and navigating social norms now that i have considered several instances of the fundamental change narrative, it is worth considering the significance of this framework for how both trans people and non-trans people account for experiences of transition in relation to identity. though overall describes her investigation into transition and identity as a “theory of the metaphysics of sex/gender transitions” (overall 2009, 22), she specifically turns to narrative as a device through which the question of a trans person’s continuing identity can be framed (21). overall asserts that “sex/gender identity [is] developed by and understood through a series of interpretations,” further adding that “…whatever our sex/gender identity may be, we develop them by, in effect, creating the continuing narrative of our lives” (21; italics original). though these continuing interpretations involve a significant “freedom to choose” on the part of trans people, overall also situates this description in the social world, explaining that the social norms and ways of policing nonconformity in a culture will heavily influence the extent to which a trans person has access to self-determination and self-interpretation (21). overall’s approach thus indicates that narratives are a useful device for understanding how continuous identities can be sustained through interpretations while simultaneously embedded in one’s social world. in addition to negotiating between freedom of choice and one’s social situatedness, overall’s gesture towards narrative as a way to understand trans people’s continuing identities is a useful departure from metaphysics for our purposes, since it is unclear whether people who invoke narratives of fundamental change actually believe that a trans person has had their old identity metaphysically pulverized. it thus seems more compelling to characterize these depictions as narratives rather than as a popular foray into trans metaphysics or an attempt to grapple with some “gender of theseus” problem, as fundamental change depictions rely more on invoking a particular story or interpretation to explain transition.4 though overall provides a helpful acknowledgment of narratives in the context of identity continuity, her consideration of narrative occurs in only one small section in a larger piece on the metaphysics of identity. consequently, it will be useful to consider a more detailed account of narratives in order to understand how 4 the ship of theseus is a classic puzzle of identity introduced by the ancient greek historian plutarch, who noticed that philosophers argued over whether the ship of theseus retained its identity after rotting planks were replaced over time (plutarch 2001, 14). incidentally, the original version of this essay was entitled “the gender of theseus,” and provided a metaphysical rather than narrative-based analysis. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 narratives as a device function in the context of fundamental change interpretations. mark johnson does just this in moral imagination: implications of cognitive science for ethics, emphasizing that narratives provide an integral source of selfunderstanding and self-justification for humans living in a world with others (johnson 1993, 154). while his book is primarily focused on ethics, johnson is also concerned about the role of narratives in humans’ search for meaning in their lives (177). in this context, narratives are relevant because they allow humans to “organize and reorganize our experience from moment to moment” such that we can form an understanding of the world and our place within it (152). johnson thus expands narrative to include not only “linguistic stories” that we tell others, but also our imaginative activity of synthesizing our experiences (152) such that we can make a connected account of the events that occur throughout our lives. this also means that narrative does not include merely textual discourse, since “nonlinguistic, nonpropositional language structures” are also involved with our activities of interpretation (153). by extending the notion of narratives beyond the general act of storytelling, johnson shares overall’s concern with the ways humans synthesize our actions in relation to identity (154), but he focuses specifically on giving an account of ourselves to others. johnson argues that narratives are not the properties of a selfmaking individual, but instead draw from broader societal values when we seek to justify our actions (155). after providing a sex worker’s narrative explanation for how she came to choose sex work, johnson writes, this woman is trying to explain, to another, and thereby to understand for herself, who she is, why she came to be where she is today, and how things work in her world. more important, she is trying to justify herself morally in terms of the values and practices of her culture. she is trying to construct a narrative explanation that will be morally acceptable in her social and cultural setting. (155) this passage indicates that the narratives we use to synthesize our experience and identities in coherent ways also depend to a large extent on the norms of our culture, especially when narrative is put forth as a mode of justification towards another person. and this element of justifying our life to others is (understandably) missing from overall’s account. overall does acknowledge the limits of narratives in the context of a social world, but mostly frames trans narratives as “an ongoing narrative project that [resists] the original sex/gender assignment, opting instead for transition” (overall 1995, 21). johnson’s consideration of narratives as a form of justification toward oneself and others in the context of a social world allows us to 11 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 deepen overall’s general description of narratives as a tool of resisting an original sex/gender assignment, as it is also important to consider the ways in which these narratives may involve an appeal of justification to society. johnson, like overall, insists that we are not entirely bound to the roles or narratives into which we are thrown and forced to perpetuate social norms wholesale. because humans are frequently imaginative, meaning-making creatures (johnson 1993, 177), the employment of narrative as a way to unify our experience into an understandable trajectory (170) can often tinker with narratives in ways that reconfigure them according to our own goals. in this way, johnson’s account of narrative is compatible with his experientialist view of a self that is creative and able to “transform our experience” within “limits marked by our biological and cultural being” as part of a “constrained freedom” (161). finally, johnson’s account can assist with understanding the specific role of technology when it is emphasized in fundamental change narratives. johnson argues that narrative structures often borrow from imaginative patterns in order to synthesize experience into meaning (johnson 1993, 166). chief among these patterns is the “source-path-goal” schema, which “consists structurally of a starting point, a contiguous series of intermediate points, and an end point” (166). this further links narratives with stories, as they often frame events in relation to a starting point, a series of intermediate movements, and “some culminating event” (166). in addition to this, johnson notes that narratives often turn upon some sort of “agon, a struggle or conflict” during the journey to a concluding destination (168). if we look at narratives of fundamental change in relation to this sourcepath-goal schema, we find that the pre-transition self serves the role of source or initial state, while the post-transition self is characterized as the goal or culminating status. this is clear in the presentation of beatie’s ‘before and after’ pictures on winfrey’s website, with ‘before and after’ serving as proxies for the ‘source and goal’ of beatie’s transition. and technologies of transition do not serve as the agon in this situation, but are instead facilitators of the path. it is the pre-transition subject, the source to be moved away from, who is framed as both origin and agon in narratives of fundamental change. in the christine jorgensen docudrama, george is the source and agon who ultimately fades away from view during a dreamlike montage of sexual reassignment surgery, and this technology is ultimately able to provide the path to the goal of christine (the christine jorgensen story 1970). at the level of navigating one’s personal identity, it is useful to consider the use of fundamental change narratives as an attempt to justify trans experiences in relation to acceptable societal norms and values. trans people do not exist within a self-determining vacuum, but rather inhabit a social world that is laden with assumptions about what transition involves and how trans people should live. consequently, the use of narratives such as the narrative of fundamental change 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 may often be an attempt by a trans person to justify their life in a way that nontrans people will accept and understand. this corresponds with johnson’s description of applying narratives to one’s life in the context of social embeddedness, as discussed above. but what of the usage and formulation of fundamental change narratives by non-trans people, who, as we saw in the context of winfrey’s website, often shape narratives of transition for their own purposes? to some extent, this aspect is implicitly present in the account we derived from johnson of trans people synthesizing narratives of their lived experiences from their social situation, as fundamental change narratives may be listed among the socially constructed ‘menu’ of narratives from which trans people can choose. but this description may focus on the ability of individual trans people to weave their own path while failing to account for the way in which these narratives might be architected by non-trans people, who often have more social power. consequently, a discussion of possible motivations for narratives of fundamental change is required to determine both the social messages and personal motivations present in such narratives as they are constructed and referenced by both trans and non-trans people.5 change we can believe in if, as johnson asserts, narratives are often used as a justification of our life to others in society, then this means that society may have certain standards to which they expect narratives to conform in order to be acceptable or even understandable. likewise, if certain narratives are often used by non-trans people to understand trans people, to the extent that trans people may be strongly motivated to adopt 5 in ecological thinking lorraine code argues that johnson’s account of the subject overemphasizes individualist self-determination to the point of missing the often hegemonic character of the narratives from which we draw (code 2006, 223), including the ways narratives may be imposed upon people by others (224). in sovereign masculinity bonnie mann describes the ability of words and narratives to “assign us our place in existence,” which may provide resources for a more internal critique and reworking of johnson’s account of narrative than code’s due to shared resources in george lakoff’s work (mann 2014, 139, 143). but a detailed epistemological extension of johnson’s account of personal identity outside of individual meaning-making is beyond the scope of the present essay’s goals of accounting for fundamental change narratives. thanks to anna cook, devin fitzpatrick, jon larochelle, and gus skorburg for these references. 13 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 these narratives, this indicates that narratives of fundamental change can tap into social practices or beliefs that give them some force of social justification.6 consequently, one possible motivation for the acceptance of fundamental change narratives as a justificatory device is the constructed oppositional binary between male and female, already described by aristotle’s metaphysics when he asserts that the pythagorean school declared “male-female” to be opposite principles (aristotle 1991, 343). julia serano writes of a similar phenomenon, calling it oppositional sexism. according to serano, oppositional sexism can be defined as “[a form of sexism] that is rooted in the presumption that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes, each possessing a unique and non-overlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires” (serano 2008). oppositional sexism is the belief that female is the opposite of male, the negation of male is female, and male and female can never exist in the same space. ‘female’ and ‘male’ hence become polar entities, both linguistically and logically. sandy stone also notices this trend in “the empire strikes back,” asserting that in early transsexual narratives, “the authors…reinforce a binary, oppositional mode of gender identification. they go from being unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women. there is no territory between” (stone 225). this form of narrative hence frames men and women as unambiguously different, relying on the oppositional sexism described by serano. stone notes how surgeons would employ “the strategy of building barriers with a single subject” between their pretransition and post-transition selves (225), ensuring an oppositional status would remain within the transsexual person and therefore “deny[ing] the potentialities of mixture” of male and female to “preserve ‘pure’ gender identity” (226). in this way, patients’ “male selves” and “female selves” were separated by the surgeons so that oppositional sexism could remain intact, with both sides cast as irreconcilable categories. the narrative of fundamental change hence may be put forth as a story of transition that draws from societal assumptions about the purity of these oppositions in order to understand and justify transition. beyond conceptions of sex/gender and their relation to fundamental change narratives as a means of accounting for transition, widespread misinformation about technologies of transition is another likely reason for their use. perhaps the best example of this is a south park episode, eloquently titled “mr. garrison’s fancy new 6 this is not to say that non-trans people consciously craft the narrative of fundamental change and issue a fiat to powerless trans subjects who must adopt it, but rather that the general social situation and power differences between trans and non-trans people may encourage the usage of certain narratives. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 vagina,” in which the recurring character mr. garrison simply walks in for “reassignment surgery,” has it performed without any anesthesia, and leaves the room magically transformed into mrs. garrison (“mr. garrison’s fancy new vagina” 2007). the framework of this episode accords with other ways in which technologies of transition are singled out from the general life history of trans people, reducing transition and the people who choose to transition to a single, fetishized moment divorced from context. in reality, transitioning does not involve a simple light-switch flick between female and male, and sexual reassignment surgery is not the only method people use to transition. if we consider the additional factors of pain and recovery time, it is clear that no transition can be instantaneous, and the case of mrs. garrison and others like it exist only in fiction. however, if a non-trans person has misconceptions of transition as instantaneous, then this could make it easier to posit a particular moment (typically sexual reassignment surgery) as a moment of fundamental identity conversion. it is also important to consider historical interactions between trans people and non-trans people as a potential source of fundamental change narratives, especially in the context of social institutions. another cause of fundamental change narratives, especially in older accounts, is likely the historical expectation that trans people not reveal their history after they have transitioned, often referred to as being “stealth.” jamison green mentions the pressure to be stealth in “look! no, don’t!” writing, non-stealth] behaviour is completely at cross-purposes with the stated goals of medical and psychological treatment for transsexual people. that treatment is supposed to make us feel normal. we are not supposed to want attention as transsexuals; we are supposed to want to fit in as ‘normal’ men…in short, in order to be a good – or successful – transsexual person, one is not supposed to be a transsexual person at all. (green 2006, 501) trans people are often encouraged to assimilate into a transphobic world in order to be considered adequate human beings, and in the past this has been enforced by the directions of the medical community. serano mentions this in whipping girl, noting the way “trans people were required to invent gender consistent (i.e., [non-transsexual]) histories for themselves, so that if they were ever questioned about their pasts, they would not have to reveal their trans status” (serano 2007, 124). people who transition were encouraged to cut off their ties to friends and family and relocate, taking pains to ensure nobody ever found out about their transsexual history, to the extent that openly identifying oneself as trans could be accused of behaving pathologically by 15 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 medical practitioners (125). in this context, it makes sense that trans people would adopt a narrative that reflected the demands of non-trans doctors to abandon their current mode of living and construct a completely new one. this focus on institutional interactions between trans and non-trans people also intersects with the lived experience of trans people, as this setup effectively forced trans people to construct a new life separated from the old one. even if they kept their identities continuous before and after the move, their place of living and way of life would be rendered dramatically different. this splitting of one life into two parts could have easily caused people to look at their selves as having been split into two parts, and thus the compelled practice of stealth lent itself towards a fundamental change narrative. additionally, this pried trans people from the friends and family who previously knew them, perhaps leading those left behind to consider the person they once knew as living not just a new life, but as a new person. finally, we cannot disregard the possibility that lived experience may lead a non-trans person to adopt the fundamental change narrative for personal reasons, as the fundamental change narrative can also be adopted in a way that is therapeutic. in the past, transsexualism often was referred to as gender dysphoria, which centers on the depression and anxiety a trans person feels when not living as or being perceived as their preferred sex (brown and rounsley 1996, 10). after transitioning, this dysphoria often dissipates, and a person might lose the depression and anxiety associated with it, feeling much better. people who have transitioned may find dwelling upon such an emotionally difficult time period of their life stressful and remember the feelings they once had. additionally, trans people often feel regret about not having transitioned earlier, or being forced to live in a society that did not recognize their self-asserted identity prior to transition.7 in choosing to not acknowledge the part of their life that caused them so much pain, trans people can disassociate their current, happier self from their miserable past self. this analysis indicates that while fundamental change narratives may personally be adopted by trans people for therapeutic or experiential reasons, narratives of fundamental change may also evoke societal assumptions or misunderstandings that can be inattentive or even harmful to trans experiences. for example, while beliefs in a sex/gender binary may empower narratives of fundamental change as a source of self-justification to others in a sexist society, as noted by stone in the context of surgeons, the sex/gender binary does not seem to permit the reality of those who do in fact ‘cross’ its seams or experience a more 7 for example, a 2012 mental health survey of trans people in scotland found that far more trans people regretted not transitioning earlier than regretted having transitioned (mcneil et al. 2012, 67). 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 prolonged, ambiguous space of sex/gender embodiment. additionally, historical mandates that trans people neither present themselves visibly as trans nor mix their pre-transition and post-transition life masks the actual existence of trans people and their experiences of transition.8 this indicates that narratives of fundamental change may often not be a neutral way to frame transition, but also can bring into play the erasure or fracturing of trans people’s experiences. this raises the question of to what extent narratives of fundamental change will remain relevant if trans people and their transitions are more visible in society, especially if more trans people are given a voice to express their life narratives in new ways. hence it will be useful to consider ways in which trans people might creatively experiment with given narratives to navigate their social world and considering the possibility that they may tinker with new ways of understanding their identity and life trajectory.9 the next section will round out our analysis of fundamental change narratives by explicitly considering some of their drawbacks for trans lives and looking at factors that may significantly diminish their use in society at this particular moment in time. emerging narratives this analysis of possible social motivations behind fundamental change narratives indicates that these narratives may often depend upon problematic origins, including misinformation about technologies of transition and binary assumptions about sex/gender. hence, while it is understandable that many trans people might turn to narratives of fundamental change as a source of meaning, it is also worth considering what possibilities for self-understanding these narratives close off. while this essay introduces narratives of fundamental change as distinct from hausman’s emphasis on the effacement of technology in transition narratives, fundamental change narratives similarly risk purifying and demarcating a posttransition body from bodies in transition. but fundamental change narratives are distinct from the effacement narratives that hausman focuses on because they often highlight transition technologies as 8 stone voices this concern, asserting that for trans people the practice of passing as non-trans and constructing a “plausible history” of a non-trans life can entail “erasing a considerable portion of their personal experience” (stone 231). 9 in this way, we are diverging from hausman’s assertion that trans people are “the dupes of gender” (hausman 1995, 140) and instead looking at a more creative account of trans people navigating their social norms and the narratives with which they have been presented, which will often result in subtle and direct confrontations with societal assumptions. 17 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 part of the cauterization of a post-transition subject from the transition process. this results in the unique irony that technology’s power of fundamental change serves as its own vanishing act, perhaps reflecting the broader irony that historically the most successful trans person has been understood as the person who has been purified of their trans status.10 hence, even in the course of emphasizing technology, the fundamental change narrative also divorces a post-trans subject from the work, pain, and achievements that are part of the transition process. though retained in memory, these experiences risk being framed as merely a precursor to a posttransition subject who emerges as the culmination of a process that pre-existed them. if the work and pain of transition is separated from the self who emerged from it, this also risks covering over the experiences of transphobic oppression and violence that a trans person may have faced while attempting to gain access to the technologies that would permit a better way of life. though the points that are labeled “transitioning” as opposed to “post-transition” are often vague, usually the designation of “transitioning” refers to a particularly difficult time of pronounced gender ambiguity, which can multiply the risk of harassment and violence within a society that still largely demands unambiguous men and unambiguous women. if we return to johnson’s description of narrative as a process of synthesizing one’s experience into a larger meaning, the fundamental change narrative risks bracketing out the work, pain, oppression, and violence of transition from one’s selfunderstanding in an effort to distance oneself from that phase of life. furthermore, such a designation between transitioned bodies and bodies in transition risks curtailing solidarity among people who have transitioned, those who are transitioning, and people with fluid gender identities in an effort to appeal to the pure boundaries between men and women often demanded by society. in this context, it is crucial to pay attention to johnson’s emphasis on the contextual dimensions of narratives, and how changing social circumstances may open up the possibility for emerging narratives of transition and lived experience. narratives of fundamental change have often been evoked in historical circumstances in which many trans people have either been compelled to remain silent about their history, or encouraged to tell their story in a way that could be adopted by a population that continues to be hostile and suspicious about trans identities. and yet, 2014 indicated progress for the recognition of trans people with laverne cox’s appearance on the cover of time magazine in june (steinmetz 2014), and the framework of the article is a distinct step forward from just a few years ago 10 this is addressed by both green (green 2006, 501) and serano (2007, 124125) who are mentioned in the preceding section. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 when trans people started receiving recognition from venues such as oprah in the mid-to-late 2000’s. in an interview on time’s website, cox does not distance herself from her past, but instead tells a continuous narrative that includes her pre-transition childhood and adolescence experiences along with the post-transition acting work that has made her famous. the inclusion of cox’s past history in her account allows her to reflect upon how being bullied as a child continues to affect her life, and it is this acknowledgment that causes her to make further political claims against the continuing bullying of gender variant kids in schools (steinmetz 2014a). in this way, her experiences of the past and the trauma she experienced is not forgotten, but instead carried forward to inspire claims for the amelioration of trans people. cox has also used her experience as a trans woman of color to reframe the discussion of trans people to focus on social justice in the face of intersections between transphobia, racism, and classism (steinmetz 2014a). in this way, cox has not only turned away from narratives of fundamental change, but has also directed trans narratives in general towards a discussion of how transition relates to domination and empowerment rather than continuing the tradition of narrating transition in a way that will appeal to non-trans norms and anxieties. while cox has also stressed that trans people should not be compelled to account for surgery in the context of talk shows such as katie couric’s (gold 2014), this does not mean that the role of technology is effaced in trans lives. indeed, understanding one’s life as an integration rather than a discontinuity may involve embracing the continuing roles that technology has played in shaping current experiences. instead it indicates, as johnson might phrase it, that cox is creatively working upon the narratives that non-trans people expect and insisting upon a discussion that centers the needs of trans people on their own terms. when one writes of the effacement of technology in trans accounts, it is crucial to keep in mind the ways in which technology is often used as a rhetorical tool to cast trans people as artificial or exotic, which takes up discursive space and time that trans people could use to articulate their identities and their political goals in their own voices. cox locates her success in mainstream media within a larger context of emerging trans narratives. she explains, we are in a place now where more and more trans people want to come forward and say ‘this is who i am.’ and more trans people are willing to tell their stories. more of us are living visibly and pursuing our dreams visibly, so people can say, ‘oh yeah, i know someone who is trans.’ when people have points of reference that are humanizing, that demystifies difference. (steinmetz 2014b, 40) 19 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 cox’s integrated account of her life thus occurs within the context of not only an increasing amount of familiarity of trans people in the public eye, but also the proliferation of discourses that involve trans people giving an account of their life narratives and goals on their own terms. cox associates the increasing ability for trans people to speak on their own terms with the use of social media and internet venues which allow trans people to express themselves in ways that are often less filtered by the narrative demands of more mainstream media venues such as talk shows. cox asserts, social media has been a huge part of it and the internet has been a huge part of it, where we’re able to have a voice in a way that we haven’t been able to before. we’re being able to write our stories and we’re being able to talk back to the media … we are the reason. and we are setting the agenda in a different way. (cox) this may indicate that the increasing ability of trans people to speak on their own terms without having their accounts totalized by non-trans social norms is resulting in many integrative, complex narratives. if this is the case, these narratives are may go beyond a simple effacement or fixation on technology, and towards more complex ways of navigating the relationship between the body, technology, and life history. and in the context of a society that often fixates exclusively upon the surgical technologies involved in transition, a refusal to weave a narrative that highlights surgery as a focal moment of trans people’s lives may signal a refusal to comply with non-transsexual narrative demands rather than discounting the role of technology altogether. appealing to cox’s interview in order to project a hopeful vision of emerging trans narratives may seem a bit hasty, and potentially risks reducing the politics of narratives to a dependence upon heroic, celebrity figures (bassichis et al. 2013, 659). however, cox’s references to trans people crafting narratives on their own terms has also been a recurring theme in transgender studies. several formative texts include this theme, including leslie feinberg’s assertion in 1992 that “transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions” (feinberg 1992, 6), and stone’s call for transsexual people to “begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written” (stone 232). and more recently, stryker has ended the trajectory of transgender history by noting “the growing acceptability of transgender representation in mass media” (stryker 2008, 153), while kate bornstein expresses in gender outlaws: the next generation that trans people are no longer “just quietly grateful for being allowed to live” but instead are open to being “righteously cranky” (bornstein and bergman 2010, 21). 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 additionally, research on trans people and the internet has indicated that certain spaces, such as tumblr, may serve as venues for contesting the “silences and misrepresentations of trans people in public culture,” instead offering an alternative space for trans people to share information and express themselves (fink and miller 2014, 614). this includes complications of trans narratives from intersecting standpoints of “racial, disabled, activist, artistic, and transnational” identities (616), and general “possibilities for expanding trans self-representations” (624). while more research is required on these emerging narratives, considering these aspects both situates cox in a larger conversation with transgender studies and begins lending academic credence to her claims about the role of the internet in emerging trans narratives. considering the potential for emerging trans narratives indicates that fundamental change narratives are socially and historically situated. it will be crucial to track whether and how narratives of fundamental change may be altered or fall out of use over time. this analysis also indicates that while we may remain hopeful of emerging trans narratives, these narratives might continue to appeal to norms, beliefs, and institutions that privilege non-trans people over trans people. if we are currently experiencing a “transgender tipping point” in narratives, in which direction are they going to fall? in a recent interview, stryker expresses concerns that contemporary expansions of trans representations in popular culture risk playing into “a neoliberal progress narrative” that ignores racism and globalization, although she also praises particular trans celebrities such as laverne cox and janet mock, who both “speak out on race, classism, the prison-industrial complex, and sex-work” (dierkes-thrun 2014). stryker’s hopeful vigilance thus indicates that we must continue to look at how popular narratives of trans people’s lives are constructed and navigated over time by both trans and non-trans people. in sum, narratives of fundamental change have historically occurred in the social sciences, the media, and in accounts by families of trans people, partners of trans people, and trans people themselves. considering mark johnson’s explanation of narrative as a meaning-making activity that draws from societal norms indicates that oppositional sexism, misinformation about transition, stealth, and minimizing distress make fundamental change narratives an attractive framework for accounts of transition. while these factors encourage fundamental change narratives to disidentify a post-transition trans person from their experiences of transition, changing historical circumstances may also enable emerging integrative narratives of transition, which emphasize the ability for trans people to develop their own voice. this essay consequently points towards further research on not only the varieties of transition narratives and their likely causes, but also the ways in which changing historical circumstances open up possibilities for emerging narratives that contest non-trans assumptions and allow trans people to speak on their own terms. 21 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 references appiah, anthony. 1990. “‘but would that still be me?’ notes on gender, ‘race,’ ethnicity, as sources of ‘identity.’” the journal of philosophy 87 (10): 493-499. aristotle. 1991. selected works. 3rd edition. translated by hippocrates g. apostle and lloyd p. gerson. des moines, iowa: the peripatetic press. bassichis, morgan, alexander lee, and dean spade. 2013. “building an abolitionist trans and queer movement with everything we’ve got.” in the trans-gender studies reader 2, edited by susan stryker and aren z. aizura, 653-667. new york: routledge. bolin, anne. 1987. in search of eve: transsexual rites of 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girl.” julia serano: renaissance woman!. <http://www.juliaserano.com/whippinggirl.html>. accessed september 13, 2014. shrage, laurie j. 2009. “introduction.” in you’ve changed: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie j. shrage, 3-10. new york: oxford university press. 23 billingsley: narratives of continuity in transgender experiences published by scholarship@western, 2015 steinmetz, katy. 2014a. “laverne cox talks to time about the transgender movement.” time.com. <http://time.com/132769/transgender-orange-is-thenew-black-laverne-cox-interview>. accessed september 13, 2014. steinmetz, katy. 2014b. “america’s transition.” time 183 (22): 38-46. stone, sandy. 2006. “the empire strikes back.” in the transgender studies reader, edited by susan stryker and stephen whittle, 221-235. new york: routledge. stryker, susan. 2008. transgender history. berkeley: seal press. “unprecedented pregnancy.” 2008. the oprah winfrey show. <http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow%09/oprahshow1_ss_2008040 3/>. accessed february 13, 2015. warnke, georgia. 2009. “transsexuality and contextual identities.” in you’ve changed: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie j. shrage, 28-42. new york: oxford university press. amy billingsley is a phd student in the department of philosophy at the university of oregon, where she focuses on the intersections between feminist poststructuralism and humor studies in the context of humor’s dual capacity for emancipation and subjugation. her research interests also include 19th century continental philosophy and transgender studies. most recently, she has published “hope in a vice: carole pateman, judith butler, and suspicious hope” in hypatia (forthcoming summer 2015). (amyrbillingsley@gmail.com) 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.6 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 technology and narratives of continuity in transgender experiences amy billingsley recommended citation microsoft word 451791-convertdoc.input.439265.nppvz.docx catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state—twenty-five years later feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s article 2 toward a feminist theory of the state 2017 catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state— twenty-five years later natalie nenadic university of kentucky, natalienenadic@gmail.com recommended citation nenadic, natalie. 2017. "catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state—twenty-five years later."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2. catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state—twenty-five years later natalie nenadic abstract catharine mackinnon’s feminist work on sexual abuse and violence has had a major impact on law and on policy in the united states and internationally. however, her complex theoretical writings, which are a foundation of that work, have yet to be adequately appreciated by philosophy, especially continental philosophy, that tradition with which she identifies her project. i explain her project in continental terms, especially heidegger’s thought, so that we may better grasp the philosophical nature and significance of her work. in doing so, i also open paths by which those within the continental tradition may make it more relevant to the pressing real-world problems that mackinnon uniquely illuminates, especially pornography, prostitution, and other practices significantly constituted by sexual abuse and violence. keywords: mackinnon, feminism, heidegger, continental philosophy, sexual violence introduction it’s a pleasure and an honor to comment on and celebrate catharine mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state (tfts).1 i first read this book shortly after it was published twenty-five years ago and have returned to it on numerous occasions, with every reading revealing another layer of depth and 1 i presented a version of this paper at the pacific division meeting of the american philosophical association (april 1–4, 2015), on a panel marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of catharine mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state (1989). thank you to lori watson for the invitation and opportunity to present these reflections. also, thank you to the organizers of the annual meeting of the pacific association for the continental tradition, where i presented a shorter version of the paper (september 24–26, 2015). 1 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 relevance. that feature of course reflects the power of major works, but it is also part of their vulnerability. for it takes a long time for writings that so profoundly move the ground under our taken-for-granted understandings to be more widely grasped. this contrasts with many works that attain immediate recognition, only soon to be forgotten as a trend, as outdated, or not as profound as many initially thought. hegel remarks on this phenomenon. he notes that some works “after a time [have] no audience left” while others have “an audience only after a time” (hegel 1977, 45). referring specifically to mackinnon, guido calabresi, former dean of yale law school and senior judge on the u.s. court of appeals for the second circuit, indicated something of this sort. “[her work] was so original that law faculties did not understand its significance . . . and mackinnon ‘didn’t have the patience to write the kind of busywork that we would have understood’” (strebeigh 1991). i think (and hope) that tfts and, more generally, mackinnon’s deeply grounded theoretical oeuvre is that kind of work, which will have its eventual audience. it especially needs an audience that appreciates the philosophical project behind the significant real-world impact that her writings and social interventions have already had. for instance, her concept of sexual harassment was adopted by the courts, her rethinking of rape has contributed to rape law reform, and (with andrea dworkin) a reconceptualization of pornography yielded the unprecedented feminist civil rights approaches to pornography in the 1980s and early 1990s (mackinnon 1989, xiv). there remains tremendous need for mackinnon’s work given the ubiquity of pornography today, growing sex trafficking, and other sexual abuses whose physical and psychological damage and aftereffects often invisibly reverberate throughout late modern life. these are problems that mackinnon has spent her career confronting through complex analysis and groundbreaking practical means. professional philosophy has begun seriously taking up tfts, which i treat here as part of her wider work. analytic philosophy has led these efforts. early on, sally haslanger, rae langton, martha nussbaum, susan brison, lori watson, and others recognized its significance. they have rigorously and more comprehensively engaged it in ways that intersect, for instance, with the philosophy of language, epistemology, moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and early modern history of philosophy. often, these engagements have made creative use of philosophical concepts to frame mackinnon’s breakthroughs in new ways, for example, through austin’s speech-act theory or through kantian moral philosophy.2 other treatments have explicated and elaborated mackinnon’s insights, such as her analysis of the relationship between objectivity and sexual objectification. they have 2 see langton 2009; maitra and mcgowen 2012. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 helped explain her claim that the objective stance has often concealed sexual objectification when that stance has merely mirrored, as truth, the outcome of what men’s political and social power over women has so successfully manufactured.3 these engagements with mackinnon’s thought have variously unpacked her breakthroughs, which has contributed to rendering them more widely intelligible. continental philosophy, by contrast, has generally been less receptive to mackinnon’s thought. here, it hasn’t been treated as much and as thoroughly. when it is treated, it is not unusual to find it simplified or mischaracterized. this kind of reception makes it easier to dismiss her work and to evade the philosophical challenges it poses. it especially facilitates evading the ethical summons to confront the very trying and pervasive problems of sexual violence, abuse, and objectification in their variety of forms. in continental feminism, mackinnon’s thought doesn’t have that more immediately identifiable place that it has in analytic feminism, a place that might support and make it more realistically possible to engage her thought in continental terms. one is certainly an odd person out and often falling through the professional cracks when one tries to treat her work within the orbit of continental classics such as works by hegel, heidegger, or arendt. for mackinnon’s thought doesn’t yet have a presence within these traditional areas. meanwhile, trying to create such a presence there is also to go against the grain of what is usually done as continental feminism, such as explicating or using the thought of beauvoir, kristeva, irigaray, judith butler, or psychoanalysis. as i will spell out below, mackinnon’s project is unambiguously continental. undoubtedly, she is also one of the most significant feminist thinkers. yet it is as if her thought isn’t “continental feminism,” at least not in the way that it is mainly understood and conducted in academic philosophy today. in what follows, i address this somewhat perplexing current state of mackinnon’s thought within continental philosophy. there are many ways to approach this topic. for my present purposes, my focus is not to lay out what i consider the numerous simplifications and mischaracterizations of her work and then demonstrate how she actually does not say this or that, or how her positions are in fact much more subtle, or how criticisms of positions wrongly ascribed to her are in fact her own criticisms, or how she already anticipated and addressed a given criticism. there is of course much benefit to this approach. my aim instead is to show how classically continental mackinnon’s work is, especially by pointing out some of its connections to heidegger’s philosophy even 3 see haslanger 1993. 3 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 though she makes no references to his work.4 in so doing, i indicate a few of the innumerable ways that continental philosophy might productively engage her thought. i want thereby to help create a bridge that might make it more possible for those in continental philosophy, especially graduate students and researchers, to directly encounter her work instead of attaining “familiarity” with it in a manner filtered by a caricature of it. facilitating more considered treatment of her thought in what seems its obvious philosophical home will ultimately make philosophy more accountable and relevant to the urgent and difficult contemporary problems that she uniquely illuminates. pornography, trafficking in sexual slavery, and other sexual abuse and violence that abound in late modern life pose incredible challenges to thinking and desperately need the resources and intervention of philosophy. continental philosophy, mackinnon’s continental project, and heidegger’s thought continental philosophy is that tradition of mainly european thought from around the time of hegel onward that seeks to understand the humanistic domain in a manner that is more self-consciously experiential and world-involved. it is grounded in life problems as they are lived in the world. those working within this tradition also understand their contributions as situated within the history of philosophy. the few among them who are also major thinkers advance their own original theories, but those theories are something like later parts of that common and familiar philosophical story or historical reference point. of course, not everyone working in continental philosophy today is doing such grounded work that is so directly relevant to real-world concerns; indeed, few are. that few philosophers of every era make breakthroughs of this kind is a separate topic beyond my current scope. my purpose here is only to state salient features of this tradition’s selfconcept in some of the ways that it shifts from the more detached major philosophies of the early modern period epitomized by figures such as descartes and kant. most basically, mackinnon’s project is continental because it is self-identified as such. it reflects her doctoral training in the history of modern german philosophy and the history of political philosophy. she studied these areas through both the political science and philosophy departments at yale in the 1970s with prominent continental thinkers such as shlomo avineri and karsten harries. mackinnon’s work is also phenomenological through and through (1989, 38– 39), which i understand in a generally heideggerian sense as theoretical in a manner 4 in mackinnon’s remarks during the panel presentation of this paper, she very emphatically and publicly agreed with how it philosophically situates her work. she stated: “finally someone got it.” 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 guided by, emanating from, and always anchored in lived experience. phenomenology is her way of fundamentally questioning, testing, and rethinking governing assumptions about the areas of life she investigates and of putting forth new interpretations that better account for that experience. in addition to being an original thinker, mackinnon is also an innovative and groundbreaking lawyer, which underscores her phenomenological approach. for in this profession, one is often forced to face the everyday, nitty-gritty reality and details of harms as they are lived in the world. this is how she arrived at deeper theoretical understanding of various forms of sexual abuse. that new understanding in turn guided her proposals for making law more accountable to those harms, which she has accomplished in historic ways. accordingly, mackinnon’s theoretical work emanates from the “minutiae of everyday existence” (1989, 38) or, as she says about her specific inquiry into pornography, “how [it] works in everyday life” (mackinnon 1997, 23). her complex thought doesn’t drift into flights of theoretical fancy that are disconnected from life, as often occurs in philosophy and other theoretical endeavors. the latter is no less an issue with many contemporary continental theorists despite this tradition’s selfunderstanding to the contrary. indeed, mackinnon’s theoretical and legal work might be considered a model for how to make phenomenology within philosophy, in particular heideggerian phenomenology, truer to itself. on her understanding, original thinking and innovative law are born precisely in this way. they come from the “ground up,” from out of that crucible of the interaction respectively of thought and law with life (1989, xiv). as she states this point elsewhere, “legal change comes from life, not from the brow of moral readers [detached from the world]” (mackinnon 2007b, 68). this notion of thinking could have come straight out of heidegger’s philosophy. a main project of tfts is to offer an original theory of women’s social subordination that emanates phenomenologically from most women’s experiences of various forms of sexual objectification and violation. those experiences reflect a dimension of the human condition that is usually hidden and that her analysis—to state the matter in heideggerian language—aims to “draw out of concealment” (wrathall 2011). a major component of her theory formation is a constructively critical encounter with the dominant contemporary and historical account of oppression, namely marxist thought. this path of theory formation exemplifies heidegger’s idea of philosophy’s vocation. philosophy as such delineates usually hidden dimensions of the human condition through grappling with how they are actually experienced in the world 5 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 and through the aid of a constructively critical encounter with philosophy’s past.5 that ground of experience and the new understanding emanating from it guide the thinker in dismantling, at their source, problematic assumptions in philosophy’s history that persist into the present-day and contribute to the cover-up of these usually concealed dimensions of the human condition. that ground also orients the thinker toward discovering resources in philosophy’s history that she may creatively adapt to this task of illuminating these dimensions. this way of responding philosophically to a contemporary problem that philosophy or theory hasn’t addressed or is only beginning to address remains anchored within an identifiable historical tradition. heidegger scholar william lovitt summarizes this idea of philosophy. it is “thinking within the sphere of tradition” (1977, xxxvii) but that, here, elicits the “unthought” from the thought (xxxviii). “as such it is freed by tradition from being a mere thinking back, to becoming a thinking forward . . .” (xxxvii), lovitt continues, stating that philosophy so understood reshapes the past “in the next on-writing of thought” and thus “point[s] to some way or reality needed beyond what is now known” (xxxviii, italics added). simon critchley clarifies philosophy as such. it responds to a contemporary crisis “through a critique of present conditions” (critchley 2001, 72–73) and a relationship to philosophy’s past that is not merely that of received experience but “a critical confrontation with the history of philosophy and history as such” (68–69, italics in the original). this “appeal to tradition . . . is in no way traditional” but grapples with “what has been unthought within [philosophy’s past] and what remains to be thought by it” (69). here, a phenomenological approach goes so far as to yield insights that are of the order of groundbreaking thought or philosophy. phenomenology gathers insights that emanate from lived experience, but as an approach, it is fairly broad. it covers a wide range of such insights, including those gleaned in this way in areas outside philosophy. in exceptional cases, however, the phenomenologist gathers and hones them in a manner that yields an original and notably deep account of the worldly area in question. this is original thinking or philosophy in heidegger’s sense. it is, of course, phenomenological but a distinct and deeper expression of it. the main and guiding source of mackinnon’s original theory is women’s experiences of sexual objectification and violation. they were first more widely revealed through consciousness-raising groups, which were a key element of the 5 see heidegger 2003; campbell 2012. my review of campbell’s book (nenadic 2014) draws attention to aspects of it that pertain to heidegger’s idea of philosophy’s vocation. it also describes some of the specific ways that heidegger engages philosophy’s past, especially in relation to figures such as plato and aristotle, as part of the formation of his own original contemporary thought. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 feminist movement in the united states in the 1960s and 1970s, and through the social studies to which they gave rise and that more systematically tracked these phenomena. we may think of these groups as constituting something like a clearing within a larger social context that so effectively denied the reality of these experiences and so successfully pilloried those who would assert that reality. as mackinnon notes, citing pamela allen, “[consciousness raising] ‘clears a space in the world’ within which women can begin to move” (1989, 101). these groups were trusted, open, and free spaces for eliciting, making, and safeguarding such disclosures. in an often pre-articulate and groping way, here women gave voice to, named, and ultimately revealed a pervasive, though usually hidden, pattern of sexually intrusive treatment of women and the varieties of psychological, physical, and other damage that that treatment causes (1989, 83–95). this pattern was so widespread that it was simply thought to be natural, the “way things are” and thus in no need of questioning. this manner of articulating something that so profoundly affects and limits one’s life may be considered an example of what heidegger considers phenomenology’s most basic way of recovering usually concealed dimensions of the human condition, that is, of according them the status of being considered real. this recovery occurs through listening to and speaking with others to give language to that experience. such authentic speaking, as heidegger calls it, erupts in those moments in which one has been delivered to a heightened awareness and anxiety about one’s existence. here, one has made a decision to try to come to terms with one’s life and with who one is.6 consciousness-raising groups uncovered the replication within many women’s most private relations, where they were thought to be most free, “a structure of dominance and submission which characterizes the entire public order” (1989, 94). that structure is experienced by each woman thus affected in her “own particular, even chosen, way” (94), which is not to say that all women experience that phenomenon. mackinnon furthermore elaborates that this condition is often marked by ambivalence. she states: realizing that women largely recognize themselves in sex-stereotyped terms, really do feel the needs they have been encouraged to feel, do feel fulfilled in the expected ways, often actually choose what has been prescribed, makes possible the realization that women at the same time do not recognize themselves in, do not feel, and have not chosen this place. (102) 6 see especially campbell 2012, 142, 163, 173; nenadic 2014, 102–103. 7 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 her analysis accordingly has ample room for both feminist insight into women’s condition and recognition that “women’s nonfeminist perception of their situation is . . . probably as justified by aspects of the woman’s experience as a feminist perception would be” (102). yet this openness is not such that it undercuts our ability to make some manner of truth claims about women’s condition, as relativism does (118). for, as mackinnon indicates, (phenomenological) analysis of what consciousness raising reveals leads to a recognition that for something to be true about women’s condition, it need not be universal in the sense of holding for every single woman or being universal in an absolute way. it also reveals that consciousness of oppression is not inevitable (102). i think that we may interpret her conclusion as being in line with philosophical criticisms respectively of a cartesian model of epistemology and a neohegelian teleological metaphysics. such criticism is the centerpiece of heidegger’s own major phenomenological project, especially his magnum opus being and time. generally speaking, cartesian epistemology assumes that our knowledge of the world can be absolutely certain. that knowledge is said to exhaust the reality of the domains that it is about and therefore to be definitive. hegel extends such assumptions to the realms of human relations and history. he concludes that human history is governed by the law of freedom’s inevitable progress and of our inevitable consciousness of oppression and struggle for freedom as part of that larger law of history. he considers this law to be absolutely certain and to exhaust the reality of the domains of human relations and history.7 marx carries over these basic assumptions from hegel. in light of mackinnon’s phenomenological treatment of women’s subordination and her subsequent encounter with marxism, she is compelled fundamentally to question these assumptions, as i detail below. her questioning has significant overlap with heidegger’s famous criticism of this cartesian and neo-cartesian epistemology. he recognizes that the world, especially the humanistic domain, does not lend itself to being known in an absolutely certain, exhaustive, and definitive way, however much we may know about the world. there is simply too much variability and flux in life to fix it in this absolute manner. there will always be previously unconsidered experiences that may lead to new understanding of the areas in question. accordingly, one can have knowledge of these areas without that knowledge having to hold in every single case or be understood in a manner that is absolute and exhaustive. that is, we may distinguish sounder understanding from less sound understanding while still maintaining an openness to the world, namely to other unconsidered experiences. that openness allows us to continue testing, tweaking, or, if need be, completely altering an established understanding in light of newly uncovered experiences or 7 see hegel 1975, 1977. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 changed contexts. mackinnon’s treatment of epistemological issues reflects this position. that treatment also places her analysis within the orbit of contemporary continental criticisms of (postmodern) relativism.8 on mackinnon’s interpretation, feminism locates women’s consciousness of inequality within our resistance to the power of male dominance to so profoundly circumscribe our lives. consciousness, she states, arises from circumstances of “being shaped in the image of one’s oppression, yet struggling against it,” a resistance to “the world in [women’s] . . . selves as well as toward a future” (1989, 102). the central point of her interpretation of consciousness raising as feminism’s method is precisely to capture and appreciate women’s power and agency against that to which these political circumstances would limit women. but she does so without minimizing the destructiveness of those circumstances. through consciousness raising, oppression that wasn’t previously as evident, even as its harms were undoubtedly felt, became more visible. that oppression was concealed especially through the fact that women tend to experience it separately and in isolation, in contrast with how oppressed groups that are together experience their subordination; their “togetherness” makes perception of oppression more discernable and less easily undermined (mackinnon1989, 8). these developments revealed that “simply being a woman has a meaning that decisively defines all women socially” even as a woman’s particularities, for instance, “race or class or physiology may define her among women” (90). one must remember that these developments were occurring at a time when it was controversial to even suggest that there is something distinctive about women’s social subordination that demands its own discrete analysis emanating from these experiences. then, it wasn’t more widely recognized that women’s inequality constitutes a discrete kind of subordination such as inequalities that were more recognized, for instance, race, or class, or anti-semitism. indeed, a significant point and outcome of these feminist efforts, especially writings such as mackinnon’s, was to secure recognition of the very existence of women’s social subordination as a discernable type against varieties of denial that it is. the aim was to place a kind of thread around this area, acknowledging that it has a most basic shape and intelligible demarcations or boundaries. as mackinnon’s work consistently emphasizes, those boundaries, however, have a permeability to them rather than being fixed or sealed up in an absolute way. mackinnon sought to contribute to this recognition of the distinct existence of women’s social subordination in a manner that was careful not to subsume or otherwise deny the discrete existence of other and intersecting forms of inequality such as those of race or class. that is, she did not want to do what theorists of other 8see harries 2002; simpson 2001; scharff 1997; mackinnon 2000. 9 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 inequalities had often done about women’s subordination. in her role in helping to secure an understanding of women’s inequality as its own kind, within a contemporary context largely denying that recognition, she was especially attentive to preserve an ongoing openness to the complex context of how a woman or a group of women experience their condition. this attention is evident, among other ways, in her frequent expression of the tremendous need for and the still largely incipient state of theoretically mapping these intersecting inequalities. as she writes: to look for the place of gender in everything is not to reduce everything to gender. for example, it is not possible to discuss sex without taking account of black women’s experiences of gender. to the considerable degree to which this experience is inseparable from the experience of racism, many features of sex cannot be discussed without racial particularity. . . . comprehension and change in racial inequality are essential to comprehension and change in sex inequality. (1989, xi–xii) mackinnon very meticulously, deftly, and consistently weaves concrete work on such intersectionality within her analyses. and, of course, that intersectionality is also at the heart of her legal precedents on behalf of women who live these interconnected forms of subordination.9 nevertheless, she respects that tfts does not pretend to present an even incipiently adequate analysis of race and sex, far less of race, sex, and class. that further work—building on writings by authors of color such as those cited in this volume, stunning efforts in fiction and literary criticism, developments in the social world and advances in political practice and analysis, and recent contributions in the legal arena by women such as kimberlé crenshaw, mari matsuda, cathy scarborough, and patricia williams—will take [still more time]. (1989, xi–xii) through carefully gathering, distilling, and remaining grounded in the findings of a wide range of women’s experiences, mackinnon embarked on formulating a theory that expressed what these findings suggested were the most salient features of the commonality of women’s subordination, a commonality that 9 for instance, on behalf of mechelle vinson, an african-american woman, in meritor savings bank v. vinson, 477 u.s. 57 (1986). this case pioneered the claim for “hostile environment” sexual harassment as sex discrimination and was ratified by the supreme court. see also other examples such as the testimony and analysis in in harm’s way (mackinnon and dworkin 1997) and in the texts referenced in note 13. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 she did not consider absolutely universal. a significant part of this procedure of theory formation was, as mentioned above, a constructively critical encounter with philosophy’s past, a move of course placing her project further in line with heidegger’s philosophy, especially his idea of philosophy’s vocation. that is, in this grounded way, she “had it out” with the dominant theory of oppression, namely contemporary and historical marxism, including here the thought of engels and others. traditional marxist thought claimed already to account for women’s inequality. it thus obviated recognition of women’s inequality as a distinct experiential domain demanding its own phenomenologically elicited theoretical responses. mackinnon describes how, thus grounded, she set out to assess such marxist claims and the evidence adduced for them. i began trying to disentangle the economic from the sexual roots of women’s inequality: is it sexism or capitalism [that principally explains the inequality of women as a group, even if not necessarily every woman]? . . . in this form, the question was intractable because it referred to realities that appeared fused in the world and the inquiry devolved into a question about the factor to be isolated: is it sex or class?” (1989, x, italics added) out of a very productive encounter with marxist thought, mackinnon arrived at a clearer appreciation that, contrary to traditional marxist assumptions, women’s inequality demanded a “theory that could stand on its own” (x). she contrasts this appreciation with the totalizing claims of much marxist thought that worked against such recognition. the aspiration to encompass all inequality within a critique of the ‘totality’ of social life has been a central feature of marxist theory from the beginning. its ambition for inclusiveness has produced attempts to explain in marxist terms all inequalities marxists have perceived as real. feminism by contrast has not typically regarded the existence of class, or any other social division or theory, as needing to be either subsumed or dismissed, or as a challenge to the theoretical viability or practical primacy of focus upon relations between the sexes. (1989, 60) mackinnon did not find an already existing theory of male dominance that she thought offered an account of it in the way that marxism did of class. that is, there was no theory “of [the] key concrete sites and laws of motion [of male dominance] . . . of why and how it happened and why (perhaps even how) it could 11 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 be ended” (x). thus assessing that “feminism seemed an epic indictment in search of a theory, an epic theory in need of writing” (xi), she set out to construct one. mackinnon’s phenomenological path toward that theory consisted, of course, in gathering the indications revealed by consciousness raising and related sources. it also consisted in canvassing and gathering clues left by historical feminist works by thinkers such as mary wollstonecraft, charlotte perkins gilman, and simone de beauvoir. the new knowledge revealed by consciousness raising—much of it uncovering the nature of the damage and the pervasiveness of sexually intrusive treatment of women—was not as available to these past thinkers. so, their theories could not emanate phenomenologically from that ground of experience but instead left this dimension of the human condition still largely hidden. nevertheless, they provided mackinnon’s project with rich and helpful descriptions of “the variables and locales of sexism and possible explanations for it.” andrea dworkin’s thought, which does theorize from this ground, provided even more help (1989, xi). thus anchored, prepared, and oriented, mackinnon could carry out what i claim may be described in heideggerian terms as a “de-structuring” or “destruction” of marxist thought, or what, in heidegger’s earlier work, he refers to as a “destructive retrieval” (heidegger 2008, 41–49).10 these are his specific terms for that part of his idea of philosophy’s vocation centered on how the thinker, in constructing her own original theoretical account of a present-day problem, conducts a productive and critical engagement with philosophy’s past as a key step in that theory formation. “de-structuring” or “destructive retrieval” is, of course, phenomenological because the impetus behind the theory formation is that incipient understanding emanating from the experiential domain that is newly being considered. that fledgling understanding then guides the thinker in her encounter with philosophy’s past. to use heidegger’s famous idea, this emerging new understanding helps “light up” (2008, 105) problematic assumptions of philosophy’s past that persist into the present-day and are implicated in actively concealing the dimension of the human condition at issue. that emerging understanding likewise “lights up” aspects of philosophy’s past that the thinker may creatively use to help construct that contemporary theory. “de-structuring” in this larger sense refers to a particular and rarer expression that phenomenological inquiry may take, an expression that delivers us closer to original thought. as such, we may consider it an additional element of the connections between mackinnon’s project and heidegger’s philosophy. 10 on “destructive retrieval,” especially heidegger’s own “destructive retrievals” visà-vis dilthey and nietzsche, see scharff 2014, 164, 226–296. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 mackinnon thus conducts “de-structuring” vis-à-vis marxism. specifically, in light of the newly revealed domain of the systematic sexually intrusive treatment of women of which marxism had no account and that it helped to conceal, mackinnon wrested out from under marxist thought both a clearer recognition that these experiences demanded their own account and an articulation of such a theory. she refers to this account as “feminism unmodified.” this is feminism that is qualified neither by marxism nor by liberalism (another contemporary and historical tradition that she engages in tfts). that is, hers is a theory of women’s subordination that is not subsumed by and disappeared into these other theories. to be “allowed to exist,” an account of women’s subordination need not remain entirely under their rubric any more than do analyses of racism, anti-semitism, class, and other inequalities. but “feminism unmodified” does not leave class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or other key dimensions of a woman’s experience behind. mackinnon consistently and painstakingly insists on the contextual nature of women’s subordination. she recognizes that it cannot be extricated from its intersections with other kinds of subordination as well as with social privilege and other involvements in the world. one can have a discrete category of understanding, a category that preserves its own integrity, while at the same time remaining contextualized in the world, as part of involvements from which we are never fully extricated. this insistence on distinction within inextricable contextualization furthermore aligns mackinnon with heidegger’s project. for this position reflects an elemental feature of his philosophy, especially his criticism of cartesian and neo-cartesian ontology in being and time. nor does “feminism unmodified” necessarily prioritize subordination based on sex in relation to other intersecting inequalities if circumstances do not phenomenologically warrant that understanding. the context and factual evidence of a given set of circumstances are what will determine whether there is such priority and what the priority may be. as a good portion of tfts so precisely, methodically, and painstakingly shows, marxist thought (and liberalism) have not explained women’s subordination but have typically assumed and concealed it in one way or another. this recognition is not to say that these traditions might not offer helpful resources for understanding women’s subordination, as they did, for instance, in the formulation of mackinnon’s own theory. but such approaches have especially left issues of sexual objectification and violence unchanged (1989, 11). to express this shortcoming in heideggerian language, these issues pertaining to sexual violation that distinctively and often cross-culturally affect women require a more “historical” approach. this means that the theorist needs to plumb more deeply into life as it is concretely experienced, at least this domain of life. she needs to re-immerse inquiry in the world rather than remain on the surface 13 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 of these phenomena, where one tends to reconstitute old assumptions in the absence of generative contact with this newly revealed ground under them. mackinnon provides numerous concrete examples of this difficulty of fit between marxism’s explanations of women’s inequality and many women’s experiences, especially those centering on sexual abuse and violence. for instance, given that many women’s class status is defined through their relations to men, how do we even determine the class status, much less the oppression at issue, when we are speaking about “the middle-class girl abducted into pornography” or “a young runaway fleeing rich suburban incest [and now] being pimped downtown?” (1989, 48). tfts reflects mackinnon’s efforts to crystallize a theory that “fundamentally identifies sexuality as the primary sphere of male power” (109). here, sexuality refers to that range of sexual objectification characterized by breaches of bodily and personal boundaries, directed mainly at women, which constitutes a lot of what sexual experience has been made into under men’s political dominance and is subsequently read off as natural sex difference. feminism, especially her theory, questions sexuality as such in order to confront its limitations on our freedom and life possibilities. as mackinnon often emphasizes about her claim here—against careless readings of her work—it reflects a general yet clearly discernable pattern without being absolute or all-encompassing. as already indicated, she explicitly rejects that her theory can be all-explanatory or absolutely universal or an absolute science, much less essentialist.11 i interpret her, in part, to be making this epistemological point when she says that feminism, or at least her working of it, is methodologically post-marxist (107). in this vein, “men” or “male,” she writes, “is a social and political concept, not a biological attribute, having nothing whatever to do with inherency, preexistence, nature, essence, inevitability, or body as such” (mackinnon 1989, 114). it refers rather to “a gender group characterized by maleness as socially constructed” (112). she adds that “the perspective from [this] standpoint is not always each man’s opinions or even some aggregation or sum of men’s opinions, although most men adhere to it nonconsciously and without considering it a point of view” (114). furthermore, any person, male or female, can inhabit this stance in any of its variety of forms, including the most extreme. for instance, one of the examples that mackinnon adduces about the sexual use and breakdown of another 11 see cindy richards, “fighting a lie that just won’t die,” chicago tribune, may 30, 1999, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-05-30/news/9906030177_1_sexualharassment-databases-journalism-ethics; and also “editor’s note,” new york times, february 12, 2006, sunday book review, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/editors-note.html. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 human being is that of one woman doing it to another woman (142). this example, however, remains firmly contextualized within the wider and unambiguous recognition that in present political circumstances, this kind of dynamic flows overwhelmingly in the direction of men towards women (and children). mackinnon summarizes this phenomenological path of constructing her theory of sexuality, so understood, as the primary sphere of men’s political power over women. it emerged “from consciousness raising and other feminist practice on diverse issues including rape, incest, battery, sexual harassment, abortion, prostitution, and pornography” and not “from freudian conceptions, not from lacanian roots” (1989, 109). these psychoanalytic theories, foucault’s work, and many later theories in this vein—when it became “customary to affirm that sexuality is socially constructed”—have had little relation to that ground of experience that consciousness raising and later studies uncovered (131). instead, they have usually left unquestioned this general composition of sexuality that mackinnon’s deeper phenomenological approach on the subject was “dismantling,” that is, sexuality that reflects breaches of the bodily and personal boundaries mainly of women. further continental engagement with mackinnon’s thought when we bring mackinnon’s major theoretical accomplishments in engagement with the continental tradition, hidden dimensions of the latter “light up.” indeed, my own grounding in her work prior to my entry into professional philosophy oriented me towards heidegger’s philosophy, towards recognizing connections between the two and the relevance of his thought for feminism. it helped me discern resources within his philosophy to creatively adapt to the task of taking our thinking about the problems of pornography and other sexual abuse and violence to new places. those resources center on heidegger’s criticisms of ambivalent aspects of modernity, modern freedom, and technology. now, coming back to mackinnon’s thought with a grounding in the philosophy of heidegger and other major continental figures, in turn, “lights up” even further ways of engaging the two. sparks fly as new possible directions and tasks for continental feminist inquiry come into view. thus moving between mackinnon’s thought and continental classics, they redound on each other. i have addressed only some of the most basic connections between mackinnon’s thought and heidegger’s philosophy. there are numerous other connections to flesh out here. one such task might be to elaborate ties between mackinnon’s presentation of consciousness raising as feminism’s method and heidegger’s phenomenology. that project would anchor consciousness raising in its philosophical tradition while taking that tradition to places where it could be even more directly relevant to real-world concerns. the result could serve as a platform for continuing to further map how phenomenology uncovers usually hidden 15 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 dimensions of the human condition in light of even more recent revelations of the role of sexual violation in women’s subordination, for instance, in such international contexts as crimes against humanity and genocide. given mackinnon’s “de-structuring” of marxist thought, there are ample opportunities for productive engagement in relation to marxist philosophy. one scholarly task would be to detail and explicate the complex path of that “destructuring.” that exercise would help render her philosophical project more widely intelligible, thus countering the still predominant simplifications and mischaracterizations of her work. it would also be instructive for showing, via mackinnon’s particular path, a general model for doing theoretical and philosophical analysis that is so directly tied to real problems and ways of changing them. furthermore, it would show how one arrives at that original thought, in this case concerning contemporary feminist topics, in ways that are consistent with, and thus benefit from, how major philosophers have arrived at it over the ages, which is through a “dialogue” with philosophy’s past. of course, such an approach is not the only way of being philosophically relevant to feminist and other contemporary challenges. with regard to psychoanalytic theories or foucault’s analysis of socially constructed sexuality, it would be instructive to engage them in light of mackinnon’s theory of the place of sexuality, as manufactured under male dominance, in women’s social inequality. that is, it would be intriguing to see a “de-structuring” of these theories in light of the new experiential ground concerning the workings, imposition, and pervasiveness of sexually intrusive treatment of women. this hasn’t yet been done more comprehensively, including by feminist versions of psychoanalysis, as tfts argues (57–59, 151–153), and by feminist deconstructions of psychoanalysis that do take these experiences into account but are less theoretical. there would also be an interesting project of thus engaging irigaray’s work. mackinnon herself indicates such a task. she appreciates irigaray’s thought but, at the same time, recognizes that it is not connected to this particular ground. the knowledge emanating from that ground was not so readily available to irigaray, as the work of more systematically drawing these experiences “out of concealment” was happening mainly in north america. in france, such experiences have only very recently been more widely investigated, uncovered, and treated as real against an especially effective denial of their reality. as mackinnon analyzes: “irigaray’s critique of freud in speculum of the other woman . . . acutely shows how freud constructs sexuality from the male point of view, with woman as deviation from the norm. but she, too, sees female sexuality not as constructed by male dominance but only repressed by it” (1989, 280). it would be intriguing to see what productive outcomes arise were irigaray’s thought, including her later work, considered in light of what i claim is mackinnon’s phenomenological “de-structuring” of the notion of sexual 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 difference as one of dominance and her resulting complex understanding of sex equality that does not collapse it into sameness. the latter is something that her real-world legal work simply does not permit. mackinnon also indicates possible directions for productive engagement with beauvoir’s philosophy. in tfts, she weaves in references to beauvoir’s analyses. respecting her insights, mackinnon also offers phenomenological critique of ways that beauvoir treats certain social conditions as universal givens that are beyond history. an example is beauvoir’s identification of “woman’s biology as the source of [women’s] subordination.” mackinnon explains: “[on beauvoir’s analysis,] it is not the meaning [that] society has given women’s bodily functions but the functions themselves, existentially, that oppress women. . . . a woman’s body determines her social being as a pre-social matter” (54). it would be interesting to gather these references in tfts into a more concerted engagement between their respective projects. another thread of inquiry might be to investigate beauvoir’s treatment of the marquis de sade in light of mackinnon (and dworkin’s) treatment of pornography. many other fruitful projects come into view that are too numerous to mention here. the point is that they would be facilitated, and both feminism and philosophy would tremendously benefit, were mackinnon’s thought more present and integrated in teaching and research in continental philosophy, that tradition which her work natively inhabits. for example, it should be taught with heidegger, marx, beauvoir, hegel, irigaray, foucault, and psychoanalysis, among other areas, not to mention taught expressly as a part of continental feminism. all indications suggest that the main problems that mackinnon seeks to better understand and change, namely the oppression associated with the physical and internal breakdown effected by sexual objectification and abuse, in all their complexity and despite gains made, have not gone away. indeed, they are becoming worse, especially through pornography’s unprecedented reach and mainstreaming in the internet age. it is also a fact that the history of philosophy and academic philosophy today still don’t have a thinker whose work more systematically addresses these problems in the way that mackinnon’s work does. we won’t find these analyses in beauvoir, kristeva, irigaray, butler, or psychoanalysis, despite how helpful some of their works might be. instead, those of us in academic philosophy who are working on these problems are drawing significant theoretical sources from mackinnon’s thought. that is where we mainly go if we want to address such problems that are so much of our contemporary landscape that they hardly stand out as such. in this vein, i want to conclude by briefly revisiting the issue of what a grounding in mackinnon’s work can help reveal to thought and to efforts at seeking practical solutions to contemporary crises. on a trip to europe in the early 1990s, i 17 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 took a copy of tfts to asja armanda, a croatian-jewish feminist. this was just before the genocidal war in the region when serbia attacked croatia, bosniaherzegovina, and kosovo and committed atrocities not seen in europe since the holocaust. armanda responded practically and philosophically to this crisis and, with her, i soon followed suit. in our work with refugee survivors in the war zone, we phenomenologically elicited and theorized a usually hidden dimension of the human condition that we named “genocidal sexual atrocities” or “genocidal rape.” this crime was not “known” to the world before this genocide and precisely for that reason needed philosophy to make it known. key sources of theoretical guidance in our work with concentration camp survivors include armanda’s own remarkable feminist philosophical background on issues of sexual abuse and her knowledge of the holocaust. against all odds, she cultivated that understanding through desperately seeking clues outside the closed, marxist-totalitarian country of yugoslavia in which she grew up and outside the regime’s official philosophers and its official positions on and by women. these sources also include ones that i brought, especially mackinnon’s thought on sexual abuse, civil rights, and law as well as african-american feminist thought on the intersections between sex and ethnicity.12 this is the philosophy that we went to, philosophy that gave us real aid in our own, urgently needed, original thinking and that could help us make a real difference in the world. however, this fledgling understanding about genocidal rape would have been snuffed out by an unimaginable and relentless campaign of genocide denial and lost to history had mackinnon not, at my request, agreed to intervene in these events. specifically, i asked her to represent survivors in a legal action that armanda and i were pursuing. the three of us soon initiated a landmark lawsuit in new york (kadic v. karadzic) that would pioneer the crime’s recognition under international law. through the public voice that mackinnon gave to making this crime more widely intelligible, we could eventually break through that denial such that this crime is now recognized in the world.13 for philosophy to be seriously relevant to such major problems of our time, we need greater availability and deeper consideration of mackinnon’s thought, especially within continental philosophy. for that is the tradition from which her thought arose: her work is guided by the phenomenological task of gathering, distilling, and theorizing the insights of a range of feminist practices and writings and is more clearly formulated through productive and critical encounter with philosophy’s past. this original thought, in turn, guided the major legal, policy, and 12 just prior to this period, i had been a student of angela y. davis and had the opportunity even more rigorously to study this area of thought. 13 see nenadic 2011; mackinnon 2007a. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 other positive practical changes in the world that mackinnon has delivered and continues to deliver. these changes are themselves monumental achievements of so many women’s agency, changes that now offer new and previously unimagined possibilities of that agency. all of these developments were the outcome of both feminism and continental philosophy. they are continental feminism—at its best. references campbell, scott m. 2012. the early heidegger's philosophy of life: facticity, being, and language. new york: fordham university press. critchley, simon. 2001. continental philosophy: a very short introduction. new york: oxford university press. harries, karsten. 2002. infinity and perspective. cambridge, ma: mit press. haslanger, sally. 1993. “on being objective and being objectified.” in a mind of one's own: feminist essays on reason and objectivity, edited by louise m. antony and charlotte witt, 209–253. boulder, co: westview press. hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich. 1975. lectures on the philosophy of world history: introduction. translated by h. b. nisbet. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 1977. phenomenology of spirit. translated by a. v. miller. new york: oxford university press. heidegger, martin. 2003. what is philosophy? translated by jean t. wilde and william kluback. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. ———. 2008. being and time. translated by john macquarrie and edward robinson, 1962. new york: harper & row. langton, rae. 2009. sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. new york: oxford university press. lovitt, william. 1977. introduction to the question concerning technology and other essays, by martin heidegger, xiii–xxxix. translated by william lovitt. new york: harper torchbooks. mackinnon, catharine a. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1997. “the roar on the other side of silence.” in in harm's way: the pornography civil rights proceedings, by catharine a. mackinnon and andrea dworkin, 3–24. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2000. “points against postmodernism.” chicago-kent law review 75 (3): 687– 712. ———. 2007a. are women human? and other international dialogues. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2007b. women's lives, men's laws. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 19 nenadic: mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2017 mackinnon, catharine a., and andrea dworkin, eds. 1997. in harm's way: the pornography civil rights hearings. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. maitra, ishani, and mary kate mcgowen, eds. 2012. speech and harm: controversies over free speech. new york: oxford university press. nenadic, natalie. 2011. “genocide and sexual atrocities: hannah arendt's eichmann in jerusalem and karadzic in new york.” philosophical topics 39 (2): 117–144. ———. 2014. “review of scott campbell, heidegger's philosophy of life: facticity, being, and language.” gatherings: the heidegger circle annual 4:96–105. scharff, robert. 1997. “what postmodernists don't get.” the focusing institute: carrying life and thought forward. http://www.focusing.org/postmod.htm. ———. 2014. how history matters to philosophy: reconsidering philosophy's past after positivism. new york: routledge. simpson, lorenzo c. 2001. the unfinished project: toward a postmetaphysical humanism. new york: routledge. strebeigh, fred. 1991. “defining law on the feminist frontier.” new york times magazine, october 6. wrathall, mark a. 2011. heidegger and unconcealment: truth, language, and history. cambridge: cambridge university press. natalie nenadic is an associate professor of philosophy at the university of kentucky. her research centers on illuminating the problems of pornography, sexual violence, and genocide through creatively adapting 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, especially the philosophies of heidegger and of arendt, to these new ends. she is also an expert on the thought of catharine mackinnon, whose feminist project she situates within and brings into productive engagement with this philosophical tradition. in 1992, she enlisted mackinnon to represent survivors of rape and genocide. together with asja armanda, they initiated the landmark lawsuit, kadic v. karadzic (1993–2000), which pioneered the claim for sexual atrocities as acts of genocide under international law. some of nenadic’s publications include “heidegger and the ubiquity and invisibility of pornography in the internet age” (final proceedings of the 2015 meeting of the heidegger circle), “heidegger, feminism, and pornography” in the philosophy of pornography (ed. lindsay coleman and jacob m. held, 2014), and “genocide and sexual atrocities: hannah arendt’s eichmann in jerusalem and karadzic in new york” (philosophical topics, 2011). 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.2 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state—twenty-five years later natalie nenadic recommended citation catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the stateâ•fltwenty-five years later feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation higgins, peter. 2019. “three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 1. 2019 three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men peter higgins eastern michigan university phiggin1@emich.edu higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men peter higgins abstract are men oppressed as men? the evidence given in support of affirmative responses to this question usually consists in examples of harms, limitations, or requirements masculinity imposes on men: men are expected to pay on dates, men must be breadwinners for their families, men can be drafted for war, and so forth. this article explicates three hypotheses that account for the harms, limitations, and requirements masculinity imposes on men and, drawing on the work of alison jaggar, seeks to show that these hypotheses collectively are explanatorily superior to the hypothesis the men are oppressed as men. keywords: oppression, intersectionality, homophobia, masculism, meninism, david benatar, marilyn frye, alison jaggar 1. introduction well-meaning people sometimes say that if the definition of “feminism” were more widely understood, then almost everyone would be a feminist. i have come to doubt this claim. i regularly teach a course called feminist theory. it is an introductory-level course cross-listed in philosophy and women’s and gender studies at my university. because it may be used to fulfill requirements in our general education program, feminist theory attracts a large number of students, many of whom begin with no particular interest in or background knowledge about feminism. in response to what marilyn frye calls “a fundamental claim of feminism,” namely, “that women are oppressed,” (frye 1983, 1) many of my students express reservations. in this paper, i examine a common source of student resistance to feminism (and to the specific claim that women are oppressed): the belief that men are oppressed (as men). students who are inclined toward this belief (a large minority in any given class1) argue that the masculine gender role imposes a variety of 1 i’ve suspected that my social position as a man may influence some students, who perhaps think i will respond favorably, to articulate this belief. if this is true, it would provide support for alison jaggar’s claim that “ceteris paribus, women are better feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 oppressive burdens on men and cite myriad examples in evidence of their view: men must pay on dates; men are expected to be breadwinners for their families; men have more limited fashion options than women and may not wear makeup; men rarely receive primary custody of children following divorce; men are discriminated against when they seek certain types of employment, such as in day care centers; men are more likely than women (overall) to be victims of violence; men can be drafted for war.2 one way to challenge these examples as evidence of the view that men are oppressed is to defend an account of “oppression” whose conditions are not satisfied by such examples.3 in this paper, i wish to pursue a distinct but complementary approach. i shall argue that there are better explanations for the data in question (the examples of limitations and harms masculinity imposes on men) than the hypothesis that men are oppressed. in section 2 of this paper, i outline the feminist conceptual basis for denying that men are oppressed as men by reference to the accounts of “oppression” in the work of frye, iris marion young, and ann cudd. in section 3, i identify the main grounds of student resistance to feminism (and to the specific claim that women are oppressed) with the goal of examining in particular the one already indicated (that men are oppressed). in section 4, i present three separate but compatible hypotheses that make sense of how it can be that men are not oppressed despite the limitations and harms the expectations of masculinity impose on men. finally, in section 5, drawing on the work of alison jaggar, i present two advantages of my hypotheses over the hypothesis that men are oppressed as men. specifically, i shall argue that my hypotheses collectively are more comprehensive (capable of explaining not only the data in question but also related phenomena) and more impartial (likely to represent the interests of society as a whole) than the hypothesis qualified than men to teach [feminist philosophy] courses” (jaggar 1977, 249). alternatively, it might be the case that some students were already inclined toward the belief that men are oppressed and that my being their instructor made them less reluctant to voice this belief. 2 david benatar defends this sort of view as well, though he avoids claiming that men are oppressed. benatar claims that men experience unfair disadvantages, or are discriminated against, as men (2003, 177). 3 indeed, this is frye’s approach (1983, 1–16). it is also the approach of iris marion young (1990, 42) and ann cudd (2006, 25). i examine all three approaches in section 2. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 that men are oppressed as men. i take for granted in this essay that women are oppressed as women.4 2. feminist accounts of oppression it is common for feminist philosophers to conceive of oppression in such a way that, if women are oppressed, then men (considered as such) cannot be. for example, young argues that “for every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in relation to that group” (young 1990, 42; emphasis in original). given this aspect of young’s account of oppression, together with her view that women are oppressed,5 it follows that men are a privileged (and therefore, nonoppressed) social group. cudd similarly defends an account of oppression on which it cannot be the case that both women and men are oppressed in virtue of their gender. according to cudd (2006, 25), “oppression” comprises four conditions: 1. the harm condition: there is a harm that comes out of an institutional practice. 2. the social group condition: the harm is perpetrated through a social institution or practice on a social group whose identity exists apart from the oppressive harm in (1). 3. the privilege condition: there is another social group that benefits from the institutional practice in (1). 4 more precisely, i take for granted in this essay that women are oppressed qua their intersectional identities as women. see section 2 for a more detailed explanation of the concept of oppression, and section 4.2 for a more detailed explanation of intersectionality. i resist in this paper providing examples of how women are oppressed. though a list of examples would be illustrative, i also believe it would be misleading. one reason is that any list of examples would almost inevitably be more representative of the experiences of some women than those of others; there are probably few or no examples that are representative of women across all social groups. second, no list of inequalities, harms, or limitations (no matter how accurate, widely representative, or vividly described) would, by itself, show that a group is oppressed. as section 2 shows (and as frye [1983] notes in response to examples invoked to show that men are oppressed), demonstrating that any one inequality, harm, or limitation is oppressive requires a complex analysis that goes well beyond what could be accomplished in short list of examples. 5 young invokes women as an example in discussion of each of her five faces of oppression (1990, 48–63). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 4. the coercion condition: there is unjustified coercion or force that brings about the harm. thus, as is the case on young’s account, cudd’s account of oppression—the privilege condition in particular—entails that, if women are oppressed, men cannot be (given the implausible-to-deny assumption that other gender groups are not the beneficiaries of institutional practices that harm women).6 making this explicit, cudd states, “for every social group that is oppressed there are correlative social groups whose members benefit, materially or psychologically, from this oppression” (2006, 25). frye’s account of oppression is especially useful to consider in some detail since it is the claim that “men, too, are oppressed” that motivates her to set it out. frye can be read as arguing that oppression has six individually necessary, jointly sufficient conditions. the first is that one can be oppressed only as a consequence of social group membership. like cudd and young, frye regards oppression as, by its nature, a group-based phenomenon; no one can be oppressed simply as an individual—that is, in virtue of idiosyncratic characteristics they possess (frye 1983, 87).7 frye argues, second, that a group is oppressed only if its members experience barriers or limitations to their freedom as a consequence of group membership. oppression fundamentally concerns limitations on freedom, frye says, which is illuminated by the root of the word: press. something that is pressed is caught between forces related to each other so that they jointly restrain, restrict, or prevent that thing’s motion (1983, 2). this illuminates frye’s third condition, which is that a group is oppressed only if the barriers it experiences are systematic. systematic barriers, like the wires of a bird cage, are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. as a result, they are unavoidable; they block or penalize motion in every direction (frye 1983, 4). the systematic nature of oppression is most evident, frye 6 for example, the expectation that women perform the majority of unpaid domestic labor benefits men who, not being subject to this expectation, are thereby competitively advantaged in the paid workforce. the benefits of women’s uncompensated domestic labor do not accrue to, for example, genderqueer or nonbinary people. 7 frye does not give an account of social groups, but her examples (which involve oppression on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, class, age, and disability) imply at least that she regards the relevant sorts of groups as nonvoluntary collections of people that are presumed (typically in error) to share physical or biological commonalities. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 observes, in double binds (“situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure, or deprivation” [1983, 2]). fourth, frye suggests that a group is oppressed only if the barriers it experiences are, on balance, harmful to the group. a putative case of oppression can fail to meet this condition in two ways. first, some barriers that members of a group encounter (in virtue of their membership in that group) may ultimately benefit them, all things considered, even if the immediate effect is harmful. second, even if a barrier that a person experiences (as a result of a group membership) is, all things considered, harmful to him individually, the barrier may work generally to the benefit (or at least not the detriment) of his group (frye 1983, 7–8).8 fifth, frye argues similarly to young and cudd that a group is oppressed only if there is another social group that benefits from the barriers the former faces (1983, 11–12). as this suggests, oppression is a concept that implies the existence of an inequality; when a group is oppressed, the harmful barriers it experiences are causally connected to a benefit for another group. finally, frye suggests that a group is oppressed only if another social group plays the primary role in enforcing the barriers faced by the putatively oppressed group. as this illuminates, oppression is, in frye’s view, externally and coercively imposed (1983, 14–15). frye says at the beginning of her essay that she does “not want to undertake to prove that women are oppressed (or that men are not)” (1983, 2), that her goal is merely to bring clarity to the concept. but her observations in illustration of the six conditions of oppression i have identified in her essay go a long way to establish the conclusion that men are not oppressed as men. while the examples of the expectations masculinity imposes on men show that men indeed satisfy frye’s first two conditions (that one can be oppressed only as a consequences of membership in a social group and that a group is oppressed only if its members experience barriers or limitations to their freedom as a consequence of group membership), it is doubtful that men, considered as such, satisfy any of the other four.9 that men do not satisfy the frye’s third condition (that a group is oppressed only if the barriers it experiences are systematic) is revealed by reflecting on why women do: women face pervasive double binds in which they may either conform 8 for example, in a society where there is overt racial segregation, a white restaurant owner who is harassed, intimidated, or fined for not excluding black patrons is not oppressed as a white person. this is because the social norms she is penalized for violating (racial segregation laws) work to the benefit of whites in general (and may even benefit her individually, all things considered). 9 in the two paragraphs that follow, i merely seek to explain the rationale for why men do not satisfy the latter four conditions; i do not attempt to support these claims, which is beyond the scope of this essay. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 to feminine norms (which harm them) or resist feminine norms (and be penalized). men face the same choice (conform to or resist masculine norms), but only the latter is penalized; men are rewarded in wide variety of ways for appearing masculine. masculine expectations sometimes harm some men, but they tend to the benefit of men all things considered, if not individually, then collectively. thus, frye’s fourth condition (that a group is oppressed only if the barriers it experiences are, on balance, harmful to the group) is also not fulfilled. men would satisfy frye’s fifth condition (which holds, like young and cudd’s privilege condition, that a group is oppressed only if there is another social group that benefits from the barriers the former faces) only if women or another genderdefined group benefitted from the barriers masculinity imposes on men. the existence of well-documented, pervasive, substantial social inequalities (not just sufferings) experienced by women in relation to men makes this suggestion a challenge to take seriously. finally, the most overt forms of masculine gender enforcement—legal code and physical violence—are nearly the exclusive domain of men. even when it comes to ridiculing and ostracizing masculinity’s transgressors, it is men who do it most vigorously and most often. thus, frye’s sixth condition (that a group is oppressed only if another social group plays the primary role in enforcing the barriers faced by the putatively oppressed group) is not fulfilled either. 3. resistance to feminism among students in feminist theory resistance to feminism, and the specific claim that women are oppressed, materializes among students in feminist theory as early as the second day of class, when i present them with basic examples of factual gender inequalities such as the gender wage gap. i have found that almost all of this resistance (whether to the specific claim that women are oppressed, or to the more general claim that women suffer morally significant social inequalities that are unjust) has one or more of the following five bases.10 1. skepticism: on this view, women (at least in contemporary western societies) generally have the same opportunities as men and so do not suffer the sort of restrictions or harms required for a case of oppression. in this most basic form of resistance to feminism, factual claims of gender inequalities are simply 10 i take some of these categories from ann cudd and leslie jones’s essay “sexism” (2005, 81–82). what i label as “skepticism” is the same as what they use the term to describe. i call their “essentialism” “biologism” to distance it from the more general idea of essentialism, which need not have anything to do with biology. cudd and jones discuss an idea that they call “defeatism,” but mine is different. they do not discuss libertarianism or masculism. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 denied, usually on the basis of the gender neutrality of laws and institutional policies. 2. biologism: this view holds that women indeed suffer significant and systematic social inequalities in comparison to men but maintains that these inequalities can be accounted for largely or exclusively in terms of “natural” differences between females and males. this entails (it is assumed) that the inequalities women suffer are not unjust and therefore that women are not oppressed (or that women’s “oppression” is not unjust). 3. libertarianism: in this context, i use “libertarianism” to name the view that the significant and systematic social inequalities women suffer in comparison to men can be accounted for largely or exclusively in terms of the cumulative effect of the voluntary choices of individual women and men (which are supposed to diverge from each other on average along lines of gender). this entails (it is assumed) that the inequalities women experience are not unjust and therefore that women are not oppressed (or that women’s “oppression” is not unjust). 4. defeatism: defeatists allow that women suffer significant and systematic social inequalities in comparison to men but suggest that these inequalities cannot be redressed without unacceptable consequences for men, children, the economy, society generally, or women themselves. therefore, defeatists say (or, more commonly, imply) that the inequalities women experience must be tolerated— which suggests the position that the inequalities are not, in fact, unjust or truly oppressive.11 finally, 5. masculism: i use “masculism” to name the view that men are oppressed, or more generally, that men suffer unfair disadvantages as men.12 the evidence for this view generally consists in examples, such as those mentioned in the introductory section of this paper, of limitations or harms masculinity imposes on men. the view that men are oppressed as men does not itself (at least on face) entail opposition to the claim that women are oppressed or to feminism generally. indeed, students who express this view often say that men are oppressed too. for 11 “defeatism” reflects what i take to be an implication of the pattern of some students’ responses to remedies for gender inequality presented in various readings over the course of the term. no student has articulated defeatism as i have presented it here; rather, students profess to believe that women suffer unjust social inequalities but find every single remedy proposed unacceptable for one reason or another. 12 that men suffer unfair disadvantages as men is what david benatar (2003, 177) calls “discrimination” against men, or “the second sexism.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 many students who articulate the view i call masculism, there appears to be a sincere concern for men’s and women’s suffering. however, there are two reasons for thinking that one cannot hold both masculism and feminism (where feminism is taken to include the claim that women are oppressed as women). first, given standard elements of feminist philosophical accounts of oppression, if men are oppressed, it is not logically possible that women are oppressed (unless some third gender group is oppressing both). in terms of the privilege condition common to young, cudd, and frye, if men are oppressed, then women are a privileged social group, which would be incompatible with women being an oppressed social group. in terms of frye’s last condition and cudd’s coercion condition, if men are oppressed, then women have the social power to enforce the barriers that oppress men, which would make it hard to understand how the coercion condition could be fulfilled in women’s case. second, regardless of the details of any specific philosophical account of oppression, “oppression” must surely be thought to name a special, and especially grave, form of injustice. if everyone—men, women, and people who reject these categories—is oppressed by gender norms and expectations, then it cannot be said that women suffer a special, and especially grave, form of injustice. to put it another way: if everyone (considered along lines of gender) is “oppressed,” then no one is really oppressed—i.e., no one is suffering a special, and especially grave, form of injustice.13 4. three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men i assume in this paper that women are oppressed as women.14 i do not seek to deny that men sometimes experience limitations or harms as a result of masculine gender expectations. instead, my goal is to show that the limitations and harms masculinity sometimes imposes on some men can be explained (well) without invoking the notion that men are oppressed. in order to meet this goal, i present in the subsections below three independent but compatible hypotheses for explaining the limitations and harms of masculinity: the noncompliance penalties hypothesis, the intersectionality hypothesis, and the homophobic contempt hypothesis. 13 tom digby makes a superficially similar but distinct point about the rhetorical impact (as opposed to the conceptual implication) of saying that everyone is oppressed: “when you say that whites are victims of racism, too, or men are victims of sexism, too, the rhetorical impact is to create the impression that everyone is a victim of racism or sexism, so it must be an unavoidable aspect of the human condition, so little or nothing can be done about racism or sexism” (digby 2003, 266). 14 see note 4. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 providing alternative explanations for what appears to be evidence of men’s oppression is not a new philosophical project. a familiar hypothesis, defended by kenneth clatterbaugh (1996, 300–301) and james sterba (2003, 229),15 holds that certain harms and limitations men experience as men are, in fact, side effects of male privilege and men’s compliance with masculine expectations. david benatar, a critic of this view, calls this the “costs-of-dominance” argument (2003, 203–205; 2012, 194–199). the costs-of-dominance argument has its clearest application as an explanation of the fact that men are more likely than women (overall) to be victims of violence: masculinity requires that men be aggressive, quick to violence, emotionally restrained (except with respect to anger, crucially), and “protective” toward women. compliance with these expectations indeed sets men up for many harms, such as vulnerability to violence; men are likely to see each other as posing a threat for which violence is the best response. but this and other costs of masculinity (such as the demands of being the primary breadwinner for one’s household) are predictable results of compliance with and affirmation of a system of gender roles, norms, and stereotypes by which men are able to gain the benefits of social cooperation to a greater extent than women. violence and threats of violence are powerful and often effective forms of coercion; the breadwinner requirement (and the related expectation that women perform unpaid domestic labor) ensures economic advantages by which men are able to secure greater control than women over valuable resources. the hypotheses i present below are separate from but complementary to the costs-of-dominance argument.16 4.1. the noncompliance penalties hypothesis the costs-of-dominance argument is useful for explaining cases in which harm accrues to men as a consequence of complying with masculine expectations. defenders of the idea that men are oppressed sometimes invoke examples of men being penalized for failures of masculinity, both intentional and unintentional. the example with which frye opens her 1983 essay (men not being permitted to cry in public) is such a case. similarly, men who are stay-at-home fathers may be ridiculed or faulted by acquaintances or extended family members. a man who eats a vegetarian diet may have his manliness questioned. describing a man as “metrosexual” is (lighthearted) way of mocking him for his “frivolous” concern with 15 also see ward e. jones and lindsay kelland’s (2013) review of benatar’s the second sexism. 16 frye (1983, 15) gestures toward the costs-of-dominance argument when she notes that some limitations on men required by masculinity (e.g., emotional restraint) are the consequence of a system by which men are accorded, and women are denied, respect. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 fashion and personal appearance. indeed, many similar portmanteaus (e.g., “bromance,” “manscape”) have been introduced in the past several years for the same purpose: to gently tease men—while simultaneously affirming their heterosexuality—for behaving in ways culturally associated with femininity. as frye points out, masculine norms are enforced against men primarily by men (frye 1983, 14–15); they are not externally imposed, as a claim of oppression requires. to deny that these examples are evidence of men’s oppression is not to say that they do not sometimes involve genuine harm for some men.17 but these harms are simply penalties for noncompliance with norms of masculinity. men who defy, intentionally or not, the expectations of masculinity are living counterexamples to the belief that traditional gender roles, the cornerstone of male privilege, are “natural” (i.e., biologically determined). if traditional gender roles are “natural,” then the social advantages men accrue from them are (it is conventionally supposed) inevitable and, thus, cannot be challenged as unjust. the maintenance of male privilege therefore requires that counterexamples to the naturalness of traditional gender roles be eliminated.18 the threat and application of noncompliance penalties serve a deterrence function as well as a “moral education” function (by encouraging the internalization of masculine ideals in men and boys). thus, while some men are indeed harmed by masculinity, its enforcement protects 17 this is why the noncompliance penalties hypothesis is not a version of what benatar calls the “inversion” argument (2003, 199–204). the inversion argument claims that, in such examples, the apparent harms to men are actually themselves benefits to men. 18 the noncompliance penalties hypothesis does not imply that men demand men’s compliance with masculine ideals as a conscious strategy for maintaining male privilege. a variety of explanations could be given for why a particular man teases, shuns, or assaults other men for insufficient masculinity. patrick hopkins argues that “gender treachery” is penalized because it is understood (even if nonconsciously) as a threat to personal identity for many men: “because personal identity (and all its concomitant social, political, religious, psychological, biological, and economic relations) is so heavily gendered, any threat to sex/gender categories is derivatively (though primarily non-consciously) interpreted as a threat to personal identity—a threat to what it means to be and especially what it means to be me. a threat to manhood (masculinity) is a threat to personhood (personal identity). not surprisingly then, a threat to established gender categories, like most serious threats, is often met with grave resistance, for challenging the regulatory operations of a gender system means to destabilize fundamental social, political, and personal categories (a profoundly anxiety-producing state), and society is always prejudiced toward the protection of established categories” (hopkins 1998, 171). higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 from refutation the ideology by which male privilege generally is rationalized. so understood, such examples of harms masculinity imposes on some men are, in fact, evidence of women’s oppression. the noncompliance penalties hypothesis is useful for dispelling a confusion among those who are inclined to think men are oppressed in virtue of the limitations and harms masculinity imposes. a proponent of masculism might be puzzled why, if feminists invoke examples of women being penalized for not satisfying gender expectations as evidence of the oppression of women, examples of men being penalized for the same does not show that men are oppressed. the noncompliance penalties hypothesis provides an explanation of how it could be the case that penalties for insufficient masculinity on the part of men do not satisfy the harm condition in cudd’s account and frye’s fourth condition of oppression: considered as a group, men benefit, all things considered, from the enforcement of masculine expectations. given the scope and goal of this paper, i do not attempt to defend this claim (that considered as a group, men benefit, all things considered, from the enforcement of masculine expectations). nevertheless, supporting the noncompliance penalties hypothesis as an alternative to the hypothesis that men are oppressed does require showing why proponents of masculism should accept cudd’s harm condition (or frye’s fourth condition) as part of the meaning of oppression. first, most of the examples given to show that men are oppressed would be irrelevant if those who say that men are oppressed did not accept that oppression must involve some kind of harm, broadly construed. further, it seems uncontroversial that oppressive harms cannot be causally connected to a greater benefit for the injured party; it would be arbitrary to count only a subset of the consequences of a barrier to freedom when considering whether or not the barrier is oppressive. finally, the harm condition requires that the subject of the oppressive harm be a social group.19 yet this is something that proponents of masculism accept as well—by virtue of their contention that men (as opposed to persons a, b, and c, all of whom happen to be men) are oppressed as men. 4.2. the intersectionality hypothesis one of the most seemingly powerful examples of the oppression of men is expectations of military service. that men are expected to risk physical injury and death in military service is a central example for benatar of sexism against men. benatar acknowledges that the burden of military service, combat especially, does 19 this need not be taken to mean that the group exists apart from its members; the harm condition merely requires that the aggregate effect on members of the group be a harm. (see cudd 2006, 52.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 not fall equally on all men; men of color and poor white men are more likely than middle-class and wealthy white men to be placed in active military combat. in their review of benatar’s 2012 book, the second sexism, ward e. jones and lindsay kelland (2013) fault benatar for failing to recognize that such examples therefore provide evidence not of discrimination against men but of class or race discrimination. but such cases, benatar might reply, cannot be explained simply in terms of class or race discrimination (or oppression). if they could, we would expect the burdens of military combat to fall as heavily on women of color and poor white women as they do on men of color and poor white men. since they don’t, it may seem that benatar indeed has evidence for sexism against men. however, this reply would not salvage benatar’s example, for there is a way to make sense of why the burdens of military combat do not fall as heavily on women of color and poor white women as they do on men of color and poor white men without invoking the hypothesis that men are discriminated against or oppressed simply as men: intersectionality. intersectionality is the idea that (among other things) how oppression is experienced by members of a social group varies depending on what other social groups each belongs to.20 in the classic example, the forms of sexism a black woman encounters differ in some ways from those a white woman encounters due to white women’s race privilege and black women’s race oppression. similarly, intersectionality entails that the forms of racism a black man encounters differ in some ways from those a black woman encounters as a consequence of black men’s gender privilege and black women’s gender oppression. the intersectionality hypothesis thus provides an alternative to claiming that men are oppressed as men even as one acknowledges that the burdens of military combat do not fall as heavily on women of color and poor white women as they do on men of color and poor white men. specifically, the intersectionality hypothesis makes it possible to understand the unique burdens of military service on men as a gender-specific instantiation of race and economic oppression. via intersectionality, other examples, such as police violence against black men, can similarly be understood as gender-specific instantiations of race oppression rather than as instantiations of the oppression of men qua men.21 20 a very long list of references could be included here. for a start, see combahee river collective 1982, hooks 1984, crenshaw 1989 and 1991, spelman 1988, collins 1993, and gines 2016. 21 sally haslanger’s view is relevant to consider here. haslanger notes that “there are contexts in which being black and male marks one as a target for certain forms of systematic violence (e.g., by the police)” and adds to this that “in those contexts, higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 to this suggestion, a proponent of masculism might ask why we should not instead say that expectations of military service for poor and working-class men (and police violence against men of color) are classand race-specific instantiations of the oppression of men. for my reply, i assume that the proponent of masculism acknowledges the racist oppression of people of color and economic oppression of the poor and working class in contemporary western societies. (if they did not, they could not make the claim that expectations of military service for poor and workingclass men and police violence against men of color are classand race-specific instantiations of the oppression of men.) if (it is not disputed that) people of color are oppressed by racism and the poor and working class are oppressed by economic institutions, no explanatory purpose is served by positing that men are oppressed (in raceand class-specific ways): police violence against black men and the overrepresentation of men of color and poor and working class men in military service are already accounted for by race oppression, class oppression, and their intersection with gender categories. to clarify, i am not simply arguing that the simplest explanation is the best one. after all, by invoking intersectionality to explain the putative examples of men’s oppression, i have put forward a more complex explanation than proponents of masculism generally do. however, my argument has been that intersectionality is necessary to explain such examples: if particular harms (such as the burdens of military service and vulnerability to police violence) are borne disproportionately by men of color and poor and working class white men, then these harms cannot be contrary to frye’s suggestion, being male is not something that a man ‘has going for him’” (haslanger 2000, 41; emphasis in original). haslanger’s view is not necessarily contrary to my own, however; in saying that police violence against black men can be understood as a gender-specific instantiation of race oppression, i have argued that black men’s being men is indeed part of the explanation of such phenomena. had haslanger argued that being male is something black men have going against them, it is possible that our views would be in conflict. (whether haslanger holds such a view is doubtful; later, she says “when systems of white supremacy and male dominance collide, a black man’s male privilege may be seen as so threatening that it must be violently wrested from him” [42; emphasis added].) nevertheless, even if it is haslanger’s view that being male is something black men have going against them, this would not support the general claim of masculism that men are oppressed, or suffer unfair disadvantages, as men simpliciter. at most, the view that being male is something black men have going against them would mean that black men qua black men suffer unfair disadvantages or are oppressed. see my response to the second objection to the intersectionality hypothesis for further explanation of this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 entirely explained by any one of the gender oppression of men, the race oppression of people of color, or the economic oppression of the poor and working class alone. thus, in order to fully explain the phenomena in question (the burdens of military service and vulnerability to police violence), proponents of masculism must incorporate as elements of their explanation three things: the race oppression of people of color, the economic oppression of the poor and working class, and the intersection of these oppressions with gender categories. yet, once they do so, proponents of masculism render one element of their explanation—the claim that men are oppressed as men—superfluous. one might object that my use of intersectionality to account for harms some men experience without saying that men are oppressed as men misconstrues intersectionality. on this view, intersectionality entails that black men (for example) are a social group unto themselves and that phenomena such as police violence against black men are instances of the oppression of black men qua black men (rather than gender-specific instantiations of race oppression).22 it would be beyond the scope of this paper to defend a particular understanding of the implications of intersectionality for social ontology. if the understanding of intersectionality suggested in this objection is correct, it would undermine my claim that certain harms experienced by some men are gender-specific instantiations of race or class oppression. however, it would not undermine my claim in a way that is beneficial for proponents of masculism; indeed, it would undermine the central claim of masculism (that men are oppressed as men) in a distinct way. on the understanding of intersectionality suggested by this objection, men simpliciter do not exist and thus “men” do not constitute a social group. if “men” do not constitute a social group, then they cannot be oppressed as men. 4.3. the homophobic contempt hypothesis in some cases, men are penalized for gender deviance but not in ways it seems appropriate to describe as lapses of masculinity simpliciter. boys who naively extol the virtues of madonna to their classmates and men who order colorful cocktails or gab excitedly about figure skating may be viciously harassed, accosted, or physically attacked. but such examples involving men (and boys) being ridiculed, harassed, or threatened for engaging in certain behaviors culturally associated with femininity are of course not penalties for being a man; they are penalties for being (or seeming) gay, as gay men are stereotyped in contemporary american society. in other words, what explains such cases is not the oppression of men but contempt for homosexuality. in contrast to the noncompliance penalties hypothesis, where 22 for a proponent of this sort of construal of intersectionality, see spelman 1988. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 violations of masculinity themselves precipitate the imposition of a harm, the homophobic contempt hypothesis explains cases in which violations of masculinity are taken as evidence of homosexuality and a man’s assumed homosexuality occasions the imposition of a harm. in such cases, the goal of the imposition of harm is not to deter or teach, but simply to punish or perhaps incapacitate. does the homophobic contempt hypothesis prove too much? one might argue (as benatar does [2012, 137]), that the penalties imposed on men suspected of being gay support the claim of masculism since (one might think) lesbians are not as severely penalized for homosexuality. indeed, benatar claims that “homosexual males suffer more victimization than do lesbians” (2012, 54), and takes this as evidence of his view that men are unfairly disadvantaged as men. one might imagine that responding to such an objection is primarily an empirical matter, requiring that one reference criminal statutes, statistics, and social scientific data that compare the disadvantages associated with being identified as a lesbian with those associated with being identified as a gay man. empirical research would be only limitedly helpful at best on this question, however. first, given the tendency, consequent on the oppression of women,23 to regard men’s experience as paradigmatic human experience, there is a plausible basis for suspecting that disadvantages more associated with the oppression of lesbians than with the oppression of gay men are less readily recognized in empirical research (which could, thus, be misleading). second, even if it could be empirically established that gay men are more disadvantaged than lesbians, this would not by itself constitute evidence for the claim that men are oppressed. as the foregoing discussion of the intersectionality hypothesis illuminates, the putatively greater disadvantage of gay men is conceptualizable as a gender-specific instantiation of homophobic oppression—or as the oppression of gay men qua gay men. both of these ways of understanding the allegedly greater disadvantages of gay men would challenge the notion that such disadvantages are evidence of the oppression of men as men. finally, if gay men are more disadvantaged than lesbians, this would only appear to be evidence that men are oppressed if one fails to reflect on why such disadvantages are imposed on gay men. perpetrators of homophobic discrimination and violence against gay men ostensibly regard gay men with contempt for gay men’s stereotypical effeminacy and womanliness. in other words, it is disdain for women and the feminine that would explain the alleged greater disadvantage of gay men, not the oppression of men. 23 that women are oppressed is generally not disputed by proponents of masculism, the logical implications of their position notwithstanding. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 5. advantages of the three hypotheses these three hypotheses, together with the costs-of-dominance argument, are at least the explanatory equal of the hypothesis that men are oppressed as men in accounting for the various harms and limitations masculinity imposes on men. making use of two criteria of theoretical adequacy that alison jaggar invokes in defense of socialist feminism in feminist politics and human nature, i argue that collectively they are, in fact, superior to the hypothesis that men are oppressed. jaggar argues that the socialist feminist theory of women’s oppression (and liberation) is preferable to that of liberal feminism, traditional marxism, and radical feminism because it (best) represents the social world from the standpoint of women. all theories of political morality represent the world from one standpoint or another, even if some do not acknowledge that they do so. in general, theories that reflect the standpoint of the oppressed (women, in the case of feminist theories) are superior to those that do not because they are (a) more comprehensive and (b) more impartial, in jaggar’s view. jaggar explains that the standpoint of the oppressed is comprehensive because “whereas the condition of the oppressed groups is visible only dimly to the ruling class, the oppressed are able to see more clearly the ruled as well as the rulers and the relations between them. thus, the standpoint of the oppressed includes and is able to explain the standpoint of the ruling class” (jaggar 1983, 371). abstracting from this, jaggar’s defense of the theoretical virtues of socialist feminism implies that one hypothesis is superior to another if, besides accounting for the phenomenon in question, it explains the appearance of truth in the competing hypothesis. the noncompliance penalties, intersectionality, and homophobic contempt hypotheses (together, along with the costs-of-dominance argument) are more comprehensive than the hypothesis that men are oppressed in the following sense: they can explain the appearance of truth in the hypothesis that men are oppressed because they together account for the various examples given in evidence of men’s alleged oppression. in contrast, the hypothesis that men are oppressed cannot itself account for social disadvantages imposed on women, people of color, the poor and working class, or sexual minorities. the standpoint of the oppressed is impartial because, jaggar argues, “it comes closer to representing the interests of society as a whole; whereas the standpoint of the ruling class reflects the interests only of one section of the population, the standpoint of the oppressed represents the interests of the totality in that historical period” (1983, 371). more generally, the criterion of impartiality favors hypotheses that come closest to representing the interests of society as a whole. political strategies designed to ameliorate the putative oppression of men may benefit men but would leave in place and perhaps exacerbate the oppression of women, people of color, the poor and working class, and sexual minorities. the higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 noncompliance penalties, intersectionality, homophobic contempt, and costs-ofdominance hypotheses are more impartial, and therefore pose less social risk, than the hypothesis that men are oppressed: political strategies designed to challenge the forms of oppression these hypotheses invoke would (in principle) benefit women, people of color, the poor and working class, and sexual minorities (respectively) as well as the men whose disadvantages these hypotheses explain. 6. conclusion responding to the claim that men are oppressed as men merely by presenting a definition of “oppression” whose conditions men do not satisfy may be perceived as sophistry by undergraduate students, however sound a philosophical strategy it is. it is my hope that the hypotheses presented here might reduce student resistance to such feminist conceptions of oppression by showing that the examples that inclined many of them toward what i’ve called masculism can be accounted for without positing that men are oppressed. i sometimes gather that students are led to endorse the view that men are oppressed, or that men experience sexism too, because it strikes them as a failure of inclusivity or, worse, a microaggression to deny that any group is oppressed, especially if some members of the group claim that they are. in other words, acknowledging the oppression of men is supposed to be required from a progressive, forward-thinking perspective. the three hypotheses delineated here reveal that just the opposite is the case. the noncompliance penalties hypothesis shows that many of the harms and limitations masculinity imposes on men are evidence of the oppression of another group—women. the intersectionality hypothesis shows that certain harms and limitations experienced by some men, as men, are similarly examples of the oppression of other groups—people of color and the poor and working class (among others). and the homophobic contempt hypothesis shows that some of the harms and limitations masculinity imposes on men are an aspect of the oppression of yet another group—sexual minorities. the notion that the examples of harms and limitations masculinity imposes on men are evidence of the oppression of men is therefore insidious, for it has the effect of directing concern for social justice away from actually oppressed groups. references benatar, david. 2003. “the second sexism.” social theory and practice 29 (2): 177– 210. ———. 2012. the second sexism: discrimination against men and boys. chichester, uk: wiley-blackwell. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 clatterbaugh, kenneth. 1996. “are men oppressed?” in rethinking masculinity: philosophical explorations in light of feminism, edited by larry may, robert strikwerda, and patrick d. hopkins, 289–305. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. collins, patricia hill. 1993. “toward a new vision: race, class, and gender as categories of analysis and connection.” race, sex & class 1 (1): 25–45. combahee river collective. 1982. “a black feminist statement.” in all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave: black women’s studies, edited by gloria t. hull, patricia bell scott, and barbara smith, 13– 22. new york: the feminist press at the city university of new york. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1989. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex.” university of chicago legal forum 1989 (1): 139–167. ———. 1991. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43 (6): 1241–1299. cudd, ann e. 2006. analyzing oppression. new york: oxford university press. cudd, ann e., and leslie e. jones. 2005. “sexism.” in feminist theory: a philosophical anthology, edited by ann e. cudd and robin o. andreasen, 73–83. malden, ma: blackwell. digby, tom. 2003. “male trouble: are men victims of sexism?” social theory and practice 29 (2): 247–273. frye, marilyn. 1983. the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. new york: crossing press. gines, kathryn t. 2016. “race women, race men, and early expressions of protointersectionality, 1830s–1930s.” in why race and gender still matter, edited by namita goswami, maeve m. o’donovan, and lisa yount, 13–25. new york: routledge. haslanger, sally. 2000. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” nous 34 (1): 31–55. hooks, bell. 1984. feminist theory: from margin to center. boston: south end press. hopkins, patrick. 1998. “gender treachery: homophobia, masculinity, and threatened identities.” in race, class, gender, and sexuality: the big questions, edited by naomi zack, laurie shrage, and crispin sartwell, 95– 115. malden, ma: blackwell. jaggar, alison m. 1977. “male instructors, feminism, and women’s studies.” teaching philosophy 2 (3–4): 247–256. ———. 1983. feminist politics and human nature. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. jones, ward e., and lindsay kelland. 2013. review of the second sexism: discrimination against men and boys, by david benatar. hypatia reviews online. http://hypatiareviews.org/reviews/content/288. higgins – three hypotheses for explaining the so-called oppression of men published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 spelman, elizabeth. 1988. inessential woman: problems of exclusion in feminist thought. boston: beacon press. sterba, james. 2003. “the wolf again in sheep’s clothing.” social theory and practice 29 (2): 219–232. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. peter higgins is an associate professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at eastern michigan university. he specializes in feminist political philosophy and is the author of immigration justice (edinburgh university press, 2013). 7291 higgins title page.pdf 7291 higgins final format.pdf on the politics of coalition feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s article 4 toward a feminist theory of the state 2017 on the politics of coalition elena ruíz michigan state university, ruizele1@msu.edu kristie dotson michigan state university, dotsonk@msu.edu recommended citation ruíz, elena and kristie dotson. 2017. "on the politics of coalition."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/ 2017.2.4. mailto:ruizele1@msu.edu on the politics of coalition elena ruíz and kristie dotson abstract in the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in catharine mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state while exploring productive spaces of coalition. to explore such spaces, we reframe toward a feminist theory of the state in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. this is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in mackinnon’s argument, and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. in the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on mackinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. keywords: women-of-color feminisms, intersectionality, catherine mackinnon, coalitional theory historically, the discourse of allyship has been marked by asymmetrical conditions of exchange that ask women of color to work within the political projects of white feminism, even to have our difference recognized as such. rarely do white feminists subsume the great feminist emancipatory frameworks of universal suffrage and freedom from heteropatriarchal oppressions to sexist racism and intersectional oppressions (based, for instance, on imperial, colonial, settler colonial, and neoliberal violence). despite the rise of standpoint epistemologies, one standpoint continues to dominate political projects, academic discourses, and journal refereeing, such that women-of-color authors are asked to translate basic issues in women-of-color feminisms into terms the ‘uninitiated’ can always already understand. every conversation between us thus becomes an act of translation through a settler language that grammatically forecloses this acknowledgement. and yet, when white feminism fails politically, as it did in the 2016 u.s. presidential election, the spotlight falls on women of color’s alleged failure to serve as its corrective, to sufficiently mobilize, turn out in even greater numbers, and stem the 1 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 tide of white women’s enfranchised vote for authoritarianism. structural asymmetries in coalitional work thus need to be brought to the foreground again, such that their systematicity can gain formal articulation in the basic conditions for negotiation and exchange between us. in 2015, we were invited to comment on the twenty-fifth anniversary publication of catharine mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state at the pacific division meeting of the american philosophical association. as women-ofcolor feminist philosophers working at the intersections of black and latina feminisms and social epistemology, we accepted the invitation with a critical awareness of the pressing need to continue generating constructive criticisms of asymmetrical allyship. we were troubled by how mackinnon’s work was being celebrated in ways that could be used to exclude women-of-color feminisms, and the seeming absence of critical awareness of this outside women-of-color feminisms1. at the same time, we had witnessed her engaged commitment to intersectional feminisms at the level of scholarship and activism, her alacrity and willingness to respond to criticism emanating from intersectional concerns. and we were also long-time supporters of mackinnon’s legal advocacy projects to end gender-based violence domestically and abroad. it is not nothing, after all, to spend a lifetime advocating for the humane treatment of women and girls, just as it is not nothing to insist that the concept of humanism be decolonized, so that a western feminist interpretive lens is not a conceptual precondition for intervention and mitigation of gender-based violence in all its forms across the global south. given the asymmetrical conditions of coalition, one way to proceed—one among many— was to reframe the historical reception of toward a feminist theory of the state in terms of its epistemological project, one that highlighted a synchronicity with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. and yet, while it is the case that mackinnon and women-of-color feminisms share in many of the same concerns—the invisibility of gender-based harms in society, the erasure of women’s lives in social institutions, and the need to generate correctives to the interpretive frameworks that license those erasures—the interstitial sites of those convergences are often fraught with logics and assumptions that still privilege the political projects and concerns of anglo-american and liberal feminisms. one place this is evident is mackinnon’s feminist critique of the state, which retains a conceptual commitment to the founding categories of western political theory even as it works to pluralize and transform them. the centralization of women’s subordination in the exploitative social processes regulating women’s sexual capacities and reproduction is predicated on the existence of a patriarchal 1 see “open letters to catharine mackinnon” (1991). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 state formation governing these processes, and thus in need of feminist reform. under this dialectical framework, feminist jurisprudence may not be robust enough to capture harms enacted by colonial violence against racialized women. indigenous feminisms, in particular, may face dauntingly asymmetrical challenges in critiquing the systematicity of gender violence and oppression using political categories imposed by coloniality, and which do not undermine the very legality of a state formation through which patriarchal power flows. coalitional thinking between our feminisms is therefore precarious without a clear identification of the tacit prioritization of categories that may preclude the identification of gendered jeopardizations produced by the complicity between systems of colonial domination and liberal institutions, and which would form the basis for a decolonial feminist theory of the state. we hold that it is indeed possible to enact a productive coalition of difference with this precarity in mind. this essay is divided into two sections. the first situates the major contributions of toward a feminist theory of the state beyond an applied critique of liberal jurisprudence by highlighting mackinnon’s broader epistemological project. this is done through an analysis of the philosophical role ‘method’ plays in her argument, and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. in the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on mackinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. i. reframing toward a feminist theory of the state in the twenty-five years since the publication of toward a feminist theory of the state (a work that took eighteen years to write), a great deal has changed. the feminist task of giving voice to exclusionary social practices has undergone significant developments beyond the book’s landmark critique of liberal jurisprudence as normatively male. mackinnon’s claim that “feminism has no theory of the state” (as a specific theory of the state form of power) has been eclipsed by feminist political theorists across liberal, postcolonial, postmodern, and anarchic traditions (1989, 158).2 the explanatory frameworks, the lexical and theoretical resources for understanding and talking about gender and sexuality, have also evolved to minimize reductive and biologistic conceptions of selfhood, which can cover over the phenomenological complexity and diversity of women’s speaking positions. women-of-color feminists, whose critiques were already robust at the time, have developed even more inclusive analyses of women’s lived experience as 2 cf. brown 1995, haney 2000, allen 1990, shanley and narayan 1997. 3 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 structured by intersectional oppressions that operate along multiple axes of power beyond the sex/gender paradigm—like race, ethnicity, migratory status, and linguistic difference. in short, the centrality of sexual difference (as sexuality) underpinning the book’s main arguments—evinced through claims such as: “it is sexuality that determines gender, not the other way around” (111)— no longer holds as a methodological fulcrum for organizing feminist political projects. in fact, many of the criticisms the book originally garnered claimed it never did, and those criticisms can be seen as mirroring the growing debates within north american feminisms questioning propensities to subordinate all forms of domination and subordination that harm women to sex. drucilla cornell, for instance, famously questioned mackinnon’s reduction of sexual difference to the vulnerabilities enacted by reading the social construction of women’s identities as a purely victimized, sexualized femininity, and for promoting a hierarchy of oppressions in the book’s structural analysis of sex (1991). legal theorists have similarly focused on mackinnon’s treatment of liberalism by alleging a misadaptation of its underlying claims (due to a conceptual privileging of identity as grounded in gender) that result in a skewed picture of women’s lack of agency. arguably, this is a misreading of mackinnon’s project if we take into account the caveat she provides at the beginning of the book: “it must be said that this book does not try to explain everything. . . . to look for the place of gender in everything is not to reduce everything to gender” (xi). mackinnon’s worry, and it is a good one, is that her readers will find the project of radical feminism inattentive to the ways race, class, and other historical categories of oppression work to produce systematic harms and social exclusions against women. “it is not possible to discuss sex without taking account of black women’s experience of gender,” she writes. “to the considerable degree to which this experience is inseparable from the experience of racism, many features of sex cannot be discussed without racial particularity” (xi–xii, emphasis added). yet the question remains as to the veracity of mackinnon’s worry in her own enactment of feminist theory; looking for the place of gender in everything comes, in part, from seeing gender as a centripetal force in the way the logic of domination plays out, or of understanding the central role gender plays as an organizing concept in one’s life. we only look for what we already theorize as missing, as ‘trackable’ by virtue of the prior cultural backdrop of interpretive resources that guide our theoretical projects and claims. this backdrop is not a timeless, monolithic perspective but rather an epistemic looking glass through which our concerns show up as such. toward a feminist theory of the state reflects the looking glass of radical feminisms but within an anglo-normative tradition of white feminisms, such that it is ‘sexism’ and not sexist racism, or settler colonial sexist racism that becomes the organizing concept in the analysis of oppression (itself a multistable phenomenon). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 the book’s structure follows the decades-long timespan of theoretical development in mackinnon’s published essays that begin, for instance, with classical themes in western political theory (including an exegesis of john stuart mill) and a methodological section on feminist consciousness raising. consider now the criticisms generated in open letters written by women of color in response to a paper mackinnon gave at the feminism in the 90s: bridging the gap between theory and practice conference, entitled “from practice to theory, or what is a white woman anyway”: we disagree with your notion of an empirical reality which would pervade all experiences ‘as a woman’ in third world and in white cultures. your speech presents examples of gender oppression as if they are not mediated by race, thereby manifesting the limitations of your concept of women's experience. . . . we disagree with your definition of women's experience, which gives primacy to exploitation based on female reproductive and sexual capacity. you incorporate a limited concept of womanhood in your analysis, and thus misconstrue the criticisms women of color have made of feminist theory. . . . while you use women of color's experiences, you do not integrate the theories created by women of color as you seek to create theory. (“open letters” 1991, 179, 183–184) forming a coalition based on differences here means reading mackinnon against mackinnon, rehabilitating her argument by reframing it through a conceptual prism that is compatible with intersectional concerns rather than universalist tendencies in white feminism. since one of the most fruitful points of coalition rests in mackinnon’s feminist epistemological project, we begin by recontextualizing the work’s main arguments in terms of the epistemic imperialism sustaining “how social power shapes the way we know” (ix) rather than through its well-known historical reception within north american feminisms. while the latter has produced sustained criticisms of mackinnon’s view of gender—which situates feminine sexual difference as emerging from male power—as inadequate for building a feminist theory of the state that can accommodate differences, what is generally underemphasized is the connection between her theory of gender and the epistemological views that support it. this is not from lack of clarity or textual insistence, as mackinnon tells us from the beginning of the book that she wants to “reconstruct feminism on the epistemic level,” since she sees “epistemology and politics [as having] emerged as two mutually enforcing sides of the same unequal coin” (xi). to do justice to mackinnon’s critique of liberal jurisprudence within a wider epistemological sphere, an analysis of the role method plays in her project is 5 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 warranted. in chapter six, “method and politics,” mackinnon uses the notion of method as a conceptual tool to talk about causal relationships in social epistemology. through it, she describes our prior social entanglement with cultural biases, normative valuations and pre-judgments that shape the contours of our attitudes, beliefs, and judgments in a patriarchal society, but which operate on stealth mode and become manifest in the prevailing account of social reality as normatively male. these biases are historical and form the basis of men’s privileged cultural positions and women’s unconscious conditioned reflections of oppression. since feminism is a competing account of reality in patriarchal culture (and exponentially so at the time the book was written), mackinnon needed a broader conceptual tool to pull the rug out from under the swarm of anti-feminist critiques, which often simply passed for the status quo. she also needed a tool to begin disarming male biases in liberal jurisprudence, which claims to be an objective arbiter in culture. masculinist perspectives and concepts are not a natural state of affairs, she writes; whether in marxism, feminism, or liberal jurisprudence, concepts “derive their meaning and primacy from the way each theory approaches, grasps, interprets, and inhabits its world. there is a relationship between how and what a theory sees” (107). while the commonplace use of method in the social sciences is that of a value-free procedural technique that safeguards correct judgment between inner mental states and an objective, mind-independent reality, mackinnon employs a view of method closer to its original greek formulation as μέθοδος, a particular way of journeying, bodying forth or undertaking a path that can, but need not be reduced to a manner of inquiring within knowledge systems. to be sure, the way we partake along a path shapes how we encounter it and limits the range of meanings attributable to it, but it need not presuppose epistemic neutrality. she writes: method organizes the apprehension of truth. it determines what counts as evidence and defines what is taken as verification. operatively, it determines what a theory takes to be real. ‘method is not neutral, it establishes the criteria by which one judges the validity of conclusions, and consequently carries with it not simply technical skills but deeper philosophical commitments and implications.’3 (106) following the successes of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century and the rise of specialist research culture that accompanied this revolution, the explanatory power of the natural sciences began to dominate our understanding 3 mackinnon is quoting mary lyndon shanley and victoria schuck, “in search of political woman,” social science quarterly 55 (december 1974): 632–644. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 of method as reducible to principles of disembodied objectivity and neutrality. because knowledge in the context of scientific paradigms operates as falsifiable truth-claims, representational epistemologies and their accompanying view of language (as an impartial, representational system bound by rules of subjectpredicate grammar) went from underpinning knowledge claims about the natural world to validating knowledge claims about our everyday experience of the world. because this process is not made explicit as the result of socio-historical forces, it took on the character of a natural law-like developmental ‘fact.’ thus, those lived perspectives that fell outside of this newly normative objective framework were seen as less reliable, subjective phenomena, to the detriment of women’s experience of patriarchal culture: scientific epistemology defines itself in the stance of ‘objectivity,’ whose polar opposite is subjectivity. socially, men are considered objective, women subjective. objectivity as a stance toward the world erects two tests to which its method must conform: distance and aperspectivity. to perceive reality accurately, one must be distant from what one is looking at and view it from no place and at no time in particular, hence from all places and times at once. this stance defines the relevant world as that which can be objectively known, as that which can be known in this way. an epistemology decisively controls not only the form of knowing but also its content by defining how to proceed, the process of knowing, and by confining what is worth knowing to that which can be known in this way. (97) it is this sense of objectivity that mackinnon worries about, since the grounds on which sexual difference arises are mired in values and assumptions that produce negative asymmetries (which make male privilege self-confirming) as opposed to recognizing embodied specificities. because what gets carried over into legal codes and values is the presumed intrinsic worth of categories of objectivity and neutrality, they may also fail to interpret different needs and lives, and, most importantly, to hear different perspectives. so representational epistemologies would not be problematic in her analysis were it not for the “methodological hegemony over the means of knowing” they play in liberal democracies, which feature “the objective standard—that standpoint which, because it dominates in the world, does not appear to function as a standpoint at all” (237). juridical neutrality is one important example: neutrality, including juridical decision making that is dispassionate, impersonal, disinterested, and precedential, is considered desirable and descriptive. . . . formally, the state is male in that objectivity is its norm. 7 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 objectivity is liberal legalism’s conception of itself. it legitimates itself by reflecting its view of society, a society it helps make so by seeing it, and calling that view, and that relation, rationality. since rationality is measured by point-of-viewlessness, what counts as reason is that which corresponds to the way things are. (162) for mackinnon, there exists a discontinuity between the ‘official’ legitimating stories of fairness, justice, and equality underscoring public life in western liberal democracies and the host of tacitly operative norms, values, and male-centered cultural assumptions that work against the internal coherency of those stories (by supporting gendered asymmetries in civic life) at the same time that they propagate their dominance as objective public goods. distance and aperspectivity are not epistemic harms in themselves on this view; they are harms because they are conduits for gendered power asymmetries in culture. on her account, processes of naturalization shifted to procedures of methodological neutralization, so that over time “politics neutralized and naturalized becomes morality. discrimination in society becomes nondiscrimination in law.” as law becomes legitimate, social dominance becomes invisible (237). this constitutes a form of epistemic violence against women because one’s everyday experience collides with the public lexicons and resources available to describe it outside male norms; if she claims experiences of racism, sexism, and discrimination, she is likely to be met with objective counterfactuals of gendered equality, personified in statistics about the exceedingly high rates of women enrolled in law schools or colleges, perhaps even a rosie the riveter slogan that reminds her how far she’s objectively come from ‘true’ inequality (238). under mackinnean feminism, objectivity, aperspectivity, and juridical neutrality are thus epistemic harms. mackinnon’s epistemic project is closely linked with her political project, allowing her theory of the state to come into focus. for mackinnon, the state adopts the standpoint of power that establishes the relation between law and society. jurisprudence in the liberal state thereby reflects the values of a historically patriarchal society, both in what it says and how it does it (i.e., under the guise of gender neutrality and legal objectivity). this process-driven account of the state differs significantly from traditional political interpretations of the state as form, as neutral arbiter of rights or sovereign that can be overthrown, or to whom appeals for intervention are made. the disembodied reason of liberal theories of law, she argues, cover-over the ways the state is a value-laden mechanism for systematizing gendered social dominance. she notes the state is not the actual source of male power but a powerful vehicle for its institutionalization through the very laws it sanctions. as a consequence, “the law becomes legitimate and social dominance becomes invisible” (237), leading to the pervasive character of gendered oppression. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 at best, liberal jurisprudence extends rights to women through feudal-like ‘protections’ that reinforce its own power and rely on a picture of negative freedom that leaves women’s positive interests out. thus, even when women seek rights previously denied to them, the state is always triangulating with male power, not advancing the positive laws and positive freedoms of women’s interests that may be independent of that power on account of the structural inability to accommodate those epistemic standpoints. oppression is structural, all the way down. under mackinnon’s account, the law is the dominant arm of the state because it produces a systematic mechanism for retooling facts of social power into enforceable scripts the liberal state can arbitrate, keeping the production, arbitration, and mitigation of male power an internal affair (thereby reproducing the very basis of it in culture). thus, “to the degree it succeeds ontologically, male dominance does not look epistemological: control over being produces control over consciousness, fusing material conditions with consciousness in a way that is inextricable short of social change” (238). mackinnon is caught in the difficult position of describing a way out of domination without fundamental social change at both the epistemic and institutional levels of culture. undeterred, she notes that “the first task of a movement for social change is to face one’s situation and name it” (241). while she does not provide a competing theory of the state (outside of the state as a function of power), she is not immobilized by it, noting sexual harassment plaintiff michelle vinson’s statement that “if i fight, some day some woman will win” (237). mackinnon’s theory of the state thus culminates in ways, through feminist theory, that “shifts in the episteme” can begin to take shape. “the first step is to claim women’s concrete reality. . . . the next step is to recognize that male forms of power over women are affirmatively embodied as individual rights in the law,” thereby expressing the need for theoretically informed legal interventions (244). moving in this direction, mackinnon’s feminist jurisprudence works to “comprehend how law works as a form of state power in a social context in which power is gendered. it would answer the questions: what is state power? where, socially, does it come from?” (159), but in order to effect change, not solely reflect on it. her work can thus be read as a contribution in liberatory feminist epistemology. just because mackinnon’s epistemological project is underemphasized, does not mean that it was completely ignored. sally haslanger (2013) and elizabeth hackett (1996), among others, have drawn out mackinnon’s feminist epistemological project as a constitutive feature of her political views and analysis of gender-based harms in liberal jurisprudence. their conclusion of its salience, however, differs from ours. for instance, whereas we find mackinnon’s critique of the “methodological hegemony over the means of knowing” (107) in liberal democratic societies paramount to the successes of her political project, hackett 9 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 thinks mackinnon’s overall feminist project is hindered “by complicating her discussion of gender with discussion of irrelevant epistemological issues” (1). haslanger, who endorses the basic aims of mackinnon's project, thinks it falls flat, noting that without a normative theory of justice to adjudicate between good and bad judgment in feminist consciousness raising, “we will be left with a feminist project that encourages liberation from existing oppressive structures, but cannot distinguish our replacing them with new oppressive structures or from replacing them with structures that are truly unjust” (10). we will not know when “different” is “better.” latin american liberation theorists have extensively addressed this stance as predicated on a theory of oppression that stems from predominantly white, anglosaxon metropolitan cultural centers of knowledge production, since it is insufficiently attentive to the ways existing oppressive structures necessitate theoretical interventions that acknowledge the centrality of oppositional consciousness against domination and subordination (which is not the same as a de facto uncritical deployment of oppositional consciousness): “feeling that the world is wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to put in its place. . . . we need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong. that is our starting point: rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. this is what we must cling to,” especially in the wake of unprecedented violence against women on the world stage (holloway 2002, 2). mackinnon, like us, does not need a utopia to strive for something better than the world at hand. mackinnon’s theory of liberation develops differently because her theory of oppression requires theorizing from below—from the perspective of those subordinated and dominated by, for example, patriarchal norms and the power inequalities they beget. we three hold this stance in common. on this account, we may start our analyses from the top down by looking at the ways patriarchal norms and values have worked their way into codified legal norms and statutes, operating and replicating male power on stealth mode. but the perspective remains with those harmed by the exclusionary logics they deploy, often in the name of inclusion (i.e., through egalitarian discourses). reframing her critique of liberal jurisprudence in terms of a larger epistemological project also helps us get a better grip on mackinnon’s choice of feminist consciousness raising as the methodological fulcrum of her liberatory program in toward a feminist theory of the state. according to mackinnon, “the key to feminist theory consists in its way of knowing” (84), ways of seeing that can call out or name how “the state is male jurisprudentially, meaning that it adopts the standpoint of male power on the relation between law and society” (163). rather than a primary perspective for describing the full complexity of women’s phenomenological experiences, consciousness raising serves to counter to the 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 universalizing tendencies of liberal rationality, since “feminist method as practiced in consciousness raising, taken as a theory of knowing about social being, pursues another epistemology” (98). given the feminist limitations of orthodox marxism outlined in the first part of the book, mackinnon needs the veil-lifting mechanism of ideology critique, but in such a way that does not reify representational epistemologies she critiques in the second part. under this framework, “mind and world, as a matter of social reality, are taken as interpenetrated. knowledge is neither a copy nor a miscopy of reality, neither representative nor misrepresentative as the scientific model would have it, but a response to living in it” (98). this is a powerful point for coalition building, as this insight is shared in much of black feminist thought and latina feminist thought. coalitions, however, are dangerous places, and often require the symbiosis of distancing and bridge-crossing to be mutually respectful of differences. ii. the politics of coalition in this section, we take a coalitional approach that positively highlights conceptual symmetries between the mackinnean feminist project in toward a feminist theory of the state and decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms by emphasizing the importance of the epistemic dimension of subordination, while respecting important asymmetries that threaten collaborative engagement. insofar as mackinnon’s feminist epistemology is able to see the ways legacies of domination, subordination, and oppression work their way into our value judgments through tacit cultural processes (that call for a feminist liberatory epistemology as part of any political project), mackinnean feminisms are conceptually closer to those of women of color than many anglophone strains. it is important to note that this is indeed a strong symmetry between our work and mackinnon’s project in her book. however, this symmetry exposes instabilities at the site of this juncture. the instability of our coalition can follow a failure to account for the globalizing tendency in universalizing categories of gender, the inadequacy of european frameworks of statehood and the law to describe the oppressive effects of colonialism on noneuropean women, and the reality that oppression is a multistable phenomenon.4 to be clear, this is not an “i gotcha” commentary. rather, we are here to contribute towards the difficult work of coalition-building—to building a coalition across time; a coalition across differences that make a difference all for the important project of producing a feminist theory of the state that is attentive to the colonial project of cultural subjugation through state-building. 4 cf. collins 2000, narayan 1997, moraga and anzaldúa 1981, mohanty 2003, davis 1983. 11 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 in “coalition politics: turning the century,” bernice johnson reagon (2000) gives a moving account of coalition work as a distinctly unstable and potentially dangerous phenomenon. it places individuals and communities in the precarious position of forming coalitions not only out of shared interest for positive projects of social justice, but often out of sheer life-saving needs. in coalitions, “people come together for a common interest but, in many cases, do not ultimately share a great number of assumptions that render the collaborations unstable” (343), though not necessarily unproductive. what is key is an awareness that coalition—in this case theoretical coalescing with shared feminist liberatory goals—is not a homogenous hermeneutic space that provides an equal sense of home for all involved. “it is very important not to confuse them—home and coalition,” reagon cautions, particularly since “the women’s movement has perpetuated a myth that there is some common experience that comes just cause you’re women” (343). the most salient feature of a lived experience of harm or subordination can be race, for example, or even race coalescing in temporally indistinct ways with the experience of gendered subordination. but even that doesn’t mean that collaborating on the basis of race is not without its challenges. this is something women of color know well. we call ourselves “women of color”—enough said. what is wonderful about mackinnon’s feminism is her unrelenting advocacy of women’s situated subordination across cultural institutions and structures—her perceptually gifted ability to see sexual subordination in everything. this is not the same thing as reducing everything to sex in the same way modern-day marxists can see the inner workings of capitalism coursing through every social practice—from scientific reasoning, to sexuality, to the race-based discrimination in ferguson, mo, filling the coffers of municipal city authorities by way of for-profit policing. mackinnon would perhaps highlight—among other things—how civil rights violations systematically targeted women when non-defendant children were barred from accompanying their defendant mothers into courtrooms, often resulting in child neglect charges when they were left outside the courtroom. so both account for all the ways a system or structure can exclude, partly by inclusion—by assimilating possible ways of being-in-the-world to a few limited possibilities, to be interpreted though discreet sets of (for mackinnon, malecentered) epistemic norms. it is in this spirit that she contends, “what female epistemology can confront male ontology? what point of view can question the code of civil society? the answer is simple, concrete, specific, and real: women’s social inequality with men on the basis of sex, hence the point of view of women’s subordination to men” (1989, 241). but the answer is not so simple if we’re building coalitions, because some people will have to work harder to be heard and have their needs met in ways that might reify inequality. this is especially the case if the coalitions are intercultural 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 and do not share in the same background assumptions for interpreting selfhood, identity, or gender—or where the resources of expression for giving voice to the experience of subordination are themselves the product of european colonialism and require prior decolonization. on this account, dismantling asymmetries of power and privilege that resulted from these impositions might require one to do so using the language of one’s oppressions (as the resources of expression by which one comes to terms with these distinctions have themselves been colonized). thus, if feminist consciousness raising is “the technique [that] explores the social world each woman inhabits through her speaking of it, through comparison with other women’s experiences,” and which serves “to unpack the concrete moment-tomoment meaning of being a woman in a society that men dominate” (86), the nature of the medium through which the collaboration takes places needs to be reformulated to accommodate legacies of imperial domination. iris marion young famously questioned the neutrality of communicative practices to do justice to the embodied specificity of women’s lived experiences; mackinnon, too, excels at pointing out this dimension in in the language of juridical neutrality, but less so in cross-cultural dialogue, where the neutrality of language as a post-conquest discursive practice (including the western understanding of metaphor and nonliteral language) is taken as a methodological given. this is a place of instability. but it does not dissolve the possibility of coalition. it enhances our understanding of the differences that make a difference when proposing schedules for liberation. here is where this coalition becomes a place where no one is at home. you see, mackinnon’s commitment to a perspective following from those harmed by exclusionary logic (a definite place of coalition), in our estimation, also demonstrates that oppression and its many manifestations are exceedingly complicated (a definite site of instability). what critiques of toward a feminist theory of the state demonstrate is the reality that oppression is multistable, or, as frantz fanon might say, has a “polydimensional character.” how a multistable phenomenon, like oppression, is interpreted in space will depend on a variety of factors, not the least of which will be one’s ‘perspectival perception’ and goals, including, but not limited to, cultural inheritances, cognitive commitments, and embodied location. the way oppression is perceived will also depend on its social effect and one’s relations to it (dotson 2016, 51). so no matter how inclusive mackinnon wants to be, and we believe she does have this desire, it is simply impossible to be so completely. there is only so much that can be seen from there or here or over there. this means that the very thing that makes this particular coalition possible, a robust appreciation of the epistemic nature of the oppressive “state of things,” is the very thing that makes this coalition unstable. but (and this is the point of our commentary) it is the very thing that makes coalition necessary. oppression is multistable and provokes ways of knowing it that are neither reducible to each other 13 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 nor very far apart. languages articulate lives in distinctly non-neutral ways that can distort our realities so that we no longer recognize ourselves in the telling of our own stories. addressing either (or both) of these realities requires coalition. but coalitions, especially theoretical coalitions like this one, are not home spaces. they are unstable. dangerous. but they are also necessary. works cited allen, judith. 1990. “does feminism need a theory of the state?” in playing the state: australian feminist interventions, edited by sophie watson, 21–27. sydney: allen and unwin. brown, wendy. 1995. states of injury. princeton, nj: princeton university press. collins, patricia hill. 2000. black feminist thought. new york: routledge. cornell, drucilla. 1991. “review: sexual difference, the feminine, and equivalency: a critique of mackinnon's toward a feminist theory of the state.” yale law journal 100 (7): 2247–2275. davis, angela. 1983. women, race and class. new york: vintage. dotson, kristie. 2016. “making sense: the multistability of oppression and the importance of intersectionality.” in why race and gender still matter: an intersectional approach, edited by maeve m. o’donovan, namita goswami, and lisa yount, 43–58. new york: routledge. hackett, elizabeth. 1996. “catharine mackinnon’s feminist epistemology.” phd dissertation, university of pennsylvania. haney, lynne. 2000. “feminist state theory: applications to jurisprudence, criminology, and the welfare state.” annual review of sociology 26: 641– 666. haslanger, sally. 2013. “liberatory knowledge and just social practices.” apa newsletter on philosophy and law 12 (4): 6–10. holloway, john. 2002. change the world without taking power. london: pluto press. mackinnon, catharine a. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mohanty, chandra talpade. 2003. feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. moraga, cherrie, and gloria anzaldúa. 1981. this bridge called my back. london: persephone press. narayan, uman. 1997. dislocating cultures. new york: routledge. “open letters to catharine mackinnon.” 1991. yale journal of law & feminism 4 (1): 177–190. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.4 reagon, bernice johnson. 2000. “coalition politics: turning the century.” in home girls: a black feminist anthology, edited by barbara smith, 343–356. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. shanley, mary lyndon, and uma narayan, eds. 1997. reconstructing political theory: feminist perspectives. university park: pennsylvania state university press. elena ruíz is an assistant professor of philosophy at michigan state university. she is also core faculty in global studies and the research consortium on gender-based violence at msu. she received her phd in philosophy and ma in social and political theory from the university of south florida. prior to joining msu, dr. ruíz was a research fellow at institut de hautes études internationales et du développement in geneva, switzerland. her primary areas of research are in social & political philosophy, feminisms of the global south and decolonial theory. kristie dotson is an associate professor of philosophy at michigan state university. she received her ma and phd in philosophy from the university of memphis, her ma in literature from the university of illinois at chicago, and a ba in african american studies and english literature from coe college. professor dotson researches in epistemology, feminist philosophy (particularly black feminism and feminist epistemology), and critical philosophy of race. 15 ruíz and dotson: on the politics of coalition published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 on the politics of coalition elena ruíz kristie dotson recommended citation on the politics of coalition acknowledging our referees from september 2014 through june 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 7 2016 acknowledging our referees from september 2014 through june 2016 student assistants feministphilosophyquarterly@gmail.com editors fpq fpqeditor@gmail.com recommended citation assistants, student and editors fpq. 2016. "acknowledging our referees from september 2014 through june 2016."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 7. mailto:feministphilosophyquarterly@gmail.com the editors express sincere gratitude to all those who have refereed for feminist philosophy quarterly between september 2014 and june 2016. ben almassi scott anderson alison bailey bat-ami bar on celia bardwell-jones asha bhandary claudia bianchi marilea bramer evelyn brister steven burns sylvia burrow joan callahan dennis cooley sharon crasnow shannon dea oisin deery esa diaz-leon tom digby kristie dotson matt drabek lauren freeman ann garry cynthia gayman anca gheaus heidi grasswick daniel groll lisa guenther elizabeth hackett jennifer hansen kelby harrison susan hawthorne carol hay cressida heyes catherine hundleby grayson hunt katrina hutchison carrie jenkins heather keith joshua knobe christine koggel rebecca kukla hallie liberto maureen linker helen longino colin macleod patricia marino lori marso mary kate mcgowan jose medina letitia meynell amy mullin julinna oxley shelley park gaile pohlhaus linda radzik kristin rodier phyllis rooney jennifer saul laurie j. shrage daniel silvermint lissa skitolsky james sterba shari stone-mediatore shannon sullivan erin tarver chloë taylor lisa tessman laurence thomas lynne tirrell joan tronto maura tumulty georgia warnke lori watson rivka weinberg shay welch shannon winnubst catherine womack george yancy 1 assistants and fpq: acknowledging referees published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 acknowledging our referees from september 2014 through june 2016 student assistants editors fpq recommended citation acknowledging our referees from september 2014 through june 2016 fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 8 2016 fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy alexis shotwell carleton university, alexisshotwell@cunet.carleton.ca recommended citation shotwell, alexis. 2016. "fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 8. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8. fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy alexis shotwell in the late 1980s and early 1990s, what drugs there were to treat the opportunistic infections that killed people living with aids were frequently not legal or were so expensive that they were in effect unobtainable, particularly for people living in poverty. in the canadian context, being imprisoned, being racialized, being disabled, having unstable immigration status, having reduced family support, and living with hiv or aids were in the past (and are in the present) often entangled experiences. in this paper, i examine how direct-action activists addressed these cofactors in people’s premature deaths. their work changed the material conditions of people’s lives in large part through changing the epistemic conditions that shaped how aids was known about and what it was. i use examples from the toronto-based group aids action now!’s campaigns, which produced the canada’s emergency drug release program and then ontario’s trillium drug program, a program that even today provides access to medical treatments not otherwise available. i take this work as a grounded example of activism resulting in multilayered antioppression effects—but, interestingly, work that was not coherently grounded in an interlocking-oppressions or intersectional analysis. the forms of medical activism i am interested in here powerfully express a non-reductionist and complex intersectional science and technology practice, bridging lay and professional medical contexts even when they are not politically unified and “pure” in their analysis. i draw on lorraine code’s generative theory of the importance of “ecological thinking” as one way to practice what she calls “epistemic responsibility” to work in helping us think about the varied and complex early responses of activists in canada to aids. activists made wide-ranging, theoretically sophisticated, and socially significant interventions in how aids manifested in canada. i am particularly interested in how their interventions manifested a kind of political work welcoming to unpredictable and emergent medical and social situations. i offer three preliminary insights from an ongoing research project investigating the history of aids activism in the canadian context. i argue for: (1) the usefulness of code’s conception of the social imaginary for understanding how calcified social relations shape and limit the conditions for responsible knowing; (2) the importance of recognizing the communal and social nature of knowledge as a key piece of epistemic responsibility, which i articulate in terms of collective epistemic privilege; and (3) the possibility for practices of epistemic responsibility to create virtuous epistemic effects beyond what is known 1 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 (about) or intended by particular agents. social-political-epistemic interventions in the social imaginary aids in canada moved roughly two years behind its development as a crisis in the us. this meant that activists in the canadian context were keenly aware of the medical and social practices being used across the border to manage the illness and, variously, the panic about it and the social worlds of the stigmatized people (the so-called “4-h” categories of homosexuals, haitians, intravenous heroin users, and hemophiliacs) targeted as vectors of infection. they drew on this awareness in critiquing, for example, the canadian government’s refusal to test drug protocols (such as the use of aerosolized pentamidine to prevent pneumocystis pneumonia [pcp]) that were already in use in the us. activism to make specific medical treatments available in canada meshed with sometimes quite audacious campaigns within the queer community to promote and eroticize safer sex practices. the work of early direct-action groups shifted the material and sensual contexts of people’s lives, and in many respects fundamentally shaped aids policy decisions at provincial and federal levels. attending to how aids arose, manifested, and was managed in canada offers a valuable case study of how the state has dealt with a socially charged epidemic. because all epidemics have social and political aspects, understanding how socialmovement actors engaged with and shaped the path of the aids epidemic in particular will offer lessons worth learning. a surprising number of these lessons concern the question of what it is, and was, to know the virus. steven epstein’s foundational text impure science: aids, activism, and the politics of knowledge illuminated how, as he wrote, we “understand the configuration of interests, beliefs, and practices that determine how we come to believe what we think we know about the epidemic” (epstein 1998, 4). there is a generative ongoing discussion grounded in science and technology studies about this question of how we know medical and scientific objects of concern, which provides substantial traction for understanding how lay people shaped the scientific and medical understandings and embodied practices of aids. however, to truly understand the epistemic and ethical role lay people— activists as well as friends and family members of people living with aids—had in shaping the ontologies of the virus itself, it is productive to focus more directly on the formation of “responsible knowing” as a form of life-giving epistemic-ethical practice. as code writes, “it is clearly of paramount importance for community standards of responsible cognitive practice to prevail if members of epistemic communities are to be able to know well and to construct environments where they can live in enabling rather than oppressive circumstances” (code 1991, 270). for people living with hiv and aids, life was quite literally at stake in the knowing 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 practices surrounding the disease. particularly in the first decade of aids, canadian state policies focused predominantly on providing palliative care for people who were dying and preventing the spread of the disease. as one aids activist put it at a film showing about act up new york: “there were a lot of people who would hold your hand while you were dying, but no one who was interested in keeping you alive!” to shift this situation required creative political action. more importantly, however, it required a shift in epistemic practice, such that new forms of scientific practice, and thus new ontologies, could arise. the social imaginary of aids as a death sentence, for which it was only possible to craft palliative responses, precluded policy, medical, and social practices premised on the possibility of living, and living well, with hiv and aids. as code argues, the social imaginary in question matters profoundly: a social imaginary is social in the broadest sense; it is not merely about principles of conduct, although it is about those too; but it is about how such principles claim and maintain salience; about the scope and limits of human knowledge and the place of knowledge in the world; about the structural ordering of institutions of knowledge production; about intellectual and moral character ideals, subjectivity, and agency; about the kinds of habitat and living conditions that are within reach and/or worth striving for; about social-political-economic organization and just distributions of goods, privileges, power, and authority. (code 2006, 30–31) changing the social imaginary in which hiv meant aids and aids meant death was necessary to produce the policy, institutional, practical, and medical conditions that would make it possible to live. the conditions for life with hiv and aids were both biochemical (was there medicine that could treat the syndrome) and social (was there a place to live, food, people who would touch you). making these changes required in turn changing who was understood as a knowing subject, and reframing what would count as “good knowledge.” as i'll argue in the next section, an individual knowing subject manifesting knowledge tested by the scientific standards of the day was not adequate to the epistemic and political context of aids. collective epistemic privilege in the case of aids activism’s work to transform the social imaginary, as in other situations of movement-produced theory and praxis, it is worth asking how social transformation involves knowledge. in this section i affirm one piece of what lorraine code articulates as epistemic responsibility. i argue that, indeed, epistemic responsibility is an important norm, vitally one that incorporates a non-individualist 3 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 approach to knowing. code argues that it is “crucial that individuals be recognized as social beings, as members of communities with all the obligations membership entails, as much in intellectual as in moral activity. for such an epistemology . . . epistemic responsibility is a central virtue from which other virtues radiate” (code 1987, 44). code compellingly articulates an account of the necessary sociality underlying any knowledge practice, framing epistemic responsibility as constellating moral and intellectual virtues, and laying out an articulation of the broader context in which intellectual virtues associated with epistemic responsibility might be understood and practiced. here i am focusing more narrowly on the implications of code’s discussion of epistemic responsibility as a communal activity. my title characterizes activist work here as fierce love, echoing what some of my interviewees communicated about their orientation toward this work: unreasonably demanding, committed to possibilities beyond what is outlined by conventional reason, invested and situated. we need our love to be fierce in order to change the world. this is an epistemic and ontological orientation that takes a stand and has a stake, opening the possibilities for an orientation that code calls epistemic responsibility. rather than performing what donna haraway calls the “god trick” of imagining that we can stand outside the relations of knowing in our knowledge practices, we understand ourselves as within and constituted by the social relations we attempt to know. we say: i know this because i care about this, i am invested in changing the world that i know in virtue of my placement in it. george smith calls such changes in understanding “making the ontological shift,” by which he means that our theory and practice does best when it starts from the understanding that we are placed within the world we are trying to understand; our understanding is an intimate part of transforming that world. situated knowledges are, on this view, the only form of knowledge worthy of the title. and attending to how we knowers are differentially situated calls us to decide whose knowledge is best for the particular purposes we aim to enact. attending to knowledge with this orientation is sometimes framed as respecting epistemic privilege; the people directly experiencing something are the ones whose knowledge claims we should take seriously. in political situations, this usually means attempting to hold responsibility toward those experiencing the negative effects of decisions about how the world should be. in responding to social relations of oppression and privilege, recognizing epistemic privilege then means to centre the lives and experiences of people experiencing vectors of vulnerability and harm. a bad but common effect of evoking an allegiance to epistemic privilege arising from an understanding of situated knowledge is that it individualizes the knowledge in question, with the practical result of an epistemic version of the “oppression olympics”—the idea that in order to respond to wrongs and harms we 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 ought to find the most oppressed person in the room and ask them what we should do. thinking about situated knowledge and epistemic privilege from an individualized point of view will almost certainly produce knowledge that is better than making decisions based on a supposedly neutral or general knower, since no such knower in fact exists. but understanding epistemic privilege as held by individuals also requires more than any one person should have to bear, with the familiar burdens of one person being asked to represent an entire group, or being forced to split-separate their identifications according to one particular political project. in the case of the aids activists i’ve been speaking with, such an approach resulted in challenging dynamics around who should have standing to make decisions. should the locus of knowing be hiv-positive people? queers? intravenous drug users? people living in poverty? people in prison? people in haitian communities affected by the stigma of being identified as propagating the epidemic? no one that i’ve spoken to described trying to find a single person who would be able to speak from all these different locations—that would be ridiculous—but the question of whose identity and understandings should guide a group’s political work was clearly live. it’s not always easy to determine who is “most affected” by oppression. this is to say that the category of “who is most affected” is an unsettled category, shifting with context and urgency, depending on who is experiencing the group vulnerability to premature death. and as an unsettled category, political actors will have to continually and in unsatisfactory ways negotiate the relevant “we” they, or we, deploy in political work. in conversation once, dean spade called this form of negotiation an attention to “collective epistemic privilege.” collective epistemic privilege produces effects that resist multiple co-constituting forms of oppression; it has effects that track the co-constitution of multiple social relations of oppression and benefit. i understand collective epistemic privilege to begin from the central insight encoded in the idea of epistemic privilege simpliciter; the people most affected should, indeed, have standing to determine an organization’s or campaign’s direction. but the collectivity of this approach requires another aspect of love—the doggedness and care to work through complexity and impurity in our political work, to not settle or yearn for a clearly delimited “cut” around a relevant identity category, and to attend to the flourishing of a relevant group as well as individuals within it. activists succeeded in reconfiguring the political terrain of who needed to be understood as “good knowers” in relation to hiv and aids, employing what code theorizes as non-individualist advocacy work intertwined with non-individualist knowing practices. in other words, they mobilized collective epistemic privilege and called medical and political decision-makers to account from that stance. this is a 5 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 common feature of advocacy and activist work. as code writes, we ought to think about advocacy as a practice of establishing deliberative communities where inquiry becomes subject to public scrutiny devoted to evaluating agendas according to larger criteria of social-politically responsible epistemic practice. . . . advocacy is thus both an epistemic and an ethico-political issue. without advocacy, few of ‘us’ could claim sufficient credibility to challenge the combined force of the scientific paradigms and hegemonic social imaginaries sustaining the received politics of knowledge. (code 2006, 194) in the case of canadian aids activism, advocacy forced the canadian state to implement a previously mothballed emergency drug release program, create funding structures for drug access, include the voices and views of people living with hiv and aids on ethics review boards around these issues, and much more. understanding the work these activists accomplished benefits from code’s analysis of epistemic responsibility; simultaneously, their work provides a productive illustration and affirmation of the importance of code’s work on the politics of epistemic location, on how, and how well, we know. propagating ecologically attuned epistemic-scientific processes let’s start by considering a particular transformation of knowledge, and then the formation of that knowledge into transformed institutions: the emergency drug release program, or edrp. george smith, mentioned above, was an important but too often forgotten scholar-activist, centrally responsible for much of the early activist response to hiv and aids in the canadian context. a sociologist attuned to the politics and practices of knowledge production, he contributed enormously to the formation of the toronto activist group aids action now! (including the imperative that every political group should have a name that you could also shout as a demand at a protest). smith investigated what was wrong with the management of the aids epidemic in ontario—what the collective responsibility and opportunities for critical intervention, in code’s sense, were. he says that “the study’s most important finding about the management of the aids epidemic, from the standpoint of people living with aids or hiv infection, is the lack of an infrastructure to manage the delivery of new, experimental treatments. these findings have directed the work of aids action now! in designing and in putting in place just such an infrastructure” (smith 46). george smith is here using the sense of “having a standpoint” that dorothy smith has articulated as an important part of feminist methodology: beginning from the experience of those most affected by the social relations under investigation. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 glen brown, a long-term toronto activist, explained aids action now!’s discovery of the edrp: it was a hidden mechanism that they could’ve been using for years and just hadn’t bothered despite all the pressure, and then after enough pressure they finally figured out they actually had this mechanism to allow people access to drugs that were not yet fully licensed if there was a ‘catastrophic’ illness. . . . in subsequent years, and probably still today the name of the program has changed, but it is still a program that is accessed. and now not just by people living with hiv and aids, but people with other catastrophic illnesses, this little mechanism that was previously hidden. . . . it’s saved many lives. (brown 2014, 15) making the edrp an activist target, then, required investigating the hidden policy infrastructure shaping medical practice. aan!’s work changed enactment of policy, starting with knowing that the policy existed and understanding what its implications were, and then transforming the biochemical and social possibilities for legal drug access for people living with new or catastrophic illnesses. this was partially a matter of relentless confrontation. as tim mccaskell remembers: there was already an institution in place whose job it was to do just what we wanted it to do, but they wouldn’t do it, for no apparent reason. because it was a federal department and there was an election . . . that fall, every time mulroney came to town we were there with the aids action now! banner. we managed to get some really good media coverage of [toronto doctor] michael hulton phoning the edrp and asking for a drug for a patient, and the guy from the edrp on the other end of the line, swearing at him and telling him to leave him alone. “i told you that before, we won’t do it.” finally, he just said, “fuck off,” or whatever. it was very bad press for the edrp and for the mulroney government. so, as soon as they got re-elected, the first thing that the new minister of health did was to announce that the edrp would be open for a number of experimental aids drugs, and then it got expanded. (mccaskell 2014, 14) as mccaskell describes, part of the work aan! took up involved embarrassing the government in power, raising the political stakes of inaction just before election time. at the same time, they were transforming the social imaginary. this may be hard to remember, because what hiv and aids means for people with access to drugs in the era of highly active retrovirals has already transformed. at the time, though, even to show that there were drugs that would help keep people alive 7 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 longer, and that those drugs were being withheld because of an extant but unused policy for accessing them, constituted a shift in the social imaginary both of the disease and of the supposedly beneficent canadian health system. in her discussion of apotex, a pharmaceutical company that brought a suit against whistle-blowing doctor olivieri for revealing that a drug lauded for helping with a condition also had bad health effects, code discusses the collective responsibility for advocacy-based transformation of scientific practice. she writes: apotex is not solely answerable for the olivieri affair: it is a symptom, not the disease. the social practices and institutions that make its funding style possible demand ongoing social-political intervention, committed to democratic, ecologically attuned epistemic-scientific process whose purposes include honouring the responsibilities capable of contributing to viable, habitable community. (code 2006, 275) the campaign around the edrp shows how activists made social-political interventions in response to particular social practices and institutions using what code beautifully frames as an ecologically attuned epistemic-scientific process. practicing collective forms of knowing in advocacy work attuned to social and medical realities manifests transformational epistemic responsibility. as code writes, “ecological thinking works with a conception of materially constituted and situated subjectivity for which place, embodied locatedness, and discursive interdependence are conditions for the very possibility of knowledge and action. it ushers in a renewed conception of responsible deliberative-negotiative citizenship, as responsible in its knowing as in its doing” (code 206, 20). in the edrp work, activists cleared space for a more democratic, ecologically attuned epistemicscientific process. the edrp expansion came out of hard, confrontational work by activists; it was not something politicians figured out and offered out of the goodness of their hearts. because most politicians at the time didn’t know anything about the life conditions and needs of people living with hiv and aids; lacking that knowledge, they failed to think hard and imaginatively about what could be done. as with so many things, that hard, imaginative work had to be done by people directly affected by multiple vectors of vulnerability, strength, and resistance. of course, winning this fight did not solve everything; once drugs could be released through the program there were still substantial barriers between people living with hiv and aids and meaningful social and medical support—after aan! won edrp, they turned to fight for drug affordability and access, which i'll say a bit about next. this campaign to permit quicker release of experimental or off-label use of existing drugs also shows us, then, the importance of incremental wins that can provide the foundation for 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 future, further, wins. i discuss this further in the following section. emergent material effects of practicing epistemic responsibility doing and knowing are intertwined. putting the emergency drug release program to work on aids as a catastrophic illness shifted the terrain of possibilities, opening the possibility for understanding hiv and aids as something other than a death sentence. this work transformed the social imaginary, and that transformation had material effects—drugs were available that could keep people alive when particular opportunistic infections struck. but then there arose the situation in which there were some drugs available, thanks to winning the emergency drug release program, but they were too expensive to access. as brent southin says: i remember a lot of stuff later in the ‘90s around trillium of course, but, because that was one of my big issues from day one. they kept saying, “let’s get all these drugs,” and i kept saying, “but they cost tens of thousands of dollars,” so . . . . (southin 2014, 9) because the drug costs were so high and many of the drugs were experimental or not on the coverage lists, even if people had jobs that carried drug benefits, they could not afford them. so people living with hiv and aids were often forced to quit jobs if they had them, spend any savings they had (and of course a lot of people had neither jobs nor savings) and go on social assistance, because then they could have some access to coverage for medical needs. to address this situation, aan! shifted its focus from the national campaign that won edrp access, governed at the federal level, to a provincial campaign, because coverage for health care is funded and managed at the provincial level. part of the organizing work in ontario involved interventions with politicians just before a conservative government came into power. in our interview with him, southin told us a story about going to a provincial political convention of the more leftleaning party then in power. this kind of more conventional political participation was not part of the regular work aids action now! did—most people in the organization weren’t members of political parties. southin, however, was a member of the ndp in addition to being a member of aan!, so he had a pass to the provincial convention in the lead-up to the elections. the plan had been to coordinate a protest with aids activists in hamilton, a small city outside of toronto—but no one from the local area showed up. southin narrated: so, there’s three of us—greg, me, and one other. so, i said, “well, let’s go in,” and i had a pass. but if they stopped you at the door because you don’t 9 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 have a pass, you were stopped! so, in the end, i got in. they stopped greg. many people had to stop greg. he was pretty angry. [laughter] because he didn’t have a pass, and it was like, “okay, he’s really friendly.” (southin 2014, 9) in the end, though, southin went in to the convention alone. southin is a fairly softspoken and quiet person, who nevertheless single-handedly disrupted the ontario premier’s speech, refusing to allow the convention to proceed until the question of funding for expensive drugs was addressed. in talking with our research project, he phrased this intervention with characteristic understatement: so, i interrupt bob rae’s speech and then he met with us— greg and myself and with ruth greer, who was the health minister at the time. and they again said, “oh no, we can only do it later maybe.” and then we said, “well, on world aids day we’re going to burn you in effigy if you don’t do it by then.” this was like, in november. the day before world aids day, they announced trillium, the drug plan. people who worked in his office said that was why. they had no intention of doing it. (southin 2014, 9) the threat to burn the ontario premier in effigy had some weight, because aan! had shortly before burned an effigy of the minister of health to protest his handling of the aids crisis. glen brown was a co-chair of aids action now! during the negotiations for the trillium drug plan, which even today provides access to drugs for people who cannot afford them. he said: if there wasn’t this plan, there was a lot of people who had high drug costs, so they had to go on welfare. it was the only way, which didn’t really make any sense for anybody. at one point, they put forward a plan that they could afford this thing if they started charging seniors, if they started putting seniors on . . . deductible plans. and so we got a call from the ontario federation of labour saying, “what the fuck are you doing?” and we said, “no, we’re not supporting that. we will not agree to a plan that starts taxing seniors for this”. and so they backed up on that. and then they began talking about what a deductible strategy would look like. at that point, our demand was fairly clear that we didn’t want anything that was just an hiv plan, that it had to be for anybody who had a catastrophic illness. as it turns out, the plan was even a little better than that because it’s not based on any illness category at all. (brown 2014, 22) 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 he situated winning the drug access program as it manifested in the provincial election: of the platform that we put together and then they adopted, that was the last one that we were able to achieve. and in fact we achieved [it] in the very dying days of the rae government. bob rae now speaks so proudly of that accomplishment, but he would not have done it if we had not beaten the crap out of him for months and months and months and months and months. in talking to people about the fight for funding for drug access, i have been very moved by this moment in which aan! refused the plan to make catastrophic drug funding available only to people living with hiv or aids. the activists doing this work were under tremendous pressure, with a number of central people in the organizing group dying simply because they could not afford drugs that would very likely have kept them alive. in this context, holding out for a plan that was not aids-specific is remarkable, creating a really important option for people to access the medicine they need without going on social assistance or checking into the hospital. this had immediate and ongoing effects for people at every stratum in ontario, but it had a disproportionately big effect for racialized, disabled, and working poor people. i have been thinking about this campaign—and much of the aids activist history i am learning about in doing this project—in terms of ruth gilmore’s definition of racism: she defines it as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies” (gilmore, 28). i reflect on gilmore’s argument about this approach to the social determinants of life and death in relation to what in feminist academic spaces we usually think about as intersectional analysis. i more often use the language of “interlocking oppressions analysis,” or “intermeshing analysis,” drawing more explicitly on the ways black and women of colour feminists talked about how social relations mutually create oppression and benefit in the years before we had a kimberlé crenshaw article to cite in academic spaces. terminology aside, this particular campaign for what became the trillium drug program has intersectional effects that gilmore’s work helps us understand. this campaign’s effects include quite profound benefit for people experiencing multiple vectors of vulnerability—we can celebrate it from the point of view of an interlocking oppressions analysis. but, although i am still early in the process of tracing how aids activism happened in this country, it is very clear to me that not everyone in aan! shared such an analysis. there were profound conflicts about class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and immigration status, and disability 11 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 within the political milieu of the aan!, and the people central to making trillium drug funding happen were not always on what i would identify as the right side of debates about these issues. their intentions didn’t express an intersectional analysis. and yet because they correctly identified a social relation calcified in a textually mediated ruling relation, to take up some of george smith’s and dorothy smith’s language for this approach, they were able to make a political change with profoundly anti-oppressive effects. to understand this fact is to reject the idea that each individual working on a given political project needs to have political righteousness, or to even be totally correct in our analysis (individually or as a group) in order to make changes that are actually in line with a politics expressing an understanding of how oppressions and benefits interlock and co-produce an unjust world. instead, when we resist the group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death of some people (in this case, people living with aids) and resist closing down the space of identification, we might produce effects beyond what we know. that is, because these social relations cannot exist in isolation, when we change the practice of one site of living, we also change the others. the fact that we can do political work with profound effects on the co-produced social relations of oppression and harm such as racialization, class, ability, and sexuality affirms again the usefulness of conceiving of epistemic responsibility in relation to collective epistemic privilege; a multiply constituted epistemic centre of gravity for our political decision making might produce more adequate political work. so, what produces these kinds of effects? at least in the interviews i’ve done so far, though very few people say this explicitly, it seems to be that there was sometimes substantial conflict around what was only sometimes talked about as interlocking oppressions analysis—where resources were allocated, how priorities were set, and how aan! interfaced with other groups. some of this had to do with who would hold primary decision making power; in aan! that conversation centred around the importance of having hiv-positive people in the roles of chair or co-chair of the steering committee, which made the core political decisions for aan! and this was sometimes contentious and difficult. in many of the aids activitst groups we’ve been talking with, this question of who would lead the group was centred on serostatus; positive people were understood in many aids activist groups as holding epistemic privilege. renee du plessis articulated this well in framing how she got involved in aan!: and so that is one of the reasons i got into aids action now!—but why do you stay, you know, or make any sort of commitment? really it had to do with, for me, these were the people who were the most affected in a very immediate way, from what i was reading and seeing. and they had organized 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 themselves and they were articulating the possible solutions. and so i thought, “that’s great, because i don’t want to be articulating and i don’t want to be creating.” i like the idea of the people most affected taking leadership and defining what my support would be. and that’s how it’s always been, whether it’s in first nations work or women’s work, i have always seen it as being, “who’s the most affected by the particular problem that the group is representing?” (du plessis 2014, 2) however, as du plessis told us, the challenges were that the group that was the most affected was not exclusively well educated, with a multitude of resources. gay men also included poor men and first nations men and immigrant men, you know. and then it started also getting to be where i became more and more aware of criticism that lesbians were holding, and that women in general were holding, both to the organization and what they were doing and their presumptions on who was actually the most affected. (2014, 5) she described hearing more and more criticism of the organizing practice of aan!, and reflecting on them. and so just hearing various people who were in one way or another respected and yet they were really challenged by this group that they felt was putting a stranglehold onto what the direction should be and how we presented things. by the time i became aware of their criticisms, i was also feeling, “why are we so limited in focus. i thought the group was for all people who were struggling with aids, not just this narrow group.” . . . i remember a conversation with one of the leaders, who just point blank said, “well, i’m the one who’s dying, not you.” i was made to feel, because my involvement was not . . . because i wasn’t dying or my health wasn’t affected directly that i didn’t have any legitimacy. it was troubling for me, because those people not at the table were also dying. and so i was just very troubled and feeling very conflicted for a while because i was giving my energy to something that i felt wrongly excluded legitimate claims. (du plessis 2014, 8) du plessis was not alone in being troubled about the scope of what claims were taken up; in toronto, it is clear that there was substantial debate and deliberation about epistemic standing for setting political priorities. there were various smaller groups and organizations, many of which spun off and continue to have a life of their own—combat (community organizations mutually battling aids together), 13 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 black cap (black coalition for aids prevention), pasan (prisoners with aids support action network), voices of positive women, and other organizations grounded in politically rooted identity formations. and there were other people who had organized with aan! who left the organization at some of the sites of friction coded as “identity conflicts.” and yet, out of this process, we have the example of trillium funding for drugs. partially for pragmatic reasons about coalitional political work with other “disease groups,” as they were called, but also perhaps for other reasons, aids activists refused the easier deal that would have secured funding for aids drugs only. the intersectional effects of their standing in solidarity with others in their present and in aspirational solidarity with people needing drug access in the future is significant. at the same time, as one person told us in the interview after asking us to turn off the camera, there were solidarity duties that people felt—when aan! was asked to approve a version of trillium drug funding just for people experiencing aids, one reason that they may not have done it is that they were working with other groups. when i asked glen brown about which other groups could have been explicitly part of the conversation about drug access, he said: i think epilepsy would’ve been one of them. diabetes probably—the canadian diabetes association. there were other groups. so, once we actually got the commitment to develop this thing and there were more people that were on the table saying, “what does it look like?” then there were other illness groups, i hate to use that phrase, at the table. it wasn’t just us. but we were still the cranky ones. alexis shotwell: right. the cranky powerful ones. gary kinsman: the cranky ones get things done. glen brown: we had an anniversary gathering at, i guess, the twentieth year. and i phoned ruth greer, who was the minister of health when we were fighting for the drug plan. she was actually the person—i remember yelling at her in city hall or something. i said, i don’t know if you remember me, but i remember you.” [laughter] and she also said that the trillium drug plan was one of the things that she was most proud of, of anything that she had done in her life. so, okay. as: nice to facilitate. gb: yeah, you’re welcome! [laughter] (brown 2014, 25) this mix, this sometimes painful muddle, produced the conditions for increased (though contingent) possibility for living. i am interested in holding the complexity of how these things were produced in view as we try to tell complex histories about 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 the vital and vibrant work that movements of the past did to shape the lives we can have now. conclusion fighting for the emergency drug release program to allow drug access, or for the trillium drug funding program to make that access available to people regardless of how much money they had, came out of following the lead of people with hiv and aids, who were articulating what they needed to live and flourish. practicing epistemic responsibility for better practices of knowing and being will, then, involve also practicing an in-process attention to collective epistemic responsibility and what code productively theorizes as ecological thinking. sometimes this might be accidental; the people we’ve talked to about their attempts to multiply who was “at the table” and making decisions in aan! often seemed to feel that they had failed their comrades, or that they had been kicked out for their views; conversations about these things were painful for them. and yet, reflecting on these complexities has convinced me that it was partially through their work that a practical effect—of a policy that was more capacious and friendly to people in poverty, racialized people, unhoused people, imprisoned people—was won. staying with the trouble that inevitably comes out of such an approach might, as in the case of the trillium win, produce liberatory effects, vectors of freedom, for people experiencing multiple co-shaping vectors of oppression and vulnerability. this kind of approach might help us practice politics of responsibility from however and wherever we are situated toward worlds that don’t yet exist but that we can draw into being through our collective yearning and struggle. references brown, glen. 2014. interview by alexis shotwell and gary kinsman. aids activist history project interview 2014.006/2014.025, may 25 / november 11. https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp__glen_brown.pdf. code, lorraine. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover, nh: university press of new england for brown university press. ———. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. oxford; new york: oxford university press. du plessis, renee. 2014. interview by alexis shotwell and gary kinsman. aids activist history project interview 2014.024, october 31. https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp__renee_du_plessis.pdf. 15 shotwell: fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_glen_brown.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_glen_brown.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_renee_du_plessis.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_renee_du_plessis.pdf epstein, steven. 1998. impure science: aids, activism, and the politics of knowledge. vol. 7. university of california press gilmore, ruth wilson. 2007. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press. mccaskell, tim. 2014. interview by alexis shotwell and gary kinsman. aids activist history project interview 2014.026, november 14. https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp__timmccaskell.pdf. smith, george. 2006. “political activist as ethnographer.” in sociology for changing the world: social movements/social research, edited by caelie frampton, gary kinsman, kate tilleczek, and a. k. thompson. black point, ns: fernwood. southin, brent. 2014. interview by alexis shotwell and gary kinsman. aids activist history project interview 2014.002, february 8. https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp__brent_southin.pdf. alexis shotwell is an associate professor at carleton university, on unsurrendered algonquin territory. her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. she also gives workshops on reducing suffering in our academic writing and teaching practices. she is the author of knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding and against purity: living ethically in compromised times. website: alexisshotwell.com. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 8 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/8 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.8 https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_timmccaskell.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_timmccaskell.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_brent_southin.pdf https://aidsactivisthistory.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/aahp_-_brent_southin.pdf http://alexisshotwell.com/ feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy alexis shotwell recommended citation fierce love: what we can learn about epistemic responsibility from histories of aids advocacy after mr. nowhere: what kind of proper self for a scientist? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 2 2015 after mr. nowhere: what kind of proper self for a scientist? sandra harding university of california, los angeles, sharding@gseis.ucla.ed recommended citation harding, sandra. 2015. "after mr. nowhere: what kind of proper self for a scientist?."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2. after mr. nowhere: what kind of proper self for a scientist?1 sandra harding abstract the conventional proper scientific self has an ethical obligation to strive to see everywhere in the universe from no particular location in that universe: he is to produce the view from nowhere. what different conceptions of the proper scientific self are created by the distinctive assumptions and research practices of social justice movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism? three such new ideals are: the multiple and conflicted knowing self; the researcher strategically located inside her research world; and the community that knows. keywords: objectivity, scientific selfs, social justice movements my project here is a small one: to identify new kinds of “proper scientific selfs” that have emerged in social justice movements since the decline in belief in both the actuality and desirability of “the view from nowhere.” this “view from nowhere” is the long-recommended stance for those engaged in scientific research and in the philosophy of science, reflecting the belief that maximizing the objectivity of research requires maximizing its freedom from social values and interests. the model researcher is to strive to see everything in the world from no particular place in it. for this “mr. nowhere,” pure or basic research can achieve such objectivity in ways that mission-directed research cannot. yet for at least five decades, this stance has been contested by social justice movements. we can now see that it is a delusion to imagine that scientific research could be value-free, and a cognitive as well as ethical mistake to think it desirable. objectivity can be maintained without requiring value-neutrality. indeed, “strong objectivity,” as i have referred to it, requires direction by social justice values and interests: it can be value(and interest-) rich (harding 2004; 2008; 2015a). as historian robert proctor (1991) pointed out several decades ago, it is a mistake to 1editors note: from time to time feminist philosophy quarterly publishes invited papers. this paper was invited to celebrate this first issue of feminist philosophy quarterly. a different version of this essay, entitled "after mr. nowhere: new proper scientific selfs," is appearing in objectivity and diversity: another logic of scientific research. 1 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 presume that the empirical reliability of research is inevitably damaged when it is directed by social values and interests. after all, we can note that guns don’t miss their mark just because they were designed by people with nationalist and militarist values and interests. pharmaceutical products don’t fail to work just because the sponsors and/or scientists were motivated by the hope of financial riches. of course some social values and interests do indeed decrease the reliability of research, and not all research motivated by social justice concerns maximizes objectivity. but the point here is that not all social values and interests have the bad effects attributed to them. why should research produced by militarists and greedy corporations somehow qualify as maximally objective while that produced by those who seek social justice does not?2 the next section reads standpoint methodology through the lens of lorraine daston’s and peter galison’s (2007) account of how shifts in the methods of securing objectivity have produced shifts in conceptions of the proper scientific self. they argue that methodological shifts create moral shifts in the status of the scientist and his/her life work. sections two, three, and four identify three distinctive kinds of proper scientific selfs that have become visible in recent social justice research. these are the multiple and conflicted self, the strategic researcher, and the researcher who is simultaneously an individual and a community or collective. 1. methods of “right sight” produce proper scientific selfs daston and galison have shown how the concept of objectivity has had a distinctive history, shifting as scientists developed new technologies of observation—technologies of “right sight,” as they put the point. they historicize what had been presumed to be a universal standard for good science. at one point, they focus on the relation of objectivity to subjectivity, which draws attention to otherwise unanalyzed ethical dimensions of scientific practice, of right sight, and of the classical modern proper scientific self. what is the nature of objectivity? first, and foremost, objectivity is the suppression of some aspect of the self, the countering of subjectivity. objectivity and subjectivity define each other, like left and right or up and 2 philosophers will be aware that ian hacking (2015) has provided compelling arguments for abandoning appeals to objectivity on the grounds that the term is primarily used as an “elevator word” to boost the status of claims regardless of how value-free they are. as i have argued elsewhere (2015b), nevertheless the term has not worn out its usefulness and can be refocused to preserve its promise of fairness to the empirical evidence and to the severest critics of research results, as outlined below. “strong objectivity” is real objectivity. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 down. one cannot be understood, even conceived, without the other. if objectivity was summoned into existence to negate subjectivity, then the emergence of objectivity must tally with the emergence of a certain kind of willful self, one perceived as endangering scientific knowledge. the history of objectivity becomes, ipso facto, part of the history of the self. or, more precisely, of the scientific self. (daston and galison 2007, 36-37) daston and galison’s account links shifts in the standards for objectivity to changes in scientists’ preferred ways of observing natural phenomena—to shifts in research technologies or methodologies. their focus is on the history of atlases of natural phenomena, such as those that classify plant and animal species. these atlases provided the equivalent of the internet for scientists of the seventeenththrough mid-twentieth centuries, permitting scientists separated by time and space to carry their atlas into their fieldwork, comparing the orchid in front of them in the peruvian jungle, for example, to those already classified in the atlas. was the one in front of them a new species or just an example or variation of an existing species? thus they permitted scientists to work together to classify natural phenomena and thereby to organize our ways of thinking about the world around us. especially significant in this history is the invention of photography and other mechanical recording devices in the mid-nineteenth century. these changed the notion of a “proper scientific self,” daston and galison argue. in this shift to “mechanical objectivity,” the very language of desirable research as “objective” came to replace its earlier characterization as “true to nature.”3 my argument is that a particular methodological strategy developed by the social justice movements has produced a new and increasingly widely recognized way to attain maximally reliable observations of nature and social relations. the social justice movements have produced a new logic or technology of good research. they recommend starting off research from the daily lives of economically and politically vulnerable groups, rather than from questions arising from the dominant conceptual frameworks, for example, of research disciplines or of the dominant national or international institutions and agencies that such research disciplines so often serve. this is, of course, the methodological strategy recommended by standpoint theory. in other words, standpoint theory produces a new methodology of right sight that enables us to see aspects of natural and social phenomena that would be difficult or perhaps even impossible for people not in those socially and politically 3 think of the beautiful framed lithographs of plants that often decorate hotel walls. 3 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 vulnerable groups to get into focus. if one is not homeless, or not sexually assaulted, or not gay, not an african american male in the prison system, or not blind, it is all too easy to fail to grasp what the world looks like—how it works—in these people’s daily lives. people in oppressed groups can come to understand regularities of natural and social relations that the rest of us do not. standpoint methodology and its standards for “strong objectivity” are no doubt familiar to many readers, so only a brief summary will be provided here. the origins of standpoint theory are conventionally traced to the marxian “standpoint of the proletariat,” which was to provide the maximally objective account of just what were the actual political and economic relations of societies structured by capitalist forms of the production of goods. marx and engels developed the standpoint of the proletariat through reflection on the inability of both the new industrial workers and social theorists of the day to actually understand how a capitalist economic system inevitably worked to accumulate riches in the lives of the owners of industries and misery in the lives of their workers. the proletarian standpoint was intended to explain the new kinds of social relations which further immiserated the already economically and politically vulnerable groups while vastly enriching those who could command the resources of land and its raw materials as well as the labor necessary to become the new urban and industrial entrepreneurs. these new social relations were not fully visible in that era if one started off thinking about society and its ways of producing knowledge from the conceptual world and daily experiences of the factory owners and their elite allies in all of the other dominant social institutions of the day. their privileged daily lives obscured from them the actual economic and political mechanisms that produced their increased wealth. their daily experiences led them to think that they were, by nature and through their own supposedly hard work, entitled to their economic and political benefits. only by starting off thought from the standpoint of the proletariat could one detect how the new capitalist political economy continually shifted resources of labor and land rights from the already poor to the already wealthy and the new bourgeoisie, and then skimmed off a large portion of the value of laborers’ efforts for the capitalists. in the 1970’s, feminists in several social science disciplines drew on and transformed this framework and its subsequent development by györgy lukács, theodor adorno and, max horkheimer. the feminists argued that the socially sanctioned relations between men and women were something like those between bosses and workers. conscious or unconscious commitments of both men and women to male-supremacist economic, political, and social relations produced a 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 “political economy” of gender relations that shaped dominant social institutions (including the family), their cultures, practices, and philosophies.4 note, however, that this is only the conventional, official history of standpoint theory and its origins in marx’s form of the enlightenment legacy. in fact this critical research methodology has a larger, unofficial history. every time a new group steps on the stage of history, so to speak, it says something like “from the perspective of our lives, the world looks different.” this is true, for example, of african americans from frederick douglass and sojourner truth to the u.s. civil rights movement, of poor people’s movements, of the gay, lesbian, and queer movements, and of the disability movement. this has also been the cry of those in postcolonial and antiimperial social movements around the globe. thus, standpoint approaches to research appear to follow an organic “logic of scientific inquiry” that arises under distinctive kinds of social transformations; this is so regardless of whether it is so named.5 recently, the “occupy” and “arab spring” uprisings have made similar claims and used similar methodologies to gain the kinds of knowledge of how nature and social relations actually work in their particular social environments, and to design research that can produce the kinds of knowledge that these groups need and want. for the feminist researchers, the standards of research disciplines were a main target of their criticisms from the beginning.6 the disciplines recommended forms of scientific rationality, objectivity, and good method that in fact produced systematically sexist and androcentric results of research, the feminist researchers argued. the “conceptual practices of power,” as sociologist dorothy smith (1991) put the point, were guided by assumptions of male supremacy, as well as of class, 4sociologist dorothy smith (1991; 2004) was the earliest to make this move, and she has published most extensively on this topic through the decades. nancy hartsock (1983) independently decisively framed such issues for political philosophy. researchers in other fields, sometimes independently and sometimes influenced by smith or hartsock, developed parallel accounts aligned with issues in their particular disciplines (see, e.g., harding 2004). 5 so the logical positivists were wrong to think they had identified the logic of scientific inquiry. we can now see that they proposed a particular kind of “rational reconstruction” of research processes that was compelling to them and their readers at their particular time and place in history, as a number of historians of philosophy have been pointing out (cf. especially reisch 2005. see also harding 2015, chapter 5). 6 other important initial targets were the standards of powerful social institutions, such as the legal system, health and medical systems, social welfare and education systems, and international development agendas. 5 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 and ethnic/race supremacy, and they were served up to public policy by research disciplines such as sociology and, we can add, philosophies of natural and social sciences, among others. the remedy for this was to conduct research in a different way. in the 1970’s feminists pointed out how already new work in the social sciences and biology/medicine was starting off research projects from the daily lives of women, rather than from the issues and conceptual frameworks thought important in social science, biology, and medical research disciplines. feminist researchers asked, “what were the questions and problems that women perceived in their daily lives?” moreover, this kind of research was not intended just to produce a more accurate ethnography of women’s lives, though it did do that. rather, it was to be a starting point for projects to “study up,” that is, to describe and explain how the dominant institutions, their cultures and practices, actually worked. it intended to make visible the sexist, racist, and class assumptions of “good research” processes, which— because such assumptions were seamlessly interwoven with those of their larger social worlds— were frequently not visible to conventional researchers. “weak objectivity” was ensured when all the individuals or groups legitimated to repeat scientists’ original observations shared the discriminatory values and interests of the original researchers. male supremacy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, ableism, eurocentrism, and class biases were not idiosyncratic properties of individuals that could be identified by having other legitimated scientists repeat the original observations. rather they were culture-wide assumptions shared by virtually every researcher as well as the surrounding communities. only by starting off research from outside those dominant conceptual frameworks could the frameworks themselves be brought into focus and “strong objectivity” maximized. of course no one can ever get completely “outside” the prevailing ways of thinking. such an assumption was a key characteristic of the offending “view from nowhere.” but it took only a small degree of freedom from the dominant frameworks, achieved in this practical way, to begin to reveal the “political unconscious” of what passed for good research (jameson 1981). after all, those dominant conceptual frameworks were neither designed nor maintained by economically and politically vulnerable groups. the actual social location of the offending (supposedly value-/interest-free) research, and the kinds of research practices that had produced it, became visible through such strategies. it was not a real mr. nowhere who had produced the dominant research. researchers could not in fact do the “god trick,” as donna haraway (1991) famously put the point. rather it was the dominant groups in particular socially and historically local communities, who turned out—often unintentionally, to be sure—to be hidden behind the mask of mr. nowhere. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 but is "strong objectivity" real objectivity? isn’t it relativist? extensive discussions of these issues have occurred elsewhere for several decades.7 here one can just point out that strong objectivity preserves the core of the older notion of value-free objectivity. one must be fair to the empirical evidence, and fair to one’s severest critics. of course what constitutes empirical evidence and severe critics will always be contested, but that was always the case for the older notion of objectivity as well. yes, what counts as good empirical evidence and severe critics will always be sociologically and historically relative to one’s time and place. but “facts of the matter” are not epistemologically relative in the sense that there are no reliable standards for evaluating the adequacy of knowledge claims. such standards do exist in each research discipline. it is not the case that each person is his own historian, as historian peter novick (1988) worried in his award-winning book. so this was one problem that the progressive social movements encountered in trying to understand how their lives came to be immiserated in the ways that they were: the conventional assumptions and practices of the research disciplines lacked cognitive resources to enable them to identify the values and interests that shaped research designed by dominant groups. another problem was that the conventional rule was to eliminate all values and interests from shaping research processes. but the feminists, anti-racists, advocates for poor people, and post-colonials were clearly using their own ethical and political values and interests to shape the research producing these very criticisms of “the view from nowhere.” evidently not all values and interests had the bad effects so feared by the positivists. so, as noted in the opening section, the social justice research produced new scientific and philosophic questions: which social values and interests could advance the growth of knowledge, and which were likely to block it? rich discussions in the many decades of each of the social justice movements have contributed tentative answers. hints to such answers will appear below in the descriptions of new kinds of proper scientific selfs. and more such discussions are constantly occurring, stimulated, as noted earlier, by the recent “arab spring” and “occupy” social movements. our project here will now be to identify several kinds of new proper scientific selfs that such new research methodologies have produced. the next three sections focus on the emergence of the multiple and conflicted knowing self, the strategic 7 see, for example, the essays in harding (2004). key issues in these discussions are summarized in chapter 2 of harding (2015). 7 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 researcher, and on the knower who is simultaneously an individual and a collective, or community. 2. multiple and conflicted subjectivities philosopher ann ferguson (1996) and literary theorist lourdes torres (1991) identify how valuable concepts of multiple and conflicted selfs have emerged from feminist and anti-racist concerns. ferguson is concerned to identify a concept of the self that shows how oppressed individuals can resist oppressive practices of wellinstitutionalized structural forms of racism, sexism and other such oppressive social relations. at the same time, this must be a concept of the self such that the perpetrators can be held responsible for their oppressive practices; they are not to be conceptualized as helpless tools of a deterministic social order. dominant institutions are often represented as so well-organized, so farreaching, and so powerful that the individuals in them who deliver their policies and practices to members of oppressed groups can seem to be not responsible for the oppressive consequences of their behaviors. administrators of the world bank, the welfare system, or the military can seem to be just following orders. trying to resist these mere “tools” of the institution, or holding them responsible for oppressive behaviors, can seem futile and even inappropriate. with such concerns in mind, ferguson argues that the self must be conceptualized as a disunified, on-going, social process, not as a coherent, static, completely internal entity. for ferguson, agents of knowledge and of social action are always firmly located in complex and often conflictual structural social relations, and yet are never determined by them. the targets of oppression, no less than the perpetrators, must be conceptualized as capable of choosing to associate with others, and to deliberate and organize, in order to engage in resisting oppression and to transform the offending social structures, such as racist and sexist legal or educational systems. ferguson points out the targets of oppression can create and/or join oppositional networks, coalitions, and communities in daily interactions and critical reflection. indeed, for ferguson, those of us who would contribute to eliminating oppressive and exploitative social relations have a moral obligation to seek out and participate in such oppositional social groups. such groups enable individuals to transform their conflicted selfs into effective agents of progressive knowledge and action. torres, the literary critic, points out that the influential latina autobiographies that began to emerge in the 1980’s differ significantly from the familiar “great man” autobiographies (1991). she looks at three such autobiographies by cherie moraga (1983), gloria anzaldua (1987), and the daughter-mother authorship of aurora levins morales and rosario morales (1986). each person’s self is multiple and often conflicted as members of multiple oppressed groups that sometimes compete for their loyalties. they are u.s. citizens and also latina. they may be lesbian and yet 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 loving of their homophobic families. they are feminists, and yet often need to work with their still-sexist brothers and fathers in struggles against racism. the unitary, coherent self so often depicted in autobiographies of scientists is not the self of these latinas. these authors stress the importance of acknowledging the contradictions such selfs entail; they must learn how to transform such contradictory positions into sources of knowledge and power. torres identifies linguistic strategies that are used to give voice to multiple cultural legacies in these works. the authors mix linguistic codes in different ways, writing in english, but sometimes in spanish and/or spanglish. sometimes they translate for english-only speakers, sometimes not. these works articulate the mestiza consciousness that has developed a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguities, a plural positionality, and shifting and multiple identities.8 indeed, feminist and anti-racist work more generally has been full of metaphors of a split consciousness, from w. e. b. dubois’ (1986) “double vision,” to bell hooks‘ (1983) feminist theory from margin to center, and patricia hill collins’ (1991) “the outsider within.” as bell hooks (1990) argues, one must learn to choose “the margin as a space of radical openness.” bi-lingual students from immigrant families often report powerful and disturbing senses of divided loyalties to their familial home cultures and to the cosmopolitan u.s. university culture in which they find themselves and into which we professors are supposed to train them.9 learning to see this kind of difference and displacement as a source of creativity and power requires support groups, and exposure to social movements and their thinkers who articulate the positive aspects of such potentially transformative positions. relatedly, feminist work of the 1970's and after often noted the “hyphenated identity” issue. from mainstream perspectives, it seemed that liberal-feminist, socialist-feminist, catholicor jewish-feminist each named a kind of contradiction in terms. prevailing institutions thought of feminist revisions in dominant theories as an “outside,” and usually as an incomprehensible and disturbing force, that should be resisted by the “inside,” well-established, proper, authoritative, (parental) disciplinary or social movement thought. thus a woman-scientist, woman 8 the work of audre lorde (1984), maria lugones (1987), and the contributors to cherie moraga and gloria anzaldua’s (1983) this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color provide additional influential examples where this kind of self is identified. 9 one such challenge for teachers, for example, is working with students for whom their cultures’ high respect for elders leaves them morally and psychically uncomfortable putting forth their own ideas in class discussions, producing critical analyses of text materials or, in graduate seminars, addressing professors (who will be their colleagues in a few years) by their first names. 9 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 philosopher, woman-priest or woman-president marked deviations from norms— oddities that threatened the centrality, legitimacy and privilege of the norm. however, feminists pointed out that the great creativity of feminist work came precisely from its origin in thinking out of such contradictions—in thinking out of the hyphens, so to speak. sociologist dorothy smith (2004) captured this insight in noting that the puzzled consciousness of women graduate students confronting classical sociological theory’s pronouncements on natural or normal gender roles was one fruitful starting point for a standpoint of women. a “fault line” opened up in the consciousness of these students who couldn’t recognize themselves and their life experiences in the social analyses of max weber, émile durkheim, georg simmel, karl marx and the other “greats” in their theory courses. thus the successes of standpoint methodology and its "strong objectivity" projects depend upon making productive use of just such socially embedded, multiple and contradictory subjects for the production of the kinds of knowledge that oppressed groups need and want. in these proposals for better ways of thinking about proper scientific subjects of research, one can begin to see how knowers are not fundamentally autonomous, self-creating, culture-free individuals. in a variety of ways these accounts draw attention to researchers’ inevitable and necessary co-production through interactions with networks, communities or social movements in the production of knowledge. such multiple and conflicted subjectivities offer possibilities for progressive transformation that are less available to the unified, perfectly coherent, and autonomous subjects to which we have all been supposed to aspire.10 progressive social transformations require that our selfs be recognized by us as dynamic, containing forces from the past and also new liberatory possibilities for the future, and thus capable of responding to changing circumstances, and that we take responsibility for whatever social relations our activities turn out to advance. thus multiplicity and conflict enable us to recognize our selfs in response to different kinds of claims on our responsibilities and rights in different social contexts.11 finally, an influential way of talking about what can appear as multiple and conflicted selfs appears in the discussions of intersectionality. this concept was itself developed at the intersection of critical legal studies and critical race theory. kimberle crenshaw (1989) intended to intervene in legal thinking which could not conceptualize the importance of addressing the needs of black women, and by 10 should any actually exist in anyone! this notion of the unified coherent self is also aligned with consensus political theory rather than conflict theory. 11 see social psychologist sandra jochelovitch’s (2007) rich argument for a conception of the knowing self that draws from many of the sources used in this article's analysis. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 extension, the needs of any women of color. as crenshaw argued, black women were perceived as “too similar to black men and white women to represent themselves and too different to represent blacks or women as a whole” (cho, crenshaw, and mccall 2013, 790). consequently their needs and interests were systematically ignored or distorted in legal contexts, as well as in white feminist and in anti-racist theory and politics. insisting on the recognition of intersectionality required that every individual and social group be recognized as existing at the intersection of whatever were the powerful structural elements of the social order. so black women’s opportunities, responsibilities, and limitations are shaped by forces of race, gender, and class, among others. so, too, are black men’s, white women’s, white men’s, and everyone else’s (cho, crenshaw, and mccall 2013). everyone’s daily lives are conducted at the intersections of all of the powerful structural forces in their particular social environments. i say “what can appear as multiple and conflicted selfs” since what appears to others as a multiple and conflicted identity may not be experienced that way by the subject. it is only the refusal to recognize the experience of, for example, kimberle crenshaw as that of a distinctively black woman and of supreme court chief justice john roberts as that of a distinctively white man, not of a universal human, that creates a legal system in which black women cannot be heard by the white men who have designed such legal systems, nor, often, by white women or black men either. to put the point another way, one can identify the hegemonic discourses and the structural features of a society that make kimberle crenshaw’s identity multiple and conflicted to her and many others but leave john roberts’ identity singular and unconflicted to him and to everyone else. in research the intersectionality directive has two focuses. one is on the people and processes studied. how are the opportunities for and burdens upon black women created not only by race relations, but also by class and gender relations (among others)? how are white women’s, white men’s, and black men’s different opportunities and burdens created by those very same multiple and intersecting structural social relations? a second relevance of intersectionality theory is to the position of the researcher, for example in science, philosophy, or science studies. (here it seems that intersectionality should also be considered under the new self of the strategic researcher, identified in the next section.) how does her location in multiple, intersecting structural social relations have effects on what research she can and does choose to do and on how it is done? and what benefits and costs does such an intersectional position deliver to the research’s stakeholders? how are our research opportunities, priorities, and resources, as well as our limitations and blind spots— 11 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 our systematic ignorances—shaped by the intersected race, gender, class, etc. positions we occupy? this is a question about us as individuals, but also as knowledge workers in particular kinds of institutions, located at particular social/historical times and places. thus attention in our analyses to issues of intersectionality improves the quality of our research. it works against irresponsible universalizing tendencies in our thinking and practice. and it can induce a welcome dose of modesty about the ability of our work to provide the “one true account,” that perfectly reflects reality, at any particular moment. there are always other locations in structural social relations from which the phenomena and issues on which we focus may well reasonably look different. thus attention to intersectionality requires careful positioning of “the scientific self” and its research project in existing social relations—a kind of new proper scientific self to which we turn next. 3. the strategic researcher: positionality how should such researchers position progressive research projects in prevailing social relations now that we can no longer legitimately claim, at least in principle, to be able to see everywhere in the world from no particular social location in it: i.e., to produce “the view from nowhere”? perhaps the earliest articulated home in the last half of the twentieth century for positioning research projects in progressive social relations is participatory action research (par) in the social sciences. this emerged initially as part of efforts in the 1970's to conduct research that was for poor people, not just about them. its inspiration lay in the work of paulo freire (1970), liberation theology, and new left politics. yet it can also claim a significant history in the natural sciences dating back at least to various “people’s science” projects of the 1960's and viet nam war era.12 par proposed a model of research that rejected fundamental assumptions of the positivist natural science model that had become dominant in the social sciences. it also differentiated itself from ethnographic research of the day that kept its eyes focused firmly on the internal symbolic and material relations of unfamiliar cultures, which were most often in the global south or among the poor and/or minorities in the global north. in neither the positivist nor ethnographic case was there a focus on the macro social forces that shaped the material and symbolic social relations responsible for producing the conditions under which their informants and subjects lived. nor did either focus on the individual, disciplinary, or other institutionalized projects shaping 12 for the social sciences see park (1993a and 1993b). for recent natural science work that also references this history, see backstrand (2003) and hess (2011). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 the work of the positivist or ethnographic researchers themselves. the researcher’s assumptions and practices were not interrogated in the same ways as were the assumptions and practices of their objects of study. this was the context in which the most progressive par rejected the hierarchical relation between observer and observed that was assumed by both models. in one of the more ambitious statements of par goals, the new par research was to combine education, research, and activism to enable economically, politically, or socially vulnerable communities to learn how to determine the kind of information they needed, what the required research would be, and to conduct the community relations necessary so that they could transform their own lives (park 1993). 13 par includes a range of such attempts to redistribute control of research processes to be more accountable to vulnerable communities with stakes in the research. in a 2009 speech to the american archaeology association, philosopher of archeology alison wylie identifies a continuum of par practices in the case of archeological research. these start with the minimalist consultation with the “descendant communities” (today’s indigenous peoples) and obtaining the informed consent that the world archeological congress first code of conduct had begun requiring in 1989/91. a more robust participation creates reciprocity arrangements in which the researchers give back resources of value to the descendant community, such as research training, historical research, and advocacy for relevant potential governmental and non-governmental resources on behalf of the community’s needs. the most ambitious form of par requires deep transformations in how researchers think about their work. consultation and reciprocity turn into collaborative practice when descendant communities get directly involved in the intellectual work of archeology. it is a matter of according control to collaborative partners in areas traditionally reserved exclusively to disciplinary authority: setting the research agenda and shaping both the process and the products of archaeological inquiry. (wylie 2009, 5; 2015) in this ambitious form of par, researchers assist a particular community in formulating a problem, researchable by members of the community with the assistance initially of the trained researchers, that will enable the community to 13 see wolf (1996) for sophisticated reflections on the limitations of attempts in feminist research to realign knowledge and power relations in fieldwork. 13 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 become active agents in improving the conditions of their lives as they experience them. this is neither a quick nor an easy task.14 for collaborative research, the interests of researchers must be balanced with the interests of the relevant communities. yet, the very idea of redistributing intellectual control over the agenda and processes of research can be incomprehensible and terrifying to conventional researchers—as wylie reports archeologists responded when such collaborations were first proposed. however, histories do exist of at least some researchers learning to balance their interests with the interests of other stakeholders in their research in such fields as health, medical, and environmental research, and in the appropriate technology movement. such an idea gets less terrifying as it is practiced. collaborative research projects have been advancing in such fields as archaeology, environmental and health research (colwell-chanthaphonh and ferguson 2008; fortman 2008). one can see both standpoint methodology and the citizen science projects described by karin backstrand (2003) and david hess (2011) as committed, in different ways, to similar redistributions of authority in research projects. neither is usually conceptualized as a form of par. i am suggesting that this commitment links them to par agendas. of course, par has not been politically or cognitively perfect. it can get coopted by groups not actually committed to empowering oppressed people to take control of their own lives, as has been the case with all too many northern ngos working in development contexts in the global south (cooke and kathari 2001).15 moreover, if understood only as commitments to retrieving suppressed cultural forms of knowledge and ways of life, as is sometimes the case, par does not in itself automatically lead to resisting sexist, racist, and other damaging features of traditional cultures. that is, it takes targeted attention to such controversial social relations as those shaped by gender, race, ethnicity and class to ensure a chance for fair treatment for such oppressed groups. nevertheless, par offers good directions for thinking about just who should be the subjects or agents that produce the sciences and philosophies of science that simultaneously advance the reliability of research and also provide the resources that politically vulnerable communities need in order to survive and flourish. 14 see reardon (2005) for a harrowing account of a well-intentioned team of geneticists’ inability to recover the legitimacy of a research project once a significant group of stakeholders in the research had not been consulted initially on whether the research even should be done. 15 see also responses to cooke and kothari’s arguments in hickey and mohan (2004). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 4. communities that know what are the kinds of social contexts necessary for producing the most reliable results of research that can simultaneously advance democratic social relations? this issue has arisen in earlier sections. the standard image of the lone genius that is used to inspire seventh graders and graduate students to aspire to become nobel prize winners became anachronistic some 70 years ago. clearly, knowing is a fully social process; it is misleading to represent the knower as only a solitary, autonomous individual. communities, collectives are also significant knowledge producers. there are at least two kinds of analyses that develop this insight in different ways. big science. one begins from the analysis by one of the founders of the field of sociology of knowledge. five decades ago, derek de solla price (1963) pointed out that research such as the manhattan project required many scientists from many disciplinary specialties to coordinate their research in order to produce such facts as those that resulted in the atomic bomb. he argued that this quantitatively different scientific workforce introduced qualitatively different research processes. the new era initiated by the manhattan project came to be referred to as “big science.” another way to think about this is in terms of craft versus factory models of manufacturing. the kind of “craft” production of facts suggested by the lone genius image still can be valuable in the early stages of developing a new research field. james watson (1969) provides a report of such work that established the structure of genes in his the double helix.16 but subsequently a “factory” model becomes necessary to move beyond the initial insight in order to provide usable facts. many researchers with different sets of skills are needed to design research and collect data to which the original insight brought attention. subsequent work in the field of science studies has identified a second kind of expansion of the “bigness” of scientific research. the establishment and management of many kinds of complex social relations are necessary to organize, produce and disseminate research. there are the relations with the funders and sponsors of the research. there are the relations with conference committees, journal editors, and book publishers who will assist in disseminating and thus helping to confirm or disconfirm the research results. there are the relations with mentors, students, competitors and critics at various stages of the research. also numerous categories of subsidiary workers must be organized and worked with: lab 16 james watson and his co-winner of the nobel prize, francis crick, were not quite as “lone” as watson reports. the theft—or, at least, unethical appropriation— of rosalind franklin’s photographs from a neighboring laboratory was what enabled them to imagine the design of dna that they eventually provided (hubbard 2003). 15 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 technicians, systems engineers, project managers, secretaries, equipment manufacturers, and suppliers of materials. let’s add this extension of participants in the production of scientific knowledge to price’s “big science” so we can begin to see “really big science.” here we have been concerned with yet a third extension of contributors to the production of scientific knowledge, namely those brought into the category of knowledge producers by standpoint methodology and its "strong objectivity" projects. we have argued for the inclusion of all of the “stakeholders,” in the research—all of those whose lives will be affected by use of the results of such research. here one should resist the temptation to simply “add and stir” these contributors into the collection of “proper scientific subjects” of research. we saw that the multiple and conflicted subjects of knowledge discussed earlier had to learn how to transform their consciousnesses so that their identities, which were initially experienced as a problem, could be turned into effective agents of progressive social change. political theorist mark brown (2009) rejects the idea that knowledge can advance through discussions between individuals, groups, and institutions with rigidly fixed identities. like many other observers of social transformation, he thinks of “identity politics” as an example of this problem. he sees the demands of feminist, racial, and ethnic groups as all too often establishing such rigidly fixed identities that can never move past the stage of debilitating “politics of resentment” where everyone’s “bottom line” is so fixed that no one can learn anything.17 all parties cling to their positions as hurt victims, suspicious of the other, and no emancipatory movement is possible. to be sure, most of us have experienced this kind of hurtful interaction in some context or other. thus a “knowing community” must cherish its dynamism, as its representative institutions and the citizens that animate them engage in processes of critically debating, rethinking and revising scientific and technical agendas and their own roles in advancing them in public fora. this desired quality of “knowing communities” is another aspect of the kinds of “scientific selfs” called for by recent attempts to relink sciences and their philosophies to democratic social relations. should we say that these processes create really, really big science? simultaneously individual and community knowers. a second focus on communities that know has a different origin. in this case individual grassroots organizers have entered the world of national, regional, and international agencies 17 these critics of the social justice movements seem oblivious to the similar but politically much more powerful “rigid identities” of the powerful, such as many corporate, military, and state actors. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 and organizations in order to negotiate with such organizations on behalf of the needs of the peoples to whom they are accountable. for example, on the tv news in 2013 one could see a representative of a low-lying pacific island country advocating that the united nations move forward quickly to institute global environmental practices that could protect the pacific islanders from rising sea levels due to climate change. in moving between their own group and western-type governance institutions and agencies, such people develop distinctive bodies of expertise not possessed by either their own groups or the governance institutions. they address the western institutions in the voice of their own distinctive individual and institutional experiences, and also the voice of a community that knows how rising sea levels will affect them. similarly, native american grassroots organizers learn how to negotiate land rights, climate change amelioration, and other matters between their own people and their tribal councils and the county, state, regional, and national governmental institutions (whyte 2013). one might be tempted to think that there is no new kind of knower in these cases. the grassroots speaker at the united nations is simply speaking on behalf of his community. to be sure this can be a reasonable way to conceptualize the situation. yet it misses important features of at least some cases of such “proper scientific subjects” that do not easily fit into modern western conceptions of persons as fundamentally individuals. from this western perspective communities are simply collections of individuals and it is only the individuals to whom knowledge can properly be attributed. this issue was famously brought into focus by western reactions to the account that rigoberta menchu gave of the horrors she experienced when cia-aided local warriors destroyed her salvadoran village. she gave an interview to a french journalist in paris that became her book, i, rigoberta menchu (1983), for which she received a nobel prize. however, a united states journalist objected that her account was unreliable; she was falsifying facts. some of the injuries that she had reported as done to her were in fact done to her uncle, her cousin, or to other villagers. she seemed mystified by such charges, and anthropologists and other journalists joined the fray, which lasted a good decade. by that time, the original journalist admitted that her account was fundamentally completely reliable if one accepted the fact that to her, whatever happened to her community thereby happened to her individually also. as the anthropologists pointed out, the journalist assumed that western individualism provided the only reasonable framework to use in evaluating the accuracy of first-person reports. yet in non-modern societies, including those in the history of the west, persons are not fundamentally individuals. rather, identities are fundamentally a function of their kinship groups. 17 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 so these are two different ways in which the proper subject of knowledge and history has been shifted from individuals to communities or collectivities, or shared between them. a focus on such communities that know emphasizes how the production of knowledge is always a deeply social project. it is never the outcome only of a lone individual’s activities. 5. conclusion i have been arguing that the research projects of the social justice movements have insisted on a different standard for maximizing objectivity, one that they insist is a higher, more rigorous standard. in doing so, they have produced new kinds of proper scientific selfs. this phenomenon aligns well with historians’ accounts of how shifts in research methodologies have tended to have just this effect: they create new forms of “right sight.” they shift the moral status of the scientist and his work since the “rightness” of scientific observation is a matter of ethics as well as of epistemology. no wonder mainstream responses to social justice research have been so emotionally fraught. much more is at issue than merely figuring out nature’s order. references anzaldua, gloria. 1987. borderlands/la frontera. san francisco: spinsters/aunt lute press. backstrand, karin. 2003. “civic science for sustainability: reframing the role of experts, policy-makers, and citizens in environmental governance.” global environmental politics 3 (4): 24-41. brown, mark. 2009. science and democracy: expertise, institutions, and 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a theoretical and methodological perspective.” in voices of change: participatory research in the united states and canada, edited by peter park et al. westport: bergin and garvey. ___ et al., eds. 1993. voices of change: participatory research in the united states and canada. westport, conn.: bergin and garvey. petras, elizabeth mclean, and douglas v. porpora. 1993. “participatory research: three models and an analysis.” the american sociologist 23(1): 107-26. price, derek de solla. 1963. little science, big science. new york: columbia university press. proctor, robert. 1991. value-free science? purity and power in modern knowledge. cambridge: harvard university press. reardon, jenny. 2005. race to the finish: identity and governance in an age of genomics. princeton: princeton university press. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.2 reisch, george a. 2005. how the cold war transformed science: to the icy slopes of logic. cambridge: cambridge university press. smith, dorothy. 1991. the conceptual practices of power. toronto: university of toronto press. ___. 2004. “women’s perspective as a radical critique of sociology.” in the feminist standpoint theory reader, edited by sandra harding. bloomington: indiana university press. torres, lourdes, 1991. “the construction of self in u.s. latina autobiography.” in third world women and the politics of feminism, edited by chandra talpade mohanty, ann russo, lourdes torres. bloomington: indiana university press. watson, james. 1969. the double helix. new york: new american library. wolf, diane l., ed. 1996. feminist dilemmas in fieldwork. boulder: westview press. wylie, alison, 2008. “legacies of collaboration: transformative criticism in archaeology.” presentation, patty jo watson distinguished lecture, at the archaeology division, american anthropological association, san francisco, ca, nov 21, 2008. sandra harding is the distinguished research professor in education and gender studies at the university of california los angeles. she received her doctorate at new york university. she has written or edited 16 books and special journal issues on topics in feminist and postcolonial epistemology, philosophy of science and research methodology. most recently she edited the postcolonial science and technology studies reader (duke university press 2011), and authored objectivity and diversity: another logic of scientific research (university of chicago press, 2015). harding co-edited signs: journal of women in culture and society 2000-2005. she was awarded the 2013 john desmond bernal prize by the society for the social studies of science (4s). she has consulted with a number of international agencies, including the pan american health organization, unifem, the united nations commission on science and technology for development, and unesco. 21 harding: after mr. nowhere published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 after mr. nowhere: what kind of proper self for a scientist? sandra harding recommended citation microsoft word 451790-convertdoc.input.439264.sfamy.docx transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and “other” women’s power feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 1 article 1 2017 transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and “other” women’s power serene j. khader cuny brooklyn college, serene.khader@gmail.com recommended citation khader, serene j.. 2017. "transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and “other” women’s power."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (1). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1. transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and “other” women’s power serene j. khader abstract postcolonial and transnational feminists’ calls to recognize “other” women’s agency have seemed to some western feminists to entail moral quietism about women’s oppression. here, i offer an antirelativist framing of the transnational feminist critiques, one rooted in a conception of transnational feminisms as a nonideal theoretical enterprise. the western feminist problem is not simple ethnocentrism, but rather a failure to ask the right types of normative questions, questions relevant to the nonideal context in which transnational feminist praxis occurs. instead of asking which forms of power are gender-justice-enhancing, western feminists are fixated on contrasting “other” cultures to an idealized western culture. a focus on ideal theorizing works together with colonial epistemic practices to divert western feminist attention from key questions about what will reduce “other” women’s oppression under conditions of gender injustice and ongoing imperialism. western feminists need to ask whether “other” women’s power is resistant, and answering this question requires a focus on what amartya sen would call “justice enhancement” rather than an ideal of the gender-just culture. i show how a focus on resistance, accompanied by a colonialism-visibilizing hypothesis and a normative vision that allows multiple strategies for transitioning out of injustice, can guide western feminists toward more appropriate questions about “other” women’s power. keywords: decolonial feminism, postcolonial feminism, transnational feminism, resistance, multiculturalism, feminist ethics, feminism and globalization, political philosophy, global justice, nonideal theory transnational and postcolonial feminists criticize western feminists for seeing “other” women only as “victims” or “dupes of patriarchy” (mohanty 1988; obiora, hall, and jardine, 1996; narayan 2002, nnaemeka 2003, mahmood 2005). these same calls to recognize “other” women’s agency have seemed to some western feminists to entail moral quietism about women’s oppression. if saying that 1 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 “other” women lack power is imperialist, the worry goes, it becomes impossible to object to women’s oppression. for example, susan moller okin sees chandra talpade mohanty’s argument that third-world women’s movements have different priorities as creating an “anti-universalizing climate” that reduces claims about oppression to “offensive cultural imperialism” (okin 2000, 37) and as preventing “the framing of women’s rights as universal human rights” (okin 2000, 38)1. here, i offer a framing of the transnational feminist critiques that is explicitly antirelativist. the western feminist problem is not simple ethnocentrism, but rather a failure to ask the right types of normative questions, questions relevant to the nonideal context in which transnational feminist praxis occurs. instead of asking about which forms of power are gender-justice-enhancing, western feminists are fixated on pointing out the nonideality of non-western cultures. a focus on ideal theorizing works together with colonial epistemic practices to divert western feminist attention from key questions about what will reduce “other” women’s oppression under conditions of gender injustice and ongoing imperialism. in this article, i describe western feminist difficulties in evaluating “other” women’s power as involving misuses of ideal theory. i contend that articulating the western feminist mistake as the misuse of ideal theory reveals the nonrelativist character of many transnational feminist calls to recognize “other” women’s power. in the first section, i explain how ideal theoretical habits combine with colonial epistemic practices to generate moral insensitivities in western feminists. ideal theory and colonial epistemic habits encourage western feminists to treat encounters with “other” women primarily as opportunities to rank entire cultures. in the second section, i focus more narrowly on questions about “other” women’s power. i describe three causes of arbitrary western feminist dismissal of “other” women’s power. i call these “the idealization of western cultural forms,” “the idealization of the territorial public,” and “the culturalist category error.” examples of these dismissals appear frequently in transnational feminist writing, but interpreting them as misuses of ideal theory locates the western mistake, not in normativity itself, but in a failure to ask the right types of normative questions. third, i suggest that many questions about “other” women’s power relevant to transnational feminist praxis concern what amartya sen calls “justiceenhancement.” western feminists need to ask whether “other” women’s power is resistant, and answering this question requires comparative historical judgments rather than an ideal of the gender-just culture. i show how this focus on resistance 1 mohanty’s specific argument in this piece is that focusing on women’s shared victimization by men and alleged antinationalism occludes the different priorities of third-world feminist movements. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 can guide western feminists toward more appropriate questions without denying the need to criticize gender injustice. i. ideal theory, colonial epistemic practices, and culture-ranking western feminists often see their dismissals of “other” women’s power as required by moral universalism. many such dismissals are, i contend, motivated by confusion about the types of moral judgments transnational feminist praxis necessitates. western feminists wrongly assume the need for an ideal vision of gender justice. since my overarching claim is that many western feminist difficulties perceiving “other” women’s power originate in ideal theoretical commitments, i begin by explaining the term “ideal theory.” i use the term in charles mills’s sense to refer to normative approaches that develop visions of just social conditions rather than analytical tools for rectifying and responding to existing injustices (pateman and mills 2007, 94). i am about to argue that, within a colonial epistemic context— one in which westerners always “already know” that western culture is closest to embodying the ideal—ideal theory interferes with western feminists’ abilities to ask the right questions about “other” women’s power.2 my point is not that “other” women’s power always serves feminist ends; it is rather that moral insensitivities stemming from ideal theory and colonialism cause western feminists to dismiss “other” women’s power for morally arbitrary reasons. the background epistemic context in which many western feminist judgments occur is characterized by a preoccupation with cultures and ranking cultures relative to one another. transnational and postcolonial feminist scholars have identified many distinct mechanisms by which analytical frameworks that emphasize culture shield westerners from genuinely morally grappling with imperialism.3 two key analytical approaches that participate in minimizing imperialism are what lila abu-lughod calls “resort to the cultural” (abu-lughod 2002), and what uma narayan refers to as “cultural essentialism” (narayan 1998). the resort to the cultural occurs when “other” women’s oppression is only explained in an endogenous, ahistorical fashion. gender injustice faced by “other” women must be caused by their “culture.” in addition to being descriptively suspect, the resort to the cultural pre-empts consideration of western responsibility for the 2 mills argues that ideal theory is inherently ideological. i do not take a stance on whether ideal theory is inherently colonial here; i show only that it comes to serve imperialist ends in a colonial epistemic context. 3 for further discussion of the ways in which cultural essentialism and cultural explanations produce distorting normative judgments about the lives of “other” women, see jaggar (2005), narayan (1997), nnaemeka (2003), hale (2005), volpp (2001), and abu-lughod (2002). 3 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 oppression of “other” women by blocking questions about the role transnational political and economic processes may have played.4 cultural essentialism includes the idea that the cultures of “others” are relatively internally homogeneous, have characters that have not changed over time, and whose character causes harm and subordination of women (narayan 1998). cultural essentialism portrays contact with westerners as the cause of all moral progress. i want to suggest that cultural essentialism and the resort to the cultural are symptomatic of a deeper theoretical orientation wherein cultures are ahistorical and possessed only by “others,” and wherein the only important questions about “other” women’s lives are “what are ‘other’ cultures like?” and “how are they inferior?” this orientation prevents western feminists from confronting many important questions that arise in encounters with “other” women—among them, questions about transnational feminist political strategy. we can understand this orientation toward cultures and culture-ranking as promoting two distinct types of moral insensitivity, or what rebecca kukla calls “moral blindness.” one type is caused by a lack of attention; it “keeps the gaze averted” (kukla 2002, 328). the focus on cultures keeps the western feminist gaze away from data about the origins and effects of specific non-western practices. as we shall see in the next section, transnational feminist claims about the meaning of specific forms of power are rarely apprehended in their specificity. instead, they are treated as (false) claims that “other” cultures are ideal, equivalent, or superior to western culture. rather than analyzing specific strategies and practices, western feminists refer discussion back to cultures as wholes. a second type of moral insensitivity bred by the colonial epistemic “exclude[s] or misconstrue[s] certain kinds of morally relevant information directly at the level of perception” (kukla 2002, 329). this type of insensitivity infects both western feminist judgments about entire “other” cultures and the role of specific practices within them. western feminists “already know” that “other” cultures oppress women more than western culture and so assign particular weight to data that would confirm this. oppressive practices become so salient as to stand metonymically for “other” cultures in their entirety. metonymy takes parts to represent wholes; the western feminist eye is trained to pick out oppressive practices in “other” cultures and take them to support the judgment that other cultures are wholly dangerous to women—or at least more dangerous than western culture. an american audience’s reception of a paper on sudanese women offers a 4 abu-lughod’s example of the resort to the cultural is the western view that extreme repression of afghan women can be traced to “muslim culture.” according to her, this ignores the role that u.s. foreign policy played in bringing the taliban to power. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 case in point. though the paper, by sondra hale, pointed out sudanese women’s superior rates of women’s employment and political representation in the 1960s, the audience became fixated on the presence of infibulation to the point that they were unable to consider the rest of hale’s data (hale 2005). hale recounts this story, not to endorse infibulation, but rather to point out that the audience was so used to taking infibulation as the relevant fact about “sudanese culture’s” treatment of women that they could not evaluate other evidence. ideal theoretical habits exacerbate the moral insensitivities caused by preoccupation with cultures and culture-ranking. as mills argues, ideal theory can serve an ideological function. in his words, “one has to be self-conscious about the concepts that ‘spontaneously’ occur to one, since many of these concepts will not arise naturally but as the result of social structures and hegemonic ideational patterns” (mills 2005, 75). three specific features of ideal theory allow it to magnify colonial moral insensitivities. first, ideal theory may promote what sen calls “transcendental institutionalism”—the idea that there is a single best form of social organization (sen 2009). though imagining ideally just societies does not logically require the view that there is one best form of social organization,5 sen argues that the emphasis on ideal theory in political philosophy bolsters the view that there is one way just societies can look. the colonial epistemic context in which it is always already known that “other” cultures are inferior makes transcendental institutionalism particularly pernicious; if there is a single best form of social organization, western culture must come closest to approximating it. since cultural essentialism dictates that “other” societies do not change, it is only natural that western societies, as the ones that evolved, would be the most morally and politically developed. further, if colonialism cannot be understood as stemming at all from western culture, suspect practices attributable to it escape evaluative scrutiny. second, ideal theory contributes to culture-focused moral insensitivity by concealing the thickness of normative ideals. thick descriptive content is ineluctably contained in normative ideals. in other words, normative ideals include culturally specific information about how to identify and respond to instances of them. normative ideals have this descriptive thickness both because they are developed and understood within specific sociocultural situations and because they need thick descriptive content to be capable of being applied.6 getting the level of thickness right is especially challenging for cross-cultural normative evaluation. given that ideals arise in particular contexts, special problems arise in attempts to make ideals 5 rawls (2001) explicitly eschews transcendental institutionalism by arguing that there are many liberalisms an3d that justice as fairness is but one. 6 for a longer discussion of thick ethical concepts, see williams (2011). 5 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 travel from context to context. the prescription to achieve the ideal may include the morally arbitrary injunction to adopt practices of the culture in which the ideal originated, or in which the evaluator is used to employing the ideal. i will offer some richer examples in the next section, but a simplified example can make the point for now: it may seem to me, if i come from a context where most people eat rice, that we should advocate a moral entitlement to rice, rather than a more abstractly formulated entitlement to adequate nutrition. the culturally thick prescription of rice is, for me, sedimented onto my understanding of the normative ideal—but it is in principle distinguishable from the ideal itself. further, it may be impossible to know in advance of cross-cultural encounters whether there is arbitrary thick content sedimented onto the ideal. as i have argued elsewhere (khader 2011), this provides a strong reason for those engaged in cross-cultural normative judgment to be hypervigilant about the risk of confusing the unfamiliar with the normatively unacceptable. this danger of importing arbitrary and culturally specific expectations accompanies all normative judgment. what is particularly problematic about ideal theory, however, is its occlusion of the processes by which normative ideals were arrived at in the first place. mills and elizabeth anderson independently argue that ideal theory advocates for a particular resolution when the ideal and the actual world diverge: alter the world (mills 2005, 168–169). as anderson puts it, “we risk assuming that gaps we see between our ideal and reality must be caused by problems in the world,” rather than problems in the theory (anderson 2010, 4). though it is unclear that visions of an ideal society require us to ignore the sociocultural contexts from which normative ideals arise, they do suggest a sort of settledness of our understanding of what human societies should aspire to. rather than encouraging western feminists to grapple with the possibility that the ideals they use to evaluate “others” may contain arbitrary ethnocentric expectations, ideal theory tends to treat normative ideals as ossified. the western feminist may think that the trappings of western culture just are the markers of opposition to sexism. the ossification of normative ideals may prevent her from asking why the ideality of western culture and the greater injustice of “other” cultures are always already “known.” if the genesis of normative ideals that associate western culture with gender justice is not up for discussion, western feminists may not only make arbitrary ethnocentric judgments; they may not even realize they are doing it. third, ideal theorizing promotes western feminist moral insensitivities by producing a dearth of analytical tools for assessing nonideal conditions. it is particularly easy to turn one’s gaze away from particular strategies and practices when most of the available evaluative concepts apply properly only to entire societies. many nonideal theoretical questions, including questions about how to reduce oppression, will ultimately be questions about specific strategies and 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 practices rather than entire cultures. however, ideal theory evaluates complete sets of social arrangements. my point is not that there is no feminist value in envisioning just social arrangements. as we shall see in the last section, however, envisioning such arrangements tells us little about how to move existing social arrangements to more gender-just ones. when most available normative concepts concern the ideality of societies, western feminists can remain convinced that ranking cultures is just the operating cost of normative judgment. ii. ideal theory and “other” women’s power now that i have explained how ideal theorizing can exacerbate colonial moral insensitivities, i turn to the specific topic of “other” women’s power. i will show that three western feminist difficulties seeing “other” women’s power involve inappropriate uses of ideal theory. my hope is that construing the difficulties in this way will make clear that the western feminist mistake is not the attachment to normative judgment as such—but rather difficulty identifying the questions, and collecting the data, relevant to transnational feminist praxis. the first two misuses of ideal theory i discuss can be understood as involving the idealization of social relations. onora o’neill describes idealization as a phenomenon wherein an abstraction distorts what it attempts to describe (o'neill 1987, 56). it typically proceeds by attributing positive features to the idealized object that the object does not actually possess. according to mills, idealizations can prevent us from perceiving the role certain normative views and institutions play in perpetuating injustice (mills 2005, 168–169). a first misuse of ideal theory that occludes “other” women’s power is what i call “the idealization of western cultural forms.” western feminists often assume that “other” women’s embrace of unfamiliar cultural practices, particularly genderrelated ones, tracks the extent to which those women embrace or perpetuate their oppression. many western feminists who make this assumption see themselves as doing nothing more than insisting that “other” cultural practices can be oppressive. i want to suggest that western feminists are making a mistake here, but it is not the mistake of suggesting that “other” practices can be oppressive. it instead involves ascribing a feminist valence to western cultural forms because they are western. the issue is not judgments about oppression as such, it is attributing antioppressiveness to western cultural forms for a morally arbitrary reason. in practice, this idealization of western cultural forms can inure western feminists to recognizing the possibility of feminist potential in non-western practices. “other” practices will often lack the contingent cultural features that count, for western feminists, as markers of gender justice. mainstream french discourses about the hijab offer an example of western cultural forms being taken to be feminist, and uniquely so, because they are 7 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 western. according to joan scott, the french desire to ban muslim headscarves in public schools stems from white french citizens mistaking their gender relations for the ideal ones. a common source of french outrage about the hijab concerned the supposed tragedy of young women “covering their beautiful faces.”7 according to scott, this outrage reveals an underlying preoccupation with “girls’ refusal to engage in . . . the ‘normal’ protocols for interaction with members of the opposite sex” (scott 2010, 154). gender justice ostensibly required “sexual liberation,” which in turn required presenting oneself as available for sexual relations (or evaluation as a sexual object) in public. in contrast, one purpose of the hijab is to declare that sexual relations are off-limits in public. as scott notes, some muslim feminists argue that not having to be sexual in public is empowering (2010, 171). we do not have to take a stance about whether the hijab is empowering in france to see this as an instance of western feminists attributing an arbitrary positive valence to the familiar—and failing to realize that they are doing so. scott explicitly argues that mainstream french conceptions of gender relations and muslim ones that require hijab are both patriarchal. the issue is that the french cannot see the sexism of their own gender protocols because women displaying their bodies in public has, because of its frenchness, come to appear as a requirement of gender justice. further, the french view presupposes their possession of the correct gender protocol, not just a correct one. treating public display of women’s bodies as a necessary marker of gender justice excludes the possibility that acceptable gender protocols could originate in cultures that coded the place of sexuality in human life differently. it is possible to imagine gender egalitarian societies that discourage the sexualization of interactions with strangers, and this is what some muslim feminists who veil hope for. the perception of women’s sexuality as especially threatening to social order is undoubtedly antifeminist, but not all advocates of veiling place the responsibility for modest dress primarily on women (al-khatahtbeh et al. 2014). the problem with idealizing western cultural forms, however, is not merely that it is morally arbitrary. it also may also encourage ineffective strategies for change. western cultural forms, even if they are effective at increasing or embodying gender justice in their respective contexts, may not be equally effective in all contexts. the effectiveness of means typically varies from context to context (a car is a better tool for getting around in a society constructed around roads than one constructed around waterways, for example). a danger of idealizing western cultural forms involves treating their feminist potential as emanating uniquely and 7 of course, the hijab does not cover the face, but this phrase is consistent with the tendency to take the most oppressive practices in a culture to stand metonymically for the entire culture. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 only from their intrinsic features, rather than from a combination of their intrinsic features and the contexts in which they are implemented. what are means to the achievement of gender justice in western contexts can become fetishized and confused with gender justice itself.8 feminists who idealize western cultural forms will have difficulty imagining the possibility that “other” women’s exercises of power might seek universal goods through different, potentially more contextually effective, means. consider naila kabeer’s depiction of rural bangladesh as characterized by “the continued centrality of family in social life and the near-universality of marriage” (kabeer 2012, 229). according to kabeer (1999), some feminists assume that frequency of divorce tracks women’s ability to act in their own interests. yet the divorce focus ignores the differential benefits of marriage and divorce in different types of societies. in societies where family membership is both valued extremely highly and necessary for accessing other goods, casting out one’s own may have little appeal. it does not follow from this that women are unable to distinguish their interests from those of their families or that they are unable to act in their individual interests. according to kabeer, many bangladeshi women use income gained through microcredit as a bargaining chip that allows them to effect what kabeer calls a type of “divorce within marriage.” kabeer argues that the ability to limit interaction with one’s husband can be an instrument for the universal good of being able to identify and assert one’s interests. the idealization of divorce prevents western feminists from seeing ways that women in more communal societies seek the ability to distinguish their interests from those of their families. so, the idealization of western cultural forms keeps western feminists from distinguishing familiar cultural forms from those that reduce gender injustice. this is problematic, not merely because it causes the morally arbitrary valorization of certain cultural forms, but also because it ignores the role contextual factors play in determining the effectiveness of strategies for change. a second western feminist misuse of ideal theory is also a form of idealization. i call this mistake the “idealization of the territorial public.” transnational and postcolonial feminists have long argued that the public/private distinction causes western feminists to misunderstand the meanings of “other” women’s exercises of power. this criticism has been particularly common in discussions of sub-saharan africa, about which it is argued that feminized traditional forms of power are available to women. the idealization of the territorial public assumes that the spaces that are sites of social power in the west are vehicles for increasing women’s power in postcolonial contexts. i use the term “territorial public” to emphasize the way the term “public” 8 i mean “fetishism” here in the sense of “commodity fetishism,” wherein the value of an object is wrongly assumed to inhere in the object itself. 9 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 sometimes refers to a set of spaces (i.e. the public functions as a territorial concept) and other times refers to a set of activities that need not be spatially bounded. the former meanings of public include formal male-dominated institutions—institutions supported by official regulatory mechanisms, like the taxed portion of the market and political decision-making institutions. in contrast, democratic theorists use the term “public sphere” to mean the metaphorical space in which claims about the meaning of the collective political enterprise are made and disputed.9 to the extent that it idealizes the sorts of spaces and institutions that are common in the west, the idealization of the territorial public includes a variant of the idealization of western cultural forms. however, the idealization of the territorial public includes a further idealization—an idealization of history. it does not merely attribute an arbitrarily positive valence to western institutions; it suggests that the processes by which such institutions arose and continue to arise are either uniformly gender-justicepromoting or irrelevant to assessing whether they will bring about gender justice for “other” women. note that this second assumption would be strange about any case; to know whether certain changes are making things better or worse, we need to know what pre-existed those changes. but the second assumption takes on a special strangeness when formal institutions in colonial and neocolonial contexts become the topic of discussion. the institutions in question are often artifacts of colonialism—a process that we know often decreased women’s power.10 one of the things imperialism did (and does) was alter existing power relations. the investment of power in formal, male-dominated structures was often a colonial strategy for increasing the power of elites, men, or both. in addition to allowing westerners to instate what they saw as appropriate gender relations,11 new institutional forms allowed them to empower local forces amenable to discharging colonial goals. to be clear, the issue is not merely that imperialism generated such institutions. the issue is that colonial institutions often supplant(ed) forms of power for women that preexist(ed) them—forms of power that were potentially greater. (note that favoring 9 for a discussion of the usage, as well as the ways in which imprecise uses of it occlude women’s power in the west, see fraser (1990). 10 african women’s loss of control over land and the political power that came from farming is one example of a colonial reduction in women’s power. colonialism meant the advent of private land ownership and the idea that only men could own property, the exclusive selection of men for formal political roles, and the idea that women’s appropriate role was homemaking. see parpart (1986). 11 for an argument that colonialism imposed gender itself (or gender as understood in the west) on the colonized, see lugones (2010). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 precolonial forms of power does not imply that they were perfect or ideal; i will discuss this in the section on the culturalist category error below.) for an example of the variant of the idealization of the territorial public that sees historical processes as irrelevant to assessing “other” women’s power, consider ifi amadiume’s discussion of young wakirike women’s participation in a coming of age ritual.12 young women are prepared for marriage by spending weeks with powerful women in their community, “being pampered and loved like princesses, and they equally have to display their decorated bodies to the community in a public ceremony” (amadiume 2002, 47). part of the goal is for them to gain weight to meet cultural standards of beauty for marriage. amadiume discusses two girls—one who wants to stay in the village, and one who is home from university in lagos. according to amadiume, the young woman who stays in the village chooses the protection of a “matriarchal umbrella.” she refuses to subject herself to the violence of the “global city”—a form of violence brought about by neoliberalism. the neoimperialist violence is both literal (economic exploitation, sex work, and the lack of protection from kin) and symbolic (racist beauty standards). complicating matters is the fact that sexism is an element of imperialist violence—part of what imperialist violence does is wrest power from the hands of women. amadiume asks, “which of these girls might more easily find support and protection if confronted with any of these new forms of violence against women? the one under the matriarchal umbrella or the one in the city? is there a feminist imperative that the rule of law must supersede ritual? is the rule of law more empowering than ritual?” (amadiume 2002, 48). it is striking that amadiume does not answer the last question. it is unusual to even raise the question of what new, northern-imposed, institutional forms might have taken away. in other cases, however, the idealization of the territorial public does not assume history is irrelevant. it instead suggests that history is relevant, but the content of the “history” is always already known; precolonial institutions were worse for women than the territorial public. in other words, the history of contact between westerners and “others” is rewritten in an idealized fashion. nkiru nzegwu’s argument that western anthropologists mistake the extent of women’s oppression prior to colonialism offers an example of the idealization of history. nzegwu argues that a variety of distinct political associations and offices existed in igbo society, and some were reserved for women. western anthropologists overlook this, because they assume that the only institutions that are sources of power are the ones dominated by men. for instance, helen henderson argues that igbo power is concentrated in age-sets and that women’s 12 the ritual portrayed in the film amadiume is criticizing does not involve female genital cutting or forms of force-feeding that are severely detrimental to health. 11 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 exclusion from them is a sign of their marginalization. nzegwu argues that henderson has decided that age-sets are the source of power because they are maledominated (nzegwu 2006, 182), and this allows her to suggest that western forms will offer women social power for the first time. the history of colonial contact has been rewritten so only institutional forms introduced by, and familiar to, westerners are the ones that can bring about gender justice. thus, the idealization of the territorial public may involve either type of moral insensitivity discussed above; it may turn the gaze away from history or give perceptual salience only to historical data that confirm women’s need for institutional forms that will liberate them from their especially patriarchal “other” cultures. casting the western feminist mistake here as an idealization of history makes clear that the force of the critique does not lie in the romantic view that “other” women’s power is always emancipatory. instead, it is important to gather historical data and work to recognize the role colonial perceptual habits play in filtering them. both amadiume and nzegwu criticize western feminists for overlooking feminist potential in precolonial cultural forms. but their reason is not that african women are not oppressed; it is that it is impossible to assess the antioppressive potential of the territorial public without information about the types of gender relations that preceded it. to know what will improve women’s access to power, it is important to know what forms of power existed before. the assumption that colonialism either did not occur or only introduced gender-beneficial institutions precludes this type of knowledge. the two western feminist difficulties evaluating “other” women’s power i have discussed up to this point are forms of idealization. a third misuses ideal theory in a different way. it uses ideal theoretical standards to evaluate practices and strategies employed under unjust conditions. it constitutes an inappropriate use of ideal theory for two reasons. first, ideal theory evaluates entire networks of social institutions, where strategies for change usually work in a more piecemeal fashion. second, as i will discuss in more detail in the next section, what matters for the possibility of social change is the ability to effect a certain type of transition. practices that move toward gender justice in an unjust society will likely diverge from those that would exist in a society that was already just. (to give a familiar example of this point, it is noncontradictory to believe that society should be “colorblind” and to believe that affirmative action is necessary in a racist society). there are a variety of reasons we should expect strategies for change under nonideal conditions to differ from the forms of power that would be present in an ideal world. people may resent being asked to abandon their existing oppressionsupportive beliefs wholesale. oppressors may resent losing their power and have to be persuaded to give it up gradually. “other” women, who are, by definition, multiply oppressed may face trade-offs in which they feel they must leave one 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 oppression intact to resist another. intersecting oppressions, widespread oppression-supportive beliefs, and oppressors who refuse to relinquish their advantage would not be parts of a just political landscape, but they are typical of our nonideal one. i call this third misuse of ideal theory the “culturalist category error.” it occurs when strategies and practices that are endorsed for their value under nonideal conditions are evaluated as though they constitute visions of ideal gender justice. in conversations about “other” women’s power, the culturalist category error often takes the following shape: an unfamiliar practice or strategy, recommended for its potential contribution to long-term gender justice, is responded to with a claim about the gender injustice of the context in which it occurs. since the context is usually an entire “other” culture, the culturalist category error usually deflects conversation back to the claim that the culture in which it occurs is especially patriarchal. a debate about severe female genital cutting between leslye obiora and monica jardine offers one example. obiora argues that western-influenced attempts to combat it are vanguardist and so will be ineffective. women in villages cling to circumcision, she argues, largely because they are poor and marginalized by neoliberalism (obiora, hall, and jardine 1996, 74–76). she argues that “moderate” approaches to ending female genital cutting are more likely to garner support from rural women. obiora also claims that improving maternal health and decreasing poverty are more likely than moral grandstanding to be effective means for ending circumcision. jardine first responds to obiora by accusing her of relativism. in a second response, jardine asserts that obiora disagrees with other african women who believe female circumcision should be ended (obiora, hall, and jardine 1996, 80). jardine continues by attributing to obiora a “desire to make accommodations for traditional african cultural practices” and a failure to see the need to “break with the cultural practice of female circumcision.” these responses are curious, given that obiora explicitly describes her concerns as centered on efficacy and calls the motives behind the campaigns she criticizes “noble” (1996, 73). jardine, however, refuses to engage with questions about strategy at all. it is sufficient to return to the claim that female genital cutting is oppressive and to suggest that obiora is really motivated by a desire to preserve “traditional african culture.” this instance of the culturalist category error takes advantage of both types of moral insensitivity we have discussed; the western feminist eye is averted from questions of strategy and toward something that is already known—that “african culture” is gender unjust. another instance of the culturalist category error is present in susan okin’s influential is multiculturalism bad for women? bonnie honig’s (1999) response to okin includes the claim, attributed to leila ahmed, that veiling can empower women. okin replies with the following: “i do not doubt that this is so. but surely to 13 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 be unable to go out and practice one’s profession without being enshrouded from head to toe is not, on the whole, an empowering situation in which to live, unless it is a temporary transition to greater freedom” (okin 1999, 124). note first that this move by okin shifts the discussion from a practice to an entire cultural situation. further, it is strange for okin to think that she wins the argument by pointing out that a situation in which women have to wear burqas is unjust. honig has already quoted ahmed as pointing out that the situation is nonideal, “‘a sexually integrated’ urban world that is ‘still an alien, uncomfortable social reality for both women and men’” (honig 1999, 37). ahmed and honig never claimed anything about burqas besides that they had transitional value toward a more gender-just world. admittedly, okin mentions an apposite response in the point about transition, but it is not only rhetorically buried in a minor clause; the rest of the essay focuses on reminders about the patriarchality of “other” cultures. indeed, a very similar point about the nonideality of polygamy follows soon after and occurs in response to the idea that co-wives benefit from solidarity.13 both of okin’s essays in the book vacillate between questions about whether patriarchal cultures are unjust and what should be done about patriarchal practices under unjust conditions. when individual practices come into question, her argumentative strategy is almost always to point out that the cultures in which they occur are patriarchal—but is this really what matters for which practices should be allowed to persist in the short term? the political cases the book addresses are largely about whether western countries should tolerate sexist practices by internal minorities, but most of okin’s arguments conclude that non-western cultures are not exemplars of gender justice.14 this move is bound to distort the meaning of “other” women’s exercises of power, because all power exercised under nonideal conditions will be disqualified from resistance, and the colonial epistemic context guarantees that nonideality will attach to “other” cultures more than western culture. the culturalist category error criticizes strategies for moving out of nonideal conditions for the simple fact that they take place under nonideal conditions. in other words, it criticizes strategies for change taking place in contexts where change is necessary. understanding this western feminist error as the misapplication of ideal theoretical concepts makes clear that the problem does not lie in the 13 honig argues that co-wives form solidarity and this can help them divide labor and bargain with their husbands. okin replies that wives only need solidarity because of the context’s patriarchality (1999, 124). 14 okin does explicitly state that western cultures are patriarchal. see khader (2016) for a discussion of how her argument depends on a depiction of non-western cultures as ultrapatriarchal. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 employment of normative concepts as such. those engaged in the culturalist category error seem to think of themselves as put upon to remind us of the wrongness of gender injustice. recognizing that endorsing strategies as part of a transition out of nonideal conditions is not the same thing as endorsing the conditions that enable them can help defuse the western feminist argumentative strategy. to be clear, seeing the culturalist category error as a problem does not entail claiming that feminists should never point out the nonideality of entire sets of conditions. rather, neither acknowledging gender injustice nor knowing what gender justice would look like tells us which strategies and practices will bring about gender justice. the judgment that certain practices occur under gender unjust conditions is not the only normative judgment relevant to feminist politics. nonideal conditions open up much room for reasonable disagreement among those who see the same practices as gender unjust and see gender injustice as wrong. iii. resistance under nonideal conditions and justice-enhancement i have argued that many western feminist difficulties evaluating “other” women’s power can be traced to the operation of ideal theoretical habits in a colonial epistemic context. because western feminists often justify their controversial claims about “other” women by characterizing their stance as the only one capable of criticizing gender injustice, i have insisted on distinguishing critiques of misplaced ideal theorizing from critiques of normative judgment as such. western feminists can no longer claim a monopoly on normativity if the accusation against them is that they are confused about the types of normative judgments relevant to transnational feminist praxis. so, what kinds of normative judgments does transnational feminist politics actually require? how can getting clearer about what these judgments entail help western feminists overcome their difficulties evaluating “other” women’s power? it is to answering these questions that i now turn. to begin, we need in view some facts about the practical contexts in which questions about “other” women’s power arise. these are typically contexts in which western feminists face choices about which strategies for change to support and which normative ideals to invoke in making such choices. such contexts are nonideal in two ways. first, they are gender unjust. transnational feminist praxis occurs within a field of systemic global gender injustice. judgments about which local strategies for change to support usually occur against a backdrop where local and transnational gender injustice are intertwined. 15 second, the contexts are nonideal in the sense of being characterized by historical and ongoing imperialism. this fact introduces important practical considerations for “other” women’s attempts to 15 for a discussion of the ways in which global and local forces work together to cause retrench the oppression of women in the global south, see jaggar (2014). 15 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 reduce gender injustice in their own contexts. among the practical considerations introduced by imperialism are incentives for “other” women to dissociate their activism from association with westerners16 and the co-presence of other forms of deprivation, such as poverty, with sexist oppression. the fact of imperialism also introduces epistemic impediments to western feminists evaluating data about “other” women’s lives. i have already mentioned a number of these impediments. all i wish to draw attention to now is that these impediments are endemic to the practical situation in which transnational feminisms occur—that it is misguided to simply imagine them away. mills argues that ideal theorizing is characterized by an “idealized cognitive sphere” (mills 2005, 169), wherein agents making normative judgments are perceived as uncontaminated by ideology or other biases introduced by power relations. historical and ongoing imperialism give us reason to worry that western feminists are likely to have their judgments about “other” women’s exercises of power infected by ideology. an appropriate normative approach to “other” women’s power must not imagine away the nonideality of the contexts in which transnational feminist praxis occurs. the real world contains widespread gender injustice. there is no gender-just culture, and there are significant epistemic impediments to western feminists imagining such a culture in a way that is not morally arbitrary. under such circumstances, imagining an ideal culture is both dangerous and politically unnecessary. what matters for transnational feminist praxis is whether “other” women’s exercises of power are resistant,17 rather than whether the surrounding cultural contexts are ideal. homing in on the importance of resistance can sharpen our understanding of what the culturalist category error gets wrong. focusing on the gender injustice of entire cultures supposes that pointing out the nonideality of contexts is decisive about which exercises of power within those contexts to support. but resistance, by definition, occurs under nonideal conditions. resistance, after all, has to be against something. the observation that the conditions under which “other” women organize are oppressive is, from the perspective of transnational feminist praxis, banal. it amounts only to the observation that resistance is necessary. perhaps more damningly, claims about the sexism of contexts do nothing to help feminists pick out strategies worthy of support within a given context; all strategies in a given context will be equally sexist or nonsexist. recognizing that strategies and practices, rather than entire cultures, are the 16 see narayan (1998) for a discussion of how association with western agendas can delegitimize women’s movements in the global south. 17 the term “empowering” is also a process term that denotes transitions out of nonideal conditions. i use the term resistance here because empowerment is usually used transitively—to suggest that one agent is awakening power in another. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 relevant objects of normative analysis can begin to orient western feminists toward the right questions. this is not to say that attempts to recognize the presence of resistance do not require normative ideals. if resistance requires moving closer to gender justice, it is undoubtedly necessary to have some ideal of what gender justice is. however, there are two reasons the requisite ideal need not reduce to the ideal of the genderjust culture, or what sen would call a “transcendentally institutionalist” vision. first, judgments about whether resistance is present can be made without a single vision of gender justice—or at least without the type of vision that would function as a blueprint. sen identifies a category of political projects that are “justice-enhancing” and argues that most real-world political projects are of this type. according to sen, such projects “demand comparative assessments, not simply an immaculate identification of the just society” (sen 2009, 401).18 i would argue that judgments about the presence of feminist resistance are of this sort. they assess potential changes to states of affairs over time and not ahistorical cultures. as maria lugones puts it, “resistance is always in the gerund, resisting” (lugones 2003, 208). what matters is whether exercises of power are likely to improve gender justice vis-à-vis current conditions, not whether they match up completely to some ideal, culturally specific or otherwise. western feminists do need an ideal that restricts the kinds of power relations compatible with gender justice, but this is different from a thick, culturally specific picture of the types of institutions, practices, and conceptions of gender that would obtain in a gender-just world. even if such an ideal were necessary and available, it is not obvious it would be useful in tracking progress. looking for approximations of a thick ideal is often not the best way of assessing behavior under nonideal conditions. as lisa tessman puts it, “the best goal in the actual world . . . may require very different actions than the best in the ideal world (tessman 2015, 198). robert goodin offers a simple example of this point: whether one wants chocolate sauce or pasta sauce should depend on whether one has pasta or ice cream in front of them (goodin 1995, 51). even if one’s ideal is ice cream with chocolate sauce, chocolate sauce on pasta is worse than fettucine marinara. to draw this point back to feminism, even if a specific culture were the ideal (ice cream with chocolate sauce), it would not follow that looking for pieces of that culture would be a useful way of tracking progress. it would risk the feminist equivalent of looking for chocolate sauce, irrespective of whether we had access to ice cream or fettuccine. the idea that the embrace of western forms identifies power with feminist effects would be questionable even if we began from the unnecessary and ethnocentric belief that western culture is the feminist blueprint. recognizing this 18 mills makes the same point. see pateman and mills (2007, 121–122). 17 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 can help western feminists see what is wrong with the idealization of western cultural forms. even if western culture were the ideal, it is far from clear that embracing pieces of western culture in non-western background contexts would bring “other” contexts closer to the ideal. more importantly, recognizing that feminism does not require a transcendentally institutionalist vision forces western feminists to ask why they treat the presence of western cultural forms as tracking progress toward gender justice. the idea of a one-to-one correspondence between western cultural forms and those compatible with gender justice is based on the mistaken assumption that there is a single path from our nonideal world to gender justice. second, if resistance is defined partly by its consequences for future gender justice, the baseline relative to which resistance must be judged is a historical. what matters is whether things are getting better relative to some point in time, not just what gender justice would look like. recognizing this fact can help western feminists overcome the moral insensitivities associated with the idealization of the territorial public and the culturalist category error. the culturalist category error arises from the mistaken assumption that only judgments about the presence or absence of gender justice are relevant to choices about which strategies to support. the idealization of the territorial public is based on either the view that historical information is irrelevant or on a false historical narrative about colonialism. if judgments about what constitutes resistance require information about what has happened in the past and what is likely to happen in the immediate future, then undertaking them requires careful attention to actual historical circumstances. of course, given the idealization of history involved in the idealization of the territorial public, it may be necessary for western feminists not only to look for historical information, but also to actively work to offset the moral insensitivities that filter perceptual data. if the issue is sometimes that historical institutions are always already known to be worse than western ones, it may be important to attempt to explicitly offset these biases. one way to do this would be to adopt a defeasible colonialism-visibilizing hypothesis. according to this hypothesis, in contexts where women have been, or are, colonially oppressed, colonialism has generated new forms of sexist oppression. when western feminists encounter “other” women’s exercises of power, they can ask: in what ways does imperialism shape their possibilities? in what ways have gender relations and women’s opportunities been shaped by imperialism? so, resistance does not require an ideal of gender justice that functions as a blueprint and should be measured with reference to a historical baseline. it is also worth noting that a variety of strategies are capable of counting as resistant in a given context, and that a conception of resistance alone cannot dictate strategy choice. a notion of feminist resistance will need to exclude certain forms of power 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 from counting as resistant, but this is not the same thing as directly dictating strategy choice. though i will not commit to a definition of feminism here, many existing definitions, such as bell hooks’s definition of feminism as opposition to sexist oppression, focus more on ruling out certain types of gender relations than suggesting the ideal ones. even as they rule out certain courses of action, ideals formulated negatively like this one allow a number of different strategies in a given context to be capable of counting as resistant; there are a number of ways gender injustice could be reduced. as i have argued elsewhere, normative ideals that focus on what is wrong rather than what is right underdetermine what strategy should be pursued in a given context (khader 2011). a number of other considerations can be relevant for choosing which resistant strategies to support. for instance, western feminists may be morally obligated to choose strategies that are consistent with the reparative moral duties they incur because of the history of colonialism.19 considerations of effectiveness may also be important; it may be necessary to rank strategies that are likely to reduce gender injustice in terms of effectiveness. it may also be worth considering which strategies combine opposition to sexist oppression with other important political goals, like poverty reduction or the extension of power to non-elites. this, too, is a reason not to idealize western cultural forms; reasons not to export western forms, even when they are desirable in the west, may arise because of pragmatic considerations that are context-specific. the type of notion of resistance i have sketched does not specify how to adjudicate among these concerns. but it does illuminate how these types of concerns, and not just concerns about whether cultures are ideal, are relevant to political judgments about “other” women’s exercises of power. further, it makes clear that they are relevant for nonrelativist reasons. to see how recognizing nonideality can help western feminists overcome their inability to ask the right questions about “other” women’s power, let us return to the example of okin’s culturalist category error. seeing the world in which women move about uncovered as the ideal, okin engages with questions about whether women should be permitted to wear the burqa primarily to assert that burqas are a marker of nonideal conditions. if okin instead had begun with the question of what would improve women’s progress toward gender justice, she would perhaps have been more able to hear her interlocutors’ central claim—that burqas had transitional value. if she had had an eye toward historical conditions and allowed that “other” cultures change, she may have been able to see that, in contexts where seclusion preceded the burqa, burqas may represent progress 19 see jaggar (2005) for arguments that western feminists bear particular responsibilities for responding to injustices they have caused and for speaking to international institutions who are likely to prioritize their voices. 19 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 toward gender justice. further, and perhaps more controversially, if she had had less of a focus on markers of the territorial public, her essay may have ended up less focused on burqas—which mark the association of women with the private—and more focused on the gender-related priorities of muslim feminists.20 of course, this reorienting of the relevant normative questions cannot simply undo the insensitivities that color unfamiliar strategies and practices with ultrapatriarchality; many of these occur at the level of perception. but part of what has prevented western feminists from learning to see differently has been a worry that refusing to treat western culture as ideal means relinquishing normativity. worries about moral quietism have motivated western feminist dismissals of “other” women’s power. i hope to have clarified here that many transnational feminist calls to recognize “other” women’s agency are not defenses of sexism; they are demands that western feminists start asking the types of normative questions central to the fundamentally nonideal project of transnational feminist politics. repeatedly pointing out the nonideality of non-western cultures, as western feminists have tended to do, is a red herring. prescribing the proliferation of western cultural forms as a solution to gender injustice is a way of refusing to grapple with questions about history and contextual effectiveness. questions about history and effectiveness are undoubtedly central to any justice-enhancing political project, and western feminists need to acknowledge this fact. resistance, power that is likely to reduce the presence of gender injustice, must be measured relative to a historical baseline, and its presence cannot be detected without contextual detail. framing key transnational feminist challenges as demands to 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albany: state university of new york press. obiora, leslye, julia hall, and monica jardine. 1996. "situating a critic in her critique: a conversation." circles: the buffalo women's journal of law and social policy 4:73–77. okin, susan moller. 1999. is multiculturalism bad for women? s. m. okin, edited by joshua cohen, matthew howard, and martha c. nussbaum. princeton, nj: princeton university press. okin, susan moller. 2000. “feminism, women’s human rights, and cultural differences.” in decentering the center: philosophy for a multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist world, edited by uma narayan and sandra harding, 26–46. bloomington: indiana university press. o'neill, onora. 1987. "abstraction, idealization, and ideology in ethics." royal institute of philosophy lectures 22:55–69. parpart, jane. 1986. “women and the state in africa.” usaid working paper 117. washington, d.c.: u.s. agency for international development. pateman, carole and charles w. mills. 2007. contract and domination. malden, ma: polity press. rawls, john. 2001. the law of peoples. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. scott, joan wallach. 2010. the politics of the veil. princeton, nj: princeton university press. sen, amartya. 2009. the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.1 tessman, lisa. 2015. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. oxford: oxford university press. volpp, leti. 2001. “feminism versus multiculturalism.” columbia law review 101 (5): 1181–1218. williams, bernard. 2011. ethics and the limits of moral philosophy. new york: routledge classics. originally published in 1985 by fontana press. serene j. khader is jay newman chair in philosophy of culture at brooklyn college and associate professor of philosophy at the cuny graduate center. she works in moral psychology and global gender justice. she is the author of adaptive preferences and women's empowerment (oxford 2011) and is finishing a book on the normative requirements of transnational feminist solidarity. she is also a coeditor, with ann garry and alison stone, of the routledge companion to feminist philosophy (2017). 23 khader: transnational feminisms, nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and “other” women’s power serene j. khader recommended citation transnational feminisms, nonideal theory, and â•œotherâ•š womenâ•žs power different voices, perfect storms, and asking grandma what she thinks: situating experimental philosophy in relation to feminist philosophy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 1 article 3 2015 different voices, perfect storms, and asking grandma what she thinks: situating experimental philosophy in relation to feminist philosophy gaile pohlhaus jr. miami university oxford, gpohlhaus@miamioh.edu recommended citation pohlhaus, gaile jr.. 2015. "different voices, perfect storms, and asking grandma what she thinks: situating experimental philosophy in relation to feminist philosophy."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (1). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3. different voices, perfect storms, and asking grandma what she thinks: situating experimental philosophy in relation to feminist philosophy gaile pohlhaus jr. abstract at first glance it might appear that experimental philosophers and feminist philosophers would make good allies. nonetheless, experimental philosophy has received criticism from feminist fronts, both for its methodology and for some of its guiding assumptions. adding to this critical literature, i raise questions concerning the ways in which “differences” in intuitions are employed in experimental philosophy. specifically, i distinguish between two ways in which differences in intuitions might play a role in philosophical practice, one which puts an end to philosophical conversation and the other which provides impetus for beginning one. insofar as experimental philosophers are engaged in deploying “differences” in intuitions in the former rather than the latter sense, i argue that their approach is antithetical to feminist projects. moreover, this is even (and perhaps especially) the case when experimental philosophers deploy “differences” in intuitions along lines of gender. keywords: experimental philosophy, women in philosophy, diversity in philosophy, metaphilosophy at first glance it might appear that experimental philosophers and feminist philosophers would make good allies. after all, both sets of projects draw on methods from other disciplines for which they have both been accused from some quarters of being less philosophical, or even not philosophical at all, and both seek in some form or another to shake up the discipline of philosophy. moreover, some experimental philosophers have explicitly expressed a concern for issues of diversity and gender in philosophy, which would seem to put them in line with feminist philosophical projects. nonetheless, experimental philosophy has received criticism from feminist fronts, both for its methodology and for some of its guiding assumptions. for example, lisa schwartzman calls attention to the way in which experimental philosophy does not interrogate structures and institutions that might 1 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 encourage particular intuitions over others. schwartzman connects this absence to individualist assumptions and to an atomistic view of the individual underlying particular experimental approaches to philosophical questions (schwartzman 2012, 308-310), making it antithetical to many feminist projects insofar as atomistic and individualist views of the subject have obscured, among other things, the degree to which human beings are interdependent and rely upon the unacknowledged labor of women and other non-dominantly situated persons. 1 from a different angle, louise antony is critical of and raises serious concerns about the idea, forwarded by some experimental philosophers, that “differences in intuition” might contribute to the demographic gender imbalance found in academic philosophy. antony criticizes this idea on two fronts, questioning the degree to which the methodologies purporting to find gender differences are rigorously scientific (antony 2012, 243-9) and raising the possibility that talk of “different voices” might do more harm than good insofar as it may inadvertently (but no less powerfully) contribute to the more rigorously empirically demonstrated phenomena of implicit bias and stereotype threat (233-6). given the evidence, antony cautions, we ought to take a “perfect storm” approach to questions of diversity in philosophy, identifying and analyzing the ways in which forms of discrimination might converge, interact, and intensify within the discipline (250-1). while i share a number of these concerns, i have reservations about casting the question of whether intuitions might play a role in philosophy’s demographics as a choice between “different voices” and “perfect storms,” as antony has done. i agree that a “perfect storm” approach is warranted. still, i think antony is too quick to align buckwalter and stich’s 2014 essay “gender and philosophical intuition” with a concern for different philosophical voices. neither buckwalter and stich nor antony go so far as to designate the possible differences in question as philosophical. however, there is more than one way to understand the meaning of “different voices,” and it is here that i think feminist and other philosophers concerned with philosophy’s demographics ought to pay very close attention. as i aim to show, the way so-called gender and cultural “differences” are understood by some experimental philosophers is not at all compatible with feminist projects, including those feminist projects that take seriously differences in social position (differences between women and men, as well as differences among women). moreover, how and why so-called gender and cultural “differences” are deployed by these experimental philosophers is not only incompatible with, but also seriously antithetical to, feminist philosophical concerns. 1 see for example, baier (1985); campbell (2003) and (2014); code (1991), (1995), and (2006); collins (2008); kittay (1999); lugones (2003); mackenzie and stoljar (2000); and meyers (1996). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 experimental philosophy interrogates the role of claims taken to be obvious within philosophy and specifically within philosophical thought experiments. because thought experiments often, but not always, point to something philosophers take to be obvious (e.g., that gettier examples “obviously” do not qualify as cases of knowledge), the primary method of experimental philosophy is to present such thought experiments to non-philosophers to see whether they find obvious what a philosopher would through the use of surveys that ask things like “does this count as knowledge, yes or no?” before i give further details to and analysis of the experimental approach, however, i recount here my initial response to hearing that experimental philosophers had purportedly found differences in judgments about traditional thought experiments that fell along lines of gender and culture. i should stress at the outset that subsequent research 2 has failed to replicate the findings of the two studies that are the catalyst to the narrative i provide here, seriously calling into question the data they provide. nonetheless, i recount my own initial response to these studies for three reasons. first, i do share antony’s concern that emphasizing differences may in some cases compound rather than alleviate philosophy’s lack of demographic diversity. my own response to talk of differences (as opposed to actual differences) illustrates at least one kind of frustration that such emphasis can elicit. second, my account also demonstrates a way of responding to differences in philosophical intuitions that, as i shall argue later in this paper, is missed and even possibly obscured by the experimental approach. third, by demonstrating an alternative response to possible differences in philosophical intuitions, my account illustrates how narratives, like thought experiments, can be philosophically informative, calling philosophical attention to avenues of inquiry not yet considered. i. a story about differences in intuition, or a thought experiment of sorts… it sometimes happens that scientific data that appear to justify or explain current social relations (for example, that women and men think differently, or that western minds are somehow different from non-western minds) receive a great deal of attention and traction, 3 while subsequent studies that provide data 2 see for example, adleberg, thompson, and nahmias (2014); kim and yuan (forthcoming); seyedsayamdost (2012); seyedsayamdost (2014); and nagel, san juan, and mar (2013). 3 interestingly, i “received word” that experimental philosophers were investigating differences in intuitions along gender lines well before buckwalter and stich’s article hit the press. the single footnote in weinberg, nichols, and stich’s 3 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 contradicting such research do not garner the same interest, instead fading into the background, if they are noticed at all. so while there seems to be a good deal of evidence that there are not differences in philosophical intuitions that fall along lines of gender and culture, 4 the claim that there might be remains live in some philosophical circles. thus i found myself at a major philosophical conference, amidst fervent discussions of how (or whether) gender and cultural differences yielded differences in judgments concerning gettier examples. in particular, it appeared at the time (although this is now disputed) that a statistically significant number of women and of east asians judged gettier cases to be cases of actual knowledge. 5 it is a peculiar experience (although perhaps not uncommon to those complexly situated within relations of dominance and subordination) to be told that a statistically significant number of “people like you” 6 make certain judgments that “normativity and epistemic intuition” that “we are confident that gender differences will be an important area for further exploration” (weinberg, nichols, and stich 2008, 45, footnote 30) caused enough buzz about “gender differences” at one conference i attended to move me to devote some time to considering their arguments. it is for this reason that i initially focused on the buick/pontiac gettier case even though the purported “difference” found was between western students and east asian students. 4 again i direct the reader to adleberg, thompson, and nahmias (2014); kim and yuan (forthcoming); seyedsayamdost (2012); seyedsayamdost (2014); and nagel, san juan, and mar (2013). 5 while “normativity and epistemic intuition” treats differences between u.s. and east asian students’ intuitions, the idea that there might be differences that fell along lines of gender and the fact that buckwalter and stich were beginning to investigate such differences was enough to cause discussions at this conference to elide the two. why conference participants zeroed in on gettier examples (“normativity and epistemic intuition” treats other types of thought experiments as well), i am not sure. nonetheless at the conference i attended the result was much debate over the implications of whether “east asians and women have different intuitions about gettier examples.” 6 to be fair, the people tested and discussed by experimental philosophers are typically (although not always) ones who have not yet taken (or have taken only one) philosophy class. so it might be objected that the category of persons under discussion is not one to which i belong, since i am a professional philosopher. in response to this potential objection: first, at one point in time i was a woman in her first philosophy class and so the puzzlement still remains, “my past self found thought experiments in my first philosophy class intriguing and thought provoking, 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 do not make any sense to you at all whatsoever. 7 when one is not a member of the group in question, one can “make sense” of the apparent incomprehensibility of members of the other group by recourse to things like cognitive and/or cultural differences between groups. but when you are a member of the group in question, this strategy does not work very well, since it is as members of the group to which you belong that these people are said to be making the judgments. 8 when the groups in question are highly essentialized—i.e., when you are aware that there is a cognitive tendency among all parties involved to make the “presumption that all members of the kind share a fundamental and explanatory nature, which licenses broad generalizations about all members of the kind and underwrites projections of properties observed in one member to other members of so what on earth is going on with these women?” second, distinguishing persons with regard to whether they have studied philosophy does not produce essentialized categories in the way that dividing them according to gender does; consequently the gender division often becomes the more salient feature in such conversations. and third, as it happens, the manner in which the discussions took place at the conference i attended did tend to frame the issue as being about “women and east asians…” such that this was in fact the claim that i was confronted with. 7 i would distinguish this experience from cases where one disagrees in judgment, but can at least make sense of the other’s judgment. when one cannot even begin to think of reasons another could hold for making a particular judgment, one is at a loss for how to understand another’s judgment. fortunately, one thing an epistemic agent can often do in these kinds of cases is to ask the other person why they make a particular judgment and not another. in such cases, parties stand to learn something about the world from one another. however, structures of domination and subordination might make these kinds of epistemic pursuits particularly difficult. while there is a wealth of feminist philosophical literature on this very topic, i direct the reader unfamiliar with this literature to dotson (2011), narayan (1988), and young (1997). 8 one might have recourse to considering oneself “exceptional” in some sense, grouped with, but not really akin to, those others who do not make sense. one might, for example, consider oneself (and even be considered by others) to be an “honorary member” of the group to which one is not normally classified as belonging. when the group one is otherwise said to belong is non-dominantly situated in relation to the group one is granted “honorary” membership, this “honorary” membership (e.g. honorary male, honorary white, or “not like most women,” “not like most blacks” etc.) raises one’s own individual status at the expense of reinforcing relations of domination. for this reason, i think honorifics of this sort ought to be resisted and questioned. 5 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 the kind” (antony 2012, 241)—an extreme cognitive dissonance can result. 9 on the one hand, you are categorized with these others who are making a particular judgment and you are aware that their membership in your group is being invoked as somehow significant to their making this judgment. moreover, the grouping invoked and to which you belong is one that is widely seen and experienced as being fundamental to who a person is, 10 so that your being categorized in this way is not something you can simply ignore. on the other hand, the judgment being attributed to people as members of the group to which you belong really makes no sense to you. and so, confronted with the idea that there could, in some possible world, be a state of affairs where a statistically significant number of women judge gettier examples to be cases of actual knowledge, i attempted to make sense of the situation by manipulating gettier examples into cases that i could maybe somehow see as possible candidates for knowledge, even if in the end i might still judge them not to be knowledge. 11 for example, when presented with the case in which bob holds the belief that his friend, jill, owns an american car because bob has known jill to have driven a buick for many years, but is wholly unaware that jill’s buick was recently stolen and replaced by her with a pontiac, i wondered whether those who answered “yes, bob 9 for in such cases the stakes are raised. groups that are essentialized are typically, if not always, situated non-dominantly in relation to others—it is precisely because of relations of dominance that cognitive tendencies that unfairly erase one’s status as an individual can be maintained. still, it strikes me as interesting, and worth noting, that one could experience cognitive dissonance and care a great deal about why a significant number of persons regardless of social category make a particular judgment that appears to make no sense. in doing so, one would, i think, need to consider what is at stake given these differences of judgment, and depending on stakes and context, approach the difference in a variety of ways, e.g. by locating a cause, trying to generate reasons that could support the judgment, or simply asking, “why do you judge things this way instead of that?” 10 please note that i am not claiming that gender is fundamental to who people are. there is serious disagreement among feminists as to how fundamental gender in fact is. still, it seems fairly uncontroversial to make the claim that gender identity is something our current socio-historical situation forces one to at least be cognizant of in a variety of ways and for a good deal of one’s lifespan. 11 i grant that this is not the only way to make sense of the situation. as it happens, this is the way i attempted to do so. moreover, i think trying to view a situation, imagined or otherwise, in a manner whereby one might have a different intuitive judgment than one actually has is an important cognitive activity, a point for which i will argue later in the paper. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 does know that jill owns an american car” if probed further as to why they think so, might answer something along the lines of, “bob and jill have been friends for many years, at least as many years as bob has known jill to drive a buick, so perhaps bob has very good reason to believe jill would never drive anything but an american car. for example, maybe he knows jill is partial to “buying american,” so he has good reason to believe that, should she ever have need to do so, jill would only ever replace her buick with another american car. and sure enough when faced with this situation that is exactly what jill did. . .” 12 of course, that’s not how gettier cases are supposed to work, but as with any described situation (including those presented in thought experiments) we are given a sketch and the mind fills in various details, attending to some parts of the situation described and not others in a variety of ways. i therefore wondered if something like this might be going on in the specific instances where differences in intuitions about gettier cases were purportedly found. that different groups of people might habitually draw on particular background assumptions to make sense of the world (which when taken seriously by people who habitually draw on different background assumptions, would help this second group to attend to different aspects of the world than they normally do) is a little less troubling to me than the claim, “a lot of people like you don’t judge gettier examples the way a philosopher would.” after all, presenting thought experiments to people devoid of any context with which to make sense of the scenarios as highlighting one thing as opposed to another seems highly likely to result in divergent understandings of those thought experiments, which could, in a way, be interesting. given the buzz surrounding the “different voices” hypothesis, i was curious and wondered if anyone had done more qualitatively oriented research to see what people had to say about why they judged gettier examples one way as opposed to another. as it happens, i subsequently found myself at another conference with a number of experimental philosophers, so i thought i would ask the experts to see if they could point me to a qualitative study. interestingly, i found it nearly impossible to get an answer from anyone and one particularly vocal advocate of experimental philosophy simply replied by saying, “are you serious? do we really want to ask grandma what she thinks?” setting aside for the moment the fact that some of the most accomplished and brilliant philosophers i know happen to be grandmothers (or that my own maternal 12 while this particular case is one used in an earlier piece by weinberg, nichols, and stich (see footnote 5, above), i do think it demonstrates that gettier cases can be manipulated back into cases that appear closer to instances of actual knowledge than they are designed and taken to be within the context of analytic epistemology. 7 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 grandmother, though not a professional academic, was as they say “smart as a whip”), i was a bit taken aback because this response was not at all what i would have expected from someone who has vociferously championed the claim that “what non-philosophers actually think” should matter to philosophers. said differently, i found it very curious indeed that what seemed intuitively obvious to one philosopher, me, was not at all intuitively obvious to another philosopher, my interlocutor. rather than a “different voices” hypothesis, my interlocutor’s response implicitly advanced a “voices worth hearing/voices not worth hearing” hypothesis. ii. situating experimental philosophy and its need for (a certain kind of) difference perhaps i ought not to have been so surprised. had i known more about experimental philosophy at the time i would have understood how and why differences in philosophical intuitions matter to experimental philosophers. for those unfamiliar with experimental philosophy i will now provide a few more details to this approach before analyzing the problems i see with its interest in and understanding of differences in intuition. as previously stated, experimental philosophers are concerned with what philosophers take to be obvious and the role of claims taken to be obvious in philosophical argument. specifically, they are concerned with the evidentiary status of such claims. so, for example, in a gettier case where a philosopher would say “it is obvious that we would not call this knowledge” or “normally we would not call such a case knowledge,” the experimental philosopher says “but how do you know that’s not what people would normally call knowledge?” and then conducts surveys to test what people find obvious or “normally” say about the example. what is of interest to the experimental philosopher is not so much to establish the truth of the claim the philosopher finds obvious, but rather to call it into question by finding divergences and fluctuations in what people take to be obvious, thereby calling into question the kind of philosophical thinking that does not rely upon empirical methods. this distrust of (and in some cases disdain for) claims taken to be so obvious as to need no further justification is aptly represented by the emblem of experimental philosophy, the burning armchair signifying that “armchair thinking” ought to be cast to the flames. typically experimental philosophers are divided into two camps. in the first are those who hold a negative thesis that differences and fluctuation in intuitions indicate that intuitions are an unreliable source of truth. moreover, they contend that “reflection…and dialogue are not reliable sources of evidence for (philosophically relevant) claims about our [everyday] concepts” (kauppinen 2014, 5). instead, the negative approach urges philosophers to abandon any and all claims that are not empirically verified and to investigate the world through the use of the 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 sciences. the second camp, typically referred to as the positive approach, is less hostile to philosophical intuitions. while similarly advocating that philosophers remain skeptical concerning what appears intuitively obvious, this camp thinks that in some cases we may indeed find universal agreement regarding some intuitions, and that important things may be learned from investigating the causes of divergence in intuitions. 13 in both versions, however, finding differences in intuitions matters a great deal. without them there is nothing with which to garner support for the experimental philosopher’s claim that philosophers ought to “burn the armchair,” abandoning the kind of thinking that does not use verification through scientific experiment. and yet, there is something curious about this fervent desire to cast aside all claims taken to be obvious as well as the notion that the proper response to divergences in philosophical intuitions is to reject (or to suspend judgment concerning) claims that appear intuitively obvious. to analyze some of the problems i find here, i now turn to weinberg, nichols, and stich’s “normativity and epistemic intuition.” after analyzing some of the assumptions and attitudes toward differences in intuitions that i find problematic in that piece, i will turn to buckwalter and stich’s “gender and philosophical intuition” to examine precisely how differences are deployed in this piece in a manner quite distinct from the feminist deployments of differences with which antony aligns it. my aim in examining these pieces is to highlight how and why data are used in them, independently of whether the data are in fact accurate, since it is here that i think feminists and those interested in philosophy’s demographics ought to pay close attention. 14 iii. different ways of responding to differences in intuitions while the name “experimental philosophy” leads one to think of thought experiments, the specific target of the experimental philosopher is what is variously called a conceptual, philosophical, or epistemic intuition. for weinberg, nichols, and stich, who are primarily concerned with epistemic intuitions, “an epistemic intuition 13 for a more thorough discussion of the similarities and differences between the negative and positive programs of experimental philosophy see kauppinen (2014) and alexander & weinberg (2007). 14 by this i do not mean to say that we ought not to pay attention to how the data are collected and/or whether they are in fact accurate. this too is important and louise antony already does a fine job of demonstrating why we ought to consider buckwalter and stich’s data to be inaccurate (antony 2012). nonetheless, in addition to accuracy i have questions about why the data are sought and how this influences the way data are interpreted. 9 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 is a spontaneous judgment about the epistemic properties of some specific case” (weinberg, nichols, and stich 2008, 19). anniti kauppinen, characterizing experimental philosophy more broadly, offers the following: “conceptual intuitions—or socratic intuitions as they are sometimes called (margolis and lawrence 2003)—are roughly speaking, pre-theoretical dispositions to apply concepts to some particular cases or scenarios and refuse to apply them to others” (kauppinen 2014, 4; internal citation in the original). what is in question is whether such judgments ought to play a role in philosophy at all, given their status as justified due solely to their “obviousness” to the philosopher. in an attempt to call into question the use of epistemic intuitions, weinberg, et al., aim to show that philosophical intuitions are in fact highly variable and so not as obvious as philosophers typically claim them to be. by calling into question whether epistemic intuitions are universally shared, weinberg, nichols, and stich hope (as they put it) to undermine “a sizable group of epistemological projects” from plato, descartes, and mill to “much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition” (weinberg, nichols, and stich 2008, 17). because the paper aims at such a large swath of philosophical projects, “the exact details of how they work will play no role in our argument” (weinberg, nichols, and stich 2008, 21). instead the authors seek to discredit the use of epistemic intuitions altogether by characterizing the kind of philosophical thinking that is their target (from plato to most of 20 th century analytic epistemology) as a process that “takes intuitions (and perhaps other data) as input and produces implicitly or explicitly normative claims as output” (21). if, the argument goes, normative philosophical claims (the output of philosophical cognitive processes) are generated from input that can vary from population to population (as their experiments aim to show), then the whole procedure should be scrapped. nowhere do the authors justify the use of this picture to adequately describe philosophical cognition—instead it is assumed as a sort of shared “obvious” intuition concerning what “we” do when we do philosophy. however, appeals to the meanings of our words and attempts to spell out particular implications of everyday concepts can be done for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, not all of which are very aptly described in the way that weinberg, et al., paint them. both thought experiments and appeals to word use appear within the contexts of larger arguments within which authors can direct attention to the phenomenon or difficulty they would like readers to consider. moreover, considering the use of a word or what it makes sense to say may be asked of a reader for a number of reasons, including but not only: to get clear on one’s commitments, to identify instances where implicit commitments are at odds with stated commitments, to examine the way certain lines of thought obscure and/or distort our understanding 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 of particular phenomenon, to direct the reader to a very specific aspect of a concept that is of concern to the writer, to create new working concepts for calling attention to things that matter to the writer, and/or even to live well. insofar as some philosophers become so fixated by particular aspects of our lives with words that they cannot see anything else, falling prey to what david owen and cressida heyes call “aspectival captivity” 15 i can understand a frustration with what is being tagged “epistemic intuition.” but does any philosopher really expect that a simple, but proper input, will lead to another philosopher automatically agreeing with them? and when someone finds obvious what another does not, is the only option really simply to throw one’s hands in the air? in what world is this picture of what philosophers do useful? or, perhaps more pointedly, for which philosophers are “hand waving” and “quizzical stares” viable responses to people who do not see what they take to be obvious? for which philosophers are such responses not viable? the homogeneity of the “we” who make judgments deemed to be “obvious” in philosophy and elsewhere has been of great concern to feminist philosophers. moreover, those who are non-dominantly situated are no strangers to the experience of finding obvious what others do not. however, variability in what appears obvious does not necessarily mean that one ought to abandon the claim taken to be obvious, nor does it necessarily mean that one ought to suspend judgment until one can produce scientific proof, for example, that racism exists or that date rape is indeed rape. certainly collecting data can help demonstrate the truth of one’s claim, but it is not the only (and often not the most effective) way of helping one person to perceive what another finds obvious. sometimes one needs to help another attend to the world in a particular way, much like the scientist might guide the novice to see what is clearly there underneath the microscope. one might even need to help the fellow expert to attend to the world in a novel way in order for something that is obvious as day to one expert to clearly emerge to another. this kind of work, of helping others to attend to the world in particular ways, is important work; it helps to widen our attention to the world and to open new avenues of investigation that until now were perhaps not quite so obvious. for the purpose of this paper then, i will distinguish between two types of knowledge work. the first is the work of helping others to attend to what one would like to investigate, of getting knowers on the same page, as it were. following the 15 aspectival captivity is the inability (or refusal) to shift one’s attention to other aspects of a given situation, concept, or object of thought, such that epistemic attention is captivated by just one aspect or set of aspects at the expense of others (owen 2003, 87-91) and (heyes 2007, 17-20). 11 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 philosopher sara ahmed, i will call this first kind of work “orientating work.” 16 the second kind of work is what knowers do when we are already on the same page and need to fill in acknowledged gaps in our knowing. this kind of work i will call “procedural work,” in order to encompass the variety of procedures we have for justifying possible candidates for knowledge. it will perhaps not go unnoticed by those familiar with feminist work in philosophy of science that orientating work pertains to the context of discovery (one where we may indeed see a great deal of variation), whereas procedural work pertains to the context of justification. for many feminist philosophers that “we” find certain things “obvious” may indeed be owing to the particular set of persons encompassed by the “we.” however, this is not reason to stop philosophizing from and about particular aspects of the world that are obvious or salient to specific communities. instead, it is reason to investigate whose interests are being served by some things appearing more obvious than others, to diversify the “we” of philosophers so as to expand philosophical attention to the world, and to engage in orientating knowledge work, finding ways of making what is obvious (particularly to those non-dominantly situated in the world) more obvious to others (particularly those dominantly situated in the world). 17 returning to experimental philosophy, we might consider whether in all cases thought experiments and appeals to the obvious are doing procedural work or orientating work. 18 for example, a gettier case can be taken to be evidence that cases of justified true belief are not knowledge, end of story (doing procedural knowledge work). in contrast, a gettier case can be taken to be doing orientating work, calling attention to something interesting and curious about the nature of justification that philosophers have not noticed until the example makes this undertheorized area “obvious.” if the latter, one would expect our philosophical attention 16 in queer phenomenology sara ahmed uses the term “orientating” to describe and analyze various ways in which attention is directed within the world (ahmed 2006, esp. the introduction and chapter one). 17 i place emphasis on attending to what is obvious to those non-dominantly situated, because as standpoint epistemologists, among others, have argued, part of what it means to be dominantly situated is precisely to have the epistemic attention of those around you already directed at what you find obvious and to have no (or little) practical need to (re)direct your own attention to what is obvious to subordinated others. 18 i grant that it may be the case that not all thought experiments and appeals to the obvious are engaged in orientating work, but it seems clear that some cases at least are, and we would be foolish to eliminate this kind of work from our philosophical toolbox. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 to expand and new areas of investigation to be followed, such as new debates about and new models for understanding the nature of justification to emerge. if some of the cases considered by experimental philosophers are indeed engaged in orientating and not procedural knowledge work, then the fact that there might be fluctuation in how these cases are understood is not only unproblematic, but perhaps even to be expected; it can be quite difficult to get another to see a very specific aspect of a concept, which would be made even more difficult by excising the example from the context within which it is offered to a reader. still, there is something further to be noticed here that should be of concern to feminist philosophers, and that is the desire to eliminate claims taken (by some, but perhaps not yet others) as obvious. attempting to eliminate what one takes to be obvious or salient from one’s thinking is akin to attempting to eliminate the context of discovery from one’s investigations of the world. moreover, it is akin to attempting to eliminate the very knower from the activity of knowing, a favorite pastime of analytic philosophy, but nonetheless a self-defeating and epistemically harmful project. 19 in this regard, weinberg, et al., are not really engaged in anything new. instead of actually eliminating the knower and/or the context of discovery within which certain aspects of the world are more salient than others, eliminating any and all discussion of what one takes to be obvious simply removes these matters from philosophical scrutiny. what we need here is not less self-reflexivity, but more. in other words, philosophers ought to scrutinize ourselves and the epistemic communities that sustain our knowing to discern whose interests are being served and whose are not by the particular orientations we inhabit that make some things obvious to us while making others less so. for example, one could argue that the fixation on propositional knowing in academic philosophy has left other important types of knowing such as knowing persons seriously under-theorized (code 1993). one might, furthermore, wonder what aspects of our lives might become more obvious if philosophical attention to the activity of knowing persons were as fine grained as attention toward propositional knowing and the nature of justification. whose interests might be more adequately served? whose interests might not? iv. attending to philosophy’s “demographic challenges” this approach, however, is not the one recommended by wesley buckwalter and stephen stich in their essay “gender and philosophical intuition.” as stated 19 self-defeating insofar as knowing requires a knower, harmful insofar as more often than not the “invisible” knower standing in for “knowing in general” is the knower who is dominantly situated in the world, rendering those nondominantly situated as less than ideal knowers. 13 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 above, the negative version of experimental philosophy depends upon differences and fluctuations in intuitions precisely in order to argue that such intuitions should be excised from philosophy. in “gender and philosophical intuition,” buckwalter and stich set out to find differences in intuitions along lines of gender and then imagine for their readers “the predicament of a young woman in a philosophy class” (buckwalter and stich 2014, 332) who does not share the same intuitions as her male classmates and professor. following their own intuitions on this imagined predicament, buckwalter and stich write that “it is plausible [obvious?] to suppose that some women facing this predicament will be puzzled or confused or uncomfortable or angry or just plain bored…[and some] may become convinced that they aren’t any good at philosophy” (333). buckwalter and stich do not indicate that they consulted any female undergraduates to support their intuitions in constructing this imagined scenario, although they do take care to say that they do not mean to present it in any scientific way (331). still, one wonders why buckwalter and stich saw fit to include such speculation in their paper without testing to see how female undergraduates actually experience their first philosophy class and why two white male professors would feel entitled to imagine what the experiences of female undergraduates must (or even could) be like without actually asking any female undergraduates this question. 20 nonetheless, it is on this basis that they suggest that philosophical education should not rely so heavily on philosophical intuitions and thought experiments (338), thereby forwarding the agenda of the negative approach to experimental philosophy to turn to strictly empirical methods for investigating philosophical questions. of course, this is not the only response one can have to finding apparent differences in philosophical intuitions. instead, one might conclude that it is absolutely imperative to diversify philosophical communities so as to widen the scope of what philosophers find obvious thereby broadening philosophical attention to our shared world. it is here that we can most clearly discern two ways of responding to (apparent) differences in intuitions, one of which is rightly akin to carol gilligan’s (1982) concern for different voices, while the other is not. 20 in contrast, eva cadavid and w. david hall have been conducting their own experiments to determine undergraduate perceptions of their philosophy classes, to see whether perceptions confirm buckwalter and stich’s speculations or are more consistent with the thesis that stereotypes about philosophy result in a schema clash for women, as speculated by haslanger (2008), calhoun (2009), and antony (2012). preliminary results indicate that student perceptions are in line with the latter, but not the former (cadavid et al. 2014). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 recall that gilligan’s study on moral development was not a study seeking to establish that women made judgments different from men’s judgments. rather, gilligan’s study was an attempt to make sense of data already gathered using lawrence kohlberg’s scale that suggested there was a statistically significant difference in moral judgments between women and men. in other words, kohlberg’s scale appeared to show a difference and gilligan wanted to know why. moreover, she wanted to know how women made sense of their judgments, not what caused them to make one judgment rather than another. here, we might say gilligan was concerned with women not as objects moved by psychological processes, but as moral agents, capable of making sense of their own judgments. consequently, she conducted qualitative experiments to see whether the instrument being used to chart differences might contain an unhelpful bias resulting in misleading data. by examining the larger narratives within which the women she interviewed made sense of their judgments, gilligan argued that kohlberg’s scale was indeed biased and that we could make sense of differences in moral judgments with recourse, not to gender, but rather to different sets of concerns guiding the different judgments. paying attention to and seriously grappling with these different sets of concerns, carol gilligan and subsequent theorists from a variety of disciplines explicitly articulated a way of thinking about moral situations that can be employed (or rejected) by anyone, regardless of gender. this kind of work significantly expanded philosophical attention to our moral lives in important ways. here, then, is where antony is wrong to align buckwalter and stich not only with gilligan, but also with philosophers such as lorraine code, linda alcoff, iris young, and alison jaggar. these philosophers do not advocate eliminating from philosophy all claims found to be obvious to some but not others, nor do they claim that women have innate intuitions that make them different from men. on the contrary, they argue that differences in social location might make some things appear more obvious to women, but that these things can be made more obvious to men, and they ought to be made more obvious to all philosophers. moreover, they engage in the difficult task of developing concepts for making what is not yet obvious to some more so, and they demonstrate how philosophical thinking that begins from a different set of concerns can bring into focus whole aspects of the world previously unnoticed or disregarded by philosophers. this kind of work can be seen as enriching our epistemic, moral, and political lives generally speaking, by expanding philosophical attention to more aspects of the world. however, this is not at all how the negative version of experimental philosophy is oriented. the real analogy to negative-version experimental philosophy’s use of apparent differences would be if kohlberg and gilligan had noticed differences in moral judgments and concluded that we ought not to discuss 15 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 morality or think about morality in any sustained way, since the data showed that there is not universal agreement in moral judgments, or that we ought to conduct more experiments to see what might cause people to respond one way and not another. however, locating causes does not tell us how one ought to respond to the world (unless of course one is relying on an unstated intuition assumed to be shared with one’s audience and “obvious” to the writer). nor does it engage with knowers as epistemic agents capable of noticing things about the world and expanding others’ attention to the world in ways that might make what is salient, of interest, and obvious to one person more obvious to another. using differences and fluctuations in what is found to be obvious to argue that we ought not to consider what some do take to be obvious is not “listening” to different voices, but rather wielding them in ways that preclude the difficult work of understanding intuitions that are not (or not yet) shared and the work of developing epistemic resources that answer to a wider range of the experienced world. v. what’s obvious and what is not within positive experimental approaches while the negative version of experimental philosophy ironically relies upon the unsupported intuition that differences in intuitions mean we ought to excise intuitions from philosophy altogether, the positive version seems more promising. for example, joshua knobe and shaun nichols go to great lengths in the introduction to their first volume of experimental philosophy to assure readers that “we are not going to give up all other forms of thought” (knobe and nichols 2008, 10), that no one “is suggesting that . . . we do away with any of the methods . . . traditionally . . . used” (10), and that “experimental philosophers are calling for a more pluralistic approach” (12). while i am somewhat more sympathetic to the positive projects, i have worries about them, too, which i will discuss briefly in terms of what is “obvious,” what is not, and what something’s being obvious (or not) might indicate about the epistemic communities that sustain such projects. knobe and nichols categorize experimental philosophy as being engaged, generally speaking, with three types of projects. the first set they describe are projects that inquire into the causes of belief, something they note that was of great interest to philosophers of the past such as marx, nietzsche, and feurbach, but then something strange happened. although arguments of this basic type [about things like the impact of religion, tradition, and ideology on our epistemic lives] had traditionally been regarded as extremely important, they came to occupy a far less significant role in the distinctive form of philosophy that rose in the 20 th century . . . leading to a diminished interest in questions about, for example, the fundamental sources of religious faith 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 and a heightened interest in more technical questions. (knobe and nichols 2008) this shift strikes knobe and nichols as “a somewhat peculiar one” (7). however, this shift is only peculiar if one ignores the larger socio-historical context and institutions within which this shift took place, something to which a marxist or nietzschean genealogical approach would certainly attend. so what strikes me as more peculiar is that knobe and nichols seem unaware of, or at the very least do not see fit to mention, the possibility that pursuing projects even remotely linked to marx might have been a difficult, even dangerous, endeavor for one who wished to keep an academic job in the united states in the 1950s. also strikingly peculiar is that knobe and nichols seem unaware of (or again simply fail to mention) a rich critical tradition of investigating the sources of belief that flourished within philosophy during the 20 th century, not only in the work of such figures as hannah arendt, simone de beauvoir, frantz fanon, and michel foucault, but also among u.s.-born thinkers within feminist and critical race philosophical traditions, such as angela davis, alain locke, and grace lee boggs. why experimental philosophers, to my knowledge, have not seriously engaged with philosophical work written within the intellectual traditions of non-white, nonmale philosophers concerning questions about what “we” do and do not know, what does and does not circulate as “common knowledge,” remains an open question. however, to proceed as if this work does not exist by characterizing a concern with questions about the sources of belief as something absent from philosophy “since the 19 th century” contributes to a picture of philosophy that perpetuates a kind of epistemic injustice. at the very least, the illusion of “newness” hinges on disregarding, or remaining ignorant of, whole traditions of thought while granting epistemic authority to define the discipline of philosophy to persons who, for the most part, happen to be white and male. this leads to the second set of projects knobe and nichols outline: projects interested in doxastic diversity. here the authors note that “at the turn of the century anthropologists provided a catalog of . . . striking cultural diversity . . . such diversity . . . was an important catalyst to philosophical reflection” (11). what they fail to note, however, is that doxastic and practical diversity was also a catalyst for european philosophers’ arguments that non-europeans were not human or lacked history or true moral understanding. this kind of thinking, particularly in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, was not limited to “armchair” thinking, but infiltrated scientific pursuits as well. 21 the problem here was neither the presence of armchairs nor the absence of lab coats, but rather with how people were, and continue to be, 21 see for example gould (1981). 17 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 organized in relation to them. in our current context, if “we” take the view that the only way the meaning of concepts can be engaged is to collect data about how people respond to “yes or no” questions, then women and people of color can be relegated to data sets for white men to discuss, preventing epistemic engagement with aspects of the lived world that might unsettle dominant interests. in other words, those in the discipline of philosophy stand to learn a great deal by following the intuitions of philosophers from traditionally under-represented groups, particularly when those intuitions are not at first shared. this is, of course, easier said than done. one of sara ahmed’s interests in calling attention to the ways in which attention to the world is orientated is to identify and examine how it can be coercively orientated, making it difficult to call attention to that which unsettles historically and institutionally dominant interests. in such cases, reorienting oneself might require some knowers to “unlearn” habits of epistemic hubris that make it seem as though we could dispense with the friction provided by other knowers in order to know the world well. 22 i suspect a concern with precisely this kind of hubris might drive the impulse (in some at least) to “burn the armchair.” but to replace the armchair with a lab coat does not rid us of the hubris that resided in the thinker to begin with. instead, knowing well (and without hubris) might hinge upon an ability to become disoriented and reoriented in the world by a wide range of lives. such reorientation would require not data sets, since data sets do not instruct us on how to understand or be oriented toward them, but rather the creation, use, and maintenance of concepts honed on and developed by a wide range of bodies, not all socially located in the same position. and this would require, among other things, more diversity in philosophy departments and more serious, wide-spread engagement with work by (and not just “about”) members of groups previously excluded from the discipline—especially work that is disorienting to and reorients those dominantly situated. notice, however, that maintaining that one can excise all intuitions so as to approach the world, not from a perspective, but from an everywhere (or nowhere), removes from consideration and scrutiny the question of how one’s approach is directed to some parts of the world and not others. moreover, approaching the world by proceeding down a particular path as though it were the only path available can be a way of coercively requiring others to be on a page shaped by particular interests to the exclusion of others. 22 here i follow josé medina (2013) in advocating the importance of productive resistance from other knowers, differently situated in the world, for knowing the world well. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 ahmed calls these kinds of maneuvers “straightening devices” (ahmed 2006, 92). i worry that experimental philosophy may, perhaps inadvertently, be a straightening device, still engaged in organizing the world according to concepts that were and continue to be honed, for the most part, on the bodies of white men. furthermore, i am concerned that relegating non-white, non-male people to comparative sets of statistical data may be just one more way of deflecting attention away from the world as it actually matters and materializes in the interaction between non-dominantly situated subjects and their/our lived worlds. this issue is one that can be seen operating in the third set of projects catalogued by knobe and nichols, which they characterize as being concerned with “the mind and its workings.” using my distinction between two types of knowledge work (orientating and procedural) there are at least two ways in which one can understand the question, “what is a mind and how do minds work?” one is to understand the question as concerning an uncharted section of a path we are already on, the other is to understand the question as concerning where the path is. knobe and nichols appear to be doing the former, where minds are identified as discrete objects somehow lodged inside the heads of individuals whose causal properties can be discerned by observing behavioral responses to surveys. but thinking that this is the only way to consider what minds are is to preclude consideration of what we ought to be regarding when we ask the question “what is a mind?” the likelihood that one will neglect this distinction seems high for persons who think they are not engaging intuitions in their knowledge pursuits. coupled with social power and a sense that one’s own experienced world is all the world there is might lead to “quizzical stares” as opposed to a sense of wonderment concerning those aspects of the experienced world that cannot be understood without actually listening to and being epistemically moved by others. vi. listening to others returning to the question as to whether philosophy’s demographics ought to be framed in terms of antony’s perfect storm, buckwalter and stich’s different voices, or my own sense that we ought to be asking and listening to grandma about what she thinks, philosophers stand to learn a great deal not just by considering the causes of our demographics, but also the effects of them on our ability to know the world well. many of the omissions and problems i point out with knobe and nichols’ characterization of the projects of experimental philosophy, for example, might have been more noticeable to them if they were engaged more fully with feminist philosophers and other non-dominantly situated philosophers who are attempting to reorient philosophical attention so that it is shaped by a wider range of human experience. this kind of reorientation requires philosophers to engage with 19 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 philosophers from under-represented groups as epistemic agents, not as objects of study. among the reasons why antony’s concern with such things as implicit bias, gender scripts, and stereotype threat is important is that these mechanisms are ways of suppressing the epistemic agency of members of traditionally underrepresented groups. when one is dealing with an unwarranted credibility deficit it is that much more difficult to call epistemic attention to whole areas of human experiencing that are systematically ignored and/or “not obvious” to some but perfectly obvious to others who are similarly subjected to unwarranted deficits in credibility attributions. while i agree with antony that the “different voices” approach advocated by buckwalter and stich may indeed exacerbate the situation, making it seem as though there are unbreachable and “natural” epistemic chasms in how men and women intuit the world, i do not share the intuition that theirs is the only way to understand or to approach possible differences in intuitions. moreover, i do not think antony is correct to align buckwalter and stich’s treatment of apparent “differences” with feminist work that takes differences in social positioning seriously. instead, a good deal of feminist work that takes differences seriously does so with the understanding that while one’s situatedness in the world can indeed make some things appear more obvious, part of the work that epistemic agents can do is to call others’ attention to different aspects of the world, making them more obvious to others. this is no easy task, particularly when philosophers posit the matter of something’s being obvious as either simply “how things are” or, if not this, then something we ought to disregard altogether or investigate solely in terms of causal mechanisms acting on discrete individuals. instead, the obvious may very well be something that it takes work to notice, 23 and it is work that can only be done by engaging with other epistemic agents who find these aspects of the world to be so. to take seriously and attempt to engage the world in ways that are informed by what others find obvious is to engage with those others as epistemic agents capable of orientating one’s epistemic attention to the world. this kind of engagement does require philosophers to deal with the perfect storms that suppress women’s epistemic agency, but it also requires engaging with philosophers from underrepresented groups as epistemic agents, particularly with regard to what they/we find obvious and others do not, reorienting philosophical attention so that new things may appear more obvious than they did before. 23 for an analysis of one way in which it might require a good deal of work to notice the obvious as well as one particular way of systematically avoiding what is obvious to non-dominantly situated subjects, see pohlhaus (2012). 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 attending to the world well and in ways that are epistemically informed by others is complex business. this much i hope to have made at least a little more obvious to some. moreover, seriously expanding philosophical attention to our lived world requires philosophers to look for and to pursue equitable philosophical engagement at places where there are differences in what appears obvious and what does not. given social relations of dominance and subordination, this type of work is and will continue to be difficult. nonetheless, it is work that many nondominantly situated thinkers have been pursuing for quite some time, since it is work we must do in order to live. grandmothers may very well be worth asking and listening to, precisely because they may bring different epistemic resources to the conversation, and in so doing enrich the field of knowing. acknowledgements i would like to thank my grandmother, marjorie (mckeough) benson, for encouraging me, through her example, to cultivate a life of intellectual curiosity and precision of thought. references adleberg, toni, morgan thompson, and eddy nahmias. 2014. “do men and women have different philosophical intuitions? further data.” philosophical psychology. doi:10.1080/09515089.2013.878834. ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, n.c.: duke university press. alexander, joshua, and jonathan weinberg. 2007. “analytic epistemology and experimental philosophy.” philosophy compass 2: 56-80. antony, louise. 2012. “different voices or perfect storm: why are there so few women in philosophy?” journal of social philosophy 43(3): 227-255. baier, annette. 1985. “cartesian persons.” in postures of the mind: essays on mind and morals. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. buckwalter, wesley, and stephen stich. 2014. “gender and philosophical intuition.” in experimental philosophy volume 2, edited by j. knobe and s. nichols. new york: oxford university press. cadavid, eva, w. david hall, allyson scott, and sidney (katie) rodgers. 2014. “inclusiveness and the pipeline problem: working to close the gender gap in philosophy.” paper presented at the annual meeting of the u.s. midwest society for women in philosophy, des moines, iowa, october 10-12. calhoun, cheshire. 2009. “the undergraduate pipeline problem.” hypatia 24(2) 216223. 21 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 campbell, sue. 2014. our faithfulness to the past: the ethics and politics of memory. edited by c. m. koggel and r. jacobsen. new york: oxford university press. ___. 2003. relational remembering: rethinking the memory wars. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. code, lorraine. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. new york: oxford university press. ___. 1995. rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations. new york: routledge. ___. 1993. “taking subjectivity into account.” in feminist epistemologies, edited by l. alcoff and e. potter. new york: routledge. ___. 1991. what can she know?: feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. collins, patricia hill. 2008. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236-257. gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice. cambridge: harvard university press. gould, stephen jay. 1981. the mismeasure of man. new york: ww norton and company press. haslanger, sally. 2008. “changing the ideology and culture of philosophy.” hypatia 23 (2): 210-223. heyes, cressida. 2007. self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. new york: oxford university press. kauppinen, anniti. 2014. “the rise and fall of experimental philosophy.” in experimental philosophy volume 2, edited by j. knobe and s. nichols. new york: oxford university press. kim, minsun, and yuan yuan. forthcoming. “no cross-cultural differences in gettier car case intuition: a replication study of weinberg et al. 2001.” episteme. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: oxford university press. knobe, joshua, and shaun nichols. 2008. “an experimental philosophy manifesto.” in experimental philosophy volume 1, edited by j. knobe and s. nichols. new york: oxford university press. lugones, maría. 2003. pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. mackenzie, catriona and natalie stoljar, eds. 2000. relational autonomy: feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self. new york: oxford university press. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. new york: oxford university press. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.1.3 meyers, diana tietjens, ed. feminists rethink the self. boulder, co: westview press. nagel, jennifer, valerie san juan, and raymond a. mar. 2013. “lay denial of knowledge for justified true beliefs.” cognition 129(3): 652-61. narayan, uma. 1988. “working together across difference.” hypatia 3 (2): 31-47. owen, david. 2003. “genealogy as perspicuous representation.” in the grammar of politics, edited by c. heyes. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27(4): 715-735. schwartzman, lisa. 2012. “intuition, thought experiments, and philosophical method: feminism and experimental philosophy.” journal of social philosophy 43 (3): 307-316. seyedsayamdost, hamid. 2014. “on gender and philosophical intuition: failure of replication and other negative results.” philosophical psychology. doi:10.1080/09515089.2014.893288. ___. 2012. “on normativity and epistemic intuitions: failure to detect differences between ethnic groups.” available at ssrn 2168530. weinberg, jonathan, shaun nichols, and stephen stich. 2008. “normativity and epistemic intuitions.” in experimental philosophy volume 1, edited by j. knobe and s. nichols. new york: oxford university press. young, iris. 1997. “asymmetrical reciprocity: on moral respect, wonder, and enlarged thought.” constellations 3(3): 340-363. gaile pohlhaus jr. is an associate professor of philosophy and an affiliate of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at miami university (ohio). her areas of research are feminist philosophy, social/political epistemology, and the later wittgenstein. she has published essays in hypatia, social epistemology, social philosophy today, and political theory. currently she is working on questions concerning the relationship between epistemic agency, epistemic interdependence, and epistemic injustice. 23 pohlhaus: different voices perfect storms & asking grandma what she thinks published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 different voices, perfect storms, and asking grandma what she thinks: situating experimental philosophy in relation to feminist philosophy gaile pohlhaus jr. recommended citation microsoft word 451792-convertdoc.input.439266.mi8tg.docx care workers on strike feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 1 article 1 recommended citation huget, hailey. 2020. “care workers on strike.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (1). article 1. 2020 care workers on strike hailey huget georgetown university heh26@georgetown.edu huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 care workers on strike1 hailey huget abstract this paper investigates a moral conflict that care workers, defined as workers who care for dependent others, confront when they go on strike. care workers who confront decisions about whether to go on strike are, in my analysis, caught between impossible options: should they prioritize the needs of those who are currently dependent upon them, and forego striking, or prioritize their long-term ability to provide the best possible care, and partake in strikes? i argue that care workers who confront these decisions are often caught in a tragic moral conflict where “moral failure” is inevitable. however, i argue that we should place blame for said moral failures not upon striking care workers themselves but upon employers and others responsible for creating the decision contexts in which care workers must morally fail. i also argue that those responsible for creating the decision contexts in which care workers must morally fail are guilty of various moral and material harms to care workers. keywords: moral failure, moral conflict, care work, labor, unions, strikes after a long period of declining strike activity in the us, the tactic is once again showing signs of life. teachers from every county in west virginia went on strike for close to two weeks in march 2018, completely shutting down the state’s public education facilities. the strike was so successful in convincing the state government to cede to teachers’ demands that teachers throughout the country— including teachers in oklahoma, arizona, north carolina, and colorado—followed suit, launching strikes of their own under the banner of the “red for ed” movement (mcalevey 2018a, 2018b). in a different sector, nurses at tufts medical center as 1 i would like to thank matthew shields, karen rice, michael barnes, daniel threet, olúfẹmi táíwò, and mark lance for thoughtful comments and feedback on this paper. i am also grateful for feedback from attendees at the 2018 care ethics and research consortium conference and the society for analytical feminism session at the 2019 eastern apa meeting. finally, i am indebted to feedback from anonymous reviewers for feminist philosophy quarterly. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 well as at baystate franklin medical center went on strike in 2017 (mcalevey 2017). in summer 2018, hundreds of nurses went on strike at university of vermont medical center (d’ambrosio 2018). in 2015, 2,600 mental health professionals employed by kaiser permanente went on strike for over a week (papazian 2015). a fascinating feature of the strikes2 just mentioned is that they all involve care workers. many care workers, including ones involved in the strikes referenced above, go on strike for reasons related to their roles as carers—claiming that improvements to their pay, benefits, and working conditions will enable them to provide the highest possible quality of care.3 because empirical research supports the claim that substandard working conditions do in fact undermine the quality of certain types of care work (mchugh et al. 2011), as well as the claim that strikes succeed in improving pay, benefits, and working conditions (burns 2011; mcalevey 2016), the decision to go on strike as a means of improving quality of care seems reasonable. however, when care workers strike, they confront a moral conflict that striking workers in other sectors do not typically face. when workers at an auto factory go on strike, the primary consequence is that they undermine their employer’s ability to make a profit. by contrast, through striking, care workers deliberately abandon their role-based obligations to provide care to specific individuals who are dependent on them. care workers are then caught in a moral conflict: should they prioritize the immediate care needs of those who are currently dependent upon them, and forego striking, or prioritize their long-term ability to provide better care, and partake in strikes? care workers thus face a unique moral conflict that this paper aims to illuminate. i argue that care workers who face decisions about whether or not to strike are often caught in a moral conflict where they must choose between impossible options.4 care workers who confront this conflict often experience feelings of “moral failure”—and attendant moral emotions such as regret, shame, or guilt—whether they choose to go on strike or not. 2 not all of these actions were labeled by workers as “strikes,” though they fit that description. in some cases, workers chose instead to describe their actions as “walkouts,” because of legal consequences to striking in their areas; see white (2018). 3 this is evidenced by the frequent use of slogans like “teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions,” or the parallel, “nurses’/social workers’/therapists’ working conditions are patients’ healing conditions.” see, e.g. west (2018). 4 to be clear, performing each leg of the conflict is possible; what is impossible is doing both actions (striking and not striking) simultaneously. huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 while philosophers have addressed this issue insofar as it applies to strikes by a specific subtype of care workers—particularly health-care workers like doctors and nurses5—this paper differs from that body of work in two ways. first, it aims to extend some of the observations of that literature: i argue that the conflict nurses face when considering whether to strike generalizes to other forms of care work. second, even within the literature that highlights practical conflicts that health-care workers face when considering whether to go on strike, existing discussions do not center the moral emotions that striking workers themselves experience as they confront this conflict. taking up a perspective that centers the moral experience of striking care workers has the following advantages. one is that it allows us to see that when there are broad institutional failures in the social provision of education, health care, and so on, failing institutions often force care workers into situations where they must morally fail. this is a form of harm to care workers, as i will argue. another is that taking up the perspective of striking care workers allows us to see how the existence of this conflict shapes and constrains the tactics that care workers employ when going on strike—in both a prudential and moral sense. section i defines care work and draws some distinctions that will be important for the subsequent discussion. section ii discusses the ways in which care workers experience decisions about whether or not to strike, highlighting the conflicting moral emotions often involved. section iii argues that we can best make sense of these emotional responses through an analysis that sees care workers as confronting a moral conflict. section iv illustrates how the existence of this conflict constrains the range of tactics that care workers employ when engaging in strike activity. section v articulates what i take to be the primary upshot of this discussion: we should place blame for these moral failures squarely upon the shoulders of employers and other powerbrokers who make up institutions of care provision, rather than upon striking care workers. the final section raises some complications for the account that i have provided and poses some additional questions for future work on the subject. i. care work: definitions and distinctions for purposes of this paper, “care workers” are those who are responsible for caring for dependent others. one is dependent upon others if one must “rely on the care of other individuals to access, provide or secure (one or more of) one’s needs, and promote and support the development of one’s autonomy or agency” (dodds 2014, 183).6 5 neiman 2011; tabak and wagner 1997. 6 some authors employ broader definitions of care work, such as this one by england, budig, and folbre (2002): care work consists in providing “a face-to-face feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 the people who perform care work so defined include many people who are paid for it as well as many people who are not. professions where people are typically paid to perform care work include teachers, nurses, childcare workers, eldercare workers, therapists, and social workers, among others. roles where people are not typically paid to perform care work include parenting and childrearing as well as care for elderly, disabled, or sick family members. whether they are paid or unpaid, care workers are usually women. for example, 77% of public school teachers in the us are women (nces 2019). some data suggest that about 90% of registered nurses (rns) in the us are women; an even higher percentage (about 93%) of licensed practical nurses (lpns) are women. women of color in particular comprise the largest demographic group within the home-care workforce (newkirk 2016). the family caregiver alliance (2019) estimates that “upwards of 75%” of all unpaid caregivers are women, and that women “may spend as much as 50% more time providing care than males.” i focus on strikes by paid care workers in what follows, because strikes by paid workers offer clearer examples of the conflict that i mean to elucidate.7 developing an account of how the moral conflict described below applies to unpaid care work is a fascinating subject that is beyond the scope of this paper. that said, i will return briefly to the subject of unpaid care work—insofar as it interacts with paid care work—in the final section. ii. experiences of care workers on strike care workers who face decisions about whether or not to go on strike often confront complex moral emotions in the process, in which they feel caught between impossible options. they describe the status quo as intolerable and as creating service that develops the human capabilities of the recipient” and where “human capabilities” include “physical and mental health, physical skills, cognitive skills, and emotional skills.” care work thusly defined will include many professions which do not involve caring for dependent individuals: piano teachers, personal trainers, etc. if one prefers this broader definition, then the rest of my argument will apply only to the subclass of care workers whose roles consist in caring for dependent others. 7 furthermore, even though i take the broad shape of what i say to apply to strikes by unpaid care workers, some of the terms that i use in my discussion do not translate easily from the paid context to the unpaid context. for example, in section iv, i refer to “employers” and their responsibilities for creating conditions where care workers must experience moral failure. those observations will not apply in the same way to many unpaid care workers, because unpaid care workers typically do not have “employers” in a straightforward sense. huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 conditions which make it difficult or even impossible to do their jobs well. as one social worker wrote of her working conditions: the problems we are asked to confront often feel insurmountable. how are we supposed to work with someone with decades of chronic, complex trauma without the pay and support we need? we got into this field to help people, but that is impossible when we have to wait a month after their initial appointment to bring in a traumatized client. (west 2018) nurses describe working conditions in which they have many more patients than they can adequately care for: i’m routinely seeing more patients than i can really manage, and i don’t have time to get back to them. i have a colleague who works in an office where they have a position that’s sat open for two years, so she’s been working 50-, 60-hour weeks and also can’t ever get back to patients in a timely fashion about their results. so it just leaves us feeling incredibly nervous that patients are going to die or that something really bad will happen. (adie 2018a) however, even when they come to believe that going on strike can be a powerful remedy for these problems, care workers also acknowledge feelings of regret, failure, and concern about strike action. as one striking nurse at university of vermont medical center described it, she and her fellow strikers had “sincere and deep concerns about leaving our patients in the care of scab nurses,” but despite that “entire units joined each other on the picket lines” because “the majority of nurses . . . were angry about our working conditions” (adie 2018b). echoing a similar sentiment, a student in west virginia—who organized many of her fellow students to show up and support teachers on the picket line—described her reasons as follows: our teachers do so much for us and we know that a lot of them felt down during the strike, like they were failing us by not being in class. we wanted to show that we supported them—and we wanted to fire them back up. (blanc 2019, 79–80) these feelings of failing the students, patients, and others, while striking are common. they seem to become particularly prevalent, however, when something bad happens to a student or patient during a strike. for example, when nurses at an oakland, california, hospital went on strike in 2011, a patient tragically died due to a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 medical error committed by a scab nurse. a local news outlet reported that nurses responded with “a mixture of anger and sadness” following the patient’s death (colliver and bulwa 2011). one nurse remarked, “i might go to work and we’ll all start crying. . . . i know i’ll get over it and it will make me stronger, and i’ll fight even more for our patients” (colliver and bulwa 2011). another nurse at the same hospital said, “nurses do not come into this profession to strike. . . . we’re here because we want to provide safe patient care, but our employer leaves us no choice other than to strike as a last resort” (colliver and bulwa 2011). what unifies these different accounts is the sense of being caught between impossible options—of having no choice but to do something they take to be wrong, either by not striking (and thus allowing an intolerable status quo to continue) or by striking and “abandoning” those in their care.8 how should we evaluate these feelings of moral conflict? one response would have us dismiss them—provided it is the case that one can make an allthings-considered judgment that one course of action is the right thing to do. in other words, if choosing to strike is better for more people in the long term than choosing not to do so, it seems clear that going on strike is the right thing to do. therefore, a striking nurse should dismiss feelings of guilt, failure, or regret she may have about the path not chosen. this response would have us rid ourselves of “moral remainder”—the residue of emotions that lingers in the aftermath of choosing one particular path in a moral conflict (tessman 2017, 45)—provided we choose the all-things-considered correct path. this approach sees moral remainders as misguided, unwarranted, or irrational. 8 one certified nursing assistant who formerly worked at a nursing home describes acute feelings of moral conflict simply around the question of whether or not to take fifteen-minute breaks (to which cnas are legally entitled) twice a day. though not specifically about striking, it is relevant to our subject because it involves moral conflict surrounding a stoppage of care work. it is easy to imagine how this feeling of conflict would be heightened if the author engaged in strike action: our bodies’ need for a short break, one that rejuvenates us to be more patient, more clear-headed, and less susceptible to careless mistakes was pitted against our residents’ immediate bodily needs. this was our daily moral dilemma. having to weigh this dilemma every day was mentally exhausting. either choice we made, we blocked out something deeply human—either our care for our own bodies, or our care for others’. it shouldn’t be so hard, not like this. not just so our callous bosses can hike their paychecks by saving on staffing, at our expense. (jomo 2012) huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 one advantage of this kind of approach from a pro-labor perspective is that it provides a powerful way to undermine a common attack that care workers encounter when striking. often employers and other powerbrokers blame care workers for striking, on grounds that they are “abandoning” those for whom they care. for example, former kentucky governor matt bevin responded to a statewide teacher strike by claiming that the teachers were responsible for putting their students in danger of sexual assault (darby 2018). an op-ed which ran before the arizona teacher’s strike called the planned action a “war against parents,” because parents were “begging friends and family to watch their kids” and “worrying if they’ll be able to afford” daycare during the strike (quoted in blanc 2019, 46). us education secretary betsy devos condemned striking teachers in oklahoma by suggesting that teachers were putting their own interests above students’, saying, “i think we need to stay focused on what’s right for kids. and i hope that adults would keep adult disagreements and disputes in a separate place, and serve the students that are there to be served” (balingit 2018). in a similar vein, referring to teachers and nurses who go on strike as “greedy” and fundamentally self-interested is common (furman 2018). a spokesperson for tufts university hospital, for example, accused striking nurses of seeking to “harm our great medical center” and patients (lafratta 2017). if we want to say that such criticisms of care worker strikes are unwarranted (as i do), one way to do so would be to categorically deny that striking care workers are doing anything bad or wrong. striking is the all-thingsconsidered best option for students, patients, and so forth, so these claims from employers and others do not hold water. but what if we could take care workers’ complex tangle of emotions about striking seriously—understanding these emotions as reasonable responses to the existence of conflicting moral reasons—without also giving ammunition to antiunion employers and politicians? if such a move is possible, i think that we should pursue it. one reason is that it allows us to avoid condescending to care workers who experience moral remainders; we do not have to maintain that these emotions are irrational or that care workers who regret striking (or not striking) are fundamentally confused. but i think there are additional benefits to this approach. as i will argue in section v, it allows us to more fully comprehend the emotional toll taken upon care workers when they are forced to make choices between intolerable options. it also, as i’ll argue in section iv, provides a better framework for understanding the decisions care workers themselves make when engaging in strike actions. this alternative approach is still compatible with believing that, in many circumstances, care workers do make all-things-considered correct choices when they choose to go on strike. however, my approach differs from the dismissive feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 approach above by avoiding the verdict that care workers’ moral remainders are irrational.9 iii. the moral conflict an agent faces a moral conflict when she has moral reasons to do (or not to do) two different actions, but where doing (or not doing) both actions is impossible.10 given this definition, showing that care workers confront a moral conflict when they face decisions about whether to go on strike requires me to show that they have moral reasons to go on strike and not to go on strike. there are two types of moral reasons that are relevant to this discussion: moral reasons that arise from general moral obligations and moral reasons that arise from specific roles that agents occupy. one might have moral reasons to perform or to not perform some action because the action straightforwardly violates a general moral obligation or is morally required. one has moral reasons not to kill another human being, for example, because doing so would violate a general moral obligation. but one might also have moral reasons to perform or not to perform some action because of a specific role that they occupy. for example, a parent plausibly has special moral reasons, vis-à-vis that role, to provide for their own children which they do not have toward children who are not their own. moral conflicts can arise when general moral reasons and role-based moral reasons recommend conflicting courses of action. but they can also arise when general moral reasons conflict with one other and when role-based moral reasons conflict with one other. an example of a conflict that arises when general moral reasons conflict with role-based moral reasons occurs in the novel les misérables, where jean valjean must decide between stealing bread to feed his starving nephew or letting the nephew go hungry. there, he faces a conflict between violating a general moral obligation not to steal and falling short with respect to a role-based obligation to provide for his family. but moral conflicts do not only arise when 9 this is not to deny that dismissing feelings of guilt or regret might be the best and most prudent first-personal strategy for care workers on strike. for example, it might be difficult to put in long hours on the picket line if you are unable to put feelings of guilt and shame about striking from your mind. but this need not have any bearing upon the question of whether care workers’ emotional responses to striking are rational. in other words, having a prudential reason to manage your emotions in a certain way does not mean that the existence of those emotions is irrational or misguided. 10 this definition of moral conflicts is adapted from mcconnell (2018), who defines them as cases where “an agent regards herself as having moral reasons to do each of two actions, but doing both actions is not possible.” huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 general moral reasons conflict with role-based moral reasons; two general moral reasons can also conflict with each other, such as when an agent confronts a choice between killing someone or letting people die when such deaths are avoidable. this plausibly is a conflict between two general moral obligations to not kill others and to prevent harm when doing so is possible. there are also moral conflicts that arise from conflicts within the class of role-based moral reasons. these kinds of conflicts fall into two broad categories. one category is when role-related expectations from different roles may come into conflict, such as when someone who is a doctor and a parent can either spend more time caring for an extremely ill patient or attend her child’s parent-teacher conference, but not both. the second category is when the same role gives rise to moral reasons that recommend conflicting courses of action. for example, when medical professionals must make decisions about resource allocation that end up determining which patients live or die,11 they face a moral conflict that occurs within the singular role of “medical professional,” and not between different roles or between role obligations and general obligations. i think the conflict that striking care workers confront belongs to this final category: it is a conflict between different moral reasons that arise from within a single role (one’s paid care role). given the importance of role-based moral reasons to the overall discussion, i will focus in the next section on defining roles and explaining the connection between occupying a role and moral reasons. iii.a. roles and morality zheng (2018, 873) defines roles in the following way: social role: a social role r is a set of expectations e—predictive and normative—that apply to an individual p in virtue of a set of relationships p has with others (such that anyone standing in the same type of relationships as p occupies the same r), and where e is mutually maintained by p and others through a variety of sanctions. on zheng’s definition, ‘nurse’, ‘teacher’, ‘therapist’, ‘fire fighter’, ‘parent’, and ‘citizen’ are roles, insofar as these are all positions that are attached to certain expectations about how people who occupy them will and should behave. the normative and predictive expectations associated with these roles are also enforced through a variety of sanctions—ranging from legal punishment to interpersonal blame. these roles are often (though not necessarily) part of institutions like 11this occurred at certain hospitals in new orleans in the aftermath of hurricane katrina; see fink (2013). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 schools, governments, hospitals, and so forth.12 the role of us citizen, for example, is inextricably bound up with the institution of the us government; that government is a big part of what articulates the expectations for the role, as well as the sanctions for failing to meet some of those expectations. the normative and predictive expectations of any given role will, however, “never fully specify in complete detail exactly what the [role-]occupier is supposed to do” (zheng 2018, 874). as zheng observes, “performing a role . . . is an ongoing process of making infinitely many tiny decisions about how to perform it, thereby calibrating one’s behavior with another’s expectations and behavior at the same time that the other is calibrating their expectations and behavior with yours” (2018, 875). in making these decisions about how to discharge their social roles, agents are guided by their conception of the “role-ideal,” or their conception what makes a good nurse, teacher, citizen, parent, and so on. zheng defines role-ideals in the following way: role-ideal: for every social role r occupied by an individual p, a role-ideal is p’s interpretation of how she could best satisfy the expectations constituting r. (2018, 875) in this way, role-occupiers have “wiggle room” within the normative expectations that attach to their roles to enact their conceptions of the role-ideal. furthermore, because the obligations and expectations that attach to any given role are never fully specified, part of performing the role necessarily involves constructing, reflecting upon, and striving towards a role-ideal. as zheng helpfully puts it, constructing a role-ideal requires critical reflection on the purposes and aims of the role, how it might be modified to better achieve them, what auxiliary 12 crawford and ostrom write that “institutions are enduring regularities of human action in situations structured by rules, norms, and shared strategies, as well as by the physical world” (1995, 582). institutions are dynamic, insofar as “the rules, norms, and shared strategies are constituted and reconstituted by human interaction in frequently occurring or repetitive situations” (crawford and ostrom 1995, 582). likewise, hardimon claims that institutions include “rules that define offices and positions, which can be occupied by different individuals at different times” (1994, 335). he illustrates this by giving the example of hospitals, which “retain their identity across changes of health-care professionals, patients, and staff” (335). on these definitions, other examples of institutions would include police forces, schools, churches, businesses, and nation-states. huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 roles should be created or modified, and how to collaborate with others possessing similar aims. (2018, 878) part of being a good teacher or nurse will, then, involve critical reflection about what the role-ideal of “teacher” or “nurse” involves. while some roles have their role-ideals spelled out explicitly in the form of professional codes of ethics, those codes are subject to ongoing interpretation and revision as the expectations of the role and circumstances within which the role is enacted change. what is the connection between roles and moral reasons? philosophers who work on role morality often debate the kind of moral import that role-related expectations have (e.g., andre 1991). it’s easy to see, for example, how the normative and predictive expectations attached to certain roles do not always or necessarily give rise to moral reasons. this is because not all roles are moral roles. if your job is to torture innocents for an organized crime group, the demands of your role plausibly conflict with the demands of morality. so, a role like “torturer of innocents” will not give rise to moral reasons to fulfill the demands of the role. such roles may, however, give rise to moral reasons to construct and strive for a roleideal which consists in bringing about conditions where the role in question no longer exists (zheng 2018, 882). the various roles that care workers perform are of fairly clear moral importance, however, so these thorny questions about the relationship between roles and moral obligations have more straightforward answers. feminists have long drawn attention to the importance of care work for the very maintenance and continued functioning of society. that a sufficient number of individuals perform care work is essential for “social reproduction,” as nancy fraser and others have argued (e.g., dodds 2014, 195; kittay 1999). fraser writes that “birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally” is “indispensable to society” (2016, 99). without anyone performing this kind of work, “there could be no culture, no economy, no political organization” (99) because there would be no one to “produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings” (102). this leads fraser to conclude that “no society that systematically undermines social reproduction can endure for long” (99). i take this to be sufficient reason to consider many of the various roles care workers hold—teachers, nurses, therapists, social workers, and the like—to be of moral importance. this suggests that the obligations and reasons that come along with care workers’ roles do not give rise simply to role-related reasons but also to moral reasons that are acquired and discharged through roles. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 further, as zheng argues, the normative expectations associated with roles include expectations to perform the role well—to, in other words, cultivate a roleideal and strive to achieve it. it is part of being “a good college teacher” to ask, what course offerings are we missing? what trends are shaping higher education today, and what political and economic conditions are affecting my students’ ability to learn? what committees or local organizations should i serve on to address the problems i see? (2018, 878–879). but for morally important roles, like care roles, one not only has role-related reasons to strive toward a role-ideal but also has moral reasons to do so. this is because of the deep moral importance and social necessity of care work. iii.b. moral reasons to strike we’re now in a position to see how care workers, in certain contexts, have moral reasons to strike. part of what it is to occupy a role that consists in care work is to occupy the role well—to, in other words, critically reflect upon what one’s roleideal is and to attempt to achieve it. and while different care workers’ role-ideals may differ, there are certain structural and institutional barriers that can prevent carers within a given context from realizing any of their role-ideals. for example, institutional conditions like substandard pay, benefits, and working conditions plausibly prevent care workers from realizing their role-ideals, even where those role-ideals differ in some details.13 my contention is that care workers have compelling moral reasons to go on strike when institutional barriers prevent them from realizing their role-ideals. the moral reasons to go on strike plausibly become weightier along with the severity of the institutional failures in question. a teacher whose school is catastrophically under-resourced, causing teachers to fall far short of realizing their role-ideals, has a weightier moral reason to go on strike than a teacher whose school is well resourced and which provides conditions for teachers to more closely approximate their roleideals. this claim is compatible with the reasons care workers themselves give for going on strike: they want, among other things, institutional conditions that enable 13 care workers may also have duties of self-preservation that play an important part in grounding reasons to go on strike. because there is controversy over whether self-regarding duties truly count as “moral” rather than “prudential,” i omit them from discussion here. huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 them to provide better care.14 when chicago public schools teachers went on strike in 2012, one of their reasons for doing so was the fact that class sizes were too large—a feature of their working conditions which compromised their ability to serve students effectively (moran 2012). the more recent 2019 chicago teachers union strike was almost entirely about improving the institutional conditions in the chicago public schools district: teachers fought for the district to hire more support staff, like social workers, psychologists, and nurses; for smaller class sizes; and for other resources for students (burns 2019). one reason nurses at tufts medical center went on strike in 2017 were burdensome nurse-patient ratios that undermined their ability to give each patient sufficient attention (mcalevey 2017). when mental health professionals went on strike at kaiser permanente in 2015, the primary reason was that kaiser did not “staff its psychiatry departments with enough psychologists, therapists, social workers, and psychiatric nurses to treat the ever-growing number of patients seeking mental health care” (papazian 2015). this produced a staffing crisis where “patients in dire need” were forced “to endure lengthy and illegal waits for treatment,” which, in some cases, led to patient suicides (papazian 2015). a major motivation behind the wave of teacher strikes in the us in 2018 was inadequate funding for public education, which has resulted in crowded classrooms, crumbling facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and many other issues that compromised the quality of the education teachers were able to provide (denhoed 2018; mcalevey 2018a, 2018b). further, empirical evidence vindicates the claims of care workers who argue that improvements to their pay, benefits, and working conditions will result in improvements to care provision. a body of literature on teacher turnover shows that teachers leave schools because of poor working conditions (johnson and birkeland 2003; johnson 2006; allensworth, ponisciak, and mazzeo 2009; johnson, kraft, and papay 2012). high teacher turnover, in turn, has a demonstrably negative impact on students’ abilities to learn (allensworth, ponisciak, and mazzeo 2009; balu, béteille, and loeb 2009; guin 2004; ronfeldt, loeb, and wyckoff 2013). likewise, the quality of nurses’ working conditions—including the safety of the work environment, their pay and benefits, and nurse-patient ratios—has a direct impact 14 in a news analysis piece, journalist andrea denhoed (2018) writes the following about the 2018 statewide oklahoma teacher strike: every teacher i spoke to in the past week said the same thing: they were in it for the long haul, and “this is not about the raise. it’s about the kids.” they told stories of teaching from badly outdated textbooks, or turning to crowdfunding sites to purchase books for their students or furniture for their classrooms, of passing unprepared students on to the next grade because another overcrowded classroom of children would arrive in the fall. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 upon patient outcomes and the overall quality of care nurses are able to provide (institute of medicine 2004; mchugh et al. 2011; trinkoff et al. 2011). because evidence also supports the claim that strikes do in fact succeed in improving pay, benefits, and working conditions, the decision to go on strike as a means of improving quality of care in the long term seems eminently reasonable. zigarelli (1996) found that laws protecting teachers’ rights to strike were associated with improvements to their working conditions, like higher salaries. mcalevey (2016) and uetricht (2014) also argue that strikes are a potent weapon for improving pay, benefits, and working conditions, with a special focus on the 2012 chicago teachers union strike. in summary, care workers have moral reasons to strike when the institutions of which they are a part fail to provide conditions that enable them to enact their role-ideals and when care workers have reason to believe that striking will improve this state of affairs. i take these conditions to be met in the strikes i have primarily focused on here: the wave of teacher strikes at us public schools in 2018; the chicago teachers union strikes in 2012 and 2019; nurses’ strikes at baystate franklin medical center and tufts medical center in 2017; and the kaiser permanente strike of mental health providers in 2015. those strikes largely succeeded in bringing about the changes that care workers demanded and were linked to improvements in care provision (papazian 2015; mcalevey 2018a; uetricht 2014). iii.c. moral reasons not to strike the moral reasons that care workers have not to strike also stem from their roles within institutions of care provision. care workers have moral reasons not to strike because, as voluntary participants in institutions of care provision, they have incurred role-based obligations to specific individuals who are dependent on their care and whom they abandon in striking. the moral reasons not to go on strike may become weightier along with the extent of the dependency of those cared for. we can use dodds’s observations about care, dependency, and vulnerability to elucidate why care workers have moral reasons not to go on strike and why these reasons may become weightier along with the cared-for’s degree of dependence. while vulnerability, for dodds, is a general part of the human condition, “dependence is one form of vulnerability” that “requires the support of a specific person (or people)” (2014, 182). she continues, “the provision of personalized, reliable, and attentive care is particularly important in responding appropriately to those whose dependency is extensive (covering a wide scope of vulnerabilities) or enduring or intimate” (2014, 184). the relationship between care providers and those cared for is one of dependency, where those cared for rely upon specific individuals who have been tasked with caring for them. because strikes disrupt the provision of the “personalized, reliable, and attentive care” that dependent huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 individuals need, and which care workers have agreed to provide, we can see the decision to go on strike as violating these role-specific obligations to those for whom they care. we can feel the force of this by considering what happens to dependent individuals when their care providers go on strike. in most cases, those dependent on care either go without it or must adjust to receiving care from a temporary “scab” workforce. either scenario is unwelcome. when nurses go on strike, for example, hospitals frequently hire a scab workforce to ensure that patients continue to receive medical attention. nevertheless, the national bureau of economic research estimates that in-hospital mortality increases by 19.4 percent and hospital readmissions increases by 6.5 percent for patients admitted during a strike. hiring replacement workers does not help, as hospitals that hired replacement workers performed no better during strikes than those that did not hire substitute employees. in each case, patients with conditions that required intensive nursing were more likely to fare worse in the presence of nurses’ strikes. (wright 2010) another study found that “hospitals functioning during nurses’ strikes do so at a lower quality of patient care” and that strikes increase safety risks for patients (gruber and kleiner 2012, 127). when teachers go on strike, it is less common for schools in the us to hire a scab workforce and more common for them to shut down for the strike’s duration (uetricht 2014). this means that the students and their families may be left without essential services that they depend on, like free or reduced-cost meals and childcare. but students also suffer by being deprived of their education for the strike’s duration. for example, students can fall behind in important subjects; high school seniors may experience disruptions to their college application process (hendrickson 2019); and students with histories of trauma, particularly if the trauma was caused by separation from their family members or other caregivers, may be re-traumatized by the sudden absence of their teachers (garrett 2019). these considerations suggest that care workers have moral reasons not to go on strike which become weightier along with the degree of the cared-for’s degree of dependence upon specific care providers. this reality, combined with the previous section’s conclusion that care workers have moral reasons to go on strike, suggests that, in many circumstances, care workers face a moral conflict where they must choose between impossible options and where they may experience moral failure. however, before turning to the question of who is to blame for these moral failures, i’ll briefly address some practical implications of this moral conflict for organizing efforts. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 iv. implications of the conflict for labor organizing first, i claim that the existence of this conflict constrains the range of tactics available to care workers who go on strike. second, i claim that it provides a moral—rather than merely prudential—reason for care workers’ unions to adopt organizing strategies grounded in “social movement unionism” rather than “business unionism.” iv.a. moral constraints on tactics in an analysis of labor movement tactics in the twentieth-century united states, joe burns (2011) argues the most effective kind of strike is one that completely halts the employer’s production, rather than one where a group of workers withdraws their labor only to be replaced by a temporary “scab” workforce. he writes, “a strike which involves putting up picket lines and waiting for scabs to cross while workers essentially ‘quit’ en masse is not one that favors workers” (2011, 22). in strikes where workers are unable to halt production, and the employer hires a scab workforce to allow operations to continue, “strikers force the market to determine the value of their labor as a group” (20). in other words, it is less likely that striking workers whose employer hires a scab workforce will be able to raise wages or secure benefit improvements above the going free-market rate (burns 2011, 23). this is because the employer has no incentive to pay the striking workers more than they would pay their scab workforce. by contrast, if workers are able to completely halt production by preventing their employer from hiring scabs, they will have a much better chance of securing improvements that are better than the going market rate for their labor. tactics utilized by strikers to completely halt production have historically included “mass picketing to block plant gates,” “monopolizing union labor through the closed shop or control of training,” and “the social ostracizing and punishment of scabs,” as well as solidarity strikes and secondary boycotts (burns 2011, 23). my aim is not to deny burns’s point that strikes which completely halt production are more effective ways of convincing an employer to make concessions than strikes which do not halt production. instead, my aim is to draw out the implications of this claim for care workers. if burns is correct that an ideal strike is one which completely halts production, this ideal may be unacceptable for care workers—and, crucially, this ideal may be unacceptable for moral reasons. this is because, if care workers go on strike and succeed in halting production, what they would be doing is halting social reproduction: the work of caring for others, maintaining communities, and cultivating social bonds (fraser 2016). halting social reproduction may be the most effective way for care workers to win concessions from their employers and other powerbrokers; however, it comes with a moral cost that may be too high to bear. huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 in practice, striking care workers negotiate this conflict in a variety of ways. nurses frequently go on strike for very short periods of time; their strikes typically only last for a few days (bradbury 2014). one common tactic for nurses’ unions affiliated with service employees international union (seiu) since the mid-1990s has been the use of one-day “publicity strikes,” where the union informs their employer that they will be going on strike but will be returning to work within 24 hours. this can have the effect of preventing the employer from hiring scabs; however, the limited duration of the strike means that it typically produces little gain for workers (burns 2011, 73). when nurses strike for longer than one day, their employer typically hires scabs. in those situations, if nurses aimed to completely “halt production” by preventing the hospital from hiring a scab workforce—as burns recommends workers in other sectors do—their action could result in deaths, medical emergencies, or other issues, rather than simply hurting their employer’s ability to turn a profit. while schools do not always hire a temporary workforce when teachers go on strike, striking teachers typically engage in other forms of care work for their students while on strike—meaning that, even while on strike, many teachers never completely “halt production.” in the 2018 west virginia teachers’ strike, for example, teachers engaged in a variety of forms of care work for students who depend on their schools for free or reduced-price lunch (blanc 2019, 78). they packed lunches for economically vulnerable students, organized and promoted food donations and drives, and organized various childcare and day care options for working families (savransky 2018). as one west virginia organizer put it, “before [the teachers] made the decision to strike, they wanted to make sure their students’ needs were taken care of” (savransky 2018).15 these observations taken together have one interesting—albeit depressing— upshot. if burns is right that the most effective kind of strike will completely succeed in halting production, and if i am right that this kind of strike is morally unacceptable for many care workers, this might provide part of the explanation for care workers’ low pay relative to workers in other sectors. as folbre and smith write, “jobs that involve care provision typically pay less than other jobs, even controlling for differences in individual human capital and other job characteristics” (folbre and smith 2017; see also england, budig, and folbre 2002). it is possible that the moral 15 another way in which care workers negotiate this conflict in practice is by treating striking as a last resort. in many contexts, striking is not only an effective way to discharge this requirement to provide adequate care but is most often utilized when it is the only strategy care workers have left. care workers typically utilize the strike weapon when many other strategies for making change—petitions, contract bargaining, protests, pickets, and the like—have been exhausted (morris 2018; ketter 1997). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 cost of utilizing the most effective type of strike weapon—a production-halting strike—forms part of the explanation for why this is so. if these observations are correct, it shows how the existence of this moral conflict creates material, in addition to psychological, harms for care workers. iv.b. social movement versus business unionism organizers and labor scholars commonly draw a distinction between two models of union organizing: “business unionism” and “social justice/movement unionism.” according to labor scholar kim moody, business unionism has a limited vision which “does not extend beyond ‘bread-and-butter’ issues related to workers’ compensation” while social movement unionism “identifies itself as a vehicle for society-wide transformation on issues that affect communities beyond individual workspaces” (cited in uetricht 2014, 111). social movement unionism may still concern itself with bread-and-butter issues, of course, but it also has a broader vision that priorities social justice and the liberation of the working class. scholars, activists, and organizers have often focused upon providing prudential reasons for why social movement unionism is preferable to business unionism. they argue that social movement unionism is more likely to win gains for union members (mcalevey 2016) and to help unions weather attacks (uetricht 2014, 111), as well as having a host of other benefits (see blanc 2019, 44–47). uetricht’s work on the 2012 chicago teachers’ union (ctu) strike offers one representative example of this prudential justification for social movement unionism: in the case of ctu, the strike was part of a broader fight against neoliberal education reform. its fight was based on a broad vision of what progressive education reform could look like; it included genuine organizing alongside communities and public demonstrations beyond teachers’ bread-and-butter concerns, such as provisions beneficial to students. placing the strike within the framework of a larger strategy allowed chicago’s teachers to win. (2014, 116) a social-movement-unionism model that emphasized the relationship between teachers’ working conditions, students’ learning conditions, and the welfare of the chicago community as a whole is what, on uetricht’s analysis, enabled the success of the ctu strike. the existence of the conflict described in the previous section allows us to envision a moral—rather than merely prudential—reason for care workers’ unions to pursue models rooted in social movement unionism. in fact, a moral commitment to social movement unionism is baked in to the characterization of care workers’ moral reasons to strike that i provided in section ii(b). if the moral reasons to strike huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 have to do with providing support for those for whom they care—reasons to provide high-quality care, in line with their role-ideals—then it is only right to adopt a model of social movement unionism. this is because a central purpose of strike action will be to provide better care. in other words, for care workers, the reasons one has to go on strike are other-directed—going beyond bread-and-butter issues—from the very beginning. v. responsibility and blame because striking care workers often (though not always) confront a moral conflict, many are caught in conditions where moral failure is inevitable. however, i argue that we should not blame striking care workers for these moral failures, but rather blame those who are responsible for creating the conditions wherein that failure is inevitable. to make this case, it’s crucial for me to draw a distinction between culpable and nonculpable moral failure. nonculpable moral failure refers to cases when the conditions that make moral failure inevitable arise through bad moral luck or through other circumstances that, for whatever reason, could not have been avoided. imagine, for example, that a hurricane strikes a group of sailors who are out at sea. the sailors are as prepared as they could possibly have been for this contingency—but, through no fault of their own, the hurricane severely damages their food supply, meaning that there won’t be enough food for everyone to survive the journey. so the sailors must sacrifice a member of their crew. this counts as moral failure because, in killing any member of the crew, the sailors violate general moral obligations. but this counts as nonculpable moral failure because no individual or institution was responsible for creating the decision context wherein the moral failure had to occur—its existence was just bad moral luck. culpable moral failure, by contrast, refers to cases where some identifiable individual, group, or institution is responsible for creating the conditions in which moral failure must occur. one example of this latter category that appears frequently in the literature on moral conflicts and dilemmas is the story of “sophie’s choice.” in the story, sophie and her two children are taken from their home and sent to auschwitz. there, sophie encounters a concentration camp guard who tells her that one of her children must die and gives her a choice about which one to sacrifice. in this situation, sophie’s moral failure is inevitable, because in choosing to sacrifice either child, she violates a moral requirement. however, this is a case of culpable moral failure, because an identifiable individual (the guard) and institution (the nazi party) were clearly responsible for creating the decision context. in other words, once presented with the decision, sophie could not have avoided moral failure; however, the existence of the context in which sophie’s moral failure took place was clearly avoidable and was the fault of the guard and the nazi regime. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 the conflict that striking care workers face often belongs squarely within the category of “culpable moral failure” as i’ve articulated it above, insofar as there are identifiable individuals and institutions who are responsible for creating the decision contexts that lead to care workers’ moral failures. exactly which individuals and institutions are responsible for creating the decision context in which care workers must morally fail, however, is a highly contextual matter. sometimes the responsible institution will be their direct employer, like a particular hospital, while other times it will refer to other aspects of the system within which care workers function, such as a local, state, or federal government which is responsible for allocating funds to care provision. given this contextual variation, going forward i will refer to those parties responsible for care workers’ moral failures as “institutions of care provision.” how is it that institutions of care provision can be responsible for care workers’ moral failures? it is because they create the conditions that generate care workers’ moral reasons to strike. without moral reasons to strike, no moral conflict arises. for example, oklahoma teachers went on strike in 2018 to demand that the state increase funding for public education (blanc 2018). oklahoma education funding was so low that many public schools could only stay open for four days per week, could not afford to buy new textbooks when the old ones had almost completely fallen apart, had to function with enormous class sizes, and had to cut art and music education (brown 2017). in other words, if state politicians hadn’t made deep cuts to education funding over the course of decades, the moral reasons to strike would likely not have arisen in the first place. likewise, when thousands of california mental health professionals went on strike in 2015, they were protesting a staffing crisis where patients were forced “to endure lengthy and illegal waits for treatment” (papazian 2015). a california health-care regulatory agency found their employer, kaiser permanente, to be responsible for the crisis, issuing a “scathing report” that resulted in the “unusual step of referring the findings for immediate enforcement” (clifford 2013). had kaiser permanente staffed their facilities adequately, those mental health professionals would not have had moral reasons to go on strike in the first place, and thus would not have experienced moral failure. there are many more examples of cases where institutions of care provision are responsible for creating conditions where care workers must experience moral failure.16 in these cases, there is an obvious sense in which the institutions in question and the most powerful individuals within them—elected officials, ceos, and so on—are blameworthy because they too have role-based moral reasons to 16 the entire wave of teacher strikes in 2018 in the us was (plausibly) caused by nationwide funding cuts to education; see brown (2017), blanc (2018, 2019), and goldstein (2018). huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 ensure that the institutions of care provision of which they are a part function adequately. insofar as kaiser permanente, for example, is an institution whose purpose is to provide health care and mental health care, its leaders—as part of that institution—also have responsibilities to ensure that their institution adequately fulfills the demands of the social role. because care workers need adequate support in order to provide care in alignment with their role-ideals, and because institutions of care provision are responsible for providing that support, it is easy to see how employers could be blameworthy in these circumstances. in short, it’s because they’ve reneged on their own role-specific obligations to contribute to care provision. however, i would like to suggest that employers are blameworthy in a second sense: they are blameworthy for harming the care workers who must then live with the fact of having failed morally. even where agents know that they could not have helped but fall morally short, the first-personal experience of moral failure is often one of self-blame, guilt, and shame (tessman 2015). as discussed in section ii, care workers may also experience anger, sadness, hopelessness, disempowerment, and uncertainty. given that the decision contexts which force care workers in to positions of moral failure are often avoidable, the negative moral emotions they experience in the aftermath of this kind of moral failure are, then, avoidable as well. the very existence of these emotions—and the distressing and disempowering effect they may have upon care workers—can be blamed upon those culpable for institutional failures. this is why those who are responsible for conditions in which care workers are forced to experience these moral emotions are worthy of condemnation. institutions of care provision and powerful individuals within them make matters worse when they not only fail to acknowledge the horrible position they’ve put care workers in but turn to blame them for attempting to improve their working and caring conditions by going on strike. vi. interactions between paid and unpaid care work for simplicity’s sake, i have focused upon the moral conflict as it applies to paid care workers. though a full exploration of how this conflict applies to unpaid care workers is beyond the scope of this paper, i do want to say a little bit about the interaction between paid and unpaid care work, because it gives rise to additional issues and questions. this is because paid care workers often perform unpaid care work as well—in the form of parenting or caring for sick, disabled, or aging family. when an individual who occupies both paid and unpaid care roles chooses to go on strike from the paid care role, she may do so not only because she wants to improve the conditions under which she provides paid care but because she wants to have more money or benefits available to her so that she may better shoulder the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 responsibilities of unpaid care roles. furthermore, care workers themselves may have dependent children or family members who rely upon the very institutions from which they are on strike. when mcalevey (2018a) writes, “educators, like health-care workers, have an incredibly powerful, organic relationship with their communities,” she is likely referring to both of these ways in which unpaid care roles interact with paid ones. teachers often have children who attend school in the same districts or even in the same schools where they teach; nurses often have family who utilize the hospitals or clinics where they work. characterizing nurses, teachers, and others exclusively as paid care workers obscures the fact that those individuals likely occupy unpaid care roles that give them complex and multilayered connections to the communities and institutions of care provision of which they are a part. the fact that many care workers perform both paid and unpaid care roles gives rise to the following question. can a moral reason to strike arise when institutions fail to enable the successful performance of other, unpaid care roles? it’s easy to imagine, for example, that an underpaid teacher who must take on a second paid job to make ends meet—and who is also raising children—might strike because she wants to be paid enough so that she is not forced take on the second job. not having to take on a second job will mean that she is able to spend more time with her children or better able to afford childcare. if she made a bit more money, had better benefits, or had more time off, she might be able to more closely approximate her role-ideal for her role as a “parent” or “mother.” whether or not these cases generate moral reasons to strike will turn on how we answer the following question: what kind of responsibility do institutions of care provision have to the communities of which they are a part? remember that one state of affairs that must obtain in order to generate moral reasons to strike is that institutions of care provision fail to provide conditions that enable care workers to realize their role-ideals. the relevant question, then, involves whether institutions are responsible for creating conditions that allow care workers to realize role-ideals that are outside of the auspices of the formal mission of the institution. a school superintendent or a hospital ceo might say that saddling hospitals or school districts with responsibilities to enable their workers’ successful performance of auxiliary care roles is too high a cost. a care worker within a hospital, school, or other institution of care provision will, however, have the following rejoinder available. the united states is unique among advanced capitalist countries in that almost the entire social safety net—including childcare, retirement, health care, and so on—is provided through employers rather than through public programs (windham 2017). if employers do not provide these kinds of benefits, care workers’ abilities to perform unpaid care roles will suffer. in turn, as fraser (2016) huget – care workers on strike published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 argues, the very project of social reproduction will suffer, which will undermine these kinds of institutions in the long term. i cannot hope to adjudicate this debate here. i simply raise it to illustrate some important and unresolved questions about the relationships between paid and unpaid care roles, as well as the need for further work on the morally complex—and often painful and fraught—situations that care workers find themselves in when institutions fail to provide conditions that enable them to achieve their role-ideals. i also raise this issue of interactions between paid and unpaid care roles to combat what i take to be a pervasive—but misguided—perception of care workers’ unions as representing greedy individuals who want plum jobs at the expense of students and patients. one reason this stereotype about care workers’ unions is misguided is because it fails to reckon with the actual reasons that care workers provide for going on strike, which have to do with improving paid care provision. but there is also another way in which this stereotype fails to map on to reality: it does not recognize the many ways in which care workers are embedded within communities that are impacted by the institutional failures in question. when we realize that teachers and nurses are also likely to be parents and guardians—whose own children and families may be impacted by the institutional failures in question, as well as by strike activity—we can begin to see this stereotype of the greedy, selfserving care worker for what it truly is: a complete and utter fiction, cynically promoted by those who are actually culpable for the issues to which the strikers are responding. references adie, tristin. 2018a. “socialist nurse 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“fast facts: teacher trends.” based on digest of education statistics 2017, by thomas d. snyder, cristobal de brey, and sally a. dillow, chapter 2. washington, dc: us dept of education. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28. neiman, paul. 2011. “nursing strikes: an ethical perspective on the us healthcare community.” nursing ethics 18 (4): 596–605. doi:10.1177 /0969733011408050. newkirk, vann r., ii. 2016. “the forgotten providers.” the atlantic, sept. 29. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/home-health-careworkers-wages/502016/. papazian, clement. 2015. “why 2,600 kaiser mental health workers are on strike,” labor notes, january 12. https://labornotes.org/2015/01/why-2600-kaisermental-health-workers-are-strike. ronfeldt, matthew, susanna loeb, and james wyckoff. 2013. “how teacher turnover harms student achievement.” american educational research journal 50 (1): 4–36. doi:10.3102/0002831212463813. savransky, rebecca. 2018. “west virginia teachers pack food bags for students in need even as they go on strike.” the hill, feb. 27. http://thehill.com/blogs /blog-briefing-room/news/375846-west-virginia-teachers-pack-food-bagsfor-students-in-need-even. tabak, nili, and nurit wagner. 1997. “professional solidarity versus responsibility for the health of the public: is a nurses’ strike morally defensible?” nursing ethics 4 (4): 283–293. doi:10.1177/096973309700400404. tessman, lisa. 2015. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. oxford: oxford university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 28 ———. 2017. when doing the right thing is impossible. oxford: oxford university press. trinkoff, alison m., meg johantgen, carla l. storr, ayse p. gurses, yulan liang, and kihye han. 2011. “linking nursing work environment and patient outcomes.” journal of nursing regulation 2 (1): 10–16. uetricht, micah. 2014. strike for america: chicago teachers against austerity. london: verso. west, erica. 2018. “why social workers need to join the strike wave.” socialist worker, december 10. https://socialistworker.org/2018/12/10/why-socialworkers-need-to-join-the-strike-wave. white, kaila. 2018. “what's the difference between a walkout and a strike? for arizona teachers, it matters.” azcentral, april 20. https://www.azcentral .com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2018/04/20/arizona-teacherwalkout-strike-difference-redfored/537838002/. windham, lane. 2017. knocking on labor’s door: union organizing in the 1970s and the roots of a new economic divide. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. wright, sarah h. 2010. “evidence of the effects of nurses’ strikes.” nber digest, july, 3. https://www.nber.org/digest/jul10/jul10.pdf. zheng, robin. 2018. “what is my role in changing the system? a new model of responsibility for structural injustice.” ethical theory and moral practice 21 (4): 865–885. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9892-8. zigarelli, michael a. 1996. “dispute resolution mechanisms and teacher bargaining outcomes.” journal of labor research 17:135–148. doi:10.1007 /bf02685789. hailey huget recently received her phd in philosophy from georgetown university, where she specialized in moral and political philosophy. she is now working as a labor organizer and is writing public-facing philosophy essays focused on labor issues. 8063 huget title page 8063 huget final format credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 1 2017 credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault audrey s. yap university of victoria, ayap@uvic.ca recommended citation yap, audrey s.. 2017. "credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 1. mailto:ayap@uvic.ca credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault1 audrey yap abstract this paper will connect literature on epistemic injustice with literature on victims and perpetrators, to argue that in addition to considering the credibility deficit suffered by many victims, we should also consider the credibility excess accorded to many perpetrators. epistemic injustice, as discussed by miranda fricker, considers ways in which someone might be wronged in their capacity as a knower. testimonial injustice occurs when there is a credibility deficit as a result of identityprejudicial stereotypes. however, criticisms of fricker have pointed out that credibility is part of a more complex system that includes both deficits and excesses. i will use these points to argue that we should look closer at sources of credibility excess in cases of sexual assault. this means that in addition to considering sources of victim blaming by looking at ways in which “ideal” victims are constructed, we also need to consider ways in which “ideal” perpetrators are constructed. keywords: epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, sexual assault, testimony, narrative, active ignorance 1. introduction in june 2016, brock turner was convicted of raping a young woman and sentenced to six months in county jail, with three years probation, rather than the more typical state prison sentence of up to fourteen years. the judge’s reasons for handing down the extremely light sentence included turner’s positive character references and the significant impact that prison time and media scrutiny would have on his life (wong 2016). turner was a student at stanford university on a swimming scholarship, whose loss was one of the negative impacts the judge considered him already to have suffered. statements made by both turner and his father placed the blame on campus drinking culture and denied moral culpability for the rape itself. though there are several ways in which this case is atypical of sexual assaults (the fact that he was even prosecuted, much less convicted, for one), it will 1 thanks to nina belmonte and scott woodcock for extremely helpful comments on drafts of this paper. 1 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 still be useful for us to discuss it. what i want to highlight about turner’s treatment is that he seemed to have been regarded by the judge as a basically good young man with a bright future that had been ruined by external forces. my argument in this paper will imply that the sympathy for turner is the result of a credibility excess resulting from his failing to fit the paradigm of a perpetrator of sexual assault. while there is a significant amount of literature on consequences for those who fail to live up to the image of an ideal victim (cossins 2003; larcombe 2002; randall 2010), there is much less on nonideal perpetrators. while the phrase “ideal victim” might seem strange, it is sometimes used to refer to a common cultural understanding of how assault victims should behave. i will use the parallel phrase “ideal perpetrator” to refer to a common cultural understanding of what a typical perpetrator of sexual assault is like. literature on rapists’ motives will often focus on those who have been convicted of rape (levine and koenig 1980), no doubt for practical reasons. but without acknowledging that perpetrators of sexual assault are not necessarily more uniform than victims of assault, we cannot hope to ensure that victims will be appropriately believed and treated with respect. this is because our systems of according credibility are complex, including both excesses and deficits. discussions of sexual assault and credibility need to focus not only on the credibility deficit of non-paradigmatic victims, but also on the credibility excess of non-paradigmatic perpetrators. without an increased acknowledgement of the complexities of the credibility economy and the ways in which it is sustained by the social imaginary, we will not be able to properly account for, much less ameliorate, the credibility deficits of sexual assault survivors. 2. epistemic injustice we will first turn to discussions of credibility in the context of miranda fricker’s epistemic injustice (2007) in which she identifies two types of ways in which someone might be wronged in their capacity as a knower: testimonially and hermeneutically. situations of testimonial injustice are those in which systemic identity prejudice results in someone being viewed as a less reliable source of knowledge than is warranted. situations of hermeneutical injustice are those in which the conceptual resources for expressing one’s experience are, due to reasons of systemic prejudice, unavailable. since our primary focus here will be on issues of credibility, we will primarily discuss testimonial injustice. but as we will see in later sections, there are places in which the distinction between the types of injustice becomes blurry. testimonial injustice is a wrong that is caused by systemic identity prejudice. this means that certain speakers are accorded less credibility than they should be simply because of who they are. this need not be a conscious decision on the part of 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 the perpetrator of the injustice, however. many perpetrators of testimonial injustice are likely quite unaware that they are doing so. there is a significant amount of psychological data showing that implicit biases about such factors as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability can result in certain people’s being viewed as less competent or less sincere sources of knowledge than is actually warranted.2 perfectly well-meaning people might unreflectively ignore a woman’s complaint about a situation, believing her to be reacting overly emotionally. they might reply patronizingly slowly to a wheelchair user.3 or they might be skeptical of expert testimony coming from a person speaking with a lower-class accent. no malice needs to be attributed to an individual who does any of these things; in many cases, people who wrong others epistemically are unaware that they are doing so. regardless, a wrong is being done and we can locate its source in false identityprejudicial stereotypes that exist about different groups. these stereotypes might affect our perceptions of competence or sincerity, or both, and result in our giving less weight to someone’s testimony than it deserves. one criticism of fricker’s framework is that its focus on credibility deficit fails to acknowledge that some injustice can be a result of credibility excess (medina 2011, 2013). in particular, medina argues that credibility is comparative and contrastive; this means that rather than looking at credibility deficits or excesses in isolation, we should look at the proportional credibility differences assigned to various individuals in comparison with their epistemic authority. prejudice, both positive and negative, associated with social identity, can affect the ways in which members of different groups are epistemically treated. both fricker and medina discuss issues of credibility in the book to kill a mockingbird, in particular, the differential credibility accorded to tom robinson, a black man, and mayella ewell, a white woman. where the two differ, however, is that fricker focuses her analysis on the credibility deficits faced by robinson, while medina takes a broader view of the trial proceedings as a whole, looking more generally at the ways in which credibility is disproportionately assigned to the different individuals involved. medina points out that the trial accords a situation in which there is a hierarchy of credibility: white women are more credible than black men, but white men are more credible than white women. thus, while ewell’s testimony is accorded more credibility than robinson’s, both atticus finch and the prosecutor are in a sense allowed to speak for her in a more credible fashion than she herself is capable of (medina 2013, 66). 2 for instance, bertrand and mullainathan (2004); steinpreis, anders, and ritzke (1999); moss-racusina et al. (2012); tilcsik (2011). 3 for a related issue, see blankmeyer burke (2016) to introduce the term “hearsplaining” by non-deaf people. 3 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 however, a different issue that medina raises is more significant for our analysis here, namely that certain aspects of robinson’s testimony are virtually unintelligible to the jury given the society in which they find themselves, because some of what he describes is beyond the limits of the social imagination. as part of robinson’s interrogation by the prosecutor, he is asked why he regularly helped mayella ewell with her chores, resulting in his stopping by her house regularly. his response was to tell the prosecutor that he felt sorry for her. but this sentiment is unintelligible in their social context. given the social background of presumed black inferiority, it is unimaginable for a black man to feel pity for a white woman. this diminishes robinson’s credibility in a way that is not a direct result of identityprejudicial stereotypes about the untrustworthiness of black men. rather, the credibility deficit results from the fact that it does not fit with the background assumptions and stories of the social context in which he lives. given the incomprehensibility of his motivation for visiting the ewell house, the rest of his story becomes suspect. the social imaginary and the disproportionate amount of credibility accorded to ewell in contrast to robinson (not to mention the prosecutor) both contribute to the epistemic injustice that robinson faces. i will argue that similar mechanisms frequently operate in many cases of sexual assault. sexual assault, in our culture, is viewed as a serious crime; while this is clearly the case, i will argue in this paper that it is too closely linked to the idea that those who commit it are in some way monstrous or morally bankrupt. and this limits the social imaginary in a way that ultimately results in a credibility excess for many perpetrators of sexual assault, thereby resulting in many situations of epistemic injustice that hurt their victims. 3. sexual assault and the social imaginary narratives that are available in the social imaginary contribute to the complex system of credibility excess and deficit that medina describes. these narratives shape our concepts and can affect the extent to which we are likely to judge another person as falling under them. there are certain paradigmatic scenarios that come readily to mind when we think of sexual assault, but many of these are not as statistically common as we might suspect. there is a significant amount of evidence about the typical relationship between perpetrators and victims; while many of our standard narratives about sexual assault involve strangers, in reality these cases are in the minority. sexual assaults occur in a wide range of situations, with a wide variety of perpetrator/victim relationships. they are also both relatively common and infrequently reported to law enforcement, much less tried in court. for example, a canadian 2009 survey found that 34 out of 1,000 women had experienced an incident of sexual assault in the past 12 months. but only 30% of spousal assaults and 10% of non-spousal assaults were reported to the 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 police. so sexual assault should not be seen as something that is always brought to trial, or to the attention of the authorities. further, the majority (75%) of these sexual assaults are committed by people the victim knows (sinha 2013). thus, stranger assault, despite being a staple of crime tv, is not, in fact, the norm (which of course is not to say it is rare). also, many victims do not come forward out of fear that they will not be believed, or will be blamed for the fact that they have been assaulted. after all, testimony about sexual assault is frequently the only available evidence outside parties have about whether or not it took place, and the testimonial injustice faced by survivors can have far-reaching effects on them, sometimes described as their revictimization (brody 2011). and despite having a legal definition of sexual assault that encompasses a wide range of possible situations, there are only a handful that frequently recur in movies and tv. here are two: example 1. a young woman is walking home by herself late at night, when she is sexually assaulted by a stranger with a weapon. the strange man, who is discovered to have an undiagnosed mental illness, is eventually found and charged by the police. example 2. a university student goes to a party on campus. a drug is slipped into her drink, and while unconscious, she is sexually assaulted by several male members of a sports team. the story only comes to light because the team members are heard bragging about the incident with no remorse. the trial is prolonged and emotionally draining. both of these should be relatively familiar to people who watch tv and follow north american news; the former is a standard plot in many police procedural dramas and several stories like the latter have received north american media coverage in the past few years. these examples can be fleshed out in various different ways. but as with many instances of testimony that we hear (not just anecdotes about sexual assault), they come to us as “standard stories.”4 standard stories are narratives that have a limited number of characters with specific characteristics and resources, whose actions form a sort of closed system. everything that takes place in a standard story is a direct result of something else within the story, meaning that all of the relevant 4 many of the problems with standard stories that will be highlighted are problems with testimony more generally, not just testimony about sexual assault. but we will only focus on the specific problems this format causes for believing victims of sexual assault. 5 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 causal factors for events and the actions of characters are included (tilly 1999).5 though as in the cases above, some amount of cultural understanding can go into explaining characters’ actions. for instance, in the first example, people are often quite willing to attribute the behavior of rapists they do not know to their being “disturbed” or “mentally ill,” and letting social prejudice against mentally ill people do the rest of the work. (yet, given that a great many mentally ill people never even attempt to assault anyone, mental illness does not seem like a particularly good explanation for why someone might try to commit rape.) in the second example, though, we can likely just infer the immoral nature of the men involved from the fact that they are bragging about their assault and show no signs of regretting it. so, in both cases, we can attribute the crime to some form of pathology. the existence and prevalence of the standard-story format is not in itself problematic. after all, there are many cases in which we have limited resources to hear about a situation in full detail, meaning that many instances of testimony need to be short, episodic, and incapable of capturing all of the complexities of a real-life situation. the problem is not with the stories themselves, or the format in which they are presented, but of our general lack of acknowledgement of the format’s limitations. the limitation i will be most concerned with is the fact that the causes of an event, or the motivation for a person’s actions, are often too complex to be properly represented by a standard-story format. so, the construction of a standard story about that event will fail to represent its underlying causal mechanisms in a sufficiently complicated way. but many of us tend to assume, tilly argues, when we hear a standard story, that all of the relevant causal factors are included in the account. this, as we shall see, will make some standard stories seem less plausible than others, in cases in which we cannot understand why the actors might behave as the story describes. the two examples given above function relatively well as standard stories, in that the details given make it easy to understand the causal mechanisms involved, and the parties play well-understood roles. in a sexual assault, there is at least one person being assaulted and at least one other person who attacks them. what both of these stories have in common is that the details given about the attackers make it easy for us to understand why they might be attacking another person. this makes the standard-story format adequate, more or less, to account for these cases. in the first example, it is easy to assign some kind of pathology to the stranger who attacks the woman, and to blame a vaguely described mental illness for his actions.6 in the second case, the men involved are easy to slot into a stereotype of egotistical 5 thanks to colin macleod and sally haslanger for pointing me to the literature on standard stories. 6 the ableism involved in this kind of attribution is an important, but separate issue. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 athletes who believe they are entitled to anything they like. the cause of their actions, then, is also some kind of pathology or major character flaw. now, while these are not the only standard stories we have available about sexual assault, many of them do involve assault by strangers or pathological individuals (or both). but these stories are not in fact representative of sexual assaults in north america, even though our understanding of what constitutes sexual assault is in part constituted by paradigm cases such as these, which are prevalent in the social imaginary. gendler (2000, 56) has connected issues of the imagination to issues of morality through the puzzle of imaginative resistance: “our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant.” one example of this type of resistance is that we have considerably less difficulty in imagining worlds in which reproduction is entirely based on cloning than worlds in which female infanticide is morally laudable. imaginative resistance might make it difficult to picture “normal” people “like us” committing crimes like rape, which we find morally reprehensible. while we are not, in these cases, being asked to imagine entire fictional worlds in which sexual assault is morally acceptable across the board, we are being asked to imagine ordinary people who perform acts that fit the definition of sexual assault, that they nevertheless find to be morally acceptable. while this might not require as much of a stretch as imagining an entire world in which rape is morally permissible, the difficulties are analogous. the next section will use some of the psychological literature on concepts as well as some of the philosophical literature on narrative in order to explain some of the mechanisms through which these narratives in the social imaginary are sustained. works on narrative (such as velleman 2003) will complement psychology literature on concepts (murphy 2004; ross 1987, 1989; brooks, norman, and allen 1991) to frame the effects of stereotypes that we are likely to encounter in north american media. for instance, experiments testing the exemplar model of concepts have shown that exposure to past instances of the relevant concepts can have a strong influence on our classification of new instances. 4. concepts and exemplars some theories of concepts account for our application of them primarily in terms of comparisons to exemplars. such theories are sometimes given empirical support with reference to what are called exemplar effects: the use of remembered exemplars to decide how to categorize a new item (murphy 2004).7 while the present discussion of concepts will not presuppose an exemplar model, it will at least be supported by the experiments showing that there are exemplar effects. the 7 thanks to corinne bloch for pointing me to the literature on the exemplar model of concepts. 7 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 claim that notable past instances of a concept can shape our future applications of that concept does not necessarily commit us to a single theory, or even a single type of theory, though it does signal that the exemplar model is at least getting something right. ross (1987, 1989) has shown that people solving new mathematics problems tend to refer back to examples of previously solved problems. this is sometimes to their detriment, since they may pick up on irrelevant similarities between cases, resulting in attempts to apply the wrong type of solution in new cases. for example, word problems which merit significantly different solutions may nevertheless have similar storylines. in ross’ experiment, some of these problems were probability questions involving mechanics repairing cars at a motor pool. how the different objects (mechanics and cars) fit into the formulas provided varied from problem to problem. subjects in the experiment would sometimes use the formulas inappropriately for the current problem, though in ways that were similar to past solved problems to which they had been exposed. brooks, norman, and allen (1991) tested these insights in a categorization context, namely medical diagnosis. this study was designed to determine how exposure to past classification instances would affect subjects’ abilities to classify future instances. the experimenters presented general practitioners (with a variety of amounts of medical experience, and no specialized training in dermatology) with correctly labeled photographs of dermatological lesions. they were then asked to determine which conditions were represented in new photographs. not all instances of a given condition look alike, but the experimental results found that visual similarity to past examples was a significant factor in the subjects’ ability to classify new instances accurately. as with the previous study, not only did similarity to previous instances help subjects classify new examples correctly, it also showed a strong connection to subjects’ classifying new examples incorrectly. these results held even when there was a two-week period between subjects’ being shown the labeled instances and their being asked to classify the new ones. the point to take away from these studies is perhaps unsurprising: when we classify new entities as falling under concepts, one potential source of error can be found in their superficial similarities (or lack thereof) to past instances of those concepts. these kinds of insights can also be found in the philosophy literature, in discussions of epistemic issues surrounding narrative. in that context, writers such as velleman (2003) explore how ways in which we process new information can sometimes be affected by the extent to which that new information fits with our background stories. our understanding of some concepts can be shaped by stories involving them, shaping our collective understanding of how certain events “normally” take place. following mink (1970) and schank (1995), velleman writes, 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 how do we know what a mutiny is, for example, if not by knowing the general scenario for a mutiny? our concept of a mutiny may thus involve a story-skeleton or the memory of a paradigm case. when we comprehend a sequence of events under the concept of a mutiny, as envisioned by mink’s theory, we may well be assimilating those events to a story-skeleton or a particular remembered story, as envisioned by schank’s. (velleman 2003, 10) story-skeletons are general schemas into which we can fit multiple distinct instantiations of a story. we might have a story-skeleton giving us the general outline of the events in a mutiny that could be filled in in different ways with different crews, captains, motivations, types of vessels, etc. but we might also have some particular instance of a mutiny in mind, perhaps having seen the 1935 movie mutiny on the bounty. such a story would be our exemplar of a mutiny. and applying insights from exemplar model research, we would expect to categorize an event more readily as a mutiny if it resembles our exemplar more closely—even in superficial ways, such as its involving the english navy. given the relative infrequency of mutinies, the social justice implications of this expectation might not be apparent. but when we consider some of our other concepts that also involve an account of events taking place, the problems become more obvious. in the next section, we will consider stories of sexual assault that do not fit as nicely into the standard-story format, and which are dissimilar to many of our exemplars. when many people hear stories like these, they react with skepticism. what this means is that we could hear about a non-paradigm case of sexual assault and think to ourselves that this is not how such things generally happen. this could well make us think that what we had heard was not in fact accurate. just as we might be confused and skeptical if we heard about a mutiny on a ship filled with even-tempered pacifists committed to norms of civil discourse, we might also be confused and skeptical if we hear about a male feminist sexually assaulting a woman. yet cases such as these do in fact happen. in the case of a mutiny, there are generally far more people involved, more empirical evidence available to determine what happened, and far fewer instances of them in the first place. so it is less likely that an entrenched narrative about a typical mutiny will cause epistemic injustice. but in the case of a sexual assault, i will argue that entrenched narratives about typical sexual assaults can and do cause a great deal of harm, some of which takes the form of epistemic injustice. 5. atypical stories and epistemic injustice sexual assault occurs to a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances, though the exemplars available in the social imaginary do not reflect 9 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 that. we can contrast examples 1 and 2 above with the following two examples below. example 3. a woman who is not considered conventionally attractive (by being thin, able-bodied, young, etc.) has a romantic interest in a conventionally attractive male colleague. she does not pursue this interest because he is already in a heterosexual relationship. however, he gives her a ride home after a work function and is invited into her home, where, later that evening, he sexually assaults her. example 4. a woman and her male partner break up after a stable long-term relationship. they try to stay on good terms and continue to see each other socially since they have many mutual friends. one morning, he arrives unannounced as he often has in the past, but this time she is rude to him and asks him to leave. upset, he sexually assaults her. these are not common ways in which sexual assault is portrayed in the media, nor are they common news stories.8 they might also be among the majority of cases in which the crime is not reported to the police. perhaps the woman in the first story feels embarrassed and wonders if she brought it on herself. the woman in the second story might be afraid of the reactions of her friends. to what extent does the non-paradigm nature of these stories contribute to the extent to which others will believe them? reactions to such stories in the literature are variable but generally show that unattractive women are more likely to be blamed for their own assaults and that a previous romantic relationship with the perpetrator tends to reduce perceived severity of the offense (pollard 1992). one gap, however, in the studies pollard reviews, is that variations in the sexual assault scenarios all focus on the victim or the victim’s relationship with the perpetrator. studies will vary her behavior, attire, past history, the history she has with the perpetrator, both in the prior acquaintance and in the current encounter. but none of pollard’s discussion talks about variation in the perpetrator’s own character or history. i think this signals another common assumption about sexual assault, which is that it is only perpetrated by a particular kind of person with specific pathologies in his character. this is likely compounded by the fact that, of necessity, behavioral studies about the 8 there are many other stories that do not commonly get attention—for instance, same-sex assaults, assaults where the victim is male or a sex worker. these stories were chosen because of the nonstandard way in which the perpetrator is portrayed. other nonstandard elements would most likely make the stories seem even less plausible. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 characteristics of rapists can only study people who are in fact charged with rape. this makes it extremely difficult to gather clear empirical data about just how many people actually do sexually assault someone, and about the characteristics of people who are never charged with rape. given the aforementioned statistics about how few assaults are even reported, much less warrant charges, it is likely that the data from studies such as those gathered by mccabe and wauchope (2005), only interviewing men charged with rape, is unrepresentative, as the majority of these men were strangers to their victims.9 an important element in examples 3 and 4 is the fact that the perpetrators are easily seen as relatively ordinary people, capable of sustaining normal and healthy relationships with others. these are unlike many of our stereotypes about rapists. we could believe that they are merely pretending, which is also a relatively common trope in thrillers and mystery novels, but nothing in the stories themselves signals this to us. in contrast, in examples 1 and 2, the perpetrators seem more obviously to be sick or immoral individuals—even to the point of caricature. this is further supported by the standard-story format, in which we tacitly suppose that the important details are all included. no direct causes are given for the assaults in examples 3 and 4, so, given a lack of easily recognizable motivation for their actions, listeners are faced with the more difficult task of understanding how relatively normal individuals might end up committing sexual assault. since the woman in example 3 is not conventionally attractive, and the man is already in a relationship with a woman, sexual desire does not seem to be an obvious motive.10 and many of our exemplars of sexual assault do not give us clear motives besides pathology or bad character. in example 4, some motivation is given, namely that the man is upset at his ex-partner’s rejection. but for many recipients of her testimony, this might not seem sufficient motivation to commit such a significant crime. on the other hand, if an individual is described as being mentally ill (despite the lack of information about the type of mental illness), it becomes easier to fit them into existing stereotypes. indeed, this picture matches many common perceptions of what a rapist is like. an israeli study that surveyed male university students initially found that they 9 but even in this study, there were many men who displayed surprisingly solicitous behaviors towards their victims, using “words that suggested that the offender was worried about the victim, words that indicated that the offender was trying to persuade the victim to do something, or words that were meant to be reassuring in nature” (mccabe and wauchope 2005, 240). 10 though it is highly questionable whether desire on its own is ever really the motivation for sexual assault in the first place. 11 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 felt that rapists had a lower educational background and were mentally disturbed. more specifically, those participants described rapists as displaying the following personality characteristics: high sexual needs, uncontrolled sexual urges, an external locus of control, depression, emotional instability, fear and anxiety that are projected onto helpless people, and violent-aggressive tendencies. . . . seventy percent of the participants believed that all rapists had themselves suffered some form of sexual, physical or emotional abuse during childhood. (lev-wiesel 2004, 203–204) this study highlighted the important fact that a “typical perpetrator” was often imagined to be someone very different from the men themselves. but as the interviews progressed, the men’s attitudes shifted from disgust towards rapists to admissions that rape may be a “natural trait” in males. sixty percent of them also said that rape may sometimes be a result of miscommunication between the parties involved. eventually, 30% admitted that under very specific circumstances such as these, they might commit rape. this shows an internal tension in these men’s attitudes about rape and who might commit it. while their ideas about typical perpetrators match our exemplars nicely, they do display an underlying awareness that lack of control and emotional instability might not be the only things that might cause a person to commit this kind of act. these findings are consistent with earlier studies, such as those conducted by malamuth, haber, and feshbach (1980) and osland, fitch, and willis (1996). the former much-cited study gave the description of an unambiguous sexual assault to a group of american university students and provided them with an anonymous questionnaire afterwards. one of the most striking results from the questionnaire is the response that many male students gave when asked if they would ever act as the rapist in the description did. respondents were asked to give an answer between 1 and 5 in response to the statements, where a “1” meant that they would absolutely never do such a thing, and “5” meant that they absolutely would. of the 53 males, 17% indicated a 2 or above in response to whether they personally would be likely to act as the rapist did in the same circumstances. fifty-one percent similarly responded when questioned about their likely behavior if they could be assured of not being punished. furthermore, 21% chose the middle of the scale (3) or above in response to the latter question. (malamuth, haber, and feshbach 1980, 130) the studies under discussion here have been conducted among university students, and thus relatively well-educated and socially functional individuals. they are 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 studies conducted among “ordinary” young men, which gives some plausibility to examples 3 and 4. after all, one of the problems previously mentioned with these examples is that we might find it difficult to attribute any kind of intelligible motivation to the perpetrators, given their relative ordinariness. given a lack of readily available explanation for the perpetrator’s behavior, we might take another path of least resistance. for example, we might simply believe that the victim is lying. this might be due to the invocation of a trope such as the jilted ex-lover who is attempting revenge by making up stories. something like this could easily be invoked in our examples. indeed, the proverbial “woman scorned” is a familiar idea in north american culture.11 this trope is easy to evoke when the perpetrator is known to us but the victim is not. if we have evidence at our disposal about the character of the victim or the relationship between the individuals that is difficult to reconcile with the image of a stereotypical scorned woman, then other explanations are readily available. “victim-blaming” is a term used to describe holding people responsible for crimes committed against them. it is regrettably common in cases of sexual assault to hold victims at least partially responsible for their own rapes. for instance, pollard (1992) reviews a large number of studies about victim-blaming in which participants are given different scenarios in which a sexual assault occurs (though it may not be explicitly described in those terms) and are asked about the responsibility the different parties hold for the assault and the sentence, if any, that should be handed down to the perpetrator. while some of the studies disagree with each other, overall trends can still be seen in which past sexual history and attire have noticeable effects on listeners’ attitudes. in many cases, listeners believe that the perpetrator was to some extent justified in his actions, perhaps because there was some degree of consent, or some legitimate reason for him to believe that there was consent. in brock turner’s case, there was an attempt to shift the blame for his crime onto party culture, and onto the alcohol consumption by both him and the victim. this is because, just as a black man feeling pity for a white woman was virtually unintelligible in the setting of to kill a mockingbird, it is similarly unintelligible in north american culture for a nice, intelligent young white man with a bright future to be a perpetrator of sexual assault. this gives turner’s denial of guilt an unwarranted credibility excess. we lack resources in our social imaginary to account for “nice young men” who commit sexual assault while maintaining loving 11 a relatively recent example of the invocation of this trope was the radio host jian ghomeshi’s claim that the sexual assault allegations were primarily due to a “campaign of false allegations pursued by a jilted ex girlfriend.” see global news 2014 for further discussion. 13 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 relationships with their friends and family. of course, turner was in fact convicted of sexual assault, and in this case the issue in question is not whether he actually committed the crime, but what sentence it merited. though it is notable that in the case of this conviction, there were two sober white male witnesses who saw him carrying it out; it seems likely that the social identity of these witnesses was extremely significant in the guilty verdict. in other cases, the guilt of the perpetrator needs to be decided in large part by comparing their credibility to the credibility of the victim. in considering the issue of victim-blaming and consent, one objection that might be made is that the phenomena i am describing here simply fall under the heading of hermeneutical injustice. but as fricker describes the two types of epistemic injustice, it is not clear that this particular kind of credibility excess is appropriately captured by either of them. the issue of sexual assault relates to both of these types of injustice, certainly. there is surely some hermeneutical injustice involved in the definition of sexual assault in the first place and our conceptualization of consent. there may be cases where the parties involved can agree on the literal sequence of events, but disagree significantly about the concept under which those events fall. still, the label of hermeneutical injustice would be better suited to instances in which someone has trouble believing that marital rape, or the rape of sex workers, is possible. these are extremely important cases, but they are not the type i am interested in here. instead, the cases i have been focusing on are those in which, if a listener did believe the events took place just as described, they would believe that there had been a sexual assault. the problem is when listeners do not believe that cases like these take place as described because they seem implausible. and these cases seem implausible because of the nonparadigmatic nature of the perpetrators. and while the phenomena we are interested in might be instances of testimony, many of the situations of systematic disbelief are not a result of identity prejudice against the testifier themselves, as in the case of fricker’s testimonial injustice. rather, they are the result of rape culture as a whole and a lack of resources in the social imaginary. for instance, while the victim in example 3 may suffer from identity prejudice, it seems to be indirect, affecting the plausibility of her story in general, rather than her credibility or competence as a testifier. another signal that identity prejudice is not the main source of skepticism here is the fact that it seems independent of the story’s narrator (since the victim-blaming is found in the psychology literature in which researchers rather than victims are the narrators of the story). rather, it is that the content of the latter stories, insofar as they are described as an instance of sexual assault, is not believed as easily as the content of the former stories. but this does wrong the victims, by questioning their credibility or their competence. if we do not believe that they were in fact victims of 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 sexual assault, then we undermine them in their capacity either to correctly understand what happened to them or to report it truthfully. in many cases, this can lead to the victims’ questioning whether they even correctly recalled what had transpired, thereby further undermining them as knowers. given that victim-blaming is a problematic and well-known phenomenon, and that statistics about the nature of sexual assault are readily available, we might wonder why the current state of affairs remains the norm. why does the range of stories we have about sexual assault remain so narrow, thereby contributing to the systemic injustice we are talking about here? medina’s (2013) concept of active ignorance can be useful here in explaining the continued acceptance of the stereotypical pathologized rapist. as medina describes it, active ignorance is connected to several epistemic vices typically found among (but not restricted to) those with relative privilege. such vices can make one’s ordinary ignorance into a meta-ignorance, such that we become insensitive to the fact that there is something important about which we are ignorant. in many cases, active ignorance serves to preserve ignorance about one’s own privilege. in this case, however, active ignorance might preserve some more general form of comfort which may not necessarily track privilege. why, after all, would many of us want to believe that perpetrators of sexual assault can be people with otherwise normal lives rather than being obviously predatory or pathological? though the number of perpetrators of assault is no doubt lower than the number of victims, there is still quite a good chance that, for many of us, our circle of friends and family likely contains some people who have committed an assault. to use medina’s terms, this is a tendency toward being epistemically closedminded, in the sense of avoiding things that are difficult to accept and acknowledge (medina 2013, 34–35). yet although active ignorance about the wide range of people who commit sexual assault does not necessarily track privilege, such ignorance is much more sustainable among those for whom sexual assault is less of a pressing life concern. for example, first nations people in canada are much more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-first-nations canadians and are also much more likely to be economically disadvantaged.12 in such communities, it might not be as easy to maintain active ignorance as in settler canadian communities, since those with more privilege, broadly speaking, also tend to be at lower risk of being the victims of violent crime, and can thereby afford a higher degree of ignorance about it. note the contrast between the perpetrators described in the two standard stories and the perpetrators in the nonstandard stories. we have evidence in these latter stories that the men committing these assaults are capable of maintaining 12 see, for example, scrim (2016). 15 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 relatively normal friendships and romantic relationships. they are, for many readers, people “like us.” as such, they do not fit the ordinary profile of the isolated and disturbed individuals that we more easily imagine to be rapists. rather, they force us to accept the possibility that people who are close to us might commit rape (or even more challenging—that we might actually be capable of committing rape under certain circumstances). but this challenging view is important—the image of the prototypical rapist can cause a tension when we hear one of our nonstandard stories, which might result in our making the following modus tollens inference: a) if someone commits a sexual assault, then that person is a monster. b) person x is not a monster. c) therefore, person x did not commit sexual assault. this is an inference we will in many cases want to reject, but since we cannot challenge its validity, we need to challenge the truth of its premises. since we often have relatively good evidence that our friends, relatives, and even acquaintances, are not monsters, then the belief that needs to be changed is that sexual assault is something only committed by moral monsters. and this, to some extent, requires accepting that some people who commit sexual assault are also people who can treat others decently and might as a general rule be decent to others. they might have normal relationships with many women. so, our difficulty in reconciling our background views about sexual assault and what it involves with the description of these situations might lead us to reject the label of sexual assault in examples 3 and 4. since the stereotype of rapists articulated by (a) is supported by many of our paradigm cases, this will likely result in our (validly) drawing the conclusion in (c). this inference will then result in our believing that the accusation is false. but this, of course, is difficult to reconcile with the fact that people we do know can be perpetrators of sexual assault and can maintain perfectly ordinary relationships with others. and resolving this conflict frequently results in the testimonial injustice that manifests itself in victim-blaming. listeners can easily speculate about what might “really have happened” in stories 3 and 4. one might easily think these are cases in which mixed messages are to blame, or in which there is some doubt about whether the sex was really nonconsensual. and this is the way in which the content of these stories becomes suspect—at least more suspect than the content of the other stories. the fact that they do not fit well with our background views about what sexual assault consists in, about victims of sexual assault, and about perpetrators, makes it easy for us to doubt them. not to mention that other standard stories, such as the jilted ex-girlfriend trope mentioned earlier, could easily be complicating matters. active ignorance, then, allows us to 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 maintain the illusion that the ordinary people we know would never have committed acts of assault, despite the fact that it is likely that some have. 6. conclusion: diversifying stories it can be challenging and uncomfortable to think of non-paradigmatic perpetrators—a temptation that easily leads to epistemic closed-mindedness. the lack of diverse accounts (and relatedly, the prevalence of stories such as the vindictive woman prone to false rape accusations) is most likely linked to structures of power, because nonstandard accounts of rapists can strain our social or moral imagination by forcing us to picture situations in which people “like us” have committed sexual assault. and this might even lead us to the conclusion that people we know and like have committed sexual assault. the main reason, then, for highlighting this different route to testimonial injustice is that solving this type of epistemic injustice might require different strategies than the ones fricker suggests. the virtue-epistemic approach she suggests is appropriate for counteracting individual prejudices, but in this case, the problem has more to do with the systematic misrepresentation of sexual assault scenarios. the fact that atypical scenarios (or at least a very narrow range of scenarios) are portrayed as the norm leads us to our having a skewed conception of sexual assault in the first place. the lack of paradigm cases means that many cases of sexual assault are viewed with undue skepticism. but viewed in the abstract, this skepticism is reasonable. after all, it is reasonable to be somewhat skeptical of stories of events we believe to be unusual. so the most direct way to do something about these kinds of testimonial injustices is to expand the range of paradigm cases by actively working for the inclusion of as many stories as possible. this is similar to a prescription from nussbaum (1997) to read literature that comes from different perspectives in order to cultivate compassion: if the literary imagination develops compassion, and if compassion is essential for civic responsibility, then we have good reason to teach works that promote the types of compassionate understanding we want and need. this means including works that give voice to the experiences of groups in our society that we urgently need to understand, such as members of other cultures, ethnic and racial minorities, women, and lesbians and gay men. (nussbaum 1997, 99–100) it is crucial to include marginalized voices when expanding the range of stories. given that many people who are sexually assaulted are from marginalized groups, compassion for them at least makes it somewhat less difficult to discount their testimony. at the very least it makes for more portrayals of them than the 17 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 stereotypes that might be culturally familiar. for example, given the empirical evidence that black people tend to be seen as superhuman (waytz, hoffman, and trawalter 2015), police violence against them is often portrayed as more justifiable, with white officers in fear of their lives. these latter portrayals are challenged in reports like “say her name: resisting police brutality against black women,”13 which calls attention to the importance of including stories about violence against black women, particularly gendered violence. the importance of victim narratives is absolutely crucial in many cases, particularly cases of violence against marginalized populations. however, opinions differ on their helpfulness in the case of sexual assault. for instance, heberle (1996), while acknowledging the importance for victims of speaking out, raises the worry that victim narratives can also have the unintended consequence of reifying rape culture and male dominance. as women who empathize with victims realize that any of us could be the targets of sexual violence, and accept that rape culture is a real problem in society, heberle also worries that this can “participate in setting up the event of sexual violence as a defining moment of women’s possibilities for being in the world” (1996, 65). there is, after all, a fine line between accepting that sexual violence is a legitimate possibility in many women’s lives and letting it play a toosignificant role in circumscribing the possibilities for those lives. now, heberle’s strategy is not the silencing of victim narratives but rather their reframing. rather than portraying stories of male sexual violence against women as representative of male power, she suggests portraying them as representations of the instability of masculinity. thus, while they might be expressions of power in one sense, they are expressions of weakness in another. my suggestion for diversifying narratives is compatible with heberle’s arguments, though. since if this analysis of our reason for disbelieving many cases of testimony is correct, then it is crucial to expand our compassion to the perpetrators as well as the victims. rather than seeing them in general as monsters whose actions are incomprehensible, we should see them as people who have committed actions that were wrong, for reasons that we might condemn but might nevertheless be able to understand. indeed, insecurity and weakness might well be among these reasons. after all, despite our stereotypes about rapists, malamuth, haber, and feshbach (1980) provide evidence that we as a society are at some level aware that these stereotypes are unrepresentative, taking their findings to support the contention that rape is an extension of normal attitudes and socialization practices in our society rather than totally the product of a sick and aberrant mind. if within the normal educated population there is a very sizeable 13 available at http://www.aapf.org/publications/. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 proportion of males who believe that they might be inclined to rape if they would not be punished and if both males and females perceive half the population to be so inclined, then it is quite apparent that people generally do not view rape as potentially committed by deviants only. (malamuth, haber, and feshbach 1980, 134) but even though many people might know that not all rapists are sick and aberrant, many of our exemplars of rapists nevertheless portray them as such. so, we will nevertheless be inclined to mistakenly misclassify many actual rapists as the wrong kind of person to commit such an act when they do not match these exemplars. the suggestion to view rapists with more understanding and compassion might seem counterintuitive at first as a solution, but it is a way to get around many of the reasons for disbelief that have been discussed here. if one of the main barriers to believing the content of the stories is that the people described as committing these crimes seem too much “like us” to be real perpetrators, then one way to do this is to show that the actual perpetrators of these crimes are more like us than we are comfortable admitting. just like the men interviewed by lev-wiesel (2004), many people imagine rapists to be very unlike themselves while at the same time harboring sexist attitudes about consent and entitlement. for medina, the epistemic friction resulting from the interaction between heterogenous imaginations is crucial to bring about positive social change. we need to compare imaginative resistances in order for people to gain greater understanding of possible lived experiences. so, in order to believe that people who commit rape are also people who might live otherwise unremarkable lives, we might need to be able to imagine it. nussbaum comes close to the suggestion that i am making here. she writes that we ought to invite literature that disturbs us in order to promote our literary understanding, to “allow inside one’s mind people who seem alien and frightening.” one example she cites is that of wright’s native son whose challenge was “to look into the life of a violent criminal who kills his lover bessie more casually than he kills a rat” (nussbaum 1997, 98). but while i agree with nussbaum that we should include stories from the perspective of people who commit crimes, i do not think the importance of these is always their alienness. rather, i think that showcasing the ways in which such people are not so alien after all is equally, if not more, important. but accepting that otherwise ordinary people might be capable of committing violent acts under certain circumstances is not that much of a stretch if we expand the range of violent acts under consideration. the well-known stanford prison experiment (haney, banks, and zimbardo 1973) has demonstrated that ordinary people can inflict cruelty on others under certain circumstances. even 19 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 murder has a relatively wide range of portrayals.14 while our stereotype of a murderer might be a jack-the-ripper-esque serial killer, many of our action movie heroes (whom we are meant to identify with and admire) kill other people. there are also movies and books where sympathetic characters turn out to have committed murder. one of the best examples of a character who commits a terrible crime that seems rational to her at the time is the character of sethe in toni morrison’s novel beloved. sethe, an escaped slave, kills her two-year-old daughter rather than have her be recaptured and taken back to the plantation. killing one’s own child is an act that seems incomprehensible to most of us, but part of the exemplary storytelling that morrison exhibits in the novel is exhibited by the way in which she gives us insight into sethe’s state of mind when she does it. the answer, then, is not quite nussbaum’s suggestion, giving us insight into the minds of those who seem alien and frightening. rather, it is to give us insight into the minds of those who are relatively ordinary but commit acts that we readily attribute to the alien and frightening. while this helps dismantle the generalization that those who commit sexual assault are monsters, the introduction of these additional accounts also has the function of mitigating the problem of standard stories. the problem with the standard-story format described above was the lack of causal mechanisms in the accounts that would allow us to understand how relatively ordinary people could commit sexual assault. but if we have enough stories of such things happening, we might not need to know the specific reasons for a particular act; rather, we can simply recognize the fact that there are many reasons why such a thing could have happened. finally, the suggestion that we should not see rapists as monsters is not to excuse the acts they commit. rather, it is to recognize that one need not be a fundamentally evil human being, or someone whose psyche is basically alien and terrifying, in order to commit such an act. and while attempting to humanize perpetrators might seem prima facie counterproductive, this paper has outlined several ways in which it will help us accord the testimony of victims the credibility that it deserves. committing sexual assault out of anger or a temporary loss of control is still the commission of a violent and reprehensible act. but it is nevertheless the kind of circumstance that can arise in the life of an otherwise ordinary individual, or an individual who does not treat everyone they know (or even all the women they know) poorly. and whether we want to admit it or not, many such people commit sexual assault, and we do an epistemic wrong to their victims if we are unduly incredulous in the face of these stories. 14 though some literature does try to pinpoint the particular wrongness of rape (berkich 2009). 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 references berkich, don. 2009. “a heinous act.” philosophical papers 38 (3): 381–399. bertrand, marianne, and sendhil mullainathan. 2004. “are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal? a field 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tenure candidates: a national empirical study.” sex roles 41 (7–8): 509–528. tilcsik, andrás. 2011. “employment discrimination against openly gay men in the united states.” american journal of sociology 117 (2): 586–626. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/1 http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/victim/rd3-rr3/p3.html tilly, charles. 1999. “the trouble with stories.” in the social worlds of higher education: handbook for teaching in a new century, edited by bernice pescosolido and ronald aminzade, 256–270. thousand oaks, ca: pine forge press. velleman, j. david. 2003. “narrative explanation.” philosophical review 112 (1): 1– 25. waytz, adam, kelly marie hoffman, and sophie trawalter. 2015. “a superhumanization bias in whites’ perceptions of blacks.” social psychology and personality science 6 (3): 352–359. wong, julia carrie. 2016. “stanford sexual assault: records show judge's logic behind light sentence.” guardian, june 14. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/13/stanford-sexualassault-aaron-persky-brock-turner-transcript. audrey yap is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the university of victoria, canada, which stands on unceded lekwungen territory. her main research interests are in feminist epistemology as well as the history and philosophy of mathematics. in particular, she is interested in the nature of epistemic oppression and ways of overcoming it. 23 yap: credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/13/stanford-sexual-assault-aaron-persky-brock-turner-transcript http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/13/stanford-sexual-assault-aaron-persky-brock-turner-transcript feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault audrey s. yap recommended citation credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault the construction of a consumable body feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 1 article 1 recommended citation suen, alison. 2019. “the construction of a consumable body.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (1). article 1. 2019 the construction of a consumable body alison suen iona college, new york asuen@iona.edu suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 the construction of a consumable body alison suen abstract in this essay, i analyze various ways in which pregnant bodies are rendered consumable. tracing our preoccupation with pregnancy diets, i argue that a pregnant woman is made responsible for producing a consumable body. indeed, producing and maintaining a consumable, fetus-friendly body is a responsibility that women carry before, during, and even after pregnancy. the sphere of this responsibility is also ever-expanding: it goes from detoxing the body to disinfecting the household, and even to protecting the environment at large. i examine two conditions that help construct the maternal body as consumable: 1) the invisibility of the consumed body, and 2) the appeal to “nature” as a justification for consumption. as i will show, the default position of women as consumable is reinforced both by erasing the maternal body and by appealing to the “naturalness” of breastfeeding. keywords: breastfeeding, consumption, pregnancy diet, maternal responsibility, motherhood, nature, reproductive ethics in margaret atwood’s the handmaid’s tale, fertile women are corralled, raped, and forcibly impregnated by high-level government officials in a theocratic dystopian state called “gilead.” these women—the handmaids—are essentially sex slaves whose primary function is to produce children for their assigned household. reflecting on the boredom she experiences as a handmaid, the main character, offred, compares herself to a pig:1 i wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. pig balls were large coloured balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. the pig 1 “offred” means “of fred’s household,” so her name signals the reduction of her identity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked to have something to think about. (2017, 69)2 offred’s comparison of her own predicament to that of a “prize pig” is telling, and what they share in common goes beyond the ennui of existence. both the pigs and the handmaids are supposed to produce and maintain a body fit for consumption. the pigs are expected to produce quality meat for humans; the handmaids are expected to produce and nourish a baby for their master and mistress. both pigs and handmaids are defined by, and reduced to, their function as a food source for others. that the existence of a handmaid is defined by her function as a food source is particularly evident in the hulu tv adaptation of the novel. in season two, offred is shown having difficulty pumping enough breast milk as a result of being separated from her newborn daughter. to encourage milk production, aunt lydia (the autocratic custodian of the handmaids) arranges a meeting for offred and her daughter. the purpose of the meeting is, in aunt lydia’s words, to “prime the pumps.” offred is later permitted to return to her master’s house (where her daughter lives)—but only to offer a steady supply of breastmilk. moreover, it is noteworthy that handmaids serve as a food source in more than one sense. in addition to the monthly “ceremony” of impregnation—a ritualized rape—the daily task of a handmaid is food shopping for the household. she gets credit or blame for what she manages to bring home from the market, as food is scarce and rationed. hence the handmaid is, in a sense, also a food source for the entire household. while the handmaids exist only in the fictional world of gilead, the novel depicts an all too real cultural tendency to regard pregnant women as consumable bodies to be disciplined and managed. the cliché that a pregnant woman is “eating for two” encapsulates an ongoing cultural preoccupation with pregnant women’s bodies. the injunction that she is “eating for two” suggests that a pregnant woman ought to be vigilant about her dietary consumption, as she is no longer eating for 2 atwood has elsewhere invoked an implicit comparison between women and animals. for instance, in her novel the edible woman, the main character marian— the “edible” woman who believes she is being devoured by her fiancé—invokes such a comparison when she visits the supermarket. reflecting on the sounds she hears from the speaker, marian is reminded of “an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them” (1998, 187). both offred and marian are sensitive to the insidious ways we manipulate animals’ bodies for our own purposes and how their own human female bodies are also susceptible to manipulation for (usually) male purposes. suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 herself only. the concern about maternal consumption is often couched in terms of its effects on fetal development, and specifically, the “risks” that certain foods may pose to fetal health. yet the obsession over her responsibility to “eat right” also betrays a widespread cultural inclination to treat the pregnant woman’s preferences and cravings as subordinate to the fetus’s well-being. in other words, to be a good mother, a woman must be willing to subordinate her interests to those of the fetus. whether a woman is willing to adjust (or even overhaul) her consumption habits becomes the test of her maternal love, a test of her willingness to put the fetus’s interests above all else. many women have experienced the intense policing of their bodies and diets during pregnancy. from a stranger’s disapproving look at the wine store to a restaurant server’s unsolicited advice, pregnant women are targets of constant public scrutiny. how best to understand the anxiety surrounding pregnant women’s diets? in a way, this sort of social scrutiny is not news for feminists: policing a pregnant woman’s diet is just one of the many ways a woman’s body is managed by patriarchy, one of the many reminders that women’s autonomy over their own bodies is constantly undermined. but while this explanation certainly contains some truth, it fails to tell the whole story. indeed, while it is true that pregnant and nonpregnant women alike tend to be deprived of their bodily autonomy, there is a further form of objectification at work in our societal treatment of the maternal body. specifically, the lack of autonomy ascribed to maternal bodies is compounded by society’s construction of the maternal body as a consumable body—a body whose default function is to serve as a food source for another. what does it mean to have a consumable body? i propose that a body is rendered “consumable” when its perceived default function is that of a food source. in this sense, a consumable body is an instrumentalized body, but the form of instrumentalization it takes differs from other forms of instrumentalization, such as sexual objectification. moreover, a consumable body need not be a disposable body. even though disposability is the common fate of many consumable bodies (e.g., animals turned into meat), not all consumed bodies are disposed of. indeed, different kinds of consumption involve different kinds of sacrifice: chickens, pigs, and cows are killed to become food, whereas a pregnant/lactating woman need not perish in order to nourish her fetus/infant. some forms of consumption are violent, some less so. some forms of consumption cause permanent and irrecoverable damage to the consumed body, some don’t. some forms of consumption are offered voluntarily, some are forced. in short, both animals and pregnant women undergo external preparation and maintenance of their bodies for the purpose of being consumed. yet the manner of consumption is vastly different. the human consumption of animals as meat is total and is characterized by physical force, violence, and death; the consumption of pregnant women’s bodies is not. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 “consumable” is thus an umbrella term for bodies whose perceived default function is that of a food source. although the particular ways and degrees to which such bodies are consumed differ, all such bodies share in the property of being regarded as consumable.3 my argument is structured as follows: in part 1, i argue that the widespread preoccupation with pregnancy diets is very much informed by the perception that the maternal body is, by default, a consumable body. in part 2, i argue that producing and maintaining a consumable, fetus-approved body is an ever-present responsibility for pregnant women. the sphere of this responsibility is also everexpanding: it goes from detoxing the body to disinfecting the household, and finally to protecting the environment at large. parts 3 and 4 draw from the literature on animal ethics to illuminate the conditions under which the maternal body is made consumable.4 part 3 examines the connection between consumption and identity. there, i employ carol adams’s notion of the “absent referent” to articulate the ways that consumable individuals are often rendered invisible—animals are made into different “cuts” of meat, while pregnant women are displaced by the fetus. while the edible body remains invisible and nameless, the “consumer” is front and center while consuming with a sense of entitlement. just as the consumption of animals presupposes human superiority, the consumption of the mother gives primacy to the fetus/infant’s interests. part 4 examines how the consumer’s sense of entitlement to the consumable body is expressed in the form of an appeal to “nature.” as we will see, “nature” is regularly invoked as an authority to justify current consumption practices: meat eating is permissible because it is part of our 3 of course, a mother is expected to do more than just feed the fetus/infant. to say that a maternal body is consumable does not mean that consumption is the only function of (or expectation for) the mother. consumability is a perceived default function—a function that a pregnant woman (or mother) is expected to perform. 4 while there are certainly important differences between consuming an animal body and consuming a pregnant woman’s body, it is profitable to juxtapose these two forms of consumption as the rhetoric of meat eating is often repurposed in pregnancy-consumption narratives. as such, it is instructive for feminists who want to challenge pregnancy-consumption narratives to turn to animal consumption, as they are likely to encounter a form of resistance with which animal advocates are already familiar. it is further important to note that although my analysis is informed in part by narratives about animal consumption, the point is not to analogize or equivocate these two very different forms of consumption. rather, in keeping with the idea that “consumable” refers to the perceived default function of the body, my goal is to make sense of the conditions that help construct the maternal body as consumable. suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 evolution, “breast is best” because breast milk is the most “natural.” in part 5, i identify some of the problems inherent in an uncritical appeal to nature. i conclude that doing away with the authority of nature opens up a space for us to rethink whether something or someone is, indeed, consumable. before i proceed, i should note that my analysis is based primarily on north american pregnancy culture. the studies i use and the cultural practices i cite in this essay are mostly north american. as such, my analysis is not (nor is it meant to be) applicable across all cultures. moreover, it is worth noting that even within north america, perceptions and expectations of the maternal body vary according to one’s class, race, culture, and other identity markers—thus troubling any easy generalizations about the north american context. furthermore, although my analysis is limited to the north american context, it is not meant to imply that the notion of a consumable maternal body does not apply to other cultures. rather, further analysis is required to understand the specific ways in which the maternal body is constructed and policed in other cultures. after all, there are pregnancyrelated food taboos in other cultures, and the excessive scrutiny of the maternal body is surely not exclusive to north america (e.g., lau 2012; jette, vertinsky, and ng 2014; washington 2015). while my analysis is limited in scope, i hope it offers a useful vocabulary to understand and critique the policing of the maternal body.5 5 my sincere thanks to the editorial team and the two anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments on the essay. i am also grateful to trevor bibler and rebecca tuvel for offering substantive suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. one of the anonymous referees has suggested that i consider how the bodies of trans* individuals might complicate my argument. i am grateful for the suggestion. for one thing, not all pregnant bodies identify as women (as with the case of trans men who become pregnant). for another, in the future, new technologies such as uterus transplantation might enable transwomen (or cis men) to experience gestation and childbirth via cesarean section, thereby complicating the question of whose body is “consumable.” as commentators have pointed out, reproductive and fertility services remain trans-exclusionary; from compulsory sterilization to restricted access to assisted reproductive technology, trans* individuals are often deemed unfit to be parents (see epstein 2018; honkasalo 2018; lowik 2018; leibetseder and griffin 2018; toze 2018). given the urgent need for reproductive justice for trans* individuals, i very much agree that trans* pregnancy deserves serious consideration in an analysis on the pregnant body. however, due to constraints of length, i will not explore this particular intervention here, as i fear a brief analysis would do injustice to such a rich and important topic. while in this essay i will restrict my goal to establishing the consumability of the maternal body, i agree that a pregnant body need not be maternal, and that it is also pressing to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 1. eating for two: constructing a consumable maternal body in the context of an affluent consumerist culture, a mother’s competency is often measured by how she shops and what she shops for. (does she buy dairy without recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbgh)? does she check food labels? is the bottle bpa-free?) the growing availability of organic food at the supermarket increases options—as well as anxiety—for any grocery shopper but for none more so than the mother. in their study on the ideology of the “organic child” in canada, cairns, johnston, and mackendrick argue that ideal motherhood now involves both preserving “the purity” of the child and protecting the environment (2013, 98). there is an expectation for mothers to keep their children “pure” and “organic,” to keep them away from the “harmful impurities of an industrialized food system” (98). in fact, even though the expectation to buy organic food is typically more widespread in affluent communities, and shopping at organic food stores is a classprivileged practice, poor and working-class women are in no way immune from the ideology of the organic child. as a result, women who lack access to expensive organic food often feel guilty about their inability to provide the “purest” food for their children (cairns, johnston, and mackendrick 2013, 111–112). keeping one’s child “pure” or “uncontaminated” is certainly an impossible mission to accomplish, no matter how resourceful and affluent one is. however, not only are mothers held to the absurd standard of maintaining purity, they are often viewed as the source of contamination, especially if their fetus has a health issue (mackendrick 2014). centrally for the purposes of my analysis, the maternal body is often identified as the primary site responsible for mediating the child’s exposure to toxins, despite the fact that environmental chemicals are omnipresent.6 as a result, mothers, rather than fathers, are typically the ones engaging in labor-intensive “precautionary consumption”: researching, purchasing, and consuming organic food and products (mackendrick 2014). in short, the mother is perceived both as the conduit for—and the shield against—contamination. when we talk about the “risks” that certain foods may pose to the fetus/infant, what do we really mean? we tend to understand “risk” as the likelihood of an undesirable outcome. but in pregnancy narratives, the concept of “risk” is often employed to justify a “better safe than sorry” hypervigilant approach that is overly cautious and arbitrary (lyerly et al. 2009; kukla 2010). for example, physicians routinely overemphasize the risk of radioactive exposure by discouraging examine the ways in which nonbinary pregnant bodies can be rendered consumable. 6 for an excellent analysis of the complicated relationship between environmental concern and maternal responsibilities—or “motherhood environmentalism,” see sandilands (1999). suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 diagnostic procedures that include radiation, such as a ct scan, during pregnancy (lyerly et al. 2009). the concept of “risk” is also “laden with moral significance” as it allows us to assign blame (debruin 2016, 12). after all, if there is a risk, there must be a “risk-taker” to be held accountable. as rebecca kukla (2010) argues, pregnant women are held to a higher standard when it comes to risk avoidance. the focus on maternal diet or consumption highlights the individual responsibility of the pregnant woman and in so doing feeds the perception that the mother is singularly responsible for fetal health.7 indeed, the conflation between risk and “don’t take your chances” contributes to an unreasonably high expectation imposed on mothers. as joan wolf argues, the widespread misunderstanding of risk and risk assessment in breastfeeding campaigns is responsible for what she calls “total motherhood,” an ethic “in which mothers are exhorted to optimize every dimension of children’s lives . . . good mothering is construed as behavior that reduces even minuscule or poorly understood risks to offspring, regardless of potential cost to the mother” (wolf 2007, 615). producing (and maintaining) a consumable body—to minimize environmental risks to the fetus—is part and parcel of the regime of total motherhood.8 markens, browner, and press attribute our preoccupation with pregnancy consumption to “the extreme individualism in american culture and medicine” (1997, 369). such individualism not only gives rise to a tendency to scapegoat the mother—it also obscures other social and institutional factors that contribute to fetal health. for example, by focusing on maternal consumption, we tend to 7 the infamous arrest of pamela rae stewart is a particularly good case in point. stewart was advised by her doctor to avoid various activities that could be harmful to the fetus, including sexual intercourse. however, when her son was born with extensive brain damage, stewart was the only one charged and arrested for “fetal abuse” specifically for having intercourse against her doctor’s order. stewart’s husband—the person with whom stewart had intercourse—was never charged (stabile 1992, 182). 8 the steep demand of total motherhood works in tandem with the presumption that a “good mother” is always willing to subordinate her interests to that of her child. building on the literature on care ethics, sarah lachance adams argues for a more nuanced account of motherhood—one that doesn’t idealize the mother–child relationship. for adams, acknowledging the ambivalent and conflicted nature of maternal feelings can be “morally productive” (2014, 5). specifically, it helps us recognize the need to care and be cared for, while also affirming the need to maintain independence—in this case, the need for the mother to be independent from her child (2014, 25). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 overlook the effect of paternal consumption on fetal health.9 and by focusing on individual (whether maternal or paternal) consumption, we tend to downplay environmental and social factors that also affect fetal development. in the case of keeping children safe from chemical exposure, we put the onus on the mother by policing her consumption habits instead of directing resources to lobbying for cleaner air, stricter governmental regulations, or increased manufacturer responsibility. moreover, substance abuse and other “risk-taking behaviors” are often prompted by environmental stresses such as domestic abuse.10 yet we pay more attention to the woman’s responsibility and willpower than to stress management and social support. even though intimate partner violence (ipv) contributes to various fetal health problems, health care professionals often fail to include ipv screening as part of the prenatal care routine.11 this systematic oversight is especially problematic given that ipv often begins or worsens during pregnancy. given these other social and environmental factors that influence fetal development, the focus on maternal consumption is disturbing for the disproportionate burdens it places on women. this overburdening is even more alarming when we consider that a pregnant woman can be subjected to involuntary commitment or even incarceration if her habits of consumption are deemed harmful to the fetus. in wisconsin, for example, a state law known as the “cocaine mom” act permits the police to detain a pregnant woman if they suspect her of drug or 9 for example, both paternal and maternal caffeine intake before conception are associated with miscarriage risk (nih 2016). 10 according to bianchi et al., “intimate partner violence during pregnancy may also result in negative, risk-taking behaviors, such as smoking, alcohol use, and the use of illicit drugs” (bianchi, cesario, and mcfarlane 2016, 3; see also deshpande and lewis-o’connor 2013, 143; coker sanderson, and dong 2004, 266). paltrow and flavin study 413 cases from 1973 to 2005 in which pregnant women are deprived of their physical liberty for allegedly endangering the welfare of their unborn children; notably, “in several cases a woman’s efforts to seek help after having been physically abused resulted in her arrest, although factors such as drinking alcohol or using illegal drugs while pregnant were cited as grounds for those arrests” (2013, 313–314). 11 according to smith, “less than half of reproductive health care workers screen for domestic violence” (2008, 24). parsons et al. (1995) suggest that male physicians are less likely to screen for abuse, while mezey and bewley point out that pregnant women are routinely screened for problems that are less prevalent than ipv, such as preeclampsia and gestational diabetes (1997, 528). suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 alcohol use.12 tennessee had explicitly passed a law permitting criminal charges for substance abuse during pregnancy (the law was in effect from 2014 to 2016); the supreme courts of alabama and south carolina have also upheld convictions that deemed substance abuse during pregnancy tantamount to criminal child abuse. as of june 2018, health care professionals in 22 states (and the district of columbia) are required to report suspected prenatal drug abuse (guttmacher institute 2018). in other words, to enforce “fetal protection,” the state can strip a pregnant woman of her physical liberty and her privilege to physician–patient confidentiality.13 a pregnant woman’s privilege to physician–patient confidentiality is not the only value at risk here. insofar as a pregnant woman’s body serves as the food source for the fetus, her consumability takes precedence over her privacy and bodily autonomy. in many states, a woman’s advance directive can be nullified if she is pregnant. that is, remarkably, the state can override a pregnant patient’s advance directive to keep her on life support against her explicitly stated will. in the notorious case of marlise muñoz, a hospital insisted on keeping her body on life support even though she met the neurological criteria for death. the hospital cited the “pregnancy exclusion” clause in the texas advance directive act, which requires continued life-sustaining treatment for pregnant patients.14 the pregnancy exclusion gives primacy to the consumability of the pregnant patient—her body is sustained for the explicit purpose of nourishing the fetus and keeping it alive. what do these disciplinary measures that revolve around pregnancy and maternal consumption tell us? i argue that the repeated injunctions for mothers to eat healthily aim to produce a consumable body. the maternal body is both the site and the material for fetal consumption. singling out the effect of maternal 12 in 2013, a wisconsin woman was accused of endangering her unborn child when she refused to start an anti-addiction drug. she was taken by the police to the hospital to be examined. and even though her doctor declared that inpatient treatment was unnecessary, the court ordered her to undergo inpatient drug treatment (vielmetti 2013). in april 2016, a us district judge blocked the enforcement of the law statewide—the block was lifted by the supreme court in july 2017. for an analysis of the state’s intervention in the maternal–fetal relationship, see linder (2005). 13 the very fact that a pregnant woman can be criminalized for allegedly harming the fetus reinforces the presumption that the mother–fetus relationship is adversarial: the mother becomes the “legal adversary” of the fetus and is “held liable for conduct that may cause it injury” (thompson 1989, 359). 14 the pregnancy exclusion shouldn’t even be invoked in this case, given that muñoz was considered dead by neurological criteria (mayo 2014). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 consumption on fetal health reinforces the idea that the pregnant body serves the fetus. it confers on the maternal body a duty to be consumed. as such, the disciplinary measures that revolve around maternal dietary consumption serve to construct a consumable maternal body. the pervasive rhetoric that the pregnant woman is “eating for two” is a constant reminder that the pregnant woman’s identity is defined by her function as a food source. 2. once a woman, always a mother importantly, this responsibility to be consumed is an ever-present one. there is, as mentioned above, the cliché that the pregnant woman is “eating for two,” hence the concomitant injunction that she needs to “eat right” for the fetus during her pregnancy. but a woman’s responsibility to produce a consumable body continues even after the birth of her child. breastfeeding is rigorously promoted both in popular culture and the hospital. (the saying, “breast is best,” is perhaps just as ubiquitous as “eating for two.”) the expectation to breastfeed means that a woman must continue to feed her child with her body. that is, the maternal body continues to serve as the food source for the child. insofar as the mother’s dietary consumption affects the production of her breast milk, she must continue to observe various dietary norms proper to a lactating, breastfeeding woman even after pregnancy. ironically, the expectation to breastfeed is so ingrained in north american pregnancy culture that even efforts to reduce such a pressure continue to privilege breastfeeding. there is a growing awareness of how presenting breastfeeding as the gold standard may cause non-breastfeeding mothers to feel guilty about their feeding practices. accordingly, many childcare education materials are now taking measures to advise mothers to “not feel guilty” about formula feeding (williams et al. 2013; williams, donaghue, and kurz 2013). but as kate williams and her coauthors point out, telling mothers to not feel guilty does not actually reassure them that they aren’t guilty (williams et al. 2013). on the contrary, it may inadvertently confirm the mother’s guilt—she is simply advised to not feel that way. in another study, williams, donaghue, and kurz (2013) find that many nonbreastfeeding mothers believe that the feeling of guilt is a marker of a “good” mother, even if they cannot breastfeed. for many non-breastfeeding mothers, guilt is a “proper” feeling that they should have when they have failed to offer the best for their child. in short, even the injunction to “not feel guilty” continues to privilege breastfeeding; that is, it continues to presume the woman’s body as consumable after pregnancy.15 15 similarly, women continue to be cast as the primary (or default) food source for infants even in formula-feeding campaigns. the “fed is best” foundation is an suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 indeed, a woman’s responsibility to produce a consumable body begins even before her pregnancy, as evidenced by public health campaigns that target women’s pre-conception health. for example, the “show your love” health campaign launched by the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) explicitly promotes the idea that a woman can show her love for her baby before pregnancy by taking care of her pre-conception health (waggoner 2015, 944).16 in her analysis, miranda waggoner argues that the campaign is premised on the assumption that all women of reproductive age are “future mothers”—it encourages all women, regardless of their reproductive plans, to prepare for a healthy, pre-pregnant body (2015, 946). the campaign problematically divides women into two groups, the “planners” and the “non-planners” (as if not getting pregnant cannot be a proper plan for a woman). the “planners” are obviously expected to produce a healthy preconception body for their future babies, but even the “non-planners” are encouraged to prepare for a fetal-friendly body just in case they change their plans or accidentally get pregnant. the assumption is that even if a “non-planner” does not intend to get pregnant now, she may want to do so in the future, and it is never too early to get your body ready for a future fetus. alternatively, a “non-planner” may get pregnant by accident, so it is important that she is always ready for a possible fetus. as waggoner puts it, the campaign presents pregnancy “as an everpresent possibility and [assumes] that an unintended pregnancy will proceed to birth” (2015, 946). in other words, any woman, insofar as she could get pregnant, carries the responsibility to produce a consumable maternal body. diachronically, the responsibility to produce a consumable body extends beyond the nine-month pregnancy. a woman is responsible for maintaining a consumable body before, during, and after pregnancy. synchronically, the sphere of maternal responsibility extends from the womb to the household. a 2015 study on organization that offers an alternative voice to the “breast is best” motto endorsed by mainstream medical establishments. by rejecting exclusive breastfeeding as the gold standard and promoting pluralism in feeding practices, one might expect men to increase their share of work when it comes to infant feeding. nonetheless, in the fed is best promotional video, we continue to see a cascade of images with women doing the feeding, with just one image of a man feeding an infant. in other words, women continue to serve as the primary food source for the infant—even when their bodies are no longer required. 16 mansfield argues that seafood consumption advisories “depend on and even intensify demands that women, including childless ones, discipline themselves in order to be ‘good mothers’” (2012, 598). indeed, seafood consumption advisories are predicated on the assumption that all “premenopausal women are mothers of potential fetuses” (mansfield 2012, 598–599; my emphasis). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 school-based healthy eating intervention concludes that “future interventions that seek to target eating practices would do well to target the mother since she would appear to be the main food ‘gatekeeper’” (hardcastle and blake 2015, 6; emphasis mine).17 just as women are made responsible for producing a consumable body (read: pure and organic body) for their fetus/newborn, they are also made responsible for providing an overall healthy household for their children, and by extension, their family.18 remarkably, the sphere of maternal responsibility goes beyond the household. as we have seen in cairns, johnston, and mackendrick’s study on the figure of the “organic child,” the mother is expected to keep her child “pure” and away from contamination. “good” mothers are those who strive to “preserve their children’s purity and protect the environment through conscientious food purchases” (cairns, johnston, and mackendrick 2013, 101).19 extending maternal responsibility to the environment presents a burden to pregnant women/mothers that they have to confront every day: environmentally conscientious food shopping. consistent with my argument that pregnant women are expected to produce a consumable body, the transition into motherhood is often the catalyst for women to begin researching and buying organic food, as they have now taken on the moral burden of caring for another life (cairns, johnston, and mackendrick 2013, 103). importantly, the desire to produce an “organic child” often intersects with a form of environmentalism that puts a premium on individuals making good, responsible consumption choices—shopping at whole foods or local farmers’ markets, for example.20 in cairns, johnston, and mackendrick’s study, some participants even 17 in this study, researchers conducted interviews exclusively with mothers. given that mothers have traditionally been responsible for food preparation, the focus on mothers is not surprising. yet, the recommendation to “target” mothers in future intervention reinforces the notion that mothers—as “food gatekeeper”—are especially responsible for the health of the family. 18 in light of my analysis, it is perhaps not a mere coincidence that the handmaids in atwood’s novel are also responsible for food shopping for the household. 19 the extension of motherhood to environmentalism is consistent with the emergence of global motherhood: mothers are encouraged to extend their maternal responsibilities to all babies. one particularly pertinent example is the “one pack = one vaccine” initiative, a joint effort by pampers and unicef in which first world mothers are encouraged to help third world mothers (and their babies) via ethical consumption. for a helpful feminist analysis of the “one pack = one vaccine” initiative, see hawkins (2011). 20 as many have pointed out, shopping is an important ritual through which a woman enters into motherhood. “caring shopping” is also a way to express suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 link motherhood to environmental responsibility by claiming “a greater responsibility toward future ecological sustainability” (2013, 107). given the popular conviction that shopping is a means to effect environmental change, and given that entry into motherhood is a time period in which many women begin to shop more conscientiously, it is not surprising that motherhood invokes a greater sense of environmental responsibility.21 as such, the sphere of maternal responsibility extends from the woman’s body to her household, then from her household to the environment at large. examining contemporary pregnancy-consumption narratives makes it clear why women bear a disproportionate share of the burden when it comes to food labor. my analysis of pregnancy consumption offers an embodied account of this uneven distribution of labor. more specifically, it articulates a connection between a socially constructed maternal body and women’s perceived duty to become keepers of family health. as the site of consumption, the maternal body becomes singularly responsible for the fetus/baby’s health. the mother’s exclusive responsibility to consume properly, in turn, reinforces the perception that women are especially responsible for children’s health even after the birth and weaning of a child. this ever-present responsibility to maintain a consumable body accounts for why women feel particularly responsible for their family’s well-being, and by extension, environmental health. in the next two sections, i will examine two conditions that help construct the maternal body as consumable: 1) the invisibility of the consumed body, and 2) the appeal to “nature” as a justification for consumption. as i will show, the default position of women as consumable is reinforced both by erasing the maternal body and appealing to the “naturalness” of breastfeeding. 3. the invisibility of the consumable body in the sexual politics of meat, carol adams argues that our anthropocentric language often masks our violence against animals (2010, chap. 3). from objectifying animals by referring to them with the pronoun “it,” to insulting other humans by calling them “animals” or “beasts,” our language betrays our contempt for other nonhuman creatures (2010, 93). adams also points out that by giving animals different meat names (e.g., “veal” instead of calves, “pork” instead of pigs), the animal victims are rendered absent (2010, 98). after all, it is much easier to consume anonymous body parts than an individual with an identity who comes with maternal love (see abighannam and atkinson 2016; afflerback et al. 2014; de laat and baumann 2014; song and paul 2016). 21 for a helpful account of how pregnancy consumption and environmentalism intersect, see also abighannam and atkinson (2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 a distinct history and personality. as such, animals are not only made absent in slaughterhouses by being killed, they are also made absent in our language by being renamed (2010, 98). accordingly, we may say that animals are being consumed twice: both by having their flesh eaten and by having their identity obliterated. the literal consumption of one’s body often goes hand in hand with the metaphorical consumption of one’s identity. although there are obviously important differences between the treatment of animal and human mothers, adams’s notion of the “absent referent” helps us understand the ways the human maternal body is also rendered consumable. in pregnancy narratives, a pregnant woman is also made “absent” by the fetus in her womb. feminists have identified and critiqued the “mother vs. fetus” rhetoric in discourses about women’s reproductive rights (berlant 1994; lupton 2012; stabile 1992). one especially important accessory to this rhetoric is the perception of the fetus as an individual, abstract from the womb, seeking “rights” against the mother. following rosalind petchesky’s (1987) important work on visual culture and reproductive discourse, feminists have diligently identified various cultural images that posit or presuppose the fetus as an independent entity (hartouni 1992; oaks 2000; stabile 1992). as petchesky and others have argued, ultrasounds further the image of the fetus as a free-floating, autonomous entity by erasing the maternal body. in an effort to promote fetal interests over, and in opposition to, maternal interests, anti-choice groups often capitalize upon the visual abstraction of the fetus from its mothers. furthermore, the free-floating fetus is often represented as a baby, even if it is still in the early stage of gestation. thus, we have a baby-looking fetus taking center stage in the image, being suspended in midair as if it were man in space, with the umbilical cord being the only reminder of the fetus’s connection to the maternal body. as petchesky argues, we need new representations that “recontextualize the fetus, that place it back into the uterus, and the uterus back into the woman’s body, and her body back into its social space” (1987, 287). with new technological and social currents, we see new visual representations of the fetus being developed—a new “public fetus.” in recent years, pregnancy photography has become fashionable. this trend is promoted in part by our new obsession with the “baby bump.” the pregnant belly is no longer something that the woman conceals by wearing loose clothing, but something that she wants to show off (oliver 2012). in many of these pregnancy pictures, the baby bump is the focus. for example, photographers may feature the silhouette of the pregnant woman by tracing the curve of her belly. another popular belly shot is the close-up of the baby bump, with the hands of the expectant mother (or her partner) on her belly, as if she is holding her child from the outside. at first glance, the emphasis on the baby bump seems to suggest a reversal of visibility—the fetus is now the one made invisible. we do not even see the fetus, suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 just the belly. does this mean we have finally put the fetus “back into the uterus, and the uterus back into the woman’s body,” as petchesky advocated more than three decades ago? does our interest in the baby bump signal “progress” in the feminist movement? i think not. if we pay closer attention to these images, a disconcerting pattern emerges. the face of the mother is often missing from these photographs: by featuring the silhouette, the mother is literally cast as a shadow; meanwhile the close-up shot of the baby bump is achieved only by blurring or cropping out the rest of the mother’s body. in the first case, the pregnant woman is faceless. in the second case, she is represented as a headless, dismembered torso. her face is hidden, and her identity is reduced to her belly, her pregnancy. this kind of dismemberment is replicated in other pregnancy memorabilia as well. in addition to taking belly shots, making a “belly cast” is becoming increasingly popular. a “belly cast” is a plaster sculpture of a pregnant woman’s belly. although some women also cast their breasts and limbs, most of these casts sculpt only the belly. it is common for a parent to decorate the belly cast, giving an individualized character to her cast with various embellishments. however, even though a belly cast can be made unique, one cannot tell who the mother is by simply looking at the cast. just as the belly shot produces a headless torso, a belly cast constructs a dismembered body. in both instances, the identity of the mother is diminished or excluded to the point of removal. it appears that even though the new “public fetus” is “back to the maternal body,” our belly obsession reinforces the perception that the maternal body is a vessel for the fetus, a means to an end. as such, the new “public fetus” serves as a reminder of maternal responsibility; that is, the responsibility to protect her precious cargo and make sure she delivers. in this section i discussed various forces that serve to erase the maternal body by centralizing the fetus and its interests.22 in the next section, i turn to the role played by appeals to nature in constructing a consumable body. specifically, i will examine how “naturalizing” breastfeeding may inadvertently render the practice normative. 4. “it’s evolution, baby” the push to “natural birth” in the west has been a response to the overmedicalization of childbirth. while “natural birth” can mean many different things, there are certain practices that natural-birth advocates often privilege: 22 to be clear, i am not arguing that belly casts/baby bumps themselves show that pregnant women are consumable. rather, my discussion is meant to show the invisibility of pregnant women. the invisibility (or, the effacement of identity) is one of the conditions that enable the pregnant body to be consumable. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 vaginal birth is considered superior to cesarean section, drug-free labor is hailed as empowering and preferable to epidurals, and breast milk is deemed better than formula. at times, the appeal to nature goes beyond what is purportedly natural for women—it can even mean appealing to the natural world. in popular culture, for example, placenta eating has been promoted on the grounds that other mammals in nature also do it. how should we understand these various appeals to nature in relation to the maternal body? what role does the language of nature play in constructing the maternal body as a consumable body? once again, we can glean insight from literature in animal ethics, and in particular from the ways that “nature” is employed to justify animal consumption. as we will see, invoking nature is yet another way to reinforce the perception that certain bodies are, by default, consumable. even though veganism/vegetarianism has gradually amassed supporters, meat eating remains the dominant dietary practice in north american society. however, it is not just that meat eating happens to be more “popular” or that more people “prefer” to eat meat. rather, marti kheel makes the case that meat eating is “compulsory” by comparing it to the normativity of heterosexuality: just as in a heteronormative society one is expected to be heterosexual, in a compulsory meateating society one is expected to be a meat eater; once queers and vegetarians “come out,” they are often subjected to interrogation for their “deviant” sexual/dietary practice (2004, 329). the normative, compulsory nature of meat eating is often couched in the language of “nature.” melanie joy articulates the “three ns of justification” in meat eating: natural, normal, and necessary (2011, 96–97). meat eating is “normal” (or “normalized,” as kheel argues) because it is purportedly “necessary” and “natural” for us to eat animals. we have come to believe that meat eating is a “necessity” because we “need” nutrients from meat to stay strong and healthy. we have also come to believe that meat eating is part of “nature”: from the claim that humans are at the “top of the food chain” to the biblical myth that asserts human dominance over other animals, we seem to find our “natural” place atop other animals. the “naturalness” of meat eating is strengthened by the belief that we have evolved to eat meat, or that it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to eat meat. for example, in an article published in nature, katherine zink and daniel lieberman argue that meat consumption plays a significant role in the evolution of homo erectus (2016). specifically, they contend that meat requires less masticatory force to chew per calorie than tough plants that were available to early hominids; thus, the consumption of meat enabled selection to favor hominids with smaller masticatory features. the decrease in facial and dental size, in turn, makes room for functions such as “speech production, locomotion, thermoregulation, and perhaps suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 even changes in the size and shape of the brain” (zink and lieberman 2016, 502). i shall leave it to the evolutionary biologists to determine the merits of this argument. what is significant for the purpose of the present discussion is the idea that meat eating favors the development of speech. as we know, there is a long philosophical tradition going back to aristotle whereby humans are defined as the animal with speech: our capacity to speak is the quality that defines us as human, a quality that sets us apart from other animals. to say that meat eating is a part of evolution does more than naturalize the practice, for it suggests that meat eating facilitates both our biological evolution (becoming homo erectus) and our ontological evolution (becoming an animal with speech). indeed, when time magazine picks up this article, the author reminds us that without meat, “we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are” (kluger 2016; emphasis mine). it is difficult to overstate the weight evolution carries in the rationalization of meat eating. the appeal to evolution is supposed to illustrate the “necessity” or “naturalness” of meat eating, thereby normalizing the practice. after all, how can we fault nature? if meat eating is what makes us human, how can it be wrong? how can we be blamed for doing what is merely necessary? in these ways, evolution (or more generally, nature) lends moral support to meat eating. concomitant with the practice of compulsory meat eating is the notion that animals are, by nature, consumable. after all, if it is part of a natural order for humans to eat meat, then it is also part of a natural order for animals to be eaten, and if we have evolved to eat meat, then animals are designed by evolution to become meat.23 animals are, by nature, consumable insofar as their existence is not only defined but also justified by their function as food. this is evidenced by the fact that animals are often bred for the explicit purpose of being consumed. indeed, it seems that even wild animals are destined to be eaten: former alaska governor sarah palin famously declares in her book that “there is plenty room for all alaska’s animals—right next to the mashed potatoes” (2010, 19). for palin, an avid hunter, animals’ place is on our plate. it is their inevitable fate to be eaten. we have seen thus far that an appeal to nature renders the animal body a consumable body. in pregnancy-consumption narratives—and here i will focus specifically on breastfeeding—we see a similar appeal to “nature” or “naturalness.” i should say at the outset that i am not interested in settling the debate over the benefits or drawbacks of breastfeeding, nor does my analysis depend on such a debate. and it is certainly not the purpose of this essay to either promote or reject 23 of course, this position suffers from its own inconsistencies. not all animals are considered consumable: humans are not food, and many people who eat cows and pigs would not consider eating cats or dogs. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 breastfeeding. i am primarily interested in how the language of nature is employed to construct the maternal body as consumable, as well as how “natural” has become a shorthand for “good.” just as the appeal to nature is used to justify meat eating, the appeal to nature is employed to encourage breastfeeding (in particular breastfeeding in public). in fact, some of the justifications for meat eating are so similar to the promotion of breastfeeding that we need only change the subject matter from “meat” to “breast milk” to recognize an all too common narrative. here are two examples of breastfeeding campaigns that explicitly invoke “nature”: ▪ a section in the american academy of pediatrics new mother’s guide to breastfeeding carries the heading: “breastfeeding: a natural gift” (meek and yu 2011,18). ▪ in 2013, the us department of health and human services initiated a campaign aimed specifically at encouraging african american mothers to breastfeed. it is called “it’s only natural: mother’s love, mother’s milk.”24 it is important to remember that the appeal to nature in pregnancy narratives is often made with the intention to empower women. as noted above, the “natural birth” movement is a response to the overmedicalization of childbirth; it is one way for women to reclaim control over their bodies and assert agency over pregnancy. as such, “nature” as an alternative is meant to resist the hegemony of medical knowledge and intervention. at times, “nature” is employed to resist the continued pathologizing and shaming of public breastfeeding. despite the expectation to breastfeed, breastfeeding in public is still treated as taboo: breastfeeding mothers are often asked to retreat to bathrooms to feed their children, perpetuating the idea that breastfeeding is a shameful practice that ought to be hidden. in response to such hostility, breastfeeding campaigns endeavor to empower breastfeeding mothers by “naturalizing”—thereby normalizing—the practice.25 24 see http://www.womenshealth.gov/itsonlynatural/. 25 while my analysis is primarily concerned with how the language of “nature” is deployed to justify or mainstream breastfeeding, it is important to note that “nature” is a double-edged sword. for example, the purported “naturalness” of breastfeeding may contribute to the shame and humiliation experienced by many breastfeeding mothers—especially when this “naturalness” ties the mother to an animal. for an excellent analysis of the ways breastfeeding is associated with animality, and the ways in which our negative attitudes toward breastfeeding stem in part from our anthropocentrism, see tuvel (2013). http://www.womenshealth.gov/itsonlynatural/ http://www.womenshealth.gov/itsonlynatural/ suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 but the appeal to nature in pregnancy narratives can disenfranchise as much as it can empower women (williamson et al. 2012). after all, if mothers are supposed to breastfeed, then the “failure” to breastfeed is likely to undermine one’s identity as a mother (williamson et al. 2012, 11). emphasizing the “naturalness” of breastfeeding also obscures the fact that breastfeeding is often difficult and unpleasant for many women, and even impossible for some. mothers often find themselves unprepared for the reality of breastfeeding, and they tend to blame themselves for the “inadequacy” of their bodies when they struggle to breastfeed (williamson et al. 2012, 7). furthermore, the language of nature may even shame women who do not breastfeed. as feminists have rightly pointed out, the effort to put breastfeeding in the mainstream is not value-neutral. for kukla, the slogan that “babies are born to be breastfed” implies that breastfeeding is a “natural entitlement of infants,” and mothers are “thwarting natural law if they don’t manage to breastfeed” (2006, 173). charlotte faircloth even argues that “nature” is invoked as a “moral authority” insofar as it authorizes feeding practices that are deemed unconventional by the mainstream (2017, 23). faircloth finds that proponents of “full-term breastfeeding”26 often appeal to nature to justify their practice. for example, they cite the breastfeeding practice of nonhuman primates to articulate the “need” to delay weaning, thus promoting this atypical feeding practice in terms of “evolutionary adaptation and development” (2017, 28). once again, “evolutionary” becomes a shorthand for “necessary” or “beneficial.” 5. the failed promises of nature my analysis reveals that the appeal to nature helps construct a consumable maternal body. yet, just as our (purported) natural appetite for meat does not justify meat eating, the “naturalness” of breastfeeding does not mean it ought to be promoted as the paragon of infant feeding. suppose breastfeeding is indeed natural—does being “natural” automatically imply it should be promoted? i am not here suggesting that we should discourage breastfeeding. rather, i am simply pointing out that “natural” does not necessarily mean good—at least not without an argument. after all, there are many things in nature that we wouldn’t necessarily want to promote. for example, bullying and social hierarchies also exist in nature. but my concern goes beyond the validity of these arguments, as an uncritical appeal to nature may yield further unexpected, problematic consequences. if we conflate the natural and the good, then the flip side of this conflation would also be true: the unnatural becomes the bad and the undesirable. as jessica martucci and anne barnhill (2016) argue, the association of the unnatural and the dangerous has 26 full-term breastfeeding involves weaning the child only when he or she no longer wants breast milk. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 problematic implications in medicine. for example, opponents of childhood vaccination regularly employ the rhetoric that vaccination is “unnatural” and therefore risky and harmful. as such, the appeal to nature in breastfeeding promotion may inadvertently undermine other medical care that is essential to public health (martucci and barnhill 2016). setting aside the problem of equivocating between the natural and the good, feminists should be especially wary of this sort of “nature” talk. first, it reinforces the gender stereotype in which a woman is cast as a default (“natural”) caretaker (martucci and barnhill 2016, 2). second, the idea that it is “natural” (and hence necessary) for a lactating woman to breastfeed may inadvertently promote the perception that the woman’s body is always at the service of others. third, the way reproduction happens nowadays is highly regulated by technology—there is nothing “natural” about taking birth control pills or wearing a condom, and while miscarriage is part of nature, abortion is not. given that many of the reproductive rights we want to safeguard for women are not “natural,” the appeal to nature in pregnancy narratives is problematic from a feminist point of view. but lastly, a particularly insidious feature of appeals to nature concerns their purported authority. when nature becomes a “moral authority,” can it still make good on its initial promise to liberate women, allowing them to reclaim control over pregnancy and childbirth? or does it liberate women from the tyranny of the medical establishment only to subject them to the new puissance of “nature”? as we have seen, the appeal to nature is an attempt to mainstream breastfeeding practices that have been marginalized (be it breastfeeding in public or full-term breastfeeding). however, an appeal to nature that accords nature a moral authority does not necessarily promote diversity or tolerance, especially when such an appeal merely replaces one practice with another as the proper, normative practice.27 in other words, even if the language of nature may empower some, it is done at the expense of others. it is time to jettison our reverence for “nature” and consider a new strategy to support breastfeeding mothers, a strategy that does not presuppose a good mom/bad mom dichotomy or deepen the perception that it is an everpresent responsibility for women to maintain a consumable body. and finally, without the “authority” of nature to normalize or necessitate our consumption/feeding practices, we can also begin to reconsider the question of what makes something or someone consumable, and whether we are justified to treat them as such. 27 according to a policy statement issued by the american academy of pediatrics, “breastfeeding and human milk are the normative standards for infant feeding and nutrition” (2012, e827; emphasis added). suen – the construction of a consumable body published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 in conclusion, the way we have codified the norm to produce a consumable maternal body goes hand in hand with the “just in case, don’t take risks” mentality that produces a hypervigilant pregnancy-consumption culture. this culture imposes excessive bodily, cognitive, and emotional burdens on the pregnant/breastfeeding woman. as we have seen, the responsibility to produce a consumable body extends well beyond pregnancy, as women are expected to be perpetually readying themselves for possible pregnancy, regardless 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breastfeeding promotion.” pediatrics 137 (4): e20154154. doi:10.1542/peds.2015-4154. mayo, thomas w. 2014. “brain-dead and pregnant in texas.” american journal of bioethics 14 (8): 15–18. doi:10.1080/15265161.2014.925365. meek, joan, and winnie yu. 2011. american academy of pediatrics new mother’s guide to breastfeeding. new york: bantam books. mezey, gillian c., and susan bewley. 1997. “domestic violence and pregnancy.” bjog: an international journal of obstetrics and gynecology 104 (5): 528– 531. doi:10.1111/j.1471-0528.1997.tb11526.x. nih (national institutes of health). 2016. “couples’ pre-pregnancy caffeine consumption linked to miscarriage risk.” news release, march 24. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/couples-pre-pregnancycaffeine-consumption-linked-miscarriage-risk. oaks, laury. 2000. “smoke-filled wombs and fragile fetuses: the social politics of fetal representation.” signs 26 (1): 63–108. doi:10.1086/495568. oliver, kelly. 2012. knock me up, knock me down: images of pregnancy in hollywood films. new york: columbia university press. palin, sarah. 2010. going rogue. harpercollins. paltrow, lynn m., and jeanne flavin. 2013. “arrests of and forced interventions on pregnant women in the united states, 1973–2005: implications for women’s legal status and public health.” journal of health politics 38 (2): 299–343. parsons, linn h., daniel zaccaro, bradley wells, and thomas g. stovall. 1995. “methods of and attitudes toward screening obstetrics and gynecology patients for domestic violence.” american journal of obstetrics and gynecology 173 (2): 381–386; discussion 386–387. petchesky, rosalind pollack. 1987. “fetal images: the power of visual culture in the politics of reproduction.” feminist studies 13 (2): 263–292. sandilands, catriona. 1999. the good-natured feminist: ecofeminism and the quest for democracy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. smith, elizabeth. 2008. “domestic violence in pregnancy.” international journal of 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conduct during pregnancy: a decisonmaking model for lawmakers.” indiana law journal 64 (2): 357–374. toze, michael. 2018. “the risky womb and the unthinkability of the pregnant man: addressing trans masculine hysterectomy.” feminism & psychology 28 (2): 194–211. doi:10.1177/0959353517747007. tuvel, rebecca. 2013. “exposing the breast: the animal and the abject in american attitudes toward breastfeeding.” in coming to life: philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, edited by sarah la chance adams and caroline lundquist, 263–282. new york: fordham. vielmetti, bruce. 2013. “pregnant woman fights wiscosin’s fetal protection law.” journal sentinel, october 24. http://archive.jsonline.com/news/crime/pregnant-woman-fights-wisconsinsfetal-protection-law-b99127289z1-229077121.html. waggoner, miranda. 2015. “cultivating the maternal future: public health and the prepregnant self.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 40 (4): 939–962. doi:10.1086/680404. washington, nicole. 2015. “eat this, not that: taboos and pregnancy” national geographic, march 19. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-andculture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-andpregnancy/. williams, kate, ngaire donaghue, and tim kurz. 2013. “ ‘giving guilt the flick’?: an investigation of mothers’ talk about guilt in relation to infant feeding.” psychology of women quarterly 37 (1): 97–112. doi:10.1177/0361684312463000. williams, kate, tim kurz, mark summers, and shona crabb. 2013. “discursive constructions of infant feeding: the dilemma of mothers’ ‘guilt.’” feminism & psychology 23 (3): 339–358. doi:10.1177/0959353512444426. williamson, iain, dawn leeming, steven lyttle, and sally johnson. 2012. “‘it should be the most natural thing in the world’: exploring first-time mothers’ breastfeeding difficulties in the uk using audio-diaries and interviews.” maternal & child nutrition 8 (4): 434–447. doi:10.1111/j.17408709.2011.00328.x. wolf, joan b. 2007. “is breast really best? risk and total motherhood in the national breastfeeding awareness campaign.” journal of health politics, policy and law 32 (4): 595–636. doi:10.1215/03616878-2007-018. zink, katherine, and daniel lieberman. 2016. “impact of meat and lower palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans.” nature 531 (7595): 500–503. doi:10.1038/nature16990. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2015/03/19/eat-this-not-that-taboos-and-pregnancy/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2019 26 alison suen is an assistant professor of philosophy at iona college, new york. she received her ba in philosophy from university of northern iowa in 2006, and her phd in philosophy from vanderbilt university in 2012. her published works include a monograph, the speaking animal: ethics, language and the human-animal divide (2015) and an edited anthology, response ethics (2018). her articles have appeared in philosophia: a journal of continental feminism and teaching philosophy. she is interested in various intersections between feminist philosophy and animal ethics, and her current research focuses on the ethics of consumption. disoriented life: a review of ami harbin, disorientation and moral life feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 4 2018 disoriented life: a review of ami harbin, disorientation and moral life ted rutland concordia university, montreal, quebec, canada, ted.rutland@concordia.ca recommended citation rutland, ted. 2018. "disoriented life: a review of ami harbin, disorientation and moral life." feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 4. disoriented life: a review of ami harbin’s disorientation and moral life ted rutland abstract this article reviews ami harbin’s recent book, disorientation and moral life (oxford university press, 2016). it summarizes and affirms the book’s attention to the moral and political significance of moments of disorientation, moments in which people lack certainty regarding what to do, how to do it, or both. it also suggests two ways in which the book’s analysis could be extended, including an exploration of more extensive and systemically produced disorientations. keywords: moral philosophy disorientation and moral life is an engaging and provocative exploration of the personal and systemic relationships that bind us to each other. its core aim, as harbin explains, is to illuminate, theorize, and appreciate a moral terrain that lies beyond the boundaries of actions characterized by “moral resolve.” moral resolve is harbin’s term for the dominant characteristic of the kinds of actions that have most often interested moral philosophy. these are actions in which people “know what to do” and “how to do it” (41). they are also actions in which people “have confidence” (41) about the action they are taking and/or about oneself as a moral agent. the central premise of disorientation is that something morally and politically valuable can emerge before, after, and outside these moments of moral resolve. to make sense of these other moments, harbin introduces the concept of disorientation to refer to “temporally extended, major life experiences that make it difficult for individuals to know how to go on” (2), and she reflects deeply, imaginatively, and always precisely on the moral processes that can occur in these particular experiences of disorientation. harbin’s project is precisely defined, and it is important to register what she is, and is not, trying to theorize. disorientation, for harbin, does not refer to spectacular moments of losing one’s direction or losing oneself, moments like visiting a foreign country or experiencing a spectacular shift in consciousness (e.g., by taking drugs). disorientations, harbin insists, are ubiquitous in life, they are often mundane, they are seldom brief, and they are mostly unchosen. the moral importance 1 rutland: disoriented life published by scholarship@western, 2018 of disorientations, meanwhile, is not restricted to the possibilities they can create for new ways of thinking and acting. disorientations may create new possibilities by clearing away old assumptions and goals and making way for new ones, but that’s not their only value. significant moral processes, harbin explains, can happen before, or in the absence of, some new moral orientation. the import of disorientations lies, in part, in its naming of disorientation as a potentially valuable experience, rather than an interval between potentially valuable experiences. it also lies, however, in the many examples of morally beneficial, disoriented processes that the author brings up and thinks through. one such example involves a white person recognizing a particular way that racial norms structure their life and, as a result, coming to know these norms better—coming to know the norms, that is, without the certainty of knowing them completely and without necessarily knowing how to act in relation to them. another example involves a person experiencing the debilitation of illness, trauma, or migration. this experience might help the person to develop a richer sensitivity to the vulnerabilities that shape all of our lives and that shape some lives, due to structures of oppression, much more than others. for me, the book’s most important effect is to make it more possible to dwell in moments of disorientation, moments when one does not fully know how to act. the book does this, in part, by encouraging attention to what else is happening in these moments besides a kind of moral stasis, a kind of value-less interval between resolute and decisive actions that may feel like it needs to be overcome as quickly as possible. reading the book brought to mind a whole series of disorientations in my own life that i found perplexing at the time, and that i continue to find perplexing because i continue to not know what the right action would have been. one of these incidents occurred in a reading group that i co-facilitate, which focuses on black critical scholarship. nearly all of the group’s members are black students (usually graduate students); i’m often the only white person and the only professor present. in a recent meeting, the discussion of a particular text verged into a quite wide-ranging, insightful, and (i think) important criticism of white people. i didn’t participate in this part of the discussion and, probably for this reason, a student turned to me at one point and said, “sorry, ted.” this kind of thing has occurred in my life before, but the repetition of the experience hasn’t taught me how to respond with moral certainty. the possible responses that have come to my mind over the years are wide-ranging, from signaling my agreement with what people are saying (“that’s okay; everything you’re saying is true”) to signaling my social or emotion distance from what people are saying (“it’s okay; i’m not taking this personally”). what makes responding to this difficult, for me, is that any response that i have thus far imagined either (a) makes the discussion more difficult for others (by showing that this criticism does implicate me and 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/4 does make me feel uncomfortable, even as i think it’s valid and necessary) or (b) positions me as the “good white person” (by suggesting that the criticism applies to white people in general, but not to me, or that it does apply to me, but that i can endure it). the absence of a fully appropriate response in this context brings to mind the advice of african american activist maurice mitchell to the many white antiracists who sought to support the ferguson uprising when it began in 2014. “your anxiety about getting it right,” he said, “has nothing to do with black liberation” (cited in crass 2015). when “getting it right” is either impossible or unnecessary, harbin’s book has much to offer. thinking about my experience in the reading group, for example, i notice something more about the pushes and pulls of white selfidentification, including the tricky ways that white people’s necessary criticism of whiteness, white actions, or white supremacy can unwittingly perform a kind of disidentification with whiteness—an implicit suggestion that the problem lies elsewhere, among other white people. noticing this problem does not produce a sure framework for future action, but it does seem essential to the ongoing practice of what harbin, following sue campbell, calls “resistant identification” with privileged group membership, which is to say, being accountable for one’s membership in a social group that exists only as part of a structure of domination that one is struggling against (see nopper 2003). the moments that i found most compelling in the book were ones like this: moments where none of the conceivable actions can be taken with certainty, incontrovertibly. it was the same kind of moments that i found most interesting when the book touches on political actions. one example of this kind is political action in which various incommensurable kinds of actions are possible, but it is hard to choose just one. one may face a choice, for instance, between political actions that seek to improve conditions in prisons versus actions that seek to abolish the prison system entirely. these two kinds of actions are incommensurable, but it hard to rule out either one. another example is political action where the ultimate goal is not yet articulable. community organizing in postindustrial cities like detroit, harbin argues, can take this form. harbin labels this kind of work, following scott kurashige, “building without blueprints.” this kind of work entails a productive, sustained disorientation. it requires one to act, without a precise sense of where one is headed or the exact steps that would carry one there. the absence of a clear blueprint, in this context, is not a limitation, but the condition of real social transformation. this is another part of the book that i found helpful and, in fact, i think it’s possibly more helpful than harbin claims. reading the book caused me to search my memory for political actions that didn’t fall into the disorienting framework that harbin theorizes. the one action that came to mind was my involvement in the 2012 quebec student movement. this involvement, for me, entailed no great quandary, 3 rutland: disoriented life published by scholarship@western, 2018 no disorientation. what i needed to do, and what i knew i needed to do, was simply to support the students in any way i could. the entire student movement could potentially be seen in similar terms. in contrast to a political project like prison abolition, which can scarcely imagine the world that it is trying to create, the student movement was directed toward a fairly straightforward and easily imaginable outcome: the cancellation of a major tuition increase that the quebec liberal government had planned to institute. and yet, for those intimately involved in the movement, there were countless moments of disorientation, moments where decisions needed to be made about tactics, strategy, alliances, actions, messaging, deliberation, consensus making, and so on. in these moments, no clear decision-making framework existed, and the advice of the institutionalized left in quebec (far too complacent and conservative) could not be fully trusted. these moments, though they are reminiscent of those discussed in harbin’s book, may suggest the need for a modest expansion or revision of her conception of disorientation. two specific questions seem to require attention. first, is it possible that disorientation in politics is a matter not just of the kind of struggle, but of the kind of position one occupies within the struggle (mine versus the students)? second, are there cases in which one can commit resolutely toward a goal (and, thus, know where one is trying to go) but still experience all kinds of disorientations in the pursuit of that goal? to the extent that the answer to either of these questions is yes, then there is some work to do in exploring what’s politically valuable in these other moments. these could be moments that, while lying outside of harbin’s present definition of disorientation, could be brought productively within the latter. in any case, disorientations makes it possible to frame and explore these additional political issues and, thus, invites further work on the politics of disorientations. in addition to moments like these, there are other moments that i think fit within harbin’s present definition of disorientation, but that could actually be more disorienting than the book suggests. concretely, reading the book caused me to think about the political contexts discussed by certain black scholars. frantz fanon (1986), for example, evokes a particularly vexed situation in his famous essay, “the lived experience of the black.” the essay moves dialectically toward the final paragraph, in which fanon finally pinpoints the situation of the black subject: a situation in which this subject can neither fully affirm its blackness (in an oppressive, antiblack society) nor transcend this racial position (through organized struggle) to attain a universal class position. fanon, locating himself in this situation, writes of himself “straddling infinity and nothingness,” a vexed situation that, when contemplated, causes him “to weep” (140). the context depicted by fanon is certainly one of disorientation. however, it does not seem to be defined by the subject facing a pair of incommensurable actions that, in the end, must both be chosen (a situation that calls for what harbin, 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/4 following chris dixon, terms “both/and” decisions). it seems to be a context, instead, in which the subject faces no action that can, with assuredness, be taken (a situation that, it could be said, calls for “neither/nor” decisions). a similar predicament is sketched, more recently, in christina sharpe’s 2016 book, in the wake. sharpe’s book clearly aims to make sense of a kind of impossibility—the ongoing disaster opened up for black people by transatlantic slavery. this impossibility, for sharpe, lies in the paradoxical fact that “the ongoing statesanctioned legal and extralegal murders of black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary” (7). the major consequence of this situation is that all of the concepts that one might use to articulate political action lie within this “democracy” and therefore cement black subjection and premature death rather than promising freedom. the list of these concepts is long; it includes justice, freedom, agency, progress, equality, and empowerment. as sharpe explains, these concepts have been fully compatible with, and contingent upon, the ongoing production of their opposite condition for black people. the concepts, she concludes, produce and require black exclusion, subjection, and death as normative. if one accepts sharpe’s claims, then political action for black people—and simply existing as black people—may call for a way of living amid the absence of tenable political action and the inconceivability of political change. this kind of living is what sharpe calls “wake work,” and she describes it in terms that align with harbin’s book. sharpe’s core question in the book is the following: “how . . . might [we] begin to live in relation to this requirement for our death[?] . . . what happens when we proceed as if we know this . . . to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, of an ‘i’ or a ‘we’ who know[?]” (7). implied in wake work, then, is a particular relation to knowledge. knowledge, as it is usually conceived, is not possible in the wake. one must live “as if” one knows. also implied is the belief that something useful happens here, in the wake, in this unending moment in which proper knowledge and resolute action are impossible. sharpe’s premise is that it might be better to develop concepts and ideas to describe this moment than to make recourse to established, surer ideas like freedom, progress, and justice. both fanon and sharpe, then, point toward a kind of disorientation that harbin does not discuss, but that could be approached in the same manner as those that she does discuss. it could be useful, then, to consider whether there are political contexts or positions in which even something like a “both/and” action or “building without blueprints” isn’t (yet) possible. what kind of subject experiences these contexts (for neither fanon nor sharpe is depicting this as a universal experience)? if this experience of disorientation is unique to black people in the post-1492 world (as fanon and sharpe suggest), are there other experiences of disorientation that are specific to other groups? might disorientation arise more frequently, or more endur5 rutland: disoriented life published by scholarship@western, 2018 ingly, for groups experiencing the gravest forms of oppression? to what extent, finally, are scholars like fanon or sharpe crafting tools and concepts for a more enduring and structural form of disorientation than the forms described by harbin— not disoriented moments, but disoriented lives? the questions above are, in all cases, questions about expansion. they are questions about applying harbin’s work more broadly. this, to me, is the mark of a significant, thought-provoking, and nourishing work. disorientation and moral life, in shedding light and value upon usually disregarded moral processes, suggests new ways of thinking about life and new ways of living that life. to the extent that disorientations are ubiquitous (as harbin claims), then the book is helpful in a great many moments. what comes to the person here is not an answer, and not even guidance really, but rather a kind of companionship that makes it possible to live better in the recurrent stretches of life where one does not know how to go on, but one cannot stay put either. i feel fortunate, in this case, to have harbin’s book at my side, and very grateful that she wrote it. references crass, chris. 2015. “answering the call: white people showing up for racial justice.” the good men project, 18 june. https://goodmenproject.com/featuredcontent/answering-the-call-white-people-showing-up-for-racial-justicehesaid/. fanon, frantz. 1986. black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. london: pluto press. harbin, ami. 2016. disorientation and moral life. new york: oxford university press. nopper, tamara k. 2003. “the white anti-racist is an oxymoron.” race traitor february. http://www.racetraitor.org/nopper. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. ted rutland is an associate professor in the department of geography, planning, and environment. his work examines the racial politics of urban planning and policing in canadian cities, and he is the author of displacing blackness: power, planning, and race in twentieth century halifax (university of toronto press, 2018). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/4 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 disoriented life: a review of ami harbin, disorientation and moral life ted rutland recommended citation disoriented life: a review of ami harbin, disorientation and moral life (part of a cluster of reviews) feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 7 recommended citation narayan, uma. 2019. “sisterhood and ‘doing good’: asymmetries of western feminist location, access, and orbits of concern.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 7. 2019 sisterhood and “doing good”: asymmetries of western feminist location, access, and orbits of concern uma narayan vassar college umnarayan@vassar.edu narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 sisterhood and “doing good”: asymmetries of western feminist location, access, and orbits of concern uma narayan abstract there are a variety of discourses and practices that position western feminists (and western political subjects more generally) as people who have a moral and political obligation to concern themselves with the welfare, suffering, or empowerment of non-western subjects, often women, and intervene to “do good” on their behalf. conversely, there are virtually no discourses and practices that assign moral and political obligations to non-western feminists (or non-western political subjects more generally) to intervene in matters involving the welfare or suffering of western subjects, including women. a central goal of my paper is to make this asymmetry explicit and distinguish it from charges such as “essentialism” more commonly made against western feminist representations of their others. i explore the consequences of discourses and practices that construct western subjects as entitled to and obligated to concern themselves with the world entire, while not extending this global scope of concern to non-western subjects. i critically examine, among other things, the roles assigned western-funded ngos in enabling western subjects to engage in practices of “doing good” and i explore alternative possibilities that are more explicitly “political.” along the way, i examine certain blind spots in western political theory that appear connected to the picture of western subjects as obligated to “do good” in distant places. my analysis engages substantially with alison jaggar’s essay, “saving amina,” drawing attention to matters of agreement and possible disagreement. keywords: adaptive preferences, capillary power, democracy, criteria for development aid, dictators, doing good, gender essentialism, human rights, imperialism, liberalism, alison jaggar, neoliberalism, ngos, non-western feminists, non-western women, patriarchy, resource privilege, saving amina, western feminism, western women introduction this essay addresses some problems that beset western and western feminist engagement with issues affecting women and the “global poor” in nonwestern contexts. my analysis engages throughout with alison jaggar’s (2005a) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 thought-provoking article, “saving amina.” i strongly agree with jaggar’s critique of western feminist tendencies toward “culture blaming” and with her insistence that western feminists should focus on the ways in which western countries and subjects themselves contribute to the problems faced by non-western women (2005a, 75). i want to extend and complicate jaggar’s critique by focusing on certain interesting asymmetries of power pertaining to location, access, and orbits of concern between western and non-western subjects, including feminists. these asymmetries help to construct western subjects as having one-sided obligations to concern themselves, morally and politically, with issues in non-western contexts while effacing the existence, nature, and consequences of this one-sidedness. these obligations are one-sided because non-western subjects are not constructed as having parallel obligations to make moral and political interventions on similar issues located in the west, rendering the scope of their concerns far narrower than those of western subjects. this one-sidedness transforms what appear to be obligations into a form of western privilege whose theoretical and practical consequences i want to explore. i begin by sketching a dominant western political imaginary at work in the amina case which helps me point toward some of these asymmetries. i make these asymmetries more explicit as i go on, offering a picture of how they structure the framing of western and western feminist philosophical discourses pertaining to non-western others. i illustrate how these asymmetries go beyond theoretical discourse, showing how they are replicated by real-world practices that enable westerners to travel to non-western contexts to express such one-sided concern in multiple corners of the non-western world. i end with an exploration of how these asymmetries play out in shaping concepts and solutions prevalent both in western feminist discourses and in western philosophical discourses on global justice. along the way i offer an account of what i think is required of westerners rising to jaggar’s call to focus on how they themselves contribute to problems faced by non-western subjects. i will explain my reasons for pessimism both about the ways in which they might interpret this call and about their willingness to do what is required. the western political imaginary and the case of amina jaggar’s “saving amina” begins with a discussion of western engagement with the case of amina lawal, a divorced nigerian woman initially convicted of adultery under sharia law for having a child outside marriage. in early 2003, an electronic petition asked recipients to sign an appeal against the sentence of stoning to death that it depicted as imminent, collecting over five million signatures.1 a few 1 the five million figure is from libby brooks’s article, “saving amina” (guardian, may 7, 2003, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/08/gender.uk). narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 months later, another email signed by ayesha imam and sindi medar-gould, representatives of nigerian organizations engaged in lawal’s legal defense, asked people to stop the protest-letter campaign. jaggar (2005a, 55) notes that this second email asserted that the save amina petition “endangered lawal and made the task of her nigerian supporters more difficult, in part because the petition contained a number of factual errors, including a false assertion that execution of the sentence was imminent.” jaggar (2005a, 73) notes that the counter-appeal expressed concern about protest letters that stereotyped islam as incompatible with human rights, perpetuating racism, inflaming local sentiments, strengthening the hand of local right-wing extremists, and putting victims of human rights abuses and their supporters at risk. i want to add that westerners often remain unaware of the very possibility that their expressions of solidarity may pose dangers to the women they wish to help. i think there is a dominant western political imaginary that helps to insulate western subjects from understanding that their expressions of concern might do harm, an imaginary that goes back to colonial times. westerners often see their actions of protest and solidarity as an expression of individual concern, overlooking their identities as citizens of western nations that have long had, and continue to have, adverse economic and political impacts on distant countries. in earlier work, i described the ways in which the colonial encounter, part of the history of most non-western countries, resulted in ideological battles between colonial powers and nationalist male elites over understandings of “native culture” and its values. justifications for colonization relied on depictions of native culture as barbaric and backward, and practices pertaining to women (such as sati or veiling) were centrally deployed in support of these depictions. anticolonial nationalist discourses constructed by male elites responded by depicting these very practices as constitutive of their culture’s special respect for women. both colonialist and nationalist discourses tended to misrepresent the nature, meanings, and consequences of these practices, making the women of the colonies mere placeholders in their political contestations. non-western women were constructed as subjects who were constantly being “spoken for” by either westerners who desired to rescue them from the cruelties of native patriarchy or by local male elites who wished to rescue them from the evils of “westernization.” neither recognized these women’s capacities to articulate their own interests. feminists in former colonies continue to struggle with these legacies as they attempt to redefine and contest local practices in feminist terms (narayan 1997). and, western feminists continue to struggle with this western legacy of speaking for non-western women. some concerns that imam expresses about the save amina petition illustrate how these legacies play out in the nigerian context. imam worries about how feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 western signature campaigns can incite “vigilante and political overreaction to international attempts at pressure” and cites the case of an unmarried teenager convicted of extramarital sex whose flogging sentence was illegally brought forward by a state governor who boasted of his resistance to “letters from infidels.”2 westerners are often woefully ignorant about the complex legal systems of contemporary non-western nation-states. many signatories of the save amina petition would likely be surprised to learn that a similar case last year involving a woman named safiya hussein . . . had also been overturned upon appeal. even if ms. lawal’s sentence had been upheld by the upper shariah court in katsina state . . . , she would still have had two chances to appeal, both times to secular courts: first to the federal court of appeal, and then to the supreme court. both courts would have acquitted her because in nigeria, federal law, which doesn’t punish adultery, is superior to any regional law, religious or otherwise. and the president olusegun obasanjo opposes capital punishment; no executions have been carried out since he took office in 1999.3 many westerners might be even more surprised to learn that nigerian groups had successfully used islamic law itself to appeal such cases before a higher court—they had a record of successfully appealing seven or eight cases that raised issues similar to amina’s in the prior three years. many western subjects tend to imagine non-western patriarchy and religious fundamentalism as entirely sui generis, a view historically connected to colonialist pictures of non-western cultures.4 they thereby efface the ways in which western policies contribute to these phenomena. jaggar provides numerous examples that sharply challenge this colonial picture. she calls attention to the poverty, dislocations, upheavals, and violence created in these countries as a result of neoliberal economic policies imposed by western-dominated international institutions (jaggar 2005a, 62–65). imam too describes how structural adjustment policies imposed on the african continent by the imf and world bank have slashed spending on health and 2 ibid. 3 the passage is from helon habila’s article “justice, nigeria’s way” (new york times, october 4, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/04/opinion/justicenigeria-s-way.html). 4 for a good example, see sinha (2006). sinha’s book focuses its analysis on american journalist katherine mayo’s 1927 book mother india, which depicted a variety of social ills affecting indian women as results of an irredeemable hindu culture that rendered india unfit for self-government. narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 education and switched agriculture from subsistence farming to cash-cropping in ways that have increased hunger and sickness—upheavals that have strengthened the appeal of religious fundamentalism.5 large-scale global policies which demonstrate western culpability for harms in distant places are seldom the subject matter of protest petitions eliciting the concerned clicks of western subjects—an asymmetry i find interesting. i am not suggesting that such electronic petitions would cause significant change to those policies, but i do think they would have the minimal virtue of educating westerners about the ways in which the international economic and political policies of their nation-states adversely affect the lives of millions elsewhere. such information might help them learn that their status as western citizens is likely to have harmful effects on how their expressions of concern are heard and interpreted abroad— when, for instance, they are perceived as acting in tandem with their nation-states, their aid-agencies, and their corporations as one more form of western intrusion into contexts not their own. even in cases where the sincerity of westerners’ concern, their liberty to critique, and the sagacity of their criticisms are unimpeachable, westerners cannot undo the reality that their voices speak and are heard in a world where western subjects have plenty of say that is entirely onesided and nonreciprocal in non-western contexts. asymmetries of concern: western theorizing and non-western subjects i would like to turn to thinking about the fact that non-western subjects are seldom invited to express moral or political concern about the patriarchal problems suffered by western women. why have people not come across innumerable petitions specifically soliciting non-western individuals, including feminists, to express outrage about or support for a western woman facing some horrible patriarchal problem? why is it that such solicitations are even difficult to imagine? there is no dearth of western women who suffer greatly from patriarchy. and, while proportionately fewer non-westerners may have access to computers, a considerable number do in fact have access. even outside the electronic domain, non-western citizens and feminists are seldom, if ever, recruited to show support for women confronting patriarchal problems in western contexts or asked to think about their obligations to address injustice in western contexts. the taken-forgranted ubiquity of this phenomenon makes it easy not to notice. permit me to belabor this point by “putting in reverse” the questions at the end of the opening paragraph of alison jaggar’s essay, “global responsibility and western feminism,” switching the subject-positions of western and non-western subjects. i want my 5 see michele landsberg’s “muslim feminist focuses on roots of extremism” (toronto star, dec. 15, 2002). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 readers to register the strangeness of this reversal. that text (jaggar 2005b, 185) would then read as follows: it is indisputable that, in a variety of mundane ways, women in the global north are worse off than are otherwise comparably situated men. how should feminist philosophers in the global south respond? are we entitled or even obligated to criticize customs and traditions in the global north that we regard as oppressive to women? should we support practical interventions destined to improve northern women’s situations? why are these questions never asked? it is true, after all, that, in a variety of mundane ways, women in the global north are worse off than are otherwise comparably situated men. and there surely are feminists and feminist philosophers and academics in a variety of disciplines in the global south capable of exercising their intellectual and political faculties on such matters. so, why is the arrow of concern for one’s others so ubiquitous in one direction and peculiarly impossible in the other? what does this asymmetry say about dominant notions of feminist solidarity and global responsibility? and, how does this asymmetry fit in with the universalism of human rights discourse, which asserts that all of us are obliged to care about the human rights of all our fellow humans, a discourse often deployed to support westerners’ obligations to condemn harmful patriarchal practices in nonwestern contexts? i want to make this interesting asymmetry visible as one which routinely and tacitly signifies that westerners have an obligation to be attentive to the problems of non-western others but that these others are not expected to reciprocate this concern. i have an amused suspicion that in the political imaginary that underwrites this asymmetry, non-western subjects are thought of as too exhausted to concern themselves with western problems—they are imagined to be subjects drowning in the quagmire of their local poverty and patriarchal oppression, or they are subjects politically exhausted by fighting all those issues on their own turf. non-western feminists’ “orbit of concern” is thus confined to patriarchal practices in their own contexts and perhaps to occasional countering of western feminist misconceptions about non-western contexts—a pattern evident in a great deal of feminist discourse and exemplified in the case of amina. various forms of oppression in western contexts are not conceptualized as topics for non-western moral concern, let alone political intervention. if i were a western feminist (and in some ways i am) inclined to intervene on issues in non-western contexts, such asymmetries of power would worry me. i would feel uneasy about the ways in which this asymmetry seems analogous to the one-sided way in which middle-class victorian women thought they had political narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 obligations to their more “downtrodden” sisters in the colonies (burton 1994). i would try to take account of the fact that not all non-western subjects, including feminists, are more downtrodden and oppressed than all western women. i would attend to the fact that their countries are unequal players in the global economy and in global geopolitics does not entail that there aren’t plenty of highly educated, affluent, or middle-class non-western individuals and feminists whose lives are more comfortable than that of many poor and working-class women in the west. i would suspect that non-western subjects were being effaced in yet another instance of chandra mohanty’s (1991, 56) oft-cited point that western women are portrayed as educated and modern and free to make their own decisions while the “typical third world woman” is seen as poor, uneducated, victimized, and so on. i would try to rescue my fellow western subjects from being oblivious to these asymmetries. the asymmetries of concern and location that i draw attention to here are different from postcolonial feminist critiques that charge western feminist depictions of non-western cultural practices with being forms of “feminist orientalism” that exoticize and sensationalize them. these asymmetries pertain to the location and orbits of concern of western and western feminist subjects, not to the content or manner of depiction of culturally other practices. even when the content of western feminist understandings is unproblematic, these asymmetries are worrisome in that they posit certain (western) subjects as entitled or obligated to concern themselves with matters elsewhere and everywhere, while other (nonwestern) subjects seem tacitly confined to their own national and cultural corners. my point about these asymmetries also differs from charges of “feminist essentialism”—critiques that also pertain to the biases and overgeneralizations present in the content of western feminist depictions of non-western women.6 however, these asymmetries of location and concern might well undergird proclivities to orientalism and essentialism, and something of the sort of essentialism mohanty points to likely plays a role in the perpetuation of these asymmetries. asymmetries of concern in real-world practices the asymmetries i have described above do not manifest only in philosophical discourses or theoretical domains. they are deeply connected to a variety of “asymmetries in global practices” that enable large numbers of western subjects to wander around the world making issues in non-western contexts takenfor-granted matters of their “concern” and “doing good,” while non-western 6 i draw on jaggar’s discussion of feminist orientalism and essentialism in “saving amina” (2005a, 56–58). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 subjects are not enabled to travel in reverse, making western issues sites for their moral or political engagement. that these sites of western engagement encompass matters variously characterized as humanitarian issues, development issues, feminist issues, human rights issues, global justice issues, and so forth only make this asymmetry more pressing to think about.7 the western agents of such engagement run the gamut from students and academic researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, to members of churches and secular institutions of charity, to people involved in various nodes in the web of “development organizations.” for brevity’s sake i will confine myself to saying a little about two ubiquitous “types.” non-western countries, especially the smaller and poorer ones, are full of western subjects working for aid agencies, agencies that range from the official aid agencies of western states (such as usaid) to a huge variety of private ngos that receive western (private and state) funding. recipients of western aid are often required (explicitly or tacitly) to hire “higher-level staff” for aid projects from the donor country. this remains the case even if suitable (and cheaper) personnel are available in the recipient country or in a different lessaffluent country. actionaid estimates that such “technical assistance” accounts for one quarter of all global aid expenditures (greenhill 2005). most of this money funds expensive western consultants,8 and training and research carried out under their direction in non-western contexts that is connected to research projects in the west. many of them constitute the well-paid staff of the “development aid industry,” who get to live in poor countries and think of themselves as “doing good” while being paid lucrative western salaries. thomas dichter has many eye-opening descriptions of exactly how lucrative some of these “development aid” jobs are.9 7 there are numerous western subjects present in non-western contexts other than those i focus on in this essay. they include the many westerners who are present as part of western military or security forces and those who are there as representatives of western commercial interests. 8 see john-paul ford rojas and rowena mason’s “probe over millions spent on foreign aid consultants” (telegraph, september 17, 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9547162/probe-over-millions-spent-onforeign-aid-consultants.html). the article mentions concerns about a group of “poverty barons” paying themselves up to 2 million british pounds a year for their work helping the disadvantaged. 9 dichter (2003, 84–86) mentions a long list of “freebie” allowances that many development aid employees receive. the most interesting include a “hardship differential” that is often 25 percent of base salary and attached to all jobs in the third world, a “hazardous duty differential” given when the country one is posted to is deemed “dangerous,” and a “sunday differential” for those posted to middle narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 the second sort of western subject who gets to go abroad to do good is well-represented in the context where i teach. several of my students report experiences ranging from pre-college “gap years” to summer internships to voluntourism stints to junior year abroad segments, all of which take them to urban slums or rural villages in poor countries to engage in projects variously characterized as humanitarian efforts, human rights work, or feminist work helping to empower poor non-western women. these individuals are taught to see themselves as capable subjects who can act to assist non-western others—without asking questions like what an american teenager who has never done her own laundry can do for poor villagers in mali. in a heady mix, these experiences are marketed to western subjects as opportunities to do good in exotic locations, as educational opportunities to learn about oneself and one’s others, and as credentialization for a variety of employment opportunities later in their lives. for both types of western subjects, moral efforts allegedly on behalf of less-fortunate others become crucial sites for self-advancement. the existence of both sorts of subjects appears to have made schlepping concerned westerners around to meet with their oppressed others a major ngo function in many non-western countries. under the guise of their being helped, subaltern lives, experiences, and speech have become valuable commodities for western consumption, enriching the life-experiences, moral credentials, and career goals of westerners. the global poor have become crucial raw materials in the western marketplace of ideas and in the marketplace of funding opportunities for projects that purport to making the marginalized central. their marginalization is paradoxically increasingly entangled with habituation to the concerned presence of western others, and to various practices of interrogation, commiseration, participation, and “empowerment,” which involve forms of intrusion nonsubalterns would never accept for themselves.10 (neither here nor elsewhere do i wish to eclipse the roles that elites in non-western contexts play in these processes. i cannot do justice to that topic in this paper.) most importantly, i would argue that both sorts of subjects embody forms of “capillary power” that extends the reach of the west beyond its more “arterial” connections to non-western states and elites, all the way down to non-western subjects who are poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised. capillaries are connected to arteries, but these connections are often eclipsed in constructions of the “caring western heart.” metaphor aside, i am making a structural point about the many eastern countries where friday is the holy day. dichter mentions friends who complain of occasional postings “back home” where they had to pay their own mortgages, utilities, and costs of schooling their children. 10 for interesting examples, see the essays in cooke and kothari (2001). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 connections—of funding, of research and information-sharing, of building circuits of influence, and of actual access to non-western contexts—that exist between western institutions that see themselves as “doing good” and those that are engaged in maintaining western military and political power, access to markets, and so forth. westerners engaged in “doing good” projects are often ignorant, sometimes willfully, about such structural connections and dearly wish to see themselves as “countering” rather than as complicit with harmful western institutions. i encourage western subjects to consider the fact that the “capillary power” of doing good projects is still power, and one-sided power at that, and to figure out its many connections to arterial types of western power. both sorts of subjects i have discussed earlier do not have non-western counterparts. western countries are not dotted with non-western do-gooders engaged in various forms of humanitarian, human-rights, development, or “women’s empowerment” work. neither have i come across hordes of non-western youth visiting the west primarily motivated by the prospect of doing good, although there are certainly many non-western subjects getting an education here. so, in both theoretical-philosophical domains and in real-world practices, the “arrow of concern” remains heavily skewed in favor of western subjects alone taking an interest in the welfare of their others and having a variety of forms of institutionally mediated “capillary” access to their others. this brings me to an important issue on which jaggar and i may have significant differences—the vexed issue of non-western ngo’s and their western funding. jaggar is clearly aware of many of the current critiques of ngo’s—she mentions the problems of western money coming with strings attached, civil society organizations’ dependence on nonelected overseas funders, priorities determined abroad, and nonaccountability to the local people. nevertheless, she then concludes in an integrated global economy, however, nonintervention is no longer an option; our inevitable interventions are only more or less overt and more or less morally informed. although the foreign funding of women’s ngo’s has dangers, it is not necessarily imperialistic. (jaggar 2005, 72–73) it is clear jaggar and i are both familiar with many of the same critiques of ngos. it is also clear to me that i find myself balking at the two sentences i have quoted above. i will suggest what our differences on this topic might be by focusing on what i find myself resisting in these sentences while acknowledging uncertainty as to how deep a divergence there is between us. my own sense is that the global economy has been “integrated” from colonial times onward and that “inevitable (western) interventions” which were more overt in the colonial period have changed to more covert forms. thus, i am unsure as to what jaggar means when she narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 says that nonintervention is “no longer” an option. i find myself uneasy with jaggar’s sense that western interventions into non-western contexts are “inevitable” and that the only issue therefore is whether or not they are “overt” and “morally informed.” given my interest in the asymmetries of location and concern between western and non-western subjects that are the central topic of my essay, i may well have a greater stake in asking western subjects to be less sanguine and more worried about the fact that their “interventions” in non-western contexts are “inevitable” while similar non-western interventions into western contexts are not. i worry too about exactly how the “overtness” and “moral informedness” of western interventions are to be evaluated and by whom. in any case, the moral sagacity of westerners strikes me as insufficient to undo the politically problematic existence of this asymmetry in the powers to intervene. my restiveness about the “inevitability” of ongoing contemporary western intervention into non-western contexts may also be connected to the fact that i see this as symptomatic of the ways in which westerners have continued to have “colonialist” positionings and powers with respect to many non-western contexts. different non-western groups fought anticolonial struggles to have “a country of their own” that would enable them to become “citizens” of a state rather than remain “subjects” of a colonial power. they were struggles to eradicate western control over non-western territories in matters economic and political. however, very few of those postcolonial states have managed to retain much of their hopedfor autonomy, and one central effect of many current neoliberal policies has been to weaken those states further, transferring many of their “development” and “human rights” functions to ngos. one does not have to be a fan of states to worry about the purposes behind this weakening or about the ongoing transformation of their “citizens” into “clients” of foreign-funded ngo’s. one might also worry about the overarching place of ngo’s in the global order—a place that arundhati roy describes as forming a buffer between empire and its subjects, constituting themselves as arbitrators, interpreters, and facilitators.11 these are some of the reasons why i find myself unwilling to endorse jaggar’s sense that foreign-funded ngos are not “necessarily imperialistic.” keeping with the theme of this essay, let me point to yet another asymmetry using a thought experiment. imagine western citizens waking up to find nonwestern funders, donors, and citizens in charge of a large chunk of their human rights, development, and welfare programs, and of the empowerment of their women. i feel pretty sure that they would not be concerned merely with whether these forces were overt or morally informed. they would worry about the 11 see arundhati roy’s “help that hinders” (le monde diplomatique, nov. 16, 2004, https://mondediplo.com/2004/11/16roy). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 undermining of the state capabilities of their own country, about the replacement of state functions by foreign private institutions accountable only to their donors, and about the antidemocratic implications of the conversion of their “citizens” into “clients” of foreign-funded organizations. they would worry about the agendas possibly being served by foreign funding even in the absence of a long colonial history that would make them “imperialistic.” and these worries might well generate some adverse responses—xenophobia among them. since this is a thought experiment, i would like my readers to actively imagine what western responses to ngos might be in such a reversed situation. while i am unsure how exactly to interpret the term “necessarily” in jaggar’s contention that ngos are not “necessarily imperialistic,” i can attempt to clarify one sense in which i do think they are. i cannot see how my antipathy for neoliberalism can ignore the structural place of ngos in this schema. ngos are part and parcel of the “privatization” policies and associated slashing of government expenditures endorsed by neoliberalism for poor non-western states, whose public-sector state enterprises are being sold to private western corporations and whose public welfare functions are shifted to private ngos. such “privatization” is mainly justified in terms of these countries needing to use their state funds to pay down their national debt. my structural point suggests that ngos are in one important sense “necessarily imperialistic” to the same degree that neoliberalism is. jaggar notes the refusal of the wealthiest countries to conform to their own neoliberal principles (2005a, 63), an asymmetry which only underscores, i think, the imperialistic structures in which ngos are embedded. i would like to draw attention to how such “structural” critiques of ngo’s can interact at cross-purposes with what appear to be more “empirical” arguments. when i discuss the issue of ngos with students or friends, i am struck by the desire of my interlocutors to focus on a specific ngo they are familiar with and to insist on the specific good things the ngo has achieved in a particular context. perhaps jaggar’s sense that some particular ngos are in fact doing some good might be at the root of her being less harsh in her assessment. however, i would like to point out that the possibility that some western-funded ngo’s are doing some real “good” in non-western contexts does not address the worries expressed by the structural critiques. i argue that a structural critique which asserts that westernfunded ngos are the sugar coating on the bitter pill of global neoliberalism is not substantially undermined by assertions that sugar coatings do sometimes mask the bitterness of the pill!12 12 jaggar might also be responding to the fact that some western-funded advocacy ngos (such as oxfam) have supported positions contrary to neoliberalism—such as increased public spending or preservation of state-funded public welfare programs. i narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 i am afraid that many western subjects, including feminist and progressive subjects, are neither deeply familiar with the various critique of ngos nor fully engaged by their import. this failing is partly the result of the doing good paradigm that keeps westerners focused on questions of aid and how to “do aid better.” surrounded by a cacophony of moral injunctions to help distant others using western aid, western subjects seldom understand how such aid functions as an ideological smoke screen that allows problematic western economic and geopolitical agendas to continue, without notice from western citizens. how many western subjects, i wonder, have come across, let alone fully digested, the fact that in 2012, developing countries received a total of $1.3 trillion including all aid, investments, and income from abroad while $3.3 trillion flowed out of them to the developed world? how many know that possibly the largest chunk of this is due to “trade misinvoicing” whereby both foreign and domestic corporations spirit money out to western tax havens in places ranging from belgium and luxembourg to delaware and manhattan? how may would know that customs regulations that worked to make such “misinvoicing” nearly impossible until 1994 were altered to require customs to accept invoices at face value (except under very suspicious conditions) because the wto deemed that the former rules made trade “inefficient?”13 am willing to count such aspects of their work as consistent with trying to get western feet off non-western necks. i am grateful to the editors for drawing my attention to this point. however, i remain unconvinced that oxfam, for instance, is unproblematic as an institution. the following three articles capture aspects of my concern. ian brown discusses the increasing connections between “big charities,” including oxfam and transnational corporations, in “the company they keep” (new internationalist, december 1, 2014, https://newint.org/features/2014/12/01 /charities-and-transnationals). sexual exploitation by aid-workers has become a big issue of late, and one instance of it is outlined in damien gayle’s “timeline: oxfam sexual exploitation scandal in haiti” (guardian, june 15, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/15/timeline-oxfam-sexualexploitation-scandal-in-haiti). finally, for a critique of oxfam’s attempt to change its representations of africa, see tolu ogunlesi’s “oxfam’s new africa campaign reveals a misguided messiah complex” (guardian africa network, jan. 7, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/07/oxfam-campaign-africa-aid). 13 see jason hickel’s “aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries” (guardian. jan. 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-developmentprofessionals-network/2017/jan/14/aid-in-reverse-how-poor-countries-developrich-countries). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 while jaggar appears less critical of ngos than i am, she does strongly endorse the obligations of western subjects to call western nation-states to account for the various harmful militaristic, anti-immigrant, and neoliberal economic policies they support nationally and internationally. she argues that the western focus on non-western cultural practices engages “in a form of culture blaming that depoliticizes social problems and diverts attention from structural violence against poor populations” (2005a, 74). jaggar ends the article by saying, “rather than simply blaming amina lawal’s culture, we should begin by taking our own feet off her neck” (75). while i agree with these positions, i would like to complicate them with some thoughts about what jaggar’s call might entail and about powerful obstacles in its way. continuing asymmetries in western theories of global justice agreeing with jaggar, i argued earlier that the dominant political imaginary in western contexts imagines amina’s neck as endangered purely by the local patriarchy that has her by the throat and which effaces the copresent danger she faces from western feet. this focus on local patriarchs is ubiquitous in a number of popular discourses about the problems of non-western women—a good example is the book half the sky, where nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn (2010, xx) manage to position even goldman sachs, the world bank, and the pentagon as allies in rescuing nonwestern women from local patriarchy.14 the strangling hands of local patriarchs remain far easier for westerners to conceptualize than structural violence involving the complicities of western feet. if i may amuse myself by shifting metaphors to yet another body part and to the bible, this situation perhaps explains why many western feminists want to focus on the mote in their non-western patriarchal brother’s eye and not on the beam of western privilege in their own. (neither here nor elsewhere do i wish to minimize the harms caused by local patriarchy.) where one’s privileges are direct causal consequences of the very institutions that create the “underprivileged,” as the concept of structural violence suggests, working towards changing the location of one’s feet, strikes me, as it does jaggar, as the place to start. but i am pessimistic about the alacrity and sagacity with which westerners will rise to this task and worried that they will interpret this injunction in ways that keep them focused on “doing good” rather than on “ending harms.” many western subjects engaged in the ngo-mediated activities i criticized earlier appear to see their activities as countering the weight of western feet. i would like western subjects to interpret jaggar’s call differently, and not as an invitation to credentializing forms of “doing good.” on my preferred interpretation, jaggar’s call would entail westerners’ trying to start and sustain large-scale political 14 for a critical review of the book, see narayan (2010). narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 movements in the west that challenge the foreign policies of powerful western nation-states and international institutions, educating western citizens about these policies, and making connections between issues at home and issues abroad. (it appears that many western citizens need to learn a great deal about the weight of western feet on western necks in addition to their weight on non-western necks.15) it would entail trying to critically understand both the domestic and foreign conduct and policies of western corporations. it would entail difficult political struggle and possible repercussions at the hands of state power that are not conducive to resume-building or funding opportunities. and, alas, my interpretation of jaggar’s call requires western subjects to stay and work politically on home ground, depriving them of travel opportunities and meaningful encounters with faraway “subaltern voices.”16 the option of fighting structural violence as it originates in their own institutions, and fighting it primarily on home ground, strikes me as the best option western subjects have. however, i doubt the possibility of a significant shift in this direction soon, given the powerful discourses and institutions that leave many westerners enthused about and rewarded for doing good in distant places. it seems likely that i have some differences with jaggar regarding the best ways in which westerners should proceed in trying to remove their feet. my own sense is that they should focus on “arterial domains,” on challenging and changing the heads that currently determine the position of western feet and not in ngo 15 a political movement that made connections between the growing inequalities of wealth and income in many western countries and the poverty of the non-western poor is an example of what i have in mind. data suggests that income and wealth inequalities in the us are huge. according to recent reports, the wealthiest 1 percent of american households own 40 percent of the country's wealth and the top 1 percent of households own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. (see christopher ingraham’s “the richest 1 percent now owns more of the country’s wealth than at any time in the past 50 years” [washington post, december 6, 2017]). most citizens do not appear to have an accurate understanding of either the size or the implications of these inequalities. for more on this, see “it’s the inequality, stupid” by dave gilson and carolyn perot (mother jones, march/april 2011, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-inamerica-chart-graph/). 16 for a position that long predates current debates on ngos and doing good abroad, but has some interesting affinities with my critique and what i would prefer westerners to do instead, see illich (2010). while illich’s address was never published, it can be found in entirety in several places, including http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 mediated “capillary” areas close to non-western necks, where they are currently overrepresented. i believe westerners have a long way to go articulating such arterial challenges to national policies in places where they are citizens and not concerned outsiders, especially where their fellow citizens are more likely to have heard about amina than about africom.17 i believe that western actions to end policies that continuously cause harm (such as western food subsidies and food dumping) are more urgent than turning up to help the victims of these policies survive famine and food insecurity with western aid. i believe this is a position many westerners would endorse if non-western feet were on their own necks. my pessimism also results from my encounters with western feminist and philosophical discourses, some of which fail to notice their feet, and others of which offer what i find to be problematic or inadequate accounts of foot removal. i will offer some examples of such theories in what follows, starting with an example of a concept whose use in feminist contexts i often find frustrating—that of “adaptive preferences.” in her extended critical engagement with the ideas of martha nussbaum and susan okin, jaggar notes that okin and nussbaum “suggest that women who seem content with unjust cultural practices suffer from adaptive preference or learned desires for things that are harmful, a phenomenon called ‘false consciousness’ by western feminists influenced by the marxist critique of ideology” (2005a, 58). jaggar critiques the mode in which okin and nussbaum deploy the notion of “adaptive preferences,” saying: but raising questions of false consciousness only with respect to nonwestern women who defend their cultures could be read as suggesting that these women’s moral perceptions are less reliable than the perceptions of western women, whose consciousness is supposedly higher or truer. . . . nussbaum and okin both recognize explicitly that non-western women are perfectly capable of criticizing unjust cultural traditions and frequently do precisely that, but their practice of raising questions about adaptive preferences and false consciousness only when confronted by views that oppose their own encourages dismissing those views without considering them seriously. (2005a, 69) i would like to extend jaggar’s criticisms by setting out what i find disturbing about the term “adaptive preferences” and the theoretical uses it is put to by some 17 those interested in africom should read nick turse’s “the startling size of us military operations in africa” (mother jones, sept. 6, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/us-military-bases-africa/). narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 western feminists. the terms “adaptive preferences” and “false consciousness” are often used as synonyms by feminists, but i think there is an important difference between them that makes them far from synonymous. as i understand it, “false consciousness” in marxist theory amounts to a systematic misrepresentation of dominant social and economic relationships, a misrepresentation which, while inimical to the interests of the exploited classes and conducive to the interests of their exploiters, is a form of consciousness that both members of dominant classes and members of subordinate classes can suffer from.18 what is disanalogous in nussbaum’s and okin’s uses of “adaptive preferences” is its one-sidedness—the privileged are not afflicted by it, and it uniquely afflicts the oppressed. it is not my task here to defend or critique the marxist theory of false consciousness. i merely want to point out that it has the minimal virtue of suggesting that the material oppression suffered by exploited workers, in tandem with critical analyses offered by marxist theory, renders workers more likely to critique and recover from false consciousness than their exploiters. since the term “adaptive preferences” suggests that oppressed people are less likely to “get things right,” it can help support the view that the desires and preferences of poor non-western women might be discounted by the more fortunate, including western feminist philosophers, because, as jaggar notes with respect to nussbaum, “they are an unreliable guide to justice and the good life” (2005a, 59). in short, “adaptive preferences” could function in even more problematic ways than “false consciousness.” my biggest problem “adaptive preferences” is both an asymmetry and a “mote and beam” problem—the resolutely one-sided insistence on oppression as a source of preference-distortion is accompanied by a resolute refusal to focus on privilege as a serious, ubiquitous, and problematic source of preference-distortion. this refusal is all the stranger because most theories of oppression, feminism included, often have as their starting point an analysis of the ways in which forms of privilege distort not only the preferences of privileged subjects, but their expectations, entitlements, and understandings of how things work. feminist texts are full of analyses of how patriarchy distorts the expectations and sense of entitlement and worldviews of patriarchs; theories of white supremacy are replete with examples of analogous distortions engendered by white privilege. 18 addressing the development of the concepts of “ideology” and “false consciousness” in the works of marxist scholars like antonio gramsci, georg lukacs and members of the frankfurt school, ron eyerman (1981, 43) offers an important conceptual clarification when he says, “false consciousness came to mean a distorted and limited form of experience in society that could be applied to all social groups and classes; ideology was applied to those explanations offered by intellectuals to legitimate such experience.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 acquaintance with these analyses should suggest that people with problematically placed feet are less-than-ideal candidates for making evaluative judgments about the preferences or welfare of those on whose necks they stand. in what follows, i will suggest some ways in which privileges associated with problematically placed feet might produce interesting distortions in theories of justice. one of the distortions produced by western privilege is, i would argue, susan moller okin’s easy distinction between western “liberal” societies and “illiberal” non-western cultures and minority /immigrant cultures.19 the characterization of western societies as “liberal” might be far from obvious to certain members of western societies themselves—say to muslim women being denied the right to veil, to activists engaged in the issues raised by black lives matter, or to trans people forced to use the bathroom of their “biological sex.” jaggar (2005a, 69) notes this issue, saying, “western cultures certainly are not liberal all the way down—and illiberal values frequently rear above their surfaces.” however, the external policies of western countries arguably raise even more pressing questions, ones that strike me as rarely asked. what exactly is “liberal” about western foreign policies that have a long history of militarily supporting dictators in a variety of non-western countries, knowingly putting huge sums of aid money into their hands that then predictably flows to western banks, leaving the poor people of poor countries drowning in national debt that then enables the world bank to impose conditionalities that undercut national autonomy? why do these sorts of things that western countries do outside their borders not consistently undermine their standing to be called “liberal?” take the debate about the relative contributions of “internal” and “external” factors to the impoverishment of the non-western poor often found in the work of thomas pogge and in discussions of pogge’s work.20 i find myself struggling with what seem to be unexamined assumptions behind the distinction itself. i believe that it is very difficult to isolate what counts as “internal factors” in a world where non 19 see okin (1997). okin’s article is also available in cohen and howard’s (1999) anthology. several of the contributors to that volume make a similar critical point about okin’s distinction. 20 this debate and the internal/external distinction are central to several of the essays in thomas pogge and his critics (jaggar 2010). joshua cohen’s “philosophy, social sciences, global poverty” (pp. 18–45) and neera chandhoke’s “how much is enough, mr. thomas? how much will ever be enough?” (pp. 66–83) are two of the essays in this volume that focus a fair amount on the distinction between “internal” and “external” factors in their discussion of pogge’s work. they put this distinction to very different uses from each other and to very different uses from my points in this essay. narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 western dictators and elites depend on the tacit or explicit support of western powers to impoverish their people and to hide their ill-gotten assets in tax havens. with respect to any non-western country, the historical time frame one uses, the number of structures one takes account of, the ways in which one understands structural causalities and complicities, all make significant difference to distinguishing between what seem to be “internal factors” and what appear “external.” i worry that the distinction itself takes relatively autonomous western countries (where it is easier to distinguish internal from external factors) as the norm, effacing the ways in which their intrusive relationships to their others makes the distinction difficult to apply outside western contexts. how does one even begin to determine when and how and why the actions of a non-western dictator who has secured his position through western support amount to “internal” or “external” factors? if we lived in a world where all countries were relatively equal in power, it might make sense to judge whether a country was “liberal” or “democratic” by only looking at policies internal to the country itself. but we arguably live in a world where some countries that might be relatively “liberal” or “democratic” in terms of internal policies have long histories of supporting many overtly illiberal, undemocratic, and dictatorial regimes in other countries. it is striking to me how these external policies do not ever undermine their standing as liberal democracies. a quick look at the criteria used by the democracy index to rank the state of democracy in 167 countries will serve to confirm my point—their external policies do not appear to count in these rankings.21 the standing of western nations to be counted as “liberal” and “democratic” despite what they do outside their borders affects western theories of global justice in ways i find disturbing. i will try to describe some of my problems and begin by using as an example thomas pogge’s analysis of the international resource privilege. this is the privilege whereby rulers of a country have the power to sell the natural resources of a country, regardless of how they came to power. pogge is concerned about non-western dictators who use this privilege to sell their country’s natural resources, often to western countries and corporations, impoverishing their own people and profiting privately.22 pogge (2002, 114) calls for boycotts whereby western countries and corporations will not purchase natural resources from such dictators, denying them the ability to profit off such resource privilege. pogge is 21 for a good overview of the criteria employed, see the wikipedia entry for “democracy index” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/democracy_index). 22 leif wenar (2010, 128) sees the international resource privilege as one of the two features of the global order that pogge sees as “particularly ripe for reform.” the other is the international borrowing privilege, which i do not address in this essay. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 clearly a philosopher who is conscious about the weight of western feet on nonwestern necks. however, i think there are disturbing asymmetries in some of his solutions as to how the removal of these feet should proceed. from pogge’s description, readers might be tempted to see the resource privilege problem as a result of transactions between two equally culpable parties, given that both profit off the transactions and do so in callous disregard of the global poor. but when one thinks of other factors that pogge himself mentions along the way—such as the fact that western powers are often responsible for these dictators coming to power and responsible for maintaining them in power via arms sales— one might conclude that western states and corporations are even more culpable, given their roles in creating and maintaining the existence of the other culpable party, the dictator.23 in addition, while a particular non-western dictator typically impoverishes those who constitute the citizens of his own country, a particular western power that aids and abets a multiplicity of dictators in several non-western countries arguably impoverishes a greater number of people overall. while i have no problems with pogge’s call for non-western dictators being denied such resource privilege, i do have “asymmetry problems” with pogge’s proposed solutions for how the resource privilege issue should be handled. pogge proposes two different policies as conjoint solutions to the resource privilege problem, and i will set them out very briefly. first, he proposes that resource-rich fledgling democracies pass amendments to their constitutions declaring that “only its constitutionally democratic governments may effect legally valid transfers of ownership rights in public property” (2002, 169). second, pogge proposes an independent and international “democracy panel” that will judge whether countries are sufficiently constitutionally legitimate and democratic for their leaders to enjoy resource privilege, and thus warranted in selling its natural resources with legitimacy. pogge sees these steps as ensuring that (western) purchasers would be on notice as to when resource purchases from a country are illicit and face a variety of possible legal consequences if they purchase illicit resources (2002, 162). what strikes me about these twin proposals is that they both “regulate” non-western, potentially dictatorial countries to a significant degree in order to establish the legitimacy of their resource sales to western purchasers but that there is no suggestion of regulating western countries in identical ways that might provide them with reasons for caution about the legitimacy of their resource purchases. why, for instance, does pogge not call for a constitutional amendment to western constitutions that makes it unconstitutional for them to aid and abet dictators coming to power elsewhere and to buy resources from dictators when 23 see for instance pogge’s world poverty and human rights (2002, 148), where he gives a scathing account of western countries trading with such tyrants. narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 they do? why might pogge’s independent and international democracy panel not have the jurisdiction to use the external policies of western nations to adjudicate whether they warrant being considered “sufficiently democratic” to legitimately sell their own resources? my earlier point about the standing of western powers to be counted as “liberal” and “democratic” despite what they do outside their borders is, i think, arguably part of the answer to why such proposals seldom appear in philosophical discussion.24 it strikes me as a noteworthy asymmetry that no western philosopher i know of has even suggested that western nations to be subject to penalties with respect to their own resource privileges for their roles in aiding and abetting nonwestern dictators from coming to power and for trading with them. the fact that global trade would be radically undermined by a move that denied resource privileges to western countries that aid and abet dictators does not strike me as sufficient moral reason for a theory of global justice to totally ignore this possibility.25 that western nations who are powerful players on the global scene appear to be inoculated even in theory against certain penalties that are to be deployed against relatively less-powerful non-western countries strikes me as a 24 pogge is prolific, making it difficult to keep track of the ways in which his “solutions” evolve over time in various pieces of work. in a more recent piece, pogge’s description of the resource privilege problem, as well as his solution to it, appears to have changed in some ways. i do not think they have changed for the better. pogge (writing with mitu sengupta) says, “the populations of some less developed countries suffer from massive natural resource outflows that are not approved by or beneficial to the people. states shall agree that future such exports will be vetted by a southern resource export expert committee to determine whether they are acceptable to or serve the interests of the population. should the committee find that neither condition is met, then subsequent acquisitions are to be discouraged and partly compensated for by requiring buyers to pay a percentage of the value of the acquired natural resources into the human development fund” (pogge and sengupta 2014, 10). i will content myself with noting that i cannot begin to imagine northern countries agreeing to a northern resource export expert committee that would vet whether their own natural resource outflows were “approved by or beneficial to” their people. 25 it might be salutary for western subjects to notice that the boycott, a term which has its origins in the irish land war and was made famous by its use by mahatma gandhi’s swadeshi movement against british colonial rule, has under the current conditions of the global economy devolved into “trade sanctions” that can only be imposed (in anything approaching a “total boycott”) on relatively powerless countries by relatively powerful ones. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 disturbing asymmetry. i suspect that some notion of “feasibility” is at work here that would explain why these moves to subject western countries to constitutional amendments or potential losses of their resource privileges never occur. i am aware that the issue of “feasibility” is endemic in theorizing about changes to the global order required by a theory of global justice. i cannot robustly engage with this issue here, but i do want to note that it is not well defined. i admit that my own sense of what is “feasible” seems far more pessimistic than those of many who write in this area. while i find many proposals in the work of pogge and philosophers who respond to his work intellectually interesting, i do not find myself convinced they are “feasible” in the sense of “likely to actually happen any time soon.”26 i do not see poor non-western nations rushing to pass pogge’s constitutional amendment any more than i see their western counterparts passing the constitutional amendment i suggested. i do not see pogge’s version of the democracy panel being set up any more than i do mine. i would concede that, at an abstract level, there appear to be fewer obstacles in the way of pushing poor nonwestern countries to line up for pogge’s proposals than in the way of getting affluent western countries to accept mine. but i am not sure exactly how such considerations, which seem to be considerations about power, translate into considerations pertinent to a theory of global justice. i wonder whether something akin to the point i made earlier in my discussion of “adaptive preferences”—about 26 pogge’s solutions often call for the setting up of funds to which western nations will be required to contribute and whose proceeds are to be used to lift the nonwestern “global poor” out of poverty. one of the earliest calls for such a fund is in “eradicating systemic poverty: brief for a global resources dividend” (pogge 2001). this fund was to gain its proceeds from a grd “tax” on commodities disproportionately overconsumed by western nations such as oil. the human development fund he calls for in his 2014 essay (pogge and sengupta 2014) proposes to get it funds from what appear to be fines imposed for western “bad behavior” including western protectionism and subsidies, arms exports that fuel conflicts, civil wars and repression, sham transactions and mispriced trades, and buying resources from less-developed countries which are not approved by or beneficial to their people. since none of these funds seem likely to be set up any time soon, i continue to wonder what “feasibility” amounts to in philosophical theory. leif wenar (2010, 127) argues that “one can see the issue of feasibility absorbing increasing amounts of pogge’s attention as his work on global justice has unfolded over the past 20 years.” i think wenar is correct in his assessment of the increasing role of “feasibility” in pogge’s work, but i am unconvinced that most of pogge’s solutions are likely to happen any time soon or that they would work as pogge envisions. narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 how privilege might function to distort the preferences of the privileged—might be relevant to the issue of what strikes different people as “feasible.” i worry that the notion of “feasibility” might serve to mask or perpetuate power inequalities between countries and to keep people more focused on the question “what good might ‘we’ hope to persuade the powerful to do sometime soon?” overshadowing the very different question “what does global economic justice require?” i fear that such theories may serve to move western feet to moral high ground more than to dislodge them from non-western necks.) as i stated earlier, i have sympathy with jaggar’s call to westerners to focus on their feet, although i am leery about their interpreting this injunction as one more reason for doing good in faraway countries. likewise, i appreciate pogge’s work insofar as it focuses attention on the contribution of western feet to the weight on non-western necks, even though i have serious reservations about many of his “solutions.” so, one of my conclusions in this paper is that there is perhaps more to think about and worry about with respect to the ways in which westerners think they should dislodge their feet from non-western necks. one overarching worry connects to the asymmetry i began discussing at the start of this paper—that western subjects are constructed as having obligations to morally and politically intervene on issues in non-western contexts, while non-western subjects are not constructed with a symmetrical obligation with respect to western contexts. i will circle back to that asymmetry now. in discourses about global poverty, the non-western global poor occupy a position reminiscent of the position poor non-western women occupy in nussbaum’s and okin’s use of the term “adaptive preferences.” i often feel that the global poor, like poor non-western women, enter the texts to testify to “our” understanding of their suffering, abjection and degradation—a result of acute poverty in the former case and a result of patriarchal oppression in the latter. thereafter, they recede into the margins while “we” figure out what policies might serve to improve their situations. unlike the problematic moves that nussbaum and okin make with respect to “adaptive preferences,” philosophical discourses on global poverty like pogge’s do not “overtly” discount “their” preferences and do a much better job of pointing to “our” contributions to “their” problems. while the pogge-type philosophical discourses on the global poor seem better in these two respects, i remain anxious about the dominant place that continues to be held by concerned westerners, whose understandings, analyses, sensibilities, and solutions dominate the stage. i remain anxious about the corollary absence of the global poor. i even begin to worry about the metaphor of western feet on non-western necks, since it might suggest a picture where non-western subjects are immobilized and voiceless until owners of western feet move them at least a little. the metaphor might also suggest that owners of western feet are best positioned to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 figure out how to remove those feet and that they are not in need of input from the non-western necks whose voice-boxes their feet are squeezing. less metaphorically, i suspect that an “agency-eradicating” picture of the nature of “poverty oppression” is at work in both okin-nussbaum cases and in many discourses about the global poor. these discourses portray poverty as depriving the poor of access to the forms of knowledge and political understandings they need to provide meaningful input on how their conditions might be improved. on this picture, “we” have a responsibility to come up with solutions that reduce the abjection produced by patriarchy and/or poverty to a level where these subaltern subjects can then come to “have a meaningful voice.” i know that many people find this a “realistic,” albeit regrettable, picture of the abjection produced by poverty, and i also know that many people, including myself, react to this picture with moral unease and political queasiness. i tend to think of this difference as one of those unlikely to be resolved by argument. all i can do is to point to one important source of my uneasiness. none of the political movements that i admire, historical or contemporary, are movements where some segment of the privileged were overwhelmingly in charge of theorizing how to ameliorate the situation of the oppressed, though there are examples of people from the ranks of the privileged who supported these movements. i am thinking of a range of movements from anticolonial movements to movements for racial equality to feminist movements to movements fighting for the welfare of sexual and gender minorities. in all these movements, those from the ranks of people suffering from the set of systemic injustices centrally addressed by the movement were well represented in both leadership roles and in the taking of political action. in the “movement” to end global poverty, at least as i encounter it in philosophical discourses and academic corridors, the intellectual work of figuring out what global justice requires and what westerners owe their non-western others is heavily dominated by affluent westerners, whose theoretical picture of the subjectivity of the non-western poor likely excuses their absence. that bothers me: it taps into worries i have expressed earlier, both about the distorting “adaptive preferences of the privileged” and about the one-sided concerns for one’s others rooted in colonial history. more than a decade has passed since jaggar’s “saving amina” essay. yet many in the west, including philosophers and feminists, still have a lot to learn about the ways in which their feet are on non-western necks. they have perhaps even more to learn about the problems that might beset their attempts at theorizing how to remove their feet. i have used my odd positionality as a person whose feet have turned western but whose head retains enough non-western elements to hurt in the presence of certain aspects of western feminist and philosophical narayan – sisterhood and “doing good” published by scholarship@western, 2019 25 theories, to point to some of these problems. philosophers must, i suppose, continue to reinterpret the world even if their interpretations do little to change it. references burton, antoinette. 1994. burdens of history: british feminists, indian women, and imperial culture, 1865–1915. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. cohen, joshua, and matthew howard, eds. 1999. is multiculturalism bad for women? princeton, nj: princeton university press. cooke, bill, and uma kothari, eds. 2001. participation: the new tyranny? 4th ed. london: zed books. dichter, thomas w. 2003. despite good intentions: why development assistance to the third world has failed. amherst: university of massachusetts press. eyerman, ron. 1981. “false consciousness and ideology in marxist theory.” acta sociologica 24 (1/2): 43–56. greenhill, romilly. 2005. real aid: making technical assistance work. johannesburg, south africa: action aid international. illich, ivan. 1968. “to hell with good intentions” address to the conference on interamerican student projects (ciasp) in cuernavaca, mexico, april 20. jaggar, alison m. 2005a. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics & international affairs 19 (3): 55–75. ———. 2005b. “global responsibility and western feminism.” in feminist interventions in ethics and politics: feminist ethics and social theory, edited by barbara s. andrew, jean clare keller, and lisa h. schwartzman, 185–200. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———, ed. 2010. thomas pogge and his critics. cambridge: polity press. kristof, nicholas d., and sheryl wudunn. 2010. half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide. reprint edition. new york: vintage books. mohanty, chandra talpade. 1991. “under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.” in third world women and the politics of feminism, edited by chandra talpade mohanty, ann russo, and lourdes torres, 51–80. bloomington: indiana university press. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures: identities traditions and third world traditions. thinking gender series. new york: routledge. ———. 2010. “women: rights-bearers, economic assets, or stranded starfish?” review of half the sky, by nicholas d. kristof and sheryl wudunn. perspectives on politics 8 (1). okin, susan moller. 1997. “is multiculturalism bad for women?” boston review, october/november. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2019 26 pogge, thomas. 2001. “eradicating systemic poverty: brief for a global resources dividend.” journal of human development 2 (1): 59–77. ———. 2002. world poverty and human rights: cosmopolitan responsibilities and reforms. cambridge: polity press. pogge, thomas, and mitu sengupta. 2014. “rethinking the post-2015 development agenda: eight ways to end poverty now.” global justice: theory practice rhetoric 7:3–11. sinha, mrinalini. 2006. specters of mother india: the global restructuring of an empire. durham, nc: duke university press. wenar, leif. 2010. “realistic reform of international trade in resources.” in thomas pogge and his critics, edited by alison jaggar, 123–150. cambridge: polity press. uma narayan is professor of philosophy on the andrew w. mellon chair at vassar college. she received her ba in philosophy from bombay university and her ma in philosophy from poona university, india. she received her phd from rutgers university in 1990. she is the author of dislocating cultures: identities, traditions and third world feminism. she has coedited reconstructing political theory: feminist perspectives with prof. mary l. shanley, having and raising children with prof. julia bartkowiak and decentering the center: postcolonial and feminist challenges to philosophy with prof. sandra harding. she is currently working on issues pertaining to feminist political economy and globalization. 7299 narayan title page.pdf 7299 narayan final format.pdf the morality of resisting oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation smith, rebecca hannah. “the morality of resisting oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4). article 2. 2020 the morality of resisting oppression rebecca hannah smith st mary’s university, twickenham rebecca.smith@stmarys.ac.uk smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 the morality of resisting oppression rebecca hannah smith abstract this paper reconsiders the contemporary moral reading of women’s oppression, and revises our understanding of the practical reasons for action a victim of mistreatment acquires through her unjust circumstances. the paper surveys various ways of theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression, and considers objections to prior academic work arguing for the existence of an imperfect kantian duty of resistance to oppression grounded in selfrespect. these objections suggest (1) that such a duty is victim blaming; (2) that it distorts the normative direction of self-regarding duties; and (3) that consequentialist reasons are inapt for justifying self-regarding ethical responsibilities. the paper then argues that the need for normative coherence in our very concept of a moral duty is of paramount importance, and especially so in the fight against patriarchal oppression. accordingly, we should acknowledge the salient differences between pro tanto or defeasible moral reasons and fully fledged moral duties identifying agent-relative obligatory action. the paper concludes that we better respect and defend women’s rights when first we understand them as having, at best, defeasible moral reasons to oppose their oppression; and second, ensure that we make adequate allowance for a woman’s interpretative right to choose how to respond to her oppressive circumstances. keywords: kant, feminism, rationality, oppression, deontology, practical reason, specification. introduction what does morality require of me, if anything, when i am oppressed? should i engage in a verbal confrontation with a group of builders who wolf-whistle me as i walk past? should i request a meeting with hr when i discover my less-qualified male colleague is paid significantly more than i am? should i make a placard and march through parliament square when the prime minister proposes yet more budget cuts to vital family and domestic violence services? to most people, the answer to these questions is a resounding yes—of course i ought to do these things. similarly, most people would likely have no hesitation in qualifying that “ought” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 statement if it became clear that, for example, i would only endanger myself, my livelihood, or others by openly confronting my oppressors and/or my oppressive circumstances. what, then, is the exact nature of a victim’s moral impulses in cases of oppression? what is the most accurate moral reading of the practical reasons for action a victim of oppression acquires through her unjust circumstances? this paper will survey various ways of theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression, and argue against the idea that there is an imperfect kantian moral duty of resistance grounded in self-respect. it will then put forward an alternative account which suggests that it may be both more normatively coherent and pragmatically useful to view oppression as generating agent-relative pro tanto or defeasible moral reasons for resistance on the part of the victim, rather than fully fledged moral duties to do so. theorising victims’ moral duties to resist their own oppression there are two main schools of thought on the theoretical possibility of a victim’s moral duty to resist their own oppression: so-called “other-regarding” accounts and “self-regarding” accounts. other-regarding accounts, perhaps better labelled agent-neutral accounts, theorise a victim’s moral duty of resistance simply in terms of their broader duties of social justice. as members of oppressive social institutions victims are also thereby co-contributors to oppressive social practices and therefore have a moral duty to counter and correct it (vasanthakumar 2020, 3). in this sense, a victim’s own moral duty of resistance to their oppression is not unique to them in any particular way. it is not an agent-relative moral duty but rather an agent-neutral one, equally applicable to all participants in the oppressive social practices. it is grounded not in an individual’s status as a particular victim of the oppression in question, but rather in their citizenship and participation in the social institutions and structures that generate and perpetuate the oppression that they, and others, suffer from. as such, their moral duty is of no qualitative difference to any other citizen’s duty to resist oppression by promoting just social institutions and practices. yet, as vasanthakumar writes, to fail in this duty to resist, in other words to capitulate or acquiesce to living under unjust and oppressive social institutions and practices, is effectively to endorse, legitimise, enable, and even contribute to the oppression in question (3). such conduct may even amount to tacit acceptance of the values which underpin the oppression, and ultimately normalise or even deny the fact of it, reinforcing the structural architecture of domination for generations to come (3–4). by contrast, self-regarding, or agent-relative, theories of victims’ duties of resistance ground them in a particular victim’s ethical responsibilities towards themselves. for example, thomas hill (1973) has argued that a failure to value one’s moral rights is a violation of a duty to oneself, while daniel silvermint (2013, 406) smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 has argued that individuals have moral duties towards their own well-being, and under conditions of oppression these duties entail resistance to that mistreatment. one of the most richly theorised self-regarding accounts comes from analytic feminist philosopher carol hay, who has argued that women have an imperfect kantian moral duty grounded in self-respect to resist their own oppression.1 drawing heavily on kant’s supreme principle of the doctrine of virtue that “a human being is an end for himself as well as for others” (kant 1996, 6:395–396) hay argues that sexual oppression harms women’s rational nature. in particular, she claims it damages women’s capacity for practical rationality, including their capacity to form reasonable, practically relevant beliefs; to form reasonable, consistent intentions on the basis of those beliefs; and to deliberate practically from beliefs to intentions (hay 2011, 24). this harm may also be manifested, she says, through encouraging women’s self-deception;2 preventing victims from using means-to-ends reasoning, or from selecting objectively valuable ends for themselves by depriving them of vital resources; or causing weakness of will (25; hay 2013, 123–124). she believes that women therefore have a moral obligation to resist their own oppression, grounded in their kantian duty of self-respect. hay characterises this moral obligation to resist oppression as an imperfect duty, which permits a degree of latitude regarding the actions which may fulfil it. thus, the imperfect duty to resist oppression may be satisfied in a variety of ways— for example, by directly confronting one’s harassers, notifying some authority, or raising awareness more generally. crucially, hay argues, it could also be satisfied by “resisting internally,” for example, simply by recognising the moral injustice of the situation yet taking no external action. hay writes: there are many different forms that resistance to oppression can take . . . because the fundamental duty here is one of self-respect, even in cases where external resistance is imprudent or impossible, an oppressed person can still recognize that something is wrong with her situation and that she deserves better. this, i argue, is profoundly better than nothing. (hay 2013, preface, x) hay says that it is a distinguishing characteristic of kantian imperfect duties that they permit a wider range of acceptable actions in fulfilling them than perfect duties. this is because imperfect duties require one to adopt a general maxim rather 1 see timmermann (2006) for further background on the nature of kantian selfduties. 2 for example, believing falsehoods about oneself contrary to evidence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 than to perform specific actions (hay 2011, 29). she suggests that a general maxim for her victims’ duty of resistance might be as follows: “there is an imperfect duty to protect one’s own rational capacities by resisting oppression externally whenever prudent” (huseyinzadegan 2015, paraphrasing hay 2013). however, hay maintains that just because imperfect moral duties lack a specified obligatory action does not mean that they are any less stringent than perfect duties. on the contrary, she argues, there is a strict duty to set the intention of resisting one’s own oppression; there are just many ways to go about achieving this end (hay 2011, 29–30). problematically, however, hay also acknowledges that the degree and quality of latitude we have when meeting our imperfect duties is “up in the air” (30). we must take each duty individually, in context, and determine on an ad hoc basis what must necessarily be done, at a minimum, to satisfice it (30). significantly, hay’s imperfect duty of resistance does not permit a victim the latitude to completely refrain from action. a victim may only permissibly refrain from external action under certain circumstances, and even then only providing the victim simultaneously recognises the injustice of her situation internally. furthermore, refraining from external action must also be the best way to protect the victim’s rational nature. this would be the case if, for example, resisting through external action would be dangerous or counterproductive somehow. hay does state that a victim would still be acting in accordance with the general maxim to protect her rational capacities under the imperfect duty of resistance if she internally recognised her oppressive circumstances and opted to do nothing externally for prudent reasons. yet hay is also clear that the imperfect duty of resistance does not permit a victim to resist so rarely or infrequently that the harms of oppression gradually accumulate and damage her rational nature (36). this is because, she says, “if we err on the side of caution in every case and never require women to confront their harassers, then patriarchy will never be eradicated” (hay 2013, 104). as vasanthakumar writes of hay’s analysis: “under conditions of oppression, resistance is intrinsically selfrespecting and autonomous . . . while acquiescence, as opposed to protest, expresses servility rather than self-respect” (vasanthakumar 2020, 2; see also superson 2010). hay’s argument is both an ambitious reconciliation of kantian moral philosophy and the goals of feminist theory, as well as a rallying cry to end patriarchal oppression. however, there are several theoretical problems which flow from her moral reading of oppression, and good reasons remain for some lingering reservations about her account of the moral reasons for action that victims of oppression acquire through their unjust circumstances. the remainder of this section of the paper will focus on exploring hay’s analysis of the kantian imperfect moral duty to resist oppression and some of the theoretical issues it gives rise to. the second half of the paper will put forward an alternative account of kantian smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 moral obligations which shows oppression as generating agent-relative pro tanto moral reasons for resistance on the part of the victim, rather than fully fledged moral duties. nevertheless, many of the arguments which follow might also be applied to other self-regarding or agent-relative theories of victims’ duties, for these accounts share the same theoretical concerns about the very concept of a victim’s moral obligation to resist their own mistreatment. objections to victims’ moral duties of resistance the demandingness objection firstly, and perhaps most obviously, hay’s idea that kant’s imperfect duty of self-respect morally obligates victims of oppression to resist can seem unwarranted. it is well known that by arguing that failures in self-respect ultimately derive from failures of rationality, kant was led to some morally unpalatable conclusions—for example, in his views on suicide.3 for similar reasons as we would today strongly oppose the idea that an act of suicide must necessarily have resulted from a failure of rationality, it is difficult to agree that a victim of oppression who does not meet hay’s obligation to resist must have done so because of a failure of her rationality. such a proposition not only seems a harsh moral judgment but furthermore seems to do no good towards the feminist cause. burdening victims of oppression with a moral duty to resist their victimhood on pain of failing their categorical duties, no less, seems to place the moral obligation on the wrong shoulders.4 hay acknowledges that her account of the obligation to resist oppression can appear to engage in victim blaming, and that this is “unfair.” but she responds to this objection by claiming that “normative considerations of unfairness are not sufficient to dispel the existence of the obligation” (hay 2013, preface, x). she writes: a reluctance to be guilty of blaming the victims of sexual harassment, coupled with other practical and normative considerations that tell in favour of the unfairness of this obligation, might make us think that women never have an obligation to confront their harassers. but i argue that the fact that women are oppressed is not usually sufficient to relieve them of their moral obligation to resist that oppression by confronting the men who sexually harass them. normative considerations of fairness do not remove this obligation, even if we are willing to recognize that it is not fair that women 3 one who attempts suicide is said by kant to have “discarded his humanity contrary to the highest duty we have towards ourselves” (1996, 149). 4 it should be noted that this point is well established in feminist literature (see, e.g., superson 2009, 153; 2010, 256; stark 1997; silvermint 2013). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 are burdened by extra moral obligations as a result of their oppression. we can recognize that women’s oppression leaves them with an unfair share of obligations and still be justified in saying that they have further obligations to resist their oppression. i argue that the fact that patriarchy harms women by burdening them with unfair obligations is just one more reason it must be eradicated. (hay 2013, preface, x) elsewhere, hay suggests that the answer to the victim-blaming objection lies in her characterisation of the duty of resistance as an imperfect one. she argues that if the duty of resistance were perfect, specifically requiring resistance every time someone was oppressed, it would likely be too demanding “given the ubiquity of oppression and the resilience of the systems that produce it” (hay 2011, 29). but, she claims, the obligation she envisions is not to resist at every available opportunity; nor is it to resist “whatever it takes” (29). if resistance is impossible, dangerous, counterproductive, victimising, or if it heightens chances of retribution, or requires cooperation from others that is not forthcoming, then one may simply internally resist without external action. this, she alleges, shows that her duty of resistance is not onerous in the way the victim-blaming objection suggests. it may be objected here that hay’s response does not truly answer the victim-blaming accusation. imagine in the most egregious circumstances, where oppression takes its most insidious form, blinding the victim’s own perception of her self-worth and rationality so severely that her preferences, interests, and ambitions become adapted to her subjugation in the saddest way possible.5 in these cases, why should we still indict the victim for having failed her kantian duty of resistance when the oppression she has been subjected to has effectively ruled out even the lowest bar hay sets for satisficing it—that of internal recognition of her unjust circumstances? just as in the case of suicide, surely the right moral reading of this situation cannot be that the victim’s inability to recognise the wrongs being perpetrated against her means she has failed her moral duty to respect herself. her ability to meet her duty by acknowledging her subjugation has been destroyed by that very domination, and so to continue to demand it of her surely violates kant’s own “‘ought’ implies ‘can’” maxim.6 hay does draw a distinction between women who fail to resist because they are unaware that they are being oppressed, and those who simply cannot be bothered to make the effort to resist. in the latter case hay says they have 5 for wider discussions of adaptive preferences, see evans (2010), malik (2011), and marshall (2006). 6 “the action to which the ‘ought’ applies must indeed be possible under natural conditions” (kant 2007, 473). smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 fundamentally failed in the duty of self-respect, whilst in the former case hay says the obligation to resist is still present, but they are excused from blameworthiness (hay 2011, 39–40). significantly, she also states that any argument advocating that internal resistance might sometimes justifiably be foregone would effectively amount to a claim that the victim needn’t be self-respecting in those circumstance— and this, she says, is a difficult argument to make out, requiring an independent explanation (38). it might be objected here that if hay’s analysis argues for an obligation which a victim need not externally carry out when the circumstances of her oppression are particularly egregious, this shows that she is not, in fact, committed to indicting the victim for failing to resist in the way that the victim-blaming accusation suggests. but it is odd to say that we have moral obligations which we need not carry out, are exempt from carrying out, or are not culpable for failing to meet. indeed, in order to accept hay’s suggestion that it is not normatively problematic to identify a moral duty which we need not meet, her argument requires some further explanatory distinction between those moral duties which we are compulsorily bound to meet (and which we may justifiably be held to be blameworthy for failing) and those which we are exempt from meeting. they cannot be the same thing, because the normative landscape is very different in each case, and yet hay does not supply this distinction. without any explanation of the difference hay relies upon here between compulsory and noncompulsory moral obligations, her argument does effectively indict the victim of egregious oppression to the extent that it identifies her as having an obligation she cannot meet—even if she is to be held nonculpable when she fails to meet it. this is what renders hay’s analysis vulnerable to the demandingness objection: it unfairly indicts the victim of egregious oppression simply by claiming that she has failed her obligation to resist, even if further downstream that failure is said to be excusable. the problem is that the flexibility permitted in meeting imperfect duties cannot go far enough to let hay off the victim blaming hook. there inevitably must come a point, even with imperfect duties which permit a wide range of permissible actions, when that duty has been failed; and failure of a moral duty must mean something significant. in the context of the duty of resistance that hay envisions, that failure is most likely to occur in the most egregious contexts of subjugation, since the bar for satisficing the duty is low enough to include simple internal acknowledgement without external action. yet it is in precisely these cases of oppression that we should not think that victims have failed any kind of moral obligation, even blamelessly. if seriously oppressed women are effectively prevented from relating to themselves in self-respecting ways, then they suffer a unique moral injury. but this moral injury is not a result of their moral failure. by way of illustration, hay’s analysis feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 would seem to let the wealthy, financially independent, well-educated western woman off the hook if she were to refrain from external action against the group of wolf-whistling builders across the street because it is dark and there are six of them; yet it would seem to indict the uneducated, impoverished, male-dependent woman in rural india for lacking the bare capacity to recognise that her situation is oppressive in complex intersectional ways. such a woman might foreseeably miss even the lowest bar hay sets for satisficing her imperfect duty to resist, that of recognising the injustice of her situation. to be clear, hay thinks this woman is not culpable for this failure. but her analysis nevertheless commits her to the conclusion that she has failed a moral duty. more theoretically concerning, however, is the fact that it is not convincing to assert the continued existence of a moral obligation despite overriding moral reasons releasing the victim from being bound by it. why not simply acknowledge that it makes no normative sense to claim that the victim has a real moral obligation here? hay’s analysis ends up in an otherwise avoidable tangle because she commits herself prematurely to the identification of fully fledged moral duties and ignores the role pro tanto moral reasons play in practical deliberation when identifying compulsory actions. to clarify: the tangle results from hay’s insistence that an independent explanation is needed for why victims of egregious oppression should have different duties of resistance than victims in less egregious contexts, when this explanation is actually unnecessary; a mistake born of misreading the pro tanto moral situation in terms of fully fledged moral duties rather than defeasible moral reasons. rather, both types of victim have, at most, pro tanto moral reasons to resist their oppression: for one victim, these reasons are borne out in practical deliberation, while for the other they are simply overridden by countervailing moral reasons. this paper will return to make out the details of this objection to hay’s analysis later. for present purposes it is sufficient to note that, despite hay’s disavowals of victim blaming, there will still come a point when a victim of oppression might fail her imperfect duty of resistance—and even if this claim is tempered by holding the victim not culpable for this failure, it is nevertheless inherently problematic when we are talking about women’s oppression. normative distortion in kantian self-duties hay’s argument also appears to distort the normative direction of kantian duties of self-respect. the primary failure of rationality in her examples of sexual harassment lies in the practical deliberation of the oppressors, for failing to treat another human will appropriately as an end in itself rather than as a sexually objectified means to their ends. as such, the obligation hay asserts on the part of the victim to resist her own oppression not only sounds heavy-handed, even in the smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 imperfect form that hay envisions, but also seems to up-end the moral direction of kantian duties of self-respect, which are primarily concerned with the quality and appropriateness of one’s own behaviour towards oneself. kant’s vision of self-duties primarily concerns a moral agent’s regard for their own rationality, not their response to other people’s failure to respect them. i fail my obligation of selfrespect when i fail to treat my own will in the appropriate way kant requires of me, not necessarily when i fail to confront others for failing to treat my humanity appropriately. permitting someone to persist in treating me in an oppressive way might effectively allow them to frustrate my rationality, but that is not the same thing as frustrating my rationality myself or treating myself instrumentally— particularly when permitting them to behave in this way through a positive choice of nonresistance may be the only practicable option i have open to me. it might be objected here that respecting one’s own rationality effectively requires you to resist oppression because that is just part of asserting the rationality that others wrongfully disregard when they oppress you. but it is important to recognise that there is nothing within kant’s duty of self-respect that requires this kind of external action. it is a duty i owe directly to myself, and to myself alone. it is entirely foreseeable that there may be situations in which i can fulfil my duty of selfrespect internally whilst simultaneously externally ignoring mistreatment from others. indeed, it would be a mistake to think that externally asserting one’s rationality is a hard requirement of one’s self-duty. it is also important to recognise the moral inversion hay falls into of interpreting kantian self-duties as placing an obligation to resist on the shoulders of the oppressed, even though the idea that women have a special moral obligation to resist oppression sounds like an inspirational call to feminist action. indeed, a more uncharitable reading of hay’s argument might suggest that her notion of a feminist kantian duty of self-respect seems only to work for those women who already have sufficient resources to resist their oppression, or to know when to decline to act upon it; leaving others who are most vulnerable—those living without a basic level of intellectual or material resources—under a double moral burden. there is also the problem of epistemic privilege to consider here. while it may frequently be true that victims of oppression are best able to explain what a remedy to their mistreatment ought to consist in, this can easily slip into epistemic exploitation. nora berenstain (2016) has argued that epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged actors compel victims of oppression to educate them about their experience of oppression. providing this education is not only another form of forced labour that is “involuntary, taxing, and uncompensated,” it also reinforces oppressive structures by prioritising the needs of the privileged over those of the oppressed, and represents another mechanism for extracting value from the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 oppressed for the benefit of the privileged (berenstain 2016; vasanthakumar 2020, 7). hay does acknowledge this problem, writing: we need to recognize that a woman who has been harassed suffers real harm—psychological, social, and emotional—and by saying that she has an obligation to confront her harasser, we impose a further burden on her. because she hasn’t done anything wrong, it seems unfair to demand that she take on the burden of trying to rectify the situation . . . there is concern that obliging women to resist sexual harassment risks shifting the moral burden away from harassers and onto their victims. (hay 2005, 103) but she nevertheless concludes: i’m also no apologist for patriarchy: i don’t want to excuse or justify the ways in which it harms women. if it turns out that one of the ways that patriarchy harms women is that it burdens them with unfair obligations, then this is just one more reason to eliminate it. i think there is good reason to believe that women’s obligations to resist their oppression—and thus to confront their harassers—are unfair. but unfair obligations are obligations nonetheless. (hay 2005, 104) but this just raises the question what exactly is a moral obligation that is “unfair”? a deeper analysis of this question forms the next part of the article. does “ought” imply an “all-things-considered ought”? moral obligations seem, by their very nature, to be all-things-considered duties we owe in virtue of the constellation of relevant moral reasons which combine to prescribe right action in particular circumstances. identifying and ascribing moral obligations allows us to identify, first, the actions we are bound to perform, and second, the times when we have failed to do something we should have done. but how can we fail to have done what we morally ought if that obligation was not fairly imposed upon us? in virtue of what kind of moral reason could a moral “ought” statement be considered unfair? the very idea of an unfair moral obligation is a bit like claiming one ought to do something one should not have to do, which sounds a bit like moral nonsense. it could be suggested that the notion of an unfair moral obligation simply refers to the duties we have under nonideal circumstances. but this misses the root of the objection here. nonideal circumstances can certainly make the execution of one’s moral duties practically difficult, or psychologically unpleasant, and can smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 obviously contribute their own particular set of countervailing moral reasons for action. yet none of this extinguishes the fact of obligatory moral action. furthermore, experiencing real-world practical or psychological difficulties in meeting one’s moral duties is not what hay is referring to when she writes that one should not have to resist one’s oppression under patriarchal domination. this latter claim is a normative one, concerning what one ought to do; it is not a claim about the difficulties of applying ideal principles in nonideal circumstances. for example, imagine a victim’s testimony in court at her sexual abuser’s trial. hay’s analysis foreseeably commits us to thinking that testifying is morally obligatory for the victim in most cases. testifying in court is not impossible, dangerous, or counterproductive; nor does it obviously heighten the chances of retribution, or require cooperation from others that is not forthcoming. so, if hay is right, we must get on and do it.7 our moral duty is to confront and resist our oppression, no matter if our real-world circumstances make testifying in court frightening, re-traumatising, or ultimately unsuccessful. but hay does not say that the duty to resist oppression is difficult and unpleasant in real-world circumstances; she says that it is unfair—and furthermore, for all that it is unfair, it remains obligatory. yet if compelling testimony in court is truly unfair, as opposed to being just difficult and unpleasant for the victim, then it is wrong to conceive of it as obligatory. is it not that the real-world, nonideal circumstances which make testifying in court difficult and unpleasant negate its obligatory nature; rather, it is the moral fact of the injustice of the situation that means we must climb down from the statement that we are morally bound to do it. of course, many good, strong moral reasons for testifying remain in spite of its difficult and upsetting nature. it just cannot be obligatory. nevertheless, hay continues to press the idea of an “unfair obligation” to resist: i suggest the reason we think that moral obligations don’t apply to those who lack autonomy is that it would seem profoundly unfair to require moral obligations of someone who was incapable of actually fulfilling them . . . [but] . . . thinking about obligations in this way . . . leaves room for cases in which the appropriate amount of moral obligation to demand does not appear to be in direct proportion to the amount of autonomy an agent actually has. (hay 2005, 99; emphasis added) but now two further problems arise. first, hay implies that there is nothing obviously incorrect about demanding obligations from those who lack full 7 it may foreseeably be re-victimising, however, in which case hay’s analysis would presumably be that it is a nonculpable failure of duty to refrain from testifying. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 autonomous capacity to control their actions. second, and perhaps more theoretically problematic, she argues here as if moral obligation were a quantifiable and proportionable shades-of-grey concern. but this cannot be correct. what exactly would a small “amount” of moral obligation look like, as opposed to a larger amount? obligations are, by their nature, things we are bound to do, and that nature cannot therefore be anything but all-things-considered. at the point at which an obligation becomes impossible to perform, it violates kant’s own “‘ought’ implies ‘can’” maxim; and by the time an obligation becomes morally unjustifiable to demand, it cannot sensibly be said to still be obligatory. more fundamentally, however, it is impossible to envisage what a proportion of the obligation to resist would be. moral obligations are comprised of many constituent moral reasons for action which together combine to prescribe obligatory action. but the many potential constituent moral reasons to resist oppression are not necessarily the same thing as a moral obligation to do so, by any means. pro tanto moral reasons are defeasible in character, unlike the all-things-considered nature of fully fledged moral obligations, and this subtlety is lost on hay’s analysis. despite her disavowals, by accepting hay’s argument we are at best coming perilously close to engaging in victim blaming, and at worst perhaps even flying in the face of kant’s own prerequisite maxim that “ought” implies “can” in the most egregious circumstances of oppression. but while one might be able to dispute that “ought” implies “can,” one cannot sensibly dispute that “ought” necessarily and decisively implies “ought.” we might be able to make hay’s proposition work if she were to admit the pro tanto notion of moral reasons in practical deliberation—for example, if she were to claim instead that a victim has a defeasible pro tanto moral reason to resist her oppression which might be qualified, or even defeated, by countervailing moral reasons not to do so in the particular circumstances. but she does not do this. she instead identifies a fully fledged moral obligation to resist, not its constituent moral reasons which we engage with in practical deliberation, and she does so before the all-things-considered position in morality has been ascertained. her identification of the moral obligation to resist oppression can therefore seem premature, for it is this which leads her into the uncomfortable normative territory of having to argue for the survival of a moral obligation in the face of good moral reasons against its very existence. it might be objected here that, on the contrary, it does make sense to say we have moral obligations that can be overridden. but this is not self-evident. indeed, it makes more sense to say we have moral reasons that can be overridden, while obligations, properly so-called, identify our all-things-considered compulsory actions. kant himself was an internalist about reasons and obligations; he held that having a moral obligation (for example, to treat the human will as an end in itself, smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 and never as a means) necessarily entails a moral agent having a reason to act upon it. so, for kant, rather than moral reasons being prior to obligations, our obligations necessarily mean we have reason to fulfil them. by contrast, the argument i have put forward here is an externalist account, in the sense that moral reasons represent external facts which are independent of the motivational condition of those for whom they are reasons. on my account, we first ascertain our external moral reasons based on some prior interpretation of our primary values at stake (e.g., equal moral respect); we then deliberate practically to arrive at an understanding of the moral duties we are bound by, which prescribe compulsory action. there is room on this analysis to accommodate some leftover moral “residue” (oberdiek 2008, 143)—that is, the good moral reasons we could not act on and so have reason to regret, nonculpably. in this sense, my account does not jar with the kantian model, since it also views moral obligations as entailing practical reasons for action. it just positions general, defeasible moral reasons prior to the identification of moral obligations; and specific, compulsory practical reasons for action appear downstream of that identification. thus, in the context of women’s oppression, my account suggests a different story about a victim’s practical reasoning: (1) first one determines the primary moral values at stake (e.g., equal moral respect, or perhaps some conception of self-respect for rationality or dignity). (2) next one identifies the full set of defeasible moral reasons, several of which may conflict with each other (e.g., reasons to resist oppression and reasons to shield from further harm). (3) then one identifies compulsory moral duties through practical deliberation which seeks to resolve the value conflicts among defeasible moral reasons. (4) finally one acquires specific, practical moral reasons for action derived directly from one’s moral obligations. there may be moral residue (i.e., defeased moral reasons) for which one may experience regret for having “lost” in practical deliberation, without having acted culpably. much of this seems to match kant’s own characterisation of the absolute nature of moral duty and the possibility of conflicts between moral obligations. in the metaphysics of morals, kant writes: conflict of duties: is a relation in which one duty would cancel out another duty (wholly or in part). however, 1. since duty and obligation are concepts that express the objective practical necessity of certain actions, 2. since two feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 rules opposed to each other cannot be necessary at the same time, 3. if it is a duty to act in accordance with one rule, then to act in accordance with the opposite rule is not a duty but even contrary to duty. 4. therefore a collision of duties and obligations is inconceivable. (kant 1996, 6:224) however, kant’s account is problematic when he asserts absolute moral obligations precisely because he does not take into account any context-specific countervailing moral considerations when he makes this claim. for example, we can agree that kant is right, in that there is primary value in truth (perhaps grounded on some explanation about the importance of truth to one’s dignity, or one’s rational ability to reason from means to ends); and this gives us defeasible moral reasons to tell the truth. the all-things-considered position in morality will be that we should either tell the truth or not, depending on the particular circumstances in question. if we cannot or should not tell the truth depending on the moral circumstances in question, we might feel regret about that (moral residue), but we will not have acted culpably by lying. what kant ultimately says about conflicts of duty does not therefore seem particularly problematic. duties cannot conflict if we conceive of them as an absolute. but if this is our concept of duties, they should demarcate the all-thingsconsidered position in morality rather than any more general or universal claim. duties cannot be both universal and absolute. for a number of reasons, we need our obligatory “ought” statements to decisively indicate “ought,” not “ought but for a number of other moral considerations”—particularly so when we are talking about challenging patriarchal oppression. what kant fails to do is elucidate any of the practical deliberation that is necessary to reach such a position of “all-thingsconsidered” morality.8 yet subjecting one’s pro tanto moral reasons to some kind of value-conflict resolution methodology is just part of the messy business moral agents have to engage with when trying to identify the right course of action. mistakes will, of course, be made; humans are inherently morally fallible, and nonideal circumstances make this all the more difficult. but holding off “ought” statements about fully fledged moral duties until after this deliberation has been completed preserves the clarity and normative force of these kind of “ought” statements, where and when we deploy them.9 8 something kant himself always kept in the dark, in the “noumenal world”; see dworkin (2011, 19). 9 i am particularly grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for helping me clarify my views on this. smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 moral duties or pro tanto moral reasons? one might question what is the benefit, if any, of switching from the paradigm of moral obligations to that of pro tanto moral reasons? is this not simply superficially altering the terminology with which we describe the same moral situation, without adding anything further to our normative understanding of the matter? to this objection it may be responded that there are several good reasons for acknowledging the normative difference between pro tanto moral reasons and fully fledged moral duties, and especially so in the context of women’s oppression. firstly, our intuitive understanding, and practical observance, of moral duties seems to correlate them with conclusive normative implications regarding our individual reasons for action. when someone fails to meet a moral obligation, we tend to follow this failure with certain kinds of judgments of moral responsibility, like criticism, labels of blameworthiness, and sometimes even punishment. this is because we consider the action to be morally obligatory—in other words, compulsory and nonoptional. indeed, it seems to be generally implied that there are no countervailing moral considerations when we say, without further explicit qualification, “my duty is to do x” or “i have an obligation not to do y” (brandt 1964, 377).10 yet, if this is the case, and moral duties really do have this kind of final and conclusive obligatory nature, it then becomes philosophically problematic to explain what happens to them when they appear to conflict with other moral reasons for action. it is this kind of problem that we face when, for example, a victim’s moral reasons for self-preservation seem to mitigate her imperfect duty of resistance. there is always a philosophical difficulty when moral reasons for action, or the values they serve, conflict. it has been suggested by jeremy waldron (1989, 505) that conflicts essentially present us with a choice to make between “incompossible” duties. for example, if two children are sick, but their doctor has only a single indivisible dose of medicine available, each child seems to possess a right to be given the dose, and their doctor may be said to have a corresponding duty towards each child to give them that dose. yet, quite plainly, meeting both these duties is impossible. the problem with true conflicts of incompossible duties such as this one—and therefore, the challenge for any ascriptive theory of moral duty like hay’s—is how to justify meeting one duty over the other. any choice about which duty we should meet appears to illegitimately trade off our conflicting duties against one another; yet, on the other hand, it cannot be morally correct to do nothing 10 i am treating duty and obligation as synonymous terms, on the grounds that the core necessary and sufficient conditions for identification in either category is precisely the quality of obligatoriness, and susceptibility to culpability for transgression. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 simply because we cannot rationally justify a way to choose one duty instead of the other. it has been said that there is no better test of an account of human obligations than the plausibility of what it has to say about those obligations in conflict (griffin 2009, 57). indeed, some think it may be impossible to fully understand the nature of moral obligations without an account of what happens when they conflict (wellman 1995, 271). however, if the very rationality of our practical deliberation is threatened when we are faced with normatively incompatible moral obligations, we might be tempted to argue backwards, as it were, and conclude that moral duties cannot be the final and conclusive indicators of obligatory conduct that we thought they were. perhaps moral duties do not really function as indicators of justifiable blameworthiness when moral agents violate them? this approach, however, is a mistake. reverse engineering our normative conception of moral duties in order to salvage our rationality when faced with hard choices is an unsatisfactory resolution. rather, the way we theorise about obligations, conflicts, and their resolution depends to a large extent upon how we conceptualise the deeper philosophical nature of those obligations, and the normative implications which follow them (waldron 1989, 507). the theoretical plausibility of situations of truly incompossible duties appears to rest on a deeper assumption about the pluralist nature of values and their incommensurability—that is, the idea that values lack a common measure and therefore cannot be gauged in relation to one another (chang 1998). therefore, when values conflict, any choice will inevitably result in a loss or violation of one of the values. if two incommensurable values pull in such different normative directions that there is genuinely no way to rank, order, measure, or relativise one against the other, it does not matter how long we deliberate, nor which value we ultimately decide to act upon—when values are incommensurable in this way then the loss we incur when we choose one cannot ever be replaced or compensated for with what we gain by choosing the other. it is this prospect that seems to threaten the rationality of our practical reason when we are confronted by moral conflicts, for any choice we make will certainly mean we have neglected some moral obligation or failed to act upon some right reason in making that choice. therefore, we inevitably fail to do something we ought to have done when we make choices about incommensurable value conflicts. problematically, the practical necessity of actually making choices about right action in situations of incommensurable value conflict can encourage mistakes, such as thinking of values in quantitative rather than qualitative terms, or thinking that some values are somehow more important than others in particular circumstances. for instance, in a putative conflict between hay’s imperfect duty to resist oppression and a victim’s prudential reasons not to endanger herself, while both are smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 obviously valuable ends, we might be tempted to try reasoning our way out of the conflict by thinking that the duty of resistance is more important, or generally more beneficial to society somehow, than the prudential reasons of those who might incur unpleasantness and inconvenience (as opposed to danger or serious harm) by confronting their oppression—as many feminists conceivably might. if we do this, however, then we allow ourselves to be led into trading off the allegedly smaller, or less important, risks against the supposedly much greater, or more important, gains in opposing patriarchal oppression. but this is inherently problematic, for it fails to reflect the very incommensurability of values we found ourselves torn between because we have effectively allowed ourselves to be seduced into commensurating them in a rather opaque fashion, which obscures the fact that we are resolving the conflict through moral intuition. this is precisely the type of reasoning about our moral obligations which hay advocated when she spoke of “proportionate” moral obligation (2005, 99). the disjunctive solution to this difficulty suggests that as long as a particular course of action is chosen on the basis of some right reasons, that choice should not be considered wholly unjustifiable simply on the basis that good reasons also existed not to choose it (jacquette 1991). for example, if good moral reasons to choose either resistance or self-preservation exist in a particular context of women’s oppression, both options might be considered “rationally eligible” and therefore justifiable. jacquette has acknowledged that in moral dilemmas, where circumstances prevent two or more equally justified prima facie ethical requirements from being fulfilled, “commonly received deontic logic suggests that conjoint obligation is overridden by kant's principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ and the agent nevertheless has a disjunctive obligation to perform one of the otherwise obligatory actions” (jacquette 1991, 43); while thomas nagel (1991, 172) suggests, along similar lines, that if good moral reasons exist in favour of either course of action, then either choice may properly be considered blameless, if not necessarily morally admirable.11 for example, if a woman were to make a decision under situational pressure not to resist her oppression, nagel’s analysis might suggest that no cause for moral blame would exist for her choice. for nagel, difficult situations exist which demand hard decisions. rather than indict people for making these decisions, we should instead recognise that we are simply doing the best we can in nonideal circumstances, even if ultimately that is only a second best (172). this disjunctive approach to deontic conflict suggests that, at first, a woman may be faced with what appears to be an incommensurable value conflict between good moral reasons to resist her oppression and good prudential moral reasons to 11 nagel’s example of incompossible duties was choosing who to save between two equidistant drowning swimmers. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 self-protect. however, at the point at which she realises that both courses of action cannot be followed simultaneously, and a difficult choice must be made, the woman’s moral reasons for action fundamentally change. she now has an overriding moral reason, perhaps even a moral duty, to act on one of the conflicting moral reasons she initially perceived, rather than freeze like a rabbit in the headlights and fail to act on either. indeed, perhaps omitting to act might be the only outcome where she could be held morally culpable, if her overriding moral reason is now to meet at least one duty rather than fail two. her initial moral reasons for action have become qualified: she now has a disjunctive moral obligation to meet one or the other of her originally conflicting moral reasons. while this does nothing to ease the practical deliberation required of her in the heat of the moment, it does provide a way of thinking about the resolution of value conflict which preserves her rationality when tasked with choosing between two incompossible duties. furthermore, this construction of moral conflict leaves room to accommodate a certain attitude of regret within the moral agent when she realises that she could not act on all the good moral reasons that originally presented themselves. room for regret for the unacted upon moral reasons is a natural human reaction “after the fact,” and importantly need not be directly related to any identification of morally obligatory action, nor to any violation of moral obligations by the agent. whatever one thinks of these suggestions, one need not seek a conclusive resolution to the question of incommensurable values in order to fully understand what is potentially problematic about hay’s conception of moral duty. it seems likely that a conflict of incompossible duties was not the situation hay primarily meant to describe. she focused on examples in which the duty of resistance would trump other moral considerations, rendering it “unfair” but still obligatory nonetheless; and she gave alternative examples in which prudential moral reasons for shielding overrode the duty of resistance, leaving the duty itself intact and the moral agent in question blameless for violating it. hay therefore seems to acknowledge the need to make difficult decisions in times of incommensurable value conflict quite readily, and she can foresee what she intuitively thinks those decisions should look like. in fact, she does not paint a picture of women torn between incompossible duties at all. on the contrary, hay seems to be quite pragmatic about the fact that decisions about the right course of action in situations of conflict must be made in the real world, yet her resolution feels like a hasty leap to the conclusion that sometimes we simply cannot do better than to inevitably fail at least one of our moral obligations. we need to reconsider the way we theorise about obligation conflicts and their resolution. to posit a universal moral duty before the all-things-considered position in morality has been ascertained leaves us with a situation where we lack normative clarity over the meaning and consequences of the term moral obligation. this is of particular significance when we are talking about challenging the systemic smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 domination of women. moral duties are best seen as manifestations of the prior moral grounds for fully justified obligatory conduct, and as such, they function as determinate and final conclusions about the moral obligatoriness of our reasons for action, rather than peremptory or defeasible partial moral explanations for what one may or may not be eventually morally required to do (oberdiek 2008, 127). what we might have thought of as a universal moral duty (for example, hay’s general maxim to protect one’s rational capacities by confronting oppression wherever prudent) is actually a nominal placeholder for a cluster of specific, individuated, and particularised moral permissions and obligations that exist in virtue of all the relevant moral considerations which bear on a particular moral relationship between two parties in context. this view of moral duties imposes a particular structure to moral reasoning on account of their moral features. moral determination of justifiably obligatory action comes prior in practical deliberation before any general assertions of moral duty. on this account, specific moral duties to behave in particular ways remain post hoc manifestations of our final normative conclusions about our reasons for action. my account of moral duties inherits a great deal from the specificationist theory of rights, which was first written about by judith jarvis thomson (1986, chap. 3) and later developed into a more sophisticated account of rights conflicts by john oberdiek (2008). specification theory itself is morally neutral; it is a theory of the moral structure of entitlements and obligations, and of how they conflict. it is not a substantive theory positing any particular view about the actual entitlements or obligations that moral agents have, and it implies nothing by itself about the contexts in which the duty to resist oppression should trump conflicts with countervailing prudential moral reasons for self-preservation. rather, specification theory requires further moral substantiation in order to reach a full elaboration of rights entitlements and moral obligations. what specification theory does claim is that specified entitlements and obligations are always absolute and can never be morally overridden. accordingly, every rights infringement is also a wrongful rights violation (shafer-landau 1995, 209). the same may be said about moral duties: every failure of a moral duty is also a wrongful breach of that duty. if this is correct, then hay’s idea of an “unfair moral obligation” is a nonstarter. this is due to the special role accorded to rights entitlements and moral duties in deontological moral theory. lesser moral considerations, like common or garden variety defeasible moral reasons, may be overridden in practical deliberation, but rights entitlements and moral duties may not. this special place that rights entitlements and moral duties occupy derives from the logical normative implications of possessing them. rights entitlements and moral duties are normatively special because when and where they exist it follows that we are culpable for acting in ways which infringe them (shafer-landau 1995, 221). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 by contrast, virtues, ideals, and supererogatory behaviour do not possess this special characteristic of entailing conclusive verdicts about the overall justifiability and obligatoriness of our actions, for it may sometimes be permissible to act contrary to ideal, virtue, or supererogation. neither do pro tanto moral reasons have this special nature, as they may be viewed instead as defeasible calls on our practical reason which may subsequently be overridden by competing moral considerations. any normative inconsistency or conflict between pro tanto moral reasons is dealt with by a moral agent’s individual practical deliberation and will depend on their particular methodology for value-conflict resolution. pro tanto moral reasons therefore may have universal applicability but are not absolute moral requirements, since they are liable to being overridden in this way. hay’s account does acknowledge these issues when she allows that some victims of oppression have circumstantial conditions which excuse their failure to meet their moral obligations, meaning we cannot blame them for their failure. yet she also insists that we still need to eradicate patriarchal oppression, and until we do, women will just have to shoulder an unfair moral burden despite there being good moral reasons against it. but these kinds of normative gymnastics citing excusable failures to do what one morally ought to do are not only unnecessary but add to the lack of clarity we so urgently need in the context of resisting oppression. to talk prematurely of universal moral duties to resist oppression in the way hay does seems to reify what is really a pro tanto moral reason for resistance into something that sounds like an all-things-considered conclusion about our compulsory reasons for action. but resistance to oppression cannot be an all-thingsconsidered statement of compulsory reasons for action because hay asserts it as a universal moral duty, before it has been through any deliberative value-conflict resolution methodology during which the all-things-considered position in morality is ascertained. this problem is not unique to hay’s argument, by any means. the tendency to reify what are really pro tanto moral reasons into quite different claims about the all-things-considered position in morality is problematic across normative theory, and particularly in rights conflict theory. it is, however, a distinct problem for hay’s argument because it muddies the sense of right and wrong we so desperately need in the context of women’s oppression. it is particularly problematic to put forward an account of a victim’s moral duty to resist oppression that many feminist scholars find victim blaming. however, if we only refine that notion of moral obligation then much of hay’s argument retains its value for both kantians and feminists alike. the benefits of my approach are that we would no longer be committed to believing in “grey areas” of moral obligation, proportions of moral obligation, or the counterintuitive notion of “unfair” moral obligations, as hay’s analysis led us to be. thinking first in terms of pro tanto moral reasons also means we avoid victim smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 blaming when particular moral considerations against resisting egregious oppression override our general moral reasons to confront it; and we avoid distortion in the normative direction of kantian duties towards the self. thinking in terms of pro tanto moral reasons rather than fully fledged moral duties also means that we do not lose the moral urge to confront and eradicate patriarchal oppression without inflating it to a justificatory role. it should be noted that hay effectively makes out a secondary, consequentialist argument for the existence of her duty to resist by citing the urgent need to eradicate the patriarchy (hay 2013, 104). when pushed for further explanation of her double moral burden on victims of oppression, hay’s answer is that we owe it to ourselves because we must eradicate the patriarchy. but it is far from clear that such a reason could actually justify the kind of self-duty, even an imperfect one, which hay envisions. it is a mismatched argument to claim that we owe ourselves a kantian duty of selfrespect to resist oppression because a world without patriarchy is better. while eradicating the patriarchy is no doubt a consequence that would be inherently good for all concerned, we cannot justify a kantian self-duty on this kind of consequentialist reasoning. if such a universal moral obligation really does exist, its justification must be grounded wholly in some independent argument about the nature of the self, and the kinds of attitudes and behaviours we owe ourselves. on this argument, perhaps it could be suggested that if a victim fails to resist her oppression, she cannot be said to have lived a good life, or it could be said that she may have failed to have lived well in terms of forming, revising, and pursuing a conception of ethical value for herself. 12 but (and herein lies the real benefit of admitting the pro tanto account of defeasible moral reasons) to have failed to select ethical value for herself in this fashion would not necessarily need to have come about due to a failure of her rationality or a violation of her moral obligations—and there is some significant moral solace to be found in that conclusion. a victim’s resistance to her own oppression is better characterised as an interpretive right, in which case we can simultaneously believe that she attains both a good and a better life if she selects and pursues ethical values for herself which do call for resistance, but not that she has failed any moral obligation if she does not. by characterising resistance to oppression as a moral duty rather than an interpretive right, hay seems to have failed to make adequate allowance for a victim’s ability to choose to 12 i am drawing here on dworkin’s (2011, 202–210) conception of the ethical responsibility to live well by selecting the values one wishes to live by in accordance with one’s moral duty. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 respond to her circumstances in the way she best sees fit, which seems crucial to our recognition of a woman’s ethical autonomy.13 conclusion: the morality of resisting oppression throughout her work, hay paints a picture of the spectrum of choices a victim might select from when meeting her imperfect duty to resist sexual oppression, depending on the particular situation—choices including overt verbal outrage, physical violence, appealing to higher authority, and silent protest. yet given that one can still transgress this imperfect duty, hay cannot escape the charge that her theory will be victim blaming. if she cannot, and hay envisions her imperfect duty of resistance to be effectively unenforceable in pragmatic terms, it therefore seems that a more accurate reading of the moral situation to say that victims have, at most, a pro tanto moral reason to resist, not a fully fledged moral duty. thus, while hay’s idea of a duty of self-respect to resist oppression supplies a powerful call to arms for the feminist cause, we should remain cautious of the limitations of her argument for the most vulnerable; and we should be wary of the moral distortion it seems to demand of the direction of kantian self-duties. chiefly, we should be concerned with preserving the integrity of the idea of moral obligation and avoiding the conflation of pro tanto moral reasons with fully fledged moral duties. preserving this moral clarity, correctness, and power is of the utmost importance in the context of eradicating oppression in all its forms—even if that comes at the cost of apparently “downgrading” a universal moral duty to resist patriarchal oppression to a defeasible pro tanto moral reason. while hay’s claim that such a universal moral duty exists is a powerful rhetorical tool, this cost is a necessary one: women stand more chance of winning the battle against patriarchal domination without overstating or misattributing moral obligations in our haste to improve the quality of lives of women around the world. hay’s work makes out a fascinating and rich case for an imperfect kantian duty of self-respect to resist sexual oppression. in many ways her work charts new and fertile territory for the moral philosophy of oppression, as well as for her skilful reconciliation of kantian moral theory with the goals of feminism. this paper’s response to her account of the imperfect duty of resistance has been to laud these achievements, whilst suggesting that it may be more normatively accurate and pragmatically useful to think of this duty in terms of pro tanto moral reasons, and to 13 hay does acknowledge the objection that resisting oppression might be seen as supererogatory or heroic, and therefore inappropriate for blame if one fails to do it. but she repeats her response that the characterisation of the duty as an imperfect one can meet this objection (see hay (2011, 29). smith – morality of resisting oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 avoid prematurely identifying fully fledged moral duties, even imperfect ones. if we can avoid victim blaming, distorting the normative direction of kantian self-duties, or committing ourselves to concluding that a victim whose self-esteem has been completely obliterated in the most egregious circumstances of oppression has failed her moral duties, we will have a stronger account of morality in the context of oppression. by adopting the pro tanto account of moral reasons, we also preserve the clarity and normative force of “ought” statements, which then decisively imply “ought,” not “ought but for any number of other countervailing moral considerations.” we are left with no grey areas of obligation, no philosophically unclear notions of unfair obligations, and moral duties remain an all-thingsconsidered indicator of morally obligatory action. in other words, we lose nothing in terms of nuance and gain everything in terms of clarity by switching paradigms from all-things-considered duties to pro tanto moral reasons. we also retain the valuable consequentialist reason hay identifies for eradicating the patriarchy without inflating it to a justifying ground upon which we base our moral self-duties. this argument does not require us to abandon the general idea of self-directed moral responsibilities or to think that victims of oppression do not have these moral requirements. it just reformulates moral responsibilities in less absolute terms, as defeasible moral reasons. the benefit of switching paradigms from moral duties to pro tanto moral reasons is not simply a superficial function of the terminology we happen to use to describe situations of oppression. thinking in these terms allows us a more nuanced understanding of how the varieties of oppressive circumstances can be taken into practical moral deliberation, without losing the moral motivation to confront and eradicate patriarchal oppression. a woman’s interpretive moral right to resist her mistreatment comes with the ability to waive this opportunity should she so wish, just like any other right. a woman has the right to speak freely but never a duty to speak. she has the right to life, but there exists no duty to live if doing so is against her wishes. her choice to contest her own oppression, even if backed up by incontrovertible moral reasons to do so, should never be inflated into a moral requirement to act at the cost of her ethical autonomy. references berenstain, nora. 2016. “epistemic exploitation.” ergo 3 (22): 569–590. https://doi .org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.022. brandt, r. b. 1964. “the concepts of obligation and duty.” mind 73 (291): 374–393. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/lxxiii.291.374. chang, ruth, ed. 1998. introduction to incommensurability, incompatibility, and practical reason, 1–34. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 24 dworkin, ronald. 2011. justice for hedgehogs. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. evans, carolyn. 2010. “religious speech that undermines gender equality.” in extreme speech and 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/10.1086/293094. wellman, christopher heath. 1995. “on conflicts between rights.” law and philosophy 14 (3–4): 271–295. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01000702. vasanthakumar, ashwini. 2020. “recent debates on victims’ duties to resist their oppression.” philosophy compass 15 (2). https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12648. dr. rebecca hannah smith is a senior lecturer in law, st mary’s university, twickenham. rebecca joined the law school at st mary’s university as a lecturer in september 2015, having previously taught at university college london as a teaching fellow in jurisprudence. her doctoral research examined the notion of incommensurability between individual partiality and our moral duties towards others in practical reason, and analysed the ways in which this influences our approach to reasoning about conflicts between human rights. rebecca’s current research focuses on the potential for consonance between contemporary egalitarian rights theory and specificationist methodologies for the resolution of rights conflicts; value incommensurability and practical reason; and feminist philosophy. 7938 smith title page 7938 smith final format feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 2 article 2 2015 feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices ben almassi governors state university, balmassi@govst.edu recommended citation almassi, ben. 2015. "feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (2). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2. feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices1 ben almassi abstract ‘feminist masculinity’ might seem like a contradiction in terms. one might have assumed that we can embrace feminism or embrace masculinity, but not both. if traditional masculinity is contrary to feminist values, a pressing query for feminist men is whether repudiation of traditional masculinity should move one to reject normative masculinity entirely, or to reframe and reclaim it instead. bell hooks and michael kimmel each counsel against discarding manhood and masculinity. hooks envisions feminist masculinity as an alternative to patriarchal dominance, with masculinity to be reconstituted in terms of love, integrity, and mutuality; kimmel advocates moving from immature and traditional masculinities toward justice and democratic manhood, with a new model of masculinity that identifies real men with adulthood and doing the right thing. neither proposal provides a viable stance for feminist men without collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men’s and women’s identities and experiences. building on alcoff’s work on anti-racist whiteness, i suggest that feminist allyship practices ground a normative model of masculinity compatible with, and informed by, feminist values. we may understand allyship masculinities as open-ended feminist approaches to manhood: masculinities predicated on recognizing and responding to, rather than ignoring or accepting, the privileges and expectations distinctive of men under patriarchy. keywords: masculinity, allyship, men in feminism 1 earlier versions of this paper were presented at a 2012 meeting of the society for analytical feminism and a 2014 meeting of the northeast modern language association, and i extend my deep appreciation to the organizers and participants, especially to kathryn norlock for her generous and incisive commentary. i am also grateful to rebecca thall, rachel fredericks, jeremy fischer, lars enden, kristie dotson, lisa day, jonathan allan, and negin almassi, each of whom offered criticism and commentary that have greatly improved this paper. any and all errors are mine alone. 1 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 1. introduction “feminist masculinity” might seem like a contradiction in terms. one might have assumed that we can either embrace feminism or masculinity, but not both. this apparent tension is particularly pressing for what connell (2005, 70) identifies as “normative definitions” of masculinity: that is, masculinity understood as “what men ought to be.” the ways such expectations are manifested in hegemonic forms of masculinity2 contradict feminist values and goals of sexual equality, freedom from domination, and dismantling oppressive social structures. it is a live question for many feminist women and men whether resistance to hegemonic masculinity should move us to reject normative masculinity completely, or instead to reframe and reclaim some other approach to normative masculinity. the first option aligns with what we might call an ideal of androgyny. a general repudiation of manhood, of being men, has been championed by both radical3 and liberal4 profeminist scholars and activists. here masculinity might be retained as a critical descriptive tool to uncover or challenge existing gender expectations and practices, but a normative analysis of men or how men as men ought to be is cast aside. achieving androgyny need not make all people anatomically identical, of course, nor render everyone socially or psychologically the same; the aspiration is that biological sex differences become no more socially significant than height or eye color. social roles, divisions of labor, and other behaviors would no longer be indexed to presumed anatomical sex, and femininity and masculinity would lose their meanings as oppositional social categories. there might still be female and male people, as there are blueand brown-eyed people, but they would not be expected to do certain work, act certain ways, exhibit certain traits, or meet other norms because they are female or male. for those suspicious of traditional gender practices and acutely aware of how hegemonic masculinity oppresses women and harms both women and men, androgyny can be an appealing aspirational ideal. resistance to an ideal of androgyny can come from those who value masculinity as it has been traditionally exalted and organized and who regard feminist critique of it as directly, deeply harming men. clatterbaugh (1997) distinguishes between conservative and mythopoetic perspectives on masculinity, each of which present anti-feminist visions of normative masculinity, of how men as men ought to be. conservatives wish for men to hold power as they are allegedly properly entitled as heads of households, industry, and government; they urge men 2 for more on hegemonic masculinity, see connell (2005) and connell & messerschmidt (2005). 3 for radical profeminism, see stoltenberg (1975, 1989, 1993). 4 for liberal profeminism, see sterba (1998). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 to embody and embrace those masculine traits attendant to their rightful social roles.5 meanwhile, mythopoetic models of masculinity such as bly’s iron john (1990) level criticism against both traditional gender expectations of men and feminist analyses of men and masculinity. a wild-man masculinity found in loving brotherhood with other men is here championed as a healthy and decidedly masculine alternative, where men are truly free to be neither unemotional providers nor androgynous feminist toadies, but men.6 yet as hooks (2004b) argues, this remains a kind of domination masculinity, with a normative vision of men as kinder, gentler, more emotionally open patriarchs. not all resistance to rejecting masculinity for an ideal of androgyny comes from those antagonistic to feminism, however. in particular, hooks (2004a; 2004b) and kimmel (1996; 2008) each warn against discarding manhood and masculinity too quickly and each propose alternative normative accounts of masculinity offered as compatible with feminist ideals. in manhood in america (1996), kimmel defends “democratic manhood” as contrasted with traditional masculinity and androgyny; in guyland (2008), he counsels moving from an immature and unjust masculinity to the deeper masculinity of just guys. in we real cool (2004a) and in the will to change (2004b), hooks counsels feminist masculinity as a constructive alternative to patriarchal masculinity. there is much to admire in both hooks’s and kimmel’s attempted reclamations of normative masculinity; many of the things they identify as constitutive of a better kind of masculinity are indeed virtuous human qualities. but do these efforts to find a normative feminist masculinity, against hegemonic masculinity on one side and androgyny on the other, actually work? my concern is that neither hooks nor kimmel provides a viable guide for feminist men without either collapsing into androgyny or risking erasure of some men’s and women’s experiences and identities. neither shows what makes empathy, courage, justice, and love constitutive of masculinity, without assuming that masculinity is simply whatever male people do. on their own, i argue, neither account provides a viable model of normative feminist masculinity reclaimed. i do think we can make sense of normative feminist masculinity, however, such that men as men have distinctive, constructive contributions to make to feminist work; i suggest looking to feminist allyship as a place to ground and give meaning to a normative model of masculinity distinct from both androgyny and hegemonic masculinity. in feminist allyship we might find an open-ended model of ways of being men, of masculinities predicated on recognizing and responding to 5 for conservative accounts of masculinity, see farrell (1986, 1991) and haddad (1991). 6 for more on mythopoetic perspectives on masculinity, see bly (1991) and keen (1992). 3 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 rather than ignoring or accepting those privileges and expectations distinctive of men under patriarchy. much like an ideal of androgyny, this approach seeks to upend masculinity as a received social category; but it also emphasizes men’s specific yet non-essentialist contributions to feminist work. here i am especially indebted to alcoff’s (1998; 2006) work on white anti-racism as a fruitful comparison for making sense of the possibility of normative feminist masculinity. 2. priorities for a model of feminist masculinity what we look for in a worthwhile model of masculinity is in large part a function of our model’s intended uses. in what follows, my critical analysis is informed by the following theoretical priorities: normativity. the model should enable cogent critique of patriarchal norms of masculinity as well as underwrite alternate norms of masculinity compatible with feminist values and commitments. normative masculinity is understood here as a set of expectations of how men as men ought to be, where such expectations may be imposed by ourselves, our communities, or wider social structures. in focusing on normative masculinity here, i do not mean to neglect descriptive ethnographic studies of men and masculinities, but only to take up a different project. i would echo connell’s observation (2000, 14) that although descriptive research methods have yielded impressive results for masculinity studies in the past thirty years, these productive approaches do not exhaust the scope of worthwhile study. i also affirm may’s (1998, 149) exhortation for philosophical writing on masculinity “to provide not only critical arguments but a new vision of what men can become.” hooks and kimmel are notable for their efforts to articulate better and explicitly profeminist visions of masculinity. differentiation. unlike an ideal of androgyny, which aims to evacuate fully the category of masculinity, a normative model of feminist masculinity must identify features that effectively differentiate expressed masculinity from non-masculinity. such features need not be understood as essential properties nor strictly necessary conditions but cannot be at once constitutive of masculinity and indistinguishably applicable to those who are not masculine. as all human beings are born and will die, a fortiori those who embody masculinity are born and will die; but to say that mortality is constitutive of masculinity would fail to identify anything particularly distinctive about it. multiplicity, intersectionality, and non-androcentricity. the model should allow multiple instantiations of feminist masculinity given variations among men across races, classes, sexual orientations, and other such categories. a model of normative feminist masculinity should not assume, for example, that only those men capable of or interested in meeting middle-class or heteronormative social expectations can be real or good men. further, the model should not treat 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 masculinity as the default or central issue of gender from which implications for women, girls, and feminist femininity would thereby automatically and presumptively follow. an absence of masculinity need not imply a presence of femininity, nor vice versa. 3. hooks: masculinity reclaimed hooks (1998) has long articulated a vision of feminist change in which men play productive roles as “comrades in struggle.” this vision is grounded in an emphasis on two claims sometimes seen as incompatible: that patriarchy oppresses women, and that it harms both women and men. hooks insists that “the primary genocidal threat, the force that endangers black male life, is patriarchal masculinity” (2004a, xiv). men benefit by challenging presumptive gender roles, she argues, and a truly visionary feminism must make room for love of men and boys. yet the challenge to presumptive masculine gender roles that hooks defends cannot merely reshuffle traditional masculinity, but must face and critique patriarchy directly. this is her objection to mythopoetic movements: that they “did not consistently demand that men challenge patriarchy or envision liberating models of masculinity” (2004b, 113). if mythopoetic models of masculinity fall short, so too do proposals to abandon masculinity altogether for an ideal of androgyny. of those who “suggest that we need to do away with the term [masculinity], that we need ‘an end to manhood,’” hooks (2004b, 115) says, “such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.” this notion would be contrary to feminist love of men and boys, she insists, and contrary to her feminist vision to reclaim masculinity. we begin to see this positive vision of masculinity in the following contrast between domination and partnership: to offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings. in the partnership model selfhood, whether one is female or male, is always at the core of one’s identity. patriarchal masculinity teaches males to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent for self-definition on the privileges (however relative) that they receive from having been born male. . . . in a partnership model male identity like its female counterpart would be centered around the notion of an essential goodness that is inherently relationally oriented. (hooks 2004b, 117) hooks further articulates her vision of feminist masculinity as non-dominating and loving masculinity with particular emphasis on the value of interdependency: 5 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist masculinity presupposes that it is enough for males to be to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others. this strength is a trait males and females need to possess. . . . “feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.” the core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender equality and mutuality as crucial for interbeing and partnership in the creating and sustaining of life. (2004b, 117-118) what emerges in these passages is an alternative to masculinity as domination, one that resists a move to androgyny and does so on explicitly feminist grounds. whereas patriarchy insists that “real men must prove their manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection,” feminist masculinity as hooks (2004b, 121) sees it urges men to see themselves differently, such “that they become more real through the act of connecting with others, through building community.” so understood, men successfully embody feminist masculinity by embracing reciprocity, mutuality, and genuine interdependence. 4. kimmel: real men and just guys kimmel has long contributed to the sociology of men, masculinity, and gender through his scholarly and popular books, edited collections, presentations, talks, and his work with the national organization for men against sexism (nomas). he identifies himself and his work as avowedly feminist, and regularly affirms the importance of feminist recognition of men’s privilege and women’s oppression. kimmel recognizes that the idea that men as beneficiaries of patriarchy are thus fundamentally incompatible with feminism is a real and serious challenge. “to be a man means to be an oppressor. thus we—men who could support feminism— cannot be said to exist if the polar dichotomy by which they see the world is to remain in place” (kimmel 1998, 61). the concern is not that men are essentially antifeminist, but that because widespread privilege is “indelibly inscribed onto men, and men embody it whether they choose to or not, then the only possibility for men to be redeemed is for them to renounce masculinity itself. one simply cannot be a man and support feminism” (1998, 62). here kimmel explains though does not endorse a position incompatible with feminist masculinity, one allowing only for an ideal of androgyny or strict feminist political delineation between men and women. yet kimmel himself is optimistic that men can fruitfully engage the privilege problem. “profeminism, a position that acknowledges men’s experience without privileging it, 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 possesses the tools,” he says (1998, 64), “to both adequately analyze men’s aggregate power, and also describe the ways in which individual men are both privileged by that social level of power and feel powerless in the face of it.” throughout his work, kimmel strives to understand masculinity as constantly changing, and to understand manhood as socially constructed, while challenging the assumption that manhood and masculinity must be inimical to feminist values. rebuking “the implicit equation of manhood with oppression and inequality–as if real men support injustice” (1998, 67), kimmel holds that really real men support justice. this identification of real, good manhood with ethics and justice carries through to guyland, his popular critical appraisal of american manhood today for mostly white, straight, middleand upper-class men in the years before, after, and at four-year universities. “guyland” as kimmel understands it is a relatively recent socio-historical development: a sort of arrested development between adolescence and adulthood, and an extremely gendered period of life. in guyland, masculinity is constantly policed by other men and tightly prescribed as not-feminine and not-gay. women are affected as well insofar as their own sexualities and relationships with the guys of guyland are tightly prescribed and limited accordingly. the main question for kimmel is not how to avoid guyland, which is a stage of development, but rather how to make the constructive transition from guyland to adulthood in better ways (2008, 288). here adulthood is understood in traditional demographic terms: completing education, holding a job, getting married, having kids, moving out of one’s parents’ house (kimmel 2010, 122). in envisioning the possibility of a healthy, successful transition from guyland masculinity, kimmel (2008, 267) contrasts “just” guys with just guys: that is, “guys who are capable of acting ethically, of doing the right thing, of standing up to the centripetal pull of guyland. guys can become everyday heroes. they can actually become men.” so understood, manhood becomes associated with achieving adulthood and doing the right thing. in the discussion that concludes guyland, kimmel articulates “a new model” of masculinity in the following terms: [b]eing a real man is not going along with what you know in your heart to be cruel, inhumane, stupid, humiliating, and dangerous. being a real man means doing the right thing, standing up to immorality and injustice when you see it, and expressing compassion, not contempt, for those who are less fortunate. in other words, it’s about being courageous. (2008, 287) notice how the normative approach to masculinity is retained: virtues of courage and compassion are gendered with normative force for a “real” man. here kimmel echoes and builds on the “new definition of masculinity for a new century” 7 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 that he sketched in the epilogue to manhood in america. in this earlier text, he argues for a “democratic manhood” distinct from both traditional masculinity and androgyny, the latter of which he describes as “blurring of masculinity and femininity into a mélange of some vaguely defined human qualities” (1996, 334). democratic manhood, by contrast, is to be composed of old and new “masculine virtues” such as compassion, nurturing, egalitarianism, inclusion, dependability, strength, self-reliance, purpose, and an abiding commitment to justice and ethical action (1996, 333-335). where mythopoetic men’s movements insist that initiation into wildmanhood can only be led by other men, kimmel (2008, 272) is happy to recognize the roles women play in guiding guys to manhood/adulthood. yet fathers do have a special duty to resist their own temptation to guy-regression. “when fathers resist the urge to identify with guyland,” kimmel (2008, 277) argues, “they can model empathic manhood and enrich their sons’ lives with a concrete example of what honor and integrity look like . . . [and] can show their sons that there are real alternatives to guyland in which responsibility and accountability and self-respect are qualities that should be strived for.” 5. reflection and critique hooks and kimmel both demonstrate careful and perceptive attention to men’s relationships to feminism; both identify and defend sensible, worthwhile qualities for men as constructive alternatives to patriarchal domination. it is unclear to me, however, how these proposed alternatives are properly represented as constitutive of masculinity. let us agree that courage, compassion, empathy, selflove, an opposition to injustice, and a commitment to gender equality are valuable human qualities, and ones certainly important in the pursuit of feminist change. let us appreciate also that many of these qualities are lacking in many men, in some part because hegemonic masculinity frames them as incompatible with real or laudable manhood. why should we understand men who embody and exhibit such qualities as thereby embodying a kind of masculinity, however, rather than as embodying and exhibiting gender non-specific human virtues? the answer is surely not that only male people can or even should embody these qualities. for her part, hooks explicitly sees the partnership model as something in which women and men both can and should participate, such that “male identity, like its female counterpart, would be centered around the notion of an essential goodness that is inherently relationally oriented” (2004b, 117). while she argues that feminist masculinity “defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others,” hooks also understands this kind of strength-asresponsibility as “a trait males and females need to possess” (2004b, 117). feminist masculinity is built around a deep commitment to gender equality and mutuality, 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 and yet hooks recognizes this commitment as important for feminist women, too. so how do men become “more real” by participating in community-building and interconnection, on this view of feminist manhood, when this sort of work and interconnection are also constitutive of feminist womanhood? to the extent that these qualities and pursuits are identified and advanced as worthwhile for women and men, how do they give meaning to a kind of masculinity rather than to a kind of androgyny? let us recall sterba’s (1998, 292) description of feminist androgyny as “a broader-based ideal for both women and men that combines virtues and desirable traits traditionally associated with women with virtues and desirable traits traditionally associated with men.” the feminist reclamation of masculinity hooks advocates does this: it rejects traditionally masculine traits of domination and disconnection and embraces traits of empathy, mutuality, and self-love. hooks recognizes these traits as necessary for female and male people, which makes her cautioning against calls for an end to manhood and her characterization of the embodiment of such traits as a kind of masculinity very puzzling. here i share fagan’s (2013, 37) appreciation for hooks but also her conclusion that hooks’s account of masculinity “seemed to be simply a description of a healthy person not a healthy man; nothing in it felt specific to manhood or masculinity.” the puzzle is no easier for kimmel’s vision of just guys, democratic manhood, and a new model of masculinity in which acting ethically, doing the right thing, and standing up to injustice are presented as ways that guys become better men. so being a “real man” is about courage (2008, 287), yet kimmel surely will agree that women can be courageous and stand up to injustice too, and it’s not as though through their courage, these women thereby embody masculinity. such virtues are not distinctive of masculinity and manhood as kimmel recommends them, even as they are presented as constitutive of masculinity and manhood as he articulates them. one might argue that an identification of escaping guyland with achieving adulthood understood on traditional markers of success (degree, job, spouse, kids, home) is distinctive of manhood specifically, with kimmel’s discussion of fathers modeling manhood as accountability and responsibility. to whatever extent this is true, however, we regress to some version of traditional patriarchal masculinity instead of distinctively feminist masculinity. we are left with a far from liberating model, one that associates adulthood with masculinity and denies real or better manhood to those men blocked by homophobia, classism, racism, and forms of systematic oppression from attaining adulthood so defined, not to mention those men who may be uninterested in these markers of maturity. one might try to frame the various admirable qualities kimmel and hooks see as constituting feminist masculinity rather than androgyny or hegemonic masculinity by stipulating that these qualities are constitutive of masculinity just in 9 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 cases when they are expressed in a male body. in this way, one might try to identify courage and empathy as part of a normative model of feminist masculinity, while recognizing that women too can be courageous or empathic, and yet resist the implication that being courageous or empathic would thus makes them masculine. to put the idea somewhat formally, the trait or quality x is constitutive of normative masculinity, even though x is not unique to those who are masculine, because x is stipulated as constitutive of normative masculinity just in cases when x is associated with or expressed in a male body. i worry, however, that this revised model of reclaimed masculinity has problems on conceptual and feminist grounds. beyond bald stipulation, it does not seem to show any meaningful difference between this kind of masculinity and an ideal of androgyny. both would allow that everyone can be wise, courageous, caring, and so on, but the revised model of masculinity rather superfluously insists that these things are masculine when attendant to male biology. we might further worry that this revised model will prove discordant with some women’s and men’s identities and experiences. it would seem to presume that one’s gender can simply be read off one’s biological sex, and yet not all men self-identify as biologically male, as not all women self-identify as biologically female. the revised model would seem to deny feminist masculinity of trans men who have yet to or choose not to pursue anatomical change, despite their deeply considered gender identities as men, and no matter how wise, courageous, responsible, or empathic they might be. given these implications, the revised model would seem to fail to meet even the most minimal requirements of trans-positive feminist theory,7 and so in my view it is not a promising addendum to either hooks’s or kimmel’s attempted reclamations of masculinity. 6. alcoff: the whiteness problem in trying to make sense of feminist masculinity, we might look to alcoff’s work on white anti-racism for useful comparison. in particular, we might consider how alcoff addresses what she calls “the question of white identity”: [a]ntiracist struggles require whites’ acknowledgement that they are white: that is, that their experience, perceptions, and economic position have been profoundly affected by being constituted as white. . . . but what is it to acknowledge one’s whiteness? is it to acknowledge that one is inherently tied to structures of domination and oppression, that one is irrevocably on the wrong side? in other words, can the acknowledgement of whiteness 7 see hale (1998) and heyes (2003). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 produce only self-criticisms, even shame and self-loathing? is it possible to feel okay about being white? (2006, 207) while avowed white supremacists might feel okay about being white, what about white people committed to anti-racism? alcoff argues that each of us needs some felt connection with a larger community, some history beyond ourselves to avoid falling into nihilism and to stay invested in the value of social progress. while it can be understandable that anti-racist whites might wish to disavow their unjust social privileges, alcoff (2006, 213) rejects repudiation of white identity as itself seriously problematic: “whites cannot completely disavow whiteness or distance themselves from their white identity. one’s appearance of being white will still operate to confer privilege in numerous and significant ways.” thinking that one has successfully disavowed whiteness when one has not is not merely mistaken: it might also encourage shirking one’s responsibility to contribute meaningfully to dismantling white supremacy. those who disavow their whiteness, alcoff warns, “might consider a declaration that they are ‘not white’ as a sufficient solution to racism without the trouble of organizing or collective action. this position would then end up uncomfortably close to a color-blindness attitude that pretends ignorance about one’s own white identity and refuses responsibility” (2006, 215). this conundrum is what alcoff (2006, 221) identifies as the whiteness problem: namely, “why maintain white identity at all, given that any group identity will be based on exclusion and an implicit superiority, and given that whiteness itself has been historically constituted as supremacist since its inception?” one promising way to address this problem is to remember, regarding whiteness and the value of identifying with histories and communities, that the histories of white supremacy and communities of white people who accept their race privilege unreflectively are not the only relevant histories and communities. while anti-racist whites must acknowledge and own their relationship to white racist histories and communities, alcoff (2006, 223) also urges whites committed to anti-racism to keep “a newly awakened memory of the many white traitors to white privilege who have struggled to contribute to the building of an inclusive human community.” alcoff describes this sort of white identity as a kind of “double consciousness,” different from the double consciousness identified by du bois, although inspired by him. in this case, she says, consciousness involves anti-racist whites acknowledging how white identity figures centrally into racial inequality and exploitation while also remembering contributions made by anti-racists whites to dismantling white supremacy. alcoff aims neither to let white people disassociate themselves from bad white histories and communities nor to allow white people to wallow in guilt-ridden stasis, as though an unavoidable white identity robs one of all capacity for anti-racist work. histories of white anti-racism also can be histories with 11 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 which white people positively identify, not instead of but alongside histories of white privilege, ignorance, and exploitation. identification with white anti-racism does not come automatically, to be sure. it must be earned, which gives further impetus to white people genuinely committed to anti-racism to actually and persistently do something. 7. allyship and masculinity there is much to alcoff’s analysis of white anti-racism that is worthwhile in its own right, but for present purposes, i want to emphasize two features that extend fruitfully to the question of feminist masculinity. the first point is her insistence that socially privileged identity and group membership are not easily disavowed: not only will disavowal be quite difficult for the person himself, given a lifetime of privilege, but the world may well continue to confer privilege in many subtle, pervasive ways, one’s disavowals notwithstanding. the second, complementary point is that allyship against privilege and oppression can be partially constitutive of anti-racist whiteness, through contributions to justice and recognition of how such contributions fit within anti-racist white histories and communities. this latter point dovetails with brod’s (1998, 210) critique of stoltenberg on the ideal of androgyny: “what is lacking is precisely the standpoint from which to practice a transformative politics that being profeminist as men provides. one is left with only an ungendered individual moral identity, rather than a gendered collective political identity that i believe is essential for sustained, effective political action.” newton (2002, 183) similarly emphasizes the importance of “the pleasures of collectivity” that are available to men and which can help sustain their progressive political activities. in this spirit, the approach to normative feminist masculinities i advocate here emphasizes masculinity in political, gendered, and feminist terms. specifically, i submit that allyship offers a viable and open-ended normative model for feminist masculinities distinct from an ideal of androgyny (though quite friendly to it) and grounded in feminist values. to begin, let us characterize an ally generally as one who supports or assists another in a shared project or end.8 for present purposes i emphasize three features of allyship particularly relevant for normative feminist masculinity. the first point is that a good ally neither dominates nor takes over a shared project; as hooks (2004b, 117) reminds us, the goal is one of cooperation rather than of domination. this leads to our second point: the project is shared, meaning that an ally values the project as her/his own end while also appreciating that others value it as theirs. the third point is that an ally is, in some significant 8 for further discussion of allyship, see bishop (2002), connell (2005), and casey (2010). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 sense, in coalition with another, such that an alliance is a relationship involving two or more allied parties who are non-identical in some relevant way, “rather than mobilization of one group around its common interest” (connell 2005, 238). while no two parties are ever perfectly identical, the point is that the differences between or among allies are themselves relevant to their participation, relevant to their contributions to be made to the shared project, and therefore relevant to their relationship being one of allies working in coalition. to make sense of men’s feminist allyship in particular, let us reflect on feminism broadly construed. sherwin (1989, 70) aptly identifies several commitments held in common by a wide variety of feminist theories: “a recognition that women are in a subordinate position in society, that oppression is a form of injustice and hence intolerable, that there are further forms of oppression in addition to gender oppression (and that there are women victimized by each of these forms of oppression), that it is possible to change society in ways that could eliminate oppression, and that it is a goal of feminism to pursue the changes necessary to accomplish this.” one might add further commitments, to be sure, commitments central to and distinctive of particular feminisms. but starting here, we can say that a feminist at least shares these recognitions and contributes to pursuing these changes. applying our general characterization of allyship, we can say also that a feminist ally comes to these feminist recognitions and pursues changes alongside varied others; an ally sees these ideas and work as important on her/his own analysis, while appreciating that others have their own analyses, perspectives, and experiences as well. a good feminist ally provides complementary contributions without subsuming, assimilating, erasing, or preventing others’ recognitions and contributions. finally, a man as feminist masculine ally recognizes how various norms of masculinity and femininity undergird social oppression; recognizes how men uphold oppressive systems and how men can contribute to dismantling them; and achieves his recognition and makes his contributions to undoing oppression in ways that are sometimes similar to and sometimes rather different from his allies, these differences owing accordingly to what differentiates his positionality from his allies in this work. we are reminded that being a man under patriarchy is at least in part about how one is interpreted, by others and oneself, as occupying a social position of male privilege.9 manhood is fungible, and gender fluidity is possible. yet like alcoff’s observation on anti-racist whiteness, the attempt to disavow one’s manhood as a repudiation of patriarchy may not succeed, as when the world “will still operate to confer privilege in numerous and significant ways” (alcoff 2006, 213). this is not to deny the ability of trans women and men to affirm their respective identities as 9 see haslanger (2000, 2012). 13 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 women and men against presumptive social categorization. those who would like to distance themselves from masculinity so as to deny their gender privilege are in a rather different position, in which a repudiation of manhood assuages guilt and shame and encourages the tempting conclusion that, in so doing, this is enough to wash one’s hands of what connell (2005, 79) calls the “patriarchal dividend.” but what men can do instead is exercise significant control over how we respond to privilege and patriarchy in ways consistent with and grounded in feminist values. masculinities, connell and messerschmidt (2005, 836) argue, are “configurations of practice.” we might consider men’s feminist allyship practices as constitutive of normative feminist masculinities, such that the norms of feminist allyship give meaning to better ways of being men, ways that are constructive, distinctive, and intersectional. so understood, feminist masculinity involves something akin to the awareness alcoff describes—in this case, involving feminist men acknowledging how men benefit from and are complicit in gender oppression, while celebrating the contributions to undoing oppression that men make and have made.10 i make no claim of masculine double consciousness, however, as i would not mean to suggest something comparable to what du bois (2007) describes as the pervasive lived experience of oppressed peoples. allyship has a social-epistemological dimension. consider, for example, may’s (1998, 135)11 description of a progressive male standpoint grounded in a critical reflection upon one’s own experiences as a man alongside a mindful attention to women’s experiences as they testify to them. achieving and maintaining such a standpoint takes work, dedication, self-scrutiny, and sincere willingness to listen humbly. drawing on both men’s and women’s experiences of a gendered world, one does so from the position of a committed ally standing in different relation to women’s experiences than they stand themselves. here may’s own work may be understood reflexively, as he strives to meet his own standards in drawing upon bar on (1993), harding (1993), and other feminist women theorists while also testifying to his own particular perspective and gendered experiences. while each instance of allyship masculinity will not necessarily apply uniformly to all men, examples might help to illustrate the model. consider the case of men who are part of a community in which sexual harassment and discrimination are endemic problems, yet who sincerely believe that they have not seen these things themselves. (meanwhile other men in this community do recognize that they have witnessed sexual harassment and discrimination; perhaps some have been targets themselves.) on first analysis, these men might treat their absence of personal observation as some counterevidence against the pervasiveness of sexism 10 see also nall (2010). 11 see also pease (2000). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 in their community, and they might even say as much in community forums. in this case, the norms of allyship masculinity would ask these men to seriously consider how their gendered social positions as men might be relevant to their notwitnessing sexism even if it actually exists in their community. “is my not-witnessing better understood as counterevidence, or as a sort of gendered ignorance?” these men might ask themselves. allyship masculinity also would mean considering the significance of one’s testimony of not-witnessing sexism in its social-epistemic context, particularly in response to other community members’ testimonies of their firsthand experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination. “what is the point of my not-witnessing testimony?” these men might ask themselves. “is it making a constructive contribution to our collective understanding, or obscuring the issue?” different men might well answer these questions differently, given the specific details of their lives and the specific cases at hand. to be sure, testimonial injustice (fricker, 2007), testimonial smothering (dotson, 2011), and other forms of epistemic violence are not unique to men nor limited to gender oppression. my claim here is not that virtuous listening is uniquely constitutive of allyship masculinity. but to the extent that existing patriarchal systems differently inform our experiences along gender lines, an allyship model of normative masculinity will ask men to consider how our distinctively gendered experiences as men make an epistemic difference, for better and for worse, and to take these considerations into account in our beliefs and actions. there is work toward gender equality and undoing oppression to which women and men can contribute in similar ways, just as there are truths about the world women and men recognize in similar ways. yet the reason we might conceive of men’s feminist allyship practices as masculinities is the fact that men stand in distinctively gendered relations to the insights and social projects of feminism. when it comes to contributing to collective projects toward dismantling gender oppression, men’s social positions may find them better situated to make some contributions than others, and sometimes find them better situated than women may be to make particular sorts of contributions. sterba (1998, 298) argues that “there are still many contexts in which men are good for feminism, that is, many contexts in which men can make useful contributions to the cause of feminism.” for example, he encourages feminist men to argue for gender equality in spaces where women are underrepresented and to use their male privileges to advocate for gender equality in conversations with those who extend greater credibility to men than women. ravarino (2013, 160) likewise reminds us that, “as men, we have unique access to other men. this same-sex dynamic means that men can be effective social justice allies in addressing sensitive topics.” in addition to issues of credibility, men sometimes might be more willing and able to appraise their privileges and their complicity in patriarchal systems honestly 15 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 alongside other, similarly implicated men. this is not to say that men working with men or other such distinctively gendered contributions to dismantling oppression are somehow more important than other feminist contributions—far from it. but through these examples, we begin to see how men’s committed, reflective pursuit of feminist allyship can itself give meaning to particular masculinities. i have raised questions for kimmel’s “new model” of masculinity as proposed in manhood in america and guyland. but elsewhere he locates a distinctive role for men, in his description of a gentlemen’s auxiliary of feminism as “an honorable position, one that acknowledges that this is a revolution of which we are part, but not the central part, not its most significant part” (1998, 67). “it will be the task of a gentleman’s auxiliary to make feminism comprehensible to men, not as a loss of power . . . but as a challenge to that false sense of entitlement to that power in the first place.” guyland too contains examples of how men can make distinctive contributions to undoing oppression. kimmel shares the story of one fraternity member moved to scrutinize his complicity in the “walk of shame,” in which the fraternity members gathered to heckle sorority women going home on weekend mornings after hooking up with the guys. inspired by kimmel’s visit, this man sought out like-minded fraternity members opposed to the heckling, and after discussion among themselves, they took their opposition to their fraternity, made their case, and effected small but meaningful local social change. in this man’s efforts, kimmel (2008, 281) sees a genuine attempt to get beyond the limits of his experiences and better identify and stand against injustice as others experience it. i think kimmel is right on here, and the example does fit his model of masculinity through justice. but let us notice also that this fraternity member did not oppose injustice in a generic way, but from his specific social situation within this highly gendered institution. his experience of the walk of shame was different than that of the sorority women who endured it, and his position as a fraternity member allowed him to pursue a particular avenue for change unavailable to these women and to other outsiders. in allyship masculinities, i think we can find some resolution to the paradox of profeminist pride in manhood, aptly described by schmitt (2001, 399), that “since we are not profeminists with unspecified gender but specifically profeminist men, we struggle in fact against ourselves, against what most persons in our society expect us to be, and against what we were raised to be.” schmitt realizes that selfhatred, while tempting, cannot enable long-term contributions to feminist progress, yet a call for pride in manhood “carries with it overtones of the old patriarchy with its distinctions between the natures of men and women” (2001, 399).12 but if we acknowledge how men’s and women’s positions in patriarchal systems serve to constrain and enable our respective relationships and our contributions to social 12 see also kahane (1998). 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 justice differently, then the pride available to men as feminist allies is not pride in some essentially male nature, rather, pride in doing the work that one can as a feminist man. 8. concluding remarks we might look to men’s feminist allyship practices as a decidedly nonessentialist approach to normative masculinity not only compatible with feminist values but grounded in them. allyship masculinities share with androgyny a healthy amount of skepticism toward traditional gender norms and oppressive power structures. the behaviors and activities that are identified and advocated here as normatively masculine do not concern dress, bodily comportment, or many other traditionally gendered things. instead, this reclamation of normative feminist masculinity is akin to alcoff’s advice for anti-racist whites to do the work necessary to become contributing parts of anti-racist white communities and histories. so understood, the norms of allyship masculinities involve contributing meaningfully to feminist work while mindful of how our gendered privileges, expectations, ignorance, and knowledge as men situate our relationships and our constructive contributions to this work in coalition with our differently situated allies. one might wonder whether a model of normative feminist femininities is meant to follow from this model of normative feminist masculinities. but i would resist drawing conclusions from the present discussion for what feminist femininities would or should look like, or even whether this is a fruitful way to approach such things. the question of feminist reclamation of normative femininity is not one i would try to answer, and i do not mean to treat masculinity as any sort of default case with straightforward isomorphic implications for other gender categories. in looking to feminist allyship practices as a way to give meaning to normative feminist masculinities, i do not mean to present allyship as simple or uncontested. while some theorists and activists see allyship and allies as playing valuable roles in social justice movements,13 others are more critical,14 particularly of the actions and the pronouncements of men and white, upper-class, cisgender, and straight people who see and describe themselves as “allies.” such selfascriptions draw criticism and warranted suspicion because they evidence misplaced emphasis on self-glorification and public performance rather than the actual work of undoing oppressive structures. critics and proponents agree that “ally” is understood best as a kind of anti-oppressive activity, not as a badge of honor. for 13 for more positive accounts of allies and allyship, see bishop (2002) and ravarino (2013). 14 for more critical accounts of of allies and allyship, see mckenzie (2014) and mckinnon (2014). 17 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 this reason, i have sought to focus on feminist allyship practices rather than selfascriptions. perhaps stressing allyship practices as underwriting normative masculinities can help mitigate the self-congratulatory excesses of allies and allyship culture: it is not enough for men to see or to describe themselves as feminist allies in order to meet feminist masculinity norms, any more than it would be enough to see or to describe oneself as trustworthy or generous in order to meet the norms of trust or generosity. so understood, the extent to which we are succeeding in living up to feminist masculinity norms will be evidenced by what we have done and what we are doing, not by what we want to call ourselves. i have raised concerns about the alternate models of masculinities put forward by hooks and kimmel on the grounds that the things they identify as constitutive of masculinity are embodied and expressed equally well by women and men. it is reasonable, then, to ask whether men’s feminist allyship as a model for normative masculinities invites similar critique: does my own approach attribute something to men that is not distinctive of them? norlock (2012) notes that women too act in contribution to feminist work, mindful of how their sexually marked privileges as feminine affect how they understand this work; men and women both can accrue gender privileges if and when they meet socially expected racist, heterosexist, and classist norms. if gender privilege is not so distinctive of what it means to be a man, a feminist allyship model might seem to have problems similar to those that i raised for hooks and kimmel. i take this as a welcome challenge for allyship masculinities built around the recognition that, as men, our relationships to patriarchy are distinctively different than women’s, and so our contributions to feminist work are sometimes distinctively different than our allies. it is true that sexuality, race, and other social categories undeniably affect how men are accorded gender privilege; it is also probably right to say, at least in some sense, that women are rewarded if and when they conform to patriarchal expectations. yet the ways in which men as men and women as women are accorded gender privileges are nonetheless distinctively different, such that the norms of men’s feminist allyship practices require us to be mindful of these differences in our gender privileges as we reflect, listen, speak, and act accordingly. of course, the ways different men are accorded gender privilege also can be different. intersectional analyses of oppression emphasize that all women do not experience patriarchy in the same way,15 and the corresponding point is true of how different men experience patriarchy.16 we might consider mcintosh’s (1988) familiar image of a knapsack filled with various privileges: the collection of privileges large and small that each man carries with him is undeniable 15 see especially crenshaw (1989) and spelman (1988). 16 see awkward (1995), connell (2000, 2005), and kimmel & messner (2010). 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 though often taken for granted by the beneficiary himself. while the contents of different men’s knapsacks can be similar, not all men across social categories are accorded the same set of gendered privileges manifested in the same way. the upshot of this critical reflection is the reminder that, as men might work and aspire to be good feminist allies to women, so too might different groups of men work and aspire to be good allies to each other, just as different groups of women work and aspire to be good allies to each other as well. the coalition among allies is diverse indeed. what does an intersectional analysis mean for a feminist model of normative masculinities? it complicates the model in welcome and constructive ways. men may work to be better feminist allies to women by recognizing the diversity among women’s various identities and experiences, remembering that allyship with women necessarily bridges multiple dimensions of social power and difference. men likewise may work to be better allies to other men by recognizing the diversity among our identities and experiences, and appreciating how allyship among men requires bridging differences too. so when i am doing my part as best as i am able, my embodiment of feminist allyship masculinity overlaps with and differs from feminist allyship masculinity as embodied by many other particular men doing their best. for this reason, we would do well to speak of a normative feminist model of masculinities, pluralized, recognizing the panoply of gender-based privileges and expectations that are accorded to men, pluralized, living in patriarchal systems. among the distinctive tasks for those men aspiring to meet the norms of feminist allyship masculinities are to reflect on the particular ways that these gendered privileges and expectations are extended to us as men and to develop our understanding of and tender 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advances in social work 11 (2): 267-282. clatterbaugh, ken. 1997. contemporary perspectives on masculinity, 2nd ed. boulder: westview press. connell, r. w. 2000. the men and the boys. berkeley: university of california press. ———. 2005. masculinities. 2nd ed. berkeley: university of california press. connell, r. w., and j. w. messerschmidt. 2005. “hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept.” gender and society 19 (6): 829-859. crenshaw, kimberle. 1989. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex.” university of chicago law forum 139-168. digby, tom, ed. 1998. men doing feminism. new york: routledge. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236-257. du bois, w.e.b. 2007. the souls of black folk. oxford: oxford university press. fagan, r. w. 1993. “the bullying demands of masculinity.” in tarrant 2013. farrell, warren. 1986. why men are the way they are. new york: mcgraw-hill. ———. 1991. “we should embrace traditional masculinity.” in thompson 1991. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice. oxford: oxford university press. haddad, richard. 1991. “feminism has little relevance for men.” in thompson 1991. hale, c. jacob. 1998. “tracing a ghostly memory in my throat.” in digby 1998. harding, sandra. 1993. “rethinking standpoint epistemology.” in alcoff & potter 1993. haslanger, sally. 2000. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” nous 34 (1): 31-55. ———. 2012. resisting reality. oxford: oxford university press. heyes, cressida. 2003. “feminist solidarity after queer theory.” signs 28 (4): 10931120. hooks, bell. 1984. feminist theory: from margin to center. boston: south end. ———. 1998. “men as comrades in struggle.” in men and feminism, edited by doris ewing and steven schacht, new york: new york university press. ———. 2004a. we real cool. new york: atria books. ———. 2004b. the will to change. new york: atria books. kahane, david. 1998. “male feminism as an oxymoron.” in digby 1998. keen, sam. 1992. fire in the belly: on being a man. new york: bantam books. kimmel, michael. 1996. manhood in america. new york: the free press. ———. 1998. “who’s afraid of men doing feminism?” in digby 1998. ———. 2004. “masculinity as homophobia.” in murphy 2004. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 ———. 2008. guyland. new york: harpercollins. ———. 2010. “guyland: gendering the transition to adulthood.” in kimmel & messner 2010. kimmel, michael, and michael messner, eds. 2010. men’s lives. 8th ed. boston: allyn & bacon. may, larry. 1998. masculinity and morality. ithaca: cornell university press. mcintosh, peggy. 1988. “white privilege and male privilege.” center for research on women, wellesley college. mckenzie, mia. 2014. black girl dangerous: on race, queerness, class and gender. oakland: bgd press. mckinnon, rachel. 2014. “‘allies,’ active bystanders and gaslighting.” paper presented at the workshop on (lack of) diversity in philosophy, rice university. murphy, peter, ed. 2004. feminism and masculinities. oxford: oxford university press. nall, jeffrey. 2010. “exhuming the history of feminist masculinity.” culture, society and masculinity 2 (1): 42-61. newton, judith. 2002. “masculinity studies: the longed-for profeminist movement for academic men?” in masculinity studies and feminist theory, edited by judith k. gardiner. new york: columbia university press. norlock, kathryn. 2012. commentary presented at the annual meeting of the society for analytical feminism, chicago, illinois, february. pease, bob. 2000. recreating men. los angeles: sage publications. ravarino, jonathan. 2013. “being a social justice ally.” in tarrant 2013. schmitt, richard. 2001. “proud to be a man?” men and masculinities 3 (4): 393-404. sherwin, susan. 1989. “feminism and medical ethics.” hypatia 4 (2): 57-72. spelman, elizabeth. 1988. the inessential woman. boston: beacon press. sterba, james. 1998. “is feminism good for men and are men good for feminism?” in digby 1998. stoltenberg, john. 1975. “toward gender justice.” social policy 6 (1): 35-39. reprinted in murphy 2004. ———. 1989. refusing to be a man. london: university college london press. ———. 1993. the end of manhood. london: dutton. tarrant, shira, ed. 2013. men speak out. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. thompson, keith, ed. 1991. to be a man: in search of the deep masculine. london: st. martin’s press. ben almassi is an assistant professor at governors state university, where he teaches courses in philosophy, political theory, research ethics, and gender & 21 almassi: feminist reclamations of normative masculinity published by scholarship@western, 2015 sexuality studies. his research primarily addresses issues of trust and epistemic difference in scientific and social contexts. he welcomes questions, criticisms, and suggestions, and can be reached at balmassi@govst.edu. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.2 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices ben almassi recommended citation feminist reclamations of normative masculinity: on democratic manhood, feminist masculinity, and allyship practices feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 9 recommended citation jaggar, alison m. 2019. “thinking about justice in the unjust meantime.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 9. 2019 thinking about justice in the unjust meantime alison m. jaggar university of colorado at boulder and university of birmingham alison.jaggar@colorado.edu jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 thinking about justice in the unjust meantime alison m. jaggar abstract many philosophers endorse the ideal of justice yet disagree radically over what that ideal requires. one persistent problem for thinking about justice is that the unjust social arrangements that originally motivated our questions may also distort our thinking about possible answers. this paper suggests some strategies for improving our thinking about justice in the unjust meantime. as our world becomes more just, we may expect our thinking about justice to improve. keywords: ideal and non-ideal theory, structural epistemic injustice, epistemic democracy, experiments in living. 1. philosophers thinking about justice western philosophers’ thinking about justice has often taken the form of envisioning worlds that are more just than our own. celebrated work in this tradition include plato’s republic, thomas more’s utopia (1516), and rousseau’s social contract (1762). closer to our own time john rawls’s a theory of justice (1971) presents an ideal of the “well-ordered society.” some feminist philosophers in the twentieth century used a similar method for thinking about gender justice. for example, the ideal of androgyny was widely discussed in the 1970s (ferguson 1977; trebilcot 1977; morgan 1982). in 1983, i proposed an ideal society that would be genderless and classless (jaggar 1983), and susan okin recommended abolishing gender (okin 1989). in the 1990s, martha nussbaum proposed a partial standard of global justice formulated as a list of ten capabilities (nussbaum 2000). in all these cases, feminist philosophers envisioned worlds whose gender relations they regarded as more just than our own as a method for diagnosing existing injustice and pointing a direction for social change. ingrid robeyns has called such ideals mythical paradise islands. she writes: we have heard wonderful stories about paradise island but no one has ever visited it, and some doubt that it truly exists. we have a few maps that tell us, roughly, where it should be situated, but since it is in the middle of the ocean, far away from all known societies, no one knows precisely where it is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 situated. yet we dream of going there and ask ourselves how we could get there, and in which direction we should be moving in order to eventually reach paradise island. (robeyns 2008, 344–345) imagining alternative worlds is a type of utopian thinking. 1 although this can be inspirational, the term “utopian” is also used dismissively to mean something like impractical dreaming. marx was notoriously critical of utopian thinking because he thought it tended to produce visions of the future that were speculative, unjustified, ineffective, and premature (ollman 2005).2 can imagined worlds be more than fantasies? can they be taken seriously as guides to social/political action? for rawls, at least, the answer is “yes.” he states that the ideal of the well-ordered society is intended to offer “a conception of a just basic structure and an ideal of the person compatible with it that can serve as a standard for appraising institutions and for guiding the overall direction of social change” (rawls 1971, 263). rawls offers the term “ideal theory” for his method of thinking philosophically about justice. in a theory of justice, he set himself the task of ascertaining which principles of justice would characterize a fair system of social cooperation in which “the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled” (rawls 1971, 3). he thought the most promising method for this undertaking was to begin by determining which principles of justice would be appropriate for regulating the basic structure of an ideal or “well-ordered” society rather than an existing one. rawls did not suppose that the well-ordered society was empirically attainable but 1 in france, britain, and the united states, the nineteenth century was the heyday of utopian thinking and many aspiring model communities were established at that time, though most of them died out by the end of the century. in the 1960s, similar aspirations re-emerged at least in anglophone countries; in the 1970s, various radical feminist versions of utopian community building were evident in moves to establish “women’s land.” 2 bertell ollman (2005) summarizes marx’s criticisms of utopian thinking as follows: (1) utopian thinking tends to produce visions of the future that are unrealistically rigid and complete; (2) there is no basis for determining if a vision constructed in this speculative manner is desirable, if it really is the good society; (3) equally, there is no clear way of determining if it is possible, that is whether people will ever be able to build such a society, and, if they do, whether it will function as expected; (4) by taking up the space allotted to the future in our thinking, utopian visions undermine the possibility of making a dialectical analysis of the present as a temporal dimension in which the future already appears as a potential; (5) utopian thinking results in ineffective ways of arguing; and (6) it also leads to ineffective political strategies. jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 he wrote, “while the principles [of justice] belong to the theory of an ideal state of affairs, they are generally relevant” (rawls 1971, 246). he thought that philosophers would better understand the confusing complexities of the real world if they began by reflecting on simplified models. in order for the models to be action-guiding in the real world, rawls acknowledges that they must be supplemented by non-ideal theory, whose purpose is to figure out how the ideal may best be established in nonideal conditions. the well-ordered or “perfectly just” society that rawls imagines resembles existing societies in many ways. like many real-world societies, the well-ordered society enjoys generally favorable conditions but also suffers from moderate scarcity. this circumstance, together with disagreement among its residents in conceptions of the good life, means that the well-ordered society, like the real world, experiences conflict as well as cooperation (rawls 1971, 4). however, the well-ordered society has some features that differentiate it sharply from real-world societies. for one thing, it is imagined as a society in which “everyone is presumed to act justly and to do his part in upholding just institutions,” so it is a world of “strict” as opposed to “partial compliance” (rawls 1971, 8). in addition, it is imagined as a society that is more or less self-sufficient (rawls 1971, 4) and “conceived as a closed system isolated from other societies” (rawls 1971, 8). ideal theory methodology became very popular among philosophers in the decades immediately following the publication of a theory of justice. more recently, however, it has come under heavy criticism. how should its strengths and weaknesses be assessed? 2. paradise for whom? philosophical paradise islands are not intended as working blueprints for building a just society. instead, they offer standards of assessment and a compass for moving toward justice. however, a number of critics contend that rawls’s ideal of a well-ordered society does not fulfil even these limited functions. they argue that the well-ordered society fails to meet several uncontroversial criteria of adequacy for a political ideal, including internal consistency, relevance, and normative acceptability. rawls envisions the well-ordered society as a fair system of social cooperation in which “the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled” (rawls 1971, 3). in the well-ordered society, citizens are imagined as free, equal, and fully cooperating members of society over the course of a complete life. however, eva kittay argues that rawls’s ideal of personhood structurally excludes two classes of persons from equal citizenship. one class is composed of people whose lives depend on hands-on care from others, some of whom will never be able to function as fully cooperating members of society. the other class is composed of people who provide feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 this care, people whom kittay calls dependency workers. they are mainly women. for them, kittay argues, “the non-fungible nature of much dependency work vitiates much of the freedom assumed available for the caregiver under equality of opportunity and constrains her, by ties of affection and sentiments of duty, to her charge” (kittay 1999, 112). kittay writes, “between the idealization [of equal situation and equal powers] and the reality [of asymmetries of situation and inequalities of capability] lies the danger that dependents and dependency caregivers will fall into a worst-off position” (kittay 1999, 92–93). in a somewhat similar vein, margaret walker argues that the ideals of human agency and society proposed by rawls are unattainable by many people, especially those whose disadvantaged life circumstances do not permit them to form a rational plan of their whole lives or to live without regret (walker 2008,142–143). in the view of both these authors, rawls’s ideal of the well-ordered society structurally excludes issues of justice for some vulnerable populations. the same point is pressed from different angles by other critics. susan okin notes that rawls’s theory of justice makes it impossible even to consider questions of justice within the household. this is partly because rawls is not consistent in including the family among basic social institutions, partly because he imagines the parties who negotiate the basic principles of justice to be representatives of households whose internal justice is taken for granted. for these reasons, rawls’s theory has no conceptual resources for considering the justice of the gendered division of household labor which disadvantages women in the world of paid work and renders them vulnerable to domestic abuse (okin 1989). charles mills asserts that the “endless deferral” of race by rawls and his followers amounts to philosophically marginalizing deep structural injustices that fundamentally affect the life chances of every citizen in the united states (mills 2005). he says that the theory fails to acknowledge that we are “living in one of the most race-conscious societies in the world, with a history of hundreds of years of white supremacy” (mills 2005, 177, 198). a third set of issues structurally excluded by rawls are those surrounding migration justice. rawls’s theory cannot address these issues because the wellordered society is imagined as closed, entered only at birth and exited at death. the problem is not simply that a theory of justice has gaps or is incomplete. it offers principles of justice for an idealized world that is unlike our own in many morally crucial respects. its structural exclusion of some crucial issues of real-world justice bias the theory against the interests of several vulnerable populations, including those who are racialized, those who are disabled, those who wish to cross the society’s borders, and those who bear the responsibility for taking care of children or others unable to care for themselves. so, the well-ordered society would not be paradise for many real-world populations. although rawls was personally committed to racial and gender equality, these personal commitments were not jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 fully integrated into his theory of justice, which lacks the resources to address racial injustice, disability, migration, the household division of labor, and the human need for hands-on care. the justice questions excluded from rawls’s theory are not minor issues affecting only a few people in unusual circumstances; instead, they profoundly affect the life prospects of everyone in modern societies. insofar as the theory obscures and rationalizes injustice, it is normatively inadequate. how should philosophers respond to these criticisms of the twentieth century’s most influential ideal of social justice? should we simply try harder to imagine an ideal that is more internally consistent, relevant, and normatively adequate? or should we instead reconsider the methods by which paradise islands are designed? 3. do philosophers employ good methods for designing paradise islands? philosophers designing ideal societies have utilized a variety of methods. one of the best known of these is contractarianism. the classical social contract theorists, such as hobbes, locke, and rousseau, postulated hypothetical agreements that supposedly would be made by people living in a state of nature, which is imagined as a situation lacking an established political authority. the point of postulating such contracts is to justify the prima facie obligation to obey the law by persuading people that it would in their self-interest to accept the coercion and inequality that are intrinsic to state power because only the state can guarantee freedom and equality. robert nozick (1974) utilizes a similar method to argue for a minimal libertarian state. despite the popularity of this method, appealing to hypothetical contracts has little more evidential credibility than rudyard kipling’s famous just so stories for little children (jaggar 1993; kipling 1902). imagined social contracts are one well-known type of thought experiment. thought experiments are a favorite method of intuitionist philosophers, who rely on intuitions as philosophical data. in moral philosophy, thought experiments are typically simple stories designed to highlight factors believed morally crucial to a particular problem while eliminating detail believed to be irrelevant. the philosophers who design the experiments aim to invent situations that are analogous to the problem at hand on what they take to be its most relevant dimensions but to cut out details that they think constitute mere “noise.” famous thought experiments in contemporary moral philosophy include a fat man stuck in the mouth of a cave (foot 1967), a hospital patient finding herself involuntarily providing life support to a famous violinist (thomson 1971), and an able-bodied person who sees a child drowning in a shallow pond (singer 1972). by means of these fictional stories, philosophers intend to “pump” people’s intuitions about controversial situations in order to sharpen or modify those intuitions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 intuitionism is also a problematic method. rawls rejects it in part because he sees that our intuitions are developed in unjust societies and may be shaped by mistaken values. for this reason, they may rationalize conventional beliefs. as an alternative, rawls develops his famous method of original position reasoning, many features of which are motivated by his desire to avoid the danger of conventionalism, which he sees as inherent in intuitionism. rawls imagines multiple parties meeting in a fictional original position to determine the fundamental and permanent principles of justice for the future world that they will inhabit. the parties meet behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents them from knowing their particular places in society, their fortunes in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, and their conceptions of the good (rawls 1971, 12). rawls carefully designs the situation of the parties and the characteristics assigned to them with the aim of ensuring that the principles of justice on which they settle are freely agreed, impartial, and sustainable. rawls’s method of reasoning in a hypothetical original position has been criticized in turn by many philosophers. this elaborate thought experiment postulates a discussion among parties imagined as identical with each other, all with the same motivations, valued goods, and reasoning strategies. as discourse theorists have pointed out, it is quite misleading to represent such a conversation as a discussion because the parties are interchangeable with no variety in their perspectives. the supposed conversation is logically equivalent to a monologue by its author. conceptions of justice produced by solitary armchair practices can only be as good as the political imaginations of their authors, and everyone’s imaginative capacities are limited. discourse ethicists argue that we need to move beyond imagining what others might say to engaging directly with others in actual intersubjective reasoning (habermas 1990). nussbaum appeals to four methods to justify her list of capabilities. the first method is what nussbaum calls aristotelian practical reasoning. this consists in critically refining eudoxa or reputable beliefs via “the exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings within history” (nussbaum 1992, 215) nussbaum asserts that examining “a wide variety of self-understandings of people in many times and places” reveals a “great convergence across cultures” and provides “reason for optimism that, if we proceed in this way, using our imaginations, we will have in the end a theory that is not the mere projection of our own customs but is also fully international and a basis for cross-cultural attunement” (nussbaum 1992, 213–216). brooke ackerly has criticized nussbaum’s appeal to this method. she says that the supposition that every society has subscribed to a single conception of the human good, even a vague one, is implausible and indeed that people’s deep beliefs seem often to be racist or otherwise discriminatory. moreover, the method fails to jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 require that all available data be collected and provides no safeguard against its user interpreting the data through the prism of her own beliefs (ackerly 2000, 102–110). nussbaum’s second method, which she calls the narrative method, relies on the supposed testimony of two poor indian women, vasanti and jayamma (nussbaum 2000). however, okin asserts that nussbaum’s work does not exemplify the “dialogue” with poor women that nussbaum explicitly recommends. okin charges that nussbaum has failed to avoid the error of imposing on vasanti and jayamma categories that “reflect (her) own immersion in a particular theoretical tradition” (nussbaum 2000, 39) and that, as their interpreter, she has allowed her own voice to dominate (okin 2003, 297). nussbaum calls her third method the informed-desire approach. this method assesses preferences with a view to eliminating those that are corrupt or mistaken. it is coupled with nussbaum’s fourth method, which she calls the nonplatonist substantive-good approach. the latter is a type of intuitionism but discards intuitions that are “naïve or untutored” (nussbaum 2000). i have argued that both of these methods allow nussbaum too much latitude to produce the results she wants. her test for determining whether a desire is informed seems to be whether or not the desire is for something on her capabilities list. similarly, her test for determining whether an intuition is trustworthy seems to be whether or not it endorses the list of capabilities; indeed, the non-platonist substantive-good approach explicitly authorizes its users to dismiss the ideas of those with whom they disagree. in the end, i argue, both these methods are simply claims to privileged moral authority and not good methods for developing any social ideals (jaggar 2006). should philosophers work harder to develop better methods for designing paradise islands? rather than trying harder to come up with better methods, some philosophers argue that the entire enterprise of designing ideal societies is misconceived. 4. from ideal to non-ideal theory iris young is one philosopher who challenges the goal set by ideal theorists. although she aims to provide a normative theory of justice, she does not aim to produce an ideal that “both stands independent of a given social context and yet measures its justice” (1990). young rejects “as illusory the effort to construct a universal normative system insulated from a particular society” (1990, 5). she thinks that, if a theory were truly universal and freestanding, “presupposing no particular social situations, institutions, or practices, then it is simply too abstract for use in evaluating actual institutions and practices” (1990, 4). instead, young thinks that the task of the political philosopher is to articulate “normative ideals and moral arguments intended both to reveal moral deficiencies in contemporary . . . societies feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 and at the same time to envision transformative possibilities in those societies” (young 2000, 8–9).3 so young aims instead for what she calls a critical conception of justice that is tailored to a specific context rather than intended to be applicable for all contexts. charles mills also argues against rawlsian ideal theory. according to mills, idealization in political philosophy is likely to distract from real-world injustice because “ideal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it.” mills asks rhetorically: why should anyone think that abstaining from theorizing about oppression and its consequences is the best way to bring about an end to oppression? isn’t this, on the face of it, just completely implausible? (mills 2005, 171) in mills’s view, the deficiencies in rawls’s substantive theory of justice suggest the need for an alternative non-ideal methodology. the past two decades have seen a flood of philosophical debate on the merits of ideal versus non-ideal methodology in political philosophy. the debate has been confusing because ideal and non-ideal theory have been understood in several different ways. one line of discussion emphasizes a distinction between abstraction and idealization. mills follows onora o’neill in presenting abstraction as a matter of bracketing predicates that are true of the matter under discussion rather than explicitly denying them (o’neill 1996, 41). o’neill and mills both say that abstraction is indispensable in political philosophy but that idealization is dangerous. in response, theresa tobin and i argue that o’neill and mills exaggerate the significance of this distinction (tobin and jaggar 2013, 403). we think that abstraction and idealization can both sometimes provide useful simplification and focus in political philosophy and that indeed bracketing diversity and inequality can be just as misleading and politically dangerous as denying them if bracketing diverts philosophical attention away from areas where it should focus.4 another line of discussion equates ideal theory with reliance on counterfactual thought experiments, not only contracts made in states of nature but also fat men blocking the mouths of caves or under threat of being pushed from bridges in order to stop 3 this is reminiscent of marx’s description of the paris commune, about which he wrote, “they have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du people. . . . they have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. (marx 1871). 4 for instance, angela harris (1990) has argued that feminist theory is not exempted from the charge of racism if it simply mentions women of color in passing. jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 approaching trains from killing multiple people improbably tied to the track. however, philosophical reasoning is like legal reasoning in that it often depends on arguments from analogy, and there is no principled reason to avoid analogies that are fictional so long as we remember that their evidential value is likely to be quite limited. the limits result not only from the fact that analogous cases always have disanalogies that may undermine the moral relevance or plausibility of the argument but also from the fact that fictional thought experiments are typically stripped of contextual features that might have moral relevance. elizabeth anderson provides a more useful way of distinguishing between ideal and non-ideal theory. she asserts that, although all political philosophies offer normative ideals, the epistemic status of these differs in ideal and non-ideal theory. in ideal theory, moral and political ideals are offered as fixed standards of assessment for all societies, whereas in non-ideal theory, ideals function as provisional hypotheses posed as possible solutions to specific real-world problems (anderson 2010, 6). non-ideal theory conceived in this way has different aims from ideal theory, so it relies on different methods. rather than reflecting on what rawls calls the nature and aims of a perfectly just society, young writes that the critical theorist reflects “on existing social relations and processes to identify what we experience as valuable in them, but as present only intermittently, partially, or potentially” (young 2000, 10). non-ideal theory requires careful thought about existing injustices, including empirical investigation of their underlying causes. this sort of reflection, simultaneously normative and empirical, may enable us to conceptualize new types of injustice, develop new strategies for addressing these, and articulate new political ideals. as anderson puts it, we begin with an “admittedly inchoate starting point” and undertake “detailed empirical investigation” in order to move toward “a definitive diagnosis and evaluation” (anderson 2010, 3). non-ideal theorists reject rawls’s claim that clarifying “the nature and aims of a perfectly just society” provides “the only basis for the systematic grasp” of the more “pressing and urgent problems” of injustice that we face in everyday life (rawls 1971, 9). instead, they agree with anderson who writes, “knowledge of the better does not require knowledge of the best. figuring out how to address a just claim on our conduct now does not require knowing what system of principles of conduct would settle all possible claims on our conduct in all possible worlds or in the best of all possible worlds” (2010, 3). non-ideal theory contrasts with ideal theory both in its mission and its methods. it does not take its mission to be the design of a universal ideal applicable in most circumstances of justice. instead, it aims to develop ideals that are empirically informed and context-specific and whose status is provisional and open to revision. in pursuing this mission, non-ideal theory utilizes methods that are feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 ground up rather than sky down. it begins with empirically informed reflection on daily experiences of injustice, and its ideals are ultimately strategies for addressing these injustices. the adequacy of these strategies is tested in real-world experience. reconceptualizing the mission and method of political philosophy shifts the locus of the moral and epistemic authority to define what is just. in ideal theory, the main moral and epistemic authority belongs to the philosophers who stipulate the ideal. in non-ideal theory, by contrast, more people work together to develop new conceptions of justice and share the moral and epistemic authority among them. the ultimate moral and epistemic authority for defining justice belongs to those people who must live under the new ideals. unfortunately, as we shall see, those people often disagree with each other. in broad outline, i endorse this non-ideal methodological approach to thinking about justice. however, non-ideal theory is a very broad category and the devil is in the details. the rest of this paper considers how some challenging difficulties might be addressed. 5. challenges for doing non-ideal theory in the unjust meantime philosophers doing non-ideal theory are advised to begin our thinking about justice with “a diagnosis of injustices in our actual world, rather than from a picture of an ideal world” (anderson 2010, 3). however, the real world is full of injustices, and people have very different ideas as to what they are and how they should be diagnosed. not everyone views as unjust the absence of universal health care or abortion rights or public childcare or minimum wage. moreover, people are troubled by different aspects of what might be regarded as the same problem. should we be more troubled by sexual assault on college campuses or by false accusations of assault? by police brutality or street crime? with which problems should we begin our thinking and which descriptions of them should we accept? people’s disagreements about real world injustices tend not to be idiosyncratic; instead, they are typically linked with systematic differences in their experiences, including their interactions with each other. people who interact frequently tend to share a “reality bias,” or a convergence in their understandings of the world (anderson 2012b, 169–170). however, interactions occur in the contexts of differing social positions, and the perspectives of those who are less powerful tend to be very different from the perspectives of those who wield power. marx described how nineteenth century employers and workers experienced capitalist society as heaven or hell, respectively (marx 1967, 176 and 645). in 1852, frederick douglass famously asked, “what to the slave is the fourth of july?” for those still enslaved in the united states at that time, it did not mark a day of independence. different perspectives on social justice often do not have equal public credibility; some are more widely accepted than others, and the ideas that are more widely jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 accepted are usually those endorsed by more powerful elites. the varying perspectives often do not compete on a level playing field; people who are more powerful are better able to promote their points of view by influencing institutions such as education, research funding, and media and sometimes through direct suppression and censorship. nevertheless, oppositional systems of ideas are often nourished among subordinated populations and, when circumstances permit, they are available as a moral resource for challenging dominant perspectives. standpoint theorists argue that the perspectives on social reality and injustice available from below are not only different from the perspectives available from above; in many ways they are more trustworthy (hartsock 1983; harding 1998; wylie 2003). anderson cites dewey in support of the view that shared reality bias disproportionately affects those with more social power. dewey observed that the powerful not only display the self-serving bias that afflicts everyone; in addition, they tend to be unaware of the needs and interests of the less powerful and to have an arrogant perspective that makes them “liable to misread challenges from below as signs of vice—of insubordination and insolence, irresponsibility, laziness, and so forth” (anderson 2014, 8). many other authors have written of the arrogant perceptions of those in power, including fanon (1967), frye (1983), and medina (2012). the term “epistemic injustice” has recently become popular among philosophers, due primarily to the work of miranda fricker (2007). fricker uses the term to refer to situations when reasoning processes are influenced by social power in ways that arbitrarily advantage or disadvantage some participants. she identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice. testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker’s credibility is unjustly devalued because of prejudice on the part of listeners. listeners who are prejudiced may rationalize disbelieving a particular speaker by asserting that she is ignorant, superstitious, hysterical, or suffering from adaptive preferences. the other side of testimonial injustice is giving a speaker more credence than his epistemic credentials warrant.5 hermeneutic injustice occurs when the available language is unable to articulate people’s experience of oppression. the concept of epistemic injustice has resonated widely among philosophers, and some have gone far beyond fricker in describing epistemic injustices such as epistemic silencing, smothering, gaslighting, and violence (dotson 2011; pohlhaus 2017; kidd, medina, and pohlhaus 2017). when controversy and conflict arise in liberal democracies, it is common to place epistemic trust in the so-called court of public opinion or the free marketplace of ideas. however, systematic power asymmetries bring into question the 5 fricker does not consider this to be testimonial injustice (2007, 19) but others do (medina 2012). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jos%c3%a9_medina_(philosopher) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 applicability of such metaphors. the real world is quite unlike a courtroom and ideas do not contend at all freely within it. instead, we have seen that real-world discussion is typically deformed by systematic biases and dominant ideologies. in the unjust meantime, how can we begin thinking well about justice? 6. some strategies for improving individuals’ thinking about justice western philosophers have long reflected on the mutually interactive relations between power and knowledge. over the past several decades, some philosophers have proposed strategies for addressing various kinds of epistemic bias and injustice. with regard to testimonial injustice, it is not always unjust to proportion the amount of credence we accord to different speakers; to the contrary, it is usually wise. there are legitimate epistemic reasons for treating one speaker’s testimony with skepticism and another’s with more respect. awarding differential credence is unjust only if a speaker is denied the credibility that she is properly due or given more credibility than her credentials warrant. antiracist and feminist philosophers and activists have proposed several strategies for giving due consideration to individuals from groups whose perspectives are often disregarded. for instance, laurence thomas advocates “moral deference” to those with direct experience of oppression (thomas 1992–1993). elsewhere, i have described many complementary strategies developed in feminist activist groups in 1970s and 1980s (jaggar 1995). all are designed to take into account the diversity and inequality of different speakers. more recently, fricker has advocated epistemic justice as a virtue that we “can, and should, aim for in practice” (2007, 98–99). hermeneutic injustice has been discussed extensively by feminist activists and philosophers ever since the late 1960s, although not under this name. one chapter of betty friedan’s classic the feminine mystique was titled “the problem that has no name” (friedan 1963). one famous method developed for addressing hermeneutic injustice was consciousness-raising, which consisted in small groups of women meeting to share first-hand experiences usually regarded as private or trivial. listeners were expected to be “nonjudgmental,” although questions to clarify or stimulate reflection were encouraged. the practice of consciousness-raising helped group members to recognize and name many oppressive patterns of behavior. the vocabulary of gender justice dating from the 1970s includes “sexism;” “sexual harassment;” “the double day;” “sexual objectification;” “heterosexism;” “the male gaze;” “marital, acquaintance, and date rape;” “care work;” “eating disorder;” “stalking;” “hostile environment;” “displaced homemaker;” “comparable worth;” and “feminization of poverty.” in the last three decades of the twentieth century, feminists created epistemic communities in multiple locations and on multiple scales. they included jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 women’s and feminist meetings, retreats, restaurants, coffee/tea shops and bookshops, conferences, journals, and the new discipline of gender and women’s studies. in the 1990s, such spaces were theorized as subaltern counterpublics, "parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs" (fraser 1990, 67; see also jaggar 1998). additional concepts for capturing gender injustice continue to be forged within similar crucibles: more recent terminology includes “hegemonic masculinity,” “heteronormativity,” “implicit bias,” “mansplaining,” “microaggression,” and “slut shaming.” today, a mushrooming literature, in philosophy and elsewhere, addresses various epistemic biases caused by things like prejudice and stereotyping, and academic institutions have a range of “best practices” to counteract bias in admissions, classrooms, and hiring many of these strategies are very helpful for thinking about justice in the unjust meantime. if they focus exclusively on interpersonal interactions, however, they fail to address the fact that epistemic violence and injustice do not occur only or even primarily at the interpersonal level. unjust interpersonal interactions are typically rooted in unjust systems or structures. for example, most testimonial injustice affects individuals who are members of demographic groups that are either overly privileged or systematically disadvantaged. particular interactions may conform to standards of testimonial justice, but when they occur between individuals who have had systematically different opportunities to acquire epistemic credentials, they rest on deeper structures of injustice. in such typical cases, testimonial injustice should not be construed merely as a self-contained or one-off episode; instead, it is a symptom of underlying structural injustice. similarly, hermeneutic injustice is structural whenever it consists in a dominant group’s inability or even refusal to understand concepts designed to express the experiences of subordinated groups. antibias strategies are useful for helping counteract epistemic injustice in particular situations, but they do little to remedy underlying structural injustices. anderson puts the point well: it is not wrong to promote practices of individual testimonial and hermeneutical justice. . . . such individual virtues can help correct epistemic injustices. but in the face of massive structural injustice, individual epistemic virtue plays a comparable role to the practice of individual charity in the context of massive structural poverty. just as it would be better and more effective to redesign economic institutions so as to prevent mass poverty in the first place, it would be better to reconfigure epistemic institutions so as to prevent epistemic injustice from arising. structural injustices call for structural remedies. (2012b, 171). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 biased systems of ideas remain tenacious both because they are promoted by powerful forces and also because they are embedded in many taken-for-granted practices of daily life. the highly segregated and unequal structure of many us public school systems means that african american children have lower test scores, and when this fact is taken in isolation from its structural context, it may be taken as evidence that african american children have less scholarly aptitude than white children. how can structural bias be challenged in situations where people— especially those in power—feel little urgency to reconsider established norms? 7. thinking in and about structural epistemic injustice those who rule are liable to conflate their own power with moral authority. anderson writes that “people are prone to confuse their own desires with the right in rough proportion to their power” (anderson 2014, 8). in order to induce the powerful to reexamine self-serving and entrenched moral norms, she argues that contentious politics are often necessary. contentious politics range along a spectrum from pure moral argument at one end to forms of violence on the other (anderson 2014, 9). they disrupt habitual ways of thinking and living and force people to engage seriously with new proposals for reorganizing social life. in anderson’s view, “contentious politics is a major engine of social progress” (anderson 2014, 14). one strategy for waging contentious politics is creating a social movement. anderson defines social movements as sustained campaigns of claim making, “using repeated performances that advertise the claim, based on organizations, networks, traditions, and solidarities that sustain these activities” (anderson 2014, 10; tilly and tarrow 2006, 111). she describes social movements as “one of the most powerful social practices ever developed for the peaceful transformation of moral consciousness” (2014, 7). she presents them as efforts to correct the biases that are embedded in established institutions and to reshape the moral thinking of those in power. using the case study of the movement to abolish slavery in the british empire, launched in 1787, anderson describes many tactics, including petitions, logos, mailing lists, public testimony, consumer boycotts, and report cards on representatives (anderson 2014, 11). through these and other tactics, the movement not only achieved the political success of abolishing slavery in the british empire; it also transformed the general population’s conception of justice. feminist movements for gender justice have been active at least since the nineteenth century. a familiar example is the british movement for women’s suffrage, which adopted many of the same tactics as the movement to abolish slavery, though the british suffragists were also driven eventually to what many regarded as violent or even terrorist tactics, such as window breaking and mailbox jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 bombing. both abolitionism and the women’s suffrage movement succeeded in bringing about revolutions in popular conceptions of justice, even though both remain incomplete. in our own time, the black lives matter movement offers a systematic perspective on structural racism especially as manifested in the state institutions of canada and the united states.6 social movements exist on global as well as national levels. both the antislavery movement and the campaign for women’s suffrage soon became transnational. the pre-world war i london marches for suffrage included representatives from many british colonies, dominions, and protectorates, including india. us activist alice paul trained with british suffragists and later led the us campaigns for women’s suffrage and the equal rights amendment to the us constitution. today, a global public sphere exists, and the possibilities for transnational organizing constantly increase with easier travel and better communications, including the internet. in the 1980s and 1990s, a global feminist movement successfully organized around the slogan, “women’s rights are human rights.” one notable success of this movement was its influence on the 1993 vienna declaration and programme of action, which included a formal declaration of women's rights as human rights and violence against women as a human rights violation (united nations general assembly 1993). 7 in 2011, “slut walks” erupted all over the world as responses to sexual violence against women. currently the #metoo movement is enjoying huge success in creating communities of survivors who together are raising popular awareness of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and violence and leading efforts to reform social practices at many levels and in many countries. the demands of social movements typically evolve. for instance, the transnational feminist sexual and reproductive health and rights movement (srhr) has gone through considerable change over the past two decades. at the 1994 international conference on population and development, pressure from this movement resulted in the “cairo consensus,” with governments agreeing that, in order to stabilize population growth and attain sustainable development, it was necessary for women to have equal access to information, education, and employment, as well as access to integrated health services and respect for their 6 https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we-believe/ (accessed 13 august, 2018). 7 some transnational movements address particular national governments, although not always the government of those protesting; some address global institutions such as the united nations or the wto. in march, 2015, the united nations responded to the efforts of the transnational lgbtq movement by announcing that it would recognize marriage equality among un workers, even if same-sex marriage were not recognized in their countries. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 sexual and reproductive choices. for the first time, unsafe abortion was seen as a major public health problem. following up in 1995, the beijing platform for action called on governments to consider reviewing laws that punished women who had undergone illegal abortions. since 2010, new issues placed on the agenda of the srhr include the violence and discrimination faced by people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities (sogi); the particular service needs and reproductive rights of women with hiv; the discrimination and violence faced by sex workers; and the claims of indigenous women to have access to services, information, and education appropriate to their cultures and in their languages. even more recently, an openly sex-positive approach has been able to emerge, and since 2012, sexual rights have been pressed in several recent un conferences in bali, montevideo, bangkok, and addis ababa (garita 2014). social movements advocate alternatives to dominant conceptions of justice, and they pressure the powerful to take those alternatives seriously. their goal is to undermine the moral authority of the existing order, and their disruptive tactics are designed to push elites to reconsider dominant ways of thinking. by changing consciousness, they aim to move toward justice. 8. recognizing justice unfortunately, not all social movements are progressive. in europe and the us, we have recently seen a distressing surge in ethno-nationalist movements, which target vulnerable groups, such as religious or ethnic minorities, immigrants, and lgbtq* people, or seek to take away existing rights, such as abortion. how can we know which social movements promote justice, especially when they use slogans that seem to appeal to human rights, such as the “right to work” and especially the “right to life”? and when change occurs, how can we know that society has moved in the direction of justice rather than simply established another modus vivendi that is possibly even more unjust? for anderson, as a pragmatist, this question is answered by whether or not the new way of living passes the test of experience. she offers examples of various social experiments in the egalitarian tradition, some of which she says have failed while others have succeeded. she thinks anarchism doesn’t work because it is too optimistic about human nature (2012a,10), that “various types of communal living have been repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed” while “comprehensive centralized state-managed economies have been disastrous” (2012a, 7). however, she asserts, “other experiments have been highly successful—democracy, social insurance, universal education, human rights” (2012a,7). she describes the abolition of slavery as a successful “experiment in living according to the principle of free labor” (2014,7). jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 the results of the tests of experience are often debatable, however, because the success or failure of particular social experiments is rarely taken to provide a conclusive test of the feasibility or normative adequacy of the ideals inspiring those experiments. instead, people sympathetic to social experiments that appear to have failed typically offer extrinsic explanations. anarchists attribute the 1939 defeat of spanish anarchism by franco not to the unworkability of anarchism, which indeed worked well in spain during the 1920s and 1930s, but rather to its betrayal by the spanish communist party, supported and directed by the soviet union. the prevalence of strongman rule in many african countries in the immediate postcolonial period does not mean that the ideal of democracy has been proved infeasible for africa; many external factors currently undermine the establishment of democratic african institutions. people who favor communal living say that the development of new tools for promoting harmonious interpersonal relationships are making this way of living increasingly feasible, and experiments in living this way certainly are not ended. the success or failure of an experiment in living is not determined by its longevity. underlying her appeal to the test of experience, anderson seems to rely on a version of the liberal principle of legitimacy, according to which a system is legitimate when it has established moral authority in the eyes of those who live within it. she writes, “the ultimate test of moral progress must lie in critical reflection on the results of a social movement, in the experiences of those living under the new norms that an effective social movement establishes” (2014,15). in practice, of course, it is far from easy to determine how far those who live within a system have consented to it freely, especially in the light of what we know about adaptive preferences, hegemonic ideology, and government propaganda, not to mention the personal costs of resistance. nevertheless, the liberal principle of legitimacy can guide our investigation. for example, slavery and male dominance have persisted for millennia, but this is not enough to count these experiments in living as successful. the persistent histories of revolt and resistance against these social orders, as well as the intense repression that characterizes them, give us every reason to believe that these ways of living lack moral authority in the eyes of many whom they govern. the principle gives us a direction for investigation through conceptual argumentation combined with empirical investigation. 9. moving toward justice in the unjust meantime the non-ideal methodological approach sketched above offers a partial account of how we can promote structural justice and assess the progress we have made toward it. on this view, assessing the justice of proposed social ideals requires utilizing methods of investigation that are intersubjective, democratic, and experimental. philosophical investigation must move out of the armchair and utilize feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 multidisciplinary methods that draw on empirical information as well as conceptual argument. our work should not aim to produce ideals capable of serving as permanent standards of assessment for all societies; instead, like the results of scientific investigations, the ideals we produce should be taken as provisional, subject to change as our circumstances change. the work of political scientists catherine eschle and bice maiguashca offers one illustration of this non-ideal methodological approach to thinking about global gender justice (eschle and maiguashca 2010). eschle and maiguashca studied feminist involvement at the world social forum in 2001–2005. they began by examining the panoply of concrete proposals for social change advocated by feminist activists from around the world in response to directly experienced injustice, and they used reflexive and dialogical methods to distill five ethical principles from these proposals (2010, 12–14). they argue that these five principles, taken together, amount to an ideal of gender justice that addresses all human beings and calls for another world (2010, 115). stated baldly, the five principles that eschle and maiguashca identify are broad and hardly novel. they are economic equality, democracy, respect for the environment, bodily integrity, and peace. what makes the call for these principles any different from another mistily glimpsed paradise island or a bumper sticker that says “visualize world peace”? the difference is in the methods by which the ideals were produced and the epistemic status assigned them. they were formulated through a bottom-up democratic process, and they are situated in, and must be interpreted in, the light of particular gendered life experiences. for example, economic equality in this context is interpreted to mean eradicating gender-specific oppressions that disadvantage women relative to men, revaluing and redistributing the burdens of care work, and redistributing economic resources in order to address basic needs such as water and leisure—described in some versions as human rights (eschle and maiguashca 2010, 116–117). furthermore, the principles are not taken to be incontestable. instead, they seek to “woo the consent” of everyone through a moral language that is understandable to others and therefore draws on widely recognized traditions of thought (eschle and maiguashca 2010, 114, citing benhabib 1992). unlike paradise islands, the principles do not propose an ideal of global justice designed for all time and places, situated sub specie aeternitatis (rawls 1971, 587). instead, they are taken to be one particular stage of a work perennially in progress. for example, important components of gender justice today probably include access to contraception and abortion, literacy, official documentation, cell phones, internet access, and transgender health care. most of these could not have been predicted a hundred years ago. ultimately, we can learn how far our ideals provide workable and normatively acceptable possibilities for justice only by trying to live them in the real jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 world. when we find that proposed ideals do not work for everyone, we must be ready to try to live differently. in other words, we must engage in politics that are not only strategic but also prefigurative. from a non-ideal methodological perspective, part of thinking philosophically about global gender justice is working with nonphilosophers to bring it about. references ackerly, brooke a. 2000. political theory and feminist social criticism, cambridge: cambridge university press. anderson, elizabeth. 2010. imperative of integration. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2012a. “the new leveller.” interview by richard marshall. 3:am magazine. july 25. accessed feb. 1, 2014. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/thenew-leveller/. ———. 2012b. “epistemic justice as a virtue of social institutions,” social epistemology 26 (2): 163–173. ———. 2014. social movements, experiments in living, and moral progress: case studies from britain’s abolition of slavery. the lindley lecture, university of kansas, feb. 11. benhabib, seyla. 1992. situating the self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. new york: routledge. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. eschle, catherine, and bice maiguashca. 2010. making feminist sense of the global justice movement. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. fanon, franz.1967. black skin, white masks. new york: grove press. ferguson, ann. 1977. “androgyny as an ideal for human development.” in feminism and philosophy, edited by mary vetterling-braggin, frederick a. elliston, and jane english. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams. foot, philippa. 1967. “the problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect.” oxford review 5: 5–15. fraser, nancy. 1990. “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” social text 25/26: 56–80. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. friedan, betty. 1963. the feminine mystique, new york: w. w. norton and co. frye, marilyn. 1983. “in and out of harm's way: arrogance and love.” in the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory, 52–84. new york: crossing press. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15272001/2011/26/2 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 garita, alexandra. 2014. “moving toward sexual and reproductive justice: a transnational and multigenerational feminist remix.” in the oxford handbook of transnational feminist movements, edited by rawwida baksh and wendy harcourt. accessed 12 aug. 2014. oxford handbooks online: http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199943494 .001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199943494-e-029?rskey=k2bfcw&result=1. habermas, jürgen. 1990. “discourse ethics: notes on a program of philosophical justification." in moral consciousness and communicative action, translated by christian lenhardt and shierry weber nicholsen, 43–115. cambridge, ma: mit press. harding, sandra. 1998. “borderlands epistemologies.” in is science multicultural? postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies, 146–164. bloomington: indiana university press. harris, angela p. 1990. “race and essentialism in feminist legal theory.” stanford law review 42 (3): 581–616. hartsock, nancy. 1983. “the feminist standpoint: developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism.” in discovering reality: feminist perspectives on epistemology, metaphysics, methodology, and philosophy of science, edited by sandra harding and merrill b. hintikka, 283–310. dordrecht, the netherlands: kluwer. jaggar, alison m. 1983. feminist politics and human nature. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———. 1993. “taking consent seriously: feminist practical ethics and hypothetical dialogue.” in applied ethics: a reader, edited by earl winkler and jerrold coombs, 69–86. oxford: blackwell. ———. 1995. “toward a feminist conception of moral reasoning.” in morality and social justice: point/counterpoint, by james p. sterba, tibor r. machan, alison m. jaggar, william a. galston, carol c. gould, milton fisk, and robert solomon, 115–146. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———. 1998. “globalizing feminist ethics.” hypatia 13 (2): 7–31. ———. 2006. “reasoning about well-being: nussbaum’s methods of justifying the capabilities.” journal of political philosophy 14 (3): 301–322. jaggar, alison m., and theresa w. tobin. 2013. “situating moral justification: rethinking the mission of moral epistemology,” metaphilosophy 44 (4): 383– 408. kidd, ian james, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr. 2017. routledge handbook of epistemic injustice. new york: routledge. kipling, rudyard. 1902. just so stories for little children. london: macmillan. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love's labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. http://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315212043.ch1 http://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315212043.ch1 jaggar – thinking about justice in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 marx, karl. 1871. the civil war in france, third address. accessed 12 aug. 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-warfrance/ch05.htm. ———. 1967. capital: a critique of political economy, vol. i. new york: international publishers. medina, josé. 2012. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. mills, charles w. 2005. “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” hypatia 20 (3): 165–183. morgan, kathryn pauley. 1982. “androgyny: a conceptual critique.” social theory and practice 8 (3): 245–283. nozick, robert. 1974. anarchy, state, and utopia. new york: basic books. nussbaum, martha c. 1992. “human functioning and social justice: in defense of aristotelian essentialism.” political theory 20 (2): 202–246. ———. 2000. women and human development: the capabilities approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. okin, susan moller. 1989. justice, gender and the family. new york: basic books. ———. 2003. “poverty, well-being, and gender: what counts, who’s heard?” philosophy and public affairs 31 (3): 280–316. ollman, bertell. 2005. “the utopian vision of the future (then and now): a marxist critique.” monthly review 57 (3): 78–102. o’neill, onora. 1996. towards justice and virtue: a constructive account of practical reasoning. cambridge: cambridge university press. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2017. “varieties of epistemic injustice." in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr., 13–26. new york: routledge rawls, john. 1971. a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. robeyns, ingrid. 2008. “ideal theory in theory and practice.” social theory and practice 34 (3): 341–362. singer, peter. 1972. "famine, affluence, and morality." philosophy and public affairs 1 (3): 229–243. thomas, laurence. 1992–1993. "moral deference," philosophical forum 24 (1–3): 233–250. thomson, judith jarvis. 1971. "a defense of abortion." philosophy and public affairs 1 (1): 47–66. tilly, charles, and sidney tarrow. 2006. contentious politics. new york: oxford university press. tobin, theresa w., and alison m. jaggar. 2013. “naturalizing moral justification: rethinking the method of moral epistemology,” metaphilosophy 44 (4): 409– 439. http://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315212043.ch1 http://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315212043.ch1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/peter_singer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/philosophy_and_public_affairs feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 trebilcot, joyce. 1977. “two forms of androgynism.” in feminism and philosophy, edited by mary vetterling-braggin, frederick a. elliston, and jane english. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams. united nations general assembly. 1993. “vienna declaration and programme of action.” world conference on human rights, june 25. https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/vienna.aspx. walker, margaret urban. 2008. moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics, 2nd ed. oxford: oxford university press. wylie, alison. 2003. “why standpoint matters.” in science and other cultures: issues in philosophies of science and technology, edited by robert figueroa and sandra harding, 26–48. new york: routledge. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. ———. 2000. inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. alison m. jaggar is arts & sciences professor of distinction at the university of colorado at boulder. she is a professor in the departments of philosophy and women & gender studies and an affiliate faculty member in the department of ethnic studies. she is also distinguished research professor of global ethics at the university of birmingham, uk. jaggar specializes in moral epistemology and moral and political philosophy, especially transnational feminism. 7283 jaggar title page.pdf 7283 jaggar final format.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation walsh, joseph. 2019. “caregiving and the abuse of power.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (3). article 3. 2019 caregiving and the abuse of power joseph walsh independent researcher j.p.walsh@hotmail.co.uk walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 caregiving and the abuse of power joseph walsh abstract caregiving relationships are often characterized by an imbalance of power between the caregiver and her cared-for. the danger that this power will be abused is a source of serious moral concern. in this article, i argue that the risk of an abuse of power sometimes stems not from the possession of power itself but from the very nature of caring relationships. this is because carers must be prepared to exercise nonminimal amounts of power over their cared-fors, even if doing so is likely to cause the cared-for distress or even pain. this means that caring itself, rather than the malign influence of power dynamics, generates a risk of unintentional abuse. i argue that this risk can be reduced by trying to avoid an exclusive focus on the outcomes of care and by paying more attention to the way in which that care is delivered. keywords: care ethics, morality, power 1. introduction relationships of care often give rise to ethically charged power dynamics. on the one hand, cared-fors are in a position to exercise power over their caregivers. they may, for instance, have psychological power over them, such as the power to cause emotional distress by denigrating their attempts to provide care or by blaming them for not doing more, thereby prompting feelings of guilt. cared-fors can also have financial or social power over their caregivers. for example, if a caregiver is employed to provide care, then they risk unemployment and financial difficulty if they fail to act as their cared-for believes they ought. alternatively, when a higher social status is conferred on a cared-for by virtue of their race, gender, or socioeconomic class, they may feel able to use this status to pressure caregivers into providing excessive amounts of care. power inequalities such as these, then, expose carers to the risk of exploitation and even abuse from their cared-fors.1 1 as noted by kittay (1999, 35). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 on the other hand, those who require care often do so because they lack the power to meet certain needs through their own agency. such dependency can therefore provide caregivers with a considerable degree of power over their caredfors. carers may, for example, have epistemic power over a cared-for, such as the authority to claim which forms of care (e.g., medical treatment, physical therapy) are required. they may have legal power, such as the right to make life-changing decisions on the cared-for’s behalf, to have them hospitalized or institutionalized, or to sell their property to finance further care. carers may also have psychological power over a cared-for, such as the power to persuade, manipulate, or emotionally influence the cared-for’s judgments. finally, they may have physical power, such as the power to administer medication (if necessary, by force), to restrain, or to prevent the cared-for from exercising their agency in ways which the caregiver deems inappropriate. these unequal distributions of power are often seen as the source of potential moral wrongdoing (e.g., barnes 2012, 23; bubeck 2002, 171–172; phillips 2007, 144), and it is easy to see why: power confers upon its possessor the ability to subordinate the interests of others to their own, and to act on self-interested desires without fear of adverse personal consequences. in what follows, i will focus specifically on the power possessed by caregivers and on how and why that power may sometimes come to be misused. we might be tempted to think that power has an intrinsically morally corrosive effect and that its misuse is simply a result of this corrosion. to dig no deeper than this, however, is to fail to ask interesting, and philosophically important, questions. why is it that carers who genuinely want the best for their cared-fors sometimes end up misusing the power with which they are entrusted? how is it that genuinely caring intentions can sometimes lead to the commission of acts which do violence to the very person whose interests are supposedly being looked after? in this essay, i provide a partial answer to these questions. my answer is only partial because power comes in many different forms, and its use has many different manifestations. here, i am interested in quite a narrow range of these. specifically, i am interested in power as it is used to influence the behaviour of others. it should be noted that i am using the phrase “to influence behaviour” in a broad sense. according to this usage, an agent’s behaviour has been influenced if she is caused to do something which she would not have done had she not been so influenced. this influence might be psychological, such as threats or some other form of coercion, and of course it might be physical, such as being picked up and walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 carried from one location to another.2 even within the confines of this narrow focus, however, a closer look at the power dynamics found in caring relationships has the potential to shed interesting new light on the subject. specifically, it will be seen that it is not the nature of power which generates the risk of its misuse but instead the nature of caregiving. in section 2, i show that, far from being an undesirable feature of good caring relationships, the exercise of power over a cared-for is often an enabling condition of good care. without it, caring relations are sometimes impossible to sustain, and the provision of certain important goods is sometimes impossible. in section 3, i argue that there is a grey area concerning how much of their power a caregiver may permissibly exercise over a cared-for. carers must often be prepared to use some nonminimal degree of power in their provision of care, even if doing so will predictably cause their cared-for to experience distress or even pain. this makes it very difficult for carers to recognise (or for philosophers to specify) the precise point at which the legitimate exercise of power becomes an illegitimate misuse of power. then, in section 4, i propose a values-based approach to the evaluation of a caregiver’s use of power. i identify a number of values associated with caring, and argue that the misuse of power can occur when carers become exclusively focussed on just one of these, thereby neglecting the others. by placing a greater emphasis on the plurality of values involved in good care, it becomes possible to aim at a “balanced” approach to caring, which is properly responsive to each of these values. such an approach, i argue, is less likely to lead caregivers to misuse the power which they have over their charges. finally, in section 5, i reply to some possible objections to my account. 2. power as constitutive of good care caring relationships are often relationships in which there is an unequal balance of power between the cared-for and her caregiver.3 indeed, it is sometimes precisely the cared-for’s lack of power which generates the need for care. thus, as joan tronto writes, “if people didn’t have needs that they needed others to help them meet, there would be no care” (1993, 170). similarly, eva feder kittay writes that “the inequality of power is endemic to dependency relations” (kittay 1999, 34). infants and young children, for example, depend entirely upon the power of a caregiver to meet even their most basic needs. 2 the example of being carried should alert the reader to the difference between “being caused to do something” and “acting”, and to my focus on the former. 3 this is often the case, but it need not always be the case. one can imagine, for example, caring relationships between siblings or spouses which are not characterised by significant power inequalities. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 for both tronto (1993, 170) and kittay (1999, 35), as well as for other writers on care (e.g., barnes 2012, 23; ruddick 1995, 213; phillips 2007, 143), this imbalance of power generates a risk that the caregiver’s power will be misused, and that as a result of that misuse, caring will deteriorate into paternalistic abuse. of course, as kittay has also observed, the mere presence of an imbalance of power does not suffice to make caregiving abusive: “not every [power] inequality amounts to domination” (kittay 1999, 34). still, legitimate concerns about the potential for abuse might lead one to think that, whilst power discrepancies in caregiving relationships may sometimes prove to be unavoidable, carers would be well advised never to exercise their power over a cared-for. according to this thought, by refusing to exercise however much power they may have, carers can effectively eliminate the risk that they will misuse their power in an abusive way. some further consideration, however, shows that this is by no means good advice for caregivers to follow. not only is the use of power in caregiving sometimes permissible, it is also sometimes required. virginia held, for example, notes that the use of physical force to “yank a child out of the path of an oncoming car” may be called for, even if that force is so great that the child is injured as a result of its use (held 2010, 121). the same thought has also been expressed by sarah clark miller, who writes that firefighters may, during the course of a rescue, “engage in behaviour that we would not normally understand to be a pattern of good care,” such as intentionally breaking someone’s leg in order to free them from being trapped in the path of the encroaching fire (miller 2012, 87). of course, for these remarks to be true, it must be assumed that such force is proportional to the urgency of the situation; that is, that no lesser (and thereby noninjurious) degree of force would have been sufficient to save the lives of those endangered. with this assumption in place, however, claims such as these are surely correct.4 of course, examples like those considered above are extreme and serve only to establish that, in dire situations, caregivers might properly be called upon to exert their power over a cared-for. yet the legitimate use of power in the provision of care actually extends far beyond life or death scenarios such as these. indeed, the use of power permeates even some of the most commonplace caregiving activities. consider, for example, a variety of situations that the carers of very young children might encounter on a daily basis. as the reader may be aware, children are not always perfectly compliant with their carers’ wishes. indeed, they may sometimes actively resist a carer’s efforts to provide that which she takes (we may stipulate correctly) to be necessary for the child’s well-being. the reader may also be aware 4 although the examples in this paragraph both relate to the use of physical force, it should be kept in mind that power may also be exercised through nonphysical means. for an example of this, see the discussion of florence in section 3. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 that children are not always perfectly responsive to reasons. that is, whilst a child might be able to understand the reason why it is in her interest to comply with her carer’s wishes, she may not always be able to use that reason to form an appropriate set of action-guiding desires. thus a two-year-old might, for example, refuse to allow her teeth to be cleaned; refuse to get dressed; refuse to take unpleasant tasting medicine; refuse to allow a splinter to be removed from her foot; refuse to sit in her booster seat during car rides; or refuse to comply with any number of other day-to-day, care-oriented activities. how will a caregiver respond to such refusal? there are, of course, a number of approaches which she might try. she might, for example, defer the resisted course of action for a period of time, perhaps waiting until after the child has slept or eaten, in the hope that things will go more smoothly later. she might try to reason with the child or to persuade or cajole her in some other way. alternatively, she might try to turn the objectionable activity into a game of some sort, thereby encouraging the child to view the activity as something fun rather than as something to be resisted. approaches such as these are likely to be effective at least some of the time. they will not, however, be effective all of the time. when they are not, the carer will have no choice but to enforce compliance: sometimes children just have to be strapped into their booster seats whether they like it or not; sometimes they just have to take their medicine; sometimes they just have to clean their teeth. on such occasions, then, the carer will exercise her power over the child in order to bring about the desired state of affairs. this power might be physical (e.g., holding the child in place), or it might be psychological (“if you don’t take your medicine, we won’t go to henry’s birthday party”). of course, saying this is by no means to sanction the use of extreme or unnecessary force. nevertheless, when a child is being held in place, against her will, so that she can be strapped into a car booster seat, she is unequivocally on the receiving end of her caregiver’s power. there are, then, many possible examples of carers using their power over a cared-for to further the ends of caregiving, in situations which are entirely commonplace and non-life-threatening. furthermore, it is clearly morally unobjectionable for carers to use their power in this way. indeed, for them not to do so (e.g., by allowing a child to ride in a car without being securely restrained) would be to endanger their cared-for’s life. without exercising power in these ways, then, caregivers would be failing to act as they ought. this claim is not restricted to the case of parenting. other forms of care also require the judicious use of power at certain times. in her study of student teachers’ conceptions of caring, for example, carol weinstein (1998) stresses that the best forms of educational care are those which combine elements of personal and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 emotional connection with a more disciplinarian focus on controlling students’ behaviour and ensuring their obedience to classroom rules. weinstein describes how student teachers who conceive of caring exclusively “in terms of nurturance, warmth and empathy” (1998, 155) find it extremely difficult to create learning environments in which students are able to thrive. for these teachers, that is, caring stands in opposition to authoritarian attempts to impose order and discipline on the classroom (weinstein 1998, 160). in trying to create maximally caring environments for their students, then, these student teachers neglect the enforcement of rules and reject “managerial” forms of interaction with their students, such as establishing clear behavioural expectations and consistently dealing with behaviours deemed inappropriate. however, if these authoritarian aspects of teaching are neglected for too long, weinstein observes, it can lead to the creation of environments “so chaotic and so confused that no learning, teaching, or caring [is] possible” (1998, 153). what weinstein is criticizing here is a conception of caring which excludes the judicious use of power. student teachers who subscribe to this conception see caring for students and maintaining discipline in the classroom as two separate activities. from this perspective, the more time one spends enforcing rules and policing behaviour, the less time there is available to spend in caring for one’s students. weinstein rejects this conception of care in favour of an alternative approach according to which the use of power to maintain discipline is partially constitutive of caregiving. in support of her view, weinstein writes that “caring can also include a commitment to creating an orderly environment in which children can flourish” (1998, 154). weinstein notes that this conception of caring is one which has, at times, been explicitly endorsed by some student teachers (weinstein 1998, 154).5 there also seems to be some acceptance of this conception amongst students themselves, who describe a caring teacher as, in part, one who makes an effort to create a safe, controlled learning environment (weinstein 1998, 162). weinstein summarizes these thoughts by referring to a remark made by george noblit (1993, 24), which she quotes approvingly (weinstein 1998, 154): “caring in classrooms is not about democracy—it is about the ethical use of power.” thus, just as in the context of caring for children, providing educational care may also require a willingness to exert one’s power over a cared-for. this is a position which not only has been accepted by those working in education and education research but which also seems to find at least tacit acceptance among students themselves. of course, some sceptics may still wish to draw a clear distinction between exercising power on the one hand and caring on the other. before doing so, 5 obviously, not the same student teachers who take care and discipline to be diametrically opposed to one another. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 however, they should recall the emphasis which those working on the ethics of care typically place on the active nature of caring. for many writers on care ethics, caring is not simply a feeling of benevolent concern; rather, it is also a form of activity. as such, caring not only aims at, but also brings about, some improvement in the condition of the cared-for (see, for example, bubeck 1995; held 2006; kittay 1999; noddings 1984; tronto 1993). this claim draws support from the way in which the concept of caring is used outside of philosophical contexts. imagine, for example, a carer who through inattention or lack of skill actually harms her cared-for. we would not say of this carer that she is actually providing care. rather, we would say that on this occasion she has failed to care, even though her intention to care may have been genuine. thus, to say that an agent is caring is to say that her attempts to provide care are meeting with at least some minimal degree of success; it is to say that her actions are good enough to be described as caring.6 now, as weinstein’s discussion makes clear, when student teachers excise the use of power from their caregiving activities, they create environments in which the aims of educational care simply cannot be met (weinstein 1998, 154). a rejection of the use of power, in other words, leads to a failure to provide care. the practical aspect of caregiving, then, makes it very difficult simply to reject the claim that the use of power is sometimes an element of good care. in this section i have argued that it is sometimes necessary to exercise power in order to provide adequate care. this is something which has been previously recognised in the literature on care ethics, but that recognition is typically made in a way which suggests that the use of power will be the exception rather than the rule, something which occurs only in situations of dire need. on the contrary, however, even the most everyday instances of caregiving will often call for the caregiver to exercise power over her cared-for. the use of power in this way is, in and of itself, morally unproblematic. however, the need to use power in the provision of care generates a risk that caregivers will exercise too much power in pursuit of their caring activities, thereby undermining their care even to the point at which it begins to resemble abuse. one way to avoid this risk would be to specify exactly how much power it is permissible for carers to exercise. as will be seen in the next section, however, any attempt to make such a specification will encounter serious problems. 3. identifying the ethical limits of power: three difficulties so far, we have seen that the use of power is sometimes a necessary and legitimate aspect of certain caregiving practices. of course, this is by no means to 6 i say that care provision must be at least minimally satisfactory to allow conceptual space for the existence of better and worse forms of care. this would not be possible if attempts to care needed to be optimific in order to count as successful. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 say that the use of power will always be permissible, just so long as it is exercised in the service of some genuinely care-based end. it would not be permissible for an agent to exercise her power over a cared-for, for example, if the end which she is pursuing was attainable without the use of that power. of course, whilst it is one thing to say that caring agents may sometimes legitimately exercise their power over a cared-for, this is as yet to say nothing about how much power it is legitimate for them to exercise. it is surely plausible to think that good carers will aim to use as little power as possible in the furtherance of their caregiving aims. there is a difficulty here, however. suppose that a carer initially exercises some minimal amount of power, which we will refer to as p, as a part of her care provision. as it turns out, however, this proves to be an insufficient amount of power for the attainment of her end. she therefore tries again, this time exercising just a little bit more power: p1. this is a process which can be repeated an open-ended number of times, until the care-based end at which she aims has finally been attained, through the use of some amount of power, pn. now, the precise value of n will of course vary from case to case, depending on how much power it was ultimately necessary for the carer to exercise. however, at least some of the possible values of n will constitute excessive uses of power, and will therefore be morally inappropriate. that is to say, given the amount of power which it was necessary for the carer to exercise to achieve her end, she ought not to have exercised that power and should have given up the relevant end instead. the question is, how are carers supposed, in any given situation, to identify the maximum morally permissible value of n? or, in other words, how are carers to recognize when the amount of power which they are using is excessive in relation to some particular end? this is a question without a straightforward answer. we cannot simply claim that carers ought always to use only the minimum possible amount of power necessary to achieve their ends, as this is merely a redescription of the morally problematic situation outlined in the previous paragraph. sometimes, the minimal amount of power needed to bring about a particular end may be so great as to be morally objectionable, and a carer ought to give up that end rather than exercise the required amount of power in its pursuit. in other words, some goods are simply not worth attaining if one of the conditions of doing so is the substantial overpowering (whether through physical or mental means) of a cared-for. this will most clearly be the case when the end in question would provide only a marginal benefit to the cared-for. it may also be true even for much greater goods, however, if these are sufficiently difficult for the caregiver to attain. instructing carers to use the minimum possible amount of force needed to attain their end, then, does not provide a solution to the problem at hand; indeed, it does little more than restate it in an altered form. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 an alternative approach is to suggest that the amount of power which carers exercise in the pursuit of their ends ought never to exceed p. unlike the guideline discussed in the previous paragraph, this approach succeeds in restricting the amount of power which it is morally permissible for carers to exercise to a very low level. unfortunately, however, it is still wholly inappropriate as a normative guideline for practical caregiving. this is because p is, by definition, an extremely low value which it will often be appropriate for caregivers to exceed. this will be the case, for example, in the sort of life-threatening situations discussed in the previous section. it will also be the case in situations which are much less extreme, as when unwilling children must be strapped into car booster seats. the problem with this second suggestion, then, is simply that it does not legitimate many uses of power which seem entirely appropriate and wholly morally justified. a third possibility is that carers ought only to exercise an amount of power which the cared-for experiences as nondistressing. this approach is attractive because it is less vulnerable to the problems discussed above. we might think, for example, that a cared-for would not be distressed by being shoved forcibly out of the way of a speeding car.7 we might also think that an agent’s use of power becomes morally objectionable precisely at the point at which the use of that power becomes a cause of distress. whilst this may be true in many cases, however, it will not be true in every case. as i explain below, sometimes a morally appropriate use of power will foreseeably cause the cared-for distress, even physical pain. for this reason, this third suggestion also fails to identify appropriate limitations on a carer’s ethical use of power. to say that caring can sometimes justifiably cause pain or distress may seem surprising. it is, after all, natural to think of caregiving as a practice which aims at alleviating the distress of a cared-for, by providing comfort, reassurance, and (both practical and emotional) support. yet whilst this thought is surely correct, it is important also to acknowledge that, if they are to care effectively, carers must sometimes also be willing to cause or to allow a cared-for to become distressed. of course, this is not the same as saying that a carer will desire her cared-for to experience distress. such a desire would, after all, be incompatible with the attitude of benevolent concern from which we expect carers to act. a preparedness to cause or allow distress, on the other hand, is not incompatible with an attitude of benevolent concern if it arises as an inevitable (though undesired) product of morally appropriate care. the reason for this is that many forms of care may be unwanted by the cared-for and may therefore be experienced by her as unpleasant and distressing. consider, for example, taking a child to receive a measles immunisation. having 7 or at least, that they would find this much less distressing than the alternative. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 injections can be quite painful, and many children find it highly distressing, even if only in the short term. despite knowing that her child is likely to be distressed by the injection, a caring parent ought nevertheless to have that child immunised. to refuse to do so would be to expose the child to a serious and unnecessary risk of debilitating illness and death. such refusal would therefore be constitutive of a failure to provide appropriate care, at least in this particular respect. similar considerations apply to many other types of parent–child interaction, including trips to the dentist, the administration of unpleasant medicine, or leaving a child at preschool or kindergarten for the first time. readers who have experience of this will no doubt also have experience (whether in relation to their own child or to someone else’s) of inconsolable children sobbing hysterically because they do not wish to be left by their parents or carers. nevertheless, these children are still left, and their distress is viewed as a highly regrettable, but acceptable (because it is accepted), aspect of promoting greater independence and enhanced social skills. the observation that carers must sometimes be willing to cause distress is by no means a new one. it has previously been made in the literature on empathy, particularly by writers who are sceptical of attempts to ground morality in empathetic concern, and also in the literature on caring.8 whilst this point may not be novel, it is important: caring agents must sometimes be willing to cause or allow their cared-for to experience distress as a part of the provision of good care. now, it is plausible to think that there will be a considerable overlap between situations in which caregivers feel compelled to use their power over a cared-for, and situations in which the use of that power is the cause of distress. some of these have already been mentioned above, for example, when administering medication to a reluctant infant, or when holding a child in place as she is strapped into a car booster seat. in cases of this sort, there is active and ongoing resistance to the caregiver’s actions, and the carer’s implacability in the face of this resistance will often be a cause of distress to the cared-for. yet this distress does not mean that the caregiver ought to discontinue her efforts. this willingness to cause distress applies not only to the use of physical power or to the care of young children. to see this, let us consider an example of the use of nonphysical power directed towards an adult. in her study of power relations between aging parents and their children, karen pyke (1999) describes the case of florence and her mother-in-law. tensions in this relationship are produced by florence’s repeated attempts to (as she sees it) improve her mother-in-law’s level of care, despite her mother-in-law’s resistance to those attempts. 8 see, for example, bloom (2016), collins (2015, 27), noddings (2002, 63), prinz (2011), and slote (2007, 85). walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 she [florence] said that even though her 91-year-old mother-in-law, who lives alone, did not want any assistance, florence “pestered” her husband to hire a woman to provide companionship for her mother-in-law and assistance with bathing and housekeeping. florence explained, “we decided that this is how it has to be, whether she likes it or not. you can’t always get what you want.” (pyke 1999, 666) the case of florence and her mother-in-law as it is presented here is insufficiently detailed to allow a verdict on whether or not good care was actually taking place. what florence’s remarks do allow us to see, however, is that florence (and, according to florence’s account, her husband) were willing to embark upon a course of action even if doing so would cause her mother-in-law emotional distress: “this is how it has to be, whether she likes it or not.” furthermore, florence was prepared to take this course of action precisely because she believed that it was the best (or at least an appropriate) way to provide care for her mother-in-law. this shows that a willingness to cause or to allow distress is not confined to the use of physical power or to the context of caring for young children. the idea that a carer’s use of power becomes morally objectionable at the moment it begins to cause their cared-for distress is therefore mistaken. such an approach cannot, then, provide an appropriate guideline for the ethical limitations of a caregiver’s power. to recap, in this section we have considered three possible answers to the question of how carers ought to limit the use of their power. each of these answers failed, albeit for different reasons. the picture of caring which begins to emerge in the light of these failures is one according to which the use of power is an ineliminable aspect of some types of care, and in which there is no obvious way for carers to identify when they are using an excessive, and therefore morally inappropriate, degree of power. it is worth noting at this point that this position does not entail the claim that carers can never be in a position to recognise that they are using too much power. sometimes a carer’s misuse of power may be so great that it will clearly be morally reprehensible both to themselves and to others. there nevertheless exists a morally grey area, of indeterminate size, in which it is possible for carers to use more power than they ought to without any conscious recognition that this is what they are doing. now, simply recognising this problem as an intrinsic aspect of caregiving relationships is already to go some way towards dealing with it, at least insofar as that recognition can prompt carers to exercise their power more cautiously than they otherwise might. however, as we will see in the next section, it is possible to provide some additional guidance which might help carers to avoid misusing their power. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 4. balanced caring so far, we have seen that the risk of abusing one’s power over a cared-for does not stem merely from the possession of such power. rather, it is generated by the combination of a number of features of caregiving itself: that care sometimes calls for a caregiver’s power over a cared-for to be exercised; that it is unclear how much power it will be appropriate to exercise in any given instance; and that carers must be prepared knowingly to cause distress to their cared-fors on some occasions. each of these claims express genuine features of caregiving. because of this, it is not fitting simply to advise carers never to exercise their power over a cared-for or never to allow a cared-for to become distressed. to do so would be to undermine aspects of caregiving which are at times both necessary and important. the nature of caregiving itself, then, seems to generate an unavoidable risk of power abuse. what should care ethicists say about how to minimise this risk? one promising approach is to draw attention to the different types of value associated with caregiving and to encourage what might be termed a “balanced” approach to care, which aims at responding appropriately to each of these values rather than to just one of them. this section outlines just such an approach. in subsection 4.1, i identify some of the values around which caring is, or at least ought to be, oriented. then, in subsection 4.2, i discuss some of the ways in which caregiving should respond to these values and how this can reduce the risk that abuses of power will occur. it should be kept in mind that what follows is not intended as a complete account of how carers ought, always and on every occasion, to respond to the values which i discuss. indeed, i believe that such an account is neither desirable nor, ultimately, possible: moral life is simply too complicated to be fully captured by examples and generalisations. my discussion should therefore be understood not as making a definitive statement about how balanced care will always operate but rather as outlining a framework which can further inform our moral deliberation about caregiving practices. 4.1 caring values one of the values which guides any form of caregiving is that of the quality of life of the cared-for. the relief of pain, the healing of wounds, and the encouragement of healthy emotional and physical growth are all activities oriented around the promotion of this value. the promotion of a cared-for’s quality of life thus constitutes the teleological, or goal-oriented, aspect of caregiving. this goal is so central to good caregiving that it is tempting to think of it as the primary, or most important, of the values to which caring responds. this thought draws support from the fact, as seen throughout this paper, that a carer’s use of power is morally justifiable only when, and because, it is deployed in the service of walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 this end. indeed, this is something which caregivers themselves are often aware of, as can be seen when they try to justify their use of power by telling a cared-for that “it’s for your own good.” despite its intuitive appeal, however, i wish to reject the idea that any one of the values which i consider here is more or less important than any of the others, tout court. assigning priority to a single value in this way would suggest that a carer ought always to promote that particular value above all others. as we will see later, however, this is simply not the case. despite its obvious importance, a cared-for’s quality of life is not the only thing which is of value to caring practices. this has convincingly been shown in recent work by miller (2012, 2017), who argues that dignity is also a vitally important aspect of the caring relationship. genuinely caring goals can sometimes be pursued in ways which are undignified, demeaning, or dehumanising. when this takes place, miller argues, it stems from a failure fully to recognise the moral worth of the cared-for (2012, 86). one of the results of this failure is the danger that a cared-for will come to be (wrongly) perceived by others, and perhaps even by herself, as genuinely lacking in moral worth (2012, 83). for this reason, miller claims, undignified forms of care are in fact “morally impermissible” (2012, 86). to describe certain forms of care as morally impermissible is equivalent to identifying them as pseudo forms of care. thus, to say that one is caring for someone by treating them in a morally impermissible way is effectively to say that one is not, in fact, caring for that person at all. a claim of this sort is, i believe, precisely what miller has in mind when she writes that “the duty to care is a duty to deliver dignifying care” (2012, 87, emphasis added). for miller, there is no distinction to be drawn between our duty to care and our duty to do so in a way which dignifies the cared-for. in addition to quality of life and dignity, caregiving also values the autonomy of a cared-for. the importance of autonomy has been increasingly recognized in recent years, particularly by health care providers (such as the nhs in the united kingdom) who have emphasised patients’ rights to be included in the decisions about the care which they receive.9 this right not only includes being involved in decisions about medication and other treatment options, but also extends to the right to refuse certain, potentially highly effective, courses of treatment should a patient wish to do so.10 9 see, for example, coulter and collins (2011). 10 for instance, one might for religious reasons refuse blood transfusions or organ transplants. one might also refuse to undergo highly unpleasant treatments, such as chemotherapy, even though there is a chance that they could prove to be highly beneficial. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 of course, autonomy does not begin and end with involving cared-fors in the making of decisions. it also concerns helping them to live the kind of lives which they wish for themselves. a concern for a cared-for’s autonomy, then, might call for a caregiver to provide support in the undertaking of various projects which would be impossible without that support. such projects may be ongoing, such as a weekly trip to the local library; or they may be one-off events, such as attending a birthday party for a relative who lives overseas. more generally speaking, the value which a carer attaches to her cared-for’s autonomy ought to lead her to support and enhance that cared-for’s agency wherever it is appropriate for her to do so. the final value which i will identify here as a part of caregiving is the value attached to the maintenance of caring relationships.11 the importance of this is something which has been stressed many times in the literature on care ethics (e.g., collins 2015; kittay 1999; noddings 1984). whilst i cannot provide a complete account of the nature of caring relationships here, it is worth briefly drawing attention to two of their noteworthy features. the first of these is that caring relationships are grounded in a commitment to meeting the needs of the caredfor.12 this does not mean that these relationships will always last a long time. what it does mean, however, is that the care which they provide will not be arbitrarily discontinued by the carer. on the contrary, as long as the needs which motivate that care remain, carers will endeavour to meet them. this commitment points to another noteworthy feature of caring relationships. this is that they often involve a degree of trust between the carer and her cared-for.13 trust takes time to develop and can be quickly lost if it is betrayed, so good caring relationships ought where possible to be enduring and open, with thoughts and feelings easily shared between carer and cared-for. 4.2 striking a balance if caregiving is about more than one sort of value—that is, not just about promoting a cared-for’s quality of life, but also about respecting her dignity, supporting her autonomy, and maintaining caring relationships—then the best forms of care will be those which manage to respond appropriately to each of those values rather than just to one or two of them. of course, this is easy to say, but what does it mean in practice? 11 i am open to the thought that a commitment to some further values is implied in caring practices, but i do not have space to conduct a full examination of these here. 12 this has been claimed by friedman (1987), meyers (2004), noddings (1984), and tronto (1989), among others. 13 cf. banks 2016; mullin 2011. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 this is a question which does not admit of a single answer. like many others writing on care ethics, i am deeply sceptical of broad generalisations about what morality requires of us, preferring instead a contextualist, case-by-case approach to moral deliberation.14 still, it is possible to say something substantive in response to this question without endorsing a one-size-fits-all approach. i remarked in subsection 4.1 that none of the values associated with caring ought to take priority, tout court, over any of the others. this does not mean, however, that a carer cannot assign relative priorities to those different values on any given occasion. what it does mean is that how she prioritises them will vary according to the details of the situation in which she finds herself. to see how this might work, consider just two of the values discussed above: quality of life, and autonomy. in many clinical settings, respect for a cared-fors autonomy will (rightly) take precedence over the promotion of their quality of life. it would be wrong, for example, for a clinician to insist on a particular course of treatment (say a blood transfusion) in the face of a patient’s expressed desire not to receive this treatment for religious reasons. on other occasions, however, respecting a cared-for’s autonomy may be less important than promoting their quality of life. for example, patients suffering from advanced (or metastatic) cancer may strongly desire an aggressive course of chemotherapy, in the hope that this will send their cancer into remission. such treatment is not always advisable, however, because it can sometimes result in serious harm to the patient without producing any lengthening of their life expectancy. in such cases, practitioners may refuse to prescribe chemotherapy despite the patient’s wishes and choose instead to offer palliative care, aimed at making the patient’s remaining time as pain-free as possible. here, then, we have an example of when it might be appropriate to prioritise the value of a cared-for’s quality of life over that of their autonomy. so, the priority which carers ought to assign to different caring values will vary from case to case. this is not to say, however, that a carer can simply ignore those values which she takes to be less important in the case at hand. respecting the autonomy of a patient who refuses a life-saving treatment, for example, does not mean that there is no need to make that patient’s remaining life as pain-free as possible or to continue to treat her in a dignifying way. each of the values associated with caring is always important, in every caregiving context, even when one of them takes priority over the others. sometimes, in tragic cases, there may be nothing which a caregiver can do in relation to one of those values. in some situations, for example, a carer might be genuinely unable to enhance their cared-for’s quality of 14 see, for example, held (2006, 11), noddings (1984, 7–8), sevenhuijsen (1998, 59), and walker (1989, 19). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 life. even in these cases, however, the value of that quality of life remains, and its inevitable loss should be recognised as a source of deep regret and sorrow. with all this in mind, i contend that some instances of power abuse in caregiving may be understood as resulting from the neglect of some of the values which i have associated with caring. consider, for example, the following statement by one of the nurse subjects in a study by eriksson and saveman (2012, 81): we sometimes have to hold [patients] by force to be able to take specimens because we want the patients to get well but you forget to treat them with dignity, as they don’t know what is best for themselves. here, the value of patients’ quality of life is being promoted at the expense of (at least) two other caring values, specifically autonomy and dignity. now, it may be the case that, in situations such as these, respecting patients’ autonomy is simply not possible. this is highly regrettable, but it is not what makes such this particular example morally problematic. rather, this occurs with the additional neglect (the “forgetting”) of the patients’ dignity. if that dignity had not been forgotten, and nurses had done their best to take the required samples in a dignifying way, then such treatment would not have constituted a misuse of their power. similar considerations apply to the example of florence, discussed in the previous section. if florence’s mother-in-law was genuinely unable to care for herself at home, then overriding her decision about allowing a live-in carer may have been the correct course of action. but if this was not the case, and alternative arrangements could have sufficed to ensure her continued well-being, then florence ought to have respected her mother-in-law’s decision not to have live-in help. even if live-in help was necessary, however, there may have been other ways in which florence could have shown respect for her mother-in-law’s autonomy, for example by including her in the decision about who to hire and what level of support would be provided. as previously noted, caregivers often justify their use of power by telling the cared-for that “it’s for your own good.” we can now see that this sort of justification, whilst sometimes appropriate, is morally risky precisely because it can obscure a failure to achieve the desired balance between the different values to which caring ought to respond. indeed, in its exclusive focus on caring’s telos, the thought that “it’s for your own good” may even mask a lack of recognition on the part of the caregiver that caring is not just about pursuing a particular outcome but also about the way in which that outcome is pursued. rather than attempt to draw a firm line between permissible and excessive uses of power, then, care ethicists ought instead to work towards enriching our conception of caring by more fully articulating the values around which care is walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 oriented. this is not something which is currently taking place to any great extent. on the contrary, the expositions of caring which one typically finds in the literature tend to obscure these different values, based as they are around less cumbersome descriptions of caring which identify it simply as an activity aimed at the meeting of needs. caring is just such an activity, of course, but it is important to give the fullest possible account of what this activity entails. an important part of such an account ought to relate to the different values which guide caring practices. if a more widespread recognition of these values can be fostered, then the need to balance them against each other may be more fully appreciated, and the risk of the unintentional abuse of power thereby lessened. 5. objections and replies here, i briefly consider two objections which may have occurred to readers during the previous section. the first of these is that my account depends on an undefended, value-pluralist conception of care ethics.15 the second is that my proposal simply misses the point about the causes of abuse and therefore does not make the commission of abuse any less likely. with regard to the first of these objections, let me note at the outset that i do in fact think that a value-pluralist conception of care ethics is both plausible and worth defending.16 however, my argument in the previous section does not presuppose, nor depend upon the correctness of, this position. to see why, let us suppose that there is in fact just a single value around which caring is oriented, and let us refer to this as the value of need-satisfaction. does this invalidate my argument? not at all, for it is highly plausible to suppose that the value of needsatisfaction encompasses not only the need for a sufficiently high quality of life but also the need for dignity, autonomy, and a host of other things as well. in other words, the value of need-satisfaction ranges over each of the goods around which the argument of the previous section was based. consequently, even if this monistic perspective were true, it would still be possible for me to claim that caring must strike a balance between the cared-for’s need for autonomy, dignity, quality of life, and so on. 15 value pluralism holds that there are multiple, irreducibly distinct types of moral value. this distinctness means that values can sometimes come into conflict with one another, with agents forced to choose between them. pluralism thus stands opposed to monistic accounts of moral value, such as utilitarianism, according to which there is only one source of moral value (i.e., the promotion of utility). for discussion, see chang (2015) and schaber (1999). 16 i have argued for this claim in walsh (2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 to constitute a genuine objection to my account, a monistic approach must argue not only that caring should respond only to a single value but also that the value to which it should respond does not include at least three of the goods identified in the previous section.17 such an approach might hold, for example, that caring is really only about quality of life, and not dignity, autonomy, or maintaining caring relationships. now, this would be a genuine objection to my account, and it would be one based on (or at least involving) a rejection of the pluralist aspect of that account. it would also, however, be a deeply counterintuitive objection, requiring a considerable amount of argument against the normative relevance of the rejected values. i take it that such an argument would be unlikely to find many wishing to support it. my argument in the previous section, then, does not rest in any problematic way upon the truth of value pluralism. i turn now to the second of the objections mentioned above, that is, that my proposal simply misses the point about the causes of abuse. this would be true if i were claiming that all, or most, abuse was the result of carers failing to recognize or respond to some of the values around which caring is oriented. this is not my claim, however. the factors which contribute to the likelihood of abuse are numerous and complex, including drug and alcohol dependency, mental health issues, susceptibility to stress, a perpetrator’s previously having been a victim of abuse, and host of other factors. it would be naïve in the extreme to think that a single conceptual issue lay behind each type, and every instance, of abuse. consequently, my account is by no means offered as a panacea for ending abuse. indeed, there sadly can be no such panacea. what i have done, however, is to show that even in the absence of each of the risk factors noted above, simply being in a caregiving relationship generates a risk that one’s care will deteriorate into the unintentional abuse of power. one of the ways in which this risk can be minimized is by articulating a conception of caring which explicitly foregrounds the various goods to which care ought to be responsive. these goods must be identified explicitly and in detail rather than left at an intuitive level or in the shadow of some more general concept such as need-satisfaction or welfarism. to leave them in the background is to risk overlooking them, when they should in fact be front and centre in our deliberations about how to provide care. a caregiver who is sufficiently attentive to these values, and who takes account of them when considering how to care for those around her, will be less likely to use her power over her cared-fors in morally objectionable ways. so, at any rate, i have argued here. 17 i say at least three because it is conceivable that such an approach could reject all four of these goods in favour of a fifth, as yet unspecified, alternative. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 6. conclusion care and abuse are at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. it is therefore natural to think that when care begins to deteriorate into abuse, the explanation for this must be sought in the operation of something foreign to, or outside of, that care. power, with its widely recognized potential to generate moral corruption, is often identified as the foreign agent in question. this paper has cast doubt on that assessment. imbalances of power should not be seen simply as regrettable features of caring relations, to be minimized whenever possible. on the contrary, the exercise of power over a cared-for is, on many commonplace occasions, a necessary condition of providing good care. so, too, is the willingness to exercise that power, even if doing so will predictably be a cause of distress to the cared-for. it is this feature of caregiving, rather than the presence of power itself, which creates the risk that care will deteriorate into abuse. the risk of abuse, that is, stems not from the mere presence of an imbalance of power but from the very nature of caregiving. because this risk of power abuse is a product of care itself, it is not something which can simply be annulled by some fancy philosophical footwork. it can, however, be mitigated. one of the ways in which to begin to do this is to recognize explicitly the nature of that risk, as i have tried to do in this paper. another way is to engage in closer critical reflection on the nature of caring itself and the values around which care is based. by trying to strike a balance between each of these values, it is to be hoped that our pursuit of the ends at which caring aims will be both informed and restrained by, among other things, a concern for the dignity and autonomy of the cared-for. references banks, sarah. 2016. “everyday ethics in professional life: social work as ethics work.” ethics and social welfare 10 (1): 35–52. doi:10.1080/17496535.2015.1126623. barnes, marian. 2012. care in everyday life: an ethic of care in practice. bristol: the policy press. bloom, paul. 2016. against empathy: the case for rational compassion. london: the bodley head. bubeck, diemut elisabet. 1995. care, gender and justice. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2002. “justice and the labor of care.” in the subject of care: feminist perspectives on dependency, edited by eva feder kittay and ellen k. feder, 160–185. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 chang, ruth. 2015. “value pluralism.” in international encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, 2nd edition, edited by james d. wright, volume 25: 21– 26. oxford: elsevier. collins, stephanie. 2015. the core of care ethics. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. coulter, angela, and alf collins. 2011. making shared decision making a reality: no decision about me, without me. london: king’s fund. engster, daniel. 2007. the heart of justice: care ethics and political theory. new york: oxford university press. eriksson, catharina, and britt-inger saveman. 2002. “nurses’ experiences of abusive/non-abusive caring for demented patients in acute care settings.” scandinavian journal of caring sciences 16 (1): 79–85. doi:10.1046/j.14716712.2002.00061.x. friedman, marilyn. 1987. “beyond caring: the de-moralization of gender.” canadian journal of philosophy 17 (s1): 87–110. doi:10.1080/00455091.1987.10715931. held, virginia. 2006. the ethics of care: personal, political and global. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2010. “can the ethics of care handle violence?” ethics and social welfare 4 (2): 115–129. doi:10.1080/17496535.2010.484256. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. meyers, diana t. 2004. “narrative and moral life.” in setting the moral compass, edited by cheshire calhoun, 288–305. new york: oxford university press. miller, sarah clark. 2012. the ethics of need: agency, dignity, and obligation. new york: routledge. ———. 2017. “reconsidering dignity relationally.” ethics and social welfare 11 (2): 108–121. doi:10.1080/17496535.2017.1318411. mullin, amy. 2011. “gratitude and caring labor.” ethics and social welfare 5 (2): 110–122. doi:10.1080/17496535.2011.571061. noblit, george w. 1993. power and caring. american educational research journal 30 (1): 23–38. doi:10.2307/1163187. noddings, nel. 1984. caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley: university of california press. ———. 2002. starting at home: caring and social policy. berkeley: university of california press. phillips judith c. 2007. care. cambridge: polity press. prinz, jesse. 2011. “against empathy.” southern journal of philosophy 49 (s1 spindel supplement): 214–233. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00069.x. walsh – caregiving and the abuse of power published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 pyke, karen. 1999. “the micropolitics of care in relationships between aging parents and adult children: individualism, collectivism, and power.” journal of marriage and family 61 (3): 661–672. doi:10.2307/353568. ruddick, sara. 1995. “injustice in families: assault and domination.” in justice and care: essential readings in feminist ethics, edited by virginia held, 203–223. boulder, co: westview press. schaber, peter. 1999. “value pluralism: some problems.” journal of value inquiry 33 (1): 71–78. doi:10.1023/a:1004377115243. sevenhuijsen, selma. 1998. citizenship and the ethics of care: feminist considerations on justice, morality and politics. new york: routledge. slote, michael. 2007. the ethics of care and empathy. new york: routledge. tronto, joan c. 1989. “women and caring: what can feminists learn about morality from caring? in gender/body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, edited by alison m. jaggar and susan r. bordo, 172–187. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. ———. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. walker, margaret urban. 1989. “moral understandings: alternative ‘epistemology’ for a feminist ethics.” hypatia 4 (2): 15–28. doi:10.1111/j.15272001.1989.tb00570.x. walsh, joseph p. 2018. “caring: a pluralist account.” ratio 31 (s1): 96–110. doi:10.1111/rati.12179. weinstein, carol s. 1998. “‘i want to be nice, but i have to be mean’: exploring prospective teachers’ conceptions of caring and order.” teaching and teacher education 14 (2): 153–163. doi:10.1016/s0742-051x(97)00034-6. joseph walsh completed his phd at the university of kent in 2013. he researches the ethics of care and virtue ethics, and is currently working on the normative significance of commitment and what this means for caregiving. recent publications include “commitment and partialism in the ethics of care,” hypatia (2017); “caring: a pluralist account,” ratio (2018); and “care, commitment and moral distress,” ethical theory and moral practice (2018). 5418 walsh title page 5418 walsh final format.docx burning it in? nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 1 2018 burning it in? nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory marie draz san diego state university, mdraz@mail.sdsu.edu recommended citation draz, marie. 2018. "burning it in? nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 1. burning it in? nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory1 marie draz, san diego state university abstract in this article, i extend the feminist use of friedrich nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting to consider the contemporary externalization of memory foregrounded by transgender experience. nietzsche’s on the genealogy of morals argues that memory is “burnt in” to the forgetful body as a necessary part of subject-formation and the requirements of a social order. feminist philosophers have employed nietzsche’s account to illuminate how gender, as memory, becomes embodied. while the account of the “burnt in” repetitions of gender allows us to theorize processes of embodied identity on an individual level, analyzing gender today requires also accounting for how gender is externalized. i take up this question through the specific examples of identity documents and sex-segregated bathrooms. returning to nietzsche’s call to practice a resistant forgetting, i conclude by exploring the distinct strategies required to disrupt externalized memory. these strategies include contesting the use of past gender assignments in data collection and rewriting architectural reminders of gender. keywords: nietzsche, memory, forgetting, gender, feminism, transgender, identity documents, sex-segregated bathrooms “feminist work is often memory work.” —sara ahmed, living a feminist life in chicago’s south loop neighborhood, one of the world’s largest data centers spans 1.1 million square feet. the site is one of many so-called data farms that have cropped up alongside the internet, as the relentless collection of data 1 the research for this essay was in part supported by a faculty research grant from the college of arts and letters at san diego state university. i would also like to acknowledge the participants of the southwest seminar in continental philosophy and the nietzsche & critical social theory conference for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this project. finally, i would like to thank feminist philosophy quarterly's anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. 1 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 through massive online servers has become big business. as the term “farming” suggests, this data gathering is commonly described with natural metaphors: data pools and streams, ebbs and flow, leaks and clouds (lupton 2013). in a talk at a conference on big data, web developer maciej ceglowski argues against such “bucolic terminology” in favor of imagining big data as waste product. while the massive amount of collected data seems innocuous and likely to be forgotten, ceglowski argues that its persistence actually rivals that of nuclear waste; given that “the whole point of having a data lake is you can just chuck things in there and go fishing for patterns later,” ceglowski cautions that the lifespan of data is “far longer than the institutions we could build to guard it” (2015). while it is tempting to think that much of this data will be forgotten, through the sheer vastness of what is collected if nothing else, it is also crucial to acknowledge its persistence as memory. the unpredictable effects of such massive data collection provide a stark reminder of the complexity of thinking about memory and forgetting today. from a philosophical standpoint, one of the most generative accounts of memory and forgetting arguably appears in nietzsche’s on the genealogy of morals. here, memory is “burnt in” to the body as a necessary part of subject-formation and civilization. feminist philosophers have employed nietzsche’s account to illuminate how gender, as memory, becomes embodied. in this essay, i extend and complicate this feminist nietzschean account by examining the contemporary externalization of memory. keeping the thread of gender as memory, i explore two examples of the externalization of memory foregrounded by trans experience2: identity documents and sex-segregated bathrooms. finally, i argue that paying attention to the externalization of gender as memory today requires taking seriously nietzsche’s call to practice a resistant forgetting. i. memory and forgetting in nietzsche’s on the genealogy of morals in the second essay of on the genealogy of morals, nietzsche locates the emergence of culture in the ability to make promises. to ensure that a promise is kept, he writes, a memory of that promise must be created: “that this problem has been solved to a large extent must seem all the more remarkable to anyone who appreciates the strength of the opposing force, that of forgetfulness” (nietzsche 2 throughout the essay, i use trans and transgender to indicate a wide variety of ways that people move away from the gender assigned at birth. at a few points, i link trans with gender nonconforming in order to emphasize the many paths of departure from gendered assignments and expectations. i emphasize that these are political terms and thus open to contestation and renegotiation. for more on how these terms developed in the context of the us and should not be hastily universalized, see stryker 2008. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 1989, 57). acknowledging that forgetfulness is usually cast in a negative light, nietzsche positions it instead as an active and creative force that allows one to “close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time,” enjoy “a little quietness,” and “make room for new things” (57–58). however, while forgetfulness can be a sign of health, or a way to remain open to forces at work in the present, it must be revoked when one needs to remember a promised future. as rosalyn diprose (2002, 22) puts it, “the modern moral subject, the individual who is responsible for his or her acts enough to enter social contracts, requires a faculty that opposes forgetting—memory.” the active desire to remember is not itself the problem for nietzsche. to the contrary, he positively marks the ability to enact what one promises as a sign of a sovereign individual; this sovereignty is held up as the “ripest fruit” of this process, or as at least one possible outcome of such memory work (nietzsche 1989, 59). instead of focusing on memory writ large, he locates the problem in the calculability and predictability that so easily results from this social memory machine. in establishing this interpretation of memory and forgetting in nietzsche’s work, diprose writes that he is describing a “particular kind of memory, a memory that unifies a selection of activities, events, experiences, and effects so that they belong to one person” (22). for nietzsche, it is crucial that this unifying narrative work of memory operates in service to a promised future (i.e., how we promise to act, what we will or will not allow to happen), and that this focus in turn all too easily safeguards sameness. this tightly wound temporal loop guarantees that what is to come will be a continuation of what has been. through adhering to a promised future, a chain of inevitability is forged in the present. this, nietzsche (1989) tells us, is the “long story” of how humans become “like among like” through a shared (and enforced) allegiance to a particular future (58–59). one of the most intriguing aspects of this story is nietzsche’s claim that this memory is instituted through bodily pain, or the “mnemotechnics of pain” (61). reflecting on the counteracting force of forgetfulness, nietzsche argues that punishment is one way that memories are “burnt into” the body. bodily pain buries the memory of the law inside. the embodied memory of punishment compels one to forestall future harm through a promised adherence to a social order. these techniques of punishment in turn carry social norms and values. as nietzsche puts it, “with the aid of such images and procedures one finally remembers five or six ‘i will not’s,’ in regard to which one had given one’s promise so as to participate in the advantages of society” (62). corporeal punishment forges a connection between the forgetful human and the legal subject, thereby creating a subject capable of linking a past promise with a future self. given nietzsche’s genealogical coupling of guilt [schuld] and debt [schulden], kristen brown (2006) emphasizes that the emergence of a unified subject (a subject capable of linking a past promise with a future self) 3 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 also halts the movement by which one’s guilt or debt can be resolved or forgotten. through the burning in of punishment, the subject is therefore made permanently guilty—in other words, the subject is made to remember. after a long list of various corporeal forms of punishment (“stoning . . . breaking on the wheel . . . boiling the criminal in oil or wine” and so on [nietzsche 1989, 62]), nietzsche states that it is by taking refuge in the interiority of a memory that one is able to promise a future, or the “five or six ‘i will not’s’” (62). through punishment, the subject both takes responsibility for past actions and forestalls future harm by anticipating the possible results of actions. as social promises grow stronger, the need for overt reminders lessens; your body remembers for you. the whole bloody, bodily process of instituting memory therefore only comes to a “sort of end” with the internalization of a consciousness that remembers.3 “the severity of the penal code,” nietzsche writes, “provides an especially significant measure of the degree of effort needed to overcome forgetfulness and to impose a few primitive demands of social existence as present realities upon these slaves of momentary affect and desire” (61). forgetfulness becomes a sign that one has not properly internalized the demands of the social and political order. ii. gender as internalized memory while feminist philosophers have questioned nietzsche’s account for its focus on, among other things, the primacy of aggression in the formation of the subject (butler 2008; diprose 2002), his work has remained a generative way for feminist philosophers to examine “a subject who internalizes the law” (butler 2008, 15).4 insofar as this subject is formed through the unification of actions across time, these learned expectations calcify in the habitual body; bodily memories are formed. as michel foucault (1977) develops through the concept of disciplinary power, the success of this political use of the body is due at least in part to the belief that the body is impervious to power. as such, it remains a powerful hiding place for social and political norms. in her work on nietzsche, gender, and embodiment, 3 while nietzsche refers to a “consciousness” that remembers, his overall critique of the mind/body split invites the feminist reading of this memory through the gendered body, to which i turn below. 4 as kelly oliver and marilyn pearsall (1998) write in their introduction to feminist interpretations of nietzsche, feminist writing on nietzsche generally falls into two camps. the first focuses on nietzsche’s comments about women and femininity, while the second asks how we might use nietzsche’s work to ask our own questions about gender. i locate my work here in the second of these camps without claiming to answer the question of whether these camps are or should be disconnected. for more on nietzsche’s use of women and femininity, see also oliver (1995). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 elizabeth grosz (1994, 132) writes, "it is almost as if the skin itself served as a notebook, a reminder of what was not allowed to be forgotten . . . the 'unforgettable' is etched on the body itself." across its many different iterations, feminist theory has taken up the question of how the gendered requirements of a social and political order are “burnt in” to one’s body. in one of the more well-known examples of this line of thought, judith butler examines the minefield of punishment and reward that shapes how we navigate gender. through the repetition of punished and rewarded acts in a highly regulated social frame, gender eventually “congeal[s]” into “the appearance of substance” or what we take to be “a natural sort of being” (butler 1999, 43–44). consider gendered practices of taking up space in public. as the popular “men taking up too much space on the train” internet memes succinctly illustrate, the way one sits or stands in public often reflects intermeshed social identities, with gender operating as one salient factor.5 it is precisely because privileged ways of sitting, standing, or occupying space often feel quite natural that such projects seek to make us look again, or think twice about how our social identities have contributed to the ease with which we do or do not take up space. butler draws on nietzsche to explain that it is through precisely these kinds of bodily repetitions that we come to believe that there is a “doer behind the deed” or a gendered essence behind the gendered doing. by emphasizing the repetition that leads to the ease of a bodily habit, butler articulates a framework in which the appearance of a stable, natural gender is actually constituted through the repetition of bodily acts over time.6 following nietzsche’s invitation, this gender work can be understood as normalizing memory work. i mean this in two ways. first, these repetitive sanctions and rewards over lifetimes and generations create bodies that remember how to move, speak, take up space, adorn themselves, and so on. through analyses of such bodily practices, feminist theorists have illustrated how habitual interpretations subsume new experiences (e.g., ahmed 2006; bartky 1990; diprose 2002; and young 2005). bartky’s (1990) classic account explores this punishment in terms of relationships: the failure to embody gender in particular ways may result in lost friendships, romantic relationships, and family connections. in nietzschean language, gender becomes an embodied memory of a promise to a social and 5 for more on the language of intermeshed social oppression as a model for intersectional theorizing that resists analogical thinking, see lugones 2003. 6 while i continue to use nietzsche’s language of “burning in” from genealogy here, i acknowledge that both foucault and butler choose to develop this account along the lines of inscription, not internalization (butler 1999; foucault 1977). due to my focus on how gender, as memory, is both taken into (or, in the model of inscription, inscribed on) and preserved outside the body, i do not belabor the distinction here. 5 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 political order. to ensure the promise is kept, punishment (ranging from mundane shaming and social ostracizing to overt physical violence) is on deck. normalizing forgetting also plays a role here: successfully embodying gender in this framework might be understood as the successful forgetting of this mundane and violent memory work. second, however, we might also consider resistance to the bodily congealing of gender to be a kind of memory work. in this resistant memory work, the emphasis is placed on remembering the repetitive acts and regulatory frames through which normative gender has been forged. for example, such work might involve recalling earlier moments in which one was explicitly rewarded or punished for taking up space in gendered ways. in turn, then, forgetting an expected or promised bodily repetition also serves as a source of resistance. at the level of bodily habits, this forgetting could entail working to alter the habitual ways one embodies gendered norms. this forgetting also requires memory work; it is by remembering what has been burnt in that resistant forgetting becomes possible. through such work, we gain a better understanding of the promises that have been made. to think about forgetting in this way is, at least in part, to hear a nietzschean echo of forgetting in the promise of genealogical approaches to gender. as sara ahmed (2006) puts it in queer phenomenology, “we don’t know, as yet, what shape such a world might take . . . when we no longer reproduce the lines we follow” (156).7 or, in the language of genealogy of morals, “every table of values, every ‘thou shalt’ . . . requires first a physiological investigation” (nietzsche 1989, 55, emphasis added). iii. gender as externalized memory in memory practices in the sciences, geoffrey bowker (2005) describes memory as a property of infrastructures. the structures themselves, and not just the data they carry, store memory in ways that remain external to consciousness. memory practices are the “range of practices (technical, formal, social) that . . . allow . . . useful/interesting descriptions of the past to be carried forward into the future” (7). these practices, when exercised through structures such as classification systems and databases, preserve memory along particular lines (for example, according to certain keywords or markers) and allow the past to be recalled according to the demands of the present. in other words, memory practices help us to remember that which otherwise we may forget. “memory is often, and wrongly,” 7 this positive valuation of forgetting has also been explored in the context of what lee edelman (2007) calls reproductive futurism or jack halberstam (2011) discusses as the heteronormative mandate to focus on the future at all costs and to not lose one’s way. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 bowker writes, “conceived of as an act of consciousness and associated with what can be called to mind” (8). by turning to modes of remembering that have very little to do with what enters consciousness, but rather with how the past is preserved in structures all around us, bowker emphasizes that “we are social and technical creatures who engage in a vast span of memory practices, from the entirely nonconscious to the hyperaware” (8). in what follows, i extend the feminist use of nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting to this question of externalized memory. until this point, i have focused my discussion on how gender, as an internalized memory, serves to project the body into the future as a way to adhere to, or make a promise to, a social order. this account of the ‘burnt in’ repetitions of gender allows us to theorize processes of embodied identity on an individual level. to analyze gender today, however, it is necessary to account for how gender is externalized. this move not only implicates the interaction between individuals and external memory structures, but also complicates the question of where gender lives and how it is remembered. to elaborate the stakes of theorizing this distinction between internalized and externalized memory, i first turn to the question of what it means for memory to be preserved outside the body. i then turn to the question of what it means for the memory of gender to be externalized. many scholars have examined how memory practices take on a life of their own outside the body. in their respective projects, adrian forty and susanne küchler (1999) and michel de certeau (1984) both question how the externalization of memory may lead to its decay, shutting down its movement and dynamism. a related line of concern may be extended all the way back to the discussion in plato’s phaedrus concerning whether the externalization of knowledge through techniques of writing will lessen the need to remember things on one’s own. in these and related discussions, externalized memory is understood as something that can be contained and stored for retrieval. the question that emerges is how this storage of memory may release us from the responsibility of knowing things “by heart,” or the potentially negative impact of memory being located elsewhere. against this view, others have argued that this focus on the danger of externalized memory too easily overlooks the “agency of things” and the “complex dynamics of remembering” that occur as external objects “[rub] against humans in a memorable way” (freeman, nienass, and daniell 2016, 4–5). this view maintains that memory is dynamic and that its externalization does not necessarily lead to its decay. to the contrary, by paying attention to the interaction between humans and objects, and the unpredictable ways objects can participate in memory and forgetting, the line between internal and external memory is blurred. jacques derrida (1981, 1996) makes the related point that memory, whether externalized or internalized, is always a kind of writing, the meaning of which is beyond the 7 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 subject’s control. rather than see this lack of control as a problem, derrida contends that this interplay between memory and forgetting is a defining characteristic of fluid, dynamic subjectivity; to follow this line of thinking is to work against a view of forgetting as something that should be solely guarded against. throughout these perspectives lies a common question: how does externalization affect the interplay between memory and forgetting? what does it enable or disallow? in the view of memory as a retrievable, static, external container often lies the hope that memory can be managed. a stagnant memory does not threaten in the same way as the flood of dynamic sensation and unpredictable flows of information associated with individual memory. the concern about memory is also, therefore, a concern about forgetting: on the one hand, that the externalization will increase forgetting (insofar as the knowledge is no longer located “in us,” so to speak); on the other hand, that the externalization will prohibit forgetting (insofar as memory’s existence outside of us may take on an unpredictable life of its own). i turn now to bring this set of questions about the implications of externalized memory into conversation with the question of gender. in recent years, there has been more attention paid to the role that state institutions play in administering gender (e.g., currah and moore 2009; namaste 2005; salamon 2010; spade 2011). this shift in focus takes on increased urgency given the current clash in the us between the increased visibility of trans issues and the ongoing and intensifying violence against trans and gender nonconforming people. the cultural conversation around people who move away from the gender they are assigned at birth is arguably changing. however, the disproportionate violence faced by trans and gender nonconforming people in the us shows that there is an ongoing need to understand how and why an assignment of gender is enforced. focusing on the state administration of gender requires us to pay particular attention to the effects of the initial assignment of gender, in the form of sex, at birth. if we think about this initial gender assignment as an externalized memory, how is this memory created and preserved? what is at stake in the state preservation of a particular memory of the body (the body stamped at one point with m or f) in various knowledge-gathering structures? do such memories ensure the promises of bodies to function in particular ways? how does the externalized archiving of gender impact the way gender is lived? in a nietzschean sense, i move now to trace the “burn” between individuals and the externalized memory of gender. foregrounding the question of externalized memory expands what is at stake in thinking about gender as memory. i use the specific language of externalization to emphasize that the institutional forces that “burn memories in” are also invested in preserving memories of gender outside the body. in other words, the externalized memories i analyze here do not necessarily have to 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 originate from an individual’s (internal) memory, but rather indicate more broadly the institutional procedures by which “reminders” can operate at some remove from the individual, internal level. i explore the contours of this externalization of gender through two examples: identity documentation and sex-segregated institutions. i then close by exploring what resistant forgetting looks like at the level of externalized memory. identity documents identity documentation poses a host of problems for trans and gender nonconforming people. problems may occur due to the perception of a mismatch between an individual and an identity marker or even across institutions, such as when the dmv and the social security office possess conflicting gender designations (meadow 2010; spade 2003, 2011).8 despite evidence that there is no simple legal or medical definition of gender or sex (fausto-sterling 2000; greenberg 2012), state institutions continue to deploy rigid classification schemes.9 these schemes deploy rigidity as overcompensation for an actual lack of consensus, leading to a situation in which requirements for gender marker reclassification can vary widely not only between cities and across states but also across types of documentation, including birth certificates, social security cards, passports, state id, and driver’s licenses. these disparities may lead to having a driver’s license that has one gender marker and a passport that has another, or being unable (due to cost and/or the required medical intervention) to have a changed marker at all. the effects of being illegible within a particular classification system are intensified by one’s location in intermeshed systems of power such as race, class, nationality, and ability, all of which will decrease or increase (depending on one’s relative privilege in that system) the likelihood of being able to buy a way out of the system or bypass situations where identity documents are demanded. as one result of this interplay between a lack of consensus and the countervailing certainty that it must be possible to legislate a sexed body, identity documentation remains a source of harm. richard juang (2006) has emphasized the harmful effects of this failure of state recognition for transgender people, while others theorize sex as a matter of state allocation (salamon 2010) and question the degree to which state recognition should be the goal of trans politics (spade 2011). regardless of one’s position on the 8 in addition to state administrative systems, scholarship in trans studies is also beginning to look at the gendered contours of identity data in private sectors such as credit reporting (see mackenzie 2017) to which i will turn below. 9 as is apparent in the recent state “bathroom bills” in the us, these debates often rely on the language of biological sex. given that what is at stake in this deployment of biological sex is control over gender, and the assumption of a system in which sex is gendered, i use the terms interchangeably here. 9 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 goal of state recognition, however, it is clear that this conflict between one’s “lived and documented gender” (mock 2014, 144) has serious repercussions. thinking about the identity document through the lens of externalized memory has the advantage of foregrounding the role of time in debates around gender markers. for example, a repeated concern in these debates is the length of time an identity must be in place for a change of gender marker to be granted. the emphasis placed on gender assignment at birth translates to a normative expectation of “born this way” identity narratives as key to gaining legitimacy in the eyes of state institutions (draz 2017). the framework of externalized memory draws attention to the institutional processes through which memories are made and preserved over time. nietzsche’s “burning in” of memories becomes a “burning out,” as these identity documents preserve past gender assignments and remain a source of cisgender privilege. in the case of identity documents, locating the memory-constituting punishment requires listening to those for whom such paperwork burns. while for many people such documents are barely noticeable (a mundane matter of paperwork), the memory is sufficiently punishing for others. regardless of how someone is living, or how others affirm their lived gender, the past assignment preserved at this level can resist forgetting. the documentation too easily serves as a reminder; this memory, in turn, is used to either support or contradict the present. for those who are privileged by current arrangements, for whom the memory is more or less “correct,” these systems of classification do not feel punishing. to the contrary, they feel quite boring. they are a matter of paperwork. however, the largest survey to date of trans people in the us found that only 11 percent of respondents had their preferred name and gender on all ids and records, while 67 percent did not have an id or record with the gender they preferred. a third of respondents reported harassment as a result. one respondent said, “even after paying for proper identification to be issued, [the dmv] refused to send the identification because my female photo didn’t match my ‘m’ gender marker,” while others expressed the “disheartening, dysphoria-inducing, and kind of dehumanizing” effects of not being able to change documents at all or of having mismatched documents as a result of the state’s refusal to change gender markers on birth certificates (james et al. 2016; see also grant et al. 2011). for those who experience this disconnect between lived and documented gender, the “reminder” of the document and the persistence of a past assignment preserved therein can certainly burn. sex-segregated bathrooms in addition to identity documentation, daily life also involves moving through architectural spaces designed around the presupposition of biological sex (and/as 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 gender) as a division between male and female bodies.10 from locker rooms and schools to bathrooms and prisons, these sex-segregated institutions offer another example of gender as externalized memory. what do these structures remember about bodies? how do their reminders work on the bodies that move through them? take the example of sex-segregated bathrooms. in queering bathrooms, sheila cavanagh (2010) reports on a number of interviews she conducted with people who have experienced conflict while navigating bathrooms. a recurring theme in the interviews is how trans and/or gender nonconforming people are repeatedly read as “‘out of place’ in the gender-normative landscape of the bathroom, as anomalous beings” (63). while many of the interviewees emphasize the violent “look” of the other—a look that often exercises varying combinations of voyeurism, disgust, anxiety, and hostility—it is also the case that the architecture undergirds the validity of these social interactions, or the feeling of being “out of place.” the very design of sex-segregated restrooms affirms the naturalness of the sex/gender system, a system that is, in turn, policed by those who feel enabled by its architectural embeddedness (gersheson and penner 2009; kogan 2007; more 2008). a normative gender order is secured not only through this work of dividing space, but also by incorporating reminders of how the space should be used. the justificatory power granted to bathroom signs illustrates this enabling work of architecture (abel 2010; nirta 2014). using these signs is a crucial part of the memory work involved in navigating sex-segregated bathrooms. this memory work often involves a tripartite reading of the sign, self, and others; in this regard, cavanagh notes that many trans and gender nonconforming interviewees emphasized that cis people often first read themselves as “out of place” when they encounter someone “unexpected” in the restroom. a number of interviewees report witnessing people choose which restroom to use based on their reading of the gender of the person coming in or out of the space (reading the other as sign), and then occasionally doubting whether they are in the right place depending on that reading. often, however, the person will then check the door sign, exhibiting an intriguing amount of self-doubt about the extent to which one is supposed to adhere to the sign on the door or the other people in the bathroom. the process 10 as with identity documentation, it is also the case that the more vulnerable you are within multiple systems of oppression, the more likely you are to move through additional sex-segregated institutions such as homeless shelters and prisons. in the case of bathrooms, for example, your class status may make it less likely that you will need to access public restrooms regularly, given that you may have easier access to private restrooms (whether in the home or in a place of business where a single stall restroom is available upon making a purchase). 11 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 here follows a pattern: who are you? am i in the right place? am i that sign? are you that sign? the potential disorientation is usually eased by the memory work of the sign, a sign that can be trusted to remember what otherwise we might all be more productively confused about. the externalized memory of the sign enables a normative forgetting of the complexity of bathrooms and identification. nietzsche also directs us to look for the ‘burn’ of this memory-making; in the space of the restroom, the burn of the sign indicates this memory work. the burning stare of the other indicates a memory that is being supported by this space. however, the reminders only burn for those who have failed, in some way, to allow this memory-making to go unnoticed. the view of identity underpinning these encounters is especially apparent in the recent debates in state legislatures around the so-called bathroom bills, wherein it is the past self, assigned at birth, who is supposed to use the restroom. the lived self is taken out of the equation. the navigation of this gendered space is thus designed to make one feel the reminder of this past assignment through its tension or acquiescence with one’s present gender. the space is designed to remind inhabitants of the success or failure to match up to this past assignment. while the design of the sex-segregated restroom perpetuates the idea that knowing which one to use is an obvious and natural fact, the energy expended in policing both the space and oneself tells a different story. cavanagh (2010) describes the bathroom as a place of forgetting, of burying cultural logics and structures: “the bathroom is a repository for the societal unconscious: all that western modernity forgets, disavows, and casts asunder in polite discourse” (29). in turn, her critical response can be understood as the work of remembering everything that is forgotten in the cultural function of the bathroom. i am arguing, however, that the bathroom is also a site of intense memory. moving in and out of these spaces involves being reminded in a number of ways of what otherwise seems more at risk of resistant forgetting. it is a place where sex/gender in particular is remembered as architecture. we must, in turn, learn how to creatively forget this memory, or how to cultivate a resistant forgetting. in closing, i turn now to the question of what this resistant forgetfulness looks like at the level of externalized memory. iv. resistant forgetting in the second of nietzsche’s (1997) untimely meditations, he questions the degree of forgetting that is necessary for the health of an individual or culture. the failure to forget is a “historical sickness” (120), a sickness contracted from being so tied up in the past that its repetition becomes a compulsion. as an antidote, the “art and power of forgetting” (120) promises to balance the historical and the 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 unhistorical. in the language of nietzsche’s (1989) genealogy of morals, this is the kind of forgetting that “digests” and clears room. forgetting is not endorsed here as an abstract good. to the contrary, it is a specific tool wielded against an overdetermined (and overdetermining) past. nietzsche’s discussion of monumental history clarifies this point by explicitly marking a negative use of forgetting; in this mode of relating to history, the past is surveyed for its imitability or its worthiness of being monumentalized. to relate to the past in this monumentalizing way, so much has to be forgotten: “the past itself suffers harm: whole segments of it are forgotten, despised, and flow away in an uninterrupted colourless flood, and only individual embellished facts rise out of it like islands” (nietzsche 1997, 70). forgetting is negatively cast here as a strategic way to close the potential forces at work in the present; in other words, forgetting can be used to retroactively fit the past to the narrative needs of the present. in the framework of gender as internalized memory outlined above, this normalizing forgetting might involve, for example, the erasure of the work that goes into the habitually gendered body. there is also, however, a resistant forgetting that rejects what has been “burnt in” in order to clear room for other relationships to the present. in nietzsche’s (1997) untimely meditations, this forgetting is involved in the critical mode of history: “if he [sic] is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past” (76). here, forgetting represents the possibility of dissolving a calcified present. what if we took a cue from nietzsche and saw the movement away from assigned genders as a sign of creative forgetfulness? what, then, stands in the way of these creative acts of forgetting? in considering gender as internalized memory, such resistant forgetting includes acting otherwise, or failing to remember what is expected. at the level of the individual, this may involve remembering the work that has gone into the habitual body in order to forget the expected repetition. the shift to externalized memory complicates the question of resistant forgetting. what does resistant forgetting look like when gender, as memory, has been “burnt outside” the body, as in the examples of identity documents and sexsegregated institutions? first, i suggest that this shift involves attending to the consequences of a mismatch between one’s lived and documented gender. it is crucial to situate this disconnect as a potential form of resistance to the preservation of an externalized memory while also attending to the harmful consequences of the preservation of gender at the level of the state. resistant forgetting therefore involves thinking differently not only about how and why we participate in mundane, everyday acts of identity documentation but also about the kinds of punishments with which this memory-making is intertwined. 13 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 in his work on gender markers and privatized credit reporting, lars mackenzie (2017) writes that “outdated data stick, maintaining a connection between a past and present identity and drawing a trans history into focus” (46, emphasis added). data inconsistencies—or the “haunting” of past data (46)—caused by a change in name can cause trans people to become illegible to credit reporting systems, leading to long-lasting negative effects in areas such as employment and housing. when both administrative and consumer reporting systems expect an identity that is unchanging, the attempt to link a new legal identity to past data is thwarted by the persistence of that outdated data (the data that “sticks”).11 this is what mackenzie refers to as the “afterlife” of identification data. forgetting retains its doubled meaning here. on the one hand, it is tempting to say that the massive amount of information collected by big data surveillance is, in an important sense, forgotten. certainly, much of it will never see the light of day. as a normalized forgetting, however, the massive amount of data does not simply disappear but rather threatens to reemerge as a memory that “burns” when the normative assumptions of identity are challenged in the present. it is by taking advantage of this accumulation of externalized memory, however, that strategies of resistant forgetting also emerge. mackenzie writes: while the disconnected yet interrelated processes that go into producing a credit report are a bureaucratic nightmare for some, . . . the materiality of the bureaucracy may work in favor of illegible subjects at certain moments, disrupting the presumed omnipotent power of data systems to tell the truth about a person’s identity. trans people take advantage of the confusing and chaotic processes of data surveillance over their bodies, and the assertion that institutions must have the final word on which data are produced about them. (58) examples of this resistance include convincing data entry clerks that the gender marker on their ids is clearly an error, claiming that ssns must have been mixed up with a sibling, or simply asking a data entry clerk to change the record (56–58). the same inconsistencies that cause harm become potential sources of resistance. affirming the actual dynamism of externalized memories becomes one way of resisting the harm of static and unmoving memories. furthermore, such struggles are not only individual matters, but must be part of larger efforts to change the identity narratives expected and embodied by these data structures. 11 the normative expectation that identity will remain unchanging over time may also lend force to the desire to narrate gender transition in terms of fundamental change. for a critical account of this narrative, see billingsley 2015. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 moving from identification data to the structures of sex-segregated bathrooms further complicates the question of what it means to forget an externalized memory. in the space of the bathroom, resistant forgetting may involve failing to engage in expected ways with architectural gender reminders. as we move through the space of the bathroom, paying attention to what has been made habitual—through normalized forgetting—has the potential to rewrite the repetitive scripts witnessed in cavanagh’s interviews, especially in terms of the unthinking reliance on a stable reading of self, other, and sign-as-arbiter. resistant forgetting may also be practiced at the level of architecture. in nietzsche’s (1989) defense of forgetting in genealogy, forgetfulness allows one to “close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time” (57). here, consciousness is figured as internal architecture; forgetting therefore operates metaphorically as a shutting of doors and windows. by tracing the externalization of memory, however, we also come to see the inverse: when architecture serves as consciousness, or as memory, forgetfulness must disrupt space in more literal ways. in this regard, consider universities that have refused to ontologize gender in the form of sexsegregated bathroom signs. as the result of student-led efforts to make campus bathrooms exclusively gender neutral, hampshire college relabeled existing bathrooms (single and multi-stall) as “gender neutral restroom,” “restroom with urinals,” or “restroom without urinals” (pitcher and zurn, forthcoming; pryor 2017, 132). this rewriting of signs counteracts the normalizing memory work of sexsegregated signs with a resistant forgetting—in this case, such forgetting involves disrupting the reminders embedded in bathroom business as usual. it is also worth noting in this regard that an intermediary stage of signage at hampshire relied on the language of “self-identified men” and “self-identified women”; when read through a nietzschean framework of memory and forgetting, this signage arguably fails to adequately disrupt the normalizing memory work of the bathroom due to its continued reliance on familiar categories of male and female. while the effects of the most recent sign decision and this kind of architectural forgetting in general are far from predictable, such initiatives offer a way of thinking about what it means to make a bathroom forget. beyond this specific example, the challenges faced more broadly by efforts to implement gender neutral bathrooms speak to the intense investment in the bathroom as an externalized memory of the normative body. from another angle, lucas crawford (2014) argues that changing signs is not enough to disrupt the gendered space of the bathroom. while many of the arguments against gender neutral bathrooms fail to stand up to logical examination (overall 2007), crawford emphasizes that the demand for privacy and norms around hygiene are embodied by the architecture of the restroom in ways that resist rational critique. to take one example, the gendered space of the bathroom is also deeply racialized, connected as modern restrooms are to histories of public health 15 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 and colonial anxiety. crawford (2014, 634) concludes that “if washroom fears are ingrained in bodily habits at a different register than thoughtful rationality, then such fears will not respond to education campaigns or policy alone.” the multilayered nature of the issues at stake in the bathroom leads crawford to disagree that implementing gender-neutral space is enough to “neutralize” the bathroom. what does it mean, for example, that the “urinal” referent remains in the signs at hampshire college? is this language a way of preserving a memory of the body, and therefore of expected gender? rather than resolving the question of whether rewriting bathroom signs in any particular way is sufficient, i suggest the nietzschean framework of memory, especially when expanded to the question of externalized memory, allows a way to navigate these questions with a focus on both the importance and complexity of engaging in resistant forgetting. conclusion: clearing room i have offered two examples of externalized memory and resistant forgetting through identity documents and sex-segregated institutions. in both cases, gender is being preserved outside the body. taking seriously this externalization of gender has several implications that allow us to rethink nietzsche’s account of memory and forgetting in a contemporary frame. first, while social or interpersonal punishment may continue to burn gender into the body (and it certainly does), institutionally administered punishment is focused on burning a version of gender outside the body. at this level of power, punishment targets a mismatch between lived and documented gender or a mismatch between a person and an institution. these consequences range from not being able to access health care to being denied housing and employment. this kind of mismatch also causes intensified visibility and vulnerability in spaces such as airports, interactions with police, and seemingly mundane, everyday actions such as using the bathroom. the punishment here is importantly distinct. its contours direct our attention to rates of incarceration, unemployment, partial employment, lack of social security, and so on. such punishment is in some way removed from the body, even as it impacts bodily experience. by analyzing the impact of gender as an externalized memory, we grant new life to nietzsche’s questions about memory and forgetting. while the individual level remains important, disrupting such externalized memory requires different strategies. in other words, a focus on the internalization of gender does not offer a sufficient explanation of how gender operates as a memory today or of what resistant forgetting might entail at this externalized level. second, this shift to gender as externalized memory relates directly to recent conversations in feminist and queer theory around how to best understand a neoliberal embrace of nonconformity at the level of the individual (e.g. w. brown 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/1 2015; duggan 2003; mcwhorter 2012; winnubst 2012, 2015). many scholars and activists have questioned how to understand a shift in regimes of power from a focus on individual bodies to a focus on what foucault calls security and population management. given neoliberal claims to love difference and diversity— a love that allows the machine of capitalist, entrepreneurial subjectivity to have even more material to profit from—power can appear to have loosened its hold on the individual. as a result, there has been a struggle to understand an increased embrace of nonconformity and diversity that confounds longstanding feminist frameworks built around a fear of difference. the externalization of memory offers one way to understand how identity categories such as gender are being preserved along other levels of power, even as there is a claim to embrace diversity and nonconformity at the level of the individual. in light of nietzsche’s interest in how the whole “bloody, bodily process” of instituting memory only comes to a “sort of end” with the internalization of consciousness, i have examined the externalization of this consciousness through the examples of identity documents and sex-segregated institutions. by separating a normalizing forgetting from a resistant forgetting, i have also made clearer the kind of memory work involved in each. resistant forgetting requires resistant memory work; this work sifts through the institutional practices that legitimize particular identity arrangements at the expense of others. knowing what has been “burnt in” is crucial for resistant forgetting; the past is loosened, rather than solidified, through this resistant memory work. as a result, other movements become thinkable in the present. nietzsche (1997, 76) is clear that “it is not possible to wholly free oneself from this chain [of the past].” something like complete forgetting, a blank slate, is not the goal. to simply regard oneself as free of the past is not the purpose; rather, the goal is to understand what one has inherited “so that our first nature withers away” (76). creating a second nature, here, is then “an attempt to give oneself . . . a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate” (76). resistant forgetting is not invested in erasure but in how to reopen the present; in nietzsche’s words, this is a forgetting that “clears room.” as demonstrated by the example of architecture, it is through the realization that a space is remembering for you that resistant forgetting becomes possible; this occurs not in order to erase any trace of that past normalizing memory work but as a way of reopening the present. certainly, both forgetfulness and memory can be used in the name of the status quo. forgetfulness can be used to absolve oneself of responsibility just as memory can be used to ensure that one controls the present and future. as theorists of colonialism have shown repeatedly, temporality is a crucial tool in struggles for power. forgetting is too often wielded as an instrument of the powerful. nietzsche, however, urges us to also see forgetting as a positive activity. 17 draz: nietzsche, gender, and externalized memory published by scholarship@western, 2018 against the view of it as a passive and negative force, forgetting may be a creative and resistant act. we must in turn also be more creative about locating where and how we are being remembered. references abel, elizabeth. 2010. signs of the times: the visual politics of jim crow. berkeley: university of california press. ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2017. living a feminist life. durham, nc: duke university press. bartky, sandra lee. 1990. femininity and domination. new york: routledge. billingsley, amy. 2015. 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"bias, structure, and injustice: a reply to haslanger."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (1). article 4. bias, structure, and injustice: a reply to haslanger1 robin zheng abstract sally haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. i argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and i propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure. keywords: structural injustice; implicit bias; moral responsibility; social justice i. introduction moral philosophers, those who write on matters of morality and those concerned to conduct themselves morally, have taken great interest of late in the phenomenon of implicit bias, for many reasons. to give just two: implicit biases have been used to explain the persistence of social inequalities (e.g., the underrepresentation of women and minorities) long after discrimination has been outlawed, and to advocate changes in everyday practices that may be implicitly biased (e.g., grading, hiring, peer-review) (saul 2013a). however, it has long been argued that oppression is not reducible to problems with individuals or individual psychologies. in other words, we might say, “racism (sexism, etc.) ain’t in the head.” rather, forms of oppression are complex systems of disadvantage encompassing 1 i am grateful for feedback from audiences at the 2016 university of sheffield bias in context conference, 2016 association for social and political philosophy annual conference, map@leeds conference, university of hamburg feminist philosophy workshop, north carolina state university philosophy colloquium series, the 2014 yale bouchet conference on diversity and graduate education, and the university of sheffield feminist reading group. i am also thankful for extremely helpful comments from simeon newman and two anonymous referees for feminist philosophy quarterly. 1 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, political, economic, social, and cultural institutions—in short, they are structural (see, e.g., collins [1990] 2000; frye 1983). what is the connection between implicit bias and structural injustice? sally haslanger (2015) has made a crucial intervention by posing this question. her answer, however, is largely negative: “if the best explanation of social stratification is structural, then implicit bias seems at best tangential to what is needed to achieve justice. why the recent emphasis on implicit bias as a solution?” (2). haslanger’s critique raises challenges for the burgeoning moral literature on implicit bias (see, e.g., brownstein and saul 2016), which has predominantly been concerned with the question of individual responsibility for biases. specifically, haslanger charges that the individualism of the implicit bias literature makes it “inadequate to explain ongoing injustice” and “fails to call attention to what is morally at stake,” and hence that “an adequate account of how implicit bias functions must situate it within a broader theory of social structures and structural injustice” (1). in this paper, i take some steps toward carrying out that task by showing that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice. in section ii, i present haslanger’s argument against focusing on implicit bias, which falls out of a deeper critique of individualist approaches to injustice. i first address the charge of individualism in sections iii and iv. i defend the need for a theory of individual responsibility for structural change, and i show how recent theories of responsibility as accountability provide a different way of focusing on individual action and attitude that is responsive to haslanger’s concerns. i further argue that collective action itself requires individualistic responsibility practices, using examples from contemporary labor and social movements. finally, in section v, i briefly consider implicit bias on its own terms, suggesting an alternative understanding on which biases are themselves a certain kind of social structure. in short, social transformation begins once we step out from the explanatory perspective of social theorist and into the practical perspective of organizer or concerned individual, and it is from this vantage point that individual responsibility and implicit bias loom large. ii. haslanger’s challenge explanatory vs. normative individualism haslanger’s critique, in a nutshell, is that if rectifying structural injustice cannot be achieved by modifying individual (racist, sexist, etc.) actions and attitudes, then a fortiori it cannot be achieved by modifying implicit (racist, sexist, etc.) attitudes. she identifies and rejects two potential roles implicit bias might play in theorizing injustice: an explanatory role identifying the causes of structural injustice, and a normative role identifying what is wrong with and who is responsible for 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 structural injustice. the problem with both, for haslanger, is their individualism, their focus on individuals rather than social structures. haslanger’s primary target is the presumed explanatory role of implicit bias and its use in “standard stories.” standard stories are explanatory narratives in which social outcomes are explained as the aggregative effects of individual agents’ actions—for example, when racial and gender inequality are explained as the cumulative result of individuals’ (implicit) racist and sexist decisions. but, as haslanger demonstrates, racist and sexist attitudes are not necessary for unjust outcomes, for there are many that result from ordinary decent individuals acting in perfectly reasonable ways, given their situations: a husband and wife whose decision to make her the primary caregiver (because only she receives parental leave) results in unequal incomes, a teacher whose fair disciplining of a black student leads him and his non-white friends (because they have experienced long patterns of racism) to disengage and perform badly in her classroom, and a worker who loses his job due to the city’s cancelling (because they are strapped for cash) his bus route to work. in these cases, individuals might have sexist or racist attitudes, or they might not. but just giving an account of structural constraints in each case is sufficient to make intelligible why these individuals acted as they did and what resulted; no further investigation into whether they also harbor implicit biases is necessary. my primary aim in this paper, by contrast, is to consider individualism and implicit bias from a normative perspective—that is, to defend a “normative focus” on individuals (haslanger 2015, 10). although haslanger is not very clear on what she means by this, she seems to countenance at least two distinct ways in which individual action and attitude might serve as a focus in normative theorizing: first, as a guide to the best explanation of what is wrong with injustice,2 and second, as a guide to who is responsible for injustice.3 she rejects the first possibility for the following reasons: the focus on individuals (and their attitudes) occludes the injustices that pervade the structural and cultural context and the ways that the context both constrains and enables our action. it reinforces fictional conceptions of 2 early in the paper she asserts that the “normative core of what is wrong with racism/sexism lies not in the ‘bad attitudes’ of individuals but in the asymmetrical burdens and benefits and inegalitarian relationships that societies impose on such groups” (haslanger 2015, 2). 3 in the same section, she considers the view that “implicit bias may be part of the normative story, for insofar as we can change our implicit attitudes, we are plausibly responsible for them” (2). 3 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, autonomy and self-determination that prevents [sic] us from taking responsibility for our social milieu (social meanings, social relations, and social structures). (10) the idea seems to be as follows. responsibility for an action, traditionally understood, requires that an agent was able to choose differently than she did (or that she had control over her actions, did so voluntarily, and so on). by trying to hold individuals responsible for actions contributing to injustice, we thereby ascribe to them forms of autonomy and self-determination that they lack. in reality, their choices are highly constrained by social structures.4 as haslanger puts it: “structures, and their component schemas and resources, can be responsible for injustice, without implicit bias or ill-will on the part of the participants in a milieu” (4).5 the wrongness of injustice, then, consists primarily in bad social structures rather than bad individuals. moreover, since individuals lack the power to change social structures, haslanger advocates shifting normative focus away from individuals to social groups, that is, shifting away from a “tendency to focus on the individual (or state?) as the moral (or political?) agent” to a “politics of claim-making by and on behalf of social groups” (10–11). she writes: social change requires contestation, organization, and activism. working to correct our own biases may be a minimum requirement on us. but we are each complicit in the perpetuation of unjust structures, practices, and institutions. moral responsibility concerns not only what i can and should do, but also what we can and should do together. (12) i wholeheartedly endorse haslanger’s call to collective contestation. however, i am doubtful that we can6 or should avoid a normative focus on individuals, in the sense 4 see lavin (2008) for a broadly similar argument. 5 indeed, in earlier work haslanger has defended a distinction between “agent oppression,” an act of wrongful harm committed by an individual, and “structural oppression,” that is, cases in which “there may not be an oppressor, in the sense of an agent responsible for the oppression [because] practices and institutions oppress” (2004, 103). rather than think that no agent is responsible for injustice, my view is that we should think of all agents as responsible (but only in the accountability, rather than attributability, sense; see section iii). 6 perhaps this could be done in terms of collective responsibility; indeed, many philosophers, following virginia held (1970), have conceived of responsibility for injustice as a problem of collective inaction. on this view, individuals can be judged 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 of viewing them as the appropriate bearers of responsibility for structural transformation. in particular, i think that the two kinds of normative focus come apart. while questions of normative explanation can be undertaken from a broadly theoretical third-personal perspective (as haslanger does), questions of responsibility are necessarily addressed from the firstand second-personal practical perspectives of motivating and responding to action, from which we cannot but think of ourselves and others as persons imbued with individual agency. it is all very well to say that we need structural solutions rather than reformed individuals, but it is much less obvious what kind of collective action should be undertaken and how. existing social structures are highly resilient and exert strong pressures on individuals, who often prefer to simply try surviving the status quo. as many organizers would attest, the biggest obstacle to collective action usually just is empowering people to think collectively rather than individually—to invest substantial time, effort, and hope in the face of dauntingly powerful structures of domination. moreover, it is often those most disadvantaged by existing structures who possess the fewest resources to spare toward political organizing. under these conditions, then, how can we hold people responsible for organizing collective action? what does it actually mean for us to take responsibility for our social milieu? in the next two sections i shall argue that the best answers to these questions, especially when we accept haslanger’s call to collective action, retain a normative focus on individuals. specifically, i shall argue that theories of individual moral responsibility for injustice are available and necessary (section iii), and that collective organizing itself must involve certain individualistic accountability practices (section iv). blameworthy for failing to form a hypothetical collective agent that they could have formed (held 1970). wary of the charge that collective responsibility is “barbarous” for punishing individuals for the actions of others, however, theorists of collective responsibility have worked to preserve the same conditions of autonomy and selfdetermination required for responsibility as traditionally understood. thus with regard to collective inaction, they have limited ascriptions of blameworthiness to cases in which it would be clear to a reasonable person that a collective agent could and should be formed (isaacs 2011) or to instances when there is sufficient time and knowledge of how to coordinate actions such that there is “practical plausibility to the counterfactual claim that the group could have done otherwise” (may 1990, 269–277). i am doubtful, however, that these clarity and plausibility conditions are often or ever met (cf. doan 2016). 5 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, iii. accountability for structural injustice from attributability to accountability the problem, i think, is this: extant theories of responsibility for implicit bias—haslanger’s target—have largely been theories of responsibility as attributability, whereas the most promising theories of responsibility for injustice are theories of accountability. while the purpose of attributability is to assess people’s quality as moral agents, the purpose of accountability is to distribute duties and burdens across a moral community. the problems haslanger identifies with individual responsibility are features of attributability but not accountability. while the former may be orthogonal to structural injustice, the latter is important and well-suited for rectifying injustice. in earlier work i advanced an interpretation of the attributability vs. accountability distinction as originating from two separate philosophical problems (zheng 2016). attributability has its roots in metaphysics and action theory, and arises from the problem of action: what makes my actions count as genuine exercises of my own agency (and not merely events happening to or within me)? the primary function of this concept is delineating which actions count as legitimate exercises of agency and hence as grounds for assessing moral agents as good or bad exemplars of their kind; accordingly, the conditions for ascribing attributability are typically psychological or metaphysical in nature. the implicit bias literature has focused on just this question of whether implicitly biased actions are properly attributable to agents as exercises of their moral agency. jules holroyd, for instance, argues that we have the types of control and awareness required for responsibility—namely, indirect long-range control over actions that can mitigate bias over time (holroyd 2012), and occurrent observational awareness that one’s responses are biased (holroyd 2015). by contrast, neil levy (2014a, 2014b) cautions against ascribing responsibility for implicit biases because they are only “patchy endorsements” and cannot be taken to reflect an agent’s evaluative stance. i have argued similarly that biases are not attributable when agents would not reflectively endorse them and have otherwise made reasonable efforts to mitigate them (zheng 2016). but michael brownstein contends that we are responsible for implicit biases because they express our cares, that is, what really matters to us, even if we do not endorse them (brownstein 2015). each of these views proposes some candidate condition—control, awareness, evaluative endorsement, and expressing care—under which an implicitly biased action may be attributed to a person as reflective of her agency and hence warrant blame, punishment, or reactive attitudes. however, a different concept of responsibility—responsibility as “accountability”—is more important for cases of implicit bias. accountability is rooted not in metaphysics but in moral and political philosophy, where the 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 foundational question is, how should we assign duties and burdens across the moral community in line with principles of justice and fairness?7 when a person fails to carry out some duty, the concept of accountability functions in the first instance to ensure that the moral community takes up the costs of dealing with harm done, by distributing those costs to appropriate parties. it is not yet, and not necessarily at all, to determine whether she has acted badly or well or what kind of agent she is. of course, if the reason an agent has failed to carry out her responsibility is that she acted badly, then she deserves blame and punishment as well—but whether she does is a further question that we can, but need not, ask. seeking to assign blame in addition to assigning burdens of repair will trigger considerations of attributability at this later stage, which is why the two concepts are often conflated. in other words, a person may be ascribed accountability for some action even if she is not attributively responsible for it, or if we do not care to further investigate whether she is also attributively responsible. theories of accountability have primarily been developed by political philosophers. iris marion young (2011), for example, distinguishes between what she calls the “liability” and “social connections” models of responsibility. the former is a conception of attributability, on which an agent is responsible for an unjust outcome if she brought it about knowingly and voluntarily. young, however, advocates that we adopt the latter model, a conception of accountability on which everyone who causally participates in an unjust outcome is responsible for bearing some of the burdens of collectively reforming the structural processes that led to it. robert goodin (1987) has defended a theory of “task-responsibility,” according to which people are assigned different ex ante tasks, and responsibility is subsequently apportioned in accordance with a person’s role, rather than evil intentions or character-revealing negligence; this distinguishes it from what goodin calls “blameresponsibility”—another conception of attributability. in light of the above, it is clearly theories of attributability rather than accountability that are vulnerable to haslanger’s critique. whether an agent acted with autonomy and self-determination is relevant to determining if an action is properly attributable to her, because actions lacking those features do not count as genuine exercises of moral agency. they may not have been chosen under the agent’s control, with her reflective endorsement, as an expression of her cares—or however we want to cash out “autonomy” and “self-determination” metaphysically 7 note that this refers to a normatively acceptable, i.e., just and fair, rather than actual distribution of duties and burdens. injustice may consist precisely in the way that duties are inequitably distributed, e.g., how caretaking responsibilities fall heavily on women rather than men. i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point. 7 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, and psychologically; it would be unfair to blame, punish, or resent her in these cases even if the action is morally faulty. but autonomy and self-determination are not required for assigning burdens to an agent for the purpose of remedying some harmful outcome. since those costs must be distributed somehow or other, an agent may be fairly assigned these burdens merely on the basis of causal proximity, or in virtue of her role, even if she was in no way at fault. thus, just as we can hold an agent accountable for her implicitly biased action without thereby attributing it to her, we can hold an agent accountable for structural injustice without attributing any fault to her.8 why responsibility? at this point it might be asked, why do we need any concept of responsibility at all, be it attributability or accountability? why not dispense with these “fictional” conceptions of autonomy and self-determination altogether, given that it is often structures rather than individuals that oppress? i would like to offer three reasons why individual responsibility remains important for theorizing structural injustice. first, theories of responsibility do important normative work in justifying and enforcing the demand to work toward structural transformation. for we have accepted that unjust outcomes result even when individuals act in reasonable ways that would otherwise be morally unproblematic, that is, if not embedded within overarching unjust social structural systems. if that is so, then why should any particular agent be expected to change their behavior,9 so long as they do not commit blatant wrongdoing? as young (2011, 8 indeed, both of my arguments for ascribing accountability rather than attributability for implicit bias transfer directly to structural injustice. just as it is difficult to establish the operation of implicit bias in any given particular case (though it can be determined at the aggregate level), so too does the nature of structural injustice mean that it is almost impossible to identify precisely how a specific agent’s actions directly caused a specific harm to others (though the harms of the overall structural process can be identified) (i. m. young 2011, 96). and just as blaming people for implicit bias often provokes denial and resistance, structural injustice often produces what young (2011, 117) calls a “round-robin ‘blame game’” in which parties (justifiably) point to others’ actions over which they had no control, rather than their own, as the cause of some unjust outcome. 9 this problem is vividly summed up in a popular three-panel cartoon depicting a man speaking to a large audience from a podium. in the first panel, all hands are up and the crowd is all smiles, as he asks: “who wants change?” in the second, all hands have come down and the smiles have vanished, as he asks: “who wants to 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 165) notes, people often think the task of structural transformation is “not their job,” but rather someone else’s, for example, the state’s. some justification is required for demanding of individuals that they undertake burdens for the sake of rectifying injustice. ascribing responsibility to a person provides justificatory grounds for such a demand. when we ascribe responsibility to someone, we make a normative claim on them to the effect that they are expected to act in some way or take up some kind of burden, such that they are appropriately subject to critical moral responses by others. for attributability, the grounds for this claim lie in the fact that persons are moral agents and are expected to exercise their agency in accordance with moral norms. when they exercise their agency badly, they deserve on that basis to be blamed, punished, or subject to other reactive attitudes. for accountability, both justification and response will be different (as i explain in the next section). of course, actual agents may take up the work of structural transformation out of all sorts of motives: compassion, benevolence, religiosity, rebelliousness, or ambition, to name a few. but bearing responsibility is a normatively powerful reason for acting. second, some notion of responsibility—with its attendant notions of autonomy, self-determination, and the like—is necessary for action. haslanger notes that standard stories “may be irresistible for humans . . . because they focus on the autonomy of persons and enable us to locate and judge moral responsibility” (haslanger 2015, 9). i would say, rather, than they are indispensable, because it is always from the individual first-person perspective that each of us acts. in acting, we cannot help but experience ourselves as having the choice to act or not act, in one way or the other. conversely, experiencing this choice as a choice is a necessary step for undertaking any action at all, but especially action directed against what can feel like overwhelmingly oppressive social structures. as haslanger notes, structure and agency are interdependent: while structures constrain individuals’ actions, they only exist so long as they are enacted and reenacted by individual agents. the possibility of social change, then, lies in the agency of individuals within a structure whose behavior maintains it—whose behavior, therefore, might alter it. and it is usually other moral agents who alert us to the existence of this agency and shape our experience of it. this means, finally, that theories of moral responsibility perform an important action-guiding function. they direct us, from the second-personal perspective, toward morally appropriate responses to others’ actions. thus, normative individualism might not derive from the “impoverished” view that change?” in the final panel, he is left facing an empty room after he asks: “who wants to lead the change?” 9 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, haslanger rejects, that is, the individualist idea that “our only (or best) option for changing social reality is to take responsibility for our own thought and perception and encouraging others to do the same” (2015, 12). rather, theories of moral responsibility provide guidance in cases where others fail to take up their share of the collective burden or make mistakes in doing so—both of which are unavoidable on the long hard road to justice. while the work of structural change is collective, it is always particular individuals, their actions and attitudes, that we confront in the classroom, in the meeting hall, and on the streets. a theory of individual moral responsibility for structural injustice thus takes seriously the interpersonal relationships between persons that are key to the actual day-to-day work of contestation, organization, and activism. and different theories of individual moral responsibility as expressed in organizational practice, for example, whether attributability or accountability is being ascribed, can markedly impact how well the organization is able to engage its own members and to build coalitional solidarity with others. i illustrate these claims in the next section. iv. practicing accountability in collective organizing i have argued that we need a theory of individual moral responsibility for structural injustice, and that accountability is ascribable even when attributability is not, such as in contexts of injustice. but how should we actually hold agents accountable for injustice? while political philosophers have explicitly eschewed practices of blame associated with attributability, they typically do not offer any account of distinctive backward-looking critical moral responses that are central to any theory of moral responsibility.10 in this section i describe two examples, organizing conversations and call-outs, that address problems central to the kind of collective organizing and activism that haslanger advocates: the problem of mobilizing action, and the problem of maintaining solidarity. the burdens of rectifying injustice first, however, i need to say something about how a theory of accountability addresses the problems of justification and response i outlined in the last section, since it will not depend on judging that a person exercised her moral agency poorly. in contexts of structural injustice, such ascriptions of attributability are problematic 10 david miller (2001, 454, 469) mentions “pressure of various kinds” and “sanctions,” but states only that they will vary from case to case. notably, even christopher kutz’s (2000) careful treatment of the various relationship-dependent backward-looking responses merited by individuals complicit in collective harms changes tune when he reaches the problem of unorganized collectivities: there he redirects focus to cultivating forward-looking motivations. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 because they mislocate what needs to be changed: the range of options available, not the agency of the individuals involved. moreover, it is a highly fraught question just how much a person is morally obligated to do towards rectifying injustice, and we are often not in a position to know whether a person’s failure to contribute on some particular occasion is due to a blameworthy exercise of agency or to other pressing structural constraints,11 or whether she is contributing in some other way. by contrast, normative claims on an agent based on accountability rest on very different justificatory grounds. to be sure, accountability does presuppose basic moral agency. but what serves as the real basis for normative claims here are the duties assigned to a person in virtue of her place within a moral community— something that, far from being inimical to a structural picture of injustice, fits right in. indeed, we might combine young’s and goodin’s respective proposals for what is required to ascribe accountability—causal participation in structural processes, and role occupation—to say that individuals are accountable for working toward structural transformation in virtue of their social roles, that is, precisely because of their being embedded in certain positions within social structures.12 in other words, 11 martha nussbaum raises two objections against iris marion young (2011), in favor of holding agents attributively responsible for not contributing. she argues first that “if a has responsibility r for social ill s, and she fails to take it up, then, when the relevant time passes, she is guilty of not having shouldered her responsibility,” and second, that “if it is a general moral truth that citizens ought to monitor the institutions in which they live and be vigilant lest structural injustice occur within them, then i think it follows that they are culpably negligent if they do not shoulder that burden” (i. m. young 2011, xxi). i believe, however, that this objection misconstrues the nature of injustice on haslanger’s and young’s structural accounts. once we understand that injustice is structural, it becomes unrealistic to believe people ever could act on all the social ills for which they can be held in some sense responsible, or that they could adequately monitor the institutions they inhabit for possible injustice. our institutions are already rife with injustice, through and through—after all, structural injustice by its very nature is not limited to particularly egregious cases of wrongdoing but comprises the very background conditions against which these cases occur. moreover, there are so many dimensions of structural injustice that it is unclear how we can be considered to have fully and successfully “shouldered” our responsibility, so long as injustice persists. in other words, there is no “relevant time” at which our responsibilities suddenly get activated; we are at all times already responsible for doing what we can to change unjust background structural conditions. 12 i do not have the space here to defend this particular conception of accountability as grounded in social roles. but in traditional social theory, social roles have a long 11 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, the normative claim is justified by the fact that each of us, no matter how well we exercise our agency, still perpetuates unjust outcomes through our otherwise unproblematic ordinary behaviors; hence we must share some of the burdens of rectifying that injustice by working to transform those behaviors. the logic of accountability practices is thus importantly different from the logic of attributability practices. blame, punishment, and the reactive attitudes consist of some negative appraisal of faulty agency, along with some additional unpleasant treatment or attitude that functions as negative sanction,13 except where that sanction is unwarranted because the negative appraisal is undermined, that is, in cases where the agent has an excuse because the action did not count as a genuine exercise of moral agency. practices of accountability, by contrast, do not require this kind of appraisal in order to be justified. instead, i suggest, in the context of rectifying injustice they have the logic of reminders—reminders of the fact that because one participates unavoidably in unjust structures,14 one therefore bears a burden to work toward structural transformation. reminders, i claim, are critical moral responses because their basic function is to redirect attention, to call upon an agent to stop and reflect on what else she ought to be doing.15 because this fact is not grounded in some poor exercise of agency—and, moreover, because the work of structural transformation is never over, so long as injustice persists—no appraisal of an individual’s actions is necessary for such a reminder to be warranted. reminders are appropriate, indeed, even when a person is already doing everything as she should, for example, when event reminders are sent to everyone on a mailing list, whether or not they are likely to forget. in other words, justification for accountability practices does not depend on an answer to the question “have you acted badly?” but merely on the fact that it is more or less16 always appropriate for us to be reminded of our burden. let me be clear, however, that i do not mean to say that attributability practices of blame and the reactive attitudes are never warranted or efficacious; my point here is merely that accountability licenses history of being understood as the interface between structure and agency (dahrendorf 1968; parsons [1951] 1991). 13 there is considerable disagreement as to precisely what this additional negative sanction is. see coates and tognazzini (2013). 14 again, i do not defend a particular conception of accountability here, but different conceptions will identify different facts in virtue of which one bears this burden: causal participation in structural processes, role occupation, etc. 15 see springer (2013) for an account of critical moral responses as functioning to communicate moral concern about some problem. 16 by this i mean that it is always pro tanto morally justified; it may, for instance, be inconsiderate or insensitive during moments of grief, healing, and so on. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 different critical moral responses that may often be justified or effective in cases where blame is not. it might be objected here that it is unfair for the burdens of rectifying injustice to fall also on its victims, since, as i mentioned in section ii, they have the least resources to spare toward collective action. but this objection lapses back into the framework of attributability. as young (2011, 146) points out, while it would be “perverse” to judge victims of injustice blameworthy for their condition (as on an attributability model), they still share responsibility (as accountability) for these conditions in the sense that they can be reasonably expected to take steps to collectively organize against them, if only because they know the most about their own oppression. moreover, the objection rests on an overly narrow assumption of the ways in which the burden of rectifying structural transformation can be discharged. some of the most visible ways of contributing to structural transformation—protesting in the streets, lobbying city councils and state legislatures, or overhauling discriminatory institutional policy—certainly are burdensome, and it is thus particularly important for those in positions of privilege and power to support this work. but contributions need not all be like this. for structural transformation requires not only changes in material conditions and legal institutions, but also in culture and ideology (haslanger 2017). there are thus many different ways, formal and informal, in which people with varying amounts of time and resources may work to discharge their transformative duties: not only in workplaces and unions, but also in their own churches, neighborhoods, households, and so on. each of these relationships17 and contexts presents opportunities for people to facilitate (local) structural transformation, in ways that need not be materially burdensome. for example, consider what patricia hill collins (2000) calls the “motherwork” performed by black women, a contribution performed outside of a formal institutionalized role. collins points out that black women fight oppression when—as an alternative to riskier, more visible forms of activism that require greater time and resources—they “resist passing on to their children externally 17 a striking fact about the astonishingly rapid shift in attitudes toward lgbt people is that those who report to know many lgbt people are more than twice as likely to support gay marriage as those who do not, and those who report having an lgbt close friend or family member are 1.75 times more likely; the effect of personal acquaintance is significant even after controlling for demographic factors (jones, cox, and navarro-rivera 2014). in other words, merely being in a relationship can sometimes constitute meaningful political work. and although such attitude change is no substitute for structural reform, it is important for initiating, implementing, and preserving structural change against backlash (see madva 2016). 13 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, defined images of black women as mules, mammies, matriarchs, and jezebels” and choose instead to “use their families as effective black female spheres of influence to foster their children’s self-valuation and self-reliance” (210). because of the way that “political consciousness can emerge within everyday lived experience” (209), all individuals have ample opportunity to contribute, however incrementally or imperceptibly, to the collective project of structural transformation. the particular ways in which they do so will vary widely depending on their position within a social structure, and in particular on their social roles, because different social roles confer different powers and enable different relationships for individuals who occupy them.18 for some, the effort of merely surviving with one’s self intact represents a form of resistance against hostile structures built to crush them; as audre lorde famously wrote: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” ([1988] 2017, 130). thus the nature of each individual’s contribution will be different. but we all share equally, together, the collective burden of structural transformation—and this fact justifies us in deploying critical moral practices of accountability to remind each other of that burden. the problem of mobilizing action: organizing conversations the two practices of accountability i explore here address problems inherent to any kind of collective organizing. my first example, the organizing conversation, is a response directed toward omissions or failures to act in certain ways; it promotes taking responsibility (as accountability) for structural injustice. my second example, the call out, is a way of holding others responsible for actions that reproduce oppressive dynamics amongst allied groups. in both cases, a theory of individual responsibility provides an underlying rationale for guiding second-personal responses to others’ inaction and mistakes. perhaps the largest barrier to collective organizing (to which i alluded in section i) is the problem of mobilizing people to act against apathy, fear, limited time and resources, competing obligations, and the many other reasons that people fail to participate in collective political action. such failures to act, i claim, do warrant critical moral response—but not blame. one example of the kind of response i have in mind can be found in the contemporary labor movement, which has long been an exemplar of successful collective organizing. many unions train their members to go door-to-door and engage in face-to-face conversations with other members, to persuade them to be more active. a paradigm “organizing conversation” unfolds as follows. the organizer, instructed to spend 70 percent of 18 see iris marion young (2011) for an account of the parameters (power, privilege, interest, and collective ability) that alter how differently positioned people can contribute to structural transformation. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 the conversation listening and 30 percent talking, begins by asking the worker to describe who she is and what her work experience is like (weingarten, cortese, and johnson 2009). the next step is to “agitate and educate” by asking questions such as, “who decides? why are things the way they are, who has the power to determine working conditions and policies, what role do unit members have in determining work and professional conditions?” (49). this is followed by “the union vision,” in which the worker is asked to imagine an ideal workplace through questions such as, “what would it take/what would need to happen for you to do a better job/better serve students/provide better patient care” (49). both of these steps require the worker to locate specific individuals and herself within the social structure of the workplace, along with a range of possible actions that could be performed from those respective positions. the conversation thus serves to highlight the individual agency that sustains—and can therefore alter—the structure. next comes an inoculation against common fears and objections. if an individual describes herself as unable to do anything about a problem, for instance, the organizer can ask what would happen if her entire unit did something together, such as sign a joint letter or show up together in their supervisor’s office. finally, the organizer is in a position to make an “ask.”. what is crucial about making asks is meeting people where they are, no matter where that is, and pulling them just a bit further—to schedule a follow-up conversation, provide information, join a mailing list, wear a button, attend a meeting, or recruit another member—because “that’s how 3s become 2s and 1s” (49). whilst the organizing conversation is designed specifically for union-building, it seems clear to me that it is also a practice of holding people accountable for taking responsibility for injustice. there is a critical dimension to the contours of the conversation, because it functions as a reminder of the agency that individuals can exercise in service of structural transformation—where that agency can be exercised differently by different individuals and might consist in something quite small, such as wearing a button. the organizing conversation thus encourages two senses of “taking responsibility” identified by claudia card: a person’s “agreeing to answer or account for something, or finding that one should be answerable” along with “committing [themselves] to stand behind something, to back it, support it, make it good” (card 2010, 28). but its internal logic is not justified by any kind of agent appraisal; organizing conversations are directed at an entire membership, not only inactive members. the goal is not to negatively sanction anyone, but to acknowledge the constraints individuals face while reminding them of what they can do and empowering them to do what they can. it is therefore important, as 15 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, emphasized by unions using the “organizing” rather than “service” model,19 to engage in regular and consistent organizing, outside of particular campaigns or in reaction to particular abuses of power (banks and metzgar 1989). one can imagine the organizing conversation being adapted for a variety of problems, or, more likely, one can recognize trace elements of it in all sorts of ordinary conversations that already transpire between concerned individuals. although the organizing conversation is not the only way to mobilize action, it is the most reliable and effective technique in the organizer’s handbook. the problem of maintaining solidarity: call-outs a second significant barrier to collective action is the difficulty of preserving solidarity amongst diverse groups who relate to one another across varying dimensions of oppression. the white working class is oppressed, but they may oppress their fellow black workers; black men are oppressed with respect to race, but they may also oppress black women, and so on—this is a familiar point (e.g., hooks 1984). the easiest way to prevent collective action is for such groups to be divided and conquered.20 contemporary social movements organizing around identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. represent the cutting edge in thought and praxis concerning the day-to-day practicalities of intergroup solidarity. one example of such a practice is the “call-out.” to “call out” a person is to point out to them how something she has said is racist, sexist, heterosexist, ableist, or otherwise oppressive. call-outs represents an important way in which “allies,” that is, people who do not themselves belong to but support the liberation of some oppressed group, can work to relieve some of the onus21 that usually falls on members of those groups. 19 “service model” unions focus on providing expert services on behalf of their members, e.g., negotiating labor contracts and providing legal representation. “organizing model” unions, by contrast, emphasize high involvement and activity on the part of rank-and-file members, not just the leadership. 20 while exogenous factors such as violent repression can certainly also crush a movement, i focus on the dangers of internal divisions because they are inherent to all attempts at mass organizing, and because they are in principle preventable by those participating in such efforts. for accounts of how racial and gender divisions have weakened the labor movement see, e.g., fletcher and gapasin (2008) and cobble (2007). cobble (2007) and clawson (2003) argue that the revival of the us labor movement will require prioritizing the concerns of diverse constituencies concentrated in the new identity-based social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 21 this is what nora berenstain (2016, 570) calls “epistemic exploitation,” that is, “the unpaid and often unacknowledged work of providing information, resources, 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 what i want to point out here is that critical moral responses like call-outs are important—especially in the context of collective organizing—because there is a normative and practical problem here that structural explanations cannot automatically resolve. the specific individuals involved face the real, live question of how to feel and relate to one another after what has just been said or done. how should one feel and respond after oppressive behavior? does it matter if it was done unwittingly and with good intentions? what are the psychic and other costs of educating or carrying on with that person—for oneself and for the group? these questions are part of an acrimonious and ongoing debate in (online) activist circles around what has been deemed “call-out culture.” critics of call-out culture charge that the practice produces a “toxic” climate of vicious attacks, banishment and ostracization, self-censorship, fear, and ultimately the disintegration of the movement (ahmad 2015; lee 2017; trần 2016). defenders of call-outs, however, point out that these criticisms have been largely aimed at women of color, and in return raise charges of the “tone argument” or “tone policing,” that is, the “act of disregarding the substance of someone’s argument by focusing on the way it was conveyed” (c. young 2014). the argument here is that objections to being called out often amount to (privileged) people not being able to tolerate being held accountable for their mistakes, and unfairly asking (marginalized) people to suppress their legitimate feelings of anger and resentment (cooper 2014). my aim is not to try and resolve this debate, but to emphasize again that the practical problem at hand, which has as a matter of fact generated significant divisions within the feminist activist community, is how particular individuals ought to engage with each other when recurrent oppressive dynamics in their midst threaten to compromise their ability to work collectively. i suggest that an important open question is whether we should understand call-outs as practices of attributability or accountability (where this will likely vary across situation, types of relationships, and so on). in other words, should we understand call-outs as functioning as a kind of negative sanction that a person deserves in response to oppressive behavior, or as an appraisal of an agent’s oppressive attitudes (e.g., “calling out a person’s ableism”)? or should we understand them as assigning burdens of repair, that is, for the person called out to apologize for the psychological harm she has caused and to take up the work of educating herself and others? my own view is that the latter is preferable.22 in any case, theories of attributability and and evidence of oppression to privileged people who demand it—and who benefit from those very oppressive systems about whose existence they demand to be educated.” 22 it seems to me that many of the damaging effects of call-out culture are traceable to people’s tendency to use call-outs to ascribe attributability. katherine cross 17 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, accountability, by delineating the conditions required for different types of responsibility, can help us to navigate this complex moral terrain as it manifests across varied social contexts, such that we respond to each other in morally appropriate (and practically efficacious) ways as we organize ourselves for collective action. i take it, then, that at least one of the aims behind the moral philosophical project of theorizing individual responsibility for implicit bias is to aid in situations like these. as i stated in section iii, a normative focus on individuals need not be motivated by the idea that we are each only responsible for our own psychologies. rather, it can reflect a concern for the ways that we as social beings necessarily relate to one another qua particular individuals. because my interlocutor is always a person, not a structure, i cannot dispense with perceiving actions and attitudes as manifested in particular individuals with whom i negotiate an ongoing personal relationship. and it is always a specific individual whom i engage in an organizing conversation, of whom i make a specific “ask” and encourage to undertake a specific action. a normative focus on individuals remains practically necessary insofar as an important part of the work of social change consists precisely in efforts to make normative claims on others that can elicit transformative agency. even the most well-oiled political machine is subject to the vagaries of interactions between specific individuals both at the “top” within its leadership core as well as at the “bottom” peripheries wherein lies the hard work of recruitment and turnout.23 thus, the kind of interpersonal work expressed paradigmatically in practices of responsibility forms a necessary part of the task of actually carrying out collective action. (2014) describes her fear of “being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time.” asam ahmad (2015), similarly, writes that the problem with call-out cultures is that “one action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being . . . and to banish and dispose of individuals.” as a practice of accountability, by contrast, call-outs might instead be executed in accordance with the popular ground rule: “criticize the action, not the person,” or with explicit refusal to attribute to persons the mistakes and imperfections that are inevitable in the process of “radical unlearning” (lee 2017; trần 2016). on the other hand, call-outs ascribing attributability may be important in response to certain kinds of behavior, like sexual harassment, where the conditions for counting such actions as exercises of genuine moral agency are more likely to be satisfied. 23 for a fascinating study of such interactions in the civil rights movement, see barbara ransby’s (2003) magnificent biography of ella baker. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 put differently, i have argued here that practices of individual responsibility are necessary to “get the ball rolling,” as it were, and to “keep the ball rolling,” because they are normatively grounded ways of getting individual agents to do things, and we cannot get a handle on a “structure” apart from getting at some individual or group of individuals. before i conclude this section, however, let me clarify that i am not claiming that structural injustice would be rectified if only everyone was adequately held accountable for collective action. i am not even under the illusion that structural injustice can be rectified through labor unions, social movements, and collective organizing alone. if history is any guide, radical social transformation requires a confluence of factors, a perfect alignment of stars— many of which cannot be anticipated or forced. yet significant social change can also occur gradually in the absence of great ruptures (e.g., growing acceptance of lgbt and transgender rights). more importantly, the steady day-to-day organizing work performed by labor unions, activists, and social movements, is one critical factor that must obtain. one cannot force a revolution, but one can try to be ready for one. v. implicit bias, habitus, and action having defended a normative focus on individuals, along with the importance of responsibility practices in collective organizing, let me return now to the subject of implicit bias. the point i want to make is that implicit biases are not ordinary attitudes, and addressing biases can be part of structural transformation if we understand them to be a particular type of social structure. toward a bourdieusian account of implicit bias haslanger writes that the problem of structure versus agency is “arguably . . . the theoretical issue occupying social theory for the last three decades” (haslanger 2015, 13). however, haslanger’s own conception of social structures as networks of practices, schemas, and resources (in the tradition of anthony giddens and william sewell) is only one out of several social-theoretic conceptions of social structure. here i consider how an alternative conception might accommodate the phenomenon of implicit bias, generating different implications for the explanatory and normative relevance of bias. pierre bourdieu has famously laid claim to transcending the problem of structure versus agency altogether (bourdieu 1990; bourdieu and wacquant 1992). while i cannot develop a fully detailed bourdieusian theory of implicit bias here or do justice to the entirety of bourdieu’s field theory, let me sketch a sort of “proof of concept” grounded in his notions of field and habitus. bourdieu conceives of social structures as fields, that is, as configurations of relationships between social positions. agents can be mapped to locations in a field according to how much and what sorts of capital (i.e., social, material, and cultural resources) they possess; an 19 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, agent’s trajectory within the field predicts her behavior (bourdieu and wacquant 1992, 94–100). as for habitus, bourdieu writes: [habitus] ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the “correctness” of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. (1990, 54) even on a first pass, this characterization of habitus is remarkably congruent with greenwald and banaji’s (1995) early definition of implicit attitudes as the following: implicit attitudes are introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects. (8) habitus both shapes and is shaped by the field; while habitus grows out of time within a field, fields persists only insofar as people remain invested in ways of acting that preserve them. there is thus a certain kind of mutually reinforcing fit that obtains between habitus and field and serves to maintains them both: social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside of agents. and when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted. . . . it is because this world has produced me, because it has produced the categories of thought that i apply to it, that it appears to me as self-evident. (bourdieu and wacquant 1992, 127) this description of implicit categories as introspectively invisible and taken for granted, yet efficacious in guaranteeing conformity to existing social realities, is again an impressively apt description of implicit social cognition. moreover, bourdieu’s understanding of habitus as multifaceted, as “durably inscribed in the body and in belief” (1990, 58) through “schemes of perception, thought and action” (54), is well in line with recent philosophical theories of implicit associations as involving more than pure information processing. tamar gendler (2011), for instance, has argued that implicit biases are a species of alief, that is, “automatized representational-affective-behavioral triads” (41); alex madva and michael brownstein (2016) have also argued that implicit biases should be understood as clusters of semantic-affective associations straddling the divide between cognition and affect. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 a crucial point for understanding bourdieusian habitus is that habitus is not just another form of agency contrasted against structure (lizardo 2004). this is important, because habitus (and hence implicit biases, if we conceive of them as an element of habitus) is not something attributable to a person as manifesting her agency and on the basis of which we can assess her quality as an agent. or at least, it need not be construed as such, though that is one possible view.24 for bourdieu’s is a structural approach on which the distinction between external forces acting on an agent versus an agent’s own exercise of agency has no real meaning.25 yet the very problem of action that gives rise to questions of attributability depends on such a distinction to be meaningful.26 moreover, bourdieu is characteristically uninterested in questions of individuals’ blameworthiness, writing that “those who nowadays set themselves up as judges and distribute praise and blame . . . would be better occupied in trying to understand what it was that prevented the most lucid and best intentioned of those they condemn from understanding things which are now self-evident” (1977, 5). omar lizardo (2004) thus interprets the habitus to be a type of structure27 in the head that corresponds to structures outside the head (i.e., fields). he writes: 24 i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to address this potential objection. 25 he writes: “overriding the spurious opposition of forces inscribed in an earlier state of the system outside the body, and the internal forces arising instantaneously as springing from free will, the internal dispositions—the internalization of externality—enable the external forces to exert themselves, but in accordance with the specific logic of the organisms in which they are incorporated” (bourdieu 1990, 55). 26 in his influential paper “identification and externality,” harry frankfurt writes: “we think it correct to attribute to a person, in the strict sense, only some of the events in the history of his body. the others—those with respect to which he is passive—have their moving principles outside of him, and we do not identify him with these events. certain events in the history of a person’s mind, likewise, have their moving principles outside of him. he is passive with respect to them, and they are likewise not to be attributed to him” (1988, 61). 27 this sort of view also seems to be available on haslanger’s preferred conception of social structure. for haslanger, schemas are “intersubjective patterns of perception, thought, and behavior” that, along with resources, make up the practices constituting haslangerian social structures (2012, 415); following sewell (1992), she thus thinks of them as having only a “virtual” existence, i.e., as abstract objects. habitus, by contrast, exists ontologically as part of an individual’s psychology; what i am proposing here is that we understand implicit biases as 21 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, “the habitus is itself an objective structure albeit one located at a different ontological level and subject to different laws of functioning than the more traditional ‘structure’ represented by the field” (lizardo 2004, 394, emphasis mine). this is what it means for social reality to exist “twice.” to try and determine whether or not a person’s habitus is attributable to her as a manifestation of autonomous or self-determining agency, then, is to lose sight of the fact that it is not that type of thing at all; it is social structure, but simply micro-level rather than macro-level. this, i think, is a better way of thinking about implicit bias that does justice to why philosophers have been so captured by it. it is a crucial part of the explanation for social injustice that social structures get “deposited in persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and structured propensities to think, feel and act in determinant ways” (wacquant 2005, 315). hence implicit biases should not be assimilated into the category of individual actions and attitudes that haslanger finds to be “beside the point” (2015, 8, 10). if i am right, they are no ordinary “attitudes” at all but precisely the thing that “fits” us to social structures, because they are themselves a species of social structure—one of the many interlocking and mutually reinforcing structures that constitute structural injustice. standard stories redux bourdieu locates social change in moments of crisis, where habitus and field fall out of alignment, such that previously invisible tenets encoded in the habitus are surfaced and made available for evaluation. he writes: “the critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objective structures, destroys selfevidence practically” (1977, 169). theorists have thus offered studies of how social partial constituents of the psychological entity or mechanisms that constitute an individual’s habitus. but since schemas for haslanger can also be “embodied in individuals as a shared cluster of open-ended dispositions,” such that what is in an individual’s psychology has a “counterpart” in the wider culture (2012, 415), we might equally understand implicit biases to be a part of an individual or sociocognitive schema. elsewhere, haslanger suggests that bourdieusian habitus is similar to her concept of “ideology,” that is, the conscious and nonconscious shared discursive framework of representation that we use to understand the world (2012, 18). she does not state exactly how schemas and ideology are related, but i take it that ideologies are sets of interrelated schemas distinguished by the way they function to maintain the status quo (cf. haslanger 2017). if this is correct, then ideologies are also intersubjectively virtual objects that differ from my understanding here of habitus as a psychological object. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 structures can function to deposit in individuals a “habitus of resistance” (clarke 2000, medina 2013), or a “radical habitus,” that is, an “amplified and politicized . . . habitual self-interrogation” (crossley 2003, 55). nick crossley, arguing that radical habitus is formed in an ongoing way, even outside specific moments of crisis, writes: the individual acquires specific reflexive schemas for inspecting and defining their actions, perceptions, thoughts and feelings, and elects to work upon them to bring them into line with their new ideals. . . . they seek social change, in part, through self-change. their activism entails an ongoing attempt to change their habitual ways of being-in-the-world: that is, “habitbusting habits.” (56) insofar as the cultivation of radical habitus is crucial for social movements, then, at least this kind of modification to individual attitude is necessary for structural transformation (cf. madva 2016). indeed, self-change of this sort can constitute a form of structural transformation, where the type of structure being transformed is habitus. i think responding to implicit bias is an important (though certainly not the only) way in which habitus gets radicalized. i thus defend a certain kind of standard story about implicit bias, adapted from the one haslanger rejects: i am an employer who is considering three candidates for a job: kwame, kathy, and eric. i am committed to treating all candidates equally but i have implicit gender and racial biases and although kwame and kathy have comparable strengths and weaknesses to eric’s, eric appears to me to be the strongest candidate because he is a white male (though this latter fact is unbeknownst to me). repeat this scenario—including cases of applications for educational opportunities, access to health and financial resources, etc.— and this provides part of an explanation of social inequality along lines of race/sex. (2015, 3) this is a story of what jennifer saul (2013b) calls “bias-related doubt.” the key difference between haslanger’s original story and this one is a shift from the thirdperson to first-person perspective. i think there is something very valuable about this story, mainly because it is not really a very standard story at all. as i have argued, it actually is a story about structures, albeit of habitus rather than traditional macro-level social structures. and it can trigger a moment of crisis: for why is it that i and so many others keep choosing the white male candidate over the female or non-white ones even when we are committed to equal treatment? what explains this lack of fit? knowing my own sincere egalitarian commitments, and 23 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, those of many others, such a choice cannot be explained by my own moral agency. i am thus forced by such a story to bring to the surface precisely those “offstage” social structures that haslanger (2015, 10) wants us to focus on—only i find them to be in my own head. but it is precisely because it has the form of a standard story that the implicit bias story is able to generate this sense of normative urgency that other structural explanations lack. for i qua agent necessarily see myself as having freedom and agency whenever i take the first-personal practical perspective. from this perspective—not the third-personal explanatory perspective of the social theorist— my implicit biases appear to me as external forces, as structural constraints on my rational freedom, and hence as a crisis to be dealt with. while a story about large macro-level structures may not seem to implicate me or leave me any role to play, a story about structures in my own head cannot but involve me. this, i think, is the story that philosophers of implicit bias have been telling. it is a story that impels me to act, because action always begins from some particular individual’s first-person perspective. as saul (2013b, 243) writes in her account of bias-related doubt: “we feel perfectly fine about setting aside [traditional skeptical] doubts we have felt when we leave the philosophy seminar room. but with bias-related doubt, we don’t feel fine about this at all. we feel a need to do something to improve our epistemic situation.” haslanger’s real worry about implicit bias seems to be that, in acting, i will try merely to correct my own biases. it is true that there is danger in putting too much store in individual “de-biasing” techniques and thinking that that is all justice requires. but no philosopher working on implicit biases defends such a claim. again, the very nature of implicit biases—their invisibility, the fact that they are like water—generates the ever-present lurking possibility motivating the skepticism “that we really should not trust ourselves as inquirers” (saul 2013b, 253). such skepticism makes it clear that remedies for injustice cannot consist in individuals exercising their agency, but rather in the construction of other external structures that can undergird better internal structures. indeed, haslanger herself acknowledges a number of practical advantages of discussing implicit bias, including as a starting point for discussion (because we all have biases), as a site for moral improvement, and as an explanation for the intractability of social injustice (2015, 12). but i hardly think that these are accidental features; rather, they derive from the structural nature of implicit bias. understanding them as such thus creates more room for theorizing implicit bias than the “small space” that haslanger allots (11). by directing our attention to specific junctures between structures where bias makes a difference (as in our everyday practices of grading, hiring, and peer-reviewing), efforts to address implicit bias represent attempts to intervene surgically on particularly vulnerable sites 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 within the complex and otherwise unwieldy edifice of social structure. bourdieu writes of “identifying true sites of freedom, and thus of building small-scale, modest, practical morals in keeping with the scope of human freedom which, in my opinion, is not that large” (bourdieu and wacquant 1992, 199). more optimistically, i would say that by cultivating attentiveness to implicit bias, we begin to cultivate the kind of radical habitus that sustains and is sustained by social movements—in other words, we begin to construct new social structures, from the inside out. after all, most of the recommendations made by philosophers working on implicit bias have in fact been institutional and collective, for example, encouraging policies of anonymous review at philosophy journals, writing and disseminating good practice guides, and starting the gendered conference campaign.28 in trying to mitigate and block bias, we immediately see specific ways the social world must change for this to be successful, beginning with the small-scale structures over which we do have control.29 from the theoretical perspective of explaining social phenomena, then, haslanger may be correct that we lack important kinds of autonomy and selfdetermination. but from the practical perspective of acting—of choosing between doing nothing, on the one hand, and seeking out others to work together, on the other—i am an individual who experiences the autonomy to choose actions (from the options set and constrained by my social milieu, to be sure) that constitute taking responsibility for structural injustice. thus it is through storytelling and engaging one another as particular individuals that we mobilize and hold one another responsible for doing so. this, i conjecture, is why the first-person story of implicit bias and bias-related doubt has had such success in motivating many philosophers to be concerned about injustice within the discipline, and in spurring just the sort of collective action—the beginnings of new social structures—that we have seen in the wake of such a concern. vi. conclusion i have argued that we need a theory of individual responsibility for structural injustice, understood as accountability rather than attributability, and i have argued 28 the british philosophical association (bpa) and society for women in philosophy (uk) good practices scheme features “gender bias” as one of its five main categories. the gendered conference campaign, run by the feminist philosophers blog, argues that all-male line-ups contribute to stereotyping and implicit bias against women in philosophy. notably, one of the primary movers behind these efforts is jennifer saul, whose early work on implicit bias was largely responsible for bringing it to the attention of the discipline. 29 i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this way of putting the point. 25 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, that individualistic practices of accountability are needed to address the problems of mobilization and solidarity inherent in all collective organizing. additionally, i have proposed an alternative social-theoretic understanding of implicit biases as a type of bourdieusian structure. in short, we can and should understand individuals as responsible (in the accountability sense) for structural injustice. and we can and should understand the effort to block and eliminate implicit biases as itself a kind of structural transformation. references ahmad, asam. 2015. “a note on call-out culture.” briarpatch magazine, march 2. http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/a-note-on-call-out-culture. banks, andy, and jack metzgar. 1989. “participating in management: union organizing on a new terrain.” labor research review 8 (2): 1–58. berenstain, nora. 2016. “epistemic exploitation.” ergo, an open access journal of philosophy 3 (22): 569–590. bourdieu, pierre. 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(1988) 2017. a burst of light: and other essays. mineola, ny: ixia press. madva, alex. 2016. “a plea for anti-anti-individualism: how oversimple psychology misleads social policy.” ergo, an open access journal of philosophy 3 (27): 701–728. madva, alex, and michael brownstein. 2016. “stereotypes, prejudice, and the taxonomy of the implicit social mind.” noûs. doi:10.1111/nous.12182. may, larry. 1990. “symposia papers: collective inaction and shared responsibility.” noûs 24 (2): 269–277. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. new york: oxford university press. miller, david. 2001. “distributing responsibilities.” journal of political philosophy 9 (4): 453–471. parsons, talcott. (1951) 1991. the social system. london: routledge. ransby, barbara. 2003. ella baker and the black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. saul, jennifer. 2013a. “implicit bias, stereotype threat, and women in philosophy.” in women in philosophy: what needs to change?, edited by katrina hutchison and fiona jenkins, 39–60. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2013b. “scepticism and implicit bias.” disputatio 5 (37): 243–263. 28 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 4 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/4 sewell, william h., jr. 1992. “a theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation.” american journal of sociology 98 (1): 1–29. springer, elise. 2013. communicating moral concern: an ethics of critical responsiveness. cambridge, ma: mit press. trần, ngọc loan. 2016. “calling in: a less disposable way of holding each other accountable.” in the solidarity struggle: how people of color succeed and fail at showing up for each other in the fight for freedom, edited by mia mckenzie, 59–63. oakland, ca: bgd press. wacquant, loïc. 2005. “habitus.” in international encyclopedia of economic sociology, edited by jens beckert and milan zafirovski, 315–319. london: routledge. weingarten, randi, antonia cortese, and loretta johnson. 2009. powering up: the aft organizing and union-building model. washington, dc: american federation of teachers, afl-cio. young, cate. 2014. “a refresher course on tone policing.” battymamzelle, april 11, 2014. http://www.cate-young.com/battymamzelle/2014/04/a-refreshercourse-on-tone-policing.html. young, iris marion. 2011. responsibility for justice. new york: oxford university press. zheng, robin. 2016. “attributability, accountability, and implicit bias.” in implicit bias and philosophy, volume 2: moral responsibility, structural injustice, and ethics, edited by michael brownstein and jennifer saul, 62–89. oxford: oxford university press. robin zheng is an assistant professor of philosophy at yale-nus college. her research focuses on issues of moral responsibility and structural injustice, along with other topics in ethics, moral psychology, feminist and social philosophy, and philosophy of race. recent publications include “why yellow fever isn’t flattering: a case against racial fetish” in the journal of the american philosophical association, “precarity is a feminist issue: gender and contingent labor in the academy” in hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, and “attributability, accountability, and implicit bias” in implicit bias and philosophy: volume 2 (edited by michael brownstein and jennifer saul). she has recently served on the apa task force on diversity and inclusion as well as the apa task force on a good practices guide. 29 zheng: bias, structure, and injustice published by scholarship@western, feminist philosophy quarterly bias, structure, and injustice: a reply to haslanger robin zheng recommended citation bias, structure, and injustice: a reply to haslanger dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 3 2018 dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life cressida j. heyes university of alberta, cheyes@ualberta.ca recommended citation heyes, cressida j.. 2018. "dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 3. dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life1 cressida j. heyes abstract this article summarizes ami harbin’s 2016 monograph, disorientation and moral life, which argues that disorientations are an invaluable ethical resource. harbin offers what she calls a “non-resolvist account of moral agency,” in which non-deliberative and non-decisive action has the potential to be just as morally significant as fully thought-through and conclusive decision-making. it then suggests that harbin’s moral method provides a useful way of thinking through political inequities in the discipline of philosophy, and illustrates this with some examples. it highlights three lacunae or possible extensions to the argument: the value but also the complexity of understanding “doubling back” strategies; the ambivalence between psychological and philosophical claims about the value of irresoluteness and the paradoxical nature of being certain of the value of moral uncertainty; and the spatial, temporal, and embodied nature of disorientation. keywords: ethics; moral theory; disorientation; virtue; feminist philosophy the message of ami harbin’s wonderful book can perhaps be most pithily captured by a quote she herself provides. “paradoxically,” writes rosi braidotti, “it is those who have already cracked up a bit, those who have suffered pain and injury, who are better placed to take the lead in the process of ethical transformation” (harbin 2016, 125). well said. harbin’s intervention is into certain ethical conventions that tacitly structure the way philosophers think about moral agency and action. ethics, she points out, tends to treat moral action as decisive, conscious, deliberate, and intentional (126), when in fact “disorientations” (the central concept of the book) can provoke useful ethical insight. becoming disoriented is, for harbin, “to lose one’s bearings in relation to others, environments, and life projects” (xi); 1 the author would like to thank alexis shotwell for generously organizing the panel on which this symposium is based, jane dryden for her excellent work organizing the 2016 cswip conference, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the original manuscript. 1 heyes: dislocation and self-certainty published by scholarship@western, 2018 “disorientations are experiences that make it difficult to know how to go on” (13). the kinds of commonplace unmoorings caused by having a child, getting sick, ending a relationship, coming out (or becoming queerer), bereavement, and so on, are not just wobbles on an otherwise straight course toward moral certainty; the very dislocations they provoke have moral value. disorientations are an invaluable ethical resource: they can make us vulnerable or tender, more aware of structures of injustice. harbin thus offers what she calls a “non-resolvist account of moral agency,” in which non-deliberative and non-decisive action has the potential to be just as morally significant as fully thought-through and conclusive decision-making. in this context, i understand harbin’s intervention as being part of a larger political project, taking place across radical philosophy but perhaps more convincingly within interdisciplinary social theory coming from literature, cultural studies, or anthropology, in which aspects of our dominant models of the self are deflated. by “our,” i mean western, settler-colonial, white european-descended, bourgeois mostly men, and the stories about the self that are the corresponding cultural background. in these stories—and perhaps especially in their us variants— individuals take control of their lives, using cognitive skill and ethical fortitude to map a path through moral challenge, along the way developing and demonstrating their virtue. virtuous character traits, as harbin points out, are “typically understood to be static . . . , enduring . . . , and global,” as well as being qualities that individuals deliberately cultivate (31). being able to successfully develop such traits is clearly facilitated by a normative environment that validates its subject and thereby supports the illusion of integrity. what harbin calls moral resoluteness is not always a desirable trait, or a marker of virtue, despite its pervasive representation as such. instead it may reflect a tendency to inflate moral agency and individualize moral responsibility, all the while minimizing the real-world conditions that make particular moral attitudes possible. as she puts it, “the social world is currently such that it does not make real interdependence and a life beyond productivity seem livable. especially in conditions of austerity, individuals are often inclined to think we are responsible for our own security, to blame for acquired insecurity . . . and in need of privacy above all else” (166–167). against the impetus to over-value moral certainty, the book defends a politically sensitive ethics that carefully maps out our existing moral habits—“of not responding to vulnerabilities, of assuming preparedness, of practiced individualism, and of the irresistibility of oppressive norms”—while articulating the “importance of sensing vulnerabilities, living unprepared, in-this-togetherness, or living against the grain of norms” (119). disorientation and philosophy this is a hard book to respond to because so much of the work it does consists in shifting the pictures of ethics that have held us captive, rather than in 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/3 antagonistic argument against particular positions. indeed, what makes it so insightful is how often it shows rather than tells, and how it creates novel ethical grammars instead of just countering existing ones. i want to focus my comments around a theme—the politics of philosophy—because i think harbin’s book has a number of insights that could be very useful as we think critically about our own discipline. first, harbin has a wonderful description of what she calls “doubling back ethical strategies,” which she describes as particularly useful in overcoming implicit bias: “doubling back” action against injustice is not resolute movement toward a goal, but a constant questioning and challenging of unjust tendencies, and cultivating capacities to hear challenges from others. it is irresolute, precisely because it starts from having destabilized the expectation that one’s own judgment is likely to be the best. (142) doubling back, she argues, is useful in contexts of injustice that share three features: psychological habits one ought not to trust, epistemic uncertainty about the right thing to do, and meta-ethical awareness that a moral situation makes iterative demands rather than inviting moral closure. doubling back, in other words, entails a refusal to see equity as something to be achieved, once-and-for-all, and insists on the impossibility of ethical closure in the face of continued epistemic humility. i suggest that failures to recognize equity challenges in philosophy share these features, and that doubling back should be an important strategy in the context of a moral community where practices of justification are unusually highly prized. as i have argued myself (heyes, forthcoming), philosophy exhibits a culture of judgment, in which the ability to articulate and justify a performative certainty about one’s own evaluative stance is seen as a marker of ability. judgments such as that a particular piece of work is “not real philosophy,” kristie dotson (2012) points out, are primarily concerned with showing how a current exemplar is unlike the worthy tradition that precedes it: by relying upon a presumably commonly held set of normative, historical precedents, the question of how a given paper is philosophy betrays a value placed on performances and/or narratives of legitimation. legitimation, here, refers to practices and processes aimed at judging whether some belief, practice, and/or process conforms to accepted standards and patterns, i.e. justifying norms. (5) 3 heyes: dislocation and self-certainty published by scholarship@western, 2018 such exercises of legitimation involve lining up philosophical projects (especially projects by scholars whose intellectual approach—or, indeed, their minority status itself—invites a priori scepticism) in order to evaluate whether they “fall within the purview of a certain set of commonly held, univocally relevant justifying norms” (dotson 2012, 8). this is exactly the kind of moral environment in which disorientation could be most provocative, and where an insistence on doubling back could undermine entrenched moral habits that are enabled by privilege. doubling back here will entail a committed (resolute?) belief in the epistemic value of diversity—the claim familiar from sandra harding’s work, for example, that knowledge is advanced by the most diverse community of inquiry—and an openness to revising past claims. i remember in the 1990s the incredulity that greeted suggestions that “there should be more women in philosophy.” “what could be more sexist?!,” men in philosophy departments exclaimed. a good philosopher is a good philosopher regardless of what they have “between their legs” (as a colleague once put it). many of us white women argued hard against this kind of reductionism, but without a differentiated sense of the forms of femininity and masculinity we were advancing or of the intersectional nature of gender. “doubling back” has historically meant for many of us returning to those political moments to understand their racial exclusions and to think about how we could have, and can do, better. second, relatedly, there is also an interesting problematic threaded through the book about privilege and oppression in the context of disorientation. embedded in harbin’s argument is the feminist political claim that many cases of disorientation involve people marginal to structures of power: the queer person is disoriented precisely because of the force of heteronormativity, for example (112). even in cases of disorientation that can happen to anyone at any time—like being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness—the experience of being thrown off track is exacerbated by these structures. harbin (2016) cites, for example, audre lorde’s famous account of the sexism and racism she encounters after her breast cancer diagnosis (103–104). yet she also alludes to examples where those with normative identities are disoriented, referencing george yancy’s concept of “white ambush”—when white people see our previously tacit racism reflected back to us in disconcerting ways (75). chapter 3 includes a long discussion of the complexity of disorienting experiences in situations where privilege and oppression intersect, including directly in the lives of individuals. harbin rejects any equivalence between (for example) the disorientation of experiencing racism and that of having one’s own racism revealed (76–77). that is, she pulls back from making any kind of claim about whether being unwillingly disturbed out of a normative position is more ethically provocative than being disoriented because of one’s own inadvertent failure of normativity, saying 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/3 that “awareness” both of “oppressive norms and their contingency” and of “political complexity” (88) can be disorienting and ethically valuable. i found it hard to sort out the ethical and the epistemic in this nexus of issues. i think harbin concurs that persistent disorientation due to oppressive norms can be ethically undermining, and, conversely, the ways that refusals of disorientation are enabled by structures of power form a central part of the psychic structure of privilege. she fully recognizes and cites examples of both of these phenomena: the experience of gaslighting of women of colour in professional philosophy (80–81), and the “individual [who] can refuse to think of himself as disorientable” (170). in the first case, disorientation is involuntary and deeply disconcerting. when one is being gaslighted in a philosophy department, one craves moral certainty. we long for our moral perception to be triangulated by others who can confirm our experience. it really is true that feminist graduate students are being overlooked for choice teaching assignments! it really is true that women’s contributions to the shared department workload are taken for granted while their research is disparaged! the department chair who calmly insists that his decisions are fair and that he treats colleagues equally, needs to be disoriented. he will likely refuse any voluntary disorientation in favour of moral resoluteness and belief in his own virtue. so here is an ethical asymmetry where (dis)orientation looks differently valuable from each side of the relation. for me this raises the question of how disorientation might be forced upon those who refuse it—an interesting ethical issue that i would like to see harbin address. the book is organized around a paradox: lack of moral certainty is ethically valuable, and this claim is itself a moral certainty. further, there are specific moral certainties that underlie the value of disorientation: that gender normalization constrains human possibility, including within the academy (as i would put it), and that work in philosophy toward “equity” should build on this fact. harbin, however, doesn’t offer a systematic account of which moral claims she accepts as foundational (“women of color in philosophy have been oppressed”?), and which need to be thrown into question (“our philosophy department is doing an excellent job on equity and diversity”?).2 in a way, this is more an issue in moral psychology than in meta-ethics: more of us should more often recognize that our moral certainty is a product of our privilege, and should allow ourselves to be disoriented in the service of overcoming moral complacency. this seems correct to me, but it still begs the question of how certain we can be about the value of moral irresoluteness in particular contexts. harbin suggests that “doubling back” (as a key strategy in situations of moral irresoluteness) is useful in three contexts of injustice: 2 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for phrasing this objection in a similar way and pushing me to elaborate it. 5 heyes: dislocation and self-certainty published by scholarship@western, 2018 psychological (having habits that make one less likely to recognize injustice), epistemic (finding it difficult to know when injustice has occurred), and meta-ethical (no obvious state of affairs that would count as justice having been achieved), and it may be that harbin’s analysis is more useful in the first case than in the latter two. that is, we can read her as offering a valuable political-sociological account of how power comes to make people feel overconfident about their moral judgements when they should be more willing to double back, but it is a less convincing philosophical argument for the general value of moral uncertainty. that this is the value of the book is confirmed by my own sense that political change comes from material shifts in power rather than from “awareness.” a symposium presenting feminist analysis of subtle practices of harassment and discrimination might have no effect at all on department dynamics. but if gaslighted faculty ask the union to file a grievance and the dean decides to intervene, that is more likely to provoke disorientation—albeit likely not in ways that inspire critical self-reflection. often the reaction to a materially significant intervention is angry and inchoate—raising the question of whether one must know one is disoriented and/or see the moral value of disorientation for harbin’s account to have ethical purchase. thus at some points in the book it is hard to map the fairly commonsense (and tacitly certain) feminist account of privilege and oppression that harbin mobilizes onto the arguments that she makes about disorientation in moral life. i also think there are outstanding questions about the relation of her work to feminist standpoint theory (which is surprisingly under-referenced). in that tradition (to speak in simplistic hegelian terms), being the master brings with it a certain kind of inadvertent ignorance, while being the slave brings knowledge, including of the master. that epistemic claim cross-cuts (it seems to me) the ethical intuition about asymmetry in the value of disorientation i just sketched. subordination brings knowledge: it is the experience of manifest sexism on the academic job market that shows me the easy erasures in the claim made by male graduate student peers that “all departments just want to hire a woman.” but the disorientation caused by that sexism need not itself be ethically productive—as harbin describes. its value, then, comes importantly in the way it generates “epistemic humility” (91–93). yet there is something odd about gaining knowledge only to learn epistemic humility—hence the tension between standpoint and moral psychology here. finally, third, harbin explains that her method, in the tradition of naturalized ethics, involves paying close attention to examples and connecting conceptual argument to empirical work in moral psychology. in certain respects, though, her analysis of disorientations is surprisingly separate from the experience of disorientation as temporal, spatial, and embodied. to be oriented (in its pretwentieth century uses) in english implied at the same time an attitude, a direction, and a trajectory. that is, to be oriented is to be located relative to a field (spatial or 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/3 semiotic) and along a vector (an orientation suggests not only where i am now, but where i am going in the future). when i am disoriented, i have lost my sense of where my body is in space; i don’t know in which direction i should go to get back onto my planned trajectory. harbin (2016) cites the phenomenological tradition that culminates in sara ahmed’s book queer phenomenology (8–9), but i think that there is more work to do connecting the deeply affective and somatic experiences of disorientation with the examples of moral uncertainty at the heart of this project. i won’t say much about this here—in part because i think this would be an extension of the project rather than an integral part of the work the book achieves. it would be interesting, though, to think about how visceral affective experiences such as disgust, anxiety, or grief are formative of experiences of disorientation, or how disorientation provokes clumsiness, physical and cognitive error, and so on, in ways that can be treated as phenomena of spatiality and temporality—in other words, treated existentially and phenomenologically. harbin surveys some of these issues in the introduction (6–12) before turning to more analytically inflected moral psychology. i think her analysis in disorientation and moral life could usefully be brought back around to this introduction, to reconsider these levels of analysis in light of the work the book does. * * * ami harbin has written a book that is both extraordinarily intellectually creative and clear-headed. inspiring us to an account of moral agency more in keeping with the realities of our messy worlds, she has made a major contribution to moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and ethical theory. i have been asked to comment on three books recently in this kind of forum: in addition to disorientation and moral life, karen houle’s (2014) book on abortion, and ellen feder’s (2014) book on intersex (see heyes 2016). all three offer brilliantly oblique feminist perspectives on the self-certainties of mainstream ethics. they encourage us to situate ethical thinking in the complexities of everyday moral life and to see ethics as inseparable from contexts of power, and i sincerely hope that they are part of a revolution in philosophy we have yet to see fully unfold. references dotson, kristie. 2012. “how is this paper philosophy?” comparative philosophy 3 (1): 3–29. feder, ellen. 2014. making sense of intersex: changing ethical perspectives in biomedicine. bloomington: indiana university press. harbin, ami. 2016. disorientation and moral life. new york: oxford university press. 7 heyes: dislocation and self-certainty published by scholarship@western, 2018 heyes, cressida j. 2016. “making sense of making sense of intersex.” philosophy today 60 (3): 789–797. ———. forthcoming. “practices of justification: from philosophy to pluralism.” in civic freedom in an age of diversity: james tully’s public philosophy, edited by dimitrios karmis and jocelyn maclure. houle, karen. 2014. responsibility, complexity, and abortion. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. cressida j. heyes is professor of political science and former canada research chair in philosophy of gender and sexuality at the university of alberta, canada. she is the author most recently of “dead to the world: rape, unconsciousness, and social media” (signs 2016), and (with j. r. latham), “trans surgeries and cosmetic surgeries: the politics of analogy” (trans studies quarterly 2018). she has authored and edited many other articles and books, most notably self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies (2007), and copies of many of her publications can be found on cressidaheyes.com. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/3 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life cressida j. heyes recommended citation â•œdislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral lifeâ•š queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 2 article 3 2015 queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood justin morris mcmaster university, morrisjr@mcmaster.ca recommended citation morris, justin. 2015. "queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (2). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3. queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood1 justin morris abstract i consider christine overall’s (2012) proposal that counteracting the ecological threats born from overconsumption and overpopulation morally obligates (most) westerners to limit their procreative output to one child per person. i scrutinize what overall finds valuable about the genetic link in the parentchild relationship through the complementary lenses of shelley m. park’s (2013) project of “queering motherhood” and the ecofeminist concept of “earth mothering.” what comes of this theoretical mix is a procreative outlook i define as queer earth mothering (qem): an interrogative attitude for identifying the ways in which anti-ecological and heteronormative ideologies seep into maternal praxis. i argue that qem has potential to relocate the value(s) of the putative parent-child relationship, change attitudes toward adoptive motherhood for the better, and shed light on the reality that procreative decisions in affluent contexts can and will rebound with devastating environmental consequences on both present and future populations if left unabated. my hope is that with qem as our guide for thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood we will be in a much better position to appreciate why affluent prospective parents should (generally speaking) favour adoption over biological reproduction. keywords: procreation, motherhood, queer theory, ecofeminism, moral responsibility 1 the following wonderful people had a hand in making this paper far better than it would have been otherwise: laura benacquista, elisabeth gedge, violetta igneski, conference attendees who heard an earlier version of this paper at the 2015 annual meeting of the canadian society for the study of practical ethics (csspe), as well as two anonymous referees and the editors at feminist philosophy quarterly. my thanks to each and every one of you. fortunately for me the referees and editors at feminist philosophy quarterly are skilled practitioners in the vanishing art of critique without cruelty. i am grateful for their incisive yet humanely delivered feedback on a previous version of this article. 1 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 introduction we the affluent wreak such havoc on the planet that determining the extent of the damage on future populations remains something of a mystery. “it is a grand experiment,” robert a. mcleman (2014) says, “the early results of which will be manifest within our children’s lifetimes, if not our own” (228).2 what kind of results? failing to dramatically cut our carbon emissions by 2050 could mean, among other dismal possibilities, that 25 million more children will suffer malnourishment; the overall number of people at risk of hunger will increase 1020%; and an additional 600 million individuals will die from malnutrition by 2080. importantly, these grim predictions are the result of ongoing environmental harms produced “mainly by members of rich, industrialized countries, who have also been their main beneficiaries” (lichtenberg 2013, 33). what a cruel irony it is, then, that those individuals living in the most impoverished communities across the globe— particularly women and children—are the ones expected to absorb their most devastating impacts.3 obviously this dreadful situation is rife with acute challenges in need of “feminist philosophical investigations across a range of topics” (tuana and cuomo 2014, 535). one such topic—posed here as a question—has failed to compel much ink (or pixels for that matter) by way of philosophical discussion: what does motherhood mean in an age of global ecological crisis? i suggest that whatever it means, we—heavily qualified as this “we” must be—have to make motherhood “greener.” at present, a “child born to a woman in the united states ultimately increases her carbon legacy by an amount (9,441 metric tons) that is nearly seven times the analogous quantity for a woman in china (1,384 tons)” (murtaugh and 2 the adverse impacts of climate change on human health and well-being are already well underway. the world health organization estimates that “climate change was responsible for some 160,000 [human] deaths in the year 2000 alone” (dwyer 2013).the number continues to grow. as of 2013, the global humanitarian fund pegs it at around 300,000 (2013). shockingly, these are taken to be conservative estimates in both cases. 3 for more detail about how the harms of climate change are gendered and undemocratically distributed, see the webpage of the united nations project, womenwatch, especially “the threats of climate change are not gender-neutral,” available at the following url and last accessed on march 17, 2015: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/climate_change/#threat. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 schlax 2009, 18).4 given the greenhouse gas impact of having children in affluent contexts, deciding whether or not to have them is therefore “almost 20 times more important than some of the other environmentally sensitive practices people might employ [for] their entire lives—things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs” (14).5 does this mean that not having children for environmental reasons is a morally compelling position? how about redefining motherhood in a more ecologically informed way—is that possible? should feminists scrutinize procreation as closely as other carbon-hungry habits if its effects threaten the well-being of those who are the worst off among us? what follows is my attempt to answer all these questions in the affirmative. i begin by considering christine overall’s (2012) proposal that counteracting the ecological threats attributable to overconsumption and overpopulation morally obligates (most) westerners to limit their procreative output to one child per person. overall interprets her recommendation as a practical compromise between setting an unrealistic moratorium on procreation on the one hand and encouraging procreative recklessness on the other. in making her case, overall considers thomas young’s (2001) argument that we should not have children for environmental reasons; she finds it is implausible and beyond philosophical repair. however, in what follows i argue that overall’s criticisms of young’s position rely on certain problematic assumptions that define the parent-child relationship in terms of what shelley m. park calls a biological paradigm of motherhood, i.e., a “natural, biological phenomenon including both a gestational and genetic connection to one’s child” (2013, 58). in particular, i scrutinize what overall finds valuable about the genetic link in the parent-child relationship through the complementary lenses of park’s (2013) project of “queering motherhood” and the ecofeminist concept of “earth mothering.” what comes of this theoretical mix is a procreative outlook i 4 for precise details about these stats, see http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2009/jul/family-planning-majorenvironmental-emphasis. 5 lisa hymas (2011) vividly describes the situation: “when someone like me has a child–watch out, world! gear, gadgets, gewgaws, bigger house, bigger car, oil from the mideast, coal from colombia, coltan from the congo, rare earths from china, pesticide-laden cotton from egypt, genetically modified soy from brazil. and then when that child has children, wash, rinse, and repeat (in hot water, of course). without even trying, we americans slurp up resources from every corner of the globe and then spit 99 percent of them back out again as pollution.” given this, hymas decided against having children. see http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/27/not-have-childrenenvironmental-reasons. 3 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 define as queer earth mothering (qem): an interrogative attitude for identifying the ways in which anti-ecological and heteronormative ideologies seep into maternal praxis. i argue that qem has potential to relocate the value(s) of the putative parent-child relationship, change attitudes toward adoptive motherhood for the better, and shed light on the reality that procreative decisions in affluent contexts can and will rebound with devastating environmental consequences on both present and future populations if left unabated. with qem as our guide for thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood, my hope is that we will be in a much better position to appreciate why affluent prospective parents should (generally speaking) favour adoption over biological reproduction. i. the challenge of situating procreative decision-making in a global context christine overall’s (2012) analysis of the morality of procreative-decision making considers the question indicated in the title of her book—why have children?—in a global context. as she explains, “it is no longer possible for human beings, especially in the west, to pretend we are all not related: international travel, environmental changes and global resource extraction, manufacturing, and trade demonstrate that national boundaries count for much less than they once did” (175). overall hopes (as i do) that, from this cosmopolitan realization of global interconnectedness, it only takes a few short steps to appreciate that our individual choices are uniquely positioned to command a disastrous amount of nonrenewable resources and leave a sizable carbon footprint in their wake to boot.6 what overall wants to impress upon us is the fact that procreative choices are no exception to this rule. so when we read stuart rachels’s (2014) recent claim that “one’s procreative decisions have causal implications that ripple across one’s world” (568), it should strike us as causally modest to a fault. in truth, the implications of these decisions are manifold: they span the globe and stretch far 6 dale jamieson (2014) argues that we have already lost the battle for mitigating the harmful effects of anthropogenic climate change: “the dusk has started to fall with respect to climate change and so the owl of minerva can spread her wings. we can now begin the process of understanding why the global attempt to prevent serious anthropogenic climate change failed and begin to chart a course for living in a world that has been remade by human action” (1). recent studies and a leaked u.n. draft report (gillis 2014) only serve to confirm jamieson’s pessimism. still, i do not think the current strategy of spewing ever more gasoline on the global fire is the answer. ask any firewoman and she will tell you: even if a blaze cannot be snuffed out for good, the smaller ones are generally easier to contain. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 beyond the limited reaches of “one’s world.”7 but this last point must be delivered very cautiously. otherwise we could end up democratizing moral accountability for our environmental crisis to such an extent that we obscure social differences, gender inequalities and other factors that would “inappropriately place equal responsibility for ecological damage on the north and the south, the rich and poor, black and white, men and women” (mellor 2005, 210). this approach would be not only wrongheaded, but also demonstrably false. the reality of the situation is that we are living on a planet that was once “shaped primarily by natural biophysical processes” but has shifted “to an anthropogenic biosphere shaped primarily by human systems” (ellis 2011, 1029) thanks to our efforts. put less abstractly, the “human systems” responsible for the anthropogenic greenhouses gases involved in that dramatic terrestrial shift bear the signatures of affluent human beings. speaking about the problems created by the affluent raises other concerns as well. we do not want to assume an imperious tone of moral condescension by implicitly suggesting that individuals in developing regions (and elsewhere) should be left out of discussions about how to mitigate environmental threats. nor should we participate in the “soft bigotry of low expectations” by holding them to a lower moral standard because they—unlike us—cannot be expected to take up certain strategies for reducing the size of their carbon footprint. indeed, the effort involved in doing the right thing often corresponds to a putative agent’s level of autonomy—something that we know is staggeringly uneven across the complex intersections of race, sex, class, etc. so minimizing our impact on the environment will no doubt mean different things for different people. situating moral responsibility and procreative decision-making in a global context is one important way of making sense of those differences. to wit: overall (2012) offers five reasons to support her claim that westerners in general bear a significant moral responsibility for curbing their ecologically destructive habits. [first,] most of us living in the global west are on average well educated. as a result, we know (or should know) about the dangers of 7 in this sense, environmental harms are a “peculiarly modern case, especially because [they operate] on a much grander scale than [our] moral intuitions evolved to handle long ago when acts did not have such long-term effects on future generations (or at least people were not aware of such effects)” (sinnott-armstrong 2010, 334). indeed, the moral grammar of our philosophical heritage is bereft of clear-cut moral principles for how to deal with ontologically undignified entities like carbon dioxide molecules. 5 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 overpopulation . . . [and] are also sufficiently informed to know how to curb our numbers. second, we in the west consume far out of proportion to our numbers . . . [so] we need to help [compensate] . . . by curbing our fertility. third, we in the west have the ability—the research, resources, and technologies—to limit the number of children we have. fourth, we in the west do not have the same economic needs for many children that people elsewhere have (or think they have). finally, if prosperous westerners make a concerted attempt to limit their numbers, then arguments to citizens of developing nations that they should consider using effective contraception likewise to limit the numbers of their children will be far more credible. (179) the combined normative upshot of these points—touching on areas of epistemic, empirical, economic, and moral concern—is that “we in the developed world have a moral responsibility to limit our numbers, given the current threats to planetary carrying capacity posed by overpopulation” (179). claiming that we ought to “limit our numbers” raises the predictable objection that it places an unfair moral burden on western shoulders. these problems—so the argument goes—are simply too big to be dealt with at the individual level and ought to be addressed as a matter of global policy, not individual culpability. this objection speaks to the tremendous difficulty involved in parsing out the normative subtleties of individual and collective moral responsibility, especially when “we are now experiencing the cumulative [ecological] impact of individuals living their lives in ways that, until recently, no one had good reason to question” (overall 2012, 7). procreation appears to be one such area of quotidian practice commonly assumed to be outside the scope of serious moral scrutiny. after all, we generally “view begetting as an obviously good thing” (rachels 2014, 569) and that sentiment speaks for western pronatalist sensibilities at large.8 indeed, in my experience, the suggestion that 8 as rachels (2014) puts it: “in our culture, nothing seems more natural than to congratulate someone who has just had a baby: ‘what a blessing!’ ‘it’s a little miracle!’ ‘what a bundle of joy!’ we’ve all seen someone react to the presence of a baby like frances mcdormand’s character in the movie raising arizona (1987): ‘he’s an angel! he’s an angel straight from heaven!’” from this basis, rachels speculates that “almost no parent wants to talk publicly about the disadvantages of parenthood, for fear of looking like a bad parent or uncaring person. thus, we tend to hear mostly positive things” (569). maybe rachels is right. or perhaps there are better reasons to explain why pronatalism predominates in our society. my point is simply that it does. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 individuals in the west should limit their procreative output for environmental reasons has been commonly viewed as applicable to diehard environmentalists but nobody else. therefore, i think overall is right to insist that—rather than complain about shouldering an unfair burden—we need to do some bootstrapping and face up to the reality that our “population will not stabilize, let alone decline, without active decisions being made by individuals” (180).9 leaving the task of confronting the ecological perils of procreation at the doorstep of—forgive the neologism—“the supererogateers” among us is simply not a viable option.10 rather we need to see ourselves as part of a collective working together to create practical solutions to our shared environmental crises in which we occupy the dual roles of victim and victimizer. against this backdrop, our main preoccupations for the next two sections emerge: how can we unsettle western attitudes that problematically situate procreative issues outside the scope of ecological and moral concern, and what approach should we take in doing so? ii. one and done? overall’s proposal for procreative minimalism without concrete practical solutions, we have mere philosophical description. overall knows this well and deserves credit for putting pen to policy like so: “every individual adult has a moral responsibility to limit herself or himself to [one] procreative replacement only” (183). overall deems this limitation necessary because “the birth of new human beings . . . will otherwise contribute both to [over]consumption and to the despoliation of our planetary home” (191). given this, she believes there is “something morally problematic, perhaps morally wrong, about having a large family in the wasteful, consumerist west” (187). here i think we can safely pin the label of procreative minimalism to overall’s account. this can be roughly sketched as the idea that procreative austerity measures offer a morally legitimate way of reducing the environmental damage caused by having children. 9 according to the international food policy research institute (ifpri), “the total calories available in 2050 will be lower than in 2000” (see http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6271). a statistic like that should be read against the backdrop of yet another disturbing fact: the population is slated to reach some 9.6 billion by 2050. overall is right: active decisions on our part matter, and they matter a great deal. 10 to be clear, i am not denying the existence of supererogatory acts—that would be silly. i am merely concerned with how easily certain acts are classified as “supererogatory” and neatly filed away outside the realm of plausible moral action for that reason alone. i discuss this point in more detail below. 7 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 overall takes procreative minimalism to be “easily justified” since “persons get to (try to) have a child of ‘their own,’ if they want one, and the value of every adult is implicitly endorsed through the fact that each one is allowed to reproduce herself or himself” (183). it is largely by design that this approach leaves a constellation of established values about procreation and the parent-child relationship completely untouched. overall wants procreative minimalism to gain broad appeal and so would rather not stray too far from certain biocentric norms about procreation. besides, overall is convinced that competing antinatalist arguments are not only unpopular, but also philosophically untenable. to this end, she considers thomas young’s (2001) environmentalist argument that “human procreation is morally wrong in most cases” (183) as a lesson in their general implausibility.11 here is young’s argument in a nutshell: a fundamental tenet of mainstream environmentalism is that “waste and resource depletion from unsustainable consumption are morally wrong, bad (in some sense), or manifests a serious character flaw” (181). environmentalists argue that we should abstain from acts of unsustainable consumption for this reason. as it turns out, conceiving and rearing 11 unabashed antinatalism of the benetarian kind does not get much play in philosophical circles. but there is a recent exception in stuart rachels’s (2014) bluntly titled essay “the immorality of having children.” rachels crunches the numbers involved in the cost of raising one child in the u.s.— conservatively estimated at $227,000 (usd)—and uses it to formulate a position inspired by peter singer called the “famine relief argument against having children.” succinctly stated, it goes like this: “having a child costs hundreds of thousands of dollars; that money would be much better spent on famine relief; therefore, it is immoral to have children” (571). or, formulated slightly differently: “in countries like the united states, parents typically spend over $200,000 to raise a child. that money would be much better spent on the poor. therefore, individuals who live in countries like the united states shouldn’t have children” (580; emphasis original, et passim). rachels notes that this is “essentially an expected-utility argument: we shouldn’t have children because having a child is a poor way to squeeze benefit out of $227,000. if the language of expected utility seems cold, then we might say: we should immunize, feed and clothe impoverished children who already exist rather than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on having one child of our own” (571). whether or not this argument is well supported cannot be considered in any meaningful detail here (i cringe at rachels’s complete lack of feminist insight). even so, he usefully illustrates just how much rides on procreative decision-making. and in the pages ahead i aim to show that the ramifications therein are far from exhausted by economic or opportunity costs. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 children causes substantial environmental impacts via harmful greenhouse gases. despite this, environmentalists generally concede that “having children [is] morally permissible, even praiseworthy” (181). yet, and this is the heart of young’s argument, if “having even just one child in an affluent household . . . produces environmental impacts comparable to what mainstream environmentalists consider to be an intuitively unacceptable level of consumption, resource depletion, and waste, [then] they should also oppose human reproduction (in most cases)” (183; emphasis mine). for young, then, the takeaway message is simple: moral consistency demands that environmentalists should be committed antinatalists for the exact same reasons they oppose other common consumerist forms of unsustainable consumption. while overall agrees with the spirit of young’s message—“environmental degradation and overpopulation behoove all of us to limit the numbers of offspring we create” (overall 2012, 181)—she nevertheless finds it wanting on four counts. let us consider them one by one. first, overall claims that due to “the centrality of childbearing and child rearing to human existence, an obligation not to have any children would be supererogatory” (181). bracketing for the moment overall’s conflation of childbearing with child rearing, it does not necessarily follow that, simply because one paints an obligation as supererogatory, we can excuse ourselves from trying to live up to the moral standard it posits or assess how our actions fare against it. simply put, falling pathetically short of certain moral ideals—even if very demanding and never fully actualizable—can be immoral and blameworthy.12 if matters were otherwise, then philosophical moral inquiry would be in the sorry business of maintaining status quo values for fear that anything “too demanding” could upset prevailing social mores. the erroneous idea that a “behaviour, if sufficiently common, is self-excusing” (goodin 2009, 11) is already wildly popular, and the last thing we need is philosophers tripping over themselves to justify it. so even if an obligation not to have children were classified as supererogatory, we could not disregard it for that reason alone. but suppose we are feeling charitable and grant that childbearing and child rearing are central to human existence. even making this assumption cannot get us very far, for it merely sidesteps the philosophical issue of whether they should be and ignores the possibility that in the future they won’t be. on the latter point, an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence indicates that the more education 12 an obvious example concerns telling the truth. suppose i cannot be truthful at all times. does this mean i can excuse myself from the enterprise of truth-telling altogether? not even close. a habitual liar who tries to justify her behaviour by maintaining as much would, i think, be easily rebuked for her paltry reasoning. 9 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 women receive, the less inclined they are to have children. if this trend persists, then perhaps, when women are given more educational opportunities across the globe, the once popular idea that childbearing and child rearing are “central to human existence” will become an antiquated view. any supererogatory associations with going childless will therefore disappear since it would be the de facto preference for most women. now whether or not this future state will ever materialize is no doubt fodder for counterfactual contemplation (with possibly very depressing results). back in the actual world, my point is simply this: too often undocumented forces are at work in our classification of certain actions as supererogatory, which, upon closer inspection, are morally problematic in their own right. these unregarded forces are malleable, subject to change, and should not be granted the ahistorical privilege of unearned permanence if we can help it. qualities we currently peg as essential to human existence are no exception. overall’s second reason for rejecting young’s position is that “people are not likely to adhere to such an obligation not only because it would be so difficult (given how much some people value procreation), but [also] because it would most likely be violated . . . thereby lowering their own motivation and drastically increasing resentment” (2012, 181). certainly both possibilities could come true. but notice how the same exact charge, mutatis mutandis, can be leveled against overall’s policy almost word for word. might not some adherents to overall’s procreative minimalism—who value procreation as much as the next person—resent those who completely ignore her one-child-per-person recommendation? couldn’t this presumably lower their motivation to follow overall’s advice? would this not then drastically increase their resentment toward others? all signs point to yes. so it appears overall’s criticism of young boomerangs right back on her own position. yet, even if it does, i cannot see why overall’s procreative minimalism or young’s antinatalism should be deemed impractical simply because they might be difficult to follow or could generate possible feelings of resentment. striving for moral consistency in a world rife with so much wrong is never an easy go. but if the very striving generates feelings of envy or resentment for those participating in actions that we recognize as immoral, then maybe we have yet to fully appreciate the moral significance of our commitments. overall’s third reason for rejecting young’s position is that it would be hard to “undertake such an obligation knowing that once the population was sufficiently reduced, people would no longer have to adhere to it” (2012, 181). need it be so? we need not strain our imagination to envision a world where the size of the global population is far from exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity, and yet, thanks to certain technological advances in the art of emitting harmful greenhouse gases, the affluent are better positioned than ever before to cause significant environmental damage at the individual level. in these circumstances, 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 the obligation against procreation would remain relevant for affluent populations and would need to be preserved even if the global population were sufficiently downsized. hence the potential problems associated with population growth are not strictly numerical ones. once again this criticism speaks to the fact that overall consistently has us at the mercy of individuals who appear incapable of appreciating the moral dimension(s) of their actions. i suspect that is why she never seriously considers the possibility that one might want to undertake an obligation not to have children and find it valuable precisely because it means that future generations will not have to uphold it. on this more optimistic interpretation of moral motivation, the idea that an obligation is perishable does not deter the agent from adopting it now and into the foreseeable future even if she might never reap the full benefits of its intended effects. overall’s fourth and final reason for rejecting young’s position is that, “unlikely as it is, if large numbers of people did not have children at all, then a sizable gap in the population might create serious problems within a few decades as a result of a lack of workers (unless adoption from the developing world were undertaken on a massive scale)” (2012, 181). eyeing overall’s parenthetical remark, if the great majority of individuals in the west saw young’s obligation as morally binding, then perhaps adopting children from developing regions could easily become standard practice and would therefore ameliorate any of the potential problems she is concerned about. moreover, this line of reasoning assumes that an obligation not to have children would somehow take the world’s economies by surprise. yet why should we think it would be simultaneously taken up en masse? the more likely scenario—in what overall admits is already an “unlikely” situation—is that, like most other revolutionary social changes, it would steadily gain appeal over time. any “serious problems” that might result from a decrease in the population could then be anticipated and abated. furthermore, even if this sudden transformation were to take place we would have no way of knowing whether a sudden drop in the workforce would deleteriously impact future economies. perhaps having one child per person would somehow more severely hamper economic growth. does guesswork of this sort constitute a morally sound basis for rejecting overall’s procreative minimalism? i sure hope not. and if i am right, then the same holds true for young’s proposal: mere speculation offers insufficient grounds for dismissal. developing an acute moral sense of our procreative responsibilities requires a sharpened focus on what we already know—namely that ours is a world overrun with environmental problems caused by overpopulation and overconsumption. with this in mind, it seems wrong, if not morally irresponsible, to dismiss young’s proposal on the basis of some unlikely scenarios that may or 11 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 may not actually occur in the far-flung future as a result of not having children. quickly recapping my arguments above: i argued that overall’s four objections against young not only problematically rebound on her procreative minimalism, they also fail to offer us philosophically compelling justification against his argument that having children (in the west) is (in many cases) on par with other environmentally destructive enterprises. it appears young is right to think that true environmentalism entails a stronger stance against procreation. undoubtedly this view lacks mainstream appeal, and that is why overall would rather pursue more palatable solutions. fair enough. but we still need to understand why young’s conclusion would strike western pronatalist sensibilities with such jarring force. closer inspection of the apparent unpopularity of young’s position might have us rediscover the parental wisdom of an old and oft-neglected saying: “what is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular.” in what follows, i will examine overall’s position in the context of tracy isaacs’s (2011) deceptively simple observation that “together we can do things that we could not do alone, from moving a grand piano to significantly reducing humanity’s carbon footprint” (8-9).13 i would add that together we are capable of significantly changing attitudes toward procreation. giving proper daylight to feminist strategies for queering and ecologizing motherhood in ways that transcend the dominant biological paradigm under which it currently resides is, i think, an excellent start. iii. queer earth mothering so far i have defended thomas young’s argument of not having children for environmental reasons against christine overall’s criticisms. recall that young thinks argumentative consistency demands that environmentalists must awaken to their implicit antinatalist commitments, lest they risk moral hypocrisy. in this section, i expand the scope of young’s arguments to include affluent prospective parents in general—and not just the environmentalists among them. to achieve this goal, i take queer theory and ecofeminism together and develop what i call queer earth mothering (qem). it has two main components. first, qem is a critical procreative stance that draws on queer theory for the purposes of situating 13 isaacs (2011) beautifully illustrates this point with the following example: “think of some small part of a machine. if we take it out, it is useless on its own. the part only makes a difference when it is working in concert with the other parts. when each part is doing its job, the whole thing works. it is very important for individual moral agents to understand themselves as playing possibly small, but certainly valuable, parts. when individuals think of their actions in this way, moral possibilities expand” (10). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 adoptive motherhood outside the prevailing biological paradigm of motherhood (bpm) that strictly defines the parent-child relationship in terms of a “natural, biological phenomenon including both a gestational and genetic connection to one’s child” (park 2013, 58). we need to consider why a vast majority of women would rather “undergo expensive, painful, and potentially harmful fertility treatments rather than choosing adoptive motherhood” (park 2006, 206). second, qem exists as a directive to queer the ecofeminist concept of “earth mothering”— an intimate, caring disposition toward nature—by decoupling it from its gendered associations while retaining the valuable ecofeminist vision at its core. bringing the two components of qem together should ideally situate us to appreciate how, on the one hand, choosing adoption does not compromise a mother’s ability to participate in the many goods offered by the parent-child relationship and, on the other, understand why the ecological cost of procreation is so often neglected. it almost goes without saying that the biological relationship between parent and child is frequently singled out as being importantly different than other relationships. what is unique about it, according to overall, “is that the parents not only start to build a relationship with the child but actually create the person with whom they have the relationship. they choose to have their child” (2012, 215; emphasis original). along these lines, overall suggests that becoming a biological parent qualifies as the singular expression of seeking “out a connection to a new human being” (216). apparently seeking a new relationship with an already existing human being does not meet this standard. why not? because in rearing one’s genetically related offspring, very real experiences are involved in discerning and appreciating the similarities between oneself and one’s children. a parent can also enjoy witnessing her own parents’ talents or personality emerging in her children. there is a sense of continuity and history created by the genetic tie. (overall 1987, 154) given these supposed procreational perks, whenever overall (2012) is consulted by prospective parents about whether or not they should have children, she answers with unhesitating confidence in the affirmative: “don’t miss it!” (220).14 overall is aware that her pronatalist cheer is hard to square with her skepticism about whether “human beings have an ethereal existence, in which they wait for their potential parents to call them into the material world” (195) or that, as a point of metaphysical fact, children “are not brought into the world for their own sake because they do not preexist their conception” (204). well then, 14 in keeping with her procreative minimalism, overall adds the caveat: “yet i also say, ‘please consider having no more than one each’” (220). 13 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 what can be said about the precise value of bringing a now nonexistent being into a parent-child relationship that supersedes the importance of giving children existing here and now (complete with actual needs) that benefit? an awful lot rides on this question. unfortunately, overall’s answer reaffirms her reluctance to be an enemy of the commonplace. she argues that procreation gives biological parents a unique opportunity for “self-transformation,” the implicit assumption is that a genetic link must ground the parent-child relationship for one to reap the selftransformational benefits therein. elsewhere, overall claims the “best reason” for prospective parents to have a child of “their own” is that it generates a conditional form of love that provides a “particular meaning to one’s own life and to the life of the being that is created” (217).15 appealing to this brand of pronatalist cliché merely elides the thorny issue at hand: why should this specific form of love—and the related benefits of self-transformation—require the passage of genetic material from parent to child? if overall concedes that these benefits could arise without such a connection, then why elevate a matter of contingency to a level of significance that has yet to be convincingly justified (morally or otherwise)? and, let us be clear, she ought to concede that point. otherwise she risks giving the impression that a genetic link to one’s offspring houses a special relational property unavailable to adoptive parents. now maybe some parents out there are willing to bite through bullets like taffy to maintain that they only truly love 15 to overall’s credit, she acknowledges that “to become a biological parent of a child whom one will raise is to create a new relationship: not just a genetic one, but a psychological, physical, intellectual, and moral one” (216; emphasis original). yet, despite the qualification, overall nevertheless consistently tries to single out the unparalleled significance of the genetic tie with unfortunate results. for example: “in becoming a parent, one creates not only a child and a [corresponding] relationship, but oneself; one creates a new and better self-identity” (216). from this basis, overall thinks her procreative minimalism “implies that every person is sufficiently valuable as to be worth replacing” (183) and, as a result, all “persons get to (try to) have a child of ‘their own’” (183). taken together, the upshot of the two claims is rather unsightly: it seems as if only biological offspring get to count as suitable “procreative replacements” for our personage. lacking a genetic connection, then, adoptive parents could not strictly speaking consider an adopted child as “their own” in the sense reserved for biological offspring. these unseemly consequences are the direct result of overall’s unwavering commitment to certain aspects of the biological paradigm of motherhood (bpm). i pursue the reasons why she should cancel her subscription to bpm in the pages ahead. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 their children because they share a genetic tie. but i hope their numbers are few and far between, and i doubt that overall wants to count herself among them. moreover, even if there were a perfectly legitimate reason for emphasizing the singular value of the genetic link, we would still face a moral quandary. because if the cost of maintaining that link jeopardizes the environmental integrity of the material circumstances that precondition the very possibility of anyone becoming any kind of parent at all (pardon my thick kantian accent), then seeking alternative sources of self-transformation other than procreation would still be the morally preferable course of action to take. or suppose the benefits of the parent-child relationship did not hinge on a genetic link. what would it require for us to take this possibility seriously? i think we could go about making a case for it in any number of ways. for my part, i suggest that assessing the prevailing assumptions about motherhood that potentially (and often inadvertently) reinforce heteropatriarchal norms should be near the top of the feminist philosopher’s list. luckily, queer theorists have already made significant strides on this front by inventing “new practices and new ways of relating that are beyond normative understandings of what bodies should and should not be able to do” (browne, lim, and brown 2007, 53). it is in this vein that i take shelley m. park’s (2006; 2013) mission of “queering motherhood” as my normative blueprint for recasting adoptive motherhood in a more favourable light. as i stated, park observes that motherhood is commonly defined as a “natural, biological phenomenon including both a gestational and genetic connection to one’s child” (2013, 58), and she calls this a biological paradigm of motherhood (bpm). i have previously associated it with overall’s procreative minimalism (although she would certainly deny any endorsement of its unsavoury consequences). bpm further implies that there is something queer about adoptive motherhood. it is queer because, as park says, claims about ‘real mothers’ equate maternal reality with participation in a particular set of biological processes such as pregnancy, birthing, and lactation. because of participation in these biological processes, a mother is frequently thought to possess a special bond with a child such that loving and caring for the child is natural, a matter of ‘maternal instinct.’ (4) as a result, adoptive mothers who lack these experiences are essentially “given an entry visa, but not full citizenship in motherhood” (58). in this way, park perceives adoptive motherhood as providing ample “opportunity for [developing] a critical perspective on the dominant scripts of motherhood” (58). dwelling on these scripts, as it were, is necessary for uncovering 15 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 the prevailing, heteronormative assumptions about biological mothering that make it seem as if, in rebecca walker’s words, “the love you have for your non-biological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood” (quoted in park 2013, 5). it is not difficult to find such biocentric norms lurking beneath overall’s (2012) modus operandi: “i am endorsing a particular vision of who we are as human beings and what parenting is about” (109). what that particular vision reinforces is the idea that claiming “persons get to . . . have a child of ‘their own’” (183; emphasis mine) inevitably means having a biologically related child of “one’s own.”16 hence the queer in queer earth mothering is about being wary of the ideological nature of maternal subjectivities cut from the conceptual cloth of bpm that construe adoption as a “‘second-best’ solution to the problem of discovered infertility” (park 2013, 61). failing said wariness, we risk sending the recurring message—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—that “adoptive motherhood is better than being childless; but inferior to having a child of ‘one’s own’” (park 2013, 61; emphasis mine). as i see it, queering motherhood means overcoming bpm and escaping its influences. otherwise adoptive motherhood will continue to be unfairly interpreted as an unauthenticated, if not counterfeit, form of mothering. so how do we escape them? making a moral imperative out of appreciating the many “nongenetic, nongestational, bodily relationships between mothers and children that serve to connect parent and child in both momentary and in fundamental and long-lasting ways” (61) would be a good first step. but it would be even better if we could untangle our understanding of motherhood in general from the strictly biological and heterosexual family unit. in park’s words, this means paying attention to how adoptive motherhood “allows us to re 16 i am not about to deny that some women value not just the genetic linkage itself, but also the “female experiences of pregnancy and childbirth” (park 2013, 60). i say “some women” because pregnancy is typically fetishized as a transformative experience when, for many women, it is anything but. pregnancy can be a veritable mountain of accumulated miseries from the first trimester to the time of delivery. for other women, of course, it can be an undeniably positive experience on the whole. but we should not count the hits and ignore the misses by downplaying the multiplicity of meanings that can be derived from gestational experiences—both good and bad. of course, there exists a vast feminist literature on the phenomenological significance of the gestational link and childbearing that i simply cannot contend with here (see, for example, oliver 2010; young 1984; lundquist 2008; oksala 2003; heinämaa 2014; diprose 2002; guenther 2006). but if it reassures the reader to know it, i developed qem with the full philosophical weight of these issues never far from my mind. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 envision motherhood and family, thus opening possibilities for novel practices in which biological as well as adoptive mothers may engage” (61). from this undertheorized maternal viewpoint, park thinks we can “shift family configurations in ways that blur the distinction between the queer and the normal and, in so doing, allow for—indeed, demand—the honest negotiation of differences within and across generations” (221). no doubt it is a tall order, but i think park is right to start the negotiations at the level of blurring distinctions. fanning the flames of binary thinking is likely to encourage a zero-sum opposition between biological and adoptive mothers. our best chance at avoiding this outcome, so park thinks, is to open up shop for discursive spaces where heteronormative notions about motherhood are openly contested, debated, and if the dialogical cards are played right, possibly resolved. clearly i agree with park for the most part, but i think that these conversations will remain systematically incomplete if they fail to encourage an acute awareness of the ecologically perilous stage on which they take place. spreading this form of awareness has a privileged place in ecofeminist circles and that brings us to the earth mothering segment of queer earth mothering. while ecofeminism is not reducible to axiomatic principles, it can nevertheless be charitably simplified as placing a philosophical emphasis on “the historical and mutually reinforcing devaluation of women and nature with a view to transforming existing forms of exploitation” (kheel 2008, 8).17 the benefit of analyzing the morality of procreative decision-making from this perspective as a means for expanding our concept of motherhood beyond bpm is that it starts “from an understanding of the social relations underpinning current patterns of unsustainability together with an understanding of the material relations between humanity and nature” (mellor 2005, 209). among other things, ecofeminists 17 the latter point—with its use of the categories “woman” and “nature”—has generated a great deal of controversy for possessing an unforgivably essentialist tenor (which i shall discuss shortly). as a result, ecofeminists have faced accusations of ignoring their own “predominantly white, middle-class ethos and uptake” and that ecofeminism, as a movement, is “irretrievably marred by essentialism about women and by regional-, class-, and ethnocentrism” (thompson 2006, 507). this critique won the day and has effectively cast ecofeminism into the unmarked margins of feminist philosophy. an unfortunate state of affairs i must say. especially since most ecofeminists burden their claims with an almost overwhelming amount of context-sensitive qualifications. however, i will leave aside these and other peripheral criticisms and focus directly on their proposals since there is already an abundance of articles demonstrating the weaknesses of these criticisms—a notable example being gaard (2011 ). 17 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 typically use this methodological perspective to pinpoint a longstanding ontological dualism between a rational masculine sphere and a feminine domestic sphere. the former is associated with “human freedom and control … over nature, especially via science and in active struggle against nature and over circumstances” (plumwood 1990, 213); the latter “represents the area of immersion in life, the natural part of the human being, the sphere of passivity, acceptance of unchangeable human nature and natural necessity, of reproduction and necessary and unfree labour” (213-214). these mutually reinforcing dualisms form a fault line through contemporary western culture and come prepackaged with the implication that “it is better to be rational, intellectual, and spiritual than emotional, bodily, and physical" (bailey 2007, 41). more plainly stated: it is better to be a man (above nature) than a woman (within nature).18 of course the dyad masculine/feminine is far from the only hierarchical dualism. there are numerous other splits between culture/nature, reason/nature, mind/body, rationality/animality, universal/particular, human/animal, human/nonhuman, civilized/primitive, and more still (plumwood 1993, 43). together these form a tapestry of “mutually reinforcing dualisms that constructs, marginalizes, and inferiorizes numerous social groups, while providing powerful justifications for coercing oppressive relations between groups based on race, nation, class, sexuality, age and species” (carr 2000, 16-17). given how seamlessly this patchwork of interlocking oppressions integrates itself into western culture (and elsewhere), many ecofeminists identify dualistic thinking as being “at the heart of the current ecological crisis” (carr 2011, xiv). important for our purposes is another side of this dualistic story. the ageold association of women with nature supposedly fosters a profound historical connection “between women’s mothering and caring disposition and their unique propensity to care for nature” (macgregor 2006, 20). consequently, many ecofeminists have embraced this primordial women-nature connection and describe it in terms of earth mothering (or sometimes ecomaternalism). focusing for the moment on the conceptual genealogy of earth mothering, carolyn merchant (2005) describes how it coheres with the image of earth as a living organism and nurturing mother served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. one does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails for gold, or mutilate her body. as 18 let me reemphasize an important point: the dualisms in question need not be peddled as all-encompassing categories with “universal man” on the one side and “universal woman” on the other (plumwood 1993 , 11). rather, they are better understood simply as “a feature of western thought” (11). 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 long as the earth was conceptualized as alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behaviour to carry out destructive acts against it. … today, [this] organic cosmology, experienced in some form by almost all of the world’s people for all times, has been superseded. (43) reviving this type of ecological interrelatedness does not depend on “abstract theorizing but, rather, on what women do—indeed, have always done—to survive the vicissitudes of capitalist-patriarchal-colonial development” (macgregor 2006, 4). that is why earth mothering is put forward as an ideal candidate for the job. because what women have always done in the form of (earth) mothering is to treat nature with respect as a “living organism and nurturing mother” rather than as a fungible, inert resource. so perhaps ecofeminists can claim they have a plausible explanation for the growing social science research indicating that women on the whole generally show a greater concern for the environment than men.19 the thinking is that “as mothers they fear for their children’s health and [therefore] feel a sense of duty to protect and restore their environments” (20). i recognize the inclination at this point might be to cite earth mothering as a textbook example of false universalization on account of its unseemly essentialist overtones. yet the reality is that it can and does function as a powerful maternalist justification for environmental protection.20 the question then becomes whether it is possible—much less advisable—to yield the practical potential of earth mothering without taking onboard its gender-troubled underpinnings. i think it is both possible and advisable. but i can understand why those 19 for a brief and lighthearted synopsis of this research, see polakovic (2012). polakovic concludes with the lukewarm suggestion that aldo leopold’s “land ethic”—being a hemmingyeseque manly-man way of appreciating nature (my words, not polakvovic’s)—might be useful for attracting more men to environmental issues. i doubt it. or at least i suspect that an admonition to “think like a mountain” is incapable of generating widespread appeal (it has had plenty of time to catch on and the teeming masses of leopoldians are nowhere to be found outside of academia). but even if leopold’s thinking could gain widespread support, that would not be a point in its favour. rather than rehash the manifold reasons to explain why that is the case, i will simply point the reader to mallory’s (2001) wonderful article as a more than sufficient rebuttal to the idea. 20 the non-profit “ecomom alliance” and the group “mothers out front: mobilizing for a livable climate” are but a few of many examples that attest to this fact; see their urls in references. 19 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 familiar with the less than stellar legacy of ecofeminism in feminist philosophy might want to withhold their enthusiasm for resurrecting one of its most derided concepts. after all, doesn’t earth mothering ignore the fact that the duties associated with satisfying the biological needs of other human beings are habitually and unceremoniously passed on to women who would rather not have such an “intimate connection” with nature? and if that is true, then shouldn’t feminists paint the women-nature connection with the unsettling look of a forced embrace? obviously they should if associating women with nature casts them in the ontological mold of beings whose lives are “circumscribed by obligated labour (e.g., housework, childcare, managers of domestic economies) [and] performed on the basis of duty, love, necessity, violence, need for, or fear of, loss of economic support” (mellor 2005, 215). thankfully, we are under no obligation to fetishize the women-nature connection to the point where we have to ignore its problematic features. in fact, if i am right, the same heteronormative notions about motherhood that i singled out earlier as endemic to bpm are largely responsible for sapping earth mothering of its “spectacular potential to bond women to each other and to nature, to foster a liberating knowledge of self, [and] to release the very creativity and generativity that the institution of ‘motherhood’ in our culture denies to women” (umansky 1996, 3). in other words, it is high time we queer earth mothering. how do we do this? we can start by channeling the maternalist commitments of earth mothering across gender boundaries. expressing concern for the well-being of future generations, becoming politically active in environmental causes, caring about environmental degradation, and honing in on an attitude of ecological interdependence are not a woman’s burden. at a time of widespread failure to meaningfully address human-made climate catastrophes, they become moral requirements for anyone capable of undertaking them. i am not denying that ecofeminism goes astray whenever it “attempts to combat what it sees as the blanket domination of women and nature with the very logic of that domination” (johns-putra 2014, 132). yet i view recruiting the ambition of queering motherhood and recontextualizing it as a corrective for righting the wrongs inherent in the earth mothering of old as anything but the recycling of bad philosophical habits. and i see no reason why we should discard valuable ecofeminist insight when, if we can successfully queer the concept of earth mothering, then most of the charges against it—that it is essentialistic, gender-specific, complicit with patriarchy and so on—will be dropped. so taking earth mothering beyond its otherwise narrowly gendered borders is the right move to make in this case. indeed, at a time when the twin motors of anthropogenic climate change are overpopulation and overconsumption, the process of queering motherhood would be radically 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 incomplete without ecofeminist insight to support it. this means the value of qem cannot be located in the mere fusion of queer theory with ecofeminism— nor could we locate it in one theoretical branch without the other—but rather in the novel ways they bolster each other when brought to bear on issues of procreation, ecological stability, and motherhood.21 taken together, qem conditions an interrogative attitude for critically assessing the oppressively heteronormative and ecologically destructive assumptions that are employed in the construction and maintenance of bpm. defining qem as an interrogative attitude makes it difficult to draw a clear line of separation between the dos and don’ts of procreative decision-making. still, i think there are obvious practical implications at hand. here is one of them: given the ecological calamity caused by affluent populations—recall the “dreadful situation” i outlined in the introduction—it is clear that affluent prospective parents should (generally speaking) favour adoption over biological reproduction. however, and this is a crucial difference between qem and young’s position, the reasons for this suggestion are not entirely reducible to the environmental harms caused by procreation. i strongly recommend that any affluent prospective parent should keep the following figures close at heart: the number of children living in foster care in the u.s. hovers around 104,000. roughly 20,000 of them will never be adopted. at the global level, the numbers are staggeringly higher.22 should we be surprised that this situation is only getting worse by the day? not if affluent prospective parents of all people are led to believe that not having biologically related children is asking too much of them, or that from a moral point of view it is perfectly acceptable if adoption never amounts to anything more than a velleity for those who are in the best position to pursue it. with qem as a guide for relocating the value in the parent-child relationship, i am hopeful that, at the very least, we can influence procreative decision-making in the direction of adoption without having to view it as a major compromise to make that transition. to be sure, even the best-intentioned prospective adoptive parents will 21 citing the mere melding of queer theory and ecofeminism as a novel contribution would ignore the important and ongoing contributions that proliferate under the umbrellas of “queer ecology” and “queer ecofeminism.” for instance, see (just to name a few): mortimer-sandilands and erickson (2010); azzarello (2012); and gaard (1997). 22 for a closer look at these depressing numbers, see “facts and statistics” on the congressional coalition on adoption institute webpage, available at the following url and last accessed march 27, 2015: http://www.ccainstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layo ut=blog&id=25&it emid=43. 21 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 confront a disheartening amount of bureaucratic obstacles throughout the course of the adoption process. couldn’t these obstacles prove so onerous as to be serious deterrents for bothering with it at all? i certainly hope not. but i think if anything must be wrapped in red tape, it should be whatever safeguards adoptees from lousy adoptive parents.23 plus, it is not outlandish to think that if more people choose adoption, the demand for it to become a more streamlined process would be harder to ignore. that being said, most prospective parents never pursue adoption as a realistic alternative to procreation in the first place. therefore, i feel comfortable in maintaining that changing attitudes toward adoption (and adoptive motherhood) via qem is a necessary and positive (even if not fully adequate) step in the right direction. iv. conclusion let me stave off two probable misreadings of my motives before i wrap up. i have tried to steer clear of synonymizing biological mothers with the biological paradigm of motherhood for three main reasons. first, conflating the two makes it seem as if biological mothers are incapable of deviating from bpm. yet they can and do. feminist theorists with biological children are responsible for some of the most devastating criticisms of bpm and count as the most obvious examples of this possibility. second, it overlooks the fact that biological mothers are entirely capable of becoming adoptive mothers and that many women occupy both roles simultaneously. third, without the distinction, qem might be construed as a thinly veiled attempt to shame affluent women with biological children. this move would be so counterproductive and useless to my purposes that i could not hope to gain anything from it. qem is about changing hearts and minds, not hardening them. next, it is worth reemphasizing that qem is not a simple matter of calculating environmental harms and following the procreative course of action 23 that does not mean i think it should take nearly as long it does. in some of the worst cases international adoption can take upwards of four years and clearly that is unacceptable. in fact, the delays have caused a dramatic decline in international adoption rates for the u.s.; see jordan (2015). this brings a related issue to mind: should affluent prospective parents prioritize their adoptive preferences for adoptees living in conditions where basic subsistence is not guaranteed? i think it is important to raise this question, but i must confess that answering it will have to be the topic of a future paper. although i am happy to leave the door open on the possibility that qem could require a moral obligation of this kind, currently we are at the ground level of a consciousness-raising enterprise and need something like qem to elevate the cause of adoptive motherhood. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 that causes the largest net reduction of harmful greenhouse gases. a biological mother who, say, commits to a vegan diet to offset the carbon emissions caused by procreation has effectively removed herself from an enterprise responsible for more harmful greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.24 an adoptive mother who, by comparison, never procreates but regularly consumes nonhuman animal flesh—and engages in other environmentally devastating habits without a second thought—will almost certainly have a more significant carbon legacy over the course of her lifetime. so obviously certain measures like becoming vegan can be implemented to drastically minimize the carbon cost of procreation—and no doubt they should be.25 yet notice how this approach leaves bpm thoroughly untroubled. considering the philosophical complexity of biological motherhood quickly becomes immaterial if all we are interested in doing is making procreation more “eco-friendly.” that is why a more comprehensive procreative outlook like qem is required.26 reckoning with the reality that procreative choices made in affluent contexts can have ecologically devastating consequences and making motherhood kinder to the planet in turn are major parts of qem. but it is far from exhausted by these assignments. we have the additional responsibility of critically evaluating bpm, queering the picture of mothering and motherhood implicit within it, and ultimately coming away with a new appreciation for what makes the parent-child relationship meaningful. or at least that is the hope. references azzarello, robert. 2012. queer environmentality: ecology, evolution, and sexuality 24 for more about this statistic, see steinfeld (2006). 25 incentives to this end abound—even purely anthropocentric ones. for instance, if all the food crops currently devoted to “livestock” (a truly loathsome term for what are sentient beings) were redirected to human populations we could easily feed 4 billion people; see cassidy (2013 ). 26 at the 2015 meeting of the canadian society for the study of practical ethics (csspe) an audience member objected that qem would prohibit the possibility of adopting children in developing regions on the assumption that bringing them into an affluent context could drastically increase their (otherwise minimal) carbon footprint. this objection does not hold for the reasons i just provided. and i am hard put to imagine that penalizing those most in need of adoption on account of our ecologically destructive habits could follow from anything i have said about qem. 23 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 in american literature. burlington, vt: ashgate. bailey, cathryn. 2007. “we are what we eat: feminist vegetarianism and the reproduction of racial identity.” hypatia 22 (2): 39-59. block, ben. 2013. “climate change will worsen hunger, study says.” worldwatch institute. accessed august 24, 2015. http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6271. browne, kath, jason lim, and gavin brown, eds. 2007. geographies of sexualities: theory, practices, and politics. aldershot, hampshire: ashgate. carr, glynis. 2000. “introduction.” in new essays in ecofeminist literary criticism, edited by g. carr. london: associated university presses. ———. 2011. “foreword.” in ecofeminism and rhetoric: critical perspectives on sex, technology, and discourse, edited by d.a. vakoch. new york: berghahn books. cassidy, emily s., paul c. west, james s. gerber, and jonathan a. foley. 2013. “redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare.” environmental research letters 8 (3): 1-8. congressional coalition on adoption institute. n.d. accessed march 27, 2015. http://www.ccainstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=categor y&l ayout=blog&id=25&itemid=43. diprose, rosalyn. 2002. the bodies of women: ethics, embodiment and sexual difference. london: routledge. dwyer, james. 2013. "on flying to ethics conferences: climate change and moral responsiveness." international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics, 6 (1): 1-18. ecomom alliance®. n.d. accessed august 22, 2015. http://www.ecomomalliance.org. ellis, erle c. 2011. "anthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere." philosophical transactions of the royal society a: mathematical, physical and engineering sciences 369 (1938): 1010-1035. gaard, greta c. 1997. "toward a queer ecofeminism." hypatia 12 (1): 114-137. ———. 2011. "ecofeminism revisited: rejecting essentialism and re-placing species in a material feminist environmentalism." feminist formations 23 (2): 2653. gillis, justin. 2014. "u.n. draft report lists unchecked emissions’ risks." new york times, august 26. accessed march 13, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/science/earth/greenhouse-gasemissions-are-growing-and-growing-more-dangerous-draft-of-un-reportsays.html. goodin, robert e. 2009. "demandingness as a virtue." the journal of ethics 13 (1): 1-13. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 guenther, lisa. 2006. the gift of the other: lévinas and the politics of reproduction. albany: state university of new york press. heinämaa, sara. 2014. "an equivocal couple overwhelmed by life: a phenomenological analysis of pregnancy." philosophia 4 (1): 31-49. hymas, lisa. 2011. "i decided not to have children for environmental reasons." guardian, september 27. accessed march 27, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/27/not-havechildren-environmental-reasons. isaacs, tracy l. 2011. moral responsibility in collective contexts. oxford: oxford university press. jamieson, dale. 2014. reason in a dark time: why the struggle against climate change failed—and what it means for our future. new york: oxford university press. johns-putra, adeline. 2014. "care, gender, and the climate-changed future: maggie gee’s the ice people." in green planets: ecology and science fiction, edited by g. canavan and s. k. robinson. middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. jordan, miriam. 2015. "foreign adoptions by americans drop to lowest level since 1982." wall street journal, april 1. accessed august 22, 2015. http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-adoptions-by-americans-drop-tolowest-level-since-1982-1427837631. kheel, marti. 2008. nature ethics: an ecofeminist perspective. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. lichtenberg, judith. 2013. distant strangers: ethics, psychology, and global poverty. cambridge: cambridge university press. lundquist, caroline. 2008. "being torn: toward a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy." hypatia 23 (3): 136-155. mallory, chaone. 2001. "acts of objectification and the repudiation of dominance: leopold, ecofeminism, and the ecological narrative." ethics & the environment 6 (2): 59-89. macgregor, sherilyn. 2011. beyond mothering earth: ecological citizenship and the politics of care. vancouver: ubc press. mcleman, robert a. 2014. climate and human migration: past experiences, future challenges. new york: cambridge university press. mellor, mary. 2005. "ecofeminism and environmental ethics: a materialist perspective." in environmental philosophy: from animal rights to radical ecology, edited by michael e. zimmerman, j. baird callicott, karen j. warren, irene j. klaver, and john clark. upper saddle river, new york: pearson prentice hall. merchant, carolyn. 2005. radical ecology: the search for a livable world. 2nd 25 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 edition. new york: routledge. mortimer-sandilands, catriona, and bruce erickson. 2010. queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire. bloomington, in: indiana university press. mothers out front. n.d. accessed august 22, 2015. http://www.mothersoutfront.org. murtaugh, paul a. and michael g. schlax. 2009. “reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals.” global environmental change 19 (1): 14-20. oliver, kelly. 2010. "motherhood, sexuality, and pregnant embodiment: twentyfive years of gestation." hypatia 25 (4): 760-777. overall, christine. 1987. ethics and human reproduction: a feminist analysis. winchester, ma: allen & unwin. ———. 2012. why have children? the ethical debate. cambridge: mit press. park, shelley m. 2006. "adoptive maternal bodies: a queer paradigm for rethinking mothering.” hypatia 21 (1): 201-226. ———. 2013. mothering queerly, queering motherhood: resisting monomaternalism in adoptive, lesbian, blended, and polygamous families. albany: state university of new york press. plumwood, val. 1990. “women, humanity, and nature.” in socialism, feminism, and philosophy: a radical philosophy reader, edited by sean sayers and peter osborne. london and new york: routledge. ———. 1993. feminism and the mastery of nature. london: routledge. polakovic, gary. 2012. "are women greener than men? los angeles times, june 13. accessed august 25, 2015. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/opinion/la-oe-polakovic-genderand-the-environment-20120613. rachels, stuart. 2014. "the immorality of having children." ethical theory and moral practice 17 (2): 567-582. salleh, ariel. 2000. "in defense of deep ecology: an ecofeminist response to a liberal critique." in beneath the surface: critical essays in the philosophy of deep ecology, edited by e. katz, a. light, and d. rothenberg. cambridge: mit press. sinnott-armstrong, walter. 2010. "it’s not my fault: global warming and individual moral obligations." in climate ethics: essential readings, edited by stephen m. gardiner, simon caney, dale jamieson, and henry shue. new york: oxford university press. steinfeld, henning, pierre gerber, tom wassenaar, vincent castel, mauricio rosales, and cees de haan. 2006. livestock's long shadow. rome: fao. thompson, charis. 2006. "back to nature? resurrecting ecofeminism after poststructuralist and third-wave feminism." isis 97 (3): 505-512. tuana, nancy and chris j. cuomo. 2014. "climate change—editors’ introduction." 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.3 hypatia 29 (3): 533-540. umansky, lauri. 1996. motherhood reconceived: feminism and the legacies of the sixties. new york: new university press. young, iris marion. 1984. "pregnant embodiment: subjectivity and alienation." in throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. bloomington: indiana university press. young, thomas. 2001. "overconsumption and procreation: are they morally equivalent?" journal of applied philosophy 18 (2): 184-192. justin morris is a phd candidate in philosophy at mcmaster university. his main research interests are in climate ethics, ecofeminist philosophy, critical animal studies, and environmental aesthetics. he is currently working on a dissertation examining what moral responsibilities affluent individuals bear for mitigating the pernicious effects of anthropogenic climate change on the globally impoverished. 27 morris: queer earth mothering published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood justin morris recommended citation queer earth mothering: thinking through the biological paradigm of motherhood feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 1 article 2 recommended citation luttrell, johanna c. 2020. “women’s work and assets: considering property ownership from a transnational feminist perspective.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (1). article 2. 2020 women’s work and assets: considering property ownership from a transnational feminist perspective johanna c. luttrell university of houston johannaluttrell@gmail.com luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 women’s work and assets: considering property ownership from a transnational feminist perspective johanna c. luttrell abstract development literature on global gender empowerment devotes much attention to employment, a code word for the inclusion of women’s labor in the global market. recent work in transnational feminisms shows that the emphasis on employment over assets may not prevent exploitation of labor and perpetuity of poverty. this paper first highlights research on how women are increasingly taking on too much responsibility, working in a confluence of survival-oriented activities that undermine their own well-being. i also address how women are increasingly able to get out of poverty: when they can labor in such a way that they are not merely working to survive but also working for accumulation of their own material assets, foremost of which is basic housing. finally, i consider these transnational feminist insights about the importance of housing for women in light of philosophical concerns about property ownership, specifically locke’s theory of property. in justifying property rights through labor, and arguing against the state’s right to usurp property, a lockean can give a defense against forced evictions that still occur in some contexts and give support for a normative connection between women’s labor and assets. keywords: transnational feminisms, urban slums, women’s labor, capabilities approach, housing, john locke, property, forced evictions, homelessness, assets introduction: the misguided emphasis on employment over assets development literature on women, gender, and poverty has stressed the importance of investment in women’s labor as the key to poverty reduction. implicitly, some theorists consider women in terms of their economic utility, envisioning women’s labor as the ‘solution’ to poverty (world bank 2001, 2012). they encourage women, and young girls especially, to be the so-called “double x solution” to the problem of economic inequality between nations, and even the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 problem of capitalist crises (kristof and wudunn 2009, xvli).1 this vision is ethically objectionable because its aim is not always or primarily women’s empowerment but rather economic growth for growth’s sake, generally, and in particular for the sake of the growth of the larger economic units within which poor women live and work.2 these units are most often the nation-state but can include transnational corporations, or women’s own communities or their families. for example, the widely lauded microcredit programs have been almost exclusively aimed at women, because women tend to invest more in others (their families, their communities) than themselves (banerjee et al. 2014, 5; karim 2011, xxi, 95, 191). transnational feminists worry that some trends in development economics have co-opted the insights of second-wave feminism, and that well-meaning development efforts instrumentalize women and reproduce the intersecting inequalities they set out initially to address (benería, berik, and floro 2015, 22; calkin 2015, 626; chant 2016, 16; chant and mcilwaine 2016, 176). globally, women are increasingly working not only a ‘second’ but also a ‘third’ shift: taking care of families, earning an income, and also advocating for basic goods and services (moser 2016, 6; 1993, 15). sylvia chant calls this gendered exploitation of labor under globalization “the feminization of responsibility,” by which she means that women are now responsible for most of the productive labor and reproductive care work; women are simply doing more of the work, but this work does not necessarily translate into an increase in their well-being, empowerment, or economic stability (chant 2007, 331; chant and mcilwaine 2016, 221). however, normatively speaking, the subject of economic reforms should be women’s own well-being, that is, in amartya sen’s (1999) words, development as freedom. considering women’s own well-being as the goal of development takes each person as an individual and an end in themselves. such an approach does not 1 chant, sweetman, and calkin give direct critiques of positioning women as solutions to national inequality (see chant 2016, 1–2; chant and sweetman 2012, 527; calkin 2015, 614). 2 this paper’s topic is limited to women’s property ownership. men’s situation and vulnerabilities, such as the lack of work and demands of masculinities, are outside this paper’s scope because my approach here is not, on the whole, comparative. but men do experience serious vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities in property ownership—thus the paper does not suggest that men in poverty necessarily have any more secure relationship to land tenure than women. it is only that we do know that more secure land tenure can empower women. the analysis centers women but is not necessarily limited to them. for work on men and masculinities in slums, see izugbara, tikkanen, and barron (2014). luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 ask what women are for, but rather, what social, political, and material goods work for women? (zerilli 2005, 94). caroline moser and others have shown how women in poor, urban areas can and do get out of poverty: mainly through asset accumulation, most importantly the acquisition of adequate housing (hamdi 2014, 44; phillips, seifer, and antczak 2013, 56; moser 2016, 7; 2009, 63; varley 2007, 1739; sweetman 2008, 7; rakodi 2014, 3; pritchett 2012; chant and mcilwaine 2016, 71). but the relationship between work and assets is currently under-theorized in much of international development, and especially so regarding the intersections of gender, poverty, and global geography (baruah 2007, 2108). feminist philosophy, especially, has not yet theorized these intersections. even though it is widely lauded as the strongest counter to ‘smart economics’ schemes, the capabilities approach that martha nussbaum iterates has not yet considered the descriptive and normative connection between women’s work and assets, considering the exigencies of the current global economy (nussbaum 2013). for instance, nussbaum writes, “having decent, ample housing may be enough [to ensure capabilities]: it is not clear that human dignity requires that everyone have exactly the same type of housing. to hold that belief might be to fetishize possessions too much. the whole issue needs further investigation” (nussbaum 2013, 41). indeed it does. nussbaum’s statement is indicative of an area yet to be explored among progressive intellectuals in general and among liberal feminists in particular. similarly, feminist philosophy lags behind transnational feminist work in other disciplines, in that it has worried about the relationship between material and symbolic oppression in the abstract, but not enough, yet, about the concrete relation between housing, poverty, and empowerment. here, i propose considering the importance of asset-ownership and housing from a transnational feminist perspective. transnational feminism, as tina fernanda botts describes, “is concerned with connections between nationhood, race, gender, sexuality, and economic exploitation on a world scale in the context of the rise of global capitalism” (tong and botts 2013, 246). it is a perspective that unsettles a “global feminist” analysis in the tradition of susan moller-okin and charlotte bunch that proposes universal values (like antimaterialism or inclusion in the workforce) and tends to lump all so-called “third world women” into one category, without cultural and economic contexts and differences (tong and botts 2013, 137). the questions, then, that motivate this article are, what kind of work are women doing, living as most do now, and what is their work getting them? normatively speaking, what should their work be getting them? i focus on urban contexts because of global trends in poverty and urbanization; cities are where most feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 poor women now live and work.3 i argue that locke’s theory of property is useful to transnational feminists who are worried about the global exploitation of women’s labor in the context of urban poverty because it (a) bolsters a normative connection between work and labor and (b) gives a theoretical protection against forced evictions that (c) reorients property rights along the lines of labor instead of inheritance or capital. instrumentalizing women’s labor in the urban contexts focusing on property ownership problems in urban contexts is important because the world is rapidly urbanizing. the current era is experiencing an unprecedented movement of urban migration, wherein rural populations are increasingly moving to and living in cities, especially rapidly expanding megacities. the un has termed this explosive growth “the new urban revolution”; it is a new period of human history (undesa 2014, 2; un-habitat 2016; chant and mcilwaine 2016, 1).4 as urban centers expand, cities, bursting at their seams, often struggle to build the planning, infrastructure, and funding to support the influx of people. in many cases, urban inhabitants squat and settle in enormous slums, using whatever material they can find (cardboard, aluminum, cane, and hopefully, eventually, brick and mortar) to build their houses. often, migrants first set up informal housing or squatter settlements, outside or beyond the sphere of city provided goods and services, including basic plumbing and trash collection (connolly 1999, 53; unhabitat 2016; chant and mcilwaine 2016, 93). it takes time to connect infrastructure to need, and there are varied stages of secure and insecure land tenure. a “slum,” according to the un, is a setting defined by five characteristics: inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, and insecure residential status (un-habitat 2016).5 an urban slum refers to the settings that develop in large cities as part of the global, twentiethand twenty-first-century trend of urbanization (tacoli 2012, 30). 3 the paper’s focus on urban contexts does not preclude the analysis’s possible application to rural contexts, but that application is outside this paper’s scope. 4 the un reports: “the urban population of the world is expected to increase by more than two thirds by 2050, with nearly 90 per cent of the increase to take place in the urban areas of africa and asia. the world’s urban population is now close to 3.9 billion and is expected to reach 6.3 billion in 2050” (undesa 2014). 5 the definition of “slum” is contested, to be sure. yet there is enough scholarly consensus to use the name, and, while acknowledging the controversy, the un’s definition is satisfactory for the purposes of this paper, because it is careful not to suggest that “slums” have any relation to the character of the people who live in them. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 although the practice is diminishing, in some places, even once migrants settle into fairly stable communities, their neighborhoods can be razed at a moment’s notice, repeatedly displacing their families (potts 2011, 709; macharia 1992, 221; doshi 2013, 844). in limited cases, local governments still hold to the razing of slums as standardized policy practice (sawhney 2013, 42; doshi 2013, 847; baruah 2007, 2109). what kind of work are women who live in cities doing? or, asked differently, what is the nature of the majority of women’s labor now, in this stage of globalization? first, it is important to note that so-called “women’s work” is one factor (among many) driving urban migration in the first place, in so far as their work at home makes it possible for their husbands and other family members to work outside the home in manufacturing, agriculture, and other more ‘formal’ settings (sassen 2010, 30). once arriving in the city, women work both (in what economists call) “productive” and “reproductive” activities, and in both the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors. women continue to engage in ‘reproductive labor,’ the care and the maintenance of the domestic and the so-called ‘private’ sphere. however, women are not often in charge of these realms of labor; they are still vastly underrepresented in management and property ownership (banerjee et al. 2014, 26; chant 2007, 331).6 in terms of ”productive” labor, women in many of the world’s urban areas, especially on the us-mexico border and in china, work in factories owned by transnational corporations (even though, recently, there has been a decrease in the percentage of women hired by these factories) (benería, berik, and floro 2015, 114). women especially predominate the garment and electronics industries. however, most often, having women in the factory does not challenge the workplace’s gender norms themselves. men are still more likely to be foremen and managers, while women and lower-class men are laborers. in other words, men in a comparatively wealthier class still own the means of production (benería, berik, and floro 2015, 129; piketty 2014, 336). large-scale manufacturing production has engendered a sort of global feminization of the labor force, and so too a “feminization of the proletariat” (benería, berik, and floro 2015, 108; chant 2016, 24; sassen 2010, 32). the “women proletariat weakens strong unions and secures competitive prices,” keeping turnover high and wages low (sassen 2010, 32). 6 of course, full control over one’s labor power is an elusive goal for the majority of men, as it is for women, and men can be equally vulnerability to labor exploitation and marginalization. again, the intent here is not to make a comparative claim between men’s and women’s vulnerabilities, but merely to point out the vulnerabilities that do exist for women. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 however, the more traditional vision of the proletariat as factory workers does not encompass all work that women are doing. especially in east asia, women are increasingly working in the so-called “pink collar” sector, doing data entry, credit-card processing, and tourism-industry work. there has also recently been an expansion of facilitated prostitution and related sex work, and more women than ever travel out of their native country to engage in domestic day care work (benería, berik, and floro 2015, 118; parreñas 2005; ehrenreich and hochschild 2002). international patterns of migration exist wherein entire governments are dependent upon remittances from women migrants (parreñas 2005, 56). the feminization of the global workforce has also meant the comparative informalization of women’s work.7 the informal sector includes activities such as opening up an unincorporated restaurant from one’s house, selling fruit on the sidewalk, doing weaving and tailoring work out of a private residence, or collecting metal scraps from a trash dump. in the words of mike davis (2007, 178), “all together, the global informal working class (overlapping with but non-identical to the population of the world’s slums) is about one billion strong, making it the fastest-growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth.” the people who survive in informal economies are extraordinarily innovative and resourceful. however, often the informal work does not provide a security net or long-term, sustainable hope for improvement of livelihoods. the sparseness of informal work, the fits and starts that characterize the flow of cash in the informal arena, and the privatization of the work space can harm women and children especially and can ensure the extreme abuse of women and children (breman and das 2000, 36). globally, the informalization of the economy constitutes a poverty trap for women, concentrating them, as kate meagher explains, in “low-skill, low-income activities with little prospect of advancement” (meagher 2010, 472). in addition, many recent economic reforms increased women’s economic disadvantage because they turned the “double burden” of unpaid care labor without adequate social and/or state support into a “triple burden” of domestic labor, income generation, and community organizing (tacoli 2012, 17, 30; kumar 2010, 367; moser 2016, 6; 1993, 15). those expectations are just too much of a burden for women, or anyone, to bear. women’s increasing responsibility for both productive and reproductive labor has, in general, only increased their exploitation, not their empowerment. the entrance of women into the workforce is not an unqualified good. women are doing most of the work and not accumulating enough assets. they spend too much time in 7 any firm distinction between formal versus informal labor, and productive versus reproductive labor, is problematic. i use the terms here as a cursory description of the kind of work women do—the terms are not essential to the lockean defense against forced evictions. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 “survivalist” work, without getting basic housing or infrastructure, or security for the future. getting out of poverty: asset accumulation instead of endless work what would it look like, then, if women could labor not only for survival or subsistence, but labor to build something for their communities that would last into the future? in other words, what does it take for women’s work to lift them out of poverty? transnational feminist work has emphasized the importance of assets over work (moser 2009; doshi 2013, 861; pritchett 2012; varley 2007, 1739; rakodi 2014, 9; sweetman 2008, 7; baruha 2007, 2108). caroline moser’s (2009) excellent, longitudinal study on a group of families living on the outskirts of guayaquil, ecuador offers an especially useful guide as to how to account for some families getting out of poverty, while others remain. moser concludes that the accumulation of assets, with basic housing being the first asset, is a necessary (while not sufficient) condition of poverty alleviation. moser lived and worked in a suburbio (slum on the outskirt of a city) of guayaquil from the 1970s to 2004. in the 1970s, the community of indio guayas first settled a swath of swampland, building houses on stilts above the water and connecting the houses with rickety boardwalks made of wood, sugarcane, and aluminum. most first-generation families in this community had come to guayaquil looking for work in the city when farm life became too difficult to sustain. being far from the city center, indio guayas did not originally have electricity, running water, sewerage, or roads. the lack of basic infrastructure was harder for women, who had to complete their domestic tasks in difficult conditions. also, moving from their places of origin was harder for women, as they feared loneliness when they first moved to the settlement. in leaving their families, women had to find different kinds of support. by 2004, the neighborhood had changed significantly; many families had brick and mortar houses, and they had been able to send their children to school. secondand third-generation families were able to start out their adult lives with more assets and security than first-generation families. moser argues that the families who were able to dig themselves out of first-generation poverty did so because of a combination of factors: they were able to build themselves homes, mobilize for infrastructure, educate family members, deal with violence within the family, and identify opportunities for employment both in ecuador and in spain. when individual men and women in the families were able to be empowered in these ways, they could get out of poverty with minimal support from external aid agencies or ngos (moser 2009, xvi). in this multifaceted process of gaining security and reducing vulnerability, housing is the first building block of all those varied elements of social capital feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 women can develop later on. “housing,” moser writes, “is the first priority asset, and while it does not necessarily get households out of poverty, adequate housing is generally a precondition for the accumulation of other assets” (moser 2009, 40). older discourses of “self-help housing,” as well as new research in community action planning, confirms the importance of housing in poverty reduction and empowerment (turner 1972; hamdi 2014). nabeel hamdi writes that, while lack of housing or poor housing conditions is a symptom and not a primary cause of deeper social problems like insecurity and unemployment, one does not address those social problems without, first, making sure everyone has a place to live (hamdi 2014, 31). property is important for everyone but especially important for women. bipasha baruah stresses that not only does property ownership have the potential to change women’s and men’s relationships and inequalities in inheritance, landed property is “a critical entry-point for women’s over-all empowerment” (baruah 2007, 2096). the women in baruah’s study consistently emphasized the importance of upgrading their property. they explained that their property provided protection from violence, in contrast to the instabilities of the rental market, especially for single women (baruah 2007). property ownership is the lever that turns the momentum of poverty: it is an intervention into the flow of survivalist-oriented labor to which women are increasingly bound. the tangible asset of a home is a necessary but not sufficient condition in gaining intangible goods like security, identity, inclusion, hope, and a place in the world. of course, there is no magic solution to getting out of poverty—both income and assets matter and are interrelated. in addition, there are innumerable nonmaterial goods that come along with inclusion into the workforce, for example confidence, freedom, sociality, independence, and so forth. legal land rights, by themselves, are not enough to ensure women’s upward mobility, and sometimes land titling increases violence against women, because men see women’s land rights as a threat (varley 2007, 1739; pritchett 2012). in addition, in the urban context, women need not only a home but the property on which that home is built (rakodi 2014, 9). however, when women own land and have an opportunity to build their own houses, they have the potential to accumulate other varied and valuable assets, against which they can leverage their way out of poverty. like virginia woolf wrote about a “room of one’s own” as a necessary precondition for women’s basic growth and empowerment, so urban women may need “a house of one’s own,” or rather, control over housing assets for themselves and the well-being of their families. moser expounds upon the varying benefits of housing as a first-generation asset: housing was not only the most important component of physical capital but also the first asset accumulated. although housing did not get all households luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 out of poverty, for various reasons it was a precondition for the accumulation of other assets. first, shelter reduced the physical vulnerability of the homeowner’s family as well as the socioeconomic fragility of extended household members, who often stayed during times of adversity. second, over time it provided a mechanism through which additional income could be generated; options included home-based enterprises, rent (from rooms or separately built apartments above the original house), and cash from subdivisions. finally, for many of the next generation, the original plot continued to provide shelter for them as adults with their own families, with houses extended (upwards or outwards) or separate structures built in the same plot. (moser 2009, 44–45) what benefit does owning a home give, as opposed to renting or squatting? first, in owning something, a person can leverage their property to their own specific needs and uses. second, in owning, a person has the right to any income that can be derived from their home, the right to use and manage it, and to security from its expropriation (honoré 1961). owning property gives the right to “manage, use, possess,” and the power to transmit it should the need arise. women who own their homes are extraordinarily resourceful in terms of the ways in which they leverage these properties to their own benefit. for instance, they start their own shops on the first level, build upwards to accommodate growing families on the second level, rent out rooms to gain extra income. for children going to school, a stable home wherein, say, the ceiling does not cave in when the rain comes, or the floor does not give if their friends dance too much, gives a sense of consistency and stability, a peace of mind that allows them to leave the house and do other things. further, land ownership gives social respect and recognition. research in chandigarh, india, shows that when women can joint-title their homes, they make more decisions, have more access to public knowledge, and gain more respect from their husbands (datta 2006, 291). in short, the benefits of secure land tenure, the ability to own and keep a house in the slums, are both material and symbolic. alternately, expropriation from private property hurts women especially. forced eviction disproportionately affect women because it disrupts the social support system for caregiving. in many places, though, it is harder for women to gain access to land—they face discriminatory credit practices and exclusion from property inheritance (kumar 2010, 367; rakodi 2014, 353; doshi 2013, 856). it is worthwhile, then, for development organizations to follow transnational feminists’ lead and take a serious look into empowerment through asset accumulation (housing and land), rather than considering inclusion into the economy solely by way of labor. women’s labor is being leveraged and exploited for purposes other than feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 their own well-being,8 and their endless increase in responsibility does not contribute to their ability to increase their assets. however, normatively speaking, there should be a connection between one’s labor and one’s assets, one’s security, and one’s place in the world. women must be allowed to labor in such a way that their labor does indeed result in their own asset accumulation. owning property, specifically owning a house, undergirds such a relation between labor and assets, in so far as housing provides a bulwark against constantly laboring in survivalist modes. women leverage basic housing for other material and nonmaterial assets, and so it functions as a sort of protection against the exploitation of labor. owning property: supporting the normative connection between labor and assets justifying property ownership means returning to the questions of early political philosophy, the questions of hobbes, locke, marx, and to some extent, hegel, among others. in fact, the question over what material resources can be considered “mine” motivates hobbes’s entire inquiry.9 however, that return is nuanced: marx was, of course, attempting to abolish the system in which capitalists owned the means of production, while locke and hobbes were interested in assembling a justification for people who already owned property to be able to keep it.10 hegel believed everyone, excepting perhaps women and noncitizens, should be able to own property as an element of their moral development. interestingly, though, jeremy waldron notes that no modern political philosopher has a fully developed theory of property, in the way that locke and hegel do (i might add marx to this mix) (waldron 1988,14). perhaps the dearth of thought on property is due to rawls’s influence, wherein questions on property were relegated to the sphere of practical political judgment, outside the scope of theories of justice proper. certainly though, the matter of women owning property is a matter for justice, both practical and theoretical, both ideal and nonideal.11 the fact that, for much of western history and thus western political philosophy, women were excluded from property 8 see amartya sen’s (2009) the idea of justice. 9 “my first enquiry was to be from whence it proceeded, that any man should call any thing rather his owne, th[a]n another mans” (hobbes 1983, 26–27). 10 to note, james tully thought that the modern debates about defending public or private property have mischaracterized locke, that he was neither defending socialism nor capitalism but rather defining basic subsistence rights (tully 1980, x). 11 it is outside the scope of this paper to give a systemic defense of any universal theory of property, hegelian or otherwise. the paper’s aim is problem and context specific: to bolster the normative connection between work and assets for women getting out of poverty, especially in urban contexts. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 ownership (and therefore excluded from being full citizens and political agents) makes the matter even more pressing. knowing that property ownership works in many ways as a litmus test and reinforcement of inequality makes the matter a consideration of justice.12 the issue of women in the slums needing to own their landed houses has a unique starting point: the goal is to encourage an environment for people who are not originally property owners to be able to squat, then make, then keep their housing, knowing housing can function as a protection against the exploitation of their labor. further, if labor alone is not giving women security and reducing their vulnerability, labor is not liberation. justifying squatters building and keeping their homes is tricky, first because one runs up against the myths about squatter settlements that have persisted since the 1950s (the beginnings of the twentieth century’s urbanization trend): that slums are chaotic, unorganized settings of economic drain, marked by crime, prostitution, and drug addiction, and further that the squatters do not participate in city life, are poorly educated, and live in breeding grounds of radicalism (ward 1982). governments and corporations have used these myths to justify forced expropriations and eradications. squatter settlements, then, present a unique challenge to state-sanctioned rules of private property acquisition. in some urban contexts mostly outside the us and europe, we have a situation where very ingenious and hardworking people have (conjuring locke) very much “mixed their labor with the land” to heroically, and, for the most part, illegally, scrap out an existence from the detritus of industrial centers. of course, writing prior to the industrial revolution, locke meant something very different by “mixing one’s labor with the land”; he meant applying the european agricultural techniques to terra nullius, newly acquired colonial territories (squadrito 2002). the case of the squatters is an issue of repopulating after, in between, under, or over industry, and it presents a different test case, not one locke himself could have anticipated. modern readers can transport the insight of “mixing one’s labor with the land,” and its ideal of the heroic, creative pioneer, into new landscapes. within the united states, there are also burgeoning movements of squatters, other “heroic pioneers.” oakland, california, for instance, hosts the collective moms 4 housing, a movement of mostly single, working mothers, many of whom used to be homeless, who have begun to occupy investor-owned homes that have been sitting vacant for years (kendall 2019). the movement addresses the housing crisis in the area, where women who grew up there can no longer afford to own property, and where the homeless population is growing exponentially. forced evictions present a very real threat to these women’s livelihoods, and they anticipate them 12 see, for example, elizabeth anderson’s (2010) the imperative of integration. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 looming on the near horizon. locke’s theory can provide theoretical justification for these women to occupy and eventually own these homes as well. even though their houses are very well connected to government infrastructure, when these women experienced homelessness, they were denied the social contract benefit of basic safety and security. in contrast to the aluminum and cardboard structures of some slums, the oakland houses have enormous exchange value, whether used or not. the moms 4 housing movement reconnects the link between use of the house and ownership, in the way locke did: as a way to create a social contract where none exists, or where one has failed. again, i am concerned to provide theoretical protection against forced evictions, and protections that bolster a normative connection between labor and assets. when waldron reads hegel, he stresses, like moser, the importance of property ownership for people’s well-being. that is, property ownership gives a person more than material status or wealth; it also gives a sort of autonomy or empowerment, respect and recognition, a place to stand in the world and at least minimal control of resources (waldron 1988, 22). thus, when moms 4 housing assert that they have a right to live in investor-owned houses because “housing is a human right,” their claim is entirely reasonable, in part because they can draw from the lockean natural rights tradition (ibid.). in so far as recognition is a precondition to authority, property ownership, for hegel, was a universal condition of recognition. locke, too, recognized the power in owning material assets. of course, we do not find in locke the sort of hegelian demand that everyone should own property or the sort of account of what property does to enhance one’s moral development. rather, locke begins by worrying about preventing the government of stuart england from disrespecting existing property rights, and preventing the peasants from abuse of the commons (tully 1980, 153–154). the former worry, though, motivates locke’s defense against forced evictions, along with support for a normative connection between labor and assets. locke’s central claim on property rights is as follows: though the earth, and all inferior creatures be in common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. this no body has any right to but himself. the labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. (locke, second treatise, ch. 5, sec. 27) writing in the “basic rights” tradition of aquinas, locke believes it immoral that civil society should be a hindrance to people’s basic subsistence. thus, even before luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 beginning to talk about the right to property, all people, equally, have a right to life, and therefore a right to work to maintain that life (tully 1980, x). even though the right to property is, along with the rights to life and liberty, the cornerstone of liberal political theory, property rights are not unlimited. rather, for locke, they are always constrained by the right to subsistence. that is, my own right of property ownership does not trump another’s right to survive.13 thus, if squatting is indeed an effort of survival, a lockean might argue that a society’s existing property laws should not prevent people from squatting, even illegally. or, for example, an owner of an airport cannot prevent people from squatting on the airport’s unused land if those people are on the very edge of survival. of course, people move to urban areas and start squatting for any number of different reasons (for example, independence from conservative family, adventure, economic improvement, and survival).14 when the reasons people squat do not include mere survival, the lockean case against forced evictions vis-à-vis the right to subsistence is significantly weakened. nevertheless, the right to survive does give significant momentum to the beginnings of an argument against forced evictions and secure land tenure for squatters, in extreme settings. working in parallel to this right to survival, we see in locke an emphasis on equality, albeit equality of a theological origin: god gave the earth to all men equally, and therefore all men equally have a right to use the bounty of the earth, providing each only uses enough as he needs (the sufficiency/ fairness proviso) and does not leave the land unusable for others who come later (the spoilage proviso) (tully 1980, 123) of course, locke very literally here meant these provisos to apply only to men, but we can extend his provisos to women without losing the guiding 13 the right to subsistence is the first premise and cornerstone of locke’s argument for property. “whether we consider natural reason, which tells us, that men, being once born, have a right to their preservation, and consequently to meat and drink, and such other things as nature affords for their subsistence: or revelation, which gives us an account of those grants god made of the world to adam, and to noah, and his sons, it is very clear, that god, as king david says, psal. cxv. 16. has given the earth to the children of men; given it to mankind in common.” (locke, second treatise, ch. 5, sec. 25). elsewhere, “therefore no man could ever have a just power over the life of another, by right of property in land or possessions” (locke, first treatise, ch. 4, sec. 42).” 14 for rich explanations of the varied reasons young women in china move from rural zones to the cities, see leslie t. chang’s factory girls: from village to city in a changing china (2008, 25). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 spirit of his argument.15 further, locke believed that property existed before, and in some ways independent of, the advent of civil society. that is, property relations existed in the state of nature, because people labored in the state of nature (tully 1980, 3, 54, 101, 137). if one is committed to natural rights in the way that locke was, those rights are ceaselessly violated in a context of forced evictions. one need not be a natural-rights inclined lockean to believe that women who occupy and labor in their homes have a right to them, and a right not to be evicted. there can be a sound, overlapping consensus regarding normative appeals, such as commitments to right to housing, a right to the city, even basic human rights like a right to life, in the case where forced evictions are threats to basic survival.16 however, sometimes, governments’ forced evictions implicitly justify themselves by arguing that they are working on behalf of slum inhabitants’ well-being, and consequently with public consent. justifications governments give for forced evictions most often rely on the basis of an assumed, but very weak-to-nonexistent, social contract, including the need to give publicly consent-able reasons and the promise of a rule of law. but, for locke, the social contract, rule of law, and the juridical state must be created and protected in order to secure a right to subsistence, not to undercut it. if forced evictions that are justified under so-called “protections” of the state undercut the right to subsistence, a lockean has resources to unravel consent-justified eviction orders. large squatter settlements and homeless crises can resemble a state of nature to such an extent that existing legal orders have much weaker jurisdiction. the resemblance even holds for underground homeless communities or tent camps.17 under a lockean framework, and in the absence of a juridical state, “mixing one’s labor with the land” constitutes ownership. take for instance, the justification the brazilian government gave for the displacement of the favelas in rio de janeiro, before the 2016 summer olympics. residents objected to the expropriations, because they saw them as a cover for the government to present a hypocritically immaculate face of the city to international travelers arriving for the games (rio prefeitura 2015). officials argued for the displacement of the vila autódromo community on at least three different bases: (a) 15 feminist readings of locke have heretofore typically taken one of two routes: disputing whether an emancipatory agenda exists in locke’s individualism and social contract, or inquiring what locke thought of women in general. see nancy hirschmann and kirstie mcclure’s (2007) feminist interpretations of john locke. 16 see, for instance, the new urban agenda from habitat iii (2017). 17 see, for instance, christian storm, “striking photos of the homeless community that lived beneath manhattan,” business insider, november 13, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-homeless-living-underground-2014-11. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 to allow for open road access to olympic park, (b) for the environmental protection of a local lagoon, and (c) for safety of the inhabitants living on sliding soil (rio prefeitura 2015). they appealed to brazil’s 1988 federal constitution, which allows for expropriation of land “for public necessity or use, or for social interest, upon just and prior compensation in cash, with the exception of cases provided for in this constitution” (brazilian federal constitution, title ii, chapter i, article 5, item xxiv). under such terms, the government must justify expropriations on the grounds of integration and fairness, increased infrastructure, and decreased precariousness of living situations. the requirements in brazil mandate that explanations must be framed in terms of the well-being of slum inhabitants, giving reasons to which the public—lockean “fellow commoners”18—could reasonably consent. the repeated expropriations in waterfront communities in lagos, nigeria, since 2013, which have displaced thousands, are given in similar, disingenuous, yet potentially consent-able reasons. amnesty international reports on the nigerian state and local government’s changing and inconsistent justifications for the expropriations: in november 2016, it denied any responsibility for the forced evictions and blamed them on a communal clash that resulted in fires which razed down the community. in march 2017, the government said its actions that month were taken to protect environmental health. on 9 october 2016, the lagos governor also stated that waterfront demolitions are intended to stem a rise in kidnappings in the state, alleging that irregular structures serve as hideouts for criminals. in april 2017, the state ministry of justice said the government forcibly evicted thousands of otodo-gbame residents because it had reason to believe that “militants are hiding amongst the people in the otodo-gbame and are perfecting plans to attack the lekki and victoria island environs using the settlement as a base.” (amnesty international 2017) as in brazil, lagos authorities justified expropriations on the basis of the inhabitants’ own good, including their health and safety. under locke, the reasoning for the state takeover of land—enclosure by consent, or the prevention of peasants from 18 “ ‘tis true, in land that is common in england, or any other country, where there is plenty of people under government, who have money and commerce, no one can inclose or appropriate any part, without the consent of all his fellow-commoners: because this is left common by compact, i.e. by the law of the land, which is not to be violated. and though it be common in respect of some men, it is not so to all mankind; but is the joint property of this country, or this parish.” (john locke, second treatise, ch. 5, sec. 35) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 privatization of the commons—depends upon the presence of a “law of the land,” the existence of a country or parish in the first place. government justifications assume or promise a juridical state, but, in the case of large urban slums, the degree of a presiding social contract depends upon the degree of infrastructure and local governments’ reach in terms of social services. while dedicated groups form flourishing grassroots civil societies in the majority of slums, in some cases residents fail to benefit from basic infrastructure and emergency services because of poor or nonexistent responses from governments. in such cases, their loyalty to the social contract specifying legal ownership need not be demanded, as their benefits are not yet reciprocal. there are ways in which the state of globalization, urban migration, and housing crises resemble locke’s state of nature. people can live in an informal and illegal world, outside the scope of many governments’ goods and services. when the state’s contractual goods, services, and protection catch up to migration and eventually reach the cities’ poorest residents, the lockean argument against forced evictions loses its power. but where poor women see little to no protection and rights of the juridical state, they have a right to create protection and create new contracts. i do not want to imply that those with insecure land tenure are any less “civilized” than property owners in the traditional sense. thus, when i claim that insecure land tenure can be like a state of nature, i mean “state of nature” in terms of lack of state support, not as a description of people. if land insecurity can be a kind of state of nature, then locke’s right to survival reorients property relations along the lines of labor, rather than, say, inheritance. while there is much critical scholarship skeptical of the connection locke assumes between “mixing labor and the land” and ownership,19 when thinking about first, the exploitation of women’s labor, and second, the severing of the normative connection between that labor and women’s assets, locke’s theory of “mixing one’s labor with the land” works to repair a normative connection between labor and assets. first, locke, contra marx, is concerned to found property (and maybe even a theory of value) on use value, and not upon the value of an object’s exchange on the global market (tully 1980, 144). ownership depends upon, for locke, how one uses the material with which one has mixed their labor. this emphasis on use value especially sheds light on the sort of value that is at stake in squatter settlements. many shack houses in slums do not have much exchange value. if anything, the value they have for local governments and private companies is in the land itself, not the sugarcane or aluminum structure that constitutes the houses. turner and the “self-help” housing debates of the 1970s and ‘80s stressed this point, that human and social value of these homes trumps their market value, and that the 19 for criticism, see, for example, nozick’s (1974) anarchy, state, and utopia. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 basic resources for homes can only be used properly when people themselves control them (turner 1972). for women who could own that house and its land, it is precisely the use value of those structures that they leverage towards their eventual well-being. but interestingly, the same tenets of use-as-source-of-value apply to the women in oakland who are squatting in very expensive houses. the use value of these houses, ostensibly much more affordable, trumps their exchange value on the same grounds. thus, locke shows us how migrants who stake out small parcels of unserviced land on the outskirts of cities to make and build their houses, as well as those who squat in the most overpriced of homes, are making rational decisions that deserve to be supported by civil bodies. furthermore, locke imagines a sort of “first appropriator” of such private property, the first man who, by his labor, enclosed land and made it his own. this earliest laborer was no ordinary person. in waldron’s words, he was “particularly resourceful and opportunistic character. . . . he is the individual who sees personal advantage in rupturing what might have been a previously satisfactory mode of subsistence by enclosing land and seizing the materials for himself. . . . this person is the true founder of private property; and this is the sort of economic opportunism that a lockean theory takes it upon itself to vindicate” (waldron 1988, 172). so, locke’s original appropriator was an ingenious originator, who sought more than subsistence out of life and worked hard to transform say, a sallow, unused field into a thing from which he could extract advantage. needless to say, besides their gender, this person looks remarkably like a migrant woman and her family who, in moving from the rural to urban areas, settles in unserviced land, works hard to construct her home and community, and then leverages her home for remarkable uses related to the furtherance of her own well-being. she also looks like a woman escaping homelessness through leveraging unused property for the benefit of her and her family. locke’s theory of ownership provides a normative connection between women’s work and their assets. having a home gives women the ability to begin to benefit from their labor, in that it gives them a tangible asset over which they have control, and which they can leverage for other tangible and intangible goods, like authority. in his theory of moral development, hegel understood the way in which property gives authority. what locke gives, by contrast, is an argument against the state forcibly taking away a person’s property, along with a picture of ownership that, in some kind of “state of nature,” is justified not by inheritance or capital but instead by labor itself. if one labors on the land, if one transforms it from something uncultivated to something cultivated, then one makes a justifiable claim of ownership, especially and imperatively so if one is laboring to survive. in such a setting, it would be wrong for a government to send bulldozers to a slum of 3,000 people near the airport, a place that international business people flying overhead feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 see as a scourge, but where its inhabitants have slowly been building their dwellings piece by piece, over many years.20 it would also be wrong for the airport to justify forced expulsion of the people from its land if they are dumping their industrial waste in it and not using it for any other purpose. under locke’s account, the use value to the people living on the land would trump the market value of the land for the parties who own the official title. i recognize it is strange and controversial to present a transnational feminist analysis of labor and work that relies upon locke, firstly given locke’s support for colonization in the americas and his implied critique of indigenous agricultural practices and land dispossession (squadrito 2002, 108, 121). historically locke is less useful, and actually harmful, for discourses of indigeneity and rural agriculture. however, his theory of property is helpful for the specific problem that women are doing much the work without being able to benefit from the fruits of their labor. secondly, it is strange for a transnational feminist account to advocate for a liberal, lockean justification of property and enclosure over and against a marxist destruction of the institutions themselves. the turn to property might be especially jarring, given the concern with the effects of neoliberalism on women, especially regarding the retreating of state services. so, i must emphasize that the analysis i have given acknowledges the exploitation of women’s labor on a global scale and worries about the ways in which global capitalism is creating unprecedented inequalities and perpetuating poverty. however, giving an account of the ways in which property ownership could politically empower a person is not equivalent to giving a defense of global capitalism or justifying its inequalities. this account of property does not rule out the possibility that collective or common property can be just as empowering to women’s well-being as private property. neither is the account a definitive argument for or against either socialism or capitalism—that is not my aim, nor, according to james tully, was it locke’s (tully 1980, x). the account is, though, a description of how women’s labor is currently being exploited, an argument about housing assets being a bulwark against endless exploitation of women’s labor, and an explanation as to how locke’s theory of property could provide a normative connection between labor and her assets. i am skeptical of the degree to which international development organizations and governments use or need normative justifications from the history of philosophy to do their work. yet i offer the lockean approach as one possible tool in the fight against forced evictions. i leave it to development practitioners to determine the usefulness of such a tool. as i mentioned, it is likely that practitioners and activists would be better served by appealing to a more direct 20 here i am referencing the annawadi slums that boo (2012) depicts in behind the beautiful forevers. luttrell – women’s work and assets published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 defense of the right to housing, or, importantly, the right to the city. this paper precludes none of those approaches and offers little in the way of advice on how to persuade the confluence of government and corporate interests away from forced evictions. such practical know-how is context specific. the claim here is limited: if anti-eviction activists are compelled by a lockean, natural rights approach to make their case, they would be justified in doing so. one benefit to using such an approach is that it uses liberal political theory to undermine one of the most harmful trends in our current era of capitalism, which has involved the loss of stable dwelling places for so many. feminists like nancy fraser and alison jaggar have done a right and necessary job of critiquing neoliberal ideologies that hold material gain and efficiency over all other values, like love, care, and freedom (fraser 2013, 209; jaggar 2009, 35). transnational feminist work outside of philosophy, like the work of caroline moser, sylvia chant, and sidney calkin and others, has done a good job of showing how these other values are supported by basic asset ownership, and demonstrating that severing a connection between employment and assets is harmful to women. locke’s theory of property can bolster these insights. given the empirical shape of the harm, locke’s theory of property gives a normative grounding to a connection between work and assets within a just society. even a very minimal commitment to the right to subsistence can offer normative support against forced evictions. beyond the right to subsistence, a more thoroughgoing commitment to more of locke’s natural rights tradition supports projects that create social contracts through more secure land tenure. references amnesty international. 2017. “nigeria: deadly mass forced evictions make life misery for waterfront communities.” november 14. https://www.amnesty 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is an instructional assistant professor at the hobby school of public affairs at the university of houston. her research in political philosophy focuses on transnational feminisms, philosophy of race, human rights, and social movements. 6308 luttrell title page 6308 luttrell final format pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 2 2016 pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives matt l. drabek act, inc., matt.drabek@gmail.com recommended citation drabek, matt l.. 2016. "pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2. pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives1 matt l. drabek abstract how does pornography subordinate on the basis of gender? i provide part of an answer in this paper by framing subordination as something that works through everyday classification. under certain material and social conditions, pornography classifies people through labeling them in ways that connect to structures of oppression. i hope to show two things. first, pornographic content is not the major driving force behind pornography’s subordination of women. second, pornography, when repurposed in new ways, carries the potential to counter the ill effects of other kinds of pornography, as feminist pornographers have attempted to show through their words and actions. keywords: pornography, subordination, classification, oppression how does pornography subordinate on the basis of gender? i provide part of an answer in this paper by framing subordination as a process that works through classification in everyday life. under certain material and social conditions, pornography classifies people through labeling them in ways that connect to structures of oppression. the material and social environment in which pornography is viewed sometimes encourages this classification through labeling, and the subordination that results. i begin from the assumption that pornography has the power to subordinate, and i trace out the operations of this power, which work through a kind of feedback loop. but this paper is not a defense of anti-porn feminism, in either an ‘unmodified’ or ‘moderate’ version. in explicating the role of the material and social environment in pornography’s operations, i hope to provide strong evidence in favor of two claims. the first is that pornographic content is not the major driving force behind pornography’s gender subordination. the second is 1 i would like to thank the audience and fellow participants at the feminist philosophy and pornography conference at the humboldt university of berlin for important feedback on this paper. i'd also like to thank, in particular, louise antony, anne eaton, and rae langton for feedback and direction on this paper, as well as the anonymous referees for this journal. 1 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 that pornography, when repurposed in new ways, carries the potential to counter the ill effects of other kinds of pornography, as feminist pornographers have attempted to show through their words and their work. the sort of feedback loop that drives pornographic subordination may also work to counter it. pornography historically, the claim that pornography subordinates on the basis of gender has been formulated as the claim that pornography subordinates women, where ‘women’ can be read to mean ‘cisgender women.’2 this claim is historically associated with a segment of anti-porn feminism led by andrea dworkin and catharine mackinnon (mackinnon 1982, 1987) and brought to the attention of academic philosophers in the early 1990s by rae langton (langton 1993). to subordinate a group of people, as a group, is to rank that group as inferior or to authorize ill treatment of that group (langton 1993, 307). i consider subordination to be one component of broader, interlocking systems of oppression. subordination is what feminist theorist iris marion young called a ‘face’ of oppression. oppression is a general inhibition of one’s ability to develop, exercise one’s capacities, or express one’s needs as a result of systemic social forces (young 2011). as a face of oppression, the subordination of a group paves the way for their marginalization, or exclusion from meaningful participation in social life. when a community ranks a group as inferior, it facilitates their exclusion from positions of influence or authority. in this paper i assume that pornography has the power to subordinate women, and i ask how this power works. while the operations of power are relevant to much of the philosophical literature on pornography, it is rarely the main topic or focus. much of this literature focuses on authority, and particularly linguistic authority. i address power rather than authority because i want to focus solely on getting at how pornography changes the world without considering whether it does so as a speech act. the literature on authority, by contrast, is often focused on the specific question within the philosophy of language of whether, and to what extent, the person who is subordinated or the society at large must recognize the legitimacy of pornography’s authority for it to count as an authoritative speech act in the relevant sense (e.g., green 1998; langton 1998; antony 2012). langton and others (e.g., langton 2009; langton and west 2009) have argued that pornography has the linguistic authority to subordinate. but i address the literature on authority only 2 it’s possible that the claim is trans-inclusive, and it could certainly be formulated in a trans-inclusive way, but examples involving trans women are exceedingly rare in the literature. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 insofar as it provides us with background reasons to focus on social and material contexts. from where does pornography get its powers? how do these powers operate? langton takes pornography to be an embodied practice, something enacted within a material and social environment and meaningful in light of these contextual features. i think this is insightful and will use it as my own starting point. in the following section, after discussing what pornography is, i will move on to a discussion of how pornography’s power operates. the main claims of this paper should stand regardless of how the debate over whether pornography has the authority to count as a speech act is settled. what is pornography? what does pornography do? internet users have articulated ‘rule 34,’ which says that ‘if it exists, there is porn of it.’3 utterances of rule 34 are tongue-in-cheek, but only partially so. rule 34 expresses one popular understanding of the word ‘pornography.’ on this understanding, ‘pornography’ picks out sexually explicit material produced and distributed commercially to general audiences for the purposes of sexual gratification. it’s merely a descriptive term without any normative implications. people who talk about rule 34 are pointing to the explosion of sexually explicit material in the internet age. the determined viewer can find just about any scenario, any fetish, any combination of identities, sexual desires, and sexual positions imaginable. one’s ability to find the sexually explicit material one wants seems to be limited only by one’s wallet and one’s ability to navigate the internet. i also take it as a starting point that most people have something like this understanding of pornography in mind when they discuss it. if it’s a written description, graphic video, sound file, audio cassette (so very passé), or any other commercial medium with sexually explicit content generally sold for purposes of sexual gratification, it’s pornography. it would be fair to present this descriptive definition of pornography as apolitical in nature. most people who use it are not using it for the purpose of identifying and/or ameliorating oppression. nevertheless, descriptive uses of the word ‘pornography’ do appear in feminist literature organized around this specific purpose. ann garry, for instance, uses a descriptive definition in her work, finding it to be a useful, neutral starting point that recognizes sexually explicit material as a force for both good and ill (garry 2002). she then uses this starting point to launch into a more directed analysis. feminist work in this vein often aims at identifying and/or ameliorating oppression in part by separating the good from the ill. 3 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rule%2034. last accessed may 18, 2014. 3 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 but other feminists like mackinnon and langton begin from the same goals of identifying and/or ameliorating oppression, and use a novel definition of ‘pornography’ in order to direct their work. they define ‘pornography’ in terms of subordination, claiming that part of what it means for sexually explicit material to be pornography is that it subordinates women. this is quite a claim. few feminists, probably no feminists, would deny that some pornography sometimes causes women to be subordinated. but each italicized word modifies the claim, leaving open the possibility of pornography of a different sort, whether banal pornography that does not affect women as a group or perhaps even liberatory pornography that combats subordination. mackinnon and langton remove the modifiers, instead claiming that pornography is sexually explicit, commercial material that constitutes the subordination of women. it does not merely sometimes cause subordination, but rather always, in fact, is subordination. there’s a broad and a narrow way to read the claim that pornography constitutes subordination. the broad way claims that all or most sexually explicit material subordinates women, thus defining pornography almost as broadly as the descriptive approach. as jennifer saul notes (2003, 76–78), anti-porn feminists in the dworkin/mackinnon tradition sometimes seem to hold this view. but it’s quite a bold claim, as it would commit one to holding the view that even seemingly banal or affirmative sexually explicit material subordinates women. the narrow way claims that only those sexually explicit materials that subordinate women count as pornography, leaving open the possibility that there’s a wide range of such materials that do not subordinate women and hence would not count as pornography. while prima facie less difficult to defend, this interpretation leaves us with the question of what to call these other materials. some have defended a distinction between ‘erotica’ and ‘pornography,’ a distinction that raises as many questions as answers.4 stipulating that pornography is being defined for specific social goals may, of course, advance the extent to which these issues can be overcome. until we reexamine the 4 the distinction is a classic of second wave feminism (e.g., steinem 1984) and is typically framed in terms of the content of the (allegedly) pornographic material at issue. for example, ‘erotica’ might be defined in terms of mutual pleasure or intellectual stimulation while ‘pornography’ is defined strictly in terms of physical stimulation or commercial profit. opponents of this distinction typically argue that it’s an arbitrary distinction relying primarily on the class background (i.e., middle class sensibilities) of the person drawing the distinction. i’ll take no official position on the success of the distinction, though insofar as the distinction is grounded in the content of (allegedly) pornographic images, it should be covered by my argument that content-based distinctions are unsuccessful. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 question of pornography’s definition, i will try to use the word neutrally between the descriptive and various normative approaches. constitutive and causal approaches while feminists have approached pornography through a variety of lenses, the philosophical literature is dominated by constitutive and causal approaches. constitutive approaches begin from a normative understanding of pornography, where pornography constitutes subordination. langton’s speech act analysis of pornography is the best known constitutive approach. on langton’s analysis, pornographic content is speech that performs the action of subordinating women. it subordinates through the authority it has amongst its predominantly white, cisgender, heterosexual male audience. this is the authority to rank women as inferior, deprive women of rights, and justify the ill treatment of women. the basic idea of langton’s speech act analysis, with its background in speech act theory (austin 1962), is that pornography’s authority enables it to perform these acts of subordination through or by way of its content, namely the words, sex acts, bodies, gestures, motions, and other features of individual works of pornography. one primary concern of langton’s, and the one on which she has faced the greatest challenges, is on developing the analogy between pornography and linguistic acts in such a way as to build a case that pornography has the right sort of authority to subordinate. she has compared the workings of pornography to the rulings of judges in civil or criminal proceedings. through rulings, judges have the authority to issue factual statements and to change the word in accordance with their rulings (langton 1993, 304–5). judges may, for instance, rule that a violation of the law or civil code has occurred and guarantee that the world conforms to this judgment by issuing a civil or criminal penalty. langton has also compared the operations of pornography to those of hate speech or libel. a sign such as “whites only,” placed in front of a restroom or water fountain in the american south in the jim crow era, served to subordinate black people in those regions. the sign does not merely cause black people to be subordinated, langton argues. rather, in virtue of being placed in the appropriate context and conveying a particular message, it constitutes subordination through its content that is generally perceived as legitimate (langton 1998). opponents such as louise antony have argued that this analysis conflates authority with power and incorrectly interprets austin on what is required for genuine authority (antony 2012). philosophers who defend causal approaches argue that works of pornography cause the subordination of women through some form of causal chain. causal and constitutive approaches are not inherently opposed, as a causal critic of pornography might argue that a causal chain advances the constitutive enactment of patriarchal norms. but the approaches differ in emphasis, as the causal critic may 5 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 see pornography as some independent thing with a nexus of causal links to patriarchal culture. causal critiques are also compatible with a descriptive definition of pornography as inclusive of all sexually explicit materials produced commercially and distributed to public audiences for the purpose of sexual gratification, though it is not a requirement that the causal critic adopt this definition. anne eaton, a causal critic of pornography, raises the interesting possibility that there is a causal feedback loop between the subordination caused by individual pornographic works and gender inequalities in a broader society (eaton 2007). below, where i will begin to sketch out my own views on pornography’s power, i will use eaton’s insight as a starting point. eaton’s idea is that individual pornographic works, when viewed, make relatively small contributions to the subordination of women that, in turn, fit into the contexts provided by a patriarchal society. these small contributions to subordination confirm and extend a broader system of gender subordination. eaton’s causal critique is elastic, responsive to the diversity of sexually explicit material currently available on the market and to a wide variety of causal origins. she allows for the possibility that “both pornography and its putative harms are collateral effects of some common cause” (713–34), a possibility she leaves open to confirmation or disconfirmation by empirical investigation. she also acknowledges that pornography might not be exceptionally effective at causing subordination when compared to other sources of gender subordination in patriarchal societies, sources like advertisements that objectify women or cultural prejudices that prevent women from holding political offices. she has, in short, the beginnings of a system to explain the continuity between sexually explicit material and broader gender norms, laying out a program that can aid future empirical work and feminist analysis. there have been a variety of other proposed models for how pornography subordinates that do not necessarily fit cleanly into either a constitutive or causal approach (though most would appear to have great affinity with causal approaches). these models generally go beyond the claim that cisgender, heterosexual men who use pornography merely imitate what they see. a straightforward imitation model would appear to be a shortsighted model that fails to give people credit for being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality and incorporate what they see into their sex lives in more subtle ways (soble 2002). more sophisticated and plausible models focus on cultural climate and its relationship to the ways young men develop sexual desires. some theorists, for instance, have speculated that pornography reinforces and generates social beauty standards and the excitement of sex outside the context of committed relationships (brosius et al. 1993).5 others argue for a 5 the point about sex outside of committed relationships raises a broad range of additional issues. it’s far from clear why sex outside of relationships is a bad thing, 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 generalized version of this idea, claiming that pornography changes the norms surrounding relationships, changing how men view women and how women view themselves, and contributing to a culture of sexual violence against women (paul 2005). these more plausible models are contextual ones, and contextual in a variety of senses. pornography and context philosophical critiques of pornography generally recognize the importance of context to how pornography’s power operates. this research has often followed langton’s lead and been conducted within the tradition of the speech act model. however, the drawing of attention to context has broader import. i’ll discuss linguistic context in this section before moving on to demonstrate the need for a renewed focus on social and material contexts, which forms the basis of my own approach. jennifer saul claims that pornography, on a speech act model, can only perform the act of subordinating if it is an utterance in context (saul 2006). but saul goes a bit further. she points out that when we are considering pornography, we can ask whether it is the production or the viewing of pornography that constitutes the relevant context. does pornography subordinate through the ways it is made or through the ways it is consumed? saul uses the metaphors of encoding and decoding to pick out the respective utterances. she uses a simple thought experiment to support her view that decoding, or viewing, is the relevant context. suppose ethel finds herself in an environment requiring the use of multi-purpose signs to communicate. she creates a sign saying ‘i do,’ using it “to get married, to agree to return her books on time, and to confess to murder” (2006, 235). analogously, a work of pornography may be put to many uses. pornography may sexually arouse or offend its viewers. one might use examples of pornography in a seminar designed to criticize pornography. one might use pornography to instruct people how to perform a particular sex act or technique. saul points out that the relevant acts, the acts that subordinate women, appear in only some of these uses. furthermore, the fact that pornography has many uses, as does ethel’s sign, demonstrates that the production of sexually explicit materials does not fix a context of viewing. tracing how pornography subordinates thus depends heavily on studying the viewing of pornography (bianchi 2008; mikkola 2008), tracing how that viewing occurs and how particular contexts of viewing serve to facilitate subordination. and the person appealing to this research would have to tell a good story on this issue. 7 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 while the importance of linguistic context is widely recognized, mackinnon and langton have long recognized the importance of social and material contexts, as well. langton advocates that “we shift our perspective on the asymmetric patterns of sexual violence and view it afresh, not simply as harm or as crime, but as an aspect of women’s subordinate status” (langton 1993, 307). the social and material contexts are critical to understanding the total picture of gender subordination, how pornographic subordination operates through linking to a larger structure. so, what’s so important about the social and material contexts of pornography? in short, i think we can learn a great deal from examining the standard or typical uses of works of pornography in western culture, particularly among men and especially among adolescent men who are learning about sex and sexual mores. it’s here that we find out how pornography serves to classify people in everyday life. this is a project that builds upon saul’s insights. saul shows, quite correctly, that we ought to be concerned about viewings of pornography. we can narrow this focus by asking questions about how people use pornography at social and material sites. what social roles do works of pornography play? what do people usually do with pornography in particular places? what are they expected to do? through which media is pornography delivered, and do these media affect the types of pornography that can be produced and consumed? has the internet changed any of the facts on the ground, and what difference has this made? the subordination of social groups on the basis of gender does not emerge from one or two negative events or viewings, but rather from a broad pattern of problems. if pornography subordinates women, it must do so broadly and effectively in particular environments. we ought to see this when we ask these questions about pornography’s social and material sites. theorizing about pornography, and responding to it, thus depends on understanding something about its role in local environments. implications of a shift to social and material contexts what implications does a renewed emphasis on social and material contexts have for a study of pornography’s subordination? for one, i think causal approaches focus too narrowly on the content of individual works of pornography, and that there’s a need for more of a focus on environment. both italicized words are key. defenders of causal critiques often try to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ types of pornography. eaton, for instance, distinguishes between inegalitarian pornography and all other types of pornography (non-inegalitarian pornography), defining inegalitarian pornography as “sexually explicit representations that as a whole eroticize relations (acts, scenarios, or postures) characterized by gender inequality” (2007, 676). this is more a distinction between ‘bad’ and ‘not so bad’ than between ‘bad’ and ‘good.’ 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 at first glance, it’s difficult to argue that there is not a systematic distinction between good and bad pornography, or at least between bad and not-so-bad pornography. the intuitive appeal of the distinction lies in the impression that certain kinds of sexually explicit material are more harmful than other kinds. it seems like sexually explicit material eroticizing relations of gender inequality is worse than banal sexually explicit material or sexually explicit material characterized by intimate, loving sexual relationships. suppose we have two internet videos. the first video depicts a man in spiked leather striking a nude woman with a flogger, while the second video depicts a woman masturbating alone. one might want to say that the former video is more harmful than the latter. it certainly seems as though the former presents a range of problems not presented by the latter. attempts by governments to restrict pornography often make use of this intuitive distinction. iceland, for instance, has considered a ban on what it calls ‘violent’ pornography on the grounds that violence in pornography may beget violence in domestic relationships. even many strong opponents of pornography, people committed to labeling all pornography as the subordination of women, sometimes acknowledge that some types are worse than others. gail dines, an anti-porn sociologist, says that pornography, quite9 generally, “shifts the way people think about sexual relationships, about intimacy, about women” (mcveigh 2013). but not all pornography is created equal. she considers the case of the adolescent boy who is being socialized into pornography, noting that a young boy searching for pornography “doesn’t get some playboy pictures” (ibid.). rather, dines is concerned that the adolescent boy will find pictures and videos of women being physically assaulted and brutalized, which she implicitly takes to be worse than those playboy pictures. the trouble with such distinctions between types of pornography is that they are not supported by empirical evidence and there is substantial overlap between inegalitarian pornography and other types of pornography. eaton does cite empirical support suggesting a link between inegalitarian pornography and gender subordination. however, the empirical literature does not consistently draw the inegalitarian/non-inegalitarian distinction, leaving it currently unable to support this link. to some degree, eaton is aware of this problem and acknowledges it. she recognizes the possibility that “any erotic material would have this effect” (eaton 2007, 688n), i.e., the effect of changing male attitudes toward women. but even beyond the empirical troubles, we simply do not have good reason to believe that gender subordination tracks the inegalitarian/non-inegalitarian distinction. this is to say that we have reason to believe that a great deal of non-inegalitarian pornography is involved in gender subordination and a great deal of inegalitarian pornography is not involved in gender subordination. 9 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 let’s examine a number of cases. consider a case of seemingly banal or harmless sexually explicit materials, perhaps a short video of a man and woman engaged in uneventful sexual intercourse or the banal playboy photos mentioned by dines. these are things that would appear on the ‘non-inegalitarian’ side of the inegalitarian/non-inegalitarian distinction. these videos and images do not eroticize gender inequality, at least not in virtue of the content of the videos and images themselves. but i think banal pornography often does contribute to gender subordination when it is produced and viewed in the right social and material contexts. adolescent boys and girls who view this material internalize and advance assumptions about the body and about sex. and they do so, at least in part, because they are not trained to critically examine this material. it presents no obvious problems, but it may function as a kind of trojan horse. even a callous adolescent boy is going to react somewhat skeptically to videos of someone being beaten senselessly. what boy would react in the same way to seemingly harmless sex? but boys learn from this seemingly harmless material how women are expected to look and act, in some cases specifically because they are taught to see it as harmless. they learn from these images that women are not supposed to have pubic hair, leg hair, or armpit hair. they learn how to perform sexual positions that are unsatisfying to women, and they learn a model of female pleasure that does not match what most women actually do or want to do.6 this sort of material is ubiquitous on the internet. much of it is banal and uninteresting to the point of being comical. how many people in real life enjoy having sex with one another with only their genitals touching? how many women enjoy moaning theatrically while not experiencing pleasure? how many men enjoy thrusting and grunting in a programmatic, robotic way? these positions seem to work perfectly well for the target audience of mainstream pornography, namely the heterosexual, cisgender, white male who is masturbating alone in a room. but when these lessons transfer from masturbation session to sexual activity with a partner, they can engender gender subordination. they are not teaching sexual activity that the partners of these young men are likely to enjoy. these banal images and videos, even when they are not advancing gender subordination in virtue of their content, may advance gender subordination in the aggregate, as a part of a broader pattern of pornographic content and delivery. a single image of a nude woman staring longingly at the camera presents no obvious problem. a single video of a heterosexual couple engaged in intercourse, missionary position, where the man orgasms and the woman moans theatrically, might not be a 6 for a comparison of banal representations and reality, see the video “porn sex vs. real sex: the differences explained with food.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q64htnej6kq. last accessed august 16, 2013. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 problem on the surface. these things seem like perfectly harmless fun or perfect boredom, as the case may be. but these things could drive gender subordination in the aggregate when disproportionately produced. if an absurdly disproportionate percent of nude images are images of women and not men, and if an absurdly disproportionate percent of videos of heterosexual intercourse depict genuine male pleasure and lack depictions of genuine female pleasure, gender subordination may result. thus, it seems that non-inegalitarian material might subordinate. the other side fares no better. there’s a wide range of material that would be called ‘inegalitarian’ that does not subordinate. when causal critics advance the claim that inegalitarian material advances gender subordination, i suspect what they have in mind are those sexually explicit representations found in a great deal of “mainstream” pornography. they have in mind images of men choking women, women gagging on penises while engaged in deep throating, gangbang porn, and other forms of physical discomfort and humiliation (not in the bdsm sense) directed at women. however, the world of sexually explicit representations is vast and diverse. the genre of sadomasochist pornography, in particular, is full of material that is unabashedly inegalitarian, but often careful to incorporate discussion and enactment of explicit consent and positive sexual exploration among practitioners. the eroticization of violence, humiliation, and gender inequality are common, but often done in an affirmative way. practitioners discuss what they do and do not like, they construct and use safe words to let each other know when things have gone too far, and they negotiate and agree to every aspect of the sexual event. the bdsm community is careful to document this procedure with appropriate terminology, using a thick notion of consent and stipulating that everything in a ‘scene’ must be consensual. insofar as this material is used primarily by insiders looking to explore sexuality in a similarly affirmative way, it seems very unlikely that this inegalitarian material advances gender subordination. while sadomasochist pornography is one of the clearer examples, commercial sexually explicit material is diverse in any number of ways that challenge any attempt to systematically link types of content to degree of gender subordination. while a great deal of material eroticizing gender inequality surely advances subordination, there are also entire subgenres of sexually explicit representations that eroticize gender equality or violence in ways that depict men as inferior to women. 7 there’s also a great deal of material eroticizing gender inequalities in ways that do not uphold any kind of strict binary between cisgender men and cisgender women. there’s material depicting trans* people (who might be 7 of course, sexually explicit material geared around female domination may still subordinate, particularly if it’s based on male fantasies that men attempt to push onto their partners. 11 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 women, men, or nonbinary) both as inferior and superior to men and women, both cisgender and transgender. some of this inegalitarian material appears very unlikely to advance the subordination of women, both in virtue of its content and in virtue of its likely audience. where does this leave us with respect to the anti-porn feminist critiques found in the literature and our project of explaining pornography’s power to subordinate? causal approaches, particularly eaton’s, leave us with an outline of how subordination might work, namely through causal interactions between pornography and broader gender norms. but social and material contexts prove to be more important than the actual content emphasized in many causal approaches. i think we are also in a position to see the serious shortcomings of normative definitions of ‘pornography.’ those definitions may have once been helpful for certain legal projects. mackinnon, for instance, famously drafted civil rights ordinances for the cities of minneapolis and indianapolis that made use of this narrow definition of pornography (mackinnon 1987; lacey 1998). but for someone interested in a broad picture of pornography and its social effects, mackinnon’s normative definition is awkward. it leaves out much of what one would intuitively want to count as pornography, even if we have a specifically ameliorative purpose to an analysis of pornography. how about representations that do not depict subordination, or representations that are banal or harmless? how about representations that depict banal and consensual sexual intercourse between men and women? how about representations that depict women or men masturbating alone? how about representations depicting men having consensual, loving sex with men? each of these cases may be important for getting at how social and material contexts contribute to subordination, and thus may play some role in the analysis. using a narrow definition and emphasizing the role of pornographic content are two moves that leave us in a difficult position to explain how pornography’s power operates. the idea that pornography subordinates through its content, by content embedded within a society that facilitates subordination, is important to the starting point of both constitutive and causal approaches. but many of the cases of apparent pornographic subordination are cases where the content is not doing the relevant work. there’s pornographic content, as presumably there must be in order for something to count as pornography, but it’s not the content that’s driving the subordination. what we find in many cases is a range of banal content not depicting subordination that is still a part of a broader causal pattern of subordination. consider the website texxxans.8 this website contained banal, seemingly harmless 8 http://www.texxxans.com. the site was recently shut down and is not active as of march 30, 2014. in conversation, eaton suggested that this website, depending on the details of its contents, might not count as pornography for aesthetic reasons. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 images of nude women. what’s the problem? the website is an example of a vicious subgenre of pornography called ‘revenge porn.’ most of the images of women were uploaded by jealous ex-boyfriends or short-term sexual partners. one goal was to embarrass the women in the images through eroticization of their bodies in a particular context. the gender subordination that occurs is generated entirely from the social and material contexts of the images, and this does not lessen the harm caused by such a vile and shameful display. the images are of women from different parts of texas, and the website is organized according to the region of the state where the women live. the goal is to allow the woman’s friends and neighbors to view the images and pour scorn upon the depicted women. the material context is thus the physical location where the women live, and the social context is the negative attitudes conservative texans hold for women’s bodies and sexual autonomy. gender subordination is clearly a part of what is going on with the website, but this gender subordination does not come from the content of the images. responding to pornographic subordination in the previous section i considered constitutive and causal approaches to pornography, focusing in particular on attempts to explain how pornographic subordination operates. i argued that approaches emphasizing a narrow definition of pornographic content will miss important issues with respect to how pornography’s power operates. where does this leave us? how does pornography’s power to subordinate operate? what are some effective ways to respond? i’ll argue that it’s best to adopt a descriptive definition of pornography and that there’s a need to both broaden and sharpen the main claims around pornographic subordination. this will improve our understanding of pornographic subordination and help point the way to helpful responses. the first claim, then, is that it would be best to adopt a descriptive rather than a normative definition of pornography when discussing the social implications of sexually explicit material. this is to say that it would be best to define pornography, roughly, as any sexually explicit material produced for commercial purposes and generally used for sexual gratification. i make this suggestion for both substantive and pragmatic reasons. substantively, the sexually explicit materials found in western culture are incredibly diverse. considering this diversity opens us to seeing the gaps between pornographic content and subordination. there’s a wide variety of banal sexually explicit material that does not subordinate in virtue of its content, but there’s also an entire industry of sexually explicit materials aimed at countering mainstream pornography. i refer here to feminist pornography, which we will consider shortly. using a ‘big tent’ definition of pornography appropriately recognizes these changes. pragmatically, a descriptive definition better accounts for 13 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 the wide variety of experiences people have with pornography and avoids the sort of confusion people have when encountering normative definitions. once one sees that a wide variety of sexually explicit materials do not subordinate, one is forced to draw the seemingly outlandish conclusion that such materials are not pornography. this will open a rift between theory and reality, particularly among younger people who do not remember the days before the widespread availability of internet pornography. second, i think there’s a need to modify the claim that pornography subordinates. in one sense, the claim should be broadened, and in another sense, it should be sharpened. we began with the claim that pornography subordinates women and considered different approaches for fleshing out this claim. but, when discussing an updated version of this claim, i have been careful to address ‘gender subordination’ in general rather than the ‘subordination of women,’ specifically. many of the people subordinated by pornography are transgender, some of whom are women and some of whom are men, nonbinary, or identify in some other way. there’s also a need to sharpen the claim, particularly by de-emphasizing pornographic content. pornography’s power to subordinate presupposes prior, broader gender subordination in the cultures in which pornography is produced and viewed. mackinnon and langton long ago, as we saw earlier, recognized that pornography is an embodied practice, embedded in a patriarchal culture of gender subordination.9 pornography subordinates through changing the sorts of actions, attitudes, and norms that people imbibe as a matter of course. pornography spurs action, and it does so in ways that are consistent with the cultures in which it is viewed. this is the lesson to be learned from a study of the social and material contexts of pornography, showing us that even identical pornographic content might operate differently depending on the community in which it is viewed. indeed, pornography need not even depict subordination at all in order to enact gender subordination. so, what ought we to do about pornography? a short and unhelpful answer is that this depends on who we are and what our skills are. but i’ll put some focus on some unsuccessful efforts grounded in approaches to pornography i have argued against in this paper and on potentially successful efforts grounded in approaches i argue for. restricting or regulating pornographic content, at least regulating 9 in personal conversation, langton suggested that this point may indeed have been lost in subsequent debate. this is probably due to the fact that it was never the main point of the specifically philosophical debate over pornography, which concerned some of the questions in the philosophy of language mentioned above. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 pornography qua pornography, looks like an example of a failed response.10 it’s difficult, if not impossible, to draw the sorts of distinctions needed to legislate the bad without unfairly attacking the good or banal. we’ve also seen that even the “bad” isn’t always so bad and that the “good” isn’t always so good. of course, this is not the only reason why many ways of regulating pornography are a bad idea. regulation depends on state power to write and enforce regulations. in the united states, on which i have the most expertise, the people who would be writing and enforcing legislation are mostly opposed to feminist calls to end subordination and marginalization on the basis of gender. and even the well-intentioned legislator is prone to unintended problems. one’s mileage may vary, depending on local conditions. the ultimate authorities here are the people who best know the local conditions and who are victims of gender subordination. but in the united states, a country where regressive attitudes and norms about women are ubiquitous, not to mention the dreadful attitudes and norms about trans* people, the odds of creating a successful state regulatory program that produces positive effects do not look promising. approaches to pornography grounded in collective action guided by consciousness-raising, a traditional project of feminists and anarchists, is much more promising. continuous exploration and criticism of gender norms, and the manifestations of those norms, are particularly important to such approaches. constitutive and causal critics have done some valuable work toward these goals, as have other feminists and cultural critics, but much of what is needed is collective and diy action. but talk of collection action and consciousness-raising is vague and nebulous. let’s look at concrete examples: feminist and queer pornography. the 2013 anthology the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure explains feminist pornography as a project of using “sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers” (penley et al. 2013, 9). as discussed earlier, we have some reason to believe that pornography can affect people’s attitudes. feminist pornography uses this causal relationship, turning it toward positive ends. i do not think feminist pornography is a panacea for the ills of 10 eaton in particular distinguishes four categories of remedies to the harms of pornography: criminalization, civil action, state regulation that falls short of bans or criminalization, and moral condemnation (eaton 2007, 690). by claiming that we ought to avoid focus on regulating pornography qua pornography, i mean to say that there are a lot of other reasons for regulating pornography (e.g., when the women involved in pornography are trafficked, when nonconsensual sex occurs in filming, etc.). but these are cases when the regulation is not because it’s pornography, but rather because there is a social ill taking place. 15 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 pornography, but i do think it is time to acknowledge its positive functions. a much more common approach among anti-porn feminists has been to dismiss or ignore feminist pornography (e.g., dines et al. 2010). the internet has revolutionized the pornography industry in many ways, some of which feminist pornographers have used for this positive project. the industry now includes more women-owned and operated pornographic shops, websites, and other media. with the expansion of internet pornography, the industry’s start-up costs are lower and material is less dependent on maledominated studios and distributors. some of these newer outlets present a more realistic and positive image of female and transgender bodies and allow to women a space for agency and control. feminist pornographers connect to a wider network of feminist media, both media outlets like bitch magazine and diy feminist projects like the tumblr blog hairy pits club,11 a space on the web for women who violate norms about body hair that tries to be a safe space for these violations of norms. we know that the most effective types of pornography are the ones most ‘mainstreamed,’ those pornographic outlets that are most continuous with a broader popular culture. feminist pornography, too, can be effective when it is connected to a broader feminist culture. what does it mean to say that feminist pornography can be connected to a broader feminist culture? what are feminist pornographers doing to encourage these connections? many of these connections are educational. the feminist sex shop serves as a safe space where feminists, queers, trans* people, and other marginalized groups can explore their sexual interests. the smitten kitten in minneapolis, for example, is a sex shop that sells a bewildering array of sex toys, focusing in particular on toys for people of marginalized body types and sexualities. the store sells everything from kegel balls, to bdsm equipment, butt plugs, dildos, lubricants, strap-on harnesses, and special furniture designed to accommodate the sexual positions of people with larger bodies. it pairs this equipment with knowledgeable staff and courses designed to teach people about the different ways they can gain pleasure from sex. the store also sells feminist pornography in dvd format, allowing people to integrate what they are watching with their own bodies and pleasure. feminist pornography often focuses directly on sex education, making sure that all actors and actresses demonstrate the proper use of contraceptives and body barriers, equipment designed to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. it’s also common for feminist pornographers to engage in direct political education, offering actresses a chance to explain and enact their own political views. the smitten kitten, for instance, reserves space for feminist pornography dedicated 11 http://hairypitsclub.tumblr.com. last accessed may 18, 2014. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 to the use of vegan-friendly sex toys. queer pornography has garnered a particularly well-earned reputation for countering body norms and expectations by including trans* participants, cisgender women who disregard norms dictating that women should shave their armpits and legs, and both cisgender and transgender women with larger body types. of course, the point that non-inegalitarian pornography might promote gender subordination also applies to feminist pornography. used in the wrong context, apart from its positive or educational contexts, feminist pornography, too, could subordinate. this is no doubt a challenge both to the ability of feminist pornography to secure uptake and to avoid reproducing harms. we are in an excellent position to say a bit about what is going on in feminist pornography, what it is about feminist pornography that can be effective. people navigate a world where they are classified in their everyday activities. this contributes to gender subordination, leading to gender marginalization. but feminist pornography is, at its core, an attempt to organize people to create a new kind of feedback loop, a feedback loop that generates new expectations and new ways of organizing social life. people are marginalized as a matter of course, but feminist pornographers want to organize people so that they can create a world where people are treated with dignity as a matter of course. naturally, it’s one small part of such a project, but it is a part. this is a project with a long, though marginalized, history. it has operated under many names, from anarchism to consciousnessraising to feminism or collective, direct action. references antony, louise. 2012. “against langton’s illocutionary treatment of pornography.” jurisprudence 2:387–401. austin, j. l. 1962. how to do things with words. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bianchi, claudia. 2008. “indexicals, speech acts, and pornography.” analysis 68:310– 36. brosius, h. b., j. b. weaver iii, and j. f. staab.1993. “exploring the social and sexual ‘reality’ of contemporary pornography.” journal of sex research 30:161–70. dines, gail, linda thompson, rebecca whisnant, and karen boyle. 2010. “arresting images: anti-pornography slide shows, activism and the academy.” in everyday pornography, edited by karen boyle, 17–33. london: routledge. eaton, anne w. 2007. “a sensible antiporn feminism.” ethics 117:674–715. garry, ann. 2002. “sex, lies, and pornography.” in ethics in practice, 2nd ed., edited by h. lafollette, 344–55. new york: blackwell. 17 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 green, leslie. 1998. “subordination, silence, and pornography’s authority.” in censorship and silencing: practices of cultural regulation, edited by robert post, 285–311. oxford: getty research institute and oxford university press. lacey, nicola. 1998. unspeakable subjects: feminist essays in legal and social theory. oxford university press. langton, rae. 1993. “speech acts and unspeakable acts.” philosophy and public affairs 22: 293–330. ———. 1998. “subordination, silence, and pornography’s authority.” in censorship and silencing: practices of cultural regulation, edited by robert post, 261– 83. oxford: getty research institute and oxford university press. ———. 2009. “pornography’s authority? response to leslie green.” in sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. oxford university press. langton, rae and caroline west. 2009. “scorekeeping in a pornographic language game.” in sexual solipsism: philosophical essays on pornography and objectification. oxford university press. mackinnon, catharine. 1982. “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: an agenda for theory.” signs 7:515–44. ———. 1987. feminism unmodified. cambridge: harvard university press. mcveigh, tracy. 2013. “can iceland lead the way towards a ban on violent online pornography?” guardian. accessed february 23, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2013/feb/16/iceland-onlinepornography. mikkola, mari. 2008. “contexts and pornography.” analysis 68:316–20. paul, pamela. 2005. pornified: how pornography is damaging our lives, our relationships, and our families. new york: times books. penley, constance, celine parreñas shimizu, mirielle miller-young, and tristan taormino. 2013. “introduction: the politics of producing pleasure.” in the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, celine parreñas shimizu, constance penley, and mirielle milleryoung, 9–20. new york: the feminist press. saul, jennifer. 2003. feminism: issues & arguments. oxford university press. ———. 2006. “pornography, speech acts, and context.” proceedings of the aristotelian society 106:229–48. soble, alan. 2002. pornography, sex, and feminism. new york: prometheus books. steinem, gloria. 1984. outrageous acts and everyday rebellions. new york: henry holt & co. young, iris marion. 2011. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.2 matt l. drabek is a content specialist at act, inc. in iowa city, ia, and a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the university of iowa. his research interests include social philosophy, feminist philosophy, and philosophical issues in the social sciences. his first book, classify and label: the unintended marginalization of social groups, was published in 2014 (paperback edition in 2016). he is presently working on the social effects of propaganda, as well as how to assess critical thinking in postsecondary education and the workforce. 19 drabek: pornographic subordination and feminism published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives matt l. drabek recommended citation pornographic subordination, power, and feminist alternatives moral failure — response to critics feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 6 2016 moral failure — response to critics lisa tessman binghamton university, ltessman@binghamton.edu recommended citation tessman, lisa. 2016. "moral failure — response to critics."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 6. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6. moral failure—response to critics lisa tessman abstract i briefly introduce moral failure as a book that brings together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology to examine moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” i respond to rivera by arguing that the process of construction that imbues normative requirements with authority need not systematize or eliminate conflicts between normative requirements. my response to schwartzman clarifies what is problematic about nonideal theorizing that limits itself to offering action-guidance. in response to kittay, i defend my rejection of “ought implies can,” and consider the implications of the concept of unfair moral requirements. keywords: moral failure, nonideal theory, moral psychology, constructivism, moral demandingness in moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality (2015), i argue that there can be situations of unavoidable moral failure, or, put differently, that there can be impossible moral requirements, moral requirements that contravene the principle that “ought implies can.” we apprehend impossible moral requirements intuitively, when we grasp both that “i must” and “i can’t.” the most obvious cases of unavoidable moral failure are a result of moral dilemmas, in which either option that one can choose involves wrongdoing. both deontologists and consequentialists rule out moral dilemmas, but i argue that there are genuine dilemmas, by drawing a distinction between negotiable and non-negotiable moral requirements; only those that are negotiable, and which concern values that can be substituted or compensated, are canceled when overridden in the resolution of the conflict. nonnegotiable moral requirements remain binding even when they become impossible to fulfill. other cases of impossible moral requirements arise in situations where it is a person’s need or vulnerability that gives rise to a moral requirement; when the need is basic and significant, but also impossible to meet—for instance, when someone needs for an irreplaceable loss to be replaced or for an irreparable harm to be repaired—the moral requirement to which it gives rise is also impossible to fulfill. 1 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 i draw on empirical work that supports a dual-process model of moral cognition; we have both an automatic, unconscious, affect-laden intuitive system and a consciously controlled reasoning system, and while we can make our judgments through either process, the empirical work shows that most of our moral judgments are made intuitively, and that reasoning tends to take place after the judgment has been made, to justify the judgment to others (haidt 2001). i show that while the reasoning processes referred to by deontologists and consequentialists cannot yield judgments that we are impossibly required, we can indeed make intuitive judgments that we face an impossible moral requirement, because “ought implies can” cannot insert itself into the intuitive process the way it can in the reasoning process. one of the main concepts in the book is the idea of the unthinkable. to make a judgment that an action is morally wrong is just to judge ‘i must not do it.’ to make an intuitive judgment that an action is unthinkable is to judge both that ‘i must not do it’ and that ‘i must not even consider doing it’ (by ‘consider’ i mean engage in justificatory reasoning about). that is, it matters how one makes the decision, and it matters because it matters to us, namely to people who want certain affect-laden, automatic, intuitive responses from each other. the idea of the unthinkable is behind bernard williams’s famous example of the rescuer who has “one thought too many” when he considers whether morality permits him to prioritize his wife or requires that he decide impartially between rescuing his wife or a stranger first (1981, 18). the wife “might have hoped” that it was an affect-laden intuitive judgment that prompted her husband to rescue her first (18). harry frankfurt captures the same idea in his characterization of love as involving a volitional necessity about actions that protect or care for one’s beloved; love for him constitutively involves finding certain actions—such as actions that threaten one’s beloved—to be unthinkable (frankfurt 1982, 2004). in such cases—in other words, cases where what we value in another person’s response to us is not just their action but their emotions as well, emotions that motivate them to act in a certain way toward us without questioning, calculating, or justifying—we (morally) must rely on our intuitive judgments. there is further empirical work on “sacred values” showing that individuals and moral communities tend to treat a set of values as sacred, as infinitely valuable, so that any consideration of sacrificing the value (even if one chooses not to sacrifice it) is forbidden. that is, in the case of sacred values it is wrong to think one thought too many—to rationally consider rejecting the value (tetlock et al. 2000; tetlock 2003). because our judgments regarding impossible moral requirements are intuitive judgments, and these requirements may be requirements not to do the unthinkable, they must be shielded in a certain way from reasoning that involves comparing or weighing values—that is, reasoning that involves considering doing 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 what should be unthinkable. but this means that our usual ways of double checking on our intuitions—such as reflective equilibrium (rawls 1971) or even margaret urban walker’s transparency testing (walker 1998, 2003)—might actually violate the values about which we must not think one thought too many. in some way we need to leave these values unquestioned, but leaving them unquestioned is also very dangerous, because our intuitions can be ideologically shaped (that’s what transparency testing is meant to address) and because social groups sometimes sacralize values in such a way that they view other values or certain other people as evil threats to sacred values, threats that they then believe must be eradicated (graham and haidt, 2012). my book, more broadly, is an account of what morality is and how we construct it—i’ll say more about this in response to lisa rivera’s comments. it also considers what more we might want from morality than action-guidance, namely that we might want to assess actions as constituting moral failures, even when we cannot avoid performing these actions—i’ll say more about this in response to lisa schwartzman’s comments. and it enters discussions of what is known as the question of moral demandingness, arguing that if other people’s needs and vulnerabilities can be sources of moral requirements for us, and sources that in some cases we respond to with the intuitive sense of “i must,” then morality, far from being moderate the way that many theorists want to argue that it is, can be impossibly demanding—i’ll say more about this in response to eva kittay’s comments. i would like to thank all three critics for their wonderful, thought-provoking comments. each of them, through their own work, has contributed over the years to my thinking, and i greatly appreciate hearing their reflections on my work. response to critics response to lisa rivera lisa rivera offers what i find to be an illuminating interpretation of moral failure, characterizing it as implicitly identifying, and addressing, two different conflicts: the “theory vs. phenomena” conflict and the “explanation vs. prescription” conflict. i do believe, as rivera suggests, that both conflicts can be avoided or resolved. the theory vs. phenomena conflict exists for theories that try to systemize—but because i don’t think a theory must (or should) thoroughly systemize, at least not in such a way that it reduces plural and conflicting values into a harmonious unity, one can avoid the tension between theory and phenomena by abandoning the quest for a unified system (sorry, parfit, but there is more than one mountain to climb). as rivera points out, giving up on systemizing may leave us 3 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 facing conflicting moral requirements, and if these moral requirements are nonnegotiable, we will also face unavoidable failure. if we acknowledge this, and accept a moral theory that has conceptual space for impossible moral requirements and unavoidable failure, then there need not be any conflict between (such a) theory and moral phenomena. the explanation vs. prescription conflict is more complicated. this conflict would clearly arise for moral realists if they were to accept the sorts of scientific explanations that i do, because then it would be terribly mysterious why our normative experiences, as outcomes of the processes that can be scientifically explained, would happen to match the moral prescriptions that follow from the independently existing moral facts that realists posit. sharon street demonstrates this in her brilliant debunking of moral realists’ accounts of morality, in “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value” (2006). but i’m not a moral realist, so the question is whether there is still any explanation vs. prescription conflict for an antirealist of a constructivist sort. i don’t think that there necessarily is; whether or not this conflict exists will depend on what the constructivist takes the process of construction to be, and whether that process is one that will tend to produce authoritative moral prescriptions that cannot be reconciled with the subjective experiences (the phenomena)—such as experiences of requirement—that we (or scientists) might describe or explain. my position is that we prescribe in part because we have certain experiences, and engage in certain evaluative processes, though a description or explanation of these experiences or processes does not entail any particular prescription. we (or neuroscientists) might explain what neurological processes take place in the brain when we prescribe. we (or evolutionary anthropologists/biologists/ psychologists) might explain what evolutionary processes led to our being the kinds of creatures who will tend to experience certain things normatively or prescriptively, or what psychological mechanisms we have evolved to motivate our prescriptive behavior. since we can study the processes involved in prescribing, we can then explain or describe them, but it is not the explanation that does any of the work of prescribing or of lending authority to our prescriptions—we do that when we prescribe or when we place our confidence in certain prescriptions. there is no reason why explaining how and why we prescribe would preclude prescribing, or even take any of the punch out of our prescriptions. (we might also note that there is likely to be an explanatory gap: the subjective experience of requirement, or the “what it is like” to have a normative experience or to prescribe, cannot be completely captured by a scientific explanation. but the fact that we cannot completely capture this in our explanations does not diminish the force of our prescriptions). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 if we express our prescriptions in the form of normative theories, and if these theories try to systemize beyond what the phenomena explained (partially) by the scientific theories can support, then we are back to the phenomena vs. theory tension. but our prescriptions, whether or not they take the form of normative theories, need not systemize, and need not eliminate conflicts (though if they do not, our prescriptions may be impossible to carry out). we could include, under the umbrella of prescribing, a wide range of evaluative acts, any of which may contribute to the construction of morality. i believe (unlike most other constructivists) that the construction of morality is not limited to being a justificatory endeavor, since some moral requirements come to carry authority without being justified. prescriptions are produced in some sense from both first-order judgments and second-order judgments, and these might differ from each other in how much authority we take them to carry. thus we could include as a prescriptive act the act of forming an immediate, intuitive judgment that “i must” or (to put it in imperative form) “do this!” —accompanied by a feeling of necessity or requirement about what one is to do. we could also include the act of producing a verdict as a result of a conscious reasoning process, such as “push the large person off the footbridge.” first-order judgments, though, are not necessarily authoritative, since in many cases we will end up without confidence in a first-order judgment and this lack of confidence will deprive the prescription of its moral authority. this is why we might want to distinguish between prescriptions that are backed with moral authority and prescriptions that are not, but we must keep in mind that there is not just a single route to imbuing a prescription with authority. in the case of sacred values, the tendency will be to automatically endorse and have confidence in one’s first-order intuitive judgments; and, i have argued, this is the only way in which sacred values may (permissibly) be judged. the first-order judgment that “i must protect this sacred value” and the second-order judgment that i must not even consider rejecting the first-order judgment (lest i have one thought too many) come together automatically. in other cases, rational reflection, or the social process as characterized by haidt’s social intuitionist model (haidt 2001), may indeed be an important part of the process of coming to have confidence in a prescription and granting it moral authority. rivera writes: “what i am responding to in situations—what i believe makes me required—seems to have no immediate explanatory or causal connection to the metaethical construction/social justificatory process. it is hard to see how the process plays a role in the moment i believe myself required.” i would modify this somewhat; the process of construction is wider than the “social justificatory process” and so the two should not be conflated. the process of construction may include justification—typically performed socially—but it is not limited to 5 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 justification. the “moment i believe myself required”—that is, the intuitive grasping of “i must”—is also part of the process of the construction of morality. in any case, our prescriptions, and the moral authority that they carry, are not somehow derived from our explanations; one cannot, after all, derive an ought from an is. instead, the prescriptions come from us, when we do any of the things that count as prescribing; we construct them through the wide range of processes that are involved in the construction of morality. my account of the construction of morality portrays these processes as a good deal messier than they appear to be in other constructivist accounts, because i don’t think that the processes are always, or should always be, reasoning processes, and i don’t think that they yield a consistent set of prescriptions. some constructivist accounts may create a tension or conflict between explanation and prescription, if the scientific explanations reveal a plurality of relevant experiences, all of these experiences are taken as the raw materials for the process of construction, and the process is supposed to yield a consistent set of prescriptions. here there will be tension because the plurality will not be easily reduced into a consistent set, so the explanation will point to plurality and the prescription will not “fit” this plurality. as soon as one relinquishes the hope for a single correct prescription, the tension dissolves. what remains is a morality that is thoroughly contingent. it is contingent on what we value and imbue with authority, and thus on what sorts of processes and structures lead to our having confidence in the authority of any particular moral requirement. these may include different cognitive processes through which we have normative experiences, and different social arrangements that structure how we interact to create shared understandings of what is required of us. morality must, then, be relative to these contingencies. response to lisa schwartzman lisa schwartzman is right that i am interpreting “nonideal theory” to mean theory that is action-guiding in the actual, nonideal world, and that in doing so i am following some other critics of ideal theory, as well as being guided by rawls’s own understanding of the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory. however, i want to clarify that i do not deny that nonideal theorists may do other things as well—for instance, schwartzman’s own work in challenging liberalism (2006) works out a methodology for a kind of nonidealizing epistemology, aimed at understanding oppression as structural (while ideal theory, in being ideological, obscures this fact). the reason that i focus on nonideal theory’s centering of action-guidance is because this is where i think a problem arises. it is not that i object to offering appropriate action-guidance, since we clearly need this kind of action-guidance, and especially action-guidance that has taken into 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 consideration what the actual wrongs are that need to be addressed through our actions (rather than action-guidance that is inappropriate—and potentially ideological—because it is based on an idealized picture of the conditions in which the action is to take place). rather, what i object to is the thought that, in offering action-guidance, we answer the question, “what is the right thing to do?” in other words, i object to what i take to be the false sense that if we make the right actionguiding decision—which just means that we choose the best of the available alternatives, all of which might be awful—then we have not failed.1 i want actionguidance and action-assessment (stocker 1990), so that we recognize the awfulness of what we do even when we do the best that we can, and i would like for this recognition to replace the righteousness we might otherwise have about what we do. schwartzman asks why i don’t challenge rawls’s own characterizations of the division between ideal and nonideal. rawls understands nonideal theory to concern situations of noncompliance or partial compliance with principles of justice. i don’t think that noncompliance or partial compliance must be interpreted, as schwartzman interprets it, as referring to the actions of individuals (“individual bad behavior”), though it is true that there is a lot of literature that does interpret it this way, such as literature on the moral demands faced by “compliers” in light of others’ noncompliance (e.g. murphy 2000). i understand noncompliance with justice to include any form that injustice takes, and because injustice tends to take structural forms, i take nonideal theory, even when understood as theory about situations of noncompliance or partial compliance with principles of justice, to indeed concern itself with “fundamentally oppressive structures of social hierarchy and power.” schwartzman also wonders why i might be interpreting nonideal theory as action-guiding theory. those whom i follow in doing this include amartya sen (2006, 2009) and charles mills, though primarily the position that mills expresses in contract and domination (pateman and mills 2007), rather than in “‘ideal theory’ as ideology” (2004). mills’s critique of ideal theory is emphasized in “‘ideal theory’ as ideology” while his development of what nonideal theorists should do is the focus of his chapters in contract and domination. mills’s claim in “‘ideal theory’ as ideology” is that the absence of descriptive accounts of actual conditions, and the presence of idealizations, serve an ideological purpose. with this i absolutely agree (and so i do not problematize it in moral failure). what it seems to suggest that nonideal theorists should do is to correct for the mistakes of ideal theory by foregrounding descriptive accounts of the actual and by scrutinizing normative ideals to determine whether they are truly worthy. in contract and domination, mills is explicit in his claim that we ought to utilize nonideal theory to arrive at “prescriptions for remedial 1 this idea is also expressed by martha nussbaum (2000). 7 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 justice in a racist social order” (pateman and mills 2007, 114)—that is, actionguidance in the nonideal, actual world. he proposes that we do this by imagining a hypothetical “later position” (in place of the “original position”), which puts parties in a position to choose principles of reparative justice, to choose the actions that should take place to compensate for a history of (racial) injustice. in other words, mills insists here that the descriptive account, combined with a vision of the normative ideal for which to strive, enables us to offer appropriate action-guidance. sen, too, is quite explicit about nonideal theory being action-guiding; in particular, it should guide us in how to make comparative action-guiding choices, where the comparison is between different options that are available in an actual, nonideal society. sen (2006) contrasts what he calls “transcendental” and “comparative” theories, and advocates comparative theories. he claims that transcendental theories—theories that identify what a perfectly just society would be like—are neither necessary nor sufficient for making comparative choices between available alternatives, all of which are nonideal. without commenting directly on his argument for these claims, i want to point out one way in which i differ from sen: i do think that we need what schwartzman calls “normative ideals” (sen’s “transcendent ideals”), but for a different purpose than for guiding action. this brings into view the mistake that i think nonideal theorists tend to make when they offer action-guidance that they believe aims at their normative ideals. the problem is not with their offering action-guidance, nor is the problem with their holding normative ideals. the problem is the tendency to not question the relationship between the two. as the “general theory of second best” (lipsey and lancaster 1956, discussed in goodin 1995) demonstrates, the best possible action (call this the second-best, since an impossible action is the first-best) is not necessarily the action that one would choose if one were trying to reach the normative ideal, the first-best. robert goodin illustrates this point by asking us to suppose that the ideal is to be served gelato with chocolate sauce. if i am only served fettuccine and not gelato, then instead of coming as close as possible to the ideal by having fettuccine with chocolate sauce, i will choose as the second-best (that is, the best that is possible), fettuccine with marinara sauce. to give an example related to politics rather than fine dining: if we have only a racist society (fettuccine), we would be better off choosing racially based affirmative action (marinara) than choosing colorblindness (chocolate sauce). but let’s not lose sight of the fact that the first-best, the normative ideal (the gelato with chocolate sauce), would be a racially egalitarian society with no further need for racial reparations and so one where colorblindness would be appropriate. the normative ideal here cannot be action-guiding, but it should be recognized as that which is the truly worthy (i.e. first-best) ideal. the best action-guiding decision is to pursue racially based 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 affirmative action over colorblindness, but only because we know we cannot reach the normative ideal. we must not lose sight of the gap between the (non-action-guiding) firstbest—which i call a “worthy ideal”—and the (action-guiding) second-best—which i call a “feasible ideal” (2015, 199). nonideal theory is very good at telling us what to do in the nonideal conditions we are in, but this is usually accompanied by the illusion that if we follow the prescription, we will be getting closer to our (worthy) normative ideals, as well as the illusion that we won’t be doing anything wrong. however, we won’t necessarily be getting closer to the ideal; sometimes we are getting farther away from it, and i count this as a failure, even when it is the best thing we can do. thus i do stand by my claim that there are two problems with nonideal theory: 1) it inadvertently idealizes the moral agent by portraying the agent as someone who always can do the right thing simply by making the right action-guiding decision, and so as someone who does not face unavoidable moral failure. 2) it suggests that what nonideal theory tells us to do is good (rather than not good enough but better than the alternatives). for instance, every time one chooses (whether one does this an activist, as a member of a progressive institution, as an applied ethicist, and so on) how to allocate resources, one makes trade-offs, often in situations where making trade-offs is unacceptable because the sacrificed value is one that cannot be substituted or compensated; in other words, one violates a non-negotiable moral requirement. to think of this as doing the right thing is to inappropriately adapt (borrowing language here from serene khader’s term, “inappropriately adaptive preferences” [khader 2011]) one’s normative expectations downward, labeling something as good even if it is something terrible. response to eva kittay the most basic question that kittay poses to me is: why am i so intent on rejecting “ought implies can”? why should “ought implies can” be tossed out as one of the dogmas of moral theory? after all, there seem to be so many good reasons— several of which kittay points out—to affirm that “ought implies can.” for one thing, it keeps us sane and wards off some of the pain of seeing ourselves as having failed. kittay tells us, in fact, that the very idea that she could be required to do something impossible seemed crazy to her from the moment her therapist pointed it out. i don’t think it is crazy to judge oneself to be impossibly required. i don’t think it’s rational, but neither do i think that makes it crazy. i don’t think it’s rational in the sense that i don’t think it’s a reasoned judgment. but i believe that we should have 9 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 confidence in the authority of some of our automatic, intuitive moral judgments— including judgments about impossible moral requirements—even when they must sit alongside other judgments that are inconsistent with them. if we don’t keep, and endorse, some of our intuitive judgments of being impossibly required, we lose some morally valuable ways of responding to each other. in some cases, when we rule out impossible moral requirements we rule out a certain kind of love. but nevertheless kittay’s point—that there are many good reasons to affirm that “ought implies can”—is well taken. that’s why i think that the process of construction of morality cannot produce a consistent set of judgments. i think it can produce both the judgment of impossible requirement and the judgment that “ought implies can.” both are valuable. because of this, i do think that “ought implies can” functions as a dogma of moral theory, which prevents us from apprehending impossible moral requirements and recognizing the value of doing so. kittay wonders why i don’t join bernard williams (1973) in rejecting the agglomeration principle instead of rejecting “ought implies can.” i doubt i would have argued for rejecting “ought implies can” if my own intuitive judgments did not favor rejecting it, so the next question is what i should do with these intuitive judgments—should i dismiss them, the way i would want, for instance, to dismiss intuitive judgments that exhibit implicit bias? i find myself extremely resistant to giving up my intuitive judgments about impossible moral requirements. my resistance is based on my sense that in some cases the only alternative to the act that i judge to be impossibly required is an act that is unthinkable. if i make an intuitive judgment that something is impossibly required, i may also make an automatic second-order judgment that the first-order judgment about an impossible moral requirement must not be questioned through justificatory reasoning. but it is only through such reasoning that the principle that “ought implies can” could be applied, and that inferences could be made from it. justificatory reasoning, in which i consider rejecting the requirement, would constitute “one thought too many” if the alternative to the required act is unthinkable. the clearest cases, for me, of experiencing some option as unthinkable, take place in the context of a certain kind of love, which harry frankfurt presents beautifully. someone who experiences this kind of love “finds that he [sic] must act as he does” (frankfurt 1982, 264). as frankfurt puts it, “an encounter with necessity of this sort characteristically affects a person less by impelling him into a certain course of action than by somehow making it apparent to him that every apparent alternative to that course is unthinkable” (263). it is not that there is any requirement or duty to love, or to love in this way, or to love anyone in particular; rather, if you love in this way, then your love itself gives you a reason, and leads you to find some actions (such as actions that protect the beloved) to be absolutely 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 required and other actions (such as actions that sacrifice the beloved) to be unthinkable. so why must we sometimes make our judgments about what we are required to do intuitively rather than through reasoning? because love requires it; because if we love someone in a certain way, then some things will be unthinkable. we’d be unable to even bring ourselves to consider doing them, to have that one (reasoned) thought too many. unthinkability serves as a sort of impossibility; an unthinkable act is impossible in the sense of being unthinkable. this means that the alternative to an unthinkable act must be absolutely required (though it may also be impossible). this is why love—and the unthinkability of certain acts, which we grasp when we love in a certain way—can necessitate that we acknowledge ourselves to be bound by impossible moral requirements. if choosing not to protect someone whom i love is unthinkable—and impossible in the sense of being unthinkable—then, even if i cannot in fact protect them, i still must do so. to not find myself to be impossibly required would reveal that i take it to be thinkable not to protect, which in turn would reveal an absence of a certain kind of love. if we want to live in a world in which one can love and be loved in the way that comes with the automatic, decisive sense that we must do certain things—a sense that is paired with the realization that all alternatives to what we must do are unthinkable—then we must accept a world in which we don’t necessarily reject our own judgments that we’re required to do the impossible. that is why i am so resistant to giving up my judgments that i am impossibly required. i don’t want to be the wife of that rescuer who thought the unthinkable when he thought one thought too many (nor do i want to be that rescuer). i argue in the book that it is in more than just relationships of love that we value people’s finding some acts to be unthinkable. in a variety of situations that go well beyond particular relationships of love, part of what we want from other people is their emotional response or their affect-laden intuitions; we want them to have an immediate feeling of horror, for instance, at the thought of pushing the large person off the footbridge in the push version of the trolley problem (tessman 2015, 66–67). as philip tetlock’s empirical work finds, people do tend to want and expect other people to make a certain class of moral judgments intuitively, and to find certain actions to be unthinkable—that is, protected from a process of rational consideration (tetlock et al. 2000; tetlock 2003). i want to return for a moment to why kittay may find it to be simply crazy to speak of requiring the impossible. it would be crazy to judge someone who has failed to do the impossible to be morally blameworthy in the same way that someone would be if they had failed to do something that they could do. unavoidable moral failure is not the same as avoidable moral failure. blame, including self-blame or guilt, is not exactly right in the case of unavoidable moral 11 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 failure. when i have failed to do what is impossibly required, i feel a pained recognition of the failure, but this is not the same as guilt. while kittay is right that i treat the principle that “ought implies can” as a dogma to be questioned, kittay’s portrayal of me as treating the action-guidingness of moral theory as dogma is not exactly accurate. i believe that one of the things that moral theory must do is offer action-guidance. what i find to be a dogma of moral theory is the notion that moral theory begins and ends with action-guidance; under the influence of this dogma, moral theorists conflate “what is to be done” with “what it is right to do.” what i and others, such as michael stocker (1990) and christopher gowans (1994), have emphasized against this dogma is that even after the action-guidance and the action have taken place, there is more for the moral theorist to say. for instance, following stocker, i believe that we can still assess the action that we have decided is the action to be done: we can still judge that performing this action constitutes a failure. what is the point of doing this? the point, here, is to match the subjective experience of unavoidable failure. when i find myself facing what i intuitively judge to be an impossible requirement, and i find myself failing to fulfill it, it is alienating to turn to moral theories that have no conceptual space to account for this phenomenon. offering the concept of impossible moral requirements, and enabling us to claim that we have unavoidably failed, are non-action-guiding functions of moral theory. moral theories that perform these non-action-guiding functions are, i believe, better than those that merely guide action, even though i do agree that action-guidance must be, and usually is, the central task of moral theory. lastly, i turn to kittay’s discussion of how i treat her vulnerability model of moral requirements, which she develops in love’s labor (1999). according to this model, if someone is vulnerable to or dependent on a moral agent, and the moral agent is positioned to be able to respond to the dependent’s needs, then the moral agent may be morally required to do so. this is true even if the moral agent did not voluntarily choose to be in such a position. however, if the moral agent was coerced into being in such a position, then according to kittay everything changes. i interpret kittay to be saying that a vulnerability-responsive moral requirement simply does not arise in cases where the moral agent has been coerced into being in a position where someone is dependent on her. in her comments, kittay challenges my claim that, to the contrary, one can—due to bad (systemic) moral luck—be saddled with a vulnerability-responsive moral requirement, regardless of whether it is due to coercion that one is positioned to be required to respond to someone’s need or vulnerability. this claim is important to my view in part because situations in which one has been coerced into a position whereby one is required to care for a dependent might be dilemmatic (depending on whether there are conflicting requirements, and on whether both requirements are non-negotiable). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 i think that an important distinction—brought to my mind by anja karnein’s argument in “putting fairness in its place: why there is a duty to take up the slack” (2014)—will illuminate our disagreement. the distinction is between cases in which the agent who is doing the coercing is also the dependent, and cases in which the agent who is doing the coercing is a different person than the dependent. karnein’s point is that in the latter kinds of cases, there can be unfair moral requirements; the “place” of the unfairness (or other wrongdoing) is in the relationship between the coercer and the coerced moral agent, and it does not affect the fact that a moral requirement arises out of the need or vulnerability of the dependent, as long as the dependent is a third party. karnein’s point is made in the context of debates about moral demandingness and is targeted at theorists, such as liam murphy (2000), who argue that the demands of morality are limited, and thus moderate, because one cannot be required to do more than one’s “fair share.” these theorists, whom karnein dubs “fair shares objectors,” insist that in situations where some parties (such as the global poor) are in need and other parties (such as those who are well-off) are in a position to meet that need, the moral requirement to meet the need must be distributed fairly amongst those who can meet the need. according to the objection, in nonideal conditions in which some of those who are able to meet the need refuse to do so—call them the noncompliers—those who are willing to comply with the requirement still cannot be required to do more than their fair share, that is, the amount they would have to do under ideal conditions of full compliance. in other words, they cannot be required to pick up the slack. karnein disagrees, charging that the objection “fails to distinguish between two separate issues: first, what individual agents owe to the third party, and second, how fellow duty bearers ought to relate to each other” (karnein 2014, 594); furthermore, “while the problem of fairness arises chiefly in the latter context, individual agents’ duties to third parties are determined independently of how fellow duty bearers ought to relate to each other… there will be cases in which what individual agents owe to third parties amounts to taking up the slack of noncompliers, even though this is very unfair” (594–595). the key to karnein’s argument is separating two distinct relationships: the relationships of fellow duty bearers to each other (where the unfairness takes place when some are noncompliers) and the relationship of any one duty bearer to a third party. in the relationship between the duty bearer and the third party, if the third party is dependent, that dependency gives rise to a moral requirement to meet the need. putting fairness in its place means putting it in the relationship between fellow duty bearers. karnein illustrates her point by imagining different scenarios in which some people need rescuing (such as children in danger of drowning), and there are several 13 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 potential rescuers, some of whom are noncompliers in the sense that they do not comply with the requirement to do their share of the rescuing. the details vary in order to capture some subtleties, but the basic idea is this: if two children are drowning and you, the only other competent swimmer around, walk away, you have treated me unfairly (burdening me with your share of the rescue work), and you have wronged the child whom you should have rescued (because you “recklessly endangered” her [karnein 2014, 604]); nevertheless, i am now faced with two drowning children who have not wronged me in any way, and thus i must rescue both of them. your behavior becomes part of the background of bad luck that has put me in the position of being required to rescue two children. in order to translate karnein’s argument to kittay’s vulnerability model, let’s conceive of the parties as follows. suppose that agent a and agent b are the potential duty-bearers (or in kittay’s language, agents who potentially have vulnerability-responsive obligations), and c is a dependent. for instance, we can imagine that a and b are c’s parents, and that there is no one other than a and b who can or will care for c. karnein’s point will be that unfairness between a and b— let’s suppose a is unfair to b by not doing his share of the work of caring for c—does not change the fact that if c still needs care and a is not doing it, the requirement falls on b. a’s noncompliance functions like luck for the purpose of the relationship between b and c; it is b’s bad luck to face c’s need—and the requirement to meet it—alone. we can even imagine a to be more horrible than someone who is simply unfair. let’s suppose b never wanted to have a child but was manipulated by a into doing so; let’s suppose a is abusive to b, and isolates b in the home, cutting her off from support, and undermining her chances of earning a living that would enable her to leave a; let’s suppose a spends his money on alcohol and drugs, or on luxuries for himself, providing b with so little money that b can only meet c’s basic needs by sacrificing some of her own. clearly, a is wronging b in some very serious ways that go beyond simply being unfair; to use kittay’s language (and to drastically understate things), a is not treating b like some mother’s child. still, karnein’s point holds. a wrongs b (and a also wrongs c). but this wrongdoing plays the role of bad moral luck—as karnein puts it, it functions just like a force of nature (605)—in the way that it affects the obligations that b has to c (again, assuming that there is no one else who could care for c). karnein is also careful to point out that a’s wrongdoing does not function like a force of nature in the way that it affects the relationship between a and b; there, it functions as the action of a responsible moral agent, a, who must be treated as an agent rather than as a force of nature, and thus can and should be held accountable (605–606). a owes all kinds of reparations to b. a also owes all kinds of reparations to c, because a has not met his vulnerability-responsive moral obligations to c. but none of this nullifies the 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 obligations that b has to c, which include the obligation to pick up a’s slack. c, after all, is not the one who has wronged b; nothing about c’s need has changed, and nothing in the relationship between c and b would inhibit that need from giving rise to a vulnerability-responsive moral requirement. i’ll make two points about this case. the first is a clarification to forestall misinterpretation. i am not saying that the correct action-guiding decision for b is necessarily to meet c’s needs. rather, if meeting her own needs—or, for instance, protecting her dignity—conflicts with meeting c’s needs, then the best actionguiding decision for b may very well be to prioritize her own needs or rights. but if she does so, that decision will involve unavoidable moral failure, namely her failure to fulfill her vulnerability-responsive moral requirements toward c. the fact that protecting herself or her dignity conflicts with meeting c’s needs does not serve to cancel the moral requirement to meet c’s needs. if we follow goodin (1985) in conceiving of b as having duties toward herself, then we can describe the situation as a genuine moral dilemma. the second point is that it is crucial to the case (as for karnein’s cases) that the wrongdoer, a, is not the same person as the dependent, c. this may be what is behind kittay’s and my disagreement: kittay has in mind two-person cases in which the dependent is the wrongdoer (such as the master, johnny, in jubilee), and i have in mind three-person cases in which the dependent is an innocent third party (such as the dying auschwitz prisoners in primo levi’s narrative). i think that in my reading of love’s labor i did not pay attention to the fact that the cases that kittay presents as cases in which coercion prevents a moral requirement from arising are primarily two-person cases in which the dependent is the wrongdoer. in cases like this, i am willing to agree with kittay that the dependent/wrongdoer has no claim on the care of the person whom he wrongs. when we put fairness (or any other wrongdoing) “in its place” in such a case, its proper place (and the place of any wrongdoing and accountability for the wrongdoing) is in the very relationship in which a vulnerability-responsive moral requirement would otherwise arise. part of the wrongdoer’s being accountable for the wrongdoing may mean forfeiting the care of the person whom he has wronged. (although i also agree with kittay that even in such cases, it is possible that the relationship between the two parties qua human beings may permit a moral requirement to arise, while in the relationship between the two parties qua master and slave, a relationship that lacks “moral warrant,” no moral requirement can arise). but if the dependent is a third party rather than a wrongdoer, then this dependent has done nothing that would entail forfeiture of care; the innocent third party’s need still triggers a vulnerability-responsive moral requirement. thus the situation described by primo levi must be treated differently than the situation 15 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 described in jubilee; the dying prisoners whom levi feels impossibly required to respond to are a third party and have not wronged him in any way.2 when we put fairness in its place—and recognize that the source of unfairness or other wrongdoing is often distinct from the source of our moral requirements, and so the unfairness or other wrongdoing does not serve to prevent the moral requirements from arising—we can see that karnein has given us a novel concept: the concept of unfair duties. there are moral requirements that it is unfair for us to be bound by, but that nevertheless are binding on us. karnein does not intend for this concept to be applied in cases where meeting the requirement would be impossible—in fact, she explicitly rules this out, presumably because she accepts that “ought implies can” (see karnein 2014, 594n4). however, i find that acknowledging that there can be unfair moral requirements makes impossible moral requirements more palatable, for i take it that part of the reaction against impossible moral requirements is due to their unfairness. after all, what could be more unfair than being required to do the impossible? it is terribly unfair to be set up for failure, and impossible moral requirements do exactly that. to this i say: yes, impossible moral requirements are totally unfair—but that does not diminish their authority. references frankfurt, harry. 1982. “the importance of what we care about.” synthese 53 (2): 257–272. ––––––. 2004. the reasons of love. princeton, nj: princeton university press. goodin, robert. 1985. protecting the vulnerable. chicago: university of chicago press. 2 kittay mentions the case of a woman who is pregnant by rape and wonders whether she has a duty to give birth. my response is, of course not. this is not because the dependent fetus is a wrongdoer, but rather because the fetus is not yet a person whose needs generate vulnerability-responsive moral requirements. if the woman does give birth, then she will face a requirement to find someone—not necessarily herself—to care for the child (obviously the rapist also has an obligation toward the child, but presumably he will be a noncomplier and will fail to fulfill this obligation, leaving the mother to pick up the slack). but the mere presence of the mother’s obligation toward the child does not entail that the right action-guiding decision for her is a decision to meet the obligation, because the obligation to find care for the child might be overridden by another requirement; in that case, however, the overridden obligation, which is non-negotiable, would not be canceled and so would leave a moral remainder. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 ––––––. 1995. “political ideals and political practice.” british journal of political science 25 (1): 37–56. gowans, christopher. 1994. innocence lost: an examination of inescapable moral wrongdoing. new york: oxford university press. graham, jesse, and jonathan haidt. 2012. “sacred values and evil adversaries: a moral foundations approach.” in the social psychology of morality: exploring the causes of good and evil, edited by mario mikulincer and phillip r. shaver. washington, dc, american psychological association: 17. haidt, jonathan. 2001. “the emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.” psychological review 108 (4): 814–834. karnein, anja. 2014. “putting fairness in its place: why there is a duty to take up the slack.” journal of philosophy cxi (11): 593–607. khader, serene j. 2011. adaptive preferences and women’s empowerment. new york: oxford university press. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love’s labor. new york: routledge. lipsey, r. g., and kelvin lancaster. 1956. “the general theory of second best.” review of economic studies 24 (1): 11–32. mills, charles. 2004. “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” in moral psychology, edited by peggy desautels and margaret urban walker, 163–181. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. murphy, liam. 2000. moral demands in nonideal theory. oxford: oxford university press. nussbaum, martha. 2000. “the costs of tragedy: some moral limits of cost-benefit analysis.” journal of legal studies 29 (2): 1005–1036. parfit, derek. 2011. on what matters. oxford: oxford university press. pateman, carole, and charles mills. 2007. contract and domination. cambridge: polity press. rawls, john. 1971. a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. schwartzman, lisa. 2006. challenging liberalism: feminism as political critique. university park: pennsylvania state university press. sen, amartya. 2006. “what do we want from a theory of justice?” journal of philosophy 103 (5): 215–28. ––––––. 2009. the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. stocker, michael. 1990. plural and conflicting values. oxford: oxford university press. street, sharon. 2006. “a darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value.” philosophical studies 127: 109–166. tetlock, philip. 2003. “thinking the unthinkable: values and taboo cognitions,” trends in cognitive science 7 (7): 320–324. 17 tessman: moral failure — response to critics published by scholarship@western, 2016 tetlock, philip, orie kristel, s. beth elson, melanie green, and jennifer lerner. 2000. “the psychology of the unthinkable: taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals.” journal of personality and social psychology 78 (5): 853–870. walker, margaret urban. 1998. moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics. new york: routledge. ––––––. 2003. moral contexts. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. williams, bernard. 1973. “ethical consistency.” in problems of the self. cambridge: cambridge university press. ––––––. 1981. “persons, character and morality.” in moral luck. cambridge: cambridge university press. lisa tessman is professor of philosophy at binghamton university. she teaches and does research in ethics, moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and related areas. her work focuses on understanding how real human beings construct morality and experience moral demands, especially under difficult conditions. she is the author of burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles (oup, 2005), and moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality (oup, 2015). she is currently completing a book entitled when doing the right thing is impossible, which will be her first book written for a general audience; it is under contract with oxford university press. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.6 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 moral failure — response to critics lisa tessman recommended citation moral failure â•fl response to critics resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 2 2018 resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism samantha n. wesch university of alberta, wesch@ualberta.ca recommended citation wesch, samantha n.. 2018. "resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 2. resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism1 samantha wesch abstract this paper examines the contemporary phenomena of sexualized depictions of nazism in various forms of media. drawing on both the work on power and on resistance and perfectionist ethics of michel foucault, i argue nazism has become conflated with deviant sexuality and used as a “floating signifier” in media to represent and further binary good/evil, normal/abnormal narratives. i argue that there are three primary tropes of sexualized representation (“sexy sadistic,” “gender nonconformist,” and “star-crossed”) which each adheres to the same binary logic. applying foucault’s theory of biopolitics, particularly that of the “perverse implantation” and “the speaker’s benefit,” i further argue nazism has become conflated with deviant sexuality through the constitutive and product influence biopower has on the sexuality of subjects. i conclude this paper by looking to contemporary jewish voices and, looking to foucault’s perfectionist ethics, argue that sexualized representations of nazism are problematic because of their silencing effect on the narratives of the victims and survivors of the shoah, and that representations of nazism based on the binary logic of good/evil and normal/abnormal ought to be resisted in favour of depictions based on survivor and witness testimony. keywords: foucault; foucaultian politics; biopower; biopolitics; sovereign power; binary logic; binary narrative; philosophy of sexuality; perfectionist ethics; foucaultian ethics; foucaultian resistance; holocaust media; shoah media; holocaust representation; shoah representation; ethics of representation; ethics of media in november 2014, rapper and sex symbol nicki minaj caused controversy with the depiction of german fascism in her music video “only.” though hip hop has never been shy toward harnessing the attention-grabbing power of shock value, the blatant sexualization of nazism in “only” is relevantly distinct from the profanity 1 i would like to thank kyler chittick, jared burton, courtney bogstie, matti thurlin, howard nye, jack zupko, and, most of all, my supervisor chloe taylor for their kindness and support throughout the duration of this project. 1 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 typically seen in mainstream rap. a cartoon minaj appears in a skintight gimp suit, with her record label’s logo modified to resemble a swastika plastered on arm bands, banners, flags, and the centre of minaj’s breasts. animated completely in red and greyscale, featuring rows of soldiers in front of a nuremberg-style palace, minaj is accused of emulating the triumph of the will, and of deliberately releasing the video on the anniversary of the kristallnacht (mccormack 2014). though “only” was publicly criticized (foxman 2014; denham 2014), the trend of representing nazism as erotic is prevalent in contemporary media, and has been since wwii. typically, representations of nazism are highly sexualized, glamorized, and sensationalized, with no regard for or attention to the horrors and suffering conveyed in survivor testimony. over eleven million people perished in concentration camps; horrendous suffering was the consequence of german fascism. such atrocity brought forth from evil intention and exploitation of the desperate usually invokes compassion and mourning, yet the conflation of “sexy” and german fascism is so pervasive in western media it has become mundane, and even considered an actual quality of historical nazism. michel foucault asks: how is it that nazism—which was represented by shabby, pathetic puritanical characters, laughably victorian old maids, or at best, smutty individuals— how has it managed to become . . . in all the pornographic literature throughout the world, the ultimate symbol of eroticism? (foucault 1989, 97) sexy, or at least sexual, has become as essential to depictions of nazism as swastikas, small square moustaches, and anti-semitism, and consequently, these symbols and objects have become deeply entangled with eroticism, with one announcing the presence of the other. the erotic presentation of nazism makes these fictional characters both easily recognizable and consumable; more importantly, i argue, it also functions as a means of establishing and preserving hegemonic narratives. when deviant sexuality becomes understood as the “truth” of nazism, the testimony of survivors and the stories of those lost are swept away by the claims of uncovering a “greater,” “more real” truth of the opposing binaries of good/evil, normal/abnormal, and deviant sexuality/heteronormative romance. sexualized representations perform the revealing of a greater, more fundamental “truth” than can be found in the narratives of survivors and witnesses. i take up foucault’s question and offer an ethical analysis, drawing on foucault’s later works, for resistance to the understandings of a truth of deviant sexuality of nazism, and the sexualized representations to which this assumption is foundational. i begin by arguing sexualized depictions of nazism tend to adhere to the same logic of representation, and produce and shape a collective understanding of the shoah which conforms to a binary narrative of “good versus evil” through conflation with deviant sexuality. second, i 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 apply foucault’s theories of power and sexuality to understand how and why this conflation has happened, and how nazism is used as a floating signifier for the evil/abnormal. finally, i argue these understandings and representations can and should be resisted in favour of media which is grounded in survivor testimony, as opposed to hegemonic narratives, to discuss and preserve the histories of the victims of german fascism. the purpose of this paper is not to prescribe strict rules for representations of nazism nor to make judgements about the way individuals view and respond to these portrayals, nor do i mean to morally condemn every piece of media i examine in this paper; i believe that it is possible to be critical of aspects of representations without saying the piece itself is problematic. rather, my purpose is to look critically at how and why nazism has become sexualized, and to argue that these representations function to disregard or silence witness testimony, and exploit suffering of the victims of the shoah through guising hegemonic binaries of good/evil, normal/abnormal, and others, through technologies of power. following foucault’s ethics of engaging critically with power to cultivate one’s own freedom, i look at what forces have caused nazism to become sexualized, and why subjects should be resistant to these representations. claims of “truth” in opposition to subjectivity were a major interest of foucault’s throughout his career. foucault importantly denies there can be a “liberating truth” that frees subjects from power. he rejects the traditional or popular correspondence theory of truth, that there is a singular, “right” truth which reflects something “real” about the world. foucault is primarily concerned with exploring how and why current political conditions arose. he is curious about how the particular phenomena of our present emerged, understanding these as contingent and stemming from particular historical conditions, rather than universal or necessary. foucault notes that making these claims of knowledge or existence of a “truth,” to sexuality, human nature, morality, and so on, is a mechanism of biopolitics, and often appears to “prove” or “support” preexisting moral or political commitments of the state (gutting 2013). he is skeptical of a possible universal truth to questions about humanity; foucault is explicit that he is not seeking a “truth” in his work, nor does he think this is the job of the philosopher. rather, he critically engages with knowledge and power in order to help his reader reflect on their own situation with power structures and how they may live within them. inspired by nietzsche, foucault argues “truth,” in the correspondence theory sense, is a conceptual invention used to connect knowledge to the implication of power technologies (elden 2017, 32–35). power and knowledge are then deeply intertwined through the concept of and claims to this “truth.” therefore, the “factual truth” is never entirely clear. this critical attitude towards claims of “truths” and what these claims are doing are integral for our following discussion. how claims of a knowledge or discovery of a 3 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 “foundational” or “greater” truth function as a technology of power is essential to our following discussion. in the seinfeld episode “the raincoats,” jerry and his girlfriend are spotted by newman kissing during a screening of schindler’s list. when jerry’s confronted, he responds arguing he had not seen his girlfriend in so long the couple could not resist. but perhaps something else got them hot and bothered. in “fascinating fascism,” susan sontag argues nazism is marketed and consumed like pornography, as demonstrated in her analysis of a pocket book of nazi paraphernalia: ss regalia is [pornographic]. the cover already makes that clear. across the large black swastika in the nazi flag is a diagonal stripe which reads “over 100 brilliant four-colour photographs” and the price, exactly the way a sticker with the price on it used to be affixed—part teaser, part deference to censorship—dead centre, covering the model’s genitalia, on the covers of pornographic magazine. (sontag 1975) this is the standard marketing of nazism from the 1940s to today. a recent edition of mein kampf2 features a black and white portrait of hitler with “new: uncensored edition” bannered across the top, “uncensored” bolded in red, and another red banner diagonally covering part of the portrait. the similarities between these books, published forty years apart, are astounding; both sensationalize their material, while claiming to present truthful documentation. despite appearing radically different on the surface, i argue, the majority of media featuring nazism obeys the same logic of representation. there is always an assertion of a claim of a “hidden,” “greater” truth to the opposing binaries of the axis and the allies, and a further claim that this is revealed in the sexuality of each of the opposing sides. nazism is used as an easily accessible and universal symbol of the evil/abnormal to make a greater claim in the overarching western narrative of good/normal versus evil/abnormal. the binaries of good/evil, normal/abnormal, order/chaos, natural/unnatural, and romantic love/deviant sexuality have become intertwined in popular media featuring national socialism so that nazism may be used as an assumed symbol that evil/abnormal is infectious, desirable, and has the potential to become absolutely powerful. in his lecture series abnormal, foucault argues the binary normal/abnormal as a stable and meaningful “truth” of individuals, is used as a normalizing dispensary technology, while simultaneously producing more “abnormalities.” sexual deviance is one of these “abnormalities,” and sexuality is thereby presented to have within it the truth of an individual’s “normalcy” or “ab 2 published by elite minds, inc. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 normality.” deviant sexuality, as indicating the truth of “abnormality,” becomes as much a symbol of “evil” as a nasty cackle or an all-black outfit: fascism is everywhere, above all in our heads. . . . the non-analysis of fascism is one of the most important political facts [post-wwii]. . . . it enables fascism to be used as a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation. (foucault 1980a, 139) it is through lack of examination and attention to testimonies, paired with the spectacles of power that characterize national socialism, that nazism becomes a symbolic replacement or indicator of evil/abnormal. when nazism is used as a floating signifier, real suffering is taken up, distorted, and used as a symbol of a “greater truth” (that the “normal” will triumph over the “abnormal”). the “good/evil” narrative disguises itself in the dress of nazis and jews, hushing survivors by claiming the “more real” or “overarching” truth. nazism is particularly effective as a floating signifier; one cannot question or disagree with the representation of nazism in these depictions without risking being labelled a “fascist” or “nazi sympathizer” themselves, despite these extreme erotic fictionalizations having almost nothing in common with the accounts of survivors. for the most part, despite their claims of “truth,” these representations certainly do not concern themselves with reflecting the accounts of survivors. i argue there are three standard but non-mutually exclusive ways nazism is conflated with deviant sexuality, each following the same binary logic of representation tied to hegemony. these are: through bdsm imagery, through gender nonconformity, and in opposition to heteronormative romantic love. the “sexy sadistic nazi” presents the desire to subordinate and inflict pain on others as a universal quality of german fascists, either being “natural” to the subject or inherited once they join the party. these characters exhibit sexual excitement and/or gratification, either explicitly or implicitly, from subordinating, humiliating, torturing, experimenting on, and killing camp prisoners, ally soldiers, and even other lower-ranking nazis.3 3 mainstream and “highbrow” films that feature the “sexy sadistic nazi” include the night porter (1974), sophie’s choice (1982), schindler’s list (1993), apt pupil (1998), island at war (2004), the reader (2008), and inglourious basterds (2009), but nearly all cinematic representation of nazism feature motifs of the “sexy sadistic” nazi. and this is not just in film but appears in literature as well, though these fictionalized accounts share their own style as well; tours of the black clock (1989), eve’s tattoo (1992), the kommandment’s mistress (1993), hitler’s angel (1997), hitler and geli (1997), hitler’s niece (1999), and the kindly ones (2006) are popular novels which 5 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 the “sexy sadistic” nazi made one of its first appearances in “stalag fiction,” a genre of pocket books published in tel aviv in the early 1960s (richardson 2012, 45). despite being israeli written and produced, stalag fictions avoid acknowledging jewish suffering. the stories focus on “ally versus axis” characters, with nearly no jewish characters, and only allusions to the shoah. judaism is always external to, if not completely disregarded from, stalag fiction (pinchevski and brand 2007, 390, 398). adherence to testimony and historical documentation is swapped for the themes and logic of representing evil/abnormal established in men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s (pinchevski and brand 2007, 391). stalags flout accuracy in favour of narratives of hegemonically masculine heroes who conquer and defeat the evil/abnormal, but not before voyeuristic eyes enjoy the humiliation and torture of the female protagonist. the female ss officers of stalag fiction are abnormal; they are sadistic and promiscuous, rejecting hegemonic femininity. ally heroes conquer the nazis, restore women to their subordinate roles, dismantle sexual deviance, and replace it with heteronormative romance. women are reminded in stalags both of the dangers of resistance to their subordination and of sexual and gender deviance. although the works are clearly fictions, the authors of stalag fiction attempt to make their stories appear as documentation of true events. stalags were published under american-sounding pseudonyms, credited to nonexistent translators, and written in the form of a diary (brothers 2011). this attempt to legitimize the alternated narrative, based not on survivor or soldier testimony, but on archetypes and ideals of hegemony, works to further sensationalize the material, and to justify its violence. soon after the popularity of stalag fiction, a whole film genre of “sexy sadistic” nazis emerged in the west, the most famous being ilsa, she wolf of the ss. ilsa depicts the reign and fall of the cruel and curvaceous commander of a pow and experimentation camp. ilsa is very much the typical nazisploitation film. the genre is defined by lack of plot, graphic scientific experimentation, torture, and violent sexual assaults, with domineering, anti-social, and beautiful nazi officers/scientists who are defeated, usually by rape and murder. ilsa, like a number of nazisploitation films, begins with a “historical disclaimer” claiming that the film is based on true events, and even performs the exposing of real horrors (kozma 2012, 59). but, unlike stalags, nazisploitation films utilized real photographic documentation of concentration camps and pulled “inspiration” from famous and mythologized nazis. the use of the historical disclaimer implies a connection between the third reich and fiction depictions of nazism, intentionally blurring the viewers’ knowledge of what is feature sexually deviant nazis. fictions of hitler’s own abnormal sexual tendencies are notably more popular in literature than film. bdsm, gender deviance, and incest are notably prevalent themes. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 based in documentation and what is fictional. nazisploitation films perform bearing witness and testimony, while anchoring their claims in the logic of hegemony. the “based on a true story” tagline makes the films more titillating and removes guilt from the viewer for the voyeuristic morbid pleasure of watching the victims tortured and the female perpetrators defeated through graphic rape and violence. accuracy of representation to testimony or historical documentations does not matter as long as the nazis are represented as directly conflicting with the “good” in the established binary; getting who-is-who in the good/evil binary right is what is “truth” in hegemonic logic. the heyday of stalag fiction and nazisploitation is over, but their influence is still seen in contemporary media. purposeful confusion of fantasy and reality has shaped popular representations, and subsequently cultural understanding, of german fascism. “lowbrow” media, such as bdsm pornography,4 fictional erotica,5 and internet fan fiction,6 overtly display the influence of nazisploitation and its hegemonic foundation. better disguised is its influence in mainstream and “highbrow” depictions. alicia kozma argues nazisploitation produced the subsequent rules for how nazism is recognized and represented in mainstream film: nazisploitation films . . . develop generic tropes and an enduring aesthetic that is critical to the creation of cinematic nazism. the translation of those images to mainstream film created powerful mythic images that have pushed past the margins of exploitation and made an indelible impact on film as a whole. the iconic images engrained by nazisploitation films are gendered, bound in the costume of fetish and signaled through violence and a particular fascination with the body. (kozma 2012, 56) but this goes even further than kozma claims. even mainstream depictions of nazism establish their narratives through claims to truth based in the oppositional hegemonic logic of the normal/abnormal binary. kozma compares ilsa to dr. elsa schneider, the nazi-sympathizing archaeologist from indiana jones and the last crusade (kozma 2012, 62). both reject hegemonic femininity; they are sexually deviant, 4 mood pictures’ dr. mengele (2005), gestapo and gestapo 2 (2006) and keith j. cocker’s blitzkreig: return to stalag 69 (2008) are a few examples. 5 a quick amazon.com search will bring you to bend over hitler, forced by the nazi soldier, leather nazis, and suzie’s ss spanking story, to name a few. 6 both the fictionalized version of ameon goeth from schindler’s list and col. franz landa of inglourious bastards have dedicated fandom. 7 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 professional, unmarried intellectuals who commit violent acts.7 ilsa and elsa both follow the same logic of “abnormality”; for ilsa this signals her intrinsic evil/abnormality (she only appears to be human), while elsa chooses evil over good. these deviations from feminine norms make them abnormal, and therefore dangerous. for this, each is punished and destroyed by hegemonic masculinity (one begins to ponder the origin of “femi-nazi”). elsa is humanized by her momentary adherence to the good/normal; she is attracted and sympathetic to jones, and admits hatred for her nazi employers, but, ultimately, her commitment to intellectual achievement, coded as abnormality, wins out, and she is inevitably destroyed. isla and elsa are both also examples of the second form of representation, the “gender nonconformist” nazi. gender deviance in depictions of nazism is both overt and subtle, and appears across sexes. the “gender nonconformist” nazi manifests in two primary ways: gender fluidity and feminization. many representations of nazism engage with both femininity and masculinity, making them a fluid hybrid of each, consequently neither “male” nor “female,” and therefore, abnormal. many sexualized representations of nazism display hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine traits simultaneously, and their appearance and behaviours slide between the extremes of gender expression, while the heroes display a stable hegemonic gender identity corresponding to their biological sex.8 one of the most vivid depictions of the dual manifestation of hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity is the villainess bruno from frank miller’s graphic novel the dark knight returns. bruno has an army-style buzz cut and a machine gun; she towers over her male cronies with her height and robust musculature; and she wears nothing but swastikas on her voluptuous breasts and bottom, brown-uniform bottomless chaps, long black gloves, and combat boots. blending hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity renders bruno synchronously sexual and repulsive; her exaggerative gendered features turn her into a violent, sexual monster. her appearance garners multiple jabs throughout the novel, and her gender fluidity appears to be both the manifestation and the basis of her 7 oliver speck has suggested that the conflation of nazism with ruthless scientific pursuits depicts intellectualism and academia as suspicious or even sinister; the “mad scientist nazi” likely finds its basis in the anti-intellectualism it works to enforce (speck 2012, 202). this is especially true in the case of intellectually driven women. 8 examples of these include lady gaga’s music video “alejandro,” michelle “bombshell” mcgee’s controversial 2005 photoshoot and subsequent bdsm pornography film, col. franz landa from inglourious basterds, and the films the damned, cabaret, and the night porter. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 evil. the rejection of stable masculinity or femininity acts as an indication of these characters’ rejection of hegemony, and therefore reveals their evil/abnormality. the feminization of nazism is often used to detract from its power and trivialize both its power and its racist logic and agenda, and it is usually accompanied by sexual humiliation and violence. adolph hitler himself is the target of much of this, potentially beginning with the decades-long fascination with his alleged single testicle. the film little nicky features a sequence of daily life in hell in which hitler, dressed as a french maid, is forcibly penetrated with a pineapple. in jackboots on whitehall, hitler sings and prances while dressed as queen elizabeth i. the producers draws much of its humour from the feminization of german fascism. the eccentric nazi-in-hiding franz pens the musical springtime for hitler, and reveals hitler’s middle name to be elizabeth, as he was “descended from a long line of english queens” (stroman 2005). recently, the popular comedy website collegehumour.com produced the sketch “ways hitler was like a teenage girl,” featuring a parody of hitler at a teenage slumber party, yelling at his mom and reading from his diary, while the narrator cites biographical facts. this feminization changes the intimidating displays of nazism into ridiculous spectacles: conflation with femininity both destabilizes german fascist power and trivializes it. comparing hitler to english queens, a surprisingly reoccurring motif, insinuates he is dramatic, histrionic, and unfit for and undeserving of leadership. the feminization of nazism both delegitimizes its power and makes a mockery of its ends. ladelle mcwhorter explains the function of “queering” hitler in racism and sexual oppression in anglo-america: hitler’s alleged homosexuality had become a joke in popular media in the united states long before pearl harbour, and entry into the war. . . . available evidence led . . . researchers to conclude that hitler was effeminate and had homosexual tendencies—which made him queer by 1940s standards; however, none found any evidence of overt homosexual activity. (mcwhorter 2009, 239–240) unfounded accusations of homosexuality were used to “other” hitler (and by extension, nazi racism) from the hegemony of western culture. this just-so narrative, used to illustrate the “truth” of an intrinsic abnormality of nazism, subsequently produced feminized representations of german fascism, while still maintaining a presentation of a “factual” basis. nazism is subordinated, and nazis are revealed to be hysterical floozies who only care about indulgence and decorum, through conflation with heteronormative femininity. in representations featuring the “gender nonconforming” nazi, females are portrayed as hard, militaristic, lustful soldiers, while males are dramatic, superficial, and hysterical. though each representation functions differently, attributing gender fluidity and femininity to nazism both functions 9 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 as a marker representing a “truth” of an abnormal, and works to subordinate nazism and gender nonconformity as evil and in opposition to hegemony. not all sexy nazis are desecrated by hegemony. sometimes, nazi characters are saved, converted, or redeemed through heteronormative romantic love. stories of the “star-crossed” nazi usually feature (typically male) nazis caught between love for an opposite-sex ally or jew, and their loyalty to german fascism and sexual deviance, and, consequently, abnormality.9 in schindler’s list (spielberg 1993), ameon goeth gains sexual gratification, at least implicitly, from his disturbingly nonchalant humiliation, torture, and murder of camp prisoners. his only humanizing quality is his “love” for his jewish maid, helen hirsch. notice, in the previous two discussions, jews are external to, and often disregarded in, the representation. with the “starcrossed” nazi, they play an important role in the narrative, but always as defined in opposition to, and as needing saving from, nazism. goeth and hirsch’s relationship is depicted as that of an abusive but infatuated husband and reluctant wife; though he treats her horribly his fondness and devotion are genuine. his violence towards her is horrendous, but, in typical hegemonic fashion, his “true love” for her has the potential to redeem him from his abuse. on their first meeting, goeth instantly falls for hirsch (“love at first sight”), choosing her over more qualified domestic help with a lightly cloaked insinuation of virginity: “i don’t want someone else’s maid.” schindler recognizes goeth’s love, and when hirsch confesses her fear of goeth, schindler explains the special, even miraculous, impact she has on goeth. goeth is shown sympathetically when he reaches out to hirsch; only the beautiful ashkenazi brings the nazi to his knees, and offers him redemption, revealing the truth of his potential “normalcy.” schindler’s list and other works with the “star-crossed” nazi place fascist characters in dualisms of good/evil and normal/abnormal, suggesting the character is torn between sides in the eternal battle of good and evil. though the “star-crossed” nazi’s “truth” is not presented as inherently evil/abnormal, it still adheres to the logic of representation which uses nazism as a floating signifier for evil/abnormal for the purposes of perpetuating a political message about human nature, sexuality, and romantic love. the previous analysis reveals sexualized depictions of nazism adhere to specific rules of hegemonic representation; this already established binary formula absorbs the shoah into a good/evil political mythology which is marketable and consumable. i argue foucault can tell us why nazism is particularly effective as a floating 9 examples of the “star-crossed” nazi are featured in the films the sound of music (1965), the night porter (1974), the summer of my german soldier (1978), indiana jones and the last crusade (1985), aimee & jaguar (1999), black book (2006), the reader (2008), and suite française (2015), to name a few. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 signifier, and how sexuality has become an essential aspect of its life as a floating signifier. this section will look to foucault’s work on sovereign and biopower to examine how the unique power dynamics in the historical third reich contribute to contemporary erotic preoccupation with nazism, and how present forces of regulatory and disciplinary power have worked to sexualize nazism. i argue it is the first condition which captures erotic attention and produces fascination around nazism, and the second condition which has given rise to the distinctly sexual connotation western media has imparted on german fascism. michel foucault was fourteen when the nazi occupation of france began in 1940. foucault spent a large part of his youth under the threatening presence of nazism and the oppressive influence of the regime’s ideology (macey 2004, 15). this period spent under german fascism certainly made an impression on foucault and influenced his theory of sovereign and biopower.10 foucault directly addresses the unusual power dynamics of the third reich in the history of sexuality vol. 1: an introduction and his lecture series society must be defended. in the former, he writes: “nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naive (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and paroxysms of a disciplinary power” (foucault 1978, 149). foucault is referring to the blending of sovereign power and biopower; the distinct and usually, but not necessarily, separate forms of power he theorizes exist in western societies. i argue that, to understand the erotic appeal of nazism today, we must look to not only the biopolitical binaries of othering the abnormal at work in our own society, but also the power dynamics of nazi germany itself. in history of sexuality vol. 1, and its predecessor discipline and punish, foucault claims the dominant forces exercised on populations and individuals have shifted from sovereign power, which demanded obedience to a single authority enforced through spectacles of violence and death, to biopower, which operates through technologies not usually recognized as power on both individuals and populations to produce thoughts, desires, and beliefs to more effectively manage external behaviour. the third reich combined these two forms of power and their technologies in ways which foucault argues are unique to that specific historical and political situation; german fascism was a rare case in which strong elements of both sovereign power and biopower operate in complimentary ways. national socialism was able to establish racist and oppressive laws and demand compliancy of both behaviour and belief through the simultaneous use of dazzling spectacles of power and through subtle disciplinary and regulatory technologies. both the sovereign “blood right” to rule and biopower’s claim for “the greater good” are blended 10 foucault speaks directly of his encounters with nazi power while writing about spain under the franco dictatorship (foucault 1994, 775). 11 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 to establish the authority of german fascism; those with aryan blood are given authority not solely because they are the superior race, but also because it is only those of aryan blood who can continue biological progression and facilitate the flourishing of society and humanity. foucault explains how these seemingly oppositional forces worked together in hitler’s germany: we have, then, in nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill. the two mechanisms— the classic, archaic mechanisms that gave the state the right of life and death over its citizens, and the mechanism organized around discipline and regulation, or in other words, the new mechanism of power—coincide exactly. we can therefore say this: the nazi state makes the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people. (foucault 2003, 260) hitler believed in the idea of the “aryan master race,” that different biological races were in possession of different qualities and potentials shaped by evolutionary pressures; the aryan race, he believed, was responsible for all of humanity’s achievements and the only race capable of further growth (bendersky 2014, 20). blood and the common good were rendered inseparable in the nazi myth that established its claim to power (and thus blending sovereign and biopower); inherited superiority bestowed the right to rule to those with the inborn ability for the evolution of civilization and the continuation of human development. their right to rule was both inborn and for the greater good. foucault argues this conflation with biology and social progress, based on social darwinism, is basis of the logic and power of german fascism (foucault 1989b, 269). if both biological and cultural evolution are one, the fate of civilization is therefore dependent on the reproductive behaviours of the entire population, most importantly those genetically desirable. pleasure and desire are then both the aryan race’s defence and its vulnerability; race purity and expansion will continue their evolutionary legacy, while interbreeding and reproductive failure would dismantle present progress and halt further advancement. sexuality becomes a collective and individual responsibility. nazism utilized “the characteristic privileges of sovereign power [over] the right to life and death” (foucault 1978, 135); those who were hostile to the leviathan, either through the threat posed by their biology or through direct disobedience to the sovereign führer, were killed (though not always in the spectacular and public sense characteristic of sovereign power). the genocide and execution carried out by the nazi party can be understood simultaneously as justi12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 fied by the mutually reinforcing protection of the sovereign and as a necessity for the promotion of the “greater good.” nazi mythology teaches that aryan blood, and therefore the entirety of human progress, is in danger at the hands (or, more accurately, the genitals) of competing less-evolved genes; hitler believed that the jewish people were the greatest threat to the aryan race because of their racial purity and self-preservation (bendersky 2014, 21). keeping the aryan genome pristine and increasing offspring production could not be enough to ensure the future of the aryan race. foucault explains that biopower required national socialism to kill in the name of life: wars . . . were waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations were mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have become vital. . . . one had a right to kill those who presented a biological danger to others. (foucault 1978, 137–138) the third reich maintained its benevolent appearance by declaring that some were too dangerous to live. these were not just those of non-aryan races; “eugenically undesirable” aryans, such as those with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, and others, were the manifestation of erosion within aryan blood. there existed both internal and external threats to the population, each with equal means of desecration between their legs. the reproductive bodies of both non-aryans and “eugenically undesirable” aryans were presented to the general population as biological weapons of mass destruction, and the third reich became preoccupied with the sexual behaviours and desires of its subjects. sexuality was now understood as a public and political act; what was sexually permissible became a central aspect of population policy, and essential to the actualization of national goals (timm, 2005, 223). the importance of sexuality to population control transformed it from the inconsequential and uninteresting to a predominant part of the anxious and paranoid collective consciousness. german fascism endorsed a reproductive preemptive strike that required the cooperation of all eugenically desirable aryans; the plan was for racially pure aryan subjects to both out-produce others races and effectively annihilate competing genetics before their numbers could overwhelm or contaminate the aryan ones. what was before of little interest or consequence to the government now suddenly was a national concern; genitals became property of the regime. regulatory power was implemented through the study and surveillance of the reproductive lives of the german population. the nuremberg laws (better known as the “blood purity laws”) offered “eugenically desirable” aryans various incentives for early marriage and high birthrates, and for the barring of aryan women from the use of birth control and abortion, while creating disincentives, forced sterilization, and even “euthanasia” for 13 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 those deemed “eugenically undesirable” (heineman 2005, 43). reproduction became “compulsory labour” for “eugenically desirable” aryans, as the desirable population was “made to live” (heineman 2005, 43). it is important to note that, contrary to popular belief, the third reich was not an entirely sexually repressive society. historian dagmar herzog has argued that fascist germany was a sexually complex society and that its attractiveness to citizens (and, i argue, part of its contemporary appeal) was partially due to its attitudes towards sexuality and romance: the deliberate sacralization of human love [was] a crucial aspect of national socialism’s reconfiguration of notions of mortality and furthering ongoing processes of secularization . . . to read the nazis’ paeans to the delights of love as simply tactical embellishment of what was actually a narrowly reproduction-oriented agenda would be to miss the ways nazi advice-givers inserted themselves into the most elemental desires for personal happiness . . . even as the glorification of heterosexual romance provided the context for (and distracting counterpoint to) defences of some of the most grotesque and violent aspects of nazi politics. (d. herzog 2005, 15) romantic love was understood as a “higher pleasure” than intercourse, and one that races less-evolved than aryans were not capable of. the “eugenically undesirable,” particularly the jewish people, were deemed sexually driven and predatory without interest or capacity for romantic love. jewish men were understood as simultaneously animalistic yet organized in their plan to exploit and corrupt aryan women, and to spread venereal disease and infection into the aryan race. jewish women were believed to be promiscuous and sexually voracious and were said to disguise themselves as racially pure women to prey on aryan men (szobar 2005, 147). promiscuity and sexual desire were deemed suspicious; aryans were instructed to remain chaste until marriage because of the dangers of non-aryan sexualities. traditional romantic and family values were to be defended against from corrupting animalistic sexualities: “aggressive sexuality was coded as jewish and dangerous” (swett 2011, 42), and lust was feared and romance glorified. though the contemporary popular understanding of sexuality in the third reich may not be completely historically accurate, general knowledge of the relationship between power and sexuality, and the strength of sexuality in the collective consciousness of nazi germany, have contributed to western erotic fascination with nazism. mcwhorter notes in her discussion of the “queering” of hitler, western countries were able to maintain their allegiance to biopolitics and eugenic and hegemonic logic, the same forces at the foundation of nazi germany, by “othering” nazism through declaring a “truth” of abnormality (mcwhorter 2009, 244). it becomes clear the ideological basis of nazi germany is not far from the “othering” done through the conflation of deviant sexuality with 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 nazism. it is this shallow and general historical understanding that has allowed nazism to work as an especially effective floating signifier for the evil/abnormal, particularly when paired with deviant sexuality. i have argued that nazism has become conflated with sexuality through the power dynamics displayed in nazi culture and paraphernalia through the “othering” done by western cultures to preserve their own destructive biopolitics. i also see one more component of its sexualization: through the inadvertent eroticism constituted by power relations. foucault argues labelling acts and attractions as sexually perverse and taxonimizing desires as “sexualities” that are both inherent to and revealing of the true nature of the subject, is “less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying mechanism” (foucault 1978, 46). an attraction to nazism is created first by its presentation as dangerous and powerful, then enforced by the cultural belief that sexualities are inborn and unchanging parts of identity. according to foucault, the judgement of a sexual desire as shameful, disgusting, and perverted only makes the attraction more powerful and erotic. and what could be more immoral and distasteful than an erotic inclination towards the perpetrators of some of history’s worst crimes? sexual imaginations are sparked and relationships eroticized when they are outlawed; these seemingly contradictory desires are the unintended residue of biopower’s productive effect on a subject’s desires. foucault explains that sex acts and attractions are split into a binary, in which everything erotic must be either “permitted or forbidden” (foucault 1978, 83). though the intention of exercising this constituting power over subjects is to perpetuate what is permitted and extinguish the forbidden, power works in unexpected and unwanted ways. the relationship between power and sexuality is unpredictable and impossible to control, and attempts to constrain and direct desire usually backfire. power relations render the sexually forbidden, and therefore evil/abnormal, as accidentally desirable, and the conflation of sexuality and identity make these desires stable and more powerful. the role contemporary representations of nazism have been given in the good/evil binary has, inadvertently, eroticized it. foucault refers to the unintentional production of undesirable sexualities through mechanisms of biopower as “the perverse implantation.” we can understand the sexual energy surrounding nazism in contemporary collective consciousness as the perverse implantation on a greater scale than the medicalized version foucault puts forth in the history of sexuality vol. 1: an introduction, but as following the same logic. here, the perverse implantation is working at the level of mainly populations, as opposed to just individuals. there are two aspects at work in the sexualization of the fictional nazism that is used as a floating signifier. first, its conflation with the evil/abnormal renders it dangerous and powerful, and each is very erotic. foucault explains how its conflation with power reveals the sexual understanding of power: “power has an erotic charge. . . . aren’t we witnessing the begin15 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 nings of a re-eroticization of power, taken to a pathetic, ridiculous extreme by the porn-shops with the nazi insignia that you can find in the united states?” (foucault 1989a, 97–98). nazi imagery has become so closely associated with “sexy” that sex has become conflated with its symbolism and vice versa. though perhaps counter-intuitive, all uses of nazism as a floating signifier, no matter how lewd or offensive, adhere to the same logic of biopower. even the most vulgar depictions of nazism are not a form of resistance to power; though deemed an undesirable sexuality, they still play into biopower’s effect on sexuality. foucault explains that what he refers to as the “speaker’s benefit”—performing resistance and presentation of exploration of sexualized nazism as liberated from constraints— is itself constituted by power relations: there may be [a] reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression; something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. if sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. a person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. (foucault 1978, 6) those who enjoy nazisploitation, or other blatantly sexualized media involving nazis, may feel as though they are being brave or naughty while expressing their “real selves and sexuality.” this is, however, a failure to understand that expressions of sexuality are not inherently liberating; if one is buying into biopower and believing that constituted desires are real, inherent parts of the self, and that power is only repressive on sexualities, then they are failing to understand the real relationship between power and sexuality and adhering to the idea that sexuality is a real, stable aspect of the self. this further perpetuates these beliefs and adheres to the logic of biopower. there is nothing inherently “sexy” about nazism, nor is anyone in possession of a natural disposition of sexual attraction to german fascism. what has rendered nazism erotic is its presentation in media as the manifestation of the evil/abnormal, the taboo surrounding nazism and sexuality, and the configuration of nazism as powerful and even otherworldly. no one is sexually attracted to the “real nazis”; they instead desire the fantasy created around national socialism that allows it to function as a floating signifier. it is not an attraction to nazism per se, but an attraction to the power and abnormality it has come to represent in media, and that exists in collective consciousness. the second aspect of the perverse implantation is the belief that desires are indicative of a subject’s “sexuality.” fleeting, meaningless desires constituted 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 through power relations are transformed into prevalent erotic inclinations that the subject believes are an unchanging aspect of their identity, through categorization, documentation, study, and diagnosis of perversions and sexualities. subjects are made to believe that “therein resided a truth” (foucault 1978, 158) of both their natural sexuality, and what this sexuality means about the nature of themselves and of humanity. nazism’s presence in collective consciousness, paired with sexual media representations where it is used as a floating signifier, has allowed nazi directeddesire to become an aspect of the identity of those so inclined. this is manifest not as people necessarily identifying with a “nazi sexuality,” but with conflating nazism with a dark seductive power to which a subject’s attraction reveals their true nature. when sexuality becomes “a sort of mirage in which we think we see ourselves reflected” (foucault 1978, 157), arbitrary feelings become understood as indicative of a “true self,” and these attractions become more permanent and pervasive. there is nothing inherently sexy about nazism, and desires directed at german fascism reveal no truth about the subject or a greater human nature; however, these erotic feelings do reveal the ways in which power is acting on subject and the ways in which national socialism is conveyed in media and in collective consciousness” (foucault 1978, 45). whether the sexualization of nazism in media is an unintended byproduct of biopower or an effective way of perpetuating the dualisms of good/evil (normal/abnormal), it is certainly an example of the productive workings of power relations working in surprising and unexpected ways. now that we have a clear foucaultian picture of how and why nazism has been sexualized, and an understanding that these representations rely on a hegemonic logic which is damaging to witness and survivor testimony, what are we to do? throughout his work, foucault argued that it was harmful and wrong to claim to speak for or on behalf of others, and advocated for an “archeology” of the voices of people whose stories have historically been silenced and swept aside of discussion and study. much of his work11 has focused on creating a discourse where those who have been ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized through biopolitics may speak on their own behalf and be listened to seriously. foucault worked to create a dialogue in which the voices of the unheard could be freely expressed and acknowledged without being glamourized, romanticized, or commodified: [the masses] know far better than [the intellectual] and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. but there exists a system of power which 11 specifically, in his discussion of knowledge in the archeology of knowledge, but this is also applied in his books madness and civilization, the birth of the clinic, discipline and punish, and history of sexuality vol. i 17 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in manifest authority of censorship but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. . . . the intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather it is to struggle against forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse.” (foucault 1980b) the job of the philosopher is to resist pressures to explain the lives and experiences of others, but to show how these voices have been stifled and give room so they may speak freely. the flip side of this, then, is foucault’s rejection of an ethics of hard imperatives decided on by philosophers (foucault 1988, 49). such kinds of normative judgements would, after all, undermine the philosopher’s role of the critic of power; moral imperatives make, for foucault, a problematic claim a “truth” of what is right. what foucault ultimately rejects is the sort of imperative-based ethics of deontology and consequentialism; it is clear, given both his earlier texts and his own activism, he is not a moral subjectivist. but how can there be an ethics without truth?12 though he never offered a comprehensive moral theory, foucault began to develop an “aesthetics of life” rooted in the possibility of a “self-constitution” in his final books (foucault 1997, 291). this “self-constitution” refers to the subject’s own ability to resist and engage with power structures. johanna oksala explains: foucault sought to develop a way to think about ethics and politics that does not rely on any ahistorical, ontological assumptions about the subject. the subject is neither the starting point nor the foundation of morality, any more than it was of epistemology or history. throughout his work foucault warned us against fixed meanings of what a human being is. to be consistent, his ethics cannot be built on any foundational understanding of the ethical subject, but on the contrary, must aim to break essences, constants and human natures. ethics becomes possible exactly the movement of revealing forms of subjectivity as contingent and questioning constraining essences. (oksala 2005, 192) foucault holds that the subject has, to some extent, a role in producing their sexuality; the subject will be necessarily at least somewhat sexually constituted by the power exercised on them, but the subject does have the ability to resist and disman 12 charles taylor (1984) raises this fascinating point in his essay “foucault on freedom and truth.” 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 tle power, though this is difficult. foucault’s final works are concerned with exploring how subjects in alternate cultures understood and expressed sexuality; foucault reveals how much of understanding and practice of sexuality is culturally shaped. contemporary power may be inescapable, but in embracing resistance one may become, to some extent, self-constituting. timothy o’leary maintains that history of sexuality vol. 1 has a distinctly moral slant: “the history of sexuality, volume 1 deals with ethics because it deals with the ways we are constituted and constitute ourselves as subjects; and the task of understanding the historical forces which have made us the kinds of individuals that we are is, for foucault, one of the most important tasks of ethics” (o’leary 2002, 31). history of sexuality vol. 1 engages directly with foucault’s “aesthetic of life” because it examines how subjects are constituted by power, and therefore, inadvertently, offers the means of resistance to this constitution. therefore, sexual practices are neither inherently liberating or oppressive, but it is how we engage with sexuality that is ethically significant. pat califia defends the use of the nazi fantasy in sexual role-play: “not everyone who wears a swastika is a nazi . . . s/m is more a parody of the hidden sexual nature of fascism than it is a worship or acquiesce to it” (califia 1982, 36). it is true that many people attracted to fascism do not condone nazism or other racist ideologies. the problem with califia’s claim lies in the “truth” claim. califia argues that part of the positive and liberating nature of s/m role-play is that the historical oppressor often is the one degraded or in the masochistic role; s/m allows for a reversal of power dynamics through fantasy (35–36). this is clearly an example of the speaker’s benefit; califia claims the resistance of nazi sexual fetishization lies in its “parody” of some sort of sexual or erotic “truth” to fascism. though seemingly resistant, ascribing a “truth,” particularly one corresponding to deviant sexuality, follows straight back to hegemonic logic. assuming there to be a hidden “truth” to nazism, and believing and role-playing this, rather than attending to survivor testimony, buys directly into biopolitics. a notion playing on the logic of the speaker’s benefit has been used to argue in favour of less explicit representations of nazism which follow the hegemonic structure. todd herzog argues films which “flip the script,” such as inglourious basterds, are constructive because they free cinematic representations of the shoah from constraints around political correctness and sensitivity. herzog holds there is a problematic sanctified treatment of nazism in film which should be upset and resisted through films which play with the course of history (t. herzog 2012, 282). herzog is confused that this sort of fictionalized “turning the tables” on nazism is both something new and a form of resistance to the traditional logic of representation of nazism in media. inglourious basterds is merely the most mainstream and critically acclaimed of these “alternate” but “more true” presentations of nazism. i hold the personal role-playing and cinematic representations that califia and herzog 19 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 argue in favour of are the opposite of liberating, but rather, through claiming to find “truth” or “liberation” in claims to truth, silence witness testimony. as feminist philosopher jana sawicki explains, one should not confuse different manifestations of the same power dynamics with liberation or resistance: foucault wants to shift our attention away from a preoccupation with “repression” as a central concept of analyzing the relationship between sex and power . . . relations of power are dispersed and fragmented throughout the social field . . . if there is no central locus of power, neither is there a central locus of resistance. (sawicki 1988, 182–187) this is not to say that presenting a nonsexualized or noneroticized depiction of nazism is an act of resistance. we cannot say this; presumably, it is possible for there to be representations of nazism which engage with sexuality without enforcing hegemonic narratives or claiming to tell the “truth” of the shoah. however, fictions which construct nazism as a floating signifier adhere to and perpetuate understandings of the evil/abnormal as established by biopower and always compromise the voices of survivors and witnesses, and many of these representations have done so through appeals to sexuality. as gavriel d. rosenfeld explains, the more nazism is an object of entertainment and a prop in fantasies, the less seriously the general population regards the shoah (rosenfeld 2015, 339). though it will be difficult, perhaps not even entirely possible, resistance to attractions to glamourized nazi imagery is both liberating for the subject and discontinues damaging understandings of german fascism. giving into every desire is not to act in a sexually liberated way; rather, it is sexually liberating to understand that sources of pleasure are not inherent to identity and so can be cultivated (foucault 1978, 157). sensationalized depictions of nazism often do not seek to perpetuate the memory of the shoah or the suffering of its victims, but rather regard it as a fiction that may be used as a setting for its own purposes. to use the history of the shoah as a means—whether it be to make a comment on human nature or the existence of evil, for sexual gratification, for cathartic fantasy, and so forth—fails to regard the shoah with respect or dignity. writer, professor, and survivor elie wiesel replied to the sensationalizing of fascist power and victim suffering, and the disregard for historical accuracy in nbc’s 1978 miniseries holocaust: untrue, offensive, cheap; as a tv production, the film is an insult to those who perished and those who survived. . . . if [the series] makes you cry, you will cry for the wrong reasons. . . . the implications are troubling and far reaching. . . . it removes us from the event rather than bringing us closer to it. . . . the holocaust must be remembered. but not as a show. (wiesel 1978) 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 philosopher martin buber argued against the death penalty for nazi war criminal adolph eichmann for reasons which may be applied to fictional portrayals of nazism. buber himself was disgusted with the sensationalism of the eichmann trial and pleaded for life imprisonment instead of capital punishment for eichmann (friedman 1983, 356). buber held this “symbolic justice” was useless and would present some sort of retribution where none was possible (friedman 1983, 359). the suffering of the shoah can never be made up for, and buber was concerned that eichmann’s death would create a false sense of justice. this is true also of any fictionalized attempt; these pieces should not be presented as if they provide any sort of “symbolic justice” as this diminishes the reality of suffering. buber was further concerned with what treating eichmann as a force of evil would mean for collective consciousness (friedman 1983, 360). depicting nazism as a supernatural force of darkness, and suggesting that the death and destruction (either real or depicted) of nazis may be justice for victims’ suffering, is problematic as it presents itself as retroactively serving justice where none is possible. foucault offers us a jarring yet hopeful understanding of ourselves as political and sexual beings. by understanding the ways in which power, knowledge, and claims of truth in sexuality work exploitatively to disregard witness testimony and use the shoah as a prop for the assertion of hegemony, we can acknowledge the damage exploitive representations of nazism do to collective understandings of the shoah and resist the temptation to look past the suffering of many to find a hidden “truth.” foucault’s aesthetics of life give the means by which we can better listen to narratives of the shoah, and free these stories from biopolitical usage. references: bendersky, joseph w. 2014. a concise history of nazi germany, 4th edition. plymouth: rowman and littlefield. brothers, eric. 2011. “‘stalags’: kinky s&m pulp fiction from israel.” suite.io, published february 1. https://suite.io/eric-brothers/503b207. [editors’ note: antivirus software identifies this url as “very risky.”] califia, pat. 1966. “feminism and sadomasochism.” in feminism and sexuality: a reader, edited by stevi jackson and sue scott, 230–237. new york: columbia university press. ———. 1982. “feminism and sadomasochism.” coevolution quarterly 33 (spring): 33–40. denham, jess. 2014. “nicki minaj accused of glorifying nazism in video for ‘only.’” independent, november 10. http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/music/news/nicki-minaj-accused-of-glorifying-nazism-in-newlyric-video-for-only-9850771.html. 21 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 http://suite.com/ elden, stuart. 2017. foucault: the birth of biopolitics cambridge: polity. foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality, vol. 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. ———. 1980a. “power and strategies.” in power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977, edited by colin gordon, translated by colin gordon, leo marshall, john mepham, and kate soper, 134–145. brighton: harvester press. ———. 1980b. “intellectuals and power: a conversation between michel foucault and gilles deleuze.” in language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews by michel foucault, edited by donald f. bouchard. new york: cornell university press. transcript reprinted at libcom.org, http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-betweenmichel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze. ———. 1988. “an aesthetics of existence.” in michel foucault: politics, philosophy, culture: interviews and other writing 1977–1984, edited by lawrence d. kritzman, translated by alan sheridan et al., 47–56. new york: routledge. ———. 1989a. “film and popular memory.” in foucault live: collected interviews, 1961–1984, edited by sylvère lotringer, translated by john johnston, 122– 132. new york: semiotext(e). ———. 1989b. “an ethics of pleasure.” in foucault live: collected interviews, 1961– 1984, edited by sylvère lotringer, translated by john johnston, 157–278. new york: semiotext(e). ———. 1994. “asiles, sexualité, prisons.” in dits et écrits, vol. 2, edited by daniel defert, françois ewald, and jacques lagrange, translated by david macey, 771– 783. paris: gallimard. ———. 1997. “the ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom.” in essential works of michel foucault 1954–1988, vol. 1, ethics: subjectivity and truth, edited by paul rabinow, translated by robert hurley, et al., 281–302. harmondsworth: penguin. ———. 2003. society must be defended: lectures at the college de france. edited by mauro bertani and alessandro fontana. translated by david macey. new york: picador. foxman, abraham h. 2014. “adl deeply disturbed by nazi imagery in nicki minaj video.” anti-defamation league press release, published on 10 november. http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/holocaust-nazis/adl-deeplydisturbed-by-nazi-imagery-in-nicki-minaj-video.html#.vgecuvtf-i0. friedman, maurice. 1983. martin buber’s life and work: the later years, 1945– 1965. new york: e. p. dutton. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 gutting, gary. 2013.“michel foucault." in stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta. modified winter 2014. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/foucault/. heineman, elizabeth d. 2005. “sexuality and nazism: the doubly unspeakable?” in sexuality and german fascism, edited by dagmar herzog, 22–66. new york: berghahn books. herzog, dagmar. 2005. “hubris and hypocrisy, incitement and disavowal: sexuality and german fascism.” in sexuality and german fascism, edited by dagmar herzog, 1–21. new york: berghahn books. herzog, todd. 2012. “what shall the history books read? the debate over inglourious basterds and the limits of representation.” in quentin tarantino’s inglourious basterds: a manipulation of metacinema, edited by robert von dassanowsky, 271–296. new york: continuum international. kozma, alicia. 2012. “ilsa and elsa: nazisploitation, mainstream film and cinematic transference.” in nazisploitation! the nazi image in low-brow cinema and culture, edited by daniel h. magilow, elizabeth bridges, and kristin t. vander lugt, 55–71. new york: continuum international. macey, david. 2004. michel foucault. london: reaktion books. mccormack, david. 2014. “rapper nicki minaj accused of “glorifying hitler” over blatant use of nazi imagery in her latest video.” daily mail online, november 10. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2827929/rapper-nickiminaj-accused-glorifing-hitler-blatant-use-nazi-imagery-latest-video.html. mcwhorter, ladelle. 2009. racism and sexual oppression in anglo-america: a genealogy. indianapolis: indiana university press. oksala, johanna. 2005. foucault on freedom. cambridge: cambridge university press. o’leary, timothy. 2002. foucault and the art of ethics. london: continuum. pinchevski, amit and roy brand. 2007. “holocaust perversions: the stalag pulp fiction and the eichmann trial” critical studies in media communication 24 (5): 387–407. richardson, michael d. 2012. “sexual deviance and the naked body in cinematic representations of nazis.” in nazisploitation! the nazi image in low-brow cinema and culture, edited by daniel h. magilow, elizabeth bridges, and kristin t. vander lugt, 38–54. new york: continuum international. rosenfeld, gavriel d. 2015. hi hitler! how the nazi past is being normalized in contemporary culture. cambridge: cambridge university press. sawicki, jana. 1988. “identity politics and sexual freedom: foucault and feminism.” in feminism and foucault: reflections on resistance, edited by irene diamond and lee quinby, 177–199. boston: northeastern university press. 23 wesch: resisting ilsa published by scholarship@western, 2018 sontag, susan. 1975. “fascinating fascism.” new york review of books. february 6. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating0fascism/. speck, oliver c. 2012. “is tarantino serious? the twofold image of the auteur and the state of exception.” in quentin tarantino’s inglourious basterds: a manipulation of metacinema, edited by robert von dassanowsky, 193–213. new york: continuum international. spielberg, steven (director). 1993. schindler’s list. universal pictures and amblin entertainment, 2013, dvd. stroman, susan (director). 2005. the producers. universal pictures, columbia pictures, and brooksfilms, 2006, dvd. swett, pamela e. 2011. “selling sexual pleasure in 1930s germany.” in power and pleasure in nazi germany, edited by pamela e. swett, corey ross, and fabrice d’almeida, 39–66 new york: palgrave macmillan. szobar, patricia. 2005. “telling sexual stories in the nazi courts of law: race defilement in germany, 1933 to 1945.” in sexuality and german fascism, edited by dagmar herzog, 131–163. new york: berghahn books. taylor, charles. 1984.“foucault on freedom and truth.” political theory 12 (2): 152– 183. timm, annette f. 2005. “sex with a purpose: prostitution, venereal disease, and militarized masculinity in the third reich.” in sexuality and german fascism, edited by dagmar herzog, 223–255. new york: berghahn books. wiesel, elie. 1978. “the trivializing of the holocaust.” new york times, april 16. https://www.nytimes.com/1978/04/16/archives/tv-view-trivializing-theholocaust-semifact-and-semifiction-tv-view.html. samantha wesch is currently an ma student in the department of women’s and gender studies at the university of alberta. she received an ma in philosophy from the university of toronto in 2017, and a ba (hons) in philosophy from the university of alberta in 2016. wesch’s research primarily focuses on ethics, epistemology, kant, foucault, enlightenment philosophy, and the philosophy of sexuality. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/2 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism samantha n. wesch recommended citation resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism cover page footnote resisting ilsa: foucaultian ethics and the sexualization of nazism possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 5 2016 possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements lisa rivera university of massachusetts boston, lisarivera@gmail.com recommended citation rivera, lisa. 2016. "possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 5. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5. possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements1 lisa rivera abstract the priority that tessman’s argument gives to phenomenological and neuropsychological explanations of moral requirements entails a fundamental shift in our understanding of these. two central problems of normative theory come together in tessman’s account. the first arises when an agent’s sense of requirement clashes with what a systematic theory prescribes. the second arises when neuropsychological accounts fail to fit the prescription. tessman argues that no account successfully resolves moral dilemmas such that ought always implies can, and she argues that neuropsychology explains our sense of impossible requirements. this explanation eliminates the role of a prescriptive theory in explaining an agent’s sense of requirement. keywords: moral requirements, moral dilemmas, metaethical construction, lisa tessman, moral psychology i. the trajectory of debates in normative ethics raises a dilemma, although not necessarily an insoluble one. normative theories purport to provide an account of moral requirements that squares with moral experience. however, moral phenomena—that is, moral experience and the beliefs we have about it — tend to be unruly and difficult to systematize. elements of moral phenomena continually slip the grasp of various unified and systematic theories. the quandary of whether to continue to press for a unified account or submit to the pull of residual moral phenomena can be called a theory vs. phenomena dilemma. escaping the theory vs. phenomena dilemma is possible; wholly avoiding it is not. an argument for a normative theory starts with our moral beliefs. systematic theories of the right or the good bootstrap their way from core beliefs (about, for example, the universality of moral requirements or the intrinsic goodness of pleasure) to systematic generalizations thought to unify those beliefs. 1 i am grateful to daniel fireside for help with this paper. 1 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 even if we leave the content of general principles open, or promise to construct something later out of idealized moral judgments, normative theories must answer to those of our more certain and pervasive actual moral judgments. any systemizing normative strategy must also account for deeply held understandings of our moral experience that are anomalous or in conflict with the theory. while there is the option of trimming away overhanging phenomena by denying that the phenomena have moral legitimacy, few wholeheartedly prefer to chop. rather, the standard response for twentieth century defenders of various moral theories is to show that the theory fits the phenomena. kant lets us care about our friends sometimes rather than act from duty, and consequentialism is not so demanding that it can't leave space for agents to prefer their own projects.2 whether or not this dilemma for moral theory can be resolved, the enterprise of creating a systematic moral theory that harmonizes our conflicting judgments is not unlike whack-a-mole. our theoretical hammers rarely keep the phenomena down for long. lisa tessman's (2015) argument for impossible moral requirements turns on the ideas that some moral dilemmas are irresolvable for moral agents and that we may find ourselves required to do what it is impossible for us to do. in such cases, even if a person does her best to satisfy one moral requirement while failing to satisfy another, she cannot eliminate her sense that she remains required to do what she was unable to. and she is likely to morally regret what was left undone. this type of moral failure is not the usual moral failure caused by poor judgment, weakness of will, or preference for one’s own interests. rather, it is failure caused by the collision between moral requirements we can’t relinquish and our human limitations in an imperfect and often tragic world. how tempting then, in the face of unavoidable regret and inescapable loss, to create a systematic theory to harmonize and prioritize such conflicts. tessman cautions us that giving into this temptation makes us unable to account for a core phenomenon of moral experience: our sense that some moral reasons we have are non-negotiable even when we lack the means to adequately act on them. the pervasiveness of the theory vs. phenomena dilemma for contemporary normative theory reveals that tessman's defense of impossible moral requirements has far-reaching consequences. if she is right, we have no choice but to abandon the hope of a systematic normative theory altogether. and there is more: if we want to take the phenomena seriously, she argues, ought does not imply can. 2 see baron (1995), herman (1985), and scheffler (1982). there is necessarily a trimming of the phenomena here. for example, herman argues that kantian theory leaves room for partial concerns but that a moral agent's first commitment must be to morality itself. for a criticism of this response see rivera (2010). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 a second dilemma for normative moral theory lies in wait. it arises out of scientific explanations for moral belief, primarily using the tools of neuropsychology, evolutionary theory, and experimental psychology. normative theory takes moral phenomena—beliefs, intuitions, emotions—as its data. a systematic normative theory gets its purchase through its power to organize and unify what people think and feel about morality. scientific approaches offer an alternative, and wholly distinct, account of moral beliefs, emotional responses, and the phenomenology of moral experience. tessman explains the ineliminability of impossible moral requirements via recent work in neuropsychology. she reveals an explanatory match between the moral phenomena for agents in the throes of dilemmatic moral requirements and neuropsychological accounts that explain such experiences. here then is an alternative account of the moral phenomena. tessman borrows from neuropsychology the key finding that moral judgments arise out of two systems: an intuitive system and a rational system. she argues we cannot give clear priority to one or the other. each is fundamental to our moral thinking. what does attention to the explanatory power of the scientific account mean for any theory where prescriptive moral requirements ground our moral reasons? one hope is that scientific accounts do not automatically debunk our sense of requirement. tessman’s account contains this hope. if it is realized, science offers an explanation for the phenomenological experience of moral requirements and leaves normative theory to resolve the justificatory issues. on this view, multiple accounts of moral phenomena provided through different modes of explanation can all be correct. (clearly, the neuropsychological account and the evolutionary account of moral belief and behavior necessarily square off somewhere.) when we try to choose between theory and phenomena, inconsistencies force us to find a fit between them; however, it may be that a prescriptive normative theory and a scientific account of how we experience normativity are compatible or can be harmonized in some way. whether things work out this way depends upon the explanatory scope of normative theory. as with agents’ experiences of moral dilemmas, normative theory may suffer an ineliminable loss when a scientific account is given explanatory priority over normative theory to account for our moral beliefs and values and what we do with these. the scientific account offers a different paradigm than that offered by normative theory to explain why we believe we are subject to moral requirements. obviously, it does not show us that we are indeed justified or bound to change our reasons in the face of an argument that they are bad ones. however, if we give a scientific account explanatory priority—if science tells us why we have certain kinds of moral reasons, and we nevertheless want to have an independent normative theory that prescribes certain reasons—we must either fit the prescriptive account to the science or choose between the scientific or prescriptive 3 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 explanation as the ultimate account of the reasons someone has. call this an explanation vs. prescription dilemma. i will focus here on tessman’s solution to this dilemma. what makes tessman’s argument so powerful is that she tackles both of these dilemmas for moral theory holistically and offers a view of moral requirements that squares the moral phenomena with a normative theory that is designed to square with neuropsychology. the book therefore tackles an indispensable task for our understanding of moral reasoning. normative theory has to square with science somehow. we are certain kinds of creatures. we have certain kinds of brains. our moral experiences are fundamentally shaped by these unavoidable facts. tessman shows why we cannot deny their relevance. tessman’s book does not lay out these dilemmas explicitly. but her argument confronts them head on. her solutions are likely to prove revolutionary. the theory vs. phenomena dilemma threatens to undermine the possibility of an impartial, unified, systematic normative theory. tessman embraces this result, arguing that morality is plural, involves both partial and impartial reasoning, and can come from both rational and emotional processes. morality is therefore unavoidably dilemmatic. while normative theorists may resist tessman’s conclusion that morality is dilemmatic, the comprehensive way her argument matches current neuroscience with central—and recurring—problems of normative theory and moral psychology presents a significant challenge to a theoretical paradigm of normative theory that has so far neglected the neurological character of moral reasoning. the explanation vs. prescription dilemma threatens to undermine an understanding of the role of normative theory in providing an explanation for the source of our moral reasons. it is paradigmatic in normative theory that the theory of the right or the good plays some role in explaining why we have the reasons we do. thus, normative theory not only tells us how to identify and/or arrive at good moral reasons (if it is not a decision theory) but gives us an account of the way actual moral reasoning works. for example, in chapter 5 of utilitarianism, mill takes it as given that he must provide some explanatory link between the sense of justice and the utilitarian principle.3 kant claims we apprehend moral law and takes it as 3 for example, mill says, “to have a right, then, is, i conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. if the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? i can give him no other reason than general utility. if that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, nor to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only, but also an animal element, the thirst for retaliation; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 given that this explains both the structure and content of many of our moral beliefs. the fit between explanation and prescription in aristotle is similarly tight. while only virtuous people fully understand what their good really consists in, we can explain the moral reasons we have by viewing them as attempts to strive for our good. there’s a close fit in tessman between explanation and prescription but it suggests a different explanatory paradigm for normative theory. thus, there’s a theoretical remainder in tessman’s solution to the explanation vs. prescription dilemma. her account of what makes a moral requirement truly authoritative does not play a role in an explanation of the agent’s sense of requirement. tessman does not doubt that normative theory can still do the job of arriving at action-guiding prescriptions that give interpersonal reasons to moral agents—reasons we can confidently apply to others whether they have them or not. she provides the outline of such an account. while the view she presents is compelling, it does not fully acknowledge how the rest of the book’s argument challenges a close explanatory tie between normativity and the way moral agents reason. if we square normative theory with neuroscience, and allow neuroscience priority in explaining moral reasons, there may be no direct relationship between the way a normative theory anchors some moral requirements as legitimate and our belief that we are required to do some particular thing. tessman holds that our sense of requirement can be explained through neuroscience and that normative theory can go on to eliminate some requirements as legitimate. she offers a type of metaethical-constructivist / social-justificatory normative theory that could potentially do this job. the question i consider in this paper is whether the scientific explanation changes one job that normative theory has generally been tasked with by changing the evidential role of moral experience within normative theory. a difficulty in doing justice to the book’s arguments is that they are incredibly systematic and comprehensive. tessman’s approach to the theory vs. phenomena which is concerned.” and also “. . . the idea of justice supposes two things; a rule of conduct, and a sentiment which sanctions the rule. the first must be supposed common to all mankind, and intended for their good. the other (the sentiment) is a desire that punishment may be suffered by those who infringe the rule. there is involved, in addition, the conception of some definite person who suffers by the infringement; whose rights (to use the expression appropriated to the case) are violated by it. and the sentiment of justice appears to me to be, the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathises, widened so as to include all persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human conception of intelligent self-interest. from the latter elements, the feeling derives its morality; from the former, its peculiar impressiveness, and energy of self-assertion. . . .” (mill [1861]1951, 73–79). 5 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 dilemma bears on many central dilemmas of normative theory. for example, bernard williams (1985), lawrence blum (1980), michael stocker (1976), and others have noted the normative pull of our partiality to those we care about. tessman's argument follows up on these concerns, and she shows that neuropsychology makes further trouble for the view that morality is impartial by its very nature (144). she also rejects value monism. the norms we feel bound to inevitably come from all over. one reason tessman's conclusions are more difficult for prescriptive normative theorists to ignore than prior uses of neuropsychological and experimental data is that she doesn't start by assuming science is authoritative over normative theory or dismantle normative theory that fails to fit with neuroscience. rather, her argument works from inside the phenomenological descriptions of moral psychology that have been pushing normative theory along for many decades. she uses the phenomena of moral experience to show that neuroscience could account for whole swaths of moral psychology that are generally theorized about without even a cursory glance toward the brain.4 what makes tessman’s conclusions unavoidable is that normative theory must answer to fundamental aspects of moral experience. if science offers us a relevant explanation of the data of moral experience that bears on how we experience moral requirements, we are hard-pressed to prefer a prescriptive account as our primary explanation for the origin of moral requirements. ii. i will now turn to some of the more particular details of tessman’s argument. moral dilemmas can cause unavoidable moral failure. however, not all cases of unavoidable moral failure arise out of moral dilemmas. at certain points, tessman considers unavoidable moral failures that are not dilemmas in the standard way because there is no pull between two things that are required and cannot be done; rather, there is a situation in the world where a person cannot do the one thing that she believes she is required morally to do. tessman focuses on two main scenarios that create impossible moral requirements for individuals. first, a person may be in a situation where she faces two requirements and can only act on one due to incompatibility or conflict. second, a person may face something she ought to do and is unable to do. tessman sets aside the issues of blame and avoidable agent failure, such as forgetting. at one point, she suggests there may be impossible moral requirements of which we are 4 it is possible that the specific findings of haidt, greene, and others are not decisive. however, the more general structural issue regarding moral reasoning that tessman’s view raises is likely to remain. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 unaware.5 generally, however, tessman attends to requirements as they arise from within the agent's perspective, in keeping with the neuropsychology she utilizes to explain the experience of moral dilemmas. not all dilemmas raise impossible moral requirements. an impossible moral requirement arises when something nonnegotiable is lost by failing to act on the moral requirement. moral failure arises when nothing similarly valuable can be substituted or compensated for what someone failed to do; dismissing her sense that she remains required would force her to reject a value that she regards as non-negotiable. as stated earlier, insoluble moral dilemmas and impossible moral requirements cut very deeply into the idea that we can provide a systematic account of morality. those skeptical about systematic accounts, such as williams and stocker, rely on descriptions of the phenomena of moral experience to make such arguments. tessman’s argument goes further than this and shows that neuropsychology supports her dilemmatic picture of morality by demonstrating the existence of a dual process of moral reasoning that inevitably creates conflictual senses of moral requirement. she utilizes haidt’s “social intuitionist model” of moral reasoning and greene’s model that moral reasoning encompasses both a costbenefit/consequentialist type of reasoning and a more immediate affective response type (tessman 2015, 63). when we pay attention to the phenomenology of our moral experience, it is clear our moral reasoning is untidy, and we are continually susceptible to doubt, dilemma, conflict, and regret. we can explain this by the fact that we are “creatures who create and maintain a plurality of moral values through different cognitive processes” (59). on this dual process model, some moral (and other) judgments will arrive through ‘system 1,’ which is fast, automatic, intuitive, holistic, and context-dependent. (59) in this system the “process is unintentional and runs automatically,” the “process is inaccessible,” and “only results enter awareness” (59). other moral judgments will arise through ‘system 2,’ which is slow, intentional, accessible to consciousness, and context-independent. both systems generate reasons that we feel required to attend to, and there will be some reasons we find ourselves unwilling to jettison even when we cannot act on them. according to tessman, “neuroscientific studies illuminate why violating a non-negotiable 5 “it is likely the case that some of our negative affective responses are caused by phenomena that should not be considered to be moral remainders; furthermore, there are cases in which in some sense we should have a negative affective response such as regret or remorse (say, to not successfully meeting the needs of the distant needy) that would signal a moral remainder, and yet we lack this negative response and so do not notice any moral remainder. thus non-negotiable moral requirements may or may not be experienced as such, that is, as remaining standing when overridden. (tessman 2015, 31–32) 7 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 moral requirement does not feel the same as negotiating away a negotiable moral requirement: the two experiences involve different sorts of brain processes” (13). a difference between haidt and greene is that haidt sees the ‘rationalizing’ element of neurological process as informed by interpersonal social reasoning (which fits with tessman’s (13) view, following margaret urban walker, that moral justification is ultimately social). by contrast, greene sees the intuitive emotional processes as operating in conjunction with independent rational ones. reason-giving is post hoc after an intuitive process pushes our moral judgment in a particular direction. greene’s account describes two different types of emotional responses in moral reasoning—‘alarm bells,’ which do not allow for moral trade-offs, and ‘currency,’ which “determine[s] the values and disvalues that can be traded off in consequentialist reasoning” (tessman, 70). if we follow the trail left by the history of moral philosophy, we’ll be led to conclude that the truly authoritative judgments must be those endorsed through a rational process. tessman rejects this path. it is crucial to her view that emotional responses to others (for example, ones stemming from love) also present moral requirements. the argument that we are unable to dismiss intuitive processes as irrational or subsume them under the authority of rational processes relies on the idea that there are moral aliefs—affect-laden associative states that drive behavior but which are not fully responsive to evidence. in the case of a nonmoral alief, we have tamar gendler’s example of our recoiling from eating dog-poop shaped fudge even when we know it is likely to taste delicious (gendler 2008, 635). according to tessman, moral aliefs are normative, and they prescribe or proscribe that “the agent who has a moral alief must not just be moved to action, but rather moved to action while grasping that it is good or right to be so moved, or that she/he must be so moved” (78) tessman agrees with jesse prinz that certain psychological states can be normative in this way and our moral emotions will signal which these are by causing us to have the view that we ought to do something, or what prinz calls “oughtitude” (tessman 2015, 78). guilt, anger and love all render “prescriptive sentiments” which are volitional states found in a whole range of feelings of necessity, from a mild sense that it would be good to perform an act or that an act is negotiably required, to the strong experience of volitional necessity that frankfurt describes, where not performing an act is utterly unthinkable. (tessman, 75) these are, according to tessman, among the ways that we apprehend moral requirements. what makes the use of moral aliefs compelling in our explanation of 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 how dilemmas are experienced is that they are able to account for the ineliminability of the moral remainder. thus, reason cannot resolve our dilemmatic moral responses—or eliminate our sense we must act when failing to do so leaves a non-negotiable moral remainder. tessman painfully illustrates this in primo levi’s description of his experiences at auschwitz. the impossibility of helping his fellow italian prisoners cannot eliminate levi’s sense that he should do this, even at agonizing cost. naturally i would have liked to have helped them, given the means and the strength, if for no other reason than to stop their crying. in the evening when all the work was finished, conquering my tiredness and disgust, i dragged myself gropingly along the dark, filthy corridor to their ward with a bowl of water and the remainder of our day’s soup. the result was that from then on, through the thin wall, the whole diarrhoea ward shouted my name day and night with the accents of all the languages of europe. (levi [1959] 2008; quoted in tessman, 187) tessman says that levi “did not reason his way to judgment. instead, he had a prescriptive sentiment regarding, and experienced the volitional necessity of, saving the patients, a judgment that was triggered automatically through what must have been alarm-bell-like emotions” (89). attention to the phenomena suggests that our apprehension that we must do something in the face of others’ suffering doesn’t begin in reason. reflection on characteristic moral reactions to others’ suffering, particularly when we love them and feel responsible for their welfare, also indicates that reason has limited authority over our moral responses. we apprehend requirements both intuitively and rationally, and neither has authority over the other. from the inside, tessman’s account vividly tells us what it is like to experience moral failure. this doesn’t yet tell us, however, what makes a subjective sense of requirement into an actual requirement. tessman is unwilling to grant that any experience of requirement elicits an actual requirement. our sense we must care for our cruel and domineering father at the expense of our own happiness, or our belief we must commit violence against innocent people out of loyalty to our nation-state, can be experienced in precisely the same way that parental love or outrage over a genuine injustice can be experienced. and this danger is not a function of the unreliability of alarm-bell emotions or intuitive responses alone. people can take the data given to them through greene’s ‘currency’ process—our mental operation responsive to cost-benefit/consequentialist considerations—and also regard themselves as required to do horrific things. 9 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 if our sense we are morally required can be wrong, how do we arrive at good moral reasons? what makes a person’s sense that she is morally bound to act legitimate? tessman moves her explanatory account toward a prescriptive account by conjoining a type of metaethical constructivism to a social process of justifying values in collaboration with others. an important metaphor throughout tessman’s account is that of a neurathian ship. we cannot assess our values from an independent, objective standpoint. we build our normative ship at sea, rather than on the ground. tessman’s additions and revisions to metaethical constructivism show her commitment to account for as much of the phenomena as possible. sharon street’s metaethical constructivism fits naturally with tessman's phenomenology of how an agent arrives at the view she is morally required to do something. street says that "normative experience" arises when things are "'counting in favor of' or 'calling or' or 'demanding' certain responses on our part" (street 2008, 240; quoted in tessman, 104). on the constructivist view, all values “are constructed out of the activity of valuing,” and the ultimate test for correctness lies in the agent’s own set of reasons (tessman, 103). genuine values arise out of a practical or evaluative standpoint. the moral judgment becomes correct "when it has emerged as the all things considered judgment that is the result of a successfully resolved conflict" (tessman, 113). in tessman’s view, the various processes—both rational and arational—are seen as raw material from which we can build better judgments. the problem with the metaethical demand for consistency, tessman argues, is that moral dilemmas reveal that some values are non-negotiable and thus consistency isn't realistic. authority may come from finding a judgment true, but authority also inheres in those judgments that are non-negotiable—such as requirements arising from the commands of love. these judgments survive reflective equilibrium and the process of reflection the metaethical construction requires. they are sacred; not to do them is unthinkable. if every judgment, including judgments regarding sacred values, had to be subjected to the method of reflective equilibrium, then one would have to think of every judgment as open to reconsideration and rejection. this is precisely what a sacred value is not: it is not open to reconsideration and rejection. (tessman, 125) although she thinks constructivist accounts must allow some sacred values to survive, tessman points out that people are prone to sacralize values that are formed through bad processes, such as harmful ideologies. how do we determine which of our values (or those of others) should remain immune to reconsideration? tessman’s solution here is to adapt the metaethical constructivist account to 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 accommodate a social process of justification, following margaret urban walker. walker’s view also relies on a process of reflective equilibrium but with an important addition. for walker, the process whereby moral judgments attain authority do not just take place in an agent’s head. morality is “a socially embodied medium of mutual understanding and negotiation between people over their responsibility for things open to human care and response” (walker 1998, 9; quoted in tessman, 130). we must bring our moral beliefs forward so that others can respond to them. we must use a transparency test on our moral judgments for these to generate truly authoritative moral requirements. an issue for sacred values remains. walker’s account suggests they should be eliminated due to inconsistency and would thus fail to reflect their role in our reasoning. in response to this, tessman also sees a role for a neuropsychological account in haidt’s social intuitionist model, which de-emphasizes reasoning and leaves greater room for automatic intuitive processes. such a model is metaphorically described as a “trial by water” such as those purportedly given in the middle ages to see if a person is a witch. in this trial, a sacred value is “thrown in the water” to see if it floats (tessman, 128). while the agent herself cannot willingly put the sacred value in the water, her communication and collaboration with others make it possible to see the value in such a way that enables her to consider— indirectly—whether the value is something she truly must not relinquish. this can still be thought of as a neurathian process, but a social one, and one that may rely heavily on affective interactions and automatic, intuitive processes. it is not i, but rather we, who are on board the neurathian ship. i might not be able to step off the rotten plank. . . . but other members of my moral community (or another community) stand on other planks, are confident of other things, and can elicit changes in me and my values. (tessman, 138; italics in original) although tessman, like street, rejects moral realism, moral values are grounded by these social processes. thus, it is not just up to me which of my moral values generate legitimate moral requirements. if i am attentive to the views of others, it becomes possible for me to see that filial loyalty should not take precedence over my own freedom and well-being. if patriotism urges me to fight in an unjust war, the harms such a war causes for others and their rejection of my government’s propaganda offer me an alternative account that can potentially (but not necessarily) transform my confidence that loyalty to my compatriots or patriotic duty generates a moral requirement in this case. while the legitimacy of the purported requirement depends on a metaethical construction/social justification process, tessman’s use of science to 11 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 explain why dilemmas arise commits her to the view that our sense of requirement is due to neurological processes. the metaethical constructivist/social justification account gives us a procedure whereby our moral intuitions and emotions generate something that can be established as an interpersonal moral requirement, but it does not seem that this is a process of truth-tracking. my sense that i am required to protect my child depends on my love for my child, and my neurology explains why i won’t relinquish that sense of requirement. what is left over when we consider the explanation vs. prescription dilemma? once we have an explanation of the phenomenological experience, we may ask where prescriptive theory continues to be informative. it tells us what we should do—but how? we believe circumstances give us reasons. we experience our reasons in particular ways; for example, we may experience the suffering of our compatriots in a situation of overwhelming agony and powerlessness as a non-negotiable moral reason in the way that primo levi did, a reason that cannot be disregarded, even when helping them is impossible. tessman says that the sense we should do something to alleviate suffering even when we are completely unable—and our inability to utilize a rational process to extinguish that sense—is like ‘alarm bells,’ arising as it does out of an intuitive and emotional process that reason cannot push away. this seems right. her view is that such responses can undergo both an internal process of reflective equilibrium and an external social process that puts forward our reasons for examination to see if they make sense. again, this account rings true in a phenomenological sense: we do retrospectively assess our past experiences of moral failure, both by asking ourselves if the moral expectation fits within our set of moral values and by considering what others believe morally. if shame over our moral failure does not shut down our ability to reflect, it is often an urgent question for us whether we were required to act in the way that we believe. a woman in agonizing guilt over a past abortion desperately needs recourse to perspectives that allow her to consider whether her belief she murdered a child is justified. here is the puzzling thing about this answer when it comes to anchoring moral requirements: what i am responding to in situations—what i believe makes me required—seems to have no immediate explanatory or causal connection to the metaethical construction/social justificatory process. it is hard to see how the process plays a role in the moment i believe myself required. it cannot do so on tessman’s account because many of the intuitive responses that give me the sense of requirement are immediate and not subject to dismissal through a rational process. my moral responses have a causal and explanatory connection to a metaethical construction/social justificatory process over time if i happen to change the aspects of the world that i respond to as a result of transparency testing some of my values. taking tessman’s use of haidt’s social intuitionist model into account, we are always responding morally within interpersonal contexts, and the moral claims 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 we believe the world makes on us are shaped by others’ reactions to our choices. so there is a way that reasons can be informed by aspects of the testing/verification process tessman describes. however, the examination via metaethical construction and social intuition does not explain our sense that we are required because the sense that we are required comes before this process. rather, the prescriptive account runs alongside our sense of requirement and checks the status of this sense. my beliefs about what i should do necessarily occur prior to the justificatory process on this account. thus, there is no clear explanatory relationship between our feeling we are morally required in a particular situation—to respond to someone’s vulnerability, to care for our children, to protect the rights of others whose lives we are bound up with in a social system—and our being required. this need not be an objection to tessman’s account. rather it shows that attempts to make normative theory responsive to scientific findings will have substantial impacts on the structure of normative theory, particularly its explanatory role. tessman does not regard scientific explanation as debunking or undermining of normative theorizing. we may still be able to arrive at a theory of moral requirements that allows us to posit interpersonal moral reasons, but our getting it right with our personal moral reasons is not clearly dependent on our success at drawing from this more universal set of moral reasons. tessman’s book is best read in my view as showing us that both the theory vs. phenomena dilemma and the explanation vs. prescription dilemma are dilemmas that unavoidably leave theoretical remainders. there may be no way to put the genie back into the bottle if we agree to the following two propositions: first, normative theory cannot ignore scientific explanations of our moral experiences. (the particular neuroscience is still in flux but this actually won’t undermine the overall program tessman sets out.) second, there’s no dodging the phenomena in the form of central moral beliefs about persistent moral emotions, such as the regret over moral failure. if tessman’s account is correct, moral beliefs and values come from all over the place. they come from interpersonal commitments, and they come from higher-order processes of rational reflection. our current neuropsychology suggests that these types of reasons cannot be harmonized in a moment. but if this is the case, then normative theory’s purchase on the project of moral prescription is not secure. we can prescribe, but the prescription is limited to what kind of creatures we are, and this changes to a significant degree a paradigmatic understanding of the explanatory role normative theory has over our beliefs. tessman’s ultimate achievement is showing that an account of why we reason morally as we do is relevant for virtually every important question in normative theory. it tells us if values should be plural. (they should.) it tells us if 13 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 morality should be impartial. (it shouldn’t.) it shows us if the rational should have authority over the emotional and intuitive. (it cannot.) it shows whether we have a hope of a systematic account of our moral reasons that unifies, harmonizes, and systematizes those reasons. (we don’t.) what we as moral agents should do and should believe is explanatorily secondary on her account of moral requirements. i have argued that this constitutes a significant paradigm shift for normative theory. my suspicion is that this shift is unavoidable. references baron, marcia. 1995. kantian ethics almost without apology. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. blum, lawrence a. 1980. friendship, altruism, and morality. london: routledge & kegan paul. gendler, tamar s. 2008. “alief and belief.” the journal of philosophy 105 (10): 634– 63. herman, barbara. 1985. "the practice of moral judgment." the journal of philosophy 82 (8)8: 414–36. doi:10.2307/2026397. levi, primo. (1959) 2008. survival in auschwitz. new york: collier books. reprint, new york: classic house books. mill, john stuart. (1861) 1951. utilitarianism, liberty, and representative government. london: fraser’s magazine for town and country. reprint, new york: dutton. rivera, lisa. 2010. "worthy lives." social theory and practice 36 (2): 185–212. scheffler, samuel. 1982. the rejection of consequentialism: a philosophical investigation of the considerations underlying rival moral conceptions. oxford: clarendon press. stocker, michael. 1976. "the schizophrenia of modern ethical theories." the journal of philosophy 73 (14): 453–66. doi:10.2307/2025782. street, sharon. 2008. “constructivism about reasons.” oxford studies in metaethics 3:207–45. tessman, lisa. 2015. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. new york: oxford university press. walker, margaret urban. 1998. moral understandings. new york: routledge. williams, bernard. 1985. ethics and the limits of philosophy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lisa rivera is associate professor of philosophy at university of massachusetts boston. her research is primarily in the area of moral and political philosophy. her 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.5 work in ethical theory considers whether moral theory must be impartial, the moral philosophy of bernard williams, the scope of moral demands, whether beneficence can be harmful to free agency, captivity and coercion, and how voluntarily assumed commitments to promote justice can obligate us. in political philosophy she has published on political liberalism and the responsibility of citizens for unjust war. she is currently working on the moral responsibilities raised by political membership and the relevance of emotions for political theory. 15 rivera: possible dilemmas published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements lisa rivera recommended citation possible dilemmas raised by impossible moral requirements feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation sertler, ezgi. 2018. “the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 2. 2018 the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit ezgi sertler butler university, esertler@butler.edu sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit ezgi sertler abstract one of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. following this attempt, i aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. this structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. this institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. keywords: epistemic injustice, institutional comfort, gender-based asylum, epistemic resources according to the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr), forced displacement of people has doubled in less than twenty years. in 2015, 65.3 million people were displaced: 40.8 million of these people were displaced in their home countries, 21.5 million were refugees, and 3.2 million were seeking asylum (unhcr 2015).1 citing these numbers is a dangerous endeavor. while it is one of the only ways in which we can articulate what is happening on a larger scale, it is inevitably reductive, and it leaves untouched the question of how many of us can actually make sense of what it means for 65.3 million people to be displaced in many different ways. attempting to explore the epistemic dimensions of forced 1 for detailed definitions of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people, see http://www.unrefugees.org/what-is-a-refugee/. http://www.unrefugees.org/what-is-a-refugee/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 displacement is not an easy task. an attempt has to be context-dependent, movement-sensitive as well as temporally and spatially specific. one of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender-based asylum applications (wikström 2014). the institution of asylum, in general, refers to the (internationally) institutionalized reality of the idea of asylum as an important mechanism for international refugee protection as it is practiced through different asylum regimes. “regime,” here, refers to “the institutional environment within which international policies are made” (soroos 1986, 21–23, quoted in bauman and miller 2012, 8).2 the institution of gender-based asylum, then, refers to the institutionalized reality of the idea of gender-based asylum as it is practiced through different asylum systems. i use the term “gender-based asylum claims” to refer to a range of different claims where gender-related persecution is a relevant consideration for the determination of refugee status (unhcr 2002).3 in this paper, my aim is to demonstrate that the institution of gender-based asylum has a structural limit: it is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. and i will argue that this structural limit can be understood when we realize how the institution of gender-based asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the 2 asylum regimes can also be seen as subregimes of the international refugee regime defined by liisa malkki as the international order “in which contemporary ‘refugee problems’ are managed” and “in which humanitarian aid and legal protection efforts unfold” (malkki 1995, 517). also see betts and durieux (2007, 510). 3 gender-related persecution, according to the unhcr, refers to the kind of persecution where gender “influences” or “dictates” the type of persecution or harm suffered (unhcr 2002, 3). according to the unhcr guidelines, gender-related persecution has “typically encompassed, although [is] by no means limited to, acts of sexual violence, family/domestic violence, coerced family planning, female genital mutilation, punishment for transgression of social mores, and discrimination against homosexuals” (unhcr 2002, 1–2). karen musalo also notes that “the term ‘genderasylum’ is generally understood to describe two types of claims: (1) claims in which the form of persecution is unique to, or disproportionately inflicted on women (for example, female genital cutting (fgc), domestic violence, rape, forced marriage) regardless of the 1951 geneva convention relating to the status of refugees (refugee convention) ground for which it is inflicted and (2) claims in which the harm may or may not be gendered, but the reason (nexus) it is imposed is because of victim’s gender” (musalo 2010, 46–47). sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 respective migration courts and boards enjoy in decision-making. by institutional comfort, i mean the ways in which state actors in migration courts and boards are systemically afforded the ability to arbitrarily and ambiguously misinterpret asylum applicants’ experiences, cultures, and countries. this institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice. this paper will proceed in two parts. i will first turn to a recent article by hanna wikström (2014), which identifies cases of testimonial injustice in assessments of gender-based asylum applications in sweden, and i will underline three cases where the institutional comfort of the swedish migration authorities is visible. i will argue that detecting forms of testimonial injustice allows us to observe this institutional comfort in three different forms: comfort in denying applicants’ experiences, comfort in ignoring available information, and comfort in deciding which information/criteria to use. i will then use gaile pohlhaus jr.’s (2012) and kristie dotson’s (2012, 2014) analyses of dominant epistemic resources in order to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to this institutional comfort. i will conclude by hinting at a few implications of this analysis for the institution of asylum in general. 1. the institutional comfort of the migration board and court in “epistemic injustice in practice,” franziska dübgen notes that “reflecting on the workings of epistemic injustice” can be a useful tool in grasping different forms of domination and exclusion if “the grammar of epistemic injustice” is used for and adapted to the singular case studies (dübgen 2016, 1, 2, 5). i consider wikström’s (2014) work in “gender, culture, and epistemic injustice: the institutional logic in assessment of asylum applications in sweden” to be one of these adaptations. by focusing on the workings of epistemic injustice in genderrelated asylum assessments, wikström aims to access and articulate specific forms of domination and exclusion pervasive in the institutional logic of sweden. wikström’s empirical material consists of 62 cases of asylum applications of asylum seekers from a wide range of countries. among these 62 cases, wikström notes, “five women and one man are accepted as refugees, 27 are given subsidiary protection, and 29 applicants are denied” (wikström 2014, 212). the subsidiary protection is granted to asylum seekers as a temporary form of protection when decision makers in sweden do not believe the applicant in question qualifies for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 refugee status, and thus as a temporary form of protection, it does not offer all the benefits of refugee status.4 unhcr defines an asylum seeker as follows: . . . an individual who has sought international protection and whose claim for refugee status has not yet been determined. as part of internationally recognized obligations to protect refugees on their territories, countries are responsible for determining whether an asylum-seeker is a refugee or not. . . . this responsibility is derived from the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees and relevant regional instruments and is often incorporated into national legislation. (unhcr 2014, 5n2)5 the legal definition of refugee status can be found in article 1 a(2) of the 1951 convention and the 1967 protocol relating to the status of refugees: the term refugee shall apply to any person who . . . owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or, who, not having a nationality and being outside of the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.6 in what follows, i will briefly summarize how wikström emphasizes the importance of credibility assessments in gender-related asylum applications and highlights how testimonial injustice occurs. i will then cite three exchanges 4 https://www.migrationsverket.se/english/private-individuals/protection-andasylum-in-sweden/when-you-have-received-a-decision-on-your-asylumapplication/if-you-are-allowed-to-stay/residence-permits-for-those-grantedsubsidiary-protection-status-.html. also see: http://www.bamf.de/en/fluechtlingsschutz/ablaufasylv/schutzformen/subsidiaere rs/subsidiaerer-schutz-node.html. 5 here, i should note that we should not confuse the legal refugee status granted to asylum seekers with a more common definition of a refugee as “someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence” (http://www.unrefugees.org/what-is-a-refugee/). 6 the convention is available at http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/1951-refugeeconvention.html. https://www.migrationsverket.se/english/private-individuals/protection-and-asylum-in-sweden/when-you-have-received-a-decision-on-your-asylum-application/if-you-are-allowed-to-stay/residence-permits-for-those-granted-subsidiary-protection-status-.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/english/private-individuals/protection-and-asylum-in-sweden/when-you-have-received-a-decision-on-your-asylum-application/if-you-are-allowed-to-stay/residence-permits-for-those-granted-subsidiary-protection-status-.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/english/private-individuals/protection-and-asylum-in-sweden/when-you-have-received-a-decision-on-your-asylum-application/if-you-are-allowed-to-stay/residence-permits-for-those-granted-subsidiary-protection-status-.html https://www.migrationsverket.se/english/private-individuals/protection-and-asylum-in-sweden/when-you-have-received-a-decision-on-your-asylum-application/if-you-are-allowed-to-stay/residence-permits-for-those-granted-subsidiary-protection-status-.html http://www.bamf.de/en/fluechtlingsschutz/ablaufasylv/schutzformen/subsidiaerers/subsidiaerer-schutz-node.html http://www.bamf.de/en/fluechtlingsschutz/ablaufasylv/schutzformen/subsidiaerers/subsidiaerer-schutz-node.html http://www.unrefugees.org/what-is-a-refugee/ http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/1951-refugee-convention.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/1951-refugee-convention.html sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 wikström narrates between an asylum applicant and the migration board or court that have resulted in subsidiary protection rather than refugee status.7 according to wikström, the frequent use of subsidiary protection rather than refugee status in gender-related persecution cases suggests that decision makers in sweden fail to recognize the kinds of persecution in question as gender-related persecution, and thus fail to recognize those applicants as entitled to asylum (wikström 2014, 211). the following three exchanges can be used to articulate the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy in deciding how to read, interpret, and process the cultures and the countries in question and the applicants’ experiences within them. institutional comfort, here, refers to how migration boards and courts are systemically afforded the ability to arbitrarily and ambiguously misinterpret asylum applicants’ experiences, cultures, and countries. in other words, the institutional comfort calls attention to the discretionary space systemically afforded to state actors within their institutional roles and how easily this discretionary space can be used to produce inconsistent, ambiguous, and arbitrary assessments of applicants’ experiences.8 even though the existence of discretionary space is not unusual for the institution of asylum in general, how easily it can used by state actors to negate applicants’ narratives, where gender-related persecution is a consideration, is worrisome (baillot, cowan, and munro 2014; mckinnon 2016; querton 2012). the internationally inconsistent approach to gender-based asylum exacerbates this situation further. the un high commissioner for refugees initially has suggested that gender-based claims and gender-related persecution can be evaluated under the category of “membership of a particular social group” (musalo 2010; unhcr 1991).9 they further encouraged states to develop their own 7 i should note here that wikström’s analysis (2014) is more complicated and extends further than what i will be focusing on here. a significant part of the analysis, for instance, tracks how “gender-based” cases are understood to mean cisgender and heterosexual women’s cases. although i briefly mention the importance of the question of “what counts as gender-based or gender-related” in the next paragraph, i do not provide a detailed analysis of that problem in this paper. see mckinnon 2016 for further discussion. 8 i thank the reviewers for helping me clarify this point. 9 as musalo (2010) highlights, this was after excom conclusion no. 39 in 1985 stating that “states, in the exercise of their sovereignty, are free to adopt the interpretation that women asylum-seekers who face harsh and inhuman treatment due to their having transgressed the social mores of the society in which they live may be considered as a ‘particular social group’ within the meaning of article 1 a(2) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 guidelines for gender-based asylum claims, and in 2002 they issued new guidelines to encourage a gender-sensitive interpretation to the refugee convention as a whole (musalo and knight 2002, 59; unhcr 2002). these efforts, of course, do not guarantee a clear and consistent approach to gender-based asylum. in a recent report, for instance, christel querton notes that despite the common understanding that refugee convention requires a gender-inclusive and gender-sensitive approach “there are vast and worrying disparities in the way different eu member states handle gender-related asylum claims” (querton 2012, 2). this is especially concerning because how we answer ‘why and how gender matters’ for the determination of refugee status relies on how we answer the following questions: at what point does discrimination become persecution? what constitutes protection in the country of origin? what does it mean to belong to a particular social group? what can be counted as gender-based or gender-related? thus, within this context, i take institutional comfort to refer to how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to enable its state-actors to carry out systemically arbitrary and ambiguous assessments of applicants’ cases comfortably. to start the asylum process in sweden, applicants register with the migration board, and the board reaches an initial decision. if the decision is negative, it can be appealed at the migration court and afterwards at the migration court of appeal. in court, wikström states, the board becomes the counterpart to the applicant and their lawyer. the assessments, wikström says, focus on the reasons for asylum and the credibility of the applicant’s narrative. the applicant has to present and justify that her fear of persecution is well grounded. that is to say, the applicant has to provide information about their country and their position within their country of origin, which will later be compared with the “available information” that the migration authorities have on the country in question. in sweden’s case, this available information is usually retrieved from the country information database: the approach to, and nature of, country of origin information in sweden is factual. . . . lifos [database] is a compilation of “facts.” the idea is that there are a number of observable facts about countries and societies that can be captured and structured in a database. the underlying logic seems to be that anyone . . . can use these facts to come to the right (and thus the same) of the 1951 united nations refugee convention” (http://www.unhcr.org/enus/excom/exconc/3ae68c43a8/refugee-women-international-protection.html). http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/excom/exconc/3ae68c43a8/refugee-women-international-protection.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/excom/exconc/3ae68c43a8/refugee-women-international-protection.html sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 conclusion.” (flärd 2007, 38, quoted in wikström 2014, 215; wikström’s brackets and ellipses)10 this comparison between the information given by the applicant and the information retrieved from the database is crucial because it allows authorities to justify first whether the applicant’s reasons for asylum are well grounded and further whether there is possibility of protection in the country of origin, which, then, negates the reasons for asylum application. within this context, wikström suggests, “asylum assessments largely rest on credibility assessments,” which leads to the argument that asylum applicants suffer from testimonial injustice (wikström 2014, 210).11 testimonial injustice, for miranda fricker, “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” (fricker 2007, 1). the prejudice in question tracks “the subject through different dimensions of social activity—economic, educational, professional, sexual, legal, political, religious, and so on,” and therefore relates to social identity in a systematic way (fricker 2007, 27). fricker calls such prejudice “identity prejudice” and argues that in a central case of testimonial injustice, a speaker “receives a credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer” (28). in other words, testimonial injustice occurs when 10 wikström (2014, 215) also notes that lifos (the country information database) relies on a realist/positivist paradigm that the migration authorities depend on in forming their beliefs. 11 wikström defines epistemic injustice at the beginning of the article by presenting fricker’s definition of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice together and does not necessarily announce for every case she mentions whether it amounts to testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or both. one case where she clearly indicates an instance of hermeneutical injustice is related to the use of gender in law, which i will not discuss here. however, since the cases (and especially what i choose to emphasize about the cases here) bring up the issue of credibility assessments, i’m categorizing them as testimonial. i should also note here that because fricker’s (2007) initial discussion of hermeneutical injustice assumes one set of collective hermeneutical resources and does not differentiate between making sense to ourselves and making sense to (different) others (as discussed by dotson [2012], mason [2011], medina [2013], and pohlhaus [2012]), applying that notion to asylum applicants and their cases has to be done very carefully (cf. rusin and franke 2010). that is one reason why i think a discussion of hermeneutical injustice in the context of gender-based asylum should be addressed in a separate paper. also see medina 2017 for further discussion on hermeneutical injustice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 there is an identity-prejudicial credibility deficit in the hearer that is caused by a negative identity-prejudicial stereotype, which is defined by fricker as a widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or more attributes, where this association embodies a generalization that displays some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counterevidence owing to an ethically bad affective investment. (fricker 2007, 35) the following exchanges between the migration board and the applicants demonstrate how the board gives applicants a deflated level of credibility based on its stereotypical understanding of the culture, the culture’s norms, and how the culture forms identities. in these exchanges, we witness the migration board demonstrating a strong “disinclination to believe” in the applicants’ testimonies (dotson 2012, 27). for wikström, “epistemic injustice becomes evident as the reasoning of the authorities shows how arguments of culture are primarily used to negate individual claims, and in that resistance to and deviations from dominant cultural norms [that the board assumes/considers itself to know] are not seen credible” (wikström 2014, 214; citing fricker 2007). “as such,” she continues, “epistemic injustice” [or testimonial injustice] occurs when applicants suffer from “a deflated level of credibility” compared to other sources of information (wikström 2014, 215). it seems to me, then, that detecting cases of testimonial injustice in assessment of asylum applications allows us to observe the institutional comfort the migration board enjoys in three different forms: comfort in denying applicants’ experiences, comfort in ignoring available information, and comfort in deciding which information/criteria to use. in what follows, i will discuss each comfort through an exchange between an applicant and the migration authorities. a. the comfort in denying applicants’ experiences: this comfort refers to the ease with which the migration board is able to reject the reality of an applicant’s experiences. in other words, it refers to how easily the migration board can reject a lived reality as narrated by an applicant especially when the lived reality does not correspond to how decision makers understand these applicants, cultures, and countries (wikström 2014, 214). wikström explains: sara is an applicant of kurdish descent and from iraq. she claims that her family arranged for her to be married against her will. despite this, she had a sexual relation with a work colleague of hers. one day sara’s brother caught the couple in her family’s residence and a fight and shooting ensued. sara fled and went to the police. an officer told her he would have killed her sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 himself had she been his sister, and that the police could not do anything “since it was an honour-related crime” (verdict 15:2). the board (mb) turned sara’s application down because it did not find her credible: mb: it is odd and not very likely that she would initiate a sexual relation with another man when she knows she is going to marry her cousin. . . . that she would be so blinded by love and disregard the consequences is not a reasonable explanation, with the culture that is prevalent in northern iraq and with her family traditions in mind. . . . furthermore, it must be considered striking that, at her age, an arranged marriage has not occurred earlier. (verdict 15: 3) [. . .] [when] sara responds to a number of things she claims the board has misunderstood, she also states that: “it is not strange for women to initiate secret relationships.” (verdict 15: 4) (wikström 2014, 214, quoting the migration board verdict; unbracketed ellipses are wikström’s)12 in this case, we witness the migration board giving sara a deflated level of credibility by relying on stereotypes that label her as a subject that cannot possibly show any agency within a “homogeneous” culture that has full control over its subjects.13 the interplay between the cultural stereotypes the court holds in terms of what kind of a culture sara’s culture is and the identity-prejudicial stereotype about how a woman in her circumstances behaves (must behave) proves to the board that sara’s testimony cannot be believed. her experiences are found unreal mostly because her culture is interpreted in an essentialist way. essentialist, here, refers to the way in which cultures are interpreted to have an essence that is static and present for every member in the same way. as trina grillo states: 12 as i have mentioned above, the court later grants sara subsidiary protection (wikström 2014, 215). it is important to remember here that, first, subsidiary protection only offers a temporary form of protection and does not offer all the benefits of a refugee status. second, subsidiary protection in this case, as wikström notes, suggest that the persecution sara suffers from is not recognized as the kind of persecution that qualifies for refugee status in light of the 1951 refugee convention. third, i should note here that sara is granted subsidiary protection only after initially being denied asylum by the board. 13 also see narayan (1997) on totalizations/totalizing pictures of cultures (15) and “death by culture”. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 an essentialist outlook assumes that the experience of the group under discussion is a stable one, one with a clear meaning, a meaning constant through time, space, and different historical, social, political, and personal contexts. (grillo 1995, 19) this interpretation, while rendering applicants’ cultures intelligible for decision makers, also demonstrates how gender-based violence is not only salient but also “endemic and essential” to those cultures (mckinnon 2016, 30).14 as a result, an essentialist frame of culture places gender-based violence “at the core of what it means to live as a woman in the region and these countries” (mckinnon 2016, 30). it also ends up “racializing” and “ethnicizing” gender-based violence as well, where gender-based violence is understood to be an essential problem of certain “races” and “ethnicities” (mckinnon 2016, 30). in other words, when the board listens to sara, they do so through a frame in which “non-white” women seem intelligible insofar as they are without any agency, and their cultures seem intelligible insofar as they are all oppressive. thus, the board uses the fact that sara’s narrative does not fit into a monolithic “image of an average third world woman” who is “powerless” and doesn’t have any agency as a reason to find her experiences unintelligible (mohanty 1988, 65, 66). what is striking here is the comfort, the ease, with which the migration board can find her experiences to be unreal or unlikely to occur when she tells them specifically that they are not. b. the comfort in ignoring available information: this comfort refers to the ease with which the migration board can overlook and disregard the information provided in applicants’ testimonies. this comfort can be read as both underlying and caused by the first comfort i identified. this is because the ease with which the board declares an applicant’s experiences unreal due to essentialist approaches to cultures enables its members to overlook the available information provided in the testimony. at the same time, ignoring the available information that is present in testimony (such as the fact that it is not strange for women to start sexual relationships) allows the board to sustain its approach to sara’s “culture.” thus, giving applicants a deflated level of credibility prevents the board from paying attention to the information present in testimonies or enables them to disregard the available information present in testimonies. this becomes clear in nesrin’s case: 14 also see mckinnon 2012. sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 nesrin is of kurdish origins and from iraq. she claims to have had a love affair with omed. nesrin’s family rejected omed’s proposal to nesrin, as she was promised to a cousin of hers. as a result of the proposal, nesrin’s family repeatedly abused and threatened her and omed. while the couple prepared to escape the country, omed was murdered by nesrin’s family and nesrin managed to escape through the aid of a women’s organization. (wikström 2014, 212–213) wikström explains that in the case of nesrin, the board finds the protection of abused women in northern iraq satisfactory: mb: for abused women there is generally a possibility of good enough protection against hv15 (verdict 12: 4). they further state that: mb: nesrin did not make contact with the police, other authorities or alternative mediation institutions in iraq [for her protection] before seeking international protection (verdict 12: 5). (wikström 2014, 215; bracketed insertion is wikström’s) in nesrin’s case, the board does not believe her testimony that the protection in her own country was not a possibility anymore. the board seems to question nesrin’s capacity to evaluate her own situation and decide that “going to the police was not an option.” more importantly, the board (in order to maintain that there was sufficient protection in iraq) ignores the fact that nesrin’s brother, uncle, and cousin were employed by the police force. thus, they ignore the fact that going to the police for nesrin would be equivalent to going back to her family. furthermore, the board ignores “nesrin’s claim that it was a women’s shelter that helped her to escape” (wikström 2014, 216). as wikström highlights, ignoring available information seems to be a technique that is frequently used by the migration board in order to suggest that the country of origin is still relatively safe and therefore the international protection is not needed.16 15 honour-related violence. 16 despite the fact that the court later ends up giving nesrin subsidiary protection, it is important to note here that, similar to sara’s case, her application for asylum is initially denied by the board. however, the court claims that “according to the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 c. the comfort in deciding which information/criteria to use: this comfort refers to the ease with which the migration boards can be arbitrary and ambiguous in their decision-making processes. wikström describes a third case that demonstrates this comfort: almas and afya are both from syria; they both refer to hv and claim to have been severely abused by their families and threatened to death; they applied for asylum during the same period of time. in the case of almas, the ruling court relies on six both national and international country reports, based on which the court concludes that the lack of protection in the country of origin is established by law: mc: hv and murders take place all over syria. syrian law statutes impunity or punishment mitigation in honour-related violations. the state indicates that 30 such murders take place every year. ngos put the number at 2,000–3,000 such cases. (verdict 21: 7)17 the case of almas is awarded refugee status. in the case of afya (verdict 24), only the internal report from the swedish board is used as country information. the board, which in its claim stresses the equal legal status of murders with and without honour motives, states: mb: generally considered, the number of honour killings has gone down in the country in recent years. it is said that people have become more enlightened and changed their attitudes in this matter. men more often refrain from killing in the name of honour because they know they will be sentenced to harsh prison terms when they are not granted sentence reductions. (verdict 24:4) country information, the authorities in the kurdish area have made several efforts to stop hv and murders, but that the protection is not necessarily good enough” (wikström 2014, 216). nevertheless, the court gives nesrin subsidiary protection instead of refugee status because it argues that the persecution nesrin suffers from is not gender-related persecution since the man she had a relationship with is killed as well (213). and because her persecution is not registered as gender-related, she is not granted refugee status. 17 wikström notes that “the country report from which the number is taken reads ‘200–300’ such cases, not 2000–3000, indicating that the court misrepresented the number in this citation” (wikström 2014, 217n4). sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 this is contradictory to statements made in the case of almas (verdict 21). it also differs from what the court, in the case of afya (verdict 24: 7), chooses to stress regarding the same country information, namely that hv is said to have “deep cultural roots,” that the “police see threats and less serious offences as part of upbringing” and that hv has not been a high priority. the court also states that: mc: any deviation from the family’s rules can lead to punishments. sometimes you kill the person wronged. many young women are married off to older men in return for payment. . . . ngos report that between 200–300 women are killed in the name of honour each year. the authorities, however, believe that the number is 30–35. (verdict 24: 9) the court refers lack of protection in the country of origin to “habits of culture,” and afya is granted subsidiary protection. (wikström 2014, 215; wikström’s emphases and ellipses) the fact that almas and afya are both from syria and claim honour-related violence does not automatically render their cases the same. however, what is striking here is the comfort of the migration board and court in turning to different reports concerning honour-related violence in syria and not identifying why they do so. in other words, the migration authorities can with ease refer to the reports of ngos or not, choose different authorities to count on, and in fact offer two different interpretations of syria with respect to honour-related violence. this suggests that the migration board and court can read, interpret, and process the cultures and the countries in question as they please. wikström thinks that the decision processes described in almas’s and afya’s cases “show the arbitrary nature of the use of country information” by the migration authorities (wikström 2014, 215). the use of country information can be arbitrary, but the fact that the authorities can arbitrarily decide which information/criteria to use, speaks to the institutional comfort they enjoy. thus, the problem is not only that they rely on essentializing and racialized discourses of culture and different country reports, but that they can also be ambiguous and arbitrary in their reliance. this is to say that the courts can easily seem arbitrary about their decisions to choose what information to use, and they can also be ambiguous about how they will use that information. i have tried to demonstrate above that the migration board and court enjoy a certain institutional comfort that we can disentangle by following an analysis of testimonial injustice in assessments of gender-based asylum applications in sweden. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 this comfort can be seen in three forms: comfort in denying applicants’ experiences, comfort in ignoring available information, and finally comfort in deciding which information/criteria to use for evaluations. an analysis of testimonial injustice allows us to address the unwarranted credibility deficit the asylum applicants suffer from. however, what seems to underlie the cases of testimonial injustice is that the board and court can afford to be arbitrary and ambiguous when negating and ignoring applicants’ experiences, when selectively determining what is salient about the country in question, and when structuring what “good enough” or “efficient” protection looks like in the country in question. in these cases, the problem is not that the decision makers rely on other reports such as country of origin reports and expert reports to assess these claims. the problem is that the decision makers can afford to be ambiguous and arbitrary in their reliance in a way that usually ends up negating applicants’ contributions to these cases. in other words, the migration board and court can afford to be arbitrary and ambiguous in their reconstruction of applicants’ experiences, cultures, and countries during the review process. being able to afford to be arbitrary and ambiguous in processing the cultures, the countries, and the applicants’ experiences in a way that negates applicants’ own experiences is what comprises this institutional comfort. and this institutional comfort performed in the review process at the same time performs the authority of the current order of nation-states in the existing asylum regimes. in what follows, i aim to show how the institution of gender-based asylum structurally legitimizes this institutional comfort and why that is important. 2. the structural limit: legitimization of the institutional comfort this institutional comfort is not limited to sweden’s migration board and courts. other scholars have pointed out that applicants in gender-related asylum cases in the uk and the us get assigned lower epistemic authority and credibility compared to any other source of information (e.g., country of origin reports, websites providing information about these countries, or experts) and suffer from inconsistent, ambiguous and arbitrary assessments (baillot, cowan, and munro 2014; kelson 1997; kennady 1998; mckinnon 2016; neacsu 2003). this is to say that these dynamics that we were able to identify and discuss for these cases are not isolated incidents: they are part of a process that seems to be continuously and regularly juxtaposing how asylum applicants make sense of their situations with how “authorities in respective countries” make sense of applicants’ situations. the question i would like to ask is, can the institution of gender-based asylum as it is practiced today allow an environment where “how applicants make sense of their situations” can be acknowledged and affirmed? i think that the answer is most likely no. this is because, i argue, the institution of asylum is built to legitimize the institutional comfort of migration courts and boards. and this legitimization sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 prioritizes the epistemic resources of the boards and courts rather than that of applicants. this legitimization further overlooks and actively ignores applicants’ epistemic resources. epistemic resources, here, refers to various sense-making mechanisms that we need in order to make sense of what is salient and relevant in a given situation.18 in order to know the world well, pohlhaus (2012) notes, a knower attends to her world. when a knower attends to her world, her particular location in the world matters since it determines what is more likely for her to notice and attend to (what is salient and relevant for her).19 knowers, she continues, need epistemic resources that can make sense of their experiences of attending and noticing things in the world. these epistemic resources are developed and circulated by groups of other knowers who attend to the world in different ways. thus, she says, in a given epistemic landscape, it becomes important for a knower to be a part of the process of developing epistemic resources that are calibrated based on what is salient for her and at the same time enjoy the already circulating epistemic resources’ ability to articulate what is salient for her.20 however, pohlhaus notes that “in a socially stratified society, some persons are situated in positions that allow their experiences to count more in the development and circulation of epistemic resources” (pohlhaus 2012, 718). thus, when the dominant epistemic resources (developed and circulated) do not suffice to make sense of what is salient for certain knowers who are situated in particular ways, these knowers need to “recalibrate and/or create new epistemic resources” in order to “know the world more adequately” (pohlhaus 2012, 720). however, since creating new epistemic resources is an interdependent endeavor, that is, one that cannot be completed only by individual efforts, it is easy to imagine different groups that maintain and cultivate different epistemic resources. looking at wikström’s narration of sara’s and nesrin’s testimonies, for instance, we see that they know “perfectly well what is happening” to them (pohlhaus 2012, 725). as knowers, they have the epistemic tools (developed and [re]calibrated collectively) to make sense of their experiences and what those experiences mean within the context of their country. in other words, they have their own sense-making mechanisms. what seems to happen is that the epistemic resources that the migration authorities use to make sense of the world are not 18 even though i discuss decision makers’ epistemic resources here, akram (2000) points out that epistemic resources of advocates and lawyers can also be problematic. 19 also see alcoff 2007, code 1993, harding 1991, and hill collins 2009. 20 for dotson (2014), the former relates to the efficiency of epistemic resources, and the latter relates to sufficiency of them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 calibrated for and do not allow the authorities to understand the “intelligibility” of sara’s and nesrin’s claims (pohlhaus 2012, 725). as pohlhaus suggests, “the resources that would call their [the board’s] attention to those aspects of the world to which they do not attend are the very ones under contestation” (728). thus, it is nearly impossible to demonstrate to the board that the epistemic resources they are using to attend to the parts of the world are inadequate without using the epistemic resources that the board dismisses to begin with. the migration board’s insistence on using the dominant epistemic resources that cannot make sense of the applicants’ testimonies is at the same time a systematic refusal and active undermining of different hermeneutical resources developed and calibrated by the applicants themselves. in other words, the migration board’s refusal to find sara and nesrin credible is not just a mere “not understanding” or an “inability” but an active, systematic and coordinated misinterpretation of the world as it makes sense to nesrin and sara (pohlhaus 2012, 731). in sara’s case, the board cannot understand that it is not strange for a woman to initiate secret relationships. in nesrin’s case, the board ignores the fact that that she couldn’t go to the police and the fact that a women’s shelter helped her escape. what seems obvious in both cases is that the board selectively and systematically refers to the epistemic resources that makes sense of the country, the culture, and nesrin’s and sara’s identities in a way that ends up negating nesrin’s and sara’s experiences. pohlhaus suggests that willful hermeneutical ignorance occurs “when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally” (2012, 715). “such refusals,” she continues, “allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world” (715).21 for dotson, in this case, the board commits contributory injustice: the board’s “willful hermeneutical ignorance in maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources thwarts a knower’s ability to contribute to shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community by compromising her epistemic agency” (dotson 2012, 32; my emphasis).22 thus, in the cases listed above we witness how the migration 21 pohlhaus suggests that “willful hermeneutical ignorance may be a type of the broader category of contributory injustice insofar as the former is one way dominant knowers can refuse to acknowledge the significance of contributions of marginalized knowers to the general knowledge pool” (2012, 734). 22 for dotson, epistemic agency concerns “the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given epistemic community in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, revision of those same resources” (2012, sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 authorities can comfortably utilize dominant hermeneutical resources, disregard different hermeneutical resources, dismiss applicants’ contributions to the shared epistemic resources, and maintain its ignorance with respect to the applicants’ epistemic resources and experiences as a matter of process. migration boards and courts do this because the epistemological framework that maintains and sustains the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to provide “legitimacy” to arbitrary and ambiguous use of the epistemic resources of the authorities in the given nation-state that is evaluating the asylum applications as a matter of procedure. the problem here is not only that the institution of genderbased asylum structurally marginalizes and ignores epistemic resources of asylum applicants, but also that the structure of the institution is, to use dotson’s terminology, built to “uphold” and “preserve” the epistemic resources of the evaluative mechanisms in the respective nation-states (dotson 2014, 131). in other words, the institution of gender-based asylum is structured not to provide the conditions for the possibility of asylum applicants’ epistemic resources to be legitimized. the epistemological framework that sustains the institution of gender-based asylum and provides the legitimacy mentioned above is supported further by another one: “the contemporary order of sovereign nation-states as given” (malkki 1995, 502). liisa malkki calls this “the national order of things.” as malkki argues, “the national order of things secretes displacement, as well as prescriptive correctives for displacement” (516). this is also to say that the entire legal, political, social, historical, and economic culture at work positions refugee claimants as problems for the benefit of the states of refuge (rusin and franke 2010). within this national order of things, “the refugee determination process performs the state’s authority to protect the freedom of its citizenry, through the right to exclude refugee claimants on grounds of security and past behavior, and to demand particular manners of civil conduct from those who seek refuge” (rusin and franke 2010, 195). this national order of things, for example, is reflected in the arguments made by opponents to gender asylum. as karen musalo suggests, there are usually two kinds of arguments used against gender-based asylum and gender-related persecution (musalo 2010, 47). the first one states that the 1951 refugee convention and the 1967 protocol were never meant to extend international protection to “domestic” and “private” issues. the second one asserts that accepting gender-based and gender-related claims “will open the floodgates and result in a deluge of claims” (musalo 2010, 48). despite unhcr’s efforts to 24). she also notes that her definition of epistemic agency is influenced by cynthia townley’s (2003) definition of agency. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 encourage a gender-sensitive interpretation of the refugee convention, many countries’ failure to follow through guidelines concerning gender-related persecution, their failure to apply their own guidelines in a consistent manner (without forgetting that consistent does not mean just), and their arbitrary interpretation of gender-related persecution demonstrate to us that the current order of nation-states and their border control politics also influence the evaluative mechanisms of those states. thus, the contemporary order of sovereign nationstates as given facilitates the institutional comfort these migration courts and boards enjoy and legitimizes the epistemological framework that upholds and preserves the dominant epistemic resources, which delegitimize applicants’ experiences. concluding remarks i have tried to demonstrate that the institution of gender-based asylum has a structural limit, that is, it is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. this structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy in deciding how to read, interpret, and process the cultures and the countries in question and the applicants’ experiences within them. in other words, i have followed wikström’s attempt to identify epistemic injustice in gender-based asylum cases and used her article as a case study to show how migration boards and courts are systematically afforded the ability to arbitrarily and ambiguously misinterpret asylum applicants’ experiences, cultures, and countries. i’ve suggested that although testimonial injustice can indicate the unwarranted credibility deficit applicants suffer from, contributory injustice can demonstrate to us how epistemic resources of decision makers are prioritized. paying attention to this systemic prioritization allows us to underline systemic misinterpretation afforded to migration boards by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states. following this analysis, i think it is important to raise at least two questions: (1) what is it that a structural and epistemological analysis can do in this case? (2) can this analysis be extended to the institution of asylum in general? i now try to answer these questions briefly. first, it is important to articulate what a structural and epistemological analysis can enable in the context of gender-based asylum. i should note here that the point of this analysis is not to overlook or undermine the success of how genderbased asylum is used by advocates and lawyers to obtain refugee status for many asylum seekers; the point is to understand the failures of this institution better. if the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice, then we have to ask: what do we need to pay more attention to in developing sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 guidelines, practices, and policies for gender-related persecution in order to make sure that states comply with the 1951 refugee convention when considering gender-related persecution? if, for example, in order to overcome this structural limitation, migration boards and courts need to be able to learn different epistemic resources and to shift among different epistemic resources, the question to ask is, what kinds of institutional practices could enable that? both dotson (2012) and pohlhaus (2012) point out that learning different epistemic resources and being able to use them is not impossible, but it is quite difficult. this is because it requires a fluency in differing hermeneutical resources, which is not easy to achieve.23 this difficulty further raises the question of what institutional practices can carry migration boards and courts and their evaluative mechanisms closer to that fluency without abusing the material, social, historical, legal, and political power they have held. this question is crucial to remind ourselves that “the law cannot on its own create justice” (davis 2005, 88). thus, a structural and epistemological analysis in the context of gender-based asylum can allow us to acknowledge the limits of national and international law, which is significant for projects that plan to create more just institutional practices (davis 2005, 88). furthermore, it is important to ask whether this analysis can be extended to the institution of asylum in general. is the institution of asylum structured to produce different forms of epistemic injustice? although answering this question requires a more detailed and extensive discussion, i would like to mention a few points that speak to the importance of raising that question. when discussing refugee claimants in canada, jill rusin and mark franke cite an excerpt from an interview with a nigerian refugee claimant. this claimant complains about the lack of clear guidelines and criteria in courts’ interpretation of race, political opinion, and the social and political context in the countries of origin: to go to the level of the hearing proper, i don’t know the criteria that they are using to make their judgements. i told you before about the nigerian from viessa state, orgoniland. i felt he should have won status here but he lost his case . . . i know that that area is being wracked by violence between the indigenes and the government. the people from the area produce the wealth of the country while they are being neglected. they are environmentally being destroyed by the international oil companies: mobil, shell, chevron. based on my experience of what is going on in that area of the country, anybody from that area is at risk, a refugee in their own country. i feel if somebody from that area can lose his case, do i stand a good chance of winning mine? at least give some clear guidelines. you can make your 23 also see “incommensurability” in schutte (1998). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 claim on race, religion, political opinion . . . but race in what way? it’s not that clear. they are making this claim based on their political opinion or for religious reasons only to be told it is not this. . . . it is not fair for people to see the process as a gambling thing . . . cause you never know if you are going to win or not. (lokhorst 2003, quoted in rusin and franke 2010, 188– 189) this excerpt suggests that decision makers’ inconsistent, ambiguous, and arbitrary assessments of applicants’ cultures, countries, and experiences can create problems for asylum claims other than those that are based on gender. in other words, state actors’ approaches to asylum grounds such as race, political opinion, and religion, can also be arbitrary, ambiguous and inconsistent in a systemic and persistent fashion. in addition, if we recall the five categories in the 1951 refugee convention— race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership of a particular social group—we can see that it matters significantly whether intersectional analyses can play a significant role in decision makers’ approach to applicants’ cases. despite the fact that asylum applicants’ experiences can speak to multiple grounds (such as race, gender, religion, and political opinion) in the refugee convention, it is not unusual for decision makers to approach applicants’ cases with “expectations based on inappropriate nonintersectional contexts” (crenshaw 1991, 1251).24 for instance, some applicants are denied asylum on being found too feminine or not gay enough or based on the importance of class not being understood in relation to gender or based on gender-based violence and sexual orientation-based violence not being considered at the same time (mckinnon 2012, 2016; neilson 2005; mcdonaldnorman 2017). these issues show us that it is crucial to acknowledge the failures of the dominant epistemic resources employed by decision makers and to discuss the structural limits of the institution of asylum in general. the unhcr, in a 2012 report, states that “wealthier countries that are geographically removed from crisis zones implement numerous measures to deter and prevent the arrival of asylum-seekers” (unhcr 2012, 9). this is to say that current asylum procedures are further influenced by how states manage immigration in general. according to the unhcr (2012), the increasing border control mechanisms25 make the institution of asylum less and less meaningful as a way of protecting refugees. however, the practice of asylum not only is made more 24 also see anthias 2012, mckinnon 2012, and mckinnon 2016. 25 border control mechanisms such as “border closures, push-backs, interception at sea, visa requirements, carrier sanctions, and offshore border control” (unhcr 2012, 10). sertler: the institution of gender-based asylum and epistemic injustice: a structural limit published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 difficult and complicated, but also is “fraught with inconsistencies” (unhcr 2012, 10). states do not have a consistent understanding of asylum and offer very different types of protection. these inconsistencies, the unhcr notes, undermine the integrity of the international refugee protection system (2012, 10). within this context, then, paying attention to the structural limits of the institution of 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solidarity. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/sowr/4fc5ceca9/state-worlds-refugees2012-search-solidarity.html. ———. 2014. asylum trends 2014: levels and trends in industrialized countries. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/551128679/asylumlevels-trends-industrialized-countries-2014.html. ———. 2015. global trends: forced displacement in 2015. http://www.unhcr.org/enus/statistics/unhcrstats/576408cd7/unhcr-global-trends-2015.html. wikström, hanna. 2014. “gender, culture, and epistemic injustice: the institutional logic in assessment of asylum applications in sweden.” nordic journal of migration research 4 (4): 210–218. ezgi sertler is an assistant professor of philosophy at butler university’s department of philosophy, religion, and classics. she received her phd in philosophy from michigan state university and her ma in philosophy from loyola university chicago. her research focuses on several areas in feminist philosophy, feminist and social epistemologies, refugee and forced migration studies, and social and political philosophy. http://www.unhcr.org/3d58ddef4.pdf http://www.unhcr.org/publications/sowr/4fc5ceca9/state-worlds-refugees-2012-search-solidarity.html http://www.unhcr.org/publications/sowr/4fc5ceca9/state-worlds-refugees-2012-search-solidarity.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/551128679/asylum-levels-trends-industrialized-countries-2014.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/551128679/asylum-levels-trends-industrialized-countries-2014.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/576408cd7/unhcr-global-trends-2015.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/statistics/unhcrstats/576408cd7/unhcr-global-trends-2015.html just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 2 article 1 2015 just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care alison reiheld southern illinois university edwardsville, areihel@siue.edu recommended citation reiheld, alison. 2015. "just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care. "feminist philosophy quarterly1, (2). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1. just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care1 alison reiheld abstract traditional considerations of justice for those who require caregiving have centered on what is due to the dependent person. however, considerations of justice also bear strongly on what is due to the caregiver. i focus on unpaid dependency work, too long treated as a private matter rather than a public concern. more is owed to those who render care: the division of labor is unjust, the nature of dependency work creates vulnerabilities for caregivers, and unpaid caregivers are disadvantaged in the world of paid work. obligations to mitigate these facts are ultimately based on the truth that all members of society at some point in their lives benefit from caregiving and that noncaregivers benefit unfairly from the heavy distribution of dependency work to a small number of certain kinds of individuals. it is necessary to ask which agents of justice are responsible for remedying this state of affairs, and how. i propose a distributed scheme of obligation in which members of society and the state, as arbiter of social responsibility, share responsibility for the remedy. it is incumbent upon us as a society to refrain from making vulnerable the most essential among us, to reap benefits without sowing unjust burdens. keywords: caregiving, political philosophy, doulia, dependency work introduction considerations of justice with respect to dependent persons in need of care often center on what is due to the recipient of care. dependent persons may be patients who require intense caregiving outside of medical settings, children, elderly persons who can no longer live completely on their own, or disabled persons at any stage of life. such a focus makes sense: dependent persons, after all, have often experienced great difficulty in receiving adequate care. as important as such 1 i am grateful to anna gotlib and fpq's rigorous reviewers for critical feedback without which this paper would not have its current form. i am also grateful to my writing group at southern illinois university-edwardsville, which supported me through multiple iterations of this paper. 1 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 analysis is, considerations of justice also bear strongly on what is due to the caregiver who performs such dependency work, and different social policy recommendations result from considerations of the caregiver than result from simply considering the recipient of care. while i have argued elsewhere that justice for paid dependency workers is inseparable from justice for the recipient of care (reiheld 2013), i focus here on what society owes to those who render care. in the united states, for example, millions of people care for elderly parents or other dependent friends and family members in informal caregiving arrangements. dementia care, only one kind of such caregiving, illustrates this nicely: 75% of persons with dementia are cared for by friends and family; in 2007, 10 million americans were providing such care (brodaty and donkin 2009, 217). millions of other caregivers are caring for strangers in exchange for pay in arrangements that vary from regulated formal pay to informal compensation for assistance. care is rendered by a combination of paid and unpaid labor in service to people who are temporarily or permanently dependent. caregivers often find their own health damaged through injury or stress with no respite in sight (schulz and beach 1999). paid dependency workers, citizens, and especially immigrants face exploitation, low wages, and poor labor protections in both canada and the united states (reiheld 2013; boyd 2006; weir 2005). both paid and unpaid dependency workers are more likely to be female than male. unpaid dependency workers, both male and female, often have other formal paid employment unrelated to their caregiving functions. these formal workplaces have criteria of success and systems for promotion that penalize those who do not put paid work first. and the number of persons who require medical caregiving and elder care is increasing due to changing medical technologies and demographics, both in the u.s. and globally (world health organization 2002). such care may involve providing assistance for those who can no longer perform activities of daily living (adls) such as dressing or bathing oneself, but also medical caregiving such as wound care, physical therapy, and proper medication administration. such work is often referred to as “direct care,” care which attends directly to a wide variety of daily needs. the caregivers who perform this sort of dependency work can be nonprofessionals and thus, unpaid. eldercare in particular exemplifies this: nearly one-fourth of eldercare providers on any given day are unpaid—39.6 million people—spending an average of 3.2 hours each daily providing care (u.s. department of labor 2013). the great range of those who require caregiving and the care required demonstrate a key fact of caregiving: that all members of society, from birth to death and in between, at some point in their lives benefit from it. in what follows, i focus on unpaid direct care, a form of dependency work that has too long been treated as a private matter rather than a public concern. i 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 include unpaid medical caregiving as well as the more general considerations of caregiving for dependent children and elderly or disabled persons. persons who do this work are generally picked out by their relationship with the dependent individual, e.g. family and close friends, rather than by the professional descriptions that accompany paid work. i elaborate on the lives of unpaid caregivers and briefly show why their lots are unjust rather than merely unfortunate, for at least three reasons: the division of labor is unjust, the nature of dependency work creates vulnerabilities for caregivers, and unpaid caregivers are disadvantaged in the world of paid work. i argue for obligations to mitigate these injustices, drawing on feminist philosophers’ arguments that all members of society at some point in their lives benefit from caregiving, and noncaregivers benefit unfairly from the heavy distribution of dependency work to a small number of certain kinds of individuals. yet we must go further than arguing for the moral basis of society’s obligations to those who render care. we must also ask which agents of justice are responsible for remedying this state of affairs, and how. i propose a distributed scheme of obligation in which members of society, and the state as an arbiter of social responsibility, share responsibility for the remedy. i consider an obvious objection to this scheme, that such obligations to care for caregivers may be just but are too expensive to be fulfilled, and offer several replies. let us begin with further consideration of why society owes anything at all to those who render care, and why this generates both general obligations and specific obligations for particular agents. i. the origin of obligations of justice to caregivers there are many ways of parsing obligations when considering justice. one might ground them in responsiveness to rights claims. compatibly and equally plausibly, one might ground obligations in a duty to avoid the perpetuation of injustice. either way, the obligation is a way of satisfying a kind of moral debt that is owed; to say that one is not obligated is to say that nothing is owed. and yet much is indeed owed to caregivers. many discussions of justice begin with basic human rights, which are presumed to be universal. as onora o’neill (2001) notes, documents such as the 1948 universal declaration of human rights approach justice by “proclaiming rights”: they proclaim “what is to be received, what entitlements everyone is to have,” but say “very little about which agents and agencies must do what if these rights are to be secured” (183). the “allocation of obligations matters, and some means of designing and enforcing effective allocations is required if any ascription of rights is to have practical import” (184). it is obligations, after all, that are “the active aspects of justice” (185). any universal claim, whether about general human rights or the sort of claims we are about to encounter regarding what society owes to 3 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 caregivers with respect to rights claims and avoiding injustice, is hobbled without the ability to ascribe specific obligations to specific agents. my concern in this paper is to lay out general obligations based in an expanded notion of reciprocity and fairness aimed at reducing caregiver vulnerability, and subsequently to offer a scheme for assigning particular obligations to particular agents. caregiving has traditionally been seen as a dyadic relation between the caregiver and the dependent person. in the paid-professional context of medical caregiving, the dyad is illustrated by the predominance of the terms “nurse-patient relationship” and “physician-patient relationship” as well as the more general “provider-patient relationship.” this same notion extends to the relationship between unpaid caregivers and dependent persons. while there is great moral power in these obligations of care that individuals have to one another, this emphasis on caregiving as a dyadic relationship between individuals is problematic and belies the true nature of dependency work as a necessary function in a healthy society. however, it should come as no surprise. as hilde lindemann (2006) points out in her consideration of classic philosophical concepts, concepts that have become embedded in american culture, the traditions of reasoning about our obligations to one another are riddled with flawed assumptions that often go in sets, which she refers to as “pictures” (7281). two especially relevant pictures, for the purposes of this essay, are those of the independent person and the public-private split in society. though we are quick to judge those who we believe ought to be performing caregiving duties for dependent persons, we see dependency as a thing to be avoided in part because of the flawed picture of the person. lindemann argues that this flawed picture privileges the notion of persons as fundamentally independent of others, as “detached from other people” and “self-sufficient” with “just as much social power as everyone else” (73). the dependent person cannot fit into this picture which, as margaret urban walker has said, is “none of us at all times and many of us at no times” (1998, 21-22). one of the critics of this picture is eva feder kittay (1998; 1999), who considers it in the context of america’s welfare system. she observes that both the right and the left, liberal and progressive politicians, assume that a person “can only be incorporated as a full citizen by fulfilling the role of ‘independent’ wage earner” (1998, 124). so powerful is this picture of the person that it is shared between widely disparate political value systems which share the claim that the goal of welfare reform should be paid work. we see this ideal in its opposite: the “‘icon of dependency’ in america is the single black mother on welfare, who combines the characteristically dependent attributes of women, blacks and the poor” (weir 2005, 309). ronald reagan famously caricatured such women as “welfare queens,” doing no real work at all, a “controlling image” of black women (collins 2008, 78) that shapes our views of 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 women rendered vulnerable by caregiving. paradoxically, in american culture our willingness to judge those we think ought to be doing unpaid caregiving for those to whom they are attached is paired with the ideal of being independent: detached, with equal social power to anyone else, and self-sufficient. and yet we are attached, do not have equal social status, and we are not self-sufficient—all of us have been dependent and will be dependent again at some point due to injury or age, whether temporarily or permanently. we see caregiving as damaging our independence, we see the dependent person as worth less, and all of this makes unpaid caregiving in particular appear to be without value. the flawed picture of the person as selfsufficient and equal in social status complicates our thinking about dependency and about caregiving for dependent persons. the second flawed picture lindemann identifies also complicates our thinking about dependency and caregiving. this picture depicts society as consisting primarily of two spheres, the public and the private. though there is overlap in reality, we conceptualize them as distinct. the public and private spheres are distinguished not only by the spaces in which they take place—literally public spaces where one can be seen by others, and private spaces where one has privacy such as the home or a bathroom—but also by what sorts of considerations are seen to belong to each: the public sphere is the one in which people’s freedom is secured by rights. . . . these rights . . . can fairly be summed up as the right not to be interfered with. . . . the public sphere is also the place for impartiality. if the public sphere is the sphere of rights, the private sphere is the sphere of the good. it’s here that people pursue their various “thick” visions of the best way to live. . . . the private sphere is the one in which relationships and the responsibilities that arise from them are frequently unchosen. it’s the place of favoritism, because it’s the sphere of friendship, love, and families—relationships in which another person is singled out for special consideration rather than treated like everybody else. (lindemann, 76-77) allison weir (2005) suggests that such patterns are instantiated in “global institutions of public work and private family that render these two spheres inherently conflictual” (308). because of this picture, it is an uphill battle to argue that events that occur in the private sphere can be the subject of rights or the purview of justice. for example, marriage is a conceptualized as private, and it was not until the mid-1970s that american states began to consider that it might be possible for a husband to rape his wife; the last states (oklahoma and north 5 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 carolina) to withdraw marital exceptions to rape as a crime did so as recently as 1993 (bergen 1999). it is this distinction between private and public that makes caregiving seem to be a matter of one-to-one relations, of an individual’s obligations to another dependent individual. as weir says in an observation combining both the picture of society and the picture of the person, “the valuation of care is romanticized, feminized, and privatized, so that it is inevitable conflicts with the masculine model of work—with the valuation of independence, of wage-earning and individual career success in the public sphere” (2005, 314). it is this flawed picture of society, combined with the flawed picture of the person, that makes it seem so obvious that caregiving is no concern of justice at all. this is, however, patently not the case. caregiving is a fine illustration of a set of conditions in which the private-public distinction is detrimental to right action. it is precisely because of reliance upon this flatly false division between the public and the private that traditional theories of justice are very poorly suited to deal with caregiving, which is relegated to the realm of the “private.” as kittay has said, “theories of the just state . . . fail to include among the social goods those that bear on the needs of dependency workers, dependents, and the relations of dependency” (1998, 131). how so? caregiving is a relationship not only between caregivers and dependent persons but also between caregivers and society, and thus spans the alleged public-private divide. as martha fineman argues, “without aggregate caretaking” for all persons but especially for children, “there could be no society, so we might say that it is caretaking labor that produces and reproduces society. . . . the uncompensated labor of caretakers is an unrecognized subsidy, not only to individuals who directly receive it, but more significantly, to the entire society” (2004, 48). this is not simply a matter of individual members of society treating individuals fairly. rather, caregivers are owed, at a minimum, decent treatment by those whom they serve—society as a whole—as a matter of reciprocal justice. according to susan moller okin (1989), some injustices result from social structures that create vulnerabilities that would not otherwise exist. consider the social structures embedded in marriage, often a basis for caregiving relationships. if institutions such as work and government determine wages, benefits, and social services based on assumptions about the institution of marriage and the financial security and caregiving it often entails, then individuals are made vulnerable by this system in the eventuality that marriage is undesirable, inaccessible, or insufficient for individuals. since the vulnerable individual is vulnerable because of society, society has an obligation both to attend to the vulnerability and to alter the structures that cause it (okin 1989, 138-139). many employment and benefit systems make caregivers vulnerable because they assume there is access to free dependency work 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 from another person. meetings and work hours, demands for unscheduled labor to complete projects, required travel for work, and requirements that welfare recipients seek paid work all assume that the worker is not the caregiver and that someone else is. all the while, society denigrates and fails to support such caregivers because of the high value placed on paid work. as eva feder kittay and ellen feder (2002) have pointed out, these caregivers and their families generally bear the costs of caring for dependent individuals, “yet the social benefits of such care are distributed throughout society” (3). benefitting from socially necessary labor while not giving back commensurately and actively denigrating those who perform such labor violates reciprocity and is thus deeply unjust. society as a whole, and component members and institutions of society that do not support caregiving— such as noncaregiving individuals, the state, and corporations—are free riders on the unpaid labor of caregivers (folbre 2001; fraser 1994, 613; parks 2003, 489) and contribute to the vulnerability of caregivers. such vulnerabilities accrue in what florencia luna (2009), writing on research ethics and medical consent, has called “layers of vulnerability” (121). rather than seeing certain persons as intrinsically vulnerable to coercion or exploitation, luna argues that we should see them as “rendered vulnerable” by different layers of vulnerability (128). while the reader may be forgiven for thinking this is just another way of conceptualizing intersectionality, it is not, for these layers can be removed by changing “a particular situation that makes or renders someone vulnerable” (129). one need not remove all layers of vulnerability in order to reduce the vulnerability to which a person finds herself subject. removing even some can constitute a significant improvement for the vulnerable person. thus, on grounds of reciprocal obligations, society owes caregivers decent treatment and reformation of relevant social structures. at the end of this paper, i will propose just such specific measures to remove the resultant layers of vulnerability. i have characterized the ground of reciprocal obligation here as one between caregivers and society rather than, more classically, between caregiver and patient; caregivers provide a service that is essential to society and thus society owes caregivers relevant compensation and improved treatment that reduces vulnerability. however, one need not embrace a traditional one-to-one reciprocal obligation in order to find a ground for society having obligations with respect to caregivers, dependent persons, and the caregiving relation. there is no doubt that caregivers are made vulnerable by the caregiving relation. in kittay’s 1998 article “welfare, dependency, and a public ethics of care” and her 1999 book love’s labor, she seeks a system in which unpaid caregivers—overwhelmingly women, though 7 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 increasingly men2—will not be made vulnerable by their work. this is precisely the sort of theory of justice that i am after, as well. one of kittay’s signature contributions to social and political philosophy is her principle of doulia, “a concept of interdependence that recognizes what is not precisely a relation of reciprocity, but a relation [characterized] as ‘nested dependencies.’ these link those who need help to those who help, and link the helpers to a set of supports” (1998, 133; my emphasis). claims to such a set of supports are rooted in the caregiver’s “entitlement” to expect that “one can give care without the caregiving becoming a liability to one’s own being” (1999, 66). this is less a matter of one-to-one reciprocation, as i had argued for earlier with the caregiver-society obligation, and more a concept of “social cooperation” (kittay 1998, 133) and “reciprocity-inconnection” (kittay 1999, 67) rather than the classic “exchange reciprocity”—you scratch my back, i’ll scratch yours. kittay herself describes the nested dependencies of doulia as a matter of “what goes around comes around,” adding, “a connectionbased equality calls upon those within the nested set of social relations to support the dependency worker sufficiently, so that she is not made unduly vulnerable as she answers to the vulnerability of another” (1999, 170). she extends this to the context of welfare, arguing that welfare should be expanded beyond the poor to focus less on poverty and more on vulnerability through caregiving. in other words, we refocus our welfare obligations from a ground of charity to a ground of reciprocity qua social cooperation. this would mean that anyone who might be made vulnerable through caregiving should be given access to welfare, without focusing on means testing as the criterion for eligibility. this claim is a universal claim of general obligation. but recall o’neill’s comment regarding universal human rights. we cannot adjudicate universal rights claims without some way of assigning particular obligations to particular agents. as i shall argue, particular obligations cannot fall—must not fall—only on government as the agent of public policy. before i take on that task, it should now be clear that on grounds of both one-to-one reciprocal obligations and doulia’s more nuanced nested reciprocities of social cooperation, society owes caregivers decent treatment and reformation of relevant social structures. to see what specific obligations follow from this general social obligation to create a just system of caregiving, we must further examine the specific facts of caregiving. 2 just under 40% of unpaid dementia caregivers are now men, often spouses of the person with dementia, though the typical dementia caregivers remain wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters, and other female relatives (brodaty and donkin 2009, 217). for all unpaid caregiving, an estimated 66% of caregivers are female, and 34% male (family caregiver alliance 2012). 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 ii. the labor of dependency work carries unique burdens which are unjust although caregivers perform work that must be done so that all of society may benefit, caregivers not only experience a substantial drain on time and energy but can also experience illness, injury, or death as a result of their dependency work. a 1999 study of elderly spousal caregiving (schulz and beach 1999) found that caregivers who reported strain had a 63% increase in mortality during the four-year study period relative to other caregivers and noncaregiving controls. the authors conclude that “being a caregiver who is experiencing mental or emotional strain is an independent risk factor for mortality among elderly spousal caregivers” (1999, 2215). the authors also note that previous work has shown increased morbidity among those caregivers of all ages who live with the care recipient (2219). such burdens add layers to the vulnerability of caregivers, even moreso to a surprising demographic: in 3.2% of households with children, at least one child performs dependency work for a family member, usually for an adult but sometimes for a sibling. children who provide help with adls and additional duties of care report abnormally high levels of belief that expressing their emotions is not valuable, that too much is asked of them, and that they cannot rely on anyone else. they also report lower levels of attendance and participation at school, and inability to complete homework (hunt et al., 10-12), further layering vulnerability. hiring paid dependency workers to relieve these burdens and remove this vulnerability from unpaid caregivers may seem like a solution to the problem of imposing unjust burdens. but it is not. all too often, unjust burdens are simply transferred to a class of worker with low protections, low salary, and long hours (reiheld 2013; kittay 1998; weir 2005). many of these workers are women of color and/or migrants who enter the u.s. illegally or on restrictive work visas like the h-2b temporary non-agricultural worker visa. in canada, the live-in caregiver program (lcp) allows immigration for the explicit purpose of providing care for children, seniors, or people with disabilities, without supervision—and thus also without recourse or appeal in the event of mistreatment—in a private household; workers who enter canada under the lcp are almost all women (boyd 2005, 5). as weir has noted, such women are compelled to leave their children behind in their country of origin or, if they bring them along, are unable to provide care for their own children while providing care for others at wages insufficient to hire safe caregiving of their own. wages for an au pair performing childcare work in the u.s. can be under $140 a week with no real oversight or way of restricting work hours (weir 2005, 191-193). one of the eight lowest-paying jobs in the united states is personal and home care aides; when paid, these workers receive an average of only $9.75 an hour (tahmincioglu 2014). the reality of such exploitation indicates that displacing the burden moves the target of obligations from unpaid caregivers to poorly paid and 9 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 poorly protected caregivers, who already suffer additional layers of vulnerability imposed by immigration. this is no solution to problems of injustice. if we owe anything to those who render care, then we owe dependency workers a more reasonable level of burdens than they typically have. that some caregivers shoulder the burden of their own premature deaths or increased morbidity, learn that they cannot rely on others, or experience educational impairment is surely too much. in this case, there is an obligation to reduce the mental and emotional strain experienced by unpaid caregivers by peeling away vulnerabilities where possible, and to do so without simply displacing them onto vulnerable paid caregivers. after establishing additional obligations that society owes to unpaid caregivers, i will show how they can be assigned to particular agents. iii. division of labor is unjust the division of labor within caregiving also demonstrates classic injustice. noncaregivers benefit unfairly from the heavy distribution of dependency work to a small number of certain kinds of individuals. the relevant line of distribution of unpaid caregiving is gender.3 women perform roughly two-thirds of all unpaid caregiving (family caregiver alliance 2012). one cause of this gender discrepancy is what jennifer parks (2003) describes as socially pervasive “representations of caretaking as unskilled, voluntary, private ‘women’s work’” that has “resulted in the ghettoizing of care work, turning it into unpaid, altruistic familial labor or poorly paid labor provided by a transient, exploited, impoverished workforce” (493). gendering of such work as “women’s work” isn’t the only reason for its low social valuation, however. marilyn waring argued in counting for nothing: what men value and what women are worth , originally published in 1988, that the gendered labor done primarily by women is actually both unpaid and largely invisible to global means measuring economic productivity precisely because it is private. in a follow-up essay, waring (2003) points out that, historically, work that is “consumed” inside the home is considered private household labor and thus is invisible to economic measures; only work “produced” to be consumed by others is measured by economic measures such as the united nations system of national accounts. thus, paid caregiving done outside of private relations has economic value, whereas work done inside the home by unpaid caregivers who are generally family or friends is significantly devalued by society’s primary economic and other 3 while paid direct caregivers are disproportionately non-white relative to the population as a whole and relative to the population for whom they provide care, unpaid caregivers span racial and ethnic groups because the caregiving/dependency relation is so tightly bound to interpersonal relations. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 social measurements. as economist nancy folbre (2001) has said, “conventional economic theory concedes that human capital . . . is an important factor of production. . . . if human capital is so important, maybe we should pay more attention to how and where it is actually produced” rather than treating people as “exogenously given” to the economic system by forces outside of it (71). perhaps because of this socioeconomic devaluing of dependency work, it is performed by men far less often than it is performed by women. one direct indicator of this disparity in unpaid caregiving is the varying degree to which men and women leave work, or take leave from work, to attend to familial responsibilities. more and more men are doing so but the disparity still exists: in caregiving overall, two-thirds of caregiving is performed by women (family caregiving alliance 2012). use of leave under the family and medical leave act (fmla) mirrors these numbers: according to a 2012 nonprofit report based on data from the u.s. department of labor (dol), 56% of those who took leave in 2011 were women (npwf 2013, 1), meaning that 44% of those who took leave in 2011 were men. the report notes that “the rate of leave taking among men has increased in small but steady increments in the 20 years since the fmla’s enactment” (npwf 2013, 1). shifting the metric from the percentage of leave-takers who are a certain gender to the percentage of men taking leave in the previous 18-month period, the report documents the trend: in 1995, 13% of men reported taking leave; in 2000, 14 percent; in 2005, 16%. of all those taking leave, 19% reported taking leave to “care for a parent’s, spouse’s or child’s health condition” (npwf 2013, 1). this may appear promising in terms of the degree to which men are increasingly performing women’s work, and it is. but the numbers are not as straightforward an indicator as they might first appear. after all, the fmla simply requires that employers retain the employee and allow them to return to work after the leave period has ended. it does not require that they be paid during the time of the leave. this explains an ongoing gender disparity: the nonprofit report also points out that “a growing share of workers need leave but do not take it—most commonly because unpaid leave is unaffordable—and women bear a disproportionate burden” (npwf 2013, 2). in fact, women made up 64% of those who needed leave but did not take it. gender disparity in caregiving, and the burdens thereof, become even clearer when we look away from those who take leave from paid work to do caregiving and focus on those who leave paid work entirely. in october of 2014, of those who left work because of “family responsibilities,” 29% were male (71,000 men) and 71% female (176,000 women). a year later in october of 2015, the number of men remained 71,000 but the number of women leaving work because of “family responsibilities” had decreased to 135,000. so while there was no 11 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 increase in the number of men leaving work because of “family responsibilities,” they now constitute 34% of those doing so (bls 2015). from year to year, the percentages fluctuate but one thing is clear: this labor is still heavily gendered, and those who leave paid work to do unpaid caregiving are still overwhelmingly women. the costs of leaving work are significant and often unmitigated. in rare cases, persons who quit work to care for a seriously ill family member are still eligible to collect unemployment; eligibility depends on each state’s requirements for severity of illness and which family members are covered. folks who leave the workforce— whether they be men or women—to care for ill family members suffer degradation of their subsequent earning capacity in addition to loss of income for the duration of caregiving. the burdens of continuing to do paid work while also taking on the second unpaid job of caring for dependent persons, and the burdens of leaving the workforce to care for dependent persons, fall predominantly on women. of course, if indeed women were somehow better suited to perform “women’s work,” this distribution of labor might not be unfair.4 after all, not all inequalities are injustices. however, the skills required to perform activities of daily living and administer medications and simple medical treatments are clearly skills that men also possess. indeed, the average man is stronger and taller than the average woman and may be better suited to much of the physical labor involved in caring for a dependent adult: bathing, lifting, dressing, and so forth. and yet it is women who do most of the caregiving and on whom the burdens of caregiving fall most heavily, women who are least likely to take leave from paid work and most likely to leave the labor market. that certain kinds of work are assigned according to attributes irrelevant to the performance of that work is a hallmark of injustice, and we see it here. remedy will require a change in the basic structure of family—within marriages, sibling relationships, and other aspects of family life. kittay has acknowledged this, noting that de-gendering dependency work may require “public programs of educating for dependency work—especially for young boys and men” (1998, 137). this is part of a change in the sociocultural perception and valuation of any such thing as “women’s work.” we should no longer devalue unpaid work such as caregiving simply because it is unpaid, simply because it cannot easily be measured in economic terms (folbre 2001; waring 2003, 2004), simply because it is done by women and, even when paid, receives a lower wage. thus, there is an obligation to alter social perceptions, attitudes, and basic structures that result in gendered division of, and devaluation of, the labor of 4 we would still be concerned over whether they were adequately compensated, fairly treated, and their work were valued, just as we would be for dancers who have unusual strength or flexibility, or surgeons with superb manual dexterity. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 caregiving. i shall argue for one more such general social obligation to caregivers before we address which agents must fulfill such duties. iv. treatment of unpaid dependency workers in the context of paid work is unjust economic pressures often drive businesses to concentrate only on what will serve their bottom line,5 yet businesses are also part of free-riding society. as susan moller okin (1989) says: . . . many full-time employers assume, in innumerable ways, that “someone” is at home at least part-time during the day to assume primary responsibility for children. . . . it is assumed by the high degree of geographical mobility required by many high-level management positions. it is also implicit in the structure of the professions, in which the greatest demands are placed on workers at the very peak of their child-bearing years. (156) work is equally as insensitive to those who care for any sort of dependent person. many of these aspects became apparent in the discussion of leave from work, and leaving work, in the previous section. and yet, as okin notes, nothing in the nature of work makes it impossible to adjust to the fact that people are caregivers as well as workers (1989, 5). she argues that “any just and fair solution to the urgent problem of women’s and children’s vulnerability must encourage and facilitate the equal sharing by men and women of paid and unpaid work, of productive and reproductive labor” (171). it might be argued that the fmla does just this. indeed, when okin’s justice, gender, & the family was published in 1989, the fmla was not yet law. were a good solution to the problem okin describes so well already on the books, we would need only concern ourselves with implementation. however, the fmla is deeply unsatisfying. for one thing, it requires only unpaid leave, forcing paid workers into exactly the kind of choice discussed in the last section: to take leave and lose pay, or to continue working and take on the second unpaid job and unpredictable hours of caregiving. for another, it only covers employees who work for a “covered employer” at a worksite within 75 miles of which that employer employs at least 50 people, for whom they have worked at least 12 months cumulative and 1,250 hours during the previous 12 months (u.s. dol 2015). approximately 40% of the actual work force is not even eligible due to these and other restrictions, including what 5 governments experience similar financial pressures, especially when political priorities include fiscal responsibility. 13 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 ellen bravo calls a “very narrow definition of family,” which does not include samesex partners or one’s own grandparents (ludden 2013a). in addition, the fmla only allows leave from 12 workweeks during any 12-month period (u.s. dol 2015). this is insufficient for most caregiving, much of which ranges well above the covered 3 months. according to the bureau of labor and statistics, duration of eldercare was less than 1 year for only 22.9% of caregivers, while 26.9% of caregivers provided care for 1 to 2 years, and on the high end, 15.4% had provided care for 10 years or more (bls 2015). despite its flaws, fmla is a boon for those individuals who qualify and who can afford to take advantage of it. far superior for the purposes of my argument are various paid family leave pilot programs being implemented in several states that have “paid family leave insurance programs” (ludden 2013a). these seem similar to the workers’ compensation insurance programs in which employers pay into the program and the program pays out to employees who qualify. the issue of who qualifies, however, and for how long still holds. how long will benefits last? will parents of any gender—fathers as well as mothers—receive them for caring for their children, and for the same duration? will married or unmarried children of either gender—sons as well as daughters—receive them for caring for their parents? what of grandchildren who care for their grandparents, who are currently not eligible for fmla coverage? what of close friends, nieces, or nephews of the dependent person who perform unpaid dependency work? will they also be eligible? we must ask ourselves whether what we want is to support certain kinds or degrees of family-based dependency work, or whether we want to support dependency work per se because of its value to society. it is the latter, a kind of universal support for caregivers, that kittay (1999) argues for when she calls for a "universalistic model" (128) of entitlement to a "socially supported situation in which one can give care without the caregiving becoming a liability to one's own well-being." (66) without changing the basic structures of paid work, including programs that allow paid leave as well as unpaid leave, and for a wider variety of those who often perform unpaid dependency work, caregivers will continue to be vulnerable precisely because they provide care. thus, there remains unfulfilled an obligation to reform the basic structure of paid work so that it does not inherently disadvantage those who perform unpaid work, and a concomitant obligation to alter social perceptions of who should engage in caregiving. now that we have seen the general social obligations that society owes to unpaid caregivers, we can determine which agents are responsible for fulfilling them. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 v. the remedy: a distributed scheme of obligations, its policy ramifications, and required changes in the basic structures of society i have established that the obligations society has to caregivers are grounded in the fact that society demands dependency work and is thus responsible to dependency workers for a just distribution of burdens. the obligations are x to reduce emotional and mental strain on unpaid caregivers. x to alter social perceptions, attitudes, and basic structures that result in gendered division of the labor of caregiving. x to reform the basic structure of paid work so that it does not inherently disadvantage those who perform unpaid dependency work. x to alter social perceptions of who should engage in caregiving. these are, as kittay would have it, universal obligations. addressing each to whatever degree possible will remove layers of vulnerability, reducing injustice. for instance, the first obligation, to reduce emotional and mental strain on unpaid caregivers, is indeed a general claim, even a universal one. however, the obligation is strongest to those who suffer the most, such as children who perform dependency work, as discussed earlier in this paper. by removing layers of vulnerability from the most vulnerable, we best satisfy this obligation. we satisfy it by removing layers of vulnerability from any caregiver made vulnerable by emotional and mental strain. what does society owe to those who render care? what is just caring for caregivers? to fulfill these obligations. but as i have argued, we are only partially done once we understand obligations of justice in relation to caregivers. the final step is to be able to assign responsibilities for implementing these obligations to particular agents. classically, the distinction between public and private has been used to assign these obligations, deriving unfairly limited public policies and relegating such work to those held responsible for the private sphere. with those who have critiqued the public-private distinction before me, i am calling for a principled erasure of the flawed picture of society on the grounds that it does not suit the pursuit of justice in this case (or, it could be argued, in most others). this opens up a whole new range of agents and concerns that had previously been exempt from dealing with dependency work, especially in its unpaid form. how can we specify those agents and their obligations? seeking to provide a “robust and realistic account of agents of justice who are to carry the counterpart obligations,” onora o’neill (2001) focuses on the assignment of obligations to what she calls “agents of justice” (186). o’neill describes two major kinds of agents of justice (hereafter referred to as aojs): primary aojs and secondary aojs. these differ in their capabilities. this matters, 15 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 because agents of justice must have “specific, effectively resourced capacities which they can deploy in actual circumstance. . . . it is the specific capabilities of agents or agencies in specific situations . . . that are relevant to determining which obligations of justice they can hold and discharge. . . . [this] provides a seriously realistic starting point for normative reasoning” (189). primary aojs have the capacity to determine how principles of justice are to be institutionalized within a certain domain and typically have some means of coercion. they also have the ability to construct other agents or agencies with specific competencies regarding that institutionalization. primary aojs could be a body like a legislature or one without a formal structure like a loosely organized town meeting, or an individual like a monarch or elected leader—in sum, the state (181). secondary aojs, on the other hand, are typically thought of as contributing to justice by meeting the demands of primary agents and of justice more generally. secondary aojs can be nonprofit organizations like the robert wood johnson foundation, local churches, the alzheimer’s association, the american nursing association, or even individuals within the community whose actions can have effects on justice relations within the community (181). as o’neill sees it, if agents have the capability to fulfill the remedy, then they have the obligation to fulfill the remedy (184-185). one does not become an agent of justice because one has served justice, but rather because it is possible for one to do so. according to o’neill, we can determine the obligations any particular aoj has by assessing that agent’s capabilities in light of the overall task of achieving justice and eliminating injustice. in o’neill’s eyes, all of the aojs she discussed (primary or otherwise) have capabilities that can contribute to greater justice. that they may fail to do so does not make them any less agents of justice, though it does make them less praiseworthy or more blameworthy depending on the nature of that failure. responsible aojs work together in a distributed scheme of specific obligations in order to fulfill the duties of justice: “justice has to be built by a diversity of agents and agencies that possess and lack varying ranges of capabilities, and that can contribute to justice—or to injustice—in more diverse ways than is generally acknowledged” (o’neill 2001, 194). however, the primary aoj must be convinced that certain principles of justice apply, for without the primary aoj, pervasive change is unlikely. o’neill concerns herself with the role of secondary aojs in a weak state, a state that does not use its power to pursue injustice—a rogue state—but rather one that is incapable of pursuing justice or compelling it (190). she contends that when states fail as agents of justice, it is because they “lack a specific range of capabilities that are needed for the delivery of justice” (190). in these cases, secondary aojs step in to take over these functions to the best of their capabilities. while they may have some of the necessary capabilities, they will lack the enforcement ability that is the legitimate authority of government. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 however, i contend that secondary aojs have a role to play even in strong states beyond just “badgering” the primary aoj to pursue justice (think of the american civil rights movement and women’s movements). even in strong states, secondary aojs can actually implement cultural and practical changes that fulfill obligations within their capabilities. based on o’neill’s conception of secondary aojs, in the case of meeting obligations to those who render care, we should indeed draw on both strong primary agents of justice and secondary ones. we ought to expand the notion of agents of justice well beyond the kinds of organizations o’neill envisions to include quite small community groups and even individuals. nonetheless, primary aojs are important, for only they have the enforcement capabilities and large-scale implementation capabilities necessary for sweeping change. they are uniquely capable of removing certain layers of vulnerability and fulfilling particular aspects of obligations with respect to caregivers. these include family leave policies and labor conditions that make caregiving less burdensome, and remove layers of vulnerability, for caregivers who perform paid work outside the home. it may be tempting in the united states, where many people have a strong resistance to government involvement in business, to suggest that policies should at most provide guidance to those who wish to voluntarily comply. alas, as nancy folbre (2001) has pointed out, “bad capitalisms” too often outcompete good ones: “employers who assume their fair share of social costs . . . will operate at a disadvantage” (186) if others are permitted to refuse to do so. policies that require employers to give reasonable paid leave, to not penalize employees for caregiving, and so forth, must involve mandatory compliance. mandatory compliance requires enforcement mechanisms, and only the teeth of a primary aoj can effect such change. while both secondary and primary aojs can remove layers of vulnerability and do their part to fulfill society’s obligations of justice to caregivers, the most effective endeavors in pursuit of justice will indeed, as o’neill said, require varying ranges of capabilities and thus a diversity of agents and agencies. within this diversity, many secondary agents of justice have a substantive role in realizing obligations to caregivers. there are some aspects of supporting caregivers and removing layers of vulnerability that government alone lacks the capability to perform, not because it is weak but because of what is required. while doulia and one-to-one reciprocity are the grounds of social obligations to caregivers, the state alone—as the primary aoj—will not be sufficient for fulfilling those social obligations. in order to effectively fulfill social obligations to caregivers, a concerted scheme of distributed obligations and interlocking policies will need to be put in place. consider the following proposal. unpaid care work cannot continue to be performed primarily by individuals, relegated to the private sphere. the burdens of intense caregiving are too great for 17 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 both children and adults performing dependency work, as i have shown. to reduce emotional and mental strain on unpaid caregivers, we will need the state and other agents of justice to offer actual assistance to caregivers in the performance of their duties. i concur with nancy fraser when she suggests that some socially “supported care work would be located outside of households altogether—in civil society” (1994, 613). examples of concrete ways this has been done in the past include respite care centers where dependent persons can be brought one or more days a week, where their needs will be met by others. i have already warned against displacing the burdens of caregiving onto those already burdened in exploitative ways. i recommend against that. however, there are ways to set up respite care centers and in-home care assistance such that those who staff these endeavors are individual agents of justice from within the community who volunteer to help, or who are decently paid with workplace protections.6 existing iterations or respite centers have been local and not consistently available, due to the lack of involvement by a widely effective primary aoj, and prone to exploitation of paid staff. such centers can be supported by a combination of government funding and volunteerism, by the involvement of civil society. however, volunteers of both genders will not be forthcoming unless the state or strong, respected secondary agents of justice can broker a national debate on caregiving in order to indicate a symbolic endorsement of the reconsideration of the value of caregiving and who should perform it, thereby also raising the issue of the basic structure of the family. the need for such public policies is reinforced by fraser, who notes that “women today often combine breadwinning and caregiving, albeit with great difficulty and strain. . . . [the state must] ensure that men do the same, while redesigning institutions so as to eliminate difficulty and strain” (1994, 611). however, the state cannot accomplish this simply by regulation. members of society who have so far been unwilling to take on caregiving must change their willingness to take on such duties and become agents of justice, themselves. distributing caregiving more fairly and widely will lessen its burdens on all caregivers. this will also require a change in society’s culture of work. at the very least, employers would not seek to skirt inadequate but relevant laws such as the family and medical leave act. acting rightly, government would enforce such policies with substantive disincentives. but there will also have to be a significant change in the underlying assumptions of employers. per okin, they could no longer assume that all paid workers have someone at home to take care of the family. doing so makes caregivers who are doing paid work particularly vulnerable. in the same vein, fraser proposes that, in a work culture which supports caregiving on 6 see reiheld 2013 for descriptions of attempts by home care workers to achieve such protections, which are stronger with a primary aoj to enforce them. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 grounds of justice rather than charity, “all jobs would assume workers who are caregivers, too . . . and all would have employment-enabling services” (1994, 612) such as flexible scheduling, several different promotional tracks, and leave—paid, and not overly restrictive—to care for dependent family members. employers are capable of contributing to justice as secondary agents of justice, and they are obligated to do so. a strong primary agent of justice dedicated to fulfilling these obligations would ensure it. one of the most compelling objections to increased involvement by the state in supporting members of society has always been that it costs too much. this objection carries even more weight as the global economy, and the u.s. economy with it, hobbles slowly out of the recession that began late in the first decade of this century. this is compelling not because money is the goal of all human endeavor, but because all government-run social programs require funding; adding increased funding to directly support caregivers, and an infrastructure to coordinate support for caregivers, is no small thing. taxes will go up or the state will have to borrow funding on top of the already significant national debt. smaller government and fiscal responsibility are run over roughshod by such a proposal, folks might say, as they have done in response to the affordable care act of 2010 (a.k.a. obamacare). there are at least three ways to respond to the cost-based objection. first, one might reject the consequentialist perspective wholesale and say that money is no object when doing the right thing, especially something so fundamental to the lives of humans as support for our nested dependency upon one another. however, this seems to ignore that doing the right thing requires resources. without expanding the pool of resources in some way, doing this right thing will require undoing some other (perhaps also right) thing. this leads me to a second possible reply: i do not reject consequentialism outright, but i reject the cost-based objection’s focus on the negative consequences, namely the size of government, the increase in taxes, and fiscal responsibility. i am entirely comfortable with expanding the pool of resources in order to do more right things. i believe that we must mitigate the consequences that fall upon the tens of millions of unpaid caregivers in the united states who perform this essential labor, contributing to the well-being of not just the dependent person but society as a whole. to focus on plausible duties to restrict the growth of government or keep taxes and debt stable for this and future generations is too petty and narrow a consequence, when faced with how critical it is to maintain and support caregiving relationships. justice, as i have argued in this paper, has so strong an argument in favor of support for caregiving that the concomitant obligations to caregivers far outweigh any plausible duties to restrict the growth of government or keep taxes and debt stable. 19 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 now i come to the third and final reply to the cost-based objection. it may well be that we can all accept a modified consequentialism based on the importance of support for caregiving relationships, and that we can also embrace a principled pursuit of justice in support of caregiving relationships. doing so will not be cheap, but the distributed schema of obligations keeps the costs as low as possible while holding agents of justice throughout society accountable for exerting their capabilities to achieve a more just society. after all, it is not only the primary aoj— government—that is responsible. employers can change their family leave policies and work-schedule expectations, offering flex time, supporting telecommuting, or adjusting expectations of availability for late meetings so that family members can reliably be home in time to provide promised care. non-governmental organizations such as the alzheimer’s association or the national alliance on mental illness, social welfare organizations such as rotary, the knights of columbus, or the ymcas of america, and local communities may be able to set up respite care programs or socalled “adult day care.” friends and neighbors might offer to stay with and care for the dependent person to give respite and support. relatives whose gender or positioning have allowed us to assume caregiving was not their job can either take on more of the caregiving or give better support to the caregiver. by distributing obligations and calling on all sectors and members of society to improve support for caregiving relationships, we can accomplish justice in a way that is not only just—asking those who benefit from, and are capable of supporting, caregiving relationships to do both—but also cost-effective if we are to do it well. vi. conclusion recent years have seen an increasing number of primary agents of justice playing a key role in support for caregiving. states and municipalities have been experimenting with innovative solutions to the flaws in the reach and scope of the fmla. vicki shabo, director of the national partnership for women and families, has been tracking such solutions: [ten] cities and states have passed paid sick days or family leave or expansions to family leave laws. new york city put in place a paid sick days law which covers every worker in the city, guarantees more than one million access to paid sick time and the rest access to unpaid sick time. that means you can't lose your job if you're sick or a family member is sick or needs medical care. portland and jersey city did the same things. then rhode island, most significantly, became the third state in the country to have a family leave insurance program in place. which means that workers there would be able to take time when a new child joins 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 the family or when a family member is seriously ill. (ludden 2013b) all good news, to be sure, and these options provide more reinforcement from primary agents of justice that this is indeed an obligation that a just society has toward its members. however, if i am correct, laws alone will not do the trick. american culture will have to change, a change helped and not hindered by the work of primary agents of justice, and multiple primary and secondary agents of justice will need to become involved. laws like the fmla are promising but constitute a patchwork, and cannot do the job alone. if employers fight compliance or employees remain afraid to take leave because of the consequences of doing so, no amount of family leave in the world will suffice. nonetheless, these are promising changes, like the changes before them, for they indicate that even in the throes of recession, as employers progressively strip benefits from employees (ludden 2013b), there is nonetheless increasing acknowledgement that the current structure of american society ill-serves unpaid caregivers. piece by piece, we can strip away the layers of vulnerability imposed on caregivers by the way we (fail to) value such work. to embrace that as a society calls for each agent to embrace their share of fulfilling obligations to unpaid caregivers. i contend that the capabilities for fulfilling society’s duties towards caregivers determine the specific obligations of agents of justice. they also imply necessary involvement of noncaregiving men and women, employers, social welfare organizations, non-governmental organizations, and the state at all levels. without this distributed involvement, the burdens of caregivers may increase as caregiving needs increase and will, at best, remain at the current unjust status quo. with it, to whatever degree possible, we relieve these burdens incrementally, layer by layer. a full deployment of responsible agents of justice may well eliminate them. the personal actions of those who serve the public good must not remain a matter for private redress. surely it is incumbent upon us as a society to refrain from making vulnerable the most essential among us, to reap benefits without sowing unjust burdens. references beauchamp, tom l., and james f. childress. 2001. principles of biomedical ethics, 5th edition. new york: oxford university press. bergen, raquel kennedy. 1999. “in brief: marital rape.” applied research forum: national electronic network on violence against women. accessed july 29, 2015. http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/marital%20rape.pdf. 21 reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/marital%20rape.pdf boyd, monica. 2005. “gender aspects of international migration to canada and the united states.” international symposium on international migration and development, population division, department of economic and social affairs, united nations secretariat. turin, italy. accessed october 23, 2006. 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reiheld: just caring for caregivers published by scholarship@western, 2015 http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/paid-leave/paid-leave-good-for-business.pdf http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/paid-leave/paid-leave-good-for-business.pdf http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38168029/ns/business-careers/t/lowest-paying-jobs-america/#.uz8m7vldv8e http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38168029/ns/business-careers/t/lowest-paying-jobs-america/#.uz8m7vldv8e http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/1421.htm world health organization. 2002. “current and future long-term care needs.” accessed april 4, 2014. http://www.who.int/chp/knowledge/publications/ltc_needs.pdf. alison reiheld is assistant professor in the philosophy department at southern illinois university – edwardsville. dr. reiheld also serves as director of the interdisciplinary women’s studies program at siue. she has written as a scholarly public intellectual as well as producing traditional scholarly works on food ethics, medical ethics, miscarriage, obesity, medicalization, and civility in a morally diverse society. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1 http://www.who.int/chp/knowledge/publications/ltc_needs.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care alison reiheld recommended citation just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation stark, cynthia a. “why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4). article 1. 2020 why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression cynthia a. stark university of utah cynthia.stark@utah.edu stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression1 cynthia a. stark abstract luck egalitarianism has been criticized for (1) condoning some cases of oppression and (2) condemning others for the wrong reason—namely, that the victims were not responsible for their oppression. oppression is unjust, however, the criticism says, regardless of whether victims are responsible for it, simply because it is contrary to the equal moral standing of persons. i argue that four luck egalitarian responses to this critique are inadequate. two address only the first part of the objection and do so in a way that risks making luck egalitarianism inconsistent. a third severely dilutes the luck egalitarian doctrine. a fourth manages to denounce some instances of oppression for the right reason, but at the same time permits other instances of oppression and condemns yet others for the wrong reason. keywords: oppression, luck egalitarian, relational egalitarian, equality, inequality, distributive justice any egalitarian theory of justice must condemn oppression. when one group of people systematically subordinates or degrades another, they are in clear violation of egalitarian ideals. one strain of egalitarianism, known as luck egalitarianism, has been criticized for lacking the theoretical resources to denounce oppression. if correct, this criticism is fatal. hence several luck egalitarians have attempted to refute it. i argue below that none of these attempts succeed. i begin by briefly outlining the difference between two reigning egalitarian approaches: relational egalitarianism and luck egalitarianism. i then elaborate upon the oppression objection. next, i explain attempts by nicholas barry (2006), mark navin 1i owe thanks to members of the audience at the 2017 feminist ethics and social theory conference and at the society for analytic feminism session at the 2017 pacific apa conference. i am especially indebted to kathryn joyce for her copious feedback on both the saf conference version and the penultimate version of this paper. i am also grateful for the excellent feedback i received from two anonymous referees for this journal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 (2011), shlomi segall (2007, 2010), and kok-chor tan (2008, 2012) to combat the oppression objection. finally, i explain the flaws in each of these approaches: the first two establish that oppression is (merely) conditionally unjust, which, i argue, threatens to render the approaches inconsistent; the third severely dilutes the luck egalitarian doctrine; and the last condones certain obvious cases of oppression and, further, condemns some cases as (merely) conditionally unjust. two types of egalitarianism egalitarians theories of justice generally fall into two categories. the first contains what are called “relational” or “democratic equality” accounts. this category is fairly eclectic. it includes rawlsianism and other views that stress the importance of egalitarian social relationships. these views tend to foreground such values as equal citizenship, nonhierarchical social arrangements, and reciprocity (rawls 1971; anderson 1999; scheffler 2003; schemmel 2012a). the second category contains luck egalitarian approaches (dworkin 1981; arneson 1989; cohen 1989). according to these views, differences in people’s distributive shares are just if they are traceable to choice and unjust if they are traceable to brute luck. luck egalitarians distinguish between “option luck” and “brute luck.” according to dworkin, who introduced the distinction, “option luck is a matter of how deliberate and calculated gambles turn out—whether someone gains or loses through accepting an isolated risk he or she should have anticipated and might have declined. brute luck is a matter of how risks fall out that are not in that sense deliberate gambles” (dworkin 1981, 293).2 the inequalities that luck egalitarians judge unjust are those caused only by brute luck. inequalities arising from option luck, like those arising from choice, are just. henceforth, “luck” is to be understood as “brute luck” unless otherwise noted. luck egalitarians invoke the distinction between luck and choice because they believe that people should be held responsible for their choices by paying the costs of those choices and that they should not be held responsible for their luck. therefore, it is unjust for the state to aid persons who are comparatively badly off due to their choices, because in doing so, the state forces some people to subsidize the choices of others in which case those people are forced to take responsibility for the choices of others. it is just, however, for the state to aid persons who are comparatively badly off due to their luck because, in this case, their deficits occur through no fault of their own. 2 for discussion of this distinction, see christiano (1999), lippert-rasmussen (2001), vallentyne (2002), sandbu (2004), and barry (2008). stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 the oppression objection parties to the debate about luck egalitarianism and oppression rely on iris marion young’s (1990) account of oppression. she argues that oppression is, by definition, a structural phenomenon and that it has five faces: exploitation, marginalization, cultural domination, powerlessness, and violence. proponents of the oppression objection state that these phenomena are unjust on the ground that they violate the equal moral standing of persons. they claim that luck egalitarians fail to recognize that equal moral standing requires that citizens relate to one another as social equals, which precludes any sort of oppressive social relations (anderson 1999; scheffler 2003).3 this failure is rooted in the luck egalitarian aim of eliminating inequalities produced by luck but not those produced by choice. this aim causes luck egalitarians to make two mistakes. first, they end up condoning oppression when it is created by choice. for instance, they condone gender hierarchy created by women’s informed choices to do unpaid care work. second, when they do end up condemning oppression, they do so on the ground that it is caused by luck. for example, they condemn gender hierarchy created by discrimination because being subject to discrimination on the basis of one’s gender is a matter of luck. strategies for combatting the oppression objection though they rebut the oppression objection in different ways, all the theorists listed above deny the objection’s claim that luck egalitarianism ignores the implications of universal moral equality. they contend that luck egalitarians simply see those implications differently. where the relational egalitarian sees universal moral equality as grounding a demand for nonhierarchical and nonoppressive social arrangements, the luck egalitarian sees universal moral equality as grounding the idea that inequalities produced by choice are just, while inequalities produced by luck are unjust.4 for luck egalitarians, this luck/choice principle, which in turn grounds more specific distributive principles,5 respects universal moral equality by 3 for discussion of anderson’s (1999) paper, see kaufman (2004), brown (2005), and knight (2005). 4 tan (2012) argues that the luck/choice principle is, contra anderson, a relational principle that is clearly connected to the equal moral worth claim. the luck/choice principle, he states, expresses the idea that people stand in relations of equality with one another when they hold one another responsible for their choices and not for their luck. (see also schemmel 2012b.) 5 in tan’s (2012, 12) words, the luck/choice principle is the “grounding reason” for “why equality matters.” it does not specify the currency or pattern of luck egalitarian distributive justice. (see also tan 2008, 674.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 holding moral agents responsible for their choices but not their luck (tan 2012). as we will see below, their explicit endorsement of universal moral equality presents difficulties for the defenses presented by barry, navin, and (to some extent) tan. oppression as unchosen barry (2006) argues that if luck egalitarians adopt objective well-being as the metric of justice—as the good that should be distributed in accordance with the luck/choice principle—they can condemn virtually all types of oppression. barry’s two-part argument is as follows. the first part runs as follows: oppression inevitably reduces people’s objective well-being. people are oppressed on the basis of their group affinities. in most cases, people do not choose their group affinities. therefore, in these cases, people’s oppression-caused reduced well-being is unjust on luck egalitarian grounds. the second part runs as follows: included in a person’s well-being is the right to choose certain things that are central to their identity—for example, a religion—without being oppressed as a result. hence if a person chooses to affiliate with an oppressed group, we should regard them as choosing their affiliation but not their oppression. thus, the oppression-caused diminished wellbeing they experience is luck egalitarianly unjust. hence, oppression, whether caused by a chosen or an unchosen group affiliation, is always unjust because it is always unchosen. why must luck egalitarians adopt objective well-being as the currency of justice if they want to denounce oppression? consider a comparison with the resourcist view advanced by dworkin (1981). this view denounces inequalities in resources provided they are caused by luck and not choice. suppose a person chooses to inhabit an identity that causes him to be oppressed. let us say that he converts to judaism and is then subjected to anti-semitic exclusion and hostility in his community. the resourcist cannot register this inequality because it is not an inequality in resources. our convert does not have fewer resources due to his religion. he has less well-being. the idea is that when the metric of justice is wellbeing, the luck egalitarian can easily register the inequalities instituted by oppressive practices, such as anti-semitism, because these inevitably impact people’s well-being. barry aims to show that luck egalitarians are “fundamentally” concerned with inequalities caused by, for example, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, and that “addressing social oppression becomes a very important goal of luck egalitarianism” once well-being is adopted as the currency of justice (barry 2006, 93). the problem with his approach is that it evades the heart of the oppression objection. according to that objection, luck egalitarianism is flawed because it permits, not only in fact but in principle, certain oppressive relationships (namely, those created by choice). it is, therefore, in principle, incompatible with the stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 equal moral worth of persons. barry’s response is to argue that (when outfitted with the proper currency of justice) luck egalitarianism, in fact, must prohibit all oppressive relationships and is therefore, in fact, compatible with the equal moral worth of persons. the point is that where the proponent of the oppression objection sees oppression as unconditionally unjust, the luck egalitarian sees it as conditionally unjust. the proponent of the oppression objection says that oppression in itself violates the moral equality of persons and so is in itself unjust. she opposes the fact that, for the luck egalitarian, oppression is unjust on the condition that is unchosen. hence, barry’s argument that this condition is always met does not address the whole of the objection. barry appears to be aware of this problem, for he observes that advocates of the oppression objection see “equality as about treating people as moral equals, independent of questions of well-being” (barry 2006, 96). for them, he notes, oppression would be wrong even if it had no effect on the well-being of those involved. he seems to think that this is a flaw in the oppression objection, although he does not argue for this idea. he concedes that oppression is wrong independent of people’s subjective welfare and suggests it is a strength of his view that it is sensitive to the effects of oppression on people’s objective welfare. so, in the end, barry does not defeat the oppression objection; he simply takes a stand against oppression. oppression as something for which people are not responsible navin (2011) responds to the oppression objection by arguing that people who become members of oppressed groups through their choices are nevertheless typically not responsible for their oppression. this is not because, as barry claims, they have chosen the group but not the oppression. navin believes, contra barry, that it is reasonable to think that persons who choose to join an oppressed group have indeed chosen to be oppressed, provided they had, at the time, adequate options and were capable of anticipating the consequences of their actions. there are two reasons, he says, that people are generally not responsible for their oppression when it is caused by their choices. the first is that people who have not experienced oppression, even when they understand the likely outcomes of their choice to join an oppressed group, are not capable of anticipating the way in which those outcomes will restrict their later options. the second is that even if a person may be responsible for becoming oppressed, she may not be responsible for remaining oppressed because the person who made the initial choice may not be the same person (in the sense relevant for responsibility) who is now suffering due to the initial choice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 to illustrate the first type of case, navin gives the example of a man who chooses not to study and fails out of university. he has adequate options and knows that the result will be lower-paying and less-inspiring work. so, he is, in essence, choosing the oppression experienced by members of the working class. navin claims that this person, however, cannot be expected to anticipate how the workplace powerlessness and marginalization that accompany unskilled labor will limit his future opportunities in life. he cannot be expected to see, that is, how joining the working class will constrain his life prospects, and so he is not responsible for his oppression. to illustrate the second type of case, navin provides the example of a 60year-old woman who suffers from job-market marginalization because, at age 19, she chose to sell illegal drugs and was convicted of a felony. he stipulates that, unlike the unmotivated university student, this woman was capable in her youth of comprehending the lifelong constraints that would be imposed on her as a convicted felon. he concludes that, nevertheless, she is not currently responsible for the choice she made as a teenager because she now has different beliefs, desires, and character traits than did the 19-year-old version of herself. she is, therefore, not responsible for her current oppression.6 whatever its merits, navin’s response, like barry’s, does not defeat the oppression objection, which says that oppression is unjust categorically, simply on grounds of the moral equality of persons. like barry, navin holds that oppression is unjust conditionally. it is unjust only when people are not responsible for it. as it turns out, navin says, they are virtually never responsible for it: those born into it are obviously not responsible, and those who choose it are typically not responsible either, for the reasons he provides. navin, like barry, argues that the luck egalitarian condition on which the injustice of oppression depends virtually always holds and that therefore luck egalitarianism virtually always prohibits oppression.7 but the concern of the oppression objection is not merely that luck egalitarianism cannot prohibit all instances of oppression but that it does not prohibit oppression for the right reason. 6 sher (2014) discusses cases of this sort. 7 navin’s (2011) approach brings out a problem with the luck egalitarian’s approach to oppression that i do not discuss: some luck egalitarians seem to be committed in at least some cases to compensating people for their oppression rather than eradicating the oppression itself. for instance, suppose a working-class person’s nonresponsibility for their oppression gives them a claim upon the state for extra resources or opportunities. this does not necessarily end their oppression, nor does it eradicate working class oppression in general. stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 barry and navin might respond by claiming that my expectation of a definitive refutation of the oppression objection is unreasonable. in fact, it is question-begging, they might say, to expect them to show that oppression is wrong according to luck egalitarianism on the same ground that it is wrong according to relational egalitarianism. as long as they can show that luck egalitarianism virtually always prohibits oppression, they have established its egalitarian credentials. to say that luck egalitarianism is defective unless it condemns oppression for the same reason that relational egalitarians do, they might argue, would be akin to saying that utilitarianism is defective unless it condemns slavery for the same reason that deontologists do. but that is simply to say that utilitarians should be deontologists. this response does not pass muster. notice that the analogy with the dispute between utilitarians and deontologists is inapt. those theories have very different accounts of value: the first endorses the intrinsic worth of happiness, whereas the second endorses the intrinsic worth of persons. many of their differences are traceable to that fundamental difference. however, both relational egalitarians and the luck egalitarians under discussion explicitly found their views on the equal intrinsic worth of persons. hence in order to reject the claim that what makes oppression unjust is that it violates the equal-worth ideal, these luck egalitarians cannot deny the ideal nor view it as defeasible. instead they must establish that transgressing the ideal through political arrangements is not an injustice, or they must show that oppression does not, in itself, transgress the ideal. i assume the first claim is plainly indefensible. but the second is also unassailable. this is because social hierarchies have historically been justified by the idea of differences in the intrinsic worth of persons. furthermore, even if these hierarchies are no longer so justified explicitly, they are maintained by structures that emerged under ideologies of natural group hierarchy and which permit some people to treat others as if they have less intrinsic worth. the luck egalitarians under discussion, moreover, cannot deny the existence of such structures, because they accept young’s (1990) account of oppression as a structural phenomenon.8 it follows that they must concede that oppression as such violates universal moral equality. in order to make their case, then, barry and navin must, first, establish the theoretical advantage of founding the injustice of oppression upon a principle derived from universal moral equality—namely, the luck/choice principle—rather than upon the ideal itself, even though oppression clearly violates the ideal directly. second, they must demonstrate that their view is not internally inconsistent. given that they ground their theory in universal moral equality, they are committed, for the reasons i stated above, to the categorical injustice of oppression. yet, in grounding the injustice of oppression in the luck/choice principle, they are 8 this applies especially to barry’s (2006) approach. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 committed to the conditional injustice of oppression. it follows that barry and navin appear to endorse simultaneously the idea that oppression is unjust regardless of whether we are responsible for it and the idea that it is unjust only when we are not responsible for it. value-pluralist luck egalitarianism segall’s (2010) approach is distinct from that of barry and navin. he maintains that luck egalitarians should be value pluralists (temkin 2003; lippertrasmussen 2015). on his view, distributive justice is one aspect of justice, and justice is one aspect of morality. distributive justice (or “fairness,” in segall’s terms) is the comparative aspect of justice: it concerns people’s shares of goods relative to one another. because the luck/choice principle tells us which differences in shares among persons are just, it is strictly an ideal of fairness. the design of social institutions, segall believes, should be responsive to considerations of morality, broadly speaking, and not merely to considerations of justice, much less merely to considerations of fairness. relevant values outside of justice include such things as utility, self-respect, autonomy, compassion, and so on. it follows that the state may be allowed—or indeed, required—to assist those who are worse off than others due to their own choices because doing so may be demanded by some other moral value. a virtue of this approach, segall explains, is that it enables luck egalitarianism to avoid the “abandonment criticism,” which accuses luck egalitarians of leaving to terrible fates those whose choices have bad outcomes.9 according to this criticism, luck egalitarianism demands, for example, withholding health care from lung cancer patients who chose to smoke or perhaps from those who are injured while skiing.10 segall’s value pluralism relies on a specific reading of the luck/choice principle, in particular of the choice half of that principle (the “choice principle”). the luck egalitarian views i discussed earlier interpret the choice principle as stating that it is unjust for the state to ameliorate inequalities produced by choice; justice requires that those inequalities be sustained. call this the “strict view.” segall holds what i will call the “lax view,” which says that justice allows but does not require that inequalities produced by choice be sustained. hence it is not contrary to justice to mitigate choice-generated inequalities. 9 this objection is largely credited to anderson (1999). 10 in contrast with dworkin (1981), segall (2010, 20) defines brute luck as the outcome of actions (or omissions) that it would have been unreasonable for society to expect (in the normative and not epistemic sense) the agent to avoid (or not to avoid). for example, if it is unreasonable to expect people to refrain from skiing, then injuries suffered from skiing are a matter of bad brute luck. stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 the lax version of the choice principle is designed to provide flexibility when making value trade-offs, which are central to the value-pluralist approach. segall identifies two types of trade-offs that might be required. the first arises when the choice principle is “indeterminate.” there may be times, segall says, when the principle does not issue a verdict as to whether or not an inequality produced by choice should be ameliorated. so, we must appeal to some other value to determine the moral acceptability of that inequality. the second type of trade-off arises when the choice principle recommends sustaining an equality produced by choice. in these cases, another value recommending that the inequality be eradicated might outweigh the verdict of the choice principle. in these types of cases, fairness requires sustaining an inequality, but fairness, it turns out, must be sacrificed to some other value. according to segall, only the “less demanding” first type of tradeoff is required to avoid the abandonment objection because, in cases where that objection might be leveled, the choice principle is in fact indeterminate. segall’s approach can arguably be adapted to address the oppression objection.11 indeed, the allegation that luck egalitarianism cannot oppose oppression is plausibly understood as a type of abandonment objection (or at least, like the abandonment objection, as a type of harsh-treatment objection). luck egalitarianism, one might say, abandons those whose choices regarding group membership cause them to suffer marginalization, exploitation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, or violence. it abandons, for instance, the privileged person whose choices lead him to drug addiction and homelessness and therefore to severe marginalization. in response, a proponent of segall’s view can say that, for example, a moral duty of respect for persons requires that the inequality in this type of case be eradicated. value pluralism, then, provides luck egalitarians the resources they need to counter the oppression objection: while the luck egalitarian principle itself does not condemn oppression, another principle does. there are four problems with segall’s view, which together strongly suggest that it is not viable. the first is that the indeterminacy of the choice principle makes it problematically weak. the second is that the demand to revert from the choice principle to an alternative value to counter the abandonment objection is invoked in an ad hoc manner. the third is that segall assumes without warrant that the alternative value we must revert to will inevitably recommend assisting, and not abandoning, those with severe disadvantages resulting from their choices. the fourth problem is that if the choice half of the luck/choice principle is indeterminate, it stands to reason that the luck half is also indeterminate. so, to the extent that indeterminacy weakens the choice principle, it also weakens the luck principle. 11 i am indebted to kathryn joyce for pointing this out to me. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 consider the first problem. according to segall, for the (lax) choice principle to be indeterminate (when it is indeterminate) is for it to be silent “for one reason or another” on the issue of whether or not a choice-generated inequality should be offset (segall 2010, 26). it is indeterminate, in other words, when it implies, for some reason, that rectifying such an inequality is neither fair nor unfair. the lax choice principle, though, is not only sometimes indeterminate. it is always indeterminate because what makes the lax principle lax is that it is indeterminate. the lax version of the choice principle asserts that not offsetting inequalities produced by choice is not unfair. it thereby refrains from stating whether or not offsetting a particular inequality produced by choice is fair. therefore, it is, as such, indeterminate with respect to whether an inequality produced by choice should be offset—it is always silent on this issue.12 it follows that the second type of trade-off identified by segall is impossible: if the lax principle as such never delivers a verdict on the matter of whether to ameliorate an inequality produced by choice, then it never delivers a verdict requiring that such inequalities be sustained. hence we are never required to sacrifice fairness for the sake of another value. indeed, we have no option but to appeal to another value to determine whether or not to rectify any given choicegenerated inequality. this might seem like a strength of the lax choice principle, for the more demanding trade-offs are more contested, and they force us to sacrifice something of great value—namely, fairness. nevertheless, the lax choice principle is feeble. it gives us little guidance regarding inequalities traceable to choice, despite the fact that this is its purpose. it tells us merely that those inequalities may be sustained, but it does not tell us in any case whether they should be. on segall’s approach, then, all cases of inequalities produced by choice must be subjected to some principle other than the choice principle in order to determine whether they should be sustained. hence, the luck/choice principle itself gives us limited guidance on issues of distributive justice on segall’s interpretation of it. now consider the second issue—the problem of ad hocism. let us assume that i am wrong and that the lax choice principle is only sometimes indeterminate, as segall claims. this would mean that, in some instances, it demands maintaining a choice-produced inequality, and in other instances, it is silent. if this is the case, we 12 as i read him, segall is not suggesting that the choice principle is a pro tanto principle, for if it were, it would never be indeterminate. that is, it would never be silent on the issue of whether or not to ameliorate an inequality caused by choice; rather, it would always demand preserving inequalities caused by choice unless a countervailing value demanded that those inequalities be eliminated. thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point. stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 need to know how to tell in which instances the choice principle is silent and hence amenable to a less-demanding trade-off. this is where the threat of ad hocism emerges. segall’s outline of value pluralism suggests that it is precisely when its verdict is counterintuitive that the choice principle is indeterminate: “the abandonment objection” he says, “points to the sort of case, it seems to me, where luck egalitarian distributive justice is indeterminate” (segall 2010, 65). as it stands, this is an ad hoc rescue of the luck egalitarian ideal. to be fair, segall may believe that there are independent criteria of indeterminacy and that it so happens that those criteria imply that virtually all those who would be abandoned by the choice principle should be assisted. for example, he might hold that the choice principle is indeterminate whenever it is hard to establish whether or not a person’s disadvantages are the result of brute luck or option luck.13 but segall should identify these independent criteria, or at least suggest how they might be constructed, so that the critic can see how the appeal to value pluralism legitimately shores up the luck egalitarian theory. moreover, constructing these criteria is no small undertaking, for it is difficult to see how the criteria will avoid merely catering to the harsh-treatment objections that arguably prompted the appeal to value pluralism in the first place. the third problem with segall’s view is that it fails to acknowledge that value pluralism cuts both ways. in fact, segall seems to believe that the values we appeal to when the luck/choice principle is inert will inevitably demand assisting those who suffer excessive disadvantages produced by their choices. so, oppressed people will be rescued for sure. it is conceivable, though, that the value that steps in to fill the void created by the indeterminacy of the choice principle will seal the fate of the person whose choices turned out badly. perhaps a strongly libertarian ideal of personal responsibility is applicable in the case of a person who is convicted of a felony as a young adult. this ideal would likely demand not compensating that person for the inequalities she suffers once released from prison. we cannot know how often value pluralism yields this type of result until we know more about the values at play and about the norms for weighing those values against one another. segall overlooks this double-edged feature of his view because he invokes value pluralism specifically to avoid harsh-treatment criticisms; his aim is to show how luck egalitarians can support policies such as full medical treatment for lung cancer patients who chose to smoke. 13 on segall’s approach, given his account of the distinction between brute luck and option luck, this type of case would arise when it is hard to establish whether or not it is unreasonable for society to expect someone to avoid the action that produced the disadvantage. see footnote 10 above. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 the fourth problem with segall’s view concerns the provisional nature of the verdicts of the luck/choice principle under a regime of value pluralism. absent an argument to the contrary, consistency would seem to demand that if a value can outweigh the verdict of the choice half of the luck/choice principle when that principle is determinate (assuming that it is sometimes determinate), then a value can outweigh the verdict of the luck half (which is always determinate on segall’s view). that is, if value pluralism allows fairness to be overruled in some cases where inequalities have been produced by choice, it must allow fairness to be overruled in some cases where inequalities have been produced by luck. hence, value pluralism implies that perhaps some inequalities caused by luck should be sustained. allowing that other values can trump the verdicts of both halves of the luck/choice principle significantly weakens the principle in the sense that its prescriptions are always and inevitably provisional. the provisional nature of the luck/choice principle under value pluralism is a problem because it makes the structure of the view hard to distinguish from some relational egalitarian positions, such as rawls’s. luck egalitarians claim that rawls also deploys the moral distinction between luck and choice (tan 2012; navin 2011). specifically, in justifying the difference principle,14 rawls (1971, 73) maintains that inequalities produced by one’s initial social position or by one’s place in the distribution of natural talents are “arbitrary from a moral point of view” and therefore unjust. the difference between their view and rawls’s, luck egalitarians say, is that in rawls’s theory, the luck/choice distinction is not foundational, while it is in luck egalitarianism. however, when luck egalitarianism is embedded in the doctrine of value pluralism, the luck/choice distinction’s foundational status is compromised. this is because it is possible that the luck and the choice principles might be outweighed simultaneously, resulting in a verdict that is completely untethered from the luck/choice principle. for example, the value of utility might demand that the last available icu bed be given to the patient whose illness was caused by choice and not to the patient whose illness was caused by luck. luck and choice in various domains like segall, tan (2008, 2012) believes that the moral terrain has a “plural character,” and like segall, he believes that the luck/choice principle is therefore limited in its applicability.15 so, like segall, he believes that luck egalitarians can, in many cases, condemn oppression regardless of whether it is caused by luck or choice. two limits on the luck/choice principle are relevant to the issue of 14 this principle says that inequalities in wealth and income are just if and only if they are to the greatest benefit of the least wealthy. 15 however, he opposes segall’s appeal to value pluralism (tan 2012). stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 oppression.16 first, the luck/choice principle, on tan’s account, is an ideal of distributive justice only. it is a comparative principle that regulates the distribution of economic goods such as resources and opportunities. it does not apply within the domain of political justice, which determines citizens’ basic civil and political rights and liberties. it follows that, when oppression manifests itself as civil or political inequality, as it frequently does, it is not governed by the luck/choice principle. consider the recently revoked prohibition on same-sex marriage in the united states. the luck choice/principle would not apply here, on tan’s view, because the deficit experienced by gay people was a deficit in civil rights. so, whether preferring a same-sex marriage partner is a matter of luck or choice is irrelevant to the justice of eliminating this deficit: a principle of equal civil rights, which is grounded in universal moral equality, demands ending the state’s oppression of gay americans by legalizing same-sex marriage. the second limit is this: the luck/choice principle, for tan, applies only above a certain threshold of basic need. if that threshold is not met, the relevant principles are duties of humanity, which ignore the distinction between luck and choice and are grounded in the moral equality of persons. the plight of persons who are economically very badly off in the absolute sense, then, is not determined by a luck egalitarian distributive principle.17 so, when people are economically very badly off due to oppression, they are owed aid regardless of whether or not their situation arose from their choices. the starving tenant farmer, then, is owed humanitarian assistance regardless of whether his crop failure is traceable to luck or choice. on tan’s view, the luck egalitarian as such is not committed to a particular account of political justice or humanitarian aid. therefore, he can rely on strongly egalitarian principles of political justice and/or stringent duties of humanity, which would enable him to condemn a variety of types of oppression on the ground that they violate the equal standing of persons. however, the luck/choice principle is not 16 a third limit tan (2008, 2012) places upon the luck/choice principle is that it applies only to the design of institutions. institutions, on his view, must refrain from converting matters of luck into distributive inequality. therefore, the luck/choice principle does not apply to people’s personal pursuits. for example, it does not apply to inequalities produced by people giving one another gifts. moreover, it does not apply to nature. for example, it does not apply to inequalities caused by people’s differing degrees of attractiveness. because oppression is a structural phenomenon, which virtually always involves social institutions, there is no oppression caused by personal pursuits alone or by nature. therefore, tan’s distinction between the institutional and noninstitutional domains is not relevant to the issue of oppression. 17 this restriction is what allows tan to avoid the abandonment objection. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 exempt, on tan’s view from evaluating inequalities associated with oppression. remember, it applies whenever there are comparative deficits in economic goods that are not a matter of basic need, for that is when the question of fair distribution arises. the fact that it applies, and cannot be defeated, whenever this question arises, is what makes tan’s view a distinctively luck egalitarian view, in spite of the constraints he imposes upon the applicability of the luck/choice principle. it follows that the luck/choice principle applies to inequalities in resources or opportunities that are caused by race, ethnicity, sex, gender, religion, sexuality, or any other factor that qualifies people for oppression. so, it applies to a large swath of inequality. according to tan, the luck/choice principle condones inequalities caused by these factors when the factors are chosen, and it condemns inequalities caused by these factors when the factors are unchosen. so, tan’s view implies that inequalities in wealth or opportunity caused by, for example, race, sex, or ethnicity are unjust; and inequalities in those goods caused by, for example, adopted religion, social class, or gender status are just. it follows that tan’s view does not succeed in avoiding the oppression objection, for it both permits some types of oppression and condemns some types conditionally; and in condemning those types conditionally, tan’s view is vulnerable to the inconsistency worry that applies to the views of barry and navin. conclusion above i have challenged three strategies used by luck egalitarians to rebut the oppression objection, which says that luck egalitarianism not only condones some cases of oppression but also wrongly locates the injustice of (unjust) oppression in the fact that victims are not responsible for it. the first strategy, employed by barry, argues for a specific metric of justice that enables luck egalitarianism to classify oppression based on both chosen and unchosen group affiliations as a matter of luck. on this approach, virtually all cases of oppression are unjust. the second, employed by navin, drives a wedge between choice and responsibility: people should not be held responsible for choices that lead to oppression. on this approach, too, virtually all cases of oppression are unjust. i maintained that neither of these arguments addresses the entirety of the oppression objection. though they may establish that oppression is virtually always unjust, because people are never responsible for their oppression, these arguments fail to address the objection’s claim that oppression is unjust because it violates the ideal of equal moral worth. i argued, further, that because proponents of these arguments in fact endorse the ideal of equal worth (as the ground of the luck/choice principle), their theories may be inconsistent. oppression as such is clearly incompatible with equal moral worth, i argued, and so it seems that luck egalitarians, as proponents of that ideal, are committed to the categorical injustice stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 of oppression. yet at the same time, they argue that oppression is unjust only when (and because) people are not responsible for it, which implies that oppression is conditionally unjust, even if it is always unjust. but oppression cannot be both unjust categorically, as a violation of universal moral equality, and unjust only on the condition that we are not responsible for it. the third strategy, used by segall and tan, is to restrict the purview of the luck/choice principle. segall argues that the luck/choice principle can be defeated in some cases by other principles. tan argues that the luck/choice principle applies only within a particular domain. this restriction strategy is subject to the following dilemma. if the luck/choice principle is limited so as to condemn all cases of oppression as categorically unjust, as it arguably is on segall’s view, the resulting theory is not distinctively luck egalitarian. if the luck/choice principle is limited so as to preserve the theory’s distinctively luck egalitarian character, as it is on tan’s view, it condones some cases of oppression, and some of those it condemns, it condemns conditionally rather than categorically. so, it does not defeat the oppression objection. references anderson, elizabeth s. 1999. “what is the point of equality?” ethics 109 (2): 287– 337. https://doi.org/10.1086/233897. arneson, richard j. 1989. “equality and equal opportunity for welfare.” philosophical studies 56 (1): 77–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00646210. barry, nicholas. 2006. “defending luck egalitarianism.” journal of applied philosophy 23 (1): 89–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14685930.2006.00322.x. ———. 2008. “reassessing luck egalitarianism.” journal of politics 70 (1): 136–150. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022381607080103/. brown, alexander. 2005. “luck egalitarianism and democratic equality.” ethical perspectives: journal of the european ethics network 12 (3): 293–339. christiano, thomas. 1999. commentary on “what is the point of equality?’’ by elisabeth s. anderson. bears (brown electronic article review service) symposium. http://www.brown.edu/departments/philosophy/bears/9904chri.html. cohen, g. a. 1989. “on the currency of egalitarian justice.” ethics 99 (4): 906–944. https://doi.org/10.1086/293126. dworkin, ronald. 1981. “what is equality? part 2: equality of resources.” philosophy & public affairs 10 (4): 283–345. kaufman, alexander. 2004. “choice, responsibility and equality.” political studies 52 (4): 819–836. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2004.00510.x. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 knight, carl. 2005. “in defence of luck egalitarianism.” res publica 11 (1): 55–73. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-004-4973-z. lippert-rasmussen, kasper. 2001. “egalitarianism, option luck, and responsibility.” ethics 111 (3): 548–579. https://doi.org/10.1086/233526. ———. 2015. “luck egalitarians versus relational egalitarians: on the prospects of a pluralist account of egalitarian justice.” canadian journal of philosophy 45 (2): 220–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2015.1061369. navin, mark. 2011. “luck and oppression.” ethical theory and moral practice 14 (5): 533–547. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9260-9. rawls, john. 1971. a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sandbu, martin e. 2004. “on dworkin’s brute-luck–option-luck distinction and the consistency of brute-luck egalitarianism.” politics, philosophy & economics 3 (3): 283–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594x04046243. scheffler, samuel. 2003. “what is egalitarianism?” philosophy & public affairs 31 (1): 5–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2003.00005.x. schemmel, christian. 2012a. “distributive and relational equality.” politics, philosophy & economics 11 (2): 123–148. https://doi.org/10.1177 /1470594x11416774. ———. 2012b. “luck egalitarianism as democratic reciprocity? a response to tan.” journal of philosophy 109 (7): 435–448. https://doi.org/10.5840 /jphil2012109718. segall, shlomi. 2007. “in solidarity with the imprudent: a defense of luck egalitarianism.” social theory and practice 33 (2): 177–198. ———. 2010. health, luck, and justice. princeton, nj: princeton university press. sher, george. 2014. equality for inegalitarians. cambridge: cambridge university press. tan, kok-chor. 2008. “a defense of luck egalitarianism.” journal of philosophy 105 (11): 655–690. https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil20081051120. ———. 2012. justice, institutions, and luck: the site, ground, and scope of equality. oxford: oxford university press. temkin, larry s. 2003. “exploring the roots of egalitarian concerns.” theoria: a swedish journal of philosophy 69 (1–2): 125–151. https://doi.org/10.1111 /j.1755-2567.2003.tb00757.x. vallentyne, peter. 2002. “brute luck, option luck, and equality of initial opportunities.” ethics 112 (3): 529–557. https://doi.org/10.1086/339275. young, iris marion. 1990. “five faces of oppression.” in justice and the politics of difference, 39–65. princeton, nj: princeton university press. stark – why luck egalitarianism fails in condemning oppression published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 cynthia a. stark is an associate professor at the university of utah. her published works are on pornography, gaslighting, the gendered division of labor, disability, impartiality, social contract theory, egalitarianism, rawls, and self-respect. they can be found in the journal of philosophy, noûs, journal of political philosophy, social theory and practice, the monist, hypatia, and various other journals. 8101 stark title page 8101 stark final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 7 recommended citation jackson, debra l. 2018. “‘me too’: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 7. 2018 “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition debra l. jackson california state university, bakersfield djackson9@csub.edu jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition1 debra l. jackson abstract congdon (2017), giladi (2018), and mcconkey (2004) challenge feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists to come together to analyze epistemic injustice. i take up this challenge by highlighting the failure of recognition in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. i offer the #metoo movement as a case study to demonstrate how the process of mutual recognition makes visible and helps overcome the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. i argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. keywords: epistemic injustice; recognition theory; sexual harassment; sexual assault, #metoo in its december 18, 2017, issue, time magazine declared “the silence breakers” as the “2017 person of the year.” the article features stories from 35 women and men who had suffered from sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in a variety of occupations, from hollywood actors, prominent journalists, and political lobbyists to hotel housekeepers, restaurant dishwashers, and office assistants. the honor bestowed on “the silence breakers” was, in part, sparked by a symphony of 1 i am grateful that the research and writing of this essay were supported by the neh summer institute on diverse philosophical approaches to sexual violence held at elon university in june 2017, a one-semester sabbatical funded by california state university, bakersfield, and a mini-grant from csub’s research council of the university during fall 2017. i also appreciate the comments and suggestions offered by the anonymous reviewer from feminist philosophy quarterly, and i am indebted to my colleagues senem saner and steven gamboa for their encouragement and comments on drafts of this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 “me too” declarations across the world, which began on october 15, 2017, when actress alyssa milano posted on her twitter account, me too. suggested by a friend: “if all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” if you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet. the response was overwhelming. milano told time that she received 32,000 replies to her tweet within 24 hours (zacharek, dockterman, and sweetland edwards 2017, 32). cnn reported that 4.7 million people engaged in the “me too” conversation on twitter, with over 12 million posts, comments, and reactions in the first 24 hours after milano’s post (santiago and criss 2017). “me too” statements also flooded other social media platforms including facebook and instagram. some of the posts were a simple “me too,” while others included descriptions of the incidents that the writers endured. although #metoo as a social media phenomenon appeared at the end of 2017, “me too” as a social movement has a much longer history. tarana burke, founder of the youth organization just be inc., is widely credited as the originator of the “me too” movement beginning in 2006. #metoo is not the first social media campaign aimed at drawing attention to sexual harassment and sexual assault. in 2011, photography student grace brown created project unbreakable, a website featuring photographs of survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse holding signs which quote their attackers or those to whom they had disclosed their experience. in 2012, activist laura bates launched the #everydaysexism campaign, which catalogs stories of sexism from around the world, including experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault. in 2014, #yesallwomen was widely posted to raise awareness about violence against women after a misogyny-driven killing spree in isla vista, california. in 2016, #notokay drew attention to rape culture following the release of the access hollywood video in which donald trump bragged about groping women. and, in response to the october 5, 2017, new york times article about harvey weinstein’s long history of sexual misconduct (kantor and twohey 2017), #myharveyweinstein appeared as individuals shared their own stories of sexual harassment in the workplace. however, #metoo differs from previous campaigns to raise awareness about sexual harassment and sexual violence, and that difference is not just about the numbers of people across the globe who have participated in the conversation. the difference can be illuminated by drawing on two lines of scholarship: work in feminist social epistemology on epistemic injustice and work in social philosophy on the role of recognition in the development of self-identity. in this essay, i argue that jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 “me too” is more than a strategy for “giving people a sense of the magnitude of the problem;” it simultaneously makes visible the epistemic injustice suffered by victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and helps overcome that injustice through a process of mutual recognition. to make this case, i describe the recognitive failures of testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, and argue that in declaring “me too,” the epistemic subject emerges in the context of a polyphonic symphony of victims claiming their status as agents who are both able to make sense of their own social experiences and able to convey their knowledge to others. epistemic injustice and recognition theory while the term “epistemic injustice” itself highlights the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and political theory, the literature has focused primarily on epistemic questions rather than questions of justice. for example, in the introduction to her 2007 book, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, miranda fricker distinguishes her focus from political concerns about “distributive unfairness in respect to epistemic goods such as information or education” (fricker 2007, 1). unfortunately, this remark misses the fact that questions of justice are more than a matter of the distribution of goods, as recognition theorists have argued (young 1990; c. taylor 1994; honneth 1995). in contrast, congdon (2017), giladi (2018), and mcconkey (2004) insist that feminist epistemologists and recognition theorists join theoretical forces in analyzing epistemic injustice. on the one hand, matthew congdon and paul giladi argue that social epistemologists working on epistemic injustice ought to pay attention to recognition theory. in “what’s wrong with epistemic injustice? harm, vice, objectification, misrecognition,” congdon contends that the wrongness of epistemic injustice is not only a matter of harmful consequences, vicious perception, and objectification; it is also a matter of misrecognition. because a person’s self-identity is both developed and maintained through relations with others, epistemic injustice undermines a positive relation-to-self through the denial of one’s standing as a knower. that is, epistemic injustice is a failure of recognition. like congdon, paul giladi also argues that recognition theory can help diagnose the wrongness of epistemic injustice. in his essay, “epistemic injustice: a role for recognition?” giladi describes how both testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice are failures of recognition. the former entails denying a speaker the status of a rational enquirer, which alienates her from her own rationality and excludes her from the community of rational enquirers. the latter entails preventing members of marginalized groups from accessing the self-interpretational dimension of rational agency, which maintains existing ideological structures and prevents radical social change. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 giladi further considers how recognition theory can help identify ways to overcome epistemic injustice. he writes, “the practice of overcoming epistemic unsociability and realizing our epistemic sociability seems to share much in common with the process of transitioning from asymmetrical recognition orders to genuinely symmetrical recognition orders, since true sociality does not merely consist in interacting with others simpliciter, but rather in interacting with others in a way that enables self-realization” (giladi 2018, 149; italics in original). that is, epistemic justice and mutual recognition are mutually supporting. to treat a person with epistemic respect is to recognize that person as one’s peer, and this supports his/her/their2 status as a rational agent. giladi points to consciousness-raising initiatives and solidarity movements as potential examples of symmetrical cognitive environments in which testimonial justice is possible. he also suggests that while hermeneutical justice is difficult under oppressive social conditions, attempts to shift unequal power relations can result in progressive gains. jane mcconkey, on the other hand, argues that recognition theorists ought to pay attention to the phenomenon of epistemic injustice. in “knowledge and acknowledgement: epistemic injustice as a problem of recognition,” she links epistemic injustice to forms of oppression such as cultural imperialism. because cultural imperialism involves the misrepresentation of marginalized groups and the ongoing misunderstanding of that group’s social identity, it is widely accepted as a problem of recognition (young 1990). however, she maintains, cultural imperialism can also be understood as involving epistemic injustice. although she doesn’t use the terms hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice, her description of the injustice committed by cultural imperialism entails both concepts. this is because marginalized groups are denied the opportunity to contribute to the collective epistemic resources, given that only the dominant group’s cultural products are regarded as valuable and thus universally representative of the human experience. mcconkey describes the paradox faced by members of oppressed groups: “they are understood in terms of crude stereotypes that do not accurately portray individual group members but also assume a mask of invisibility; they are both badly misrepresented and robbed of the means by which to express their perspective” (mcconkey 2004, 202). recognition theory has much to offer critical social epistemology: it can help diagnose interpersonal acts of testimonial injustice; it can help diagnose political relations supporting testimonial and hermeneutical injustice; and it can help identify remedies for epistemic injustice. in the following sections, i highlight the recognitive failures in cases of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice experienced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, and characterize the #metoo movement as a 2 for the remainder of this essay, i will use the pronouns “she,” “her,” and “hers.” jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 performance of mutual recognition which both reclaims a victim’s status as an epistemic subject and builds a community of solidarity. testimonial injustice and the struggle for recognition the role of testimony in the recovery of the self following a traumatic event is often emphasized in trauma studies scholarship (although usually put in terms of narrative rather than testimony to highlight the agency of the testifier). susan brison (1999, 2002), for example, argues that self-narration is a process of resubjectification. in narrating one’s own experience, the victim shifts from the status of an object to that of a subject, resulting in the restoration of both the victim’s sense of self and her membership in a community of selves. recovery of the self after a traumatic event requires, then, the ability to authoritatively tell one’s story, to testify about what one has experienced. it also requires a recognitive response to that testimony. i argue that when that recognition is mutual, when it occurs between two (or more) victims, the restorative potential of testimony is more fully achieved. when victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault disclose their experiences, some are believed, but many are not. the credibility of their testimony greatly depends upon their social identity and the nature of the incident. that is, the credibility of a victim’s testimony depends upon the “rhetorical space” in which it is uttered. lorraine code (1995) uses the term “rhetorical spaces” to characterize “fictive but not fanciful or fixed locations, whose (tacit, rarely spoken) territorial imperatives structure and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with a reasonable expectation of uptake and ‘choral support’: an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously. they are the sites where the very possibility of an utterance counting as ‘true-or-false’ or of a discussion yielding insight is made manifest” (code 1995, ix–x). the rhetorical spaces in which a victim’s testimony is expressed are shaped by social scripts, attitudes, stereotypes, and discourses which are culturally and historically situated. when it comes to experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault, the testimony that elicits social and legal response is generally restricted to that which conforms to social scripts about legitimate victims. for example, affluent white women who are sexually assaulted by strangers and suffer substantial injuries are the most likely to be believed. their experience fits the model of “real rape.” but those whose experiences do not conform to the model of “real rape” are those which are denied uptake and choral support. women who are sexually assaulted by acquaintances are unlikely to be believed due to the wide acceptance of rape supportive attitudes. these include the views that women frequently lie about being raped to draw attention to themselves, to protect their reputation as chaste, or to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 enact revenge when a relationship fails.3 women of color who are sexually assaulted are unlikely to be believed due to racialized gender stereotypes. black women, for example, are subject to what patricia hill collins (1990) identifies as “controlling images of black womanhood,” namely the mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, and jezebel, which situate them as either unsexed thus unrapable or else oversexed thus unrapable. similar social scripts are at work with respect to sexual harassment. women’s reports of sexual harassment are frequently met with incredulity for many of the same reasons as are reports of sexual assault (lonsway, cortina, and magely 2008). in some cases, the inappropriate behavior is acknowledged, but the woman’s report is discounted on the basis that she failed to understand the nature of the behavior: the victim’s offense is attributed to her being oversensitive and unable to “take a joke.” in other cases, the inappropriate behavior is denied altogether, and the victim is accused of lying to gain attention, to seek revenge, or to profit financially. men who are sexually harassed or sexually assaulted are also unlikely to be believed due to gendered social scripts. wendy hollway (1989) identifies “male sexual drive discourse” as having a pervasive influence on attitudes about male sexuality. according to this script, men have an overwhelming desire or need to have sex, which translates not only into justification when men perpetrate sexual harassment or sexual assault, but also translates into the impossibility that a man could be victimized. hegemonic masculinity is equated with potency and impermeability, not sexual victimization. each of the situations described above involve testimonial injustice. miranda fricker defines testimonial injustice as a distinctively epistemic harm that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word” (fricker 2007, 1). victims of sexual harassment or sexual assault are perceived as lacking credibility due to the wide acceptance of rape-supportive attitudes, racialized gender stereotypes, sexual harassment myths, and gendered social scripts. fricker points out that these prejudices operate through the collective social imagination, distorting the hearer’s perception of the speaker at the nondoxastic level. that is, these prejudices may operate in ways that may be inconsistent with 3 one of the most debated issues regarding sexual violence is the frequency of false allegations. in 2006, criminal justice professor philip rumney published a comprehensive review of studies and reports on false rape allegations, finding estimates ranging from 1.5% to 90% (rumney 2006). psychologist david lisak and colleagues argue that few of the sources included in rumney’s review are credible. they argue that when considering only credible studies—those which clearly define what constitutes a false report, clearly explain the source data used, and evaluate the data received from law enforcement agencies—the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10% (lisak et al. 2010). jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 the conscious beliefs of hearers. hearers perceive women and men who report sexual harassment or sexual assault as dishonest, even at the same time as they might deny conscious adherence to rape myths. the pervasive and powerful influence of these prejudices on the social perception of victims is captured by the term “rape culture.” for many victims, particularly those whose experiences do not fit the expectations for credible reports, testimonial injustice can be exacerbated by “epistemic violence,” the pervasive silencing of marginalized groups. kristie dotson (2011) distinguishes between two of these practices of silencing, namely “testimonial quieting” and “testimonial smothering.” on the one hand, testimonial quieting refers to practices in which a speaker’s testimony is silenced due to the hearer’s failure to identify her as a knower. the credibility of victims who are members of epistemically marginalized groups is systematically undermined already, thus their testimony of victimization has little chance to gain uptake. on the other hand, testimonial smothering refers to practices in which a speaker engages in selfsilencing due to the hearer’s incompetence. in these cases, victims are effectively coerced into silence because to testify to their victimization would risk future harm to themselves. in both cases, the victim is perceived as dishonest and as an unreliable source of knowledge. the effects of testimonial injustice on victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault are profound. to be denied the status of a “genuine victim” is to be denied access to the emotional, social, medical, and legal responses that status warrants (burt and estep 1981). instead of receiving sympathy, hearers respond to victims with hostility, which can be particularly painful when coming from loved ones to whom one typically turns to for support. instead of receiving social support, victims become socially isolated and ostracized. they are left to attempt to cope with the harm they endure on their own, or to try to locate limited services from organizations such as rape crisis centers. instead of being able to access medical care or legal recourse, victims are rejected by those professionals sworn to advocate on the behalf of the vulnerable. even when a report is filed with human resources or the police, the case is rarely prosecuted. and for those who undergo a sexual assault examination kit, the evidence is unlikely to be analyzed as rape kits sit in storage for decades (mulla 2014). as a result, most victims forgo reporting their victimization to authorities. for example, only 6% to 13% of those who experience sexual harassment in the workplace file complaints (cortina and berdahl 2008), and only 31% of attempted and completed rapes are reported to police (l. taylor 2006). this indicates the extent to which testimonial smothering affects victims of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault. in the face of an incompetent audience unwilling and unable to hear one’s testimony, victims suffer in silence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 above all, to be denied the status of a “genuine victim” is to be denied recognition as an epistemic subject. when hearers respond to a victim’s testimony with incredulity, they deny her the status of someone who can authoritatively speak to the facts of the events she endured, and deny her the status of someone who others can rely upon to gain knowledge about the world. thus, testimonial injustice alienates the speaker from both her own self-relation and her relation to others. her diminished status also erodes her self-confidence in being able to effect change to the social environment that produced her victimization. if she is not believed, she is less likely to be able to improve her working conditions or living situation. she may, herself, come to accept the judgment that she is at fault, that her actions precipitated the incident(s), or that she deserved the harm she suffered. this is particularly true for victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault. a sexual predator, in committing a crime against a person, attacks the victim in her capacity as a subject, refusing to recognize her as an individual agent with her own life plans, projects, and perspective. when a victim discloses her experience to another person, her status as a subject is on the line. if the hearer responds with disbelief, her diminished status is reinforced. all this points to the fact that testimony calls for an empathic response. because the self is relational, narrating one’s experience cannot be monological; it must be shared with and heard by others even if those others are imagined, potential others. the ability to interpret and represent one’s own experience requires an audience, someone to whom and for whom the narrative can be told. dori laub writes, “the absence of an empathic listener, or more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story” (laub 1992, 68). without uptake and choral support, that is, without recognition, testimony cannot accomplish its intention, namely to convey knowledge to others. brison captures how the need for an empathic listener is particularly critical for victims who are traumatized by their experiences. she writes, “in order to construct self-narratives we need not only the words with which to tell our stories, but also an audience able and willing to hear us and to understand our words as we intend them. this aspect of remaking a self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are unwilling to listen to what they endured” (brison 1999, 46). to counter the testimonial injustice experienced by many victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, two common responses from empathic listeners are “i believe you” and “that should not have happened to you.” these responses are recognitive acts and powerful indictments of rape culture. in taking up a victim’s testimony as true, the former recognizes her as an epistemic subject, as someone jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 capable of understanding her own experience and contributing her knowledge to the collective epistemic resources. the latter expresses moral outrage for the injury that the victim experienced, affirming her rights to bodily integrity and autonomy. thus, these responses affirm the victim’s positive relation-to-self as both an epistemic and moral subject. i do not intend to contest the appropriateness of these responses to hearing a victim’s disclosure of sexual harassment or sexual assault. however, i do want to note that both “i believe you” and “that should not have happened to you” pose a risk of reinscribing the victim’s disempowerment. they posit the hearer-respondent as the epistemic and moral authority, as the subject capable of making a judgment on the veracity of the testimony and the wrongfulness of the deed. these recognitive responses thus create an asymmetrical relationship between the victim-testifier and the hearer-respondent, in which the latter’s validation as a subject depends upon the former’s judgment. in the struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflict (1995), axel honneth argues that the development and maintenance of a positive selfrelation is grounded not on an asymmetrical process of recognition but on an intersubjective process of mutual recognition. he writes, “the very possibility of identity-formation depends crucially on the development of self-confidence, selfrespect, and self-esteem. these three modes of relating practically to oneself can only be acquired and maintained intersubjectively, through being granted recognition by others whom one also recognizes. as a result, the conditions for selfrealization turn out to be dependent on the establishment of relationships of mutual recognition” (honneth 1995, xi). unlike “i believe you” and “that should not have happened to you,” “me too” creates a symmetrical relationship between the victim and the listener since the act of recognition simultaneously reverses the roles of victim-testifier and hearer-respondent. when i respond to another’s testimony with “me too,” i am both testifying and recognizing her testimony, and my recognition of her as a victim is dependent upon her recognition of me as a victim. the “too” in the response is the central feature of the moment of mutual recognition. when i respond “me too,” i not only recognize her as reliable testifier, i also expose myself as a victim and make myself vulnerable to her judgment about my testimony. our mutual vulnerability empowers each other as both epistemic and moral agents. hermeneutical injustice and the struggle for recognition being able to narrate one’s experience of victimization requires the hermeneutical resources with which to characterize the events as harmful or injurious. but these interpretive resources are not always available. in some cases, this is a matter of circumstantial bad luck, but in others it is a result of a systematic prejudice regarding which social groups have the authority to interpret the world. fricker identifies this phenomenon as hermeneutical injustice, namely, a distinct feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 form of epistemic injustice occurring “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their own social experiences” (fricker 2007, 1). one of fricker's central examples of hermeneutical injustice is taken from susan brownmiller's memoir, in our time: memoir of a revolution (1999), in which she recounts how the phenomenon of sexual harassment appeared on the feminist agenda. it begins with the story of carmita wood, who had worked at cornell university for eight years. wood endured unwanted sexual attention from one of the professors at the university. his behavior included jiggling his crotch when he stood near her desk, brushing against her breasts when reaching for papers, and cornering her in an elevator to kiss her. the stress from these encounters led to a host of physical ailments including chronic back pain and neck pain, so wood left her job and filed for unemployment insurance. however, brownmiller writes, "when the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, wood was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. . . . her claim for unemployment benefits was denied" (brownmiller 1999, 280–281). because this incident occurred prior to 1975, wood lacked the interpretive resources necessary to identify her experience as a form of sex discrimination which we now identify as sexual harassment. as a result, fricker argues, wood suffered hermeneutical injustice. like testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice also involves a failure of recognition. giladi writes, “the principle harmfulness of hermeneutical injustice consists in depriving a victim of having access to the self-interpretational dimension of rational agency: this represents a specific variety of alienation, because an indispensable feature of rational agency is one’s ability to make sense of one’s experiences” (giladi 2018, 152 italics in original). victims of hermeneutical injustice do not just accidently lack the concepts to understand their experiences; they are systematically denied the epistemic authority to interpret their own experiences. charles mills characterizes this succinctly: “it is not a matter of an innocent misunderstanding or gap, but of a misrepresentation generated organically, materially, from the male perspective on the world, motivated by their group interests and phenomenologically supported by their group experience” (mills 2017, 105). the phenomenon of what we now recognize as sexual harassment is highly gendered and differentially impacts men and women. the historical absence of this concept is determined by the parameters of the existent rhetorical spaces. women’s social subordination to men both produces and is reinforced by their unequal ability to participate in the shaping of dominant interpretive resources (fricker 2007, 152). when women are not fully recognized as epistemic subjects who are both equal members of the epistemic community and at the same time subjects whose experiences of the world are different from that of men, their subjectivity is not only jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 devalued, it is given no value at all. in other words, the failure of recognition is one of nonrecognition, not just misrecognition. hermeneutical injustice can, then, be attributed to the pervasive power of ideology, what in common parlance is referred to as “rape culture.” unfortunately, this hegemonic worldview is often internalized by those whose experiences flatly contradict the prevailing interpretations (mills 2017, 102). for example, psychologist lynn m. phillips (2000) has documented how young women from diverse backgrounds frequently describe experiences that fit the legal definition of rape, battering, or harassment, yet do not define them as such. when a victim internalizes rape myths that blame victims for eliciting the assault, deny that a person with a particular social identity can be raped, or excuse perpetrators for being at the whim of “evolutionary drives,” she will be unable to understand her own experience of victimization. in “rape myths and domestic abuse myths as hermeneutical injustices” (2017), katherine jenkins argues that this constitutes a kind of hermeneutical injustice. instead of attributing a victim’s understanding of herself as a result of her failure to make use of the interpretive resources available (e.g., legal definitions) that would warrant seeing herself as a victim, jenkins insists that these conceptual resources are genuinely not at her disposal. this is because there is a conflict between the meaning of the concepts at the formal, policy level and those at the everyday level of practice. the rhetorical space of “rape culture” produces failures of recognition, and these failures can be both the inability of a victim to recognize herself as well as the inability of others to recognize her as a victim. interestingly, what makes hermeneutical injustice visible is its overcoming through an intersubjective process of mutual recognition. it is through the collective efforts of those who are hermeneutically marginalized that a gap in the economy of interpretive resources is exposed and filled. to see this, let’s return to the case of carmita wood. brownmiller credits the emergence of the term “sexual harassment” to a group of eight women working in cornell university’s human affairs office who were discussing how to raise awareness not only about wood’s experience but also the experiences of other women, including those in lin farley’s seminar on “women and work.” because wood’s experience was identified as just one example among many, it could be situated as a result of a larger social pathology. farley’s colleague, karen sauvigne, described to brownmiller the recognitive moment: “lin’s students had been talking in her seminar about the unwanted sexual advances they’d encountered on their summer jobs,” sauvigne relates. “and then carmita wood comes in and tells lin her story. we realized that to a person, every one of us—the women on staff, carmita, the students—had had an experience like this at some point, you know? and none of us had feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 ever told anyone before. it was one of those click, aha! moments, a profound revelation.” (brownmiller 1999, 281) the women decided to hold a “speak-out” in order to “break the silence” about their collective experiences but needed a name to advertise the event. after some brainstorming, the term “sexual harassment” was coined. the ability of the women to identify the gap in the collective hermeneutical resources and to fill it with a new concept depended upon a process of mutual recognition in which women who had been targeted by predatory coworkers or bosses were able to see themselves as victims by seeing the others as victims. note that if the response to carmita wood’s testimony had been simply “i believe you” or “that should not have happened to you,” the rhetorical space for the emergence of collective action to protest the harm she endured would not have been possible. although “i believe you” and “that should not have happened to you” leave open the risk for enacting an asymmetrical relationship in which the hearer-respondent is the epistemic and moral authority, these responses also preserve the isolation of the victim-testifier, or rather the potential victim-testifier since, so long as she is solitary, she can continue to understand her experience as natural, inevitable, or deserved. honneth argues that in order for members of subordinated groups to understand the profound disrespect they experience to be something they encounter not simply as individuals but in virtue of their membership in that social group, they need a semantics with which to articulate and protest it. he writes, “as soon as ideas of this sort have gained influence within a society, they generate a subcultural horizon of interpretation within which experiences of disrespect that, previously, had been fragmented and had been coped with privately can then become the moral motives for a collective ‘struggle for recognition’” (honneth 1995, 164). without an intersubjective process of mutual recognition, wood would have lacked the opportunity to understand her experience as shared, as a part of a group whose members are similarly situated and thus suffer similar harms. honneth states this clearly: “one can count as the bearer of rights of some kind only if one is socially recognized as a member of a community” (honneth 1995, 109). throughout her memoir, brownmiller describes numerous “speak-outs” aimed at “breaking the silence” about a variety of issues facing women, including ones on abortion, rape, and sexual abuse. these “speak-outs” are public testimonies of victims’ experiences aimed to demonstrate that these experiences are not isolated incidents but part of a pervasive social pathology. in each of these cases, consciousness-raising plays a big part. brownmiller defines consciousness-raising as the process of “bringing submerged truths to the surface, where i learned that i wasn’t alone” (brownmiller 1999, 7). in sharing one’s own experience with abortion, jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 rape, sexual abuse, or sexual harassment in the context of others who share their stories, victims experience “me too” moments, which allow them to discover that their suffering is not a “personal problem,” but is instead a result of a larger system of oppression. that is, “me too” launches the realization that the personal is political. as a result, new hermeneutical resources emerge, allowing for the recognition of a variety of forms of sexual misconduct which were previously obscured. these include, for example, the now familiar terms date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, and male rape. #metoo: empowerment through empathy thus far, i have argued that both testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice are failures of recognition, and that a process of mutual recognition, embodied in the response “me too,” offers a restorative response to epistemic injustice at both the interpersonal and collective level. on the one hand, “me too” as a response to testimonial injustice works at the intersubjective level to establish the epistemic and moral agency of victims through a process of mutual recognition. on the other hand, “me too” as a response to hermeneutical injustice works at the social/collective level to create new concepts to name the harms experienced by members of the group. in this final section, i consider the political potential of “me too” as a social movement, arguing that the stream of “me too” statements across the world inscribe both the victim-testifiers and the hearer-respondents into a community of others who are able to mutually sympathize with each other and work to raise the esteem of themselves as a collective group. i also consider some of the potential pitfalls facing the movement. the process of mutual recognition embodied in “me too” creates the groundwork necessary for a political movement. by recognizing the epistemic and moral agency of its members and then generating new concepts to name the harms experienced by its members, “me too” is positioned to become #metoo, a political movement uniting victims in solidarity to work toward cultural change. it is a public struggle demanding widespread attention and aimed at elevating the status of the group. this requires recognizing the distinct features of the group as different yet worthy of equal esteem, rather than erasing the group’s differences through assimilation. honneth writes, “the more successful social movements are at drawing the public sphere’s attention to the neglected significance of the traits and abilities they collectively represent, the better their chances of raising the social worth, or indeed, the standing of their members” (honneth 1995, 127). in the case of sexual harassment and sexual assault, the experience of victims provides evidence challenging the social scripts, attitudes, stereotypes, and discourses that comprise “rape culture.” one of #metoo’s aims, then, is to reconfigure the rhetorical space so that these insights can be expressed and heard. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 as of the writing of this essay, #metoo has garnered significant uptake and choral support. time’s recognition of “the silence breakers” as the “2017 person of the year” indicates the success of the #metoo movement in attracting the public attention it needs to effect change. the magazine provides the victims a stage upon which to speak (the magazine) and invites an audience (its readers) to listen to their testimony. in that sense, #metoo is a successful act of defiance, both as a challenge to the epistemic injustice faced by victims and as a way to “put a face” to the statistics confirming the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault. it is also notable that time names “the silence breakers” as the “2017 person of the year.” conferring the status of a person on this group of women and men must be understood as an act of recognition that raises the esteem of the group and its members. although the members of this group have been epistemically marginalized insofar as they have been pressured to remain silent via testimonial smothering, or if they have not been silent, their speech has landed on unresponsive ears via testimonial quieting, to honor them in this way is to recognize that their experiences have an important contribution to make to understanding the world. importantly, “the silence breakers” are not a homogenous group. the 35 women and men featured in the article come from diverse socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds and work in a wide range of different occupations. this diverse yet harmonious chorus of voices works in concert to create a movement for social change. they not only represent those typically recognized as “legitimate victims,” but also those whose experiences are often excluded in dominant narratives. thus, the article creates a counternarrative to the usual testimonial injustice victims face. there are, of course, dangers to this kind of public recognition. the call for victims to expose themselves as victims through public declarations of “me too” risks enacting a confessional culture. in the history of sexuality: volume i: an introduction (1990), michel foucault highlights how power operates through the rituals of confession. he writes, “one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it” (foucault 1990, 61–62). it is this ritual of confession that reinforces testimonial injustice faced by victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, and captures why “i believe you” and “that should not have happened to you” as responses from a hearer can, under certain conditions, be disempowering. when the rhetorical space situates hearers-respondents as the epistemic and moral jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 authority, the victim-testifier is made more vulnerable. #metoo also threatens to create a spectacle of victims’ experiences. in “survivor discourse: transgression or recuperation?” (1993), linda alcoff and laura gray expose the ways that victim testimony has been co-opted through television talk shows, which sensationalize and exploit their narratives for public entertainment. as a result, the transgressive potential of victim testimony is undermined. rather than victims speaking for themselves as epistemic and moral authorities, they are “reified purely as objects, in need of expert interpretation, psychiatric help, and audience sympathy” (alcoff and gray 1993, 278). although rituals of confession and spectacles of suffering are real threats to the success of #metoo as a political movement, its grounding in a process of mutual recognition resists these dangers. “me too” establishes a symmetrical relationship between the victim-testifier and the hearer-respondent, in which mutual vulnerability and mutual authority to interpret and judge are recognized. in this way, victims are not reified as objects; they are empowered to speak on their own behalf, not needing the expert interpretation of a medical or legal authority figure. by building a community of solidarity among each other, they are able to generate interpretive resources grounded in their own experience and supported by the experience of others who are similarly situated. this process of mutual recognition is critical because agency is something that must be claimed, not given, if it is to avoid undermining itself. some critics have expressed concern that #metoo’s operation outside of the bonds of formal, legal processes for investigating and prosecuting cases of sexual harassment and sexual assault constitutes a violation of due process for those accused. when victims post #metoo on social media platforms such as twitter, facebook, instagram, and public blogs, they often describe their experiences and/or name particular individuals as the perpetrators. these accusations can unfairly damage reputations and livelihoods. for example, harvey weinstein, kevin spacey, and louis c.k. were all fired following allegations of, not prosecution for, sexual assault. margaret atwood cautions that this “understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained” (atwood 2018). it’s true that the failure of the legal system to effectively respond to and deter sexual harassment and sexual assault has inspired some victims to look for extra-legal solutions such as publicly exposing perpetrators. for example, the same month that alyssa milano’s call for #metoo posts on twitter, moira donegan created an anonymous, crowdsourced spreadsheet, “shitty media men,” which listed more than 70 men accused of sexual misconduct before it was taken offline 12 hours later (donegan 2018). donegan admits that although it was not her intention, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 the spreadsheet could be used to inflict consequences on those named as perpetrators. she notes that investigations have been conducted into some of the men listed on the spreadsheet, some of whom have left their positions or been fired. at the same time, donegan has also suffered consequences for her efforts to give victims a platform from which to testify without fear of retaliation. she, too, has lost her job. concerns about false allegations and the threat of retaliation for speaking up have long afflicted victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, shaping the rhetorical spaces in which victim testimonies are expressed (or not expressed, as in the case of testimonial smothering) and heard (or not heard as in the case of testimonial quieting). in contrast, the focus of #metoo is victim empowerment and solidarity, not vigilante justice. at variety’s 2018 “power of women” new york event, tarana burke clarified the purpose of the movement: “folks think it’s about naming and shaming, about taking down powerful men. but they’re wrong” (noveck 2018). “me too” centers victims’ epistemic authority and agency. it does not call for the abandonment of existing legal channels established for responding to sexual harassment and sexual assault, but for their reform. a more significant concern is that #metoo can become a self-serving mechanism that empowers some victims while exacerbating the marginalization of others. many of the victims who have attracted public attention from the #metoo movement are those who already hold considerable social and economic power. despite the fact that the black activist tarana burke had created the “me too” movement in 2006, it was only a decade later that the movement gained substantial public attention through the tweet of a white celebrity, alyssa milano. while burke’s work aimed to center the voices of women and girls of color who had suffered from sexual abuse, the voices that have been centered in the media at the end of 2017 are mostly those of affluent white women. unfortunately, this is an all too common phenomenon. in “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color” (1991), kimberlé crenshaw emphasizes the need for attention to the intersectional nature of gender and race to address violence against women of color. on the one hand, the intersection of sexism and racism result in women of color experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault differently than white women. on the other hand, prevailing approaches to feminist and antiracist politics have marginalized women of color’s experiences with domestic violence and sexual assault. while time’s article features voices from a diverse group of women and men, none of the narratives interrogates the intersectional nature of systems of oppression nor their role in the production of sexual harassment and sexual assault as a social pathology. it remains to be seen whether the #metoo movement will do better. jackson – “me too”: epistemic injustice and the struggle for recognition published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 despite the dangers, #metoo has great promise as a political movement. its foundation in a process of mutual recognition offers the opportunity for the movement to alter the rhetorical spaces in which victims’ testimonies can be heard by empathetic listeners. exposing the epistemic violence of testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering, #metoo encourages both individual and collective instances of silence-breaking. moreover, the influx of a polyphonic symphony of voices testifying to their experiences of sexual harassment and sexual violence can challenge the prevailing ideology of rape culture and shift the social imaginary shaping both how victims are perceived and how they perceive themselves. as burke explains, “the power of using ‘me too’ has always been in 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cambridge law journal 65 (1): 128–158. santiago, cassandra, and doug criss. 2017. “an activist, a little girl and the heartbreaking origin of ‘me too.’” cnn october 17. http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/17/us/me-too-tarana-burke-origintrnd/index.html. taylor, charles. 1994. “the politics of recognition.” in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, edited by amy gutmann, 25–73. princeton, nj: princeton university press. taylor, lauren r. 2006. “has rape reporting increased over time?” national institute of justice journal 254. https://www.nij.gov/journals/254/pages/rape_reporting.aspx. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zacharek, stephanie, eliana dockterman, and haley sweetland edwards. 2017. “the silence breakers.” time december 18. 190 (25–26): 34–71. debra l. jackson is a professor of philosophy at california state university, bakersfield. she has published essays on racialized assumptions in anti-rape discourse (studies in practical philosophy: a journal of ethical and political philosophy), on the representation of gender, race, and sexuality in online gaming environments and in television (world of warcraft and philosophy: wrath of the philosopher king and slayage: the journal of whedon studies), and on crisis intervention and rape survivor advocacy as a form of witnessing trauma (critical trauma studies: understanding violence, conflict, and memory in everyday life). judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state article 5 2017 judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state clare chambers cec66@cam.ac.uk recommended citation chambers, clare. 2017. "judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 5. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5. judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state clare chambers abstract this paper engages with the work of catharine mackinnon to consider three ways of understanding the phrase "judging women." first, when is it acceptable or necessary to make judgements about what women do? the paper argues that feminist analysis urges compassion and empathy for women, but also highlights the ways that choices are limited and shaped by patriarchy. thus we cannot and should not avoid all judgment of women’s—and men’s—choices. second, when can women engage in the act of judging? it is sometimes claimed that it is anti-feminist to engage in such judgment, and that feminists must above all else avoid being judgmental. the paper rejects this idea and argues instead that feminism should insist on women's right to exercise judgment: women’s voices matter. third, how are we to judge who counts as a woman? mackinnon’s work offers profound, sustained, rich analysis of these questions, but does not fully resolve them. keywords: catharine mackinnon, feminism, judgment, gender, women, sex, choice, essentialism one cannot really overstate the importance of catharine mackinnon’s work. its philosophical, political, and legal impact is huge. mackinnon’s legal work has improved the standing of women around the world, and her political philosophy is both a defining statement of feminism and a challenge that every theorist, feminist or not, must face. re-reading toward a feminist theory of the state for the purposes of this special edition, i kept wanting to interrupt my reading. every page, every paragraph, has a claim that i want to tell people about and discuss with them. so many of the sentences in the book are quotable: are in themselves complete, enlightening, provocative, so obviously right, so fraught with difficulty, at the same time the final word on one question, and the thrown-down gauntlet on another. 1 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 reading mackinnon, in other words, is an exhilarating ride through philosophy and politics, a journey in which it is impossible to sit still and in which it is no use wearing a seat belt. there is going to be challenge, there is going to be danger, and there is, above all, going to be an emergency stop: a point at which everything sharply judders to a halt, silence descends, and you whisper to yourself, can that really be true? and, at the very same moment, how could i not have seen this before? it is tempting, then, simply to proceed by quoting a selection of my favourite mackinnon sentences. but i will resist that temptation and try to make a more sustained contribution. one philosophical question with which i have been grappling for some time, and which toward a feminist theory of the state tackles head-on, is how much significance we should grant to the fact of choice. the role of choice is problematic within the context of social construction generally and gender inequality specifically. in liberal theory, choice is treated as what i call a ‘normative transformer,’ something that transforms a prima facie unjust inequality into a just one. i have argued that the fact of social construction prevents choice from playing this role (chambers 2008). we cannot assess the justice of a situation by reference to a choice that is itself, at the most profound and sometimes unconscious level, a result of that situation. this over-reliance on individual choice is a central problem for liberalism. mackinnon’s work provides foundations for this critique. she writes that liberalism’s “aggregation of freely-acting persons is replaced, in radical feminism, with a complex political determinism. women and women’s actions are complex responses to conditions they did not make or control; they are contextualized and situated. yet their responses contextualize and situate the actions of others” (1989, 46–47). and, as she puts it in the chapter on consciousness-raising: the instrument of social perception is created by the social process by which women are controlled. but this apparent paradox is not a solipsistic circle or a subjectivist retreat. realizing that women largely recognize themselves in sex-stereotyped terms, really do feel the needs they have been encouraged to feel, do feel fulfilled in the expected ways, often actually choose what has been prescribed, makes possible the realization that women at the same time do not recognize themselves in, do not feel, and have not chosen this place. (1989, 102) mackinnon here draws our attention to our situation as simultaneously recipients and transmitters of norms, victims and agents of oppression, conformists and rebels, apologists and malcontents. we are all trying to find ways to negotiate the social demands on us: how to fit in while remaining individual, how to distinguish those preferences that are authentic from those 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 that are distorted, how to live in a way that both we and others can accept, how to find a place that is both unique and human. western liberal culture requires both conformity and individuality. the individual is exalted as a unit of analysis even while being expected to fit into recognisable social tropes. culture urges us to assimilate and to differentiate, with predictably unpredictable effects. an issue that arises from this analysis is the question of judgment. one feature of contemporary popular feminism is the rejection of judgment: the idea that it is somehow a violation of feminist ideals, and perhaps a general moral failing, to assess other women’s behaviour and find it wanting. one encounters this conviction in discussions of parenting (which usually means mothering—the critique of judgment is most pointed in matters of breastversus bottle-feeding), activism, domestic violence, fifty shades of grey-inspired sadomasochism, beauty practices, and cultural difference.1 consider some examples from the popular media. jemma wayne writes in the huffington post that the phenomenon of women who judge other women’s parenting styles on online forums is “just as dangerous [a] trend undermining feminist values” as the sexualisation of children.2 the risk, according to wayne, is great: “with every wagging finger we are unravelling the victories of feminism.” jessica wakeman, in the frisky, writes that, for feminists, “there are a lot of areas where i think being judgmental is inappropriate, particularly when it comes to people’s private choices that do not hurt anyone else and do not affect you.”3 kiara imani williams, in the huffington post again, writes, “you know what is worse than donald trump? other judgmental women.”4 michaele ferguson interprets critiques of judgment like these as part of choice feminism: the idea that feminism means respecting women’s choices, whatever they may be, on the assumption that choice is the measure of freedom. ferguson proposes that choice feminism is, inter alia, an attempt to 1 linda zerilli discusses the question of whether feminist may judge those from other cultures in “toward a feminist theory of judgment” (2009), a title that invokes mackinnon even though mackinnon is not mentioned at all. 2 jemma wayne, “mother judgement: how women are undermining modern feminism,” huffington post, 4 april 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jemma-wayne/women-undermining-modernfeminism_b_3006752.html. 3 jessica wakeman, “the soapbox: on feminism & judging other women,” the frisky, 19 june 2012, http://www.thefrisky.com/2012-06-19/the-soapbox-onfeminism-judging-other-women/. 4 kiara imani williams, “you know what’s worse for women than donald trump? other judgmental women,” huffington post, 18 august 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kiara-imani-williams/you-know-whats-worsefor-_b_8002682.html. 3 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 neutralise three criticisms of (non-choice) feminism: it is too radical, it is exclusionary, and it is judgmental. her analysis is that “feminism will continue to provoke these three criticisms so long as it is deeply critical of existing institutions, or aims in any way to speak for or about a collectivity (such as women), or claims that the personal is political” (2010, 249). ferguson suggests that, while it is both understandable and in some sense laudable for feminism to wish to “make feminism appeal to as many people as possible” (250), feminists should not shy away from judgment. “without making judgments,” she writes, “politics becomes vacuous relativism: we have no reason to prefer one course of action over another. . . . political freedom requires that we make the best judgments that we can, without knowing for certain that the judgments we make are correct” (251). ferguson’s analysis is helpful and perceptive. i agree with ferguson that the concern to avoid judgment is a key feature of choice feminism; i agree with her (as i argued in chambers 2008) that the focus on choice as the measure of freedom is ultimately not compatible with feminism as a political and philosophical project; and i agree with her that one must “resist the temptation to reject judgment” (ferguson 2010, 252). ferguson suggests that the concern to avoid judgement is a concern to make people like feminism and feminists. this may well be part of the matter. in addition, as evident in the examples from popular feminism given earlier, judgement is often rejected not just for being unappealing but for being in some way normatively wrong. in the first part of this paper, i want to question this normative critique of judgement. why is avoiding judgment seen by some as a central feminist concern? feminists might well worry about judgment that is directed to women, since one aspect of feminism is the need to listen to women rather than denigrate or silence them. but in wider patriarchal society, judgment is demonised when it is done by women. women are not supposed to judge, not supposed to think themselves sufficiently qualified to have opinions or criticise others, particularly if those others are men. this is part of the reason why women in the public eye are subject to such vile online abuse,5 particularly if they write about issues on which men feel themselves to be particular experts (which is to say: all issues). a woman is not supposed to have a controversial opinion (which is to say: any opinion). i don't think i’ve ever heard a man berate 5 see becky gardiner, mahana mansfield, ian anderson, josh hodler, daan louter and monica ulmanu, “the dark side of guardian comments,” guardian, 12 april 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-ofguardian-comments; and david grimer, “men read mean tweets about female sportswriters, and are shocked at how dark it gets,” adweek, 26 april 2016, http://www.adweek.com/creativity/men-read-mean-tweets-about-femalesportswriters-and-are-shocked-how-dark-it-gets-171064/. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments himself or another man for being too judgmental. as mackinnon might say, judgment is a male method. i get the sense, from discussions with my students and others, that readers of mackinnon often feel that they are being judged. i certainly feel that way. that feeling is, for me, part of the exhilaration that i referred to earlier: there is exoneration in mackinnon’s work, and explanation, and excitement, but there is also judgment. i think one of the reasons i have to keep stopping when i read her work is that i keep needing to introspect: do i do that? and: should i stop? mackinnon address this point directly: feminism aspires to represent the experience of all women as women see it, yet criticizes antifeminism and misogyny, including by women. not all women agree with the feminist account of women’s situation, nor do all feminists agree with any single rendition of feminism. authority of interpretation—here, the claim to speak for all women—is always fraught because authority is the issue male method is intended to settle. consider the accounts of their own experience given by right-wing women and lesbian sadomasochists. how can male supremacy be diminishing to women when women embrace and defend their place in it? how can dominance and submission violate women when women eroticize it? now what is women’s point of view? (1989, 115) for mackinnon, the answer is neither subjectivism nor determinism. we must not assume that women are free, having what mackinnon calls “considerable latitude to make or choose the meanings of their situation” (1989, 116). no individual is the final arbiter of the meaning of her action. but we must also not rely on an idea of false consciousness, according to which “they” are hopelessly blinded by their situatedness while “we” somehow remain magically isolated, perspectivally pure. instead, the project of feminism “is to uncover and claim as valid the experience of women, the major content of which is the devalidation of women’s experience” (116). judgment is thus particularly fraught. there is a serious qualm about claiming to speak for all women, to assert the authority of the authentic female voice. this qualm is both to be respected (after all, who are we to judge?) and rejected (why shouldn’t we judge?!). now, one sense in which it may be right to refrain from judgment is that it is not helpful to judge people for doing something that they cannot avoid doing, or for responding rationally to circumstances they cannot control. and so it does not make sense to judge women for participating in beauty practices in a world that judges them always and everywhere on their appearance; or to judge women for staying with abusive partners in a world that fails to protect them from violence whether they stay or whether they leave; or to judge women for 5 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 enjoying sadomasochism in a world that teaches them from childhood that they will find romantic and sexual fulfilment in submission; or to judge women for participating in pornography and prostitution in a world that suggests that doing so is empowering, lucrative and freely chosen, even at the same time as women and children by the thousands are forced into prostitution and pornography by poverty, violence, and powerlessness. of course, we can praise the bravery and feminism of those who reject beauty practices, or who leave violent men, or who resist pornography, or who escape prostitution. but these things are difficult, often crushingly so, and feminism cannot write off women who do not achieve them. still, it surely must make sense to judge men who participate in and benefit from these practices. it is hard to envisage a feminism that lets abusive men off the hook. although both women and men would be better off in a world without patriarchy, freed from the oppression of gender inequality, it is unpalatable to extend sympathy or even empathy to those men who actively brutalise, use, and exploit women and children. perhaps the fact that abusive men benefit, in terms of power, wealth, and sexual gratification, makes them proper subjects of judgment. but then can we judge those women who deftly manipulate the position patriarchy gives them, those who find status and success, of sorts, through maintaining practices of gender inequality? mackinnon studiously avoids making what she terms a moral critique: this book is not a moral tract. it is not about right and wrong or what i think is good or bad to do. it is about what is, the meaning of what is, and the way what is, is enforced. (1989, xii) earlier i mentioned that toward a feminist theory of the state is full of compelling arguments. in the interests of balance, let me state that the claim just quoted may be my least favourite part of the book. i dislike it for two reasons. first, i find it unconvincing. the idea that there can be a non-moral statement of what is seems to me to contradict mackinnon’s claims that “there is no archimedean point” (1989, 117), no “purely ontological category,” no “category of “being” free of social perception” (119). the recognition that there is no authentic subject-position outside of social construction means that we must rely on normative critique if we are to have critique at all. we cannot be against rape and pornography because women are not objects for the sexual pleasure of men because, under patriarchy, they are. we cannot be against sexual harassment and female poverty because women are not unequal to men because, under patriarchy, they are. we are against rape and pornography and sexual harassment and gendered poverty because women should not be unequal to men, should not be objects for the sexual pleasure of men, and because it is bad to treat them in that way. and if it is bad to treat women in this way then it 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 is bad for men to do it, and it is bad for women to do it, and it is at least sometimes right to judge those who do it. the second reason why i dislike mackinnon’s refusal to declare “what i think is good or bad to do” is that i find it unsatisfying. i would like to know what she thinks is good or bad to do, not just in the legal struggles in which she is such a crucial participant, but in general. in our personal lives, in that space where the political is truly to be found, where what is is most significant and most entrenched, what should we do? now one answer that mackinnon gives to this question is consciousnessraising, which she terms feminism’s method. mackinnon argues that consciousness-raising, namely systematic collective attention paid to the realities of women’s everyday and personal lives, is politically significant because it is in our personal and everyday lives that male dominance is most located. as she puts it: daily social actions are seen to cooperate with and conform to a principle. they are not random, natural, socially neutral, or without meaning beyond themselves. they are not freely willed, but they are actions nonetheless. from seeing that such actions have meaning for maintaining and constantly reaffirming the structure of male supremacy at their expense, women can come to see the possibility, even the necessity, of acting differently. (1989, 101) this account of consciousness-raising offers hope. it tells us that there can be feminist activism in every action and every location: when thinking, when reading, when caring, when working, when living. we can do these things in an unconscious, habitual way, in a way that conforms to our social context with its explicit and implicit patriarchy. or we can attempt to do these things in a more conscious way, in a way that is at least aware of, and ideally does something to subvert, gender inequality. ***** in the current political climate, one area of women’s experience that has become profoundly invalidated relates to the question of who counts as a woman and thus what counts as women’s experience. the question “what is a woman?” is a question that mackinnon identifies as “implicit in feminism” (1989, 54). her answer is developed in chapter 3 of toward a feminist theory of the state. in this discussion, the distinction between moral judgment and political critique comes once again to the foreground. mackinnon notes that feminists have given a variety of answers to the question of what counts as a woman. she identifies two extremes. at one extreme, there is feminism in which womanhood is “almost purely biological, in 7 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 which women are defined by female biology” (54). at the other, there is feminism that sees the category as “almost purely social, in which women are defined by their social treatment” (1989, 54). mackinnon does not explicitly say where she stands on or outside this continuum, but we can draw some inferences about her view. the first thing to note is that any feminist account must reject the association between women and inferiority, if it is to count as feminist at all. so any feminist account of womanness based on biology derives its feminism, on mackinnon’s analysis, from one of two places. female biology might be seen as the source or cause of women’s subordination. alternatively, female biology might be seen as the terrain or subject-matter of contestation. mackinnon certainly rejects the first option and seems to endorse the second. mackinnon rejects the idea that biology is “the source” of women’s subordination, an idea that she attributes to feminists such as simone de beauvoir and susan brownmiller (1989, 55). mackinnon argues that de beauvoir sees childbirth and motherhood as necessarily natural functions involving no project, failing to realise that motherhood has no “universal invariant significance” (1989, 58). similarly, mackinnon critiques brownmiller’s claim that the difference between male and female genitals is what makes rape possible. this claim relies on seeing the penis as in some sense necessarily active with the vagina passive; coitus is thus an act of penetration that can be performed aggressively. mackinnon notes that the mere fact of genital biology cannot do the work needed for brownmiller’s account, since it would be equally biologically possible for women to “lurk in bushes and forcibly engulf men” (1989, 56). we might think that this image is somewhat over-optimistic about women’s ability forcibly to procure an erection or proceed with coitus regardless, but mackinnon’s general point is correct: rape and sexual assault do not necessarily involve what brownmiller calls the “locking together” of penis and vagina, even when men attack women, and so the fact that women do not sexually assault men with anything like the frequency or ferocity that men attack women cannot be explained by their lacking a phallus. the existence of penises does not explain rape and sexual assault, and sexual assault does not require a penis or even a phallic object. in the social context of women’s subordination, to be sexually attacked is to be attacked by or as if by a penis. the penis itself is not an aggressive organ. it becomes one only when accompanied with physical strength, brute force, intimidation, or humiliation. by any of these features could, in a different social context, accompany sexual assault by or as if by vagina. mackinnon demonstrates this alternate social possibility with her use of the language of engulfment. it is society, not biology, that determines that we do not fear aggressive vaginal engulfment (or smothering, flattening, compressing, devouring, the tropes of the vagina dentata that have been used by women to 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 assert power and discourage rape [blackledge 2003, 190–194]). rape is explained by doctrines of masculinity and male supremacy, not the existence of penises. these doctrines portray the penis as a powerful instrument of dominance but they do not make it so. to paraphrase andrea dworkin, have you ever wondered why women do not frequently rape men? it’s not because there’s a shortage of dildos.6 viewed in this way brownmiller’s and de beauvoir’s accounts of biology as the cause of subordination are question-begging. they assert that biology causes social subordination, but in fact biology subordinates only if it is socially interpreted as subordinating. as mackinnon puts it, “social and political inequality begins indifferent to sameness and difference. differences are inequality’s post hoc excuse, its conclusory artefact, its outcome presented as its origin” (1989, 218). brownmiller’s and de beauvoir’s accounts may be question-begging, but what makes them feminist is their insistence on applying normative critique to biology and nature. feminism along these lines encourages a sharp line between nature and nurture, biology and culture: nature may make something possible or even likely, but it does not make it right. normative critique, judgement, is crucial here. brownmiller wants to recognise and prosecute rape as an illegitimate attack; de beauvoir wants to free women from the fetish of motherhood that stifles their active creativity. mackinnon rejects these feminisms insofar as they are based on a normative critique of a biological reality perceived as autonomously, albeit not inevitably, producing subordination. these feminisms, which she identifies with liberalism, “construe evidence of women’s subordination as evidence of women’s difference, elevating the body of women’s oppression to the level of a universal, a category beyond history” (1989, 59). what we are left with is the idea that “women’s biology is part of the terrain on which a struggle for dominance is acted out” (1989, 54); or, as she puts it earlier in the book, “a theory is feminist to the extent it is persuaded that women have been unjustly unequal to men because of the social meaning of their bodies” (37). but this, of course, returns us to the question we started with—what is a woman? which bodies, and which bodily features, have had the social meaning that counts as legitimating inferiority? again we are returned to the biology/culture divide. mackinnon highlights various answers within feminism without directly identifying which, if any, she endorses: 6 i am paraphrasing dworkin’s speech to the midwest regional conference of the national organization for changing men: “i came here today because i don't believe that rape is inevitable or natural. if i did, i would have no reason to be here. if i did, my political practice would be different than it is. have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? it’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country” (dworkin 1988, 169–170). 9 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 what, really, is a woman? most feminists implicitly assume that biological femaleness is a sufficient index and bond because of what society makes of it: a woman is who lives in a female body. others locate what women have in common within a shared reality of common treatment as a sex: a woman is who has been treated as one. a few define a woman as one who thinks of herself, or identifies, as one. most consider women’s condition to be a descriptive fact of sex inequality: no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a social system that defines one according to gender, and most do. women’s diversity is included in this definition, rather than undercutting it. once sameness and difference are supplanted by a substantive analysis of position and interest, women become defined politically: since no woman is unaffected by whatever creates and destroys women as such, no woman is without stake in women’s situation. (1989, 38) mackinnon seems to be rejecting the first three options, or at least highlighting their incompleteness,7 and endorsing the fourth. if that is right, then, for her, being a woman is not merely living in a female body, or merely being treated as a woman, or merely identifying as a woman. instead—or perhaps additionally—mackinnon seems to endorse the idea that “no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a social system that defines one according to gender.” woman becomes a political category, and one with deep ontological significance: “no woman is unaffected by whatever creates and destroys women as such.” we can get a handle on this idea by considering the concept of (biological) essentialism. this idea has two main components. first, it invokes the idea that there is something about women’s biology that determines their social position. second, it invokes the idea of commonalities between women: that women exist “as women,” in the sense of having some experiences that transcend other significant differences such as race and class. mackinnon strongly defends the second idea, as discussed below. we have already seen that mackinnon rejects the first idea, that biology determines women’s social position. this rejection continues in women’s lives, men’s laws: while treating women as if they are a biological group is not necessarily easy to avoid, to say that a biologically determinist theory of gender is not very feminist is not very controversial. contemporary feminism begins by resisting biology as destiny. if women’s bodies determine women’s inferior social status, the possibilities for sex equality are pretty 7 for the argument that woman is a “cluster concept,” requiring resemblance rather than identity between its members, see stoljar 1995. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 limited. on this simplest level, one cannot be essentialist and feminist at the same time. (2005, 86) however, this first dimension of essentialism actually disguises two contrasting claims. while it is not true that biology actually explains or justifies women’s oppression, it is true that biology is often used socially to explain or justify the oppression of women. consider the claim that “women are subordinated because women can get pregnant.” as a description of social reality, it is true. the fact or assumption that some women and not men can become pregnant does lead to their subordination in many ways: it contributes to them being paid less, promoted less, and hired less than men; it allows women to be controlled through restrictions on the availability of birth control and abortion; and it can be a contributory factor in women’s vulnerability to domestic violence. but this does not mean that the fact of pregnancy necessarily or essentially explains women’s subjection. a feminist society would not use women’s propensity to pregnancy in these ways. as a statement of essential reality, “women are subordinated because women can get pregnant” is false. feminists and anti-feminists do not always expressly distinguish these meanings, which can lead to confusion. feminism is in part the simultaneous realisation of and resistance to the fact that women’s bodies are used to subject them. we need to be careful to distinguish feminist identification of a social reality with an anti-feminist identification of an essential reality. mackinnon herself makes this distinction clearly and emphatically, but it is often missed by critics of feminism in general and of her work in particular. for mackinnon, it is the truth of the identification of social reality that explains the truth of the second aspect of essentialism: the idea of commonality between women. this idea of commonality between women can be understood in different ways. one answer to the question of what it is that women share “as women” is that they share some biological feature. on this account, women share the experience of having female bodies, and female bodies have a variety of uniquely female experiences such as menstruation, gestation, childbirth, and breastfeeding. many feminists8 insist on the significance of these biological experiences both to individual women and to women as a group, and their work is vitally important. but though these experiences are shared by many women they are not shared by all women. some do not conceive, gestate, birth or breastfeed a child, and some do not menstruate. the fact that some women, including those who have what is commonly called “female biology,”9 do not share some or any of 8 young (2005) is a notable example. 9 many trans people and scholars reject references to “female biology,” since they argue that even sex categories are social and perhaps reject the very idea of a biological element to sex or gender. this is a live question within feminist and 11 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 these experiences means that it is problematic to speak of them as phenomena that unite all women. it does not mean that it is problematic to speak of them as phenomena that unite women. a significant part of the ordinary everyday life that feminist consciousness-raising uncovers as significant and as political concerns bodily experiences and the way they are socially treated—for example, the shame and secrecy associated with menstruation, together with the ways that it is used as a trope to undermine women as irrational or unreliable. the demonization of menstruation is an issue that affects all women by affecting their social and political status, regardless of whether they have ever menstruated or will do so in the future. when feminists including mackinnon insist on the commonalities between women they predominantly mean that women share the experience of being socially constructed and situated as women. they share the fact that they are treated as inferior to men because they are women. this shared experience applies even if they are also treated as superior to some other women and men because of their position in another dimension of privilege such as race and class. sally haslanger’s work seems to question that conclusion. she gives the example of a black man who is treated as a legitimate target for systemic police violence because he is both “black and male,” and argues that in cases like these “someone marked for subordination by reference to (assumed) male anatomy does not qualify as a woman, but also, in the particular context, is not socially positioned as a man” (2000, 41). haslanger’s account suggests that people who would usually be referred to as men on the basis of their “assumed male anatomy” do not necessarily share the experience of being dominant. but, for haslanger, that experience of being dominant (an experience which accompanies being socially identified as male and thus accorded male privilege) is necessary for someone to be a man. it follows for her that a person with “male anatomy” who is being subordinated is, at that moment at least, not a man—even if common usage and his own gender identity would label him as one. by implication, a person with “female anatomy” in a position of dominance or power is not a woman and does not share the experience of womanness with other women, even those with the same anatomy. the problem with this aspect of haslanger’s analysis is that a black man’s subordination as compared to white men is compatible with his dominance as compared to black women. it is thus problematic to say that in this interaction the black man loses his manliness. the dominance of masculinity does not translate into absolute dominance; it intersects with other hierarchies. but in trans theory: how does biology itself interact with gender experience and identity? i want to leave open the idea that, while sex categories are social, they are not only social. for an argument that sex categories have a biological basis at the group level, see richardson (2013). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 male supremacist society there is no situation in which a woman is socially positioned as superior to a man of her own race, class, and so on. even a woman in a position of great power, such as german chancellor angela merkel, is subjected to sexist commentary that serves to mark her as other from and inferior to men in equivalent positions, and in some respects to all men.10 as mackinnon writes in women’s lives, men’s laws: [elizabeth spelman writes about] “assumptions of feminism.” these assumptions include “that women can be talked about ‘as women,’ . . . are oppressed ‘as women,’ . . . that women’s situation can be contrasted to men’s” and so on. professor spelman is wrong to call these assumptions. they have been hard-won discoveries. calling feminism “essentialist” in this sense thus misses the point. analysing women “as women” says nothing about whether an analysis is essentialist. it all depends on how you analyse them “as women”: on whether what makes a woman be a woman, analytically, is deemed inherent in their bodies or is produced through their socially lived conditions. (2005, 86) so feminism asserts that there is a reality to how women are treated as women, and that this does lead to a commonality between women. moreover, this shared experience and treatment is often related to assumptions about their biology, to their socially perceived femaleness, in the sense that women’s bodies are the terrain on which gender hierarchy is played out. but this is not to say that women’s bodies produce their social position. society dictates that women are to be subjected, and it also dictates that much of this subjection will be played out on their bodies, and it also dictates that women’s bodies are to be fraudulently used as the apparent justification for their subjection. ***** 10 see mary dejevsky, “if even merkel attracts ‘black widow spider’ sexism, what hope is there for the rest of us?” independent, 25 september 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-even-merkel-attracts-blackwidow-spider-sexism-what-hope-is-there-for-the-rest-of-us-8839577.html; ngaire donaghue, “gender bias: why appearance focus fuels sexism in media,” conversation, 13 april 2013, http://theconversation.com/gender-bias-whyappearance-focus-fuels-sexism-in-media-13325; and amelia hill, “sexist stereotypes dominate front pages of british newspapers, research finds,” guardian, 14 october 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/14/sexist-stereotypes-frontpages-newspapers. 13 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-even-merkel-attracts-black-widow-spider-sexism-what-hope-is-there-for-the-rest-of-us-8839577.html http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/if-even-merkel-attracts-black-widow-spider-sexism-what-hope-is-there-for-the-rest-of-us-8839577.html http://theconversation.com/gender-bias-why-appearance-focus-fuels-sexism-in-media-13325 http://theconversation.com/gender-bias-why-appearance-focus-fuels-sexism-in-media-13325 http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/14/sexist-stereotypes-front-pages-newspapers http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/14/sexist-stereotypes-front-pages-newspapers what does this analysis of gender and essentialism mean about what we ought to do? what are the political implications? in a recent interview published on the transadvocate website, mackinnon reiterates her distaste for morality and also, in some circumstances, for judgment. for example, she repeats several times her support for trans people and states that there is no need to justify what she calls “individual people’s decisions about the social presentation of their bodies” (williams 2015). at the same time, she does make normative, political criticisms, some implicit and some more forthright. for example, she states: there is no relation between the biology of sex and the meanings socially enforced on it, other than the very real consequences of the social system of sexual politics that does that forcing. this does, of course, raise the question: if it is all a social construction, why intervene in the biology of sex? that is a real political question. (williams 2015) this statement implicitly questions sex-reassignment surgery and other forms of medical intervention such as hormone treatments. the interviewer does not pick up on this point, and so we do not have a close analysis of why this “real political question” has no implications for “individual people’s decisions about the social presentation of their bodies.” but the comment is not a one-off: mackinnon also raises questions that do seem directly to affect individual choices, such as when she states “if [as i agree] ‘sex creates oppression,’ how does changing from one sex to another oppose that oppression? if ‘there is no sex,’ how do we describe the gain and stake in changing it?” (williams 2015). the general political-philosophical issue is this: if biology is not the cause of oppression, what is its role, both actual and ideal? what significance should we attach to biology? how do changes in biology affect oppression? and what is the significance of shifting our definition of “woman”—and, for that matter, of “man”—so that it does, or does not, require certain biological features? viewed in this context, indeed in any recognisably feminist context, “individual people’s decisions about the social presentation of their bodies” are necessarily political. after all, the personal is political. we cannot act without being at once the product and the producer of social meaning. trans issues are paradigmatic examples of mackinnon’s claim that “women’s biology is part of the terrain on which a struggle for dominance is acted out” (1989, 54). who counts as a woman? which privileges does a trans person acquire and which do they lose? who gets to speak for women or as a woman? if biology does not determine one’s gender position, can men speak for women? if men can speak for women, can women speak for women? can they speak at all? in the transadvocate interview, the main target of mackinnon’s judgment is non-feminist women: 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 having been surrounded by born women who do not identify as women particularly, and reject feminism as having nothing to do with them, it has been inspiring to encounter transwomen who do identify as women, actively oppose violence against women including prostitution (in which those who engage have little choice), and are strong feminists. “woman” can be, in part, a political identification. to be a woman, one does have to live women’s status. transwomen are living it and, in my experience, bring a valuable perspective on it as well. i have encountered transwomen with excellent, clear feminist politics. they are quite a contrast to the many privileged women i am often surrounded by who deny that sex discrimination exists or who assert that prostitution is a liberating choice for women. i’ve encountered transwomen who are prostituting who strongly oppose prostitution, who make clear that they would not be in prostitution if they could be paid to do anything else. and i’m supposed to conclude that the born women who support prostitution are my team? (williams 2015) in these passages, mackinnon praises feminists and judges non-feminists, with particular judgment implied for “born women” non-feminists, which is surprising. but what strikes me particularly is mackinnon’s praise for people who “identify as women.” elsewhere mackinnon is scathing about the focus on identity, describing it as a “shift away from realities of power in the world” (2005, 90). identity, she writes, “is not women’s problem. reality is: a reality of group oppression that exists whether we identify with our group or not” (2005, 90). so why should it be praiseworthy to “identify as a woman,” or problematic not to? it would be implausible to interpret mackinnon as suggesting that there is anything suspect about a woman not particularly identifying with femininity, since nonconformity to feminine practices such as passivity, beauty, and submissiveness has always been a central part of radical feminism. alternatively, if the category “woman” is a social category, and if women are socially defined as the sex that is subordinated, then “identifying as a woman” seems to mean “identifying as a member of a subordinate group.” but feminists have pointed out that there are many sensible reasons not to “identify as women particularly,” if that means identifying with one’s position of subordination in a male supremacist world (reilly-cooper 2014). it is plausible in fact to think of feminism as the claim that one can identify as a woman in the sense of recognising the significance of one’s embodied experience and socialisation as female, while rejecting women’s subordinate position and thus refusing to identify as a woman in the sense of refusing to “live women’s status.” feminists recognise that women are treated as subordinates and actively fight for the erasure of this subordination. if the end of male supremacy means the erasure of the social category of woman then it would seem right for feminists not to identify 15 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 particularly as women, socially; instead, a feminist would identify as a human first and foremost, and would identify as a woman only in the sense of recognising the social meaning of her body and socialisation, and feeling solidarity with others whose bodies and socialisation rendered them similarly liable to subordination. alternatively, the sense of “identifying as a woman” that mackinnon is praising might be synonymous with “identifying as a feminist.” but that identification has no direct relationship to sex or gender. feminists can be male or female, gay or straight, masculine or feminine, trans or not. it would be clearer then if mackinnon were to say that some people are feminist and some are not, regardless of biology or social position, and that it is better to be a feminist. but the question then raised by mackinnon becomes: who is on “my team”? is it women, defined however they are defined by patriarchy, as a subordinated group, the target of eroticised domination? or is it feminists, however constituted: those who criticise male supremacy, even if they benefit from it? the notion that all feminists are on the same team seems initially attractive, but it is troubling if the team “feminists” should somehow be pitted against those women who do not identify as women, or do not identify as feminists, if those are different categories. this image of teams means that women who are complicit with patriarchy are ranked lower than those people who critique it, even if those people are men who also benefit from patriarchy and to whom patriarchy grants the right to act as critic. yet feminist analysis of male supremacy of the sort we find in toward a feminist theory of the state provides us with ample resources to understand the complicity of the oppressed. and the image of opposing teams is also vulnerable to mackinnon’s own critique of the way that liberal feminism focuses on the individual woman and her actions rather than on women as a unified group or class. one answer to this problem is consciousness-raising as a collective practice, as something that women do together. mackinnon writes: if every woman’s views are true, regardless of content, how is feminism to criticize the content and process of women’s determination, much less change it? regardless of the weight or place accorded daily life or women’s insight, feminist theory probes hidden meanings in ordinariness and proceeds as if the truth of women’s condition is accessible to women’s collective inquiry. the pursuit of the truth of women’s reality is the process of consciousness; the life situation of consciousness, its determination articulated in the minutiae of everyday existence, is what feminist consciousness seeks to be conscious of. (1989, 39) it is thus the collective consciousness-raising of feminism that enables us to question any individual woman’s perspective: together, we can uncover and seek 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 to change the various ways in which we are determined. but, of course, even consciousness-raising need not produce consensus, and so we are still faced with the issue of how to deal, methodologically speaking, with the persistence of disagreements between women. we are also still faced with the problem of how to answer the prior question of who qualifies as a woman: whose consciousness counts? consciousness-raising’s focus on the everyday, on ordinariness, shows us that feminists should be interested in someone’s presentation of their own body. bodily presentation is part of the ordinariness of daily life, part of how one fits in with or resists gender norms, how one fits in with or resists structures more generally. recall mackinnon’s statement in toward a feminist theory of the state that “a theory is feminist to the extent it is persuaded that women have been unjustly unequal to men because of the social meaning of their bodies” (1989, 37). this seems to make the social meaning of bodies a fundamental feminist question, and a person’s use of their own body, and claims about its proper social place, a fundamental feminist or anti-feminist act. of course, one reason to refuse judgment of other people’s use of their own bodies is that women, feminist or not, know all too well what it is to be subject to such judgment; and feminists recognise such judgment as a subordinating political act. what we wear is political, how we present ourselves as feminine or masculine is political, and the act of endorsing or critiquing clothes or presentation is political. for example, wearing revealing clothes or high heels is to position oneself in a certain aspect of femininity. it is to say that one belongs there whether by choice or by necessity. various responses to such dress are possible: one response from within male supremacy is to say that a person wearing such clothes deserves sexual assault, which is to affirm the male supremacist doctrine that to be feminine (or even just female) is to be worthy of such assault. wearing such clothes—wearing any clothes11—thus becomes a political action, because it is to situate oneself in the category of feminine, a category which is taken by many to indicate worthiness for assault. but the possible motivations and meanings for this action are multiple, and there is no stable correlation between motivation (which depends on the agent) and meaning (which does not). consider some examples of possible motivations. wearing feminine clothing might be a necessary or normal route to access certain sorts of resources, such as sex or money or power, experienced by the wearer as a necessary evil or just the simple cost of life. it might be a preference, perceived as freely chosen yet socially constructed as all choices are, and this preference might present itself as urgent, profound, and essential to oneself, or as frivolous, 11 wearing any clothes is a political action because it is to situate oneself, or attempt to situate oneself, inside or outside any number of socially defined and politically significant groups: gender, race, class, religion, culture, age, and so on. 17 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 pleasurable, and peripheral. it might be a conscious act of rebellion against constraining gender norms, such as in the drag performance or the feminist slutwalk. or it might be a wholehearted endorsement of those very same norms. how one presents oneself is inexorably political, in that it cannot make sense outside of a particular context of power. moreover, how others respond to those presentations will depend on both their views about, and their position within, that context of power. wearing feminine clothing might bring success or failure, acceptance or rejection, advantage or attack. when feminine clothes are worn by people whom observers assume to be women the result is simultaneously beneficial and harmful: women benefit from the approval they receive by conforming to norms of femininity at the same time as they are harmed for indicating their membership of the subordinate sex. this simultaneous benefit and harm can be seen in any number of examples: the businesswoman who must wear makeup and high heels to be accepted professionally, but who is then marked out as less serious than a man, less suitable for hiring or promotion, and less deserving of her salary; the young woman who must wear revealing clothing on a night out so as to be considered attractive by her peers and by potential male partners, but whose clothes simultaneously render her physically and symbolically vulnerable to rape; the woman who gains authenticity, comfort, and integrity from rejecting certain feminine beauty ideas, but whose grey hair and natural features earn her derision or disregard. the body and its presentation are thus deeply politically significant. but we can recognise this and still be wary of judging individuals. women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, so maybe we should stop damning! an example of this compassionate approach can be found in andrea dworkin’s woman hating. dworkin urges us to “refuse to submit to all forms of behaviour and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female submission” (1974, 192–193). she advocates the wholesale rejection of feminine beauty practices: “the body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint and girdles and all varieties of crap. women must stop mutilating their bodies and start living in them” (1974, 116). she envisages a future in which “community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it” (1974, 186–187). at the same time, while we are not in that future, dworkin argues that a trans person is “in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual” (1974, 186–187). a world that violently enforces a gender binary is a world which is hostile to trans people (and, of course, to women). in response, dworkin argues, “every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. that means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. this is an emergency measure for an emergency condition” (1974, 186). 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 emergency measures for emergency conditions are understandable and may be the best we can do in any given situation. dworkin herself was the victim of the most vicious personal attacks, many of which focused on her refusal to participate in various norms and rituals of feminine appearance. as necessary as emergency measures are, though, we must be wary that they do not prolong the emergency situation for everyone even as they alleviate the emergency for some. ***** there is an intersection between the questions “what is a woman?” and “may women judge?” feminists and women are increasingly wary of asserting a judgment about who counts as a woman because “transphobia” has become a stick to beat women with, feminist women in particular. in 1997 (published in 2005), mackinnon spoke of the way that the charge of essentialism was being used against feminism. in 2017, everything she says in the following excerpts from that talk could be said of transphobia. replace “essentialism” with “transphobia” in the following paragraphs and you get a pretty accurate picture of the current climate: the “essentialism” charge has become a sneer, a tool of woman-bashing, with consequences that far outrun its merits. the widespread acceptance of the claim seems due more to its choice of target than its accuracy in hitting it. male power is ecstatic; its defenders love the accusation that feminism is “essentialist,” even though they don’t really know what it means. they do know that it has divided women, which sure takes a lot of heat off. (2005, 88) fear of being labelled “essentialist” . . . has far-reaching consequences. those within and outside the academy who know that male power in all its forms remains entrenched also know they face defamatory attacks and potential threats to their economic survival if they say so. as “essentialism” has become a brand, a stigma, a contagious disease that you have to avoid feminism to avoid catching, it has become one more way that the connections and coherence of the ways women are oppressed as members of the group “women” can be covered up. it is silencing when women cannot tell the truth of what they know and survive. (2005, 89) the charge of transphobia is so damaging to feminism because it can be used to conflate the legitimate demand for acceptance, consideration, and support of trans people with the illegitimate demands for uncritical acceptance of very specific ways of thinking and speaking. feminists who question some 19 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 forms of trans theory and practice, particularly those feminists who want to reserve some significance for “born women” and “female biology,” have been vilified and, sometimes, threatened with paradigmatic forms of male violence against women, namely rape and murder.12 trans people, including trans women, are also subjected to violence, including sexual violence (stotzer 2009). violence against trans people is abhorrent. but feminist analysis shows us that violence against trans people and violence against trans-critical feminists are versions of the same thing. they are misogyny 101, proof that women may not judge, that women may not assert their opinions, that women’s bodies and women’s bodily appearance is a crucial site of their oppression, and that it doesn’t much matter what sort of a woman you are or seem to be when susceptibility to male sexual violence is at stake. ***** the title of this paper is “judging women,” a phrase that can be understood in three senses. first, when is it acceptable or necessary to make judgements about what women do? second, when can women engage in the act of judging? third, how are we to judge who counts as a woman? mackinnon’s work offers profound, sustained, rich analysis of these questions, but does not fully resolve them. this is not to say that full resolution is possible or desirable. it is simply to welcome ongoing discussion. references blackledge, catherine. 2003. the story of v: opening pandora’s box. london: orion books. chambers, clare. 2008. sex, culture, and justice: the limits of choice. university park: pennsylvania state university press. dworkin, andrea. 1974. woman hating. new york: e. p. dutton. ———. 1988. letters from a war zone. london: secker & warburg. ferguson, michaele. 2010. “choice feminism and the fear of politics.” perspectives on politics. 8 (1): 247–253. haslanger, sally. 2000. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” noûs 34 (1): 31–55. mackinnon, catharine a. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2005. women’s lives, men’s laws. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. 12 examples are documented at the website “terf is a slur” at https://terfisaslur.com. terf stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.5 reilly-cooper, rebecca. 2014. “am i cisgender?” more radical with age. https://rebeccarc.com/2014/08/04/am-i-cisgender/. richardson, sarah s. 2013. sex itself: the search for male and female in the human genome. university of chicago press. stoljar, natalie. 1995. “essence, identity, and the concept of woman.” philosophical topics 23 (2): 261–293. stotzer, rebecca l. 2009. “violence against transgender people: a review of united states data.” aggression and violent behavior 14 (3): 170–179. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s1359178909000202. williams, cristan. 2015. “sex, gender, and sexuality: the transadvocate interviews catharine a. mackinnon,” transadvocate. http://www.transadvocate.com/sex-gender-and-sexuality-thetransadvocate-interviews-catharine-a-mackinnon_n_15037.htm. young, iris marion. 2005. on female body experience: “throwing like a girl” and other essays. oxford: oxford university press. zerilli, linda. 2009. “toward a feminist theory of judgment.” signs 34 (2): 295– 317. clare chambers is university senior lecturer in philosophy and fellow of jesus college, university of cambridge. she is the author of against marriage: an egalitarian defence of the marriage-free state (oxford university press, 2017) and sex, culture, and justice: the limits of choice (penn state university press, 2008). 21 chambers: judging women published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state clare chambers recommended citation judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 5 2018 dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition liat ben-moshe university of toledo, liat.benmoshe@utoledo.edu recommended citation ben-moshe, liat. 2018. "dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 5. dis-orientation, dis-epistemology, and abolition1 liat ben-moshe abstract this paper is a brief reflection on ami harbin’s work disorientation and moral life and its relation to epistemology, especially in the context of abolition, and more specifically prison abolition and ways of not knowing i term dis-epistemology. it asks: how does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled (tenderized) about not knowing? how can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? keywords: epistemology; activism; abolition what is the relation between knowledge and orientation? how does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled (tenderized) about not knowing? how can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? these are some of the questions that ami harbin’s disorientation and moral life brought up for me and which i explore below, using prison abolition as one brief example. first, it is important to understand harbin’s specific definition of disorientation, as “temporarily extended, major life experiences that make it difficult for individuals to know how to go on” (2016, 2). in other words, it is about experiencing serious (prolonged and major) disruption to one’s life so that one does not know what to do. the hope generated by harbin’s analysis, or my interpretation of it, is that these experiences of disorientation, although often unpleasant and jarring, can also be productive. in essence, these unpredictable experiences of not knowing how to go on have the capacity (not always realized and certainly not romanticized by harbin) to teach us about how to live responsibly in changing circumstances. it is this connection between epistemology and disorientation (or knowing and not knowing how to go on) that offers a rich point of analysis, one 1 this essay was part of a forum on ami harbin's disorientation and moral life. i thank alexis shotwell and ami harbin for inviting me to take part in it. 1 ben-moshe: dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition published by scholarship@western, 2018 which i believe can aid in conceptualizing activism in our current unpredictable and disorienting times. harbin’s discussion of the connection between consciousness and action is especially illuminating for these purposes. in activist circles we often talk about the need to create awareness around specific injustices (for example, within the prison abolition arena to make people aware of the project of mass incarceration and its effects; or for those who know about mass incarceration, to understand the racist, gendered, racial capitalist, and ableist logics of incarceration and segregation, often discussed through the prism of the prison-industrial complex). but once people are aware of these injustices, once they know, what does this knowledge do?2 in the examples that harbin puts forward, especially for those “living against the grain” (116–117)—those who do not fit societal norms—“the generation of awareness does not override their deep uncertainty about how to go on” (89). this is because, perhaps contrary to popular opinion, awareness can go hand in hand with, and is not the opposite of, disorientation. feminist consciousness-raising, being one of harbin’s examples, can also reorient and potentially lead to moral resolve, resulting in action (sometimes political action). but these instances of disorientation don’t necessarily lead to political action, moral resolve, or action. as harbin explains, gaining awareness (in feminist classrooms, understanding racism, etc.) is more likely to lead to ethical action, but it does not necessarily mean it will. furthermore, even after people become aware, they may still be disoriented, not knowing how to go on. the focus here, on those living against the grain or on individuals subjected to oppressive structures, seems apt. this is because such “affect aliens” (as ahmed [2010] calls them/us) are more likely to experience a kind of double consciousness (discussed beautifully by dorothy smith [1987] as bifurcated consciousness). as harbin and other feminist philosophers explain, those in positions of privilege don’t just lack awareness about oppression but actually exhibit active denial of this oppression and its effects, a kind of refusal to know. i would push this analysis a bit further and suggest that some people—especially those in privileged positions— know and are aware of inequality but perceive inequity and oppression as just (e.g., poor people are needed as a category to maintain capitalism; people are in prison because they are perceived to be criminals or made bad decisions, but the system itself is just). so what is the value of knowledge of oppression, of being aware or of disorientation more generally (since disorientations don’t always lead to awareness or to political action)? why am i suggesting, following harbin, that disorientations 2 harkening back to sedgwick’s (2003) illustrious dilemma in her discussion of reparative reading 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/5 are useful to activism? the answer is that disorientation can be productive in creating not just specific new knowledge but a different relationship with knowledge, and with the inability to know ‘how to go on.’ this inability, this disorientation, this unfamiliarity, can be harnessed as a potential tool for liberation in the form of epistemic humility. the important intervention that harbin’s book makes is to establish the insightful connections between disorientation, ethics, and epistemology. here harbin differentiates between “aha” moments of reorientation gained by new knowledge or awareness (referred to as moments that “click”) and moments that make us feel both more aware and less conclusive, which can lead to epistemic humility. in the epistemology of resistance (2013), josé medina suggests: “having a humble and self-questioning attitude toward one’s cognitive repertoire can lead to many epistemic achievements and advantages: qualifying one’s beliefs and making finer-grained discriminations; identifying one’s cognitive gaps and what it would take to fill them; being able to formulate questions and doubts for oneself and others; and so on” (43). in other words, connecting medina’s and harbin’s discussions together, epistemic humility is the process of knowing what you don’t know and of maintaining humility about the knowledge you do have, especially in regards to others’ experiences. this sense of epistemic humility seems to me to be a crucial aspect of ethical political action. disorientation that leads not only to reorientation but also to understanding what we don’t know (especially about oppression) seems crucial to any coalition building and sustaining of social movements. relatedly and perhaps more crucially, not knowing how to go on (harbin’s definition of disorientation) can be a powerful basis for ethical political action, contrary to common logic and common practice. such disorientations can alter not only the content of our knowledge but the way we gain it and what we think knowledge is. here i would like to show how these insights might be relevant and useful in the context of carceral abolition. by carceral abolition i am referring to the myriad movements and frameworks that call for abolition of penal and carceral spaces and logics (chapman, carey, and ben-moshe 2014). the below examples refer mostly to perspectives emanating from activists in prison/penal abolition. abolitionary (or “fugitive,” in the words of harney and moten [2013]) knowledge originates from and takes into account those who are most affected by state violence and capture. and abolition, of course, emerged from the discourse of the abolition of slavery. what i want to emphasize is that prison or carceral abolition is not only a political movement but also a specific epistemology that produces an ethical position, one which resonates with the kind of disorientating (or jarring) ways of knowing that require or lead to epistemic humility (not knowing what to do or how to go on). i suggest that abolition as a radical epistemology could be construed in two ways—as a counter epistemology, and as an epistemology that produces 3 ben-moshe: dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition published by scholarship@western, 2018 specific forms (not just contents) of knowledge. in the first instance, one can view abolition as a specific epistemology, one that is counter hegemonic (see gramsci 1992). it counters the hegemonic discourse about the need to segregate others in the name of punishment, treatment, or safety (of themselves or the people who might encounter them/us). i propose that in its second sense, as an epistemology that produces specific forms of knowledge, abolition facilitates other ways of knowing. i call this disepistemology, by which i mean letting go of attachment to certain ways of knowing. dis-epistemology denotes letting go of the idea that anyone can have a definitive pathway for knowing how to rid ourselves of carceral logics. it is this attachment to the idea of knowing and needing to know everything that is part of knowledge and affective economies that maintain carceral logics. abolition is about letting go of attachments to forms of knowledge that rely on certainty (what are the definitive consequences of doing or not doing) and expertise (tell us what should be done) as well as specific demands for futurity (clairvoyance—what would happen), as i discuss more fully elsewhere.3 according to harbin’s analysis, this “missing” knowledge of what to do, due to the jarring experience of disorientation, cannot be resolved by solely gaining new knowledge about the condition at hand; it also requires a moral positioning and epistemic humility. abolition efforts are often described as not being prescriptive and not offering specific solutions and therefore as being not useful. abolitionists work on a case-by-case basis in their campaigns, research, and calls for action. they are often in a position of not knowing what to do (the knee-jerk reaction of “lock her up”’ as a catchall solution for harm is critiqued heavily by abolitionists, as are ‘one size fits all’ answers to harm or healing). some opponents (be they progressives who believe in reform or those wanting to maintain the status quo) posit this stance as, “if you can't offer a specific solution, then you are part of the problem.” but i want to suggest, following harbin, that this tenderizing effect and its resulting epistemic humility can actually be conceptualized as a strength of abolition. as harbin discusses: “what gets tenderized by the particular disorientations discussed here are practices of easily embodying the habits and expectations individuals have learned, shared, and firmed up in the past. the language of changing habits and changing expectations helps us understand what is required to allow for these shifts—getting below the level of individuals’ decisions, to the level of unlearning. when expectations are unsettled, individuals can come to embody social norms and practiced habits of interaction differently, in ways more responsive to the ways the 3 in my forthcoming book, politics of (en)closure: deinstitutionalization, prison abolition and disability (university of minnesota press), i develop this idea more fully. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/5 fragility, relationality, and nonideal realities of the world affect lives” (120). these tenderizing effects of unlearning are a part of, and not counter to, abolition as a disepistemology. for example, recall recent critiques of the black lives matter movement(s). one prevailing strand can be found in a recent (wasow 2016) online op-ed titled “how to go from #blacklivesmatter to #blackpolicymatters.” the subheading reads, "instead of demanding a series of changes, we should focus on one achievable reform that could significantly reduce police violence and lead the way for other policy changes." i am offering this op-ed as an example of misrecognizing the value of insurgent decentralized activism and the kind of ethical stance it promotes based on dis-epistemology (disorientation and epistemic humility). under the framework espoused by such critics, ‘reform,’ ‘achievable,’ ‘reduction,’ and ‘policy’ are the (only) desired goals and are viewed as the (only) means of making ‘real’ social change (as the subheading of the article suggests). but abolition is not about prescriptive solutions, as decisions in one case will not work in another, which is challenging for doing activist work, especially on a mass scale. as a (dis)epistemology and an ethical stance, abolition politics invites us to abandon our attachment to definitive types of knowing and especially to knowing all(s). in his groundbreaking work, thomas mathiesen conceptualizes abolition as an alternative in the making: "the alternative lies in the unfinished, in the sketch, in what is not yet fully existing" (mathiesen 1974, 1). abolition takes place when one breaks with the established order and simultaneously breaks new ground. abolition therefore, by definition, cannot wait for a future constellation when appropriate alternatives are already in place. this is inherently impossible, as mathiesen suggests, because alternatives cannot come from living in the existing order, but from a process of change that will come as a result of a transition from it. according to mathiesen, abolition is triggered by making people aware of the necessary dilemma they are faced with—continuing with the existing order with some changes (i.e., reform) or transitioning to something unknown. this is tied in with the connection harbin makes between ethical positioning, moral resolve, and the tenderizing effects of disorientation, especially epistemic humility. as harbin puts it: “one way in which awareness of contingent oppressive norms and political complexity can be morally or politically productive even without generating moral resolve is by allowing individuals to relate differently to others and themselves as knowers” (91). the goal of carceral abolition, as i alluded to earlier, is to rid ourselves of carceral locales, which will require resolute action and moral resolve, the pushing and the steps needed to shutter carceral enclosures (such as specific campaigns in the spirit of ‘no new jails’ or prison building moratoria, as well as steps towards decriminalization of a host of currently punishable deeds). but carceral abolition is 5 ben-moshe: dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition published by scholarship@western, 2018 also (and some abolitionists might say more importantly) about ridding ourselves of carceral logics. it’s about building a society in which caging and segregating people for wrongdoings would be nonsensical. abolition necessitates creating different ways of understanding and responding to harm, and therefore requires epistemic humility of the kind harbin discusses. the question becomes not "what is the best alternative" in its final formulation, but how this new order shall begin from the old. in this sense a question that emerges from the "unfinished" as alternative, is how to maintain it as such, a sketch, not a final result but a process (mathiesen 1974). it is precisely for this reason that mathiesen’s work has often been criticized for lacking any concrete suggestions for penology or even activism, and therefore perceived as abstract and detached from specific activist and policy stances. but reclaiming abolition as disepistemology, with its lack of certainty, would solidify abolition as fashioning new ways of envisioning the world and opening up opportunities that are not closed off by readymade prescriptions. this notion of nonabsolute solutions to social injustice comes from an understanding of the open approach needed to oppose such large and changing terrain. if the issue itself is multifaceted, the solution to it can’t be one-dimensional, and the tools to counter it are also varied. in abolition this is exhibited in the tension between reformist approaches (improving education and health care for those incarcerated, for example) and abolitionary approaches. harbin discusses this tension as one example of encountering injustice in ways that require “both/and” actions. for those living against the grain, those marginalized in current systems of power, these are survival techniques coming out of the kind of bifurcated consciousness discussed earlier. the tension between reform and abolition is a key characteristic of the penal/prison abolitionist stance, and there is no agreement as to how to resolve it. the movement is diverse and ranges from calls for focusing on the present circumstances of prisoners and advocating for gradual decarceration (as described by the attrition model by knopp et al. 1976), to those who contend that any type of reform would lead to the growth of the prison-industrial complex and should be avoided by activists (see davis 2011; knopp et al. 1976; mathiesen 1974). but pragmatism and a vision for the future of a non-carceral society are not necessarily binary opposites, especially through the duality of the both/and approach that harbin suggests. harbin also draws on the work of leanne simpson, who discuses indigenous resurgence as connecting with generations of ancestral indigenous communities, and therefore as not a linear movement toward a specific goal. because colonialism is still at play and is in flux—and i agree here with scholar/activists who reject notions of indian removal and genocide as being in past tense but instead see it as a 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/5 structure and not an event (see wolfe 2006 and kauanui 2016)—creating strong indigenous communities and fighting against colonialism is therefore a constant process and requires constant redevelopment of ways to both resist and build. a precolonial world cannot be achieved since the damage has already taken place. however, even the goal of decolonization (by being in or supporting indigenous communities reclaiming land, resources, knowledge, and ways of being) is a tenuous future-oriented vision, more than it is a goal per se. in other words, the world we struggle to decolonize is already tainted by colonialism, and therefore this struggle necessitates constant questioning and shifting strategies and frameworks in unpredictable ways, a process harbin discusses as “doubling back.” this sense of urgency enables abolitionism, as utopian epistemology, to become a model for political activity in the here and now, with an idea of the future. this is the concept of becoming, instead of being, or of potentiality, as opposed to possibility. for agamben (1999), potentiality differs from possibility, which is something that might happen in the future; while potentiality represents the immanent, that which is present but not fully manifested yet. abolitionists strive towards a non-carceral society in the here and now (where systems of incarceration and its logics are still present) but with glimpses towards such a world, for example, within the platform for black lives with its push for reparations, with approaches to mental healing that go beyond state interventions, and within successful campaigns to stop any and all new jails (whether they are gender-responsive, green, mental health focused, or not). translating the usefulness of disorientation to the level of activism will necessitate building new relationships and ways of reacting and connecting to each other, often without having a clear or existing model as to how to do so. it might therefore enable a sense of humility and acceptance of this fact of not knowing and not having a clear blueprint for change. even if one had a specific solution to a social problem, harbin reminds us, following longtime activist grace lee boggs, it might not work in a different locale or context.4 this may lead to further disorientation, but again, this sense of not knowing how to go on can actually be beneficial as it leads to epistemic humility and further experimentation in the here and now in order to reach a different then and there (borrowing from the late queer studies scholar josé esteban muñoz 2009). 4 as was the case in detroit, where grace lee and jimmy boggs were major engines for change for many decades. harbin, as a current detroit resident herself, is obviously inspired by and continues in their tradition. for more on their incredible work, see http://boggscenter.org/. 7 ben-moshe: dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition published by scholarship@western, 2018 http://boggscenter.org/ my argument here is not to suggest that there is no possible answer to the question of what to do and how to go on in the context of mass incarceration or carceral logics more broadly. quite the opposite, i want to suggest that there are perhaps infinite answers to this question, but they are made invisible in our current paradigms (of justice or rehabilitation, for example). like scott kurashige suggests, following and taking the lead from james and grace lee boggs, “we must move toward the future lacking a clear-cut blueprint of what is to be done” (quoted in harbin 125). i would amend this powerful refrain to exclude the word ‘must,’ as i think the kind of vision offered by the boggses is by definition nonprescriptive (no absolute suggestion is given). the boggses do not tell us what we must do, which makes the need for “carrying with us a shared sense of the awareness, values, methods, and relationship necessary to navigate these uncharted waters” (125), as kurashige further suggests, even more essential. this is the hopeful potential of analyzing and cultivating the power of disorientation, if we heed harbin’s illuminating analysis. references: agamben, giorgio. 1999. potentialities: collected essays in philosophy. edited by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, ca: stanford university press. ahmed, sara. 2010. the promise of happiness. durham, nc: duke university press. chapman, c., a. c. carey, and l. ben-moshe. 2014. “reconsidering confinement: interlocking locations and logics of incarceration.” in disability incarcerated, edited by l. ben-moshe, c. chapman, and a. c. carey, 3–24. new york: palgrave macmillan. davis, angela y. 2011. are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. gramsci, antonio. 1992. prison notebooks, vol. 2. new york: columbia university press. harbin, ami. 2016. disorientation and moral life. new york: oxford university press. harney, stefano, and fred moten. 2013. the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. new york: minor compositions. kauanui, j. kēhaulani. 2016. “‘a structure, not an event’: settler colonialism and enduring indigeneity.” lateral 5 (1). doi: 10.25158/l5.1.7. knopp, fay honey, barbara boward, mark morris, and morris bartel schnapper. 1976. instead of prisons: a handbook for abolitionists. prison research education action project mathiesen, thomas. 1974. the politics of abolition. new york: halsted press. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. new york: oxford university press. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/5 muñoz, josé esteban. 2009. cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: nyu press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. 2003. "paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you." in touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity, 123–151. durham, nc: duke university press. smith, dorothy e. 1987. the everyday world as problematic: a feminist sociology. toronto: university of toronto press. wasow, omar. 2016. “how to go from #blacklivesmatter to #blackpolicymatters.” the root, july 16. http://www.theroot.com/how-to-go-fromblacklivesmatter-to-blackpolicymatter-1790856042. wolfe, patrick. 2006. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8 (4): 387–409. liat ben-moshe is an assistant professor of disability studies at the university of toledo. from 2019 she will be assistant professor of criminology, law and justice at the university of illinois at chicago. she is an activist/scholar who has worked and published on such topics as deinstitutionalization and incarceration; prison abolition; disability, anti-capitalism, and queerness; inclusive pedagogy; disability in israel/palestine; and representations of disability. for more information: utoledo.academia.edu/liatbenmoshe. 9 ben-moshe: dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition published by scholarship@western, 2018 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition liat ben-moshe recommended citation dis-orientation, dis-epistemology and abolition resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 3 2017 resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach sherri irvin university of oklahoma, sirvin@ou.edu recommended citation irvin, sherri. 2017. "resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 3. resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach1 sherri irvin abstract this article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. the convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment, and criminal justice. the injustice is compounded by the interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. i argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. this does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. instead, i advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. i argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. keywords: aesthetics, attractiveness, beauty, body, disability, fat, gender, hume, oppression, race, social injustice, ugliness 1 i am grateful to audiences at the 2015 meeting of the american society of aesthetics, the college of charleston, oklahoma state university, the 2015 pacific division meeting of the american philosophical association, the university of miami, and the white rose aesthetics forum for discussions of earlier versions of this paper. particular thanks are due to sheila lintott for many discussions of related issues. 1 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 it is an everyday part of human experience to find certain faces and bodies more pleasing, more attractive, more beautiful, or sexier than others. and it is sometimes thought that when we experience them in this way, we are tapping into their true aesthetic value: my experience of pleasure in encountering another person’s body is caused by, and is a detection mechanism for, the aesthetic value that body genuinely possesses. this is roughly the picture that hume offers of the beautiful: he says, “some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease” (hume 1907, 271). the “original structure of the internal fabric” is the structure of the mind: the suggestion is that, given the structure of a well-functioning human mind, some objects will naturally give us pleasure, and those are the objects we rightly call beautiful. ugly objects, similarly, are those “fitted by nature” to displease (hume 1907, 273). whether one thinks that the sources of our aesthetic responses are primarily natural or, instead, are the product of conventional or cultural standards, this is a picture of aesthetic appreciation that remains dominant within philosophical aesthetics: we assess objects in relation to some appropriate standard, detect their aesthetic value, and issue judgments that can be correct or incorrect.2 appropriate judgments, according to such views, should converge, identifying the same set of objects as beautiful or ugly. this sort of picture is most often offered in relation to the appreciation of artworks, but there is no obvious reason why it can’t be extended to the aesthetic appreciation of human bodies. moreover, it’s not hard to see why there might be structures in the mind that produce uniform aesthetic reactions to certain kinds of bodies. evolutionary psychology suggests that some qualities are found attractive because they are honest indicators of health and reproductive fitness (davies 2012). evolution has, on this view, selected for minds that feel pleased by, and are thus drawn to, bodies with good reproductive prospects. on this picture, then, judgments of human beauty or attractiveness have intersubjective validity, can be correct or incorrect, and may even be such that correct judgments make one more likely to pass on one’s genes, if we accept the evolutionary account. body oppression but there’s also a dark side to these judgments. this dark side has been researched extensively in other disciplines, but recent philosophical aesthetics has, 2 carlson (2000) and walton (1970), discussed below, are among the myriad defenses of the objectivity of aesthetic judgments. i do not mean to suggest that this is the dominant lay view of aesthetic value. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 oddly, had little to say about the body.3 the dark side has to do with the way in which judgments of bodily and facial attractiveness get tied up with judgments about other aspects of the embodied person, resulting in a wide range of differential treatment that—with some exceptions—favors people whose bodies are judged to be attractive over those whose bodies are judged unattractive. (even the exceptions, as we’ll see, are not particularly comforting.) here is a small selection from the myriad findings. from the moment of birth, unattractive children receive less nurturing treatment. mothers of more attractive infants were more affectionate and playful compared with mothers of less attractive infants. . . . the mothers of less attractive infants were more likely to be attentive to other people rather than to their infant and to engage in routine caregiving rather than affectionate behavior. (langlois et al. 1995, 464) adults judge attractive infants to be better behaved, smarter, and more likeable than unattractive infants (stephan and langlois 1984). numerous studies have shown that people punish unattractive children more harshly and judge their actions more negatively (langlois et al. 1995).4 when a child’s school file is associated with an attractive photograph, a teacher expects the child to be more intelligent and more popular, to progress further in school, and to have parents who are more interested in education (clifford and walster 1973). “attractive children are more likely to receive encouragement from their teachers” (hatfield and sprecher 1986, 49–50, citing adams and cohen 1974). teachers and undergraduate education majors judged unattractive black boys to be less academically competent than members of any 3 the principal exceptions are brand (2000, 2013) and irvin (2016). richard shusterman (1999, 2000, 2012), who has advocated an aesthetics of the body under the name ‘somaesthetics,’ tends to focus on the aesthetics of bodily experience rather than on bodily attractiveness. other relevant work has been done outside aesthetics by deborah rhode (2010) and outside philosophy altogether by tobin siebers (2010). 4 i use the present tense to report most findings, which i assume to be indicative of how attractiveness judgments are implicated in many domains. however, it should be understood that not all results will apply seamlessly outside experimental contexts, and some trends may have shifted since studies were conducted. 3 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 other group (parks and kennedy 2007).5 it is well known that teachers’ expectations and level of attention have a powerful effect on student performance (rosenthal and jacobson 1968), so it’s easy to see how some of these attitudes become selffulfilling prophecies. many studies have shown that physically attractive candidates are more likely to be hired and to have their work assessed favorably (hosoda, stone-romero, and coats 2003). however, attractive women are at a disadvantage in applying for managerial positions (heilman and stopeck 1985), as well as for “masculine sextyped jobs for which physical appearance is perceived as unimportant” (johnson et al. 2010, 301). attractive criminal defendants are judged more leniently than unattractive ones (mazzella and feingold 1994; leventhal and krate 1977). people judge a car accident to be more serious, and award more money, when an attractive victim is harmed by an unattractive driver than when the situation is reversed (kulka and kessler 1978). unattractive rape victims are judged more blameworthy for the fact that they have been raped (thornton and ryckman 1983). and fighting back doesn’t help: “subjects responded the least favorably to the unattractive rape victim, particularly when she resisted the rape by fighting with her attacker” (deitz, littman, and bentley 1984, 261). social sanctions against overweight and obese people are likely related to judgments of attractiveness. women who are slender, but not emaciated, are more likely than fat women to be judged worthy of receiving help after a minor accident (swami et al. 2008). as puhl and brownell (2001) discuss, obese people are subject to a wide variety of penalties. in studies, researchers found that 24% of nurses were “repulsed” by obese patients, and 12% preferred not to touch them (bagley et al. 1989). parents provided less financial support for overweight children to attend college (crandall 1991, 1995). obese applicants are less likely to be hired, and if hired are paid lower wages for comparable work and are less likely to be promoted; these effects are more pronounced for women than for men (gortmaker et al. 1993; loh 1993; pagan and davila 1997; register and williams 1990). attractiveness is also racialized. it has been widely observed that in a majority white society with a history of white supremacy, standards of beauty are racialized white, and this negatively affects both other-perceptions and selfperceptions of beauty in women of color. shirley anne tate (2009) and maxine leeds craig (2002) are among the many scholars who have written extensively on 5 i follow the convention here of capitalizing terms, including black and white, used to identify racialized groups. i’ll say more below about the racialized aspects of judgments of attractiveness. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 this phenomenon. in a recent and controversial study (lewis 2011), white subjects judged black male faces more attractive than white male faces, but judged black female faces less attractive than white female faces.6 however, black men face other forms of stigma associated with appearance: they, unlike white men, are more successful as corporate leaders if they are perceived as baby-faced. the researchers hypothesize that “babyfaceness is a disarming mechanism that facilitates the success of black leaders by attenuating stereotypical perceptions that blacks are threatening” (livingston and pearce 2009, 1229). i’ve focused on empirical studies that tell us about quantifiable outcomes. obviously, the experiential effects of judgments of attractiveness are immense as well. lizzie velásquez has a rare disorder that prevents her body from storing fat, causing her to appear extremely emaciated. “when velásquez was in high school, she discovered a video of herself on youtube that was titled ‘world's ugliest woman.’ it had garnered millions of views” (barness 2014). sarah atwell has an incurable condition that has caused a large tumor on one side of her face. she was physically bullied as early as third grade (james 2013). when she was 16, she posted a video online in which she holds handwritten placards saying “i have very few friends i trust,” “i get called names all the time . . . bitch, slut, fat face, fat, ugly. . . . it hurts” and “sometimes i wish i looked different. maybe the hurt would go away” (discovery fit & health 2013). the issue, then, is not that attractive people are treated a bit more nicely than unattractive people. instead, we have a picture whereby, from the moment of birth, attractive people (with a few exceptions) accrue positive social capital in families, schools, and workplaces, while unattractive people pay a very substantial penalty that may involve less positive parental attention, less support from teachers, less recognition for their qualifications, less help when they need it, more punishment, and so forth. some are routinely teased, bullied, dehumanized, and ostracized. these judgments often interact in disturbing ways with race, gender, disability, age, and gender identity, among other aspects of social identity (see, e.g., ferens and sikora 2016). clearly, judgments of attractiveness are a significant driver of harm. moreover, the pattern of rewards and penalties associated with attractiveness judgments constitute a form of systemic social injustice. first, the harms in question 6 this study was harshly and correctly criticized for testing the hypothesis that “lighter women will be more attractive than darker women and darker men will be more attractive than lighter men” (lewis 2011, 159) by studying only the responses of 18 white british subjects. while the study does not tell us “what makes a face attractive” (lewis 2011, 159), it does tell us that attractiveness judgments made by white subjects under white supremacy are racialized. 5 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 are pervasive, and at times severe, affecting many areas of a person’s life prospects. second, the harms are tied to judgments about features the subject did not choose and has little power to alter. third, judgments about these features lead to effects in domains to which they are not legitimately relevant. finally, these judgments are governed by broader social practices and conventions that are transmitted much as other forms of bias are transmitted. thus, although attractiveness, unlike race and gender, is not overtly recognized as a fundamental scheme by which we categorize one another, the pattern of results i have described shows that it does have a systemic effect in shaping the life prospects of identifiable groups of people. i take this to be sufficient to regard the situation as one of social injustice. the systemic injustice is constituted in part by the fact that aesthetic judgments tend to converge on the same sets of faces and bodies as attractive or unattractive, just as standard views of aesthetic judgment suggest that they should. because the same people are consistently found attractive or unattractive, the rewards and penalties associated with judgments of attractiveness are concentrated rather than distributed. alternative strategies one way we might address body oppression is by trying to separate judgments of attractiveness from judgments about and behavior toward people in domains where attractiveness is irrelevant. for example, if we find that gender is affecting our judgments of the quality of a student’s work, we should find a way to remove gender from our assessment algorithm so as to focus on factors that are in fact indicative of the work’s quality. might we do the same for attractiveness judgments? i suggest that this is not a promising strategy. first, the role of attractiveness in these domains is often implicit, and it is often difficult even to recognize, much less correct for, the influence of implicit factors on one’s judgment (see, e.g., nisbett and wilson 1977). there is good evidence that failure of introspection into assessment processes is a widespread phenomenon that is relevant to aesthetic judgment (irvin 2014; lopes 2014). when people are unaware of the role bias plays in their judgment, they cannot engage in individual practices of eradicating it. systemic solutions, such as eliminating information about race and gender in choice contexts, are required (e.g., goldin and rouse 2000; saul 2013). in many instances of individual interaction, however, solutions of this kind are not available: we can’t simply remove information about attractiveness from the situation. when we aren’t able to anonymize the judgment situation, the standard solution is to reduce bias associated with race and gender, not to leave the bias in place and attempt to reduce its influence in other domains. bias can be reduced through such strategies as elimination of bias-promoting information in the social 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 environment (dasgupta 2013) and repeated exposure to role models who defy negative stereotypes (blair 2002). the aim is to eliminate the negative valence associated with recognition of race and gender. but there is no way to eliminate the negative valence associated with attractiveness judgments, since the latter are inherently valenced: as hume suggested, they are associated with—indeed, partly constituted by—positive and negative affects. to judge someone to be unattractive, then, is not like simply judging them to be of a certain gender or race; it is, instead, analogous to judging them to be of a certain gender or race while laden with negative bias about that gender or race. for this reason, i will pursue a strategy that aims to disrupt the judgment of unattractiveness and replace it with a form of positively valenced aesthetic response, rather than a strategy that leaves the judgment of unattractiveness untouched and aims to reduce the influence of this judgment on judgments and behavior in other contexts. another strategy i will not pursue involves decreasing our attention to others’ embodiment, especially when we recognize that this embodiment triggers negative responses in us. attempting to suppress or ignore information has variable effects and can backfire, as studies of implicit bias have shown (blair 2002; blair, ma, and lenton 2001). moreover, withdrawal of engagement with others’ embodiment is one of the mechanisms of social oppression, as scholars of disability have often argued. rosemarie garland-thomson notes that “truncated stares come from our distress at witnessing fellow humans so unusual that we cannot accord them a look of acknowledgment” (2009, 79). “looking away,” she continues, “is an active denial of acknowledgement” which can “erode . . . dignity and self-esteem” (2009, 83). withdrawal of attention to another’s embodiment, then, is often dehumanizing. a strategy that involves taking care not to attend to the embodiment of people consistently judged unattractive risks communicating a denial of their personhood. for these reasons, i will not consider strategies that involve either quarantining our judgments about people’s bodies from other judgments about them, or withdrawing attention from their bodies in favor of attention to other aspects of their personhood (though attending to other aspects of their personhood is certainly important, and is compatible with the strategy i advocate). instead, i will argue we should choose to cultivate a specific kind of aesthetic practice, one that does not involve assessing bodies in relation to standards that are derived either from natural response tendencies or from culture or convention. i’ll first consider the adaptation of an aesthetic practice that has been proposed in relation to natural environments, but ultimately reject it in favor of a more radical proposal. positive aesthetics and appropriate aesthetic categories kendall walton (1970) famously observed that many of our aesthetic assessments depend on seeing an object in relation to a category. many aesthetic 7 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 assessments are comparative: when we say that something is “dynamic” or “serene,” we are implicitly comparing it to other items, and for these assessments to be correct, we need to ensure that we are using an appropriate comparison class. walton suggested that the correct category for an artwork is determined in part by historical considerations having to do with what the artist intended or which categories were well established in the culture in which the work was made. allen carlson adapted this framework to the aesthetics of nature. rather than appealing to cultural factors to determine correct categories for natural objects, carlson suggested that such categories are determined by the natural sciences. he offers the following examples: the rorqual whale is a graceful and majestic animal. however, were it perceived as a fish, it would appear more lumbering, somewhat oafish, perhaps a bit clumsy (maybe somewhat like the basking shark). similarly, the graceful and even elegant moose would seem an awkward deer; the charming, cute woodchuck, a massive and awe-inspiring brown rat; the delicate sunflower, a stiff and stodgy daisy. (carlson 2000, 89) obviously, part of carlson’s brief, like walton’s, is to argue that assessments that depend on an inappropriate category assignment are incorrect. carlson suggests that a positive aesthetics of nature falls out of an understanding of appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature. positive aesthetics is the idea that everything, or everything belonging to a particular category, has positive aesthetic value. why should we expect correct categorization to yield a positive aesthetics of nature? this, carlson says, is a function of how appropriate categories for nature appreciation are chosen: a more correct categorization in science is one that over time makes the natural world seem to be more intelligible, more comprehensible to those whose science it is. our science appeals to certain kinds of qualities to accomplish this. these qualities are ones such as order, regularity, harmony, balance, tension, resolution, and so forth. . . . moreover, these qualities that make the world seem comprehensible to us are also those that we find aesthetically good. (carlson 2000, 93–94) a striking aspect of carlson’s argument for a positive aesthetics of nature is the rather narrow array of positive aesthetic qualities he appeals to: “order, regularity, harmony, balance, tension, resolution, and so forth.” when we encounter nature, surely part of what is there for us to appreciate is its wildness, its irregularity, its unruliness. the idea that proper aesthetic appreciation of nature 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 requires assimilating its aesthetic values to the aesthetic values of order and regularity that may be apt to scientific theories is not sufficiently motivated. in addition, as applied to bodies, this approach seems excessively disciplinary. order, regularity, harmony, and balance may constitute a body aesthetics well suited to ballerinas, at least while they’re dancing. but if we think about sexual encounters, for example, the aesthetic values we most treasure may be quite different. a second problem is that this foundation might secure a positive aesthetics for nature overall—since we choose categories on which nature comes out to be orderly, harmonious, and so forth—but it will not secure a positive aesthetics for all the exemplars within any category. once the categories are selected, we are still in the business of comparing each sunflower to other sunflowers (though not to daisies). some members of any given category are going to lose out. the idea of a positive aesthetics is a helpful one. an approach that yields a positive aesthetics of the body could allow us to continue to respond aesthetically to each other’s embodiment without yielding the sort of injustices associated with judgments of attractiveness and unattractiveness. but how is this possible? on the consensual view, aesthetic appreciation just is the detection of aesthetic value in relation to some sort of standard or comparison class. could there be aesthetic appreciation that does not invoke conventional standards? could such aesthetic appreciation yield a true positive aesthetics of the body? aesthetic exploration as resistance to body oppression i’ve used the expression “aesthetic practice” throughout this discussion, and now i’d like to make the concept explicit. an aesthetic practice, as i conceive it, is a practice of cultivating aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation. hume, walton, and carlson advocate aesthetic practices within the same broad family having to do with assessment by relevant standards. this practice, if done well, should yield intersubjectively valid judgments about the true aesthetic character of the object. this form of aesthetic practice is often privileged in philosophical aesthetics; indeed, it’s often treated as the only legitimate form of aesthetic appreciation. but other aesthetic practices are available to us. i’d like to highlight a particular kind of alternative practice, aesthetic exploration, and examine its prospects for transforming negative aesthetic responses to bodies. it involves a specific kind of attitude in approaching an object: namely, a disposition to seek out that object’s particular aesthetic affordances and enjoy them. aesthetic exploration is not geared toward experiencing pleasure from “beautiful” objects and displeasure from “ugly” objects. it isn’t particularly interested in beauty or ugliness per se, and it isn’t content to rest in displeasure. it actively seeks pleasure. 9 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 one step in aesthetic exploration is, as i said, seeking out aesthetic affordances. much of this has to do with careful attention. here’s an example. considering the skin alone, my hand has a remarkable array of colors and textures. it’s completely different on the palm side than on the outside. the topography seems infinitely complex and shifts constantly with my movement—for my hand is in constant motion whether or not i intend it. there are wrinkles and folds and tiny divides, lines that run parallel, meet up, radiate out from a point, intersect. there are spots darkened with age, fine purple blood vessels visible below the surface. the tactile experience afforded by my hand is similarly rich. the skin on the sides of the fingers is soft and silky; the skin of the lower palms is smooth, but without that silky quality; the outer surfaces of the knuckles are rough. perhaps you’d like to take a moment to study your own hand, if you have one—if not, another body part will do as well. the exploration can involve any or all of the senses; it need not be primarily or at all visual. i’ve barely scratched the surface of what the hand has to offer as an aesthetic object, especially if we consider the shapes it can take on with movement, the structures that can be seen and felt under its skin, and so forth. i haven’t even begun to reflect on how knowledge of the body and its functioning could enrich my experience, such as if i considered the movement of my hand as a function of an intricate system in which nerves, tendons, ligaments, bones, muscles, and skin all have a part to play. (note that i need not rely on assumptions about how the hand “should” function in order to explore and take aesthetic interest in how it is in fact functioning: tremor, for instance, can be aesthetically fascinating.) and the hand is only one, comparatively small part of the body—there would be just as much to say about other body parts, and still more to say about the body considered as a whole. i’ve mostly offered a description of how my hand appears to me. i haven’t said anything about its aesthetic properties, as these are usually construed: i haven’t said that by virtue of the silkiness of the skin and the fine purple blood vessels below the surface it is delicate; i haven’t said that by virtue of the roughness of the knuckles and the darkened spots and the thickness of the fingers it is coarse. i also haven’t made any kind of pronouncement about its aesthetic value. i’ve just tried to offer a description of how i experience my hand on close inspection, and the description of course falls well short of the actual complexity of that experience. but the experience itself, in which i study the hand with open attention to its form and behavior, can be considered an experience of aesthetic appreciation, as i have argued elsewhere (irvin 2008a, 2008b). of course, nothing in what i’ve said guarantees or even suggests that the experience will be pleasurable. another component of the practice of aesthetic exploration is required: namely, a disposition to seek out and enjoy things that are interesting. this, like the tendency to assess things in relation to appropriate 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 categories, can be cultivated. it involves a sense of adventure, a willingness to encounter and celebrate the unique and surprising, a willingness to tolerate and persist through moments of experience that are jarring. the term ‘aesthetic exploration’ is meant to suggest both that we seek out aesthetic affordances that might frequently be ignored, and that we do so with a sense of adventure. the fact that this is a practice has some implications. first, it may be cultivated through specific forms of activity. second, one’s experience will change over time, as one becomes accustomed to and masters the practice. what are the forms of activity through which aesthetic exploration is cultivated? first, one directs an exploratory gaze at ordinary objects, including bodies, with the aim of seeking out sources of richness and interest. of course, when it comes to bodies, one must undertake this practice in an ethical way, not directing intrusive and unwanted gazes at others. obviously, one shouldn’t practice on one’s coworkers, students, patients, or others over whom one is in a position of power. one shouldn’t direct lengthy gazes at people in public places, unless one has a very compelling reason—one that is definitely not a product of one’s imagination—to think that such gazes are welcome. one’s own body, and the bodies of one’s lovers, are a good place to start here. one can aim to look honestly. one can linger. one can seek out new sources of enjoyment. since we have the internet at our disposal, we can also attend to material that has been publicly released by people who are offering themselves and their bodies for aesthetic attention. this includes, for instance, videos of performances by dancers with visible disabilities or other forms of unusual embodiment (to use garland-thomson’s term). of course, videos on the internet have their limits: they offer only visual information, and the level of detail is limited; they do not support the sort of rich multi-sensory engagement we can have with objects and bodies that are present in our space. nonetheless, dance gives us an opportunity to appreciate the body as it moves rather than see it as a static shape, and to appreciate it as the dancer is actively presenting it. and, of course, there is nothing awkward or inappropriate about directing an extended appreciative gaze toward the body of a dancer in the act of performing: that’s what the dance is for. of course, if we can attend such performances in person, so much the better. should we expect that aesthetic practices we cultivate in our role as mere observers will be transferable to situations in which we are interacting, as is required for the success of this project? empirical evidence suggests that attention to counterstereotypic role models with whom we have no prospect of interacting can reduce implicit bias, which in turn would be predicted to improve our direct interactions with others (blair 2002; blair, ma, and lenton 2001). this gives some support to the prospect that practices undertaken in one’s capacity as a mere observer can be transferred to situations of interaction. 11 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 returning specifically to the aesthetic case, the perceptual features available to us when we are merely observing are the same as those available when we are interacting. if we cultivate the ability to aesthetically appreciate these features in one context, it should be possible in principle to transfer this ability to other contexts where the same features are available. when we attempt the transfer, interaction and aesthetic exploration may initially involve a heavy cognitive burden, and the two tasks may interfere with one another. but this is a matter of practice: one can become so proficient at a task that it recedes into the background, ceasing to interfere with other things one might be doing. something similar is true with the perceptual tasks involved in driving a car: initially, one might experience the combination of controlling the car and surveying the road and surrounding areas for potential hazards to be highly effortful, but eventually the perceptual task becomes second nature. our approach is to direct an exploratory gaze at the body and seek out aspects of it that are unique, experiences it affords that we have never had before. we aim to take pleasure in these encounters. on encountering a body with interest and openness, with a willingness to see it in ways that we have never seen it before, we can have an aesthetic experience of it that need not involve assessing it or issuing a verdict about whether it is delicate or coarse, beautiful or ugly, elegant or common. we can simply immerse ourselves in the experience for its own sake. this is one kind of aesthetic experience we might have of visual artworks or musical works: encountering the work with interest and exploring it. we can approach the body as though it were a new planet, or a familiar landscape made unfamiliar through the quality of our attention to it. there are two obstacles we may encounter: negative aesthetic responses, and positive ones. we may find a particular body, or a part of it, ugly, unattractive, or disgusting. that is a familiar experience, isn’t it? you might find some part of your body unpleasantly wrinkled; your knuckles might be enlarged with arthritis in a way you find unsightly. you might have age spots or burn scars that you experience as marring your skin. you might be disturbed by stretch marks or a protruding belly. your hand might have fewer or much smaller fingers than most people’s hands, it might be shaped differently or move differently, and you might—having lived your whole life in a society that treats this feature as an aesthetic defect—experience it that way yourself. one can, of course, also have such negative responses to the bodies of others. when this happens, we do not conclude our exploration. we continue to look with openness and interest. we attempt to shift our attention away from the body’s violation of our expectations for what bodies should be like, and back to exploring what this body really is like. burn scars may cause us to cringe initially, but on continued encounter, we may be able to appreciate their intricate 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 networks and distinctive textures. garland-thomson, discussing doug auld’s paintings of burn survivors, says, as portraits, the paintings announce that their subjects are worthy of public commemoration, important enough to look at, even beautiful. these pictures force us to make sense of faces patterned with vivid colors, limbs sculpted into surprising shapes, and bodies deeply etched with intricate swirls. (2009, 80) exposing ourselves to images that encourage a positive aesthetic approach to subjects usually understood as ugly or disfigured is an important strategy for cultivating aesthetic exploration. positive aesthetic responses, too, are an obstacle. when we experience pleasure triggered by the satisfaction of our conventional expectations for bodies, we may be tempted simply to linger there, deepening rather than undermining our reliance on conventional standards. we must apply aesthetic exploration in these cases as well, seeking to have positive aesthetic responses that are not triggered by conformity to standards. the point of this practice is not to rest in a constant state of fascination. and it is also not, ultimately, to direct a disproportionate level of exploration at bodies that we encounter as somehow unusual or atypical. instead, the aim is to gain a facility at appreciating the specific aesthetic affordances of bodies we encounter— all bodies, whether they seem typical to us or not. cultivating a practice is a process that unfolds over time. one may initially need to focus on particular kinds of bodies in order to actively resist and overcome aesthetic practices that are deeply ingrained. but ultimately, the aim is to settle in to a different mode of aesthetic response to bodies as we encounter them throughout the course of the day, even when we aren’t actively aiming to appreciate them aesthetically. the aim is to cultivate the practice consciously so that it eventually becomes second nature. aesthetic exploration and psychological plausibility i am, of course, assuming that it is possible for us, given the kind of creatures we are, to cultivate an attitude and practice whereby we take pleasure in these experiences of exploration. but notice that hume, walton, and carlson, too, must make assumptions about what we will take pleasure in, given the kinds of creatures we are, if their views are to yield conclusions about which things are aesthetically valuable. my argument depends on two psychological claims. first, it is possible to cultivate practices of appreciation that differ from those one might already be 13 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 commonly engaged in. second, such practices, once cultivated, are likely to lead to pleasurable aesthetic experiences of a wide array of bodies. let’s examine these claims in turn. it seems to be entirely possible to change the kinds of appreciative practices one participates in. one can shift from appreciative practices in which one simply lets art or music or wine wash over one, feeling whatever pleasures happen to arise in the encounter, to practices in which one consciously exposes oneself to certain products and attempts to understand what they have to offer, even if one does not initially find them pleasing. one can listen to and attempt to grasp what other critics have to say about these products, one can learn about the relevant art-historical traditions, one can discuss one’s experiences with others, and so forth. one can thus adopt and cultivate a historical and critical form of appreciative practice to replace the ahistorical and acritical practice in which one was previously engaged. returning to the example of natural entities, one can cultivate appreciative practices of categorizing these entities in accordance with scientific knowledge, and evaluating them in relation to other items in their categories; or one can cultivate appreciative practices in which one is “moved by nature,” as carroll (1993) describes: one can allow oneself to feel the sort of awe that comes from striking perceptual stimuli regardless of whether one possesses scientific knowledge to explain why the entity one is encountering is especially notable. it may even be possible for the same person to cultivate both kinds of appreciative practice and the ability to shift between them. i’ve offered a brief demonstration of what it would be to cultivate a different form of appreciative practice in relation to the body, when i described having an aesthetic encounter with the hand by attending to the complex details of its forms, surfaces, textures, and movements. we usually gloss over most of these details, and when we are assessing our bodies in relation to conventional standards of attractiveness, a few details may dominate our consciousness almost completely, especially when we are finding our bodies aesthetically unsatisfactory. but it is possible to reinvigorate our ability to pay attention to a wide variety of aspects of the body that are normally neglected. it’s possible to learn how to perceive and attend to far more of what is available to us. you can test this claim for yourself. the first psychological claim was that it is possible to change one’s practices of appreciation, and to adopt the sort of practice i’m advocating. the second is that experiences of the body that arise out of this sort of appreciative practice will generally be positive. i’m not claiming that all objects will afford positive experiences if approached this way: there may be some things that are so recalcitrantly banal that even the most open and creative mind cannot find within them any source of aesthetic delight. but living human bodies, all of them, do have very rich affordances by virtue of their colors, textures, ever-shifting forms, complex 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 structures, capacities for movement, and so forth. the human body—every human body—is an incredibly replete aesthetic object. some will be deeply skeptical about the prospect that bodies that don’t satisfy conventional standards of attractiveness—especially those that are quite far from satisfying them—could be sources of positive aesthetic experiences. one may feel that one is simply directly struck by the ugliness, or even disgustingness, of some bodies. hume says, as we saw earlier, that some qualities are “fitted by nature” to produce aesthetic displeasure; and some people may feel that their responses of displeasure to some bodies are so powerful that they can’t be overcome. but i’d like to call into question the very idea that these responses are natural, or so basic as to be unalterable. the body shapes that are judged to be most attractive demonstrably change over time in a particular culture and vary from culture to culture (anderson et al. 1992). individuals’ body preferences can shift over time: many people come to find aging bodies more attractive as they themselves age, and one may come over time to place either more or less value on muscularity. there is evidence that one’s attitudes regarding body fat change when the people around one get fatter or thinner (christakis and fowler 2007). notoriously, attitudes about body hair have shifted over the past few decades: pubic hair, which was once thought of as essential to sexual attractiveness, is now often thought of as a liability, to the extent that many people routinely have it painfully removed. the advent of photoshop and related technologies has altered aesthetic preferences related to women’s genitalia. pornographic photographs frequently showcase altered labia, and in australia there is a law (office of legislative drafting and publishing 2008) that pornographers have interpreted as requiring that, when editing images, they trim down any visible inner labia that protrude beyond the outer labia (abc tv 2010). surgery to alter the appearance of the labia, known as labiaplasty, has dramatically increased in many countries, apparently as a result of a media-driven reshaping of what is considered normal and attractive in female genitalia (lowenstein et al. 2014). the entire industry of marketing is predicated on the idea that people’s tastes and preferences about a wide variety of things, including bodies, can be altered. empirically, it seems to be quite effective. a recent entry is an ad campaign discussed in a sociological images blog post titled “gillette, stymied by beards, heads south” (wade 2014). the ad features three female models who describe how strongly they prefer shaved genitals in men. if even our preferences regarding human genital configurations and presentations can be altered by elements of our social environment, that seems fairly powerful evidence that even if aspects of those preferences are natural or basic, they can sometimes be overridden. once we have established this, there is 15 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 every reason to think that we might, through our choices, examine, explore, and manipulate our own response tendencies. we can choose to change the kinds of images we consume, to minimize our exposure to images that reinforce conventional standards of attractiveness, and to cultivate habits of thought and attention that actively resist a simple experience of pleasure in conventional beauty (lintott and irvin 2016). similarly, we can cultivate habits of thought and attention in our encounters with bodies that don’t satisfy conventional standards of attractiveness, with the aim of appreciating what every body, just as it is, has to offer as a rich and replete aesthetic object. this is not to say that aesthetic responses are infinitely malleable. individuals may have sticking points in their ability to relinquish conventional aesthetic judgments, and cultivating aesthetic exploration may be easier for some people than for others. my argument requires not that perfection be attainable, but only that it be possible to loosen the grip of conventional standards so as to reduce their unjust effects on our judgments in other domains. replacing a negative aesthetic response to a burn victim’s scarred skin with a positive response grounded in aesthetic exploration positions us to avoid penalizing her in other domains, and perhaps also enables us to offer her full recognition rather than avoid her gaze. this is true even if we are unable to shift our judgments and actions similarly in some other situations where doing so would be desirable. can there be ethical reasons for aesthetic practices? when i introduced the idea of cultivating an alternate form of appreciative practice in relation to bodies, i discussed the pervasive social injustice that attends judgments of attractiveness. concern about this injustice is, of course, an ethical concern; and yet, i have used it here to motivate an aesthetic proposal. some might wonder whether there is some sort of value confusion going on here. can there be ethical reasons for aesthetic practices? let me first clarify one thing i’m not doing. i’m not suggesting that ethical reasons should figure directly in our aesthetic judgments. there are two prominent lines of argument suggesting that they should: there’s an argument in environmental aesthetics suggesting that once we know how harmful manicured green lawns are in many geographic regions, we should find them aesthetically repugnant rather than attractive (lintott 2006). and there’s an argument that an artwork’s immoral content should sometimes diminish our assessment of its aesthetic value (eaton 2003). an analogous line of argument in relation to judgments about bodies would be that once we know a particular body’s shape has been produced by a debilitating eating disorder or some other unhealthy behavior, we ought to stop seeing that body as beautiful or withhold aesthetic approbation. but that is decidedly not what i 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 am arguing here. in fact, this strikes me as a probably misguided way of dealing with bodies that we understand to be unhealthy due to the embodied person’s behaviors: eating disorders, and many other behavior syndromes that diminish bodily health, are often associated with psychological distress, and to socially penalize the person simply adds to that distress, potentially exacerbating any unhealthy behavior. moreover, the idea that we should incorporate our beliefs about the health status of a body into our aesthetic response to it is troubling, given that as lay observers we are often in a poor position to know much about a person’s health. a person seeing lizzie velasquez might well assume that she is suffering from a severe eating disorder, when in fact the condition that causes her body to be unable to store fat is genetic, and she reportedly eats about 5000 calories per day. meanwhile, fitness models, who appear to be paragons of health, often achieve their body shapes through intermittent starvation dieting that leaves them physically weak and emotionally wrecked (isaacs 2013, 2014). what i advocate, then, is not that ethical considerations be incorporated in our aesthetic judgments of bodies, but, instead, that ethical considerations figure at an earlier stage, when we are deciding which aesthetic practices to adopt and cultivate. if we realize that a widespread aesthetic practice has pernicious and pervasive effects, then that is a reason to stop it, just as it would be with any other practice (cf. saito 1998). aesthetic practices, just like other human practices, can be assessed in relation to reasons, ethical and otherwise, that are external to the practice itself. traditional aesthetic theorists might doubt that the form of appreciative practice i am advocating here is truly aesthetic. i will not address this worry extensively here, since i have made relevant arguments elsewhere (irvin 2008a, 2008b). suffice it to say that there are a number of contemporary accounts of aesthetic experience or aesthetic appreciation on which a practice of consciously attending to the formal features of an object is straightforwardly an aesthetic practice (e.g., carroll 2002). some accounts add a requirement that one have some sort of affective experience, preferably a positive one (e.g., levinson 2014), or that one be focusing on the formal features for their own sake rather than, say, for the purposes of telling whether one has sprained one’s wrist (e.g., stecker 2006). the appreciative practice i advocate does have us direct our attention to the formal features of the body for their own sake rather than using them as a vehicle for some other purpose. and, when these formal features are approached with attention and openness, one is likely to have an affective response: perhaps one of pleasure, interest, delight, or wonder, or what richard shusterman (1999, 299) calls a “slow savoring awareness.” i conclude that this is a genuinely aesthetic practice. 17 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 is aesthetic exploration creepy? in the short term, the practice i’m proposing would require increasing, not decreasing, one’s focus on bodies: one’s own (which is a good place to start) and those of others. to cultivate a new form of appreciative practice in relation to the body, one needs to practice it. it’s possible that one could make progress, perhaps quite a lot, by adopting a similar sort of appreciative practice in relation to objects other than bodies. but ultimately, one will need to practice on bodies as well. it’s not hard to see how consciously performing this sort of appreciative practice on the bodies of others could be undesirable in ways that might be subsumed under the term ‘creepy.’ to allay this concern, let’s first be honest with ourselves. we subject others’ bodies to gazes of aesthetic assessment quite frequently, perhaps constantly. when an appreciative practice is a deeply ingrained habit, this assessment may be largely automatic, to the extent that we deceive ourselves that it isn’t happening. but it is still happening: this is what explains the empirical results we saw earlier. the fact that we are not conscious of our aesthetic engagement with the bodies of others doesn’t prevent us from committing microaggressions (sue 2010) against people we judge unattractive: when we’ve automatically assessed someone as unattractive, we may be less likely to make eye contact with them, listen carefully to them, or take them seriously, and we may evince facial expressions or other forms of bodily comportment that subtly or not so subtly convey our lack of regard. and, as we’ve already seen, whenever we have power to alter their access to fair treatment in education, health care, criminal justice, employment, and so forth, we are likely to do poorly by them. these considerations should undermine the idea that our current practices are benign. once we’ve done that, we can see that it might be worth the investment to change them, even if changing them involves an awkward period while we get our act together. we may compare a phenomenon that sometimes happens when white people start to recognize and attempt to disrupt the patterns of engrained racism in which they have been, perhaps unwittingly, implicated. there can be a period of heightened racial awareness that leads a white person to be awkwardly and visibly self-conscious in the presence of people of color. obviously, white people should do their best to minimize the effects of their awkwardness on others and to get over it posthaste. but it is better to go through an awkward period than to leave intact one’s tendencies to commit racial microaggressions and abet racist institutions and practices in other ways. when it comes to cultivating new appreciative practices in relation to the body, there are several strategies one can use to avoid creepiness. first, as i recommended above, one should start with one’s own body, the bodies of one’s lovers, and the bodies of dancers and other performers who have presented their 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/3 bodies for public display. in addition, one can aim to minimize the impact of the shift in one’s practices of looking: to look as one always has, but attend, think, and perceive differently. the practice i advocate does not conflict with another approach one might wish to take in resisting oppression of people judged unattractive: namely, heightening one’s attention to the humanity of the embodied person. it is, of course, of the first importance, in considering whether to hire someone, what kind of educational environment to offer them, whether to convict them of a crime, and what kind of health care to offer, to focus on the aspects of their personhood that are relevant to these contexts. getting to know someone’s personality, ideas, interests, and quirks is vital to knowing and appreciating them as a person, and may sometimes help us to have more positive experiences of their bodies. however, much appearance-based discrimination occurs in contexts where counteracting negative aesthetic responses to the body through focus on the personality isn’t feasible: we just don’t have sufficient time or information to get to know the person’s inner life. cultivating a practice of positive aesthetic experiences of bodies addresses bias in a wide array of contexts, and is compatible with the aim of giving full attention to relevant aspects of personhood including skills, interests, needs, and talents. we live as embodied persons, and giving another person full recognition involves acknowledging, not denying or looking past, the condition of their embodiment. the strategy i have described is part of, not in tension with, full recognition of the personhood of others. conclusion i suggest that through active cultivation, we can gradually shift our aesthetic practice from one of automatically assessing bodies in relation to conventional standards toward one of appreciating the embodiment of others, even when that embodiment does not satisfy conventional standards. if this is correct, then we can loosen, and perhaps eventually eliminate, the grip of attractiveness assessments on our minds, and thus weaken their influence on domains where they are irrelevant. what i propose, then, is moving away from a model of comparative aesthetic assessment in relation to standards, and toward a model of aesthetic exploration in which bodies are appreciated as they are, for what they have to offer here and now. rather than aiming to detect aesthetic properties and aesthetic value that are really there (or really not there) in relation to some intersubjectively valid standard, the idea is to seek out valuable aesthetic experiences of bodies. the claim is not that there is some different standard according to which all bodies have positive aesthetic value, but rather that all bodies can afford positive aesthetic experiences if approached through an appropriate appreciative practice. moreover, there are ethical reasons for adopting such an appreciative practice, and for aiming to 19 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 extinguish the standards-based appreciative practice in which we are commonly engaged. is the practice i advocate free of categories and comparisons? surely not: we see a body as a body, a hand as a hand, skin as skin; and what we notice, what we are able to notice, what is salient to us, is surely shaped in many ways by our background experience. perhaps this practice is not free of standards, either: when i have a positive aesthetic experience of a body, perhaps i am in some way seeing it positively in relation to some standard. but this standard, if it can be called that, is not one that i bring to every bodily encounter, but rather one that i construct in this very encounter; it’s one that is apt to reveal the aesthetic affordances of this very body as it is present to me at this moment. kendall walton notes that it is possible to construct an ad hoc category in relation to which even a mediocre artwork will come out to be aesthetically great. he suggests, rightly, that this sort of category construction, which “would require talent and ingenuity on the order of that necessary to produce a masterpiece in the first place” (1970, 359), is nonetheless unacceptable for artworks: both the surrounding culture and the artist’s intentions serve as historical constraints on appropriate categories for artworks (1970, 359–361). but perhaps for bodies, creative category construction that treats bodies as unconstrained by the aesthetic standards of a particular historical moment is just what is needed. aesthetic appreciation of the body, done well, is itself an art. references abc tv (australia). 2010. “labiaplasty.” episode of hungry beast. first aired mar. 3. adams, g. r., and a. s. cohen. 1974. “children’s physical and interpersonal characteristics that affect student-teacher interaction.” journal of experimental education 43 (1): 1–5. anderson, judith l., charles b. crawford, joanne nadeau, and tracy lindberg. 1992. “was the duchess of windsor right? a cross-cultural review of the 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http://abcnews.go.com/health/teen-half-face-stands-bullies/story?id=21036047 mazzella, ronald, and alan feingold. 1994. “the effects of physical attractiveness, race, socioeconomic status, and gender of defendants and victims on judgments of mock jurors: a meta-analysis.” journal of applied social psychology 24:1315–1338. nisbett, richard e., and timothy d. wilson. 1977. “telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes.” psychological review 84:231–259. office of legislative drafting and publishing. 2008. guidelines for the classification of publications 2005. attorney-general’s department, canberra, australia. published with amendments on mar. 19. http://www.comlaw.gov.au/details/f2008c00129. pagan, jose a., and alberto davila. 1997. “obesity, occupational attainment, and earnings: consequences of obesity.” social science quarterly 78:756–770. parks, felicia r., and janice h. kennedy. 2007. “the impact of race, physical attractiveness, and gender on education majors’ 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38:968–981. tate, shirley anne. 2009. black beauty: aesthetics, stylization, politics. farnham, surrey, uk: ashgate publishing, ltd. thornton, bill, and richard m. ryckman. 1983. “the influence of a rape victim’s physical attractiveness on observers’ attributions of responsibility.” human relations 36:549–561. wade, lisa. 2014. “gillette, stymied by beards, heads south.” sociological images (blog), feb. 20. accessed june 18, 2017; post later removed from site. originally at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/20/gillettestymied-by-beards-heads-south/. post preserved at https://web.archive.org/web/20140304030411/http://thesocietypages.org/s ocimages/2014/02/20/gillette-stymied-by-beards-heads-south/. walton, kendall l. 1970. “categories of art.” philosophical review 79:334–367. sherri irvin is presidential research professor of philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the university of oklahoma. her edited collection body aesthetics with oxford university press appeared in 2016. her book immaterial: a philosophy of contemporary art is under contract with oxford. 25 irvin: resisting body oppression published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/20/gillette-stymied-by-beards-heads-south/ http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/20/gillette-stymied-by-beards-heads-south/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140304030411/http:/thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/20/gillette-stymied-by-beards-heads-south/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140304030411/http:/thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/02/20/gillette-stymied-by-beards-heads-south/ feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach sherri irvin recommended citation resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 introduction recommended citation emerick, barrett, and scott wisor. 2019. “introduction to the special issue: in the unjust meantime.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). introduction. 2019 introduction to the special issue: in the unjust meantime barrett emerick st. mary’s college of maryland bmemerick@smcm.edu scott wisor minerva schools at kgi scott.l.wisor@gmail.com emerick and wisor – introduction to the special issue: in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 introduction to the special issue: in the unjust meantime barrett emerick and scott wisor in 2014, we helped to organize a conference titled “in the unjust meantime: a conference in honor of alison m. jaggar.” three invited keynote speakers were joined by 18 of jaggar’s current and former students who gave papers that engaged a wide array of philosophical topics. it was important for jaggar that her students’ papers not be all about her, but instead should be inspired by her work and the many contributions she has made to philosophy. this should come as no surprise to those who know jaggar and understand her deep commitment to her students. this special issue, born from that conference, develops lines of argument and areas of inquiry inspired by jaggar’s nearly five decades of scholarship. the first six papers were authored by jaggar’s former students. those papers, along with the three invited papers, all engage with the insight for which this issue and the conference take their name. in her 2009 coauthored book on abortion, jaggar notes that philosophical accounts of justice and ethics often abstract away from the realworld facts on the ground. while some claims about the nature and scope of our moral obligations or just social arrangements might be true in a future, utopian world, “in the unjust meantime,” (jaggar 2009, 145) our understanding of justice and right action must be similarly non-ideal. indeed, in our view the move towards non-ideal theory is one of the most significant developments in contemporary philosophical methodology. this is of course not to say that there is no room whatsoever for imagining what a perfectly just world would look like, but it is to say that our work as philosophers must be grounded in the world as it is and must engage with actual social arrangements and real-world problems. given not only jaggar’s groundbreaking role in helping to create contemporary feminist philosophy as an area of study, but also her role in helping to carve out the space for non-ideal methodology, we are delighted that this collection has found a home at feminist philosophy quarterly. in what follows, we offer brief summaries of the papers included in this special issue. it is simultaneously striking and common to encounter those who claim that men are the victims of gender-based injustice and that in virtue of men’s status as men, they are oppressed. peter higgins (“three hypotheses for explaining the socalled oppression of men”) undertakes a careful analysis of what might be meant when others (especially his students) make these claims, and then offers three independent hypotheses that can explain the harms and limitations which men experience qua men. higgins argues that these hypotheses are a superior alternative to the claim that men are oppressed as men. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 abigail gosselin (“‘clinician knows best’? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness”) argues that the medicalization of mental illness—that is, the treatment of mental illness as a primarily biological phenomenon located in the individual, rather than a social phenomenon which arises at least in part due to social factors external to the individual—traps those living with mental illness in a cycle of vulnerability. in doing so, gosselin takes seriously the standpoint of affected individuals and focuses on oppressive background conditions and systems of injustice which oppress those living with mental illness. corwin aragon (“global gender justice and epistemic oppression: a response to an epistemic dilemma”) explores the complicity of western feminists in global gendered epistemic injustice. global epistemic justice, like global justice more generally, will not be delivered tomorrow. in the unjust meantime, we must think about how to approach the unequal epistemic engagements between western feminists and non-western knowers. for aragon, critically interrogating their role in producing epistemic oppression is a better place for western feminists to focus their efforts than on judging the epistemic “failures” of non-western cultural groups. amandine catala (“multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance”) builds off jaggar’s work on the relationship between multicultural literacy and democracy. catala argues that the persistence of the character black pete in dutch society amounts to a failure of multicultural literacy and an epistemic injustice in which white dutch citizens fail to recognize black pete as a racist figure. on catala’s view, avoiding this instance of what charles mills calls “white ignorance” will involve combating both subjective and objective hermeneutical injustice. theresa tobin (“religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse”) argues that in addition to recognizing the physical, sexual, and psychological harms caused by sexually abusive clergy members, it is essential to recognize the spiritual harm of clergy abuse. tobin uses a naturalized feminist epistemology (which she has codeveloped with jaggar) which grounds moral and political conclusions in structural injustice, the standpoint of survivors, and the context of abuse. tobin argues that spiritual trauma is a serious component of clergy sexual abuse and to disregard this aspect is to disrespect the testimony of survivors. as the preceding papers make clear, our world is far from perfect. however, it is arguably more just than it was in the past. moral progress has sometimes involved incremental change, but in other cases it has, in the view of dan lowe (“the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology”), involved moral revolutions. lowe argues in favor of studying moral revolutions (such as women’s suffrage or the abolition of slavery) as a form of naturalized moral epistemology. for lowe, this approach to moral epistemology offers a superior alternative to the armchair theorizing still widespread in analytic philosophy. emerick and wisor – introduction to the special issue: in the unjust meantime published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 in the first of the three invited papers to this special issue, uma narayan (“sisterhood and ‘doing good’: asymmetries of western feminist location, access, and orbits of concern”) focuses on western feminists engaging in non-western contexts. narayan engages with jaggar’s 2005 paper “saving amina,” putting it in conversation with her own groundbreaking work, noting that prominent “asymmetries of concern” exist in which westerners may be worried about the “global poor,” but they may fail to apply that same critique of injustice in the west. narayan further develops jaggar’s critique (as well as her own earlier critique) of the use of “adaptive preferences” to claim that women in non-western contexts are mistaken about what is best for them. serene khader (‘global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility”) argues that there has been a feminization of responsibility, shifting additional burdens on women in the global south, often in the name of women’s economic empowerment. khader criticizes efforts which aim to increase women’s productivity without recognizing or providing alternatives for the significant amounts of productive but uncompensated work women are already doing. khader argues both that the feminization of responsibility is caused by structural factors in northern economies and creates obligations for those in the global north to not contribute to, and help to alleviate, the exploitation and overutilization of women in the global south. in the apt conclusion to the collection, jaggar (“thinking about justice in the unjust meantime”) argues against idealized approaches to theorizing about justice on the grounds that such approaches are destined to employ mistaken methods, privilege some groups over others, and provide philosophers in their armchairs too much authority in determining what justice is or should be. jaggar endorses recent calls to move towards non-ideal theorizing which examines the lived experiences of the oppressed and attempts to learn from social movements that challenge oppression. doing so is not without its own problems since it can often be difficult to determine which social movements can be sources of truth about justice and how we can know whether social experiments have succeeded. despite those methodological pitfalls, jaggar concludes on a note of optimism regarding our ability to work towards justice in the unjust meantime, in part by engaging in politics with nonphilosophers to build a better world. works cited jaggar, alison m. 2005. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics & international affairs 19 (3): 55–75. ———. 2009. “abortion rights and gender justice worldwide: an essay in political philosophy.” in abortion: three perspectives. by michael tooley, celia wolffeminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 devine, philip e. devine, and alison jaggar, 120–179. oxford: oxford university press. barrett emerick is associate professor of philosophy at st. mary’s college of maryland. he writes and teaches about normative ethics, moral psychology, and social justice, focusing in particular on gender, racial, and restorative justice. he recently published a chapter called “the violence of silencing” in pacifism, politics, and feminism: intersections and innovations (brill), edited by jennifer kling. one of his current projects is to explore the limits of the moral rights of free thought and expression. scott wisor is associate professor of arts and humanities at minerva schools at kgi. he is the author of measuring global poverty: toward a pro-poor approach (palgrave) and the ethics of global poverty (routledge), and is primarily interested in ethics and international affairs. 7200 emerick and wisor title page.pdf 7200 emerick and wisor final format.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 8 recommended citation khader, serene j. 2019. “global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 8. 2019 global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility serene j. khader brooklyn college and cuny graduate center serene.khader@gmail.com khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility1 serene j. khader abstract this paper morally evaluates the phenomenon sylvia chant calls "the feminization of responsibility," wherein women's unrecognized labor subsidizes international development while men retain or increase their power over women. i argue that development policies that feminize responsibility are incompatible with justice in two ways. first, such policies involve northerners extracting unpaid labor from women in the global south. northerners are obligated to provide development assistance, but they are transferring the labor of providing it onto women in the global south and expecting them to do it for free. second, development policies that feminize responsibility increase women's exposure to sexist domination. these two problems are present irrespective of whether policies that feminize responsibility improve women's basic well-being. keywords: transnational feminisms, global feminisms, gender and work, care ethics, global justice, development ethics, gender and development, exploitation enthusiasm for “empowering” and “investing in” women has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. official policy documents increasingly identify gender equality as a key development goal.2 popular media tout women in the global south as the “double x solution” (kristof and wudunn 2010, xix) to poverty, portraying them as superpowerful individuals capable of lifting their countries out of poverty (wilson 2011) this increased attention to women is undoubtedly a product of transnational feminist advocacy. yet there is reason to worry that something has been, to use jane jenson’s words, “lost in [the] translation” (jenson 2009, 179) of feminist ideals into mainstream development practices. justifications of attention to gender are often instrumental. women are an “untapped resource” (narayan 2010), 1 i benefitted from comments on this paper from participants in the theoretical explorations of exploitation in practice workshop organized by monique deveaux, meena krishnamurthy, and vida panitch at the university of guelph in january 2015. 2 see, for example, the millennium development goals, the sustainable development goals, and the 2012 world development report (world bank 2012). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 and gender equality is a way of “increasing the productivity of labor and increasing the efficiency of time allocation” (world bank gender and development group 2003, 6). though assertions of women’s intrinsic value increasingly accompany such justifications (due, in no small part, to ongoing feminist interventions), development policies continue to exploit women’s unpaid labor and overlook the significance of gendered power relations. sylvia chant names this shift in the international development agenda, wherein women’s unrecognized labor subsidizes development and men retain or increase their power over women, “the feminization of responsibility and obligation” (chant 2006, 2008). according to chant, development interventions demand more work from women without “any discernible increase in rewards or entitlements” (chant 2008, 176). these policies demand diversification of women’s work without analogous expectations from men (179). in other words, women take on increased responsibility for income generation, while their household labor burdens stay the same, and their domination by men sometimes increases. men withdraw from responsibility for household and family expenses ( 179–180), and women emphasize their conformity to sexist gender roles to reduce household conflicts caused by poverty and men’s newfound discomfort with women’s role in earning income (chant 2008, 181–182; kabeer 2001). even development projects that are ostensibly gender-sensitive may actively incentivize women’s acceptance of subordinate roles (molyneux 2006, 2008; khader 2014). one normative question we can ask about the feminization of responsibility, the one typically asked about development policies, is whether it improves the basic well-being3 of the people it affects. some downsides of the feminization of responsibility do indeed register as downsides if we focus on its effects on individual well-being. adding to a poor woman’s already grueling work burdens may decrease her well-being below a threshold level, or prevent her from ever coming to achieve basic well-being. for example, one participant in opportunidades, the child health program i will describe below, says that meeting the program’s requirements of attending lectures and taking her child to town for medical visits, on top of working as a mother and a paid domestic servant, is causing her to “lose [her] health” (luccisano 2006). assuming debt, as microcredit can cause women to do, is a straightforward cause of poverty. similarly, losses or deficits in women’s negotiating power can sometimes show up in traditional welfare indicators. domestic violence 3 some accounts, such as martha nussbaum’s capability approach, understand certain relational goods, like the ability to affect one’s political context, to be constitutive of well-being. much of this essay discusses potential tradeoffs between traditional poverty indicators like income and health and status indicators, so, for purposes of clarity, i restrict basic well-being to the latter. khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 or men’s appropriation of household income can, for example, cause bad health or poor nutrition. however, as iris young famously argues, evaluative frameworks that focus attention on how well individuals are doing risk placing social relations, including those that produce and sustain deprivation, outside of the scope of normative analysis (young 1990). additionally, the justice of forms of relationship matters independently; a set of social relations can be unjust even if it improves the wellbeing of those within it. alison jaggar’s work has been pivotal in bringing these insights to bear on normative frameworks used to analyze interventions in the lives of women in the global south. jaggar argues that we cannot track the status of these women without attention to the vulnerabilities to which interlaced local, national, and transnational factors subject them (jaggar 2009). she also injects concerns about intergroup fairness, calling our attention to the way in which global structures systematically transfer the value of labor extracted from women in the global south to the inhabitants of the north (jaggar 2013). following these methodological cues from jaggar, i argue here that the feminization of responsibility involves injustice by actors in the global north, irrespective of whether development projects entailed in it sometimes enhance individual women’s welfare.4 i offer two distinct justice-focused arguments about the feminization of responsibility, one that presupposes that northerners are morally obligated to provide development assistance and another which does not. one holds that the feminization of responsibility constitutes exploitation; the other holds that it exacerbates structural injustice. before making these arguments, however, i offer a clearer picture of the types of interventions and global structural conditions that produce the feminization of responsibility and make explicit some core assumptions in both of my arguments. these assumptions require stating and explaining because sexist and imperialist epistemic biases (or ideologies) occlude the actual effects of northern-led development policy. feminizing responsibility: two examples according to chant, the feminization of responsibility has four distinct components: (a) “the diversification and intensification of women’s work inputs accompanied by declining inputs from men,” (b) “persistent and/or growing disparities in men’s and women’s household negotiating power,” (c) “increasing disarticulation between responsibilities and entitlements,” and (d) in some cases, reduction of women’s participation in paid labor and/or political participation 4 there does not seem to be a general answer to whether interventions that feminize responsibility improve women’s basic well-being; in some instances, they do and in others they do not. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 (chant 20016, 208). the feminization of responsibility is the effect of a shift in the development agenda under a particular set of (neoliberal) economic conditions. though the background conditions themselves are a source of harm to women, now-popular development interventions exacerbate their effects by asymmetrically burdening women with the tasks of improving the well-being of their family members and supporting economic growth in their societies at large. though often described as a method of “women’s empowerment,” these interventions by design treat women’s existing subordinate roles as enhancing their ability to function as vehicles of service delivery for others. further, as we shall see, these interventions do not merely take advantage of existing gender roles; they often provide incentives to perpetuate them. development interventions with this character are widespread largely because of the priorities of northern development actors, such as pressures to deliver development through “investment” rather than social spending. to give a richer sense of what such interventions look like, we can consider two examples. the first is the now widely copied opportunidades program. originally a mexican government project that came to be funded largely by the inter-american development bank (molyneux 2006, 196)—50% of whose shares are owned by the united states and europe—it has been adopted by other countries, such as nicaragua, as part of world bank/imf poverty strategy reduction papers (bradshaw 2008, 196–197). at its heart, opportunidades is a conditional cash transfer program that provides money to women for children’s school fees and to supplement their nutrition that emphasizes “co-responsibility” (molyneux 2006). mothers are also expected to participate in a variety of training programs aimed at sensitizing them to children’s needs and their own—but the latter only when they are pregnant or breastfeeding. additionally, women must take their children (often into town) for regular health checks. since the program is designed to emphasize “coresponsibility” over dependency on the state, the women must contribute work to the program, usually by cleaning the school building or handling the school’s garbage. just the travelling and standing in line for health visits can amount to a day of lost work per month, and the workshops and work add to women’s time expenditures (molyneux 2008, 49) two gender-related features of the program are worth noting explicitly: the program demands labor of women who are already extremely time-poor, and the program does not compensate them, since the stipend they receive is for child welfare. a second example of a development program that feminizes responsibility can be found in the microcredit programs in zimbabwe operated by the self-help development foundation in zimbabwe. though the program grew out of a savings movement originated in zimbabwe in the 1960s, the program is funded by a german foundation (mayoux and lacoste 2005, 2), and similar programs around the world are funded by international ngos and even private-sector banking institutions. the khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 organization’s model involves groups of 10–30 people forming savings groups that provide loans to individual members. over 90% of loan recipients are women, who use loans to contribute to established businesses (mayoux and lacoste 2005). though the women involved do tend to use the money to start businesses (which is less common in other regions, such as south asia) and often experience improvements in certain well-being indicators, the increase in income has had problematic results for women’s social status. over 40% of women in a 2005 survey had become the main income-earner for their household (mayoux and lacoste 2005), but men seemed to be reaping many of the rewards. men very explicitly claimed that they valued women’s income because it allowed them more leisure time and absolved them of certain household responsibilities (mayoux and lacoste 2005, 15). researchers also found that women borrowers were much more likely than men to give earned income to the household or their spouse. responsibility for paying school fees was increasingly conceptualized as women’s responsibility (mayoux and lacoste 2005, 14). though the effects of microcredit and incomegeneration programs directed at women vary, this trend toward male withdrawal from household activities and expenditure is by no means an isolated example (chant 2008). two background assumptions the same phenomenon chant calls the “feminization of responsibility” is referred to by other commentators as “the double x solution,” or even “women’s empowerment.” neither of these descriptions is morally neutral, and the latter, positive description has clearly captured the popular imagination in the north. a reason for this sanguine assessment is, in my view, that certain ideological background views frame northern understandings of the lives of women in the global south. these ideological views concern women’s time use and the causes of women’s oppression. in calling them ideological, i mean that the views offer a distorted picture of reality that helps perpetuate sexist and neoimperialist domination. my analysis of the feminization of responsibility departs from two assumptions about the facts that contradict these ideological background views, so i spell out the tension between them and my assumptions. my assumptions are that (a) that women who are not employed in the formal economy nonetheless engage in necessary but burdensome forms of labor and (b) that the intensity of women’s labor burdens and the gender division of labor, are, and have historically been, responsive to political and economic conditions. my first assumption denies that widespread analytical tendencies to invisibilize or devalue women’s work are appropriate. among the overlooked and devalued forms of work are cooking and other housework, caring for dependent persons such as children, and, in many cases, care of the natural environment. though it seems feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 uncontroversial that women disproportionately engage in these forms of work, standard analytical frameworks rarely count it as economically productive. yet, as feminist philosophers and economists argue, the formal economy is effectively subsidized by women’s nonmarket activities. for example, the tasks of providing care for people in periods of dependency and preparing food are essential to the sustenance and (literal and figurative) reproduction of the paid labor force (kittay 1999; schutte 2003; beneria and sen 1981; waring 1988; folbre 2001). it is important to note that, for poor women, unrecognized or low-status gendered work activities that subsidize the formal economy often extend beyond the boundaries of the home. this point has been made about poor women and women of color in the united states, who often took on feminized tasks—such as laundry—for pay. in contexts in the global south, differences in family structure and the border between the household and the “productive” sphere, as well as varying degrees of industrialization, enlarge the set of domains in which gendered labor burdens occur (beneria and sen 1981). for example, as lourdes beneria and gita sen note, women in the global south may cook in the home and take it to feed workers in the fields. further, in many rural areas throughout the world, women have been responsible for food production as well as food preparation. responsibilities for collecting fuel (such as firewood or dung) and water are also tasks necessary for the reproduction of the labor force that are commonly assigned to women. acknowledging that such feminized tasks constitute labor requires more than noting that women perform the tasks or giving lip service to the idea that “motherhood is a full-time job” or “women’s work is never done.” it requires, at the least, allowing these tasks to figure in analytical frameworks and policy recommendations similarly to the ways other forms of labor do. in the context of assessing development, analytical frameworks must acknowledge women’s productivity and the constraints women’s labor burdens place on their life opportunities. to explain the latter point a bit further: development frameworks should acknowledge that what women can be and do in their lives is constrained by gendered work burdens. for example, the extent to which a girl can participate in formal education will depend on how much time she spends caring for younger siblings, collecting water, and so forth.5 since the unrecognized work women do is necessary for families and economies, strategies for improving women’s well-being and increasing gender equality must reallocate that work rather than assume that women who do not generate income are at leisure. 5 there is evidence that increases in women’s labor burdens often cause shifts of labor onto children, and onto girls in particular. khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 yet a failure to acknowledge this is evident even in feminist-influenced development frameworks. some imply that women are not working enough, that women are an untapped resource, instead of, as diane elson puts it, “an overutilized” one (quoted in chant 2008, 188). this is particularly striking in the world bank’s 2012 world development report. the report, focused thematically on women, devotes pages to discussing women’s time poverty and gender differences in the types of labor expected of women. at the same time, however, the report identifies women’s insufficient productivity as a problem (world bank 2012, 237). though the report mentions that women need support for care and housework to enter the labor market effectively, the policy recommendations focus on having women enter the paid workforce in larger numbers without supports for housework and care work. jaggar observes in her analysis of the report that paid parental leave is recommended as a policy objective only for affluent countries. for women in the south, it focuses on transportation, electricity, and running water, despite the fact that, as jaggar notes, there is no clear evidence that running water significantly changes women’s time use (jaggar 2013, 118). as jaggar further argues, the report stops short of claiming that changes in the gendering of responsibilities—that is, increased labor inputs from men—are part of the solution. my arguments about the injustice of the feminization of responsibility will rely on the idea that it adds to existing work burdens in unacceptable ways, but this will be difficult to apprehend if we do not recognize the presence and necessity of the work that constitutes these burdens. a second assumption from which my argument about the feminization of responsibility departs is occluded by imperialist ideological biases more than sexist ones. this is the assumption that the severity of women’s labor burdens and the gendering of expected labor inputs are responsive to structural conditions, including international structural conditions. simply put, the extent to which women are responsible for housework, care work, and similar activities changes, and has changed, in response to economic conditions and external interventions. in her work on “transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability,” jaggar (2009) shows that interlaced national and international structural processes impact what may initially appear to be culturally produced forms of gender oppression. in an application of the work of postcolonial feminist theorists to the anglo-american philosophical literature on global justice, jaggar (2005) describes the epistemic habits that cause northerners to assume that the sexist practices of “others” have only endogenous causes. drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, jaggar argues that westerners seem concerned exclusively with harms to “other” women that can be traced to local culture. this is a convenient focus, in jaggar’s view, given that the global economy is both harmful and gender oppressive, and given that westerners bear responsibility for its operations. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 to see how the feminization of responsibility is unjust, we will need to see that gendered work burdens can intensify as a result of structural forces and western interventions, but the attribution of sexism to culture gets in the way of seeing this in two ways. first, as i have already mentioned, the idea that sexist oppression is cultural suggests that gender roles are traceable exclusively to local causes. second, as uma narayan (1997) argues, the idea that gender roles are culturally constituted suggests that they have not changed over time. the notion that cultures do not change is often coupled with the notion that moral progress involves the abandonment of culture. as a result, it may seem that western intervention could only result in one of two things: leaving existing gender roles intact or improving them by eroding local culture.6 yet northern interventions have intensified demands on southern women’s labor and increased the sexist character of labor distributions in a number of cases, in the colonial period and contemporarily. for example, british colonial rule in west africa replaced an economic system in which women and men both cultivated subsistence crops with one in which men migrated or cultivated cash crops and women became responsible for agriculture and became dependent on men for income (camamert 2016, 30–31). more contemporarily, research in rural malawi suggests that a family’s access to microcredit increases child labor by girls—probably to compensate for losses in household labor performed by women (hazarika and sarangi 2008). it is not merely interventions, narrowly construed, that can intensify women’s labor responsibilities. as jaggar has consistently argued (2001, 2005, 2009, 2013), neoliberal changes in the global economy have also intensified women’s labor burdens. for example, reduced regulations on business often result in environmental degradation that increases the distance women have to travel to access water or firewood (desai 2002). cuts to education and health care promoted by economic liberalization have had to be compensated for by women’s unpaid work; for example, when health care becomes unaffordable, women are more likely to have to care for the sick in their homes (desai 2002). claiming that women’s gendered labor burdens respond to economic conditions and external interventions does not require claiming they are exclusively caused by external or structural conditions. the fact that women in the global north continue to contribute more household work, even in cases where they generate more income than their male partners, suggests that cultural factors have a role to play. the important point, however, is that it is deceptive to treat the set of tasks that are feminized and the number of labor hours women spend in unpaid labor as 6 for more extended analysis of the ways a focus on endogenous cultural factors and the assumption that the west is an agent of moral progress promote feminist complicity in imperialism, see khader (2018, 21–36). khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 fixed. the presupposition that they are fixed makes it impossible to notice intensifications or increasing inequalities in gendered labor burdens. it also makes it impossible to raise questions about responsibility for the gendered structure of labor as belonging to anyone but local “culture” or local men. the feminization of responsibility as northern exploitation of southern women now that we have seen that women’s unrecognized labor is productive and constrains women’s life activities, and that the gendering of labor burdens is sensitive to external forces, we can see the feminization of responsibility for what it is: a phenomenon wherein northern-driven strategies for decreasing poverty retrench, or risk retrenching the gender division of labor and its disadvantageousness to women. the feminization of responsibility embodies a failure of northerners to discharge duties of justice for two reasons. the first reason is that it amounts to northerners extracting uncompensated labor from women in the global south. to function, this argument requires the view that development assistance is something northerners are morally obligated to provide. arguments to this effect fall into two groups: arguments that assistance is obligatory and arguments that remediation or rectification is obligatory. remedial duties are ones incurred as a result of having caused harm. i focus on remedial duties here, though my exploitation argument would succeed even on an assistance-focused analysis. development assistance can be thought of as a means of discharging remedial duties people in the north owe to people in the global south. one way of arriving at the conclusion that the north bears such duties is to adopt the position, developed independently by jaggar (2001, 2002, 2005) and thomas pogge (2002), that northerners have historically, and are currently, violating the rights of people in the global south. among pogge’s arguments to this effect are that northerners derive an unfair starting position from the history of colonialism, that southern poor are unjustly excluded from access to natural resources, and that northerners impose an unjust institutional order on them (pogge 2002, 199–205). among jaggar’s are that the privatization of natural resources from the global south, including the wto defense of patents on seeds and indigenous medicines, continues to benefit northern corporations and harm the rural global poor, especially women (jaggar 2001). any of these arguments will work to show that development assistance is obligatory, but i further explain pogge’s argument for illustrative purposes. according to pogge, it is wrong to impose on others institutional rules that cause severe poverty and inequality when some alternative feasible set of institutional rules would leave them better off. among the institutional rules he claims play a causal role in global poverty are asymmetrical trade rules that protect northern industries and deregulate southern ones, payments to undemocratic governments feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 in southern countries to secure national resources from them, and insistence on enforcing intellectual property rights such as drug patents in the global south (pogge 2002). if it is true that northerners are violating the rights of people in the global south, northerners owe both reform of the global order and some form of reparations to the global poor. presumably, development assistance will be part of any scheme of reparations. but an argument about how northerners acquire remedial duties need not be as demanding as pogge’s to furnish the conclusion on which my exploitation argument depends—namely, that northerners are morally obligated to provide development assistance. for example, christian barry and david wiens (2016) argue that remedial obligations are incurred when retaining the benefits one has gained from a harm contributes to the persistence of that harm. this argument on its own may be sufficient for the claim that development assistance is obligatory. the ways in which northerners need injustice to continue to receive certain benefits are myriad, including ongoing unjust forms of extraction of natural resources such as oil, sweatshop labor for ongoing access to cheap consumer goods, and so on. admittedly, applying this argument requires tracing specific chains of injustices and benefits to make the case that development assistance is owed to some particular group of southern women. however, given the pervasiveness of practices through which northerners rely on injustice to southerners for benefits and the extremely low amount of development assistance that is actually given,7 it is safe to speculate that most women who actually are recipients of development assistance are candidates for being owed such duties. if northerners owe development assistance to people in the global south, they are responsible for bearing the costs associated with providing it. the feminization of responsibility then amounts to northerners requiring southern women to provide labor that they themselves would otherwise be responsible for subsidizing. as the title of a paper by maxine molyneux, “women at the service of the new poverty agenda,” suggests, women increasingly occupy a role analogous to that of paid development workers. the work of sweeping the school, taking care of the school’s garbage, and taking children to town regularly to be weighed, is development work—work that fills in gaps in social services. that some of this work is associated with the role of mothering anyway is simply a red herring. it is one thing for a program to take advantage of existing unremunerated labor and another to add new and more expansive labor demands. these programs add to the 7 less than 1% of the united states federal budget goes to overseas development assistance, 54% of which is “tied aid,” that is aid that purchases goods and services from us businesses in 2006, according to an oxfam report (https://www.oxfamamerica.org/static/media/files/aidnow-tiedaidroundtrip.pdf). khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 unremunerated set of labor tasks associated with mothering and actively incentivize women’s participation in these tasks. the reason the desired behaviors, such as income-generation and cleaning children’s schools, need to be incentivized by development programs is precisely that women are not already doing them—or not doing them in the ways designers of development initiatives would like. if we accept that the people of the global south are owed development assistance, the conclusion that the feminization of responsibility exploits women will follow on virtually any theory of exploitation. making someone work without compensation is plainly unfair. if providing development assistance is an obligation northerners hold, engaging southern women to do it without compensation is also unfair. if it seems that this concern is blunted by the fact that women consent to participating in the programs, it is worth remembering first that women have been given no option for promoting their own well-being and the well-being of their families that does not rely on their unpaid labor. jaggar (2013) argues that this option restriction is severe enough to make the labor choices of many women in the global south count as coerced. additionally, the options faced by poor women in the global south are in many cases so impoverished that “working fewer hours may literally be incompatible with the survival of their families” (jaggar 2013, 126). it may be objected that the feminization of responsibility is not exploitative because it benefits women. many theories of exploitation allow that exploitation can benefit the exploited. since a lack of decent options is classically what renders people vulnerable to exploitation, such theories are probably the right ones. but my argument that the feminization of responsibility exploits women does not need a beneficial exploitation theory to get off the ground. one reason is that it is unclear that women are generally benefitting from the policies in question. for example, between a third and half of opportunidades participants say the demands of the program are difficult to fulfill and/or conflict with their other responsibilities (molyneux 2008). recall the woman who says the program responsibilities are causing her to sacrifice her own health. a second reason is that, if i am correct that development assistance is owed to women in the global south, it is unfair to require uncompensated labor in exchange for access to these benefits. the wrongness of extracting uncompensated labor obtains irrespective of whether a person benefits. consider the analogy of one person who steals from another, or of one person who is given an item that has been stolen from a third person who continues to be deceived about the whereabouts of the item. in neither of these cases would we think that it was justified for the thief or the retainer of the stolen object to transfer the labor required to return the object back to its original owner. the analogy is imperfect, and there may be reasons to expect work from people as a part of their relationship with public institutions. but the obvious justifications of expecting work do not apply in our feminization of responsibility feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 example. it may be argued that such work produces solidarity among citizens. but to be capable of producing solidarity, the work would have to be distributed fairly among citizens, which it is clearly not in our case. alternatively, it might be argued that requiring work for the receipt of benefits is the only way to ensure that the benefits will actually be received. absent strong evidence for this empirical claim, it is difficult to see why it should motivate development policy. additionally, given that the feminization of responsibility aggravates women’s social subordination (as we shall see in the next section), justice concerns would likely outweigh efficiency concerns even if it the most efficient way to deliver development was through work. a second objection to my claim that the feminization of responsibility is exploitative is that, even if women in the global south are owed remediation for poverty, they are not necessarily owed remediation for gender equality. a preliminary response to this objection is just to recall jaggar’s analysis of transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability and the more general fact that global poverty, militarism, and inequality exacerbate gender inequality. more importantly, however, objecting to the feminization of responsibility does not require the claim that development should aim at remediating past gender inequalities. my view is that worsened gender inequality is a result of structurally induced poverty, as well as northern-led attempts to remediate it. the primary argument is not that northerners have failed in their remedial duties if they do not work against gender inequality; it is that the way that they are attempting to discharge remedial duties related to poverty involves treating women in ways that are independently morally unjustifiable. the feminization of responsibility as exacerbating structural injustice a second justice-related criticism of the feminization of responsibility does not require the assumption that development assistance is a remedial duty. it requires only the more modest views that women deserve access to equal social decision-making power and that it is wrong to avoidably worsen the situation of others when one interacts with them. though the data are mixed, the feminization of responsibility may be increasing women’s exposure to domination. to make sense of this second criticism, we need to understand domination as a distinct form of deprivation, one that is ultimately not reducible to poverty. poverty is traditionally understood as a lack of access to resources and taken to impact people’s lives primarily by undermining their ability to achieve functionings constitutive of very basic well-being, such as health and safety. domination, in contrast, is a deprivation wherein people lack equal abilities to determine the courses of their lives and to impact social processes (young 1990). two contrasts khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 between domination and resource poverty are worth noting.8 first, as young (1990) argues, domination is not well understood as a function of the distribution of resources. though resource distribution can produce and reinforce domination (as in cases of poor people who have little political influence because they are poor), the structure of decision-making processes, symbolic and cultural forces, and distributions of labor can also work to exclude people from decision-making or reduce their decision-making power. second, domination is a relational notion while poverty is not. whether a person is dominated is ultimately a question of how one stands relative to others, whereas we can know a person is poor without knowledge of how well others are doing. for a person’s level of domination to be reduced, her position must not only be enhanced; her position must be closer to that of others. the important upshot for our discussion of the feminization of responsibility is that it is possible for a person’s poverty to decrease while her domination remains, or is even worsened. as long as more income is confused with “empowerment,” it will be difficult to apprehend the potential harms of the feminization of responsibility. as i have already noted, some women involved in development programs that feminize responsibility experience increases in wellbeing indicators such as income and health and others do not. both groups are potential victims of increased domination, however. as chant puts the domination concern, it seems that development programs are “more preoccupied with addressing the condition of poor women than their position”(chant 2008, 186). the feminization of responsibility threatens to worsen women’s subjection to sexist domination by exacerbating the gender division of labor, by decreasing women’s household negotiating power, and by creating a political context in which women have difficulty representing themselves as sources of self-authenticating claims. it is worth noting that these forms of domination are not reducible to demands for increased labor time from women. though the feminization of responsibility undoubtedly increases the amount of labor women do, effects on decision-making power are not reducible to effects on time use. first, the feminization of responsibility exacerbates the gender division of labor by widening the domains of life in which women are expected to serve men and making the fulfillment of feminine gender roles more costly to women. new numbers and types of tasks become associated with femininity. in the conditional cash transfer case (opportunidades), we have the association of motherhood with taking one’s child to town, adopting certain nutritional practices (and being seen adopting them), and also cleaning the school. in income-generation cases (such as the self-help development group case), we see women taking on what have 8 for an argument that domination should be seen as constitutive of poverty, see deveaux (2016) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 recently been male-gendered responsibilities for bringing money into the household. these constitute, in chant’s terms, a diversification of women’s work inputs (chant 2006, 2008). using data from her own studies in three countries in combination with a much larger data set, chant notes that, even when women take on previously male-gendered tasks, they typically do not gain the social prerogatives associated with performing these tasks. instead, this type of diversification seems in many cases to amount to attributing an ever-widening set of responsibilities and work burdens to a subordinate role. in two microcredit programs in uganda, some men began leaving all household expenditures to women (mayoux 1999, 972) to put it differently, income generation, paying for children’s school fees, and other tasks are being feminized and turned into tasks performed by subordinates—rather than the feminine gender role disappearing. the changes in women’s work responsibilities seems in many cases to be encouraging men to instrumentalize women and freeing up men to take further advantage of privileges that women do not have (mayoux 1999 chant 2006, 2008). men can now spend more time socializing with other men. there is worry that women’s increased work also frees up men to engage in financially risky activity, such as gambling and the consumption of sex work. women discuss the extent to which seeking a wife has now become analogous to seeking a servant (chant 2006, 207) and worry that conditions are now such that “unless a woman [can] bring in an income a husband will leave her” (mayoux 1999, 174). there is evidence in south asia that men sometimes see women’s access to microcredit in terms similar to those in which they see dowry (hoffman and marius-gnanou 2007; khader 2014) in contexts where polygyny is practiced, men can now use extra disposable income to seek additional wives—and having additional wives is now a source of even more income (see chant 2008, 177–178; 2006; mayoux 1999, 974). this increased attachment to masculine prerogatives is undoubtedly a product of a number of factors, including, in many cases, lack of opportunities for men, the fact that women are preferred wage workers in many cases because they will work for less than men do, and the tendency of antipoverty programs to focus only on providing economic opportunities to women. but the lack of opportunities for men has not translated into a decrease in men’s social power over women; instead, work that was previously masculinized seems simply to be losing it status as a marker of power (chant 2006, 176). chant summarizes the current state of affairs as follows: “investments are becoming progressively detached from rights and rewards, and conceivably evolving into a new and deeper form of female exploitation” (chant 2008, 77). a second way the feminization of responsibility heightens women’s domination is by reducing their household negotiating power. many bargaining models of intrahousehold behavior suggest that women have low negotiating power khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 because of the perception that they are noncontributors to the household (sen 1990). it thus might seem that women accessing income, and even women accessing the recognition associated with being a “good, modern” mother, would increase women’s household decision-making power. there is some evidence that women are increasingly exiting relationships and forming women-headed households, at least as a result of income-focused interventions (chant 2008, 182). but many women do not exit, and, as naila kabeer argues, the desirability of exit varies, not only with what a woman’s economic prospects are but also with the extent to which male patronage is a source of access to other benefits (kabeer 1999). women who do not exit are left to manage the intrahousehold tensions their increased labor burdens create. microcredit participants in sub-saharan africa discuss increased fears of domestic violence (mayoux 1999). a common management strategy involves acting in the household in ways that reaffirm subordinate feminine behavior, and that demonstrate men are still in charge. importantly, this may be a reason women continue to do large shares of unrecognized household labor; continuing to be a “good wife” or “dutiful daughter” can be a way of minimizing household tension. some opportunidades women describe themselves as making sure the household work is finished before going on to perform program tasks to avoid angering their husbands (adato et al. 2000, xiii). pointing out that this falling back on feminine norms of sacrifice and subordination is agentic or tactical, though accurate, is beside the point. if the actual effect of these acts is to reinforce the idea that the energies of wives and daughters ought disproportionately to go to serving men, it is desirable to stop supporting policies that make such uses of agency women’s best option. kabeer argues that, in cases where microcredit increases domestic violence, intrahousehold tensions are signs that gender equality is improving (kabeer 1998), but this assessment, in my view, rests on the panglossian notion that equality just is the natural long-term outcome of women gaining power (see khader 2014). chant’s work suggests that it is just as likely that the long-term outcome will be a new femininity in which women take on some masculine roles without the social recognition and power traditionally associated with them (as in the income-generation cases), or in which feminized responsibilities increase without increased power attached to them (as in the opportunidades cases). third, the feminization of responsibility risks creating a political environment in which women cannot be sources of self-authenticating claims. john rawls (1996) treats being seen as a source of self-authenticating claims as a basic requirement for an individual’s possession of equal social standing. self-authenticating claims have weight in social and political processes merely because they belong to some individual. rawls’s own example of the person who is not a source of selfauthenticating claims is the slave whose political demands matter only insofar as she feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 is useful to other people. the feminization of responsibility participates in creating local and transnational political contexts in which women’s claims to the benefits of cooperation rests on their instrumental value to others. the programs and discourses that feminize responsibility give women a special role in development because women discharge feminine roles. the issue here is deeper than women being expected to fulfill stereotypes. it is that the content of the stereotypes is noxious because of how it conceives women primarily as bearers of instrumental value. a glaring case of this is of course the opportunidades program’s focus on women when they are pregnant or breastfeeding. jenson (2009) notes that the millennium development goals generally focus on adult women only in the goal of maternal health. but not all examples of such instrumental valuing are so literal. when women are treated as loci of entitlements primarily because women are a fulcrum for other forms of social investment, especially when these entitlements are as basic as health, their claims to basic well-being are treated as needing to be authenticated by others. absent more than lip service to gender equality for its own sake, it is unclear that women matter more in their own right now than they would in policy contexts that simply ignored them. though the gender and development community sees women’s well-being and gender equality as intrinsically valuable, these justifications are not the ones that have received the most uptake from mainstream development actors. instead, there is a precarious alliance between the gender and development community and the larger development community, as poverty-focused development actors are most likely to take gender on board as an efficiency concern (chant 2008, 183 ). political contexts shaped by the feminization of responsibility do not merely portray women as vehicles for the well-being of others; they provide incentives for women to represent themselves as such. molyneux argues that the opportunidades mothers have now increased their investment in motherhood as a means to social recognition; where they already saw sacrifice for their children as worth engaging in, they now see “their publicly reaffirmed status as mothers” as a path to empowerment and self-esteem (molyneux 2008, 33). molyneux also suggests that women may be encouraged to internalize views about their instrumental value, since the program is “binding women [to oppressive notions of motherhood] ever more closely, aspirationally, and materially” (molyneux 2008, 54). additionally, sarah bradshaw argues that women who do not participate in opportunidades because they prefer to earn money for their households are socially punished (bradshaw 2008, 201). this point that women lose status as self-authenticators may seem based on assumptions that undermine the feminist project of socially valuing caregiving roles. eva feder kittay (1999) argues that the idea that people are sources of selfauthenticating claims gets in the way of caregivers’ ability to make claims for society khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 on behalf of their charges. without taking a stance about whether the ability to represent oneself as a source of self-authenticating claims is sufficient for equal standing, it seems clear that the ability to be seen as a source of self-authenticating claims is at least necessary. when claims to goods like health care and basic income are treated as owed contingently upon the performance of self-sacrifice, it is difficult to see how women can count as independent individuals at all. a context in which women can represent themselves politically primarily as wives and mothers and men can represent themselves as independent individuals creates nonreciprocal conditions of social recognition that seem paradigmatic of domination. it is built into the design and justification of many programs that that gender matters primarily insofar as it enables service delivery to entire communities. admittedly, intensification of sexist domination is possible only because of existing sexist domination. but we should be careful not to let this fact absolve northerners of responsibility for reducing women’s ability to count as selfauthenticators. even if there is an explanatory role for local factors, it does not follow that they are exclusively responsible. i mentioned earlier that sexist domination in the global south that preexists the feminization of responsibility has often already been heightened and shaped by colonialism and structural economic factors. even more directly relevant to our current discussion, however, is that worsened gender inequality is not an accidental result of northern-shaped development (and economic) policy. as i have mentioned at a number of points, the programs in question perpetuate women’s subordination by design. women need to be especially altruistic in order to be efficient development investments. further, it is not as though northerners could not have anticipated the ways the dominant style of development intervention would affect women’s status; some elements of the feminization of responsibility are present in the north as well. the speed with which women’s “empowerment” has been assimilated to “targeting women” and/or “increasing their access to income” can, after at least 30 years of gender and development advocacy pointing this out, be understood as a concerted failure to acknowledge the basic fact that gender is a relational phenomenon—and thus that doing something about it means changing men’s roles and self-conceptions as well as women’s. the pervasiveness and intransigence of sexist domination may trigger a related worry that any imaginable intervention in women’s poverty—or poverty in general—would end up increasing domination. increasing women’s income and subsidizing women’s role as mothers both increase domination, the worry might go, so sexist domination is just the cost of doing the business of poverty alleviation. it is worth clarifying what this objection actually says: that worsening many women’s lives, as increased labor burdens and sexist domination undoubtedly do, is morally acceptable. though it is possible for harms to be justified by very important feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 benefits, we need to be clear that the objection hinges on justifying harm, not keeping an existing condition intact, or the failure to provide some luxury good. the objection that worsened domination is just the cost of doing business is based on an unsubstantiated empirical claim. we do not have evidence that poverty-alleviation programs are incapable of reducing gender inequality. nor do we live in a world where resources are too scarce to do research into the prospects of other types of development interventions. evidence we do have suggests that high levels of male investment in household expenditure are positively correlated with nutritional and educational outcomes for children, so encouraging men’s household contributions and involvement in parenting may hold promise for improving both children’s wellbeing and gender equality (barker 2006). additionally, a variety of interventions aimed at changing notions of masculinity that are harmful to women are beginning to be practiced, such as requiring time in day care centers as a part of vocational training, encouraging men to accompany women to reproductive health care visits, consciousness-raising groups for fathers, and media-based campaigns about involved fatherhood (barker 2006, 66–67). even in the opportunidades case, there is evidence that explaining the program aims to men reduces intrahousehold tensions (adato et al. 2000). additionally, the objection may be nearsighted. for even if increasing gender domination were the only way to decrease poverty in this generation, it is unclear that this form of poverty alleviation would be stable over time. conclusion popular media and mainstream development representations notwithstanding, focusing development interventions on women is not the same thing as empowering them. i have argued that development interventions that rely on women’s labor to improve the well-being of families and communities both threaten to worsen women’s exposure to sexist domination and involve northerners taking unfair advantage of women in the global south. to see these injustices, however, northerners need to resist ideological temptations to ignore the onerousness of many poor women’s unpaid labor burdens and to treat gender inequality as only locally caused. northerners also need to see that questions about justice, and not merely questions about individual well-being, are relevant to the normative assessment of the development agenda, and the international economic order more generally. mary wollestonecraft (1996, 72) famously wrote, that it was “justice, not charity, that [was] wanting in the world.” an adequate normative analysis of the feminization of responsibility requires attention to the local gender relations and the north-south relations it creates, not just its potential effects on poverty. khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 references adato, michelle, bénédicte de la brière, dubravka mindek, and agnes quisumbing. 2000. the impact of progresa on women's status and intrahousehold relations. washington, dc: international food policy research institute. barker, gary. 2006. “men's participation as fathers in latin america and the caribbean.” in the other half of gender, edited by ian bannon and maria correia, 43–73. washington, dc: world bank. barry, christian, and david wiens. 2016. “benefiting from wrongdoing and sustaining wrongful harm.” journal of moral philosophy 13 (5): 530–552. beneria, lourdes, and gita sen. 1981. “accumulation, reproduction, and women's role in economic development.” signs 7 (2): 297–298. bradshaw, sarah. 2008. “from structural adjustment to social adjustment.” global social policy 8 (2): 188–207. camamert, jessica. 2016. undesirable practices. lincoln: university of nebraska press. chant, sylvia. 2006. “re-thinking the feminization of poverty in relation to aggregate gender indices.” journal of human development 7 (2): 201–220. ———. 2008. “the feminization of poverty and the feminization of anti-poverty programs.” journal of development studies 44 (2): 165–197. desai, manisha. 2002. “transnational solidarity: women's agency, structural adjustment, and globalization.” in women's activism and globalization, edited by nancy naples and manisha desai, 15–34. new york: routledge. deveaux, monique. 2016. “beyond the redistributive paradigm: what philosophers can learn from poor-led politics.” in ethical issues in poverty alleviation, edited by helmut p. gaisbauer, gottfried schweiger, and clemens sedmak, 225–246. switzerland: springer international publishing. folbre, nancy. 2001. the invisible heart. new york: the new press. hazarika, gautam, and sudipta sarangi. 2008. “household access to microcredit and child work in rural malawi.” world development 36 (5): 843–859. hoffman, elisabeth, and kamala marius-gnanou. 2007. “credit for women: a future for men?” ada dialogue 37:7–11. jaggar, alison m. 2001. “is globalization good for women?” comparative literature 53 (4): 298–314. ———. 2005. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics and international affairs 19 (3): 55–75 ———. 2009. “transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability.” philosophical topics 37 (2): 33–52. ———. 2013. “we fight for roses, too: time-use and global gender justice.” journal of global ethics 9 (2): 115–129. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 jenson, jane. 2009. “lost in translation: the social investment perspective and gender equality.” social politics 16 (4): 446–483. kabeer, naila. 1998. “‘money can’t buy me love’? re-evaluating gender, credit, and empowerment in rural bangladesh.” sussex: institute for development studies. ———. 1999. “resources, agency, achievements: reflections on the measurement of women’s empowerment.” development and change 30 (3): 435–464. ———. 2001. “conflicts over credit: re-evaluating the empowerment potential of loans to women in rural bangladesh.” world development 29 (1): 63–84. khader, serene j. 2014. “empowerment through self-subordination.” in poverty, agency, and human rights, edited by diana meyers, 223–248. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2018. decolonizing universalism: a transnational feminist ethic. new york: oxford university press. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love's labor. new york: routledge. kristof, nicholas, and cheryl wudunn. 2010. half the sky. new york: vintage books. luccisano, lucy. 2006. “the mexican opportunidades program.” canadian journal of latin american and caribbean studies 31 (62): 53–86. mayoux, linda. 1999. “questioning virtuous spirals: micro-finance and women's empowerment in africa.” journal of international development 11 (7): 957– 984. mayoux, linda, and jean-paul lacoste. 2005. “saving for sustainability? self-help development foundation zimbabwe.” genfinance website on sustainable micro-finance for women's empowerment. http://gamechangenetwork.info/documents/gendermainstreaming/financia lservices/gender%20impact/shdf_genfinance.pdf. molyneux, maxine. 2006. “mothers at the service of the new poverty agenda.” social policy and administration 40 (4): 425–449. ———. 2008. “conditional cash transfers: ‘a pathway to women's empowerment’?” pathways working paper 5. sussex: institute of development studies. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures: identities, traditions, and third-world feminism. new york: routledge. ———. 2010. “symposium: global gender inequality and the empowerment of women.” perspectives on politics 8 (1): 280–284. pogge, thomas. 2002. world poverty and human rights: cosmopolitan responsibilities and reforms. new york: polity. rawls, john. 1996. political liberalism. the john dewey essays in philosophy series. new york: columbia university press. khader – global gender justice and the feminization of responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 schutte, ofelia. 2003. “dependency work, women, and the global economy.” in the subject of care, edited by ellen feder and eva feder kittay, 138–159. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. sen, amartya. 1990. “gender and cooperative conflicts.” in persistent inequalities: women and world development, edited by irene tinker, 123–149. oxford: oxford university press. waring, marilyn. 1988. counting for nothing. wellington, nz: allen urwin. wilson, kalpana. 2011. “race, gender, and neoliberalism: challenging visual representations in development.” third world quarterly 32 (2): 315–331. wollestonecraft, mary. 1996. a vindication of the rights of woman. mineola, ny: dover thrift. world bank. 2012. world development report: gender equality and development. washington, dc: world bank. world bank gender and development group. 2003. gender equality and the millennium development goals. washington, dc: world bank young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. serene j. khader is jay newman chair in philosophy of culture at brooklyn college and associate professor of philosophy at the cuny graduate center and brooklyn college. she works in ethics and political philosophy, with an emphasis on normative questions that affect the lives of women in the global south. she is the author of decolonizing universalism: a transnational feminist ethic (oxford, 2018) and adaptive preferences and women's empowerment (oxford, 2011). 7282 khader title page.pdf 7282 khader final format.pdf hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 3 article 1 2017 hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority komarine romdenh-romluc university of sheffield, k.romdenh-romluc@sheffield.ac.uk recommended citation romdenh-romluc, komarine. 2017. "hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (3). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1. hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority komarine romdenh-romluc abstract in this paper, i discuss a problem for miranda fricker’s notion of ‘hermeneutical injustice’—harm done to a social group by the fact that their culture’s shared hermeneutical resources are skewed towards the experiences of its more powerful members. the problem i raise here is revealed when we consider how to remedy these hermeneutical wrongs. fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as involving a lack of concepts. but what has not been properly appreciated in the literature to date is that it is really competing views of the world that are at stake. fricker’s account then seems to imply that the disadvantaged group’s understanding of the world (or at least that bit of it, where their understanding is contested by the dominant group, and where that difference in interpretation is harmful to the disadvantaged group) should be treated as authoritative, and taken up by the wider culture. the worry is that, in some cases, the disadvantaged group’s view of things is not one that we think should be accepted. having presented this problem, i will then show that it bears some similarities to another debate: the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. i will then argue that lessons drawn from the latter can help overcome the problem of authority in fricker’s case. keywords: hermeneutical injustice, cultural relativity, dialogue introduction miranda fricker (2008) identifies a wrong she calls ‘hermeneutical injustice.’ a culture’s hermeneutical resources are the shared meanings its members use to understand their experience, and communicate this understanding to others. cultures tend to be composed of different social groups that are organised hierarchically. as a consequence of these uneven power relations, the culture’s shared meanings often reflect the lives of its more powerful members, and fail to properly capture the experiences of the less powerful, which sometimes results in them being harmed. such instances of harm constitute, for fricker, hermeneutical injustice. in this paper, i discuss a problem for fricker, which arises when we 1 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 consider how to remedy such a hermeneutical wrong. fricker characterizes hermeneutical injustice as involving a lack of concepts, on the part of the disadvantaged group, to capture some important aspect of their experience. but what has not been properly appreciated in the literature to date is that it is really competing views of the world that are at stake. moreover, fricker’s account seemingly implies that the disadvantaged group’s understanding of the world (or at least that bit of it where their understanding is contested by the dominant group and where that difference in interpretation is harmful to the disadvantaged group— what i will call ‘the target of the injustice’) should be treated as authoritative, and taken up by the wider culture. the worry is that, in some cases, the disadvantaged group’s view of the world is not one that we think should be accepted. having presented this problem, i will then show that it bears some similarities to another debate: the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. i will then argue that lessons drawn from the latter can help overcome the problem of authority in fricker’s case. hermeneutical injustice fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice can be captured with the following three criteria. she contends that a person is a victim of hermeneutical injustice when: a) her culture lacks the appropriate meanings to understand (some aspect of) her experience; b) she is harmed by this lack of meanings; c) the lack of meanings is due to the fact that the social group to which she belongs is hermeneutically marginalized. to understand these conditions, it will be helpful to consider three of the cases that fricker takes to be paradigmatic instances of hermeneutical injustice. the first two are taken from brownmiller (1990). in the late sixties, wendy sanford took part in a consciousness-raising group where women started sharing stories about what we now describe as postnatal depression. “in that one forty-fiveminute period i realized that what i’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency. it was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing: isolation” (brownmiller 1990, 182). in the mid-seventies, carmita wood worked in cornell’s department of nuclear physics. a professor subjected her to what we now call sexual harassment. the stress of dealing with his behaviour made wood ill, ultimately leading to her resignation. she applied for a transfer to a different department, and later for unemployment benefits, but was turned down as she could not satisfactorily explain her circumstances. “when the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, wood was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. she was 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 ashamed and embarrassed. . . . her claim for unemployment benefits was denied” (brownmiller 1990, 281). the third case is drawn from a boy’s own story, edmund white’s semi-autobiographical novel about growing up gay in the us in the 1950s. white has sexual desires for men. the negative ideas associated with homosexuality by his culture influence his understanding of himself. “i see now that what i wanted was to be loved by men and to love them back, but not to be a homosexual. . . . what i required was a sleight of hand, an alibi or a convincing act of bad faith to persuade myself i was not that vampire” (white 1998, 70). these cases clearly show what it is for (a) to obtain. sanford’s culture lacks the concept of postnatal depression; wood’s lacks the idea of sexual harassment; and white’s does not possess the positive ideas about homosexuality he needs to understand his experience as healthy and non-perverse. two further things are worth noting. first, the examples make clear that ‘experience’ does not refer to an inner datum before the subject’s mind. instead, it includes the subject’s perspective on the events of her life, the activities in which she engages, the world in which she lives, and her self-identity. second, there is, in many cases, an evaluative dimension to the ideas used to capture our experiences. our concepts both describe the firstorder phenomenology of our experiences and assign them a place in the grand scheme of things. in so doing, our concepts designate certain valuations of those experiences—and the subjects who undergo them—as appropriate or inappropriate. for example, the concept ‘postnatal depression’ picks out (and so has as its descriptive content) a certain set of feelings that sometimes descend after giving birth (irritability, helplessness, anger, mood swings, and so on). it also classifies them as a medical condition, which makes it appropriate to offer support to the person who undergoes them, rather than blaming her. it is likely that the first-order phenomenology of an experience and the way it is evaluated/the place it is assigned in the grand scheme of things will inform each other. an experience’s phenomenology (partly) determines where it fits in the grand scheme of things. but its assigned place can also affect its phenomenology. for example, the feelings that constitute postnatal depression will take on a different character when compounded with guilt from thinking that one is to blame. condition (b) holds that for a person to be a victim of hermeneutical injustice, she must be harmed by the lack of appropriate meanings. the examples reveal the three central sorts of harm that may result, according to fricker’s analysis. first, the subject might be unable to fully understand her experience. for example, wendy sanford was unable to see that she was suffering from a medical condition also shared by other women, for which she needed support. second, the agent may be prevented from properly communicating her experience to others. for example, carmita wood cannot explain why she wanted to transfer departments or why she resigned. third, the lack of appropriate hermeneutical resources may affect 3 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 the subject’s construction of her self-identity in detrimental ways. fricker takes the white case to illustrate this effect. the meanings available to white shape how he understands his sexuality, and this pervades his sense of who and what he is—an ill pervert. fricker labels these failures of understanding, the ‘primary’ harms of hermeneutical injustice. they go hand-in-hand with ‘secondary’ harms, which are those ills that befall the victim of such injustice as a result of the primary harms. wood’s loss of income is an example of a secondary harm. fricker is often interpreted as holding that victims of hermeneutical injustice are always unable to understand their own experience. indeed, this is how she tends to present the matter. however, this claim is problematic. mason (2011) points out that fricker’s talk of a culture lacking meanings to properly understand some phenomenon runs two different scenarios together. in one, nobody in the culture understands the experience properly. in the second, the less powerful group understands whatever is at stake perfectly well, but this understanding is not shared by more dominant members of the culture. the less powerful group may be harmed in the latter scenario, even though they understand their experiences perfectly well. medina makes the same point when he writes, hermeneutically marginalized subjects can eventually achieve understanding of their obscured experiences while they may still remain systematically misunderstood by others (some others) when they try to communicate about those experiences. in these cases the hermeneutical injustice continues even after the lack of self-understanding disappears. (medina 2012, 207) a social group is constituted as dominant (partly) in virtue of its members having greater control over, or better access to, institutions of power, such as the law, social norms, and so on. thus, where dominant groups fail to properly understand a less powerful group’s experiences, the institutions of power are unlikely to reflect those experiences, and this may be detrimental to the less powerful group. consider carmita wood. it was important for women to recognise when they were sexually harassed and understand that such behaviour was unacceptable. but it was not enough for just women—members of the less powerful group—to possess such an understanding. it was also important that the laws governing conduct in the workplace deemed such behaviour to be unacceptable, and punished the perpetrators and compensated the victims accordingly. indeed, mason (2011, 297) argues, in contrast to what fricker claims, that wood understood the wrongs done to her. the obstacle she faced was communicating her situation to the dominant social group(s). medina (2012) also makes this same point. pohlhaus (2012) likewise focuses on situations where the disadvantaged group has the hermeneutical 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 resources needed to understand their experiences, which are missing from the stock of meanings possessed by the dominant group(s). she suggests that in some such cases, the latter is not simply unaware of the disadvantaged group’s view of things, but actively refuses to listen and so learn from them. she coins the phrase ‘wilful hermeneutical ignorance’ to describe such a situation. here, hermeneutical injustice is held in place by what fricker (2008) calls ‘testimonial injustice’—the failure, due to prejudice, to give appropriate weight to someone’s testimony.1 for fricker’s account to be satisfactory, she must be able to accommodate cases where the disadvantaged group has the resources to understand their own experience, but where hermeneutical injustice persists because the dominant group fails—in some cases, wilfully—to understand. she can do so by holding that the harm involved in some instances of hermeneutical injustice consists in being unable to properly communicate one’s experience to people of significance (such as, members of the dominant cultural group), even though one understands it perfectly well oneself. the final condition (c) states that the harmful lack of meanings must result from ‘hermeneutical marginalization.’ it is usual to distinguish between harms that are mere bad luck and harms that count as injustice. fricker contends that this distinction obtains in the hermeneutical case too. she gives an example of someone suffering from a mystery illness. the sufferer’s culture lacks the concepts to properly understand his situation. as a result, he fails to receive appropriate medical care. his loved ones may think he is malingering as no diagnosis can be given. fricker holds that whilst this person suffers significant harm due to the lack of appropriate concepts, he is not a victim of injustice.2 for an injustice to occur, the gap in the hermeneutical resources must result from uneven distributions of power. the sort of power in question is hermeneutical, where this consists in the ability to create meanings, share them with others in one’s culture, and embed them—as appropriate—in institutions of power such as the law, norms governing the workplace, social practices surrounding the family, and so on. fricker points out that different social groups have differing access to this sort of power. first, certain social roles are associated with larger amounts of hermeneutical power. it is particularly 1 dotson (2012) also discusses cases where the disadvantaged group possesses resources needed to understand their situation but cannot communicate this to the dominant group. she identifies another form of epistemic injustice that can arise in such situations, which she calls ‘contributory injustice.’ this bears some similarities to hermeneutical injustice insofar as it concerns a clash of conceptual resources, but it falls beyond the scope of fricker’s account. i will not consider it here. 2 dotson (2012) contests this claim. i will set her discussion aside for the purposes of this paper, since it does not affect the argument i want to present. 5 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 enjoyed by those who are journalists, lawyers, politicians, academics, and similar professions. second, members of certain social groups find it easier to attain these roles. the professions in question still tend to be dominated by white males from affluent backgrounds. one is hermeneutically marginalized if one is a member of a social group with inferior access to hermeneutical power, that is, if one is a member of a social group that faces obstacles to entering those careers that afford greater hermeneutical power. the problem of authority the problem of authority arises when we consider how to remedy an instance of hermeneutical injustice. since it involves a lack of appropriate meanings, eradicating it requires the introduction of adequate hermeneutical resources. however, whilst this is right, more detailed analysis is needed here. consider first, how exactly we should understand the notion of a ‘gap’ or ‘lacuna’—fricker’s (2008) terminology—in the cultural resources. her description suggests the cultural repertoire is roughly akin to an array of paints on a shelf, with spaces where certain colours should be. the restricted array of paint colours means that the artist has fewer options available to her for capturing a scene. similarly, the restricted array of meanings means that the subject has fewer options available for interpreting her experience. improving the situation for the artist involves adding paints to the shelf, so that she has more colours she can use. likewise, remedying the situation for the victim of hermeneutical injustice means adding more meanings to the cultural repertoire so that she has more ways to interpret her experience available to her. it is clear that this picture is inadequate. it appears that remedying a hermeneutical injustice does not just require that a meaning be available in the minimal sense in which the tin of paint is available, so that someone could use it to interpret the experience in question. it also requires the wider culture to actually use it to interpret the experience. in other words, it is not enough that the idea exists in the cultural repertoire; the wider culture must also endorse a description of the experience in those terms. this is an important point that i do not think has been fully appreciated in the existing literature. to see this, consider again, the case of wendy sanford. one might suppose that remedying the hermeneutical injustice in her case just involves introducing the notion of postnatal depression into the cultural lexicon. however, imagine that the wider culture comes to recognise postnatal depression, but is then persuaded by a group of doctors that no such thing exists, and that women like sanford should be blamed and punished for how they feel. the meanings women require to properly understand their experiences are part of the cultural lexicon, but the wider culture rejects a description of their experience in these terms. these women will suffer exactly the same sorts of harm as sanford. similar points apply in the case of edmund white. fricker describes his 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 case as one where the wider culture lacks the meanings he needs because it understands homosexual activity as morally corrupt and symptomatic of mental illness. but we could equally say that the dominant culture possesses the appropriate meanings because its hermeneutical resources contain notions of healthy, wholesome, sexual activity. the hermeneutical injustice comes about because it rejects a description of white’s sexuality in those terms. what these cases illustrate is an important fact about the way in which the harms of hermeneutical injustice come about. there is perhaps a small number of cases in which someone sits alone in her room and is harmed by being unable to properly articulate her experience to herself because the cultural lexicon lacks the ideas she needs to do so. but such cases are in the minority. typically, the subject is harmed because other people impose ill-fitting meanings on her, irrespective of whether alternative, better meanings are available in the cultural repertoire. it might happen in conversation between two individuals, where one insists on interpreting the other’s experience in an inappropriate way (“surely the professor was just flirting with you? why are you so upset?”) the dominant culture’s meanings are also imposed on people through those meanings being embedded in institutions of power, including, but not restricted to law; norms governing the workplace; and practices surrounding the family. it follows that to eradicate such harms requires not just that the appropriate meanings are available in the cultural resources, but that they are also used by the dominant cultural groups. in other words, eradicating instances of hermeneutical injustice requires the dominant culture to take up an alternative description of whichever experience is at issue. this includes individuals using those ideas when thinking and talking about that experience. it also involves embedding those ideas, where relevant, in institutions of power—as happened with the idea of sexual harassment, when it was incorporated into employment legislation. fricker’s account also implies that the requisite meanings must be developed by the victimised group. this is because the injustice consists (partly) in the fact that the group in question has had—due to a (relative) lack of power—less opportunity to develop the meanings required to understand their experiences and spread those ideas through the wider culture. to right the wrong, it follows that they should be given the opportunity to develop the resources they need, and their ideas should be taken up the dominant group(s), so that they majority see the world in those terms, and their understanding is embedded in the relevant institutions of power, such as laws, social norms, and so on. in this way, the victimised group must be treated as authoritative with respect to the experience that is the target of the injustice. this is a significant point that has yet to be fully acknowledged in the literature on this topic. 7 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 the problem for fricker is that there will be cases that count as hermeneutical injustice according to her analysis, but where the victims’ understanding of the experience that is the target of the injustice is not one the wider culture should accept. all that is required for such a case to fit fricker’s model is for the social group holding the problematic view to be hermeneutically marginalized, and for its members to be harmed as a result of the wider culture’s rejection of their ideas. where the wider culture spurns a view, it is very likely that harm will be done to those who espouse it. the harm might consist in widespread denial of a particular group’s self-identity, or in legal and social sanctions against those who hold it and act in accordance with it. there will be other ways in which harm flows from the wider culture’s rejection of an idea. in a case where these conditions hold, members of the social group will suffer hermeneutical injustice, and the wider culture will be obliged to remedy the wrong by adopting the group’s understanding of whatever is at stake. but since the group’s view of things is one we do not feel the wider culture should accept, such cases cause difficulties for fricker. i call this the problem of authority. it is probably clear how counterexamples fitting this pattern can be constructed. but to focus our discussion here, i will present three. first, a small but growing number of teenagers in the us claim to be vampires. according to reports, they socialise with other ‘vampires,’ sometimes engage in occult ceremonies, and drink blood—both animal and human, the latter usually provided by willing donors. ‘vampires’ have not found widespread acceptance in us society. churches condemn them as evil. the medical establishment considers some of them to be mentally ill (white and omar 2010). they are often bullied by their school peers. at least one ‘vampire’ has been driven to suicide by the prejudice they face. the situation fits fricker’s model of hermeneutical injustice. teenagers in general are a social group lacking in hermeneutical power.3 they cannot become lawyers, politicians, journalists, and so on. teenagers thus face hermeneutical marginalization qua teenagers. their lack of access to the production of the culture’s shared resources means that these ideas are likely to be a poor fit for at least some of their experiences. indeed, it is a cultural trope that teenage subcultures are, by and large, something of a mystery to adults. in the case we are examining, the wider culture rejects the teenagers’ self-understanding as vampires. this denial of their professed identity is the primary harm. the secondary harms brought about by the lack of understanding consist in the bullying, prejudicial treatment, and so on meted out to them. to eradicate this hermeneutical injustice, we—members of the wider culture—should accept that the teenagers are vampires rather than humans. but 3 a related point about epistemic injustice and young people is made by carel and györffy (2014) in relation to healthcare. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 since this is patently false, it is not something the wider culture can be obliged to accept. the second case is based on the recent trophy killing of ‘cecil’ the lion. the hunter was an american dentist who paid £32,000 to shoot the big cat. the lion lived in hwange national park, zimbabwe, and was protected within its confines. the dentist’s hunting guide allegedly lured the lion onto land where he could be legally killed. the case has been widely reported in western media, where the overriding view is that trophy-hunting is morally repugnant; it is wrong to lure animals out of land where they are protected in order to kill them for fun; and lions are an endangered species that should be protected. the zimbabwean environment minister, oppah muchinguri, has demanded that the dentist be extradited to face charges. his hunting guide is due to stand trial for his part in the events, and faces fifteen years in prison if convicted (bbc news 2015a). whilst this is the dominant understanding of events, it is not—according to goodwell nzou—shared by the zimbabwean villagers. when i turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an american dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: one fewer lion to menace families like mine. . . . in my village in zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. they are objects of terror. when i was 9 years old, a solitary lion prowled villages near my home. . . . when the lion was finally killed, no one cared whether its murderer was a local person or a white trophy hunter, whether it was poached or killed legally. we danced and sang about the vanquishing of the fearsome beast and our escape from serious harm. (nzou 2015) against this background, let us imagine that the dentist’s hunting guide was a zimbabwean villager who rejects the idea of conservation areas and believes that all lions should be killed. the case becomes one of hermeneutical injustice. the zimbabwean villagers are hermeneutically marginalized—they face various obstacles to taking up a career in a hermeneutically powerful profession. consequently, the cultural resources do not reflect their understanding of things. whilst the dominant group thinks that lions should be protected, wildlife conservation areas are a good thing, and that trophy-hunting is wrong, the villagers believe that all lions should be slaughtered because they are terrifying monsters. they are against the creation of wildlife conservation areas. moreover, the hermeneutical situation brings harm to the villagers—their perspective is not understood by the wider culture who think of them as bloodthirsty savages destroying the ecosystem (primary harm), and the hunting guide faces fifteen years 9 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 in prison for acting on his beliefs (secondary harm). since the villagers are victims of hermeneutical injustice, the wider culture is obliged to accept their view. we may well sympathise with the villagers’ fear of lions, and think that more should be done to ensure their safety. we may also be bemused by the strength of rage directed at the dentist and his hunting guide by people in the us and europe. moreover, we may be disturbed by the fact that this rage seemingly coexists with callous indifference to the suffering of people, such as the migrants trapped at calais. yet, we do not, i think, feel that the wider culture should adopt the villagers’ view that conservation areas should be abolished and all lions killed. the final counterexample is based on a case of ‘honour killing.’ ‘honour’ is an imprecise translation of the concept ‘izzat,’ which is found in the hermeneutical lexicon of social groups within the uk (and elsewhere) whose members trace their heritage to pakistan and north india. the notion of izzat is nuanced and multilayered (soni 2012). but one aspect of it concerns the way in which a man’s selfworth, social status, and even his identity as a man are bound up with the behaviour of women in his family. when they behave in accordance with the relevant social norms, izzat is preserved. when they contravene them, izzat is lost. izzat can be restored by destroying the cause of its loss—that is, by murdering the recalcitrant woman. the notion is thus essentially linked to ‘honour crimes’ in which women, and in some cases their male lovers, are severely injured or murdered by their family members, so as to restore the latter’s izzat (reddy 2008). the concept of izzat bears some similarities to other ideas found in the hermeneutical resources of dominant social groups within the uk. for example, the old-fashioned word ‘cuckold’ labels the still-current idea of a man being emasculated by the infidelity of his female partner. his masculinity can be restored by inflicting violence on her and her lover. it is also the case that the conduct of one’s family members can bring shame upon oneself. but despite these similarities, izzat is clearly distinct from such ideas. it does not make sense within the dominant framework of ideas for a father to kill his daughter, or for a man to murder his brother’s wife, because she has contravened social norms. now consider the case of shabir hussain who killed tasleem begum—his sister-in-law—because she had fallen in love with a married man.4 initially, hussain was convicted of murder. but at appeal, the judge accepted his plea of manslaughter by reason of provocation and gave him a reduced sentence of just six and a half years.5 hussain was thereby judged to be, not a murderer, but someone who had lost control and acted in the same way as a reasonable man would have done in the same circumstances (the test for provocation). begum was correspondingly 4 r v. shabir hussain [1997] ewca crim 24. 5 r v. shabir hussain, newcastle crown court, 28 july 1998. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 transformed into someone who behaved in a way that would cause a reasonable man to lose control and kill her, that is, making her causally responsible—at least partly—for her own murder. (indeed, many authors argue convincingly that there is also a shift in moral responsibility, so that the victim bears some of the moral blame for their own killing too. see, e.g., fitz-gibbon (2014) on this point.) what was it about the circumstances that made this the case? the judge’s remarks indicate that this was made so by ideas connected with the notion of izzat.6 fricker’s model provides us with the following understanding of the case. hussain is a member of a social group that has a relative lack of hermeneutical power. for example, as of 2014, the uk office of national statistics reported that asian people were underrepresented amongst the senior british judiciary. similarly, as of 2013, the higher education statistics agency reported that they were underrepresented at britain’s elite russell group universities. consequently, when hussain was first sentenced, the idea of izzat was largely missing from the wider culture’s hermeneutical lexicon: it was not part of the dominant group’s view of the world, and behaviour governed by ideas to do with izzat was misunderstood. the hermeneutical lacuna led to people being harmed. hussain is one such example. against the backdrop of a worldview that includes the idea of izzat, his behaviour is a legitimate response to the situation, not murder. from this perspective, hussain’s conviction is a grave miscarriage of justice, resulting from the wider culture’s lack of understanding of izzat. the overturning of his sentence at appeal went some way to righting this wrong. the ruling accepted that both begum’s and hussain’s behaviour should be understood by the wider culture through the lens of izzat, which downgraded his crime from murder to manslaughter. moreover, it set a legal precedent thereby embedding these laws in uk law. in this way, the ruling was effectively the partial adoption of ideas surrounding izzat by the dominant uk culture. (i say ‘partial’ as hussain was not completely vindicated.) the appeal ruling therefore partially remedied the hermeneutical injustice. the case is a counterexample to fricker’s account because it does not seem that the wider culture should accept ideas surrounding izzat, since they sanction violence against women. indeed, the decision in hussain’s appeal case has been heavily criticised, and subsequent cases have not followed the precedent set.7 6 during the sentencing the judge stated that “something blew up in your head that caused you a complete and sudden loss of self-control,” and acknowledged that begum’s behaviour “would be deeply offensive to someone with your background and your religious beliefs” (r v. shabir hussain, newcastle crown court, 28 july 1998). 7 see reddy (2008), and h.c. deb (1998–99) 325, col. 265. 11 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 some possible responses in this section, i will consider some possible strategies for responding to the problem.8 for the most part, my aim in this section is not to consider all possible responses in detail—to do so would be far beyond the scope of this paper. instead, i want to put forward a series of considerations that, i think, shed doubt on the thought that any of these strategies can provide a successful response to the problem of authority. this, in turn, will motivate us to look elsewhere, paving the way for the discussion in the final part of this paper. the problem of authority is generated by the claim that to remedy an instance of hermeneutical injustice, the culture must ‘plug the gap’ in the hermeneutical resources, which, i have argued, requires the wider culture to adopt the less powerful group’s understanding of the target of the injustice. however, the reader may have noticed that fricker’s account offers another way to eradicate hermeneutical injustice. criterion (c) states that hermeneutical marginalization is a necessary condition for hermeneutical injustice. it follows that if this form of marginalization is eradicated, such injustices will disappear. there may still be harmful ‘gaps’ in the hermeneutical resources—some people may still suffer because they do not have the meanings required to capture some aspect of their experience—but in the absence of hermeneutical marginalization, these will no longer count as injustices. they will be cases of bad luck, like the person with the mystery illness. if they are not injustices, then there is no obligation to remedy them, and so no requirement for the wider culture to take up problematic understandings of the world. it therefore seems that the problem of authority can simply be sidestepped by holding that the way to tackle hermeneutical injustice is not by ‘plugging the gaps’ in the cultural resources, but by ending hermeneutical marginalization. unfortunately, this will not do for the two following reasons. first, it is surely right that we should work towards ending hermeneutical marginalization. however, this consists in bringing about full participation in the creation of the culture’s resources, and it is very far from being something that can be accomplished overnight. it follows that this route to eradicating hermeneutical injustice is a longterm task. whilst we are working to bring about equal participation in the creation of the culture’s hermeneutical resources, hermeneutical injustice will persist, and so it seems we should also take other measures to remedy such injustice in the interim period. in other words, even if we work towards eradicating hermeneutical injustice by ending hermeneutical marginalization, we must also fill the harmful ‘lacunae’ in 8 an alternative strategy is to try and show that such cases, despite satisfying fricker’s criteria, are not instances of hermeneutical injustice after all. i pursue this line of thought elsewhere (romdenh-romluc 2016), arguing that it cannot be defended. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 the cultural resources. second, whilst hermeneutical marginalization is a necessary condition for hermeneutical injustice to occur, it also seems that instances of the latter serve to reinforce the former, in at least some cases. consider, for example, black people’s representation amongst academics. black people face obstacles to entering careers in academia, as evidenced by the fact that there are so few black professors in the uk (ackah 2014). these obstacles range from explicit racism on the part of individuals to more insidious problems faced by black children at school (tackey, barnes, and khambhaita 2011). the hermeneutical resources associated with academia thus disproportionately reflect the perspectives of white people. the whiteness of these resources then serves to further prevent black people from entering academia. for example, an idea that still prevails is that black life is antiintellectual. the scarcity of black people in academia is partly what allows this stereotype to persist, and the idea, in turn, makes it more difficult for black people to enter academia (grove 2014). in this case, there is hermeneutical marginalization that leads to harmful ‘gaps’ in the cultural resources. these ‘gaps’ then serve to further reinforce the hermeneutical marginalization. it follows that, in this case, eradicating hermeneutical marginalization will also require ‘plugging the gaps’ in the cultural resources. it is plausible to suppose that many cases will be like this. it follows from both of these considerations that just attempting to bring about equal participation in the creation of the culture’s hermeneutical resources is not a sufficient response to hermeneutical injustice on its own. we also need to try to ‘plug the gaps’ in our cultural resources, and so the problem of authority remains. the problem of authority turns on the claim that certain views of the world are, in some sense, unacceptable, and as such, the wider culture should not be obliged to adopt them. a different strategy for responding to this problem is thus to try and articulate why they are unacceptable, and from this, derive criteria for deciding when a view of the world should, or should not, be adopted by the wider culture, which can then be used to supplement fricker’s account. moreover, one might suppose that there is an obvious way to do this. fricker presents her account of hermeneutical injustice as part of a larger theory of epistemic injustice, that is, injustice that concerns us as knowers. against this background, it is clear that she is committed to a certain kind of realism. she thinks the disadvantaged subject’s experience is a potential object of knowledge—something that really has a certain character, which is available to be known.9 the culture lacks appropriate 9 fricker (2010) is explicit about this commitment to realism, but explains that she takes realism to be compatible with holding that the character of the disadvantaged subject’s experience is shaped by the concepts available in the cultural repertoire. her picture is that in cases of hermeneutical injustice, this shaping is on the basis of “conceptual resources . . . [that] were immanent in our collective hermeneutical 13 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 hermeneutical resources for capturing such experience to the extent that the existing concepts do not allow for proper knowledge of it. this picture provides an easy way to decide whether or not a disadvantaged group’s view of the world should be accepted by the wider culture: it should be accepted only if it is true. however, things are not as straightforward as the simple epistemic picture suggests. in some cases, our views of the world do not just reflect the facts, but play a role in constructing them. this is, of course, compatible with there being truths about such matters. money is socially constructed. the existence of certain pieces of paper and lumps of metal as money depends in various ways on our financial practices. it is nevertheless true that the us currency is the dollar, and false that it is the euro. but where two social groups have differing views of some socially constructed bit of reality, the dispute between them should not always be understood as a disagreement concerning which view of the matter is more accurate, but as a dispute concerning how the facts of the matter should be constructed. in such cases, simply pointing out that one’s group’s worldview is false is completely beside the point. consider the activist slogan, “no-one is illegal.” given the way that social facts about citizenship and national boundaries have been constructed, this slogan is manifestly false. in particular, the very people the activists are trying to help— refugees without papers—are illegal. but to point out its falsity is completely inadequate a response to the activist slogan. this is because it is not intended as a description that aims to correctly reflect an independent reality, but as a vision of a better way the facts could be constructed, where there is free movement of people across national boundaries, or where they are abolished altogether. it follows that even if an appeal to truth will allow us to rule out some of the counterexamples to fricker’s account, it cannot provide a general criterion for deciding when a disadvantaged group’s view of the world should or should not be taken up by the wider culture. a third strategy begins from the thought that what one is obliged to do to remedy an instance of injustice must also be sensitive to other relevant considerations pertinent to the context in which the injustice takes place. one might then suppose that competing considerations could completely override an obligation one has towards remedying an injustice in some cases. consider control of land in zimbabwe. during british colonial rule, white settlers seized farmland from black zimbabweans, cementing their control of the land through legal means. these included the 1930 land apportionment act, which divided the land along racial resources” (2010, 169). the concepts missing from the shared resources are those required to make this experience explicit. the issue of realism is also taken up by congdon (2015). neither author addresses the problems posed by socially constructed aspects of reality, which i point out below. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 lines, designating certain areas as tribal trust lands available to black people, and other areas available to whites. the tribal trust lands were less fertile, malariaridden areas. the best farmland was reserved for whites. the 1944 land settlement act then legalised further forced removal of black people to ‘reserves’—which were remote, arid, and disease-infested—so that their land could be given to white veterans of the second world war (mlambo 2014). president mugabe recently tried to remedy this injustice by redistributing white farmland to black people. however, this has often led to violent removals of white farmers by vigilante groups who have also attacked black farm labourers. the farmland has ended up under the control of people who—it is alleged—do not have the necessary expertise to sustain zimbabwe’s agricultural system. this is usually taken to be a significant causal factor in zimbabwe’s increasingly dire economic situation. something that even president mugabe has been forced to acknowledge (bbc news 2015b). it could be argued— and is often implied by western media reports—that the harms brought about by righting the injustice are so great that they override the obligation to remedy it. one might try to make an analogous case with respect to the counterexamples to fricker’s account. these are all cases where we think it is unacceptable to oblige the wider community to take up the disadvantaged group’s view of the world. thus one might try to argue that the reasons why this is unacceptable outweigh the harm of the hermeneutical injustice in such a way that the obligation to right the hermeneutical wrong is overridden. if there is no obligation to right the hermeneutical wrong, then there is no obligation for the wider culture to adopt the problematic view of the disadvantaged group. however, there is a significant problem with this strategy. even if one could make a case to show that the harm of the hermeneutical injustice is less than the problems that would result if the wider community adopted the disadvantaged group’s worldview, it is not at all clear that this would simply erase the obligation to remedy the hermeneutical injustice. consider again, land ownership in zimbabwe. whilst it is true that mugabe’s programme of land redistribution has been harmful in various ways, it is surely not the case—as is often implied—that the harms brought about by remedying the injustice override or cancel the obligation to right the wrongful seizure of land from black zimbabweans. the conclusion to draw is, instead, that some alternative means of remedying the colonial era injustice needs to be found. similarly, the obligation to remedy an instance of hermeneutical injustice does not seem to be simply cancelled by the fact that the victimised group’s understanding of the world is problematic. members of the wider culture still have some obligation towards righting the wrong. in this section, i have considered some possible strategies for responding to the problem of authority. whilst my discussion is inconclusive, i take the considerations i have put forward to shed doubt on the thought that any of these 15 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 strategies can provide a successful response to the problem of authority. this in turn motivates the search for a different approach. a way forward? the problem of authority arises when we consider what is required to remedy an instance of hermeneutical injustice. to right such a wrong, the gap in the culture’s resources must be filled—seemingly, by ideas developed by the victimised group, which the wider culture is then obliged to adopt. the problem is that some ideas are such that we do not think anyone should be obliged to accept them. our debate here parallels the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. it will be helpful to begin by setting out the parallels between the two debates. i will do this by focusing on western feminist critique of female genital mutilation (fgm). fgm is defined by the world health organisation as a collection of “procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” (world health organisation 2014). it is found in countries across africa (particularly the eastern, western, and northeastern regions), and in the middle east.10 feminists in the west have criticised fgm on the grounds that it is an extremely harmful practice that often results in diminished sexual pleasure, difficulty with intercourse, recurrent infections, serious complications during childbirth, and even death. moreover, they take there to be no good justification for fgm, since they see it as largely premised on ideas about controlling women’s sexuality, so that men can be sure which children are theirs (see, e.g., nussbaum [1999]). against this, some writers have argued that the feminist critiques embody a problematic cultural imperialism because members of the dominant western culture(s) seek to impose their views onto less powerful cultures. this has uncomfortable echoes of colonial thinking where western colonial powers thought of themselves as morally superior to the colonised ‘savages.’ moreover, it is argued that the feminist critiques misunderstand fgm. they tend to equate all forms of fgm to the most extreme practice, where a large amount of genital tissue is removed and the vaginal opening sewn up, leaving just a tiny opening (infibulation), when in some communities it is a symbolic event where the clitoris is merely pricked to extract a drop of blood. western feminists understand the practice in terms of their own preoccupations with male control of female sexuality. but fgm has different meanings for different communities. it is, for example, found in some polyandrous (where women take more than one ‘husband’) and matrilineal (where family lines are traced through the mother) societies. such communities have much 10 it is worth noting that female genital piercing (insertion of metal jewellery into the clitoris and/or labia) practised by some western subcultures counts as fgm under this definition. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 less need of mechanisms for men to be sure of which children are theirs. western feminists also fail to appreciate the importance of rites of passage to many african societies (obiora 2000). how should we attempt to resolve such disputes? one approach holds that alien cultural practices are beyond criticism; the western feminist arguments against fgm are therefore illegitimate. however, many writers—e.g., nussbaum (1999)—have pointed out that this view slides very quickly into relativism. it is very easy to think that the reason alien cultural practices should not be criticised is because different people have different moral codes, and there is no cultureindependent way of adjudicating between them. this sort of relativism is deeply problematic. our common nature as human beings means that we have the same basic needs and flourish in broadly the same sorts of ways, even though these are shaped by our cultures.11 the alternative is to endorse universalism of some sort, and hold that it is possible to develop or uncover moral principles that apply to all people in all places and at all times, such that criticism of alien cultural practices is possible. if one takes worries about cultural imperialism seriously—which it seems we should—the challenge is thus to develop or discover universal moral principles in ways that ensure that the views of dominant groups are not simply imposed onto less powerful people. the parallels between this debate and our discussion of fricker are clear, although there are also some differences. uneven power relations between cultures lead to injustice where the dominant culture imposes its view of the world onto less powerful cultures—this is cultural imperialism. an obvious response to this is to think that each culture should be able to develop its own understanding of the world/engage in its own practices, free from interference. the obvious response faces difficulties when a cultural practice/view of the world is immoral from the perspective of outsiders.12 cleaving to the obvious response leads very quickly to relativism, where each culture is held to be authoritative with respect to the moral status of its own views and activities. the competing universalist intuition is that there is an independent vantage point from which worldviews and cultural practices can be examined. the challenge is how to do this in a way that does not fall foul of cultural imperialism. hermeneutical injustice is basically a form of cultural imperialism, but one where the parties are social groups within a single culture, 11 a full overview of the many arguments against cultural relativism is well beyond the scope of this paper. the topic has been addressed by many writers, see e.g., nussbaum (1999) and narayan (1997). 12 it may also be immoral from the perspective of cultural insiders because cultures are not homogeneous. 17 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 rather than different cultures.13 the obvious response to remedying such injustice is to hold that the wider culture should take up the victimised group’s understanding of whatever is the target of the injustice. this response runs into difficulties when the victimised group’s understanding of the world is one we do3 not feel that the wider culture should accept. in this way, it aligns with the relativist position regarding alien cultural practices. indeed, one could insist in the face of the counterexamples that the wider culture adopts the victimised group’s understanding of the world, which—as i noted above—would lead to various forms of relativism. the counterexamples trade on the universalist intuition that different understandings of the world can be assessed as more or less appropriate, harmful, true, false, etc., from an independent vantage point. this aligns with the view that it is possible to develop or discover universal moral principles that allow us to assess a different culture’s practices from a standpoint that is independent from them. the challenge facing fricker’s account is thus how to remedy instances of hermeneutical injustice without endorsing relativism. a satisfactory resolution in the case of the feminist debate about alien cultural practices needs to balance two competing requirements: one must avoid cultural imperialism, whilst retaining the possibility of criticising alien cultural practices. the way to do this is through dialogue. people need to work together across cultural boundaries to develop ways of thinking about important moral issues on which we can all agree. of course, not just any old dialogue will do. conversations dominated by members of more powerful cultures (such as western feminists) would simply replicate problematic power structures and be further instances of cultural imperialism. instead, the participants must be open-minded, take others’ perspectives seriously, treat others as equal partners in the conversation, and be receptive to criticisms of their own cultural practices. in the words of maleiha malik, “you have to approach dialogue with a sense of humility about your own culture as well as a willingness to learn and be transformed through an encounter with the ‘other’” (quoted in cordes 2012). the process will often be difficult; indeed, much has been written on how to conduct such transcultural dialogue, and this is still a matter of controversy—see, for example, waller and marcos (2005). furthermore, it will not always be possible to reach consensus about the issues in hand. transcultural dialogue is, nevertheless, the only way to discover or develop universal moral principles—allowing for the criticism of alien cultural practices—whilst avoiding cultural imperialism. these points can be applied in our discussion of fricker’s account. the way to overcome hermeneutical injustice is through dialogue. of course, this claim is 13 in some cases, it may be difficult to say whether one is dealing with different social groups within a single culture, or two distinct cultures. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 nothing new. hermeneutical injustice arises from the relative exclusion of certain groups from the production of cultural meaning. certain voices are simply not heard, or they are not properly listened to, or they are wilfully misunderstood. the only way to remedy the situation is for members of dominant groups to enter into dialogue with those who are disadvantaged. the accounts of authors like medina (2012), pohlhaus (2012), and dotson (2012), who emphasise the connections between testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, entail that ending hermeneutical injustice requires the dominant cultural groups to take seriously the testimony of the disadvantaged, and to learn how to use the hermeneutical resources they have developed. the new insight that has emerged from our discussion here, however, is that there are two competing considerations that need to be balanced through dialogue. in order to resolve the problem of authority, we need to both ensure that dominant social groups do not simply impose their ways of seeing onto less powerful social groups, and hold any understanding of the world open to criticism—and, indeed, rejection—irrespective of the relative positions of power occupied by its critics and those who endorse it. members of the wider culture must engage in dialogue with people from the victimized social group, and together develop a way of understanding the target of the injustice, so that the hermeneutical wrong is put right. the dialogue needs to be open-minded, respectful, and one in which the participants treat each other as equals.14 members of the wider culture need to engage with hermeneutically marginalized people and listen seriously to their accounts of their experience. there will be many cases where the wider culture should simply adopt the victimised group’s understanding of whatever is at stake. however, such acceptance cannot be a given. where some group’s understanding of the world is problematic from the perspective of the wider culture, members of the latter should work with the victimised group to try and develop a new set of meanings acceptable to both parties. engaging in such dialogue will often be difficult, and the danger of replicating problematic power structures will be everpresent. moreover, just as some intercultural disputes are intractable, so too it is likely that it will be impossible to settle some disputes between different social groups. the teenage ‘vampires,’ for example, may be completely resolute in their belief that they are vampires, and no amount of dialogue will change that. similarly, the wider community may (and should) be completely resolute in its belief that the teenagers are not, in fact, vampires. no amount of respect for the teenagers as interlocutors, ensuring that they are treated as equal partners in the exchange, and so forth, can or should change that belief, since it is manifestly false. it follows that 14 when such dialogue is sustained over a sufficiently long period of time, it will constitute the end of hermeneutical marginalization. 19 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 the best the wider community can do is work towards eradicating hermeneutical injustices by engaging in dialogue with victimised groups. we may have to accept that some instances of hermeneutical injustice cannot be remedied because it will not be possible to develop a way of thinking that the wider culture can take up, which will erase the injustice. but this is the price we have to pay in order to solve the problem of authority without resorting to an unpalatable relativism. conclusion in this paper, i identify a problem for fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice. to remedy such a wrong, it looks as though the gap in the culture’s resources must be filled with ideas developed by the victimised group, and then taken up by the wider culture. in other words, the victimised group should be treated as authoritative with respect to the target of the injustice. the worry is that in some cases, their ideas will be ones that we do not think should be spread through the culture. the discussion parallels the dispute over feminist critiques of alien cultural practices. in both cases, we need to balance two requirements: to avoid a dominant culture or social group imposing its ways of seeing the world onto a less powerful culture or social group, whilst also avoiding the threat of relativism, which comes from treating the less powerful culture or social group as authoritative about some domain, just in virtue of its less powerful status. the obvious way to do this is for different cultures/social groups to engage in respectful, open dialogue in order to develop a way of understanding the world together. references ackah, william. 2014 “there are fewer than 100 black professors in britain—why?” conversation, 10 march. http://theconversation.com/there-are-fewer-than100-black-professors-in-britain-why-24088. bbc news. 2015a. “cecil the lion’s killer a good man, says zimbabwe hunter.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-33787351. ———. 2015b. “robert mugabe admits zimbabwe’s land reform flaws.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-31663267. brownmiller, susan. 1990. in our time: memoir of a revolution. new york: dial press. carel, havi, and gita györffy. 2014. “seen but not heard: children and epistemic injustice.” the lancet 384 (9950): 1256–1257. congdon, matthew. 2015. “epistemic injustice in the space of reasons.” episteme 12 (1): 75–93. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 cordes, susanne. 2012. “western feminists and muslim women in new dialogue.” kvinfo’s web magazine 30 january. http://kvinfo.org/mena/westernfeminists-and-muslim-women-new-dialogue. dotson, kristie. 2012. “a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression.” frontiers 33 (1): 24–47. fitz-gibbon, kate. 2014. homicide law reform, gender and the provocation defence. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. fricker, miranda. 2008. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2010. “replies to alcoff, goldberg, and hookway on epistemic injustice.” episteme 7:164–178. grove, jack. 2014. “black scholars still experience racism on campus.” times higher education 20 march. https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/blackscholars-still-experience-racism-on-campus/2012154.article. mason, rebecca. 2011. “two kinds of unknowing.” hypatia 26 (2): 294–307. medina, josé. 2012. “hermeneutical injustice and polyphonic contextualism: social silences and shared hermeneutical responsibilities.” social epistemology 26 (2): 201–220. mlambo, alois. 2014. a history of zimbabwe. new york: cambridge university press. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures. london: routledge. nussbaum, martha. 1999. sex and social justice. new york: oxford university press. nzou, goodwell. 2015. “in zimbabwe, we don’t cry for lions.” new york times 4 august. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/05/opinion/in-zimbabwe-wedont-cry-for-lions.html. obiora, leslye. 2000. “bridge and barricades: rethinking polemics and intransigence in the campaign against female circumcision.” in global critical race feminism: an international reader, edited by adrien katherine wing, 260– 274. new york: new york university press. pohlhaus, gaile. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27 (4): 715–735. reddy, rupa. 2008. “gender, culture and the law: approaches to ‘honour crimes’ in the uk.” feminist legal studies 16:305–321. romdenh-romluc, komarine. 2016. “hermeneutical injustice: blood-sports and the english defence league.” social epistemology 30:592–610. soni, sangeeta. 2012. “‘izzat’ and the shaping of the lives of young asians in britain in the 21st century.” phd diss., university of birmingham. tackey, nii djan, helen barnes, and priya khambhaita. 2011. poverty, ethnicity and education. york: joseph rowntree foundation. waller, marguerite, and sylvia marcos. 2005. dialogue and difference. gordonsville, va: palgrave macmillan. 21 romdenh-romluc: hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority published by scholarship@western, 2017 white, edmund. 1998. a boy’s own story. london: picador. white, megan, and hatim omar. 2010. “vampirism, vampire cults and the teenager of today.” international journal of adolescent medical health 22 (2): 189– 195. world health organisation 2014. female genital mutilation. fact sheet. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en/. komarine romdenh-romluc is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the university of sheffield, uk. whilst the main focus of her research is phenomenology, she also writes on other topics. one strand of her current work is concerned with issues to do with power and culture. she is particularly interested in trying to understand interactions between people from different cultures. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.1 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority komarine romdenh-romluc recommended citation hermeneutical injustice and the problem of authority introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s article 1 toward a feminist theory of the state 2017 introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later lori watson university of san diego, pwatson@sandiego.edu recommended citation watson, lori. 2017. "introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.1. introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later lori watson first, i would like to thank the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly for agreeing to publish this symposium and allowing me to guest edit it. the papers collected here, along with catharine a. mackinnon’s response to them, grew out of a book symposium on toward held at the pacific division meeting of the american philosophical association in the spring of 2015. i was, then, a member of the pacific division program committee, and as such had the opportunity to organize invited sessions for the program. given complete carte blanche to organize sessions, i conceived of this “dream session,” featuring mackinnon’s groundbreaking work and initiated the invitations. amazingly, everyone agreed to participate, including mackinnon. after that session, a philosopher approached me and said, “how did you get mackinnon to come to the apa?” my reply: “i asked her.” when initially brainstorming about possible sessions, a symposium on toward leapt to my mind for two reasons: first, as a feminist scholar, this book has been ground zero for my work since first reading it as an undergraduate. whether others take up its charge or not, it certainly serves as a reference point, a fundamental orienting text, for many, many others. second, it seems to me that many of the current “cutting-edge” topics in philosophy—testimonial injustice, situated epistemologies of the oppressed, exploration of the policing of the boundaries of philosophy in the service of dominant groups, ideology, propaganda, the concept of “woman,” and indeed much else—owe an intellectual debt to toward, one often unacknowledged. many of these topics are deftly analyzed in toward explicitly, and some, such as testimonial injustice, not called that in toward, find their first expression or proto-expression in mackinnon’s words. thus, paying homage to this text, explicitly acknowledging our intellectual debts, seemed to me well overdue. the papers collected here by natalie nenadic, susan brison, elena ruiz and kristie dotson, and clare chambers engage, with great care, the substance of mackinnon’s views across a wide range of topics. nenadic’s paper is a truly original contribution, developing an account of the shared philosophical method between some continental approaches to understanding and analyzing the phenomenology of the lived-experience of persons (as members of groups) and mackinnon’s feminist method. along the way, nenadic also does a remarkable job of explicitly 1 watson: introduction published by scholarship@western, 2017 drawing our attention to the ways in which mackinnon’s analysis of gender was intersectional from the beginning and never reductive (though some critics have consistently and mistakenly claimed it was). nenadic’s careful reading and exposition of these aspects of mackinnon’s view provide what one hopes will be taken up as the complete rejoinder to those critics who continue to misread, in this and other respects, toward. susan brison’s piece takes its title from one of the epigraphs that begin chapter 5 of toward, on “consciousness raising”—the poem “artemis” by olga broumas. “we must find words or burn,” broumas writes and brison demonstrates. “sisterhood,” as a concept of feminist solidarity, is not as frequently invoked as it once was, in part due to the ways in which marginalized women have articulated their exclusion from such sisterhood, both in practice and in theory. however, i think the concept can be articulated in an inclusive and open way (as nenadic’s piece beautifully shows), and it is the word that kept coming to my mind as i first heard and then read brison’s piece. sisterhood is often forged through taking up a cause together, in the flesh and face to face, but as all of us have surely experienced, it is also created and sustained through words and texts, which can create a bond through great distance, whether distance of geography or time. toward has been, and will continue to be, that bridge through geography or time for many. brison articulates what no doubt many readers of toward have felt: an igniting of our own feminist consciousness raising, a text to return to for sustenance, and a powerful call to action—we will be silent no more. elena ruiz and kristie dotson’s piece seeks to articulate the grounds of “allyship” among mackinnon’s work and feminist decolonizing work, especially as done by women of color and feminisms situated in the context of liberatory struggles of the global south. they lay out a very careful and illuminating exegesis of mackinnon’s critique of dominant epistemological norms that serve to reify and “universalize” dominant perspectives, which are actually partial and in service of power. while they argue for the liberatory potential of exposing the false universality of epistemologies of dominance, ruiz and dotson warn that the very project of giving voice to new ways of knowing, grounded in the experience of subordinated groups, runs the risk of falling back into a false universalization, marginalizing those subordinated through multiple intersections of power (sex, race, class, geo-political location, disability, and so on). they lay the groundwork for future work on coalition building among various (and internally diverse) groups, acknowledging that while such work is fraught with difficulty, it is necessary. clare chambers’s piece queries whether, and if so, what, moral theory underlines or emerges from mackinnon’s political critique. chambers insists that if, after all, “the personal is the political,” then individual “choices” call for political critique, especially when such choices reflect or support unequal power dynamics. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.1 another way of stating chambers’s line of inquiry is as asking, what are our individual, moral duties under systems of oppression? where and when do we have duties to resist? where and when are we condemnable for our complicity or failure to resist? building on this line of inquiry, chambers asks what we should make of our own (and others’) gender presentations, under current conditions, extending this line of questioning to “who counts as a woman?” here she explores the possibility of a trans-inclusive feminism and a feminism-inclusive trans politics. as tempting as it is to offer my own responses and replies to the numerous issues raised in these papers, readers here have the benefit of catharine mackinnon’s direct engagement and response. anyone having previously read any of mackinnon’s work surely knows that in addition to the depth of their substance, they also stand out for their style. susan brison remarks on this briefly in her piece; one rarely finds substantive writing of the sort mackinnon is known for with the flare of style with which she consistently punctuates her pages. one doesn’t exactly expect to laugh out loud when reading a book entitled toward a feminist theory of the state, but indeed the wit peppered throughout the compelling prose provides opportunities for relief, a welcome respite against the gravity of reality simultaneously documented and explored. her reply here, once again, does not disappoint, combining substance with style in the way we have come to expect from mackinnon. lori watson is professor and chair of philosophy at the university of san diego, and affiliate faculty in the school of law. she has published on a wide range of topics in feminism and political philosophy, including pornography, prostitution, food justice, as well as a number of articles on political liberalism. she is author of three books: a concise introduction to logic (with patrick hurley), equal citizenship and public reason: a feminist political liberalism (with christie hartley), forthcoming from oxford university press, and debating sex work (with jessica flannigan), also forthcoming from oxford. 3 watson: introduction published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later lori watson recommended citation introduction: symposium on toward a feminist theory of the state, twenty-five years later unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 2 2016 unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege claire a. lockard elon university, clockard@elon.edu recommended citation lockard, claire a.. 2016. "unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2. unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege1 claire a. lockard abstract admissions of white privilege and/or racism are common among white anti-racists and others who want to combat their racism. in this article, i argue that because such admissions are conscious attempts to address unconscious habits, they are unhappy speech acts and contrary to their implied aims. admissions of white privilege or racism can be conceptualized as foucauldian confessions that are pleasurable to enact but ultimately reinforce white people’s feelings of goodness and allow them to avoid addressing this racism. i ground my argument in shannon sullivan’s analysis of white privilege and sara ahmed’s critique of confessions of racism/privilege to show that in addition to doing no anti-racist work at the moment of saying, these confessions actually reify white privilege deeper into the unconscious and make it harder to address. sullivan’s work, i conclude, offers white people a more productive way forward than their unhappy performative declarations of privilege. a white person’s understanding of her confessing habit cannot break this habit, but it might orient her toward examining what sorts of antiracist moves do work. keywords: non-performative, ahmed, sullivan, foucault, whiteness, confession, racism, anti-racist work, race in this paper, i put sara ahmed’s work on the non-performativity of admissions of racial privilege into conversation with shannon sullivan’s work on unconscious habits of racial privilege. i agree with ahmed that admissions of privilege or racism do not do the anti-racist work they intend and in fact extend 1 i would like to express my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers and to the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly for their generous and charitable feedback; to ann j. cahill and stephen bloch-schulman for their comments on multiple versions of this paper; to members of the elon university philosophy department senior seminar course and to sean wilson for helpful feedback and discussion; and to shannon sullivan, whose comments on an initial draft helped shape subsequent revisions. 1 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 rather than challenge white privilege (ahmed 2004, 52).2 i suggest that if we take seriously sullivan’s claim that white privilege operates as a set of unconscious habits, we can understand this extension as the reification of racism and privilege deeper into the unconscious. given that admissions of racism actually reinforce rather than challenge white privilege, my second aim in this paper is to ask why it is so tempting to believe that these admissions of privilege do anti-racist work. i begin by agreeing with ahmed that admissions of racism or racial privilege are unhappy performatives—that is, they are speech acts that do not actually do the anti-racist work they intend (ahmed 2004). i then argue that sullivan’s vision of white privilege as a set of unconscious habits can explain why these admissions don’t work and in fact do negative work. these declarations can be thought of as foucauldian confessions; they make white people feel as though they have purified and transformed their core selves, which is why they/we think the statements work to combat racism or privilege.3 i conclude by suggesting that a better understanding of the unconscious habits of white privilege that tempt us toward confession can actually offer white people a more productive way forward than our confessions of privilege. sara ahmed’s analysis of anti-racism as non-performative in her essay “declarations of whiteness: the non-performativity of antiracism,” sara ahmed analyzes six different ways that whiteness is declared in academic writing, conversation, and/or official/institutional policy. while ahmed is describing declarations made mostly by white scholars of whiteness, i am interested in how these admissions function for white people who are not consistently engaged 2 ahmed’s article was published in an online journal that does not use page numbers. instead, each paragraph is numbered. the numbers i list in my parenthetical citations are the paragraph numbers rather than the page numbers. 3 throughout this paper, i use a variety of pronouns when referring to white people. ahmed uses “they” or “one” to refer to whites; sullivan uses “she” for singular and “they” for plural. i use a combination of these pronouns when quoting or describing their work, and i sometimes also use first-person pronouns in order to signal my own whiteness. i also use the collective “we,” though i try to be specific about whether i am referring to “we” (white people) or “we” (all people). i recognize that using “we” to talk about white people implies a solely white audience, but i hesitate to refer to white folks only in the third person because i do not want to distance myself from this group. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 in anti-racist theory or anti-racist work.4 the admissions i refer to in this paper are primarily admissions made by white people who position themselves as anti-racist but lack experience with anti-racist conversations, theory, or activism. while this population is different from the group ahmed is concerned with, it seems to me that the admissions function similarly, whether made by white scholars of whiteness or by white people trying to enter into conversations about race, racism, and privilege. ahmed argues that “such declarations [of racism or privilege] are nonperformative: they do not do what they say” (ahmed 2004, 50). using j. l. austin’s conception of performative speech acts, ahmed contends that when wellintentioned white people admit to their privilege or racism, they are not intending to make declarative claims; rather, they believe that their utterance does something at the moment of saying (10). ahmed places admissions of racism/privilege in the category of unhappy performatives: statements that would be performative but fail to meet the required criteria. as austin puts it, unhappy performatives occur when “something goes wrong and the act—marrying, betting, bequeathing, christening, or what not—is therefore at least to some extent a failure: the utterance is then, we may say, not indeed false but in general unhappy” (austin 1962, 14, emphasis in original). ahmed contends that admissions of privilege or racism are examples of such unhappy speech acts. of the six types of unhappy utterances of racism ahmed analyzes, i am most interested in the one she describes as “i am/we are racist” (ahmed 2004, 17). ahmed explains that “the claim to be racist by being able to see racism in this or that form of practice is also a claim not to be racist in the same way. . . . the logic goes: we say ‘we are racist,’ and insofar as we can admit to being racist (and racists are unwitting), then we are showing that ‘we are not racist,’ or at least, that we are not racist in the same way” (20). for ahmed, admitting to racism does the opposite—admitting to it becomes a way to show that one is actually not a racist, or at least not as bad a racist as the people who do not even recognize their racism. in trying to perform an acknowledgement of racism, white people actually refuse to acknowledge it. before i continue with my description of ahmed’s argument, i want to make two clarifying points about her use of austin’s work on performative speech acts. first, i will discuss ahmed’s conflation of the terms “non-performative” and “unhappy performative,” and second, i will suggest that what she names as declarations are actually better understood as admissions. 4 it is also important to note that neither ahmed nor i am interested in declarations of racism/whiteness made by white supremacists who are quite proud of their status as racists. 3 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 for austin, there is a distinction between non-performative utterances and unhappy performative utterances. non-performatives are utterances like descriptions or statements of fact: they do not perform an action and are not intended to be performing an action. in contrast, as stated above, unhappy performatives are speech acts that would be performative if certain conditions were met, but that fail to meet these necessary conditions and thus fail to perform what they intend. in other words, with unhappy performatives, something has failed/gone wrong such that the utterance does not do the action it purports to do (austin 1962, 14), whereas non-performatives were not purporting to do an action at all. for example, the statement “it is raining outside” is a non-performative statement; it is a description. but (to use austin’s example) if i utter the statement “i name this ship the mr. stalin” without having the proper authority to name a ship, my utterance is an unhappy performative: a type of utterance that would normally be performative (the naming of something) failed to meet the necessary conditions of performativity (23). throughout her essay, ahmed seems to conflate non-performativity and failed/unhappy performativity. in the title of the work, she claims that declarations of whiteness are non-performative, but as early on as her abstract, she suggests that “declarations of whiteness could be described as ‘unhappy performatives,’ the conditions are not in place that would allow such declarations to do what they say” (ahmed 2004). while ahmed uses the term “non-performativity” throughout much of the essay, it seems to me that what she really wants to say is that these declarations are failed/unhappy performatives. they can be placed in the category of performative speech acts because these declarations are not mere descriptions, though they do describe one’s whiteness/racism. ahmed would suggest that what i mean when i say “i’m a racist” is actually that i am not a racist, because real racists do not know they are racists (53). when i make that admission, i intend to perform the action of showing my goodness, or proving that i am on my way to being less racist by at least admitting to my racism. but what i am actually performing is an act of defining racism in a particular way (by implying that the real racists cannot even admit to their racism), implying that i am really not a racist (because i can admit to my racism), and reproducing my white privilege (because in my admission, i can feel good about myself and my efforts) (54). this utterance has performed, but it has performed an action contrary to its intended one. this places it into the category of unhappy performatives and not non-performatives. one might also wonder whether ahmed is correct in categorizing admissions of whiteness as austinian declarations. declarations for austin are one type of performative; they are utterances like “i declare war.” for austin, what characterizes a declaration is that it commits one to a certain course of action 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 (austin 1962, 155). while an utterance like “i am racist” is grammatically a declarative sentence, it does not seem to be this future-oriented, austinian sort of declaration; it can be better categorized as an expositive performative. these are statements that shift from descriptive to performative when “the main body of the utterance has generally or often the straightforward form of a 'statement,' but there is an explicit performative verb at its head which shows how the 'statement' is to be fitted into the context of conversation, interlocution, dialogue, or in general of exposition” (85). in other words, an expositive performative develops when utterances that initially look like statements are paired with a verb that performs some action. one of his examples is the utterance “'i admit (or concede) that there is no backside to the moon'” (85). an utterance like “i admit that i am a racist” functions similarly: each admission is performative because they are not claims with truth value (we can’t ask “did that person really admit to it?”), they require the utterance in order to be admissions, they were uttered deliberately, and they cannot literally be false (though they can be insincere, which would make them unhappy) (84). while the utterance “i am a racist” might appear distinct from “i admit that i am a racist,” it seems to me that the “i admit” is almost always implied when people affirm their status as racists (particularly the population i have in mind: wellintentioned white folks who are newly or inconsistently engaged in anti-racist work). in fact, if we think about how utterances of individuals’ racism are made in our dayto-day lives, it is hard to make sense of them as anything other than admissions. no white person says casually, upon meeting a non-white person, “just to let you know, i am a racist.” statements about one’s racism are not made or heard as descriptive truth claims like this. ahmed is concerned with statements that serve not only to describe one’s racism but also to provide the speaker with a way out of this racism. ultimately, despite her departure from austin’s terminology, i think ahmed’s main point stands: admissions of whiteness or racism do not achieve their intended effect of being anti-racist acts in and of themselves. in austinian terms, it is perhaps more accurate to say that ahmed is concerned with admissions of whiteness/racism because they function as unhappy performatives, rather than saying, as she does, that she is concerned with declarations of whiteness/racism that are nonperformative. or we could think of these utterances as performative contradictions: they are performative, but they perform the opposite action they intended.5 in my description of ahmed’s work, i will use the terms unhappy performatives and admissions in order to keep her terminology in line with austin’s. 5 thank you to the anonymous reviewer who suggested that i look more carefully at how ahmed takes up austin’s work and for suggesting that the utterances ahmed describes could be called performative contradictions. 5 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 alison bailey provides a helpful distinction between the literal and functional meaning of speech acts like these admissions of racism: the utterance "i’m not a member of the aryan nation” is not meant to be taken literally in this context; that is, its function is not to alert listeners to an interesting factual aside about my political alliances, or about who i don’t hang out with after work. the actual content of the sentences uttered in white talk may be true, but that’s not the point. when asserted in response to the white problem question, the remarks do something else: they are offered as evidence of one’s innocence. (bailey 2015, 44) although the admissions ahmed talks about and the example bailey gives above are not explicitly claiming anti-racism on the surface, their function is intended to be anti-racist. these utterances can be described as what bailey, building from the work of alice mcintyre (1997), calls “white talk” (2015, 38). white talk is “a predictable set of discursive patterns that white folks habitually deploy when asked directly about the connections between white privilege and institutional racism” (38). it allows white people to move away from acknowledging that we are responsible for the perpetuation of racial injustices (39) and instead, lets us focus on our own experiences and our desire to be good. for bailey, white talk is not only a set of conversational moves; it is also a set of bodily comportments. white talk can be verbal, but the nonverbal and unconscious bodily signals that white people send out as they talk about race are for bailey just as revealing about the nature of white privilege and white racism as the words they say (42). bailey explains that white talk fails to engage deeply or critically with issues of race or racism (42). it serves as a distancing strategy that refocuses the conversation on the white person and shields them from vulnerability (41, 43). bailey argues that one “can’t engage whiteness critically using the fluttering grammar of white talk because these utterances bolster white privilege on moral, ontological, and epistemological grounds” (47). although bailey does not cite ahmed, bailey’s account of white talk is in accordance with ahmed’s account of admissions of racism: each is incapable of doing anti-racist work.6 6 one might argue that while white talk prevents whites from engaging with conversations about race, admissions of white privilege may act as a first step toward engaging this conversation. but i argue that because of the unconscious nature of habits of white privilege (see pages 12–13 of this paper), this admission is actually more likely to stop future conversation than prompt it. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 for ahmed, these admissions allow white people to avoid engaging with their/our racism and white privilege while also reinforcing this racism and white privilege. this happens because in admitting to privilege or racism, we might think we have taken action to address it—the admission becomes “a fantasy of transcendence in which ‘what’ is transcended is the very ‘thing’ admitted to in the declaration [admission]” (52). she explains that “declaring [admitting to] whiteness . . . is not an anti-racist action, and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution, or person to a form of action that we could describe as anti-racist” (ahmed 2004, 12). 7 here, ahmed is describing austin’s sixth way that a performative can fail or be unhappy (austin 1962, 10), arguing that because they fail to commit speakers to a future course of anti-racist action, anti-racist statements intended as actions are not effective anti-racist actions at all. ahmed’s concern about these admissions leads her to a broader argument that “anti-racism is not performative” (11), though it is more accurate to summarize her argument as “antiracism is unhappily performative.” to put it another way, ahmed’s worry about these speech acts is not only that they don’t do anti-racist work but also that they “can actually extend rather than challenge racism” (ahmed 2004, 52) by blocking future action. for example, at my own university, education sessions on race and racism often end with white students asking what they can do to combat racism (a question ahmed argues is itself a manifestation of white privilege because it again refocuses the conversation on white people [56]). quite often, the answer given is that white people must educate themselves on racial issues and become aware of their own biases. on the surface, this answer appears helpful: even if it does not decrease my internalized racism to learn about my biases or learn about non-white people, it is a worthy goal to become more informed about issues besides those affecting white people and to recognize how the world has been shaped by the interests of what charles mills calls the political system of “global white supremacy” (mills 1997, 2).8 7 in her essay, ahmed talks both about admissions of racism and admissions of whiteness. she views declarations of whiteness and declarations of racism as both being unhappy performatives (though perhaps in different ways). i would add that declarations of white privilege attempt the same work as declarations of racism or whiteness. 8 i echo shannon sullivan’s concern that the term “non-white” centers on whiteness as the norm, but i also share her worry that using the term “people of color” implies that white people do not have a race. i have chosen to use “white” and “non-white” but like sullivan, i recognize that this linguistic choice is not unproblematic (see sullivan 2006, 199n2). 7 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 but besides assuming that white people have access to our own biases, this solution of self-education encourages white students to merely think about and express the existence of their biases and racism, and think that they “get it” because they are more knowledgeable about racism than their peers. before they were told to think about their own biases or privileges, white students may at least have thought racism was complex and hard to understand. after being told to “study up” on their privilege but not taught how to be critical of that privilege or use it against itself, white students will, i fear, begin feeling bad about their racism, then admit to it, then feel better and continue to act in white-privileged ways that make their communities worse. this surface-level engagement seems to satisfy white people’s desire for goodness more than it allows them to engage critically in conversations about whiteness and racism (bailey 2015, 43), and it permits white people to, as bailey suggests, continue to “feel as if we are thoughtfully engaging race and racism, but . . . from a place of imagined invulnerability, comfort, and safety” (43). learning about my biases with earnest determination is a perfect way for me to later engage in white talk that shores up my perception of myself as a good white person. thus, it seems that admitting to racism is an easy way to prove one’s desire to be anti-racist and good but is an ineffective tool for breaking down racial hierarchy. it might seem that learning about bias and privilege could be used strategically; perhaps if students can learn about their biases and privileges (maybe by first admitting to them), they will do future anti-racist actions that are more effective than what they would have done before. it could be that these admissions act as a starting point on an anti-racist journey. but bailey’s work suggests that this is unlikely; admissions, as white talk, are by definition incapable of leading to useful engagement because their deployment serves as a distancing strategy that allows whites to feel good and to perpetuate their/our ignorance about the nature of racism (39, 43). the admission of racism also allows white people to blame others for the problem of racism when racism is positioned as the fault of those who cannot even recognize it (ahmed 2004, 53). thus, while white people may take the advice of learning about their biases and privilege and naming them as such, this learning will not (as much as it can feel like it will) result in effective anti-racist work. shannon sullivan’s account of white privilege as unconscious habit ahmed’s argument about the unhappy performativity of anti-racism explains how admissions of racism/privilege fail; shannon sullivan’s account of white privilege as a set of unconscious habits can offer, i argue, an even clearer explanation of why they fail. sullivan argues against the idea that white privilege is something that can be easily accessed and addressed; she also distinguishes between white supremacy and white privilege and argues that today, white privilege 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 is the more common and insidious form of racism.9 rather than a white supremacybased vision of racism as “conscious, deliberate forms of white domination” (sullivan 2006, 5), sullivan’s vision of white privilege is one where white domination is unconscious and often invisible (5). sullivan contends that in contemporary u.s. society, most racism is not the product of overt white supremacist ideas that white people are better, smarter, more capable, or more deserving of human flourishing than non-white people. rather, “white privilege operates as unseen, invisible, even seemingly nonexistent” (1),10 a set of unconscious habits that “actively work[s] to disrupt attempts to reveal its existence” (2). sullivan defines habit as “an organism’s subconscious predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political, and natural worlds in particular ways” (23). habits are “mental and physical patterns of engagement with the world that operate without conscious attention or reflection” (4), and they are often not easily revealed or transformed. for sullivan, viewing white privilege as habit is crucial because it explains “how white privilege often functions as if invisible” (4). in fact, part of what constitutes white privilege is the strong resistance to conscious recognition of racist and privileged habits. habits (including those of white privilege) are thoroughgoing; they are “deeply constitutive of who a person is and therefore . . . difficult and slow (though not impossible) to change” (21). if these unconscious habits of racial privilege are ignored in favor of conscious argumentation or conversation about them, much of white privilege remains unaddressed. this is because a conscious desire to change one’s habits will not likely have much of an effect on them; in fact, sullivan contends that “as unconscious, habits of white privilege do not merely go unnoticed. they actively thwart the process of conscious reflection on them, which allows them to seem nonexistent even as they continue to function” (6). what makes white privilege so much harder to combat than white supremacy for sullivan is the fact that white privilege simply makes up the background of white people’s lives; white people do not notice (and have a 9 while i disagree with sullivan’s positioning in revealing whiteness of white supremacy and white privilege as mutually exclusive (sullivan 2006, 5), i find her contrasting of white privilege with white supremacy to be a helpful description of why de facto racism is so hard to address. thanks to helen meskhidze for pointing out to me the problems with conflating white supremacy and white privilege. 10 while it is too soon to know the long-term impact of white supremacy on the u.s. political climate, in light of the 2016 presidential campaign, i am now curious about how sullivan would respond to white supremacists like david duke endorsing donald trump, and to the blatantly racist rhetoric of various candidates being met with fairly widespread approval. it seems that white supremacy is perhaps more prevalent than sullivan accounts for. 9 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 great stake in never noticing) that they are, for example, more likely to be called for job interviews (bertrand and mullainathan 2004, 991), that they are more likely to have a choice about the spaces they occupy, or that they engage with non-white cultures as though they are interchangeably exotic others (sullivan 2006, 192). the fact that white privilege is unconscious is part of how it resists being transformed, though this is not because the unconscious is some untouchable core within each of us (sullivan 2006, 57). while sullivan believes that many habits of white privilege are developed unconsciously and that they are difficult to know and change (50), she does not agree with a freudian vision of the unconscious as completely formed and unchangeable after infancy; this leaves no hope for changing unconscious racist habits. sullivan instead calls for a vision of the unconscious as transactional (61), grounded in jean leplanche’s theory of the unconscious as relational. a detailed account of sullivan’s reading of laplanche is beyond the scope of this paper, but a brief summary will be important for my later argument about why declarations of racism don’t work. sullivan contends that the transactional unconscious is formed and constantly re-formed as habits develop via interactions with the social and political world (61). it is not the case that an infant is a passive vessel into which various ideologies are deposited and coalesce to form an unchangeable core. rather, for laplanche, the unconscious continues to form after infancy (85) and from various sources in addition to the parents or caregivers. sullivan pushes this argument further, suggesting that we think of the unconscious not as a thing inside of us but rather as “an adjective describing certain bodily and psychical habits” (62). under sullivan’s vision of the unconscious, social context matters greatly, and it continues to matter throughout one’s life as habits develop and respond to their environments. a sullivanian explanation of unhappy admissions of white privilege now that i have talked generally about sullivan’s vision of white privilege and the unconscious, i want to apply some of her claims to ahmed’s argument that declarations of white privilege and/or racism are unhappy. ahmed asserts that one reason that admissions of white privilege/racism don’t work is that they rely on the assumption of many white people that “real” racists cannot admit to their own racism (ahmed 2004, 53). thus, those who do admit it cannot possibly be the “real” racists. sullivan would likely not be at all surprised at ahmed’s claims. recall that for sullivan, it isn’t merely that white privilege is habitual and unconscious; it is also that conscious efforts to address it will not undo the privilege (1). thus, sullivan’s work can provide two additional reasons that admissions of white privilege or racism are ineffective: first, they are best positioned to address conscious experience, but most examples of white privilege and racism are unconscious; and second, they can reify 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 habits of racism further into the unconscious, making them even harder to transform later.11 to explore these two ways of being ineffective, i will offer an example of a set of speech acts that would, according to ahmed, be considered unhappy admissions of racism/privilege. i will then explore the reasons sullivan might offer to explain how and why they are not doing the kind of anti-racist work they want to. in the spring of 2015, i attended a rally sponsored by my former institution in response to a series of racial bias incidents that occurred on the campus. at the rally, both black and white students spoke about how issues of racism affected their experiences on campus. the black students who spoke were justifiably angry that they could not walk across campus feeling safe from racial slurs being shouted at them from passing cars, and the white students spoke at length about white privilege. one student in particular listed the ways her privilege made her able to ignore racial tensions on campus. she admitted to her privilege and even admitted to using what she referred to as “the n-word.” she also claimed that even though her privilege allowed her to ignore racial problems on campus, she had chosen to continue the conversation about privilege and racism. i do not reference this student’s comment to shame her or claim that her white privilege or racism are worse than that of any other white college student. rather, i am interested in the way the rally turned into an opportunity for her and for several other white students to attempt to show their solidarity by talking at length about their privilege and racism, rather than using their privileged voices to encourage other white students to engage in critical conversations about race or stepping back and helping create a space for non-white students to share more of their experiences and ideas. the rally concluded with students, staff, faculty, and administrators signing banners pledging something (it was never clear what), and the general sentiment that everyone who attended the rally should feel good about themselves for having taken the first step toward working for racial justice. ahmed might suspect that the rally was framed in such a way as to make attendees think that having the rally about racism on campus was actually evidence that racism on campus is not so bad. this rally is an instructive example for thinking about ahmed and sullivan together. it illustrates both ways that sullivan’s argument contributes to ahmed’s 11 of course, habits are not solely conscious or unconscious; one might briefly become conscious of her racist habit but lose that consciousness over time even as she tries to change her habit. what sullivan suggests (and what i think her work can bring to ahmed’s work) is that even though we can become conscious of our racist/white privileged habits, this is much more difficult than it might first appear, and much more of our privilege operates unconsciously than we might assume. 11 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 view of unhappy admissions. first, the rally does not change unconscious habits of white students. since white privilege is rooted in unconscious bodily and psychic habit, the purposeful declaration of privilege or racism on the conscious level cannot address these habits. sullivan argues that white privilege “require[s] indirect, roundabout strategies for transformation. . . . a person cannot merely intellectualize a change of habit by telling herself that she will no longer think or behave in particular ways” (9). this is particularly true for unconscious bodily habits of privilege; consciously desiring to change the way one comports one’s body provides no mechanism for doing so. speaking about past racist actions is, it seems to me, a clear example of an attempt to address racist habits intellectually rather than employing sullivan’s recommended roundabout strategies. habits were not the only things the white students speaking at the rally failed to change; they were also not bringing about a change in the wider world as they vocalized their privilege and racism. a performative speech act is, for austin and for ahmed, one that brings about a change in the world. there are some antiracist speech acts that do bring about a change in the world, such as a declaration from a state’s governor that a school will no longer be segregated by race. such a declaration breaks down rather than builds up white privilege.12 but although the speech acts at the rally were likely intended as anti-racist statements, they did not work because they did not commit the students to a particular action. worse, they contributed to a feeling that if the university was able to have a rally about race in the first place, things were okay. it could be true that attending this rally was an important first step for some white students who had not previously engaged with questions of racism, but as argued above, sullivan would likely contend that a conscious statement about privilege or racism does not itself transform those habits. ahmed would add that it’s unlikely that such an admission would lead to further action, since it masquerades as sufficient in and of itself (ahmed 2004, 9). furthermore, the fact that so much of the rally was dedicated to white students talking about their white privilege revealed the rally as a venue for white confessions and white feelings of goodness rather than a space for anti-racist action. to be fair to the rally, correcting these white privileged habits is not simple or straightforward; sullivan would remind us that since habits are deeply constitutive of the self, they are incredibly difficult to change. sullivan cautions against this impulse to rest easy as one tries to fight their privilege, arguing that instead, one must “continually be questioning the effects of her activism on both self and world” (sullivan 2006, 197). white people trying to combat their white privilege will inevitably reproduce privilege in some ways, but it is crucial for sullivan 12 thank you to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this comparison. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 that white people give up “the privilege of always feeling that they are in the right” (184). furthermore, “unless she [the white person] recognizes the stubborn, manipulative resistances that arise from the desire to ignore the repugnant aspects of her habits, those resistances are likely to derail her efforts to change them” (9). when the rally speakers assume that they can know and speak about their privilege and thus fight it, they are likely to be derailed from understanding its complexity and pervasiveness. the second way that an admission of racism or privilege fails to do anti-racist work is one that ahmed outlines, but that sullivan’s work can even more clearly illustrate: admissions of racism actually make racism harder to address by appearing to be effective anti-racist actions in and of themselves. my admission of racism or privilege might encourage me, as ahmed worries, to stop doing anti-racist work because, since i (apparently) understand my own racism, i cannot possibly be the problem. using sullivan’s reading of laplanche’s vision of the unconscious, we can make an even stronger statement: since the unconscious continues to form and change after infancy,13 conscious, verbal admissions of racism or privilege (even admissions made by adults) reify white privilege. the admissions repeat the privileged habit and make it less likely to be revealed as privilege. furthermore, people making these admissions are performing an old privileged habit and creating a new habit of thinking these unhappy performative acts are anti-racist acts. while alison bailey does not provide a psychoanalytic analysis of white privilege and the unconscious, her analysis of white talk provides additional support for my claim that admissions of white privilege/racism can make anti-racist work harder. she contends that “when we fall back on white talk we actively give ourselves permission to put racism and genocide in the past, dismiss historic atrocities as insignificant, dismiss people of color’s very real day-to-day grievances, or to privilege our own desire not to talk about it” (bailey 2015, 49, emphasis in original). we can think again of the rally. the student who admitted to her racism is now able to put it in the past and sever it from the present reality; she has, she might think, become a non-racist in her admission of racism, and her statement does not provide the critical perspective necessary for it to lead to useful anti-racist action in the future. sullivan might say that the student admitting to using a racial slur has just done something to protect her white privilege. she may have been rewarded by her 13 sullivan does not believe that the unconscious is subject to change easily; since it is habitual it is far easier to reify parts of the unconscious than change them. so she would likely suggest that new unconscious behaviors that preserve white privilege contribute to an already-privileged psyche far more easily than any habit that would challenge this privilege. 13 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 context for admitting to her racist action. perhaps other white students have confided in her that they too used racial slurs in the past (another example of ahmed’s unhappy admissions). perhaps black students felt compelled to tell her they were glad she was brave enough to admit it; perhaps some black students really were glad she admitted it. we can imagine all sorts of scenarios where the student is socially rewarded for her unhappy admission. she may begin to associate her admissions of racism with being anti-racist, and so she might continue to make them. she may build an unconscious habit of confessing to her privilege each time a conversation about race or racism occurs. in this case, and understandably so, she has succumbed to the seduction of the confession. a foucauldian explanation of why confessing to privilege is appealing if it is true that admitting to racism or white privilege does not do anti-racist work because 1) it fails to address unconscious habits and 2) it reifies the very privilege admitted, why is it so hard to resist thinking we are being effective when we make these admissions? why might this confessional habit develop? while ahmed and bailey discuss the harms of admitting to one’s whiteness or racism and sullivan suggests the hidden complexity of combating this privilege/racism, none of them ask why confessing remains such a common way for white people to talk about race. in my view, these kinds of comments are particularly prevalent among people who are newly engaging in or have not consistently engaged with anti-racist theory or politics, and their prevalence is something that folks doing anti-racist work need to understand in order to develop more effective anti-racist practices. one possible reason that many white people persistently think they/we are being effective anti-racist allies when we admit to our privilege/racism is that we think our admission of racism indicates that we are not as much of a racist problem as racist whites who do not acknowledge their racism. i argue that foucault’s work on the confession can provide us one additional answer to why so many white people keep admitting to racism/privilege as a means of doing anti-racism. i will first summarize foucault’s description of the confession, and then suggest ways it connects to unhappy admissions of racism/privilege. in the history of sexuality, foucault describes the western construction of the confession. he suggests that historically, the truth about sex has been produced in two ways. the first is truth “drawn from pleasure itself” (foucault 1978, 57), where the erotic was considered a skill set that one gained through practice, experience, and often, work with an instructor. from this perspective, speaking in detail about one’s sexual practices would cause the experiences to lose their intensity—that is, sexual knowledge “would lose its effectiveness and its virtue by being divulged” (57). we might think here of the ancient greek pederasty, where older men had sex with young boys as part of the boys’ educational and intellectual development. sex was 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 viewed as a skill set one could practice and that one needed for a virtuous life, rather than as a secret to be shared out of a sense of shame or impurity. this mode of truth production stands in contrast to the second way that truth about sex has been produced: through the confession. western civilization has, according to foucault, developed “procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret” (58). here he refers to the confession. no longer was talking about a sex act a way for it to lose its distinctiveness; instead, confession became a central way of producing truth, particularly in civil and religious contexts. think here of the catholic confessional or of police work centered on persuading suspects to confess their crimes. foucault marvels at how widespread confession has become, explaining that “it plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life. . . . western man [sic] has become a confessing animal” (59). confession, in foucault’s view, allows for “men’s subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word” (60). by confessing their sexual deviances or secrets, people come to believe they understand themselves as subjects; in fact, people must subjugate themselves to this constructed truth-in-confession system in order to be subjects. rather than being a set of skills, under the confession model sex and sexuality are conceptualized as central to who people are (not merely what they do). foucault argues that for people in contemporary western society, “it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined” (61). since it is so connected to truth, confession became crucial to purifying one from their sinful sexual behavior. it is difficult to formulate and perform this confession, and it is “a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him [sic]; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him his salvation" (62). we believe, in other words, that confession changes and purifies our core selves. we have constructed confessions to be performative speech acts. because of their connection to purification, these speech acts are highly pleasurable. foucault explains that “it is no longer a question simply of saying what was done—the sexual act—and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it” (63). the more perverse the sexual act, thought, or desire confessed, the harder it is to confess to it. but in the confession’s difficulty, foucault argues, is intense pleasure. this is “a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth . . . of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open” (71). in fact, the pleasure of orgasm is often overshadowed by “this multiplication and intensification of pleasures connected to the production of the truth about sex” (71). the effort exerted in a confession makes 15 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 it particularly pleasurable, and so the pleasure of describing and analyzing our acts and desires has overtaken the physical pleasure or human flourishing we might expect to gain from sexual acts. while foucault is focused on confessions related to sex, i argue that his work can also shed light on an analysis of unhappy declarations of white privilege or racism. perhaps confessing to racism has become pleasurable using a similar process of purification-via-confession. viewing ourselves (and here i mean white people) as racists is what makes the confession so powerful—it can purify us and change not what we do, but who we think we are. under the confession model, white people are revealed as racists and in this revelation are purified and made into non-racists, or at least people seeking to become non-racists. since the confession takes a lot of work to enact, it can feel like white people have already done the hardest part of anti-racism. to be sure, it often does take work for a white person to see themselves as having a race at all, let alone a set of privileges that accompany it. admitting to our racism can feel like they/we have confessed to some perversion or impurity that wants to remain hidden. thus, we are not only purified; we are ahead of our white peers who have not even realized their perversion yet. admissions of racism may seem a strange type of utterance to categorize as a confession. foucault suggests that part of what makes confession pleasurable is that it takes an immense amount of effort to discover and admit to one’s secret/hidden perversion, and it is certainly not a secret that we live in a racist society. however, while many people concede that we live in a racist society, very few concede that they are partially responsible for or even directly implicated in this racist society. thus even as the existence of racism (both systemic racism and the racism of other individuals) seems obvious to many white people, their own racism, as sullivan points out, remains stubbornly out of their view. learning to see and admit to this hidden (perhaps even secret) racism is, in my view, similar to the confessions about sex that interest foucault. confessing to racism may also produce a pleasure like foucault describes with sexual confessions. in coming to know ourselves as racists, we paradoxically become non-racist and even anti-racist. this, like the sexual confession, feels like a purification of our core selves. if we are also persuaded by freud’s conception of the unconscious, we might believe we have purified the supposedly untouchable core self that was developed in infancy, and we may feel even more pleasure for thinking we accomplished this. in examining every detail of our racism and our shame for it, we derive a similar pleasure as we do when we confess to sexual deviances. this confession of racism feels like the performance of a purifying anti-racist act. this analogy may seem to break down because foucault is describing social institutions (like the catholic confessional) that require and structure the confession, 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 and there are no such formal institutions for confessions of racism. but while it is true that there is no social norm requiring confessions of racism and no structured way to verbalize those confessions, there are more and more spaces where confession becomes expected. i am thinking not only of the anti-racist rally i described above, but also of diversity training sessions held at universities, where facilitators often set as one goal for the training that students be able to recognize and admit to their privilege(s). one might also suggest that in confessions of racism, there is no authority requiring the confession, like a judge or a priest. but sullivan and bailey may disagree; often, white people look to non-white people to forgive them for their racism, to educate them about racial issues, or to be friends with them in order to eliminate racial tension (sullivan 2014, 157; bailey 2015, 38, 42). in this way, nonwhite people can become the authority figures even as they remain marginalized. furthermore, it is possible that institutions like the catholic confessional and the criminal justice system have already taught us what we ought to think confession is and does, and thus make it easy to apply it in this new area.14 of course, an explanation of why it feels good to confess to privilege does not amount to a justification for doing so. the connection i draw between confessing to racism and the confessions foucault outlines is intended as an explanation of why the habit is so engrained and tempting rather than an exoneration of those doing what is tempting. using ahmed and sullivan to transform whiteness in this paper, i have agreed with sara ahmed that admissions of white privilege or racism are unhappy performatives. i have suggested that shannon sullivan’s vision of white privilege as unconscious habit can further explain why they fail to perform. finally, i have suggested that white people are nevertheless tempted toward these speech acts because the appeal of confession is so strong. if i am correct, what are the implications? if ahmed is right that admissions of white privilege are unhappy performatives, and sullivan’s argument in favor of white privilege as unconscious habit can further explain why these speech acts don’t work, where are we? and if confessing my racism feels pleasurable but fails to address my unconscious habits and reinscribes white privilege into my unconscious, what hope is there for working against white privilege and racism? it is true that ahmed’s argument doesn’t leave much room for hope that white people can be effective anti-racists. in the conclusion of her essay, ahmed asks whether anti-racism is even possible (ahmed 2004, 46). she goes on to mention 14 thank you to ann j. cahill for suggesting this connection between formal confession practices and less formal confessions of racism. 17 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 that often when she presents her work on unhappy performatives to white people, the typical response is “‘but what are white people to do[?]’” (56). this jump toward what white people can do instead of confessing their racism is another example of white privilege and the desire to be good (ahmed 2004, 57; sullivan 2006, 184; bailey 2015, 42) rather than a true acknowledgement of or move against racism and injustice. in one way, ahmed’s resistance of action and hope is important because white privilege tends to make white people want to feel good and hopeful about our efforts; it can be useful to disrupt that. furthermore, ending this paper about white privilege with the question of what white people can do to finally “do anti-racism right” is another move away from the problem of racism and toward the white experience. still, a sullivanian understanding of ahmed’s argument about unhappy performativity and a foucauldian exploration of why white people confess to privilege/racism anyway can, i think, offer a way forward (or an opening for a way forward, which may be the best we can ask for). after all, sullivan contends that even as white anti-racists are doomed to imperfection, partial transformation of racist/white-privileged habit is possible and whites must keep trying. we cannot wallow in white guilt or see our efforts as doomed to fail (sullivan 2006, 184). maybe if white people keep confessing and re-forming our unhappy performative habits, the failure is inevitable. but there are alternatives to this cycle of confession; sullivan might call them ways to transform whiteness (sullivan 2014). this transformation will not end white privilege, but it might help whites cause less damage to their/our communities than they/we do at present. we can now ask, for example, how to transform white habits in order to move them away from confession. this could be characterized as part of sullivan’s recommendation that white people use their privilege against itself (165–166). if confession is habitual (and this habit is unconscious), simply promising oneself or asking others not to confess likely won’t fix the problem. but perhaps confessions can be taken up differently. when someone begins a confession, perhaps there is a way to shift what they say into something performative. to the person admitting to using the n-word, one could ask, “how will you change your verbal habits in the future to avoid using that word or words like it?” this would be asking them to consider their unconscious habits consciously, so it is not a perfect solution. but it moves away from the moment of confession and toward adjusting future actions. to the person fretting over their privilege, we can suggest ways of using that privilege in the future to challenge the racist status quo in ways that emphasize the agency of non-white people and avoid white-centric conversations about white guilt. furthermore, even though white privileged/racist habits are often unconscious, there are moments when they emerge at the conscious level. white people armed with a foucauldian understanding of the racist confession have a 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 better shot at recognizing and undermining their own confessional tendencies. and white people can learn to recognize our white friends’ and peers’ confession habits even if we have difficulty recognizing our own, allowing us to help one another, as bailey suggests, engage our whiteness with vulnerability rather than epistemological resistance (bailey 2015, 40). bailey suggests that while white talk is habitual and pervasive, it is not the only way white people can engage our whiteness; the choice is not one between white talk and silence (bailey 2015, 48) or as i would put it, between confession and silence. bailey suggests a new entry point into the question of whiteness; this entry point would resist turning the conversation into one either about white goodness or about the protection of white ignorance (50). she suggests a discourse of vulnerability that would help whites enter conversations about racism and whiteness with the openness to being affected by them and the willingness to affect others (50–51). perhaps this discourse of vulnerability is one way to interrupt a confession of whiteness and turn it into some action that does allow the speaker to take responsibility for racism and engage deeply with their whiteness. we can also remember the various ways that white people engage in antiracist work without confessing to their white privilege. whites can attend rallies and marches or campaign for anti-racist political candidates, for example. they could have non-confessional conversations with their white friends and family members, using what they know about the dangers of confession to guide those conversations. white confession is not the only way to begin anti-racist work (and in fact, it is actually not likely to be an effective beginning at all). once we recognize this impulse toward confession and understand the unconscious habits of white privilege that make it at once pleasurable and privilege-reifying, we can begin using different strategies to work against our white privilege and racism. at the end of her essay, ahmed challenges white scholars of whiteness to “stay implicated in what they critique” (ahmed 2004, 59) in order to clear “some ground, upon which the work of exposing racism might provide the conditions for another kind of [anti-racist] work” (59). i suggest that if sullivan’s vision of white privilege as unconscious habit is applied to ahmed’s claims about the unhappy performativity of anti-racism, and the foucauldian confession is considered as one explanation for this phenomenon, then admissions of privilege or racism can be transformed to become (or start to become) performative. i do not have the desire to offer a comprehensive list of ways that unhappy confessions can be moved toward performativity; rather, it is my hope that i have offered a better understanding of the racist confession. this understanding is perhaps one way toward clearing the ground ahmed recommends for new types of anti-racist work. 19 lockard: unhappy confessions published by scholarship@western, 2016 works cited ahmed, sara. 2004. “declarations of whiteness: the non-performativity of antiracism. borderlands 3 (2). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm. austin, j. l. 1962. how to do things with words. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. bailey, alison. 2015. “‘white talk’ as a barrier to understanding the problem with whiteness.” in white self-criticality beyond anti-racism: how does it feel to be a white problem? edited by george yancy, 37–56. london: lexington books. bertrand, marianne and sendhil mullainathan. 2004. “are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal? a field experiment on labor market discrimination.” the american economic review 94:991–1013. foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. mcintyre, alice. 1997. making meaning of whiteness: exploring racial identity with white teachers. albany: state university of new york press. mills, charles w. 1997. the racial contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. sullivan, shannon. 2006. revealing whiteness: the unconscious habits of racial privilege. bloomington: indiana university press. ———. 2014. good white people: the problems with middle-class white anti-racism. albany: state university of new york press. claire a. lockard is a graduate student at loyola university chicago. she is most interested in questions about whiteness and white privilege; feminist phenomenological accounts of pregnancy and childbirth; and the underrepresentation of female-identified students in philosophy. she can be reached at clockard@luc.edu. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.2 http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol3no2_2004/ahmed_declarations.htm feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege claire a. lockard recommended citation unhappy confessions: the temptation of admitting to white privilege feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation lobb, andrea. 2018. “‘prediscursive epistemic injury’: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice?” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 3. 2018 “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? andrea lobb la trobe university, melbourne andrealobb@yahoo.com.au lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice?1 andrea lobb abstract this article revisits miranda fricker’s epistemic injustice (2007) through one specific aspect of axel honneth’s recognition theory. taking a first cue from honneth’s critique of the limitations of the “language-theoretic framework” in habermas’ discourse ethics, it floats the idea that the two categories of fricker’s groundbreaking analysis—testimonial and hermeneutical injustice—likewise lean towards a speech-based metric (equating harm to the capacities to know with compromise to the capacity to speak of what one knows). if we accept, however, that there are also implicit, preverbal, affective, and embodied ways of knowing and channels of knowledge transmission, this warrants an expansion of fricker’s original concept. by drawing on honneth’s recognition theory (particularly his winnicottianinspired account of ‘first order’ recognition and basic trust), i argue it is possible to extend the account of epistemic injustice beyond fricker’s two central categories, to glimpse yet another register of serious “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” i define this harm as prediscursive epistemic injury and offer two central cases to illustrate this additional form of epistemic injustice. keywords: prediscursive epistemic injury, recognition, fricker, honneth 1 i would like to express my thanks to the members of my supervision panel in the department of politics and philosophy at la trobe university, melbourne: drs. miriam bankovsky, toula nicolacopoulos, and kerreen reiger. this paper has also benefited from a few forthright challenges from an anonymous peer reviewer for this journal that lead me to rethink some of my initial examples and pushed me to improve on the original version of the argument made here. funding: this work was supported by an australian government research training program scholarship. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 1. preparatory notes on an epistemic scandal in the early 1970s, while conducting research into the experiences of women in a maternity hospital in london (and shadowing the medical staff on ward rounds, notebook in hand), the british sociologist ann oakley was witness to the following exchange between a male doctor and his female patient: doctor: [reading case-notes] ah, i see you’ve got a boy and a girl. patient: no, two girls. doctor: really, are you sure? i thought it said . . . [checks in case-notes] . . . oh no, you’re quite right, two girls. (oakley 1993, 22) if most readers share the impulse to guffaw at this moment of resplendent “mansplaining,”2 recorded as it was by the sociologist’s shrewd eye for everyday sexism and power hierarchies in the medical institution of the day, this is not, of course, to deny the seriousness at the heart of the laughing matter. many feminists have long drawn attention to the unhappy fact that women—just by dint of being women—can find themselves on the receiving end of negative stereotypes that undermine the credibility of whatever they might profess to know (more so, if they compound the issue by being mothers; perhaps multiplied “n”-fold if they happen to be women of colour, or hail from the so-called global south, or live on the social margins, or are poor).3 the doctor-patient exchange reveals how automatically— and with what casual offhandedness—the gendered dynamics of testimonial privilege and exclusion can kick in, even where there are scarcely grounds to dispute the word or authority of the woman in question. here the fast and dirty heuristic of everyday sexism (i.e., here is a gravid woman—she can’t know anything for toffee) runs on automatic pilot and crashes promptly into the absurd.4 despite the ubiquity of these dynamics of social power and their determinant effects on of the conditions of knowledge and the practices of knowers, getting them taken seriously within traditional anglo-american philosophy heralds a rather momentous shift—instituted in no small part by miranda fricker’s groundbreaking epistemic injustice (2007). the unjust deflation of credibility of some knowers owing to identity prejudice, and the hermeneutic marginalization of 2 for her definition of “mansplaining,” see solnit (2014). 3 on the effects of intersectionality on epistemic injustice, see patricia hill collins (2017). 4 the doctor engages in what we might call a ‘ritualized’ acknowledgement of his patient as ‘informant’ in the sense that fricker (after edward craig) deploys this term. but the dubiousness he expresses the moment she contradicts his paperwork shows this is more formal than real. lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 those already so often marginalized in myriad other ways, is put front and centre of the philosophical task of understanding the conditions of knowledge, what it means to know, and who exactly gets to do the knowing. fricker’s categories of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice set the parameters for this new attentiveness to the operations of power and prejudice in the work of epistemology and are now so well known as to scarcely need much reiteration here. to summarize briefly, testimonial injustice identifies the prejudicial (systematic) deflation of a knower’s testimonial credibility (due to group identity features such as those of race, gender, class) as illustrated by fricker’s central cases: racist prejudice in the case of the trial of the innocent black defendant tom robinson in to kill a mockingbird (denied testimonial credibility by his all-white jury), and the case of sexist prejudicial deflation of testimony of the character of marge sherwood from the talented mr ripley, whose knowledge is dismissed as belonging to a “hysterical” subject and the unreliable product of “female intuition.” if the wrong of testimonial injustice is enacted through a prejudicially induced lack of uptake of the listener of what the speaker-knower attempts to communicate, then hermeneutical injustice strikes the knower elsewhere and, in some sense, more fundamentally. this harm impinges on the knower’s capacity to name or conceptualize an important aspect of her own experience to herself, let alone convey it with any coherence to others. hermeneutical injustice comes about, according to fricker, because the interpretive schemas or “hermeneutical resources” within the social imaginary of a culture are always something of an ideologically stacked deck. tracking the way that “material resources” are distributed in favour of the interests of the dominant and powerful, “hermeneutical resources” similarly reflect, shore up, and legitimate the ideological perspective of the more privileged and powerful, leaving subjects who are socially marginalized hermeneutically marginalized as well. the central case here for fricker is the report of the wrong done to carmita wood, a black woman5 subjected to sexual harassment by her boss in the workplace. as these distressing incidents happen prior to the phrase “sexual harassment” having any public currency or legal purchase, wood is unable to seek redress or legal protection. consequent to having no way to say what is happening to her that can arraign it as the moral wrong it is, she is exposed to serious secondary harms—she is denied welfare benefits when she fails to give “adequate explanation” for leaving her job for what she can only helplessly describe as “personal reasons” (fricker 2007, 183). it takes the movement of second wave feminism and the shared experience of consciousness raising groups to generate the 5 in an odd elision, fricker herself does not record the fact that carmita wood is black. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 resistant hermeneutic resources to give this sexual harassment the name it warrants and to insert it into legal and everyday discourse. indeed, this process of the “lifting of hermeneutical gloom” is just as much the achievement of fricker’s text itself. for, as fricker notes, until and unless these forms of epistemic injustice (testimonial and hermeneutical) are appropriately named and defined, they all too easily go unchallenged or resisted. in what follows, however, i will make the case that these two forms may not exhaust the terrain of epistemic injustice. the purpose of this paper is to explore and identify a third form of epistemic injustice that, i will claim, meets fricker’s general criteria of a “harm done to the subject specifically in her capacity as a knower,” yet is neither testimonial nor hermeneutical in character. this harm i describe as prediscursive epistemic injury.6 my claim is that this harm is not directly available for analysis within the parameters of fricker’s account because she so thoroughly equates the figure of the knower with the figure of a speaker or linguistic “informant.” yet this, i will argue, does not cover the complex myriad of preverbal cues, expressive gestures, and implicit and embodied knowledge that make up a significant volume of how one functions in the world as a knower, especially as this applies to relational knowledge. it is these alternative embodied epistemic capacities of the knower that are my focus here. by drawing on honneth’s notion of a “first order” of recognition in his classic the struggle for recognition (informed in part by the work of the british paediatrician-psychoanalyst donald winnicott), and by following honneth through his “detour through infant research” in his later essay on social invisibility, i argue that here we find a means with which to extend fricker’s original framework. before homing in, however, on this specific moment of potential meeting between the two theoretical perspectives, it may be helpful to prepare the ground first with a few more preparatory remarks about what can be anticipated from such a dialogue. 6 i refer specifically to “epistemic injury” to discuss this form of epistemic injustice for several reasons: firstly, for its resonance with honneth’s use of “moral injury” (echoing too sennett and cobb’s classic analysis of the hidden injuries of class, which analyses how structural injustice impacts injuriously on the body and psyche of the individual). an emphasis on the embodied nature of these harms is also in keeping with the way “moral injury” appears in the recognition literature. see, for example, this passage from robert sinnerbrink: “the effects of social misrecognition involve not only distorted forms of communication but the real corporeal experience of suffering; this remains a fundamental experience essential to any account of misrecognition as a moral injury to the integrity, and hence freedom and dignity, of the autonomous subject” (sinnerbrink 2011, 204). lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 2. bringing two traditions into a new conversation it is true that recognition theory and feminist and critical race theories of epistemic injustice have only rarely crossed paths to date.7 in many ways, this lack of historical dialogue seems explicable more as the happenstance of their emergence in separate philosophical traditions that evolved along separate trajectories than as reflecting any inherent lack of common ground. as central representatives of each of these respective theoretical orientations, the german critical theorist axel honneth and the anglo feminist philosopher miranda fricker share something in the departure points from which they launch their respective philosophical and moral projects: namely, a commitment to starting from the “negative space” of social injustice and the phenomenology of the suffering this causes.8 if neither commence with the theoretical project to set out any “ideal” theories of justice or the political, nor is either persuaded that distributive theories of justice alone can do enough of the heavy lifting required by an effective social critique. for honneth, what this demands is a theory that addresses the moral injury entailed in failures of recognition; for fricker, as we have seen, what this requires is an account that can put onto the radar the wrongful harms that identity prejudice and unequal distribution of hermeneutical resources inflict on the capacities of the subject as a knower.9 yet, if fricker and honneth converge at important points in their respective social diagnoses, points of sharper divergence emerge when it comes to their visions of what might constitute progressive solutions to the harms they diagnose. for honneth, a normative pressure towards moral progress and social learning resides immanently in the anthropological facts of human relations of mutual recognition. the progressive history of an expansion of the “circle of humans” who, for example, are deemed worthy of legal equality is what he sees as the central achievement of those moral struggles for recognition that drive social and protest movements. 7 some important vanguard exceptions to the rule are articles by paul giladi (2018) and matthew congdon (2017). 8 fricker, of course, follows up the critique of epistemic injustice with her proposed “corrective” of practices of epistemic virtue and testimonial sensitivity. honneth also moves from the “negative” space of injustice, in so far as he assumes a positive normative and moral grammar can be extrapolated from the negative emotions of disrespect. 9 the dispute between honneth and fraser over the respective virtues of a recognitive versus a redistributive paradigm (fraser and honneth 2003) parallels the debate between fricker and david coady over the respective merits of a discriminatory versus a distributive model of epistemic injustice (see fricker 2017; and coady 2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 these “struggles for recognition,” for honneth, rise up predominantly “from below” (honneth 1995, 116), and the morally progressive changes are attributed therefore, for the most part, “under pressure from disadvantaged groups” themselves (117). fricker’s vision of moral progress, by contrast, does not unfold along these lines of a post-hegelian realization of the potentials immanent in the “pre-theoretical” realm, nor does it carry any of the residual traces of an intellectual legacy of german postmarxist critical theory. instead, moral progress for fricker comes framed around an aristotelean model of virtue and excellence of character, where the vision of human flourishing—even if it has a democratic and normative commitment to expanding who gets included in the “circle” of those deemed worthy knowers—nevertheless envisages the corrective tasks of moral philosophy as rather more heavily conducted “from above” (in empathic solidarity, it is true, with those who are disadvantaged and who suffer, but virtuous testimonial sensibility seems to be practiced from above, nevertheless). in fact, there is not much agonism at all in fricker’s vision of the corrective epistemic and ethical virtues. her corrective project consequently turns primarily on the cultivation of virtuous listening in the appropriately sensitive listener. another point where the two theorists most obviously reconverge is in the view that the flourishing of the self (as either an autonomous agent and rational knower, or as a subject of recognition) is fundamentally and constitutively dependent on intersubjective relations with others. for fricker, this plays out in terms of the knower’s dependence upon how open (or closed) are others to the reception of a speaker’s testimony, a question that has profound ontological as well as epistemic implications for the speaking subject. as she observes, “even relatively inconsequential instances of testimonial injustice” (like, for instance, that apparently trivial moment recorded by ann oakley) “can carry a symbolic weight to the effect that the speaker is less than a full epistemic subject: the injustice sends the message that they are not fit for participation in the practice that originally generates the very idea of a knower” (fricker 2007, 145). this view seems readily translated into recognition-theoretic language and chimes with a key tenet of honneth’s moral philosophy, absorbed from the early hegel, namely “that practical identityformation presupposes intersubjective recognition” (honneth 1995, 92). in “recognition as ideology” (2012), honneth directly broaches the question of the specifically epistemic status of practices of recognition. what knowledge claim is at work when we “recognize” another human being? honneth weighs up two possibilities. according to the first, an act of recognition entails a receptive knowing of the other. depending on which of the three spheres of recognition is involved, this might entail 1) an affectionate recognizing of what is valuable about a beloved intimate, who is at once a fellow creature of human need and utterly unique and irreplaceable, in the “first sphere” of recognition, as love; 2) recognizing lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 her as the bearer of equal and universal rights and human dignity, in the “second sphere” of recognition, as rights; or 3) it might entail recognition of her unique achievements, skills, and contributions that bring value to the collective social world, in the “third sphere” of recognition, as solidarity. where it involves a “receptive” knowing, such acts of recognition are a positive affirmation (“anerkennung”) of qualities as belonging to and already there in the person so recognized. but honneth contemplates another, more complex, epistemic implication of an act of recognition, one that may offer a better clue to how the withholding of recognition can amount to a social injustice. in this case, recognition is allocated “attributive” (rather than “receptive”) power. receptive recognition takes its knowing cue, so to speak, from what emanates from the object; recognition that is attributive, by contrast, actually puts something into the entity recognized, actively projecting upon it an attribute that may indeed not have been there prior to the act of recognition itself. the implications of this active attributive effect of recognition are even more relevant to the issue of epistemic injustice when we consider the consequences that follow upon such recognition being refused. for then the withholding of recognition from someone (of her appropriate status, say as a knower) is potentially a much graver wrong than simply exposing her to the failed reception of whatever piece of knowledge he might be attempting to impart. as fricker suggests, “persistent intellectual undermining causes him to lose confidence in his beliefs and/or his justification for them,” the result of which being that “he literally loses knowledge” (fricker 2007, 49). precisely because epistemic recognition can be “attributive,” it can also be actively “detractive,” stripping away from the knowing subject capacities she might otherwise have had. to illustrate how intersubjective recognition can be epistemically detractive as well as attributive (or how the recognition of others has the capacity to give us the gift of our identity as knowers but equally has the power to steal it from us), consider the following scenario: let’s say, for example, that i recognize that you are a real maths wiz. in accord with the first receptive account of recognition, the fact that i acknowledge you in this respect stands as a factor independent of the fact that you are so. my (receptive) recognition might contribute a gratifying social icing on the “cake” of what you are, but it is not a central ingredient of the cake itself, so to speak. but, if we take recognition to instead be capable of exerting attributive (or, in the negative, causally detractive) power, such an act of recognition (or its refusal) can do something to the one so known (or so refused). now, it might appear that it should make no difference at all to the natural brilliance of the maths wiz whether anyone else gives a big tick to her wizardry. but, as creatures who are anthropologically vulnerable to the messages of fitness we receive from others, what might appear at first glance to be an intrinsic capacity (safely tucked away, so the subject has either “got it” or not, be it philosophical brilliance, mathematical feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 skill, or whatever) in fact only becomes securely internalized through the provision of external, intersubjective recognition. the pathway to its intersubjective securing is also the route to its potential undoing. in this sense, failures of recognition can leave us epistemically undone. epistemic injustice tracks social injustice like racism and sexism in part because discriminatory prejudice and negative identity stereotypes expose subjects to special degrees and chronicity of being epistemically undone, in excess of the general or anthropological vulnerability that we all carry as creatures dependent upon our social relations of recognition. the research of social psychologist claude steele on “stereotype threat,” for example, stands as one of the most striking pieces of evidence that heightened epistemic vulnerability tracks racial prejudice. it was enough for his black (but not his white) experimental subjects to be told that they were about to sit a test measuring their academic capacity for this to prime the stereotype “blacks aren’t as good academically as whites” and thereby induce objectively worse performance from them than if told the test was measuring something else entirely. thus, it is possible to bring about deterioration in epistemic function simply by triggering internalized stereotype threat (for discussion, see fricker 2007, 57). identity power, in short, can work in subtle ways to bring about a subject’s epistemic destabilization or even collapse, much as honneth conceives that extreme refusals of intersubjective recognition can instigate (in situations such as rape or slavery) a “psychological” or “social” death (honneth 1995, 135). what a more intersubjectively supported (hence robust) individual might be able to endure without losing her footing or bearings, a more vulnerable one might succumb to, especially where a slight or insult is the latest in an accumulated mountain of many other equally “minor” messages of unfitness. as they pile up, the thousand minor cuts of a negative stereotype “may actually exert a causal force towards its own fulfillment” (fricker 2007, 58). 3. expanding the concept of epistemic injustice through axel honneth’s recognition theory matthew congdon recently made the point that, “though it has not been explicitly undertaken in the recognition literature, it would not be difficult to extend [honneth’s] three-part schema of recognition, in order to reveal love, respect, and esteem as each bearing a special role in epistemic practice” (congdon 2017, 249). his recognition-theoretic extension of fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice results in his three hybrid concepts: “epistemic neglect, epistemic disrespect, epistemic disesteem.” these refer, it would seem, not so much to forms of epistemic injustice per se (whether they are testimonial or hermeneutical) as to domains of the recognition-cum-epistemic failures involved. as terms of misrecognition, they offer productive ways to reconsider certain cases of epistemic injustice. lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 using congdon’s terminology, we might, for example, return to our opening vignette—the exchange between the woman patient and her doctor recorded by oakley. if fricker’s analysis gave us the tools to identify the vignette as a (micro-) instance of testimonial injustice, congdon’s adaptation of recognition theory yields to a further interrogation of whether we are dealing here with an instance of epistemic disrespect or one of epistemic dis-esteem. (for the moment, i bracket the question of epistemic neglect that correlates to the first sphere of recognition (as love), to which i return later). were the former to be the case, then the wrong done would pertain to the failure to afford the female patient the general degree of credibility that is universally and automatically owed all knowers, as subjects in possession of baseline epistemic capacities as human rational agents. congdon describes this as “the acknowledgement of the minimal set of capacities we grant to any knower whatsoever,” where this minimal standard is not deflated by the effects of prejudicial discrimination or sexism (see congdon, 2017, 249). if the wrong is one of dis-esteem, rather than disrespect, then the specific mode of testimonial injustice involved would lie in the way it targets the woman’s particular knowledge or special skill or competence. (although my intuition leans towards the latter, i leave it as an open question whether the insult goes more to a more “minimal set” of capacities one would universally ascribe to any caregiver—hence involves the wrong of disrespect—or whether it targets her particularly privileged epistemic position as the one who has insider knowledge of her own particular child(ren). it is also conceivable that both might be involved). to further differentiate epistemic respect from epistemic esteem, consider for example the difference between the standing afforded to jury members (the defendant’s “peers,” whose task as knowers is to assess presented evidence and to come to a verdict “beyond reasonable doubt”), as compared to that of expert witnesses in a courtroom. while the first group carries the epistemic respect granted all citizens of the polity, the second figure, by contrast is afforded a particular and additional epistemic standing on the basis of their specialist expertise. where jury members are assumed to possess minimally functional epistemic capacities taken as held in common by all adult citizens, the expert holds a different degree of epistemic esteem where her knowledge is founded on a particular level of acquired skill. her testimony consequently carries particular weight in this designated domain of recognized specialist epistemic capacity.10 10 interestingly, to be in possession of more than average knowledge (than that expected of the general citizen) is sufficient to get one excluded (“excused”) from performing jury duty. anyone with legal training, for example, is deemed to “know too much” or too “expertly” to be able to engage in the kind of layperson’s deliberation expected of the reasonable jury member. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 of course, the same presumptions of superior epistemic esteem, when overdone, can (much like excess testimonial credibility) puff up into epistemic arrogance—arguably, exactly what leads to the testimonial injustice in oakley’s vignette, where the hyperinflation (or overextension) of epistemic esteem of the doctor in question leads him to walk (and talk) all over the epistemic recognition he owes his patient. indeed, the epistemic wrangles between competing realms of respect and esteem have historically played out in complex ways between the medical profession and women’s attempts to assert authority over their own bodies (as reflected for example, in barbara ehrenreich’s for her own good: 150 years of expert’s advice to women, 1978).11 congdon’s terminology, then, gives us useful conceptual tools to locate in which spheres or domains of “social integration” (honneth, 1995, 60) a testimonial injustice occurs; it delineates the domain-specificity of the epistemic capacity that is being deflated or denied credibility. an example of epistemic dis-esteem from fricker’s own illustration of testimonial injustice might be the conversations she quotes in which women tell of encounters in which their contributions are repeatedly given less recognition or “uptake” than those of their male colleagues, owing to sexist prejudice in the workplace. thus, in professional meetings a woman will find her input ignored, talked over, brushed off (see fricker 2007, 47). it does not seem quite right, however, to simply say that the woman in question has not been “heard.” indeed, these women report that what can then ensue is that a male colleague then parrots exactly the same suggestion but gets a very different reception. as he does not run into the same obstructive testimonial wall (or testimonial glass ceiling?), the same point (now made by a different “informant”) can be seized upon enthusiastically, lauded as a great idea, recognized as a valuable contribution, and so on. in other words, when testimonial injustice operates, speech may get “heard” perceptually but not socially.12 such cycles of respective deflation and inflation of credibility in the realm of public and professional esteem can be tracked at all levels, including at the highest level of epistemic recognition (right up 11 this clash is particularly intense in the field of women’s reproductive health and gynecology. for an interesting australian study of the institutional (and gendered) patterns of refused recognition between obstetricians and midwives, and their mutual (if unevenly balanced) struggles to wrest (epistemic) esteem from each other, see reiger (2008). 12 this suggests that one can be both “heard” and yet not (socially) heard. this parallels honneth’s 2001 account of how the protagonist of ralph ellison’s invisible man is both (perceptually) “seen” (hence “cognized” as an object), but not “socially seen” (not re-cognized as a subject). lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 to that of the awarding of nobel prizes—think here, for example, of the story of crick/watston and rosalind franklin). congdon’s hybridized analysis of “epistemic-injustice-as-recognition–failure,” then, offers one productive instantiation of dialogue between the work of fricker and honneth. the extension of the category of epistemic injustice that is the purpose of this paper, however, takes a slightly different path. it applies to one particular aspect of honneth’s analysis of mutual recognition—which he initially articulates in the context of theorizing the “first sphere of recognition” (recognition as love), but which he consequently extends beyond that intimate/familial domain to his later analysis of “social invisibility” (honneth 2001). what he does there, addressing these aspects of intersubjective recognition, is to highlight the significance of the affective, embodied and “pre-linguistic gestures” (honneth 2001, 118). it is these “expressive gestures that normally signal first-order recognition” (honneth 2001, 121), that also, i will contend, give us an intimation of the category of prediscursive epistemic injury that i propose to introduce here. it is this specific moment of productive encounter between the work of honneth and fricker to which i now turn. 4. on recognizing embodied knowledge one promising result of a palimpsestic overlay of a theory of epistemic injustice by this feature of honneth’s recognition theory, i claim, is that it opens conceptual space for the identification and analysis of a third manifestation of epistemic injustice, termed here prediscursive epistemic injury. by applying honneth's (psychoanalytic/object-relations-inspired) analysis of the first (or primary) sphere of recognition in tandem with fricker’s concern with wrongful harms done to subjects’ capacities as knowers, we gain a refined, bi-focal theoretical lens through which to detect a distinct prediscursive form of epistemic injustice: arguably a form of injustice not fully legible in either theory on its own. following fricker’s method of elaborating her definitions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice via the introduction of “central cases,” i will defend this claim through offering a few cases that might serve as illustrative instances of prediscursive epistemic injury. case 1: ellison’s the invisible man—racial prejudice and prediscursive epistemic harm the first case of prediscursive epistemic injury i take from axel honneth’s essay on a phenomenon that he calls “social invisibility” (honneth, 2001). here honneth references ralph ellison’s novel invisible man and the musings of the novel’s black protagonist regarding the paradox that he is, at once, a man who incontrovertibly exists in physical space (and therefore can be “seen” by others), yet he is “not-seen.” a mote or flaw exists in the “construction of the ‘inner eye’ in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 those who look through him unrelentingly” (honneth 2001, 111); a stubborn blind spot in white vision into which he falls as a black man, which makes him “invisible.” as honneth observes, the black narrator is “perceived” as an object (hence he is cognized [erkannt]), but he is not socially seen as a subject (he is not “re-cognized” [anerkannt]. this demotion from a “subject” of relational knowledge to a mere “object” of instrumental knowledge resonates with the demeaning process fricker describes as “epistemic objectification,” in which the knower as “informant” ceases to be treated as an epistemic subject or agent and becomes instead a mere objectified “source of information” (see fricker 2007, 164).13 while honneth frames this as a case of (racist) misrecognition, what i want to argue here, however, is that it also represents a form of epistemic harm, albeit different in kind from the two forms elaborated by fricker. the epistemic harm in question is not one operating in either the register of testimonial or of hermeneutical injustice. instead, it is prediscursive and involves the communicative channels of affect transmission and embodied knowledge. reading this infliction of social invisibility as a case of prediscursive epistemic injury allows us to set it as a companion piece to fricker’s own central case of testimonial injustice—the trial of tom robinson in harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird. there, as we saw, fricker homes in on how identity prejudice generates the specific moral harm of the deflation of testimonial credibility of a black defendant arraigned before the judgement of an all-white jury who refuse to believe anything that a black man says. in the language of edmund craig’s epistemology, tom robinson is denied all status as a “trustworthy informant” (fricker 2007, 134).14 here, however, honneth’s focus is on the refusal of a different mode of communicative “uptake” of the black subject owing to racial prejudice. while it is not framed by honneth explicitly in terms of its harmful impact on the (invisiblized) subject in his capacity as a knower, i want to suggest that there may be compelling grounds for such an inference. this derives from the fact that while expressive, embodied, affective, and gestural communications do not carry the semantic information of propositional discourse, they most certainly do carry vital 13 if social invisibilization endured by racial and other minorities causes serious epistemic harm, it is also important to set this point alongside the seemingly paradoxical counter-claim that it can also be the basis of a variety of epistemic advantage which josé medina calls “meta-lucidity” (medina 2013, 186–188). 14 this testimonial injustice wrongs tom robinson in his dignity as a (rational) knower but also brings severe secondary harms in its wake (his wrongful conviction and ultimate death). on the various normative frameworks through which the nature(s) of the wrongs of testimonial injustice can be assessed (i.e., consequentialist, kantian, recognition theory, etc.) see congdon (2017). lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 information nevertheless. the black protagonist of ellison’s novel is (like tom robinson) denied uptake of his communications. but here we can register that this pertains to the broader spectrum of the nonverbal and embodied communications that an “invisible” man might use to signal his relational knowledge. this form of communication—much like verbal testimony—can then be subject to devastating deflation in the face of racist and identity-prejudiced interlocutors. the point to note here is that this kind of epistemic injury can be inflicted without a word being said. there is a form of epistemic injustice that does not play out in either the linguistic, propositional, or conceptual register, but yet is both epistemic and equally, profoundly unjust. we might think of the prediscursive epistemic harm done to the “invisible” man as the silent film version of the epistemic injustice that plays out in fricker’s central case of testimonial injustice. as it runs again, this time without words, we can see that there are, in fact, many channels in which the subject’s social knowledge and his status as social informant can be refused uptake—spoken testimony being only one of them (if a very significant one). a subject might be thus harmed in her capacity as a knower in this broader sense—without a single word being uttered. such prediscursive harms impact on the capacities of the knower that include the patterns of giving and receiving of expressive, embodied, and affective cues. these can be highly sophisticated and complex patterns of communications and response, without being either linguistic or propositional. as honneth describes it, “with this class of affirmative gestures and facial expressions we have to do with a special, almost automatically practised, form of the multiple expression with which [even] adults can signal to one another in a fluid manner that they are extending sympathy or paying attention. . . . it is, for example, ‘adult greeting rituals’ that make known, by way of a subtly nuanced game of changing facial expressions, the particular social relationship in which adults stand” (honneth 2001, 117). what a honnethean perspective can bring to fricker’s account is this sensitivity to the additional modes of deflation by which the uptake of the social communication can be refused: those that are unworded, affective, expressive, and communicated by the body. prediscursive epistemic harm therefore may be akin in certain respects to testimonial injustice, but its specific embodied form remains nevertheless nontestimonial. if the first case of prediscursive epistemic harm described above shares something of a structural similarity with testimonial injustice (yet is nevertheless nontestimonial in its form), in my second case i sketch out a case of prediscursive epistemic harm that shares something with hermeneutical injustice, but is nevertheless, for reasons i describe below, nonhermeneutical. this second case of prediscursive harm resembles cases of hermeneutical injustice in so far as it similarly pertains to a gap that interposes itself between a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 subject’s experience (that it is very much in her interest to grasp) and her ability to know this experience adequately. but just as the first case of prediscursive epistemic harm was not testimonial, despite sharing the feature of communicative deflation, so too this case of prediscursive injustice involves a gap of informational access, yet one that cannot be deemed hermeneutical. it is not hermeneutical because the gap involved is not, in fact, a conceptual one. it does not pertain to the distribution of hermeneutical resources, nor does it speak to lacunae in the social imaginary. rather this is a gap that is opened up by a harm done to the epistemic capacities of the knower to effectively process incoming information from the social and sensory world, as well as to read her own bodily signals. this failure can manifest as an informational shutdown or a sensorial flooding, as a hypervigilant overattentiveness to signals of threat in the environment, for example, or conversely, of an epistemic numbing. this kind of prediscursive injury is a harm to the knower at a basic level of informational processing, and it is also a moral injury in so far as it results from social injustice, but it is a nonhermeneutical. it is once again to the work of honneth that i turn to illustrate what this kind of epistemic injury looks like. case 2: extreme failures of first-order recognition and the dissociated knower that fricker’s conception of epistemic injustice should be so exclusively oriented towards speech acts and practices as its exclusive site is scarcely surprising, given its lineage in the analytic literature of testimony (of c. a. j. coady), and speech act theory (and its feminist innovators, langton and hornsby). but in honneth’s account, the intersubjective processes of recognition through which the practical relations to self are realized are from the outset conceived as by no means exclusively processes that occur in and through language. nor, for that matter, is the anthropology of recognition theory restricted to the view of the human knower as a “rational enquirer.” what the aspect of his theory directed to the first sphere of recognition instead recognizes is that the complex task of knowing each other as human beings demands more than is dreamt of by an epistemology restricted to propositional or discursive knowledge. in her essay “forms of knowing and epistemic resources,” alexis shotwell takes up something of this challenge to the generally accepted boundaries of epistemology (although she gets there via a very analytic debate around the knowhow/know-that distinction) when she asserts that “there are forms of understanding and knowledge that are not propositional,” and even goes on to make the forceful claim that “focusing on propositional knowledge as though it is the only form of knowing worth considering is itself a form of epistemic injustice” (shotwell 2017, 79). shotwell’s avowed interest in highlighting these nonpropositional ways of knowing is primarily to make the case that they can constitute alternative epistemic resources of resistance with which oppressed groups can counter something of the lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 dominant stronghold and monopoly that privileged groups in society may have on the hermeneutical resources (shotwell, 2017, 79). for her, these alternative epistemic resources involve “affect, implicit knowledge, and socially-situated embodiment” (86). this is a suggestive train of thought, but the argument i want to make here is not concerned with the status of this nonpropositional domain of knowledge as resource for resistance (although this is an important line to pursue). my purpose is rather to draw attention to how these nonpropositional, implicit, affective, gestural, and embodied ways of knowing can also be sites of injury: equally vulnerable to damage and wrongly induced compromise in function as are the epistemic capacities associated with knowers as speakers. as we return to honneth’s (winnicottian-inspired) vision of the primary sphere of recognition (as love and care), it might, at first glance, be tempting to dismiss what goes on in the exchanges between mothers and infants, for example, as having no place in the realm of “real” epistemology. but this conclusion, i think, is a mistake. it is a mistake, firstly, because while an infant is not yet a fully realized subject (uppercase s), there are nevertheless clearly emergent signs of agency, intention, and openness to learning from experience already present in the small proto-subject (lowercase s). now, while “s” may not know “that p,” and while it may be maternal empathy (with its curious feedback loops of projection, imagination, and recognition) that stands in place to receive much of the communication from the infant that can only be made sense of via empathic attunement, nevertheless these caregiver-infant communications do seem to warrant description as operating under special epistemological conditions. in defence of this claim that the caregiver-infant relation warrants the label of an epistemic space, let me briefly continue honneth’s own earlier “detour through infant research,” this time going by way of beebe and lachman’s careful microanalysis of interaction between mothers and their four-month-old infants, filmed in the research lab. there the authors describe how microanalysis reveals subtle, split-second events that are often not visible to the naked eye in real time. it is this “subterranean” level of communication that our research reveals. . . . these moment-to-moment processes are rapid, subtle, co-created by both mother and infant, and generally out of awareness. nevertheless they continue to influence how we act and feel, from infancy to adulthood. they profoundly effect moment-to-moment communication and the affective climate organizing different modes of relating. the films that we describe illustrate how strikingly different expectations are created, as these patterns repeat over time and form generalized action-sequence (procedural) memories. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 important, too, for the view that prediscursive knowledge can operate relatively autonomously from what “informants” can tell each other in speech, they clarify that we do not imply that as infants develop, these patterns are actually transmitted into a linguistic format. we assume that early infant experiences are encoded in a nonverbal, imagistic, acoustic, visceral, or temporal mode of information, and that they may not necessarily be translated into linguistic form. (beebe and lachmann 2014, 3–4: emphasis added). nor is it the case that these special epistemic conditions (perhaps constituting an epistemology of the infants?) actually come to an end with the period of infancy itself, but continue on into adult life as the accompanying undercurrent of the rest of our highly verbal epistemic lives.15 if we take the step of regarding nonpropositional and nonlinguistic forms of knowledge as also deserving of inclusion in the list of capacities a subject possesses as knower, then what might wrongful harm to these capacities look like? while honneth does not himself directly address issues of epistemic harm that might arise as a consequence of the failures of recognition (as love), there is fascinating new experimental research (itself a continuation of the winnicottian focus on early attachment relationships between infant and caregivers) which does just this, and which can tell us more about how epistemic neglect can manifest empirically. two psychoanalytic psychologists from university college london, peter fonagy and elizabeth allison, have shown how the nature of attachment style developed between infants and their caregivers has striking consequences for the development of epistemic trust and what honneth elsewhere describes as “a social form of openness to the world” (honneth 2001, 118). these researchers firstly classified several infant-caregiver pairs (by the method of the so-called “strange situation” test) into four standard attachment categories of “secure,” “avoidantinsecure,” “pre-occupied-insecure,” or “disorganized” and then examined how each of these attachment styles correlated with the patterns of epistemic trust (and mistrust) with which the infants viewed their caregivers and third parties (see 15 fricker, by implication, in fact does recognize something of the role played by nonpropositional, nonverbal, and affective knowledge. how else does the empathic teacher, who is described as sensing that her pupil is frightened of her, come by way of this knowledge (see fricker 2007, 79)? yet mention of this nonverbal way of knowing appears only in the context of fricker’s discussion of corrective testimonial sensibility. that such prediscursive capacities of the knower might also be subject to harm is the additional point i want to make here. lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 fonagy and allison 2014). given that these affective relational patterns often persist throughout the lifespan, this supports a strong genetic link between becoming an adequate knower and the affective embodiment involved in “first-order” recognition. if a category of “epistemic neglect” can be extrapolated from honneth’s first sphere of recognition as love (as congdon suggests), then another severe failure of “first-order” recognition can impact the knower at a somatic level of bodily knowledge. thus, bodily violation such as rape and torture can threaten to dismantle the integrity of the self as knower. 5. bodily violation as epistemic injury? in a recent essay, paul giladi (2018), a prescient early adopter of recognition theory as a relevant resource through which to enrich and enhance the theories of epistemic injustice, finds much that is useful in honneth’s account of basic selfconfidence achieved through primary recognition. giladi draws on this aspect of recognition-theoretic material to argue that the effects of traumatic disruption of basic self-confidence (of the sort that result from the horrors of rape or torture and other violations of the body) can be seen as analogous to the way that the “discursive abuse” and “violation of epistemic integrity” of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can similarly decimate the “basic confidence” of the knower. akin, then, to the traumatic loss of self-confidence and basic trust that can follow experiences of physical abuse, he posits that “epistemic abuse” wreaks analogous damage on the epistemic self-confidence of the subject as a rational enquirer (giladi 2018, 147). for my purposes here, however, i want to supplement this reading by analogy and suggest that there is another potential way to bring together the work of honneth and fricker on the question of instances of severe bodily violation, as in, for example, the case of rape. my argument here is that physical abuse might be not just analogous to epistemic abuse, but that physical abuse itself can have direct and severe negative epistemic consequences for the victim. in so far as these then subsequently harm her capacities to function well as a knower, they also qualify as epistemic harms. of course, a rapist’s violation of his victim’s integrity and agency is not directed explicitly at his victim’s capacity as a knower per se—except in so far as his intention manifests utter indifference to what she knows about her own desires: namely that she does not want this to be happening to her. but such violation can, i suggest, bring resultant epistemic harms that, as honneth suggests, can undo the foundational sense of an embodied self-confidence and not only shatter the epistemic trust and openness to the world and other people, but also undermine the subject’s epistemic trust in the signals of the body itself. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 the harms that may be done to the physically violated subject specifically as a knower might not be accessible at all if we take the figure of the knower to be synonymous with a rational enquirer. to accept such a claim requires countenancing modes in which embodied ways of knowing exceed or precede propositional, conceptual, and discursive knowledge, and indeed accepting that there may be modes of direct phenomenological apprehension of the world that do not involve rational enquiry at all. this is not in any way to underestimate the gravity of not being able to function fully as a rational enquirer, of course; rather, it is to suggest that to address only this kind of epistemic impact may be to underestimate the extent and depth of the loss of knowing function that is incurred by the violated body (as the subject of knowledge). this embodied form of epistemic harm, in other words, may shatter the capacity to function as a knower at levels of a different order than those which operate when she stands in the “space of reasons” as a rational enquirer, or functions as a giver of testimony, or accesses her culture’s semantic and hermeneutical resources. it is for this reason that i think that we need another phrase to describe it. if epistemic harms can be inscribed somatically, these violations may go to a deeper level than even those of testimonial or hermeneutical injustice. it seems to me that we miss something about the full extent of the epistemic harm that has been perpetrated against such a victim if we do not appreciate it is not only harmful on the semantic level , but also a compromise in bodily knowledge, or a compromise in embodied epistemic function. there is now, in fact, extensive research that suggests that when violation of bodily integrity is severe (to the degree that selfconfidence and basic trust are compromised), the brain literally changes under its impact of such experience, as does the central nervous system’s reactivity to cues of danger (even down to autonomic functions such as the so-called “startle response,” elevated cortisol levels, and other physiological symptoms of a body in a state of hypervigilant scanning of the environment). that there may be an analytical distinction to be drawn between the categories of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, on the one hand, and that of prediscursive epistemic harm, on the other, does not mean that in practice they don’t occur simultaneously or even as part of a conglomerate of interwoven harms. the devastating epistemic consequences of rape may in fact include all three. thus, a rape victim may find, all too commonly, that her attempt to reveal what has happened (whether in a legal or informal context) is met with disbelief or her credibility undermined: in short, she becomes a victim of testimonial injustice.16 in 16 as audrey yap argues, a rape victim can be subject to credibility deflation if she does not accord with the dominant cultural “script” of the “good rape victim,” as so too a perpetrator can be the beneficiary of a “hyperinflation” of testimonial lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 addition, a rape victim might potentially also be a victim of hermeneutical injustice: if, say, the legal and social norms of her society determine that the category of “marital rape” is an oxymoron, because the “hermeneutical resources” of the day define it as unthinkable that married women can be raped by their husbands. as katherine jenkins has recently argued, a rape victim might also be subject to hermeneutical injustice of a slightly different form when such a concept exists in her culture, but she nevertheless cannot access it.17 but the epistemic gap that i want to highlight here between experience and knowing is more akin to the clinical category of dissociation and results in the figure of what we might call the dissociated knower (whether this dissociation is produced by relational trauma such as the childhood neglect congdon mentions, or else by traumatic failures of basis recognition involved in experiences of bodily violation, as honneth discusses). this is not a gap between experience and hermeneutical resources. it is, rather, a gap that interposes between the subject and her apprehension of her own experience and that impacts at the “lower levels” of basic processing of information, operating in a different register than those of conceptual naming. such embodied epistemic disruption occurs, for example, in heightened startle reflexes, changes in such fundamental perceptual functions as pupil dilation, in malfunctioning habituation responses or hypervigilant states of autonomic arousal. all of these, i contend, might be understood to reflect an epistemic injury done to the subject in the wake of severe failures of “first-order” recognition. once we accept there is, in fact, a high degree of implicit bodily knowledge involved in the regulation and decoding of our encounters with others in the social world, then it also seems right to consider that a violent assault upon the material integrity of the body can be enough to produce such a distinctively embodied form of epistemic harm, damaging the subject in her particular capacity as a knower. if so, then the experience of rape might constitute a devastatingly dense and concentrated site of epistemic injustice, in so far as the three modes of testimonial, hermeneutic, and primary epistemic harm can all follow in its wake. as i have attempted to show with the two “central cases” of prediscursive epistemic injury (the first elaborated explicitly as a nontestimonial case, the second as nonhermeneutical), there may then be grounds to take seriously the body’s implicit sensorium as a practical knowledge system. this separate category of harm credibility and sympathy, if he does not fit the expected profile of what a rapist “should look like” and instead seems (is) a thoroughly normal guy (yap 2017). 17 jenkins contends that the internalization of “rape myths” can interfere with a victim’s ability to appropriately apply the label to her experience, “even though the relevant conceptual resources are available at some social locations” (jenkins 2017, 200). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 to this epistemic system—what i have here called prediscursive harm—can stand alongside those of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (which are measured by the metric of how they affect the knower as speaker, or the speaker’s voice). this new category, i have argued, can help capture the range of nondiscursive and nonpropositional forms of epistemic damage for which it is not the presence or absence of the spoken word, but rather the “body that keeps the score.”18 it is this elusive scorecard at the level of the phenomenology of the socially “invisiblized,” neglected, and/or violated body to which attention must be paid, if we are to grapple with the full reach of epistemic injustice right down into the “marrow of the bone” of its victims.19 setting honneth’s theorization of the “first order” of recognition in dialogue with the contributions of fricker, is, i have argued here, one effective route to discerning the presence of such an alternative category of epistemic injustice, so that it too can be given a name and tracked to its source. references beebe, beatrice, and frank m. lachmann. 2014. the origins of attachment: infant research and adult treatment. new york: routledge. coady, david. 2017. “epistemic injustice as distributive injustice.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 61–68. london: routledge. collins, patricia hill. 2017. “intersectionality and epistemic injustice.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 115–124. london: routledge. congdon, matthew. 2017. “what’s wrong with epistemic injustice? harm, vice, objectification, misrecognition.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 243–253. london: routledge. 18 this phrase comes from the work of trauma specialist bessel van der kolk (2014). 19 the striking term “hermeneutical death” is deployed by josé medina to describes those “marrow-of-the-bone cases, in which hermeneutical harms become so pervasive that they compromise one’s epistemic life and status as a meaning-making subject” (medina 2017, 47). while medina still figures this death primarily as the “loss of voice” (i.e., as speech-oriented), it is notable that in his metaphor the body pushes itself forward as a site of registration, as if it is the body itself that can be penetrated (to the marrow of the bone) by epistemic injustice. my thought here is that this is actually more than a metaphor. epistemic injustice might really penetrate the body and “score” it in deeply damaging ways. lobb – “prediscursive epistemic injury”: recognizing another form of epistemic injustice? published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 ehrenreich, barbara, 1978. for her own good: 150 years of the expert’s advice to women. london: pluto press. fonagy, peter, and elizabeth allison. 2014. “the role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship.” psychotherapy 51 (3): 372–380. fraser, nancy, and axel honneth. 2003. redistribution of recognition?: a politicalphilosophical exchange. london: verso. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2017. “evolving concepts of epistemic injustice.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 53–60. london: routledge. giladi, paul. 2018. “epistemic injustice: a role for recognition?” philosophy and social criticism. 4 (2): 141–158. honneth, axel. 1995. the struggle for recognition. translated by joel anderson. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 2001. “invisibility: on the epistemology of ‘recognition.’” aristotelian society supplementary volume 75 (1): 111–126. ———. 2012. “recognition as ideology.” in the i in the we: studies in the theory of recognition, translated by joseph ganahl. cambridge: polity. jenkins, katherine. 2017. “rape myths and domestic abuse myths as hermeneutical injustices.” journal of applied philosophy 34 (2): 191–205. medina, josé, 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2017. “varieties of hermeneutical injustice.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 41–52. london: routledge. oakley, ann. 1993. essays on women, medicine and health. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. reiger, kerreen. 2008. “domination or mutual recognition? professional subjectivity in the midwifery and obstetrics.” social theory & health 6 (2): 132–147. shotwell, alexis. 2017. “forms of knowing and epistemic resources.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr.,79–88. london: routledge. sinnerbrink, robert. 2011. “power, recognition, and care: honneth’s critique of poststructuralist social philosophy” in axel honneth: critical essays, edited by danielle petherbridge, 177–205. brill. solnit, rebecca. 2014. men explain things to me. chicago: haymarket books. van der kolk, bessel. 2014. the body keeps the score: mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. london: penguin. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 yap, audrey s. 2017. “credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault.” feminist philosophical quarterly 3 (4): 1–23. andrea lobb is currently pursuing a phd in gender, sexuality and diversity studies in the department of politics and philosophy at la trobe university, melbourne. her research interests include psychoanalysis, feminist theories of empathy, and the critique of power in social and political thought. her work has appeared in feminism & psychology, foucault studies, and constellations. “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 4 article 5 recommended citation clausen, ginger tate. “‘next time’ means ‘no’: sexual consent and the structure of refusals.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4). article 5. 2020 “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals ginger tate clausen university of tennessee, knoxville gclausen@utk.edu clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals1 ginger tate clausen abstract this paper emphasizes a need to recognize sexual refusals both in public discourse and in the context of particular interactions. i draw on sociolinguistic work on the structure of refusals to illuminate a much-discussed case of alleged sexual violence as well as to inform how we ought to think and talk about sexual consent and refusal more generally. i argue on empirical and ideological grounds that we ought to impute the same significance to refusals uttered in sexual contexts as we do to those uttered in nonsexual contexts. finally, i propose an amendment to the definition of affirmative consent that would put it in line with the conclusions drawn in the rest of the paper. keywords: sexual consent, refusal, #metoo, sexual violence, affirmative consent 1. introduction as has been widely observed, two popular slogans calling for an end to sexual violence—“‘no’ means ‘no’” and “‘yes’ means ‘yes’”—are helpful in some ways but misleading in others (see harris 2018). the older “‘no’ means ‘no’” slogan emphasizes that if someone refuses sex, that is the end of the matter—to press forward despite a refusal would be sexual assault. in the mid-2000s, however, some feminists advocated for a change in sloganeering to reflect the necessity of affirmative consent (see friedman and valenti 2008). these feminists observed that sexual consent requires more than the absence of a refusal. in addition, it requires a “knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity.”2 thus, “‘no’ means ‘no’” was deemed inadequate because mere lack of a 1 i want to thank nora berenstain and connie rosati for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. i am also grateful for the insightful and constructive reports of two anonymous reviewers for feminist philosophy quarterly. finally, i would like to thank victor kumar for inviting me to present some of these arguments to the mind and morality lab at boston university, and the audience of that talk for an inspiring and fruitful discussion. 2 this verbiage is pulled from the suny (2020) definition of affirmative consent. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 refusal does not entail a voluntary decision, and “‘yes’ means ‘yes’” was proposed as a replacement.3 however, as “‘no’ means ‘no’” misfires for seeming to imply that lack of a “no” establishes consent, “‘yes’ means ‘yes’” misfires for seeming to imply that agreement entails consent. contrary to what the slogan suggests, a “yes” does not entail consent, because agreements can be coerced. consider the notorious highwayman’s phrase, “your money or your life.”4 if you hand over your wallet, you have not done so consensually and would be entitled to have it returned to you. likewise, if somebody says, “i’ll grope you or i’ll kill you,” and you enthusiastically choose the former option, what follows is still a sexual assault. of course, a slogan may sacrifice accuracy for pithiness, and while “‘yes’ means ‘yes’” does not preclude coercion, the definitions of affirmative consent that the slogan advertises do insist that agreements to have sex be voluntary. compliance in response to an armed threat is clearly nonvoluntary. likewise, even in the absence of a direct threat, compliance does not entail consent in cases where the power imbalances are so severe as to render voluntary agreement impossible.5 controversies arise, however, over attempts to determine whether compliance is voluntary in cases where a person who is in principle capable of consenting to sex in a situation only acquiesces after repeated and insistent pressure from another party. a paradigm example of such a case was described in a 2018 babe.net article reporting an account given by a woman using the pseudonym “grace” about an evening spent with the comedian aziz ansari, which she described as “the worst experience with a man [she] ever had” (way 2018). in short, grace alleged that ansari quickly initiated physical contact upon their return to his apartment after a date and didn’t let up even when she communicated both verbally and nonverbally that she would like things to slow down. by the time grace left the apartment, they had engaged in oral-genital contact. however, grace alleged that she was “not listened to and ignored” throughout her time there, and that “the last hour [during which she allegedly performed oral sex on ansari] was so out of [her] hand [sic]” (way 2018). ansari, however, in a statement released after the publication of the article, claimed that the encounter was “by all indications, completely consensual” (guglielmi and petit 2018). the alleged encounter (henceforth, “the ansari case”) quickly became a flashpoint in discussion of the #metoo movement and has since been referenced in 3 somebody who is asleep or severely intoxicated, for example, may not vocally refuse contact, but neither are they capable of rendering consent. 4 gorr (1986, 385) refers to this well-known line as a paradigm case of coercion. 5 such as, for example, cases involving prison guards and inmates, police officers and those they have detained, human traffickers and trafficked persons, and many others. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 a number of legal and philosophical works on sexual consent. many subsequent purportedly feminist analyses of the case fall into one of two camps, which i will term the antifragility camp and the situational-coercion camp. the antifragility camp argues that characterizing women who don’t assertively refuse unwanted sex as victims of sexual misconduct disempowers and infantilizes women. they claim that because grace acquiesced to ansari’s advances, calling the case an instance of sexual violence implies that adult women are not sufficiently autonomous to refuse unwanted sex. further, they claim, implicitly classifying this kind of case along with cases where power imbalances really do undermine the possibility of consent is damaging to the project of combatting “actual” sexual violence, since the false equivalence gives the opposition a brush with which to paint the entire movement as an absurd overcorrection that makes victims out of women who had easy outs and rapists out of men who aren’t hypervigilantly cautious in how they initiate sex (weiss 2018; brawley 2018).6 the situational-coercion camp imbues greater significance to how sexist ideologies constrain the moves it is possible, reasonable, or comfortable to make in the course of a given interaction.7 for example, in “what is a sexist ideology? or: why grace didn’t leave,” hilkje charlotte hänel (2018) argues that sexist ideology structures sexual negotiations between men and women in ways that make women vulnerable to sexual violence even from men who do not intend to violate their boundaries, and even in situations that they could theoretically disengage from. on hänel’s analysis, the resources ansari possessed that night—that is, “[his] physical strength (even if he makes no use of it), the location of his apartment, his persistence, the distinct gender roles of ansari and grace, and so on”—along with sexist schemas, such as the idea that women are givers and men are takers (2018, 906; citing manne 2018, 22), that men are sexually dominant while women are sexually submissive (2018, 906; citing mackinnon 1987, 1989), and the rape myth that men are sexually entitled to women’s bodies (2018, 906), help to explain both 6 see also worthington (2020) for an analysis of the top comments on weiss (2018), indicating that the majority wrote in support of what i am calling the antifragility line of argument. 7 the concept “situational coercion” was developed in kim (2011) in order to explicate the abusive power dynamics that characterize many human trafficking cases. specifically, kim develops the concept in order to explain what causes trafficked workers to comply with abusive working conditions absent explicit threats of violence or deportation. an employer is culpable of situational coercion if they deliberately take advantage of the employee’s vulnerabilities in a situation where they hold considerable power over the employee, even in cases where they do not directly threaten to make the employee worse off if they don’t comply. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 why grace felt “unable to resist” ansari’s advances (2018, 899) and why ansari “did not pick up on [grace’s] verbal and non-verbal clues of discomfort” (2018, 901). thus, on hänel’s account, sexist ideology leads to scenarios where women who could in theory have removed themselves from a situation may be less free to do so than may have initially appeared to be the case. the situational-coercion camp agrees with the antifragility camp that adults of different genders are in principle capable of consensual sex but insists that in some situations, sexist ideologies enable men to be sexually violent to women even in the absence of intentional coercion or direct use of force (hänel 2018; filipovic 2018). a major point of disagreement between the camps is thus whether and to what degree situational power differentials like those present in the ansari case should be viewed as meaningful constraints to women’s autonomy.8 in what follows i take on board the point that sexist and other ideologies influence sexual negotiations and behaviors in ways that tend to favor the interests of those whose continued power the ideologies support. but accepting this point leaves open how best to theorize the interplay of ideologies, sexual violence, and sexual consent in cases where power imbalances are significant but not so extreme as to vitiate the very possibility of consent. and, in my view, neither the situationalcoercion camp nor the antifragility camp accurately characterizes the interplay of these factors in the ansari case. the situational-coercion camp maintains that the encounter was sexually violent not because it was nonconsensual but because ansari’s situational power exerted a coercive influence on grace’s behavior. i argue instead that the alleged encounter was violent simply because it was nonconsensual, and it was nonconsensual because grace repeatedly refused ansari’s advances and ansari did not heed those refusals.9 my argument proceeds as follows. section 2 examines more closely the relationship between situational power imbalances and sexual violence in cases where consent is at least in principle possible. i conclude that situational power imbalances are not germane to understanding the fundamental violation alleged in 8 see ferzan (2018) for a useful discussion of how possible ambiguities in the concept of coercion may have led to commentators on the ansari case talking past one another. 9 my analysis thus compliments the one advanced by price (2018), who describes having undergone a days-long period of unrelenting sexual pressure from a man and maintains that “every time he pushed, and re-asked a question that had already been answered, and begged, and complained, he was committing an assault. he just hadn’t gotten to the gratifying part of the assault yet.” price characterizes ansari’s alleged behavior as assault in virtue of its fitting this same pattern of a persistent failure to respect another person’s explicit refusals. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 the ansari case, which comes down to the fact that grace persistently refused ansari’s advances and ansari did not heed those refusals. section 3 further supports this view by examining the dialogue reported in the babe.net article in light of empirical data on the linguistic structure of refusals and demonstrating that grace’s alleged refusals fit linguistically normal patters. section 4 considers arguments that the prevalence of certain sexist ideologies complicates a straightforward inference from a speech pattern’s constituting a refusal in a nonsexual context to that same speech pattern’s constituting a refusal in a sexual context. i argue that there are empirical as well as ideological grounds to favor a model according to which refusals uttered in sexual contexts are akin to those uttered in nonsexual contexts. finally, in section 5, i propose an amendment to the definition of affirmative consent that would put it in line with the conclusions drawn in the rest of the paper. 2. situational power and the possibility of consent in order to assess the relationship between situational coercion and sexual violence in the ansari case, it will be useful to compare it to a relevantly but not exactly similar case. in an infamous episode of it’s always sunny in philadelphia, “dennis” makes the case to “mac” that women are more likely to say yes to sex when propositioned on a boat “because of the implication” that they might be thrown overboard if they refuse (einhorn 2010). dennis: think about it. she’s out in the middle of nowhere with some dude she barely knows. she looks around her, what does she see? nothing but open ocean. “oh, there’s nowhere for me to run, what am i gonna do, say no?” mac: okay . . . that seems really dark though. dennis: no, no, it’s not dark. you’re misunderstanding me, bro. mac: i think i am. dennis: yeah, you are. ‘cause if the girl said no, then the answer obviously is no. the thing is that she’s not gonna say no, she’d never say no . . . because of the implication. mac: now, you said that word “implication” a couple of times. what implication? dennis: the implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to sleep with me. now, not that things are gonna go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will. dennis’s lines in this scene demonstrate that he is aware of the kinds of implicitly threatening power imbalances to which feminist theorists of sexual violence call our feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 attention.10 indeed, his analysis of the scenario of propositioning a woman for sex on a boat is structurally similar to hänel’s analysis of the features of sexist ideology at play in the ansari case. hänel posited that ansari derived a threatening form of structural power from his physical strength, from their location in his apartment, and from the distinct gender roles of ansari and grace. likewise, dennis observes that the mere fact of being stranded on a boat with a man, given the background awareness that men can be prone to violence when their sexual demands are not met, would incline a woman to acquiesce to sex out of fear. of course, dennis doesn’t stop at merely observing the possibility of situational coercion. instead, he states an intention to leverage the coercive features of the situation in order to secure a woman’s agreement to sex. a few key differences between the scenario dennis describes (henceforth, “the dennis case”) and the ansari case help to clarify debates about the relationship between situational coercion and sexual violence. for one, dennis explicitly intends to leverage the power imbalances present in his situation in order to get what he wants, whereas we can’t presume to know whether ansari consciously or intentionally leveraged any power imbalances, or whether he was even aware of the features of the situation that may have registered as coercive to grace.11 the question of intent is not just legally but morally relevant: dennis’s intent to leverage a coercive situation is condemnably predatory. but this assessment of his intentions does not directly entail anything about the status of any particular sex act he might engage in. to understand the ways in which character assessments, power differentials, and assessments of particular encounters can come apart, consider four possible versions of the dennis case. version 1 (leveraging present and necessary): dennis recognizes that janet might reasonably fear murder at sea if she refuses sex on a boat, and he consciously leverages this in order to make it more likely that she will agree to sex if propositioned. (that is, he deliberately chooses to initiate sex while they’re out on open water, rather than while they’re docked, for this specific reason.) dennis initiates sex while at sea, and janet reciprocates his advances, despite not actually wanting to. she only reciprocates out of fear she will be murdered if she refuses. had he initiated sex while they were docked, she would have refused and left the boat. 10 see gavey’s (2019, 129–135) discussion of the pressures that can be generated by discourses on the “insistent” male sex drive. 11 see hänel’s (2018, 913–914) argument that sexist ideology tends to “mask” the true nature of sexually violent encounters from both parties and that this could explain why ansari may have been sexually violent without realizing it. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 version 2 (leveraging present but not necessary): dennis recognizes that janet might reasonably fear murder at sea if she refuses sex on a boat, and he consciously leverages this in order to make it more likely that she will agree to sex if propositioned. (that is, he deliberately chooses to initiate sex while they’re out on open water, rather than while they’re docked, for this specific reason.) dennis initiates sex while at sea, and janet happily reciprocates his advances. she had already intended to have sex with dennis and was very excited to do so. she would have had sex with him that day no matter where or when he initiated. version 3 (situational coercion but no leveraging): dennis has not given any thought to whether being propositioned for sex at sea could be a fearsome prospect to janet. he had thought he would likely initiate sex at some point that day but put no prior thought into when and where it might happen. but he finds it romantic on the open water, so he initiates sex there. janet reciprocates his advances, despite not actually wanting to. she only reciprocates out of fear she will be murdered if she refuses. had he initiated sex while they were docked, she would have refused, and left the boat. version 4 (situational coercion inefficacious): dennis has not given any thought to whether being propositioned for sex at sea could be a fearsome prospect to janet. he had thought he would likely initiate sex at some point that day but put no prior thought into when and where it might happen. but he finds it romantic on the open water, so he initiates sex there. janet happily reciprocates his advances. she had already intended to have sex with dennis and was very excited to do so. she would have had sex with him that day no matter where or when he initiated. which, if any, of these versions of the dennis case describe sexual assault? we want more information before answering, such as descriptions of the manner in which dennis initiated sexual contact and the character of janet’s verbal and bodily response to dennis’s initiation. for the sake of isolating questions about the relevance of situational power imbalances, then, let us stipulate that dennis and janet’s observable behavior is identical in all four versions of the case: dennis doesn’t overtly pressure janet, and janet immediately and seemingly enthusiastically reciprocates his advances.12 12of course, the versions of the case where janet only had sex out of fear would not likely play out this way. if somebody is having sex only out of fear, they are likely to respond differently than if they had engaged out of enthusiastic desire. thus, some feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 with this stipulation in place we can observe without much controversy that version 4 describes a consensual encounter.13 but what of the other three, which are behaviorally equivalent? members of the antifragility camp would likely insist that all four scenarios are straightforwardly consensual. because dennis did not actively threaten jane, and because the situation is not so coercive as to undermine the very possibility of consent, jane’s fears of “the implication” do not nullify her behavioral demonstrations of consent.14 and dennis’s intentions in the first two scenarios, however predatory, do not automatically render the sex he initiated nonconsensual. this position is not unreasonable. however, antifragility feminists often go on to add claims such as “jane should have adamantly refused the unwanted sex,” or “calling any of the first three cases sexual violence is harmful to all, because it classes what any reasonable party could easily have mistaken for a might argue that the dennis in the third version of the case ought to have recognized that his janet was unenthusiastic and ceased the sexual contact. however, enthusiasm can be faked. janet may find herself suddenly so terrified of dennis that she worries about how he might respond to even so much as hesitancy on her part. she may worry that even a minor blow to his ego could be disastrous for her, and thus intentionally perform enthusiasm and happiness until the point where she can safely escape. 13 kukla (2018) argues that sexual-ethics discourse has suffered from its singleminded focus on the concepts of consent and refusal. she maintains that consent is not sufficient for ethical sex, and that ethical sexual negotiation incorporates speech acts additional to those which grant and refuse consent—in addition, for example, sexual negotiation can be used to establish desires, make sexual offers, set limits, and establish exit conditions for sexual activity. as such, sexual negotiation is a fundamental tool of sexual autonomy: it enables a kind of agency and fulfillment that we can only fully theorize when we take into account the totality of its functions. i wholeheartedly agree that consent is not sufficient for ethical sex and that other important norms of sexual discourse and activity are woefully undertheorized. however, i hope to make the modest case in this essay that there is more to understand about the nature of sexual refusal than has been widely accepted, with the hope that the arguments here will support the baseline project of ending sexual violence even if they don’t speak to the equally important project of theorizing the conditions under which sex is ethical and fulfilling rather than merely consensual. see also gavey (2019, 129–131) for a compelling argument that ethical sex requires more than consent. 14 some situations involve power imbalances so significant as to vitiate the possibility of sexual consent, and in those cases the inference from behavioral demonstrations of consent to actual consent fails (see footnote 5 for examples). clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 consensual encounter as an instance of sexual violence, which leads to unfairly castigating innocent men as rapists and offensively characterizing merely unassertive women as victims.”15 neither of these addendums follows, however, even on the assumption that all four acts are consensual. the first depends on insisting that jane should have fully trusted that there would be no violent consequences to her refusal, and, as even dennis understands, that is not the world we live in. the second is a thesis about the harm of making certain statements about instances of consensual but unwanted sex, and, in order to assess its truth, we need to consider more than the status of the act vis a vis consent. for example, we need to examine the relationship between sexual consent and sexual violence with an eye to the possibility that an encounter may be consensual and yet violent. thus, members of the situational-coercion camp could take on board the claim that all four acts are consensual but argue that at least some versions of the dennis case are nonetheless sexually violent. the ansari case, however, is violent for a different reason, as we can see by slightly reimagining the dennis case. recall that we stipulated that dennis does not pressure janet in any of the four versions of the dennis case, and that janet does not resist dennis’s advances, even in the versions where she only reciprocates out of fear. but let us remove that stipulation and imagine a variation of the case in which janet does not immediately and enthusiastically reciprocate dennis’s advances. instead, she politely declines by saying something like, “i like you, but i prefer to take things slow. maybe next time. for now, let’s just enjoy the boat ride.” she is afraid to upset him without the possibility of an easy escape but nevertheless expresses her disinterest in case she is wrong to fear what he might do. now suppose that, rather than leave her alone after these remarks, dennis reinitiates his advances by following her around the boat, kissing and groping her, and continually requesting that she perform oral sex on him despite her repeated attempts at deescalation. suppose too that this behavior makes dennis and the situation even more menacing to her, and so after about an hour she acquiesces to oral sex. 15 see weiss’s (2018) remarks that “if he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door,” and that “the insidious attempt by some women to criminalize awkward, gross and entitled sex takes women back to the days of smelling salts and fainting couches.” and brawley’s (2018) statement that “we cannot indiscriminately start destroying careers over consensual sexual activity, which based on her account is what this case appears to be. when we do that, we trivialize the brave victims who are coming forward about actual sex crimes.” see also many of the comments cited in worthington (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 dennis’s behavior in this version of the case is akin to how grace alleged ansari behaved in his apartment. thus, we can assume that the antifragility camp would claim that no sexual violence occurred in this scenario, while the situationalcoercion camp would maintain that sexual violence did occur. however, the situational-coercion camp’s analysis of the nature of that violence does not adequately account for the profound distinction between scenarios in which janet unhesitatingly reciprocates dennis’s advances and those in which she explicitly refuses them.16 my own view is that the ideologically generated power imbalances present in these scenarios are fruitful theoretical subjects in their own right but are red herrings vis a vis the nature of the violence that transpired in the ansari case. i maintain that the alleged encounter was violent simply because it was nonconsensual, and it was nonconsensual simply because ansari did not heed grace’s refusals. thus, my analysis subtly but meaningfully differs from hänel’s— whereas hänel (2018, 902) argues that the power differentials in such cases make the less powerful “[feel] unable to refuse” the advances of those to whom ideologies encourage us to cater, i argue that grace did indeed repeatedly refuse ansari’s advances, and in order to combat sexist ideology and empower those most victimized by it, we must insist that such refusals be recognized both in public discourse and in the context of particular sexual negotiations. i further this analysis in the next section by examining the dialogue reported in the babe.net article in light of empirical data on the linguistic structure of refusals. 3. the ansari case and the structure of refusals in their article “just say no? the use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal,” psychologist celia kitzinger and social scientist hannah frith (1999) offer a sociolinguistic analysis of refusals generally in order to provide background context for analyzing sexual refusals specifically. they observe that “both men and women have a sophisticated ability to convey and to comprehend refusals, including refusals which do not include the word ‘no,’” and conclude that “male claims not to have ‘understood’ refusals which conform to culturally normative patterns can only be heard as self-interested justifications for coercive behavior” (kitzinger and frith 1999, 295). in support of these claims, they cite numerous studies analyzing the structure of nonsexual refusals in everyday conversation, establishing that acceptances of invitations (offers, proposals, etc.) usually do involve “just saying yes,” and doing so without hesitation. refusals of invitations, however, generally do not involve “just saying no,” and typically involve hedging or hesitation of some kind 16 as i clarify in footnotes 5 and 14, this distinction is only significant in scenarios where consent is in principle possible. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 (1999, 300–301). as such, refusals tend to incorporate some of the following features: (i) delays, e.g. pauses and hesitations . . . ; (ii) prefaces (also referred to as ‘hedges’) e.g. use of markers like ‘uh’ or ‘well’ . . . ; (iii) palliatives, e.g. appreciations, apologies, token agreements etc. which serve to alleviate the pain caused by the refusal; compliments such as ‘it’d be great’ or ‘that’s awfully sweet of you’ are both examples of palliatives. other possible palliatives would include accompanying a refusal with a delayed acceptance (‘not today, but tomorrow’) [emphasis mine] . . . ; and/or (iv) accounts, i.e. explanations/justifications/excuses for why the invitation is not being accepted such as a prior engagement or commitment. (301) the fact that refusals are typically indirect might lead one to wonder whether refusals are generally less likely to receive uptake than acceptances. there is strong evidence, however, that refusals do receive uptake in nonsexual contexts, even when they are hesitant and hedged—that is, they receive uptake when they are structured in the manner typical to refusals. indeed, even so-called “weak acceptances” (such as a half-hearted “yeah” given after a pause) can successfully communicate refusals. thus, kitzinger and frith conclude that “[because] young women are communicating [in sexual contexts] in ways which are usually understood to mean refusal in other contexts . . . it is not the adequacy of their communication that should be questioned, but rather their male partners’ claims not to understand that these women are refusing sex. . . . [these men] are claiming not to understand perfectly normal conversational interaction, and to be ignorant of the ways of expressing refusal which they themselves routinely use in other areas of their lives” (1999, 309–310). the studies cited in kitzinger and frith (1999) help to substantiate grace’s own analysis of what transpired that night. grace’s considered view at the time of the babe.net interview was that ansari had sexually assaulted her and that she was “not listened to and ignored.” thus, her own assessment of the encounter runs counter not only to the analysis put forward by the antifragility camp but also to the analysis offered by the situational-coercion camp.17 my own analysis concurs with 17 filipovic’s (2018) discussion of the ansari case, for example, posits that “women are so strongly socialized to put others’ comfort ahead of our own that even when we are furiously uncomfortable, it feels paralyzing to assert ourselves.” this may be feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 grace’s assessment. as i will argue, grace’s alleged refusals fit linguistically normal patterns. thus, ansari’s alleged physical contact following those refusals violated her explicitly stated boundaries, and his claim afterward that the encounter was “by all indications completely consensual” was false, however sincerely he may have believed it. the dialogue reported in the babe.net article indicates that grace verbally refused sexual contact at least four times.18 first, she said, “whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill” when ansari reached for a condom shortly after they began kissing. and, while ansari did cease in that moment from attempting to initiate penetrative sex, he continued to kiss her and go down on her without pause, and then asked her to reciprocate, which she briefly did (way 2018). i would argue that this first refusal should be understood as a call to pause all sexual contact, not simply as a refusal of penetrative sex. note that she doesn’t say, “let’s just keep kissing for a while,” or “let’s just do other stuff for now.” she says, “let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.” people say that sort of thing when they want to step back and get their bearings, not when they want to continue—let alone escalate—whatever is currently happening. the second refusal came shortly after, when she replied, “next time,” when he asked where she wanted to have (penetrative) sex. he said, “oh, you mean the second date?” she replied, “oh, yeah, sure,” and he said, “well, if i poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?” and poured out a glass and handed it to her (way 2018). grace’s “next time” exemplifies the palliative mode of expressing refusal with a delayed acceptance. and the joke ansari allegedly made afterward communicated that he did not take this refusal seriously and would continue to pressure her for sex despite having understood that she’d verbally refused it. shortly after this exchange, grace excused herself to go to the bathroom and stayed there a while to collect herself. when she emerged, ansari asked if she was okay. she replied: “i don’t want to feel forced because then i’ll hate you, and i’d rather not hate you” (way 2018). this third refusal fits the model of a refusal accompanied by a justification/excuse for why the invitation is not being accepted. ansari’s reply was, “oh, of course, it’s only fun if we’re both having fun,” and he suggested they chill on the couch. they moved to that area; ansari sat on the couch and grace sat on the floor next to him. he then told her to turn around. when she did, as she told babe.net, “he sat back and pointed to his penis and motioned for me true, but, as i will argue, it is important to emphasize that grace asserted herself quite clearly. 18 i focus on grace’s alleged verbal refusals, but her alleged nonverbal refusals also bear mentioning—e.g., moving away from him, going cold, removing her hand from his genitalia after he placed it there, etc. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 to go down on him. and i did. i think i just felt really pressured. it was literally the most unexpected thing i thought would happen at that moment because i told him i was uncomfortable.” he then pulled her up on the couch, kissed her again, and said, “it doesn’t look like you hate me” (way 2018). the fourth refusal was an explicit “no”; when he led her to a nearby mirror and attempted to initiate penetrative sex. after she refused this, he suggested they return to the couch, and put on an episode of seinfeld. he allegedly began kissing her again and attempted to undo her pants. she turned away and said, “you guys are all the same.” he asked, “what do you mean?” but when she turned to him to answer he began kissing her again. at that point, she got up, went to her phone, and said she would call herself a car. he kissed her again, and she pulled away. he then said he would call her a car, which he did. on the way home, grace said it hit her just how violated she felt by the encounter. as she put it, “that last hour was so out of my hand [sic]” (way 2018). it might be argued—indeed, it has been posited by some media discussions of the incident—that while grace did not consent to penetrative sex, she did consent to oral sex (see reed and fritts 2018). after all, her first two verbal refusals were offered while ansari was attempting to escalate from kissing/groping to penetrative sex. however, i would argue that kissing and oral sex were also within the scope of these refusals. as suggested earlier, grace’s saying “let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill” scans as a request to deescalate the encounter, not to continue it. recall also ansari’s own alleged words later in the evening after grace had told him that she did not want to feel forced, because then she might hate him. shortly after she said that, he requested that she go down on him, which she did. afterward, he said, “doesn’t look like you hate me,” which implies that he understood oral sex to be within the scope of actions that grace didn’t want to feel forced into, and thus, within the scope of what she was refusing. once we understand that refusals are typically expressed indirectly, we can see that ansari’s alleged actions that night violate the “‘no’ means ‘no’” model of consent. if somebody refuses sexual contact and you persist in touching and groping them, you have violated their explicit sexual boundaries—that is, you have sexually assaulted them. some argued that grace ought not to have engaged in oral sex if she didn’t want to, and since ansari didn’t directly threaten her in any way, her performance of oral sex entailed that she consented to it (reed and fritts 2018; weiss 2018; brawley 2018). however, the inference from compliance to consent is weakened once we recognize that grace’s sexual boundaries were violated from the moment her first refusal was unheeded. because that violation transpired within moments of their arrival at his apartment, and was soon followed by others, she was in a position of both being continually subject to unwanted advances and having to contend with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 repeated sexual violation for most of her time there. thus, it should not surprise us that she felt “stunned and shocked,” and didn’t act in the way her desires would perhaps have inclined her to act had she not been repeatedly assaulted—that is, why she didn’t leave, and instead complied with his requests for oral sex (see price 2018). while the question of why she complied has important implications for how we ought to understand and empathetically respond to the behaviors of victims of sexual violence in a rape culture, it is not crucial to assessing the question whether grace was sexually assaulted. and i have argued that, if the encounter transpired as alleged, the answer to that question is straightforwardly yes. 4. two models of sexual refusals i have argued that grace repeatedly refused sexual contact in the ansari case, and ansari did not heed those refusals. in my view, this is the fundamental violation that occurred in that case, and its nature can be understood without reference to the power imbalances generated by sexist ideologies. indeed, the encounter would have been equally violating if grace had ignored ansari’s refusals in a similar manner.19 those who emphasize the relationship between sexual violence and sexist ideology might agree with me on that point but maintain that sexist ideologies explain why grace’s refusal was ignored. i would not disagree. indeed, sexist ideologies would likely also factor into explanations of why women sometimes ignore men’s sexual refusals.20 however, some theorists maintain that refusals are not just ignored as a consequence of sexist ideology but are actually unutterable. rae langton (1993), for instance, argues that certain kinds of pornography, when sufficiently pervasive and authoritative, might render it impossible for women to refuse sex in certain contexts despite their sincere attempts to do so.21 19 gavey (2019, 181–201) questions the view that the nature of a sexual violation can be held fixed if the genders are reversed. however, her argument depends on the view that situational power differences are essential to acts of rape. i have argued that while these power imbalances may explain gendered differences in typical behavior surrounding sexual boundary violations, sexual boundary violations are instances of sexual assault regardless of the genders of the perpetrator and victim. 20 for example, the schema that men are always urgently sexually aroused, which is an aspect of the rape myth that women have an obligation to cater to men’s insistent sexual arousal, might lead a woman to believe that a man’s sincere refusals can’t possibly be genuine. 21 see also hornsby and langton (1998) and mikkola (2011) for further development and defense of this position. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 langton supports this view by noting that pornography is often legally defended as a form of speech and analyzing the possible functions pornography might perform as speech. as j. l. austin observed, utterances of speech are used not only to convey information but to perform actions. for example, saying “i name this boat drusilla” while smashing a bottle of champagne on its bow is an act of naming. more nefariously, utterances can function as acts of subordination and silencing. for example, if a legislator with the necessary power utters, “women are no longer allowed to vote,” then that speech subordinates women. langton argues that it is at least possible that pornography is speech that subordinates women, insofar as it depicts women as being sexually available at the will of men and is sufficiently authoritative in the domain of sexuality that men internalize this conception of women’s sexual availability and take it as normative in their sexual encounters (1993, 300–314). in addition to subordinating women, langton argues, pornography might also silence them by effecting the illocutionary disablement of their sexual refusals. illocutionary disablement occurs when a person intends their utterance to be a certain kind of act, but something about the situational context or their authority within that context blocks the intended act from occurring. for example, if a wouldbe groom says “i do” at a wedding ceremony, but unbeknownst to him, the person conducting the ceremony is not an ordained minister, the utterance does not count as an act of marrying. or if an actor intends to warn of a real fire just offstage, but there is a fake fire onstage visible to the audience, the actor’s utterance may fail to count as a warning (1993, 315–317). langton suggests that pornography might illocutionarily disable women’s attempts at sexual refusals, and that this phenomenon could explain why sexual assault is so widespread. as in the case of the actor’s attempt to warn of the fire, a woman might intend to refuse by explicitly saying no to sex, but widespread social exposure to pornography might render her refusal unsuccessful. langton argues: pornography might legitimate rape, and thus silence refusal, by simply leav[ing] no space for the refusal move in its depictions of sex. in pornography of this kind there would be all kinds of locutions the women depicted could use to make the consent move. "yes" is one such locution. "no" is just another. here the refusal move is not itself eroticized as in the pornography considered earlier: it is absent altogether. consent is the only thing a woman can do with her words in this game. someone learning the rules of the game from this kind of pornography might not even recognize an attempted refusal. "coming from her, i took it as consent," he might say. refusal would be made unspeakable for a woman in that context. (324) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 thus, langton suggests that pornography might be so authoritative as to alter the conversational norms in sexual contexts so that a woman’s “no” can’t actually mean “no,” even when she intends it to. call this the failed-refusal model. kitzinger and frith’s (1999) analysis of refusals suggests an alternative, which we might call the unheeded-refusal model. on the unheeded-refusal model, sexual assault after a refusal is best explained by the fact that the refusal has not been heeded, even though it is structurally similar to refusals that would easily be understood as such in other contexts. the question why a particular refusal was not heeded would need to be assessed with attention to the particular details of the case, and sexist ideologies will likely factor into explanations of cases where men and women fail to heed one another’s refusals.22 each of these models, then, has the resources to explain what happens when men don’t heed women’s attempted refusals in sexual contexts.23 indeed, the failed-refusal model could also explain what transpired in the ansari case. perhaps ansari’s exposure to pornography, or his immersion in sexist ideology, positioned grace’s attempted refusals to misfire. someone who supports the failed-refusal model could argue that, while grace’s attempted refusals would have successfully registered as refusals in nonsexual contexts, in the sexual context they were illocutionarily disabled. someone in ansari’s position, on this model, may have genuinely been incapable of registering them as the refusals that they were intended to be. 22 thus, accounts of sexist ideologies such as those advanced in hänel (2018) and in gavey (2019) could work in tandem with the unheeded-refusal model to explain cases where women’s refusals are unheeded by men. 23 a third model, which this paper won’t delve into, we might call the token-refusal model. the token-refusal model is elaborated in husak and thomas (1992). citing a study muehlenhard and hollabaugh (1988) that finds that 39 percent of texas female college undergrads reported that they had said no in situations where they actually wanted sex, husak and thomas (1992) argue that men might reasonably interpret a “no” as a “yes” in sexual contexts insofar as it is conventional for women to utter token refusals. muehlenhard and rodgers (1998), however, conclude that the use of token refusals is not widespread, and cast doubt on the prevalence data reported in previous studies. i would imagine the deployment of token refusals has only decreased in frequency since 1998, and, in any case, agree with husak and thomas (1992, 124) that it is for the best if convention mandates an affirmative duty to ensure that consent has been freely and sincerely given. indeed, this paper attempts to further the establishment of such a convention. clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 i have argued that the reported evidence suggests that ansari did indeed understand grace’s refusals as refusals.24 however, not all cases of sexual assault contain verbal evidence that the perpetrator understood that the victim had intended to refuse. nonetheless, follow-up studies to kitzinger and frith’s (1999) analysis have shown that men are capable of understanding refusals that do not contain the word “no” in specifically sexual contexts, and, further, are able to recognize even very subtle nonverbal refusals in those same contexts (o’byrne, rapley, and hansen 2006). thus, there is mounting evidence against the view that sexual assaults in cases involving polite refusals are best explained in terms of miscommunication (see beres 2010). additionally, there are pragmatic and ideological reasons to favor the unheeded-refusal model over the failed-refusal model. proponents of the failedrefusal model have done the important work of explaining how sexist ideology naturalizes the objectification of women and wrongfully excuses the violation of our boundaries. proponents of the unheeded-refusal model need not deny these important observations. indeed, the crux of my argument in favor of the unheededrefusal model is that its widespread acceptance would go further toward dismantling sexist ideologies than would acceptance of the failed-refusal model. the failed-refusal model suggests that in order to ensure that women’s refusals are expressible, we need to either banish speech that silences women’s refusals, or undercut the authority of that speech via further speech, such as feminist or queer pornography or large-scale public campaigns emphasizing the importance of respecting women’s sexual boundaries (langton 1993, 330). the unheeded-refusal model, on the other hand, affirms that women are more successful than it is often acknowledged at communicating our sexual boundaries. it maintains that we do not need to defang the pernicious influence of sexist ideology in order to insist that such refusals are genuine and ought to be heeded. instead, we must recognize a universal obligation to put our understanding of how refusals are communicated to work even in contexts where we would prefer not to receive one. the failed-refusal model accords individual men and women relatively little power to ensure nonviolent sexual interactions.25 indeed, some critics of the model have worried it might entail that sexual contact following a failed refusal cannot accurately be characterized as assault, since the contact in question was not actually refused (bird 2002; jacobson 1995). mikkola (2011) defends the failed-refusal model from this objection by noting that the absence of a refusal does not entail the 24 by reference to his alleged statement, “it doesn’t look like you hate me.” 25 hesni (2018, 951–952) also argues that the failed-refusal model harmfully strips victims of sexual assault of agency. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 presence of consent. thus, even if we say there was no refusal in such cases, we cannot draw the further conclusion that the cases were consensual, since they may have failed to achieve the standard of affirmative consent (mikkola 2011, 431–432). however, my analysis of the ansari case calls this defense of the failed-refusal model into question. i have argued that the ansari case describes nonconsensual sex specifically because grace’s refusals were unheeded; the fact that ansari didn’t heed grace’s refusals explains why subsequent acts that, in other contexts, may have been consensual—for example, her performing oral sex on him after he indicated that he would like for her to do so—were in fact nonconsensual. to put the point more abstractly, mikkola is correct to note that the lack of a refusal doesn’t entail consent. however, the presence of a refusal does entail nonconsent. and if we deny that refusals are expressible by women because of certain sexist ideologies, then we lose the ability to point to cases of sincerely expressed but unheeded refusals as straightforward instances of sexual assault.26 the unheeded-refusal model, on the other hand, accords the power to state boundaries and the responsibility to respect them to all parties capable of engaging in consensual sexual encounters. and, when it comes to refusals, “maybe next time” is as clearly stated as “no.” 5. conclusion: sexual refusal and affirmative consent the unheeded-refusal model insists that refusals fitting linguistically normative patterns be heeded in sexual contexts, and that when they are not heeded, a sexual assault has occurred. in order to incorporate this model into definitions of affirmative consent, i suggest adding the following condition to such definitions: “if any sexual contact has been refused, then sexual contact must wholly cease unless voluntarily reinitiated by the person(s) who last refused contact.”27 this addition would have at least three benefits. first, when properly followed, it would prevent cases of sexual violence such as that which allegedly transpired between 26 mikkola would perhaps respond that proponents of the failed-refusal model could insist that sexual contact following an attempted refusal be classified as sexual assault, even when that refusal fails (see mikkola 2011, 432–434). presumably, however, this would only be justifiable in cases where the attempted refusal is expressed in line with behaviorally typical expressions of refusal, and so the justification for classifying such cases as sexual assault would at bottom be the fact that the person did express refusal. 27 price (2018) proposes a similar standard of conduct: “if the person you’re spending time with says no, you stop. if they don’t help you to “move things along” (i.e., if they don’t advance the sexual encounter), you slow down, don’t advance, or stop.” clausen – “next time” means “no”: sexual consent and the structure of refusals published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 grace and ansari. if ansari had acted in accordance with this condition, he would have ceased physical contact after grace’s initial request to “relax for a sec,” and not reinitiated contact. second, it leaves open the possibility of willingly changing one’s mind about choosing to engage in sexual activity, since the person who initially refused contact is free to reinitiate and/or initiate a different form of activity. thus, the condition respects the sexual agency of persons who might be vulnerable to sexual assault, while also protecting them against sexual boundary violations. third, it provides a clear behavioral criterion for ascertaining when such a change of mind has occurred in one’s partner, so that the person who had initially been refused could trust that the other was a willing participant and not simply complying out of shock in the aftermath of a boundary violation. of course, this third benefit will only be seen as such by those who sincerely prioritize not violating sexual boundaries. and sadly, most perpetrators of sexual assault do not have that concern at the forefront of their minds. their reasons for not prioritizing their partner’s sexual boundaries can be more or less vicious. someone like dennis in the original dennis case, for example, who deliberately hopes to leverage any available situational power in order to procure compliance to sex that the other party may not actually want, is unlikely to care about his partner’s sexual boundaries so much as he cares about putting her in a situation where she feels unfree to express them. in more mundane but equally harmful cases, however, perpetrators may not have explicitly predatory intent but nevertheless may not specifically care about or prioritize understanding the desires or boundaries of their partner. instead, their sole focus may simply be getting the sexual contact they desire. and while they would cease if confronted with a firm and direct refusal, they will persistently attempt to escalate sexual contact in the absence of such a protest, and perhaps attempt to reinitiate contact even after a direct refusal has been given. the preceding discussion is offered with the hope of mitigating this somewhat less intentionally predatory kind of sexual violence. if the positions argued for in this paper are widely accepted, then those who don’t actually care about their partner’s desires and boundaries will be rendered less believable when pleading ignorance to having committed sexual assault, and those who do actually care about respecting their partner’s desires and boundaries will have some empirically informed and explicit guidance on how to do so. references bird, alexander. 2002. “illocutionary silencing.” pacific philosophical quarterly 83 (1): 1–15. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by 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“token resistance to sex: new perspectives on an old stereotype.” psychology of women quarterly 22 (3): 443–463. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1998.tb00167.x. o’byrne, rachel, mark rapley, and susan hansen. 2006. “‘you couldn’t say “no,” could you?’: young men’s understandings of sexual refusal.” feminism & psychology 16 (2): 133–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959-353506062970. price, devon. 2018. “a few words about sexual coercion in the wake of the aziz ansari accusations.” medium, blog post, january 14. https://medium.com /@devonprice/a-few-words-about-sexual-coercion-in-the-wake-of-the-azizansari-accusations-7db015c1cde5. reed, r. p., and megan fritts. 2018. “consent isn’t everything and sex is not like tea.” quillette, october 19. https://quillette.com/2018/10/19/consent-isnteverything-and-sex-is-not-like-tea/. suny (state university of new york). 2020. “definition of affirmative consent.” accessed july 20. https://system.suny.edu/sexual-violence-preventionworkgroup/policies/affirmative-consent/. way, katie. 2018. “i went on a date with aziz ansari. it turned into the worst night of my life.” babe, january 13. https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari28355. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 weiss, bari. 2018. “aziz ansari is guilty. of not being a mind reader.” new york times, january 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/azizansari-babe-sexual-harassment.html. worthington, nancy. 2020. “celebrity-bashing or #metoo contribution? new york times online readers debate the boundaries of hashtag feminism.” communication review 23 (1): 46–65. https://doi.org/10.1080 /10714421.2019.1704110. ginger tate clausen is a lecturer at the university of tennessee, knoxville. she completed her phd work at the university of arizona and is the author of “love of whole persons” (journal of ethics, 2019). 8390 clausen title page 8390 clausen final format dismantling purity: toward a feminist curdling of hawaiian identity feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 3 article 2 2017 dismantling purity: toward a feminist curdling of hawaiian identity l brooke rudow-abouharb university of georgia, lbschue@uga.edu recommended citation rudow-abouharb, l brooke. 2017. "dismantling purity: toward a feminist curdling of hawaiian identity."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (3). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2. dismantling purity: toward a feminist curdling of hawaiian identity1 l. brooke rudow-abouharb abstract this paper explores hawaiian racial identity formation using maría lugones’s metaphor of curdling as a guiding theme. i aim to show that the accepted definition of “native hawaiian” is based on a purity model of race that serves to undermine the unity of the hawaiian nation. i begin by outlining the pre-contact understanding of hawaiian identity. this conception of identity was subsequently altered through various political agendas to fit within a western/european notion of “pure” racial identity. i argue that continuing to use the imposed definition of “native hawaiian” makes the fragmentation of hawaiian identity and society difficult to overcome. additionally, i offer a discussion of the gendered rhetoric of some hawaiian activists that complicates the effort to regain a precolonial cultural identity that was largely egalitarian. finally, i suggest that a rejection of racial purity and a rearticulation of hawaiian identity that recaptures pre-contact, strategic notions of belonging by way of lugones’s “impure resistance” can set the stage for a more inclusive hawaiian nation. keywords: hawaii, race, kinship, purity, resistance, lugones ka lāhui hawai’i is an organization fighting for the sovereignty and land rights of the hawaiian people. this organization seeks “nation within a nation” status similar to that of many native american tribes. ka lāhui asserts itself as a “native hawaiian initiative,” stating that “ka lāhui ’s approach is to seek inclusion of hawaiian people in the federal policy which affords all native americans the right to be self-governing” (ka lāhui hawai’i 1993). ka lāhui seeks inclusion. yet, they seem to rely on a style of rhetoric that speaks otherwise, one that maría lugones might call “split-separated” (lugones 2003, 128). beyond exclusivity, calls to action take on a decidedly gendered tone, placing higher demands on female hawaiians. by appealing to their mana, women are charged as the keepers of hawaiian identity. 1 i am much indebted to dr. chris cuomo, dr. beth preston, and my anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 in this paper, i explore hawaiian racial-identity formation and show that the accepted definition of “native hawaiian” is based on a purity model of race that serves to undermine the unity of the hawaiian nation. i begin by outlining the precontact understanding of hawaiian identity, which was subsequently altered through various political agendas to fit neatly within western notions of “pure” racial identity. i argue that continuing to use the imposed definition of “native hawaiian” makes the fragmentation of hawaiian identity and society difficult to overcome. additionally, i offer a discussion of the gendered rhetoric that complicates the effort to regain a precolonial cultural identity that was largely egalitarian. finally, i suggest that a rejection of fictitious racial purity and a rearticulation of hawaiian identity that recaptures pre-contact, strategic notions of belonging by way of lugones’s “impure resistance” can set the stage for a more inclusive hawaiian nation. analyzing race from an outsider’s position is precarious business. there is much about these issues that i do not know and cannot know. i have attempted here to give an account and analysis that is accurate and respectful. where i have failed, i apologize and hope to be corrected. discussions of native american identity in contemporary race theory are few and far between, and when it comes to hawaiian identity, even more so. it is my hope that this paper can contribute to the growth of serious conversations about a wide range of political and social issues facing contemporary hawai’i. what is race? traditional hawaiian understandings of belonging, identity, and family are far removed from european notions of blood “purity” as fundamental to identity formation. to illustrate the differences, j. kēhaulani kauanui cites alan howard’s identification of four main assumptions of european identity formation: (1) “genetic inheritance is the main transmitter of a person’s vital substance.” (2) “race, culture, and language strongly cohere . . . to compose a distinctive racial type.” (3) where they do not cohere, “the character of individuals is primarily determined by genetic inheritance.” and (4) in the case of “racial mixing,” the “lower” racial type determines the racial identity of the offspring (kauanui 2008a, 49). here, a person is defined by her race and her race is predetermined in the sense that it is given by the race of her parents. it is fixed, unchangeable, and pure. any racial “confusion” is sidestepped by the prescription of the “lower” racial type, says howard. yet, linda martín alcoff significantly complicates the final assumption. she says, “in cultures defined by racialized identities, infected with the illusion of purity, and divided by racial hierarchies, mixed white/nonwhite persons face an irresolvable status ambiguity. they are rejected by the dominant race as impure and therefore inferior, but are also sometimes disliked and distrusted by the oppressed race for their 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 privileges of closer association with domination” (alcoff 2006, 267; emphasis added). alcoff’s observation points to the insidious nature of this model, which is illuminated in its relationship to control. those who are not easily placed into a racial category, those of “mixed” blood, are not permitted to exist as multiplicitous. lugones says that, instead, they are “split-separated” into two (or more) pure parts which do not interact, where “what is multiple is understood as internally separable, divisible into what makes it one and the remainder” (lugones 2003, 128). she calls this ‘fragmentation.’ lugones says that fragmentation “follows the logic of purity” and creates a subject which is abstract and without particularity (lugones 2003, 128–129). the fundamental assumption of the logic of purity, she says, is that underneath all multiplicity must be unity. a multiple must reduce to the pure element. where there is no pure element, one is assumed for the sake of purity. this is clearly identified in howard’s fourth assumption: in mixes, the “lower” racial type determines identity. the “mix,” the multiplicity, is denied in favor of a unified simple. this logic of purity is based on the logic of control. a thing unified, simple, pure is easily controlled. in contrast to the western logic of purity, lugones provides an alternative understanding of identity. she calls it ‘curdled,’ where identity is defined by one’s mixtures and multiplicities. she uses a metaphor of making mayonnaise to show that when oil and eggs are mixed hastily, they curdle. you cannot get the oil out of the egg or the egg out of the oil. they defy strict separation or combination. likewise, multiplicities cannot be split-separated. they curdle. they intermesh; you will not find one “part” without the others. and while for the chef, or the lover of purity, this mixture is undesirable—curdling “ruins” the end product—lugones understands curdling as a potentially empowering practice of resistance. importantly, curdling is something performed, as opposed to purity, which is determined before birth. curdling defies control and fragmentation because there are no pure parts to be had (lugones 2003, 123). it resists classification, or at least any fixed classification. this notion of identity is in direct opposition to the logic of purity, and is what we find in pre-contact kanaka maoli genealogical kinship.2 indigenous kanaka maoli cultural practices are such that identity is based on genealogical ties and lineal descent. kinship is bilateral and is determined by relationship, status, and duty (kauanui 2008a, 47). people are recognized as related through their mothers and fathers equally. for example, one might forge a connection to another kanaka maoli by following her father’s line to a shared 2 kanaka maoli is the term hawaiians used to refer to themselves pre-contact. there is a movement to reclaim much of hawaiian language and it is in that spirit that i use this phrase alternately with hawaiian throughout this paper. 3 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 relative, or she might invoke her mother’s line to claim certain privileges or respect if she is connected to an ali’i, “royalty,” through that route. as genealogy and relatedness make up identity, a child born to a kanaka maoli is immediately and wholly integrated into the kanaka maoli kinship system. this genealogical web cannot be broken (unless, as we shall see, it is forgotten) and thus, kinship cannot be “diluted.” in this way, kanaka maoli identity is both inclusive and strategic. it gives one social flexibility as well as a collective identity. j. kēhaulani kauanui says, “genealogy is about quality, not quantity; it is the quality of the connection that counts, not the ‘distance’ in relation to some mythic purity. . . . there are no exclusive boundaries between defined sets of relatives or bounded descent groups associated with land. instead, there is social flexibility where there are no determinate kinship groups or rigidly prescribed relationships” (kauanui 2007, 113). by quality, here, she means the virtue, merit and, especially, pono of one’s ancestors (silva 2004, 239).3 additionally, a genealogical relationship to the hawaiian islands is crucial for kanaka maoli. the land is the mother of all hawaiians, and their relationship to the cosmos is familial (trask 1999, 59). given that all kanaka maoli are children of the land, they are all family. familial relationships are understood as reciprocal, where the elder sibling is required to provide and care for younger siblings, who are then required to love, honor, and care for their elders. in traditional indigenous society, this familial model was reflected in the language itself, whereby all hawaiians of one’s own generation were referred to as sisters or brothers. all kanaka maoli of the parents’ generation were mothers and fathers. this reciprocal obligation extends to the land; kanaka maoli must mālama ‘āina, “care for the land,” and the land will care for all of its family. therefore, access to and the ability to protect the land is fundamental and vital to kanaka maoli moral order. but should we consider this undilutable, genealogical understanding of kanaka maoli identity a concept of race? through this model, it is certainly the case that i, a haole from the continental us with no hawaiian relatives, cannot be hawaiian.4 it does not matter what cultural practices i may adopt or where i may move. one cannot become hawaiian (kauanui 2008a, 49).5 one is either born 3 silva defines pono as “goodness, uprightness, morality, correct or proper procedure, excellence, well-being, prosperity, welfare, benefit, sake, just, virtuous, fair.” 4 while haole simply means “foreigner,” it is most often used in contemporary times to mean “white person.” i use it throughout as “foreigner.” 5 adoption and fostering of non-biological relatives was practiced. however, kauanui notes that “the fact that unrelated persons could be incorporated in these ways into 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 hawaiian or not. familial relationships are passed through genetic material and require that one is physically and physiologically connected to other hawaiians and the land. hawaiian identity does have a biological foundation, but does that make it racial? after all, what is race? michael omi and howard winant propose a definition of race that does not rely upon blood purity as primary to race. they write that we must understand race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle. . . . race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. although the concept of race invokes biologically based human characteristics . . . , selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. . . . there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race. indeed, the categories employed to differentiate among human groups along racial lines reveal themselves . . . to be at best imprecise, and at worst completely arbitrary. (omi and winant 1994, 55; emphasis added) is this description of race what we find in kanaka maoli genealogy? on one hand, social obligation and interests are certainly understood in virtue of one’s relatedness to other kanaka maoli. being related to a pono ali’i would give one a higher social standing and more class mobility. this political and social hierarchy is related to the body. however, it is unclear how this manifests itself symbolically in (or on) the body. genealogy is a type of history that must be taught, remembered, and retold again and again. if one “forgets” her genealogy, those ties become unraveled and can be broken. indeed, many traditional hawaiian songs, chants, and stories held the genealogical connections from a family to its ancestors. especially important were those cosmological chants which connected ali’i directly to the land which legitimized their rule (silva 2004, 182).6 further, marriage and procreation with foreigners was neither uncommon nor problematic. the children resulting from hawaiian and non-hawaiian unions ‘ohana does not undercut the fact that hawaiian society still works by ancestral links and privileges genealogy” (kauanui, 2008a, 49). 6 this also made the fact hawaiians were prohibited from speaking hawaiian, given that their histories were entirely oral, especially tragic. by losing their histories that connected them genealogically to their ancestors, they lost a highly, if not the most, significant part of their hawaiian identity. 5 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 were accepted as kanaka maoli (silva 2004, 20–26). due to bilateral kinship, a child could legitimately claim kanaka maoli identity through whichever line held a hawaiian relative. the fact that one’s parent might not be hawaiian in no way reduced one’s social or political position. even contact and partial integration with white haole did not immediately change this. kauanui gives a nice example of this, citing the runoff for the throne between queen emma and david kalākaua. although queen emma had a white british grandfather, she was a descendant of the kamehamehas (a highly regarded line of ali’i) and was therefore seen by the kanaka maoli as more qualified than kalākaua, who, by european standards, had a “more hawaiian” heritage. “[her] european ancestry was not seen as something that weakened her high-ranking hawaiian lineage, which bolstered her claim and popularity. her mixedness was not seen as negative in any way nor a discount of her hawaiianness” (kauanui 2008a, 59). hence, social standing could not be determined by visible physical features, but rather by the memorized, historical connection to a virtuous or powerful ancestor. certainly political and social, but by no means unstable, imprecise, or arbitrarily determined, this indicates to me that kanaka maoli identity cannot be understood through omi and winant’s version of race. further, insofar as kanaka maoli kinship was social and political, it operated within a distinct group but not as a tool for political struggle against other racial groups. however, before long, the kanaka maoli would become “hawaiian,” a full-fledged racial designation. before delving into this racial formation, a brief history to contextualize the discussion may be of some use. a brief history it is difficult to determine exactly when a white presence in hawai’i began. most european accounts place the first haole arrival in or “discovery” of the hawaiian islands with captain james cook in 1778. however, recently translated hawaiian language newspapers place the onset of white haole visitors as early as 900 ce and no later than 1555 (silva 2004, 20). challenging both the european models of historical reporting and the notion that captain cook magically and uniquely appeared in hawai’i to the paralyzing amazement of the kanaka maoli, samuel kamakau tells of a long, rich, and mostly peaceful relationship with white haole. he recounts stories of hawaiians travelling to and from foreign lands and foreigners travelling to and from hawai’i.7 european versions, nevertheless, prevail, 7 it is important to note that this information comes from the original version of samuel kamakau’s text written in hawaiian and not the english translation in which all of this pre-cook history is left out. interestingly, also left out of the english translation are the detailed accounts of woman-led sea voyages and expeditions. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 giving cook credit for the discovery of the hawaiian islands, as well as the subsequent destruction of the kanaka maoli land, culture, and bodies that followed his arrival. “the fruits and the seeds that his actions planted sprouted and grew, and became trees that spread to devastate the people of these islands,” says kamakau (silva 2004, 22). after cook’s death, as more haole from the us and europe arrived, peace did not return. europeans brought foreign plants and animals, disease, armed conflict, and mass death. conservative population estimates of the kanaka maoli upon cook’s arrival in 1778 range from 400,000 to 1,000,000, dropping to 135,000 in the following 45 years, and then to only 40,000 by 1890 (trask 1999, 6). christian missionaries justified colonization, asserting a causal relationship. they connected the “evil” ways of the kanaka maoli and their pagan gods with the sickness, weakness, and devastation of their people. white haole did not succumb to these sicknesses and used this to convince kanaka maoli of their own righteousness. “the fertile field of conversion was littered with the remnants of holocaust, a holocaust created by white foreigners and celebrated by their later counterparts as the will of a christian god” (trask 1999, 6). conversion, the missionaries asserted, would be the kanaka maoli’s only salvation, both physically and spiritually. thus, by 1890, the kanaka maoli had been almost completely dispossessed of their religion, moral order, chiefly government, cultural practices, land, and water. by 1898, they would lose their nation as well. through the combination of the rapidly declining kanaka maoli population, powerful missionaries, and the strategic positioning of haole businessmen in the hawaiian government, us interests were increasingly served by new laws regulating the sale of hawaiian land which almost exclusively benefited american-owned sugar plantations (silva 2004, 39–43). “by 1888, three-quarters of all arable land was controlled by haole” (trask 1999, 7). high us tariffs on sugar trade and increased competition from foreign markets reduced profits, thus us annexation of hawai’i would provide a convenient solution for american sugar planters. the kanaka maoli vehemently opposed annexation and rightly associated annexation with enslavement and national death. yet, any public demonstration of this opposition was met with intervention from the us military, purporting to be merely “keeping the peace.” conspiring with the united states minister to hawai’i, a small group of haole planters and businessmen overthrew queen lili’uokalani, hawai’i’s final lawful ruler. backed by the us marines, the businessmen created their own “provisional government” (trask 1999, 12). this provisional government became the republic of perhaps hawaiian identity could be more easily reconstructed in a european model when these gender roles were historically (yet, falsely) reinforced. 7 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 hawai’i. in spite of a previous verbal agreement from the president of the united states respecting the independence of hawai’i and the 1843 recognition of hawai’i as an independent nation and member of the family of nations, signed by officials from england and france, and further, in spite of the fact that no vote was taken in hawai’i or in the us congress, the republic of hawai’i succeeded in obtaining full annexation by resolution (silva 2004, 36–37). haunani-kay trask captures the profound impact of this largely illegal apprehension: because of the overthrow and annexation, hawaiian control and hawaiian citizenship were replaced with american control and american citizenship. we suffered a unilateral redefinition of our homeland and our people, a displacement and a dispossession in our own country. in familial terms, our mother (and thus our heritage and our inheritance) was taken from us. we were orphaned in our own land. (trask 1999, 16) yet the redefinition of hawaiian identity would not stop there. the 1920s brought a rearticulation of “hawaiian” under the guise of rehabilitation for kanaka maoli. and once again, the battle centered on haole interest in hawaiian land. racial formation in the hawaiian islands the formation of a “purified” hawaiian identity began when the white haole took an economic, religious, and political interest in hawai’i. it initially took the form of us press depicting kanaka maoli as inferior, lacking morals and culture. newspapers and missionary writings portrayed them as savages or barbarians: we learned that mr. charles h. derby went over to san francisco . . . taking with him some native men and women. . . . a man must be pretty hard up for employment to undertake an exhibition of these islanders and their disgusting dances in a civilized country and to a refined community. (pacific commercial advertiser, march 1862; quoted in noyes 2003, 33) laka, the obscene goddess, still presides over the unspeakable abominations of the hula. (j. s. emerson, “the lesser hawaiian gods,” hawaiian historical society papers, april 7, 1892; quoted in noyes 2003, 33) speaking generally, a region larger than several of our states has been redeemed from utter savagery. . . . the natives are steadily disappearing in number and seem likely sooner or later to disappear, their places are already supplied by others of sturdier stock. (d. l. leonard, d.d., “christianity and 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 the hawaiian islands,” the missionary review of the word. july 16, 1903; quoted in noyes 2003, 61) politically these images and constructions were necessary for white american haole to garner support for the eventual us takeover of the hawaiian nation and can be understood as what omi and winant call a racial project. “a racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines,” the resource in this case: land (omi and winant 1994, 55–56). painting the picture of kanaka maoli as savage, disgusting, weak, immoral, and animalistic served as a powerful political move which justified (1) encroachment on hawaiian lands, for natives did not use it properly; (2) (re)population of the islands—hawaiian souls needed replacing with christian ones and dead hawaiian bodies needed replacing by sturdier white ones; and, of course, (3) the eventual “adoption” of the nation as a whole, for “barbarians” certainly cannot rule themselves. racial categorizations that served the colonization project grew ever more prominent. settlers began carefully distinguishing between full hawaiians (as if there were such a thing) and part hawaiians, especially in identifying caucasian hawaiians versus asiatic hawaiians. hawaiian born children were also classified by nationality, which had become a clear code word for race, given that anti-chinese and anti-japanese sentiments were strong (kauanui 2008a, 57). dividing the population of hawai’i would serve to reify and justify an entire social order, extant still, determined by and beneficial to white haole. this project of racializing hawaiian bodies culminated in the establishment of a fully formed racial identity with the hawaiian homes commission act of 1920 (hhca). the hhca was the result of a rehabilitation movement initiated by hawaiian elites on behalf of hawaiian commoners. they were highly concerned with the dropping population, poor living conditions, and high rates of unemployment. at that time, options and mobility were limited, dominated, and completely determined by the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very few. of all privately owned land in hawai’i, over 80% was haole owned, the remaining lands were owned “by individual part-hawaiians, hawaiians, and asians” (kauanui 2008a, 69). rehabilitation meant giving (back) some of the land to hawaiians so that they might engage in homesteading and improve their circumstances in hawai’i. the argument hinged on the us recognition that it was a social and moral duty to help the impoverished kanaka maoli. these very lands were being held by sugar plantation owners, but their 39 leases on over 26,653 acres of the best agricultural land, astonishingly cheap leases8 that kept the sugar profits high, would be expiring 8 for example, one plantation had 90,000 acres at two cents an acre per year! 9 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 soon (kauanui 2008a, 68). thus, the haole plantation owners, the big five as they were known, had a vested interest in the outcome of the rehabilitation pleas. a legislative commission was sent to congress to negotiate new land laws on behalf of both kanaka maoli rehabilitation and the sugar expansion interests. these two agendas were pugnaciously opposed and set the stage for the problematic outcome of the mission. the first version of the hhca was quickly rejected by congress due to adamant opposition from the big five. it was much too inclusive, they complained, for it stated that anyone of 1/32 hawaiian blood would be eligible to receive leased land for the purposes of homesteading. when the commission returned to hawai'i to reconfigure the hhca, the big five had a list of demands for their support. first, the degree of blood quantum would have to be increased. second, the size and location of the homestead lots would need to be decreased. third, the hhca would have to be an "experiment" limited to five years. and, last, but certainly not least, the section of the organic act that limited the number of acres a corporation could own would need to be deleted (kauanui 2008a, 154). representatives rejected the experiment clause, but negotiated the rest. the hawaiian senate rejected the second point, calling it "a sellout" because it gave hawaiians only the poorest of lands, not suitable for homesteading in the first place. yet, the big five argued that if they did not retain control of the most productive and valuable lands, there would be no revenue to support hhca and the bill "would be a dead letter" (kauanui 2008a, 152). thus, existing plantations and ranches were left alone and kanaka maoli were given undesirable, arid lands. the final demand was granted and all that remained to negotiate was blood quantum. representatives of the big five asserted that the point of the rehabilitation was to increase the number of native hawaiians, thus it made little sense (to them) that 1/32-blood hawaiians should be permitted leases to the land. they and the us congress were concerned about this for two reasons. first, the white haole government, both on island and off, had little interest in aiding in any way those hawaiians with any chinese or japanese blood. in support of allowing only "pure" hawaiians to lease land, george m. mcclellan of the hawai'i chamber of commerce stated, "here is a hawaiian intermarried with a chinese, so that man of half chinese blood and half hawaiian blood is given special privileges which are denied to a full blooded american. we do not object to that as far as the hawaiian part of it is concerned" (kauanui 2008a, 157, emphasis added). just what does he mean by "full blooded american" and "the hawaiian part?" the man in mcclellan's example, born to one chinese and one hawaiian parent in hawai'i, would, by legal definition, be a full-blooded american. american is (supposed to be) a nationality, not an ethnicity or race. to be american only requires american citizenship, not “american” blood. but the us congress was not 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 confused by his literally nonsensical statement. he meant white, and everyone present understood the code. he meant a pure-blooded white man would be denied the privileges given to some chinese half-blood. but more, what exactly is the "hawaiian part"? he was fine with the hawaiian part of the man getting homestead lands, just not the chinese part. conceptual breaking of human bodies into parts is by no means uncommon or outdated and is a clear example of purity in the form of lugones’ fragmentation. in fact, ruth frankenberg notes this very phenomenon in her interviews with white women in the late 1980s. she says, "the concept of a racially 'mixed' person is an odd one. even if it made sense to subordinate the social dimensions of humans to their physiological states, genetic matter and its combining are highly complex. the notion of a racially 'mixed' individual brings forth a simplistic and entirely erroneous image of two pots of paint (or blood!) stirred together, so that a 'half chinese' person is exactly twice as chinese as someone who is 'a quarter chinese,' and so on" (frankenberg 1993, 95). the other (stated) reason that the big five were opposed to 1/32-blood hawaiians leasing land was an almost complete reversal of the first; it was because of "the white part." opponents of the bill said that "a person of one thirty-second hawaiian blood was to all intents and purposes a white person; that as a matter of fact you could not tell the difference between a person having one-thirty-second part of hawaiian blood and a white person” (kauanui 2008a, 158, emphasis added). we can think of this as the inversion of the "one-drop rule" which held that virtually any quantity of "black blood" was enough to make one for "all intents and purposes" black. but annette jaimes points out that, when it comes to indigenous blood, this inversion is all too common. jaimes classifies this as motivated by "racially preoccupied 'white' europeans" who are obsessed with and operate on an "unproven assumption of a 'purity of racial blood'" (jaimes 1995, 317). but while i do not doubt the accuracy of jaimes's assertion, i think there is quite a bit more going on here. remember, this negotiation of blood quantum rules for kanaka maoli is a racial project working toward the formation of a hawaiian race. it is, in principle, political. the white haole deciding who can and cannot be hawaiian stand in a position to be politically advantaged or (probably only slightly) disadvantaged by the outcome of these debates. the more hawaiians able to claim land, the less land whites can hold. the more hawaiians existing in hawai'i, the less "full blooded americans" can dominate political discourse. here, limiting the definition of hawaiian identity has very little to do with some fictional ideal of racial purity but everything to do with increasing, or stabilizing, white power on the islands. a new definition will only stand in as the new standard of what it takes to be pure. whether it is the one-drop rule or its inversion, the deciding factor will be whichever gives white haole a bigger piece of the pie. 11 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 even so, how is it that a 1/32 hawaiian is basically a white person? it comes down to the racial essence of the pure hawaiian. the full-blooded hawaiians were seen as helpless, as primitive and unintelligent. they needed white haole's help to make it in the new white haole land. so the white haole objected, "a few hawaiians of pure blood who might be entitled to governmental assistance would not in any manner be benefited by the passage of the present bill, because of all of the parthawaiians who do not need any rehabilitating and are amply able to take care of themselves, as they are intelligent, industrious and prolific" (kauanui 2008a, 148, emphasis added). those part-hawaiians, in virtue of their whiteness, could get along just fine. whiteness had already helped them. in fact, mcclellan was dubious as to whether native hawaiians could make it, even with the help of the bill. he claimed that native hawaiians were just not meant to farm. they could be anything, indeed "everything but farmers; everything but successful homesteaders" (kauanui 2008a, 162). kauanui points out the utter insidiousness of this portrait of the native hawaiian, given that kanaka maoli understood themselves as the children of the land, especially endowed with the capability and responsibility of caring for their mother. yet, perhaps the most telling argument against part-hawaiian inclusion in the bill was the claim that "you could not tell the difference" between a white and 1/32blood hawaiian. how could the hhca claim to perpetuate the (now almost fully formed) hawaiian race, if many included did not even look hawaiian? without a physical marker of race, the claim to racial identity made little sense to white americans. as omi and winant told us, "race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies" (omi and winant 1994, 55). hawaiians, if they included bodies that did not look hawaiian, were not properly a race. the race could not, then, be rehabilitated for it did not exist! for the white american government to approve a plan to rehabilitate a native race, then a full racial identity must be forged with reference to the body. hawaiians needed to look hawaiian; they needed hawaiian bodies clearly distinguishable from white bodies. only once the hawaiian race was formed and formalized by legal definition, only once hawaiian identity was neatly placed within the western/european assumptions of pure racial identity, could a racialized bill be ratified. facing anger and resistance from kanaka maoli to limiting the bill to only "full blooded" hawaiians, the big five and the hawaiian representatives agreed to meet (literally) halfway. they defined the appropriate recipients of homestead leases as hawaiians of 50% blood quantum or more. with this alteration, along with the other two concessions to the big five, the hhca was signed into law on july 9, 1921. in the final bill, it became obvious that hawaiian rehabilitation was merely a 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 facade, masking the real agenda behind the amendments. kauanui provides a sobering recapitulation: [the] section on "hawaiian rehabilitation" was relegated to an explicitly minor role in this omnibus bill while the colonial form of land expropriation won out. large corporations were then free to control the bidding at public auctions of leases to the 26,000 acres of highly cultivated "public land" without threat of withdrawal for any homesteads, and without the 1,000acre limit that had been imposed in the 1900 organic act. thus, the major impetus behind the hhca was revealed—to amend the organic act land laws by repealing homesteading for the general public under the pretext of rehabilitating hawaiians. (kauanui 2008a, 164) haole bonus: the 50% blood quantum rule would serve to undermine hawaiian solidarity toward the reclamation of hawaiian identity and land for the next 90 years and counting. rearticulation and the curdling of hawaiian identity haunani-kay trask speaks of women’s mana. she says that mana is a form of power that enables and entitles one to lead effectively. to possess mana one must be pono and speak the needs of the land, people, and cosmos. she recognizes that hawaiian women have incredible mana (trask 1999, 92–97). women have a strong political presence in hawai’i’s sovereignty movements, and especially in ka lāhui hawai’i. ka lāhui was engendered by mililani trask, and women continue to lead its efforts. haunani-kay trask believes that women have the mana to lead in part because of the ways they have been affected by and respond to colonization. women were disproportionally affected by colonialism, given that it was a patriarchal system which came to replace a highly egalitarian hawaiian society. hawaiian men have, to a larger degree, become powerful through the us system. they receive “rewards” for their cooperation, rewards for which the women are not eligible.9 she also genders the colonial picture even more by giving a detailed account of white haole’s prostitution of hawaiian culture, especially of hawaiian dances like the hulu and the fetishization of female hawaiian bodies (trask 1999, 136–147). 9 trask recognizes that a very few hawaiian women have adopted the male-model of politics and do participate and benefit from that system. however, in large part, hawai’i’s politicians have all been men who tend to work against native hawaiian interests. 13 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 kauanui agrees, adding that the us occupation in hawai’i was founded on gendered oppression “with the islands being viewed as feminine and therefore ready for masculine dominance” (kauanui 2008b, 285). she points out that hawaiian men took advantage of the rapidly decreasing status of hawaiian women, working with white men to advance their own lot. further, many hawaiian men became involved with the us military, which had and still has a dominant presence on the islands. “[their] socialization within that institution has arguably contributed to sexism and violence in home communities by setting new standards about what is considered culturally appropriate. us militarism also perpetuates gendered violence against both the hawaiian people and lands and waters of our archipelago” (kauanui 2008b, 285). trask takes this to mean that the mana found in hawaiian women is not present in many men. perhaps more accurately, it is not invoked by hawaiian men due to the patriarchal colonization which benefits them. yet for trask, women’s mana is something more than this particular positioning in the colonialist hierarchy. rather, it is a deeper connection to the land and to the nation which drives women to speak out and to lead: i believe the main reason women lead the nationalist front today is simply that women have not lost sight of the lahui, that is, of the nation. caring for the nation is, in hawaiian belief, an extension of caring for the family, the large family that includes both our lands and our people. our mother is our land, papahanaumoku, she who births the islands. hawaiian women leaders, then, are genealogically empowered to lead the nation. (trask 1999, 94) h. k. trask calls hawaiian women the “life-givers of the nation” (1999, 143). this is especially important to her considering that the number of hawaiians is decreasing. another hawaiian sovereignty activist, lynette cruz, tells us that by 2044, there will be no more hawaiians with 50% or more hawaiian blood. she says, “this means, in effect, there will be no more hawaiians by our definition, and the federal government no longer has to deal with us as a people” (quoted in kauanui 2007, 114). thus, population recovery is a primary agenda for the ka lāhui movement. mililani trask says, “there is a saying in the hawai’ian [sic] culture that you can marry whomever you wish, but mate with your own kind. in this way, we regenerate our numbers” (quoted in kauanui 2007, 114). cruz gives a similar call: “we’re telling people, especially hawaiian women, that we need to have some hawaiian babies from hawaiian men who are full-blooded. . . . this is one strategy that we can use to make sure that hawaiians do not become extinct by somebody else’s definition” (quoted in kauanui 2007, 114). here we find that “life-givers of the nation” should be taken quite literally. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 trask and cruz ask women to repopulate the hawaiian nation by mating with full-blooded hawaiian men. several questions arise when we consider this call and especially when we look at the language used in making such a call. first, they are specifically asking hawaiian women to choose full-blooded hawaiian mates. why not men? while they certainly do desire that men take up the task as well, the framing of the demand to repopulate provides a clear answer to this question. women, in virtue of their mana and their connection to the land as mothers, daughters and sisters, carry the responsibility of giving life to the nation. this is a responsibility that they cannot (or at least, should not) escape. men, while also connected to the land as sons, fathers, and brothers, do not embody the land in the same way that women do. thus, it is appropriate, as physical bodies capable of producing life, just as the land is a physical body capable of producing life, that women should be called to stand and give life to the nation by instantiating their mana.10 while trask and cruz may intend to reinforce a connectedness to place and the land, their commanding of women to literally produce a nation comes across as a disturbing attempt to control the reproduction and sexuality of hawaiian women. ecofeminist val plumwood points out that the connection between women and nature is an ancient one that many feminists regard with (appropriate) suspicion. “the very idea of a feminine connection with nature seems to many to be regressive and insulting, summoning up images of women as earth mothers, as passive, reproductive animals, contented cows immersed in the body and in the unreflective experiencing of life” (plumwood 1993, 20). while not all connections of this type are oppressive—after all, women (and men) are connected to nature—instructing hawaiian women to choose a full-blooded “mate” does conjure images of selective breeding for high pedigree. decidedly heteronormative, this call to “action” completely disregards the individual desires of hawaiian women who may not want to have sex with a full-blooded hawaiian man, a half-blooded hawaiian man, or any man at all, for that matter. this can work to undermine the cultural history of samesex unions, and it also seems to undermine the significance of any union whatsoever, turning sexuality into a means to a greater end. “it is as if people expect hawaiian women to tap full-blooded men on the shoulder and call them out into the 10 it also makes a great deal of sense from a simple biological standpoint. a single man can produce vastly more offspring than one woman. thus, her options for the fathers of her children are fewer and must be made more carefully if she wishes to populate the hawaiian nation. it is more crucial that a woman be impregnated by only “full-blooded” hawaiian men. a hawaiian man, however, may impregnate any woman, as long as he includes some hawaiian women. 15 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 bush for a quickie” (kauanui 2007, 114), hinting at the idea that somehow fullbloodedness is perceptible to the world at large. given that the association of women’s bodies with the land is largely through conceptual and analogical connections, cannot their “life-giving” duties be understood in the same way? kauanui asserts that “replenishment among hawaiians can certainly be achieved through a variety of means,” but these procreative requests to bear hawaiian children harken to “the imaginary need for the authentic sign, with the ‘pure’ body as ultimate referent” (kauanui 2007, 112). and this points to the deepest problem in this ka lāhui rhetoric. h. k. trask says that any decolonization movement requires, first, decolonization on the most basic level. she mentions rejection of western clothing and the superiority of the english language as some elementary steps to activate the process. she says that hawaiians must throw off and peel away a forced behavior in favor of “native cultural alternatives” and “conscious native resistance.” she says, “but decolonization is political at the core because it functions to unscrew the power of the colonizing force by creating a new consciousness very critical of foreign terms, foreign definitions, and foreign solutions” (trask 1999, 89–90). what trask is describing here is what omi and winant call rearticulation, or the redefinition of the meaning of racial identity and, hence, race itself (omi and winant 1994, 99). while a rearticulation of hawaiian identity in opposition to and rejection of american colonialism is certainly the intention here, it is unclear that ka lāhui and the female leaders of the hawaiian sovereignty movement are successfully rearticulating the hawaiian race itself. recall cruz’s call to action. on the one hand cruz asserts that hawaiians have been defined by hawaiians, but that, on the other hand, hawaiians have been defined by someone else. indeed, ka lāhui’s definition of ‘native hawaiian’ is precisely the same definition as that of the hhca. perhaps she recognizes that it is strategic to work within the formal definitions already legally recognized. us-defined “native hawaiians” are recognized as having certain claims to the land, thus it is a legitimate strategy to work within this system, staunchly demanding more. and this strategy might work, in the short term, but alas, as audre lorde so poignantly puts it, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (lorde 2007, 112). as long as hawaiian identity is defined by someone else, hawaiians will always remain in danger of complete disappearance. the definition might change and, indeed, it has. those who were once kanaka maoli became hawaiian. those who were hawaiian are now “for all intents and purposes” white. if the power to define remains in the hands of someone else, the hawaiian is never safe. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 kauanui rightly criticizes the ka lāhui movement for remaining rooted in a purity framework of racial identity. not only does it “unwittingly promote objectification and the fetishization of ‘full-blood’ bodies,” but in light of lorde’s insight, it serves to reproduce colonial legacies rather than rearticulate a consciousness which can then be critical of foreign forces (kauanui 2007, 115). kauanui stresses that racial purity is completely incompatible with hawaiian sovereignty. blood quantum indicates individuals where kanaka maoli genealogy represents collective and related identities. further, purity is stagnant. lugones calls it “ahistorical;” it does not come to be, change, or move (lugones 2003, 128). one is born with a particular position in relation to others and is then defined by that position. genealogical kinship is dynamic. it is strategic; it is curdled. based on one’s motivation, one’s context, or even one’s present company, a lineage can be invoked to forge or strengthen relationships. while one’s identity is grounded in descent, history, and, to some degree, biology, one is not completely determined by it. kanaka maoli genealogy grants a mobility and freedom to create one’s own hawaiian identity. blood quantum/purity is the utter antithesis to this model. while trask argues that white feminism undermines hawaiian solidarity, the 50% blood quantum rule is probably the most divisive racial project initiated by the white haole (trask 1996, 909). by redefining hawaiian identity in order to more easily acquire hawaiian lands, the haole was set up nicely to remain dominant in a fragmented society, creating a vast divide between “native” hawaiians and those “for all intents and purposes”-but-just-not-quite whites. kauanui says, “many [hawaiians] are still invested in blood to prove their indigeneity. these concerns with ‘measuring up’ reflect a growing angst among hawaiians that is extremely troublesome and all too common. there are many alarming examples” (2007, 111). kauanui tells of parents restricting their daughters from dating “less-than-fifties,” of a friend criticizing her for dating a non-hawaiian man, an activist’s distress crying, “what are we gonna do when the full-bloods die out? how will we define our lahui [people]?” (2007, 112). but kauanui asks a poignant question: “what other baby could come from my womb . . . if not a hawaiian child?” (2007, 115). kauanui emphasizes that calls to literally repopulate a hawaiian nation merely serve to repopulate a colonizer’s portrait of what a hawaiian is. “too many of us are internalizing colonial notions of race and reproduction—all of which work to suppress the freedom of hawaiian women” (2007, 115). she says that hawaiian women must turn to kanaka maoli philosophies of hawaiian identity. and this is where lugones is most helpful. kanaka maoli kinship is already a curdled identity, but it is powerful in that it could be invoked to practice the “art of curdling,” or mestizaje: impure resistance (lugones 2003, 122). curdling, like kanaka maoli kinship, is strategic. “it is something we do in resistance to the logic of control, to the logic of purity . . . that we curdle testifies to 17 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 our being active subjects . . . it can become an art of resistance, metamorphosis, transformation” (lugones 2003, 144). impure resistance incorporates both purity and impurity, split-separation and curdling. revisiting my earlier question: is kanaka maoli kinship a racial identity? i think the answer is that it can be. if kanaka maoli kinship is understood as an art of curdling and impure resistance—as a political tool of decolonization—it becomes a rearticulated racial identity in its own right. that is, hawaiian identity can be both pure and impure, depending on the project at hand. embracing a genealogical model of kinship, an oppression paradigm of racial purity is rejected in favor of an inclusive and empowering identity-building practice. yet, when negotiating with the us government, which remains wedded to racial categories, kanaka maoli can function as a race. it is in this sense that the kanaka maoli identity can be strategically understood as a race without succumbing to an oppressive and totalizing agenda to restrict it to just that. the identity is thus curdled on two levels, inside and out. first, genealogical kanaka maoli identity is curdled in that it defies the logic of purity in virtue of its dynamic and shifting character. but second, it is curdled in the sense that it is not strictly a race or not a race. the status of the identity itself can be one that is curdled in relation to strategic efforts to, on one hand, bring more solidarity to the hawaiian nation when it appeals to inclusion and kinship, and, on the other, bring more power to political resistance when it functions as a racial identity that can demand justice of the us government. by reclaiming the genealogical model of kinship, the hawaiian nation can increase its numbers exponentially without any rhetorical recourse to the control of women’s bodies. in this, hawaiian men and women remain free to choose their partners and welcome their children into the hawaiian family, while they are equally charged with the duty of making genealogical histories known. genealogical kinship stands in stark contrast to the blood quantum rule—imposed by the white haole businessmen, missionaries, and us government—and to a western version of a purified, racially defined identity. by encouraging a rejection of this “logic of purity” and embracing a curdled kanaka maoli identity, ka lāhui can continue to empower its people to become mothers and fathers of the kanaka maoli, but in a way that is political and pono, inclusive and strategic. by leading this genuine rearticulation of hawaiian identity, hawaiians can invoke their mana and each give life to their nation. references alcoff, linda martín. 2006. visible identities: race, gender, and the self. new york: oxford university press. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.2 frankenberg, ruth. 1993. white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. jaimes, m. annette. 1995. "some kind of indian: on race, eugenics, and mixedbloods." in american mixed race, edited by naomi zack, 133–154. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ka lāhui hawai’i. 1993. the sovereign nation of hawai’i: a compilation of materials for educational workshops on ka lāhui hawaii. hilo: ka lāhui hawai’i. kauanui, j. kēhaulani. 2007. “blood and reproduction of (the) race in the name of ho’oulu lahui—a hawaiian feminist critique.” pacific studies 30:110–116. ———. 2008a. hawaiian blood: colonialism and the politics of sovereignty and indigeneity. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2008b. “native hawaiian decolonization and the politics of gender.” american quarterly 60:281–287. lorde, audre. 2007. “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” in sister outsider: essays and speeches, 110–114. berkeley, ca: crossing press. lugones, maría. 2003 “purity, impurity, and separation.” in pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions, 121–150. new york: roman & littlefield. noyes, martha h. 2003. then there were none. honolulu: bess press. omi, michael, and howard winant. 1994. racial formation in the united states: from the 1960s to the 1990s. new york: routledge. plumwood, val. 1993. feminism and the mastery of nature. london: routledge. silva, noenoe k. 2004. aloha betrayed: native hawaiian resistance to american colonialism. durham, nc: duke university press. trask, haunani-kay. 1996. “feminism and indigenous hawaiian nationalism.” signs 21:906–916. ———. 1999. from a native daughter: colonialism and sovereignty in hawai’i. revised edition. honolulu: university of hawai’i press. l. brooke rudow-abouharb is a phd candidate at the university of georgia in athens, ga. her research focuses primarily on issues within political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and environmental ethics. some of her publications include “creating life, giving birth, and learning to die” in the volume philosophical inquiries into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, “tragedy and reconciliation in the ramayana” in the journal for indian philosophy and religion, and a forthcoming piece, “knowing nature responsibility” in a collection on lorraine code’s work, thinking responsibly, thinking ecologically. 19 rudow-abouharb: dismantling purity published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 dismantling purity: toward a feminist curdling of hawaiian identity l brooke rudow-abouharb recommended citation the first version of the hhca was quickly rejected by congress due to adamant opposition from the big five. it was much too inclusive, they complained, for it stated that anyone of 1/32 hawaiian blood would be eligible to receive leased land for the p... representatives of the big five asserted that the point of the rehabilitation was to increase the number of native hawaiians, thus it made little sense (to them) that 1/32-blood hawaiians should be permitted leases to the land. they and the us congres... just what does he mean by "full blooded american" and "the hawaiian part?" the man in mcclellan's example, born to one chinese and one hawaiian parent in hawai'i, would, by legal definition, be a full-blooded american. american is (supposed to be) a n... the other (stated) reason that the big five were opposed to 1/32-blood hawaiians leasing land was an almost complete reversal of the first; it was because of "the white part." opponents of the bill said that "a person of one thirty-second hawaiian blo... we can think of this as the inversion of the "one-drop rule" which held that virtually any quantity of "black blood" was enough to make one for "all intents and purposes" black. but annette jaimes points out that, when it comes to indigenous blood, th... even so, how is it that a 1/32 hawaiian is basically a white person? it comes down to the racial essence of the pure hawaiian. the full-blooded hawaiians were seen as helpless, as primitive and unintelligent. they needed white haole's help to make it ... yet, perhaps the most telling argument against part-hawaiian inclusion in the bill was the claim that "you could not tell the difference" between a white and 1/32-blood hawaiian. how could the hhca claim to perpetuate the (now almost fully formed) haw... facing anger and resistance from kanaka maoli to limiting the bill to only "full blooded" hawaiians, the big five and the hawaiian representatives agreed to meet (literally) halfway. they defined the appropriate recipients of homestead leases as hawai... anatomy of the thigh gap feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 1 article 2 recommended citation leboeuf, céline. 2019. “anatomy of the thigh gap.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (1). article 2. 2019 anatomy of the thigh gap céline leboeuf florida international university cleboeuf@fiu.edu leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 anatomy of the thigh gap1 céline leboeuf abstract this article explores the ongoing obsession with the thigh gap ideal in certain pockets of western societies. a thigh gap is the space some women have between their inner thighs when they stand with their feet together. the thigh gap ideal is flaunted on “thinspo” websites, which compile diet and exercise tips and display pictures of fashion models and “real women” in their efforts to inspire women to become thinner. i aim to identify what is wrong with the thigh gap obsession and to suggest a way to overcome it. i begin by describing the genesis of the obsession. i then argue that the relation women in the grip of this preoccupation have to their bodies is an instance of what i call bodily alienation. next, i consider responses to the thigh gap phenomenon. i claim that a viable response, besides broadening standards of beauty, lies in pursuing bodily activities for their own sake. i call the view i articulate “sensualism.” i conclude by discussing the merits of an individual response of the type i advocate, in light of the structural character of women’s oppression through standards of beauty. keywords: embodiment, bodily aesthetics, bodily alienation keep calm and remember the thigh gap. one day i will have a thigh gap. feet together thighs apart. do it for the thigh gap. mind the thigh gap. #thighgap 1 i would like to thank audiences at the mit feminist ontology conference and at the 2018 eastern meeting of the american philosophical association for their questions and comments on this paper. i am also indebted to the feedback i have received from nancy bauer, mariana ortega, linda martín alcoff, kathryn gines, robert bernasconi, and amy allen. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 for the uninitiated, a thigh gap is the space some women have between their inner thighs when they stand with their feet together. the thigh gap is a “thing” for a not insignificant portion of western women.2 it is flaunted on “thinspo” websites, which compile diet and exercise tips, and display pictures of fashion models and “real women” in their efforts to inspire women to become thinner. hence the label “thinspo,” which is short for “thinspiration.” at the same time, there is a backlash against the thigh gap. some voice concerns over the dangers of dieting to achieve a thigh gap: only some women of a healthy weight naturally have one.3 others poke fun at the thigh gap craze: witness the emergence of “mermaid thighs” as a new aesthetic ideal.4 my goal in this paper is to identify what is problematic about the thigh gap phenomenon and other structurally similar phenomena, and to suggest a way to address them.5 first, i describe the genesis of the thigh gap obsession. second, i explain what i find problematic about the pursuit of the thigh gap; i explain that the 2 an online article entitled “15 tips on how to get a thigh gap fast” stresses that “you have to want this. no, strike that—you have to need this. or your thighs will never gap. reach deep inside and choose the gap. anything less is choosing to lose” (https://therealyouisskinny.com/how-to-get-a-thigh-gap-fast; emphases in the original). likewise, the presence of the thigh gap on online platforms such as pinterest, where users can create virtual boards with images and inspirational quotes, speaks to the presence of the thigh gap obsession. for instance, see the “how to get a thigh gap” board here: https://www.pinterest.com/sltro/how-to-geta-thigh-gap/. 3 examples of articles that highlight the dangers in dieting or exercising to achieve a thigh gap include kimberly spector wolf’s (2016) “filling in the facts about thigh gaps” and winnie ma’s (2015) “the truth about the dangerous thigh gap.” 4 a google search of “mermaid thighs” yields a wealth of articles and images taking aim at the thigh gap. as an example of a piece reacting to the thigh gap, consider marissa g. muller’s 2016 article for teen vogue entitled “mermaid thighs are the body-positive trend you want to know about.” 5 i consider “structurally similar phenomena” to be those that concern body parts other than the thighs and are also symbols of slenderness. i believe the “bikini bridge” and “ribcage bragging” to be phenomena that are structurally similar to the thigh gap. for those who are unaware of these less well-known trends, a person with a bikini bridge’s abdomen is so flat that a “bridge” could unite each hip bone (that is, her lower abdomen does not protrude beyond her hipbones), while a person who engages in the recent vogue of “ribcage bragging” is focused on the thinness of her torso. https://therealyouisskinny.com/how-to-get-a-thigh-gap-fast leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 harm involved in the phenomenon can be cashed out in terms of the concept of bodily alienation. third, i canvass some responses that have been given to phenomena like the thigh gap. fourth, i argue that, besides broadening standards of beauty, a remedy to the thigh gap lies in pursuing bodily activities for the sake of pleasure. i call the view i articulate in this section “sensualism.” and, fifth, i conclude by discussing the merits of an individual response of the type i advocate, in light of the structural character of women’s oppression through standards of beauty. before considering the genesis of the thigh gap, i should address two related worries that the reader might have concerning the scope of my argument. first, am i simply discussing anorexia? and are online forums dedicated to the thigh gap simply thinly veiled “pro-ana” groups? second, does investment in the thigh gap fall under the scope of body dysmorphic disorder? let me take these worries in order. first, i should acknowledge that there may be a relation between the thigh gap phenomenon and anorexia: the pursuit of slenderness may precipitate mental illnesses including, but not limited to, anorexia. yet there is a difference between the cases i would like to focus on in this paper and clear-cut cases of mental illness— namely, whether the preoccupation concerns achieving a certain beauty ideal or mastering one’s hunger. as sheila lintott persuasively explains, while beauty “may start many women on the path to developing an eating disorder,” appealing to the category of beauty is insufficient to comprehend what “keeps many on that path” (lintott 2003, 80). lintott invokes the category of the sublime, that is, the mastery of one’s fear of a fearful object, to better conceptualize anorexia; she argues that the mastery of hunger inherent in anorexia gives women who might not otherwise have access to the sublime an experience of it. lintott’s interpretation of anorexia is useful to delimit the scope of my argument. the phenomenon at stake in this paper is one in which the beauty ideal of slenderness still figures in the equation. second, i wish to exclude body dysmorphic disorder from the scope of my argument. i doubt that the recommendation i offer in this paper would be sufficient for someone for whom there is “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.”6 yet, i would argue that while i restrict the scope of my argument from the most extreme cases of dieting, exercise, or preoccupation with bodily appearance, it might still be under the purview of philosophy to propose a solution that could find its way into a therapeutic context. i say this based on my own experience. as a feminist philosopher, i think that it is important to incorporate one’s experience in theorizing and not to pretend that our 6 diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: dsm-5. “obsessivecompulsive and related disorders.” (arlington, va: american psychiatric association publishing, 2013). https://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/book/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 theories come down to earth from an impersonal heaven of ideas. therefore, i would like to indicate that the proposal of sensualism is one i developed in dialogue with a therapist who encouraged me to pay more attention to what i enjoyed in physical activities and less on the payoff these might afford in terms of my appearance. thus, i do not think that professional treatment and philosophical recommendations are mutually exclusive. rather, the severity of the case in question should determine the extent to which my proposal is useful and whether it could be pursued within or outside of a therapeutic context. 1. the genesis of the thigh gap the thigh gap arises at the intersection of at least three currents: 1) a certain form of narcissism women are encouraged to cultivate; 2) the current association of feminine beauty and thinness in large segments of contemporary western culture;7 3) an online visual culture that magnifies this association. this section will describe these currents and allow us to revisit the groundbreaking work of sandra bartky (1990) and susan bordo (1993) on women’s relation to standards of beauty, which, i hope to prove, remains all too relevant today. at the same time, i will consider a critical response to bartky and bordo—namely, research by cressida heyes (2007) on weight-loss dieting, which responds to their analyses by stressing the “enabling” character of efforts to pursue ideals of thinness. to understand the thigh gap phenomenon, let me first appeal to bartky’s idea of “repressive narcissism.” in “narcissism, femininity, and alienation,” bartky calls our attention to the network of corporations that function to regulate bodily aesthetics, which she dubs the fashion-beauty complex. these corporations, whether they manufacture or market products, communicate the message that the female body is a “task, an object in need of transformation” (bartky 1990, 40). according to bartky, women’s efforts to live up to the ever-changing aesthetic norms of the complex result in alienation: “the fashion-beauty complex produces in woman an estrangement from her bodily being: on the one hand, she is it and is scarcely allowed to be anything else; on the other hand, she must exist perpetually at a distance from her physical 7 i am deliberately cautious about making general statements about standards of beauty in the united states and in the west, for that matter. ideals such as the thigh gap appear predominantly attractive to white women. a google search of the words “thigh gap” mostly uncovers pictures of white women. in fact, to discover “thinspo” images of women of color, more specific searches, such as “black thinspo” or “asian thinspo” are required. the racial specificity of the thigh gap obsession finds support in work on the related phenomenon of “pro-ana,” or pro-anorexia, groups. as richardson and cherry (2011) and mccurley (2014) underscore, most participants in pro-ana communities are white. leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 self, fixed at this distance in a permanent posture of disapproval” (bartky 1990, 40). fashion magazines and television shows, for example, communicate this sense of disapproval and a future-directed relation to our bodies: we can truly be fulfilled only once our bodies are transformed. think of the ever-present theme of the makeover. the makeover promises a “new you.” that is, it promises an improved version of the self through diet and exercise, makeup and clothing, and so on. commenting on the images we receive every day, bartky says that they “remind us constantly that we fail to measure up” (bartky 1990, 40). the effort to cultivate the right body, she elaborates, is both narcissistic and repressive: it is narcissistic because it involves an over-investment in the body’s appearance, and it is repressive because the body is always experienced as in need of disciplining. the investment that women who visit thinspo websites have in images of extremely thin women is narcissistic and repressive in bartky’s sense. to achieve the state portrayed in these images, including the thigh gap, requires a fixation on one’s appearance. what is of concern is not how the thighs are experienced from within, whether they feel strong or sore when performing activities, or whether they are a source of pleasure. instead, the contours of the thighs are paramount to the woman invested in her thigh gap. she matches her visual representation of her thighs with the images she browses online, almost as if she were comparing an object separate from her body with other similar items. furthermore, the repressive character of the thigh gap obsession is evidenced in the demanding exercises and diets that are typically required to achieve the look. indeed, the fact that a thigh gap is so difficult to obtain has motivated many of the articles that are critical of the trend. the thigh gap phenomenon is, of course, only one manifestation of repressive narcissism. developing or maintaining one’s thigh gap, at least at first, appears no different from achieving or maintaining silky hair or hairless, smooth skin. all these “maintenance activities” require observing and correcting the body— policing it. that said, the thigh gap seems to be one of those particularly pernicious feminine pursuits insofar as it can be harmful to one’s psychological well-being. in this context, let me comment on the ideal of feminine thinness that underwrites the phenomenon. there is an abundance of philosophical and sociological work on the connection between femininity and thinness in much of contemporary western culture. for example, elizabeth wissinger (2015) draws our attention to the roles the standardization of clothing sizes and the modeling industry played in the emergence of our present-day ideals of thinness.8 she explains that with the standardization of clothing sizes came a standardization of the measurements of fashion models (for 8 in particular, i have in mind wissinger’s (2015) chapter “cover girl: managing the model body.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 instance, weight and height requirements). coupled with the perception that taller and thinner models best showcased clothing, these forms of standardization fueled the normalization of feminine slenderness. wissinger’s work helps us understand one facet of the emergence of the thinness ideal. but to appreciate the psychological mechanisms at stake in thinspo, i think we should return to an earlier analysis of the femininity-thinness connection: susan bordo’s in unbearable weight (1993). there bordo interprets anorexia and everyday preoccupations with thinness as continuous with one another. she attributes gender associations between women and anorexia to at least two factors: first, the “fear and disdain for traditional female roles and social institutions”; second, “a deep fear of ‘the female,’ with all its more nightmarish and archetypal association of voracious hungers and sexual insatiability” (bordo 1993, 155). as an illustration of this conflict, she highlights some anorexic adolescents’ disgust before the female body: they express disdain for “womanly” bodies, and some go so far as to avow the desire to remain children forever (bordo 1993, 155–156). bordo’s analysis highlights the emergence of this conflict in the united states in the twentieth century. newly emancipated women found themselves torn between two contradictory images: they were increasingly seen as productive and capable of mastery, but lurking in the background was the specter of femininity as consumption. this analysis is relevant to thinspo culture, which is marked by the urgent demand to shape the body: a web search of the words “thigh gap” will reveal slogans such as “do it for the thigh gap” or “mind the thigh gap.” these slogans reveal the importance of sculpting the body: the thigh gap is an achievement, which demands dieting and exercise. for example, consider the slogan, featured on the side of the photo of a thigh gap: “rome wasn’t built in one day. don’t give up.”9 bordo’s analysis is relevant to the thigh gap phenomenon, because a preoccupation with a body part like the thighs speaks to a certain fear of female embodiment. the association between feminine beauty and thinness in large portions of contemporary western societies is nothing new. that is why i think we need to dig deeper to understand the emergence of the thigh gap phenomenon. this phenomenon is, in my view, a product of an online culture that intensifies the temptation to narcissism. an online search of “thigh gap” will yield a wealth of images of the prized gap, most of them taken by women involved in thinspo culture. what is striking about these images is that in most of them the woman’s head is mostly obscured. this is a result of the angle in which the photos, mostly selfies, are taken: the images focus on thigh gap, while the face recedes into the background. in some instances, this effect stems from the fact that the camera is placed in front of 9 this photo can be found on the blog whiskey and high heels (https://whiskeyandhighheels.wordpress.com/tag/thinspo/). leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 the woman’s face. these quasi-headless images heighten the self-objectification inherent in thinspo culture. with the disappearance of the face in these images, the viewer of these images loses sight of a singularly expressive body part. there is no smile to discern, no expression in the eyes; the images reduce the woman pictured to one body part. this reductive tendency is echoed in the slogans used to motivate those interested in achieving a thigh gap: “do it for the thigh gap” and “mind the thigh gap,” for instance, elevate the thigh gap to the status of an alien thing, a totem. besides the narcissism that is part and parcel of thinspo culture, it is worth mentioning that this culture also intensifies the fragmentation of the body that earlier feminists have identified in messages concerning feminine beauty. bartky, in particular, sheds light on this fragmentation in her essay “foucault, femininity, and the modernization of patriarchal power.” there she shows how foucault’s idea that the body’s movements become segmented and disciplined applies to feminine embodiment. to illustrate this idea, bartky mentions foucault’s reference to a military manual that carefully decomposes the breakdown of the gestures required of soldiers at drill. this segmentation of the body is manifest in women’s relation to standards of beauty: bartky notes that in our culture, “a woman must stand with stomach pulled in, shoulders thrown slightly back, and chest out” (bartky 1990, 68). in addition to the postural norms, other beauty norms contribute to the body’s fragmentation: as a woman, i need to apply moisturizer to my face, put styling product in my hair, and shave my legs. thus, each body part is subject to its own regimen. similarly, the idea that we can “troubleshoot” the appearance of certain body parts (such as the stomach or “saddlebags”) segments the body. this fragmentation takes on even greater proportions in thinspo culture by breaking up the image of the body to feature only the thigh gap. not only does the composition of the images fragment the body, but the hashtags used on social media featuring the thigh gap shape our responses to the images; they direct our attention to the thigh gap itself, thus excluding other elements of the image from our aesthetic appreciation. altogether, online thinspo culture heightens a narcissistic fixation on thinness through images and associated hashtags or slogans. in connection with the online visual culture surrounding the thigh gap, it important to note that technological advances increase our own options for enhancing images of the body. magazines, of course, have used sophisticated tools to create a thigh gap on a person who does not have one (think of the celebrities whose thighs have been airbrushed to feature the famed gap). furthermore, it is now far easier for professional video editors to edit moving images, thereby broadening the encroachment of enhanced images. worse yet, those equipped with smartphones also make use of an array of apps, such as snapchat, youcam, facetune, and camera+, with which to enhance their images and upload them to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 social media. in fact, the ability to enhance one’s own images might blur the line between a signature distinction in online thinspo culture—namely, the difference between “thinspo” simpliciter, which can include images of celebrities, and “real thinspo,” which refers to the images of “real” women who upload photos of themselves. in fact, users of such apps have reported that they forget what their faces and bodies look like through long-term use of them.10 overall, these technological advances skew our perception of what real bodies look like, thus widening the gap—no pun intended!—between our actual bodily shapes and sizes and our perception of them. thus far, i have identified feminine narcissism, the cult of thinness, and a certain online visual culture as three factors in the genesis of the thigh gap phenomenon. yet i would be remiss if i did not comment on the online communities that also fuel the obsession. take, for example, the website skinny gossip, which features discussions of models’ and celebrities’ physiques and requires signing up in order to post to its forums.11 similarly, pinterest allows thinspo adepts to form communities by liking and sharing each other’s images and motivational messages. in this regard, thinspo communities resemble “pro-ana,” or pro-anorexia, groups. as richardson and cherry (2011) and mccurley (2014) highlight in research on pro-ana online groups, providing community support and monitoring group membership are key features of these communities. despite the communal aspect of thinspo and pro-ana websites, the communities differ, in my view, in that the presence of publicly accessible pages such as pinterest boards suggests that thinspo is more visible to the mainstream than pro-ana forums. moreover, as i have indicated at the beginning of this paper, i think there is a distinction to be made between the psychology of anorexia and that inherent in undertaking a dietary or physical regimen for the sake of slenderness. one of the lessons to take from my analysis is that the thigh gap phenomenon has antecedents in a certain western valorization of feminine slenderness, but our online culture takes this valorization to new “heights” (or shall we say new “lows”?). yet i think there might be more to the temptation to pursue the thigh gap ideal. are we women merely brainwashed into subjecting our bodies to beauty norms? or can more be said of our desire to conform to these norms? what incentivizes us to pursue the thigh gap ideal, for instance? 10 for self-reports concerning the effects of image-enhancing apps and studies of such effects, the reader might consult ruth faj’s (2017) article, “is snapchat making us forget what we look like?” faj’s article also cites the psychologist giuseppe silva’s assessment that virtual images alter our understanding of our bodies. 11 the skinny gossip blog can be accessed at https://www.skinnygossip.com/community/. https://www.skinnygossip.com/community/ leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 to answer these questions, i suggest that we turn to cressida heyes’s work on weight-loss dieting. in self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies, heyes contends that “weight-loss dieting” is not simply “an activity that constructs the docile body,” as bartky and bordo would have it, but “a process of working on the self” (heyes 2007, 64). this process taps into our desire for self-care. in heyes’s assessment: “neither bordo, nor bartky, however, fully theorizes the micro-practices of power that make up the day-to-day experience of weight-loss dieting. this erasure leads them to stress the repressive moments in the discursive construction of the slender body, contra the enabling functions of the dieting process” (heyes 2007, 77). drawing on foucault, heyes shows how the “minutiae of [the practice of weight-loss dieting], its everyday tropes and demands, its compulsions and liberations” help constitute the self (heyes 2007, 64). she devotes much attention to the style of weight-loss leaflets, which she views as the modernday versions of the hupomnemata studied by foucault. for him, these notebooks, written in antiquity, were “key aids to caring for the self” (heyes 2007, 81). writers of hupomnemata compiled quotations, reflections, and reminders to aid themselves in developing specific attitudes and behaviors that would empower them to understand and manage life events as best as possible, rather than to be overwhelmed by them. heyes argues that weight-loss leaflets, of the type distributed by such companies as weight watchers, function like hupomnemata in that they underscore how “the care of the self-implicit in successful dieting will improve one’s self-knowledge, and that knowing oneself is central to weight loss” (heyes 2007, 81). for example, heyes cites a weight-loss leaflet, “a self-discovery puzzle,” which states that “these past few weeks you’ve learned many new things about yourself. . . . weight loss is a continual process of learning about your body, your relationship to food, and the environment you live in” (quoted in heyes 2007, 81). heyes’s account of weight-loss dieting is relevant to understanding certain aspects of thinspo culture. the tips for dieting and exercise that are compiled on thinspo websites and pages could be conceived as the online version of the pamphlets that heyes sees as our modern-day hupomnemata. like the paper pamphlets of weight watchers, these sites and pages collect inspirational material and practical tips for attaining a certain physical ideal. for example, pinterest boards contain thinspo material such as “the drop 10 workout,” which lists 10 exercises to repeat daily to “drop 10 pounds in just two weeks,”12 or, especially tellingly, “five questions [to ask yourself] before eating,”13 which reminds us of the self-knowledge required to sculpt the body. 12 see https://www.pinterest.com/pin/49891508345723564. 13 see https://www.pinterest.com/pin/337770040793779547/. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/49891508345723564 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/337770040793779547/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 in sum, for heyes, the practices inherent in weight-loss dieting constitute a form of care for the self in a socioeconomic situation where there are few other opportunities for women to accomplish this. this claim, in turn, implies that resistance to the culture of weight-loss dieting might not merely consist in a flat-out refusal of the norms that motivate this dieting, as some feminists would have it, but in finding other ways of caring for the self (heyes 2007, 87–88). i would like to take heyes’s conclusion concerning care of the self on board as we explore ways to resist the thigh gap phenomenon. the solution i advance, sensualism, could be considered a way of caring for the self and, as such, as an alternative to the care of the self that weight-loss culture offers. but before examining resistance to the thigh gap, we need to get clear on why the thigh gap trend is problematic. 2. what exactly is problematic about the thigh gap trend? thus far, i have intimated that the thigh gap is a problematic phenomenon. next, i spell out why i hold the body sculpting aimed at achieving the thigh gap aesthetic to be worrisome. first, one could object to the thigh gap phenomenon because of its genealogical origins in patriarchy. as bordo explains in her treatment of anorexia, the ideal of thinness is motivated by anxieties about women’s role in society and “archetypal associations” between femininity and insatiable appetites. the thigh gap ideal fits within these traditional anxieties and associations, as the rhetoric of some thinspo websites highlights. second, following bartky, one could object to the thigh gap obsession because it is a creation of the fashion-beauty complex and an ideal not crafted by women. third, one could object to the thigh gap on the grounds that it is a supererogatory standard of beauty that conflicts with duties to preserve one’s health. for example, archer and ware (2018) contend that there are aesthetic demands in the realm of everyday aesthetics (which includes bodily beauty) which are not reducible to moral demands, and that many of the bodily aesthetic demands to which women strive to conform are supererogatory. applying the concept of aesthetic supererogation to the thigh gap phenomenon would explain why it is not a standard to which we need conform, since the thigh gap demands attempts at weight loss which might conflict with our duties to preserve our health. my view is that the thigh gap is objectionable for all three reasons. i wish, however, to bring out a fourth reason for which the thigh gap is problematic. in line with the third suggestion, i believe that the pursuit of the thigh gap is a form of selfharm. but, unlike the third argument against it, this pursuit is problematic not merely because it may be physically harmful, but because it is psychologically harmful. specifically, the harm i would like to identify is the harm inherent in being alienated from one’s body. i focus on bodily alienation, both because i wish to leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 expand on bartky’s ideas and because my solution to this pursuit, sensualism, borrows from marxian ideas concerning nonalienated labor. on my interpretation, bodily alienation stems from experiencing one’s body overwhelmingly from the outside—that is, as an object. the distinction i introduce here between our experience of our bodies as objects and our experience of our bodies as subjects is inspired by husserl’s distinction between the human body as a material thing (körper) and the human body as it is lived in everyday experience (leib), which is developed in ideas ii (§§35–42). for husserl, the body is conceived as a material thing under the natural scientific attitude. this is the attitude my doctor adopts when she examines my body. the human body as we respond to it in everyday dealings, though, is apprehended in the personalistic attitude. in the context of this discussion, i wish to focus on our capacity to shift perspectives on our bodies, and to experience them more, or less, as objects. on the one hand, when we experience our bodies as objects, we tend to appreciate our bodies as things and compare them to other things; most often we compare our bodies to other human bodies. this is the type of appreciation of the body that is evidenced in the thigh gap phenomenon. on the other hand, when we experience our bodies as subjects, the body tends to disappear from the center of our awareness. consider merleau-ponty’s example in the phenomenology of perception of a blind person who learns how to use a cane to guide her movements (merleauponty 2002, 175–176). she focuses on the cane to understand how to manipulate it and how it can guide her. with time, though, the cane becomes integrated in her body schema, which, according to merleau-ponty, is a structure that guides our movements and allows us to anticipate interactions with external objects.14 there is also the dancer who learns a new set of choreographed dance moves. he puts effort into learning them first by slowly focusing on and executing each move. but with time they become seamlessly integrated in his body schema and feel like second nature. it is important to note that for an object or skill to become incorporated in the body schema, it eventually needs to recede from the subject’s attention.15 in other words, if the cane does not recede from reflective awareness, then it cannot serve to point to other objects. so too, the dancer will not perform his dance with the same grace and mastery if his awareness remains focused on the details of how 14 to be clear, merleau-ponty’s body schema is not a representation of the body; rather, it is meant to “structure our awareness of objects” by carving out a space of possible modes of interacting with the environment (merleau-ponty 2002, 106). 15 kristin zeiler (2013) also develops this point about the phenomenology of skillful activity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 to execute each move.16 my point in invoking the ideas of recession and incorporation into the body schema is to highlight the fact that the reverse is happening in the case of the thigh gap: a certain body part comes to the forefront of awareness. for example, if i am a thigh gap adept, as i put on my jeans, rather than executing the required movements without any explicit awareness of my legs, i may pause and become reflectively aware of them. to borrow the concept of “excorporation,” or reversal of incorporation, from erik malmqvist and kristin zeiler (malmqvist and zeiler 2010; zeiler 2013), i would argue that the thigh gap can be conceived as an excorporated body part—that is, one “expulsed” from our usual unthematic bodily awareness—and that this excorporation, when repeated or sustained, implies bodily alienation. as i have just noted, i am concerned with the thigh gap because of the excessive focus on the body as an object that comes with it. but, beyond the alienation inherent in living one’s body from the outside, there is another layer to the thigh gap phenomenon to which i alluded earlier: to the extent that a woman working to achieve a thigh gap fixates on one part of her body at the expense of others, her body becomes segmented. as merleau-ponty argues, the body is experienced from within as a unity, which is why he likens it to a “work of art” in the phenomenology (merleau-ponty 2002, 175). he calls our attention to the fact that, as the body is lived, bodily parts relate to one another in virtue of the task that the subject is intending to accomplish (merleau-ponty 2002, 172ff). the body’s motor intentionality organizes the movements of each part with respect to the other. for instance, when i aim to catch a ball, my arm extends upwards and my fingers fan out, not because one movement causes another movement mechanistically, but because the catching of the ball calls forth these movements synergistically. by contrast, if we return to the example of a thigh gap adept putting on her jeans, we witness a fragmentation of the body that disrupts a unified experience of the body that is part and parcel of much of our everyday, unreflective bodily experience. 3. responding to the thigh gap obsession how can we undo the alienation inherent in the thigh gap phenomenon? in this section, i will consider some responses to our investment in bodily aesthetics. i do not think that we should reject bodily beauty altogether as a pursuit, but i want 16 there are limits to the claim that the recession of the body from awareness is a condition for not experiencing one’s body as an object. for example, in her essay on pregnancy in on female body experience, iris marion young (2005) explains that during pregnancy the body can be something that we feel and are constantly aware of but that this does not necessarily prevent us from acting or from experiencing a nonobjectified subjectivity. leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 to suggest that solutions that bypass the focus on bodily beauty are also worth considering. but, first, is there a case for maintaining that bodily beauty is worth pursuing? in her recent work on fashion models, cecilie basberg neumann (2017) looks into the creativity that models embody in their work. she begins by presenting the beauty/narcissism double bind that characterizes many women’s experiences with the pursuit of bodily beauty. according to this double bind, we women are encouraged to invest in our appearance, while being at the same time shamed about such an investment (neumann 2017, 381). the double bind thus becomes translated into one of “desire” versus “shame” (neumann 2017, 383). in her argument against resisting this double bind, neumann looks to modeling, a profession that many earlier feminists have dismissed as alienating. she examines the creativity inherent in modeling activity to underscore the value of creating beauty in our lives. thus, she argues that we should not discredit the pursuit of bodily beauty altogether (neumann 2017, 393). such a dismissal would fail to “acknowledg[e] that beauty matters as a major source of creativity” in human existence (neumann 2017, 393). appealing to the work of elaine scarry on beauty, neumann contends that the “urge for beauty” is “an important part of what makes life meaningful” (neumann 2017, 393).17 like neumann, i believe that bodily beauty is worthy of our appreciation. nonetheless, reasserting that beauty matters to a meaningful human life does not yet tell us what to do with stringent standards of beauty, those that motivate the idea of a repressive narcissism. so, what should we do to resist such standards? should we try, as bartky herself suggests at the end of “narcissism, femininity, and alienation,” to embrace a “nonrepressive narcissism” (bartky 1990, 42–44)? there bartky encourages women to develop a feminist “practice” in which “our ideas of the beautiful will have to be expanded and so altered that we will perceive ourselves and one another very differently than we do now” (bartky 1990, 43). such a practice would encourage us to develop “our capacity to apprehend the beautiful” and would release it from “the narrow limits within which it is now confined” (bartky 1990, 44). this would be a form of narcissism, but a nonrepressive one, since it is motivated by the expansion of ideals of beauty. the idea that we should expand our ideals of beauty has been voiced more recently by a. w. eaton and by sherri irvin. eaton (2016) encourages us to resist fat oppression by developing broader “tastes” in bodies and including fat bodies within such tastes. invoking aristotle’s ideas on taste and habituation, she devises a 17 on a related note, ann j. cahill (2003) underscores the value of feminine beautification by arguing that it can be a source of bonding for women and, as such, a “feminist pleasure.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 strategy according to which we would habituate ourselves to develop a “taste in,” or aesthetic appreciation of, fat bodies. this strategy would require that we “produce and widely promote vivid, imaginatively engaging, and artistically interesting representations that celebrate fat bodies and encourage us to see them as likeable and attractive” (eaton 2016, 53). i find that eaton’s work offers a concrete and compelling strategy for loosening the grip that ideals of thinness have on many of us. in a similar vein, irvin (2017) calls on us to resist body oppression through “aesthetic exploration,”—that is, an “aesthetic practice” in which we seek out “aesthetic affordances” across a wide range of embodiments (irvin 2017, 9–13). as a model of aesthetic exploration, irvin describes the experience one might have of one’s hand as one studies it “with open attention to its form and behavior” (irvin 2017, 10). likewise, the aesthetic exploration of bodies would consist in cultivating an open appreciation of different bodies. irvin’s project is motivated by the recognition that “judgments of bodily and facial attractiveness get tied up with judgments about other aspects of the embodied person, resulting in a wide range of differential treatment that—with some exceptions—favors people whose bodies are judged to be attractive over those whose bodies are judged unattractive” (irvin 2017, 3). if “judgments of attractiveness are a significant driver of harm” (irvin 2017, 5), then, in the name of social justice, it behooves us to try to adopt strategies to mitigate this harm. hence her appeal to the idea of “aesthetic exploration,” which would move us to appreciate a wider variety of bodies. some voices in the current body-positivity movement also urge us to reconsider what human beauty looks like. put simply, the aim of this movement is to “reclaim” the body from a culture that only values certain bodies as “worthy and beautiful.”18 the movement encourages those whose bodies do not fit dominant norms to embrace their bodies. the issue, then, is how to define the reasons for embracing one’s body. for some body-positive activists, body positivity involves recognizing that “all bodies are beautiful.” a message like this resembles the ideas espoused by bartky, eaton, and irvin, since it promotes an appreciation of the body as an aesthetic object—regardless of dominant ideals. “all bodies are beautiful” can be thought of as a nonrepressive, yet narcissistic, message, and also dovetails with eaton’s and irvin’s arguments for expanding our aesthetic appreciation of bodies. i bring up the body-positivity movement not only because some of its messages intersect with arguments found in feminist philosophy but also because the movement has taken note of the thigh gap craze. responses to it take such 18 as the bloggers for the ellipses project write, the body-positivity movement contests a culture that “recognizes only white, able-bodied, heterosexual, and thin bodies as worthy and beautiful.” leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 shape as the social media campaign #mermaidthighs or humorous jabs, such as tshirts, bags, and mugs featuring the slogan “not having a thigh gap saved my phone from falling in the toilet.”19 such responses aim to shift the aesthetic norm, though perhaps not always successfully, from thinness to curvaceousness. women who do not meet the thinspo ideal are encouraged to feel beautiful, now that their bodies are accepted. yet, it is important to mention that certain body-positive activists have questioned the emphasis on bodily beauty within the movement. take kaila prins’s contributions on the website everyday feminism. as prins (2015a) explains in “3 reasons why body-positive ad campaigns are less empowering than you think,” the barrage of advertisements featuring “real beauty,” such as those in dove’s campaigns, reinforces the sense that beauty is paramount for women. the advertisements imply that we should broaden the norms for feminine beauty, since we women must first and foremost feel beautiful. according to her, such campaigns do not challenge the longstanding imperative to be beautiful that has dominated women’s lives. the question of how we should relate to our bodies remains. in “3 ways the body-positivity movement could be more body-positive,” prins (2015b) not only discourages us from defining ourselves in terms of beauty, but also advises us to focus on our lives as a whole. for instance, we should focus less on our bodies and more on pursuits like volunteer work or intellectual achievements. but this proposal fails to give due to the importance of the body in our everyday lives. that is what motivates me to propose a way of being towards our bodies that avoids the repressive narcissism bartky depicts and that would complement our efforts to redefine physical beauty. the following section presents my own solution, which i call “sensualism.” 4. sensualism in line with my analysis of the thigh gap phenomenon as a form of alienation, i would like to invoke marx’s account of unalienated labor in an effort to spell out my solution. in “excerpts from james mill’s elements of political economy,” marx indicates that unalienated labor would be “the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life” (marx 1992, 278). it is admittedly difficult to spell out what the “free expression” of the body or bodily activity might consist in. therefore, i would like to focus on the second part of marx’s formula—namely, that unalienated labor would be the enjoyment of life. so too, i wish to argue that an unalienated relation to one’s body would consist in the capacity to enjoy one’s body. 19 the items mentioned can be found at https://boldomatic.com/shop/products/hmgtrw. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 my response to the thigh gap phenomenon and structurally similar pursuits is to encourage those under the grip of them to cultivate physical activities for the sake of bodily pleasure. my version of body positivity, the sensualism i advocate, does not require that we focus less on our bodies, but that we reconsider what it means to focus on the body. what activities could promote an unalienated relation to one’s body? my view is that any bodily activity that can be pursued for the sake of enjoyment, and not for the sake of producing a certain appearance, could count: breathing exercises, yoga, sports, sex, and so on.20, 21 in the case of the thigh gap, cultivating an unalienated relation to one’s body can be achieved by shifting one’s focus from regimens designed to perfect the shape of one’s thighs to activities that are pursued for the sake of pleasure. in short, one can develop a positive relation to one’s body, not simply by expanding one’s ideals of bodily beauty, but by developing an inner appreciation of the body through physical practices. not only does sensualism offer a solution to the alienation inherent in living according to certain feminine norms of beauty, but it is especially well suited to the thigh gap phenomenon, for the following reason. with many of the sensual activities i have mentioned comes the possibility of having a unified, rather than fragmented, experience of the body. this is especially true of the experience one may have while performing sports. for example, the movements of my arm feel like an extension of those of my torso and legs as i leap to catch a basketball. my proposal of sensualism opens the possibility of a more pleasurable relation to one’s body in the following sense: instead of being an object that needs to be sculpted, the body becomes a potential site of pleasure. this is not to say that 20 i should note here that i adopt the label “sensualism”—not “eroticism”—because i think that there is a wide array of activities, including erotic ones but not confined to them, through which one can resist the temptation to self-objectification. note, too, that i include only intentional activities in my list of activities that can be a source of pleasure. while there may be bodily processes (for example, breathing) that accompany bodily activities that are pleasurable, these do not figure under the description of the aim of the activity intended by the subject. the description under which i aim to jog is what matters to my thesis concerning sensualism. i can aim to jog to achieve a thigh gap or for the sheer fun of jogging. this is the distinction i wish to highlight. 21 my argument is not exclusively focused on activities that might promote physical fitness; for instance, i include meditative practices, such as breathing exercises. for excellent discussions of fitness and feminist practice, i direct the reader to the blog fit is a feminist issue (https://fitisafeministissue.com). leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 shedding norms like the thigh gap will guarantee states of bodily pleasure; we are all vulnerable to physical suffering. rather, shedding such norms means letting go of the need to dominate the body, which, in turn, could lay the ground for a less unpleasant experience of one’s body.22 the proposal that sensualism could counter the thigh gap phenomenon allows us to return to heyes’s response to bartky and bordo. sensual practices could contribute to the care of the self that heyes sees as a motivating factor in women’s participation in weight-loss dieting. rather than caring for the self through dieting, we could fill this void through sensual practices. and i would add that seemingly demanding or punishing activities, such as running a marathon, might even contribute to this care of the self. phenomena such as “runner’s high” attest to the pleasure that a strenuous activity might afford. likewise, experiences of “flow”— that is, of intense immersion and enjoyment—may accompany extremely demanding activities.23 care of the self through sensualism may come through many types of activities and not merely those that appear prima facie pleasurable. at this juncture, the reader might object that certain ways of pursuing ideals of slenderness involve an inner focus on the body. recall the model kate moss’s notorious declaration: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” or think of the description some anorexics offer of the pleasure of feeling water in one’s empty stomach. to respond to this objection, i believe that it is useful to return to the scope of this paper’s argument: i am concerned with cases where the motivating factor in a dietary or physical regimen is the achievement of a certain physique. my sensualism proposal aims to counterbalance an external fixation on the body by promoting an inner appreciation of the body. therefore, it is germane to cases where the form of harm is the excessive focus on the body’s appearance—not in the cases where someone seeks to experience the sublime through fasting, to appeal to lintott’s argument. to be clear, sensualism is meant to be not a cure-all but rather a 22 i do not mean to imply that control cannot play a role in an unalienated relation to one’s body. for example, control is part of some physical activities—maintaining balance in gymnastics or pacing oneself in an endurance event. rather, i wish to distinguish between trying to maintain a certain type of domination (the type involved in striving for a demanding aesthetic ideal) and controlling the body (as we do when we master a physical exercise). the difference between control and the domination at issue in the thigh gap phenomenon rests on the aim with which an activity is undertaken. controlling the body may be aimed at accomplishing a skillful activity, while working toward a thigh gap is aimed at achieving a certain bodily shape. 23 for a discussion of “flow” in sports, see swann et al. (2012). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 strategy in addressing the gray area between a healthy relationship to one’s body and a clinically problematic one. another related objection that may be raised concerning my proposal is this: is there any reason to believe that sensualism will replace the pursuit of the thigh gap rather than just happily coexist with it? for example, don’t many of us run for the sake of “runner’s high” and for the sake of weight loss? to answer this question, i would first clarify that if the primary end is the pleasure of fasting, then this falls out of the scope of my argument. second, however, if the pleasure of exercising is part of the picture, then i think that this is a promising personal change, one that ought not be discounted. my goal has been to propose a solution to offset our tendency to live our bodies from the outside. if someone pursues a physical activity for the pleasure it brings her even though she may also have a secondary interest in shaping her appearance, then this is already a victory to be celebrated. likewise, if someone were to pursue one form of exercise for the sake of a certain physical feature while she pursues another form of exercise for the sheer fun of it, then this too would represent an advance on relating solely to one’s body as an object of beauty to be perfected. thus, i grant that sensualism and the pursuit of the thigh gap might coexist. yet, i would counter that the very possibility that sensualism may figure in a person’s relationship to her body would mark a lesser degree of alienation. i would add that a person need not fully commit to rejecting the thigh gap before embracing sensualism. i am optimistic that when someone incorporates sensualism in her life, there will be a shift in her understanding of why she undertakes different physical activities and that this shift might propel further positive ones. before i turn to the challenges that might be faced in embracing sensualism, i should say a few words about another positive aspect to turning one’s focus away from sculpting one’s physical appearance. besides the physical enjoyment i have emphasized, such a shift may also bring a personal sense of empowerment, because feelings of pride and resourcefulness often come from cultivating a new way of being and introducing a positive change in one’s life. this has certainly been my experience. 5. individual practices and structural oppression let me close by responding to a worry that the reader might have concerning the emancipatory potential of individual practices, such as the sensual activities i envision, given the structural character of the oppression that beauty standards like the thigh gap perpetuate. to understand this structural character, it is useful to pause for a moment on what the structuralist pierre bourdieu calls “symbolic violence.” symbolic violence differs from “overt violence” in that this form of violence presupposes of those subjected to it a “complicity which is neither a passive submission to an external constraint nor a free adherence to values” (bourdieu and wacquant 1992, 168). in leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 my eyes, thinspo is a form of symbolic violence. women subscribe to thinspo ideals neither because women are physically coerced nor because they freely choose those ideals. they are caught in an intermediate position, in that they adhere to the ideals because they are socialized to do so and because the penalties for not conforming to them are high. (think of the stigma women in the west face when they do not conform to standards for female body hair.) the thigh gap and other related phenomena constitute ideals that many women believe they freely embrace but are in fact seduced into adopting in our culture. women appear locked in a cycle in which they are incentivized to cultivate a certain appearance; at the same time, cultivating this appearance maintains it as a norm. the problem this paper has sought to address is how to break out of this vicious cycle, and i have argued that sensualism offers a way out of the demands of beauty work. but can an individual response remedy a structural issue? the incentive to pursue sensual activities, i have suggested, lies in having a more pleasurable relation to one’s body. but does this incentive trump those promised by social recognition? and if not, can this situation be changed? my view is that the possibility for personal change can be increased by one’s being part of a smaller community, a community of resistance. to defend this point, i draw on fahs and delgado’s (2011) “the specter of excess: race, class, and gender in women’s body hair narratives,” which analyzes an experiment in which participants, collegeaged women from a course on women and health, were asked not to shave and to record their feelings about their bodies. fahs and delgado found that “although the original intent of the experiment was to challenge social norms and subvert compulsory shaving demands, the assignment ultimately created a new social norm within the classroom” (2011, 23). in fact, the students who had originally decided to opt out of the experiment eventually decided to join the other women who were not shaving, since they felt left out. in other words, not shaving became the social norm within this community. not only that, but the experiment encouraged some of the women to continue not shaving after it was over (23). and regardless of whether they returned to shaving or not, the women’s post-experiment responses to the surveys “indicate that even temporary and purposeful breaks from social norms can powerfully socialize women into an altered understanding of how much they ‘choose’ to do things such as shave, wear makeup, or conform to standard presentations of femininity” (fahs and delgado 2011, 21). the experiment served to raise awareness of the norms that the women subscribed to for the most part without thinking. the thrust of the essays collected in embodied resistance is that countercultures, small communities that resist social norms, can support those who challenge them. and though the example of body hair concerns the broadening of standards of beauty, there is still a lesson to be learned from it that is applicable to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 sensualism—namely, that the incentive to challenge social norms is bolstered when we come together. or, to put this point negatively, the promise of a sensual relation to their bodies might, alone, be insufficient to motivate some women to give up the prizes they win from conforming to standards of beauty. although my philosophy of sensualism concerns one’s inner relation to one’s body and might, therefore, appear to be merely individual, there is no reason to believe that we cannot make the value of sensualism a communal matter. this philosophy may take hold when we form communities that encourage a sensual relation to our bodies. our task should not be to elevate any particular physique as an ideal but to enshrine sensualism as a social norm. in this regard, it is a viable response to a structural problem if we think of it as a collective practice. sensualism could be a rallying point for women and, as such, a feminist practice. references archer, alfred, and lauren ware. 2018. “beyond the call of beauty: everyday aesthetic demands under patriarchy.” monist 101 (1): 114–127. bartky, sandra. 1990. femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. bordo, susan. 1993. unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body. berkeley: university of california press. bourdieu, pierre, and loïc wacquant. 1992. an invitation to reflexive sociology. chicago: university of chicago press. cahill, ann j. 2003. “feminist pleasure and feminine beautification.” hypatia 18 (4): 42–64. eaton, a. w. 2016. “tastes in bodies and fat oppression.” in body aesthetics, edited by sherri irvin: 37–59. oxford: oxford university press. ellipses project. 2019. “body positivity.” ellipses project (blog). accessed february 24. https://ellipsesproject.wordpress.com/101-resources/body-positivity. fahs, breanne, and denise delgado. 2011. “the specter of excess: race, class, and gender in women’s body hair narratives.” in embodied resistance: challenging the norms, breaking the rules, edited by chris bobel and samantha kwan, 13–25. nashville, tn: vanderbilt university press. faj, ruth. 2017. “is snapchat making us forget what we look like?” vice. november 20. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/8x5jm5/is-snapchatmaking-us-forget-what-we-look-like-body-image. heyes, cressida. 2007. self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. oxford: oxford university press. https://ellipsesproject.wordpress.com/101-resources/body-positivity leboeuf – anatomy of the thigh gap published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 husserl, edmund. [1952] 1989. ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. translated by richard rojcewicz and andré schuwer. dordrecht: kluwer academic publishers. irvin, sherri. 2017. “resisting body oppression: an aesthetic approach.” feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (4). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.4.3. lintott, sheila. 2003. “sublime hunger: a consideration of eating disorders beyond beauty.” hypatia 18 (4): 65–86. ma, winnie. 2015. “the truth about the dangerous thigh gap.” her campus, february 26. https://www.hercampus.com/health/mental-health/truthabout-dangerous-thigh-gap-obsession. malmqvist, erik, and kristin zeiler. 2010. “cultural norms, the phenomenology of incorporation, and the experience of having a child born with ambiguous sex.” social theory and practice 36 (1): 133–156. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23558595. marx, karl. 1992. early writings. translated by rodney livingstone and gregor benton. london: penguin classics. mccurley, kay a. s. 2014. “beauty through control: forming pro-anorexic identities in digital spaces.” ma thesis, university of massachusetts, amherst. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2002. phenomenology of perception. translated by colin smith. london: routledge. muller, marissa g. 2016. “mermaid thighs are the body-positive trend you want to know about.” teen vogue, august 23. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/mermaid-thighs-trend-hashtag-socialmedia-thigh-gap. neumann, cecilie basberg. 2017. “a dangerous subject: the fashion model and the beauty/narcissism double bind.” hypatia 32 (2): 380–396. prins, kaila. 2015a. “3 reasons why body-positive ad campaigns are less empowering than you think.” everyday feminism, may 5. http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/problem-with-body-positive-ads/. ———. 2015b. “3 ways the body-positivity movement could be more body-positive.” everyday feminism, january 14. http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/more-body-positive/. richardson, abigail, and elizabeth cherry. 2011. “anorexia as a choice: constructing a new community of health and beauty through pro-ana websites.” in embodied resistance: challenging the norms, breaking the rules, edited by chris bobel and samantha kwan, 119–129. nashville, tn: vanderbilt university press. swann, christian, richard j. keegan, david piggott, and lee crust. 2012. “a systematic review of the experience, occurrence, and controllability of flow states in elite sport.” psychology of sport and exercise 13 (6): 807–819. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 wissinger, elizabeth. 2015. this year’s model: fashion, media, and the making of glamour. new york: new york university press. wolf, kimberly spector. 2016. “filling in the facts about thigh gaps.” livestrong.com, july 5. https://www.livestrong.com/article/1012082-fillingthigh-gaps/. young, iris marion. 2005. on female body experience: “throwing like a girl” and other essays. oxford: oxford university press. zeiler, kristin. 2013. “a phenomenology of excorporation, bodily alienation, and resistance: rethinking sexed and racialized embodiment.” hypatia 28 (1): 69–84. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01305.x. céline leboeuf is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at florida international university. her current research lies at the intersection of continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the critical philosophy of race. her forthcoming papers include: “ ‘what are you?’: addressing racial ambiguity” (in critical philosophy of race), “the embodied biased mind” for an introduction to implicit bias: knowledge, justice, and the social mind, and “the legacy of simone de beauvoir” for the oxford handbook of feminist philosophy. https://www.livestrong.com/article/1012082-filling-thigh-gaps/ https://www.livestrong.com/article/1012082-filling-thigh-gaps/ feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation cull, matthew j. 2019. “against abolition.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (3). article 4. 2019 against abolition matthew j. cull university of sheffield mcull117@gmail.com cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 against abolition1 matthew j. cull abstract analytic metaphysics of gender has taken an ameliorative turn towards ethical and political questions regarding what our concept of gender ought to be and how gendered society should be structured. abolitionism about gender, which claims that we ought to mandate gender out of existence, has therefore seen renewed interest. i consider three arguments for abolitionism from radically different perspectives: haslanger’s simple argument, escalante’s gender nihilism, and okin’s argument from ideal theory. i argue that none of the above manage to establish the desirability of abolitionism and that we should be wary of the abolitionist position, as it imperils trans lives. keywords: trans theory, feminist philosophy, social philosophy, political philosophy, metaphysics of gender, social ontology 1. gender abolitionism abolitionism about gender has a venerable history within both feminist and trans thought. thinkers in these traditions of a revolutionary bent suggest that we ought to get rid of gender. what would getting rid of gender look like? it depends which theorist one asks. for some feminists coming out of the radical tradition, gender is a hierarchical system of domination, with women defined as the oppressed group in that structure and men as the dominant group.2 thus the elimination of gender is achieved simply by the destruction of the hierarchical system that constitutes genders. for others, not least those like donna haraway and some in the queer tradition, the elimination of gender is to be achieved by undermining and destabilising the supposed binary of man/woman. without a clear distinction 1 i would like to thank jennifer saul, steve makin, sally haslanger, emma bolton, rosa vince, robbie morgan, stephanie kapusta, nadia mehdi, lewis brooks, kayleigh doherty, will hornett, jacqueline davies, audiences at the universities of sheffield, oxford, and birmingham, and public audiences around sheffield for all of their helpful comments on the issues raised in this paper. 2 see, for instance, monique wittig (2017) and shulamith firestone (1971) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 between the two categories, one might think, the idea of gender becomes superfluous and might wither away in a world of androgyny. however, regardless of whether such programs could be successful, or indeed if they are plausible at all, i suggest that we first ought to ask whether the abolition of gender is desirable.3 abolitionism is an ameliorative position, and thus we ought to ask whether or not it serves our moral and political purposes first and foremost. if we judge that it does not, as i shall argue, then questions as to its feasibility never arise.4 2. haslanger’s simple argument why might one be an abolitionist about gender? sally haslanger provides us with a simple argument. suppose that the categories man and woman are understood, as haslanger suggests, in the following way: s is a woman iffdf s is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and s is “marked” as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction. s is a man iffdf s is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and s is “marked” as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (haslanger 2012, 230) on such an account, gender is a constitutively constructed by a particular hierarchical societal structure based on presumed sex. one cannot make reference to one’s gender without also making reference to one’s position in that structure, for one’s gender is simply that position in the structure. to be a woman on this account is to be systematically subordinated because of the way one is observed or imagined to be by others. in this sense there is a conceptual, or analytic link 3 in this paper, i will only address complete abolitionism about gender—the complete elimination of all genders from society. positions that attempt to undermine the political significance of gender in one way or another, whilst maintaining the existence of gender categories for identification or other uses, are, to my mind, mislabelled when called abolitionist. for instance, the xenofeminist movement argues for “abolitionism” in the form of the proliferation of gender categories (hester 2018)! i take it that the reader will sympathise with me in suggesting that xenofeminists and others like them are not abolitionists proper. 4 for a powerful argument to suggest that gender abolitionism (in its gender nihilist form) is simply infeasible, see williams (2016). cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 between gender and subordination. the argument for the abolition of gender, then, is quite simple: 1a. we ought to eliminate oppression/subordination/injustice. 1b. being a woman is, by definition, to be subordinated/oppressed/subject to an injustice/harmed. 1c. thus we ought to eliminate the category woman.5 1d. getting rid of the category woman requires abolishing gender in its entirety. 1e. thus we ought to eliminate gender. premise 1a seems eminently plausible, whilst 1b is just the relevant aspect of haslanger’s definition of woman.6 premise 1d seems a little more tendentious, but just to make it seem somewhat plausible for the moment, when thinking of gender as a hierarchy, note that it seems hard to see how the privileged class (man) could exist without a subordinated class (woman). given that, at least on the haslangerian account set out thus far in this chapter, all there is to gender are those two categories, then by eliminating both men and women, we eliminate gender. the inference from 1a and 1b to 1c is fairly simple—if being a member of the category woman is itself an injustice,7 a kind of oppression or subordination, then we ought to eliminate it. similarly, the inference from 1c and 1d to 1e is a simple application of necessary means to an end reasoning. thus gender—insofar as it defines genders in a hierarchical system of domination—ought to be abolished. mari mikkola has criticised this argument by, in effect, rejecting 1b: abolitionist accounts take womanhood to be by definition tied to oppression so that it is not possible to be a woman and not be (in some sense) oppressed. re-evaluative accounts do not take being a woman per se to be oppressive. instead, they recognize that our social circumstances create environments where women are viewed and treated in ways that 5 obviously this ought not to be read as “getting rid of the people who are currently in the social position defined by the category woman” but rather as “getting rid of the social position defined by the category woman.” 6 i also included oppression, being subject to an injustice, as i suspect that the success of the argument does not turn on the particular kind of wrong that is conceptually connected to being a woman. we will later see a version of the argument that will attempt to make a conceptual link between gender and harms. 7 for a detailed account of what we might call “ontic injustices,” injustices in virtue of being treated as a member of a given category, see jenkins (2016) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 disadvantage them—perhaps by associating with women some traits and using this association to ground unjust social arrangements. it is possible to be a woman and yet not be oppressed, provided that we have successfully altered how women are viewed and treated. so, on the former view, gender justice would dismantle unjust social hierarchies, thus doing away with women and men; on the latter, gender justice would dismantle such hierarchies while retaining women and men without (say) the earlier oppressive association in place. (mikkola 2016, 125) suppose that one does not think that woman is analytically connected to oppression, contra 1b; if so, then as mikkola rightly points out, the motivation for abolitionism disappears.8 why might one doubt that woman is conceptually connected to subordination or oppression? one might simply suggest that it is conceptually possible for women to not be oppressed on the basis of their gender. thus 1b need not, therefore, be endorsed. the person committed to 1a, but not wishing to endorse 1b, ought to strive for a society where this possible case of womanhood free from oppression or subordination is actualised. how ought we to determine the status of 1b? mikkola turns to anecdotal evidence of students who say that the conception of gender it suggests is quite alien to them. they tell her “time and again that the abolitionist strategy aims to eradicate something that seemingly need not be eradicated. as they see it, ‘the feminist revolution’ need not do away with gender, and being a woman or a man is not primarily the problem—the real problem is how people are viewed and treated” (mikkola 2016, 125–126). however, as haslanger (2012) and jennifer saul (2006) have argued, simply because a gender concept is unintuitive, it does not necessarily mean that the concept is not the one (if indeed there is a only single concept) which is operative, or that the societal structure (if indeed there is only a single structure) that it picks out is not in operation.9 indeed, in response to the kind of cases that mikkola’s students raise, the haslangerian abolitionist can simply bite the bullet and insist that putative examples of women who are not oppressed or subordinated on the basis of their gender are not women. interestingly then, we seem to be at something of an impasse—for every example purporting to show that woman is not conceptually connected to subordination, the abolitionist will simply bite the bullet 8 as she rightly notes, one can still think that women are oppressed on the basis of gender in our society (indeed all current and past societies) given this rejection. it is merely that being a woman need not entail oppression or subordination. 9 this is not to say that there are no problems from counterintuitiveness in the area here—see saul (2006, 133). cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 and argue that such examples are not women, no matter how counterintuitive that bullet-biting case is. the status of 1b, therefore, seems vexed.10 nonetheless, i wish to sidestep this question for the moment by suggesting, following haslanger in a slightly different turn in her thought, that even if the current conception of gender, or structure of society, were one that analytically linked oppression with the concept or category of woman, nonetheless, we might make gender and genders anew in a way that does not have that conceptual connection (haslanger 2012, 244–245).11 we might, as it were, perform conceptual engineering—editing our concepts (and our society in line with these new concepts) in order to better suit our purposes.12 thus we might think that even if gender, understood hierarchically, with an analytic link between woman and oppression ought to be abolished, this does not entail that gender should be abolished entirely. instead, there lies the opportunity to change gender, according to our various aims and purposes. we could (re)make gender in a way as to not be analytically linked to oppression. 13 3. gender nihilism however, we should not so quickly reject abolitionism. alyson escalante’s work, despite coming out of a very different tradition, provides the abolitionist with a powerful response to the conceptual engineering move. escalante produces a gender nihilist position on gender. the gender nihilist endorses a view of gender that has some similarities to the haslangerian view sketched above: 10 i admit that i find such a strategy unpalatable. as saul (2006, 133) remarks, we have the ability to use gender terminology relatively competently, and it seems odd to think that the operative concepts of gender are so incredibly alien to our manifest concepts as to allow huge amounts of bullet biting of this sort. 11 indeed, haslanger is quite tentative in her suggestion that the concepts she puts forward as a part of her project are actually operative in society. 12 for an excellent survey of this new area of philosophical inquiry, see cappelen (forthcoming). there are also parallels to glasgow’s (2006) racial reconstruction here. 13 as noted above in footnote 3, one might think of this as a form of abolitionism. after all, as a reviewer has pointed out, (if the haslangerian description of society is right) this is abolishing our current referent for our concept of gender. however, given that we are then replacing it with new genders via conceptual engineering and political work, it is not a form of complete abolitionism, which i have been focusing on in this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 the gender nihilist says “i am a woman” and means that they are located within a certain position in a matrix of power which constitutes them as such. (escalante 2016) whilst the gender nihilist view of gender does not insist on merely two genders arranged hierarchically, but rather a number of different genders linked by diffing power relations, it does insist that power, and therefore harms, are conceptually linked to the existence of gender categories. the gender nihilist thus recommends the rejection of gender categories entirely. escalante also has a response to my suggestion that we need only (re)make gender differently, in order to escape the conceptual link to oppression: all we do when we expand gender categories is to create new more nuanced channels through which power can operate. we do not liberate ourselves; we ensnare ourselves in countless and even more nuanced and powerful norms. each one a new chain. (escalante 2016) in conceptually linking gender categories to power, rather than oppression, injustice, or subordination, escalante makes it much more difficult to imagine the category absent that feature. whilst it seems relatively easy to imagine a case of a woman who, by chance, is not oppressed on the basis of her gender, it seems much harder to imagine a case of a woman free from the effects of power with respect to her gender. indeed, what would the category woman look like, were it not linked to power in some way? however, i suggest that this argument moves a little quickly from the link between gender categories and power to the link between power and harm, and therefore entails a conceptual link between the existence of gender categories and harm. take the following passage: to use this terminology is not hyperbolic; the violence of gender cannot be overestimated. each trans woman murdered, each intersex infant coercively operated on, each queer kid thrown onto the streets is a victim of gender. the deviance from the norm is always punished. even though gender has accounted for deviation, it still punishes it. expansions of norms is an expansion of deviance; it is an expansion of ways we can fall outside a discursive ideal. infinite gender identities create infinite new spaces of deviation which will be violently punished. gender must punish deviance, thus gender must go. (escalante 2016) cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 whilst escalante is correct to emphasise the violence experienced by those who deviate from gender norms, note that the world need not be this way. let us grant for the moment that power is conceptually connected to gender and that power inevitably generates norms of behaviour. even so, there’s nothing to suggest that violent punishment necessarily follows from deviation from the norm. we can imagine a society where trans women are not murdered, intersex children are not coercively operated on, and queer children are not thrown out onto the streets. indeed, is that not precisely what we ought to be fighting for? alternatively, another response we might also suggest is that the proliferation of gender categories does in fact create more and more space for acceptable behaviour. that is, that escalante is wrong to suggest that infinite gender identities create infinite new spaces of deviation. rather, they widen out the space of permissible behaviour. imagine a society wherein a radical pluralism about gender categories was adopted, such that new genders were adopted all of the time, to the desires of the individual members of the society. suppose one were in a “deviant space” according to the gender concepts of that society, excluded and disapproved of because one did not fit into any of the current concepts. it seems that one could merely innovate, create a new category that did include you, in order to no longer exist in a “deviant space.” this itself does not decrease the number of acceptable ways to exist in society but rather increases them. of course, in societies that do not operate under this kind of radical gender pluralism, where new gender concepts are readily accepted by the society as a whole, there are going to be practical questions about making one’s new concept widely accepted. however, i suggest that this is not an obstacle to increasing the acceptable ways to exist in society that stems from the proliferation of gender categories; rather, it is an obstacle that stems from obstacles to that proliferation. this is not to say that a personal rejection of gender is illegitimate. an individual’s rejection of gendered life as a personal identification—whether they identify as agender, otherwise, or not at all—is, i suggest, a perfectly reasonable response. nonetheless, i suggest that arguing for society-wide abolition of gender is misguided. escalante comes to a very similar conclusion in her later addendum to the anti-manifesto, drawing on the work of maria lugones, where she writes that “this piece was not meant to tell anyone how to think about gender, it was the result of a collective analysis by a specific group of people which came to conclusions that allowed us to understand our lives. if you don’t like that understanding, feel free to discard it. i do not ask or demand you agree with me” (escalante 2015). 4. transgender identities and abolitionism i have argued that one need not endorse abolitionism, even if one thinks that gender is conceptually linked to oppression, or indeed harm. are there, on the other feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 hand, positive reasons to reject abolitionism? i suggest that one of our moralpolitical purposes ought to be to maintain the existence of gender, in order to do justice to trans people’s gender identifications. again, the argument is simple: 2a. the abolition of the category woman in a society entails that one cannot identify as a woman in that society. 2b. trans women identify as women (and trans women in future societies will continue to identify as women). 2c. if one cannot identify as a woman in a society, then trans women are wrong to identify as women in that society. 2d. thus a society in which the category woman is abolished misgenders trans people. 2e. thus we ought not seek the abolition of the category woman.14 i take it that 2a and 2b are obvious, and that 2c straightforwardly follows from them.15 stephanie kapusta defines misgendering trans women as follows: i take misgendering to mean something broader than simply the use of male pronouns, or of designations associated with being male or with masculinity in referring to transgender women. here, the notion includes the use of gender terms that exclude transgender women from the category woman, or that hierarchize that category in a way that marginalizes transgender women. (kapusta 2016, 502) premise 2d uses the notion of misgendering as excluding from the category. quite simply, the thought is that, given that in a genderless society there is no category woman, trans women are excluded from membership of that category. misgendering, as kapusta has argued, and is widely accepted, is a wrong, thus i take it that 2e follows naturally from 2d. we ought to conclude, therefore, that gender abolitionists risk a transphobic conclusion that we should not endorse. a note of clarification: the language of “exclusion,” whilst being a useful heuristic for distinguishing this kind of misgendering from that associated with hierarchies within categories, is unfortunately apt for giving rise to confusions. one might, for instance, think that it is odd to talk of being excluded from a category where that category does not exist, as is the case in our argument against 14 i take it that this argument runs no matter which gender category is substituted in for woman here. 15 one might deny 2b by denying the claim that trans women will continue to identify as women in future societies—we will return to this question section 5. cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 abolitionism. however, not only do i think that a clearer formulation can be given, i suggest that this clearer formulation allows for the analysis of another case of misgendering which we would like to capture. this clearer formulation is quite simple: x is misgenderedexclusionary iff x sincerely identifies as a member of a gender category y, but some party treats x as not being a member of that y. this analysis of misgendering does not presuppose the existence of a gender category from which one is excluded, thus avoiding the potential confusion that arises with respect to the language of exclusion. moreover this analysis is not ad hoc—paradigmatic cases of misgendering are the cases of a nonbinary people who sincerely identify as a gender other than man or woman, but who live in a society with a binary gender system, and who are treated not as nonbinary but as either a man or a woman. here we need an analysis of misgendering that allows that the category “from which they are being excluded” does not exist.16 what ultimately matters is the harms that are done in denying that a trans woman is a woman, that a trans man is a man, that a nonbinary person is nonbinary and so on. these wrongs (kapusta lists psychological, moral, and political) do not presuppose that the category a person identifies as a member of exists. indeed, given what kapusta says about one of the moral wrongs of misgendering, we may think that the abolition of the category even deepens some of the wrongs of misgendering: transgender persons are denied the discursive resources to participate in furthering society's understanding of their own gender and—i would add—of gender more generally. . . . this harm may be tied to an imposed, “authoritative” interpretation of the subject's experience that constitutes her social identity. at the very least, it contributes to robbing transgender women of the power to express their own senses of self, and of the opportunity to develop a language and conceptual resources that articulate those senses of self. (2016, 504–505) 16 we might also think about dembroff’s notion of ontological oppression here, specifically its second formulation: “the structures and practices within a social context can unjustly fail to recognize or construct certain kinds” (dembroff, forthcoming, 5). we might think that just as when nonbinary people face ontological oppression due to the failure of actual societies to recognize or construct appropriate gender kinds for those nonbinary people, trans men and women face ontological oppression in a society that abolishes gender (see, for another way of thinking about this issue, jenkins [2016]). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 lacking the category in its entirety, the hermeneutical injustice of misgendering is therefore worsened! in short, that the category fails to exist is no obstacle to misgendering occurring, and indeed, may even make the worry more pressing. there is a slightly different version of the argument that we might also make: 3a. the abolition of the category woman in a society entails that the society and those who advocate for it see identifying as a woman in that society as undesirable. 3b. trans women identify as women, and for many it is an extremely important part of their identities. 3c. if one seeks a society in which identifying as a woman is undesirable, then one seeks a society in which it is undesirable for trans women to have an extremely important part of their identities. 3d. if one seeks a society in which it is undesirable for trans women to have an extremely important part of their identities, then one seeks a society in which trans women are unwelcome. 3e. we should not seek a society in which trans women are unwelcome. 3f. thus we ought not seek the abolition of the category woman.17 premise 3a here is fairly simple—the underlying thought is that the abolitionist thinks that gender is an undesirable feature of the social world and that identifying as a member of a gender category is therefore undesirable.18 premises 3b and 3c meanwhile seem fairly plausible assumptions to make. premise 3d is motivated by the thought that if one is asked to give up an important and valued part of one’s identity for entry into some space, one is going to feel unwelcome in that space. i take it that no serious member of this debate will deny 3e. not only does a society that is unwelcoming to trans women seem morally objectionable, even advocating for that society as a part of a feminist movement seems to suggest that trans 17 again, i take it that this argument runs no matter which gender category is substituted in for woman here. 18 after all, getting rid of gender means getting rid of it at both the personal and the structural level (if such a distinction is possible). i’m not sure i can make sense of an abolitionist (in the strong, complete sense i have been talking about throughout this paper) who desires that we get rid of gender completely but still thinks that individual gender identifications are desirable, or at least not undesirable. of course, one might suggest maintaining gender identity without gender as class or structure (see jenkins 2016), but of course, whilst this abolishes one aspect of gender, it is no longer gender abolitionist in the sense of this paper. cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 women are not welcome in that movement. it seems, therefore, that we should not be abolitionists about gender. 5. a note on eschatological considerations i can imagine a reader who, upon reading the above, suggests that its antiabolitionist conclusion is all very well, but that nonetheless, the ideal society is one that is free of gender. take, for instance, susan moller okin’s position. okin, working in the “ideal theory” tradition, suggests that society, in its ultimate just state, would not be one that included gender. she writes: gender, with its ascriptive designation of positions and expectations of behaviour in accordance with the inborn characteristic of sex, could no longer form a legitimate part of the social structure, whether inside or outside the family. (okin 1989, 103) suppose that one thought that we ought to try to make society in such a way as to match the ideal state set forward by ideal theory, and following okin, one thought that the ideal state is one that lacks gender. it seems that in such a situation, one ought to adopt a certain kind of abolitionism about gender. note, however, that this need not be an immediate abolitionism about gender—one might, like okin, seek to “minimize” gender whilst recognising it currently, in order to protect those whose lives are made vulnerable by gender, before eventually moving to a genderless society (okin 1989, chapter 8).19 however, for this version of abolitionism to be attractive, not only do we have to be persuaded of the relevancy of ideal theory for political action, but we also have to be persuaded by arguments to suggest that the ideal state lacks gender. here the ideal-theory abolitionist faces a dilemma: a genderless society entails either a failure to do justice to trans people’s gender self-identifications or 19 it has been suggested to me by helpful audiences at the universities of sheffield and oxford that okin herself may not have been committed to complete abolition of gender (see footnote 3 above). instead, we might interpret her as happy with the maintenance of “genders” in society so long as they do not have significance for the distribution of goods and rights. returning to questions covered in sections 2 and 3 above, it is an interesting question as to whether these would still count as genders at all on okin’s understanding of gender, given that her understanding of gender seems to conceptually link genders to particular distributions of goods and rights. if this is so, then so much the worse for complete abolitionists looking to rely on ideal theory for support of their position, as she would have been fine with the appropriately engineered “genders” at stake in this debate. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 the absence of (non-agender) trans people in that society.20 neither of these conclusions is desirable and together make it look as if an ideal society ought not to be abolitionist. why might a genderless society fail to respect trans people’s identifications? we have already seen an argument to this effect—2a–2e. trans people in a society where gender has been abolished will (aside from agender people) be misgendered, their identifications rendered moot. one might suggest that the ideal theory abolitionist might avoid this worry by denying 2b: 2b. trans women identify as women (and trans women in future societies will continue to identify as women). they might deny 2b by claiming that in their ideal future society, trans women (for example) no longer identify as women. however, this spikes them on the other horn of the dilemma. after all, denying 2b on these grounds looks a lot like denying that there are trans women in one’s ideal state—after all, if trans women are those people who were not assigned female at birth but who identify as women, then in a society where no one identifies as women, there are no trans women. this will also hold for other trans people, aside from agender people. therefore, save for agender people, it looks like trans people need to be eliminated from society in order for the abolitionist position to be saved. one might, perhaps innocently, ask what the problem with the absence of trans people from society is—what’s so bad about this horn of the dilemma? why should we be worried about the elimination of (non-agender) trans people? well, for one, there are potentially violent implications here, methods of elimination which are enacted upon trans people around the world on an everyday basis, though i take it that anyone who has followed this paper beyond its first page will automatically reject those. what might a nonviolent elimination of gender and trans identities look like? how on earth could one reach a society where trans people no longer identify as member of genders, and do so happily? if such a society is even possible, it seems like getting there is going to be extremely difficult, and no abolitionist has provided even the beginnings of a story as to how we might get there. 20 it would also entail either the failure to respect cis people’s identifications or the absence of cis people from that society. i focus on trans people for two reasons: first, they find themselves in the most vulnerable position with respect to gender, and second, i myself am trans and wish to foreground trans people’s concerns in debates over gender, where we have often been either ignored, fetishised, or demonised. cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 6. colonialism there are additional concerns here specific to advocating for abolition from within a colonial context. what should we think about the racist colonial implications of a (we ought to note, mostly white) abolitionist movement mandating, for example, two-spirit identities out of existence?21 there is a history of violence at work here that must be reckoned with. those that colonists called “berdache” suffered and continue to suffer from the effects of colonisation. scott morgensen here describes merely one such act of brutal violence: early colonists recurrently exacted a terrorizing sovereign right of death in order to educate native people in the new colonial moral order. while interpreting peter martyr's account of vasco nunez de balboa's 1513 expedition in panama, jonathan goldberg notes that balboa's victorious arrival after battle at the house of the indigenous king was framed by his condemnation and elimination of what he perceived to be gender and sexual transgression. on reportedly finding the king's brother and about forty other men dressed in women's apparel or living in sexual relationships, balboa threw them out to be eaten alive by his dogs. (morgensen 2011, 64–65) as gary bowen succinctly put it, native people “have been murdered, burned, beaten, hanged, imprisoned, flogged, stripped, humiliated, and otherwise forced into compliance with the dominant standards of sexuality or exterminated when they resisted” (quoted in feinberg 2016, 64–65). gender and sexual “deviance” that was found by the colonists was (and is) like much of native cultures, subject to a program of extermination. this has occurred in innumerable ways—not least in the white schools where native children were educated and deprived of their culture in such a way as to “kill the indian in him, and save the man” (pratt 1973). this attempted destruction of native culture meant that much history and knowledge was lost, including knowledge of various identities that the colonists grouped under the term “berdache.” this label itself represents the imposition of colonial conceptions (both heteronormative and queer) on a wide variety of native identities, an imposition which has widely rejected by native peoples (morgensen 2011). this history of violence and imposition must be considered carefully when 21 worries about the coloniality of her thought have plagued okin throughout her career, including her implicit assumption that “west-is-best,” as alison jaggar (2005, 69) nicely puts it. i take it that a western thinker positing an ideal society and using that society as a standard by which to judge the moral status of others’ societies does not merely run the risk of being myopic but also runs the risk of performing a colonial and racist act. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 theorising gender—especially when one takes one’s theorising, as the likes of okin do, to be universally applicable. this history (and present) of colonialism should raise warning flags, and the abolitionist must, if we are to find their vision of a feminist utopia plausible, provide a vision of gender abolition that does not merely reinscribe this kind of colonial violence. finally, even if one could tell a story that avoids these morally problematic conclusions whilst endorsing abolitionism, a story about some far-flung future society which is radically different from our own, then very well; but personally my concerns are more pragmatic than ideal. such an ideal society might be worth striving for—but not knowing what that society looks like, or how to get there, and sceptical of such a society’s possibility and especially its desirability, i choose to work under the assumption that we should be more concerned with a pragmatic or real theory that improves our actual society in meaningful ways. a movement that, in our current society, seeks to abolish gender is one that fails to do justice to trans people’s identifications. we are already in a desperate political situation where the us government is seeking to undermine trans rights domestically (opfer 2018) and internationally (borger 2018). in the uk, hate crimes against trans people have spiked duffy 2018), and a moral panic alongside a government consultation on the gender recognition act is occurring (barker 2017). seeking abolition in our current political landscape is a recipe for trans deaths. abolitionism is thus not a political program that i am interested in, nor one that i think is worth developing in our current political moment. references barker, meg-john. 2017. “2017 review: the transgender moral panic.” rewriting the rules (blog), december 27. accessed october 25, 2018. https://www.rewriting-the-rules.com/gender/2017-review-transgender-moralpanic/. borger, julian. 2018. “trump administration wants to remove 'gender' from un human rights documents.” guardian, october 25. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/24/trump-administrationgender-transgender-united-nations. cappelen, herman. 2018. fixing language: an essay on conceptual engineering. oxford: oxford university press. dembroff, robin. forthcoming. “real talk on the metaphysics of gender.” philosophical topics 46 (2). duffy, nick. 2018. “anti-transgender hate crime reports up by a third in one year” pinknews.com, october 16. accessed october 25, 2018. cull – against abolition published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/10/16/anti-transgender-hate-crimereports-up-third-year/. escalante, alyson. 2015. “addendum to gender nihilism: an anti-manifesto.” theanarchistlibrary.org, november. accessed november 22, 2017. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alyson-escalante-addendum-to-gendernihilism-an-anti-manifesto. ———. 2016. “gender nihilism: an anti-manifesto.” libcom.org, june 22. accessed november 22, 2017. https://libcom.org/library/gender-nihilism-anti-manifesto. feinberg, leslie. 1998. trans liberation: beyond pink or blue. boston: beacon press. firestone, shulamith. 1971. the dialectic of sex: the case for feminist revolution new york: bantam. glasgow, joshua. 2006. “a third way in the race debate.” journal of political philosophy 14 (2): 163–185. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2006.00238.x. haslanger, sally. 2012. resisting reality: social construction and social critique. oxford: oxford university press. hester, helen. 2018. xenofeminism. cambridge: polity. jaggar, alison m. 2005. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics & international affairs 19 (3): 55–75. doi:10.1111/j.17477093.2005.tb00554.x. jenkins, katharine. 2016. ontic injustice. phd thesis, university of sheffield. kapusta, stephanie. 2016. “misgendering and its moral contestability” hypatia 31 (3): 502–519. doi:10.1111/hypa.12259. mikkola, mari. 2016. the wrong of injustice: dehumanization and its role in feminist philosophy. oxford: oxford university press. morgensen, scott lauria. 2011. spaces between us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. okin, susan moller. 1989. justice, gender, and the family. new york: basic books. opfer, chris. 2018. “doj: businesses can discriminate against transgender workers.” bloomberg law, october 24. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/dailylabor-report/justice-department-says-transgender-discrimination-is-lawful. pratt, richard. 1973. “the advantages of mingling indians with whites.” in americanizing the american indians: writings by the “friends of the indian” 1880–1900, edited by francis prucha, 260–271 cambridge, ma: harvard university press. saul, jennifer. 2006. “gender and race.” aristotelian society supplementary volume 80 (1): 119–143. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8349.2006.00140.x. wittig, monique. 2017. “one is not born a woman.” in feminist theory reader: local and global perspectives, 4th ed., edited by carole r. mccann and seungkyung kim, 282–287. new york: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 williams, rachel. 2016. “the promise and failure of gender nihilism.” transphilosopher (blog), december 4. accessed november 22, 2017. https://transphilosopher.com/2016/12/04/the-promise-and-failure-of-gendernihilism/. matthew j. cull is a phd candidate at the university of sheffield, where they are working on a thesis on the metaphysics of gender, provisionally titled “thoroughgoing pluralism about genders” (a project supported by the white rose college of the arts and humanities). they previously studied at the university of st. andrews, queen’s university canada, and massachusetts institute of technology. their other publications include “dismissive incomprehension” (in social epistemology), “when alston met brandom: defining assertion” (in rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio) and “can the theory of mind hypothesis survive, given insights derived from the study of autism?” (in kriterion). 5898 cull title page 5898 cull final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 4 recommended citation richardson-self, louise. 2018. “offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 4. 2018 offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice louise richardson-self university of tasmania louise.richardsonself@utas.edu.au richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice louise richardson-self abstract in this article i analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in australia. i argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm australians of colour through these utterances. these complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). further, i argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity. bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. i argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream australians” can do their part in bringing about a just society. keywords: hate speech, social imaginary, race, epistemic injustice, recognition normative reflection must begin from historically specific circumstances because there is nothing but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from which to start. —iris marion young it is crucial for any emancipatory movement to understand the hegemonic centre and the ways people situated there think and act. after all, it is from this powerful position that most political decisions affecting the largest number of people in society come. —marcel stoetzler and nira yuval-davis feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 i. introduction in australia, the racial discrimination act 1975 (cth) (hereafter rda), makes it a civil offence to engage in hate speech.1 the language of this legislation is ostensibly neutral (gelber 2014, 407), and part iia permits a person of any race, colour, or national or ethnic origin to lodge a complaint with the australian human rights commission (ahrc) if they are the victim of an act which is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate them, and the act is done because of their race (section 18c). that said, the australian courts have maintained that the conduct complained of must have profound and serious effects which are not equivalent to mere slights (ahrc 2016).2 increasingly, white australians are taking advantage of the ostensibly neutral language of the rda to complain of racial vilification. reports have the number of complaints at around 15 percent for 2015–2016 (shanahan 2017).3 at least some of these complaints are 1 specifically, it prohibits “race hatred,” and according to the australian human rights commission, examples of race hatred may include racially offensive material on the internet, racially offensive comments or images in a publication, racially offensive speeches or abusive comments in a public place, and the like (ahrc 2015). for ease, i refer to this sort of behaviour collectively as “hate speech” and use this term synonymously with vilification. 2 section 18c is also balanced by section 18d, which does not render unlawful anything said or done “reasonably and in good faith” in a number of circumstances, including “a fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment.” 3 one high profile case saw senator david leyonhjelm complain to the ahrc of being called an “angry white male” in an article written by journalist mark kenny (henderson and patel 2016). however, this complaint was ultimately terminated by the ahrc on the ground that he was not truly aggrieved (koziol 2016). (senator eric abetz also voiced the opinion that kenny’s remark was racist, see hutchens and karp 2016.) the ahrc have, however, accepted complaints of white vilification in the past. for example, in 2003 neal mcleod complained to the ahrc of being called a “white piece of shit,” among other things, by samantha power, an indigenous woman. this complaint was unable to be conciliated so the matter was taken by mcleod to a federal court for determination; however, the case was ultimately unsuccessful (gelber 2014, 405–406). white australians’ are also complaining of racial vilification to other bodies. cases of white vilification have been brought under state law. for instance, in western australia, 2006, a 16-year-old aboriginal girl was charged with engaging in conduct intended to racially harass, which took place during an assault. (the western australian criminal code makes incitement to racial hatred an offence.) the richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 intended, in part, to illustrate that the rda sets the bar too low for what constitutes hate speech and that legislative reform is an urgent necessity. this has recently been a topic of fierce public debate, sparking a parliamentary inquiry into freedom of speech in australia in 2016, and many australians continue to believe that the rda should be amended.4 however, white vilification claims are typically (but not always) dismissed, since the speech complained of is considered to constitute only a mere slight. from a certain perspective, this is reverse racism (moran 2009, 798). many australians are wary of differential treatment for people on the basis of race (moran 2009, 791). the “natural” conclusion is, therefore, that a double standard is applied by the ahrc when they investigate claims of racial vilification and that white australians are less protected than everyone else. this undermines equality, which the law is meant to ensure, and which australians supposedly value as a community (moran 2009, 798). such perceptions of bias also appear to have been a contributing factor in establishing the aforementioned inquiry. as senator ian goodenough, chair of the inquiry, explained: anecdotally, there is a perception that certain ethnic minorities are afforded greater protections from constructive criticism than mainstream australians victim in this case had been called a “white slut.” however, while the girl pleaded guilty to assault, “the kalgoorlie children’s court dismissed the racial charges saying that the racial vilification laws ‘were intended to deal with severe abuse, and not petty name-calling’” (mason 2009, 332). additionally, several complaints were also recently lodged with the advertising standards bureau regarding a television advertisement for lamb which attempted to humorously address the lack of diversity in australian broadcasting. complaints included: “i object to the slander that infers that white men contribute towards a ‘lack of diversity’ which was completely offensive to my family, particularly my father, brother, husband and son! is it ‘diverse’ to completely remove one in favour of another?” and “the person points out that they are white and male saying that this adds to a lack of diversity. pointing out someone’s race and gender in an advertisement and then denigrating such race or gender is both racist and sexist.” however, all complaints were dismissed (thomsen 2016). 4 the results of the inquiry were released in february 2017, and subsequently a bill was introduced which sought to amend the wording of section 18c of the rda (human rights legislation amendment bill 2017). it proposed to omit the terms “offend, insult, humiliate,” and replace them with “harass.” however, this was dropped by the third reading of the bill, and ultimately no changes to the rda were made. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 through political correctness. rightly or wrongly, this perception does exist, and i would like to see the playing field levelled. (quoted in gaynor 2017; emphasis added) though senator goodenough is a singaporean immigrant himself, his comment betrays an implicit but widespread recognition of which people count as “mainstream australians”—mainstream australians are those who do not belong to certain ethnic minority groups; that is, mainstream australians are white australians. in this article, i argue that white vilification complainants are not victims of a double standard. instead, i show that this conclusion is generated from a misrecognition of self and other. further, with reference to a contemporary case study, i argue that white vilification complaints can both constitute and cause epistemic injustices, and that it is the aforementioned misrecognition which grounds these injustices. that is to say, if not for this misrecognition, these injustices would not occur. to advance this argument, this article takes the following structure. in section 2, i offer some contextualization and outline the details of two complaints lodged with the ahrc against linda burney, mp, the first indigenous woman elected to the house of representatives. in section 3, i discuss the contours of australia’s dominant social imaginary and show how this liberal imaginary encourages a form of misrecognition necessary for producing the rationale supporting white vilification complaints. in section 4, i critique this misrecognition from the perspective of a resistant imaginary which advances a politics of difference. in section 5, i illustrate that the complaints in question constitute the epistemic injustice of willful hermeneutical ignorance, as theorized by gaile pohlhaus, jr. (2012, following mills 1997). in section 6, i illustrate how the complaints in question can cause comparative credibility excess, as theorized by josé medina (2011). in concluding, i reiterate that white vilification complainants reduce differences to unity—to the singular logic of the universal human subject (young 1990, 97). paying attention to this failure of recognition best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of epistemic injustices (congdon 2017, 246). i will argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms—as alterity—that “mainstream australians” can do their part in bringing about a just society. ii. white vilification complaints in australia: a case study in 2016, 44 complaints were lodged in response to a public statement by linda burney, mp, following the federal government’s announcement of the aforementioned inquiry into freedom of speech (zanetti 2017). she remarked, “it astounds me that the people that are advocating for the removal of 18c are richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 basically white men of a certain age that have never experienced racial discrimination in their life” (quoted in zanetti 2016a). two of these complainants were bernard gaynor, a failed senate candidate, and political cartoonist paul zanetti.5 of burney’s comment, zanetti states, “i was shocked, stunned, hurt and offended to see and hear a publicly elected representative resorting to such a blatantly sexist, racist and ageist argument” (2016a). gaynor writes that burney’s words “are clearly racist and they make offensive and insulting connotations about white men,” noting that he expects the ahrc to “take [his complaint] seriously” (2016). as it so happens, both gaynor and zanetti are in favour of reforms to section 18c of the rda. what they object to is the assertion that they endorse legislative reform because of their whiteness and maleness. from their perspective, any reasonable person should be able to see that this is a bad law. (zanetti, in particular, notes that not every person in favour of legal reform is white, and that burney knew this before making her statement; see 2016b.) these complaints are designed to make a broader political point. gaynor, for example, thinks racial vilification ought not to be legally prohibited, no matter who is targeted. he states: i hope [my complaint against burney] fails. . . . but it must fail for the right reason. it should fail because linda burney should be free in our democratic nation to make such statements, regardless of the offence they cause. . . . in other words, the complaint should not fail because it is deemed trivial but because 18c itself is an unlawful law that infringes upon the implied constitutional protection of freedom of political communication. (gaynor 2016) so, while gaynor appears to believe that burney’s comment is racist, he nonetheless thinks that this degree of racism ought to be legally permissible and socially tolerated irrespective of the target. 5 i have chosen to analyse these complainants because gaynor and zanetti have published their views on their respective blogs. (details of the complaints of racial vilification made to the ahrc are not otherwise available to the public.) there is nothing unique about gaynor and zanetti’s complaints; rather, they are representative examples of reasoning patterns shared by many “mainstream australians.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 zanetti makes the point that it is no more trivial to complain of white vilification than it is to complain of (for example) indigenous vilification.6 consider zanetti’s attempt to show equivalence of harm: he says, “ms burney has used her position, not to debate the issue, but to intimidate a group based on skin colour, causing humiliation and offence” (2016c; emphasis added). he also writes that “race hate laws as they stand must be applied to all, not only some, regardless of skin colour” (zanetti 2016c). while the law may be written in language that is ostensibly neutral, from the perspective of “mainstream australians” like zanetti, it seems that all-but white people are being protected from “constructive criticism.” adding to the perception of a double-standard, in this case, is the fact that all complaints against burney were terminated (zanetti 2017). zanetti thus complains: “the message i got from the commission . . . is their obligation [to accept and conciliate complaints] does not apply to “white men.” we have no rights, or at the very best, lesser rights than non-white men or any coloured women” (2016c). he also recommends, “before filing a complaint with the ahrc, always identify as an aboriginal woman” (zanetti 2017).7 in the remainder of this article, i will argue that, though “white vilification” is no more than a mere slight within the australian context, we ought to be concerned when white vilification complaints like these are aired in the public sphere.8 this is because such complaints both constitute and cause epistemic injustices, and the misrecognition that belies them perpetuates the cultural imperialism of australia’s dominant social imaginary. iii. white vilification in australia’s dominant social imaginary australia’s dominant social imaginary is a liberal imaginary, and the dominant social imaginary is what frames the dominant epistemic context of a community. lennon describes social imaginaries as latent within our public worlds (lennon 2015, 112); they are taken-for-granted repertories which we use to make sense of our own and others’ situation(s) (taylor 2004, 25). but imaginaries are also much more than this. they provide our affective way of experiencing the world and the others we encounter within it, both as individuals and as members of groups 6 zanetti considers his complaint to be equivalent to an accepted complaint lodged against political cartoonist bill leak following the publication of a cartoon which depicted racist stereotypes about indigenous australians (see 2016b). 7 it is worth noting that the complainant in the bill leak case was an indigenous woman. 8 although i cannot be certain without further investigation, i suspect that the conclusions drawn here can be extended to complaints of white vilification in other western liberal democracies, too. richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 (lennon 2015, 112). now, what it takes for a society to be just, from australia’s liberal perspective, is for society not to be stratified by unfair relations of domination and oppression. this is “driven by conceptions of individual responsibility, equality, and reciprocity” (moran 2009, 789). of course, australians are aware that their society was not a just society in the past. australia was a settler colony, and the immigration restriction act 1901 (cth)—the cornerstone of the white australia policy—was the very first act to pass the first federal parliament (edmonds and carey 2016, 381–382). this society cannot reasonably deny its past relations of racial domination and oppression. but “mainstream australians” can—and often do—deny the relevance of the past on the present (moran 2009, 798). indeed, many believe that the aim of bringing about a just society has been more or less achieved today. consider some statements by former australian senators which are representative of this attitude: “australians are generally decent and tolerant;” “australia is blessed with less racism than virtually any other country on earth;” “australia has a long and successful history of multiculturalism;” and “i . . . believe that australia is free of a good many evils . . . such as political and religious intolerance and widespread racism.”9 we may say, then, that many mainstream australians incorporate the following meaning-generating narrative into their sense of identity—a story that explains fundamentally who australians are, what it is that they value, where australians have been, and how far australians have come: there was once a time of caste and class, when tradition decreed that each group had its place, and that some were born to rule and others to serve. in this time of darkness, law and social norms defined rights, privileges, and obligations differently for different groups. . . . then one day enlightenment dawned, heralding a revolutionary conception of humanity and society. all people are equal, the revolutionaries declared, inasmuch as all have a capacity for reason and moral sense. . . . for over two hundred years since those voices of reason first rang out, the forces of light have struggled for liberty and political equality against the dark forces of irrational prejudice, arbitrary metaphysics, and the crumbling towers of patriarchal church, state, and family. . . . today in our society very few vestiges of prejudice and discrimination remain, but we are working on them, and have nearly realized 9 these statements were made by australian federal senators siegfried spindler, james short, belinda neal, and christopher ellison, respectively, speaking both for and against the racial hatred bill 1994 (cth) during its second reading in the senate. the passage of this bill is what introduced anti-hate speech legislation into federal law (commonwealth, parliamentary debates, senate, 23 august 1995, 210–244). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 the dream those enlightenment fathers dared to propound. (young 1990, 156–157) this is a narrative that mainstream australians share with other heirs to the enlightenment tradition. adopted in the australian context, this particular meaninggenerating narrative acknowledges the flaws of our colonial past yet celebrates the achievements of the present. in short, australia’s dominant social imaginary presents as truth the impression that due to our fundamental commitment to equality, all people can now have a “fair go,” reasonably unencumbered by prejudicial attitudes, actions, laws, and policies.10 in other words, many australians find the idea that australia is a racist country “incomprehensible and against the grain of common sense” (moran 2009, 798). and, importantly, this “makes people’s antennae alert to any signs of differential treatment” (moran 2009, 798).11 of course, there is still some disagreement as to just how far along the path of enlightenment australia has really travelled. that is, there is debate as to whether australia is more or less equal. (a recent survey found that 39 percent of australians think australia is a racist country, but that number rose to 57 percent when answered specifically by indigenous australians; see wood 2017.) yet many seem to agree on the ideal we are working toward: a society that is beyond race.12 the basic idea is this: given our commitment to equality for all, we should not give people “special rights” on the basis of their differences, for our differences are ultimately arbitrary—to treat someone differently due to their skin colour is as peculiar as treating someone differently due to their eye colour.13 a just society, we 10 the rhetoric of a “fair go” is a staple in australian public discourse; see, e.g., haggis and schech (2009) and moran (2009). 11 if anything, mainstream australians are becoming suspicious that the scales have now tipped too far in the other direction, that white people are now so vilified as to have become marginalized. it is worth noting that the problem of “hate speech against whites” has recently arisen the australian senate. consider one nation leader senator pauline hanson’s motion proposing that the senate acknowledge “the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on western civilisation” and that “it is okay to be white” (bourke 2018). this motion was defeated, but only narrowly, with a total of 31 votes against and 28 votes in favour. however, after the motion made headlines, finance minister mathias cormann claimed that the coalition’s support was a mistake and due to an administrative error (morgan and elton-pym, 2018). 12 anderson (2017) calls this post-racialism. 13 on the problem of articulating equivalent rights as “special rights,” see richardson-self (2015, 64–66, 117–120). richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 seem to think, is one which is impartial to the various forms of embodied human difference that we encounter. the only thing that matters, really, is our equal human status and a fair go. thus, in the australian dominant social imaginary, what would constitute a just society is not in question. what we need to do is cast aside our differences, not allow them to cloud our judgment, and ultimately take them to be irrelevant. call this the ideal of impartiality (young 1990, 10). by paying attention to the foundational role of the enlightenment narrative in australia’s dominant social imaginary, including the ideal of impartiality, it is possible to see why white people are genuinely able to understand themselves as victims of racist hate speech, even as they simultaneously argue that such speech should not be legally actionable (because, to them, racism isn’t really that bad all things considered—free speech is of far greater importance). the arguments of zanetti and gaynor are two-pronged: like cases should be treated alike, yet the standard for prohibiting racist hate speech is too low. if it is okay to say, “he just thinks like that because he’s white,” then what is wrong with saying, “he just thinks like that because he’s black”? parity of reasoning demands we treat such cases as equivalent, and the fact that no one would seriously consider punishing someone for a comment like burney’s should illustrate that legal reform is urgently necessary—otherwise, white people will continue to be the victims of reverse racism and “free speech” will not be adequately protected. this is presented as a rational, calm, considered normative position. by using this strategy—that is, by trading on the ideal of impartiality and the grounding liberal narrative—“the standpoint of the privileged, their particular experience and standards, is [again] constructed as normal and neutral” (young 1990, 116). theirs is constructed as the perspective of “ordinary,” or mainstream, australians (moran 2009, 797). thus, the complainants hold “the false assumption that a particular standpoint [is] neither particular, nor a standpoint,” which obscures the link between (cultural) power and knowledge (tuana 2017, 127). so, the fact that the complainants, as white australians, inevitably think, imagine, and reason from a partial and socially powerful perspective is rendered invisible to them (and sometimes to others, that is, to some nonwhite australians). but problematically, as young identifies, “by claiming to provide a standpoint which all subjects can adopt, [one] denies difference between subjects” (1990, 10). white vilification complainants speak from what they presume is an impartial perspective, which denies the genuine alterity of others and denies that they may have (greater) knowledge to offer. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 iv. resistant imaginings and (re-)cognizing difference critics of the liberal tradition are not convinced by the above meaninggenerating narrative, nor do they ascribe to impartiality as an ideal of political engagement. the main quarrel, as young explains, is with the story’s conclusion, namely, that since we have achieved formal equality, only vestiges and holdovers of differential privilege remain, which will die out with the continued persistent assertion of an ideal of social relations that make differences irrelevant to a person’s life prospects. (young 1990, 163–164) in short, advocating for the ideal of impartiality covers over an uncomfortable truth: differences are not and cannot be irrelevant to a person’s life prospects. this has been obscured, luce irigaray explains, by the fact that “for centuries, no-one imagined that different subjects might exist” (2000, 121). subsequently, to be human was imagined according to a logic of singularity: one generic, universal human type. “of course,” irigaray continues, “from the late nineteenth century onwards, attention turned increasingly to the question of the other,” but: others were nothing but copies of the idea of man, a potentially perfect idea which all the more or less imperfect copies had to try to equal. these copies, moreover, were not defined in their own terms, in other words, according to a different subjectivity, but in those of an ideal subjectivity and as a function of their deficiencies with respect to it: age, race, culture, sex, etc. the model of the subject thus remained singular, and the “others” represented more or less good examples within the hierarchy established in relation to the singular subject. (irigaray 2000, 122) several feminist scholars and critical race theorists have challenged the supposed neutrality of the liberal subject (e.g., anderson 2017; lloyd 1984; mills 1997; okin 1979, 1989; pateman 1988). young claims that the universal citizen is, in fact, “disembodied, dispassionate (male) reason. the universal citizen is also white and bourgeois” (young 1990, 110). elsewhere i have argued argues that this subject is really “the male, masculine, rational, heterosexual, adult, white, western/eurocentric, able-bodied public actor,” or “benchmark man,” for short (richardson-self 2015, 57). that is to say, the liberal subject is a partial subject. further, summarizing mills, pohlhaus explains that “white european men are regarded as ‘generic’ prototypical knowers collectively on a progressive path toward richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 knowing the world” (2017, 17). that is, this subject is also presented as the universal, impartial bearer of truth.14 the claim is not only that the perspective of the universal subject has, as a matter of fact, been the perspective of a highly partial subject. the claim is also that others cannot simply be recognized by traditional political theory because there is no singular human generic, no one standpoint which all subjects can adopt, despite the impression yielded by traditional epistemology (bubeck 2000; pohlhaus 2012; stoetzler and yuval-davis 2002; young 1990). from these critiques emerges a “politics of difference”—the push for a society which does not strive for an impartiality that can never be achieved, but instead asserts that “there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups who mutually respect one another and affirm one another in their differences” (young 1990, 163; see also anderson 2017; bubeck 2000). the aim is to move away from understanding human difference as “more” or “less” with reference to an implicit but highly partial norm, away from a singular understanding of humanity, and instead to move toward recognition of and respect for alterity (bubeck 2000, 196). this critique does not see “difference” as deviance, devaluation, or hierarchical opposition, which matters greatly if we are to undermine the cultural imperialism of the dominant social imaginary and so reduce oppression (young 1990, 171). difference, according to this resistant imagining, has a specific, emancipatory meaning. it now comes to mean specificity, variation, and heterogeneity: “difference names relations of similarity and dissimilarity that can be reduced to neither coextensive identity nor nonoverlapping otherness” (young 1990, 171). consequently, in terms of what actual social groups may require to ensure social equality, we find that in some cases, people “may need to be unburdened of excessive ascribed or constructed distinctiveness,” (that is, of “otherness” understood as inferiority) whilst in other cases, people may need “to have hitherto underacknowledged distinctiveness taken into account” (fraser 2000, 115), that is, for alterity to be recognized . these are two sides of the same coin. we may therefore consider the politics of difference as constituting a resistant, marginal imaginary which runs counter to the liberal tradition, which disavows the ideal of impartiality, and understands “equality” as “equal regard”—a form of recognition that involves the esteem of multiple identities (richardson-self 2015, 3; congdon 2017, 248). from this perspective, we are now equipped to see that our white vilification complainants (and perhaps a great many mainstream australians) do not 14 and importantly, the liberal tradition considers itself “to be the only legitimate tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and the only one with access to ‘universality,’ ‘rationality,’ and ‘truth’” (grosfoguel, quoted in tuana 2017, 131). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 understand that their racial specificity is qualitatively distinct from other forms of raced identity, nor that this impacts what they know about the world. so, while they endorse a narrow norm of equal recognition that “recognizes only those qualities that are taken to be universally shared” (markell 2006, 452; emphasis added), they mistake their experience of “being raced” as a qualitatively universal experience. in addition, they mistake their conclusions regarding hate speech laws as impartial, disembodied, rational, and unbiased because of this. these white vilification complainants hold onto the ideal of impartiality and the individualistic, liberal humanist dream of “equality” through a denial of the relevance of racial difference. thus, ultimately, they misrecognize race, and what is going on here is a two-fold misrecognition: they misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. the “natural” conclusion is that we can therefore reason about australia’s true values and the makeup of a just society from an impartial, egalitarian perspective. but situatedness, feelings, perspectives, desires, and commitments “do not cease to exist and motivate just because they have been excluded [in theory]. . . . they lurk as inarticulate shadows, belying the claim to comprehensiveness of universalist reason” (young 1990, 103). why does this matter? in young’s words, the ideal of impartiality “reinforces oppression by hypostatizing the point of view of privileged groups into a universal position,” and this “allows privileged groups to ignore their own group specificity” and (re-)assert cultural imperialism over various minorities (young 1990, 112, 165). what young calls cultural imperialism can be understood as the unjust imposition of a particular way of imagining the world—where the dominant group produces the dominant social imaginary, but this imaginary cannot effectively be challenged by others, is frequently adopted by those others (causing alienation), and is directly responsible for “‘othering” those groups in the first place (lennon 2015, 105). these are oppressive social imaginaries. this also matters because this type of misrecognition underscores at least two forms of epistemic injustice, as i detail below. because the white vilification complainants’ cultural perspective is the dominant, hegemonic perspective masquerading as the universal, it is all too easy to deny the legitimacy of others’ knowledge and to harm them in their capacity as knowers. v. willful hermeneutical ignorance my claim is that the white vilification complaints analysed here both cause and constitute particular forms of epistemic injustice. one such epistemic injustice is willful hermeneutical ignorance, a form of ignorance for which people are morally culpable. here i am assuming that the complainants genuinely believe that white vilification and nonwhite vilification are qualitatively equivalent. for the purposes of richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 this article, i am interested in how misrecognition creates genuine yet false beliefs about social status, entitlements, and equality, and how this in turn brings about epistemic injustices without any ill will toward oppressed racial groups. nonetheless, this is something that white vilification complainants could and should know, and for this reason they are accountable for their ignorance. in order to illustrate how one can be culpable for what they do not know, we must return to feminist standpoint theory. as epistemic agents, we are all situated—there is no generic “knower” unbound by social location. the situations in which we find ourselves as a consequence of our social positioning create “common challenges,” and these common challenges come to constitute part of the knower’s lived experience. this experience is shared by others who also occupy the relevant social location, but not by those otherwise located. when particular experiences—that is, particular common challenges—are repeated over time, “these challenges can lead to habits of expectation, attention, and concern, thereby contributing to what one is more or less likely to notice and pursue as an object of knowledge in the experienced world” (pohlhaus 2012, 717). that is to say, the different material conditions of people’s lives (including the reception of the differences of our material bodies) affect what we are attuned to notice and what we are likely to see or experience. this in turn shapes how we make sense of our worlds—that is, it shapes what we know (see pohlhaus 2012, 716–717). however, it is a misperception that certain knowledge acquisition is only possible given a particular form of situatedness according to standpoint theory. many standpoint theorists have argued against this interpretation, suggesting that through dialogue between marginalized and dominant, oppressor and oppressed, we are better able to approximate more objective knowledge (e.g., bubeck 2000; pohlhaus 2012; stoetzler and yuval-davis 2002). that is to say, standpoint theorists believe that we can train persons in different material conditions to be sensitive toward the experiences of the marginalized, that through cooperative dialogue and trust the marginalized can share their epistemic resources, and that the privileged can learn to utilize these epistemic resources in order to better make sense of their own and the marginalized’s experiences. to explicate this idea, it pays to look to pohlhaus’s useful distinction between the “situatedness” and “interdependence” of knowers. all knowers are situated, but “relations with others are necessary for providing and maintaining [the] epistemic resources with which we know” (pohlhaus 2012, 717). these epistemic resources—such as language, propositions, concepts, standards of judgment, and so forth—are always developed (and operate) interdependently. and, as pohlhaus further explains, “our epistemic lives are fundamentally intertwined with one another such that one cannot simply ignore other knowers feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 and know well” (2017, 16; original emphasis). quite simply, it is because epistemic resources are shared, because these tools can be taken up and utilized even by persons who are not similarly socially situated, that we can collectively approximate a more accurate knowledge of our worlds. that is, so long as differently situated collectives “work cooperatively rather than coercively . . . it is not in principle impossible for those dominantly situated to recognize and learn to use epistemic resources calibrated from marginalized positions” (pohlhaus 2012, 720–721). but this does not occur when white vilification complainants co-opt the status of “victim of hate speech.”15 the concept “hate speech”’ (an epistemic resource) has been calibrated to a marginalized social location to allow oppressed groups to make sense of certain experiences and the harms they endure. though it was first developed by a group of us legal scholars in the 1980s, hate speech has now become an ordinary concept (brown 2017, 424).16 it has also spread to australia and taken root in its dominant social imaginary. however, this concept has not taken root in its appropriately calibrated form. when racial minorities employ it, the intention is to highlight a form of treatment that is substantially damaging to its targets. hate speech, properly understood, is oppressive speech that constitutes a form of systemic group-based violence, where violence is understood to include “severe incidents of harassment, intimidation, or ridicule simply for the purpose of degrading, humiliating, or stigmatizing group members” (young 1990, 61; see also richardsonself 2018). however, the ordinary meaning of the concept has been stretched, disfigured by the ideal of impartiality and the grounding view of equality as sameness. as brown observes, more recent usage seems to permit a competent user to describe as “hate speech” instances in which members of an oppressed or victimised group lashes out verbally against members of an oppressive or victimising group. . . . this newer accepted usage may partly reflect a white backlash against the original use of the term “hate speech” (to condemn what whites had to say about other racial or ethnic groups), but it is also likely to reflect the broader work that society as a whole now expects the term “hate speech” to do—for example, to identify or flag up forms of speech that 15 co-opting is different than “suppressing” and “resisting adoption” through the use of alternative concepts, which are both discussed by anderson (2017, 146). 16 by this, i mean it “is (a) used by people who are not legal professionals or writers about the law, and (b) has a panoply of uses . . . within a range of other social, cultural, political and economic domains” (brown 2017, 422). richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 society as whole fears have the potential to be very socially divisive or destructive of social cohesion. (2017, 444) while i think brown is right to diagnose that the ordinary concept “hate speech” has taken on this new meaning, i find that he is too generous in his suggestion that this is likely because society now expects the term to do broader work. that this is a form of backlash by (some) mainstream australians (as well as mainstream americans, mainstream britons, etc.) is something we need to take seriously, but it is important to realize that this backlash may be pre-reflective and largely affective, given that our social imaginaries function latently (lennon 2015, 107). such attitudes are more likely elicited because of a commitment to the ideal of impartiality and grounding view of equality as sameness, due to the white vilification complainant’s inability to recognize that he does not reason from a universal perspective, due to the privileged group’s experiences and standards being constructed as normal and neutral, due to the vested interest white vilification complainants have in not coming to understand themselves as socially privileged.17 when white complainants assert that they have been racially vilified, the epistemic resource which can make sense of a particular phenomenon is not taken up in the appropriate way.18 it would be possible for white vilification complainants to learn to use the epistemic resource “hate speech” appropriately, but the fact that they co-opt and disfigure the concept, using it instead to refer to any form of negative racialized commentary—including “these people think x because they are white”—is to engage in willful hermeneutical ignorance. the complainants distort an epistemic resource in order to maintain an inaccurate understanding of the experienced world. as a consequence, the following occurs: first, marginally situated people cannot demonstrate that there is a part of the experienced world for which the disfigured epistemic resource is inadequate, because dominantly situated knowers (that is, white vilification complainants, as mainstream australians) do not attend to that part of the world. second, the marginally situated cannot call the attention of white vilification complainants to those parts of the experienced world, because the epistemic resource which was available to do so has already been co-opted and transformed (pohlhaus 2012, 728). as luvell anderson puts it, “there is an obscuring of what the speaker intends to be the import of her speech. and . . . there is a loss in the ability of certain speakers to both produce 17 this is the type of ignorance josé medina (2011, 26) refers to as “active.” 18 anderson makes a similar argument regarding the misinterpretation of the activist phrase “black lives matter” (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 certain utterances and be interpreted correctly” (2017, 143). that is, both meaning and credibility are inhibited. in short, white vilification complainants like gaynor and zanetti maintain their ignorance by actively undermining the “epistemic resource that attends to those parts of the world they are invested in ignoring” (pohlhaus 2012, 728). what is more, these white vilification complainants ought to be held to account for this epistemic injustice because their failure to take up the proper meaning of the concept “hate speech” is not a consequence of an inability to do so.19 as pohlhaus explains, it is by attending to the distinction between interdependence and situatedness that we are able to see this. as she puts it, “situatedness cannot be transcended, but with habitual practice epistemic resources can make more evident to the knower that which is not immediately obvious from her position in the world” (pohlhaus 2012, 729). if white vilification complainants took “an active interest in how the world is revealed from marginalized experiences,” then they could learn to use epistemic resources appropriately and avoid committing this epistemic injustice (pohlhaus 2012, 731). so, it is here we see that this epistemic injustice is, in fact, grounded in a failure of recognition. in order to take an interest in the experiences of the marginalized, one must first be willing to recognize the other as other, outside the logic of unity that belies the ideal of impartiality and the foundational meaninggenerating narrative of the liberal tradition. for one cannot “forge truly cooperative interdependent relations with marginally situated knowers” (pohlhaus 2012, 733) until one comes to see difference, and to see it as alterity. vi. comparative credibility excess white vilification complainants like gaynor and zanetti may also receive an excess in credibility. this, too, would be an epistemic injustice. in order to see how this is the case, we need to keep in mind the contours of australia’s dominant social imaginary. this dominant social imaginary (or dominant epistemic context) is something that operates at the hermeneutical and testimonial levels. at the hermeneutical level, the social imaginary shapes people’s “capacities for 19 as evidence, consider senator chris evans’s argument in favour of federal legislation making racist hate speech a civil offence. as this was being debated, he said: “in considering this bill, senators must be mindful that, as predominantly white middle-class anglo-saxon males, we have a different perspective from that of the victims of racist behaviour. how many of us have been subjected to abuse in the streets, damage to our home or businesses, or campaigns exhorting our banishment or murder simply because of our race, colour or national or ethnic origin?” (commonwealth, parliamentary debates, senate, 23 august 1995, 223). richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 interpreting and understanding things (opening their eyes and ears to certain things and not others),” while at the testimonial level, the social imaginary shapes people’s “capacities for listening properly and for assigning adequate levels of credibility and authority” (medina 2011, 27). we must also understand that no testimonial exchange happens in a vacuum. they take place in historically specific circumstances. as mentioned above, australia has its own complex history of settler colonialism and, despite popular belief, remains a society that is stratified by relations of racial domination and oppression today. accepting (trusting) this as fact is crucial to illustrating how white vilification complaints like gaynor’s and zanetti’s can cause harm. as medina notes, “perceptions of credibility and authority are forms of social recognition that are bound to be affected by the cultural habits of recognition available for differently positioned subjects with respect to different social groups” (medina 2011, 21–22). thus, if the dominant perception is that racial neutrality has been (very nearly) achieved in australia, when, in fact, white australians retain the social and epistemic advantages produced by australia’s colonial past, then one will likely attribute credibility in line with this implicit racial hierarchy.20 in short, the historical tendency to attribute credibility to the testimony of white men may further incline third parties to continue attributing such credibility, since this is the type of testimony that has been rendered “impartial.” this need not be a conscious judgment, but may itself be caused by an implicit prejudice—not a prejudice as strong or self-evident as disbelieving all people of colour because they are people of colour, but perhaps simply an unconscious prejudice “against taking seriously the experienced world outside of white men” (pohlhaus 2012, 725; emphasis added). thus, we see why it is likely that testimony such as gaynor’s and zanetti’s may receive a credibility excess. to see why credibility excess is a form of testimonial injustice, we need to focus on the nature of credibility-attribution itself, and we must recognize that “the epistemic injustices we are examining have a systematic character: they are produced by—and are at the same time productive within—a complex system of social relations and practices in which unfair disparities among groups are maintained” (medina 2011, 24). while credibility may not be distributive, it certainly seems to be the case that, much of the time, we do credit others less if we credit 20 elsewhere i make a comparative point with regard to seeking queer rights in a heteropatriarchal social context. if one seeks neutrality in a biased context, then any social benefit will always be first and foremost tailored to the benchmark man (richardson-self 2015, 66–68). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 someone else more. what explains this, medina thinks, is that credibility has a comparative and contrastive quality.21 as he explains, implicitly, being judged credible to some degree is being regarded as more credible than others, less credible than others, and equally credible as others. credibility never applies to subjects individually and in isolation from others, but always affects clusters of subjects in particular social networks and environments. (medina 2011, 18) in short, it is not that credibility is finite, but that we apply it in a comparative and contrastive, contextualized way. medina holds that a credibility excess can be an epistemic injustice precisely because—history and context permitting—another group receives a credibility deficit by default, and over time this leads to unjust hierarchies of credibility, and hence contributes to unjust relations of social identity-power in the epistemic context (2011, 20). as he puts it, “credibility judgments have effects (both proximal and distal) not only on their recipients, but on others involved in the interaction as well as others indirectly related to it (predecessors and successors of the exchange)” (medina 2011, 18). gaynor and zanetti’s complaints originally involved only themselves, burney, and representatives of the ahrc, as participants in the exchange. but they emerged from a racially charged environment, and in choosing to make their complaints (and their reasoning for their complaints) public via their blogs, they also engaged in a form of open-ended testimony. those who encounter the testimony may well, in line with the historical tendency, accord them an excess of credibility due to the dominant impression that the experienced world of white men is actually neutral, universal, rational, and impartial. the white vilification complainants could not offer their testimony in good faith if they had not first failed to recognize the alterity of others. speaking from what they take to be the rational, impartial, universal(izable) perspective, they remain steadfastly closed-minded, dogmatic, and impervious to criticism. and these complaints can elicit credibility due to already established norms and (implicit and 21 importantly, miranda fricker originally argued that credibility excesses cannot constitute testimonial injustices (2007, 21), though she later changed her position, distinguishing between “distributive epistemic injustice” and “discriminatory epistemic injustice” (see fricker 2013). david coady argued further that we can gain fruitful insights when we recognize both as forms of distributive injustice (2017, 61). i prefer medina’s comparative and contrastive account, since it gets at the intersubjective nature of credibility attribution without having to treat credibility as finite. richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 explicit) biases regarding the reliability of testimony from “people like this.” this is true, even though their “being like this” (that is, white) is rendered invisible thanks to the cultural imperialism of the group in its very disavowal of difference. moreover, an excess of testimonial credibility almost always brings about a comparative credibility deficit to the speech of others. this renders mainstream australians more likely to believe that figures like linda burney are just as bad as garden variety racists, which is what gaynor and zanetti suggest. it also renders mainstream australians less inclined to believe in the severity of racial vilification complaints made by people of colour because, by parity of reasoning, they seem just as trivial as instances of white vilification. insofar as this occurs, australians of colour are wronged in their capacities as knowers. in short, any credibility excess resulting from these white vilification complaints will be an epistemic injustice because it perpetuates both the overestimation of the knowledge borne by white australians and the underestimation of the knowledge borne by australians of colour. yet, with the proper recognition of racialized identity status in the contemporary australian context—that is, by acknowledging alterity and abandoning the (unattainable) ideal of impartiality—one will not grant credibility excesses to white vilification complainants, because one will have a more “nuanced understanding of the particularities of the social context, and the needs particular people have and experience within it” (young 1990, 96). thus, again, we see that it is a failure of recognition that can cause this epistemic injustice. vii. concluding remarks as young points out in the quote which prefaces this article, there is nothing but what is, the situated interest in justice, from which to start our normative reflections on that very topic (1990, 5). in order to understand relations of domination and oppression in contemporary australia, and to attempt to change them, one must begin from a specific call to justice—even if that call is misguided and perpetuates the existing relations of domination and oppression. i also choose to focus on white vilification complaints in particular because, as indicated by stoetzler and yuval-davis, it is crucial to understand the hegemonic centre, including the ways people situated there think and act, since most political decisions affecting the largest number of people come from this position (2002, 319). like them, i believe that in order to bring about a society that is not stratified by relations of domination and oppression, it is important to first understand what the dominant cultural group believes (as reflected in the dominant social imaginary). once one understands this, one can then challenge this normative position and generate epistemic friction by calling upon resistant imaginaries that present alternatives for a different future (medina 2011, 28). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 understanding the logic behind the white vilification complaints analysed here has required making aspects of australia’s dominant social imaginary visible. having done so, we can now see how the meaning-generating narrative of liberal equality and the ideal of impartiality constrains irreducible human difference to a singular, unitary logic. this is, in itself, oppressive to marginally situated others, since it allows the privileged group to maintain its cultural imperialism under the guise of neutrality and universality. but the failure to (re-)cognize difference also underscores this comparative credibility excess. as argued above, credibility judgments are affected by the hermeneutical and testimonial levels. and, as medina points out, the latter depends on the former, since “hearers cannot listen to a speaker fairly if there is a hermeneutical gap that prevents them from understanding and interpreting that speaker” (medina 2011, 27). as we have already seen, there is a hermeneutical gap, which is maintained by willful hermeneutical ignorance. given the contours of the dominant social imaginary (which enables willful hermeneutical ignorance), it is difficult—but not impossible—for mainstream australians to engage with the appropriately calibrated hermeneutical resources developed by the marginalized for making sense of their oppression. in the case of the white vilification complaints analysed, the complainants could have learned to apply the concept “hate speech” appropriately and gained more accurate knowledge about how the world is. instead they co-opted and disfigured this concept, applying it to their own experiences of racialized speech in a way that allows them to genuinely maintain the ideal of impartiality, and to protest that political correctness has now gone too far—that white people are now the underdogs, the new victims, those who have fallen afoul of a double standard, now subjected to reverse racism. because such complaints come from the culturally dominant social group, white vilification complainants are also likely to have their understanding of the concept “hate speech” gain credibility and be taken up as the correct understanding. this further entrenches the cultural dominance of white australians, and makes it all the more difficult for the marginalized to show that the types of racial vilification they encounter is both qualitatively particular and also oppressive. their knowledge cannot be shared; thus, they are wronged as knowers. attempting to generate changes in a dominant social imaginary is no small feat. imaginaries often operate at a pre-reflective level, but when epistemic friction emerges, what is latent can be made visible, analysable, and hence changeable (lennon 2015, 107). i have suggested that a resistant imaginary which proposes a politics of difference enables people to recognize the alterity of the other rather than reduce the other’s specificity to a singular logic of sameness. i have also suggested that, where alterity is recognized, epistemic injustices such as those produced in the testimony of gaynor and zanetti would not occur (without malice). richardson-self – offending white men: racial vilification, misrecognition, and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 however, the australian dominant social imaginary will only change alongside 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lamb ad for diversity, saying it's ‘racist’ and offensive to white people.” business insider, october 25. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/some-australiansare-furious-with-a-new-lamb-ad-for-diversity-saying-its-racist-and-offensiveto-white-people-2016-10. tuana, nancy. 2017. “feminist epistemology: the subject of knowledge.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus, jr., 125–138. london: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 24 wood, patrick. 2017. “australia becoming ‘a more racist country,’ survey finds.” abc news breakfast, february 9. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-0209/australia-is-becoming-a-more-racist-country-survey/8254592. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zanetti, paul. 2016a. “an open letter to the hon linda burney mp regarding her racist, sexist, ageist comment.” zanetti’sview.com, november 13. https://web.archive.org/web/20170702102152/http://zanettisview.com:80/ story/an-open-letter-to-the-hon-linda-burney-mp-regarding-her-racistsexist-ageist-comment/3751. ———. 2016b. “australian human rights commission's discrimination—and my reply.” zanetti’sview.com, november 26. https://web.archive.org/web/20170913203812/http://zanettisview.com/sto ry/australian-human-rights-commissions-discrimination-and-my-reply/3799. ———. 2016c. “my submission to the govt's section 18c and freedom of speech inquiry.” zanetti’sview.com, december 8. https://web.archive.org/web/20170913204809/http://zanettisview.com/sto ry/my-submission-to-the-govts-section-18c-and-freedom-of-speechinquiry/3854. ———. 2017. “i’ve been trigged! sexism, racism, ageism from the aust human rights commission.” zanetti’sview.com, june 24. https://web.archive.org/web/20170727011704/http://www.zanettisview.co m:80/story/ive-been-trigged-sexism-racism-ageism-from-the-aust-humanrights-commission/4522. louise richardson-self is a lecturer in philosophy and gender studies at the university of tasmania. her recent publications include “woman-hating: on misogyny, sexism, and hate speech” (hypatia, 2018) and “same-sex marriage and the ‘no’ campaign” (humanities australia, forthcoming). she is also the author of justifying same-sex marriage: a philosophical investigation (rowman & littlefield international, 2015). her research interests include hate speech, human rights, social imaginaries, oppression, and french feminisms. response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 2 article 6 2018 response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life ami harbin oakland university, aharbin@oakland.edu recommended citation harbin, ami. 2018. "response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life."feminist philosophy quarterly4, (2). article 6. response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life ami harbin abstract in this response, i address the commentaries of liat ben-moshe, cressida heyes, and ted rutland. i argue for attention to the disorienting aspects of prison abolition, the use of disorientations in improving the context of academic philosophy, and the importance of moments of disorientation in white anti-racist work and social justice organizing. keywords: disorientation, moral psychology, ambivalence, feminist ethics, activism it is an honor to read and respond to these commentaries, written by theorists who have deeply influenced my thinking. i have found in them a number of important insights, which both elucidate existing aspects of the book and point toward new and distinct directions of thinking. following a brief overview of the book, i will take up a number of their main points here. philosophers have a tendency to understand experiences like disorientations as threats to moral agency. in disorientation and moral life, i challenge a history of moral philosophy that i claim has been preoccupied by a focus on the best moral agents as those who are most decisive, wholehearted, and clear about how they ought to act. i give this preoccupation a name, resolvism, and argue that because resolvism has informed so much of philosophical ethics and moral psychology, the moral and political promise of disorientations has been difficult to see. i focus on particular kinds of disorientations, and draw on philosophical, testimonial, and empirical sources to show that in some cases, those disorientations have effects that are morally or politically beneficial. for instance, i show how disorientations of experiencing racism, white privilege, consciousness raising, and critical education in some cases generate awareness of contingent oppressive norms and awareness of political complexity. i argue that even when these kinds of awareness don’t help us resolve how to act, they generate epistemic humility, resistant reidentification, and collaborative action, which i argue are morally beneficial given the terrain of moral action within which such capacities are sometimes required. further, i show how disorientations of illness, trauma, queerness, and migration in some cases generate capacities for living unprepared, sensing vulnerabilities, ‘in this togetherness’ and for living against the grain of norms. i argue that even when these kinds of capacities not only fail to help agents resolve how to act but also actively compromise 1 harbin: response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life published by scholarship@western, 2018 moral resolve, they are morally and politically beneficial because they generate shifted habits and expectations that more accurately reflect and better respond to conditions of unpredictability, vulnerability, and interdependence. later in the book, i claim that while many contexts of injustice demand resolute action—action that is purposeful, decisive, confident, and unwavering—not all do. irresolute actions can be called for. i describe three kinds of irresolute actions: both/and actions (giving examples of their usefulness in unjust contexts of heterosexism and mass incarceration); doubling back actions (giving examples of their usefulness in contexts of implicit bias and colonialism); and building without blueprints (giving examples of their usefulness in contexts of postindustrial poverty). i conclude with a reflection on the responsibilities we have to respond to disorientations. since disorientations are experienced and expressed by individuals in the midst of relations with others, and since both others’ and one’s own reactions to one’s disorientations can make a difference to how disorientations affect one’s life, these reactions to disorientations are morally significant. writing a book on disorientations was perhaps most enriching for the ways it brought me into contact with others’ complex experiences. i discovered in the process of writing that it was rare to find people who could not identify periods of disorientation in their own lives; discussions of disorientation are often disarming. the commentaries included here highlight, among other things, each author’s take on the kinds of disorientations that stand out in their own experience, work, and activism. some are similar to disorientations i address in the book, others are completely new. liat ben-moshe’s commentary raises a number of interesting and instructive points about disorientations’ promise in political contexts. in particular, her comments focus on how disorientations might be useful in the context of prison abolition, which is addressed extensively in her own work elsewhere. ben-moshe considers the importance of epistemic humility as a crucial aspect of radical political action. as she suggests, not knowing what to do can be a powerful basis for coalition-building and sustaining social movements. she applies this in the context of prison abolition, claiming that in fact prison abolition is a particular epistemic position. on her view, abolition is both a counter-knowing (countering the idea that people must be segregated in the name of safety), and something that produces specific forms of knowledge (a new way of letting go of attachment to the idea that anyone has a certain formula for how to rid ourselves of carceral social relations). ben-moshe suggests that abolition invites us to “abandon our attachment to definitive types of knowing and especially to knowing all” (2018, 5), as i have also claimed is integral to many processes of disorientation. this is a very interesting and fruitful analysis of prison abolition, and one which i think opens up exciting new paths for abolitionist theory. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/6 one of the main critiques of abolition i note in philosophical discussions stems from an inability to know what a future without prisons would look like. without a clear vision of how an abolitionist future could be designed and attained, even those who are friendly toward the idea of abolition seem to hesitate, and worry that it is not a viable option. ben-moshe shows that the uncertainty central to these worries is in fact integral to a promising abolitionist view. abolitionism involves, on her view, letting go of the idea that we could know how to rid ourselves of carceral logics. this resonates with how i have responded to criticisms of disorientation in philosophical contexts. that is, one might criticize the disoriented agent for not knowing how to go on, or for not being able to resolve how to act. such inabilities would seem to indicate moral weakness or incapacity. but i have argued that such an inability to resolve how to act is consistent with the potential beneficial effects of disorientations. both forms of criticism—that is, the idea that abolitionist politics could only be promising if we knew exactly how to enact them, and the idea that disorientations could only be promising if we became reoriented by them—evince an underlying preference for control that is not merited in all ethical/political contexts. we do not yet know how to live beyond prisons, and we do not always know how to go on when disoriented. as the book suggests, feigning certainty in such contexts would be a waste of energy and opportunity. cressida heyes’s commentary offers further applications of the view, as well as expansions and correctives. as heyes notes, the book joins a literature within and beyond philosophy that aims to challenge the idea of moral selves as self-controlled, virtuous, and resolute. as summarized above, part of the project is not only to consider the effects of disorientations on the lives of moral agents, but also to propose a view of the importance of irresolute moral action in some contexts. one of the examples of irresolute action considered is ‘doubling back,’ envisioned as a retreading of the ground over and over, in order to question and challenge unjust practices that might otherwise go unnoticed. i claim that ‘doubling back’ actions might be particularly useful in unjust contexts of implicit bias and colonialism. heyes suggests that doubling back actions might be further useful in the unjust context of academic philosophy, where only some philosophical projects (and thereby, philosophers) are treated as legitimate (to the extent that they align with existing norms and precedents) while others are judged ‘not real philosophy/philosophers.’ i agree that doubling back might be usefully practiced in such cases, especially given that such judgments are often seemingly learned and practiced by philosophers to the point of becoming deeply seated habits, and are bound up with any given philosopher’s own desire to be recognized as legitimate, thereby becoming difficult to even recognize as judgments. unsurprisingly, a practical challenge in making use of doubling back actions in the context of professional philosophy will be the potential of philosophers to feel assured in our clarity of thought and reason (i.e., if i 3 harbin: response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life published by scholarship@western, 2018 judge some work to be not real philosophy, i can certainly give an argument for why it is so), and to feel critical, at a meta-level, of such an indefinite, unsatisfying approach to action (i.e., why must we retread ground, instead of more straightforwardly perceiving, uprooting, and replacing any mistaken judgments?). in other words, philosophers (and others) who pride themselves on a belief that their own cognitive lives are ones to which they always have direct and uncomplicated access might be suspicious of any moral strategy that suggests more ongoing, repeated self-investigation and correction might be needed. thankfully, such a belief is not a necessary feature of philosophical life. heyes raises a related point in her discussion of differences in the disorientations faced by oppressed individuals (e.g., the disorientation of being gaslighted as a woman of color in philosophy), as compared to those faced by more privileged individuals (e.g., a department chair who refuses to be disoriented by a charge of biased treatment of colleagues and students). heyes considers whether the department chair might be forced to experience disorientation, in order to raise awareness of their own harmful biases. this raises the question: can and should disorientations be forced on those who refuse them? throughout the book, i focus only on disorientations that occur without being forced on individuals—as i say, disorientations occur often enough without individuals actively looking for them or deliberately bringing them about. but i also claim that, given that how we respond to our own and others’ disorientations can affect whether and how disorientations affect us, individuals have a responsibility to respond to themselves as disorientable. so refusals of disorientations of the kind described become issues of irresponsibility. the imagined department chair’s refusal to be shaken from their orientation (i.e., the refusal to be affected by the charge of bias, and to have their confidence shaken by it) means that the harms of the bias go unrecognized and unrepaired. in such cases of moral failure, there is the question of whether disorientation should be forced in some way. two responses seem relevant here: first, i claim throughout the book that it is not always, or typically, up to an agent whether she will be disoriented or not. agents are fundamentally disorientable—even if one is not disoriented by one thing (e.g., a charge of bias), one still might be disoriented by other things (e.g., being diagnosed with an illness, or facing grief), and disorientations can have morally beneficial effects beyond just the realm within which they occur—the tenderizing effects of disorientation in one’s personal life may have beneficial effects in one’s professional life. second, even if we could agree upon contexts where they ought to be, i am not sure disorientations can be successfully forced in all cases, in order to bring about the desired results. in some cases, though the process of disorientation might yield better results, perhaps through generating the kind of humility and awareness that could prevent similar harms in the future, it might be that agents can successfully refuse forced 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/6 disorientations. the harms of their behavior must then be corrected in some other way (e.g., their judgments overridden, or their powers limited or revoked). ted rutland’s commentary helpfully highlights moments where disorientations come up in contexts of political organizing, and in particular in activism in response to racialized displacement and austerity. rutland raises one case of not-knowing what would constitute right action, in the context of being a white participant in a reading group focused on black critical scholarship. as the only white person present, rutland describes how, in a conversation raising multiple criticisms of white people, another participant turned to him and apologized—as in, “sorry for how these criticisms must feel, ted,” or “sorry to single you out.” in such a context, rutland describes not knowing how to respond, whether to signal agreement with the criticism (“everything you’re saying is true about white people, including me”) or to signal distance (“don’t worry, i’m not taking this personally”). he notes that, even as he still does not know how to respond, it is possible to identify potentially beneficial aspects of such a non-knowing: he is made not-incontrol, as there is no way to regain power over the situation, or to ensure that he feels in charge of how others view and describe him. as a white participant, he is made not-in-control by a criticism of precisely his participation in a legacy of being most powerful. i see this as a subtle and important kind of disorientation—it would seem particularly important to not attempt to resolve the issue and regain control, but instead to allow for the discomfort and speechlessness that signals one’s powerlessness within the situation. the other case from rutland’s comments, of being a participant in political actions that are not experienced as disorienting, is equally compelling. rutland describes his own involvement as a university faculty member in the 2012 quebec student movement. as he says, his participation involved no disorientation. the goal of the movement was clear (cancel the planned tuition increase), as was his role in the movement (support the students in any way he could). and yet, he notes, for the student organizers, there were plenty of moments of disorientation. this raises three questions, according to rutland. first, does one’s position with respect to some context/action make one more or less likely to be disoriented by it? second, is it possible to be resolute towards some goal while still disoriented within the process of working toward that goal? and third, are there political contexts where no action can be taken with sureness? to all three questions, the answer seems to be yes. to the first question, the student movement example does a great job of showing how closer proximity to the center of organizing/decision-making can make one more likely to feel disoriented by it. note that this may unfortunately compound tendencies for some to want to distance themselves from the core of organizing: to the extent that activism is envisioned as chiefly an empowering, clarifying experience, individuals might be dissuaded from participating, or may 5 harbin: response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life published by scholarship@western, 2018 believe themselves to be doing it wrong, the more they are disoriented by the work. preventing this dissonance is one good reason to work to reframe assumptions about, and accounts of, what activism feels like: even very worthwhile and vital efforts do not always feel clear or empowering. to the second question, while there do seem to be some contexts where the goal itself is not clear, there are others where the goal is more clear without thereby making all steps in the process of organizing clear. and finally, yes, it seems there are some contexts where no action can be taken with certainty. as rutland describes, there are political contexts in which something like a both/and action or building without blueprints is not (yet) possible. he gives fanon’s example of how the black subject can neither affirm his blackness, nor transcend it, and points to christina sharpe’s point about the impossibility of confronting the violence of racism from within ‘so-called democracy.’ this gestures toward what rutland fruitfully calls “not disoriented moments, but disoriented lives” (2018, 6). here perhaps returning to the example of prison abolition is instructive, which as rutland describes it, is a political project that “can scarcely imagine the world that it is trying to create” (4). contexts like that of prison abolition will be the most perplexing for any view of moral/political psychology that measures success by resoluteness, and yet also crucially important for philosophers to consider. once again, i am grateful to the commentators not only for their perceptive questions and considerations but also for their openness about where discussions of disorientation resonated with their own theorizing and experience. the threads of connection running through their pieces—the recognitions of the existence and significance of contexts where sure action is not possible, the shared challenges of responding to resistance to disorientation, among other points—are a reminder of the way disorientations are familiar, and parts of life we share in common. hopefully, we will continue to create conditions that facilitate their promise. references: ben-moshe, liat. 2018. “dis-orientation, dis-epistemology, and abolition.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (2). article 5. heyes, cressida. 2018. “dislocation and self-certainty: remarks on disorientation and moral life.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (2). article 3. rutland, ted. 2018. “disoriented life: a review of ami harbin’s disorientation and moral life.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (2). article 4. ami harbin is an associate professor of philosophy and women and gender studies at oakland university. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 2, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss2/6 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life ami harbin recommended citation response to commentaries on disorientation and moral life feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation protasi, sara. “teaching ancient women philosophers: a case study.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (3). article 3. 2020 teaching ancient women philosophers: a case study sara protasi university of puget sound sprotasi@pugetsound.edu protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 teaching ancient women philosophers: a case study sara protasi abstract in this paper i discuss in some detail my experience teaching women philosophers in the context of a survey course in ancient greek philosophy at a small liberal arts college. my aim is to share the peculiar difficulties one may encounter when teaching this topic in a lower-level undergraduate course, difficulties stemming from a multiplicity of methodological hurdles that do not arise when teaching women philosophers in other periods, such as the modern era. in the first section, i briefly review some of what we know about ancient greek women philosophers, which is not only very little but frustratingly uncertain and highly debated. i devote the second section to some of the scholarly debates surrounding these philosophers’ doctrines, the details of their biographies, and their very existence. the third section is about the corresponding pedagogical challenges, and the fourth and final section describes the strategies i implemented to face those challenges. keywords: women philosophers, ancient female philosophers, greek philosophy, greek women, teaching ancient philosophy, teaching women philosophers, hypatia, diotima, neo-pythagorean women the idea that we ought to expand the western philosophical canon is gaining traction and becoming accepted in mainstream philosophy. scholars and teachers in the anglophone world are actively and successfully incorporating non-western traditions and figures and, more generally, neglected epistemic perspectives in their research and in their teaching. a major component of these efforts has been to rediscover and bring to the fore the work of women in the history of philosophy. in this paper i discuss in some detail my experience teaching women philosophers in the context of a survey course in ancient greek philosophy at a small liberal arts college. my aim is to share the peculiar difficulties one may encounter when teaching this topic in a lower-level undergraduate course, difficulties stemming from a multiplicity of methodological hurdles that do not arise when teaching women philosophers in other periods, such as the modern era. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 in the first section, i briefly review some of what we know about ancient greek women philosophers, which is not only very little but frustratingly uncertain and highly debated. i devote the second section to some of the scholarly debates surrounding these philosophers’ doctrines, the details of their biographies, and their very existence. the third section is about the corresponding pedagogical challenges, and the fourth and final section describes the strategies i implemented to face those challenges. note, however, that my intent is not to tell others what readings should be assigned or which figures exactly should be analyzed. the take-home message is that there are many ways of teaching this topic and that the plurality of perspectives and possibilities is precisely what is pedagogically valuable. finally, note that i do not defend many assumptions that lie at the heart of this paper—to wit, that the philosophical canon ought to become more inclusive of neglected philosophers and philosophies for both moral and epistemic reasons; that what we teach and how we teach it matters to increasing inclusivity; and that the delegitimization of certain authors and traditions is neither incidental nor innocuous. those are well-trodden paths that i do not beat again here.1 1. women philosophers in antiquity?! when i started teaching at a small liberal arts college, fresh out of graduate school and with no experience as a primary instructor, i wrote my syllabi with the aim of being inclusive of students from underrepresented groups and mindful of neglected philosophical perspectives and traditions. even just selecting the course readings proved much harder than i expected: in addition to my sheer ignorance of many topics outside the canon, i found it very difficult to cope with my own entrenched, unwittingly internalized dogmas. it took me a few years to realize that “swapping” audre lorde and kimberlé crenshaw with aristotle (whom my students consistently found too hard to digest in the abbreviated form that i proposed to them) would make my first-year seminar more compelling and diverse without any loss of philosophical rigor. 1 for a noncomprehensive selection of recent articles, books, and blog posts (at times in disagreement with each other) on expanding the philosophical canon, see antony 2012; drabinski 2016; rickless 2018; schliesser 2016; shapiro 2016; tyson 2018; van norden 2017; wong 2019. for a collection of posts on daily nous, see http://dailynous.com/tag/canon/. for more pedagogically oriented articles, see berges 2015; chung 2018. for a seminal paper on how to change the ideology and culture of philosophy, see haslanger 2008. protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 but the hardest challenge was writing my ancient philosophy syllabus.2 i wanted to have some women in it, but i didn’t know of any.3 i had heard of hypatia, of course, but i thought she was more of a mathematician than a philosopher. then again, i hadn’t really thought much about her at all. never in my undergraduate or graduate studies had i encountered an ancient woman philosopher—unless one counted diotima, who was, i had always been told, certainly fictional. so i started asking around in the feminist philosophy circles, and many colleagues recommended kathleen wider’s (1986) “women philosophers in the ancient greek world: donning the mantle.” the day i read it, i was amazed by the discovery that there are… binders full of ancient women philosophers!4 or, at least, there are long lists of names. one such list from the seventeenth century (ménage 1984) contains sixty-five from hellenistic times alone.5 iamblichus (4th c. ce) lists 17 of the most famous pythagorean women (huffman 2018). wider herself discusses, in varying detail, nineteen figures over the course of ten centuries (from 6th c. bce to 4th or 5th c. ce). 2 classics, like many other academic disciplines, is plagued by a colonialist and racist legacy, which the discipline is now attempting to shake off. at my own institution, for instance, the classics department has renamed itself classics and ancient mediterranean studies and is revising their courses so that the new name reflects a deep reassessment of contents and methods rather than just a cosmetic change of labels. similar enterprises are being pursued in philosophy departments, including mine, through newly introduced courses such as race and philosophy and chinese philosophy. however, for reasons of space and personal competence, in my course and consequently in this paper i maintain an exclusive focus on women, setting aside potential complications raised by the class and race/ethnicity of these figures, since as far as we know they were all greek, free, and of higher socioeconomic status (or at least we have no evidence to the contrary). i thank a reviewer for prompting this clarification. 3 in this course i focus almost exclusively on primary sources and do not ask students to read secondary sources, with the exception of one reading by martha nussbaum (1986) and one by julia annas (2008). a reviewer pointed out to me that canon revisionism does not involve only the inclusion of women authors but also feminist interpreters of male authors (e.g., freeland 1989; bar on 1994; tuana 1994; witt 2003; see also the bibliography included in witt and shapiro 2015). this is certainly correct, and it made me reflect on ways to further improve my teaching. i am thankful to a reviewer for this reminder. 4 see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/binders_full_of_women. 5 it is to be noted, though, that ménage’s criteria for including women in his list are somewhat flawed. for an insightful critique see pellò (forthcoming a and b). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 the simple act of reading the names contained in that 1986 article—names that with a couple of exceptions had never made their appearance throughout my very extensive philosophical education—was an epiphany that has radically changed the way i approach teaching and learning ancient philosophy. i talk about this revelation from a personal perspective, but my experience is far from atypical: every year i witness the same shock and elation in my students, especially those who identify as women, but not only them. whether or not the people bearing these names all existed, and whether or not they really did do philosophy—something we might never know or agree on—we know that there were women in ancient philosophical schools, and most of those unnamed and unknown women have been all but forgotten until very recently. saying their names, saying some names, is an homage to all of these forgotten figures. so here is kathleen wider’s list: theano, myia, damo, arignote, perictione, melissa, phintys, aspasia, diotima, arete, hipparchia, pamphile, leontion, menexene, argeia, theognis, artemisia, pantaclea, and, finally, the most famous of all: hypatia. theano was a contemporary of pythagoras (likely his wife or daughter) and thus lived in the sixth century bce, while the neoplatonist hypatia died in the fifth century of the common era. other names have emerged since wider’s article was published. in a volume edited by mary ellen waithe, a history of women philosophers: ancient women philosophers 600 bc–500 ad (1987), we discover the names, lives, and sometimes doctrines of asclepigenia, axiothea, cleobulina, lasthenia, and (in the roman tradition) julia domna and the christian saint macrina. more recently, danielle layne (2018) briefly discusses sosipatra and, again, asclepigenia in a blog post for blog of the apa. caterina pellò (forthcoming a) mentions plato’s disciples lasthenia and axiothea. gary gabor told me in correspondence that he is writing a paper on the pythian oracle as a philosophical figure. women thus seem to have been involved in western philosophy since its inception and within a wide range of traditions (pythagorean, academic, cynic, cyrenaic, epicurean, neoplatonic, christian). i am sure this is not an exhaustive list of ancient women philosophers who are being discovered, or rediscovered. even if one were to limit oneself to studying and teaching a subset of these authors, however, a host of issues would emerge right away. some of these women are believed by most people to be fictional (most notably, diotima). others are said to be associated with philosophers but are not considered philosophers themselves (for instance, theano was pythagoras’s wife or daughter; perictione was plato’s mother; aspasia was pericles’s partner; arete was daughter and mother of two philosophers, both called aristippus; hipparchia was protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 wife of crates).6 others are famous historical figures whose status as philosophers has been disputed (aspasia and julia domna). some have names that recur in the tradition, thus making their identification even more difficult (again, theano and perictione). some are acknowledged as philosophers, but we know nothing of their doctrines, or their doctrines are attributed to a male relative (arete) or recounted by a male relative (macrina). none of them is the author of primary texts whose authenticity is unquestioned. for all of them, ancient and even contemporary sources are biased. given these difficulties, which i will further discuss in the next section, it is very hard to introduce students to the content of the doctrines. one possibility is to say what little we know about them without caveats or qualifications, and to introduce the texts and fragments and ask students to read them, as we do with texts and views said to be authored by men. feminist scholars have done that. luce irigaray (1989), for instance, writes about diotima’s speech without any prologue concerning diotima’s existence. she simply discusses (and critiques) the view, without any concern for whether diotima is fictional or not. but this is not the approach usually adopted in teaching. any responsible teacher is expected to premise a class on the symposium with a flashing warning about diotima’s ontological status. similar warnings, as we will see later, are provided for the pythagorean women. i have seen quite a few raised eyebrows when i have given the talk version of this paper at the mention that i provide alleged primary texts. an attendee at a poster session came to ask, “how can you teach this topic without any texts?!” and was very much not satisfied by my answers. and yet, i am increasingly convinced that starting from the views is the most pedagogically fruitful and intellectually honest way to go.7 a useful starting point—i have found—is to ask students to take an educated guess: what kind of philosophy could women raised in ancient patriarchal societies have written? one might think that women who managed to write, or at least talk about, philosophy would have had access to the same resources as their male counterparts: that they somehow did get some education, that they were allowed into schools. furthermore, one might believe that women reason like men, 6 a reviewer, whom i thank, reminded me that similar claims were used to exclude women from artistic canons. notable examples include artemisia gentileschi, clara schumann, fanny mendelssohn, and alice coltrane. and, of course, there are some such cases in the more recent history of philosophy as well (e.g., harriet taylor mill until recently was not considered an original thinker in her own right). 7 i am grateful to christia mercer for pushing me in this direction, when i was still myself in the grip of the dogma that it is irresponsible to propose without comment texts that are so controversial. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 notwithstanding their different social reality. thus, one might guess that their philosophy is about the same topics that we see in mainstream ancient philosophy, such as the nature of the cosmos and of the soul, and that they wrote the same kinds of texts, such as treatises and collections of aphorisms. alternatively, one might argue that women’s freedom and ability in ancient greece were dramatically constrained and limited, that one’s thinking is shaped by such cultural and social factors, and that minds are always embodied, both literally and metaphorically. thus, one might guess that their philosophy was, in fact, different: that they discussed topics that were more salient in their daily lives, such as the management of a household or the behavior of their husbands, and wrote about them in different formats, such as letters. both guesses are indeed formulated by students. both are correct, and provide halves of a complex whole, halves with ragged edges that do not match precisely. women (may) have written treatises on the nature of the universe and the composition of our souls (e.g., aesara of lucania) but also letters to women who had just become mothers, full of advice on how to choose a nurse and feed a child (e.g., theano). they taught in traditional philosophical schools (and even headed them in several cases) presumably on orthodox topics and following established methods (e.g., arete, hipparchia, hypatia), but they also taught outside of those institutional contexts and were revered oracular or mystic figures, who are so often excluded from the western philosophical canon (e.g., the pythia, diotima).8 or, in a hybrid combination of “feminine” and “masculine” expectations, they wrote treatises on the moderation of women (e.g., phintys of sparta). but these are not just different topics and modalities. the thorny question is whether they are commensurable at all, and whether those who wrote about “womanly” matters in “womanly” ways did philosophy at all (see waithe 1987, xi– xii). this is a question that may be discussed in feminist philosophy courses and at more advanced levels of instruction in the history of philosophy, but one that rarely arises in standard survey courses in ancient philosophy, due to the scarcity of primary texts and acknowledged women figures. 8 on the significance of this exclusion, see layne (2018). andrea nye’s (1989) interpretation of diotima’s speech relies substantively on diotima’s role as a priestess and on the idea that even in classical greece women retained authority and respect in religious contexts. for parallel arguments in the study of medieval thought, see mercer (2017), who argues that teresa of avila inspired descartes’s rendering of the evil demon trope, and van dyke (2018), who argues that contemporary philosophical understanding of mysticism is affected by an ahistorical and prejudiced exclusion of embodied mysticism, which was mostly practiced by women. protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 this question, however, also evokes the current metaphilosophical discussions about what qualifies as philosophy (dotson 2012) and relatedly what qualifies as teaching introduction to philosophy (liao 2018). one might want to resist the impulse to propose this question to an audience of inexperienced undergraduate students, for fear of replicating and reinforcing oppressive disciplinary boundaries. but i have found that asking the question in the context of an introductory history of philosophy class encourages the students to think about interesting asymmetries. for instance, why has the pythagorean discussion of how women can be temperate and modest failed to qualify as an inquiry into human nature and human virtue, while the equally gendered aristotelian analysis of courage in battle has had a different fate? these are questions that are easy to grasp and that enliven metaphilosophical discussions which usually do not grip students at this level. furthermore, even the texts that appear to be philosophical in a canonical sense may be influenced by their being authored by women. consider aesara of lucania’s conception of the soul, which is superficially very similar to plato’s but differs in linking appetite with kindliness (philophrosynē) and love. one striking feature of plato’s moral psychology is its seeming obliviousness to the motivational force of maternal love and in general its neglect of forms of love that are not erotic. that a woman philosopher should be more pluralistic in her conception of human motivation and more attuned to norms that she was socially required to be attuned to would not be shocking. or would it? if these and other questions are asked in good faith, self-reflectively, and without an agonistic spirit aimed to ascertain victors and hierarchies—as mary ellen waithe (1987), vicki lynn harper (2013), annette bourland huizenga (2013), and caterina pellò (forthcoming a and b), among others, have done—the answers may be illuminating and liberating, not obscurantist and oppressive. this is especially important in a pedagogical context. while the questions above risk sounding anachronistic or trite to an audience of scholars, they are new and exciting to most students, especially in the context of an introductory history of philosophy class, which may attract a different audience than that of a gender studies or feminist philosophy class. but i hope to show in the following section that there are many more interesting questions that are peculiar to ancient philosophy and that do not arise when investigating, for instance, modern philosophers such as elisabeth of bohemia or anne conway. 2. the challenges of studying ancient women philosophers in the previous section, i have alluded to the many methodological issues surrounding the study of these philosophers: primary texts, assuming there really were any, may be lost forever; indirect ancient sources are unreliable; modern and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 contemporary scholars are hindered not only by their sexist prejudice but by millennia of an interpretive tradition written in an exclusively male voice, or conversely, they may be influenced by their desire to find undoubtable evidence even where there isn’t any. these issues are often unknown to philosophers who do not specialize in ancient philosophy. thus, in this section i spell out the aforementioned methodological hurdles in greater detail, with the caveat that a single article cannot do justice to the subtleties and complexities of the many controversies that i briefly recount. also, note that even though i attempt to present them as three distinct issues, they are unavoidably intertwined. 2.1. absence of primary texts ancient texts have gotten lost in transmission, if they existed at all. this is a well-known problem that affects even the most eminent philosophers: all of aristotle’s “exoteric” works (the more polished compositions destined for a wider audience) have been lost, probably forever, with the exception of some fragments. if this fate befell the most venerated philosopher in antiquity, and many important philosophers before him, it is unsurprising that we have no philosophical text that is undoubtedly and reliably acknowledged as written by a woman before the middle ages. the only primary texts we may have from women are letters and fragments (that is, purported quotes) attributed to the pythagorean women, and texts authored by men who claim to report women’s views, as in plato’s symposium and menexenus and gregory of nyssa’s on the soul and resurrection. these works involve distinct but related debates. i discuss the alleged primary texts in section 2.3. the problem with texts containing reported views is evident even to the nonspecialist: how can we be sure that plato and gregory represented the views of the purported authors correctly? we cannot, of course. but feminist philosophers have highlighted the hermeneutic double standard that is at play here. nobody believes that plato represents socrates’s view in a completely unfiltered way, and nobody trusts blindly any aristotelian commentator referring to his lost works. however, nobody wholly distrusts these sources either; nobody, that is, simply assumes that those who speak on behalf of others cannot be possibly referring to authentic philosophical doctrines or that they cannot be preserving any of the original content. even more relevantly to the issue at hand, there is an entire tradition, presocratic philosophy, which we study entirely on the basis of fragments and commentaria (that is, commentaries or paraphrases of what another philosopher said). i do not mean to argue that the two situations are exactly analogous: it may be the case that there are more solid grounds for accepting protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 presocratic fragments as authentic and the related commentaries as reliable.9 i simply want to point out that there is a different approach to these philosophers. even though there is no extant text attributed to thales, and many discrepancies between sources, we do not hesitate to honor him with the title of first philosopher in the western tradition and to attempt to reconstruct his philosophy as best as we can. debra nails highlights such hermeneutical double standards when talking about diotima’s disputed existence: there is a current and widespread assumption that diotima is the one named character plato certainly invented. in classical studies generally, “arguments from silence” (i.e. absence of evidence) are used with caution—not only because evidence has a way of turning up unexpectedly in some newly found papyrus or inscription—but because we can be quite certain that we have only a tiny portion of the evidence of antiquity. yet the argument from silence is the one most commonly employed to the conclusion that diotima is not historical. (nails 2002, 137) when it comes to women philosophers, then, skepticism verging on outright denial has for a long time been the default attitude. that is, the longstanding approach of (often but not exclusively male) scholars has been to not treat these sources as possibly transmitting philosophical doctrines elaborated by women, even when they are explicitly presented as such. again, skepticism in itself is not unwarranted, but it is hard to disentangle two related but importantly different factors: one is the awareness that women lived in a sexist environment that made it difficult to practice philosophy; the other is the sexist environment in which all commentators, even contemporary ones, still live, and which cannot help but affect their judgment. why is it so hard to believe that (upper-class, free, greek) women philosophized and wrote philosophy? furthermore, a distinct prejudice often at play in these discussions is to assume that the past is necessarily more subject to certain kinds of biases than the present.10 but we have many testimonies of the respect and even veneration enjoyed by women philosophers in their time and afterward. the incredulity with 9 in general, note that i do not commit myself to any specific position on the controversies i discuss, or at the very least i strive to remain as agnostic as possible. the aim of this paper is not to take sides, even though complete impartiality is not achievable and my sympathies clearly transpire. 10 see van dyke (2018) for a case study disproving this prejudice and showing why it is pernicious. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 which these testimonies have been received by modern and contemporary commentators, and the consequent eagerness to dismiss these testimonies as satirical, is telling. interpretative debate on the menexenus is an example of this attitude. many scholars have argued in favor of an ironic interpretation of aspasia’s speech, while others have endorsed what robitzsch explicitly terms the “feminist reading” (2017, 288). most recently, peter adamson has argued that aspasia’s role in menexenus is to present ideas that are perceived to be “feminine” but which are nonetheless endorsed by plato (adamson, n.d.).11 thus, he rejects an ironic reading. he presents aspasia as a controversial historical figure who attracted extreme views: she was hated and despised by pericles’s political adversaries, who mocked her as a prostitute,12 but she was greatly admired by those in socrates’s and plato’s circles: “for plato as for xenophanes and aeschines, she may have been a figure worth taking seriously and even a potential philosopher queen,” adamson writes. however, even his interpretation—in my view—falls prey to the default skepticism toward ancient women philosophers, since he presents aspasia exclusively as plato’s mouthpiece, albeit a distinctive one. aspasia’s voice is used by plato—according to adamson—to present platonic views that are gendered. but they are nevertheless plato’s views; that is, he is the only one credited for them: “if plato was a man of his time in associating women with relationships of family within and beyond the household, he was perhaps unique among classical thinkers in granting these ‘women’s issues’ a far wider philosophical significance.” as with diotima, whose presence in the symposium is often mentioned to show plato’s affinity for “women’s issues,” aspasia is never credited with these ideas. adamson never considers the possibility that aspasia, a real person who really did interact with socrates and plato, could have been the source of at least some of the views plato himself attributes to her.13 he never stops to ask: why was aspasia considered a philosopher queen? furthermore, menexenus is a socratic dialogue: with other socratic dialogues the presumption is that plato is strongly influenced by his master’s thought and that the 11 all citations are from the pdf available on academia.edu. adamson also discusses other authors who reject a satirical interpretation of aspasia’s speech. robitzsch (2017) provides what i believe is the most recent literature review on the topic. 12 aspasia was indeed a hetaira, that is, a (probably educated) courtesan. the differences between hetairai and pornai, or common prostitutes, are still debated. 13 we have many ancient sources other than plato on aspasia, including but not limited to aeschines, aristophanes, xenophon, cicero, plutarch (see nails 2002, 58– 62). in addition to those for aspasia and diotima, nails’s prosopography also contains an entry on perictione, qua plato’s mother (nails 2002, 228–229). protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 views presented there are at least in part to be credited to the historical socrates. why a different presumption in aspasia’s case?14 adamson also exemplifies another attitude i find problematic. in a post for the apa blog, he writes: there are interesting historical and philosophical questions to be asked. for instance, even if we suspect that diotima or gārgī are largely or entirely fictional, we might wonder why plato and the authors of the upanishads chose women and not men as characters for these specific contexts. we might also observe that certain types of philosophy are associated with women at certain periods. this goes not just for mysticism in medieval europe (and the medieval islamic world too by the way, as with the important sufi thinker rabi‘a), but also the branch of practical philosophy called “economics,” in other words household management, in the letters ascribed to pythagorean women. (adamson 2016) adamson concludes that “when it comes to the textual basis for the study of women thinkers, then, learning to settle for less may help us to learn more.” now this stance is likely to be considered balanced and unbiased. i worry, however, that this kind of contribution is seen as more authoritative than a view which expresses caution about the available evidence but goes on to take the content of the philosophical views at face value (such as, for instance, harper [2013] and pellò [forthcoming a and b]). that is, even assuming that the few extant texts attributed to women were not in fact written by those women, it is not clear that, by entertaining the possibility that those views were in fact held by women philosophers, and that by studying them as such, we learn less. perhaps, we simply learn different things, such as philosophical views that might be worth thinking about, independently of whether their authors are those whose names are on the page. 2.2. unreliability of ancient sources to sum up, scholars disagree not only or even primarily on the amount of evidence concerning the authenticity of primary texts but also and most importantly 14 note that i do not mean to assess personal intentions, motivations, or character. it is also not the case that i find adamson’s entire work problematic in this respect. he has another work in progress in which he considers macrina’s philosophical method and in which he takes her philosophy at face value. furthermore, his podcast history of philosophy without any gaps advances both inclusivity in the profession and scholarly inquiry. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 on the implications of this scarce evidence. similar considerations apply to a connected but distinct issue, that of the unreliability of ancient sources.15 women philosophers are constantly mentioned in relation to a man, whether it is their husband, son, father, brother, or pupil (in the case of diotima and socrates) with few exceptions, like axiothea.16 for all of them, information about their life and philosophy is provided by men (unless we believe that at least some of the pythagorean letters and fragments are eponymous). until relatively recently, all scholars who read those commentaries and did research on them were also men. several problems stem from the fact that women’s voices are transmitted by men. first, as wider states: “it has been suggested by both ancient and modern writers that women were in the philosophical schools to provide sexual satisfaction for the men” (wider 1986, 26). while some of these figures (seven, by wider’s account) could be classed as hetairai, there is no evidence that that was the case for most of them. compared to when wider wrote her article, most scholars now seem to acknowledge that women were present in most philosophical movements in western antiquity, from pythagoreanism to the hellenistic schools and beyond. however, it is difficult to shake off the effects of a sexist scholarly heritage completely: we still have to contend with pervasive cultural beliefs affecting all ancient sources, and we have to take them into account when interpreting what they say. in this regard, i agree with adamson’s reiterated warning that we never have unmediated access to the views of women philosophers. second, and relatedly, well-known issues concerning the reliability of ancient testimonials, which occur for most badly preserved ancient views, are exacerbated by this sexist bias. that is, assuming that there is no authentic primary text, secondary sources become crucial, and we cannot trust even amicable ones. remember the battle between friends and foes of aspasia. even sources that were sympathetic to her, and who did not hold her hetaira status against her, might have still misinterpreted her views, seen them through a deforming lens, and reported them incorrectly. how often, even today, does one hear the compliment “smart for a woman”? such benevolent sexism would have been endemic in classical athens, and it had not dissipated by 1690, when ménage wrote his historia mulierum philosopharum and considered a woman a philosopher simply in virtue of her relation to a philosopher. finally, even those who were not maligned as hetairai are still often portrayed in highly sexualized terms, as the “lurid, pornographic descriptions” 15 see pellò (forthcoming a and b) for discussions of the peculiar difficulties concerning the study and teaching of pythagorean women. 16 being related to a man philosopher is by itself one of the criteria gilles ménage (1984) uses in his list of women philosophers! protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 (wider 1986, 26) of hypatia’s lynching and her iconography attest.17 while we might think that this is a concern for the historian or the visual arts scholar, i think that philosophers, too, ought to be sensitive to the subterraneous influence literary and artistic depictions may have on our perception of these figures. 2.3 disagreement and bias in contemporary scholarship the lack of canonical primary texts, combined with the unreliability of ancient sources and with the fact that sexist bias persists in our societies, results in the peculiar level of disagreement among contemporary scholars, particularly on the topic of pythagorean women but not limited to them. now, i am going to assume here that no science is value-free and that no perspective is free from bias, including the feminist one. feminists are susceptible to many cognitive biases, including confirmation bias and wishful thinking, just like any other person. feminist arguments are only made stronger by this acknowledgment and by subsequent strategies aimed at reducing those biases. but even with those strategies in place, it is not possible to extract oneself from one’s context and approach the text in a totally neutral, unprejudiced way, and i do not intend to defend the idea that feminist scholars have a higher chance of being less prejudiced with regard to this topic than their nonfeminist counterparts (for one such defense, see antony [1993]). what i do aim to do in this last subsection is to focus on a specific case that illustrates well the many difficulties discussed above and the consequent disputes between contemporary commentators: the controversy concerning pythagorean pseudepigrapha, to which i have already alluded. but i recount this debate through a novel pedagogical lens. that is, i describe in some detail the contrast between discordant sources as it can be seen from a student perspective: some of these sources are likely to be perceived as authoritative and definitive; others as alternative, unreliable, and hard to access, either literally (because they are not easily available on the internet or at their library) or metaphorically (because they are complex from a scholarly perspective). as we know, students tend to stop at the first few sources they find in a library catalogue or directly on the internet. students searching for the keyword “pythagorean women” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy would find three entries. one is “feminist history of philosophy” (witt and shapiro 2015), which contains a brief direct quote from waithe (1987). this entry would be useful to students only insofar as it would direct them to waithe’s volume, but it is the third result of the search and would not be the most natural starting point, given that it 17 see, for instance, the painting by charles william mitchell, exhibited in 1885, where she is naked and only barely covered by her long hair. a recent movie (agora, 2009) shows hypatia dismissing many romantic advances. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 focuses on general theoretical issues and on early modern philosophers. furthermore, the volume edited by waithe is expensive and may not be owned by a library or available electronically. the other two entries are “pythagoras” and “pythagoreanism,” both written by carl huffman (huffman 2018, 2019). the first entry only refers to the existence of women very briefly and without mentioning any names. however, huffman devotes a whopping page and a half of the second 58-page entry to pythagorean women, where he acknowledges the unusually large role given to women in the school and the fact that women “were probably more active in pythagoreanism than any other ancient philosophical movement” (huffman 2019, sec. 3.3; my emphasis). the subsection mentions none of their alleged doctrines. it gives biographical details of theano and timycha, but not of myia, pythagoras’s daughter, whose existence is well attested. the subsection also contains the claim that there is “no reliable evidence for any writings by these women” (ibid.), and refers to other works on the topic (not a comprehensive list, see below). the only other place in the entry where the author mentions women is in the discussion of their pseudepigrapha. to perictione and phintys are attributed fragments from two treatises (on the harmony of a woman and on the temperance of a woman, respectively) and there are five letters attributed to theano, melissa, and miya. it is only here that huffman mentions very briefly the content of these views, but also adds this: “there is little that is specifically pythagorean” (2019, sec. 4.2). he also cautions the reader to take these texts seriously: “due to the dearth of preserved writings by women from the ancient world some have been tempted to suppose that the writings are genuine works by the named authors” (ibid.; my emphasis). however, the reader is left to wonder who those “some” may ever be: there is no reference, either in the text or in the bibliography. it is hard not to find this lacuna insulting: the absence of any engagement with the feminist philosophy literature on the topic seemingly suggests that the author didn’t even deem them worthy of expressing his disagreement with them. the only feminist author that huffman engages with is sarah pomeroy, a prominent classicist who published a monograph devoted to pythagorean women (pomeroy 2013). however, he cites her only briefly, saying that the book “provides some useful commentary but has some serious drawbacks” (huffman 2019, sec. 4.2) and then refers to two negative reviews of the book, one condescendingly lukewarm (brodersen 2014) and the other scathing and at times offensive (centrone 2014). the reviews are featured in the bibliography twice: once on their own, and once after the reference to pomeroy’s book. it is worthwhile to note that the entry does not deny that there were women who belonged to the pythagorean school. it thus maintains a semblance of openness and neutrality. but, at the same time, it dismisses the possibility that their protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 doctrines have survived somehow (even if transmitted by someone else, and even if they might have evolved from their original pythagorean origins) and fails to take them seriously on their own merits. huffman is not alone in deeming the work of pomeroy, waithe, and wider to be flawed. annette huizenga, whose moral education for women in the pastoral and pythagorean letters: philosophers of the household (2013) huffman cites approvingly at various points, agrees with the mainstream view that these ancient texts are pseudonymous. but first she engages extensively, even if critically, with the feminist scholarship, citing it directly. second, as the subtitle of her book suggests, she takes the philosophical content of such work extremely seriously and presents evidence concerning the existence of these women philosophers at length. her view is that some of these women philosophers existed and were held in high esteem in antiquity, and that is why the texts were attributed to them. huizenga’s book may be the most rigorous and extended analysis of the pythagorean women’s philosophy to date. it is, however, a thick volume full of footnotes, hard to navigate for nonspecialists, and—i fear—fairly inaccessible to students. i would imagine most if not all students would rest content with the sep entries, especially given how fond they are of online sources. another favorite student resource, the internet encyclopedia of philosophy, does not contain any mention of the pythagorean women.18 the topic of pythagorean women is particularly fraught, but i hope i have provided a taste of the peculiar difficulties surrounding ancient women philosophers. i have presented in some detail a couple of debates (on diotima and aspasia in the platonic corpus, and on the pythagorean women), in order to show the uneven presentation and accessibility of scholarship from a student perspective. but that is not, alas, the only pedagogical challenge one may encounter, as i explain in the next section. 3. the challenges of teaching ancient women philosophers in the first iteration of my ancient greek philosophy course, as i said, i knew very little about ancient women. at the beginning of the term, i held a class session discussing similarities and differences between sappho, hesiod, and the presocratics, so as to introduce the question, what is philosophy? my aim was to expand on the traditional distinction between mythos and logos and the comparison drawn by jonathan barnes (2001) between hesiod’s theogony and the doctrines of the school of miletus. i wanted, on the one hand, to highlight the undeniable differences in methodology and form of these texts, but on the other, to suggest 18 this is not in any way an indictment of the iep, which does have, for instance, an entry devoted to cynic philosopher hipparchia. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 that what gets included in a canon is not only dependent on that. however, i myself considered that connection a bit of a stretch, and the metaphilosophical question went well above the head of my students. i had higher expectations for a class devoted to kathleen wider’s article. but i could not think of anything better than having groups summarize findings related to each historical period analyzed by wider, and then present them to the class. the board was full of facts for each woman philosopher, but the students did not realize how peculiar that board was, nor did they grasp the import of the methodological and scholarly issues i had them regurgitate. i also worried the class felt more like indoctrination than genuine teaching. therefore, the following year i partnered with our humanities librarian katy curtis. in the first session, she introduced students to library resources; she explained the distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary sources; she had them analyze some primary sources from waithe’s volume; and finally she led them in a concept-mapping activity, using a digital tool named coggle.19 students were divided into small groups, each devoted to a different woman philosopher.20 each group received one primary text reading for their assigned philosopher. each group also skimmed entries for “pythagoras” and “pythagoreanism” from the sep to identify overlapping or related ideas. (all materials had been assigned as class reading as well). the task for each group was to contribute one “branch” related to their female philosopher to the class coggle map. branches could include biographical information, and summary or analysis of the primary text, as well as connections to the pythagorean tradition or the challenges of studying female philosophers in antiquity.21 this class was very successful in engaging students in discussion and in fostering active research and exploration of the topic. in my library colleague’s own words: this session went really well! i think it has been one of my most successful library sessions this semester. students were enthusiastic and engaged, contributing thoughtfully to all discussions. the topic of women in ancient philosophy was very effective for fostering an exploration of the library resources and i believe all students were impressed by (or at the very least recognized the value of) the specificity of the subject encyclopedias and their usefulness for getting started. the students also seemed to enjoy using coggle to outline their ideas when working with their primary texts. 19 see https://coggle.it/. 20 on the benefits of cooperative learning, see johnson, johnson, and smith (2014). 21 i owe the description of the class activity to katy curtis, whom i thank. protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 the second class was, alas, less successful. i tried to expose the students to two subsequent “twists.” the first one was the realization that the primary texts they had analyzed might not be authentic, as argued in the stanford entry. the second twist was that those authors denying the authenticity might be biased in their assessment, as argued by waithe. i tried to bring home the point that scholarship is never neutral and always embedded in a tradition that neglects some viewpoints in favor of others, and that navigating these debates is difficult but rewarding. but once again i found myself telling, rather than showing. i wanted them to realize on their own the lacunas, biases, and difficult methodological choices that scholars writing about this topic face. again, i worried about the students feeling indoctrinated, instead of discovering firsthand at least some of the issues i described to them. 4. meeting the challenges: pedagogical strategies and suggestions to sum up: the main challenges i faced were the multitude and diversity of methodological hurdles concerning the scholarship on this topic, and the risk of being perceived either as a left-leaning professor indoctrinating students or, vice versa, as a moderate liberal one paying only lip-service to a “pc”22 ideal. the breakthrough occurred after attending a teaching session on digital archives. the creation of digital archives is part of the ever-expanding toolkit of digital pedagogy in the humanities (battershill and ross 2017; hirsch 2012). digital archives have the same purpose as physical archives but contain digitized documents and are available online. the assignment asks students to create a collection of dispersed information concerning each philosopher, with the explicit aim of making it accessible to the larger public. each group was to create a web page for a woman philosopher that contained at least one image or portrait of her (assuming they could find any); any available biographical information; primary texts (again, if extant); and discussion questions. (see appendix for the prompt and related rubric). a similar assignment would be to ask students to create a wikipedia page, but for many of these figures there are preexisting entries, and i did not want to introduce the further complication of learning wikipedia etiquette and format. in fall 2017, i divided the class into seven groups, taking into account various demographic factors, personality, and skill level. since i did this toward the end of 22 i find it sad that “politically correct,” which at face value is a noble concept, is such a charged and derogatory term from both sides of the political spectrum, even though perhaps it deserves such a fate due to its not exactly pluralistic origins (see https://www.britannica.com/topic/political-correctness). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 the term, i knew the students pretty well.23 i selected the seven “hidden figures”24 so that they involved very different methodological questions: aspasia, perictione, aesara, phintys, theano, diotima, and hypatia. students would create websites about these philosophers and would have to retrieve hard-to-find sources, delve into complex scholarly controversies, and grapple with difficult choices concerning what material to include and how to frame it. i encouraged them to think about questions such as, did diotima really exist, and if so, is the theory of love she defends in the symposium attributable to her? was aspasia only pericles’s companion and a hetaira, or was she also a public intellectual, and is that enough to consider her a philosopher? was there only one theano, was she the daughter of pythagoras, and can we think of her as an independent thinker? was perictione only plato’s mother, or was she a pythagorean philosopher, and how do we know that? is aesara of lucania’s work really written by her, how does the tripartition of the soul attributed to her compare to plato’s, and are the differences “gendered”? how does phintys’s discussion of feminine virtues differ from or relate to the aristotelian account? how can one responsibly use the problematic iconography associated with hypatia, and what does that iconography teach us about the pervasiveness of the male gaze? these were only some of the questions i hoped my students would ask themselves and their peers. i hoped that proposing specific and concrete questions such as these, concerning one particular philosopher at a time, would lead them to ponder about the more abstract, metaphilosophical issues concerning ancient women philosophers and the history of philosophy more generally. in the first class, students were introduced to the library website and the class research guide; then our librarian explained differences between kinds of sources and how to trace citations; and at the end, students were introduced to wordpress and how the site works. the second class, for which they prepared by collecting and reading material devoted to each philosopher (some of which i provided for them), was mostly devoted to designing the archives. they presented the final outcome to their classmates on the last day of classes. while the level of competence and sophistication of the archives varied, the pedagogical results i expected were accomplished for all. these neglected figures 23 that year, i had exactly 21 students. our lower-level lecture courses are capped at 28 students, which, i acknowledge, is a privilege not many instructors have when teaching a survey course. such small classes allow me to do a lot of small-group work and to get to know the students individually quite well. 24 that is what i called the resulting web page—couldn’t resist the slightly banal name, since the eponymous movie on the black female mathematicians working for nasa has just come out the year before. protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 emerged from the past, coming alive in front of all of us.25 students really seemed to grasp, firsthand, most of the methodological and scholarly controversies i had been trying to convey since that first, flat litany of trivia on the board. the final assignment for the course was a reflection on the experience of designing the archives. it was rewarding to see that female-identified students felt empowered by the discovery that there were, or might have been, women philosophers even in antiquity; even more exciting was to see their male-identified counterparts not just pay lip service to the idea that women can do philosophy too, but discuss these women’s philosophical doctrines, understand the methodological pitfalls, and just enjoy the topic. a student wrote, in creating our digital archive entry, it felt satisfying to apply the knowledge i have gained from this course and others in a collaborative way, in turn creating an informative entry that other people can access and share. pursuing this project in a collaborative way channeled meaningful conversations about the texts we were researching and in that process we were philosophizing in a way that encouraged the study of women. . . . this project and similar ones reflect what a liberal arts education is really about. however, there were a few drawbacks. we did not have enough time to talk in detail about the issues. the final presentations were short and the ending was somewhat anticlimactic. perhaps more importantly, a woman student commented that she felt that this exciting topic had been relegated to the end of the course, almost as an afterthought, instead of integrated throughout the semester. this point struck me deeply, since many of us attempting to reshape the philosophical canon have been dealing with the question of ordering: the chronological order in which topics are discussed may convey an implicit, and unwanted, order of importance. i myself am guilty, for instance, of discussing philosophy of gender, race, disability, and so forth at the end of a class on human nature that starts, you guessed it, with plato and aristotle. thus, in the latest iteration of this project (fall 2019), i implemented a few changes. the first concerned chronological order. while i did keep the timing of the archives creation (because group work thrives on a sense of community that i build over time and because it is a great note to end the semester on), i previewed elements of the final project and acknowledged the erasure of women’s voices 25 unfortunately i cannot share the archives themselves via permanent link without thereby affecting the success of the assignment for future cohorts of students. i may be able to provide access for a limited time if you email me. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 throughout the term. also, when reading the symposium, i did a little “ask diotima anything” session, in which i impersonated diotima (wearing a peplos and all!) and incorporated in my answers themes from the contemporary philosophy of love, thus creating an explicit continuity from the past to the present, and centering a woman’s voice both physically (as i stood in the center of the room, surrounded by students) and metaphorically (as it was in the middle of the semester). the second change was to increase the class time devoted to the project, and the number of digital tools at our disposal. time-wise, we spent four class periods (a total of five-and-a-half hours) on the project: one class to introduce the issue (through the aforementioned article by kathleen wider [1986] and a blogpost by peter adamson [2016]); one class to read the sources, including primary texts, concerning the figure assigned to each group; one class for the groups to work on the archives; and finally one class to present their work to the whole class and have a collective discussion. they still had to submit an individual reflection on the experience, which is an essential part of any group learning (see appendix for archives and reflection prompts). for the class focused on analyzing the sources, i brought back the coggle assignment, since i was presented again with evidence that mapping is a fun and efficacious pedagogical activity (among others, see harris and zha [2017], kandiko, hay, and weller [2013], and novak and cañas [2006]). another minor technological change was to use google sites instead of wordpress. the choice of platform depends on institutional licenses and practices, and instructor’s preference and knowledge. we found using google sites very accessible. this iteration was very successful. the discussion was engaging, and students reported high levels of intellectual and personal enrichment from the experience. the students went well beyond a quick or unreflective reading of the texts i initially provided, and were, in particular, more critical of authoritative sources such as the stanford encyclopedia, while at the same time maintaining an overall cautious outlook toward all their sources. i was particularly pleased with how effective the assignment was with students who were less strong in writing essays. these students seemed to have benefited a lot more from working in a collaborative way and without the pressure of a grade attached directly to the project. their written reflections showed a high level of engagement, and they used their talents in different ways. a student who struggled with writing, for instance, by his own initiative drew an outstanding digital portrait of arete of cyrene, which received much praise from his peers. however, a student’s complaint about the use of a website as opposed to a powerpoint presentation made me realize that i had not sufficiently explained the role of digital archives as a service to the public, which is something i will have to remedy next time. there is always space for improvement! protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 teaching this topic in a way that is scholarly rigorous, morally conscientious, and pedagogically efficacious is difficult, as i am constantly discovering. there are no fast and easy solutions: any satisfactory implementation of this project requires careful reflection and rethinking of my pedagogical aims, assiduous research into the limited and dispersed literature, and painful reallocation of precious class time. but this has also been a very rewarding project for both me and the students. expanding the western canon is not only intrinsically valuable, and instrumental to achieving social justice and to improving our knowledge of the past, but can also spur fruitful innovations in one’s teaching.26 26 thank you to academic librarian katherine curtis, for being an invaluable partner in this project since its inception: katy, i could have not done any of this without your continuous support and valuable insights. i am very grateful to charlotte witt for encouragement and detailed feedback on this paper since it was a talk at mooo, and to alida liberman for written comments and advice on the revised version. i am also thankful to andrew arlig, antonio donato, gary gabor, dhananjay jagannathan, kevin kirner, julie klein, danielle layne, shen-yi liao, christia mercer, gary ostertag, nickolas pappas, caterina pellò, kaity peake, rosemary twomey, audience members of the central american philosophical association meeting in february 2020, minds of our own: an anniversary celebration conference, and american association of philosophy teachers annual conference, and two anonymous reviewers for feminist philosophy quarterly. apologies to anyone i might have forgotten: so many people over the last few years offered suggestions and bibliographic help: thank you! feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 appendix: fall 2019 digital-archives and reflection prompts. 1. digital archive: this is a collaborative group project finalized to produce a web page dedicated to a woman philosopher of antiquity. the archive itself is not graded (although i will note on the reflection’s rubric if it is incomplete). it will be presented to your classmates, though, and possibly made available to the public, so make it pretty! please follow the following instructions for content and structure. content: each page has to be titled, contain at least one image/photo, some biographical information; at least 2 discussion questions; bibliography (including primary texts if available); if relevant, links to other sources (such as videos, blogposts, popular articles). structure: i leave that up to each group to decide. make it visually appealing, but above all clear and well-organized, so that anybody can find the information that they need to know about the philosopher. 2. reflection: this is an individual graded assignment in which you will detail your specific contributions to the group project (what did you do?), explain the difficulties encountered (for instance, you couldn’t find a photo; the sources all reported the very same story, or, vice versa, the sources are in conflict), and the methodological lessons learned. no need to review any of the content presented on the archive, unless you need to do so to explain some issue. due in class in hard copy on presentation day (dec. 5th). use the same cover page instructions as the one i give for papers. recommended length: 500–1000 words. protasi – teaching ancient women philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 references adamson, peter. 2016. “the diotima problem: women philosophers in classical antiquity.” blog of the american philosophical association, may 11. https://blog.apaonline.org/2016/05/11/the-diotima-problem-womenphilosophers-in-classical-antiquity/. ———. n.d. “why is aspasia a woman? reflections on plato’s menexenus.” https://www.academia.edu/35587971/why_is_aspasia_a_woman_reflectio ns_on_platos_menexenus. annas, julia. 2008. 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ruth hagengruber and sarah hutton. new york: springer. pomeroy, sarah. 2013. pythagorean women. baltimore: john hopkins university press. rickless, samuel. c. 2018. “brief for an inclusive anti‐canon.” metaphilosophy 49 (1– 2): 167–181. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12280. robitzsch, jan m. 2017. “on aspasia in plato’s menexenus.” phoenix 71 (3/4): 288– 300. https://doi.org/10.7834/phoenix.71.3-4.0288. schliesser, eric. 2016. “pursuing the truth in and about the philosophy canon; on the very idea of western philosophy.” digressions & impressions (blog), may 13. https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions /2016/05/truthsandmythsofthecanon.html. shapiro, lisa. 2016. “revisiting the early modern philosophical canon.” journal of the american philosophical association 2 (3): 356–383. https://doi.org/10 .1017/apa.2016.27. tuana, nancy, ed. 1994. feminist interpretations of plato. university park: pennsylvania state university press. tyson, sarah. 2018. where are the women? why expanding the archive makes philosophy better. new york: columbia university press. van dyke, christina. 2018. “what has history to do with philosophy? insights from the medieval contemplative tradition.” in philosophy and the historical perspective, edited by marcel van ackeren with lee klein, 155–170. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 26 proceedings of the british academy, vol. 214. oxford: oxford university press. van norden, bryan. 2017. taking back philosophy: a multicultural manifesto. new york: columbia university press. waithe, mary ellen. 1987. “introduction to volume 1.” in a history of women philosophers: volume 1, ancient women philosophers 600 bc–500 ad, edited by mary ellen waithe, 5–9. new york: springer. wider, kathleen 1986. “women philosophers in the ancient greek world: donning the mantle.” hypatia 1 (1): 21–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15272001.1986.tb00521.x. witt, charlotte. 2003. ways of being: potentiality and actuality in aristotle’s metaphysics. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. witt, charlotte, and lisa, shapiro. 2015. “feminist history of philosophy.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, spring 2017 edition. stanford university. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017 /entries/feminism-femhist/. wong, brian. 2019. “the epistemic case for the genuine diversification of academic philosophy.” blog of the american philosophical association, may 22. https:// blog.apaonline.org/2019/05/22/the-epistemic-case-for-the-genuinediversification-of-academic-philosophy/. sara protasi (phd, yale, and university of bologna) is assistant professor of philosophy at university of puget sound. her research interests are primarily in moral psychology, ethics, and philosophical psychology. she has published scholarly essays on love, envy, beauty, pornography, and pedagogy in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. her book the philosophy of envy is forthcoming with cambridge university press. 8437 protasi title page 8437 protasi final format reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 2 article 4 2015 reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes vanessa lehan york university, vlehan@yorku.ca recommended citation lehan, vanessa. 2015. "reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (2). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4. reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes vanessa lehan abstract i examine successful strategies to diminish or eliminate stereotype threat in mathematics. some of these include informing our students about stereotype threat, challenging the idea that logical intelligence is an “innate” ability, making students in threatened groups feel welcomed, and introducing counter-stereotypical role models. the purpose of this paper is to take these strategies that have proven successful in mathematics, and suggest specific ways to incorporate them into introductory logic classes in philosophy. i consider the possible benefit of presenting logic to our undergraduate students by concentrating on aspects of logic that do not result in a clash of schemas (i.e., logic as language and the benefit of logic as aesthetic enjoyment). keywords: pedagogy, women in logic, stereotype threat the problem every year that i teach introduction to logic, it seems that i have the same frustrating experience. i find that some woman in the course is giving signs that she might be interested in taking advanced logic classes—either she is doing poorly in the class but has interesting intuitions, she is doing particularly well in the course, or she seems to enjoy the subject—so i suggest that she take some of the more advanced courses in logic that our department offers. this usually ends with either the student’s face contorting in abject horror, or the student fearfully asking me how difficult the upper level courses are. rarely, if ever, do these women enter the upper level logic classes. at my university the percentage of women in the introductory logic classes is close to 50%; however, we are lucky to get a few women taking the advanced logic classes. based on a recent conversation on the logblog about women in logic, i take this to be a common trend, i.e., women are prevalent in the lower level logic classes but tend not to continue on in logic beyond this point. new female students flee logic after the introductory classes, and that leads to a discipline where there are very few women. for example, richard zack (2007) recently analyzed data from the journal of philosophical logic on his blog. he discovered that, over the past seven 1 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 years, “out of 247 (non-unique) authors, 22, or 9%, were women. that's lower by several percentage points than any of the other publication rates for top journals reported by sally haslanger. . . . out of the 94 authors from the u.s. and canada, only 2 = 2% were women.” both the fact that there are so few women working in logic, and the fact that there is a certain point at which female students become alienated from the subject, remind me very much of studies of the gender bias in math. for a long time, it’s been obvious that there is a certain point at which girls who enjoy and are good at math suddenly stop enjoying the subject and start to do more poorly in these classes. based on these superficial similarities, i decided to look into research on gender bias in math to see whether i could take away anything that would be helpful to me as a logic teacher. i found a great deal of work on stereotype threat in math—arguing that stereotype threat is largely to blame for the gender bias—and many studies that attempt to remove or ameliorate the effects of this threat. i am proposing that the low numbers of women working in logic may be partially caused by stereotype threat. it is widely recognized that one of the effects of stereotype threat is that those whose identities are under threat will remove themselves from the field. as singletary et al. argue in stereotype threat: causes, effects and remedies, “in addition to affecting performance, experiencing stereotype threat may also affect an individual’s choice of a college major and entry into male-typed professions” (2009, 4). studies have also suggested that stereotype threat may influence students to choose different majors (gupta and bhawe 2007) or to move into a different less male-dominated field (steele, james, and barnett 2002). many studies have shown a correlation between stereotype threat and persistence in a major. for example, chang et al. (2011) argue that students who test particularly high on stereotype threat risk questions (negative racial experiences, high identification with both the subject and with the stereotyped group) were more likely to have left the program (engineering) after the first year. many other authors have explored the impact of stereotype threat on the underrepresentation of women in philosophy in general—e.g. jennifer saul’s (2013) paper, “implicit bias, stereotype threat, and women in philosophy.” i think it is possible that part of the impact of stereotype threat in philosophy in general is related to the high reliance in philosophy on logic. as saul argues, “mathematics is strongly stereotyped as male . . . and it seems reasonable to suppose that anglophone philosophy, with its heavy use of logic, will inherit this stereotype” (2013, 7). many philosophy degrees require a logic component, and logic and reason are often seen as integral parts of what philosophy is. thus, i suggest that if we want to attract more women into logic and make the discipline of philosophy as a whole more welcoming to women, we should come up with ways to reduce stereotype threat in introductory logic classes. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4 encouraging women to continue studying logic has a number of potential advantages. first, increasing the number of women in advanced logic classes will make those classes more inviting for other women. introducing more women to advanced logic classes will hopefully increase the number of women that decide to go into the field of logic. having more women working in logic may reduce the negative stereotypes about women in logic and the implicit biases against women in philosophy by challenging the notion that women are not logical or good reasoners. thus, the profession as a whole stands to benefit greatly from efforts to remove the hindrances to women continuing their studies of logic at the undergraduate level. stereotype threat a possible challenge to the idea that women are underrepresented in logic due to stereotype threat is presented by buckwalter and stich (2014). they claim that philosophy may underrepresent women, not because there is something about the way that we are engaging in philosophy or teaching philosophy that makes the area unwelcoming to women, but simply because women have different philosophical intuitions. this argument could also apply to logic, where one might argue that women simply have intuitions that are in conflict with the way we teach logic. anecdotally, it seems obvious to me that this claim is false. i’ve spoken to many other logic teachers over the years, and they tend to agree that women do just as well in logic courses as men do and that the cases of interesting intuitions (by which i mean intuitions that don’t agree with the standard truth-functional account of logic that we teach in first year courses) are mixed between male and female. more convincingly, there are a number of studies that have challenged the conclusions drawn by buckwalter and stich; serious questions have been raised about their methodology and the repeatability of their results. for example, adleberg et al. (2014) failed to replicate buckwalter and stich’s results. they argue, “our results, as well as our methodological concerns about buckwalter and stich’s results, suggest that their hypothesis that women leave philosophy because they have different intuitions about philosophical thought experiments is unlikely to be correct” (16). i think it is not incorrect intuitions that keep women from logic but rather a combination of implicit bias and stereotype threat that is impacting the numbers of women in logic. certainly, there seems enough reason to attempt to ameliorate the effects of stereotype threat in introductory logic classes and see whether this has the benefit of encouraging more women into our discipline. there are many psychological studies that have shown effective ways to reduce the effects of stereotype threat in math classes, and some of these strategies should be implemented when teaching logic and critical reasoning. stereotype threat occurs when a person believes that they will be judged on the basis of some group-based stereotype. they do not need to believe the 3 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 stereotype, and the stereotype itself doesn’t even need to be prevalent in their current environment. all that is necessary to activate this particular social identity threat is that a person believes that others will treat them negatively or evaluate them unfairly on the basis of one of their social identities (steele 1997; steele and aronson 1995). for example, a woman who thinks either that “women are not logical” is true or that many other people believe this to be true may find that such a belief impacts her performance on logical tasks or enjoyment of these tasks. as aronson et al. (2009) claim, “the logic behind stereotype threat is that because of an awareness of negative stereotypes presupposing academic inferiority, black and other minority students may worry that they could confirm the intellectual inferiority alleged by such stereotypes” (2). in her paper, “changing the ideology and culture of philosophy: not by reason (alone),” sally haslanger (2008) outlines the predictors for stereotype threat. there is often a strong identification with the subject (considering oneself a “woman who is good at logic” for example), a strong identification with the social group that is stereotyped (so someone who strongly identifies as female is more likely to experience stereotype threat where the stereotype targets women), and “high stigma consciousness,” which is the extent to which stereotypes in this area are prevalent (2008, 218). students do not have to be consciously aware of stereotypes in the area to have their performance impacted by stereotype threat. for example, a female student in a logic class may be subjected to stereotype threat even if she does not consciously associate the subject with stereotypes about illogical women. i think it very clear that logic is an area where women are subject to stereotype threat. the strong predictors—that women be a minority group in this area and that there are negative stereotypes about women’s performance in this area—are certainly met. cheshire calhoun (2009) speculates that undergraduates have conflicting schemas for “woman” and “philosopher” before ever entering a philosophy classroom; likewise, students entering a logic classroom likely already have conflicting schemas for “woman” and “logician/reasoner.” it is also important to examine the prevalent pop cultural ideas of women and logic because, as audrey yap points out in “teaching logic, fighting stereotypes” (2013), most students who enter introduction to logic classes don’t know much about the field of logic itself but have preconceived ideas about logic from popular culture. this is consistent with calhoun’s suggestion that “the major locus of women’s under-representation in professional philosophy seems to be further back in women’s educational careers, namely at the moment when female students ask themselves, ‘what shall i major in?’” (2009, 216). in the paragraphs that follow, i outline some of the specific stereotypes that concern women and logic in popular culture, philosophy as a whole, and in logic classes specifically. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4 stereotypes about logic there is a definite, pervasive, popular stereotype that women are illogical or that women’s logic is different from men’s logic (men’s logic here corresponding to what we typically think of as good reasoning). this can be evidenced by some of the urban dictionary’s definitions of “female logic” and “women’s logic.” for example, “male logic (or just plain logic) follows a direct path, clearly tying the consequences of action to the actor. female logic doesn't follow a direct path,”1 and “the unlogical *sic* decision, that either is a contradiction to the original decision or doesn’t make sense.”2 the “women are illogical” stereotype is so pervasive that there was even a game show in the nation of georgia called “women’s logic” featuring “leggy models dressed in skimpy clothing as its contestants, paired up with fully-clothed male contestants” (gray 2012). the host asked the women a series of trivia questions and the men had to try to untangle the “women’s logic” to figure out which of the (presumably incorrect) answers their female partner would give. the male contestants won when they could successfully “comprehend the world of ‘women’s logic’” (gray 2012).3 the concept of “women’s logic” even forms a fairly popular internet meme. the images from repeated searches on the term tend to be sketches or stock images with writing that explains or laments “women’s logic.” for example, one image is a little boy asking, “dad can you explain women’s logic?” the dad replies, “you’re grounded!” and when the boy asks why, the dad replies, “peanut butter.” here we have women’s logic being associated with non sequitur. shared features of the images and pages that come up in searches on “women’s logic” include the association of men’s logic with the traditional logical virtues taught in logic and critical reasoning classes and association of women’s logic with some violation of these virtues. it is not a stretch to imagine that these images, jokes, and stereotypes leave an impression on our female students. there is also a great deal of work on the conflict between femininity and 1 urban dictionary, term “female logic” retrieved from: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=female%20logic. 2 urban dictionary, term “women’s logic” retrieved from: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=women%20logic. i have eliminated typos in this quote order to make the definition easier to read. 3 the game show appears to have since been cancelled; for further reading, see also giorgi lomsadze (april 9, 2012), “georgia: tv show that explores ‘women’s logic’ sparks debate on women’s rights,” eurasianet.org, http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65242. 5 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=female%20logic http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=women%20logic http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65242 reason in the history of philosophy. in gendered reason, phyllis rooney (1991) gives historical examples showing the division between the emotional/rational where female is explicitly or symbolically associated with the emotional. rooney argues that “the parameters and politics of ‘rational’ method, discourse, and voice are defined in ways that still subtly but powerfully diminish women’s voices” (1991, 96). in genevieve lloyd’s the man of reason (1993), there is also a description of the split between emotion (female) and rationality (male) in the works of descartes and hume. the close association between logic and reason makes it likely that our female philosophy students are coming away from studying these texts with the stereotype that reason, and thus logic, is masculine. inside the logic classroom, students have for generations been subjected to examples and ideas that trigger their stereotyped identity. some examples given by noretta koertge in the feminist critique [repudiation] of logic (2010) are: no photograph of a lady ever fails to make her simper or scowl (carroll 1958, 101). a good husband is always giving his wife new dresses (carroll 1958, 121). whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing (copi 1979, 71). all popular girls are good conversationalists (copi 1968, 159). all successful executives are intelligent men (copi 1968, 134). single women are decorous only if they are chaperoned (kalish and montague 1964, 98). women without husbands are unhappy unless they have paramours (kalish and montague 1964, 98). thankfully, our current students are unlikely to be subjected to the above phrases as most of these textbooks are no longer widely used. however, these are the texts from which current instructors learned logic. while lecturing, many instructors draw from examples they remember from when they learned logic; thus, these types of examples can again rear their ugly heads (unless we, as instructors, make specific efforts to guard against this). the examples above show how implicit biases—which jost et al. define as “attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudices in the absence of intention, awareness, deliberation, or effort” (2009, 43)—held by instructors and textbook authors can create environments that are conditioned for stereotype threat. any attempt to reduce stereotype threat also requires reducing the implicit biases held by those in the field. this paper concentrates specifically on stereotype threat but recognizes that the problem outlined in the first section of this paper—exceptionally low numbers of women working in logic—will not be resolved without also concentrating on reducing implicit bias. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4 reducing stereotype threat there is still some debate about the mechanism involved in stereotype threat, but it is generally agreed that the anxieties and reduced psychic resources experienced by students suffering from stereotype threat are largely situational. this means that while it is the pervasive social stereotypes that set students up to be vulnerable to stereotype threat, the triggers for stereotype threat are primarily situations that occur in our classrooms. if this is the case, then there should be things we can do in our classrooms to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. as murphy et al. (2007) argue, “a person’s vulnerability to identity threat need not be inherent to him or her. instead, situational cues may contribute to experiences of social identity threat among groups potentially stereotyped in a setting—even when targets are interested, confident, proven achievers in the relevant domains” (879). one of the factors most often cited in the literature as impacting stereotype threat is the belief that intelligence in a particular area is innate. many female students are aware of stereotypes about women being poor at math. however, the knowledge of this stereotype primarily affects women who believe that mathematical ability is innate. carol dweck found that knowledge of the stereotype that women are bad at math “had little impact on women who viewed their math ability as something they could augment. in contrast, feeling surrounded by a negative stereotype had a strong impact on women who thought of their math ability as a gift” (dweck 2007, 51). perhaps one effective way to reduce stereotype threat is to remind students that intelligence isn’t innate. in the studies cited by dweck (2007), students were given a geometry lesson with descriptions of mathematical geniuses (euclid and reimann). in one section the innate ability or natural talent of these mathematicians was highlighted, and in another their hard work and dedication was highlighted. in this particular study, “when females got the lesson that conveyed the idea that math skills are developed, [their scores] equaled the males” (2007, 53). the fact that concentrating on innate ability can trigger stereotype threat is one of the reasons why teaching introduction to logic as though students are being given the keys to good reasoning (rationality with a capital r) can, i think, be extremely counter-productive and damaging. i am reminded of the anecdotal example of a professor who likes to introduce his logic section by telling students that he is about to give them the magical insight to the platonic realm of rationality.4 this may trigger stereotype effects for some students who are in marginalized groups. it also frames logic as an innate ability since students don’t typically think of 4 personal communication. 7 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 “rationality” as something that is worked on. and if it is innate, then it suggests to students who may find first order predicate logic counter-intuitive that they are wrong or that something is wrong with them. students should be reminded in intro to logic classes that they are learning only one system (and one that is counterintuitive in many ways). a student’s perceived failures in this particular system may show that they have more appetite for other areas of logic rather than that they have no logical ability. we can reduce stereotype threat in introduction to logic classes by making sure that, when we introduce role models for our students, we concentrate less on “genius” and “innate talent” and more on the time and hard work that goes into mathematical and logical discoveries. audrey yap (2013) argues relatedly that stereotype threat interferes with student performance, and suggests that “a role model whose intellectual ability is seen as too far beyond that of the student’s would be discouraging, rather than encouraging” (6). we can ensure that students know that their own abilities will develop with time and effort. i spend some time in logic and critical reasoning classes describing the “aha moment” that comes after enough time working on derivations. i try to make sure that students know that it is perfectly normal to spend a great deal of time working with a system before everything clicks into place. the metaphors of learning to play an instrument5 or learning a new language may help to illustrate to students that everyone needs to put in time where the activity is effortful before they become proficient. another successful method for reducing stereotype threat is “external attribution,” informing students about what stereotype threat is and how it might impact their performance (singletary et al. 2009, 6). in one study, students were told about stereotype threat and advised that any anxiety they feel is likely due to negative stereotypes about women and math and not about their own abilities, because “giving individuals an external attribution for the anxiety they feel reduces stereotype threat and results in performance that is at the level of the nonthreatened group. in these examples, female students perform just as well as male students on mathematics tests” (2009, 7). most logic teachers give a brief “what is logic?” discussion in the first class of an intro to logic section, where they disabuse students of the idea that they will be taught to think “logically” in the colloquial sense of the term. this seems an appropriate place to bring up stereotypes about logic, to have students fill in what they think logic is and what “thinking logically” entails. we should speak about gender stereotypes around thinking logically and how stereotypes, even if we don’t 5 this particular example is thanks to carla fehr who suggested that my previously preferred metaphor of playing a sport may be gendered. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4 believe they are true, can impact performance and cause anxiety. another successful method for reducing stereotype threat is the introduction of counter-stereotype role models. one way to do this is to introduce students to members of the stereotyped group who have done well in the area. for example, “when female students are exposed to women that have performed successfully in mathematics and science related fields, they perform better than female students who do not have examples of women with such performance” (singletary et al. 2009, 6). one study showed that reading essays about women who are successful in math can reduce the negative effects of stereotype threat (mcintyre et al. 2005). “thus, direct and indirect exposure to women that have successfully navigated the field can be enough to reduce the negative impacts of stereotype threat for female students” (singletary et al. 2009, 7). this suggests the importance of highlighting women in logic. as lockwood and kunda argue, “the direction of [the] impact [of role model introduction] depends on the believed attainability of their success: models of attainable success can be inspiring and self-enhancing, whereas models of unattainable success can be threatening and deflating” (1997, 101). in the interest of attainability, it is also extremely important to mention women currently working in logic such as audrey yap, penelope maddy, dorothy edgington, susan haack, and many others conveniently listed on the women in logic list.6 relatedly, having teachers who are members of the stereotyped group demonstrably reduces stereotype threat as well. for example, singletary et al. observe, “women will experience less stereotype threat on a math test if the test is administered by a female teacher, just as african americans will experience less stereotype threat if the test is administered by an african american teacher. . . . this research underscores the importance of having a diverse teaching and administrative staff” (2009, 6). in philosophy, a correlation was found between the number of female faculty in a philosophy department and the number of female philosophy majors in that department (paxton, figdor, and tiberius 2012). when giving exams we can also reduce stress for stereotyped groups. in haslanger’s words, “logic tests do not capture logical intelligence” (2008, 219). for example, we can be careful to frame the task so that it doesn’t trigger stereotypes, and make sure prior to giving an exam that we aren’t triggering membership in stereotyped groups. certainly, singling out a student on the basis of their social 6 that list can be found at: http://loriweb.org/women-in-philosophy-of-logic-andphilosophical-logic/. 9 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 http://loriweb.org/women-in-philosophy-of-logic-and-philosophical-logic/ http://loriweb.org/women-in-philosophy-of-logic-and-philosophical-logic/ identity in order to assure them that they will do fine in spite of this identity7 would do far more harm than good. another strategy that has proven to be successful during tests is to tell students that the test they are being given has no gender difference. in one study, students were told prior to taking a test that the test is gender-fair, i.e., there is no gender difference in the results. “because individuals are assured that the test does not show any gender differences, women are likely to perform as well as their male counterparts” (singletary 2009, 5). this can also be adopted as a general strategy for the evaluation of the course itself. i often remind students that there is no gender gap in grades for the introduction to logic class. this helps (i hope) to slightly ameliorate the “male students are the only ones speaking” phenomenon that sometimes happens. for example, it may remind students that there are female students who are doing just as well in the course and who also know the answers to the derivation but may just be too shy to speak up. there are alternative ways to introduce logic that don’t result in such a clash of schemas and that don’t trigger stereotype effects. by using these methods, we may not get the same gratitude from the students as we would if we pretended that we were giving them the magical keys to supreme rationality, but hopefully these methods can make logic more accessible to students of all genders and races. we can present logic to our undergraduate students by concentrating on aspects of logic that highlight logic as language. in my classes, i remind students that they have mastered at least one natural language, the rules of which are much more complex than those of formal logic. i also speak about modelling natural language using logic as though we are learning a code to simplify the structure that we already know is there. rather than reflecting of our logic or rationality, the course is simply measuring how good students get at using the code. my hope is that this reminds students of the “secret codes” most of them developed as children, when such things were inherently fun. it is admittedly idiosyncratic to find logic fun and to take aesthetic pleasure in symbolic logic. i hope these strategies can reduce stereotype threat to the point where our female students can enjoy logic free of the anxiety that their success or failure reflects on their entire gender. if this leads to more women entering advanced logic classes and more women studying logic, then so much the better. i hope that these strategies – introducing counter stereotype role models, speaking to students about stereotype threat, and introducing logical ability as a learned rather than innate skill – help to reduce stereotype threat for our female 7 i am reminded of an anecdote of a professor who went up to a female student prior to a test and said that she need not worry about being a woman – she would still do well on the test (presumably in spite of her gender). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.4 students in logic classes. i am also optimistic that the current popularity of research on stereotype threat will result in even more strategies that we can implement. jennifer saul concludes her paper on implicit bias and stereotype threat by listing a number of colleagues who are going to try to reduce the impact of stereotype threat in their logic and philosophy classes. i hope this number grows and that we start to see an increase in 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http://www.engr.psu.edu/awe/misc/arps/arp_stereotypethreat_overview_3 1909.pdf. steele, claude m. 1997. “a threat in the air: how stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance.” american psychologist 52 (6): 613-629. steele, claude m. and j. aronson. 1995. “stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of african americans.” journal of personality and social psychology 69 (5): 797-811. steele, jennifer, jacquelyn b. james, and rosalind chait barnett. 2002. “learning in a man's world: examining the perceptions of undergraduate women in maledominated academic areas.” psychology of women quarterly 26:46-50. yap, audrey. 2013. “teaching logic, fighting stereotypes.” paper presented at asl panel on logic education. zach, richard. 2007. women in (philosophical) logic, logoblog. http://www.ucalgary.ca/rzach/blog/2007/04/women-in-philosophicallogic.html. vanessa lehan is an adjunct in the philosophy department at york university in toronto. her areas of research are human reasoning and the philosophy of logic. she is also the author of "why philosophy needs logical psychologism," appearing in dialogue (volume 51, issue 4, december 2012). 13 lehan: reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic published by scholarship@western, 2015 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes vanessa lehan recommended citation reducing stereotype threat in first-year logic classes feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 6 recommended citation lowe, dan. 2019. “the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 6. 2019 the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology dan lowe university of michigan, ann arbor daniel.p.lowe@gmail.com lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology1 dan lowe abstract i argue for the merits of studying historical moral revolutions to inform moral and political philosophy. such a research program is not merely of empirical, historical interest but has normative implications. to explain why, i situate the proposal in the tradition of naturalized epistemology. as alison m. jaggar and other scholars have argued, a naturalistic approach is characteristic of much feminist philosophy. accordingly, i argue that the study of moral revolutions would be especially fruitful for feminist moral and political philosophers. keywords: moral epistemology, feminist epistemology, naturalized epistemology, alison jaggar moral and political philosophers can greatly enrich their work through the study of moral revolutions. moral revolutions are primarily identifiable in retrospect; one cannot be sure whether a current social movement is the beginning of a genuine, widespread change in moral or political consciousness, or one of the many false starts which recur throughout history. accordingly, the moral revolutions i advocate studying will be historical moral revolutions such as the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, or most recently, the victory for marriage equality. the aspect of moral revolutions most interesting to moral and political philosophers is presumably the way argument can create the change of moral consciousness represented by a moral revolution. of course, any plausible account 1 i would like to thank david boonin, adam hosein, claudia mills, alastair norcross, graham oddie, matt pike, joseph stenberg, and theresa tobin for helping me think through many of the issues discussed in this paper. i am also thankful for the feedback i received from a very early presentation of these ideas at the conference in the unjust meantime. feedback from barrett emerick and scott wisor, as well as thoughtful and perceptive feedback from two anonymous referees from feminist philosophical quarterly, improved the manuscript significantly. finally, i was, and still am, honored to have participated in a conference dedicated to alison m. jaggar. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 of argument changing hearts and minds in the real world requires a capacious conception of argument. participants of social movements typically make a number of stock arguments; some have filtered down from those of philosophers and other intellectuals, while others originate bottom-up, emerging from everyday discourse. moreover, arguments need not be explicit to be powerful; social movements are often inspired and energized by the arguments implicit in activist art, such as the key role that uncle tom’s cabin played in the abolitionist movement. of course, argument of any kind never exists in a vacuum. certain material conditions must obtain for argument to receive uptake, spark contentious social action, and eventually create institutional change. each of these factors of social change has traditionally been the subject matter of disparate disciplines—social and intellectual history, literature, and of course sociology and psychology; a complete picture of a moral revolution thus requires a deeply interdisciplinary approach. for their part, philosophers can contribute a grasp of the structure and subtleties of argument—a crucial aspect of social movements that social scientists, characteristically focused on more quantifiable historical data, tend to treat superficially. although the study of moral revolutions can provide insight into many areas, i believe the most promising is moral epistemology. the task of moral epistemology is to provide an account of how value claims can be justified. but instead of trying to come up with such an account solely from the armchair, one can look at how value claims are actually justified in the real world to see how such justification in fact proceeds. moral revolutions are especially interesting cases of such justification since they tend to involve changes in fairly fundamental moral beliefs such as one’s conception of justice. the prospect of studying moral revolutions is no doubt a surprising and even radical departure from the traditional methods employed by philosophers. accordingly, it faces significant objections. the first is that the project conflates two importantly different issues: the descriptive, empirical issue about how moral justification does go, and the normative, philosophical issue about how moral justification should go. indeed, the most prominent example of the project so far— kwame anthony appiah’s the honor code: how moral revolutions happen (2010)— has been read in just this way, as being of primarily historical, rather than philosophical, interest (fischer 2011, 99). the second objection is that the project assumes that moral revolutions involve a genuine change in moral consciousness brought on by rational argument. yet a purported moral revolution may not represent a change in moral consciousness but only superficial lip service to the moral ideals which we flatter ourselves that we hold. and even when members of a society truly change their minds, we cannot just assume that they do so on the basis of rational argument—a philosophical ideal not always reached, even by philosophers themselves. lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 the aim of this paper is to argue that, contrary to these worries, the study of moral revolutions is a legitimate and potentially quite fruitful method for moral and political philosophers. i situate the method within the tradition of naturalized epistemology, which provides the resources to respond to the two aforementioned objections. moreover, the study of moral revolutions will be an especially appealing method for feminists since much feminist philosophy is characterized by an underlying naturalistic approach (harding 1986; anderson 1995; solomon 2001; antony 2008; jaggar 2000). a complete argument for such a method would include illuminating results which come from practicing the method—in methodology as in many other things, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. of course, an empirically adequate study of even a single moral revolution is well beyond the scope of any single article. nevertheless, a prolegomenon to that larger study is necessary to explain, at a general level, why such a method is philosophically legitimate and promising. 1. naturalized epistemology: theoretical ambiguities and feminist affinities naturalized epistemology has generated a massive amount of research, not only in epistemology but also feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of science (e.g., kuhn 2012). accordingly, i sketch the view’s fundamental commitments in only the broadest strokes, focusing on the simpler case of nonmoral knowledge before moving on to cases of moral knowledge. although naturalized epistemology has been arguably practiced since the early modern period (kitcher 1992), it owes its explicit articulation as a method to w. v. o. quine (1985). the traditional project of epistemology was to discover some criterion of justification to apply to beliefs, and the traditional strategy for carrying out this project was foundationalism. quine (1951) famously argued that the failures of foundationalism were insuperable, necessitating that philosophers reconceive the very project of epistemology. according to this new vision, the project of epistemology is to study how beliefs are actually formed. in quine’s words, “the stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. why not just see how this construction really proceeds?” (1985, 19). one advantage of this conception of epistemology is that, in studying how beliefs are formed, we may avail ourselves of all of the resources provided by science. traditional epistemology, which sought to vindicate science by way of the criterion of justification, could not use empirical data to do so, since such a move would be circular. but once we have given up the project of vindicating science using pure philosophy, we are free to use the results of science in philosophical research. this philosophical use of science is why quine’s method is termed naturalized epistemology. this is a form of methodological naturalism, since it feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 concerns the method by which epistemology is to proceed, to be distinguished from substantive naturalism, according to which all phenomena may be reduced to natural properties. (the two views are certainly compatible, however.) naturalized epistemology is thus a method which advocates the empirically informed study of how beliefs are formed. quine’s article, while groundbreaking, was ambiguous in one crucial way: he did not specify which beliefs we are supposed to study the formation of. the most obvious (one might even say “natural”) way to take his claim is that we should study the formation of any and all beliefs. but this leads to an obvious problem, most famously articulated by jaegwon kim (1988): epistemology so conceived lacks all normativity. studying how beliefs are formed is merely a descriptive enterprise. kim argues that quine “is asking us to set aside the entire framework of justificationcentered epistemology . . . [and] put in its place a purely descriptive, causalnomological science of human cognition” (388). kim’s objection is a general class of the earlier worry about the study of moral revolution—that it is of purely descriptive, and not normative, significance. one consequence of epistemology so conceived is that it could make no normative distinction between the formation of our best-established scientific theories and, say, the formation of occult beliefs. as laurence bonjour (1994, 289) points out, there is, after all, no reason to doubt that occult beliefs are caused in some way by the total sensory experience of the individual, and thus no reason to doubt that psychology can offer an empirical account of how they are produced. such an account would no doubt differ in major ways from that which would be given for more properly scientific beliefs, but the differences would not, within psychology, have any justificatory significance. the problem is not merely that naturalized epistemology lacks one theoretical desideratum, normativity. rather, the problem is that the entire enterprise and point of epistemology has been thrown out the window. if epistemology is an inherently normative discipline, aimed at judging some beliefs to be better than others, then “naturalized epistemology” is not merely misguided, it is in fact impossible—a contradiction in terms. however, because quine’s position is ambiguous, it permits of an alternative way of understanding naturalized epistemology. instead of studying the formation of any and all beliefs, we might instead study the formation of a certain set of beliefs which we independently judge to deserve our epistemic confidence. on this view, the project of epistemology is the empirically informed study of how certain beliefs—specifically, beliefs which are clear cases of successful knowing—are lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 actually formed. the advantage of such an interpretation is that naturalized epistemology retains normativity. when we judge a belief to a case of epistemic success, a descriptive understanding of how that belief is formed takes on a normative significance. beliefs which are the product of similar practices in similar contexts would deserve our confidence, too, and beliefs which are the products of very different practices would look more doubtful.2 as louise antony puts this interpretation of naturalized epistemology, “the decision to treat epistemology as the empirical study of the knower requires us to presume that we can, at least for a class of clear cases, distinguish epistemic success from epistemic failure” (2008, 565). at this point we can sharpen our understanding of naturalized epistemology to see it not merely as a claim about the proper subject matter of epistemology (the formation of beliefs) but as a method with distinct steps: step 1. we begin by selecting some clear cases of successful knowing. step 2. we then use the relevant scientific disciplines to analyze these cases and generate a descriptive picture of how these beliefs are formed. step 3. we then use this this descriptive picture to generate standards about the justification of beliefs in relevantly similar contexts (jaggar and tobin 2013), standards which we can use to judge less clear cases of belief. obviously, this is quite schematic—for instance, we still need to determine what counts as successful knowing in the moral realm and how science could generate a descriptive picture of that knowing. but the point is simply to show where the normativity of naturalized epistemology is supposed to come from, while retaining what is distinctive about the naturalist approach. perhaps all good philosophy 2 one might think that this version of naturalized epistemology simply trades one objection for another. while normativity is retained, the question is now how to identify cases of successful knowing. after all, the point of a theory of justification is presumably to be able to identify such cases; this version of naturalized epistemology seems to presuppose possession of the very thing it sets out to discover. yet properly understood, this problem is not specific to naturalized epistemology. all inquiry presupposes some minimal conception of the object of inquiry, so that we might recognize it when we go looking for it. building a theory of justification without any of the raw materials of even an inchoate idea of justification is not how any epistemologist proceeds, if such a task is even possible at all. nevertheless, because this version presupposes that there are indeed cases of successful knowing, it does assume the falsity of radical forms of skepticism. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 involves starting from clear cases so that one may illuminate less clear cases; naturalized epistemology is distinguished by its commitment to doing this with the aid of the sciences. why has this approach been so appealing to feminist philosophers? alison m. jaggar (2000) and others have argued that naturalism is implicit in a wide variety of major feminist arguments. naturalism is thus characteristic of, though not definitive of, feminist philosophy; jaggar in particular has called the feminist naturalist approach “feminism’s contribution to moral epistemology” (2000, 453). consider as an example of this contribution carol gilligan’s (1982) work on care ethics. gilligan identified differences between men’s and women’s responses to ethical dilemmas, each rooted in a different type of moral thinking; in light of this, gilligan argued that dominant conceptions of moral reasoning, which focused on impartial rules to the neglect of caring interpersonal relationships, were male-biased and impoverished. gilligan’s research illustrates all three steps of naturalized epistemology: the identification of clear cases of successful knowing (women’s beliefs about the proper response to a moral dilemma; on this, see also ruddick [1989]); the use of scientific inquiry to generate a descriptive picture of how the beliefs are formed (the account of care-thinking); and the use of the descriptive picture to generate standards for judging beliefs in similar contexts (the criticism of justice-thinking as impoverished). of course, the specifics of gilligan’s account are contestable, and since her work was published it has been criticized on both empirical and conceptual grounds (jaggar 1995). but her work nevertheless serves as an illustrative example of the naturalism implicit in many feminist arguments. it may nevertheless be surprising that feminist philosophers are attracted to naturalism, with its emphasis on the study of the formation of beliefs by scientific investigation. after all, feminist philosophers of science have argued that many major scientific theories were and are male-biased (e.g., lloyd 2008). and indeed, some feminist philosophers (code 1996, 2–3) have criticized naturalized epistemology as advocating a narrow scientism, prioritizing “hard” sciences like chemistry, biology, and physics as the best resources for understanding beliefformation. however, naturalized epistemology need not be interpreted in such a narrow way. quine himself clarified in a later work that the proper empirical study of belief-formation included disciplines like history and sociology (1995, 49). naturalism’s primary commitment is to use our best science to understand beliefformation. feminist philosophy of science does not contradict naturalism but complements it. as jaggar (2000, 464) points out, feminist critiques of bias in the sciences serve to sharpen the naturalistic method by rejecting the assumption that our best science is identical with whatever scientific theory is socially dominant. the project of uncovering male bias thus helps the feminist naturalist to determine what our best science really is. lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 2. the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology i shall now argue that the study of moral revolutions is a promising version of naturalized epistemology, especially for feminists. seeing why requires a deeper understanding of the nature of moral revolutions. the paradigmatic examples of moral revolutions are instances in which largescale changes in moral consciousness resulted in the political recognition of those moral claims. i have already mentioned the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, and the more recent embrace of marriage equality. appiah (2010) argues that the banning of the transatlantic slave trade, the rejection of dueling, and the turn against chinese foot-binding also constitute moral revolutions. the hallmark of a moral revolution is that there is a “new normal” afterwards. it is not that literally everyone has been persuaded; there are always some retrograde holdouts, sometimes quite a few. but a new moral norm is assumed within group discourse, and its rejection is treated with incredulity and even social censure (anderson 2016). a moral revolution thus results in a new assumption within discourse that becomes part of the common ground of the communicative group (haslanger 2012, 455–457; following stalnaker 2002). these are epistemic signs that a moral revolution has taken place. the same is true of institutional or structural changes. although a moral revolution is often completed by such changes, they could occur in a top-down way without a corresponding change in moral consciousness; we might imagine a dictator who imposes a policy repellant to existing social norms. we would be reluctant to call such a shift, even if sweeping, a moral revolution. constitutively, then, a moral revolution is not (except derivatively) a matter of institutional change but rather a change in a group’s moral belief. more precisely: a moral revolution occurs just in case a substantial majority of a society, culture, or subculture comes to accept a general moral belief that had been previously rejected by a substantial majority of that society, culture, or subculture. the analysis i offer is meant to capture the similarity amongst paradigm cases and be consistent with linguistic usage of the term “moral revolution.” in each of the above examples, some movement took aim at a general and widespread moral belief: the morality of limiting the franchise by gender, the justice of segregation, and the propriety of restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples. perhaps the most striking feature of this analysis is that it claims that a widespread change in moral belief is a necessary condition of a moral revolution, but it does not specify whether such a change is for the better. this is perhaps feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 obscured by the examples of moral revolutions i have offered, since all of them are widely accepted to have been changes for the better. yet the aim of the definition is also to be consistent with linguistic usage, and felicitous use does not require one to agree with a moral revolution in order to diagnose it as having happened. both the political right and the left may agree that the reagan revolution happened, understood as a rightward turn in beliefs about the role of government from the 1980s on, while having lively debate about whether it was a change for the better. likewise, both right and left may agree that the sexual revolution happened, understood as looser, more secular norms around sexual behavior from the 1970s on, while disagreeing about whether it was a good thing or not. the first step in the method of naturalized epistemology is to discern clear cases of successful knowing. moral revolutions can typically be described as a change in propositional belief, as opposed to practical knowledge—the moral recognition spurred on by a moral revolution is typically knowing that, rather than knowing how. that is not to say that moral revolutions do not result in different moral practices. morality is by its nature practical, and when a purported moral revolution involves no change in practice on the ground, we rightly become skeptical of whether the alleged change in moral consciousness has actually occurred. nevertheless, we can describe moral revolutions as the acquisition of a general moral belief—that women have the same rights as men, that legal segregation by race is unjust, that there is no moral difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples. these count as cases of successful moral knowing when the moral revolution is also a change for the better. how exactly one wants to characterize this epistemic success depends on one’s metaethics—a realist will conceive of success as acquiring or moving closer to the truth; a constructivist will conceive of success as having principles more and more adequate to the rational choices or agreements of moral agents. the method of studying moral revolutions can be ecumenical on this point, inconsistent with only those metaethical positions (such as nihilism or noncognitivism) which deny the existence of epistemic success in the moral realm. although moral revolutions do not by definition include epistemic success, they constitute unusually good starting points for looking for clear cases of successful moral knowing. while there are some cases of controversial moral revolutions, the researcher who studies moral revolutions has many clear cases to choose from. few would now seriously argue that women should not hold the franchise or that we should return to de jure racial segregation; accordingly, these are excellent starting points in naturalistic inquiry. indeed, the advances of previous moral revolutions often constitute our most central and cherished moral beliefs. as rawls pointed out, moral revolutions such as abolitionism can create “fixed points [in our moral reasoning]: ones we never expect to withdraw, as when lincoln says: lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 ‘if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong’” (2001, 29). these are fixed points partly because they are important chapters in the story we tell ourselves about moral progress and our current moral identity. moral revolutions are thus an unusually robust source of clear cases of successful moral knowing partly because we grow up in a world shaped by those very revolutions. the second step in the method of naturalized epistemology is to use the relevant scientific disciplines to form a descriptive picture of how the selected beliefs were formed. in the case of moral revolutions, this involves an interdisciplinary analysis with a capacious conception of inquiry which rejects scientism and sees epistemic value in disciplines like literature, art history, and sociology. these various disciplines can help provide us with an understanding of both the material conditions which allow (and sometimes encourage) social change, along with the arguments which direct social innovation, as recorded in congressional debate, public writings by leading figures, court cases, but also activist art and fiction. it must be pointed out that one cannot limit oneself to arguments which drove the moral revolution; reactionary arguments which seek to preserve the status quo can be just as illuminating, showing what the reformers were up against and the dialectical structure of the debate as a whole. (as noted at the outset, at this point the historical record may cause us to lose confidence in our initial belief that hearts and minds had changed, or that it was argument that changed them; i shall consider this possibility in more detail shortly.) the third step in the method of naturalized epistemology is to use the descriptive picture to generate normative standards for evaluating arguments in relevantly similar contexts. this constraint means that one should always be circumspect in generalizing from individual cases. it would be unjustified to take even a richly developed account of a moral revolution to describe all moral discourse or even all moral revolutions. all results from naturalistic inquiry are limited in their generalizability to relevantly similar contexts. but this illustrates why a version of naturalism focused on moral revolutions is especially relevant to feminist philosophers. because feminists are centrally concerned with the transformation of social structures regulating gender, moral revolutions which changed formal and informal social structures provide an unusually close basis of comparison (e.g., medina 2013). furthermore, any adequate study of moral revolutions is apt to take into account how the agents and groups involved are socially situated, both in terms of how social position influences moral beliefs and how it influences the practice of moral argument itself. this avoids the atomic, hyper-idealized accounts of moral justification which feminist philosophers have argued so persuasively against (e.g., walker 2007). jaggar (2012, 240) describes the alternative, feminist account of moral justification as consisting feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 in the on-going evaluation of individual actions and social practices by people in actual communities of discourse who collectively construct historically specific ideals, norms and values. on this understanding, moral justifications are socially developed and contingently situated; ‘the’ moral point of view loses its transcendent status and becomes not single but multiple, rooted in the social world rather than floating above or outside it. deriving one’s insights about moral justification from the study of moral revolutions helps meet jaggar’s criteria for an empirically adequate account; it is harder for one’s theory to become abstracted from real-world concerns when it originates directly from actual struggles for justice and equality. having mapped the study of moral revolutions onto the three steps of naturalized epistemology, we are now in a position to answer the first objection mentioned at the outset of this paper. doesn’t recommending the study of moral revolutions in order to understand moral justification conflate the descriptive, empirical issue of how people justify beliefs with the normative, philosophical issue of how they should justify beliefs? the answer is that while the descriptive and the normative are of course different conceptual categories, it does not follow that they are epistemically unrelated. an examination of the origins of moral revolutions is an examination of how a certain set of widespread moral beliefs are formed. when those beliefs are clear cases of successful knowing, as they often are in moral revolutions, a descriptive picture of how that knowing occurs provides insight into what is epistemically valuable in such cases. and this in turn provides a normative basis for judging other, less clear cases. the study of moral revolutions turns out to be both descriptive and normative, empirical and philosophical. 3. two directions in naturalism let us now return to the second objection: the method outlined above assumes that moral revolutions involve a genuine change in moral consciousness brought on by rational argument. it is important to distinguish two ways in which this assumption may turn out to be false. first, historical investigation may reveal that a purported moral revolution involved no real widespread change in moral consciousness. (the qualifier “purported” is necessary since such a change is constitutive of a moral revolution.) for instance, before the civil war, many northern whites opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. this initially looks like principled, moral opposition to slavery; yet it may simply be that white settlers did not want to compete economically with slave labor. moreover, even when people espouse an explicitly moral belief, what people say and what they actually believe can come lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 apart. i noted above that a hallmark of a moral revolution is that a new moral norm is assumed within group discourse. yet we have seen the way norms of discourse may look dominant, and yet many in the discourse community embrace values forbidden by the new norm, which they then regard disparagingly as political correctness imposed from the outside. the first step of the method of naturalized epistemology is to identify clear cases of successful knowing, yet historical investigation may reveal that they are not clear at all. a related problem is that one can characterize the moral knowledge gained by a moral revolution in a wide variety of ways. for instance, one may describe the moral knowledge gained by the civil rights movement as knowledge of the fundamental equality of whites and blacks, the injustice of segregation simpliciter, the injustice of de jure segregation, the empirical falsity of the “separate but equal” doctrine of plessy v. ferguson, and so on. yet some of these lessons (such as the injustice of de jure segregation) have clearly been internalized far more than others (such as the injustice of segregation simpliciter).3 historical analysis may cause us to revise, sometimes radically, our description of the moral knowledge gained by a moral revolution. indeed, the arguments made by reformers are rarely accepted wholesale; the general trend of history is that the institutional changes reformers get fall quite short of the deep social changes they want. the second way the assumption may turn out to be false is that a moral revolution may involve a genuine change in moral consciousness, and yet the change is brought about by factors other than moral argument. for example, wyoming was the first territory to grant women’s suffrage, not because the population had been persuaded by suffragist arguments, but because men outnumbered women so greatly in the new territory that some means of attracting women was needed.4 philosophers will have an understandable professional bias in focusing on the role of argument in bringing about changes in moral belief; it is all too easy to project onto the complicated history of moral revolutions a simpler story of reason triumphing against unreason. the second step of the method of naturalized epistemology is to generate a descriptive picture of how these beliefs are formed, yet the resulting picture may reveal only a small role for moral justification. there is no a priori way to rule out these possibilities—they are real and must be grappled with. finding out that a moral revolution does not actually involve a change in moral consciousness means having to rewrite our moral history. and 3 i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer from fpq for drawing my attention to the richness of this particular case for this question. 4 in this case, as in history in general, causation is complex and goes beyond the factor listed here. i use this only as an illustration of a certain kind of worry. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 finding out that a moral revolution was not brought about by reasoned argument means that we cannot in that case find the positive lessons about moral justification we set out for. however, whether the scenarios envisioned above actually obtain— whether the civil rights movement failed to change the nation’s moral consciousness, whether women’s suffrage was achieved by moral argument—is an empirical question. as such, they cannot be a reason to forgo the study of moral revolutions; the only way to actually determine whether this worry about the method is legitimate is to actually do research according to the method. in fact, just these sorts of results have historically been derived from naturalistic inquiry. nietzsche, marx, and freud, for instance, are all skeptical of the idea of moral progress and reason’s role in it (albeit for very different reasons). yet as leiter (2004, 77) has argued, they should all be classified as methodological naturalists. nietzsche (1998), for instance, is concerned with the causal origin of christian moral beliefs, believing that once it is fully understood, it will be revealed as mere “slave morality,” thus debunking the idea that the christian virtues are worth striving for. marx (1978) likewise sees the dominant ideology as the expression of the interests of the bourgeoisie, thus casting doubt on the idea that real liberation will be found through the enactment of policies that the dominant class recommends. freud (1990) similarly argues that many taboos are the result of nonrational forces like subconscious impulses. although their objects of theorization were immensely varied, these thinkers shared a common approach; as leiter puts it, “when one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness” (2004, 77; emphasis in original). the possibility of empirical inquiry debunking our initial conceptions is in fact part of the naturalistic tradition. the real distinction at issue is not between naturalistic and a priori methods of inquiry, but between naturalistic inquiry which gives rise to a negative, debunking result and naturalistic inquiry which gives rise to a positive, constructive result. i have already mentioned the positive contributions made by feminist naturalists. within mainstream epistemology, reliabilism is an attempt at a naturalistic theory of epistemic justification, since it is concerned with the processes by which beliefs are formed in clear cases of successful knowing (e.g., goldman 1979). this widely varied group—marx, nietzsche, feminists, and mainstream epistemologists—illustrates that naturalized moral epistemology can pull in very different directions. it can pull in the positive direction of gaining new justified moral beliefs or the negative direction of undermining existing moral beliefs or practices. both directions are genuine possibilities—neither should be considered the necessary aim or result of naturalized epistemology as such. in short, we cannot rule out the worry that naturalistic inquiry may end up undermining our impression of the moral revolution we sought to learn from. however, this is not a reason to forgo lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 the inquiry—it serves instead as a reminder of the possibilities of that inquiry, so that we do not project onto history our preconceived notions about its course. conclusion philosophers are trained to work from the armchair. by contrast, i have proposed the study of moral revolutions as an empirically informed alternative method for moral epistemology. as i noted at the outset, the true test of any method is to be found in the results it produces, and to this end i hope to share in the future what i believe are significant findings. nevertheless, a general defense of the method is necessary, since we should take seriously the objections that any results would be of purely descriptive importance, if they end up showing rational changes in moral belief at all. i hope it is now clear that moral and political philosophers have good reason to study moral revolutions and thereby avail themselves of the rich resources provided by history. references anderson, elizabeth. 1995. “feminist epistemology: an interpretation and defense.” hypatia 10 (3): 50–84. ———. 2016. “the social epistemology of morality: learning from the forgotten history of the abolition of slavery.” in the epistemic life of groups: essays in the epistemology of collectives, edited by michael s. brady and miranda fricker, 75–94. oxford: oxford university press. antony, louise. 2008. “quine as feminist: the radical import of naturalized epistemology.” in epistemology: an anthology, 2nd edition, edited by ernest sosa, jaegwon kim, jeremy fantl, and matthew mcgrath, 552–584. london: blackwell. appiah, kwame anthony. 2010. the honor code: how moral revolutions happen. new york: w. w. norton & company. bonjour, laurence. 1994. “against naturalized epistemology.” midwest studies in philosophy 19 (1): 283–300. code, lorraine. 1996. “what is natural about naturalized epistemology?” american philosophical quarterly 33 (1): 1–22. fischer, jeremy. 2011. “review of the honor code: how moral revolutions happen.” journal of applied philosophy 28 (1): 96–99. freud, sigmund. 1990. totem and taboo. new york: w. w. norton & company. gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. goldman, alvin. 1979. “what is justified belief?” in justification and knowledge, 1– 23, edited by george pappas. dordrecht: reidel. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 harding, sandra. 1986. the science question in feminism. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. haslanger, sally. 2012. “ideology, generics, and common ground.” in resisting reality: social construction and social critique, 446–477. oxford: oxford university press. jaggar, alison m. 1995. “caring as a feminist practice of moral reason.” in justice and care: essential readings in feminist ethics, edited by virginia held, 179– 202. boulder, co: westview press. ———. 2000. “ethics naturalized: feminism’s contribution to moral epistemology.” metaphilosophy 31 (5): 452–468. ———. 2012. “feminism in ethics: moral justification.” in the cambridge companion to feminism in philosophy, edited by jennifer hornsby and miranda fricker, 225–244. cambridge: cambridge university press. jaggar, alison m., and theresa w. tobin. 2013. “naturalizing moral justification: rethinking the mission of moral epistemology.” metaphilosophy 44 (4): 409– 439. kim, jaegwon. 1988. “what is ‘naturalized epistemology?’” philosophical perspectives 2:381–405. kitcher, philip. 1992. “the naturalists return.” philosophical review 101 (1): 53–114. kuhn, thomas s. 2012. the structure of scientific revolutions, 4th edition. chicago: university of chicago press. leiter, brian. 2004. “the hermeneutics of suspicion: recovering marx, nietzsche, and freud.” in the future for philosophy, edited by brian leiter, 77–105. oxford: oxford university press. lloyd, elisabeth. 2008. “bias in the science of evolution.” in just methods: an interdisciplinary feminist reader, edited by alison m. jaggar, 130–146. boulder, co: paradigm publishers. marx, karl. 1978. the german ideology. in the marx-engels reader, 2nd edition, edited by robert c. tucker, 146–200. new york: w. w. norton & company. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. nietzsche, friedrich. 1998. on the genealogy of morality. translated by maudemarie clarke and alan j. swensen. indianapolis, in: hackett publishing company. quine, w. v. o. 1951. “two dogmas of empiricism.” philosophical review 60 (1): 20– 43. ———. 1985. “epistemology naturalized.” in naturalizing epistemology, edited by hilary kornblith, 15–29. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 1995. from stimulus to science. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lowe – the study of moral revolutions as naturalized moral epistemology published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 rawls, john. 2001. justice as fairness: a restatement. edited by erin kelly. cambridge, ma: harvard belknap. ruddick, sara. 1989. maternal thinking: toward a politics of peace. boston: beacon press. solomon, miriam. 2001. social empiricism. cambridge, ma: mit press. stalnaker, robert. 2002. “common ground.” linguistics and philosophy 25:701–721. walker, margaret urban. 2007. moral understandings: a feminist study in ethics. 2nd edition oxford: oxford university press. dan lowe is a lecturer in the department of philosophy at the university of michigan, ann arbor. he works primarily on moral and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and their intersection with moral epistemology. 7284 lowe title page.pdf 7284 lowe final format.pdf feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation randall, thomas e. 2018. “values in good caring relations.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 4. 2018 values in good caring relations thomas e. randall western university, trandal3@uwo.ca randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 values in good caring relations thomas e. randall abstract in the ethics of care, virginia held (2006) explores what values of care might fulfil normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations. held identifies seven potential values: attentiveness, empathy, mutual concern, sensitivity, responsiveness, taking responsibility, and trustworthiness. though held’s work is helpful as a starting point for conceptualizing some normative criteria, two problems need addressing. first, held does not provide sufficient justification for why these potential values ought to be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. second, held overlooks two other potential values cited in the care literature: competence (tronto 1993) and respect (engster 2007). this paper builds upon held’s work to offer a more coherent understanding of the values of care. it does so by scrutinizing and conceptually organizing the above nine potential values. of these nine, only four are considered genuine values: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. it is concluded that good caring relations are those that exemplify the four values of care in their deliverance of caring practices. keywords: attentiveness, care ethics, engster, feminism, held, mutual concern, responsiveness, tronto, trustworthiness, values 1. introduction in the ethics of care, virginia held (2006) defines care as both a practice and a value. caring, as a practical activity, has intertwined values that offer normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations.1 this allows for an ethics of care rather than mere naturalized care. held (42) argues these values (once identified) can be abstracted and extended to evaluate all relations beyond the personal, offering not just a political argument of care but a cosmopolitan account too. held identifies seven potential values: attentiveness, empathy, mutual concern, 1 held also calls these values “moral considerations associated with care” (2006, 158). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 sensitivity, responsiveness, taking responsibility, and trustworthiness.2 though held’s work is helpful as a starting point for conceptualizing some normative criteria, two problems need addressing. first, held does not provide sufficient justification for why these potential values ought to be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. second, held overlooks two other potential values cited in the care literature: competence (tronto 1993) and respect (engster 2007).3 this paper builds upon held’s work to offer a more coherent understanding of the values of care that fulfil normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations. first, held’s definition of care is defended as a persuasive middle ground for classifying good caring relations—a middle ground between daniel engster’s (2007) narrow interpretation of care and berenice fisher and joan c. tronto’s (1990) broad interpretation of care. second, the above nine potential values of care are scrutinized and conceptually organized to determine which can justifiably be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. of these nine, only four are considered genuine values: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. it is concluded that good caring relations are those that exemplify the four values of care in their deliverance of caring practices. 2. classifying good caring relations there are two components to good caring relations: a threshold of care to be met as a practical activity between two or more persons and normative criteria to guide such care. this section focuses on the first component, elucidating a suitable definition of care as a practical activity. to avoid prolonged engagement with the myriad of definitions offered in the literature, the following approach is taken: first, a narrow definition of care is analyzed (engster 2007), then a broad definition (fisher and tronto 1990), before, finally, a reasoned conclusion is reached in the middle (held 2006). 2 the corresponding page numbers in held’s (2006) the ethics of care are: attentiveness, trust, and responsiveness (15); mutual concern, trustworthiness, and sensitivity (42); empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness (119); and mutual concern, trustworthiness, attentiveness, and responsiveness (158). trustworthiness as a value is defended through pages 56–57. held (2006, 38–42) does say other modes of normative criteria could be utilized from outside the care ethical framework, such as values of justice (fairness, equality, and so on). to keep this paper’s argument bounded, it is only contextualized within the care ethical framework. 3 the reader may think of more values of care that ought to be considered. due to space restraints, this paper only scrutinizes the above nine potential values given their dominant presence in the literature already. randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 engster’s (2007) work on care and political theory provides a well-bounded minimalistic definition of care. engster’s definition takes three forms. first, “caring practices may be said to encompass everything we do directly to help individuals to satisfy their vital biological needs” (26). second, care aids “individuals to develop and sustain their basic or innate capabilities, including the abilities for sensation, movement, emotion, imagination, reason, speech, affiliation, and in most societies today, the ability to read, write, and perform basic math” (27). in turn, engster emphasizes his care theory does not prescribe any ideal of the good life; it merely outlines the minimum standards we need to survive, develop, and function to pursue a perceived good. this claim will have important ramifications, as seen below. third, caring is “helping individuals to avoid harm and relieve unnecessary or unwanted suffering” (28). these three forms of care are guided through adherence to three virtues of caring: attentiveness, responsiveness, and respect (30–31). though engster helpfully provides a specified threshold for care (intended as universal), there is a problem with it: this narrow definition risks undermining care ethics as a feminist ethic. tove pettersen defines a feminist ethic as a critical ethic “that focuses on suppression and dominance, and often pursues political aims” (2008, 24). a feminist ethic ought to have the tools necessary to ensure it can critically evaluate and challenge social and political conditions of subjugation. engster’s definition risks being indifferent to many sorts of issues that are affected by oppressive systems—issues that a care ethic should be sensitive to. for instance, consider engster’s (2007, 108) comments on same-sex marriage. engster is aware that a symbolic public gesture of legalizing same-sex marriage would legitimize this practice as normal in the realm of viable options open to society. however, engster’s minimal definition of care cannot capture this symbolic recognition. engster states the arguments for and against symbolic recognition “fall outside the scope” of his care ethic, due to his theory’s resistance to prescribing ideas about the good (108). consider another example of multicultural importance: muslim women publicly wearing a veil. again, engster’s narrow definition prevents his theory having something of substance to say: “care theory is neutral on other issues of multicultural justice that do not directly affect the ability of individuals to give or receive care” (107). engster admits his reformulation of care ethics removes it “somewhat from the feminist context in which it has developed” (vii). however, if care ethics wants to analyze the moral worth of relations, it must be able to say something noteworthy about the broader context in which these relations are embedded. a broader definition of care is therefore preferable. fisher and tronto (1990) have perhaps offered the most influential broad definition of care. fisher and tronto tie the concept of care to labour, defining it as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 live in it as well as possible” (40). an advantage of fisher and tronto’s definition is that it eschews a dyadic understanding of care. if care ethics is to transcend into the political realm, care must not be understood as merely referring to a personal relation (especially the archetypical view of mother and child). by defining care as the continual processes of work committed by a wide range of society to maintain, continue, and repair the world (nurses, teachers, social workers, and so on), then care ethics is in a better position to critically evaluate the surrounding social and political institutions that impact how successful this labour is. however, a common criticism of fisher and tronto’s definition is that it is too broad to guide a moral and political theory. both engster (2007, 24) and held (2006, 32) have argued that almost too much of society’s laborious aspects are included in this definition. for if much of our daily life consists in maintaining, continuing, and repairing the world, caring becomes indistinguishable from any given kind of practice. held specifically argues that almost any amount of economic activity could be included in this definition, such as “retail sales, house construction, and commercial cleaning” (2006, 32). consequently, the distinctive normative features of caring could be lost. though this criticism has been influential,4 more could be said to enhance its effectiveness. for instance, the examples of economic activity held (2006, 32) provides could still be interpreted in a way that reveals something about the normative features of care. customer service in retail, house construction, and commercial cleaning require the maintenance of caring relations between customer, employee, and employer: there should be no exploitation in this labour, nor hostility, mistrust, or negligence. to show why fisher and tronto’s definition is problematic, what should be highlighted are those activities that are not referent toward the normative considerations of care yet are still activities that would fit this broad definition. for instance, a person might maintain, continue, and repair their world through sustaining a garden of a thousand blades of grass, which this person religiously counts and keeps updated.5 this would seem to count as an activity of care under this broad definition (perhaps caring for the environment), but there are no real means of discerning what values or moral priorities of care can be derived from this activity alone that are relevant toward the care ethical framework. care theorists need not deny that the concept of care can be used elsewhere in different ways and, indeed, that the normatively relevant aspects of care they want to focus on can fit under fisher and tronto’s broad definition. the problem, though, is that this does not go the other way; for the purposes of care ethics alone, fisher and tronto’s broad definition cannot fit. 4 joseph walsh (2017, 819) has most recently reiterated this criticism. 5 the “grass-counter” example is adapted from john rawls (1971, 432). randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 required is a definition that offers ways to critique the social and political institutions that impact the level of care given in society while retaining focus on the minimum threshold of care engster identifies. the following argues that held provides this definition. for held, care is both “a practice and a value” (2006, 42). care as a practice is concerned with cultivating and sustaining morally worthy relations over time, with individuals having the ability to be attentive and responsive to contextual needs to provide a minimum threshold of care, build trust and mutual concern, and continually scrutinize and improve one’s care through the actual lived experience of caring itself. held understands “needs” broadly, as “innumerable subtle emotional and psychological and cultural kinds, as well as of completely basic and simple kinds, such as for sufficient calories to stay alive” (39; emphasis added). here, it is possible to read into held’s definition the same minimum threshold of care engster identifies. where held importantly differs is her mention of cultural needs. this inclusion will inevitably require care theorists to engage with different cultural perceptions of the good, engaging with the social and political context that surrounds caring relations. how care ethics deals with various kinds of cultural needs (especially in cases of nontrivial toleration in pluralistic societies) remains unclear. while those issues cannot be dealt with here, this route is at least open. held (2006) consequently interprets care as a reflective practice, whereby the provision and receipt of care are continually scrutinized through iterated efforts and communication.6 in this way, held’s interpretation of care has a built-in critical component that ensures an ethics of care, not merely naturalized or traditional care: “the ethics of care does not accept and describe the practices of care as they have evolved under actual historical conditions of patriarchal and other domination” (39). not only should caring practices can be appraised and altered if needed, their surrounding social and political context ought to be as well. of course, this implies there are normative criteria to guide such evaluative assessments. the normative criteria that held (2006) offers for guiding relations toward being good and caring refers to the second part of her definition of care: care as a value. for held, caring practices are morally evaluated through a cluster of values intertwined with good caring practices, abstracted to help evaluate and guide caring practices generally. held’s method for deriving caring values follows a process of reflective equilibrium, applied in the following way. successful caring practices are those that ensure persons survive and flourish. given the unique needs of different 6 held (2006, 20) writes that care ethics is hospitable to methods of discourse ethics. however, what held should also emphasize is that by “communication” we ought to mean both verbal and nonverbal methods. nonverbal methods of communication are particularly important to provide adequate caring for infants, or persons incapable of ordinary speech. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 persons in different contexts, caring is a continual process of cultivation and learning. caring practices deemed successful can be examined for the values intertwined with them. those values persuasively considered essential to ensure a relation is good and caring can then be abstracted as normative criteria. therefore, good caring relations are identified when they exemplify these values. to foreshadow the next section, a brief indication of what these values could look like are “mutual concern, trustworthiness, attentiveness, [and] responsiveness” (158). these are values usually identified through our personal relations first, given these values manifest most strongly there. held’s argument, though, is that these identified values can be extended to evaluate the moral worth of all relations we hold beyond the personal. an initial problem with the process held uses to derive caring values might be raised here. the need to continually analyze our relations to ensure they are good and caring implies that any attempt to classify a selection of caring values is a nonstarter. given the potential for a state of flux in assessing which caring practices work, the sorts of values we may identify might also be in a state of flux. the response to this initial problem is this: whereas caring practices may frequently change, the values that abstract from these practices do not. instead, these values form a stable normative guideline that can be fulfilled in a multitude of ways, depending on the relational context and range of caring practices utilized. consider an example: how we might care for a person’s mental health. it is sometimes necessary to alter caring practices when attending to a person’s mental health to determine the specific practice that will help that person. it is possible to abstract from this scenario some values that hold constant, which capture the purpose for why these practices are altered. for instance, there is a need for attentiveness (understanding the person’s needs correctly) and responsiveness (determining which practices work better than others through examining the person’s responses). attentiveness and responsiveness, in this example, can then be useful normative criteria to help guide what caring practices are more effective than others—not only in helping a specific person’s mental health but mental health issues universally. such values, then, inevitably spill over into broader social and political relations—perhaps, in this example, to suggest making institutional changes that provide more resources to mental health issues so that the values of attentiveness and responsiveness can be better exemplified. as selma sevenhuijsen puts it: “how we can care depends to a great extent on how we give shape to our society” (1998, 151). relations, and their surrounding institutional context, can be criticized and called for modification when they become “dominating, exploitative, mistrustful, or hostile”, precisely because they undermine caring values and therefore the possibility for good caring relations (held 2006, 37). randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 this is not to say there is a clear dichotomy between recognizing a good caring relation from an immoral relation. there is plenty of interpretative space for pinpointing how morally valuable a relation is. this point might raise two final questions: does a relation foster good caring practices (and therefore satisfies the threshold of care listed above) but lacks associative caring values? does a relation foster caring values but inadvertently provides poor caring practices? though these are reasonable questions, the response is that it is inappropriate to prise apart the caring practice from its intertwined values. this is because such values are embedded in and exemplify good caring practices in and of themselves. some caring relations may exemplify these values stronger than others; yet, without these moral considerations at all, no good care would be provided. this section concludes that held’s classification of good caring relations is preferable: good caring relations are those that meet the threshold of care as a practical activity through evaluative guidance by the values of care. 3. caring values this section elucidates what a caring value is and which caring values fulfil normative criteria for evaluating the moral worth of relations. held (2006) identifies seven potential values: attentiveness, empathy, mutual concern, responsiveness, sensitivity, trustworthiness, and taking responsibility. however, held does not provide sufficient justification for why these potential values ought to be considered genuine values within the care ethical framework. moreover, held overlooks two other potential values cited in the care literature: competence (tronto 1993) and respect (engster 2007). these values also need scrutiny. first, some conditions are required for classifying a caring value. a good starting point is to consider the different language engster (2007) and held (2006) use when referring to moral considerations of care. as seen in the previous section, both authors refer to the concepts of attentiveness and responsiveness. however, engster refers to these moral considerations as virtues of care while held calls them values of care. what explains this difference? whereas engster focuses on the disposition of the individual, held’s central unit of moral analysis is the relation between individuals. this does not say held pays no attention to individuals’ dispositions; held (2006, 44–57) argues that it is necessary for individuals to develop certain traits—including being attentive and responsive to others—to allow caring relations to flourish. however, for held, this conceptualization does not go far enough. focusing only on individuals’ traits does not fully capture what held thinks is normatively at stake with caring relations: the moral value of attentiveness and responsiveness (that is, their success in allowing caring relations, and therefore the individuals involved, to flourish) is only revealed through the relation of two or more persons—not the lone individual. indeed, without a relational context, we would not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 know that the virtues of being attentive and responsive are good traits to develop. care ethics’ emphasis, then, is on the relational value of the moral considerations of care, whereas virtue ethics focuses on perfecting an individual’s virtues. this does not intend to label engster as a virtue ethicist; it only says that engster does not do enough to separate care ethics from virtue ethics. caring values are therefore not reducible to an individual’s virtues or sentiments—they are relational moral considerations of care that form independent moral criteria for evaluating relations. this is to say, as held (2006) does, that moral scrutiny ought to be critical and not phenomenological—after all, the value that some individual attaches to a relation may be misplaced if, for instance, that individual is being exploited for their obsequiousness or a relation is exemplifiable of structural injustice (such as household relations within patriarchies). methods of discourse ethics (both verbal and nonverbal) ought to be employed by those internal and external to the relation to ensure some level of accuracy in the evaluation of that relation’s moral worth. many potential values might be shortlisted from these above conditions. for parsimony in categorizing potential values, it is useful to also posit a caring value as a stand-alone and independently recognizable moral consideration, whereby such a value refers to a distinct moral issue of a relation. where a potential value can be subsumed as a subtype of another perceived value, this ought to be pursued. a caring value, then, is a standalone, relational moral consideration of care that guides relations toward successful caring practices. this classification provides a basis to now evaluate which of the nine potential values listed above are genuine caring values. of course, in the following delineation of each value, it is not intended that each outline is complete—each value could fill the interest of a whole book.7 these values are examined to the extent that they show whether they ought to be considered genuine values in the care ethical framework. a note on the order of this analysis: though these values are listed alphabetically to provide some logical structure, these values are closely intertwined. a useful way of reading this analysis will therefore not necessarily be to evaluate each value in any strict order, but to examine them holistically as a cluster. for example, it is helpful to read the following values’ analyses together: attentiveness, empathy, and sensitivity; attentiveness, respect, and responsiveness; and competence and responsiveness. this not a complete list of all the possible combinations, but a signposting of the most obvious ones. 7 this is especially the case for trustworthiness. see hardin (2002) and potter (2002). randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 3.1 attentiveness tronto offers the most straightforward definition of attentiveness in the care literature: attentiveness “requires the recognition of a need and that there is a need to be cared about” (1993, 127; original emphasis). while the nonitalicized part of tronto’s definition states the importance of recognizing the needs of others, this is not enough by itself to capture what is at stake with attentiveness. one could recognize a need without the normative pull to do anything about it. the italicized part of the definition completes this by emphasizing that identified needs require active intervention to be cared for. this is a good start, but tronto’s definition can be enhanced. as peggy desautels (2004) writes, attentiveness requires more than basic recognition of a need; attentiveness must also embody a “nonpassive vigilance of thought where we attempt to counter known psychological tendencies and subtle social influences that prevent us from seeing and responding to the demands of care” (72). effective attentiveness requires a critical component, given our basic recognition of other’s needs may be restricted or impeded in some way by potential biases in our subjective experiences. desautels’ example concerns sexism: sexist influences may make us unaware of, or inattentive to, a particular moral demand for care. this has ramifications in both our personal relations and broader political society. as tronto observes, in modern industrial societies tasks of caring (such as nursing and social work) “continue to be disproportionately carried out by the lowest ranks of society: by women, the working class, and in most of the west, by people of colour” (1993, 113). social and political institutions can be evaluated by centralizing these caring practices, by assessing how far these carers are marginalized and held to the periphery of political life. without attention to these issues, the interests and activities of the relatively powerless remain “omitted from the central concerns of society” (tronto 1993, 20). to counter these impediments, one must break out of one’s subjective experiences to empathetically connect with the experiences of others in compassionate ways. this is not an easy task, though moral education of the kind advocated for by engster (2007), nel noddings (2002, 2006) and michael slote (2007) may be especially helpful to enrich our empathetic capacities to this end. for instance, the promotion of prosocial behaviour through young children’s curricula featuring social-emotional learning programs has been shown to broaden young people’s empathic capacities (cohen 2001). this could have significant consequences as these generations become politically active and demand greater support toward institutions of health, social care, and so on. attentiveness is a value, then, for it encourages and maintains successful caring practices within a relation. if a relation does not exemplify attentiveness, no effective care is being given—to the detriment of the individuals involved. if no feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 needs are identified, no needs can be properly cared for. as such, a relation exhibiting negligence through inattentiveness damages the flourishing of individuals involved. deliberate inattentiveness is negligence in its clearest immoral form. not only is care not being provided where it is needed, capable caregivers deliberately avoid providing this care. unless a serious change occurs here, the relation almost certainly will break down—perhaps at the expense of the cared-for if they are particularly vulnerable. yet given the complexity of our moral lives, degrees of immoral relations may begin emerging through the type of negligence that occurs. after all, not all negligence is deliberate. providing wrongful but well-meaning care may be forgiven if there has been an honest mistake in its provision. indeed, good caring practices result in part from making mistakes and learning through experience. nonetheless, accidental provision of wrongful care is still indicative of a potentially poor caring relation, and better care ought to be provided in the future.8 what is harder to normatively pin down, as tronto comments (1993, 129– 130), is inattentiveness through ignorance. this refers to cases where a lack of knowledge leads to inevitable inattentiveness; we are not attentive because we do not even know there is something to be attentive about. desautels (2004) offers some guidance here: to overcome ignorance of a cared-for’s needs is to be critically aware of whether certain prejudices are blinding us. but if we do not realize there is a prejudice blinding us, can moral blame still be attributed? a distinction between honest ignorance and willful ignorance may make sense of how moral blame could be applied. honest ignorance can be absolved insofar as positive changes occur in the caring relation once this ignorance is realized. however, to continue business as usual without making positive changes is acting through willful ignorance and deserving of moral blame. to illuminate this point, consider a parallel with darrel moellendorf’s (2014) argument on historical injustice regarding climate change. our ancestors of the industrial revolution had no idea about the impact their actions would have for polluting the planet. for that reason, moellendorf argues that the locus of moral significance should not be on the decisions of our ancestors; it is instead with those people or industries that “voluntarily and knowingly create problems” (165). the injustice sits with those that continue to emit considerable greenhouse gases through willful ignorance. willful ignorance is therefore synonymous with deliberate inattentiveness and consequently morally problematic: it entails a considered attempt to ignore 8 here, this discussion on attentiveness could move into questions on the justification of individual rights to protect from harmful interference in one's life. however, such questions on how caring values and individual rights could be made compatible move beyond this paper’s purpose. for some discussion elsewhere in the literature, see engster (2007), held (2006), and robinson (1999). randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 rectifying the plight and suffering of others when one is able and, consequently, to ignore one’s responsibilities.9 3.2 competence tronto (1993) lists competence as a moral consideration of care for the following reason: failing to provide good care “means that in the end the need for care is not met” (133). competence arises as a moral consideration, then, in the practical provision of care. it is concerned with the consequence of whether successful caring practices have been effectively delivered, not necessarily the motive behind the care. if a knowingly incompetent person attempts to deliver a certain caring practice, tronto argues, good care becomes “impossible” in this context (133). however, again, our moral lives are more complicated than this suggests. it is not always true that the locus of moral blame should be placed on an incompetent carer. incompetent caring may point to broader structural issues that have prevented individuals from being able to provide good care. tronto gives the example of an overrun teacher in a poorly funded educational system; the teacher is doing the best they can with the poor resources at their disposal (134). yet if a better-qualified teacher is readily available, and the overrun teacher refuses help (or an administrator refuses such help), then perhaps moral blame can be justifiably attributed. regardless of these intricacies, it is not clear that the moral considerations of competence are enough to ensure it can be considered a stand-alone value. this is for two reasons. first, there is nothing in competence itself that indicates a normative pull toward caring. competence is necessary for good care, but competence is also necessary for efficiently carrying out a practice of torture. as such, competence cannot be viewed as an intrinsic caring value. second, it is difficult to see how competence could be a stand-alone value when contextualized with responsiveness. responsiveness, as seen below, is a much broader concept than competence. responsiveness has two principal components, with the first component being how successfully one has attended a cared-for’s needs. should an unsuccessful caring practice be poorly delivered, responsiveness as a value indicates we ought to be morally suspicious of this relation and evaluate it accordingly. therefore, competence is subsumed by responsiveness: rather than being an independent moral consideration, competence is better understood as referring to the abilities of the carer in the broader moral picture of responding to a person’s needs. as such, competence should be considered as an instrumental component for exemplifying responsiveness. 9 for a detailed analysis of willful ignorance, see wieland (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 3.3 empathy michael slote (2007) has offered the most sustained work on how empathy ought to be understood in the care ethical framework. to be empathic is to have “the feelings of another (involuntarily) aroused in ourselves, as when we see another person in pain. it is as if their pain invades us” (slote 2007, 13). this is different from having sympathy for a person, which only entails “feeling for someone who is in pain” (13). though empathy is a fundamental component of engaging in good care, it is not clear that empathy by itself can be considered a stand-alone value. this is for two reasons. first, empathy lacks an intrinsic normative pull toward the provision of good care. as paul bloom writes, empathy is necessary “for anyone who wishes to be a good person—but it is morally neutral” (2013, 57).10 empathy is morally neutral because, just as with competence, it is a consideration that could be manipulated to learn how to be a better torturer. second, empathy is straightforwardly subsumed into both attentiveness and responsiveness. as seen with attentiveness, empathy is required to understand the cared-for’s own subjective experience. furthermore, with responsiveness, empathy is necessary to determine how successful the provision of care has been. importantly, attentiveness and responsiveness as values avoid the above criticism of empathy by stating: not only must we be empathetic to understand people’s needs, we also ought to care for those needs and respond appropriately and effectively. empathy, taken by itself, does not guarantee this conclusion. therefore, empathy is better understood as a necessary component of attentiveness and responsiveness. 3.4 mutual concern mutual concern generally refers to a common interest shared and pursued by two or more persons. however, held interprets mutual concern in a specific way. for held, mutual concern as a caring value is expressed between relations when there exists a shared interest to make possible the cooperation required to develop and sustain association for the benefit of all involved. in other words, care ethics see the interests of individuals as “importantly intertwined rather than as simply competing” (2006, 15). as such, mutual concern ought not to be understood as merely when one person’s self-interest happens to align with another’s self-interest, 10 bloom’s argument is to argue against what he calls “emotional empathy” in favour of rational compassion—that is, compassion rationally guided to make good moral decisions. while part of bloom’s argument helps show what is mistaken about slote’s claims, care ethicists would not go so far as to accept bloom’s conclusion. it is the marriage of our emotional and reasoning capacities together that needs emphasis, not one capacity having priority over the other. see baier (1994), held (1993), and meyers (1994). randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 or when persons are “competitors for benefits” (held 2006, 34). mutual concern is therefore not synonymous with altruism: caring practices should not be interpreted as zero-sum games, and the surrounding institutional context of such practices ought to reinforce that. given mutual concern refers to the success of caring practices through the intertwined interests of those individuals involved in the caring relation, mutual concern is a caring value. held defends her definition of mutual concern in her critique of the liberal contractual model of social relations. writers in the contractual tradition have generally sought to derive principles to design fair, legitimate institutions that are “acceptable to us as free, equal, rational, and fully impartial persons” (2006, 81). in this context, persons are conceptualized as seeking to further their self-interest; relations between these persons are contractual to this end. held (80–81) makes several influential arguments against this contractual model of social relations, though one pertinent argument can be singled out: mutual concern cannot only refer to contractual relations between self-interested strangers because this would degrade many types of relations that have shared interests beyond the individual. friendships are one example: although some aspects of friendship are beneficial to each individually, “if self-interest is all that motivates them” to continue their association, this friendship would be “superficial at best” (81). mutual concern in friendships (and other intimate relations) is instead focused on the amalgamated interests that result through persons coming together in association—interests that are constitutive of all the individuals involved. mutual concern as a value is undermined when these shared interests are severed. this is straightforwardly seen in cases of domination. if a person exploits their naïve friend, this relation no longer is a good caring one. yet, again, our moral lives are more complicated than this suggests. for instance, if mutual concern is undermined due to cases of paternalism, to what extent can a relation be immoral? paternalism occurs when we interfere in another person’s life because we believe our interference will make their life better, even if it is against that person’s will. there is no prima facie mutual concern here, but the destruction of a relation may not immediately follow. relations are complex and are usually not built upon a single issue—a paternalistic act may not lead to the relation’s end (such as a parent stopping their child gorging on sweets). perhaps mutual concern as a value may simply recognize the potential for paternalism to produce immoral relations and consequently require greater communicative effort to improve the way caring practices are delivered. this is especially true if the paternalistic act sought to achieve the threshold of another’s care (as with a parent’s care for their child). of course, sometimes communication does not go well, or circumstance prevents communication happening. in serious cases of domination, the relation could cause severe harm to the individuals involved. care theorists do not tolerate feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 domineering relations of this kind, and when options to repair the relation fail, the relation ought to be ended to the extent possible (although sometimes this is only a limited extent: we will never stop “being the sibling of our siblings, or the ex-friend or ex-spouse of the friends or spouse with whom we have broken a relation” [held 2006, 96]). ultimately, in this rich ethical milieu, an appeal to care ethics’ moral epistemology is necessary. to effectively analyze each scenario of paternalism and domination (and the grey space between these concepts), “sensitivity to the multiple relevant considerations in particular contexts” is required (held 2006, 20). without a fuller picture of the normative situation surrounding a paternalistic or dominating act, offering a universal “right answer” would be a dubious promise. however, the general point is this: if there are no clear intertwined interests between two or more parties, but one side pushes to keep the relation going in its present state, we ought to be morally suspicious of this relation and evaluate it accordingly. 3.5 respect respect is listed as one of engster’s (2007) three virtues for guiding care. by respect, engster does not mean anything as strong as “equal recognition of others,” but simply the recognition that “others are worthy of our attention and responsiveness, are presumed capable of understanding and expressing their needs, and are not lesser beings just because they have needs they cannot meet on their own” (31). respect as a virtue is practised through treating others in ways that do not “degrade them in their own eyes or the eyes of others” (31). this is a good start for clarifying respect as a concept, but it is not clear that respect is best understood as a virtue in the context of care. this is because respect is object-generated rather than subject-generated. that is, respect involves “a deontic experience”—we respect something because the object of attention demands our attention, not merely because we want to give it (birch 1993, 315). as john rawls writes, respect is the recognition of something “as directly determining our will without reference to what is wanted by our inclinations” (2000, 153). consequently, it would be better to say that respect is a relational moral consideration that emerges through our interactions with others. however, though respect can be interpreted as a relational moral consideration, it may not be a stand-alone caring value. instead, respect would appear to be subsumed into attentiveness and responsiveness. on respect being subsumed into attentiveness, the following argument can be made. respect entails a deontic experience, whereby the individuals involved in a caring relation have a need to not be demeaned or degraded in their own eyes or the eyes of others. attentiveness is the recognition of another’s needs and that these needs require caring for. if we are not attentive to the need for not being degraded or demeaned randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 through caring practices, then the value of attentiveness is undermined. therefore, if the value of attentiveness requires the need for not being degraded or demeaned to be recognized, respect forms an important component of attentiveness. a similar argument can be made for why respect is subsumed by responsiveness. responsiveness as a value is exemplified if a person’s needs are successfully cared for. part of responding successfully is not degrading or demeaning the them in their eyes or the eyes of others. if that person does not respond positively to care given to them because they have been degraded or demeaned, then the value of responsiveness would be undermined. therefore, respect also forms an important component of responsiveness. 3.6 responsiveness whereas attentiveness refers to the successful recognition of needs that require caring for, responsiveness indicates how successful attending to those needs has been. responsiveness has two major features. the first feature involves the ability of responding to a person’s needs. here, competence is an instrumental component of providing good care. the second feature is how attentive the carer is to the response given by the cared-for to determine if the care provided was well received. this second feature deserves emphasis: when we are inattentive to how well received care is, good care could degenerate if we do not know the care provided is appropriate. therefore, this feature of responsiveness “requires that we remain alert to the possibilities for abuse that arise with vulnerability” (tronto 1993, 135). it is one thing to respond to a person’s needs; it is another whether this response was appropriate. given this normative pull toward promoting successful caring practices, enabling evaluation of the moral worth of a relation vis-à-vis the interactions between the individuals involved in the provision and receipt of care, responsiveness is a value. an important implication of responsiveness is how responsive the carer is to their own well-being. there is a need “to keep a balance between the needs of caregivers and care-receivers” (tronto 1993, 135). unless the carer also receives suitable amounts of rest and other resources to pursue opportunities and projects that give meaning to their life, two undesirable outcomes result. first, the care given will become less effective as the carer burns out. second, and perhaps most important, there is a risk the carer becomes conceptualized as merely a tool of care provision. a prominent criticism of noddings’s interpretation of care ethics was just this: sarah hoagland argued that noddings’s carer seems only to be a “martyr, servant or slave” (1991, 255). the danger is the carer’s sense of self could be lost if the only reason they rest is for providing better care. therefore, to be responsive to oneself is to acknowledge that the reasons for rest are not merely to improve one’s care but also to develop and reinforce self-respect. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 while hoagland (1991) raises an important point, it is still possible to provide some defence to noddings. though the reasons for being responsive to our wellbeing do not entirely encompass being better carers, it is the case that upholding our caring responsibilities is also a source of meaning and reinforcement of selfrespect. caring practices include a wide range of activities, from attending biological needs to serving cultural needs. the successful iterations of these relational activities grant confidence in one’s abilities and a positive outlook of the self. consequently, it does not necessarily follow that resting to partake better in caring practices entails the denigration of the self into a tool of care. however, when caring practices within a relation become a negative burden upon the carer and do impact upon a carer’s self-respect, this relation ought to be treated with moral suspicion and evaluated accordingly. 3.7 sensitivity held (2006) understands sensitivity as the capacity for being considerate to a person’s complex needs. though mistaken interpretations of needs “are usually frequent on both sides,” steady progress moves us toward learning how to respond best and how to avoid the frustrating of these needs (53). here, sensitivity is not empathy. sensitivity only requires us to become more attentive to a person’s needs to better understand them. this does not require an empathic connection, given this might be impossible in some cases. instead, sensitivity is closer to sympathy— feeling for someone through the better recognition of their needs. moreover, sensitivity is not quite attentiveness. while sensitivity reflects the first part of attentiveness (the recognition of a need), there is no inherent normative pull in sensitivity that requires one to then do anything about that need. this latter point is important for establishing whether sensitivity is a caring value. for as held continues, sensitivity “is not always an admirable capacity: it can be used to inflict pain more effectively” (2006, 54). this criticism is barely distinguishable from one of the major problems levied at empathy above: it is possible to manipulate sensitivity for improving non-caring practices, such as the torture of another person. consequently, sensitivity is not a caring value. however, sensitivity does play an important role in two other values: attentiveness and responsiveness. while sensitivity embodies the first part of attentiveness, it is also important for the second part of responsiveness: knowing whether one’s caring was positively received. unless we are sensitive to this facet of caring, responsiveness will be undermined as a value. 3.8 taking responsibility responsibility is a difficult concept to define. indeed, tronto writes, “responsibility is among the handful of concepts that require constant evaluation” randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 (1993, 131). this is because of the ambiguity that undergirds who has what responsibility of care to fulfil: responsibility “has different meanings depending upon one’s perceived gender roles, and issues that arise out of class, family status, and culture, including cultural differences based on racial groupings” (133). however, a general definition can be derived: to take responsibility is to be made accountable for the successful fulfilment of a caring practice. what this responsibility is made up of depends on one’s context. however, when understood this way, responsibility seems instead to be the product of what relations generate for the individuals involved. for instance, we might have responsibilities to respect our shared interests, to maintain trustworthiness, to be attentive to other’s needs, and to be responsive to those needs (including our own). to avoid one’s responsibility is to ignore these caring values and risk damaging one’s relations. taking responsibility is therefore not a value in and of itself—it is rather the manifestation of undertaking what responsibilities caring values generate. of course, some questions can be raised here: how exactly are these responsibilities generated through our relations, and what is the nature of these responsibilities? moreover, as tronto writes of the ethics of care, “held’s concern to establish the moral qualities of caring does not help us answer the question: for any given caring need, who is responsible?” (2008, 215; original emphasis). unfortunately, this paper does not have the space to engage with these questions. instead, this paper hopes to have provided a normative foundation for such engagement to begin. 3.9 trustworthiness trustworthiness characterizes the expectation that persons in a relation will remain loyal and not pursue deceitful or hostile actions toward each other. through successful iterated caring practices, trustworthiness in a relation is exemplified to a stronger degree; this enables greater intricate engagement between the individuals involved. as annette baier (2004, 177) has argued, these activities of trust-building are mutually reinforcing, creating a “climate of trust” in which relations become increasingly meaningful over time.11 when this climate of trust is undermined through betrayal, the poisoned relation can be evaluated on its poor moral worth accordingly. should there be a desire to reconstitute this damaged relation, rebuilding the climate of trust is a fundamental component to ensure its success: the process of relational repair requires “restoring or creating trust and hope in a shared sense of value and responsibility” (walker 2006, 28). if there is no expectation a person will be able to continue rebuilding such trust, forgiveness and 11 cf. baier (1994) and harding (2011). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 restoration of the relation dissipates. given the importance of trustworthiness to begin, maintain, and strengthen caring relations, trustworthiness is a value of care. there are different accounts of trustworthiness that can emerge here, which karen jones (1999) labels “risk-assessment” and “will-based.” a “risk-assessment” account of trustworthiness underpins nonintimate relations. this view describes a climate of trust between persons in a formal or professional context when there is mutual concern to act in a particular way. consider an example of “formal caring”: a relation between a nurse and patient. if a primary purpose of nursing is to provide aid to its patients through guidance by the hippocratic oath, this “contract” produces a normative expectation that the trustee—the nurses, and broadly the health care system—will fulfil this purpose. without this background condition of expectation, there would be no possibility for trust (mcleod 2002, 19). as held writes, “to achieve whatever improvements of which societies are capable, the cooperation that trust makes possible is needed” (2006, 42). ignoring, refusing aid to, or worsening the plight of others poisons the climate of trust between these persons, and thereby the possibility for good care. a “will-based” account of trustworthiness allows for more intimate relations to unfold within this broader risk-assessment image and follows baier’s (2004) interpretation of trust outlined above. on a will-based account, trustworthiness emerges through a trustee motivated by goodwill to another person: the trustee acts to reinforce trustworthiness because they are engrossed with that other person. this account of trustworthiness is better suited for “informal caring,” such as between a parent and child. whereas the risk-assessment account does not assume that persons care for each other intimately, the will-based account does assume the possibility of such intimacy. both accounts align by holding a normative expectation that the trustee does what they should do, and not a predicative expectation that they will (jones 2012). 3.10 summary following this section’s analysis of nine potential caring values, four are concluded as genuine values in the care ethical framework: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. competence, empathy, respect, sensitivity, and taking responsibility are rejected as stand-alone values. competence, empathy, respect, and sensitivity are subsumed by the four genuine values, while taking responsibility is the manifestation of undertaking what responsibilities our relations generate. 4. conclusion this paper sought to offer a more coherent understanding of the values of care that demarcate the threshold of good caring relations. of the nine potential randall: values in good caring relations published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 values identified, only four are concluded as genuine values within the care ethical framework: attentiveness, mutual concern, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. as such, good caring relations are those that exemplify the four values of care in their deliverance of caring practices. references baier, annette. 1994. moral prejudices: essays on ethics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2004. “demoralization, trust, and the virtues.” in setting the moral compass, edited by cheshire calhoun, 176–188. oxford: oxford university press. birch, thomas h. 1993. “moral considerability and universal consideration.” environmental ethics 15 (4): 313–332. bloom, paul. 2013. against empathy: the case for rational compassion. new york: ecco. cohen, jonathan, ed. 2001. caring classrooms/intelligent schools: the social emotional education of young children. new york: teachers college press. desautels, peggy. 2004. “moral mindfulness.” in moral psychology: feminist ethics and social theory, edited by peggy desautels and margaret urban walker, 69–81. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. engster, daniel. 2007. the heart of justice: care ethics and political theory. oxford: oxford university press. fisher, berenice, and joan c. tronto. 1990. “toward a feminist theory of care.” in circles of care: work and identity in women’s lives, edited by emily abel and margaret nelson, 35–62. albany: state university of new york press. hardin, russell. 2002. trust and trustworthiness. new york: russell sage foundation. harding, matthew. 2011. “responding to trust.” ratio juris 24 (1): 75–87. held, virginia. 1993. feminist morality: transforming culture, society, and politics. chicago: chicago university press. ———. 2006. the ethics of care. oxford: oxford university press. hoagland, sarah lucia. 1991. “some thoughts about caring.” in feminist ethics, edited by claudia card, 246–263. lawrence: university of kansas press. jones, karen. 1999. “second-hand moral knowledge.” journal of philosophy 96 (2): 55–78. ———. 2012. “trustworthiness.” ethics 123 (1): 61–85. mcleod, carolyn. 2002. self-trust and reproductive autonomy. cambridge, ma: mit press. meyers, diana t. 1994. subjection and subjectivity. new york: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 moellendorf, darrel. 2014. the moral challenge of dangerous climate change: values, poverty, and policy. cambridge: cambridge university press. noddings, nel. 2002. educating moral people. new york: teachers college press. ———. 2006. critical lessons: what our schools should teach. cambridge: cambridge university press. pettersen, tove. 2008. comprehending care. lanham, md: lexington books. potter, nancy. 2002. how can i be trusted? a virtue theory of trustworthiness. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. rawls, john. 1971. a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2000. lectures on the history of moral philosophy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. robinson, fiona. 1999. globalizing care: ethics, feminist theory, and international relations. boulder, co: westview press. selma sevenhuijsen. 1998. citizenship and the ethics of care: feminist considerations on justice, morality and politics. new york: routledge. slote, michael. 2007. the ethics of care and empathy. new york: routledge. tronto, joan c. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. ———. 2008. review of virginia held’s the ethics of care. hypatia 23 (1): 211–217. walker, margaret urban. 2006. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press. walsh, joseph. 2017. “commitment and partialism in the ethics of care.” hypatia 32 (4): 817–832. wieland, jan willem. 2017. “willful ignorance.” ethical theory and moral practice 20 (1): 105–119. thomas e. randall is a phd candidate in the political science department at western university, canada. his thesis is entitled frontiers of care, which aims to defend care ethics as a cosmopolitan and intergenerational normative theory. his interests broadly focus on environmental, feminist, moral, and political philosophy, with published research in these areas appearing or forthcoming in between the species, international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics and the routledge handbook of food ethics. love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 1 2016 love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston matthew j. brown the university of texas at dallas, mattbrown@utdallas.edu recommended citation brown, matthew j.. 2016. "love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1. love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston1 matthew j. brown abstract in contemporary histories of psychology, william moulton marston is remembered for helping develop the lie detector test. he is better remembered in the history of popular culture for creating the comic book superhero wonder woman. in his time, however, he contributed to psychological research in deception, basic emotions, abnormal psychology, sexuality, and consciousness. he was also a radical feminist with connections to women's rights movements. marston's work is an instructive case for philosophers of science on the relation between science and values. although marston's case provides further evidence of the role that feminist values can play in scientific work, it also poses challenges to philosophical accounts of value-laden science. marston's work exemplifies standard views about feminist value-laden research in that his feminist values help him both to criticize the research of others and create novel psychological concepts and research techniques. his scientific work includes an account of the nature of psychoemotional health that leads to normative conclusions for individual values and conduct and for society and culture, a direction of influence that is relatively undertheorized in the literature. to understand and evaluate marston's work requires an approach that treats science and values as mutually influencing; it also requires that we understand the relationship between science advising and political advocacy in value-laden science. keywords: feminist science, science and values, william moulton marston, wonder woman, popular culture 1 my deepest gratitude to sabrina starnaman, without whom this project would not have been possible. my thanks to roddey reid, pamela gossin, daniel amrhein, damien williams, margaret gaida, melissa littlefield, emily tobey, joyce havstad, carla fehr, students in several of my classes from 2009–2015, and the many audiences that have listened to and provided feedback on this work. i have been helped and encouraged in this project by too many people in the comics studies community to name, and i have appreciated being welcomed into their discussions. 1 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 figure 1. panel from "the rubber barons," wonder woman #4 (apr./may 1943) 1. introduction in a story from wonder woman #4 (apr./may 1943) entitled2 "the rubber barons" (marston and peter 1943a; cited in walowit 1974, 130–31), wonder woman confronts the spy elva dove with evidence about her love interest ivar torgson, one of the eponymous rubber barons who uses elva's love for him to convince her to spy on the army. wonder woman shows elva what the narrator calls "an x-ray photograph of torgson's subconscious," revealing that brutish ivar imagines himself a wealthy king and elva his chained slave. wonder woman promises that she can "cure" ivar with elva's help. using wonder woman's magic lasso, which has the power to make the person it binds submit to and obey the user, elva begins a three-day role-reversal game, where elva is the queen and ivar the bound slave. when ivar complains, though he kneels at her feet, elva tells him, "i'm making a man of you! learning to submit is the final test of manhood!" (see figure 2marston's wonder woman comics appear in several series: all star comics (only #8 was written by marston), sensation comics, comics cavalcade, and wonder woman. i will use italics to distinguish between the comic book wonder woman and the character wonder woman. the early wonder woman stories were originally published without titles, but have been given titles in various anthologies and databases. marston's original scripts also provide titles. wonder woman #4 is collected in wonder woman archives vol. 2, from which i take the title. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 1.) and much to his surprise, ivar not only quickly learns to submit, he enjoys it! so much so that after one day, elva need no longer use the magic lasso. unfortunately, when elva gives up the game and tells ivar, "i just want to be your adoring wife," ivar's "domination" and "male conceit" return, and ivar goes on to trouble wonder woman once again, before she eventually subdues him. i will show that far from being just a kinky story from old comic books, this story is a puzzle piece in an important but under-appreciated episode in the history of feminist science, an episode that serves as a particularly rich case study for philosophers of science interested in the relationship between science and values, or the public and political role of science and scientists. to understand that link, we need to know about wonder woman's creator and author. the early wonder woman comics were credited to "charles moulton," but, as with many early comic books, this was a pseudonym. wonder woman was drawn by harry peter, who decades earlier had drawn pro-suffrage cartoons, and edited by sheldon mayer, but most importantly for our story, her adventures were written by a man named william moulton marston.3 who was william moulton marston? a thorough answer to this question is the necessary beginning to understanding the seemingly strange content of the wonder woman comics, and what they have to do with psychology, radical feminism, and social reform. marston was a harvard-trained psychologist and lawyer, the student of hugo münsterberg and thus an intellectual heir of wilhelm wundt and william james, the founders of scientific psychology. marston was the inventor of a lie detector test based on changes in systolic blood pressure; his research was foundational for the developers of the polygraph. he published articles and monographs in the leading journals and book series in psychology and criminology. he also wrote a number of articles and books popularizing his psychological ideas, and was interviewed for magazine articles. at one point, marston styled himself "the world's first consulting psychologist," and consulted for the film and comic book industries. in his student days, he wrote scripts for silent films; in his later years, he wrote a novel and self-help books, and created and wrote the comic book character wonder woman. he was a media theorist who wrote books and articles on the nature of "sound pictures" (movies with sound) and comics. he was an ardent and radical feminist, as well as a nonconformist and polyamorist. 3the publisher of all-american publications, a precursor to dc comics, was named maxwell charles gaines. gaines hired marston first as a consultant, then to create and write wonder woman. "charles moulton" is a combination of gaines' and marston's middle names. 3 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 in this paper, i will focus on marston's psychological research in the 1910s and 1920s, as well as the way that his research connects with his later, popular work. first, i will argue that marston exemplifies many aspects of feminist research, in that his feminist values play important roles in his scientific work, roles that cannot be dismissed under the rubric of mere bias, but instead contribute to the work's epistemic quality and ethical responsibility. i will focus this part of my analysis on his research on the emotions and his account of psycho-emotional health. second, i will argue that marston's work challenges the main accounts from feminist philosophy of science and the literature on values in science, because of the way that his scientific work seeks to inform and transform our values and our social institutions through proposed educational and social reforms, popularization efforts, and even popular media. here i will focus on his popularizations, his consulting work, and his creation of wonder woman. 2. feminist philosophy of science and the interplay of science and values today, some form of the thesis variously known as the value-ladenness of science, fact-value entanglement, or fact-value holism is becoming widely accepted in philosophy of science, at least, by most of those who have carefully considered the matter. though the view has been prominently defended by logical positivists, pragmatists, pluralists, and others, it is a central feature of many feminist philosophies of science, and it is the work of feminist philosophers of science that is probably most responsible for the recent growth in its acceptance. for the most part, the discussion has focused on the role values actually have in science, as well as the roles they can and should have. 2.1 the role of values in science the history of feminist philosophy of science, feminist science criticism, and feminist science is complex, but is often told starting with the growing numbers of women joining academic science in the mid-twentieth century or with the relationship between women scientists and the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. i will follow anderson (2012, 5) in briefly describing a common pattern in feminist interventions in science, before describing a few of the key approaches to the role of values in science. feminist science criticism often begins among practicing scientists, and takes the form of identifying sexist, androcentric biases and identifying them as a cause of error or limitation of the existing scientific methods, theories, and evidence. feminist science critics operating in this mode are engaged with what kourany (2010) calls the "methodological approach," which points to the ways in which androcentric, sexist science is bad science on its own criteria. though feminist values or women's standpoints may not strictly be necessary conditions for recognizing 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 such problems, they certainly enable this kind of criticism, which had been absent. feminist science criticism might focus on exclusion of women from science, applications of science that are harmful to women, accepted theories that ignore gender or women, the role of masculine and feminine cognitive styles and the cognitive loss associated with using only the former, and the role of gender bias in framing questions for research and conceptual schemes for articulating theories. as historians and philosophers of science become involved, and feminist science critics from within the field become more sophisticated, we tend to see a move from regarding bias as error, to seeing certain biases (namely, nonsexist and feminist bias) as a resource for better science. we also see feminist scientists moving from criticism of existing science towards the development of new projects that are based on or incorporate feminist values. as a result, philosophy of science moves from considering feminist critiques of science as sexist and biased to accounts of the potentially beneficial role of values in science. the most basic move available for philosophers of science is to see values like sexism and feminism not as bias or error, but as perspectives that may generate different approaches to science. the move then is to encourage pluralism, and to manage the social incorporation of different value-perspectives in a productive way (longino 1990, 2002). another approach would be a sort of broad holism, according to which empirical claims, theoretical claims, and values all form a web of belief that is modified in the face of new experience to remain coherent (white 1981; nelson 1990). a third approach is to manage the inductive risk faced by scientists with value judgments, i.e., to focus on the consequences of error and demand very strict standards when the (social) cost of false positive errors is high, and accept relatively looser standards when the cost of false negative errors is high (rudner 1953; douglas 2009). alternatively, we may regard the ethical and epistemic goals of science to be jointly necessary—scientific progress requires better justification and more beneficent social consequences (kourany 2010). these are, of course, only some of the many views that feminist and other philosophers of science have articulated about the role of values in science. what they share is the view that values have a beneficial role to play in science, guaranteeing its ethical and social responsibility, improving the epistemic quality of scientific knowledge, or both. in sections 4–6, i will show different ways in which marston's is a feminist science project that exemplifies the beneficial role of values in science. as is often the case in feminist history and philosophy of science, this is an interpretive venture—marston does not foreground the influence of values on his scientific work. this is no surprise; many scientists are reticent to do so, given the prevailing image of objective science as value-free. 5 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 2.2 the role of science in values the literature on values in science is well developed, thanks to several decades of work on the topic. the question of the role of science in values has received relatively little attention by comparison. while there have been a few scientistic moral naturalists who insist that moral facts can be derived from scientific facts, it is a rare view. what's more, there has been relatively little interaction between philosophers of science and ethicists on the question. ethicists worry about the relation of ethics to "nature," without much attention to the knowledge that science gives us about it, while philosophers of science haven't much to say about how the scientific process might alter ethics, values, and culture. philosophers of science have recently been very interested in the impact of science on policymaking, but this interest is primarily focused on how scientists inform policy; the engines of social and political change, though, are politics and the public. one view that explicitly considers the role that scientific theory and evidence might play in altering our values is the holist view that takes theory, evidence, and value to be mutual parts of a web of belief, which is altered in the face of new experience. morton white (1981), for example, is concerned about mixed inferences of the following sort: 1. one ought not to break a promise. 2. bob promised me yesterday that he would come to the party. 3. bob did not come to the party. 4. therefore, bob did something he ought not to have done. according to white, due to the duhem-quine thesis (underdetermination of falsification), if one feels strongly inclined to reject the conclusion (4), then we may reject either the ethical premises (1), the factual premises (2–3), or the logical connections that license the inference. on the other hand, if we feel strongly about (1–3) and the form of the inference, we are obligated to accept the conclusion (4). and so moral reasons can lead us to reject factual (or scientific) claims, and new factual (or scientific) knowledge can lead us to make ethical or moral claims (when we learn (3), we can judge (4) to be the case). this is a cartoonishly simple example, but it demonstrates that the scientific and the ethical are bound up for this sort of holist in such a way that permits the results of science to have an impact on our values and social practices. this sort of view has been developed in a more sophisticated and explicitly feminist direction by lynn hankinson nelson (1990) and sharyn clough (2011). elizabeth anderson (2004) provides another account of what she calls "the bidirectional influence of facts and values" (11). in considering the question of whether values in science might lead to wishful thinking, or "operate to drive inquiry 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 to a predetermined conclusion" (11), she argues that we need to ensure that value judgments are made on the basis of evidence produced by inquiry, rather than being fixed dogmatically in advance. only by accounting for what it takes for there to be evidence for value judgments can we ensure a legitimate role for values in science, according to anderson, including evidence that comes from our emotional reactions to the results of courses of actions spurred by science. in her case study on feminist research on divorce, she argues that social scientists can contribute to answering such value-laden questions as, "are children better off if parents who want a divorce stay together?" (18). answering such questions involves entangled considerations of evidence and value judgments. in sections 7–9, i will discuss work by marston that pushes us to think about the roles that science plays in values, society, politics, and culture, especially when that science is itself clearly value-laden. our current discussion of science and values doesn't focus enough on this direction of influence. marston asks value-laden questions like, "what sort of society would best promote emotional normalcy [psycho-emotional health]?" his answer is a radical feminist program of reform that he attempts to enact through education, consulting work, and pop culture. it is an open question whether, ultimately, work of the sort marston pursues is legitimate, scientifically and politically. his approach pushes us to further develop our accounts of the role of science in values. 3. william moulton marston's scientific and feminist credentials in order to understand the relationship of marston's psychological research to his feminist values and politics, it is helpful to know a few things about his life, the nature of his work, and his standing in the field at the time. this information is necessary to answering two challenges: (1) was marston a serious scientist, rather than a marginal figure or a charlatan? (2) was marston really a feminist? while marston does not figure prominently in contemporary histories of psychology, thanks to an interest in his role in the wonder woman comics, there are a few rich sources for learning about marston's life (see, e.g., bunn 1997; daniels 2000; sandifer 2013; lepore 2014).4 from these sources, we can piece together a picture of marston's life and work, and start to answer these challenges. 4jill lepore's recent book, the secret history of wonder woman (2014), is a particularly rich source, an extremely thorough and well-written biography of marston and his family, from which i draw several of the details in this section. however, note that lepore's book paints a coherent narrative over evidence of inconsistent quality, some of which is based on careful archival research, other parts of which are based on interviews with people who knew the details only secondor 7 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 some call into question marston's status as a scientist, but a full look at his academic career makes it clear that he is worth taking seriously. the wide variety of marston's pursuits, his inability to hold down an academic position, his tendency towards self-promotion, and his later involvement in lowbrow literature and comic books have all led some to dismiss him as a huckster and charlatan (sandifer 2013, 40; lepore 2014, 141, 168). nonetheless, he was trained by a protege of the two most important founding figures of psychology, he was well regarded by many of his peers, and he published in many of the best venues. marston received his bachelor's degree in psychology from harvard in 1915. he went on to pursue his law degree, finished in 1918, and his phd in psychology, completed in 1921, with a thesis entitled "systolic blood pressure symptoms of deception and constituent mental states." this work, begun as an undergraduate, laid the foundations for the lie detector test. at harvard, marston worked in the psychology program set up by william james, where he was a pupil of hugo münsterberg, a student of wilhelm wundt who james brought in to run the harvard psychology laboratory (daniels 2000, 12; rhodes 2000, 98; benjamin 2006, 103n8). münsterberg was also interested in lie detection through physiological indicators, as well as in popularizing psychology (bunn 1997, 93). marston was hired by american university in 1921, where he taught legal psychology, became a tenured full professor after his first year, and was named chair of the psychology department (lepore 2014, 61, 71, 111). there he continued his psychological research and continued to apply his work in lie detection. he attempted to intervene in the case of frye v. united states using the lie detector, which helped set the test for admissibility of scientific evidence in federal and most state courts for seven decades. marston's contribution was essentially negative, as frye lost and marston's work was ruled inadmissible. frye's lawyers were students of marston's at american (lepore 2014, 67). marston's next position was as an assistant professor at tufts (a distinct step down the ladder), starting in fall 1925. for the rest of his academic career, he would continue to take positions at impressive universities (from tufts to columbia to nyu), but he would continue to move down rather than up the ranks (from full to assistant professor, to eventually part-time lecturer) (daniels 2000, 17; cattell and cattell 1927). william moulton marston's life (1893–1947) is also full of important connections with the history of feminism in america. as an undergraduate at harvard, he was a student of philosophy professor george herbert palmer, a feminist, suffragist, and faculty sponsor of the harvard men's league for woman third-hand, though lepore is very clear about this in the endnotes. i have thus tried to be selective in relying on her account. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 suffrage. emblematic of the times, that league brought suffragette emmeline pankhurst to campus to speak. marston was likely in attendance (lepore 2014, chap. 1). a major influence on marston's feminism was his wife, elizabeth holloway, by all accounts smart, ambitious, fiercely independent, and ardently feminist. marston had met holloway in grammar school and married her between graduating college and starting harvard law school (lepore 2014, 16, 44). while william marston attended harvard law, elizabeth holloway marston pursued her law degree at boston university. while he sought his phd, she received an ma at radcliffe, also in psychology (lamb 2001; daniels 2000, 12). holloway had done her undergraduate degree at mount holyoke, where mary wooley created an intellectual atmosphere with women's suffrage and feminism at the center. at tufts, marston taught a student named olive byrne, daughter of ethyl byrne and niece of margaret sanger, both famous feminist activists and birth control advocates. he took her on as a student research assistant, then later as a friend, a collaborator, and then a second lover. she graduated from tufts in 1926 and moved in with marston and holloway; marston left tufts as well, possibly because of his relationship with byrne (daniels 2000, 13, 27–31; saunders 2011, 42–43; lepore 2014, 115–17). marston's work and his personal relationships were deeply intertwined. elizabeth holloway held steady work most of her life, including a long editorial stint at encyclopedia britannica, supporting marston when he was having trouble finding (and keeping) work. both elizabeth holloway and olive byrne held advanced degrees in psychology, and they frequently collaborated with marston, sometimes explicitly acknowledged, sometimes as silent contributors. thus, when examining the work of "william moulton marston," it is crucial to keep in mind that said work is likely a collaborative production of (at least) marston with holloway or byrne, if not both. it is tempting, then, to refer to "marston, holloway, and byrne" or "marston et al." or "the marstons" when describing "marston's" psychological contributions. marston (et al.) produced a variety of articles in academic journals such as american journal of psychology, journal of experimental psychology, psychological review, and journal of criminal law & criminology. his (their) two book-length volumes, the emotions of normal people and integrative psychology, were published in the prestigious international library of psychology, philosophy, and scientific method edited by c. k. ogden (the same series that published major works by adler, jung, freud, ogden and richards, piaget, g. e. moore, wittgenstein, carnap, and max black). thanks to holloway, marston even contributed to the 14th edition of the encyclopedia britannica an article on the "analysis of emotions" (marston 1929). his main interests were lie detection and the physiological markers of deception, the emotions, especially the basic emotions and their neurological and 9 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 physiological basis, abnormal psychology, psychological health, and the science of consciousness. emotions of normal people was the culmination of his work on the emotions, while integrative psychology aimed to be a textbook applying marston's general approach to all areas of psychology. later in life, marston's work turned to popular culture. not only did he write books, articles, and letters promoting the use of the lie detector in criminal investigations and legal trials, but he also wrote two popular psychology texts, try living (1937) and march on! (1941), and a voluminous quantity of articles for magazines like cosmopolitan, good housekeeping, reader's digest, and the rotarian (see frontmatter of marston 1937). with walter pitkin, he wrote a text on creating "healthy and appealing screenplays," called the art of sound pictures (1930; cited in rhodes 2000, 99), and he did consulting work for universal pictures and for all american / detective comics. his last prose book was a biography, f.f. proctor, vaudeville pioneer (1943). marston also turned from cultural analyst to creator, penning a novel called venus with us: a tale of the caesar (1932; retitled the private life of julius caesar in a later printing) and creating the iconic comic book superheroine, wonder woman. marston wrote and had almost complete creative control over wonder woman from the character's inception in 1941 until his death in 1947 (the final marston stories appeared in early 1948). what does marston's life tell us about his feminism? the family's close connection to margaret sanger is one key source of marston's feminism. when joye hummel started writing wonder woman scripts for marston, olive byrne reportedly gave her a copy of sanger's woman and the new race as background reading (lepore 2014, 103, 247). the theme of the book is the importance of birth control to feminism and "the revolt of woman against sex servitude," the moral superiority of the feminine spirit, and the idea that "love is the greatest force of the universe" (sanger 1920, 1, 10–11, 181–82; lepore 2014, 100–103). marston and holloway read sanger in graduate school, before byrne joined their lives (lepore 2014, 102). marston also drew heavily on writings from the women's movement that emphasized the moral superiority of women, a major theme of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century feminists like carrie chapman catt, as well as gynocentric utopians like inez haynes gillmore and charlotte perkins gilman (whose writings from the 1910s were published during marston's and holloway's college years). though most twentieth-century feminists focused on arguments based on equality rather than difference, marston and sanger both continued to emphasize women's superiority (lepore 2014, 86–87, 170–72). marston held a recognizable, if radical, form of feminism for his day, a kind of difference feminism. difference feminism has, through the twentieth century, been a less popular approach than feminisms that emphasize equality. nonetheless, it is an important strain throughout the history of feminism that would return again, in different forms, in the work of theorists like 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 nancy hartsock (1983) and carol gilligan (1982). i will argue that this feminism influenced marston's work for the better. but first, i need to explain some of the basic ideas from marston's psychology to provide a background for understanding those feminist influences. 4. marston's psychology against the status quo in the opening chapter of emotions of normal people, marston makes a striking pronouncement: "i submit that the backbone of literature has been transplanted intact into psychology, where it has proved pitifully inadequate" (1928, 3–4). what he means is that scientific psychology has adopted wholesale our commonsense, folk concepts and categories for the mind, particularly for the emotions, while improving not at all on the clarity of psychological understanding found in nineteenth-century romantic literature. the ordinary names we use for describing emotions—fear, rage, joy, aversion, panic, wonder, etc.—are scientifically misleading or even meaningless, according to marston. what psychology needed to do was break away from concepts tied to literary tropes, commonsense stereotypes, and the social status quo, and develop its own scientifically meaningful set of categories, a move that, as we shall see, is surprisingly influenced by marston's feminist perspective. the elimination of folk categories in favor of scientific ones will also remind contemporary philosophers of mind of the eliminative materialism of feyerabend (1963), rorty (1965), and the churchlands (p. m. churchland 1981; p. s. churchland 1986). this alternative, scientific set of psychological and emotional categories, marston implies, is not as likely to reproduce the same problematic stereotypes and social relations that exist in today's society, which marston explicitly regards as unhealthy or "abnormal," and which we can infer is problematic in part because it is patriarchal. as we shall see, marston hopes to provide an alternative, neurobiologically grounded psychology, including an account of psycho-emotional health, which in turn helps specify the social preconditions of psychologically healthy people. furthermore, we shall see that it is central to his theory that emotions like "rage" and "fear," conflict and unpleasantness, are abnormal and unhealthy. one of the major ways that marston demonstrates the power of his alternative perspective is in his thoroughgoing critique of the status-quo-biased, sexist psychologists in the psychoanalytic and behaviorist traditions. 4.1 marston's critiques of sexist psychologists marston's critique of previous psychological theorists springs from his line about "the backbone of literature" being transplanted into psychology. this leading idea clearly follows from his thoroughgoing opposition to a kind of naturalization of the status quo—marston everywhere opposes the idea that because something is a 11 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 certain way in our society, that it is natural, normal, healthy, or necessary that it be so. he thus goes out of his way to critique theories that accept a large part of the status quo. one clear way in which marston fits into the feminist science tradition comes in his critique of, and attempt to provide an alternative to, the mainstream traditions of freudian psychoanalysis and watsonian behaviorism. while marston's radical feminism may not be a necessary condition of such criticism, his values are clearly an enabling factor—from a feminist evaluation of the status quo, to mistrust of and antagonism towards psychologies that naturalize and reproduce it. that freud and freudian psychoanalysis have a sexist strain is a well-known problem, and there are many classic feminist critiques of freud, from beauvoir to butler (though many feminists have reworked psychoanalytic ideas into a basis for feminist thought). the basic outlines of the freudian account of the psychology of women, from penis envy to the various natural inferiorities of women, is openly sexist. furthermore, freudians have tended to be obsessed with sexist and heteronormative defenses of traditional gender roles and sexuality, as against the so-called "perversion" of "homosexuality." in his screed against comic books, the freudian psychiatrist fredric wertham focuses on what he finds problematic in the way that comics like wonder woman depict women: they do not work. they are not homemakers. they do not bring up a family. mother-love is entirely absent. even when wonder woman adopts a girl there are lesbian overtones. . . . in no other literature for children has the image of womanhood been so degraded. (wertham 1954, 234; see quotes in lepore 269) stories containing lesbian overtones and failed homemakers and mothers are psychologically detrimental themes, claims wertham, because they teach the opposite of normal, healthy womanhood. wertham's sexism and traditionalism are entirely representative of the freudian tradition; his "conservative moralizing" is founded in psychoanalytic theory (rhodes 1997, 63).5 marston's critique of freudian psychoanalysis emphasized freud's focus on conflict as a driving factor of human psychology: 5marston died before wertham made his criticisms, before wertham started the controversy that led the comics industry to create the comics code authority, which censored comics for decades. one can't help but wonder, what would have happened to the comics industry and to wonder woman if marston had not died young and had been able to answer wertham. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 on the whole, we may characterize psycho-analysis as a system of thought which assumes a continuous state of bodily conflict between the vitalistictype causes, having their origin in the libido or in consciousness itself, and the mechanistic-type causes springing from environmental stimuli. (1928, 22) it is fundamental to marston's view that the fundamental forces of psychology are those that govern a healthy mind, and furthermore, as we shall see, a state of conflict is a temporary episode of necessary engagement with a hostile environment, whereas permanent conflict is a sign of dysfunction. healthy people work toward a state of pleasant harmony with their environment; freud assumes an unhealthy, abnormal mind as the default state. as marston et al. gloss the view in integrative psychology, "they call the life energy the libido. the libido is continually fighting an antagonistic environment for self-expression" (marston, king, and marston 1931, 40). marston is also concerned with the failure of the psychoanalysts to make serious contact with "body mechanisms" (40). again, they fail to meet a basic standard for psychological theorizing adopted by marston, that of providing neurological foundations for psychological categories. the sexism in behaviorism is less prominent or well known. but here is founder john b. watson writing in the nation: when a woman is a militant suffragist the chances are, shall we say, a hundred to one that her sex life is not well adjusted? . . . most of the terrible women one must meet, women with the blatant views and voices, women who have to be noticed, who shoulder one about, who can't take life quietly, belong to this large percentage of women who have never made a sex adjustment. (watson 1927, 10; cf. lepore 2014, 110)6 watson attacks suffragists and women who have their own opinions, implies that their problem is that they aren't well-adjusted sexually (a common sexist trope going back a long time), and implies that they should be quiet, speak when spoken to, and take the life that is given to them. similarly, b.f. skinner has come in for feminist criticism, especially in the implicit sexism found in his behaviorist utopia, walden two (1948).7 6though watson's sentiment and language here are grossly sexist, the overall message of watson's piece seems to be that equal rights for women is a worthwhile and possible goal, and one best executed by appropriate education (or rather, conditioning) from infancy. 7skinner's work mainly comes after marston, but he is nonetheless an interesting point of reference, because he is often regarded as the most sophisticated and last 13 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 marston objects to behaviorism on two main grounds. first, in limiting the scope of science to human stimulus-response behavior and excluding consciousness, the behaviorists give up on the proper subject matter of psychology. marston is contemptuous of this move: "if watson should succeed in this bob-tailing of psychology, he would have talked himself out of a job" (1928, 19). furthermore, this attempt to bracket consciousness is a cheat, marston argues, because it just amounts to skipping from the first cause ("environmental stimulus") in a long causal chain to the last ("bodily behaviour"), leaving "unbridgable gaps" in the explanation (1928, 66). again, marston mocks the move: "what a world of psychological trouble they think they are saving themselves!" (66). lastly, watson wants to have his cake and eat it, too. according to marston, watson defends a full environmental determinism about behavior. and yet, "almost in the next paragraph . . . watson attempts to show how the human race can throw off its thraldom [sic] to religious and social convention and other environmentally determined influences" (1928, 20– 21). but the behaviorist view lacks the resources such intentional change would require; such change would have to come from human thought and consciousness, which watson rules out. if watson's view were right, "such dreams for human selfregulation would be sheer madness" (1928, 21). not even the behaviorist can really accept behaviorism, in the end. note that marston doesn't just call out these approaches for having sexist overtones or implications. his approach is to show that these theories are scientifically inadequate on a broad basis. he brings to bear criticism based on what longino calls "public standards" or "shared standards" (longino 1990, 77). it is also worth noting that much of the criticism of the sexist psychologists comes from work originally done by olive byrne in her columbia master’s thesis, which was incorporated into emotions of normal people without explicit acknowledgment (lepore 2014, 127–28). it is possible that not only do marston's feminist values allow him to see flaws in psychoanalysis and behaviorism, but that byrne's standpoint plays an important part as well. not only can we regard marston (et al.) here as a sort of feminist science critic, but we can see him as an example of the idea that doing feminist science amounts to uncovering and overcoming androcentric and sexist bias, or of longino's argument that adopting new perspectives, ones that explicitly reject the status quo, may generate fruitful alternative methods and theories. marston himself did not theorize the role of values or politics in science, but he comes close insofar as he suggests that he is more objective because he is better able to distance himself from the status quo than his predecessors and contemporaries. given how little regard great behaviorist, and because he explicitly represents the society of walden two as egalitarian. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 we now hold for psychoanalytic and behaviorist approaches, as well as the striking similarities between marston and some contemporary approaches, it seems like psychology at the time could have benefitted significantly as a field from taking marston more seriously. 5. marston's evidence and research methods so far, we have focused primarily on marston's negative arguments about the psychological approaches and theories of emotions of his day. what about marston's positive approach to psychological research and the justification of alternative psychological categories? marston's criteria for scientifically respectable psychological categories were complex. first, they needed to have a biological basis, to make a connection with neuroscience. second, they had to be based in a description of "normal people," i.e., the fundamental categories needed to describe a healthy, functioning person. marston argued that emotions we call "rage" and "fear" are abnormal, unhealthy emotions, and as such, that they were not part of the basic machinery of the mind but had to be explained in terms of states of dysfunction—a move that turns out to have an interesting gender valence.8 third, the categories had to be developed on the basis of and to illuminate his complex experimental work, which involved physiological measurements (such as blood pressure), "behavioristic observation, of the watsonian variety" (marston 1927, 344), and introspective reports (none of these on its own, especially introspection, was regarded a sufficient basis of evidence). marston took the first criterion, of connecting psychology to biology or neurology, very seriously, and used it to forcefully criticize other psychological theories. below, we shall see how important this tactic is for the way his feminist values influence his scientific work. marston et al. devote nearly a fifth (102 of 543 pages) of integrative psychology to "the hidden machinery," which consists mainly of laborious descriptions of neurological mechanisms that might underlie psychological phenomena. marston nevertheless insisted on the autonomy of psychology. while neurology provided the necessary "structural and functional aspects" to understand psychological phenomena, psychology would focus on the "conscious aspect" (marston, king, and marston 1931, 11). the neurological and psychological level came together in what marston called the "psychon," the basic unit of psychology. marston uses the term "psychon" to describe "integrative activity" within a synapse, where, he says, "two separate nervous impulses arriving at the same synapse may there conflict with each other or facilitate and reinforce each other during their synaptic passage" (97). the psychon is a basic unit of 8see sarah richardson (2013) on the distinction between "gender valence" and "gender bias." 15 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 psychology, while the neuron is the basic unit of neurology, the organs of physiology, the organism of biology, the atom and molecule of chemistry, and the proton and electron of physics. psychons are building blocks of the conscious mind in the same way that neurons are building blocks of a functioning brain. marston calls this "the psychonic theory of consciousness" (1926; 1928, 26–52) and uses it to base the connections between neurological and psychological research in crafting his theories. when it comes to his own empirical research, marston's approach is highly idiosyncratic. his primary sources of evidence are physiological measurements (such as measurements of systolic blood pressure fluctuations) associated with emotional states, behavioral experiments, and comparisons of behavioral and physiological measures with introspective reports of the subjects, psychological tests (such as intelligence tests), and other background information (such as case histories). he worked with a variety of populations in his experiments, including soldiers, schoolchildren, and prisoners, and with byrne's help, he even conducted a psychological study of a sorority hazing ritual (marston 1928, 299ff.). according to marston, research on emotions in particular requires the utmost sophistication and subtlety of experimental technique because of the nature of emotional reactions themselves. first, unlike sensations, which show a high degree of similarity across subjects given the same stimulus, one and the same environmental stimulus evokes radically different emotional reactions from different subjects. second, emotions by their nature tend to be a particularly sensitive matter for research subjects, and so are susceptible to "emotional shocks," antagonism, or self-protective reticence, all of which interferes with the validity of the laboratory results (marston 1927, 339– 41). marston thus recommends three techniques to the experimenter: (1) the experimenter should make use of case history, background information, or interviews to gather as much background information as possible on each subject prior to the experiment. here, marston praises the psychoanalytic school for going the furthest in terms of "preliminary analysis" of the individual subject. (2) the experimenter must devise "individual stimulus situations, to a considerable extent, to each subject" (marston 1927, 341). that is, whatever emotions the experimenter wishes to evoke, they must use their background knowledge of the subject to find the right stimulus to evoke it. (3) the experimenter must be able to develop a sense of rapport with the subject, a sense of trust or identification with the experimenter, which will prevent reticence or hostility of the subject, even when the emotions evoked are unpleasant (marston 1927, 341–42). marston pursues a kind of (informal and hastily described) factor analysis on this data to determine the core basic types of emotional response. finally, marston describes applying these categories to clinical and consulting work with individual patients/subjects, using this to test and 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 refine the categories thus developed (marston 1928, 115). as a result of his reliance on individualized and clinical studies, though marston occasionally presents statistical or tabulated evidence, most of his evidence is presented in the form of narrative case reports. marston was something of a methodological opportunist when it came to providing evidence for his views. in addition to the reliance on information from neurology and reports of his own physiological and experimental research, marston cites a variety of additional sources of support. he presents many of his ideas first as dialectical developments out of the ideas of the psychologists he criticizes, a way of acknowledging the positive if partial contributions of those who came before. though concerned not to continue to rely on the "backbone of literature" in crafting scientific concepts, marston is happy to rely on literary allusions and quotations insofar as they clarify (for instance, in clarifying a relatively technical aspect of his view, marston quotes sappho, in whose words the phenomenon is "aptly described" [marston 1928, 99]). marston also explores extended analogies as ways of developing his ideas, as when he compares the emotion of dominance to the "behaviour of forces of nature" (1928, 116–17). each of these sources of evidence seems to contribute further to recognizing the complexity of the phenomenon under question, rather than the simplifying effect of more narrow and technical approaches to evidence.9 what's more, marston displays more of a care-based approach to his research and clinical subjects than many experimental psychologists.10 while marston does not make explicit the feminist associations or inspirations for his methodological choices, we can see clear affinities. more important, however, are the feminist affinities in the psychological and emotional theories these methods produce. 6. marston's feminist theory of emotions in this section, i will argue that marston's psychological theory of the emotions is a feminist science project in the same sense as the projects analyzed in feminist science studies since the 1970s. that is, marston's theory of emotions is suffused with or informed by feminist values and, through his collaborations, women's standpoints, in a productive fashion. we must remember the caveat that marston's feminist values are not the familiar egalitarian feminist values that informed late twentieth-century work, nor are they akin to postmodern or third wave feminism. marston's values stem from the difference feminism of catt, 9on the ways that different values, standards, methodological approaches, sources of evidence, etc. reveal different aspects of complex phenomena like human psychology and behavior, see longino (2013). 10see noddings (1984) on feminist care ethics. 17 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 gilman, and especially sanger. nonetheless, this was a significant form of feminism in marston's time, with more contemporary representatives like hartsock and gilligan. my concern is not so much with what is right or wrong about marston et al.'s feminist values, but the influence of those values on his scientific theory. first, i will provide a somewhat detailed explanation of the basics of marston's theory of emotions. initially, the role of values will seem rather remote from the technical details of the view. i ask you to bear with me through this discussion, as it is necessary for an accurate understanding of those particular aspects of marston's work where the feminist affiliations are clear. other scholars who have commented on marston's work have tended to badly misinterpret his views, for lack of attention to the details of his theories, so it is worthwhile to devote some time to working through it carefully. finally, the significant originality and unusual nature of marston's views make them a fascinating object of study in themselves. i will present the views as a theoretical structure, without attempting to reproduce marston's argument in their favor. i have given the general character of marston's arguments in the previous section, which will make it clear how complex the presentation is. furthermore, and unsurprisingly, marston does not make explicit the guiding role of his feminist values in creating the theory, but we can show clear affiliations between those values and the theory itself. 6.1 the basics of marston's theory of emotions as shown above, marston et al. use the concept of the psychon, the synaptic integration of neural signals into a conscious mind, as the basis for theoretical psychology. just as there are different neural systems—sensory, cerebral, and motor—there are different types of consciousness—perception, conscious thought, and "motor consciousness" (marston 1928, 65–66). repurposing william james's arguments for associating emotions with actions while rejecting the james-lange theory of emotions as sensory awareness of the body, marston argued that "emotion is the awareness of these bodily changes as they occur" (1928, 55; emphasis in original). that is, the psychonic "motor consciousness" just is emotion. more specifically, emotions are a product of two types of neural signals that are integrated in motor psychons, the interaction between a "motor stimulus" and "motor self." signals from the motor self are "psychonic impulses of tonic motor origin," i.e., spontaneous, baseline signals primarily associated with reflex, balance, muscle tone, etc. the motor stimuli are phasic or transitory impulses in motor pathways, though not necessarily identified with a sensory or environmental stimulus (1928, 111). the integration of motor self and motor stimulus produces motor behavior and an associated conscious emotion (marston 1928, 93–94; marston, king, and marston 1931, 142ff.). 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 the interaction between motor stimulus and motor self has two axes of variation: 1. alliance/facilitation vs. antagonism/opposition 2. relative strength of self vs. stimulus with respect to the first axis of variation, interactions where the self and stimulus impulses are allied are inherently pleasant feelings. antagonistic interactions have an unpleasant character. the four extremes along these axes of interaction define four basic emotions: 1. compliance — antagonistic stimulus stronger than motor self. 2. domination — antagonistic stimulus weaker than motor self. 3. inducement — allied stimulus weaker than motor self. 4. submission — allied stimulus stronger than motor self. these basic synapse-level descriptions of the emotions provide the underlying machinery for personal-level behavioral and phenomenological characterizations of these emotions: 1. compliance — adjusting oneself to an antagonistic stimulus because of the latter's superior strength, e.g., a scolded child falls in line, an overwhelming aesthetic experience causes one to adjust one's posture to better appreciate the artwork. initially unpleasant, due to antagonism, but as the self yields to the stimulus it becomes indifferent and then pleasant. 2. domination — the self exerts energy in order to overcome the antagonistic stimulus, e.g., a baby grasps a held rod more tightly as an experimenter tries to pull it away, competitive behavior among athletes. unpleasant, but success produces pleasantness. 3. inducement — the self exerts energy in order to attract an allied stimulus, e.g., an infant holds out its arms to induce its mother to nurse it, an adult attempts to seduce one he or she loves. always increasingly pleasant. 4. submission — the self adjusts itself to an allied stimulus, giving itself over to the latter, e.g., an infant ceases crying when soothed, a student follows instructions of a trusted teacher. always increasingly pleasant. 19 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 here we see marston's basic categories of emotions, which truly do differ radically from the folk or "literary" emotional categories.11 marston's account of basic emotions provides an underlying neurological mechanism, as well as associated behavioral profiles and affects. it is also worth mentioning, in terms of marston's criteria for valid psychological concepts, that according to marston each of the basic emotions contributes to the flourishing of the organism in the right circumstances, and each produces a feeling of pleasantness, inherently or when successful. there is some subtle gendering, as we can see, in marston's account of these basic emotions, but it is not yet clear how this connects with a feminist agenda. this becomes clearer when it comes to complex emotions. marston describes two ways that the complex emotions are created out of the basic emotions: temporal successions and simultaneous compounds. for instance, a "normal" (i.e., healthy) temporal succession exists when compliance, as it successfully deals with the antagonistic stimulus, leads naturally to dominance. marston represents temporal successions with a "+" sign, so this succession would be represented as "c+d." simultaneous compound, which receive much more detailed attention in emotions of normal people, involve the combination of an active emotion and a passive emotion. for instance, active dominance requires the increase of exertion or energy to overcome a stimulus, whereas passive dominance is a resistance to compliance, because of the greater strength of the self than the stimulus, but the motor self does not exert further energy. what's more, in normal circumstances, the emotions involving antagonistic or allied impulses go together as the appetite or love emotions, respectively. marston identifies four normal compound emotions: 1. desire — passive compliance and active dominance (pcad), a.k.a. active appetite. a restless seeking, dissatisfaction with present circumstances, along with a need to satisfy some "inner requirement." 2. satisfaction — active compliance and passive dominance (acpd), a.k.a. passive appetite. a pleasant feeling associated with acquisitiveness and relief or triumph in accomplishing some task. 3. captivation — active inducement and passive submission (aips), a.k.a. active love. the pleasure associated with charming or enticing a loved one, and seeing pleasure in the latter. 11these categories survive today (in modified form), not in the mainstream psychology of emotions, but rather in the disc personality assessment system still commonly used in management training. see https://www.discprofile.com/what-isdisc/overview/. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc/overview/ https://www.discprofile.com/what-is-disc/overview/ 4. passion — passive inducement and active submission (pias), a.k.a. passive love. the pleasure of following the lead of a trusted, loved one. compound emotions themselves figure in higher-order complexes, e.g., appetite simpliciter involves the normal succession of desire and satisfaction, pcad+acpd, and love, aips+pias. compounds of the complex emotions form the higher-order emotions called "creation," e.g., active creation consists of passive appetite (satisfaction) compounded with active love (captivation). creation emotions are always temporal sequences that lead to active or passive love emotions. another aspect that must be acknowledged is the apparent connotations of bdsm that come with marston's emotional terms. tossing around terms like "dominance" and "submission" as if they were innocent scientific terminology raises a red flag. it is impossible to distance marston's terminology from these connotations, nor, as we shall see, should we try to do so. but a few important caveats are worth noting. first, as we have seen, dominance and submission do not form a natural pairing for marston—dominance requires compliance, not submission; inducement, not dominance, leads to submission. second, submission, unlike compliance or dominance, is an entirely and inherently pleasant emotion, free from antagonism or strife. marston's use of the terminology certainly seems to diverge from the common parlance associated with bdsm. how to draw connections between the former and the latter will at least be a complicated matter. finally, there are abnormal (unhealthy) emotions, which generally involve violations of the normal temporal sequences of emotions. for instance, recall that compliance is supposed to lead to dominance (c+d), allowing the organism to reassert itself in order to thrive. sometimes, marston puts this in terms of compliance being "adapted to" dominance. for example, you parry the strike of a strong opponent in order to find an opening for a winning strike, or you stop in your tracks when approaching a rushing stream and then dominate it by pushing over a leaning tree that will allow you to cross. this can go wrong in one of two ways: a hasty and ineffective dominance reaction that fails to conquer the stimulus (overdominance reversal, or rage) or an extreme magnification of compliance that makes dominance impossible (over-compliance reversal, or fear). this general schema gives rise to the following complex abnormal emotions: 1. rage — over-dominance reversal. 2. fear — over-compliance reversal. 3. jealousy — over-submission reversal. 4. hate — over-inducement reversal. 21 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 note that these terms appear on many standard accounts as categories of "basic" or "primary" emotions, but for marston, these are complex and abnormal. there are further abnormal sequences that involve higher-order emotions as well. 6.2 love over appetite marston describes the normal relationship between appetite and love as follows: the normal relationship consists of complete adaptation of appetite to love. any life which is both successful and happy must adapt its successes to its happiness. certain types of individuals who habitually attempt to adapt happiness to success ultimately fail in both. (1928, 381) this is because "love is a giving, and not a taking; a feeding, and not an eating; an altruistic alliance with the loved one, and not a selfish conflict with a 'sex object'" (1928, 382). while love is altruistic, it is by no means self-sacrificing; submission to the loved one increases, rather than decreases, the flourishing of the person: but a human being or animal in order to submit to and serve the need of the loved one must become more healthily alive than before. any deterioration or dimunition [sic] of the active creatress [one engaged in active creation, e.g., a mother during pregnancy] injures or diminishes her creation by a corresponding amount. thus it is that complete adaptation of appetite to love is maximally efficacious, even from the point of view of enlargement of the lover. adaptation of appetite to love cannot become self sacrificial so long as love is actually in control. only when the reversed relationship of adaptation of love to appetite creeps in, does any emotional conflict appear between love purposes and appetitive needs. (1928, 382) to some extent, the relationship between love and appetite is like the relationship between compliance and domination or inducement and submission. the normal movement is from appetite to love, and appetite must be "adapted to" love, i.e., the functioning of appetite-emotion needs to be controlled by and instrumental to the operation of love-emotion. love adapted to appetite is a particularly harmful abnormal emotion; it is also one that marston finds disturbingly widespread. love in its controlling relationship to appetite, especially in its role in creation-emotions, is thus the normal emotion of primary importance. this is reflected in its sublime pleasantness: 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 the conscious characteristic of this successive blending between passive and active love is unmistakable to anyone who has once experienced it, and seems to be identical in men and women. it is exquisitely pleasant, subtle, and delicate, yet, at its height, love is ecstatically intense and pervasive, completely blotting out all other emotions from consciousness for the time being (1928, 340). for marston, as for sanger, love is the greatest force in our emotional universe. love's primacy is also reflected in its unequivocal health-promoting effects. thus, normal love emotions are the most important to psycho-emotional health. they must be given highest value by individuals, and, as we shall see below, they must be promoted by society. how does the primacy of love connect with feminist values? throughout his work (both scientific and popular), marston frequently connects the love emotions with women and with femininity. while both men and women require love emotions, and enjoy and need them equally, love is connected with traditionally and stereotypically feminine traits, while appetite, domination, and force are connected with masculinity. in making love primary to appetite, marston thus makes the feminine primary to the masculine, as traditionally understood. and while both men and women need and experience love, marston says that women have a more important role to play with respect to love: "[women] have much more of what it takes to love . . . women are the primary carriers of this great force" (1942). love is necessary not only to make us healthy, but to save the world from patriarchal society's violence and selfishness.12 6.3 women and love leadership as we've seen, a normal or healthy emotional life is dependent on love, on love's primacy over appetite in particular. and love is an emotional complex that involves inducement and submission; active love (captivation) requires an actively submitting (passive love / passionate) partner: "active love requires that the person captured must be a willing, wholly submissive captive" (1928, 293). this means that love emotions require an inducing and a submitting party. the partner in a love 12we should not forget, however, the idiosyncrasies of marston's theory of love. love is an emotional state whose stimulus is a certain type of a relationship, and moreover an asymmetric one. as we have seen, love involves inducement and submission, while submission is only submission if it is wholly pleasant and directed to a stimulus aligned with the self (so "submission" to antagonistic "dominance" is abnormal). nonetheless, the idiosyncrasies and potential problems from a feminist perspective should be noted. 23 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 relationship whose role emphasizes active love, marston terms a "love leader." thus, emotional normalcy requires being in a relationship with a love leader who has "organic mechanisms" for "active love," i.e., who is capable of inducementdriven captivation-love. a healthy emotional life requires passion towards, and thus submission to, a love leader. as mentioned above, love is more closely associated with women and femininity. women are the "primary carriers" of love. this is, in part, because they are more capable, physiologically, of active love, and thus of love leadership. this is a repeated theme in later sections of emotions of normal people as well as much of marston's popular writing: "women, as a sex, are many times better equipped to assume emotional leadership than are males” (1928, 258–59), because of their superior development in inducement and love. on the other hand, "male love leadership is virtually impossible . . . a man’s body is not designed for active love, and does not, therefore, keep him sufficiently love stimulated to control his overly developed appetite" (1928, 393–94). while it is true that marston remains, to some degree, a biological essentialist about gendered traits, his account of those traits is only loosely tied to traditional stereotypes, while his valuation of those traits turns the stereotypes on their heads. thus, marston argues for a complete reversal of our attitudes about the strength and status of women: women have been regarded conventionally, for thousands of years, as the weaker sex. this almost universally recognized concept of woman's weakness has included not only physical inferiority, but also a weakness in emotional power in relationships with males. no concept of women's emotional status could be more completely erroneous. (1928, 258) women, not men, are the more capable leaders, the emotionally stronger sex, because of their capability for inducement and active love. the love in question obtains not exclusively in romantic or intimate relationships, but should obtain in all human relationships, and love (rather than appetite) should be the guiding force in social relations and political institutions more generally. 6.4 emotional normalcy and women's rights marston's conception of emotional normalcy via female love leadership is in many ways problematic, from a contemporary feminist point of view. it is essentialist, focuses on difference rather than equality, involves asymmetric relationships of submission and captivation, is gynocentric and matriarchal. nonetheless, his view reflects recognizable forms of difference feminism from marston's day: the rhetoric of the moral superiority of the "feminine spirit" that 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 arose in nineteenth century suffrage movements and was carried on by carrie chapman catt, margaret sanger, and the matriarchal utopias of inez haynes gillmore and charlotte perkins gilman. furthermore, while marston's approach is problematic in its ultimate aims, its practical and political recommendations look less problematic. according to marston, there are four criteria for suitable love leaders. first, the already mentioned capacity for active love. second, "sufficient appetitive power for self-support"—love leaders must be self-sufficient and not dependent on those that would submit to them. third, they must be knowledgeable about emotions and psychology. fourth, they must have "sufficient practical knowledge of existing social and economic institutions to be able to adapt the necessary measures of social reorganization"—they must have the knowledge and ability to participate in political processes and effect social change. marston's evaluation of the current situation is pessimistic: "these four requirements probably cannot be met by anyone in the world to-day [sic]." but with suitable social and educational change, love leaders could become possible, though, as discussed above, "the only possible candidates for love leader training . . . are women" (1928, 394). the necessary changes, the preconditions of love leadership and thus healthy people and healthy society, are increased self-sufficiency, education, and political power for women, a program that feminists of any stripe could get behind. so far, i have argued that marston's psychological work proceeded in dialogue with his feminist values in a way that was epistemically and ethically beneficial and which exemplifies accounts from philosophers of science of feminist science and values in science. in the next section, i will discuss aspects of marston's views that are less easily accommodated by current approaches to science and values. 7. from psychology to social reform: the program of emotional re-education marston went beyond incorporating values into his scientific work; he also used his value-laden science to advise the public and try to bring about social reform and cultural change. the basic idea is already present in his final chapter of the emotions of normal people, entitled "emotional re-education," where he lays out a broad program of social reform centered on training love leaders and teaching others to submit to them. he pursued this project in popular writings, consulting work, and later through popular fiction, film, and comics. marston's idea of training for love leadership, originally developed in the context of a theory of emotions and psycho-emotional health, became for him an ambitious program of social reform and emotional re-education, aimed at the psycho-emotional health of society as a whole. i have indicated the basic outlines of the program above: healthy lives require love at the center, and loving relationships 25 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 require a love leader with a highly developed capacity for active love. only (a subset of) women have that capacity, and they are (or were, in marston's time) generally incapable of serving as love leaders because in the current social conditions they lacked the knowledge and the social and material conditions of independence that are prerequisite for love leadership. thus, marston reckons his own society highly unhealthy, conducive to psychological abnormality. he proposes, at the conclusion of emotions of normal people, a radical program of "emotional re-education" that requires not only developing political, material, and intellectual rights and independence for women, but also educating everyone to become or to follow love leaders. marston was conscious of the radical nature of his proposal. he thus prefaces the chapter with a discussion of the difference between social convention and psychological normalcy. he chides his fellow psychologists and social scientists for failing to provide an account of what he calls the "normal human being" apart from a statistical account: a bold psychiatrist, not so long ago, frankly stated that if a young girl attended a school where a majority of other girls smoked and drank, she would be eligible for psychiatric examination if she refused also to smoke and drink. i take it that the eminent doctor did not mean to suggest smoking and drinking as a test of social submission to girl friends, but rather as an emphatic laying down of the rule that average behavior of a given group constitutes a proper standard by which the normalcy of any member of the group may be scientifically measured. no principle for study and improvement of the individual could be more pernicious than this. (1928, 389; emphasis mine) perhaps it is because of this common confusion between average and proper behavior that what marston calls "normalcy," we tend to think of in terms of "health." without adopting these terms marston decisively rejects this conflation. for him, psycho-emotional normalcy involves organic stability, efficiency of function, and pleasantness, whereas abnormality involves instability, breakdown of function, and unpleasantness. there is no necessary connection to what most people do or expect: the only practical emotional re-education consists in teaching people that there is a norm of psycho-neural behavior, not dependent in any way upon what their neighbors are doing, or upon what they think their neighbors want them to do. people must be taught that the love parts of themselves, which they have come to regard as abnormal, are completely normal. more 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 than this, people must be taught ultimately, that love (real love, not "sex appetite"), constitutes, in the human organism, the ultimate end of all activity, and that to gain this end appetite emotion must, first, last, and always be adapted to love. (1928, 391) this "norm of psycho-neural behavior" derives not from statistical averages, social expectations, or traditional teachings, but from neurobiology, experimental studies of psychology and behavior, and empirically supported psychological theorizing. in other words, marston proposes radically revisionary social norms on the basis of his scientific research. and though marston did not theorize the role of values in science, we should add that such social norms should be based on science that is guided by values, such as feminist values, that encourage scientists to question the status quo and attain a greater degree of objectivity. 8. from academic psychologist to popularizer marston was tragically forced out of academia. first and foremost, this was probably a result of his nonconformist lifestyle (lepore 2014, 130–31). his failure to gain recognition for the lie detector test in the courts and the accusations of fraud in his business dealings (later dismissed) surely didn't help (lepore 2014, 74–76). even while an academic, marston was seriously interested in popular work and the public role of psychology. after giving up on his academic career, her pursued popular writing and consulting full-time. in every case, he was trying to find new avenues to begin the project of emotional reeducation. marston's popular writings can be seen as a psychologist's contributions to the increasingly popular genre of self-help books in the 1930s—compare the publication dates of marston's you can be popular (1936), try living (1937), and march on! (1941) with carnegie's how to win friends and influence people (1936) and hill's think and grow rich (1937). in the aforementioned books, as well as in a series of magazine articles for publications like reader's digest and cosmopolitan, and in interviews written by olive byrne for family circle magazine (under her pseudonym "olive richard"), marston applied his psychological and emotional theories, and above all his program of emotional reeducation, to the problems that concerned the popular consciousness. try living is full of banal bromides about laughing off adversity, living in the present, seizing opportunity, the power of positive thinking, and so on, but it also applies many of the distinctive ideas of marston's psychology as advice for living happily. even the very goal of living harkens back to marston's opposition to appetite as a governing principle: "the result to seek is happiness, not success" (10). the most distinctive applications of his psychological views come in the discussions 27 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 of love (especially in chapter 6, "when you love, you live") and of social convention and conformity (especially in chapters 9 and 10, "walking backward is precarious" and "they say—let them say!"). love for marston is opposed to appetite; it is built on a fundamental alliance of self and stimulus. as he puts it in try living, "loving is giving yourself to someone else" (12), an altruistic act incompatible with expectations of reward, of quid pro quo. and it falls apart when appetite interferes: the explanation of all these love failures is quite obvious. the people concerned discarded love the moment it interfered with self-gratification. love is a giving, not a taking. we love those to whom we give; not those who give to us. . . . and when one's own attitude changes from giving to grabbing one's feeling changes correspondingly from love to selfish antagonism. (marston 1937, 99) marston describes the case of "elise" and "horton f." (111–13), who had lived together before marriage happily in a "perpetual honeymoon," when both of them were working. after marriage, elise became a homemaker, and their relationship started to fall apart. marston's advice to elise was to start working again at her old job. it worked! love was much easier to attain when elise did not depend on horton for her subsistence: "dominant demand is the antagonist of the love attitude of giving" (111). and it is just such dominance and demand that serves to perpetuate an unhealthy (because patriarchal) society, according to his earlier work. love is essential to the goal of living a happy, healthy life: "love is practical because it brings harmony and happiness. . . . love is essential to health, mental and physical" (95). and it turns out, according to marston's estimates based on cases, most of us don't really know how to love, so we are unhealthy and unhappy: we are not emotionally normal people. it is, he says, "far and away the most serious psychological problem in the world" (96). it is this problem that marston is attempting to address in his various post-academic pursuits, from popularizing, to consulting, to creating pop culture, in order to enact the program of emotional reeducation. likewise, marston describes the dangers of bowing to social convention and custom in one's thinking and behavior; rejecting custom and public opinion is of course a necessary condition of achieving emotional reeducation. marston appeals to science explicitly in this connection: "there is little justification, in short, for many of the ancient, outworn, scientifically disproved rules of behavior which millions of modern men and women unthinkingly bow down to" (180). and science not only shows us that tradition is wrong, but its effect in opposing convention should be wholly beneficial: 28 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 social conventions are admittedly of the past—a situation which is rationalized by the argument that it is not safe to change them too rapidly. the facts of psychology and sociology do not support this argument. researches all show that intelligent adaptation of social and moral standards to increased knowledge of human nature results always in betterment of humanity. . . . the principle of accepting any rule of behavior simply because your ancestors behaved that way is definitely wrong. (180) along the way, marston points to many absurd conventions of the past, to shake our confidence in our current customs. and of course, in his day and today, patriarchy remains a deep custom in need of shaking. 9. wonder woman as psychological propaganda in the midst of an uproar over superhero comics in 1940, olive byrne penned one of her family circle articles, interviewing marston on the psychological effect of comics on children. at the time, unlike today, batman was a gun-toting maniac who had just been heavily revised to be anti-gun, and superman himself casually killed criminals and appeared to be something of a fascist (lepore 2014, 183–84). marston defended comics, especially superman, as healthy exercises in wish fulfillment, and distinguished carefully between "sadism" and "exciting adventure" in their stories. maxwell charles gaines, co-publisher of all-american comics (sister publisher of national allied publications, which published superman13), read olive byrne's article. he hired marston to consult for all-american. and while marston offered gaines plenty of advice based on his psychological theories, his most significant recommendation was that gaines needed to publish a woman superhero. 13the publishing history here is complicated. for instance, lepore incorrectly claims that gaines was "superman's publisher" (185). gaines was co-publisher of allamerican with jack liebowitz, who was co-owner of detective comics, inc. (later national comics) along with harry donenfeld. to confuse the matter further, donenfeld helped bankroll all-american, and national (not all-american) published superman comics, though national and all-american cross-marketed and used each other’s characters frequently. superman did not appear in a comic entitled superman until 1942, but rather in national's action comics. both all-american and detective / national published under the logo "superman-dc" or "dc-superman." in the early '40s, gaines and liebowitz seem to have had a falling out, and the two companies stopped using each other’s characters, until detective / national bought gaines out in 1944. 29 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 and so we finally come to marston's lasting legacy: the creation of wonder woman, as well as seven years of writing wonder woman comics. marston once described wonder woman as "psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, i believe, rule the world."14 it would be take another paper to explore in depth the different ways in which wonder woman exemplifies marston's psycho-emotional theories. there has been some discussion of this connection in the various histories of wonder woman and analyses of the early comics, by comics scholars, literary and cultural studies scholars, historians, and popular writers. unfortunately, all to date have misunderstood the relationship in one way or another, mainly due to a superficial reading of marston's scientific work. i hope this paper will go some way to correct the latter so as to improve future analyses of the former. briefly, then, i will discuss a few of the key connections between marston's scientific work and his wonder woman comics. there are four connecting themes between marston's psychology and his wonder woman comics: (1) the prevalence of bondage imagery in the comics, (2) related statements about "the pleasure of submission," (3) consistent themes of the evils of male domination, and (4) an emphasis unique for superhero comics of its time on reforming criminals over retribution for their crimes. each of these themes draws in different ways on marston's account of the four basic emotions, on his particular views about the nature of healthy, loving relationships, on his views about the capabilities of the sexes, and on his views of the origins of "abnormal" behavior (including criminality). the amount of bondage imagery in the 1940s wonder woman comics has been much remarked upon. wonder woman, her allies, and her enemies were often tied, chained, or otherwise bound. tim hanley shows that 27% (!) of panels from the first ten issues of wonder woman were bondage scenes (hanley 2014, 46). lepore points out how common the theme of women in bondage was in the feminist literature of the 1910s and 1920s, including publications by margaret sanger, and makes much of harry peter's role in feminist illustration and marston's connection to sanger as partial explanation of the prevalence of such imagery. noah berlatsky (2015) takes bondage as one of the major themes in his book on the marston/peter comics; he catalogs comics theorists and historians like douglas wolk (2007), bradford wright (2001), and richard reynolds (1992) dismissing marston's claims to feminism on the basis of the prevalence of bondage in his comics. berlatsky, following earlier work by ben saunders (2011), argues that "there is no necessary contradiction between bondage and feminism" (berlatsky 2015, 18). unfortunately, neither berlatsky nor saunders arrives at this conclusion by careful and accurate 14a letter to early comics historian colton waugh, quoted in walowit (1974, 42). 30 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 analysis of marston's own fundamental scientific and social views on the relation between the two. prior commentators have largely missed the fact that bondage scenes in the early wonder woman comics fall into two types: (1) examples of domination by a master or an evil mistress and (2) examples of playful submission to a loving mistress. in the former case, wonder woman often escapes from bondage or helps her compatriots to do so, in order to escape and overcome the evil dominator. wonder woman even plays bondage games with her amazon sisters and her holiday college proteges in order to help them all learn to better escape. in the vignette from "the rubber barons" at the beginning of this essay, ivar torgson is taught proper submission. submission in this sense is not a state of conflict, but part of love, involving trust in and obedience to a mistress, and at a fundamental level, alliance between self and stimulus. an important related theme seen in the comics is that submission is pleasurable. recall that torgson enjoyed his lessons in submission. because it involves allied self and stimulus, on marston's account submission is necessarily pleasurable: "under no possible conditions can true submission be unpleasant" (243). submission is not to be confused with compliance, which does have an unpleasant component due to its essentially antagonistic nature. compliance is paired with dominance, and submission is paired with inducement. it is striking how almost all prior scholars who talk about the relationship between marston's psychology and the wonder woman comics read standard bdsm ideas into marston's thought, understanding the major principles as domination and submission, reducing marston's four-fold account to this familiar binary. they miss the fact that domination doesn't produce submission, according to marston, it produces compliance, and submission isn't associated with antagonism or sadomasochism at all. submission is a wholly pleasant emotion, induced by a loveleader with one's own interests at heart.15 and in the wonder woman comics, those who submit appropriately tend to really enjoy it. another key theme is the evils of male domination. again and again, calamity results from the desires of men to dominate or the misguided attempt by others to submit to domineering men. marston's view is that men are unsuited to be loveleaders, because they generally lack the capacity for active love that the female body provides. instead, they lead by domination. figure 2, a panel from wonder woman #5 (june/july 1943), shows a woman bemoaning her fate: "submitting to a cruel husband's domination has ruined my life" (marston and peter 1943b, 16a). 15see above for marston's idiosyncratic definition of "submission" and its supposed role in human relationships. 31 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 wonder woman counsels her to become strong and independent, so she needn't feel pressure to be ruled by domination. figure 2. ". . . a cruel husband's domination . . ." from wonder woman #5 (june/july 1943) lastly, marston's comics have a very different approach to dealing with criminals, as an alternative to what is common in the superhero genre. at the best of times, in most superhero comics, the hero delivers the criminals to the police with the idea that they will be put in jail, never to bother society again. at the worst of times, the hero wreaks vengeance on the criminal, doing violence to them or even callously killing them. wonder woman's approach is different. for marston, criminality, like all abnormal behavior, is a result of emotional maladjustment. perhaps their appetite has run wild, their desire to dominate out of all proportion with the emotions that should control it. but emotional normalcy can be taught, and wonder woman seeks to teach it. wonder woman helps elva with torgson not just out of concern for elva but also because she hopes it will help bring an end to his criminality. the amazons of paradise island also run reform island, where the most obstinate criminals, through the help of the magical venus girdle (which works much the same as the magic lasso), are taught submission. rather than leave the criminals she fights in the hands of the justice system in man's world, wonder woman often brings them to reform island herself. some of the villains so reformed, such as the baroness paula von gunther, actually become wonder woman's allies. through wonder woman, marston found a way to apply his psychological theories toward the emotional reeducation of society. the medium was at the height of its popularity, and wonder woman was one of the most successful 32 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 characters of her time. her stories appeared in at least three separate titles. in issue after issue, story after story, wonder woman taught strength and independence for women, the evils of male domination, the pleasure of submission, and the ideals of female love-leadership. in this way, marston attempted to popularize the values he thought were grounded in his psychological results. 10. conclusion i have argued that marston presents a rich case for feminist history and philosophy of science and for the bidirectional influences of science and values. not only does marston's scientific and popular work exemplify the legitimate roles that values may play in scientific research, but it also challenges us to think about the roles that science does and should play in values, ethics, culture, and social life. marston's use of science in society goes beyond science advising and even advocacy to the application of value-laden science to ameliorate social ills. accounting for whether, when, and why such applications are acceptable and desirable is a pressing task for philosophers of science. references anderson, elizabeth. 2004. “uses of value judgments in science: a general 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19 (1): 24–54. rudner, richard. 1953. “the scientist qua scientist makes value judgments.” philosophy of science 20 (1): 1–6. 35 brown: feminism and social reform in the psychology of william marston published by scholarship@western, 2016 sandifer, philip. 2013. a golden thread: an unofficial critical history of wonder woman. eruditorum press. sanger, margaret. 1920. woman and the new race. new york: brentano’s. saunders, ben. 2011. do the gods wear capes?: spirituality, fantasy, and superheroes. new directions in religion and literature. new york: continuum. skinner, b. f. 1948. walden two. new york: macmillan co. walowit, karen m. 1974. “wonder woman: enigmatic heroine of american popular culture.” phd diss., university of california, berkeley. watson, john b. 1927. “the weakness of women.” nation 125 (3235): 9–10. wertham, fredric. 1954. seduction of the innocent. new york: rinehart. white, morton gabriel. 1981. what is and what ought to be done: an essay on ethics and epistemology. new york: oxford university press. wolk, douglas. 2007. reading comics: how graphic novels work and what they mean. cambridge, ma: da capo press. wright, bradford w. 2001. comic book nation: the transformation of youth culture in america. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. by day, matthew j. brown is a mild-mannered associate professor of philosophy and history of ideas and director of the center for values in medicine, science, and technology at the university of texas at dallas. his research areas include philosophy of science, science and values, cognitive science, and the work of john dewey. under cover of darkness, he uses his powers of comics studies to fight for justice, to organize the comics and popular arts conference at dragoncon, and to present at the comic arts conference at san diego comic-con. 36 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 1 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/1 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.1 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston matthew j. brown recommended citation love slaves and wonder women: radical feminism and social reform in the psychology of william moulton marston mansplaining as epistemic injustice feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 1 article 1 recommended citation dular, nicole. 2021. “mansplaining as epistemic injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (1). article 1. 2021 mansplaining as epistemic injustice nicole dular franklin college nicoledular@gmail.com dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 mansplaining as epistemic injustice nicole dular abstract “mansplaining” is by now part of the common cultural vernacular. yet, academic analyses of it—specifically, philosophical ones—are missing. this paper sets out to address just that problem. analyzed through a lens of epistemic injustice, the focus of the analysis concerns both what it is, and what its harms are. i argue it is a form of epistemic injustice distinct from testimonial injustice wherein there is a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of hearer and speaker in a testimonial exchange. as these are roles of power and are crucial to our existence and functioning within epistemic communities, the wrong and harms suffered from this injustice are serious and, i argue, distinct from other types already discussed in the literature. i close by considering an alternative model of mansplaining as a form of silencing, as well as briefly diagnosing its general underlying cause and possible solutions. keywords: mansplaining, epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, silencing being told that, categorically, he knows what he’s talking about and she doesn’t, however minor a part of any given conversation, perpetuates the ugliness of this world and holds back its light. rebecca solnit, “men explain things to me” introduction “mansplaining,” described as when men explain to women things that they already know, is by now part of the common cultural vernacular. once a term frequent only in feminist circles, the term has reached such familiarity that it has been entered into the merriam-webster dictionary.1 people have even created charts 1 as of march 2018. see https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play /mansplaining-definition-history. the initial understanding of mansplaining given in the previous sentence is not the definition in the merriam-webster dictionary. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 about it.2 yet, academic analyses of it—specifically, philosophical ones—are missing.3 there are important philosophical questions to be answered about this cultural phenomenon. is it bad? if so, what is so bad about it? why is it gendered, as something a man does to a woman? is it something that can be done between people other than men to women? what is the underlying cause of it? but, also, perhaps most importantly, what is it? this paper sets out to give a philosophical analysis of mansplaining. the focus of the analysis will be both what it is, and what its harms are. i will approach both of these questions through an epistemic lens, specifically one of epistemic injustice.4 mansplaining, i will argue, involves a pernicious subversion of epistemic roles, wherein the speaker/giver of knowledge is forcibly relegated to the role of hearer/receiver of knowledge.5 the paper proceeds as follows. first, i begin with some real-life examples of mansplaining. i then review two theoretical models most plausibly within the realm of mansplaining: epistemic injustice, and silencing. equipped with an understanding of these models, i proceed with a conceptualization of mansplaining as a particular instance of epistemic injustice involving a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of speaker/giver of knowledge and hearer/receiver of knowledge, which is distinguished from testimonial injustice. lastly, i survey its distinct wrongs and harms, and close by sketching a brief diagnosis of the phenomenon, both in terms of its possible causes and solutions. 2 specifically, kim goodwin (2018). see https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article /20180727-mansplaining-explained-in-one-chart and https://twitter.com /kimgoodwin/status/1020029572266438657 for the chart itself. 3 the exception is an extremely brief mention of the mechanics of mansplaining by luzzi (2016). academic but nonphilosophical works on mansplaining are bridges (2017) and lutzky and lawson (2019). johnson’s (2020) article on mansplaining has appeared after this paper was written; still, the account she favors of mansplaining as a type of silencing is discussed and ultimately rejected in section 4. 4 this is because, as will be explained, an approach of epistemic injustice is what is needed to unify all the cases discussed. 5 throughout the paper, i follow fricker in using the terms “speaker” and “hearer” as epistemic notions to designate the role in testimonial exchanges properly occupied by the agent who has knowledge to give to other agents, and the role in testimonial exchanges properly occupied by the agent who is to be the recipient of knowledge, respectively. “giver of knowledge” and “receiver of knowledge” are used to clarify such epistemic use. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 1. mansplaining in action before giving a philosophical theory of mansplaining, let’s begin with some concrete examples that have been widely acknowledged6 as instances of mansplaining: solnit and mr. very important (solnit 2014, 2–3): mr. very important: so? i hear you’ve written a couple of books. solnit: several, actually. mr. very important: and what are they about? they were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but i began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, river of shadows: eadweard muybridge and the technological wild west, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life. mr. very important: and have you heard about the very important muybridge book that came out this year? he was already telling me about the very important book. . . . so, mr. very important was going on smugly about this book i should have known when sallie interrupted him, to say, “that’s her book” . . . but he just continued on his way. she had to say, “that’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. amanda seals and steve santagati (cnn 2014): seals: i live this life every day. . . . this [street harassment] is not complimentary, which is funny because i think guys think that by letting you know that they would be interested in sleeping with you that that is a compliment, and actually it’s really just objectifying me when i’m trying to walk in my daily life. i have a whole fifteen-minute set on stage about this. . . . and i can see you shaking your head but you are not an expert on this, my brother, because you are not a woman walking in the street. 6 widely acknowledged by the general public, as evidenced by nonacademic articles published on the topic. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 santagati: no, no, but i am more of an expert . . . than you, and i’ll tell you why: because i’m a guy, and i know how we think. effie brown and matt damon (project greenlight 2015): [here, brown is a panelist on a television show damon is heading, and the two are conversing about which contestant to select to direct a screenplay centered around a black female prostitute and a white male pimp.] brown: i just want to bring up something. i just want to urge people to think about, whoever this director is, the way that they’re going to treat the character of harmony. that her being a prostitute, the only black person being a hooker who gets hit by her white pimp. you have you looking at this group, right here, and who you’re picking, and the story that you’re doing, and i just want to make sure that we’re [putting] our best foot forward [in terms of diversity]. . . . damon: when we are talking about diversity, you do it in the casting of the film, not in the casting of the show. i started with the example by rebecca solnit, as she is commonly taken to be the person who first introduced the concept of mansplaining. in her essay “men explain things to me,” solnit (2014, 13) describes the story above, taking it to be part of a patterned problem wherein “some men explain things they shouldn’t and don’t hear things they should . . . it’s when they explain things to me i know and they don’t.” when first conceptualizing mansplaining here as a kind of overexplaining, one may wonder what is so problematic about it. however, as i will argue, the examples above are all instances of a pernicious epistemic injustice that carries serious harms. 2. epistemic injustice and silencing after seeing these instances of mansplaining, two existing theoretical conceptions initially seem most fitting as models of the phenomenon, for they both concern injustices that can occur in conversational exchanges: epistemic injustice, and silencing. here, i survey both models. the topic of epistemic injustice is by now an extremely fruitful field, despite its recent beginnings. broadly, epistemic injustice is the study of our epistemic practices and concepts as they intersect with injustices (oppression, marginalization, violence) within our social-political landscape. authors working on the topic approach this study from a nonideal perspective, looking at the ways in which social-political dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 injustices affect our epistemic practices, and likewise at the ways that our epistemic practices create distinct cases of injustice. many authors in contemporary analytic philosophy attribute the start of the field of epistemic injustice to miranda fricker’s (2007) epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. in it, fricker gives a theory of two forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. as hermeneutical injustice concerns concepts that describe the experiences of the marginalized which are missing, we will here focus on fricker’s theory of testimonial injustice. although i will later argue that mansplaining is a kind of epistemic injustice importantly distinct from testimonial injustice, an understanding of testimonial injustice is important moving forward, as it will serve as an illustrative foil by which to articulate the epistemic injustice involved in mansplaining. in the good case of testimony, a speaker states p, and a hearer comes to know that p, solely on the basis of the speaker’s saying so.7 work in traditional epistemology considers what criteria must be met in order for an act of testimony to produce knowledge—for example, whether the speaker has to themselves know that p, or have a justified belief that p, or whether the hearer needs to believe that the speaker is reliable, and so forth.8 on fricker’s (2007) conceptualization, testimonial injustice is when a speaker is judged by the hearer to be less credible than they in fact are due to prejudicial identity stereotypes that influence the hearer’s judgment of their credibility. oftentimes, this results in the speaker not being believed and so failing to contribute knowledge that they otherwise ought to be able to. fricker (2007) argues that in virtue of being given an unduly low credibility judgment, speakers are wronged, and wronged in a unique way: in their capacity as knowers. this is a significant wrong, and a kind of moral wrong, because it cuts to the quick of our intrinsic value.9 what is essential to our value as persons is our ability to reason, and to do so in social and socially recognized ways. insofar as testimonial injustice blocks this, it dehumanizes the speaker, communicating that they are lessthan their peers, making the best case one of objectification wherein they are mere sources of information. beyond this wrong committed against the speaker, there are also several types of harms that run downstream from instances of testimonial injustice, including epistemic harms (speakers can lose confidence in what they 7 of course, it need not be a verbal utterance. see lackey (2010). 8 see, for example, hintikka (1962) and audi (1997) for arguments in favor of a knowledge requirement, and lackey (1999, 2010) for arguments against a knowledge requirement. 9 see especially her chapter 2, and page 44, for her explication of how this is a moral wrong. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 know), practical harms (speakers can be sentenced as guilty and sent to jail), and personal (speakers can lose facets of their personal identity). alternatively, mansplaining might seem to be captured by the concept of silencing.10 very generally, silencing is the phenomenon wherein speech fails to occur: utterances that otherwise could be made are not said or entered into conversational exchanges. the notion of silencing was first introduced as a linguistic phenomenon through work by rae langton (1993) and jennifer hornsby (hornsby and langton 1998).11 in taking a speech-act approach utilizing j. l. austin’s (1962) work on the subject, langton analyzes how it is that women’s sexual refusal (in saying no) oftentimes is not successful in stopping men from committing sexual violence against them. in her analysis, she introduces three types of silencing: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. locutionary silencing occurs when no utterance is made. illocutionary silencing (perhaps langton’s greatest contribution to the literature) occurs when someone makes an utterance, but it is not successful at being the speech-act the speaker intends it to be. for example, this is when a woman says no, but the speech is taken by men to be not an act of refusal but rather something else (a request, for example, to try harder). lastly, there is perlocutionary silencing. this is when a speaker makes an utterance, uptake is secured such that the speaker’s intended speech act is successful, but they fail to achieve the effects that they aim to through their speech act. since langton’s (1993) work on silencing, other forms of it have been introduced. aside from the austinian model of silencing, it can also be understood as cases where speakers either refuse to speak or otherwise entirely fail to have their speech register as utterances. additional types of silencing that will be briefly surveyed here are testimonial smothering, preemptive testimonial injustice, acts of ignoring, and testimonial quieting. first, there is testimonial smothering. this term was first introduced by kristie dotson (2011) to describe a kind of self-censorship wherein speakers limit what they report because their audience has failed to demonstrate testimonial competence. that is, knowledgeable speakers share less knowledge on a given topic than they otherwise could because the maximal testimony they could share carries significant risks of being misinterpreted and misunderstood by their audience and, as a result, leading to false beliefs that can do serious social-political damage. this misunderstanding isn’t a random fallibility of hearers but rather an incompetence because it has roots in pernicious and socially situated ignorance: it is because one 10 for such an account, see johnson (2020). as will be made clear at the end of the paper, i argue against such an account. 11 here i am focusing on langton’s (1993) earlier work for the sake of space. see also peet (2017). dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 occupies a certain social position (typically that of dominance) that one fails to have the relevant stock of background beliefs necessary to aptly interpret and understand the testimony. another model of silencing identified by fricker (2007) is preemptive testimonial injustice. this occurs before a testimonial exchange even occurs. here, it is not that knowledgeable speakers’ utterances fail to be believed because of unduly low credibility judgments, but rather that they are not even engaged in testimonial exchanges to begin with because of unduly low credibility judgments. the credibility of such speakers antecedently suffers from such massive losses that potential hearers do not even bother asking them for information on subjects they are knowledgeable about because they judge that it is not even worth asking them; no speech is made to begin with. as a result, once again, marginalized speakers are excluded from contributing to collective epistemic communities because knowledge that otherwise could’ve been passed on isn’t, and isn’t because of the operation of prejudicial stereotypes. then, there is the basic concept of unjust ignoring. one sense of silencingthrough-ignoring is described by fricker (2007) as it relates to catherine mackinnon’s (1987) work on sexist oppression through sexual objectification.12 here, mackinnon analyzes the issue of women’s attempted acts of sexual refusal failing to be successful, arguing that it is due to the sexual objectification of women in pornography. giving an epistemic analysis of this problem of mackinnon’s focus, fricker (2007, 139–140) states, “in such a situation, women’s testimony is not quite pre-empted (they do say things to men), but it might as well be, since it is not heard as genuine testimony at all. . . . the man never really hears the woman at all—her utterance simply fails to register with his testimonial sensibility.” this appears to be a case of ignoring as women here are speaking—they do say no—but their utterance doesn’t register with the hearer as an utterance at all, as the hearer proceeds as if nothing was said to begin with. so, although with preemptive testimonial injustice members of marginalized groups really never do speak because they are not approached as candidate knowers in testimonial exchanges, in unjust ignoring members of marginalized groups do speak but literally are not heard as doing so; and again, both of these occur because of the prejudicial identity stereotypes operating in hearers. lastly, there is testimonial quieting. focusing on the crucial role an audience plays for acts of testimony to be successful, dotson (2011, 242) states that “the problem of testimonial quieting occurs when an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower. a speaker needs an audience to identify, or at least recognize, her as a 12 because fricker (2007, 139) herself describes the phenomenon mackinnon describes as “not quite pre-empted” but nevertheless a type of silencing, i proceed to distinguish it as a distinct concept from preemptive testimonial injustice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 knower in order to offer testimony.” unfortunately, unlike in the case of testimonial smothering, dotson provides no concrete examples of testimonial quieting, making it difficult to fully understand whether the phenomenon she conceptualizes is ultimately distinct from those already covered. for this depends on the explanation for the audience’s failure. with the quotation above, it seems as though the failure is in audiences identifying who is a candidate knower to even approach for knowledge, thus depriving some knowers of the opportunity to distribute their knowledge via testimony, as the issue highlighted is that one is unable to even offer, or attempt, any testimony; but this seems the same as fricker’s notion of preemptive testimonial injustice.13 alternatively, when dotson (2011, 243; emphasis added) states that the issue is the “failure of audiences to communicatively reciprocate black women’s attempts at linguistic exchanges by routinely not recognizing them as knowers,” this seems to imply that speakers who suffer testimonial quieting have already spoken and made testimonial reports, but that there is a failure for such reporting to be a successful testimonial exchange of knowledge. here, this can be either because the audience fails to understand that what the speaker is doing with their speech is testifying, or because the audience judges them to be less than credible, and so though they understand the speaker is intending to testify, they do not believe what they say.14 however, if it is the former, this appears to be no different from langton’s notion of illocutionary silencing;15 and, if it is the latter, this appears to be no different from fricker’s testimonial injustice. since it is unclear how exactly testimonial quieting is distinct from the variations of silencing already covered, going forward my analysis will focus only on setting mansplaining apart from those other forms of silencing previously discussed. 3. “well . . . actually . . .”: a theory of mansplaining as epistemic injustice let’s take a closer look at the examples introduced in section 1, to consider what they have in common as instances of the same phenomenon of mansplaining. first, they all involve instances where one person is more knowledgeable about the 13 likewise, this interpretation is supported when dotson (2011, 243; emphasis added) states that “that epistemic disadvantage [of testimonial quieting] exists only because of the dependency every speaker has on an audience to be recognized as a potential testifier or knower.” 14 the latter interpretation is supported by dotson’s explanation of how those who suffer testimonial quieting, especially black women, have a lack of credibility due to stereotypes about them. 15 this fits most well with the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy’s (grasswick 2018) characterization of testimonial quieting as the audience not giving “appropriate uptake” to the speaker. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 subject of conversation than the other: solnit had just written a highly acclaimed book on the subject of muybridge; seals has both first-personal and professional experience on the subject of street harassment; and brown, as one of very few successful producers who are women of color, likewise has both first-personal and professional experience on the subject of achieving diversity in the film industry. this kind of expertise pales in comparison to their conversational partners: mr. very important, having never written a book on the subject; santagati, being a man and having never experienced street harassment; and damon, a straight, cis, white male, having no first-personal experience working in the film industry as a member of a marginalized group or very much experience working on projects intentionally aiming to increase diversity in the film industry. secondly, let’s look at what happens within the conversations themselves. we see both that the women are speaking, and that their conversational partners do proceed in the conversation by addressing their speech. it is not, in other words, as though their conversational partners start a new conversation or pretend as if they have said nothing at all.16 lastly, we should note that despite the fact that the conversational partners proceed in the conversation by addressing what was said, they proceed as if they are the knowledgeable ones. we see this in the solnit case where mr. very important continues to explain solnit’s own book to her; where damon tells brown how diversity is achieved in the film industry; and where, most heinously, santagati explicitly states, “i am more of an expert than you.” now given that these instances all involve conversations between two people wherein there is an exchange of knowledge that has gone wrong, to understand the phenomenon itself, let’s consider our most basic model of testimonial exchange. remember that in the good case, a knowledgeable epistemic agent (speaker) passes on their knowledge to an epistemic agent lacking in that knowledge (hearer) by means of their speech: the hearer comes to know that p, on the basis of the speaker’s sayso. in the cases of mansplaining offered above, this goes wrong, but in a particular way. but it does not go wrong because of typical reasons: it is not as though the speaker is not knowledgeable, nor that the hearer does not actually listen to what the speaker is saying. rather, what is happening in these cases, i contend, is that there is a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of speaker and hearer: those who ought to be in the role of hearer due to their lack of knowledge and expertise (mr. very important, santagati, damon), falsely assume the role of speaker, and treat the rightful speaker (solnit, seals, brown) as a hearer on the topic. what’s more, this reversal of epistemic roles of speaker/giver of knowledge and hearer/receiver of knowledge is not accidental but rather forceful, in the sense of there being often 16 this is one important feature that i will return to which i will argue sets mansplaining apart from certain types of silencing. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 repeated attempts to occupy this role despite lacking the epistemic credentials for it and despite not being asked for any information (or worse yet, being told to not speak on the subject). we see, for example, mr. very important repeatedly reasserting his right to the role of speaker by continuing to speak about the book as if it were his own despite the continual reminders that “that’s her book.” as a kind of refusal to hear the speaker, it can be classified as a kind of epistemic violence.17 however, it is more than merely a refusal to hear the knowledgeable agent when they speak or treat them as knowledgeable: it is a refusal to treat them—the rightful speaker—as a speaker in a testimonial exchange—that is, as a potential giver of knowledge. to be clear, despite occupying the role of speaker within a testimonial exchange by speaking, mansplainers still do something wrong by speaking, for they unjustifiably and forcefully come to occupy such a role. it is not in virtue of their epistemic credentials of possessing knowledge that they come to occupy such a role, for they lack knowledge on the topic at issue, at least compared to those they ‘splain to. but, as an epistemic role, the role of speaker does not just refer to the agent who happens to be speaking; rather, it is fixed epistemically, as the agent who possesses knowledge and is capable of giving it. since in the functional, ideal case of testimonial exchange, it is the (more) knowledgeable epistemic agent who inhabits the role of speaker, this forceful occupation of the epistemic role of speaker by an agent who (comparatively) lacks knowledge makes such a testimonial exchange dysfunctional. in this way, the case of mansplaining highlights another way in which speakers are dependent on hearers for successful communication (hornsby 1994; dotson 2011): namely, that an audience or hearer must not only understand the meaning of the speaker’s utterance but also, in the case of testimonial exchanges, understand them as one who possesses knowledge that they lack and, most importantly, understand their rightful role in the epistemic community. mansplaining as a dysfunctional subversion of the epistemic roles of speaker and hearer is significant because these roles are ways in which we understand ourselves and each other, and the functionings available to us in our epistemic communities as “giver of knowledge” and “receiver of knowledge.”18 as a dysfunctional subversion of such roles, mansplaining cuts to the core of issues of epistemic agency and the ways in which it is possible for us to exist in epistemic 17 see dotson (2011). importantly, this refusal need not be intentional, as dotson notes as regards epistemic violence. 18 the way in which mansplaining can affect our own personal identity is explained at the end of this section. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 communities.19 it is not as though the women in the examples are solely explicitly or implicitly told that they are not knowledgeable, but rather that they are treated as having mistakenly believed that they are the appropriate givers of knowledge in the testimonial exchange when really they are the receiver of knowledge.20 this highlights one important way in which mansplaining differs from testimonial injustice: it is not as though they face issues in properly functioning as speakers in testimonial exchanges (having their word believed), but rather that the epistemic role of speaker or giver of knowledge is not even made available to them. the judgment made by the rightful hearer is not that the rightful speaker is a bad speaker or an untrustworthy testifier, but rather that they aren’t a speaker—that is, aren’t a giver of knowledge— at all.21 they are not the kind of agents who are givers of knowledge in this epistemic community; they are the kind of agents who are receivers of knowledge. they ought to listen, not speak. that explains the epistemic dysfunction that is at the core of the phenomenon of mansplaining. now, we should turn our attention to the mechanisms at work behind such epistemic dysfunction. it is important here to note that the examples above are all instances of women speaking to men on a subject about which the women are knowledgeable, and about which the men falsely assume their own expertise. hence the description of it as mansplaining. solnit herself takes mansplaining to be a gendered issue, as one that women repeatedly face from men. given this, we can say that the cause for such a forceful subversion of epistemic roles is rooted in social identities and is not an accidental feature of human fallibility. in these cases, the men are taking the role of speaker because they assume, either consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally, that as a woman their conversational partner could not be more knowledgeable on the subject, that their identity as a man affords them such expertise. remember here santagati’s response 19 the way in which mansplaining affects the way in which we exist or function in epistemic communities is clarified in what follows, where an analysis of the explaining aspect of mansplaining is given. 20 in this way, it is not as though mansplainers believe women know nothing at all, but rather that they have nothing to learn from women on the topic of that context in the sense that women have no knowledge of their own to contribute to the epistemic community regarding that topic. they are in this way treated as nonknowers. 21 of course, this is not to say that a woman is treated as though she knows nothing about any subject whatsoever—for i’m sure mansplainers would defer to women as speakers on gender-typed topics like what laundry stain remover works best—but rather that she is treated as having no knowledge to contribute on that topic within that conversational exchange. for work on how being treated as knowledgeable (only) on stereotyped topics is a kind of epistemic injustice, see davis (2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 of “i’m a guy” in his insertion of himself in the role of speaker. we can now see that, just as in the case of testimonial injustice, mansplaining involves the operation of identity prejudicial stereotypes.22 plausibly, we could surmise that, in the solnit case, it is the stereotype that women are not academics; with seals, it is the stereotype that women cannot make reliable judgments about what is good for them or even what is happening to them; for damon, it is the stereotype that women’s heads are in the clouds and lack practical tact at getting things done. importantly, because prejudicial identity stereotypes are involved, mansplaining is not only something that men do to women: it is a kind of epistemic injustice that can apply to all marginalized social groups. this is because, in sum, the injustice of mansplaining is that the epistemic dysfunction of reversal of epistemic roles cuts across social lines of oppression and marginalization; it is something that is done to members of marginalized groups as a facet of their oppression. given that mansplaining is an issue of epistemic roles and agency, and that it is a type of injustice done to members of marginalized groups, we can define mansplaining, and its generic variation, as follows: mansplaining: a dysfunctional subversion of epistemic roles (of hearer/receiver of knowledge and speaker/giver of knowledge in a testimonial exchange) due to the operation of gendered prejudicial identity stereotypes. x-splaining: a dysfunctional subversion of epistemic roles (of hearer/receiver of knowledge and speaker/giver of knowledge in a testimonial exchange) due to the operation of a prejudicial identity stereotype.23 having analyzed what mansplaining is as a type of epistemic injustice, we should now move to consider what the core wrong of it is that makes it so pernicious. 22 i say “involves” here because i wish to remain agnostic both as to whether there may be additional causal mechanisms behind instances of mansplaining, and how precisely these stereotypes operate in the case of mansplaining. the precise causal mechanisms of mansplaining beyond the operation of such stereotypes—e.g., whether these stereotypes affect credibility judgments of the speaker or hearer or both, whether they serve not as credibility judgements but rather as some sort of motivational mechanism, whether they affect the audience’s perception of the speaker—is a deserving topic but unfortunately one outside the scope of the current paper. 23 this epistemic injustice of mansplaining when applied to other groups has been called, e.g., whitesplaining, cissplaining, etc. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 at the heart of fricker’s (2007, 43–44) account of epistemic injustice is the moral wrong wherein one is “wronged in their capacity as a knower.” this is such an egregious wrong, fricker contends, because our capacity as a knower is essential to our human value and intrinsic worth, as it is tied to our ability to reason in a social and socially recognized way. thus, in committing an act of testimonial injustice, we are wronging the speaker by dehumanizing her. fricker (2007, ch. 6) explains that such dehumanization, as the foundational harm of testimonial injustice, denies one’s epistemic subjectivity, such that at best one is objectified in the sense of being treated as a mere source of information rather than an informant. in being treated as a kind of epistemic object akin to a thermostat, one is ousted from the epistemic community and its cooperative enterprise of pooling knowledge. taking a general kantian approach to value, fricker contends that this wrong of objectification foundationally lies in its denying one the status of rational agency, the center of human value, thereby exhibiting a kind of deep disrespect. the case of mansplaining presents a similar but somewhat different wrong. as we’ve seen, mansplaining is rooted in a dysfunctional subversion of epistemic roles of speaker/giver of knowledge and hearer/receiver of knowledge. what it shares with testimonial injustice is the core wrong fricker outlines: that of undermining the epistemic agency of the rightful speaker and thereby denying their status as a fully rational being. this is due to their being denied the role of speaker, as being able to give knowledge to others is a central aspect of agency. however, when considering the wrong of mansplaining as a type of epistemic injustice, there are two aspects that constitute it: that of the rightful speaker/giver of knowledge being relegated to the role of the hearer/receiver of knowledge, and that of the explaining action being done by the rightful hearer/receiver of knowledge. a closer analysis of these two aspects will reveal the notable contours of the wrong of mansplaining as a distinct kind of epistemic injustice. with respect to the first aspect, remember here that mansplaining undermines one’s epistemic agency at a basic level: one is denied the ability to be a speaker within testimonial exchanges, to be a giver of knowledge. those rightful speakers who suffer it suffer a loss of epistemic functioning in a crucial respect, in the sense that being perceived as a possible giver of knowledge is the most basic condition for actually making knowledge contributions to an epistemic community. one is being wronged in their capacity as a speaker, as a giver of knowledge. this could be seen as a wrong that is antecedent to the one fricker outlines, in the sense that before one can contribute knowledge to the epistemic community, one has to be capable of being the kind of agent that can make any such epistemic contributions, rather than merely being the kind of agent who can only receive them; and likewise, in order to be judged a credible speaker, one must first be taken to be a candidate speaker in testimonial exchanges. there is a difference between being judged or treated as a bad giver of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 knowledge in the case of testimonial injustice where one is judged as not a credible knower, and being judged or treated as not being capable of being a knower or giver of knowledge at all in the case of mansplaining: in the latter, one is denied epistemic agency except in the most passive sense of being able to receive knowledge on the words of others. in the former, one is still seen as the kind of agent who could, potentially, contribute knowledge to the epistemic community; in the latter, one is seen as the kind of agent who essentially couldn’t contribute knowledge to the epistemic community. as solnit (2014, 9–10) remarks, although there is a difference in not being believed and in not being perceived and treated as a speaker or giver of knowledge, this latter wrong of mansplaining is still tied to the undermining of one’s humanity, though: “most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.” although both types of epistemic injustice undermine one’s epistemic agency, testimonial injustice and mansplaining differ in how they do so, in the type of dehumanization that occurs. instead of at best featuring a kind of objectification wherein one is treated as a mere source of information, at the heart of mansplaining is rather a kind of degradation. in being relegated to the role of hearer, those rightful speakers undergo a change in their epistemic agency in which it is not so much wholly denied as distorted: they are still included in the epistemic community and its cooperative efforts, but in a dysfunctional way. insofar as their rational agency is undermined, it is not done so wholesale but rather specifically with respect to their epistemic autonomy. what is undermined is their ability to be a full epistemic agent by way of denying their epistemic independence: they are epistemically deprived, in need of knowledge, and unable to get it on their own such that they are epistemically dependent on others, the speakers or givers of knowledge. instead of at least being capable of providing information to other epistemic agents within the epistemic community as in the case of objectification, the participation of those who have been epistemically degraded is limited to a nonautonomous role of mere absorption of information, as they are treated as a mere epistemic vessel. as solnit (2014, 8) explains, “explaining men still assume i am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.” this goes some way to explain what is so offensive about being mansplained to, as one feels as though one is being treated like a child, utterly lost in the world and dependent on others for their ability to get about the world. a denial of such autonomy is a serious wrong on the same grounds as a denial of one’s rational agency is, for it cuts to the quick of what is central to human value, and moreover what makes us equals. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 of course, mansplaining wouldn’t be mansplaining without the explaining, the second aspect of the phenomenon to which we now turn our attention.24 what is crucial to first note is that the difference in the roles of hearer/receiver of knowledge and speaker/giver of knowledge within epistemic communities is one of an inherent power asymmetry between that of speaker and hearer: the speaker possesses knowledge that the hearer needs or otherwise lacks. this need not be bad in itself, but it can go wrong in a number of ways, and mansplaining is one such way. on this understanding, within the dynamics of mansplaining one is forcefully relegated to a position of comparative powerlessness. we can say, then, that the explaining action of the rightful hearer functions to institute an epistemic hierarchy within the epistemic community. it is, ultimately, a power grab wherein the rightful hearer forcefully asserts their false authority and therefore dominance over others. although the explaining is meant to look innocuous, such “helping” is really hurting, a selfinterested move thinly veiled as self-sacrifice. it is not meant to empower the false hearer with knowledge—for they already have it—but rather to empower the false speaker: such false speakers prove their worth to the epistemic community not by proving their epistemic credentials as individuals, but relationally by showing how needed they are by others in the community, how lost these others would be without them. again, given that such action involves the operation of identity prejudicial stereotypes, the hierarchy is dysfunctional in the sense that it is an ordering not according to epistemic merit (who has knowledge being in the more powerful role of speaker) but rather according to social identity. mansplaining therefore recreates the unjust social hierarchies found in the social-political domain within the epistemic domain. ultimately, it is a power move that seeks to further institute and solidify unjust social hierarchies within an epistemic community.25 in sum, the wrong of mansplaining is that of degradation by way of denying one’s epistemic autonomy as a rational agent. mansplaining wrongfully denies one an epistemic identity of power, of one’s very capacity to be the kind of full epistemic agent that could contribute knowledge to the resources of the epistemic community. one is worse than an unreliable informant (testimonial injustice), worse than a mere 24 although both mansplaining and testimonial quieting concern, at the most general level, the way in which marginalized agents aren’t recognized as knowers, this is one major way in which they are different. this aspect is also what sets mansplaining apart from being a case where ‘splainers merely think of themselves as peers with those who are ‘splained to: for someone who thinks of themselves as a peer to someone else does not explain core tenets of the topic under discussion to their peer but rather proceeds collaboratively. 25 here i do not mean to attribute any particular intentions or conscious thoughts within the mind of the ‘splainer; rather, i am explaining the effects such actions have. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 source of information (epistemic objectification): one is merely an empty epistemic vessel. continuing to follow fricker, mansplaining can also be analyzed in terms of its secondary harms, including epistemic harms, practical harms, and harms to one’s identity. some of these harms follow from single instances of mansplaining, while others are the cumulative effect of experiencing multiple instances of it. first, the epistemic harms. fricker (2007) notes that in the case of testimonial injustice, this can result in a loss of knowledge both in the speaker themselves and in the epistemic community at large, as well as the loss of epistemic virtues in the speaker like epistemic courage. in the case of mansplaining the epistemic harms are likewise a loss of knowledge. however, the way in which knowledge is lost differs. in the case of testimonial injustice, knowledge isn’t disseminated throughout the epistemic community because hearers do not come to believe speakers when they should. in the case of mansplaining, knowledge is lost to the epistemic community because women can come to self-silence and stop even attempting to share their knowledge after suffering repeated instances of mansplaining. solnit (2014, 4) notes this effect when she states, “every woman knows what i’m talking about. it’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.” additionally, there are issues concerning how epistemic goods like credibility are distributed across an epistemic community, and how this is a distinct epistemic harm.26 as mckinnon (2016, 440–441) states, “when speaking of epistemology and knowledge, the unevenly distributed resources are concepts, credibility, and knowledge.” our epistemic roles—concepts central to the heart of analyses of epistemic harms—are missing in this analysis. further, i suggest that our epistemic roles are goods in themselves, attributed to us by others and unevenly distributed: specifically, the unevenly distributed roles of hearer/receiver of knowledge and speaker/giver of knowledge. the other set of harms mansplaining carries are to one’s identity. mansplaining carries harms to identity that can happen downstream of the actual instance of mansplaining that takes place wherein one’s epistemic role as speaker is forcefully subverted. first, mansplaining carries the risk of reinforcing prejudicial identity stereotypes through what mckinnon (2017) calls an “epistemic circle of hell.”27 it occurs when, in an instance of mansplaining, s is not taken as a speaker, and so judged to be ignorant on the subject, which then creates more evidence that they 26 see mckinnon (2016) and medina (2013). 27 this downstream harm of epistemic injustice has been noted by mckinnon (2017), peet (2017), and buckwalter (2019). dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 couldn’t possibly be trying to speak on the subject, thus leading to more occasions where they are denied the role of speaker. if sometimes we think people can gain credibility as an expert on a topic merely by talking about it a lot, then people can also lose it by not speaking about it. generally, this seems true: we are surprised when someone suddenly starts speaking on a topic we had never even heard them mention before, and we usually approach them with suspicion: “i didn’t know you knew about x.” but in conditions of structural injustice, this surprise can become “you don’t know about x; if you did, you would have spoken about it before.” additionally, with cumulative instances of mansplaining, one can suffer a harm to one’s very practical identities. as solnit (2014, 2) notes after her encounter with mr. very important, she momentarily doubts her own identity as author and expert: “so caught up was i in my assigned role as ingenue that i was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and i’d somehow missed it.” after suffering multiple instances of mansplaining, it is plausible that one’s specific self-conceptions as an expert would deteriorate. especially in academic contexts, this could mean that one loses one’s identity, both one’s self-identity and the way in which others identify oneself: one is no longer an epistemologist but someone who merely dabbles or has an interest in the subject. lastly, there are the practical harms. one point to consider at the outset is that authorship is a social-political good. continuing on in looking at specific domains in which an epistemic identity as a speaker is most crucial, we can see once again significant practical harms for those in academia. for it is in academic arenas that it matters most who gets credit for things like speaking, expertise, and “original ideas” when it comes to practical goods like tenure and promotions. but even outside of academic contexts, lacking authorship of one’s statements and ideas results in significant practical harms for anyone in the workforce when it comes to job offers, especially those that require leadership roles. if members of marginalized groups aren’t seen as speakers, as people capable of contributing epistemic resources like knowledge and creative ideas, but rather only as people capable of inspiring and following the notions of others, they will not be seen as people capable of being effective in the more high-paying, high-esteem leadership roles. hence, we see that the epistemic injustice of mansplaining intersects with class-based oppression that members of marginalized groups face. all of those “well, actually . . .” moments don’t just cut at one’s patience but also cut at one’s pockets. as this last harm goes to show, there are structures that exist that not only fail to punish mansplainers but reward them with goods like esteem, money and professional power. having articulated a theory of mansplaining as an instance of epistemic injustice alongside its wrongs and harms, i will now turn to briefly consider silencing as an alternative model of it, arguing that it is a less ideal model. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 4. against silencing when analyzing how mansplaining compares to silencing, we should first note that speech as testimony is occurring. this immediately sets it apart from dotson’s notion of testimonial smothering, fricker’s notion of preemptive testimonial injustice, and langton’s notion of locutionary silencing. each of these forms of silencing have at their core the idea that knowledgeable speakers aren’t speaking either at all or as much as they otherwise could. but in the case of mansplaining, knowledgeable speakers do speak, and speak fully (that is, without withholding their knowledge in the particular instance in which mansplaining occurs). secondly, we should note that the speaker’s testimony does in fact register with the hearer. this is evinced by the fact that the hearers respond directly to what the speaker has said and engage with it, as they often refer back to what the speaker has said. this can be seen most clearly in the case of brown and damon, where damon states that they are talking about diversity, explicitly acknowledging both that they are in a shared conversation and that he correctly heard brown to be talking about issues of diversity. this means that mansplaining is a different phenomenon from unjust ignoring, as hearers do not in fact or in action fail to hear the speaker. the last serious type of silencing mansplaining might fit under would be as a kind of illocutionary silencing. under this understanding of mansplaining, although the speaker aims to make a report, they are instead understood as engaging in some other kind of speech act, like inquiring about a topic, or requesting help or advice, or airing a confusion. hence, rightful hearers assume the role of speaker in order to proceed in a way that is natural to the conversational exchange under the interpretation of the speaker as doing something other than making a report: they answer the speaker’s “question” or clear up their “confusion.” although this is an interesting and plausible candidate for understanding mansplaining, it still falls a bit short. this is because it does not seem as though, in all instances of mansplaining, the hearers really do genuinely take the speaker to be doing something other than reporting. (if only all mansplainers were so decent.) this is evinced by solnit’s own example, where it is implausible to think that mr. very important really understands solnit to be asking questions about her own book, as well as the general fact that many instances of mansplaining are known to proceed by the hearer exclaiming, “what she was trying to say was . . . ,” thus indicating that they typically do take the speaker to be making a kind of statement or report rather than asking a question or requesting help. of course, this is not to say that illocutionary silencing might be an additional injustice also happening in some instances of mansplaining. rather, the claim here is that it is not the core phenomenon that unifies all such instances, such that mansplaining as such ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice. dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 5. cause and solution i will close my analysis by briefly sketching a diagnosis of mansplaining, both in terms of its broader structural cause and its possible solution. we know that mansplaining involves the operation of prejudicial identity stereotypes, but i believe there is a deeper story to be told about why mansplaining as a general phenomenon occurs. that is, even if it is the operation of such stereotypes that causes the rightful hearer to forcefully subvert the testimonial epistemic identities and deny the rightful speaker their role as such, one can ask what enables such stereotypes to have such causal effects, to function in such a way. here, we should look to the notions of epistemic vices and virtues of the dominant and marginalized that josé medina (2013) analyzes in his book the epistemology of resistance. medina argues that the marginalized, due to their social status, actually gain certain epistemic virtues, like humility, curiosity, and openmindedness. given this, one could think that the root of the problem is that women have too much humility to assert themselves in the role of speaker within testimonial exchanges, leading to men assuming the open role. there are a few problems with this. first, it is inherently victim-blaming: it states that the reason why mansplaining happens to women is because they aren’t assertive enough. moreover, though, it is empirically false. we can see this in the case of solnit, whose friend repeatedly reasserts that the book mr. very important is talking about is solnit’s, to no avail; mr. very important continues to act as speaker in the conversation. on the other hand, medina also argues that the dominant suffer epistemic vices like epistemic arrogance, epistemic laziness, and close-mindedness. instead of holding that it is women’s extreme epistemic humility that causes mansplaining, the better explanation is that it is men’s epistemic arrogance. the fault, more specifically, isn’t the epistemic arrogance they have regarding individual facts that they take themselves to know— that they know that p—but rather the epistemic arrogance they have with respect to their epistemic identity: that they belong, always and as a default, in the active role of speaker. it is an epistemic arrogance to presume that you know more on any given subject under discussion than the other person in the conversational exchange, that they have more to learn from you than you do from them. it is an essentially comparative and social-relational kind of epistemic arrogance that concerns not just what one knows but how one’s epistemic profile compares to others, and what social roles one takes to be available to oneself.28 in this sense, it manifests as a kind of sense of entitlement. the issue, then, is plausibly the arrogance that members of dominant groups have which manifests as a sense of entitlement to occupy epistemic 28 this fits nicely with medina’s (2013) model of credibility in which it is essentially comparative in nature (although i make no argument here concerning credibility judgments). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 roles of power, regardless of their actual epistemic credentials compared to those of others.29 given that the issue is epistemic arrogance, any kind of “lean in” solution30— which urges the marginalized to just be louder, be more assertive, be clearer that one is making a statement, is knowledgeable, isn’t asking for clarification—is bound to be ineffective. you can tell someone over and over again that you are the speaker, that you know what you’re talking about, but if they just cannot see themselves in any role other than speaker, all that one will be met with is confusion at best and a reassertion that the dominant is the real expert. we see the former in the case of solnit, and the latter in the case of seals. rather, the solution to mansplaining lies on the shoulders of men and other dominant groups that commit instances of this epistemic injustice. men must scale down their epistemic arrogance and stop presupposing their epistemic position as the one of most power. in a way, this will look similar to fricker’s (2007) proposed solution to unjust credibility deficits that the marginalized suffer: we are to, when hearing the testimony of a member of a marginalized group, automatically ramp up our credibility judgment of them, since there is very good reason to think that a negative stereotype is causing our immediate judgment to be unduly low. likewise, in the case of mansplaining, when one is in a conversational exchange with a member of a marginalized group, one should, first, ramp down one’s confidence in one’s own comparative expertise on the subject so to treat the issue of epistemic arrogance, and, second, instead of presupposing that one is entitled to occupy the role of speaker, presuppose that one is the hearer in this conversational exchange unless proven otherwise. however, this is the ideal solution, which will undoubtedly take much time to be realized, if it ever is. in the meantime, members of marginalized groups who suffer from acts of ‘splaining have each other to use as resources. although reasserting oneself alone as the rightful speaker to a mansplainer is bound to be ineffective, finding solidarity in others reaffirming this reassertion is one strategy that is likely more effective. and plausibly, since mansplaining is due to the operation of prejudicial stereotypes, this type of resounding solidarity against mansplaining would work even better when voiced from members of privileged groups so as to gain buy-in by the privileged ‘splainer. 29 this understanding of epistemic arrogance as a sense of entitlement to epistemic roles leaves open the possibility that it is men’s internal feelings of insecurity that in fact (consciously or perhaps more often unconsciously) motivate them to mansplain. 30 see sandberg (2013). dular – mansplaining as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 6. concluding remarks men explain things to women. but their doing so, in cases of mansplaining, is an injustice. as i’ve argued in this paper, it is a type of epistemic injustice as a dysfunctional subversion of epistemic roles of hearer and speaker due to the operation of prejudicial identity stereotypes. mansplaining is a serious injustice. for these epistemic roles structure our very existence and functioning within our epistemic communities, and establish the power that we have within them. as women are systematically denied the role of speaker, and instead forcefully relegated to the role of hearer, they are degraded and suffer a host of harms: loss of epistemic and practical identities, loss of practical goods like money and prestige, and loss of their very humanity. the solution i have proposed is not hard: it merely asks that men, and others in dominant groups, renounce their entitlement to the role of speaker and assume the role of hearer in testimonial exchanges with women and other members of marginalized groups. but entitlement and power are difficult to convince anyone to give up. and anyways, in order to convince anyone to give those up, you’d have to first be taken as a speaker on what is best to do about mansplaining. but i’m sure explaining men will have a lot to explain about that subject, too.31 references audi, robert. 1997. “the place of testimony in the fabric of knowledge and justification.” american philosophical quarterly 34 (4): 405–422. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/20009910. austin, j. l. 1962. how to do things with words. oxford: clarendon press. bridges, judith. 2017. “gendering metapragmatics in online discourse: ‘mansplaining man gonna mansplain . . .’” discourse, context & media 20:94–102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.09.010. buckwalter, wesley. 2019. “epistemic injustice in social cognition.” australasian journal of philosophy 97 (2): 294–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402 .2018.1459754. cnn. 2014.“catcall video goes viral.” interview of amanda seals and steve santagati by fredricka whitfield. cnn newsroom, november 2. video clip presented on cnn’s youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4dc18wcg. 31 i would like to thank fran fairbairn, matthias jenny, and madeline ward for written comments on previous drafts of this paper, as well as audiences at the 2019 meeting of the association for feminist ethics and social theory and the 2019 meeting of the central division of the american philosophical association. i am also grateful for the feedback i received from three anonymous reviewers at this journal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 davis, emmalon. 2016. “typecasts, tokens, and spokespersons: a case for credibility excess as testimonial injustice.” hypatia 31 (3): 485–501. https:// doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12251. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. 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"do you want to direct this movie?" season 4, episode 1, aired sept. 13, on hbo. online video clip presented on weary77's youtube channel as "matt damon goes 'massa' on producer effie brown." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkaozggawze. sandberg, sheryl. 2013. lean in: women, work, and the will to lead. new york: alfred a. knopf. solnit, rebecca. 2014. men explain things to me. chicago: haymarket books. nicole dular is an assistant professor of philosophy at franklin college, where she has worked since completing her phd at syracuse university. she works on issues at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy. she is the author of “moral testimony under oppression” in the journal of social philosophy, “harder, better, faster, stronger: epistemic standards and moral beliefs” in logos and episteme, and “boy bye: a feminist defense of ghosting” in college ethics: a reader on moral issues that affect you (second edition). 8482 dular title page 8482 dular final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation gosselin, abigail. 2019. “‘clinician knows best’? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 2. 2019 “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness abigail gosselin regis university agosseli@regis.edu gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness abigail gosselin abstract this paper uses a non-ideal theory approach advocated for by alison jaggar to show that practices involved with the medicalization of serious mental disorders can subject people who have these disorders to a cycle of vulnerability that keeps them trapped within systems of injustice. when medicalization locates mental disorders solely as problems of individual biology, without regard to social factors, and when it treats mental disorders as personal defects, it perpetuates injustice in several ways: by enabling biased diagnoses through stereotyping, by exploiting and coercing people who are seen as insufficiently competent, and by perpetuating idealized conceptions of choice and control that do not take into account people’s real limitations and the social context of health. through practices of diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, medicalization can perpetuate injustices toward people who have serious mental disorders. keywords: medicalization, mental illness, stereotypes, epistemic injustice, marginalization 1. introduction1 medicalization is “the process by which a mental or physical condition comes to be seen as a medical condition deserving of medical attention” (reiheld 2010, 73).2 often medicalization involves putting behavior, experience, and bodies under medical control through means such as ideology, technology, and surveillance 1 i thank barrett emerick and scott wisor for feedback and support on this project, and three anonymous reviewers whose generous feedback on an earlier draft was invaluable in revising this paper. with deepest gratitude i also thank alison jaggar, who taught me how to be a philosopher. 2 peter conrad defines medicalization as “seeing a problem in medical terms, using medical language to describe a problem, adopting a medical framework to understand a problem, or using a medical intervention to ‘treat’ it” (conrad 1992, 211; see also purdy 2001). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 (conrad 1992, 215–218).3 medicalization is a morally neutral concept. medicalization can be beneficial as it provides a conceptual framework that can be useful to make sense of experience (wardrope 2015, 344–347); this increases understanding, enables contact with others who share the experience, provides access to resources to address the experience such as through medical treatment, and de-marginalizes groups of people who have had trouble with access to resources and social support (reiheld 2010, 80–83). medicalization is unjust, however, when it views mental disorders chiefly as problems of individual biology without regard to social factors, seeing disorders as personal defects in the context of an individualistic, idealized view of self.4 this paper focuses on ways that mental disorders5 are medicalized within the united states health care system. this paper concerns the medicalization of serious mental disorders, focusing on schizophrenia and bipolar i disorder because they both have psychotic features, which are seen as seriously undermining agency. schizophrenia is a mental disorder that impairs cognition, perception, and behavior. “positive” symptoms include those commonly associated with psychosis, including hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and catatonia, as well as disorganized thought, speech, and behavior. “negative” symptoms include social withdrawal, apathy, and inattention to personal hygiene and self-care. bipolar disorder is a mood disorder involving episodes of mania and depression; bipolar i disorder includes full manic episodes and frequently psychotic features, while bipolar ii disorder includes hypomanic episodes and longer periods of depression. mania includes symptoms like pressured speech, racing thoughts, excessive energy, grandiosity, and delusion; depression includes symptoms like poverty of thought, cognitive dulling, low energy, apathy, and preoccupations with guilt. both involve shifts in sleep and appetite and can involve psychosis when 3 case studies of how certain behaviors and experiences became medicalized over time abound. see, for instance, conrad and schneider (1992), hacking (1999), reiheld (2010), and shorter (1992). 4 in order to combat some of the problems with medicalization of women’s experience in particular, feminist bioethicists have questioned the goals of medicine, arguing for a “feminist medicine” (purdy 2001; see also garry 2001). 5 in general, i use the term “mental disorder” to refer to the clinically significant cluster of symptoms that constitutes a particular diagnostic category, while “mental illness” refers to the illness experience that some people feel as a result of having the cluster of symptoms (bolton 2008, 277; nordenfelt 2007, 54–59.) “serious” mental disorders have more severe effects and so generally create an illness experience. for this reason, and because this paper is considered with “serious” mental disorders, i use the terms “mental disorder” and “mental illness” interchangeably in this paper. gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 delusions, hallucinations, or paranoia are present. lifetime prevalence is estimated at 0.87% for schizophrenia and 0.24% for bipolar i disorder (perälä et al. 2007). in the us, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are both typically diagnosed in people who are in their late teens to late twenties, and most studies suggest that rates of diagnosis are equal among men and women (kawa et al. 2005; piccinelli and homen 1997; saha et al. 2005).6 schizophrenia and bipolar disorder both have clear biological bases and distinctive biological profiles7, so it seems appropriate that we medicalize them. medicalization is a problem, however, when it views mental disorders primarily as problems of individual biology without regard to social factors, and when it sees 6 some studies indicate higher rates of schizophrenia in men than women (messias, chen, and eaton 2007; piccinelli and homen 1997). for information about sex differences in age of onset, symptoms, course of illness, and illness behavior, see hafner and an der heiden (1997). 7 current science demonstrates certain biological markers for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. markers for schizophrenia include excessive disorganized glial cells in the brain (bernstein, steiner, and bogerts 2009; duncan et al. 2014; takahashi and sakurai 2013); abnormalities in dopamine and glutamate transmission (coyle 2006; frohlich and van horn 2014; goff and coyle 2001; krystal et al. 2003; olney and farber 1995; stone, morrison, and pilowsky 2007); deficits in gabaergic transmission (beasley et al. 2005; gonzalez-burgos, hashimoto, and lewis 2010; gonzalez-borgos and lewis 2008; hashimoto et al. 2003; volk et al. 2001; wassef, baker, and kochan 2003); abnormalities in the relationships between different neurotransmitter systems, especially dopamine (carlsson et al. 2001; coyle 2004; howes and kapur 2009; reynolds 2009). while schizophrenia has a distinctive biological profile, studies have recently determined that the cluster of symptoms that we identify as schizophrenia probably has multiple causal mechanisms, like autism, and in that sense represents different disease entities (howes and kapur 2009). markers for bipolar disorder include abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex, including smaller left prefrontal gray matter volumes (lόpez-larson et al. 2002); abnormal frontal‐limbic activation (chen et al. 2011; strakowski, delbello, and adler 2005); and peripheral markers related to oxidative stress, inflammation, and neurotrophins (berk et al. 2011; kapczinski et al. 2011). schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share certain biological abnormalities, including reduced gray and white matter volume and increased lateral ventricular volume (de peri et al. 2012; hulshoff pol et al. 2012), dysfunction in gabaergic neurotransmission (benes and berretta 2001; benes et al. 2007; fatemi et al. 2005; guidotti et al. 2005), and various brain abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex associated with impaired executive functioning (chai et al. 2011). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 disorders as personal defects in the context of an individualistic, idealized view of self. in these contexts, medicalization obscures existing power relations and thereby perpetuates them, trapping people with serious mental disorders in a cycle of vulnerability. this paper explores the way certain medical practices and approaches involved with diagnosis, drug treatment, and recovery can perpetuate injustice. in making this analysis, i adopt a non-ideal approach advocated by alison jaggar. 1.1. non-ideal theory approach for alison jaggar, philosophical analysis is done most fruitfully through a non-ideal theory approach which begins by examining actual situations of injustice in order to expose the social and political structures that lead to these injustices. throughout her work, jaggar has rejected ideal theory in moral and political philosophy in favor of empirically based non-ideal theory. within a political context, she observes that traditional political theories start with an ideal of the just state and then reason from there about what is required for current political conditions to become more just (jaggar 1983, 2014a, 2014b). jaggar argues that this traditional approach is backwards. by assuming an ideal of agency stripped of the particularities of actual human experience, these approaches conceal and thus perpetuate potentially harmful and unjust biases. the aim of philosophical analysis ought to be to uncover such biases by examining the empirical conditions in which justice and injustice occur. this non-ideal approach is preferred in moral contexts as well, in what jaggar calls “feminist social ethics” (1994a) or practical ethics. feminist social ethics politicizes everyday practices by moving them “from the private sphere to a public site” of critical inquiry (tessman 2009, xiv). this provides a level of transparency to the practice, allowing all those who engage in the practice to examine it critically; through this critical examination, patterns can be discerned which expose power relations underlying the practice (bar on 2009, 12–13). some examples of politicizing everyday practices include jaggar’s work (1973, 1994b, 2009a) on abortion and sex work and susan moller okin’s work (1989) critiquing the unpaid labor women perform such as caretaking and housekeeping. in examining gendered practices that hitherto had been taken for granted, social ethics analyzes the sexist biases that underlie these practices and uses this as the basis for theorizing about these practices. the non-ideal approach seeks to describe the world as it actually is and rejects idealized models in moral philosophy that assume perfectly rational agents reasoning about an uncomplicated world. building on work by jaggar (2000, 1983), onora o’neill (1993, 1987), and other feminist ethicists, charles mills (2005) distinguishes two senses of the “ideal” in ideal theory: ideal-as-normative, where theory constructs normative ideals to strive for, and ideal-as-model, where theory is gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 a model for practice and the ideal is a representation of the social world.8 focusing on ideal-as-model, mills further distinguishes two senses of this modeling: in the descriptive sense, the ideal is the model that most accurately represents the world, while in the “idealized” sense, the ideal is the moral exemplar. idealized theories abstract away from the particularities of people, including the different experiences and backgrounds they have, such as the experiences of injustice, and the ways these influence interests and choices. ideal theory assumes an idealized social ontology, idealized human capacities, silence on oppression, ideal social situations, an idealized cognitive sphere, and strict compliance to theory (mills 2005, 168–169). yet how people are socially situated, what kinds of injustice they experience, and how they relate to various social institutions affects the ethical reasons and political commitments they develop (rivera 2009). non-ideal theory examines the basis for people’s ethical reasons and political commitments and develops theories of justice from the actual practices in which people engage. people with privilege have the least cognitive dissonance between descriptive and idealized models, while people with less privilege experience more distance between the two.9 because philosophers constructing ideal theory tend to be more privileged, they are less likely to be aware of the distance between the two and so less able or less interested in accounting for oppression, exploitation, marginalization, and other forms of injustice in their political theory. in fact, as jaggar (2006) points out, their intellectual position allows them to assert their moral authority and to determine for themselves how to interpret people’s lived experience rather than let people interpret their own experience; this perpetuates relations of power such as colonialism. in contrast to such dominating approaches, jaggar advocates for “legitimate moral consensus,” which requires “moral dialogue under fair conditions” (jaggar 1993, 82). jaggar (1994a) recognizes that in our social world we are “living with contradictions,” as her edited volume of the same title points out. she notes that the best we can do to resolve moral tensions is “to be as 8 laura valentini (2012) conceptualizes the “non-ideal” in ideal theory differently. she argues that the non-ideal can be understood as partial compliance, in contrast to the full compliance of ideal theory; as realistic theory, in contrast to utopian ideal theory; or as a transitional theory in contrast to the end-state of ideal theory. these distinctions do not adequately explain the way ideal theory is silent on oppression and other injustices and the reasons why non-ideal theory can account for injustices. 9 for example, in his presidential address to the american philosophical society’s 115th central division meeting, charles mills (2018) argues that rawls’s ideal theory specifically, and ideal theory in general, is a “whitopia” (a utopia of whiteness), which creates epistemic injustice for people of color and other marginalized groups because of the way they are distanced and marginalized from the ideal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 open and sensitive as we can to the diversity of interests and range of values involved. this in turn requires us to commit ourselves to seeking as many different perspectives as possible.” (1994a, 11) these different perspectives must include the perspectives of marginalized groups. in her work with theresa tobin on naturalizing ethics, she critiques the idealized reasoning of discourse ethics and proposes a case study approach that starts with “real world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power” (tobin and jaggar 2013, 409; see also jaggar and tobin 2013). philosophers pursuing non-ideal theory, like jaggar, attempt to describe the world as accurately as possible, exposing sites of injustice, and thus highlighting differences between the actual world and idealized worlds. in her work, jaggar begins with people’s real-life experience of injustice, accounts for humans’ necessarily limited and partial reasoning, and theorizes for a world that includes various forms of injustice.10 jaggar’s articles that analyze the justice of everyday practices tend to follow a certain outline. they explain the social circumstances that lead to current experiences of injustice. they consider current, problematic approaches to the issue. and they propose criteria for developing a theory of justice that accounts for people’s experiences of injustice. for example, in her work on global gender justice (2001; 2002; 2005; 2013a; 2013b; 2014c), she routinely introduces data describing the current state of women’s working and living conditions; she addresses typical approaches to these conditions that are problematic; and her analysis and her proposed approaches to the issues account for the actual experiences of structural injustice faced by particular groups of women. modeled after jaggar’s outline, this paper uses a non-ideal approach to examine particular sites of injustice caused by the medicalization of mental disorders and theorizes from this analysis to propose the following principles of justice in the context of medicalization: 10 in an article comparing john rawls’s ideal theory to iris marion young’s non-ideal critical theory, jaggar (2009b) describes young’s approach in ways that are just as applicable to her own work. jaggar notes that rather than beginning with a comprehensive normative vision of injustice, young reflects on particular injustices, demonstrating her philosophical priorities and a tendency to move from the particular to the general rather than vice versa. rather than abstracting away from the particularities of people’s actual perspectives and motivations as ideal theory does, young refers to real people whose reasoning is necessarily partial and limited. and, rather than theorizing for an impossible hypothetical world, she theorizes for the real world which includes structural inequality and cultural exclusion. gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 • a just approach to diagnosis must confront stereotyping and bias and must consider the social factors of behavior as well as the biological. • a just approach to drug treatment must actively seek out patient11 perspectives and encourage open dialogue between patients and doctors about treatment effectiveness, outcomes, and decisions, and it also must not exploit people for financial gain. those in power must confront and overcome stereotypes and biases in order to trust the credibility of patient testimony, and they must make epistemic space and encourage the use of hermeneutical resources to make sense of experience. • a just approach to recovery must take into account people’s real limitations and the ways these both create material needs and constrain choice, and it must frame mental health care as a social rather than individual good and recovery as requiring social change and not simply individual treatment. using a non-ideal approach, this paper looks at examples of medical practices and approaches related to diagnosis, drug treatment, and recovery and uses these to develop theoretical principles. this paper uses a cycle-of-vulnerability model to analyze the medicalization of serious mental disorders. susan moller okin (1989) initially developed this model in a specifically gendered context as a way to explain the ways in which women are trapped in a cycle of power relations that reinforce already existing inequalities. in the gendered cycle of vulnerability as it applies in the us in the early-middle twentieth century, women who were raised to prepare themselves for marriage, rather than for paid work, found themselves unable to access the resources needed to be able to leave abusive marriages; for example, they lacked the job skills required for financial independence as well as the job opportunities that would enable independence. the cause of being trapped in this way was structural: specific institutions and practices created these conditions. alison jaggar (2014c) applies this 11 throughout this paper i use the terms “doctor” or “clinician” (as in “mental health clinician”) to refer to the treatment provider and “patient” to refer to the treatment receiver. the term “doctor” refers specifically to a psychiatrist. “mental health clinician” is a more inclusive term that includes psychiatrists, therapists, social workers, and other professionals who work with clients in a mental health setting. because one of the primary power relations examined in this paper is what we call “the doctor-patient relationship” i use the term “patient” to refer to the person who receives treatment; i prefer the term “patient” to “client” because it refers specifically to the medical context that is being examined here in a way that “client” does not. i do not favor using currently popular terms like “mental health service user” or “consumer” because of their capitalist/consumerist bias. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 model to the transnational context, showing that women around the world are trapped in sets of power relations that perpetuate existing inequalities due to global political and economic structures. i apply this model similarly here to a different population of marginalized people to show the ways that people with serious mental disorders can become trapped in a cycle of vulnerability where oppression is perpetuated through certain practices of medicalization. some of the power relations through which medicalization perpetuates oppression include race, gender, socioeconomic status, the doctor-patient relationship, and the economic dominance of pharmaceutical companies. i identify three contexts in which medicalization traps people with mental illness in a cycle of vulnerability: when they are diagnosed according to stereotypes about who has mental illness, when they are coerced or manipulated to engage in drug treatment, and when they are subject to a framework of idealized individual choice and control that does not take their limitations and circumstances into account. 2. the medicalization of mental disorders in this section, i analyze three sets of medical practices and approaches through which mental disorders are medicalized: diagnosis, drug treatment, and recovery. i show that in each of these practices, people with serious mental disorders can become trapped in cycles of power relations that perpetuate oppression. in these sites of injustice, i focus on two aspects of medicalization that contribute to this cycle of vulnerability: treating behavior identified as symptoms of mental disorders as problems of individual biology without regard to social factors, and conceptualizing mental disorders as personal defects. coupled with negative stereotyping, and with a view of the self as individualistic and idealized, these aspects of medicalization contribute to injustices. in the interest of transparency, i want to disclose that i have bipolar i disorder; i reference my experience a couple of times as illustration. 2.1. injustices in diagnosis medicalization contributes to injustices when it regards behavior identified as symptoms of mental disorders as problems of individual biology without regard to social factors, especially when this is coupled with negative stereotypes about “who” has mental disorders and what disorders look like. many social factors go into the process of identifying someone as having a serious mental disorder; this is as true in medical contexts of diagnosis as it is in social contexts. social stereotypes and stigmas play a huge role in our judgments of “who” has mental illness and what mental illness looks like (how it manifests). gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 stereotypes are generalizations about a group of people based on a shared attribute (fricker 2007, 30). when we endorse negative stereotypes about a group, we develop stigmas, or negative reactions toward members of the group which comprise both beliefs and affective attitudes (courtwright 2013; livingston and boyd 2010; manzo 2004; rusch, angermeyer, and corrigan 2005). often we do not hold stigmas consciously but rather through the unconscious categorization schemes of implicit bias (gendler 2011; holroyd, scaife, and stafford 2017b). in the us, people hold three dominant types of stigma toward severe mental illness, regarding people who have mental illness as dangerous and violent, as incompetent and needing to be taken care of, or as having a character flaw like lack of willpower (corrigan and kleinlein 2005, 16; rusch, angermeyer, and corrigan 2005, 530). when we endorse the stereotype of people with severe mental illness as dangerous, we are more likely to perceive people who look or act in ways that defy social norms as scary and interpret their behavior through that lens. when we endorse the stereotype of people with severe mental illness as incompetent, we are more likely to notice the ways in which their personal hygiene and dress suggests they are not able to take care of themselves and the ways in which their behavior suggests mental disorganization. when we endorse the stereotype of people with mental illness as lacking willpower, we are more likely to notice unorthodox appearance and behaviors and to blame people for not adhering to social norms. stereotypes and implicit bias affect what behavior doctors pay attention to when making diagnoses. when they have preconceived ideas of what a person with the disorder looks like, they make the associated diagnoses, recognizing the disorder in the people in whom they expect to find it and not seeing it in people with whom they do not associate the disorder. for instance, in the early 1930s–50s, schizophrenia was regarded as an illness of sensitive people, such as artists, and of middle-class white women who had “split personality” (mcnally 2007) and who were “driven to insanity by the dual pressures of housework and motherhood” (metzl 2009, 37). diagnoses of schizophrenia occurred largely among middle-class, white people, especially women. the idea that schizophrenia resulted from the pressures of daily life fits a white feminine stereotype of women becoming ill in response to stress (metzl 2009, 37–40) and the stereotype of people who have mental illness as incompetent. many mental illnesses have been gendered in this way, including hysteria, which reached epidemic proportions in the late nineteenth century (shorter 1992; showalter 1997), and depression and anxiety today (herzberg 2009, 47–82). while disorders such as depression and anxiety are associated more with women through cultural stereotypes, they also are in fact diagnosed more in women, not because women are too weak to deal with daily stresses but because women share a disproportionate amount of the stress of daily living (gosselin 2014; ussher 2010; feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 whomsd, n.d.). while women are more likely to be diagnosed with certain mental disorders, they are also more likely to have their medical needs disregarded by doctors and to have physiological problems such as pain explained away as psychosomatic (“it’s all in her head”), suggesting psychological weakness (dusenbery 2018; see also norman 2018). seen through the lens of gendered stereotypes, women’s physical and psychological experiences have been typically dismissed as the product of weakness, and their testimony frequently has been discredited. today gender disparities in schizophrenia have largely dissipated as the disorder is diagnosed roughly equally among women and men. schizophrenia became associated with poor black men later in the twentieth century, as more black men were increasingly diagnosed with psychotic illness (jarvis 2008). by the 1960s–70s, schizophrenia became associated with hostility, aggression, and violence, behavior which was associated with young black men seeking empowerment. in his comparison of psychiatric admissions at a state institution in michigan, jonathan metzl found that people diagnosed with schizophrenia before the 1960s were primarily white, and evenly divided among women and men, while people diagnosed in the 1960s and 1970s were mostly “negro” men. the descriptions of their symptoms were disturbingly racialized in this time period: words describing “negroes” were largely related to aggression, hostility, and violence, while words describing whites were more often related to indifference, flat affect, and withdrawal (metzl 2009, 148–151). the later midcentury idea that schizophrenia was a disease of aggression, diagnosed predominantly in black men, drew upon stereotypes of black men as angry, scary, and violent as well as the stereotype that people with mental illness are dangerous. doctors who expected to see paranoid schizophrenia in young black men interpreted hostile behavior as symptoms, ignoring the social factors underlying their behavior. studies are mixed about the prevalence of black stereotyping among clinicians today, with some studies suggesting that white clinicians are still affected by negative stereotypes of black men (abreu 1999; loring and powel 1988; spector 2001) and other studies suggesting that attitudes among white clinicians toward black men have shifted away from negative stereotypes (woods 1999).12 while the 12 one study shows that british psychiatrists are less likely to view black psychiatric patients as more violent than white patients (minnis et al. 2001), though a study from a previous decade suggested that british psychiatrists did hold negative stereotypes toward black men (lewis, croft-jeffreys, and david 1990). it is hard to say how these findings compare to psychiatrist bias in the us, but i would guess that there has been progress in reducing at least some bias against black men by american psychiatrists due to greater cultural awareness of implicit bias about race, gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 prevalence of schizophrenia in the community is equal among black and white people, schizophrenia is still more commonly diagnosed in young black men (chien and bell 2008; minnis et al. 2001; schwartz and blankenship 2014). in associating schizophrenia with middle-class white women in the early mid-century and with black men in the late mid-century, the public interpreted behavior as pathological based on stereotyping. because people expected white middle-class women to have nervous conditions caused by stress, and later expected black men to be angry and hostile, such behaviors in people were more easily picked out and generalizations were made to explain them based on stereotypes. public representations of these behaviors in media, such as magazine articles and advertisements for medicine, presented these behaviors as medical, as symptoms of mental disorder (metzl 2009). the medicalization of these behaviors led the public to view these behaviors as pathological and in need of treatment. when patients showed up in the medical clinic, hospital, or jail, doctors recognized these behaviors as symptoms and diagnosed them accordingly. the medicalization of behaviors marked as schizophrenia was propagated in these ways by framing these behaviors chiefly as problems of individual biology. the medicalization of behaviors like these makes it easy to ignore social factors such as stereotypes which underlie these behaviors and to ignore the way people adopt these behaviors in response to social factors. nancy nyquist potter (2014) argues that black people adopt certain behaviors, often unintentionally, in response to white culture; these then get medicalized inappropriately. for example, she suggests that oppositional defiant disorder is disproportionately diagnosed in black boys because the criteria of the disorder pick out features of behavior that are predominant among black young men due to social, not biological, reasons. similarly, schizophrenia may be disproportionately diagnosed in young black men when behaviors like paranoia are interpreted as symptoms of pathology without regard to social context. while paranoia can be interpreted as a symptom of psychosis, it can also be a reasonable reaction to certain social conditions. in a culture in which the public sees black men as scary and violent, it is understandable that black men would feel paranoia and feel like white people in authority, from police officers to doctors, are “out to get them” (dottolo and stewart 2008; hollar 2007, 31). arthur whaley (2004) notes that african americans adopt a variety of coping methods to deal with racial prejudice, some of which can resemble psychiatric symptoms; men who are psychiatric patients are more likely to have their behaviors interpreted as symptoms than as reactions to social conditions. whaley emphasizes that in order to avoid racist bias in interpreting behavior, it is but, due to its pervasive nature (kelly and roeddert 2008), it is hard to say how far this progress stretches. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 important to distinguish clinical and cultural aspects of paranoia. when behaviors and experiences are medicalized in a way that does not account for relevant social factors such as racism, treating the behaviors as merely a problem of individual biology, this obscures those social factors and reinforces existing power relations like racism.13 implicit bias continues to inform how behavior is interpreted and diagnosed. clinicians have more positive attitudes toward people with mental illness who have professional backgrounds and hold more negative stereotypes related to violence and incompetence toward people who do not (lauber et al. 2006). because psychotic illnesses are associated with lower socioeconomic class, clinicians are more likely to recognize these disorders in people who appear disheveled and impoverished than in people who are well dressed and professional. clinicians may assume that a person who is psychotic necessarily lacks insight into their condition14 and that a person who is well groomed and whose behavior conforms to social norms cannot have psychosis. when i had psychotic depression last year, some mental health clinicians were incredulous that i, as a philosophy professor, had psychotic symptoms and, as a consequence, i did not receive adequate treatment immediately. on the other hand, mental health clinicians might assume that a person who is not well groomed and whose behavior does not conform to social norms has schizophrenia when they may not. since lack of insight is seen as a symptom of a disorder like schizophrenia, a person who “appears” schizophrenic and denies that they are having schizophrenic symptoms may still be diagnosed with 13 similarly, the medicalization of depression has perpetuated the oppression of women by obscuring the oppressive paid and unpaid working conditions of women in many cultural contexts that leads to experiences of depression (gosselin 2014; ussher 2010). 14 for the sake of gender neutrality, in this paper i use the pronouns “they, their, theirs” in referring to singular persons. these pronouns are becoming more acceptable to use as singular pronouns, particularly since the new york times now uses these pronouns in the context of transgender individuals. my reason for using gender-neutral pronouns is to avoid invoking gendered stereotypes, including stereotypes of women having mental illness because they are weak, and of men with mental illness as being violent. i find the traditionally plural, third-person “they, their, theirs” to be less troublesome to use than other ways of attempting genderneutrality such as “he/she” (or “she/he”) “s/he,” “he or she” (or “she or he”), or alternating male and female pronouns. third-person, traditionally plural pronouns that are used to reference singular hypothetical persons may strike some readers as “wrong,” but they are smoother to read and avoid raising gendered issues that arise through language. gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 schizophrenia in part based on their denial. people who in fact have a psychotic illness may appear incompetent and dangerous when they also appear to have low socioeconomic status; people with psychotic illness who appear well groomed and of higher socioeconomic status are more typically regarded with pity or compassion, or distrusted if it is assumed that they cannot have a severe mental illness. using a non-ideal theory approach modeled after alison jaggar’s work in practical ethics, we can see that medicalizing behavior without regard to social factors traps marginalized people who are seen to have serious mental disorders in systems of oppression such as racism. diagnosing people based on stereotypes reinforces existing power relations that marginalize people and prevents effective treatment in those who need it. from this analysis of the effects of medicalization and stereotyping on marginalized people, we can draw the following conclusions. a just approach to diagnosis must confront stereotyping and bias and must consider the social factors of behavior as well as the biological. clinicians should become aware of their own biases and actively work to reduce not only stereotyping but also acts of microaggression that treat target marginalized people (owens, queener, and stewart 2016). clinicians have responsibilities to correct harms and mitigate costs of implicit bias by becoming aware of their own biases, controlling for beliefs and attitudes based on stereotyping, and addressing the effects of bias (brownstein 2016; holroyd, scaife, and stafford 2017a; holroyd 2012). in addition, mental health institutions should examine the ways that their practices and policies reinforce biases and work actively to address these. 2.2. injustices in drug treatment people who have mental illness are vulnerable to many kinds of injustice with respect to treatment. medicalization perpetuates these injustices when it conceptualizes mental disorders as personal defects, which supports stereotypes of people with mental illness as incompetent and unable to make autonomous choices about their treatment. people who have mental illness are vulnerable to coercion, exploitation, epistemic injustice, and other forms of oppression by agents that exercise power over them. in this section i examine this vulnerability in two contexts. first, i show how people with mental illness are vulnerable to coercive and exploitative practices by pharmaceutical companies; next, i show how they are vulnerable to testimonial and hermeneutical injustices when doctors do not take their concerns and choices seriously. both of these vulnerabilities stem from the assumption that people with mental illness are incompetent, which is one of the dominant negative stereotypes of mental illness. in order to focus my discussion here, i analyze these vulnerabilities specifically in the context of antipsychotic drugs used to treat psychotic symptoms like hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. while certain therapies have been feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 found useful in managing symptoms of psychosis, namely cognitive behavioral therapy (kinderman and bentall 2007, 279) and acceptance and commitment therapy (morris, johns, and oliver 2013), the dominant treatment approach is medication. in the medicalized model, recovery is conceptualized as alleviation or minimization of symptoms, and antipsychotic medicines are the seen as the first line of treatment. pharmaceutical companies routinely exploit, or take advantage of, patients for financial gain. for example, in recent years pharmaceutical companies have jacked up prices of essential and previously inexpensive drugs such as epipen (duhigg 2017) and daraprim (miller 2015) for no other reason than to make a handsome profit. pharmaceutical companies often engage in morally questionable practices to increase their market, for example by marketing antipsychotics to children or the elderly when these drugs were not approved for that use (mental health weekly 2013), or by widening the boundaries of diagnostic categories (moncrieff 2014). when pharmaceutical companies exploit people based on how they are socially situated—taking advantage of stereotypes that suggest incompetence, for example—this exploitation reinforces existing power relations, supporting and perpetuating injustices. when people are considered incompetent, they have diminished credibility and are not allowed the opportunity to transcend or negotiate existing power relations, making them easily subject to manipulation or coercion. since the initial development of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s, pharmaceutical companies have subjected people with serious mental illness to this cycle of vulnerability when they have taken advantage of the stereotype that people with serious mental illness are incompetent in order to market and sell their drugs. when the first antipsychotics were developed in the 1950s–60s, they were hailed as a breakthrough. initially called major tranquilizers, these drugs were rebranded as antipsychotics because they diminished psychosis in most patients who took them (healy 2002; shorter 2009, 34–72). when it was discovered in the 1960s and 1970s that they worked by blocking dopamine transmission at d2 receptors, the dopamine hypothesis was developed, claiming that excessive dopamine was the cause of the psychosis characteristic of schizophrenia. the dopamine hypothesis supported the medicalization of psychosis as a defect of individual biology. while the dopamine hypothesis was scientifically problematic because the causal relationship between antipsychotics and dopamine transmission was not conclusively established (healy 2002, 191; whitaker 2002, 197–198), pharmaceutical companies marketed it aggressively because it supported the use of antipsychotics in the treatment of schizophrenia. many patients did not like taking antipsychotics because of their unpleasant effects. antipsychotics can cause sedation, akathisia (inner restlessness), tremors, extrapyramidal effects (uncontrolled muscular movements), and excessive dry gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 mouth. taking antipsychotics over the long term can cause tardive kinesthesia, severe and sometimes irreversible uncontrollable movements that resemble parkinson’s disease. for decades, however, pharmaceutical companies, because they wanted to hold onto their market share, and psychiatrists, who were influenced by the drug companies, ignored claims by patients and their families that the extrapyramidal effects that they experienced were caused by antipsychotic drugs, suggesting instead that the symptoms were imaginary or, if they were real, that they resulted from schizophrenia (gelman 1999). in dismissing patients’ claims, drug companies and psychiatrists asserted their dominance over patients who were seen as discreditable due to perceived incompetence, and drug companies continued to market antipsychotics in ways that exploited this perceived incompetence. by the 1980s, tardive kinesthesia was finally recognized as a problem, and a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were developed which supposedly had fewer side effects. these drugs were branded “atypical antipsychotics”; pharmaceutical companies encouraged doctors and their patients to assume, falsely, that the term “atypical” referred to a lack of extrapyramidal side effects. by encouraging this false association, drug companies exploited patients as well as psychiatrists for the sake of profit (healy 2002, 254; see also moncrieff 2008). in fact, these antipsychotics too have extrapyramidal effects, though it is not clear if they can cause tardive kinesthesia. in these situations, people who had serious mental illness were exploited due to negative stereotypes about their mental illness, and they were subject to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as well. testimonial injustice occurs when a person’s testimony is discredited due to possessing a trait that is stereotyped negatively; hermeneutical injustice occurs when a person is denied hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experiences (fricker 2007; hookway 2010). people with serious mental illness were trapped in a cycle of vulnerability in which, due to stereotyping, they were assumed not to have a credible say in their treatment options and then were not given the epistemic space or hermeneutical resources to develop or demonstrate their credibility.15 when patients were forced or coerced to take antipsychotics, as they often were (especially in institutional settings), their 15 havi carel and ian james kidd (2017) describe the way people with various kinds of illnesses are subject to testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, where their testimony is discredited because of the discounting of firsthand experience and the disvaluing of emotional styles of expression, and where they are denied hermeneutical resources on account of lacking authority through third-person expertise on their condition. see also carel and kidd (2014), kidd and carel (2017), and discussion in scrutton (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 desires were disregarded because they were seen as discreditable due to their illness, and so they were subject to testimonial injustice. in addition, when doctors and pharmaceutical companies denied a link between antipsychotics and extrapyramidal symptoms, they left patients without a conceptual framework for making sense of side effects they were not supposed to have. thus, when doctors and pharmaceutical companies ignored tardive kinesthesia, and when drug companies led people to believe atypical antipsychotics lacked extrapyramidal effects, people who experienced these symptoms were denied the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experience, so they lacked a conceptual framework with which to make claims about those experiences. deception regarding antipsychotic side effects was both exploitative and hermeneutically unjust. drug treatment is a prime site of the kind of “contradiction” jaggar identifies (1994a) that has no easy resolution. here what seems to be in the best interests of the patient is sometimes in tension with patient autonomy (roberts and geppert 2004). for example, intravenous shots of antipsychotics are considered effective for treatment of acute psychosis and are often given coercively when patients are too incompetent to make decisions for themselves (bauer et al. 2016; bowers et al. 2012; powney, adams, and jones 2012). patients retrospectively feel mixed about having been coerced to take medicine; some feel powerless, affecting treatment outcomes (morant et al. 2018), while some are appreciative (greenberg mooreduncan, and herron 1996; patel et al. 2010). in addition, long-acting injectable antipsychotics are sometimes used to address medication nonadherence so that patients do not have to make decisions daily about taking their medicine (moser and bond 2009). patients feel mixed about these too (das, malik, and haddad 2014; iyer et al. 2013; uvais 2018). reducing coercion and involving patients in decisionmaking as much as possible is better for treatment outcomes and medication adherence and is also more just (danzer and rieger 2016), but there are circumstances where coercion may still be necessary when a patient is in imminent danger of harm to self or others. when patients do not take their medicine as prescribed, this is sometimes seen as noncompliance. noncompliance suggests that a person’s refusal to take their medicine as prescribed is willful and deliberate and can even suggest defiance, as if the patient is trying to upend power relations by willfully opposing the doctor. there are many reasons why patients may not adhere to treatment, however, many of which have nothing to do with power relations or even willfulness.16 often 16 some of the factors that impact adherence include symptoms that interfere with the will or rationality required to follow directions, lack of acknowledgment that one has an illness needing treatment (lack of insight, also called anosognosia), intolerable side effects, attachment to symptoms (i.e., symptoms are familiar and gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 patients struggle with adherence as part of their attempts to self-regulate and assert control over their experience (conrad 1985; swartz 2018b). understanding nonadherence as noncompliance ignores these factors, framing patient experience in terms of a doctor perspective rather than a patient perspective and offering patients and doctors limited ways to understand patient experience. doctors understandably get frustrated when patients do not take their medicine and may try to assert their authority such as through lecturing, punishing, or coercing. doctors easily commit “civilized” oppression, in which they perpetuate injustice unknowingly and despite good intentions (harvey 2007). empathetic understanding is crucial in such situations to perceive the oppression that others experience and to change one’s own behavior to avoid perpetuating injustice (emerick 2016). when doctors do not attempt to get outside their own perspective and to understand patient experience from the patient’s perspective, they limit the epistemic space needed for genuine dialogue, and they deny patients the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experience. moreover, ignoring patient perspectives is counterproductive. studies have concluded that dialogue between doctor and patient is crucial for medication adherence even when depot medications are given (lorem et al. 2014; patel et al. 2008), and that the quality of the patient’s relationship with their doctor in general affects medication adherence (day et al. 2005). additionally, when doctors adopt negative stereotypes about their patients, they discredit their patients’ testimony about their experience. for example, female patients may be regarded as neurotic, anxious, hypochondriac, borderline, or hysterical, and their concerns easily dismissed; members of marginalized groups such as youth, elderly, people of color, and people of low socioeconomic status may be regarded as oppositional, manipulative, ignorant, childish, or irresponsible, and may be easily discredited. in such situations, patients are not regarded as credible witnesses to their own experience and so are subject to testimonial injustice through testimonial quieting. believing that their views will be discounted, marginalized patients may decide to self-silence and not contribute to discussion, leaving uncontested and unproblematized the position and authority of the doctor, an act that kristie dotson calls “testimonial smothering” (dotson 2011; see also swartz 2018b) through testimonial quieting and smothering, patients are prevented comfortable or provide a sense of meaning), lack of worth (not deserving of treatment), stigma, substance use disorders, inconsistent health care treatment, lack of affordability, cultural factors that influence people not to take medicine, and socioeconomic status that limits access to treatment and frames the meaning of treatment (conrad 1985; phan 2016; buckley et al. 2007; lehrer and lorenz 2014; wade et al. 2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 from participating in discourse around their treatment. through this they are denied the hermeneutical resources to make sense of their experience, making them subject to hermeneutical injustice as well (swartz 2018b). i want to be clear that in criticizing some of the ways that antipsychotics have been marketed and prescribed to patients, i am not arguing that antipsychotics should not be prescribed or used. they are effective at treating symptoms of psychosis for many people; for many people the side effects are tolerable and the alleviation of psychosis is worth the side effects. in the spirit of full disclosure, i admit that i take ziprasidone (an atypical antipsychotic) daily for my bipolar symptoms. i experience some of the extrapyramidal effects described above. but, in addition to silencing the voice that i used to hear, the ziprasidone organizes me and clears away the clutter in my mind so i can think clearly. to me, taking the drug is (usually) worth it, though for various reasons i sometimes struggle with adherence myself. in such cases i appreciate it when my psychiatrist invites me into conversation about my medication use instead of asserting his authority in a dominating way, as he could do. the latter approach would silence me; in addition to shutting down, i would be unmotivated to change my behavior and so the effort would be unproductive anyway. by inviting me into conversation my psychiatrist creates epistemic space for us to develop hermeneutical resources for understanding the situation together. antipsychotics are essential for alleviating symptoms of psychosis; whether the marketing and prescribing of them is just to the people who take them depends on how these practices are done. as we have seen in this section, treating mental disorders as problems of individual biology conceptualizes them as personal defects, which supports the stereotype of people with serious mental illness as incompetent. using a non-ideal theory approach modeled after alison jaggar’s work in practical ethics, we can see that viewing psychosis as a defect and stereotyping people with psychotic illnesses as incompetent enables exploitation, manipulation, and coercion of people with mental illness as well as various epistemic injustices. through these mechanisms, medicalization perpetuates power relations by oppressing people who are already vulnerable. from this analysis of unjust approaches to drug treatment, both in marketing by pharmaceutical companies and in prescribing by doctors, we can draw the following conclusions. a just approach to drug treatment must involve actively seeking out patient perspectives (swartz 2018a) and encouraging open dialogue between patients and doctors about treatment effectiveness, outcomes, and decisions. those in power must confront and overcome stereotypes and biases in order to trust the credibility of patient testimony, and they must make epistemic space and encourage the use of hermeneutical resources to make sense of experience. in addition, pharmaceutical companies must avoid exploiting patients for their financial gain. gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 2.3. injustices in recovery the medicalization of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, in which these disorders are viewed primarily as problems of individual biology, supports a clinical model of recovery. in this model, the goal of recovery is the alleviation or remission of symptoms and the regaining of functioning, enabling a person to live relatively independently and to be integrated into the community (adenponle, whitley, and kirmayer 2012, 109; cooper 2007, 2012; gill 2012, 95; schrank, wally, and schmidt 2012, 133; slade 2012, 78). recovery is evidenced by measurable outcomes in areas such as employment, education, housing, and independence in activities like personal hygiene and self-care. for psychotic illnesses, alleviation of symptoms is achieved most efficiently with drug treatment. the widespread use of antipsychotics, especially the atypical antipsychotics which are tolerated more easily (though, as noted above, not without significant side effects), has allowed many people who in the past would have been institutionalized to live relatively independently and within the community. from the perspective of medicalization, drug treatment has been successful at enabling the recovery of many individuals with serious mental illness. while medicalization of mental disorders has been beneficial in some ways, however, it has also perpetuated injustices when it conceives of mental disorders as problems of individual biology and as personal defects, especially within a framework of an individualistic view of self with idealized conceptions of choice and control. while the clinical model of recovery sets admirable goals, we must be careful in how we understand these goals. the goal of living independently illustrates the problems that arise when goals are made with idealized conditions in mind without regard for people’s actual situations and limitations. since the 1960s we have seen a shift from housing people in institutions like state hospitals, to community care centers and group homes, and more recently to independent living in apartments without continuous care or supervision (earley 2006; powers 2017). a recent expose in the new york times showed that in new york state, many people who were moved from group homes to independent living have been unable to care for themselves, living in unhealthy and unsafe conditions sometimes leading to illness or even death (sapien and jennings 2018). not everyone has the capacities required to take care of themselves on their own, but the goal of living independently has been conceptualized in idealized terms as one that everyone should be capable of regardless of mental impairments (deegan 1988, 17).17 17 the national alliance on mental illness (nami) recommends that “based on individual needs and choices, living independently in the community should be given priority” (nami 2019), while the substance abuse and mental health services feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 independent living is a goal that is highly valued within an individualistic society like the us that valorizes a liberal conception of self. in this view, the self is seen as essentially a rational chooser, someone who can and has the right to choose their own conception of the good and select from an array of options what choice would best suit their interests and desires (sandel 1996). this view of self is often idealized, valued as an ideal without reference to the constraints on choice that people actually experience (o’neill 1993, 309). in this idealized conception of self, individual choice, effort, and responsibility are exalted, and individual actions are seen as the product of will and effort and what happens to an individual is seen as a result at least in part of their own action. independent living is thus regarded as an achievement of individual choice and effort, while economic dependence is conceived of as laziness or ineptness (jaggar 2002, 130). the capacity for economic independence is based on structural factors as much as personal factors, however. some people are simply unable to work at wage-paying jobs because of the ways that jobs are structured (terzi 2004). many women are responsible for caretaking duties within their families that prevent them from being unable to work outside the home; many jobs are structured in such a way that people with different abilities are unable to meet employment requirements. people with serious mental illness may have such severe mental impairments that they cannot meet the requirements of a wage-paying job. some people necessarily have to rely on others’ wage-earning abilities in order to survive in a capitalist economy; this includes caregivers who provide full-time unpaid care to others and the people who receive that care. in contemporary us culture, this financial reliance on others is construed as dependency (fraser and gordon 1997). within a liberal individualistic framework, economic dependency is construed as inherently negative. in the liberal framework, recovery is seen as an achievement of the individual, and goals like independent living are seen as being under the control of the person with mental illness. failure to achieve such goals and failure to progress in recovery may be seen as bad “choices” that a person makes for which they are responsible, or as meaningless “choices” due to incompetence. the assumption that nonadherence to treatment amounts to willful noncompliance is an example of a perceived “choice” for which patients are judged and held responsible. as alison jaggar notes, one of the harmful aspects of the way dependency is construed in the contemporary us is that it frames economic dependence “as an individual defect of body or character, rather than as a relation between particular bodies and specific social structures” (jaggar 2002, 130). failures to meet outcomes of recovery may be administration (samhsa) indicates that one aspect of purpose, a pillar of mental health, is having “the independence, income, and resources to participate in society” (samhsa 2019). gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 seen as the product of individual defects of bad choice or incompetence. the emphasis on individual choice and effort in the us leads individuals to believe that they ought to have control over their illness, and so are fully responsible for it, or to believe that they have no control over their illness and so are defeated by it (watters 2010, 163–165). in either case, individuals with mental disorders believe that recovery is or should be up to them, and they feel blamed when they fail to get better. this self-blame negatively impacts recovery. transcultural studies of mental disorders show that people with disorders like schizophrenia fare better in certain cultures with less individualistic views of self than they do in euro-american contexts, even when these are non-euro-american subcultures within developed countries (adenponle, whitley, and kirmayer 2012). even when they lack access to western medicine such as psychiatric drugs, people with disorders like schizophrenia often have higher levels of functioning and wellbeing in some developing countries than in many developed countries like the united states (davies 2003, 35–36; kulhara and chakrabarti 2001).18 this is presumed to be a result of lower expressed emotion in families and stronger integration into the community (el-islam 1991; watters 2010). in cultures that emphasize a sociocentric or relational view of self, mental disorders like schizophrenia may be experienced in less disruptive ways. this is partly a result of viewing mental disorders not as problems of the “sick” individual but rather as transient, alternative states of being which are dependent on a person’s interactions with their environment and their place in the community, and which have mixed harms and benefits (davies 2003, 35–36; waldron 2010, 52–55; watters 2010). people with serious mental disorders have statistically better outcomes when they have greater social capital and when they are more integrated into family, social, and economic life (mckenzie 2008). we might wonder if alternative models of recovery in the us are less individualistic and so are less harmful than the clinical recovery model. they are not. the other dominant model is the personal recovery model, which views recovery as a process rather than a set of outcomes, emphasizing hope, self-fulfillment, and personal meaning (anthony 1993; deegan 1988, 1997). instead of symptom reduction, the goal in this model is to live a meaningful life despite one’s symptoms (adenponle, whitley, and kirmayer 2012, 109–112; davidson 2012; gill 2012, 95; 18 this is not universally true, of course. in some areas, such as indonesia and west africa, people with mental disorders are shackled and abused; in others, including russia, they receive woefully inadequate treatment (carey 2015; human rights watch 2016; savenko and perekhov 2014). multiple factors account for global disparities in how people with serious mental disorders are treated; the community’s view of the self is only one such factor. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 schrank, wally, and schmidt 2012, 133–134; slade 2009; 2012, 78). rather than viewing mental illness as something bad to overcome, the personal recovery model regards it as an instigator of change and growth, with both positive and negative aspects (slade 2012, 89). some theorists find value in both the objective outcomes delineated by a clinical model and the subjective experience of recovery process as emphasized by the personal recovery model and propose multidimensional models of recovery that incorporate elements of both (jacobson and greenley 2001; lysaker and lysaker 2012; whitley and drake 2010). like clinical models, personal and multidimensional models of recovery are individualistic, emphasizing personal will, effort, and meaning in the context of an idealized view of choice and control without deep consideration of the relational and communitarian aspects of self (adenponle, whitley, and kirmayer 2012). clinical and personal recovery models both support a medical model of disability which sees disability as an impairment to be fixed or accommodated, a problem of the individual requiring changes to the individual. in contrast, a social model of disability sees disability as socially caused barriers for people of different abilities to participate in various areas of social life (morris 2001; terzi 2004). in the social disability model, society must be restructured to eliminate these barriers. a social disability model conceptualizes mental illness as a social problem to be addressed through social changes. this includes changes in our interpersonal interactions and changes in institutional structures which are stigmatizing, prejudicial, and discriminatory—for example, in the realms of employment and housing (corrigan and kleinlein 2005). the social disability model supports a model of health care as a social rather than purely individual good (austin 2001; hanson and jennings 1995), and it is compatible with the sociocentric view of self as relational. using a non-ideal theory approach modeled after alison jaggar’s work in practical ethics, we can see that idealized views of individual choice and control trap people who have serious mental disorders in systems of oppression by denying people the material and social resources to transcend their situations. medicalized approaches to recovery (as well as personal recovery and multidimensional approaches) easily perpetuate idealized conceptions of choice and control that do not take into account people’s real limitations, making mental illness a problem of the individual and recovery a matter of personal will and effort. these conceptions obscure the material needs of people who have serious functional limitations and obfuscate the importance of changing social structures for recovery. from this analysis of the effects of idealized views of choice and control propagated by dominant approaches to recovery, we can draw the following conclusions. a just approach to recovery must take into account people’s real limitations and the ways these both create material needs and constrain choice, and it must frame mental gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 health care as a social rather than individual good. a just approach to recovery sees mental illness as a social problem requiring social change and not simply as an individual problem requiring individual treatment. moreover, american society would treat people with serious mental illness more justly if it endorsed a sociocentric view of self and provided more social capital so that people with mental illness would have more support, resources, and opportunities. 3. desiderata for good approaches to medicalization of mental disorders in this paper i have shown that practices involved with the medicalization of serious mental disorders can subject people who have these disorders to cycles of vulnerability that keep them trapped within systems of oppression. when medicalization locates mental disorders primarily as a problem of individual biology without regard to social factors, it enables biased diagnoses through stereotyping. when it conceives of mental disorders as defects of the person, it endorses a stereotype of people with mental illness as incompetent, which enables the exploitation, manipulation, coercion, and epistemically unjust treatment of people with serious mental disorders. and when its view of disorders as problems of biology supports a liberal view of the self as ideally individualistic, it reinforces idealized conceptions of choice and control that do not take into account people’s real limitations and views recovery as change that must occur within the individual rather than within society. this paper has made a justice analysis of practices of medicalization through a non-ideal theory approach of examining places where people have experienced injustice due to medicalization, and theorizing from that analysis to develop principles of justice. from this analysis we can make the following recommendations: first, the most obvious point to make here, and one that ought to go without saying but somehow needs nonetheless to be said, is that pharmaceutical companies should not exploit patients for financial gain, and the us government should change marketing and health care access policies that permit such exploitation. second, clinicians should be acutely aware of the power relationship in which they have significant authority over their patients. they should be mindful of the ways that, however inadvertently, they can dominate or oppress their patients, such as through stereotyping, asserting their moral and epistemic authority, and endorsing idealized views of individual choice and control. just as we all should, clinicians should confront actively the ways in which they perpetuate “civilized” oppression and work on changing their attitudes and behaviors accordingly. medical practices and institutions should be restructured in ways that avoid stereotypes, encourage patients to assert more epistemic authority, give patients hermeneutical feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 resources and epistemic space to make meaning of their experience, and take into account the real limitations that constrain patient choice. clinicians should develop self-awareness of their own biases, including gender, racial, and socioeconomic stereotypes about who has certain mental disorders as well as stereotypes about people who have mental disorders (gosselin 2018). this means being attuned to negative beliefs or affective reactions they hold and correcting for these. stereotypes are promulgated through shared reality bias, which is the convergence of beliefs and attitudes that become so dominant that they silence other perspectives (anderson 2012, 170). by developing epistemic virtues of open-mindedness, epistemic conscientiousness, and epistemic humility, clinicians are able to recognize and challenge shared reality bias and be open to having their perspectives challenged, despite their medical authority. clinicians should also actively seek out marginalized voices and alternative perspectives that make nonstandard meanings of experience. this requires developing hermeneutical sensitivity (medina 2013), in which we are attentive and responsive to nondominant perspectives. mental health clinicians can use a phenomenological tool kit in which they bracket the natural attitude toward illness, thematize illness, and examine how illness changes a patient’s being in the world in order to better understand their patients’ experiences (carel and kidd 2014).19 i fully acknowledge the practical difficulties with enacting my proposals for clinicians, as clinicians usually have very limited time with patients, heavy caseloads, and abundant paperwork. developing awareness of bias and how injustices are perpetuated is not necessarily time-consuming, although it does take some conscientious effort to pay attention to and monitor one’s attitudes and behaviors and to try to change them accordingly. adopting a phenomenological toolkit and seeking out patient stories that have nonstandard meanings may take time and energy to learn and implement but will become second nature with practice. postgraduate education programs could teach and foster these behaviors so clinicians can incorporate them into their practice with greater comfort and ease. on the patient side, patients should create self-narratives that make meaning of their experience from their own perspective in order to develop a selfconcept that goes beyond diagnostic identity (tekin 2011). in this way, patients can take control of their experience by framing it on their own terms. these can be written narratives or stories they carry with them as they engage in clinical encounters. patients should be willing to share these narratives and make efforts to 19 my recommendations here are compatible with a narrative medicine approach (e.g., brody 2003; frank 1995; nelson 2001), but my proposal incorporates awareness of, and response to, epistemic justice issues more robustly than narrative medicine approaches traditionally do. gosselin – “clinician knows best”? injustices in the medicalization of mental illness published by scholarship@western, 2019 25 share them in contexts where it seems appropriate. offering to share their narrative is a way of reclaiming power in an otherwise lopsided power relationship where the clinician and the medical establishment in general has the most authority. when the patient’s perspective differs from the dominant (i.e., clinician) perspective, it is a counternarrative (nelson 2001) and can be used to claim recognition (radden 2012). finally, as a society we should move away from an individualistic conception of self as essentially a rational chooser, with idealized notions of choice and control, and toward a sociocentric view of the self as essentially relational. we need to strengthen various forms of social capital so that people with mental disorders have more support, resources, and opportunities as they live with their disorders. we also need to adopt more supportive ideologies. in addition, patients need the hermeneutical resources, such as a rights framework, to make claims regarding their health care needs and treatment. all of these points need to be developed in significantly more detail than i can give here. i hope i have shown some ways that medicalization of mental disorders can perpetuate injustices and pointed to ways that we can 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awarded 1998. dissertation abstracts international: section b: the sciences and engineering, vol. 59 (8-b), p. 4495. abigail gosselin is a professor of philosophy at regis university in denver. she is the author of global poverty and individual responsibility (lexington 2009) and numerous papers in social philosophy. her current work examines stigma and agency in mental illness. 7285 gosselin title page.pdf 7285 gosselin final format.pdf ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation mcauliffe, jana. “ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2). article 3. 2020 ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak jana mcauliffe university of arkansas at little rock jxmcauliffe@ualr.edu mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak1 jana mcauliffe abstract this paper explores the problem of racial privilege in us american feminist thought. drawing on gayatri spivak’s analysis of ethics, particularly her ideas of epistemic discontinuity and teleopoietic reading, i argue that a specific kind of ethical openness can help feminist social-political philosophy better negotiate the legacy of white privilege. spivak’s work calls for a reconsideration and reworking of the subject who theorizes. her analysis of ethics suggests that racially privileged feminists must be able to confront their own complicity in order to engage in political critique less likely to recreate historical patterns of racial domination and exclusion. keywords: complicity, ethics, political critique, racism, spivak, us american feminism gayatri chakravorty spivak has argued that us american subjects considering social justice too easily fall into the trap of thinking “i am necessarily better, i am necessarily indispensable, i am necessarily the one to right wrongs, i am necessarily the end product for which history happened, and . . . new york is necessarily the capital of the world” (spivak 2004, 532).2 the emotional comportment of such a “charitable orientation” represents a cultural sensibility toward politics which is, at least partly, self-satisfied, benevolent hubris. in this paper i engage this subjective orientation as a critique of a dominant us american sensibility regarding justice work. the ways to avoid concretizing such hubris in feminist philosophy that is 1 i wish to thank tina chanter, namita goswami, darrell moore, and mary jeanne larrabee for their guidance on an earlier version of this reading of spivak which appears in my dissertation, ethics and affects: a critique of social intelligibility with adorno, butler and spivak. thank you also to the anonymous readers of fpq for their thoughtful feedback. 2 given that there are many countries in the americas, i find it more precise to use the term “us american” to refer to citizens of the united states, rather than the more common “american,” and will do so throughout the paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 ostensibly anti-racist is my focus here. by engaging spivak’s work, i argue that a specific kind of ethical openness renders feminist political critique less vulnerable to recreating historical patterns of racist exclusion. in the quote above, spivak critiques the position of us academics in order to expose how well-intentioned academic work will often remain complicit with structures of global privilege. i suggest here that her critique of this complicit positionality serves as a model for how racially privileged feminist subjects who would “do good” can better contest racial domination in their theorizing. i suggest that ethical openness and ethical connections are an integral aspect of feminist philosophy, and that the constitutive structure of privileged subjectivity is one way that predictable patterns of exclusion are recreated. i engage spivak’s analysis of ethics here because for spivak ethics is marked as a recurring commitment to know the other better. she calls ethics the experience of the impossible to capture the irreducibility of the ethical relation to other forms of connection. on spivak’s view, effective feminist philosophy would recognize that one is embedded in simultaneous ethical, social, and political connections. spivak calls on global thinkers to consider how political struggle and the impossibility of ethical singularity can supplement each other. i argue here that such a supplement will help racially privileged feminist philosophers better negotiate the legacy of white supremacy. in section 1, i provide an overview of how i am framing the problem of racial privilege in feminist thought. in section 2, i introduce spivak’s project to provide a context for situating my readings of her work. in section 3, i draw on the essay “righting wrongs” to articulate how the epistemic assumptions of differing educational contexts are affected by global privilege through epistemic discontinuity. within the context of north–south global dynamics, spivak uses figures that allow her to mark the production of unintelligibility through cultural exchanges that favor capitalist-western domination. i suggest that a figure, as she discusses it, is not a specific case or an individual person but a concept-metaphor that can help present a frame for ethical engagement that displaces the tendency to appropriate by the dominant into a new relation. in section 4, i engage with her critique of academic disciplinarity from death of a discipline, in which she argues that social sciences and humanities should supplement each other. her idea of teleopoietic reading, a habit of mind achieved through attention to specificity, can resist the tendency to force texts and people to represent their culture, moving instead into an ethical relation that engages the imagination. such an ethics, ethics as the experience of the impossible, is less interested in knowledge production than in giving oneself over to being reimagined in a relation with another. i conclude that spivak’s work demonstrates that ethics calls for a reconsideration of the subject who theorizes, suggesting that racially privileged feminists must be able to confront their own mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 complicity as part of the work of political critique that actively confronts and contests racism. section 1 the idea that the category woman does not apply to all women equally and that there is therefore a need for explicitly anti-racist feminism has been consistently articulated by women of color throughout the development of feminist thought in the united states. the term “feminist thought” is admittedly broad and clunky; i use it here to refer to us american feminist work that is primarily political, academic, or both, if it has been represented in a text and so can constitute a discursive resource for contemporary feminist philosophy. as is noted by the editors of the routledge companion to feminist philosophy, feminist philosophy “originated in feminist politics . . . [and] included from the start discussion of feminist political issues and positions” (garry, khader, and stone 2019, 1). they further note that while the argument that gender cannot be understood apart from other aspects of social identity has been articulated within feminist thought since the nineteenth century, nonetheless “the voices of white, western feminists, often working in ‘analytic’ or anglo-american philosophy, have prevailed within” feminist philosophical debates (2019, 1). in this vein, i consider feminist philosophy here to be part of the broader project of feminist thought, and feminist philosophers’ grappling with white privilege should thus be understood as contiguous with the history of women of color’s alienation from us feminisms.3 to illustrate the stakes of this exclusion, consider as a representative example the alienation of black women from the project of women’s suffrage. this resulted from both the expression of racist attitudes by some key leaders such as elizabeth cady stanton and the perhaps more insidious willingness of decisionmakers in the movement to frame women’s issues in ways that would capitulate to the racist attitudes of desired white supporters (npr 2011; fields-white 2011; mcdaneld 2013; brown 2018; staples 2019). another significant example is the alienation of black women from the developing field of women’s studies, as 3 i will focus here on race largely though the work by black us american women as one example of this pattern of exclusion, but to consider this fully one would need to engage the potential of feminist philosophers to better engage racial differences beyond the black–white binary and to address normatively hierarchical differences not reducible to yet interrelated with race, including nationality, gender identity, sexuality, and ability. for a too-brief representation of such work, see clare (1999); davis (1983); jaimes guerrero (1996); lugones (2003); mohanty (2003); moraga and anzaldúa (1983); piepmeier, cantrell, and maggio (2014); smith (1983); and serano (2007). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 addressed in the speeches of audre lorde anthologized in her sister outsider. for instance, in “age, race, class and sex: women redefining difference,” delivered at amherst college in 1980, lorde critiqued a tendency by white feminist literary scholars who, she claimed, were capable of teaching shakespeare and aristophanes but claimed they could not teach black us american women’s writing because the experiences described were too “other” and too “alien” (2007, 117). in “the uses of anger: women responding to racism,” delivered at the national women’s studies association in 1981, lorde criticized barriers that were put in place to exclude poor women and women of color from participating in academic discussions of racism. these barriers included but were not limited to claims that the concerns of black women are put “too harshly” and also that the existence of expensive registration fees created a fiscal barrier to entry for many nonacademic women, including activists working on the conference theme (lorde 2007, 125, 126–127). while i have suggested that feminist philosophy should be understood in the context of feminist thought more broadly, the ways that academic feminist philosophers conceptualize and engage gender is infused by concepts and methods shared with the history of western philosophy more broadly. one significant analytic lens for feminist philosophy has been epistemology, or philosophy of knowledge.4 as i will show below, spivak’s analysis of epistemic discontinuity and ethical singularity can helpfully contribute to the work of scholars who argue that epistemic injustice should be central to thinking the possibilities of interactions across cultural gaps and power imbalances. epistemological analysis is useful in considering racism both because it exposes the norms of knowledge production as a way that racial exclusion can be perpetuated and because it offers conceptual tools that describe how the constitution of a normative subjectivity can lead one to disallow the claims of less privileged others. for instance, patricia hill collins argues that new academic knowledge is typically validated by prioritizing consistency with and acceptance by previous claims made within a field and, perhaps particularly in social sciences, according to positivist epistemic norms that value depersonalized, “objective” knowledge (2008, 253–256). this may alienate the point of view of black women, as “individuals who wish to rearticulate a black woman’s standpoint through black feminist thought can be suppressed by prevailing knowledge validation processes” (collins 2008, 254). collins suggests that a black feminist epistemology would engage alternate validation processes, for example by prioritizing the legitimacy of lived experience 4 as briefly representative of this work, see alcoff (1991), dotson (2014), giladi and mcmillan (2018), mckinnon (2019), and ortega (2006). mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 and a dialogic rather than individualistic approach to the constitution of knowledge (257–262). further, one can track the relationship between a kind of subjectivity and the way that one recognizes a claim as valid; alternative epistemologies imply alternative subjectivities. it is because of this that knowledge validation processes that are ostensibly race and gender neutral can in practice engender distrust for the knowledge claims made by black women and thereby alienate their participation in academic discourses. in order to resist the relegation of a black feminist epistemology to the status of an illegitimated other over and against a presumed neutral or objective epistemology, scholars such as linda martín alcoff have argued that all knowledge should be seen as conditioned by the specific point of view of the knower. as alcoff argues, “because knowledge cannot be completely disentangled from social location and experience, the pretension to abstraction only conceals the relevant context, disenabling a productive dialogue between contexts, which is the only means by which true agreement and understanding might emerge” (2001, 65). as has been identified by both collins and alcoff, one way that this occurs is through the coding of subjectivities formed in specific white contexts as neutral subjectivities reflecting objective contexts. this prevents any productive engagement of the impact of racial differences on people’s experiences, points of view, or senses of self. such epistemological analysis suggests that the constitutive structure of white privileged subjectivities are often closed to epistemological change, and this is one way that predictable patterns of exclusion may be continually recreated over time, even in the face of repeated critiques.5 it is because spivak acknowledges that white us american subjects’ complicity with oppression has an epistemic dimension that her work can be helpful in staging how racial privilege can be better negotiated within feminist philosophy. spivak demonstrates that because complicity is an inevitable condition for western subjects who would perform justice work, privileged subjects must allow the self who theorizes to transform in the process of engaging in critical thought. this insight will also serve feminist philosophy. section 2 for more than four decades gayatri spivak has been working as a critic concerned about the ongoing impact of coloniality and the limitations and injustices of gendered life.6 her work is not easily summed up in ways that are common in 5 for other examples that analyze the structure of white privileged subjectify as a barrier to anti-racist philosophy, see lugones (2003) and yancy (2016). 6 according to the editors of the spivak reader, spivak’s first essay in english, “shakespeare in yeats’s ‘last poems,’” was published in 1965 (landry and maclean feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 academic contexts, such as by identifying specific disciplines to which she contributes or periods in which she developed particular ideas. this is in part because of spivak’s habit of publicly commenting on and reworking her ideas and texts. shuttling back and forth as she does between her own texts troubles a teleological or progressive account that would want to point to where an idea began and conclude where it finishes up. in the preface of a critique of postcolonial reason, gayatri spivak addresses the method of her theory by noting, “i am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but i can break rules” (1999a, xiii). her use of rule-breaking that expands the capacities of intellectual discourses is another reason that it is difficult to account for the impact of spivak’s substantial body of work and interests. commenting on the difficulties of easily summing up spivak as a thinker, sangeeta ray describes spivak as “a literary theorist, a postcolonial critic, translator, feminist, marxist, and deconstructionist” (ray 2009, 3). condensed in ray’s list are a number of concerns, influences, and methods that i will here briefly unpack as an overview to her thinking. first, reading literature has been a persistent and crucial aspect of spivak’s work. as a representative example that is not exhaustive, the chapters of in other worlds include readings of short stories by the bengali author mahasweta devi, a novel by english author virginia woolf, and poetry by the irish poet w. b. yeats and italian poet dante alighieri (spivak 2006). understanding the work of comparative literature to be “reading closely in the original,” spivak always returns to reading as a task that expands the imagination and enables connection via cultural and linguistic specificity (spivak 2003, 6). as a postcolonial critic, spivak sets out to critique postcolonial, not simply colonial, reason.7 she analyzes the power dynamics 1995, 331). her publications in deconstruction began with her translation of and critical introduction to jacques derrida’s of grammatology, published in 1976 (derrida 1994). spivak herself notes that “french feminism in an international frame” [1981], her translation and critical introduction to mahasweta devi’s “draupadi” [1981], “three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism” [1985] and “can the subaltern speak?” [1985] “represented the start of a new direction in [her] thinking” (spivak 2012, ix). this new direction may be, as she puts it, “a turning of derrida toward politics” (morris 2010, 227). each of these moments represents a different way to begin to tell a story about the development of spivak’s project, and these multiple, overlapping origins are appropriate to her work. 7 i am not suggesting that spivak is the only postcolonial thinker to take a critical stance toward postcolonialism from the perspective of thinking through postcoloniality; such a critical position might be one hallmark of responsible theory in general, and in the context of postcolonial theory, as the editors of the “third mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 of a world where the global north and global south are differentially affected by economics, arguing that this dynamic becomes more clear if ones sees “the ‘third world’ as a displacement of the old colonies, as colonialism proper displaces itself into neocolonialism. . . . the post-soviet situation has moved this narrative into the dynamics of the financialization of the globe” (spivak 1999a, 3). thus, while she is undoubtedly a critic of colonialism, she also suggests that postcoloniality is not entirely sufficient for redressing the damaging effects of the global history of conquest. as a translator, spivak may be best known for her translations of jacques derrida’s of grammatology (from french to english) and mahasweta devi’s collection of short stories, imaginary maps (from bengali to english). spivak remarks in “translation as culture,” that both when translating devi’s short story “draupadi” and when translating of grammatology, she “discovered . . . that translation was the most intimate act of reading” (2012, 251). her translation work has been impactful both as a resource for english readers and as a critical aspect of her understanding of ethics and culture. this translator’s concern has enabled her to consistently argue that feminist and gender studies must think carefully about culture. her engagements with marxism include her careful reading of marx’s texts as well as critical contributions to the work of the subaltern studies collective, a group of south asian historians influenced by marx and marxian thinkers such as antonio gramsci. spivak practices deconstruction both as a reader of derrida and as an intrinsic method of how she engages with ideas, with politics, and with texts. as she states, “persistently to critique a structure that one cannot not (wish to) inhabit is the deconstructive stance” (spivak 1993, 284). it is because spivak is a theorist who continually problematizes the theory that grounds her own texts that her analysis of ethics will be helpful here. spivak has used a variety of related phrases throughout her career to thematize the ways that ethical and intellectual projects are circumscribed by their inevitable impossibility. what this means, put simply, is that her work consistently reminds any thinker that the hope or goal that drives them to think can never come to be as it is imagined or wanted. as beverley best explains, “the formulation of the constitutive aporia—the necessary paradox which structures and makes possible all meaning, knowledge, identity, subjectivity/objectivity—underwrites virtually every moment of spivak’s work” (1999, 476). such an idea is present in the abovementioned deconstructive stance, articulated in a critique of postcolonial reason as the need to enact “a persistent critique of what we cannot not want” (spivak 1999a, world and post-colonial issues” special issue of social text noted, postcolonial thinkers have for a long time been concerned with the “problematic implications” of the terms third world and postcolonial (mcclure and mufti 1992, 3). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 110). this calls a thinker to stage an active relationship to the structures that give one privilege. these structures may include intellectual discourses like philosophy, feminism, literary theory; they also include institutions like universities or nonprofits. in addition, they include concepts like justice, national belonging, or education. the ethical invitation of this stance toward one’s own enabling structures is to always unpack one’s investments in that which it seems impossible not to be or to want. in this way, one’s complicity with that which one critiques is consistently foregrounded. framing the essays in an aesthetic education in the era of globalization in the introduction, spivak engages such a relation of complicity through the idea of a double bind. she develops this through a reading of gregory bateson’s steps to an ecology of mind; it is a way of representing the condition of simultaneously navigating a set of contradictory instructions (spivak 2012, 4). examples from the text include the double bind of the private and the public and that of truth and rhetoric (2012, xiii, xv). for spivak, the legacy of the enlightenment for education is the instantiation of double binds, and these are particularly significant for the “postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant” (2012, 4). including herself in this group, spivak writes, “we want the public sphere gains and private sphere constraints of the enlightenment; yet we must also find something relating to ‘our own history’ to counteract the fact that the enlightenment came, to colonizer and colonized alike, through colonialism, to support a destructive ‘free trade,’ and that top-down policy breaches of enlightenment principles are more rule than exception” (2012, 4). the legacy of western enlightenment culture interacting with other cultures inaugurated a historical plethora of contradictory impulses for people with a foot in each. addressing the role of higher-education humanities teaching in the context of globalization, spivak expresses concern that the need to secure funding and support for humanities work entices scholars to articulate or believe that they can “resolve double binds by playing them” (2012, 1). one must resist that temptation in order to be able to learn the double bind, to effectively engage one’s imagination to rework one’s epistemological assumptions and find new ways of negotiating conflicting impulses. for that reason, in my argument below, i focus on two texts in which spivak thinks ethics in terms of pedagogically and institutionally mediated possibilities, focusing primarily on the texts death of a discipline and the essay “righting wrongs.” the argument of “righting wrongs” was first delivered as a speech at oxford university in an amnesty international lecture series, “human rights and human wrongs,” in 2001. spivak’s goal was to present a reading of human rights culture and to argue that education can help to dismantle the tendency of human rights work to function according to the dictates of global north cultural logics. death of a discipline argues that comparative literature should mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 “collaborate with and transform area studies” (spivak 2003, 19), and in that text she addresses the potential of education to contribute to social justice. spivak comments in the later “nationalism and the imagination” that death of a discipline is an “elegy to comparative literature” (2012, 300), and in her introduction to an aesthetic education in the era of globalization, she suggests that this text is “too hopeful” (2012, 26).8 my engagement with these texts below should thus be considered in the context of spivak’s caution against the optimistic notion that one can solve injustice; that would be to make the mistake of acting as if one can resolve a double bind. instead, in what follows, i engage these two texts to consider a notion of ethical singularity that poses structural questions of power in order to critique the social, political, and economic influences that condition the possibility of hearing another as a singular ethical voice. by opening up possible ways of reimagining ourselves along with an engagement with others, spivak expands the possibility of intimacy appearing as a weight that could bear on the deep privileges of a world conditioned by social injustice, even if those injustices cannot be overcome. section 3 in this section i describe the role of epistemic discontinuity in spivak’s thinking, primarily as it is treated in the essay “righting wrongs” but also drawing on a critique of postcolonial reason and “can the subaltern speak?” her analysis of the differences in epistemological norms between global north and global south subjects demonstrates why critique of global injustice requires ethical engagement: a rethinking of the self and one’s relation to power is necessary to effective justice work. she summarizes the general concern of her argument when she reflects, i have been suggesting, then, that “human rights culture” runs on unremitting northern-ideological pressure, even when it is from the south; that there is a real epistemic discontinuity between the southern human rights advocates and those whom they protect. in order to shift this layered discontinuity, however slightly, we must focus on the quality and end of education, at both ends. (spivak 2004, 527) the title of her essay thus refers to a global dynamic she is trying to unpack: the political and economic relationship between those who are “always right” and those who are “perennially wronged” (2004, 527).the notion of epistemic discontinuity encompasses differences in culturally sanctioned ways of making meaning: common approaches to speaking, recognizing the truth, and structuring arguments. these breaks between epistemic expectations precede any interaction between globally 8 spivak comments on the essay “righting wrongs” in readings (2014, 80–98). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 privileged and globally disadvantaged subjects; they are not power-neutral and are conditioned by economics and politics as well as language and tradition. to address what she sees as the epistemic particularities of these two cultural approaches to meaning-making, spivak refers to two ends, two sides, above and below, the global south and the global north. these juxtapositions gesture to the two epistemic spheres she is concerned with bridging in the piece, and they are not simply reducible to geographic location. spivak asserts that what she names “northernideological pressure” can come just as readily from those native to former colonial contexts as from the west. moreover, spivak does not intend “from below” to indicate a lower level on a hierarchy but instead intends to invoke a sense that using something from “below” is a use that is also a subversion of that thing (2012, 3–4). in this argument spivak draws heavily on her own experiences as an educator, on the one hand as a professor at columbia university in new york, and on the other hand as a teacher and a teacher trainer within rural communities in west bengal, india. the way that she figures these experiences illustrates for the reader how to link a cultural episteme to a generalizable approach while acknowledging the mediated and limited possibilities for education in each context. while spivak draws on large glosses for heterogenous populations, on my reading this should not then be taken as an assertion that either the global north or the global south can be characterized or summed up according to only one logic. rather, spivak uses such characterizations as a method for critique that operates by condensing a dominant logic into a figure or a concept-metaphor that can be interrogated. unpacking an epistemic assumption requires expressly engaging with the ways that intelligibility and unintelligibility are produced through cultural exchange. this is often marked by spivak in trying to imagine what escapes or drops out of an attempt to think about the significance of global dynamics from some particular vantage point. identifying these tropes so they can be critiqued engenders a place from which critique of the differential distribution of power across cultural epistemes can be waged. this has been a concern of spivak’s at least since the publication of her widely read “can the subaltern speak?” that essay is organized around a concern for how representation is affected by a global capitalist economy and makes at least two important interventions into the interrelation of subjectivity, epistemology, and power. first, spivak’s reading argues that the representation of the suicide of bhuvaneswari bhaduri and the practice of sati usually do not reflect a concern with the “subaltern woman’s consciousness” (1988, 295). second, she demonstrates that self-proclaimed radical western intellectuals’ active disavowal of their own complicity in hegemony recodifies the model of universal subjectivity they ostensibly work against (spivak 1988, esp. 271–284). similarly, her treatment of the figure of the native informant in a critique of postcolonial reason argues that an opaque mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 ambivalence is drawn on when western academic disciplines invoke figures of global south cultures. in anthropology or ethnography, the term native informant had traditionally described a human subject of a study who provides “insider” information for the academic to use in generating theories about the indigenous culture being studied. in a critique of postcolonial reason, spivak rethinks the position of the native informant as not one who provides information, but one who is “a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the west (or a western-model discipline) could inscribe” (1999a, 6). spivak uses this method of figuration to demonstrate the tendencies of such a western imaginary. the native informant as figure is not an ethical other so much as a reflective surface that can be made to represent an idea projected by the agent of a dominant culture. encapsulated in a figure such as the subaltern or the native informant, or in a concept metaphor such as human rights, is a power dynamic that can function coercively if left unspoken and unchecked. on my argument, critically unpacking this tendency of privileged subjects to reduce the experiences of nonwhite people is needed more broadly within us american feminist projects. the figure in the position of the native informant or subaltern is not seen to be psychically complex in a way that would warrant any extra work or undue attention. one way to personify spivak’s concern is to think of the native informant analogously to the person-of-color sidekick in a hollywood romantic comedy or television sitcom: her backstory is so familiar because of dominant cultural scripts that it can be recollected by a few choice gestures or phrases. meanwhile, her story is incidental to the plot, which is focused on the (usually romantic) destiny of the white protagonist. spivak uses the figure of the native informant to structure a critical argument about the status of western canonic thinking by tracking its appearance in two separate contexts. according to spivak’s reading of kant, hegel and marx, within the context of the “great texts” of western disciplinary humanities, the position of the native informant is an “unacknowledgeable moment” that is “crucially needed” yet “foreclosed” (1999a, 4). on her reading, what these philosophers have in common is that in the course of making now-canonical philosophical arguments about freedom, they appeal to the native informant as an example of a negative or failed position that nonetheless has demonstrative, argumentative validity. however, the disruptive potential of engaging “the poorest woman of the south” as an ethical subject who could contest the universalizing hegemony in much of western philosophical texts is structurally precluded. she writes, “i think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of man—a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation” (spivak 1999a, 6). in that sense, the idea that the native informant could appear is invoked as a kind of promise; the promise that universal western culture will spread, that eventually all people will be included in a world history, or feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 an enlightened cosmopolitanism, or an egalitarian communist order. yet this promise is disingenuous, for in the act of projecting a cultural identity onto the third-world other, the possibility of an ethical engagement is obviated; on my analogy from above, the perpetual sidekick does not get to tell her own story. unlearning the practice of figuring global others and therefore precluding ethical experience is necessary for staring to navigate the complicity of global north justice seekers. spivak clearly articulates the elision of cultural difference in north–south interactions. what needs to be discussed are the mechanisms in spivak’s work for moving this into a productive reworking of privileged western complicity. in order to develop this further, i turn to her analysis of human rights. in “righting wrongs,” the concept of human rights is introduced as an example that bears the legacy of the epistemic discontinuities between the global north and global south. spivak’s critical assessment of this idea helps clarify the stakes of these power-infused cultural differences. there are two kinds of diagnosis that spivak brings to the idea of human rights: human rights as alibi and human rights as enabling violation. regarding human rights as alibi she writes, “the idea of human rights . . . may carry within itself the agenda of a kind of social darwinism—the fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of the unfit” (spivak 2004, 524). the idea of the alibi is one that spivak employs to indicate when an idea or concept appears to be doing some good, while this “goodness” actually obscures a power dynamic and protects its beneficiaries. spivak invokes the idea of the alibi when she wants to name a psychological disposition toward an ideological power dynamic. the functioning of this alibi can be unconscious, conscious, or some combination of the two. her historical example of this is the mantle of the “white man’s burden” under which the british empire “civilized and developed” its colonies, functioning as an alibi for “economic, military and political intervention” (spivak 2004, 524). on this model, cultural relativism can be an alibi for what is actually cultural chauvinism, serving as a superficially moral reason to remake the world in the image of western norms.9 similarly, human rights can function as an alibi when the interventions made in the name of rights, for example aid projects, perpetuate rather than ameliorate the economic dependence of the south. spivak thus aligns human rights with a kind of disaster politics, in which “democratization” becomes a code word for turning a 9 this power dynamic is at stake in spivak’s critique that colonialism entails “white men are saving brown women from brown men” (1988, 296). the assertion of such an alibi remains a global tactic; puar and rai (2002, 127–130), for instance, argue that professed care for the female “victims” of the taliban served both to garner justification for the us war in iraq and as a prop for uncritical western liberal feminists to set themselves up as saviors. mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 third world nation into a “tributary economy” for the west (2004, 543). in such an instance, the human rights intervention works as an alibi for the perpetuation of the economic superiority of the north. on the other hand, human rights can also function as an enabling violation. in order to articulate this, spivak has to work through the concern that rights discourse as such, particularly the twenty-first century idea of human rights that permeates the globe, has an inherent eurocentric bias. regarding this, she writes, “i am of course troubled by the use of human rights as an alibi for interventions of various sorts. but its so-called european provenance is for me in the same category as the ‘enabling violation’ of the production of the colonial subject. one cannot write off the righting of wrongs. the enablement must be used even as the violation is renegotiated” (spivak 2004, 524). understanding how to use an alreadycompromised agency is difficult. further, it is possible that rights are not the best framework to use to address justice, and that other, better frames will be developed. spivak’s analysis takes place in the meantime, in an urgent present in which the problems of violence and injustice continue and a confrontation of global north hubris is urgently necessary. by way of an already compromised position is the only way for privileged subjects to work toward justice at all; this is what it means to recognize rights as an enabling violation. for spivak, an enabling violation engenders possibilities and kinds of agencies while it simultaneously overwrites other kinds of agency and perpetrates injustices or oppressions. it is not a pure or unproblematic position to occupy, but it is a productive one. it tries to encompass the certainty that there may be a wrong that needs righting, and yet the process of righting that wrong must remain accountable for the changes it tries to enact and for the possible violence of its own methods. using the historical example of the production of the colonial subject exposes the difficulties and the stakes of spivak’s attempt to resituate human rights as an enabling violation. she argues, “colonialism was committed to the education of a certain class. it was interested in the seemingly permanent operation of an altered normality,” one which intends a “self-empowerment” that spivak sees as “paradoxically” lacking in much of the work in contemporary human rights and development, be it undertaken by northern activists or southern middle-class descendants of the old colonial subjects (2004, 524). spivak sees in colonialism’s self-interested dedication to the education of a class in colonial india a commitment in terms of time, effort, and patience, as well as an ostensible interest in agency that should be present in much contemporary aid work. this is not meant to defend colonial domination but instead to disrupt a too-easy sense of historical progress. this uncomfortable reading of an aspect of coloniality can productively discomfort a global north reader who thinks of themself as beyond colonial power dynamics. on this view, human rights could function as enabling violations to the extent that aid feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 work participates in an alteration of the social world, prioritizing a notion of selfempowerment as articulated by the community being served by that aid work, and remaining committed to the persistent critique of the desire for rights. “can the subaltern speak?,” a critique of postcolonial reason, and “righting wrongs” each seek to mark, through a figure or a concept, the nonoccurrence of an engagement with a different cultural episteme in terms of its logics, meanings, values. the critical analysis of these figures articulates a problematic power dynamic, which raises the question of how one can minimize the reflexive epistemic orientation of privileged white/western subjects. this requires not only analyses which are situated in the larger context of global resource distribution and a historicized account of the sedimentation of cultural differences, but also a specific notion of ethical experience. in what follows, i suggest that, for spivak, a relation of dominance could shift into one of ethical engagement only on the condition that dominant cultural subjects allow themselves to be rewritten in the process of an ethical exchange. the engagement with ethics i address below does not offer proscriptions for good behavior or proper ethical principles. rather, on this analysis, “to attend to the unleashing of the ethical gives no guarantee that it will produce a ‘good’ result—just that it will bring in a relation, perhaps” (spivak 2004, 568). i address how to understand bringing about a new relation as an ethical task in the following section. section 4 here, i think through the relation between ethical and political analysis in terms of spivak’s account of singularity and ethics as an “experience of the impossible.” for spivak, ethics must always begin with the specific, and her model is one of a relation between two people. however, it is by beginning with such specificity that the relationship between the generalizable and the singular is opened up in her work, and this dynamic is relevant to political critique. she expresses this through the idea of teleopoiesis, a mode of reading a text that calls for simultaneous attention to the singular and the general. that is, spivak’s account of singularity has both a textual and an experiential component. it is on this model of singularity that an ethical concern can be made to supplement a more generalizable claim in the service of something like justice.10 in the preface of a critique of 10 spivak considers the idea that one must negotiate a structure like justice at the same time that one is dismantling and recreating it, that one inhabits the space one is problematizing, as a deconstructive idea. she notes, “we would rather not construct the best possible theory, but acknowledge that practice always splits open the theoretical justification” (spivak 2004, 531). spivak has clearly been influenced by derrida’s way of relating ethics to politics; ethics as the experience of the mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 postcolonial reason, spivak cautions against presenting “the ethics of alterity as a politics of identity” (1999a, x). the politics of identity with which she is concerned would flatten out heterogeneity in the service of collecting data, reinscribing the dominance of the global north; it would serve as an alibi for the urban postcolonial migrant to speak in the name of “the third world.” an ethics of alterity, on the other hand, would not jettison identity as a political concern. however, such an ethics would not presume that the representation of another in their identity is anything but a reductive representation, a flat bit of knowledge that does not sufficiently account for the ethical experience of interacting with another. for spivak, such an encounter is a singular experience, one that should continually bear on any generalized political claim. spivak’s work suggests that to disrupt the tendency toward hubris by dominant subjects, politics must be supplemented by ethics, and for spivak, specificity is the means of this supplementation. this sustained and careful commitment to think specificity allows for the cultivation of habits and orientations that can inculcate disruptive, critical engagements that work toward something like justice. such habits are modeled in the methodology of the “collectivities” and “planetarities” sections of death of a discipline.11 spivak turns to close reading of literature, theoretical texts, and popular political writings in order to develop a technique of accounting for singularity that opens up onto a general field. engaging the singular and general is opposed to trying to develop a universal account that can also be deployed to illuminate a specific case. by beginning with the more specific side of the duality, spivak shifts the focus onto the moment of particularity. by replacing the particular with the singular, she shifts the dynamic being explored away from a classic mode of representation toward one of a relation that must be continually renegotiated. this deployment of ethical specificity is developed as a practice of close reading but is linked in her thinking with global and social justice. for instance, spivak’s goal in the second chapter of death of a discipline is to investigate how impossible and ethics of alterity are both also deconstructive ideas. for these reasons, concrete qualifications of this idea of justice are rare in spivak’s work. however, if justice is unqualified, there is nonetheless great attention to specificity and context in spivak’s work, and she distinguishes her own approach from derrida’s by suggesting her analysis can think the specificity of classed and raced determination across genders in a way that his does not (spivak 1993, 308). for a more extensive treatments of derrida’s influence on spivak, see morton (2007, 70– 95). 11 similar arguments are made in both “righting wrongs” and imperatives to reimagine the planet. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 reading literature can feed the “formation of collectivities,” an attempt to think on an inclusive level that must be labeled the “general” without capitulating to a logic of difference that appropriates, rather than engages with, the nondominant (2003, 26). spivak calls for supplementary interdisciplinary work that could get closer to the singularity expressed in texts, arguing that comparative literature should recognize that “the proper study of literature may give us entry to the performativity of cultures as instantiated in narrative” (2003, 13). in this way, transcultural literature could grant the reader a mediated and incomplete experience of the active lives of cultural others—a first glimpse, perhaps, of the potential work of an ethical mindset. as she goes on to note, when picking up a work of literature produced from within a culture that is not one’s own, one is outside of the cultural context of that narrative. nonetheless, for spivak there is an ethical call from the work, a call for the reader to resist adopting a reductive objectifying stance, in which another—be they a character, or the authorial voice of an essay, or the bearer of a statistic—becomes a representation of culture. an objectifying gaze that looks only for flat representations of lived lives is juxtaposed in this analysis to the work of the imagination. as spivak elaborates, this is preparation for a patient and provisional and forever deferred arrival into the performative of the other, in order not to transcode but to draw a response. believe me, there is a world of difference between the two positions. in order to reclaim the role of teaching literature as training the imagination—the great inbuilt instrument of othering—we may, if we work as hard as old-fashioned comp. lit. is known to be capable of doing, come close to the irreducible work of translation, not from language to language but from bodily to ethical semiosis, the incessant shuffle that is a “life.” (2003, 13) by invoking semiosis, the process of generating signs, she highlights the activity of meaning-making that attends such an inter-cultural engagement. the transcoding of a cultural representation is aligned with a representational way of relating to a text, one that shares the problem of the figure of the native informant i discussed earlier. it invokes a reductive and stagnant identity of another, one easily interpreted in terms of a preestablished hermeneutic. resisting the search for identity claims about another’s culture in favor of experiencing the way another is presented as one aspect of the performance of a multifaceted culture, captured in a textual moment that does not stand for a larger claim “about” that different life, requires activity of quite a different nature. this activity of reading entails the participation of one’s imagination as a way to shift from engagement in terms of universality and particularity toward attending to a developing sense of the general and the singular. mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 it also requires that as one engages with a text or with another, one also engages and challenges one’s own sense of self and point of view. spivak elucidates what this work of the imagination would involve when she distinguishes between “learning about cultures” and the work of “imagining yourself, really letting yourself be imagined (experience that impossibility) without guarantees, by and in another culture, perhaps. teleopoiesis” (2003, 52). if poiesis is an “imaginative making” (spivak 1999b, 76), then teleopoiesis is an imaginative making across distances, but not one in which the reader tries to grasp the meaning of the distant text.12 instead, it is one in which a reader tries to frame a textual encounter as an ethical encounter and one is called, to use judith butler’s (2005) phrase, to give an account of oneself. to further clarify the claim that “ethics is the experience of the impossible” (spivak 1995, xxv), i turn now to how spivak connects this account of reading the singular to social and political concerns. this is crucial for how she is able to take an intimate structure and make it relevant for considering the stakes of institutional and global issues of justice. spivak addresses ethical singularity quite directly in a critique of postcolonial reason. she is concerned with the possibility of movements that work toward “an ecologically just world,” and wants to consider what supplements are needed to keep collective efforts from reproducing the power relations they fight against (spivak 1999a, 382). to this end, she writes, we all know that when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses—the answers—come from both sides. let us call this responsibility, as well as “answer”ability or accountability. we also know, and if we don’t we have been unfortunate, that in such engagements, we want to reveal and reveal, conceal nothing. yet on both sides, there is always a sense that something has not got across. . . . ethical singularity is approached when responses flow from both sides. otherwise, the idea, that if the person i am doing good to resembles me and has my rights, he or she will be better off, 12 spivak developed her use of teleopoiesis from a reading of derrida’s politics of friendship; derrida develops it through a reading of the temporal logic of nietzsche’s discussion of the philosophers to come in beyond good and evil (derrida 2006, 29– 38). derrida writes “teleiopoieós qualifies, in a great number of contexts and semantic orders, that which renders absolute, perfect, completed, accomplished, finished, that which brings to an end” (1994, 32). as corinne scheiner explains, derrida plays with two different prefixes, “teleio (bringing to an end or completion)” and “tele (far)” to give both a temporal and spatial sense to his idea. in addition, “teleiopoiesis accounts for the more metaphoric distance of alterity…the negotiation of these distances, their mediation, is the movement of teleiopoiesis” (scheiner 2005, 240). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 does not begin to disclose-efface the (im)possible ethical relation. (nor of course does an attitude of unqualified admiration for the person as an example of his or her culture.)13 (1999a, 384) here, spivak invites the reader to reflect on their own experiences of intimate exchanges with another. she uses the rhetorical tactic of gesturing to an experience “we all know.” since the question of human experience, of the meaning and nature of being human, is continually being reopened in her work, i suggest that she is not trying to name a universal experience so much as open a space that can be filled by the experiences that come to mind. for example, when i read this passage my thoughts go to times when i have made a new friend. perhaps it happens in an unexpected place—a meeting that was otherwise dull, a party one was obligated to attend. something shifts, and a singular person pops out of the backdrop as someone i want to know well, not just be familiar with. i am curious about their family, background, home. what they like to eat, their take on the tv and books i like. all of a sudden i do not want to animate my public, polite, socializing self; i want to animate a more personal version of myself for this other person, to have them see my sense of humor, my politics, my tastes.14 we are in what spivak calls a space of responding, of “answerability,” when caught up in a kind of feedback loop of discourse that nourishes itself. when one of us speaks, the other feels energized and wants to reply. this new friend is now someone i am connected to; i feel bound to their experiences in some way. this can be a joyful connection and it can be painful, but either way, it is vibrant. for some, this intimacy might take the shape of discussing their erotic lives, or their experiences with oppressions. for others, those topics are uninteresting, but they might care deeply about how to understand sacred texts. or they might care to recall how important sports were to their childhoods, to speak of the environments in which they are most at home, or to share how the loss of a child has changed their life. whatever the particulars, spivak suggests that what is unique about this experience is that in wanting to connect, one not only wants to understand and be understood, one also knows that this is impossible in any unconditioned sense. 13 a version of this same passage appears earlier in the translator’s preface to imaginary maps (spivak 1995, xxv). 14 i take the language of animate from maría lugones (1987, 10). lugones’s idea of the self suggests that although a person always experiences themself in the first person, they do not experience an underlying, true self. rather, various external and internal conditions allow one to animate different selves as one travels through worlds. mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 through such an experience with a new interlocutor, one does not require that the other share one’s experiences so much as one wants to think and feel one’s experiences anew through this engagement, and to come to understand theirs. however, it is in really trying to understand that the limits of understanding reveal themselves most forcefully. no matter what it is about this person that drew me to them, whatever our connection, we are not the same. each of our histories, contexts, personal reflections, fears, and hopes are discrete from each other’s, and there is no possibility for true transparency, for one-to-one translation from my life into the mind of another. the desire is there, to express one’s own perspective, to grasp the perspective of another, yet it is always somewhat frustrated. it is only by truly negotiating these differences that something like intimacy can develop. the moment i describe above is not the intimacy of a deep relationship. it is, however, an intimate and singular moment. spivak’s model for conceiving of ethical singularity is thus an engagement between two people, a dynamic interaction of sharing and becoming familiar that regrets what one can never know or understand about the other and about the self. spivak suggests this comportment can trouble, at least for a time, tropes of dominance. when that other person is allowed to “represent” something, to be a particular instance of “a person like that”—a person in a wheelchair, a person of color, a liberal or conservative person—the disingenuous impression that there is no more to the story precludes ethical interrelation and the integration of ethical analysis into political critique. training in reading, however, invokes the general from the position of the singular in the mode of an ethical teleopoiesis whose comportment is akin to the ethical engagement i describe above. singularity, on this analysis, breaks the tendency toward universalization common to theories that come out of western traditions. as she notes in “righting wrongs,” “…although i generalize, my example remains the singular. on the practical calculus, the problem of the singular and the universal is confronted by learning from the singularity of the singular, a way to the imagination of the public sphere, that rational representation of the universal” (spivak 2004, 542). what is at stake then is a way to reimagine the terrain of public discourse such that ethical singularity weighs on any demand for universal justice. spivak’s discussion of transnational feminisms in death of a discipline is particularly relevant for my analysis of us american feminism. there she offers a reading of virginia woolf’s a room of one’s own to demonstrate her concerns about universalization and the possibility of an unstable general account orienting a more ethical global critique. in order for a feminist project to not superimpose a preestablished idea of “woman” as the subject of feminism, the question of in the name of whom feminism works must be continually posed. the generalizable, not the universal, captures the movement of “poiesis trembling into the task of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 teleopoiesis,” an active making of meaning that turns back onto the self as part of an ethical engagement (spivak 2003, 43). in an ethical relation in which one gives in to a teleopoietic reading with another, the inability of two people to fully understand each other raises the question of how understanding oneself differently might bring the two closer. in the context of human rights work or feminist political critique, the impossibility of justice implies that one become ethically invested in remaking oneself along with the work of critiquing the world. conclusion if feminist philosophers engage spivak’s sense of ethical openness, i suggest that the complicity with structures of white supremacy that white feminists inevitably must negotiate can be negotiated more productively. the notion of ethical openness i explore here will not solve the problem of racist exclusion. however, i suggest that ethical openness is a subjective mechanism that people privileged by white supremacy can utilize in order to better hold themselves accountable to the ongoing need to work for inclusive theories. spivak’s work demonstrates that occupying the position of privilege actively, with self-awareness, is a constitutive element in the work of critiquing and reworking systems of privilege. such an intervention is necessary given that mainstream academic projects have struggled to rework the premises and methods of feminist philosophy such that the experiences and needs of less privileged people could be more meaningfully engaged. scholars of race, of disability, of sexuality, or class; scholars who engage gender in ways that press beyond the question of women; and nonacademics who have an existential stake in the questions academics pursue have repeatedly done the work to demonstrate the tendency of mainstream feminism to act in the name of privileged women. perhaps ironically, the work produced to critique these exclusions often helps feminist theory remain relevant both as an academic discipline and a cultural project, since some of this critical work, such as that of audre lorde, has been absorbed into the mainstream feminist canon. and yet, it seems that each new wave or stage in feminist movements in the united states has settled back into the pattern of refocusing the experiences of privileged women, specifically white us american women. given the enormous debt that all feminist philosophy owes to foundational texts—including, but certainly not limited to, accounts of sojourner truth’s (1998) argument for women’s rights to include racial justice in the speech called “ar’n’t i a woman?,” the revolutionary political program rooted in complex political identity introduced by the “combahee river collective statement” (combahee river collective 1983), and the indelible impact on the theorization of intersectional systems of power laid out in kimberlé crenshaw’s (1991) “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 color”—it is well past time to heed the call made by bell hooks (2000), among others, to centralize the margins of feminist theory. i have not intended to argue that political critique requires the intimacy of friendship or that political relations should be built on the model of ethical relations. it is specifically the reconsideration of subjectivity and complicity implied by spivak’s work that i argue will benefit feminist philosophy. feminists whose senses of self remain unchanged through the process of engaging political critique will remain unable to follow through with the work of social justice. it is easy for dominant power interests to co-opt and redirect the work of critical movements. it is also easy for individuals who set out to engage justice work to decide that an easier path to an easier victory is the strategic, expedient move, especially if they are benefitted. it can be easy to decide that other people can wait longer. feminist history in the united states teaches us that this error is unfortunately likely for racially privileged white feminists, given that complicity with oppressive structures is the place from which white us american feminists begin. to mitigate the impacts of such complicity, i suggest that feminist philosophy seek methods for reworking privileged subjectivity. in this paper, i engaged spivak’s work as one approach to beginning this project. in order to shift common north– south relations into the ethical, spivak advocates attending to singularity. this might require charting the connections between academic living and working in institutional contexts and the self-conscious voice of a scholar producing an academic text. the method of teleopoietic reading that spivak presents maintains a relationship between the singular and the general that does not require the subsumption of the particular to the universal. taking on the task of such engagement requires active work on oneself to cultivate openness to surprise both as a producer of theory and in one’s engagement with others; attending to epistemic discontinuities is a way to begin such self-work. as i have argued here, feminist political philosophy is better served when a theorist actively engages with the institutionally mediated conditions of their work as an ethical task. such a critique must be persistent, since there will never be a fully just argument, or institution, or nation, or world. critical philosophy, concerned with complicity and ethically engaged, should continually reopen the terms upon which the question of justice is pursued. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 references alcoff, linda martín. 1991. “the problem of speaking for others.” cultural critique, no. 20, 5–32. doi:10.2307/1354221. ———. 2001. “on judging epistemic credibility: is social identity relevant?” in engendering rationalities, edited by nancy tuana and sandra morgen, 53–80 albany: state university of new york press. best, beverley. 1999. “postcolonialism and the deconstructive scenario: representing gayatri spivak.” environment and planning d: society and space 17:475–494. doi:10.1068/d170475. brown, tammy l. 2018. “celebrate women’s suffrage, but don’t whitewash the movement’s racism.” american civil liberties union, august 24. https://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/celebrate-womens-suffragedont-whitewash-movements-racism. butler, judith p. 2005. giving an account of oneself. new york: fordham university press. clare, eli. 1999. exile and pride: disability, queerness and liberation. third impression edition. cambridge, ma: south end press. collins, patricia hill. 2008. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd edition. new york: routledge. combahee river collective. 1983. “the combahee river collective statement.” in home girls: a black feminist anthology, edited by barbara smith, 264–274. new york: kitchen table–women of color press. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1991. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43 (6): 1241– 1299. doi:10.2307/1229039. davis, angela y. 1983. women, race & class. 1st vintage books edition. new york: vintage. derrida, jacques. 1994. of grammatology. translated by gayatri chakravorty spivak. motilal banarsidass ———. 2006. the politics of friendship. translated by george collins. london: verso. dotson, kristie. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–138. doi:10.1080/02691728.2013.782585. fields-white, monee. 2011. “the root: how racism tainted women’s suffrage.” npr.org, march 25 https://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134849480/the-root how-racism-tainted-womens-suffrage. garry, ann, serene j. khader, and alison stone. 2019. introduction to the routledge companion to feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry, serene j. khader, and alison stone, 1–10. new york: routledge. giladi, paul, and nicola mcmillan. 2018. “introduction: epistemic injustice and recognition theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). doi:10.5206/fpq http://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/celebrate-womens-suffrage-donthttp://www.aclu.org/blog/womens-rights/celebrate-womens-suffrage-dontmcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 /2018.4.6227. hooks, bell. 2000. feminist theory: from margin to center. 2nd edition. cambridge, ma: south end press. jaimes guerrero, marie anna. 1996. “civil rights versus sovereignty: native american women in life and land struggles.” in feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, edited by m. jacqui alexander and chandra talpade 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medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr., 167–174. new york: routledge. mohanty, chandra talpade. 2003. feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. moraga, cherrie, and gloria anzaldúa, eds. 1983. this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color. 2nd edition. new york: kitchen table– women of color press. morris, rosalind c., ed. 2010. can the subaltern speak? reflections on the history of an idea. new york: columbia university press. morton, stephen. 2007. gayatri spivak: ethics, subalternity and the critique of postcolonial reason. cambridge: polity. npr (national public radio). 2011. “for stanton, all women were not created equal.” highlights of interview of lori ginzberg, by steve inskeep for morning edition. npr, july 13. https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137681070/forstanton-all-women-were-not-created-equal. ortega, mariana. 2006. “being lovingly, knowingly ignorant: white feminism and women of color.” hypatia 21 (august): 56–74. doi:10.1111/j.15272001.2006.tb01113.x. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 24 piepmeier, alison, amber cantrell, and ashley maggio. 2014. “disability is a feminist issue: bringing together women’s and gender studies and disability studies.” disability studies quarterly 34 (2). doi:10.18061/dsq.v34i2.4252. puar, jasbir k., and amit s. rai. 2002. “monster, terrorist, fag: the war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots.” social text 20 (3 [72]): 117–148. doi:10.1215/01642472-20-3_72-117. ray, sangeeta. 2009. gayatri chakravorty spivak: in other words. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. scheiner, corinne. 2005. “teleiopoiesis, telepoesis, and the practice of comparative literature.” comparative literature 57 (3): 239–245. jstor.org/stable /4122311. serano, julia. 2007. whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. seattle, wa: seal press. smith, barbara, ed. 1983. home girls: a black feminist anthology. new york: kitchen table–women of color press. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. 1988. “can the subaltern speak?” in marxism and the interpretation of culture, edited by cary nelson and lawrence grossberg, reprint edition, 271–313. urbana: university of illinois press. ———. 1993. outside in the teaching machine. new york: routledge. ———. 1995. translator’s preface to imaginary maps, by mahasweta devi, translated by gayatri spivak, xxiii–xxix. new york: routledge. ———. 1999a. a critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1999b. imperatives to re-imagine the planet (imperative zur neuerfindung des planeten). translated by willi goetschel. vienna: passagen verlag. ———. 2003. death of a discipline. new york: columbia university press. ———. 2004. “righting wrongs.” south atlantic quarterly 103 (2–3): 523–581. doi:10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-523. ———. 2006. in other worlds: essays in cultural politics. routledge classics edition. new york: routledge. ———. 2012. an aesthetic education in the era of globalization. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2014. readings. with a foreword by lara choksey. calcutta: seagull books. staples, brent. 2019. “when the suffrage movement sold out to white supremacy.” new york times, february 8, sec. opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/ 02/02/opinion/sunday/women-voting-19th-amendment-whitesupremacy.html truth, sojourner. 1998. “ar’n’t i a woman?” in lift every voice: african american oratory, 1787–1900, edited by philip sheldon foner and robert j. branham, mcauliffe – ethical openness in the work of gayatri chakravorty spivak published by scholarship@western, 2020 25 226–229. studies in rhetoric and communication. tuscaloosa: university of alabama press. yancy, george, ed. 2016. white self-criticality beyond anti-racism: how does it feel to be a white problem? reprint edition. london: lexington books. jana mcauliffe is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of arkansas at little rock, specializing in social-political philosophy and critical philosophies of gender, race, and class. her current research is focused on everyday politics as exemplified in taste, including “a taste for the political” in rejoinder and “she’s making profit now: neoliberalism, ethics, and feminist critique” in philosophia. 7574 mcauliffe title page 7574 mcauliffe final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation dean, megan. 2018. “eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 3. 2018 eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency megan dean georgetown university, mad301@georgetown.edu dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency1 megan dean abstract this paper argues that common social narratives about unhealthy eaters can cause significant damage to agency. i identify and analyze a narrative that combines a “control model” of eating agency with the healthist assumption that health is the ultimate end of eating. i argue that this narrative produces and enables four types of damage to the agency of those identified as unhealthy eaters. due to uncertainty about what counts as healthy eating and various forms of prejudice, the unhealthy eater label and its harms to agency are more likely to stick to some people than others and may reinforce patterns of oppression. i argue that fat people are especially vulnerable to this identification and the damage it can do. i then consider possible “counterstories” about unhealthy eaters, alternative narratives that might be less damaging to agency than the control narrative. i identify one promising counterstory but suggest that it may be limited when it comes to repairing damage to the agency of fat people. overall, this paper illustrates some of the complex ways that healthism about eating affects agency, and emphasizes the ethical importance of the ways we think about and discuss eating and eaters. keywords: eating, food ethics, unhealthy eating, unhealthy eater, agency, social narratives, damaged agency, identity, healthy eating, health, ethics of eating, fat, relational autonomy 1 my sincere appreciation to keith underkoffler, nabina liebow, rebecca kukla, kate withy, alison reiheld, catherine womack, cressida heyes, kristin rodier, the georgetown publication support group, and anonymous reviewers for their help with this paper. thanks to audiences at the 2016 meetings of feminist epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, and science studies, women’s and gender studies et recherches féministes, and the 2017 eastern apa for valuable comments on earlier iterations of these ideas. i am also very grateful to anne barnhill and the university of pennsylvania bioethics bootcamp, and the social sciences and humanities research council for their support of my research. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 in healthist contexts like the united states and canada, one of the central and most fundamental ways we categorize eating is as “healthy” or “unhealthy.” though they may not always be salient, these categories present themselves as applying to all eating, underlying all other possible designations. and as the wellworn cliché suggests, the way we eat is closely associated with who we are. (we might wonder whether it should be, though.) if all eating is healthy or unhealthy, we are all, in some sense, healthy or unhealthy eaters. in this paper i argue that common narratives about unhealthy eaters can be harmful. specifically, i contend that these narratives can significantly damage the agency of those identified as unhealthy eaters. i begin by identifying and analyzing a common narrative about the kind of person who eats unhealthily, which i call the “control narrative.” this narrative combines a pervasive view of the eater qua agent—what i call a “control model” of eating agency—with the healthist assumption that health is or should be the ultimate end of eating. within this narrative, unhealthy eating shows up as a sign that something has gone awry with the eater’s agency: perhaps her agency is undermined by ignorance, lack of selfcontrol, or a pathology of some sort. whatever the case, a good agent, properly functioning, would simply not eat unhealthily. drawing from work by hilde lindemann and alisa bierria, i argue that this narrative can damage the agency of those identified as unhealthy eaters in four ways: deprivation of opportunity, infiltrated consciousness, distorted action, and blocked identities. this potential damage should be especially concerning for feminists and others concerned with inequality and injustice because of uncertainty about what counts as healthy eating—and therefore who should be properly categorized as an unhealthy eater—but also because what does get counted as unhealthy eating is influenced by classism and racism. the “unhealthy eater” label, and its harms to agency, are therefore more likely to stick to some people than others and may reinforce patterns of oppression. in some cases, interactions between the control narrative and other common narratives can make the label particularly sticky and difficult to challenge. to illustrate this point, i draw out the ways that fat people are especially vulnerable to this identification and the damage it can do.2 in my view, the agency-related harms produced by the control narrative, and the pronounced way in which it affects vulnerable populations, present powerful reasons to reject that narrative. in the next sections of the paper i consider possible “counterstories” about unhealthy eating, alternative narratives that might be less damaging to agency than the control narrative and could be productively deployed 2 i am using “fat” as a neutral descriptor here, following scholars in fat studies and other fields who wish to avoid inherently pathologizing terms like “obesity.” dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 as a form of moral repair (lindemann nelson 2001b). i begin with two alternative accounts of the eater qua agent and suggest that while these accounts offer some benefits, insofar as they maintain the assumption that health should be the ultimate aim of eating, they remain damaging in significant ways. in the final section, i suggest that a situationist account of the eater combined with values-pluralism, a position that rejects the assumption that eating should be for the sake of health, produces a promising counterstory in several respects. however, this narrative too is limited, and may be particularly unhelpful when it comes to repairing damage done to the agency of fat people, who are particularly vulnerable to the harms of the control narrative. this demonstrates some of the challenges of deploying counterstories as a means for moral repair, and the necessity of taking an intersectional approach to such projects. in addition to contributing to the growing literature critiquing healthism (e.g., welsh 2011; cheek 2008; turrini 2015; metzl and kirkland 2010; van dyke 2018), this paper aims to illustrate some of the complex ways that healthism about eating affects agency. common bioethical debates about eating focus on the ways healthist policies and interventions may impinge upon the exercise of agency through limiting food choice. while i agree with anne barnhill and colleagues (2014) that the scope of these debates should extend far beyond concerns with individual agency, this paper shows that healthism can damage agency in more insidious ways than are often acknowledged. this paper also emphasizes the ethical importance of the ways we think about and discuss eating and eaters. narratives about eating and eaters, including the stories we tell about eating agency itself, are more than just descriptive: they can shape and even damage agency. as participants in conversations about eating and eaters, and particularly as feminist philosophers and bioethicists working on eating, we should take account of the ethical effects of our views and assumptions about how eaters eat and what kinds of people those eaters are. the control narrative a common assumption behind a good deal of media, “common sense,” policy, and health research and writing is that individuals are in control of and personally responsible for their eating (saguy 2012; kukla 2018; coveney 2006; crawford 1994; brownell et al. 2010; schwartzman 2015). this presupposes a certain model of the eater, an eater who makes food choices based on the information she has and her goals, values, and desires. i call this the “control model” of the eater. this eater “receives advice about what to eat (a diet plan) or it gathers information (for instance, about calories) that will allow it to make its own plans. in addition, it must somehow muster the motivation to act on these plans” (vogel and mol 2014, 308). motivation most readily comes from desire. but when the eater’s desires do feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 not lead her in the direction of her goals, she must use willpower and self-restraint to act rationally, that is, in the service of her own goals. a variety of factors, including advertising, social pressure, and desires, can undermine the eater’s self-control and her ability to eat rationally, but it is ultimately her own responsibility to minimize the impact of these bad influences on her behavior. her ability to secure and maintain self-control in the face of “temptation” is taken to reveal good character, especially strength of will. as rebecca kukla explains, “good people with the right character make good [food] choices. any other determinants of eating are marginal pressures that can be overcome by sufficiently virtuous eaters” (kukla 2018, 595). eating well—which, within healthist contexts means eating healthily—signals self-mastery, a characteristic assumed to be central not only to moral worth (gilson 2015, 30) but also civic responsibility (crawford 1994). because the eater is ultimately in control of her eating, or at least should be, she is responsible for its consequences. indeed, it is part of the control model that the eater is in some way responsible for her ability to act autonomously. you need to take responsibility for yourself, and if you are unable to do that on your own, then you need to seek out and accept help. this enables the moralization of both eating and, in healthist contexts, health. bad health (and being fat, a common proxy for bad health) is blameworthy because it is the result of one’s poor agency, as revealed by bad eating. and this is, or should be, under your control. when the control model of the eater is combined with healthism about eating, it produces what i call the “control narrative” about unhealthy eaters. to be clear, healthism in general is a paradigm made up of two key components: first, the assumption that health is a “monolithic, universal good” (metzl 2010, 9), and second, that individuals should be “actively engaged” in promoting their own health (turrini 2015, 18; cheek 2008). as talia welsh (2011) explains it, the central way for individuals to actively engage involves directing their “modifiable behaviors” toward health. along with bodily movement or exercise, eating is one of our central “modifiable behaviors.” healthism about eating, then, is the assumption that individuals should eat for the sake of health, above all else, and that eaters have a responsibility to make this happen. good eating is eating for health, and good eaters eat healthily. when this assumption is combined with the control model of the eater, it produces a narrative by which anyone who fails to eat healthily is either ignorant, misinformed, weak-willed, “mindless,” or pathological. perhaps the unhealthy eater is confused about whether butter or margarine is healthier, or if red wine is good for her. she may have undeniable cravings for cheese fries, or her willpower may fail in the face of the office bowl of candy. she might mindlessly snack on entire bags of chips while binge-watching tv, failing to make any conscious choice at all. she might dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 also be pathological—addicted to food, or living with an eating disorder—in which case her eating agency is deeply compromised, or perhaps (temporarily?) nonexistent. in any case, when an eater doesn’t eat in accordance with her own goals (health), it must be because she doesn’t have, or isn’t using, what good agency requires: adequate knowledge, adequate willpower or self-control, or adequate intention and awareness. in short, the control narrative characterizes unhealthy eaters as failed or flawed agents. unhealthy eating is a sign that something has gone wrong with the eater’s agency, and that she needs help. she should either help herself or acknowledge and welcome help from someone else. unlike narratives about eaters that connect ways of eating with personal commitments, social roles, or values (for example, “real men” eat meat, animal rights activists do not), this narrative posits that unhealthy eaters are not positively expressing their identities through eating. rather, unhealthy eating is an expression of the eater’s inability or failure to express herself through eating.3 unhealthy eating represents a failure or flaw that prevents the eater’s true self from shining through. to repair this, an unhealthy eater needs to educate herself, “pull up her socks,” pay closer attention to eating well, or admit she needs professional help to regain or repair her eating agency, and perhaps submit to paternalistic measures to force her to eat well.4 damaged identities, identity damage i contend that the control narrative about unhealthy eaters can do significant damage to the agency of those taken to be unhealthy eaters. this is because, as hilde lindemann argues, agency is shaped by identity, and identity is constructed, at least in part, through narratives. according to lindemann, social narratives about what it means to be this or that sort of person, what such persons typically do, and how those persons should be treated, play an important role in constructing identities. and a person’s identity—roughly, the kind of person she takes herself to be and others take her to be—has a significant impact on her agency. as lindemann characterizes it, agency is centered in “capacities, competencies, and intentions that 3 someone could say that this eating is revealing oneself, and that self is a flawed agent. but given the general societal narrative that we have “true” inner selves that need to be realized or achieved through self-control and work (heyes 2007), i do not think we generally regard being a flawed or failed agent as one’s true self. 4 note that my argument discusses the control model qua narrative and does not explicitly consider its accuracy as ways of describing the world. how accurate or true an account is (however one defines truth) is something that lends a narrative power, but it is not the only thing relevant to a narrative’s success. for the purposes of my argument here, i remain agnostic about which account of eating agency is true. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 lie within the individual” (lindemann nelson 2001b, 51), but the exercise and development of these capacities, competencies, and intentions is shaped by what the agent thinks is appropriate, expected, or available to her as a certain “kind” of person, how others expect and allow her to act, and how they understand her actions. and all of this is informed by social narratives. but there isn’t simply a top-down identity to agency relation of influence; identity and agency interact in more of a loop. agents “assess the accuracy” of their self-conceptions in light of their actions (lindemann 2014, 6) and may adjust their self-identifications accordingly. likewise, others may “confer” an identity on an agent because of how she acts or “de-confer” an identity that she previously held because her actions do not line up with that identity. these self-identifications and conferrals inform the agent’s actions and intentions, capacities, and competencies. in this way, identity and agency, informed by social narratives linking identities with actions, shape each other. many social narratives link different ways of eating to different kinds of people. anthropologists, sociologists, and food studies scholars have done a great deal of work cataloguing and interpreting the many ways food and eating are connected to racial, gender, ethnic, class, and other social identities. for example, for many white people, eating so called “ethnic” foods is a way to show adventurousness or cosmopolitanism (heldke 2003). and in many communities, if you are a “real man” you eat a lot of red meat and not a lot of vegetables (rothgerber 2013; ruby and heine 2011) or “rabbit food” (as my uncle calls them). who we understand ourselves to be, and who others understand us to be, affects how and what we eat; how and what we eat, in turn, influences who we understand ourselves to be and who others understand us to be. according to this account, identity shapes agency through social narratives. i have suggested that social narratives about eaters, including about what eating agency is like, are part of what constructs an identity. but identities can shape agency in more and less enabling ways. lindemann introduces the idea of a “damaged identity” as an identity composed of social narratives that “constrict” or “diminish” agency (lindemann nelson 2001b, 45). a damaged identity blocks recognition of someone as having full moral standing, as being worthy of respect as an agent, and so blocks possibilities for action and interaction that depend on that standing (lindemann nelson 2001a, xii). for example, “woman” is a damaged identity in societies where social narratives about women’s hysterical natures lead people to take women as less than fully rational agents. these narratives enable people to dismiss women’s actions as irrational and women’s statements as the incoherent or inconsequential ramblings of someone overtaken by hormones. when we think of women this way we tend not to trust them with certain socially valuable and important roles, such as being dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 the president of the united states. even more perniciously, these narratives may lead women to think of themselves, qua women, as unreliable or incompetent agents, and therefore the possibility of, for example, being a politician, is closed off to them “from the inside.”5 in this way, a damaged identity can limit what actions are available to you, which capacities you develop, how others take up your actions and what they allow you to do—which affects what you can accomplish—and what you even consider possible for you and others like you. one problem with the language of “damaged identity” is that it suggests that there are undamaged identities which enable the free exercise of agency (cf. lindemann nelson 2001b, 45). if so, our aim should be to ensure that everyone has one of those. but all identities constrict and constrain agency in certain ways, even when those identities are relatively privileged—consider everything that narratives about “real men” constrain people from doing. even generous narratives push us toward some actions more than others; indeed, this is one of the ways that identities enable agency, by making certain actions, capacities, and goals seem well within our grasp. but this effectively closes off, or at least makes less attractive and likely, certain other intentions, actions, projects, and the development of certain capacities.6 recognizing this, the interesting ethical question is not which identities are damaged and which are not, but in what ways a given identity—constituted as it is from social narratives—constrains and constricts agency, and to what degree? how sticky or stubborn and narrow or wide are these constraints? how difficult is it to challenge the narratives that construct this identity? focusing on these questions would lead us to work to identify the specific ways that identities place significant, narrow, stubborn, and recalcitrant constraints on agency, rather than looking for damaged identities in general. this is the task i take up in the next section by identifying four different types of damage that are produced and enabled by the control narrative about unhealthy eaters. four types of identity damage in contexts dominated by the control narrative, unhealthy eaters may be treated as incompetent eaters. an unhealthy eater may not be trusted to make eating decisions for herself. others may try to paternalistically control her eating, for 5 sandra bartky’s canonical work on psychological oppression offers us one way of fleshing out the idea that possibilities get closed off “from the inside” (1990). 6 alisa bierria (2014) also criticizes this tendency to conceptualize agency as either there or not there, damaged or undamaged. she recommends thinking of different types of agency, some of which may be available to an individual and some of which may not. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 example, by restricting what she buys, watching her when she eats, or requiring her to report her eating to them. this surveillance and control can prevent people from eating what they desire, exploring new cuisines, acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to select and prepare foods, cultivating and pursuing certain eating pleasures (welsh 2011; schwartzman 2015), and gaining the sorts of social goods that come along with sharing meals with each other. lindemann calls this type of constriction of agency “deprivation of opportunity” (lindemann nelson 2001b, 51). while in many contexts it is difficult to fully control others’ eating, those whose food is prepared or provided by others—like children, teens, people in institutions (schools, prisons, nursing homes), and people with certain disabilities (williamsforson and wilkerson 2011)—are particularly vulnerable to this type of constraint. the more that someone identified as an unhealthy eater is treated as incompetent, especially by people in positions of power and authority, the more likely she is to internalize that narrative, leading to “infiltrated consciousness” (lindemann nelson 2001b, 51). she may come to believe that her eating is out of control and that she is unable to make herself eat appropriately. she might, in other words, “lose confidence in [her] worthiness to be the author of [her] own conduct” (lindemann 2001b, 56), vis-à-vis eating. this self-understanding, caused, in part, by the way others perceive and treat her, ends up justifying the limits, constraints, and controls that others place on her. it can make an eater vulnerable to those who offer to control her eating for her, and to the exploitative and often dangerous diet industry which will sell her the technologies and tools she “needs” in order to eat in an acceptable way. someone might object here that surely some people who eat unhealthily are in fact flawed, failed, or non-agents. many people have had the experience of wanting to eat more healthily, setting that as a goal, and failing. this could be legitimately attributed to a lack of willpower, ignorance, or some other failure linked to agency. recognizing that one’s eating agency is limited or flawed and admitting the need for help may thus be a positive and necessary step. in some cases, being treated paternalistically may be appropriate and should not be understood as damage to agency, but as a way of helping someone achieve their ends.7 to be sure, this may sometimes be the case. some people are indeed ignorant about which ways of eating would help them achieve their eating goals (whether they want to eat more healthily or something else) and could use some 7 a version of this argument is put forward in sarah conly’s (2014) work, where she argues that paternalistic food policy and interventions actually help people be more autonomous, because as the flawed sorts of agents we are, we are often unable to actually achieve the goals and ends we set for ourselves (i.e., eating healthily) without such interventions. dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 education, while others may benefit from more self-awareness and self-control. certain eating disorders may undermine the agency of eaters in ways that can be fatal (and certain ways of eating may be fully agential but still harmful), which could justify paternalistic intervention as well as a self-conception as someone who needs such help. in such cases, self-understandings and paternalistic interventions may not be properly characterized as agency damage at all. but even if there are such cases, the problem is that the control narrative characterizes unhealthy eating in general as a sign of flawed, failed, or non-agency. it leaves very little space for unhealthy eating to mean anything else. this should make us nervous. for one, precisely what counts as healthy eating is not always clear. given ambiguities in the concept of health (van dyke 2018), and financial incentives for corporations and producers to have their diet or food product appear healthy, it may not be surprising that wildly different and sometimes incompatible ways of eating are lauded as healthy. healthy eating could mean counting calories, eating organic, following a mediterranean diet, avoiding gmos, or partaking in foods that “flush out” fat or “detox” your organs (klein and kiat 2015; mohammadi 2014; zeratsky 2015). even when the definition of healthy eating is narrowly circumscribed, uncertainty about what foods or diets meet its criteria persists. one dominant understanding of healthy eating is as nutritious eating: eating in accordance with nutritional guidelines and recommendations for certain amounts of vitamins, macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats), or calories (scrinis 2013). despite the fact that certain claims about nutritious eating (e.g., fruit and veggies are good: eat a lot of them) have remained constant for decades (nestle 2013), there is a widespread perception that nutritionists’ knowledge about what is healthy is in constant flux. we are told margarine is healthier than butter, then the opposite is true; red wine and chocolate are bad for you one day, then they are full of cancer-fighting antioxidants; carbohydrates are an essential part of a daily diet, but then they are accused of contributing to the so-called obesity crisis. this produces uncertainty (as well as anxiety) about what counts as healthy eating, which—as marion nestle argues—is encouraged by and benefits certain food corporations, producers, and lobbyists (nestle 2013). these ambiguities and uncertainties about what counts as healthy eating raise the possibility that some people who are taken to be unhealthy eaters might not be so in any meaningful sense.8 8 to be clear, what matters here is what gets perceived as healthy and unhealthy eating, which may be related but is not identical to what should count as healthy and unhealthy eating. for the purposes of this paper, this is because what matters is who gets perceived as an unhealthy eater and treated as such, not who is “really” an unhealthy eater. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 in addition, what gets counted as healthy food and eating is often inflected by race and class prejudice. for instance, fresh, local, organic vegetables are often held up as exemplars of healthy foods, while more affordable options like frozen or canned vegetables are ignored (kirkland 2011, 474; guthman 2008). white bread is derided as unhealthy, but baguettes are not subject to the same condemnation (kirkland 2011, 474). milk and other dairy products are promoted as an essential part of a healthy diet by the us and canadian governments, though many latinx and people of african heritage—indeed, most people whose heritage is not northern european—lose the ability to process dairy in adolescence (freeman 2013).9 this means that in some cases, people may be perceived as unhealthy eaters, and even understand themselves as such, because of prejudice rather than any legitimate criteria for determining the healthfulness of a diet. in addition to these concerns about false positives, we might also worry that some unhealthy eating is not accurately explained as a failure of agency. perhaps someone eats unhealthily, but is doing their best in a food context shaped by poverty and systemic racism. in that case, the unhealthy eating reflects a bad environment, not a bad agent. blaming the unhealthy eating on the agent’s failures rather than the oppressive environment individualizes systemic problems in a way that can re-entrench those problems and make them all but impossible to adequately address (reiheld 2015). another possibility is that someone who eats unhealthily simply does not prioritize health in their eating. we eat for many different reasons, not just health, and we might reject the assumption that health should be prioritized over other values. i will return to these alternative explanations for unhealthy eating shortly. for now, the key point is that it is not obvious that eating unhealthily is incompatible with good agency, but this is precisely what the control narrative suggests. the possibility that someone could be incorrectly identified as an unhealthy eater, or that unhealthy eaters could be incorrectly identified as flawed or failed agents, is important because infiltrated consciousness and deprivation of opportunity can affect anyone identified as an unhealthy eater, regardless of their actual status as an agent, and regardless of whether they eat unhealthily in any 9 nailing down accurate definitions of “healthy” and “unhealthy” eating, and figuring out whether and how these concepts might rid themselves of racism, classism, and other forms of prejudice, is outside the scope of this paper. it seems a worthwhile project to identify and articulate concepts of health that might be less problematic than others, but that is not my project here. what i am interested in are the consequences of dominant narratives about unhealthy eating (that is, what generally gets counted as such) and the “kind” of people these narratives describe and, in part, produce. dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 meaningful sense of the term. deprivation of opportunity depends only on others taking me to be an unhealthy eater and therefore an incompetent agent in need of help. but, as i have suggested, others could get it wrong. my unhealthy eating may be fully informed, intentional, and in service of my values and goals, or i may not eat unhealthily at all, even by mainstream standards. nonetheless, as lindemann writes: “we will be treated according to who we seem to be, even if that’s not who we are” (2014, 82). and if others regularly treat me as an incompetent agent, even if i am not, i may come to believe that i am. and thus, my agency may be damaged. the possibility of a mismatch between the way people perceive you and the way you are brings us to the third and fourth categories of identity damage caused by the control narrative about unhealthy eaters. according to alisa bierria (2014), an important part of agency is having our actions make sense to others. most of the time, we want our intentions, as expressed by our actions, to be clear to those around us. but what my actions mean in social space—and so, what my actions are—is partially determined by others. i don’t have sole authorship of them; others play an irreducible role in their authoring. as bierria explains, “even if an agent develops her intentions and acts accordingly, others who observe the agent's action also construct narratives of meaning about her actions, empowering them as social authors of her autonomous action" (2014, 131). this process of social authoring doesn’t always go smoothly. the way my actions are understood by others (or if they are understood at all) depends on what interpretive resources observers have available to them. when these resources are dominated by incomplete, prejudiced, or misleading narratives about a certain “kind” of actor or action, they can systematically distort the way observers understand actors’ intentions and actions. bierria gives the example of the way stereotypes and prejudices about black criminality in the united states systematically distort interpretation of black people’s actions (2014, 131). she explains that white people taking food from stores after hurricane katrina were described by media as “finding” food, while a black person doing the same thing was labelled a “looter” (bierria 2014, 132). this characterization of the black person’s actions is informed by racist social narratives, which enabled the media to project “phantom intentions” of criminality onto the black person in question. through the social authorship of action, she may end up “acting” in ways she never meant to act—that is, what she does, as it is understood in social space, is made criminal— and what she actually meant to do and understood herself as doing, like finding food to survive, is erased (bierria 2014, 133). in a similar way, the control narrative can distort how observers interpret the eating of those identified as unhealthy eaters. this eating is viewed as a sign that the eater’s agency is flawed or nonexistent, rather than as a reflection of her identity, values, preferences, and the like. because the categories of “healthy” and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 “unhealthy” eating can be understood as superseding all other categorizations and characterizations of eating, they have the power to undermine all other interpretations of that eating. but, again, if we may eat unhealthily in an agential way, or what gets counted as unhealthy eating is a result of uncertainty or prejudice, this is a problem. it means that the categorization of eating as unhealthy may distort the eater’s action, and thus the further characterization of that eating as a sign of troubled agency is also a distortion. this is the third way that the control narrative constricts agency: it can distort unhealthy eaters’ attempts to eat as they intend or to have their eating mean what they want it to. unhealthy eaters’ intentions and their own understandings of their actions are displaced or erased, and their eating is reconstructed into evidence of failed, flawed, or non-agency (bierria 2014, 134). the fourth form of damage to agency arises from the deeply intertwined relationship between agency and identity. recall that others confer identities on us in virtue of our actions, including our eating. but if you continually fail to take my eating as i mean it, then you will not take it to reflect the identities i am attempting to live out through my eating, and will not confer them on me. i will be unable, in a significant sense, not only to act in the way i intend but to be who i am trying to be. it is true that we can take on identities first-personally, by self-identifying in ways that others don’t acknowledge. but identities also have a third-personal component; they require social recognition (lindemann 2014, 4). without this recognition, our ability to inhabit or at least maintain most identities is limited. by distorting interpretations of eating, the control narrative can obstruct unhealthy eaters from taking on certain identities. but deprivation of opportunity and infiltrated consciousness can also obstruct identities. depriving eaters of opportunities to eat can literally prevent them from eating in ways that would enable them to inhabit, or be recognized as inhabiting, certain identities. and infiltrated consciousness can take the possibility of certain actions, and therefore certain identities, off the table “from the inside.” as mentioned earlier, there are many different racial, gender, ethnic, and other sorts of identities linked to ways of eating. those identified as unhealthy eaters could be precluded from inhabiting these identities if the eating associated with the identity is blocked, precluded, or interpreted as a sign of failed, flawed, or non-agency rather than the identity in question. but the central identity obstructed by the control narrative is “healthy eater.” being a healthy eater is associated with being a responsible citizen and a good person overall, not to mention a good agent (coveney 2006; crawford 1994; kukla 2018). by blocking this identity, and thereby these associations, the control narrative deeply constrains the agency of those identified as unhealthy eaters. this can affect an eater’s actions, intentions, and the cultivation of her capacities in many areas of life, not just with regard to eating. this dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 might be one of the most significant ways that the control narrative about unhealthy eaters can damage agency. who is an unhealthy eater? anyone identified as an unhealthy eater may have their agency damaged by the control narrative. however, because what gets counted as health and healthy behaviour is not only uncertain but inflected with classism and racism, some people are more likely to be identified as unhealthy eaters than others, and the label may stick to different people in more and less restrictive ways. in addition, the effects of the control narrative can be modulated by interactions with other social narratives. for example, the label may be less likely to stick to men than women because of stereotypes associating masculinity with indifference, and even antagonism, toward health (springer and mouzon 2011; courtenay 2000). if men eat unhealthily, their eating may be understood as expressive of their masculinity, rather than reflective of their damaged agency. at the very least, this narrative opens up space to reinterpret men’s eating so that it is not automatically or permanently understood as a failure of agency. women, however, are often expected to be responsible not only for their own eating and health but for the eating and health of their families (reiheld 2015). the label of unhealthy eater may not only be more likely to stick to women than men, but a woman may be subject to the assumption that she is a flawed or failed agent because of the way her family eats, not just because of her own eating. i suggest that “unhealthy eater” sticks to and affects fat people in particularly stubborn ways. despite the fact that the connection between eating and body size is deeply complex (bombak 2014; campos et al. 2006), it is widely assumed that a fat body is the result of unhealthy eating. this assumption appears in almost all the academic and mainstream literature on fat, whether the authors think that unhealthy eating is caused by lack of willpower, ignorance, the eater’s proximity to convenience stores and fast food outlets, or their failure to read the latest diet book.10 while these authors may come to different conclusions about what ultimately explains unhealthy eating, they share the common and pervasive assumption that a fat body is almost always caused by unhealthy eating. given this narrative, it is highly likely that a fat person will be taken as an unhealthy eater, 10 as alison reiheld writes, “with rare exceptions, to discuss obesity as it has been framed [by the medical establishment] is to discuss a disease that is related to food. here . . . the old saying applies: it is the exceptions that prove the rule” (2015, 231). some exceptions include most work in the field of fat studies, julie guthman’s work on toxins as possible contributors to “obesity” (2013), and folks working in the health at every size movement (bacon 2010). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 regardless of her actual eating practices. whether the person eats healthily or not, others will confer on her the identity of unhealthy eater simply because of the size of her body. moreover, because the association of fat bodies with unhealthy eating is so pervasive, and alternative explanations for fatness are so rarely considered, attempts to correct this conferral are likely futile. when there is a misreading of an agent’s intention, reparative strategies can often be used to reauthor the action in a more accurate way (bierria 2014). for example, say i hand you a book, and you think i have given it to you to read. you say, “i don’t want this book,” but i just want you to hold it so i can answer my phone. to correct this misreading, i can explain my intentions to you, a third party can explain it to you (“she just needs to answer her phone”), or you may be prompted to use your imagination and rethink what i am doing, perhaps when i meet your comment with a blank stare and proceed to answer my phone. these methods could be used to correct misreadings of “unhealthy eating” (“i don’t usually eat entire pies in one sitting, but today is march 14, pi day!”). but when there are systematic misinterpretations of the actions of those bierria calls “disenfranchised agents” due to widespread prejudice, these agents often do not have recourse to reparative strategies (bierria 2014, 132). attempts by the actor to explain or prompt reinterpretation might be preempted, ignored, or dismissed as lies. others are unlikely to step in and explain, since they are likely drawing from the same set of prejudiced narratives. in such cases, the interpreter is unlikely to see a need for reinterpretation, even if the actor or a third party does protest. this is often the case with fat people’s eating. there is widespread cultural and institutional enforcement of the idea that fat people get fat because they eat unhealthily. it is simply “common sense,” backed up by government and medical institutions (not to mention media and diet companies), that fat people get fat by eating poorly.11 as samantha murray writes: "we exist in a culture of a negative collective 'knowingness' about fatness. . . . we presume we know the histories of all 11 empirical research catalogs some of these “common sense” beliefs, many of which pertain to perceived flaws in fat people’s agency. review articles looking at prejudice and discrimination against fat people found widespread perceptions of fat people as lacking in self-discipline, and that medical professionals found “obese” people to be noncompliant, “indulgent,” and lacking “willpower” (puhl and brownell 2001; puhl and heuer 2009). studies have shown that educating people about the complex causes of fatness can reduce “obesity bias” (pearl and lebowitz 2014; hilbert 2016), while educating people about alleged “controllable” contributors to fatness has been found to increase it (teachman et al. 2003). dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 fat bodies, particularly those of fat women; we believe we know their desires (which must be out of control) and their will (which must be weak)" (2005, 154). because alternative explanations of fatness are few and far between, many observers cannot draw on them to inform their interpretations or produce the “productive self-doubt” (bierria 2014, 132) that would prompt reinterpretation. instead, when alternative explanations are raised, they are likely to be characterized as excuses rather than legitimate explanations, undercutting their power to force or inform reinterpretation. the hegemony of the “unhealthy eating causes fat” narrative means that when the testimony of fat people about their own eating does not concur with that narrative, it is dismissed as obviously false or deluded. 12 as the blogger “your fat friend” writes: being called a liar—openly—has become a regular feature of my life as a fat person. any answer i offer about my body, the food i eat, the way i feel, or the regularity with which i move is answered with a dismissal. . . . these questions—about diet, exercise, worth and will—have no answers that will satisfy their askers. my words have already been betrayed by the believed brokenness of my body. . . . there is nothing i can say to counter the assumptions attached to my wide, soft frame. (your fat friend 2017). and even when well-established medical authority provides an alternative explanation that will be accepted within the control narrative—say the fatness is understood to be out of the person’s control because of a thyroid condition, and she is seeing a doctor about it—the presumption that the individual is fat because she eats too much will need to be cancelled out again and again and again. for these reasons, fat people as a group are particularly likely to be identified as unhealthy eaters and subjected to the forms of damaged agency that i have described. to be clear, this is not to say that fat people do not have agency at all, or that their agency is necessarily damaged. rather, the combination of the control narrative about unhealthy eaters and the assumed link between fatness and unhealthy eating makes fat people particularly susceptible to the damage that may accompany being labeled as an unhealthy eater and leaves them with few effective means of avoiding those harms. 12 ragen chastain (2011) calls this phenomenon the “but but but syndrome.” assumptions about fat people’s eating, exercise behaviors, or health status may be challenged with evidence (such as testimony, athletic achievements, or medical test results) but this evidence is discounted or rejected because it doesn’t fit the assumptions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 this situation may contribute to and reinforce the oppression that fat people experience in north american society (eller 2014; farrell 2011).13 it may also compound other forms of oppression and inequality. fat people are a diverse group, and interactions between the control narrative, the “fat is caused by unhealthy eating” narrative, and narratives about race, gender, class, ethnicity, ability, and the like may amplify damaging effects on agency. for example, sexist narratives about women as emotional, irrational, and lacking in self-control, and sexist and racist narratives about black women as irresponsible (collins 2000), may reinforce interpretations of women’s apparent unhealthy eating as failures of agency. this may make it even more difficult for fat women, and fat black women in particular, to shake off the unhealthy eater label or force reinterpretations of their eating, even if there are alternative interpretations available. as we will discuss shortly, such interactions between narratives not only make some people particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of the control narrative but present challenges for projects of moral repair. counterstories: alternative models of the eater i have argued that the control narrative about unhealthy eaters can damage agency by informing how others identify, perceive, and treat unhealthy eaters, and how these individuals understand themselves. in my view, these damaging effects 13 it should be noted while being fat might make you particularly vulnerable to the harms associated with being identified as an “unhealthy eater,” given the racism and classism involved in identifying health and healthy eating, being “thin” does not in itself get you off the hook. being thin does, for some people, offer protection from identification as an unhealthy eater. thin people may be better able to force reinterpretation of their unhealthy eating, or that eating may be taken as a momentary lapse in agency, rather than a chronic condition. as julie guthman writes in her discussion of kathleen lebesco’s work, “fat people are imbued with little subjectivity no matter what they do, while thin people are imbued with heightened subjectivity no matter what they do” (guthman 2007, 78). though i have not found any research on the subject, i suspect that class and race come into play with who gets off the hook here; for instance, low-income white folks may be less likely to be seen as healthy eaters no matter how “normal” their bmi. their thinness may be attributed to smoking or drug use rather than good eating practices, regardless of their actual engagement in any of those activities. also, if those promoting the idea of “skinny fat” (castañon 2016) or “normal-weight central obesity” (sahakyan et al. 2015) get their way, the assumption that thinness equals health will be broken (while, at the same time, the link between fat and ill-health is reinforced). dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 and the pronounced way in which they affect vulnerable populations, like fat people, present powerful reasons to reject the control narrative. this is not to suggest that such effects should be our only consideration when deciding between accounts of eating agency or of what counts as good eating, just that they should be included. in any case, there are other good reasons to abandon the control narrative. for example, feminists have criticized the dualism and antagonism toward the body inherent in the control model (bordo 2003, 144–146), and the way it undervalues or completely ignores how relationships and context shape, constrain, and enable agency (mackenzie and stoljar 2000; reiheld 2015; gilson 2015). food and health scholars have also criticized the control model because it is apparently unable to produce effective eating interventions and fails to adequately explain the apparently massive shifts in eating habits over recent decades in the us (brownell et al. 2010). in light of these issues, alternative accounts of the eater have begun to gain traction in eating and health research and in the media. these accounts might be useful as “counterstories,” narratives that challenge and potentially replace dominant, damaging narratives (lindemann nelson 2001b, 45). since there is no such thing as an undamaged identity, we are not seeking narratives that do not constrain or constrict agency in any way. rather, we want a counterstory that is, at least, less damaging than the dominant narrative and, ideally, more enabling than constrictive. to this end, i now consider two alternative accounts of the eater and the effects of their characterizations of unhealthy eaters on agency. the environmental model in response to the failures of traditional approaches to solving the “obesity crisis” (hill and peters 1998; egger and swinburn 1997), an environmental model of eating agency was developed in the 1990s. it has since become popular among some public health researchers as a corrective to the nearly exclusive focus on individual-level factors as determining eating (and other) behaviour (brug et al. 2008; larson and story 2009; glanz and mullis 1988). broadly speaking, the environmental model draws attention to features of the environment that influence what are considered the two main areas of behaviour contributing to fatness: eating (energy input) and exercise (energy output).14 these environmental features include food policy and regulations, subsidies, the types of stores and restaurants near one’s school, work, or home, one’s income, cultural norms, and family traditions. while the control model allows that the environment can influence eating (framing it as something that a virtuous eater will overcome, if need be), the 14 this presumes an “energy-balance model” of obesity. guthman questions the validity of this model (2013), but it is widely taken for granted. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 environmental model emphasizes that environmental influences can preclude or compromise individual control over eating. proponents of the environmental model argue that contemporary environments—often called “obesogenic” or “toxic” environments (brownell and horgen 2004, 7)—undermine our ability to exercise our eating agency. these environments are broadly characterized as abundant in easily accessible, tasty, inexpensive, intensely marketed, “energy-dense,” but innutritious foods, and a variety of social and cultural forces that encourage or at least fail to discourage regular consumption of large portions of these foods. there are two key ways that contemporary environments compromise eating agency. first, they limit which foods are available for people to choose from. in “food deserts”—residential areas where healthy items are not readily available or affordable and fast foods and convenience foods are—choosing healthy foods is practically and economically difficult because they simply aren’t there to choose from.15 second, the environment “hijacks” human biology and physiology (brownell et al. 2010, 381–382). the story here is that humans evolved to survive in conditions of scarcity, which means that we are predisposed to eat large amounts of energydense foods when they are available and to store this energy in the form of fat (brownell and horgen 2004, 25). in the toxic contemporary environment, energydense foods are plentiful and constantly available, and we rarely encounter periods of scarcity. since our biology “naturally” makes it nearly impossible for us to resist these ubiquitous sweets and “junk food” (contento et al. 2007, 180), it is no surprise that we eat so much of it. in addition to the omnipresence of palatable innutritious foods that satisfy our “innate biological predispositions” (contento et al. 2007, 180), certain forms of marketing may also bypass our agency and “tap directly” into our bodies (brownell et al. 2010, 385). while it seems logically possible to conceive of an environmental account of eating agency that does not make healthist assumptions about eating, the environmental model was developed and continues to be widely promoted and deployed within a healthist framework. a healthist environmental narrative about unhealthy eating attributes that eating to an unfortunate combination of practical limitations, our natural predilection for certain foods, and the toxic environment. one important implication of this narrative is that unhealthy eaters should not be blamed for their poor eating. personal responsibility is (at least ostensibly) not the focus. rather, it is the environment that is primarily to blame, and it is the task of 15 “food desert” is defined differently by different researchers (walker, keane, and burke 2010). it generally refers to neighbourhoods with fewer supermarkets, which are assumed to have a better selection of healthy foods at reasonable prices, and more fast food outlets and/or convenience stores. dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 governments, corporations, public health organizations, and other collective bodies to alter that environment so people will eat better.16 one benefit of shifting responsibility away from the individual is that it undermines the moralization of unhealthy eating. given that many of the targets of “antiobesity” programs are low-income women of color (guthman 2013, 143), some feminists and antiracists have found this feature particularly appealing (yancey, leslie, and abel 2006). in terms of agency, shifting responsibility to the environment interrupts the association between being an unhealthy eater and being a flawed or failed agent. instead, it makes unhealthy eating not really agential at all. that said, personal responsibility for eating is not entirely absent from this account. feminist critics have argued that it shows up in implicit explanations of how some people manage to eat well despite living in toxic environments (guthman 2007; kirkland 2011). if we assume that obesogenic environments are ubiquitous, healthy eaters in such environments must be good agents, able to fend off the encroachment of the environment, while unhealthy eaters cannot. as guthman writes: “if junk food is everywhere and people are all naturally drawn to it, those who resist it must have heightened powers” (2007, 78). this is troubling since most of those assumed to eat unhealthily are members of low-income minority populations. we thus end up with a narrative in which wealthier, thinner, white people have good eating agency while poorer people of colour do not have eating agency at all: “members of one group move powerfully through the world determining their body sizes and health statuses; others are pitiably stuck within and determined by the environment" (kirkland 2011, 467–477). alternatively, if we suppose that only certain environments, such as food deserts, are toxic, then only those living in those environments are precluded from exercising their eating agency. but food deserts are generally understood to be lowincome areas, so this produces a similar story about agency. poor people’s eating agency is negated by their environment, while wealthy people, living in nontoxic (clean?) environments, can exercise their eating agency unimpeded by environmental factors.17 16 personal responsibility for eating is simply postponed, not eliminated entirely. the promise is that without the corrupting influence of an obesogenic environment, people will be better able to exercise their eating agency, which (given healthist assumptions) means they will eat more healthily, or at least, they will be properly personally responsible for their own unhealthy eating (brownell et al. 2010, 383– 384). 17 it is possible that one could take an environmental model that denies anyone really has eating agency and that eating is generally determined by the environment. perhaps those who do eat healthily despite “junk food” being feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 an environmental narrative about unhealthy eaters undercuts some of the damage done to agency by the control narrative. rather than taking unhealthy eating as a sign of a flawed or failed agency, we can attribute it to the environment. but understanding unhealthy eating as something that is not agential can lead to its own forms of deprivation of opportunity and infiltrated consciousness. given this understanding, institutions can easily justify interventions into unhealthy eaters’ lives because they are clearly unable to help themselves eat better. and if i come to understand my own eating in this way, why would i bother to try to change it myself? i may therefore welcome outside interventions and paternalistic control of my eating, understanding myself to be unable to do any better. this account can also lead to distorted actions and blocked identities in much the same way as the control narrative. others will not interpret my unhealthy eating as reflective of my identity or values. such eating is nothing more than a product of a toxic environment. and this will prevent me from constructing an identity other than “unhealthy eater” in and through my eating.18 in these respects, the environmental narrative about unhealthy eaters is not much better than the control narrative. the situationist model another model of the eater is the “situationist model,” which draws on situationist psychology and has been popularized through the work of brian wansink and “nudge” proponents richard thaler and cass sunstein.19 implicit in this work is “everywhere” are in different “microenvironments” than those who do not. (this explanation raises problems with defining the limits of an environment, since there will be people in the same household who, on this explanation, must live in different microenvironments). this would mean that no one is really a better eating agent than anyone else, which would undercut some of the harm. but unhealthy eaters would still be singled out for intervention because their eating is problematic; they would still need help from others, whereas healthy eaters would not. 18 because an environmental account is not often presented as a general theory of agency but only of eating (and exercise), this denial of agency and identity may not bleed into other areas of life. but this is a significant constriction on agency, even if confined to eating. 19 wansink’s work has recently been criticized for a variety of significant methodological problems and self-plagiarism. this has led to the retraction of six articles in addition to multiple corrections, as of march 2018 (lee 2018). it’s not clear that this undermines the viability of the situationist model of the eater, as the retracted work was less about the model itself than about particular instances of it at work (e.g., looking at which particular environmental features had which dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 an account of an eater who has some control over their eating, but this control is attenuated by unavoidable openness to environmental cues and the use of nonconscious cognitive shortcuts. for example, how much we eat at a given meal is rarely determined by careful calculation or measurement. instead, we tend to use informal consumption norms, which are influenced by a variety of factors including how many people you eat with, who those people are (e.g., strangers or friends and family), how much they eat, the size of the plate or bowl you use, and the size of the portion served (hermans et al. 2012; herman, roth, and polivy 2003). though we may think that “internal” factors like hunger and satiety are the most important determinants of how much we eat, these factors are often overridden by the environmental cues shaping the consumption norms in a particular context. we generally do not notice the influence that these features have on our judgments about how much to eat and how much we ate (spanos et al. 2014, 1487). for instance, in a study by hermans and others, most of the participants claimed to have eaten an amount typical for them when the study showed that the amount they ate was altered by both portion size and how much their eating companion ate (hermans et al. 2012, 593). simply knowing that the environment affects your behaviour in this way does little to stop it from determining the way in which you eat. nevertheless, individuals can take steps to manipulate their environments to help them eat in accordance with their goals. rather than insisting we just use our knowledge and willpower to overcome “temptation” and the influence of our environments, we can strategically use our openness to the environment to make ourselves eat in accordance with our values. brian wansink offers many tips and strategies for how to do this: use smaller plates, decide how much to eat before your meal rather than during it, keep healthy snacks like fruit visible and hide unhealthy foods in cupboards, and so on (wansink 2004, 471–472). this focus on the possibility of individual control distinguishes the situationist model of eaters from the environmental model.20 whereas the environmental model deemphasizes personal responsibility while emphasizing the need for broad, structural changes, the situationist model suggests that individuals can and should particular effects on eating). that said, wansink’s disgrace may undermine the narrative force of the situationist account as it is so closely associated with him. 20 the models may be compatible (kelly brownell and colleagues (2010) promote both, for instance); a situationist model might be understood as a fleshing out of the ways microenvironmental features affect individuals. this would be welcome for proponents of the environmental account, given that environmental accounts are lacking in theoretical explanations of why certain features affect behaviour in the way they are assumed to do (brug et al. 2008). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 take personal responsibility for their eating—at least to a certain extent. we may not be able to block the environment from influencing us, but we can shape that environment so it influences us in ways we endorse. in this way, we are less personally responsible for eating a whole bag of chips once it is opened (consumption norms make it difficult for us to stop) and more personally responsible for failing to arrange our environment in ways conducive to good eating (i.e., not getting our hands on that bag in the first place). the situationist model avoids the problematic suggestion that healthy eaters are superior agents with “heightened powers” while others have no eating agency at all. instead, it requires only the claim that all humans use cognitive shortcuts. that’s just how we are; it is not a feature that belongs to some and not others. moreover, this model is optimistic about personal control; there is room for eaters to take control of their eating, just in a roundabout way. individuals can employ a variety of tactics to modify their eating by modifying their environments, though there may be limits to what an individual can accomplish given that no one can fully control their own environment. a situationist account does not rule out that some people may eat unhealthily due to flaws in agency, like lack of willpower or self-control. it simply offers a variety of alternative explanations. unhealthy eating may be attributable to a lack of understanding about what needs to be done (perhaps one is stuck thinking that willpower alone will do the trick), a lack of good strategy to make the desired change, or environmental factors outside of one’s control. those who have proper strategies may have difficulties implementing them due to time, ability, or resource constraints. it may not be physically difficult for most of us to move things around in our cupboards, but if we do not have time to do it or the money to pay someone else to, it may not get done.21 and in some cases, the changes required to eat better are outside of any individual’s control, as with food deserts or even with cafeterias structured to induce overeating. here, institutions, collectives, and others who have the power to make these broader changes will need to step in. there are some clear benefits to the situationist narrative. for one, it offers a variety of possible explanations for unhealthy eating, opening up space for contestation and reinterpretation. while eating unhealthily could be due to lack of self-control or ignorance, it might also be due to a poorly organized kitchen, or plates that are very large. because kitchen organization, plate size, and many of the other environmental factors that supposedly cause unhealthy eating are things eaters might change, eaters may be less likely to internalize the idea that they have no hope of controlling their own eating. even if the changes needed are out of an 21 for those with certain physical disabilities or chronic pain, reorganizing the cupboards may be well out of the realm of physical possibility. dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 23 individual’s reach, at least the blame can be displaced from agency and onto the environment.22 individuals may be better enabled to reject attempts to control their eating if they believe they can make the necessary tweaks on their own or believe that the problem is with the environment and not with themselves. that said, a situationist narrative may helpfully widen the range of possible explanations of unhealthy eating, but insofar as it fails to challenge the assumption that eating should be for health, it maintains one crucial and harmful constraint on agency: unhealthy eating cannot show up as an expression of good agency or one’s identity or values. any account that precludes the possibility that unhealthy eating may express an individual’s identity or values can lead to distorted eating and blocked identities. but not all deployments of the situationist account make this healthist assumption. in nudge, richard thaler and cass sunstein are careful to reject the idea that good eating must be healthy eating. following from their libertarian commitments, they insist that people should be free to prioritize other values in their eating and other behaviours (2009, 5). this produces a valuespluralist situationist narrative about unhealthy eaters. in the next and final section of the paper, i consider how such a narrative might function as a counterstory. counterstories: values-pluralist situationism despite the prominence of healthism about eating, many people seem to have pluralist intuitions about eating. for example, many people think that pleasure is an important eating value, in addition to health (kukla 2018; welsh 2011; noë 2012). empirical research suggests that people also see eating as related to taste, ethics, cost, convenience, identity, and social relationships (connors et al. 2001; bisogni et al. 2002; devine et al. 1999). in line with these intuitions, some philosophers have pushed back on healthism about eating by suggesting that what is ethically important about eating is that individuals are able to autonomously pursue their own values through that eating, which may or may not include or prioritize health (noë 2012; bonotti 2015; thaler and sunstein 2009). i call this position “values-pluralism” about eating. values-pluralism does not preclude the possibility that unhealthy eating could be a breakdown of agency, but it enables an alternative positive interpretation of that eating. values-pluralists cannot assume that someone is a flawed or failed agent when they eat unhealthily. rather, they must always ask whether the person has autonomously chosen to pursue a value other than health through their eating. 22 that said, neoliberal individualizing and responsibilizing narratives may make people feel it is their fault for not having the time or money or energy to take care of themselves by altering their environments in the necessary way. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 24 eating deep fried oreos on a regular basis may be good agency at work, if the agent prioritizes pleasure and finds that dish intensely pleasurable (noë 2012). while values-pluralist arguments often rely on something like a control model of the agent (at least implicitly), thaler and sunstein combine it with their situationist model of agency. as we have already discussed, the situationist model increases the number of possible explanations for unhealthy eating as well as avenues for addressing unwanted unhealthy eating. if we add the possibility that unhealthy eating could be good agency at work, we undercut the major limitation i identified with the healthist situationist narrative: unhealthy eating could show up as a reflection of identity and values. a values-pluralist situationist narrative would thereby not only increase the number of possible explanations of unhealthy eating but also enable unhealthy eaters to understand their unhealthy eating as agential, making them less vulnerable to those who would take advantage of them or try to control their eating. and it may also make people more open to interpreting others’ unhealthy eating as reflective of someone’s identity, character, and values, rather than their ignorance, lack of willpower, or nonexistent eating agency. in these respects, a values-pluralist situationist narrative about unhealthy eaters seems a quite promising counterstory. that said, i have some significant reservations about the power of this narrative as a means of moral repair. in particular, i suspect that it is limited in its ability to repair the agency of fat people, who, as i have argued, are especially vulnerable to the harms of the control narrative. recognizing that the effects of a narrative on agency are modulated by interactions with other narratives, i suggest that fat people will be unlikely to benefit from this narrative for at least two reasons. first, ableism may prevent fat people from being recognized as (or recognizing themselves as) agential unhealthy eaters.23 even if we agree that individuals may legitimately prioritize values other than health, ableist assumptions about the value of able-bodiedness may lead us to believe that when someone’s health is at risk or already compromised, the rational thing to do is prioritize health. in other words, intuitive sympathy for values-pluralism about eating may dissolve when the eater in question is sick, disabled, or perceived to be at high risk of illness or disability. this affects fat people because according to the american medical association, obesity is a disease (pollack 2013). it is repeatedly and often urgently proclaimed that being fat “causes” or at least (and somewhat more accurately) is associated with serious illness, disability, and early death. according to an ableist narrative, then, even if some people can legitimately prioritize nonhealth values in their eating, fat people—some of whom are by definition diseased, and all of whom 23 for a discussion of ableism and its links to other forms of oppression, see robert mcruer (2013). dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 25 are widely assumed to be at risk for bad health if not already unhealthy—should prioritize health. otherwise they are irrational, which pushes them into the flawed or failed agent category. second, even if fat people do get counted as agential unhealthy eaters, the identity or values their eating is taken to reflect may be bad, as in sinful, corrupt, or irresponsible. david mela claims that over 50 years of scientific research has been premised on the idea that “obese” people must get more pleasure out of food than “nonobese” people do, which explains why they (allegedly) eat so much even to the (alleged) detriment of their health (mela 2006). this suggests that if fat people’s unhealthy eating is taken as agential, it is likely to be attributed to a pursuit of pleasure. as rebecca kukla argues, our ethical evaluations of pleasure-seeking through food are complicated at best (2018). who gets to be hedonistic without being judged a morally corrupt or irresponsible person is deeply coloured by classism, racism, and other forms of prejudice. for instance, thin, beautiful french women seem welcome to be hedonists, perhaps in part because their food pleasures presumably revolve around copious amounts of brie and wine, and they are assumed to remain beautiful despite (or even because of) their eating practices. on the other hand, low-income, fat americans, whose tastes are presumed to fall more into the junk food and fast food range, seem more likely to be judged as irresponsible or gluttonous. in this case, a values-pluralist situationist narrative may simply push the object of criticism from an unhealthy eater’s failed, flawed, or nonexistent eating agency to her bad character or values. and being understood a bad person can have its own damaging effects on agency. conclusion one of the goals of this paper was to illustrate some of the complex ways that healthism about eating affects agency. as noted in the introduction, conversations about agency and the ethics of eating often exclusively focus on the ways policies and interventions can impinge on the exercise of agency through food choice. but i have suggested that healthist narratives can also affect agency in significant ways. i have argued that the common control narrative about unhealthy eaters may damage the agency of those identified as such in four different ways. i suggested that two prominent alternative accounts of eating agency—the environmental model and the situationist model—are not much better, at least on their own. a values-pluralist situationist narrative holds some promise, but i have suggested that it is limited in its ability to repair the agency of some of those most vulnerable to the harms of the control narrative, namely fat people. this discussion emphasizes that any project of repair featuring counterstories needs to be responsive to the dynamic nature of social narratives and their intersectional effects on identity and agency. it also highlights that a single feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 26 counterstory is unlikely to be sufficient to repair the agency of those whose identities are constructed out of, or at least in relation to, multiple damaging narratives. despite these challenges, i hope to have shown that resisting harmful healthist narratives about eaters is an important and worthwhile project. this is not to suggest that doing so should be our only response to healthism; healthism’s harms extend far beyond agency and responding to these harms will require a variety of tactics. nonetheless, as participants in ubiquitous discussions about eating and eaters—whether focused on environmental degradation, animal suffering, weight loss, food insecurity, climate change, or diet-related illness—we can and should work to undercut harmful narratives about eaters and promote more empowering ones. precisely which narratives we should work to promote, and how to do so effectively, will have to be part of a future discussion. but i hope to have shown that it is a 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doi:10.1038/oby.2001.108. puhl, rebecca m., and chelsea a. heuer. 2009. “the stigma of obesity: a review and update.” obesity 17 (5): 941–64. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.636. reiheld, alison. 2015. “with all due caution: global anti-obesity campaigns and the individualization of responsibility.” ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 8 (2): 226–249. doi:10.3138/ijfab.8.2.226. rothgerber, hank. 2013. “real men don’t eat (vegetable) quiche: masculinity and the justification of meat consumption.” psychology of men & masculinity 14 (4): 363–375. doi:10.1037/a0030379. ruby, matthew b., and steven j. heine. 2011. “meat, morals, and masculinity.” appetite 56 (2): 447–450. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.01.018. saguy, abigail c. 2012. what’s wrong with fat? new york: oxford university press. sahakyan, karine r., virend k. somers, juan p. rodriguez-escudero, david o. hodge, rickey e. carter, ondrej sochor, thais coutinho, et al. 2015. “normal-weight dean: eating identities, “unhealthy” eaters, and damaged agency published by scholarship@western, 2018 31 central obesity: implications for total and cardiovascular mortality.” annals of internal medicine 163 (11): 827–835. doi:10.7326/m14-2525. schwartzman, lisa h. 2015. “appetites, disorder, and desire.” ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 8 (2): 86–102. scrinis, gyorgy. 2013. nutritionism: the science and politics of dietary advice. new york: columbia university press. spanos, samantha, lenny r. vartanian, c. peter herman, and janet polivy. 2014. “failure to report social influences on food intake: lack of awareness or motivated denial?” health psychology 33 (12): 1487–1494. doi:10.1037/hea0000008. springer, kristen w., and dawne m. mouzon. 2011. “‘macho men’ and preventive health care: implications for older men in different social classes.” journal of health and social behavior 52 (2): 212–227. doi:10.1177/0022146510393972. teachman, bethany a., kathrine d. gapinski, kelly d. brownell, melissa rawlins, and subathra jeyaram. 2003. “demonstrations of implicit anti-fat bias: the impact of providing causal information and evoking empathy.” health psychology 22 (1): 68–78. thaler, richard h., and cass r. sunstein. 2009. nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. revised & expanded edition. new york: penguin books. turrini, mauro. 2015. “a genealogy of ‘healthism.’” eä journal of medical humanities & social studies of science and technology, healthism & selfcare: reconfiguring body & life through science & technology, 7 (1): 11–27. van dyke, christina. 2018. “eat y’self fitter: orthorexia, health, and gender.” in the oxford handbook of food ethics, edited by anne barnhill, mark budolfson, and tyler doggett, 553–571. new york: oxford university press. vogel, else, and annemarie mol. 2014. “enjoy your food: on losing weight and taking pleasure.” sociology of health & illness 36 (2): 305–317. doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12116. walker, renee e., christopher r. keane, and jessica g. burke. 2010. “disparities and access to healthy food in the united states: a review of food deserts literature.” health & place 16 (5): 876–884. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.04.013. wansink, brian. 2004. “environmental factors that increase the food intake and consumption volume of unknowing consumers.” annual review of nutrition 24 (1): 455–479. doi:10.1146/annurev.nutr.24.012003.132140. welsh, talia. 2011. “healthism and the bodies of women: pleasure and discipline in the war against obesity.” journal of feminist scholarship 1:33–48. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2018 32 williams-forson, psyche, and abby wilkerson. 2011. “intersectionality and food studies.” food, culture & society 14 (1): 7–28. doi:10.2752/175174411x12810842291119. yancey, antronette k., joanne leslie, and emily k. abel. 2006. “obesity at the crossroads: feminist and public health perspectives.” signs 31 (2): 425–443. doi:10.1086/491682. your fat friend. 2017. “on believing your fat friend.” athena talks. march 20. https://medium.com/athena-talks/on-trusting-your-fat-friend-c1eae6750c1. zeratsky, katherine. 2018. “do detox diets offer any health benefits?” mayo clinic website. april 27. http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-andhealthy-eating/expert-answers/detox-diets/faq-20058040. megan dean is a phd candidate in philosophy at georgetown university. she has a master of arts in philosophy from the university of alberta. megan works in feminist philosophy, european philosophy (especially foucauldian theory and phenomenology), bioethics, and philosophy of science, with a topical focus on bodies and embodiment. her current research is on the ethical and epistemic effects of common conceptions of eating and eaters. response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 issue 2 symposium on catharine a. mackinnon’s article 6 toward a feminist theory of the state 2017 response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later catharine a. mackinnon university of michigan, camtwo@umich.edu recommended citation mackinnon, catharine a.. 2017. "response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later." feminist philosophy quarterly3, (2). article 6. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6. response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later catharine a. mackinnon abstract in this response to the five philosophers who engaged her toward a feminist theory of the state in decades-down-the-road assessments, professor mackinnon takes up the central questions in the dialogues they raised on questions of epistemology, method, social construction, racism, and judgment. she re-asserts the centrality of sexuality in gender and sexual abuse in gender inequality and recounts some of the legal consequences of this critique, which she originated. keywords: gender, women, power, sexuality, sexual subordination, sexual violence, sexual abuse, child abuse, racism, race, epistemology, liberalism, feminism, methodology, method, class, sex, politics, intersectionality, judgment, law, transgender, morality, choice, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, pornography political theorists critical of the gender order deserve, and seldom receive, readings of the seriousness, scope, and depth of engagement brought by these four philosophical papers to toward a feminist theory of the state. writing, one prays for careful readers who will interact with the actual project. some of us have waited for them a long time. if the person who wrote the parts of this book in around 1972–1975 that are focused upon by these papers could have anticipated this day some forty years later, it sure would have put a smile on her face. but that would be nothing to the joy of she who has lived through decades of false statements about this work, with few others taking it forward in theory or in practice—the attacks for saying what it did not say, often accompanied by appropriation of the ideas it did advance as the standard for what it lacked. friends have unsuccessfully urged this combination of distortion, erasure, and theft be taken as a compliment—which is not to say that some philosophers have not engaged this analysis seriously before.1 1 one of the earliest was hackett (1996), “catharine mackinnon’s ‘feminist epistemology.’” a more recent discussion, following up on her earlier thoughts, is sally haslanger (2013), “liberatory knowledge and just social practices.” i share the 1 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 while a lot of non-reading was going on, a veritable academic cottage industry flourished around foucault who—at the same time and without contact between us—also analyzed sexuality through a knowledge-power nexus. the major difference between our approaches—together with the fact that mine is explicitly about gender and his is not, a pretty big difference—is that he celebrates hierarchical sexuality and i criticize it. so he vaunts what is, in fact, the existing gender order, virtually without mentioning it in so many words, while my aim is to transform it. as my work along these lines was being at once largely ignored and expropriated, an elaborate literature on foucault was strenuously attempting to wedge a critical view of gender into his approach to sexuality, so as to produce a usable critique of women’s status in terms of knowledge and power. go figure. apart from the common observation that if a man says something, it is valued, while if a woman says it, it is as if it was not said, this constellation really does make one wonder. if an inconvenient or unsettling problem is ignored, or the subject is changed to something more pleasing to power, or if power is exalted as if it is a solution to a problem the same power has created, does that make the problem go away? is this academic magic? is it instructive that no one has ever shown, or ever even tried to show, that sexuality, as expressed in rampant sexual abuse, is not central to male dominance as a gender system? this is not the same as having other priorities. it is to ask, where are the groups of women to whom sexual abuse does not occur? how are the links of sexual subordination to oppression such as racism de-linked in reality, not just in denial of reality? if work is only criticized by misrepresenting it, does that mean it may be right? the papers collected here largely get past all this, some in new ways, for the first time. their engagements, finally, are among the reasons it was written. toward a feminist theory of the state was on an epistemic mission at once political and legal: to theoretically reframe the perceivable realities of women’s lives according to women’s own experiences so they could be seen for the first time, in order to change the politics and laws that construct that reality. at the time it was conceived and much of it was written, there was no such thing as what is today termed academic feminism, although a few scholars (who were footnoted) were beginning to think, research, and write about women’s distinctive situation. there certainly was a women’s movement—diverse, vibrant, engaged, outspoken, activist, and determined. the author imagined that the epistemic mission accomplished, or at least its need revealed in method through the class question, further work for disagreement with these two philosophers cogently pinpointed by ruiz and dotson at 9–10. analytic philosophers have also productively used the work to further the analysis of pornography and racist hate speech. see e.g. ishani maitra & mary kate mcgowan (2012), speech & harm: controversies over free speech. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 women, scholarly and practical, would proceed from more accurately reframed realities. this has mostly not occurred. by now, the reverse is closer to the case: more abstract academia in the same old frames, less movement of women. unforeseen careerism intervened, specifically the building of academic trajectories on unattributed lifting of watered-down ideas, obscurantism, and pleasing power, converged with the pornography wars, a backlash of liberalism and class privilege in support of male power in its most vicious as well as glossiest forms, undermining women’s movement on every level. surviving these forces unintimidated and unbought, these four readings of toward stand out all the more. having long since given up hope that toward’s actual project would be accurately contextualized intellectually, the acuity and originality of natalie nenadic’s paper comes as a blaze of light. i do not seek a home for my work other than in women’s world, but she has found one for it in continental philosophy, despite the fact that a good many pretenders inhabit the space termed continental feminism.2 one can also hope that, with any grounding in reality, professor nenadic’s explication will not result in further decades of attacks based on the aspects of heidegger’s biography that are antithetical to mine, or a sudden enthusiasm now that what i do can be subrogated into a province of what they do. the imaginative projects she outlines take the inquiry ever more deeply into the corners illuminated by her perceptive, precise, and deeply informed analysis. susan brison reveals the costs of silence and the contributions of speech in developing a vigorous defense of the potential of language in a liberatory project for women from sexual violation in particular. what if we all wrote our sexual abuse autobiographies as she did? her exemplary instance of consciousness raising shows it sets a high standard for one way of philosophizing toward through carrying its project further into the world, building on her stunning aftermath. i am deeply honored by the courage and erudition of professor brison’s contribution and hope it will be emulated. the principal purpose of this symposium is to provide these philosophers an extended opportunity to interact with the analysis in toward, to have their say, not for the book’s author to gloss the work. that said, it seems to bear repeating, given philosophical training that begins (or purports to begin) with abstractions and reasons to concrete application, or through examples, much as law does, that the method i use is the reverse: it builds concepts from realities. the dialogue with kristie dotson and elena ruiz’s excellent paper suggests the need to consider that this is emphatically the case with the operative “women” in toward. what “sex” or 2 in this, i include the postmodernists (mainly from the u.s.) although certainly not all post-structuralists. on postmodernism, see mackinnon (2006), “postmodernism and human rights,” in are women human? and other international dialogues. 3 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 “gender” then means is based on that, derived from that, not the other way around. neither term can be “universalizing,” if this is how it is methodologically built. thus, in an investigation that focused on the relation of sex and class—explicitly without purporting to have done the full analysis of the role of race in the status of women that later, better qualified scholars have gone on to build3—the “women” of toward are racially specified frequently, as they must be. sometimes their race is explicitly noted, sometimes not. i really don’t know what more to say about the apparent failure of some (not professors ruiz and dotson) to notice or know who zora neale hurston or audre lorde or carolyn craven or johnnie tillmon or mechelle vinson, not to mention angela davis, are, when quoted or cited as speaking insightfully and exemplarily as and for women.4 that they are women of color in no way limits the universality, in the sense of general applicability, of their insights in applying to women. they perfectly and completely represent women. methodologically as well as politically, they are women, often speaking for or about all women more acutely and with clearer perception than anyone else has. being of color takes nothing from this. of course, it partly constitutes it as well. this approach is not simple or conventional in politics, philosophy, or law; building “women,” then “sex,” out of the concrete women and men who comprise its reality is theoretically unusual. to illustrate this point from one experience, i find that especially analytically trained philosophers who request permission to use portions of my work in their collections for student instruction repeatedly want to eliminate what they call “the examples” or “the social science” or “the stories,” leaving only what they regard as the analysis: the more abstract statements. stripped of the realities of sexual abuse, the heart of the analysis is gone. the reality is the analysis. the core argument of toward on method in its relation to liberal jurisprudence is explicated with exceptional lucidity in the ruiz and dotson paper. furthering their recognition of our mutual convergences, notice that the concept “women” in toward is what they call a “coalition.” however, my analysis does not revolve around sameness or “differences,” but treats hierarchies of power—which language actually seems more consistent with their overall approach to “important asymmetries that threaten collaborative engagement” (ruiz and dotson 2017, 11), and would give further political edge to their critique. there seems to be something of an operative underlying assumption that unless “differences” are incorporated, a 3 see discussion in mackinnon (2013a), “intersectionality as method: a note,” in the special issue of signs, “intersectionality: theorizing power, empowering theory.” the other papers in this special issue are highly informative. 4 these references can be found on pages 125, 171, 237, 272, 275, and 288 in toward. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 group such as “women” is presumed all the same within, defined by differences outside or on its “margins.” while that approach to categories is philosophically and legally standard, as well as aristotelian, it is not at all what i do, as they largely also recognize.5 the group “women” in my work aims to be made up of all women’s diversities. if a given statement is not accurate in some way of all women, it is not a valid statement. this aspirational standard, we three know, is both utterly massive and always open to correction and falling short. this group “women” is indeed unstable internally, as they argue, and not necessarily anyone’s home; but the fact is, alas, it is extremely stable externally in the world. in accord with this understanding, “identity” is not theorized in toward because it is not where its politics originate or crucially occur; how one is identified, hence treated, in a social system of power is.6 nor is “the centrality of sexual 5 this critique is the project of chapter 12 in toward, on sameness and difference, as well as the extended argument of sex equality (mackinnon 2001). 6 my work is thus not part of what is termed “identity politics.” to illustrate, i do not “identify” as “white,” although i am well aware that i am socially identified as white and of the privileges that status confers under white supremacy. “white” as a politics advances racialized dominance. feminism opposes dominance. for further discussion of my views on this, see, e.g., mackinnon (1991), “from practice to theory, or what is a white woman anyway?” and mackinnon (2002), “keeping it real: on anti-‘essentialism,’” in crossroads, directions, and a new critical race theory. “white feminism,” if not an oxymoron, evokes nazi women prison guards or something: empowerment of women in the context of the advancement of white supremacy. undisclosed is how that term (“white feminism”) describes the u.s. 2016 presidential election, which michelle obama provided with by far its most feminist content. should it matter—which i do not think it much does—i do identify as a woman, which among other things means sexualized, gendered, second-class status and global citizenship. what does matter is the work itself, the politics it embodies and promotes, which these papers mainly engage. clare chambers raises the “who is a woman?” question, one become differently pointed and weighted since toward. women, a social status, includes transwomen because in the system of male dominance, they are seen and treated as women, coupled with gendered subordination based on their trans-status when visible or known. that they “identify as women,” as specified for a particular group of transwomen in my prior online discussion, is a political designation, not a psychological internal one, much as “woman-identified woman” once was, and for some still is. similarly, the term “born woman” is simply equivalent to a social status of “being assigned female sex at birth based on viewing one’s external genitalia” 5 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 difference (as sexuality)” (ruiz and dotson 2017, 4), far less “feminine sexual difference” (5), its focus. it rather criticizes the notion of “difference” as part of the cover-up of the reality of dominance and subordination. “identity” it avoids, as at best consciousness’s diluted relation. “reforming” what is termed “regulating women’s sexual capacities and reproduction” (ruiz and dotson 2017, 2) is not its project, nor is loyalty to the state form its precondition. ending sexual violence is not a move within the regulation of women’s sexuality any more than a critical theory of the state is a move within “state-building” (11). the harms of sexual violence against all women are toward’s primary ground and target; accountability for those harms has animated my work since as well, as the reality of this abuse persists and proliferates along with women’s resistance to it. confronting the racism of state power when deployed against delusions of sexual assault, and when not deployed against its reality—as has occurred against black men and been typical when women of color are sexually abused, respectively—is an integral part of that work. ruiz and dotson do not contend with these realities, refer to them concretely, or theorize how a distinctively postcolonial antiracist feminism critical of the liberal state would approach them. reference to “race coalescing in temporally indistinct ways with the experience of gendered subordination”7 might refer to rape of enslaved women of that has, from all that appears, gone unquestioned since. i also regard raped men as among my sisters, an embrace that has so far gone without “criticism.” for illumination along these lines, see lori watson (2015), “what is a woman anyway,” in logos. 7 ruiz and dotson, 12. the leading legal and social theorists kimberlé crenshaw and mari matsuda, as mentioned in the preface to toward, xii, went on to develop the theory of intersectionality that toward at best partly anticipated. somewhat preenvisioning this theory, as nenadic at 10 noted (“mackinnon very meticulously, deftly, and consistently weaves concrete work on such intersectionality within her analyses. and, of course, that intersectionality is also at the heart of her legal precedents on behalf of women who live these interconnected forms of subordination” while also respecting that toward does not present a unified inequality theory of sex, race, and class), toward discusses whether sexuality can be one’s own in terms of a possible parallel between black culture and women’s sexuality. among the failures of such a parallel was observed: “the parallel cannot be at all precise [because] black women and their sexuality make up both black culture and women’s sexuality, inhabiting both sides of the comparison. in other words, parallels which converge and interact are not parallels. the comparison may nevertheless be heuristically useful both for those who understand one experience but not the other and for those who can compare two dimensions of life which 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 african descent by white owners, for one instance—being subordinated through race and gender at the same time. or, today in perfect continuity, being rapedwhile-black by a white man (say, a policeman) with systemic impunity. rape being a tool of racial dominance does not make it at the same time not a tool of gender dominance. necessarily, not all the “harms enacted by colonial violence against racialized women” (ruiz and dotson 2017, 3) will be sexual. but it is worth noting that original women’s battles for sovereignty over their lands, communities, and bodies in the territory now called the united states have converged in one ongoing fight to amend the violence against women act to move jurisdiction for sexual assault of native women into tribal courts.8 this work is closer to countering the epistemic “systematic harms” (4) professors ruiz and dotson rightly see emerging from my method, as marked by sexually racialized and colonial dominance, than to “regulating women’s sexual capacities and reproduction” (2). complicity with “the very legality of a state formation through which patriarchal power flows” (3) is always a risk of legal engagement, and remains so to some extent even in this attempt to get out from under it.9 overlap and resonate together at some moments and diverge sharply in dissonance at others” (1989, 288). this last phrase strikingly converges with the ruiz and dotson analysis quoted above. see also kimberlé w. crenshaw (2010), “close encounters of three kinds: on teaching dominance feminism and intersectionality.” 8 native women worked so that the 2013 reauthorization of the violence against women act granted tribal court jurisdiction for sexual assault of native women by non-native husbands or boyfriends, at least a step in the jurisdictional direction they had urged. they conducted grassroots organizing, spoke with members of congress about the especially high rates of sexual assault on native women, and shared their own stories of domestic violence that continued because tribal courts could not prosecute a non-native attacker. for a description of their work, see capriccioso 2012, majel and henry 2012, capriccioso 2013. for documentation of the ongoing (and past) work of native women fighting against sexual assault by strengthening native sovereignty, see the various volumes of restoration magazine, available at “restoration magazine,” national indigenous women’s resource center (http://www.niwrc.org/restoration-magazine). 9 for some of my more extended writing on these themes over time, in case they are of interest, see mackinnon (1987), “whose culture?” in feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law, mackinnon (2006), “sex equality under the constitution of india: problems, prospects, and ‘personal laws’” in are women human? and other international dialogues, and “martinez revisited,” in the indian civil rights act at forty, kristen a. carpenter, matthew l. m. fletcher, and angela r. riley (2012). 7 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 as a side observation in connection with the emergency of race, notably no one prominently seems to feel the need to establish what racism is fundamentally about in order to combat it. maybe this is because it is not necessary. but the lack of a sense of urgency on this score, or any notion that the problem of racism cannot really be solved, nor can effective strategy against it be formulated, until this is known, poses an interesting vacuum, despite the existence of some competing explanations.10 relatedly, careers are not being made saying it is philosophically impossible and politically fruitless to try to end racism without offering a positive normative vision of the utopia to follow.11 yet the “race” in racism is not at all obvious to say the least, contains dramatic diversity, and is not a universal, stable, uniform reality, despite its appalling stability in the real world. there seems to be a suspicion out there that the gender of sexism must be about something valid somewhere, even though there is no such suspicion about the validity of the race in racism.12 suppose both are about nothing but the power relations predicated on 10 perhaps i am looking in the wrong place as well as asking the wrong question, but no answer to this precise question could be discerned despite the voluminous literature on race and racism generally, within every existing social discipline and intellectual current and sub-current. see, e.g., solomos and murji 2014. for quick overviews from various disciplines, surprisingly useful as entry points are the essays and bibliographies in: international encyclopedia of the social and behavior sciences, 2nd (amsterdam, 2015; see moses, fredrickson, clair & denis, augostinos & every, and hervik); the encyclopedia of political thought, michael t. gibbons, ed. (wiley, 2014; see alexander-floyd); encyclopedia of political science, ed. george thomas korlan, 1417–1420 (cq press, 2011). see also back and solomos 2002. illuminating on historical dynamics is fredrickson 2002. 11 we are in accord on this, as most else. discussing parallels between latin american liberation philosophy, my work, and theirs, ruiz and dotson comment: “mackinnon, like us, does not need a utopia to strive for something better in the world at hand” (10). 12 this statement temporally postdates the demise of the virulent racism of “scientific racism” and takes the view that the social belief by white people in the superiority of the so-called white race, and the inferiority of other races, or at least its legitimated public assertion, is largely a thing of the past, which may be a bit optimistic. the contrast being made here, in any event, can be illustrated by comparing a passage from the preamble from the convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (cerd) with the closest equivalent in convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (cedaw), which does not even come close. the cerd preamble states: “convinced that any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 them. does this exempt racism from the need for specifying its fundamental dynamic or impetus or site? white supremacy, including through colonialism, is an especially vicious and predominant institutional ideology and reality of it, but it is not the only one. further philosophy on the ground and motive force of racism, with attention to method, especially given its intra-, trans-cultural, and historical multidimensionality and complexity, would have to be illuminating as part of a “decolonial feminist theory of the state” (ruiz and dotson 2017, 3). what is the “race” of racism fundamentally about? (which is not to say that its impact on essentially everything is any mystery.) an embracing theory of inequality that is adequate to sex, race, and class will be closer when an answer on this level is persuasively advanced. that answer was not available to my knowledge in the early-to-mid-1970s,13 nor did i think i was the right person to determine or define it. professors ruiz and dotson are surely right that it is impossible for any one person to be completely inclusive (13), even as we also agree that inclusion is essential. one’s reach will necessarily exceed her grasp in this respect. no one is condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere” (international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, mar. 7, 1966, 660 u.n.t.s. 195). although cedaw is based on cerd in many respects, it has no equivalent to this perfect (except for the word “morally,” which could be cut and the passage would say the same thing) statement. cedaw’s preamble speaks of the rights of women and the utility of recognizing those rights to various ends, for instance: “recalling that discrimination against women violates the principles of equality of rights and respect for human dignity, is an obstacle to the participation of women, on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries, hampers the growth of the prosperity of society and the family and makes more difficult the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and of humanity” (convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, opened for signature dec. 18, 1979, 1249 u.n.t.s. 13). but nothing recognizes, as cerd does for racism, that sexism is an empirical flatout lie. this connects with the discussion of morality in the chambers paper as well, illustrating the difference between the recognition of factual falsity underlying cerd and the consequentialist utilitarianism of the cedaw preamble. the international critique of sexism seems to remain on the liberal level, which racism has escaped. 13 for one quick intellectual update approximating this question, see valluvan and kapoor 2016. for some material published around the time toward was being written, see robert staples 1967 and stember 1976. professor staples (2006) published his further thoughts in his exploring black sexuality. 9 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 everyone. no one can substitute for anyone else, far less for everyone else. going further, dispensing with everyone but oneself in politics is a fascist aspiration, including in theory. in a women’s politics, the pose of containing all, of being the ultimate authority, of ending debate, is totalitarian. we each have our own voice and need an ear for the voices of all of us. as to this prospect, in ruiz and dotson’s brilliant formulation, “oppression . . . provokes ways of knowing it that are neither reducible to each other nor very far apart” (13). clare chambers wants to know if we can have a feminist method that is open in this way and still make judgments. this question is somewhat puzzling after her choice book, in which she nailed down the proposition that alternatives that are constructed by inequality and weighted by power cannot be considered real choices at all in any free sense (chambers 2008). in any case, she recognized that liberalism uses “choice” to “protect inequality and social constraint” (chambers 2008, 4), because it does not squarely face the coercive power of social construction. she attempted to reshape liberalism to understand that women are socially constructed to make harmful choices that conform to patriarchal social norms. but i mean, how is it that one can come to the judgment (she presents her work as normative) that what is presented as a free choice is not really, yet saying that to or about a person—“judgment that is directed to women” (chambers 2017, 4, italics in original)—that they are inaccurate in thinking themselves free in making certain choices, for example—poses a wholly separate problem? apparently, the issue she is isolating distinguishes between what one may say critically about a social situation and that same critique to the people in the situation or even about them as people in that situation, despite the fact that the purported choice situation is only ever constituted by these very people. why is this distinct? because they don’t take it well? or because the situation is abstract and the individual is real? or because the critic may be “criticized” for “criticizing” them? what is driving the chambers analysis, its standard for itself, what successfully answering her question would be, by what measure, is not specified, so it is hard to know. “feminism,” frequently evoked, may be the answer, but what is that here? feminism is not about how an individual is to live virtuously or be liked or be or feel above criticism. for something to be feminist is not an accolade or a gold star or a secret handshake or an invulnerable soapbox. it is about (do we really need to keep saying this?) ending male dominance and the subordination of women, including the status hierarchy of masculinity over femininity. this calls for real analytic and strategic assessments, which arise occasionally in her piece, but are not its central thrust or concern. to put this discussion into one reality context in which “choice” is constantly being invoked, perhaps the distinction being made is between criticism of choosing alternate conditions—say prostitution versus starvation—and criticism of the person 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 said to be choosing between alternate conditions—say women prostituting to avoid starvation. those of us who work against prostitution neither see this as a choice nor “judge” people being prostituted. at their request, we work together to hold their exploiters accountable and to build real alternatives—that is, to move society to provide what they are asking for, toward equality. people in prostitution who do not want to work with us in this way do not (or not until they have been used a few more years . . .). the examples she cites that consider women criticizing other women’s parenting styles as just as dangerous as the sexualization of children, or women judging other women as a plague worse than donald trump, have lost any sense of reality. when and how does one learn anything? significantly, neither the consequences of the sexualization of children nor donald trump can be avoided by simply being ignored. unlike these examples, the “choice” question in the prostitution application, which is actually driving a policy discussion with real consequences worldwide, originates with people outside prostitution, usually liberal elites, who attack those of us working for abolition of prostitution for moralizing (we are not), so they can defend serial rape (most of it for the profit of others) as independent entrepreneurship. is there a special problem with “judging” these defenders of what they call “her choice” for their elitism and denial of reality, for siding with vicious abuse, and for maintaining their own privileged status above prostituted women, in part by defending their subordination, which defense is typically lavishly rewarded by power?14 does the fact some of them are women exempt them from this critique?15 chambers does ask this question. but observed in its actual factual setting, the broader question of “judgment” as she frames it does not arise in this instance, because the victims are not being “judged.” only the shills are. and the perpetrators they are standing in for. who is being “judged” for what relation to inequality has to be specified to be clear on her judgment question. the term “judgment” carries triple political/moral/legal meanings that seem to me conflated in the chambers piece. it can mean a conclusion about a reality of people or happenings based on evidence and analysis, the attachment of negative value to someone or something, or a legal decision (literally, a judgment) under pre-existing standards as to what institutional assessment will be made of what occurred by whom, usually including who is being held responsible for it. my epistemic project works on the first of these levels, its law and politics seamlessly on the third. 14 this is all discussed at greater length in mackinnon (2011), “trafficking, prostitution, and inequality.” 15 my own view on this can be discerned from mackinnon (1987), “on collaboration” in feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. 11 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 the second, the project of moral philosophers, is of no real interest, although it seems to shape the question professor chambers is trying to answer. my reading is that she seeks a grounding not for a view of reality or a determination of responsibility, but for an attribution of moral negativity—specifically one a person can, without being open to such judgment herself, level within the inequality at hand. or to have it explained why this is not doable. this is an approach fundamentally within liberalism. it can confuse who is doing what to whom and who is where in the infliction of inequality’s harms. ultimately, nothing methodological, in my view, relieves a person of the burden and responsibility of making one’s own assessments on any of these three levels and of making one’s own arguments persuasive. but i do have a lot to say about reality and liability, including concerning accuracy of assessments of them, and nothing about morality. the grandstanding and pontificating, deciding what is and is not “praiseworthy” (chambers 2017, 15) or not, and how to be liked by everyone while doing it, is left to the liberals.16 it occurs to me at this point to clarify a few basic points. one, the unit of analysis in the chambers piece is largely the individual,17 both the person doing the “judging” and the person “judged.” mine is not. two, biology is an excuse for social oppression for sex as well as for race. no more, no less. three, professor chambers seems to seek direction on how to live as a nice person, saying things that are not regarded as “surprising” (15). my project is a politics of change, calling for treating a as a, rather than not-a. she raises a decent point on this level when she observes that alleviating the emergency of gender for oneself can prolong it for everyone else. this could be (but here is not) the beginning of a very interesting political analysis of what is, although it is hardly confined to, or probably even most urgently posed by, the transgender context. fourth, social institutions are made up of people acting. they don’t have to be bad people to take advantage of positions of inequality, they just have to take advantage of positions of inequality, for which they have to be in a position to do so. fifth, i do not theorize “freedom,” including how it can exist under conditions of inequality. (liberals seem to assume this possibility without ever having accounted for it.) i theorize equality as real freedom’s precondition. where she says i address her question of judgment directly, i don’t. her conclusion that “judgment is thus particularly fraught” (chambers 2017, 5) transforms my epistemic critique of objectivity into an answer to a wholly other question. one’s social perception is indeed affected by one’s social position, but that does not mean a normative critique is necessary in order to have a critique at all (6). 16 see mackinnon (2013b), “shakespeare’s sister in philosophy and reality: a response.” 17 she becomes more collective toward the end, starting around pages 16–17. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 “we are against rape and pornography and sexual harassment and gendered poverty,” she argues, “because women should not be unequal to men . . . because it is bad to treat them that way” (6). actually, these are practices of sex inequality not because they are “bad” or because it would be “good” to treat women as if we are men’s human equals, but because we are, treated in the practices mentioned as if we are not. if sex inequality is a system of domination and subordination, a social hierarchy of power in the world, sex equality is not first a moral value and seeking it is not fundamentally a normative project in the conventional philosophical sense. because men are not (that is the existential verb) women’s biological superiors, women men’s biological inferiors, sex equality is first a fact, denied realization in social orderings. it is the social inequality of the sexes that is normative without grounding, without ever having had to provide a philosophically sound account of itself, almost universally presented as merely reflecting a factual natural “difference,” when the differences between the sexes, such as they are, are equal, i.e., equally different, and as such contain no justification for domination or subordination, a thoroughly normative arrangement. the politics of sex equality are thus first rooted in a recognition of reality—the reality of the sexes’ human equality—not fundamentally based on a moral judgment that it would be good to treat the sexes as if they were equally human. we do not have to argue this proposition anymore. once a sex equality rule exists in law, there is no more debate as to whether it would be “good” to treat the sexes equally. that has been decided. the only question is what sex equality means in particular instances. in other words, you do not need a normative position to have this critique. you need a reality position to answer the first question and a legal position to answer the third. my best guess as to what judgment means in professor chambers’ piece, then, is negative moral evaluation: question two. telling someone they are bad or wrong. there may be something generational here. i have frequently marveled at the intensity with which audiences of young people zealously (and with manifest fear) pursue postures of public tolerance, so as not to be criticized for criticizing anyone. this impulse can be expressed as sudden total silence, as everyone watches their back, or as one after another rising to attack a critic for criticizing, or to defend someone (usually someone with power) who is claimed to be criticized, especially if the imagined target of the criticism is not in the room. one sometimes gets the impression that such people would sit quietly while someone is raped in the next room (this happens all the time, actually), but will throw their bodies in the way of anyone who criticizes someone for raping someone in the next room (this, too, occurs . . .). or, closer to our discussion, and more complicated in terms of power, will attack anyone who criticizes a person for not reporting that they were raped in the next room. how did “criticizing” someone for doing or not doing something become worse than doing the thing or not, criticizing genocidaires harder to justify 13 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 than genocide? (the latter is not a random example.) why is “criticizing” someone the worst thing one can do to someone, or have done to oneself? when, and for whom, did criticism become the end of the world? in any real discussion of any reality of sexual abuse, for instance, the distinction between the person who has the power to violate and the person who was violated is highly salient. how did the project shift from stopping the behavior, which apparently can be criticized, to stopping criticism of the person engaging in the behavior? my own view is that perpetrators can be “criticized.” and prosecuted. professor chambers clearly shares this view. whether someone is a perpetrator is first a matter of evidence, though, which is a factual question, never to be lightly assumed. it has historically been inflected by racism, which when it occurs, is against the interest of all victims as well as the wrongly accused. prosecution calls, inter alia, for victims to identify perpetrators. now this is a real criticism. whether victims who do not report their victimization endanger other possible victims raises serious issues. given the way survivors are treated by existing institutions, no one other than survivors themselves is in a position to “judge” them negatively for not reporting, in my opinion. but you can’t get to either of those conclusions without knowing (i.e., coming to a conclusion about, not a judgment of) who has the power and who doesn’t, who is violated and who isn’t, and how institutional systems treat survivors and accuseds. the analysis has to be done first concretely—reality is the question, what actually happened, not what or who you think is good or bad—even in philosophy. consider now sexual abuse of children more broadly, arguably the foundation of the gender system. the moral question, virtually never asked, is how do we know it is “bad.” the reality question is, how do we know it violates the child? especially with girl children, how can it be a violation or experienced as such when females are told that being sexually used is an actualization of our existence on this earth? amazingly, it is frequently experienced as abusive by children even when they have no vocabulary for abuse, have experienced abuse as normal in their lives, and are told it makes them loved and special and valuable. what they often say, then or later, is it just felt wrong. maybe they mean wrong in chambers’s moral sense. but more importantly, on the prior level of what is, something was created in them at the very moment something was shattered in them, which is amazing. there was a glimmer of awareness of abusiveness—a miracle, because one is created by abuse. it shapes you neurologically. it shapes you cognitively. it shapes your relationships and life agendas in ways you often have no notion of for decades, if ever. it is a powerful engine of social construction. but there are no lengthy philosophical discourses struggling to explain how “we,” including survivors, know sexual abuse of children is abusive. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 professor chambers rightly points out that child abuse is generally treated socially as if it is not abuse (2017, 6). in connection with her question, there are also those to whom it has happened who say that it was not the worst thing that happened to them, it was not all that bad, or they really were not harmed by it, and make sympathetic excuses or even justifications for the perpetrator. in one memorable discussion with a survivor, she passed hers off to me as “viel verkehr, viele verkehrsunfälle.” in the double meaning: lots of traffic, lots of traffic accidents; lots of sexual intercourse, lots of sexual accidents. i think this trivialization of sexual abuse of children does not relieve those who hear its harms spoken of by survivors, who can identify the dimensions of those harms, the scholarship on which is extensive, from “criticizing” its perpetrators—as a group, certainly, but individually only so long as the victims stand behind and authorize that step. but to be critical of those who say things like this is to fail to grasp some of the consequences of abuse, one of which is its trivialization. victims of abuse who do not feel violated, including those who in liberal terms make choices that harm them (or others), while not a target of such a “criticism,” do raise the question of how consciousness change happens—the question of effectiveness, and of who the “you” is doing the engagement, your relation with the survivor, underlining the necessary humility in any serious political work on a human level, and of appropriate role, relationship, and setting. there is no philosophical perch from which to dispense judgment here, if social change is your goal. it does not happen through writing papers or speaking in public. reaching out to survivors, being there when they reach out to you, and learning from them is not done by “judgment,” which, accurate or not, is an imposition and forecloses productive interaction, real learning on both sides. obviously, people who do not feel violated will not be complaining to prosecutors, or maybe even to you. but their existence does not preclude coming to the conclusion that those who know they are hurt by the same behavior are hurt by it, with perpetrators who need to be called out in general if not always in particular. there are plenty of such survivors looking for a response other than the echo chamber of their own silence. which leads me to want to know what in life leads to the need to answer the question clare chambers poses. what makes it urgent? my own view is that the term “choice,” the circumstances in which one can most clearly know it, best applies to decisions against one’s determinants, to resistance to social construction. for this, you have to know how you are being socially constructed, what your determinants are. although no general rules will likely emerge, whatever concretely gave rise to professor chambers’s question, or at least engagement with more real situations in which serious consequences are at stake, is likely to hold the keys to an answer. 15 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 should anyone still be wondering whether philosophy matters in an applied and practical way—not the only way it can matter—the philosophical critique in each of the chapters in the second half of toward that built on and embodied the philosophical ground-clearing operation in the first half of the book, became concrete legal changes in the world. the equality chapter became sexual harassment law, in which the sameness/difference theory of equality criticized there turned into the substance of the dominance/subordination theory, which is part of anti-discrimination law. it also became a new theory of equality, substantive equality, an approach largely adopted in canada, in part in south africa, and operative in some parts of the international legal arena. the obscenity chapter became the anti-pornography civil rights ordinance as well as laid the groundwork for the swedish model on prostitution, which criminalizes the buyers and fully decriminalizes those who are bought and sold. the abortion chapter developed into subsequent scholarship that participated in preserving the abortion right. the rape chapter merged with the equality analysis to become the violence against women act civil remedy, then the international approach to gender crimes as implemented in some respects in the rwanda tribunal and the international criminal court.18 this is not to say that the philosophical analysis preceded the applications in the way a conventional theory/practice divide would suggest. it took actual engagement with the realities on the ground of each issue to produce both the critique and the applied legal intervention. as these four papers realize, the realities uncovered by women challenged epistemic, political, and legal concepts that continue to demand transformation, toward new theory and new practice. works cited back, les, and john solomos. 2002. theories of race and racism: a reader. abingdon, ox: taylor and francis. capriccioso, rob. 2012. “native women warriors lobby for pro-tribal vawa.” indian country media network, june 28. https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/native-women-warriorslobby-for-pro-tribal-vawa. ———. 2013. “president barack obama's vawa law signing spotlights native women warriors.” indian country media network, march 11. https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/politics/president-barackobamas-vawa-law-signing-spotlights-native-women-warriors/. 18 these experiences and events are discussed and illustrated in mackinnon (2017), butterfly politics. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 carpenter, kristen a., matthew l. m. fletcher, and angela r. riley, eds. 2012. the indian civil rights act at forty. ucla american indian studies center publications. chambers, clare. 2008. sex, culture and justice: the limits of choice. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2017. “judging women: twenty-five years further toward a feminist theory of the state." feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (2). article 5. cho, sumi, kimberlé w. crenshaw, and leslie mccall, eds. 2013. intersectionality: theorizing power, empowering theory. special issue, signs 38 (4). crenshaw, kimberlé w. 2010. “close encounters of three kinds: on teaching dominance feminism and intersectionality.” tulsa law review 46:151–189. fredrickson, george m. 2002. racism: a short history. princeton, nj: princeton university press. hackett, elizabeth. 1996. “catharine mackinnon’s ‘feminist epistemology.’” unpublished phd dissertation, university of pennsylvania. haslanger, sally. 2013. “liberatory knowledge and just social practices.” american philosophical association newsletter on philosophy and law 12 (2): 6–11. mackinnon, catharine a. 1987. feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1991. “from practice to theory, or what is a white woman anyway?” yale journal of law and feminism 4 (1): 13–22. ———. 2001. sex equality. michigan: foundation press. ———. 2002. “keeping it real: on anti-‘essentialism.’” in crossroads, directions, and a new critical race theory, edited by francisco valdes, jerome mccristal culp, and angela p. harris. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. ———. 2006. are women human? and other international dialogues. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2011. “trafficking, prostitution, and inequality.” harvard civil rights-civil liberties law review 46:271–309. ———. 2013a. “intersectionality as method: a note.” in “intersectionality: theorizing power, empowering theory,” edited by sumi cho, kimberlé w. crenshaw, and leslie mccall, special issue, signs 38 (4): 1019–1030. ———. 2013b. “shakespeare’s sister in philosophy and reality: a response.” american philosophical association newsletter on philosophy and law 12 (2): 16–22. ———. 2017. butterfly politics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. maitra, ishani, and mary kate mcgowan, eds. 2012. speech & harm: controversies over free speech. oxford university press. 17 mackinnon: response to five philosophers published by scholarship@western, 2017 majel, juana, and terri henry. 2012. introductory note to restoration of native sovereignty and safety for native women 20 (june): 3. http://www.niwrc.org/files/restoration-v9.2.pdf. nenadic, natalie. 2017. "catharine mackinnon, feminism, and continental philosophy: comments on toward a feminist theory of the state—twentyfive years later." feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (2). article 2. ruiz, elena, and kristie dotson. 2017. "on the politics of coalition." feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (2). article 4. solomos, john, and karim murji. 2014. theories of race and ethnicity: contemporary debates and perspectives. cambridge: cambridge university press. staples, robert. 1967. “the mystique of black sexuality.” liberator 7 (march): 8–10. ———. 2006. exploring black sexuality. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. stember, charles herbert. 1976. sexual racism: the emotional barrier to an integrated society. new york: greenwood publishing group. valluvan, sivamohan, and nisha kapoor. 2016. “notes on theorizing racism and other things.” ethnic & racial studies 39 (3): 375–382. watson, lori. 2015. “what is a woman anyway.” logos 14 (2–3). catharine a. mackinnon is elizabeth a. long professor of law at the university of michigan and james barr ames visiting professor of law at harvard law school (since 2009). she holds a ba from smith college, a jd from yale law school, and a phd in political science from yale. she writes and practices law widely, focusing on equality issues, especially sex equality, under international and domestic (including comparative, constitutional, and criminal) law and in political theory. professor mackinnon’s thirteen scholarly books include sexual harassment of working women (1979), feminism unmodified (1987), toward a feminist theory of the state (1989), only words (1993), women's lives, men's laws (2005), are women human? (2006), sex equality (3rd ed. 2016), traite, prostitution, inegalité (2014), and butterfly politics (2017). empirical studies document that professor mackinnon is among the most widely cited legal scholars in the english language. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 2, art. 6 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss2/6 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.2.6 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later catharine a. mackinnon recommended citation response to five philosophers: toward a feminist theory of the state some decades later action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 4 2016 action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory lisa h. schwartzman michigan state university, lhschwar@msu.edu recommended citation schwartzman, lisa h.. 2016. "action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4. action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory lisa schwartzman abstract lisa tessman’s moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality raises important questions about ideal theory, oppression, and the role of action-guidance in normative philosophy. after a brief overview of feminist and anti-racist philosophers’ critiques of ideal theory, i examine tessman’s claim that nonideal oppression theorists focus too narrowly on action-guidance and thereby obscure other important normative issues, such as the problem of moral failure. although i agree with tessman’s advocacy of a wider focus—and with her suggestion that situations of inevitable moral failure are particularly important to examine in contexts of oppression—i question whether nonideal oppression theorists actually emphasize action-guidance to the exclusion of other concerns. i conclude with a brief examination of the way that ideal and nonideal theory have been defined and understood in debates about normative methodology, and i suggest that a move away from rawls’s account of the ideal/nonideal distinction would benefit feminists and other oppression theorists. keywords: ideal theory, nonideal theory, rawls, oppression, idealization, actionguidance i. introduction in moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality, lisa tessman (2015) offers a brilliant and thought-provoking analysis of the problem of moral failure. in contrast to deontologists who hold that there can be no genuine moral dilemmas (since “ought implies can”), and in contrast to consequentialists who hold solutions to moral problems can be calculated, tessman argues that there are situations in which moral failure is inevitable and that such scenarios are ripe for philosophical examination. in exploring this issue, she draws on recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy, and she brings into dialogue theorists from a range of disciplines and perspectives. she ultimately develops an insightful account of this much overlooked aspect of moral life, and her work has important implications for feminists and others concerned with ethics and social theory. 1 schwartzman: action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2016 in my commentary, i focus on tessman’s remarks about ideal and nonideal theory, and in particular on her chapter, “idealizing morality.” although tessman supports the work of “nonideal” oppression theorists—and she by no means endorses the sort of “ideal” theorizing touted by john rawls and his followers—she raises some concerns about the work of these theorists. i begin with a brief overview of problems of ideal theory that have been raised by feminist and antiracist philosophers. next, i examine tessman’s claims that nonideal oppression theorists are too narrowly focused on the issue of action-guidance, and that they don’t leave adequate room for addressing other important normative issues, such as the problem of moral failure. although i agree with tessman’s advocacy of a wider focus—and with her suggestion that situations of inevitable moral failure are particularly important to examine in contexts of oppression—i question whether nonideal oppression theorists actually emphasize action-guidance to the exclusion of other concerns. finally, i conclude with a brief examination of the way that ideal and nonideal theory have been defined and understood in debates about normative methodology, and i suggest that a move away from rawls’s account of the ideal/nonideal distinction would benefit feminists and other oppression theorists. ii. ideal vs. nonideal theory and the oppression critique although there are a variety of approaches to political philosophy, the methodology proposed and employed by john rawls is one of the most prominent, at least among contemporary analytic philosophers. shortly after the 1971 publication of a theory of justice, feminist philosophers and race theorists began to question the relevance and application of an account of justice that focused so heavily on an abstract thought experiment and a well-ordered society, with parties in the original position ignorant of their race, class, and perhaps their gender. our society is plagued by deeply entrenched structures of racial domination and violence that affect access to economic, political, and social power for members of racial minority groups. and women specifically are the targets of sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination which are compounded by lack of access to economic resources. although rawls’s work was published during the height of various activist movements—including the civil rights movement, the black power movement, the women’s movement, and the anti-war movement—his work barely acknowledges this political context. while some feminists, race theorists, and progressives have embraced rawls, others have faulted him for these important omissions, arguing that political philosophy must start with a clear understanding of social structures of power. rawls’s theory fails to do this in part because of his method, which begins in the “original position,” a thought experiment that does not include gender, race, or other forms of systemic oppression. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4 one of the first philosophical essays to detail the problems with rawlsianstyle ideal theory as it pertains to oppression was charles mills’s 2005 essay, “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” drawing on onora o’neill, mills notes that all theorizing involves abstraction (since it requires generalization), and he points out that all normative philosophy appeals to some kinds of values and ideals. according to mills, it’s not the use of abstraction itself—or even the use of ideals—that defines what he calls “ideal theory.” rather, “what distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual” (mills 2005, 168). instead, idealization involves (1) a descriptive component, which involves attributing to agents in the theory capacities that actual agents lack (such as perfect rationality or self-knowledge), and (2) a normative component, which involves modeling how people should be and act, and “how society should be structured” (167–68). objecting to the descriptive idealization, feminists and others have argued that rawls’s original position seems to describe human agency in a way that is false and misleading. unlike the parties in the original position, people are not essentially rational choosers, interested only in promoting their own interests (or in maximizing their share of primary goods), and they are generally not able to bracket off important personality features or social group memberships in making such choices. not only is this a false and distorting account of the personalities, traits, and abilities of most actual humans, but it also suggests that those least affected by group membership and oppression should serve as the basis for generalization. second, feminists and other oppression theorists also criticize the normative idealizations implicit in rawls’s theory, arguing that the model of an independent, able-bodied, unencumbered individual making choices is not an appropriate ideal to which people should aspire. in her feminist analysis of various models of ethics, margaret urban walker calls the ideal posited by rawls “the career self,” since the ideal citizen is imagined as aiming to maximize primary goods in accordance with their rational plan of life (2003, 194). yet, walker notes, “the autonomous individual as the striving career self was never a self-ideal intended for women,” nor is it attainable for “many of those who are poor, chronically sick, very seriously disabled, or those who are objects of other’s [sic] domination or control” (2003, 196–97). although much has been made of the problem of idealization in ideal theory, recall that the mere existence of either descriptive or normative idealization is not itself the problem, nor is it what defines ideal theory according to its critics, such as mills. as noted above, for mills, ideal theory is defined by “the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual” (2005, 168). thus, the problem is that the theory focuses too much attention on abstract idealizations and not enough on the actual society in which the theorizing occurs, and to which the theory is supposed to be applied. it is no wonder, mills notes, that “historically subordinated groups” tend to be “deeply skeptical of ideal theory” and 3 schwartzman: action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2016 that they “generally see its glittering ideals as remote and unhelpful. . . . given this convergence in gender, class, and race theory on the need to make theoretically central the existence and functioning of the actual non-ideal structures that obstruct the realization of the ideal, what defensible arguments for abstracting away from these realities could there be?” (2005, 170). underlying these debates over methodology is the question, which tessman raises explicitly, “what do we want in a normative theory?” (2015, 175). she explains, “one thing that i want from normative theorizing is for it to enable me to witness and comprehend, rather than evade, the failures of morality. . . . i think that truly recognizing the fact of oppression entails acknowledging the associated failures of morality” (175). throughout the book, tessman notes that while dilemmatic situations can occur for a variety of reasons, people who are oppressed—and in particular, those who are negatively affected by multiple intersecting forces of oppression—are more likely to find themselves in “double-bind” situations where moral failure is inevitable. for instance, tessman offers the example of an abused woman who has a child and who is financially dependent on her abusive partner. in choosing to stay with her partner (out of financial necessity), this woman fails to protect her child from abuse. tessman explains, “the damage inflicted on the child may remain, irreparable; the mother may experience, forever after, an impossibleto-fulfill moral responsibility to repair the damage” (179). while one might argue that the woman made the wrong choice, this fails to take seriously the dire economic circumstances (and the added risk of violence that women endure in attempting to leave their abusive partners). a feminist who does understand these risks and constraints might argue that the woman’s lingering sense that she has failed to protect her daughter is not indicative of moral failure. but this response simply assumes that the moral “remainders” are not real. as tessman argues throughout her book, denying the existence or effects of genuine moral dilemmas allows moral theorists to proceed as if these problems have simple solutions, and as if oppression does not have longlasting (and, at times, irreversible) negative impacts. moreover, the dilemmatic situations created by oppression affect both individuals and those working to change larger social and political structures. for example, the decision of an activist organization to accept corporate or government funding can lead to a moral dilemma: accepting the funds could restrict the extent to which the organization can challenge structures of power, but not accepting them could lead to the organization’s demise. structures of power and oppression often place people in situations where moral failure is unavoidable, and tessman is right to argue that such situations are ripe for feminist analysis. in the next section, i explicitly address the issue of action-guidance in nonideal theory, and i argue that nonideal oppression theorists are not as narrowly focused on action-guidance as tessman 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4 claims, and that their work is more consistent with her analysis than she acknowledges. iii. nonideal theory and the role of “action-guidance” in the decade since mills published “‘ideal theory’ as ideology,” a number of philosophers and political theorists have addressed mills’s critique of ideal theory and his endorsement of the alternative of nonideal theorizing. in these debates and responses, much of the focus has centered on the claim (attributed to mills) that ideal theory is problematic because it cannot “guide action” in the real world, since it is based on principles that assume ideal conditions. in “what’s ideal about ideal theory,” zofia stemplowska argues for the value of ideal theory but also ultimately defines ideal theory as “theory that fails to issue recommendations for how to improve our society that are applicable for us here and now” (2008, 319). in “three failed charges against ideal theory,” eva erman and niklas möller (2013) describe three objections to ideal theory that they claim ultimately fail: that ideal theory cannot guide action, that it is impossible, and that it is distorting. and in “on the apparent paradox of ideal theory,” laura valentini (2009) directly addresses what she takes to be the most important problem of ideal theory: ideal theory must be able to guide action, and yet it cannot do so since it is premised on assumptions about agents and structures that are not based on current actualities. one problem with these essays is that they misrepresent the critique of ideal theory offered by mills and other oppression theorists. nonideal oppression theorists do not object to the “falsehood” or irrelevance of the idealized conceptions of persons and of society. rather, they object specifically to the ways that these idealized descriptions are ideological. what rawls refers to as “ideal theory” can make it more difficult to understand and address systems of power like racism and sexism. rather than issuing no normative recommendations, so-called ideal theory can prescribe actions that reinforce and perpetuate current social injustices. thus, these commentators are wrong to construe nonideal oppression theorists (such as mills) as though their main concern were with whether or not a theory can “guide action.” although tessman’s reasons for concern with nonideal theory differ from those of the theorists mentioned above (and she is by no means defending rawlsian ideal theory), she nonetheless seems to follow these theorists in characterizing nonideal theory as essentially concerned with action-guidance. for instance, tessman notes at the start of her chapter that she questions “oppression theorists who embrace nonideal theory unambivalently, and seem to imply that appropriate action-guidance is all that they want from a normative theory” (2015, 182). although she mentions in a footnote that there are some exceptions—nussbaum, anderson, and walker—tessman seems to imply that most nonideal oppression 5 schwartzman: action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2016 theorists hold this view. a bit later in the chapter, she asks what nonideal oppression theorists want in a normative theory, and then replies, “they want nonidealizing, action-guiding normative theories that help one identify which (achievable) moral practices are worthy, and that direct one on how best to move from unworthy, oppressive practices to worthier and less oppressive practices” (194). while tessman values practical guidance in combatting oppression, she also wants something more, explaining that there is “something rather problematic about having nothing but action-guiding nonideal theory for understanding moral life under oppression” (195). although i agree fully that having “nothing but” actionguiding nonideal theory would be inadequate, there is little reason to believe that any of the nonideal oppression theorists mentioned by tessman actually hold that a theory’s ability to prescribe concrete, immediate action-guidance is its main or only value. although mills’s account of the ideal/nonideal distinction is perhaps the most prominent, the accounts of many feminist and anti-racist philosophers raise similar problems with the methodology of political and moral philosophy. mills cites onora o’neill’s criticisms of idealization (which are feminist in certain respects), but his analysis is also indebted to carole pateman’s critique of social contract theory. in the sexual contract (1988), pateman argues that both classical and contemporary social contract theory are premised on the false assumption that the contractual agreement (whether actual or hypothetical) can be understood as one between all affected individuals. instead, the social contract was an agreement among men— and as mills notes, it was one among whites—and it was built on the assumptions that men and whites were the contracting parties and that women and nonwhites were the objects of the agreement. overlooking these important (nonideal) facts obscures the realities of racial and gender oppression. other feminists make similar arguments, though they are not always focused directly on rawls or on what is now called “ideal theory.” alison jaggar’s work in feminist politics and human nature (1983) is a prime example of an early challenge to the prominence of ideal theory in mainstream liberal political philosophy, and her objections to the abstract individualism and the ideological nature of liberalism are echoed in the work of more recent accounts of what is wrong with so-called ideal theory. the feminist critiques of moral philosophy offered by eva kittay (1999), margaret urban walker (2003), and diana tietjens meyers (1994) also raise problems with normative theory that proceeds through idealizing methods and thereby avoids addressing the context of complex relationships, which often involve power, oppression, and nested dependencies. in objecting to the method of ideal theory employed by rawlsian liberals, these oppression theorists are not arguing that ideal theory fails to guide action, but rather that it misrepresents both agents and structures in ways that deny and obscure the realities of oppression. thus, the 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4 problem of appropriate action-guidance is one objection to ideal theory. but it is not the only matter of concern. iv. rethinking rawls’s ideal/nonideal distinction at this point, a question arises: if the nonideal oppression theorists are concerned with understanding and addressing structures of power and oppression more generally, and are not solely concerned with practical questions of providing an “action-guiding” theory, why are they characterized (by tessman but also by valentini, erman and möller, stemplowska, and others) as having a more narrow concern? in this final section, i suggest that the characterization of nonideal theory as having this narrow focus is a product of rawls’s own understanding of the ideal/nonideal distinction, which tessman, mills, and many others do not directly challenge. in a theory of justice, rawls explains the rationale for his understanding of ideal and nonideal theorizing about justice: the intuitive idea is to split the theory of justice into two parts. the first or ideal part assumes strict compliance and works out the principles that characterize a well-ordered society under favorable circumstances. . . . my main concern is with this part of theory. nonideal theory, the second part, is worked out after an ideal conception of justice has been chosen; only then do the parties ask which principles to adopt under less happy conditions. (rawls 1999, 216) although rawls does not provide a detailed account of nonideal theory, he explains that it covers two kinds of situations: (a) “injustices” that result from the partial (or non) compliance of citizens and (b) circumstances in which the achievement of justice is not possible due to unfavorable background conditions caused by “natural limitations and historical contingencies.” one problem with rawls’s description and defense of ideal theory is that he assumes, rather than argues for, its precedence. after acknowledging a handful of “pressing and urgent matters” that arise frequently in everyday life, he explains, “the reason for beginning with ideal theory is that it provides, i believe, the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems…at least, i shall assume, that a deeper understanding can be gained in no other way, and that the nature and aims of a perfectly just society is the fundamental part of a theory of justice” (1999, 8). given that rawls assumes that ideal theory should be bracketed off from the problems of the nonideal, it’s worth examining more closely the sorts of problems he includes in the nonideal: namely, unfortunate background conditions (which seem to arise by natural misfortunate) and the “noncompliance” or merely “partial compliance” of individuals. rather than understanding “nonideal” to involve 7 schwartzman: action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2016 fundamentally oppressive structures of social hierarchy and power, rawls’s categorization seems to focus on the results of either bad luck (on a larger scale) or individual bad behavior (on a smaller scale). while these are among the problems that one might address under the category of nonideal theory, they are hardly the only important matters. in fact, rawls’s categorization wrongly suggests that injustice arises primarily due to noncompliance or the bad luck of unfortunate circumstances. if this is the case, rawls seems to fall prey to the problems of “luck egalitarianism” (which many rawlsian theorists would find problematic, as rawls is allegedly concerned about the “basic structure” of justice in society). thus, in much of the writing about this issue, it seems that the labels of “ideal” and “nonideal” theory have been employed in ways that fall in line with rawls’s account, even in cases where the author aims to challenge rawls. for feminist and anti-racist philosophers to be clearer about the problems with rawls’s methodology, we may need to depart more radically from the language and categories of ideal and nonideal theory. this could help open the way for a more serious consideration of the role of nonoppressive ideals that will enable us to envision more promising futures. and it can also open the doors to theorizing that includes a more serious consideration of the problems of moral failure. references erman, eva, and niklas möller. 2013. “three failed charges against ideal theory.” social theory and practice 39 (1): 10–44. jaggar, alison. 1983. feminist politics and human nature. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. kittay, eva feder. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. meyers, diana tietjens. 1994. subjection and subjectivity: psychoanalytic feminism and moral philosophy. new york: routledge. mills, charles w. 2005. “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” hypatia 20 (3): 165–84. o’neill, onora. 1987. “abstraction, idealization, and ideology in ethics.” in moral philosophy and contemporary problems, edited by j.d.g. evans, 55–69. new york: cambridge university press. ———. 1993. “justice, gender, and international boundaries.” in the quality of life, edited by martha nussbaum and amartya sen. oxford: clarendon press. pateman, carole. 1988. the sexual contract. stanford, ca: stanford university press. rawls, john. 1999. a theory of justice: revised edition. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. stemplowska, zofia. 2008. “what’s ideal about ideal theory?” social theory and practice 34 (3): 319–40. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4 tessman, lisa. 2015. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. new york: oxford university press. valentini, laura. 2009. “on the apparent paradox of ideal theory.” the journal of political philosophy 17 (3): 332–55. walker, margaret urban. 2003. moral contexts. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. lisa h. schwartzman is associate professor of philosophy at michigan state university. her research is in feminist theory and political philosophy, with a specific focus on critiques of liberalism. she is the author of challenging liberalism: feminism as political critique and the co-editor of feminist interventions in ethics and politics. she has published essays on feminist analyses of rights, equality, and hate speech, and she recently co-edited a special issue of the journal of social philosophy on the topic, “gender, implicit bias, and philosophical methodology.” 9 schwartzman: action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory lisa h. schwartzman recommended citation action-guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation anderson, derek. “linguistic hijacking.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (3). article 4. 2020 linguistic hijacking derek anderson boston university deanders@bu.edu anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 linguistic hijacking1 derek anderson abstract this paper introduces the concept of linguistic hijacking, the phenomenon wherein politically significant terminology is co-opted by dominant groups in ways that further their dominance over marginalized groups. here i focus on hijackings of the words “racist” and “racism.” the model of linguistic hijacking developed here, called the semantic corruption model, is inspired by burge’s social externalism, in which deference plays a key role in determining the semantic properties of expressions. the model describes networks of deference relations, which support competing meanings of, for example, “racist,” and postulates the existence of deference magnets that influence those networks over time. linguistic hijacking functions to shift the semantic properties of crucial political terminology by causing changes in deference networks, spreading semantics that serve the interests of dominant groups, and weakening the influence of resistant deference networks. i consider an objection alleging the semantic corruption model gets the semantic data wrong because it entails those who hijack terms like “racist” speak truly, whereas it’s natural to see such hijacking misuses as false speech about racism. i then respond to this objection by invoking the framework of metalinguistic negotiation proposed by plunkett and sundell. keywords: epistemic oppression, feminist epistemology, epistemic injustice, philosophy of language, metasemantics, active ignorance, philosophy of race & gender, metalinguistic negotiation, metasemantic ethics, conceptual ethics 1 i would like to thank everyone who provided feedback and support for this project over its long course of development. special thanks to briana toole, katherine ritchie, zeynep soysal, samia hesni, and to an anonymous reviewer who encouraged me greatly at a time when i really needed encouragement and who asked me to write a much more complex version of this paper—it will be written eventually! feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 1. what is linguistic hijacking? this paper identifies a form of epistemic and political violence i call linguistic hijacking. linguistic hijacking involves misusing or co-opting politically significant terminology in ways that harm marginalized groups. these misuses are often intended to exert a kind of political dominance, though they do not need to be intentionally controversial or politically motivated to count as hijackings. the central aim of this paper is to investigate linguistic hijacking by theorizing about the harms it causes. the present study engages with a complex set of issues in epistemology, critical race theory, and metasemantics.2 linguistic hijacking occurs when dominant groups misuse terminology that marginalized groups use to communicate and theorize about the forms of oppression they experience. something counts as a misuse of such politically significant terminology insofar as it functions to spread misinformation, ignorance, or false belief about the phenomenon referred to within the relevant marginalized discourse. for example, misuses of the word “racism” are those that function to spread misinformation, ignorance, or false belief about racism. linguistic hijacking is more than a mere misapplication of a term; it is a pattern of inaccurate usage that functions as part of a resistance to knowledge of oppression. resistance to knowledge of oppression is a form of active ignorance (collins 2002; mills 2007; pohlhaus 2012; sullivan and tuana 2007), a multifaceted group activity aimed at erasing or containing the spread of knowledge about things like racism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, capitalist exploitation, ableism, 2 metasemantic theories describe the conditions that determine the semantic features of a language (fragment). where a semantic theory describes the semantic values of expressions and the rules by which the semantic values of complex expressions are determined by the features of their parts, a metasemantic theory explains why the correct semantic theory is true, rather than some other semantic theory. a metasemantic theory might also provide counterfactual descriptions of what the correct semantic theory would have been if other facts—psychological, social, historical, physical, perhaps others—had been different. this distinction has been drawn many times; see hawthorne (2007), williams (2007), williamson (2008), rayo (2010), sider (2013), yalcin (2014), and simchen (2017). the use of the term “metasemantics” to mark the foundational side of this distinction is only recently established. earlier authors draw roughly the same distinction using different terminology. stalnaker (1997) distinguishes between “descriptive semantics” and “foundational semantics.” schiffer (1987) talks about “semantic theories” and “meaning theories” (for schiffer, meaning theories include semantic theories as components). for lewis (1969) there is the study of “languages” and of “what makes a language be an actual language of a population.” anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 and so on, in order to protect and perpetuate systems of domination. it involves spreading misinformation, misrepresenting crucial facts and concepts, misdirecting attention, covering up evidence, erasing testimony and silencing voices of oppressed groups, creating counternarratives, and many other things as well. a particular use of a term, such as a misapplication of “racism,” counts as linguistic hijacking if it is part of a usage pattern that facilitates resistance to knowledge of oppression in this sense. understanding linguistic hijacking is important. it is a matter of understanding the ways in which misuses of politically significant terminology function to undermine the effectiveness of the conceptual resources deployed by marginalized groups in political discourse. on the model developed in this paper, linguistic hijacking allows dominant communities to isolate themselves from marginalized discourses and ignore the realities of systemic oppression. further, i show how pervasive misuse might actually destabilize the semantic functions of crucial terminology within marginalized discourses and within broader public conversations. for example, widespread misuse of the word “racism” might ultimately corrupt the semantic function of that word, shifting its reference to something other than racism. if the word “racism” ceases to refer to racism, then an invaluable tool in the fight against oppression has been destroyed. linguistic hijacking is perhaps best introduced through examples. the primary cases i examine here are hijackings of the words “racism” and “racist.” consider the white protestor holding a sign that says, “affirmative action is racist,” or the angry twitter account that tweets “#blm is a racist organization.” the first implies that a practice that disadvantages white people on account of their race is a form of racism against whites. the second implies that an organization concerned to protect the lives of black people, but not explicitly concerned to protect the lives of white people, is racist. in each of these examples, the word “racist” is deployed in a way that obscures the nature of racism, invoking an alternative conception on which any differential treatment aimed at promoting the well-being of members of an explicitly specified race counts as “racist.” affirmative action explicitly aims to promote the chances of people of color in relation to their white competitors, but to call this “racist” obscures the nature of racism. it misdirects moral opposition aimed at racist institutions and turns that opposition against institutions designed to combat racism, while reinforcing resistance to knowledge of racism. a closely related misuse of “racist” alleges that conversations about the detail and extent of white supremacy are “racist.” according to this misconception, sometimes called ‘colorblindness,’ any reference to race is a form of “racism,” so any reference to white people or whiteness as such counts as “racist.” hence, any attempt to explain a racist incident by referencing feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 whiteness is seen as “racist.”3 for example, richard dawkins once tweeted that it was “racist” to call him a white man.4 such statements use the words “racism” and “racist” in ways that do not accord with our best theories of racism. racism is a matter of power and privilege, not merely a matter of difference in treatment or concern on the basis of race. collins (1998, 280) theorizes racism as: a system of unequal power and privilege in which human beings are divided into groups or races, with social rewards being unevenly distributed to groups based on their racial classification. variations of racism include institutionalized racism, scientific racism, and everyday racism. in the united states, racial segregation constitutes a fundamental organizing principle of racism. collins’s definition reflects extensive theoretical work within black feminism (lorde 2012; hooks 1981; davis 2011; collins 1986), critical race theory (lawrence 1987; crenshaw 1988; peller 1990; gotanda 1991) and intersectionality studies (crenshaw 1991, 2018; roberts 1991; cho, crenshaw, and mccall 2013). crucial for present purposes, racism is a matter of unequal power and privilege maintained by a system, something of larger ontological scale than an individual. affirmative action aimed at promoting the success of people of color is not racist on this view of racism; nor is black lives matter a racist institution in virtue of its explicit mission to promote the life chances of black folks; nor is it racist to identify whiteness as implicated in patterns of racism. i always use the word “racism” to refer to racism, so understood. i use the word “racist” to express the property of being racist, which i take to be the property of promoting or beneficially participating in racism. 3 the idea that differential treatment on the basis of race in the service of addressing past racial injustices should itself count as racism has been subjected to thorough criticism by scholars of critical race theory. see kennedy (1990) and gotanda (1991) for canonical arguments. 4 dawkins tweeted, “‘insufferable smug white male making snide comments in loafers.’ racism & sexism are fine, so long as they point in the right direction!” (@richarddawkins, twitter, may 23, 2013, 11:40 p.m. https://twitter.com /richarddawkins/status/337775059139694593), and “learn to think clearly and use language precisely. you may justify racism & sexism towards white males. but it's still racist & sexist.” (may 24, 2013, 6:04 a.m. https://twitter.com/richarddawkins /status/337871610826600448). anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 this discussion of racism highlights an important feature of theorizing about linguistic hijacking: to classify a particular usage of an expression as an instance of linguistic hijacking presupposes something about the underlying metaphysical reality of the first-order phenomena in question. it presupposes the veracity of some marginalized discourse. in the present study, a theory of racism is presupposed— namely, the theory that racism is essentially related to structural oppression. not everyone accepts such a theory of racism, and this difference tends to track political convictions related to race. consequently, claims about linguistic hijackings of “racism” will be politically contentious along roughly the same lines that the underlying theory of racism is contentious. that is, a person who disagrees with me about the first-order facts about racism will also very likely disagree with me about which usages of the word “racism” count as cases of linguistic hijacking. this is a general fact about linguistic hijacking. whether some usage counts as linguistic hijacking is theory-dependent. it always depends on background social theories of oppression and privilege. the fact that there are predictable disagreements about racism—predictable because they reliably track differences in political commitments—does not entail there is no objective fact about what racism really is. likewise, there are politically situated disagreements about which uses of “racism” count as linguistic hijackings, but this does not entail there is no objective fact of the matter about whether a given use counts as a linguistic hijacking. there are misuses of “racist” that function to spread misinformation and facilitate white ignorance (mills 2007) about racism; i maintain that this is objectively true, even though it is disputed across familiar political divides. some white supremacists may claim that white people are more racially oppressed than people of color in the united states these days. these same white supremacists may claim that “racism” is being hijacked by critical race theorists. but the white supremacists are wrong on both counts. assessing whether a given usage counts as linguistic hijacking requires applying a background theory of oppression, but this does not mean the concept of linguistic hijacking is subjective or somehow problematically biased. other examples of linguistic hijacking include attacks on gender identity, such as the statement “trans women are not really women.” here the term “women” is used in an attempt to exclude trans women from its extension. the correlated misuse of “men” functions in the same way, as when milo yiannopoulos said, “i think that women and girls should be protected from having men who are confused about their sexual identities in their bathrooms.”5 5 real time with bill maher, hbo, episode 415, february 17, 2017; emphasis added. for extensive discussion of the semantics and politics of uses and misuses of gender terminology, see bettcher (2009, 2013). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 misuses of political organizing terms such as “feminism” and “intersectionality” are also important examples of linguistic hijacking. examples of mischaracterizations of feminism within mainstream political discourse are commonplace and widely recognized by feminist scholars and activists. one can get a sense of these by searching “feminism” on the urban dictionary website, where one will find such definitions as “feminism: a relentless political advocacy group pushing for special privileges for women, which pretends to be a social movement advocating equal rights for the genders,”6 and “feminism: an ideology that supports that women are superior to men, whether biologically, socially, or mentally.”7 these definitions flagrantly misconstrue and misrepresent what feminism is and help to spread misinformation. hijackings of “intersectionality” tend to be situated in white academic discourses. henning (2020) gives an example in which a scholar attempts to quantify intersectionality using a statistical model, but the model adduced includes properties such as height and t-shirt preference in addition to race and gender. as henning argues, intersectionality is not concerned with ‘identities’ such as t-shirt preference, which have no connection to systemic oppression. the attempt to deploy the word “intersectionality” for a model of such properties functions to obscure knowledge of intersectionality properly understood, which is essentially centered on interlocking systems of oppression. according to this perspective, any attempt to use the term “intersectionality” for identities that are not centrally connected with systemic oppression is a form of linguistic hijacking.8 there are many important cases of linguistic hijacking, each of which presents a unique constellation of issues. while my focus will be on hijackings of “racist” and “racism,” my conclusions bear on epistemic and metasemantic issues concerning a very wide range of expressions involved in political speech. linguistic hijacking occurs when dominant epistemic agents appropriate an expression that is epistemically relevant to the pursuit of social justice in a way that furthers the oppression of some marginalized group. take the term “racist.” this term is epistemically relevant to the pursuit of justice insofar as it is our primary linguistic representation of racism. we use it to communicate and theorize about 6 urban dictionary, s.v. “feminism,” accessed july 30, 2020, https://www .urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feminism. 7 urban dictionary, s.v. “feminism,” definition #12 on sept. 7, 2019, https:// web.archive.org/web/20170909091321/http:/www.urbandictionary.com/define.ph p?term=feminism&page=2. 8 for further discussion of what collins (2015) calls “the gentrification of intersectionality,” see tomlinson (2013), cho, crenshaw, and mccall (2013), and collins and bilge (2016). anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 racism, to direct social and political action in opposition to racism, to challenge oppressive people and institutions, and so on. when “racist” is appropriated by political opponents of antiracist theory and activism, it’s redeployed in ways that obscure or twist the meaning of the word. it’s used to attack antiracism advocacy groups such as black lives matter, labeling them as “racist.” it’s used in ways that obscure the nature of racism by applying the term to that which is not racist. insofar as linguistic hijacking systematically infringes on the epistemic agency of marginalized groups, it is a form of epistemic oppression (dotson 2014). it might also be conceived as a form of epistemic injustice (fricker 2007; mckinnon 2016) insofar as it can be connected with individual or group-based wrongs against members of marginalized groups in their capacity as agents of knowledge.9 linguistic hijacking can facilitate willful hermeneutical ignorance (pohlhaus 2012), a form of active ignorance through which dominant agents resist uptake of conceptual resources generated by marginalized groups; this is a crucial way in which linguistic hijacking functions to promote active ignorance, as will be discussed below. linguistic hijackings of “racist” and “racism” also contribute to what mills (2007) calls white ignorance, the massive, widespread miscognition among white people about the nature and extent of racism. as will also be discussed later in more detail, linguistic hijacking helps white folks construct misleading discourses about what they call “racism,” but which is not really racism. this ultimately allows white folks to avoid thinking or talking about racism. how does linguistic hijacking work? in section 2, i introduce what i call the semantic corruption model. on this model, linguistic hijackings alter the semantic properties of politically significant terminology, changing them so they no longer function semantically in ways that promote knowledge and communication about oppression. this dynamic metasemantic model gives us a powerful tool for understanding how patterns of abuses of terminology might affect meanings in epistemically harmful ways. section 3 then presents an objection to the model—the semantic data objection—which focuses on how the model renders dominant agents as speaking truly in their own idiolects about something other than racism, despite the fact that it is quite natural (from the perspective of the critical race theorist, at least) to represent them as speaking falsely about racism. section 4 responds to this objection, drawing on the idea of metalinguistic negotiation developed by plunkett and sundell (2013). section 5 concludes with a brief discussion of the social nature of metalinguistic negotiation as it operates according to the semantic corruption model. 9 although see dotson (2012) on the limits of epistemic injustice as a framework for understanding epistemic oppression. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 2. the semantic corruption model semantic corruption is a manipulated semantic change imposed by those in power that furthers their ends, quintessentially by debasing important connections between representation and reality. by misusing the words “racist” and “racism,” the dominant group seizes control of the meanings of those terms, altering them to serve its own interests. this allows dominant groups to shelter themselves from perspectives that would challenge the status quo. the quintessential example of this is when white people use “racist” to refer to initiatives that impose burdens on white people in the course of redressing racist inequality. linguistic hijacking also creates metasemantic echo chambers. this happens when communities of white folks reaffirm one another’s mistaken usage of “racism” and refuse to uptake the meaning deployed by those who experience racism. and it has the potential to disrupt thought and communication about racism by eroding the semantic properties of expressions that are used within marginalized discourses, threatening to deprive them of their semantic function within those discourses and within broader conversations. this happens when linguistic hijacking of the word “racism” causes a change of meaning so that it no longer refers to racism, possibly even among those who are interested in talking about racism. a natural way to model the idea of semantic corruption is to draw on burge’s (1979, 1986) theory of social externalism, according to which patterns of deference determine the semantic properties of mental and linguistic representations.10 as persuasive members of dominant groups misuse the term “racism” and as this usage becomes more popular—as more people defer to those who engage in it—the term’s meaning gradually aligns with dominant usage. eventually we can no longer use “racism” to talk about racism. its original meaning has been corrupted. the term is now co-opted by the oppressor. it expresses a concept of the oppressor’s choosing. 10 the present paper does not attempt a thorough defense of burge’s socialexternalist framework. there are many complex issues regarding the nature of semantic deference and the adequacy of a semantic-externalist framework of the kind developed here, as well as potential disputes about how burge himself intended these issues to be understood and resolved. certainly, many papers could be written to explore such foundational issues. my aim in the present paper is to analyze a less foundational phenomenon, viz., linguistic hijacking, using burge’s externalist insights as a starting point. anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 2.1. a burgean thought experiment let’s start by reimagining the classic burgean thought experiment supporting social externalism. rather than focusing on arthritis as burge (1979) does, we will focus on racism. imagine eric, a young white man who thinks racism is only a matter of treating people differently on the basis of race. eric explicitly maintains that racism against white folks is possible and happens fairly often. eric frequently and wholeheartedly asserts, “affirmative action is racist against white people.” given that racism necessarily involves systematic oppression white people don’t face, eric’s claim is false. eric is also expressing a belief about racism that is likewise false. next imagine eric has never come across anyone who disagrees with him on this point until he attends a university where he eventually pursues a degree in sociology with a focus on critical race theory and intersectionality studies. on his first day of sociology 101, he comes right out with his claim that affirmative action is racist. the sociology professor rebuts him, explaining in some detail why affirmative action cannot be a form of racism because affirmative action does not reinforce systems of racial oppression. by the time he finishes his degree, eric takes himself to have had a change in belief about racism spurred by conversations with his professors and classmates and by reading critical race theory. he stands corrected. he concedes that his earlier belief was false. he defers to his professors and classmates in their usage of the term “racism.” it’s quite natural to interpret this as a case in which his original belief was false, as was the sentence he used to express that belief. now consider a different possible world in which patterns of systemic oppression are exactly as they are in our actual society—leaving facts about racism unchanged—but in which the term “racism” is not used to refer to racism but is used instead to refer to the property of merely discriminating on the basis of race. in this world when eric says affirmative action is “racist,” his sociology 101 professor agrees. all of the critical race theory he reads agrees with him on this point. eric takes himself to have been correct all along in his use of that term. following burge’s intuition about arthritis, we conclude that here eric’s sentence “affirmative action is racist against white people” and the belief it expresses are both true given the way people use the word “racist” in this alternate possible world. since none of the facts about racism are different in this other world, we conclude that the difference in truth-value must consist in a semantic difference. the semantic features of the word “racist” and the concept expressed by that term are different in this other world; relatedly, the belief eric expresses is not about racism. now let’s modify the burgean thought experiment so there are a number of different communities in the same world, some who use the word “racism” for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 racism and some who use it for mere race-based discrimination. we imagine that both “racist” and “racism” have correspondingly different meanings within each community.11 this scenario prompts the following thought. what eric means by “racism” and the concept he thinks about in connection with that term are determined by which group he is disposed to defer to. if upon reflection eric defers to the critical race theorists, then he thinks and talks about racism. if he only defers to speakers who maintain that “racism” in twenty-first-century america is primarily directed against whites, then eric does not think or talk about racism. he only thinks and talks about some other phenomenon that is not essentially connected with racial oppression. when eric believes and says, “affirmative action is racist against white people,” he speaks and believes truly, though his speech and thought are not about racism. in order to model this relationship between meaning and deference, we have to think carefully about the ways in which members of a community are related to one another in terms of who defers to whom. each person has a unique deference relation with each other person in the community. these dispositions to defer also vary on an expression-by-expression basis. i may be willing to defer to a 11 it is stipulated as part of the burgean thought experiment that the counterfactual community uses the word “arthritis” to express a different concept with a different extension, such that the truth conditions of “i have arthritis in my thigh” are different in the counterfactual world. burge doesn’t explain what the metaphysical ground of this difference is, and i follow him in that. likewise, in my thought experiment, it’s stipulated that the counterfactual community uses “racism” to express a different concept with a different extension. in the second version of the thought experiment, it’s stipulated that this alternative community exists in the actual world alongside the other; hence it’s stipulated that the two uses of “racism” express different concepts and have different extensions. this highlights the questions: where did these meanings come from in the first place? how came there to be two groups using one word with two different meanings? i leave these details unspecified here. there are many different kinds of accounts that could be given. the two communities might associate the term “racism” with different conceptual roles (greenberg and harman 2008), or they could be so constituted that their concepts have different asymmetric dependence properties (fodor 1990), or the concepts they use carry different information (dretske 1991) or differ in “direct proper function” (millikan 1984). burge (1979) expresses sympathy with an antireductionist view of semantics; on such a view, any explanation of why the two communities mean different things must make reference to what members of each community mean when they say “racism.” anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 mathematician about the meaning of “abelian group” but not “axolotl.” hence, for every expression e in the language, each person s has their own unique deference disposition profile—a set of relationships to each other person s′ in the community characterized by s’s willingness to defer to s′ concerning the correct use of e.12 note that (following burge) deference is grounded in dispositions rather than interactions. s is deferential to s′ just in case s is disposed to be convinced by s′ of the correct usage of e. this may be true even if the two never actually interact. we can say the strength of the deference relation from s to s′ concerning e is given by p in the following counterfactual: if s were to interact with s′ about the usage of e, the probability that s would defer to s′ concerning e is equal to p. hence a measure of deferential strength is a measure of a certain probability within a counterfactual situation.13 2.2. constructing the model we are now primed to give a more exact specification of the semantic corruption model. we represent each individual in the broader language-using community by a node in a network. an individual’s deference profile for a given term e is represented by a set of weighted arrows pointing to every other node in the network. these arrows indicate the strength of deference the individual bears to their fellow regarding e. a complete specification of a person’s deference profile at a given time would include a set of indexed layers of arrow maps, one layer for every term. this allows the model to discriminate deferential attitudes concerning every term the individual recognizes. we may identify the index of each layer with the term it represents; so for example, “racism” would be the index of its own layer. the total deference pattern for a single term across members of a community is given by the full collection of arrow maps for the relevant index, where each node in the network is associated with its own co-indexed arrow map. the set of all co-indexed arrow maps captures the full range of influence each node has on every other concerning the proper use of a single term at a time. it provides a static 12 the strength of these deference relations may be indeterminate in some cases, vague in many or perhaps all cases, and also context sensitive. the model i develop here idealizes away from these nuances, which are not crucial for understanding the semantic corruption model but which may be of significance when applying the dynamic metasemantic framework in detail. 13 if the suppression of context sensitivity seems too acute at this point, we can define the measure of deference as an average of the probabilities across sufficiently close possible worlds in which an interaction between s and s′ concerning e takes place. a more detailed account is beyond the scope of the present paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 representation of, for example, who is disposed to defer to whom concerning the semantics of “racism” at a single moment. let’s suppose there are two potential semantic interpretations for “racism” available, one referring to racism-as-oppression and one referring to race-conscious differential treatment. we represent the degree to which each person is committed to each interpretation by assigning two scalars to each node within the “racism” layer. we might graphically represent these numbers as colors for each node with one scalar fixing a level of red saturation and the other a level of blue saturation. fully blue nodes stand for people who use “racism” to refer to racism. fully red nodes stand for people who use “racism” to refer to race-conscious differential treatment with or without systemic oppression. purple nodes are in semantic limbo, being disposed to defer more or less evenly to members of the two conflicting semantic camps.14 the scalars at node n are determined as a function of the scalars at each other node ni together with the weight of n’s deference arrow to ni. a node that defers strongly to people with high blue saturation and defers weakly to nodes with high red saturation will be on the blue end of the spectrum—that is, they will use “racism” to denote racism—while a node that defers strongly to red nodes and weakly to blue nodes will be red and use “racism” to denote mere differential treatment on the basis of race. people with highly determinate deference profiles about “racism”—those whose nodes are not purple—will form subnetworks, collections of nodes that point strongly at one another and point only weakly or with degree zero to nodes of the opposing color. these subnetworks represent communities that are strongly disposed to defer to one another concerning the semantics of “racism” and that are unwilling to defer to members of opposing semantic factions. thus, this model produces a natural demarcation of linguistic subcommunities who use terms in accord with one another and who collectively oppose the usage patterns of outsiders. the model also grounds the claim that members of different subcommunities mean different things by “racism.” the semantic corruption model entails a kind of social constructivism about truth. each linguistic subcommunity has the power to determine for itself the semantic properties of its linguistic representations by determining who should and who should not be deferred to. by deferring only to those who use terms in preferred ways—that is, by deferring only to one another—a community has the 14 what does it mean to be in semantic limbo? a purple node in the “racism” layer has no clear conviction about what racism is or what “racism” means, such that they are disposed to defer to critical race theorists as well as their opponents in equal measure. perhaps such a person does not determinately express any meaning when they use “racism.” thanks to zeynep soysal for raising this question. anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 power to stipulate the truth of whatever statements it cares to. a reactionary community can thereby stipulate that all of its proclamations about “racism” are true. the ontological features of reality are not altered—the community does not make racism itself vanish. only the semantic features of their language are manipulated. the possibility of socially constructing truth extends to mental representations as well, in a sense. once reactionary communities convince each other that “affirmative action is racist” is true, the belief expressed by this sentence within that community is also true. the belief would not be about racism. in this way, the reactionary community leads itself to stop thinking falsely about racism and believe only truths about a gerrymandered set of facts that excludes facts about racial oppression, white privilege, or any other aspects of true racism. the community refuses to think about those uncomfortable facts. thus, dominant groups are free to dissociate from uncomfortable swaths of reality by constructing their own meanings for social and political discourses. we can now understand the harm of hijacking “racism” according to this dynamic metasemantic theory (note, we have not yet explicitly introduced the dynamic component; that will be introduced explicitly in section 2.3). hijackings undermine deferential support for those who use the term “racism” to refer to racism and increases deferential support for those who use “racism” to refer to something else. when someone convincingly asserts, “affirmative action is racist against white people,” they strengthen deferential relations within the network that refuses to talk about actual racism. they also put pressure on deferential networks of people of color and their allies who use “racism” to think and talk about racism. hijacking thus threatens to undermine any usefulness the term “racism” has for promoting social justice. it might even eliminate the concept of racism as a cognitive resource altogether by cutting off all means of expressing and communicating that concept. if the word “racism” ceases to refer to racism, then an invaluable tool in the fight against oppression has been destroyed. on some versions of the semantic corruption model it may be possible for marginalized groups to persist in using “racism” to refer to racism indefinitely by refusing to defer to dominant misuses. they would maintain their own counterhegemonic subnetworks. in that case, people of color and their white allies would be able to think and talk about racism amongst themselves but not as part of the larger community in which they are embedded. while this semantic defeat would be less dramatic than the complete obliteration of “racism” as a word for racism, losing power to think and communicate about racism in shared public discourses would still be quite devastating. this would be a scenario in which, for the most part, even antiracism advocates and theorists have abandoned using “racism” to refer to racism, and though there are some small groups who continue feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 to use it thus, their usage is so at odds with the mainstream discourse that they are seen to be confused or wrong by definition, even among political allies. all previous discourses around racism centering on a critique of power and oppression thereby come to be seen as confused. whatever new term is introduced for racism (assuming there is one), it will not have a historical connection to antiracist movements of the sort that using consistent terminology provides, nor will new theories constructed using that term be seen as elaborations of earlier theories of racism (insofar as those earlier theories will be seen as having a different subject matter). lastly, if the term “racist” is co-opted by the forces of white ignorance, they can use that word to claim that opposition to white supremacy is “racist” whenever it confronts whiteness or white people as such over their role in continuing racebased oppression. 2.3. modeling change over time the set of all co-indexed arrow maps for all terms represents one static moment of life in the community: the total pattern of deference at a time t. the semantic corruption model represents more than this one moment. it represents a dynamic system in which meanings change over time. the dynamic model describes how hijackings alter the distribution of deference-arrow magnitudes or, more generally, how use influences patterns of deference and thereby influences patterns of semantic features. those who are perceived as having the greatest competence elicit the most deference. burge describes greatest competence as consisting “in abilities to draw distinctions, to produce precisifications, to use numerous linguistic resources, to offer counterexamples to proposed equivalences—that elicit the reflective agreement of other competent speakers. . . . to put it crudely, a person counts as the most competent if he or she would be persuasive to other competent speakers in the use and explication of the language” (burge 1986, 702; emphasis in original). as members of each subcommunity attempt to persuade people, those perceived as most competent will act as deference magnets, drawing more and more nodes into their cluster and perhaps weakening the deferential resolve of tenuous members of opposing factions.15 to represent the effects of deference magnets, a dynamic model might be constructed as follows. treat each static graph as a state of a phase space containing 15 this analysis positions the semantic corruption model as a version of what ball (2020, 5) calls “power metasemantics,” on which “the experts are simply those whose testimony we will accept—those who can convince us to adopt their usage,” although the semantic corruption model complicates the use of the term “we” here, since different groups will recognize different “experts.” anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 all possible patterns of deference. within each state, the dynamic model assigns a matrix to each node representing the force with which that node acts as a deference magnet on all other nodes. each matrix represents the actions, speech acts, prestige, credibility, and so on, of the person represented by the node—whatever features determine that person’s perceived competence for others. the dynamic model then represents the effects of this perceived competence on deference patterns as a propagation operator that determines the next phase of the system as a (possibly nondeterministic) function of the effects of deference magnets together with the deference profiles of all nodes in the current phase. we could also build in as a feature of this model that as a particular usage achieves greater coverage of the graph, the pressure on nodes to conform to the dominant usage increases. this would be represented by a global variable that functions to increase the strength of deference magnets who use a term in accord with popular usage and decrease the strength of deference magnets who use it in accord with some unpopular usage. this would represent the difficulty of getting people to use a word in a way that runs counter to popular usage. it would also reflect the idea that very idiosyncratic interpretations of terms will tend to be extinguished out of sheer impracticality. in the scenario imagined above, where a small group continues to use “racism” to refer to racism in spite of widespread rejection of that meaning, the group successfully resists the pressure represented by this global variable. doing so requires strong resolve, since almost no one defers to you, and the vast majority, even many of your friends and allies, insist you are misusing the word. 2.4. harms of linguistic hijacking this subsection outlines a number of ways in which linguistic hijacking, understood according to the semantic corruption model, creates active ignorance and misinformation and generates other harms. it also discusses ways in which resistant groups use deference networks to generate and distribute resistant meanings. i begin with a consideration about why hijacking “racism” is especially harmful insofar as it turns a resource for alleviating oppression against the very people it is meant to help. the negative moral valence of the word “racism” derives from the fact that it refers (and has referred) to racism. it is because “racist” denotes racists that it’s bad to be called “racist.” this matters to the force of the complaint that affirmative action is “racist,” that it’s “racist” to call richard dawkins white, and so on. when you condemn a person or institution using the word “racist,” you are morally condemning with force that is proportional to the badness of racism. you are lumping your target in with nazis and slave owners and the kkk. when a white person calls affirmative action “racist,” they are attempting to invoke the moral feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 outrage proper for racism, co-opting that outrage and using it in defense of the system that undergirds white dominance. this is a crucial aspect of the manipulation of the semantics of “racism,” for the change of meaning brought about through semantic corruption does not alter the moral valence associated with the term (at least not quickly). this is why it is strategically useful for white people to co-opt the term for their own purposes. when a white person says a person of color is “racist” against white people, they draw on the moral condemnation appropriate for racism and turn it against someone who actually experiences and perseveres against racism. if the semantic corruption model is correct, we can expect what we might call enfranchised semantic drift, the phenomenon in which the dynamics of meaning-change will tend to favor the interests of dominant groups. enfranchised semantic drift is likely, on the semantic corruption model, due to pervasive patterns of conceptual competence injustice (anderson 2017). conceptual competence injustice occurs when a member of a marginalized group is judged to have less conceptual competence than she in fact has. such a person is unjustly regarded as lacking an adequate understanding of how a word is properly used or as failing to grasp the concept that word expresses. because members of marginalized groups are accorded less intellectual credibility, they are consistently exposed to conceptual competence injustice. since deference magnetism is a matter of perceived competence, systematic conceptual competence injustice reliably reduces the power of marginalized deference magnets. hence, patterns of deference toward marginalized communities will be relatively weak compared to patterns of deference toward enfranchised communities. for example, pervasive dominant ideology ensures that white people will typically command more respect and wield more intellectual authority than people of color. thus, according to the semantic corruption model, if left alone over time, the system will tend to settle the semantics of the term “racism” in favor of the preferred usage of white people. since white people also have a vested interest in obscuring knowledge of racism within a white supremacist society (mills 2007, 2014) and thus a vested interest in promoting misuses of “racism,” we can predict that enfranchised semantic drift will eventually corrupt the semantics of “racism” if left unchecked. enfranchised semantic drift presents an avenue for dominant groups to collectively practice what pohlhaus (2012) calls willful hermeneutical ignorance. willful hermeneutical ignorance occurs when dominant agents intentionally resist understanding or uptaking conceptual resources developed by marginalized groups for understanding oppression. when a whole community exercises its ability to control the semantics of its language in order to divest marginalized terminology such as “racist” of its emancipatory representational function, the community anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 effectively refuses to use or understand the word in a way that carries information about racism. this constitutes a kind of collective willful hermeneutical ignorance. it makes claims about real racism unintelligible and simultaneously verifies claims about “racism” made by the dominant group. the ability to interface only with some deference networks and fully reject others presents an opportunity to live in a kind of metasemantic echo chamber, in which the meanings of our words reflect the beliefs we share with those who are politically aligned with us. a similar phenomenon also facilitates the creation of marginalized epistemic resources in the first place, the very resources dominant groups work to shut out. the practice of creating a mutually reinforcing deference network walled off from dominant linguistic practices is crucial for establishing and transmitting concepts and word meanings that function to illuminate and attack structures of oppression. deferential networks of people of color and their allies are able to maintain a resistant use of the word “racist” by (a) refusing to let their usage patterns be swayed by or conform to the usages promoted by dominant linguistic networks and their deference magnets, and (b) allowing their own usage patterns to be shaped through deference to those who are seen to have the most epistemic authority in the domain under consideration. to illustrate (b): members of the black lives matter movement offer the refrain crafted by representative ayanna pressley, “the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” this refrain could also function as a guide to establishing deference magnets within resistant communities. those who have experienced the most pain as a direct consequence of oppressive circumstances should be given higher degrees of deference concerning the correct usage of the terminology that functions to express or theorize about aspects of those experiences. arguably, this deference practice is already enacted within networks of resistant populations such as the black lives matter global network. there can be subtle networks within resistant deferential networks. these subtle networks reflect differences of opinion about proper usages within marginalized communities. for example, there could be differences in opinion within blm about the correct use of “racism.” the semantic corruption model can capture these subtle patterns. it can identify subtle deference magnets within communities that are, broadly speaking, mutually deferential. for example, members of blm will defer to one another much more strongly with regard to the correct usage of “racist” than they would defer to donald trump’s uses of “racist,” which are seen to be hijackings, yet within the blm community there may be subtle differences in the strength of deference relations among community members that reflect the process of negotiating the meaning of the term within that community. the existence of counterhegemonic subnetworks has been theorized in alternative ways by a number of scholars. according to lugones (2006), for example, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 we must see communication within “coalitions of the oppressed” as dependent on recognizing and navigating unintelligibility—the fact that shared interpretation of terms within resistant communities cannot be assumed. according to lugones, the presupposition that communication within counterhegemonic subnetworks is “semiotically transparent”—that participants can easily understand one another’s words—is a counterproductive fiction. effective communication can only proceed through elaborate and complex measures, including storytelling and the patient sharing of memories to build connections and mutual comprehension; this is part of what lugones calls “complex communication.” lugones’s perspective appears to conflict with the semantic corruption model on which members of linguistic subnetworks de facto use words with the same meanings. but the two approaches aren’t really inconsistent, and seeing why helps us understand what the semantic corruption model entails. on the semantic corruption model, using a word with a shared meaning among members of a linguistic subcommunity does not entail that everyone in the subcommunity understands the word in the same way. it only means that members of the subcommunity are disposed to defer to one another in an attempt to correct and adjust their own understandings of the term. the process of actually adjusting conceptions might involve the kinds of patient and complex conversations lugones recommends. on the semantic corruption model, the meaning of a word is an abstraction representing (roughly) what a community would eventually convince each of its members to accept. complex communication might be part of the process whereby coalitions of the oppressed come to share an understanding of the meanings of crucial terms. moreover, coalitions of the oppressed might not constitute the kinds of linguistic subnetworks that the semantic corruption model describes. resistant coalitions are not founded on mutual linguistic deference but on shared interest in opposing oppression. so it could be that complex communication is part of transforming a political coalition into a resistant deferential network that uses crucial terms with shared meanings. i have outlined a variety of ways in which linguistic hijacking can serve as a source of misinformation and active ignorance. i have also showed how the semantic corruption model can help us understand the metasemantic practices of resistant coalitions. in the next section, i raise an objection to the semantic corruption model. then in section 4, i respond to this objection. 3. semantic data objection on the semantic corruption model, people who assert, “affirmative action is a form of racism,” do not refer to racism. moreover, those who hear and accept this claim thereby defer to the community that uses “racism” to refer to mere discrimination and thereby consolidate their usage as referring to something other anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 than racism. these people do not form false beliefs about racism. they don’t form beliefs about racism at all. they form true beliefs about the much less harmful— because nonsystematic—phenomenon of intentional race-based discrimination. thus the semantic corruption model misses the fact that linguistic hijacking can involve false assertions that harmfully propagate false beliefs about racism.16 recall the case of richard dawkins, who once tweeted that it was “racist” and “sexist” to call him a white man. it is quite natural to take him to have asserted that it was racist and sexist to call him a white man. given background commitments from feminist and critical race theory, it is also quite natural to take what he asserted to be false and to reveal his false beliefs. moreover, the false assertions are seen to spread false beliefs to others about the nature of racism and sexism. insofar as these claims are accepted as semantic data, the semantic corruption model can be charged with getting the semantic data wrong. our first-order commitments about the truth or falsity of sentences invoking “racist” and “racism” are data that must be accounted for by an acceptable metasemantic theory. this data, from the perspective being illustrated here, includes the fact that “affirmative action is racist” is false, which is what our best theories of racism tell us. our understanding of oppression properly informs our judgment about which sentences are true in the language we speak. these judgments in turn constrain which metasemantic theories we should find epistemically acceptable for that language. according to this objection, the semantic corruption model should be rejected because it fails to capture crucial semantic data. it incorrectly represents people who say, “affirmative action is racist,” as speaking truly. this objection aligns with a venerable tradition in the philosophy of language. kripke’s (1972) famous argument against the description theory of reference for proper names is of the same form. kripke argues that the description theory delivers the wrong semantics. it entails, for example, that a speaker who 16 a related worry i have is the following. the semantic corruption model seems to degrade the value/harm of thinking and speaking truly/falsely in political discourse. for example, on the semantic corruption model, the harm of white people calling people of color “racist” has nothing to do with thinking or speaking falsely, since they speak truly (in their own white idiolect). a person can speak truly about “racism” even when they are ignorant about racism, so what is the value of speaking truly? but of course the existence of ambiguity does not mean that there is no value whatsoever in speaking truly. on the semantic corruption model, “racist” becomes ambiguous. it is still very valuable to speak truly when the word is used with its antiracist meaning. this value is part of what makes linguistic hijacking harmful. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this reply. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 associates “einstein” with the description “the inventor of the atomic bomb” would not refer to einstein. the first-order semantic fact that “einstein” refers to einstein even when used by a confused speaker provides a decisive reason to reject the description theory. likewise, when iowa representative steve king claimed it would be “racist” to put harriett tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, what he said was false.17 his use of “racist” denoted racism regardless of his confusion. this kind of first-order semantic fact provides epistemic force, analogous with kripke’s example, against the semantic corruption model. 4. metalinguistic negotiation and semantic corruption i will now develop a response to this objection. the response is enabled by adopting a certain perspective on disagreement developed by plunkett and sundell (2013), according to which many conceptual disagreements are characterized by metalinguistic negotiation. a defender of the semantic corruption model can diffuse the objection raised in section 3 by understanding political disputes as a matter of metalinguistic negotiation. the semantic corruption model also has a natural affinity for this perspective, as we will see. metalinguistic negotiation occurs when parties to a disagreement use a shared term with different meanings. each side then attempts to persuade the other to adopt their own preferred meaning. there is no disagreement over the truth of some disputed nonlinguistic proposition. the claims made by each party are true given the way each respectively uses relevant words. take one of plunkett and sundell’s illustrations, a debate over whether a champion racehorse can be considered an “athlete.” one party says the horse is an “athlete”; the other says it is “not an athlete.” plunkett and sundell (2013, 16) claim there is “little reason to think that the dispute . . . concerns straightforward factual matters about the topic at hand.” both sides understand the attributes and accomplishments of the horse. rather, the dispute must be about the proper way to apply the word “athlete,” whether those attributes and accomplishments suffice for veridical application of the term. the speakers thus use the word differently. one speaker uses “athlete” with a meaning that includes racehorses, the other uses it with a different meaning that excludes them, and each speaks truly, even though they appear to contradict one another. person a says, “the horse is an athlete,” person b says, “the horse is not an athlete,” and yet they both speak truly because “athlete” means different things in each sentence. plunkett and sundell note this explicitly: “each speaker literally expresses a true proposition given the concept they in fact express with their term” (17). to see this dispute as a metalinguistic 17 see nussbaum (2016). anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 negotiation is to see it as a scenario in which each side is attempting to convince the other to adopt their preferred meaning. now consider the case of “racist.” we imagine one person, say richard dawkins, who insists it is “racist” to call him white. we find his interlocutor on twitter insists it is not “racist” to call him white. within the metalinguistic negotiation framework, both sides speak truly, expressing different concepts with the word “racist.” likewise when one person says, “affirmative action is racist,” and the other says, “affirmative action is not racist,” each says something true given what they mean by “racist.” the debate is aimed at convincing the other to adopt one’s own preferred meaning. this is exactly what the semantic corruption model entails. each side in the debate speaks truly, using the word “racist” to mean what their community uses “racist” to mean, and each side does its best to exert pressure on the other side to adopt its own preferred usage. moreover, as i will develop further in section 5, the semantic corruption model provides a socially embedded conception of metalinguistic negotiation. it’s not merely pressure exerted against one’s conversational partner that matters, but rather pressure exerted against whole deferential networks. according to plunkett and sundell, a metalinguistic disagreement need not be explicitly metalinguistic on its face. it can assume the surface form of first-order discourse. in other words, a dispute about the meaning of the word “racism” can sound like a first-order, metaphysical dispute about the nature of racism. the disputants may even take themselves to be having a first-order debate about racism. yet they may in fact be speaking with different meanings of “racism” and thus, unbeknownst to them, they may be engaging in metalinguistic negotiation. plunkett and sundell argue that because metalinguistic negotiation is possible and often tacit, we cannot infer that interlocutors engaged in an apparently first-order disagreement are using their words with a shared meaning. the fact that people seem to be arguing about racism (as opposed to arguing about the meaning of “racism”) could be misleading. they could be engaging in a tacit metalinguistic negotiation. widespread tacit metalinguistic negotiation is further supported by a certain view of what it is to have a theoretical dispute. plausibly, when two disputants disagree about the nature of racism, they are proposing different theories of racism. then each is likely to use their term “racism” in a different way within their theory. each distinctive theory of racism presents its own distinctive (but homophonic) theoretical term “racism.” different theories of racism entail differences in the theoretical role of the term “racism,” and this difference in theoretical role arguably feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 constitutes a semantic difference between the homophonic theoretical terms.18 a disagreement about racism is then necessarily at least partially metalinguistic in nature, because it involves proposing different theories of racism involving distinctive (but homophonic) theoretical terms. the plausibility of widespread tacit metalinguistic negotiation undermines the force of the semantic data objection. if much of what appears to be first-order disagreement is in fact metalinguistic negotiation, then the semantic data are not what they seem to be. the semantic data objection relies on accepting the claim that, for example, richard dawkins spoke falsely when tweeting that it was “racist” to call him white, and treating this judgment as data for metasemantic theorizing. that this is a datum depends on the judgment that dawkins and his detractors use the term “racist” with the same meaning. but if plunkett and sundell are correct, then the dispute between dawkins and his detractors is plausibly metalinguistic in nature, even though it appears to be a first-order disagreement. if tacit metalinguistic negotiation is taking place, then the judgment that dawkins spoke falsely is incorrect. instead, he spoke truly in his own language in accord with the theory of racism he is trying to promote—just as the semantic corruption model predicts. the proponent of the semantic corruption model therefore has a way to diffuse the semantic data objection, namely by denying that the data are what they seem to be. the metalinguistic negotiation framework provides a plausible basis for doing just that. everyone (more or less) speaks truly in conceptual disputes whenever metalinguistic negotiations are happening. this is because, in a conceptual dispute characterized by metalinguistic negotiation, everyone’s statements are true given the concept they are expressing and advocating for. this is equally the case on the semantic corruption model, at least insofar as the speaker’s usage accords with the meaning supported by their deferential network.19 we are still interested in arriving at a true theory of the phenomenon we are arguing about, but truth itself cannot be 18 see lewis (1970) for a defense of this view of theoretical terms. 19 note: this is not a consequence of burge’s semantic externalism as it is usually developed. just because, e.g., two people disagree about what “arthritis” is doesn’t entail they are expressing different concepts. the view that everyone speaks truly in their own language usually enters the dialectic as an entailment of internalist metasemantics. but the semantic corruption model does have this consequence, even though it is not an internalist metasemantics, under the circumstance where (i) each participant in the dispute defers to a distinctive deferential network, (ii) the two deferential networks use the word with different meanings, and (iii) the speaker is doing a good job of expressing the meaning of the word, given how it is used in their own community. anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 the guide insofar as both parties already speak truly. rather, we are trying to settle what exactly we should be talking about. as a consequence of our conceptual disagreement, we do not agree exactly about what the target of the theory is. while truth in a language can be manipulated by misuses of words, ontology cannot be manipulated in the same way. the existence and nature of racism is not altered by shifting deference patterns—these shifts only affect the semantic properties of words as used within the various linguistic communities. the ontology of racism is wholly independent of usage patterns. while truth can be stipulated, ontology cannot be. ontology then carries the political significance that truth is often thought to have. truth is also important, insofar as it represents a connection between representation and reality, but the relevance of having true beliefs must always be checked using one’s ontology. dawkins may express a true belief when he says it is “racist” to call him white, but the antiracist advocate can point out that his true belief is not relevantly connected with the phenomenon of racism, that which actually matters. the ontology of a theory can feature in the criticism of an opposing theory. those who believe, pace dawkins, that racism necessarily involves structural oppression can criticize dawkins’s theory of racism for failing to capture this feature, even as we recognize that his claims are true as he uses the word “racism.” that is, critical race theorists can use their own first-order theory of racism to criticize dawkins’s understanding, even though his sentences are judged to be true on the semantic corruption model. the ontological commitments of critical race theory’s conception of racism—specifically, the essential character of racism as a form of systemic, oppressive power—plays a crucial role in making this argument against dawkins. on the semantic corruption model, knowledge of the real ontology of the universe is what matters. truth is somewhat less important because it is partly conventional, relativized to linguistic subcommunities established by networks of deference relations. ontology is not relativized to linguistic community, nor is it determined by convention. it is postulated to exist independently of linguistic conventions or social behavior, unlike truth and reference. speaking and believing truly is rendered less important than knowing the correct ontology, since one can believe truly while avoiding having true beliefs that connect to the important aspects of the ontological reality. yet truth is still important, in the sense that one needs a true theory that comports with the actual ontology of the universe in order to be politically on-track. a true theory remains necessary to political knowledge, even if its status as a sufficient condition has been dislodged. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 24 5. concluding remarks: metalinguistic negotiation in a social world in their original paper, plunkett and sundell consider metalinguistic disputes as implicit arguments about word meanings carried on within a conversational context. the picture developed here suggests an expanded understanding of the phenomenon of metalinguistic negotiation, one that emphasizes dynamic change within a social fabric. on the semantic corruption model, metalinguistic negotiation involves attempting to alter patterns of deference. this expands the scope of metalinguistic negotiation. arguments can be effective, in that they can have metasemantic effects, even when one’s opponent doesn’t budge in their own usage pattern. consider a public debate, perhaps on a news program, over what counts as “racism.” the host uses “racism” to refer to mere race-based discrimination; his guest uses it to refer to racism. even if the guest never concedes to the host’s usage, the host can do work to reinforce oppressive deference networks among viewers, thus spreading his preferred semantics. similar events can occur over new media as well as old. indeed, such debates rage daily on facebook pages across the internet. these debates facilitate group metalinguistic negotiations (although in some contexts the term “negotiation” may be a misnomer). the semantic corruption model places metalinguistic negotiation into broader social contexts, representing the impacts of disagreements in terms of socially embedded actions and their effects on networks of deference. because political disputes are happening within a field of widely ranging social relations, metalinguistic negotiations carry a significance that goes beyond philosophical disputes understood within traditional philosophical dialectic. they have public import and proceed through public channels. they occur in the midst of power relations that affect how the meanings of words are spread or contained within those public channels. their effects are not just a matter of refining theoretical understanding; rather, they are involved in political currents and social movements. one crucial example of the way that metalinguistic negotiations are socially embedded is the phenomenon of enfranchised semantic drift discussed in section 2. the semantic corruption model allows us to see that the outcome of metalinguistic negotiations occurring on large scales will tend to favor those who carry more credibility within mainstream public spheres. this is due to a combination of factors, including the amplified effects of dominant deference magnets, who tend to enjoy greater and more widespread ascriptions of competence due to their social identities (as well as greater visibility), and the complimentary negative effects of conceptual competence injustice (anderson 2017) that work against the strength of marginalized deference magnets using terminology in accord with marginalized perspectives. without active intervention, we can predict that dominant semantic anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 25 deference networks will ultimately promote semantic properties that favor dominant groups and obscure the issues marginalized coalitions are trying to articulate. the semantic corruption model thus provides a clear sense in which members of dominant groups have an ethical obligation20 to ‘speak the language of the oppressed’ in order to actively push back against enfranchised semantic drift. the obligation arises from the fact that hijackings contribute to epistemic oppression (dotson 2014). persuasive but inaccurate uses of “racism” and “racist” erode the ability to use those terms as persuasively shared epistemic resources for producing and distributing knowledge of racism. this undermines the epistemic agency of people of color working to produce and distribute knowledge of racism in public, private, academic, legal, and political discourses. the obligation to speak the language of the oppressed includes the imperative that members of dominant groups (in this case, white people) must defer to members of marginalized groups in their uses of terms (in this case, “racist” and “racism”) that describe, indicate, or define the nature of the oppression they face or the nature of their social identity. the obligation also includes the imperative that members of dominant groups must actively resist linguistic hijacking of important terminology in both their own usage and in the usage of other dominantly situated agents. it is not enough for members of dominant groups to merely refrain from misusing politically significant terminology. a lack of action will tend toward semantic corruption. active intervention on the part of dominant agents is required to resist this outcome. therefore, dominant agents should be actively engaged in identifying and strategically intervening wherever they might be effective to forestall practices of linguistic hijacking in order to prevent the semantic corruption of marginalized epistemic resources. works cited anderson, derek e. 2017. “conceptual competence injustice.” social epistemology 31 (2): 210–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2016.1241320. ball, derek. 2020. “metasemantic ethics.” ratio. published electronically february 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12256. bettcher, talia mae. 2009. “trans identities and first-person authority.” in you've changed: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie j. shrage, 89–120. oxford: oxford university press. 20 this obligation might fall under the field of study that ball (2020) calls metasemantic ethics. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 26 ———. 2013. “trans women and the meaning of ‘woman.’” in philosophy of sex: contemporary readings, 6th edition, edited by nicholas power, raja halwani, and alan soble, 233–250. lanham, md: rowan & littlefield. burge, tyler. 1979. “individualism and the mental.” midwest studies in philosophy 4 (1): 73–122. ———. 1986. “individualism and psychology.” philosophical review 95, no. 1 (january): 3–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/2185131. cho, sumi, kimberlé williams crenshaw, and leslie mccall. 2013. “toward a field of intersectionality studies: theory, applications, and praxis.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 38 (4): 785–810. https://doi.org/10.1086 /669608. collins, patricia hill. 1986. “learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought.” social problems 33 (6): s14–s32. https://doi.org/10.2307/800672. ———. 1998. fighting words: black women and the search for justice. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2002. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd edition. new york: routledge. ———. 2015. “sharpening intersectionality’s critical edge.” keynote address delivered at social theory forum, university of massachusetts, boston, april. collins, patricia hill, and sirma bilge. 2016. intersectionality. john wiley & sons. crenshaw, kimberlé williams. 1988. “race, reform, and retrenchment: transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law.” harvard law review 101 (7): 1331–1387. https://doi.org/10.2307/1341398. ———. 1991. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43 (6): 1241–1299. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1229039. ———. 2018. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics.” in feminist legal theory, edited by katharine t. bartlett and rosanne kennedy, 57–80. new york: routledge. davis, angela y. 2011. women, race & class. new york: vintage. dotson, kristie. 2012. “a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression.” frontiers: a journal of women studies 33 (1): 24–47. https://doi.org/10.5250 /fronjwomestud.33.1.0024. ———. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2013.782585. dretske, fred i. 1991. explaining behavior: reasons in a world of causes. cambridge, ma: mit press. anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 27 fodor, jerry a. 1990. a theory of content and other essays. cambridge, ma: mit press. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. gotanda, neil. 1991. “a critique of ‘our constitution is color-blind.’” stanford law review 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contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 28 nussbaum, matthew. 2016. “house gop dodges vote to block harriet tubman from $20 bill.” politico, june 21. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/housecould-vote-to-block-harriet-tubman-from-20-bill-224637. peller, gary. 1990. “race consciousness.” duke law journal, vol. 1990, no. 4 (sept.): 758–847. plunkett, david, and tim sundell. 2013. “disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative terms.” philosophers' imprint 13 (3): 1–37. http:// hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0013.023. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27 (4): 715–735. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01222.x. rayo, agustín. 2010. “a metasemantic account of vagueness.” cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic, edited by richard dietz and sebastiano moruzzi, 23–45. oxford: oxford university press. roberts, dorothy e. 1991. “punishing drug addicts who have babies: women of color, equality, and the right of privacy.” harvard law review 104 (7): 1419– 1482. schiffer, stephen r. 1987. remnants of meaning. cambridge, ma: mit press. sider, theodore. 2013. writing the book of the world. oxford: oxford university press. simchen, ori. 2017. semantics, metasemantics, aboutness. oxford: oxford university press. stalnaker, robert c. 1997. “reference and necessity.” in a companion to the philosophy of language, edited by bob hale and crispin wright, 534–554. malden, ma: blackwell. sullivan, shannon, and nancy tuana, eds. 2007. race and epistemologies of ignorance. albany: state university of new york press. tomlinson, barbara. 2013. “colonizing intersectionality: replicating racial hierarchy in feminist academic arguments.” social identities 19 (2): 254–272. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2013.789613 williams, j. robert. g. 2007. “eligibility and inscrutability.” philosophical review 116 (3): 361–399. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2007-002. williamson, timothy. 2008. the philosophy of philosophy. malden, ma: wileyblackwell. yalcin, seth. 2014. “semantics and metasemantics in the context of generative grammar.” in metasemantics: new essays on the foundations of meaning, edited by alexis burgess and brett sherman, 17–54. oxford: oxford university press. anderson – linguistic hijacking published by scholarship@western, 2020 29 dr. derek anderson is a lecturer at boston university. he works in a range of areas including feminist epistemology, philosophical logic, metasemantics, intersectionality studies, and the history of analytic philosophy. he’s currently working on a book entitled metasemantics and intersectionality in the misinformation age. 8162 anderson title page 8162 anderson final format presupposition and consent feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 4 article 4 recommended citation ichikawa, jonathan jenkins. “presupposition and consent.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4). article 4. 2020 presupposition and consent jonathan jenkins ichikawa university of british columbia ichikawa@gmail.com ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 presupposition and consent jonathan jenkins ichikawa abstract i argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. when one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. a consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical central role in contemporary sexual ethics. but this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. consent language, i’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. one implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. keywords: consent, presupposition, sexual ethics, rape culture, philosophy of language, sex 1. introduction i asked my friend alice, who is an expert on presupposition, to read this paper and give me comments. she’s a busy woman with lots of demands on her time, but because she’s a generous friend, she read my paper. one might ask: (1) did alice consent to reading this paper? under the circumstances (1) is a fine question, and its answer is yes. if i’d forced her into reading the paper, or threatened her, then the answer would be no. in cases like this, we use consent language to mark whether people are doing things because they’ve freely agreed to them, or are forced or coerced. so far, so obvious. now consider bob, who read this paper for a very different reason. bob is a philosopher interested in the role of consent in sexual ethics who heard someone mention my new paper. since bob is interested in learning what other scholars have to say on the subject, bob emailed me and asked to read my paper. i sent it to him, and he read it. one might ask: feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 (2) did bob consent to reading this paper? one might ask (2), but it’s a strange question under the circumstances. nobody asked bob to read the paper; he did it at no one’s else’s behest. reading the paper was his idea. we don’t really want to say he consented to it—that makes it sound like he did it for someone else. but we don’t want to say he didn’t consent to it either. that would make it sound like somebody forced or coerced him to do it. we have the makings of a puzzle. the contrast between (1) and (2) suggests that consent language is more natural when speaking of responses to requests than it is when speaking of actions that are chosen more autonomously—at least when it comes to reading philosophy papers. (here and throughout, i use “consent language” to refer to language that uses the word “consent.”) what about sexual interactions? last year alice and bob went on a date. bob hoped to develop a sexual relationship with alice, and at an opportune moment, he asked for permission to kiss her. alice was ambivalent—he seemed nice enough, but she wasn’t really feeling sexual chemistry. but since she didn’t want to reject him, and because she thought that if they began a sexual relationship, attraction might develop, she said yes. bob kissed her. later, alice was glad she’d said yes; mutual attraction had indeed developed. now they have a comfortable sexual relationship. last night, bob asked alice for a blowjob. although alice is a busy woman (she agreed to read my paper!), she loves bob and wanted to make him feel good, so she performed oral sex on him. according to the orthodox “consent theory” in contemporary sexual ethics, both of these questions are quite important: (3) did alice consent to that kiss last year? (4) did alice consent to that blowjob last night? if the answer to one of these questions is no, then bob has violated alice’s sexual autonomy. happily, the answer to both questions is yes.1 alice agreed to everything 1 one sometimes hears the advice that sexual consent must be enthusiastic. read strongly and literally as the claim that if one is not enthusiastic when one says yes, then one has not consented, this advice implies that alice did not consent, and that these sexual interactions are therefore nonconsensual. i take these cases, and the many other real-world cases relevantly like them, to refute that strong view of consent. (it is probably not a view that many people intended literally.) compare fischel (2019, 2–3). ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 that happened on these two occasions, and she did so voluntarily, without coercion.2 in each case, things happened because bob asked for them, and alice agreed. (these cases conform, therefore, to certain heterosexual stereotypes about sexual interaction. critical interrogation of these stereotypes will be a central project in this paper.) what should we say about these questions? (5) did bob consent to that kiss last year? (6) did bob consent to that blowjob last night? consent theory says that these are fine questions—just as appropriate and important as (3) and (4) were. but given what we said above, this should be prima facie surprising. why was (2) a bizarre question to ask, if (5) and (6) aren’t? in all three cases, everything is happening just the way bob wants it to. he’s reading the paper he wants, and he’s experiencing the sexual activity he wants. “consent” feels, at least to some, like appropriate language for the sex cases but not for the reading case. why? one possible answer is that sexual consent is a very different kind of beast from other kinds of consent. a different kind of answer—the one i favour—is that a particular kind of consent-based sexual ethics shapes many of our intuitions about sexual consent, in a way that leads to a distorted recognition of consent. to bring this out, i’ll focus first on just what it is that is strange about (2); i’ll go on to argue that, contrary to orthodoxy, there is something similarly strange about (5) and (6). this will amount to novel support for longstanding feminist critiques of consentbased sexual ethics. 2. presupposition and consent this section explores the sense in which it’s strange to ask whether someone “consented” to something they chose for themselves—not in response to someone else’s request or suggestion. let’s focus for now on nonsexual cases where the consent language feels off. bob read this paper because he’s interested in the topic. i ran a marathon because i wanted to test my body’s limits. my friend flew to australia because she wanted to have a grand adventure. 2 one difference between these sexual activities is that the kiss is in an intuitive sense something bob did to alice, while the blowjob is something alice did to bob. (whether this distinction would survive deep philosophical scrutiny is not obvious; each involved active participation by the other. but there is at least an intuitive difference.) i’ll discuss this distinction further in §6 below. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 none of these cases involved coercion or manipulation. (they could have, but they didn’t.) we made those choices as freely and autonomously as anyone does anything. we didn’t bend (not even voluntarily) to anyone else’s will. nobody asked or instructed me to run that marathon; i did it for me. this is part of the reason why the consent language seems ill-fitting for these actions. saying i consented to that marathon makes it sound like someone else asked me to run it. saying bob consented to reading my paper makes it sound like he did it at someone else’s behest. (compare alice, who did consent to read my paper, as a favour to me.) still, it also doesn’t seem right to say that bob didn’t consent to reading my paper. that makes it sound like somebody else made him do it; likewise for the idea that i didn’t consent to the marathon, or that my friend didn’t consent to going to australia. in other words, both (7) and (8) seem pretty strongly to suggest that someone other than me was trying to get me to run that marathon: (7) i consented to the marathon. (8) i didn’t consent to the marathon.3 this pattern is characteristic of presupposition. the use of certain language conventionally presupposes that certain assumptions are taken for granted; if 𝑆 presupposes that 𝑝, an utterance of 𝑆 doesn’t make sense unless we assume that 𝑝. to take a famous kind of example, sentence (9) presupposes that china used to stockpile metals:4 (9) china has stopped stockpiling metals. 3 the english verb “consent” can take a noun phrase or an infinitival verb-phrase— one can speak of “consenting to a marathon” or of “consenting to run a marathon.” i do not perceive any difference in acceptability, in any of the data i’m citing, between these kinds of uses; it also sounds odd to say i “consented to run the marathon” or to say that i didn’t. it is likewise fine to speak either of alice “consenting to a kiss” or “consenting to be kissed.” so i do not draw a significant distinction between these grammatical forms, and i use data of both kinds to indicate that i intend my discussion to generalize to both kinds of sentence. thanks to a referee for drawing my attention to this distinction. i also intend my discussion to extend to the adjective “consensual” and the noun “consent”—see n28. 4 i take this example from beaver and geurts (2012, 2434). ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 if we don’t collectively think or assume that china used to stockpile metals, and i say (9), my utterance is infelicitous. (if you didn’t previously have an opinion on the matter, you might feel some conversational pressure to pretend like you’d known all along that china used to stockpile metals.) and one of the interesting features of presuppositions is that presuppositions tend to “project” from various embedded uses of the language. for example, they tend to project from negation, attitude ascriptions, and questions. note that all of the following, just like (9), carry the presupposition that china used to stockpile metals: (10) china has not stopped stockpiling metals. (11) canadian intelligence agencies believe that china has stopped stockpiling metals. (12) has china stopped stockpiling metals? projection from such embedded contexts is one of the distinguishing characteristics of presupposition, as opposed to entailment or implicature.5 other common constructions that carry presuppositions include: • definite descriptions. “the dog is hungry” presupposes that there is a unique salient dog. • cleft constructions. “it was i who loosened the bolt” presupposes that someone loosened the bolt. • factive verbs. “bob is sorry that alice is busy” presupposes that alice is busy. • gender pronouns. “she is waiting for you” presupposes that the person indicated is female.6 all of these presuppositions project from various embeddings. (note that “she isn’t waiting for you” and “i think bob might not be happy that she is waiting for you” also presuppose that the indicated person is female.) that presuppositions project 5 these three projections are discussed in beaver and geurts (2012, 2434–2435). beaver and geurts also discuss others: projection from the antecedent of conditionals (“if china has stopped stockpiling metals, the price will go down”), possibility modals (“china might have stopped stockpiling metals”), and probability adverbs (“china has probably stopped stockpiling metals”). 6 the first three forms are widely discussed in the literature. eckert and mcconnellginet (2013, 171) discuss gender pronouns as presuppositional. thanks to jennifer foster. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 from embeddings like negation and questions suggests a response to our puzzle about odd questions like (2) from §1: (2) did bob consent to reading this paper? this is an odd question, if, as assumed, bob read this paper an expression of his own will, and not at anyone else’s behest. we don’t want to say to say (13), because it suggests that he was doing it at someone else’s request: (13) bob consented to reading this paper. but it’s even odder to say (14), because that suggests he was forced or coerced: (14) bob didn’t consent to reading this paper. these data are well explained by the hypothesis that (13) presupposes, falsely, that someone else was trying to get bob to read this paper. that same presupposition would be predicted to project from the negation (14), and the question (2).7 so all three utterances involve a presupposition failure, which is why they are defective.8 more generally, when one consents, one is yielding to another’s will. one may do so freely, as when alice agreed to read my paper. (or as when alice agreed to give bob a blowjob.) but this is different from when one does things of one’s own accord. consent presupposes the former; it is typically a response to a request, an instruction, a command, or the like. when you are considering doing something at 7 this is one reason to prefer the presupposition strategy to an alternative explanation in terms of pragmatic implicature as per grice (1975). implicatures do not in general project from questions and negations; in grice’s famous thought experiments, while “he has excellent handwriting” famously implicates that he is a poor student, and “there is a gas station around the corner” implicates that it is open, “he does not have excellent handwriting” and “is there a gas station around the corner?” do not carry the same implicatures. moreover, implicatures are cancellable in a way presuppositions are not—“he has excellent handwriting, and he is an excellent student” is fine, but “he consented to read my paper, and he asked for it because he really wanted to read it” is not. thanks to chelsea rosenthal for helpful discussion here. 8 we needn’t decide what to say about the semantics of sentences involving presupposition failures. we might say with frege that they fail to express meaningful contents, or with russell that they are false. or we might say something else. i remain neutral on these options, insisting only that they are not true. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 another’s behest, the question of consent is an appropriate one. when you are considering doing something for your own reasons, the question doesn’t even arise. i’ll say more about what it takes to satisfy the presuppositions of “consent” in §4 below. first, however, i’d like to connect the thoughts above to the other main topic of this paper: feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. 3. feminist critiques of consent theory consent language is pervasive in contemporary discourse about sexual ethics. it is common in philosophical and other academic discourse,9 and completely inescapable in discussions of sexual ethics in popular liberal media. this is why i call the orthodox approach to sexual ethics “consent theory.”10 but there have been serious critiques of consent theory, challenging whether consent should be considered so central a question as the contemporary consensus assumes. some of these critiques develop the complaint that consent is a low bar for morally permissible sex, worrying that exclusive focus on consent obscures other morally important phenomena. for example, linda martín alcoff has argued that the wrongfulness of many sexual assaults of children cannot be explained by consent theory, since many children are wrongfully sexually assaulted by virtue of acts to which they consent, when for example “consent was produced by structural conditions of economic dependency, or was caused by emotional confusion, or was given in an attempt to help or protect others in the family” (2018, 81).11 audrey yap (2019) says something quite similar about consensual sexual relationships involving institutional power-over relationships, like relationships between professors and students. these critiques of consent theory are interesting and important. but they retain the orthodox insistence that consent is necessary for ethical sex.12 9 see, e.g., shafer and frye (1977) or schulhofer (1992), cited and criticized in cahill (2001, 169–174). more recent examples include west (2009), dougherty (2013), archard (2007), and liberto (2017). 10 in using this label, i do not assume that there is a specific doctrine, subscription to which is necessary and sufficient for being a consent theorist; one embraces consent theory to the degree to which consent plays a central role in one’s sexual ethics. i’ll say more about the contours of consent theory in §9 below. 11 many consent theorists will resist the characterization of such cases as consensual; see §9 below. alcoff herself seems ambivalent about the consent language; sometimes in such contexts, but not always, she puts the word in scare quotes. 12 see also west (2009). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 there have also been more radical feminist critiques of consent theory, suggesting that the emphasis on sexual consent is gendered, heteronormative, or similarly problematic. here, for example, is carole pateman: consent must always be given to something; in the relationship between the sexes, it is always women who are held to consent to men. the “naturally” superior, active, and sexually aggressive male makes an initiative, or offers a contract, to which a “naturally” subordinate, passive woman “consents.” an egalitarian sexual relationship cannot rest on this basis; it cannot be grounded in “consent.” (pateman 1980, 164)13 stereotypes of sexual consent certainly involve a man asking for a woman’s consent, as in my examples of bob and alice in §1.14 in one sense this an understandable reflection of the gendered pattern of sexual violence. but the norm is surprisingly robust—academic discussions of consent very often reinforce the pattern, even in nonsexual examples, even though most academics (and all student services websites) pay at least lip service to the idea that consent is important among all parties to sexual encounters, regardless of gender.15 so one feminist concern about consent is that it reinforces sexist heterosexual stereotypes. 13 this passage is discussed in both cahill (2001, 174) and alcoff (2018, 83). pateman’s broader point is somewhat different from mine; she ultimately argues that genuine consent requires a fuller freedom and equality than women enjoy. this passage, which fits well into my broader point, actually fits somewhat awkwardly into hers. 14 this is part of a much broader stereotype—consider also the heteronormative conventions about proposing marriage or asking someone out on a date. 15 to note one rather striking example, in larry alexander’s (2014) influential “the ontology of consent,” i count eleven total thought experiments related to whether consent is or is not present. of these, eight specify, by name, pronoun use, or both, that a man (or boy) is seeking an action that would be a violation of a woman’s (or girl’s) rights if she didn’t agree to it: john wants to take jane’s car, al tries to poison alice, jim wants to borrow jane’s lawn mower, d (male pronouns) wants to borrow v’s (female pronouns) car, d (male pronouns) wants to have sex with v (female pronouns), sam (male pronouns) wants to cross sally’s property, edith “mentally accepted” sex with ed, d (male pronouns) inserts his penis into v’s (female pronouns) vagina. two more examples specify female victims of gender-unspecified actors—one person threatens a victim (female pronouns) to have sex, and another threatens w (female pronouns) to engage in prostitution. there is only one example in alexander’s paper that definitively does not involve the question of a woman ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 a related feminist concern about consent theory is that it does not leave room for an important role for women’s sexual desire or agency. see, for example, these passages: if marriage and intercourse were clearly beneficial to women, if they were experiences that women, as self-interested, autonomous, rational beings, perceived as appealing and desirable, we would not speak of women’s consent, but rather of their desire. (cahill 2001, 174) the concept of consent relies for its social appeal on the assumption that it stands in for desire. whenever its use in the sexual arena is questioned, which is mighty seldom, the response is to wave the flag of desire. this is consent’s credibility cover. consent can be considered to include authentic desire, but the term is never used in that context in real life, and nothing limits it to that in law. in social reality, the crucible of meaning, sex that is actually desired or wanted or welcomed is never termed consensual. it does not need to be; its mutuality is written all over it in enthusiasm. consenting is not what women do when they want to be having sex. sex women want is never described by them or anyone else as consensual. no one says, “we had a great hot night, she (or i or we) consented.” . . . my point is, when a sexual interaction is equal, consent is not needed and does not occur because there is no transgression to be redeemed. (mackinnon 2016, 450 and 476) (not everyone—especially not all of today’s younger people—share mackinnon’s linguistic intuitions here. i’ll discuss this further in §9 below.) quill kukla (2018; writing as rebecca kukla) rehearses some of the worries above, but also gives a helpful theoretical explanation for why consent theory can distort our understanding of sex. consent, kukla says, is a performative speech act that, by its nature, is a response to requests. (this is closely related to my own suggestion in §2.) but, they observe, our near-exclusive focus on consent and refusal when we talk about sexual negotiation has had a deeply distorting and damaging impact on our consenting to a man—it is that of “tom the bully” (male pronouns, acting in the stereotypical male role), who wants to move “billy the 90-pound weakling” (male pronouns, acting in the stereotypical female one). this is a particularly vivid illustration, but my sense from the broader literature is that it is indicative of a wider pattern. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 understanding of sexual ethics and communication. good-quality sexual communication requires that we do much more with language than request, agree to, and refuse sex. (kukla 2018, 75) kukla goes on to emphasize other ways, besides one person consenting to another’s request, that sex might be initiated. for example, someone might accept someone’s invitation, or someone’s offer of a sexual gift. i agree with the central elements of kukla’s paper, but i wish to emphasize, as they do not, their radical consequences. kukla writes at times as if they are advancing the kind of critique i attributed to alcoff and yap above—one that complains that consent is just too low a bar for ethical sex.16 but i think their critique, properly understood, implies not only that consent is insufficient for ethical sex—it’s not necessary either. (i do not think this means that nonconsensual sex can sometimes be ok! in §5 i’ll explain how the considerations from §2 prevent that implication.) perhaps because of its obvious clash with feminist orthodoxy, kukla does not emphasize, as i do, the implication that consent is not a necessary condition for ethical sex. but the argument for this is simple. consent to 𝛷, kukla observes, echoing pateman, cahill, and mackinnon, only makes sense under the assumption that 𝛷 is something someone else is trying to get you to do.17 but your having ethical sex does not require that someone else is trying to get you to do something. therefore, your having ethical sex does not require your consent. this sounds like a radical repudiation of contemporary orthodoxy about sexual ethics. (just how radical a repudiation this is depends on sensitive questions about the relationship between language and ethics. i’ll discuss this issue in §9.) kukla is somewhat circumspect about the implications of this approach, writing that 16 e.g., “consent, including completely autonomous, unmanipulated consent, is never going to be sufficient to make sex go well—we can consent to all sorts of lousy sex, including demeaning, boring, alienated, and unpleasantly painful or otherwise harmful sex” (kukla 2018, 72). in their subsequent paper, kukla (forthcoming) seems to be working with a different notion of consent that is closer to the “inflationary” one i’ll discuss in §9. 17 how exactly to spell out what it is for someone to be “trying to get you to do” something is a tricky question. as kukla (2018) puts it, consent is always a reaction to a request. as i’ll explain in §4, i think this is too restrictive—one can consent to someone instructing one to 𝛷, or ordering one to 𝛷, or perhaps even one’s insinuating that they want one to 𝛷 too. but i agree with kukla that we do not “consent” to invitations or gift offers, and we do not “consent” to do things when we choose them autonomously, at nobody else’s behest. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 sexual activity is only ethical if everyone involved has communicated successfully that they want to engage in it and is doing so autonomously and willingly. if this broad point is all we mean by saying that all sex must be consensual, then consent is a necessary condition for the ethical acceptability of any sexual activity. but this seems to me to be an unfortunate way of describing the principle, since “consent” is the name of a speech act with a specific pragmatic shape. if i make clear that i would like to accept an invitation or a gift, then i have communicated my autonomous desire to participate; it strains the pragmatics of language to call this “consent.” at least for the purposes of philosophical analysis, it seems to me worth using the term “consent” more narrowly and giving a more fine-grained analysis of the ethics of sexual discourse. (kukla 2018, 92; emphasis added)18 so kukla emphasizes that standard normative verdicts about particular instances of sex need not be challenged by this framework—the issue is how to talk about them with regard to consent, not whether particular patterns of behaviour are ok. so far, i agree. but this passage also carries an implication i reject: the idea that ultimately, we are discussing a relatively technical linguistic matter, disconnected somewhat from contemporary moral issues. i read this implication, for instance, in the last sentences quoted, which limits the suggestion to one concerning how we theorists should use consent language. i will argue below that, given the presuppositions implicit in consent language in the ordinary vernacular, there is good reason to advocate for reform of public discourse on sexual ethics, not merely academic theoretical talk.19 4. acting at another’s behest consent to 𝛷, i suggest, presupposes that someone else is trying to get one to 𝛷. most paradigmatically, consent is a response to requests, but the language of consent can be appropriate in other cases too. here is an example where it makes 18 thanks to two referees for encouraging me to discuss this passage and contrast it with my position. 19 here are two more differences between kukla’s discussion and mine. first, kukla does not seriously engage with what i take to be the central objection to the feminist critiques of consent theory—the idea that they imply, implausibly, that sex without consent can be permissible. the detailed discussion of presuppositions and projection from negation, i think, is important to fully understand the view that kukla and i share. compare my remarks on john gardner’s related approach in §8. second, kukla says that consent is specifically a response to requests. as i’ll discuss in §4, i think consent language is appropriate to a broader range of circumstances. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 sense to talk about whether or not there is consent, even though there is no request: suppose that calvin is in moe’s path, and moe wants him to move. moe might put his hands on calvin’s shoulders and push him in the direction he wants him to go. in such a case, the presuppositions of (15) are met: (15) calvin consented to move out of moe’s way. i say the presuppositions of (15) are met; that doesn’t mean it’s true. whether this is so depends on calvin: if he recognizes moe’s desire and freely decides to cooperate in fulfilling it, it is; if he resists, it is false, whether his resistance is successful, or he is overpowered. so too if he moves reluctantly, out of the fear of further possible violence. some cases in between will be difficult to categorize. but the presuppositions are met by moe’s attempt to move him. so consent doesn’t presuppose requests in particular; the kind of will that consent involves deferring to can be manifested in various ways. (the same would be true if moe had issued a command: “move!” then calvin could consent, or not, to moe’s demand.) by contrast, one might also receive suggestions and invitations that are expressive of someone else’s desires or interests, where the presuppositions of consent are not satisfied. so far in this paper, for examples of cases where the presuppositions of consent fail, i’ve mostly used independently chosen actions. but these are not the only examples. (if they were, the application of my point to sexual ethics would be limited, as few morally interesting sexual interactions are independent in the relevant way.) return to bob, who read my paper. in §1 i said he decided by himself that he wanted to read my paper and asked me for permission to do so; let’s now suppose instead that i knew of bob’s long-standing interest in the topic and thoughtfully offered to send him my paper and let him read it. he gratefully accepted my offer and read my paper. the strange (2) is no less strange for my having been the one who raised the idea: (2) did bob consent to reading this paper? or suppose i hear about a hiking trail and ask you if you want to join me. this is an invitation. an invitation is or involves, at least to some degree, an expression of the inviter’s will—typically, by inviting you, i manifest my desire that you come. but, at least in many cases, if i say, “hey, i was thinking about hiking the baden powell this ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 weekend; would you like to come?”, that’s not a request.20 more to the point, if you welcome my invitation and accept it, and we go hiking together, the presuppositions of (16) are not met: (16) you consented to hike the baden powell trail with me. to be sure, there are possible cases of invitations that will satisfy the presuppositions of (16)—these are generally less positive experiences than the ones i have in mind. if you feel pressured by my invitation, or worry that some bad consequence might follow from declining, and so reluctantly agree to come, then the presuppositions of (16) will obtain. but if you are my friend and equal, and accepted my invitation because you like hanging out with me (or because you’re indifferent to me personally, but like hiking), the presuppositions of (16) fail. i’ve said that “consent to 𝛷” language presupposes that 𝛷 is or would be at someone else’s behest. this is meant to cover requests, commands, and the like, and to contrast with cases in which someone decides to 𝛷 on their own, or in response to an offer or a free invitation. if someone requests that you 𝛷, or orders you to 𝛷, or attempts physically to make you 𝛷, the behest presupposition is satisfied, and it makes sense to talk about whether you consent to 𝛷. if you decide to 𝛷 all on your own, or if someone offers to let you 𝛷 or invites you to 𝛷, the behest presupposition is typically not satisfied, and the question of your consenting to 𝛷 is infelicitous.21 i am now in a position to clarify more precisely how i think consent relates to ethical sex. the question of consent is obviously applicable to sexual assault: when one person forces or coerces another into unwanted sexual contact, they are imposing their will on their victim in a way that satisfies the presuppositions of the consent language, which is why it is true to describe sexual assault as sexual contact 20 compare kukla (2018, 82): “one can’t consent to an invitation—one accepts it or turns it down.” 21 “consent” may carry other presuppositions as well. as samia hesni pointed out to me, the language of “consenting to” has a tendency to communicate that is in some way out of the ordinary, or beyond what would typically be expected of someone. and as cat saint-croix pointed out to me, “consenting to” has a tendency to communicate that is the kind of thing we think might be harmful. the idea that consent language presupposes features along these lines, in addition to a reaction to someone else’s behest, strikes me as plausible, but further exploration of it is beyond my present scope. in §6 i will discuss the idea that consent language presupposes that something is being done to one. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 without consent. so consent can play a significant role in explaining what goes wrong in sexual assault. but i do think there can be cases of permissible sex where the presuppositions of “consent” are not satisfied. indeed, many of the paradigms of good sex are like this. most sex—especially most good sex—does not arrive from one person acquiescing to another’s behest. sexual negotiations that involve suggestions, invitations, brainstorming, the exploration of shared ideas and fantasies, and so on, needn’t involve satisfying these presuppositions. (asking if someone is interested in trying a new sex toy, for example, needn’t be a request any more than asking if someone is interested in going hiking this weekend need be.22) the granting of sexual requests—which is consent—can certainly be a part of ethical sexual negotiation, but it is far from the whole story.23 5. explaining away orthodox intuitions this picture’s inconsistency with consent-emphasizing language in contemporary society will make it sound objectionably surprising to many. many will complain, first, that it is repugnant to allow that sex without consent can be permissible; that nonconsensual sex is a very serious wrong. second, they will attribute the problems identified for consent theory to an overly simplistic view of consent: they may agree that professors may not have sex with their students but argue that the power differentials in such cases are inconsistent with valid consent. on the other hand, on this view, one will typically hold that cases of unproblematic sex like alice and bob’s, where i think “consent” is an inappropriate label, are in fact consensual. in this section and the next, i’ll respond to the first reply; in §9 i’ll react to the latter. i say, against orthodox consent theory and everything you’ll read on your university’s student services website, that consent is not a necessary condition for morally permissible sex. some may find this somewhat shocking, because they think it suggests that i think it can be ok to have sex without consent. but i don’t think that either. 22 as a referee points out, it can under certain circumstances be felicitous to describe responses to suggestions with consent language, as in “she suggested that they holiday in the maldives, and he consented.” i think this is because suggestions are sometimes rather request-like and sometimes much more neutral. the consent language can be felicitous, but it does introduce the presupposition that he went along in deference to her—not that it was something they decided collectively. 23 i am again in agreement with kukla (2018) here; see especially their pp. 82 and 93. i discuss permissible sex in response to requests further in §8. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 this has the air of a contradiction, but it’s a paradox that the machinery rehearsed in §2 is well equipped to resolve. i have argued that the language of “consenting to 𝛷” presupposes that somebody else is trying to get one to 𝛷. and since this presupposition projects from under negation, saying one doesn’t consent to sex presupposes that the sex is at someone else’s behest, just as much as saying that one does consent does. recall that in my thought experiments from §1, bob read this paper and got a blowjob, both at his own behest. when it came to the former, it wasn’t too hard to see that saying he consented to read my paper wasn’t right, but saying he didn’t consent to it wasn’t right either. my diagnosis was that each carries the false presupposition that someone else was trying to get him to read the paper. i’ve found, by asking colleagues and students, that intuitions are murkier about the sex case. many people are happy to endorse (17) and (18), even though each event happened at bob’s own behest: (17) bob consented to the kiss. (18) bob consented to the blowjob. both on general grounds, and in light of the feminist critiques marshalled in §3, i think we should reject both (17) and (18) as carrying a false presupposition, just as we rejected (13). someone only consents to what they are asked, instructed, or otherwise externally encouraged to do. but that doesn’t mean we should accept (19) and (20): (19) bob didn’t consent to the kiss. (20) bob didn’t consent to the blowjob. for this pair carries the same false presuppositions the previous, affirmative pair did. rejecting consent as a necessary condition for good sex doesn’t require allowing that nonconsensual sex can be okay. the entire project of consent language carries presuppositions that fail in many cases of good sex. there can be good sex that we can’t correctly describe as “consensual,” even though it isn’t nonconsensual either— these are cases where the shared presuppositions of any consent language fail. 6. comparison to cousin views a number of recent authors have suggested that consent language carries substantive presuppositions, and that this is relevant for sexual ethics. this section situates my proposal with respect to other recent discussions in the literature and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 emphasizes the similarities and differences. readers more interested in the direct questions about sexual ethics, and less interested in how my proposal fits into the broader literature, should feel free to skip ahead to §7. i have suggested that consent language presupposes that something is done at someone else’s behest. the closest extant view to mine of which i am aware is quill kukla’s (2018), which i have already been discussing. another idea is that consent language presupposes an active–passive dichotomy: it only makes sense to talk about consenting to things that are done to one. here, for instance, is another passage from the same catharine mackinnon paper cited in §3: intrinsic to consent is the actor and the acted-upon, with no guarantee of any kind of equality between them, whether of circumstance or condition or interaction, or typically even any interest in inquiring into whether such equality is present or meaningful, at least in the major definition of the most serious crime. (mackinnon 2016, 440) similarly, john gardner (2018, 60) writes that “the question of consent belongs to sex individualistically, even solipsistically, conceived, to sex conceived as something that one person does to another (even if, in the course of their sexual encounter, the individuals concerned take scrupulously equitable turns in being the doer and the done to).” and tanya palmer (2017, 13) writes that “consent is . . . a minimal, reactive form of participation. in the specific context of sexual activity, a consent framework implies that sex always involves one (active) person doing something to another (passive) person.” call the idea that consent talk requires that one must be a passive recipient, the passivity presupposition. this is a distinct idea from the behest presupposition that i have defended. theorists have not always kept these ideas separate—perhaps because stereotypes of heterosexual sex satisfy both presuppositions.24 but they can come apart. if i ask someone to punch me in the stomach—perhaps i am testing my constitution—and they do so, they do something to me, but at my behest. likewise, when bob asks alice for a blowjob, it is something she does, but at his request. 24 for example, earlier in the same page of her passage quoted above, mackinnon cites the oxford english dictionary and black’s law dictionary as offering definitions in line with the behest presupposition, saying that the former defines “to consent” as to “voluntarily acquiesce in what another proposes or desires,” and the latter gives, “voluntarily yielding the will to the proposition of the other” (mackinnon 2016, 440). but from there she maps this on immediately to the passivity distinction: “active a initiates, passive b acquiesces in or yields to a’s initiatives.” ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 i defend the behest presupposition, but i think there is something to the passivity presupposition, too. at least in many cases, talking about whether 𝑆 consents to 𝛷 will convey the idea that 𝛷 is something done to 𝑆, rather than something 𝑆 does themself. and in some cases, consent language seems appropriate when the passivity presupposition is satisfied, even though the behest presupposition fails. (consider consent to a tattoo or to a medical procedure.) although i recognize that such cases put pressure in the direction of the passivity presupposition and against the behest one, i am impressed by the force of some of the other kinds of cases i’ve discussed, which pull against it. it is important to ask, for instance, whether alice consented to give bob that blowjob, since she did it at his behest.25 as for tattoos, i want to bite the bullet and suggest that it is something of a misnomer to describe the customer of a tattoo parlour as consenting to be tattooed, if they’re not having it done at someone else’s behest. the legalistic framework in which contemporary businesses operate has a tendency to normalize this kind of language—much as orthodox consent theory does the same for sexual consent—but i do want to suggest that there is something linguistically off about talk of consenting to the tattoo that one has picked out for oneself. (in light of artistic license, one might consent to some of one’s artist’s particular choices.) something quite similar goes for consent to medical procedures (although here a more robust legalistic idiolect has certainly developed). this needn’t mean that the label of a “consent form” is inapt—one does, when one asks for a tattoo, consent to waiving certain rights and liability claims. (and this waiver is indeed granted at the parlour’s request.26) there is a strand of thought that assimilates sexual consent to this kind 25 cf. karamvir chada’s (2020, 625) observation, against john gardner’s invocation of the passivity presupposition, that “in ordinary language, we say things like ‘tracy consented to giving sam a massage’. in respect of the massage, tracy is active rather than passive—it is something she does to sam.” i would add, in defense of the behest presupposition, that sentences like this are by far the most natural in cases where sam asked tracy for the massage. 26 liquid amber, one of the local tattoo parlours in my neighbourhood, asks its clients to sign a “client waiver, release & consent to tattoo” form. but the actual text of the form, interestingly enough, does not use the word “consent” as applied to the tattoo. most of the form concerns acknowledgement of risks and the waiver of liability—a request the parlour makes of the client. the only time “consent” occurs, other than in the title, concerns the client’s “consent” to the use of their photographs in promotional material. (as of 3 november 2020, that form is available at https://www.liquidambertattoo.com/thewaiver.) some consent forms do discuss “consent to receive a tattoo,” but this is not by any means universal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 of legalistic framework of liability waivers, but this, i think, is far from desirable.27 language is imprecise and constantly changing. it may be that there is not one clear and coherent notion of consent at play in all of these examples. perhaps the behest presupposition tends to be more dominant in some contexts, while the passivity presupposition prevails in others. nevertheless, the behest presupposition, i think, is strong enough, and active enough, in a wide enough example of cases to be philosophically interesting. and i think this is of moral significance when it comes to choosing language to discuss sexual ethics. i will return to this issue in §9 below. john gardner (2018) invokes the passivity presupposition in support of a conclusion similar to mine. i will contrast my approach more specifically with his in §8. first, however, i would like to clarify the sense in which i wish to reject consent as a necessary condition for permissible sex. 7. what is it for consent not to be necessary? language that carries substantive presuppositions, especially those corresponding to stereotypes we may assume by default, makes careful statements of general theories that suspend those presuppositions difficult. in this section i will clarify more precisely what i mean when i say that consent is not a necessary condition for permissible sex. if consent were a necessary condition for permissible sex, then every example of permissible sex would be one in which there is consent to that sex. consent language, i have argued, requires that one is doing something at someone else’s behest; since there can be permissible sex that doesn’t involve one person yielding to another’s request—the kind of sex where consent language won’t even come up—we cannot maintain that consent is necessary for ethical sex. as highlighted above, the sex in question won’t properly be characterized as nonconsensual sex either. (i assume that “consensual” just means “with consent,” and carries the same presuppositions, and that “nonconsensual” is the negation of “consensual,” and also carries the same presuppositions.28) so the part of the 27 cf. danaher (2018). 28 this assumption is not mandatory, and i concede that the linguistic data is less than obvious here. i am not sure whether “bob read the paper consensually” is as infelicitous as “bob consented to read the paper.” however, given the close etymological relation, and the apparently analytic inferences, between consensual and with consent, i don’t find a view that posits significant presuppositional differences between these words to be very plausible. (a possible view like this is described by chadha [2020, 621n8]: “on that way of talking, a sexual encounter can be consensual without the individuals involved giving consent.”) this way of talking does not strike me as plausible or attractive. certainly the orthodoxy to which i am ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 consent theory that says that all nonconsensual sex is morally impermissible, is perfectly consistent with everything i have said. (and indeed, i endorse it.) that is to say, in any situation where the question of consent is even applicable, if one doesn’t agree to the sexual contact being asked of one, but that contact occurs anyway, a serious moral wrong—sexual assault—has occurred. one might be tempted to express this thought in terms of a distinction between “nonconsensual sex” and “sex without consent,” holding that the former is always bad, but that the latter can be fine when the presuppositions of consent language are not met. my view would be simpler to state, were this so. unfortunately, in ordinary english, i think “sex without consent” carries the same presuppositions that “nonconsensual sex” does. presuppositions project from a wide variety of grammatical locations, including locations inside “without” prepositional clauses. (even raising the question of whether it’s ok for me to go to the party without my wife presupposes that i have a wife.) so just as i think nonconsensual sex is always wrong, so too do i think that sex without consent is always wrong. i don’t draw a distinction between those locutions. what i do think can be fine is sex that occurs without the presuppositions of consent language being satisfied—as when, for example, sex partners mutually undertake a sexual activity out of a shared desire, or when one partner freely accepts another’s sexual invitation. since some of these are cases where sex is morally permissible, but where consent language is inapplicable—and so a consent ascription would not be true—i want to say that consent is not a necessary condition for permissible sex. i am in effect attempting to use the “is not a necessary condition for” operator in a way such that the presuppositions of consent language don’t project from within it.29 this operator is not a colloquial expression in conversational english; it is a philosopher’s term of art; i hope it is not too much of a misuse to employ it in this way. responding does not draw a clear distinction between “consensual” and “with consent.” the same goes for the noun form of “consent”: i assume the naive connection between the noun and the verb: “consent” is what happens when one “consents.” thanks to gretchen ellefson and an anonymous referee for encouraging me to discuss this point. 29 if the presupposition did project, then i would reject the sentence, “consent is a necessary condition for morally permissible sex,” but also reject “consent is not a necessary condition for morally permissible sex.” then one would have to ascend metasemantically to express the key idea; one would say that there can be cases of morally permissible sex where the description “that sex involved consent” would not be true. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 an analogy may help to illustrate the logical space i am exploiting. saying someone “stopped” doing something presupposes that they were previously doing it. so (21) presupposes that rohit was previously texting his friend: (21) rohit stopped texting his friend. texting while driving is dangerous, so one might be tempted to sign up to a norm like this one: (22) rohit must stop texting his friend, before driving. but this rule is only appropriate if we assume the presupposition of (21) and (22): that rohit was previously texting his friend. note that rohit does not comply with (22) if he drives while never having texted anyone; so if we do not want to assume that he was, (22) is a bad rule. and if we set out a universal generalization of (22) like, (23) everyone must stop texting their friend, before driving, we’d be presupposing that everyone who might drive was previously texting their friend. stopping texting one’s friend is not a necessary condition for safe driving, because it is consistent with safe driving that one was not previously texting one’s friend.30 this example feels artificial, in part because it is rather mysterious why anyone might assume that everyone who might drive was previously texting their friend. but consider a similar case where the presupposition is more tempting—and where it reinforces a harmful stereotype. here is objectionable advice that one might read in an academic lifestyle guidebook: (24) every professor should be grateful for the support his wife gives him. 30 one might challenge my claim that (23) presupposes that everyone was previously texting their friend. perhaps, as a referee suggested to me, only a weaker presupposition holds, to the effect that generically, would-be drivers were previously texting their friend. i do not agree with this suggestion; i think the “everyone” in (23) makes it explicit that all drivers who conform with the norm must have met that condition—namely, having stopped texting their friend. but the weaker claim is actually enough for the purposes that follow, so i’ll keep that idea live in this section in the next two footnotes. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 one problem is extensional: (24), like (23), miscategorizes certain cases. someone who doesn’t have a wife cannot satisfy this norm. but there is also a deeper problem: the norm itself reinforces sexist, heteronormative, amatonormative, and mononormative stereotypes, by presupposing, of every professor, that (a) they are male, and (b) they have a unique wife. even if we grant for the purpose of argument that any professor who has a wife should be grateful to her, we should think that (24) is a bad rule. the statement and reinforcement of a norm like this will explicitly censure ungrateful-husband professors, but it will implicitly exclude professors who are unmarried, married to someone who isn’t a woman, and/or nonmale.31 in exactly the same way, setting out a rule like (25) invokes the presupposition that everyone32 who might be having sex would be trying to get their partner to do it at their behest: (25) everyone who has sex should get consent first. this is a harmful assumption to presuppose, insofar as we wish to resist rape culture. i don’t think it can be ok for anyone to have sex without consent, but i reject (25) for the same reasons as i reject (23) and (24). i reject consent as a necessary condition for ethical sex because i think it carries that harmful presupposition and miscategorizes cases where the presupposition fails—not because i think nonconsensual sex can be ok. the consent theorists’ mistake here, i think, derives from an overemphasis on the wrong-making feature of sexual assault. they are right that the lack of consent is a critical piece of the picture for the wrongness of sexual assault, but they conclude from this—mistakenly in my view—that the presence of consent is necessary for, and explanatory of, the permissibility or goodness of good sex. this would be a good inference only on the assumption that the question of consent is relevant—and the presuppositions of consent language are met—in all sex. but, i have argued, this is not so. 8. comparison: teamwork sex as i mentioned in §6 above, john gardner (2018) has recently defended a view similar to mine. like me, gardner argues that consent language carries substantive presuppositions that ill suit its central role in contemporary sexual 31 and even if, per my referee’s suggestion, the presupposition were merely a generic one, as opposed to a universal one, to the effect that a normal professor is male and has a wife, the norm would be bad for very similar reasons: it marginalizes professors who do not fit the stereotype. 32 or normal people. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 ethics. like me, gardner is interested in venerating a kind of sexual activity that is inconsistent with the presupposition. but gardner’s discussion is different from mine in important ways. most obviously, gardner grounds his critique of consent theory in the passivity presupposition, not the behest presupposition. he writes: by consenting, one is placing oneself in the position of patient and the other in the position of agent, so far as what is consented to is concerned. from there, one can quickly see that the question “was there consent?” presupposes an asymmetry of exactly the kind that i suggested is not to be found in good (teamwork) sex. it presupposes that the sexual activity was not fully agent–agent symmetrical. (gardner 2018, 58) “teamwork sex,” according to gardner, is sex that the partners literally do together, as a kind of collective agent. the problem with consent theory, according to gardner, is that it cannot make sense of what is good about sex that one person isn’t doing to another. sex that happens at one person’s behest may often be sex that that person does to another, as opposed to a team action, but it needn’t be: team actions can be initiated by individual requests. (suppose i ask you, “will you please dance the tango with me?”, and, as a favour to me, you agree, and we dance. we perform the dance as a team, but you took your part in it at my behest. on my view, consent language is perfectly appropriate for describing our dance; on gardner’s it won’t be.) so, because we posit different presuppositions to consent language, our views make different predictions. another point of similarity between gardner’s approach and mine is that, like me, gardner wishes to reject the orthodox claim that consent is necessary for morally permissible sex. his rationale is similar to mine.33 33 gardner (2018, 60) writes: “here i am advancing the more explosive proposition that, when the sexual going is good, consent is also unnecessary. before you explode, bear in mind that my case proceeds, not from the thought that consent is too high an expectation for our sex lives, but rather from the thought that it is too low an expectation. ideally, i suggest, the question of consent does not arise between sexual partners.” unlike me, gardner does not explain or engage with presupposition and its characteristic projection from various embeddings. but some of the details of presupposition are essential for understanding the view. note that on its face, gardner’s suggestion, that the reason consent is unnecessary for permissible sex is that it is “too low an expectation,” crumbles under logical scrutiny. being too weak a standard could never be a reason to deny that it is not a genuine ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 in one important respect, gardner is also much more ambitious than i am: the “teamwork” that gardner esteems, he considers to be a necessary condition for good sex. i do not make any such claim, either for gardnerian teamwork nor for my corresponding notion of acting at no one else’s behest. i have emphasized that many paradigms of good sex are collaboratively elected, or initiated as the result of an open invitation, in a way that fails the behest presupposition. but i make no blanket condemnation of the consensual granting of sexual requests. undoubtedly the world would be better if there were more sex inconsistent with these presuppositions and less that matches them. but i see no reason to say that no one should ever ask for sexual favours from one’s partner, or that, if such a request is granted, the resulting sex is bad.34 sex, like most nice things, can be appropriately established in any of a variety of ways. 9. inflationary notions of consent what of consent theorists’ positive strategy? consent theorists do not typically reject sentences like (18) as suffering from a presupposition failure; on the contrary, it is standard to interpret a sincere, sober, uncoerced request for a blowjob as a strong indication of consent to a blowjob.35 likewise, consent theorists are typically happy to describe the kinds of sexual negotiation i discussed in §4, where the presuppositions of consent language are not satisfied, as consentinvolving. indeed, the rhetoric of “enthusiastic” consent is designed to valorize just these kinds of cases. there is a general tendency in discussions of contemporary sexual ethics to treat “consent” as a label for whatever it is that we think makes sex morally permissible.36 in response to ethical worries about, say, sex that an employee agrees to have with her employer, there is a temptation to describe the power imbalance requirement. absent some discussion of the mechanics of presupposition and its projection from negation, gardner’s suggestion here looks like a non sequitur. 34 thanks to carrie jenkins, cat saint-croix, and mona simion for thoughtful discussion here. 35 see pallikkathayil (2019, 110): “i might . . . ask you to move my car so that i can avoid a parking ticket. a presupposition of this request is that i consent to you moving my car.” (pallikkathayil is not, i think, using “presupposition” in the same specific linguistic sense i am—note that the consent communicated would not project from, e.g., negation: “i am not requesting that you move my car” certainly doesn’t convey consent to move my car.) 36 or perhaps more precisely, whatever it is that makes sex qua sex morally permissible. sex might be “consensual” in even the strong sense contemplated yet still immoral because, e.g., it breaks a promise. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 24 as inconsistent with genuine consent. in response to ethical worries about someone reluctantly agreeing to unwanted sex, there is a temptation to describe enthusiasm as necessary for consent. and in response to considerations like the ones i’ve offered, which i take to suggest that there are cases of ethical sex where the question of consent doesn’t even get off the ground, the consent theorist will say there is consent. words change their meanings over time, and there is a tradition of attempting to use consent’ language in the inflationary way described. based on my observations and informal polls, today’s younger adults are much less likely than those in mackinnon’s generation to feel the force of her suggestion, quoted in §3, that “sex women want is never described by them or anyone else as consensual.” perhaps the language is shifting. i have seen some evidence that this tendency is particularly pronounced in some queer communities. nevertheless, i have reservations about the attempt to salvage consent theory by altering the contours of the notion of consent. here are two.37 first, if one understands consent in a broad way, encompassing all relevant moral constraints on ethical sex, the dictum that sex requires consent becomes tautological. it is neither informative nor a helpful guide to decision-making to be told that for sex to be permissible, it needs to have all the features that are required for sex to be permissible. consent is supposed to explain moral features of sex, not merely redescribe them. on the broad understanding of consent, describing an instance of sex as nonconsensual would just be another way of saying that it is a sexual violation. it is of no use in identifying such violations to someone who doesn’t already know sexual right from sexual wrong. second, presuppositions can be both stealthy and sticky. if i am right that “consenting to 𝛷” language typically carries the presupposition that someone else is trying to get you to 𝛷, we should expect the language of consent to have a tendency to continue to communicate that thought, even at an implicit level, even as we start to use the language in a different way. the idea of deference to another is baked in deep to the idea of consent, at the level of the social imagination.38 so unless and until the language changes completely, such that the presupposition is gone altogether, one expects the invocation of consent language as a general norm about 37 in addition to the more central reservations given in the main text, i also worry that it is somewhat ad hoc, requiring a sui generis notion of sexual consent, divorced from the more general notion of consent. the idea that affirmative enthusiasm is necessary to consent to reading a philosophy paper is not remotely plausible, so holding that it is for sex requires special treatment of sexual consent. compare gardner (2018, 59) on hairstylists et al. 38 see medina (2013) or yap (2017). thanks to stacey goguen for discussion. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 25 sex to continue to convey and normalize the assumption that sex is something that one person asks for and another grants or refuses. this will reinforce the sexist stereotypes described in §3 and §7, and potentially contribute to bad norms.39 for this reason, it is often much easier to change which words one uses than it is to change what presuppositions those words carry. although language is ultimately conventional, the conventions run deep. the english “he,” for instance, presupposes that the referent is male. in cases where the gender of the person in question is unknown or unspecified, one might, with a nod to gender-inclusivity, attempt to use this word without its presupposition, intending to convey no assumption about the gender of the doctor with a sentence like, “when you see the doctor, give him this note.” some twentieth-century english style guides supported the gender-neutral “he” on such grounds.40 as feminist-informed contemporary style guides point out, this was a mistake. the maleness presupposition of the pronoun “he” wasn’t suspended, just because some speakers and writers decided it should be possible to use that word in that way. at best, the presupposition was suppressed, making its operation harder to see. this was not progress. better to reform the actual use of the language, using different gender-neutral pronouns—in contemporary english, “they” is by far the most successful and available.41 if one wishes to stop communicating what is 39 compare mackinnon (2016, 455–456) and gardner (2018, 68–69). my point here is also analogous to some of the discussion from feminist discussions of pragmatics and pornography—e.g., in langton and west (1999). langton and west argue that pornography is a kind of speech act that can subordinate women by normalizing women’s subordination; mcgowan (2004, 108) points out that this can happen in a particularly insidious way when it does so despite neither the speaker (the producers’) nor the hearers intending or even recognizing this effect. i think the accommodation of the stealthy presuppositions of consent language are excellent candidates for manifestations of conversational “exercitives” in mcgowan’s sense. thanks to cam gilbert here. 40 fowler (1926, 648), for instance: “their should be his; & the origin of the mistake is clearly reluctance to recognize that the right shortening of the cumbersome he or she, his or her, &c., is he or him or his though the reference may be to both sexes.” huddleston and pullum (2002, 492) give an overview of the debate, including arguments that this androcentric usage was at best “purportedly” gender-neutral. 41 some english speakers use neologisms like “zie,” but they remain marginal. in other languages, novel pronouns have proven much more successful—the swedish “hen,” i am told, has achieved widespread use in just the past decade. preliminary evidence suggests its use diminishes androcentric bias—see tavits and pérez (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 26 presupposed by a given bit of language, it is far easier to use different language than it is to change the meaning of the language to strip it of the presupposition. many european languages include a distinction between formal and informal second-personal pronouns; these are used to express familiarity or distance and to reflect relationships in the social hierarchy. in german one addresses a friend or a child as “du,” but a customer or social superior as “sie.” in such a language, it is quite difficult to speak to someone without communicating something about their perceived social status. insofar as a person or a society might wish to avoid this eventuality, one might prefer not to have these hierarchical structures encoded in the presuppositions of commonly used words. in theory, one possible strategy would be to collectively decide, as a society, that the words in question will no longer carry such a message. as a practical matter, this is not possible—at least not without generations of committed use. just saying, “we’ll continue to use ‘sie’ to address some people, but we’ll use it in a way that does not carry the honorific presupposition,” is not a viable strategy. it is not surprising, then, that when, in the 1960s, swedish society collectively decided, on egalitarian political grounds, to dispense with their formal secondperson pronoun, they did so by changing the use, not by changing the connotations of the words. swedish society made a rather deliberate decision to dispense with the formal “ni,” employing the informal “du” for all singular second-person uses. linguistic reform along these lines is certainly possible, even when tied to specific political ideologies, as in the case of the swedish “du.”42 so i do not hold much optimism for the strategy of retaining the central use of consent language in sexual ethics while attempting to dispense with its presuppositions. presuppositions are just not so easily dispensed with. and when the presupposition remains at a hidden level, it can lead to significant harms. some contemporary discourse about consent is used in a way that does not require that one is acting at someone else’s behest, but this is far from universally the case. quite a lot of contemporary discourse around consent pretty clearly does retain presuppositions—or even more explicit commitments—along such lines. my own university’s student services website, for example, includes this language: we know—it’s hard to make the first move, but when you do, it’s important to ask for consent first. sexual consent means that the person who initiates 42 thanks to anna-sara malmgren for discussion of swedish. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 27 sexual activity is responsible for making sure that their actions are okay with their partners.43 this is explicit in its assumption that consent is about someone’s response to a sexual overture. (it is implicit in its assumption that sexual encounters are begun by one person requesting another’s permission.) implicitly or explicitly, consent theory continues to normalize the idea that sex is something that happens when one partner agrees to give it to another. worse, the idea that the responsibility rests only with “the person who initiates sexual activity” implies that there can be no sexual violation against someone who initiated, if sexual violation is always a matter of consent. this language literally suggests that “she started it” could be an adequate defense to a sexual misconduct charge.44 this is part of the reason why, as i alluded to in §3, i think these arguments, while focused on linguistic matters, are not merely verbal in the sense of having limited normative significance. the choice of which words to use to discuss sexual ethics has practical implications. i said above that my project has radical implications with respect to sexual ethics. someone might, with one of my referees, think this an overstatement—that my proposal is at most “terminologically radical,” not “normatively radical.” while it is not my project to recategorize orthodox moral classification of sexual activity—i am not saying that lots of sex that consent theorists thought was good is in fact bad, or vice versa—i do take seriously 43 “consent is clear,” university of british columbia student services, last modified september 8, 2017, accessed november 4, 2020, http://students.ubc.ca/ubclife /consent-clear. 44 this would presumably follow even if, after starting it, she changed her mind and decided she wanted to stop, and her subsequent protestations were ignored. this confusion is bad enough when given to students as educational material, as cited above, but it can also appear in official policies, which compounds the harms. in 2019 the university of british columbia board of governors proposed an amendment to that university’s sexual misconduct policy, which would have codified this ‘initiator’ language into official policy. this language implies, potentially disastrously, that if one party ‘initiates’ sexual contact, then changes their mind, their lack of consent is irrelevant for the purpose of identifying sexual misconduct! (thea udwadia, “proposed revisions to ubc’s sexual misconduct policy are now up for student consultation,” ubyssey, january 29, 2020). at the time i am writing, i do not know whether this new language will be ratified. (i submitted a comment to university council outlining this and other problems with the proposed amendments in january 2020.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 28 normative considerations about the use of language itself. words are powerful; consequently, arguments about which words to use can have significant normative implications.45 10. conclusion: modern love and consent there is at least some anecdotal evidence that the current contemporary emphasis on affirmative consent is actively reinforcing some of these sexist norms. i will close with one anecdote. as a referee reminds me, a curated anecdote alone is of limited evidential value, but i think it can help illustrate the kinds of possible harms that i am describing—and some readers may share my sense that this story is representative of something broader. in a 2018 modern love column, courtney sender describes a perceived cultural difference in a sexual encounter with a younger man: we had met on tinder. i was nearly 30 and he was 24, but our age gap somehow seemed a lot larger than five years. not because he acted especially young. it was more that when it came to sex and foreplay, he acted so differently from guys my age, asking for my consent about nearly everything.46 she goes on to describe bemusement at repeated requests for permission, at more stages of their encounter than she’d expected. she theorized that “somewhere in our five-year age gap, a dramatic shift must have taken place in sexual training.” sender describes becoming more used to the verbal requests for permission, and coming to perceive them as an expression of care. but in a subsequent sexual encounter, when she tried to model his behaviour in her actions towards him, he balked. she asked his permission to take off his belt. his hips were arcing toward me, but i paused. learn, i told myself. i said, “is this o.k.?” he was taken aback. “i ask you that,” he said. “why?” 45 so i see my project here as part of a larger trend in recent analytic philosophy, connecting linguistic questions to central social and political ones. see, e.g., saul (2012), plunkett and sundell (2013), jenkins (2019), mcgowan (2019), or ichikawa (2020). 46 courtney sender, “he asked permission to touch, but not to ghost,” modern love, new york times, september 7, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07 /style/modern-love-he-asked-permission-to-touch-but-not-to-ghost.html. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 29 “because i’m the one who could make you do something you don’t want to do,” he said. “not vice versa.” at least sometimes, contemporary consent theory seems to be communicating the thought that consent implies a kind of imbalance of interests and autonomy. insofar as we do not wish to further normalize such an imbalance, feminist theorists, buttressed by my observations about presupposition, have a good reason to prefer other language for discussion of sexual ethics.47 references alcoff, linda martín. 2018. rape and resistance. cambridge: polity press. alexander, larry. 2014. “the ontology of consent.” analytic philosophy 55 (1): 102– 113. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12035. archard, david. 2007. “the wrong of rape.” philosophical quarterly 57 (228): 374– 393. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.492.x. beaver, david, and bart geurts. 2012. “presupposition.” in semantics: an international handbook of natural language and meaning, edited by claudia maienborn, klaus von heusinger, and paul portner, 3:2432–2459. berlin: walter de gruyter. cahill, ann j. 2001. rethinking rape. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. chadha, karamvir. 2020. “sexual consent and having sex together.” oxford journal of legal studies 40 (3): 619–644. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa011. 47 for helpful discussions of the ideas that led to this paper and discussion of drafts of it, i’m grateful to linda alcoff, sarah amjad, amanda askell, paul bass, ray briggs, brookes brown, aurora georgina bustos arellano, ann cahill, roger clarke, ian cruise, gretchen ellefson, b. r. george, stacey goguen, sandy goldberg, samia hesni, quill kukla, irem kurtsal, ida lübben, anna-sara malmgren, garret merriam, shoshana messinger, lisa miracchi, christa peterson, kathryn pogin, chelsea rosenthal, jack samuel, cat saint-croix, jennifer saul, daniel saunders, chung-chieh shan, mona simion, melanie spurling, briana toole, and kelsey vicars. i’m especially grateful to jen foster, cam gilbert, carrie jenkins, kristin conrad, cat prueitt, and emily tilton for detailed comments on multiple drafts, and to cam gilbert and kristin conrad for help with proofreading and manuscript preparation. i’m also grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal for very thorough and useful comments on two previous drafts, and to the careful work of a patient copyeditor. this work was supported in part by a canadian sshrc insight grant for a project on rape culture and epistemology. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 30 danaher, john. 2018. “could there ever be an app for that? consent apps and the problem of sexual assault.” criminal law and philosophy 12 (1): 143–165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-017-9417-x. dougherty, tom. 2013. “sex, lies, and consent.” ethics 123 (4): 717–744. https://doi .org/10.1086/670249. eckert, penelope, and sally mcconnell-ginet. 2013. language and gender. 2nd ed. cambridge: cambridge university press. fischel, joseph j. 2019. screw consent: a better politics of sexual justice. oakland: university of california press. fowler, h. w. 1926. a dictionary of modern english usage. 1st ed. oxford: oxford university press. gardner, john. 2018. “the opposite of rape.” oxford journal of legal studies 38 (1): 48–70. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqx022. grice, h. p. 1975. “logic and conversation.” in the logic of grammar, edited by donald davidson and gilbert harman, 64–75. encino, ca: dickenson. huddleston, rodney, and geoffrey k. pullum. 2002. the cambridge grammar of the english language. cambridge: cambridge university press. ichikawa, jonathan jenkins. 2020. “contextual injustice.” kennedy institute of ethics journal 30 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/ken.2020.0004. jenkins, c. s. i. 2019. “all hearts in love use their own tongues: concepts, verbal disputes, and disagreeing about love.” in routledge handbook of love in philosophy, edited by adrienne m. martin, 72–82. new york: taylor & francis. kukla, quill. forthcoming. “a nonideal theory of sexual consent.” ethics. kukla, rebecca. 2018. “that’s what she said: the language of sexual negotiation.” ethics 129 (1): 70–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/698733. langton, rae, and caroline west. 1999. “scorekeeping in a pornographic language game.” australasian journal of philosophy 77 (3): 303–319. https://doi.org /10.1080/00048409912349061. liberto, hallie. 2017. “intention and sexual consent.” in “supplement ii: the normative significance of intentions,” edited by ulrike heuer and matthew noah smith, supplement, philosophical explorations 20 (supp. 2): 127–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/13869795.2017.1356359. mackinnon, catharine a. 2016. “rape redefined.” harvard law & policy review 10 (2): 431–477. mcgowan, mary kate. 2004. “conversational exercitives: something else we do with our words.” linguistics and philosophy 27 (1): 93–111. https://doi.org /10.1023/b:ling.0000010803.47264.f0. ———. 2019. just words: on speech and hidden harm. oxford: oxford university press. ichikawa – presupposition and consent published by scholarship@western, 2020 31 medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. pallikkathayil, japa. 2019. “consent to sexual interactions.” politics, philosophy & economics 19 (2): 107–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594x19884705. palmer, tanya. 2017. “distinguishing sex from sexual violation: consent, negotiation and freedom to negotiate.” in consent: domestic and comparative perspectives, edited by alan reed and michael bohlander, 9– 24. abingdon: routledge. pateman, carole. 1980. “women and consent.” political theory 8 (2): 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/009059178000800202. plunkett, david, and timothy sundell. 2013. “disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative terms.” philosophers’ imprint 13 (23). http://hdl .handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0013.023. saul, jennifer. 2012. “politically significant terms and philosophy of language: methodological issues.” in out from the shadows: analytical feminist contributions to traditional philosophy, edited by sharon l. crasnow and anita m. superson, 195–216. studies in feminist philosophy. oxford: oxford university press. schulhofer, stephen j. 1992. “taking sexual autonomy seriously: rape law and beyond.” law and philosophy 11 (1–2): 35–94. https://doi.org/10.1007 /bf01000918. shafer, carolyn m., and marilyn frye. 1977. “rape and respect.” in feminism and philosophy, edited by mary vetterling-braggin, frederick a. elliston, and jane english, 333–346. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams. tavits, margit, and efrén o. pérez. 2019. “language influences mass opinion toward gender and lgbt equality.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 116 (34): 16781–16786. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908156116. west, robin. 2009. “sex, law, and consent.” in the ethics of consent: theory and practice, edited by franklin g. miller and alan wertheimer, 221–250. oxford: oxford university press. yap, audrey s. 2017. “credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault.” feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (4): article 1. https://doi.org/10 .5206/fpq/2017.4.1. ———. 2019. “conceptualizing consent: hermeneutical injustice and epistemic resources.” in overcoming epistemic injustice: social and psychological perspectives, edited by benjamin r. sherman and stacey goguen, 49–62. london: rowman & littlefield. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 32 jonathan jenkins ichikawa is a professor of philosophy at the university of british columbia. he publishes primarily in epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language. he is the author of the rules of thought (oup 2013) and contextualising knowledge (oup 2017). he currently holds a sshrc-funded insight grant for research on epistemology, testimony, and rape culture. dr. ichikawa lives in vancouver, british columbia. 8302 ichikawa title page 8302 ichikawa final format the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 5 2017 the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory asha l. bhandary university of iowa, asha-bhandary@uiowa.edu recommended citation bhandary, asha l.. 2017. "the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 5. the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory1 asha bhandary abstract this paper advances a framework to conceptualize societal caregiving arrangements abstractly. it is abstract in that it brackets the meaning of our particular relationships. this framework, which i call the arrow of care map, is a descriptive tracking model that is a necessary component of a theory of justice, but it is not a normative prescription in itself. the basic idea of the map is then multiply specifiable to track various ascriptive identity categories as well as different categories of care labor. in this way, the idea of the arrow of care map serves as a conceptual frame with which to identify societies’ caregiving arrangements. i characterize it as a component of “ideal theory” insofar as it seeks to clarify our values without the immediate aim of formulating principles to govern a just society. the resultant partial theory of justice is one that responds to nonideal theory’s critiques of the ideological nature of liberal contractarianism’s idealizations and abstractions while moving towards new visions of a just society. keywords: ideal theory, nonideal theory, contractarianism, care, dependency care, liberal feminism, feminist liberalism, justice, distributive justice care, compassion, and concern are crucial elements of meaningful intimate relationships (held 2006; tronto 1993; ruddick 1989). in addition, the labor of hands-on care to meet a person’s basic needs often occurs within our closest relationships. however, caregiving also occurs in paid and professional contexts, which sometimes cross national boundaries through migrations of nannies and 1 i presented this paper to the society for analytical feminism, wellesley university, and as the 2017 inaugural robinson grover lecture at the university of connecticut, where elise springer and rik hine offered interesting analyses of the view that i plan to pursue in future work. i thank the participants of each of these events. i owe a particular debt of gratitude to cynthia stark, lisa tessman, and diana tietjens meyers for philosophically open-minded discussions about the nature of my project. the written version of the paper was improved by comments by richard fumerton, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal. 1 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 other care workers. moreover, even in the contexts of families and friends, care that is given and received can be structured by internal hierarchies and inequities. various cultures and societies have different ways of organizing life around care, such as gendered arrangements, extended families, and socialized care. these arrangements have particular histories. the history of slavery in the us means that black women who tend to white women do so in a context that is racially and historically charged.2 in societies with extended family systems, systems of care provision are structured by gender oppression and internally structured hierarchies and norms. for instance, a daughter-in-law may provide elder care to her parents-inlaw, where that practice is linked to preferences for males in those cultures, or a youngest daughter may be designated as the caregiver of her own parents, a designation which is paired with a cultural custom that she not marry and have children of her own. although there is an extensive feminist literature about the highly gendered nature of inequalities in responsibilities for providing care,3 we lack a unitary model with which to identify arrangements for care in diverse cultures and social forms— one that goes beyond gender. this paper fills this gap by advancing a new abstract concept for tracking the distribution of caregiving labor in a society that i call the arrow of care map. it is an abstract representation of caregiving that brackets the meaning of the relationships within which it occurs and thereby enables critical distance from particular cultural biases about who ought to care for whom. the function of this map is to gain clarity about how caregiving actually occurs in societies, because transparency is a necessary step prior to theorizing about what a just society would be. due to the pervasiveness of obfuscating narratives about who gives care and who receives care, it will be a substantial achievement to arrive at an accurate description of the ways that care is provided and received. in section 1, i defend the need for this new concept. there, i also show how the arrow of care map is responsive to the nonideal theoretic criticism that ideal theory is ideological in virtue of the content of its idealizations and abstractions. section 2 sets forth the core components of the arrow of care map and identifies the normative commitments embedded in the model. it is a relational analysis of a society’s caregiving arrangements founded on individual units of human beings. there, i also identify the map’s variations as specified by categories of labor and identity group, while emphasizing the need for the higher-order, abstract map as a 2 i thank lindsey stewart for discussion on this topic. 3 for feminist liberal work that discusses care, see abbey (2016), baehr (2004, 2013, 2017), bhandary (2010, 2016a, 2016b), cudd (2006), dimock (2008), hartley and watson (2010, 2012), lloyd (1998), okin (1989), schouten (2015), stark (2007), varden (2006). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 way to maintain cross-cultural flexibility to track various identity groups. section 3 identifies the limited conclusions that can be drawn about what a fair caregiving society will be prior to the descriptive tracking endeavor. finally, in section 4, i contrast the scope of the arrow of care map with both the ethics of care and forms of feminist contractarianism that apply a metric of justice directly to the family and personal relationships. 1. the need for a new concept 1.1. oppression via theoretical invisibility oppression via theoretical invisibility occurs when a person has a lived experience of disadvantage or exploitation that is unintelligible by the terms of the theory. in the lexicon of that theory, the person is either not disadvantaged, or the source of their disadvantage remains out of view even if they are disadvantaged according to the theory’s metric. for instance, an african american woman in the us might be economically disadvantaged—where the disadvantage is identifiable with a metric of income inequality—but the complex structural reasons that create disadvantage will not be wholly explicable in terms of income. as a result, an agenda for social change that follows from a theory that only tracks income inequality will overlook these structures of disadvantage. thus, one of the tasks of a theorist of justice is to articulate frameworks that will identify these overlooked experiences. kimberlé crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” is a prime example of a concept that makes visible a set of issues that perhaps could have been triangulated from preexisting concepts, but would remain more difficult to theorize without it.4 the idea of intersectionality is a way to understand the social position of women of color that reveals how the categories of race and gender obscure theorizing about their lives. intersectional analyses point out how assumptions of race and gender result in the loss of data capture that is particular to the lives of women of color.5 the articulation of the concept makes subsequent theorizing possible to further explore its various dimensions and significance.6 concepts like intersectionality are abstract, insofar as they highlight one set of concerns to the exclusion of others.7 thus, the concepts of gender, race, and class have made many aspects of social 4 crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality is a way to understand the invisibility of black women by naming their location and thereby rejecting the idea of “identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition” (crenshaw 1991, 1242). 5 crenshaw explains the problem of analyses of racism and sexism as one in which all black people are men and all women are white (crenshaw 2015). 6 see p. collins (2000). 7 similarly, mills (1997) argues for the need for the concept of white supremacy. 3 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 oppression visible, and the idea of intersectionality has both augmented and complicated them. every culture or society has some way of organizing life around care, such as gendered arrangements, extended families, and socialized care. despite the universality of care, though, caregiving arrangements are among the most theoretically and practically significant sources of blindness in liberal contractarianism. therefore, if liberal contractarianism is to be a viable doctrine, it needs a way to conceptualize how care is provided. i schematize this understanding of a society-wide caregiving arrangement with the arrow of care map. the arrow of care map theorizes the labor of care—not the nuances of relations of love and affection—and it abstracts away from assumptions about family units or socialized care to offer a way to tune our intuitions about caregiving in human life. the framework embeds within it a normative claim that society must meet its vital care needs.8 in doing so, it eliminates the following form of exploitation from traditional forms of liberalism. more precisely, adding the arrow of care to an account of the just distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation removes from theory the following form of exploitation as it occurs for care labor. ~persons x are assigned to do work c when work c is not recognized as work. consequently, persons x look like non-contributors. ~ persons y do work a, which is highly valued. they are able to gain additional advantages by assiduously avoiding work c. their avoidance of c is not identifiable as shirking because c is not identified as work. if a person’s contribution to social cooperation is not identified as a contribution in a theory of distributive justice, and the benefits that some people receive are not identified as benefits, then the resultant theory will have a loophole that leads to advantages for the people who avoid that work. this is the pattern that many societies have adopted for the social contributions needed for repair and maintenance.9 eva kittay has argued that liberalism, in particular, results in disadvantages to dependency workers due to their invisibility in its basic assumptions and concepts (1999). 8 it proceeds from the premise, unargued for here, that societies need to meet their care needs, and that doing so plays a crucial role in systems of social cooperation. for that argument, see bhandary (2016b). see also reiheld (2015) for an argument that society has a duty towards caregivers. 9 on repair and maintenance, see tronto (1993), spelman (2002), walker (2007). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 1.2. non-ideological ideal theory more broadly, liberal contractarianism has been criticized for idealizations and concepts that make the sources of group-based oppression impossible to identify or, more strongly, require the subordination of a subset of society (pateman 1988; jaggar 1995; kittay 1999; held 1987; mills 2004; schwartzman 2006a). i agree with these critics that an ideal theory that refuses to scrutinize whether its core concepts result in the perpetuation of illicit privilege is a non-starter as a viable theory of justice. despite these problems with the history of the contract tradition, i share the growing consensus that one of the main targets of the critique of ideal theory—the core liberal contractarian idea of fairness—retains value as a basis for identifying a number of contemporary forms of social injustice.10 fairness, defined in a way that requires transparency, can rule out arrangements that exploit or systematically disadvantage a subset of society. a necessary, but not sufficient, step to rule out these exploitative arrangements is to develop concepts and claims that make visible what lisa schwartzman calls “the sources and manifestations of groupbased oppression” (2006a). thus, the project of advancing non-ideological liberalism requires new theoretical work to better specify the model of the person, the facts known to deliberators, and the domain of the basic structure of society.11 idealizations that perpetuate ideology must be criticized, and better concepts for mapping the realities of existing societies are needed. the arrow of care map is a contribution to the project of advancing non-ideological ideal theory. 2. the arrow of care map: overview of functions the framework i advance is one that can be used for all social forms. it will be further specified by the culturally specific details that structure social inequality in that social form—where the assignment of care may track onto a person’s caste 10 okin (1989), hampton (1993), hay (2013), and mills (2012). i follow a broadly rawlsian form of contractarianism (2001). for the criticism that contractarianism does not necessarily rule out oppression, see schwartzman’s critique of o’neill (2006b, 572). specifying the precise form of contractarianism will be necessary for a complete account of just caregiving, but that is not the task of this paper. 11 my usage of ideal theory here is compatible with stemplowska (2008) and valentini (2012). it differs from mills (2004), who says that ideal theory is necessarily ideological theory, so that if a person addresses oppression, they are doing nonideal theory. thus, if one accepts mills’s definitions of ideal and nonideal theory, the arrow of care map will count as nonideal theory because it makes a source of oppression visible. see also tessman (2009). for alternative formulations of the distinction, see rawls (2002), valentini (2012), stemplowska and swift (2015), and kang (2016). 5 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 heritage rather than race or gender. thus, the basic model of the arrow of care map is universal but multiply specifiable. the arrow of care map, as a systems-level depiction of societal caregiving arrangements, gives theories of justice something they have been lacking: a way to understand care given and received as a fundamental social good that is the outcome of social cooperation, and that is prior to—and not dependent on— contingencies such as the particular economic structure of the society. in virtue of bracketing relationships of particularity and intimacy as well as the robust meaning of giving and receiving care in human life, it is decisively abstract and moderately fact-sensitive—incorporating the most fundamental aspects of human life, while leaving aside others.12 because the need to receive care is fundamental to all human lives, it is a fact that must be included on any list of basic facts employed in a theory of justice.13 in its most abstract form, it has value for a broad range of social forms to track who tends to receive large amounts of care and who tends to provide it. at one level less abstracted, it must track historically oppressed identity groups. i do not reduce it to these specific maps, though; instead, i insist on the need to maintain an abstract version of the map so that societal variations in the exploitation of caregivers can be found even when they do not coincide with dominant narratives. it may be the case that class has a higher correlation with caregiving than gender, for instance. theorists need critical distance from cultural preconceptions about who ought to receive care and who ought to provide it because—as scholars of affect study show—our concern for others is shaped by gender, race, and class (greyser 2017). thus, it is crucial that a map that tracks care given and care received remains conceptually separable from the range of ascriptive factors that will correspond to inequities in care. maintaining a separate metric may reveal unmapped social locations, such as a caregiver who may be from an otherwise advantaged group but who becomes disadvantaged as a caregiver.14 therefore, in addition to serving as a new descriptive mapping concept, the arrow of care map makes it possible to 12 i therefore aim to respond to the problem that abstractions have too often masked false claims—that humans are maximally rational (o’neill 1996), or that they fail to be explicit about what they bracket, and why (schwartzman 2006a). my account is moderately fact-sensitive in that it includes a set of basic facts but brackets others. see also farrelly’s characterization of the moderate fact-sensitivity of rawls’s theory, which “acknowledges some moderate feasibility constraints (e.g. pluralism) but also employs a number of idealizing assumptions (e.g. society is closed, full compliance, etc.) when deriving the principles of justice” (2007, 844). 13 for a lengthier argument for this claim, see bhandary (2016b). 14 see also kittay’s “dependency workers” (1999). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 identify inequalities that are not already captured by economic analyses or racial hierarchies. arrow of care maps have two functions. the first function of the maps is to organize fact-finding about societies’ caregiving arrangements. the basic map template will then be modified into multiple maps with overlays tracking trends by race, gender, geographic origin, and class. its main purpose is to gain an understanding about trends in levels of care received and provided as a relational good. the second function of the maps is to guide thinking about what a fair arrangement will be. it is my view that there are likely many possibly fair arrangements. on my preferred view, deliberations should be guided by a broadly rawlsian methodology, which evaluates the arrangement based on the idea that you could be anyone in it, variously interpreted as the claim that you could occupy any social position in it. however, the arrow of care map idea is compatible with a broad range of interpretations of transparency and fairness tests. what it rules out are arrangements that are based on, and require, the widespread exploitation of groups of people (minorities, women) in virtue of their roles as caregivers.15 after greater transparency is achieved, further deliberation will be required to imaginatively conceptualize potential caregiving arrangements as candidates for a fair arrangement. for instance, just caregiving arrangements may include nuclear families, extended families, and non-family-based care. 2.1. function one: a system-wide descriptive mapping concept for caregiving arrangements the arrow of care map does not seek to capture the whole truth of the role of caring relationships in human life, nor does it seek to prescribe how people should think about care in their private lives. it is a systems-level analysis of a society in the sense that it holds up caregiving arrangements as objects of deliberation in a way that facilitates clearer thinking about the different possible arrangements that would be acceptable to people in a society, when the labor of care is made visible.16 15 see schwartzman’s (2006b) argument that a theory without ideals will not have resources to rule out oppression. because the paper’s aim is to advance the idea of the arrow of care map—and not to defend a specific conception of fairness—i do not specify an ideal or respond to schwartzman’s claim about the necessity of ideals here. 16 the project is aptly characterized by stemplowska’s characterization of the point of ideal theory as clarifying our values (2008). see also tessman (2015) on the need for feminist theory that apprehends our normative realities even when there are no morally viable paths of action. 7 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 the arrow of care map is properly classified as a “descriptive mapping concept” (mills 2004, 174), insofar as it creates a concept to use in order to identify what occurs in the real world. caregiving norms are deeply culturally entrenched; they are embedded within gender norms about who should care for whom—by, for example, bringing them tea. they suffuse assumptions about who deserves sympathy for their suffering. therefore, identifying what actually occurs in the domain of care is a significant task of its own. the fact-finding task will give us real data with which to inform our social understandings about who provides care, who receives it, and at what levels. in the descriptive use, it remains somewhat abstract because it brackets information about particular relationships in order to gain an understanding of caregiving that does not simply legitimate existing assumptions about who should care for whom. although the arrow of care map will promote greater clarity about the nature of a society’s caregiving arrangements, it does not purport to avoid all cultural biases. for instance, leaving nonhuman animals out of the metric is a normatively laden starting point. the arrow of care map does not avoid the possibility of embedding and legitimating existing biases, but it seeks to be transparent about the claims and assumptions it makes, and the reasons for those assumptions. it is precisely because of the cultural entrenchment of caregiving norms that we need to think abstractly about care. the preponderance of philosophical effort directed towards thinking about care counterfactually has been directed towards new action-guiding policy proposals. these proposals often embed within them assumptions of the immutability of other features of the status quo. theories of justice need a more abstract methodology to think about care, and that is what the arrow of care achieves. however, because care ethicists and other feminists have roundly criticized abstraction, it is incumbent on me to clarify and defend the role of abstraction, and also to show how my account does not fall into the pitfalls of ideal theory as it has been criticized by nonideal theorists. schwartzman represents the nonideal criticism of ideal theory as fundamentally a problem of misrepresentation: “[ideal theory] misrepresents both agents and structures in ways that deny and obscure the realities of oppression” (2016, 7). thus, i seek to avoid misrepresentation by characterizing the project and scope of the arrow of care map. the arrow of care map is an abstraction that brackets numerous features of our lived experiences of caregiving. it does not seek to characterize the complexity of lived experiences within caring relationships. although it does not accurately represent the complexity of human agents, it offers a structural analysis of caregiving that can illuminate forms of oppression. it does so in a way that seeks to attend to the ways that 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 abstractions and idealizations can be ideological to mask and perpetuate entrenched inequalities. 2.2. normativity in abstraction the arrow of care map includes normativity at two levels: first, with the values and conceptualizations that are incorporated into the arrow of care, and then to guide and assess various caregiving arrangements. it includes value claims by taking individual human beings as what is fundamental in order to then depict the amount of care each person provides, for instance, over a lifetime. as a framework for tracking actual distributions, the arrow of care map will unveil the care people give and receive in a way that is individualistic but that also recognizes the relational nature of caregiving. the individualism of the framework is built into the metric of care that is given and received for and by each person. the relational nature of care given and received occurs in a set of arrows that specify from whom and towards whom care goes. sometimes the arrows will connect two members of a family, at other times they will not connect them. quantifying care in this way will lay bare distributive inequalities that have been masked by cultural narratives. theorists must (a) peel away the norms of femininity that mask the fact that caring is labor, (b) debunk ideas of gender essentialism that naturalize the labor of care, and (c) contest narrative and social constructs about racial and ethnic identity that normalize, for instance, western presumptions that women of color should tend to the care, maintenance, and repair needs of whites. furthermore, assumptions about oppressive gender norms can leave undetected exploitative labor distributions that occur within same-sex marriages, or the subordination of a man within a heterosexual couple. consequently, the map will require extensive fact-finding by sociologists and anthropologists who attend to dominant norms, but are aware that these norms will not always describe what actually occurs. 17 to see just how difficult it may be to identify actual distributions of care when they conflict with social narratives, consider the following case: an affluent, white stay-at-home mom who does not have a paid career is credited as a full-time caregiver, but closer analysis reveals that substantial amounts of care are provided by babysitters, or unpaid caregivers like a friend, mother, sister, neighbor, or older child. mapping amounts of care given and received will also make evident the differential entitlements of groups of people occupying different social positions 17 approximately 1.4 million children between the ages of eight and eighteen serve as caregivers for parents, grandparents or siblings with disabilities (new york times, may 23, 2016, “supporting children who serve as caregivers,” by jane e. brody). i thank amy r. baehr for bringing this statistic to my attention. 9 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 marked by race, ethnicity, and histories of slavery and colonization. in these ways, the first usage of the arrow of care map satisfies a few of the nonideal theorists’ requirements: it is quite centrally about dependency care, it identifies a category of labor that has sometimes coincided with slavery, and it unmasks ideologies. in order to do this, arrow of care maps must specify the gender, race, ethnicity, citizen status, and class of care receivers and providers.18 there will be different arrow of care maps to identify these caregiving arrangements—as a short time slice—over a year, or over the lifetime of individuals. in addition, it will be a theoretically robust project to delineate the boundaries of a society in order to be able to identify the “global care chain” and care drains from one country to another (hochschild 2000; kittay 2008; gould 2008). even in its descriptive form, the arrow of care map is abstract because it brackets facts about our relationships, such as the love parents have for their children, and that children have for their parents. moreover, it does not present action-guiding recommendations with respect to caregiving, and so it says nothing about how people should approach their caring relationships in their real lives.19 2.3. mapping care the arrow of care map is fundamentally an idea that admits of increasing levels of sophistication. i specify some of its uses here only to make more concrete the idea at its core. below, i offer a schematic depiction of the idea of the arrow of care map. this particular depiction does not describe an actual caregiving arrangement, nor does it specify an ideal. instead, the idea of the arrow of care is a way of quantifying caregiving labor as it occurs across both public and private domains. it offers an idea of tracking caregiving that is analogous to the idea of tracking blood pressure. in addition, just as the metric used for blood pressure is independent of any particular person’s blood pressure measurement, the idea of the arrow of care is an abstract idea that is not equivalent to the sum of what occurs in every person’s life. the arrow of care map tracks the intensity and duration of care given and received over the course of a lifetime. the width of the arrow corresponds to the intensity of care given and the direction of the arrow identifies care going from one person and towards another person. the length of the arrow corresponds to the duration of care. 18 i am indebted to amy mullin for pressing me to make this claim abundantly clear. 19 for further discussion of this claim, see section 4.1. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 figure a. the arrow of care map 2.4. categories of care arrow of care maps will be specified to track different subsets of labor, from the narrow category of dependency care to the broader inclusive category of care, and even personal services. dependency care is care that seeks to respond to a legitimate need. dependency care is the hands-on labor without which a person would not survive. it includes, for instance, feeding a baby, helping a paraplegic person with toileting, and assisting a person with mental disabilities to obtain food and live safely (kittay 1999). i define dependency care, in part, by the relative immediacy of the harm that the vulnerable person will experience when care is absent. a paradigm case is that of a baby left in a crib without a caregiver; he will not survive long because he needs significant care to survive. this definition of dependency care does not offer necessary and sufficient conditions. it follows my view (bhandary 2016b) that the nature of caregiving will change as caregiving becomes transparent in society, and the definition is consequently provisional. the caring work the map tracks maintains its historic connection with the category of labor that women have typically performed as mothers, nannies, mammies, daughters-in-law, and so forth. however, my account of caring work excludes the activities of teaching children to read, write, and perform basic math.20 20 i disagree with daniel engster’s account of care (2007, 27), which includes these activities and is broader than my view. for engster, “caring may be defined as everything we do directly to help individuals to meet their vital biological needs, 11 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 the aim of the activity must be meeting a basic need, but attempts that fail should still be tracked. consequently, i do not build efficacy into the caregiving that is tracked because caregiving is performed at varying degrees of skillfulness. however, i agree with daniel engster that actions that can be successfully completed without satisfying biological and developmental needs of a person will not count as caregiving labor. engster offers the example of a cook in a restaurant, who can prepare and sell a meal without caring for anyone, whereas a parent cannot nourish a child without being sure that he or she actually ingests the food. of course, there is a commonsense threshold for an activity to count as caregiving. a person who says they intended to care for their baby but leaves the baby crying in the crib for days while enjoying time out in town with friends violently harms the child and clearly fails to care for her. thus, intentions matter. some cases are more difficult to assess. for instance, imagine that eugene makes his daughter soup while she is ill. he has taken off a day from work to do so. but he then spills the hot soup on his daughter, requiring that she receive medical care from someone else and also that her mother now take off a day from her work. the daughter still has not eaten anything and she now has burns that will require additional care to treat, resulting in additional caregiving by others. how do we quantify the care? do eugene’s contributions count as care, despite his ineffectiveness? if effectiveness is a necessary condition, then eugene’s labor will not count, but a distributive assessment should include his attempted care, and therefore his earnest efforts should be counted in some way, although the additional needs he created must also be tracked. for these reasons, i reserve “effective” as a modifier to care, instead of saying that care must be minimally effective for it to count as care. in contrast, amy mullin offers a normative account of care for children as an activity that should not increase their vulnerability by failing to understand their material, psychological and developmental needs (mullin 2014). mullin’s account of care tells us what good care is, but tracking labor for an abstract representation of a caregiving arrangement should also track the care that aimed at meeting the person’s needs despite its failure to do so. it is well established in medical contexts that the labor of doctors that seeks to help a patient counts as work, even if they fail to achieve this aim. other forms of care should follow the same convention. imagine a case in which beatrice, a sixyear-old child, sees a physician for a skin rash. the physician, dr. lyons, misdiagnoses it as a bacterial infection and prescribes an antibiotic, but the develop or maintain their basic capabilities, and avoid or alleviate unnecessary or unwanted pain and suffering, so that they can survive, develop, and function in society” (2007, 29). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 antibiotic results in a larger rash as a side effect. dr. lyons has not provided effective or good care. nonetheless, the health care system does not deduct the hours the physician spent seeing the child from the overall number of hours of care provided by the physician during that week. there is value in separating a quantification of labor hours from the quality of the labor—for it allows us to track that a person has spent time and effort aiming at an outcome, even if that person has failed to achieve the outcome, or if they do it poorly. in this example, dr. lyons has acted in ways that should be counted in a distributive account of labor. he has also offered bad care by failing to meet the needs of the recipient of care. good care is the proper aim of caregiving. the reason for permitting bad care to count as care in the arrow of care map is that the map seeks to capture the labor people perform. assessments of labor do not nullify labor that fails to meet a metric of high quality—which is what is illustrated with the medical case. of course, it is of the utmost importance that vulnerable and dependent persons need good caregivers, not caregivers who are ineffective, and so we need educational programs and apprenticeships to train excellence in caregiving. 2.5. map typologies unpaid dependency care there will be several iterations of the abstract but descriptive arrow of care maps. the least complex map may be one that tracks unpaid dependency care because it will identify labor that is not currently tracked in any systematic way in virtue of its exclusion from the market—for the market is among the main sources of socially tracking labor. dependency care that is poorly paid the need to track dependency-care labor that is paid is evident in the case of dependency work that is paid poorly so that the person is resultantly made vulnerable in virtue of performing the labor.21 if the ability to meet your needs and wants is dependent on money, then remunerating care well could relieve the disadvantage of it. however, i do not advocate increasing the domain and scope of 21 a host of additional questions arise at this stage—how do we weigh caregiving against other social contributions? how do we quantify burdens that result in compounded vulnerability? answering these questions will be difficult, but answering them is just as necessary as any other comparative assessment of individual and social disadvantage for a theory of distributive justice. however, we may legitimately postpone answers to these questions until the present project is complete. 13 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 market norms, for to do so treats all goods as fungible (anderson 1993). if we live in a fully marketized economy, then caregiving should be marketized and the arrow of care would identify a type of social productivity that would be included in the gross domestic product. but i do not advocate that kind of society, for increasing the scope of markets will inevitably result in the creeping of market norms. care is among the most fundamental domains of social cooperation, and it follows from its fundamentality that we will need to meet our care needs at least at a minimal level irrespective of whether we have a market economy or not, and those caregiving arrangements need to be fair. personal services another iteration of the arrow of care map must include personal services. i adopt kari waerness’s term and definition of “personal services” for the category of activity that a person does for someone else when that person is capable of meeting the basic need him or herself, or the need is not pressing and/or legitimate (1984).22 personal services include making tea for others, attending to the emotions of others, and serving as an audience to the ego of another. why should theorists of justice bother mapping personal services if the needs they meet are not essential to human life? we should map this labor because it is work that people—often women—perform. there may be strong social pressure for a person to perform the labor even if the care needs to which he or she responds are not legitimate care needs. thus, anti-oppression theory needs to include a personal-services map because the recipients of that labor reap benefits from it and the people performing it remain disadvantaged. a personal-services map is needed to track distributions of effort and time on the part of the person performing that labor, and it will include emotional work, ego-tending, and some forms of sex work.23 as in the case of dependency care, the first iteration of the personal-services map is unpaid personal services. the second iteration, which is no less important, is a map of poorly remunerated personal services. for distributive purposes, the burdens of caregiving—as both dependency care and personal services—are defined by the effort it requires in terms of time 22 engster includes care for self in the activity of caring, and therefore it need not always be other-directed (2007, 32). i do not include care for self because the nature of caring for someone else and caring for oneself differ significantly. i seek to capture the category of other-directed care that promotes the recipient’s well-being and goals. see bhandary (2016a) for further analysis of the differences between selfdirected and other-directed care. 23 see mackinnon (2011). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 and the demands on the person.24 a full analysis of the burdens of personal services must include psychological costs experienced by the caregiver. personal services that radically harm the self of the caregiver are not justified and so a just social form should eliminate them. for instance, some forms of sexual labor that destruct the self of the sex worker should be eliminated from just social forms. in the meantime, the labor should be descriptively tracked. unmet care needs a supplemental iteration of the dependency-care map requires an index of the dependency-care needs of vulnerable persons that no one meets in the current arrangement. one can expect that disabled children of parents living in poverty will have fewer of their needs met. there will likely be significant correlations between relative wealth and the level at which one’s care needs are met, but it should not be assumed that inequalities in wealth and income will subsume inequalities in care. 3. function two: fair caregiving arrangements the second function for the arrow of care map is to serve as an object for deliberations about what a fair caregiving arrangement would be. in this use, it plays an essential role in a form of revised contractarianism—one that pays attention to the need for sensitivity to the facts that are included and to those that are excluded in the use of abstractions, where abstraction is defined here as the bracketing of various predicates. the normative question for the most abstract iteration is: what would a just caregiving arrangement be? is it one with arrows of equal widths and lengths? must the arrows be exactly reciprocal, modeling something like exchange reciprocity? for instance, we can model the idea that children have duties to their parents to care for them with a set of equal arrows going to and from parents and children over the course of a lifetime. we must also ask: is a just arrangement one where caregiving arrangements are clustered by gender or race? the outcome of deliberations behind the veil of ignorance will rule out arrangements that exploit any group of people. no group of people will want to be designated as the set who must be other-directed caregivers, even if they may choose to do so in their own lives. a form of hypothetical contractarianism with an “i could be anyone” device that is moderately fact-sensitive, insofar as it includes a set of important facts that are needed for it to satisfy its function, will exclude arrangements that designate ascriptive identity groups to be other-directed. the important facts that must be included are the race, gender, class, and geographic origin of the person, but these 24 the metric requires collaboration among philosophers, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists (see, e.g., folbre and bittman 2004 for an excellent case of time-use studies). 15 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 facts are mutable, and different categories can become the most significant ones in different societies. moving caregiving arrangements to the forefront of the philosophical agenda changes contractarianism because of the way that these arrangements have been assumed to be matters of the family. thus, the exploitation that occurs when a person does activity c, but c is not considered socially useful or necessary, where c is care, will be eliminated. insofar as performing care that is invisible in the tracking of societal benefits and burdens is part of a form of group-based oppression, the arrow of care map will eliminate that source of group-based oppression.25 we can expect that the arrow of care map will show how racial hierarchies and disadvantage overlap with social norms about who should receive care, and who should provide it. a normatively acceptable caregiving arrangement cannot distribute care in ways that differentiate by race and class—nor should any inequalities systematically result from these group memberships. but these inequalities must be tracked in the descriptive form, and doing so requires bracketing details of people’s particular relationships and situations in order to document the extent to which inequalities in care given and received overlap with other categories of ascriptive identity groups. the arrow of care map is a framework within which it is intelligible to ask undertheorized questions, such as: do african american men receive more or less care than white men? and from whom? it also offers a way of systematizing inquiry into more established areas of inquiry, such as: do women of color receive less care than white women? on whom does the care deficit fall with the greatest effects? additional data can be added to incorporate how immigrant and legal-resident status correspond to care arrangements. different societies may arrive at different conclusions about the outcome of hypothetical acceptability because our actual experiences and values influence our intuitions about what we would choose in an ideal choice situation.26 therefore, i leave open the principle that meets the criterion of hypothetical acceptability. in this way, the account i offer is deliberately less determinate than rawls’s use of the original position. it leaves the principles that would result open to the person contemplating the thought experiment. in this usage, the map enables imagining a variety of caregiving arrangements and evaluating the acceptability of these arrangements—when one does not know where they will be in the arrangement 25 i think eliminating invisible forms of labor will eliminate the corresponding varieties of oppression via theoretical invisibility. however, other forms of oppression may emerge. 26 i will not endeavor to defend this claim here. my view, in brief, is that the actual cultural context within which we deliberate as philosophers influences our estimations of what ideally rational people would decide, given certain inputs. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 (stark 2000). this type of theorizing is a valuable mechanism to clarify our thinking about care in human societies, for it leads us to think about what an ideally just society would look like when it takes caregiving into account alongside all other goods. because care is one good among several fundamental social primary goods, inequality in the domain of care may be part of an overall just arrangement. 3.1. adaptive preferences and legitimacy a principle of fair distribution of care requires an account of legitimate needs for care. any metric of needs-differences must also take into account the ways in which the needs of privileged members of a society are perceived by all members of the society as more pressing. due to the ways that people’s expectations are shaped by what is available to them, and by that to which they have become accustomed, we cannot assume that we will get a clear view of what legitimate expectations for care needs will be. a woman who is expected to be self-abnegating may well demand less care from others.27 more broadly, the set of phenomena theorized as adaptive preferences suffice to give reasons to not merely rely on existing preferences and states of affairs.28 there are some clear cases of legitimate care needs. for instance, a child with a severe cognitive or physical disability will legitimately require more care—of greater intensity and duration—than a nondisabled adult man. however, there are likely racial and economic differences in the extent to which these needs for care are diagnosed and met. the arrow of care will need to track the care people are actually receiving, and add facts about race, gender, and disability, so that it can identify disparities in the care received by disabled black and white children, for instance. race must also be included to be able to theorize about the significance of white disabled children receiving more care than disabled children of color. for instance, a principle of equality of capability would recommend that everyone receive the amount of care that they need to function (engster 2007), and this requires accounting for differences in needs. therefore, race-based aggregate data about care received and given are needed in addition to data about the amounts of care people receive above or below a threshold for basic functioning. if the gap in average care received by racial groups is very great, it gives a prima facie reason to scrutinize our intuitions about which needs are legitimate, and for whom. an asymmetry in care at a group-based level is an injustice even if it does not result 27 on “deformed desires” as a phenomenon of the self-abnegating woman, see superson (2005). a related set of phenomena have been theorized as adaptive preferences. see, for example, elster (1982) and khader (2011). 28 see farrelly (2007) on the connection between maximal fact-sensitivity and the perpetuation of adaptive preferences. 17 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 in disadvantages of income and wealth. a group-based caregiving arrangement raises a prima facie problem for justice because it will create problems for everyone who shares in the ascriptive identity group of the caregivers. finally, historically informed understandings of oppression are necessary but not sufficient because the arrow of care map is a metric that can track unmapped disadvantage and relational asymmetries. 4. comparing the arrow of care map to care ethics and feminist liberalism applied within the family 4.1. the challenge from care ethics one of the commitments that differentiate care ethics from the liberal contractarian tradition is the care-ethical view that emotions are a source of moral knowledge, which is also linked to the claim that our emotions and particular ties to real people should not be overcome in order to achieve impartiality. care ethicists argue that moral theory must pay attention to particularity, and that theorizing about abstract subjects who have no ties to others misses what is important for a moral life.29 the arrow of care map enables thinking about society-wide caregiving arrangements in a way that abstracts away from particular intimate relationships and from the emotions and meaning of care in our lives so that we may gain an understanding of the distributive justice or injustice of that arrangement. unlike care ethics, it does not prescribe how we should respond to the people in our lives. care ethicists’ accounts of caregiving relationships and caring persons offer sophisticated analyses of caring practices and the aims of good relationships, but they do not include assessments of the underlying distribution of benefits and burdens.30 as i have argued, a theory of care will be incomplete and inadequate if it does not have an abstract way to depict and evaluate caregiving arrangements, for abstraction is necessary to depart from existing conventions and assumptions about who should care for whom. care ethics advances a related criticism of thinking in the terms of justice. alison jaggar characterizes this care ethical criticism of “justice thinking” in the following passage: 29 held (2006), s. collins (2015), and noddings (1982) advocate a contextual approach to moral reasoning. 30 engster (2007) theorizes about a just society that provides care. kittay (1999) theorizes about the disadvantage of dependency workers within the terms of her dependency theory. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 justice thinking is impersonal and general because it regards both moral subjects and the objects of their moral concern in terms of their moral status as representatives of humanity . . . rather than in terms of their concrete specificity; care thinking is personal and particularized in that both carers and those cared for regard each other as unique, irreplaceable individuals. (1995, 190–191)31 my view is diametrically opposed to care ethics on this matter because some level of abstraction is valuable in order to step back from the facts of one’s life. it enables the theorist to stand back from his or her family’s assumptions about who within the family ought to provide actual caregiving if they are to express love and concern. abstraction in this form is distinct from the kind of abstraction against which bernard williams (1981) counsels—the application of impartial thinking to our loved ones. and i embrace care ethicists’ claims about the moral requirements of our actual relationships. the arrow of care does not recommend standing back from love for one’s family to evaluate whether the terms of the relationship are fair. as actual people, we are embedded within imperfect and unjust social forms, and it is likely that this will always be the case. the project of theorizing about the nature of the good life within any particular social form is a task for moral theory, philosophy of action, and practical reason. a moral theory that rejects all real relationships when they are unfair would leave real persons relation-less in any foreseeable future. whereas an account of morality must discern our particularity and identify how it is that we can live good lives, a political theory should evaluate the basic structure as the matrix within which we live our lives. consequently, political theory must engage in abstractions. my argument for abstraction counsels a departure from particularity at the level of social forms—not at the level of a person’s own life. claims for abstraction at the level of justification are sometimes taken to imply that we should implement these claims abstractly in some way. stark (2010) is right to argue that we can be sensitive to context when we apply ideals we have arrived at through the use of abstraction in justification. therefore, care ethicists need not reject abstract care, for it invites attention to morally salient details at the level of an individual’s life. my view is that we must respond to our lives as they are in their particularity—to the facts about who our parents are, or to particulars about our brothers, sisters, children, neighbors, and so forth. the particularized details about who is in our intimate sphere are not defined voluntarily. it is not up to us to choose whether or not we have a neighbor who falls down after an illness and is alone in the world; or to determine our parents’ abilities, and particular types of 31 jaggar goes on to criticize care ethics. see also walker (2007) for a criticism of theoretical-juridical approaches to moral theory. 19 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 physical or mental decline towards the end of their lives; or to decide if we have a sibling, and to decide on that sibling’s need for support or help—for example, if he or she has a severe disability. in all of these cases, and in our real lives, we will have responsibilities that arise from the details of the real world, from contingencies that have nothing to do with our choices as well as from actions that we have chosen, but the consequences of which we had no way of predicting. what i wish to underscore, though, is that these responsibilities and choices occur against the backdrop of a social form that is regulated by some account of distributive justice. our sense of our responsibilities is influenced by background conditions and culture.32 for instance, is a son responsible for his mother’s needs as she ages, or is his wife responsible for them? is the younger son responsible, or is it the older one? in some pockets of indian cultures, it is the eldest son who is held responsible for his parents, but hands-on caregiving responsibilities are assigned to his wife. is the society-at-large responsible for an aging population, or is it the individuals themselves who should plan for their future with financial savings that will allow them to pay a professional caregiver? or is it children overall who are responsible for their parents’ care? if a community overall is responsible for meeting care needs, how does this actually break down by race and ethnicity? if white women regularly expect a higher level of needs-satisfaction while women of color have adapted to meeting fewer of their needs, then will a distributive assessment that relies on subjective assessments of well-being be adequate?33 to answer these questions, we will need to evaluate a number of different permutations of caregiving arrangements. faulty abstractions, not abstractions per se, are the cause of contractarianism’s perpetuation of oppression. consequently, a criterion of adequacy for contemporary forms of liberalism is that they must do the theoretical work needed to identify the abstractions the theory should employ. the arrow of care map meets these criteria as a conceptual device that identifies caregiving arrangements and then holds them up as an object of hypothetical consent. when the labor of caregiving is made visible, a new layer of privilege and disadvantage becomes evident that can address intersectionality by showing how the expectation to receive care and the social expectation to give care can map onto race, ethnicity, gender, caste, and social class. the concept of the arrow of care thereby disrupts status quo social arrangements in societies where caregiving arrangements are 32 see walker’s (2007) analysis of moral understandings, which has influenced this account. 33 see khader (2011) for the argument that “inappropriate adaptive preferences” must be identified in virtue of their conflict with an objective account of well-being. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 enforced through informal mechanisms like widely accepted expectations and narratives.34 4.2. no action-guidance the arrow of care map differs from two influential feminist liberals’ approach to inequality and caregiving responsibility.35 susan okin argued for the application of principles of justice within family—and in doing so she rejected the rawlsian view that representatives be heads of households.36 although i share okin’s project of feminist rawlsian contractarianism, the arrow of care map departs from okin in that it maintains a higher level of abstraction to accommodate cross-cultural differences in caregiving and familial structures while okin applies rawlsian reasoning within the family. moreover, i do not assume the family as a starting point, and in this way, operate at a greater level of abstraction. instead, the starting point for the arrow of care is a claim that we all need to receive care and therefore caregiving is one of the core functions that a scheme of social cooperation must satisfy. another foil for the arrow of care map is jean hampton’s (1993) feminist contractarian test for personal relationships that tells participants to assess whether they would accept the terms of the relationship as the product of an unforced agreement. in contrast with hampton’s test, the arrow of care is not a method of abstraction for individuals to map their relationships in service of demanding equality in the care given and received within each one of their intimate relationships. 37 instead, as a framework for mapping society-wide distributions which then evaluates their fairness, the arrow of care map does not seek to proffer action-guiding recommendations for individual lives. our lived engagement with families and friends should be guided by values that extend far beyond justice. 34 i do not recommend that individuals map their relationships within the arrow of care. it is not a comprehensive assessment of fairness, nor does it provide an account of what it means to be concerned about someone or to have a legitimate responsibility towards a particular other. 35 ann cudd’s (2006) account of society-wide oppression offers a systematic analysis of the context of choice, and so the arrow of care map is structurally closer to her theory than it is to hampton’s or okin’s theories. 36 see baehr (1996) for a discussion of the way okin’s view changed over time. see also abbey (2016). 37 similarly, i do not offer a solution to directly address cooperative conflicts for people here and now (sen 2011); nor does the arrow of care embed within it ways to increase women’s agency in diverse cultural contexts (meyers 2002; khader 2011). 21 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 conclusion this paper has advanced a concept—the arrow of care map—that gives us a way to think about care that is not embedded in a set of assumptions that are culturally conservative insofar as they are specific to the social form in which we live. it is a concept in the sense that it sets forth a problem. the problem it sets forth is that every society needs to advance an arrangement to secure its care needs. there will then be multiple conceptions to specify what a good caregiving arrangement is—these conceptions are solutions to the problem set forth by the concept, and they will take the form of various arrow of care maps.38 the concept of the arrow of care map takes a bird’s-eye view of the labor of care—it does not seek to identify the nuances of relations of love and affection, and it abstracts away from assumptions about family units or socialized care to offer a way to tune our intuitions about caregiving in human life. the paper has also advanced a methodology for ideal theory that seeks to be non-ideological. the insights and intuitions on which it relies are informed by existing states of affairs, and it is explicit about its value commitments. by advancing this abstract concept, and limiting my theoretical project to this conceptual work, my account may appear to conflict with the commitments of a dominant strain of feminism and anti-racist philosophy that advocates nonideal theory. whereas nonideal theories locate the core philosophical project in improving the world, and seek to do so quite directly, this paper has shown that theory that is “ideal”—in the sense that it seeks to clarify our values—must also begin with insights from the pressing problems of society, and then advance concepts that can better identify these problems. these theories must interrogate and evaluate the normative claims that are embedded in these concepts. finally, by formulating the concept of the arrow of care map, i hope to enable further theorizing about the facts of societal caregiving arrangements in order to imagine new visions of just societies. works cited abbey, ruth. 2016. “susan okin's justice, gender, and the family: twenty-five years later.” hypatia 31 (3): 636–637. anderson, elizabeth. 1993. value in ethics and economics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. baehr, amy r. 1996. “toward a new feminist liberalism: okin, rawls, and habermas.” hypatia 11 (1): 49–66. 38 i thank julie walsh for identifying the similarity between rawls’s conceptconception distinction and my own use of the arrow of care map. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 ———. 2004. “feminist politics and feminist pluralism: can we do feminist political theory without theories of gender?” journal of political philosophy 12 (4): 411–436. ———. 2013. “liberal feminism: comprehensive and political.” in feminist interpretations of rawls, edited by ruth abbey, 150–166. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2017. "a capacious account of liberal feminism." feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (1): article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4. bhandary, asha. 2010. “dependency in justice.” hypatia 25 (1): 140–156. ———. 2016a. “a millian concept of care: what mill’s defense of the common arrangement can teach us about care.” social theory and practice 41 (1): 155–182. ———. 2016b. “liberal dependency care.” the journal of philosophical research 41:43–68. collins, patricia hill. 2000. black feminist thought. new york: routledge. collins, stephanie. 2015. the core of care ethics. london: palgrave macmillan. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1991. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43 (6): 1241– 1299. ———. 2015. "say her name: politicizing black women's vulnerability to state sanctioned violence." keynote lecture at the association for feminist ethics and social theory (feast) conference, clearwater, fl, october 2. cudd, ann. 2006. analyzing oppression. oxford: oxford university press. dimock, susan. 2008. “why all feminists should be contractarians.” dialogue 47 (2): 273–290. elster, jon. 1982. “sour grapes – utilitarianism and the genesis of wants.” in utilitarianism and beyond, edited by amartya sen and bernard williams, 219–238. cambridge: cambridge university press. engster, daniel. 2007. the heart of justice. new york: oxford university press. farrelly, colin. 2007. “justice in ideal theory: a refutation.” political studies 55 (4): 844–864. folbre, nancy, and michael bittman, eds. 2004. family time. new york: routledge. gould, carol. 2008. “recognition in redistribution: care and diversity in global justice.” southern journal of philosophy 46 (s1): 91–103. greyser, naomi. 2017. on sympathetic grounds. new york: oxford university press. hampton, jean. 1993. “feminist contractarianism.” in a mind of one’s own, edited by louise antony and charlotte witt, 227–256. boulder, co: westview press. hartley, christie, and lori watson. 2010. “is a feminist political liberalism possible?” journal of ethics and social philosophy 5 (1): 1–21. 23 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 2012. “political liberalism, marriage and the family.” law and philosophy 31 (2): 185–212. hay, carol. 2013. kantianism, liberalism, and oppression. new york: palgrave macmillan. held, virginia. 1987. “non-contractual society: a feminist view.” in science, morality, and feminist theory, edited by m. p. hanen and kai nielsen, 11– 137. calgary, ab: university of calgary press. ———. 2006. the ethics of care. oxford: oxford university press. hochschild, a. r. 2000. “global care chains and emotional surplus value.” in on the edge: living with global capitalism, edited by w. hutton and a. giddens, 130–146. london: jonathan cape. kang, hye ryoung. 2016. “can rawls’s nonideal theory save his ideal theory?” social theory and practice 42 (1): 32–56. khader, serene. 2011. adaptive preferences and women’s empowerment. new york: oxford university press. kittay, eva. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. ———. 2008. “the global heart transplant and caring across national boundaries.” the southern journal of philosophy 46 (s1): 138–165. jaggar, alison. 1995. “care as a feminist practice of moral reasoning.” in justice and care: essential readings in feminist ethics, edited by virginia held, 825–833. boulder, co: westview press. lloyd, s. a. 1998. “toward a liberal theory of sexual equality.” journal of contemporary legal issues 9:203–224. mackinnon, catharine. 2011. “trafficking, prostitution and inequality.” harvard civil rights–civil liberties law review 46 (1): 271–309. meyers, diana tietjens. 2002. gender in the mirror. new york: oxford university press. mills, charles. 1997. the racial contract. new york: cornell university press. ———. 2004. “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” in moral psychology, edited by peggy desautels and margaret urban walker, 163–181. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———. 2012. “liberalizing illiberal liberalism.” closing keynote address for the oxford graduate conference in political theory, oct. 4. university of oxford podcasts. ms on file with author. mullin, amy. 2014. “children, vulnerability and emotional harm.” in vulnerability: new essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, edited by catriona mackenzie, wendy rogers, and susan dodds, 266–287. new york: oxford university press. noddings, nel. 1982. caring. berkeley: university of california press. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 okin, susan. 1989. justice, gender and the family. new york: basic books. o’neill, onora. 1996. towards justice and virtue: a constructive account of practical reasoning. cambridge: cambridge university press. pateman, carol. 1988. the sexual contract. palo alto, ca: stanford university press. rawls, john. 2001. justice as fairness: a restatement. edited by erin kelly. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2002. the law of peoples. boston: harvard university press. reiheld, allison. 2015. “just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care.” feminist philosophy quarterly 1 (2): article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1. ruddick, sara. 1989. maternal thinking. boston: beacon press. schouten, gina. 2015. “citizenship, reciprocity, and the gendered division of labor.” politics, philosophy and economics. doi: 10.1177/1470594x15600830. schwartzman, lisa. 2006a. challenging liberalism: feminism as political critique. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2006b. “abstraction, idealization, and oppression.” metaphilosophy 37 (5): 565–588. ———. 2016. “action guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (1): article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4. sen, amartya. 2011. the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. spelman, elizabeth. 2002. repair: the impulse to restore in a fragile world. boston: beacon press. stark, cynthia a. 2000. “hypothetical consent and justification.” journal of philosophy 97 (6): 313–334. ———. 2007. “how to include the severely disabled in a contractarian theory of justice.” journal of political philosophy 15 (2): 127–145. ———. 2010. “abstraction and justification in moral theory.” hypatia 25 (4): 825– 833. stemplowska, zofia. 2008. “what’s ideal about ideal theory?” in “social justice: ideal theory, nonideal circumstances,” edited by ingrid robeyns and adam swift, special issue, social theory and practice 34 (3): 319–340. stemplowska, zofia, and adam swift. 2015. “ideal and nonideal theory.” in the oxford handbook of political philosophy, edited by david estlund, 373–389. new york: oxford university press. superson, anita. 2005. “deformed desires and informed desire tests.” hypatia 20 (4): 109–126. tessman, lisa, ed. 2009. “introduction.” feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: theorizing the non-ideal. new york: springer science and business media. 25 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 2015. moral failure. oxford: oxford university press. tronto, joan. 1993. moral boundaries. new york: routledge. valentini, laura. 2012. “ideal v. non-ideal theory: a conceptual map.” philosophy compass 7 (9): 654–664. varden, helga. 2006. "kant and dependency relations: kant on the state’s right to redistribute resources to protect the rights of dependents." dialogue: canadian philosophical review 45:257–284. waerness, kari. 1984. “caring as women’s work in the welfare state.” in patriarchy in a welfare society, edited by h. holter, 67–87. oslo: universitetforlaget. walker, margaret urban. 2007. moral understandings. second edition. oxford: oxford university press. williams, bernard. 1981. “persons, character and morality,” in moral luck, edited by james rachels, 1–9. cambridge: cambridge university press. asha bhandary is assistant professor of philosophy at the university of iowa. her areas of specialization include feminist ethics, social and political philosophy, and autonomy theory. her published articles on liberalism, care, autonomy, and distributive justice have appeared in hypatia, journal of philosophical research, social theory and practice, and journal of political philosophy. 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory1 asha bhandary abstract this paper advances a framework to conceptualize societal caregiving arrangements abstractly. it is abstract in that it brackets the meaning of our particular relationships. this framework, which i call the arrow of care map, is a descriptive tracking model that is a necessary component of a theory of justice, but it is not a normative prescription in itself. the basic idea of the map is then multiply specifiable to track various ascriptive identity categories as well as different categories of care labor. in this way, the idea of the arrow of care map serves as a conceptual frame with which to identify societies’ caregiving arrangements. i characterize it as a component of “ideal theory” insofar as it seeks to clarify our values without the immediate aim of formulating principles to govern a just society. the resultant partial theory of justice is one that responds to nonideal theory’s critiques of the ideological nature of liberal contractarianism’s idealizations and abstractions while moving towards new visions of a just society. keywords: ideal theory, nonideal theory, contractarianism, care, dependency care, liberal feminism, feminist liberalism, justice, distributive justice care, compassion, and concern are crucial elements of meaningful intimate relationships (held 2006; tronto 1993; ruddick 1989). in addition, the labor of hands-on care to meet a person’s basic needs often occurs within our closest relationships. however, caregiving also occurs in paid and professional contexts, which sometimes cross national boundaries through migrations of nannies and 1 i presented this paper to the society for analytical feminism, wellesley university, and as the 2017 inaugural robinson grover lecture at the university of connecticut, where elise springer and rik hine offered interesting analyses of the view that i plan to pursue in future work. i thank the participants of each of these events. i owe a particular debt of gratitude to cynthia stark, lisa tessman, and diana tietjens meyers for philosophically open-minded discussions about the nature of my project. the written version of the paper was improved by comments by richard fumerton, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal. 1 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 other care workers. moreover, even in the contexts of families and friends, care that is given and received can be structured by internal hierarchies and inequities. various cultures and societies have different ways of organizing life around care, such as gendered arrangements, extended families, and socialized care. these arrangements have particular histories. the history of slavery in the us means that black women who tend to white women do so in a context that is racially and historically charged.2 in societies with extended family systems, systems of care provision are structured by gender oppression and internally structured hierarchies and norms. for instance, a daughter-in-law may provide elder care to her parents-inlaw, where that practice is linked to preferences for males in those cultures, or a youngest daughter may be designated as the caregiver of her own parents, a designation which is paired with a cultural custom that she not marry and have children of her own. although there is an extensive feminist literature about the highly gendered nature of inequalities in responsibilities for providing care,3 we lack a unitary model with which to identify arrangements for care in diverse cultures and social forms— one that goes beyond gender. this paper fills this gap by advancing a new abstract concept for tracking the distribution of caregiving labor in a society that i call the arrow of care map. it is an abstract representation of caregiving that brackets the meaning of the relationships within which it occurs and thereby enables critical distance from particular cultural biases about who ought to care for whom. the function of this map is to gain clarity about how caregiving actually occurs in societies, because transparency is a necessary step prior to theorizing about what a just society would be. due to the pervasiveness of obfuscating narratives about who gives care and who receives care, it will be a substantial achievement to arrive at an accurate description of the ways that care is provided and received. in section 1, i defend the need for this new concept. there, i also show how the arrow of care map is responsive to the nonideal theoretic criticism that ideal theory is ideological in virtue of the content of its idealizations and abstractions. section 2 sets forth the core components of the arrow of care map and identifies the normative commitments embedded in the model. it is a relational analysis of a society’s caregiving arrangements founded on individual units of human beings. there, i also identify the map’s variations as specified by categories of labor and identity group, while emphasizing the need for the higher-order, abstract map as a 2 i thank lindsey stewart for discussion on this topic. 3 for feminist liberal work that discusses care, see abbey (2016), baehr (2004, 2013, 2017), bhandary (2010, 2016a, 2016b), cudd (2006), dimock (2008), hartley and watson (2010, 2012), lloyd (1998), okin (1989), schouten (2015), stark (2007), varden (2006). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 way to maintain cross-cultural flexibility to track various identity groups. section 3 identifies the limited conclusions that can be drawn about what a fair caregiving society will be prior to the descriptive tracking endeavor. finally, in section 4, i contrast the scope of the arrow of care map with both the ethics of care and forms of feminist contractarianism that apply a metric of justice directly to the family and personal relationships. 1. the need for a new concept 1.1. oppression via theoretical invisibility oppression via theoretical invisibility occurs when a person has a lived experience of disadvantage or exploitation that is unintelligible by the terms of the theory. in the lexicon of that theory, the person is either not disadvantaged, or the source of their disadvantage remains out of view even if they are disadvantaged according to the theory’s metric. for instance, an african american woman in the us might be economically disadvantaged—where the disadvantage is identifiable with a metric of income inequality—but the complex structural reasons that create disadvantage will not be wholly explicable in terms of income. as a result, an agenda for social change that follows from a theory that only tracks income inequality will overlook these structures of disadvantage. thus, one of the tasks of a theorist of justice is to articulate frameworks that will identify these overlooked experiences. kimberlé crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” is a prime example of a concept that makes visible a set of issues that perhaps could have been triangulated from preexisting concepts, but would remain more difficult to theorize without it.4 the idea of intersectionality is a way to understand the social position of women of color that reveals how the categories of race and gender obscure theorizing about their lives. intersectional analyses point out how assumptions of race and gender result in the loss of data capture that is particular to the lives of women of color.5 the articulation of the concept makes subsequent theorizing possible to further explore its various dimensions and significance.6 concepts like intersectionality are abstract, insofar as they highlight one set of concerns to the exclusion of others.7 thus, the concepts of gender, race, and class have made many aspects of social 4 crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality is a way to understand the invisibility of black women by naming their location and thereby rejecting the idea of “identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition” (crenshaw 1991, 1242). 5 crenshaw explains the problem of analyses of racism and sexism as one in which all black people are men and all women are white (crenshaw 2015). 6 see p. collins (2000). 7 similarly, mills (1997) argues for the need for the concept of white supremacy. 3 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 oppression visible, and the idea of intersectionality has both augmented and complicated them. every culture or society has some way of organizing life around care, such as gendered arrangements, extended families, and socialized care. despite the universality of care, though, caregiving arrangements are among the most theoretically and practically significant sources of blindness in liberal contractarianism. therefore, if liberal contractarianism is to be a viable doctrine, it needs a way to conceptualize how care is provided. i schematize this understanding of a society-wide caregiving arrangement with the arrow of care map. the arrow of care map theorizes the labor of care—not the nuances of relations of love and affection—and it abstracts away from assumptions about family units or socialized care to offer a way to tune our intuitions about caregiving in human life. the framework embeds within it a normative claim that society must meet its vital care needs.8 in doing so, it eliminates the following form of exploitation from traditional forms of liberalism. more precisely, adding the arrow of care to an account of the just distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation removes from theory the following form of exploitation as it occurs for care labor. ~persons x are assigned to do work c when work c is not recognized as work. consequently, persons x look like non-contributors. ~ persons y do work a, which is highly valued. they are able to gain additional advantages by assiduously avoiding work c. their avoidance of c is not identifiable as shirking because c is not identified as work. if a person’s contribution to social cooperation is not identified as a contribution in a theory of distributive justice, and the benefits that some people receive are not identified as benefits, then the resultant theory will have a loophole that leads to advantages for the people who avoid that work. this is the pattern that many societies have adopted for the social contributions needed for repair and maintenance.9 eva kittay has argued that liberalism, in particular, results in disadvantages to dependency workers due to their invisibility in its basic assumptions and concepts (1999). 8 it proceeds from the premise, unargued for here, that societies need to meet their care needs, and that doing so plays a crucial role in systems of social cooperation. for that argument, see bhandary (2016b). see also reiheld (2015) for an argument that society has a duty towards caregivers. 9 on repair and maintenance, see tronto (1993), spelman (2002), walker (2007). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 1.2. non-ideological ideal theory more broadly, liberal contractarianism has been criticized for idealizations and concepts that make the sources of group-based oppression impossible to identify or, more strongly, require the subordination of a subset of society (pateman 1988; jaggar 1995; kittay 1999; held 1987; mills 2004; schwartzman 2006a). i agree with these critics that an ideal theory that refuses to scrutinize whether its core concepts result in the perpetuation of illicit privilege is a non-starter as a viable theory of justice. despite these problems with the history of the contract tradition, i share the growing consensus that one of the main targets of the critique of ideal theory—the core liberal contractarian idea of fairness—retains value as a basis for identifying a number of contemporary forms of social injustice.10 fairness, defined in a way that requires transparency, can rule out arrangements that exploit or systematically disadvantage a subset of society. a necessary, but not sufficient, step to rule out these exploitative arrangements is to develop concepts and claims that make visible what lisa schwartzman calls “the sources and manifestations of groupbased oppression” (2006a). thus, the project of advancing non-ideological liberalism requires new theoretical work to better specify the model of the person, the facts known to deliberators, and the domain of the basic structure of society.11 idealizations that perpetuate ideology must be criticized, and better concepts for mapping the realities of existing societies are needed. the arrow of care map is a contribution to the project of advancing non-ideological ideal theory. 2. the arrow of care map: overview of functions the framework i advance is one that can be used for all social forms. it will be further specified by the culturally specific details that structure social inequality in that social form—where the assignment of care may track onto a person’s caste 10 okin (1989), hampton (1993), hay (2013), and mills (2012). i follow a broadly rawlsian form of contractarianism (2001). for the criticism that contractarianism does not necessarily rule out oppression, see schwartzman’s critique of o’neill (2006b, 572). specifying the precise form of contractarianism will be necessary for a complete account of just caregiving, but that is not the task of this paper. 11 my usage of ideal theory here is compatible with stemplowska (2008) and valentini (2012). it differs from mills (2004), who says that ideal theory is necessarily ideological theory, so that if a person addresses oppression, they are doing nonideal theory. thus, if one accepts mills’s definitions of ideal and nonideal theory, the arrow of care map will count as nonideal theory because it makes a source of oppression visible. see also tessman (2009). for alternative formulations of the distinction, see rawls (2002), valentini (2012), stemplowska and swift (2015), and kang (2016). 5 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 heritage rather than race or gender. thus, the basic model of the arrow of care map is universal but multiply specifiable. the arrow of care map, as a systems-level depiction of societal caregiving arrangements, gives theories of justice something they have been lacking: a way to understand care given and received as a fundamental social good that is the outcome of social cooperation, and that is prior to—and not dependent on— contingencies such as the particular economic structure of the society. in virtue of bracketing relationships of particularity and intimacy as well as the robust meaning of giving and receiving care in human life, it is decisively abstract and moderately fact-sensitive—incorporating the most fundamental aspects of human life, while leaving aside others.12 because the need to receive care is fundamental to all human lives, it is a fact that must be included on any list of basic facts employed in a theory of justice.13 in its most abstract form, it has value for a broad range of social forms to track who tends to receive large amounts of care and who tends to provide it. at one level less abstracted, it must track historically oppressed identity groups. i do not reduce it to these specific maps, though; instead, i insist on the need to maintain an abstract version of the map so that societal variations in the exploitation of caregivers can be found even when they do not coincide with dominant narratives. it may be the case that class has a higher correlation with caregiving than gender, for instance. theorists need critical distance from cultural preconceptions about who ought to receive care and who ought to provide it because—as scholars of affect study show—our concern for others is shaped by gender, race, and class (greyser 2017). thus, it is crucial that a map that tracks care given and care received remains conceptually separable from the range of ascriptive factors that will correspond to inequities in care. maintaining a separate metric may reveal unmapped social locations, such as a caregiver who may be from an otherwise advantaged group but who becomes disadvantaged as a caregiver.14 therefore, in addition to serving as a new descriptive mapping concept, the arrow of care map makes it possible to 12 i therefore aim to respond to the problem that abstractions have too often masked false claims—that humans are maximally rational (o’neill 1996), or that they fail to be explicit about what they bracket, and why (schwartzman 2006a). my account is moderately fact-sensitive in that it includes a set of basic facts but brackets others. see also farrelly’s characterization of the moderate fact-sensitivity of rawls’s theory, which “acknowledges some moderate feasibility constraints (e.g. pluralism) but also employs a number of idealizing assumptions (e.g. society is closed, full compliance, etc.) when deriving the principles of justice” (2007, 844). 13 for a lengthier argument for this claim, see bhandary (2016b). 14 see also kittay’s “dependency workers” (1999). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 identify inequalities that are not already captured by economic analyses or racial hierarchies. arrow of care maps have two functions. the first function of the maps is to organize fact-finding about societies’ caregiving arrangements. the basic map template will then be modified into multiple maps with overlays tracking trends by race, gender, geographic origin, and class. its main purpose is to gain an understanding about trends in levels of care received and provided as a relational good. the second function of the maps is to guide thinking about what a fair arrangement will be. it is my view that there are likely many possibly fair arrangements. on my preferred view, deliberations should be guided by a broadly rawlsian methodology, which evaluates the arrangement based on the idea that you could be anyone in it, variously interpreted as the claim that you could occupy any social position in it. however, the arrow of care map idea is compatible with a broad range of interpretations of transparency and fairness tests. what it rules out are arrangements that are based on, and require, the widespread exploitation of groups of people (minorities, women) in virtue of their roles as caregivers.15 after greater transparency is achieved, further deliberation will be required to imaginatively conceptualize potential caregiving arrangements as candidates for a fair arrangement. for instance, just caregiving arrangements may include nuclear families, extended families, and non-family-based care. 2.1. function one: a system-wide descriptive mapping concept for caregiving arrangements the arrow of care map does not seek to capture the whole truth of the role of caring relationships in human life, nor does it seek to prescribe how people should think about care in their private lives. it is a systems-level analysis of a society in the sense that it holds up caregiving arrangements as objects of deliberation in a way that facilitates clearer thinking about the different possible arrangements that would be acceptable to people in a society, when the labor of care is made visible.16 15 see schwartzman’s (2006b) argument that a theory without ideals will not have resources to rule out oppression. because the paper’s aim is to advance the idea of the arrow of care map—and not to defend a specific conception of fairness—i do not specify an ideal or respond to schwartzman’s claim about the necessity of ideals here. 16 the project is aptly characterized by stemplowska’s characterization of the point of ideal theory as clarifying our values (2008). see also tessman (2015) on the need for feminist theory that apprehends our normative realities even when there are no morally viable paths of action. 7 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 the arrow of care map is properly classified as a “descriptive mapping concept” (mills 2004, 174), insofar as it creates a concept to use in order to identify what occurs in the real world. caregiving norms are deeply culturally entrenched; they are embedded within gender norms about who should care for whom—by, for example, bringing them tea. they suffuse assumptions about who deserves sympathy for their suffering. therefore, identifying what actually occurs in the domain of care is a significant task of its own. the fact-finding task will give us real data with which to inform our social understandings about who provides care, who receives it, and at what levels. in the descriptive use, it remains somewhat abstract because it brackets information about particular relationships in order to gain an understanding of caregiving that does not simply legitimate existing assumptions about who should care for whom. although the arrow of care map will promote greater clarity about the nature of a society’s caregiving arrangements, it does not purport to avoid all cultural biases. for instance, leaving nonhuman animals out of the metric is a normatively laden starting point. the arrow of care map does not avoid the possibility of embedding and legitimating existing biases, but it seeks to be transparent about the claims and assumptions it makes, and the reasons for those assumptions. it is precisely because of the cultural entrenchment of caregiving norms that we need to think abstractly about care. the preponderance of philosophical effort directed towards thinking about care counterfactually has been directed towards new action-guiding policy proposals. these proposals often embed within them assumptions of the immutability of other features of the status quo. theories of justice need a more abstract methodology to think about care, and that is what the arrow of care achieves. however, because care ethicists and other feminists have roundly criticized abstraction, it is incumbent on me to clarify and defend the role of abstraction, and also to show how my account does not fall into the pitfalls of ideal theory as it has been criticized by nonideal theorists. schwartzman represents the nonideal criticism of ideal theory as fundamentally a problem of misrepresentation: “[ideal theory] misrepresents both agents and structures in ways that deny and obscure the realities of oppression” (2016, 7). thus, i seek to avoid misrepresentation by characterizing the project and scope of the arrow of care map. the arrow of care map is an abstraction that brackets numerous features of our lived experiences of caregiving. it does not seek to characterize the complexity of lived experiences within caring relationships. although it does not accurately represent the complexity of human agents, it offers a structural analysis of caregiving that can illuminate forms of oppression. it does so in a way that seeks to attend to the ways that 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 abstractions and idealizations can be ideological to mask and perpetuate entrenched inequalities. 2.2. normativity in abstraction the arrow of care map includes normativity at two levels: first, with the values and conceptualizations that are incorporated into the arrow of care, and then to guide and assess various caregiving arrangements. it includes value claims by taking individual human beings as what is fundamental in order to then depict the amount of care each person provides, for instance, over a lifetime. as a framework for tracking actual distributions, the arrow of care map will unveil the care people give and receive in a way that is individualistic but that also recognizes the relational nature of caregiving. the individualism of the framework is built into the metric of care that is given and received for and by each person. the relational nature of care given and received occurs in a set of arrows that specify from whom and towards whom care goes. sometimes the arrows will connect two members of a family, at other times they will not connect them. quantifying care in this way will lay bare distributive inequalities that have been masked by cultural narratives. theorists must (a) peel away the norms of femininity that mask the fact that caring is labor, (b) debunk ideas of gender essentialism that naturalize the labor of care, and (c) contest narrative and social constructs about racial and ethnic identity that normalize, for instance, western presumptions that women of color should tend to the care, maintenance, and repair needs of whites. furthermore, assumptions about oppressive gender norms can leave undetected exploitative labor distributions that occur within same-sex marriages, or the subordination of a man within a heterosexual couple. consequently, the map will require extensive fact-finding by sociologists and anthropologists who attend to dominant norms, but are aware that these norms will not always describe what actually occurs. 17 to see just how difficult it may be to identify actual distributions of care when they conflict with social narratives, consider the following case: an affluent, white stay-at-home mom who does not have a paid career is credited as a full-time caregiver, but closer analysis reveals that substantial amounts of care are provided by babysitters, or unpaid caregivers like a friend, mother, sister, neighbor, or older child. mapping amounts of care given and received will also make evident the differential entitlements of groups of people occupying different social positions 17 approximately 1.4 million children between the ages of eight and eighteen serve as caregivers for parents, grandparents or siblings with disabilities (new york times, may 23, 2016, “supporting children who serve as caregivers,” by jane e. brody). i thank amy r. baehr for bringing this statistic to my attention. 9 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 marked by race, ethnicity, and histories of slavery and colonization. in these ways, the first usage of the arrow of care map satisfies a few of the nonideal theorists’ requirements: it is quite centrally about dependency care, it identifies a category of labor that has sometimes coincided with slavery, and it unmasks ideologies. in order to do this, arrow of care maps must specify the gender, race, ethnicity, citizen status, and class of care receivers and providers.18 there will be different arrow of care maps to identify these caregiving arrangements—as a short time slice—over a year, or over the lifetime of individuals. in addition, it will be a theoretically robust project to delineate the boundaries of a society in order to be able to identify the “global care chain” and care drains from one country to another (hochschild 2000; kittay 2008; gould 2008). even in its descriptive form, the arrow of care map is abstract because it brackets facts about our relationships, such as the love parents have for their children, and that children have for their parents. moreover, it does not present action-guiding recommendations with respect to caregiving, and so it says nothing about how people should approach their caring relationships in their real lives.19 2.3. mapping care the arrow of care map is fundamentally an idea that admits of increasing levels of sophistication. i specify some of its uses here only to make more concrete the idea at its core. below, i offer a schematic depiction of the idea of the arrow of care map. this particular depiction does not describe an actual caregiving arrangement, nor does it specify an ideal. instead, the idea of the arrow of care is a way of quantifying caregiving labor as it occurs across both public and private domains. it offers an idea of tracking caregiving that is analogous to the idea of tracking blood pressure. in addition, just as the metric used for blood pressure is independent of any particular person’s blood pressure measurement, the idea of the arrow of care is an abstract idea that is not equivalent to the sum of what occurs in every person’s life. the arrow of care map tracks the intensity and duration of care given and received over the course of a lifetime. the width of the arrow corresponds to the intensity of care given and the direction of the arrow identifies care going from one person and towards another person. the length of the arrow corresponds to the duration of care. 18 i am indebted to amy mullin for pressing me to make this claim abundantly clear. 19 for further discussion of this claim, see section 4.1. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 figure a. the arrow of care map 2.4. categories of care arrow of care maps will be specified to track different subsets of labor, from the narrow category of dependency care to the broader inclusive category of care, and even personal services. dependency care is care that seeks to respond to a legitimate need. dependency care is the hands-on labor without which a person would not survive. it includes, for instance, feeding a baby, helping a paraplegic person with toileting, and assisting a person with mental disabilities to obtain food and live safely (kittay 1999). i define dependency care, in part, by the relative immediacy of the harm that the vulnerable person will experience when care is absent. a paradigm case is that of a baby left in a crib without a caregiver; he will not survive long because he needs significant care to survive. this definition of dependency care does not offer necessary and sufficient conditions. it follows my view (bhandary 2016b) that the nature of caregiving will change as caregiving becomes transparent in society, and the definition is consequently provisional. the caring work the map tracks maintains its historic connection with the category of labor that women have typically performed as mothers, nannies, mammies, daughters-in-law, and so forth. however, my account of caring work excludes the activities of teaching children to read, write, and perform basic math.20 20 i disagree with daniel engster’s account of care (2007, 27), which includes these activities and is broader than my view. for engster, “caring may be defined as everything we do directly to help individuals to meet their vital biological needs, 11 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 the aim of the activity must be meeting a basic need, but attempts that fail should still be tracked. consequently, i do not build efficacy into the caregiving that is tracked because caregiving is performed at varying degrees of skillfulness. however, i agree with daniel engster that actions that can be successfully completed without satisfying biological and developmental needs of a person will not count as caregiving labor. engster offers the example of a cook in a restaurant, who can prepare and sell a meal without caring for anyone, whereas a parent cannot nourish a child without being sure that he or she actually ingests the food. of course, there is a commonsense threshold for an activity to count as caregiving. a person who says they intended to care for their baby but leaves the baby crying in the crib for days while enjoying time out in town with friends violently harms the child and clearly fails to care for her. thus, intentions matter. some cases are more difficult to assess. for instance, imagine that eugene makes his daughter soup while she is ill. he has taken off a day from work to do so. but he then spills the hot soup on his daughter, requiring that she receive medical care from someone else and also that her mother now take off a day from her work. the daughter still has not eaten anything and she now has burns that will require additional care to treat, resulting in additional caregiving by others. how do we quantify the care? do eugene’s contributions count as care, despite his ineffectiveness? if effectiveness is a necessary condition, then eugene’s labor will not count, but a distributive assessment should include his attempted care, and therefore his earnest efforts should be counted in some way, although the additional needs he created must also be tracked. for these reasons, i reserve “effective” as a modifier to care, instead of saying that care must be minimally effective for it to count as care. in contrast, amy mullin offers a normative account of care for children as an activity that should not increase their vulnerability by failing to understand their material, psychological and developmental needs (mullin 2014). mullin’s account of care tells us what good care is, but tracking labor for an abstract representation of a caregiving arrangement should also track the care that aimed at meeting the person’s needs despite its failure to do so. it is well established in medical contexts that the labor of doctors that seeks to help a patient counts as work, even if they fail to achieve this aim. other forms of care should follow the same convention. imagine a case in which beatrice, a sixyear-old child, sees a physician for a skin rash. the physician, dr. lyons, misdiagnoses it as a bacterial infection and prescribes an antibiotic, but the develop or maintain their basic capabilities, and avoid or alleviate unnecessary or unwanted pain and suffering, so that they can survive, develop, and function in society” (2007, 29). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 antibiotic results in a larger rash as a side effect. dr. lyons has not provided effective or good care. nonetheless, the health care system does not deduct the hours the physician spent seeing the child from the overall number of hours of care provided by the physician during that week. there is value in separating a quantification of labor hours from the quality of the labor—for it allows us to track that a person has spent time and effort aiming at an outcome, even if that person has failed to achieve the outcome, or if they do it poorly. in this example, dr. lyons has acted in ways that should be counted in a distributive account of labor. he has also offered bad care by failing to meet the needs of the recipient of care. good care is the proper aim of caregiving. the reason for permitting bad care to count as care in the arrow of care map is that the map seeks to capture the labor people perform. assessments of labor do not nullify labor that fails to meet a metric of high quality—which is what is illustrated with the medical case. of course, it is of the utmost importance that vulnerable and dependent persons need good caregivers, not caregivers who are ineffective, and so we need educational programs and apprenticeships to train excellence in caregiving. 2.5. map typologies unpaid dependency care there will be several iterations of the abstract but descriptive arrow of care maps. the least complex map may be one that tracks unpaid dependency care because it will identify labor that is not currently tracked in any systematic way in virtue of its exclusion from the market—for the market is among the main sources of socially tracking labor. dependency care that is poorly paid the need to track dependency-care labor that is paid is evident in the case of dependency work that is paid poorly so that the person is resultantly made vulnerable in virtue of performing the labor.21 if the ability to meet your needs and wants is dependent on money, then remunerating care well could relieve the disadvantage of it. however, i do not advocate increasing the domain and scope of 21 a host of additional questions arise at this stage—how do we weigh caregiving against other social contributions? how do we quantify burdens that result in compounded vulnerability? answering these questions will be difficult, but answering them is just as necessary as any other comparative assessment of individual and social disadvantage for a theory of distributive justice. however, we may legitimately postpone answers to these questions until the present project is complete. 13 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 market norms, for to do so treats all goods as fungible (anderson 1993). if we live in a fully marketized economy, then caregiving should be marketized and the arrow of care would identify a type of social productivity that would be included in the gross domestic product. but i do not advocate that kind of society, for increasing the scope of markets will inevitably result in the creeping of market norms. care is among the most fundamental domains of social cooperation, and it follows from its fundamentality that we will need to meet our care needs at least at a minimal level irrespective of whether we have a market economy or not, and those caregiving arrangements need to be fair. personal services another iteration of the arrow of care map must include personal services. i adopt kari waerness’s term and definition of “personal services” for the category of activity that a person does for someone else when that person is capable of meeting the basic need him or herself, or the need is not pressing and/or legitimate (1984).22 personal services include making tea for others, attending to the emotions of others, and serving as an audience to the ego of another. why should theorists of justice bother mapping personal services if the needs they meet are not essential to human life? we should map this labor because it is work that people—often women—perform. there may be strong social pressure for a person to perform the labor even if the care needs to which he or she responds are not legitimate care needs. thus, anti-oppression theory needs to include a personal-services map because the recipients of that labor reap benefits from it and the people performing it remain disadvantaged. a personal-services map is needed to track distributions of effort and time on the part of the person performing that labor, and it will include emotional work, ego-tending, and some forms of sex work.23 as in the case of dependency care, the first iteration of the personal-services map is unpaid personal services. the second iteration, which is no less important, is a map of poorly remunerated personal services. for distributive purposes, the burdens of caregiving—as both dependency care and personal services—are defined by the effort it requires in terms of time 22 engster includes care for self in the activity of caring, and therefore it need not always be other-directed (2007, 32). i do not include care for self because the nature of caring for someone else and caring for oneself differ significantly. i seek to capture the category of other-directed care that promotes the recipient’s well-being and goals. see bhandary (2016a) for further analysis of the differences between selfdirected and other-directed care. 23 see mackinnon (2011). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 and the demands on the person.24 a full analysis of the burdens of personal services must include psychological costs experienced by the caregiver. personal services that radically harm the self of the caregiver are not justified and so a just social form should eliminate them. for instance, some forms of sexual labor that destruct the self of the sex worker should be eliminated from just social forms. in the meantime, the labor should be descriptively tracked. unmet care needs a supplemental iteration of the dependency-care map requires an index of the dependency-care needs of vulnerable persons that no one meets in the current arrangement. one can expect that disabled children of parents living in poverty will have fewer of their needs met. there will likely be significant correlations between relative wealth and the level at which one’s care needs are met, but it should not be assumed that inequalities in wealth and income will subsume inequalities in care. 3. function two: fair caregiving arrangements the second function for the arrow of care map is to serve as an object for deliberations about what a fair caregiving arrangement would be. in this use, it plays an essential role in a form of revised contractarianism—one that pays attention to the need for sensitivity to the facts that are included and to those that are excluded in the use of abstractions, where abstraction is defined here as the bracketing of various predicates. the normative question for the most abstract iteration is: what would a just caregiving arrangement be? is it one with arrows of equal widths and lengths? must the arrows be exactly reciprocal, modeling something like exchange reciprocity? for instance, we can model the idea that children have duties to their parents to care for them with a set of equal arrows going to and from parents and children over the course of a lifetime. we must also ask: is a just arrangement one where caregiving arrangements are clustered by gender or race? the outcome of deliberations behind the veil of ignorance will rule out arrangements that exploit any group of people. no group of people will want to be designated as the set who must be other-directed caregivers, even if they may choose to do so in their own lives. a form of hypothetical contractarianism with an “i could be anyone” device that is moderately fact-sensitive, insofar as it includes a set of important facts that are needed for it to satisfy its function, will exclude arrangements that designate ascriptive identity groups to be other-directed. the important facts that must be included are the race, gender, class, and geographic origin of the person, but these 24 the metric requires collaboration among philosophers, anthropologists, economists, and sociologists (see, e.g., folbre and bittman 2004 for an excellent case of time-use studies). 15 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 facts are mutable, and different categories can become the most significant ones in different societies. moving caregiving arrangements to the forefront of the philosophical agenda changes contractarianism because of the way that these arrangements have been assumed to be matters of the family. thus, the exploitation that occurs when a person does activity c, but c is not considered socially useful or necessary, where c is care, will be eliminated. insofar as performing care that is invisible in the tracking of societal benefits and burdens is part of a form of group-based oppression, the arrow of care map will eliminate that source of group-based oppression.25 we can expect that the arrow of care map will show how racial hierarchies and disadvantage overlap with social norms about who should receive care, and who should provide it. a normatively acceptable caregiving arrangement cannot distribute care in ways that differentiate by race and class—nor should any inequalities systematically result from these group memberships. but these inequalities must be tracked in the descriptive form, and doing so requires bracketing details of people’s particular relationships and situations in order to document the extent to which inequalities in care given and received overlap with other categories of ascriptive identity groups. the arrow of care map is a framework within which it is intelligible to ask undertheorized questions, such as: do african american men receive more or less care than white men? and from whom? it also offers a way of systematizing inquiry into more established areas of inquiry, such as: do women of color receive less care than white women? on whom does the care deficit fall with the greatest effects? additional data can be added to incorporate how immigrant and legal-resident status correspond to care arrangements. different societies may arrive at different conclusions about the outcome of hypothetical acceptability because our actual experiences and values influence our intuitions about what we would choose in an ideal choice situation.26 therefore, i leave open the principle that meets the criterion of hypothetical acceptability. in this way, the account i offer is deliberately less determinate than rawls’s use of the original position. it leaves the principles that would result open to the person contemplating the thought experiment. in this usage, the map enables imagining a variety of caregiving arrangements and evaluating the acceptability of these arrangements—when one does not know where they will be in the arrangement 25 i think eliminating invisible forms of labor will eliminate the corresponding varieties of oppression via theoretical invisibility. however, other forms of oppression may emerge. 26 i will not endeavor to defend this claim here. my view, in brief, is that the actual cultural context within which we deliberate as philosophers influences our estimations of what ideally rational people would decide, given certain inputs. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 (stark 2000). this type of theorizing is a valuable mechanism to clarify our thinking about care in human societies, for it leads us to think about what an ideally just society would look like when it takes caregiving into account alongside all other goods. because care is one good among several fundamental social primary goods, inequality in the domain of care may be part of an overall just arrangement. 3.1. adaptive preferences and legitimacy a principle of fair distribution of care requires an account of legitimate needs for care. any metric of needs-differences must also take into account the ways in which the needs of privileged members of a society are perceived by all members of the society as more pressing. due to the ways that people’s expectations are shaped by what is available to them, and by that to which they have become accustomed, we cannot assume that we will get a clear view of what legitimate expectations for care needs will be. a woman who is expected to be self-abnegating may well demand less care from others.27 more broadly, the set of phenomena theorized as adaptive preferences suffice to give reasons to not merely rely on existing preferences and states of affairs.28 there are some clear cases of legitimate care needs. for instance, a child with a severe cognitive or physical disability will legitimately require more care—of greater intensity and duration—than a nondisabled adult man. however, there are likely racial and economic differences in the extent to which these needs for care are diagnosed and met. the arrow of care will need to track the care people are actually receiving, and add facts about race, gender, and disability, so that it can identify disparities in the care received by disabled black and white children, for instance. race must also be included to be able to theorize about the significance of white disabled children receiving more care than disabled children of color. for instance, a principle of equality of capability would recommend that everyone receive the amount of care that they need to function (engster 2007), and this requires accounting for differences in needs. therefore, race-based aggregate data about care received and given are needed in addition to data about the amounts of care people receive above or below a threshold for basic functioning. if the gap in average care received by racial groups is very great, it gives a prima facie reason to scrutinize our intuitions about which needs are legitimate, and for whom. an asymmetry in care at a group-based level is an injustice even if it does not result 27 on “deformed desires” as a phenomenon of the self-abnegating woman, see superson (2005). a related set of phenomena have been theorized as adaptive preferences. see, for example, elster (1982) and khader (2011). 28 see farrelly (2007) on the connection between maximal fact-sensitivity and the perpetuation of adaptive preferences. 17 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 in disadvantages of income and wealth. a group-based caregiving arrangement raises a prima facie problem for justice because it will create problems for everyone who shares in the ascriptive identity group of the caregivers. finally, historically informed understandings of oppression are necessary but not sufficient because the arrow of care map is a metric that can track unmapped disadvantage and relational asymmetries. 4. comparing the arrow of care map to care ethics and feminist liberalism applied within the family 4.1. the challenge from care ethics one of the commitments that differentiate care ethics from the liberal contractarian tradition is the care-ethical view that emotions are a source of moral knowledge, which is also linked to the claim that our emotions and particular ties to real people should not be overcome in order to achieve impartiality. care ethicists argue that moral theory must pay attention to particularity, and that theorizing about abstract subjects who have no ties to others misses what is important for a moral life.29 the arrow of care map enables thinking about society-wide caregiving arrangements in a way that abstracts away from particular intimate relationships and from the emotions and meaning of care in our lives so that we may gain an understanding of the distributive justice or injustice of that arrangement. unlike care ethics, it does not prescribe how we should respond to the people in our lives. care ethicists’ accounts of caregiving relationships and caring persons offer sophisticated analyses of caring practices and the aims of good relationships, but they do not include assessments of the underlying distribution of benefits and burdens.30 as i have argued, a theory of care will be incomplete and inadequate if it does not have an abstract way to depict and evaluate caregiving arrangements, for abstraction is necessary to depart from existing conventions and assumptions about who should care for whom. care ethics advances a related criticism of thinking in the terms of justice. alison jaggar characterizes this care ethical criticism of “justice thinking” in the following passage: 29 held (2006), s. collins (2015), and noddings (1982) advocate a contextual approach to moral reasoning. 30 engster (2007) theorizes about a just society that provides care. kittay (1999) theorizes about the disadvantage of dependency workers within the terms of her dependency theory. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 justice thinking is impersonal and general because it regards both moral subjects and the objects of their moral concern in terms of their moral status as representatives of humanity . . . rather than in terms of their concrete specificity; care thinking is personal and particularized in that both carers and those cared for regard each other as unique, irreplaceable individuals. (1995, 190–191)31 my view is diametrically opposed to care ethics on this matter because some level of abstraction is valuable in order to step back from the facts of one’s life. it enables the theorist to stand back from his or her family’s assumptions about who within the family ought to provide actual caregiving if they are to express love and concern. abstraction in this form is distinct from the kind of abstraction against which bernard williams (1981) counsels—the application of impartial thinking to our loved ones. and i embrace care ethicists’ claims about the moral requirements of our actual relationships. the arrow of care does not recommend standing back from love for one’s family to evaluate whether the terms of the relationship are fair. as actual people, we are embedded within imperfect and unjust social forms, and it is likely that this will always be the case. the project of theorizing about the nature of the good life within any particular social form is a task for moral theory, philosophy of action, and practical reason. a moral theory that rejects all real relationships when they are unfair would leave real persons relation-less in any foreseeable future. whereas an account of morality must discern our particularity and identify how it is that we can live good lives, a political theory should evaluate the basic structure as the matrix within which we live our lives. consequently, political theory must engage in abstractions. my argument for abstraction counsels a departure from particularity at the level of social forms—not at the level of a person’s own life. claims for abstraction at the level of justification are sometimes taken to imply that we should implement these claims abstractly in some way. stark (2010) is right to argue that we can be sensitive to context when we apply ideals we have arrived at through the use of abstraction in justification. therefore, care ethicists need not reject abstract care, for it invites attention to morally salient details at the level of an individual’s life. my view is that we must respond to our lives as they are in their particularity—to the facts about who our parents are, or to particulars about our brothers, sisters, children, neighbors, and so forth. the particularized details about who is in our intimate sphere are not defined voluntarily. it is not up to us to choose whether or not we have a neighbor who falls down after an illness and is alone in the world; or to determine our parents’ abilities, and particular types of 31 jaggar goes on to criticize care ethics. see also walker (2007) for a criticism of theoretical-juridical approaches to moral theory. 19 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 physical or mental decline towards the end of their lives; or to decide if we have a sibling, and to decide on that sibling’s need for support or help—for example, if he or she has a severe disability. in all of these cases, and in our real lives, we will have responsibilities that arise from the details of the real world, from contingencies that have nothing to do with our choices as well as from actions that we have chosen, but the consequences of which we had no way of predicting. what i wish to underscore, though, is that these responsibilities and choices occur against the backdrop of a social form that is regulated by some account of distributive justice. our sense of our responsibilities is influenced by background conditions and culture.32 for instance, is a son responsible for his mother’s needs as she ages, or is his wife responsible for them? is the younger son responsible, or is it the older one? in some pockets of indian cultures, it is the eldest son who is held responsible for his parents, but hands-on caregiving responsibilities are assigned to his wife. is the society-at-large responsible for an aging population, or is it the individuals themselves who should plan for their future with financial savings that will allow them to pay a professional caregiver? or is it children overall who are responsible for their parents’ care? if a community overall is responsible for meeting care needs, how does this actually break down by race and ethnicity? if white women regularly expect a higher level of needs-satisfaction while women of color have adapted to meeting fewer of their needs, then will a distributive assessment that relies on subjective assessments of well-being be adequate?33 to answer these questions, we will need to evaluate a number of different permutations of caregiving arrangements. faulty abstractions, not abstractions per se, are the cause of contractarianism’s perpetuation of oppression. consequently, a criterion of adequacy for contemporary forms of liberalism is that they must do the theoretical work needed to identify the abstractions the theory should employ. the arrow of care map meets these criteria as a conceptual device that identifies caregiving arrangements and then holds them up as an object of hypothetical consent. when the labor of caregiving is made visible, a new layer of privilege and disadvantage becomes evident that can address intersectionality by showing how the expectation to receive care and the social expectation to give care can map onto race, ethnicity, gender, caste, and social class. the concept of the arrow of care thereby disrupts status quo social arrangements in societies where caregiving arrangements are 32 see walker’s (2007) analysis of moral understandings, which has influenced this account. 33 see khader (2011) for the argument that “inappropriate adaptive preferences” must be identified in virtue of their conflict with an objective account of well-being. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 enforced through informal mechanisms like widely accepted expectations and narratives.34 4.2. no action-guidance the arrow of care map differs from two influential feminist liberals’ approach to inequality and caregiving responsibility.35 susan okin argued for the application of principles of justice within family—and in doing so she rejected the rawlsian view that representatives be heads of households.36 although i share okin’s project of feminist rawlsian contractarianism, the arrow of care map departs from okin in that it maintains a higher level of abstraction to accommodate cross-cultural differences in caregiving and familial structures while okin applies rawlsian reasoning within the family. moreover, i do not assume the family as a starting point, and in this way, operate at a greater level of abstraction. instead, the starting point for the arrow of care is a claim that we all need to receive care and therefore caregiving is one of the core functions that a scheme of social cooperation must satisfy. another foil for the arrow of care map is jean hampton’s (1993) feminist contractarian test for personal relationships that tells participants to assess whether they would accept the terms of the relationship as the product of an unforced agreement. in contrast with hampton’s test, the arrow of care is not a method of abstraction for individuals to map their relationships in service of demanding equality in the care given and received within each one of their intimate relationships. 37 instead, as a framework for mapping society-wide distributions which then evaluates their fairness, the arrow of care map does not seek to proffer action-guiding recommendations for individual lives. our lived engagement with families and friends should be guided by values that extend far beyond justice. 34 i do not recommend that individuals map their relationships within the arrow of care. it is not a comprehensive assessment of fairness, nor does it provide an account of what it means to be concerned about someone or to have a legitimate responsibility towards a particular other. 35 ann cudd’s (2006) account of society-wide oppression offers a systematic analysis of the context of choice, and so the arrow of care map is structurally closer to her theory than it is to hampton’s or okin’s theories. 36 see baehr (1996) for a discussion of the way okin’s view changed over time. see also abbey (2016). 37 similarly, i do not offer a solution to directly address cooperative conflicts for people here and now (sen 2011); nor does the arrow of care embed within it ways to increase women’s agency in diverse cultural contexts (meyers 2002; khader 2011). 21 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 conclusion this paper has advanced a concept—the arrow of care map—that gives us a way to think about care that is not embedded in a set of assumptions that are culturally conservative insofar as they are specific to the social form in which we live. it is a concept in the sense that it sets forth a problem. the problem it sets forth is that every society needs to advance an arrangement to secure its care needs. there will then be multiple conceptions to specify what a good caregiving arrangement is—these conceptions are solutions to the problem set forth by the concept, and they will take the form of various arrow of care maps.38 the concept of the arrow of care map takes a bird’s-eye view of the labor of care—it does not seek to identify the nuances of relations of love and affection, and it abstracts away from assumptions about family units or socialized care to offer a way to tune our intuitions about caregiving in human life. the paper has also advanced a methodology for ideal theory that seeks to be non-ideological. the insights and intuitions on which it relies are informed by existing states of affairs, and it is explicit about its value commitments. by advancing this abstract concept, and limiting my theoretical project to this conceptual work, my account may appear to conflict with the commitments of a dominant strain of feminism and anti-racist philosophy that advocates nonideal theory. whereas nonideal theories locate the core philosophical project in improving the world, and seek to do so quite directly, this paper has shown that theory that is “ideal”—in the sense that it seeks to clarify our values—must also begin with insights from the pressing problems of society, and then advance concepts that can better identify these problems. these theories must interrogate and evaluate the normative claims that are embedded in these concepts. finally, by formulating the concept of the arrow of care map, i hope to enable further theorizing about the facts of societal caregiving arrangements in order to imagine new visions of just societies. works cited abbey, ruth. 2016. “susan okin's justice, gender, and the family: twenty-five years later.” hypatia 31 (3): 636–637. anderson, elizabeth. 1993. value in ethics and economics. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. baehr, amy r. 1996. “toward a new feminist liberalism: okin, rawls, and habermas.” hypatia 11 (1): 49–66. 38 i thank julie walsh for identifying the similarity between rawls’s conceptconception distinction and my own use of the arrow of care map. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 ———. 2004. “feminist politics and feminist pluralism: can we do feminist political theory without theories of gender?” journal of political philosophy 12 (4): 411–436. ———. 2013. “liberal feminism: comprehensive and political.” in feminist interpretations of rawls, edited by ruth abbey, 150–166. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2017. 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"say her name: politicizing black women's vulnerability to state sanctioned violence." keynote lecture at the association for feminist ethics and social theory (feast) conference, clearwater, fl, october 2. cudd, ann. 2006. analyzing oppression. oxford: oxford university press. dimock, susan. 2008. “why all feminists should be contractarians.” dialogue 47 (2): 273–290. elster, jon. 1982. “sour grapes – utilitarianism and the genesis of wants.” in utilitarianism and beyond, edited by amartya sen and bernard williams, 219–238. cambridge: cambridge university press. engster, daniel. 2007. the heart of justice. new york: oxford university press. farrelly, colin. 2007. “justice in ideal theory: a refutation.” political studies 55 (4): 844–864. folbre, nancy, and michael bittman, eds. 2004. family time. new york: routledge. gould, carol. 2008. “recognition in redistribution: care and diversity in global justice.” southern journal of philosophy 46 (s1): 91–103. greyser, naomi. 2017. on sympathetic grounds. new york: oxford university press. hampton, jean. 1993. “feminist contractarianism.” in a mind of one’s own, edited by louise antony and charlotte witt, 227–256. boulder, co: westview press. hartley, christie, and lori watson. 2010. “is a feminist political liberalism possible?” journal of ethics and social philosophy 5 (1): 1–21. 23 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 2012. “political liberalism, marriage and the family.” law and philosophy 31 (2): 185–212. hay, carol. 2013. kantianism, liberalism, and oppression. new york: palgrave macmillan. held, virginia. 1987. “non-contractual society: a feminist view.” in science, morality, and feminist theory, edited by m. p. hanen and kai nielsen, 11– 137. calgary, ab: university of calgary press. ———. 2006. the ethics of care. oxford: oxford university press. hochschild, a. r. 2000. “global care chains and emotional surplus value.” in on the edge: living with global capitalism, 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gender in the mirror. new york: oxford university press. mills, charles. 1997. the racial contract. new york: cornell university press. ———. 2004. “‘ideal theory’ as ideology.” in moral psychology, edited by peggy desautels and margaret urban walker, 163–181. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———. 2012. “liberalizing illiberal liberalism.” closing keynote address for the oxford graduate conference in political theory, oct. 4. university of oxford podcasts. ms on file with author. mullin, amy. 2014. “children, vulnerability and emotional harm.” in vulnerability: new essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, edited by catriona mackenzie, wendy rogers, and susan dodds, 266–287. new york: oxford university press. noddings, nel. 1982. caring. berkeley: university of california press. 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 okin, susan. 1989. justice, gender and the family. new york: basic books. o’neill, onora. 1996. towards justice and virtue: a constructive account of practical reasoning. cambridge: cambridge university press. pateman, carol. 1988. the sexual contract. palo alto, ca: stanford university press. rawls, john. 2001. justice as fairness: a restatement. edited by erin kelly. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2002. the law of peoples. boston: harvard university press. reiheld, allison. 2015. “just caring for caregivers: what society and the state owe to those who render care.” feminist philosophy quarterly 1 (2): article 1. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.1. ruddick, sara. 1989. maternal thinking. boston: beacon press. schouten, gina. 2015. “citizenship, reciprocity, and the gendered division of labor.” politics, philosophy and economics. doi: 10.1177/1470594x15600830. schwartzman, lisa. 2006a. challenging liberalism: feminism as political critique. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2006b. “abstraction, idealization, and oppression.” metaphilosophy 37 (5): 565–588. ———. 2016. “action guidance, oppression, and nonideal theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 2 (1): article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.4. sen, amartya. 2011. the idea of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. spelman, elizabeth. 2002. repair: the impulse to restore in a fragile world. boston: beacon press. stark, cynthia a. 2000. “hypothetical consent and justification.” journal of philosophy 97 (6): 313–334. ———. 2007. “how to include the severely disabled in a contractarian theory of justice.” journal of political philosophy 15 (2): 127–145. ———. 2010. “abstraction and justification in moral theory.” hypatia 25 (4): 825– 833. stemplowska, zofia. 2008. “what’s ideal about ideal theory?” in “social justice: ideal theory, nonideal circumstances,” edited by ingrid robeyns and adam swift, special issue, social theory and practice 34 (3): 319–340. stemplowska, zofia, and adam swift. 2015. “ideal and nonideal theory.” in the oxford handbook of political philosophy, edited by david estlund, 373–389. new york: oxford university press. superson, anita. 2005. “deformed desires and informed desire tests.” hypatia 20 (4): 109–126. tessman, lisa, ed. 2009. “introduction.” feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: theorizing the non-ideal. new york: springer science and business media. 25 bhandary: the arrow of care map published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 2015. moral failure. oxford: oxford university press. tronto, joan. 1993. moral boundaries. new york: routledge. valentini, laura. 2012. “ideal v. non-ideal theory: a conceptual map.” philosophy compass 7 (9): 654–664. varden, helga. 2006. "kant and dependency relations: kant on the state’s right to redistribute resources to protect the rights of dependents." dialogue: canadian philosophical review 45:257–284. waerness, kari. 1984. “caring as women’s work in the welfare state.” in patriarchy in a welfare society, edited by h. holter, 67–87. oslo: universitetforlaget. walker, margaret urban. 2007. moral understandings. second edition. oxford: oxford university press. williams, bernard. 1981. “persons, character and morality,” in moral luck, edited by james rachels, 1–9. cambridge: cambridge university press. asha bhandary is assistant professor of philosophy at the university of iowa. her areas of specialization include feminist ethics, social and political philosophy, and autonomy theory. her published articles on liberalism, care, autonomy, and distributive justice have appeared in hypatia, journal of philosophical research, social theory and practice, and journal of political philosophy. 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 5 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/5 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory asha l. bhandary recommended citation the arrow of care map: abstract care in ideal theory the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation ciurria, michelle. “the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2). article 1. 2020 the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability michelle ciurria university of missouri–st. louis mich.ciurria@gmail.com ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability michelle ciurria abstract when we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. this paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. i draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. then i defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats blame and praise as communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters. keywords: blame, responsibility, epistemic injustice, strawson, misogyny, racial liberalism 1. introduction elsewhere, i have argued that blame and praise are unfairly distributed in our moral ecology due to identity prejudices and related cultural myths that influence ordinary people’s moral emotions and judgments (ciurria 2019). these cultural myths serve to erase or disappear, and therefore exonerate, privileged wrongdoers who contribute to and benefit from hierarchies of power. hence, disappearance narratives operate to reinforce hierarchies of power that benefit members of privileged social groups—white people, men, the rich, and so on. these narratives make it difficult for members of oppressed groups, who are epistemically marginalized, to credibly identify such individuals as perpetrators and criticize them in virtue of their status-conferring roles in hierarchies of power, because these hierarchies of power—and therefore their sustaining members—are written out of existence. by credibly identify, i mean publicly recognize with sufficient testimonial clout to elicit uptake from the majority. and by status-conferring roles, i mean roles that confer status on the person by virtue of their identity or social-group feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 membership (e.g., white, rich). in general, disappearance narratives make it difficult for epistemic minorities to elicit uptake from the majority when they testify against (e.g., blame) privileged perpetrators who contribute to hierarchies of power that benefit them. this paper will examine three sources of disappearances narratives by drawing on influential accounts of cultural myths that erase systems of power and domination, and therefore exonerate privileged perpetrators who enforce and propagate those systems. these myths create asymmetries of power in our “responsibility system” by protecting the privileged from culpability, accountability, and liability; and they unfairly inculpate the oppressed through familiar, identitybased processes of victim-blaming and scapegoating. that is, these myths both exonerate privileged perpetrators and illicitly blame members of marginalized groups. the first part of the title of this paper is taken from rebecca solnit’s (2016) article, “the case of the missing perpetrator,” which explains how popular scientific narratives erase men’s culpability for gender-based violence, abuse, and neglect. the second part of the title refers to the implications of these ‘mysterious’ disappearances on the “responsibility system,” or our system of norm-governed blaming and praising practices. responsibility, on p. f. strawson’s influential description, is part of a norm-governed interpersonal practice involving the deployment of the “reactive attitudes” such as “resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings” (2008, 5). for simplicity, we can refer to these positive and negative reactive attitudes simply as blame and praise. in holding someone responsible, then, we either blame or praise the person. more recently, philosophers have begun to characterize the set of interpersonal practices examined by strawson as the “responsibility system,” which is embedded in a broader set of moral norms and practices or a “moral ecology” (vargas 2013; cf. hurley 2011). what philosophers have so far neglected to address in detail (though see hutchison, mckenzie, and oshana 2018) is the role that malignant asymmetries of power play in our responsibility system, which is, in reality, largely structured and regulated by heteropatriarchal and colonial norms and relations. disappearance narratives are a central aspect of these asymmetries of power—they tilt the moral ecology in favour of the privileged, hiding their culpability for status-preserving transgressions. in this paper, i focus on the role of disappearance narratives in erasing privileged people’s roles in hierarchies of power and domination, for which they properly deserve blame. my argument will draw on three ‘erasure’ accounts: (1) rebecca solnit’s analysis of the erasure of gender-based violence and abuse by scientific discourse; (2) kate manne’s critique of the “naive conception” of misogyny; and (3) charles mills’s indictment of “racial liberalism.” all three analyses identify a specific set of disappearance narratives that erase, and therefore ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 exonerate, certain privileged perpetrators for transgressions that enforce relations of power and domination from which the perpetrator benefits (e.g., heteropatriarchy, white supremacy). i will devote a section to each analysis and underscore the implications of that analysis for the distribution of blame and praise in the moral ecology. then, i will propose an alternative approach to moral responsibility that helps to debunk and dismantle these pernicious disappearance narratives. my proposal is an emancipatory one that aims to dismantle hierarchies of power using blame and praise, which i construe as communicative practices that convey information about people’s roles in oppressive or emancipatory social systems, respectively. more precisely, emancipatory blame seeks to identify people’s contributions to hierarchies of power and take a stand against them (via some negative attitude) in light of those contributions; while emancipatory praise seeks to identify resisters and celebrate their contributions to resistance movements that liberate the oppressed. blame and praise, on this model, are communicative entities that contain information about perpetrators and resisters, oppression and activism, which can therefore be used to debunk and discredit hegemonic ideologies by articulating and popularizing counterhegemonic messages. hence, blame and praise are potent political tools that can be recruited to dismantle systems of oppression by laying bare their sustaining members. 2. the mysterious case of the missing perpetrator: the erasure of rapists and abusive men rebecca solnit’s article is a response to a set of guidelines published by the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) warning women about the “risks” associated with drinking alcohol. these “risks” include miscarriage, stillbirth, premature birth, injuries/violence, stds, and unintended pregnancy. the guidelines explain that “[health-care] providers can help women avoid drinking too much with 5 steps.” these guidelines are visually represented in the following poster. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 infographic originally from centers for disease control and prevention. the top half of this poster is no longer presented on the cdc website. solnit’s main criticism of the cdc guidelines is that they avoid explaining how (cisgender) women get pregnant, and how (all) women encounter such “risks” as ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 “injuries/violence” and “stds.”1 how is it that women “experience” and “encounter” pregnancy, violence, and stds? men are a critical part of the equation, obviously. women aren’t magically inseminated by exposure to alcohol, and the violence/injury cited by the cdc isn’t gesturing at the possibility of stumbling while drunk, which is just as much of a risk for men. the guidelines are implicitly referring to the risk of getting raped. and, as solnit (2016) notes, “men are the main source of violence against women (and for that matter the main source of violence against men).” similarly, women don’t spontaneously conceive a child in the presence of alcohol: fertile females are impregnated by fertile males. as solnit clarifies for the cdc, “pregnancy results when particular subsets of men and women get together in particular ways. no man, no pregnancy.” because men aren’t mentioned as part of the explanation for these adverse effects, they are effectively exonerated. you can’t hold a man responsible for rape, unplanned pregnancy, or std transmission if women are the ones who took all the “risks.” this man-less explanation of women’s ‘health problems’ is a patriarchal myth presented in the guise of scientific fact: supposedly, women who drink alcohol are at risk of conceiving a child and incurring unspecified injuries with no male agency involved. oddly, there’s no analogous poster warning men that exposure to alcohol increases their odds of committing rape and conceiving an unwanted child. men simply aren’t held accountable for these types of infractions. as solnit (2016) puts it, “seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that thing for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children.” and on the same basis, it absolves men of responsibility for rape and abuse: it’s women’s ‘risky decisions’ that expose them to injury and violence. because men are erased from the scientific explanation of gender-based violence, men’s culpability is erased, as are the effects of gender-based violence on women as a group. indeed, patriarchy itself is mysteriously disappeared, because patriarchy is a situation of unequal relations between men and women, and these relations are nowhere mentioned in the guidelines. solnit’s analysis brings to light how scientific discourse illicitly blames women for men’s transgressions (e.g., rape, failing to pay child support), thereby enforcing 1 trans women don’t get pregnant, unintentionally or otherwise, though they face even higher “risks” of violence and stds than cis women, due to prejudice, housing insecurity, and other forms of discrimination (james et al. 2016). the cdc doesn’t mention trans women at all, thereby writing them out of existence in their guidelines for “women.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 patriarchal relations. this ‘scientific’ script is one of the reasons it is so difficult for women to authoritatively and effectively blame and condemn rapists, abusive intimate partners, absent fathers, and other men who contribute to, and benefit from, patriarchal dynamics of power.2 the responsibility for these collective harms is conveniently shifted from men onto ‘irresponsible’ women, and this transference silences women—it makes it difficult for them to credibly blame men for transgressions exonerated by patriarchal scripts. hence, these scripts epistemically disempower women. 3. the mysterious case of the missing misogynists kate manne (2017) draws attention to a second mystery: the case of the missing misogynists. she argues that our society espouses a naive conception of misogyny that makes it difficult to diagnose misogyny, particularly (and ironically) in the most patriarchal milieus, in which one would most expect to find them. in short, the naive conception works to disappear misogynistic structures, individuals, and actions, depicting them as glitches or anomalies in an otherwise gender-equal society rather than structural features of a (more-or-less) patriarchal order. the naive conception, on manne’s definition, holds that misogyny is primarily a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally, simply because they are women. that is, a misogynist’s attitudes are held to be caused or triggered merely by his representing people as women (either individually or collectively), and on no further basis specific to his target. (2017, 32) misogynists, then, genuinely and deeply hate all women as women. (call this naiveconception misogyny or nc misogyny for short). a misogynist, so conceived, is defined by his psychological profile—more specifically, his deep-seated hatred of all women per se. this hatred is embedded in his deep self, or the “deep” and “ultimate” substratum of his psychological profile (manne 2017, 18). hence, nc 2 i should clarify that it is white men who are typically exonerated by patriarchal scripts. as tommy curry (2018) points out, black men are stereotyped as rapists and this “boogeyman” of black masculinity makes them vulnerable to criminalization and incarceration. i am following solnit’s analysis, but that analysis unfortunately does not address the fact that the justice system favours white defendants but not racialized defendants. i discuss racial inequality in the justice system in my book, an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility (ciurria 2019). ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 misogynists knowingly and wilfully target women with hostility and aggression because they viscerally hate all women as such. manne points out that this definition gives rise to a variety of problems, which can be divided into (a) an epistemic problem, (b) a legal-political problem, and (c) a conceptual-moral problem. let’s examine these problems in turn and then explore their implications for the responsibility system. (a) the epistemic problem: the epistemic problem, in brief, is that the naive conception makes misogyny “epistemically inaccessible” in general, but “to women in particular” (manne 2017, 44). because nc misogyny is a matter of an agent’s deep self, and it’s natural to assume that individuals have privileged access to the innermost recesses of their own minds (and thus to any evidence of misogyny lodged in their psychological substrata), it’s natural to assume that accused misogynists are the ultimate authorities on whether they are really misogynists. as peter carruthers (2011) has argued, the notion that individuals have privileged (noninferential) access to their mental states, called the “privileged access view,” is espoused by most people, even if it’s not evidentially supported. so, if we (naively) assume that misogyny is a feature of a person’s deep self, and we also (naively) suppose that people have privileged access to their deep selves, we position accused misogynists as authorities on who is and is not a misogynist; and they will, of course, deny being misogynists, if a misogynist is taken to be a rabid woman-hater. thus, the naive view positions accused misogynists to credibly deflect accusations of misogyny. and this epistemically disempowers women who try to hold men responsible for misogynistic offenses. another related issue is that the naive conception focuses our attention on the deep selves of putative misogynists, distracting from the deeper problem of patriarchal oppression, which is the source of misogynistic transactions and transgressions. it’s not just deep-seated woman-haters who harm women, of course: it’s anyone who contributes to the patriarchal structures that systemically privilege men by virtue of their identity as men. hence, not only does the naive view exonerate misogynists by privileging their testimony in debates about misogyny: it also diverts attention away from the banal, everyday perpetrators of “misogynistic offenses,” by which i mean actions that enforce patriarchal relations of power and domination, regardless of the deep psychology of the perpetrator. in this way, the naive conception operates as a red herring, fixing attention on a “boogeyman” of nc misogyny and drawing attention away from the main source of misogynistic transactions and interactions—patriarchal relations, enforced by a multitude of ‘ordinary folks.’ within a patriarchal order, many diverse manifestations of misogyny feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 sustain and reproduce patriarchal relations, not simply (or especially) the hatred of prejudiced men. in this way, the naive conception gives rise to an epistemic problem, which manne articulates as follows: [because the basis of an individual’s] attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation, is frequently inscrutable . . . the naive conception would threaten to make misogyny very difficult to diagnose, short of being the agent’s therapist (and sometimes not even that would be sufficient). this would make misogyny epistemically inaccessible to women, in particular . . . . so in effect, this notion of misogyny would be silencing for its victims. (manne 2017, 44) when women try to accuse men of misogyny, they are silenced by the naive conception, which positions accused misogynists as arbiters of debates about who is a true misogynist. and women who accuse men of acts of misogynistic enforcement, without also accusing them of being rabid woman-haters, are similarly silenced by a naive conception that locates misogyny in the psychological substrata of womanhating boogeymen. hence, women will not be able to leverage their experiences as victims of patriarchal oppression to elicit uptake for their moral testimony about misogyny. they will not be able to credibly accuse men of misogyny, especially acts of unintentional or accidental or benevolent misogyny, which don’t implicate the perpetrator’s deep self. yet these are the main sources of patriarchal oppression in our society. manne offers an alternative definition on which misogyny is not a feature of a person’s deep self (to which the person presumptively has privileged access), but instead consists of anything that serv[es] to uphold patriarchal order, understood as one strand among various similar systems of domination (including racisms, xenophobia, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on) . . . by visiting hostile or adverse social consequences on a certain (more or less circumscribed) class of girls or women to enforce and police social norms that are gendered either in theory (i.e., content) or in practice (i.e., norm enforcement mechanisms). (2017, 13) this definition shifts the presumption of authority onto women by defining misogyny as the “enforcement branch” of the patriarchal order (2017, 53). on this view, people can be guilty of committing misogynistic actions (that enforce patriarchal norms) even if they’re not feverish woman-haters. whether someone is ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 guilty of misogyny in this sense doesn’t depend on the dark chasms of the person’s psychology, or even the shallower aspects of the person’s psychological economy— it’s the person’s role in the patriarchal order, as an enforcer of patriarchal norms, that makes him guilty of misogyny. this definition helps to effectuate a fairer distribution of testimonial authority because it makes misogyny accessible to women as targets of misogynistic transactions: women have evidence of misogyny based in their experiences as recipients of misogynistic offenses. hence, manne’s definition resolves the unfair distribution of credit in the moral ecology by positioning women to hold men accountable and liable for acts of misogyny. manne’s reconfiguration of misogyny has implications for responsibility, which i shall elaborate in section 5. for now, we can simply note that the naive conception erases and exonerates perpetrators of patriarchal enforcement by positioning accused misogynists as testimonial authorities in conversations about misogyny, thereby silencing the main targets of misogyny, women.3 hence, the epistemic problem contributes to the discrediting of women’s blame. (b) the legal-political problem: the above argument points to a related objection of a legal and political nature. because the naive conception positions accused misogynists as authorities on whether or not they are misogynists, it makes misogyny not only difficult to diagnose but also “difficult to prosecute” (manne 2017, 45). on the same basis, it makes misogyny difficult to protest and resist, because true misogynists are nowhere to be found. by granting misogynists epistemic authority on questions about misogyny, the naive conception makes it difficult for women to resist and legislate against acts of misogynistic enforcement, which are erased by the naive conception.4 (c) the conceptual-normative problem: finally, manne points to an interrelated set of conceptual and moral problems. the conceptual problem is the following: intuitively, we would expect to 3 nonbinary and gender-queer people are also targets of misogynistic hostility. they aren’t a central focus of manne’s analysis, but i would remiss not to mention that people who don’t conform to binary-gender categories are also oppressed under patriarchy. 4 there are currently heated debates about the bloated american prison system, and i am not a fan of carceral justice; my point here is simply that the naive conception makes it difficult for women to advocate for their own safety in many ways, including through legislation about pay equity, access to safe housing, and other forms of security. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 find the greatest proportion of misogynists in patriarchal milieus. on this point, there is widespread agreement. yet if the naive conception is correct (and misogynists deeply hate all women as such), then patriarchal cultures—in which women are acculturated into serving men in a spirit of enthusiastic deference—will contain vanishingly few misogynists, since men will have no good reason to hate any women (i.e., people socialized into being their complacent servants), let alone all women. in manne’s words, “the naive conception of misogyny would effectively define misogyny out of prevalence within a patriarchal order, which i take to be the setting in which it should be (most) naturally occurring” (2017, 45). a patriarchal order, she clarifies, is a social milieu in which social institutions and practices position women as subordinate to men by virtue of their gender, and enforce this hierarchy with systems of rewards and punishments. in such a milieu, men would have very little reason to hate women, who have been socialized into performing “emotional, social, domestic, sexual, and reproductive labour” for them, not grudgingly but “in a loving and caring manner or enthusiastic spirit” (manne 2017, 46). any woman who refused to serve men in the ‘correct’ spirit of enthusiasm would be punished by the institutions and practices designed to discipline women into a position of subservience. in the most patriarchal milieus, then, men should have the least reason to hate women. nc misogyny should be rare, then, in the most patriarchal societies in which we would most expect to find it. the naive conception thus fails conceptually because it fails to locate misogyny in the milieu in which one would expect it to be most prevalent: an absolute patriarchy. instead, it (inadvertently) locates misogyny in the most feminist milieus: those in which patriarchy is being actively dismantled by feminists. in such milieus, misogyny is likely to be manifested in angrier forms—such as hostility and violence toward ‘unruly’ women—but it will be less prevalent, since feminists will be working to dismantle the institutions that demand their subservience. this covers the conceptual problem. but the conceptual problem gives rise to a moral problem. the moral problem is that, by defining misogyny out of prevalence in patriarchal societies, the naive conception makes it excessively difficult for women to credibly identify, criticize, or resist the most common forms of misogyny in those contexts. in societies in which the naive conception is dominant, misogyny is mythologized as a peculiar feature of rare moral delinquents (namely, men who viscerally hate all women as such). this “boogeyman” makes it difficult for women to authoritatively blame men for banal acts of misogyny, such as sexual harassment by ‘nice guys’ and ‘good mentors’ and ‘artistic geniuses,’ men who aren’t seen as misogynists. hence, the perpetrators of these (properly) misogynistic transgressions are let off the hook. although manne focuses on the naive conception’s role in erasing misogyny as a system of oppression, she also discusses its impact on specific transgressions ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 that serve to enforce patriarchal relations, thereby illustrating the personal aspect of misogyny. her main example is strangulation, which is a crime typically perpetrated on women. manne (2017, 2) points out that strangulation is “a prevalent form of intimate partner violence,” with “the large majority of strangulation . . . victims [being] female intimate partners” (followed by children and infants). she notes that there are affinities between literal strangulation and “testimonial smothering” (dotson 2011; cited in manne 2017, 3), which is a type of self-silencing common to women under conditions of epistemic injustice. strangulation often leads to testimonial smothering, such as the use of euphemisms like “choke” and “grab” to describe the more serious crime of strangulation, and reversals in allegations under social pressure (manne 2017). in this way, the prevalence of intimate partner strangulation is minimized within a patriarchal order that seeks to suppress evidence of gender-based violence, and this threatens the persistence of the patriarchal order. strangulation, manne clarifies, is literal torture: “researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels— painful, terrifying—and its subsequent social meaning. it is characterized as a demonstration of authority and domination” (manne 2017, 3; citing sorenson, joshi, and sivitz 2014). yet the psychological and moral significance of strangulation— indeed, its very existence—is rendered invisible by patriarchal scripts that suppress and silence women’s testimony about that topic. if the act of intimate partner strangulation is disappeared in our society, then the men who strangle women are effectively exonerated and cannot be brought to justice for their offenses.5 most examples of misogynistic transgression erased by patriarchal scripts are more insidious than strangulation but can be just as marginalizing. elinor mason (2018) discusses an (ostensible) omission that has received a great deal of philosophical scrutiny: a husband forgets to pick up the milk for his wife on the way home from work. on a naive interpretation of the situation, the husband isn’t responsible for his forgetting because he didn’t mean it, which is a valid excuse on the strawsonian model. his forgetting, to be precise, doesn’t express ill will toward his wife and is therefore excusable. (it was an innocent mistake, not a reflection of his deep self.) but now let’s zoom out and consider the broader context within which he commits this ‘omission’: if the husband is someone who often forgets to pick up the milk—and to pick up the kids from school, and to wash the dishes, and to do other feminine-coded forms of labour—then his forgetting begins to look less like an innocent mistake and more like a contribution to a patriarchal division of labour that benefits men as a group. that is, the omission, on a context-sensitive 5 i should note that i sympathize with anti-carceral feminists who seek to abolish carceral justice, but i believe that certain violent offenders should be socially isolated, preferably in rehabilitative, reparative, and humane confines. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 (and relational) analysis, appears to enforce patriarchal relations by foisting the majority of the feminine-coded labour on the wife, consistent with the patriarchal conventions and relations of the broader patriarchal cultural. thus, the omission is, on closer inspection, an act of patriarchal enforcement, and hence, on manne’s definition, an act of misogyny. this transgression may not be as egregious as strangulation, but it has the same epistemic effect: the silencing of women, who are positioned as men’s domestic servants by binary gender norms. a position of servitude is not a position of epistemic authority; domestic servants are epistemic patients or recipients of knowledge, not knowers or epistemic subjects. hence, the positioning of women as domestic servants contributes to the epistemic oppression of women. this analysis of acts of misogyny as acts of patriarchal enforcement reveals that misogyny isn’t just a system of norms and relations: it’s a system of power structures enforced by discretely embodied individuals—individual stranglers and negligent husbands and (as manne also mentions) incels and family annihilators and sexual harassers and other agents who enforce patriarchal relations through their choices and actions. these enforcers are guilty of misogyny. they exploit their position of privilege to enforce patriarchal norms and epistemic inequalities. the disappearance of misogyny by patriarchal narratives serves to exonerate perpetrators of patriarchal oppression. it makes it exceedingly difficult for women to credibly accuse men of misogynistic transgressions, since their testimony is at odds with the dominant cultural narrative on which misogyny is a rare form of moral delinquency, not a system of interpersonal transactions that works to oppress women, and is exploited and enforced by the privileged. hence, the naive view exonerates men who enforce patriarchal norms to their own advantage. 4. the mysterious cases of the missing racists charles mills presents a third mystery: the case of the missing racists. in his analysis of liberal theory (2017), he argues that white intellectuals have constructed a mythic version of liberalism that erases racial oppression and reinforces the established “racial liberal” order. in what follows, i will outline this analysis and draw out the implications for the responsibility system. in “black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism,” mills describes the society we live in as racial liberalism, a liberal society “in which conceptions of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government responsibilities have all been racialized. and the contract, correspondingly, has really been a racial one, an agreement among white contractors to subordinate and exploit nonwhite non-contractors for white benefit” (2017, 29). white intellectuals have hidden this reality in plain sight by mythologizing the social contract as relatively egalitarian rather than structured by ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 norms of racial inequality. anyone who subscribes to this myth will not be in a good position to diagnose or criticize forms of racism. mills himself is a liberal, but a radical liberal who seeks to “recognize the historic racialization of liberalism so as to better deracialize it” (2017, xv). the erasure of white supremacy within liberal theory has “left a legacy of white wrongs . . . not merely material but also normative and conceptual” (2017, xvi), which have been perpetuated not only by neo-nazis but also by “white moderates” (a.k.a. ordinary white liberals). as martin luther king noted when he wrote from birmingham city jail, “i have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the white citizen’s counciler or the ku klux klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (quoted in mills 2017, preface). mills traces racial liberalism back to the postfeudal intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, led by prominent philosophers such as john locke, immanuel kant, and adam smith. while liberal philosophers promoted the ideals of rationality and equality, they failed to address the relations of power and domination that made the realization of these ideals an impossibility. hence, liberal philosophies— together with false historical narratives—worked in tandem to whitewash and rationalize structural racism. mills explains how historians and philosophers have worked together to erase the reality of racial oppression and silence counterhegemonic narratives from communities of color. even today, many american history textbooks present america through an idealizing lens that erases the nation’s history of genocide and white supremacy. as james loewen notes, “the indian-white wars that dominated our history from 1622 to 1815 and were of considerable importance until 1890 have disappeared from our national memory,” resulting in a “feel-good history for whites” (1996, 133; quoted in mills 2017, 65). in the same vein, white historians have rationalized slavery by presenting it as a benevolent enterprise undertaken for the benefit of racialized communities. as mills puts it, “the ‘magnolia myth’ of paternalistic white aristocrats and happy, singing darkies . . . dominated american textbooks as late as the 1950s” (2017, 65). the erection of confederacy statues throughout the twentieth century similarly reflects a reimagining of american history in the triumphalist spirit of the colonial south. this historical narrative depicts the confederacy as a legitimate branch of the us military rather than a rogue militia that tried to overthrow the government for the sole purpose of keeping racialized citizens in shackles. far from being a legitimate national interest, the confederacy represented one of the great obstacles to the theoretical ideal of democracy in the united states. on mills’s analysis, philosophers haven’t just been complicit in the whitewashing of american history, they have been the primary protagonists of white supremacist ideologies. if history textbooks hide white supremacy by writing it feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 out of the historical record, then philosophy textbooks justify white supremacy by providing a series of rationalizations for the racial contract. some of the primary proponents of racial liberalism, says mills, are rawls, kant, and locke, and these figures remain staples of the philosophical canon in modern-day universities. to better understand the erasures of racism in professional philosophy, we can home in on the central “ideal theorists” named by mills. rawls offers a theory of justice that derives principles of justice from a decision procedure in which decisionmakers abstract away from their identifying characteristics, including race. this approach “marginalizes . . . concerns [about racial injustice] not contingently but structurally” (mills 2017, 16). by erasing race in the “original position,” rawls’s heuristic makes it impossible to address racial injustice as a social fact and an obstacle to the implementation of liberal ideals in the real world. hence, his theory lacks the resources needed to identify and remediate structural racism. rawls’s predecessor, kant, didn’t just refuse to analyze race: he defended white supremacy as a scientific ideal, positioning himself as “one of the founders—or (for some theorists) the founder—of modern ‘scientific’ racism” (mills 2017, xviii). kant is famous for developing the categorical imperative, which (on one formulation) says never to treat a person as a mere means; but his ‘scientific’ theory reserved the term “person” for white men. kant’s predecessor, locke, provided an economic rationale for white supremacy by sanctifying the property rights of white landowning males, effectively disenfranchising everyone else, and offering a convenient justification for the plantation economy and the carceral state. in practice, locke lived up to his philosophical principles by investing “in african slavery, justif[ying] native american expropriation, and help[ing] to write the carolina constitution of 1669, which gave masters absolute power over their slaves” (mills 2017, 31). in short, these three philosophers helped to erect the doctrine of racial liberalism that remains the crux of the liberal state and the core of political philosophy in the modern age. many philosophy students today read selected excerpts of these texts, not knowing that their authors were proponents of a white supremacist social contract. if mills is right that we live in a racial liberal society in which racial oppression is both very real and very hidden from white consciousness by white supremacist ideologies, then we should expect racism, in its many forms, to be largely invisible to white people. that is, we should expect white people to be largely ignorant of racist structures, agents, and offenses in their environment. and this is precisely the case: white people are bad at diagnosing racism. many white people cannot even recognize the military leader of the confederacy, robert e. lee, as a racist. how, then, could they be expected to identify a white moderate as a racist? many white ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 people cannot recognize the genocide of native americans as a historical fact.6 how, then, can they be expected to recognize their white privilege as a result of generations of colonialism and imperialism? white ignorance is an epistemic state that makes it very difficult for white people, whether they are explicitly racist or not, to diagnose and understand, let alone criticize, racism. note that this is not to say that white people are innocent victims: white people (consciously or unconsciously) have actively constructed, and continue to actively construct, the racist ideologies that structure their cognition so as to hide evidence of racism from plain sight, because this shield of ignorance protects them from guilt, culpability, accountability, and other inconvenient truths and consequences. white people have wilfully—not accidentally or innocently— cultivated the conditions of white ignorance that protect them from knowledge of their role in society, as contributors to and beneficiaries of white privilege. racism is an inconvenient but accessible truth within the field of white perception. if white people can’t admit that they are bearers of white ignorance, this is because they are living in active denial. mills’s analysis explains why it is so hard for white people to identify racism in liberal societies: because liberal societies are white supremacist societies, dedicated to systemically erasing evidence of racism. if there is no racism in america—the ideal liberal state—then there are no racists. by the same token, racial liberal narratives make it difficult for people of color to leverage their experiences as targets of racial oppression to credibly accuse white people of racist transactions (which enforce racial inequality). this is because their testimony is at odds with the dominant enlightenment myth of the ‘triumph of equality and rationality’ over ignorance and chaos after the collapse of feudalism. hence, the hegemony of racial liberalism deprives people of color of the testimonial clout they need to hold racists fully accountable. racial liberal ideologies, in fact, don’t just exonerate racist enforcers but also displace blame onto black people, mischaracterizing them as responsible for the effects of white supremacy. mills gives a common example of this type of racist scapegoating—the popular belief that “after the abolition of slavery in the united 6 a national inquiry commissioned by the canadian government found that the state is guilty of perpetrating a genocide on indigenous girls and women, which continues to this day (ian austen and dan bilefsky, "canadian inquiry calls killings of indigenous women genocide," new york times, june 3, 2019, www.nytimes.com /2019/06/03/world/canada/canada-indigenous-genocide.html). although the us government hasn’t commissioned a similar inquiry, we can infer that it is guilty of the same genocidal tactics based on its similar treatment of indigenous communities. hence, the state is a colonial state, guilty of a patriarchal genocide. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 states, blacks generally had opportunities equal to whites”; hence, racial disparities in wealth and income are due to black people’s irresponsibility as opposed to structural racism (2017, 57). this scapegoating narrative is, according to anticolonialist critics, at the heart of neoliberal economics, an ideology that purports to be to everyone’s advantage but actually functions to reproduce the colonial principles of the plantation economy—an economy that, “from the nation’s genesis,” served to extract “surplus value from racialized bodies (e.g., dispossession of indigenous lands, slavery, share cropping, prison industrial complex, forced labor camps),” thereby facilitating “the hyper-exploitation of certain (colorized) bodies and lands” by white landowners, as noted by joshua inwood (2015, 411; citing mcintyre and nast 2011). in fact, the propagation of the plantation economy through neoliberal principles is the main reason american capitalism is “so brutal” to this day, though to no one more than racialized minorities.7 the myth of neoliberal economics as a color-blind system of economic relations is a component part of a broader phenomenon that angelique m. davis and rose ernst call “racial gaslighting,” a set of “political, social, economic and cultural process that perpetuate . . . and normalize . . . a white supremacist reality through pathologizing those who resist” (2019, 3). racial liberal and neoliberal scripts work in tandem to “obfuscate the existence of a white supremacist state power structure” and “pathologize” resisters (davis and ernst 2019, 2). these mechanisms exonerate the perpetrators of racial injustice by writing white supremacy out of existence, and they simultaneously pathologize people of color by depicting their testimony as irrational, delusional, overly emotional, childish, or ‘crazy.’ in sum, america is a racial liberal order, saturated with disappearance narratives that obfuscate the reality of the racial contract and silence people of color who try to leverage their experiences to challenge racist scripts and practices. because of the hegemony of racial liberalism, racialized speakers are marginalized in conversations about racial oppression. 5. an emancipatory theory of responsibility the assumption that animated this paper was that blame and praise are not evenly distributed in our society because of disappearance narratives that exonerate privileged perpetrators and shift blame onto the oppressed. these narratives also silence members of oppressed groups who try to resist and debunk them with their own experiential testimony. the above three critiques illuminate some of the mechanisms behind the unfair distribution of blame and praise, and behind the 7 see matthew desmond, “in order to understand the brutality of american capitalism, you have to start on the plantation,” new york times, august 14, 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html. ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 silencing of epistemic minorities. solnit shows that the scientific community—which purports to be objective and value-neutral—is actually complicit in the dissemination of patriarchal myths about women’s responsibility (and men’s nonresponsibility) for gender-based violence, abuse, and unwanted pregnancy. manne shows that the naive conception of misogyny hides misogyny in plain sight, making it difficult for women to credibly identify and blame enforcers of patriarchal oppression. and mills demonstrates that racial liberalism, an ideology propagated by white intellectuals, distorts and obfuscates the reality of white supremacy, making it difficult for people of color to credibly identify and blame enforcers of racial oppression (e.g., white moderates). these analyses explain why (particularly white and privileged) rapists,8 absent fathers, abusive intimate partners, misogynistic enforcers, and racial liberal proponents so easily escape blame in our (patriarchal, racial liberal) society, and why the oppressed are scapegoated and gaslighted when they contradict hegemonic myths. if we want to promote a fairer distribution of blame and praise, then we need to overturn these disappearance narratives, as well as the responsibility practices that support them. how can we do this? my proposal, derived from emancipatory philosophical subdisciplines such as feminist philosophy, critical race theory, queer theory, critical disability studies, and intersectionality theory, is to adopt a nonideal, ameliorative, relational, and intersectional approach to responsibility, which conceives of blame and praise as potential tools of liberation from oppressive ideologies and systems. let me briefly explain these four methodological principles: (a) a nonideal-theoretic approach is consistent with mills’s rejection of abstract ideals, detached from social reality. a nonideal theorist trains her attention on real-world hierarchies of power. (b) an ameliorative approach aims to ameliorate (protest, resist, dismantle) the hierarchies of power revealed by nonideal analysis (viz., haslanger 2000). rather than merely attempting to describe or systemize commonsense intuitions about responsibility, an ameliorative theorist defines responsibility in reference to a particular political goal, such as dismantling hierarchies of power and emancipating the oppressed. (this goal may take into consideration existing prejudices in commonsense understandings of the concept in question, e.g., responsibility). (c) a relational approach understands persons as social and interdependent animals, necessarily implicated in social systems and networks. a relational theory of responsibility, then, wouldn’t hold people responsible merely for their 8 the reader should see tommy curry’s (2018) work on how black men (in sharp contrast to how white men are treated) are mythologized as rapists and sexual predators, resulting in criminalization and persecution under the justice system. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 (individually construed) intentions or deep selves but (also) for their roles in social systems and networks (e.g., patriarchy, white supremacy). (d) an intersectional approach recognizes that people are affected by multiple intersecting vectors of oppression and that these intersections inform each other (crenshaw 1989). while no one can analyze every possible intersection of oppression at once, an intersectionality theorist attempts to recognize and/or analyze more than one vector of oppression at a time. together, these methodological principles instruct us to focus on hierarchies of power, as understood from the standpoint of the oppressed (who have presumptive epistemic privilege). an emancipatory approach to responsibility, which combines (a)–(d), directs our attention to real-world hierarchies of power like patriarchy and white supremacy and ableism, and enjoins us to dismantle or resist these systems using the resources of the responsibility system (blame and praise). in light of the pervasiveness of disappearance narratives, one way of doing this is to use blame to identify people’s status-conferring roles in hierarchies of power, and hold these people in negative regard for their contributions to these oppressive systems. unlike most theories of responsibility, this methodological approach isn’t fixated on the internal properties of discretely embodied individuals, but instead fixes attention on people’s roles in the collectives and systems that structure the fabric of society—a society that is, in our case, heteropatriarchal and racist. people who enforce these oppressive norms are, on an emancipatory framework, eligible for blame, while people who resist these systems are eligible for praise. this is true regardless of the agent’s quality of will or knowledge of their own social position. the current proposal is more compatible with the critiques of oppressive ideologies offered by solnit, manne, and mills than traditional (non-ameliorative) theories of responsibility because it provides us with the resources needed to identify privileged wrongdoers exonerated by disappearance narratives and to make them eligible for blame, censure, and sanctions. in doing this, it helps us better understand the inner workings of oppressive systems. by blaming members of oppressive systems, we increase the availability of moral knowledge in our society. in miranda fricker’s words, we contribute to society’s “collective hermeneutical resources” (2007, 7). these are just some of the considerations that motivate an emancipatory responsibility ethic. in response to this proposal, however, a critic might worry that my notion of blame is still too individualistic to support the transformative sociological aims shared by solnit, manne, and mills. perhaps a focus on individual enforcement agents—even if they are understood as parts of oppressive networks— is incompatible with the structural-sociological method that feminists and critical race theorists generally favour. maybe no individual is responsible for social oppression, as “eliminativists” have argued (viz., waller 2011, 2015). in the next ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 section, i will argue that an emancipatory theory of responsibility that takes individuals to be responsible for their enforcement roles in oppressive systems is compatible with the dominant structural-sociological orientation of feminist and anti-racist analysis, and actually gains support from it. 6. is individual responsibility compatible with emancipatory aims? 6.1. solnit solnit is clearly not averse to allocating responsibility to individuals. her main argument is that the ‘scientific’ narrative promoted by the cdc absolves men of responsibility for committing gender-based violence and abuse, and transfers the blame onto women. on the other hand, she cites the lack of social resources available to women as one of the causes of gender inequality, thereby shifting the focus onto sociological explanations and systemic solutions. these two strands of explanation are not incompatible, though. it can be true both that individual men are blameworthy for committing gender-based violence, and that women are entitled to governmental support to help them navigate a patriarchal society. hence, individual responsibility can be part of a sociological analysis that identifies systems of patriarchal oppression and individual misogynistic actors as joint causes of gender inequality. the solution to this two-ply problem is a combination of increased support for women and increased epistemic sensitivity to women’s blame, including blame directed at rapists and negligent fathers. 6.2. mills mills’s critique of racial liberalism focuses heavily on the systemic and ideological sources of white supremacy. this may seem to suggest that mills is opposed to the notion of individual responsibility, and perhaps to individualist analysis in general. but this isn’t the case. as a “radical liberal” (who hopes to redeem liberalism by analyzing the systems of oppression that make the realization of liberal ideals impossible), mills affirms the reality and the moral significance of the individual, albeit as shaped by social forces. he writes, “one can without inconsistency affirm both the value of the individual and the importance of recognizing how the individual is socially molded, especially when the environing social structures are oppressive ones” (2017, 18). in other words, mills believes that individual analysis and sociological analysis are mutually compatible, perhaps even complementary, because individuals are the engines of systemic oppression. without individual oppressors, there can be no systems of oppression. hence, mills’s analysis of racial injustice is consistent with an individualist apparatus for allocating blame to specific enforcers of racial liberalism and praise to specific members of resistance movements. there is no tension between (1) recognizing the systemic nature of racial oppression, and (2) recognizing the individual feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 blameworthiness of perpetrators of systemic racism. (this should, of course, be coupled with policy changes and legislative reform.) 6.3. manne manne doesn’t outright reject the validity of individual responsibility, but she cautions that “blame has its limits” (2017, xxi). she recognizes that blame (as a type of reactive attitude) was misunderstood by p. f. strawson (2008), who ignored the role of patriarchal ideologies in the construction and enforcement of interpersonal norms; but manne doesn’t say much about how, or if, we can repair the inequalities entrenched in the responsibility system. as a solution to patriarchal oppression in general, she proposes a “piecemeal approach,” involving specific responses to specific misogynistic offenses (2017, 30). yet she is wary of individualist analysis, which she identifies as the main source of the naive conception of misogyny, that is, the view that misogyny is a property of individual woman-haters as opposed to a product of systemic forces. in spite of manne’s sociological orientation, i think that she would be amenable to seeing an emancipatory approach as a good example of a “piecemeal” solution to patriarchal oppression, seeing that the emancipatory approach brings to light people’s enforcing roles in hierarchies of power. it thereby positions women to elicit uptake for their experiential testimony about misogynistic agents, actions, and collectives. the virtue of the emancipatory approach to blame is that one doesn’t need insight into a putative misogynist’s deep self prior to blaming him: one only needs insight into his role in a collective or system that operates to oppress women. and women are in a good position to produce experiential evidence of people’s roles in patriarchal collectives, because we live in those collectives and experience their marginalizing and disempowering effects every day. hence, the emancipatory approach helps us solve the epistemic and moral problems that manne attributes to the naive conception: it positions women to effectively blame men for misogynistic transgressions—namely, transgressions that enforce patriarchal norms and relations, of which women have direct experiential evidence. women do not, on the emancipatory proposal, need to probe the innermost depths of putative misogynists’ psyches to discover whether they are rabid woman-haters in order to blame them. having said this, i am, i think, much more optimistic about the emancipatory potential of blame and praise than any of the authors cited here. i believe that the solution to the asymmetries of power that scapegoat and gaslight members of marginalized groups—while erasing the culpability of the privileged—can be overturned if we identify people’s roles in systems of power and domination, and hold them in low esteem on that basis. one reason for my optimism is that blame— as a communicative entity—contains information about perpetrators and ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 transgressions, wrongdoers and victims, and therefore holds the potential to transform the “hermeneutical” climate, or the “shared tools of social interpretation” that structure our understanding of our moral ecology, and our perception of who deserves blame for what (fricker 2007, 6). when we use blame to highlight people’s roles in hierarchies of power, we create what josé medina calls “oppositional discourses” and “counterhegemonic publics” that challenge oppressive ideologies (2013, 16). emancipatory blame is an oppositional discourse because it seeks to overturn hegemonic narratives that exonerate and absolve the powerful. thus, an emancipatory approach to blame helps us deconstruct and dismantle disappearance narratives by “reappearing” agents of oppression using counterhegemonic narratives about responsibility. this positions us to hold agents of oppression in low esteem. in this way, individual-responsibility attributions are a critical part of a decolonial approach to morality, since these attributions—when deployed in an emancipatory and ameliorative spirit—communicate information about powerful people’s self-serving investments in hierarchies of power. 7. conclusion in this paper, i used disappearance accounts of misogyny and racism to help explain why blame is so unevenly distributed in our moral ecology. a large part of the reason is that dominant cultural narratives bury the reality of rape, misogyny, and racism under an avalanche of oppressive ideologies. these ideologies aren’t anomalies: they’re the norm. they are inscribed in history books, philosophy textbooks, popular literature—in every dominant discursive space. these narratives disappear agents of oppression and thus exonerate them from blame, silencing their victims. i have proposed an ameliorative approach to responsibility as an antidote to these oppressive narratives. blame, conceived as a communicative practice, identifies perpetrators and transgressions. emancipatory blame, then, rejects hegemonic scripts and faults powerful wrongdoers for contributing to hierarchies of power that give them unfair advantages. it recognizes gender-based violence, misogyny, and racism as the results of individuals’ choices and actions, not eternal mysteries or the inevitable effects of inhuman, non-agentic sociohistorical forces. this proposal positions privileged perpetrators as proper targets of blame, and positions their victims as authorities on the subject of oppression. in other words, it rectifies entrenched inequalities in the distribution of blame and praise in our society. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 references carruthers, peter. 2011. the opacity of mind: an integrative theory of selfknowledge. oxford: oxford university press. ciurria, michelle. 2019. an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility. new york: routledge. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1989. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” university of chicago legal forum, no. 1, 139–167. curry, tommy j. 2018. “killing boogeymen: phallicism and the misandric mischaracterizations of black males in theory. res philosophica 95 (2): 235– 272. doi:10.11612/resphil.1612. davis, angelique m., and rose ernst. 2019. “racial gaslighting.” politics, groups, and identities 7 (4): 761–774. doi:10.1080/21565503.2017.1403934. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. new york: oxford university press. haslanger, sally. 2000. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” noûs 34 (1): 31–55. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.00201. hurley, susan. 2011. “the public ecology of responsibility. in responsibility and distributive justice, edited by carl knight and zofia stemplowska, 187–215. new york: oxford university press. hutchinson, katrina, catriona mackenzie, and marina oshana. 2018. social dimensions of moral responsibility. new york: oxford university press. inwood, joshua f. 2015. “neoliberal racism: the ‘southern strategy’ and the expanding geographies of white supremacy.” social & cultural geography 16 (4): 407–423. doi:10.1080/14649365.2014.994670. james, sandy e., jody l. herman, susan rankin, mara keisling, lisa mottet, and ma'ayan anafi. 2016. the report of the 2015 us transgender survey. washington, dc: national center for transgender equality. www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts-full-report-final.pdf. loewen, james w. 1996. lies my teacher told me. new york: touchstone. manne, kate. 2017. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. mason, elinor. 2018. “respecting each other and taking responsibility for our biases.” in social dimensions of moral responsibility, edited by katrina hutchinson, catriona mackenzie, and marina oshana, 163–184. new york: oxford university press. ciurria – the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators published by scholarship@western, 2020 23 mcintyre, michael, and heidi j. nast. 2011. “bio(necro)polis: marx, surplus populations, and the spatial dialectics of reproduction and ‘race.’” antipode 43 (5): 1465–1488. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00906.x. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. new york: oxford university press. mills, charles w. 2017. black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism. new york: oxford university press. solnit, r. 2016. “the case of the missing perpetrator.” literary hub, february 11. https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-case-of-the-missing-perpetrator/. sorenson, susan b., manisha joshi, and elizabeth sivitz. 2014. “a systematic review of the epidemiology of nonfatal strangulation, a human rights and health concern. american journal of public health 104 (11): e54–e61. doi:10.2105/ajph.2014.302191. strawson, p. f. 2008. freedom and resentment and other essays. london: routledge. vargas, manuel. 2013. building better beings: a theory of moral responsibility. oxford: oxford university press. waller, bruce n. 2011. against moral responsibility. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 2015. the stubborn system of moral responsibility. cambridge, ma: mit press. michelle ciurria is a visiting scholar at the university of missouri–st. louis. she completed her phd at york university in toronto and then held postdoctoral fellowships at washington university in st. louis and the university of new south wales in sydney. she is the author of “an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility.” 7322 ciurria title page 7322 ciurria final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation medina. josé. 2018. “misrecognition and epistemic injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (4). article 1. 2018 misrecognition and epistemic injustice josé medina northwestern university jose.medina@northwestern.edu medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 misrecognition and epistemic injustice josé medina abstract in this essay i argue that epistemic injustices can be understood and explained as social pathologies of recognition, and that this way of conceptualizing epistemic injustices can help us develop proper diagnostic and corrective treatments for them. i distinguish between two different kinds of recognition deficiency— quantitative recognition deficits and misrecognitions—and i ague that while the rectification of the former simply requires more recognition, the rectification of the latter calls for a shift in the mode of recognition, that is, a deep transformation of the recognition dynamics so that other forms of recognition can emerge. arguing against incremental recognitional approaches that aim only at increasing social visibility/audibility, i examine communicative dysfunctions around the phenomenon of racist violence in order to show how problems of misrecognition persist and become recalcitrant even when quantitative recognition deficits disappear. keywords: epistemic activism, epistemic injustice, misrecognition, protest, racist violence, recognition. recognition theory can be (and has been) used in a number of ways in discussions of epistemic injustice.1 i will start by distinguishing some of the ways in which recognition theory can be invoked to detect, dissect, and resist epistemic injustices. i will then go on to focus on uses of recognition theory that have not yet become standard, and uses that have not been sufficiently exploited in the literature on epistemic injustice and deserve more attention. unlike the individualistic and strictly psychological notion of empathy which is often invoked in the feminist literature on epistemic injustice,2 the notions of recognition and misrecognition have been theorized as social concepts with crucial collectivistic and structural dimension. of special significance in those theorizations is the work of axel honneth (1996, 2007) on recognition and misrecognition as social 1 see especially congdon (2015) and giladi (2018). 2 see especially linker (2014). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 phenomena that call for a diagnostic social philosophy.3 recognition theory—and honneth’s work, in particular—provides a rich theoretical framework for the diagnosis of social pathologies and for suggesting “cures” or ways of meliorating those pathologies, that is, a framework that is both diagnostic and corrective. epistemic injustices—both in their testimonial and hermeneutical varieties—can be understood and explained as social pathologies of recognition, and this way of conceptualizing epistemic injustices can help us develop proper diagnostic and corrective treatments for them. as giladi (2018) points out, under recognition theory, epistemic injustices are understood as resulting from dysfunctions in “the moral grammar of recognition attributions” (2018, 141). dysfunctional or morally deficient patterns of recognition attributions erode the epistemic respect that individuals and groups deserve, and they deprive these individuals and groups of environments in which they can make sense of their experiences (hermeneutical injustice) and in which they can credibly communicate their experiences (testimonial injustice). in other words, because of dysfunctions in the normative order of recognition of a society, the groups and subjects negatively impacted by the deficient recognition order will have the intelligibility and/or credibility of their contributions to epistemic life compromised. in this essay, i will explore how certain dysfunctional patterns of recognition result in pathologies of public discourse that undermine the intelligibility and credibility of marginalized groups. let me begin by distinguishing between two different kinds of recognition deficiency.4 first, we can talk about a quantitative recognition deficit, which can range from not being recognized at all—a sheer lack of recognition that results in not being seen or heard, in being utterly ignored in epistemic interactions5—to not 3 see zurn (2015) for a full elucidation of the diagnostic social philosophy that honneth develops from his account of “recognition struggles.” 4 my distinction here is related to (but is not identical with) the contrast between “misrecognition” and “nonrecognition.” “nonrecognition” refers to the absolute extreme of quantitative recognition deficit, in which a subject is not given any recognition whatsoever and therefore is not afforded the status of a subject at all. this is how giladi explains the contrast between misrecognition and nonrecognition: “in cases of misrecognition, the recognition order of a society acknowledges the subjectivity of a group or minority, but, incorrectly, does not afford that particular subjectivity the same level of respect and value as that of the majority. in cases of non-recognition, the recognition order of a society incorrectly fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of a group or minority, affording that group or minority no positive normative status at all” (2018, 145). 5 this fundamental kind of recognition that is the condition of possibility for epistemic interaction is closely related to what honneth (1996) calls “primordial medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 being recognized sufficiently or as one deserves—for example, being given scarce opportunities to speak or fewer opportunities than others under the same conditions. when we encounter quantitative recognition deficits, what is needed is more recognition. but there is also, in the second place, a recognition deficiency that takes place independently of the amount of recognition one is given, for the deficiency concerns the manner in which recognition is accorded and the specific (improper) content of such recognition. this is what i will refer to as misrecognition. here the recognition deficiency concerns not whether or not one is recognized, or to what degree, but how one is recognized and whether the way in which one is recognized is appropriate or not. when we encounter misrecognition, what is needed is not more recognition but rather a shift in the mode of recognition, a deep transformation of the recognition dynamics so that other forms of recognition can emerge. demands for recognition, therefore, can take very different shapes: requests for more opportunities to be recognized or for increasing the amount of recognition one deserves, but also interventions for changing the terms of the dynamics, for opening up new ways of making sense and appearing in the social world. second, we can distinguish between two different targets of recognition deficiencies: they can attach to the subject of epistemic interaction or to the object of epistemic interaction, that is, to the participant in an epistemic exchange (speaker, hearer, or communication party) or to the subject matter of that exchange. take, for example, discussions of racial violence in the us. dysfunctions in these discussions can take many shapes and many forms of recognition deficiencies. sometimes those deficiencies will have to do with recognition deficits or misrecognitions of the participants in those discussions: they are ignored or silenced on the issue of racial violence (they are not given an opportunity to speak, or they are constrained in the articulation of their experiences about violence); or they are misheard, and their contributions are improperly appraised, because of identity prejudices (e.g., because they are perceived as the “angry black person” reacting irrationally or blowing things out of proportion). but sometimes, even when there are no identity prejudices casting a distorting light on the speakers or potential recognition” or “primordial sympathetic engagement.” honneth also describes this fundamental form of recognition as “antecedent recognition” to emphasize its developmental significance and its status as a precondition for partnership in communication. as zurn puts it, this is “a form of recognition that is developmentally and conceptually prior to [other] forms of recognition. . . . the fundamental idea here is that, before any normatively substantive form of interaction with others can occur, interaction partners must become aware that they are dealing with persons” (2015, 43–44). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 participants in these discussions, the subject matter itself may be improperly recognized, and the discussions run into roadblocks because of an inability to properly recognize—to see, hear, feel, and understand—what is involved in the phenomenon of racial violence, what it is and what is at issue in its discussion. if we combine the two distinctions i laid out and use the topic of racial violence to illustrate different kinds of recognition deficiencies, we can identify the following four categories: 1. quantitative recognition deficits affecting the object or subject matter of communication; for example, the topic of racial violence not being discussed at all or not being discussed sufficiently in the society where it occurs. 2. quantitative recognition deficits affecting the agent of communication; for example, a particular person or group of people not being able to communicate at all or sufficiently about racial violence. 3. misrecognition affecting the object or subject matter of communication; for example, the topic of racial violence not being discussed properly, and distortions about what is at stake skewing the conversation. 4. misrecognition affecting the agent of communication; for example, a particular person or group of people not being properly recognized as they attempt to communicate about racial violence. these four categories of recognition deficiencies often appear deeply intertwined, reinforcing and complicating each other; and they probably are rarely to be found independently of each other. however, it is useful to distinguish them analytically in order to have a picture6 of the different kinds and layers of recognition problems, and in order to fully understand how such normative problems operate and can be stopped or meliorated. given that the quantitative side of recognition problems has been the focus of the discussions of epistemic injustice, in this essay i will turn my attention to how subjects can be epistemically 6 it is important to note that this is not a complete picture of the recognition problems involved in communicative dysfunctions. indeed, there are factors in communicative dysfunctions that go beyond the two elements i have highlighted. in particular, beyond the object/subject matter of communication and the agent of communication, we need to pay attention to the communicative environment or climate, which may be the focal point of the dysfunction as well. this broader focal point of communicative dysfunction would require ecological interventions for improving climates and environments of interaction and preventing epistemic injustices. i am grateful to paul giladi for pointing this out to me. medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 mistreated as a result of misrecognition, examining how epistemic injustices result from particular kinds of topics being misrecognized (3 above) or from particular kinds of communicators being misrecognized (4 above). it is in cases of misrecognition (rather than in mere quantitative deficits of recognition) that most insidious pathologies of public discourse can be found. these pathologies—and the dysfunctional patterns of misrecognition in which they are grounded—are the hardest to detect and properly diagnose, and they are the hardest to treat and correct. in what follows, i will argue that epistemic injustices rooted in misrecognition cannot be meliorated through an incremental approach that simply tries to promote more recognition. in the next two sections, i will elucidate how different forms of misrecognition lead to epistemic injustices that cannot be rectified with an incremental approach that aims simply at increasing visibility/audibility and recognition, for the rectification of the epistemic dysfunction in question requires a shift in the mode of recognition (rather than simply more recognition). i will use racial violence as a case study because it provides a good illustration of how different forms of recognition deficiencies operate and can be used to show perspicuously how problems of misrecognition persist and become recalcitrant even when quantitative recognition deficits disappear. 1. misrecognizing the problem of racial violence racial violence is indeed heavily discussed today, and all kinds of people are invited into the discussion. we cannot say that this pressing social problem simply goes unrecognized, but is it properly recognized? our conversations about it may remain dysfunctional, no matter how much more attention and recognition we give to the problem, if we do not attend to the manner in which the problem is (mis)recognized and the dysfunctions that may result from the inadequate recognition of the problem. it is also not clear that the problem is meliorated simply by inviting more people to talk about it, even if those people are “representatives” of previously marginalized perspectives, such as those of people of color. mychal denzel smith, ta-nehisi coates,7 and other fairly well recognized black voices may command authority and cultural capital. they may not face a recognition deficiency of any kind in a given forum, but that does not mean that in that forum the recognition deficiencies and epistemic dysfunctions around the topic of racial violence have disappeared. when a phenomenon like racial violence becomes systematically distorted, it is naïve to expect that the distortions will automatically disappear when more attention is given to the topic or when more credibility is 7 mychal denzel smith (2017) and ta-nehisi coates (2015) are journalists and cultural critics who have published insightful reflections on the topic of racial violence in the us. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 given to the victims or groups affected. in this section, i will briefly examine the misrecognitions effected by the distorted visibility of two phenomena of racial violence: lynching in the first half of the twentieth century, and police homicide of people of color (sometimes also described as “police lynching of people of color”) in the twenty-first century. ida b. wells fought for giving social visibility to the phenomenon of lynching, but she was also acutely aware that any kind of visibility will not do, and in fact, she was very much concerned with a distorted visibility which made the problem worse, hiding the most dehumanizing aspects of lynching, covering them over and even justifying it.8 this distorted visibility was created by the visual spectacle of lynching and, in particular, by lynching photos and postcards. visual communication around lynching was pathologized by lynching photography at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. twentieth-century lynching photography contributed to create publics that would tolerate the phenomenon and would cultivate insensitivity with respect to the suffering of lynching victims (who were mostly people of color9) and by extension to the violence suffered by people of color more generally. as amy louise wood emphasizes in lynching and spectacle: witnessing racial violence in america 1890–1940 (2009), lynching would not have become such a big cultural phenomenon in post-reconstruction us if it were not for the propagandistic apparatus mobilized around it by the pro-lynching movement and its sympathizers, which included the circulation and consumption of visual materials, especially photographs of lynching victims and of white people posing with them that were later shared, sold, and used as postcards.10 lynching 8 in many articles, ida b. wells noted how lynching had become a public spectacle that replaced the spectacle of public executions, and that it was a spectacle outside the law with even a greater following and even greater pathologizing effects. she also pointed out that photography played an important role in advertising, spreading, and memorializing this pathological public spectacle. as she wrote in 1900 in “lynch law in america”: “whenever a burning is advertised to take place, the railroads run excursions, photographs are taken, and the same jubilee is indulged in that characterized the public hangings of one hundred years ago” ([1900] 2014, 398). 9 although prior to american civil war there were many white victims of lynching, in the reconstruction and post-reconstruction periods lynch victims were predominantly people of color. for a detailed analysis of these changes and the racial aspects of lynching, see wood (2009). 10 wood (2009) also shows how films played a role in the spectacularization of lynching—iconic feature films such as the birth of a nation but also a myriad of medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 photography contributed tremendously to the normalization of racial violence and to the creation of an epistemic dysfunction, a pathology of public discourse: a pattern of misrecognitions of racial violence in visual communication. lynching photography created what i have described elsewhere (medina, forthcoming) as the spectacularization of the phenomenon of racial violence. this visual spectacle propagated two kinds of misrecognition with their distinctive epistemic dysfunctions: (1) sensationalistic (mis)recognition; and (2) spectatorial (mis)recognition. in the first place, the creation of the visual spectacle of lynching through lynching photos and postcards involved sensationalism: the focus on extreme cases of racial violence that had a shocking value—a shocking visual spectacle that served the purpose of the intimidating and terrorizing people of color while at the same time providing entertainment for a “white respectable public” that was formed around sadistic attitudes.11 the sensationalization of racial violence continues today in the media coverage that police brutality and police homicides receive on american media. this sensationalization leads to the misrecognition of the object or subject matter in question: the exclusive and obsessive focus on extreme physical racial violence (e.g., lynching and police homicide) detracts from the recognition of milder (but quotidian and insidious) forms of physical racial violence that happens routinely, and from the recognition of nonphysical forms of violence, such as psychological, cultural, or symbolic violence (as in, for example, hate speech), or structural and institutional violence (as in, for example, radical poverty or lack of representation). the sensationalization of racial violence reduces the phenomenon to extreme cases of physical violence and obscures the link between those cases and ordinary instances of racial violence that routinely appear in the economic, institutional, psychological, and communicative lives of people of color. the incremental approach that promulgates gradually increasing the visibility of obscured phenomena will not do here because sensationalistic misrecognition is not undermined by simply showing more images of racial violence: either those images (e.g., images of poverty, of racial slurs painted in someone’s house, etc.) will not be recognized as images of violence at all, or they will be sensationalistic enough and close enough to the spectacle that will be assimilated to it without changing it. in the second place, the creation of visual spectacles of racial violence in lynching photography or in contemporary media coverage of police homicides also promulgates spectatorial (mis)recognitions of patterns of racial violence by viewing short films of lynching that were made available in booths on the streets or wellattended spaces such as train stations. 11 for an account of the formation of a “white respectable public” through lynching photography, see my “resisting racist propaganda: distorted visual communication and epistemic activism” (medina, forthcoming). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 them with detachment, as phenomena in which we are not implicated and from which can take distance. through spectatorial attitudes—detached, disengaged, dispassionate modes of viewing—the media spectacle of racial violence, far from sensitizing publics to the problem in the right way, actually numbs publics to the persistence of the phenomenon to which they attend as mere spectators. as susan sontag suggested in regarding the pain of others (2004), exposure to spectacles of human suffering does not create the right kind of sensitivity in the public, for the unexamined spectatorial (detached, disengaged, dispassionate) attitudes of the public give way to a very disturbing form of voyeurism that creates insensitivity or, worse yet, a sadistic sensitivity that finds enjoyment in the spectacle. once again, the incremental approach that aims simply at increasing the visibility of a phenomenon will not do here because spectatorial misrecognition is not undermined by simply showing more images of racial violence. what is the cure to this social pathology then? what is needed in order to undermine the spectacle of racial violence? what is needed in order to uproot and displace the sensationalistic and spectatorial misrecognitions i have identified is not simply more recognition (of whatever kind) but also radical shifts in modes of recognition. in particular, what is needed here to rectify the misrecognitions in question is the cultivation of two kinds of recognition: (1) nonsensationalistic recognition, which requires recognizing patterns of racial violence on every corner of our personal, social, and institutional lives, keeping the focus on the everyday, the routine, the collective and structural; and (2) nonspectatorial recognition, which interrogates the subject’s positionality and interrogates his/her involvement in the phenomenon. working towards the cultivation of these forms of recognition was the aim of activists such as ida b. wells. the anti-lynching activism of ida b. well had a crucial epistemic dimension, fitting into what i have termed epistemic activism (see medina, forthcoming). ida b. wells was pointing towards nonsensationalistic and nonspectatorial forms of recognition, asking publics to see the impact of racial violence in their lives and sensibility, and to interrogate their complicity and positionality with respect to it. this epistemic activism is continued today with respect to police violence against racial minorities and its sensationalistic and spectacularizing media coverage. the epistemic injustice involved in such a spectacle concerns a new form of epistemic dysfunction in patterns of communication about police violence against communities of color: the epistemic dysfunction and injustice has shifted from invisibility/inaudibility to hypervisibility/hyperaudibility. but note also that the hypervisibility/hyperaudibility in the contemporary media has revolved around violence against men of color, while violence against women of color has remained relatively invisible/inaudible. as kimberlé crenshaw and her group of scholaractivists have called attention to in say her name (2016), one aspect of the medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 communicative problem (and the attendant epistemic injustice, i would add) concerns the gender aspects of the spectacle of racial violence and the disparity between the ways in which male and female victims are treated by the media and by society at large in terms of their differently distorted visibility/audibility. but once again the incremental approach does not help here: it would be a mistake to think that all that is needed to repair the social invisibility of racial violence against women of color is to increase its visibility; for this incremental approach runs the risk of creating just another visual spectacle—another form of hypervisibility—that far from sensitizing publics to the problem in the right way, actually sensationalizes the problem and numbs publics to its persistence, to which they attend as mere spectators. the failure of the incremental approach to rectify epistemic injustices grounded in misrecognition will also be discussed in the next section, in which i focus on the misrecognition of agents of communication: groups of people not being properly recognized as they attempt to communicate about racial violence. 2. misrecognizing protesting voices communicators go sometimes unrecognized in their attempt to communicate. but also—perhaps more frequently—they are misrecognized as communicators, with their speech and action being mistaken for something else. communicators can be misrecognized individually or in groups. in this section, i will focus on the misrecognition of group agency and collective voices protesting against the perpetration of racial violence with impunity. collective responses to instances of racial violence are often misrecognized because they are seen through distorting ideological lenses. one such distorting lens is the narrative frame of “rioting and looting,” which is often invoked in the media coverage of protests against racial violence. take two iconic cases of such protests in the american context: the 1992 los angeles uprising after the exoneration of the police officers in the beating of rodney king, and the 2014 ferguson protests after the killing of michael brown. participants in the la uprising were uniformly depicted as “rioters,” whereas participants in the so-called “ferguson unrest” were depicted in the media either as “angry protesters” or as “rioters,” which shows that the “rioting and looting” narrative frame is not only very much alive in the twenty-first century but is also interacting with and contaminating other conceptualizations, including instances of civil protests which are called into question and closely associated to riots when they include collective expressions of anger. the narrative frame of rioting and looting has been widely used in the us media as a lens through which to look at images of collective actions of minority groups. the selective deployment of this narrative frame when it comes to the marches and protests of people of color constitutes an epistemic injustice that obscures the communicative agency of those groups, making it very difficult (if not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 impossible) to properly recognize their collective actions as speech acts that express indignation and perform protestation. the rioting and looting narrative frame is differentially applied to people of color, stigmatizing them and depriving them of political and communicative agency; and it is often deployed prior to and independently of the perpetration of acts of destruction of property, stealing, or disturbance of the peace—acts properly called “rioting and looting.” an iconic example can be seen in the media coverage of the 1992 rodney king uprising in la. independently of the degree to which the uprising resulted in the destruction of property, the deployment of the narrative frame of rioting and looting as a totalizing lens in the mainstream media guaranteed that (a substantial portion of) the american public could only see lawlessness and criminality in the images of people of color taking the streets. robert gooding-williams (2006) points out that there were two dominant views of the media coverage of the la uprising after the exoneration of the police officers caught on tape beating up rodney king. according to what goodingwilliams calls “the conservative view,” demonstrators were depicted as opportunist rioters: “the people on the streets were taken to embody an uncivilized chaos that needed to be stamped out in order to restore law and order. on this account, the ‘rioting’ had nothing to do with the king verdict but expressed a repressed opportunism just waiting for an excuse to flout the law” (2006, 14). on the other hand, what gooding-williams calls “the liberal view” in the media coverage of the king uprising depicted demonstrators as out-of-need rioters: “the liberal view emphasized the social causes of the ‘riots,’ such as joblessness, poverty, and, more generally, socio-economic need” (14). as gooding-williams’s analysis emphasizes, by presenting the images shown within these narrative frames, both views in the media dissociated the uprising from the king verdict and made it difficult for publics to recognize the uprising as a protest, as a communicative act that expressed moral indignation. whether the “rioters” were depicted as “bearers of chaos” or as “looters,” they were misrecognized: they were not properly recognized as protesting a repressive political order and legal system, as acting out of moral indignation and the belief that the harm suffered with impunity by rodney king symbolized a larger social injustice that they could not tolerate any longer. as gooding-williams puts it, “it strains incredulity to deny, as did conservative and liberal pundits alike, that the la uprising was not for many an act of political protest” (14). what this media coverage reflects is “a failure to regard the speech or actions of black people as manifesting thoughtful judgments about issues that concern all members of the political community” (14). this failure was achieved by putting images in a distorting narrative frame that led to the misrecognition of the members of a collective as rioters and made it impossible to properly recognize them as political agents and communicators. this damaging use of visual racist propaganda that deprives a group medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 of political agency requires critical exposure: the critical exposure of how images are deployed and what the narrative frames accompanying them obscure and project onto those images, as exemplified in gooding-williams’s analysis.12 once again, the incremental approach that promulgates gradually increasing the visibility of obscured phenomena will not do here because what was needed as a corrective in this case was not simply more images of the la uprising. what was needed—and is still needed today—is changing the terms and dynamics of recognition. the incremental approach is ineffective here because what is needed is not more images but a radical shift in the mode of recognition in the visual communication dynamics. images of people of color taking the streets in la in 1992 or in ferguson in 2014 will not be automatically read as expressions of the collective communicative and political agency of a group if the narrative frame of rioting and looting is still operative. what is needed in order to correct the misrecognition of the collective communicative and political agency of people of color in these cases is, first, unmasking and debunking the narrative frame or lens through which the misrecognition takes place; and second, providing alternative frames or lenses through which the proper recognition of the collective communicative and political agency of the group in question becomes possible. in other words, the two-step corrective needed here to rectify misrecognition involves, in gooding-williams’s terminology, undoing a “narrative retake” and enacting or rehearsing an alternative “narrative retake.” let me briefly explain gooding-williams’s notion of “narrative retake” and how it can work in this case in order to illustrate how steps toward repairing misrecognition can be pursued. gooding-williams (2006) uses the notion of “narrative retake” to explain how the defense lawyers representing the police officers in the rodney king trial successfully contextualized the video of rodney king’s beating and directed the jurors’ viewing of it in such a way that they could only see a threatening powerful body that needed to be controlled, without seeing an unarmed citizen complying and protecting his own body from a brutal beating. in the same way, the narrative frame of rioting and looting when successfully activated in the media coverage of the la uprising allows viewers to see only destruction of property and of the civil order, without seeing an expression of moral indignation and political protest. as gooding-williams puts it, what the rhetorical strategy of the attorneys defending king’s abusers produced was “a narrative retake of an interpreted image of black bodies” (2006, 11). as he says, “rather than assume that filmed facts speak for themselves, these lawyers found in a received stock of already interpreted images of 12 this paragraph has been drawn from my “resisting racist propaganda” (medina, forthcoming) where the reader can find a fuller account of visual propaganda and its power to deprive stigmatized groups of communicative and political agency. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 black bodies ready weapons to assault rodney king’s black body. time and again they sought to affix these images to that body, as if to say repeatedly, ‘look, a negro!’13 by the end of the trial, these images had become the ‘truth’ of king’s body, the jury having learned to see in the ‘brute facts’ a narrative recycling of interpreted images familiar to them from other stories” (2006, 10). as gooding-williams reminds us, the defense attorneys depicted king “as a bear and as emitting bear-like groans”, as “a wild ‘hulk-like’ and ‘wounded’ animal whose very gesture threatened the existence of civilized society”; and “these same attorneys portrayed the white bodies assailing king as guardians against the wild, and as embodying a “‘thin blue line’ that separates civil society from the dangerous chaos that is the essence of the wild” (10). as gooding-williams argues, the misrecognition that this narrative retake produces is not easily neutralized and displaced. gooding-williams calls attention to how naïve the reaction of the society for cinema studies was by criticizing the defense lawyers for putting forward a misreading of the images instead of letting the “powerful video evidence” speak for itself. as gooding-williams points out, this kind of response is ineffectual and naïve because it is predicated on “the positivist fantasy that there exist brute facts that speak for themselves” (2006, 11). one’s meanings are obscured and one’s credibility is undermined when one’s subjectivity is misrecognized by pathological discourses such as those mobilized by the narrative retake of the defense lawyers at the rodney king trial. this misrecognition results in credibility and intelligibility dysfunctions, that is, in testimonial and hermeneutical injustices. how do we go about repairing the misrecognition produced by the defense lawyers at the rodney king trial and the testimonial and hermeneutical injustices resulting from it—that is, the discrediting of king’s voice and the casting of doubt on the intelligibility of his version of the 13 gooding-williams is echoing here fanon’s famous reflections on the incident in which a french child pointed at him on a train and said to his mother “look, a negro!” fanon explains that in this incident of racial interpellation he felt being addressed as an object and being deprived of subjectivity, feeling “sealed into that crushing objecthood” (1952, 82). as fanon puts it as he elaborates on his reflection of this incident: “‘mama, see the negro! i’m frightened!’ . . . i made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. i could no longer laugh, because i already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity. . . . i discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and i was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency. . . . on that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, i took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself into an object. . . . all i wanted was to be a man among other men” (1952, 84–85). medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 events? what is needed here to undo the stigmatizing narrative retake is not more video evidence or a fresh and impeded look at the video evidence, as if the visual material by itself could undo the narrative retake and open people’s eyes to the “brute facts.” video images (like any other communicative materials) are always open to narrative retakes that can skew what people see, what they interpret to have seen, and what they are able to recognize (or misrecognize) as a result. what is needed is a counternarrative that can both denounce the misrecognitions of the narrative retake of the defense lawyers and at the same time present the video images in a different light, an alternative narrative retake that tells a different story and connects it with a different stock of interpreted images and stories: those of the victims of racist violence and police brutality. as gooding-williams points out, this is exactly what the effigy protest at amherst college in 1992 tried to achieve. a few days after the rodney king verdicts were announced, the black student union at amherst college placed forty black and faceless effigies around campus with a copy of a newspaper article accompanying each effigy. the newspaper articles reported incidents of violence committed by white men against black americans (mostly cases of lynching) from 1880 onwards, and they placed the beating of rodney king and the exoneration of his assailants in the context of a long history of antiblack racist violence with impunity in the us. it is this kind of counternarrative that can neutralize the misrecognition produced by the narrative retake and create an alternative space for recognition and for empowering voices and perspectives that have been obscured and discredited. similarly, repairing the misrecognition of the collective communicative and political agency of protesters in the la uprising after the rodney king verdicts or in ferguson after the killing of michael brown requires more than simply making more images available; it requires unmasking and uprooting distortions in public discourse (such as the rioting and looting narrative frame) and mobilizing a counternarrative that can create an alternative space for recognition and for disclosing the previously obscured communicative and political agency of a stigmatized group. this is what some of the slogans used at black lives matter demonstrations try to achieve. think, for example, of the slogan “hands up, don’t shoot!” chanted at black lives matter marches and demonstrations and also expressed through body language by raising hands above the head. this slogan performatively challenges the misplaced presumption that demonstrators pose a threat to public order, interrogating the underlying narratives that depict them as such a threat, while invoking alternative images of peaceful expressions of group agency. think also of the slogans “whose streets? our streets!” and “no justice, no peace,” often used at black lives matter marches and demonstrations as well. these slogans make explicit that protesters are making a political statement by taking the streets, which have been taken away from them; and they make space for recognizing that reclaiming public spaces is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 participating in active citizenship and, rather than disturbing peace and order, is a way of working towards a peace and order that does not exist for some segments of the population. these slogans are part of a counternarrative that denounces the misrecognition produced by distorting narratives while trying to promote different forms of recognition. these examples illustrate well that what is needed to repair a pattern of misrecognition and to rectify the epistemic injustice that results from that misrecognition is not a mere increase of recognition but substantial shifts in modes of viewing and relating, sustained critical interventions in public discourse and communicative dynamics. this kind of qualitative change in the dynamics of recognition is what an incremental approach to recognition does not capture. 3. conclusion in this essay, i have joined forces with those who argue that recognition theory is essential for properly conceptualizing epistemic injustice (congdon 2015; giladi 2018). more specifically, this essay has tried to show that the concept of misrecognition is crucial for identifying the source of certain kinds of epistemic injustice and for offering a proper diagnostic and corrective treatment of these injustices. i have divided my analysis and argumentation into two parts, focusing on different kinds of misrecognition: the misrecognition affecting the object or subject matter of communication (e.g., the topic of racial violence); and the misrecognition affecting the agent of communication (e.g., a particular person or group of people not being properly recognized as they attempt to communicate about racial violence). in both parts of the essay, i have offered arguments against the incremental approach to the melioration of recognition dynamics, suggesting that in cases of misrecognition what is needed is not simply more recognition but a shift in recognition dynamics through the cultivation of alternative ways of viewing (and relating to) communicators and communicative contents. recognitional shifts require engaging critically and deeply with experiential perspectives; and it is in this respect that the recent literature in critical philosophy of race and gender has a lot to offer to discussions of misrecognition and epistemic injustice. great critical tools from recent feminist, queer, and antiracist phenomenology that can be used for the diagnostic and corrective treatment of epistemic injustices rooted in misrecognition include sara ahmed’s (2006) concepts of orientation and disorientation, alia al-saji’s (2014) concept of hesitation, alexis shotwell’s (2011) concept of implicit understanding, and shannon sullivan’s (2006) and george yancy’s (2017) accounts of perceptual habits. medina – misrecognition and epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 references ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects and others. durham, nc: duke university press. al-saji, alia. 2014. “a phenomenology of hesitation: interrupting racializing habits of seeing.” in living alterities: phenomenology, embodiment, and race, edited by emily lee, 133–172. albany: state university of new york press. coates, ta-nehisi. 2015. between the world and me. new york: spiegel & grau. congdon, matt. 2015. “epistemic injustice in the space of reasons.” episteme 12:75–93. crenshaw, kimberlé, andrea ritchie, rachel anspach, rachel gilmer, and luke harris. 2016. say her name: resisting police brutality against black women. new york: african american policy forum, center for intersectionality and social policy studies. kindle edition. fanon, frantz. 1952. black skin, white masks. london: pluto press. giladi, paul. 2018. “epistemic injustice: a role for recognition?” philosophy and social criticism 44 (2): 141–158. gooding-williams, robert. 2006. look, a negro! philosophical essays on race, culture and politics. new york: routledge. honneth, axel. 1996. the struggle for recognition: the moral grammar of social conflicts. cambridge: polity press. ———. 2007. disrespect: the normative foundations of critical theory. cambridge: polity press. linker, maureen. 2014. intellectual empathy: critical thinking for social justice. ann arbor: university of michigan press. medina, josé. forthcoming. “resisting racist propaganda: distorted visual communication and epistemic activism.” southern journal of philosophy. shotwell, alexis. 2011. knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding. university park: pennsylvania state university. smith, mychal denzel. 2017. invisible man got the whole world watching. new york: nation books. sontag, susan. 2004. regarding the pain of others. new york: picador. sullivan, shannon. 2006. revealing whiteness: the unconscious habits of racial privilege. bloomington: indiana university press. wells, ida b. (1900) 2014. “lynch law in america.” in the light of truth: writings of an anti-lynching crusader, 394–403. new york: penguin. wood, amy louise. 2009. lynching and spectacle: witnessing racial violence in america 1890–1940. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. yancy, george. 2017. black bodies, white gazes: the continuing significance of race in america. second edition. london: rowman & littlefield. zurn, christopher. 2015. axel honneth. cambridge: polity press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 josé medina (phd, northwestern university, 1998) has taught at vanderbilt university and carlos iii university-madrid (spain), and is currently walter dill scott professor of philosophy at northwestern university. he works in critical race theory, gender/queer theory, communication theory, social epistemology, and political philosophy. his books include speaking from elsewhere (suny press, 2006), and the epistemology of resistance (oxford university press, 2012), which received the 2012 north american society for social philosophy book award. his current projects in critical race theory, social epistemology, and gender and queer theory focus on how social perception and the social imagination contribute to the formation of vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence and oppression. these projects also explore the social movements and kinds of activism (including epistemic activism) that can be mobilized to resist racial and sexual violence and oppression in local and global contexts. a capacious account of liberal feminism feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 1 article 4 2017 a capacious account of liberal feminism amy r. baehr hofstra university, amy.baehr@hofstra.edu recommended citation baehr, amy r.. 2017. "a capacious account of liberal feminism."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (1). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/ 2016.3.4. a capacious account of liberal feminism1 amy r. baehr abstract this paper presents an account of liberal feminism as a capacious family of doctrines. the account is capacious in the sense that it sweeps in a wide variety of doctrines, including some thought to be challenges to liberal feminism, and allows us to refer to doctrines with more than one label—so we can identify, for example, care-ethical liberal feminism, socially conservative liberal feminism, and liberal socialist feminism. the capacious account also provides a conceptual framework to allow us to think with greater clarity about the scope of liberal feminist claims to justice, and about how that justice is to be secured and sustained. since there is such variety within the liberal feminist family of doctrines, it makes little sense to criticize or defend liberal feminism simpliciter. the capacious account both requires and makes it possible for us to eschew such talk and focus instead on the particular doctrines we have in mind. keywords: liberalism, political liberalism, liberal feminism, susan okin, john rawls, care ethics, socialist feminism, classical liberal feminism, libertarian feminism, social conservatism, the basic structure, liberal ethos, gender, gender justice, sex equality as feminist theory became part of academic philosophy in the 1980s and 1990s, influential work was done distinguishing kinds of feminist political philosophy; taxonomies were proposed and sharp distinctions drawn.2 but the accounts of liberal feminism in such taxonomies tended to be caricatures, their 1 for helpful discussion of earlier versions of this paper, i extend thanks to: andrew altman, blain neufeld, lori watson, and anonymous reviewers for this journal. this paper was presented at villanova’s diversifying philosophy conference (cosponsored by the journal hypatia), swipshop (the workshop of the new york society for women in philosophy), and the hofstra university philosophy department colloquium. 2 see for example jaggar (1983). 1 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 criteria for counting as liberal feminist overly restrictive.3 while recent liberal feminist work—exploring varieties of liberal feminism4 and synergies between liberal and other kinds of feminism5—puts the lie to the caricature, it runs the risk of being vague, of failing to offer clear inclusion criteria. this paper presents an account of liberal feminism that avoids both vagueness and caricature. at the core of the account is a definition. a doctrine is liberal feminist if it holds that: a) whatever else it does, society’s basic structure6 should satisfy liberal values7—that is, should be just—and a just basic structure requires justice in what i will call ‘internal workings’;8 as well as b) just coercive power is the people’s power exercised through and constrained by the institutions of constitutional democracy.9 ideas a and b are necessary and sufficient; a doctrine that denies either of them is not liberal feminist, and a doctrine that includes both of them is liberal feminist. some liberal feminist doctrines add that c) the internal workings of some social arrangements should be just apart from or beyond what is necessary for a just basic structure. the basic idea of this definition is that liberal feminists endorse constitutional democracy and hold that the internal workings of arrangements of associational life should be just because this is necessary if society is to have a just basic structure. in addition, according to the definition, some liberal feminists hold that—apart from the demands a just basic structure puts on internal workings— justice simply is the right value to guide many parts of associational life. 3 suggesting, for example, that liberal feminism can insist only on formal equality— on treating women the same as men are or should be treated—or that liberal feminism is committed to atomistic individualism. such overly restrictive understandings allow liberalism and liberal feminism to function as a foil in feminist political and legal theory. for discussion, see mcclain (1991) and baehr (2002). 4 see for example abbey (2011) and baehr (2004b, 2013a, 2013b). 5 see for example, cornell’s liberal feminism informed by psychoanalytic feminism (1998); nussbaum’s liberal feminism informed by radical feminism (1999); and bhandary’s liberal feminism informed by care ethics (2016). 6 i discuss how the basic structure is understood in liberal feminism in section 3.3. until then we must rely on an intuitive sense of the distinction between society’s basic structure and its many parts. 7 the values i have in mind are liberty and freedom, self-determination and autonomy, and equality and fairness. 8 by ‘internal workings’ i mean the way a social arrangement distributes the benefits and burdens of that arrangement. i discuss internal workings in section 1. 9 such as the rule of law, democracy, and prioritized equal basic rights. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 stated in this way, the definition will probably not surprise anyone. i show, however, that the definition has quite surprising and significant implications (which i explore in section 2). it implies that some doctrines commonly thought to be challenges to liberal feminism may actually be versions of it, and that some disagreement presented as disagreement with liberal feminism might be better described as disagreement within liberal feminism; and it allows that more than one label may be appropriate for a given doctrine, so a doctrine can be both a kind of liberal feminism and a kind of care ethics, a kind of liberal feminism and a kind of social conservatism, a kind of liberal feminism and a kind of socialist feminism, and so on. indeed, the definition suggests that liberal feminism is neither one doctrine nor a narrow range of doctrines; it is, instead, a capacious family of doctrines. three ideas are important to the capacious account’s definition: the idea of just internal workings, the idea of a just basic structure, and the idea that just internal workings are necessary to a just basic structure. section 1 introduces the idea of internal workings. section 3 explores all three ideas, showing that there are at least three ways internal workings may be thought to be just, two ways we might conceive of the relationship between just internal workings and a just basic structure, and four ways we might conceive of a just basic structure. i also distinguish, in section 3, between ideal and non-ideal theory, that is, between liberal feminist accounts of a fully just society on the one hand, and liberal feminist accounts of permissible or required remedial measures on the other. i present these as options for liberal feminist theory. which options a liberal feminist endorses determines, first, how she understands the scope of the liberal feminist claim to justice and, second, what she believes about how liberal feminist justice is to be secured and sustained. there is a substantial literature on the scope of the liberal feminist claim to justice and on how liberal feminist justice is to be secured and sustained.10 but the discussion in section 3 shows that significantly greater precision is both possible and advisable. for example, while liberal feminism is associated with the claim that the family must be just, the literature does not make clear whether that means a liberal ethos must guide the conduct of family members or whether family members’ responding to coercive state incentives suffices; nor does the literature make clear whether just families are constitutive of a just basic structure, or whether injustice in families might be compatible with a just basic structure so long as the injustice is compensated for. and while there is much discussion in the literature of measures the state might take, it is often unclear whether such proposals emerge from ideal or non-ideal liberal feminist theory, that is, whether they should be understood as claims about what a fully just liberal feminist society might look like or about what 10 for overviews of liberal feminism, see abbey (2011) and baehr (2013b). 3 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 remedial measures are permitted or required to bring us closer to such a society. finally, it is unclear whether the claim that the family is part of the basic structure entails that the state should secure justice in the family; that is, there is, in the literature, an ambiguity concerning the relationship between the demand that the basic structure be just and the claim that such justice should be secured with the state’s coercive power. the discussion in section 3 provides a conceptual framework with which we can think with more precision about these issues going forward. the capacious account of liberal feminism consists in the definition explored in section 2 and the conceptual framework laid out in section 3.11 the account is capacious in the sense that—in contrast to accounts that caricature—it conceives of liberal feminism as a family of doctrines encompassing diverse views and theoretical commitments. at the same time—and as an antidote to the vagueness one might expect from a capacious account—it provides a fine-grained conceptual vocabulary with which to think further about liberal feminism. perhaps the most important implication of the capacious account is that there is little sense in criticizing or defending liberal feminism simpliciter. the capacious account both requires and makes it possible for us to eschew such talk. it forces us, advocates and critics of liberal feminism alike, to choose our targets carefully. the hope is that the greater specificity afforded by this account will support the work of feminist political philosophy, which is to think carefully about the aims and strategies of the women’s movement. section 1 i begin by introducing the idea of internal workings. by ‘internal workings’ i mean the way a social arrangement distributes the benefits and burdens of that arrangement, where ‘the way’ refers to both the mechanism responsible for the distribution (as in ‘how did benefits and burdens get to be distributed like that?’) and the distribution that results (as in ‘who has how much of which benefits and burdens?’). consider these examples of internal workings: the way families distribute educational resources, leisure, and domestic and caregiving work; the way workplaces distribute decision-making power, tasks, and wages; the way religious associations distribute shame and esteem. all liberal feminist doctrines hold that, for society’s basic structure to be just, the internal workings of all social arrangements must lack coercively enforced gender hierarchy or traditional gender roles. by a ‘coercively enforced’ arrangement, a liberal feminist could mean that some agent makes choosing against it either 11 the aim of the paper is to present the capacious account and to offer some reasons for thinking it plausible. i do not mount a full defense of the account here— so, for example, i do not compare it to others in the literature. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 physically impossible or issues a credible threat to take away something to which one is entitled.12 we will call ‘minimally just’ those social arrangements that lack gender hierarchy and traditional gender roles that are coercively enforced in this sense either by the state or, by omission of state action, by private actors. some liberal feminists add to this that a social arrangement is coercively enforced when failure to comply means serious informal social sanction, when failure to comply will result in serious material deprivation, and/or when the capacity to assess one’s own preferences and imagine life otherwise is lacking.13 in contrast to internal workings being minimally just, internal workings that also lack coercion in this broader sense may be called ‘procedurally just.’ (while internal workings being minimally just depends on what the state does, internal workings being procedurally just depends also on a host of features of the larger society in which they are situated, for example on the availability of material resources, on the homogeneity of the culture, and on the readiness of society’s members to mete out informal sanctions.) however, a liberal feminist could mean a third thing by ‘just internal workings’: that benefits and burdens are distributed in a particular way, say equally or fairly, in a way that is acceptable to all parties (hampton 1993), or in a way that does not track gender (okin 1989, 103). call internal workings that are just in this way ‘substantively just.’ if internal workings must be substantively just, then some internal workings could be unjust even if coercion of either kind mentioned above is absent. here are some examples to illustrate these three different things a liberal feminist might mean by ‘just internal workings.’ first, imagine a family in which benefits and burdens are distributed in a gender hierarchical way—men monopolize authority, leisure, and educational resources, for example—but which adults are neither physically unable to exit nor are they threatened with the loss of something to which they are entitled as the cost of exiting. such a family counts as minimally just. now imagine a family which women and men can exit without serious informal social sanction or material deprivation, and imagine that alternatives to the arrangement are available to the imaginations of all family members. such a family is procedurally just. finally, imagine a family that distributes benefits and burdens equally or fairly or in a way that does not track gender, for example, a family in which members share domestic and caregiving work, enjoy equal shares of educational resources and leisure, and so on. such a family is substantively just.14 12 there are, of course, a range of views about what people are entitled to. 13 see, for example, chambers (2008, 263–264), cudd (2006, 234–235), mackenzie (2000), and meyers (2002, 168). 14 workplaces, religious associations, and other parts of associational life can also be just in these ways. 5 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 we explore justice in internal workings because a key claim of liberal feminist doctrines is that the justice of the basic structure15 depends (in part) on justice in internal workings. all liberal feminist doctrines hold that minimal justice in internal workings of all parts of associational life is necessary for a just basic structure, and some liberal feminist doctrines hold that procedural and/or substantive justice in some internal workings is also necessary. this is one liberal feminist meaning of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political.’ we explore justice in internal workings also because some liberal feminists add that internal workings should be procedurally or substantively just apart from or beyond what is necessary for a just basic structure. this is another liberal feminist meaning of the slogan ‘the personal is political.’ section 2 this section explores the capacious account’s definition by showing what sorts of doctrines it sweeps into the family of liberal feminist doctrines. my focus is on some doctrines commonly thought to be challenges to liberal feminism: care ethics, social conservatism, and socialist feminism. i show that some versions of these doctrines may be understood as members of the liberal feminist family and appropriately referred to with compound labels (sections 2.1 and 2.3). i show also that the definition rules out some doctrines informed by care ethics, social conservatism, and libertarianism (section 2.2). section 2.1 consider care ethics. care ethics has been widely understood as a challenge to liberalism,16 and thus to liberal feminism. but some construals of care ethics may amount to doctrines that are part of the liberal feminist family. a doctrine may be liberal feminist and take the value of care on board. recall the first part of idea a: whatever else it does, society’s basic structure should satisfy liberal values—that is, should be just. now consider a doctrine that holds that a just distribution of care is among the feminist ends that a just basic structure realizes.17 let’s say such a doctrine holds that care for those who require it to survive and thrive is a benefit and a burden of social cooperation; it is a benefit to those who require it—all of us at some times in our lives—and to those who care about those who require it; and it is a burden insofar as it is socially necessary labor, and providing it may conflict with other goods to which one is entitled. consider a doctrine that says that a just basic 15 we explore the basic structure in section 3.3 16 see, for example, held (2005, chapter 5) and slote (2015). 17 see, for example, baehr (2004a, 2014), bhandary (2016), hartley and watson (2010), and lloyd (1998). 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 structure assures that each receives the care she or he needs, assures that all have the ability to provide or procure care for their dependents, and distributes the burden of caregiving fairly within families and across society. on our definition, to count as liberal feminist a doctrine that includes these claims must also hold that a just basic structure—including a just distribution of care—may be legitimately realized only through the exercise of the people’s power channeled through the institutions of constitutional democracy. if there are people who hold a view like this—and surely there are—they are liberal feminists, and it would be appropriate to refer to them as care-ethical liberal feminists or liberal care ethicists. there is indeed a conflict between a liberal feminist doctrine that recommends liberal values in more than a minimal sense for the internal workings of much of associational life and a doctrine that rejects those values in favor of the values of a care-ethical doctrine for those internal workings. imagine the former recommends that arrangements be mutually acceptable or distribute benefits and burdens fifty-fifty. and imagine that the latter, by contrast, recommends responsiveness and attentiveness to the particular needs of the other. this is indeed a conflict. but our definition of liberal feminism allows that a doctrine can be liberal feminist even if it rejects liberal values—in anything more than the minimal sense— for the internal workings of social arrangements, so long as it holds a and b.18 so those who endorse care-ethical values for internal workings, but also endorse ideas a and b—and there is no reason to think there aren’t such people—are liberal feminist. it would be appropriate to refer to their doctrines also as care-ethical liberal feminism or liberal care ethics. some have argued that care ethics is committed to a relational conception of the self and to a view of society as a system of nested dependencies (kittay 1999), while liberalism is committed to an individualist conception of the self and a conception of society as a mere aggregate of self-interested, independent individuals (jaggar 1983).19 but this is not accurate. liberals may help themselves to either set of conceptions as an ontological matter, or to some other set. if society is a system of nested dependencies, we may still insist that the system be just. if individuals are relational selves, we may still insist—in fact it may be all the more important to insist—that the relations that constitute them not be unjust. consider now classical liberal feminism.20 classical liberal feminism holds that a just distribution of income and wealth is the distribution that results from the workings of the marketplace (free of force and fraud) with state intervention sufficient to protect public goods such as competitive markets and the institutions of 18 that is, a doctrine does not have to endorse idea c to be liberal feminist. 19 mcclain argues that this is a caricature of liberalism (1991). 20 some refer to this as call “equity feminism” (see baehr 2013b, section 2.2.3). 7 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 constitutional democracy. it holds also that a society may be just so long as the internal workings of the arrangements of associational life are minimally just; so, on this view, a society can be just even if traditional gender norms operate in internal workings to produce gendered distributions of benefits and burdens. socially conservative equity feminism adds that individuals should voluntarily accept traditional gender roles in workplaces, families, etc.21 the capacious account’s definition allows us to see that this doctrine counts as liberal feminist: while it rejects idea c, it endorses ideas a and b. one might resist calling this view feminist. but it does insist on one feminist end: the repudiation of the coercive enforcement of gender hierarchy and traditional gender roles. that is surely a very minimal feminist end, but it is a feminist end all the same.22 finally, consider this additional way a doctrine can count as liberal feminist: a comprehensive doctrine can be liberal feminist if it gives adherents reason to endorse a political liberal doctrine that has feminist content (baehr 2013a, 151). a political liberal doctrine is one that is narrow and shallow; it is narrow in the sense that it applies only to the basic structure of society, and shallow in the sense that it is grounded not in the particular values of some comprehensive doctrine but in values shareable by citizens holding diverse but reasonable comprehensive doctrines.23 we may call the feminist content of a political liberal doctrine “political liberal feminism.”24 its role “is to guide efforts to use state power to feminist ends” (2013a, 165n1). a care-ethical doctrine or a socially conservative doctrine (or even an ecofeminist or a radical feminist doctrine) could have reason to endorse a political liberal doctrine with feminist content simply because the latter is merely an account of the just uses of coercive state power (including to feminist ends) and not a full account of the proper aims of the women’s movement, of associational life generally, or of good lives. the point here is not to insist that there are people who hold such versions of these doctrines; it is rather to show that, if there are, such people count as liberal feminists. this subsection has shown that the capacious account’s definition allows some doctrines that recommend non-liberal values for the internal workings of much of social life—and for that reason are thought to be challenges to liberal 21 see, for example, morse (2001) and sommers (2000). 22 note that there is also ‘socially liberal equity feminism.’ it holds a, b and c in this way: significant internal workings should be more than minimally just, but the basic structure can be just even if internal workings are only minimally just. 23 on political liberalism, see rawls (1993). 24 for related work on political liberal feminism, see hartley and watson (2010) and schouten (2013). 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 feminism—to count as liberal feminist. it follows that, on the capacious account, some disagreement presented as disagreement with liberal feminism is better described as disagreement within liberal feminism. this suggests that multiple labels may be appropriate for a given doctrine; for example, on the capacious account, we may speak of care-ethical liberal feminism, socially conservative liberal feminism, perhaps even liberal radical feminism, and so on. section 2.2 the capacious account does not sweep in all feminist doctrines, of course. i lack space for a comprehensive discussion. but note that a care-ethical doctrine is not liberal feminist if it holds that justice is not the first virtue of the society’s basic structure, if it holds that the first virtue is instead the presence of caring relationships.25 and note that a socially conservative doctrine is not liberal feminist if it permits or requires that the state coercively enforce gender hierarchy or traditional gender roles, or permits or requires omission of state action aimed at preventing private actors from coercively doing so. libertarian feminism is an interesting case. i argued above that classical liberal feminism counts as liberal feminist. in an earlier work i equated classical liberal feminism and libertarian feminism (baehr 2013b, section 2). this would suggest that any and all libertarian feminisms are liberal feminist. but this is a mistake. before i can show this, we must fix terms. by ‘libertarianism,’ let us mean a family of doctrines prioritizing liberty and endorsing only a small state, and by ‘liberalism,’ let us mean a family of doctrines holding that society’s basic structure must be just and endorsing constitutional democracy. classical liberalism falls within both families; it prioritizes liberty and endorses a rather small state, but also endorses constitutional democracy. in contrast, some libertarian feminisms do not endorse constitutional democracy; such doctrines are not liberal feminist. to see this, imagine that a man and an impoverished woman draw up a contract (uncoerced in the minimal sense) in which the woman promises obedience in perpetuity in exchange for the man’s financial support of her and her children. let’s say the contract provides, among other things, that the woman grant him sexual access, develop her talents in ways that further his ends, and vote for candidates he prefers—all in perpetuity. state enforcement of this contract would deprive the woman of many of the protections to which the institutions of constitutional democracy entitle her, for example the right to vote her conscience, to equality of opportunity, and to bodily integrity. a doctrine that says such a contract is enforceable is not liberal feminist. some libertarian doctrines hold that 25 for exploration of such a view, see held (1987). 9 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 such subordination contracts are indeed enforceable.26 those that do don’t count as liberal feminist. this subsection has shown that while the capacious account sweeps in a number of doctrines commonly thought to be challenges to liberal feminism, it excludes doctrines that reject justice as the first virtue of the basic structure, doctrines that endorse or allow coercive enforcement of gender hierarchy or traditional gender arrangements, and doctrines that deny the protections of constitutional democracy. section 2.3 as we have seen, classical liberal feminists hold that a just distribution of income and wealth simply is what results from the operations of a particular allocative mechanism, namely the marketplace (adjusted to promote competitive markets, to assure no force or fraud, and to sustain the institutions of constitutional democracy). there are of course other, more demanding liberal accounts of justice in the distribution of income and wealth. think, for example, of rawls’s difference principle that says that inequalities in income and wealth are just only if they are to the benefit of the least well off (2001, 42–43). liberal feminists who endorse a demanding account, like this rawlsian principle (or some other), could endorse the free market as the proper allocative mechanism if the free market consistently allocated income and wealth in ways that satisfy a demanding account of income and wealth equality. but short of that unlikely event, liberal feminists who endorse a demanding account of justice in the distribution of income and wealth may find themselves choosing between other allocative mechanisms, for example welfarestate capitalism, liberal socialism, and property-owning democracy. in welfare state capitalism, the results of the marketplace, adjusted as described above, are subject to ex post redistribution downwards from the rich and affluent to the less well off. in property-owning democracy, ownership of productive assets is, ex ante, spread widely across society’s members. in liberal socialism, there is shared ownership and democratic stewardship by the people of society’s productive assets (2001, 138– 139). 26 for a libertarian argument in favor of voluntary slavery, see block (2003). block provides a nice overview of the libertarian debate about voluntary slavery (see especially 41n5). of interest is also samuel freeman’s discussion; freeman’s view seems to be that libertarianism entails that one may alienate one’s freedom through contract (2001, 131; see also 133–134). i claim here only that there are versions of libertarianism that do so, and that they are not liberal. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 i lack space to explore these in any depth.27 but note that a liberal feminist holding a demanding account of income and wealth equality may think that democratic socialism or property-owning democracy are superior to both the free market and the welfare state. following rawls, she may think that the latter mechanisms violate “a principle of reciprocity” by permitting economic inequalities that are not to everyone’s benefit, and by allowing a few to control economic and political life (2001, 138). she may argue that free markets unjustly reward those who have access to the unpaid domestic labor of others. she may also note that (at least extant) welfare states perpetuate gender hierarchy by entrenching the lower status of care work—reducing women’s opportunities and increasing gendered income and wealth disparities—and moralistically regulating the lives poor women (abramovitz 1996). but a liberal feminist may also think that aspects of gender hierarchy could endure under property-owning democracy28 or democratic socialism as well.29 this is because they do not aim at reducing inequalities within families or at addressing the myriad ways gender hierarchy is sustained in the internal workings of the many parts of associational life. for example, they do not address female primary parenting and the inequalities within families born of this distribution of domestic labor, nor do they address the inequalities between families produced by female primary parenting plus single motherhood and workplaces arranged around the “male breadwinner model” (fraser 1994). so while a liberal feminist could endorse democratic socialism or property-owning democracy—and be a liberal socialist—she may do so while insisting on additional mechanisms to ensure that the internal workings of families, workplaces, and other key social arrangements are more than minimally just. this subsection has shown that while those who endorse markets as the proper allocative mechanism can count as liberal feminists, liberal feminists can also endorse more demanding accounts of distributive justice and thus endorse other allocative mechanisms, effectively making them liberal socialist feminists. that there are liberal socialist feminists is not altogether clear from the literature. those of us who call ourselves liberal feminists and endorse robust accounts of income and wealth equality have not written much about equality in wealth and income, 27 for a debate between feminist advocates of welfare state capitalism and democratic socialism, see cudd and holmstrom (2011). 28 ingrid robeyns (2012) argues that arrangements of property-owning democracy might run at cross-purposes to arrangements required for a just distribution of care work. 29 for relevant concerns, see ferguson and hennessey (2016). 11 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 perhaps leaving the impression that we endorse the free market or the welfare state.30 our focus on examples like fifty-fifty sharing of domestic labor—as somehow key to gender equality—has not helped. focus on the fifty-fifty sharing example (which i indulge in below!) may leave the impression that liberal feminists think that inequalities between families in income and wealth are not a problem. also, focus on fifty-fifty sharing of domestic and caregiving work assumes a resident domestic partner and thus ignores the substantial numbers of women who are raising children and caring for other relatives without a resident partner, perhaps—given how class tends to track marital status—revealing class bias. section 2 has shown that the capacious account’s definition of liberal feminism sweeps in a variety of doctrines, including some thought to be challenges to liberal feminism, and allows us to use more than one label to describe liberal feminist doctrines—for example, care-ethical liberal feminism, socially conservative liberal feminism, classical liberal feminism, and liberal socialist feminism. section 2 has also shown that the definition rules out doctrines that reject justice as the first virtue of the basic structure, doctrines that endorse or allow coercive enforcement of gender hierarchy or traditional gender arrangements, and doctrines that deny the protections of constitutional democracy. section 3 this section clarifies three ideas at work in the previous section: the idea of just internal workings, the idea that just internal workings are necessary for a just basic structure, and the idea of the basic structure. i show here that there are at least three ways internal workings may be thought to be just, two ways we might conceive of the relationship between just internal workings and a just basic structure, and four ways we might conceive of a just basic structure. i also distinguish here between ideal and non-ideal theory, that is, between liberal feminist accounts of a fully just society on the one hand, and liberal feminist accounts of permissible or required remedial measures on the other. these distinctions allow us to see options for feminist theory that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. these are important because which options a liberal feminist endorses reflects, first, how she understands the scope of the liberal feminist claim to justice and, second, what she believes about how liberal feminist justice is to be secured and sustained. attention to these options should lend greater specificity to our discussion of liberal feminism going forward. 30 a notable exception is anne phillips’s discussion of egalitarianism and markets in goods and labor (phillips 2008). 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 section 3.1 i explained in section 1 that by ‘internal workings,’ i mean the way a social arrangement distributes the benefits and burdens of that arrangement. i also distinguished between internal workings being minimally, procedurally, and substantively just. but what mechanisms could be responsible for a just distribution? one could think that the internal workings of some social arrangement can count as just only if individuals in the relevant arrangement hold and act on liberal values. that is, one might think that internal workings can be just only if a liberal ethos is at work31—for example only if parents value their daughters’ education as much as their sons’. alternatively, one could think that a social arrangement could be just as a result of incentives. incentives could be coercive; for example, the state could require that families distribute educational resources evenly between boy and girl children, so when families do so because of the incentive they are just. incentives could also be noncoercive; for instance, feminist activists could create institutions that alter others’ incentive structure, say by making family planning services available and changing parents’ expectations for girl children’s opportunities, and thus changing their decisions about allocating educational resources. there is also a third possibility: some social arrangement could be just because, for lack of a better term, some invisible hand is at work.32 so for example women and men might have equal authority within some religious association simply because there is a dearth of willing and able men. distinguishing between ideal and non-ideal liberal feminist theory can shed some light on these options. let us say that liberal feminist ideal theories describe some fully just internal workings and a fully just liberal feminist society; and liberal feminist non-ideal theories describe what justice permits or requires under conditions of injustice, that is, what may or should be done to move from unjust to more just arrangements.33 one might think that all feminist political theory, including liberal feminist political theory, is non-ideal theory because it emerged as a response to actually existing injustice. to be sure, a main concern of liberal feminist doctrines is proposing remedies for actually existing injustice. but liberal feminist doctrines can be, and indeed some are, concerned with thinking through what a fully just liberal feminist society might be like. so the capacious account includes both non-ideal and ideal liberal feminist theories. some critics worry that ideal 31 for relevant discussion of ethos, see chambers (2013, 90; 2008); cohen (2008, 138); neufeld and van schoelandt (2014). 32 by ‘invisible hand,’ i mean a force, other than coercive incentives or a liberal ethos, that produces just internal workings. 33 there is a substantial literature on the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. for a selection of feminist work on the distinction, see tessman (2009). 13 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 theory, if it is liberal, must lose sight of gender, and thus any liberal feminist ideal theory will fail to adequately conceptualize a society that lacks gender injustice; and any liberal feminist non-ideal theory will fail to propose adequate remedies.34 this is an important issue; and i lack space to fully address it. for our purposes here, note simply that it is not obvious that a liberal feminist ideal theory cannot be informed by an accurate account of how gender injustice is produced and sustained in real societies; so it is not obvious that a liberal feminist ideal theory cannot include an adequate account of the mechanisms that may be necessary to produce and sustain gender justice in a fully just society; nor is it obvious that a liberal feminist non-ideal theory cannot propose efficacious remedies. consider now ethos, incentives, and invisible hands in the light of the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. one could hold that, for the basic structure to be just, the internal workings of many of the arrangements of social life must be procedurally and/or substantively just, but hold that this more-than-minimal justice is sustained by ethos or noncoercive incentives or invisible hands, but not by coercive incentives, in a fully just society. one could partner this claim in ideal theory with the claim in non-ideal theory that, under conditions of injustice, coercive measures (if effective) are indeed permitted or even required. an alternative is to hold the same ideal-theoretical view as above, but to partner it with the claim in non-ideal theory that coercive measures are not permissible to secure anything more than minimal justice in internal workings. on this view, the more-than-minimal justice in internal workings that ideal theory requires may be pursued only noncoercively in both fully just and not-fully just societies. this view makes achievement of a fully just liberal feminist society a matter of good fortune, since while coercive measures can ensure that a threshold is reached, only if we are lucky will a combination of ethos, noncoercive feminist activism, and invisible hands do the same. a further option is to hold that in a fully just liberal feminist society some internal workings are procedurally and/or substantively just, and that this justice is guaranteed by coercive measures. on this view, coercive measures are not only part of non-ideal theory—not only permissible as remedies under conditions of injustice—but play a role in maintaining some just internal workings in a fully just liberal feminist society. this is akin to the way liberal theories commonly foresee, in a fully just society, on-going coercive enforcement of a just distribution of liberties, opportunities, and income and wealth.35 so, on this view the fully just society has mechanisms that continually, and where necessary coercively, incentivize morethan-minimal justice in some internal workings. 34 see schwartzman (2006) and mills (2012). 35 for rawls’s version of this point, see rawls (1993, 284). 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 while the claim that the internal workings of parts of associational life should be just is common in the liberal feminist literature, it is often not clear whether that means that a liberal ethos must be at work or whether conformity due to incentives (or even some invisible hand) may suffice. this ambiguity is exacerbated by the fact that the literature does not sufficiently appreciate the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. thus it is often not clear whether the measures we find defended in the literature are intended as remedial measures to bring us closer to a fully just society, or as descriptions of such a fully just society itself. the distinctions laid out in this section make it possible for us to speak with more specificity about these matters; they are part of the more fine-grained conceptual vocabulary the capacious account provides. section 3.2 as we have seen, liberal feminist doctrines hold that internal workings being just is necessary for a just basic structure. but there are at least two ways this necessary relationship may be understood. consider first that some particular internal workings being just could be partly constitutive of the justice of the basic structure, in which case, the basic structure cannot be just unless those particular internal workings are just.36 or alternatively, some just internal workings could be contingently necessary for a just basic structure, in which case, some just internal workings are necessary for a just basic structure if they compensate for some other, unjust, arrangements—that is, so long as they cancel out the unjust effects of some other arrangement. for example, you might think that fifty-fifty sharing of domestic and caregiving work is constitutive of a just basic structure so the basic structure is not just unless there is fifty-fifty sharing. but, alternatively, you could think that fiftyfifty sharing is contingently necessary if it compensates for some other arrangement, say workplaces not accommodating caregiving responsibilities. say you think fifty-fifty sharing of domestic and caregiving work is partly constitutive of a just basic structure. perhaps you’d think then that a fully just society would have fifty-fifty sharing but that non-ideal theory can settle for a thirtyseventy arrangement, so long as it is compensated for by some other arrangement (such as ‘on-ramps’ easing the re-entry of caregivers to the workforce after a hiatus), and so long as the compensatory arrangement is likely to move us closer to fifty-fifty. but an alternative is to hold that a fully just society may have compensatory arrangements—so, for example, a fully just society could have thirtyseventy sharing, so long as it also has on-ramps. in this case the compensatory scheme’s justness doesn’t depend on it bringing about a fifty-fifty distribution. 36 the capacious account says that all internal workings being minimally just is partly constitutive of a just basic structure. 15 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 while the claim is common in the liberal feminist literature that justice in internal workings is necessary for the justice of the basic structure, it is often not clear whether what is meant is that some particular just internal workings are constitutive of, or merely contingently necessary for, that just basic structure. this ambiguity is exacerbated by insufficient attention to the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. the options laid out in this section make it possible for us to speak with greater specificity about these matters going forward; they are also part of the more fine-grained conceptual vocabulary the capacious account provides. section 3.3 the capacious account’s definition says that the basic structure must be just. but there are a variety of ways liberal feminists may understand a just basic structure. i lay out these four ways on a map with two axes. the north-south axis concerns whether the basic structure is the set of arrangements that would be coercively guaranteed by the state in a fully just society, or whether it includes also arrangements that would be noncoercively secured. in the north, we have the view that a just basic structure is the set of social arrangements that would be coercively guaranteed by the state in a fully just society. this view of the basic structure makes intuitive sense: coercion is permissible only if just, and just arrangements have an urgency that calls for the kind of guarantee only state coercion can provide. since one thing a set of coerced social arrangements does is produce social positions, such social positions must be just. and given the urgency of the social positions justice calls for, they must be guaranteed, if necessary coercively. on this view, those “aspects” of the internal workings of social arrangements that deserve to be coercively guaranteed are part of the basic structure (neufeld and van schoelandt 2014, 88). social arrangements that would not be coercively guaranteed in a fully just society are not part of the basic structure. a just basic structure is the set of arrangements that would be coercively guaranteed by the state in a fully just society. a just basic structure is the set of arrangements that would characterize a fully just society, including those guaranteed coercively by the state and those noncoercively secured by the state or by non-state actors. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 in the south, we have the view that the basic structure consists of social arrangements that would characterize a fully just society, whether guaranteed with state power or secured with noncoercive incentives or with ethos (or even some invisible hand). this understanding of the basic structure reflects the insight that social arrangements produce social positions whether coercively secured or not.37 it severs the tie between coercion and justice; it allows that to say that some arrangement is required by justice is not necessarily to say it would be secured with coercion in a fully just society. the east-west axis concerns whether a just basic structure is the way the internal workings of social arrangements produce the status of equal citizens—call this status an emergent entity, produced by, but not reducible to, a set of internal workings—or whether a just basic structure consists in the internal workings of profoundly influential social arrangements. in the west, we have what clare chambers calls “the whole-structure view,” according to which “the site of justice is the interactive whole, not the isolated component parts” (2013, 87). for the interactive whole to be just, it might be the case that some (or even all) of the parts must be just. but whether some particular internal workings must be just depends on how they interact with others to produce the status of equal citizenship. the view in the east is that the basic structure consists in those profoundly influential internal workings themselves. on this view when we say that the basic structure must be just we mean that the internal workings of each of the profoundly influential social arrangements must be just. the description of the two axes above allows us to draw a map of possible things liberal feminists could mean when they say that the basic structure must be just. 37 on this issue, see cohen (2008, 136). a just basic structure is the way a set of arrangements creates equal citizenship. a just basic structure consists in the internal workings of profoundly influential social arrangements. 17 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 what must be just are those internal workings coercively guaranteed by the state from which equal citizenship emerges. what must be just are the internal workings of the profoundly influential social arrangements that deserve to be coercively guaranteed by the state. what must be just are those internal workings—coercively guaranteed by the state, but also noncoercively secured by the state and by non-state actors—from which equal citizenship emerges. what must be just are the internal workings of profoundly influential social arrangements that deserve to be coercively guaranteed by the state, but also noncoercively secured by the state and by non-state actors. the liberal feminist view in the northwest says that just coercive state power guarantees the social arrangements that allow equal citizenship to emerge. the view in the northeast says that just coercive power guarantees justice in the internal workings of profoundly influential social arrangements. the view in the southwest says that the basic structure is the way equal citizenship emerges out of the interaction of a set of just arrangements, some coercively and some noncoercively secured. and the view in the southeast says that the basic structure consists in the many internal workings of profoundly influential social arrangements, whether coercively or noncoercively secured, whether by the state or by non-state actors. which view of the basic structure one adopts reflects what one takes to be the scope of liberal feminist claims to justice. note also that one’s account of what must be just will effect what remedial measures one will recommend. remedying coercive arrangements so that they conspire with other coercive arrangements to produce equal citizenship may be quite different from remedying noncoercive arrangements to the same end. and remedying arrangements so that they realize equal citizenship may be quite different from remedying arrangements that are profoundly influential.38 consider susan okin’s (1989) liberal feminism in light of this map. okin does not distinguish clearly between ideal and non-ideal theory, so this is tricky. if we take okin to be doing ideal theory, we should say that she thinks the basic structure includes more than the set of arrangements that would be coercively secured in a fully just society. she tells us that principles of justice apply directly to the family, but she also thinks that saying this does not mean endorsing coercive measures to fully realize family justice. for example, okin endorses coerced paycheck sharing 38 of course, we are assuming here that ‘profoundly influential’ and ‘necessary for citizenship’ are not synonymous. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 (1989, 180–181), but thinks the fifty-fifty sharing of domestic work, which justice also requires, should not be coercively secured (1989, 171). so okin does not hold a view in the north. since she suggests that the family is profoundly influential, perhaps she holds the view in the southeast. but okin says also that the family should be just because of the effect family injustice has on equality of opportunity of citizens more generally; this suggests that she holds the view in the southwest. my own view is that okin oscillates between the southeast and southwest, but i lack space here to make that case.39 note that doctrines that fall in the south may include an account of when coercive state power is justly used, but unlike doctrines that fall in the north, they don’t use the concept of the basic structure to anchor it. views in the south conceive of arrangements that must be coercively secured as a subset of just arrangements. think here of john stuart mill’s discussion in the fifth chapter of utilitarianism; on mill’s telling, although the idea of justice brings with it a kind of urgency and a sense that coercion might be appropriate, a further test is needed to determine whether coercion is justified in some particular case (mill 1979). mill’s test, of course, is the utility principle. okin’s liberal feminism falls in the south, but she does not provide us with a principled account of when coercive power is and is not permissible or required. this has led to confusion on the part of critics of okin who have thought she is endorsing an intrusive feminist state. work remains to be done to explain how liberal feminist doctrines that fall in the south can respond to this worry. one might think that political liberal feminism provides a clear contrast with okin and falls in the northwest. indeed, my own characterization of political liberal feminism above (section 2.1) suggests that it concerns exclusively the just uses of coercive state power to feminist ends. blain neufeld and chad van schoelandt’s political liberal feminism does as well (neufeld and van schoelandt 2014, 81–82). christie hartley and lori watson’s political liberal feminism provides an interesting contrast. they take political liberal feminism to concern those arrangements necessary for equal citizenship, and on their view, equal citizenship requires “substantive equality . . . along various dimensions of social life” (hartley and watson 2010, 2).40 we might understand hartley and watson to be saying that a just basic structure consists in the particular mix of coercively secured more-thanminimally just internal workings necessary to allow equal citizenship to emerge. this would place their view in the northwest. but there is reason to believe that hartley and watson’s view falls in the southwest. if we are doing ideal theory, we might 39 see also neufeld and van schoelandt’s related discussion of okin (neufeld and van schoelandt 2014). 40 see also hartley and watson (forthcoming). 19 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 want to say that at least some of the “substantive equality” hartley and watson think necessary for equal citizenship must be secured by ethos and not by coercive incentives. i lack the space to explore this issue further. i note only that if political liberal feminism can fall only in the northwest, it contributes to the women’s movement only an account of those ends the women’s movement should seek to realize through the agency of the coercive state. but if political liberal feminism can fall also in the southwest, it can offer the women’s movement a broader agenda. the distinctions laid out in section 3 have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. thus, as i show in section 3.1, when liberal feminist doctrines concern themselves with justice in the internal workings of the family—or some other part of associational life—it is not clear whether we are to understand that they are just only if a liberal ethos is at work or whether coercive measures, or even invisible hands, suffice. as i show in section 3.2, when liberal feminist doctrines concern themselves with the necessary relationship between justice in internal workings and the justice of the basic structure, it often not clear whether we are to understand justice in internal workings as constitutive of, or as merely contingently necessary for, a just basic structure. as i suggest in section 3.1, when liberal feminist doctrines propose measures to secure liberal feminist justice, it is often not clear whether they mean to propose remedial measures to bring society closer to a fully just liberal feminist society or to describe that fully just society itself. and finally, as i show in section 3.3, when liberal feminist doctrines claim that society’s basic structure must be just, it is often not clear whether what is being described is a set of arrangements the state must secure and sustain with its coercive power or a broader set of arrangements, some secured by coercive state action and some by an ethos embraced by non-state actors. by making these distinctions and laying out these options, the capacious account provides a fine-grained conceptual vocabulary with which to think about liberal feminism going forward. conclusion i have presented an account of liberal feminism as an alternative to accounts that suffer from caricature or vagueness. the account avoids caricature by being capacious, conceiving of liberal feminism as a family of doctrines encompassing diverse views and theoretical commitments. the account avoids the vagueness one might expect from a capacious account by providing a fine-grained conceptual vocabulary with which to think about liberal feminism. since there is such variety within the liberal feminist family of doctrines, it makes little sense to criticize or defend liberal feminism simpliciter. the capacious account both requires and makes it possible for us to eschew such talk. advocates and critics of liberal feminism alike would do better to focus instead on the particular doctrines they have in mind. the 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 hope is that the greater specificity afforded by this account will support the work of feminist political philosophy, which is to think carefully about the aims and strategies of the women’s movement. works cited abbey, ruth. 2011. the return of feminist liberalism. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press. abramovitz, mimi. 1996. regulating the lives of women: social welfare policy from colonial times to the present. boston: south end press. baehr, amy r. 2002. “liberalism in contemporary feminist political philosophy and philosophy of law.” american philosophical association newsletter 2 (1): 150–154. ———. 2004a. “feminist politics and feminist pluralism: can we do feminist political theory without theories of gender?” journal of political philosophy 12 (4): 411–436. ———, ed. 2004b. varieties of feminist liberalism. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. ———. 2013a. “liberal feminism: political and comprehensive.” in feminist interpretations of john rawls, edited by ruth abbey, 150–166. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2013b. "liberal feminism." in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta. winter 2013 edition. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/feminism-liberal/. ———. 2014. “reflections on zona vallance’s ‘women as moral beings.’” ethics 125 (1): 200–203. bhandary, asha. 2016. “liberal dependency care.” journal of philosophical research 41:43–68. ———. 2015. “the arrow of care.” unpublished manuscript on file with the author. block, walter. 2003. “toward a libertarian theory of inalienability: a critique of rothbart, barnett, smith, kinsella, gordon and epstein.” journal of libertarian studies 17 (2): 39–85. chambers, clare. 2008. sex, culture, and justice: the limits of choice. university park: pennsylvania state university press. ———. 2013. “the family as a basic institution: a feminist analysis of the basic structure as subject.” in feminist interpretations of john rawls, edited by ruth abbey, 75–95. university park: pennsylvania state university press. cohen, gerald a. 2008. rescuing justice and equality. cambridge: harvard university press. 21 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/feminism-liberal/ cornell, drucilla. 1998. at the heart of freedom: feminism, sex and equality. princeton, nj: princeton university press. cudd, ann. 2006. analyzing oppression. new york: oxford university press. cudd, ann, and nancy holmstrom. 2011. capitalism, for and against: a feminist debate. oxford: oxford university press. ferguson, ann, and rosemary hennessy. 2016. "feminist perspectives on class and work." in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta. spring 2016 edition. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/feminism-class/. fraser, nancy. 1994. “after the family wage: gender equity and the welfare state.” political theory 22 (4): 591–618. freeman, samuel. 2001. “illiberal libertarians: why libertarianism is not a liberal view.” philosophy and public affairs 30 (2): 105–151. hampton, jean. 1993. “feminist contractarianism.” in a mind of one’s own, edited by louise antony and charlotte witt, 227–255. boulder, co: westview press. hartley, christie, and lori watson. 2010. “is a feminist political liberalism possible?” journal of ethics and social philosophy 5 (1): 1–21. ———. forthcoming. equal citizenship and public reason: a feminist political liberalism. new york: oxford university press. held, virginia. 1987. “non-contractual society: a feminist view.” in “supplementary volume 13: science, morality, and feminist theory,” special issue, canadian journal of philosophy 17 (suppl. 1): 111–137. ———. 2005. the ethics of care. oxford: oxford university press. jaggar, allison. 1983. feminist politics and human nature. totowa, nj: rowman and littlefield. kittay, eva. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality and dependency. new york: routledge. lloyd, s. a. 1998. “toward a liberal theory of sexual equality.” journal of contemporary legal issues 9 (spring): 203–224. mackenzie, catriona. 2000. “imagining oneself otherwise.” in relational autonomy: feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency and the social self, edited by catriona mackenzie and natalie stoljar, 124–150. new york: oxford university press. mcclain, linda. 1991. “atomistic man revisited: connection, liberalism and feminist jurisprudence.” southern california law review 65 (3): 1171–1264. meyers, diana. 2002. gender in the mirror: cultural images and women's agency. new york: oxford university press. mill, john stuart. 1979. utilitarianism. indianapolis: hackett publishing company. first published 1861. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.4 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/feminism-class/ mills, charles. 2012. “occupy liberalism.” radical philosophy review 15 (2): 305– 323. morse, jennifer roback. 2001. love and economics: why the laissez-faire family doesn’t work. dallas, tx: spence publishing. neufeld, blain, and chad van schoelandt. 2014. “political liberalism, ethos justice, and gender equality.” law and philosophy 33 (1): 75–104. nussbaum, martha. 1999. sex and social justice. new york: oxford university press. okin, susan. 1989. justice, gender and the family. new york: basic books. phillips, anne. 2008. “egalitarians and the market: dangerous ideals.” social theory and practice 34 (3): 439–462. rawls, john. 1993. political liberalism. new york: columbia university press. ———. 2001. justice as fairness: a restatement. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. robeyns, ingrid. 2012. “care, gender, and property-owning democracy.” in property-owning democracy: rawls and beyond, edited by martin o’neill and thad williamson, 163–179. malden, ma: blackwell. schouten, gina. 2013. “restricting justice. political interventions in the home and the market.” philosophy and public affairs 41 (4): 357–388. schwartzman, lisa. 2006. challenging liberalism: feminism as political critique. university park: pennsylvania state university press. slote, michael. 2015. “care ethics and liberalism.” in care ethics and political theory, edited by daniel engster and maurice hamington, 37–50. new york: oxford university press. sommers, christina hoff. 2000. the war against boys: how misguided feminism is harming our young men. new york: simon and schuster. tessman, lisa, ed. 2009. feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: theorizing the non-ideal. new york: springer. amy r. baehr is associate professor of philosophy at hofstra university where she teaches political philosophy, philosophy of law, and women’s studies. her work has appeared in journals including ethics, law and philosophy, hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, and the journal of political philosophy. her papers have also appeared in anthologies including the philosophy of rawls: a collection of essays (edited by henry s. richardson), feminist interpretations of john rawls (edited by ruth abbey) and the original position (edited by timothy hinton). she is editor of varieties of feminist liberalism and author of “liberal feminism” (stanford encyclopedia of philosophy). 23 baehr: capacious account of liberal feminism published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 a capacious account of liberal feminism amy r. baehr recommended citation a capacious account of liberal feminism if “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts: the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's full and equal inclusion in women's sport feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation ivy, veronica. 2021. “if ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts: the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's full and equal inclusion in women's sport.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (2). article 3. 2021 if “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts: the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's full and equal inclusion in women's sport veronica ivy drveronicaivy@gmail.com ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 if “ifs” and “buts” were candy and nuts: the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's full and equal inclusion in women's sport veronica ivy abstract it’s relatively easy to say that the debates about whether trans and intersex women athletes deserve full and equal inclusion in women’s sport is a contentious contemporary issue. i’ve already argued for the legal, ethical, and scientific basis for full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. in this paper, i want to analyze what i take to be a representative selection of recent arguments against full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. in short, these arguments tend to be based on mere assumption, unsupported “common sense,” straw arguments, fallacious question begging, and a number of hypotheticals and unsupported counterfactuals rather than established fact. essentially, they’re based on a lot of “ifs.” keywords: transgender, intersex, sport, human rights, sport as a human right, transphobia, intersexphobia, olympics, inclusion in sport, transgender athlete, women’s sport it’s relatively easy to say that the debates about whether trans and intersex women athletes deserve full and equal inclusion in women’s sport is a contentious contemporary issue. i’ve already argued for the legal, ethical, and scientific basis for full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport.1 in this paper, i want to analyze what i take to be a representative selection of recent arguments against full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport. in short, these arguments tend to be based on mere assumption, unsupported “common sense,” straw arguments, fallacious question begging, and a number of hypotheticals and unsupported counterfactuals rather than established fact. essentially, they’re based on a lot of “ifs.” 1 see ivy and conrad (2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 in deciding whether trans and intersex women should be allowed to compete as women, who has the burden of proof in the debate? the answer is clear: those who seek to exclude. the international olympic committee (ioc), the court of arbitration for sport (cas), and the un human rights council (unhrc) all clearly state that there is a human right to participate in competitive sport. as aryn conrad and i have noted (ivy and conrad 2018), this right includes the right for trans and intersex women to compete as women in women’s sport categories. for the purposes of sport, trans and intersex women are considered fully female. inclusion is the default. when it comes to human rights, those seeking to exclude have the ultimate burden of proof to justify access to the right. unfortunately, those who oppose trans and intersex women’s full and equal inclusion as women in women’s sport forget that they have the burden of proof in the debate. 1. the burden of proof is on the side seeking to exclude from a human right let me begin with the burden of proof. why would those who oppose trans and intersex women’s full and equal inclusion in women’s sport hold the burden of proof? the answer is that sport is a human right. according to whom, you might ask? the international olympic committee has, as its foundational document, the olympic charter (hereafter, “charter”), which has seven “fundamental principles of olympism” (ioc 2020). the fourth fundamental principle reads: the practice of sport is a human right. every individual must have the possibility of practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. (ioc 2020, 11) it’s important to note that the olympics is only concerned with competitive sport. so the right to sport isn’t merely about recreational or nonelite sport; rather, the olympics are only concerned with the most elite levels of competitive sport. thus, the right to sport is a right to competitive sport, even at the elite levels provided the athlete qualifies. the sixth fundamental principle is a nondiscrimination clause, which reads: the enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this olympic charter shall be secured without discrimination of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. (ioc 2020, 12) ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 there are a few things of note here. first, in many international legal jurisdictions, including the united kingdom, the united states of america, australia, canada, and others, the socially and legally relevant category “gender identity” is taken to be already subsumed under the category of “sex.”2 let’s pause for a moment to make this point clear: trans and intersex women are regularly legally recognized as being women, as being female. governments and sports organizations make no distinction between “sex” and “gender.” the terms are routinely used interchangeably and in combination. for example, the 2010 uk equality act uses language such as “the sex of a woman” and “the gender of a male.” trans and intersex women’s right to compete in women’s (or “female”) sport is a right to compete as women, as female, in women’s (or “female”) sports categories. returning to the charter, even if one were to reject this current legal fact, the sixth principle is explicitly open-ended: “or other status.” gender identity is indisputably a relevant social category upon which discrimination, harassment, and the need for social and legal protections obtains. third, both intersex status and gender identity could also be understood under the protections against discrimination on the basis of “birth,” but that is at this point superfluous. in their 2015 update, “ioc consensus meeting on sex reassignment and hyperandrogenism november 2015,”3 to their 2003 policy, “2003 stockholm 2 a summary of us case law can be found here: https://transequality.org/federalcase-law-on-transgender-people-and-discrimination. repeatedly, federal courts— including district and district appeals courts—have found that protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity are subsumed under title vii protections against discrimination on the basis of sex. a summary of canadian case law can be found here: https://www.vpl.ca/guide/legalinformation. federal bill c-16, an act to amend the canadian human rights act and the criminal code, explicitly protects trans people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity and expression. a summary of australian case law can be found here: https://humanrights.gov.au /quick-guide/12104. “the sex discrimination act makes it unlawful to treat a person less favourably than another person in a similar situation because of the genderrelated identity, appearance, mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of the person.” a summary of uk case law can be found here: http://www.gendertrust.org.uk /transgender-laws/. the 2010 uk equality act explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, and this has been repeatedly decided to include prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity. 3 https://stillmed.olympic.org/documents/commissions_pdffiles/medical _commission/2015-11_ioc_consensus_meeting_on_sex_reassignment_and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 consensus on sex reassignment in sports,”4 the ioc makes clear that intersex and trans athletes have equal rights to competitive sport. the 2015 document reads in part: since the 2003 stockholm consensus on sex reassignment in sports, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of autonomy of gender identity in society, as reflected in the laws of many jurisdictions worldwide. . . . it is necessary to ensure insofar as possible that trans athletes are not excluded from the opportunity to participate in sporting competition. again, the reference to “sporting competition” is explicit. and the policy goes on to list eligibility criteria for trans athletes—it does not list criteria for recognizing a trans female as female. trans women are treated as fully female by the ioc and all its member sporting federations. as explained elsewhere (ivy and conrad 2018), the legal structure of olympic and olympic-eligible sports (that is, sports that are, or seek to be, included in the olympics) must abide by the charter, including its nondiscrimination clause. moreover, the ioc, all olympic-eligible sports, and a few others, are under the unique jurisdiction of the court of arbitration for sport (cas). cas is an arms’ length arbitral body created by the ioc. it is effectively the supreme court for sport. cas has repeatedly ruled that intersex—and by extension trans—women have a right to sport, just like cisgender non-intersex women.5 they apply common frames of international human rights law and principles, whereby an athlete’s fundamental _hyperandrogenism-en.pdf. 4 https://stillmed.olympic.org/documents/reports/en/en_report_905.pdf. 5 although the semenya 2019 decision (mokgadi caster semenya v. international association of athletics federations (iaaf), & athletics south africa v. iaaf, [2019] court of arbitration for sport, cas 2018/o/5794 & cas 2018/o/5798) contradicted much of the reasoning in the chand 2015 case (dutee chand v. athletics federation of india (afi) & the international association of athletics federations (iaaf), [2015] court of arbitration for sport, cas 2014/a/3759), the right for intersex (and by extension) trans women to compete as women was affirmed. semenya 2019 merely allowed very specific testosterone regulations as an eligibility criterion for competition in women’s events—it did not rule that hyperandrogenic women are not women or that such women did not have the right to compete. while i have argued elsewhere (e.g., ivy and conrad 2018) that such female–female eligibility rules are unethical, and not supported by available science, nothing about sport being a human right was affected by the semenya case. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 right to competition may be overridden if doing so is in service of a worthy social goal, necessary and effective at promoting that goal, and the harm caused to the excluded group is proportional to the social benefit.6 excluding trans and intersex women on the basis of gender identity, sex, or other natural physical traits such as high endogenous testosterone (e.g., hyperandrogenism) are indisputably prima facie discrimination. truly, it is indisputable. as such, the sports body seeking to exclude such women from women’s competition has the ultimate burden of proof to show that the policy is necessary, effective, and proportional. the question is not whether trans and intersex women have a human right to competitive sport—that is not seriously in dispute except by those who misunderstand both the ethics and law of international human rights; rather, the question is whether the exclusion of trans and intersex women from women’s sport can be justified in an international human rights framework. in a nutshell, this is the “sport is a human right” argument. of course, i go into much more detail elsewhere (ivy and conrad 2018). but it can be summarized thusly: ● ioc charter says that participation in sport is a human right. ● ioc charter prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex “or other status.” ● gender identity and intersex status are covered by the protections against “sex” or “or other status” discrimination. ● international human rights law and ethics require those seeking to override a right to demonstrate that the policy is in service of a worthy goal, necessary and sufficient for achieving that goal, and the harm is proportional to the social benefit. ● trans and intersex women are medically, legally, and socially recognized as female.7 6 see the european convention on human rights: https://www.echr.coe.int /documents/convention_eng.pdf. 7 see also ivy (2019f). the terms “woman” and “female” will be used interchangeably for many reasons. first, i am not convinced that there is a meaningful distinction between “sex” and “gender.” both are socially constructed and both are socially constructed at least in part out of biological “stuff.” second, common language use tends to use them interchangeably, and it’s often only academic feminists who think that there’s a meaningful distinction. third, and most relevant: governments and sports governing bodies make absolutely no distinction between sex and gender, and use the terms totally interchangeably such as “the female gender” and “the sex of a man” (e.g., in the 2010 uk equality act). finally, the distinction between sex and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 ● therefore, absent such justification, trans and intersex women have a right to compete as women/female. conrad and i (ivy and conrad 2018) argue that such exclusion clearly cannot be justified. but that is not my purpose here. it is simply an established fact that trans and intersex women have a right to compete as women in women’s categories. instead, i want to focus on the poor quality of the arguments against this “sport as a human right” argument. but i began this section on the question of burden of proof because the default in human rights is inclusion, not exclusion. as noted, the ioc and cas have clearly ruled that trans and intersex women have a prima facie right to compete as women. trans and intersex women don’t need to argue for our inclusion: that’s already granted to us through the ioc olympic charter and recent cas decisions (including the semenya case). therefore, those seeking to exclude an athlete from her right to compete have the ultimate burden of proof. they cannot simply rely on assumptions and hypotheticals: they’re the ones that need hard facts the most. “ifs” and imagined counterfactuals are insufficient grounds upon which to deny trans and intersex women their right to compete as women in women’s categories. this paper will demonstrate that they have not come close to meeting this burden. in fact, since they seem to forget that they indeed have the burden of proof, most of their arguments are misplaced by attempting to refute arguments about trans and intersex women’s right to compete as women. 2. what does the “sport is a human right” argument actually entail? i think it’s fair to say that all the most discussed—perhaps “prominent”—work arguing against the full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in women’s sport adopt the position that such exclusion is, or at least should be, the default. thus, they seem to position themselves such that those arguing for the full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in sport have the burden of argument. but as i have just shown, they are mistaken. i think that this fundamental framing error has caused the quality of their arguments to be so low. they tend to focus exclusively on gender is often only deployed as a reason to exclude trans women from “female” rights and spaces. for example, some may grant that trans women are women but not “female,” and that sport is about “sex,” and therefore trans women should not be allowed to compete in female categories. but they are mistaken: trans women are very regularly legally and medically recognized as female; moreover, as noted in the third point, sport and governments make no distinction between sex and gender. cas has been explicit on this point. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 attempting to rebut arguments, such as my own, for the full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women in sport. but they’re the ones with the justificatory burden. i’m going to focus on one recent article by pam sailors (2020), as i find it representative of other work, largely unpublished. there is surprisingly little published work on this topic. most contributions seem to be made via blog post, oped, twitter, or unmoderated internet forums. sailors (2020, 421) claims that we can understand the debate as being composed of three broad positions: “those who believe an arbitrary trait is better than none at all, those who believe the lack of a definitive trait means we should not look for one at all, and those who believe the best solution is to eliminate sexsegregated categories altogether.” adopting the language of alice dreger (2012), she refers to the first as “anatomists” and the second as “identifiers.” sailors writes: the anatomists believe that the nature of sport and the importance of maintaining two categories means that some biological marker must be selected. the identifiers think the complexity of the matter means sports authorities should stop looking for a biological marker. “instead, we ought to go simply with an athlete’s self-identity as a man or woman (only requiring, perhaps, that it be confirmed by her or his legal status).” (sailors 2020, 421; quoting dreger 2012) sailors refers to the final group—those arguing for the abolition of sex-segregated sport altogether—as “abandonists.” this third group is nearly nonexistent: nearly no one is seriously advocating for the complete abolition of sex-segregated sport categories simpliciter. sailors’s focus seems to be entirely on the arguments—and her rejection thereof—of so-called identifiers. sailors takes abandonism as mostly a nonstarter, as she believes that it would lead to the elimination of women in elite sport (nearly) altogether. i think her reasons for rejecting this position are misplaced, though. there are many sports for which gender categories make little sense. the olympic skeet shooting event, a summer event, used to be genderintegrated. in the 1992 barcelona olympics, the gold medal was won by a chinese woman, zhang shan. subsequently, in the 1996 atlanta olympics, the games gendersegregated the skeet event and didn’t even offer a women’s category. therefore, the defending olympic champion was unable to defend her title. a separate women’s event wasn’t added until the 2000 sidney olympics. no physiological difference between men and women can explain this policy decision to maintain gendersegregated categories in the skeet event. clearly, i think, there are at least some feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 events such as skeet, other shooting events, equestrian (which is already genderintegrated), and perhaps others should fall under the abandonist position. therefore, sailors rejecting the position wholesale, without the nuance of separating out different sports, is a mistake.8 her representation of the identifier position is a straw argument. i have not seen any serious proposals that athletes should be allowed to self-identify into whatever competitive category they want. i am often offered as the paradigmatic example of someone holding such a view. however, i have certainly never made any claims even plausibly misinterpreted as such! while i believe that trans people should be allowed to compete in the gender they say they are, under a self-identification policy of some sort, without medical gatekeeping, i haven’t even remotely suggested that, for example, a 23-year-old can “self-identify” as a 65-year-old to enter a masters event for athletes age 65 and over. i also haven’t seen anyone make such a suggestion in good faith. (i have, however, seen it used by those acting in bad faith to oppose trans women’s inclusion as some sort of odd “gotcha” reductio ad absurdum.) sailors refers to me by name while managing not to cite a single one of my published academic articles, op-eds, media interviews and articles, or documentary interviews. she thus places me within this identifier camp without offering any proof that i hold such a view. to be clear, i do not.9 referencing the charter’s fourth principle, sailors (2020, 426) writes: the principle also restricts itself to participation alone, without guaranteeing that the level of participation be within the realm of choice of the individual athlete. to be precise, what is at issue is not participation in sport, but participation in the women’s category of sport. given that there is a human right to sport, that right extends to all men as well, but it does not confer to all (or any) men the right to compete in the women’s category. this is either a straw argument or a spectacular misunderstanding of what the ioc’s “participation in sport is a human right” means. absolutely no one credibly thinks that 8 however, i do think that there are some reasons to maintain gender categories in some sports, but not for the same reasons that sailors does. but explicating my position and its reasons would require an entirely separate paper. 9 this is not about a personal slight: this is about demonstrating that sailors has constructed a straw argument. she claims that people such as me, by name, hold the identifier position, but i do not, and sailors has not cited a single instance of someone who does. she therefore offers a straw argument. qed. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 the right to sport is a right to compete at whatever level one wants to, irrespective of qualification criteria. i may not demand, as a human right, that i compete in the boston marathon if i have not obtained a qualifying entry time in an approved event. similarly, i may not demand to compete in the olympics, on the basis that “participation in sport is a human right” if i have not qualified to represent my country. i may not also demand to compete as a bosnian if i am a canadian citizen and, therefore, would be required to represent my country of citizenship. no one is claiming that the right to sport means such outlandish things.10 but sailors thought, it seems, that some might have thought this to the degree that she should refute it. that’s a textbook straw argument. moreover, no one is credibly claiming that men have a right to compete in the women’s category! is she suggesting that hyperandrogenic intersex women and trans women are men? they are not. this is not a debate about including or excluding men in women’s sport: it’s about including (or excluding) hyperandrogenic intersex or trans women in women’s sport.11 more charitably, perhaps, sailors seems to suggest 10 perhaps naively, one might wonder how far the right to compete extends as a right. does it mean that one has a right to compete in the olympics without meeting eligibility criteria? of course not. no one seriously thinks that “sport is a human right” means this. the right to compete is simply that one may not be excluded from competition for the mere fact that one has a particular protected characteristic. sports that have weight eligibility criteria never exclude someone from competition for being too heavy: there is always a “greater than” (e.g., superheavyweight) class. being excluded from all events for being “too heavy” would be a violation of the right to compete; but the right to compete does not extend to the right to choose which weight category one competes in, if one does not meet the weight category requirements. 11 maybe one thinks i’m uncharitable here and that sailors is referring to hyperandrogenic intersex women and trans women not as “male” but as “biologically male” and that, somehow, this is supposed to make a difference. it does not. first, hyperandrogenic intersex women are female—both biologically and legally. trans women, in many jurisdictions including the united states, canada, germany, united kingdom, etc. are medically and legally considered female. the concept of “physiologically male” but “socially female” is nonsensical. indeed, it is transphobic to refer to trans women as male in any sense. what does it mean to be physiologically male? there are 6’4” cis women. so being tall can’t be it. there are very strong cis women, too. there are intersex women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome who have xy chromosomes but who develop phenotypically female. trans women often have the hormone profile of cis women. not all cis women have a uterus. what would it even mean to claim that a trans woman is physiologically male? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 that the “sport is a human right” argument logically entails, under the identifier straw position, that a cis man would have the right to compete as a woman. but, again, this is false and simply not a logical consequence. why is the man excluded from women’s categories? because he’s a man/male! the ioc does not have biological criteria for who counts as male or female: they use legally recognized sex. if the athlete’s legally recognized sex is male, then he may not compete in female categories. there are rules about this. her claim that the human rights argument has this logical entailment is manifestly absurd. this isn’t about who is or who is not male, a man, female, or a woman. the 2015 cas decision in chand v. afi and iaaf12 was clear: the case was about eligibility criteria within the women’s category, not sex verification and whether someone is female.13 cas very clearly decided that, “whether a person is female is a matter of law” and that “the distinction between male and female is a matter of legal recognition” 14 in the athlete’s home country of citizenship. simply put, if an athlete’s country of citizenship legally recognizes her as female, she is female without qualification, including for the purposes of sport. moreover, the iaaf’s hyperandrogenism regulations (a limit on women’s endogenous testosterone to 10 nmol/l, and later to 5 nmol/l) “is not being used to determine whether an athlete should compete either as a male or female. instead, it is being used to introduce a new category of ineligible female athletes within the female category.”15 crucially, the cas panel decided that, “there is no separate category in which [hyperandrogenic women] may compete (for example, an ‘intersex category’)” and that “if the [hyperandrogenism] regulations apply to a female to preclude her competing as a female, she may not compete as a male.”16 if someone is deemed to be an ineligible female, she doesn’t thereby compete in “ineligible female” events, though: she’s excluded from competitive sport altogether. i believe that it is an empty concept typically only deployed to deny trans women equal rights as women/female. 12 dutee chand v. athletics federation of india (afi) & the international association of athletics federations (iaaf), [2015] court of arbitration for sport, cas 2014/a/3759. 13 however, behrensen (2013) makes a convincing case that the iaaf’s hyperandrogenism regulations are sex verification by another name. the 2019 cas case regarding caster semenya (semenya, cas 2018/o/5794) seems to support this critique. 14 dutee chand, cas 2014/a/3759, p. 147, para. 510–511. 15 ibid., p. 147–148, para. 511. 16 ibid., p. 147, para. 510. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 i should also note that the iaaf, the ioc, cas, and thereby effectively all olympic-eligible sports have banned sex-verification policies and testing.17 in their decision, the cas panel note, “the parties agree that it is reasonable and proportionate to divide athletes into male and female categories” and that “gender testing is not an appropriate criterion”; rather, again, “whether a person is a female is a matter of law.”18 as noted above, though, the panel does not mean to suggest that there be two female categories of sport: eligible and ineligible. what they mean is that a female athlete deemed ineligible is simply banned from competition: she may not thereby compete as a male, since she is legally female. the 1996 atlanta olympics were the last time the olympics deployed a sexverification test; namely, chromosomal testing (pieper 2016). in 1999, cas explicitly banned the practice because of its lack of scientific grounding; namely, there were too many false positives due to the newfound understanding of the prevalence of intersex conditions whereby phenotypically female athletes sometimes have a y chromosome without it conferring an unfair competitive advantage. in the past, female athletes—and only female athletes!—were required to obtain a “sex passport” medically certifying the athlete as female.19 any framing of this debate, such as sailors’s, over the inclusion of intersex and trans women in women’s sport as a matter of whether the human right to sport “confer[s] to all (or any) men the right to compete in the women’s category” is a spectacular misunderstanding of the question at issue. again, it is a straw argument. this is not the issue, and it is not entailed by the “sport is a human right” position. 17 dutee chand, cas 2014/a/3759. 18 ibid., p. 147 para 510. 19 inexplicably, some prominent female athletes who oppose trans women’s full and equal inclusion in women’s sport want to return to a pre-1996 time when we subjected (only) women to chromosome testing. for example, sharron davies has repeatedly called for this. see, for example, “the caster semenya compromise: when it comes to women’s sports, who counts as a woman?” (madeline kearns, spectator, may 6, 2019, https://spectator.us/caster-semenya-compromise/) and “sex-based discrimination: an interview with british olympic swimmer sharron davies” (raquel rosario sánchez, woman's place uk, december 3, 2019, https:// womansplaceuk.org/2019/12/03/sex-based-discrimination-an-interview-withbritish-olympic-swimmer-sharron-davies/) and “ex-olympic swimmer sharron davies says transgender athletes ‘with a male sex advantage’ should be banned from women's sport—as martina navratilova apologises for calling trans stars ‘cheats’” (leigh mcmanus, daily mail online, march 3, 2019, updated july 1, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6766263/ex-olympic-swimmer-sharrondavies-says-transgender-athletes-banned-womens-sport.html). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 the issue is not whether it is fair to include trans and intersex women in women’s sport. it’s also not about excluding (cis) men from women’s sport. rules that include trans and intersex women already successfully exclude men/males from women’s/female sport. the issue is about whether it is fair to exclude trans and intersex women from women’s sport. with human rights, the default is inclusion, not exclusion. we’re not supposed to need to argue for trans and intersex women’s inclusion, unless in response to successful arguments for our exclusion. even then, i present very detailed arguments for inclusion elsewhere (e.g., ivy and conrad 2018). therefore, any arguments based on physiological comparisons between men and women are also irrelevant: the matter is not about including men in women’s sport; it is about whether it is fair to exclude some women from women’s sport. perhaps sailors is suggesting that trans and intersex women are physiologically identical to cis males such that the physiological data comparing males to females are relevant. however, she would need to first establish that such women are, in fact, physiologically identical to cis males, and she has not done that. she has not presented any data suggesting that trans and intersex women are physiologically indistinguishable from cis males. sailors either frames trans and intersex women as men—which is at best transphobic and intersexphobic—or she’s wrongly claiming that the “sport is a human right” argument logically implies that cis men would thereby have the right to compete in women’s sport, which is manifestly not a logical consequence of the argument. this misframing is relatively, disappointingly common. in a 2019 poll, rasmussen asked the question, “do you favor or oppose allowing transgender students to participate on the sports teams of the gender they identify with, letting biological males, for example, play girls’ sports?”20 the result of 54% in agreement was then taken as evidence that public opinion opposed trans women’s full and equal 20 rasmussen reports. “americans oppose transgender trend in athletics,” november 08, 2019, https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle /social_issues/americans_oppose_transgender_trend_in_athletics. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 inclusion in women’s sport. the use of “biological males” is misleading:21 trans and intersex women are female, both legally and medically speaking.22 another question from the rasmussen reports (2019) poll was even more misleading. they asked, “transgender athletes who are biological males are winning at all levels of girls’ and women's sports these days. is the addition of biological males to girls’ and women’s sports likely to change those sports for the better or the worse? or will it have no impact?” there are two big things wrong with this question. first, trans women are not biological males. what could it mean to be a woman but a “biological male”? perhaps they mean to make a distinction between “social males,” “legal males,” “medical males,” and “biological males.” but any supposed distinction is artificial. trans women are routinely accepted as socially female—evidenced at least in part by our inclusion in “female” sport categories. we are also obviously regularly recognized as legally female: my birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, and every single piece of legal identification i have lists me as “female.” trans women are also regularly medically recognized as female: my medical records all list “female” with no asterisk or modifier.23 21 discussion of the problems with the phrasing can be found in “new poll on transgender athlete inclusion attempts to hide its own anti-trans bias” (ken schultz, outsports, november 20, 2019, https://www.outsports.com/2019/11/20/20974627 /rasmussen-trans-athlete-poll-bias-transphobic-lgbtq-politics) an in “majority of americans oppose transgender athletes in women's sports” (john riley, metro weekly, november 15, 2019, https://www.metroweekly.com/2019/11/majority-ofamericans-oppose-transgender-athletes-in-womens-sports-poll-finds/). it’s not an accident that photos of me are almost universally included in stories like this, even when they’re not about me specifically. i’ve somehow managed to become the poster girl for opposition to trans women’s full and equal inclusion in women’s sport. 22 for an overview of the landscape of legal recognition, see “rights in transition: making legal recognition for transgender people a global priority” (human rights watch, world report 2016, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016/countrychapters/africa-americas-asia-europe/central-asia-middle-east/north-0#). for an example of policy guidance on medical recognition in the united states, see “policies on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender & queer (lgbtq) issues” (ama, https://www .ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/policies-lesbian-gay-bisexualtransgender-queer-lgbtq-issues), and in canada, see “transgender-inclusive care” (june sing hong lam and alex abramovich, canadian medical association journal group, january 21, 2019, https://www.cmaj.ca/content/191/3/e79). 23 fun fact (fun to me, at least): when i’ve been hospitalized for bike race crashes and other reasons, it’s standard operating procedure to ask female patients whether she feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 perhaps “biological male” is supposed to mean “has xy chromosomes” and/or “has a penis,” and maybe even “had a penis.” but there are many ways to be female with xy chromosomes, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. and genitals do not play sports: the presence or absence, or the past presence, of a penis has absolutely zero correlation to sport performance. no one has adduced any evidence to suggest otherwise. “biological male” is a socially constructed category, and it only seems to be deployed as a way to invalidate trans and intersex women as being “not really” female. but we are female, in absolutely every way that matters. the second, and perhaps most glaring, problem with this poll question is that trans women are not winning “at all levels of girls’ and women’s sports these days.” there hasn’t been a single transgender person who has participated in the olympics, let alone won a medal. no openly trans woman holds an elite world record (mine was an age-restricted masters record).24 no openly trans woman has won an elite world championship in any sport, ever. rasmussen’s poll was misleading, framing this as an issue of “biological males” competing in female sport. similarly, some political ads target the inclusion of trans athletes in their transitioned sex, often mistakenly using trans boys or men as putative trans girls or women. for example, ousted kentucky governor matt bevin used trans male wrestler mack beggs—a transgender man now in college wrestling on the men’s team—to stoke fear against trans girls and women in women’s sport. bevin’s attack ad said, in part, that his opponent supports “allowing biological males to compete on women’s sports teams,” while showing footage that included a news story about mack beggs being forced, as a trans boy, to wrestle against cis girls due to a texas law forcing him to wrestle with his birth-assigned sex. many people who oppose trans girls and might be pregnant and when her most recent period was. on the first question, i always laugh and say, “no, no chance.” on the second question, i answer, “i don’t get periods.” if the nurse (or sometimes the doctor) was merely asking this in a perfunctory manner, they would “understand” me as trans and that of course i don’t get periods and that would be the end of it. but more than once, i’ve had to answer the follow up, “why not?” i’ve learned over time that “because i’m an athlete” ends the line of questioning because it’s well known that amenorrhea is common among elite female athletes. but before i learned this, i once answered, “because i don’t have a uterus.” this was again followed up with, “why not?” i answered, “because i was born without one.” this still was insufficient for this nurse: “why?” i finally gave up and came out, “because i’m trans, ok?” my medical records truly list me as “female,” and i have been treated as really female by every medical practitioner i interact with. they are not merely humoring me, as some transphobic people have suggested. 24 i use “openly” because for all we know some stealth trans woman has made this achievement, but we have absolutely no evidence of this. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 women in women’s sport use photos of beggs beating a girl, wrongly claiming that he is a trans girl.25 in their reporting on the aforementioned rasmussen poll, the washington times’ accompanying image was of beggs.26 this creates an odd bias where the photo in which a stereotypically looking athletic boy—who is a boy, who is male—appears to be dominating a cis girl, but it is included in a story about trans girls and women in women’s sport. polls and reporting trading on this confusion are to be taken with more salt than is healthy to consume. but this isn’t about men in women’s sport, or boys in girls’ sport, or even “males” in “female” sport. this is about female–female eligibility rules. chand v. afi and iaaf (cas 2014/a/3759) was perfectly clear on this.27 but let’s return to sailors (2020). following the aforementioned quoted selection referencing the ioc’s fourth fundamental principle of olympism, she continues: along these lines, it is worth pointing out that there are always limits on who is allowed to compete in any protected category, whether the criterion of inclusion is weight, age, level of disability, etc. for example, trans athlete veronica ivy (then known as rachel mckinnon) won two consecutive world titles in the uci union cycliste international) masters track cycling championship in the 35–44 age group, competing in a protected category within a category. (sailors 2020, 426) she continues: 25 the anti-trans rights group fair play for women is often guilty of this. 26 see “most americans oppose transgender athletes in women's sports, poll finds” (valerie richardson, washington times, november 10, 2019, https://www .washingtontimes.com/news/2019/nov/10/transgender-athletes-womens-sportsopposed-most-am/). it’s also crucial to understand that beggs, his parents, his coaches, and his opponents all wanted him to compete in the boys’ category, but texas law prohibits trans athletes from competing in anything other than their birthassigned sex listed on their original birth certificate. see “transgender wrestler raises questions about fairness and equality" (yona levin, wellesley news, march 7, 2018 https://thewellesleynews.com/2018/03/07/transgender-wrestler-raises-questionsabout-fairness-and-equality/). 27 and again, nothing in the 2019 semenya case changes this. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 that is, she was protected from competing against both younger cyclists and men. of course, the human right to sport is possessed also by those younger cyclists and men, but i suspect ivy would dispute any claim that their right entitles them to compete in the women’s 35–44 age group. (426) she concludes: it is difficult to see how the human rights argument can be used to permit only some humans the autonomy to identify into categories while prohibiting others from competing in the protected categories of their choice. if self-identity is to be the practice, we can do away with categories altogether (the abandonist’s position) or develop an alternative system of categorization. (426–427) there are many problems with sailors’s arguments. we can start with the facts: my 2018 championship was in one particular event—the sprint, sometimes known as the match sprint or olympic sprint; it is not known as the 200-metre sprint as is often wrongly reported by those not familiar with the sport. in uci masters racing, age categories begin at 35–39 and increase in five-year increments (40–44, 45–49, 50–54, and so on). race organizers have the right to combine age categories if the number of entrants of the categories is insufficient to justify the separate categories for that event in that year. for example, in 2018, the 35–39 and 40–44 age categories in the sprint event were combined into the 35–44 category. for the other event i competed in, the 500 m time trial (tt)—where i placed fourth, by the way— the categories were separated into 35–39 and 40–44. in 2019, there were sufficient entrants in the sprint event and 500 m event for separate 35–39 and 40–44 categories.28 thus, in 2019 my title is in the 35–39 28 as it happens, the woman who placed second in 2018, carolien van herrikhuyzen currently holds the 40–44 category 200 m tt world record at a time faster than my 35–39 category 200 m tt world record. she also won the sprint in the 40–44 category in 2019. carolien is also a friend who explicitly supports trans women in women’s sport. also, the woman who placed third in 2019 is also someone who became a friend, who wore my brand sticker “sport is a human right” on the podium, and who is an explicit supporter of trans women in women’s sport: kirsten herup søvang. media reporting tends not to speak to those on the podium with me who are supportive. in my experience, the overwhelming majority of elite women athletes don’t care about trans and intersex athletes’ inclusion; the next largest group is explicitly supportive; it’s only a tiny, very loud minority who explicitly oppose ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 category, not the 35–44 category as sailors mistakenly writes. this isn’t a big issue, but it’s noteworthy that such an easily confirmable fact was overlooked in her paper. much more important is sailors’s repeated straw argument, though. i note that she managed to not cite the dozens of media interviews, op-eds, published keynote addresses, and published academic articles where i clearly articulate the “human rights argument.” even my twitter feed has dozens of threads explicating my argument. and again, this is not about personal or academic slights: this is about demonstrating that she has represented me as holding a position that i explicitly do not hold; this is about demonstrating that she is arguing against a straw position. her use of the language of “protected category” is also exposed here: a 37year-old woman competing in the 35–39 female category is not “protected” from younger women and men: these other athletes are simply ineligible for that particular event category. they do not meet the age eligibility criterion, and/or the gender criterion, for the 35–39 female category. i race against the best elite women in the world throughout the year in uci elite races (no age restriction). this includes past and future olympians, the current elite world record holder in the 200 m tt (with a time a full second faster than mine), and riders from all over the globe ranked in the top 30 of the uci elite world rankings. i do lose most of my races: i can hardly be said to be “dominating” my sport.29 my best uci elite 2018 result was third place in a keirin event, and in 2019 it was eighth in a sprint event. that was my solitary top-10 finish in 2019 elite racing. hardly remarkable results. i’ve never cracked the top 70 in the uci world elite ranking. my highest ranking was something like 84th, briefly in 2019. in my two 2018 masters world championship events, i placed fourth and first; in 2019 i placed second and first in an admittedly weaker field (the woman who won gold in the 500 m tt took silver in the sprint). this fact seems to elude many people: women are not permitted to compete in men’s categories, except with very special permission, and only very special circumstances.30 such special cases never extend to championships. women are flatly inclusion. unfortunately, the media seeks them out. sailors quotes a number of them; it’s not a coincidence that it’s roughly the same five women athletes speaking out against trans women. they’re pretty rare, and often retired. 29 my road racing results can be found here: https://www.road-results.com/racer /113669. my uci results are also searchable on the uci rankings website. 30 pro woman racer, carmen small talks about her experiences in “carmen small: what it's like to race bikes with men” (interview by molly hurford, bicycling, june 25, 2015, https://www.bicycling.com/racing/a20023481/carmen-small-what-its-liketo-race-bikes-with-men/), i do actually sometimes compete in men’s categories in nonsanctioned races, which is completely typical for elite women—cis, trans, or feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 not allowed to compete in men’s categories in world championships or olympic competitions. even at the lowly 2019 south carolina state track cycling championship, i was not permitted to compete in the men’s category because i’m female. i even asked to, because the women’s field was so small that i would have had more racing against the men. the truth is that we are required to compete in the sex/gender category on our race license. yes, competitive athletes require a license to compete, issued from their national or international sports body. in my case, i have a usa cycling (usac) license and a uci license. both list “f” under “sex.” as far as usac and the uci are concerned, i’m indisputably female. the canadian and us governments also agree!31 i’m not merely “identifying” as female: i am female. this isn’t as sailors misrepresents the “autonomy to self-identify into categories.” i’m not merely self-identifying into the category of female, i am female. i wish this point didn’t bear repeating so often. and the rules of elite sport require athletes to compete in the sex category on their race license. if your license says “f,” then you must compete in the female category. athletes are not permitted to compete “in the protected categories of their choice.” it’s a red herring at best, and a fallacious straw argument at worst to claim that the right to sport for trans women—as women, as female—is analogous to a man choosing to compete in a junior women’s race. a 29-year-old man can no more do that than a 37-year-old trans woman compete in the 55–59 masters men’s category. why would sailors even suggest as much? the human right to sport does not imply this at all, and it is of dubious scholarly quality to suggest as such. the eligibility rules for sport events are always clearly laid out in policy.32 athletes with “f” as their sex must compete in the female category. athletes have a racing age determined by their age on december 31 of the year of competition. thus, an athlete who is 36 as of april in a year of competition, but has a birthday in august, would be considered 37 for that entire year of competition. athletes must compete in their racing age category. there is no choice. there are no policies to change your intersex. in regional nonsanctioned races, the women’s fields are usually not particularly strong, so the elite women often challenge ourselves against the men (usually losing, but that’s hardly the point). in the one men’s event i competed in in 2019, i placed tied for 11th out of 12. 31 e.g., i am a canadian citizen but a us permanent resident. my canadian (british columbia) birth certificate, social insurance number (canada’s version of the us social security number), passport, alberta driver’s license, south carolina driver’s license, us permanent resident card (“green card”), and my medical records in both countries all say “female.” all of them. 32 for example, the uci masters cycling eligibility criteria can be found here: http:// www.cyclingmasters.com/site/riders/regulations. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 racing age. age is not analogous with policies allowing an athlete to declare a different sex. of course 29-year-old and 63-year-old men have a right to competitive sport! but what that means in practice is that there must be at least some category, within the current structure of their sport, in which they are eligible to compete, notwithstanding qualification requirements. in elite racing, there are no age categories in cycling. a 63-year-old man has a right to attempt to compete in elite men’s races. the rules are clear: racers with “male” on their license may compete in the men’s races. they may not compete in the women’s. in masters (age-restricted) races, athletes must race according to their race age. and likewise, there are age restrictions for junior categories. however, junior racers are generally permitted to race in the elite fields (although there can be some restrictions). there is no right for a 29-year-old male to race in the 60–64 male race category. it is simply outrageous that sailors would suggest that the right to sport would entail as such. there are no social practices, policies, or cas case law to suggest as such. this is simply a straw argument against the, and in particularly my, “human rights argument.” i don’t claim that men do not have a right to sport. they do! they have just as much right as trans women. but the rules of sport—and relevant cas case law—say that sport is divided into male and female categories, and that “there are only two categories of competition: male and female. these categories are together intended to cover all athletes who wish to participate in competitive athletics.”33 however, recall that this same cas decision ruled that “whether a person is female is a matter of law” and that “the distinction between male and female is a matter of legal recognition”34 in the athlete’s home country of citizenship. men have a right to compete in men’s competitions; masters men have a right to compete in masters men’s competitions; women have a right to compete in women’s competition; and so on. it simply does not follow that a right to compete in one’s sex and age group (and/or disability group for para events) entails that one has a right to compete in any 33 dutee chand, cas 2014/a/3759, p. 148, para. 512. this isn’t to say that i think they’re particularly right to only have male and female categories. i’ve said many times that sport is completely ill-equipped to handle nonbinary athletes. i favor a policy, for example, where nonbinary athletes have the right to choose the gender category they think is most appropriate for that particular event. in essence, i wish to return a modicum of trust back to sport: overwhelmingly, trans and nonbinary athletes are keenly aware of issues of fairness and want to compete in the category they think is most fair. 34 dutee chand, cas 2014/a/3759, p. 147, para. 510–511. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 category one chooses. it is absurd to suggest as such, and thus a straw argument if used against the human rights argument(s). recall that sailors (2020, 426–427) writes, “it is difficult to see how the human rights argument can be used to permit only some humans the autonomy to identify into categories while prohibiting others from competing in the protected categories of their choice.” it’s not hard to see. in fact, i think it’s pretty simple: the human rights argument does not permit any “humans the autonomy to identify into categories.” that is not what happens with policies permitting trans women, trans female athletes, to compete in the women’s/female categories. the policies are very detailed. most international sports federations simply adopt whatever the current ioc policy is. in this case, it is the aforementioned 2015 ioc consensus meeting on sex reassignment and hyperandrogenism:35 2. those who transition from male to female are eligible to compete in the female category under the following conditions: 2.1. the athlete has declared that her gender identity is female. the declaration cannot be changed, for sporting purposes, for a minimum of four years. 2.2. the athlete must demonstrate that her total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nmol/l for at least 12 months prior to her first competition (with the requirement for any longer period to be based on a confidential case-by-case evaluation, considering whether or not 12 months is a sufficient length of time to minimize any advantage in women’s competition). 2.3. the athlete's total testosterone level in serum must remain below 10 nmol/l throughout the period of desired eligibility to compete in the female category. 2.4. compliance with these conditions may be monitored by testing. in the event of non-compliance, the athlete’s eligibility for female competition will be suspended for 12 months. the policy requires a prospective trans athlete to formally declare their sex for the purposes of competition, and the athlete may not change it for a minimum of four years. this is only the first step. but note that the policy doesn’t have anything to say 35 https://stillmed.olympic.org/documents/commissions_pdffiles/medical _commission/2015-11_ioc_consensus_meeting_on_sex_reassignment_and _hyperandrogenism-en.pdf. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 about whether an athlete is actually male or female: they leave that up to the athlete’s country of citizenship.36 so a trans woman would formally declare in writing that she is transitioning to compete as female. of course, an athlete may legally change their gender back to male, but they would not be able to change their sport sex until after the four-year period.37 on a personal note, i did not compete in cycling pre-transition, so i did not have to formally declare my transitioned sex to usac or the uci: i was already legally regarded as such, including on my birth certificate.38 in addition to formally declaring her transitioned sex, the athlete must demonstrate that she has maintained her natural endogenous testosterone below 10 nmol/l for a minimum of 12 continuous months before she may engage in her first competition in her transitioned sex. crucially, and oft overlooked or ignored, if her endogenous testosterone rises above this limit at any time during this period, her 12month clock restarts from the first test date below the limit. the athlete must also be able to demonstrate, for her entire competitive career in the women’s category, that her natural testosterone was continuously below 10 nmol/l. again, if at any point during her competitive career her endogenous testosterone rises above 10 nmol/l, her 12-month waiting period would restart, and she would be suspended from women’s competition until after the new 12-month period.39 36 it’s absolutely worth noting that not all countries are equally trans-inclusive in the ability for trans people to gain legal recognition of their transitioned sex. this presents an international justice issue. i have suggested many times, including to the ioc themselves in person at their headquarters in switzerland, that one way to obviate this issue is for the ioc to extend recognition rights to athletes based on the most progressive ioc member nation state’s policies for the purposes of sport. currently, canada has the most progressive policies: a trans person can gain full legal recognition in their transitioned sex without any medical interventions, including hormones or surgery. 37 this has problematic implications for nonbinary athletes, but let’s put that aside for now. unfortunately, that problem seems perennially to be put aside, i recognize. 38 many have claimed that my success in cycling came overnight and without significant effort due to, presumably on their part, some imagined excessive unfair physiological advantage. i was a nationally competitive athlete in badminton before moving to charleston, sc, where elite badminton is simply nonexistent. fortunately for me, cycling is physiologically very similar to elite badminton. it took me four fulltime years to win my first masters world championship. success didn’t come overnight and without intense effort. 39 the policy doesn’t strictly require that the athlete provide medical documentation; instead, it uses the language that the “athlete’s compliance with these conditions may feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 trans women are not simply showing up, looking like a man, and saying, “i’m a woman so you have to let me race in the women’s category!” we can argue over whether self-identification policies should be expanded, but my arguments about sport as a human right do not entail this, as sailors wrongly claims. athletes do not simply look at the available race categories for an event and demand to compete “in the protected categories of their choice” (sailors 2020) because “participation in sport is a human right” (ioc 2020, 11). 3. the “nondomination argument” argument i have already noted that work such as sailors’s (2020) seems to treat the trans-inclusion positions as having the burden of proof. thus she presents what she takes to be the strongest arguments in favor of such inclusion, and attempts to refute or at least undermine them. but again, it’s really those seeking to exclude trans women/female athletes from women’s/female sport that have the burden of proof. sailors is on the side with the burden of proof. but all the same, let’s turn to another of the arguments that sailors takes issue with, which she calls the “nondomination” argument. she writes: another way to argue for the inclusion of trans and intersex women in the female sporting category has been to take the opposite position, claiming that there really is not an advantage at all. according to this argument, if trans and intersex athletes really had an unfair competitive advantage, they would be dominating their sports, but the fact that they do not always win means that fears about their inclusion in the women’s category are unfounded. (sailors 2020, 425) let’s again begin with the facts. first, i can’t find anyone seriously claiming that hyperandrogenic intersex women or trans women have no advantage at all. the truth is we do not know.40 but the truth is also that there’s no clear evidence supporting that there is any such advantage, let alone an “unfair” advantage that could justify be monitored.” the “may” is important. on another personal note, there’s a reason that i don’t have to continually prove my low testosterone levels: they’re nonexistent. thus, any testosterone-based policy will fail to exclude me from women’s sport. 40 i’ve been repeatedly wrongly quoted as having said, in an october 2019 sky news interview—filmed during the 2019 masters world championships—that i “have” a competitive advantage. i said that “it’s possible” and then went on to explain why i think all of the evidence seems to support the claim that i do not have any such unfair advantage. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 exclusion from the women’s category. remember, there’s a difference between “competitive advantage” and “unfair competitive advantage.”41 and as conrad and i note (ivy and conrad 2018), we already permit huge competitive advantages in sport and call it fair. in fact, elite sport often allows advantages far greater than the 10%– 12% that people like sailors focus on. generally, people like tucker (2019) and sailors appeal to average differences between male and female athletes, or the differences in peak performances for male and female athletes. but let’s set that aside for the moment. what is the evidence that trans and intersex women are not dominating their sports? as i noted above, there hasn’t been a single known trans woman who has competed in an olympics, let alone won a medal. there has similarly never been a known trans woman who has won an elite (non-age-category) world championship in any olympic-eligible sport, ever. and that’s not for lack of trying! i promise, we’ve been trying! trans women have been explicitly and openly allowed to compete in the olympics since the 2003 stockholm consensus statement, which went into effect nearly 10 months before the 2004 olympics in athens. since the 2004 athens olympics, through the 2018 sochi olympics, there have been over 54,000 olympians (including those who competed in more than one games).42 not a single known trans woman has ever been among those more than 54,000 olympians. in 2015 when the ioc updated their trans-inclusion policy to remove the genital-surgery component and two-year waiting period, there have been two olympic cycles: the 2016 rio and 2018 sochi games. those games combine for more than 14,000 olympians. again, not a single trans athlete attended. this isn’t for want of hysterics about how the 2015 policy would lead to a trans-woman takeover of the 2016 games. one national review article claimed, “but what the olympic committee and the media are loath to discuss is that their system for allowing transgender athletes to compete in the women’s category is ripe for abuse.”43 another article stated, “it is simply inconceivable that athletes who have spent most of their lives as men wouldn’t have greater muscle mass, skeletal growth, and lung capacity than someone born female even after undergoing the hormone treatments the ioc requires, which halt male development without entirely reversing it. . . . that is a 41 see also friedlaender and ivy (2020). 42 source: olympic.org. 43 "rachel mckinnon is a cheat and a bully,” madeline kearns, national review, october 29, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/rachel-mckinnon-is-acheat-and-a-bully/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 shame, because the ioc’s standards are part of a disturbing trend that threatens the very integrity of women’s sports.”44 martina navratilova (2019), in her sunday times op-ed similarly wrote the following as her core argument: to put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organisation is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if they so desire. it's insane and it's cheating. i am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but i would not be happy to compete against her. it would not be fair. this is a fantasy. it has never happened. it is unlikely to ever happen. trans women are not cheating: we are the most heavily scrutinized athletes in the world. navratilova continues: hundreds of athletes who have changed gender by declaration and limited hormone treatment have already achieved honours as women that were beyond their capabilities as men, especially in sports in which power rather than skill is paramount. mckinnon is just one example. that may uphold the international olympic committee's charter, which holds that "the practice of sport is a human right", but it is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people who, biologically, are still men. trans women are not “biologically . . . men.” that is overtly and indisputably transphobic. perhaps one might think it unhelpful to say so, but it’s a simple fact that referring to trans women—who are, again, medically, legally, socially female—as men is a paradigmatic example of transphobia.45 second, who are these “hundreds of athletes”? apparently i’m an example? how? i didn’t compete in cycling before transition, and i obviously didn’t compete in the 35–39 age category before i was 35. i transitioned at 29. i took up cycling at 31. i 44 “the ioc’s transgender inclusion threatens the integrity of women’s sports,” paul crookston, national review, july 6, 2016, https://www.nationalreview.com /2016/07/ioc-transgender-rules-threaten-integrity-womens-sports/2016. 45 planned parenthood provides a very basic primer on what constitutes transphobia: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/gender-identity/transgender/whatstransphobia. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 shouldn’t have to make such an obvious point. navratilova claims that i couldn’t have achieved a 35–39 uci masters track cycling world championship without transitioning to female. she can’t possibly know that: no one can. the funny thing is that earlier in her op-ed, she writes: let me make a critical distinction between transgender and transsexual athletes. transsexuals have decided to change their gender and have had the deed done, surgically. they are few in number and rarely enjoy a competitive advantage. (navratilova 2019) i have a news flash for her: on her definition, i am “transsexual.” i should note that this is an increasingly dispreferred term amongst trans people. it’s heavily medicalized way to say that someone has had a very private medical procedure to, in her terms, “have had the deed done.” people really like to speculate about the status of my genitals. it’s beyond inappropriate. so somehow navratilova simultaneously doesn’t have a problem with me on the basis of being “transsexual,” and yet thinks that i have an immutable unfair advantage. she can’t have it both ways. pick a lane, martina! countless commentators also repeatedly refer to me as a man.46 similarly, andrew gilligan (2019) wrote about navratilova’s op-ed, also in the sunday times: navratilova makes a "critical distinction" between athletes such as mckinnon, who retains her male anatomy, and the tennis player renee richards, born richard raskind, who had irreversible gender-change surgery. yet more false, objectifying speculation about the status of my genitals. i’ve generally shied away from confronting this point so far, because the status of my genitals is my business—and it is irrelevant to the policy question of trans women in women’s sport. you don’t play sports with your genitals. if you are, i suggest that you might be doing it wrong. genitals do not play sports: people do. genitals have nothing to do with performance advantages. 46 e.g., “rachel mckinnon is a cheat and a bully” (madeline kearns, national review, october 29, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/rachel-mckinnon-is-acheat-and-a-bully/) and “a man won gold in women’s cycling (again). when will we say ‘no more?’” (nicole russell, daily signal, october 23, 2019, https://www .dailysignal.com/2019/10/23/a-man-won-gold-in-womens-cycling-again-when-willwe-say-no-more/). there are dozens of other examples. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 26 but much has been made about justifying antipathy towards me in particular thanks to navratilova’s, gilligan’s, and many others’ mistaken speculation about the status of my genitals. i find it humorous that navratilova and the others seem to have no problem with people like richards who have had genital surgery, yet wrongly attempt to justify their antipathy towards me on the false supposition that i haven’t as well. perhaps instead of “straw man,” we should call this the “straw penis” argument. nicola williams, of the anti-trans hate group fair play for women said, “we are approaching a decision point because there will soon be more rachel mckinnons, but without fair competition sport becomes meaningless. if girls and women can never win, they will leave sport in droves” (quoted in gilligan 2019). but i lose almost all of my races. if i’m so scary for women’s sport, why do i lose most of my races? it sure seems like women win against me a lot, and williams’s claim that “girls and women can never win” against trans women like me amounts to an irrational fear of trans women. and the irrational fear of trans women is the dictionary definition of transphobia.47 there isn’t a single trans or intersex woman dominating her sport. even caster semenya, the most famous, and arguably most successful, intersex woman athlete doesn’t “dominate” her sport. caster has won a total of two olympic gold medals and holds no world records. by contrast, usain bolt has won a total of eight olympic gold medals and holds three world records. but no one raises claims that bolt is unfairly dominating his sport; however, such criticisms are levied against semenya. why is it fair for a cis man to win as much as bolt, but it’s unfair when an intersex woman wins far less than bolt? the clear implication is that even allowing trans women to compete in women’s sport “threatens the very integrity of women’s sports.” but no trans athlete competed in the 2016 rio olympics. no trans athlete won a medal. (it’s hard to win a medal if you don’t even qualify to compete!) similarly, no trans athlete competed in the 2018 sochi olympics, let alone won a medal. it seems that the integrity of women’s sports is doing just fine. but sailors echoes this same language. she includes a quote from athlete shannon rowbury, “olympic athlete shannon rowbury was among those critical of allowing semenya to compete in the women’s category, saying ‘it challenges and threatens the integrity of women’s sports to have intersex athletes competing against genetic women’” (sailors 2020, 419). semenya is a “genetic woman.” intersex women are women. we know that genetics aren’t as simple as woman = xx and male = xy. that’s partly why the ioc 47 merriam-webster, s.v. “transphobia,” https://www.merriam-webster.com /dictionary/transphobia. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 27 formally banned sex-verification testing, including chromosomal testing, in 1999. suggesting we return to a chromosomal test for athlete sex is asking us to turn back the clock on over 20 years of scientific development. sailors (2020, 426) writes: most importantly, what matters ethically is not how few or many trans or intersex women succeed in women’s sport, but rather the effects of their participation on women’s sport as a whole. . . . if trans and intersex athletes have an all-purpose competitive advantage, their inclusion in the women’s category will have the same effects as male inclusion, negating the justifying rationale for sex segregation. if even a single athlete is unfairly deprived of her opportunity to triumph, or even to make the team, the judgment of unfairness is not attenuated by the scope of the effect. those are a lot of “ifs.” if “trans and intersex athletes have an all-purpose competitive advantage”: but do they? the evidence doesn’t show this at all. but much more importantly, we have good evidence that there is no such all-purpose competitive advantage due to the utter absence of trans women athletes at the olympics and other elite level sport.48 if “even a single athlete is unfairly deprived of her opportunity to triumph . . .” (sailors 2020, 426). oddly, trans and intersex women are never considered those who could be unfairly deprived of their opportunity to triumph: that right seems reserved only for cis non-intersex women. in fact, what’s at stake is trans and intersex women’s very right to even participate in women’s sport. that seems unjust and unfair. as sailors (426) says, “their [trans and intersex women’s] inclusion in the women’s category will have the same effects as male inclusion.” she’s begging the question: there’s no evidence that trans and intersex women athletes have an average of 10%– 12% advantage over cis non-intersex women. in fact, the 2015 cas decision noted 48 some have claimed that maybe currently and recently past competing trans women just aren’t that good, and that this explains our utter absence at elite level sport. well which is it: either we have such a monstrous competitive advantage that we must be excluded or else women’s sport will be destroyed, or we’re not very good and so shouldn’t warrant such an overreaction. unfortunately, opponents of trans women’s inclusion in women’s sport seem to want to have it both ways. personally, i never cracked the uci elite track cycling world rankings top 70, and yet people continue to claim that i have an all-purpose competitive advantage. but they then attempt to explain that i haven’t cracked the top 70 because i’m just not very good after all. again, which is it? it can’t be both. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 28 that the iaaf did not meet their justificatory burden demonstrating an advantage anywhere near that. as conrad and i (ivy and conrad 2018) make clear, even the iaaf’s own evidence showed no average advantage for hyperandrogenic women. and no evidence yet exists that trans women have an average advantage over cisgender women.49 all sailors, tucker, and others can muster is data comparing cis males to cis non-intersex females, and claiming that trans and intersex women are physiologically identical to cis males, without actually studying trans and intersex women athletes. what seems to matter to sailors is what effect the inclusion of trans and intersex women’s sport has on “women’s sport as a whole.” at first blush, it would make it more inclusive! it would mean that all women are included in women’s sport! but let’s not forget that trans and intersex women are already included (though with some medical restrictions).50 i think the implication is that including trans and intersex women might deprive “real” (read: cis, non-intersex) women of opportunities. conveniently, such a position seems not to care about equal access to these social goods for the trans and intersex women athletes. that seems more than a little unfair. sailors seems to ignore the overwhelming prevalence of transphobia, discrimination, and harassment of trans athletes in sport.51 the thing is, sailors doesn’t find this nondomination argument even the slightest bit convincing. she claims that “no argument dependent on prior results could possibly have any persuasive power with such a paucity of them” (sailors 2020, 425). but more than 54,4000olympians is a lot. and best estimates are that trans people are approximately 0.6% of the us population (flores et al. 2016). with a world population of approximately 7.5 billion, that means approximately 45 million people are trans. if we just assume that trans women are less than half of the trans people, at say 0.2% of the global population, that’s still 15 million trans women in the world. if there were any reliable significant competitive advantage for trans women, the fact that we haven’t seen a single trans woman even compete in an olympics is at least a little persuasive. the average age of an olympian is 27. the focus on excluding trans women from women’s sport focuses almost exclusively on postpubertal trans women. we’ve had 14 years of olympics without a trans olympian. that’s more than enough time for an elite postpubertal trans woman to become successful enough to compete in an olympics, especially if there’s a supposed unfair competitive advantage on the basis of being a postpubertal trans woman. remember, it’s not as if trans 49 i discuss the irrelevance of wiik et al. (2020) in section 4 below. 50 conrad and i (ivy and conrad 2018) argue that these restrictions are unethical and not supported by the science adduced in their favour, but this is outside the scope of the present paper. 51 see, for example, equality network (2012). ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 29 women athletes weren’t competing until only after the 2003 policy change: we’ve been here all along. sailors simply dismissed the point too easily. i think the numbers largely speak for themselves: on the low end, there are 10–15 million trans women worldwide, 54,442 olympians since trans women have been openly allowed to compete as women, and yet not a single trans woman has even competed in an olympics. obviously, there have therefore been zero olympic medals won by any trans women. surely that should carry a little argumentative weight rather than “no argument dependent on past results could possibly have any persuasive power with such a paucity of them.” here’s the thing: sailors wants it both ways. she rejects the past results showing an utter lack of trans women in elite women’s sport but wants to highlight a single podium at the 2016 rio games. referring to the aforementioned representation of the nondomination argument, she writes: according to this argument, if trans and intersex athletes really had an unfair competitive advantage, they would be dominating their sports, but the fact that they do not always win means that fears about their inclusion in the women’s category are unfounded. this argument is unconvincing for several reasons. to the extent that it works, it works only for trans athletes, not intersex, since the latter have, in fact, dominated at least some events. for example, the podium positions for the women’s 800 m running event at the 2016 rio olympic games were all occupied by intersex athletes, with caster semenya winning gold, francine niyonsaba taking silver, and margaret wambui finishing in the bronze medal position. (sailors 2020, 425) one podium does not a pattern make. there were 306 podiums at the 2016 rio games. just one was composed entirely of intersex female athletes (and again, no trans women even qualified to compete). women were eligible for 144 of those podiums (including women-only and mixed-gender sports or categories). one podium out of 144, or 0.69%. so apparently one podium out of 144 is enough for sailors to point to the results as evidence of events “dominated” by intersex women. i think that’s a hasty generalization. i wouldn’t describe the results of a single event as intersex (or trans) women having “dominated” the 2016 games. the winner didn’t even set a world record. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 30 semenya does not hold the world record in the 800 m event. sailors doesn’t mention any other intersex female accomplishments at the 2016 rio games.52 so according to sailors, 0 out of 54,442 trans olympians doesn’t “possibly have any persuasive power with such a paucity of them,” but 1 out of 144 events with intersex athletes on the podium is enough to have persuasive power. no. sailors can’t have it both ways. i don’t think it’s a coincidence that authors such as sailors never include the relative frequency of intersex female “domination.” intersex female athletes didn’t dominate, even the single 800 m track event that she references. semenya, the gold medallist, and intersex female at the centre of the global controversy, only has the third fastest 800 m time in the world; she does not hold the world record. compare semenya to another accomplished olympian sprinter, usain bolt. semenya has two total gold medals from the 2012 and 2016 games. bolt holds world records in every single one of his events: 100 m, 200 m, and 4x100 m relay. bolt is the only athlete ever to win gold in the 100 m (and 200 m!) in three successive olympics: beijing 2008, london 2012, and rio 2016. bolt has twice swept all three of his events at the olympics. he has eight olympic gold medals. semenya has two. bolt has 11 world championships. semenya has three. no one is clamoring to exclude bolt for being too successful in his sport. if anyone is dominating sport, it was bolt (now retired). so why the singular focus on semenya’s two gold medals and no world records? i contend that we celebrate exceptional men, but are suspicious of (and seek to exclude) exceptional women. while we’re looking at facts, let’s compare their respective winning margins at the 2012 olympics. bolt won his 100 m event by a margin of 1.25%, and won his 200 m event by a margin of 0.62% (and 2.69% over bronze). semenya won her event by 0.26%.53 52 the language of “domination” is regularly applied to me, despite all evidence to the contrary. for example, “transgender cyclist rachel mckinnon dominates as competitors cry foul” (mollie walker, new york post, october 21, 2019, https:// nypost.com/2019/10/21/transgender-cyclist-rachel-mckinnon-dominates-ascompetitors-raise-questions/). i won one gold (sprint) and one silver (500 m tt). dawn orwick took one silver (sprint) and one gold (500 m tt). we had exactly the same medal count: why am i said to “dominate”? moreover, my highest elite world ranking was 85th in the world. how can the 85th person in the world be said to be “dominating”? it’s nonsense, of course. 53 in 2016, bolt won his 100 m event by 0.82% and his 200 m event by 1.21%. semenya won her 800 m event by 1.05%. by contrast, david rudisha won the men’s 800 m by ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 31 so bolt won his 100 m event in 2012 by a margin nearly five times semenya’s respective winning advantage. there was no discussion of whether it was unfair of bolt, so why the focus on semenya? i think we know why by now: it’s misogyny.54 the simple truth is that trans women are essentially nonexistent in elite sport, especially the olympics. sailors points to a single podium of intersex women and claims “domination.” this is simply false. it’s hyperbole at best and disingenuous at worst. the problem is that people tend not to check the numbers. but that’s why i’ve provided them. on a plain reading of the record, neither trans nor intersex women are dominating women’s sport. and we celebrate exceptional “dominating” male athletes (such as bolt, michael phelps, etc.), but we cry “unfair” when the rare intersex female athlete, or heaven forefend, an entire podium of intersex women succeeds. sailors (2020, 425) argues that “separate categories are justified and necessary when their absence would leave no doubt about who would triumph through possession of competitive advantage.” the implication is that allowing full and equal inclusion of trans and intersex women athletes in women’s sport would “leave no doubt about who would triumph through possession of competitive advantage”; namely, the trans and intersex women. so where are they? they’re already included. and there is considerable doubt as to who will win a given event! in fact, the data seem to support that betting against the trans woman is the safe bet, particularly given their complete absence at the olympics. if i had to bet on who would win the women’s tennis event at the 2020*55 olympics, a cis woman or the nonexistent trans woman (because there won’t be one), i’d bet on a cis woman winning.56 i’m not sure which cis woman would win, though. simply, sailors’s argument is a hypothetical: if we allow trans and intersex women to compete with cis non-intersex women, then cis non-intersex women will not (often) win. she has the burden of proof here. she has no evidence for this, save for 0.69% of the podiums at a single olympics, and 0% of the medals at the olympics for trans women. that’s a pretty poor argument, i contend. 0.45%. in 2012, rudisha won by 0.81%. there was nothing comparatively spectacular about semenya’s winning margin. 54 see manne (2017). see also serano (2007) for the canonical work on transmisogyny. 55 thanks, covid. 56 there are a number of plausible trans candidates who will be the first ever to compete in the olympics at the 2020* games, if they ever happen, but none are medal favorites, and none are tennis athletes. so navratilova can rest assured, i suppose. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 32 4. supposed competitive advantages are just that—supposed sailors (2020, 425) says, “further, remember that male athletes have a 10– 12% performance advantage over female athletes, which means that a trans woman athlete would have to have been more than 10% better than elite female athletes before transitioning in order to be as good as an elite female.” the claim is that, wrongly, trans women are male.57 trans women are medically and legally considered female, including for the purposes of sport. sailors’s argument both is a non sequitur (and a misunderstanding of statistics)58 and a begging of the question, when she assumes that trans women are physiologically indistinguishable from cisgender men, such that preor posttransition trans women also have a 10%–12% average advantage over comparable cis women athletes. there has never been a single scientific study to support this. it’s an assumption. the assumption is that postpubertal trans women are basically men in skirts. and we can’t exclude people from their human right to sport based on an assumption. to support her assumption, sailors (2020, 425) quotes tucker (2019), who writes: an advantage may still exist. in fact, if the performance of a biological male got worse by anything less than 10% after lowering testosterone, then the resultant mtf athlete would have a conceptually “unfair” advantage, and one that could be theoretically insurmountable.59 at 10% impaired, only truly elite men could win medals in women’s sport.60 at a 7% loss of performance, you could be a medal winner even as a sub-elite male. but at 4% or less lost with lower testosterone, a sub-elite man could totally dominate women’s sport. 57 see betancurt et al. (2018) and franklin, betancurt, and camporesi (2018). 58 even if we grant the unproven assumption that trans women are physiologically indistinguishable from cis men, if a trans woman loses 10% of her performance, she would have to be 11% better. e.g., a 10.0-second sprinter losing 10% of their time would be an 11.0 s sprinter. a 10.0 s sprinter is 11% faster than an 11.0 s sprinter (11.0/10.0 = 11%). it’s a basic misunderstanding of algebra: if you lose 25% of $10, you’re left with $7.50. but then gaining 25% doesn’t return you to $10, you’d have $9.35. ten is 25% greater than 7.5, but you’d need a 33% increase from 7.5 to get to 10. 59 i also note that “mtf” and “ftm” are increasingly, heavily dispreferred by trans people. better would be “trans women” or “trans men.” 60 it’s also worth noting that this frames women as “impaired” men. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 33 let’s be careful with our language: “an advantage may still exist.” “may.” no evidence is adduced for this. tucker continues, “in fact, if the performance. . . .” “if.” it’s a counterfactual. tucker’s claims are entirely hypothetical rather than based on any data about trans athletes and the supposed competitive advantage. but let’s also note that tucker, and by extension sailors, seems to position women as “impaired” men, as inherently smaller, weaker, and in need of being protected from trans and intersex women. sailors references a recent paper by anna wiik and others, which is a study on only 12 nonathlete trans women. the authors themselves clearly state that fact: we acknowledge that this study was conducted with untrained individuals and not transgender athletes. thus, while this gave us the important opportunity to study the effect of the cross-hormone treatment alone, and as such the study adds important data to the field, it is still uncertain how the findings would translate to transgender athletes undergoing advanced training regimens during the gender-affirming intervention. it is also important to recognize that we only assessed proxies for athletic performance, such as muscle mass and strength. (wiik et al. 2020, e812) the only evidence sailors adduced for the claim that trans women have a 10%–12% competitive advantage over cis women is supposition and a tiny study on 12 nonathletes using an unreliable proxy for athletic performance, and she uses that study as evidence for a claim that the authors explicitly didn’t want people to draw from the paper. she has framed the discussion as one about “males” vs biological females. and recall that those arguing against trans inclusion in sport have the burden of proof. this is rather weak evidence on which to base the exclusion of trans women from women’s sport. tucker’s cases are simple counterfactuals as bare possibilities. they aren’t evidence. they’re counterfactuals: if trans women’s medical transition has x effect on performance, then they would have y outcome. but again, there have been 54,442 olympians since trans women have been allowed to compete and 0 trans olympians in that time. remember, if we assume that approximately 0.2% of the world population are trans women, and at most half the olympians since athens 2004 (27,221) are women, then we’d expect approximately 54 trans women olympians. but we’ve seen none. this rather seems to support the claim that trans women are at a distinct disadvantage. the argument about trans women’s supposed competitive advantage is exactly that: supposed. it isn’t measured. even the oft-cited wiik study (wiik et al 2020) wasn’t on athletes and used an unreliable proxy for athletic performance. and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 34 the results we do have more strongly support the claim that trans women are at a disadvantage in elite sport compared to cis women. and those seeking to exclude trans women from their right to sport as women/female have the burden of proof. and they haven’t even come close to approaching that. it is entirely illegitimate to argue for the denial of the human right to sport on the basis of counterfactuals and hypotheticals. let’s continue. sailors’s argument is based on the imaginary situation where we simply allow men to compete with women openly: missy franklin and ryan lochte are swimmers who have had great international and olympic success. they also have almost identical wingspans, but her best time in the 200-m backstroke is a full 9 s slower than his, which would have put her half a lap behind him if they swam their best times against one another in the same race. “in a world in which competitors were categorized by height and wingspan—or just height or just wingspan—instead of sex, franklin would not have had a world record; she would not have been on the podium; in fact, she would not have made the team. in those circumstances, we might not even know her name.” (sailors 2020, 424–425; quoting coleman 2018, 90) in her previous work, sailors (2016) has focused on whether women should compete against (cis) men. both then and now, we’re not talking about men competing against women: we’re talking about trans and intersex women competing as women against other women. arguments drawing on performance advantages of men are irrelevant to this question.61 however, sailors is clearly trying to frame trans and intersex women as physiologically equivalent to men, a fact she has only assumed but not supported. 61 lest you think i dismiss this too quickly, i go into excruciating detail elsewhere (ivy and conrad 2018). simply put, even if we assume that trans and intersex women have a competitive advantage over cis women, such an advantage would be insufficient to justify their exclusion from women’s competition. we already permit huge competitive advantages on the basis of natural physical traits as well as sociological and economic factors, much larger than even the largest supposed estimate of an advantage for hyperandrogenic intersex women and trans women due to exposure to higher-than-average endogenous testosterone. the focus on competitive advantage, i have thus argued, is entirely misplaced and rendered effectively irrelevant. of course, we go into great scientific detail on why this is so. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 35 5. conclusion: sport is a human right, even for trans and intersex women this debate and its attendant controversy aren’t about whether we should allow men into women’s sport (we don’t), or whether men have a human right to identify into the women’s category (they don’t). this is about women, real women, who also happen to be intersex or trans, having the same full and equal rights as cis, non-intersex women, as laid out by the ioc charter and cas case law. the argumentative, evidentiary burden is on the side that seeks to exclude trans and intersex women wholesale from women’s competition. it is not on those arguing for trans and intersex women’s full and equal inclusion. in this paper i have shown that the bulk of the arguments against trans and intersex women’s full and equal inclusion in sport have been based on assumptions, suppositions, and counterfactuals, not fact. since this side of the debate has the burden of proof, i submit that they have not come anywhere close to meeting their burden. the default in human rights is inclusion, not exclusion. trans women are women, are female. trans men are men, are male. and intersex women deserve just as much access to women’s sport as non-intersex women. works cited behrensen, maren. 2013. in the halfway house of ill repute: gender verification under a different name, still no contribution to fair play. sport, ethics and philosophy 7 (4): 450–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2013.856460. betancurt, jonathan ospina, maria s. zakynthinaki, maría josé martínez-patiño, and carlos cordente martínez. 2018. “hyperandrogenic athletes: performance differences in elite-standard 200m and 800m finals.” journal of sports sciences 36 (21): 2464–2471. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/02640414.2018 .1464620. coleman, doriane lambelet. 2018. "sex in sport." law and contemporary problems 80 (4): 63–126. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol80/iss4/5. dreger, alice. 2012. "the olympic struggle over sex." the atlantic, july 2. https:// www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-olympic-struggle-oversex/259321/. equality network. 2012. out for sport: tackling transphobia in sport. edinburgh: equality network. http://www.equality-network.org/wp-content/uploads /2013/03/transgender-specific-companion-report.pdf. flores, andrew r., jody l. herman, gary j. gates, and taylor n. t. brown. 2016. how many adults identify as transgender in the united states? los angeles: williams institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/transadults-united-states/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 36 franklin, simon, jonathan ospina betancurt, and silvia camporesi. 2018. “what statistical data of observational performance can tell us and what they cannot: the case of dutee chand v. afi & iaaf.” british journal of sports medicine 52 (7): 420–421. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-098513. friedlaender, christina and ivy, veronica [mckinnon, rachel]. 2020. “a defense of intentional microaggressions and microaggressive harassment: the fundamental attribution error, harassment, and gaslighting of transgender athletes.” in microaggressions and philosophy, edited by lauren freeman and jeanine weekes schroer. new york: routledge. gilligan, andrew. 2019. “navratilova blasts ‘cheating’ transgender women in sport.” sunday times, february 17. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article /martina-navratilova-blasts-cheating-transgender-women-in-sport8fmjbnh99. ioc (international olympic committee). 2020. olympic charter, revised and in force as from 17 july 2020. lausanne: ioc. https://stillmed.olympic.org/media /document%20library/olympicorg/general/en-olympic-charter.pdf#_ga=2 .34249441.1113089252.1589633798-872525654.1589633798. ivy, veronica [mckinnon, rachel]. 2018a. “cycling champ lays the case for trans inclusion in women’s sport: sport is a human right. trans women are women. let us compete with women.” outsports, october 24. https://www .outsports.com/2018/10/24/18015652/rachel-mckinnon-cycling-worldchampion-trans-women-are-women. ———. 2018b. “trans people like me have a right to be part of society--and sport. washington post, october 26. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions /trans-people-like-me-have-a-right-to-be-part-of-society--and-sport/2018/10 /26/642f42a4-d8a4-11e8-83a2-d1c3da28d6b6_story.html. ———. 2019a. “caster semenya decision is wrongheaded and discriminates against elite female athletes.” newsweek, may 6. https://www.newsweek.com /sports-caster-semenya-rachel-mckinnon-athletes-olympic-intersextestosterone-1412841. ———. 2019b. “gaslighting as epistemic violence: ‘allies,’ mobbing, and complex posttraumatic stress disorder, including a case study of harassment of transgender women in sport.” in overcoming epistemic injustice: social and psychological perspectives, edited by benjamin r. sherman and stacey goguen, 285–302. new york: rowman & littlefield. ———. 2019c. “here’s what to do, and not to do, when you do something transphobic.” outsports, january 6. https://www.outsports.com/2019/1/6 /18171654/what-to-do-trans-critic-support. ivy – the failure of arguments against trans and intersex women's inclusion in women's sport published by scholarship@western, 2021 37 ———. 2019d. “i won a world championship: some people aren’t happy.” new york times, december 5. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/opinion/i-wona-world-championship-some-people-arent-happy.html. ———. 2019e. “participation in sport is a human right, even for trans women.” sports integrity initiative, june 17. https://www.sportsintegrityinitiative.com /participation-in-sport-is-a-human-right-even-for-trans-women/. ———. 2019f. participation in sport is a human right, even for trans women. american philosophical association newsletter on lgbtq issues in philosophy 19 (1): 10–14. https://www.apaonline.org/page/lgbtq_newsletter. ———. 2019g. “sport is a human right.” diva magazine, july, 74–76. ivy, veronica, and aryn conrad. 2018. “including trans women athletes in competitive sport: analyzing the science, law, and principles and policies of fairness in competition.” philosophical topics 46 (2): 103–140. https://www .muse.jhu.edu/article/764815. manne, kate. 2017. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. navratilova, martina. 2019. “the rules on trans athletes reward cheats and punish the innocent.” sunday times, february 17. https://www.thetimes.co.uk /article/the-rules-on-trans-athletes-reward-cheats-and-punish-the-innocentklsrq6h3x. pieper, lindsay. 2016. sex testing: gender policing in women’s sports. champaign: university of illinois press. rasmussen reports. 2019. americans oppose transgender trend in athletics. november 08. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle /social_issues/americans_oppose_transgender_trend_in_athletics. sailors, pam r. 2016. “off the beaten path: should women compete against men?” sport in society 19 (8–9): 1125–1137. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437 .2015.1096255. sailors, pam r. 2020. “transgender and intersex athletes and the women’s category in sport. sport, ethics and philosophy 14 (4): 419–431. https://doi.org/10 .1080/17511321.2020.1756904. serano, julia. 2007. whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. berkeley, ca: seal press. tucker, ross. 2019. “on transgender athletes and performance advantages.” science of sport, march 24. https://sportsscientists.com/2019/03/ontransgender-athletes-and-performance-advantages/. wiik, anna, tommy r. lundberg, eric rullman, daniel p. andersson, mats holmberg, mirko mandić, torkel b. brismar, et al. 2020. “muscle strength, size, and composition following 12 months of gender-affirming treatment in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 38 transgender individuals.” journal of clinical endocrinology & metabolism 105 (3): e805–e813. published electronically december 3, 2019. https://doi.org /10.1210/clinem/dgz247. dr. veronica ivy is an interdisciplinary scholar who has published widely on topics of knowledge, language, gender, and issues of equity (particularly in sport). she is a world-leading expert on trans and intersex athlete rights and offers institutional diversity and inclusion training workshops. veronica has penned articles for the new york times, washington post, economist, nbc news, vice, and many more. she has appeared on major tv, radio, and podcast interviews to discuss trans issues and particularly trans and intersex athlete rights. in addition to her academic work, she is a two-time masters track cycling world champion and previous masters world-record holder. dr. ivy also happens to be a queer trans woman. she is the first known trans woman to win a track cycling world championship. veronica also engages in advocacy and activism for trans and intersex athletes. her message is that #sportisahumanright. dr. ivy brings a unique perspective of being an academic, an athlete, and an activist to her work. 10726 ivy title page 10726 ivy final format feminism and the carceral state: gender-responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 1 article 3 2017 feminism and the carceral state: gender responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence brady t. heiner california state university, fullerton, bheiner@fullerton.edu sarah k. tyson university of colorado, denver, sarah.k.tyson@ucdenver.edu recommended citation heiner, brady t. and sarah k. tyson. 2017. "feminism and the carceral state: gender-responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (1). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3. feminism and the carceral state: gender-responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence brady heiner and sarah tyson abstract building on recent feminist scholarship on the complicity of feminist antiviolence movements in the build-up of mass incarceration, this essay analyzes the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by carceral logic, taking the gender-responsive justice and community accountability movements as countervailing examples. both strategies claim to be a feminist response to violence. gender-responsive justice arises from feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the american prison reformatory movement. community accountability stems from grassroots intersectional and decolonial feminisms that are fundamentally at odds with the professionalization and state-centrism of the mainstream antiviolence movement. we argue that gender-responsive justice is a form of carceral humanism that repackages carceral control as the caring provision of social services, while community accountability advances a radically creative abolitionist and decolonial project of an irreducibly epistemological order. keywords: feminist theory, mass incarceration, prison abolition, decolonization, critical criminology, feminist epistemology, community accountability, critical prison studies, feminist criminology, angela y. davis, kristie dotson introduction it can be hard to imagine a world without prisons (davis 2003, 9–10, 105– 106; garland 1990, 4; morris and rothman 1995, vii). prisons not only confine millions of bodies and occupy vast swaths of land in the united states,1 they also 1 critiques of settler colonialism from native american and indigenous studies and other fields persuasively argue that the occupation of land is an important part of the formation, expansion, and legitimization of settler colonial polities like the united states. prisons offer a particularly salient manifestation of u.s. stateformation and violence through territorial occupation. as such, the u.s.’s massive incarceration project should be understood as a moment of an ongoing colonial process of dispossessing native peoples and eliminating indigenous lifeways. to 1 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 have captured, confined, and inhabited our collective capacities for thinking, feeling, imagining, and acting. the practice of incarceration conceals the prison’s historical contingency, and crucially, it masks the inadequacy of incarceration as a response to social problems. in the words of community accountability theorists, incarceration has effected an epistemic occupation such that many of us encounter profound difficulty imagining and conceptualizing the redress and prevention of violence (including state violence) without recourse to the heteropatriarchal violence of the state (durazo et al. 2012b, 2; see also brown 1992; brown and halley 2002; kim 2015; richie 2012, 88–89; smith 2012, 41). as a result of this epistemic occupation, it can even seem wrong to consider non-carceral responses to violence, because dominant neoliberal logic delineates only one intelligible schema of accountability for violence—that of an individual (non-state) agent—and only one general form of legitimate response: state-centric punishment (whether confinement, execution, or other form of physical, civil, or social death). alternative forms of community accountability and redress that break from state-centric carceral systems appear baffling, irresponsible, even monstrous. the choice seems to be confined to either ensnaring an individual with the punitive arms of the state or fomenting complete, unaccountable disorder. in this essay, we focus on the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work by this carceral logic. recent feminist scholarship has articulated the multiple ways in which feminist movements—including, if not especially, feminist antiviolence work—have been complicit in the build-up of mass incarceration and the proliferation of state violence (e.g., bevacqua 2000, gottschalk 2006, kim 2015; richie 2012). building on this scholarship, we examine a strategy that has come to be known as gender-responsive justice (grj), which seeks to reduce state violence against women in correctional settings while also responding effectively to the needs of incarcerated women who have experienced violence prior to incarceration. our second aim is to highlight the epistemic de-linking (mignolo 2007), worldconstituting, and community-building possibilities opened up by radical intersectional feminist antiviolence theory and practice. to accomplish our second aim, we look at the very different strategy of community accountability (ca), which seeks to abolish state violence, including prisons and policing, while also ending violence within communities. obtain an imaginative sense of the territorial and geographic extent of the u.s. carceral state, see data artist josh begley’s “prison map” project: http://prisonmap.com/about. on settler colonialism and its connection to histories of confinement, see, e.g., corntassel (2012a), deer (2015), goldstein (2014), ross (1998), veracini (2010), and wolfe (2006). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 http://prisonmap.com/about both strategies of addressing violence have arisen in roughly the same time frame (i.e., since the 1990s), both have largely been developed and led by women, and each claims to be a feminist response to multiple modalities of violence (domestic, internecine, civic, governmental). however, their respective theoretical frameworks, methods, aims, social locations, and effects could hardly be more divergent. one, grj, arises from interventions in feminist criminology and has genealogical roots in the american prison reformatory movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the other, ca, stems from a radical intersectional feminism that is fundamentally at odds with the professionalization and state-subsumption of the mainstream antiviolence movement. one has predominantly been elaborated by professional white women within departments of correction and criminology, the other largely by women of color in grassroots antiviolence organizations. one fuels policy initiatives to expand the reach of the criminal justice system, the other advocates and organizes for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. drawing conceptual resources from grassroots antiviolence activists, we argue that grj is a form of carceral humanism (cullors et al. 2015; curb 2007; kilgore 2014), a discursive strategy of rebranding or repackaging carceral control as the caring provision of social services. we argue that grj initiatives essentialize gender and ultimately tend toward the proliferation of violence and the expansion of the u.s. carceral state by making arrest and confinement necessary steps to receiving “wraparound rehabilitative and reentry services,” which effectively positions the criminal justice system as the neoliberal gatekeeper of social services. ca approaches, by contrast, operate with an intersectional conception of gender, make a more thoroughgoing, systemic critique of violence, and strengthen community relationships by helping people build skills for nonviolent conflict resolution without state intervention. in other words, ca questions the fundamental logic of incarceration. in doing so, ca opens up epistemic and imaginative space for alternative responses to violence and demonstrates how violence can be redressed and prevented by people within their own communities without recourse to the punitive apparatuses of the state. in the final section of this essay, we offer an explicitly philosophical analysis of the political and epistemic challenge to carceral logics that the theorists and practitioners of ca articulate. from the fields of social epistemology and decolonial thought that address questions of oppression and the politics of knowledge (e.g., alcoff and potter 1992; anzaldúa 1999; code 1995, 2004, 2008; collins 2000; fricker 2007; medina 2012; mignolo 2007, 2009; mills 1999; pohlhaus 2011; sullivan and tuana 2007), we draw upon black feminist epistemologist kristie dotson’s analysis of epistemic oppression and resistance to conceptualize the epistemic occupation of feminist antiviolence work in terms of the resilience of epistemological systems 3 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 (2014, 119). we also offer an account of the triple-loop epistemic processes through which the theory and practice of ca works, not merely to solve problems within the frame of existing criminal justice schemas, nor to modify those schemas in response to persistent problems, but to create new possibilities for thought and action by transforming and expanding the shared epistemic resources that constitute our social imaginaries. in short, we conceptualize the irreducibly epistemological ingenuity in virtue of which ca renders the feminist project of prison abolition thinkable and feasible. gender-responsive justice and feminist criminology grj was initially a response to an earlier feminist reform of prisons. in the late 1980s, on the heels of the “awakening of criminology from its androcentric slumber” (daly and chesney-lind 1988, 17–18), many radical and socialist feminist criminologists began to critique the equal treatment or parity model of criminal justice that had been championed by early (liberal) feminist criminologists in favor of a gender-responsive model of criminal justice. early feminist criminologists, influenced by second-wave liberal feminism, challenged the “separate spheres” assumptions operating in law, criminological theory and research, and criminal justice practices. conceptualizing women’s emancipation in terms of the achievement of formal legal and social equality with men in the public sphere, advocates of the parity model of criminal justice defined gender equality as equal treatment of men and women in juridical and carceral settings. they also in large part allowed male experiences and punishment regimes to function as the norms toward which the procedural and carceral treatment of women ought to conform. the prison industry’s response to parity-based legal challenges to the repressive and neglectful conditions of incarcerated women was to argue that equal treatment of incarcerated women required the construction of new equal prisons for women. some in the parity movement supported such proposals, arguing that although equal treatment may hurt women in the short run, in the long run, it was the only way to guarantee that women would ever be treated as equal partners in economic and social realms (covington and bloom 2000, 3). as the historical record indicates, the prison industrial complex swelled in the spirit of punitive equity for women. combined with the concurrent upsurge of retributive and incapacitative punishment philosophies and policies and the rise of mass incarceration, liberal feminist demands for gender parity in sentencing and prison conditions often led, paradoxically, to increased incarceration and more repressive conditions for women—a trend that critical feminist criminologist meda chesney-lind terms vengeful equity. “vengeful equity . . . emphasizes treating women offenders as though they were men, particularly when the outcome is punitive, in the name of 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 equal justice” (chesney-lind 2002, 91; on the idea of vengeful equity see also bloom and chesney-lind 2000; chesney-lind 1991, 52; 1998; 2006, 17–20; daly and chesney-lind 1988, 32; see also davis 2003, 60–83). in fact, the conjunction of the parity model of criminal justice and the war on drugs contributed to women becoming the fastest-growing segment of the u.s. prison population, increasing by 125 percent throughout the 1990s, nearly 1.5 times the rate of men (lipsitz 2012, 1770; sentencing project 2015, 1). sources: chesney-lind (1998, 66) & rafter (1990, 181–182) every year more than three million women go to jail or prison in the united states (a number which does not include trans women incarcerated in men’s prisons and jails), giving the u.s. the deplorable distinction of confining more than one-third of the worldwide total of incarcerated women (richie 2002, 137; walmsley 2015). and this exponential expansion in women’s incarceration, writes chesney-lind, has soared “untethered from women’s crime rate.” that is, it is the result of punitive public policy decisions, not an increase in women’s involvement in serious crime (2006, 17; see also 1998). feminist critique of the parity model has been diverse. since the 1990s, there have been calls for the abolition of women’s incarceration entirely, in some instances as part of proposals for generalized prison abolition, in others as a staged experiment in abolition, which would eventually be extended to men (e.g., carlen 6 8 10 13 20 37 71 104 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 1995 number of women's prisons in the united states, 1930-1995 5 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 1990; 2010, 292; chesney-lind 1991, 64–65; critical resistance and incite! 2006; davis 1996; 1998a; 1998b; 2003, 75). much more influential on penological practice, however, has been the (re)turn to “separate spheres” punishment schemes in the form of gender-responsive justice. the grj model is a criminological appropriation of the feminist ethic of care; its guiding principle is that gender makes a criminological difference, that women differ from men in their “pathways” to crime, in their social, psychological, and material issues and needs, and in their experiences of confinement. for instance, the majority (61 percent) of women currently imprisoned in the u.s. are confined for minor illegalities such as property, drug, or public order offenses. source: sentencing project (2015, 1) while largely lacking histories of perpetrating violence, incarcerated women are prevalently survivors of violence. studies by human rights watch and the u.s. department of justice indicate that nearly half of all incarcerated women had been physically or sexually abused prior to their imprisonment, and over one-third had been abused prior to the age of 18—roughly twice the percentage among the general population of american women (harlow 1999; human rights watch 1996, 32; richie 2000). in fact, sexual abuse is one of the primary predictors of girls’ entry into the juvenile justice system, a fact which the human rights project for girls and the georgetown law center on poverty and inequality recently framed as “the sexual abuse to prison pipeline” (saar et al. 2015). and in a perverse twist of justice, rise in women’s incarceration in the united states, 1980-2014 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 many women and girls who experience sexual abuse are criminalized and incarcerated because of their victimization (e.g., when victims of sex trafficking are arrested on prostitution charges). source: kajstura and immarigeon (2015) source: sentencing project (2015, 4) 5 6 7 8 8 9 9 11 13 16 127 denmark france italy netherlands norway belgium luxembourg canada united kingdom portugal united states incarceration rates of women among founding nato countries, 2015 incarceration rates (per 100,000) 54% 19% 15% 11% 37% 28% 24% 9% violent property drug public order incarceration offense type in united states, by gender, 2014 men women 7 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 in light of the distinctly gendered dimensions of the lives of incarcerated women and girls, grj maintains, against the gender parity model of criminal justice, that equality of treatment ought not be defined in terms of sameness of treatment. rather, grj devises a “women-sensitive” correctional model that emphasizes women’s “empowerment,” a carceral environment based on safety, respect, and dignity, and relational programming that addresses issues of substance abuse, trauma, and mental health, and that promotes healthy connections to children, family, and community (bloom et al. 2002; tffsw 1990). prima facie these principles seem to aim at unobjectionable feminist goals. and yet, three of the six goals of grj cited by feminist criminologists in their report for the national institute of corrections, which provides the empirical and theoretical foundation for grj policies adopted by corrections departments nationwide, are “to make the management of women offenders more effective,” “enable correctional facilities to be more suitably staffed and funded,” and “decrease the likelihood of litigation against the criminal justice system” (bloom et al. 2002, v). in other words, half of the goals seek to increase carceral efficiency and system funding, and decrease system vulnerability to legal critique—objectives explicitly aimed at strengthening and shoring up the carceral intensity and reach of the prison industrial complex. like the gender parity movement that preceded it, and which it was designed to replace, the separate-spheres feminist demand for gender responsiveness in sentencing and prison conditions has—yet again—fueled government proposals for carceral system expansion. for instance, the same feminist criminologists who contracted with the national institute of corrections to create the genderresponsive strategies project also contracted with the california department of corrections and rehabilitation to produce the master plan for female offenders: a blueprint for gender-responsive rehabilitation, which claims that “the ‘mega prison’ approach, which was designed primarily to incapacitate and punish violent [read: ‘male’] offenders, is not effective for the majority of female offenders who are nonviolent” (cdcr 2008, 9). instead, “a robust system of community correctional facilities” is needed (cdcr 2008, 10). abolitionist feminists label such modifications as “gendered tweaks to carceral business as usual” (buchanan 2012, 1685), attempts to construct “kinder, gentler, gender-responsive cages” (braz 2006, 87), and refer to grj as “carceral humanism” (cullors et al. 2015; kilgore 2014) and the “genderresponsive prison expansion movement” (chandler 2010). in the words of abolitionist human rights advocate and formerly incarcerated woman misty rojo: “if the state actually cared about women as it claims, it would stop building new gender responsive cages, close down the existing ones, and allow the imprisoned mothers, sisters and daughters to return to their families and build real community-based programs to support them” (2014). in sum, both of these opposing trajectories of 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 feminist critique—i.e., the gender parity movement and the separate spheres movement—have been subject to the same epistemic occupation. demands for equal treatment and gender-responsive treatment alike have given rise to the same outcome: demands and plans for building more prisons. critical feminists also point to the way grj relies on a “flexible rationality of empowerment” that is variously and contradictorily employed to legitimate both carceral and feminist strategies (hannah-moffat 2004a). for instance, grj theorists acknowledge that most criminalized women are oppressed by intersecting structures of race, class, and gender, but then conceptually and programmatically ignore these social and material realities in devising responses to these women. employing a neoliberal discourse of individual pathology and personal responsibility, grj proposes “corrective” interventions predicated upon “empowering” individuals to make better choices and become more productive, self-regulating agents in order to curb their own criminal behavior and transcend the conditions that cause criminality (davis 1996; hackett 2013; hannah-moffat 2000; 2004b; 2006; nixon et al. 2008). grj thus conjoins with neoliberal strategies of governance that abdicate state accountability for social welfare and societal responsibility for social justice by individualizing social problems and constructing criminalized individuals as burdened subjects blameworthy for their confinement within intersecting structures of oppression. lost is the feminist critique of social structural processes—i.e., the materialized effects of past collective or institutional actions and decisions that cumulatively produce differentials in the kinds and range of options that individuals have for their choices (young 2011, 43–74). the particular (and contradictory) conjunction of carceral and caring logics and procedures that grj embodies also prompts a rethinking of prominent conceptions of neoliberalism. for instance, in his influential account of neoliberalism and the rise of the carceral state, loïc wacquant argues that since the mid-1970s the united states has restructured the government of poverty through an overall reengineering and “(re)masculinizing” (2009b, 15) of the state “that couples welfare services and criminal justice administration under the aegis of the same punitive and paternalist philosophy” (2010, 83–84). “wedding the ‘invisible hand’ of the deregulated labor market to the ‘iron fist’ of an omnipresent and intrusive punitive apparatus” (2009a, 1), this alleged (re)masculinization process constructs a “causal and functional linkage between two sectors of the bureaucratic field”: on the one hand, a systematically atrophied social-welfare sector, which replaces the right to welfare with the obligation of restrictive workfare; on the other hand, a hypertrophically expanding penal sector (2009b, 19). wacquant refers to this coupling of welfare-turned-workfare and the carceral state as the carceralassistential complex, the aim of which he argues is to discipline, “surveil and subjugate, and if need be chastise and neutralize, the populations recalcitrant or 9 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 superfluous to the new economic and symbolic order” (2009a, 83; see also 2001, 97; 2010, 83–84). wacquant makes two claims in his account of the carceral-assistential complex of neoliberalism upon which our feminist analysis of grj sheds further light. first, he contends that in the (re)masculinization of the state “the punitive and panoptic logic that propels criminal justice seeps into and erodes the shielding capacities of the welfare sector” (2010, 84; emphasis added). in addition to the transformation of welfare into disciplinary workfare, he points, for instance, to the inflection of the practices of child protective services in ways that “turn them into adjuncts of the penal apparatus” (2010, 84–85).2 however, grj is exemplary of how the carceral logic of criminal justice has not only invaded the welfare sector, it has explicitly colonized and incorporated state welfare within the confines of state and federal departments of corrections. furthermore, contrary to wacquant’s assertion that the carceral-assistential complex is ordered by “a gendered division of labor, with its carceral component handling the men while its assistential component exercises its tutelage over (their) women and children” (2009a, 83–84; see also 2009b, 14–17; 2010, 83–84), grj is exemplary of how, for many women, especially those women of color whose strategies of survival are routinely and systemically criminalized, state assistance is (and always has been) deeply imbricated with carceral and colonial technologies. throughout penal history, liberal optimists have repeatedly and recurrently claimed that prisons are really assistential technologies of rehabilitation (morris and rothman 1995). however, prison is primarily and essentially organized for punitive exclusion by disciplinary containment. the essence of a prison is its carceral logic, and this logic inevitably erodes, if not subverts, all custodial attempts at therapy, rehabilitation, or human development (brenzel 1980; carlen and tombs 2006, 340; freedman 1984, 89–142; rafter 1990, 74–82). and, because of its intrinsic coercion, the carceral environment produces harm and ruptures in relationships that create the need for a unique set of social resources and therapeutic interventions to help people cope with the trauma of imprisonment itself. pat carlen and jaqueline tombs, radical feminist criminologists from england and scotland, respectively, expose the contradictory conceit of what carlen (2002, 2005) calls the “therapunitive prison.” 2 as intersectional (particularly black and indigenous) feminist scholarship makes clear, the practices of child protective services, contrary to wacquant’s historical narrative, have always operated as colonial and carceral technologies. see, for example, deer (2015, 67–75, 84–86) and roberts (1997, 2001, 2012, 2014). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 [the gender-responsive justice model] obscures the fact that therapeutic programming in prison is always buttressed by all the old punitive and security paraphernalia of previous centuries of creative penal governance; and that such an accretion and layering of disciplinary modes and containment strategies effortlessly produce the mixed economy of the therapunitive prison in which any isolated therapeutic attempts to reduce the debilitating pains of imprisonment are inevitably undermined by the punishing carceral context. (carlen and tombs 2006, 339) it is surprising that contemporary grj feminists fail to appreciate that prisons—however reformed—cannot and will not bring about the hoped for, even if misguided, therapeutic transformation of individual criminalized women. it is especially surprising in light of early criminological formulations of gender responsiveness, which, prior to adopting the neoliberal conceptual framework of individualistic therapy and case management, had an explicitly intersectional analytic focus on structural social processes. for instance, at the inception of the radical feminist critique of the logic of parity in criminal justice in the 1990s, when meda chesney-lind, one of the most prominent voices of grj in feminist criminology, called for a “return to an appreciation of the differences between women and men prisoners” and an embrace of a separate-spheres logic as a strategy for challenging the parity-driven pattern of mass incarceration, she proposed “using the special and unique needs of women offenders to argue against their imprisonment” (1991, 59; emphasis added). chesney-lind made four specific normative proposals to feminist criminologists at that time that are a far cry from the contemporary complicity of grj with the punitive expansionism of carceral humanism. first, she argued that feminist criminologists “should demand a moratorium on construction of women’s prisons in the united states with the ultimate goal of abolishing women’s prisons” (63, emphasis added). second, she argued that, in order “to make decarceration thinkable,” feminist criminologists must shift their research from an individualistic focus on “offender profiles” to an analysis of the ways that patriarchy and the intersections of race, class, and gender govern the patterns of women’s incarceration (64, emphasis added). relatedly, she advocated that feminist criminologists shift from studying criminalized women to studying the system that locks them up (64). lastly, and perhaps most importantly, chesney-lind proposed that feminist criminologists look to the grassroots at women “outside the academic mainstream” who are leading community initiatives and “fugitive research” agendas that chart out sustainable, non-carceral, life-affirming alternatives for addressing the needs of criminalized women (the overwhelming majority of whom are poor, of color, and survivors of violence). “in seeking to identify promising community 11 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 initiatives in decarceration,” she argued, “we must make sure that these function as alternatives rather than as mechanisms to expand state control over the lives of women” (64, emphasis added). how could feminist demand for gender-responsive justice, in the form of prison abolition and grassroots community alternatives, morph into a movement for state-centered gender-responsive prison and carceral expansion? to answer this question, grj must be understood as one element in the larger story of the occupation of the feminist antiviolence movement—an occupation which is at once organizational, political, and epistemic. the occupation of the antiviolence movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, antiviolence activists focused on rape, organized self-defense classes, took guerilla action against alleged rapists, inaugurated take back the night collective actions, founded rape crisis centers and organizations, then built alliances across these organizations, and lobbied for legal reforms (bevacqua 2000, 66–102). like the early (academic) formulations of grj, these early (grassroots) forms of organized feminist resistance to rape were driven by rapidly growing theorizations of patriarchy as the wellspring of violence against women. only by dismantling patriarchy, many activists argued, could rape be stopped. many theorized the state as a patriarchal structure that must be massively restructured, if not done away with entirely (bevacqua 2000; brown 1992; davis 1981; gottschalk 2006). during the late 70s and early 80s, however, radical critiques of social and political institutions gave way to approaches that focused on the state, particularly law enforcement, to respond to violence against women (bevacqua 2000; brown 1992; davis 1981; gottschalk 2006; kim 2015). beth richie offers an account of how that occupation became appealing to a certain segment of the antiviolence movement: academic research [on gendered violence and antiviolence intervention] followed funding streams, which emerged from legislative reforms that were less interested in social justice than social services, law enforcement, and explaining individual behavior. the emphasis was on creating generalized conclusions which, at best, focused on gender as a unifying category, but did not very effectively account for race, class, age, or other differences. from this conservative academic perspective, poor women who are raped, lesbians who are harassed, and battered women who break the law are understood as ‘troubling cases’ or ‘isolated incidences’ rather than social phenomena related to forms of structural inequality that extend beyond gender. (richie 2012, 88) 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 part of the reason legitimacy and state funding were so strongly tied to law enforcement has to do with the development of the larger victims’ rights movement in the united states. the law enforcement assistance administration (leaa), for instance, was established in 1968 as part of the omnibus crime control and safe streets act, which many regard as “the master plan for the national war on crime” (gottschalk 2006, 85; kim 2015, 7). leaa was specifically intended to address the treatment of victims and witnesses by law enforcement (gottschalk 2006, 85). by the time the anti-rape movement began critiquing and organizing resistance to law enforcement responses to victims, leaa was well enough established within the department of justice to fund studies and programs. one study concluded in 1974 that the responses of law enforcement and hospitals to victims were tantamount to a second assault (gottschalk 2006, 125). however, while the report supported local programs to address the needs of victims, it specifically called into question the work of rape crisis centers as too feminist (125). as marie gottschalk notes, “with the help of leaa money and other public financing, the government successfully absorbed many of the independent rape crisis centers and services, with their radical, volunteer, grassroots orientations, into its professional, hierarchical bureaucracy” (125). in the u.s., mobilization against domestic violence was organized later than the anti-rape movement and proved to be even more susceptible to cooptation.3 ultimately, gottschalk, kim, and richie identify both branches of the antiviolence movement (i.e., the anti-rape movement and the anti-domestic violence movement) as major contributors to the build-up of the carceral state. as the editors of a special issue of social justice on community accountability describe this transformation: “the politics of antiviolence work . . . were dislocated and repositioned into the repressive state’s powerful, and largely successful, conservative agenda” (durazo et al. 2012b, 2). many women of color objected to and resisted the cooptation of the mainstream antiviolence movement. amidst the ascendency of carceral solutions to violence against women, they continued to organize and risked confronting violence 3 it is noteworthy that the convergence of the u.s. anti-domestic violence movement with the state occurred, as mimi kim’s recent historical and ethnographic research evidences, despite the contestatory orientation of the early mobilization against domestic violence and the critical perspective that many movement participants maintained toward state cooptation and subordination (2015, 7–8). see gottschalk 2006 for an analysis of the movement’s susceptibility to cooptation. 13 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 on multiple levels. (incite! 2006, 3). despite the risk, feminists of color resisted the epistemic, organizational, and political occupation of the antiviolence movement and developed many of the abolitionist alternatives to grj that we discuss in the next section. these women, working outside and against the mainstream and outside of state funding streams to government, non-profit, and academic institutions, have tended to work within grassroots social justice organizations. indeed, engagement in social justice praxis is a key element of black feminist analysis. as richie argues, a shared assumption of black feminist theory is “that scholarly work should be in service to activism and that the beneficiaries of research findings, policy recommendations, or theoretical insights should be those most affected.” (2012, 131). richie emphasizes that those most affected in the work she does are black women experiencing gendered violence, for whom state agencies and institutions are sources of violence in their lives rather than protectors from it. by prioritizing activism and gearing scholarly work toward the benefit of those most affected and burdened by multiple intersecting forms of racialized gender violence, richie and other women-of-color feminists remain strongly disinclined to permit state violence to recede into the background of their analyses. in other words, richie shows us how to resist the political dislocation of antiviolence scholarship, advocacy, and organizing, and to refuse the subsumption of such work within state agendas and institutional practices that are complicit in the perpetration and perpetuation of violence. antiviolence frameworks that center those who are burdened by multiple intersecting schemes of violence will provide greater reason and motivation to resist epistemic, organizational, and political occupation—no matter how tempting the grant or the perceived legitimacy offered by state support. although this commitment to centering those whose social position renders them more vulnerable to multiple, intersecting forms of violence (crenshaw 1989, 1991) could be seen as a safeguard for researchers against cooptation, it should be noted that the people who have maintained a critique of state violence have largely been people whose experience (in virtue of structural social position or interpersonal affiliation) does not allow state violence to recede as a problem. indeed, the continuum of alternatives to law enforcement and prisons that we will discuss in the following sections have largely been developed by people who have lived and continue to live close to state violence and, thus, do not see the police or other mechanisms of the state as potential solutions to the violence in their lives. the community accountability critique of the criminalization of gendered and intimate violence to appreciate the epistemological ingenuity of ca theory and practice and to understand the alternatives that ca activists and theorists imagine and create, it is necessary to understand the ca critique of dominant practices of criminalization and 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 punishment. ca theorists and activists critique the current mainstream response to gendered violence for engaging in what norwegian criminologist and prison abolitionist nils christie (1977) referred to as conflict theft. once criminalized, a harmful encounter between individuals is recast as the commission of crime by a perpetrator against the state—a reconstruction that effaces survivors of violence, relegating them to the status of observers of an adversarial process administered by criminal justice professionals. this displacement usurps the potential for conflict to serve as an occasion for activity, healing, norm-clarification, and community consolidation by stripping the survivor and her/his community of the power to set goals, negotiate boundaries, and assume a determinative role in the accountability process (cara 2006; christie 1977; durazo 2012, 78; durazo et al. 2012a, 3; heiner 2015, 40–42). the dominant penalizing process also tends to reinforce conceptions of the survivor as forever wounded by the experience, profoundly inhibited from, if not incapable of, building a meaningful life after experiences of harm (cara 2006). survivors are often isolated and deprived of important avenues for moving forward. moreover, a survivor can be “objectified or minimized as a symbol of an idea instead of an actual person” (cara 2006, 251). the highly stylized role of plaintiff—a status achievable only if the police choose to investigate the report of assault and a prosecutor decides to pursue the case—prevents the survivor from having input into the process. the survivor is objectified, treated as passive and helpless—a process which paternalistically constructs and legitimizes the state as protector. for the state to take on this role, the community must be disappeared, the person who experienced the harm reduced to a victim, and the person who committed the harm transmuted into a monster. conventional criminal justice processes also relegate the aggressor to the status of a passive object of state retribution and management—a silent spectator of a discussion of how much pain he or she caused and ought to, in turn, receive, rather than a participant in a dialogue regarding how he or she could actively contribute to restoring equilibrium and well-being (christie 1977). the aggressor is also often represented as monstrous, bestial, and/or predatory, which constructs the person who has committed harm as an other, too dangerous to stay in the community (cara 2006; hudson 2006). through this process of “generative scapegoating,” the masculinist institutions of the state are made to appear as a necessary safeguard and protector against such monstrous danger (girard 1987).4 4 for a non-reductionist historical materialist account of oscillating representations of criminality and their co-constitutive relationship to social crisis, see melossi (2000). 15 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 treating survivors as forever damaged, while individualizing, pathologizing, and dehumanizing aggressors, mystifies the web of relationships within which harm occurs (cara 2006; durazo 2012). in doing so, current criminal justice responses obscure the ways that social norms and practices, as well as law enforcement interventions themselves, produce and contribute to the potential for violence. as communities against rape and abuse (cara), a seattle-based ca organization makes this point: “if we separate ourselves from the offenders by stigmatizing them, then we fail to see how we contributed to conditions that allowed violence to happen” (cara 2006, 251). rather than increasing community safety, carcerality perpetuates the norms and practices that contribute to violence within the community (cara 2006; generationfive 2007; incite! 2006; richie 2012; tyson 2015). in other words, criminal justice responses treat non-state violence as individual pathology that calls for the incapacitative disappearance or rehabilitative reformation of criminalized subjects, rather than as a social practice (connected to state violence), the abolition of which will require the invention and proliferation of alternative social institutions and practices (durazo 2012; generationfive 2007; richie 2012; tyson 2015; young 1990), or, in the case of native peoples, the decolonial resurgence of traditional indigenous ones (corntassel 2012a, 2012b; corntassel et al. 2009; ross 1998, 11–33; 2002). from the perspective of many native americans, the criminalization and labeling of native americans as “deviant” by the legal mechanisms of the u.s. government must be understood as complexly connected to the history and ongoing processes of settler colonialism (corntassel 2012a; deer 2009; goldstein 2014; lefevre 2015; ross 1998; veracini 2010; wolfe 2006). u.s. settler colonialism has variously constructed indigenous lifeways as “savage” in the service of dispossessing native peoples of their homelands, delegitimizing indigenous sovereignty, and pathologizing and eliminating the alternative normative orders presented by indigenous relational, place-based forms of existence (coulthard 2014; ross 1998). reflecting on the historical and persistent collision of native and settler colonial worlds and their respective legal systems of justice, luana ross (confederated salish and kootenai tribes) argues, “the mechanisms of euro-american law either are incapable of recognizing the cultural and legal separateness of natives or are deliberately designed to destroy that independence” (1998, 29; see also 32–33; 2002, 133). in this context, the theft of indigenous conflicts by the u.s. settler colonial state reveals a specifically colonial dimension of conflict theft. for instance, addressing the u.s. federal government’s prosecution of instances of sexual assault within indigenous communities, sarah deer (muscogee) writes, “defendants, if convicted, are held accountable by a foreign government using foreign mechanisms of justice,” which is part of denying “true community accountability—something 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 prized in tribal nations” (2009, 151). indigenous scholars contextualize such conflict theft as part of a long history and ongoing process of occupying and destroying the political, epistemic, and organizational practices of native communities (deer 2004, 2009, 2015; ross 1998, 2002; smith 2012). highlighting the colonialism of u.s. incarceration, as robert nichols has recently argued, forces consideration of the ways in which the u.s. settler colonial state “aspires to impose an exclusivity and singularity of command and control that obliterates alternative normative orders beneath and beyond its aegis” (2015, 449). the fact that communities, both indigenous and non-indigenous, are capable of producing and, indeed, do produce, alternative normative orders threatens the dominance of normative orders encoded in and reproduced by the u.s. settler colonial state (corntassel 2012a, 2012b). to contain this threat, the settler system of criminal justice and other shape-shifting colonial entities treat alternative normative orders as disordered “states of nature” from which people must be saved by the civilizing influences of capitalism and the settler state. criminalization is legitimated as a civilizing process—as rehabilitation and development. in reality, mass incarceration functions ideologically as a one-dimensionally punitive panacea that addresses only symptoms rather than the root causes of violence. in the process, mass incarceration actually exacerbates, deepens, and protracts the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of imprisoned people by devouring the public resources needed to ameliorate those problems; producing mass-scale social and civic death; disrupting and disordering families, communities, and indigenous nations; reinforcing gender binaries; and constructing an industrial complex that generates profits for corporations and careers for the politicians they fund. moreover, in order to function, prisons require whole sectors of service employees and legal, administrative, and correctional bureaucracy whose livelihoods are built upon the commodification of people as criminals (davis 1998a, 2003; durazo et al. 2012a; gilmore 2007; heiner 2015; incite! 2006). the theory and practice of ca emerges from a critical consideration of these expropriations, mystifications, and harms that the criminalization of violence enacts. epistemologically, ca theory de-links from the epistemic occupation of mass incarceration by developing a multi-axis analytical framework that scrutinizes the interrelatedness of intimate, interpersonal, and community violence and the violence produced and sanctioned by colonialism and state and social institutions. organizationally, ca strategies work to de-link from the settler colonial state and the prison and non-profit industrial complexes. politically, they “seek to transform communities and political conditions rather than buttress oppressive institutions that replicate violence” (durazo 2012, 82). 17 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 guiding principles of community accountability given its critique of mainstream responses to violence and its multi-axis analysis of violence, ca theory shows the need for a multi-track vision in community accountability processes. effective responses to violence must envisage the accountability of (1) the individual aggressor(s); (2) the community at large for the practices and discourses that cultivate a climate conducive or productive of gender violence (including rape culture, everyday misogyny, and the denial of leadership roles to women, transgender, and gender queer people); (3) violent, colonial, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal social and state institutions; (4) the community accountability process itself; and (5) the survivor(s). to accomplish such complex work, while also resisting the colonial and carceral logics of the criminal justice system, ca organizations have developed guiding principles. these guiding principles are crucial to ca’s ability to undertake the social transformation that is required to move beyond ineffective reform of the current system and to address the root causes of violence. one of the central normative principles of ca processes is to foreground the moral personhood of all the stakeholders involved (cara 2006; durazo 2012). such foregrounding involves respecting and prioritizing the self-determination of the survivor and allowing the survivor to choose to take part in generating accountability demands for the aggressor as well as the community (cara 2006; kelly 2012). the survivor’s vision and understanding of accountability matter in the process, unlike in current mainstream responses, in which the state’s decision to pursue a case can, at best, result in a narrow range of legally codified punitive responses without attention to the survivor’s desires. the community organizing work of ca also requires that aggressors be treated as subjects capable of accountability. philly stands up, a philadelphia-based ca organization, engages the aggressor in developing a plan for meeting the demands of the accountability process. when aggressors are treated in this way, ca practitioners maintain, “they are reluctant to back out because they do not see themselves as walking out on an externally imposed program” (kelly 2012, 55). the decolonial, decarceral, and world-constituting work of ca not only involves de-linking from the settler state’s system of justice and the prison industrial complex of which it is a part. ca networks also de-link from the non-profit industrial complex, i.e., a system of symbiotic relationships between the state, philanthropic foundations, and social service and social justice organizations that fashions criminalized populations as “targets” for treatment, surveillance, control, and everyday management in ways that thwart the autonomous, collective organization of marginalized communities (incite! 2007; nixon et al. 2008). a volume created by incite! women of color against violence, entitled the revolution will not be funded: beyond the non-profit industrial complex, provides 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 an illuminating historical analysis of the role that progressive philanthropy and the 501(c)(3) non-profit model of social justice organizing have played in preserving existing social hierarchies and economic inequalities by derailing revolutionary decolonial social movements led by people of color and sublimating them into corporately structured reform movements largely led by professionally credentialed whites. the volume’s editors and contributors argue that the non-profit industrial complex (npic) is the symbiotic corollary of the prison industrial complex (pic). while the pic overtly represses dissent, the npic manages and controls dissent by incorporating it into the state apparatus, functioning as a ‘shadow state’ constituted by a network of institutions that do much of what government agencies are supposed to do with tax money in the areas of education and social services. (incite! 2007, 9) critical of this destructive symbiosis and the persistent threats of incorporation, cooptation, and subordination, ca networks promote non-reliance on professionalized experts and institutions and resist the pressures “to commodify concepts and practices, to adapt to funder-driven appeals to create institutionally identified or ‘trademarked’ approaches and best practices, and to incorporate ca efforts into the state institutions [that ca networks] have been resisting” (kim 2012, 32). the fluidity and flexibility common to ca networks can be seen in the strategic ways they use and approach non-profits in community organizing. for instance, creative interventions, an oakland-based ca organization with 501(c)(3) status, began with the deliberate strategy of striving for a limited institutional life cycle, emphasizing the life of the models, tools, and technologies they could develop, rather than the non-profit organization itself, which they aimed to ultimately dissolve. as kim writes, “our aim was to contribute other informal and formal indigenous formations that were relevant to a community’s local context” (kim 2012, 24). cara enacted a strategy of creating and maintaining a “dual identity”—a disguised one for its public and foundation funders, and an authentic one for its constituents. by engaging in a kind of tactical code-switching that is common practice among people of color and poor people navigating spaces dominated by white, middle-class, and wealthy people, cara developed ways to frame its work to state and foundation agencies in a more palatable cloak of reform (e.g., referring to its community organizing and mobilizing work using the serviceoriented language of “community engagement” with “underserved communities,” omitting mention in grant reports of the community teach-ins they conducted, which aimed to undermine institutional oppressions that directly contribute to sexual violence). “while we remained consistent in our political work and ideas and 19 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 our final accountability to our constituents,” writes cara activist alisa bierria, “oppressed people develop creative strategies for survival as we move across the boundaries of our own communities and communities we do not identify as our own” (bierria 2007, 157–158). the strategic uses that the ca movement makes of non-profits are tightly linked to the liberatory aims of ca work, its commitment to mass movement building and to centering men, women, and gender nonconforming people of color in its analysis and organizing practice (bierria 2007, 153– 155; incite! 2007, 15). ca de-links from the professionalization of the mainstream antiviolence movement in favor of drawing on the skills and resources of the community and building its capacity for responding to and preventing violence. as mimi kim writes, “the people closest to the violence have the greatest motivation to end it and the greatest knowledge regarding its dynamics, context, and the elements that might lead to change” (kim 2012, 20). we see here a rejection of the idea that people need state intervention to keep them safe from others. instead, ca theorists and activists tend to treat people’s proximity to violence, and the trauma that may be experienced because of that violence, as a source of motivation, and even skills, to be used in transforming the community to reduce violence. hence, the emphasis for ca is on collective grassroots work. while communities have many resources for responding to violence that are not utilized in current mainstream responses, the possibility for violence also exists within those communities. that is, the practices, norms, and structure of a community may all have had a role in the violence. thus, communities, too, must be transformed through ca processes. such transformation through collective grassroots work requires multidimensional holism (kim 2012) and a commitment to the unfinished (mathiesen 1974). multidimensional holism entails “the consideration of multiple perspectives, including those of survivors, community allies, and those doing harm, in the process” (kim 2012, 19) and “consensus through collective negotiation of goals” (21). rather than handing the conflict over to a patriarchal power that will adjudicate the proper outcome, ca invites the people close to the violence to respond to that violence together. cara writes, “organizing for accountability should not be just about the business of developing a strategy to address the aggressor’s behavior, but also about creating a loving space for community-building and real care for others” (cara 2006, 252). but this guideline does not assume that everyone in a community will share the same analysis of the violence that has occurred and does occur within it. rather, ca processes require developing participants’ understanding of how and why violence happens; this understanding helps to develop epistemic and political resources within the community. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 indeed, ca theorists and activists are well aware that resistance to transformation is part of the process—resistance on the part of aggressors, survivors, community allies, and the state (cara 2006; generationfive 2007; durazo 2012; kelly 2012; kim 2012, 21). ca activists thus speak of creating plans for safety during the ca process and creating plans for the aggressor’s response to being held accountable, as well as considering the consequences of engaging in a ca process, rather than turning to the state (cara 2006; generationfive 2007; kelly 2012). a commitment to the unfinished requires recognizing that “community accountability is a process, not a destination” (cara 2006, 255). community accountability processes are themselves forms of community-building (bierria 2007, 161). there must, therefore, be an open goal-setting process that cannot be determined in advance (kim 2012, 21). commitment to the unfinished is closely tied to the way ca theorists and activists tend to understand their antiviolence work to be in the service of abolition and liberation. as durazo writes: “just as prison abolition is more than an anti-prison project, community accountability is more than an antiviolence project. it is a liberation project that creates the potential and space for autonomous radical transformation in our lives and communities, seeking to transform the roots of violence” (durazo 2012, 79). rather than understanding abolition and liberation as states to be achieved, ca activists and theorists tend to describe ca work as a liberatory process, even when it is not clear what will happen. in the politics of abolition (1974), thomas mathiesen closely articulates the concepts of abolition, the unfinished, and freedom: “abolition . . . takes place when we break with the established order and at the same time face unbuilt ground. . . . abolition and the very first phase of the unfinished are one and the same. the moment of freedom is that of entering unbuilt ground” (25). through their commitment to the unfinished, ca theorists and activists remain open to the ongoing need for accountability. a group such as cara can, therefore, produce 10 principles for community accountability, but it presents those principles as the bones of a process that must be fleshed out by the people involved in the process, rather than as a user’s manual (cara 2006, 250). we can see this commitment to the unfinished vividly in the reflections of mimi kim on her work as part of creative interventions (ci): “within ci intervention teams, tensions arose regarding the centrality and expression of gender analysis during an intervention. i normally assumed a gender binary and embraced the doctrine of ‘believing the victim,’ particularly when that person was a woman within a heterosexual dynamic of violence. my inability to suspend these assumptions revealed my own internal challenges, as well as those within the intervention team” (kim 2012, 27). while kim calls this inability a symptom of her own “internal challenges” and those of her fellow ca practitioners, it is also possible to read these challenges as indicative of a wider epistemic challenge in which kim participates. yet, kim marks her inability to 21 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 understand a situation outside the gender frame she has available for considering violence within a heterosexual relation. what is remarkable about kim’s account, and what we are identifying as a hallmark of ca’s commitment to the unfinished, is her ability to at once identify the gender binarism of her existing epistemic resources and to mark both the challenge that a particular ca process poses to those epistemic resources and the internal resistance she encounters when that challenge incites her to radically alter her epistemological system. even though kim does not in that moment succeed in making such a change, she identifies and stays open to the need for a radical shift in her epistemic resources, rather than simply dismissing challenges to a gender binary frame. in other words, kim resists the resilience of the dominant epistemic framework within which her theoretical and practical activity is situated. such openness to the unfinished involves a kind of vulnerability and attunement that is at once epistemic and existential. durazo describes the lived experience of ca work as a decolonization process that opens onto the unfinished— a process that involves what in the concluding section we refer to, following dotson, as a triple-loop epistemic process, which gives rise to third-order social change. what her account reveals is that inhabiting the unbuilt ground of the unfinished inevitably involves complex affect; while a moment of freedom and lightness of being, it is also simultaneously an event infused with fear and anxiety in the face of the unknown. reflecting on a ca process within a university class that she co-taught, durazo points to this affective dimension and the epistemic role that it plays in ca processes: the process is frightening because one enters it without an exact destination; there might be a semblance of a path, method, or guide, but unknowns characterize the endpoint and places along the way. fear has multiple triggers: past experiences with trauma and the possibility of new traumas. the process undeniably depends on courage in the face of an exhausting procession of sweaty palms, nausea, pressing silences, and tumultuous words and gestures. yet it was as if a ribbon of faith floated above our class, somehow getting us through the difficult moments. there was light and laughter too. the feeling that we were going somewhere and that change was imminent lifted us and inspired the courage that let the fear fall away. when driving home across the bay bridge after class, i felt a heaviness that sank the pit of my stomach to the car floor and a lightness in my heart that felt like a cloud of neblina lifting me out of the car. in collective formations and praxis, the weight of suffering coexists alongside the lightness of the possibility of healing and transformation. (durazo 2012, 86– 87; emphasis added) 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 the affective experience of ca processes as a decolonial praxis can be so profound, durazo maintains, that it can approach a kind of existential death, risking death of parts of the self/selves that are the product of oppressive systems, but to which an individual or community has become attached. “as those unequally divided through colonial violence and injustice attempt to take account and reconcile through collective and self-reflection, a form of death is beckoned in which the previous version of you/community might be deemed no longer viable” (86). in our concluding argument, we analyze and elaborate on the importance of the sort of epistemic and affective openness that kim and durazo exemplify for its role in enabling ca activists to not only question the epistemic resources available to them, but also to develop new resources and, in the process, new, decolonizing forms of subjectivity and community. the decolonial epistemology of community accountability the carceral humanism of grj’s coordinated continuum of care and the abolitionism of ca’s continuum of decarcerating alternatives not only differ from one another politically or in the quality and scope of the institutional and/or sociopolitical change that they respectively entail. their differences are also of an irreducibly epistemological order. to conceptualize these differences and to set the stage for discerning the specifically epistemological dimensions of ca’s radical ingenuity, we will draw from the work of black feminist epistemologist kristie dotson (2014). working within the fields of social epistemology and epistemologies of ignorance (e.g., alcoff and potter 1992, anzaldúa 1999, code 1995, 2004, 2008; collins 2000; fricker 2007; medina 2012; mignolo 2007, 2009; mills 1999; pohlhaus 2011; sullivan and tuana 2007), dotson sets out to conceptualize epistemic oppression, which she defines as persistent and unwarranted epistemic exclusions that hinder subjects’ ability to contribute to knowledge production (2014, 115). in the course of her analysis, she creatively appropriates an “orders of change” model of organizational change from the cognitive behavioral science of organizational development (bartunek and moch 1987; walsh 2004) in order to theorize the magnitude of the epistemic shifts required to motivate different kinds of social change—from organizational and institutional change to structural sociopolitical change. dotson analyzes the specifically epistemic exclusions that hinder subjects’ ability to engage in social change by infringing on their capacity to participate in the requisite processes of imagining uncharted possibilities, producing new knowledge, revising existing shared epistemic resources, and (in some cases) detecting and transforming the limits of the very epistemological systems or instituted social imaginaries within which their shared epistemic resources are situated. 23 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 bartunek and moch outline three different levels of organizational change, each of which entails progressively more radical alterations to prevailing schemas— i.e., “templates that, when pressed against experience, give it form and meaning” (bartunek and moch 1987, 484). first-order change transpires as part of a problemsolving strategy that seeks to overcome obstacles to fulfilling goals of already established schemas. first-order change thus leaves established epistemic resources intact, not discerning them as problematic, but focusing on solving problems and reducing inefficiencies “so that established patterns can function more effectively” (bartunek and moch 1987, 487). a first-order change, dotson explains, “does not call for revisions in beliefs and values specifically. rather, it attempts to make one’s behaviour reflect one’s [already established] beliefs and values” (2014, 118). as such, first-order change primarily involves what dotson calls single-loop processes. individuals engage in single-loop processes when “they alter their strategies or approaches to solving a problem, without examining or changing their underlying governing values” (118; citing walsh 2004, 306). second-order change alters the schemas themselves, “phasing out” one or a set of interpretive schemas in favor of others. it is typically a response to discovering that the shared epistemic resources of an organization are themselves insufficient in some way given the overarching goals of the organization. second-order change involves both singleand double-loop processes in which individuals “hold their governing and often unconscious values open for examination” and shift the conceptual, habitual, and normative constructs and processes upon which they rely in directing, evaluating, and making sense of their actions (walsh 2004). secondorder change results when individuals shift their behaviors to reflect these altered schemas. both singleand double-loop processes aim at increasing individual and organizational effectiveness either by bringing the actions of individuals into alignment with currently prevailing organizational schemas (single-loop processes) or by shifting organizational schemas themselves (double-loop processes). but, in addition to altering individuals’ values and behaviors in the service of greater organizational efficiency, second-order change can also enable individuals to consider new possibilities, such as third-order change. rather than just filling in gaps within one’s epistemic resources or making those resources more efficient, thirdorder change entails recognizing and, possibly, enabling individuals to alter the operative, instituted social imaginaries or epistemological systems within which cognitive and organizational schemas are situated and through which such schemas are preserved and legitimated (dotson 2014, 119). an instituted imaginary is a cultural system that “carries normative social meanings, customs, expectations, assumptions, values, prohibitions, and permissions—the habitus and ethos—into which people are nurtured from childhood” (code 2008, 34; cited in dotson 2014, 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 119). while “in singleand double-loop processes, instituted social imaginaries may not be challenged or even recognized,” triple-loop processes “can aid in producing an instituting social imaginary capable of altering one’s entire epistemological system” (dotson 2014, 119). the epistemic resources of the dominant order are disclosed as inadequate and thrown into question. when ca activists engage in deep questioning and critique of the criminological framing of violence—when they create non-carceral, life-affirming, decolonial responses to violence—they are creating third-order change, which throws dominant epistemological and political systems into question, opens onto the unbuilt ground of the unfinished, and produces new instituting social imaginaries. radical community accountability processes frequently engender tripleloop processes that enable us (as participants and world-traveling readers) to epistemically de-link from the dominant epistemic resources according to which an array of social problems—related to racialized and gendered violence, colonialism, unemployment, education, drug addiction, and public health—are framed through the schemas of criminality and penality. as abolitionists and ca theorists/practitioners such as bierria, davis, durazo, kim, and mathiesen testify, this is not a simple or easy undertaking. in dotson’s words, “first-, secondand third-order changes are progressively more demanding”; the resilience of dominant epistemological systems is of such magnitude that they can absorb extraordinarily large disturbances without redefining their structures (dotson 2014, 119). indeed, in language that parallels that of abolitionists and ca theorists conceptualizing the unfinished (durazo 2012, 86–87; mathiesen 1974, 13– 27), bartunek and moch, when writing about third-order change, compare the experience of encountering the limits of one’s epistemological system to an encounter with “the mystical” (1994). the possibilities opened up by triple-loop processes appear through the grid of intelligibility constructed by prevailing epistemic resources—if they appear at all—as empirically impossible, monstrous, unthinkable, or, to borrow kim’s description, internally challenging. from within the dominant epistemological systems of the u.s. carceral state, the possibility of prison abolition emerges as just such a monstrosity. like the grassroots feminist antiviolence movement that preceded it, grj theory, too, constructed a brief epistemic aperture, if not a material doorway, onto third-order change. when, in 1991, at the inception of feminist criminological critique of the “vengeful equity” of carceral feminism and its complicity in mass incarceration, chesney-lind called for the abolition of women’s prisons in the united states—when she advocated that feminist criminology move beyond an individualistic analytical focus on “offender profiles” to an analysis of the prison industrial complex and the ways that patriarchy and the intersections of race, class, and gender govern the lives of criminalized women—when she proposed that 25 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist criminologists not only look to the grassroots for successful decarceral alternatives that sever rather than widen the net of patriarchal social control but enter the political fray by joining such social movements (even at the expense of “jeopardiz[ing] their [own] ‘objectivity’, their access to funding, and ultimately even their careers”(chesney-lind 1991, 63–65)—chesney-lind effectively called upon herself and other feminist criminologists to, in dotson’s words, “take a step back and become aware of their overall epistemological systems that are preserving and legitimating inadequate epistemic resources” for detecting and redressing the oppressive structural positions of criminalized women (dotson 2014, 131). rather than just making existing epistemic resources more efficient or filling in gaps within those epistemic resources, as would be possible with firstor second-order changes, chesney-lind urged feminist criminologists to engage in triple-loop processes in order to create and disseminate new epistemic resources that might enable people to de-link from the epistemological systems undergirding mass incarceration—“to make decarceration thinkable” (64, emphasis added). as the foregoing account makes clear, this did not happen (at least en masse). grj did not turn toward and enter the political fray with grassroots womenof-color activists who are engaged in the ambitious, politically marginalized (if not vilified), infinitesimally funded, conceptually and emotionally disorienting, yet revolutionary and epistemological frame-breaking work of third-order social transformation. instead, grj turned toward the national institute of corrections and california department of corrections. it entered into major research, implementation, and consultancy contracts with the u.s. carceral state, adopted the dominant epistemic resources of neoliberal carceral logic and the systems-of-care “wraparound” social services model, and made mere firstand second-order “gendered tweaks to carceral business as usual” (buchanan 2012, 1685). grj adapted to funder-driven appeals to commodify concepts and practices, created “trademarked” approaches and best practices, and followed the mainstream antiviolence movement in incorporating its efforts into the continually expanding institutions of the u.s. carceral state. the adaptation of grj from abolitionism to carceral humanism, its abandonment of what dotson refers to as triple-loop processes and the third-order social and epistemological transformation to which those processes give rise, is a symptom not only of the cooptative political power of the u.s. carceral state, but also of the epistemological resilience of the carceral logic that undergirds it. the epistemological resilience of carceral logic is such that it can absorb extraordinarily large disturbances without redefining its essential structures. grj, like the mainstream antiviolence movement before it, has been absorbed by the expansive epistemological and political resilience of u.s. carcerality. like the mainstream antiviolence movement, grj distances itself from and objectifies survivors/criminalized women as the passive “clients” of wraparound 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 social services, and it constructs the gender-responsive prison as the “one-stop shop [!]” at which criminalized (and disproportionately poor and racialized) women survivors could receive access to this network of integrated social services (bloom et al. 2002, xxv). far from interrupting society’s reliance upon incarceration and its epistemological confinement within carceral logic, grj further entrenches the social centrality of the prison industrial complex by fashioning it as the neoliberal gatekeeper of a continuum of coordinated social services, strengthening and extending the reach of the prison industrial complex by intertwining it with the nonprofit and social service industrial complexes. thinking radically about antiviolence requires that we shift our attention from the prison, conceived as an isolated institution, to the web of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex—symbiotic relationships among correctional bureaucracies, corporations, media conglomerates, and governmental agencies, and retributive relationships that are fostered by this web among persons variously caught up in and constituted by it (davis 2003, 106–108). positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we must “let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system,” angela y. davis argues, and instead “envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment” (106–108). the ca and transformative justice movements take just such an abolitionist approach to antiviolence work by theoretically and practically constructing a continuum of alternatives to incarceration that differs decidedly from the carceral feminist “coordinated continuum of care” developed by grj. by proposing a “caring” carceral solution that “occup[ies] the same footprint as the prison system,” grj reiterates and reinforces the dominant trend of constructing and conceiving of prisons “as the default solution for a vast range of social problems that need to be addressed by other institutions” (davis and shaylor 2001, 21). gender-responsive prisons are still prisons. kinder, gentler cages are still cages. the institutions of the punishment industry (however recast) and the professionals that occupy them (however retrained) will never properly and effectively address the needs and issues of colonized and marginalized peoples. prisons cannot, and should not, be expected to function as vehicles for social change or human development (braz 2006, 87; carlen and tombs 2006; hannah-moffat 2004a; nixon et al. 2008, 33; rojo 2014). ca activists may not possess a roadmap to an abolitionist future, but they are not only creating spaces in which we can begin to think, imagine, and feel what those future political and epistemological systems might be like; they are producing the kinds of communities capable of inhabiting those systems. 27 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 acknowledgments the research for this essay was in part supported by a faculty research grant from the college of humanities & social science at california state university, fullerton. the authors would also like to acknowledge the participants of the philosophy department colloquium series at csu fullerton and the feminist theory writing group at the university of colorado denver for their critical attention to earlier iterations of this essay. a version of this work was also presented and received thoughtful commentary from interlocutors at the american philosophical association. the authors owe a special debt of thanks to alisa bierria, michelle comstock, andrew dilts, kristie dotson, sarah fields, amy hasinoff, mimi kim, lucy mcguffey, xhercis mendez, andrea pitts, gillian silverman, toni tyson, margaret woodhull, and feminist philosophy quarterly’s anonymous reviewers for critical feedback and support in helping foster these ideas to print. references alcoff, linda, and 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of sexual difference.” in death and other penalties: philosophy in a time of mass incarceration. edited by geoffrey adelsberg, lisa guenther, and scott zeman, 210–224. new york: fordham university press. veracini, lorenzo. 2010. settler colonialism: a theoretical overview. new york: palgrave macmillan. wacquant, loïc. 2001. “deadly symbiosis: when ghetto and prison meet and mesh.” punishment & society 3:95–134. ———. 2009a. prisons of poverty. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. ———. 2009b. punishing the poor: the neoliberal government of social insecurity. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2010. “class, race, and hyperincarceration in revanchist america.” dædalus summer:74–90. walmsley, roy. 2015. “world female imprisonment list.” 3rd ed. london: institute for criminal policy research. accessed july 27, 2016. http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/worl d_female_imprisonment_list_third_edition_0.pdf. walsh, k. 2004. “interpreting the impact of culture on structure.” journal of applied behavioral science 40 (3): 302–322. wolfe, patrick. 2006. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8 (4): 387–409. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2011. responsibility for justice. new york: oxford university press. brady heiner is assistant professor of philosophy and affiliated faculty of african american studies at california state university, fullerton. he has published essays in philosophy & social criticism, death and other penalties: philosophy in a time of mass incarceration (fordham university press, 2015), differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, continental philosophy review, social justice, and city: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. he is a founding member of the steering committee of the csu project rebound consortium and the founder and director of project rebound at cal state fullerton, a program that supports the higher education and successful reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. sarah tyson is assistant professor of philosophy and affiliated faculty of women and gender studies at the university of colorado denver. she has published essays in hypatia, death and other penalties: philosophy in a time of mass incarceration (fordham university press, 2015), radical philosophy review, and metaphilosophy. 35 heiner and tyson: feminism and the carceral state published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_female_imprisonment_list_third_edition_0.pdf http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/world_female_imprisonment_list_third_edition_0.pdf she is currently a member of webs, a program in denver women’s correctional facility and la vista correctional facility for healing, organizing, and learning about issues of violence. 36 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.3 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 feminism and the carceral state: gender-responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence brady t. heiner sarah k. tyson recommended citation feminism and the carceral state: gender-responsive justice, community accountability, and the epistemology of antiviolence allied identities feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 3 2016 allied identities kurt m. blankschaen boston university, blankskm@gmail.com recommended citation blankschaen, kurt m.. 2016. "allied identities."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 3. doi:doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3. allied identities1 kurt m. blankschaen abstract allies are extremely important to lgbt rights. though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the lgbt community.” in the first section i introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. i then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. we might obviously say here that allies are allied to the lgbt community, but i will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. i argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. i conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. if people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. i conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. keywords: lgbt, feminism, allies allies are extremely important to lgbt rights. though we do not often enumerate what we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the lgbt community.” in the first section i introduce three difficulties for what i call the “broad conception” that collectively suggest it is insufficient for 1 i want to thank ann cudd, travis timmerman, kenny pike, susanne sreedhar, anastasia pine, mike otteson, nadia ruiz, joao abreu, bobby withrow, and raja halwani for their helpful comments, feedback, and support. 1 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 explaining what an ally is: (1) whether the tasks that constitute what an ally is are obligations or supererogatory, (2) if those tasks turn out to be obligations, then whether the obligations are partial or impartial, and (3) determining who has the prerogative or authority to determine which obligations an ally has—which in turn is a question about who can determine or disqualify whether or not someone is an ally. in the second section i suggest a different approach. instead of starting with what allies are supposed to do, we can start with who allies are allied to. we might obviously say here that allies are allied to the lgbt community, but i will challenge that unified conception of the lgbt community by pointing out intersectional issues or otherwise conflicting interests. i argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then i argue that allies are required to do more than we commonly think. i then explain that though allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would, in fact, harm those members. i conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. if people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. however, i will show that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. before getting started, i want to establish that allies occupy a certain social status. we typically develop social statuses to fulfill some kind of purpose or function, and so we often assign or associate certain tasks with a social status; doctors heal, judges decide cases, and dmv bureaucrats issue licenses. social statuses can also incorporate different kinds of norms (e.g., legal, social, moral) that can sometimes coincide or break apart. a lawyer has a legal and moral obligation to not betray her client’s trust; when a lawyer pursues opportunistic lawsuits, she breaks a social norm and is criticized as being an ambulance chaser. if allyship is social status, then it can be responsive to social or moral norms, in which case it is not wholly a moral identity. since we often are not able to tell what social status someone occupies just by looking at them, we develop social markers or emblems to help us identify who has what status. a wedding ring denotes someone’s marital status but does not itself constitute the norms about being a spouse. so we often use status markers to help bridge some kind of epistemic gap between the status holder and other people. allies, then, could fly a rainbow flag outside a business, use a human rights campaign logo, or sport a safe zone sticker to let other people know that they 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 support the lgbt community. while these social markers sometimes are acts of symbolic power or solidarity, they ultimately only mark someone as having the allied status, which is different than actually occupying that status. just as someone could wear a wedding ring and not actually be married, so too could someone have some kind of marker for being an ally but not really care about the lgbt community. merely identifying, then, as having a social status is not sufficient for actually occupying that status. alternatively, people can occupy a social status without knowing it. sally haslanger explains that behavior or actions matter more than identification because people can still affect their status without knowing or recognizing that they occupy that status. someone might go to a country that marks her as having a certain social role without her knowing so (haslanger 2012, 127–28). if a man finds out one day that he is, in fact, a father, he does not then suddenly occupy a new social status as a father; he was already a father, even if he or nobody else knew it. if he only becomes a father when we recognize him as such, then it would make no sense for him to feel regret about not helping raise his child because he would be believing he failed the norms of a social status he did not have at that time. along similar lines, charlotte witt points out that in the u.s. whites tend never to reflect on their racial status but nevertheless contribute to how that status functions in a society in terms of racial privilege or discrimination (witt 2011, 61–62). so someone might do all the tasks we think an ally should do yet never bother to identify herself as an ally because she does not care about the social status (i.e. “i’m here to help, call me what you like”). so even if allies never adopt the term or decline any of the obvious markers, we could still count them as allies if they performed or were responsive to the tasks that constitute being an ally. similarly, while we can self-identify as a kind of shorthand for those tasks, that self-identification does not typically count as being part of the status. i might say “i am a doctor” to let people know i can treat wounds and prescribe medicine, or at least that i am qualified to do both, but those abilities, and not the identification, are what make me a doctor. if someone claims to be an ally without engaging in any of the tasks that constitute being an ally, whatever those tasks might be, then she is not really that different from someone who claims to be a doctor but knows nothing about medicine. one last point before going on. i initially designed these arguments to talk about allies to the lgbt community, but this discussion might have included more and different letters and identities, like (q) queer, (i) intersex, (a) asexual, or (p) pansexual. the problem or issue with any list i have seen is that it tends to become obsolete or exclude a new group as time goes on. i wrote about what i was most familiar with and tried to structure these arguments so that if they worked in the base case with lgbt issues, then we could go on to apply them to any future or 3 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 additive case, letter, or identity. if the arguments do not hold, then this set up may be wrong. until then, i hope to use this framework to help connect this project with future work. issues with the broad conception in this section i present three problems with the broad conception of being an ally and consider some ways we could modify it in light of those concerns. despite these modifications, i think the broad conception is ultimately insufficient. the broad conception defines allies in terms of support. the human rights campaign and gay, lesbian, & straight education network state that allies are indispensable for gay rights but do not quite spell out what allies are, beyond saying they need to be supportive or by listing the various ways allies can be supportive (movement advancement project et al. 2012; glsen 2016). these organizations have done a lot of good in actually advancing lgbt rights, so i am not criticizing their work. similarly, other people working in different fields (e.g., social psychology, developmental psychology) also hold something like the broad conception when they show all the ways allies can be (and are) supportive of lgbt rights, but i have not seen too many accounts that set down clear conceptual lines for what it means to be an ally (jones et al. 2009, 183–85; dhillon et al. 2013, 334–36). the point of this project is not to have philosophy “come to the rescue” and tell people what they are really talking about when they talk about allies. rather, i want to try to clarify a few of the defining features of what it means to be an ally. suppose we list all the ways an ally can be supportive: are the tasks that show up on that list obligations, or are they supererogatory? if we understand these tasks as obligations, and these obligations in turn constitute the set of tasks that make one an ally, then failure to do these obligations would disqualify that person from being an ally. but interpreting these tasks as obligations might downplay the historical risks and heroics that allies performed on our behalf. if, however, we were to suppose that all the tasks that make someone an ally are supererogatory, then we accept that these tasks are good to do but, by definition, not required, since they are not bad not to do (urmson 1958, 199). while thinking of these tasks as supererogatory helps capture the historical heroics of allies, if we retain the supererogatory criteria now, then all the tasks that constitute being an ally would be good to do, but not bad to not do. if it then turned out that all the tasks current allies have to do are supererogatory, or are tasks that allies do not have to do, then current allies would not, by definition, have to do anything. think about the task of publicly supporting the lgbt community. it seems reasonable to think that if someone identifies as an ally in, say, a contemporary liberal democratic society, then she is obligated to publicly support the lgbt community. if someone in the united states identifies as an ally but fails to stand up 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 for a coworker who is bullied, discriminated against, or fired for being gay, then we might have a hard time identifying her as an ally because she fails to do what an ally is supposed to do. but there might be cases where those same tasks might be supererogatory: if contesting the firing of a coworker for being a lesbian would also cost an ally her job, or if calling out a slur would result in severe bodily harm, then it seems that an ally’s action here would be good to do, but not bad not to do insofar as the cost is so severe. so we might modify the broad conception of what it means to be an ally and include some kind of context sensitivity, where sometimes these tasks are obligatory, sometimes supererogatory, and sometimes a mix of obligations and supererogatory acts. even after we add in context sensitivity, there is another issue with the broad conception of being an ally. to make the discussion easier, i will focus only on the cases in which the tasks that constitute being an ally are obligations. suppose we could list all of the obligations an ally has: are those obligations partial or impartial? impartiality requires us to treat like cases alike; we are not swayed by our personal relationships when we are evaluating the moral thing to do. we are partial when we base our moral decision making on our personal relationships and give those relationships priority over other considerations to strangers. i want to propose two examples to show how this tension is important for allies. case 1: john identifies as an ally. john’s brother kicks out john’s nephew for coming out as gay. since there isn’t any other family in the state, john’s nephew knows john identifies as an ally and asks him to take him in. there are two reasons to think john is obligated to take care of his nephew: (1) his nephew is part of his family, and (2) john identifies as an ally. but these reasons just happen to coincide and do not really tell us much about whether we think allies are partially or impartially obligated. to help figure out this tension, consider: case 2: john identifies as an ally. john does not really know his neighbor but comes home one day to see her in the yard yelling at her teenage son and screaming that she does not want a gay son in her home. as the boy walks past john’s house, he tells john he has nowhere to go because all his family lives out of state. he knows john identifies as an ally and asks if he can stay with him for a few days. here, in case 2, the reasons in case 1 come apart. if john, as an uncle, is obligated to take in his nephew but not the neighbor’s son, then john only has a partial 5 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 obligation. if john is obligated, as an ally, to take in both his nephew and his neighbor’s son, then john has an impartial obligation. suppose john, or any ally, only has partial obligations to his friends and family who happen to be lgbt. if so, john has no obligation, as an ally, to take in his neighbor’s son, and if that is the case, then it seems that the status “ally” is really just tracking the obligations a person already has as a friend or family member, so “ally” is not doing much moral work. so someone who accepts that the broad concept of being an ally here means supporting the lgbt community, not just friends or family who happen to be in that community, would have to say that allies have impartial obligations to the lgbt community.2 if john has an impartial obligation to take in his neighbor’s son, then is there a moral difference between the neighbor’s son and other lgbt teens who are currently in homeless shelters because they were kicked out for coming out? i fail to see much of a moral difference. we might argue that john can discharge this obligation imperfectly by donating cash rather than taking in a stranger, but this modification still presents a problem because it would still require allies to donate sums of cash. we could even weaken this requirement: allies need not be moral saints donating all of their disposable income to lgbt homeless shelters; they would just have to donate some money so that they help some number of individuals. now, it is certainly an empirical question as to how many allies there are, let alone how many allies donate how much, but given that many lgbt homeless shelters for teens are grossly underfunded, it seems as if there are not a lot of donors (see ray 2006; quintana, rosenthal, and krehely 2010). insofar as meeting these attenuated obligations still constitutes what it means to be an ally, then allies who failed to donate would fail to be allies.3 even if supporters of the broad conception grant that allies do not fulfill their impartial obligations, the problem lies with the commitment, not the conception. after all, if allies did step up their efforts, then there would be no issue with the broad conception of allies as those people who support the lgbt community—even if allies are obligated to do more than they currently think. the last conceptual worry i want to raise here is how, on this broad account, we would determine what counts as an obligation and who has the authority or prerogative to (de)classify people as allies in the first place. we might think of the case of a straight person 2 some obligations are entirely partial but also happen to coincide with being an ally. attending a sibling’s wedding to someone of the same sex, for instance, is a partial obligation that might coincide with being an ally but is not wholly explained or generated by being an ally. 3 of course, since ought implies can, if an ally had no spare money or time to donate, then she would not be held liable to this impartial obligation. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 who insists she is an ally while someone in the community she is supposedly allied to is denying or questioning her commitment; but i want to draw this worry out in a different way. what about the catholic church? is it an ally? certainly the magisterium, the congregation for the doctrine of faith (cdf), or any particular curia have never, so far as i know, claimed to have the ally social status. even so, the cdf has explicitly claimed that it is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. such treatment deserves condemnation from the church's pastors wherever it occurs. it reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. the intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law. (ratzinger 1986)4 u.s. bishops have repeatedly put forward documents that echo the cdf’s condemnation of violence and re-emphasize commitments to social justice while simultaneously rejecting any kind of legal union that resembles marriage between two people of the same sex.5 the cdf understands this denial as completing its position as an ally to the lgbt community insofar as it promotes a chaste lifestyle grounded in christian ideals.6 given the catholic church’s emphasis on prohibiting gay marriage initiatives, many other allies and members of the lgbt community deny the catholic church is an ally—its support for equal housing and working conditions notwithstanding. we might say that for a long time, the vast majority of people in the lgbt community considered marriage to be the marquee issue to support for gay rights; 4 i do not mean this particular quotation exonerates some of the other more disrespectful passages the cdf has approved. the very next sentence, for instance, is particularly disrespectful, if not a tacit indifference to harms lgbt people experience. i’m making this point more to show that despite all the other problematic aspects of its position, the catholic church has committed to social justice. 5 see, for example, “persona humana” (seper 1975), “always our children” (united states conference of catholic bishops 1997), and “ministry to persons with a homosexual inclination: guidelines for pastoral care” (usccb 2006). 6 the cdf grounds some of its argument in scripture, but it also offers an entirely separate justification through natural law without appealing to any revealed text. see ratzinger 1986. 7 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 not supporting marriage amounted to not supporting gay rights at all.7 but not everyone held marriage in such high esteem: some doctrinaire lgbt catholics do support the cdf’s stance. “courage” is a group of catholics who experience samesex attractions but still strive to live the chaste lifestyle the cdf prescribes. it seems perfectly reasonable, then, that people in “courage” could call the catholic church an ally—whether it be the hierarchy in rome or their local priest who supports them—insofar as the church helps them live the life they find valuable. surely the people in “courage” are just as much a part of the lgbt community as the ones who do not consider the catholic church as an ally, so it does not look as if someone in the lgbt community’s say-so would be sufficient to confirm an ally’s status, because another member in the community might equally issue a denial. i do not think people who support gay marriage could charge this subcommunity as somehow “not really” being lgbt without falling prey to a “no true scotsman” fallacy. further, i take it that any appeal to the fact that “most” or “the vast majority” of lgbt people supported marriage initiatives would work here, as they would fall prey to a sorites paradox. so the interesting tension here is not between an ally insisting she is an ally in the face of the community’s denial, but rather between the ally, part of the community that acknowledges that allied status, and part of the community that rejects that allied status. the issue at stake here is not whether marriage is a moral good for the lgbt community; rather, it is who has the purview to accept or disqualify someone’s status as an ally in the first place.8 since the broad conception holds, with the above additions, that an ally is “someone who has context sensitive obligations that can be imperfectly or weakly met to support the lgbt community,” the issue now is the “to the lgbt community.” this commitment leads to conceptual difficulties because the lgbt community is composed of different people with different, competing, and, sometimes, conflicting interests. it’s possible that the broad conception could be used in some way to resolve this issue, but because the issue is about how we hypostatize the lgbt community as if it were a homogenous group with the same interests, i think those additional modifications might be epicycles on epicycles. 7 while other issues are beginning to take center stage for importance, i merely mean that marriage dominated discussions. hence, philosophers like cheshire calhoun (2000, 106–60) or richard mohr (1988, 17–18, 137–188; and 1992, 54–86) emphasized marriage as a way to make gays and lesbians socially or politically legitimate agents. 8 lots of queer theorists, for instance, also reject same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage itself is heteronormative and, further, that same-sex marriage instantiates homonormativity. some libertarians also reject gay marriage on the grounds that they reject any kind of state sanctioned marriage for anyone. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 to reiterate, i do not think this conceptual confusion indicates any lack of success. allies, whatever they are, have used this broad definition to make real gains for the lgbt community. even so, it is important to get clear on what we mean by “ally” because we should know what we expect allies to do so allies can know what we expect of them. i now want to turn to my positive account to try to explain and address some of the worries i raised in this section. the positive account: partial allies and impartial obligations since i thought the problem with the broad account was that it fails to recognize the competing and conflicting differences in the lgbt community, i’ll begin with a deflationary account of that community. from there, i will suggest that allies are actually allied to various subcommunities, rather than the lgbt community at large, and have prima facie obligations. in order to be an ally, i have to be allied to someone or something. if we understand allies as acting on context-sensitive and imperfect obligations to improve the well-being or state of affairs for the lgbt community, then it seems as if we are presupposing a lgbt community exists, above and beyond the conflicting interests its members have. activists for transgender rights, for instance, rightfully complain that the lgb members often overlook or leave out issues that affect the trans community. compare the amount of political capital spent on gay marriage to the amount of access to hormone therapy or surgeries. while there has been outrage and activism against recent (2016) anti-trans bills that restrict access to bathrooms or locker rooms these issues are not new (weinberg 2010, 150–53). this outrage is encouraging, as it shows promising signs that we are moving towards a community, but it is not evidence of a historically shared political agenda. in another way, some of the most vitriolic prejudice bisexuals face is from gays and lesbians. often, the claim is that bisexuals are just not out of the closet all the way or that, in bitter irony, they are just “going through a phase” (burleson 2005, 105). even when the hostility isn’t overt, bisexuals regularly report that they experience micro-aggressions denying, or otherwise disparaging, their ability to know they are bisexual from their lesbian or gay friends (bostwick and hequembourg 2014, 493–98). so the idea that the lgbt community is united by some common interest or shared identity does not seem to hold up, because if it were, then there should not be this kind of rejection, or outright denial, that one of the letters even exists. even though younger bisexuals, at least in the u.s., report more positive experiences in coming out as bisexual than older demographics do (mccormack et al. 2014, 1208–11), the fact that there was this rift in the first place suggests that the lgbt community is not some monolithic entity united by a common purpose or set of political interests. in short, there is tension between the letters in the lgbt community. 9 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 even within letters there is infighting. while intersectional concerns about race or class could show issues in each letter, just consider the community of male homosexuals. michael warner contends in the trouble with normal that the current gay rights movement is really just a political movement for wealthy white suburban gays who only want to have dinner ready for their boyfriends. warner argues that this desire for marriage domesticates the edgier ethos of stonewall that challenged gender, social, and sexual norms. wealthy white suburban gays, on this account, have hijacked the gay rights movement. hence, warner distinguishes between gays, who live a life of quiet, suburban desperation, and queers, who truly embody the revolutionary spirit of stonewall (warner 1999, 30–32, 60–95). even if we reject warner’s distinction between gays and queers, other work suggests that race, class, or ethnicity can alter the experience of homosexual males.9 if we understand allies in terms of their obligations to an oppressed community, that community is still fractured by the different ways it is oppressed. passing equal marriage initiatives, for instance, might help lg members, but might not, in principle, affect any b or t members. granting easier access and funds for hormone therapy or single-stall bathrooms might redress some of the t oppression, but it does not seem like it would alter much lgb oppression. so each group might share the trait of being unjustly oppressed for their sexual orientation or gender identity, but this commonality might not mean much if they are unjustly oppressed in different ways. while i have been using examples of a straight/cis person being an ally to somebody in the lgbt community, each letter can be an ally to another. someone who is gay can be an ally to someone who is bisexual; someone who is trans can be an ally to someone who is a lesbian (brooks and edwards 2009, 137). much recent work has explored how we have expanded talking about allies from just helping the lgbt community to anyone in a dominant group helping redress a particular issue (casey and smith 2010, 955–56; brown and ostrove 2013, 2211–12). so if anyone, not just the straight/cis person, resolves to redress those harms, then she starts to adopt the obligations that would constitute her as an ally. in the beginning i pointed out that these tasks are what determine whether or not someone is an ally; self 9 joseph massad (2007) claims in desiring arabs that binary western models of sexuality have warped traditional models of arab sexuality and pressured people to adopt an alien sexual identity. jeffrey q. mccune jr. (2014) argues in sexual discretion that down-low culture offers a different way to approach and understand how african american men who have sex with men identify. jane ward even suggests in not gay: sex between straight white men (2015) that military and fraternity hazing rituals or cruising for anonymous sex in bathrooms shows that other social statuses can affect how identity can come apart from acts. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 identification may coincide with being an ally, but it does not explain what being an ally is. so someone becomes an ally if she tries to help her friend or family member with harms or issues that affect her in virtue of being lgbt. we should take a step back and think about how people become allies in the first place. there are many factors—like cultural representations of lgbt people, educational levels, age, influence of religion, or access to internet—that affect people’s attitudes towards lgbt rights and show strong correlations with people being positively disposed to lgbt people or equal rights, but being positively disposed is not quite the same as taking a more active role as an ally. it seems that people usually become allies because they find out a friend or family member is lgbt and realize their loved one is harmed, discriminated against, or otherwise disadvantaged for being lgbt.10 parents and friends of lesbian and gays (pflag), a large advocacy organization formed in the 1970s, was founded on this principle, as are many gay/straight alliance groups in high school or college (mccormack 2012). notice here that the ally is responsive to the harms or discrimination that is affecting their loved one.11 if these harms or discrimination are what generate an ally’s set of tasks, then an ally’s obligations to redress these harms or discrimination constitute what an ally is. causally speaking, someone might become an ally because of a partial obligation, but since what mattered for becoming an ally was acting in response to a specific harm that just so happened to localize in their partial relationship, then an ally would actually be responsive to that particular harm— irrespective of who experienced it.12 so if maria is upset that her brother kareem cannot get married to his boyfriend, moussa, then she might initially feel outraged that kareem and moussa cannot get married and so advocate for marriage equality. but maria’s advocacy is not aimed only at getting kareem and moussa the ability to get married, but rather at granting anyone in the same situation the option of getting married. an ally might initially believe she has a partial obligation, but i want to claim that the obligation is, in fact, an impartial obligation. this point is controversial because it would commit allies to doing a lot more than they normally believe they are responsible for. from an ally’s point of view, it probably seems as if their obligations expand; from their friends and family to 10 see mohr 2005, 1–17; mccormack 2012, 57–66; flores 2014; flores and barclay 2015; and pew research center 2015. 11 if this account is right, then there might be additional and unconscious attitudes, like care or benevolence, that also accompany the transformation of non-ally to ally. unfortunately, i do not have space to explore how these attitudes or emotional commitments would affect allyship here but want to flag this point for future work. 12 an ally could be wholly responsive to these harms but still not self-identify as an ally. 11 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 strangers who experience the harm. allies might resist this perceived expansion because it would mean they are responsible for much more than they initially thought. return to the cases of the homeless nephew and the homeless neighbor; an ally might think that she is initially only obligated to help her nephew, but if there is not much of a moral difference between the nephew and the neighbor’s son, then allies do have a larger scope of commitment than they previously thought. similar to what we said in the broad conception, we could argue that allies can meet their obligations in a weaker sense. even if we reduce the amount of responsibility in terms of what allies are obligated to do, allies would still probably have to do more. another reason this point is controversial is that it might simply overwhelm allies by charging them with a lot of obligations. if travis is an ally to sonia, who is discriminated against in five different ways, and travis is impartially responsive to those five different harms or forms of discrimination, then, as an ally, travis is facing a lot more responsibility than he might have first anticipated. if he learns that more friends are discriminated against for being lgbt in different ways, then his list of obligations becomes overwhelming. this overwhelming-ness shows that being an ally means seriously committing to a group of people who need help and is not a social status to bandy about just to appear progressive. we can mitigate this overwhelming-ness by returning to “ought implies can.” if an ally takes stock of her means in being able to meet the tasks that constitute being an ally in a particular context, then she is able to determine what she can actually do. if the tasks outstrip her resources, be they time or money, then those tasks would not be obligatory but would instead be supererogatory. from that initial point of figuring out what an ally can do to help with what she has, she could also prioritize which obligations are more pressing. so the concern about overwhelming our allies with obligations is not as daunting as it might first appear.13 if being an ally requires more than we might ordinarily think, then some people might fail to be allies even though they claim to be allies or mark themselves as allies. some people demonstrated that they were allies by changing their profile pictures or liking posts on social media in the wake of the u.s. supreme court’s 2015 obergefell v. hodges ruling. if that minimal effort was the extent of their support, then their commitment to the cause is fairly shallow. these are false allies—they are marked as being allies, probably take advantage of using the social capital they get for being allies, but merely claim to be allies by declaration, not action. this hollow demonstration not only disingenuously represents what a false ally commits to; it can also be a dangerous false flag of support. a false ally might wear a rainbow pin 13 most of this paper has been focused on the needs the ally is responding to. i would have liked to have included more of a discussion about how we weigh these demands against an ally’s own needs. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 or post a hrc sticker to have the right social markers for the ally social status but not actually plan to do anything but flaunt the social marker, which people would interpret as a sign of potential aid. while the false ally is not causing harm per se, she is still reproachable for falsely identifying or marking herself as someone who intends to help. so false allies are dangerous because there is a real possibility that people who need an ally (e.g., to stand up for them at the office) have the false impression that there is someone nearby who will help them if they need it. mia mckenzie talks about a related issue, “bad allies,” in black girl dangerous and contends that bad allies render the whole idea of “ally” a politically useless concept. one reason is that allies tend to slip into what she calls “ally theater,” where the ally does what he perceives as helpful but only in front of an audience so that he can look better or be recognized as being open-minded (mckenzie 2014, 26–30). another problem mckenzie rightfully identifies is that allies tend to sometimes overemphasize one smallish act as somehow consummating their ally status forever. rachel mckinnon develops this same point to show that allies might not help in some cases because they believe their identity as an ally is fixed and secure, so they do not have to help in a new context. mckinnon points out that some allies might unknowingly gaslight reports of legitimate insults or harms “where a hearer does not believe, or expresses doubt about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately” (mckinnon forthcoming, 2). mckinnon explains that when allies say things like “you’re being too sensitive, i’m sure they didn’t mean it that way,” they are actually reinforcing other stereotypes of being overly sensitive to slights that are not “really” there, which in turn makes someone less likely to report future harms, insults, or disparaging remarks. mckenzie and mckinnon conclude that we should scrap any talk of allies and instead think about standing in solidarity with oppressed groups or behaving as active bystanders. while i agree with mckenzie’s criticisms about bad allies and share mckinnon’s concerns about gaslighting, i disagree that those faults condemn the concept altogether or that we need to think of “ally” as a static or one-time identity. i’m now going to introduce a positive account that helps fend off the issues of bad or false allies, while showing why ally is still a useful identity. if people become allies due to partial reasons or relationships, then allies might be allies to some individuals and subcommunities but not others. not being an ally, however, does not mean that someone is an enemy; diplomatic and moral history is littered with neutrals. if isabella is advocating for equal marriage, then she might not also be advocating for job security or equal access for housing—not because she would not support those goals, but because she is not aware of them. if vladimir were to be fired for being gay, for instance, then isabella would see that vladimir is vulnerable and so would have an obligation to help redress unjust business policies or practices. if this kind of awareness is how we understand and 13 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 causally explain how people become allies, then there is not some grand overarching list that enumerates all the tasks that constitute the status “ally.” instead, this status is constituted by tasks that affect the specific needs of individuals and subcommunities. as a result, being an ally is more dynamic and flexible; it would vary with the social position and relationships an ally happens to have when she decides to become an ally. we should also be aware that moral neutrality or inaction can be due to some external factor. suppose hasani identifies as an ally and is aware that transgender people face legal barriers to filing for sexual harassment, are far more likely to ideate or attempt suicide as teenagers than their peers, and face discrimination in hospitals or medical settings. while hasani is something of a moral saint, he has dedicated most of his life to ending israeli settlement policies in the west bank and gaza strip. hasani does not contribute to efforts that alleviate the ways transgender people suffer, not because he does not think they are worthy causes, but because his time, talent, and treasure are already committed to the palestinians.14 if life got better for the palestinians, then hasani would gladly shift his resources and attention to help with some transgender causes, but, until then, he is otherwise committed. it’s hard to know what to say about hasani or other moral saints. if hasani were to do minimum upkeep, say continue to vote for politicians that promise to help with trans issues while he is still focusing all of his time and energy on the another cause, then i think we could still call him an ally. but if hasani were to have absolutely no time or resources left over for us, then it seems as if he would not be an ally anymore—which, of course, would not make him an enemy, just a neutral/potential ally. i want to use the moral saint case to try and draw out the fact that while we should expect allies to prioritize their commitments to us, we also have to realize that they are often committed to other causes, have limited resources or energy, and cannot always let their obligations to us override every other aspect of their lives. even though every ally is not a moral saint and not involved with other causes, we also have to be aware that there might be other reasons or events that take precedence over their commitment. while we should expect a certain kind of priority in terms of time, talent, or treasure to causes, we can also accept that an ally can, and does, have a life outside of being an ally. i now want to shift the discussion from how people become allies to how that status functions. for starters, allies have a prima facie obligation to accept what the people they are allied to identify as harms or as ways to improve their lives. miranda fricker (2007), for instance, argues in epistemic injustice that certain social positions put people in better positions to know more about certain social issues 14 i’m not suggesting that there are no lgbt palestinians that hasani could help. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 that affect them. so, in this case, if an ally disregards the testimony of someone in that relevant subcommunity, then she not only fails to acknowledge the epistemic gap (i.e. that she does not have access to that epistemic standpoint), but also she commits an epistemic injustice because she disregards what the person who does occupy that socials status tells her. this prima facie obligation can be challenged if an ally feels that honoring the obligation would, in fact, leave the individual or subcommunity worse off. even if someone in a subcommunity claims that meeting some demand or satisfying some desire would make them better off, an ally might actually have an obligation to try to dissuade that person from fulfilling their desire. consider tim dean’s account (2009) of an extremely small subcommunity of bug-chasers, people who are hiv negative and want to seroconvert (i.e. contract hiv) through unprotected sex. if we accept that contracting hiv, intentionally or otherwise, leaves someone worse off, then it seems that an ally’s attempt to meet a bug-chaser’s demand to help facilitate opportunities for seroconversion makes the bug-chaser significantly worse off. an ally’s role, then, is not to “just listen” because an ally would be remiss if she did not challenge this prima facie obligation in cases where there would be an obvious harm. if we want allies to be more involved, then i see no reason why they cannot also be involved in helping us determine what goals or projects we should or should not pursue. there might not always be a clear criterion for when it is appropriate to challenge a request for help as an ally. consider: case 3: juanita is a bisexual orthodox catholic who just came out and accepts the church’s stance on same-sex relationships. she is struggling to figure out how to be both bisexual and catholic. lorenzo identifies as an ally to juanita and thinks her strife is due to her religious identity. when she requests that he be supportive of her staying with the church, he challenges her to consider a different faith or to leave religion altogether. he thinks her desire to be religious will leave her worse off because he believes it conflicts with her sexual identity. it is not clear, however, that lorenzo has the right to challenge his prima facie obligation. it might be true that organized religion does not have the best track record in terms of making lgbt members feel welcome, but this generality is not sufficient for lorenzo to doubt juanita. oddly enough, we might actually find some support for why religion might still matter despite this strife when we look at conversion therapy of all things. not surprisingly, some recent psychological studies on individuals who underwent conversion therapy for religious reason showed higher rates of ideated suicide, 15 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 lower self-esteem, and higher rates of risky behavior—all supporting the idea that rejecting religion would be beneficial for lgbt people. what is surprising, however, is that many of the people initially felt a large amount of relief when they started therapy because they finally met other people who understood that religion was just as central to their lives as their sexuality was (robinson and spivey, 2007, 652– 56; weiss et al. 2010, 310–12). thus, encouraging someone who is lgbt to reject their religious beliefs because other people who are lgbt have found solace in doing so could be exceptionally damaging (flente et al. 2014, 1261–63). allies would then have to help different communities in different ways; that is, helping someone who wants to work through her faith is different from helping someone convert to a different faith or no faith. so before allies challenge their prima facie obligation, they need to find out more information about that individual or subcommunity to help explain why they are asking for help or support in the first place. one problem with this view is that since the lgbt community is also composed of a myriad of intersectional aspects, allies might end up with conflicting obligations. consider: case 4: zara considers herself an ally to micha, who was recently fired from his job for being bisexual. micah asks zara to vote for an upcoming law that would prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. zara also considers herself an ally to scott, who is a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian and also bisexual. scott staunchly believes that market solutions are ultimately the best way to empower minorities, insofar as those solutions winnow out bigoted firms as uncompetitive. scott asks that zara vote against the upcoming law that would prohibit employment discrimination. zara cannot fulfill both obligations because she cannot vote for and against the same issue in the same election. just as allies can question prima facie obligations, zara can sort through these conflicting obligations by figuring out which obligation would be best for the people she is allying with. if it turns out that market solutions are the best way to promote lgbt employees, then zara would be able to meet scott’s obligation and then try to show micah the argument or rationale for not fulfilling what he takes to be an obligation—not because she does not want to, but because she believes that his request would be not be the best for him. but if allies and those they are allied with should do what is best for them, then do these partial relationships matter at all for being an ally? would we instead be on better footing if we talked about what people are obligated to do as moral agents rather than as allies? i want to spend the last section trying to understand an ally’s obligations within the larger context of people’s moral obligations. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 impartial allies and morality in this last section, i want to look at the idea that some people might accept that they are obligated to members of the lgbt community or various members of the subcommunities not because they are allies, but because it is the decent or moral thing to do. i’ll briefly try to locate how we understand what an ally is obligated to do in light of the larger discussion of what people are morally obligated to do. what makes an ally different than a decent person? after all, it seems as if all of the ways i’ve described that an ally could help would equally apply to a decent or moral person. john should take in his nephew or neighbor (or donate money to lgbt homelessness), not because he is an uncle or an ally, but because he’s a decent person. decent people, then, would make their decisions irrespective of their partial relationships and would meet obligations to lgbt people whether they personally know any or not. or, rather, since decent people try to fight injustice wherever it is, their decision to meet these obligations is due to some larger moral principle rather than commitment to these partial relationships. while this explanation is appealing, i want to be careful about how much stress we put on it. one reason for caution is that decent people, in this context, might be pretty rare in terms of psychology. margret walker explains that our social, economic, and political conditions strongly affect our moral epistemology; without a different standpoint outside those conditions, we tend to develop moral blind spots and therefore are simply unaware of the ways certain groups that do not share our particular social position are discriminated against, harmed, or otherwise excluded from moral discourse (walker 1998, 54). people do not typically think about the ways a society excludes certain members until they have some kind of interaction with them or read about their stories or history. without people in those social positions explaining the harms and forming bonds with the kinds of people who would identify as decent people, decent people might struggle to correctly identify what people classify as harms or oppressions. while decent people might struggle to correctly identify harms to lgbt people, i accept that they could, in principle, do so without having any personal friends or relationships in any of those subcommunities. so while i claim that having friends or family who face some kind of harm is a likely explanation for why people become allies, i do not think it is a necessary condition. how do we understand what allies are obligated to do in terms of a larger discussion about what people are already morally obligated to do for lgbt people? we do not think, for instance, that allies alone are the only people who should support equal rights. someone who is homophobic does not avoid criticism because she does not identify as an ally—in fact, that very opposition gets branded as morally backwards or hidebound. so if we criticize non-allies for being homophobic 17 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 or not supporting equal rights legislation, then it looks like the moral obligations would exist prior to any obligations or tasks someone would incur when she becomes an ally. so if the status “ally” really just groups the obligations or tasks someone already had all along, while not adding anything new to those obligations itself, then the status itself is redundant. instead, i think we need to think about how a social status can add on to our obligations. john searle argues that when an agent steps into a social status, she can gain deontic powers (i.e. rights and responsibilities) that she did not have prior to adopting that status (searle 1995, 100–101). searle also contends that we can instantiate moral obligations through speech acts. since we create institutions by conventions and participate in those institutions through speech acts, those deontic powers can carry moral weight (searle 1969, 175–82). if we accept searle’s position, then we can argue that allies do have moral obligations in virtue of their social positions as allies that they might not have had prior to adopting that social status. on searle’s account we can only talk about rights or responsibilities if they are grounded in some social status or institution: no social status, no deontic powers, and in turn, no responsibilities or rights. if, as i argued, being an ally is a social status, then i think searle can explain what deontic powers an ally has in terms of social statuses. i’m less sure that searle can explain how we would criticize non-allies, or people who lack the ally social status. if a social status or institutional fact alone is what explains deontic powers, and non-allies do not have a relevant social status, then non-allies are not responsive to the kinds of deontic powers searle is concerned about. we might contend that being a bigot or being morally hidebound is a social status, albeit an informal one. while searle himself thinks we can apply his account to every level of social reality (1995, 87–88), he thinks these informal social statuses are really just descriptions and do not have a place in an institution. since our social institutions are what generate deontic powers, and searle thinks these informal statuses have no specifically recognized deontology (searle 2009, 92) then i find it hard to see how we could criticize a bigot, at least in terms of a social status, because the description or “informal social status” lacks a social institution to give it a normative status. we might approach the issue on searle’s behalf from a different perspective. in making the social world, searle argues that we think about human rights as rights and responsibilities we afford someone just for being human. since people in the lgbt community count as humans, they have certain rights as human that non-allies might infringe on if they are bigots. since this approach is entirely compatible with searle’s stance on allies as a social status, he can now explain what allies are required to do and how we can still criticize non-allies, even though they lack a salient social status. but i am still hesitant. while searle does argue for human rights, he is fairly critical of any kind of positive human rights (2009, 174–98). searle 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/3 doi: doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.3 thinks human rights are best understood as negative rights, such as not interfering with someone’s pursuit to acquire property or housing. this non-interference might help with state-level issues but does not seem to do much when a landlord refuses to rent to a trans couple—after all, there are plenty of other apartments the couple could try to rent. even if the other apartments are well beyond the couple’s price range, searle’s account, at least as it stands, would not require the landlord to rent to the couple because he is not responsible for why the trans couple cannot make rent elsewhere. charlotte witt argues for a different approach: while a social status does not generate moral obligations, it can create new social or political obligations (witt 2011, 59–66, 110–17). social statuses can create new political or social obligations, which in turn can reorganize or reprioritize which obligations we meet. we might say, for example, that everyone has some kind of imperfect obligation to help orphans, either by donating money or paying taxes that support foster care or orphanages, but when someone enters into the social status “adoptive parent,” her obligations transform in such a way that it adds on new obligations that did not exist before, or it reprioritizes all the other moral obligations she previously had, because she now has this new social role. an adoptive parent can be praised or blamed for meeting her new and old obligations in a way that people without the status cannot. but the obligations someone gains when she steps into the social position “adoptive parent” do not affect the obligations other people have to help orphans; the status only affects the obligations of the person who is in that social position. similarly, we might say that all people have some vague or imperfect obligations to support lgbt people and are blameworthy when they fail to meet these obligations, but the “ally” social status reorganizes those obligations in such a way that requires allies to prioritize the obligations to people in lgbt subcommunities. if a social status can introduce new obligations and reprioritize prior, if vague, moral obligations, then it seems as if the social status “ally” would be meaningful insofar as it would reorganize or reconstitute the vague general moral obligations decent people have prior to becoming allies. we can also recognize that while becoming an adoptive parent affects our moral responsibilities, it also introduces social or political norms and attitudes that evaluate whether or not someone is a good parent. parents who feed their children begrudgingly, or are resentful for having to make dinner, fail in some respect, even though they still perform the task they have to and provide the benefit they need to. analogously, allies who begrudgingly help, or resent being asked to help, also seem to fail in the same way, even if they do actually help. so being an ally can contain moral obligations or supererogatory elements but can also contain elements that are bound up in social or political contexts. 19 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 towards a conclusion an ally is someone who actively and continually tries to help people in the lgbt community. i argued that although people typically become allies because their friends or family members experience certain harms, allies are, in fact, responsive to anyone who experiences those harms. being an ally takes time and work; it is not a moral shield from reproach, nor should it be a fashion accessory in the latest social craze. being an ally is a serious commitment, and those who take it lightly should be taken lightly. i did not develop a grand list of what allies need to do because i think that would defeat the whole point: that allies listen and engage in conversation with the specific people to whom they are allied. i have not provided anything like an authoritative account here, and there is still much work to be done. 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yeager, and tess berry. 2010. “a qualitative study of ex-gay and ex-ex-gay experiences.” journal of gay & lesbian mental health 14 (4): 291–319. witt, charlotte. 2011. the metaphysics of gender. oxford: oxford university press. kurt m. blankschaen is a phd candidate at boston university. his research interests are primarily in feminist philosophy, philosophy of language, and social philosophy. he is currently working on his dissertation and looking at how social identities affect our obligations to resist oppression. 23 blankschaen: allied identities published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 allied identities kurt m. blankschaen recommended citation allied identities remembering claudia card: two tributes feminist philosophy quarterly volume 1 | issue 2 article 5 2015 remembering claudia card: two tributes paula gottlieb university of wisconsin-madison, plgottli@wisc.edu lynne tirrell university of massachusetts boston, lynne.tirrell@umb.edu recommended citation gottlieb, paula and lynne tirrell. 2015. "remembering claudia card: two tributes."feminist philosophy quarterly1, (2). article 5. doi:10.5206/fpq/2015.2.5. remembering claudia card: two tributes1 lynne tirrell and paula gottlieb editor’s note: on behalf of the editors of fpq, i thank our colleagues for providing us their public addresses at the celebration of life of professor claudia falconer card of the university of wisconsin-madison, who died on saturday, september 12, 2015. claudia card was the author of over one hundred articles and books, key works of moral and feminist philosophy including confronting evils: terrorism, torture, genocide (cambridge 2010), the atrocity paradigm: a theory of evil (oxford 2002), and the unnatural lottery: character and moral luck (temple 1996). she was the president of the central division of the apa 20102011, which she often described as her favorite division of the apa. she earned her ba from uw-madison, and her phd in 1969 from harvard university, as the advisee of john rawls, whom she spoke of with affection as one of the most sensitive and generous of philosophers. i remain grateful to claudia for being the sort of philosopher who helped her students, colleagues, and readers to confront our responsibilities, and the responsibilities of others, as she lived her own philosophy of taking responsibility for one’s own identity. k.j. norlock tribute from paula gottlieb (university of wisconsin-madison) there is a plaque on the door of the philosophy department seminar room in 5181 helen c white hall commemorating claudia card’s more than 40 years at the university. if you walk up bascom hill, you’ll find another famous plaque on the side of bascom hall encouraging the “continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.” there’s a story behind the plaque. the students of sociology professor edward ross presented it to the university in 1910, but because ross had invited emma goldman to speak in one of his classes, the regents at first rejected the plaque. the students complained, and the rest is history. emma goldman was a jewish anarchist born in lithuania in 1869. among other things she was imprisoned for distributing birth control literature, and she made numerous public speeches defending the right of gay men and lesbians to love as they pleased and condemning homophobia. emma goldman had a zest for life. when criticized for not taking things seriously enough, she apparently said, “if i can’t dance, i don’t want to be part of your revolution.” claudia card was the emma goldman professor of philosophy and i am lucky to have been her colleague for almost 30 years. 1 tributes by both lynne tirrell and paula gottlieb were first presented october 11, 2015, on the occasion of the family’s celebration of life for claudia card, pyle center, university of wisconsin-madison. 1 gottlieb and tirrell: remembering claudia card published by scholarship@western, 2015 i don’t have powerpoint, but here are some snapshots of claudia’s life that i was able to witness—claudia being made swip’s distinguished philosopher of the year, claudia being feted by her students (many of whom are here) at cardfest, a festival in honor of her 65th birthday, claudia presenting the dewey lecture to a packed hall at the central conference of the american philosophical association, claudia receiving a long standing ovation for her presidential address at the apa, and most recently, claudia being awarded the prestigious carus lectures. claudia card was a true wisconsinite. born in pardeeville, she did her undergraduate work at the university of wisconsin-madison with marcus singer and returned as an assistant professor in philosophy after studying at harvard. at that time women were not accepted for the ph.d. at harvard except under the aegis of radcliffe college. professor card almost threw away her acceptance letter because she did not recognize the sender. professor card was a pioneer, not just at harvard, but especially in her work on feminist and lesbian philosophy. for example, her book entitled “the unnatural lottery: character and moral luck” (a brilliant twist on rawls’ coinage of the “natural lottery”) addresses the luck involved in forming a good character when, for example, wealth, gender, race and sexual orientation introduce factors beyond one’s control. professor card was in the process of completing a third book on her theory of evil. in her dewey lecture she says: “my current work on torture, terrorism, and genocide addresses the problem of how to respond to atrocities without perpetrating atrocities oneself in responding. the challenge is to find ways to respond that preserve humanitarian values. torture, for example, is one current response to terrorism, insofar as it is used to extract information regarding suspected terrorists. but torture fails the test of preserving humanitarian values. much of this work is not focused on women. yet all of it is permeated and shaped by my experience with feminism.” now one might think that someone who spent so much time on such grim topics would be rather an off-putting colleague. far from it. claudia was a very generous, cheerful, and optimistic person. she had great faith in the ability of others to improve, so when she was confronted with an english colleague who on arrival in madison knew nothing about feminist philosophy nor u.s. women’s sports, another passion of claudia’s, here was a double challenge to be taken up. claudia’s help was unobtrusive. writing about the spirited and competitive part of the soul in plato? you might want to read vicky davion’s paper on whether feminists should favor competition. thinking about aristotle’s practical syllogism? you might want to read maria lugones’s paper about agency and oppression. one summer claudia asked me to join a reading group on feminist epistemology. philosophy “claudia style” was very socratic, lots of dialogue and lots of fun. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.5 improving my knowledge of sports proved more difficult. claudia was a great supporter of women’s sports; her generosity is acknowledged on the wall of the kohl center. she often took her junior female colleagues and graduate students to the games, and she took me too. i don’t think that i ever got the hang of women’s basketball. in england, as you know, everything is slower than in the u.s. politicians stand, not run, for office. i was brought up on netball, where you had to stand still when you caught the ball and were absolutely forbidden to run with it. but claudia was undaunted. with her usual lack of arrogance, she never gave up on the idea that i or anyone else could understand all the things she could. claudia remained undaunted and her zest for life unquenched even in her last days at the hospice. she enjoyed babcock hall ice cream, and pastries brought by her brother bruce from the amish bakery near her hometown of pardeeville. she enjoyed listening to the many heartfelt messages from caringbridge courtesy of lynne tirrell and melissa card. she enjoyed musical performances; her advisee brendan moriarty played his ’cello and jeanne swack, professor of music, played poulenc’s sonata for the flute—and she enjoyed the good company of friends and family, especially bruce, sue, melissa, john, and kim, her beloved cats mischief and persia, and of course vicky davion. claudia also enjoyed watching movies, hundreds of them, especially her favorites with ginger rogers and fred astaire because, to paraphrase claudia’s heroine emma goldman, “where would we be without dancing?” tribute from lynne tirrell (university of massachusetts boston) i am trying to think of today as a belated birthday celebration, because we just passed what would have been claudia's 75th birthday. those of us lucky to have known claudia are so grateful for her life, her friendship, her emergence into a strong and feisty feminist, and also for her kindness—always, her generosity in fact and in spirit, and her laughter and impishness, her music, and her dancing. claudia loved people and she loved life, she had a gift for it, and this became a gift to all of us. claudia worked intensely hard, day in and out, and was often alone, and yet, she had a vibrant social life too. she once wrote that "social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and inter-generational, that create an identity that gives meaning to a life" (“genocide & social death,” 2003). claudia had social vitality, that's for sure. wherever she went, she made friends, because she took delight in all the ways that we humans can be, she wasn't insular, and she wasn't a snob. claudia brought people together, was very loyal to her friends, was always open to meeting new people, and was extremely generous to young philosophers. claudia took real delight in the accomplishments of others. she was both a mentor 3 gottlieb and tirrell: remembering claudia card published by scholarship@western, 2015 and a role model in these crucial respects. claudia’s amazing capacity for friendship is one of her great virtues. so you might guess by now that my remarks today are a reflection on just some of claudia’s lived virtues, as i've seen them -a perfect blend of theory and practice in how she lived. it's common for philosophers to think (and know) that specializing in ethics doesn't make one a better person, but i think in claudia's case it strengthened her goodness. although she was a philosopher’s philosopher, claudia didn’t settle for the easier task of pure theory: she did ethics engaged in real world problems, not applied ethics, but engaged ethics, and this made all the difference. she took seriously the genuine conditions within which people make moral choices. finding her voice as a feminist really enriched her work in ethics and politics, because her feminism reinforced her tendency to look closely at the real problems of real people. in living real-world, real-time, thoughtful ethics, i believe claudia came to embody the unity of the virtues. she'd probably scoff at this a bit, but i think it is true. claudia's incisive mind was tempered by mercy: she was very patient with the rest of us. her flexibility of mind and charity of heart enabled her to find the best in an idea or a theory and polish it until it gleams. and she knew to quickly throw away philosophical foolishness and distractions. she was a talented listener, which made her a wonderful interlocutor. you always felt that claudia heard you, and thought carefully about what you were saying. claudia never took cheap shots, never hid behind someone else’s views, and stood strongly on her own two feet. she also always did her homework, and always was careful to give credit where credit was due. and she, optimistically, wonderfully, expected the same of all of us. these are just a few of her virtues. claudia was my teacher, my mentor, and a steadfast friend for 37 years. my years at wisconsin (1977-1980) just happened to be the years that claudia was beginning to write again. she was widely respected for her “mercy” paper, and some of her other early work, but she had gone through some significant life events and felt a need to change her philosophical approach, to integrate feminism into her philosophy, in short, to find her voice. in 1978, i enrolled in claudia’s new “sexual politics” course, exploring the feminist philosophy that was happening just as the field was developing. it was exciting. as a professor, claudia was a breath of fresh air, speaking to us openly, with knowledge but without pretense, making it clear that what mattered were the questions we could ask and our work together in finding possible answers. she made us be philosophers, every day. she also made us take daily life and ordinary experiences seriously, just as seriously as we took our studies. the course was intense, and was a great training ground for the senior thesis i went on to do with claudia, developing a philosophical analysis of rape. claudia’s guidance and support made the challenges less daunting, but she also 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.5 made sure that i set ambitious goals, didn’t waiver from high standards of philosophical process, and never gave up. it is a gift to encounter a teacher like this once in a lifetime. to have remained friends all these years is truly a life’s blessing. claudia's virtues were well expressed in her mentorship. when i left wisconsin and went to pittsburgh for graduate school, claudia made sure to keep in touch. she sent frequent long hand-written newsy and philosophical letters, checking in, telling me what she was working on, asking what was i studying and writing, and so on. i appreciated it then, but in hindsight i realize how crucial this support was. i loved my years at pitt—we had a fabulous faculty and i was blessed with a great cohort of students—but it’s a wonderful thing to know that your philosophical world is not all in one department. claudia always made my philosophical world bigger, and she still does, even today in her absence. what i am saying here is personal, about my own history with claudia, and even though it might seem like i am claiming to be special, we all know that claudia gave her philosophical incisiveness and her humane support to so many other students and colleagues all through her career. we were each special to her. i remember claudia saying something once about how you have to slay the fathers to become yourself, and she did, truly, become herself, a major figure in ethics and feminism and so much more, but she never forgot to look back and say “thank you.” she was so grateful for all the care and support that her own teachers gave her; she knew that she owed a lot of the life that she loved to their support at crucial times. read her dewey lecture sometime—there she eloquently expressed her gratitude to her teachers, especially professor singer, who is here with us today. and isn’t that a lesson to the rest of us, to remember to be grateful to those who throw us a lifeline, and to push any sense of hubris aside. my gratitude to claudia is deeper than i could ever pay forward, though, like her, i try. nietzsche said “one repays a teacher poorly if one remains always only a pupil.” (zarathustra, 1885). getting out into the world, using what you have learned, and building the world of tomorrow is how we pay it forward. claudia did that, so well, in how she taught, in what she wrote about, in how she mentored, in her friendships. to continue to honor her gifts to us, so we must do the same, taking good care of the students we teach, mentoring our colleagues, making the world more just whenever we can. claudia’s philosopher's life has left a legacy through her teaching, her writing, and through her mentoring others across nearly 50 years at uw-madison. after her surgery in 2014, claudia told me she might not finish the papers she was currently working on, but what mattered most to her was to return to the classroom and teach her seminar. she did that, while undergoing chemotherapy. (to paraphrase the bard): though she be but little, she was mighty. 5 gottlieb and tirrell: remembering claudia card published by scholarship@western, 2015 despite living a brilliant life of the mind, she also loved embodied life; claudia loved to sing, dance, and play her gorgeous piano. claudia loved the materiality of bodily experience, from the smooth sweet taste of butter and cheese, to the rich aromatics of a deep red burgundy. with permission, i cite a note from naomi scheman to claudia, in july 2015: ah yes, pleasure. i've been struck, claudia, by what a talent you have for it. when my mother was going through chemo i learned from watching & being with her that finding pleasure in the world & the people & other things in it was truly a virtue. that habit of mind & heart attunes one to the world in a wonderful way. you are, i think, a phronemos of the virtue of pleasure. (naomi scheman, july 9, 2015.) not quite an epicurean, not a full hedonist, claudia knew how to live life fully. and yet there were elements of stoicism always present in her realism. she was a gifted judge of when to accept reality and when to fight for change. her focus, as we all know, was fighting injustice, oppression, cruelty, and violence. claudia was worldly and wise. she had really become quite a sage and a virtuous person in a deep, deep way, and yet, she always carried the earnest girl from pardeeville in her heart, with honor. she knew who she was, she loved the life she had, and she especially loved that she could teach. and we are all the better for having the gift of her friendship. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 1 [2015], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol1/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2015.2.5 feminist philosophy quarterly 2015 remembering claudia card: two tributes paula gottlieb lynne tirrell recommended citation remembering claudia card: two tributes feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 4 recommended citation catala, amandine. 2019. “multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 4. 2019 multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance amandine catala université du québec à montréal amandine.catala@gmail.com catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance1 amandine catala abstract the traditional blackface character black pete has been at the center of an intense controversy in the netherlands, with most black citizens denouncing the tradition as racist and most white citizens endorsing it as harmless fun. i analyze the controversy as an utter failure, on the part of white citizens, of what alison jaggar has called multicultural literacy. this article aims to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy and the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. i argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance. i close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy. keywords: blackface, black pete, colonialism, epistemic injustice, epistemology of ignorance, intelligibility economy, multicultural literacy, racism, tradition, white ignorance, zwarte piet introduction every year in the first week of december, children in the netherlands2 eagerly await the visit of saint nicholas (sinterklaas),3 who brings them candy and 1 this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc). 2 saint nicholas celebrations, in their respective regional variants, also take place in belgium as well as in parts of france and germany, usually on december 6 (december 5 in the netherlands). because protests (and un involvement) regarding this tradition have mainly taken place in the netherlands, i focus on the dutch case. the analysis i offer below, however, applies equally to the belgian and french cases, which also involve saint nicholas’s companion black pete (known as père fouettard in french, literally “whipping father,” in reference to the whip the character carries to scare disobedient children). the situation is different in germany, where saint nicholas’s companion, krampus, is an evil black beast said to be the son of hel, god of the underworld in norse mythology. 3 the english pronunciation of “sinterklaas” morphed into “santa claus.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 presents if they behaved well throughout the year. children are told that if they behaved badly, however, they will instead have to deal with saint nicholas’s servant, black pete (zwarte piet), who will punish them. saint nicholas is an old, longbearded, awe-inspiring white man dressed in a red cloak who either rides a white horse or sits on an imposing throne. black pete is a buffoonish black man dressed in renaissance page boy attire who either walks alongside his master’s horse or stands next to his throne, acts clumsy or dumb, and speaks in broken dutch. each year, saint nicholas parades in the netherlands include swarms of dancing black petes— played by whites in blackface makeup4—taking over the streets of cities and towns across the country. at school, children sing cheerful songs about black pete, whose lyrics include “even though i’m black as coal, i mean well,” while they apply themselves in their arts-and-crafts classes as their teachers show them how to make blackface drawings and cut-outs of black pete that will then proudly be displayed to decorate their classrooms and homes. the year 2013 marked the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the former dutch colonies of suriname and the dutch antilles. but 2013 also started with a letter, addressed to the dutch government, by a group of experts from the special procedures of the un human rights council, regarding the celebrated character black pete, whom black citizens view as a remnant of the netherlands’ colonial past and involvement in slavery. following complaints received from individuals and civil society organizations in the netherlands, according to which “the portrayal of black pete perpetuates a negative stereotype and derogatory image of africans and people of african descent,” the group of human rights experts relays in its letter to the dutch government the concerns that “the character and image of black pete perpetuate a stereotyped image of african people and people of african descent as second-class citizens, fostering an underlying sense of inferiority within dutch society and stirring racial differences as well as racism.”5 the letter asks the dutch government whether and how it is addressing these concerns. in its response to the un experts, the dutch government states that even though it “is aware that ‘black pete’ is considered by some to be offensive,” the 4 some defenders of the tradition claim that black pete’s skin is black not because he is phenotypically black but because he is a chimney sweep who got soot on his face from coming down the chimney to leave presents for children in their homes. as many critics of the tradition have pointed out, however, this explanation does not account for the character’s uniformly black face, let alone for his exaggerated red lips, afro wig, and golden earrings. this explanation also overlooks the historical, colonial origins of the character, as argued below. 5 the letter is available at https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/tmresultsbase /downloadpubliccommunicationfile?gid=21183. catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 government “sees the sinterklaas festival as a traditional children’s festival. the focus is on sinterklaas as a figure who hands out presents.”6 the government’s response, moreover, seems to reflect the view of most dutch citizens, who are mostly white: (i) it is tradition; (ii) it is about children and presents; (iii) it has nothing to do with racism. black (and white) citizens7 who have denounced these practices as offensive and racist have in response been met with disbelief, dismissal, insults, threats, and even physical violence, as have the un rapporteurs looking into the allegations raised against the tradition. while some of these reactions straightforwardly display explicit racism or intentional racial hostility, others seem to express a genuine (if slightly annoyed or amused) puzzlement at the suggestion that the portrayal of the otherwise muchbeloved figure of black pete is racist—that is, that “black pete is racism,”8 to quote the homonymous anti-black pete campaign in the netherlands.9 both types of reaction, however, equally result in flat denial of the claim that black pete is racism. the peremptory reply, in both cases, is that black pete is not racism—end of (or rather, no need for) discussion. in this sense, this peremptory reply, voiced in both types of reaction present in the black pete controversy, powerfully exemplifies an utter failure of what alison jaggar (1999) has called multicultural literacy—that is, an effort on the part of the dominant group to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that nondominant groups might have of the dominant culture. the article proceeds as follows. i first present jaggar’s concept of multicultural literacy and explain why it is relevant and useful to analyze the controversy surrounding black pete (section 1). i then proceed to identify both the causes of this failure of multicultural literacy as well as the conditions required for multicultural literacy to be possible. i argue that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice (section 2) and connect the latter to white 6 https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/tmresultsbase/downloadfile?gid=31496. 7 in this article, i use the term “citizen” in the broad, democratic sense of being a member of civil society, rather than in the narrow, legal sense of holding citizenship. 8 “zwarte piet is racisme” in dutch. 9 note that racism is present, in different forms, on two different levels here: the individual level of certain citizens’ aggressive and explicitly racist reaction to the controversy, and the structural level of social representations, which includes the racist portrayal of black pete, quite independently of the degree of individual explicit racism displayed by anyone in dutch society, or of the degree of individual awareness of the racist character of the portrayal of black pete. for more on these different forms of racism, see section 2. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 ignorance (section 3). i close by considering possible avenues for fostering multicultural literacy (section 4). 1. the black pete controversy as a failure of multicultural literacy in her work on multicultural democracy, jaggar has argued for cultural recognition as an active project, going beyond mere passive tolerance. thus conceived, cultural recognition requires what she calls multicultural literacy. multicultural literacy, jaggar explains, “is not knowledge of the self-interpretations of the dominant culture; instead, it requires understanding the characteristic experiences and self-conceptions of groups constituted by age, gender, class, and disablement, as well as by ethnicity” (1999, 325). in particular, multicultural literacy requires that dominant groups be willing “to confront subordinated groups’ perceptions of the dominant culture and the ways in which that culture continues to exploit subordinated groups and maintain its dominance” (1999, 325). multicultural literacy, jaggar adds, involves “recogniz[ing] each other’s specific collective identities” (325). more specifically, and importantly for the connections i will draw to epistemic injustice and to white ignorance in the next two sections, multicultural literacy “means being open to the possibility that someone’s words may offer valuable insights generated not independently of, much less despite, her group identity but actually in virtue of that identity” (325). in other words, multicultural literacy as an active project of cultural recognition requires acknowledging the fact that our social position and corresponding collective identity (e.g., gender, race, class, etc.) affects our perception and understanding of the social world and its social practices. the concept of multicultural literacy thus relies on a conception of culture/cultural groups as defined or constituted by social position and collective identity as a social group. that is, the concept of multicultural literacy relies on the notion of what we might call a social-cultural group, examples of which include “groups constituted by age, gender, class, and disablement, as well as by ethnicity” (jaggar 1999, 325). to more fully spell out the concept of multicultural literacy and the conception of a social-cultural group it involves, it proves useful turn to iris marion young’s conception of a social group as defined primarily by a sense of identity, defined “in terms of the cultural forms, social situation, and history that group members know as theirs” (1990, 44). in young’s analysis, social groups constitute cultural groups. social groups occupy dominant (e.g., man, white, rich) or nondominant (e.g., woman, black, poor) social positions that correspond to different cultures. young articulates this point most clearly with her notion of cultural imperialism, which she develops with examples of social-cultural groups construed along axes such as race, gender, indigeneity, and sexual orientation (1990, 59–60). cultural imperialism occurs when the dominant social meanings and catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 representations—which reflect the perspective and experience of dominant groups—render the perspective and experience of nondominant groups invisible, while simultaneously stereotyping nondominant groups and marking them as other (1990, 58–59). in a point that might have been made in the context of the black pete controversy, young notes that “these stereotypes so permeate the society that they are not noticed as contestable” (59). importantly for our understanding of the black pete controversy as involving a failure of multicultural literacy (i.e., a failure on the part of the dominant group to understand the perspective and experience of the nondominant group with regard to the portrayal of black pete), and hence as involving a conflict between different cultural groups, young explains: the group defined by the dominant culture as deviant, as a stereotyped other, is culturally different from the dominant group, because the status of otherness creates specific experiences not shared by the dominant group, and because culturally oppressed groups also are often socially segregated and occupy specific positions in the social division of labor. members of such groups express their specific group experiences and interpretations of the world to one another, developing and perpetuating their own culture. . . . this, then, is the injustice of cultural imperialism: that the oppressed group’s own experience and interpretation of social life finds little expression that touches the dominant culture, while that same culture imposes on the oppressed group its experience and interpretation of social life. (1990, 60; emphasis in original) again, this latter passage could have been written about the black pete controversy, which, as mentioned earlier and argued in the next section, is the result of the outright rejection, by (most) white dutch citizens, of (most) black dutch citizens’ experience and interpretation of the portrayal of black pete as racist. this rejection exemplifies an utter failure of multicultural literacy—or to put it conversely, an instance of multicultural illiteracy—as no attempt is made by the dominant group to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that the nondominant group might have of the dominant culture, namely of the portrayal of black pete. clearly understood as relying on a conception of cultural groups as social groups (i.e., social-cultural groups), jaggar’s account of multicultural literacy as an active project of cultural recognition provides a relevant and useful conceptual resource to analyze the black pete controversy.10 10 it should be noted that my claim here is simply this: the concept of multicultural literacy is relevant and useful to analyze the controversy surrounding black pete. my feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 before turning to the connections between multicultural illiteracy and epistemic injustice (section 2) and white ignorance (section 3), one last point is in order regarding the characterization of the black pete controversy as a problem of conflicting cultures and multiculturalism. is multiculturalism an appropriate concept to use in this context?11 does the black pete controversy not rather amount to a conflict within one single, dutch culture, rather than between two different cultures? writing directly about the black pete controversy, afro-surinamese dutch scholar gloria wekker observes: as long as the dutch imperial past does not form part of the common, general store of knowledge, which coming generations should have at their disposal, as long as general knowledge about the exclusionary processes involved in producing the dutch nation does not circulate more widely, multiculturalism now cannot be realized, either. people of color will forever remain allochtonen, the official and supposedly innocuous term meaning “those who came from elsewhere,” racializing people of color for endless generations, never getting to belong to the dutch nation. the counterpart of “allochtonen” is autochtonen, meaning “those who are from here,” which, as everyone knows, refers to white people. (2016, 15) wekker adds that “contemporary constructions of ‘us,’ those constructed as belonging to europe, and ‘them,’ those constructed as not belonging . . . entail the fundamental impossibility of being both european, constructed to mean being white and christian, and being black-muslim-migrant-refugee” (2016, 21). these passages claim is not that multicultural literacy is the only relevant or useful analytical concept to explain what is happening or what is at stake in the controversy. nor, therefore, is my claim that the concept of multicultural literacy captures or exhausts all aspects of the complex dynamics at play in the controversy (for an overview of many of the factors at play in the black pete controversy, see wekker 2016, chapter 5). indeed, in the remainder of this article, i will connect my analysis of the controversy and the way it exemplifies multicultural illiteracy to the further analytical concepts of epistemic injustice (section 2) and white ignorance (section 3). 11 compare, for example, the accounts of multiculturalism offered by will kymlicka (1995) or jacob levy (2000), who, while open to the possibility that their arguments might have implications for cultural minorities understood along axes such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and so forth, prefer to focus on cultural minorities understood along axes such as indigeneity, language, ethnicity, or religion. for further discussion of the normative significance of these divergent understandings of cultural minorities, see catala 2015b. catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 make clear that multiculturalism is very much an appropriate concept to use in the context of the black pete controversy. they also make clear that (mis)representing the controversy as one involving one single, dutch culture contributes to the perpetuation of cultural imperialism by obscuring the fact that what appears to be dutch culture is in fact white dutch culture. having explained the relevance and usefulness of the concept of multicultural literacy to analyze the black pete controversy, i now turn to my argument that this failure of multicultural literacy is due to hermeneutical injustice (section 2), before connecting the latter to white ignorance (section 3). 2. multicultural (il)literacy and hermeneutical injustice jaggar stresses the importance of developing multicultural literacy because social-cultural groups are analogous to “systems of communication existing in unequal relationships to one another” (1999, 323). this means that nondominant social-cultural groups (e.g., women, blacks, or the poor) may face particular difficulties when engaging in democratic deliberation. specifically, jaggar notes that mainstream or dominant discourses “may not contain sufficient discursive resources to express the perspectives of subordinated groups, with the result that when the members of those groups press their claims, they may appear inarticulate, confused or, in the worst case, even be unintelligible to nonmembers” (1999, 312). jaggar adds that this type of unequal relation of communication “undermines the credibility of some speakers and may even silence some entirely” (312). she notes that challenges formulated by nondominant groups often “will be met with defensiveness, ridicule or outright attack” and, echoing wekker’s remark on the perpetual outsider status of “allochtonen,” that “those resistant to change may even contest the authenticity of the challengers’ membership in the community” (321). though she does not use the terminology of epistemic injustice subsequently developed by miranda fricker (2007), jaggar essentially refers to the undue, identity-based deficits in intelligibility and credibility that respectively characterize hermeneutical and testimonial injustice as defined by fricker (see below). more precisely, jaggar points to the threats that epistemic injustice poses to successful democratic deliberation.12 in what follows, i argue that epistemic injustice also undermines the civic virtue of multicultural literacy that jaggar advocates as a means of overcoming otherwise unequal relations of communication. specifically, i argue that the failure of multicultural literacy in the black pete controversy is due to hermeneutical injustice. 12 for a thorough treatment of the question of epistemic injustice as a necessary condition for successful democratic deliberation, referring to the black pete controversy, see catala 2015a. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 epistemic injustice is a particular type of injustice that an individual suffers specifically in her capacity as a knower—as a knowledge contributor or user—in virtue of her membership in a nondominant social group. fricker (2007) identifies two kinds of epistemic injustice. in testimonial injustice, an individual’s testimony is wrongfully dismissed because she is a member of a nondominant social group—for example, a black person is not believed because she is black. the analysis i offer below will rely on the other type of epistemic injustice: hermeneutical injustice. in hermeneutical injustice, an individual’s social experience is wrongfully misunderstood because of her social group’s unequal participation in the production of social meanings or collective understandings—for example, not being able to convey as such an experience of sexual harassment before the term was coined. otherwise put, hermeneutical injustice occurs when a member of a nondominant group is unable to successfully communicate part of her social experience because of a lack of an adequate, common, or recognized vocabulary in the society (fricker 2007, 2016). that is, her social experience is collectively misinterpreted or misrepresented because of the hermeneutical marginalization of nondominant groups—because the society’s pool of interpretive labels, conceptual tools, and social meanings (what fricker calls the society’s hermeneutical resource) is shaped mainly by dominant groups. as a result, social meanings do not adequately track, and indeed obscure, some aspects of the social experience of nondominant groups, rendering this social experience unintelligible to mainstream society. importantly, note that hermeneutical injustice is not due solely to the lack of an adequate term or understanding for a particular social experience (e.g., sexual harassment); it is also due to the prevalence of other, problematic characterizations or understandings of that same experience (e.g., harmless flirting), which attest to the undue influence of dominant groups over the society’s hermeneutical resource. hermeneutical injustice thus centrally concerns the correct understanding of a particular social experience, practice, or situation. in the remainder of this section, i argue that the failure of multicultural literacy in the black pete controversy—that is, the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture—is due to a hermeneutical injustice regarding the (in)correct understanding of black pete as (not) racist. both sides seem to agree that racism is wrong (the dutch indeed view themselves as fundamentally antiracist), and that if black pete is racism, then black pete is wrong. the question dividing both sides is whether black pete is racism. this dividing question of whether black pete is racism is a matter of hermeneutical injustice because it fundamentally concerns social representations and collective understandings—specifically, whether the conceptual label or tool of social interpretation “racism” is fitting to describe the portrayal of black pete and, catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 by extension, whether the current social representation of black pete should be discarded. as we will see, arguing that black pete is racism requires not only clarifying which understanding of “racism” is being used among several possible ones, but also countering prevalent alternative characterizations or interpretations of black pete in the mainstream hermeneutical resource. for all these reasons, the question of whether black pete is or is not racism is one that falls squarely within the purview of hermeneutical (in)justice. from the aforementioned response of the dutch government, which also matches the stance of most dutch citizens, we can glean two tentative reasons seemingly aiming to support most white citizens’ claim that black pete is not racism.13 these two reasons are presented as alternative, competing understandings of black pete, prevalent in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, and are meant to foreclose the possibility that black pete is racism. the first is that the festival, including black pete, is tradition. the second is that the festival is about children and presents. while both reasons are ultimately red herrings, they are often cited in defense of black pete and hence warrant our critical attention for a moment. the fact that a cultural practice like a festival is tradition tells us nothing about the nonracist character of this practice or festival. the appeal to tradition, rather, seems to sidestep the real question (of racism)14 and to imply that because the festival is tradition, it cannot be changed. tradition here is construed as static and ahistorical. it cannot evolve and is in no way a function of historical sociopolitical factors. ironically, this construal of tradition is what we might call the colonial construal of tradition: it is the one that european colonists typically used to highlight the supposed cultural backwardness of the peoples they colonized and to justify the practices and aims of their colonial projects (jaggar 2005; jaggar and tobin 2013; mohanty 1984; narayan 1997; said 1978). interestingly, this time, the colonial construal of tradition is invoked by the dominant group with respect to its own tradition, rather than that of the nondominant group, as a rationalization of its 13 my presently proposed analysis—which was developed independently of and prior to the publication of wekker’s book, and which is based on the response from the dutch government and on news articles from around the western world since 2011—is congruent with wekker’s diagnosis of the black pete controversy, which analyzes it in terms of several recurring themes found in dutch citizens’ reactions to the accusations that black pete is racism, among which tradition and children are most prominent. the precise content of the complementary analyses that wekker and i respectively carry out under these two headings of course differs (see wekker 2016, chapter 5). 14 on sidestepping the question of racism, see also wekker (2016, introduction and chapter 5). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 unwillingness to change a controversial festival. either way, this colonial construal of tradition is plainly inaccurate: traditions can and do change over time, and they do so as a result of historical sociopolitical factors, including colonialism and the contact between colonizers and colonized (jaggar 2005; jaggar and tobin 2013; mohanty 1984; narayan 1997; said 1978). indeed, this is so in the case of the controversial saint nicholas festival: saint nicholas stories and celebrations did not always include black pete, and the character’s first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century15 takes place against the historical backdrop of dutch colonialism and involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. if anything, then, tradition, when scrutinized more closely, points to the racist origins of the figure of black pete. of course, when tradition is invoked in defense of the festival that involves black pete, it is not subjected to such critical scrutiny. that the festival is tradition is taken to be reason enough to keep the festival as is. hence the appeal to tradition paradoxically conceals the problematic historical origins of black pete. what about the appeal to the fact that the saint nicholas festival is about children and presents, another common response to the charge that black pete is racism? again, this fact alone tells us nothing about the nonracist character of the festival. like the appeal to tradition, the appeal to children and presents seems to sidestep the real question (of racism) by creating a shift in focus through two related argumentative moves, which we might call causal erasure16 and good intentions. first, with causal erasure, the appeal to children and presents shifts the focus away from the active causal role the subjects of the festival play (the adult organizers and performers who are responsible for the festival), to the passive recipient role of the objects of the festival (the children the festival aims to entertain and to treat with presents). second, with good intentions, the appeal to children and presents points to the positive intention or purpose behind the practice of the festival (to entertain and to treat children) in order to minimize or detract attention from the negative effects or meaning of this practice (marginalization of black citizens and racist stereotypes). this double shift in focus—from the active subject to the passive object of a practice, and from the negative effects to the positive intentions behind the practice—which operates via the twin argumentative moves of causal erasure and good intentions, is not uncommon in controversies involving racism, slavery, or colonialism.17 indeed, this double shift in focus has often been used to legitimize 15 the story titled “saint nicholas and his servant,” by school teacher jan schenkman, was published in 1850. 16 what mills (2015) has termed “racial erasure” would fall under the broader concept of causal erasure i introduce here. 17 defenses of the controversial belgian tradition called les noirauds (“noiraud” is french for “swarthy”) likewise center around the two argumentative moves which i catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 european colonialism. first, the move of causal erasure. european colonialism was not about european colonizers (the subjects of colonialism), european territorial expansion via dispossession, nor european economic enrichment via exploitation; rather, european colonialism was about the colonized (the objects of colonialism), the burden of the white man to bring civilization, roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals to the backward/savage/incapable peoples it colonized. again, there is a shift from the active causal role of the colonizers to the passive recipient role of the colonized.18 second, the move of good intentions. rather than emphasize and recognize the horrors of european colonization and its inherent racism, there is a tendency to present colonization as driven by the noble purpose of bettering the colonized: their mores, infrastructure, education, or health.19 again, there is a shift from the negative effects and meaning of colonization to the allegedly positive intentions behind it. to review, the two tentative reasons seemingly aiming to support most white citizens’ claim that black pete is not racism—namely, the appeal to tradition and the appeal to children and presents—are ultimately red herrings that obscure the problematic historical origins of what is really at issue in the controversy, namely the figure of black pete and its racist character. in addition to countering these two alternative characterizations or interpretations of black pete (as being about tradition and children/presents) have called causal erasure and good intentions (for an example of such a defense, see “avec les belges qui se griment en noirs pour parader dans les rues de bruxelles” (peter detailleur, vice, march 31, 2017; https://www.vice.com/fr/article/xy9mpq/belgique-noirauds-parade-traditionbruxelles-racisme). the tradition consists in belgian notables’ collecting money for charity by parading through the streets of brussels in blackface and nineteenth century costumes, because when the tradition started in 1876, belgian people were fascinated by the european “exploration” of africa. to this day, the tradition continues in the same form. first, the causal erasure move operates a shift from the active causal role of the subjects/orchestrators of the tradition to the passive recipient role of its objects/the vulnerable: the noirauds tradition is not about wealthy and powerful white men (indeed, blackface is supposedly necessary for their anonymity!), it is about the beneficiaries of the good cause they are helping through charity. second, the good intentions move operates a shift from the historically problematic origins of the tradition and the racist meaning of blackface to its well-intentioned purpose of collecting money for charity. 18 for an insightful analysis of colonialism that complicates this dichotomy, see lu (2011). 19 for an incisive critique of european colonialism, see mills (1997, 2007, 2015). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 prevalent in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, addressing the question of whether black pete is racism requires spelling out the notion of racism—that is, clarifying which understanding of “racism” is being used among several possible ones. the following observations from mitchell esajas, cofounder of the stop blackface initiative in the netherlands, and from jerry afriyie, an artist and activist who was violently arrested in 2011 for protesting black pete, provide a good starting point to do so. esajas observes: “the dutch people, they believe about themselves that they are tolerant, but then when you point this out you get this aggressive reaction and it shows there is this conflict within. it shows that there is something wrong. . . . it shows that there is racism.”20 afriyie notes: “when you talk about these things people will say, ‘ah there is no racism here. racism is something of america.’”21 regarding racism, afriyie adds: “it’s not just about zwarte piet. it’s about discrimination on the job market, police brutality, racial profiling. the fact that if i were to jump into a lexus now and drive, i would be stopped in ten minutes.”22 in other words, most white citizens in the netherlands fail to see how black pete could be racism because the dutch are tolerant people, and tolerance, by definition, precludes racism.23 so even if white dutch citizens perform in blackface, this act cannot be racist because dutch people are tolerant and tolerant people do not do racist things. there are at least two problems with this view. the first concerns the notion of racism this view involves; the second the notion of a tolerant/nonracist culture or person. problem 1: the notion of racism. since tolerance is an individual virtue, white citizens’ presumption that tolerance precludes racism suggests that they understand racism as individual prejudice, and more specifically as explicit individual prejudice— for example, explicit beliefs that blacks are morally or intellectually inferior. the conception the dutch have of themselves as tolerant and hence not racist, however, 20 melissa noel. 2015. “the fight against ‘black pete,’ a holiday blackface tradition.” nbc news website, dec. 23. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/fight-againstblack-pete-holiday-blackface-tradition-n485081. 21 ibid. 22 ibid. 23 on the self-perception and self-understanding of the dutch as inherently tolerant and antiracist, see also wekker (2016, 151, 154, 166). this self-representation or self-interpretation prevalent in the hermeneutical resource of mainstream dutch society illustrates once more that the question whether the portrayal of black pete – and hence to some extent, dutch culture – is racist is a matter of hermeneutical (in)justice. catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 overlooks the possibility of types of racism that are not explicit or not individual, namely aversive racism and structural racism. let’s look at each in turn. to illustrate aversive racism, consider the case of a white liberal employer, sincerely committed to racial equality and thoroughly rejecting any explicitly prejudiced beliefs regarding nonwhites. still, negative stereotypes of nonwhites (e.g., as incompetent, lazy, or aggressive) in that society might give rise to implicit beliefs or biases that unduly influence the employer’s judgment when deciding whom to hire. looking at otherwise identical résumés, and despite her explicitly antiracist commitments and beliefs, the employer nonetheless chooses to hire the white candidate over the nonwhite candidate. as this example shows, aversive racism is an individual but not an explicit phenomenon. thus, the absence of explicit individual prejudice is not sufficient to preclude racism. to illustrate structural racism, consider the following story, recounted by american civil rights activist whitney young (cited in friedman 1975, 400): i go to the employer and ask him to employ negroes, and he says, “it’s a matter of education. i would hire your people if they were educated.” then i go to the educators and they say, “if negro people lived in good neighborhoods and had more intelligent dialogue in their families, more encyclopedias in their homes, more opportunity to travel, and a stronger family life, then we could do a better job of educating them.” and when i go to the builder he says, “if they had the money, i would sell them the houses”—and then i’m back at the employer’s door again, where i started to begin with. this example shows how racism can be structural, that is, how different institutions or practices (here, employment, education, and housing) combine to form a social structure (and vicious circle) that systematically excludes nonwhites while systematically including whites. structural racism is not a matter of explicit individual prejudice; it is neither an individual nor an explicit phenomenon. at no point in the story does anyone say: “i don’t like black people because they are intellectually or morally inferior, and that’s why i don’t want to give them a job/an education/a house.” suppose that no one in this story either explicitly or implicitly believes that blacks are intellectually or morally inferior (i.e., they are neither explicitly nor aversively racist). the exclusion of black people from these goods is not the result of (explicit or implicit) individual racist intentions, beliefs, or attitudes. rather, their exclusion from these advantages results from the social structure, and more precisely from the way the social institutions and practices that make up this structure work together and reinforce each other, creating a race-based cycle of systematic exclusion (for nonwhites) and inclusion (for whites). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 to go back to the question of racism in the netherlands, both aversive and structural racism might be at play in some of the indicators of racism to which afriyie points. neither racial discrimination in hiring nor racial profiling, for example, need involve explicit individual prejudice. both discrimination and profiling, however, might signal aversive and structural racism. similarly, blackface need not involve explicit individual prejudice. rather, i submit that it is a part of structural racism: it is one of the many practices and institutions, including cultural ones like black pete, that contribute to a social structure that results, for whites and for nonwhites, in systematically differential opportunities and treatment, both material (e.g., employment, education, housing, health care) and symbolic (e.g., positive or negative social meanings and representations in the media, the arts, holiday traditions, and mainstream culture in general). in sum, the absence of explicit individual prejudice on the part of white dutch citizens does not mean that black pete is not racism nor that racism does not exist in dutch society. as argued above, racism can also be aversive or structural, with blackface falling into the latter category. problem 2: the notion of a tolerant/nonracist culture or person. the question of individual tolerance, however, still warrants our attention. recall that white dutch citizens’ reasoning seems to be that because dutch culture and citizens are tolerant and tolerant people do not do racist things, black pete cannot be a racist cultural practice, nor blackface a racist act. this picture gets things backward. it assumes that a culture or person is tolerant first, and therefore its cultural practices or their individual actions are not racist. but it is the reverse. a culture or person can be said to be tolerant/not racist to the extent that its cultural practices or their individual actions are tolerant/not racist. if these practices or actions display intolerance or racism, then the culture or person can hardly be said to be tolerant/not racist.24 in the black pete case, the conception the dutch have of themselves and of their culture as tolerant/not racist seems to logically precede any normative assessment of the tolerant or nonracist character of their cultural practices or individual actions. rather, the determination of the tolerance/nonracism of the people and their culture seems logical and ontological. the claim that the dutch are tolerant/not racist is taken to be as analytically true as the claim that a bachelor is an unmarried man: to be a bachelor just is to be an unmarried man; to be dutch just is to be tolerant/not racist. tolerance/nonracism becomes naturalized as an intrinsic or necessary property and as a fixed trait of the culture or person, rather than historicized as an extrinsic and contingent attribute that is the result of an always-ongoing process. tolerance/nonracism is construed in 24 this is not to say that tolerance or racism are all-or-nothing types of matter; both tolerance and racism certainly admit of degrees. catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 an ontological, essential, and declarative mode, rather than in a practical, habitual, and performative mode.25 to review, i have argued that the failure of multicultural literacy in the black pete controversy—that is, the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture—is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist. in the next section, i shed further light on the black pete controversy by connecting this hermeneutical injustice to white ignorance. 3. hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance charles mills has powerfully shown how racially divided societies tend to be characterized by what he calls an epistemology of ignorance, “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (mills 1997, 18). mills’s analysis is directly relevant to the black pete controversy, since white citizens in this case seem unable to understand the cultural practice they themselves have created. that is, the black pete controversy seems to centrally involve white ignorance. white ignorance, mills argues, is due to what he terms racialized causality: “an ignorance, a non-knowing, that is not contingent, but in which race—white racism and/or white racial domination and their ramifications—plays a crucial causal role” (2007, 20). this racialized causality is thus “expansive enough to include both straightforward racist motivation and more impersonal social-structural causation, which may be operative even if the cognizer in question is not racist” (2007, 21). thus far, i have argued that the black pete controversy is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist. in this section, i show that looking at the black pete controversy through the twin lenses of hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance allows us to gain a more fine-grained picture of all three. to begin, it is useful to go back to the definition of hermeneutical injustice introduced by fricker. as mentioned earlier, hermeneutical injustice consists in an undue intelligibility deficit: the social experience of members of nondominant groups is collectively misunderstood. this intelligibility deficit, moreover, can have one of two causes, which each give rise to a different type of hermeneutical injustice (fricker 2007). the first possible cause of diminished intelligibility is a gap in the society’s pool of conceptual tools (i.e., in the society’s hermeneutical resource). in 25 for a similar point (though not directly put this way) in the context of allies, see mckinnon (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 this case, hermeneutical injustice concerns the content of the communicative attempt. for example, if society lacks the concept of sexual harassment, the successful communication of this experience will be greatly hindered; the social experience of women who are sexually harassed will tend to be collectively misunderstood.26 the second possible cause of diminished intelligibility is the use of a nondominant expressive style or mode of reasoning in a context where another, dominant expressive style or mode of reasoning typically prevails. in this case, hermeneutical injustice concerns the form of the communicative attempt. for example, if society favors expressive styles or modes of reasoning that are culturally associated with masculinity over ones that are culturally associated with femininity (gilligan 1982), successful communication of their social experience by individuals using the latter style or mode will be greatly hindered; their social experience will tend to be collectively misunderstood. let’s now look more closely at the form-based type of hermeneutical injustice. lawrence kohlberg’s studies of children’s moral development as related by carol gilligan (1982) provide a good illustration. gilligan shows that kohlberg’s understanding of children’s moral development was limited to the extent that the scale and criteria he was using to measure it were biased in favor of the boys’ expressive style and against the girls’ expressive style. using a scale and criteria that could make sense of the boys’ answers only, kohlberg was unable to make sense of the girls’ answers. his conclusion regarding this lack of intelligibility was that it signaled a problem not with his scale but rather with the girls’ moral development. in other words, the dominance of the boys’ expressive style made the girls’ answers unintelligible and condemned them to a rather grim verdict. importantly, it should be noted that form-based hermeneutical injustice will often produce content-based hermeneutical injustice. in the case of kohlberg’s studies, the fact that the girls’ expressive style is not recognized as valid (form-based type), and that their answers are therefore unintelligible, prevents the girls from contributing, to the field of psychology and children’s moral development, 26 note that content-based hermeneutical injustice can arise even if nondominant groups create the relevant concepts, when these concepts are not adopted into the mainstream hermeneutical resource or are blocked or ignored by dominant groups (catala 2015a; dotson 2012, 2014; fricker 2016; mason 2011; medina 2013; pohlhaus 2012). in this case, there is still a gap in the mainstream hermeneutical resource, with the same result that the social experience of nondominant groups is collectively misunderstood. i argue below that this is due to the operation of problematic cognitive-epistemic norms (such as self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization). catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 alternative understandings both of the moral dilemmas used by kohlberg and of their own moral development (content-based type). let’s now connect this two-pronged picture of hermeneutical injustice as contentand form-based to white ignorance. recall mills’s definition of ignorance as “a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (mills 1997, 18). ignorance, in this description, seems to be playing out at two related levels: the level of cognitive dysfunction and the level of inaccurate understandings of the world this cognitive dysfunction creates. that is, ignorance is not just about ignorance of the object of knowledge or what is (not) known: it is not just about missing or ignoring a certain epistemic content or outcome in the form of alternative, nondominant understandings of history, reality, or society. ignorance is also about ignorance of the subject of knowledge or the knower: it is also about failing to grasp one’s own cognitive-epistemic processes and norms in the form of self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection. as a result, one’s perception of the world will seem naturally correct and any competing perception or statement to the contrary will seem naturally incorrect in its unintelligibility. in other words, in this two-pronged picture of ignorance as involving both the object and the subject of knowledge, “the cognitive norms that produce ignorance . . . naturalize and dehistoricize both the process and product of knowing” (alcoff 2007, 56). we are now equipped to connect our two-pronged picture of hermeneutical injustice with our two-pronged picture of white ignorance. recall that kohlberg’s measuring scale is calibrated in such a way that only certain kinds of statements make sense. statements that do not make sense within his interpretive framework, moreover, signal a problem with the other, female person or object of knowledge (their inferior moral development) rather than with the scale used by the researcher or subject of knowledge (inadequate criteria to capture moral development). similarly, white ignorance involves cognitive-epistemic norms (self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) that preclude certain interpretations of the social world from making sense. interpretations of the world that do not make sense, moreover, signal a problem with the other, nonwhite person or object of knowledge (their inferior epistemic capacities) rather than with the cognitive-epistemic processes used by the white cognizer or subject of knowledge (inadequate cognitive-epistemic norms). moreover, much like formbased hermeneutical injustice (excluding nondominant expressive styles) produces content-based hermeneutical injustice (excluding alternative understandings of a given social experience or situation), subjective ignorance (involving inadequate cognitive-epistemic norms, such as self-obliviousness and dehistoricization) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 produces objective ignorance (involving inadequate understandings of the social world, such as the understanding that black pete is not racism). the foregoing articulation and juxtaposition of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance show that they overlap. by overlap, i do not mean that the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance are exhaustively coextensive. rather, they overlap to the extent that they track some of the same phenomena, namely the exclusionary processes and outcomes that define the intelligibility economy, that is, what is (un)intelligible, (mis)understood, or (not) recognized as valid in mainstream society and why this comes to be the case. that is, the foregoing shows that the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance are explanatorily similar, in terms of both their explanandum and their explanans: they not only aim to explain the same object (the intelligibility economy), they also provide very similar explanations or explanatory tools to explain this object (the two two-pronged pictures articulated and juxtaposed above).27 while the links between hermeneutical injustice and ignorance have been variously theorized,28 i want to add to this important theorization with the following distinctive claim. specifically, my claim is that hermeneutical injustice (construed as involving both a form-based and a contentbased type) and ignorance (construed as involving both a subjective and an objective level) overlap in the following ways: form-based hermeneutical injustice and subjective ignorance overlap; content-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance overlap. that is, while the concepts of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance may not be exhaustively coextensive, the social phenomena of hermeneutical injustice and ignorance will tend to co-occur. i illustrate my claim below with the black pete controversy, but before doing so, i want to further specify my claim. adapting mills’s (2007, 22) point that privileged, group-based ignorance can be theorized from several axes of social identity like race or gender—that is, that ignorance includes not only white ignorance but also male ignorance, for example—i want to suggest that, similarly, hermeneutical injustice can be further specified in terms of gender, race, and so forth. while fricker’s examples of sexual harassment for content-based hermeneutical injustice and of gilligan’s work on feminine expressive styles for form-based hermeneutical injustice both illustrate what i 27 this is not to deny that the common explanandum (the intelligibility economy) is otherwise part of a distinctive theory or project in each case (mills’s theory of the racial contract in critical race theory; fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice at the intersection of ethics and epistemology). nor therefore, is this to deny that each project may have other explananda. 28 see, for example, catala (2015a), dotson (2012), fricker (2016), mason (2011), medina (2013), mills (2015), and pohlhaus (2012). catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 propose to term male hermeneutical injustice, the black pete controversy, to cite but this example, illustrates what i propose to term white hermeneutical injustice. applying this point to my above claim, i want to suggest that white hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance explanatorily overlap as follows: form-based white hermeneutical injustice and subjective white ignorance overlap; content-based white hermeneutical injustice and objective white ignorance overlap. i can now illustrate my claim of the explanatory overlap between white hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance with the black pete controversy. recall my argument that the failure of multicultural literacy—the lack of attempt on the part of white citizens to understand and be receptive to the experiences and perceptions that black citizens might have of the dominant, white culture—is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist. my contention is that this content-based white hermeneutical injustice (the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist) overlaps with objective white ignorance (an inadequate understanding of the social world involving racialized causality). moreover, this content-based white hermeneutical injustice (the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist) is the result of a prior formbased white hermeneutical injustice (using and privileging the white/dominant group’s cognitive norms of naturalization and dehistoricization and excluding contrary cognitive norms), which overlaps with the type of cognitive dysfunction that characterizes the subjective component of white ignorance. otherwise put, the cognitive-epistemic norms (self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) involved in subjective white ignorance as well as in form-based white hermeneutical injustice, preclude certain interpretations of the social world (black pete is racism) from making sense, and hence produce the type of inadequate social understandings involved in objective white ignorance as well as in content-based white hermeneutical injustice. in the black pete controversy, the problematic cognitive-epistemic norms (selfobliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection; naturalization and dehistoricization) associated with both subjective white ignorance and form-based white hermeneutical injustice can be seen to operate in the twin argumentative moves of causal erasure and good intentions identified earlier, and in the persistence of the outright rejection of the suggestion that black pete is racism despite clear demonstrations of the historical, colonial, racist origins of the tradition.29 as i suggest in the next section, these argumentative moves and persistent denial, which result in a failure of multicultural literacy, are due at least partly to the 29 see, for example, the response from the dutch government in the introduction of this article, the analysis offered in section 2 of catala 2015a, and wekker 2016 (introduction and chapter 5). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 institutionalization of these problematic cognitive-epistemic norms through the very structure of the society:30 its bodies of knowledge, its cultural institutions and symbols, and other spheres of hermeneutical influence like the media, politics, or the arts. 4. conclusion: developing multicultural literacy to conclude, i want to suggest that developing multicultural literacy requires counteracting hermeneutical injustice and ignorance both at the level of the object of knowledge (the cognitive-epistemic content or outcome) and at the level of the subject of knowledge (the cognitive-epistemic norms or process). in this respect, the concept of (il)literacy is fitting because it refers not just to an (in)ability to read a particular content (this word or that sentence in a given language l), but more broadly to an (in)ability to read as a general process (any or most words or sentences in l).31 the ability to read l will require learning and applying certain norms or conventions (e.g., if l uses the roman alphabet, that all letters have an uppercase and a lowercase form, that certain combinations of letters yield certain sounds, that different punctuation symbols play different roles, etc.). that is, literacy can be gained, or illiteracy can be counteracted, by learning and applying certain norms (the general reading process) which then give access to a certain substantive result (reading a particular content). similarly, knowledge can be gained, or hermeneutical injustice and ignorance can be counteracted, by becoming aware of problematic, exclusionary cognitive-epistemic norms (naturalization and dehistoricization; self-obliviousness or lack of critical self-reflection) and replacing them with more inclusive cognitive-epistemic norms (denaturalization and historicization; self-transparency or critical self-reflection),32 which then give access to alternative understandings of the social world, including the cultural practice of black pete. since combatting content-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance (the level of alternative understandings) requires combatting form-based hermeneutical injustice and subjective ignorance (the level of cognitive-epistemic norms), how might denaturalization and historicization be fostered in order to yield greater self-transparency and critical self-reflection? just as literacy is best acquired when the learner is young and when it is practiced regularly, knowledge of one’s country’s33 history of colonialism and 30 see also mills (1997, 2007, 2015) and wekker (2016, introduction and chapter 5). 31 this is not to say that literacy does not admit of degrees. 32 see also medina (2013). 33 in the context of black pete, this country might be the netherlands, belgium or france, as previously mentioned (see note 1). catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 involvement in slavery should be taught in elementary and secondary education, and be further imprinted throughout the society’s many cultural institutions and symbols: for example, museums, stories, books, movies, documentaries, monuments, and town, street, or building names that highlight historical realities while bringing to the fore those that suffered and resisted them instead of glorifying those that brought them about or contributed to them.34 in other words, multicultural literacy requires historical literacy. this in turn might require measures to guarantee greater diversity and inclusion in those social and professional spheres that have a direct impact on the society’s hermeneutical resource and conception of itself: for example, affirmative action policies in spheres such as the media, advertising, politics, education, or the arts. to review, i have argued that the failure of multicultural literacy in the black pete controversy is due to a hermeneutical injustice involving the incorrect understanding of black pete as not racist. i have further shown that looking at the controversy through the twin lenses of hermeneutical injustice and white ignorance provides a more fine-grained picture of all three. i have suggested that hermeneutical injustice can be further specified in terms of gender or race, for example, allowing us to identify its different variants (such as male or white hermeneutical injustice) more directly and precisely. i have suggested that white ignorance involves both a subjective component (where the subject of knowledge is oblivious to their own, problematic cognitive-epistemic norms and processes) and an objective component (where the object of knowledge is inadequately known, construed, or understood). i have shown that subjective white ignorance and formbased white hermeneutical injustice overlap and that objective white ignorance and content-based white hermeneutical injustice overlap. i have argued that securing multicultural literacy requires combatting both subjective ignorance/form-based hermeneutical injustice and objective ignorance/content-based hermeneutical injustice. i have suggested that this might be best achieved through denaturalization and historicization channels that yield greater self-transparency and critical selfreflection on the part of the white, dominant group. my hope is that the analysis i have offered here has contributed to a more complete and precise understanding of multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and ignorance, and of the important ways in which they are connected. references alcoff, linda. 2007. “epistemologies of ignorance: three types.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 34 see, for example, the rhodes must fall campaign. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 39–58. albany: state university of new york press. catala, amandine. 2015a. “democracy, trust, and epistemic justice.” monist 98 (4): 424–440. ———. 2015b. “droits humains et minorités culturelles.” philosophiques 42 (2): 231– 250. dotson, kristie. 2012. “a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression.” frontiers 33 (1): 24–47. ———. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–138. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2016. “epistemic injustice and the preservation of ignorance.” in the epistemic dimensions of ignorance, edited by rik peels and martijn blaauw, 160–177. cambridge: cambridge university press. friedman, robert. 1975. “institutional racism: how to discriminate without really trying.” in racial discrimination in the united states, edited by thomas pettigrew, 384–407. new york: harper and row. gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice: psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. jaggar, alison m. 1999. “multicultural democracy.” journal of political philosophy 7 (3): 308–329. ———. 2005. “‘saving amina’: global justice for women and intercultural dialogue.” ethics and international affairs 19 (3): 55–75. jaggar, alison m., and theresa w. tobin. 2013. “naturalizing moral justification: rethinking the method of moral epistemology.” metaphilosophy 44 (4): 409– 439. kymlicka, will. 1995. multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights. oxford: oxford university press. levy, jacob. 2000. the multiculturalism of fear. oxford: oxford university press. lu, catherine. 2011. “colonialism as structural injustice.” journal of political philosophy 19 (3): 261–281. mason, rebecca. 2011. “two kinds of unknowing.” hypatia 26 (2): 294–307. mckinnon, rachel. 2017. “allies behaving badly.” in routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr., 167–174. new york: routledge. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and the social imagination. new york: oxford university press. mills, charles. 1997. the racial contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. catala – multicultural literacy, epistemic injustice, and white ignorance published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 ———. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 13–38. albany: state university of new york press. ———. 2015. “global white ignorance.” in routledge international handbook of ignorance studies, edited by matthias gross and linsey mcgoey, 217–227. new york: routledge. mohanty, chandra talpade. 1984. “under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3)/13 (1): 333–358. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures. new york: routledge. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27 (4): 715–735. said, edward. 1978. orientalism. new york: pantheon books. wekker, gloria. 2016. white innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. durham, nc: duke university press. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. amandine catala is an associate professor of philosophy at the université du québec à montréal and is canada research chair on epistemic injustice and agency. her research interests are in feminist, social, and political philosophy and philosophy of race, and include epistemic injustice and agency, territorial rights, secession, annexation, colonialism, self-determination, indigenous issues, migration, cultural minorities, and deliberative democracy. her work on these issues has appeared in philosophical studies, the monist, the journal of social philosophy, and critical review of international social and political philosophy. 7289 catala title page.pdf 7289 catala final format.pdf feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of "woman" feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 1 article 3 recommended citation kirkland, katie l. 2019. “feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of ‘woman.’” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (1). article 3. 2019 feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” katie l. kirkland arizona state university kkirkla3@asu.edu kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman”1 katie l. kirkland abstract in “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman,” katharine jenkins argues that sally haslanger’s focal analysis of gender problematically excludes nonpassing trans women from the category “woman.” however, jenkins does not explain why this exclusion contradicts the feminist aims of haslanger’s account. in this paper, i advance two arguments that suggest that a trans-inclusive account of “woman” is crucial to the aims of feminism. i claim that the aims of feminism are to understand and combat women’s oppression. first, i argue that denial of trans identities reinforces cultural ideas that perpetuate both transphobic violence and sexual violence against women. consequently, a feminist account of “woman” that fails to respect trans identities indirectly contributes to the oppression of women. second, i prove that nonpassing trans women are oppressed as women through the internalization of sexual objectification. i then conclude that an account of “woman” that excludes nonpassing trans women cannot successfully advance a complete understanding of women’s oppression. keywords: feminism, transfeminism, oppression i. introduction in “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” sally haslanger conducts a focal analysis of gender that is guided by the aims of critical feminist discourse. haslanger defines being a “woman” as being a member of a social class whose unifying feature is social subordination based on one’s presumed or perceived female biological role in reproduction. because feminist discourse aims to develop an understanding of the oppression of women, haslanger 1 i'd like to first thank christie hartley, who has provided extensive guidance and feedback on this project from the beginning. i'd also like to thank andrew altman, andrew i. cohen, and sandra dwyer for enthusiastically discussing this work with me. finally, i'd like to thank brennan neal for his comments on various drafts as well as his support throughout the project. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 does not think it problematic that her account excludes females who are not socially subordinated. however, in “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman,” katharine jenkins argues that haslanger’s focal analysis of gender problematically excludes nonpassing trans women from the category “woman.”2 jenkins asserts that this exclusion of some trans women from her account of “woman” is incompatible with the feminist aims guiding haslanger’s analytical inquiry. jenkins claims that such exclusion marginalizes trans women within feminist discourse, but she does not offer a satisfying account of why such marginalization is problematic given the stated feminist aims of haslanger’s account. in other words, jenkins does not satisfyingly rule out the possibility that haslanger’s exclusion of some trans women is defensible on the grounds that such trans women are not socially subordinated on the basis of their presumed biological role in reproduction. i will argue that creating a trans-inclusive definition of woman is crucial to feminist aims. i start from the claim that the aims of feminism are to understand and combat women’s oppression. i then advance two arguments for the inclusion of trans women (both passing and nonpassing) in a feminist account of “woman.” first, i argue that the political aim of feminism—the commitment to combatting the oppression of women—requires that a feminist account of “woman” be transinclusive. i argue that feminism’s commitment to eradicating women’s oppression is embedded within a broader commitment to bring about a more just society. using a definition of “woman” that marginalizes trans women is counterproductive to this aim of feminism. in addition, i argue that denial of trans identities reinforces cultural assumptions about the communicative nature of gender presentation. insofar as these cultural assumptions motivate and are used to justify transphobic violence and sexual violence against women, an account of “woman” that fails to respect trans identities may perpetuate these oppressive forms of violence. second, focusing specifically on the sexual objectification of women by cultural stereotypes that result in women’s internalization of objectification through adaptive preferences, i argue that female gender identity is sufficient for trans women (passing and nonpassing) to experience the psychological forms of oppression that women face. therefore, because all trans women can be oppressed as women, a feminist account of “woman” that excludes some trans women cannot fully serve the goal of feminist discourse—that is, advancing an understanding of women’s oppression. 2 throughout this paper, i use the phrase “nonpassing trans women” to refer to those trans women who do not “pass” as cis women. in contrast, the phrase “passing trans women” refers to trans women who do “pass” as cis women. i will elaborate more on the phenomenon of passing in section ii. kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 ii. background: summary of haslanger and jenkins haslanger conducts a focal analysis of gender in order to create a definition that serves the aims of critical feminist theory and avoids the commonality and normativity problems that often obstruct attempts to define “woman.”3 the commonality problem refers to the worry that there is no social feature or experience that all women share. the normativity problem involves the recognition that any definition of woman has normative implications and may privilege some women and marginalize others or further entrench patriarchal values of femininity (haslanger 2012, 228). in order to generate a definition of “woman” that is guided by the interests of feminist analysis and avoids the commonality and normativity problems, haslanger creates an account of “woman” in which being a woman involves being a member of a social class in which one is systematically subordinated on the basis of (presumed) biological sex: s is a woman iff (i) s is regularly and for the most part observed or imagined to have certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction; (ii) that s has these features marks s within the dominant ideology of s’s society as someone who ought to occupy certain kinds of social position that are in fact subordinate (and so motivates and justifies s’s occupying such a position); and (iii) the fact that s satisfies (i) and (ii) plays a role in s’s systematic subordination, that is, along some dimension, s’s social position is oppressive, and s’s satisfying (i) and (ii) plays a role in that dimension of subordination. (2012, 234; emphasis in the original) haslanger claims that her focal account of woman avoids the commonality and normativity problems because it is an analytical account that focuses on subordinate social positions as the feature that women share (240). further, while haslanger admits that some nonoppressed females may not count as women on her account, she claims that this is not problematic insofar as the account is intended to facilitate 3 according to haslanger, a focal analysis “explain[s] a variety of connected phenomena in terms of their relations to one that is theorized as the central or core phenomenon” (2012, 228). haslanger takes gender’s function as a social class as the “core phenomenon” to be explained. all other aspects of gender—“norms, symbols, and identities”—are to be understood through the lens of gender as a social class (228). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 critical feminist analysis: “the important issue is not whether a particular account ‘marginalizes’ some individuals, but whether its doing so is in conflict with the feminist values that motivate the inquiry” (240).4 before presenting jenkins’s account of why this marginalization is problematic, a few comments about “passing” might be helpful. a trans woman “passes” when she is perceived to be a woman by those around her. specifically, the term “passing” applies to contexts in which others observe or imagine a trans woman to have “bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction” (haslanger 2012, 234–235). following the spirit of haslanger’s definition, i will call “passing” those trans women who are perceived to be women “regularly and for the most part” and “nonpassing” those trans women who are not perceived to be women “regularly and for the most part.” jenkins argues that haslanger’s account of “woman” problematically excludes some trans women from the category of woman. specifically, haslanger’s account excludes trans women who are nonpassing. jenkins details four scenarios in which a trans woman may find herself: (1) a trans woman who does not publicly present as a woman and is perceived and treated as a man by those around her; (2) a trans woman who presents as a woman but who is perceived and treated as a man (or, further, a man pretending to be a woman); (3) a trans woman who presents as a woman and is treated as a woman because she is thought to be biologically female (i.e. she is “passing”); (4) a trans woman who presents as a woman and is treated as a woman, not because she is perceived to be biologically female but rather because those around her unconditionally respect individuals’ gender presentation (jenkins 2016, 399–401). on haslanger’s account, only trans women in scenario 3 would count as women. the trans woman who finds herself in jenkins’s scenarios 1 and 2 is not passing at that time and consequently is not functioning as a woman. jenkins explicitly states, but does not explain or defend, that the exclusion of some trans women from haslanger’s account is problematic, given the feminist aims of her inquiry: failure to respect the gender identifications of trans people is a serious harm and is conceptually linked to forms of transphobic oppression and even violence. it follows from this that an important desideratum of a feminist 4 when haslanger claims that some nonoppressed females may not be counted as women, she means women who are privileged socially, politically, and economically such that they cannot be considered members of a subordinated social class. later, in the pea soup blog discussion of jenkins’s paper, haslanger acknowledges that her account fails to capture all the individuals that feminism ought to be concerned about (i.e. trans women). see “ethics discussion at pea soup” (2017). kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 analysis of gender concepts is that it respect these identifications by including trans people within the gender categories with which they identify and not including them within any categories with which they do not identify.5 (jenkins 2016, 396) after demonstrating this alleged flaw in haslanger’s account, jenkins tries to repair the account by adding gender identity as a twin target concept with haslanger’s gender as social class (406–413).6 although i agree with jenkins’s claim, she fails to show why the harms and oppressions that trans people face necessitate that a feminist analysis of gender ought to be trans-inclusive. in light of haslanger’s account, it seems that nonpassing trans women are not socially subordinated as women “regularly and for the most part” because they are not perceived to be women “regularly and for the most part.” because the aim of haslanger’s account is to develop a definition of “woman” that allows feminist analysis to treat women as a group because of their shared experience of oppression, it is important that anyone who is counted as a woman under her account is oppressed as a woman. thus, in order for jenkins’s revision of haslanger’s account to be faithful to the original aims of the account, it must be the case that sexist subordination is a systematic and pervasive element of the experience of nonpassing trans women. in this paper, i follow haslanger and jenkins and define the aims of feminism broadly. on my view, the aims of feminism are to understand and combat women’s oppression.7 it is based on this description of feminism’s goals that i defend the claim that it is critical for feminist accounts of gender to respect trans identities. 5 it should be noted that, while jenkins’s revision of haslanger’s account solves the first problem that is mentioned here (i.e. excluding some trans women from the category “woman”) it does not solve the second problem of wrongful inclusion (i.e. including some trans women in the category “man”). 6 recall that haslanger’s “focal analysis” takes gender’s function as a social class to be the “core phenomenon” through which all other aspects of gender ought to be understood. in advocating a “twin target concept,” jenkins hopes to elevate gender as identity to have equal status with gender as social class, such that nonpassing trans women are not classified as women only in a secondary sense. 7 haslanger claims that her focal analysis is guided by “the need to identify and explain persistent inequalities between females and males,” which indicates an emphasis on the importance of understanding and explaining women’s oppression (226; emphasis added). similarly, in “on being objective and being objectified,” haslanger claims: “if feminism is successful, there will no longer be a gender distinction as such—or, allowing that there are a plurality of relations that serve to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 while at times i am critical of haslanger’s account, the purpose of this paper is not to offer a focused critique of haslanger’s account of woman (jenkins has already written that paper). rather, in this paper i hope to offer a general account of why feminist accounts of “woman” ought to include all trans women. i use haslanger’s account as my example because i agree with haslanger’s contention that feminist accounts of woman ought to be constructed in a way that serves the goals of feminism. given the aims of haslanger’s project and her explicit statements discussing jenkins’s paper (see footnote 4), i am confident that the exclusion of some trans women from her account is due to its age and the relative invisibility of trans issues at the time that she wrote it. further, i am confident that haslanger would agree that feminist accounts of woman ought to include trans women. iii. feminist politics: combatting women’s oppression in this section, i argue that a definition of “woman” that excludes (some) trans women is incompatible with the first aim of feminism—that is, combatting women’s oppression. in the first subsection, i argue that feminism’s commitment to eradicating women’s oppression entails an implicit commitment to avoid perpetuating or contributing to the oppression of others. i then argue that failure to respect trans identities is itself unjust and, further, that it perpetuates the oppression of trans individuals. consequently, a definition of “woman” that fails to respect trans identities is in tension with feminism’s implicit commitment to avoid perpetuating oppression.8 constitute gender and a plurality of feminist projects, we can say that one goal of feminism is to fight against the sexual subordination that constitutes these categories of men and women” (62). jenkins expresses a commitment to feminism’s political goal of ending women’s oppression in addition to echoing the idea that it is first necessary to understand this oppression. this reasoning is revealed in jenkins’s discussion of how her modification of haslanger’s account improves its explanatory power: “both gender as class and gender as identity are relevant to understanding the oppression of women” (414). 8 although i take trans identities to be legitimate in this paper, here i cannot make the argument that, because feminism is committed to protecting women’s interests and because trans women are women, feminists must fight the oppression of trans women. first, even if we agree that trans women are women because we hold that trans identities are legitimate, part of the task that i take up in this project is to prove that (nonpassing) trans women are oppressed as women. consequently, i cannot start this argument by assuming that the oppression of trans women is a direct concern for feminists without begging the question. second, when writing this paper, i had many different audiences in mind, one of which included individuals kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 in the second subsection, i argue that failing to respect trans identities contributes to the oppression of women. specifically, i argue that transphobic violence and sexual violence against women are both motivated and justified by cultural assumptions about the communicative relationship between gender presentation and sexual availability. i then argue that failing to respect trans identities reinforces this cultural assumption and, in turn, perpetuates the oppression of women. consequently, a definition of “woman” that fails to respect trans identities is incompatible with feminism’s commitment to eradicating women’s oppression. iii.a. a commitment to eradicating societal injustice although feminists have diverse views, all feminists hold that women are oppressed, that oppression is unjust, and that women’s oppression must be ended. given that feminists recognize oppression as unjust and, hence, a serious moral wrong, they ought to avoid perpetuating or contributing to the oppression of others in their attempts to end the oppression of women. this does not mean, however, that feminists ought to be committed to eradicating all forms of oppression simultaneously. rather, given their broader condemnation of oppression as a serious moral wrong, feminists are implicitly committed to the idea that society would be improved if there were fewer instances of oppression and injustice. that is, let us say that feminists view (or ought to view) a more just society as their end. if they are (implicitly) committed to this claim, then feminists ought not perpetuate injustice or oppression of any kind (whether directly or indirectly). such perpetuation of oppression and/or injustice would be problematic for the feminist who holds that oppression is a serious moral wrong. more importantly, however, such perpetuation of oppression is in conflict with feminism’s implicit commitment to bringing about a more just society. failing to respect trans identities involves holding them to be and/or treating them as illegitimate.9 in what follows, i demonstrate that failure to respect trans who may not automatically accept the legitimacy of trans individuals. because this is one of my potential audiences, i cannot base my argument here on the assumption that trans women are women without leaving myself susceptible to the skepticism of some readers. 9 on my view all cases of believing trans identities to be illegitimate are cases of failing to respect trans identities, but not all cases of failing to respect trans identities are cases of believing trans identities to be illegitimate. one can fail to respect trans identities without believing them to be illegitimate. take, for example, the following cases. joe believes that trans identities are illegitimate and repeatedly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 identities perpetuates transphobic oppression both directly and indirectly. using an account of woman that excludes (some) trans women reinforces the notion that trans identities are illegitimate and therefore fails to respect trans identities. here i do not want to charge haslanger herself with failing to respect trans identities; rather, i want to suggest that it is problematic for feminists to use an account of woman that does not include trans women. given that feminists ought to be committed to avoiding the perpetuation of oppression and injustice, such failure to respect trans identities is in tension with feminists’ commitment to the eradication of women’s oppression.10 according to talia bettcher in “trans identities and first-person authority,” denial of trans identities is a violation of ethical first-person authority and is therefore unjust. bettcher begins by proposing an ethical notion of first-person authority that is meant to extend beyond the epistemic notion. according to bettcher, we have ethical first-person authority (hereafter, fpa) over our mental attitudes. we can be held responsible for our attitudes in the sense that we “can be faulted for holding inappropriate, false, or irrational attitudes” (bettcher 2009, 102). in other words, disclosure of our attitudes can have social consequences. because of this culpability for our mental attitudes, bettcher claims that the ethical notion of mispronouns alex (a trans person who identities as gender nonbinary). jim does not believe that trans identities are illegitimate but does not know about alex’s gender identity and so repeatedly mispronouns them. while i do not want to say that jim is morally blameworthy for failing to properly pronoun alex, in this paper, i want to maintain that jim’s actions can be understood as failing to respect trans identities. even though jim’s actions are not motivated by a belief in the illegitimacy of alex’s gender identity, alex may nonetheless be offended by jim’s repeated use of improper pronouns. further, those around him may interpret jim’s mispronouning as motivated by a belief in the illegitimacy of alex’s gender identity and may view this as justifying their own beliefs about the illegitimacy of alex’s gender identity. i want to suggest that using an account of “woman” that excludes (some) trans women fails to respect trans identities in a similar way. 10 it should be noted that the reason that i argue for inclusion of trans women in a feminist account of “woman” is because lack of recognition as women contributes to the oppression of trans women and is therefore in tension with feminist aims. such a strategy would not apply to, say, black men, whose oppression is not intensified by their exclusion from the category “woman.” while feminists’ commitment to ending oppression requires that feminists avoid perpetuating the oppression of black men, excluding black men from the category “woman” does not contribute to their oppression. therefore, there is no imperative to include black men in a feminist account of “woman.” kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 fpa entails that individuals have a right to privacy and ownership of their attitudes.11 consequently, disclosure of one’s attitudes ought not be coerced, nor should a person “avow somebody else’s mental attitudes on their own behalf” (bettcher 2009, 102). bettcher claims “existential self-identity” falls under ethical fpa and that gender is part of one’s existential self-identity.12 bettcher claims that existential selfidentity is not a conception of the self but is instead determined by the set of beliefs, attitudes, and commitments that one has. because existential self-identity concerns one’s beliefs, attitudes, and commitments, it “falls under the reach of fpa” (bettcher 2009, 110). on bettcher’s account, gender is properly part of one’s existential self-identity and therefore ought to be protected by ethical fpa. bettcher provides three reasons why gender is properly understood as part of one’s existential self-identity. first, within trans-friendly communities, one’s gender selfidentification does not invalidate others’, even if they hold different and/or conflicting metaphysical views about gender and sex (bettcher 2009, 111). if gender was understood as constituting part of one’s metaphysical self-identity, some individuals’ gender self-identifications would inevitably invalidate others’ if they held conflicting metaphysical views about gender and sex. second, when one selfidentifies as a particular gender, one is not making a claim about metaphysical reality but rather about one’s beliefs (bettcher 2009, 111). bettcher illuminates this point with an example: “for example, if one believes some neurological state makes one a woman and it turns out one lacks this state, it follows one is not a woman. however, it is generally assumed in community interactions that the truth or falsity of a person’s self-identifying claim does not stand or fall on such issues” (111). third, existential self-identity helps us understand individuals’ motivations for self 11 one might object that we can be responsible for something without having a right to privacy with regard to that thing. for example, one may be responsible for their testimony in court without having a right to privacy with regard to what one witnessed. however, with attitudes and beliefs that are not acted upon and therefore do not directly impact other people, it seems that the right to privacy might still apply. fpa’s right to privacy regarding attitudes and beliefs is more akin to the right to privacy regarding which candidate we vote for. 12 bettcher explains the concept of existential self-identity by contrasting it with metaphysical self-identity. according to bettcher, metaphysical self-identity is “a self-conception that answers the question ‘what am i?’ it involves an overall picture of the world (including categories such as men and women) in which one locates oneself” (110). in contrast, existential self-identity answers the questions “what am i about? what moves me? what do i stand for? what do i care about the most?” (110). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 identifying in a certain way, whereas metaphysical self-identity does not (bettcher 2009, 111). because gender is part of an individual’s existential self-identity, and existential self-identity falls under ethical fpa, it follows that individuals have fpa over their gender self-identifications. recall that according to bettcher, under the ethical notion of fpa, individuals have a right to privacy and ownership of their mental attitudes. this privacy and ownership entails that it is morally impermissible to coerce someone into revealing one’s attitudes, and it is also morally impermissible to make avowals about another’s attitudes on their behalf. when applied to gender, fpa entails that one cannot be forced to reveal one’s gender to others nor can a person assume the authority of determining the truth of another’s gender identity. according to bettcher, failing to respect trans identities is a case of the latter violation of fpa. according to bettcher, the “natural attitude” regarding conceptions of sex and gender holds that “there are two naturally mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and invariant sexes, and membership within a sex is determined by genitalia” (2009, 103). bettcher claims that “normals” (those who hold the natural attitude) do not respect trans self-identifications because they hold that “real” gender is inevitably determined by genitalia. in such cases, “normals” violate trans people’s fpa over gender because they take their own metaphysical conception of sex as determinative of the trans person’s “authentic” gender. in other words, such a denial of trans identities is a case of one person making definitive and authoritative claims about another person’s mental attitudes on their behalf, which is a morally impermissible violation of fpa. but denial of trans identities is more serious than a simple case of a controlling person asserting authority over another’s mental attitudes. in contrast, when a trans person’s identity is denied, the trans person is not given any opportunity to make a genuine avowal. that is, no matter what the trans person claims regarding his or her gender, the denier has already determined the trans person’s “real” gender based on her assessment of the trans person’s “natural” genital status. in other words, if a trans woman claims “i am a woman,” this is interpreted as a lie or as pretense. when trans identities are denied, it “silences a transperson’s avowal of existential self-identity” (bettcher 2009, 115). failure to respect trans identities contributes to trans oppression by motivating sexual violence and physical violence as well as by legitimating victim blaming in cases of transphobic violence. in addition, the risk of violence, when coupled with common assumptions about the illegitimacy of trans identities, creates double binds for trans people. bettcher (2014, 392, 403) argues that one form of trans oppression is what she terms “reality enforcement,” which is motivated by kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 assumptions about the illegitimacy of trans identities.13 according to bettcher, reality enforcement has four essential features. first, identity invalidation occurs when a trans person’s gender identity is “erased”—that is, when an individual categorizes a trans woman as a man (for example). second, according to bettcher, identity invalidation is asserted in terms of an appearance-reality contrast—for example, the onlooker will say something like “that’s really a man disguised as a woman.” third, knowledge of this appearance-reality contrast presents trans people with a double bind. that is, they can either pass as cis and risk being exposed as a deceiver, or they can be openly trans and be treated as a pretender. finally, reality enforcement involves some form of genital verification either through physical exposure or through comments that assert the “reality” of a trans person’s genital status (bettcher 2014, 392). although bettcher does not explicitly defend her claim that reality enforcement is a form of trans oppression, her discussion of the phenomenon includes the necessary features for reality enforcement to constitute a form of oppression. here i draw on bettcher’s comments to assert that reality enforcement is oppressive because it involves or threatens to involve sexual violence, physical violence, victim blaming, and double binds. first, reality enforcement can paradigmatically involve sexual violence. there are two main ways that sexual violence is often involved in reality enforcement. trans people are often raped as a result of the discovery that they are trans. bettcher (2007) interprets rape of ftms14 “as an obvious strategy for putting ‘women back in their rightful place’” (57). similarly, mtfs are often subject to sexual violence in the form of rape. and, as bettcher notes, genital verification is one of the essential features of identity enforcement. genital verification can occur either through forced physical exposure or through statements about the genital status of the victim. when genital verification takes the form of forced physical exposure, this is a form of sexual violence. second, reality enforcement often involves physical violence against trans people. transphobic violence can be motivated by either the deceiver stereotype or the pretender stereotype. for those who are openly trans and are thus interpreted as “an x pretending to be a y,” they may be subjected to violence because they are interpreted as violating gender norms: “if a person is subjected to discrimination or violence because this person is taken to be in violation of gender norms (perhaps 13 in “evil deceivers,” bettcher (2007, 47) refers to the same phenomenon as “identity enforcement.” 14 ftm refers to trans men—those individuals assigned female at birth but who identify or present as men—and mtf refers to trans women—those individuals assigned male at birth but who identify or present as women. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 because the person is wearing a dress), this is no doubt because the person is being transphobically viewed as a man” (bettcher 2014, 396). in contrast, trans people who attempt to pass as cis are often viewed as malicious deceivers upon discovery and are often subjected to brutal violence as a form of retaliation for the deception. third, in cases of transphobic violence, the acts of the perpetrator are often justified or minimized by use of victim blaming. specifically, the trans panic defense has been used in court as a defense against hate crime charges for individuals who murdered trans people (bettcher 2007, 42–45). the trans panic defense often appeals to the sexual deception that the trans victim engaged in and, according to bettcher (2007, 52–54), this sexual deception is often equated with rape. consequently, the violence against and consequent murder of the trans “deceiver” is interpreted as a violent and enraged response to the shock of discovering that the perpetrator has been deceived by the trans victim. finally, as i mentioned above, one of the essential features of reality enforcement is the double bind that trans people face. that is, trans people face the deceiver-pretender double bind in which they must choose between having their gender identity taken seriously and minimizing the risk of lethal violence. this double bind is characteristically oppressive insofar as it limits trans people’s options to two unsavory choices.15 all of these paradigmatic features of reality enforcement are motivated by a belief that trans identities are illegitimate. consequently, failing to respect trans identities by treating them as illegitimate contributes to trans oppression in the forms of double binds, sexual violence, physical violence, and victim blaming. thus, failure to respect trans identities is in tension with feminists’ implicit commitment to avoid perpetuating oppression. insofar as feminism is necessarily embedded within a broader condemnation of oppression and injustice, it runs counter to the aims and commitments of feminists to perpetuate oppression, particularly oppression that is based on gender or gender identity. failure to respect trans identities often underlies transphobic violence, which is a form of oppression.16 thus, it seems that there is, in fact, a strong imperative for a feminist analysis of gender to respect the gender identities of trans people by ensuring that feminist definitions of woman are trans-inclusive. iii.b. common sources of sexism and transphobia as i claimed above, one of the aims of feminism is to eradicate the oppression of women. here, i argue that using an account of “woman” that excludes 15 see marilyn frye’s “oppression” (1983, 2–3). 16 systematic violence is one of the forms of oppression that iris marion young discusses in her “five faces of oppression” (1990, 61–63). kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 (nonpassing) trans women is in tension with this aim of feminism. using a feminist account of “woman” that excludes (nonpassing) trans women fails to respect trans identities and thereby supports a cultural assumption that motivates and is used to justify sexual violence against women. therefore, it is crucial to the aims of feminism that a feminist account of “woman” be trans-inclusive. according to bettcher, gender presentation is taken to communicate genital status. i would like to suggest, further, that gender presentation more broadly communicates sexual availability. specifically, female gender presentation is taken to communicate sexual availability for men—where sexual availability for men includes female genitalia and a heterosexual interest in sex with men.17 bettcher argues that the communicative connection between gender presentation and genital status underlies the trans panic defense (which has been used to defend perpetrators of transphobic violence). she compares the denial of authenticity at work in the trans panic defense to the denial of authenticity that is employed in shifting blame to victims of sexual violence. here, i want to suggest that the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability 17 note that the way i define and discuss sexual availability here does not have the implication that gay men are counted as women on my account. first, here i am discussing the communicative nature of female gender presentation, and i suggest that female gender presentation communicates sexual availability to men. i am not suggesting that sexual availability to men is what defines a woman but rather that it is what is communicated by female gender presentation. second, i define sexual availability as discussed here as the possession of female genitalia and a heterosexual interest in men. that is, when i claim that female gender presentation is taken to communicate sexual availability to men, i mean that female gender presentation is taken to communicate female genital status and a heterosexual interest in men. gay men meet neither of these criteria, so even if i was offering a definition of woman based on perceived sexual availability to men, gay men would not be perceived as being sexually available to men in the way i am discussing here. similarly, my statements here would not exclude butch lesbian women from the category “woman.” again, my comments about sexual availability identify the communicative thrust of female gender presentation rather than circumscribing who counts as a woman. consequently, these comments would not exclude butch lesbian women from the category “woman.” additionally, later in the paper i demonstrate how even nonpassing trans women can be oppressed as women simply by recognizing that they are the type of person to whom certain oppressive norms of femininity apply. if, as i believe, my account applies to the trans woman in jenkins’s scenario 1 (i.e. the trans woman who does not publicly present as a woman), then butch lesbian women would also count as women on my account. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 both motivates and is used to justify sexual violence against women as well as transphobic violence. when a woman adopts a feminine gender presentation, she is taken to be communicating her sexual availability—she is communicating female genital status but, more importantly, she is taken to be communicating an interest in sex with men. marilyn frye expresses this idea in the following: it is a sort of implicit theory of women’s sexuality according to which a woman who largely adheres to patriarchal feminine norms in act and attitude and who does not radically challenge or rebel against patriarchal institutions is heterosexual, and a woman who does not comply with feminine norms or who seriously challenges or rebels against patriarchal institutions is a lesbian. (1992, 127–128) when a woman refuses a man’s sexual advances, the assumption that her gender presentation is communicative can be invoked and used to undermine her expressions of disinterest. that is, in some cases, gender presentation overrules a woman’s expressed disinterest in sex. in this way, the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability motivates sexual violence against women by undermining the authority of women’s refusals of sexual advances. further, in cases where a woman has been a victim of sexual violence, blame is often shifted to the victim by alluding to the victim’s attire. specifically, remarks are often made about the victim’s attire, suggesting that, by her gender presentation, “she was asking for it.” in this way, the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability is used to justify sexual violence against women. similarly, bettcher (2007, 56) claims that much transphobic violence is motivated and justified by the idea that trans victims “deceive” their assailants by presenting a gender that does not align with the genital status that they were assigned at birth. that is, trans women in particular are often subjected to violence that is motivated by the assailant’s anger at discovering that the woman he was sexually interested in (or intimate with) is “really a man.” underlying this violence is an assumption that trans identities are illegitimate or false. in this way, the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability motivates transphobic violence. additionally, the assumed illegitimacy of trans identities is used to defend perpetrators of transphobic violence. again, blame is shifted to the victim because it is asserted that the victim has misrepresented her “true” identity by presenting as a woman when her genital status at birth is thought to make her “really a man.” in this way, the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability is used to justify transphobic violence. kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 insofar as the same cultural assumption about the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability motivates and is used to justify both transphobic violence and sexual violence against women, anything that supports this cultural assumption also contributes to transphobic violence and sexual violence against women. failure to respect trans identities supports the notion that trans people are deceivers because of the misalignment of their gender presentation and their genitalia. in other words, failing to respect trans identities supports the identification of trans people as deceivers because of their violation of the communicative connection between gender presentation and sexual availability (specifically genital status). because failure to respect trans identities supports the communicative connection between gender presentation and genital status, it contributes to transphobic violence and sexual violence against women. insofar as sexual violence against women (and women’s resultant fear of being subjected to such violence) is a feature of women’s oppression, failure to respect trans identities contributes to the oppression of women. therefore, failure to respect trans identities conflicts with the feminist aim of eradicating women’s oppression. consequently, using a feminist account of “woman” that fails to respect trans identities by excluding (nonpassing) trans women undermines the feminist commitment combatting women’s oppression. iv. feminist discourse: understanding women’s oppression as stated above, feminist discourse is intended to advance our understanding of the oppression that is faced by women as women. as haslanger claims (and jenkins seems to agree), successful feminist discourse requires the use of a definition of “woman” that allows us to focus our analysis on those individuals who are oppressed by sexual subordination: “for the purposes of critical feminist inquiry, oppression is a significant fact around which we should organize our theoretical categories; it may be that nonoppressed females are marginalized within my account, but that is because for the broader purposes at hand . . . they are not the ones that matter” (2012, 240). if it is the case that nonpassing trans women are oppressed as women, then using an account of “woman” that excludes them cannot successfully fulfill the purpose of feminist discourse in what follows, i demonstrate that nonpassing trans women are oppressed as women, and consequently, a definition of “woman” that is intended to serve the aims of feminist discourse must include trans women. because nonpassing trans women are not perceived to be women “regularly and for the most part,” i cannot rely on external sources of oppression to prove that they are oppressed as women. i argue that nonpassing trans women are oppressed as women because they are sexually objectified as women in some senses. first, i suggest that, as women, trans women (both passing and nonpassing) are subject to indirect sexual objectification feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 at the hands of cultural stereotypes that sexualize women, their bodies, their appearances, and their actions. then, i draw on sandra bartky’s suggestion that women can and do objectify themselves to argue that, like all other women, nonpassing trans women can be oppressed by their internalization of oppressive gender norms. iv.a. accounts of sexual objectification objectification typically involves a failure to recognize the objectified individual as a person and moral equal. that is, the victim of objectification is not recognized as an autonomous individual with interests and desires of her own (cudd 2006, 165; hay 2005, 96). further, sexual objectification involves viewing the objectified individual as an instrument for one’s own sexual pleasure, as bartky explains: “a person is sexually objectified when her sexual parts or sexual functions are separated out from the rest of her personality and reduced to the status of mere instruments or else regarded as if they were capable of representing her” (1990, 26). both bartky and ann cudd identify sexual objectification as a form of psychological oppression. according to bartky, psychological oppression necessarily involves a failure to recognize the full personhood of the oppressed (29–30). pervasive sexual objectification meets the criteria for psychological oppression because it involves viewing members of certain groups as less than full persons and, when victims of objectification internalize these views, objectification in fact prevents its victims from exercising their full personhood. bartky rejects the notion that sexual harassment based on sexual objectification is merely an expression of attraction or eroticism. instead, bartky suggests that sexual objectification involves the employment of ideas and stereotypes about women’s social subordination and the appropriateness of treating women as sexual objects: while it is true that for these men i am nothing but, let us say, a “nice piece of ass,” there is more involved in this encounter than their mere fragmented perception of me. they could, after all, have enjoyed me in silence. . . . but i must be made to know that i am a “nice piece of ass”: i must be made to see myself as they see me. . . . what i describe seems less the spontaneous expression of a healthy eroticism than a ritual of subjugation. (27, emphasis in the original) according to bartky, sexual objectification plays an essential role in the social subordination of women not simply because it involves viewing a woman as a mere object but because the victim is often made aware of being viewed as a mere object kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 (27).18 sexual objectification of women is, however, far more complex than isolated instances of individual women being objectified by individual men. cudd and bartky both argue that women as a group are systematically objectified by the cultural emphasis on women’s appearance and the sexualization of women in popular media: apart from directly objectifying actions, there is also a sense in which our culture constantly, tacitly sexually objectifies women so commonly as to constitute direct, cultural, psychological oppression. women are sexually objectified in this indirect sense when as a gender they are taken to be the representatives of sex and sexual passivity, for example, when goods are marketed to them by displaying women as objects of adornment or sexual pleasure, or through beauty pageants and pompon squads. (cudd 2006, 166– 167) here cudd illustrates the way that culture indirectly objectifies women by unquestioningly representing women as sex objects whose purpose is to satisfy the sexual desires of men. iv.b. sexually objectifying stereotypes women (both trans and cis) are objectified by sexually objectifying stereotypes that are dominant in our society. such objectifying stereotypes play a significant role in the social subordination of women as a group. even if nonpassing trans women are not the victims of isolated, individual instances of sexual objectification (which seems unlikely), one can still argue that they are sexually objectified as women by attending to the ways that they are subject to cultural sources of indirect sexual objectification. bettcher describes the sexualized stereotypes that are often applied to trans women but not trans men: “it is not uncommon for mtfs to be viewed as sexually available and disposable whores—a stereotype simply not applied to ftms” (2006, 179). what bettcher here refers to as a stereotype is not simply a stereotype but a sexually objectifying stereotype. the stereotype that trans women are “sexually available and disposable whores” meets both the criteria of sexual objectification 18 in contrast to bartky, carol hay distinguishes between sexual objectification and sexual harassment. on hay’s account, sexual harassment is “the outward behavior that arises from sexual objectification” (2005, 96). according to hay, sexual harassment is a group harm. in other words, women as a group are harmed by sexual harassment because it arises from and contributes to women’s diminished (sense of) autonomy as a result of oppression (97). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 mentioned above—it fails to recognize a group of persons as autonomous moral agents with their own wishes and desires, and it treats the objectified individuals as instruments for (men’s) sexual pleasure. further, because this stereotype applies to trans women but not trans men, it is clear that, while the stereotype is influenced by trans women’s intersecting identities, an element of the stereotype is unique to the oppression of women generally. thus, the stereotype that bettcher mentions demonstrates that trans women as a group are sexually objectified as women by cultural sources. similarly, julia serano explains that trans women’s transitions are often sexualized through the common assumption that the transitions are motivated by a desire to attract men: “the assumption that we change our sex in order to attract men essentially sexualizes our motives for transitioning, a move that disempowers trans women and femaleness while reinforcing the idea that heterosexual male desire is central” (2007, 259). serano connects this sexualization of trans women’s transitions to the rampant sexualization of women generally in our society: however, it’s a mistake for cissexual women to view depictions of trans women as having little to do with themselves, as they are so obviously meant to dismiss both transsexuality and femaleness. after all, in a world where women are regularly reduced to objects of male desire, it’s no accident that trans women—the only people in our society who actively choose to become women and who actively fight for their right to be recognized as female—are almost universally depicted in a purely sexualized manner. (262; emphasis in the original) serano’s analysis of the connection between the sexualization of mtf transitions and the sexual objectification of women generates compelling support for the claim that trans women (passing and nonpassing alike) are subject to indirect sexual objectification at the hands of cultural sources in the same way as women generally. iv.c. self-objectification as a result of systematic objectification, some women internalize their objectification, such that they come to objectify themselves. cudd discusses the way that women’s internalization of sexual objectification can lead women to want to satisfy men’s (sexual) desires without considering or at the expense of their own desires (sexual and otherwise): “the sexual objectification of women involves taking women to have a nature that suits them to be objects for the sexual pleasure of men, that is, to naturally desire to fulfill men’s wish that they become subordinate to men, to fulfill men’s desires rather than to seek to know and fulfill their own” (cudd 2006, 166). bartky focuses on a different aspect of women’s selfkirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 objectification—the reduction of women’s identities to their bodies and physical appearance: “subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best. our identities can no more be kept separate from the appearance of our bodies than they can be kept separate from the shadow-selves of the female stereotype” (1990, 28). according to bartky, external sources objectify women so pervasively that women themselves learn to objectify themselves by treating their physical appearance as an essential determinant of their identity and worth. i would like to suggest that not only can trans women be susceptible to this form of oppressive self-objectification but also many trans women are victims of self-objectification as women. further, because this is an internalized form of oppression, it does not matter whether or not the individual woman in question is classed as a woman by the surrounding members of society. rather, what matters in determining whether or not a particular woman is, in fact, included among those who are harmed or potentially harmed by such self-objectification is whether or not she takes herself to be the type of individual to whom the cultural expectations and stereotypes apply. in other words, what matters is whether or not the individual in question identifies as a woman.19 19 the point here is that anyone (including nonpassing trans women) who has a female gender identity can be said to be oppressed as a woman. that is, anyone who views herself as the type of person to whom the oppressive norms of femininity apply can be subject to self-objectification if they internalize these norms. here, i would like to briefly guard myself against a potential objection. matthew salett andler (2017, 883) critiques jenkins’s modification of haslanger’s account by arguing that it fails to be trans-inclusive because it “understands transgender gender identity through a cisgender frame.” one might suggest that my claims about the gender identity of trans women also rely on a cisgender frame. while i cannot be certain that i have completely transcended the limits of my social position in trying to understand and theorize about the experiences of trans persons, i think that the understanding of gender identity that i operate on here differs from jenkins’s in an important way. andler criticizes jenkins’s account of gender identity because it requires trans persons to experience bodily unification—that is, because jenkins relies on the concept of a “map” to explain gender identity, andler claims that her concept of gender identity precludes the possibility that some trans persons might not experience one map or the other as being fully applicable to themselves. i think that my understanding of gender identity eludes this criticism because i claim that one can be subject to self-objectification as a woman if she takes herself to be the kind of person to whom oppressive norms of femininity might apply. while perhaps not all trans women will see themselves this way, i think that it is perfectly possible feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 subject to the same societal identifications of women with their sexualized bodies, trans women who want to present as women face the difficult double bind of wanting to present and be recognized as the gender that they identify with in a society that intensely associates female gender presentation with social subordination and sexual objectification. in other words, in presenting as women, trans women adopt the norms of attire and behavior that commonly reduce women to their bodies and sexual function. serano suggests that the process by which trans women come to internalize these norms is not unlike the experience of cis women: despite being socialized male, those of us on the mtf spectrum have been exposed to many of the same explicitly sexualizing cultural messages about womanhood and femininity as those socialized female, and we are just as susceptible of constructing our own sexualities and self-images around those very same cultural ideals. (270) specifically, the ideal image of female beauty is a slim, hairless, young woman who has large (but not too large) “assets.” this image contains within it several different norms that might govern a woman’s behavior in attempts to conform to the ideal: hairlessness, youth, and physical fitness. not only are women not supposed to have facial hair, but the norms of feminine beauty require the removal of body hair from the legs, armpits, and pubis.20 adherence to this norm requires extensive, regular (sometimes painful and expensive) hair removal. women’s armpits, legs, and pubis ought to be shaven, waxed, or sometimes even treated with laser hair removal. but some women take this norm even further, removing hair from their chests, arms, stomachs, feet, backs, and hands. not only is this particular norm costly in terms of time, effort, money, and pain, but it is also somewhat unachievable in that it requires women’s bodies to exhibit a characteristic that is unnatural for adult women. in other words, this norm requires women to constantly wage war against the natural process of hair growth, such that attempts to adhere to this norm are never-ending. that someone might perceive some norms of femininity as properly applying to themselves without experiencing bodily unification. 20 according to a study done by rowen et al. (2016) that investigated the prevalence of and motivations for pubic hair grooming among women in the united states, 83.8% (2,778) of women surveyed reported that they had been grooming regularly for most of their adult lives. further, the most commonly cited situation for which women groom was sex. specifically, 55.6% (1,544) of women surveyed claimed that they often groom for sexual situations. kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 a similarly unnatural norm contained within the image of female beauty is the emphasis on youth. it seems that the ideally beautiful woman ought to appear to be in her twenties long after that is physically possible. in order to achieve such results, women are advised by fashion and beauty magazines to begin anti-aging regimens as early as their late twenties. women are sold countless creams, serums, and masks designed to fight the aging of their skin. women are expected to dye gray hairs. and, if one is desperate, brave, and/or wealthy enough, women can undergo any of a number of expensive and painful procedures designed to give the appearance of youth—including, but not limited to, face lifts, botox injections, and laser treatments.21 further, the ideally beautiful woman also has a physique that is practically impossible to achieve, both because it is internally contradictory and because it requires extreme dedication to dieting and exercise, as clare chambers expresses quite clearly and succinctly: “most women could never be as thin or as flatstomached as the models they try to emulate, . . . breasts that are both large and pert are somewhat oxymoronic” (2008, 29–30). women are supposed to be slim but not too muscular. female bodies ought to be “soft” but not “fat.” further, breasts and buttocks are supposed to be round and perky, large but not too large. such expectations of women’s bodies often require adherence to extreme forms of dieting and exercise—beyond what is required or even advisable for maintaining a healthy lifestyle. sometimes, attempts to conform to this norm involve trips to a plastic surgeon—again a costly, painful, and dangerous measure. many women will assert that they conform to these norms not in order to be deemed attractive to men but for their own personal comfort and satisfaction. one will often hear such women say things like, “i do this for myself” or “i shave because that’s my preference.” however, even if these women are not consciously trying to make themselves attractive to men by conforming to these norms, they are nonetheless trying to achieve an ideal of female attractiveness that advantages men and disadvantages women. in other words, such women have internalized what society has set up as the ideal of female attractiveness, such that they judge themselves according to an ideal of attractiveness that is based on male preferences. thus, we see that adherence to these sexualized norms of female appearance is exemplary of bartky’s self-objectification. these women have 21 an article on glamour magazine’s website discusses a particularly extreme antiaging skin treatment that involves treating skin with stem cells harvested from the surgical discards of routine infant circumcisions. (beth shapouri, “this new antiaging skin treatment might give you the heebie-jeebies, but the science is fascinating,” glamour, march 10, 2015, https://www.glamour.com/story/this-newanti-aging-skin-treat.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 internalized the male gaze such that, even if they are not trying to attract men by conforming to certain norms, that is the standard by which they judge themselves. further, these norms are harmful. the harms are threefold. first, any efforts made to conform to the norms will inevitably limit the freedom of the woman in question. specifically, trying to conform to sexualized gender norms is costly in terms of time, effort, money, and pain.22 second, the ideals that many women aspire to achieve are typically unrealistic and unachievable: “real women are not beautiful when compared with the standards expected of them” (chambers 2008, 30). thus, a woman may feel a sense of inferiority due to her inability to perfectly conform to the ideal image of feminine beauty. finally, as chambers notes, norms of feminine appearance are harmful because of the role they play in marking women as inferior members of society: “the problem with disciplinary appearance norms is not just that they are different for men and women, and not just that they are more exacting and expensive (in both time and money) for women, but that their effect is to cast women as inferior” (29). that is, oppressive norms of femininity exact not only financial, physical, and psychological costs, but also social costs—that is, they mark women as women, and in doing so mark them as individuals who occupy a subordinate social position. given these details about the ways that self-objectification is built into norms of femininity, we can understand how women come to sexually objectify themselves in attempting to achieve norms of feminine beauty. what is important for my purposes, however, is that trans women (both passing and nonpassing) can (and often do) take these norms to apply to themselves. consequently, if a trans woman takes these norms of femininity to apply to herself she may come to sexually objectify herself in a way that is characteristic of women’s oppression. v. conclusion developing a trans-inclusive definition of gender is essential to feminist aims—namely, understanding and combatting women’s oppression. the political aim of feminism—combatting women’s oppression—implicitly commits feminists to bring about a more just society. given that failing to respect trans identities is itself an injustice and leads to further injustices against trans people, it is contrary to this broader commitment of feminism for a feminist analysis of gender to marginalize trans women. additionally, given that sexist oppression and transphobic violence share some underlying causes, a definition of “woman” that excludes some trans 22 the issue here is not simply that conforming to these norms limits women’s freedom. rather, the issue is that, in conforming to these norms, women’s freedom is limited in an attempt to achieve an ideal that marks them as subordinate and sexualized members of society. kirkland – feminist aims and a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 women may indirectly perpetuate the oppression of women. a trans-inclusive definition of “woman” is essential to the success of feminist discourse. all trans women (both passing and nonpassing) can be oppressed as women through cultural stereotypes and internalized oppression such that excluding them from feminist analysis would only hinder our understanding of women’s oppression. references andler, matthew salett. 2017. “gender identity and exclusion: a reply to jenkins.” ethics 127 (4): 883–895. bartky, sandra lee. 1990. femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. bettcher, talia mae. 2006. “appearance, reality, and gender deception: reflections on transphobic violence and the politics of pretence.” in violence, victims, and justifications, edited by felix murchadha, 175–200. new york: peter lang. ———. 2007. “evil deceivers and make-believers: on transphobic violence and the politics of illusion.” hypatia 22 (3): 43–65. ———. 2009. “trans identities and first-person authority.” in “you’ve changed”: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie shrage, 98–120. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2012. “full-frontal morality: the naked truth about gender.” hypatia 27 (2): 319–337. ———. 2014. “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 39 (2): 383–406. chambers, clare. 2008. sex, culture, and justice: the limits of choice. university park: pennsylvania state university press. cudd, ann e. 2006. analyzing oppression. oxford: oxford university press. “ethics discussion at pea soup: katharine jenkins’ ‘amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman,’ with précis by talia bettcher.” 2017. pea soup (blog). january 26. https://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2016/01/ethics-discussions-at-peasoup-katharine-jenkins-amelioration-and-inclusion-gender-identity-and-the.html. frye, marilyn. 1983. “oppression.” in the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. by marilyn frye, 1–16. trumansburg, ny: the crossing press. ———. 1992. “willful virgin or do you have to be a lesbian to be a feminist?” in willful virgin: essays in feminism 1976–1992 by marilyn frye, 124–137. freedom, ca: the crossing press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 hale, c. jacob. 2009. “tracing a ghostly memory in my throat: reflections on ftm feminist voice and agency.” in “you’ve changed”: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie shrage, 43–65. oxford: oxford university press. haslanger, sally. 2012. resisting reality: social construction and social critique. chapter 1, “on being objective and being objectified,” 35–82, and chapter 7, “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” 221–247. oxford: oxford university press. hay, carol. 2005. “whether to ignore them and spin: moral obligations to resist sexual harassment.” hypatia 20 (4): 94–106. jenkins, katharine. 2016. “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman.” ethics 126 (2): 394–421. koyama, emi. 2016. “the transfeminist manifesto.” in catching a wave: reclaiming feminism for the 21st century, edited by rory dicker and alison piepmeier, 244–260. lebanon, nh: northeastern university press. mckinnon, rachel. 2014. “stereotype threat and attributional ambiguity for trans women.” hypatia 29 (4): 857–872. rowen, tami s., thomas w. gaither, mohannad a. awad, e. charles osterberg, alan w. shindel, and benjamin n. breyer. 2016. “pubic hair grooming prevalence and motivation among women in the united states.” jama dermatology 152 (10): e1–e8. serano, julia. 2007. whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. emeryville, ca: seal press. shapouri, beth. 2015. “this new anti-aging skin treatment might give you the heebie-jeebies, but the science is fascinating.” glamour, march 10. https://www.glamour.com/story/this-new-anti-aging-skin-treat. young, iris marion. 1990. “five faces of oppression.” in justice and the politics of difference, by iris marion young, 39–65. princeton, nj: princeton university press. katie kirkland is a phd student in the philosophy department at arizona state university. her research interests are primarily in feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and applied ethics. her current projects focus on obligations to resist oppression as well as global justice and immigration. introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 4 2016 introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code anna mudde campion college at university of regina, anna.mudde@uregina.ca recommended citation mudde, anna. 2016. "introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 4. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.4.. introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code anna mudde many readers versed in feminist philosophy will know the central importance of lorraine code’s feminist epistemological work, particularly through the oftentaught “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” (1991)1 and “taking subjectivity into account” (1993). in this symposium of papers, invited by feminist philosophy quarterly, the authors return to code’s first book, epistemic responsibility (1987), to re-read it, respond to it, and rethink code’s articulation of epistemic responsibility anew, considering it in light of her other work and drawing it into contact with their own. this symposium is the outcome of a conference panel that i co-organized with susan dieleman,2 held october 25, 2015, at the annual meeting of the canadian society for women in philosophy (cswip) at my institution, the university of regina, in saskatchewan, on the canadian prairies. susan and i conceived of this panel even before we realized that it could serve as a lead up to the 30th anniversary of the publication of epistemic responsibility in 2017. lorraine3 is a central figure in the establishment, and continued nurturing, of cswip, and since she has a family connection to saskatchewan, we thought it might be an especially nice place to celebrate her work. the timing was a happy coincidence. the publication of epistemic responsibility marked a groundbreaking shift in epistemological theory and practice. despite not having written the book as an explicitly feminist text, code later acknowledges, in the preface to her collection of essays rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations, that, upon finishing it, she came to “a recognition that it was specifically a woman’s and a feminist’s book” (1995, 11). by raising the indispensable epistemological and ethical questions “who 1 this is chapter one of code’s what can she know? a paper with the same title was published in metaphilosophy in 1981. see code’s footnote 1 in the 1991 chapter for her discussion of the shift in approach between the earlier paper and later chapter. 2 i would like to thank susan dieleman (whose paper is included in this symposium). she graciously allowed me the pleasure of chairing the panel, and was instrumental in my having the opportunity to introduce this symposium. thanks also go to the editors of feminist philosophy quarterly, and kathryn norlock in particular, for their interest in publishing the panel. 3 throughout, i use first names when recounting events, and the tradition of using last names when discussing the author’s work. 1 mudde: introduction to essays in honour of lorraine code published by scholarship@western, 2016 knows?” and “who can know?,” epistemic responsibility opened crucial spaces for explicitly feminist work in epistemology and the areas of thought that draw upon it, including feminist ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of science, as well as feminist work in other humanistic and social scientific disciplines. in calling for knowing practices that emphasize the inherent sociality of knowers, the concept of epistemic responsibility remains a decisive development in challenging traditional assumptions about the subjects and objects of knowledge, and in undoing orthodox epistemic ontologies of knowers, knowns, and knowing relationships. the panel was an opportunity for collective reflection on and celebration of code’s work, and highlights the concept of epistemic responsibility as a pivotal contribution to early critiques of epistemological orthodoxies (e.g., epistemologies of “s-knows-that-p”). the papers in this symposium cast code’s concept of epistemic responsibility as a uniquely feminist contribution to thinking about subjectivity, agency, and power, and as an early and persistent antidote to debates that continue in social epistemology. but there was also a second, more forwardlooking goal of the panel: to explore some of the novel directions in which the theory and practices of epistemic responsibility can move, including thinking about creativity and social imaginaries, epistemic communities and advocacy work, and the application of the concept to social movements and activist practices. one of the results of preparing for this panel was that all of the contributors took the opportunity to re-read (or read) epistemic responsibility. what i relish in each paper is the way that each author finds in the book something distinctive that is resonant with her own work. the papers in this symposium are indicative of the richness of code’s thought and the breadth of her philosophical influence. they are also a testament to her sustained and deep mentorship work, which includes but exceeds her relationships with many members of this panel. this collection is, moreover, squarely a product of the larger canadian community of feminist philosophers, a community with which code’s contributions are intimately entwined. another of the salient features of the papers here is that they point, vividly, to the challenge posed by code’s demands for epistemic responsibility, and how it serves as a way past the “but is this philosophy?” question, so prevalent in the discipline. code’s work pushes readers to be skeptical about the gatekeeping of the discipline. yet to cite lorraine code is to cite rigorous, unfailingly sharp, responsible philosophy; her philosophical ideas provide openings in, and demand engagements beyond, the purported boundaries of the discipline. among the key themes of the essays that follow are discussions of the ways that code’s thinking develops over the course of her (still prolific) career; code’s “remodeling” of responsibility, subjectivity, objectivity, and autonomy for situated human knowers; the idea that responsible knowing requires at once an appeal to 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.4 who knows or is claiming knowledge, and attention to the adequacy of a knower’s ability to be, non-naïvely, “open to how things are;” the imperatives of advocacy work, as a form of epistemic responsibility, and as a way of insisting upon and living responsibly with and for others; and a sense of selfhood that exceeds the boundaries of skin and of individual consciousness, so that thinking about and living the constellations of privilege, oppression, and responsibility as individual, interchangeable knowers becomes both inadequate and inaccurate. christine koggel’s paper is an invitation to read or return to epistemic responsibility, disclosing the contemporary value of the moral theory found in that book for discussions in feminist ethics and epistemologies. koggel considers code’s early reading of kant and her appeal to virtue ethics in epistemic responsibility as grounding the concept of responsibility that code seeks for epistemology. making an indispensable connection between (a) the virtuous knower and knowing well, and (b) questions of realism and relativism, koggel draws attention to the realist features of epistemic responsibility. she shows how this position emerges amid code’s thinking about the challenges of relativism, challenges that arise when one takes seriously questions about who the knower is, so central to code’s work. koggel argues that post-epistemic responsibility, code will come to distance herself from realism-relativism debates. not only are accounts of these concepts too tied up in philosophers’ fears and misunderstandings, but more importantly, koggel argues, relativism is a non-starter for gaining insight into epistemology or moral and political theory. attending to code’s articulations of responsibilism and her early commitment to normative realism, susan dieleman diagnoses a current debate in mainstream social epistemology as relying on an artificial epistemological-normative distinction, one which was already, she argues, being addressed in epistemic responsibility. drawing on code’s theorization of the role of community in individual epistemic agency, dieleman highlights the ways that code’s early assumption of (relatively) equivalent epistemological access among knowers was, already in 1987, nuanced by, and deeply inflected with, considerations of power-knowledge. as dieleman reveals, despite code’s more recent self-critique about the (relative) absence of power-discourse in epistemic responsibility, she is, early on, interested in the ways communities at once enable and constrain the potential for knowledge and responsibility. beginning with this same self-critique, cathy maloney draws our attention to code’s more recent theorization of advocacy as a practice of epistemic responsibility and a development of her earlier conception of subjectivity. turning to code’s thinking about the ways the credibility of a knower’s testimony is shaped by social imaginaries, and the ensuing challenge of and need for dialogical advocacy work (that is, the work of thinking across differences and articulating knowledge not yet 3 mudde: introduction to essays in honour of lorraine code published by scholarship@western, 2016 part of the/a social imaginary), maloney draws out the connections between testimony, advocacy, and autonomy in code’s ecological thinking (2006). this “autonomy” holds even under conditions when a knower might not, as maloney puts it, following miranda fricker, “understand her own experience.” considering the role of advocates in such circumstances, maloney draws code’s conception of epistemic responsibility into conversation with fricker, mikhail bakhtin, and her own work developing intercultural learning programming for university students. alexis shotwell, too, draws code’s thinking about advocacy and epistemic responsibility toward her own recent work on the development of aids activism in canada. in particular, shotwell considers the “life-giving epistemic-ethical practice” of the advocacy work that characterized (and characterizes) activists’ role in shaping the social imaginary of the virus and epidemic in canada. in charting a history of the funding of aids medications in ontario, shotwell pushes readers to notice the ways that ferocity, crankiness, and love are central features of successful aids (and other) advocacy and activism work. even without a grounding in intersectional analyses of oppression or commitments to epistemic responsibility, advocacy practices can manifest “multilayered anti-oppressive effects” by attending to concrete realities, to “how things are.” shotwell focuses and extends the insistence in code’s work that knowing well or badly is inescapably collective, but also, often, an intimately personal, concrete matter of life and death. the papers, which the authors have expanded and revised, were presented in the order that they occur here, with—as here—lorraine providing a response at the end. as christine koggel, who spoke first, finished her paper and began to take questions, we realized that it was strange to speak about lorraine’s work as though she wasn’t in the room. the usual panel format shifted, so that the person speaking might answer questions, and lorraine, seated in the middle of the “audience,” might also engage more freely in the discussion. as each presenter finished speaking, the question and answer period became more conversational; we laughed and smiled a lot, and were also serious. lorraine sometimes added contextual anecdotes (many of which i would have loved to replicate here), as well as insights about her own thinking and the conditions under which it occurred. i suspect i am not alone in taking away a new understanding of her philosophical contributions, but also a sense of collective, affective knowing about how to inhabit one’s work—and collective work—with sharpness, authority, and vulnerability. references code, lorraine. 1981. “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” metaphilosophy 12 (3–4): 267–276. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/4 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.4 ———. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover, nh: university press of new england for brown university press. ———. 1991. “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” in what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge, 1–26. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 1993. “taking subjectivity into account.” in feminist epistemologies, edited by linda alcoff and elizabeth potter. new york: routledge. ———. 1995. rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations. new york: routledge. ———. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. new york: oxford university press. anna mudde is assistant professor of philosophy at campion college at the university of regina, canada. she works in feminist epistemologies and metaphysics, and on responsible knowing and being. her published work attends to embodiment, critical race and queer theory, critical subjectivity, self-knowledge, privilege, and simone de beauvoir. she has interests in science, technologies, and practices, and in theorizing objectivity and responsibility. 5 mudde: introduction to essays in honour of lorraine code published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code anna mudde recommended citation introduction to the challenge of epistemic responsibility: essays in honour of lorraine code mansplaining and illocutionary force feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation johnson, casey rebecca. “mansplaining and illocutionary force.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4). article 3. 2020 mansplaining and illocutionary force casey rebecca johnson university of idaho crjohnson@uidaho.edu johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 mansplaining and illocutionary force casey rebecca johnson abstract in this paper i describe three kinds of mansplaining, “well, actually” mansplaining, straw-mansplaining, and speech act–confusion mansplaining. while these three kinds have much in common, i focus on speech act–confusion mansplaining and offer a speech act theoretic account of what goes wrong when people mansplain in this way. in cases of speech act–confusion mansplaining, the target of the mansplaining is not able to do what she wants with her words. her conversational contribution is taken to have a different force than the force she intends. this contributes to women’s discursive disablement and to the restriction of women’s participation in epistemically relevant exchanges. keywords: illocutionary force, speech acts, mansplaining, discursive injustice 1. men explaining in 2016, jimmy kimmel interviewed hillary clinton on his show, jimmy kimmel live. in the course of the interview, kimmel had the following exchange with clinton: jk: are you familiar with mansplaining? you know what that is? hc: that’s when a man explains something to a woman in a patronizing way. jk: actually, it’s when a man explains something to a woman in a condescending way. but you were close.1 this parody works, in part, because so many women who are experts with respect to some area (as one might expect clinton herself to be with respect to mansplaining) have that area of expertise explained to them by men who are less expert (as kimmel plausibly is). 1 hillary clinton, interview by jimmy kimmel, jimmy kimmel live, abc, march 24, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2wbpyt6zlo. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 “mansplaining” is a neologism that means something like “explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman” (rothman 2012). in paradigm cases of mansplaining, a woman—often one with expertise in the subject at hand—expresses some content. a man—often one with less or commensurate expertise—expresses some related content with a high degree of confidence and condescension. and this phenomenon is neither new nor isolated.2 rebecca solnit, in her essay “men explain things to me,” writes, every woman knows what i'm talking about. it's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. it trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence. (solnit 2014, 4) solnit herself does not use the term mansplaining for a variety of understandable reasons. however, the cluster of related phenomena plays a role in many places in women’s conversational and epistemic lives. in this paper my goal is to account for some cases of mansplaining in speech act theoretic terms. doing so will illuminate the ways in which the kind of conversational dynamics that mansplainers exploit is itself benign. layering this conversational phenomenon on top of a system of misogyny, subordination, and silencing, however, is pernicious. this project is of use and interest because mansplaining has yet to receive much philosophical attention. the project attempts to contribute to the philosophical analysis of the ways in which social position and power make a difference to speakers, conversation, testimony, and other related phenomena (see, for example, mckinney 2016; mcgowan 2019; tirrell 2018; dotson 2011). often, these conversational inequities are difficult to identify, track, or demonstrate to be damaging because the dynamics of conversation are messy and complicated. systematic philosophical treatment, then, can be helpful when it 2 mansplaining is not the only kind of pernicious exploitation of conversational norms by privileged conversers. whitesplaining, wherein a white person needlessly explains to a person of color will have relevant similarities to the kinds of phenomena discussed here. i also suspect that disabled people and members of other marginalized groups experience this as well. it can even take place in cases in which the comparative privilege is very localized—primary caregivers who are men have complained of mum-splaining, for example (goodwin 2018). indeed, it would be interesting to look at the similarities and differences across these categories. johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 allows us to carefully point to these harmful conversational dynamics and how they fit with the rest of our conversational practices. i will proceed as follows: in the next section, i’ll briefly discuss some varieties of mansplaining and focus in on my target type. then, i’ll introduce the mechanics from speech act theory that we’ll need to understand the target cases of mansplaining. in section four, i’ll apply those mechanics to explain one kind of mansplaining. in the fifth section, i’ll conclude. 2. mansplaining we know that mansplaining involves a woman receiving unhelpful “explanations” from a conversational partner. i can, however, be more precise. on my view, mansplaining, in general, involves the following: mansplaining: participating in one of a set of conversational practices because one’s conversational partner is a woman, despite the fact that one’s conversational partner has commensurate or superior expertise in the subject at hand. if one’s conversational partner were not a woman, one would participate in a different sort of conversational practice. most mansplainers are men. i should note, though, that it is possible for women to mansplain. on my account, mansplaining occurs when some conversational behavior happens because the mansplainer is speaking to a woman. if mansplainer would not have mansplained if his target were not a woman, this counts as mansplaining—this counterfactual is key. many of the behaviors i’ll describe below could occur in cases that are not mansplaining. if i just correct everyone’s explanations or doubt everyone’s expertise, then i’m not mansplaining when i do so to a woman. in what follows, i’ll sometimes use “the man” for the mansplainer because it (a) seems statistically likely that mansplainers are men, and (b) because it is psychologically tricky for a woman to mansplain. i’ll address this further below, but i think we can make some inferences about the attitudes of mansplainers toward women. usually, these will involve thinking that women are not or cannot be experts in the relevant subject area because they are women. if a woman mansplains, she must, at once, believe (implicitly or explicitly) that women are not experts about x, and that she (a woman) is an expert about x. this is a plausible combination of attitudes, but i take it to be unusual and to involve a kind of pernicious exceptionalism or egocentrism. so, in what follows i will refer to the mansplainer as “the man” and his target as “the woman.” it is also important to note that, contrary to jimmy kimmel and hillary clinton’s take on the matter, i don’t think that mansplaining is always done in a patronizing or condescending way. i think it often is patronizing or condescending, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 but it need not be. many mansplainers are likely entirely sincere and plausibly well intentioned—they may deny that their conversational contributions were performed with any condescension. i don’t think we need to argue about this. when a mansplainer mansplains, a person with superior or commensurate expertise is treated in a way she ought not be simply because she is a woman. this is problematic, whether or not it is done in a patronizing way. in what remains of this section, i will briefly describe three kinds of mansplaining.3 each of these three will be described as if they are discrete categories with distinct explanations; however, i am not claiming that each case of mansplaining is one or another of these. i don’t take this list to be exhaustive, and i don’t take the categories to be exclusive. in the example with which we began, kimmel appears to make an inconsequential “correction” to clinton’s answer. while this exchange is satirical, the joke works in part because it is a familiar phenomenon. kimmel appears to register that clinton has answered, and then marks that he’s going to offer a “correction” by uttering, “actually.” call this type of mansplaining “well, actually” mansplaining. “well, actually” mansplaining is one kind of mansplaining. in cases of this kind, a woman offers an explanation or an answer to a query, and a man jumps in to offer his own account. when this happens, the man appears to believe that his account is superior—which explains why he uses the phrase, “well, actually.” the mansplainer’s account is put forward as an improvement on or a correction to the woman’s. sometimes mansplainers who participate in this type of mansplaining are, indeed, offering different explanations than those offered by the woman. sometimes, as in the example above, the difference is minimal, and likely immaterial.4 sometimes mansplainers of the “well, actually” type offer explanations of something entirely separate from the original subject matter of the woman’s contribution. another kind of mansplaining we’ll call straw-mansplaining.5 this kind of mansplaining often occurs in response to a question or comment from the woman who is the target of the mansplaining. in cases like this, the woman, who has as much if not more expertise than the mansplainer, might ask a difficult question, or level a challenging objection to the mansplainer, only to find the mansplainer 3 i’m grateful to lisa cassell, nicole dular, emily mcwilliams, deborah tollefsen, and brianna toole for suggesting some of the remarks in this section. 4 this is similar to the kind of mansplaining that federico luzzi (2016) describes as “a man explains to a woman why something she just asserted is true.” however, i’m suggesting a different etiology and explanation for the phenomenon. i suspect that there are many nearby kinds of mansplaining. 5 i’m grateful to lavender mckittrick-sweitzer for suggesting this term. johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 answering a simpler question or addressing a straw-man objection. to be a case of mansplaining, this answer must be more or less sincere. someone might appear to be mansplaining but really just attempting to avoid answering difficult objections. this might be a kind of obfuscating move, rather than mansplaining proper. assuming that the man is sincere, though, by his answer he is straw-mansplaining. the third kind of mansplaining will be our topic for the remainder of the paper. call this kind of mansplaining speech act–confusion mansplaining. a mansplainer of this type hears his interlocutor making a conversational move—like an assertion or hypothesis—and takes it to be a different move, one that invites him to display his expertise. in paradigm cases like this, the mansplainer takes the utterance to be a question or a request for information. this is despite the fact that the woman who is his target intends to be asserting something. the mansplainer of this type jumps in to address the woman’s utterance, despite the fact that the woman, who is an expert in the relevant subject matter, took herself to be telling rather than asking (or requesting). i’ll discuss this kind of mansplaining at length below, but for now note that this kind of mismatch happens all the time. i am not always culpable for taking someone to be making a different conversational move than she intends. notice the way that “i’ll meet you at the pub” can be a promise, a threat, or a prediction. if my interlocutor intended it as a promise and i took it to be a prediction, i’m not clearly culpable in any substantive way. thus, it seems, like in the cases above, the mansplainer is exploiting a common and benign conversational pattern. also notice what must be going on for a mansplainer to have this kind of confusion. he interprets the woman’s conversational move as a question (or request for information). one explanation for why he might do this is that he takes women to be in need of his expertise and assistance. again, more on this below, but for now, we can note that men who perceive women to need their expertise and help likely take themselves to have superior expertise than women who are, in fact, experts. our focus for the remainder of the paper will be on speech act–confusion mansplaining. however, it is important to notice what all these kinds have in common. first, mansplainers are only sometimes involved in the conversation or exchange as directly as kimmel is in the starting example. kimmel’s “well, actually” mansplaining would be especially egregious if it were in earnest because he asked clinton for her explanation. this is not always the case. sometimes mansplainers are involved in the conversation, and sometimes they merely overhear the original explanation and insert themselves as an interlocutor. second, in all of these cases, the mansplainer exploits a conversational pattern that is more or less benign. i’ll discuss this further below, but notice that this gives the mansplainer a kind of plausible deniability. when someone explains feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 something badly in a conversation, it is sometimes conversationally appropriate to offer an alternative explanation. when someone is not equipped to understand the answer to their question as asked, it is sometimes conversationally appropriate to answer a simpler one. we do this with our students, and sometimes in casual conversations when we are experts in the relevant subject matter and our interlocutor is not. the problem with the mansplainers is that the explanations they offer are often (a) not better, (b) not asked of them, and/or (c) made to a woman who is more of an expert than they are. this feature, though, is part of what makes mansplaining so insidious. the man wasn’t doing anything pernicious, he might argue, he was just -ing, where -ing is something we all occasionally nonculpably do. finally, to explain the behavior of all three kinds of mansplainers, we have to make some inferences to what their mental states might be. i am not claiming to have access to mansplainers’ mental states, but given that a woman with some expertise offers an account of something, what are the likely beliefs of a man (often with commensurate or less expertise) who offers an alternative? or who dumbs down her question? or who mistakes her assertion for a request for help? it seems likely that the mental states of such a man include an evaluation of the woman’s expertise as less substantial or less valuable than his. he takes himself to be in a superior position to offer an explanation. he must be ignoring her expertise, evaluating it as less than his, or treating her as in need of his assistance. as a recent article by mia mercado in bustle puts it, mansplaining “implies that the person best suited to explain the topic at hand is a man, regardless of subject matter and whether or not the man present is the one most qualified to do the explaining” (mercado 2017). it is, of course, possible that my inferences regarding the attitudes of mansplainers are incorrect. we would have to do some empirical research to be sure. i should also note that i think that it is likely that in many cases of mansplaining, the mansplainer is simply inattentive to the conversational moves that the target of his mansplaining is making. a mansplainer might appear to be a “well, actually” mansplainer, but might simply fail to attend to the woman’s explanation—he might just be so ready to offer his (clearly superior) view. this does not require the occurrent belief that his target is ill-qualified, but i’m not sure it speaks much better of the mansplainer’s attitudes or habits. one thing that is distinctive about speech act–confusion mansplaining is that this kind of mansplainer makes a mistake regarding the woman’s speech action. we’ll get into this more in the next section, but this means that the woman is, to some extent, kept from acting as she would choose. in both “well, actually” mansplaining and straw-mansplaining, the woman explains, and is taken to be doing so (albeit not as effectively as she would like). in speech act–confusion cases, she is johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 taken to be doing something else entirely. in the rest of the paper i’ll focus on this kind of mansplaining because i think that my analysis helps explain how this kind of mansplaining happens and why it is so pernicious. this analysis is in the tradition of what mary kate mcgowan calls “the linguistic approach to group-based injustice” (mcgowan 2019, 4). that the focus is on speech act–confusion mansplaining does not indicate that the other kinds of mansplaining do not warrant attention. indeed, i’m hopeful that identifying these different kinds of mansplaining and offering an indepth discussion of one might prompt further work. 3. speech acts to better understand speech act–confusion mansplaining, we’ll need some tools from speech act theory. speech act theory is engaged in the project of understanding, diagnosing, and giving an analysis of the dynamics of conversation. one major observation from speech act theory is that communication is a kind of social action—that is, fully successful communication requires action on the part of both the speaker and the hearer. a speaker attempts a speech act of a particular kind, and the hearer registers or takes up that speech as a particular kind of speech act. developed from the work of j. l. austin (1975), speech act theory has been explored and applied, criticized and defended (see, for example, searle 1969; sbisà 2009, 1984; langton 1993; kukla 2014). i won’t defend speech act theory directly, here. nor should this application be taken as an all-things-considered endorsement of the theory. however, some of the machinery from speech act theory will be useful in understanding our target kind of mansplaining. according to speech act theory, the basic picture of a successful communicative exchange is as follows: a speaker, martha, utters, “the window is open” to george, her interlocutor. call this utterance martha’s locution. martha intends her locution as a move in conversation. call this move martha’s illocution. despite its grammatical form, she does not intend her illocution to be an assertion, but rather intends it as a request that george close the window. this is a key observation from austin. speakers can use grammatically identical utterances for distinct illocutionary acts. martha could have intended the same utterance as an assertion, or a reminder, or a command; but she intends it as a request, and george recognizes it as such. this recognition constitutes uptake—george takes up martha’s illocution, and martha’s request is felicitous in part because she has secured uptake from her interlocutor. if george then closes the window, that action is part of martha’s perlocution, and her speech act has been successful. there are a number of ways that martha’s speech act might be less than fully successful: martha might attempt to speak but find she’s too shy—her locution might fail. george might not recognize her communicative intention—uptake might fail. martha might secure uptake from george, but george might be intransigent, fail feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 to close the window, and frustrate martha’s perlocutionary intentions. george might frustrate martha’s perlocutionary intentions, though, even if he is not merely being intransigent. if martha has been mean or rude to george all day, george might recognize that martha intends to make a request, but he might think she is not well-positioned to do so. george might not respond to martha’s request because he takes her to lack the standing to make it. in this case, martha’s speech act misfires. while it’s plausible that george might take martha to be badly positioned to make requests of him, requesting is not the sort of speech act that usually requires any official standing. to see a case of misfiring more clearly, consider a case in which a layperson attempts to perform a roman catholic marriage by simply saying the relevant words in the proper order. performing this kind of marriage requires a very particular official standing. the layperson lacks this standing, so her attempted marriage misfires. misfires, uptake, standing, felicity, locutions, illocutions, and perlocutions are all part of the basic picture, according to speech act theory. this basic picture is used to explain a variety of conversational patterns. austin’s original presentation discusses constatives like assertions, requests, and promises, as well as performatives like marriages, excommunications, and christenings, using the basic picture. more recently, rae langton used the basic picture to investigate what goes on in some cases of rape. langton, in responding to work on pornography from catharine mackinnon (mackinnon 1987), argued that certain kinds of subordinating pornography make it impossible for women to secure uptake when they attempt to refuse sex. langton describes this as follows: sometimes "no," when spoken by a woman, does not count as the act of refusal. the hearer fails to recognize the utterance as a refusal; uptake is not secured. in saying "no" she may well intend to refuse. by saying "no" she intends to prevent sex, but she is far from doing as she intends. since illocutionary force depends, in part, on uptake being secured, the woman fails to refuse. (langton 1993) langton argued that pornographic depictions of rape and other sexual violence silences women. women are able to utter no but not able to fully successfully refuse. langton called this kind of silencing illocutionary disablement. the explanation that langton offers, in her original discussion and in her later work with jennifer hornsby (hornsby and langton 1998), is that the woman’s assailant has consumed violent pornographic depictions of women enjoying sexual assault. in this kind of pornography, women are depicted as merely being shy or coy in refusing sexual advances from men instead of genuinely refusing. hornsby and langton argue that consuming pornography of this kind is argued to shift men’s realjohnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 world expectations about women’s expressed sexual intentions. this shift keeps him from taking her to be performing the illocution of refusing—to fully successfully refuse one must not want the course of action on offer to proceed.6 because women, on his way of thinking, want violent sex to proceed even if they’re appearing to refuse, she is unable to bring him to recognize that she meets this preparatory condition. that is, she cannot secure uptake for her refusal. her “no” is taken as demure consent. according to langton, the woman is rendered unable to enact her refusal. she is silenced. langton’s explanation of this case has been controversial. alexander bird (2002), building from work of daniel jacobson (1995), argues that if langton is right, then the woman in this case is not raped, since she did not refuse. leaving aside arguments regarding bird’s interpretation, his objection brings something important to light: langton, and bird, and most philosophers writing about illocutionary force have assumed that each utterance is, at most, one kind of illocution. either the woman’s utterance is a refusal, or she’s coyly consenting. martha’s utterance is either a request or a command. marina sbisà (2013b) challenges this assumption, as do i (johnson 2019), but it is still widespread. my conclusion, in my work on this, is that while the assumption of what i call “illocutionary monism” is prevalent, it is by no means compulsory. we can, in other words, have a coherent view of speech acts without assuming that each utterance has one and only one illocutionary force. i argue for what i call “illocutionary pluralism,” according to which an utterance can have more than one force. langton’s woman’s utterance, then, could be a refusal and a coy consenting. i’ll return to this point below, but for now, simply notice that the assumption of illocutionary monism is not compulsory, even if we want to use the notion of illocutionary force in our theorizing. this constitutes a complication to the basic picture described above. if illocutionary pluralism is correct, and we can countenance multiple illocutionary forces for a single utterance, this does not mean that all the relevant forces are created equal. in langton’s case, there is only one force that the utterance should have—it should be a refusal. however (and this is key), this is because of the moral facts about sexual consent, not because of anything about the speech act itself (johnson 2015). morally, the woman’s attempt to refuse is sufficient to rule out permissible sex. nonetheless, that the assailant took her to be consenting matters for our ability to predict and explain his behavior, and to account for the systematicity of the communicative harms to which women are subject. 6 see searle (1969) for a discussion of conditions for different illocutions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 in other kinds of cases there could be multiple forces an utterance should have—if, for example, there are prudential reasons it should be taken to have some force but moral reasons it should have another. these, however, will not be determined by the facts about the speech act alone—indeed, adopting illocutionary pluralism means that both the prudentially and the morally appropriate illocutionary force can be equally real. and, further, even if we accept illocutionary pluralism, we might still retain the commitment from austin that a match between a hearer’s uptake and a speaker’s intention is necessary for fully successful illocutionary force. so, with illocutionary pluralism we enjoy several benefits. we enjoy the explanatory benefit of multiple illocutionary forces, we are able to diagnose some forces as better (morally, prudentially, legally, etc.) than others, and we can say that only those forces that have a match between speaker intention and hearer uptake are fully successful. an illocutionary act is less than fully successful if something is or has gone wrong in its execution. sometimes called an infelicity, this failure to be fully successful is not always fatal to the illocutionary act—that is, there are many illocutionary acts that are executed but executed imperfectly. there are, according to austin, several ways that an illocutionary act can be infelicitous: as mentioned, it can misfire if the speaker fails to follow the procedure for making the act of the relevant kind or if the procedure cannot be followed in the conversational context— remember the catholic marriage case. an illocutionary act can also be abused. an act is abused if the speaker lacks the relevant attitudes and/or intentions, or if the illocutionary act fails to have the relevant social effects—if it fails to secure uptake. if a speaker says, “i promise to meet you at the bus stop,” without intending to do so, the illocutionary act has been abused. if a speaker shouts, “look out for that banana peel,” and her addressee is inattentive, the illocutionary act has been abused. nonetheless, the first speaker promised and the second speaker warned. and further, austin admonishes us, “do not stress the normal connotations of these names!” (austin 1975, 16). just because an act is abused doesn’t mean the speaker or the addressee is an abuser in any morally weighty sense. these terms are picking out (perhaps imperfectly) the ways that illocutionary acts can go wrong. these various ways of “going wrong” are ways that the speech act can diverge from an idealized paradigm. they are not symptoms of a deeply flawed or practically defective speech act. as sbisà points out, “a speaker may perform a certain illocutionary act even if she violates one or more of its conditions” (sbisà 2013a, 50). so, according to the kind of pluralism i defend, the illocutionary act occurs even if there is a mismatch in the perception of the speaker and the uptake of her interlocutor. however, the illocutionary act made to the inattentive interlocutor is infelicitous—it is an abuse. johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 whether or not we can make sense of illocutionary pluralism depends, in part, on how illocutionary force is generated. in explaining illocutionary force, austin says, “the illocutionary act ‘takes effect’ in certain ways as distinguished from producing consequences in the sense of bringing about states of affairs in the ‘normal’ way” (austin 1975, 117). this is not maximally clear. sbisà elucidates as follows: the effect of the naming of a ship consists of a change not in the natural course of events but in norms, that is, in something belonging to the realm of social conventions; and it is an effect that comes into being thanks to the hearer’s uptake, that is, insofar as it is clear to the relevant audience that the speaker has (felicitously) named the ship. it is not rash to identify such an effect with the “conventional effect” which the illocutionary act, as an accepted conventional procedure, is designed to produce. in fact austin’s felicity condition a1, the first in his list of felicity conditions for performative utterances, reads: “there must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances. . . .” (sbisà 2007, 464; quoting austin 1975, 14)7 sbisà, then, identifies the illocutionary force of an utterance with the conventional effect that that utterance has on a relevant audience. there are certain effects that assertions conventionally have on audience members. for an utterance to have that illocutionary force requires that a member of the audience be affected in those conventional ways. and to be fully happy, the effects on the audience member will match the effects conventionally associated with the illocutionary force that the speaker intends. for clarity, let’s return to the example of george and martha and their conversation regarding the window. martha says, “the window is open,” intending it to be a request. she follows one conventional procedure for requesting.8 her utterance prompts in george a reaction conventional for requests—he recognizes that martha would like him to close the window and feels free to either do so or make his polite excuses. if he reacted as if his refusal would be an act of defiance, 7 for more on conversations and how utterances change norms, see mcgowan (2019). 8 sbisà makes a good case for thinking that many of these procedures overlap. for example, some of the procedures for conjecturing are also procedures for asserting or hypothesizing or considering. this ambiguity is often easily sussed out in conversation, but sometimes the ambiguity remains (sbisà 2013b). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 his reaction would be conventional for a command. with this example, one can see that uptake, for sbisà, is also a matter of convention. three features of conversation complicate this picture from sbisà. first, a single utterance might have different effects on different audience members, and those effects might be conventional for different illocutionary forces. this is related to the observation that drives my earlier argument. imagine that penny is also present for george and martha’s conversation. if penny reacts to martha’s speech in the manner conventional for questions, and george reacts in ways conventional for commands, then her utterance meets at least one requirement for two different forces. for the utterance to be fully successful, george’s and penny’s reactions have to match martha’s intention. it is important to keep in mind, though, that there are many ways that a speech act can fail to be fully successful. the second complicating feature is that conventions are mutable and ephemeral, and they vary both within and across communities. conventions change over time, which precludes us from specifying, for all communities, for all times, the conventional procedure for making an assertion (for example). furthermore, communities are by no means discrete. i am a member of many different communities: the community of philosophers, the community of my neighborhood, and the community of my family. each of these communities has subtly (or not so subtly) different conventions. we would expect, then, that members of these different communites respond to questions, for example, in different ways. despite these differences, they may be responding in the way that is conventional for that community. there is a further implication of the mutability of conventions for sbisà’s account. this is that the accepted conventional procedure for making a conversational move with a particular force might vary. in the community of philosophers, for example, i would proceed to make a suggestion in ways that are pretty different from how i would do so in my family. this is because the norms, the conventions, and the proceedures are different. moreover, this is in addition to the ways in which, within a single community, the conventional procedure for making a request might be very similar to the conventional procedure for making a command. third, speakers are themselves audience members of their own speech. in martha’s conversation with penny and george, martha plays two roles. she speaks and is a member of the audience. when martha speaks, her speech prompts effects on herself. she has a reaction to her own speech, which will be conventional (or not) for a particular illocutionary force (johnson 2015). so, in the martha, penny, and george conversation, there are three possibly distinct reactions, each of which might be conventional for a different illocutionary force. as we know from the above, at most one of these three forces will yield a fully felicitous illocutionary act. if martha’s speech follows the conventional johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 procedure for a request, and penny’s reaction is coventional for the effects of a request, then her speech is successfully a request. though, as we’ve seen, such conventions are mutable, and varied from context to context. one might object, here, that the only force that martha’s utterance can have is the force she intends and that some audience member takes up.9 after all, the objection might go, austin’s conditions require intention, uptake, authority, and the rest. on a view like this, martha’s utterance has the force of a request just in case she intends to ask a request, follows the procedure for doing so, and penny or george reacts in the ways conventional for requests. this is a view that one kind of illocutionary monist might hold. notice that making this objection requires denying sbisà’s claim that one can perform an illocutionary act even if one violates one of its conditions.10 beyond that, though, there are two responses that the illocutionary pluralist can give in response to this kind of objection. quill kukla (2014, writing as rebecca kukla) has argued that intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient to fix the force of an utterance.11 instead, kukla argues that an utterance can sometimes be turned into a different speech act than the one intended. kukla offers an example in which a woman, celia, who manages a factory floor tries to issue an order but is treated as making a request. utterances have the forces they have, according to kukla (2014, 443), “only in virtue of the concrete social difference that they make, or how they are taken up in practice.” kukla is not defending illocutionary pluralism, but the arguments they offer for thinking that social effects fix an utterance’s force would be of use to the pluralist. it is easy to imagine cases in which an utterance makes a plurality of concrete social differences. indeed, these social differences are the kind of thing that sbisà has in mind when she argues that the conventional effects are part of what gives an utterance its force. my own view is that this objection mistakes having an illocutionary force with having a fully successful illocutionary force. while the objection is right that the intention and the uptake of an utterance must match for a fully successful assertion, or request, or so forth, this does not mean that they must match for an utterance to have a force at all. the felicity conditions that austin offers are conditions on fully 9 i am grateful to a reviewer for encouraging me to consider this objection in some detail. 10 for more on pluralistic intentions see sbisà (2013b). 11 kukla prefers “performative force” to “illocutionary force” for reasons she details in her 2014 paper. i will not take up that debate here. that paper is rich, and the sketch i provide here cannot do justice to all the important arguments in it. i use “force” here as neutral between illocutionary and performative force, hoping that my account holds, modulo some changes, if kukla is right about performative force. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 “happy” speech acts. if they were all necessary for an act to have a force at all, then the view would have odd predictions. for example, wondering about the answer is a preparatory condition on questioning. if all the felicity conditions were necessary for illocutionary force, then a speaker would be unable to pose a question to which she already knew the answer. this may be a matter of theory choice, but i prefer to have an account according to which most utterances have (somewhat less than fully successful) forces over an account according to which many utterances are forceless because they are infelicitous. perhaps we might say, instead, that only some felicity conditions are necessary for an utterance to have a particular force. matching the intention to the uptake could be a special (or perhaps constitutive) condition. this version of the objection yields similarly problematic predictions: it leaves many speech acts forceless. consider, again, the conversation between martha, george, and penny. say that martha intends to request, george takes her to be commanding, and penny takes her to be questioning. such a case is easily imaginable, given how flexible we are with our grammatical conventions. in a case like this, if we require both intention and uptake for an utterance to have a force at all, martha’s utterance fails.12 according to the kind of illocutionary pluralism i have in mind, the social effects that an utterance has determine its illocutionary force. when martha speaks to george and penny, each party to the conversation has a reaction to her speech. some part of that reaction will be conventional for some illocutionary force. if martha reacts as though she’s requesting, george reacts as though she’s commanding, and penny reacts as though she is questioning, her utterance has those forces. depending on the legal, moral, and prudential facts of the context, one of these forces might be better than the others, but if so, it will be legally, morally, or prudentially better. to summarize this section, recall that speech is social action. it involves speech made by a speaker, and some reactions from one or more hearers, including the speaker himor herself. for full success, the speaker’s intention in performing an act using a certain conventionalized procedure must match the kind of reactions that the hearers have. conventions are mutable, overlapping, evolving, and ambiguous, so mismatches are common and often tolerated, within some margin of similarity—there’s often no need to establish a single, correct illocutionary force. conversations are complicated and messy, and often take place between more than two participants. all of this means that the conventional responses to a single utterance are likely to vary, at least sometimes. we’re able to handle this in the course of conversation, and we tolerate some mismatches, as long as they don’t get 12 there is more discussion of this in my recent paper (johnson 2019). johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 too in the way of achieving our other goals. despite our conversational tolerance of mismatches, mismatches can sometimes both be the result of and also contribute to unjust social institutions and arrangements. 4. speech act confusion how does all of this speech act theory relate to mansplaining? i propose that we can understand speech act–confusion mansplaining as a mismatch between conversational participants’ reactions to a particular utterance. the mismatch i have in mind is between the reactions that a man audience member has to a woman speaker’s utterance, and the reactions that the woman speaker (or some other audience member) has. these reactions are conventional for different illocutionary forces. further, the mismatch is caused by differing perceptions of the conventional procedure followed by the speaker in making her utterance. let’s make that a little more concrete with an example (adapted from solnit’s [2014] discussion). consider the following conversation: 1) rebecca: i’ve been researching eadweard muybridge, and… 2) ralph: and have you heard about the very important muybridge book that came out this year? it considers all sorts of important . . . (holds forth) 3) sallie: that’s her book. 4) ralph: continues undeterred 5) sallie: that’s her book! among the other things that ralph is doing wrong (interrupting rebecca, ignoring sallie), ralph is also mansplaining. and he might be doing so just because he is a jerk. it may be that ralph is deliberately undermining rebecca’s expertise. it may also be that ralph simply didn’t attend to rebecca sufficiently—if he wasn’t really listening, he might just be free associating with the name “eadweard muybridge.” however, i want to entertain a different possiblity—one in which ralph does something more ordinary but, because of pernicious social structure, nonetheless communicatively and epistemically harms rebecca. when rebecca makes her utterance in (1), she probably intends to make an assertion. she is certainly following a procedure that is conventional for asserting, and the conversation suggests that sallie, at least, is reacting as if rebecca asserted. however, as we know from the above, conventional procedures for making an utterance with a particular illocutionary force can both vary by community and be largely overlapping with the procedures for making other kinds of illocutions. so, despite her intentions to make an assertion, her utterance (1) also could follow the conventional procedure for making a request for information (or posing a question). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 and ralph, in his response (2), appears to have precisely this kind of reaction. that is, his response (2) would be a perfectly reasonable response to a request for information about eadweard muybridge, and so we can plausibly infer that he was affected by rebecca’s utterance (1) in the way conventional for such requests. we can further tell by sallie’s utterance (3) that she was not affected by rebecca’s utterance in the way convetional for requests. if she had been, she would not react to ralph as she does in (3). so, ralph’s uptake of rebecca’s utterance (1) fails, and so her utterance fails to be fully successful relative to ralph’s perspective. this is despite the fact that rebecca does successfully assert relative to sallie’s perspective. one thing to notice is that ralph’s reaction by itself is neither crazy nor particularly pernicious. this is for two reasons. first, there are conversational contexts in which a person might ask a question or make a request for information about x by saying “i’ve been researching x.” second, conversational mismatches occur all the time. our conversational exchanges are messy and, as austin points out, can be less than ideal in myriad ways. some of these mismatches are harmless, or even helpful. to see this, imagine an exchange like the above, but with a professor and her student. a first-year student comes into dr. gilbert’s office hours and attempts to assert, “i’ve been researching joint intentionality.” dr. gilbert interprets her student as asking for more information about her area of expertise and suggests that he read her latest book. while it is possible that the student would have a negative reaction to this, it is probably a good opportunity for him to learn. he might not even notice that his speech act wasn’t fully successful. we really only need our exchanges to be successful enough, and less than fully successful speech acts often suffice. and if i am right about illocutionary pluralism, we don’t have to worry about what the illocutionary force was. we have the tools to say why the student’s assertion (from his perspective) was not fully successful. and we can say why the professor’s conversational contributions were sensible—the student made a request (from her perspective). this kind of benign mismatch is familiar and part of conversational dynamics. but mansplaining is not just a benign conversational quirk. it is pernicious and constitutes a harm to those on the receiving end. how can this be explained? there are at least two ways in which mansplaining is pernicious. the first is at the level of ralph’s reactions, and the second is more systematic. let’s take each of these in turn. we can see why ralph’s behavior is pernicious when we consider why he reacted to rebecca’s utterance (1) in the ways conventional for questions. clearly the conversational context did not dictate that her utterance (1) must be a question. we can see from (3) that sallie responded as if it were an assertion—she is attempting in (3) to show ralph that he was mistaken to react as if rebecca were trying to ask a question. we can see from (4) that ralph does not immediately see johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 this. it seems likely that ralph’s reaction to rebecca’s utterance (1) is informed by pernicious social structures. i hypothesize that ralph reacts to rebecca’s utterance (1) in the way that he does because he reacts to the conventional procedures for asserting vs. questioning in a way that is informed by the gender of the speaker. that is, women, when speaking to ralph, have to follow a different procedure than men in order to prompt the conventional reaction for assertions.13 indeed, given that there is no conventional proceedure in our conversational community to assert-as-a-woman (there is no such force), women are left unable to assert in certain conversational contexts. this means that women who are in conversation with ralph and people with similar habits and attitudes, are illocutionarily disabled in langton’s sense. ralph may default to reacting as if women have asked questions because he takes women to be less informed, less intelligent, or more in need of intellectual assistance than he takes men to be. he takes his own authority to be of value—a value that he takes women to be seeking. so, when rebecca utters (1), he incorporates her gender into his perception of the conventional procedure she is following, and reacts as his presuppositions dictate. ralph isn’t doing something entirely unfamiliar by incorporating rebecca’s gender into his perception of her speech. we incorporate people’s social position into our illocutionary reactions with some regularity. compare the utterance “can i look inside your bag?” made by a two-year-old and made by a police officer—we’re likely to react to these as having different forces because the speakers have different social positions. the problem with ralph’s reaction is that gender should not make a difference in the procedure for making assertions. taking it to make this difference requires at least a degree of acceptance of a range of misogynistic background beliefs. the second reason that ralph’s reaction is pernicious is that rebecca likely faces this kind of illocutionary mismatch with some regularity. not all men mansplain, and not all mansplainers mansplain in every conversation, but the phenomenon is sufficiently widespread to have a name and be immediately recognizable to most women (every woman, if solnit is right). facing mansplaining as a regular response is frustrating, exhausting, and epistemically stunting. it can contribute to and cause testimonial injustice (see fricker 2007; wanderer 2011; pohlhaus 2014). if women’s attempted assertions are regularly treated as requests for information, they’re going to have a hard time transmitting their knowledge to others by testimony. we know that women are 13 lynne tirrell’s (2018) recent paper suggests that this gendered difference in conversational procedures is widespread and has analogs for all speakers who are members of subordinated groups. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 seen as less expert than similarly situated men (thomas-hunt and phillips 2004; elmore and luna-lucero 2017). this may be in part because they aren’t interpreted as asserting even when they follow the conventions for doing so. or, to put it better, this may be because people perniciously and subconsciously incorporate gender into the conventions for asserting. knowing that they are likely to be mansplained to may also make women reluctant to testify at all (see dotson 2011). these harms are faced by women when mansplainers incorrectly incorporate gender into their perceptions of women’s speech acts. it might be tempting to simply diagnose ralph as mistaken about the illocutionary force of rebecca’s utterance. the illocutionary monist would tell us that rebecca intended her utterance as an assertion, sallie took it up as an assertion, so it was an assertion, and ralph is making a factual mistake to treat it as a question. i don’t think that we should give in to this temptation, however much we might want to insist that ralph is incorrect. certainly he should treat the utterance as an assertion, but that is because of the moral and epistemic facts of the example. as mentioned above, kukla (2014) points out that we miss something important about the power of our utterances when we don’t attend to their social effects. recall, again, kukla’s case involving celia, the factory floor manager. her attempt to order is thwarted, kukla argues, and she requests instead. i agree that this can sometimes happen. however, i think there is an intuitive sense in which celia orders, as long as she prompts, in at least herself, the reactions conventional for ordering. if illocutionary pluralism is right, then we don’t have to choose. celia’s utterance is both an order and a request. this allows us to predict why celia’s expectations don’t match those of her employees. it allows us to better understand, and hopefully to mitigate, discursive injustices. 5. conclusion mansplaining comes in several varieties which have a number of different etiologies and explantions. it would be worthwhile to give detailed analyses of all of them. my goals in this paper, however, have been to identify several kinds of mansplaining, and then give a detailed explanation of one kind using the tools available from speech act theory. what goes wrong in cases of speech act–confusion mansplaining is that these mansplainers incorrectly incorporate a woman’s gender into their perception of the illocutionary procedure they react to. this leads them to react to the woman’s utterance with conventional request/question type reactions. this is epistemically frustrating for women who are trying to do something else with their words. it can contribute to epistemic injustices such as testimonial injustice and testimonial smothering. and, perhaps this is something that all instances of mansplaining have in common: mansplainers behave problematically because of the johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 ways that they react to a woman’s gender and incorporate it into their conversational practices.14 references austin, john langshaw. 1975. how to do things with words. oxford: oxford university press. bird, alexander. 2002. “illocutionary silencing.” pacific philosophical quarterly 83 (1): 1–15. dotson, kristie. 2011. “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing.” hypatia 26 (2): 236–257. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01177.x. elmore, kristen c., and myra luna-lucero. 2017. “light bulbs or seeds? how metaphors for ideas influence judgments about genius.” social psychological and personality science 8 (2): 200–208. https://doi.org /10.1177/1948550616667611. fricker, miranda. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. goodwin, kim. 2018. “mansplaining, explained in one simple chart.” bbc worklife, july 29. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180727-mansplainingexplained-in-one-chart. hornsby, jennifer, and rae langton. 1998. “free speech and illocution.” legal theory 4 (1): 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1352325200000902. jacobson, daniel. 1995. “freedom of speech acts? a response to langton.” philosophy & public affairs 24 (1): 64–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10884963.1995.tb00022.x. johnson, casey rebecca. 2015. “speech acts and silencing: a social account of speech action and restrictions on speech.” phd dissertation, university of connecticut. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/790/. ———. 2019. “investigating illocutionary monism.” synthese 196 (3): 1151–1165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1508-7. kukla, rebecca. 2014. “performative force, convention, and discursive injustice.” hypatia 29 (2): 440–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01316.x. langton, rae. 1993. “speech acts and unspeakable acts.” philosophy & public affairs 22 (4): 293–330. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265469. luzzi, federico. 2016. “testimonial injustice without credibility deficit (or excess).” thought: a journal of philosophy 5 (3): 203–211. https://doi.org/10.1002 /tht3.212. mackinnon, catharine a. 1987. feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. 14 i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helping me see this. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mcgowan, mary kate. 2019. just words: on speech and hidden harm. oxford: oxford university press. mckinney, rachel ann. 2016. “extracted speech.” social theory and practice 42 (2): 258–284. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract201642215. mercado, mia. 2017. “here is what mansplaining actually looks like, because it’s way more common than you probably think.” bustle, may 10. https://www.bustle.com/p/here-is-what-mansplaining-actually-looks-likebecause-its-way-more-common-than-you-probably-think-57097. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2014. “discerning the primary epistemic harm in cases of testimonial injustice.” social epistemology 28 (2): 99–114. https://doi.org /10.1080/02691728.2013.782581. rothman, lily. 2012. “a cultural history of mansplaining.” atlantic, november 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/a-cultural-history-ofmansplaining/264380/. sbisà, marina. 1984. “on illocutionary types.” journal of pragmatics 8 (1): 93–112. ———. 2007. “how to read austin.” pragmatics. quarterly publication of the international pragmatics association (ipra) 17 (3): 461–473. ———. 2009. “uptake and conventionality in illocution.” lodz papers in pragmatics 5 (1): 33–52. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10016-009-0003-0. ———. 2013a. “locution, illocution, perlocution.” in pragmatics of speech actions, edited by marina sbisà and ken turner, 25–75. berlin: de gruyter. ———. 2013b. “some remarks about speech act pluralism.” in perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy, edited by alessandro capone, franco lo piparo, and marco carapezza, 227–244. new york: springer. searle, john r. 1969. speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. solnit, rebecca. 2014. men explain things to me. chicago: haymarket books. thomas-hunt, melissa c., and katherine w. phillips. 2004. “when what you know is not enough: expertise and gender dynamics in task groups.” personality and social psychology bulletin 30 (12): 1585–1598. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0146167204271186. tirrell, lynne. 2018. “authority and gender: flipping the f-switch.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq /2018.3.5772. wanderer, jeremy. 2011. “addressing testimonial injustice: being ignored and being rejected.” philosophical quarterly 62 (246): 148–169. https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1467-9213.2011.712.x. johnson – mansplaining and illocutionary force published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 casey rebecca johnson is an assistant professor at the university of idaho. her research focuses on the effects of social position and power on agents’ abilities to do what they want with their words and knowledge. she is the editor of the volume voicing dissent (routledge, 2017). 8168 johnson title page 8168 johnson final format care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 1 article 2 care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities iva apostolova dominican university college, iva.apostolova@dominicanu.ca elaina gauthier-mamaril aberdeen university, e.gmamaril@abdn.ac.uk recommended citation apostolova, iva and elaina gauthier-mamaril. . "care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities." feminist philosophy quarterly4, (1). article 2. care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities iva apostolova and élaina gauthier-mamaril abstract our paper focuses on the philosophical perspective of constructing active (as opposed to reactive) caring masculine agencies in the contemporary feminist discourse. since contemporary feminisms are not simply anti-essentialist but, more importantly, polyphonic, we believe that it is far more appropriate to talk about ‘masculinities’ as opposed to ‘masculinity.’ we are proposing a revised understanding of the self in which the self is not defined primarily in the dichotomous, categorical one-other relationship. we use paul ricoeur’s anthropology to describe the self as relational, as well as joan tronto’s recent perspective on care, which fits well with a ricoeurian reconstruction of the self. we also engage with raewyn connell’s discourse on masculinity and, more specifically, hegemonic masculinity. by using ‘caring masculine agencies’ as an alternative to ‘masculinity as reactive anti-femininity,’ we are proposing a paradigm shift that hopefully is flexible enough to respect the dynamism inherent to any act of genderidentification. keywords: hegemonic masculinities, reactive masculinities, active/caring masculinities, ethics of care, relational self our research aims at opening a new narrative space for masculinity within a feminist context. more specifically, we will focus on the philosophical perspective of constructing caring masculine agencies that would be active (as opposed to reactive) in the contemporary feminist discourse. since contemporary feminisms are not simply anti-essentialist but, more importantly, polyphonic, we believe that it is far more appropriate to talk about ‘masculinities’ in the plural, as opposed to ‘masculinity’ in the singular.1 we believe that as far as the masculinity discourse is 1 we accept r. w. connell’s understanding of masculinities as “socially constructed configurations of gender practice” (connell 2005a, 1805). 1 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, concerned, it is already embedded in the feminist discourse.2 however, this discourse has often been described as a reactive type of masculinity, a masculinity entrenched in the dialogue, or the lack thereof, between the categorical ‘one’ and ‘other’ (sex), where the ‘other’ has been defined either more radically, as exclusively ‘feminine’ and underprivileged, or more moderately, as standing in an opposition to the ‘one.’ we believe that it is time to revise the classical feminist discourse of the ‘one-other’ relationship with the hope of moving away from it and constructing new masculinities which are not (still) anchored in a discourse of power. in light of this, we would like to propose a revised understanding of the self in which the self is not defined primarily in the dichotomous, categorical one-other relationship. we will use paul ricoeur’s work to describe the self as not only narrative but, more importantly, relational. while we fully recognize the richness of the literature on relationality (relational ontology), we have chosen paul ricoeur’s perspective of the self for two main reasons. first, and also practically, joan tronto, whom we use extensively in our paper, herself engages in a dialogue with ricoeur’s anthropology. second, we feel that bringing in a thinker who is entrenched in the continental tradition, however tentative the divide may be, increases the intersectionality of the analysis which is, we are convinced, necessary for the purposes of constructing the possibility for caring masculine agencies. in taking relational ontology as our starting point, we thus recognize that relationships with others are essential for the existence of the self. thus, we will argue that the self is constituted in and through relationship with others. this relational picture of the self necessitates a new discourse involving the notion of care at its center. we will use joan tronto’s recent works where she proposes a new perspective on care which, we find, fits well with a ricoeurian reconstruction of the self. tronto advocates a structural approach to care (as opposed to treating care as a personal attitude only) where care is viewed as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. that world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (tronto 2013, 19). we share tronto’s belief that until we transform our social and political power practices into caring practices, where all institutions are reformed to embody the care for the ‘life-sustaining web’ built by the self and its relationships, including to itself, we cannot really hope to live peacefully and democratically as equals. this 2 we use the term ‘masculinity discourse’ loosely here but with emphasis on how masculinity has been handled in the feminist academic literature. this would point in the direction of “masculine domination” and “modes of thinking that are themselves products of millennia of masculine domination,” “the historical social structures of masculine rule” as pierre bourdieu calls it (bourdieu 1996–1997, 191). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 transformation requires, among other things, redefining such key concepts as agency, autonomy, and vulnerability, all intimately connected to the ‘ethics of responsibility.’ we thus hope to show that although the relational self is genderinformed (we do not limit the genders to two), it is free to engage in various feminine as well as masculine discourses and behaviors all at once. the paper follows a ‘backward’ tripartite structure in which we gradually build up to the discussion of active masculinities. we first expose what we believe is the best normative platform for constructing active masculinities. we make a case for ethics of care as the alternative normative platform of choice in which the (moral) agent is interpreted as a caring agent. we believe that, on the one hand, ethics of care pairs well with another type of alternative normative ethics platform, such as virtue ethics, in that both of them put at the center the self/agency as opposed to various principles of action. we consider it an advantage for the ability of a normative theory to co-operate, as it were, with another normative theory. on the other hand, ethics of care leads directly to relational ontology in which the self/agent is constructed relationally (as our construction of a ricoeur-inspired relational self will illustrate), as opposed to dichotomously, for example. it is in this nondichotomous milieu that we think active masculinities can be successfully constructed and sustained. it needs to be noted at the outset that what we mean by active masculinities is caring masculinities, a term which will be put together as the very last stage of the paper, on the backdrop of connell’s discussion of “hegemonic masculinity.”3 care as structure: noddings’s model of care in her 1984 seminal work, nel noddings argued that it is care, which we are all born into, and not duty, that is at the base of ethical behavior. we have chosen noddings’s version of ethics of care as we very much sympathize with her effort to build an alternative bottom-up normative ethics which kills many birds with one stone, as it were. our sympathy is based on two main merits the discussion of her theory brings to our project. first, it shows how ethics of care can, in fact, function as an alternative normative ethical system, one with heightened sensitivity to gender issues. and second, the noddings-tronto debate is not only exemplary in that it allows us to see the carving up of a normative ethical model in action, so to speak, but it also leads us to a new and, we believe, highly potent (from a theoretical point of view) consideration of care, namely, care as structure. we believe that it is care as structure that holds the key to proposing a different model of looking at types of masculinities within the gendered self. put otherwise, we believe that, if we accept the platform of ethics of care where the agent/self is 3 see connell 2005a, 2005b. 3 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, formed and continuously ‘evaluated’ in relation to all other agents/selves, we will comfortably make the transition to considering the agent/self as a polyphonous gendered self. tronto: care as structure joan tronto was one of the early critics of noddings’s ethics of care. tronto, along with disability scholars such as sunaura taylor (2014) and christine kelly (2013), cautions that even under ideal circumstances, care as a moral attitude poses problems. care is often asymmetrical and labor intensive; it requires a constant displacement of one’s self in order to meet the needs of the other. under taylor and kelly’s criticism of care, we need to be mindful of the possibility of using care for the construction of just another ableist picture of justice. but if we interpret care as a structure, as opposed to a moral attitude, as tronto ends up doing, we are bound to accept relational ontology, and we can at least map out various forms of formal and informal care practices on the basis of which different public policies can be built. (it is a long-standing criticism of tronto’s that nodding’s platform of care has difficulties being applied outside the family structure.) although the logic of care is in direct opposition to the logic of domination, applying the former will require a close look at things like purposiveness, politics, particularity, and plurality (tronto 2010, 162). the bottom line is that the logic of care requires a constant negotiation of the ends of care, the relationship between the existing power relations and care relations, as well as reconciling the needs of diverse populations. since care structure is intimately linked to recognizing and catering to the needs of groups and individuals in a unique way, as opposed to a standardized way, it is paramount that the complex—and often fraught with ambiguity and vagueness—discourse of determining needs (as opposed to, or in conjunction with, wants) is taken seriously. this realization presents us with a model whose complexity and multidimensionality are further amplified by the fact that the model itself is to be constantly renegotiated in real time. the requirement of renegotiation makes us aware that care is, in fact, a process of caring. in other words, if we want to understand care as a process and not a commodity, it is inadequate to appeal to an a priori organizational purpose, or to cater to the desire of holism, which is, no doubt, imbedded in care itself. to make sense of the complexity of care as structure, we need to ask: how does the institution understand and negotiate its own needs? how is the effectiveness of care evaluated? how are the responsibilities within the organization allocated? we suppose that relational responsibility does away with a substantive account of responsibility under which we abide by a formal set of relationship properties which entail each other. thus, a given community, in caring for the relationships which are immediately formed among its members, will try to refine 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 the understanding of the moral beliefs, extend the consensus, and eliminate the conflict where this is possible. along the same lines, accepting the logic of care does not, in fact, allow us to ignore the existing power structures. this is especially true for placing care in a global context. while it remains a brute fact that we are born and live for the duration of our lives in relationships, which creates various degrees of dependence among the members of a given community, we cannot ignore another fact, namely, that relationships imminently carry power differentials. failing to understand this, as tronto puts it, creates moral harm ‘on its face’ (tronto 2012, 313). the understanding that new relationships develop within the network of existing ones (which exist within a communal framework) should tip us off that relationships are ever-growing complexities, and understanding them means understanding the dynamics, including the power dynamics, within them. it is this tension between care structure and power structure that will be explored in a subsequent section of this paper, where we will map out a possible new model of constructing active/caring masculinities. but before we get there, we need to shed more light on what we mean by the relational self, since it will be the relational self that acts as a springboard for caring masculinities. the relational self: from oneself as another to caring masculine agencies the idem and the ipse: ricoeur’s attempt at shifting the understanding of selfhood our proposed perspective on caring masculine agencies fits well, we find, with ricoeur’s anthropological model of the self. after expounding briefly on ricoeur’s model of the self, we will respond to tronto’s objections to using ricoeurian anthropology in ethics of care. we are hoping to shed light on the fact that both can be used in conjunction to open up a post-dialectical, or a post-binary, perspective on identity and selfhood to show that, if there is always tension with otherness, that otherness is (a) not always exterior to ourselves and (b) does not always come neatly in pairs, but is, most of the time, invested in a complex web. in the introduction to oneself as another, ricoeur expresses his endeavour to move away from an atemporal understanding of the self as an isolated and immediate ‘i,’, as a subject that can in turn either be over-evaluated or underevaluated. by introducing otherness as constitutive of one’s own identity, ricoeur draws attention to the mediated and relational quality of selfhood. by proposing the overarching dialectic of “on one side, identity as sameness (latin idem, german glechkeit, french mêmeté); on the other, identity as selfhood (latin ipse, german selbstheit, french ipséité),” ricoeur attempts to explain how we, in fact, live the tension between the continuity and the discontinuity of our temporal existence (ricoeur 1992, 1). while sameness allows us to account for our permanence in time, selfhood structures the internal discontinuities that arise from the fact that we live in spatial-temporal contexts that include a variety of discontinuous events. for 5 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, ricoeur, we make sense of this tension through narrativity, by constructing and telling our life story within a social order and a web of relationships. the autonomous/vulnerable self ricoeur’s narrative construction of selfhood through time allows him to introduce agency as the playing of multiple roles. for example, just as identity is never divorced from otherness, for ricoeur, autonomy is never dissociated from vulnerability. translated into a context of ethics of care, this means that each individual has the capacity to both receive and give care. it is also important to note that, just as otherness is never only an external opposition to the self, autonomy and vulnerability are not polar opposites whose respective powers wane as the other’s grows stronger. it is tempting to conceive of autonomy as belonging to a self with a greater degree of agency that is as invulnerable as it can be, yet: for ricoeur, however, the two notions are bound together inseparably. each form of autonomy has a corresponding figure of fragility (i.e., vulnerability) (76). autonomy needs the experience of vulnerability: it turns autonomy from a general supposition into a task to be performed. the highest form of autonomy, then, does not consist in the vindication of vulnerability, but in the mediation of both notions in the social order. (hettema 2014, 496) therefore, when evaluating selfhood, we cannot abstract ideas of activity from ideas of passivity, or notions of power from notions of powerlessness. as beings capable of reflecting on their own constructed selfhood, all humans experience these tensions at the very core of what we consider to be our own ‘identity.’ our narrative must be open to criticism and challenges. identifying with different masculinities, for example, is never only an autonomous-invulnerable choice, but is always also the result of various instances of vulnerability within each individual. thus, by proposing a perspective on caring masculine agencies, we are not positioning ourselves against what could be regarded as ‘substantial’ qualities of hegemonic masculinity such as power and autonomy. rather, if agency is inseparable from passivity, this necessitates that we include people who identify themselves within the masculinities spectrum without exhibiting ‘substantial’ masculine qualities, or in addition, and even on the contrary, exhibiting ‘substantial’ feminine qualities. this means not only that they are capable of providing care as opposed to forcefully oppressing (taking care), but also that they need to receive care for themselves. thus, caring masculine agencies must also imply caring masculine passivities. a philosophical approach to discourses about masculinities can therefore propose a complex relational model of selfhood that could encourage meta-dialectical considerations of gender identification. we recognise that this kind 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 of identification happens within social structures, and that is why we believe that structural practices of care can inform and be informed, in turn, by the relational construct that is selfhood. this statement, however, cannot be made without reservations and we must acknowledge that tronto herself raises issues with the use of any kind of philosophical anthropology as a basis for an alternative normative ethics (i.e., ethics of care). we will address these issues next. responding to tronto’s “practices all the way up” objection to the ricoeurian anthropology by conceiving of care ethics from a structural, care-about point of view, tronto and her coauthors advocate for a “practices all the way up” approach to ethics that builds upon the moral questions that arise from caring practices as supposed to being deduced from moral theories (tronto, van nistelrooij, and schaafsma 2014, 489). they are wary of using any specific philosophical anthropology as a foundation, including ricoeur’s, because any anthropological foundation will inevitably exclude other diverging accounts of human beings and their relationships and should therefore not be used as the basis for a normative ethics. however, it is our position that tronto’s project of structural care, especially with its emphasis on the relational and nested qualities of care, is not incompatible with ricoeur’s exploration of the autonomous/vulnerable self. on the contrary, the possibilities that ricoeur’s anthropology opens up are rather amenable to a “practices all the way up” approach. first, tronto, van nistelrooij, and schaafsma stress the fact that “caring practices are always contextual and relational” (2014, 489). this relationality is what ricoeur puts forward in his analysis of the construction of selfhood. he multiplies the dialectics (idem/ipse, sufferer/agent), but we believe that this can be opened up into a horizon in which strict dialectical poles are not the only way to make sense of the selfhood landscape. by highlighting how dialectical tensions within an individual are always intertwined with external relationships and oppositions, we maintain that ricoeur, while not completely abandoning binary concept couplings, frames selfhood in a less rigid and decisively nonlinear way. thus, using ricoeur’s anthropological framework to conceive of various dynamic practices and fluid conceptions of the self would not be committing hermeneutical heresy, and neither would it preclude us from expanding its foundation. second, tronto and her coauthors underline the nested quality of caring practices that can be related to the embedded quality of the self, as per ricoeur’s theory. one could object that the difference that tronto et al. claim between practices and theories still holds in this case; however, we do not think that the analogy should be so easily dismissed. as a reflexive construct, the self evolves in space and time, in relation to other individuals as well as to institutions. thus, when 7 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, tronto et al. claim that the ends of individual caring practices are parts of larger, institutional and societal care practices, we are convinced that they are echoing ricoeur’s assertion that the self is narratively constructed not only in contact with other individuals, but also with institutional and societal discourses. it is, therefore, not incongruous that we turn to both tronto and ricoeur in trying to understand what kind of philosophical discourse contributes the most to evaluating and, subsequently, constructing conceptions of masculinities. caring masculine agencies: the philosophy angle when we were researching this paper, our main concern was to reflect on what a philosophical approach had to offer to a discourse on masculinities. such a discourse is a reflection on the ‘form,’ on the ‘act’ of identification and selfidentification. both our readings in the sociology of masculinity and in feminist philosophy have pointed out the somewhat common-sense negative definition of masculinity as anti-femininity. we, therefore, approached the definition of masculinity/ies as a question about whether it would be possible to shift this inquiry outside the binary, dialectical power polarity, and what this ‘outside’ would look like. in addition to our choice of ethics of care as the most appropriate normative ethical system, ricoeur’s anthropological account of the mediated, constructed self, although still employing dialectical couples, provides another platform from which we believe conceiving of a post-polarized perspective on masculinities is made possible. we have termed this perspective ‘caring masculine agencies.’ we would like to attempt an explanation of what we mean by that, knowing full well that we will not exhaust the subject in any shape or form. shifting from reactive/active to caring masculinities as we have already discussed, when considering the relationality of the self, one of the consequences of defining selfhood as constructed by the mediation of our relationships with others, with social environments and institutions, is that it is no longer possible to think of it in terms of strict dichotomies. for example, autonomy and vulnerability are not to be conceived as being mutually exclusive or to be impermeable to one another, but rather as being bound together to better represent human lived experiences from the point of view of being simultaneously an agent and a sufferer. furthermore, we can take away from tronto’s critical appraisal of ethics of care that a care structure on a social and political level would understand care in a broader sense and, therefore, allow for the construction of caring masculine agencies that do not necessarily need to position themselves as being feminine or anti-feminine, since the existential reality of the “need for care” has been “redistributed” to all humans, regardless of gender. from this premise of 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 care as a socio-political structure, the self-defining, identity-building value of “consideration” can be derived. if the notion of care can enable us, through normative precepts, to recognise the otherness in ourselves and the constant inner tension between autonomy and vulnerability, we propose that we can draw from it an ethical attitude of consideration. to be considerate within a caring framework is to enact one of the instantiations of care. it is an attitude, a posture that one can adopt to perform the awareness and affirmation of the self, and as such, it is a fruitful way of showcasing how active masculinities could be formed. to be considerate in this way means to practice the dual exercise of assessing our capabilities and vulnerabilities and becoming aware of the capabilities and the vulnerabilities of others in order to act upon this knowledge. it is not self-effacement, as we do have consideration for ourselves, but neither is it an exclusionary and atomistic affirmation of self. when the agent is considerate in her actions, she makes an effort to not only assert herself in the world, but also to understand how she is of the world. within the caring framework that reminds us all of our co-constructed identities that need to draw upon our environment (physical and socio-political), consideration may seem a tad pragmatic, but we believe it is a useful way of grounding the social skills that are necessary to enact care, such as the skill to negotiate the self–other landscape. we do acknowledge that opening a dialogue between masculinity and femininity is a good strategy to expose the fluidity of gender as well as its significant influence on institution formation. however, what we believe is even better, is placing masculinities in the context of care interpreted as a structure of thinking, conversing, and socializing. we believe that, through care, a very important aspect of social practices is brought about, namely considerate negotiation. negotiation requires relational ontology as well as acting, as opposed to merely observing and analyzing. in other words, we believe that the use of the model of care as structure can be expanded further. (so far, we have seen in the literature the model of care being used to redefine the human–animal relationship in ecofeminist scholarship, or to criticize the existing capitalist socio-economic model, as tronto does.) on the one hand, it offers what lorraine code (1991) calls “mitigated relativism,” under which a middle ground is opened up where the creative tension between the personal and collective experiences and histories, material circumstances, and social structures is maintained without precluding an open dialogue (320). on the other hand, care retains a form of normativity necessary for the creation and functioning of social practices, without turning it into rigid normativity under which “the unwarranted assumption that role and identity correspond” threatens to set us back to the dialectical-dichotomous-adversarial framework of reactive masculinity (and reactive femininity) (connell 2005b, 70). 9 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, in order to better flesh out what we propose as active or caring masculinities, we would like to relate our discussion to connell’s seminal notion of “hegemonic masculinity” (connell 2005b). we echo connell and messerschmidt’s concern that despite the many transformations of hegemonic masculinity as the main social factor in proliferating the domination of men over women, it is, today, still an active practice, despite its immense internal complexity (connell and messerschmidt 2005, 846). the rise of many men’s rights movements around the world over the past decades has done little for abolishing gender hierarchies. on the contrary, as connell aptly points out elsewhere, it seemed to have triggered a wave of neoconservative and antifeminist politics (connell 2005a, 1806).4 it seems that hegemonic masculinity, along with gender itself, has become more fluid but, because of that, also more insidious. for example, instead of resorting to forms of violence, mainstream media uses commercial sports to celebrate “force, domination, and competitive success,” all unmistakably hegemonic masculine traits (1816). what is more, the visible mechanisms of hegemony, often masked as positive parading of culturally acceptable virtues, are accompanied by invisible ones where the hegemonic masculinity is “withdrawn from scrutiny,” as in the many cases of media reports of us high school shootings witnessed over the past decade 4 to illustrate connell’s point, we would like to mention a 2016 documentary, the red pill, directed by cassie jaye. the documentary, which has enjoyed high ratings since its release and could be considered to represent a perception of feminism in mainstream us pop culture, follows the young director’s own personal encounter with some of the men’s rights movements in the us. the documentary ends with ms. jaye’s confession that she no longer considers herself a feminist. while we believe that the documentary is honest in its intention to present the views on both sides of the gender equality fence, what we found to be a glaring gap was a lack of critical reflection on the types of male voices heard in the documentary. while a certain slant is every artist’s privilege, a consideration for the situatedness of the male, and female for that matter, voices heard is of paramount importance when dealing with gender equality issues. and so, instead of enabling men’s rights activists to speak on behalf of all men, an emphasis on the specific vulnerabilities that some men face in contemporary us society, would have rendered a much more sensitive and honest approach to the topic. as connell successfully observes, “in the domain of power, men collectively control the institutions of coercion and the means of violence (e.g., weapons). but men are also the main targets of military violence and criminal assaults. . . . the disadvantages listed above are, broadly speaking, the conditions of the advantages” (connell 2005a, 1809). “equally important,” connell continues, “the men who receive most of the benefits and the men who pay most of the costs are not the same individuals” (1806). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 (connell and messerschmidt 2005, 835). we take connell’s point that the notion of alliance (between the genders) is really important, both theoretically and practically, for achieving gender equality (connell 2005a, 1817). we believe that the concept of alliance is founded upon the notion of considerate negotiation, itself based on the ethical attitude of consideration, mentioned above.5 to go even further, while sidestepping most of the accumulated criticisms of hegemonic masculinity with which connell and messerschmidt diligently engage, we would like to single out one concern that active/caring masculinities can help with (connell and messerschmidt 2005, 836–845). we agree with s. m. whitehead’s criticism of hegemonic masculinity as an obfuscating concept which results in an “abstract structural dynamics” that does not take into consideration the fluidity of masculinities but instead tries to fit them into an overarching structure of sorts (whitehead 2002, 94). put otherwise, hegemonic masculinity can be shown to result in “structural determinism” that erases the subject, a stance with which connell and messerschmidt “flatly disagree” (connell and messerschmidt 2005, 843). it seems to us that what connell and messerschmidt propose in response to whitehead’s criticism is an intersectional (without using the term itself) analysis of masculinity, supported by various social and historical studies of gender. while intersectionality in gender study is indispensable, we worry that intersectional analysis might remain too local (and hence, partial) to be of use, especially on a global scale. we believe that the concept of active/caring masculinities might just provide the structural unity for dealing with all existing ambiguities and tensions that are part and parcel of the process of understanding gender dynamics and, subsequently, for dealing with existing or anticipated conflicts among various masculinities and femininities. the notion of active/caring masculinities would not threaten to lead to structural determinism which obscures and/or erases the self because it has imbedded in it the requirement of ongoing critical evaluation and reevaluation of the notions of agency, autonomy, and (gender) identity. we believe that of all existing normative models, the one grounded in care is the most promising in the sense of being the most flexible and non-content-imposing. in other words, gender analysis focused on practices of care has the potential of bringing together various forms of femininities and masculinities in a decisively nondichotomous way. thus, it seems to us that an emphasis on constructing active/caring masculinities could serve the purpose of uniting, without homogenizing, the empirical analysis of hegemonic masculinity on the three levels described by connell and messerschmidt, namely local, regional, and global (849). 5 connell seems to refer to care almost exclusively in the sphere of domestic practices, if at all. this seems to relegate care to a practice that has a rather narrow reach (see connell 2005a). 11 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, at the same time, an emphasis on care would not only not exclude the social embodiment discourse, but quite on the contrary, encourage it (851–852). care for one’s self implies care for one’s body. care for the body, mine and the other’s, is necessitated by the understanding of one’s vulnerabilities. it is precisely because the self is both autonomous and vulnerable that it requires care. this means that a model of active masculinity—and, indeed, of any genderidentification—starts with recognizing what is common to all individuals: their inescapable and constitutive relationality and, therefore, their need for care and their capacity to care for one another. this does not mean that genders are, or even should be, undifferentiated. it simply directs the crafting of (self)-identification from the common-to-the-individual self via the acknowledgement of differences, as opposed to the more strictly dichotomous position that the differences between individual people trump their relational situation and place them into binary categories that only produce social sense if they are diametrically opposed to one another. in broad strokes, we could say that while passive or reactive masculinities focus on digging a trench that promptly divides up masculinity from femininity, active masculinities pick their own unique style of building on the ground they share with femininities and other gender-identifications. concluding remarks as history has shown all too well, if ‘masculinity’ is interpreted in an essentialist way, it can easily lead to ideology. the connection between masculinity, power, and domination is all too evident to be lost on feminist thinkers. we believe, however, that the same goes for reactive masculinities. if masculinity is always interpreted dialectically in opposition to femininity, then the diversity of masculinities recognized within a given social context will not help the case since, at the end of the day, all of the different masculinities will be placed in opposition to all the different femininities. diversifying masculinity will not end the process of creating masculine institutions, for example, even if women are employed in them. as todd reeser (2010, 20) aptly points out, “various institutions clearly have selfinterest in masculinity: the government needs soldiers to defend itself, so it produces military masculinity; the business world needs a capitalistic masculinity to make money, so it makes its version of gender appear ideal.” we deliberately kept the unconventional plural of ‘agency’ to emphasise even more what we understand to be the plural and multifaceted way that an individual chooses to identify as “masculine.” once more basing ourselves on tronto and connell, we believe that a theoretical discourse on masculinities must acknowledge that this concept is made up of ‘practices’ that must continue to inform its definition dynamically, as opposed to categorically. that is why we propose the integration within a discourse on masculinities of the general structures 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 of care as well as of the relational self. we believe that it could not only be a first step outside the anti-femininity paradigm towards a more active and positive definition, but also it could propose a viable alternative to some of the issues that connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity encounters or responds to. furthermore, as structures, these philosophical options do not prescribe strict normative content but rather place the agent within a normative environment in which it can grow, change, and evolve. by using ‘caring masculine agencies’ as an alternative to ‘masculinity as reactive anti-femininity,’ we are proposing a paradigm shift that hopefully is flexible enough to respect the dynamism inherent to any act of genderidentification. references bourdieu, pierre. 1996–1997. “masculine domination revisited.” berkeley journal of sociology 41:189–203. ———. 2002. masculine domination. stanford: stanford university press. code, lorraine. 1991. what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. connell, raewyn. 1983. which way is up? essays on sex, class, and culture. sydney: allen & unwin. ———. 2005a. “change among the gatekeepers: men, masculinities, and gender equality in the global arena.” signs 30 (3): 1801–1825. ———. 2005b. masculinities. cambridge: polity press. connell, raewyn, and james w. messerschmidt. 2005. “hegemonic masculinity: rethinking the concept.” gender and society 19 (6): 829–859. gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice. psychological theory and women’s development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. gruen, lori. 2014. “facing death and practicing grief.” in ecofeminism: feminist intersections with other animals and the earth, edited by carol j. adams and lori gruen, 127–141. new york: bloomsbury. hettema, theo l. 2014. “autonomy and its vulnerability: ricoeur’s view on justice as a contribution to care ethics.” medicine, health care and philosophy 17 (4): 493–498. kelly, christine. 2013. “building bridges with accessible care: disability studies, feminist care, scholarship, and beyond.” hypatia 28 (4): 784–800. noddings, nel. 1984. caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley: university of california press. reeser, todd w. 2010. masculinities in theory: an introduction. chichester: wileyblackwell. 13 apostolova and gauthier-mamaril: care and the self: caring masculinities published by scholarship@western, ricoeur, paul. 1992. oneself as another. chicago/london: university of chicago press. taylor, sunaura. 2014. “inter-dependent animals: a feminist disability ethic-ofcare.” in ecofeminism: feminist intersections with other animals and the earth, edited by carol j. adams and lori gruen, 109–126. new york: bloomsbury. tronto, joan c. 1989. “women and caring: what can feminists learn about morality from caring?” in gender/body/knowledge: feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, edited by alison m. jaggar and susan r. bordo, 172–187. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. ———. 2010. “creating caring institutions: politics, plurality, and purpose.” ethics and social welfare 4 (2): 158–171. ———. 2012. “partiality based on relational responsibilities: another approach to global ethics.” ethics and social welfare 6 (3): 303–316. ———. 2013. caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice. new york: new york university press. tronto, joan c., inge van nistelrooij, and petruschka schaafsma. 2014. “ricoeur and the ethics of care.” medicine, health care and philosophy 17 (4): 485–491. warren, karen. 1990. “the power and the promise of ecological feminism.” environmental ethics 12 (2): 125–146. whitehead, s. m. 2002. men and masculinities: key themes and new directions. cambridge: polity press. iva apostolova is an assistant professor of philosophy at dominican university college. her research interests include early analytic philosophy, especially the philosophy of bertrand russell, the metaphysics and epistemology of neutral monism, philosophy of memory, ethics of care, bioethics, and critical thinking. élaina gauthier-mamaril is a phd candidate in philosophy at the university of aberdeen. her current research interests include spinoza's notion of individual and collective agency, relational autonomy, feminist new materialisms, and theories of patient participation in sociology of medicine. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 2 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/2 feminist philosophy quarterly care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities iva apostolova elaina gauthier-mamaril recommended citation care and the self: a philosophical perspective on constructing active masculinities feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 3 article 5 recommended citation vince, rosa. 2018. “testimonial smothering and pornography: silencing refusing sex and reporting assault.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3). article 5. 2018 testimonial smothering and pornography: silencing refusing sex and reporting assault rosa vince university of sheffield, rvince1@sheffield.ac.uk vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 1 testimonial smothering and pornography: silencing refusing sex and reporting assault rosa vince abstract this paper defends the claim that there are two previously underexplored ways in which pornography silences women. these ways that pornography silences are (1) the smothering of refusal and (2) the smothering of sexual assault reports, and they can be explained in part through kristie dotson’s account of “testimonial smothering.” unlike the work of other writers in the pornography as silencing literature, my discussion of silenced refusal of sex deals with the cases where women have said yes to sex but would have said no if they had felt that they could have. i show that this, and cases where women do not report sexual assault, count as testimonial smothering through identifying rape myths as a species of “pernicious ignorance.” i make the connection to pornography in presenting evidence that pornography contributes to acceptance of rape myths. this takes us to my general conclusion: dotson’s account of testimonial smothering gives us a way in which pornography contributes to the silencing of women, by silencing their refusal of sex and their reports of sexual assault. keywords: silencing, speech, kristie dotson, pornography, sexual assault, rape myths, refusal work on women’s silencing through pornography has so far focused largely on rae langton’s account of failed refusal of sex.1,2 this paper defends the claim that there are two underexplored ways in which pornography silences women. these are (1) the smothering of refusal and (2) the smothering of assault reports, and they can be explained in part through kristie dotson’s account of 1 i will not discuss the influential account of silencing proposed by langton for two reasons. first, it has already been discussed a great deal; see for example jacobson (1995), bird (2002), and langton and hornsby’s (2009) responses. second, i think we could benefit from an account that does not rely on austin’s speech act theory, as that is where problems with langton’s account generally arise. 2 influenced by mackinnon and dworkin, e.g. mackinnon (1987) and dworkin (1981). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 2 “testimonial smothering.”3 my discussion of silenced refusal of sex differs from langton’s, in that i deal with the cases where women in fact say yes to sex, but would, if they felt they could, have said no. these are two contexts in which women cannot speak that are so widespread that they call for explanation and move the debate from the confused ground of “illocutionary silencing” to the more tangible “locutionary silencing,” or “literally not speaking.” i do not claim testimonial smothering is the sole factor contributing to women consenting to unwanted sex and not reporting sexual assault, or that pornography is the sole cause of this testimonial smothering. i claim it is plausible that testimonial smothering plays an important role in women’s silence in these two cases and that pornography plays an important role in that testimonial smothering. applying dotson’s work in this way is valuable in demonstrating the broad utility of testimonial smothering as a concept, and in filling explanatory gaps regarding these two cases of women not speaking, where the existing literature is limited. this paper is split into four parts. in part 1, i suggest two circumstances in which women are silenced: women not refusing sex when they don’t want it, and women not reporting rapes and sexual assaults. in part 2, i explain an account from dotson which describes similar kinds of silencing and categorizes them into testimonial quietening and testimonial smothering. in part 3, i apply dotson’s account of testimonial smothering to the silenced refusal of sex, and taking into account various studies into women’s ability to speak in these circumstances, i demonstrate that pornography contributes to this silencing. in part 4, i apply dotson’s work to silenced testimony of rapes and sexual assaults and show that pornography contributes in much the same way. i do not commit to any particular definition of pornography. my arguments will hold under most definitions. they certainly hold under a radical feminist definition: “the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words” (mackinnon 1987, 176). they will also hold under an everyday definition, such as “sexually explicit material aimed at arousing the viewer,” as long as most pornography is also oppressive and furthers harmful attitudes towards women.4 i do not expect or intend my arguments to hold against feminist pornography or “erotica,”5 or against pornography under an 3 in a surprising and encouraging instance of two people independently and simultaneously drawing the same conclusions, a similar argument to this is made in beecroft (unpublished). 4 i am not assuming this; i spend the end of part 3 arguing that typical pornography does further harmful attitudes towards women. 5 some feminists use this term for nonoppressive sexually explicit material aimed at arousal. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 3 everyday definition in a possible world where oppressive and harmful pornography is uncommon.6 whilst the area i am entering tends to treat pornography as speech, my discussion does not require commitment to this position.7 the consequence is simply that where i think of “pornography that silences,” some will think of “speech that silences.” finally, i wish to make it clear that i will make no prescriptions in this paper as to what should be done about the problem of silencing. i leave it as an opportunity for other writers and researchers to discuss whether pornography can and should be restricted in order to minimize its silencing of women. i only show that pornography does contribute to the silencing of women in certain ways, though i do make the more modest claim that with this kind of silencing explained, we are in a better position to next establish what might be required in solving the problem. part 1: two failures to speak i suggest there are two very common circumstances in which women fail to speak, and that these should be characterized through a silencing account. these are: (1) women not refusing, and consenting to, sex that they do not want, and (2) women not reporting rape and sexual assault. in j. l. austin’s terms these are both instances of locutionary silencing, as they are not speech acts that failed in some way, but rather they are cases where women do not utter at all. 8 this means that they are a kind of silencing that all can take seriously, not just those who defend austin’s speech act theory and the difficult concept of “illocutionary silencing.” this can help further our understanding of how pornography may silence women’s refusal of sex, providing an important alternative to the claims langton makes. silenced refusal of sex many women do not refuse sex when they do not want it. muehlenhard and cook (1988, 64) found that 97.5% of women in a university had experienced unwanted sexual activity at some point in their lives, 9 and o’sullivan and allgeier 6 i mean to imply here that i am not “anti-pornography” and that my arguments in this paper do not conflict with my pro-sex worker commitments; i am simply pointing to some ways that the pornography industry currently contributes to harms to women. these harms are not necessarily intrinsic to pornography. 7 for an excellent case against pornography being speech, and analysis of the related subordination debate, see saul (2006). 8 or, as in some cases, they do not utter refusal at all—they utter consent. 9 in this study 507 men and 486 women filled in an anonymous questionnaire in a room with other respondents (seated at alternating desks to avoid being influenced by others) and a research assistant, all of the same gender. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 4 (1998, 239) reported that 50% of women (compared to 26% of men) in relationships had consented10 to unwanted sexual activity with their partner in the last fortnight.11 in most studies, men who had unwanted sexual activity most often reported peer pressure as their reason for consenting,12,13 whereas women more often consented out of fear or a sense of duty. koss and oros (1982, 456) found that 32.8% of 2,016 women students had unwanted sex because they feared that refusal was pointless as the man would be unable to stop.14 in muehlenhard and cook (1988, 65), 56.6% of women reported having unwanted sex because they feared the man would terminate the relationship if they did not consent. sandberg, jackson and petretic-jackson found that 63% of women had unwanted sexual activity because they “felt it would be inappropriate to refuse,” despite 98% of the same women saying they were “completely comfortable saying no to sexual activity with a dating partner” (quoted in walker 1997, 158). shotland and hunter (1995, 232) showed that 67% of women consented to unwanted sex because, as one woman said of her partner, “i did not want to disappoint him”; this was the most common reason given in this study.15 impett and peplau (2002) reported similar findings, but additionally observed racial differences in results: while around two-thirds of all women in the study had consented to unwanted sex, 100% of the african american women in the study had done so. though there is not space to cover it here, this shows that there is scope to address unwanted sex as a problem that not only disproportionately affects certain genders but also disproportionately affects certain races.16 i have 10 i do not mean to suggest that nonrefusal and consent are equivalent; i mean to be talking about cases where women do not refuse, and in addition they may consent. 11 in this study, 80 men and 80 women who were in relationships kept diaries of their sexual activities for two weeks. 12 the exception is muehlenhard and cook (1988), who present the broadly construed “enticement” (which bizarrely includes “something about the person turned you on” [61]) as the most common reason men engage in unwanted sexual activity. they did however separate “inexperience” (which seems to me a symptom of peer pressure anyway) and “peer pressure,” which showed 65.7% and 52.1% of men in engaging in unwanted sex for those reasons respectively. 13 notice this implies the pressure comes from other men. 14 this study involved 3,862 students completing a survey on their sexual experiences. 15 in this study, 378 women students responded to a questionnaire asking how many times they had participated in certain sexual practices and why. 16 this could be contributed to by dotson’s first kind of silencing, testimonial quietening, which demonstrates that black voices are taken less seriously than white voices. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 5 shown here that women often do not voice refusal when they do not want to have sex, and that this is often because of fear or a sense of duty. it may be objected that the cases in which a woman says yes and where a woman says nothing are very different cases. and they certainly are.17 however, as we will see, this does not mean there are different kinds of silencing at work. in both cases, a woman wants to say no, and that “no” is smothered for the kinds of reasons mentioned. this will not mean, as could be objected, that any speech that is not what the speaker would have preferred to say counts as this kind of silencing, because there are still three circumstances for testimonial smothering that need to be met, as we will see in part 2. silenced reports of assault it is difficult to establish how many women do not report rape, precisely because they do not report it. some women who do not report rape to the police may still report it in studies and to women’s crisis centres, but it is likely that there are many women who just don’t tell anyone. still we can gather information from studies and crisis centres, though we should be aware of the fact that we are potentially missing out huge numbers of women, and our figures for unreported rapes will always be too low. according to rainn (sexual assault prevention charity and hotline) 68% of rapes and sexual assaults in the us are unreported (rainn 2018), and according to rape crisis only 15% are reported in the uk (rape crisis england & wales 2018). so upwards of 68% of sexual assaults and rapes are never reported to the police; these women’s18 testimony on their experience is simply not spoken. these women fail to speak about their suffering, usually because of fear. linda belden recorded women’s testimonies to a crisis line over two years, and found that the most common reason women had for not reporting crimes to the police was fear of retaliation and fear of police. the second most common reason was fear of family members finding out; this was mostly the case with underage women. the third most common reason was fear of not being believed, or being blamed, and fourth most common was fear of violence from their partner if they 17 the person who has sex with someone who has said yes and the person who has sex with someone who has said nothing have each done something quite different, and those differences should be attended to in discussions of that person’s behaviour. here, however, we are concerned with the systematic silencing that affects what the woman can say. 18 i am aware that not all rape victims are women, but seeing as this is a paper about women’s silencing, and women represent upwards of 90% of rape victims, i will continue talking about women rape victims. rainn estimates 9/10 victims of rape are women, rape crisis claims 94% are women, and koss and oros (1982, 455) claim that according to the law enforcement assistance administration “virtually 100%” are women” (presumably they are rounding up). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 6 found out (linda belden 1979–1980, 9).19 mcgregor and colleagues (2000, 659) do not discuss women’s fears of violence or retaliation but cite fear of not being believed as the main reason women don’t report sexual assault and rape, thus explaining why women raped by strangers and suffering obvious injuries are the most likely to report.20 i have now shown that women not speaking about their sexual assaults and rapes is extremely common and often due to fears of violence and unsympathetic (fundamentally disbelieving) treatment. it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to these cases in the philosophical literature, given that they are so widespread. with austin’s speech act theory being so influential, writers on silencing have been more often concerned with the things women do say (or try to say), than the things they don’t. dotson’s writing is a refreshing and illuminating exception to that rule and provides us with the tools to explain potentially many kinds of silencing. part 2: dotson’s testimonial smothering in “tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing,” kristie dotson (2011) describes ways in which marginalized races, and black women in particular, are silenced. she terms this silencing a kind of “epistemic violence,” and separates this silencing into two kinds: “testimonial quieting” and “testimonial smothering.” i will briefly explain dotson’s account before discussing how it can be utilized in discussions of pornography. a key concept in dotson’s account is pernicious ignorance; this means a reliable ignorance that causes harm in a given context. this kind of ignorance is reliable in that it is “consistent or follows from a predictable epistemic gap”21 (dotson 2011, 238). it must also cause harm, but this will be different in each case (unless you subscribe to the view that all ignorance is harmful); physical and emotional harms will count, as well as social harms or harms to a movement. to give a very simple example: if some reliable ignorance causes a man to assault a woman, that ignorance is pernicious. epistemic violence occurs in relation to testimony when a hearer fails in understanding a speaker due to pernicious ignorance. dotson describes two kinds of silencing that fit this model of 19 the third reason listed here (fear of disbelief or blame) is also common in the study by jones et al. (2009), but the other fears are not reflected in their study with the same frequency. this is because their study is severely limited by ruling out women who do not speak good english, who were drunk when assaulted, and who did not want photographs taken of their vaginas (418). it is hardly surprising that women who have been sexually assaulted and are afraid of further assault would prefer not to have a stranger poking around in their vagina for the purposes of jones et al.’s study. 20these authors collected data of 958 people who accessed the sexual assault service over five years. 21 an epistemic gap is a lack of knowledge. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 7 epistemic violence. first, she describes “testimonial quieting,” when a hearer does not understand the speaker to be a person capable of knowing. for a speaker to give testimony, their audience must believe that they are knowers, otherwise their speech act will fail. when pernicious ignorance of a hearer causes them to not understand a speaker to be a knower, this constitutes testimonial quieting. the case that dotson describes is when black women’s speech is not taken seriously because of ignorance about black women as knowers. i describe testimonial quieting just to give a fuller picture of dotson’s account and will not discuss this kind of silencing in any further detail. dotson’s second kind of silencing is “testimonial smothering.” this occurs when a speaker realizes that their audience may not react or understand their testimony in an appropriate way and so censors their own speech. dotson (2011, 244) describes testimonial smothering as “the truncating of one’s own testimony in order to ensure that the testimony contains only content for which one’s audience demonstrates testimonial competence.” dotson urges us to understand these cases not as a free choice to speak (or not speak) about certain things, but rather as a coerced silencing; something about the hearer has forced the speaker to restrict their testimony. to show how this happens, dotson provides three circumstances that tend to feature22 in cases of testimonial smothering: 1) the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky; 2) the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker; and 3) testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance. (dotson 2011, 244; line breaks added for emphasis) before explaining these circumstances, i must first explain what dotson means by “testimonial incompetence.” an audience possesses “testimonial competence” if they have the ability to understand the speaker’s testimony and to identify cases where they have not understood the testimony. an audience possesses “testimonial incompetence” if they would fail to understand the speaker’s testimony and also fail to realize that they have not understood the testimony.23 for an audience to “understand”24 the testimony, they must find it “clearly comprehensible and defeasibly intelligible” (dotson 2011, 245). this 22 it is not clear whether dotson intends these conditions to be necessary for testimonial smothering, or for a number of them to be necessary. i think she can make that claim if she wants, but i will continue without making a commitment to this as it has little effect on my account. 23 explained more thoroughly in dotson (2011, 247). 24 dotson calls this particular kind of understanding “accurate intelligibility” (245). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 8 does not require that the audience clearly comprehend all of the testimony, but that the parts that the audience does not comprehend are apparent to them; they know when they don’t “get it.” the example dotson offers to illustrate this is herself attending a lecture on nuclear physics as a layperson: it will be pretty easy for her to tell when some material is not comprehensible to her (245–246). the first circumstance refers to situations in which speaking a certain testimony may risk harmful consequences. dotson (2011, 244–245) gives the example of women in african american communities wanting to report domestic violence, but being aware that there is a risk that hearers may understand their testimony as reinforcing racist associations between black people and violence. so, for black women, testimonies about domestic violence might be unsafe and risky because of the risk of harming attitudes to black people in general. the second circumstance refers to situations in which the audience indicate that it is likely that they will fail to understand whatever it is that the speaker wants to say. how they demonstrate this misunderstanding can be understood very broadly, to include examples such as an eye-roll or the hearer’s tone of voice indicating that they will be unsympathetic to the speaker’s point of view, but in a way that relates to a particular lack of understanding. whether this has occurred is left in the hands of the speaker: if they perceive25 testimonial incompetence, this condition has been met (regardless of the hearer’s intention). for example, if a man says to me, “are periods really that bad?” then he has indicated testimonial incompetence about periods. testimonial incompetence has been indicated by his word choice (“really” suggests disbelief) and by the need to ask the question at all; his asking shows that he has limited understanding of periods. i may then choose to silence myself, rather than risk him misunderstanding my testimony and thinking i am exaggerating or attentionseeking. while i remain faithful to dotson’s characterisations of the other features, here i am persuaded by beecroft that an amendment is necessary. beecroft (unpublished, 7–9) argues that the audience not demonstrating incompetence is not usually enough to enable a speaker to speak their testimony, as it is often reasonable for the speaker to come to expect incompetence until the audience demonstrates otherwise. given a context where rape myths are widely believed, it has to be demonstrated by the audience that they don’t believe rape myths, that is, that they are testimonially competent. one additional reason for accepting this amendment is that it more 25 i am going to assume that in all our cases, the perception on the part of the speaker is a “reasonable” one, and not a delusion of some kind. this is because while the speaker is not infallible, the speaker is well positioned to assess the level of understanding of their own speech, particularly when that speech is about something in regard to which their interlocutor is socially situated such that they are less likely to have direct access to the information (more on this later). see also note 31. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 9 neatly parallels the third condition; for the third condition, pernicious ignorance must only appear to be present from the speaker’s perspective. since we prioritize the speaker’s perspective for the third condition, it makes sense to do the same for the second. so the second circumstance can be restated as: “the audience must either demonstrate testimonial incompetence, or fail to demonstrate their competence, with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker” (beecroft, 9). the third circumstance will refer to situations described in the second circumstance, but with the additional qualifier that the testimonial incompetence displayed appears to be caused by the hearer’s pernicious ignorance. remember, pernicious ignorance is a reliable ignorance that causes harm in a given context. so if the aforementioned man has a gap in his knowledge about periods, and that ignorance causes harm, it counts as pernicious ignorance. in this example, it causes harm by virtue of making me feel ashamed and making me silence myself; dotson and i agree that someone silencing themselves can be understood as a harm in itself.26 a less controversially harmful consequence would perhaps be that i am not granted sick leave as the man is my boss and doesn’t understand the pain i am in, or i am not offered painkillers by him. in addition to “pernicious ignorance,” dotson provides us with the concept of “situated ignorance”; situated ignorance is ignorance possessed due to some social or epistemic position one holds. people in different positions have access to different knowledges, with epistemic advantages in some areas and disadvantages in others.27 the man in my example is in the position of being male, and this position means he does not have the tools to readily/directly understand the experience of periods; he is epistemically disadvantaged in understanding female bodily functions.28 in the same way, a white person will not have the tools to easily understand aspects of nonwhite communities, so they possess situated ignorance regarding nonwhite communities. although situated ignorance is probably unconscious and not blameworthy,29 it can still count as pernicious. firstly, situated ignorance is very much reliable; white people will consistently lack information about life in black communities, and this lack of knowledge is predictable. secondly, situated 26 at least when caused by a reliable ignorance. see dotson (2011, 241). 27 this thought is rooted in standpoint epistemology. for an account of this, see harding (1993) or longino (1990, 1999). 28 again, i am aware that some men do have periods, but i am counting the man in my example as one who does not and am writing in this way for the sake of ease. 29 although we may be considered morally responsible for making ourselves aware of potential situated ignorance that we might possess. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 10 ignorance can certainly cause harm.30 my period-pain example is a clear instance of this; the man possesses situated ignorance about periods, and his failing to understand my period pain causes harm. similarly, a black woman might suffer from a white person not understanding her testimony about experiences of racial injustice, when the white person’s ignorance is clearly situated. although situated ignorance is a kind of pernicious ignorance when it is harmful, there can also be situated ignorance that is not pernicious. it may appear that there is little difference between nonpernicious situated ignorance and everyday epistemic variations (e.g., carli knows more about football than dana because carli is a footballer); however, the key difference is that situated ignorance results from broader social structures (e.g., race, class, gender, etc.) and is therefore much more difficult to overcome.31 for this reason, situated ignorance is an important theoretical tool in understanding some types of epistemic variation. i have now explained the three circumstances for testimonial smothering and presented one kind of pernicious ignorance: situated ignorance. i will next move on to apply these concepts to pornography, refusal, and reporting assault. unsurprisingly, i will discuss situated ignorance men may possess with regard to information about life as a woman, as well as how pornography may contribute to testimonial incompetence. part 3: silenced refusal for this discussion we will consider two cases of silenced refusal and explain them with dotson’s testimonial smothering. the first case will be more decisive than the second, but i want to show that both count as silencing by pornography. • case (a): edina does not want to have sex, but she consents to sex with franco because she is afraid of the consequences of refusal; she has reason32 to suspect franco may be violent or end their relationship if she refuses. 30 note: situated ignorance is only also pernicious ignorance when it causes harm. 31 it would be fairly easy for dana to learn lots about football if she wished to, but not so easy to learn about working-class motherhood when dana is upper class. 32 i am going to assume in all of the cases we are considering that the beliefs the speaker holds about the audience are held for a reason. beliefs held “unreasonably” might indicate something different from testimonial smothering is going on in those cases. it may be that in cases where it is ambiguous whether there is a reason for belief or not, or good reasons for belief, it is more difficult to determine whether testimonial smothering is occurring, but this worry is beyond the scope of this paper. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 11 • case (b): gina does not want to have sex, but she consents to sex with harry because she feels like it is expected of her and refusing would be rude or inappropriate,33 perhaps because she had had sex with him in the past. i will now show that these two cases meet all three of dotson’s circumstances for testimonial smothering.34 “the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky” edina certainly believes that speaking refusal would be unsafe/risky, and she is not alone. in addition to the evidence above that many women believe they are at risk of being raped or of having their relationship terminated if they refuse, women may also be afraid of nonsexual violence upon refusal. the website when women refuse35 documents testimonies from women who have experienced violence after refusing sex, as well as news stories about women who were murdered, or had family members or pets murdered, as a result of refusing sex. women’s fears of violence, sexual violence, and relationship termination are not unfounded; there are plenty of data to show women being assaulted upon refusal. new stories appear on the when women refuse page every day, and 20% of women in one study had consented to sex because when they refused in the past their current partner had assaulted them (basile 1999, 1050).36 so the first circumstance has been met for case (a). although gina may not consider herself at risk of violence to the same extent as edina, she is risking other things. gina thinks refusal would be “inappropriate,” so she is risking being seen as rude, being socially ostracized, and being in an uncomfortable situation where she must feel guilty for doing something inappropriate. i urge the reader to not be biased by edina’s risk seeming greater; this is still a risk, albeit of a different kind. again the data in part 1 show us that gina’s worries are not uncommon, and they are certainly not unfounded: many men believe that in certain situations a woman has a duty to have sex,37 and that in some situations a woman has indicated she wants to have 33 by inappropriate, i mean something like seen as a surprising or disappointing way to behave, not meeting social expectations. 34 again, since i argue that all three circumstances are met, it doesn’t matter whether dotson means them all to be necessary or not. however, if they are not all necessary, then there is room for a reader to deny that one or more of them are met in my examples, and my conclusions will still follow. 35 http://whenwomenrefuse.tumblr.com/. 36 basile’s study involved telephone interviews with a sample of 41 women who had experienced unwanted sex in their long-term relationship or marriage. 37 i have been unable to find evidence that supports this claim word-for-word, and my argument would benefit greatly from a study into men’s perceptions of http://whenwomenrefuse.tumblr.com/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 12 sex, and in such situations it would be seen as rude or unconventional for her to refuse.38 so in case (b), the first circumstance for testimonial smothering is met, as refusal would be risky for gina. “the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence, or fail to demonstrate their competence, with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker” testimonial incompetence with regard to women refusing sex seems like it would cover a broad range of attitudes. a man not understanding that she wants to sincerely refuse, that refusing can be frightening for women, and that the refusal is about her desires and not a tool to harm his ego, are all misunderstandings that men may demonstrate about refusal. more serious misunderstandings may also be demonstrated; sometimes men may give the impression that they do not understand women to be beings with beliefs and desires as complex and important as their own. in case (a), for edina to have got the impression that refusing may be risky, franco must have given some indication that he would not consider refusal acceptable (or at least, failed to indicate that refusal is acceptable). whether this indication was deliberate or not, the salient factor is that edina reasonably interpreted the situation in that way.39 so the second circumstance has also been met. as in case (a), the second circumstance for case (b) will be met, as gina must have understood harry as demonstrating testimonial incompetence by virtue of the fact that she thinks he would take refusal to be inappropriate. again we can posit the same kinds of testimonial incompetences as in case (a). “testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance” does franco’s apparent testimonial incompetence follow from pernicious ignorance? there are two likely scenarios under which it does. first, if franco accepts rape myths, this is a clear example of pernicious ignorance. rape myths are false beliefs about rape that tend to represent the victim in a more negative or blameworthy light and represent rapists in a more positive light, often denying that they are in fact rapists. i suggest that rape myths count as women’s duties. however, there are studies showing many men believe they have a right to sex (see bouffard 2010), and showing that men should expect sex when women do certain things, like visit their home: see bouffard (2010) and burt (1978, 1980). 38 for example, 50% of men think that visiting a man’s home on a date implies willingness to have sex (burt 1978, 301). 39 if franco has not given such an indication, but edina has instead inferred testimonial incompetence from her experiences with other men, franco has at the very least still failed to indicate testimonial competence. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 13 pernicious ignorance;40 a false belief about rape victims is a kind of ignorance, and since rape myths are so commonly accepted, this ignorance is reliable. this reliable ignorance also tends to cause harm, as acceptance of rape myths correlates with committing rape as well as with poor treatment of victims (burt 1980; loh et al. 2005; check and guloien 1989, 170–171).41 so belief in rape myths meets our definition of pernicious ignorance. if franco accepts any rape myths (or edina perceives that he does) that contribute to his attitude to edina’s agency and refusal, then his apparent testimonial incompetence is a result of pernicious ignorance and thus meets our third circumstance. we can also consider edina consenting to unwanted sex as a harm,42 so even if franco’s ignorance was not contributing to wider harms, it has caused a harm here. a second way in which franco’s testimonial incompetence may follow from pernicious ignorance is by virtue of the fact that he is a man in a society structured by gender hierarchy. recall that situated ignorance is a kind of pernicious ignorance which one is more likely or better placed to possess by being a member of a particular group. as a man, franco may well have situated ignorance in relation to information about life as a woman, including the kinds of experiences women have of refusing sex and having their desires respected (or not). franco does not have direct access to the perspective of someone who may be afraid of refusing sex, afraid of violence, and accustomed to having their testimony taken less seriously.43 case (a) therefore meets the third circumstance in various ways, and we can now see how situated ignorance allows most cases to meet the third circumstance meet the third circumstance, provided there is also a harm involved, as there is here. case (a) meets dotson’s three circumstances for testimonial smothering, so we can say that edina has been silenced in this way. harry’s testimonial incompetence results from pernicious ignorance in much the same ways as franco’s does: if harry believes any rape myths 40 beecroft (unpublished) again makes almost exactly the same moves as i do here; she argues that rape myths are both pernicious ignorance and epistemic violence. 41 loh et al. assessed 325 men for sexist and rape-myth-accepting beliefs and attitudes, and for likelihood to commit certain kinds of sexual assaults, using multiple scales. check and guloien exposed 436 men to no films, sexually violent films, or nonsexual but dehumanizing films and assessed the men’s differing sexually aggressive attitudes and behaviours. 42 even if such consenting isn’t a harm in itself, 65% of women reported some negative consequences of consenting to unwanted sex (o’sullivan and allgeier 1998, 240). 43 though franco could gain indirect access to this kind of information, by listening to and attempting to understand perspectives of women, he does not have direct access to it; the information is not as readily available to him. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 14 (particularly ones relating to when refusal can be given), the third circumstance is met immediately. if harry believes there are circumstances in which women have a duty to have sex, then harry possesses a reliable false belief that directly relates to gina’s fears about refusal. in this case harry would believe exactly what gina fears he might believe: that her refusal would be inappropriate. this certainly counts as pernicious ignorance, as gina not refusing is a harmful consequence. harry also possesses situated ignorance by virtue of being a man. in particular, harry will not have the tools to easily understand the feeling of pressure to have sex that women experience,44 and how this makes women feel uncomfortable or guilty in refusing. harry also is less well equipped to understand what women’s desires may feel like in these situations, and that women may reasonably want to refuse in circumstances like this. harry is simply not in the right situation to easily understand how women’s attitudes to refusal and consent may work. thus in case (b), harry possesses some pernicious ignorance, and particularly situated ignorance about women’s experiences of refusal.45 at this point i should have shown that cases like (a) and (b) are common and count as instances of testimonial smothering on dotson’s account. i suggest that real-world cases similar to (a) and (b) which meet the three circumstances will also be testimonial smothering. this is valuable for explaining women’s realworld experiences of consenting to unwanted sex and illustrating the breadth of application of dotson’s account. is this silencing by pornography? my account provides good reason to believe that pornography is a cause of silencing. it thus helps us understand where pernicious ignorance can come from and provides a new direction for the pornography debate.46 i first claim that pornography influences men’s acceptance of rape myths, and this makes pornography the source of pernicious ignorance in the cases we are considering. then, to strengthen the connection between our case and pornography, i show that these rape myths correspond to reasons women silence their refusal. 44 remember it is not impossible for harry to gain this understanding; he is just not well placed to access it easily. 45 it could be objected here that this ignorance exculpates men who fail to ensure that the women with whom they are having sex really want to have sex with them; i do not mean to imply this. we should ensure the consent our partner gives us is enthusiastic and should attempt to identify and minimize any harmful ignorances we possess. 46 i do not claim pornography is the only contributory factor; there may well be other things contributing to this kind of silencing. i also don’t mean to imply that this is a singularly good reason to restrict pornography. i only mean to suggest that pornography plays a role here. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 15 multiple studies demonstrate pornography negatively affects men’s attitudes to women and sex; a collection of evidence that pornography causes men to treat women more callously can be found in zillmann and weaver (1989). zillmann (1989, 134–135) also found that both men and women consider rapists less blameworthy and deserving of jail time after repeated exposure to pornography.47 pornography-using men are more likely to accept myths like “a woman doesn’t mean no until she slaps you” and “women enjoy rape” (donnerstein, linz, and penrod 1987, 75–76; malamuth and check 1985). many studies show that pornography use leads men and women to consider rape victims as less injured and rapists as less deserving of punishment.48 all of this suggests that exposure to pornography means men are more likely to harbour attitudes less sympathetic to women and support rape myths.49 burt (1978) presented an influential study documenting how common belief in rape myths actually was.50,51 many of these rape myths contain content that is directly relevant to reasons women do not refuse unwanted sex. the best explanation of this similarity in content, i claim, is that the one influences the other. where 50% of people believe the rape myth that visiting a man’s home on a date implies willingness to have sex (burt 1978, 301–302), a woman may not refuse unwanted sex on a date because she “did not want to seem like [she] had been leading him on”52 (shotland and hunter 1995, 232–233), with recognition of the aforementioned rape myth informing that decision. similarly, the 32.8% of 47 the study discussed here recorded subjects’ attitudes after no exposure to pornography, moderate exposure (3 films a week for 6 weeks), and massive exposure (6 films a week for 6 weeks). their attitudes were assessed one week, two weeks, and three weeks after the final film. in the third week after the final film, the subjects who were exposed to “massive” amounts of pornography reliably recommended much less harsh sentences for rapists than those subjects of lower exposure. 48 for example, zillmann (1989, 134–136) and malamuth and check (1985). 49 for additional evidence see peter and valkenburg (2011), foubert, brosi, and bannon (2011) and hald, malamuth, and lange (2013). 50 this study questioned 599 members of the public, 99 social workers who were likely to have worked with rapists, and 36 rapists, and asked to what extent they agreed with certain claims, like “scenario counts as rape x” or “women deserve assault if x.” i use the general public results here. 51 this might seem dated, but edwards et al. (2011) collect more recent data that show only fractionally better attitudes. for example, they found evidence that 25–35% of people agree with most rape myths and 66% of people agree with some (edwards et al. 2011, 762). i use the burt study as it is the most comprehensive. 52 shotland and hunter found 56% of women not refusing sex for this reason (1995, 232–233). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 16 women who have sex because “refusal would be pointless, as he would do it anyway” (koss and oros 1982, 456) have identified the prevalence (17%) of myths like, “a woman who is drunk and has sex with a man at a party is ‘fair game’ to be raped by others at the party” (burt 1978, 301–302).what these figures illustrate is that where a man may demonstrate testimonial incompetence by indicating acceptance of a rape myth, a woman may not speak her refusal because she has perceived this attitude.53 returning to case b: gina perceives that harry is likely to accept the rape myth “if a woman participates in other sex acts with a man, it is her fault if he rapes her,” and since she has participated in other sex acts with harry, she chooses not to refuse because “[she] had sex with him before so [she] thought that [she] shouldn’t refuse.” though many cases will not have such a strong direct link between the content of his pernicious ignorance and her reasons for not refusing, this illustrates my hypothesis well; pernicious ignorance in the form of rape myths causes testimonial smothering of women who want to refuse sex but don’t. i have shown that in cases like (a) and (b) women experience testimonial smothering of refusal, and that pornography can contribute to a key source of pernicious ignorance: rape myths. if this is right, a change in focus in feminist discussions of pornography may be necessary, from speech act theory to testimonial smothering. part 4: silenced reports we now turn to the second way women are silenced: silenced reports of sexual assault. in this section we explore two cases of silenced reporting of sexual assaults, and apply dotson’s testimonial smothering to them. as in part 3, the first case will be more decisive than the second but i argue that both count as testimonial smothering. • case (c): ida was raped. ida would like to report the crime but does not because she suspects her rapist or her (male) partner may be violent if she says anything. • case (d): jesse was raped. jesse would like to report the crime but does not because she suspects she will be blamed or not believed. next, i show that both cases meet dotson’s three circumstances for testimonial smothering. 53 it should be noted that while many of the studies into rape myth acceptance take both men and women in their samples, it has been shown that rape myth acceptance is significantly greater among men than women. see, e.g., anderson, cooper, and okamura (1997) or suarez and gadalla (2010). vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 17 “the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky” ida certainly believes the content of her testimony would be unsafe or risky. belden’s (1979–1980) study recorded many women giving fear of retaliation as a reason not to report sexual assault; this is particularly common where the assailant is not a stranger (which is more likely anyway).54 again this fear is not unfounded; the assailant has already proven he is willing and able to use violence against a woman. as regards intimate partners, i could not find any data to show men being violent as a result of learning their partner has been raped, as there is little information recording men’s motivations for violence. however, given that 22% of women in europe have experienced violence from their partners (european union agency for fundamental rights 2014, 21) and 34% of uk women have experienced violence in a previous relationship (european union agency for fundamental rights 2014, 29), the woman who gives her partner bad news (particularly news he may blame her for55) has reason to fear. belden (1979–1980, 12) describes one particular case where a woman was raped by her husband’s employee, and she did not report it because “her biggest concern was to get home, clean up, and get her torn clothes hidden before her ‘violent and jealous’ husband got home. . . . she was terrified about what he would do if he found out she had been raped.” i think this suffices to say that the first circumstance has been met for ida’s case: women can reasonably believe that reporting rape risks violence. in case (d) jesse considers the content of her testimony risky: she is risking being blamed or not believed. jones and colleagues (2009, 420) report 73% of women chose not to report rape because they feared other people would think the women were responsible. this fear is justified; 53% of students believe that a woman’s actions caused her assault (mcmahon 2010). forty-nine percent of women in jones’s study did not report rape because they thought some people would not believe them. again, this fear is justified; many people believe that women lie about rape.56 the likelihood of disbelief is greater when the victim knows the assailant, as is the case in 90% of rapes (rape crisis england & wales 2018). the risk of being blamed or not believed is very real, and there is the associated risk of experiencing distress and relationship problems if the victim’s loved ones do not believe her, as well as the distress of police/courts not believing her. 54 as one victim said, “if [he were] not convicted, [he] could immediately wreak vengeance on me” (belden 1979–1980, 11). 55 when discussing case (d), we will see just how common victim-blaming is. 56 fifty-six percent of people think women lie about rape when they are annoyed with a man (burt 1978, 302). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 18 “the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence, or fail to demonstrate their competence, with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker” if ida is afraid that her partner will be violent, then she has taken him (rightly or otherwise) to have incompetence regarding her testimony, as violence is not the response her testimony calls for. if it is the rapist that ida fears, then her silence might be testimonial smothering in the same way as jesse’s is; she suspects the police, her family, or other hearers might not respond in the right way to her testimony. alternatively, if ida is only afraid of the rapist’s retaliation, and has no concerns about how her hearers will respond, then this condition is not met, and what ida is suffering is straightforward threats or blackmail, rather than testimonial smothering in particular. i will proceed as if it is her partner that ida fears, for the sake of simplicity. in case (d), for jesse to get the impression that the hearer would not believe her or would blame her, she must have perceived them as displaying testimonial incompetence. further, testimonial incompetence is often displayed by police and attorneys regarding rape: fortythree percent of attorneys showed moderate to high rape myth acceptance (edwards et al. 2011), and police sometimes jeer at victims and do not file reports when they don’t believe victims.57 policemen, and men in general, can be read as demonstrating testimonial incompetence in relation to rape victims. this perception is articulated well by one of the women in belden’s study: “after half a lifetime of living and learning about male attitudes, i had absolutely no assurance of meeting a sensitive male in the police station, of all places” (1979– 1980, 10). in ida’s and jesse’s cases, the second circumstance has been met, as testimonial incompetence can be, and is, demonstrated by police and by other people in the victims’ lives. “testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance” the partner who thinks violence is an appropriate response to a report of rape can be said to have pernicious ignorance. firstly, if he accepts any rape myths, then this condition is met. for example, if ida’s partner believes, with 53% 57 numerous women in belden’s study discovered after reporting their experience that the police never followed through with the report. some quoted policemen as saying things like, “why didn’t you just sit back and enjoy it?” (1979–1980, 10). sadly, more recent studies report similar testimonies, for example: one officer said, “come on kathleen, we know you are making this up. we know you were having an affair and you were having sex that morning and it all got a bit rough and you made all this up so your husband doesn't find out” (jordan 2008, 56). see also: jordan (2011). vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 19 of students (mcmahon 2010), 58 that a woman’s actions lead to her being sexually assaulted, then that is a reliable ignorance that causes harm. it causes harm in this instance in particular, as ida feeling unable to give her testimony is a harm,59 and it causes broader harms, as acceptance of rape myths reliably predicts the likelihood of performing violence and sexual violence (burt 1980; loh et al. 2005; lackie and de man 1997;60 check and guloien 1989, 170–171). secondly, the partner will possess situated ignorance, again by virtue of being a man. he simply won’t understand what it is like to fear violence from men and what it is like to be a victim.61 as in case (c), the testimonial incompetence in case (d) is rooted in pernicious ignorance in two ways: rape myths and situated ignorance. in cases where women are not believed or are being blamed, it is very likely that rape myths are being believed; all the examples i have drawn on here are rape myths (e.g., women lie about rape, women cause their own assaults, etc.). i will demonstrate the extent of these rape myths in the next section. belief in rape myths counts as reliable ignorance that causes a harm—not just the harm caused by rape myth acceptance in general, but also the harm for the individual who cannot testify about their assault. secondly, policemen and other hearers who are men will possess situated ignorance by virtue of being men; that is, being people not accustomed to being taken less seriously whenever they speak, and being afraid of men. they possess the situated ignorance of being men, and not being victims, and perhaps in addition the pernicious ignorance of believing rape myths. case (d) has now met all three of the circumstances for testimonial smothering. is this silencing by pornography? i argued in part 3 that pornography influenced acceptance of rape myths. given this, if there are common rape myths causing women not to report sexual assaults, this too has roots in pornography. in addition to the myths described previously, we can add some more with content that corresponds to reasons women do not report sexual assault. i again claim that the best explanation of this similarity in content is that the one influences the other: where 69% of people believe the rape myth that in most rapes the victim was promiscuous or 58 mcmahon’s study surveyed 2,338 students using the illinois rape myth acceptance scale and the bystander attitude scale. 59 as for edina, it could be claimed that being unable to speak a testimony is a harm in itself. also consider that allowing a rapist to get away with his actions and target future victims is uncontroversially a harm. 60 lackie and de man interviewed 86 men, assessing what factors affected their likelihood of sexual aggression. 61 ferraro (1996) conducted 1,101 telephone interviews and found that women are much more afraid of violence than men are, and the difference is particularly strong with sexual violence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 20 “bad” (burt 1978, 301–302), a victim may choose not to report her experience because “people will think [she is] responsible”62 (jones et al. 2009, 420), with her awareness of the former myth affecting this decision. the worry that people will think the women are responsible could be informed by many similar rape myths. for example, 71% of people believe that “some women unconsciously want to be raped and may unconsciously bring the rape upon themselves,” 33% believe hitchhikers deserve to be raped, and 48% believe that women wearing revealing clothing are “asking for trouble” (burt 1978, 301–302). the myths that women lie about rape to “get back at” men and that they falsely report rape for attention—believed by 53% and 41% of people, respectively (burt 1978, 301– 302)—may both inform a woman’s decision not to report on the entirely plausible belief that “people will not believe [them]” (jones et al. 2009, 420): forty-nine percent of women did not report sexual assault for this reason (jones et al. 2009, 420). these figures demonstrate that where a man possesses pernicious ignorance by accepting rape myths, a woman may read this testimonial incompetence and choose not to report sexual assault for that reason. as before, the content of the rape myth accepted by a man need not directly correlate to a woman’s reason for not reporting; the examples where they do correlate just illustrate the connection nicely, and give cases where the link will be particularly strong. recalling case (d), imagine jesse was wearing a short skirt when she was raped, but she wants to report the crime. jesse may suspect that the police officer accepts the rape myth that women dressed revealingly are “asking for trouble,” so she chooses not to report the rape because of the fear that “people will think [she is] responsible.” in this case the testimonial incompetence jesse perceives, resulting from pernicious ignorance, prevents her from speaking a testimony that appears risky. that rape myth has silenced jesse’s report, in a manner that fits dotson’s model of testimonial smothering. in cases like (c) and (d) women experience testimonial smothering of reporting sexual assault, and provided it is also the case (as i argued at the end of part 3) that today’s pornography influences acceptance of rape myths, pornography can contribute to the pernicious ignorance involved. conclusions i have defended the claim that an account of pornography silencing women can work when informed by dotson’s account of testimonial smothering. 62 seventy-three percent of women did not report sexual assault for that reason (jones et al. 2009, 420). this figure should be taken with a grain of salt; i suspect the correct figure would be higher, but jones et al.’s study is severely limited by ruling out women who had been drinking when they had been assaulted, women who did not want a vaginal examination, and women who did not speak good english. vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 21 in part 1, i introduced two very common ways in which women fail to speak: women not refusing—and consenting to—sex that they do not want, and women not reporting rape and sexual assault. in part 2, i introduced dotson’s account of silencing and explained how testimonial smothering works: a speaker suspects their audience possesses testimonial incompetence regarding the speaker’s testimony, and therefore chooses not to speak it at all. i explained testimonial incompetence and how this can be rooted in pernicious ignorance. in part 3, i gave two examples of women not refusing unwanted sex and demonstrated that they meet dotson’s description of testimonial smothering. i argued that refusing sex is risky, and that choosing not to refuse sex out of fear or out of a sense of duty counts as testimonial smothering where the choice not to speak is informed by the perceived testimonial incompetence and pernicious ignorance of the hearer. additionally, i argued that rape myths are a species of pernicious ignorance, so a hearer of refusal of sex may possess pernicious ignorance in two ways: by believing rape myths, and by possessing situated ignorance. i ended the section by demonstrating that pornography contributes to the silenced refusal of sex by affecting men’s acceptance of rape myths. in part 4, i showed that women not reporting sexual assault also meets dotson’s description of testimonial smothering, and counts as silencing on that model. i illustrated that women may find reporting sexual assault risky because they may receive more violence and be treated as lying or blameworthy. i showed that police officers, partners, and other hearers often possess testimonial incompetence, and this may prevent a woman from speaking her testimony. i again posited that this testimonial incompetence can be attributed to two kinds of pernicious ignorance: rape myths and situated ignorance. finally, i argued that as pornography increased rape myth acceptance in men, pornography can be seen as contributing to the silencing of women who are forced to silence their reports of sexual assault. in sum, i suggest that dotson’s account of testimonial smothering provides a way in which pornography contributes to the silencing of women, by silencing their refusal of sex and their reports of sexual assault. references anderson, kathryn b., harris cooper, and linda okamura. 1997. “individual differences and attitudes toward rape: a meta-analytic review.” personality and social psychology bulletin 23 (3): 295–315. austin, john l. 1962. how to do things with words. oxford university press. basile, kathleen c. 1999. “rape by acquiescence: the ways in which women “give in” to unwanted sex with their husbands.” violence against women 5 (9): 1036–1058 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2018, vol. 4, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2018 22 beecroft, naomi. unpublished manuscript. “rape culture and epistemic violence: why testimony goes unheard.” http://www.academia.edu/34774687/rape_culture_and_epistemic_viol ence_why_testimony_goes_unheard.docx. belden, linda. december 1979–january 1980. “why women do not report sexual assault.” excerpt. amazon 8 (1): 9–13. http://voices.revealdigital.com/cgibin/independentvoices?a=d&d=caefjjj19791201.1.9&srpos=1&e=------en-20--1--txt-txin-why+women+do+not+report+sexual+assault-------------1#. bird, alexander. 2002. “illocutionary silencing.” pacific philosophical quarterly 83 (1): 1–15. bouffard, leana a. 2010. “exploring the utility of entitlement in understanding sexual aggression.” journal of criminal justice 38:870–879. burt, martha r. 1978. “attitudes supportive of rape in american culture.” house committee on science and technology, subcommittee on domestic and international scientific planning, analysis, and cooperation. in research into violent behavior: sexual assaults (hearing, 95th congress, 2nd 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rights, and speech.” in feminism unmodified, 163–197. harvard university press. malamuth, neil m., and james v. check. 1985. “the effects of aggressive pornography on beliefs in rape myths: individual differences.” journal of research in personality 19:299–320. mcgregor, margaret j., ellen wiebe, stephen a. marion, and cathy livingston. 2000. “why don’t more women report sexual assault to the police?” canadian medical association journal 162 (5): 659–660. mcmahon, sarah. 2010. “rape myth beliefs and bystander attitudes among incoming college students.” journal of american college health 59 (1): 3– 11. muehlenhard, charlene l., and stephen w. cook. 1988. “men’s self-reports of unwanted sexual activity.” journal of sex research 24:58–72. o’sullivan, lucia f., and elizabeth r. allgeier. 1998. “feigning sexual desire: consenting to unwanted sexual activity in heterosexual dating relationships.” journal of sex research 35 (3): 234–243. peter, jochen, and patti m. valkenburg. 2011. “the influence of sexually explicit internet material and peers on stereotypical beliefs about women’s sexual roles: similarities and differences between adolescents and adults.” cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking 14 (9): 511– 517. rainn (rape, abuse & incest national network). 2018. “the criminal justice system: statistics.” accessed feb. 12. https://rainn.org/getinformation/statistics/reporting-rates. rape crisis england & wales. 2018. “statistics.” accessed feb. 12. http://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php. saul, jennifer. 2006. “pornography speech acts and context.” proceedings of the aristotelian society 106:229–248. shotland, r. lance, and barbara a. hunter. 1995. “women’s ‘token resistant’ and compliant sexual behaviours are related to uncertain sexual intentions and rape.” personality and social psychology bulletin 21 (3): 226–236. sleath, emma, and ray bull. 2017. “police perceptions of rape victims and the impact on case decision making: a systematic review.” aggression and violent behavior 34:102–112. suarez, eliana, and tahany m. gadalla. 2010. “stop blaming the victim: a metaanalysis on rape myths.” journal of interpersonal violence 25 (11): 2010– 2035. walker, sarah j. 1997. “when “no” becomes “yes”: why girls and women consent to unwanted sex.” applied & preventative psychology 6:157– 166. https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates https://rainn.org/get-information/statistics/reporting-rates http://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php vince: testimonial smothering and pornography published by scholarship@western, 2018 25 zillmann, dolf. 1989. “effects of prolonged consumption of pornography.” in pornography: research advances and policy considerations, edited by dolf zillmann and jennings bryant, 127–158. lawrence erlbaum associates. zillmann, dolf, and james b. weaver. 1989. “pornography and men’s sexual callousness toward women.” in pornography: research advances and policy considerations, edited by dolf zillmann and jennings bryant, 95– 125. lawrence erlbaum associates. rosa vince is a current phd candidate at the university of sheffield in the department of philosophy (supported by the white rose college of the arts and humanities). her thesis examines debates within feminism on sex work and pornography, with a particular focus on sexual objectification, and whether it is necessarily harmful. she received her ma and ba in philosophy from the university of sheffield. rosa is interested in feminism, sexual ethics, and philosophy of sex more broadly, and has recently taught a third-year undergraduate module covering the intersections of these areas. heyes’s introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 4 recommended citation heyes, cressida j. 2023. “heyes’s introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 4. 2023 heyes’s introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge cressida j. heyes university of alberta cheyes@ualberta.ca heyes – introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 heyes’s introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge cressida j. heyes abstract in this short introduction to my monograph anaesthetics of existence, i explain the origin of the book in a mishearing of foucault’s phrase “an aesthetics of existence” and outline the book’s method (a melding of genealogy and phenomenology) and its subject: the politics of experience, and especially how to think about undergoings that either are excluded from experience or happen at its edges. the book contains a chapter on foucault and this new method; one on sexual violence against unconscious victims; two chapters on postdisciplinary temporality in twenty-first century work, and what i call “anaesthetic time”; and a closing chapter on the limit-experience of childbirth. keywords: experience, genealogy, phenomenology, time, feminism anaesthetics of existence is a complicated book to introduce. the title itself, as i explain in the first pages, emerged from a mishearing at a conference where i was very tired. listening to a paper on foucault’s ethical thought, i imagined that a speaker talking about “an aesthetics of existence”—a phrase that captures the view that life should be lived as art, a project of self-creation rather than a quest for authenticity— was in fact saying “anaesthetics of existence.” i had no idea what that meant, but it sounded good—perhaps a way of checking out of the exhausting demand to be constantly self-making. a couple of years later, when i started working, very slowly, on this book, i was a new parent suffering from mysterious chronic pain and disabling sleep deprivation following the birth of my son in 2009. already very depleted by the demands of being a feminist scholar in philosophy, i had developed even more reason to be wary of how the avant-garde language of self-fashioning (ironically a theme of my own previous book) seemed to jibe with a neoliberal emphasis on individual resilience and building human capital. i did my phd in philosophy in a predominantly analytic department, and my first book (an intervention in feminist metaphysics that applied wittgenstein’s account of family resemblance to the category “women”) was marked by that tradition in terms not only of its theme but also the precision (and occasionally feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 clunkiness) of the writing style i painstakingly developed and the emphasis on working through an argument until it was truly transparent and cohesive (sometimes to the detriment of complexities in the real world). i still think those are the best things i learned from analytic philosophy. as i grew past my first years in academia, however, i realized that whole intellectual traditions in philosophy had been closed off to me, and that the ideas, figures, and styles of the so-called continental traditions might help me with some of the philosophical problems with which i was grappling. my second book, which engaged seriously with foucault’s genealogical and ethical texts, was a big learning experience. because it was about self-transformation and technologies of the self, it oriented my attention toward lived experience, which i quickly realized i could describe fluently enough using the everyday language of firstpersonal narrative, even while i lacked a richer philosophical vocabulary to give structure and meaning to those stories. i spent several years after that second book trying to teach myself phenomenology—an arduous and fraught process that was really only possible because of the brilliant contributions of critical phenomenologists such as alia al-saji, lisa guenther, and gayle salamon, who showed how politics and ethics could be woven through rigorous accounts of lived experience. thus anaesthetics took a long time to write for intellectual as well as personal reasons, and it was an experience that brought home to me why so many philosophers stick to a narrow terrain that emerges from their early formation, writing closely related articles (or books) that don’t stray beyond a particular tradition or even figure. doing otherwise is massively hard work. i hope, however, that the combination of analytic style, continental themes, a good dose of political theory, first-personal narrative, popular examples, and bits of history and empirical social science that anaesthetics of existence weaves together might model a way of transgressing some of the intra and interdisciplinary barriers that we too rarely cross. in the early 2010s, when i started this work, there was a lot of interest in foucault’s views on experience (as an epistemic category, as well as a political resource). he allegedly eschewed his early adoption of phenomenological method in his work on mental illness in favour of genealogy, which tends to treat experience as artifactual of longer and larger discursive processes; what any individual believes about their undergoing might, to a genealogist, seem irrelevant to its theorization (heyes 2020, 15–17). i was sceptical about this interpretation of foucault, who said explicitly that everything he wrote was somehow based on his own personal experience, and who engaged so seriously with memoir (as, for example, in his commentaries on the life stories of herculine barbin and pierre rivière). i set out to see whether i could articulate a philosophical method that engaged both critical phenomenology—with its emphasis on situating lived experience in its historical and political contexts—and genealogy—with its emphasis on the conditions of possibility for subjectivity. heyes – introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 this rather technical philosophical problem dovetailed with my feminist interest in the politics of experience. the feminist truism “the personal is political” was soon complicated by joan scott’s (1991, 797) observation that “what counts as experience is . . . always contested, and therefore always political.” if the category of experience itself is contested, i reasoned, it must have edges and, hence, an outside— events that we undergo that somehow don’t make it over an epistemic bar. while the first chapter of anaesthetics explains these quandaries in more detail, all the subsequent ones are attempts to apply my method to cases that invite what johanna oksala (2011, 220–21) has described as the “crosslighting of two irreducible perspectives” (the subjective and the historical). i used the categories of classical phenomenology (most notably, space, time, and embodiment as they are constitutive of lived experience) in a more critical vein to illuminate political phenomena that also have complex histories and intersectional feminist meaning. for example, chapter 2 provides a framework for understanding the distinctive harm of sexual violence against unconscious victims. looking at how the passive, white, feminine body is objectified and eroticized in western culture, i show that the circulation of sexualized images of unconscious women via digital communication is continuous with this tradition of exploitation. such violence creates its own communities of voyeurs, from which victims are excluded, rendering them two-dimensional and also making the intermittent safety of “night” (that distinctive withdrawal from time and space that sleep best exemplifies) impossible. chapters 3 and 4 examine the emergence of what i call “postdisciplinary time”—a temporality that reflects underlying economic transformations that call upon subjects to accelerate, reduce idle time, multitask, and reject slow activities. in part as a response to postdisciplinary time and its uneven effects, i argue that a countertemporality has emerged. reviewing what can be learned from phenomenological psychology on depression and addiction, i suggest that more and more people are drawn into what i call “anaesthetic time”—a temporality in which drugs are deployed to make time diffuse, drifting, and unproductive. anaesthetic time is often represented as harmless fun, as i show through a reading of marketing to “moms who need wine,” but it has a more dangerous aspect, as when whole populations are drugged-toward-death. the last chapter is an attempt to describe the experience of giving birth using the language of phenomenology to capture (at least one version of) “what it’s like,” using the language of limit-experience: a shattering of self and of the edges of subjectivity induced, in this case, by extreme pain. the impossibility of narrating such a birth story comes not only from pain’s unspeakability but also from the history of misogyny in obstetrics that persists in clinical practices that deny the birthing person their own experience. i completed anaesthetics on december 31, 2018, and spent 2019 ushering it through the production process for duke university press. it landed with a little fizzle feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 in may 2020, just as the full horror of the covid pandemic was becoming apparent and everyone was in some version of “lockdown.” it turned out to be just about the worst possible moment to publish a book one has spent nearly a decade assembling and polishing, given the shuttering of the academic and publishing worlds that happened that spring and summer. on the other hand, some of the major themes of the book—depletion, withdrawal from cultures of speed, rethinking our relation to time—seemed to have a fresh and important salience, and readers turning to the book now might well find it has more resonance than my manuscript would have had in 2019 (see heyes 2020 on “pandemic time”). i had long joked that anaesthetics was really a prequel to a project i had started writing alongside it—a feminist philosophy of sleep entitled “sleep is the new sex.” that work is starting to be published now (heyes 2023; heyes and haugen, forthcoming), and the commentaries that follow here, on anaesthetics, in many ways echo my own intellectual trajectory by picking up on the politics of temporality and sleep to show new ways of working with the ideas i sketched. reading a colleague’s monograph carefully and writing a thoughtful commentary is a huge amount of work and, hence, a gift and an honour for its author. talia bettcher, alisa bierria, and megan burke were generous, critical, and expansive in their responses, which have been tremendously valuable to me in finding ways of being in conversation with colleagues across philosophical traditions and political preoccupations. references heyes, cressida j. 2020. “the short and the long of it: a political phenomenology of pandemic time.” philosophy today 64, no. 4 (fall): 859–63. https://doi.org/10 .5840/philtoday20201110367. ———. 2023. “reading advice to parents about children’s sleep: the political psychology of a self-help genre.” critical inquiry 49, no. 2 (winter): 145–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/722384. heyes, cressida j., and hannah haugen. forthcoming. “the new horizontal worker: privacy, sexuality, and professionalism in the digital bedroom.” intermédialités. oksala, johanna. 2011. “sexual experience: foucault, phenomenology, and feminist theory.” hypatia 26, no. 1 (winter): 207–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15272001.2010.01153.x. scott, joan w. 1991. “the evidence of experience.” critical inquiry 17, no. 4 (summer): 773–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/448612. heyes – introduction to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience on the edge published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 cressida j. heyes holds a henry marshall tory chair and is professor of political science and philosophy at the university of alberta. they are the author of three monographs: anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge (duke university press, 2020, discussed in this symposium); self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies (oxford university press, 2007); and line drawings: defining women through feminist practice (cornell university press, 2000), as well as a series of articles appearing in journals including hypatia, signs, and critical inquiry. they are currently working on a book that is a feminist philosophy of sleep. more information and copies of many articles can be found at www.cressidaheyes.com. heyes intro title page heyes intro final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 5 | issue 2 article 5 recommended citation tobin, theresa. 2019. “religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (2). article 5. 2019 religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse theresa w. tobin marquette university theresa.tobin@marquette.edu tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 1 religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse theresa w. tobin abstract clergy sexual abuse is both sexual and psychological violence, but it is also a paradigmatic case of spiritual violence that rises to the level of religious trauma. in this paper i argue that the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse diminishes, and in some cases may even destroy, a survivor’s capacities for religious faith or other forms of spiritual engagement. i use and illustrate the value of feminist methodology, as developed and advanced by alison jaggar, for generating and pursuing philosophical questions about religious experience. feminist methodology’s sensitivity to theorizing situated subjects who stand to each other in relations of racialized male dominance helps us see the ways in which clergy sexual abuse is gender-based violence in both its causes and effects. it also helps us both ask and answer questions about religious faith in the unjust meantime from the perspective of those who endure spiritually violent faith communities. keywords: spiritual violence, clergy sexual abuse, gender, religious faith, feminist methodology introduction in july 2018, the high-ranking roman catholic cardinal, theodore mccarrick, resigned from the college of cardinals as news broke of allegations that he had sexually abused children and adults for decades while serving in the washington, dc, diocese (zauzmer and harlan 2018). in august 2018, a grand jury investigation reported that since 1947, across six dioceses of pennsylvania, at least 301 roman catholic priests had sexually abused over 1,000 children and that church officials knew about and covered up the abuse (o’loughlin 2018). these stories mark the latest in mounting evidence emerging over nearly twenty years of a global clergy sexual abuse epidemic within the roman catholic church.1 when people express 1 in 2002, the boston globe reported the first story to expose the crisis in the us, reporting sex abuse allegations from over 130 survivors against boston diocesan priest fr. john j. geoghan and the cover-up by then bishop of boston bernard law, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 2 moral outrage about clergy sexual abuse cases, they often focus on the psychological and sexual harms and betrayal of trust survivors suffer and the church cover-up of the abuse. in this paper, i foreground survivor experiences of the spiritual harm clergy sexual abuse inflicts when priests “weaponiz[e] the catholic faith and us[e] it as a tool of their abuse” (o’loughlin 2018). clergy sexual abuse is both sexual and psychological violence, but it is also a paradigmatic case of spiritual violence that rises to the level of what michelle panchuk (2018) calls religious trauma. i argue that the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse diminishes, and in some cases, may even destroy a survivor’s capacities for religious faith and other forms of spiritual engagement. recent work in christian philosophy of religion argues that worship is a primary way we come to know and love god and is partially constitutive of a relationship with god (roberts 2007; smith 2013; wolterstorff 2015; cueno 2016). clergy sexual abuse uses religiously significant objects, spaces, texts, and prayers through which people engage in worship as instruments of sexual violation. this can transform worship into a religiously traumatic experience, leading some survivors to experience god as hostile, even abusive, or diminishing their ability to participate in worship altogether. a survivor who cannot step foot in a church without vomiting at the trace smell of incense, or cannot recite the “our father” without flashbacks of being raped by a priest is unable to participate easily or at all in christian worship. in some cases, the abuse may irreparably damage a person’s capacities for spiritual engagement of any kind. one male survivor shared that as a result of the abuse his “spirituality and ability to believe in a higher power were destroyed” (gartner 2007, 98). a second aim of this paper is to use and illustrate the value of feminist methodology for generating and pursuing philosophical questions about religious experience. my approach is deeply indebted to and shaped by the work of alison jaggar, who over the past several decades has developed feminism as a methodology—a way of doing moral and political philosophy that foregrounds gender as a central category of philosophical analysis (jaggar 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2016; jaggar and wisor 2014; jaggar and tobin 2017). jaggar distinguishes feminist ethical theory “by its exploration of the ways in which cultural devaluation of who knew about the abuse and transferred fr. geoghan from parish to parish instead of removing him from ministry. (see: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news /special-reports/2002/01/06/church-allowed-abuse-priest-for-years /cshfgktirat25qkgvbudnm/story.html.) the 2016 oscar winning film, spotlight, details the story of the boston globe team that investigated and broke the story. the website bishops accountability documents abuse cases globally (http://www.bishop-accountability.org). tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 3 women and the feminine may be reflected and rationalized in the central concepts and methods of moral philosophy” (jaggar 2000c, 1). i adopt a similar approach, in part, because i am concerned that gender bias may be reflected in or at least obscured by philosophical accounts of worship and religious faith that operate too much in the abstract and analyses of clergy sexual abuse that neglect its gendered dimensions. feminist methodology’s sensitivity to theorizing situated subjects who stand to each other in relations of social power, and specifically relationships of racialized male dominance, makes relevant the religious experiences of more than the spiritually privileged who can take for granted their basic worthiness for spiritual thriving. it helps us both to ask and answer questions about religious faith in the context of spiritually violent faith communities and to “reveal rather than obscure empirical inequalities related to gender” in these experiences (jaggar 2000a, 458). my methodology in this paper is feminist in at least three ways. first, i analyze clergy sexual abuse as gender-based spiritual violence, highlighting how structural male dominance in the catholic church contributes to the vulnerability of victims of both sexes to clergy abuse and impacts how survivors experience the abuse. second, i situate philosophical claims about the role of worship in faith formation in a specific religious and social context and bring survivor testimony to bear on these claims. third, i urge researcher responsibility to prioritize research questions that address religious experience in the unjust meantime, rather than assuming ideal conditions (jaggar 2000a, 2000b, 2016; jaggar and wisor 2014; jaggar and tobin 2017).2 in the first section, i define spiritual violence and religious trauma and establish clergy sexual abuse as religiously traumatic spiritual violence. section two distinguishes interpersonal and structural modes of spiritual violence and describes structural gender-based spiritual violence as a background condition that enables clergy abuse and impacts victims’ experience. analyzing clergy sexual abuse as gender-based spiritual violence is vital for grasping its structural causes and fully 2 feminist methodology also generates analyses that counter misleading narratives from some in the church about the abuse. it is common to hear church leaders speak about priests who abuse as immoral or psychologically unstable individuals who did bad things, and bishops who covered up the abuse as weak or neglectful. some church officials saw clergy sexual abuse as more of a violation of the priest’s vows than a crime and sin against the victim (sands 2003, kaveny 2019). this focus on “bad apple” priests whose primary sin is against the priesthood frames the church as a victim rather than a culprit or accomplice. feminist methodology draws attention to a spiritually violent church culture of male dominance and entitlement that enabled and sustained abusive priests and left thousands of survivors spiritually traumatized. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 4 appreciating its damaging spiritual effects for both male and female survivors.3 section three shares survivor testimony, highlighting the spiritual injuries they endure as a result of the abuse and the institutional betrayal. sections four and five then bring this testimony to bear on philosophical arguments about the role of worship in religious faith. by tarnishing a survivor’s relationship to worship, clergy sexual abuse can diminish and may in some cases destroy a person’s capacities for knowing and loving god and for other forms of spiritual engagement. i conclude by returning to the significance of feminism as methodology and praxis for religious faith in the unjust meantime. 1. clergy sexual abuse as religiously traumatic spiritual violence philosophical accounts of how worship cultivates religious faith tend to assume that background conditions of faith communities are spiritually safe and healthy and theorize the believer irrespective of their social identity (roberts 2007; smith 2013; wolterstorff 2015, 2016; cuneo 2016). this results in conceptions of worship and theories about its role in religious faith that privilege the experiences of those who are not vulnerable to or survivors of spiritual violence. the term “spiritual violence” was coined by lay christians as an umbrella term to name a variety of ways that churches and their members use religious means to degrade or demean people 3 in the majority of reported cases of clergy abuse (a range from 64% to 78%), the victims are males between the ages of 11 and 17. a 2004 report from john jay college of criminal justice found that approximately 64% of accused priests abused males only, 22% abused females only, and 3% abused both; and in 10% of cases, the gender of the victim was unknown. a 2005 united states conference of catholic bishops report found that 78% of victims are male and 22% are female. these data are summarized in frawley-o’dea and goldner (2007). (see also: http://www.usccb .org/issues-and-action/child-and-youth-protection/upload/the-nature-and-scopeof-sexual-abuse-of-minors-by-catholic-priests-and-deacons-in-the-united-states1950-2002.pdf.) an anonymous reviewer of a previous draft of this paper questioned whether it was appropriate to consider clergy sexual abuse genderbased violence since the majority of victims are male. i disagree with what may be implied by this objection—that gender-based violence is, by definition, maleperpetrated violence against females. male-on-male sexual abuse can and should be analyzed as gender-based violence. nonetheless the question helps clarify my analysis of clergy sexual abuse in this context as gender-based violence: gendered (patriarchal and clerical) power abuse is at the root of a church structure and culture that encourages and sustains clergy sexual abuse against victims of all sexes, and against these background conditions, gender identity shapes a survivor’s experience of spiritual violence and paths to healing. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 5 spiritually (truluck 2001; manson 2010). spiritual violence is violence in the sense of violation of persons. it shares some features with psychological violence, which may or may not use force or be bodily or physical in nature but violates a person by diminishing or degrading the integrity of the self in some way (bufacchi 2007; galtung 2007; garver 2007). spiritual violence is distinctively spiritual both in terms of its means and its target. it occurs when churches or their agents use religiously significant symbols, texts, teachings, rituals, prayers, or religious leaders to violate or threaten a person’s spiritual self, including their experience of or capacity for relationship with god (tobin 2016). spiritual violence can diminish their religious capacities, which include the cognitive, affective, and imaginative capacities through which a person comes to know and love god. “spiritual violence” is a broad term denoting any use of religious means to violate a person’s spiritual self, and it can be more or less severe.4 on the extreme end, spiritual violence inflicts what michelle panchuk (2018) calls religious trauma. religious trauma is a traumatic experience that has a religious cause, something that the individual believes is closely connected to the religion, and results in a religious effect by transforming the person’s beliefs about god or generating emotional experiences of extreme fear or distrust of the divine being and/or the religious community (panchuk 2018, 516). victims of clergy sexual abuse often believe that their priest perpetrators are god’s specially designated representatives. because children are not yet easily able to comprehend the notion of symbolic meaning, they are often unable to understand that “‘god the father’ is a symbolic way of referring to the ineffable” and are likely to equate the priest with god (redmond 1989, 73–74).5 even when priestly status is understood symbolically, sexual abuse by a priest who is imbued by the community with religious authority can convey a message that god condones or approves of the abuse. some perpetrators explicitly frame or “justify” the abuse to 4 spiritual violence is not unique to theistic or christian faith communities. it denotes the use of spiritually significant texts, rituals, objects, symbols, or roles to violate a person spiritually by diminishing human capacities to experience and connect with the transcendent and develop a spiritual self. i focus here on how spiritual violence perpetrated by the roman catholic church against its own members impacts their religious faith. survivor testimony indicates, however, that clergy sexual abuse can also impact survivors’ capacities for other, non-christian or nontheistic forms of spiritual engagement. 5 redmond’s analysis comports with a large body of testimony from adults who were childhood victims of clergy sexual abuse and who identified the priest with god. for a fairly comprehensive record of the damage detailed in testimony from clergy abuse survivors, see http://www.bishop-accountability.org/accounts/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 6 victims using religious teachings, or telling them that the abuse is god’s will or that if victims told about the abuse god would severely punish them. the abuse also often takes place in sacred spaces such as altars, sacristies, or confessionals, sometimes using sacred objects such as crucifixes, rosaries, or holy water. when religious objects, symbols, language, or rituals are used as instruments of sexual violation, the trauma is often experienced as having a religious, even divine, cause or source. religious trauma also has religious effects and can yield a shattering of the victim’s spiritual self, which can include both a shattered worldview and shattered affective and imaginative capacities (panchuk 2018). as a result of the abuse, some survivors come to believe that god despises them or that they are fundamentally evil. some come to distrust god or experience extreme anxiety or dread about addressing god. some survivors are able to distinguish the will of god from the will of the perpetrator but, as a result of the abuse, become incapable of entering a church, participating in communal worship, or reciting traditional prayers and so are significantly diminished in their ability to participate in religious life. one male survivor who was abused for three years by his parish priest, who was also his spiritual mentor, explained: i went to seminary because catholicism meant something to me. but now i can’t go into a church without feeling i will vomit. my wife says, “let’s go to an episcopalian church—it’s almost the same!” but it is not the same. i am not an episcopalian, i’m a catholic. and there’s nowhere i can go to be one.” (gartner 2007, 94–95) as a result of the abuse, this survivor was left feeling spiritually homeless. panchuk distinguishes three general forms of trauma, all of which are relevant to analysis of clergy sexual abuse. first, the dsm-5 medical definition of traumatic experience for the purposes of medical diagnoses includes “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” that is directly experienced (panchuk 2018, 507). second, some psychologists identify what they call complex trauma, which results from exposure to “severe stressors that are (1) repetitive or prolonged, (2) involve harm or abandonment by caregivers or other ostensibly responsible adults, and (3) occur at developmentally vulnerable times in a victim’s life, such as early childhood or adolescence” (courtois and ford 2013; panchuk 2018, 507–508). finally, feminist psychologists have identified chronic trauma, which refers to a buildup of routine, everyday experiences of racism, sexism, classism, or heterosexism that can, over time, make a person vulnerable to posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) (panchuk 2018, 508). clergy sexual abuse perpetrated against children or adolescents inflicts all three forms of trauma. as a direct experience of sexual violence, it is medically tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 7 diagnosable trauma on the dsm-5 definition. because it is often repeated sexual violation occurring in early childhood or adolescence by adults who are entrusted with a person’s spiritual and moral care, it also meets all three conditions for what constitutes complex trauma. finally, as i will explore further in the next section, clergy sexual abuse in this context is also arguably chronic trauma, to the extent that institutionalized male dominance within the church (and broader society) imbues sexual violence by male perpetrators on male and female victims with additional layers of meaning (card 1994; brison 2002). 2. structural gender-based spiritual violence in the catholic church spiritual violence can be both interpersonally and structurally inflicted. in its interpersonal expression, an individual uses a religiously significant object, text, or their religious authority to violate another individual, as, for example, when a priest rapes a child with a crucifix grossly abusing both his religious role and authority and the symbolic meaning of the crucifix.6 in structural spiritual violence, violating norms or teachings, which partially constitute the religious environment in which a person is spiritually formed, are upheld and sustained through collective human agency.7 for example, sexist or misogynist interpretations of scripture that become part of the tradition of the church and are passed down through generations would constitute structural spiritual violence against women. in this environment, women are at risk of distorted spiritual formation through their routine participation in the ritual life of a faith community whose central doctrines or teachings incorporate interpretations that express spiritually demeaning views of women.8 the boundaries between interpersonal and structural violence are often blurred in practice because interpersonal violence very often has pronounced structural causes and structural 6 there are multiple modes of violence inflicted in this case, including sexual, psychological, and physical violence. i mean here to highlight the spiritually violent dimensions of this form of interpersonal abuse. 7 for a general account of structural violence see galtung (2007) and garver (2007). 8 not all spiritually harmful institutional norms are themselves violent. we have to distinguish between aspects of the institution that are violent and aspects of the institution that themselves may not be violating but that support violence. sexist or misogynist interpretations of scripture are violent on my account because they are agent caused and maintained, express spiritually demeaning attitudes toward women, and are capable of extensively damaging the spiritual identities of women who pursue formation in this community. theological teachings that valorize suffering as a way to draw one closer to god may themselves not be violating, but in conjunction with other aspects of the institution, these teachings may function to enable or support spiritual violence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 8 violence can manifest in interpersonal encounters. in the roman catholic church, ongoing structural gender-based spiritual violence enables and sustains interpersonal clergy sexual abuse and its institutional cover-up and impacts victims’ experience of the abuse (frawley-o’dea 2007). feminist theologians have documented a long history of the conceptual and material devaluation of women in christian thought and tradition. in her book just love, margaret farley (2018, 42) summarizes aspects of this conceptual history that are especially relevant for our purposes: though the eve of canonical scriptures does not bear the same weight of responsibility for the fall as the eve of apocryphal literature, her role was nonetheless frequently interpreted as that of a seducer of adam. and whether or not women were consciously thought to be a threatening force, the great temptresses of men, they nonetheless appeared throughout christian writings as a special agent of evil. instead of losing an identification with pollution and defilement through the development of christian thought, the notion of “woman” became theoretically entrenched as the dangerous “other” in theologies of original sin, of higher and lower nature, mind and body, rationality and desire. even without attributions of evil, women were considered intellectually inferior to men, naturally more passive, less important in the movements of history, and only derivatively and partially participants in the imago dei, the image of god. as farley’s summary indicates, christian thought has portrayed women as spiritually inferior to men, as participating less fully than men in the image of god, and as agents of evil who are especially responsible for sexual sin. this spiritual diminishment of women is tied to the spiritual valorization of men. the christian worldview presents god almost exclusively in male terms. this suggests, as sandra schneiders (1983) puts it, that “god . . . is man ‘writ large’” and “men are god ‘writ small,’” such that “god and man belong to the same order of things and from that order women are excluded.” the roman catholic church formalizes exclusion of women in its institutional structure by enshrining spiritual and moral authority in an all-male clerical hierarchy. to the extent sexism or misogyny are built into the structure and expressed in dominant narratives of the church, women spiritually formed in this environment are vulnerable to experiencing chronic religious trauma that thwarts their spiritual agency. the impact of structural gender-based spiritual violence may appear less severe than other forms or be less visible because it is what newton garver (2007) calls “quiet violence,” which gradually builds over time and can erode a person’s agency, in this case their spiritual agency. the point here is that people may tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 9 experience spiritual violation without being victims of interpersonal violence.9 however this spiritually violent male power structure contributes to the vulnerability of children of both sexes to interpersonal clergy abuse by encouraging uncritical obedience to and unwavering trust of priests who are believed by many to be imbued with god-given spiritual and moral authority over the laity.10 additionally, a culture of clericalism in the church has emphasized the ontologically privileged status and power of clergy as somehow metaphysically closer to and more like god than lay people are (doyle 2006). clericalism bolsters priests’ power to abuse with impunity by legitimating their desires and actions and making them seem irreproachable.11 survivor steve lynch shares how this structural violence made him vulnerable to abuse and silenced him from reporting it at the time: do you know that my parents considered the priest to be god and my society revered this man as god himself? so when a nine-year-old boy is in the room with god, and there is unfathomable shame, excruciating stress, pain, confusion, guilt, uncomfortableness, and more shame absolutely filling the room. . . . does a nine-year-old boy blame god or put the shame on god? do you speak against god, knowing the whole of society reveres this 9 this diminishment of spiritual agency as a result of structural gender-based spiritual violence is analogous to the experience susan brison (2002) discusses in her account of sexual violence. brison shares that prior to her experience of rape, in virtue of her social identity as a woman, she was already experiencing the “quiet” violence of a violating structure that makes differently situated women differently and disproportionately vulnerable to sexualized violence and to living with a sense of violability, even if many manage to avoid its interpersonal manifestation (18, 89– 90, 98). of course, a person may also experience increased sense of violability from an interpersonal attack that does not have structural causes, if the attack is traumatic enough. 10 this church culture also gave priests greater access to males who were allowed and encourage to be altar servers or to go on weekend camping trips or retreats with priest. 11 the sacramental character of the priesthood exacerbates the abusive potential of clericalism. sacraments in the catholic church are formal rites or rituals, said to be instituted by christ, through which a person can experience god’s grace. as kathleen sands explains, the priest “not only administers the sacraments but is himself a sacrament. the priest’s own body . . . is consecrated. it is the priest’s touch that sanctifies and the priest’s words that forgive. how vulnerable, then, are children when their own sexuality is touched by a priest and their own forgiveness promised” or denied (sands 2003, 81). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 10 incarnation of god? it is an unresolvable, insane, impossible choice to make at nine years old. (lynch 2006, 6) structural gender-based spiritual violence in the church, amplified by broader socially enforced gender norms and rape myths, also impacts how some survivors differently interpret and experience the abuse. for instance, male and female victims are likely to experience shame differently as a result of the abuse. some male survivors report shame about failed or weak masculinity, internalizing social narratives that “real men” aren’t victims, or wonder if they were targeted because they are too effeminate (frawley-o’dea 2007, 30–31; figueroa and tombs 2016, 19; garter 2007, 88). church teaching that same-sex attraction is a “grave disorder” and same-sex sex a “sinful perversion” leads some male survivors to feel spiritual terror about their own sexuality if they interpret the abuse to mean that they might be gay12 or if they are blamed by the perpetrator for tempting a priest into this sinfulness. by contrast, female victims of clergy sexual abuse report feeling shame not for failing gendered expectations but for confirming them (bartky 1990). for some, including a survivor whose story i share in the next section, the abuse cemented messages that girls are spiritually inferior to boys, inherently sinful for possessing a female body, responsible for sexual sin, and despised by god because they are girls. in the following section, i share testimony from two female survivors who were sexually abused by catholic priests in order to examine more closely the nature of the spiritual wounds they have suffered. i foreground testimony from female survivors here because their experiences provide an especially clear illustration of the complex interrelation between interpersonal and structural gender-based spiritual violence operative in experiences of clergy sexual abuse that inflicts both complex and chronic religious trauma. i also share testimony from one secondary victim who was not directly abused by an individual perpetrator but experienced a crisis of faith as a result of structural spiritual violence that sustained a culture of sexual abuse and the spiritual diminishment of women. collectively these three cases illustrate different levels at which clergy abuse distorts capacities for worship and the impact on a survivor’s possibilities for recuperating religious faith or other forms of spiritual engagement. 12 based on a qualitative study of the shame experiences of lgbt conservative christians, moon and tobin (2018) argue that the church’s teaching that same-sex attraction is sinful, which is part of its broader narrative about gender, is itself spiritually violent or too easily enables churches to inflict spiritual violence on their lgbt members. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 11 3. survivor accounts of clergy sexual abuse as religious trauma dr. ann hagan webb beginning at age five, ann hagan webb endured eight years of sexual abuse at the hands of a monsignor who was her “grandfather’s golf buddy” (webb 2006, 23). in a 2003 speech given at a voice of the faithful conference, webb described the abuse: i remember an awful feeling that i know now to be fear and anxiety. as the years went by, molestation became oral rape, and ultimately vaginal and anal rape with a crucifix. it was not all violence and it took a long time in therapy for me to put this label on it. it was mixed with nurturing, soft words, sitting on his lap, and being special. (2006, 23) as a result of the abuse, webb consciously rejected catholicism for nearly 20 years, but she reports that she continues to experience spiritual injury through her interaction with catholic clergy. as horrific as the abuse was, webb claims that the experience of being silenced, ignored, and even censured by members of the catholic hierarchy when she came forward to testify to the abuse was equally if not more spiritually damaging. yet she finds this baffling given that she no longer consciously identifies as catholic. as she puts it: “each time they disappoint me, i am shaken to the core which makes no sense since i renounced the religion long ago” (27). the fact that someone who has for twenty years consciously renounced catholicism nonetheless can be shaken to the core by the behavior of its leaders suggests that the spiritual wounds webb endured are enduring and deep. despite her spiritual recovery within the unitarian church, the damage to her spiritual capacities sustained through her catholic spiritual formation and violation was nonetheless extensive enough to make her vulnerable to spiritual revictimization by the “second wound” of being ignored or silenced by catholic clergy. understanding webb’s experience as religious trauma helps explain this baffling experience. traumatic experience that results in ptsd often intrudes memory, is easily triggered, and drags people back to the past to relive the experience over and over again despite their conscious beliefs. as with other forms of trauma, it is difficult to heal from religious trauma, even when one has “moved on” to a new spiritual home and has managed to retain some sense of connection to the transcendent, as webb has through participation in a unitarian faith community. kathleen dwyer a second survivor, kathleen dwyer, endured three years of ritual, sexual abuse at the hands of roman catholic priests and also involving her biological father feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 12 that began when she was five years old. in an essay about the abuse dwyer describes her experience: they cloaked their abuse in sacredness and used god’s name to justify and sanctify the sacrifice of me . . . and framed it in what was supposed to be a sacred space. and, as the blood poured out, over, on and through me, i remembered two of the ten commandments [sic] and i said to god “yes, yes i will. i will ‘love the lord thy god with my whole heart and with my whole soul and with my whole mind’ and yes, yes i will, i will ‘honor thy father (both priestly and biologically) and mother’ but please dear god” i prayed . . . “please . . . please make me not be.” (2002, 2) dwyer endured repeated rapes by multiple clergy all which were “done in god’s name by those [she] was taught were god-like” (dwyer 2006, 40). the abuse took place in her home parish, which she describes as “the church where my catholic foundation was cemented, trusting that indeed priests were next to god and whatever they said i was to follow. that they were the ones who knew best how to help me be less sinful . . . less evil . . . more worthy of god” (dwyer 2006, 36). as those she took to be god’s representatives were raping her, dwyer frantically prayed, promising god that she will obey his commandments requiring her to love him and honor her parents, while simultaneously begging god to destroy her. as a result of the abuse, dwyer’s experience of god might be described as pathological. she was left with the belief that she is fundamentally evil and that she never should have been born. she prayed regularly, but her regular childhood prayer was that god would make her a boy or, preferably, that god would make her “not be” (dwyer 2006, 42). in her journey toward recovery, dwyer has written several poems about her experience, which convey better than any narrative reconstruction the spiritual injury she has endured. one of her poems, “peace be with who?” (dwyer 2006, 38– 39), is particularly illuminating and is worth sharing here in its entirety. “may the peace of the lord be with you always” and the sun shone through the stained glass windows, embracing statues, robes and people. it was as if, while they knelt worshipping, praising and listening to “his” word, they were wrapped in a ray of holiness . . . and that evening, as the sun began to set, she slowly crawled into his bed, for the “word” had said that god is father and father is god . . . tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 13 and that to be in “his” grace you must honor thy father and mother” “the mass has ended . . . go in peace” and the penis became the exploding bomb, and the semen the fall-out that could not be cleansed; but the red cross did not come . . . for there was no war . . . there was no death . . . there was no destruction just “our father, who ar’t in heaven . . .” remember o’lord, those who have died . . . may these . . . find . . . peace . . .” and she still doesn’t understand why death seems a viable alternative to life. she has grown now . . . many things are good. she knows that the scriptures and attitudes that say women must serve men . . . that women are evil . . . that women are responsible for everything, even death itself are not true . . . or, does she? “may the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace” amen! the first three bolded lines (bolded in the original) are direct quotes from the ritual of the catholic mass. these lines, coupled with dwyer’s references to the “our father” prayer and the misogynist interpretation of scripture she was taught as a child, are intertwined with descriptions of her experience of the abuse, indicating how the abuse conveyed spiritual damage through religious means and illuminating the interplay between structural and interpersonal gender-based spiritual violence. as dwyer describes it, her catholic environment furnished her with an image of god as a harsh tyrant who watched her every move and would punish her for all the wrongs she committed. she internalized the view that as a girl she was especially bad and that priests “were the only ones that could make [her] worthy of god’s love” (dwyer 2006, 36–38). she was also taught that non-catholics were going to hell, which instilled in her a sense of being trapped (36). the emphasis on blind obedience to priests, coupled with the view that priests were unerring, made dwyer especially spiritually vulnerable and made it easy for her perpetrators to abuse their power. dwyer describes her images of and beliefs about god, and the religious teachings about women, as terrorizing and filling her with anxiety. as a result of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 14 structural gender-based spiritual violence in her religious upbringing, and independently of the abuse, dwyer experienced chronic religious trauma— internalized religiously imbued sexism and misogyny. the interpersonal violence dwyer endured when she was raped by priests who “justified” the abuse as god’s will affirmed, strengthened, and integrated the “truth” of these broader narratives into her young spiritual personality. it also extended their meaning by introducing what dwyer perceived as divinely ordained sexual torture as punishment for her very existence. dwyer was caught in a web of interpersonal and structural forces, some of which issued direct violent assaults on her religious capacities and others of which functioned to create an environment that supported interpersonal spiritual violation. debbie a white, middle-class catholic woman in her sixties who i call debbie, was not directly sexually abused but shared in an interview her experience of the profound spiritual injury she endured from spiritual formation in a catholic environment that encouraged a sense of spiritual inferiority in women as sexually deviant while sustaining a culture of clergy sexual abuse. debbie had lived most of her life as a rigidly rule-following cradle catholic who pitied non-catholics who she believed were hell-bound. faith was a matter of conforming to church rules, which instructed her especially in how to be a “good girl” in god’s eyes, which meant sexual purity at all costs. her faith was based on fear of god’s punishment should she step out of line and on the sense that as a girl she was especially prone to sexual sin. since she couldn’t change the fact that she was a girl, she says she spent the bulk of her life trying to justify herself to god by putting herself down, belittling and judging herself as a way of making restitution with god. debbie described experiencing an overwhelming sense of betrayal by the church and a crisis of faith when the clergy sexual abuse crisis broke publicly in 2002. she had spent her whole life fearfully obeying priests and trying to live out the teachings of the church. all along, church leaders were violating those teachings in especially egregious ways while condemning lay catholics, and women in particular, as hell-bound for the smallest transgressions. in her journey toward recovering her faith, she said she came to the quite painful realization that she had never actually experienced relationship with god. she lamented that the “god” she had worshipped for over sixty years was “the roman collar” and not the god of the gospels whom she realized she didn’t even know despite sixty years as a churchgoing catholic. the structural spiritual violation she endured led to a form of idolatry in which she worshiped not god but male priests who had shepherded her into a false faith based on extreme fear, distressing anxiety, and debilitating shame about being a woman. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 15 4. faith and worship the spiritual violence these survivors experienced erected enormous barriers to their ability to know and love god and harmed their faith. this section draws from recent work in christian philosophy of religion to explore the link between worship and faith, in order to analyze more precisely how clergy sexual abuse and its institutional bulwark can undermine faith in god and other forms of spiritual engagement.13 when people speak of having faith in god, they can mean many different things, ranging from mere belief in the existence of a transcendent being that has some interaction with the world, to a more robust and active sense of having a relationship with god that anchors one’s search for meaning and purpose, shapes one’s values, and influences one’s life choices. spiritual violence can tamper with faith at any place on this spectrum. here i examine harms to faith in the more robust sense of having a relationship with god, as knowing and loving god. faith in this sense is underwritten and partially constituted by an attitude of worship, which is a mental state that includes beliefs, desires, and emotions according to which a person knows and loves god and desires communion with god (wolterstorff 2015, 2016; cuneo 2016). nicholas wolterstorff defines this attitude as a “particular mode of godward acknowledgement of god’s unsurpassable greatness . . . in a stance of awed, reverential, and grateful adoration” (2015, 26). christians develop and express an attitude of worship toward god through practices of worship, which include personal devotion and communal worship. roman catholics are among the christian denominations to engage in liturgical worship, which refers to formal, communal rituals with set readings and prayers placed in a specific order. worship practices reflect a faith community’s doxastic commitments and provide opportunities for affective and imaginative experience of god through activities such as prayer, meditation, blessings, chanting, and petitioning. practitioners may use incense, music, mantras, sacred symbols, or movements, all of which engage a person’s senses and imagination, and work to coordinate her desires and emotions both to reflect and reinforce the basic beliefs of the faith and to express “awed, reverential, grateful adoration” toward god 13 in an unpublished manuscript, joshua cockayne, david efird and jack warman (2018) cite (disapprovingly) a meme circulating on christian facebook pages stating, “church hurt: if being hurt by church causes you to lose your faith in god, then your faith was in people and not in god.” they argue that in addition to being callous and insensitive to survivors’ experiences, this view ignores the corporate nature of worship, including personal devotion, and the role of a community in our experience of god. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 16 (wolterstorff 2015, 26). over time, through participation in worship practices, a person learns from and with others how to be in relationship with god, how to know and love god, and can develop an attitude of worship that orients and expresses this relationship. knowing and loving god is embodied, practical knowledge and involves implicit understanding that is not reducible to propositional knowledge. worship practices facilitate personal knowledge of god, in a way analogous to how we come to know a friend and acquire the skill-based knowledge and attitudes that constitute being a good friend, for example.14 nondissenting participation in worship, meaning that the person performs actions of worship with the intention that those actions be acts of worship as opposed to enacting the behavior without intending to be worshipping, is a primary way christians develop and express an attitude of worship toward god (wolterstorff 2016).15 importantly, worship is not a mere means to knowing and loving god; worship partially constitutes our relationship with god. as robert roberts writes, the point of worship is not performance, but expression. worship is . . . an expression of our hearts, of our lives, of our character. it is communion with our god. . . . thus worship cannot be detached from spirituality . . . worship has to be the same kind of activity that shapes our hearts. (2007, 21–22; italics in original) without worship—both the attitude and the activities that give rise to and sustain it—there is no relationship with god or substantive spiritual identity, even though there may be a religious affiliation in the sense of nominal group membership. to worship is to participate in and express relationship with god. extending the analogy 14 in order to explain the activity of worship, wolterstorff draws analogies to other examples of skill-based knowledge, such as painting—which is never complete and cannot be learned except by doing and acquiring a kind of feel for it—and examples of knowing another object, such as the way biologist barbara mcclintock came to know her corn plants by spending long periods of time simply observing them and tending them carefully. we don’t come to know god in quite either of these ways, but wolterstorff’s insight is that over time, by engaging liturgical practices of worship, a person can get a feel for who god is, and how to relate to god (2016, 9). 15 wolterstorff and cuneo discuss specifically practices of liturgical worship in coming to know and love god. roberts (2007) and smith (2013) speak more broadly about worship to include nonliturgical and liturgical forms. the claim here is that worship, defined broadly, is necessary for developing, sustaining, and expressing relationship with god. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 17 with friendship may be useful here. friendship designates a relationship, but it is also an activity, and there are certain practices and attitudes both that enable a person to experience friendship and that are also partially constitutive of the kind of activity friendship is. for example, friendship requires, at the very least, spending quality time together; people who never spend any time together or never communicate cannot maintain a friendship. spending time with a friend both enables friendship and partially constitutes the friendship. similarly, coming to know god is an activity—it is something we do and not just something we have or acquire, and practices of worship both enable and partially constitute a person’s relationship with and experience of god. terence cuneo speaks of knowing and loving god as developing rapport with god. to have rapport with someone includes “privileged epistemic contact with that person” but also knowing “how to engage that person” and “what that person cares about” (cuneo 2016, 148). rapport is a skill-based, personal knowledge that can effect a state of mutual recognition. in this case, rapport with god can effect “divine-human mutual recognition” and love (cuneo 2016, 149n9). acts of worship through which a person develops and expresses rapport with god are not unidirectional, just as genuine friendship with other people is not onesided. through worship people engage in mutual acts that generate opportunities to express awe and adoration toward god and for god to respond by listening and speaking to them (wolterstorff 2015, 66–67, 71). as wolterstorff puts it, in worship there is reciprocity of orientation which “brings into existence an i-thou relationship between god and us. god is a thou for us” (2015, 61). when a person worships, she orients herself toward god in “a mutual relationship, which involves mutual address and adoration” (cockayne, efird, and warman, 2018). in summary, having faith in god involves having a relationship with god expressed through an attitude of worship: to adore god and to be open to god adoring us. having an attitude of worship is a mode of knowing and loving god and being receptive to god knowing and loving us. nondissenting participation in worship practices is a primary way that christians develop, sustain, and express an attitude of worship, and “if all goes well,” worship generates an experience of human-divine mutual recognition and rapport with god. we are now in a better position to examine more precisely how religiously traumatic spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse undermines religious faith by diminishing survivors’ religious capacities—the cognitive, affective, and imaginative capacities activated in worship and through which they come to know and love god. clergy sexual abuse erects obstacles to the attitude of worship by tarnishing a person’s relationship to practices of worship through which a person develops and expresses this attitude. in the next section, i return to survivors’ testimony to analyze how clergy sexual abuse in the roman catholic church damages a survivor’s relationship to two kinds of liturgical feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 18 worship practices: liturgical address, or speaking to god, and liturgical actions that engage what cuneo calls liturgical props, which are ordinary objects that liturgy transforms into sacred, dynamic mediators of our relationship with god. 5. clergy sexual abuse: a barrier to knowing and loving god clergy sexual abuse harms a person’s capacities for religious faith, in part, by damaging their relationship to religiously significant objects, texts, prayers, rituals, and religious leaders a person engages in worship, leading a person to develop a toxic or troubled faith (i.e., an attitude of worship that is harmful to them) or disabling a person altogether from being able to worship. one way worship facilitates relationship with god is by teaching a person how to address god (wolterstorff 2016). addressing god is a form of speaking to god, which can yield personal knowledge of god in at least two ways. first, the form of liturgical address takes certain features of god for granted. the form of address in christian liturgical enactments address god in the second person, as a being capable of listening and apprehending what is said: “we bless you, o god”; “we praise you, o god;” “we thank you, o god”; etc. (wolterstorff 2016, 11). as wolterstorff continues, this form of address would make no sense if god could not apprehend what they say. . . . when addressing god in praise and adoration, one takes god to be worthy of praise and adoration for being how god is and for doing what god has done. whatever they take god to be like when performing the actions of the liturgy, if god is in fact that way, then by learning to perform those actions and performing them, they come to know god as being that way. (2016, 12– 13). in light of this, we might ask what kathleen dwyer learned to take for granted about who god is and what god is like through her participation in catholic worship. dwyer’s liturgical address of god is troublingly nondissenting, and the trouble is a direct result of being raped repeatedly by those she believes are god’s representatives, in sacred spaces such as altars, and having the abuse “justified” by her perpetrators (and the broader religious environment) in god’s name and with reference to scripture. as the abuse was taking place, dwyer spoke to god using forms of liturgical address common in catholic worship and referencing the ten commandments, “yes, yes i will. i will ‘love the lord thy god with my whole heart and with my whole soul and with my whole mind’ and yes, yes i will, i will ‘honor thy tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 19 father (both priestly and biologically) and mother’ but please dear god” i prayed . . . “please . . . please make me not be.” (dwyer 2002, 2) dwyer’s poem (shared above) recites several lines from the catholic mass, including lines that address god during the eucharistic prayer, lines that address god during the mass of funeral rite (remember, o lord those who have died), and the “our father,” which is recited during the liturgy of the eucharist at catholic mass. dwyer addresses god in the second person as a being who is worthy of praise and capable of listening and understanding her, and her prayers reflect aspects of the central pattern of catholic liturgy—blessing and petitioning god. yet her liturgical address indicates that she “knows” god as a being who condones what is happening to her, perhaps even one who commands sexual torture as punishment for being a girl. her address expresses a reciprocal orientation between her and god, but not one of mutual adoration or rapport. she addresses god as a being of unsurpassable greatness and begs god to make her “not be.” dwyer’s priest perpetrators inflict egregious spiritual violation by hijacking liturgical forms of address and using them as instruments of sexual violence. the spiritually violating force of the abuse is amplified by structural spiritual violence against women, which prior to the abuse primed dwyer to experience god as hostile toward girls. participants in liturgical worship also come to know god through the content of the addressee-identification terms they use to speak to god, terms like “father,” “almighty god,” “comforter,” which tell us something about what god is like (wolterstorff 2016, 13–14). when using these terms over and over to address god, if these terms fit god, then in using them we get a feel for what god is like (wolterstorff 2016, 14). for dwyer, this too is a site of religious trauma. she learns to address god as “father,” for instance, but the knowledge of god she comes to have through repeatedly addressing god as “father” draws analogously from what she knows about other fathers: she is raped by priests who she calls “father” who work in conjunction with her biological father who also sexually violates her. in light of this, using “father” to address god reinforces her personal knowledge of a father god who condones sexual abuse and like human “fathers” also harbors hostility toward her.16 it may also imbue her human father with godlike authority reinforcing her sense that the abuse is warranted or deserved. in addition to practices of address, liturgical worship also makes available an array of ritual actions and objects through which a person engages god (cuneo 16 feminist theologians have long emphasized the significance of names for god in a person’s experience of god and the impact of exclusively masculine terms and imagery for god on women’s experience of god especially against background social conditions of male dominance. see especially johnson (1992). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 20 2016, 159–160). terence cuneo explains two ways that liturgy contributes to coming to know god in a way that can effect divine-human mutual recognition: first, “liturgy makes available act-types of a certain range such as chanting, kissing, prostrating, and eating that count in the context of a liturgical performance as cases of blessing, petitioning, and thanking god” (161). second, “liturgy furnishes an array of conceptions of god and god’s activity under which to perform such actions” 161). liturgy provides, then, a certain conception of god and god’s activity in the world, and actions and objects for engaging god under this conception. if “all goes well,” liturgical worship leads a person to engage god in ways that are fitting of god, that track who god is (162). cuneo calls material objects of worship liturgical props. liturgical props are ordinary materials that in the context of liturgy acquire a numinous quality, becoming vehicles of blessing, veneration, or petition. for instance, in the context of liturgy, water becomes a vehicle for blessing, and the wood out of which a crucifix is constructed becomes an object of veneration (161). clergy sexual abuse turns liturgical props and actions into spiritual weapons, which can furnish the person who engages them in the practice of worship with harmful images of and desires regarding god. consider ann webb’s experience of being raped with a crucifix by a monsignor.17 a crucifix depicts jesus being crucified on the cross and is often constructed from wood or metal or some combination of these. different religious environments may encourage different interpretations of the symbolic meaning of the crucifix. for instance, theologian rita nakashima brock (1989) maintains that when the crucifixion is interpreted as atonement for our sins, this may be taken to convey a narrative of divinely ordained child abuse in which god demands the torture unto death of his only child in order to absolve the sins of humanity. if webb internalized the crucifix as symbolizing divinely ordained child abuse, the monsignor’s use of a crucifix as an instrument of sexual violation reinforces the message that god, the ultimate source of value and life, sanctions abuse. when coupled with the christian tendency to valorize suffering as a way to draw one closer to god, this primes the child with a spiritual character that makes her especially vulnerable to both sexual and spiritual violation—communicating that this form of suffering is the price to pay for knowing god or being accepted by god. the violence of the cross is extended to make the violence of rape spiritually significant. if, on the other hand, webb’s religious context taught a meaning of the 17 the christian symbology of the cross has varied historically. it was originally intended to represent the resurrection rather than the crucifixion, and veneration of the bloody, nail-pierced, crucified christ, which became an “idealized icon of pathos and pain,” were not customary on church altars until the late fourteenth century (frawley-o’dea 2007, 40). theologians debate the spiritual meaning and symbolism of the crucifix. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 21 crucifix as signifying divine love and hope, the symbol is made spiritually ruinous by the monsignor who uses it as an instrument of sexual violation teaching the child sexual violation as a model of divine love.18 in webb’s experience, for example, the sexual abuse was delivered with soft, nurturing words and being special. this confused webb, making it difficult for her as a child to recognize what was happening as abuse and reinforcing the idea that sexual violation is what divine affection feels like. the spiritually violent impact of the abuse is even more extensive when we consider the centrality of the crucifix to catholic worship and the centrality of worship to developing a relationship with god. if participating in worship partially constitutes relationship with god, then webb’s experience of god (and not just her beliefs about god) are threatened by the monsignor’s use of a crucifix as an instrument of sexual violence. the crucifix typically figures prominently on the altar of catholic churches as a symbol to encourage the attitude of worship—awed, reverential, grateful adoration of god. the crucifix adorns the end of rosaries that people use in worship and personal devotion, and it functions as a central liturgical prop in the good friday rite during the easter season, which is the holiest time of the liturgical year for catholics. one can imagine webb as a child praying her rosary, or at a good friday service, kissing the feet of the crucified christ: kissing the sacred symbol that god’s representative used to rape her. kissing is one of the act-types cuneo names, which in the context of liturgy becomes a vehicle for honoring god. if worship partially constitutes and is an expression of a person’s relationship with god, this makes the child vulnerable to experiencing god as an abuser. 6. religious faith in the unjust meantime clergy sexual abuse can undermine faith in god in part because it turns worship into a religiously traumatic activity. when practices of worship and the actions and objects central to those practices become sources of religious trauma, then engaging in worship is unlikely to yield personal knowledge of a loving god and mutual human-divine rapport; it is more likely to yield quite the opposite. survivors are vulnerable either to cultivating a troubled, toxic attitude of worship whereby god is experienced as hostile or abusive, and/or being incapacitated altogether from having an attitude of worship toward god because it becomes impossible to engage in the practices of worship that develop and sustain this attitude. and even when 18 some theologians have demonstrated a potentially less violent or liberating theology of the cross (wink 1998). serene jones (2009) examines how female victims of domestic violence have reimagined the imagery of the cross as a symbol of a god who understands the pain of unjust and unwarranted suffering and who desires that it be healed. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 22 people are capable of distinguishing god from the human institutions and religious leaders who abused them, they may still be incapable of mutual divine-human rapport with god because their relationship to the practices of worship that foster and express this kind of relationship is irreparably damaged (panchuk 2018).19 this appears to be kathleen dwyer’s experience. she laments that as a result of the abuse, her faith has been forever “broken, shattered, and bloodied” (dwyer 2006, 42). for dwyer, the religious trauma of clergy sexual abuse globally incapacitated her religious capacities for engaging god, resulting in a shattered faith and making rapport with god impossible. in her recovery, dwyer speaks of recuperating some ability to connect with transcendent value, developing what she calls a “spirituality of justice” that connects her to an ideal of “humanity.” but her capacity for religious faith was, by her own description, destroyed by the abuse.20 some survivors as a result of the abuse feel incapable of any form of spiritual engagement because the abuse has so fundamentally violated their capacity for trust in and vulnerability to something greater than the self (gartner 2007, 95).21 19 panchuk argues that religious trauma gives people a justified reason to de-convert because in some cases the trauma so ruins their relationship to worship that they are globally incapacitated from participating in religious life, even if they retain a belief in god. 20 theologians have debated whether or not one’s ability to respond to god can be irreparably destroyed by human acts, or whether god’s grace is powerful enough to overcome the harm. see for example, jennifer beste’s (2007) work on the spiritual impact of childhood incestuous abuse. for now, i want to leave open the possibility of spiritual death since from the perspective of at least some victims who underwent extremely horrific experiences of clergy sexual abuse, it is not clear that a relationship with god is any longer possible, or, more precisely, that access to that relationship is any longer possible. furthermore, it may be more common that religious faith is destroyed but that spiritual death, when ‘spiritual’ is defined more broadly in terms of self-transcendence, is less common as a result of this form of violence. still, some survivor testimony indicates that the abuse diminished their capacity for spiritual engagement of any kind, and not just their capacity for religious faith. 21 understanding precisely how spiritual violence inflicted through religious worship could disable a person from other nontheistic or nonreligious forms of spiritual engagement requires more argument than i can develop in this paper. this phenomenon raises questions about the fundamental human capacities: a person engages in spiritual experience that can but need not take religious form. here it suffices to note that for some victims this does appear to happen. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 23 philosophers writing about the role of worship in religious faith do not consider experiences like dwyer’s, but they likely would say that the twisted, violating meanings of the terms of address dwyer uses to speak to god do not fit god and are not true of god. they might say, then, that dwyer does not come to know god through her participation in liturgy because the liturgical forms of address she uses have been tainted; they don’t track what god is in fact like and so she comes to misunderstand who god is.22 but this is where the communal, corporate aspects of religious faith become vital to appreciate. the religious meaning and significance of liturgical texts, objects, symbols, prayers, rituals, and roles are communally given and sustained and are learned and reinforced in the context of corporate worship.23 these meanings often carry over to and are reinforced in personal devotion and individual prayer. clergy sexual abuse, especially when the abuse is perpetrated against children, can cement a spiritually violent foundation for a person’s relationship to the religious objects, texts, prayers, and rituals that a person engages in the activity of worship. if god is not a hostile abuser, how is a person to come to know this? one possible avenue is to engage alternative interpretations of scripture and alternative worship practices that convey a conception of god and god’s activity in the world as loving. but it may be enormously difficult, or even psychologically and spiritually impossible, for a person to engage scripture at all (or central prayers or worship objects and spaces) without being triggered and experiencing ptsd symptoms (panchuk 2018). one survivor named carolyn, speaking publicly just after 22 wolterstorff might say that since the attitude of worship is defined as an attitude of adoring god and being open to god adoring us, then dwyer does not worship god, since she incapable of being open to god adoring her and instead develops a sense that god despises her. her behavior mimics worship but is not genuine worship. the point still stands, though, that religiously traumatic spiritual violence (structural and interpersonal) disables her capacities for worship. 23 joshua cockayne and david efird (2018) argue that the corporate nature of worship is central to our knowing god better than we otherwise would know god through individual, personal worship because of how other people can improve our second-personal knowledge of others. for instance, we can gain deeper secondpersonal knowledge of a friend through the way other people interact with and experience that friend and the way the friend interacts with other people. similarly, our second-personal knowledge of god can become deeper by witnessing how others interact with and experience god in corporate worship. this also makes us vulnerable, though, to other people poisoning our knowledge of god, especially when those people are religious leaders the community designates as god’s special representatives who have privileged epistemic contact with god. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 24 the release of the pennsylvania grand jury report, shared that “whenever she hears the word ‘god’ [. . .] flashbacks of the abuse keep coming back. . . . the word ‘god’ makes me think of him” (yan 2018). the most basic christian term for addressing the divine is a traumatic trigger for this survivor. i am not here claiming a necessary connection between a particular set of liturgical practices and a relationship with god. nor is the claim that participating in liturgical worship is the only way a person can develop and express relationship with god. but if a person’s relationship to worship practices is tarnished because their relationship to liturgical prayers, liturgical actions, and liturgical objects and spaces is violated, this can make it difficult to cultivate an attitude of worship even in an alternative religious community with nonliturgical worship practices or outside of religiosity altogether. a person who cannot step foot in a church without getting nauseous or having a panic attack, or cannot hear the word “god” without flashbacks of the abuse, has a significant barrier to recovering their faith even in a different christian tradition or new religious home and may be disabled from other nonreligious forms of spiritual engagement. when people like ann webb do recover their faith in a new faith community, this indicates a new understanding of the divine and the person’s relationship to it, which demonstrates the centrality of worship to faith. a change in worship practice reflects a change in one’s conception of and relationship with the divine, for instance, whether a person conceptualizes the divine as a personal being, rather than a force or power. and the fact that, after twenty years of renouncing catholicism and recovering in a different faith community, webb can still be spiritually injured as a result of the actions of catholic clergy suggests the extent to which damage to one’s religious capacities as a result of religiously traumatic spiritual violence is difficult fully to overcome. i am also not claiming that survivors never recover faith within a christian faith community. some clergy sexual abuse survivors remain in the catholic church, although many also report that the abuse diminished their ability to participate fully in the sacraments or ritual life of the community. debbie is not a survivor of interpersonal abuse, and so her experience is not analogous in important ways to webb’s experience and dwyer’s experience. when debbie realized that she had spent her whole life to that point worshipping priests and missing out entirely on a relationship with god, the betrayal and anger she felt led her to leave the catholic church for a while. it did not poison her longing for faith in god, though, and she sought spiritual renewal initially in other theistic traditions and in buddhism. she has since returned to worship in a catholic community with a renewed faith forged through interpretations of scripture and worship practices that counter the spiritually demeaning views about women that were the cornerstone of her “faith” for sixty years. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 25 conclusion the primary goals of this paper have been to foreground the religious trauma suffered by survivors of clergy sexual abuse; to analyze clergy sexual abuse as gender-based spiritual violence in order to grasp its structural causes and appreciate its spiritual harms; and to show how this kind of spiritual violence is a serious threat to faith in god and spiritual thriving. for many clergy sexual abuse survivors, the church has been a barrier, indeed the barrier, to faith. and for some, the abuse robbed them of their ability to develop the human capacity for spiritual engagement even outside of religiosity. by drawing attention to a church structure of male dominance and entitlement, feminist methodology enables us to see the nuanced ways that clergy sexual abuse is gender-based violence in both its causes and its spiritual effects. this methodology also encourages theorizing from the experiences of survivors, and doing so generates a different set of research questions than the questions that occupy many philosophers interested in religious experience and the connection between worship and faith: how does one come to know and love god in the context of spiritual violence and its aftermath? what role can or does worship play when worship objects and rituals have been sources of spiritual violation and religious trauma? what dispositions and attitudes enable resistance to or healing from spiritual violence, or what attitude of worship might facilitate knowing and loving god in a spiritually violent environment? is there a role for lament or righteous anger in such an attitude (rea 2018)? are their possibilities for liturgical worship to function as a form of protest?24 finally, i also hope more feminist philosophers might find questions about religious experience and the spiritual dimensions of human life important to pursue. many expressions of spiritual violence are forms of gender-based violence, and for many gender and sexual minorities, religious faith or spirituality is partially constitutive of their sense of flourishing, and it is a great loss when spiritual engagement seems forever tarnished, out of reach, or oppressive. i am one such person. religious faith is central to my identity and sense of meaning and thriving, but i live this faith in the unjust meantime as someone who has experienced genderbased spiritual violence as a barrier to faith. early in my career as a philosopher, alison jaggar’s scholarship and mentorship gave me the tools to recognize and articulate experiences of genderbased spiritual violence, the nature of which had been impossible to capture with philosophical approaches i had been introduced to up to that point. drawing on 24 i thank michelle panchuk for raising this question, which she pursues in an unpublished manuscript. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 26 feminist methodology did not necessarily rule out faith-based forms of identity; it provided resources to build and own a new religious faith and religious identity that i could inhabit with integrity, although always also with tension and sometimes contradiction. this tension is a gift because it prevents complacency about christianity’s role in gender-based violence and its complicity in gender injustice, in spite of its professed values and those arms of the christian tradition that enact radically inclusive love and justice. feminist methodology has equipped me to investigate philosophical questions that arise in the lived experience of religious faith in the unjust meantime, and to live the tension of this experience philosophically, by which i mean reflectively, critically, and creatively. references bartky, sandra. 1990. femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge press. beste, jennifer. 2007. god and the victim, new york: oxford university press. brison, susan. 2002. aftermath: violence and the remaking of a self. princeton, nj: princeton university press. brock, rita nakashima. 1989. “and a little child will lead us: christology and child abuse.” christianity, patriarchy, and abuse. new york: pilgrim press. bufacchi, vittorio. 2007. violence and social justice. new york: palgrave mcmillan. card, claudia. 1994. “rape terrorism.” in the unnatural lottery: character and moral luck, 97–117. philadelphia: temple university press. cockayne joshua, and david efird. 2018. “common worship.” faith and philosophy 35 (3): 299–325. cockayne, joshua, david efird, and jack warman. 2018. “shattered faith: the social epistemology of deconversion by spiritually violent religious trauma.” unpublished manuscript cited with permission of the authors. courtois, christine a., and julian d. ford. 2013. treatment of complex trauma: a sequenced, relationship-based approach. new york: guilford press. cuneo, terence. 2016. ritualized faith: essays on the philosophy of liturgy. oxford: oxford university press. doyle, thomas. 2006. “clericalism: enabler of clergy sexual abuse.” pastoral psychology 54 (3): 189–213. dwyer, kathleen. 2002. “in the name of the father . . . and of the son . . . and of the holy ghost . . . amen!” the brown papers: a monthly essay of reflection and analysis from the women’s theological center vi (4): 1–15. ———. 2006. “in god’s name.” in survivors’ lullaby, edited by ruth moore, 36–65. bloomington, in: authorhouse. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 27 farley, margaret. 2008. just love: a framework for christian sexual ethics. new york: continuum international publishing company. figueroa alvear, rocio, and david tombs. 2016. listening to male survivors of church sexual abuse: voices from survivors of sodalicio abuses in peru. dunedin, nz: center for theology and public issues, university of otago. frawley-o’dea, mary. 2007. perversion of power: sexual abuse in the catholic church. nashville, tn: vanderbilt university press. frawley-o’dea, mary, and virginia goldner. 2007. “abusive priests: who they were and were not.” in predatory priests, silenced victims: the sexual abuse crisis and the catholic church, edited by mary gail frawley-o’dea and virginia goldner, 21–34. mahwah, nj: analytic press. galtung, johan. 2007. “violence, peace, and peace research.” in violence: a philosophical anthology, edited by vittorio bufacchi, 78–109. london: palgrave macmillan. gartner, richard b. 2007. “failed ‘fathers,’ boys betrayed.” in predatory priests, silenced victims: the sexual abuse crisis and the catholic church, edited by mary gail frawley-o’dea and virginia goldner, 85–100. mahwah, nj: analytic press. garver, newton. 2007. “what violence is.” in violence: a philosophical anthology, edited by vittorio bufacchi, 170–182. london: palgrave macmillan. jaggar, alison m. 2000a. “ethics naturalized: feminism’s contribution to moral epistemology.” metaphilosophy 31 (5): 452–468. ———. 2000b. “feminism in ethics.” in the cambridge companion to feminist philosophy, edited by miranda fricker and jennifer hornsby, 225–244. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 2000c. “feminist ethics.” in the blackwell guide to ethical theory, edited by hugh lafollette, 348–374. oxford: wiley blackwell. ———. 2016. just methods: an interdisciplinary feminist reader. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. jaggar, alison m., and theresa w. tobin. 2017. “moral justification in an unjust world.” in the routledge companion to feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry, serene khadar, and alison stone, 501–514. new york: routledge. jaggar, alison m., and scott wisor. 2014. “feminist methodology in practice: learning from a research project.” in just methods: an interdisciplinary feminist reader, edited by alison m. jaggar, 498–518. new york: paradigm publishers. johnson, elizabeth. 1992. she who is: the mystery of god in feminist theological discourse. crossroad publishing. jones, serene. 2009. trauma and grace. louisville, ky: westminster john knox press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2019 28 kaveny, cathleen. 2019. “what benedict’s letter on abuse gets wrong.” commonweal magazine, may 20. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org /putting-justice-first. lynch, stephen. 2006. “a room full of shame: selected writings” in survivors’ lullaby, edited by ruth moore, 6–15. bloomington, in: authorhouse. manson, jaime l. 2010. “new norms are much more than a pr disaster.” [editorial]. national catholic reporter. july 10. accessed july 2012. http://ncronline.org/blogs/new-norms-are-much-more-pr-disaster. moon, dawne, and theresa tobin. 2018. “sunsets and solidarity: overcoming sacramental shame in conservative christian churches to forge a queer vision of love and justice.” hypatia 33 (3): 451–468. o’loughlin, michael. 2018. “pennsylvania report documents over 1,000 victims of priest abuse.” america magazine. august 14. https://www.americamagazine .org/faith/2018/08/14/pennsylvania-report-documents-over-1000-victimspriest-abuse. panchuk, michelle. 2018. “the shattered spiritual self: philosophical exploration of religious trauma.” res philosophica. 95 (3): 505–530. rea, michael c. 2018. “a god to contend with.” in the hiddenness of god, edited by michael c. rea, 137–194. oxford: oxford university press. redmond, shelia a. 1989. “christian ‘virtues’ and recovery from child sexual abuse.” in christianity, patriarchy, and abuse, 70–88. new york: pilgrim press. roberts, robert. 2007. spiritual emotions: a psychology of christian virtues. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans publishing company. sands, kathleen m. 2003. “speaking out: clergy sexual abuse: where are the women?” journal of feminist studies in religion 19 (2): 79–83. schneiders, sandra. 1983. “the effects of women’s experience on their spirituality.” spirituality today 35 (2): 100–116. online version at http://opcentral.org/resources/2015/01/12/sandra-m-schneiders-theeffects-of-womens-experience-on-their-spirituality/. smith, james k. a. 2013. imagining the kingdom: how worship works. grand rapids, mi: baker academic. tobin, theresa w. 2016. “spiritual violence, gender, and sexuality: implications for seeking and dwelling among some catholic women and lgbt catholics.” in seekers and dwellers: plurality and wholeness in a time of secularity,” edited by philip j. rossi, 133–167. cultural heritage and contemporary change series viii, christian philosophical studies, vol. 20. truluck, rembert. 2001. “spiritual violence.” whosoever (online magazine). http://www.whosoever.org/v5i6/violence.html. tobin – religious faith in the unjust meantime: the spiritual violence of clergy sexual abuse published by scholarship@western, 2019 29 webb, ann hagan. 2006. “how can we sleep at night?” in survivors’ lullaby, edited by ruth moore, 23–35. bloomington, in: authorhouse. wink, walter. 1998. the powers that be. new york: doubleday. wolterstorff, nicholas. 2015. the god we worship. grand rapids, mi: william b. eerdmans publishing. ———. 2016. “knowing god liturgically.” journal of analytic theology 4 (may): 1–16. yan, holly. 2018. “priest abuse victims detail lifetime of trauma and broken trust.” cnn website. accessed august 16, 2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/15 /us/pennsylvania-catholic-church-victims/index.html. zauzmer, julie, and chico harlan. 2018. “cardinal theodore mccarrick, facing sexual abuse reports, resigns from the college of cardinals.” washington post. july 28. accessed august 14, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/actsof-faith/wp/2018/07/28/cardinal-theodore-mccarrick-facing-sexual-abusereports-resigns-from-the-college-of-cardinals/?utm_term=.f4db8d9e2bd1. theresa w. tobin is an associate professor of philosophy at marquette university. she researches topics in theoretical and practical ethics and feminist philosophy, including moral justification, the emotions in moral and political agency, and spiritual violence. her publications on these topics include “the relevance of trust for moral justification” in social theory and practice (2011); “naturalizing moral justification: rethinking the method of moral epistemology” (with alison jaggar) in metaphilosophy (2013); and “sunsets and solidarity: overcoming sacramental shame in conservative christian churches to forge a queer vision of love and justice” (with dawne moon) in hypatia (2018). 7290 tobin title page.pdf 7290 tobin final format.pdf is utilitarianism bad for women? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 4 article 6 2017 is utilitarianism bad for women? h. e. baber university of san diego, baber@sandiego.edu recommended citation baber, h. e.. 2017. "is utilitarianism bad for women?."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (4). article 6. is utilitarianism bad for women? h. e. baber abstract philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of “adaptive preference” makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. poor women in the global south, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. this critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. if well-being is understood as preference satisfaction, it is easy to see why poor women in the global south are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions, they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference rankings. utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. keywords: adaptive preference, utilitarianism, feminism, preference, preferentism, desire theory, rational choice, well-being, nussbaum, khader, capability philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of “adaptive preference” makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. poor women in the global south, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. so, serene khader writes, “one problem with treating preference satisfaction as the end of development is that people can have preferences it seems morally questionable to fulfill.” she continues: people’s wants can become deformed by bad circumstances. taking preference satisfaction as the end of development implies that we have an obligation to fulfill people’s deformed preferences. this implication of 1 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 preference satisfaction theories of social distribution is deeply objectionable . . . and so we should be wary of utilitarian approaches. (khader 2011, 43) this critique assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. in section 1 of this paper, i argue that it is a mistake to understand preferentism as “the desire theory of well-being”: preferentism is an account of betterness rather than well-being as such. where an individual, i, prefers x to y, she is better off getting x. in section 2, i suggest that disadvantaged individuals reconciled to their lots in life may prefer conditions more conducive to flourishing even if they do not actively desire or pursue them. in section 3, i note that rational choosers may be ignorant or misinformed about both empirical facts and “values” so that, as a consequence, their choices do not reveal their preferences. in section 4, i suggest that while there are authentic cases of adaptive preference, it is not as common as many writers suggest and is likely not what drives women living in adverse circumstances to make choices that privileged observers construe as expressions of “deformed” or “inappropriately adaptive” preferences. if well-being is understood as preference satisfaction, then it is easy to see why poor women in the global south are badly off: even if they do not actively desire more favorable conditions, they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference rankings. utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. 1. preferentism is not the “desire theory” writers are inclined to use the terms “preference” and “desire” interchangeably for elegant variation. this is, however, a grave error. first, for practical purposes, we need an account of relative well-being. where resources are abundant, we should be able to explain why, though an individual would do well with either of two states of affairs, she might be better off with one rather than with the other. and where resources are scarce and individuals are badly off with all available options, as is the case for poor women in the global south, we should be able to identify the least-worst of those options. while we have some intuitive notion of the relative “strength” of desires, our intuitions are unstable and provide little guidance when it comes to determining the relative betterness of various states of affairs, which preference rankings readily provide. secondly, while desire can be understood as a dispositional state, nussbaum and other critics who cite what they take to be instances of “adaptive preference” in objections to the desire theory assume that desire is an occurrent state involving 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 yens, urges, and cravings which, if not satisfied, result in anger and felt frustration. so, nussbaum writes: [in] andhra pradesh i talked with women who were severely malnourished, and whose village had no reliable clean water supply. before the arrival of a government consciousness-raising program, these women apparently had no feeling of anger or protest about their physical situation. . . . now their level of discontent has gone way up: they protest to the local government, asking for clean water, for electricity, for a health visitor. . . . the consciousnessraising program has clearly challenged entrenched preferences and satisfactions, taking a normative approach based on an idea of good human functioning. (nussbaum 2001, 69) on the preferentist account proposed here, even while the women put up with adverse conditions, they preferred states of affairs that we should regard as more conducive to flourishing, that is, states they would have chosen given adequate information. understood in this way, they were not damaged victims whose deformed preferences had to be dislodged through therapy or “consciousnessraising” but rational choosers who needed information about what options were available so that they could take action to satisfy their preferences. a preferentist account of well-being is preferable to the version of the “desire theory” assumed by nussbaum, where desire is understood as an occurrent state, because preferences can be ranked, because preferences are dispositional, and because the preferentist account can explain why, ceteris paribus, lifeimprovement is better than life-adjustment. 1.1. preferences are ranked desire is a binary relation holding on an agent and a state of affairs or bundle of goods. preference is a ternary relation. we do not simply prefer states of affairs or bundles of goods: we prefer them to other states of affairs or to other bundles of goods. if i prefer x to y and get x then my preference for x (over y) is satisfied—even if i prefer w to x and v to w and . . . a to b, that is, even if x is low on my preference ranking, and even if i do not desire x. the “desire theory” is an account of well-being according to which only those states of affairs that a person desires contribute to her well-being. preferentism, however, is an account of relative well-being. preferentism ranks states of affairs according to their relative betterness. on this account, where i prefers x to y, that is, where x is higher on i’s preference ranking than y, i is better off getting x than she would be getting y. that is not to say that x contributes to her well-being as we should ordinarily understand it. it may be that x is low on i’s preference ranking and, 3 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 indeed, a state of affairs that she would ceteris paribus prefer to avoid—a condition in virtue of which we should say she is badly off. but y is still lower on her preference ranking and so, on the preferentist account, however bad x is, it is better for i than y. a woman may remain in an abusive marriage because she believes, with justification, that her only alternative is destitution and homelessness, and because she prefers abuse to destitution and homelessness. remaining in that marriage does not, we should say, contribute to her well-being: she is badly off. nevertheless, given her preference, she is better off than she would be sleeping rough and begging in the street. not every state of affairs is desired, but every state of affairs is preferred—to some state of affairs or other. and, unless we restrict consideration to a finite menu, preference rankings do not bottom out or top out so, on the preferentist account, neither does betterness or worseness. no matter how good things are, they could always be better, and no matter how bad they are, they could always be worse. every state of affairs is preferred to some state or other. since, to this extent, every state of affairs satisfies a preference, we cannot reasonably understand well-being as preference satisfaction: preferentism must be understood as an account of betterness, or relative well-being. 1.2. preferences are dispositional preference is the disposition to choose. if, as a rational agent, i would choose x over y after due deliberation, given all relevant information, then i prefers x to y.1 this is a rough-and-ready characterization. the aim here is just to note that preference is a disposition, in particular a disposition to choose given one’s beliefs and other psychological states, rather than a feely psychological state with respect to which we have privileged access. an individual, therefore, may be ignorant or mistaken about her preferences. i may be unaware that she prefers x to y because the very idea of x has never occurred to her. i might prefer to study sanskrit rather than spanish, that is, she would choose to study sanskrit if she were adequately informed, but chooses spanish because she has never heard of sanskrit. desire too may be understood as a dispositional state. but that is not the way in which jon elster, who introduced the term “adaptive preference” (paradigmatically illustrated by the fable of the fox and the grapes), understands it. fox, when he realizes that the grapes he wants are out of reach, becomes convinced that they are sour and, therefore, undesirable. later, when the grapes become available, he jumps for them. elster’s take is that fox’s desire for the grapes is “unstable”: extinguished when fox believes that they are unattainable, since he no 1 preference as it figures in the current account is to be understood as informed preference—as it must in any account of well-being as preference satisfaction. 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 longer yearns and or feels frustration, but reignited when he recognizes that he can, in fact, get them.2 on the current preferentist account, preference is a dispositional state, and fox’s preferences did not change since he was, from the outset, disposed to jump for the grapes should they become available. fox on this account is a self-deceiver. initially, he believed, falsely, that he would prefer other cibarious options to the grapes. nevertheless, so long as the grapes were unattainable, fox was doing as well as he could since he had successfully extinguished desire and so avoided fruitless yearning and felt frustration. fox’s preference ranking grapes + no felt frustration no grapes + no felt frustration no grapes + felt frustration fox would, however, have been better off getting the grapes even when he did not actively desire them since he preferred them to other edibles. if desire is understood as an occurrent, phenomenal state, then we may prefer what we do not desire. fox desired mice, fungus, carrion, and other fox fare (jackson 2016) that was available; so long as the grapes were out of reach, he did not desire them. like us, however, he preferred grapes to mice, fungus, and carrion. even if an individual, i, desires x but does not desire y, it does not follow that i prefers x to y. 1.3. life-improvement and life-adjustment we can avoid frustration by life-adjustment or by life-improvement: by changing ourselves to suppress our desires, or by changing the conditions of our lives to satisfy our desires. fox avoided fruitless yearning through self-deception. other rational choosers achieve serenity through what elster calls “character planning”: they intentionally extinguish desire in order to avoid felt frustration. elster suggests that “character planning” is better than foxy self-deception. individuals engaged in character-planning act as rational, autonomous agents; unintentional adaptation to unsatisfactory circumstances and self-deception undermine autonomy and selfdetermination. on the preferentist account, however, neither rationality nor autonomy nor self-determination is of any intrinsic worth. they are valuable only to 2 see elster 1983. elster’s reading of the fable is not uncontroversial. desire can be understood as a disposition and, read in this way, we should say that fox desired the grapes all along. 5 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 the extent that they facilitate preference satisfaction, which alone is intrinsically valuable. it is an empirical question whether deliberate character-planning is a more effective strategy for maximizing preference satisfaction than self-deception. there is, however, some reason to believe that unintentional adaptation is the better strategy, since it takes less effort than character-planning. ceteris paribus, most of us prefer less work to more work and theft to honest toil, so we may be better off cultivating the habit of self-deception in order to avoid frustration in circumstances where we are cannot get what we want. whatever their respective merits, foxy self-deception and deliberate character-planning are both are life-adjustment strategies. intuitively, all other things being equal, life-improvement is better than life-adjustment. and the preferentist account of relative well-being explains why. as a dieter, i have suppressed my desire for crusty bread and stinky cheese. i prefer bread and cheese to veggies and tofu, but at the supermarket i head for the produce section. i have extinguished my yearning and, by habit, don’t stop at the bakery section or the cheese cooler. my preferences, however, have not changed. if i could gorge on bread on cheese without gaining weight i would. intuitively, i would be better off if i could have my cake and eat it than i am in virtue of having extinguished desire: if there were a treatment that fixed my metabolism so that i could indulge in cheese, or if the dairy industry could contrive a convincing lowcalorie stilton, i would be better off than i am now, having adjusted to greens and extinguished my habit of cheese-seeking. preferentism can explain why we are better off with life-improvement than with life-adjustment. even though i don’t yearn, i still prefer bread and cheese to veggies and tofu: all other things being equal, bread and cheese is what i would choose. but all other things are not equal: if i eat the foods i prefer, i gain weight, and that is something i cannot change. so, i am better off extinguishing desire: lifeadjustment is better than fruitless yearning since it satisfies my preference for serenity over felt frustration. but it does not satisfy my preference for cheese, which persists even though my cravings have been extinguished. life-improvement would be better: i would be better off avoiding frustration and getting cheese than i am just avoiding frustration. if, however, well-being is the satisfaction of desire then extinguishing desire should be as good as satisfying it: either way, we avoid felt frustration. if the costs are the same, there is no reason to choose one over the other; and where desireextinction is less costly, that is what we should choose. moreover, if well-being is just desire-satisfaction then getting goods we do not desire, or states of affairs for which we do not yearn, does not contribute to well-being. this is what worries critics, and rightly so, about the desire theory. if impoverished women in the global 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 south do not yearn for literacy, crave clean water, adequate food, and housing, or cry out for better health care then, on this account, the provision of these goods would not make them better off. and if providing these goods would not make them better off then there is no reason to invest scarce resources to make them available—much less to provoke dissatisfaction and demands for improved conditions. preferentism tells a different story. there are infinitely many possible states of affairs and, for any two, x and y, an individual either prefers x to y, or y to x, or is indifferent between them. the menus from which individuals can choose are, however, finite: innumerable states of affairs are unattainable, and every ordinary, finite being has innumerable preferences that cannot be satisfied. rational choosers may practice foxy self-deception or engage in character-planning to suppress yearning and avoid felt frustration. nevertheless, on the preferentist account, they would be better off attaining the states of affairs they prefer—those they would choose if attaining them were feasible. 2. preference beyond feasibility rational choosers adopt a variety of strategies to cope with unsatisfiable preferences. nevertheless, even where an individual does not feel frustration with the conditions of her life, it does not follow that she prefers this state of affairs to conditions that we should regard as more conducive to flourishing. 2.1. the least-worst option the literature on adaptive preferences rehearses stories of impoverished women in the global south whose menus of feasible options are severely restricted, who settle for options that are low on their preference rankings because they believe, with justification, that they cannot do better. that is to say, they are rational. martha nussbaum’s subject jayamma, a rational chooser who works at her local kiln hauling bricks for starvation wages because she has no viable alternatives, “does not waste mental energy” stewing over the injustice of her professional (or equally unsatisfactory domestic) arrangements. she would prefer a better job: she would jump at one if it were on offer, but believes that that option is not available. being clever, like fox, she settles for what she has reason to believe is her leastworst option: jayamma’s preference ranking better job + no feelings of outrage or frustration current lousy job + no feeling of outrage or frustration current lousy job + feelings of outrage and frustration 7 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 since getting a better job is, for all practical purposes, impossible, jayamma is doing as well as she can. nussbaum, who imagines herself “giving voice” to impoverished, oppressed women, produces what she takes to be a transcript of jayamma’s stream of consciousness: “consider jayamma,” she writes, acquiescent in a discriminatory wage structure and a discriminatory system of family income sharing. when women were paid less for heavier work at the brick kiln and denied chances for promotion, jayamma didn’t complain or protest. she knew that this was how things were and would be . . . she didn’t even waste mental energy getting upset, since these things couldn’t be changed . . . and she didn’t waste time yearning for another way. (nussbaum 2000, 113) this likely is the way in which jayamma reasons because jayamma is a rational, informed chooser. her inner monologue is not, as nussbaum suggests, a manifestation of deformed preferences. to assess her prospects, jayamma considers the way things go for others who are similarly situated, assuming quite reasonably that that is likely the way they will go for her, and concludes that she hasn’t got a chance. to determine how our lives are likely to go and, therefore, what policies are worth pursuing, we look at the lives of individuals who are demographically similar to us and similarly situated, assuming that our lives are likely to go in the way that theirs do. we look at the statistics and play the odds. and, as rational choosers we avoid taking on the costs and risks of pursuing outcomes that are, by that statistical standard, highly unlikely. that is jayamma’s policy: she believes, with justification, that she cannot get a better job or more favorable domestic arrangements because that is the way things go for women who are similarly situated. she quite reasonably prefers to avoid felt frustration, and so makes the best of a raw deal—not because she prefers it to states of affairs that are more conducive to flourishing but because she believes, with justification, that it is the best she can do. she avoids felt frustration in circumstances where the state of affairs she prefers is not available and, like fox, is doing as well as she can. nussbaum understands jayamma’s policy differently. she suggests that “jayamma seemed to lack not only the concept of herself as a person with rights that could be violated, but also the sense that what was happening to her was a wrong” (nussbaum 2000, 113). this is highly speculative. nussbaum has not engaged jayamma or any of the other women whose lives she chronicles in any discussion about their concepts of personhood or what they believe their rights are. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 she assumes that because jayamma and other impoverished indian women put up with occupational and domestic arrangements that more privileged individuals regard as unsatisfactory, their preferences are “deformed.” in adverse circumstances, rational choosers whose options are few and poor prefer their least-worst options to alternatives that are worse still. preferentists do not hold that we are obliged to satisfy this preference for least-worst options instead of preferences for states of affairs that are higher on their preference rankings, which are unattainable. we hold that additional options should be available to them so that they can achieve results that are higher on their preference rankings and do not have to settle for the least-worst. 3. varieties of ignorance and misinformation sometimes we do not do as well as we can for ourselves because we believe falsely, but with justification, that we cannot do any better. rational choosers making decisions under uncertainty are sometimes ignorant or misinformed, and so may be overly pessimistic. 3.1. factual error vasanti, another one of the women whose lives nussbaum chronicles, stayed for years in an abusive marriage because she believed falsely, but with justification, that it was her least-worst option. she, reasonably, preferred sticking with her abusive husband to begging in the street and sleeping rough, which she assumed was her only alternative. vasanti’s preference ranking home and basic necessities + no beatings home and basic necessities + occasional beatings no home or basic necessities + no beatings vasanti did not have a “deformed preference” for abuse. all other things being equal, she would have preferred to avoid being beaten. but all things were not equal—or so she thought. a rational chooser may prefer x to y but nevertheless choose y + z over x + w because she is more averse to w than she is to y and cannot get x without w. that is the situation vasanti believed herself to be in. she was more averse to homelessness and destitution than she was to beatings and believed falsely, but with justification, that she would not have a roof over her head unless she knuckled 9 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 under to her abusive husband.3 she chose a “mixed bundle of goods”, the bads along with the goods, because she believed that, on balance, it was the best she could do—her least-worst option. we all choose from amongst the “mixed bundles of goods” we encounter in our lives and rarely pursue the outcomes that are highest on our preference rankings because the bundles we most prefer are almost never available. we compromise and make trade-offs to pursue the outcomes that are on balance best from amongst those that are feasible. i like both money and leisure. the bundle of goods highest on my preference ranking includes limitless wealth and complete idleness. but that bundle is not available, so i forgo the extra income i could earn by teaching summer school and winter intersession classes. i do not prefer less money to more money. all other things being equal, i would choose to have as much money as possible, but all other things are not equal: i can only get more money at the cost of more work. since i am highly averse to teaching, i trade off income for nonmarket time—like vasanti, who, given her reasonable assessment of her options, chose to trade off “bodily integrity” and “autonomy” for food, clothing, and shelter. vasanti was in fact mistaken about her prospects: contrary to custom, her family of origin took her back when she left her husband. once she discovered that they would provide a home and basic necessities for her, that is what she chose— revealing that, all other things being equal, she preferred to avoid spousal abuse. she climbed higher on her preference ranking than she had believed possible: she got a roof over her head and basic necessities without beatings. an individual prefers x to y only if she would choose x over y given all relevant information. ideal choosers have perfect information; ordinary choosers, however rational, reflective, and duly deliberative, do not. a great many people are factually misinformed. some believe that fgm promotes good hygiene or that it is required by the koran; others believe that vaccines cause autism. many others, like vasanti, are mistaken about the consequences their actions will have: the future is always uncertain. individuals making life decisions under uncertainty are not like the ideal consumers of the economics literature who know what products are available and what they cost. shoppers choosing breakfast cereals know exactly what products are 3 some privileged observers might suggest that preference for the mixed bundle that includes abuse is itself a “deformed” preference, imagining that they would choose material deprivation over beatings and humiliation, or even death rather than dishonor. others, including myself, and perhaps many more if they were being honest with themselves, would certainly prefer beating, humiliation, and dishonor: this preference is not peculiar to deprived women in the global south, and it is not plausible to suggest that it is an “adaptive preference.” 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 available: the cereals are on the shelf for all to see. they know also that they will succeed in achieving their ends: they will get the product they select. when it comes to consumer behavior, it is reasonable to assume that choice reveals preference. when it comes to many more significant life decisions, it is not. these choices are decisions under uncertainty where an individual chooses to pursue a course of action in the interests of achieving a result that may or may not come about. under such conditions, rational choosers, deliberating about which courses of action to pursue, consider not only their preferences but the probability that a given course of action will bring about the projected outcome. since the ends we most prefer are usually the hardest to attain, we, as rational choosers, do not often choose courses of action aimed at bringing about states of affairs that are highest on our preference rankings. vasanti, as a rational chooser, stuck with an abusive husband because she knew that the odds that her family of origin would take her back were low and predicted that if she left him she would be destitute and homeless—not because she preferred her domestic arrangement to circumstances more conducive to flourishing. she was, quite reasonably, pessimistic but, happily, incorrect. optimistic middle-class observers, brought up to believe that they could “be anything” and achieve virtually any goal by dint of commitment, persistence, and hard work are baffled by the pessimism of individuals in less favorable circumstances. disadvantaged individuals in traditional societies know better: they recognize that they cannot “be anything” and that commitment, persistence, and hard work are unlikely to pay off. where poverty is intergenerational, social roles are locked in by custom, and occupational choices are few, they have good reason to believe that social, economic, and political arrangements are as immutable as the laws of nature. they are pessimistic, cynical, and fatalistic because, given the evidence available to them, they quite reasonably believe that they can no more make significant changes in their social or economic conditions than they can make changes in the weather or the tides. their preferences are not deformed; rather, they believe, with good reason, that their preferences cannot, realistically, be satisfied and make their choices accordingly. women are beaten, health care and sanitation are poor, and institutions are ineffective and corrupt: that is the way of the world they occupy. they choose the least-worst options not because they prefer them but because they believe, with justification, that that is likely the best they can do. 3.2. normative ignorance many individuals in affluent countries, as well as the global south, are unaware of alternative norms, values, and moral codes. and, like factual error, ignorance of alternative norms may lead individuals to make choices that do not 11 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 reflect their preferences. all other things being equal, i might prefer x to y. but all other things may not equal. i may endorse a code of conduct that prescribes choosing y over x and choose to act in accordance with that code because she believes that it is the right thing to do. she may be mistaken. but even if she is, that is not to say that her preferences are deformed. it may be that, as lucky jim put it, that she does not “know what is possible.” in many traditional societies where female subordination is the norm and wife-beating is common, a remarkable number of women apparently believe that if a woman leaves the house without her husband’s permission, resists his sexual advances, or even “cooks bad food,” she should be beaten. according to a recent global survey: in 29 countries . . . one-third or more of men say that it can be acceptable for a husband to “beat his wife.” [and] . . . in 19 countries, one-third or more of women agree. . . . in rwanda, 96 percent of women say the practice can be justified, according to the world values survey. (aizenman 2015) these remarks have to be assessed with care because, arguably, in many cases they are not expressions of “values” or moral commitments but rather reports of what the local code of conduct allows or mandates. in the surveys cited, subjects were asked: “sometimes a husband is annoyed or angered by things which his wife does. in your opinion, is a husband justified in hitting or beating his wife in the following situations?” and presented with a number of scenarios. even with the qualification that respondents were to give their “opinions” on this matter, the question was ambiguous. it might not have been clear to subjects whether they were being asked a normative question about the moral acceptability of a practice or an empirical question about a feature of their local code of conduct. unless individuals are aware of alternative codes of conduct and practices, they are not likely to make that distinction at all. unsophisticated individuals who have no conception of ethical alternatives may read any questions about what practices are morally acceptable or unacceptable as factual questions about what their local codes of conduct permit or prohibit. the study notes further that there’s evidence that women’s attitudes are changing dramatically in some places. in nigeria, 44 percent of women said it was all right for a husband to beat his wife in 2003, but the figure dropped to 21 percent in 2013, according to the world bank. in benin, the drop was from 39 percent to 10 percent over a similar period. and in haiti, the decline was from 11 percent to 3 percent. (aizenman 2015) 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 these results, authors of the report remark, are puzzling: why the change? as the study notes, the association with urban residence does not make a difference in acceptance of wife-beating across cultures. neither does religion: muslim women were significantly less likely to justify wife-beating than catholic respondents in malawi, while the relationship was in the opposite direction in mali and benin. most surprising, in many of the countries studied, women working for pay were either more or as likely to justify wife-beating then than non-working women. according to studies, it is rather “secondary or higher education and household wealth . . . [that] emerged as the most significant and consistent predictors of non-acceptance of wife-beating” (rani, bonu, and diop-sidibé 2004, 133). arguably, the results of the studies suggest that many women who responded that wife-beating was acceptable were not distinguishing the normative question from the factual one, and were not expressing a preference for being beaten if they should violate the local code of conduct but rather reporting on the conditions under which wife-beating was justified according to that code. education and wealth increase awareness of the way things are outside of the local community. women with education and access to media discover that people live in a variety of different ways and have different conceptions of correct behavior. educated, informed women recognize that there may be a difference between what their local code of conduct permits and how things should be, and may conclude, as a consequence, that wife-beating, even if it is acceptable in their local communities, is not morally permissible. there may be women who, given all relevant information about alternative social norms and moral codes as well as factual matters, prefer to live according to a code of conduct that mandates female subordination and condones corporal punishment for women who do not comply. nevertheless, there is reason to believe that many of the women surveyed who held that wife-beating was acceptable were not adequately informed since the provision of further information and about alternative ways of life and codes of conduct made a striking difference. 4. changing preferences? adaptive preference happens but is not nearly as common as critics of preference utilitarianism imagine. it is unlikely that poor women in the global south acquired a taste for deprivation and came to prefer the adverse circumstances of their lives to conditions more conducive to flourishing or that their preferences changed after “consciousness-raising” and other therapeutic interventions. tastes change. and sometimes people make different choices at different times because their preferences have changed. choice, however, does not always reveal preference. i may choose x over y even though she prefers y because she 13 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 believes that y is not available, because she doesn’t know what y is like, or because the very thought of y has never occurred to her. and i may prefer y to x even if she does not desire y. the women whose stories are rehearsed in the literature on adaptive preference do not desire better conditions: they do not crave or yearn for improvement. but this is not to say that they desire poverty and oppression. not desiring x does not mean desiring not-x. and, more to the point, it does not follow that they prefer the conditions of their lives to what we should regard as conditions more conducive to flourishing. on the account proposed here, the preferences of women in andhra pradesh did not change after “consciousness-raising.” rather, they learnt what options were available, concluded that improvement was feasible, and decided that it was worthwhile to agitate for better conditions. sometimes preferences change; sometimes they don’t. 4.1. stockholm: when preferences change during a 1973 bank robbery in stockholm, sweden, several bank employees who were held hostage in the bank vault by career criminal jan-erik olsson and a confederate became emotionally attached to their captors, rejected assistance from government officials, and even defended their captors after they had been freed. if, as it seems reasonable to assume, the hostages were ordinary law-abiding swedish citizens who, prior to the robbery, had disapproved of criminal activity and wanted to see criminals punished, their preferences changed as a consequence of their experience. in a 2009 interview . . . kristin ehnmark, [one of the hostages,] explained: “it’s some kind of context you get into when all your values, the morals you have, change in some way.” . . . in one phone call from the bank’s vault to the country’s prime minister olof palme, ehnmark begged to be allowed to leave the bank with the kidnappers. one of olsson’s demands had been the delivery of a getaway car in which he planned to escape with the hostages. (wescott 2013) and after olsson and his confederate, clark olofsson, were captured, ehnmark and olofsson met several times and their families became friends. unlike fox, who jumped for the grapes once they were in reach, or the alleged victims of adaptive preference (as described by martha nussbaum and other writers), who took advantage of opportunities to better themselves once they became available, the stockholm hostages did not jump at the chance to escape. their preferences had changed. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 stockholm syndrome is rare (wescott 2013). and so, arguably, is adaptive preference among deprived women in the global south. indeed, the stories martha nussbaum and other writers tell to illustrate the phenomenon show that their subjects’ preferences were neither inappropriately adaptive nor “deformed”: when options that were more conducive to “flourishing” were available and they were convinced that these options were within reach, they jumped for them—unlike the stockholm hostages.4 initially, the women of andhra pradesh didn’t protest about their physical situation—later they did. initially the stockholm hostages didn’t fraternize with bank robbers—later they did. the stockholm hostages’ preferences changed. before being held hostage, it seems highly likely that, as bank employees, they disapproved of bank robbery and if asked, would have said: “we really don’t like bank-robbers.” afterwards, as one put it, “your values, the morals you have, change.” nussbaum doesn’t report any such change of heart on the part of her subjects. 4.2. andhra pradesh: when women get what they wanted all along it is possible that the women of andhra pradesh initially valued malnutrition, preferred dirty water to clean water, were averse to the provision of electricity and the services of a health visitor, but changed their minds after their “entrenched preferences” were dislodged by “consciousness-raising.” nothing in nussbaum’s story suggests that this was the case. it is unlikely that if they had been asked what they wanted before “consciousness-raising,” they would have said, “we don’t like clean water, we enjoy our malnutrition, we don’t want health visitors poking around, and you can take your electricity and shove it.” and it is unlikely that after “consciousness-raising” they would have reported that their values or morals had changed.5 it is easy to explain why they didn’t initially protest their poor conditions even though they didn’t prefer them to conditions more conducive to flourishing: they were rational choosers with inadequate information who believed in induction. 4 they may not jump immediately because they are, quite reasonably, pessimistic and skeptical about whether proposed schemes for life-improvement are feasible. they believe in induction: things have always been lousy and are likely to stay lousy. compare working class americans clamoring for grunt work in coal mines and smokestack industries. it seems unlikely that they prefer these jobs to work in green energy projects, or that they prefer polluted rivers and denuded landscapes to woods and streams where they can they can hike, fish, and hunt. rather, they are skeptical about whether alternative arrangements are feasible. 5 i assume also, as it seems martha nussbaum does not, that they are perfectly capable of understanding, in their own language, what “values” and “morals” are. 15 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 “this is the way things always have been around here, and nothing anyone has ever done has made a difference, so it seems likely that things will always be this way and nothing that we can do will make any difference. no point in getting upset about it.” in adverse circumstances, where individuals believe, with justification, that conditions more conducive to “flourishing” are not available, that satisfying preferences higher on their preference rankings is not feasible, they quite reasonably avoid striving after the wind. many individuals living in adverse circumstances acquiesce and “become complicit in perpetuating their own deprivation” (khader 2011, 5): a fact which cries out for explanation. according to the orthodox view, they acquiesce because they have “internalized limiting views” and prefer oppression and deprivation to conditions more conducive to flourishing. given this explanation, only a perfectionist account—according to which certain states of affairs are objectively conducive to “flourishing,” whether people prefer them or not—can motivate humanitarian intervention and justify programs intended to promote social justice. i have proposed an alternative and, i believe, more plausible explanation. deprived individuals, including the women in the global south whose plight nussbaum, khader, and others rightly deplore, want better lives and prefer conditions more conducive to flourishing but do not know what it would take to make things better and, in any case, do not believe that improvement is feasible. humanitarian intervention and programs aimed at promoting social justice are required, in the interest of fairness, to see to it that their preferences are satisfied. preferentists agree with nussbaum and other critics of the “desire theory” that impoverished women in the global south would be better off achieving states of affairs that were more conducive to flourishing, since there is reason to believe that even though they do not yearn for those states or feel frustration, they prefer them. 5. preference, desire, and distributive justice preferentism is an account of relative well-being: it does not, by itself, provide a program for the allocation of scarce resources to determine who should be better off, by how much, or at whose expense. neither does nussbaum’s perfectionist account. nussbaum provides a list of “central capabilities for flourishing” generally agreed to be good things, but her account is not a program allocating scarce resources to secure these benefits. the list only “gives the basis for determining a decent social minimum” (nussbaum 2000, 74). it provides no guidance about how goods should be distributed in circumstances where extreme scarcity or conflict makes that impossible or how excess goods should be allocated when everyone has what they need for a minimally decent life. it is not even clear what the items on the list come to for practical purposes. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 the nussbaum’s list includes “life. being able to live to the end of a human life at a normal length,” which is surely a good thing, but the list provides no guidance for making hard choices about who gets to live or for how long. living in an affluent country with access to advanced medical technology, i regard a life of 85 years as a human life of a normal length. by historical standards, however, that is an abnormally long lifespan. should scarce resources be deployed to keep citizens of affluent countries alive and healthy into extreme old age or should we sacrifice years of our lives to provide the resources to enable individuals in poor countries to be alive and healthy longer—or to provide them with opportunities for “play. being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities” (nussbaum 2000, 79)? again, “being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature,” another item on nussbaum’s list, is also surely a good thing. urban residents in affluent countries enjoy their pets, houseplants, and nature hikes. individuals who make their living farming and raising livestock, however, cannot afford to tolerate predators, including members of endangered species, that destroy their crops, attack their stock, and threaten their livelihood. and farmers engaged in slash and burn agriculture cannot afford to “respect . . . the world of nature.” there are conflicts of interest that require trade-offs and compromise. nature lovers want national parks; ranchers want grazing land. even if we agree that being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals and the environment is a central capability for human flourishing (itself controversial), it is not clear how we should adjudicate conflicts of interest in circumstances where resources are scarce and trade-offs (prohibited by nussbaum) have to be made. preferentists agree with perfectionists that the women in the global south who nussbaum, khader, sen, and others suggest suffer from adaptive preference are much worse off than most citizens of affluent countries. a preferentist may adopt further principles for the fair distribution of goods and for measuring social welfare, and conclude that the distribution of goods is unfair, that the women whose stories nussbaum tells are suffering from the grossest injustice, and that we are morally obliged to work for change.6 like perfectionism and unlike the “desire theory,” preferentism makes it possible to “conduct a radical critique of unjust institutions” (nussbaum 2000, 116). the difference is that whereas nussbaum and others hold that jayamma, vasanti, and the rest are badly off because they do not 6 they may, for example, adopt the max-min principle which measures the social welfare of a society on the basis of the welfare of the least well-off individual member. or, insofar as they are concerned with international development, may adopt the welfare function proposed by sen according to which the average per capita income of a measured group, such as a nation, is multiplied with (1 – g) where g is the gini index, a relative inequality measure. 17 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 prefer objectively valuable states of affairs and so do not pursue them, i have argued that they prefer conditions more conducive to flourishing and are badly off because their preferences are not satisfied. this is not a distinction without a difference. the claim that poor women in the global south suffer from “inappropriately adaptive preferences” is patronizing and insulting. it suggests that because of oppression and material deprivation they are psychologically damaged—that they have deformed preferences and need encouragement, consciousness-raising, and participation in discussion groups facilitated by culturally sensitive aid workers to reform their preferences and set them straight.7 currently there is an emerging consensus that cash transfers and the provision of “public goods” are the most cost-effective ways to alleviate poverty and improve quality of life.8 in-kind donations are expensive and distort local economies; microcredit is inefficient and ineffective (banerjee et al. 2014); and the consciousness-raising and empowerment programs attached to other forms of aid are wasteful as well as humiliating. poverty is the lack of money and the solution is, precisely, money.9 we who, by pure dumb luck, have money do not have superior 7 if i may editorialize in a footnote: i am not one of the poor women in the global south whose stories nussbaum et al. tell, but my life has been tough. i acquiesced and compromised, and later struggled and fought to get the life i wanted and, more importantly, to avoid a life i would have found intolerable. i am outraged by the privileged promoters of “consciousness-raising” who suggest that we—i, and the women in the global south who, like myself, are constrained by external circumstances—have “deformed preferences” and need to get our heads straight. this is the voice of privilege: of well-meaning reformers who have never themselves felt the pinch and imagine that the fault is not, or not only, in our stars but in ourselves—who imagine that we need some form of therapy to improve our selfesteem and fix our “deformed” preferences, and believe that they have superior wisdom to impart to us. don’t make me your anthropological specimen, among those impoverished women in the global south whom you pride yourselves on treating with the greatest cultural sensitivity, as one of those benighted proles who “cling to guns and religion.” don’t give me your involvement, which i do not need, or your company, which i do not want, or your sympathetic retelling of what you take to be my story, which you do not understand. 8 see, e.g., blattman and niehaus 2014. see also banerjee and duflo 2011 for a comprehensive account, and the website associated with their book at http://www.pooreconomics.com/about-book. 9 givedirectly is a highly efficient program that sends money to people living in extreme poverty. to donate go to https://www.givedirectly.org/. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 http://www.pooreconomics.com/about-book https://www.givedirectly.org/ wisdom. poor women in the global south do not need our encouragement or tutelage, our “consciousness-raising” or “empowerment” therapies, or our help in making “wise decisions.” they just need money, the permanent possibility of preference satisfaction, and public goods—decent roads, reliable electricity, adequate policing and the like—to enable them to use their resources effectively. preference utilitarianism, i have argued, is good for women. preferentism provides an account of utility as relative well-being according to which impoverished women in the global south are very much worse off than affluent individuals in the global north—not because they suffer from “deformed” or “inappropriately adaptive” preferences but because they are harmed by deformed social, economic, and political arrangements that prevent them from attaining goods that are higher on their preference rankings. that, intuitively, is unfair. preferentism, while it does not provide an account of fairness, is a starting point for formulating such an account, and for the discussion of how unjust institutions and unfair social arrangements can be dismantled in order to provide people with the widest possible range of options for preference satisfaction so that utility may abound. references aizenman, nurith. 2015. “alarming number of women think spousal abuse is sometimes ok. goats and soda (blog), national public radio. march 18. http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/18/392860281/alarmi ng-number-of-women-think-spousal-abuse-is-sometimes-ok. banerjee, abhijit, and esther duflo. 2011. poor economics. washington, dc: public affairs books. banerjee, abhijit, esther duflo, rachel glennerster, and cynthia kinnan. 2014. “the miracle of microfinance? evidence from a randomized evaluation.” http://economics.mit.edu/files/5993. blattman, christopher, and paul niehaus. 2014. “show them the money: why giving cash helps alleviate poverty.” foreign affairs, may/june. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/show-them-money. elster, jon. 1983. sour grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality. cambridge: cambridge university press. khader serene j. 2011. adaptive preferences and women’s empowerment. new york: oxford university press. jackson, jo. 2016. “what do foxes pray on?” pets on mom.me website. http://animals.mom.me/foxes-prey-on-4041.html. nussbaum, martha c. 2000. women and human development: the capabilities approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. 19 baber: is utilitarianism bad for women? published by scholarship@western, 2017 http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/18/392860281/alarming-number-of-women-think-spousal-abuse-is-sometimes-ok http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/03/18/392860281/alarming-number-of-women-think-spousal-abuse-is-sometimes-ok http://economics.mit.edu/files/5993 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/show-them-money http://animals.mom.me/foxes-prey-on-4041.html ———. 2001. “adaptive preferences and women’s options.” economics and philosophy 17 (1): 67–88. rani, manju, sekhar bonu, and nafissatou diop-sidibé. 2004. “an empirical investigation of attitudes towards wife-beating among men and women in seven sub-saharan african countries.” african journal of reproductive health 8 (3): 116–136. sen, amartya. 1977. "rational fools: a critique of the behavioral foundations of economic theory." philosophy and public affairs 6 (4): 317–344. wescott, kathryn. 2013. “what is stockholm syndrome?” bbc news magazine, august 22. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22447726. harriet baber is professor of philosophy at the university of san diego. she has published on a range of topics in metaphysics, philosophical theology, and feminism, including identity through time, relative identity and the stage view, the eucharist, the doctrine of the trinity, and issues concerning discrimination in employment and women’s labor force participation. she is author of three books: the multicultural mystique: the liberal case against diversity, globalization and international development and, forthcoming, the trinity: a philosophical investigation. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 4, art. 6 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss4/6 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22447726 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 is utilitarianism bad for women? h. e. baber recommended citation is utilitarianism bad for women? algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 4 recommended citation kassam, alysha, and patricia marino. 2022. “algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 4. 2022 algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach alysha kassam university of california, irvine akassam@uci.edu patricia marino university of waterloo pmarino@uwaterloo.ca kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach alysha kassam and patricia marino abstract this paper contributes to debates over algorithmic discrimination with particular attention to structural theories of racism and the problem of “proxy discrimination”—discriminatory effects that arise even when an algorithm has no information about socially sensitive characteristics such as race. structural theories emphasize the ways that unequal power structures contribute to the subordination of marginalized groups: these theories thus understand racism in ways that go beyond individual choices and bad intentions. our question is, how should a structural understanding of racism and oppression inform our understanding of algorithmic discrimination and its associated norms? some responses to the problem of proxy discrimination focus on fairness as a form of “parity,” aiming to equalize metrics between individuals or groups—looking, for example, for equal rates of accurate and inaccurate predictions between one group and another. we argue that from the perspective of structural theories, fairness-as-parity is inapt in the algorithmic context; instead, we should be considering social impact—whether a use of an algorithm perpetuates or mitigates existing social stratification. our contribution thus offers a new understanding of what algorithmic racial discrimination is. keywords: algorithms, algorithmic bias, racial discrimination, structural theories of oppression, proxy discrimination this paper contributes to debates over algorithmic discrimination with particular attention to structural theories of racism and the problem of “proxy discrimination”—discriminatory effects that arise even when an algorithm has no information about socially sensitive characteristics such as race. structural theories emphasize the ways that unequal power structures contribute to the subordination of marginalized groups: these theories thus understand racism in ways that go beyond individual choices and bad intentions (see, e.g., mills 2003; lebron 2013). our question is, how should a structural understanding of racism and oppression inform our understanding of algorithmic discrimination and its associated norms? we argue that from a structural point of view, existing frameworks of algorithmic antidiscrimination based on technical understandings of fairness are insufficient; feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 instead, we must consider the broader social impact of an algorithm’s use and whether that use contributes to or ameliorates racial inequity. increasingly, algorithms play a central role in a range of public and private practices: predicting recidivism in criminal justice; determining who should be hired, admitted to university, or granted social welfare benefits; evaluating job performance; and suggesting who should get a loan, see an ad, or pay which insurance rate. in these contexts, it has been noted with increasing urgency that the outcomes associated with these processes can be worse for racialized people, for women, and for people in other marginalized communities. as is often noted, one mechanism central to discussions of algorithmic discrimination is the fact that algorithms pick up on social patterns of inequity and past discrimination in the data they are trained on; the algorithms are then are used in ways that perpetuate those patterns (barocas and selbst 2016; bent 2020; johnson 2021; prince and schwarcz 2020). for example, if a hiring algorithm looks at correlations of résumé details with later success to predict future success, then in contexts of existing discrimination and inequity, the result will downgrade résumés of people in marginalized groups. it is well known that these effects arise even if the algorithm has no direct access to information about group membership: instead, the algorithm finds correlations with seemingly innocuous attributes. that discrimination can arise because of these correlations has been called the “proxy problem” and the result “proxy discrimination” (johnson 2021) or “unintentional algorithmic discrimination” (bent 2020; prince and schwarcz 2020). the question of how to conceptualize antidiscrimination in the algorithmic context has received a great deal of attention, and there is disagreement over how to understand the concept and associated norms. while some scholars have focused on exploring how existing antidiscrimination norms are relevant to the algorithmic context (e.g., kleinberg et al. 2018), others argue that because of the possibility of proxy discrimination, norms of the pre-algorithm context, which often focus on largely intention rather than effects, are insufficient (e.g., ajunwa 2020; prince and schwarcz 2020; bent 2020). in proposing new normative tools, some frame the problem of confronting algorithmic discrimination as one of improving algorithmic fairness. while there is debate over how to conceptualize what algorithmic fairness is, many proposals focus on fairness as a form of “parity,” aiming to equalize metrics between individuals or groups—looking, for example, for equal rates of accurate and inaccurate predictions between one group and another (hellman 2020; see also bent 2020; huq 2019; johnson 2021). but we argue that, from the structural point of view, framing the problem of algorithmic racial discrimination as a lack of parity is insufficient: algorithms should be evaluated with respect to their broader social impact and whether their use exacerbates or mitigates racial stratification. from a structural perspective, what is racist is understood not with respect to creating unjustified differential outcomes— kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 as parity-based characterizations might suggest—but rather in terms of whether an act contributes to, or helps to undermine, the existing, asymmetrical social structures of racial inequity and oppression. as we show first, it’s worth noting that structural theories of racism add direct and unifying support to claims that we need new norms for antidiscrimination in the algorithmic context—norms focusing on effects and harms over reasons and intentions. but our main point is that starting from the structural understanding of racism, framing algorithmic discrimination in terms of fairness-as-parity is inapt; instead, we should be considering social impact—how a use of an algorithm perpetuates or mitigates existing social stratification. our contribution thus offers a new understanding of what algorithmic racial discrimination is.1 in section 1, we explore algorithmic racial discrimination through examples of proxy discrimination arising in various contexts. in section 2, we discuss the us antidiscrimination normative landscape before the introduction of algorithms, and we explicate recent work proposing new norms of algorithmic antidiscrimination as fairness in a form of parity. in section 3, we draw on structural theories of racism to argue that while proposals to ameliorate discrimination through fairness-as-parity are useful for addressing some forms of discrimination, they do not help address racism as conceptualized structurally. we propose instead a social-impact approach, which centers on considering how an algorithm’s use bears on existing racial stratification, and we examine some implications of such a framing. in section 4, we consider broader implications of adopting a social-impact approach, with particular attention to the relationship between “bias” and “discrimination” and to potential intersections with business ethics. 1. algorithms and the problem of proxy discrimination in this section, we explicate proxy discrimination through consideration of examples in the contexts of criminal justice, hiring, and setting insurance premiums. machine learning comes in various forms, often including a “training” phase followed by a “test phase.” many algorithms are deployed in contexts where the goal is to predict an outcome associated with each person in a group, with the results used in 1 partly because structural theories remind us that discrimination and inequity takes different forms in different contexts, we focus here just on racial discrimination in the us context, and we leave extensions to other forms of discrimination for other occasions. because structural theories of racism and the social-impact approach require attention to the particular social context and how racial stratification functions in that context, our proposal can be seen as a contribution toward applying a nonideal methodology in the context of algorithmic fairness, a shift recently urged by sina fazelpour and zachary lipton (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 decision-making. to be represented by data, this outcome must be specified in terms of a specific “objective function” to be maximized: for example, in hiring, the aim might be to maximize number of years at the company or the eventual salary of the employee. these are specific measurable outcomes that stand in for murkier concepts like “successful employee.” in these kinds of cases, the training phase involves the use of data in which the various input factors and the objective function are both known; the program then picks up on the various correlations that exist between the input factors and the objective function. in the testing phase, the algorithm is given input factors only, a prediction is made, and the result is checked against the actual value of the objective function. for example, a hiring algorithm might be trained on data that included input factors like years and place of education, years of previous work experience, number of previous positions, and so on, where the objective function is something like “years of employment at the company.” in the testing phase, the algorithm would be given the input information only, a prediction would be made for each person for the objective function, and those outputs would be compared with the actual data. as is often observed, patterns in the training data will emerge in the predictions, and sometimes those patterns are due to existing social injustice and inequality and other social factors we would want to change, not perpetuate. if black people are less often promoted than white people in a company due to explicit and implicit racism, then algorithms trained on data from that company will predict that black people will be less successful as future employees. as documented by safiya umoja noble (2018), because people using the internet post images and content in ways that correlate images of black people with pornography and criminality, algorithms predict that is what people are looking for; as a result, google answers search queries for “black girls” with porn, while searching for “white girls” brings up innocuous images. as gabbrielle johnson explains, one study found that google’s adtargeting software resulted in “males [being] shown ads encouraging the seeking of coaching services for high paying jobs more than females” (johnson 2021, 9944; quoting datta, tschantz, and datta 2015). as cathy o’neil (2016) has argued, if an algorithm to predict recidivism takes into account zip codes or “previous family contact with criminal justice system,” then the overpolicing of black neighborhoods and racialized practices like carding or stop-and-frisk mean that even if the algorithm does not include information about race, black people will be adversely affected. consider the much-discussed compas model, which aims to predict recidivism in the criminal justice context. the algorithm is accurate for white and black people at equal rates but in different ways: it wrongly labels black people as future criminals at twice the rate of white defendants while labeling white defendants as low risk more often than black defendants (huq 2019; hellman 2020). one mechanism for these outcomes is that algorithms pick up on social patterns of bias and discrimination kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 and then perpetuate them; informally, it is said that the algorithm “bakes in” the existing social injustice. as is often discussed, these effects arise even when the algorithm is not presented with direct information about a person’s membership in any particular group; instead, the algorithm finds correlations with seemingly innocuous attributes. the discrimination is thus often unintentional (prince and schwarcz 2020; johnson 2021). for example, “zip code” may seem a like neutral feature, but due partly to the effects of racial stratification, it correlates with race. “proxy discrimination” refers to the ways that correlations between seemingly neutral attributes and socially sensitive ones resulting from societal inequity and oppression lead to worse results for people in marginalized communities, thus perpetuating inequity. in our analysis of racism in the algorithmic context, we’ll consider a couple of examples beyond the criminal justice context. the first is hiring. in explaining proxy discrimination, hacker (2018) presents the example of an algorithm that takes into account the distance a potential employee lives from work. it may be that greater distance correlates with worse job performance. but it may also be the case that applicants from farther away are more likely to belong to a particular racial or ethnic group. if both of these are true, then the use of the algorithm will produce proxy discrimination against that group. more generally, if an algorithm uses business success as an objective function, then social discrimination that negatively affects people in marginalized racial groups will produce results that are more likely to predict success for white people and thus to rank them more highly. for instance, the algorithm might pick up on correlations involving features such as anglo-sounding names and predict future success for people with those features, reflecting existing structures of social inequality and discrimination; this attribute may then correlate with race and ethnicity. as ifeoma ajunwa (2020, 1703) explains, algorithms can be used for virtual interviews, tracking facial expression, vocal indications, word choice, and so on, even though facial recognition works less well on darker skin colors. ajunwa (2020, 1700) also documents the ways that algorithms lead to inequities in how job openings are advertised. next, consider the example of setting insurance premiums. in their analysis of proxy discrimination, anya prince and daniel schwarcz (2020) present a hypothetical insurance algorithm picking up on a correlation between visits to a free website with information on a genetic mutation and the insured person claiming higher future payouts. plausibly, this could arise because people who have the genetic mutation, and need more expensive health care, visit the website, so there is a correlation between visits and higher claims. if the algorithm assigns to people visiting the website higher premiums on the basis of data showing such correlations, this is proxy discrimination against people with the genetic mutation. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 algorithms are already being widely used in car insurance. as gert meyers and ine van hoyweghen (2018) explain, the dutch insurance company fairzekering (the name is a play on dutch word for insurance, verzekering) has drivers place devices in their cars that track their driving, then uses the data to adjust what a person should pay. the device “will send data every minute such as the location of the vehicle, time, speed, the g-forces the car experiences and what the notifications are from the motor-management” (meyers and van hoyweghen 2018, 428). based on the data received, an algorithm calculates what premium to charge to reward driving styles thought to correlate with safer driving and thus lower claims. more broadly, in many areas there has been a controversial move toward including information from credit scores in setting insurance premiums. o’neil (2016) points out that a driver who must commute to a low-paying job with a chaotic schedule may be regularly driving through what are statistically unsafe neighborhoods; an algorithm tracking that kind of data will charge them higher premiums. because they are unable to absorb small losses, poor people tend to file more claims; use of the algorithm may thus result in higher claims for poor people. because black people in the us tend to be poorer, the burden of such costs would fall disproportionately on them. if there are correlations between proxies for race and higher costs to the insurer, this could potentially be because other drivers are more likely to sue black drivers.2 again, if the algorithm picks up on these correlations and assigns higher premiums to black drivers, this is proxy discrimination. 2. equity and antidiscrimination prior to and in the algorithmic context in this section, we consider the normative antidiscrimination landscape before the introduction of algorithms, briefly survey criticisms of those approaches arising from the possibility of proxy discrimination, then explain the fairness-as-parity conceptualizations crafted specifically to address algorithmic discrimination. prior to the use of algorithms, existing norms of antidiscrimination often focused on intentions rather than effects, and it is worth noting here how those norms functioned differently in different contexts. in discussing discrimination, it is useful to distinguish between “disparate treatment” and “disparate impact,” a distinction crucial to us law. legally, disparate treatment involves a practice that is intentionally discriminatory with respect to a protected class such as race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and is illegal. disparate impact is more subtle and occurs when practices appear to be neutral but result in a disproportionate impact on a protected group. for example, a test for employment might result in people in some class being less likely to be hired. us law here is nuanced: if there is a good reason for the disparate impact, the practice can be legal. for example, if men are more likely to pass 2 this possibility was suggested to us by anya prince and daniel schwarcz. kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 the physical part of the test to become a firefighter because the job requires upper body strength, this can be legal disparate impact. but if there were a physical strength test to become, say, a teacher, and men got hired more than people of other genders, this would be illegal, as physical strength isn’t relevant to the job. furthermore, in addition to ruling out disparate treatment, us law specifies that when disparate impact arises, there must be a “business necessity” for the impact; and that furthermore if the selection rate for one protected group is less than four-fifths of that of the group with the highest selection rate, the employer is at fault (see, e.g., barocas and selbst 2016; raghavan et al. 2020). while the disparate impact clause introduces some nuance, the focus of the law is avoiding disparate treatment and thus intentional discrimination. in the case of criminal justice and predicting recidivism, matters are obviously more complex, but at a basic level, the relevant us legal norms in play before the introduction of algorithms are found in the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. as legal theorist aziz huq (2019) explains, this content is focused on two principles: prohibiting the government from classifying people according to categories including race and prohibiting actions that harm individuals due to racial animus or stereotypes. huq (2019, 1088) calls these “bad classifications” and “bad intent.” again, the focus is largely on intentions and the reasons for which a given decision is made. in the insurance context, antidiscrimination norms have long been contentious. in the use of “actuarial fairness,” widely accepted as an industry standard, premiums should “match as closely as possible” the risk exposure—that is, expected losses—of the insured (landes 2015). according to this standard, those in riskier positions ought to pay more, and those whose likelihood of loss is less, should pay less, regardless of the cause of the risks (heath 2007). on the face of it, this entails that some forms of discrimination are actuarially fair: as is often noted, since young men get into more accidents, young men will pay more for insurance even if they are very safe drivers; this is justified under the principle of actuarial fairness. this means if black people have worse health outcomes than white people because of societal racism and racial inequity, and this leads them to claim more expensive treatments, then actuarial fairness would, in principle, require them to pay more. as these examples suggest, actuarial fairness can also penalize people for things that are beyond their control; for example, a person with a serious health condition, under the concept of actuarial fairness, would pay more for health insurance (see jha 2012). relatedly, there is the question of whether there is a causal relationship between the factors and the results: if higher credit scores are correlated with lower payouts, it may seem a higher premium is only justified if there is a causal relationship between credit score and good driving (e.g., an underlying feature of “being careful”); but under the norm of actuarial fairness, showing causation isn’t necessary, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 correlation is sufficient, if predictive, even if it rests on factors that are not understood (see gandy 2016). again, the normative focus in these framings is on avoiding intentional discrimination, not on avoiding disparate impact. discrimination by proxy has long existed, but before the use of algorithms, it was often intentional. in the practice of redlining, civic organizations created neighborhood boundaries to influence who should or should not get a mortgage, with racist intentions; this involves using a neutral-seeming proxy—“neighborhood”—to discriminate on the basis of something else—race. the fact that discrimination by proxy used to be typically intentional is reflected in the fact that, as we’ve seen in the examples, existing legal and ethical analyses focus largely on ruling out disparate treatment and intentional racialized differential treatment. with respect to the question of whether these norms are sufficient for the algorithmic context, scholars from various disciplines have argued that they are not, and that the unintentional proxy problem is central among reasons that discrimination needs to be reconceptualized (see, e.g., barocas and selbst 2016; chander 2017; bent 2020; huq 2019; prince and schwarcz 2020). with the use of algorithms, discriminatory and harmful effects can often be unintentional, as we may not know the range of correlations in our data or how the patterns have been influenced by discrimination or bad social attitudes and practices. when it is unintentional, proxy discrimination counts as a form of disparate impact, not disparate treatment. with respect to harms, notice that because algorithms scale, they can produce disparate impact effects that are more widespread and more pronounced than practices before the introduction of algorithms. prince and schwarcz (2020) identify several impacts of proxy discrimination that conflict with the aims of antidiscrimination law.3 most importantly for the present context, not only can proxy discrimination “thwart” antisubordination goals, but it can “affirmatively promote the opposite result”—reinforcing legacies of historical discrimination (prince and schwarcz 2020, 1296). that is, proxy discrimination can perpetuate and legitimize past inequity: if people with a certain socially sensitive characteristic have been less likely to succeed at work because of discrimination, and an algorithm predicts that people with that feature are less likely to succeed and so determines that they don’t get hired, then the use of the algorithm is perpetuating the discrimination. another impact is that proxy discrimination can undermine efforts at social solidarity. 3 in their characterization, prince and schwarcz (2020) say that proxy discrimination includes only cases where the discrimination benefits the organization deploying the algorithm. this is narrower than our definition, but the difference is not relevant for our argument. in our view, the harms listed apply whether or not the discrimination benefits the discriminator. kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 antidiscrimination laws are often aimed at communal sharing of risks and costs that should not be borne by individuals: a person with a genetic anomaly should not be forced into astronomical insurance payments because of something beyond their control, and one aim of health insurance is the social sharing of that burden. but proxy discrimination allows the cost to shift back to the individual. a third impact runs counter to aims preventing stereotyping: when an algorithm discriminates by proxy for people of a certain race or ethnicity, it effectively results in a stereotype; rather than being treated as an individual, a person is regarded as a representative of a group, whether they share that group’s statistical profile or not. and because proxy discrimination works in ways that are difficult to predict, it is likely to have chilling effects on the expressive or associational activities of people in protected groups: if a person would be penalized for being treated as a member of a group, they may be less likely to engage in activities connecting them with others in that group. a further harm is that, as o’neil (2016) also points out, proxy discrimination can create pernicious feedback loops: a defendant wrongly judged to be a high recidivism risk will be sentenced to a harsher sentence, but the experience of being in prison can lead to more engagement with the criminal justice system, thus creating the impression that the risk factors identified by the algorithm are genuine when in fact the result was created by the effects of the algorithm itself (o’neil 2016). more generally, prince and schwarcz (2020, 1296–97) raise the possibility that proxy discrimination in hiring can lead to lack of steady employment, leading to difficulties getting insurance and health care—which in turn make higher education even less accessible. this type of feedback loop “makes proxy discrimination by ais particularly pernicious,” because “it is the inequitable outcome from one silo that makes the use of that outcome as a proxy rational in the next silo” (prince and schwarcz 2020, 1297). critics of existing normative frameworks often focus on specific contexts. in the hiring context, ajunwa (2020) points out that proving illegal discrimination, always difficult, is exceedingly so when algorithms are used: the employee would have to identify a policy or practice that caused the adverse employment outcome, compile relevant statistics to show that the policy has a disparate impact, and rebut the employer’s defense that the policy is justified by a business necessity. given the ways that algorithms work, it is particularly difficult for an applicant or employee to show that a given algorithm caused the discriminatory situation. jason bent (2020, 807) points out that in the context of the rule that allows for disparate impacts but only in cases of business necessity and only in restricted ways, the structure of the algorithm itself may provide a business necessity defense to disparate impact liability—as long feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 as the algorithm is predictive, it is predictive of something, and the question then is just whether that something can be shown to be relevant in the right way.4 with respect to criminal justice, huq (2019) argues existing norms such as “bad classifications” and “bad intent” fail to capture the full spectrum of racial issues that can arise in the use of algorithmic tools in criminal justice. because of the way algorithms rely on historical data, the norms against racial classification may not apply; as the proxy problem shows, eliminating intentional discrimination on the basis of race may leave outcomes unchanged. with respect to insurance and actuarial fairness, we’ve discussed that the use of credit scores means that poorer and black people will pay more for insurance whether or not they are good drivers; o’neil (2016) says that this approach puts people into “buckets” of people with similar risk profiles and fails to treat them as individuals. we would add that while risk assessment generally uses approaches that consider features, and thus generalize, because of access to detailed data, and because algorithms scale, these aspects and their effects will be more pronounced in the context of algorithms. prince and schwarcz (2020) argue that norms in the insurance context should change partly to take into account whether there is a plausible causal story linking an attribute with costlier claims. in response to the inadequacy of framings based on intentions and disparate impact, some proposals for avoiding algorithmic discrimination focus on improving algorithmic fairness, understood as a form of parity. computer scientists, legal theorists, philosophers, and others have proposed a wide range of characterizations of what it means to be algorithmically “fair”—by one count, twenty-one different definitions (huq 2019, 1115). for some of these, there are impossibility results: an algorithm’s fairness in one sense is typically incompatible with its fairness in others (see johnson 2021). notably, there is agreement that partly because of proxy discrimination, fairness and the amelioration of discrimination cannot be achieved in the algorithmic context through the removal of information about sensitive characteristics. in a discussion of what he calls “algorithmic affirmative action,” bent describes “widespread consensus” among machine learning scholars that algorithmic fairness cannot be accomplished by “hiding protected characteristics” from the algorithm (bent 2020, 807). in fact, the inclusion of information about socially sensitive characteristics like race is often presented as necessary to improving algorithms, as with this information, we can achieve improved accuracy for people in those groups. 4 raghavan et al. (2020, 478) also point out that “machine learning may discover relationships that we do not understand,” and they conclude that “a statistically valid assessment may inadvertently leverage ethically problematic correlations.” kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 in an overview of a range of algorithmic fairness proposals, bent (2020, 817) characterizes “group fairness” as attempting to measure fairness “by comparing the target variable outcomes of a machine-learning process between two groups sorted along the sensitive variable.” group-fairness approaches often appeal to technical definitions that themselves focus on symmetry or parity in the relevant comparison between target variable outcomes (huq 2019; bent 2020; hellman 2020). the simplest form of group fairness is demographic parity, which aims to match proportions in outcomes to proportions in populations. for example, if the applicant pool for a job is 20 percent black, the outcome should be that 20 percent of people hired are black. this form of group fairness is sometimes set aside as untenable, on grounds that the result may seem unfair to those predicted to be successful who are not then recommended in the decision process (bent 2020; see also pessach and shmueli 2020) more subtle parity definitions focus on other measures, such as an equal rate of accuracy among groups, an equal rate of false positives, or a balance of other quantities. the metric used by propublica in criticizing the compas algorithm looked at “how frequently false positives are conditional on being in fact a low-risk person” for people in that group (huq 2019, 1054–55). the metric of “equal predictive value” measures whether scores are “equally predictive of the target trait for members of one group as for members of the other” (hellman 2020, 827); error-rate balance obtains when people of each group who have or lack the target variable are equally likely to be accurately scored by the test (hellman 2020, 828). for example, as huq (2019, 1115–16) explains, applying fairness metrics in the use of the compas model, we might consider whether equal proportions of different racial groups are deemed likely to reoffend; we might consider whether there is a single numerical cutoff used to demarcate the “likely” from the “unlikely” to reoffend; we might consider whether defendants in different racial groups assigned the same risk score are equally likely to actually recidivate; or we might compare each racial group and “ask how frequently false positives are conditional on being in fact a nonrisky person” for people in that group. the details of these characterizations can be technical and complex. but a vivid example arises in the compas case. here the creators of the algorithm defended its fairness by pointing out that it was equally likely to be accurate for black and white defendants. but propublica and others argued that its unfairness arises because it is inaccurate for black and white defendants in different ways: propublica charged that the algorithm “was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants” (quoted in huq 2019, 1048). that is, black people were more often wrongly classified as likely to recidivate. reflecting partly on the compas case, deborah hellman (2020, 845) argues that among all the possible metrics for parity, we should focus our attention first on feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 “error ratio parity”—“the ratio between false positive and false negative rates”—for various groups. here, she says that an algorithm ought to “set the balance between false positives and false negatives in the same way for each group” (845). while balanced erp is not the only item for attention in her view, it is “suggestive of unfairness” and points toward the need for further investigation and caution. 3. structural racism and algorithmic discrimination: the need for a social-impact approach we’ve seen in section 2 that characterizations of racial discrimination before the introduction of algorithms often focused on intentions and the reasons for a given decision, and that new proposed frameworks often focus on understanding discrimination in terms of unfairness, to be ameliorated through the pursuit of parity. but in this section, we show that from the point of view of structural theories of racism, these new frameworks are not fully adequate because they fail to consider the ways that even seemingly fair algorithms can perpetuate wider social patterns of stratification. while parity views like hellman’s aptly focus on effects rather than intentions, and will flag some cases of unfairness correctly, parity doesn’t account for the structural nature of discrimination. we argue first that adopting a structural theory of racism provides a new, unifying argument to the range of reasons given in different contexts for why focusing on reasons and intentions is inapt in the algorithmic context. but our main point is that structural theories show the need for a normative framework that goes beyond fairness-as-parity to consider “social impact”—how an algorithm’s use bears on existing social stratification. scholars have long argued that inequity and oppression are better understood as systemic and institutional problems rather than individual ones, and philosophers have drawn on this insight to offer theories of racism that reflect it (see, e.g., mills 2003; lebron 2013). instead of analyzing racism at the individual level, we should see racism in terms of unequal power structures that subordinate those in minority groups. according to charles mills (2003), analyzing racism at the individual level makes it seem symmetrical or, in other words, makes it seem that black people are as culpable as white people when having prejudices. this obfuscates the asymmetrical power dynamics of whites versus minorities (mills 2003). instead, racism and other forms of oppression should be viewed as systemic, where the word “systemic” refers to the institutions, policies, or social structures that create disparate impacts for historically marginalized communities. this removes intentionality from the picture, demonstrating how there can be racism even in the absence of racist or otherwise bad intentions, beliefs, or attitudes. furthermore, such a framing sees racism as applying to specific groups in specific ways: the problem is not the unwarranted drawing of distinctions but rather sustaining an existing racial hierarchy. structural approaches reject the idea that what makes an action racist is best understood in kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 terms of unjustified differential outcomes. instead, they emphasize that what makes an action racist or sexist or discriminatory is that it contributes to the hierarchical system; what makes an action antiracist is that it helps undermine or dismantle that system.5 this development in our understanding of racism helps explain why, despite the decline of overt racism, we nevertheless see marginalized minorities continue to have less wealth and fewer opportunities compared to white counterparts (mills 2003). in section 2, we presented some important critiques of norms based on intentions and disparate treatment. but none of these critiques explicitly invokes a structural theory of racism. we claim that a structural point of view provides a new and powerfully unifying argument for moving away from focusing on reasons and intentions and toward considering harms and social impacts. of course, the general point that structural theories of inequity show the insufficiency of existing frameworks of antidiscrimination centered on intentions and individual reasons is well known. but in the algorithmic context, this point takes on new significance. proxy discrimination is often unintentional, and effects on marginalized communities transcend disparate treatment and take a variety of forms. because algorithms scale, the relevant effects come with a greater impact than similar decisions before the use of algorithms. shifting our focus to a structural one gives a new, direct, and general argument that the effects of using algorithms can be discriminatory or oppressive when their outcomes harm marginalized communities, regardless of intentions. the harms of proxy discrimination are well documented; taking up structural theories of racism helps us understand when and why those harms and social impacts are racially discriminatory. while this point about unification is significant, our main argument is that structural theories show the need for a normative framework that goes beyond parity definitions of fairness and considers “social impact”—how the use of an algorithm bears on existing racial stratification. structural understandings of racism and oppression highlight that stratification and power dynamics are asymmetrical across groups, that some groups are dominant while others are subordinated, and that evaluation requires considering the ways that impacts can bear differently on those in dominant versus marginalized communities. it follows that generally what makes a given use of an algorithm discriminatory is whether it contributes to existing 5 in an analogous analysis in the context of sexism, marylin frye (1983, 38) argues that sexism is not about irrelevant markings of the sex distinction but rather about whether and how our actions “create and enforce the elaborate and rigid patterns of sex-marking and sex-announcing which divide the species, along lines of sex, into dominators and subordinates.” see also iris marion young’s (2011) analysis of oppression. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 stratification. because different groups have different background conditions, starting points, and experiences, effects that are similar from the point of view of metrics fairness will have different impacts on those groups. 6 in a “social impact” characterization, an algorithm is thus racially discriminatory if its use harms marginalized people in ways that add to racial stratification. while he does not discuss structural theories of inequity, huq’s analysis in the criminal justice context provides an example of a practical approach that would be justified by the normative social-impact framing. in this context, huq (2019, 1104–5) argues that parity characterizations of algorithmic fairness are inapt because they ignore the ways that the operation of the criminal justice system in the contemporary us generates special harms to those in black communities, harms that systematically exacerbate racial stratification. overpolicing, harsher treatment of black defendants, and the white cultural use of inherent black criminality to justify social racial discrimination are among an array of mechanisms creating such harms, which have greater negative spillover effects for black communities than for white ones. false positives—wrongful imprisonment or harsher sentences for those who do not deserve them—perpetuate an existing injustice for black people in ways that do not apply to members of other racial groups. error ratio parity, a norm in which we aim for the same proportion of false negatives and false positives for black and white defendants, can thus lead to outcomes that bear more harshly on those already marginalized. according to huq (2019, 1113), a proper instantiation of racial equity in the criminal justice context would account for the fact that negative spillover effects are substantially greater for racialized minorities than for the racial majority. thus evaluation of algorithms should center directly on whether and how their use contributes to racial stratification. crucially, since there will be a class of crimes for which a greater benefit will be required to achieve net positive effects when black suspects are being evaluated by the algorithm, it follows from huq’s proposal that the risk threshold for black suspects would be set at a higher level than the threshold for white suspects (huq 2019, 1114). instead of error ratio parity, we should consider different error ratios depending on the group in question. in essence, the proposal involves considering the impact of the use of the algorithm on people in marginalized groups holistically rather than looking at technical definitions of fairness in the working of the algorithm. huq’s 6 it may seem that a challenge in considering social impact is that the analysis would require taking into account some information about membership in marginalized groups. as discussed above, however, this challenge is not particular to the socialimpact framework. parity definitions also require that we use information about socially sensitive features, and it’s generally accepted that avoiding the proxy problem will require giving algorithms this kind of information (bent 2020, 816). kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 approach thus considers the ways algorithms can disproportionately perpetuate harms for marginalized communities, and his framework determines an algorithm’s appropriate use based on whether it intensifies or mitigates these harms. this is a basis for decision-making that would ameliorate algorithmic racial discrimination as we are understanding it here; thus, one implication of adopting a social impact approach would be that adopting different risk thresholds for different social groups would be normatively justified. next let’s explore analogous implications for the two other contexts we’ve considered—hiring and insurance. in the case of hiring, notice that error ratio parity would invite us to consider whether an algorithm is correct in its predictions in similar ways for people in dominant groups and people in marginalized groups. but if society is such that people in marginalized groups are less likely to be promoted, have higher sales, or achieve the milestones that constitute the objective function, then an algorithm may well be equally predictive for people in various groups and still end in outcomes favoring those in the dominant group. from the structural point of view, if algorithms bear differently on people in different groups, we have some reason to consider using different processes for those groups. a social-impact framework will call our attention to disparate impact in which people in marginalized racial groups are less likely to be hired, and this would entail reason to believe that such a use of an algorithm would be racially discriminatory and therefore wrong. with respect to further potential implications of this idea, ajunwa (2020) argues that the difficulty for hires in establishing the relevant facts of wrongful discrimination (e.g., that there has been disparate impact, that it is not a business necessity) should cause us to shift our thinking to what she calls “discrimination per se”—if the use of proxy variables has the potential to result in adverse impact, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to show that its practices are nondiscriminatory. in a hypothetical example that bent (2020) offers, a city notices that the parts of an exam used in making promotion decisions for firefighters have differential effects in which the written part is more highly predictive of success for white people and the field test is more highly predictive of success for nonwhite people. the city, bent says, may well have good reasons for weighting the two tests differently for the two groups; among others, these could include reasons to do with avoiding disparate impact from weighting the tests equally. as we’ve explained, some characterizations of fairness as parity focus on inaccuracies, comparing false positives, negatives, or ratios. but in our framing, it is striking that even an algorithm with perfect predictions can be used in a way that perpetuates discrimination and inequity. the hiring context showcases this possibility: if an algorithm is trained on data reflecting inequity, and this form of inequity persists in our society, then even an algorithm that is perfect in its predictions can be perpetuating proxy discrimination. parity definitions of fairness that rest on feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 comparing accuracy rates would fail to capture the inequity of these results. in his discussion of the hypothetical example in section 2, in which distance from work correlates negatively with work performance, hacker (2018) distinguishes between discrimination resulting from proxy discrimination and that resulting from biased data; he argues that while “getting rid of biased training data generally increases predictive accuracy, the elimination of proxy discrimination reduces it” (italics in original). but if our society has the same patterns of inequity that produced the data, then plausibly getting rid of biased training data would also reduce predictive accuracy: an algorithm trained on data in which black employees get promoted less often than white employees will correctly predict that black employees will get promoted less often than white employees. with respect to the insurance context, we’ve seen how the use of algorithms can result in higher premiums for racialized people and how, from the point of view of actuarial fairness, this is not a problem: correlation with predicted payouts is the only normative consideration. as mentioned above, the normative argument against actuarial fairness is partly that it penalizes individuals for their membership in certain groups. central to this debate have been questions about causation and responsibility: if being a member of the group is causally connected to making claims, because of actions the person is responsible for—say, because the group is “convicted of drunk driving”—then it is said that this may justify a higher premium; if not—say, because the group is “born with a certain gene”—then a higher premium is thought to punish people for what is beyond their control. again, from the point of view of a structural approach to algorithmic racism, the relevant considerations concern not causation and responsibility but rather how the impacts relate to existing stratification. on the face of it, the use of information in credit reports would be wrong, on grounds that, as we’ve seen, poorer people tend to have worse credit scores, racialized people tend to be poorer, and higher premiums make people poorer. in this way of looking at things, actuarial fairness is wrong not (or not only) because of considerations due to causation and responsibility but rather because its pursuit in the context of algorithms will tend to perpetuate existing social inequality. in the insurance context, premiums that create higher costs for black drivers will perpetuate racial inequity, even if the reasons for those higher premiums are in accordance with error ratio parity; for the reasons we’ve considered, even fully accurate predictions will result in such higher premiums. in the social-impact characterization of algorithmic racial discrimination, the focus is directly on effects rather than intentions, and the effects are understood through the lens of how those effects feed, or counter, the social patterns that constitute systemic racism, inequity, and oppression. therefore, an algorithm that is fair in any sense of parity could still be discriminatory. kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 4. further implications of a social-impact approach we’ve seen in section 3 a few implications of adopting a social-impact approach: it would provide normative justification for using different thresholds in criminal justice (as huq recommends), for weighing criteria differently for different groups in hiring (as in bent’s hypothetical example), and for setting insurance premiums in ways that that conflict with the norm of actuarial fairness. in this section, we consider a few broader implications. first, adopting a social-impact approach has implications for how we understand the relationships among discrimination, bias, and fairness. it is common in the algorithmic context to talk of “bias”: often, the problem is understood as “algorithmic bias” and the fairness-as-parity proposals are developed with the aim of ameliorating that bias. as birhane and colleagues argue, “fairness” and “bias” in the algorithmic context are often understood abstractly, as linked to “neutrality” or “objectivity” (birhane et al. 2022, 951). for example, “bias” may be understood to indicate the drawing of distinctions when they are unwarranted or irrelevant in context; bias would thus arise whenever differential outcomes arise for no good reason and could be against any group. gabbrielle johnson (2021, 9941) characterizes algorithmic bias generally in terms of “inherit[ed] social patterns reflected in an algorithm’s training data.” as she says, her broad characterization of bias in general means that virtually all inductive reasoning includes some form of bias, and it includes biases that are “epistemically reliable and morally unproblematic” (johnson 2021, 9951). relatedly, o’neil (2016, ch. 8) points out that generalizing about people from behavioral data—putting them into metaphorical “buckets”—has the problem that it means we are asking “how have people like you behaved in the past” rather than the more apt question “how have you behaved in the past?” our analysis results in a characterization of algorithmic discrimination that differs from these understandings of “bias” because it emphasizes the asymmetrical and hierarchical stratification of racism. in the social-impact framing, algorithmic racial discrimination applies to racial groupings asymmetrically: unlike these conceptualizations of bias, which could be against any group, algorithmic racial discrimination is understood as a harm specifically against people marginalized by racism. the resulting concept is thus narrower and more targeted than “bias” in the sense of any unwarranted distinction. in johnson’s framing, our conceptualization of algorithmic discrimination could be a candidate for understanding the particular “problematic” biases she considers a subspecies of bias generally. with respect to the “bucket” metaphor, structural theories of racism emphasize that generalizing about people based on data takes on a particularly pernicious aspect when the groups in question are racially marginalized groups. this way of understanding algorithmic discrimination has implications for debates over the role of intuitive fairness in characterizing discrimination. in a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 response to huq’s (2019) proposal to consider different risk thresholds for people in different racial communities, deborah hellman (2020) points out that it requires attention to how the use of an algorithm affects a group overall—including those in the group not directly scored by the algorithm. she argues that this scope is inappropriate, on grounds that it leads to an inapt conceptualization of algorithmic fairness: we cannot generally make up for unfairness to some members of a group with a benefit to other members of that group. for example, she says, if the concern is that the use of compas means black people are treated unfairly compared to white people, we cannot ameliorate this unfairness by a method that provides a benefit to black people overall and thus possibly to black people not scored by the algorithm (hellman 2020, 845). from our perspective, a response to hellman would be that any contrast between decision processes fitting our fairness intuitions and those aimed toward reducing discrimination shows not that the latter are misguided but rather that fairness may not be the central value in antiracism. the example she appeals to is framed in terms of how an algorithm affects individuals compared to other individuals and imagines fairness along the lines of applying a relevantly similar criterion in all cases. but as we’ve seen, structural theories of racism frame antidiscrimination in systemic, asymmetrical terms. the relationship between fairness and antiracism is obviously complex; our point here is just that taking up a structural perspective shows how addressing racism in the algorithmic context may require going beyond fairness. there are also implications related to business ethics. it might be objected that our framing of discrimination is inapt for contexts of private enterprise where corporations, rather than governments, are making decisions and bearing relevant costs and benefits. huq, for example, argues that in the criminal justice context, which is public, a bifurcated decision procedure with one threshold for white people and another for black people has special justification that would not apply to more traditional forms of affirmative action.7 one reason he gives is that setting different risk thresholds in the criminal justice context could be ideal not only from an equity point of view but also from a social efficiency one: if we are aiming to minimize negative effects of policing overall while maximizing potential benefits, we might most effectively do that by treating different groups differently. and in the context of business and private enterprise, this reasoning would not apply, as decisions are usually based on what’s best for the company, not what’s best for society. 7 a further reason he gives for this conclusion is not applicable to our discussion, as he says that alleviating racial stratification “is a more acute interest than diversity” (huq 2019, 1131); our arguments for a social impact approach rest on justifications based directly with alleviating racial stratification, and not with the “diversity” goals sometimes associated with affirmative action policies. kassam and marino – algorithmic racial discrimination: a social impact approach published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 even in business ethics, where values are considered, one dominant view is that corporations should be managed in the best interests of shareholders (moriarty 2021). if firms should be managed in the best interests of shareholders, then the use of an algorithm that produces disparate impacts for marginalized groups would perhaps be seen as defensible in cases where the company derives a benefit from its use. for instance, if credit score is being used as a proxy for income, and black people in the us end up paying higher premiums than their white counterparts because of correlations, we’ve shown this could be actuarially fair, and from a shareholder’s perspective may be defensible: poor people tend to file more claims and consequently impose a higher expected cost. mitigating disparate impacts for marginalized communities could be antithetical to shareholders’ interests. in response, notice first that many companies have value statements that indicate their endorsement of antiracist and equity-related values. in the wake of black lives matter protests and other forms of antiracist activism, corporations have shared messages on social media condemning racism and announcing their donations to advocacy groups like the naacp legal defense and educational fund and the equal justice initiative. some corporations have pledged to take actions to divest from the harmful systems of american policing. for instance, ibm and microsoft said they would no longer sell facial recognition software to law enforcement until further notice or until there are laws regulating it (bensinger 2020). for companies expressing antiracist values, a social-impact framework could be relevant and useful to guiding action. but more broadly, as jeffrey moriarty (2021) points out, shareholder primacy and other theories of business ethics (such as stakeholder theory) should not be interpreted as views about the ultimate ends of decision-making: managers should also make decisions that are consistent with the requirements of morality. working out those requirements is part of what business ethics is all about. notably, many standard business ethics textbooks do not include discussions of topics related to racial equity, such as “retail redlining”—a concept that predates algorithms and refers to “inequitable distribution of retail resources across racially distinct areas” (kwate et al. 2013). plausibly, antiracism falls within the purview of moral requirements and constraints; these reflections on the social impacts of algorithms thus suggest that racial equity and disparate impact should be a topic of increased attention in business ethics research and teaching. it’s worth noting in this context that a potentially constructive aspect of socialimpact framing—and of the structural theories it emerges from—is that they allow for shifting our attention away from individual blame and more toward collective responsibility. frameworks focused on intention tend to encourage an emphasis on individual blame and the question of when it is appropriate to hold particular persons responsible for discriminatory or oppressive effects. holding people responsible can feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 be important, but identifying individuals to blame can be difficult, since it requires us to consider the extent to which we are individually morally blameworthy for perpetuating discrimination—and, in the case of unintentional proxy discrimination, possibly unknowingly. even defining an individual’s role in a large bureaucratic structure can be difficult. but when we shift our focus away from intent to something more systemic, we are better able to explain directly why algorithms can be discriminatory, and why there is an obligation to address this discrimination, without needing a judgment about who is specifically to blame. one possibility in this direction is that the responsibility associated with adopting a social-impact framework could be understood as a collective responsibility. forward-looking collective responsibility can be described as a responsibility for making sure that a particular desirable state of affairs comes into existence (see, e.g., french and wettstein 2014). in this context, forward-looking collective responsibility concerns what collective agents should be doing to make 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philosophy of science program at the university of california, irvine in 2021. her research focuses on the role that social and political values play in scientific research, especially in policy-relevant areas. more recently, she has been studying the various ways nonepistemic values are encoded in complex and oftentimes opaque mathematical models across disciplines. she currently teaches courses at california state university fullerton and california state university long beach. patricia marino is professor of philosophy at the university of waterloo in canada, where she works in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of economics, and philosophy of sex and love. she is the author of moral reasoning in a pluralistic world (mcgillqueens university press, 2015) and the philosophy of sex and love: an opinionated introduction (routledge, 2019) as well as articles on economic methodology, law and economics, bioethics, moral dilemmas, sexual objectification, and other topics. for more information, visit patriciamarino.org. 14275 kassam and marino title page 14275 kassam and marino final format epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 1 article 2 2022 epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief aron edidin new college of florida edidin@ncf.edu recommended citation edidin, aron. 2022. “epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (1). article 2. mailto:edidin@ncf.edu edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief aron edidin abstract this paper develops an account that connects the value of knowledge to socially situated agency twice over. we value the exercise of agency in connection with outcomes we value, and true belief is such an outcome. but true belief is valuable to us because belief is the form of information-possession most directly suited to feed into the interpersonal dimensions of our agency, both epistemic and otherwise. in the first place, the credit-worthiness approach to the value of knowledge locates that value in the broad domain of epistemic agency. an account in terms of the exercise of epistemic agency puts us in position to address criticisms of the creditworthiness account by mobilizing insights from feminist work on relational autonomy. meanwhile, epistemic agency is an essential component of agency tout court. effective action requires information. if our agency is paradigmatically exercised in socially embedded contexts, our information must be in substantial measure communicable in sentences—that is, it must take the form of beliefs. keywords: knowledge, value of knowledge, belief, agency, epistemic agency, relational autonomy this paper develops an account that connects the value of knowledge to socially situated agency twice over. we value the exercise of agency in connection with outcomes we value, and true belief is such an outcome. but true belief is valuable to us because belief is the form of information possession most directly suited to feed into the interpersonal dimensions of our agency, both epistemic and otherwise. my first task will be to work out the connection between feminist thought on relational autonomy and mainstream views of the value of knowledge. focusing on the socially embedded nature of human agency allows us to develop one mainstream approach in ways that respond to existing objections, deepen our understanding of the values engaged by the approach, and connect the approach to a second, putatively antithetical one. more specifically, the credit-worthiness approach to the value of knowledge locates that value in the broad domain of epistemic agency. an account of the value of knowledge in terms of the exercise of epistemic agency puts us in position to address criticisms of the credit-worthiness account by mobilizing published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 insights from feminist work on relational autonomy. locating the exercise of epistemic agency in the context of a community of interacting agents further connects this development of the credit-worthiness approach with the apparently contrasting approach that connects the value of knowing with the value of being a good informant in social practices of information-sharing. within feminist epistemology, the value of knowledge has also been questioned. in “what knowledge is and what it ought to be: feminist values and normative epistemology,” sally haslanger (1999) develops a different “value of knowledge” question than the “mainstream” one. but the connection to socially embedded agency can be extended to haslanger’s question, which ends up focused on the value of belief. the extension develops a hint that haslanger herself leaves at the end of the article, connecting the value of belief with the exercise of agency. agency must be informed. a propositional attitude like belief involves the possession of information in propositional form, the form most directly connected to the possibility of sentential expression. and possessing information in sententially communicable form is particularly valuable in light of the socially embedded nature of human epistemic agency and of human agency more generally. my second task will be to develop this response to haslanger’s challenge and so to connect the mainstream “value of knowledge” questions to haslanger’s. two questions about the value of knowledge and belief epistemology is traditionally focused on conditions that are deemed valuable: knowledge, justification by evidence, truth. in “what knowledge is and what it ought to be,” haslanger (1999) raises concerns about taking these valuations for granted. the role of gender in our practices of ascribing or denying these conditions might indicate that the values involved are seriously flawed. at the end of the article, haslanger suggests that traditional analyses of knowledge do indeed capture a condition that we should value. but she only hints at a positive account of this value. her main purpose is to establish that a substantial positive account is needed. the key, she thinks, will be to establish the value of belief. the value of knowledge may lie in its relation to justified true belief, and the value of justification may lie in its relation to truth; and true belief will be valuable if belief is, because truth is the internal end of belief. that entails that true beliefs are better than false ones, but it doesn’t entail that true beliefs are better than no beliefs at all. so for the whole chain of conditional value-defense to get going, a case for the value of belief is needed. haslanger is willing to grant, at least tentatively, the further steps in the chain. she focuses on ways that the question of value can keep getting pushed back from knowledge to justification to truth without resolving the worries that motivate the question for her. and she’s particularly keen to distinguish the project of identifying published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief valuable epistemic or doxastic conditions from the project of characterizing as exactly as possible the currently established concept of knowledge. (part of the achievement of the article is a taxonomy of philosophical projects that situates this distinction.) so she has nothing at all to say about complications that might be introduced by the fact that justified true belief isn’t sufficient for knowledge, as indicated by our intuitive denial of the status of knowledge in gettier cases. but those complications connect to a second literature on the value of knowledge. this latter discussion has proceeded without reference to the feminist work that provides much of the context for haslanger’s paper. but there’s a connection to be made, and making it can provide both an improved response to the gettier-related problem of the value of knowledge and a related response to haslanger’s challenge concerning the value of belief. in what follows, i’ll begin by briefly describing the gettier-related problem of the value of knowledge and one prominent category of response to it. i’ll then explain how that direction can be strengthened by connecting it to feminist work on related values. finally, i’ll make the connection back to haslanger’s challenge. epistemic agency, relational autonomy, and the value of knowledge first, then, the gettier-related problem of the value of knowledge. to go briefly over familiar ground, the gettier problem concerns how to respond to the recognition that a person can believe something true, and have perfectly good reasons for the belief, and yet not know the thing (gettier 1963). a simple example is this: i arrive in my office and look at the trusty old clock to check the time. the clock reads 10:00, and so i believe that it’s 10:00. and so it is. but unbeknownst to me, the clock stopped at 10 the previous night. i just happened to look at it exactly twelve hours later. so a further condition must be added to those of justified true belief to get a full account of what’s required to know: a succession of proposed conditions and counterexamples focused on our willingness or unwillingness to ascribe knowledge in a wide variety of arcane and artificial conditions. but patterns of ascription don’t seem to be the end of the story here. one question that the clock case raises is: what’s wrong with my situation vis-à-vis my belief that it’s 10:00? we may agree that the verb “to know” doesn’t apply to me in this situation. but that’s not just a neutral fact about what words we use for what situations. it reflects a deficiency in our situation vis-à-vis something we care about. something important to our cognitive relation to the world seems to be missing in these cases. but what is that? my belief corresponds to the way things are, and i’m assessing the evidence as i should. in this case, it’s just a lucky coincidence that my cogent assessment leads me to true belief, but good luck is good, right? (concern with luck as a feature of true belief that isn’t knowledge goes published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 back to plato; the gettier problem extends the concern to cases of justified true belief.) one prominent response is to note that my good luck may be good for me, but it doesn’t reflect any credit on me. to say that i lucked out with respect to some outcome pretty much1 just means that i don’t deserve credit for the outcome. and deserving credit is a good thing. if gettier cases are ones in which a believer just lucks out in the truth of her justified belief, credit-worthiness for the truth of her belief is something valuable that’s missing in those cases (pritchard 2007, especially 89, 98– 100, and references cited there). this seems to be on the right track (both in terms of what’s missing in gettier cases and of what’s valuable about what’s missing), but objections have been advanced that suggest that the focus of the credit-worthiness account isn’t quite in the right place. one objection is that knowledge sometimes involves the “easiest” of true-belief formation—for example, knowledge of easily perceived features of the knower’s immediate surroundings. duncan pritchard notes that agents can sometimes know even while having a true belief that is of very minimal credit to them. a question to be answered, however, is this: if the credit involved is this minimal, then in what sense is the credit reflecting a cognitive achievement on the part of the agent? (pritchard 2007, 99) one response to this sort of objection is to replace the vocabulary of credit and accomplishment with that of attributability: knowledge is valuable because when we know, the truth of our belief is attributable to us. but why is that valuable? it’s easy enough to see why i might like the condition of deserving credit for some good thing. but if attributability is divorced from credit-worthiness, where’s the good in it? one direction, developed by john greco (2012), is to look is away from valueto-the-knower and toward value-to-the-attributor. attributing outcomes to sources is part of a process of orienting ourselves toward using the sources to obtain the outcomes and toward intervening with sources to modify outcomes. this also provides guidance in determining just what contribution to the production of the outcome makes the outcome attributable to you: the outcome is attributable to me if focusing on my contribution is a good way of organizing the relevant orientation toward sources and outcomes. attributing knowledge to someone can play a role in our orientation toward potential sources of information. 1 the two come apart in cases discussed below: very easy accomplishments and ones that result largely from aid from others. i may be worthy of little credit in these cases, but they’re not really cases of lucking out either. published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief but this is at best only a part of the picture. we value knowledge itself, not just correct attributions of knowledge. we take knowledge to be valuable to the knower, not just to others who might include her in their orientation toward potential sources of information. related to the cases of “easy” knowledge that pritchard raises are ones in which a knower is aided by technological or interpersonal assistance in ways that suggest the assignment of credit to the source of assistance rather than to the knower.2 one version of this phenomenon involves simple cases of knowledge by testimony. jennifer lackey describes the following case: having just arrived at the train station in chicago, morris wishes to obtain directions to the sears tower. he looks around, approaches the first adult passer-by that he sees, and asks how to get to his desired destination. the passer-by, who happens to be a chicago resident who knows the city extraordinarily well, provides morris with impeccable directions to the sears tower by telling him that it is located two blocks east of the train station. morris unhesitatingly forms the corresponding true belief. (lackey 2007, 352) the considerations raised by pritchard and lackey suggest that we might do better to shift the focus from credit-worthiness to the broader category of agency. the assignment of credit and the attribution of accomplishments to persons identify their targets as agents.3 whatever value we assign to agency will be tracked by this sort of assignment and attribution. framing the question this way, we might say that the value of knowing is the value of exercising a certain kind of agency—epistemic agency. thinking about characteristics of agency in general, and about how we value agency, is likely to help to illuminate what we might value about knowledge. here’s one example: agency extends to the doing of very simple, easy things that we accomplish with little or no explicit thought. (consider walking and talking, eating and drinking, grasping and holding small objects, etc.) there may be little credit-worthiness in these actions, but they can be integral parts of fancier actions that might be more credit-worthy. and the absence of agency in these simple matters can constitute a significant kind of helplessness. all of this seems to apply directly to the epistemic agency involved in perceiving features of our immediate surroundings. in many cases this can be easy and not particularly credit-worthy, but it’s an integral 2 for technological examples, see vaesen (2011). 3 sosa (2015) comes very close to this formulation, connecting his account directly to gettier examples (and gettier-like examples in connection with other kinds of agency) in chapters 1 and 3. published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 part of our epistemic agency more generally, playing a key role in fancier epistemic accomplishments. and conditions that interfere with perceptual access to our surroundings can produce an intense sort of cognitive helplessness. again, and more centrally to what will follow, we perform both simple and fancier feats of agency by engaging with others. if i ask you to pass the salt and you do so, you may have played a larger role than mine in getting the salt to me; but an environment of cooperative fellows is a favorable domain for getting things done, one in which i can act effectively, not one in which my action is moot. if i ask you where a particular building is and you tell me, i’ve informed myself of the location by engaging your cooperation. your participation increases the scope of my epistemic agency. attending to the ways that agency can be facilitated by engagement with others helps to put lackey’s example into perspective. but it isn’t just an incidental fact about some exercises of agency that they involve engagement with others. human agency is interpersonally facilitated in most of its many instances. this is brought out dramatically in feminist work on the nature of autonomy, a dimension of agency that has often been conceived in terms of independence from social support on one hand and from influence on the other. for example, diana meyers (1989) emphasizes the role of socialization in facilitating the development of the competencies required to make my actions most genuinely my own. andrea westlund (2009), reflecting a long tradition of concern about how we can be bound by our own inflexible inclinations, argues that those competencies require the ability to engage dialogically with others whose perspective differs from one’s own. marina oshana (2006) notes the ways in which leading a life of one’s own choosing is a matter of gearing into social structures and arrangements that enable, and often actually constitute elements of, the chosen way of life. the lesson of all of this is that the actions that most deeply reflect our authentic individual selves also draw deeply on our relations to others. the social facilitation of epistemic agency in lackey’s example is an instance of a pervasive feature of human agency. we can get a vivid sense of the depth of social embedding by considering a really homely example of something that most of us do alone—say, brushing our teeth. when i brush my teeth nobody else is helping me. but, first of all, i’m availing myself of tools and substances that were made by others. i couldn’t brush my teeth the way i do if others didn’t make toothbrushes and toothpaste and mirrors and eyeglasses, and engage in practices of distribution, transportation, and sale that put those things in my possession. meanwhile, i was taught how to brush my teeth by parents and schoolteachers and dental hygienists, and my choice to brush is informed by information i’ve received from all of those. i brush partly for broadly medical reasons, to preserve dental and oral health. but i also brush to make my appearance and the smell of my breath more palatable to people around me, conforming to standards that are in some respects society-wide and in others deeply inflected by published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief gender and class and other dimensions of social positioning. brushing my teeth is something i do myself; i’m the agent of the activity. but my agency is enabled by and entangled with social (including economic and medical) structures and practices and phenomena of tremendous extent and variety. the profoundly social character of our agency suggests that if knowledge is a matter of agency in a particular (epistemic) domain, it too will be profoundly social. again, this will come as no surprise to readers of feminist epistemology. among others, lynn hankinson nelson (1990), helen longino (1990), heidi grasswick (2004), and gaile pohlhaus jr. (2012) have explored the idea that we inform ourselves by gearing into communal structures and arrangements that contribute concepts, standards of evidence, acceptable presuppositions, and opportunities for testimonial sharing of information and dialogic exploration and questioning. we can get a vivid sense of the depth of social embedding by considering a homely example of firsthand—as opposed to testimonial—knowing. if i recognize the make and model of the car in front of me in traffic, nobody is, on that occasion, actively assisting me in my identification of the car. but first of all, i’m availing myself of tools that were made, distributed, and sold by others. if i weren’t wearing my glasses, i wouldn’t see the car well enough to identify it. and, of course, it’s my car that enables me to get close enough to the other one to identify it. meanwhile, my ability to recognize vehicles was inculcated and developed in my childhood, first by picture books with titles like cars, trucks, and things that go, and later by magazines, more detailed books, and schoolyard conversation. all of this was informed by social constructions of gender: these epistemic capacities were particularly valued for boys. so boys who read car magazines and talked about cars on the playground and so got to be good at recognizing makes and models were going with the socially sanctioned flow, whereas girls who did the same were transgressing gender expectations. and in addition to all of this, car models are designed to be recognizable; my epistemic capacity is in this way tied up with marketing strategies in the auto industry. if the value of knowing is the value of exercising epistemic agency, then given the way human agency and human epistemic agency work, that’s going to be the value of participating in appropriate ways in social practices and structures and systems surrounding the acquisition, propagation, and mobilization of true beliefs. feminist work both in social epistemology and on relational accounts of agency and autonomy connects the value of agency (epistemic and otherwise), and thus the value of knowledge, to participation in such practices and structures and systems. this contributes to our understanding of the value of knowledge in a way related to the “credit-worthiness” approach, by moving from credit-worthiness itself to the more general category of agency. but it also allows us to connect that approach to another that is typically presented as a rival to the credit-worthiness approach. this second approach focuses on the place of knowers in interpersonal practices of published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 information-sharing, characterizing knowers as potential good informants and the value of knowledge as deriving from that of being a good informant.4 (greco’s emphasis on the value of knowledge-attribution fits this pattern.) but being an informant is another way of participating in social practices, structures, and systems surrounding the acquisition, propagation, and mobilization of true beliefs. and inclusion as a full-fledged participant in such practices is a social good for the one included, so this elaboration of the value of knowledge-attribution does identify a value of knowledge to the knower and not just to others. at this point, the two approaches seem to focus on two different kinds of relation to this one overall structure. as socially supported agents, knowers draw on the structure. as potentially valuable informants, they contribute to it. so the two approaches look like two sides of the same coin. but the sides are interconnected. the draws help to inform the contributions, and the contributions enrich the source of the draws. we might think of interconnected mutual enrichment along the lines of productive conversation, in which the roles of contributor and recipient are not really distinct. in that case, the two approaches are more like one side of the same coin, or perhaps two sides of the same möbius strip. one way or the other, they’re closely related. and thinking about the details of the relation will be a matter of sorting out dimensions of social embedding of epistemic agency. so we can think of the fundamental value of knowledge in terms of its relation to epistemic agency. but it can’t quite be that the value of knowledge is that it entails the exercise of epistemic agency with respect to the true belief involved. it’s possible to know in cases in which the true belief in question isn’t the result of the knower’s successful exercise of epistemic agency.5 suppose there’s something i don’t want to know: i’ve recorded a televised contest, and i don’t want to know who won until i have the chance to watch. you know the winner. i ask you not to tell me. i cover my ears so i can’t hear what you say. but you pull my hands away from my ears and tell me who won. now, to my disappointment, i know. but it would be perverse to describe my true belief as the result of successful exercise of my epistemic agency. it’s important to note first of all that in this case, it seems reasonable to say that the characteristic value of knowledge is absent. this is, after all, a case in which i take myself to be worse off for knowing. and that’s certainly related to the fact that my knowing is contrary to my agency. to that extent, the example remains a good fit for the agency-focused account of the value of knowledge. but even with respect to values based on agency, cases of knowledge-against-the-knower’s-will raise instructive complications. 4 see pritchard (2007, 97–98, and sources cited there). 5 i owe the following example to jon matheson. published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief regarding my agency in the case i’ve described, the picture is mixed. something has gone badly wrong: i’ve been informed against my will. but the case remains closely related to ones in which i successfully inform myself by drawing on the knowledge of others. as we’ve already seen, learning from others is an important domain of exercise of my epistemic agency. when i learn successfully in this way, i seek information from others, and they tell me what they know. in this case, we have the second part without the first. can we make sense of this combination in a way that continues to center on agency? one way to do so is suggested by diana meyers’ idea of autonomy competencies. meyers (1989) characterizes autonomous actions as ones that exercise a variety of underlying competencies. something similar seems to apply to agency quite generally. we can further characterize the variety of relevant competencies by noting that autonomy and successful agency require the exercise of competencies relating both to the making of decisions (understood very broadly as the sense of selfdirection) and to the execution of decisions we’ve made. suppose i bake a delicious cake. my agency in producing the result can be compromised in either of two ways. on one hand, i might be an incompetent baker. i make a well-considered decision to bake a cake, but the successful result is sheer accident given my deficiencies in the kitchen. my agency in producing the cake is compromised in a different way if i am forced to bake it, bypassing the exercise of my capacities in the dimension of deciding what to do. for the baking of the cake to constitute a successful exercise of agency on my part, the outcome must be appropriately related to my exercise of both decisionmaking competencies and decision-enacting competencies.6 in the contest-winner case, it’s the sidelining of my self-directing competencies that compromises my agency. the belief is a product of my competent uptake of the testimony of a reliable informant, but my exposure to the testimony is forced; my decision-making is bypassed.7 so one possibility is that knowledge is present when the true belief in question was acquired through the successful exercise of decision-enacting competencies relevant to agency in the acquisition of the belief, even if the exercise of the relevant decision-making competencies is compromised. the special importance of decision-enacting competencies to the presence or absence of knowledge suggests a more nuanced account of the value of knowledge as a component of agency. successful exercise of agency must of course be informed; 6 note that the social dimensions of agency that i discussed above apply to both sorts of competency. 7 note that decision-making competencies can be engaged negatively, by not doing anything to block ambient sources of information and so remaining open to their deliverances. but in this case, my actual attempt to isolate myself from the information is frustrated. published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 my agency may be compromised if i’m misinformed or lack relevant information, even if the outcome of my action is in accord with my decision.8 (this requirement applies to both decision-making and decision-enactment.) in gettier cases, where knowledge is absent, the use of the (true) belief in question to inform further action and inference seems to involve this sort of compromise. if i truly believe that it’s 10:00 because i’ve seen a clock that stopped at 10:00 twelve hours before, and i act on that belief by rushing to a 10:00 meeting, my action has the desired result by accident; i get to the meeting in spite of the fact that my information is compromised. but if i act in ways that are informed by my true belief about the winner of the contest (perhaps making the best of the fact that i wasn’t able to avoid hearing about it), there is no such problem. true beliefs that result from the successful exercise of the enactment component of epistemic agency competencies feed forward into further agency, epistemic and otherwise. even if i wish i didn’t know the winner of the contest, my knowledge still has this value to me. this special “forward-feeding” role of the exercise of enactment competencies seems to apply more generally than to epistemic competencies alone. if i’m forced to bake a cake and competently do so, and then find uses of my own for the cake i’ve baked, my agency in the further use of the cake isn’t compromised by the fact that i was forced to bake it. my enactment competency allowed me to forge a tool that (as it turned out) i could use for my own purposes. indeed, you may have forced me to bake the cake in order for me to have it available for further use. (parents do this sort of thing a lot.) but if the decision to bake was my own, but my incompetent baking meant that it was just by accident that i wound up with an edible cake, the accidentalness carries forward to further use of the cake, even if i’m wholly competent in that use. (if i’ve baked the cake to serve for your enjoyment, and i serve you the cake competently and you enjoy it, my agency in relation to your enjoyment remains compromised by the fact that what makes the cake enjoyable is the accidental product of my incompetent baking.) meanwhile, the forward-feeding capacity that’s tied to the successful exercise of the enactment component of epistemic agency competencies also connects the agency-focused approach to the value of knowledge to the good-informant-focused approach. one way of putting the forward-feeding is to say that in the cases in question, even though my agency has been compromised in its decision-making components, the outcome still leaves me a good informant to my future self in the matter in question. my future actions and inferences aren’t less well informed because of the compromise. and this carries over to my capacity as an informant to others. 8 this is discussed in considerable detail in sosa (2015, chapters 6 and 7). published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief if we identify the characteristic value of knowledge with the exercise of the enactment component of epistemic agency competencies and its consequent positioning with respect to future exercise of agency, we get an account that applies not just to typical cases but to cases of knowledge against the knower’s will. the relevance of social dimensions of agency, and the relation to practices of information sharing, carry over directly from the simpler identification of the value of knowledge with the exercise of epistemic agency with respect to the information known. and we needn’t give up the idea that this value typically takes a form that involves the knower’s exercise of epistemic agency with respect to that information. we keep ourselves informed about the state of our surroundings in large part by maintaining a comportment of perceptual openness to potentially salient features. part of what makes the easy cases of perceptual self-informing so easy is that the relevant selfdirection needn’t extend beyond the casual maintenance of this comportment. with respect to information that might engage my epistemic enactment-competencies, the default situation is one in which the relevant decision-competencies are (at least thus minimally) exercised. only if i actively attempt to disengage my normal epistemic openness will the possibility arise of knowledge without the exercise of epistemic agency. this won’t be a vanishingly rare occurrence; i will, for example, sometimes act to shield myself from unwanted distractions. but this is itself a response to the default condition of willing openness, and in the default condition, my epistemic selfdirection is engaged in a way that makes any consequent acquisition of knowledge an exercise of epistemic agency. social dimensions of agency and the value of belief so much (for now) for the part of the project that relates some of the preoccupations of feminist epistemology and autonomy theory to mainstream, gettier-related discussions of the value of knowledge. to make the connection back to haslanger, we can note to begin with that the approaches i’ve discussed to the gettier-related problem presuppose the value of true belief. when we know, we’re typically the agents of our own cognitive good in the form of true belief. at minimum, we’ve exercised the enactment competencies involved in such agency, in ways that can feed into subsequent exercises of (epistemic and other) agency. this agency has value beyond the value of the goods of which we’re the agents. we value the agency along with the outcome. but the value of agency isn’t independent of the value of the outcome. if we don’t care about true belief, then we won’t care in the same way about being the agents of our true belief. so the value of true belief is centrally connected to the solution i’ve proposed to the gettier-related problem. haslanger is sympathetic to the idea that truth is a value essentially connected to belief itself, that belief essentially aims at truth. but she notes that this confers value on true belief only if belief itself is valuable. truth is the internal goal of belief. published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 that is a reason to prefer true belief to false belief, but it isn’t a reason to prefer true belief to no belief. so haslanger proposes that we approach the question of the value of true belief by way of the value of belief. this all happens near the end of a paper that doesn’t go on to a detailed treatment of that question. but it does include a hint: haslanger suggests that the value of belief stems from its essential role in agency, for beings like us. indeed, in a closely related paper, haslanger (2000) suggests that attending to many of the social features of knowledge and agency, and to the feminist literature exploring them, might help to shed light on the issue. to develop the hint, one starting point is the familiar fact that agency must be informed. i can effectively control what’s going on only if i can tell what’s going on and track the effects of my interventions. this much seems built into the very idea of agency. and it carries with it the idea that agency with respect to the relevant kinds of information is part and parcel of agency tout court. my agency is strengthened by the ability to inform myself in relevant respects and weakened by the inability to do so. this role distinguishes belief from some potential alternatives. haslanger proposes accepting propositions as a possible alternative to believing them. but acceptance that doesn’t involve belief—say, accepting a proposition as a working hypothesis—doesn’t do this work of tracking our actions and their outcomes. it doesn’t in the appropriate way involve the possession of information needed for effective agency. one can, of course, act on a working hypothesis; that’s how working hypotheses work. but when we act on a working hypothesis, the action, like the hypothesis, is in a sense provisional. we try acting on the hypothesis and see how that works out. “seeing how the hypothesis works out” itself involves tracking outcomes in a way that must go beyond the generation of further working hypotheses about how the initial one is working. this needn’t involve anything like certainty, but it requires a verdict rather than a further hypothesis. “so far, so good” can be one legitimate verdict, though if no evaluation on any level ever gets beyond “so far, so good,” that will constitute a limitation on one’s agency in the situation. but the “so far, so good” must itself be a verdict, the object of belief-like commitment. the tracking of outcomes can be tentative, but it needs to be tracking (however tentative) of what’s actually going on, not just the generation of further hypotheses (which may be accepted as working hypotheses) about what’s going on.9 9 a rather different version of acceptance is catherine elgin’s (2004) notion of accepting a proposition as “true enough.” this form of acceptance is a verdict, of a kind that can inform action. but elgin’s case for the appropriateness of this form of acceptance for some propositions assumes belief in others (she doesn’t propose acceptance as a universal replacement for belief), and acceptance as true enough involves a belief-like essential aim of being true enough, which leads to a notion of published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief this doesn’t by itself mean that agency requires beliefs, because belief is only one way of possessing information. so what distinguishes beliefs from other carriers of information? a familiar formulation characterizes beliefs as propositional attitudes; the information captured in beliefs is propositional in form. and this in turn suits the contents of belief to sentential expression. discussions of belief often emphasize the grammatical form of belief attributions, which involve “that clauses” with sentential complements: “so-and-so believes that p,” where what replaces “p” is a sentence. paul churchland (2013) takes this as the key to understanding belief attribution: beliefs are states whose content is closely related to the content of sentences, so belief content can typically be reported in sentential form. what sets beliefs apart, on churchland’s understanding, is precisely their suitability to sentential expression. on other approaches than churchland’s, the relation between propositional attitude and sentential expression may be more indirect.10 even on churchland’s approach, it doesn’t follow that every belief is sententially expressible. but one way or another, propositional attitudes are the form of information storage most directly linked to sentential expression. why should beings like us want our agency to be informed in ways that are expressible sententially? well, for beings like us, agency (including agency with respect to information) is deeply social. our agency in general is supported by social connections that depend on sharing of information. our ability to inform ourselves itself depends heavily on structures and practices of information-sharing. and the primary way beings like us share information is with language, with sentences. the connections that support our agency depend on an extensive ability to say what we know. we certainly possess information in forms that we can’t effectively express in sentences. but it’s essential that lots of the information we possess can be told. for beings like us, who depend on social resources for our agency and on language for the constitution and sharing of those resources, belief—that is, information in tellable form—is essential to the agency we value. churchland contemplates the possibility of agents who communicate differently, say by way of direct brain-to-brain links, without the need of language. for such beings, even if their agency required social support as ours does, there might be no particular value to having beliefs. churchland supposes that this sort of communication might be vastly superior to our sentential kind, and he presents it as an exciting possibility for further human development. but for agents like us presentday humans, language, and therefore sentences, and therefore beliefs, are essential “true enough” knowledge to which the considerations in this paper apply mutatis mutandis. 10 though both language-of-thought accounts like fodor’s (1978) and attributability accounts like dennett’s (1971) keep the connection very close indeed. published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 http:indirect.10 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 2 to the sharing of information, which is itself an essential part of the ways in which we act socially to support our own agency and that of others. so belief, and thus true belief, is valuable to beings like us. and agency with respect to this valuable outcome is valuable. but the connection is tighter than just that: the outcome is valuable in part because of its potential contribution to the agency. true belief is valuable because it’s the form of information best suited to sharing in support of our collective epistemic endeavors, and of our collective endeavors more generally. it’s the social dimension of epistemic agency that in this second way connects the value of knowledge with the value of belief itself. the value of knowledge is that of epistemic agency and of epistemic contribution to agency more generally, and our agency is exercised in an interpersonal context that depends on sentential communication of information, and thus the possession of information in the form of beliefs. references churchland, paul. 2013. matter and consciousness. 3rd ed. cambridge, ma: mit press. dennett, daniel c. 1971. “intentional systems.” journal of philosophy 68, no. 4 (february 25): 87–106. elgin, catherine z. 2004. “true enough.” philosophical issues 14:113–31. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1533-6077.2004.00023.x. fodor, jerry. 1978. “propositional attitudes.” monist 61, no. 4 (october): 501–23. gettier, edmund. 1963. “is justified true belief knowledge?” analysis 23, no. 6 (june): 121–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/23.6.121. grasswick, heidi. 2004. “individuals-in-communities: the search for a feminist model of epistemic subjects.” hypatia 19, no. 3 (summer): 85–120. https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1527-2001.2004.tb01303.x. greco, john. 2012. “a (different) virtue epistemology.” philosophy and phenomenological research 85, no. 1 (july): 1–26. haslanger, sally. 1999. “what knowledge is and what it ought to be: feminist values and normative epistemology.” philosophical perspectives 13:459–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2676113. ———. 2000. “defining knowledge: feminist values and normative epistemology.” in the proceedings of the twentieth world congress of philosophy, volume 8: contemporary philosophy, edited by daniel dahlstrom, 41–55. bowling green, oh: philosophy documentation center. lackey, jennifer. 2007. “why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know.” synthese 158, no. 3 (october): 345–61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-0069044-x. published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2676113 http:https://doi.org https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/23.6.121 https://doi edidin –epistemic agency and the value of knowledge and belief longino, helen. 1990. science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. princeton, nj: princeton university press. meyers, diana t. 1989. self, society, and personal choice. new york: columbia university press. nelson, lynn hankinson. 1990. who knows: from quine to a feminist empiricism. philadelphia: temple university press. oshana, marina. 2006. personal autonomy in society. new york: routledge. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2012. “relational knowing and epistemic injustice: toward a theory of willful hermeneutical ignorance.” hypatia 27, no. 4 (fall): 715–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01222.x. pritchard, duncan. 2007. “recent work on epistemic value.” american philosophical quarterly 44, no. 2 (april): 85–110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20464361. sosa, ernest. 2015. judgment and agency. oxford: oxford university press. vaesen, krist. 2011. “knowledge without credit, exhibit 4: extended cognition.” synthese 181, no. 3 (august): 515–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-0109744-0. westlund, andrea. 2009. “rethinking relational autonomy.” hypatia 24, no. 4 (fall): 26–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01056.x. aron edidin is a professor of philosophy at new college of florida. he works primarily in epistemology (most recently, social epistemology) and in the philosophy of music (focusing on characterizing the artistic collaboration of performers and composers in western classical music), but he has also published in philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01056.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20464361 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01222.x 13641 edidin title page 13641 edidin final format is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 1 article 2 2017 is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? kate m. phelan royal melbourne institute of technology, kate.phelan2@rmit.edu.au recommended citation phelan, kate m.. 2017. "is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is?."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (1). article 2. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2. is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is?1 kate m. phelan abstract on catharine mackinnon’s view, feminism aspires to be a theory of the kind that marxism is: a theory of the organisation of the social world as sex hierarchy, just as marxism is a theory of the organisation of the social world as class hierarchy. in 1982, mackinnon observed that feminism was not yet such a theory, and set out to make it one. she did this by developing a theory of sexuality as to feminism what work is to marxism. if one shares mackinnon’s view that feminism aspires to be a theory of the kind that marxism is, then one sees mackinnon as, with her theory of sexuality, creating, albeit in beginning form, a feminist theory. one thus considers mackinnon’s theory of sexuality a definitive moment in the history of feminist theory. yet, for all its importance, no one, neither critics nor proponents, has analysed this theory on its own terms. it is therefore not clear whether mackinnon’s theory of sexuality succeeds, and so whether feminism is yet a theory of the kind that marxism is. in the spirit of progressing mackinnon’s project, in this paper, i return to her theory and consider whether it succeeds. keywords: feminism, marxism, catharine mackinnon, sexuality to answer an old question—how is value created and distributed?—marx needed to create an entirely new account of the social world. to answer an equally old question, or to question an equally old reality—what explains the inequality of women to men? or, how does gender become domination and domination become sex? or, what is male power?— feminism needs to create an entirely new account of the political world. – catharine a. mackinnon, toward a feminist theory of the state 1 i am grateful to caroline norma, for reading and commenting on endless iterations of this paper, karen jones, for a conversation that convinced me that i was onto something, the participants of the workshop on gender and philosophy, for their enthusiasm for and helpful thoughts on an earlier version of this paper, phoebe hollins and gabrielle smith, for the example of resilience and persistence that they are to me, and the reviewers of this paper, for a critique that has resulted in a clearer, fairer, and more genuine paper. 1 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 in 1982 and 1983, catharine mackinnon wrote a pair of articles, “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: an agenda for theory,” and “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: toward feminist jurisprudence,” in which she sought to transform feminism into the theory that for her it aspires to be. on her view, the sexes are socially arranged hierarchically, and this hierarchy is not only unjust but also, crucially, primary, just as for marxism the classes are socially arranged hierarchically and this hierarchy is not only unjust but also primary.2 so, on her view, a feminist theory aspires to be a theory of the sexes as so arranged. as such, it aspires to be a theory of the kind that marxism is. she says, marxism and feminism are theories of power and its distribution: inequality. they provide accounts of how social arrangements of patterned disparity can be internally rational yet unjust. but their specificity is not incidental. in marxism to be deprived of one’s work, in feminism of one’s sexuality, defines each one’s conception of lack of power per se. they do not mean to exist side by side to insure that two separate spheres of social life are not overlooked, the interests of two groups are not obscured, or the contributions of two sets of variables are not ignored. they exist to argue, respectively, that the relations in which many work and few gain, in which some fuck and others get fucked, are the prime moment of politics (1982, 516–517). mackinnon did not arrive at this view of feminist theory independently of feminist work. she saw this view as on some level held by feminists, as motivating and guiding their work, even where that work explicitly contradicted it. indeed, perhaps this is why feminism has been drawn to and shaped by marxism, because feminists have sensed that sex hierarchy somehow resembles class hierarchy, that it is, like class hierarchy, fundamental. and perhaps this is why, however much it has been drawn to marxism, it has ultimately rejected it and set out on its own, because feminists feel also that sex hierarchy is inexplicable by marxism, that it demands an entirely new explanation. but if feminism aspires to be such a theory, it was, mackinnon saw, not yet that. she says, my initial strategy assumed that feminism had a theory of male dominance: an account of its key concrete sites and laws of motion, an 2 i follow mackinnon in writing “marxism” in lower case. she explains why she does this: “i have rendered “marxism” in lower case . . . . since i wish to place marxism and feminism in equipoise, the disparate typography would weigh against my analytic structure. capitalizing both would germanise the text” (mackinnon 1982, 516). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 analysis of why and how it happened and why (perhaps even how) it could be ended. i assumed, in short, that feminism had a theory of gender as marxism had a theory of class. as it became clear that this was not the case in the way i had thought, the project shifted from locating and explicating such a theory to creating one by distilling feminist practice, from attempting to connect feminism and marxism on equal terms to attempting to create a feminist theory that could stand on its own (1989, x). this is not at all to diminish the significance of the feminist work that preceded mackinnon, rather, it is to say that that work, however insightful, had no thoroughgoing account of sex hierarchy as primary. mackinnon sought to transform feminism into the theory that for her it aspires to be by developing a theory in which sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism. if one shares, as others (rowland and klein 1997; millett 2000) and i do, mackinnon’s view that the sexes are socially arranged hierarchically, where this hierarchy is primary, then one sees mackinnon as, with her theory of sexuality, creating, albeit in beginning form, a feminist theory. susan bernick suggests something like this when she describes mackinnon’s work as “a logical culmination of radical feminist thought” (1992, 1), and radical feminist thought as “the central trunk of feminist theory” (1992, 2). one thus considers the formulation of mackinnon’s theory of sexuality a definitive moment in the history of feminist theory.3 but this is only if one shares her view. and many feminists do not (mahoney 1992; romany 1991; harris 1990). they object to it, i think, for two reasons. the first is that they take it to imply that sex hierarchy is the most severe inequality, and they disagree that it is. the second is that they see it as theoretically divorcing sex hierarchy from other inequalities, and thus failing to grasp the interconnectedness of all forms of inequality. but by primary, mackinnon means only that this hierarchy exists unto and for itself, that it is not derivative of another hierarchy, existing only to serve that, as engels ([1884] 2010) considered it to be. or, more simply, she means that sex hierarchy is an issue of its own. and this, that it exists unto itself, means, with regard to its relationship to other inequalities, nothing other than that it does not exist in order to serve them. i think ellen willis captures nicely what is meant by primary. she says, “i sided with the ‘feminists,’ who at some point began calling themselves ‘radical feminists.’ we argued that male supremacy was in itself a systemic form of domination—a set of material, institutionalized relations, not just bad attitudes. men had power and privilege and like any other ruling class 3 examples of work which sees mackinnon’s theory of sexuality as a definitive moment in the history of feminist theory include rapaport 1993; de lauretius 1990; and littleton 1989. 3 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 would defend their interests; challenging that power required a revolutionary movement of women. and since the male-dominated left would inevitably resist understanding and opposing male power, the radical feminist movement must be autonomous, create its own theory and set its own priorities” (1984, 93). so, the claim that sex hierarchy is primary neither implies that sex hierarchy is the most severe inequality nor theoretically divorces it from other inequalities. moreover, firstly, it seems to me that it is because feminists saw sex hierarchy as existing unto itself and so demanding an entirely new explanation, namely, a feminist one, that feminism came into being. as iris marion young says, “we need not merely a synthesis of feminism with marxism, but a thoroughly feminist historical materialism” (1980, 181). she continues, “a feminist historical materialism must be a total social theory, not merely a theory of the situation and oppression of women. that theory will take gender differentiation as its basic starting point, in the sense that it will seek always to keep the fact of gender difference in the centre of its accounts, and will reject any account that obscures gender-differentiated phenomena” (1980, 184). secondly, i think that a theory of sex hierarchy as primary is politically helpful, for such a theory makes sex hierarchy an issue of its own, no longer merely an aspect of another issue, namely class hierarchy. as such it makes it the issue, and so itself worthy of our attention. or, in mackinnon’s language, it makes “the woman question,” which had “always been reduced to some other question,” finally “the question, calling for analysis on its own terms” (1989, 12). thirdly, i think that even if we abstractly disagree with the claim that sex hierarchy is primary, we still have reason to keep mackinnon’s theory. this is because it has explanatory force. it makes sense of, for instance, why persons are socially divided into two groups, man and woman, why the word sex refers to both the categories male and female and the sex act, why virility is the measure of manhood, why women are seen as, indeed are, masochistic, why sexual intercourse, the paradigmatic sex act, takes the form of penetration, why rape is rarely seen as such. this is why mackinnon’s theory resonates with feminists, even those who criticise it. drucilla cornell, for instance, says, “before turning to my critique of mackinnon, i want to pay her the tribute she clearly deserves for her relentless insistence that any theory of equality for women will fall short of its own aspirations if it neglects the question of how sexual identity, and more specifically femininity, is constructed through a gender hierarchy in which women are subordinated and subjected” (1991, 2248). but while mackinnon’s theory of sexuality may be considered a definitive moment in the history of feminist theory, no one, neither critics nor proponents, has analysed it on its own terms. as bernick perceives, “rather than analysing the logic of the arguments mackinnon marshals in favour of her position . . . her critics in the main reject her logic without or prior to engaging it” (1992, 8–9). it is not clear whether mackinnon’s theory of sexuality succeeds, and therefore whether feminism is yet the theory that for her it aspires to be. moreover, it is 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 not clear which aspects of her theory, if any, require work if feminism is to be such a theory. with the aim of clarifying the current state of mackinnon’s theory so that we feminist theorists who find this theory promising may know what work is to be done in order to progress it, in this paper i return to mackinnon’s theory and consider whether it succeeds. in the first part of the paper, i outline mackinnon’s theory of sexuality, in the second, i explain marx’s account of how work organizes the social world as class hierarchy, in the third, i reconstruct mackinnon’s account of how sexuality organizes the social world as sex hierarchy, and in the fourth, i consider whether her theory of sexuality succeeds. finally, as my aim in returning to mackinnon’s theory is ultimately to establish what work is to be done in order to progress it, having found that it does not succeed, i then suggest a line of inquiry that may get mackinnon’s theory back on course. i. mackinnon’s theory of sexuality mackinnon argues that “sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” (1982, 515). by this she does not mean that sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism only in that it is “that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.” the parallel between sexuality in feminism and work in marxism runs much deeper than this. this becomes clear as she goes on: marxist theory argues that society is fundamentally constructed of the relations people form as they do and make things needed to survive humanly. work is the social process of shaping and transforming the material and social worlds, creating people as social beings as they create value. it is that activity by which people become who they are. class is its structure, production its consequence, capital its congealed form, and control its issue. implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the moulding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes— women and men—which division underlies the totality of social relations. sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. as work is to marxism, sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity, yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind. as the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class—workers—the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some defines the sex, woman. heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue. (515–517) 5 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 in this passage it becomes clear that what mackinnon means by “sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism” is that, like work in marxism, it is that which necessarily organizes the social world hierarchically. as work in marxism is organized by some for their benefit, namely, those who own the means of production, sexuality in feminism is organized by some for their benefit, namely, men. as the owners of the means of production organize work for their benefit, they make work that which divides people into classes, those who own the means of production into one class and those who work into another, and arranges the classes hierarchically, those who own the means of production as those who profit and those who work as those who are exploited. similarly, as men organize sexuality for their benefit, they make sexuality that which divides people into the sexes, men and women, and arranges the sexes hierarchically, men as dominant and women as subordinate. as work divides people into classes and arranges the classes hierarchically, it organizes the social world as class hierarchy. similarly, as sexuality divides people into sexes and arranges the sexes hierarchically, it organizes the social world as sex hierarchy. so to ask if mackinnon’s theory of sexuality succeeds is just to ask if mackinnon succeeds in showing that sexuality organizes the social world hierarchically as work does in marxism.4 given the parallel, in order to determine whether mackinnon’s theory of sexuality succeeds, it will be helpful to first understand how work in marxism organizes the social world hierarchically. ii. marx’s account of how work organizes the social world as class hierarchy marx begins his theory with a conception of a person. this conception is one of a person as first and foremost a material being, that is, a corporeal, fleshand-blood being. this is implicit in marx and engels’s assertion that “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things” ([1932] 1974, 48). marx thus conceives of what a person first and 4 i am concerned with whether mackinnon’s theory of sexuality specifically being to feminism what work is to marxism succeeds. her theory of sexuality may be understood differently, for example, as a theory of sexuality as socially constructed, or as “that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away” (mackinnon 1989, 3), or as “the linchpin of gender inequality” (113). understood as one of these theories, it may succeed (although, i do not think it succeeds as the third). but given that mackinnon opens her essay, “an agenda for theory,” and her book, toward a feminist theory of the state, with the claim that “sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism,” and that she follows this claim with the passages that i have cited above, this understanding of her theory of sexuality—being to feminism what work is to marxism—seems to me that which most fully grasps what mackinnon means her theory to be. as such, it seems worth considering whether thus understood it succeeds. 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 foremost needs to live as what he needs to live as such a being, which are just material things, such as food and water. but one does not just find in the world what one needs to live; rather, one must make it. marx and engels imply this when they say, “men . . . begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence” ([1932] 1974, 42). work is the process by which one makes what one needs to live: “production creates the objects that correspond to the given needs” (marx [1939] 1993, 89). on marx’s view, one must enter into relations with others in order to work ([1849] 1933, 28). it is thus necessarily through work that one first enters into relations with others. this means that work necessarily organizes social relations, which is to say, the social world. this is the first half of marx’s account. i turn now to the second—how work organizes the social world as class hierarchy. only some people own the means of production, the means by which one works. under capitalism, these people are the capitalists. as the capitalists own the means of production, and as those who do not own the means of production must work in order to live, so cannot refuse to work on the terms of the capitalists, the capitalists have control over work, and can therefore organize it such that they profit. but that they can so organize work does not explain why they do. marx argues that the system of capitalism necessitates that the capitalists profit. this is because this system is such that if the capitalist does not make a profit, he will go under, thereby ceasing to be a member of the capitalist class, and losing the status that comes with that (marx [1876] 1976, 739). now to the question of how the capitalists organize work such that they make a profit. to make a profit is just to withdraw more value. but according to the law of exchange, commodities of equivalent value must be exchanged. how then can the capitalist withdraw more value? marx argues that under capitalism a commodity has two values: one is the use-value and the other the exchangevalue ([1876] 1976, 125–177). the use-value is the usefulness of the product (125–126). the exchange-value is the proportion at which the commodity can be exchanged for another commodity (126). unlike use-value, exchange-value is not “inherent” in the commodity, it is “purely relative” (126), in other words, contingent. it is determined by the amount of labour-time necessary for its production (130). as the capitalist must buy and sell commodities at their exchange-value, the only way in which he can withdraw more value is by withdrawing it from the use-value of a commodity (270). in order to make a profit, then, the capitalist must find a commodity that, in being used, can produce more value than the value that he paid to use it. the capitalist finds this commodity in labour-power, which is the capacity for labour. how, through using labour-power, the capitalist produces more value than the value that he paid to use it is as follows. firstly, as i have said, the exchange-value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour-time that is necessary to produce it. so, the exchange7 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 value of labour-power is the amount of labour-time that is required to produce labour-power. as the means of subsistence are what render a person in a condition to work, they are what produce labour-power (marx [1876] 1976, 274). the exchange-value of labour-power is thus the amount of labour-time that is required to produce the means of subsistence. marx tells us to suppose that half of a day is the amount of labour-time necessary to produce the means of subsistence that a person requires to be in a condition to work for one day, which is to say, to produce labour-power for one day (276). this means that the exchange-value of labour-power for one day is half of a day of labour-time. marx then tells us to suppose that half of a day of labour-time is embodied in three shillings (276). so, the capitalist must pay the worker three shillings for the use of his labour-power for one day. marx tells us to suppose finally that the worker can spin 20 pounds of yarn over one day (301), which means that the yarn is the embodiment of one day of labour-time (296). as half of a day of labour-time is embodied in three shillings, one day of labour-time is embodied in six shillings. so, the exchange-value of twenty pounds of yarn is six shillings. in sum, the capitalist has paid the worker three shillings for the use of his labour-power, but in using his labour-power, receives six shillings. the capitalist thus manages to withdraw more value through the use of labour-power. but it is not just that he makes a profit, he does so by exploiting the worker. he has paid the worker three shillings, as that is an amount that is commensurate with the value of six hours of labour-time, but the worker has produced for the capitalist a commodity which embodies, hence has the value of twelve hours of labour-time. the capitalist has paid the worker the value of six hours of labour-time but the worker has provided the capitalist with the value of twelve hours of labour-time. if the capitalist must organize work such that he makes a profit, and if he makes a profit through the use of labour-power, then he must be assured of getting labour-power. in order for him to be assured of this, two conditions must be fulfilled. the first condition is that the owner of labour-power must continually own his labour-power (271). in order for labour-power to continually be a commodity in the market, the owner of labour-power must continually be able to sell it, which requires that he continually own it. in order to continually own it, “he must always sell it for a limited period only” (272). the second condition is that the owner of labour-power be continually forced to sell it (272). this assures the capitalist of being able to continually buy it. in order for the owner of labour-power to be forced to sell it, selling it must be the only way that he can get what he needs to live. the payment of a wage fulfils the first condition. the wage is an amount of money that the capitalist pays the worker for his labour-power over a definite period of time (marx [1849] 1933, 17). in other words, it is the exchange-value of labour-power over a definite period of time. that it is paid to the worker for his labour-power means that the labour-power is the worker’s own. as it is the exchange-value of labour-power over a definite period of time, the worker can 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 sell his labour-power only for a definite period of time, which means that the worker always ultimately gets his labour-power back. in this way, the wage makes the worker continually own his labour-power. the payment of a wage also fulfils the second condition. as the wage is the exchange-value of labour-power, the value of the wage is equivalent to the value of labour-power. as the exchange-value of labour-power is the amount of labour-time that is required to produce the means of subsistence, the value of labour-power is equivalent to the value of the means of subsistence. in short, the value of the wage is equivalent to the value of the means of subsistence. with his wage, then, the worker can buy only that which is equivalent to the means of subsistence. this means that he can buy only that which produces his labourpower. he cannot buy the means of production, which would enable him to make and sell commodities, and thereby live without selling his labour-power. he must therefore continually sell his labour-power in order to buy what he needs to live. if the capitalist makes a profit through the use of labour-power, and if he is assured of getting labour-power just through the payment of a wage to the worker, then the capitalist organizes work such that he makes a profit through the payment of a wage to the worker. work thus becomes a process by which the capitalist makes a profit, and, as he makes a profit by exploiting the worker, by which the worker is exploited. work, then, is that which organizes people into classes, the capitalists into one class and the workers into another, and arranges the classes hierarchically, the capitalists as those who profit and the workers as those who are exploited. but this is not all, for if, as i have explained, it is necessarily through work that one first enters into social relations, which means that work is necessarily primary in organizing social relations, then for work to organize people into classes and arrange the classes hierarchically is for work to organize the social world as class hierarchy. iii. mackinnon’s account of how sexuality organizes the social world as sex hierarchy i must begin by acknowledging that, differently from marx, mackinnon does not lay out in step-by-step fashion an account of how sexuality organizes the social world as sex hierarchy. but it seems to me clear that she does consider sexuality as playing this role and that she does mean to have an account of it as such. if we bear this in mind as we read her work, then we can see the pieces of this account within it and assemble them so that they form an explicit account. the account that i go on to provide is, then, most accurately described as a reconstruction of mackinnon’s account. but i do think it is a construction that is true to mackinnon’s ideas, and that realizes rather than alters or distorts them. like marx, mackinnon begins with a conception of a person. but unlike marx, hers is one of a person as, in the first instance, existing only in society. she says, “the person in radical feminist thought is necessarily socially constituted” 9 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 (1989, 46). this means that a person has no existence prior to or apart from his or her social existence, that a person exists only inasmuch as a person socially exists. the being that a person is, then, is just the being a person socially is, which is just the being as which a person is socially defined. this is the being man or woman. this is clear in that a person is born a boy or girl, which means that a person comes into existence as one comes into existence as a boy or girl, that a person’s being consists in his or her gender. thus, the being that a person is, is just the being man or woman. judith butler makes a similar point, saying, “insofar as social existence requires an unambiguous gender affinity, it is not possible to exist in a socially meaningful sense outside of established gender norms” (1985, 508). if a person is just the being man or woman, then what a person needs to live is just what the being man or woman needs to live. on mackinnon’s account, the being man is just the sexual being that man is, the being woman just the sexual being that woman is. she conveys this when she says, “sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men” (1982, 516). that is, sexuality is the process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs sexual desire, which is to say, makes what men and women sexually desire, which is to say, forms men and women as sexual beings, and, forming them as sexual beings, forms them as the beings men and women. here, mackinnon is saying that the being man is just the sexual being that man is and the being woman just the sexual being that woman is. perhaps, says mackinnon, this is why the word sex means both the sexual act and the categories male and female (1989, 143). if the beings man and woman are just the sexual beings man and woman, then men become men and women, women in becoming the sexual beings they are. as one becomes a sexual being in satiating one’s sexual desire,5 and as one satiates one’s sexual desire in sexual acts, men and women become sexual beings, thus, become men and women, in sexual acts. in having sex, in the sense of sexual act, men and women have sex, in the sense of male or female being. what the beings man and woman need to live, then, is just what the sexual beings man and woman need to live. what a sexual being needs to live, in other words, what sustains it, is just what satiates its hunger. the hunger of a sexual being is sexual hunger, that is, sexual desire. what satiates sexual desire is the object of sexual desire (vadas 2005, 182). so, what the beings man and woman need to live is the object of their sexual desire. this means that the sexual occupies in feminism the place of the material in marxism: that which one needs to live. perhaps this is why a sexual desire is often seen as a need;6 to see it as such is to see the object of it as not merely desirable but as necessary. 5 i explain this in greater detail below. 6 see, for example, maslow 1943, 381. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 as one must live before all else, one must get what one needs to live before all else. so, as in marxism a person must get material things before all else, in feminism men and women must get the object of their sexual desire before all else. as in marxism one does not just find in the world what one needs to live, nor does one in feminism; rather, one must make it. sexuality is the process by which one does this. this means that sexuality is, as much as work in marxism, the process by which one makes what one needs to live. mackinnon does not explicitly state that sexuality is the process by which one makes the object of sexual desire, but it must be this process, given her view that sexuality is the process that forms men and women as sexual beings. one is formed as a sexual being as one gets what makes one exist as a sexual being, which i have explained is the object of sexual desire. so, if sexuality is the process that forms men and women as sexual beings, then it is the process by which one gets the object of sexual desire. as one does not find but must make the object of sexual desire, the process by which one gets that object is just that by which one makes it, which means that sexuality is the process by which one makes the object of sexual desire. as one must get what one needs to live before all else, one must engage in the process of sexuality before all else. it is, then, necessarily through sexuality that one first enters into relations with others. this means that sexuality necessarily organizes social relations, hence, the social world. this is the first half of mackinnon’s account. i turn now to the second—how sexuality organizes the social world as sex hierarchy. on mackinnon’s account, as men have epistemic authority while women do not,7 men’s image of a man is socially accepted as what a man is in truth. men thus come to see that image as what they must become in order to become men, which is to say, in order to exist. and so they become that. therefore, what a man is, is just what men’s image of a man is. on mackinnon’s view, that image is one of just a masculine being. she says, “masculinity precedes male as femininity precedes female, and male sexual desire defines both” (1989, 130). on her view, a masculine being is just a sexual being who desires dominance. she says, “dominance eroticized defines the imperatives of its masculinity” (130). so, men’s image of a man is one of just a sexual being who desires dominance. suggestive of this, a man’s virility is considered the measure of his manhood. to be virile is to be forceful. it is also to be sexually potent, which is to say, to be able to act as a sexual being, which is to say, to succeed as a sexual being. thus, for a man to be forceful is for him to succeed as a sexual being, is, socially, for him to succeed as a man. in short, a man is just a sexual being who desires dominance. on mackinnon’s account, the erotic is not given by nature; rather, it is that as which society defines it. she says that “sexual is whatever sexual means in a particular society” (1987, 53). but this does not mean that the erotic is as 7 i explain why this is below. 11 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 both men and women define it. as men have epistemic authority and women do not, the erotic is just as men define it (mackinnon 1987, 53). men define the erotic as what they experience as erotic, which, on mackinnon’s view, is dominance. she says, “whatever it takes to make the penis shudder and stiffen with the experience of its potency is what sexuality means culturally. whatever else does this . . . hierarchy, a constant creation of person/thing, top/bottom, dominance/subordination relations, does” (1989, 137). thus, the erotic is just men’s dominance. if the erotic is just what men experience as erotic, then a sex act is just an act in which they get what they experience as erotic. that is, one does a sex act in order to satiate one’s sexual desire, as suggested by the fact that if a man does not reach orgasm in sex, then he considers the sex to have been unsuccessful. if in doing that act one did not satiate one’s sexual desire, then one would not do that act in order to satiate one’s sexual desire, and so that act would cease to be a sex act. a sex act, then, is just an act in which one satiates one’s sexual desire (vadas 2005, 179). because what satiates one’s sexual desire is just the object of sexual desire, in other words, what is to one erotic, then a sex act is just an act in which one gets what is, to one, erotic. so, by making the erotic just what they experience as erotic, men make a sex act just an act in which they get what they experience as erotic. suggestive of this, the act of penetration is sex despite the fact that women often do not reach orgasm in that act (koedt 1973). as what men experience as erotic is dominance, a sex act is just an act in which they get dominance. to get dominance is to get dominance over the other. as people are socially divided into men and women, that other, to men, is women. a sex act is thus just an act in which men become dominant and women subordinate. hence, sex as conquest, as suggested by the fact that to have sex is for men to “have” women, which is to say, for men to possess women, for men to make women men’s own, which is for men to get dominance over them.8 while mackinnon argues that a sex act is just an act in which men get dominance, she does not explain exactly what getting dominance involves. as i see it, one gets dominance over another just in the precise moment in which he 8 as mackinnon explains, that heterosexual sex is sex as conquest does not mean that homosexual sex is not, for “sexuality in that form may be no less gendered” (1987, 60). that is, as it is not in being biological beings but in being sexual beings that men and women are men and women, sex between biological males or females, does not thereby cease to be sex between men and women. in it, the one who dominates, for being the one who dominates, occupies the position of the man, the one who is dominated, for being the one who is dominated, occupies the position of the woman. homosexual sex thus remains heterosexual sex, in the sense that it is done between beings who are socially men and women, which means that it remains sex as conquest. (see also mackinnon 1989, 141–142.) 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 subordinates her to himself. to subordinate her to himself is just to make her subject to his own will. one makes another subject to his own will just by overcoming her will; if he does not overcome her will, then she remains autonomous. one overcomes another’s will just by doing something to her against her will. if it were not against her will, if she were willing to do that, then he would not be overcoming her will. it might be objected that one need not overcome another’s will in order to make her subject to his own will, for she could choose to be subject to his will. but if she is subject to his will only because she has chosen to be so then her subjection to his will is ultimately her subjection to her own will, hence, not to his will. in short, one gets dominance over another just by doing something to her against her will. robert dahl’s view of what it is to have power closely resembles this. he says, “my intuitive idea of power, then, is something like this: a has power over b to the extent that he can get b to do something that b would not otherwise do” (1957, 202–203). so, if a sex act is just an act in which men get dominance, then it is just an act done by men to women against women’s will. this explains why women are told to resist men’s sexual advances (as in, play hard to get); resisting men’s sexual advances, sex can be done by men to women against women’s will, hence, can be an act in which men get dominance, hence, can be sex. while mackinnon does not explain exactly what getting dominance involves, she does seem to share the view i have presented, recognizing that men require women’s resistance in order to feel that they are getting dominance. she says, for instance, “force is the desire dynamic, not just a response to the desired object when desire’s expression is frustrated” (1989, 136). and, elsewhere, the struggle to have everything sexual allowed in a society we are told would collapse if it were, creates a sense of resistance to, and an aura of danger around, violating the powerless. if we knew the boundaries were phony, existed only to eroticize the targeted transgressable, would penetrating them feel less sexy? taboo and crime may serve to eroticize what would otherwise feel about as much like dominance as taking candy from a baby. assimilating actual powerlessness to male prohibition, to male power, provides the appearance of resistance that makes overcoming possible, while never undermining the reality of power, or its dignity, by giving the powerless actual power. (1989, 132–133) if a sex act is just an act done by men to women against women’s will, then, as to do something to another against her will is just to violate her, a sex act is just an act in which men violate women. mackinnon often describes sex as violation. she says, for instance, “from pornography one learns that forcible violation is the essence of sex. whatever is and does that is sex” (1989, 140). suggestive of this is that men find a “tight” vagina sexually desirable and a “loose” one sexually undesirable (braun and kitzinger 2001). the tighter it is, the 13 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 more physically forcible sex can be, the looser, the less forcible. thus, the more forcible sex feels to men, the more pleasurable sex is, which means the more sex, sex is. if a man is just a sexual being who desires dominance, then what men need to live is just what they need to live as sexual beings who desire dominance. this is the object of their sexual desire, dominance. as sexuality is the process by which one gets the object of sexual desire, men must organize sexuality to the end of getting dominance in order to exist. they do this through the process of sexual objectification. mackinnon says, “sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. it unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. man fucks woman; subject verb object” (1982, 541). how the process of sexual objectification works is as follows. masculine qualities are seen as enabling objectivity, while feminine qualities are seen as precluding it.9 that is, men, for being men, are thought to be capable of detachment, hence, of externality to the object of inquiry, hence, of objectivity. women, for being women, are thought to be emotionally involved, “ruled by subjective passions” (mackinnon 1982, 536), hence, incapable of objectivity. consequently, men are seen as occupying the objective standpoint, while women are not. objectivity is considered the right way of knowing (mackinnon 1989, 106–107). as the right way of knowing is just the way of grasping the truth, this means that what is seen from the objective standpoint is considered just what is in truth. as men are seen as occupying the objective standpoint, their image of a woman is accepted as a woman as she is in truth. as it is so accepted, it is established in men’s and women’s minds as a woman as she is in truth, reinforcing to men who they see a woman as being, and creating for women who they see themselves as being. men’s image of a woman, construed as a reflection of a woman, becomes women’s self-image. as it becomes their selfimage, it becomes to women all of what they must become in order to become women, which is to say, in order to exist. for women, then, to cease to be this image is to cease to exist. zoe moss expresses this: “what, fat, forty-three, and i dare to think i’m still a person? no, i am an invisible lump” (1970, 170). if men’s image of a woman becomes to women all of what they must become in order to exist, then women must know what that image is, in order to become it, in order to exist. men’s image of a woman is what men see women as. so, in order to know what men’s image of a woman is, women “watch themselves being looked at” (berger 1972, 47), seeing how they are seen through male eyes. they observe what of themselves men look at, and do not, taking in what makes them be there to male eyes, and what is counter to that, which is what is to be fostered and what denied if women are to become men’s 9 see, for example: browne 2004; baron-cohen 2003. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 image of woman, if women are to exist. this means that, looking at women, men make women know what women must become in order to exist. knowing what this is, women then become just that. if women so become men’s image of a woman, then what a woman is, is just what that image is. taking from simone de beauvoir, mackinnon argues that men’s image of a woman is one of just a feminine being. she says, “the discovery that the female archetype is the feminine stereotype exposed ‘woman’ as a social construction” (1982, 530). it might be objected that men’s image of a woman is no longer one of a feminine being. but if we consider the attributes of a feminine being to be, as mackinnon says, “docile, soft, passive, nurturant, vulnerable, weak, narcissistic, childlike, incompetent, masochistic, and domestic, made for child care, home care, and husband care” (530), then we can see that this is not the case, for although women can perhaps be less docile, soft, passive, weak, vulnerable, childlike, incompetent, and so forth, while remaining women, women who are not these things, women who are truly assertive, aggressive, strong, invulnerable, independent, self-sufficient, worldly, ambitious, and so forth, are seen as men (530). this means that for ceasing to be feminine beings, women cease to be seen as women, which means that men’s image of woman is still just one of a feminine being. if men’s image of a woman is one of just a feminine being, then what a woman is, is just what a feminine being is. mackinnon argues that feminine qualities constitute sexual availability, saying, “vulnerability means the appearance/reality of easy sexual access; passivity means receptivity and disabled resistance, enforced by trained physical weakness; softness means pregnability by something hard. incompetence seeks help as vulnerability seeks shelter, inviting the embrace that becomes the invasion, trading exclusive access for protection . . . from the same access” (530; ellipsis in the original). she goes on, “socially, femaleness means femininity, which means attractiveness to men, which means sexual attractiveness, which means sexual availability on male terms” (530–531). that feminine qualities constitute sexual availability means that a feminine being is a sexually available being. to be sexually available is to be available for sexual use, which is to say, sexually usable, which is to say, sex object. in short, a feminine being is a sex object. mackinnon says, “woman through male eyes is sex object” (538). a woman is thus just a sex object. this is how the process of sexual objectification, which, on mackinnon’s account, is that through which men organize sexuality to the end of getting dominance, works. iv. does mackinnon’s theory of sexuality succeed? at first glance, mackinnon’s theory of sexuality appears to succeed. in fact, it does not. it does not succeed because if a woman is a sex object, then men do not sexually desire dominance. to be a sex object is to be an object that has sex as its function, which is to be an object that exists to be used for sex. as mackinnon says, “sex is what women are for” (1989, 181). if a woman exists to 15 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 be used for sex, then having sex with a woman is using her for that for which she exists to be used. to use a thing for that for which it exists to be used is to treat it in a way that respects its nature, which is to treat it rightfully. sex is thus the rightful treatment of a woman. as such, it is precisely the opposite to what, on mackinnon’s view, sex is. on mackinnon’s view, a sex act is just an act in which men violate women. rightful treatment is the opposite to violation. the rightful treatment of an object is the treatment of an object that respects its nature. the violation of an object is the treatment of an object that disrespects its nature. as such, it is the wrongful treatment of an object. it is not that mackinnon does not see this; she does. she says: from a feminist perspective, what exactly does playboy do? it takes a woman and makes her sexuality into something any man who wants to can buy and hold in his hand for three dollars and fifty cents . . . . she becomes something to be used by him, specifically, an object for his sexual use. think of it this way. a cup is part of the object world, valued according to its looks and for how it can be used. if someone breaks it, maybe that is considered an abuse, or maybe it is briefly mourned and then replaced. but using it does not violate anything, because that is what it is for. playboy as a standard means that to use a woman sexually does not violate her nature; it is what she is for. (1987, 138) having sex with women is like using a cup to drink. here, mackinnon contradicts her view of sex as just an act in which men violate women. to put it another way, if a woman is a sex object, then women ontologically can only be willing to have sex; they cannot be unwilling. for a woman to express unwillingness would be for her to act in discordance with her nature. this means that if women did express unwillingness to have sex, that is, if they did resist, their resistance would not be able to be seen as resistance. if women ontologically cannot be unwilling to have sex, then men cannot have sex with women against their will, which means that sex cannot be men’s violation of women. as i have explained, if sex is not an act in which men violate women, then it is not an act in which men get dominance. as a sex act is just an act in which men satiate their sexual desire, if it is not an act in which men get dominance, then dominance is not what satiates men’s sexual desire, in which case it is not what men sexually desire. in short, if a woman is a sex object, then men do not sexually desire dominance. if men do not sexually desire dominance, then they do not organize sexuality to the end of getting dominance. that is, as sexuality is the process by which one gets the object of one’s sexual desire, and as men’s need to get the object of their sexual desire is what compels them to organize sexuality, just as the capitalist’s need to profit is what compels him to organize work, then men, if they do not sexually desire dominance, do not organize sexuality to the end of 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 getting dominance. if they did organize sexuality to the end of getting dominance, then they would be organizing it in such a way that they do not get the object of their sexual desire. this is nonsensical. moreover, they would be making sexuality no longer the process by which they get the object of their sexual desire, and so no longer the process of sexuality, in which case it is not sexuality that organizes the social world as sex hierarchy. of course, if men do not sexually desire dominance, they might unintentionally organize sexuality so that they get dominance, but they do not organize it with the aim of, which is to say, to the end of, getting dominance. and if this is so, then sex hierarchy is not of the nature that feminism sees it to be.10 it is an unintended social arrangement, persisting accidentally, rather than by design. that men do not organize sexuality to the end of getting dominance means that they do not necessarily make sexuality that which organizes the social world as sex hierarchy, which means that sexuality is not that which necessarily organizes the social world hierarchically. mackinnon’s theory of sexuality does not succeed. feminism is thus not yet a theory of the kind that marxism is, sex inequality not yet an issue of its own. i must at this point acknowledge two objections, the first of which pertains to the specific argument for why mackinnon’s theory does not succeed, and the second and more serious of which pertains to my treatment of mackinnon’s account more generally. the first is that, while women are on one level sex objects, they are on another, deeper level, the level of truth, autonomous beings, such that, on that level, the sexual use of a woman can be the violation of her. but on mackinnon’s view, men’s image of a woman wholly constructs who a woman is, such that a woman is nothing other than that image. this means that there is no level on which a woman is not a sex object. the second is that i have been rather unfair to mackinnon, for i have engaged in a comparison of her account with marx’s, but i have accepted without question that his succeeds, while i have subjected hers to critique. serious criticisms have been made of marx’s account, specifically his labour theory of value, the theory that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour-time necessary for its production.11 for example, g. a. cohen (1979) argues that the labour theory of value is untenable. this is because, he says, two versions of the labour theory of value, “strict” and “popular,” (strict 10 mackinnon says that “male dominance is perhaps the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history” (1989, 116). 11 however, equally, in response to these criticisms, defences have been made of marx’s labour theory of value. see, for example, shaikh 1998; mohun 1994; lee 1993. the grounds of these defences vary. the one that i find particularly compelling is that criticisms of the labour theory of value often rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the true meaning of the labour theory of value. see, for example, steele 1992; nadvi 1985. 17 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 being the theory that value is determined by socially necessary labour time, and popular being the theory that value is embodied labour) which each appear true only in light of the other, in fact contradict one another. ian hunt (1986), however, has challenged cohen’s critique. he argues that the strict and popular versions of the labour theory of value are perfectly compatible (140–141), and, in addition, that cohen has failed to understand what marx meant in arguing that value determines exchange-value (141–142). he thus refutes cohen’s critique.12 steve keen, too, argues that marx’s labour theory of value does not succeed (keen 1993). this is because marx fails to show that the means of production are not a source of value. keen explains that marx, in his attempt to show that they are not a source of value, contradicts his claim that use-value and exchange-value are unrelated to one another (112). keen then argues that if we accept this claim, and apply it to the means of production, then we must conclude, as marx in fact elsewhere does, that they are a source of value (115). but keen recognizes that marx, in his explanation of how the capitalist makes a profit through the use of labour-power, succeeds in showing that labour is a source of value (112). so it seems to me that the failure of his labour theory of value does not damage his account of how the capitalist makes a profit, hence, his account of how work organizes the social world as class hierarchy. another strand of criticism deals with marx’s account of how the capitalist exploits the worker. richard arneson (1981), for example, suggests that marx does not adequately explain how the capitalist, in making a profit, exploits (in the sense of the term that denotes a wrong) the worker. arneson insists that “the appropriation of an economic surplus by nonproducers must be a forcible taking if it is to count as technical exploitation. without force or coercion there is no exploitation” (225). he implies that marx does not explain how that appropriation is a forcible taking. but if this criticism succeeds, it results in a quite different problem for marx than my criticism does for mackinnon.13 it does not alter the fact that with his extraction of surplus value the capitalist makes work a process that organizes people into two classes, and arranges those classes hierarchically, but it does mean that that hierarchy is not unjust. but mackinnon’s claim that a woman is a sex object alters the equivalent aspect of her account, for it means that men, not sexually desiring dominance, do not necessarily make sexuality that which organizes the social world as sex hierarchy. the problem for marx is that class hierarchy is not unjust, the problem for mackinnon that sex hierarchy does not exist. while both are problems, the problem for mackinnon is more basic and more damaging than that for marx. all in all, it seems to me that firstly, many criticisms of marx’s account have been 12 see, for another somewhat similar critique, smith 1994, 118–122. 13 at any rate, i am not convinced by this criticism. for examples of arguments that in marx’s account the capitalist exploits the worker, and that exploitation is an injustice, see holmstrom 1997; geras 1985; elster 1983. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 met with persuasive defences of it, so cannot be said to have altogether succeeded, and secondly, even if we do accept that they succeed, the problems in marx’s account to which they point do not undermine it on a fundamental level. in contrast, the problem that i have found in mackinnon’s account does. however, this is a somewhat defensive reply to the objection that i have been unfair to mackinnon. i would now like to step back a little and respond to this objection in a more genuine way. my aim in subjecting mackinnon’s account to critique is not at all to portray it as a lesser account than marx’s. it is really quite the opposite. it is as much to show that mackinnon’s account is systematic and comprehensive as it is to show that it is contradictory. it is partly because it is rigorous and far-reaching that its contradictoriness is of consequence and worth illuminating. moreover, as the criticisms i have discussed demonstrate, marx’s account has been subjected to sympathetic yet serious critique. such critique, exposing problems and drawing others’ attention to them, paves the way for their resolution, enabling a theory to grow. but mackinnon’s account has not been similarly subjected to this kind of critique, and so has not been able to grow in the way that marx’s has. because i consider mackinnon’s account important, i have tried here to provide it with this kind of critique, not to reveal its failings but to illuminate aspects requiring attention in order that it may be improved. this is why i have not been so concerned with subjecting marx’s account to critique. following from this, i do not take the contradiction in mackinnon’s account as a reason to reject her theory of sexuality. as i see it, mackinnon’s theory of sexuality fits with and makes sense of an awful lot about our social world, and is only undone by her claim that a woman is a sex object, as this implies that men do not sexually desire dominance. but mackinnon’s claim that men sexually desire dominance is a convincing one; it is, for instance, consistent with the fact that men sexually desire women who are “hard to get,” and not those who are “easy” (walster 1973, 113). a woman who is hard to get is one who resists men’s sexual advances. if she resists, then for a man to have sex with her is for him to violate her, which is for him to get dominance over her. a woman who is easy is one who readily succumbs, which is to say, willingly accepts a man’s sexual advances. if she willingly accepts his sexual advances, then for a man to have sex with her is not for him to violate her, thus, not for him to get dominance over her. so, men desire to have sex with women, where sex is an act in which they get dominance over women, which means that dominance is the object of male sexual desire. i am therefore reluctant to simply accept without further consideration the claim that a woman is a sex object, however intuitively it appears correct. in fact, on such consideration, i think we have reason to doubt it. this is the reason: for a woman to be considered sexually promiscuous is for her to be considered a whore. to be sexually promiscuous is to readily have sex, which is to be available for sex, which is to be available for sexual use, which is to be sexually usable, which is to be a sex 19 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 object. socially, the worst thing that a woman can be is a whore: “young girls are taught to hate a whore, before they know what the word means” (mandeville 2006, 65). the worst thing that a woman can be is what it is most not in accordance with the nature of a woman to be. for a woman to be most not in accordance with the nature of a woman is for her to be most not what a woman is. in short, for a woman to be considered a sex object is for her to be considered most not a woman. this suggests that men’s image of a woman is not one of a sex object; in that case, if, as mackinnon argues, that image makes who a woman is, a woman is not a sex object. if mackinnon’s theory of sexuality makes sense of a lot about our social world, and if we have reason to doubt that men’s image of a woman is one of a sex object, then we feminist theorists ought to pursue the line of inquiry that this doubt opens up, namely, the question of what men’s image of a woman is. perhaps we will discover that this image is consistent with her claim that men sexually desire dominance. pursuing this question is a task unto itself, and as such beyond the scope of this paper, the aim of which has been not to resolve problems but to identify them and so orient feminist effort. however, in the spirit of orienting feminist effort, i would like to suggest a starting point for inquiry into this question. this starting point is to be found in mackinnon’s own work, for she also refers, almost in passing, to a woman as a sexually violable being.14 mackinnon seems to regard the two conditions—that of being a sex object and that of being sexually violable—as synonymous. but they are not. a sex object exists to be sexually used. it exists to be had sex with, where sex is simply the use of it as it is intended to be used. a sexually violable being does not exist to be sexually used; it exists to be sexually violated. it exists to be had sex with, where sex is the violation of it, which is quite the opposite of the use for which it is intended, is the misuse, the abuse, of it. but not only are these conditions not synonymous, the second logically aligns with mackinnon’s claim that men sexually desire dominance. if a woman is just a sexually violable being, a being that exists to be violated by sex, then sex is ontologically the violation of a woman. as such, it is necessarily an act in which men get dominance, in which case men do sexually desire dominance. given this, i think it is worth considering whether the attributes of a feminine being constitute not sex objecthood but sexual violability. works cited arneson, richard j. 1981. “what’s wrong with exploitation?” ethics 91 (2): 202– 227. baron-cohen, simon. 2003. the essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain. london: allen lane. 14 she says, “feminine means violable” (mackinnon 1987, 118). 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 berger, john. 1972. ways of seeing. london: british broadcasting corporation; harmondsworth: penguin books. bernick, susan e. 1992. “the logic of the development of feminism; or, is mackinnon to feminism as parmenides is to greek philosophy?” hypatia 7 (1): 1–15. braun, virginia, and celia kitzinger. 2001. “the perfectible vagina: size matters.” culture, health and sexuality 3 (3): 263–277. browne, kingsley r. 2004. “women in science: biological factors should not be ignored.” cardozo women’s law journal 11:509–528. butler, judith. 1985. “variations on sex and gender: beauvoir, wittig, and foucault.” praxis international 4:505–516. cohen, g. a. 1979. “the labour theory of value and the concept of exploitation.” philosophy and public affairs 8 (4): 338–360. cornell, drucilla. 1991. “sexual difference, the feminine, and equivalency: a critique of mackinnon’s toward a feminist theory of the state.” the yale law journal 100 (7): 2247–2275. dahl, robert a. 1957. “the concept of power.” behavioural science 2 (3): 201– 215. elster, jon. 1983. “exploitation, freedom, and justice.” nomos 26:277–304. engels, friedrich. (1884) 2010. the origin of the family, private property, and the state. harmondsworth: penguin. geras, norman. 1985. “the controversy about marx and justice.” new left review 150:47–85. harris, angela p. 1990. “race and essentialism in feminist legal theory.” stanford law review 42 (3): 581–616. holmstrom, nancy. 1997. “exploitation.” in exploitation, edited by kai nielsen and robert ware, 76–91. new jersey: humanities press. hunt, ian. 1986. “a critique of roemer, hodgson and cohen on marxian exploitation.” social theory and practice 12 (2): 121–171. keen, steve. 1993. “use-value, exchange-value, and the demise of marx’s labour theory of value.” journal of the history of economic thought 15:107–121. koedt, anne. 1973. “the myth of the vaginal orgasm.” in radical feminism, edited by anne koedt, ellen levine, and anita rapone. new york: quadrangle books. de lauretius, teresa. 1990. “eccentric subjects: feminist theory and historical consciousness.” feminist studies 16 (1): 115–150. lee, chai-on. 1993. “marx’s labour theory of value revisited.” cambridge journal of economics 17:463–478. littleton, christine a. 1989. “feminist jurisprudence: the difference method makes.” stanford law review 41 (3): 751–784. mackinnon, catharine a. 1982. “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: an agenda for theory.” signs 7 (3): 515–544. 21 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 1983. “feminism, marxism, method, and the state: toward feminist jurisprudence.” signs 8 (4): 635–658. ———. 1987. feminism unmodified: discourses on life and law. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma; london, england: harvard university press. mahoney, martha r. 1992. “whiteness and women, in practice and theory: a reply to catharine mackinnon.” yale journal of law and feminism 5:217– 251. mandeville, bernard. 2006. “a modest defence of public stews: or, an essay upon whoring.” in women in the eighteenth century: constructions of femininity, edited by vivien jones, 64–66. new york: routledge. marx, karl. (1849) 1933. “the nature and growth of capital.” in wage-labour and capital, 28–30. new york: international publishers. ———. (1867) 1976. capital: a critique of political economy, trans. ben fowkes. harmondsworth: penguin books. ———. (1939) 1993. grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy, trans. martin nicolaus. london: penguin books. marx, karl, and frederick engels. (1932) 1974. the german ideology, edited by c. j. arthur. new york: international bestsellers. maslow, a. h. 1943. “a theory of human motivation.” psychological review 50 (4): 370–396. millett, kate. 2000. sexual politics. new york: doubleday. mohun, simon. 1994. “a re(in)statement of the labour theory of value.” cambridge journal of economics 18:391–412. moss, zoe. 1970. “it hurts to be alive and obsolete: the aging woman.” in sisterhood is powerful: an anthology of writings from the women’s liberation movement, edited by robin morgan, 170–175. new york: random house. nadvi, khalid. 1985. “exploitation and labour theory of value: a critique of roemer’s general theory of exploitation and class.” economic and political weekly 20 (35): 1479–1484. rapaport, elizabeth. 1993. “generalising gender: reason and essence in the legal thought of catharine mackinnon.” in a mind of one’s own: feminist essays on reason and objectivity, edited by louise m. anthony and charlotte witt, 127–143. boulder, colorado: westview press. romany, celina. 1991. “ain’t i a feminist?” yale journal of law and feminism 4:23–33. rowland, robin, and renate klein. 1997. “radical feminism: history, politics, action.” in radically speaking: feminism reclaimed, edited by diane bell and renate klein, 9–36. north melbourne, australia: spinifex. shaikh, anwar m. 1998. “the empirical strength of the labour theory of value.” in marxian economics: a reappraisal. vol. 1, essays on volume iii of 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 1, art. 2 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss1/2 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.3.2 capital profit, prices and dynamics, edited by riccardo bellofiore, 225– 251. london: macmillan. smith, murray e. g. 1994. “alienation, exploitation and abstract labour: a humanist defence of marx’s theory of value.” review of radical political economics 26 (1): 110–133. steele, david ramsay. 1992. from marx to mises: post-capitalist society and the challenge of economic calculation. la salle, illinois: open court publishing company. vadas, melinda. 2005. “the manufacture-for-use of pornography and women’s inequality.” journal of political philosophy 13 (2): 174–193. walster, elaine. 1973. “‘playing hard to get’: understanding an elusive phenomenon.” journal of personality and social psychology 26 (1): 113– 121. willis, ellen. 1984. “radical feminism and feminist radicalism.” social text 9/10:91–118. young, iris. 1980. “socialist feminism and the limits of dual systems theory,” socialist review 10 (2/3): 169–188. kate phelan teaches in the school of global, urban and social studies at rmit university. this paper forms part of her recently completed phd thesis, in which she attempted to explain how men’s oppression of women is knowable as such. her research interests lie primarily in the fields of feminist philosophy, marxist theory, and pragmatism. 23 phelan: is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? published by scholarship@western, 2017 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? kate m. phelan recommended citation is feminism yet a theory of the kind that marxism is? two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 1 spring/summer 2016 article 3 2016 two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure eva f. kittay stony brook university, eva.kittay@stonybrook.edu recommended citation kittay, eva f.. 2016. "two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (1). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3. two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure eva feder kittay abstract in moral failure, lisa tessman argues against two principles of moral theory, that ought implies can and that normative theory must be action-guiding. although tessman provides a trenchant account of how we are thrust into the misfortune of moral failure, often by our very efforts to act morally, and although she shows, through a discussion well-informed by the latest theorizing in ethics, neuroethics, and psychology, how much more moral theory can do than provide action-guiding principles, i argue that the two theses of moral theory that she disputes remain indispensable for ethical theory. keywords: moral failure, moral luck, the vulnerability model, bernard williams, robert goodin, ought implies can, action-guiding moral theory lisa tessman’s moral failure is an excellent piece of scholarship and the best sort of philosophical thinking. tessman’s approach is feminist and constructionist. using the latest scholarship in ethics, moral psychology, and empirical findings, she argues against two principles of moral theory, that ought implies can and that normative theory must be action-guiding (tessman 2015). these principles are so fully accepted, and so fundamental, that they could be thought of as the two dogmas of moral theory. normative theory, she insists, must be about more than a prescription for action. we need to know how to evaluate moral decisions, to decide what values are worth affirming whether or not they yield prescriptions for actions, and to understand our moral responses. i point out tessman’s rejections of ought implies can (4) and normative theory as action-guiding (6) not only because i understand these to be central features of her thesis, but also because they figure heavily in her engagement with my own work to which i will want to respond. tessman uses the findings of neuroethicists to help her establish the inevitability of moral conflicts that result in what she calls, borrowing from bernard williams, moral remainders (tessman 2015, 31). her utilization of the empirical research of joshua greene and jonathan haidt is not intended to impugn either the moral importance of the intuitive response nor the reasoned one, as some 1 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 philosophers have done. instead she wants to give both systems of moral response their due, insisting that even when the two yield incompatible results, there is reason to say that both issue in oughts that have equally good grounding, and there is often no easy or possible blending of the two that preserves the moral importance of the called-for response. tessman argues the significance of intuitive responses whose moral authority derives from a particular type of intuition “that is experienced as a potent feeling that certain values are sacred and that one must protect them; part of what they must be protected from is the threat of being sacrificed if they are found to lack justification” (4). intuitive responses therefore can have a moral authority that would suffer by the injection of reasoning. there are relationships as well as values that issue in an “i must” and present themselves with a “volitional necessity,” the force of which, once again, is compromised when a reasoned justification is introduced (81). the notion of “volitional necessity” is borrowed from harry frankfurt, but tessman makes a convincing case that frankfurt should have recognized that the “commands of love” can also issue in moral commands (53). the moral significance of such direct, immediate, and unreasoned responses was perhaps best captured when bernard williams, famously using the example of the man who reasoned that it was morally permissible for him to save his own wife rather than another person, remarked that the man had “one thought too many” (1981, 18). although reasoned responses can be important correctives against ingrained prejudices, reasoned responses alone can fail us for a variety of reasons: they may not be sufficiently motivating if they lack emotional urgency; they may conflict with deeply held values and so fail to receive emotional validation when unchecked by the process of reflective equilibrium; or they may be based on false beliefs, and knowledge of the error may not be possible for us to access. most importantly, the two systems can result in incompatible, but valid solutions: whether one goes the intuitive road or the reasoned one, one may act in such a way that harm results— even irreparable harm that no one should have to bear, a moral remainder. tessman acknowledges her affinity to williams, who also argues moral conflict comes about when we have two oughts, and that the conflict is not resolved even when we chose the better of the two (when there is a better). williams writes that unlike the case of conflicting beliefs, in the case of conflicting moral obligations, “i do not think in terms of banishing error. i think, if constructively at all, in terms of acting for the best, and this is a frame of mind that acknowledges the presence of both the two ought’s [sic]” (1973, 172). while tessman and williams share the desire to acknowledge that two oughts cannot be theoretically reduced to one, as both deontology and consequentialism insist on doing, williams is not on board with abandoning what i 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3 dubbed the two dogmas of moral theory. tessman wants us to reject ought implies can because, she argues, bad moral luck can put us in an impossible situation where we cannot do what we ought to do. the prime example is the case of conflicting obligations where we cannot do both a and b, and so we have an ought that does not imply can. although williams is the modern philosopher most responsible for taking up the aristotelian notion of moral luck, williams does not question whether ought implies can. williams, in trying to sort out the logic of two conflicting oughts, rejects instead “the agglomeration principle”: if one ought to do a, and one ought to do b, by the agglomeration principle we ought to do a and b (1973, 183). but in the case of conflicting oughts we cannot do a and b. rather than throw out ought implies can, william concludes that the agglomeration principle fails and should be rejected. i am not sure why tessman does not take the same route. i do however believe that tessman is correct when she points out that bad moral luck can place us into situations where we are confronted with morally impossible situations, situations where moral failure of some sort is inevitable. tessman, in discussing my own work, implies that i do not take moral luck into account. she writes: kittay avoids the possibility of inevitable moral failure by denying the legitimacy of moral requirements that come about through coercion (that is, through a form of bad moral luck); they are canceled before they even have an opportunity to come into conflict with any other moral requirement. in this way, both goodin and (especially) kittay create a much “cleaner”—more innocent—moral agent than the moral agent whose experience of moral failure i am trying to capture. (2015, 245) but i believe she misunderstands me. i do deny the legitimacy of moral requirements that i have to care for someone when i am placed in that position through deeply unjust situations insofar as the person in that position is part of the unjust structure. but i do recognize that there can be a human being to human being relationship even in the condition of slavery, and that i can be called to respond to the person under my care qua another human being, rather than qua the oppressor who coerces my care. in such a situation, i may also have other obligations, not the least of which is an obligation to myself. looked at this way, some situations of coerced care can issue in conflicting obligations in which there is a moral remainder no matter what i do. moral luck also plays an inevitably important role in an ethics of care. it is not something that i discuss because the full import of it was not that apparent to me when i wrote love’s labor (kittay 1999). but moral luck plays a significant role in any theory that does not appeal to intention alone, where good intentions are 3 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 insufficient to determine that an action is good or even right. if i am charged to care for someone who refuses my care, i cannot fulfill my responsibility to care—and the failure is due not to my irresponsibility, but to the sheer moral bad luck of having the responsibility to care for someone who makes it impossible for me to fulfill my moral obligation. i take this to be the point in williams’s discussion of moral luck: that how our intentions play out, and are subsequently understood, often depends not on us but on the outcomes of our actions—outcomes which we are only partially able to control (1981). the question at stake is whether situations of bad moral luck demonstrate that ought does not imply can. and here i do part company with tessman. but more of this later. but first i want to speak to what tessman appears to view as the second dogma of moral theory which ought to be questioned: that normative theory must be action-guiding. the reason i want to interject a discussion about the second dogma is because the two dogmas are relevant to one another. if normative theory must be action-guiding, then to deny that ought implies can would gut out the core of moral theory. only if normative theory can be something besides action-guiding could there be a possibility that we could issue oughts that we knew were impossible to carry out. williams, unlike tessman, thinks that recognition of two oughts brings us face to face with the centrality of the action-guiding role of moral theory. showing that there isn’t a logical inconsistency in holding that we have two conflicting oughts, williams directs us to the practical question of what to do in the face of two oughts. moral theory needs to do more than define the oughts, it needs to help us choose among these so that we can act. but moral theory may need the help of other practical questions. he concludes his essay on “ethical consistency” this way: in fact, of course, it is not even true that the deliberative question is ‘what ought i to do?’ it may well be, for instance, ‘what am i to do?’; and that question, and the answers to it – such as ‘do a’ or ‘if i were you, i should . . .’ – do not even make it look as though decision or advice to act on one of the ought’s in a moral conflict necessarily involves deciding that the other one had no application. (1973, 186) with these remarks williams indicates both that there are moral remainders, but that the point of deliberation is still action-guidance. for tessman, however, the point of the moral dilemma, the two oughts, is not to choose even in the face of conflict—although she of course acknowledges that we must act. the point is rather to appreciate that, because of the conflict, we are always subject to moral failure. theories that make moral failure a matter of 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3 simply not doing the one thing you should do let us down because we lose the important fact that we can fail morally even if we do what we ought to do. i do not disagree that it is important to recognize that there are situations where no matter what we do we may still do harm, even when the action we have chosen to do is the least harmful, or violates a value that is a lesser one than the one we chose to guide us. but, like williams, i think the importance of noting the possibility, and perhaps even the inevitability, of moral failure under conditions of bad luck, is tied to the idea that the central role in normative theory is actionguiding. it is true that i want to do more than ask “what am i do to do here and now?” but the more is the question of where the moral failure lies and how it comes about. does it lie with the moral agent or with a background injustice? what can and should be done to reduce the possibility for moral failure by identifying what is leading to such failures, to reduce, if not fully eliminate, the moral remainders? as much as i appreciate what tessman is doing in this book, and the incredible sensitivity and insight in her analysis, i do not really understand the ultimate point of it if it isn’t, in the end, supposed to guide us in our present and future decisionmaking. tessman’s rejection of these two central principles of moral theory and her emphasis on the inevitability of moral conflict and moral failure lead her to reject deontological and consequentialist theories, since these theories cancel out one ought when one acts as one should; alternatively, these theories create a hierarchy of goods such that there is no conflict between different oughts. neither has a place for moral failure. one theory that tessman believes can accommodate moral failure is the “vulnerability-responsive” theory that she attributes to me (tessman 2015, 209n8) and robert goodin (tessman 2015, 237). she recounts the versions of this theory both in the work of robert goodin (1985) and in my work (1999) which is built on goodin’s. in its barest form, the theory asserts that the (or a major) reason we have moral obligations and responsibilities toward each other is that we are so positioned toward another that the other is vulnerable to our actions. goodin introduces this principle for special relationships, that is, for relationships we have toward particular others that we do not necessarily have toward just any others. these relationships, i add, are agent-relative and patient-relative, that is, they are obligations or responsibilities particular to a given moral agent, not just any moral agent, and are directed to a given patient, not just to anyone. in relationships such as parent-child, the parent has obligations to and responsibilities for the child that a stranger doesn’t have—such responsibilities are not always voluntarily assumed. even if we have chosen to become a parent, we may not have considered that the child might have 5 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 special needs, but if the child does have special needs we are nonetheless responsible for the child’s well-being. goodin’s point is that in these sorts of relationships, one party is particularly, sometimes uniquely, situated to meet the needs of the other party and so that other party is vulnerable to the actions of the first party. vulnerability, argues goodin, is at the source of agentand patient-relative obligations even when these do not assume some prior relationship between parties. when i make a promise to you, for instance, you become vulnerable to my actions. you will make your plans in anticipation that i will fulfill my promise. goodin takes the vulnerability model to apply wherever one person gets to be so situated that another becomes vulnerable to his actions. consider the following example: on a day in august 2015, spencer stone, anthony sadler, and alek skarlatos were on a high-speed train in belgium headed toward paris. when a terrorist started to attack the train passengers, the three young men who had served together in the military spontaneously mobilized and used their recent training to restrain the attacker and save the day. because they were uniquely situated to respond to the threat, on the vulnerability model, they became obligated to act on behalf of those who would die had they failed to act. goodin extends the vulnerability model to institutions as well. even if the person in need does not recognize that someone is uniquely or especially wellsituated, so that they are vulnerable to that person’s actions, the person who is well-situated should see that unless he acts, another will suffer and he will have failed morally. goodin also maintains that how you came to be situated such that another is vulnerable to your actions, especially when they are uniquely vulnerable, is irrelevant to your moral responsibility, assuming you know that the other is so vulnerable. you may never have chosen to be in that position—say you never wanted to have a child, but motherhood was thrust upon you. you still are responsible for the child, and the child is dependent on you for her welfare, even if your choice is to give the child up for adoption. you may be in the position you are in through some form of injustice; say you became pregnant as a result of a rape. (tessman gives several examples of unchosen situations in her text, some of which come from primo levi.) goodin insists that however the current situation came about, the other’s vulnerability and dependency on you is what defines the moral ought. i argue, with goodin, that voluntarism is inadequate, and the fact that a dependency responsibility is thrust upon you does not relieve you of moral responsibility for the dependent’s needs. however, if it is thrust upon you through coercion, it is less clear that you have such a moral responsibility. in the case of a child born of pregnancy by rape, i do have some ambivalence. someone surely has a responsibility for the child. however, i have no ambivalence in saying that i do not 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3 think that a woman has a responsibility to bring this life into the world. abortion in the case of rape i believe to be the woman’s unequivocal right. if, because of coercion, the woman is made to give birth, i do believe the born child has the right to life, and we are morally obligated to assure that the child’s needs are met. but i am less willing to say that the biological mother has the moral obligation to rear the child. in love’s labor, i cite an example in novelist margaret walker’s jubilee. jim was a house slave in the dutton home who accompanied the plantation heir to the front lines. he contemplates what he is to do with his mortally wounded young master: marster johnny dying and he can’t get home by hisself. i’ll carry him home to his maw where he can die in peace, but i sho ain’t staying there. if jim had been a field hand, such a delicate conflict would not have disturbed him. he would have felt no ties to the dutton household, but he had nursed the old man and he had watched the children grow. contemptuous as he was of big missy he was nevertheless tied to a strange code of honor, duty, and noblesse oblige which he could not have explained. so he was taking johnny home. (walker 1966, 184) one finds many such encounters talked about in literature about slavery. on goodin’s and tessman’s views the slave whose master is ill or injured has a moral obligation to tend to the master whenever the master is dependent on the slave for care. the injustice of slavery is irrelevant as the needs of the master don’t go away because the person he is dependent upon is his slave, and so the slave has a moral obligation to care for him. if the slave sees this as a time to escape, the master will suffer harm, perhaps irreparable harm. the idea that the slave has a moral obligation to care for his master seems bizarre to me, and either the vulnerability model must be wrong or there must be some way to argue that the slave has no such obligation and to argue that the slave has moral permission to escape. the relation of master and slave has itself made the master vulnerable to the actions of the slave, all the while reserving for the master a system of coercion by which to punish a slave who failed to do the master’s bidding. the system that put the slave into the position where the master is vulnerable to his actions is first of all a system of the gravest injustice, and any vulnerability born of such injustice cancels the obligations. at the same time, the master has also made himself invulnerable by erecting a scaffolding that disallows the slave from harming him on pain of death. it is hardly clear to me that the vulnerability model is appropriate here. i see no moral warrant that obliges the slave to the master. goodin’s solution is to say that we are not just vulnerable to the actions of others, but we are also vulnerable to actions to ourselves. because we are uniquely 7 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 vulnerable to our own actions, it may be the case that this vulnerability trumps the vulnerability of the master. we may be free to act to attend to our own need, but the obligation to the master would, especially if we admit two conflicting oughts, still remain valid. if i am a slave i may act so as to be self-respecting, that is, respecting my need for freedom, but there is a moral remainder and moral failure on my part. at least this is what tessman, i conjecture, would want to say. i do not buy this answer. the vulnerability of a dependent, say, a highly dependent person such as a young child, will often tax the one who cares for that child; yet as long as we are able to do so, we have the obligation to that child—that obligation exceeds the obligation we have to ourselves. why should the obligation to oneself trump the obligation of a slave to, say, a very ill master — someone as dependent on the caregiver as a young child is? it is only because of the nature of the relationship, which is through and through unjust and coercive. as i mentioned before, however, in the process of caregiving, even coerced caregiving, an additional relationship does often develop—an affective relationship between the two people that is in excess of the slave-master relationship. it is to that relationship that jim was responding when he chose to take his young master back to his mother to die. it is a relationship that would not have formed between a field hand and the master. tessman asserts that i am wrong to deny an obligation or responsibility on the part of the slave, and to say that the coercion that places the person in the position where the other is vulnerable to his action is a system of gross injustice that cancels the responsibility that the vulnerability model otherwise posits. because, she says, the need still persists, and so i gather she wants to say that a moral harm remains. she would, like goodin, cast the problem as one between two conflicting oughts: the obligation the slave has to himself, and the obligation the slave has to his master. for tessman, the advantage of the vulnerability model is that one cannot cancel one ought in favor of the second. the master’s need remains as a need, and whosoever is on the scene, on tessman’s view, still is faced with two conflicting oughts —the ought one owes oneself and the ought owed to the vulnerable person, and only the vulnerability-responsive model gives us that conflict. she suggests that i fail to see this because i hold on to ought implies can (tessman 2015, 243n28). because the slave cannot gain his freedom and respond to a vulnerable master, i must think that he ought not to respond to the vulnerable master. but that is not what i think. i think the relationship of slave to master has no moral warrant, full stop. it is sheer might, without any right, that stands behind it. there does remain a vulnerable man, a need to be met, agreed. but in making a slave the one on whom he is dependent, he has lost any moral claim to having this individual, in this relationship that has no moral warrant, care for him. my point is that when the positioning of that someone is the consequence of coercion and injustice, the position is effectively vacated. the point of the vulnerability8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3 responsiveness model is not simply to point to a need that needs satisfaction; the point of the model is to assign an obligation to a someone, a someone so positioned to meet the need. it is agent-relative when there is a someone in that position. but slavery hijacks a person’s agency—as does any truly coercive structure. that agency no longer belongs to the slave. that is, there is no longer an agent who occupies that position. to say that the master’s need remains, is simply to say that there is a need to be met—not an agent-relative obligation. someone should perhaps still meet that need, but that someone ceases to be the slave. one could say that even if we think that, as his master’s slave, he has no obligation to meet the master’s need, as one human being to another he still has the obligation—especially if there is no one else who can tend to the master. the relationship of one human being to another is one to which even a field hand may respond. perhaps that does leave us with some moral remainder, and a moral failure. in the case of slavery, i am not sure even such a bare relationship exists. for there to be a human being-to-human being relationship, each must see the other as a human being, but the slave is not situated as any stranger might be. as a slave, there is no recognition of his humanity—he is mere property. the master who would reliably promise to release the slave at that very moment would be able to make the claim on the man who was formerly his slave—but under slavery, one is hard pressed to be able to rely on any such promise. nonetheless, tessman is right to say that if one refuses to respond to a pressing need, there is a moral failure. but it is a moral failure of a system that has allowed slavery, not of the slave. the same thing is true of primo levi’s terrible situation, which tessman recounts: auschwitz has been abandoned by the nazis, but the remaining prisoners are either nearly starved to death or dying of dysentery. primo levi hears the cries in the ward full of prisoners who are dying of dysentery. he recognizes the sound of a fellow prisoner from his town and tries, as feeble as he is, to help him. when he does, he is besieged by the others who want his help, and there is no way he can help them all. tessman takes it that, insofar as all these ailing men are vulnerable to his actions, levi now has a responsibility toward them and recounts how terribly he suffered knowing it was impossible to do so. he surely was so positioned because of terrible injustice, but he was nonetheless responsible for something that it was impossible for him to do. one could say that levi’s situation is somewhat different than the slave’s. the camp has now been abandoned by the nazis—they can no longer deprive him of all remnants of agency. this is indeed what levi experiences; he is free to act, but he is incapable of meeting all the need before him. but even if levi feels this as his responsibility, i do not believe that levi was responsible, and he was not responsible because there was no way he could fulfill that responsibility. we need ought implies can for precisely such cases. 9 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 now we know that levi did feel responsible for this and other situations in which he was unable to act as he would have otherwise have acted. what are we to make of such an experience of responsibility? as a child of two holocaust survivors, i felt responsible for the suffering of my parents. it took a psychotherapist in my college years to shake me out of what was delusion—that i had a responsibility to act when there was no way i could have acted to save them. the therapist brought me to my senses by posing a simple question i had never posed to myself: how could i save my parents when i was not even born? of course! that didn’t mean that i couldn’t continue to be terribly pained by what they had undergone—but to feel guilt or responsibility for something that was impossible is simply crazy—quite literally so. levi could no more help his fellow prisoners than i, as an unborn, as yet unconceived, child could help my parents. that he was wracked with pain at their suffering and his helplessness is surely appropriate. but to take this as his moral failing is no less crazy than my guilt was. ought implies can brings desperately needed sanity. i said above that nonetheless i do think there is a certain way that ought does not always imply can. i argue elsewhere that care, in the fully normative sense, is a success term. that is, unless we actually succeed in helping another flourish, we have failed to care in this fully normative sense, even when we tried to care. we can fail for all sorts of reasons that are beyond our power to control. even though it may objectively be the case that we will fail to care, we still may have an obligation to care. but i actually think that the obligation here is to try, as best we can, to give care. whether we will succeed may be a matter of moral luck. this means that caring is often morally fraught. we do not always know if success is possible, and yet we have to try to do it. but if we fail to care, it may not be a moral failing, at least, in the sense that we are blameworthy. in primo levi’s case, i don’t even think he was obliged to try to care, not because he couldn’t succeed, but because even attempting to do so was beyond the realm of the possible. i think that our job as philosophers is to locate the blame for moral failure where it belongs, and it is more likely to belong to those who are in powerful rather than powerless positions. this is not simply to leave us off the hook, morally speaking. tessman is right to say that we need to recognize the moral remainders we leave in our wake. and her work here is an enormous contribution. but we need to recognize those moral remainders for a reason, and that reason, i think, is to guide our future actions, to arrange society as justly as possible, and so to avoid, as much as possible, putting people into morally untenable positions. i love to discover dogmas wherever they are, but the two principles, that ought implies can, and that action-guidance is the principle role of moral theory, are not dogmas. we need to recognize the work of moral luck and moral failures precisely because action-guiding 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 1, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss1/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3 is at the core of moral theory: what are we to do, given all the things we ought to do. references kittay, eva feder. 1999. love's labor: essays in women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. tessman, lisa. 2015. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. vol. kindle edition. new york: oxford university press. walker, margaret. 1966. jubilee. boston: houghton mifflin. williams, bernard. 1973. problems of the self: philosophical papers 1956–1972. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 1981. moral luck: philosophical papers 1973–1980. cambridge: cambridge university press. eva feder kittay is distinguished professor of philosophy, emerita, at stony brook university/suny. she is the incoming president of the american philosophical association. her interests focus on cognitive disability and feminist care ethics. she is the recipient of an neh fellowship and a guggenheim fellowship for disabled minds and things that matter, a work in progress. her publications include love's labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency, cognitive disability and the challenge to moral philosophy, blackwell guide to feminist philosophy, the subject of care: theoretical perspectives on dependency and women, and women and moral theory. 11 kittay: two dogmas of moral theory? published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure eva f. kittay recommended citation two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessmanâ•žs moral failure the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work feminist philosophy quarterly volume 2 issue 2 fall 2016 article 5 2016 the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work christine m. koggel carleton university, christinekoggel@cunet.carleton.ca recommended citation koggel, christine m.. 2016. "the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work."feminist philosophy quarterly2, (2). article 5. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5. the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work christine m. koggel it is no exaggeration to say that a survey of lorraine code’s philosophical works over the past thirty years can help to trace the development of feminist epistemology: from code’s initial and important criticisms of traditional approaches to knowledge in epistemic responsibility (1987)—which did not name her approach as “feminist”—to the explicit incorporation and application of feminist insights to knowledge claims in what can she know? (1991), to examining the significance of gendered locations in rhetorical spaces (1995), to the expansion of feminist epistemology to what it is to know well in a global context of intersecting factors of power, oppression, and threats to the environment in ecological thinking (2006). each new publication fits into a trajectory of works that are groundbreaking and significant to the development and expansion of feminist epistemology. that trajectory will, no doubt, continue with the book she is currently working on and with those that are yet to be published. it is perhaps a hallmark of feminist epistemology that it rejects the idea that rigid boundaries can or should be drawn between epistemology and moral and political philosophy. this feature is already evident in code’s first book where the connection between the epistemological and the moral is captured in the title itself—epistemic responsibility or what it is to know well. two things are striking about code’s approach in her first book; the first weaves its way through and is developed in new ways throughout her work, and the second is dropped, or at least shifts, in her subsequent work. first, the idea of the knower as embedded in creative and interactive knowledge-seeking activities in communities plays a key role in epistemic responsibility and is present throughout code’s work. yet, the idea that knowledge seekers are differently situated in terms of relations of power in those very communities will not come to the forefront of code’s work until what can she know? second, epistemic responsibility is a much more sustained and explicit examination of moral theory and, in particular, of virtue ethics than code’s later work. though i examine the second more extensively than the first in this paper, i need to discuss the first because the two points are connected and reveal something quite important in the evolution of feminist epistemology. my plan for this paper is to start with code’s first book to record the key objections she raises against traditional and mainstream epistemological accounts. they are the sort of objections that will thread their way through all her work and be important to the development of feminist epistemology. i will then introduce, 1 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 summarize, and discuss the work code does on virtue ethics in epistemic responsibility and speculate on why she abandons this path in the rest of her work. code uses virtue ethics and, specifically, virtues of the intellect, to frame an account of moral responsibility that i find interesting, promising, and still relevant to the contemporary revival of virtue ethics and to feminist epistemology more generally. epistemic responsibility: the knower and the known code opens epistemic responsibility with the following: “this book has grown out of a sense that something important is missing from philosophical discussions of ‘the problem of knowledge.’ epistemologists in their analysis of the meaning and justification of knowledge claims rarely ask, ‘but whose claims? when? and in what circumstances?” (1987, ix). answers to these kinds of questions about who and where weave their way through all of code’s work. but code answers these questions in a humbler and perhaps narrower way in epistemic responsibility. as in her other work, epistemic responsibility displays code’s skill of drawing from some of the central figures in the history of western philosophy in order to credit what they contribute at the same time as she identifies where she departs from them. epistemic responsibility has a host of central figures that include aristotle, plato, william james, kant, rorty, putnam, foucault, and wittgenstein, to name a few. some of these figures will drop out in her later work, most notably aristotle and the framework of virtue ethics. but the one figure who makes repeated appearances in code’s work is kant. starting in epistemic responsibility and then again in what can she know? and in rhetorical spaces, code uses kant as a pivotal figure because he initiated a major shift in epistemology from a focus on the observed, the object in the world, to the observer, the subject who comes to the world with concepts or capacities that are used to organize all cognition. the world, therefore, does not come with a ready-made structure that can be cognized by using a particular methodology. moreover, we do not come into the world as blank slates ready to receive and discover the world that presents itself to us. rather, we come with concepts, cognitive capacities, through which we perceive the world and give it a structure. in fact, code’s outline and use of kant when i first read what can she know? decades ago had me understand the kantian epistemological project in a way that i hadn’t before.1 i was reminded of this again when i read epistemic responsibility for the first time a year ago. 1 in addition to learning about kant from code, i also benefitted from delving into what i take to be an accessible and proper reading of kant’s important contribution to epistemology in andrew brook’s kant and the mind (1994). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 epistemic responsibility gave me additional insight not only into kant but into code on kant and into code on code as it will play out in her later work. code writes: for kant, one of the fundamental questions of philosophy is, ‘what can i know?’ in my view, insight into the nature of the knower is required to answer this question satisfactorily. if the question is read with the emphasis upon the first verb—‘what can i know?’—then clearly part of the answer, and an important part, must be in terms of the nature of cognitive capacity. if it is read with the emphasis upon the pronoun—‘what can i know?’—then who i am, the circumstances of my epistemic life, my cognitive ‘location’ will rightly figure in the reply. emphasis upon the i, upon the knower, permits the recognition that what holds knowledge together is a real human being. . . . only if the emphasis is entirely upon the last verb—‘what can i know?’—is there any justification for neglecting the other terms; but i can see no reason for privileging the latter reading. (127) the emphasis on can in “what can i know” reveals kant’s assumption that all knowers come into the world with the same capacities and can come to know the same things about the world. however, as code points out, the “standard knower” in kantian epistemology is of an “intelligent, forty-year-old konigsberg bachelor as constitutive of the norm for human knowledge in general” (110). code herself will only grasp the full significance of the emphasis on i in “what can i know” a few years later when she writes what can she know? the use of “she” will indicate that code is making the explicit turn to seeing knowers as not only different one from another, but as affected by where they are located in a nexus of relations of power. this will be an important move in developing an account of feminist epistemology that takes background conditions of oppression as affecting who is believed and who is taken to know. in epistemic responsibility, code will argue, against kant, that her account provides “no suggestion that human nature is fixed so that each human being will develop in precisely the same way, whatever the environmental conditions; rather, there is a structuring of the world and, reciprocally, of knowers. the manner of this structuring is dependent upon a knower’s interaction with the world and will vary accordingly” (100). code’s account of the reciprocal relation between the world and what knowers bring to the world that in turn shapes their understanding of the world and of themselves allows her to make the following claim in epistemic responsibility: “my central contention is that the knower, or would-be knower, bears as much of the onus of credibility as does the known” (x). 3 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 the notion of credibility already goes well beyond kant in connecting epistemological and moral/political projects. the theme of credibility weaves its way through all of code’s work. yet she will take her work on credibility in a different direction in what can she know?, a direction that unpacks how those who are members of oppressed groups are taken to lack credibility. this is not, at least not explicitly, what she does in epistemic responsibility where she focuses instead on “moral values and questions of ‘character’ [as] integral aspects of epistemic evaluation” (3). in her first book, it is the people, and not the background conditions, that need to be critically examined for what they can know and for what sort of character they ought to develop to know well. epistemic responsibility: knowledge and virtue in her first book, code will answer questions about the “epistemic evaluation” of character by using the framework of virtue ethics and, in particular, that of virtues of the intellect. the alignment between intellect and virtue, knowledge and ethics, is more easily made in greek philosophy than in contemporary epistemology as is evident in plato’s often quoted phrase, “knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.” code agrees with this linking of intellect and virtue when she explains that “knowing well, being epistemically responsible, have implications for people’s individual, social, and political lives” (10). the path to explaining credibility in epistemic responsibility, therefore, leads code to attend to the character who can learn to know well by cultivating and habituating virtues that allow them to interact with others in the world in morally responsible ways. because virtue ethics is agent-centered, rather than action-centered, virtue ethicists answer questions about morally right action by paying attention to the shaping of dispositions, habits, and feelings that allow agents to know the what, when, how, where, and with whom of right action. an agent-centered approach pays attention to how a person should be in order to be counted on to correctly assess what the right action will be. as aristotle puts it, being virtuous involves knowing how to act “to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way” (en 1109a27–29). what code adds to the aristotelian account is a more explicit and richer social agent, a relational self who knows and can come to know responsibly and well in interactions with others in communities. yet, the path to using the virtues of the intellect to know how to become virtuous through habit, disposition, and action with others in communities is dropped in code’s later work. a quick look at the indices for her three other books reveals at most one entry per book for “virtue ethics.” yet i find code’s “conception of virtue . . . whose orientation is broadly aristotelian” to be illuminating for at least two reasons. first, her focus on virtues of the intellect allows her to defend a position on the question of relativism, a 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 question, i venture to say, that has been posed repeatedly in connection with her work. the virtue ethics account that code takes in epistemic responsibility cashes out in a form of realism (knowing how to live well in a community of knowers) that shifts in code’s subsequent work. second, while code steers away from this path of virtue ethics after epistemic responsibility (and there are reasons for this), there has been quite a resurgence in this area of moral theory in the past decade as demonstrated, for example, by lisa tessman’s book, burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. however, as i will go on to show in the section that follows, tessman is a moral philosopher whose work does not focus on virtues of the intellect in a way that can highlight the significance of the community-oriented, relational aspects of code’s account of virtue ethics. on this front, i will argue, code’s account in epistemic responsibility is better positioned to deal with deficiencies in both aristotelian and contemporary feminist appropriations and applications of virtue ethics. i will deal with the two points in reverse order, discussing the second now and turning to explore the first point on the issue of relativism in the final section. epistemic responsibility: virtue ethics and the beginnings of relational theory the virtue ethics framework that code adopts in epistemic responsibility ties knowing well to being virtuous—with others and in a community of knowers. i now know better what was behind code’s question about my paper on “relational ethics and memory” at the 2015 canadian philosophical association/north american society for social philosophy panel on sue campbell’s book, our faithfulness to the past (2014).2 code responded to my account of the difference between individualist ethics and relational ethics by asking whether it should be said that all ethics has to be relational. i confess i was unsure how to answer that question at that time— especially because i have worked on relational theory and its challenges to the individualism in mainstream liberal theory for decades. but i found myself in an “aha” moment of understanding what was behind her question when i got to chapter 7 of epistemic responsibility, where code explains that all moral theory, with the exception of hobbes, starts with the assumption that human beings are social beings—that assumption will be what motivates moral and political theorists to figure out how best to interact with others and to structure societies. code writes, “human beings, who are the agents in moral theory and the knowledge seekers in theory of knowledge, are curiously different creatures in each domain of 2 sue campbell’s work has been hugely important to projects of developing and applying relational theory more generally and to my own work in this area (koggel 2014). 5 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 enquiry. moral theory, with the possible exception of hobbesian-type approaches, starts from the assumption that human beings are social beings” (166). code arrives at the idea that all ethics has to be relational by way of contrasting how moral theory has done better on issues of recognizing the fundamental significance of relationships and communities to the shaping of a self than has traditional epistemology. already in her first book, code is rejecting the central feature of mainstream epistemology that takes knowledge seeking and acquisition to be best achieved by solitary knowers who can abstract themselves from the distractions of “people’s individual, social, and political lives” (10). this move away from solitary knowers will be crucial to feminist epistemology and to social epistemology more generally. on the side of moral and political philosophy, however, and after rawls’s a theory of justice, the idea of solitary moral agents who can abstract themselves from contexts, conditions, and circumstances is still alive and continues to call for challenge and criticism by anti-oppression theorists. i can now better answer code’s challenging assertion that moral theory just is fundamentally relational. code focused on the individualism that she found in traditional epistemology, and that drew her to the relational aspects of virtue ethics. this then gave her a vantage point from which to challenge the fundamental tenets of traditional epistemology. i take another route in that i challenge the individualism at the heart of traditional and mainstream western liberal theory. in this tradition, theorists tend to argue that the moral agent is best viewed as solitary and isolated in the reasoning required of them to determine right action—they must abstract themselves from their circumstances and conditions so as to achieve an objective and impartial stance from which to determine morally right action. these are not the community oriented knowledge seekers interacting with and being affected by others in contexts that call on them to know well and responsibly so as to become virtuous agents. they are certainly not the knowledge seekers described by kant in his assumptions about the interchangeability of knowers who come into the world equipped with cognitive capacities that have them structure experience and acquire knowledge of the stuff that makes up the world. like solitary moral agents, kant’s knowers also reveal partial and particular perspectives. and they are certainly not the agents that have been central to my own work, in which agents are affected by and shaped in and through networks of relationships in communities. code’s virtue ethics approach in epistemic responsibility provides the foundation for an account of moral activity and reasoning that is essentially social. it is what will center the epistemology of knowing well on social and communal activities of human beings interacting, learning, trusting, and acquiring knowledge of the world and of each other in order to survive and flourish as human beings: “it is undeniable that human flourishing is deeply dependent on knowing well” (9). take away the language of “flourishing” and these will continue to be themes pursued in 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 code’s work and in feminist epistemology more generally. yet feminists whose work is less centered in epistemology than in moral and political theory are retrieving the language of flourishing and the framework of virtue ethics and making it directly applicable to contexts of oppression and suffering. tessman provides one such account that leaves aristotle far behind in her application of a virtue ethics framework to the “context of oppression and of the liberatory struggles that take place against oppression” (2005, 3). tessman focuses on the limits to and burdens on moral goodness under adverse conditions of oppression, “where the external or background conditions necessary for flourishing will tend to be lacking or diminished” (159). as with code in epistemic responsibility, tessman is drawn to virtue ethics, a “tradition of ethical theory that is agent-centered and that foregrounds questions of character” (3). unlike code, however, tessman does not foreground how moral interactions and reasoning about how best to live well with others take place in communities of knowers, knowers who ought to be held accountable for knowing well and responsibly. yet in at least some places in burdened virtues, tessman recognizes the significance of communities and of the relational self. against aristotle, tessman argues that moral agents can only flourish in inclusive communities in which members are committed to addressing the suffering of others and ensuring the well-being of all members: “one must stipulate that the pursuit of one’s own flourishing cannot qualify as morally praiseworthy (and what one attains cannot count as flourishing) unless one is engaged, as part of that pursuit, in promoting the flourishing of an inclusive social collectivity” (76). for tessman, however, the inclusivity requirement leaves little room for optimism that agents can be virtuous let alone flourish: “moral goodness requires a pursuit of not just my own well-being, and not just the well-being of those whose well-being i depend on, but also the well-being of those whose very lack of well-being may have been a condition of my privileges” (76). in other words, tessman turns the focus back to what individual agents can and should do in the face of enormous suffering and thereby reaches the conclusion that “none of us will ever live well in any foreseeable future, for it is inconceivable that across the globe unjust suffering will be eradicated” (87). what i have said about tessman’s book, at an apa “author meets critics” session and in the paper that was published as a cluster on her book in hypatia (2008b), is that tessman had a lot to say about burdened virtues but did not say enough about how virtues of the intellect could help to explain the responsibilities that moral agents have to understand how who we are and what we do in our interactions with others contributes to the world of enormous suffering. tessman asks brutally blunt questions about why so many of us “stand by while atrocities happen across the globe” (82). she rightly draws attention to the extremes of total 7 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 indifference and too much sensitivity to others’ suffering that make it impossible to discuss her burdened “virtue of sensitivity to others’ suffering” in terms of finding a mean between these extremes. both extremes are damaging to the self. total indifference is reflected in the passivity and complacency that goes along with benefiting from privilege, or focusing exclusively on one’s own goals, or believing that anyone can rise above their circumstances on their own with enough effort. while it is morally wrong to be indifferent to the suffering of others, too much sensitivity comes with anguish and pain in the face of never being able to eradicate suffering or of needing to make choices about whose suffering to address and thereby still leaving a vast amount of suffering unanswered. tessman is right to give a place to this as a burdened virtue in our context of great injustices and enormous suffering. she is also right to argue that her inclusivity requirement for human flourishing would have it that the virtue of sensitivity to others just will be burdened well into the foreseeable future. but there may be a way out, one suggested by code’s epistemological account of virtues of the intellect that can only be understood and given substance in the context of communities of knowers. if “one’s well-being is really tied up with the well-being of all others” (tessman 2005, 87), then this requires the kind of critical reflection (virtues of the intellect) that recognizes and rejects a norm of human flourishing that allows so many people to remain complacent in the face of great injustice and enormous suffering—even in interactions with those in our communities. this is an important point because it expands the discussion beyond the burdens connected with individuals needing to choose whose suffering to address to discussions of the burden of coming to know how who we are and what we do contributes to and connects with enormous suffering to different others, whole communities, and the world itself. it would broaden the discussion of suffering, for example, to that created by environmental or natural disasters brought on by climate change or the suffering connected with the decimation of cultures, livelihoods, communities, and the environment brought on by multinational corporations who exploit resources and people. and it would broaden the discussion of burden to a demand to know responsibly and well how what we perceive and pursue as the good life (for ourselves) connects with the suffering and fate of others in a postcolonial, interdependent, and globalized world. these are all topics that code pursues in her later work and in some depth in ecological thinking. unlike epistemic responsibility, however, ecological thinking explores these themes not through virtue ethics but in and through a thoroughly relational account developed for a context of interconnected networks of 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 relationships that stretch across the globe.3 and so we return to the significance of a responsibility to know well and to the interconnectedness of the epistemological and the moral/political. ultimately, i found code’s account of virtues of the intellect surprisingly contemporary in its articulation of a new epistemology that takes seriously the responsibility that knowers have to know well and responsibly. feminist epistemologists may still find insights in a virtue-ethics approach in which epistemic aims are tied to moral and political ones. the upshot is that these aims need to be in sync rather than pitted against each other. it may mean that a full understanding of our commitments to fairness, equality, and justice, for example, requires us to situate these commitments in the world in which we live, a world that manifests relationships of oppression, discrimination, and disadvantage. it will mean that we need to be vigilant in our efforts to understand and know these conditions and how they affect particular others who are members of oppressed groups. it will mean an attitude of humility and openness in the face of difference. it will mean that we use that knowledge and understanding to develop virtues that manifest a conscious awareness of our own role in assuming norms, biases, and stereotypes that are often implicit in our interactions with others and that shape the feelings we have toward others and the actions we take. these ideas and arguments are taken up in some of the important literature on implicit bias (e.g., shotwell 2011) that calls on us to be conscious of the ways in which our stated moral commitments to treating others with respect are often out of sync with epistemic biases that thwart and undermine those very commitments. virtue ethics may still have a role to play in thinking through what it means to shape a character that can be called on to do the right thing through habituating one’s actions and emotions so as to know well and responsibly. as code points out in epistemic responsibility, these knowledge seeking activities can only happen in communities in which there is a commitment to a responsible knowing so as to live well with others. epistemic responsibility: virtues of the intellect and relativism the call to know well and responsibly means that there are right and wrong ways to acquire knowledge and interact with others in morally responsible ways. code is clearer in this early work than she is in later work that hers is a realist and not relativist account. here is how these two things, realism and virtues of the intellect, come together for code in epistemic responsibility. in place of the solitary, individualistic, and interchangeable knowers that populate traditional epistemology, either by way of a passive receiving and recording of what objects in the world 3 i explore these themes in more detail in my paper, “ecological thinking and epistemic location: the local and the global,” published as a cluster in hypatia (koggel 2008a). 9 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 reveal or by way of an active imposition of a structure on the world, code takes knowers to be socially and cognitively interdependent creatures and knowledgeseeking to be a moral activity done together with others in a community of knowers. the fundamental sociality of knowledge seekers and the communities in which they seek to know, what she refers to as “human cognitive interdependence” (1987, 60), will constrain what individual knowers can be said to know. it turns out, then, that the fundamental sociality of humans—as captured in a philosophical thread stretching from aristotle to hume to communitarians to feminist relational theorists —is all important for explaining both knowledge and virtue. as code puts it, “such relationships generate a complex set of responsibilities that can be fulfilled only by cultivating an appropriate sensitivity to the other person’s situation” (11). this early articulation of a relational approach is a defence of the fundamental and inescapable significance of relationships to an account of the self, to the shaping of moral agents, and to the pursuit of knowledge. these are hints of relational theory that will emerge more fully in code’s later work. they are insights that have been crucial to developing my own work in moral and political theory (koggel 1998, 2002, 2012). while i have never situated my work in the tradition of virtue ethics, i now understand better how my work has affinities with that tradition. code’s first book has made me ask myself what those affinities are and to what extent virtue ethics still has something to offer.4 i want to end by exploring code’s explicit defence of realism over relativism in epistemic responsibility and how this emerges from her account of the significance of acquiring and habituating virtues of the intellect. code writes: intellectual virtue is, above all, a matter of orientation toward the world, toward one’s knowledge-seeking self, and toward other such selves as part of the world. central to it is a sort of openness to how things are: a respect for the normative force of ‘realism’. this attitude involves a willingness to let things speak for themselves, a kind of humility toward the experienced world that curbs any excessive desire to impose one’s cognitive structuring upon it. intellectual honesty consists in a finely tuned balancing of these two factors, in cultivating an appropriate interplay between self and world. (1987, 20) 4 i have learned a great deal about the possibilities for connecting relational theory and virtue ethics not only from epistemic responsibility but also from supervising andrew hoult’s ma thesis (2015), in which he argues that virtue ethics can benefit from a thoroughgoing relational approach that situates moral agents in broad networks of relationships in which people are affected by structures and conditions oppression manifested in the global context. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 the question, and an issue for virtue ethicists more generally, is how to explain what is required to cultivate an intellectually virtuous character. answering this kind of question must turn the attention to the moral agent, issues of character, and evaluations of whether particular agents can be said to be epistemically responsible for what they know. for code, attempting to answer these kinds of questions will reveal tensions that may explain why she abandons a virtue ethics approach in her subsequent work. in epistemic responsibility, code puts the onus on evaluating “character” and on those who claim to know needing to “produce good reasons for what they claim to know or understand” (12). but it will become more and more difficult to have a virtue ethics account bear the burden of accounting for how those who have power and privilege are likely to be taken to have good reasons and to thereby be understood as knowing well and responsibly. while the idea of cognitive activity as a communal process places limits, at least somewhat, on what will count as good reasons, without a proper account of power and the politics of power in all its forms, it still allows those who shape the norms, the rules, and the methodology, whether in domains of science or ethics/politics, to be taken as virtuous knowers. in epistemic responsibility, code takes the kantian question of “what can i know” to wrongly put the emphasis on the can instead of the i. what this means will be developed in steps and in interesting ways throughout code’s work, from the title itself of what can she know?, to the broader notion of “gendered locations,” to the more global account of “ecological thinking.” but highlighting the significance of location to an account of who knows or who gets to know raises the spectre of relativism more easily and especially for philosophers who cannot tolerate such a possibility—thus the reaction of fear and accusation by the panelists and audience members at a 1993 cpa book panel on what can she know? that code was embracing relativism. i understand all of this better now in light of what code tried to do in epistemic responsibility in defending a version of realism that, in the end, focused too exclusively on knowers, no matter what their location or circumstances, who need to situate themselves with respect to approaching the world with humility in order to interpret it responsibly and well. code’s version of realism in her first book made use of the idea, often dismissed or rejected in mainstream liberal moral and political theory, that virtue ethics is not an “anything goes” kind of moral theory that embraces relativism. this is the natural outcome of an account that aims to have us know well and responsibly—there are right and wrong ways to be and do so as to live well with others. code’s use of virtue ethics in epistemic responsibility will accept aristotle’s contextually sensitive account of agents as needing to develop dispositions, character, and habits that have them know how to act at the right time, in the right way, and with the right aim. while often not thought of this way, virtue ethics is on 11 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 the side of realism and not relativism. yet code’s account is also a radical departure from aristotle in its call for humility and openness in a community of knowers. it will be the case, however, that dispositions of humility and openness may not be enough to ensure that what is taken to be virtuous is not relative to particular people, in particular contexts, at particular times, and with the wrong aims of assuming norms and biases that allow one to hold on to and benefit from positions of power. and so the concepts of the “social imaginary” and of “ecological thinking” will come to better capture and explain responsible knowing as collective and ongoing projects of coming to know well across differences and contexts. code will abandon virtue ethics and take the explicit turn to critically analyzing power in networks that stretch across the globe and affect how knowledge is produced so as to sustain rather than challenge background conditions of oppression. and so code will worry less about whether she can be called a relativist and turn to the task of figuring out how to know well and responsibly. she will distance herself from this debate by challenging those who build epistemological approaches and moral and political theories on versions of realism or relativism against which all comers are judged and condemned: “an acknowledgment of the relativistic implications of feminist epistemology would make space for reassessing the stark conceptions of relativism that have prompted critics to target a caricatured, hyperbolic relativism that no self-respecting relativist would endorse” (2010, 537). “hyberbolic relativism” appears in accounts by theorists who think virtue ethics is a form of relativism because it cannot give us absolute answers to questions of morally right action, as well as in accounts by those who charge feminist epistemologists with being relativists because they do not ground what we can know in a methodology that abstracts people from realworld conditions and contexts. as code puts it in a brilliant paper that explores answers to the question posed in its title, “must a feminist be a relativist after all?”: “warning against a slide into relativism became a strategy for silencing any suggestion that situations, subjectivities, or interests figure integrally in the making, and should figure in the adjudication of knowledge claims” (538). conclusion if i have read too much into what code attempted to do with virtue ethics in epistemic responsibility or speculated too freely on why virtue ethics was abandoned in her work after this first book, it is with the intention of tracing themes that continue to preoccupy those working on the intersections between epistemology and moral/political theory. exploring themes that retrieve philosophical traditions that embrace relational ways of knowing and being, and contrasting these with traditions that start and end with what individuals can know about the world and morally right action apart from their circumstances, conditions, 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 and situatedness in relations of power, has given me important insights. it has helped me understand why code’s beginnings in virtue ethics made the idea that all ethics is relational obvious to her in a way that my beginnings in traditional liberal theory have not made it obvious to me. it has helped me understand that it would take a long time to develop virtue ethics in ways that could speak to the exclusionary form of it in aristotle and the all-too-frequent alignment of virtue ethics with moral rather than political theory. starting with an account of knowers as engaging and interacting with others in networks of relationships that manifest conditions and structures of oppression and that stretch across the globe means that virtue ethics must now be made relevant to moral and political theory. in this paper, i merely scratch the surface in exploring why i think there is still some promise in an epistemology that focuses on virtues of the intellect to connect projects in theory of knowledge with those in moral and political philosophy. my reflections on what virtue ethics can offer in our world of enormous suffering and oppression have the benefit of being able to engage with the work of feminist virtue ethicists and of relational theory more generally. i venture to say that reflecting on code’s use of virtue ethics in epistemic responsibility has also allowed me to engage with the work of feminist epistemologists in new ways. code’s later work would take different paths, ones less fraught with the pitfalls of evaluating “the characters of would-be knowers” (1987, 3). yet the basic idea of “cognitive activity as a communal process” (1987, 64) remains and continues to be a rich foundation for a wide variety of feminist epistemologists. on the issue of relativism, it will still be the case that “as it is known, reality is knower-relative, then; but a relativism of this nature would by no means endorse just any mode of interpretation” (1987, 135). acknowledgements it was pure genius on the part of anna mudde and susan dieleman to put together a panel on lorraine’s work for cswip in regina in october 2015. i am so pleased to have been invited to participate in this panel. it gave me a splendid opportunity to do a careful reading of lorraine’s epistemic responsibility, which came out close to 30 years ago now. that cswip panel lived up to what i have come to expect of cswip events: it was an honouring, celebrating, and respecting of the work of a fellow (and long-time) cswiper in the context of a deep and critical engagement with that work. thinking about that event now, i understand that it reflected what code defends and explains in epistemic responsibility: a community of knowers interacting and exchanging in order to know well and responsibly. the task of knowing lorraine’s work well and responsibly is not easy, however. her work is complex, sophisticated, and has unexpected twists and turns in the philosophers she calls on, sometimes as friends and sometimes as foes, to elucidate her arguments and in the literature she references that goes well beyond that found in 13 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 the discipline of philosophy that is often so rigidly bounded and policed. i have learned and continue to learn a tremendous amount through my long friendship with lorraine and in my repeated engagements with her work—through the books she continues to publish and now with my own graduate students who learn from and use her work. finally, it was pure genius as well for kate norlock to suggest that the participants at that cswip panel rewrite their papers and to have them included with anna’s introduction and lorraine’s response for publication in an issue of feminist philosophical quarterly. thank you, kate, and thank you, anna, susan, alexis, cathy, and lorraine for following through and having these papers appear in print in celebration of the 30-year anniversary of epistemic responsibility. references aristotle. 1984. nicomachean ethics. in the complete works of aristotle, volume two: the revised oxford translation, edited by jonathan barnes. princeton, nj: princeton university press. brook, andrew. 1994. kant and the mind. new york: cambridge university press. campbell, sue. 2014. our faithfulness to the past: the ethics and politics of memory, edited by christine m. koggel and rockney jacobsen. oxford: oxford university press. code, lorraine. 1987. epistemic responsibility. hanover, nh: university press of new england. ———. 1991. what can she know? feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 1995. rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations. new york: routledge. ———. 2006. ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2010. “must a feminist be a relativist after all?” in relativism: a contemporary anthology, edited by michael krausz, 536–552. new york: columbia university press. hoult, andrew. 2015. on relationality in virtue ethics: accounting for injustices in a global context. master’s thesis, carleton university, department of philosophy. koggel, christine m. 1998. perspectives on equality: constructing a relational theory. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ———. 2002. “equality analysis in a global context: a relational approach.” canadian journal of philosophy. supplementary volume 28: feminist moral philosophy, 247–272. ———. 2008a. “ecological thinking and epistemic location: the local and the global.” hypatia 23 (1): 177–186. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 2 [2016], iss. 2, art. 5 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol2/iss2/5 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2016.2.5 ———. 2008b. “burdening the burdened virtues.” hypatia 23 (3): 197–204. ———. 2012. “a relational approach to equality: new developments and applications.” in being relational: reflections on relational theory and health law and policy, edited by jocelyn downie and jennifer llewellyn, 63– 88. vancouver: university of british columbia press. ———. 2014. “relational remembering and oppression” hypatia 29 (2): 493–508. ———. 2015. “memory and relational ethics.” paper presented at a joint north american society for social philosophy and canadian philosophical association symposium, “sue campbell’s our faithfulness to the past: the ethics and politics of memory.” canadian philosophical association 59th annual congress, may 31–june 3, university of ottawa. rawls, john. 1971. a theory of justice. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. shotwell, alexis. 2011. knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding. pennsylvania state university press. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. new york: oxford university press. christine m. koggel is a professor of philosophy and graduate supervisor at carleton university. she came to carleton from bryn mawr college, where she was the harvey wexler professor of philosophy and co-director of the center for international studies. her main research and teaching interests are in the areas of moral theory, practical ethics, feminism, and social and political theory. current topics pursued within these areas include the capabilities approach in development ethics, relational approaches in feminist theory, and connections between these. she is the author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books, chapters in books, special issues, and journal articles. 15 koggel: the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2016 feminist philosophy quarterly 2016 the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine code’s work christine m. koggel recommended citation the epistemological and the moral/political in epistemic responsibility: beginnings and reworkings in lorraine codeâ•žs work for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 1 article 3 2018 for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon dilek huseyinzadegan emory university, dhuseyin1@emory.edu recommended citation huseyinzadegan, dilek. 2018. "for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon." feminist philosophy quarterly4, (1). article 3. for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon dilek huseyinzadegan abstract as feminist scholars, we hope that our own work is exempt from structural problems such as racism, sexism, and eurocentrism, that is, the kind of problems that are exemplified and enacted by kant’s works. in other words, we hope that we do not re-enact, implicitly or explicitly, kant’s problematic claims, which range from the unnaturalness of a female philosopher, “who might as well have a beard,” the stupid things that a black carpenter said “because he was black from head to foot,” the poor women “living in the greatest slavery in the orient,” to the “sheep-like existence of the inhabitants of tahiti.” in this piece, i argue that we cannot simply hope to avoid these problems unless we are vigilant about incorporating the full picture of kant’s and kantian philosophy into our feminist appropriations. i will show that one way to minimize if not altogether avoid this risk is to follow the model of a new methodology that establishes the continued relevance of all of kant’s claims for our present. inspired by spivak’s a critique of postcolonial reason, i will call this alternative methodology the “constructive complicity” approach. keywords: kant, kantian feminism, feminist interpretations, spivak, lorde as scholars using kant as a resource for feminist purposes, we assume that our own work today is exempt from structural problems such as racism, sexism, and eurocentrism, that is, the kind of problems that are exemplified by kant’s works. in other words, we hope that in reproducing works on kant’s philosophy we do not reenact, implicitly or explicitly, his problematic claims, which range from the unnaturalness of a female philosopher, “who might as well have a beard,” the stupid things that a black carpenter said “because he was black from head to foot,” the poor women “living in the greatest slavery in the orient,” to the “sheep-like existence of the inhabitants of tahiti” (kant 2007, gse 2: 229ff., 254–255; rezherder 1 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 8: 65–66).1 in this piece, i argue that we cannot hope to avoid these problems if we focus only on the useful parts of kantian thought and continue to treat these other claims as marginal or incidental to it. in particular, unless we are vigilant about incorporating the full picture of kant’s and kantian philosophy into our feminist appropriations, we risk inadvertently claiming that problems of sexism, racism, and eurocentrism, as well as intersections of these systematic injustices in kant’s texts and our lives, can be easily dismissed or evaded. i will show that one way to minimize if not altogether avoid this risk is to follow the model of a new methodology that establishes the continued relevance of all of kant’s claims for our present. inspired by spivak’s (1999) a critique of postcolonial reason, i will call this alternative methodology the “constructive complicity” approach. spivak shows us that the structural issue underlying kantian philosophy writ large is that the subject as such in kant, that is, the subject of culture, civilization, rationality, and philosophy, is geopolitically differentiated in and through his philosophical system and thus positioned as the white man from the global north (spivak 1999, 26f.). indeed, as recent scholarship on kant’s writings on history and anthropology also demonstrates, the question of the nature of the human being as well as kant’s hierarchical notion of humanity bear on the entire edifice of kantian philosophy (bernasconi 2003 cohen 2009; louden 2000; mensch 2017; mills 2005b). spivak argues, however, that this geopolitical marking of what counts as human in kantian thought should not discourage us from using his works for our purposes today; rather, she shows that especially if we presume a line of continuity between his problematic claims and our present, we will be in a better position to diagnose and critique our philosophical and political problems today. therefore, i argue that the best thing that we can hope to achieve as feminist appropriators of canonical figures such as kant is to employ a methodology of constructive complicity. first, we must admit that we as professional philosophers constructing and re-constructing kantian arguments are complicit in the problems that kant’s texts exemplify. then, we must highlight and inherit these problems as our own issues rather than disavowing them as the historical limitations of the man himself or marginal empirical claims that do not infect or inflect the rest of his philosophical system. i will show that this approach requires us to take seriously the kantian question 1 all references to immanuel kant’s works are from the cambridge edition of the works of immanuel kant. since this edition cites the volume and page of the akademie edition (kant 1902), i cite only the latter. kant’s works are abbreviated as follows: anth: anthropology from a pragmatic point of view; gms: groundwork for the metaphysics of morals; ms: metaphysics of morals (includes doctrine of virtue and doctrine of right); ku: critique of judgment; gse: observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime; log: logic; rezherder: review of herder’s ideas. 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 “what is the human being?” together with his problematic answer and its echoes in our contemporary moment. from such a position of complicity, we can then hope to move the conversation on kant and systematic injustice further and offer more nuanced and honest interpretations of his work as well as our philosophico-political challenges today. by feminist appropriations of kant, i refer to the works that take up kantian vocabulary or arguments in order to solve a philosophical puzzle about gender justice, or in order to construct a tenable position on various ethical and political issues; thus, a feminist appropriation assumes, from the beginning, that kant has something useful to say about contemporary problems of injustice.2 the problem is that most feminist appropriations of kant continue to treat kant’s unsavory claims about women’s incapacities or the inferiority of nonwhites and non-europeans as marginally related to kant’s philosophy overall or as not authentically kantian. other approaches occupy a more ambiguous position, claiming that despite the deep misogyny expressed in his writings, feminists should not give up on some of the more useful concepts, such as rights, autonomy, or the ideal of justice. implicit in both lines of inquiry is the idea that kant’s sexist, racist, or eurocentric claims are not useful for feminist philosophizing.3 while i am sympathetic to these positive appropriations in general, i remain suspicious of the ease with which they move to a more useful kant. here, i will offer a supplementary feminist approach that instead lingers on the problematic kant, and show that doing so will allow us to recognize the legacy of these problems in our lives in three interrelated domains: in terms of what alcoff termed “philosophy’s demographic challenge” (alcoff 2013); in terms of the canon formation in philosophy (park 2013); and in terms of the so-called contradictions between (neo)liberalism and (neo)racism (balibar 1991). i start by outlining the methodological issues facing feminist appropriations of kant and show that the hermeneutic choice undergirding these appropriations is a dangerous one. i then analyze the major contemporary trends in kantian feminisms, all of which have the implicit effect of treating kantian philosophy as a reservoir of unconnected and inherently good ideas. as a necessary supplement to 2 note that in this paper i only take up the positive appropriations of kant, what cynthia freeland called the “inheritance approach.” (freeland 2000, 380). thus, i hereby leave aside feminist readings of kant’s work that articulate its gendered, colonial, and racial logic; for examples, see hall (1997); klinger (1997); kofman (1997); marwah (2013); and may schott (1997). i thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on clarifying my position on this. 3 i take it for granted that philosophers attuned to the dangers of sexism must also care about other intersecting forms and dimensions of oppression, including racism and eurocentrism. 3 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 these existing methodologies, i push us to rethink what it means to own kant’s corpus as a whole and suggest that we perform a comprehensive feminist reading of kant. in the final part of the essay, then, i sketch out this alternative way of how to be a kantian feminist or to perform feminist appropriations of kant. here i suggest that we adopt an intersectional feminist methodology: rather than focusing only on gender and sexuality, that is, we move toward a feminist hermeneutic à la spivak that accounts for the various interlocking forms of oppressions, concerning race, class, and geopolitics as well as gender, from a position of constructive complicity with all of kant’s works. while spivak’s (1999) main concern in a postcolonial critique of reason is not how we can read kant in a feminist way, i will show that we can nonetheless learn a lot from her method and adopt it for a better version of kantian feminism, which would amount to emphasizing a continuity between kant’s problematic claims and our contemporary issues. a final word about the stakes of this paper: while the issue of how to be a kantian feminist will bear on the feminist appropriations of other canonical figures of western philosophy, such as aristotle or hegel, who also made racist, misogynist, or eurocentric claims, i take my contribution here to be primarily about kantian feminism. i aim to offer a meta-theory of intersectional feminist readings of kant by putting mainstream kantian feminist scholarship, which implicitly or explicitly often includes the conviction that kant can be saved from himself, into conversation with recent feminist, anti-racist, postand decolonial scholarship, which points out the complicated legacies of this particular canonical thinker. my main question is not what constitutes good and authentic kant or feminist scholarship per se; rather, i am concerned with what we reproduce when we reproduce kant’s work in feminist philosophy. as such, i am looking at the effects of using kant on our own thinking and will develop constructive complicity as a matter of orientation toward reading kant for feminist purposes. “what is the human being?” methodological issues facing feminist appropriations of kant while reflecting on how various elements of philosophy form a complementary whole in his jäsche logic, kant highlights a particular question and subfield as the cornerstone of his critical philosophical system; he writes, the field of philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense can be brought down to the following questions: 1. what can i know? 2. what ought i to do? 3. for what may i hope? 4. what is the human being? metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, because the first three questions refer to the last one. (kant 1992, log, 9: 25) 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 here we see that the nature of the human being emerges as the central question of kant’s critical philosophy, because the field of anthropology gathers together and matters a great deal to all the questions of being, knowledge, morality, and religion, with which his system is concerned. his own answer to this question has been thoroughly hierarchized along gendered and racialized lines: for instance, when it comes to the ability to develop and act on rational principles, kant argues that white people fare better than nonwhites and men do better than women (kant 2007, gse 2: 229–240; anth aa 7: 209; 303–311). furthermore, as jennifer mensch points out, kant did not develop his anthropology as an afterthought to his critical system; rather, “it is precisely in kant’s assessment of anthropology as a field capable of providing an encompassing report on the nature of human life that we are finally able to discern the link between anthropology and the critical system, namely, human being itself, in its materially determined and empirically observed existence, but also in its spontaneous or free moral character thought to lie at its basis” (mensch 2017, 129). until recently, kant’s anthropological writings (which most explicitly deal with the question, “what is the human being?”) have been considered peripheral. the mainstream scholarship draws this distinction between central and peripheral writings of kant in two ways: one distinction is chronological in that it draws the line at the publication of the first edition of the critique of pure reason in 1781 and catalogs any writings prior to this date to be ‘pre-critical’ and any writings after this date as ‘critical;’ here, we are urged to study or inherit only his critical corpus.4 another way to make the central-peripheral distinction is systematic in that it draws on kant’s own classification of ethics and politics as having pure and impure parts, a classification that is then taken to imply the philosophical superiority and importance of the pure or ideal theory over the empirical part (hill and boxill 2001; louden 2000; wood 1999). according to both of these distinctions, then, only his critical and central writings are worthy of our scholarly attention, and kant’s legacy today should refer only to his ideal theory, such as the three critiques, groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, the doctrine of virtue, and “perpetual peace,” and not to the less important writings on anthropology, pedagogy, geography, and history, such as observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime, anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, and lectures on physical geography. 4 the distinction between pre-critical and critical works of kant is so pervasive in mainstream kant scholarship that it is impossible to cite all those who maintain it; one may refer to the series which contain the complete english language edition of kant’s works, the cambridge edition of the works of immanuel kant, edited by paul guyer and allen wood (cambridge university press, 1995 – present). 5 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 interestingly enough, however, both the chronological and the systematic way of dividing kant’s works agree that the racism, sexism, orientalism, and eurocentrism found therein can and must be safely ignored, be it as pre-critical or peripheral. even recent works that began to pay more attention to kant’s anthropology and geography have a tendency to downplay his racism and sexism. they celebrate kant on his insight that philosophy must have an empirical part, but they do not seriously engage with these issues of race and gender as genuine philosophical problems. in short, mainstream kant scholarship would have us believe that kant’s philosophical and political legacy today does not include his racist, sexist, and orientalist claims (louden 2000).5 however you cut it, the most problematic aspects of kant’s work often fall by the wayside: this alone must arouse our suspicion as kantian feminists. furthermore, and more importantly, critical philosophers of race and postcolonial theorists, including bernasconi (2003), eze (1997), and mills (2005b), have effectively shown in the past few decades that the distinction between central and peripheral writings of kant is not only philosophically unjustified but also politically dangerous to maintain. the problem with the chronological distinction is that even after 1781 we find racist and sexist arguments in kant’s critical or mature works, e.g., the argument that women are passive citizens in the doctrine of right (kant 1996, ms 6: 314ff.) or the claim that south sea islanders are lazy in the groundwork (kant 1996, gms 4: 423). the problem with the systematic distinction is that even in his central works on pure and ideal theory kant resorts to arguments from the ‘impure’ disciplines of history, pedagogy, and anthropology, e.g., arguing that application of the categorical imperative requires an anthropology in groundwork (kant 1996, gms 4:412; louden 2000, 8). if we take seriously kant’s claim that moral theory requires an anthropology for application, then his argument that women and people of color are especially at a disadvantage with respect to the development of moral principles, for instance, will have important consequences for interpreting his moral philosophy overall. for this reason, critical philosophers of race point out that there is no neutral philosophical criterion by which we can decide which writings of kant’s are central and must be studied exclusively today (bernasconi 2003, 16ff.; mills 2005b, 170ff.).6 5 note that the essays in a recent volume on kant’s writings on geography edited by stuart elden and eduardo mendieta, reading kant’s geography, seem to be of two minds about this issue: see elden and mendieta (2011). 6 mills demonstrates why this distinction between kant’s central and peripheral writings is unjustified most effectively in his “kant’s untermenschen.” to restate his eloquent rendering of the problem very briefly: the central-peripheral distinction 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 thus, the supposedly neutral or systematic distinction between central and peripheral works of kant is dangerous for feminist aims, because it tends to hide the uglier aspects of kant’s philosophy and forecloses the opportunity to study them in depth. this then takes us further away from being able to recognize that in reproducing kant’s work in our own thought we may be reproducing some of the problems that kantian philosophy exhibits. feminist appropriations of kant have to make an important methodological decision, which, as i have shown, is fraught with many problems of its own. in what follows, i look at a number of major trends in feminist interpretations of kant’s work that redirect our focus exclusively to what is salvageable in kant’s work. while this methodology has its merits—as it is perfectly acceptable to pick what is useful in kant and leave the rest alone—it unfortunately also leads us to miss an important opportunity to address problems of sexism, racism, and eurocentrism head-on, and more often than not, this line of inquiry inadvertently has the effect of reconstructing an almost fictional kant or a piecemeal kantianism. in bernasconi’s terms, we do not know where the “real kant” would stand,7 even if we wanted to hold him accountable for all of his claims. “not throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and “reading kant against himself”: major trends in feminist appropriations of kant one line of feminist approaches is exemplified in positive appropriations of some kantian terms and positions, such as self-respect (hay 2013), rational selfhood (piper 1997), and moral and political ideal of character development (rumsey 1989) at the expense of kant’s more problematic claims. in her “development of character in kantian moral theory,” jean rumsey (1989, 261) relies on the distinction between kant’s intelligible and empirical accounts of character to argue that women’s subjugation is inconsistent with his ideal theory of moral and political development, and that kant’s views on women are not actually “kantian.” adrian piper’s (1997) famous essay “xenophobia and kantian rationalism” argues that kant’s conceptualization of rational selfhood allows us to diagnose and eventually resist xenophobic tendencies in our consciousness (22ff.). similarly, carol hay’s (2013) begs the question. when we make this distinction, we determine, from the beginning, that kant cannot be sexist or racist because of this distinction, and then we justify this distinction by means of arguing that kant is not sexist or racist (mills 2005b). 7 bernasconi points out the irony that, on the one hand, we have a real historical kant, who did make racist and sexist claims; on the other hand, we want to claim that the “real kant,” who is worthy of our scholarly attention, is exempt from the actual things that he did say (bernasconi 2003, 16ff.). 7 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 recent book, kantianism, liberalism, and feminism: resisting oppression, makes a convincing argument that if we put aside kant’s peripheral writings on the secondary status of women in civil society or on women’s inability to fully develop their rational capacities, then the kantian liberal notion of self-respect offers us an important tool to resist and combat sexist oppression (50ff.). all of these approaches explicitly bracket and therefore choose not to engage kant’s more problematic claims regarding racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies, treating them to be inconsistent with his ideal theory (rumsey 1989), irrelevant to his theory of cognition (piper 1997), peripheral to his moral-political philosophy or a part of the historical limitations of the man (hay 2013). thus, they can be grouped under the category of “not throwing out the baby [i.e., kant] with the bathwater,” for they buy into the distinction between kant’s central and peripheral writings, constructing a form of kantianism, either altogether or in large part, as devoid of the problems of sexism and racism.8 a second set of feminist authors occupy a more ambiguous position regarding kant’s sexism or heterosexism in that they do not deny these problems in order to make room for a positive appropriation; rather, they urge us to propose feminist revisions of some key kantian concepts either by exploring other unproblematic threads or by proposing a gender-neutral form of kantianism.9 rae langton recounts the story of kant’s misogynistic treatment of his contemporary maria von herbert, calling this “the severe kant” of the groundwork, who is partly responsible for equating women like von herbert with mere things (langton 1992). as opposed to this misogynist “severe kant,” langton urges us to turn to what she terms the “sane kant,” whose more feminist-friendly views on embodiment, cultivation of emotions, and genuine friendship can be found in the doctrine of virtue (501). barbara herman (1993) wonders if it is worth thinking about kant on sex and marriage, pointing out the surprising congruity between his arguments and contemporary feminist positions against sexual objectification. herman admits the 8 for a diverse set of positive appropriations of kant’s philosophy that urge us to disregard or revise its problematic tendencies, see nagl-decakal (1997) adopting kant for care ethics; wilson (1997) using him for ecofeminist approaches; kneller (1997) and moen (1997) using elements of the third critique; mikkola (2011) urging us to dismiss severe feminist critiques of kant on account of the fact that he is inconsistent at best. 9 for other examples of such feminist appropriations, see baron (1997) correcting the kantian notion of emotional detachment in ethics; korsgaard (1996) prioritizing a gender-equal or gender-neutral ideal of kingdom of ends and (1992) for a genderneutral ideal of friendship; langton (1995) on analyzing sexual solipsism and objectification on kantian grounds. 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 oddity of turning to kant for a feminist rethinking of sex and marriage, given “his misogyny, his disdain for the body, and his unhappy status as the modern moral philosopher feminists find most objectionable;” but she wishes to force kant “to go beyond what he otherwise casually accepts” (51). lastly, helga varden (2006) reconstructs a kantian conception of rightful sexual relations, including sex in heterosexual and gay marriages, and prostitution, based on his relational account of justice. these approaches can all be summarized as “reading kant against himself.” i do not wish to dismiss any of these reconstructions of kant; from a pluralistic perspective, all of the approaches i have outlined here are all authentically kantian and feminist. however, because all of these approaches take inspiration from some kantian argument or term but do not deal with kant in a wholesale way, i will suggest in the remainder of the essay that we call them kantinspired, not kantian, feminisms, and that we reserve the term “kantian” for a comprehensive account of all of kant’s work. an important reason to do so comes from how kant constructed his critical system of philosophy; as i have mentioned earlier, he views his entire philosophical system to be enveloped in the question “what is the human being?” additionally, as well established in his writings on anthropology, the kantian answer to this question is thoroughly gendered, racialized, and eurocentric. for this reason, a genderor race-neutral construction of human nature first and foremost goes against what kant himself understood by this question (kleingeld 1993, 145; mills 2005b, 33ff.). thus, we cannot properly or straightforwardly call our position kantian in this comprehensive sense if we are answering a question about morality or politics independently of the question of what the human being is for kant. we can at best be kant-inspired if we are using a handful of kantian concepts to reconstruct a tenable ethical or political position today. one may suggest that such a comprehensively kantian position is found in varden’s (2015) more recent piece, “kant and women.” varden argues, via an indepth analysis of both kant’s central and peripheral writings, that the kantian philosophy does not collapse in contradiction between egalitarianism and sexism. rather, the critical system overall gives us both a descriptive account of human nature and a normative account of moral ideals as well as the argument that the latter should correct the former–even if in kant’s own thought it did not (20ff., 33).10 her argument advances the current feminist readings, for she focuses not only on gender but also on sexuality as well as their intersections. she defends a better 10 note that varden’s more nuanced reading is almost diametrically opposed by another teleological reading by inder marwah (2013); her argument that kant’s central works are written in a gender-neutral language is also contested earlier by pauline kleingeld (1993). 9 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 kantianism on the grounds that kant “made sure that his philosophical system safeguarded against perpetuating such prejudicial, rationalized mistakes through his conception of morally justifiable construction of related legal-political institutions” (varden 2015, 19). however, in the end, varden too relies on the distinction between ideal and descriptive theories of morals in kant and on the primacy of the former over the latter, a move that implicitly and sometimes not so implicitly forecloses the possibility of analyzing the more complex forms that misogyny and sexism take in kant’s writings and how these problems may spill over to our present. that is, when we subordinate his descriptive (in this case, sexist) claims to the normative claims in the text, we are already allowing kant to get away with a lot, since now we cannot analyze what power those descriptive claims held for kantianism and for us. a number of defensive moves in varden’s essay exemplifies this issue: she calls for a “sympathetic” reading of kant’s problematic claims (14, 22) and tells us to “cut him some slack” by pointing out his oppressive-traditional context and his inexperience with women (23, 27); she further argues that kant “meant no offense” (23ff.) and that his seemingly disparaging remarks about women’s emotional capacities were in fact meant to flatter the social intelligence and power of women (12, 13, 16ff., 22). thus, although varden’s feminist appropriation of kant is comprehensive and much more nuanced than the earlier ones i described here, it also originates out of the motivation, in her own terms, to “resist the conclusion that kant was an incorrigible sexist” (22), implying that we should be more sympathetic to kant if we want to employ his ideas for feminist purposes, for otherwise we would need to dismiss him out of hand. in sum, although varden’s version does sound like a better form of kantianism, i would suggest that we cannot hope to get there so quickly, especially if we immediately insist on “cutting him some slack,” as she does. this brings me to the second reason why kantian feminism would be well served if it became comprehensive in a way to emphasize the continuity between our problems and kant’s. a common tendency in the secondary feminist literature on kant that i have surveyed here is to suggest, if indirectly, that anything useful for feminist purposes, for example, arguments against sexual objectification and oppression, for legal egalitarianism, or for the importance of friendship, is kantian, while maintaining that anything distasteful, such as misogyny or racism, is not truly “kantian.” in brief, the effect of this kind of feminist appropriations ends up being more celebratory than critical of kant’s ideas. this is what freeland (2000) calls an ideological position regarding the canon; she warns us feminist interpreters against situating “ourselves as inheritors of a valuable tradition, one from which we seek justifications and legitimacy, [which] may require us to consider it more valuable than it actually is. we may be too respectful toward our forefathers (or masters) and toward canons of historical scholarship about them (such as employing the principle 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 of charity [or i would add, cutting him some slack])” (389).11 as a result, some feminists argue that we cannot use kant for feminist purposes at all, because his views are imbued with problems that undermine even the most egalitarian commitments of his philosophy (schröder 1997). relatedly, freeland (2000) argues that all feminist appropriation is ideology, buying into the (false) idea that canonical figures are good. indeed, when we call only good things such as egalitarianism or resisting oppression kantian and when we claim that things like racism and sexism are not kantian or negated by other parts of kantian philosophy, then it does sound like we are ideologically inclined to cut kant some slack no matter what. i nevertheless resist the skeptical position that kant is not at all useful for feminism or that all uses of kant lapses into ideology in freeland’s sense of the term. i will show in what follows that we have the resources to combat this skeptical position and that furthermore we have valid philosophical and political reasons for continuing to push for a more comprehensive kantian feminism. i thus join varden and others in thinking that a better kantianism or a better kantian feminism must be possible; i differ in how we can go about reconstructing it. the question of how to appropriate kantianism for feminist purposes can be formulated in audre lorde’s (2007) terms as one of whether or not the master’s tools can really dismantle the master’s house. can the master’s tools really dismantle the master’s house? in her speech entitled “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” lorde claims that unless we are willing to take a good critical look at ourselves and at the ways in which we consciously and unconsciously might have inherited the patterns and tools of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy, we cannot hope to fully dismantle the various forms of oppressions in our own lives (lorde 2007, 112ff.). this claim is important for my purposes, since kant’s works, for better or for worse, are considered to be master texts of western philosophy, with all the resonances that the term “master” has: they are master texts in the sense of inaugurating and legitimizing a certain way of doing philosophy, they designate certain social identities as masters, and they are currently revered and reproduced in our field with more frequency than others. at the same time, these texts provide major tools for critique, and to that extent, as spivak (1999) puts it, “our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by kant for us to be able to reject [him] as a motivated imperialist” (6). here i will modify lorde’s (2007) claim slightly and argue that the master’s tools alone will never dismantle the master’s house, that we also need to account for the effects of the master’s tools on our own thinking before we 11 also see mills (2005a). 11 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 can reclaim these tools.12 we first need to acknowledge the problems of the entire house, analyze how these tools may have shaped our world and worldview, and critique the tools as well as the house. from this position, we can continue to dismantle the old house and rebuild a more inhabitable place.13 it proves difficult to detach the kantian tools from the entirety of the edifice, and this will give us more reasons to be skeptical of using kant for feminism. for instance, feminist critiques point out that the kantian ideal of moral autonomy portrays a gendered, male-centric view of morality and ethical relations (jaggar 1983; lloyd 1986); queer theorists argue that his argument for the seemingly egalitarian marriage contract supports and reproduces a heteronormative understanding of sexual intimacy (floyd 2009); and political philosophers show that his ideal of civilization that prioritizes arts, letters, and commerce at the expense of other forms of living envisions a eurocentric view of culture (serequeberhan 1996; zöller 2011). now, if we want to reclaim any of these kantian notions such as autonomy, marriage, or culture, we need to grant that these very tools are often implicated in the construction of the eurocentric, imperialist, white supremacist, and hetero-patriarchal house in which we live, and that therefore they cannot be unambiguously or unproblematically appropriated for feminist concerns. at any rate, using kant for feminist purposes comes with a problematic baggage, and we need to think carefully about what we want to do with this baggage. the feminist approaches that i have outlined thus far are not unaware of this baggage; they choose to take what is useful for contemporary feminist and antiracist concerns and leave the rest untouched and unanalyzed. while this pragmatic orientation has been useful, i am worried that without paying particular attention to the ways in which the kantian tools are structurally interconnected, we inadvertently risk erasing, downplaying, disavowing the fullness of kant’s work, or worse, we might end up merely remodeling the master’s house as opposed to dismantling it entirely. in this sense, then, feminists cannot rely on the kantian tools alone to dismantle oppression; we need to take a good critical look at the effects of these tools on our own thinking as well. 12lorde is obviously talking about the white feminist establishment and how its very tools (white supremacist heteronormativity) will not dismantle the patriarchy. my point is slightly different and refers to method of appropriating master’s texts for dismantling current structures of western philosophy and our lives. i thank lucius outlaw for pushing me to clarify this point regarding lorde’s claim. 13 i take charles mills’s more recent work on black radical kantianism (mills 2017) to be this kind of rebuilding that can only come after first acknowledging the problems of kantianism, as his earlier work did. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 one way to minimize the risk of merely remodeling the master’s house, as well as to heed lorde’s (2007) warning, would be to follow mills’ suggestion that we re-read kant’s writings with the realization that we are presented with two different aspects of the same theory and that therefore his racism is not contrary to his egalitarianism but forms a complementary whole (mills 2005b, 170ff.). indeed, bypassing the sexism, racism, and orientalism located in his texts in favor of an ideal theory has the effect of severing the link between kantian arguments for white supremacy, patriarchy, eurocentrism and our contemporary liberal sensibilities and positions. to restore this connection, we need to explicitly deal with the fact that in one and the same breath kant’s work articulates autonomy and racial hierarchy, and analyze how this has logically and historically been possible. in the remainder of this essay, i will introduce another necessary feminist orientation toward kant’s work that both admits the problems that kantianism exhibits and appropriates him for enabling a constructive complicity between our position and his thought. acknowledging that kantianism can mean both a racist, sexist, eurocentric worldview and an egalitarian system, to put it somewhat directly, does not have to be an obstacle against taking him up for feminist or anti-racist aims. i suggest that we redirect our focus from what is salvageable (the good kant or kantianism) to inheriting kantianism as a whole, and that we make kant’s texts ours (i.e., feminists’) by reclaiming them in their entirety, the good, the bad, and the ugly. to be a kantian feminist in this comprehensive sense that i advocate, then, requires that we pursue the question of the human being as it figures and shapes the rest of kant’s philosophy; such a pursuit has the additional benefit of offering a form of kantian feminism that is intersectional.14 the origins of such a comprehensive methodology, albeit with different goals and stakes, are located in spivak’s (1999) complicit construction of kant’s critique of judgment. enabling a constructive complicity in feminist readings of kant: the case of spivak in her critique of postcolonial reason: toward a vanishing present, spivak (1999) offers a re-reading of what she calls the three wise men of europe, namely, 14 with the exception of herman (1993) and varden (2006, 2015), the feminist interpretations that i have analyzed focus only on one aspect of oppression, mainly on gender or sexuality, without attending to the ways in which kant’s texts enact an intersectional account of identity and oppression. if the term “kantian” will have to mean a systematic or comprehensive construction of kant’s arguments, then subjecthood as such in a kantian system must be grounded not only on maleness but also on whiteness and europeanness. this is another way to heed lorde’s warning about the pitfalls of white feminism. 13 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 kant, hegel and marx, with a view to show that they are not merely transparent or motivated repositories of ideas but are also remote discursive precursors of postcolonial theory. she undertakes this reading with the hope that it will do more than merely point out their imperialism and that it will find a reader who will discover a “constructive rather than a disabling [sic] complicity between our positions and theirs, for there often seems no choice between excuses and accusations” (3–4, emphasis added). the disabling, or rather the discouraging, complicity she talks about is the result of a strategy of reading canonical philosophical figures in a way that merely accuses them of being racist, sexist, or imperialist. for instance, such a reading would either excuse kant for being limited to his historical circumstances or accuse him of initiating the current systemic oppressions that we experience now. either way, they imply that there can be no productive engagement with the complexities of kantian thought because any engagement is doomed to get stuck between defensiveness and finger-pointing. constructive complicity approach, however, refuses this simplistic binary and argues for a more ambiguous position regarding the founding figures of western thought. rather than assuming that kant is incorrigible, spivak’s feminist and postcolonial reading of kant uses kantian philosophy to elaborate on the basic premise of postcolonial theory, namely, that the white upper-middle-class male subject of the global north is understood to be the subject of philosophy and how the noneuropean non-male subject was foreclosed from humanity, as if by a mere rhetorical gesture. by focusing on a seemingly accidental moment in a central text such as the critique of judgment, spivak provides a positive philosophical construction that traces a line of continuity and complicity between kant’s position and our postand neo-colonial present (9). spivak begins by arguing that kantian philosophy must be understood systematically and comprehensively, and that even a “critical” or “central” work such as the critique of judgment relies on arguments from the so-called peripheral writings on anthropology and history. more specifically, she analyzes a passage about the final purpose of human existence in the critique of judgment, where kant makes a remark about how difficult it is to know the purpose of the existence of human beings, “especially when it comes to the new hollanders or the fuegians” (kant 1998, ku 5: 378). she points out that if we bypass this remark as a minor rhetorical detail or just historical bias, we ignore and deny the ways in which kant’s text is grounded in a particular history and geography, namely that of europe, while purporting to a universal and all-inclusive subjectivity (spivak 1999, 16ff.). this is an important textual moment for spivak, since this is where the subject of philosophy and rationality is named by ejecting, by means of a passing remark, those who does not count as full persons. this claim about full personhood is repeated in and therefore continuous with kant’s purported peripheral anthropological writings as 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 well. thus, in the first place she thoroughly deconstructs the central-peripheral distinction. through spivak’s reading, we come to the realization that the most important kantian question, namely, the question of what the human being is, runs through and determines the entirety of kant’s corpus. her feminist appropriation of kant in this way exposes a certain geopolitical “norming of personhood” (mills 1997, 53ff.), that is, the allocation of more importance to some lives at the expense of others based on their geographical location and social identity. it bears repeating that she does not undertake this endeavor in order to merely blame kant or kantian philosophy; as she puts it, “ostentatiously to turn one’s back on, say, [kant], when so much of one’s critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history” (spivak 1999, 9). taking for granted that kant and kantianism have deeply shaped our present, spivak’s interpretation of this “wise man of europe” is systematic and teases out this important line of continuity about the notion of humanity between kantianism and postcolonial theory as well as between kant’s and our historical contexts. i cannot possibly give a full account of spivak’s (1999) appropriation of kant’s critique of judgment in her a critique of postcolonial reason, nor would that serve my aim here. her main goal is to trace the genealogy of contemporary postcolonial theory, which became complicit with european hegemony, back to kant, hegel, and marx. nonetheless, i take the following to be the major gain of spivak’s constructive complicity with, or a complicit construction of, kant’s work: she neither denies kant’s racism in order to use some of his tools such as autonomy, nor dismisses kant’s philosophical importance out of hand because kant doubts that indigenous lives have a purpose at all. instead, she offers a third, more ambiguous path, beyond a vacillation between a pure palatable kant or a piecemeal kantianism. the lesson that i draw from spivak’s complicit construction or constructively complicit reading, then, is that in order to make these “master texts our servants once more” in her words, or in this particular case, in order to make kant truly useful for feminist, antiracist, anti-colonial theorizing, we need to look at his text in its entirety, including its seemingly accidental or minor moments in which kant makes problematic claims about women and nonwhite or non-european peoples. enabling a constructive complicity with kant requires that we go back to these “master” texts of philosophy, not only in order to salvage bits and pieces that are useful, but also and more importantly in order to show our determination by and complicity with them. a feminist appropriation of kantian philosophy like spivak’s shows us that the more we can question and problematize the neat but ultimately false choice between a neutral, good, pure kantianism and a problematic kant, the better we will be able to critique our present and diagnose the extent to which our current philosophical and political commitments may bear implicit or 15 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 explicit traces of racism, sexism, and eurocentrism as enacted by a certain kantianism itself. in brief, it is despite and especially because of all their problems that the canonical texts such as kant’s can serve critical feminist thought today. in what follows, i will tease out this point about the continuity between kantian problems and our contemporary issues in more detail. toward a constructive complicity with the good, the bad (and the ugly) in kant’s work as feminists and critical philosophers of race in thinking about these issues have taught us, when we unproblematically replace “men” with “all of human kind” in canonical works (as opposed to reading them as just men or just white, western european, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men of upper-middle class), then we are in fact distorting and misrepresenting these texts and their contemporary legacies. we are making it impossible to recognize the link between the canon and the present and moving away from taking responsibility for the oppressive structures that the arguments of these canonical texts erect and support. kleingeld (1993) suggests that the so-called “contradictions” regarding sex and gender in kant’s writings can be productive for feminist aims (145). similarly, bernasconi (2003) argues that these contradictions regarding race and ethnicity will perhaps say something interesting about today’s cosmopolitan ideas, and it will remind us to be vigilant in assuming that cosmopolitanism is automatically race-inclusive or race-less (18). in what follows, i will show by means of concrete examples that a productive way to engage with these supposed contradictions between a hierarchical notion of humanity and egalitarianism as well as their legacies in our thinking today would need to reclaim the whole of kant’s thought and not downplay, nor dismiss, nor pass over quickly the problematic aspects. for we all know these contradictions exemplified in kant’s work are in fact representative of the larger contradictions of our lives today and not so easily undone. in order to develop a constructive complicity approach to kant’s work, then, we must start with the premise that kantianism includes the ideal of kingdom of ends as well as the beginnings of scientific and cultural racisms, a reinforcement of patriarchy, and a casual eurocentrism. this requires that we enact a complicity with the good, the bad, and the ugly of kantianism. put very briefly, what i mean by constructive complicity in appropriations of kantianism amounts to first acknowledging and accounting for kant’s arguments for the second-class status of women and people of color in his critical system overall. we must pay attention to just what we are doing when we are reproducing kant’s work by asking ourselves if our reconstruction of kantianism has the effect of foreclosing the possibility of talking about the more problematic aspects of his thought such as racism, sexism, and eurocentrism, or if it leads us to evade 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 responsibility for the problems of the master’s house in which we live. the best thing for which the kantian feminist can hope, then, is not to merely remodel—or worse, to inadvertently reinforce the foundations of—the master’s house. more specifically, following spivak’s (1999) constructive complicity approach in re-reading kant and owning up to kant’s thought as a whole today would lead to recognizing the full legacy of kantianism in the present. while this is not a complete list, here are some concrete ways in which we can enable a constructive complicity between kantianism and the current race and gender gap in philosophy, its exclusive canon formation, and the supposed contradictions between racism and liberalism: 1. enabling a constructive complicity between kantianism and philosophy’s demographic challenge: it would behoove us to consider what linda alcoff (2013) termed “philosophy’s demographic challenge,” namely, the current gender, race, and ethnicity imbalance in professional philosophy as a continuation of the claims made by the canonical figures of western philosophy (21). this problem can be understood particularly as concrete instantiations of kant’s arguments that it is unnatural for a woman to be a philosopher, or that black people, because they are black, say stupid things and have no intellectual abilities. we can then begin to see some of the data concerning the gender and race gap in academia, especially in the discipline of philosophy, as a direct legacy of kant’s claim that a woman whose head is full of greek goes against her nature or of his agreement with hume that people of african descent are no more than parrots (kant 2007, gse 2: 229ff., 2: 253). according to this constructive complicity approach, then, an important reason why philosophy has a demographic challenge is that we may have inherited from kant, even in our explicit disavowals, the hierarchical or exclusionary ways to think about who can be a philosopher or what philosophy is. we can trace this very informative line of continuity, however, only when we take responsibility for the uglier parts of kant’s claims and assume a position of complicity with them. kant very likely did not mean “all human beings” when he employed the german word for mankind [mensch] or when he used masculine pronouns. we can of course now extend some of these claims to be more inclusive, but we need to do so by first going over kant’s usage of the term, that is, without erasing its historically exclusionary meaning and the contemporary resonances of this meaning. hearing these contemporary resonances allows to give an account of the pervasive “culture of justification in professional philosophy” in kristi dotson’s (2012) terms as a continuation of those very kantian claims about the innate rational capacities of certain kinds of people. we can also understand bill lawson’s (2012) point about 17 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 how the idea of the intellectual inferiority of blacks still haunts the achievements of black scholars in the discipline of philosophy (192). 2. enabling a constructive complicity between kantianism and canon formation in philosophy: when we include kant’s full body of work rather than dismissing his remarks about non-europeans as minor rhetorical details, we will be able to diagnose and better understand how kantianism shaped philosophical thinking since the 1780s in the global north, i.e., the canon of (western) philosophy, in a very particular way. for instance, kant remarks in the introduction to the critique of pure reason that egyptians were merely groping about concepts of mathematics until the greeks came to the scene and turned it into a systematic science (kant 2000, bxvi). this claim legitimizes only a certain kind of theoretical inquiry, that is, a systematic one, as scientific and therefore philosophical. following this claim and through extensive historical analysis, peter park’s (2013) recent book demonstrates in a striking way kant’s major role in defining what counts as philosophy or who counts as philosophers today. park shows that it was kant’s immediate successors who included only systematic, scientific, and therefore western thinking in philosophy textbooks, and they did so by following kant’s remarks about the nature of “genuine” philosophy as systematic. taking a closer look at kant’s notion of “system” or “science” and at how these notions are connected to the idea of the “west” and philosophy, then, no matter how unpalatable we find it, will be helpful for diagnosing the ways in which kantianism gave rise to and is complicit with an exclusive understanding of the philosophical canon then and now (park 2013, 27). 3. enabling a constructive complicity between kantianism and (neo)liberalism/(neo)racism: it is no secret any longer that kant was among the first thinkers who helped to create and solidify a scientific notion of race (bernasconi 2001, 11ff.). additionally, his views on civilization center around european ways of living and being. thus, he is crucial to race-thinking in terms of both eurocentrism and a certain scientism. an intersectional feminist appropriation of kant that investigates the link between scientific racism and cultural supremacy together with kant’s versions of racism will be able to trace the historical continuity between kant and the present. in this way, we will find valuable tools for diagnosing and working through the rise of white supremacy in europe and the us today in the midst of ostensible liberal democracies. as étienne balibar (1991) points out, ever since we supposedly left behind scientific or biological racism, a somewhat new form of racism, namely, the idea that certain cultures and ways of living are incompatible with and inferior to european or 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 american ideals of freedom, has emerged as its replacement; in this way, culture has become the new race for liberal thought. this is evidenced by the rise of islamophobia and anti-immigration policies in europe as well as in the us, where the rhetoric about the incommensurability of the culture and practices of muslims and immigrants have been repeatedly used to bolster this “neoracism,” not only by right-wing conservatives but also by liberals. relatedly, in today’s mainstream liberal political theory, it is perfectly acceptable to explain away global economic inequalities in terms of “a culture of poverty,” that is, some culture’s inherent lack of ability or talent, or as an entire continent’s haplessness and “resource curse.”15 because these claims find an uncontested place in liberal thinking today, we cannot easily presume that we left behind problems of eurocentrism or western white superiority that kant’s work exemplifies. drawing a line of continuity between kant’s claims about tahitians’ lack of rational abilities, south sea islander’s laziness, africans’ lack of talents, and current neoliberal ideologies will be useful for being able to identify the neo-racism implicit in certain strands of global economic and political liberalism. on this note, i also suggest that every time we teach kant’s groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, we teach it alongside his views on women and people of color. we should make the so-called tensions or contradictions between universalism and sexism/racism explicit and clear to our students without trying to excuse, erase, or downplay them. furthermore, rather than trying to show a way out of these problems, let us first invite our students to appreciate them as important philosophical and political problems. allowing our students to embrace the difficulties surrounding ethical and political situations is in fact an important pedagogical lesson that will prepare them to develop complex positions: in this way, they will be able to analyze why there are still very few women in upper-level management in any given institution, how the declaration that all men are created equal went hand in hand with slavery for almost a century, or how a liberal constitution committed to the right to a fair trial for all citizens can coexist with a disproportionate number of incarcerated black people in the contemporary us. lingering on these so-called tensions of liberalism will yield a deeper understanding of how, as sheth (2015) puts it, (neo)liberalism and racism are wed. conclusion on the one hand, kant’s name is rightly associated with the ideals of egalitarianism, autonomy, and self-respect, and feminists have been returning to 15 for the resurgence of “culture of poverty” in political thought, see small, harding, and lamont (2010); on the origins of the “resource curse of africa” and its critique, see respectively ajei and flikschuh (2014) and huntington (1991). 19 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 these kantian concepts as they see fit. on the other hand, kant’s work also helped establish and gave credence to various forms of racism, including scientific and cultural ones, exhibited a casual yet dangerous misogyny, and legitimized the construction of the philosophical canon as exclusively western and european. for these reasons, tackling these problems in the context of kant scholarship should also be a feminist concern. insofar as kantianism as a philosophical system is figured by the question of the nature of the human being, and insofar as kant’s own answer to this question was racialized and gendered, then the kantian house to which we want to give a feminist make-over has some structural issues that we also need to take up. in short, using kant for feminist work always comes with baggage; while one way to deal with this baggage is to ignore it and focus on instead what is useful, here i have offered another necessary way that explicitly traces a line of continuity between this baggage and our contemporary problems. i am convinced that despite our good will and best efforts, none of us can ever be safeguarded from consciously or unconsciously reproducing in our lives and work the sexist, racist, and eurocentric structures and tendencies that coexisted with and are implicated in the tools that we want to salvage from kant. this is why i suggest that we confront the kantian arguments about them head-on and inherit these arguments as a fundamental part of our own thinking and situation, rather than try to dismiss or downplay their influence on the kantian notions that we do want to reclaim. as bernasconi (2003) suggests, if one wants to address (and i would add diagnose and combat) racism, then investigating kant’s racism in its coexistence with his commitment to various liberal ideas such as equality, freedom, and cosmopolitanism would be a good place to start (17). a scientific as well as a cultural racism, an overt eurocentrism, and patriarchal-misogynistic arguments existed side by side with kant’s commitment to egalitarianism, just as they may exist side by side with our liberal sensibilities and philosophico-political commitments today. we should therefore take care not to sever the important connection between the canon and our philosophical and political sensibilities, for we cannot presume that our work is exempt from sexism and racism just because we use gender-neutral pronouns, explicitly denounce the biological hierarchy of races, or do not overtly proclaim other ways of doing philosophy to be inferior. acknowledging kant’s racism or misogyny does not mean that a kantian antiracism or feminism is impossible; furthermore, by first taking responsibility for the kantian edifice as a whole, we can arrive at a kantian feminism that is more nuanced and responsive to the complexities of structural oppression. i suggest that each time we write on kant we clarify our standpoint and methodology without committing to the ideology that kantianism will be immediately good. that is, a feminist appropriation does not need to reconstruct an ethically or politically pure kantianism, for such a reconstruction of the “feminist-friendly,” “real,” or “sane” 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [2018], iss. 1, art. 3 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/3 kant has the effect of suggesting that we have already left behind the “insanity” that was racism, sexism, or european supremacy. the question of whether or not we really left these problems behind is exactly the question on the table for intersectional feminists. as spivak shows us, while acknowledging kant’s foreclosure of non-european non-male subject from rationality does implicate him in imperialist thinking, it does not make kantian philosophy useless for postcolonial theory. on the contrary, this approach situates him as a discursive precursor to any form of postcolonial critique and makes him newly relevant for our present moment. we should therefore take care not to foreclose the possibility of using kantianism to refer to arguments about the natural inequality of the sexes, races, and ethnicities, so that we can recognize, trace, and criticize his role in articulating and supporting contemporary political and philosophical problems, including but not limited to philosophy’s demographic challenge, the exclusivity of philosophical canon formation, and neoracism on the surge, as i have shown. our modern political and philosophical sensibilities are indebted to kant. just as kant has strains within his philosophy that (seem to) run contrary to or undermine these liberal sensibilities or commitments, so too do we today. just as his philosophical commitments may have determined the limits of who can be a good philosopher or what counts as good philosophy, so too do ours today. i have suggested that we offer a construction of all of kant’s work, without apologizing for or excusing him or without rushing to a better kantianism. this would mean taking into account kant’s answer to the question of what the human being is, together with the resonance of this answer today, when we reproduce his work. let us inherit even the more problematic aspects of kantianism as our own issues, diagnose the 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press. varden, helga. 2006. “a kantian conception of rightful sexual relations: sex, (gay) marriage, and prostitution.” social philosophy today 22: 199–218. ———. 2015. “kant and women.” pacific philosophical quarterly 97 (2): 1–42. wilson, holly. 1997. “rethinking kant from the perspective of ecofeminism.” in feminist interpretations of immanuel kant, edited by robin may schott, 373– 400. university park: pennsylvania state university press. wood, allen. 1999. kant’s ethical thought. new york: cambridge university press. zöller, günter. 2011. “kant’s political anthropology.” kant yearbook 3:131–162. dilek huseyinzadegan is an assistant professor of philosophy, affiliated faculty of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and of the program in global and postcolonial studies at emory university. her current research interests include social and political philosophy, kant and german idealism, feminist philosophies, and critical philosophy of race. 25 huseyinzadegan: for what can the kantian feminist hope? published by scholarship@western, 2018 feminist philosophy quarterly 2018 for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon dilek huseyinzadegan recommended citation for what can the kantian feminist hope? constructive complicity in appropriations of the canon are second person needs ‘burdened virtues’?: exploring the risks and rewards of caring feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 3 article 4 2017 are second person needs ‘burdened virtues’?: exploring the risks and rewards of caring katharine l. wolfe st. lawrence university, kwolfe@stlawu.edu recommended citation wolfe, katharine l.. 2017. "are second person needs ‘burdened virtues’?: exploring the risks and rewards of caring."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (3). article 4. doi:0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4. are second-person needs ‘burdened virtues’? exploring the risks and rewards of caring1 katharine wolfe abstract this essay contributes to the ethics of vulnerability and to the tradition of feminist care ethics by introducing the notion of second-person needs. employing the work of annette baier, who argues that we are all ‘second persons’ insofar as personhood arises through a childhood in the care of others, it draws attention to the needs that are illuminated when we approach ourselves and others as second persons, and makes a case for the moral import of second-person needs. in drawing from and critically responding to lisa tessman’s concept of ‘burdened virtues,’ it also adds to a growing field of ethical work on moral damage. in particular, this paper reminds readers of the benefits of the virtue of sensitivity and attention to other’s suffering, without ignoring the toll that it can extract. keywords: feminism, ethics, vulnerability, need, second-person needs, burdened virtues in “cartesian persons,” annette baier uses the term ‘second persons’ to capture a general truth about human dependency and relational life: we are all ‘second persons’ before we are ‘first’ persons. baier explains: “my first concept of myself is as the referent of ‘you,’ spoken by someone whom i will address as ‘you.’ . . . the second person, the pronoun of mutual address and recognition, introduces us to the first and third” (baier 1981, 186). the ‘second person’ is the mode of address through which we approach another not as ‘he,’ ‘she,’ an object or as an ‘it,’ but as a ‘you,’ that is, as a subject in relation to ourselves. to address another in the second person is to take up a relational attitude not only to that other but also to oneself; another is a ‘you’ for me only insofar as i am also a ‘you’ for another. 1 a draft version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the new york society for women in philosophy in june 2016, where i received powerful and provocative feedback from those in attendance. i owe my gratitude to these thoughtful commentators, as well as to the insightful referees who reviewed this essay anonymously for feminist philosophical quarterly. 1 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 claudia rankine’s citizen: an american lyric illustrates the relational power of the second-person mode of address. by writing in the second person, rankine moves her readers from a standpoint of detached judgment concerning microaggression and systematic racism to one of personal investment and identification: you are twelve attending sts. philip and james school on white plains road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written. . . . the girl is catholic with waist-length brown hair. you can’t remember her name: mary? catherine? you never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person. you assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person. sister evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy mary catherine’s answers. sister evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there. (rankine 2014, 5–6) rankine’s mode of address appeals to her reader to put herself into the place of the young black girl in this catholic schoolroom, and not to stand objectively apart from the experience in a cold, objectively evaluative posture. further illustrating the relational nature of the second-person mode of address, rankine is unable to use the second-person standpoint as a rhetorical device without situating herself, either implicitly or explicitly, in relationship to the addressee. this paper argues that being second persons means having a unique set of vulnerabilities and, among these vulnerabilities, a distinctive set of needs. i call these needs ‘second-person needs.’ second-person needs express those aspects of our own good that are inseparably entwined with the good of others. secondperson needs occur when others’ needs for care give rise to corresponding needs of one’s own to care for them. in this way, second-person needs express our deep relational interdependency: the entwinement of our welfare with the welfare of others makes responsiveness to others’ needs an urgent and dire part of our own good.2 working from within the wider framework of an ethics of vulnerability 2 i develop the concept of second-person needs as a form of vulnerability in my 2016 article, “together in need: relational selfhood, vulnerability to harm, and enriching attachments” (southern journal of philosophy 54 (1): 129–148). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 informed by feminist care ethics, this paper also responds to lisa tessman’s alarm call regarding the moral damage done by ‘burdened virtues’ in oppressive climates. while virtues are typically dispositions that aid in our own flourishing, and thus have a central role in ethics understood, in the aristotelian sense, as the art of living well, tessman’s burdened virtues (2005) argues that there are some peculiar virtues that compromise the well-being of the one who has them at the same time that they may be ethically required of us all. i argue that some second-person needs are virtuous proclivities, developed through caring relations to others and sensitivity and attention to their suffering. yet second-person needs are also vulnerabilities that can lead to devastating harm if neglected or abused, making them seemingly paradigmatic ‘burdened virtues’ in tessman’s sense. this risk is amplified when the care for others that these needs express and enact is itself uncared for in turn; that is, when second-person needs and the ethical appeals they make are unacknowledged and unsupported. indeed, insofar as second-person needs express a deep care for others that binds one’s own welfare to theirs, the term ‘burdened’ could perhaps not be any more appropriately applied. one of the meanings of the word ‘care’ refers to being in a burdened state of mind, one of anxiety, fear, doubt, or concern. yet, while it is undeniably painful to have a connected sense of self in a context where there is little or no social and political support for relational investments and where suffering is widespread and rampant, i widen tessman’s lenses on how oppression can undermine flourishing by contending that it is even more devastating to one’s flourishing to have oppression succeed at severing the ties to others that allow one to experience second-person needs, even in an unjust and oppressive climate, than it is to maintain these embodied forms of connectedness. moreover, i insist that second-person needs often contribute to one’s flourishing despite their risks. virtue and vulnerability in showing that another’s good can also be an integral part of one’s own, second-person needs confound individualistic thinking about human welfare. these needs are a testament to a relational dimension of human flourishing in which, in the words of alasdair macintyre, “goods . . . are neither mine-rather-than-others’ nor others’-rather-than-mine, but instead . . . can only be mine insofar as they are those of others” (macintyre 1999, 119). insofar as second-person needs express the extent to which one’s own good depends on the good of others, second-person needs are also a testament to the moral capacity for care. the moral capacity for care is, as sarah clark miller explains, “the distinctive ability to adopt and advance another person’s ends as one’s own,” a capacity that, according to miller, deserves to be esteemed just as much as the capacity for self-determination deserves to be respected (miller 2012, 77–78). likewise, second-person needs express what eva 3 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 kittay has called the virtue of care: “a disposition . . . in which ‘a shift takes place from the investment in our life situation to the situation of the other, the one in need’” (kittay 2001, 260; quoting gastmans, dierckx de casterlé, and schotsmans 1998, 53). because second-person needs speak to an investment in others’ wellbeing so profound as to cause one’s own well-being to flourish or fall together with theirs, the one who experiences them is immediately and urgently moved by the interconnections between her own good and the good of others, unable to stand passively by as others suffer. in protecting the vulnerable, robert goodin overturns the contractual view of ethical obligation as arising from the commitments one makes to others. by attending to our special responsibilities towards our friends and family members, as well as others with whom we establish special relationships throughout the course of our lives, goodwin shows that vulnerability, and not self-assumed obligation, is the source of our ethical responsibilities (goodin 1985, xi). the special relationships we have with others make strong moral claims upon us, not because we have elected to enter into them voluntarily, but because our special relationships with others make them uniquely vulnerable to harm as a result of our actions or neglect. moreover, these special relationships often make us uniquely able to answer to others’ needs, protecting them from harm and/or exploitation. if vulnerability is the basis of ethical obligation, we, as members of a moral community able to think, sense, and feel the ethical appeal, cannot ignore the unique forms of vulnerability that arise from one’s ties to others. the concept of second-person needs highlights a very special form of relational vulnerability, the importance of which is often overlooked not only in moral theory but also in daily life and public policy making. having second-person needs heightens one’s vulnerability in the world, thus increasing one’s risk of harm and making demands on others to respond to needs one would not otherwise have—this is one way in which ‘second personhood’ makes ethical life more onerous.3 nonetheless, having 3 i believe that all second-person needs, just insofar as they are vulnerabilities to harm, make ethical demands. yet, as soran reader has argued, the one responding to second-person needs is also vulnerable, in that role, to being manipulated. thus, reader writes, “the moral agent’s skill includes the ability to judge in some cases that the right response to a claim of need is to challenge the claim—to question whether the satisfier is really needed at all” (reader 2007, 83). imagine here, for instance, the need to be needed, and the sense of vulnerability it might induce when someone for whom one has been caring no longer needs us (an example suggested by an anonymous reviewer of this article), the need for a chanel handbag, driven by a consumptive capitalist culture, or the psychological need to lord power over a third party in order to rebuild one’s ego after having been treated as subordinate 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 second-person needs also opens us to many of the unique rewards of relational life. moreover, these needs are expanded and strengthened through exercising the moral capacity, nay, the virtue, of care. in our current world of social and economic stratification, group oppression, and rampant individualism, we have an ethical responsibility to acknowledge second-person needs and the relationships from which they emerge, to care for second-person needs as they arise in others, and, in some cases, to make ourselves even more vulnerable to second-person needs than we may currently be by increasing our own sensitivity, receptivity, and ‘acknowledged dependency.’ i take the term ‘acknowledged dependency’ from alasdair macintyre. acknowledging one’s dependency means recognizing that protecting the welfare of others can go hand in hand with protecting oneself, as caring for another can also be an act of self-care. caring for another in need because they are in need, for macintyre, can also be an expression of the virtue of “just generosity” insofar as one gives to another on the basis of need, not proportional return (macintyre 1999, 121). yet to be virtuous, such an act of care cannot be merely rationally deduced. instead, it must also be motivated by an affective entwinement of one’s own good with that of another: one must be pained by another’s distress. such distress indicates the presence of a second-person need. when other-regarding interests are intimately entwined with self-regarding ones, they are often discounted as unethical. yet second-person needs defy any easy division between the good of the self and the good of others by challenging the self’s boundaries. while one might suspect that the strongest second-person needs will always be concerned with the welfare of those who are most near and dear to us, the testimonies of many holocaust rescuers, collected in gay block and malka drucker’s the rescuers, prove otherwise. ermine orsi testifies: “what i did during the war came naturally; because i had lost my mother i identified with the children who had sustained loss” (block and drucker 1992, 122). and helene jacobs: i remember seeing soldiers everywhere, and feeling offended that they were a part of my world. i feel there is no difference between the self and the world, and the nazis made it impossible for me to keep my world intact. . . . i am often asked how i had the strength to stand so firmly, in the face of such oneself. conversely, however, a morally appropriate response to another’s need cannot be paternalistic, unilaterally determining another’s needs and imposing that judgment without regard for the other’s protestations. as reader explains, “the moral agent must . . . steer a fine course between the scylla of manipulation and the charybdis of paternalism” (84). 5 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 risk, on the side of the persecuted jews. my answer is that i followed my drive for self-preservation. (150) jacobs adds, “even if many among us did not notice it at all and did not want to notice . . . it directly concerned us, even if it was not directed against us” (149). moreover, while the risks for the rescuers were great, so too were the rewards. as johtje vos reports, “if someone heard us talk today with some of those we saved, they would think we were being nostalgic, remembering a beautiful time. but there was something beautiful in it, because we were standing together, for whatever reason, totally together” (83). similarly, semmy riekert observes: we had many good things during the war. one thing we had that still exists, and that we have nowhere else with other people, is that all of us who worked together feel we belong together. i think now, why do i feel so well after coming home from being with people from the resistance? even if they do things i don’t like now, still i feel good because i trusted them with my life, and they trusted me. it’s a bond. . . . you have been one body. if you heard that one was caught it felt like your arm was cut off. (77) vulnerability’s demands in his recent dewey lecture, edward casey used the concept of secondperson needs that i have developed in my work to describe his complex life-long relationship to his sister, connie, who suffered from schizophrenia, while connecting it to the psychological practice of accompaniment: “a measure of how much i owe to my sister is the fact that her recent and sudden death left me bereft in a very special way: it made me realize how much i had come to need her—out of my own need to accompany her in her desperate life” (casey 2016, 84). in the field of psychosocial psychology, to ‘accompany’ another means to forego the safety of one’s separateness, and to share in another’s “fate for a while” (farmer 2013, 234; quoted in watkins 2015, 326). as mary watkins explains, “accompaniment demands our capacity and willingness to experience the pain and struggle of those we accompany” (327). speaking to accompaniment’s social and political relevance, she writes: too often when individuals and communities experience extremely difficult situations, others turn away with a blind eye. the initial insult is redoubled by others’ absence, by their failures of acknowledgment, empathy, and compassion. accompaniment can be a needed antidote to the injuries caused by others’ passive bystanding or active denial of the human suffering in their midst. while accompaniment cannot wipe away the pain born of traumatic 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 injuries—individual or collective—it can begin to set into motion needed processes of psychic and social restoration. the one who accompanies turns toward rather than away from those suffering. the accompanier sees and acknowledges seeing what others turn away from. the accompanier brings his presence to what is difficult, allowing it to affect him, to matter to him, to alter his course. (330) as casey captures, having second-person needs, which express a deep entwinement between one’s own good and the good of others, is one embodied way in which we accompany others throughout their trials in lives, and in which we share in their fate for a while. bound by the need to stand beside his sister through her trials, casey writes of connie: being part of her troubled life gave me an education of its own, fully as valuable as my extensive formal education in philosophy itself. it was an education in the range of suffering on the part of those diagnosed as psychotic or schizophrenic. the suffering was not only mental; it extended to every domain of life, physical (obesity is rampant among this population due to the side-effects of antipsychotic drugs) and economic (most are living on a skimpy ssi check of less than $1000 a month). and it included abusive treatment at the hands of uncaring caretakers. (84) connie’s vulnerabilities as one suffering from the mental, physical, economic, and interpersonal hardships that plague the mentally ill in the contemporary us are certainly different from those of the caring brother who accompanied her through these trials. yet casey’s second-person vulnerabilities—the vulnerabilities of one caring for a schizophrenic sister—are themselves a source of ethical demands, demands that call out to the larger interpersonal community for response. just as casey accompanies connie, others are called upon to accompany him through the trials and tribulations that arise as he travels this precarious course together with his sister, for, as eva kittay argues in love’s labor, all persons are entitled “to a socially supported situation in which one can give care without the caregiving becoming a liability to one’s own well-being” (kittay 1999, 66). moreover, it is such social support that enables the caregiver to perform the work of care well. indeed, if vulnerability is the very basis of our sense of ethical imperatives, no vulnerability—second-person or otherwise—can be devoid of an ethical charge. yet an ethics of vulnerability must be attentive not only to the harms done by failures to meet certain needs but also to the tolls extracted from those that attend to the needs of others. while having certain relational needs go unsatisfied can be utterly devastating, answering other such needs can be just as detrimental. 7 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 responding to other’s needs can become especially dangerous when relationships of responsibility are asymmetrical, with one party dehumanizing the other by exploiting his or her care to maintain an unjust relationship. a relational approach to need must be attuned to the vulnerabilities of those who extend care as well as those in need of it. while the ethical force of vulnerability is undeniable, who should respond to it and how they should respond are things that must be carefully weighed. kittay argues that both how one comes to be specially positioned to meet certain needs and how these needs arise matter to assessing one’s ethical responsibilities to respond to them, especially if answering some needs undermines one’s own moral worth (1999, 54–55). kittay points out, for instance, that one can become especially well positioned to meet the needs of others through injustice and oppression, and that injustice and oppression can give rise to exploitative needs. in toni morrison’s song of solomon, miss butler, the last surviving member of a family whose wealth was acquired through slavery, chooses to commit suicide rather than live a life in which the privileges slavery afforded her are lost. having servants numbered among these privileges. in her psychological inability to endure life without such privileges, which eventually leads to her suicide, miss butler shows a deep vulnerability to harm and a genuine need for the service of others, yet to treat this need as one to which a response is morally obligatory on the part of those best situated to answer it—the servants she and her family have long exploited—would be perverse. thus, kittay argues that “[a] critical understanding of needs requires not only a sensitivity to the neediness of another and an understanding of how another may be vulnerable to one’s own actions, but also a knowledge of when fulfilling those needs would morally diminish oneself or the other” (58). this does not mean, however, that one cannot still feel ethically moved by a need like miss butler’s, nor that such a sense of ethical motivation is a sign of moral ineptitude. in morrison’s novel, circe, the last remaining servant to miss butler, lingers out of satisfaction in bearing witness to the degeneration of her estate, not care for her former master. in contrast, however, in margaret walker’s jubilee, a slave carries home his mortally wounded ‘master,’ injured fighting in defense of slavery in the civil war. balancing his sense of responsibility with his sense of justice, he exclaims: “marster johnny dying and he can’t get home by hisself. i’ll carry him home to his maw where he can die in peace, but i sho ain’t staying there” (walker 2016, 222; quoted in kittay 60). while considerations of justice must amend a vulnerability-based approach to ethics in order to protect us against any requirements to abase ourselves, even those needs that can only be met through our own moral degradation can still make ethical appeals. in “two dogmas of moral theory?”, kittay writes: 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 i . . . deny the legitimacy of moral requirements that i have to care for someone when i am placed in that position through deeply unjust situations insofar as the person in that position is part of the unjust structure. but i do recognize that there can be a human being to human being relationship even in the condition of slavery, and that i can be called to respond to the person under my care qua another human being, rather than qua the oppressor who coerces my care. in such a situation, i may also have other obligations, not the least of which is an obligation to myself. looked at this way, some situations of coerced care can issue in conflicting obligations in which there is a moral remainder no matter what i do. (kittay 2016, 3) the impetus for kittay is not on denying the importance of forms of vulnerabilities that arise because of injustice, but rather on shifting our focus. the inclusion of considerations of justice within the mantle of a vulnerability-based approach to ethics requires just such a shift, a shift that draws our attention towards the one called to respond. many vulnerabilities demand that one prioritize the needs of others over one’s independent projects and goals, a demand that is part and parcel of their ethical force. but, explains kittay, “the obligation owed to a person who must defer her own interests and projects is that her responsibilities to another not be unjustly thrust upon her. to disregard such an obligation is to treat her as someone of lesser moral worth than either the person she cares for or those who placed her in the obliging position” (1999, 65). this edict protects our connectionbased equality, ensuring that we can give care without caregiving compromising our own well-being. when society fails to honor this appeal, it undermines the very core of a vulnerability-based ethics, for “the sanctity of the relation that makes possible all human connection is violated” (69). eudaimonistic judgments approaching second-person needs from the perspective of virtue ethics, we see an effect they have on one’s whole person that might otherwise go overlooked. that second-person vulnerabilities can be lived, and not just objectively characterized, as needs speaks to the power of these vulnerabilities to form dispositions that compel one to act contrary to one’s momentary desires or rational choices and to act instead in accordance with one’s deeper relational ties and ethical dispositions. while second-person vulnerabilities are thus no different from first person ones in their potential to make ethical appeals, we here begin to see an additional ethical dimension of second-person needs. developing certain secondperson needs is a largely overlooked part of cultivating one’s ethical character, albeit one that entails both risks and rewards. in her work on the emotions, itself a subject of critique in tessman’s 9 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 burdened virtues, martha nussbaum argues that feeling compassion as well as other emotions such as love and grief entails an implicit “eudaimonistic judgment.”4 a eudaimonistic judgment is a judgment that is concerned with one’s own flourishing (2001, 31). in the case of compassion, she explains, this judgment “places the suffering person or persons among the important parts of the life of the person who feels the emotion. it says ‘they count for me: they are among my most important goals and projects’” (2008, 10). in this respect, compassion defies impartiality; there is no compassion without me in it. nussbaum insists, however, that “eudaimonism is not egoism” (2008, 10). the one who is eudaimonistic in her emotional life is not one who defends her own interests against others but who “make[s] herself vulnerable in the person of another” (2001, 319). the eudaimonistic judgment that underpins compassion is one that recognizes the interconnectedness of self and other by identifying another’s suffering as an impediment to one’s own flourishing, not one that reduces another’s good to a mere means of achieving one’s own ends. the partiality of this judgment does not make it an immoral one, although it does make it localized: compassion, like both love and grief, looks out upon the world from the perspective of one’s own life, and finds the world seen from that perspective blighted by others’ suffering. in upheavals of thought, a work written in response to the death of her mother, nussbaum unfolds these points through reflection on her own grief. she writes: what inspires grief is the death of someone beloved, someone who has been an important part of one’s own life. . . . what makes the emotion center around this particular mother, among all the wonderful people and mothers in the world, is that she is my mother, a part of my life. . . . the notion of loss that is central to grief itself has this double aspect: it alludes to the value of the person who has left or died, but it alludes as well to that person’s relation to the perspective of the mourner. (2001, 31) nussbaum’s concept of a eudaimonistic judgment here captures the entwinement between one’s own good and the good of others that allows for second-person needs. it also captures the role that personal investments in another’s welfare play in this entwinement. for nussbaum, it is only when someone is given a place of importance in relation to one’s own life that her well-being and one’s own can run 4 since it is the political implications of nussbaum’s claims regarding compassion— and not the ethical ones—that most concern tessman, tessman’s objections to nussbaum are not addressed here. 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 together. this goes beyond granting others dignity and intrinsic worth to include recognizing their value “as constituents of a life that is my life and not someone else’s” (32). nussbaum’s attention to the eudaimonistic ties that must bind one’s own good to the lives of others in order that the feeling of love, of compassion, or of grief occur can serve to better illuminate the virtue in many second-person needs as well as their ethical import. when the constitutive entwinement between one’s own welfare and the good of others breaks through one’s previous complacency with the imperative force of a demand that would improve the lot of those to whom we feel ourselves tied, protecting one’s own good together with theirs, one is moved by second-person needs. second-person needs such as this demand that one not be a bystander to another’s harm, as such harm also threatens to shake the foundations of one’s own world. if the virtues are those excellences of character that allow for a flourishing human life, determining what these virtues are requires considering what flourishing looks like for beings that need each other. the incredible moral and relational capacity to care for others so deeply that their good becomes a constitutive part of one’s own welfare is one of the virtues of dependent beings such as ourselves. second-person needs enact this virtue when they assure that one’s own good cannot be maintained without also assuring the well-being of others. burdened virtues identifying certain forms of second-person needs as an expression of virtue begins a conversation with lisa tessman’s burdened virtues. in this insightful and provocative book, tessman troubles easy assumptions about the good life by attending to the effects of oppression on virtuous dispositions. one of the dispositions that oppression burdens, according to tessman, is “sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering,” something that must be present in order that second-person needs can arise (tessman 2005, 84). in a world marred as ours is by immense amounts of preventable suffering caused by systematic injustice, tessman questions whether it is possible for anyone to flourish while also caring for the suffering of others. she argues that although the trait of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a fundamental moral virtue and remains so in the context of oppression, where it becomes all the more incessantly demanded, it hinders one’s own flourishing rather than promotes it because one cannot attend to other’s suffering without experiencing pain. moreover, insofar as the current climate of rampant injustice and oppression calls for the ceaseless exercise of this sensitivity, this virtue paradoxically undermines—even decimates—the self. 11 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 tessman begins her inquiry into this burdened virtue with a reflection on her own heightened sensitivity to the suffering of other’s following the birth of her daughter. tessman writes: immediately after my daughter was born, i began to experience—and still do though it has become blunted and much less constant—an excess of sensitivity to other’s suffering. it was the fall of 2000, and an(other) intifada was starting up in israel/palestine; every night on the news there were scenes of palestinian boys and young men being shot at, then bombed, by the israeli defense force, and even more detailed portrayals of the israelis who were killed or wounded. watching it was anguishing; every person, especially but not only the young among them, was somebody’s child, somebody’s baby. i held my own newborn baby, yuval, and envisioned in tiny flashes the terrifying and unbearable possibility that somebody might hurt her. with every new report of an injury or death i moved to imagining myself as that parent, losing my baby. all that loss! the level of pain was unfathomable. (81) tessman’s reflection captures how the experience of caring for an intimate other can trigger a deepening of care for others at a much greater remove from one’s intimate circle. sara ruddick has also commented on the expansive reach of care as experienced by mothers, beginning in an intimate relationship to a child and growing outward. she writes: “keeping the world safe is human work and in no way the special responsibility of mothers. yet i am not surprised when a mother testifies that her love requires a commitment to world protection nearly as demanding as the feeding, holding, and nursing of her infant,” for the welfare of any infant ultimately depends on safeguarding the world (ruddick 1989, 81). moving beyond the strictly maternal paradigm, pema chödrön, a buddhist nun, recounts a similar experience undergone by one of her students: the father of a two-year-old talks about turning on the television and unexpectedly seeing the bombing of the federal building in oklahoma city. he watched as the fireman carried the limp and bloody bodies of toddlers from the ruins of the day-care center on the building’s first floor. he says that in the past he was able to distance himself from other people’s suffering. but since he’s become a father, things have changed. he feels as if each of those children were his child. he feels the grief of all the parents as his own grief. (chödrön 2000, 86) 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 each of these testimonies, including tessman’s, speaks to the capacity for a widereaching sense of ethical responsibility to grow out of intimate experiences of caring for others. reflecting on such experiences through the framework of buddhist philosophy, chödrön writes: “this kinship with the suffering of others, this inability to continue to regard it from afar, is the discovery of our soft spot, the discovery of bodhichitta. bodhichitta is a sanskrit word that means ‘noble or awakened heart.’ it is said to be present in all things. just as butter is inherent in milk and oil is inherent in a sesame seed, this soft spot is inherent in you and me” (86). care awakens the ethical heart. tessman argues, however, that a heightened sensitivity to other’s suffering can be an overwhelming burden in our current world, one that is potentially devastating to one’s own flourishing. in the passage above, she describes her enhanced sensitivity to violence and the loss of life after the birth of her daughter as an excess of sensitivity, language that marks it as a painful extreme rather than a happy aristotelian median. she also describes such an excessive sensitivity as having to contend with an “unfathomable” amount of pain in the world today, illustrating the hardship that such sensitivity can entail for anyone whose life it colors. while indifference to other’s suffering “is morally horrifying” to tessman, she argues that excessive sensitivity, such as that exemplified by her own experiences following her daughter’s birth, “is psychically unsustainable” in our contemporary world (83). thus, it seems that some limits must be placed on this sensitivity in order that one’s own life not be undone. nonetheless, where and when to draw these limits, and where and when to limit ethical responsibility to actively attend to the suffering of others is not clear (84). in the words of sandra bartky, a source of inspiration for tessman: “on what basis can i offer myself to some sufferings and deny myself to others? and given the persuasiveness of suffering and the multitude of forms such suffering may take, how can i keep myself from getting so spent emotionally that i burn out and so turn out to be useless as a political agent?” (bartky 1997, 180). in a world where preventable human suffering were less rampant, there might be a simple solution to this ethical dilemma. one could be sensitive to every instance of suffering and actively attend to it without becoming, in tessman’s words, “so immersed in the boundless pain of others—and so exhausted with the efforts of ameliorating that pain—that no piece of the self is left free to experience joy or to flourish” (85). but this is not our world. in our world, with its grotesque abundance of remediable injustices such as oppression, economic exploitation, and more, even moderate sensitivity to injustice threatens to destroy the one who has it while anything less than perfect sensitivity and attention to other’s suffering remains morally unsatisfying. “suppose . . . that i open myself compassionately to a moderate number of those who are suffering,” writes tessman. “i feel with them 13 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 their hardships and the mistreatments they bear, and i am moved to intervene and struggle against the injustices that cause them to suffer” (85). as i focus my sensitivity and attention on the suffering of a limited population, i encounter enough pain here alone to overwhelm me with anguish at the same time that i coldly and condemnably turn my back on the suffering of countless others. according to tessman, anyone who strives for virtue in the realm of sensitivity and attention to others suffering will thus be at once both too indifferent and too anguished, as the virtue of caring for others and the necessity of caring for oneself are rent apart by pervasive injustice and oppression (85). this precarious tightrope walk between indifference and anguish cannot be ignored if we are to name all forms of violence done to the human community through global injustice and oppression. further, while tessman’s analysis stresses the heightened conflict between sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering and one’s own flourishing that arises in the context of global injustice, she doubts whether this disposition can make a seamless contribution to human flourishing in any climate. tessman questions the potential for any “inherently painful disposition” to ever be a component of a flourishing human life, and any degree of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering will always entail pain (90). as she writes, “sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering involves taking on others’ pain, being pained by their pain; one’s actual felt pain is part of the response to the other that constitutes the morally recommended responsive action” (93). indeed, it is because having this disposition cannot but detract from one’s own flourishing for tessman that demanding an excess of it is a way in which oppression harms those who live in its midst (95). tessman does recognize that the exercise of some virtues demands that one risk the hardship of suffering pain—courage, for instance, often involves putting oneself in harm’s way. moreover, part of the merit of these virtues lies in the willingness to face the pain they entail, something that it is much harder to do than it is to cultivate dispositions that only allow for pleasure. yet she insists that this special merit does not keep these virtues from potentially detracting from one’s own flourishing. the disposition of sensitivity to others’ suffering may be virtuous, and so too may be having certain second-person needs. yet these dispositions, according to tessman, are likely to detract from a flourishing life rather than contribute to it, particularly if they are “especially in demand,” as is the case in the current world order of rampant human suffering due to injustice and oppression (94). the disjunctive relationship between sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering and a flourishing life, together with the relentless demand for this disposition in the context of oppression, makes it a paradigmatic burdened virtue for tessman: one of those “traits that make a contribution to human flourishing—if 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression . . . , while in other ways they detract from the bearer’s well-being, in some cases so deeply that their bearer may be said to lead a wretched life” (96). tessman argues that the struggle for liberation from oppression requires sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering. however, taking this virtue upon oneself weighs one down with pain, with anguish, and with the losses that come from self-sacrifice. experiencing second-person needs is an especially heightened form of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering, for having second-person needs means that one’s own welfare is so intimately coupled with that of others that one will not only be pained by their pain, but may also be utterly devastated by it. insofar as these needs must be coupled with pain or, at the very least, with its prospect, it would thus seem that they are counterproductive to one’s flourishing. yet although tessman presents sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering as a threat to one’s own well-being, it is not at all clear that a human life—the life of a social animal— can flourish without sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering even if having this disposition is a cause of psychic disruption, pain, and agony that one might otherwise avoid. to lack in this sensitivity or to be unmoved by it is to fail to authentically acknowledge one’s self-constitutive ties to others and to impoverish one’s life by stripping it of the relational connections that give it much of its meaning and that allow for many of its most precious joys, even if these connections can also cause pain. in focusing on pain, tessman is seeing only a part of the effect that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering has on those who experience it. sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is an ethical disposition that can grow out of more immediate, interpersonal relations of care, of which second-person needs are an especially deep expression. caring deeply enough about others to have these needs means that one’s well-being has come to depend on theirs. this interdependency allows for others’ joys—and not just their pains—to be redoubled in one’s own, and for one’s own life to be enriched through others’ triumphs. while second-person needs intensify the pain that others’ suffering causes, the joys they also bring to our life may make this cost worthwhile. as pema chödrön writes: we think that by protecting ourselves from suffering we are being kind to ourselves. the truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. we experience ourselves as being separate from the whole. this separation becomes like a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us. curiously enough, if we primarily try and shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer. . . . unwise people think only of themselves, and the result is confusion and pain. wise selfish people know that the best thing they can do 15 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 for themselves is to be there for others. as a result, they experience joy. (chödrön 2000, 88) insofar as we are the kinds of animals that depend on one another, caring for others is not fundamentally at odds with caring for ourselves; instead, it can be one of the deepest forms of our own self-care. certainly, our affective ties to others make us vulnerable in the world in ways that we would not be otherwise, and making others’ ends our own makes us susceptible to being harmed ourselves when others are harmed. moreover, there may be times when we are forced to sever our ties to others in order to protect ourselves, but this detachment is often also selfdevastating because our bonds to others are a part of our own good, and not just an empty liability to harm. the devastation of disaffection reflecting on tessman’s account of the “burdened virtue” of sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering, the virtue that so clearly underpins the ability to experience second-person needs, i am repeatedly struck by the vast demand for this virtue in the current climate of global injustice and widespread oppression that it reveals. after all, as she emphasizes, for someone to be coldly indifferent to any instance of human suffering is morally abhorrent. tessman’s work also brilliantly exposes the harm oppression does to those who are sensitive and attentive to others’ suffering by populating our world with an endless amount of that suffering, never letting us rest safely in the pleasures that our caring connections to others bring for the constant onslaught of violence against either those near and dear to ourselves or those distant others to whose pain our intimate bonds can heighten our own sensitivity. so too am i struck by the potential risk tessman alerts us to for one’s own life to be devastated by second-person forms of vulnerability in a world where the suffering of others is incessant. yet even in such a bleak and hostile external climate, to be disaffected by others’ suffering must be recognized as a form of eudaimonistic loss and not merely an ethical failure. as nussbaum’s concept of eudaimonistic judgments helps to capture, second-person needs are able to arise because, as relational animals, human beings are the kinds of beings whose flourishing depends on the flourishing of others. our self-constitutive investments of care in the welfare of others give rise to some of our deepest vulnerabilities to harm just because we are relational selves. yet, for the same reasons, to have one’s ability to attend to the needs of others systematically restricted by oppressive social or political systems is one of the most heinous harms that a human being can be made to suffer. caring for others is vital to our own flourishing; it is a constitutive part of a healthy relational life—a life that is tied to others in anguish but also in joy. inevitably, second-person needs 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 introduce a unique form of vulnerability into our lives through the connection-based harms to which they expose us. however, they are also a profound expression of the constitutive connections of care to others that make a human life more than an empty shell. indeed, it may be those who have been targeted by the machinations of systems of social violence that are most attuned to the immense value in such relational connections, having intimately experienced the traumatic decimation of the relational and ethical self that can result from assaults on second-person forms of vulnerability and need. testimonies such as that of primo levi, a survivor of auschwitz, reveal that a life can be devastatingly blighted by the systematic diminishment of the ability to sustain both caring and ethical connections to others just as much—if not more—than it is harmed by sustaining these connections despite the pain entailed. reflecting on the rash of suicides that followed liberation from the camps and the feeling of shame to which many survivors attested prior to taking their own lives, levi writes: few survivors feel guilty about having deliberately damaged, robbed, or beaten a companion. those who did so . . . block out the memory. by contrast, however, almost everybody feels guilty of having omitted to offer help. . . . the demand for solidarity, for a human word, advice, even a listening ear, was permanent and universal but rarely satisfied. there was no time, space, privacy, patience, strength; most often, the person to whom the request was addressed found himself in his turn in a state of need, entitled to comfort. (levi 1998, 78) it is a deep and devastating eudaimonistic loss to not be able to build, maintain, or honestly acknowledge the constitutive ties to others that make the good of one person a vital component of the good of others, something that especially severe forms of oppression attempt to wretch away from their subjects through the exploitation and abuse of one’s needs. through levi’s testimony, we are able to witness the appalling social violence that occurs when one’s ability to care for others is systematically assaulted as a means of undermining one’s humanity, an assault on the firmament of the ethical self that many of those interned in the holocaust camps were forced to endure. lisa guenther’s recent book, solitary confinement: social death and its afterlives, names such violence as a form of ‘social death,’ a concept first developed by orlando patterson in a study of slavery. social death decimates one’s intersubjective life through systematic acts of oppression that target the connection-based existence of the relational self. as guenther explains, patterson argues that the slave system—a paradigm example of a system geared towards the 17 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 social death of its subjects—sought to reduce the multivalent web of social relationships giving human life meaning to a single relationship of domination: the relationship to one’s master. in guenther’s words, “this reduction not only circumscribes the slave’s personal freedom and exposes them to radical domination by the master, since they are no longer protected by a network of kin who would intercede on their behalf, it also bans slaves from interceding on behalf of others” (guenther 2013, xxii; emphasis added). one of the most devastatingly painful parts of the total assault on the intersubjective dimensions of selfhood that results in social death is its attack on the ability to come to the aid of those for whom one most cares, an attack which is often also an assault on one’s deepest second-person needs. the violence of this assault is captured in the words of a former american slave, mr. reed: the most barbarous thing i saw with these eyes—i lay on my bed and study about it now—i had a sister, my older sister, she was fooling with a clock and broke it, and my old master taken her and tied a rope around her neck—just enough to keep it from choking her—and tied her up in the back yard and whipped her i don’t know how long. there stood mother, there stood father, and there stood all the children and none could come to her rescue. (rawick 1972; quoted in guenther xxii) the assault on the precious capacity “to respond to the others who matter most” is one of the most effective maneuvers of the systematic violence that aims to exact social death (xxiii). in guenther’s analysis, this assault is the lynchpin of a system that “seeks to undermine . . . social, ethical, and political subjectivity . . . at the very sight of its emergence”, that is, in self-constitutive connections of care (xxiii). the eudaimonistic connections between self and others that nussbaum’s work on the emotions captures—the same connections that lie at the heart of the capacity to experience second-person needs—reveal the danger in experiencing another’s welfare as a constitutive part of one’s own good in climates that assault the deep connections of relational life and the unique second-person vulnerabilities they entail. eudaimonistic connections, as the word itself implies, play a vital role in human flourishing yet can simultaneously expose us to the agonizing pain of having the suffering of others tear our own lives apart; although without these constitutive ties to others our lives would be deeply impoverished, it is also because of these constitutive ties that another’s suffering can be the source of one’s own lifeshattering agony and another’s death, as was that of nussbaum’s mother for nussbaum, the cause of “a gaping hole in [one’s] own life” (nussbaum 2001, 82). tessman is certainly right that it is painful to maintain a connected sense of self in the context of oppression. yet it may be more painful still to have oppression 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 succeed at severing one’s ties to others than to continue to care, and to be moved by second-person needs, even in oppressive climates. it was, after all, oppression’s victories against his relational and moral personhood, and not the painful persistence of these dimensions of his personhood despite the holocaust camps’ horrific assaults against them, that left primo levi deeply haunted and ultimately unable to go on in his own life. as he writes, “when it was all over, the awareness emerged that we had not done anything, or not enough, against the system into which we had been absorbed” (levi 1988, 76). yet despite the limitations of her negative take on how caring for others affects one’s own good, tessman’s work helps us to see what this last line from levi suggests: that maintaining the intimate connections to others that allow for their welfare to be a constitutive part of one’s own good is indeed a crucial virtue for those committed to liberatory struggles, for maintaining these investments is an immeasurably powerful act of resistance against oppressive systems that target the ethical self. further, tessman’s attention to the moral damage caring persons endure in oppressive climates can be taken up in order to strengthen the case for our ethical and political responsibilities towards those who experience second-person needs and vulnerabilities. together with the capacity to care for others so intimately as to make their good a constitutive part of one’s own flourishing comes the additional second-person need to have this precious moral ability supported by one’s larger social and political community. without this support, the virtue of caring for others so deeply as to tether one’s own welfare to theirs can have devastating costs. as kittay insists, every caretaker “is entitled not to a reciprocity from the charge herself, but to a relationship that sustains her as she sustains her charge”—a principle of social cooperation that she names doulia, after “the postpartum caregiver (a doula) who assists the new mother as the mother cares for the infant” (kittay 1999, 68). coda: further questions the testimonies of both reed and levi also reveal that the very precious relational ability to experience another’s good as a constitutive part of one’s own flourishing is often the prime target of systems of violence that seek to destroy the social self. still, as tessman suggests, for those whose lives are most affected by systematic oppression, the prospective harms to which some second-person needs expose one may be too high a cost to pay for the meaningful human connections to which they attest. for this reason, being able to be vulnerable in the connectionbased ways that second-person needs entail may be a luxury that not everyone can afford. if this is so, how could it be just to make maintaining, and even cultivating, second-person needs an ethical obligation, as seems to be implied in suggesting these needs can be virtuous dispositions? certainly, some of those targeted by the 19 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 machinations of systems of social death have found the strength necessary to maintain non-oppressive relational ties, a profound act of resistance in the service of liberation. but is doing so something that can be ethically required? a second question is whether cultivating second-person needs might be much more generally a form of privilege in contemporary times, something reserved for those whose lives are relatively unscathed by global forms of injustice and oppression? is maintaining and developing these connection-based needs a kind of “bourgeois morality,” to take a term from marx, which only those whom first world privilege has sheltered from bearing the unbearable pain of being a daily witness to the decimation of other’s lives through poverty, hunger, or illness can afford to maintain? in a recent discussion i had with students on the ethics of vulnerability, one of them spoke of her experience volunteering in a hospital in the philippines the previous summer. she had been struck by a climate of apathy in the hospital, something that she eventually came to attribute to the extreme lack of resources and its effect on the medical staff’s ability to care for their patients. while alarming, such disaffection can be a crucial coping mechanism for those who are the targets of the gross social and economic injustices of global capitalism and rampant neoliberalism, injustices which often cripple the capacity to translate one’s care for others into effective action to remediate their suffering. should those who truncate their affective care for others in order to be able to go on, day after day, performing the labor of care in a context where global injustice has effectively tied their hands be chastised for it? these ethical issues cannot be adequately addressed without a wide-angled, globally mindful approach to the problem. yet only a relational approach is able to see the moral damage done to those whose abilities to care for others are impaired as a global failure in both care and ethical responsibility. anytime one is able to respond to another’s ethically demanding needs and fails, that failure is a moral one. the need to care for others is one such ethically obligating need, a need we all share as second persons. in naming this harm, we make it possible to begin the work of ameliorating, on both the local and the global level, the moral damage done by having one’s capacity to care for others impaired by injustice and oppression. for some, such disaffection may be a survival strategy, a means by which one preserves just enough of one’s emotional, ethical, and relational resources each day to be able to extend care to those who need it most from them. for others, disaffection is a method of preserving one’s privileges, deadening one’s receptivity to the needs of others and willfully entertaining the conceit that one’s own privileges cannot be “located on the same map as [others’] suffering” (sontag 2003, 103). the two cannot be treated as ethically comparable. yet regardless of the reasons for it, a life severed from affective ties to others, and thus short on compassion, love, and the bonds of personal investment in others’ lives that allow 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 one to grieve over their deaths as well as rejoice in their successes, can hardly be described as a flourishing one. works cited baier, annette. 1981. “cartesian persons.” philosophia 10 (3–4): 169–188. bartky, sandra. 1997. “sympathy and solidarity: on a tightrope with scheler.” in feminists rethink the self, edited by diana tietjens meyers. boulder, co: westview press. block, gay and malka drucker. 1992. rescuers: portraits of moral courage in the holocaust. new york: holmes & meier publishers. casey, edward. 2016. “a life in philosophy in several stages.” proceedings and addresses of the apa 90:71–89. chödrön, pema. 2000. when things fall apart: heart advice for difficult times. boston: shambala. farmer, paul. 2013. to repair the world: paul farmer speaks to the next generation. berkeley: university of california press. gastmans, chris, bernadette dierckx de casterlé, and paul schotsmans. 1998. “nursing considered as moral practice: a philosophical-ethical interpretation of nursing.” kennedy institute of ethics journal 8:43–69. goodin, robert e. 1985 protecting the vulnerable: a reanalysis of our social responsibilities. chicago: university of chicago press. guenther, lisa. 2013. solitary confinement: social death and its afterlives. minneapolis: university of minneapolis press. kittay, eva. 1999. love’s labor: essays on women, equality, and dependency. new york: routledge. ———. 2001. “when caring is just and justice is caring: justice and mental retardation.” public culture 13 (3): 557–579. doi:10.1215/08992363-13-3557. ———. 2016. “two dogmas of moral theory? comments on lisa tessman’s moral failure.” feminist philosophical quarterly 2 (1): 1–11. doi:10.5206/fpq/2016.1.3. levi, primo. 1988. the drowned and the saved. translated by raymond rosenthal. new york: vintage books. macintyre, alasdair. 1999. dependent rational animals: why human beings need the virtues. chicago: open court. miller, sarah clark. 2012. the ethics of need: agency, dignity, and obligation. new york: routledge. nussbaum, martha. 2001. upheavals of thought: the intelligence of emotions. cambridge: cambridge university press. 21 wolfe: the burdened virtue of second person needs published by scholarship@western, 2017 ———. 2008. “compassion: human and animal.” institute of development studies kolkata, special lecture 4, july. http://idsk.edu.in/wp-content/uploads /2015/07/sl-4.pdf. rankine, claudia. 2014. citizen: an american lyric. minneapolis: graywolf press. rawick, george. 1972. the american slave: a composite autobiography. westport, ct: greenwood press. reader, soran. 2007. needs and moral necessity. new york: routledge. sontag, susan. 2003. regarding the pain of others. new york: picador. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtues ethics for liberatory struggles. oxford: oxford university press. walker, margaret. 2016. jubilee. new york: mariner books. watkins, mary. 2015. “psychosocial accompaniment.” journal of social and political psychology 3 (1): 324–341. doi:10.5964/jspp.v3i1.103. katharine wolfe is assistant professor of philosophy at st. lawrence university in canton, new york. her recent work focuses on feminist approaches to ethics, existentialism and phenomenology, and issues in bioethics. recent publications include "together in need: relational selfhood, vulnerability to harm, and enriching attachments" (southern journal of philosophy 54 (1): 129–148) and “mutual dependency and the ethics of home birth” (http://impactethics.ca/2014/05/13 /mutual-dependency-and-the-ethics-of-home-birth). 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 4 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/4 doi: 0.5206/fpq/2017.3.4 http://idsk.edu.in/wp-content feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 are second person needs ‘burdened virtues’?: exploring the risks and rewards of caring katharine l. wolfe recommended citation burdened virtues feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4 1 acknowledging our referees for the first five volumes of feminist philosophy quarterly in honor of the close of our fifth year as an open-access, peer-reviewed, triply anonymous journal, the editors express sincere gratitude to all those who have refereed for feminist philosophy quarterly for these first five years. this enterprise would not be possible without your service. roksana alavi linda alcoff lucy allias ben almassi scott anderson lauren ashwell alison bailey bat-ami bar on celie bardwell-jones bipasha baruah guillaume beaulac nora berenstain asha bhandary claudia bianchi ashley bohrer kirstin borgerson marilea bramer liam bright steven burns evelyn brister sylvia burrow ann cahill cheshire calhoun joan callahan alisa carse sharyn clough catherine clune-taylor dennis cooley sharon crasnow alex davies shannon dea megan dean oisin deery robin dembroff peggy desautels esa diaz-leon tom digby susan dimock michael doan kristie dotson matt drabek jane dryden barrett emerick helen fielding jane forsey cynthia freeland lauren freeman ann garry cynthia gayman elisabeth gedge anca gheaus heidi grasswick daniel groll lisa guenther elizabeth hackett jennifer hansen ami harbin susan hawthorne carol hay lisa heldke feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4 2 barbara herman cressida heyes catherine hundleby grayson hunt katrina hutchison violetta igneski tracy isaacs sherri irvin ada jaarsma carrie jenkins katharine jenkins heather keith daniel kelly elselijn kingma joshua knobe christine koggell rebecca kukla sarah lachance adams ann levey hallie liberto maureen linker heidi lockwood helen longino colin macleod alex madva hans maes ishani maitra patricia marino lori marso rebecca mason simon may emily mcgill-rutherford aidan mcglynn mary mcgowan robin mckenna carolyn mcleod jose medina diana meyers mari mikkola sarah clark miller kristie miller monica mookherjee sarah moss amy mullin mark navin mariana ortega christine overall julinna oxley shelley park robert piercey gaile pohlhaus jr. nancy potter linda radzik amy reed-sandoval todd reeser alison reiheld kristin rodier sarah roe phyllis rooney jill rusin ruth sample jennifer saul naomi scheman lisa schwartzman liam shields alexis shotwell laurie shrage daniel silvermint lissa skitolsky robert stainton edward stein james sterba natalie stoljar shari stone-mediatore robert strikwerda arthur sullivan shannon sullivan anita superson jennifer szende bonnie talbert erin tarver feminist philosophy quarterly, 2019, vol. 5, iss. 4 3 chloe taylor serife tekin lisa tessman yannik thiem laurence thomas lynne tirrell joan tronto nancy tuana maura tumulty mark vopat georgia warnke lori watson katherine wayne rivka weinberg shay welch karen wendling holly wilson shannon winnubst catharine womack lenore wright nicole wyatt george yancy naomi zack robin zheng some reflections on gaslighting and language games feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation englehardt, jeff. 2023. “some reflections on gaslighting and language games.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (3). article 2. 2023 some reflections on gaslighting and language games jeff engelhardt dickinson college engelhaj@dickinson.edu engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 some reflections on gaslighting and language games jeff engelhardt abstract this paper proposes that, in many cases, conversational norms permit gaslighting when socially subordinate speakers report systemic injustice. section 1 introduces gaslighting and the kinds of cases on which i focus—namely, cases in which multiple people gaslight. i give examples and statistics to suggest that these cases are common in response to reports of raceor gender-based injustice; and i appeal to scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance to suggest that this kind of gaslighting is common because it is systematically produced by dominant epistemic systems. section 2 draws on lynne tirrell’s account of language games that’ve been influenced by oppression to make the case that conversational norms make gaslighting “appropriate” when socially subordinate speakers report systemic injustice. together, these points make the case that the kind of gaslighting discussed in this paper (i) occurs systematically and (ii) is mutually reinforcing with systems of ignorance. the discussion is meant to help us understand and address the conditions that make gaslighting commonplace. if it’s true that gaslighting occurs systematically in part thanks to our warped conversational norms, then we may be able to mitigate the prevalence of gaslighting by attending to these norms. keywords: gaslighting, language games, oppression, epistemic gaslighting introduction gaslighting is a kind of abuse that is both manipulative and epistemically damaging. in paradigmatic examples of gaslighting, a man in a heterosexual romantic couple manipulates his partner and her environment in ways that prompt her to doubt her own perceptions, thoughts, and epistemic standing. in kate abramson’s influential account, she distinguishes gaslighting from other types of abuse by appealing to gaslighters’ goals or intentions. for instance, she says a gaslighter tries “(consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds— paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy” (abramson 2014, 2). and she gives the following sufficient condition: feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 we all need interpersonal confirmation, especially in difficult situations. and when the interpersonal confirmation is refused, or deliberately thwarted, precisely in order to radically undermine someone’s sense of standing to protest bad conduct, it’s gaslighting. (abramson 2014, 6) others writing on gaslighting have deemphasized gaslighters’ psychologies and focused more on paradigmatic gaslighting behaviors or on what gaslighting does to those who suffer it. for instance, here’s how rachel mckinnon introduces epistemic gaslighting: i’m interested in the more subtle form [of gaslighting], often unintentional, where a listener doesn’t believe, or expresses doubt about, a speaker’s testimony. in this epistemic form of gaslighting, the listener of testimony raises doubts about the speaker’s reliability at perceiving events accurately. directly, or indirectly, then, gaslighting involves expressing doubts that the harm or injustice that the speaker is testifying to really happened as the speaker claims. (mckinnon 2017, 168) mckinnon allows that epistemic gaslighting may be unintentional, and she characterizes it instead in terms of the sorts of situations in which it arises and how gaslighters behave in those situations. in the relevant situations, the subject of epistemic gaslighting is reporting a harm or injustice. in mckinnon’s paradigm case, victoria is mispronouned by a colleague, james, and she complains about it to their mutual colleague, susan. in situations like this, the gaslighter raises doubts either about the injustice reported or about the victim’s ability to perceive events accurately. in mckinnon’s example, these occur when susan responds to victoria’s complaints as follows. susan: “i’m sure you just misheard him: you’re on edge and expect to hear mispronouning. i just don’t believe that james would do that. he won a university diversity award for his supporting queer issues, after all. besides, he’s been a supporter of yours in the past too. he really is your ally.” (mckinnon 2017, 168) paul-mikhail catapang podosky also allows that gaslighting can be either intentional or unintentional, and he develops distinct conditions for each. his account of unintentional gaslighting characterizes it according to the kinds of actions that are engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 apt to make someone doubt her perceptions, whether or not those actions actually have the relevant effects. unintentional gaslighting: gaslighting occurs when (i) a speaker uses words without the intention that a hearer come to form negative attitudes toward her own interpretive abilities, but (ii) the use of such words is apt to cause the hearer to form such attitudes (iii) owing to the hearer being subject to systemic epistemic injustice that has disposed her to do so. (podosky 2021, 211) moreover, it’s worth noting that although he doesn’t make it an explicit part of his account, podosky’s examples also begin with a report of injustice. indeed, podosky’s account of what makes unintentional gaslighting apt to make someone doubt her perceptions seems to turn on the relevant perceptions being such that they inform a report of systemic injustice: consider the case . . . where the woman testifies to being deliberately brushed up against by a man in the office, and her colleague responds, “john isn’t the kind of guy to act inappropriately at work.” in a society that systematically fails to treat the testimony of women seriously when it comes to allegations of sexual harassment (and sexual assault) . . . [t]he tendency of members of society to disbelieve women when such allegations are made disposes women to doubt their own experience involving sexual harassment. (211) the colleague’s behaviors are apt to induce doubt because behaviors like his occur systematically in specific situations—namely, when women report sexual abuses. in this article, i focus on cases of gaslighting that closely resemble those described by mckinnon and podosky: a speaker reports a systemic injustice, and others then raise unwarranted doubts about the report and/or the reporter. in the paradigm cases on which i focus, however, there are multiple gaslighters. i use “normative gaslighting” to refer to such cases. for my purposes, it won’t matter whether we think of these as cases of collective gaslighting or as multiple instances of one individual gaslighting another.1 i take it that both of these occur, and each can 1 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to be clearer about these possibilities and for suggesting helpful ways to navigate the discussion of them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 motivate my ultimate point: that dominant conversational norms give speakers warrant to gaslight in response to reports of systemic injustice.2 although my focus differs from abramson’s, she nonetheless provides three examples of what i have in mind. in one, a philosophy graduate student tries to explain to other graduate students why she felt “ostracized or ignored because of [her] gender,” and they respond by raising doubts about her interpretations of events (abramson 2014, 5). in another, an undergraduate says she’s concerned about racism in her community, and those who hear her say she’s being too sensitive. in a third, a gay junior academic finds herself in circumstances in which it’s reasonable for her to fear that she’ll be fired for her sexual orientation, and when she tells her colleagues, they dismiss her fears (4–5). prima facie, these are instances of gaslighting because of the kinds of behaviors that the gaslighters engage in—setting aside whatever intentions they had. following mckinnon, i take it that gaslighters needn’t intend to discredit a person or her claims; rather, they need only to express unwarranted “doubts that the harm or injustice that the speaker is testifying to really happened as the speaker claims.”3 thus, i also follow mckinnon in taking it that gaslighting occurs when a speaker reports a harm or injustice. and like podosky, i take it that in the relevant cases, gaslighting may be apt to make someone doubt her perceptions because it is perpetrated systematically. we can tie some of these points together as follows: in cases of normative gaslighting, the injustice that the speaker is testifying to is one that targets members of oppressed or subordinate groups. in mckinnon’s (2017, 168) case, it’s transphobic mispronouning; in podosky’s, it’s sexual harassment. since members of oppressed or subordinate groups are systematically targeted for harm and injustice, when one reports such a harm or injustice, one is reporting an instance 2 my view on conversational norms is clarified in section 2, but for now, let it suffice to say that they’re the rules that distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate conversational contributions. they can help maintain an oppressive status quo by, for instance, making it appropriate to discount assertions made by members of oppressed groups (see tirrell 2018). 3 i take it that the doubts raised by epistemic gaslighters are unwarranted on mckinnon’s (2017) account by virtue of her remarks on pp. 169–70: in brief, that gaslighters’ doubts are based on a false belief that they’re epistemically betterpositioned than the reporter to identify the harm(s) reported. note that pohlhaus, in her account of structural epistemic gaslighting, also supposes that the challenges are unwarranted: structural epistemic gaslighting “occurs when a person, practice, image, or institution exerts unwarranted pressure on epistemic agents to doubt their own perceptions” (pohlhaus 2020, 679). engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 of something that occurs systematically. in what follows, i give reasons to think that, in addition, doubts about such harms/injustices are raised systematically. granted that these doubts are raised systematically, it’s plausible that normative gaslighting is apt to make someone doubt her perceptions in part because it occurs systematically. i make the case that normative gaslighting occurs systematically in the next two sections. first, i appeal to examples and relevant statistics to make the case that normative gaslighting is at least quite common. second, i appeal to scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance to make the case that normative gaslighting is common because it is systematically produced by dominant epistemic systems. in section 2, i propose that these points give us reason to suppose that dominant conversational norms often make normative gaslighting appropriate. in effect, i clarify what normative gaslighting is and make the case that it’s systemic in order to motivate the claim that dominant conversational norms make gaslighting “appropriate” in the relevant cases. thus, this paper is less concerned with what gaslighting is and more concerned with features of our social systems that make it more common and, in some cases, more vicious.4 the points raised here suggest ways to address the prevalence of gaslighting by attending to features of our social environment. 1.1. examples in the paradigm examples of normative gaslighting, a speaker reports an injustice that targets a subordinate group, and then multiple others raise unwarranted doubts about this report and/or reporter. we can see this type of sequence play out in various public reports of systemic injustice. as kate manne has pointed out, for instance, the following rhythm is pathetically common: some misogynistic injustice occurs, and people say publicly that it was an instance of misogyny, but then media commentators repeatedly and vehemently raise doubts about whether it was really an instance of misogyny and about the perceptual capacities of those who said it was misogynistic. take the 2014 isla vista murders. in a video posted online before the killings, the murderer, elliot rodger, had accused girls and women collectively of giving “their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me;” as an apparent consequence of this, he said, “i will punish you all for it” (manne 2018, 35). many women and other feminists quickly pointed out that the murders were part of a broader pattern of attitudes, behaviors, and social forces that target women for punishment when they don’t give men “affection and sex and love” (36). then, predictably, multiple others responded to these reports of systemic injustice by publicly raising doubts. steven pinker tweeted, for instance, “the idea 4 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this way of framing the project in this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 that the [isla vista] murders are part of a pattern of hatred against women is statistically obtuse” (pinker 2014; quoted in manne 2018, 37). in an article in the national review, heather mac donald suggested that those who make connections between the murders and misogyny are “solipsists” who are “apparently living in a different world” (mac donald 2014; quoted in manne 2018, 38). a similar pattern plausibly unfolded in early 2019, when a video depicting racial abuse “went viral” on social and news media. in the video, nathan phillips, a native american man, is surrounded by an all-white group of students who jeer at him and do the “tomahawk chop,” a gesture that endorses violent stereotypes of indigenous americans.5 many who saw the video, including reporters for national public radio and the washington post, pointed out that the video depicts racial abuse. in response, several news outlets ran editorials denying that the manifestly racist behavior we’d all witnessed had in fact been racist. in an opinion for the washington examiner, becket adams (2019) wrote, “the teens abused no one. they mistreated no one.“ in an opinion for fox news, todd starnes wrote, in context, it appears that what really happened on the steps of the lincoln memorial is that a group of catholic school boys was targeted and harassed by grown adults just because they were white, catholic trump supporters. (starnes 2019) commenting on this pattern in the guardian, jason wilson called it “gaslighting:” media outlets have been effectively gaslighted, and many climbed down from coverage which was based on the most clear and obvious interpretation of the boys chanting, making gestures and making tomahawk chops. (wilson 2019) prima facie, wilson is right. in pointing out that the video depicts racism, speakers connected phillips’s experience to other injustices that target members of a socially subordinate group. in response, many raised doubts that events had unfolded as reported, even though the video was available for all to see. we can make similar points about public and media responses to allegations of sexual harassment or abuse raised by anita hill, dr. christine blasey ford, e. jean carroll, and many, many others. each of these women credibly accused a high profile 5 francesca paris, “video of kentucky students mocking native american man draws outcry,” npr, january 20, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/686988268/video -of-kentucky-students-mocking-native-american-man-draws-outcry. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 and powerful man of sexual harassment or abuse; and for each, responses in media and public conversation raised doubts about her claims and her ability to perceive events accurately, not to mention her character, her motivations, and, often, the value of her life. these patterns persist in less visible cases as well, of course. karen c. adkins describes cases in which complaints of sexual harassment in the workplace are dismissed or met with accusations that raise doubts about the complainant’s perceptual capabilities: she’s “too sensitive” or “crazy” (adkins 2019, 76, 83). a 2020 dissertation on institutional responses to campus racism found that such responses routinely minimize and dismiss the concerns of students who protest racism (cho 2020; see also cho 2018). a 2019 study of sexual assault and harassment at music festivals in australia found that those who reported assault or harassment to police, security, or festival officials “typically recalled negative responses from authority figures, such as victim-blaming, not taking the report seriously, and/or a failure to take appropriate action.” (fileborn, wadds, and tomsen 2019, 4, 29) a study of sexual violence at music events in england found similar results; participants reported that security “shrugged their shoulders and took no further action” in response to reports of sexual violence, while venue staff, bands, and promoters seemed to accept the rape myth that “women lie about being assaulted” (hill, hesmondhalgh, and megson 2020, 378–79). a 2015 study of police responses to reports of domestic violence in new south wales found that in about 10 percent of reports, police minimized, belittled, or ignored the report or reporter; the researchers concluded that “many police did not take domestic violence reports seriously” (goodman-delahunty and corbo crehan 2016, 1, 8). and, of course, when police and other law enforcement are credibly accused of racist violence, and even where there is video depicting that violence, those accusations and the people who make them are very often dismissed and discredited, not to mention retaliated against. i take it that these examples and related statistics make at least a prima facie case that it’s rather common for reports of systemic injustice to be met with multiple unwarranted doubts about both the report and the reporter. readers may also be familiar with other cases of these sorts, local to their workplace, neighborhood, hobbies, or other communities in which they participate. ultimately, my concern here is to motivate the point that not only is gaslighting like this common but it’s systematically made appropriate by conversational norms that have been warped by systemic oppression. the next section makes the case that normative gaslighting occurs systematically. i support the claim about conversational norms in section 2. 1.2. epistemologies of ignorance in this section, i appeal to scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance to motivate the claim that normative gaslighting occurs systematically. in brief, i make feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 the case this way: scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance shows that contemporary systems of oppression tend to be supported by epistemic systems that cultivate ignorance of oppression; they systematically produce ignorance of oppression and its injustices. it’s plausible that systems like this succeed partly by responding to reports of systemic injustice by raising doubts about the report and/or reporter. normative gaslighting would serve this purpose: it occurs whenever some person(s) report systemic injustice, and then multiple others raise unwarranted doubts about that report and/or reporter. i take this as reason to suppose that normative gaslighting is common because it is produced systematically by dominant epistemic systems. after making this case, i distinguish normative gaslighting from gaile pohlhaus jr.’s account of structural epistemic gaslighting. charles mills and others have developed the idea that where there is systemic oppression, the oppressive systems are often accompanied by social-epistemic systems that maintain ignorance of oppression. epistemologies of ignorance study social-epistemic systems like these and articulate the mechanisms by which ignorance is produced. for instance, mills’s (2007) well-known work on white ignorance articulates mechanisms by which ignorance of racial oppression is produced in societies influenced by white domination and european colonization. he says ignorance of racial oppression is produced when european colonizers are characterized in educational texts and courses as having discovered various territories, obscuring the truth that they colonized the lands and committed genocide against their peoples (mills 2007, 27). in belgium, ignorance regarding the deaths of millions of congolese during king leopold ii’s regime in belgian congo was maintained by the systematic destruction of belgian state archives (29). ignorance of a 1921 racist massacre in tulsa, oklahoma, was maintained when the city’s official records on the event disappeared (32). and so on. mills even points out that mainstream western political philosophy contributes to systematic ignorance of racial oppression by making “no mention of the centrality of racial injustice to the ‘basic structure’ of the united states” (33). but we shouldn’t take it that only racial oppression is obscured by our social-epistemic systems; rather, our epistemic systems plausibly help obscure many systemic oppressions and their injustices: misogyny, sexual abuse, colonial genocide and exploitation, transphobia, ableism, and more. it’s plausible that systems like this work partly by making it so that reports of systemic injustice and those who report them are systematically doubted. there are of course many ways that this might be achieved, but one direct way would be to encourage audiences to such reports to raise doubts—whether warranted or not— about the report and/or reporter. that is, one way to maintain systematic ignorance of systemic oppression and injustice is to ensure that normative gaslighting occurs systematically. i take it that this is prima facie reason to suppose that normative engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 gaslighting is common because it is produced systematically by dominant epistemic systems. we can bolster this prima facie supposition by raising additional support for the general idea that social-epistemic systems of ignorance work partly by determining norms that govern conversation (alcoff 2007, 50; engelhardt 2019). as i have described elsewhere (e.g., engelhardt 2019, 632–33), white ignorance is sustained partly by widespread conversational rules that make it inappropriate to use the term “racist” in ways that acknowledge racist structures, systems, or histories; it’s appropriate only to use it for individuals that are openly hostile to people of color. this point bolsters the supposition on grounds that normative gaslighting occurs in conversations, broadly construed. indeed, as i claim in the next section, conversational norms often make it permissible to raise rationally unwarranted doubts about reports of systemic injustice—that is, conversational norms make normative gaslighting permissible or appropriate. if we have general reason to accept that systems of ignorance influence our conversational norms in ways that systematically pressure us to ignore instances of systemic injustice, then it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that systems of ignorance systematically license normative gaslighting in order to exert this pressure. if this hypothesis is correct, then normative gaslighting is common, as we saw in the last section, because it is produced systematically by dominant epistemic systems of ignorance. gaile pohlhaus jr. has also developed an account of gaslighting that draws on epistemologies of ignorance; it will be helpful to distinguish her account from mine before moving on. in part, pohlhaus’s idea is that epistemic systems of ignorance gaslight those who are aware of experiencing systemic oppression. as pohlhaus describes it, one is gaslighted by virtue of carrying on epistemically within a system of ignorance while also experiencing the oppression that others are pressured to ignore: the epistemic pressures placed upon nondominantly situated persons within epistemologies of ignorance to ignore instances of injustice that they face constitute a form of epistemic gaslighting. mills and most of the epistemology of ignorance literature highlights the effects of structural injustice on producing ignorance and vicious knowers. in contrast, the term epistemic gaslighting highlights those whose experienced world is ignored and how very epistemically difficult it can be to traverse a world within which your experiencing of that world is systematically ignored by the knowers around you. (pohlhaus 2020, 679–80) on pohlhaus’s account, then, there is incomplete but substantive overlap between epistemic structural gaslighting and normative gaslighting, and neither wholly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 subsumes the other. whenever a nondominantly situated knower reports a systemic injustice and multiple others raise unwarranted doubts about report and/or reporter, it will be an instance of both normative gaslighting and structural epistemic gaslighting. but there will of course be cases in which a nondominantly situated knower hasn’t reported a systemic injustice but she is still pressured to ignore instances of injustice she’s faced—her reporting may be preempted, for instance, by cultural messaging that makes it clear that she’ll experience victim-blaming, retaliation, and perhaps violence, loss of income, loss of social support, and so forth. when this happens, it’s a case of structural epistemic gaslighting but not normative gaslighting. on the other hand, if a speaker who is not nondominantly situated reports systemic injustice, and then multiple others raise unwarranted doubts about the report and/or reporter, then this will be a case of normative gaslighting but not structural epistemic gaslighting. although the subjects of normative gaslighting often are nondominantly situated, they needn’t be. in many cases, commentators who publicly assert that something racist or misogynist was in fact racist or misogynist are not dominantly situated, but they are often still subjects of normative gaslighting. so far, i’ve made the case that normative gaslighting occurs systematically. in the next section, i take up and develop a point gestured at above—namely, that dominant conversational norms make normative gaslighting appropriate. 2. oppressive language games many philosophers have pointed out that gaslighting of various kinds often seems enabled by broader social facts: cultural scripts, institutional policies, professional norms, and more. for instance, cynthia stark proposes that when women are gaslighted after reporting gendered dominance, this gaslighting is often underwritten by broader misogynist structures that encourage hostility that targets women. misogynist hostility is delivered by people when they do such things as adhere to culturally condoned scripts, conform their actions to the reigning ideology, participate in rituals, traditions, long-standing practices, etc. hence, people may enact it unwittingly—they may not harbor overtly misogynist attitudes and may not be aiming to enforce patriarchal norms. (stark 2019, 230) karen c. adkins makes a similar point. speaking of kathy ahern’s (2018, 62) account of how nurses are gaslighted when they report injustice at work, adkins (2019, 84) says that seemingly isolated incidents in fact “often [reflect] unstated but consistent policies and values held by the institution.” elena ruíz makes the case that the norms and practices of professional philosophy perpetrate “a kind of engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 professionalized, ambient abuse,” wherein work that doesn’t hew to a narrow, predominantly white conception of philosophy is subject to relentless challenges asking “how is this project philosophy, again?” she calls this abuse “professional gaslighting” (ruíz 2014, 201; emphasis added). this section pursues a similar line of thought by appeal to lynne tirrell’s work on language games shaped by oppression. after introducing tirrell’s framework, i suggest two modest extensions motivated by the above reflections on normative gaslighting. in brief, i say that in some dominant language games, the rules make it appropriate to challenge those who report systemic injustice, even if the challenge would otherwise be rationally unwarranted.6 at the end of the section, i sketch a traditional line to explain how speakers can gaslight in accordance with the rules of language games without intending to gaslight or even intending to follow conversational rules—perhaps similar to how stark says above that we can enact misogynist hostility unwittingly. tirrell works within a framework according to which conversation is fruitfully understood as a rule-governed activity—a language game—such that speakers’ contributions to conversation are marked by changes in their normative statuses. the observation that some contributions are “out of bounds” gives us reason to suppose that conversation is rule-governed (see mcgowan 2009, 395). for instance, if you and i are talking about your new home, saying things like “the house is beautiful, but the property needs work” and “we rent the house,” it’s out of bounds for either of us to use the phrase “the house” to refer to some other house. it’d be out of bounds for me to say of my own home, “the house will have to be sold when i move” (see mcgowan 2009, 394). since some contributions to conversation are out of bounds, conversation is a rule-governed activity. the rules make it so that some “moves” we make in conversation are out of bounds and some are fair play.7 conversational contributions change our normative statuses in that they tend to give and/or take away entitlements and commitments. if ghassan promises to help me with my taxes, he takes on a commitment to do just that. in addition, i become 6 similar points supporting the idea that conversational norms often make it permissible to raise rationally unwarranted doubts about reports of systemic injustice can also be found in ichikawa (2020) and tuckwell (2022). 7 this isn’t to say, of course, that if you break a conversational rule, there’ll be a trial and you may go to conversation jail. david lewis (1979, 347) points out that when no one objects to impermissible moves, conversational rules tend to evolve to make participants’ moves count as fair play. typically, we register that something has gone amiss, and the conversation may temporarily “breakdown” while we adjust to the turn the conversation has taken. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 entitled to carry on as though ghassan will help me; everyone else in the conversation becomes entitled to assert that ghassan promised to help me; and so on. ghassan’s promise is a conversational contribution, and when he makes it, he changes his normative status by taking on a commitment; my normative status changes because i accrue a new entitlement; and so on. within this framework, tirrell pays especial attention to assertions and challenges to assertions. when ghassan asserts that i’ve made a mistake on my tax form, he takes on new commitments: he commits himself to the truth of what he’s asserted, to defending his assertion if it’s challenged, to answering questions about his claim, and so on. one way that someone might challenge ghassan’s assertion is by challenging whether he was entitled to make it. chitra may challenge his credentials as an accountant, for instance, or his general ability to identify errors on tax returns. in maintaining his commitment to the truth of his assertion, ghassan should meet those challenges that come his way. chitra’s challenge changes ghassan’s normative status by putting his claim into doubt, making it so that he must meet her challenge, give up the claim, or perhaps challenge chitra’s entitlement to make her challenge. challenges are also conversational contributions, of course, and a speaker who makes a challenge takes on commitments of their own. for instance, if ghassan replies to meet chitra’s challenge, she commits herself to answering his reply or else withdrawing her challenge. and just as chitra might challenge ghassan’s entitlement to his assertion, someone might challenge a challenger’s entitlement to make their challenge. a speaker’s epistemic authority relative to other participants can influence how assertions and challenges affect her normative status. if ghassan is a certified accountant with years of experience and a sterling reputation while chitra is filing taxes for the first time, it would seem that her challenge is unwarranted or unentitled unless she can produce some compensating justification, showing that in fact the challenge is warranted. thanks to their relative epistemic positions, when chitra makes her challenge, she incurs a burden to show that her challenge is warranted, and unless she shoulders this burden, her challenge will be unwarranted, unentitled. it’s as if chitra’s challenge is unwarranted by default—when she makes it, it’s as if she must meet a challenge to her entitlement for it even without anyone making that challenge. if the tables are turned, however, and chitra has years of experience while ghassan is a novice, then chitra’s challenge will have a different effect on normative statuses. her relative authority in the conversation will more likely make it so that her challenge is entitled by default. when she makes her challenge, she doesn’t incur a burden to show that it is warranted, and instead, ghassan incurs the burden of meeting her challenge as soon as she makes it. indeed, in this context, because engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 ghassan is a novice, his assertion might be challenged by default. that is, it might be that ghassan’s relative authority in the conversation makes it so that when he asserts that i’ve made a mistake, he straightaway incurs a burden to show that this assertion is warranted. and unless he shoulders this burden, his assertion will be unwarranted. it’s as if his assertion has faced a challenge even if no one has in fact moved to challenge what he’s said. tirrell points out that, for language communities beset by systemic oppression, this normative structure of entitlements and commitments is—like almost everything—warped by that oppression. if participants in some conversation were all to have roughly equal social standing, then epistemic authority would plausibly affect entitlements and commitments in that conversation in the ways described above. but when participants in a conversation occupy different positions in a social hierarchy—structured by race, gender, class, and so on—then these differential positions will also play a role in shaping how conversational moves affect participants’ normative statuses. for instance, tirrell says that a speaker’s being a woman is “often prima facie justified grounds for challenge” to her conversational contributions (tirrell 2018, 24). when a woman makes an assertion, anyone who would challenge that assertion won’t typically incur the burden of justifying that challenge. rather, the challenge is justified by the asserter’s subordinate social position. generally, tirrell (2018, 24) says that “oppressed people often face default challenges.”8 the specifics of how hierarchical social positioning affects assertions and challenges will of course depend on the practices and discourses in which those assertions and challenges take place, on the participants’ intersectional social positions, and so on; but i take it that, generally, when one speaks from a subordinate social position, challenges to one’s assertions typically need no further justification— such challenges are justified by default or by the asserter’s subordinate social position. coming back to normative gaslighting, it’s easy to see how tirrell’s work can help explain some of what we’ve observed. in normative gaslighting, multiple speakers raise unwarranted doubts about reports of systemic injustice and those who report them, especially when the reporter occupies a subordinate social position. if normative gaslighting occurs systematically, then speakers systematically raise 8 the point that a speaker’s marginalized social identity negatively affects their conversational contributions has also been made by others from within a variety of theoretical frameworks and perspectives. see, for example, dotson (2012), mckinney (2016), popa-wyatt and wyatt (2018), ichikawa (2020), podosky (2022), and tuckwell (2022). thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to note the similarities among these works. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 unwarranted doubts in response to reports of systemic injustice. tirrell’s framework can help us explain why unwarranted—or better, rationally unwarranted—doubts would be raised so often (indeed, systematically) in response to certain speakers’ assertions. it’s because when our language games are distorted by oppression, challenges against assertions made by subordinate speakers are warranted by default or by the asserter’s subordinate social position. when the rules of the language game are like this, it doesn’t matter if the challenger is in a worse epistemic position than the asserter,9 it doesn’t matter if the challenger’s stated reasons are unfounded, and it doesn’t matter if the challenger gives no reasons at all. when the language game is fixed against subordinate speakers in this way, challenges to subordinate speakers’ assertions are “warranted” by the game’s rigged rules. this suggests that it may be fruitful to suppose that normative gaslighters are following conversational rules, but if normative gaslighting occurs systematically, there’s more to our oppressive language games than the aforementioned default challenges. first, the appeal to default challenges would tell us why all assertions made by subordinate speakers face unwarranted doubts, but it wouldn’t explain why reports of systemic injustice seem especially likely to invite gaslighting. furthermore, as noted above, although normative gaslighting most often occurs when subordinate speakers report systemic injustice, it doesn’t occur only then. it can occur when anyone reports a systemic injustice. together, these two points suggest that it’s not only speakers’ subordinate positioning but also reports of systemic injustice that are underwriting unwarranted challenges. there are two ways we might deploy tirrell’s framework to accommodate this point. first, we might say that reports of systemic injustice also face default challenges. second, for some language games, we might say something stronger: that reporting systemic injustice is out of bounds. both changes to the framework would make it so that every speaker in the conversation is warranted in raising rationally unwarranted doubts about a report of systemic injustice. this would explain why speakers so often raise rationally unwarranted doubts in the relevant contexts. in addition, since every speaker would be warranted in raising unwarranted doubts, this would explain why multiple speakers so often do so—each has warrant for it. each proposal would also help us understand why other speakers rarely intervene to stop normative gaslighting: the gaslighters’ doubts are warranted in the conversation. as karen adkins argues, when others are thus complicit in (or at least silent about) gaslighting, it can give the gaslighter and his doubts greater authority, making it seem to the subject as though “‘the world’ is not as she thinks it is, but that everyone else 9 as in mckinnon’s (2017, 169–70) example. see also many cases of mansplaining, whitesplaining, etc. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 has access to reality she lacks” (adkins 2019, 77, 82). with normative gaslighting, that would be to give the impression that no systemic injustice occurred. if normative gaslighting gives this impression to anyone—agents, patients, or onlookers—it would be quite effective at maintaining ignorance of systemic injustice. in contexts where either of these proposals holds and tirrell’s default challenges are in play, then when the speaker who reports a systemic injustice occupies a subordinate social position, warrant to challenge her report will be overdetermined. this can help us explain why the subjects of normative gaslighting so often occupy subordinate social positions. i develop this point further below, after articulating the two ways we might extend tirrell’s framework. first, there are plausibly contexts in which reports of systemic injustice face default challenges. this is just to say that in such contexts, when one reports that a systemic injustice has occurred, the rules make it so that others can appropriately challenge such assertions without needing further justification or epistemic authority. this makes it so that everyone in the conversation is entitled to challenge the assertion, and so it makes it more likely that multiple people will raise doubts about the report and reporter, no matter their justification or epistemic standing. thus, when reporters for national public radio and the washington post asserted that nathan phillips had been racially abused in a widely viewed video, they asserted that a systemic injustice had occurred. prima facie, making an appropriate challenge to this assertion would require some justification or epistemic authority. after all, the assertion was “based on the most clear and obvious interpretation” of what can be seen in the video—namely, “the boys chanting, making gestures and making tomahawk chops”—and the video was readily available on the internet (wilson 2019). but in some public conversational contexts, it was treated as appropriate for an oped to say simply, “the teens abused no one. they mistreated no one“ (adams 2019). and it was treated as appropriate for another to say, “what really happened . . . is that a group of catholic school boys was targeted and harassed by grown adults just because they were white, catholic trump supporters” (starnes 2019). in both cases, the authors challenged the assertion that the video depicted racial abuse. in each case, the author offered either little or no justification for the challenge; neither author had witnessed the relevant events first-hand, and neither had any expertise relevant to racial abuse, racism, and so on. if reports of systemic injustice face default challenges, then we can say that these challenges were nonetheless treated as appropriate (by many, but of course not all of us) because challenges to reports of systemic injustice are always appropriate in many dominant language games; they need no further justification or especial epistemic authority. our language games make it appropriate to epistemically gaslight those who report systemic injustice exactly because they are reporting systemic injustice. similarly, when the undergraduate in abramson’s example says that the community has a problem with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 racism, audience members don’t need to justify their doubts or to have any epistemic authority on the community or racism; their challenges to the student’s assertion are warranted by default because of the kind of assertion it is. second, we might suppose that in some language games, it’s just out of bounds to report systemic injustice. if a speaker were to report some systemic injustice in a language game like this, the rules would make it appropriate for others to object or raise doubts because the report violates the rules and objections to ruleviolations are warranted. when a participant in a language games makes a move that’s impermissible, those who raise doubts or objections need not have epistemic authority or justification for their challenge; their challenges are warranted by the rules of the game. if everyone is entitled to enforce the rules of the game, then everyone is entitled to challenge moves that are out of bounds, so it’s again more likely that multiple conversational participants will raise doubts about report and reporter. this proposal looks more plausible the more seriously we take the idea that our epistemic systems affect conversational norms so as to produce ignorance of systemic injustice. one way to produce ignorance of systemic injustice is to make talking about it forbidden. according to mills, the system of white ignorance does something close. for whites, the system makes it forbidden to challenge the system of ignorance on pain of forfeiting the benefits of whiteness (mills 1997, 18). for people of color, conformity to the system of ignorance is enforced by “the two traditional weapons of coercion: physical violence and ideological conditioning” (83). prima facie, reports of systemic injustice challenge epistemic systems that produce ignorance of these injustices.10 if so, and if mills is right, then reports of systemic injustice will tend to provoke the reactions that enforce conformity to the system of ignorance. to generalize, subordinate speakers who report systemic injustice will be subject to violence and ideological conditioning; dominant speakers who do the same will be in danger of forfeiting their dominant status (presumably just for the period of the conversation or just in the eyes of some conversational participants—not across all contexts and in all areas of life). where ignorance is enforced these ways, the doubts raised in the process of normative gaslighting will play a different role in enforcement depending on whether the speaker they’re raised against occupies a dominant or subordinate social position. when the speaker is subordinate, the conversational norms may make normative gaslighting appropriate as a form of ideological conditioning: the doubts raised should 10 it’s important to note that reports of injustices that target subordinate groups can also be deployed to reinforce oppressive systems. for instance, reports of sexual abuse targeting women have historically been used to “justify” racist violence. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 get the speaker to doubt her own interpretation of events, to accept her gaslighters’ interpretation, and ultimately, to adopt the gaslighters’ worldview. in short, conversational norms in this case may warrant something resembling gaslighting as abramson understands it: the point is to “radically undermine someone’s sense of standing to protest bad conduct” (abramson 2014, 6). when the speaker is dominantly situated, then the norms won’t typically warrant ideological conditioning. instead, they’ll make it appropriate to raise doubts about the report and perhaps about the reporter’s entitlement to a privileged social position. in this case, doubts raised as part of normative gaslighting may serve more as warnings or corrective nudges: “do you really believe that?” “you’re starting to sound like one of them.” “do you really think he would do something like that?” the point will be to get the speaker to retract his report and to come back into conformity with the rules that make such assertions impermissible. furthermore, the proposal may seem more plausible in light of some recent cultural trends: political efforts to ban “critical race theory” from us public education, to defund gender studies programs, and to prohibit accurate education on colonialism, sexual orientation, imperialism. in 2021, at least thirty-six us states adopted or introduced laws or policies to restrict the teaching of “critical race theory,” institutional racism, white privilege, or other topics related to systemic racial oppression. gender studies has come under imminent legal threat from political leaders in hungary (redden 2018), wyoming (greenberg 2022), brazil, and florida (cabrera 2020), but of course rhetoric attacking gender studies as a field is much more widespread (redden 2018). for those who support these efforts, it’s not only warranted to raise doubts about reports of systemic injustice; it’s impermissible to report systemic injustice in the first place. it is—or according to some, it should be— out of bounds to teach school-age children about histories of racial oppression, women’s oppression, and colonial genocide. those who support defunding gender studies programs are plausibly invested in maintaining ignorance about gender norms, their histories, and their oppressive effects. prima facie, they support conversational rules according to which it’s out of bounds to make accurate assertions regarding gender norms and their oppressive effects. note that if each of the aforementioned rules holds in some contexts, then we have several ways to understand why normative gaslighting more often targets subordinate speakers and why it is likely more severe when it does. i don’t claim that these are the only reasons why normative gaslighting most often targets subordinate speakers; surely stereotypes, cultural scripts, biases, and structural power relations also play a role in the explanation. but these points can help us understand why the subjects of normative gaslighting most often occupy subordinate social positions. first, where either of the two rules proposed above holds, then if tirrell is right about default challenges, there will be at least two rules making it appropriate to raise feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 rationally unwarranted doubts about a subordinate speaker’s report of systemic injustice. warrants to raise doubts will be overdetermined, presumably making it more probable that speakers will raise doubts. second, there are many reasons to suppose that subordinate speakers are more likely to report systemic injustice. for instance, subordinate speakers are plausibly more likely both to experience systemic injustice and to know that they’re experiencing it (see mills 1998, 21–40). if subordinate speakers report systemic injustice more often, then there are more occasions to normatively gaslight them. third, where the aforementioned rule making it impermissible to report systemic injustices holds, then responses to subordinate speakers will be more severe while responses to dominant speakers might not even register as gaslighting, even though they do involve raising rationally unwarranted doubts. before concluding this section, i should say something about how people may come to follow the rules of language games. on the one hand, i’ve argued that normative gaslighting occurs systematically, and i’ve taken that as reason to suppose that there are conversational rules that make normative gaslighting appropriate. on the other, i’ve said it’s possible for speakers to perpetrate normative gaslighting without intending to gaslight. moreover, it’s implausible on its face that, in every instance of normative gaslighting, the gaslighters intend to enforce oppressive norms or to follow conversational rules. how can that be? how can conversational rules play a role in explaining speakers’ gaslighting behaviors if speakers aren’t plausibly intending to follow the rules (or to gaslight)? my answer follows a response developed by wilfrid sellars. in his influential work on language games, sellars (1954, 209) makes the case that to say a language game is governed by rules isn’t to say that speakers always intend to follow the rules, that all speakers are aware of the rules, or that one must be taught the rules explicitly in order to be a competent speaker. while one may learn a rule of a language game explicitly as a rule, and one may thus be aware of (some of) the language’s rules, and one may intend to follow the rules,11 this isn’t necessary for one’s “moves” in a language game to be governed by the rules of the game. consider the rule noted above: if participants in a discussion are repeatedly using “the house” to refer to anne’s house, then it’s typically out of bounds for someone to abruptly use the phrase “the house” to refer to some other house (see mcgowan 2009, 394). this is a rule governing conversations in english that you probably followed for years before becoming aware of it as a rule, without intending to follow the rule, and without having been taught the rule explicitly. rather, as you’ve participated in language games, you’ve developed dispositions that produce behaviors that conform 11 for instance, if one is learning italian from a grammar book written in english. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 to the rules of the game, and this was sufficient to make it so that, for the most part, you followed the rules. as john haugeland (1998, 149) says, all it takes to reliably abide by even elaborate norms is this: people need “simply acquire the relevant complexes of dispositions from their fellows (via imitation and positive and negative censoriousness), and then behave as they are disposed.” similarly, normative gaslighters needn’t intend to gaslight, to maintain ignorance of systemic injustice, or to follow the rules of any language games. and normative gaslighters needn’t have been taught the relevant conversational rules explicitly and then eventually “internalized” those rules. rather, they need only to have developed dispositions that produce behaviors that conform to the rules—just as nearly all competent speakers of english have developed dispositions to conform to the rule about definite descriptions like “the house” without having been taught the rule explicitly, without consciously intending to follow the rule, and often without awareness of any such rule. thus, one way that many people plausibly develop dispositions to follow conversational norms like those i’ve proposed is by “imitation and positive and negative censoriousness.” if normative gaslighting is as common as i’ve claimed and often public, speakers should have ample opportunity to imitate others who participate in normative gaslighting, and they needn’t be explicitly told any conversational norms that make it appropriate—they’ll ‘see’ that it’s appropriate as it unfolds and others treat it as appropriate. take abramson’s example with the graduate student: i moved out of one field of philosophy in grad school due to an overwhelming accumulation of small incidents. . . . when i tried to describe to fellow grad students why i felt ostracized or ignored because of my gender, they would ask for examples. i would provide examples, and they would proceed through each example to “demonstrate” why i had actually misinterpreted or overreacted to what was actually going on. (abramson 2014, 5) it’s not difficult to imagine that some of the students present for this normative gaslighting were still in the process of learning to navigate the norms in the profession, in the department, in graduate school, and so forth, and they weren’t in a good position to reflect on or perhaps even entertain the question of whether those norms ought to be followed. they were just trying to fit in, to shake off impostor syndrome, to be taken seriously, and so on. for someone in that position, imitating other students’ responses may well lead to a disposition to treat reports of gendered injustice in the field as if they are unwarranted and ought to be challenged in the ways described. similar normative gaslightings unfold in news media, social media, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 institutional responses to injustice; they occur when teachers, religious leaders, and other authority figures are presented with reports of systemic injustice and similar wrongs. when normative gaslighting is so common and visible, speakers imitating these responses to reports of systemic injustice will plausibly develop dispositions to follow conversational rules that make it warranted. that said, it’s also plausible that many people develop the relevant dispositions because they’re following apparently innocuous conversational norms that in fact covertly support systematic ignorance of systemic oppression.12 for instance, there are various mechanisms that encourage speakers to treat as warranted various false assertions that, if true, would make reports of systemic injustice unwarranted. in the paradigm cases, these false assertions suggest in various ways that western societies are inclusive and egalitarian on the whole, implying that raceand gender-based injustices are not systemic but deviations from the norm (see mills 2007, 17). such assertions are easily found, for instance, in school curricula—on us history, on the enlightenment, on european colonialism, on political philosophy, and so on—and at all levels of education (26–33). insofar as a disposition to treat such assertions as warranted will also treat assertions about systemic injustice as unwarranted, western educational systems encourage the development of dispositions that will follow the aforementioned conversational norms without explicitly teaching or mentioning those norms. many more such mechanisms are discussed in scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance. at this point, an objection might come to mind. when we follow rules without explicit recognition of them or their purpose, we tend to find behavior that comports with the rule unremarkable and hardly noticeable. so too with normative gaslighting: many who participate in it likely don’t think of it as differing from other epistemic practices in which dubious claims are challenged. but there is a notable difference between the rule about definite descriptions and the rules making gaslighting appropriate. if one were pressed to say why we follow the rule about definite descriptions, the ordinary speaker would likely say something like, “that’s just how it is.” it’s not likely to go that way if you point out to someone that they’re following the rules proposed above. is that reason to think that we’re not following the rules proposed above? i don’t think so. there are strong cultural taboos against acknowledging and endorsing overtly discriminatory behaviors. of course, this fact doesn’t give us reason to suppose that people don’t participate in practices that perpetuate discrimination and oppression. rather, participation in such practices is common; our culture 12 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to develop this way of accounting for how the relevant dispositions might be acquired. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 maintains these practices and the taboo against acknowledging overt discrimination in part by supplying ready-made denials and deflections. similarly, if one were asked why he raised doubts about some report of sexual abuse, racial abuse, or some other systemic injustice, there are cultural scripts that provide answers: “she’s just looking for attention.” “nobody except him can know whether he did it because he hates women/people of color.” “c’mon—did you see how she was dressed?” “but he has black friends!” indeed, notice that if one were to point out that, say, others are following a rule that makes it appropriate to doubt women’s assertions without rational warrant, this would be to assert that systemic injustice has occurred. that is, in this case, if one were to acknowledge the rules that make normative gaslighting appropriate in the contexts where those rules are in force, then it would be appropriate for others to engage in normative gaslighting. they would be licensed to deflect the assertion by raising rationally unwarranted doubts about it, raising doubts about the asserter’s perceptual and interpretive capacities, and so on. normative gaslighting helps obscure the rules that make normative gaslighting appropriate. conclusion i’ve made the case that the rules of oppressive language games often make normative gaslighting an “appropriate” response to reports of systemic injustice. above, i suggested that if reports of systemic injustice are systematically met with doubts, then such doubt-raising behaviors are apt to make people doubt their perceptions of injustice by virtue of their occurring systematically (podosky 2021, 211). if dominant conversational norms make normative gaslighting an appropriate response to reports of systemic injustice, then it plausibly occurs systematically when systemic injustice is reported. this is what gives normative gaslighting the characteristic feature of gaslighting: for those who suffer it, it is apt to induce “negative attitudes toward [their] own interpretive abilities” (211). when it is successful at inducing such negative attitudes or at reinforcing gaslighters’ own ignorance of systemic injustice, normative gaslighting serves the epistemic systems that produce and enforce ignorance of systemic injustice. if normative gaslighting serves systems of ignorance, and if systems of ignorance systematically license normative gaslighting, then, plausibly, the two are mutually reinforcing or mutually dependent. i don’t endorse the conversational norms described in this paper, of course. the point is to advance our understanding of the oppressive conditions that structure our lives and that make gaslighting commonplace. if it’s true that normative gaslighting occurs systematically in part thanks to our warped conversational norms, then we may be able to mitigate the prevalence of gaslighting by attending to these norms. such efforts can be developed alongside ongoing efforts to address the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 institutional, legal, social, and psychological causes of discrimination and oppression. whereas many of these efforts are aware of and aim to address the ways in which subordinate speakers are discredited and dismissed, their programs can easily be adapted to also address the ways in which speakers who report systemic injustice are discredited and dismissed—especially, of course, when those speakers occupy subordinate social positions. references abramson, kate. 2014. “turning up the lights on gaslighting.” in “ethics” issue, philosophical perspectives 28 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12046. adams, becket. 2019. “too little, too late: washington post admits it screwed up big in the covington catholic story.” washington examiner, march 1, 2019. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/too-little-too-late-washingt on-post-admits-it-screwed-up-big-in-the-covington-catholic-story. adkins, karen c. 2019. “gaslighting by crowd.” in “health, well-being, and society” issue, social philosophy today 35:75–87. https://doi.org/10.5840/socphiltod ay201971660. ahern, kathy. 2018. “institutional betrayal and gaslighting: why whistle-blowers are so traumatized.” journal of perinatal and neonatal nursing 32, no. 1 (january /march): 59–65. https://doi.org/10.1097/jpn.0000000000000306. alcoff, linda martín. 2007. “epistemologies of ignorance: three types.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 39–57. albany: state university of new york press. cabrera, cristian gonzález. 2020. “supreme court strikes down bigotry in brazil’s schools.” human rights watch, may 19, 2020. https://www.hrw.org/news/20 20/05/19/supreme-court-strikes-down-bigotry-brazils-schools. cho, katherine s. 2018. “the perception of progress: conceptualizing institutional response to student protests and activism." thought and action: the nea higher education journal 34, no. 1 (summer): 81–95. ———. 2020. “responding to campus racism: analyzing student activism and institutional responses.” phd diss., university of california, los angeles. https://escholarship.org/content/qt7j10b4kn/qt7j10b4kn.pdf. dotson, kristie. 2012. “a cautionary tale: on limiting epistemic oppression.” frontiers: a journal of women studies 33 (1): 24–47. engelhardt, jeff. 2019. “resources, rules, and oppression.” hypatia 34, no. 4 (fall): 619–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12497. fileborn, bianca, phillip wadds, and stephen tomsen. 2019. safety, sexual harassment and assault at australian music festivals: final report. sydney: university of new south wales. engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 23 goodman-delahunty, jane, and anna corbo crehan. 2016. “enhancing police responses to domestic violence incidents: reports from client advocates in new south wales.” violence against women 22, no. 8 (july): 1007–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801215613854. greenberg, susan h. 2022. “wyoming senate votes to defund gender and women’s studies.” inside higher ed, february 28, 2022. https://www.insidehighered.co m/quicktakes/2022/03/01/wyoming-senate-votes-defund-gender-and-wome n%e2%80%99s-studies. haugeland, john. 1998. having thought: essays in the metaphysics of mind. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. hill, rosemary lucy, david hesmondhalgh, and molly megson. 2020. “sexual violence at live music events: experiences, responses and prevention.” international journal of cultural studies 23, no. 3 (may): 368–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/1 367877919891730. ichikawa, jonathan jenkins. 2020. “contextual injustice.” kennedy institute of ethics journal 30, no. 1 (march): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/ken.2020.0004. lewis, david. 1979. “scorekeeping in a language game.” journal of philosophical logic 8:339–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00258436. mac donald, heather. “the ucsb solipsists.” national review online, june 1, 2014. reprinted online by manhattan institute. https://manhattan.institute/article /the-ucsb-solipsists. manne, kate. 2019. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. mcgowan, mary kate. 2009. “oppressive speech.” australasian journal of philosophy 87 (3): 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048400802370334. mckinney, rachel ann. 2016. “extracted speech.” social theory and practice 42, no. 2 (april): 258–84. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract201642215. mckinnon, rachel. 2017. “allies behaving badly: gaslighting as epistemic injustice. in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr., 167–174. new york: routledge. mills, charles w. 1997. the racial contract. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 1998. blackness visible: essays on philosophy and race. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 11–38. albany: state university of new york press. pinker, steven (@sapinker). 2014. “the idea that the ucsb murders are part of a pattern of hatred against women is statistically obtuse.” twitter, june 1, 2014, 4:05 p.m. https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/473193729927286784. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 24 podosky, paul-mikhail catapang. 2021. “gaslighting, firstand second-order.” hypatia 36, no. 1 (winter): 207–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.54. ———. 2022. “agency, power, and injustice in metalinguistic disagreement.” philosophical quarterly 72, no. 2 (april): 441–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq /pqab023. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2020. “gaslighting and echoing, or why collective epistemic resistance is not a ‘witch hunt.’” hypatia 35, no. 4 (fall): 674–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.29. popa-wyatt, mihaela, and jeremy l. wyatt. 2018. “slurs, roles and power.” philosophical studies 175, no. 11 (november): 2879–906. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s11098-017-0986-2. redden, elizabeth. 2018. “global attack on gender studies.” inside higher ed, december 4, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/05/gen der-studies-scholars-say-field-coming-under-attack-many-countries-aroundglobe. ruíz, elena flores. 2014. “spectral phenomenologies: dwelling poetically in professional philosophy.” hypatia 29, no. 1 (winter): 196–204. https://doi.org /10.1111/hypa.12066. sellars, wilfrid. 1954. “some reflections on language games.” philosophy of science 21, no. 3 (july): 204–28. https://doi.org/10.1086/287344. stark, cynthia a. 2019. “gaslighting, misogyny, and psychological oppression.” monist 102, no. 2 (april): 221–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onz007. starnes, todd. 2019. “covington catholic high school students smeared by mainstream media lies—don’t expect an apology.” fox news, january 21, 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/covington-catholic-high-school-stu dents-smeared-by-mainstream-media-lies-dont-expect-an-apology. tirrell, lynne. 2018. “authority and gender: flipping the f-switch.” feminist philosophy quarterly 4 (3): article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2018.3.5772. tuckwell, william.2022. “the politics of relevant alternatives.” hypatia 37, no. 4 (fall): 743–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2022.53. wilson, jason. 2019. “how conservative media transformed the covington catholic students from pariahs to heroes.” guardian, january 23, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/how-conservativemedia-transformed-the-covington-catholic-students-from-pariahs-to-heroes. jeff engelhardt is associate professor of philosophy at dickinson college. most of their recent work concerns systems of oppression and the philosophies of mind and language. in nonideal theory and content externalism, forthcoming from oxford university press, they argue that many contemporary theories of mind and language engelhardt – some reflections on gaslighting and language games published by scholarship@western, 2023 25 are systematically inaccurate because they misrepresent society as free of oppression and its effects. in other recent papers, they’ve tried to articulate mechanisms of misandrogyny—the system that enforces the gender binary. 15077 englehardt title page 15077 engelhardt final format acknowledgment of editors, graduate student assistants, and referees for fpq acknowledgment of editors, graduate student assistants, and referees published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 acknowledgment of editors, graduate student assistants, and referees for feminist philosophy quarterly as feminist philosophy quarterly celebrates ten years as an open-access, peer-reviewed, triply anonymous journal, we wish to express sincere gratitude to the former editors and graduate student assistants from the past ten years, and to referees for volumes 6–10, who have made this journal possible. they have contributed to the greater publication and accessibility of feminist philosophy. past editors samantha brennan, 2015–2019 serena parekh, 2020–2021 carla fehr, 2015–2024 alice maclachlan, 2015–2024 past graduate student editorial assistants sara weaver, 2015–2017 jaclyn lanthier, 2017 connor fraser, 2018 shannon buckley, 2018–2020 janet jones, 2020–2022 lisa trefzger-clarke, 2022–2023 referees for fpq volumes 6–10 cheryl abbate andrew aberdein kathryn abrams alison adam karen adkins linda martín alcoff mark alfano muhammad ali khalidi hannah allen ben almassi luvell anderson scott anderson kristin andrews louise antony kiran asher lauren m. ashwell b. lee-harrison aultman amy baehr michael randall barnes bipasha baruah rima basu heather battaly eric bayruns garcía laura beeby macalester bell rowan bell emily bender nora berenstain amy berg sandrine bergès brian berkey asha bhandary andria bianchi claudia bianchi stephen bloch-schulman nic bommarito kirstin borgerson tina botts luc bovens samantha brennan aili bresnahan judith bridges ingo brigandt ray briggs liam bright victoria browne luke brunning taina bucher mary margarete buckley shannon buckley megan burke sylvia burrow ann j. cahill loren cannon anna carastathis åsa carlsson mary carman alisa carse amanda cawston sonya charles feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 mich ciurria justin clardy sharyn clough catherine clune-taylor justin coates alan coffee marc cohen claire colebrook rach cosker-rowland margaret couch alice crary sharon crasnow alba curry annaleigh curtis jessie daniels karen davis ronald de sousa shannon dea megan dean robin dembroff esa díaz-león jill dieterle susan dimock michael doan josh dohmen pinar dokumaci jenna donohue mathieu doucet tom dougherty matt drabek eleanor drage lidal dror jane dryden brian earp gen eickers natan elgabsi gretchen ellefson kevin elliott benjamin elzinga barrett emerick jeff engelhardt melinda fagan maegan fairchild tamara fakhoury saba fatima helen fielding jeremy fischer jade fletcher amy flowerree jane forsey rachel fraser cynthia freeland jasper friedrich stacie friend katy fulfer mark gatus elisabeth gedge anca gheaus john gleaves trystan goetze stacey goguen namita goswami anna gotlib heidi grasswick aaron griffith daniel groll lori gruen hilkje haenel dan haggerty kim q. hall raja halwani nora hämäläinen irene han sid hansen ami harbin carol hay samia hesni sahar heydari fard cressida heyes daniel hicks joshua hobbs jerome hodges shannon hoff jules holroyd mark hopwood leslie a. howe moira howes catherine hundleby grayson hunt jonathan ichikawa violetta igneski ada jaarsma debra jackson christine james carrie jenkins casey rebecca johnson rebekah johnston kathryn joyce lindsay kelland daniel kelly eric kennedy susan kennedy jeanette kennett ian james kidd jennifer kling christine koggel youjin kong quill kukla sarah lachance adams holly lawford-smith celine leboeuf ted lechterman david leichter ann levey shen-yi liao alida liberman nethanel lipshitz heidi lockwood kathryn mackay hans maes patricia marino neri marsili annette martín amy marvin acknowledgment of editors, graduate student assistants, and referees published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 rebecca mason sharon mason sarah mattice lee mcbride kelly anne mccormick lucy mcdonald emily mcgill-rutherford aidan mcglynn nancy mchugh robin mckenna carolyn mcleod laura mcmahon paddy mcqueen diana meyers mari mikkola sarah clark miller dana miranda gregory morgan swer deborah mühlebach amy mullin cecilea mun l. ryan musgrave mark navin mariana ortega julinna oxley elisabeth paquette shelley m. park javiera perez gomez menaka philips carissa phillips-garrett andrea pitts paul-mikhail catapang podosky gaile pohlhaus jr. theron pummer alison reiheld joel michael reynolds sarah richardson louise richardson-self regina rini catherine rioux sarah roe monique roelofs dorothy rogers miriam ronzoni phyllis rooney amanda roth jennifer rycenga ronni gura sadovsky pamela sailors mark sanders jennifer saul joe saunders marina sbisà naomi scheman elizabeth schiltz angela schneider sally scholz timothy schroeder jeanine weekes schroer falguni sheth liam shields alexis shotwell maureen sie laura soter eddy souffrant andrew spear david spewak susanne sreedhar joshua st. pierre titus stahl  cynthia stark edward stein rachel sterken katie stockdale laura specker sullivan anita superson olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò bonnie talbert alessandra tanesini giulia terzian lisa tessman briana toole adriel trott tiffany tsantsoulas mark tschaepe nancy tuana suzanne uniacke desiree valentine peter vallentyne julie c. van camp lucinda vandervort helga varden elizabeth victor catherine villanuevagardner rosa vince mark vopat ruth walker julie walsh madeline ward jack warman georgia warnke lori watson katherine wayne chris weigel penny weiss shay welch danielle wenner rebecca whisnant ella whiteley cynthia willett charlotte witt katharine wolfe lenore wright sarah wright nicole wyatt audrey yap naomi zack robin zheng perry zurn the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practice-dependent theories of moral responsibility feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 1 recommended citation holroyd, jules. 2024. “the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practice-dependent theories of moral responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 1. 2024 the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practice-dependent theories of moral responsibility jules holroyd university of sheffield j.d.holroyd@sheffield.ac.uk holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practice-dependent theories of moral responsibility jules holroyd abstract practice-dependent approaches to moral responsibility appeal to our practices of moral responsibility in order to identify and justify the conditions for holding each other responsible. yet, our practices are shaped by oppressive norms. for example, attributions of praise can be shaped by ableist norms, antifat norms, and norms of toxic positivity. i argue that such cases pose methodological and justificatory challenges for practice-dependent approaches of various stripes. in considering what resources these approaches might have to confront these challenges, i formulate some supplementary norms for theorizing about our practices of moral responsibility and for structuring those practices themselves. this paper makes the following novel contributions: first, it advances examples that show that reactive attitudes can be oppressive irrespective of patterns of comparative distribution. second, it articulates the implications of oppressive reactive attitudes for a range of post-strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility. third, it more fully articulates the norms that ought to shape our responsibility practices and locates them in relation to two recently proposed approaches to moral responsibility, from shoemaker and ciurria. keywords: moral responsibility, praise, oppression, practice-dependent theories, amelioration practice-dependent approaches to moral responsibility appeal to our practices of moral responsibility in order to identify and justify the conditions for holding each other responsible. yet, our practices are shaped by oppressive norms (ciurria 2020a, 2020b, 2023; holroyd 2021). for example, attributions of praise can be shaped by ableist norms, antifat norms and norms of toxic positivity. i argue that such cases pose methodological and justificatory challenges for practice-dependent approaches of various stripes. in considering what resources these approaches might have to confront these challenges, i formulate some supplementary norms for theorizing about our practices of moral responsibility and for structuring those practices themselves. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 in section 1, i outline the key strawsonian move that instigated the development of “practice-dependent theories” of moral responsibility. in section 2, i present new examples of oppressive praise, which show how reactive attitudes can be oppressive irrespective of their patterns of comparative distribution. in section 3, i articulate the implications for post-strawsonian theories of moral responsibility. i then formulate some supplementary norms for theorizing about our practices of moral responsibility and for structuring those practices themselves. i show how each approach from section 3 could incorporate these norms and the implications of their doing so. this work goes beyond previous work on oppressive praise in two key ways: first, the cases i use (in section 2) show that praise can be oppressive without any comparative or distributive concerns arising. second, rather than simply arguing that practices of praise should be sensitive to a norm about challenging oppression, this paper shows how such a norm could be incorporated into different post-strawsonian approaches to moral responsibility (section 4). 1. the social turn one of the most influential approaches to moral responsibility in the second half of the twentieth century is strawson’s 1962 essay “freedom and resentment” (reprinted in his 1974 book, freedom and resentment and other essays). there, strawson advanced an approach to moral responsibility that shaped much theorizing about responsibility that followed. rather than see responsibility as threatened by determinism, or as a purely instrumental practice, strawson argued that we should see our practices of holding each other responsible as a fundamental and unforesakeable part of interpersonal relationships as we know them. we are deeply committed to these interpersonal social relationships; we cannot, and should not want to, give them up. and indeed, when we look at our social practices, strawson argued, we see that the sorts of considerations that do lead us to step back from holding another responsible have nothing to do with metaphysical theses of determinism. rather, (drawing on watson’s reconstruction of the strawsonian view) when we look at our practices, we find that “to be responsible is just to be a (possible) fit target of that sort of attitude” [viz, the reactive attitudes, praise and blame] (watson 2014, 16). these “personal reactive attitudes rest on, and reflect, an expectation of, and demand for, the manifestation of a certain degree of goodwill or regard on the part of other human beings towards ourselves” (strawson [1974] 2008, 15; see watson 2014, 19). in practice, when we modify or withdraw from the reactive attitudes, strawson claimed, it is due to the presence of certain exempting or excusing conditions that show us that the action did not manifest the agent’s quality of will. strawson’s work marks what we might think of as the “social turn,” which has prompted the flourishing of rich lines of thought and argumentation that attempt to draw insights about the concept of moral responsibility and the conditions for its holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 application from observations about our social practices of holding each other responsible.1 in a recent volume on social dimensions of moral responsibility, hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana (2018, 2) write that “most (if not all) of the recent social approaches to moral responsibility—directly or indirectly—owe a debt to p. f. strawson’s” work on this topic (see also shoemaker and tognazzini 2014). characteristic of these approaches, they argue, is that “we identify what it means for an agent to be responsible by examining the practices under which we hold agents responsible. . . . strawson therefore develops a practice-dependent theory of moral responsibility” (hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana 2018, 4). another way of characterizing the social turn is in terms of strawson’s key insight (in victoria mcgeer’s words) “that philosophers can make real progress in understanding what traits or capacities are required to be a responsible agent by focusing on our attitudes and practices of holding responsible” (mcgeer 2019, 301). in turning to the social, strawson was not impervious to the fact that the practices might be shaped by, and take on, particular instantiations that may vary according to cultural context. far from describing a universalist conception of how we respond to each other, strawson attends, albeit briefly, to “the great variety of forms which these human attitudes may take at different times and in different cultures” ([1974] 2008, 26). indeed, some aspects of our practices may demonstrate, strawson observed, a “seamy side,” which might make us “rightly mistrustful” of the relationships and attitudes that he takes as fundamental to our responsibility practices. our blaming responses might be shaped, for example, by self-deception, guilt transference, unconscious sadism, he notes. nonetheless, these troubling manifestations, strawson submits, are a “factor of comparatively minor importance” (26), which should not lead us to revoke our commitment to—or see, on the whole, any less justification for—our practices of holding each other responsible. my contention is that these observations—about the “seamy side” of our practices—in fact have greater significance than strawson was willing to countenance. the systematic distortion of our practices by oppressive norms is not after all a factor of minor importance. rather, it presents considerable challenges to practice-dependent approaches to theorizing about moral responsibility and requires revision both to our practices of attributing and to our theories of moral responsibility. the challenge is this: if our practices function, in systemic ways, to 1 “the social” is broad, and it includes some things that were outside the remit of strawson’s primary concern; for example, social institutions and—as we will see—the dynamics of social power and social hierarchy. however, i use this terminology in order to follow the language of recent discussions about how post-strawsonian theorizing has the capacity to be sensitive to social dynamics of the sort that are the focus of this paper (see, in particular, hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana 2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 enforce oppressive norms, rather than track whatever qualities are supposed to be relevant to moral responsibility, then looking to those practices is unlikely to illuminate the conditions for moral responsibility; rather, it is likely to misrepresent them. on the strawsonian approach, being a responsible agent just is a matter of having what it takes to be an apt participant in interpersonal relationships characterized by concern for reciprocal quality of will. there is no reason to believe that what it takes to be a participant in those relationships will be in step with what it takes to be a participant in interpersonal relationships characterized by (inter alia) instrumentalization of reactive attitudes for the enforcement of oppressive norms.2 nor, if oppressive, are those interpersonal relationships well placed to provide justificatory support for our responsibility practices.3 my argument proceeds as follows. first, i present cases of praise which are inflected by oppressive norms (section 2). these cases demonstrate how even positive reactive attitudes require careful scrutiny, since they can encode stereotypeinformed expectations and misrepresent the contours of morally responsible agency. moreover, the specific cases i focus on advance our understanding of how to diagnose the problems with oppressive praise (cf. holroyd 2021). the challenges these cases pose for practice-dependent theories will depend on the particular kind of practicedependent theory. so, in section 3, i draw on the work of victoria mcgeer to tease out three different ways in which we might understand the relationship between practices as we find them and our theories of moral responsibility. our practices might 2 note that our practices should not be instrumental to oppressive ends; this does not entail that they should not have instrumental purposes for other, legitimate, goals. see section 4. 3 for other challenges to the strawsonian approach, see watson (2004, 282–83), mckenna and russell (2008, 12–14) and fischer and ravizza (1993,18), and the more recent authors, discussed in 2.1. however, none has framed the challenge in the terms i do here, regarding the ways that patterns of praise challenge the methodology and justification of practice-dependent approaches. the concerns i raise here won’t apply only to these practice-dependent approaches. approaches to moral responsibility that articulate the metaphysical conditions for moral responsibility won’t be vulnerable in exactly the same way, but related problems may present: the articulation of the metaphysical conditions themselves may be influenced by oppressive social practices; epistemic problems may arise if individuals’ beliefs about whether those conditions are met are distorted by oppression; and, if oppressive practices prevent individuals or groups from meeting those conditions, then the matter of who is responsible may be shaped by oppression. these are substantial questions that require treatment on their own terms, and i do not have space to fully address them here. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 constitute, or be evidence about, or partly construct, moral responsibility. i consider the resources that each approach has available to address the concerns i raise. the core problem facing each view is that, to adequately deal with the phenomena of oppressive reactive attitudes, some practice-independent norms are needed. this motivates some supplementary norms for our practice, and for our theories of moral responsibility, which i articulate in section 4. i show how these norms supplement the three approaches canvassed in section 3. finally, i locate my preferred account in relation to recent attempts to justify our (perhaps revised) practices of holding one another morally responsible. 2. oppressive practices, complicated distortions mich ciurria writes that “responsibility theorists must be concerned with the asymmetries of power that influence intuitions about responsibility” (2020c; see also ciurria 2023). with a focus specifically on strawson, one key problem, ciurria writes, is that while attending to our social practices, “he does not address social injustice, he (mis)represents the social ontology as basically egalitarian, human beings as basically rational, laws and institutions as basically fair, and the reactive attitudes as basically objective and unbiased” (2023, 40). a few theorists have recently examined the systematic distortions of our responsibility system. for example, marina oshana (2018) has examined the ways that asymmetries of power can affect who is regarded as having the status to hold another to account and for what one might be held accountable—as well as whether one is given the opportunity to account for oneself. catriona mackenzie (2018) has examined how the “moves” one is able to make in relationships of accountability—as well as for what one is accountable—can be affected by power dynamics. likewise, vanessa carbonell (2019) has argued that power relationships can affect who is regarded as having the moral standing to hold others responsible. katrina hutchison (2018) has cautioned that biases might inform assessments of individuals’ capacities, and hence their inclusion within relations of responsibility, especially for members of marginalized groups. ciurria (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2021, 2023) has pointed to the ways that our practices of blame are systematically distorted, and in ways that might obscure the conditions for moral responsibility. all these theorists are focused primarily on blame, or accountability following (presumed) wrongdoing. like ciurria, carbonell, oshana, mackenzie, and hutchison, i am concerned with bringing these effects of social power on practices of moral responsibility to light and with the implications of doing so for theorizing about moral responsibility. however, my focus is on how praise might be involved in such distortions. there are important gains from this focus on praise. ciurria’s powerful analyses, across a number of papers, suggest that when we focus on these power feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 asymmetries, we will find distinctive patterns of unequal distributions of praise and blame. focusing chiefly on blame, ciurria (2020a, 167) argues that distortions skew the “responsibility system against disadvantaged [participants], who are more likely to receive blame rather than praise compared to privileged [participants].” and thus, for example, “we should expect women to receive less praise and more blame than men” (2020a, 160). ciurria makes a convincing case that, in many instances, those in privileged positions escape blame—via “disappearance narratives,” or due to flawed conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to identify and blame for wrongs. and, ciurria argues, those in positions of disadvantage are more likely to be blamed: witness the victim-blaming of those women, cis and trans, who experience sexual assault and the excessive punitive treatment of black people, including children.4 we might suppose the inverse pattern characterizes praise in societies structured by oppression: those in privileged positions as recipients of praise (see ciurria 2020a, 180–82); those in oppressed positions as less likely to be praised. yet, as we will see, things are not so straightforward when it comes to the ways in which praising responses might be distorted. those in positions of disadvantage may be praised more (holroyd 2021). occupying a marginal position or being socially oppressed does not mean one will not be praised. rather, praise can function as a tool of oppression, and it can do so where there is no obvious concern about the comparative distribution of praise. in making this claim, i go beyond my earlier (holroyd 2021) analysis of oppressive praise by showing that problems of oppressive praise are primarily to do not with the comparative distribution of praise but with praise’s role in perpetuating stereotypes about how people are or how they ought to behave. next, i articulate the complex ways in which praising responses misrepresent the contours of moral responsibility and the distinctive problems this poses for practice-dependent theorists. in doing so i build on existing analyses in two ways: first, i articulate a more complex relationship between oppression and the reactive attitudes than other theorists have supposed; then, in section 3, i tease out more fully the implications for contemporary post-strawsonian practice-dependent theorists of moral responsibility. 2.1. antifat appraisal the author aubrey gordon (2021), formerly writing under the pseudonym “your fat friend,” remarks on the problematic positive appraisals she receives as a fat person: “you’re not fat you’re beautiful. as if i couldn’t be both.” some such appraisals have explicitly moral content, as when gordon writes of her objection to being praised 4 see also mckiernan (2022) for a discussion about reactive attitudes in contexts of oppression, but again with a focus on blame. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 for her “bravery” in wearing what she ultimately describes as a rather “unremarkable, standard” dress: i was only brave if my body was meant to be a source of shame, something to be shut away, covered up, rarely seen and never discussed. and she [the appraiser] simply couldn’t conceive of someone with a body like mine daring to get dressed, daring to be seen, daring to show up in the same places as someone with a body like hers. (gordon 2020a)5 there are multiple problems with this expression of praise for being “brave.” one problem is that this appraisal expresses expectations: that people—women in particular—ought to be thin (if they are to be beautiful), that fat people ought to be ashamed of their bodies, that the intensity of this shame is such as to require great— praiseworthy degrees of—courage to overcome. there are multiple harms here, in terms of the disrespect expressed in the rude and unwanted evaluation of appearance, the assumptions about body ideals and gordon’s relationship with her body, the false and harmful beauty norms communicated, and the body-shaming the appraisal involves. these problems can be identified without there being a comparative or distributive issue, concerning whether praise is systematically apportioned more, or less, to thin or fat people (cf. holroyd 2021, ciurria 2020a). what i want to focus on here are the implications of such appraisals for thinking about moral responsibility. as described by gordon, her appraiser is attributing praise for supposedly displaying a certain quality of character: courage. yet, gordon rejects this ascription of courage. appraisers are wrongly attributing moral virtue and, accordingly, praiseworthy behavior here.6 note that, contra ciurria’s suggestion, in this instance gordon is being accorded praise when no praise 5 while concerned with attire, this appraisal is moralized in two ways. first, norms of appearance often take on ethical or moralized content (widdows 2018). gordon (2020b) elsewhere writes of the perception that fat people should relate to their bodies as “character flaws or moral failings.” second, the character trait of bravery is widely considered a moral trait (or virtue), and one which will interact with other traits in ways that influence our interpersonal relationships. see brink (2021, 45–47) for narrower and broader understandings of strawson’s notion of “quality of will,” ranging from regard or concern, to character trait, to mesh of relevant psychological attitudes. 6 this is not to say that it is never courageous, e.g., to disregard restrictive norms of appearance, and ignore the anticipated shaming attitudes from others. rather, it is to point to instances where the attribution of courage is problematized and rejected. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 is (by gordon’s own lights) warranted.7 this is of course consistent with acknowledging that another aspect of antifat oppression is that the personhood of fat people is overlooked and denied (gordon 2020c) and with the claim that fat people face negative reactive attitudes due to antifat bias and marginalization. fat people are encouraged to see their bodies as “moral failings” (gordon 2020b). the first key point i want to emphasize is that the way patterns of appraisal are shaped by oppressive norms appears to be complex: sometimes attributing moral traits of character or virtue when none is exercised, other times denying personhood, and other times holding people accountable and blaming for supposed moral failings. the second key point is that such appraisals multiply misrepresent the contours of moral responsibility, treating people as having done something for which they are esteemable when they have not, as having done something for which they can be held to account when they have not, and sometimes denying personhood at all. the appraisals are not tracking moral qualities or moral regard. instead, they enforce oppressive antifatness norms. 2.2. ableist “inspiration porn” drawing on stella young’s work, joseph stramondo describes the tendency of able-bodied people to use the lives and experiences of disabled people as “inspiration porn.” young developed the term to capture her experiences of being appraised as “inspirational,” saying: i’ve lost count of the number of times that i’ve been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think i’m brave or inspirational. . . . they were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (young 2014, 4:33) the problem with this kind of positive appraisal, stramondo (2020, 8) writes, is that “it gives voice to the very low expectations the world has for disabled people. by treating the completion of ordinary tasks as if they were monumental accomplishments, it shows just how incompetent people assume we are.” one of the problems with praise is that it can express stereotype-informed expectations. this problem can be diagnosed without identifying any problematic comparative distribution of praise (cf. holroyd 2021, ciurria 2020a). this phenomenon was widely publicized on twitter in 2019 with the viral hashtag started by activist imani barbarin, #disabledcompliments. participants in the 7 the praise is of course bound up with other negative moral attitudes, as gordon (2020a) writes: the presumed courage was related to overcoming “the shame we’re meant to carry for simply living in our bodies.” holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 thread share the putative compliments that express low expectations for disabled lives. these putatively positive appraisals express low expectations for disabled people and entrench stereotypes of disabled people as “helpless, hopeless, nonfunctioning and noncontributing members of society” (kemp 1981; quoted in stramondo 2010, 124). such patterns of appraisal are informed by what eli clare has described as the “supercrip model” of disability, writing that this way of thinking “frames disability as a challenge to overcome and disabled people as superheroes just for living our daily lives” (clare 2001, 360). the primary wrongs here are the disrespect conveyed by such appraisals, the low expectations they express, and the harms related to the ableist stereotypes they entrench. but i again want to focus on the implications for how the contours of moral responsibility are misrepresented. ciurria has articulated the ways in which oppressive ableist norms can shape attributions of responsibility, writing that “according to ableist tropes, disabled people are either morally ‘impaired’ or culpably evil” (2023, 44). ciurria elaborates: according to ableist stereotypes, disabled people are either subhuman or villainous. if the first claim is true, then we deserve condescending pity and patronizing caretaking, but if the second claim is true, then we deserve scorn, resentment, and punishment. (ciurria 2023, 45) while bringing to light how ableist norms threaten the strawsonian project, ciurria’s focus on the negative reactive attitudes overlooks the distorted positive appraisals also informed by ableist norms, such as those that young, stramondo, and clare each articulate. this complicates the picture of how ableist norms operate in the domain of moral appraisal. on the one hand, positive appraisals express the stereotypeinformed low expectations for disabled people, according to which any achievement has to be qualified in such terms. the praise is underpinned by a view of disabled people as lacking in agential competence—consistent with ciurria’s diagnosis. but on the other hand, these low expectations inform misrepresentations of moral responsibility. because of the expectation of incompetence, the performance of mundane activities is attributed to heroic and inspirational levels of moral character, and courage in particular. since those expectations of incompetence are unwarranted and unfounded, these authors, young and stramondo, each reject the attributions of heroism, bravery, or inspirational degrees of courage, as clare rejects the “supercrip” narrative.8 we can observe the precarity of this rejection, given the tendency ciurria 8 again, this observation is consistent with the thought that there will be some instances in which disabled people do display bravery in overcoming obstacles. but i take first-person testimony as (ceteris paribus) authoritative on these matters, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 notes for ableist norms to deny the agency of disabled people, sometimes construing disabled people as “subhuman.” the ways in which ableist norms misrepresent the contours of moral responsibility is thus more complicated than ciurria allows. crucially, such appraisals—both positive and negative—are misrepresenting the contours of moral responsibility: sometimes denying personhood, other times identifying exercises of courage and qualities of character when (by the lights of the appraised person) they are not manifested, in that instance. the appraisals are not tracking moral qualities or moral regard; they are instead enforcing ableist oppressive norms. 2.3. toxic positivity consider next the positive appraisals remarked upon by those experiencing serious illnesses. for example, writing about her experiences of cancer treatment, megan-claire chase writes of the difficulties of being positively appraised for the strength and bravery they are presumed to possess: it’s impossible to be this tower of strength all the time. a lot of us get annoyed when we are told: “oh, you’re so brave,” or “i don’t know how you do it.” when that happens, all i’m thinking is “do i want to live or do i want to die. it’s not a fair choice.” (chase 2020) these objections to praise for “bravery” chime with barbara ehrenreich’s critiques of the toxic positivity she encountered in her “cancer career”: those who are in the midst of their treatments are described as “battling” or “fighting,” sometimes intensified with “bravely.” (ehrenreich 2010) these appraisals for bravery are part of a trend which ehrenreich (2010) critiques according to which “there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure.” thus, confronting one’s illness with a positive attitude and bravery becomes part of the normative expectations facing cancer patients, despite there being no evidence supporting the idea that a positive attitude improves one’s prognosis (american cancer society 2020). one of the problems with such appraisals is that they express these pernicious normative standards—the expectation that people be positive, brave, strong in the face of grave diagnoses. other—perfectly reasonable—negative emotional responses my focus is on the cases in which the targets of the appraisals problematize and reject the praise. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 are invalidated, even prohibited. when bound up with false assumptions about the causal efficacy of such positivity, such expressions entrench ableist expectations of health and wellness, which it is assumed can be achieved by mere exercises of positive attitude. the flip side, of course, is that if one is not positive and brave, then one is to blame for any failure to recover. illness becomes constructed as the fault of the person and their failure to live up to norms of positivity. in rejecting these normative expectations, both ehrenreich and chase write of the various supposedly taboo negative emotions in their experiences of cancer and treatment: anger, loss, grief, frustration, despair. once again, while my earlier (holroyd 2021) analysis emphasizes problematic, stereotype-informed distributions of praise, in cases of toxic positivity we can articulate the problems without there also being any comparative distributive concern (whether praise is attributed more or less than to a comparison group). what i want to draw attention to here is that in praising for such “bravery,” these appraisals again misrepresent the contours of moral responsibility. such praise elevates the moral character of the patient—in ways that, as above, chase rejects in annoyance and ehrenreich resists. yet these misrepresentations are again complex, with these elevations of moral character sitting alongside denials of personhood. ehrenreich (2010) writes of experiences whereby “i had been replaced by it, was the surgeon's implication.” chase (2021) also writes of her experiences of her pain not being taken seriously and of being outright dismissed.9 ehrenreich and chase report on sometimes experiencing denial of their personhood alongside mistaken positive appraisals of their moral characters. these appraisals are not functioning to track moral character or moral regard, but to entrench oppressive ableist wellness norms.10 in the next section, i tease out the implications of these insights for contemporary practice-dependent approaches to responsibility. 3. three challenges practice-dependent theories of moral responsibility, recall, “identify what it means for an agent to be responsible by examining the practices under which we hold agents responsible” (hutchison, mackenize, and oshana 2018, 4). the challenge, in methodological terms, to the strawsonian project is this: if our practices at least sometimes are concerned with enforcing oppressive norms, rather than responding 9 this in the context in which evidence shows that black people’s pain is not taken seriously (see, e.g., trawalter and hoffman 2015). 10 my examples here all focus on courage and bravery. i think these cases best exemplify the problem, but the wider literature contains other cases that do not involve attributions of courage and that can also be understood as involving misrepresentations of the contours of moral responsibility: see, e.g., holroyd (2021), jeppsson and brandeburg (2022). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 to whatever are the responsibility-relevant properties, why think that attending to the practices will deliver an adequate picture of those properties? moreover, even if attending to the practices helped us to see the conditions for moral responsibility, there remains the question of whether, once we notice their oppressive dimensions, the practices can be justified by appeal to their role in social and interpersonal relations. as mackenzie puts it, these worries raise a skeptical challenge to the strawsonian project: if our moral responsibility practices and reactive attitudes are indeed so entwined with dynamics of power and oppression, then how can these practices and attitudes provide any kind of justification for moral responsibility ascriptions? (mackenzie 2018, 76)11 mackenzie raises, but does not fully address, this skeptical worry. in what follows, i consider these challenges. this requires identifying what exactly is the connection between an examination of the practices of holding agents morally responsible and what it means for an agent to be morally responsible, for different practicedependent theorists. victoria mcgeer (2019) helpfully teases out three ways of understanding the relationship between social practices and our theories of moral responsibility. in this section, i consider what resources they each have to address these methodological and justificatory challenges. 3.1. conventionalist views one way of thinking about the connection between our practices and our theorizing about moral responsibility is to see the practices as wholly determining the conditions for moral responsibility. the practices are governed by a series of norms— which can change and shift—and those practices determine what it is to be a morally responsible agent. as mcgeer puts it, on the conventionalist view, what it is to be a responsible agent is simply to have whatever it takes to be deemed an “appropriate” target of reactive attitudes and practices, as determined by the generally accepted norms (whatever those happen to be) that govern those attitudes and practices. (2019, 302)12 11 see also smith (2007) for concerns about what we can read off the contours of our practices of holding responsible. 12 this reading seems to best cohere with watson’s (2014) reconstruction of strawson. shoemaker’s (2017) view also appears to be best understood as conventionalist in this way (though see mcgeer’s [2019] discussion of shoemaker’s holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 mcgeer provides the example of “fashionable” as a useful analogue. there are facts, at any particular time or in any particular context, about what is fashionable. something or someone can have the property of being fashionable. but these facts, or possession of the property, are wholly determined by the norms of fashion and by the practices involved in it. there is no independent, objective property that fashionrelated practices track. as shoemaker (2017, 482), who defends a version of this view, puts it: “there simply is no question as to its [the ‘system of responsibility responses’] correctness or incorrectness from an external stand-point.” those practices determine the properties. as with fashion, so for the conventionalist picture of moral responsibility: the practices determine—by constituting—the facts about moral responsibility. on this practice-dependent view, the distortive practices i have set out above will determine facts about morally responsible agency, and praiseworthiness in particular. fat people just are morally responsible, and laudable, for existing in public. disabled people just are exercising responsibility-relevant capacities, and doing so in a praiseworthy way, for getting up in the morning. ehrenreich and chase just are exercising morally responsibility relevant capacities, demonstrating moral character, and are praiseworthy for bravery and positivity (despite protestations to the contrary). this is the case since the norms of the practice identify exercises of morally responsible—and, indeed, praiseworthy—agency, in the cases described in section 2. it is clear why the conventionalist looks to social practices as a methodology: on the conventionalist view, there are no practice-independent facts or properties about moral responsibility. but as a methodology, such practices don't seem well placed to deliver anything like the strawsonian claim that our reactive attitudes track participants’ concern with one another's quality of will or responsibility-relevant traits or behaviors. being an apt target of attitudes that function to enforce oppressive norms is unlikely to coincide with what it takes to be an apt target of reactive attitudes that track quality of will. nor, where we find the practices enforcing oppressive norms, will this strategy provide effective justification for those practices (see ciurria [2023] for a thorough articulation of some of the ways responsibility practices might further function to enforce oppressive racist, ableist, and misogynistic norms.) but are there more critical responses available to the conventionalist? mcgeer (2019, 303) observes a distinction between individual and collective fallibility to which views at 318n10). i discuss shoemaker’s view more fully in section 4. see also brink’s (2021, 39–41) discussion of response-dependent views. brink’s characterization of response-dependent views coheres with mcgeer’s conventionalist. in mcgeer’s articulation of them, indicative and constructivist views would amount to responseindependent (because realist) views, for brink. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 the conventionalist might advert.13 individuals can always be wrong in their application of the relevant norms. for example, if i praise someone for their cruelty, praising just how bad they have been and how terribly they have failed to live up to the relevant normative demands, i have misunderstood the norms of the practices of praising and can be criticized and corrected accordingly. collectively, though, there is no room for fallibility—given that the practices of the collective generate the norms, the practices cannot be wrong. (compare, sticking with mcgeer’s analogue: while i might get the norms of fashion wrong, the teams of fashionistas coordinating the paris fashion week cannot—they determine what is fashionable.) might we think that the problematic instances i have described, in section 2, are cases of individuals getting the norms of the practice wrong? one consideration against this interpretation is that the instances of praising of the kind i’ve identified are not incidental; they are not cases of isolated error but rather are one amongst a pattern of similar responses (recall young, above: “i’ve lost count of the number of times . . .”). the problem is not with an individual who misapplies the norms but with the patterns of appraisal we find—with the norms themselves, as identified and critiqued by the authors in section 2. but still, there is scope for addressing this within the conventionalist picture: as mcgeer notes, there will be “norm-guided property recalibration” (2019, 304), whereby the collective norms evolve or change (and hence will shift the relevant properties considered to ground moral responsibility, praise and blameworthiness). one mechanism by which this recalibration might occur, attention to which enables us to finesse mcgeer’s claims here, is by nuancing our understanding of “the collective” that generates norms. mcgeer writes as though there is relative homogeneity in the norms of a practice, with an emphasis on the collective. but— with respect to fashion, grammar, and moral responsibility practices, inter alia—this oversimplifies. there will be subcultures within a society, characterized by different constituting norms.14 and it is from within these subcultures that resistance to the dominant norms can be generated and that pressures toward certain kinds of normgenerated recalibration can be applied. for example, feminist and antiracist movements identify and challenge norms that distort moral responsibility and generate praise in sexist and racist ways; disability rights movements identify and challenge ableist constructions of moral responsibility and praiseworthiness. still, a problem remains: how is the conventionalist to determine which evolutions of norms are valuable ones? that is, how might they adjudicate whether dominant or subcultural norms should be endorsed? since there are no practice-independent 13 see also brink (2021, 40–42) on the impossibility of systemic error for such views. 14 compare calhoun’s (1989) discussion of subcultures who challenge moral understandings. see also moody-adams (1994) and isaacs (1997). holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 properties to guide the recalibration of the conditions for moral responsibility, the conventionalist will need to appeal to supplementary norms to identify welcome and progressive evolutions of the practices. the take-home messages for the conventionalist, then, are twofold: first, they should take care to identify subcultural practices that contribute to the evolution of the practices and shaping of the conditions of moral responsibility, rather than attending exclusively to the dominant norms of the practice. second, they will need supplementary norms to determine which evolutions are welcome and progressive ones. i propose such norms in the final section. 3.2. indicative views as mcgeer characterizes it, an indicative approach to moral responsibility holds that what it is to be a responsible agent is to have whatever it takes to be an objectively appropriate target of reactive attitudes and practices, as indicated by the underlying nature of these attitudes and practices. (mcgeer 2019, 304) the idea here is that there is some metaphysically realist property that our practices are tracking (perhaps imperfectly).15 examining those practices helps us to articulate what that property is. while those practices are helpful indicators, the relevant property exists independently of our social practices and is not constituted by them. mcgeer’s analogue here is with the property of “red”—there is some objective property that certain surfaces have, which means that beings like us experience it as red. features of ours (our particular visual systems) make this property interesting to us, but its existence is not dependent upon us. likewise with properties relevant to moral responsibility, for the indicative theorists. some objective properties exist, and they determine facts about moral responsibility, about praise and blameworthiness.16 those facts are particularly interesting to us, given features that we have qua human beings (say, being sensitive to norms and caring about others adherence to them, or quality of will toward ourselves and others). but the relevant properties are not dependent upon us. however, we can look to our practices in order to identify and articulate what that property is. what is the relevant property? this is of course the crucial question. drawing on what theorists identified as indicativists have argued, 15 see, for example, brink and nelkin (2013), as discussed by watson (2014), and brink’s (2021, 39–42) articulation of the “realist” interpretation of strawson. 16 this view seems to be operative in the work of, e.g., oshana (2018), hutchison (2018), and carbonell (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 mcgeer (2019, 305) articulates the relevant property as “the capacity for understanding and living up to normative demands/expectations as these are expressed in our reactive attitudes and practices”; “normative self-governance” for short. the indicative approach is not hostage (as the conventionalist arguably is) to the claim that the norms of the social practices just are—since they constitute—the norms of moral responsibility. however, the indicativist faces the challenge that looking to the practices, if they are distorted by oppressive norms, is methodologically dubious: they may well be poor indicators of the relevant underlying properties. if the practices of praising are distorted, then we will not have good indications of the relevant properties for praiseworthiness. if the practices of blaming are distorted, then we will not have good indicators of the relevant properties for blameworthiness. and if the practices regarding when morally responsibility is exercised at all are distorted, because the practices function to enforce oppressive norms, and not only (or rather than) to track interpersonal concern, then we may not even have a good indication of who is—or should be—within the domain of morally responsible agents. instead, attention to the practices may lead us to believe that praiseworthiness has to do with conformity to antifat ideals, or ableist conceptions of “achievement,” or norms of toxic positivity. attention to the social practices, insofar as they misrepresent when morally responsible agency has been exercised at all, may instead lead us to distorted conceptions of what the conditions of moral responsibility are. scholars have indeed argued that theorists have been guided by the wrong properties in articulating the conditions for moral responsibility: that the “normative self-governance” conditions of the sort articulated by mcgeer in fact illegitimately exclude some who should not be excluded—some children, cognitively disabled, neurodivergent, or mentally ill persons (see ciurria 2023). moreover, the practices may lack justification if they fail too widely in their tracking or indicating of the relevant properties. how might the indicativist respond to this challenge? they could point to the possibility of collective fallibility: it is a consequence of the indicativist position that everyone, or almost everyone, could be systematically wrong about the relevant properties for moral responsibility, in the presence of certain distorting factors. thus, the indicativist has available a process of “property-guided norm recalibration,” as described by mcgeer (2019, 306): because the property we are triangulating on . . . under appropriate (normal or standard) conditions is a perfectly objective feature of the world, it stands to reason that as our understanding of that property improves, so will our understanding of what constitutes the right sort of conditions for discerning that property, as well as our understanding holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 of the kind of things that possess it. this may lead to some important recalibration in the norms we embrace for determining when our responses are accurate or adequate. because of the need to ensure that we continue tracking the same property across the calibration process (to avoid changing the subject), such recalibrations, mcgeer suggests, are likely to be conservative. given my argument in section 2, with respect to the systematic distortion of our norms of moral appraisal, i want to suggest that mcgeer radically underestimates both the mechanisms and the consequences of such property-guided norm recalibration. firstly, once we notice that “normal or standard” conditions of accessing the relevant properties are conditions of oppression, we might become more circumspect about the extent to which our social practices really do indicate the relevant properties (rather than serve the interests of those in positions of power and privilege). we might worry that we have not homed in on the “underlying nature” of those attitudes and practices. at best we may have an incomplete picture of the properties relevant to moral responsibility; at worst we are quite misguided in the properties to which we have attended. second, depending on the extent to which our practices are distorted, we might think that any recalibration of the norms might be quite radical, rather than conservative. we might determine that under nonoppressive conditions, different understandings of the properties that ground moral responsibility would be revealed; these revisions might counsel in favor of new norms for attributing praise and blameworthiness.17 if one shares these concerns, how might the recalibration process be embarked upon? i point to the norms that might guide such a process in section 4. 3.3. constructivist views mcgeer offers (and endorses) a third way of understanding the relationship between our practices and the conditions for moral responsibility. this strategy, which builds on the indicative approach, is to see our practices not only as indicating but as themselves shaping—scaffolding—our agency and normative sensitivities, such that they construct us as morally responsible agents. the capacities of relevance—as 17 mcgeer rejects the indicative and conventionalist views, as they stand, finding that neither are adequate to meet intuitions about desert that strawson held dear—the conventionalist because desert has no practice independent role; the indicativist because the dispositional version of the relevant property (to respond to reasons) is ill placed to explain why blame is deserved when the disposition does not manifest (see also mcgeer and pettit 2015). instead, she develops the view outlined (and critiqued) in 3.3 here. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 mcgeer has it, the capacities for normative self-governance, or responsiveness to moral reasons—are essentially developmental. they can be enhanced or inhibited, over time, depending on the extent to which they are exercised, honed, and nurtured. as with any skill, these capacities require environmental feedback, and the significant kind of feedback for our responsibility-relevant skills concerns feedback from others. this includes the kinds of moral responses with which we are familiar: praise, blame, holding responsible, holding to account; the range of strawsonian reactive attitudes. the key insight of this view, then, is that these responses are not just reactive in the backward-looking sense. they have a forward-looking dimension, in that they shape—and are intended to shape—the capacities and sensitivities of those to whom they are directed. we expect others to react to these moral responses; they are “evocative” of morally responsible agency, as mcgeer puts it (see also mcgeer and pettit 2015; mcgeer 2015). they are “proleptic” moral responses.18 this conception sees the properties relevant to moral responsibility as crucially shaped by the moral responses to which they are subject. these responses are apt if we are liable to be sensitive to them and have the capacity to develop our moral sensibilities in light of them. this account is striking and unusual for its emphasis on and foregrounding of the extent to which we—specifically, our responsibilityrelevant capacities—are shaped by the social relationships in which we stand. however, once we note the oppressive dimensions of our social practices, this makes visible the ways in which our moral sensibilities can be constructed in troubling ways. as a methodology, looking at the practices may reveal this. so long as we have attention trained on those oppressive dimensions—something that, until recently, has not been the case for responsibility theorists—as a methodology this may be useful. but justifying the practices remains challenging. for the constructivist, observing the ways that praise (or blame) can encode oppressive norms means recognizing that moral responses may shape our capacities for normative selfgovernance in accordance with those oppressive norms. praise might be evocative in encouraging people to conform to norms of appearance that privilege thin, white, cisgender, bodies and subscribe to antifat ideals. praise might be evocative of attitudes that invalidate negative emotional responses to illness. praise might communicate low expectations and fail to engage with the capacities of those who do not already conform to dominant ableist norms. as various authors have argued, 18 for other “proleptic” conceptions of moral response—in particular, blame—see fricker (2016). the formulations of mcgeer and of mcgeer and petit focus primarily on the proleptic dimensions of blame, and little is said about praise in particular. see holroyd (2023) specifically on proleptic praise. note that there is an instrumentalist rationale for our practices, on these approaches—that of cultivating morally responsible agency. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 oppressive norms can be internalized and integrated into the self, and it can take considerable work, including in collective consciousness raising, to identify and address the ways in which they have been internalized (bartky 1990; mackenzie 2018; widdows 2018). thus, the challenge for the constructivist is that our practices of moral response may construct sensibilities in ways that sensitize people to oppressive norms, and shape moral responses in accordance with oppressive or stereotyped expectations. although mcgeer does not attend to these oppressive dimensions, one virtue of the constructivist approach is that it directs our attention to these phenomena, since it emphasizes the role of social feedback in shaping our responsibility relevant capacities (mcgeer 2019, 313). methodologically, attending to the social practices is a useful way of elucidating these aspects of how we might be “scaffolded” in better or worse ways. however, if morally responsible agency requires having the sensitivity to respond to and develop one’s capacities in light of moral responses, the constructivist must have the resources to articulate which moral responses it is important to be sensitive to, and which moral responses can and ought to be resisted, if those practices are to be justifiable. again, some supplementary norms are needed. in this section, i have argued that those who pursue post-strawsonian strategies of articulating and justifying our moral responsibility practices by appeal to our social practices face distinctive challenges, once we observe the extent to which those social practices are shaped by oppressive norms. in the following section, i propose some supplementary norms both for our practices of moral responsibility and for theorists articulating the contours of those practices. these norms resonate with those i proposed elsewhere (holroyd 2021). i show how they would inform the approaches outlined in section 3. and i here give a fuller articulation of what those norms are and how they are located in relation to two recent approaches, from shoemaker (2017) and ciurria (2020a, 2020b). 4. ameliorative pluralism what sort of tools might practice-dependent theorists need in order to be able to identify and uncover oppressive aspects of our responsibility practices, rather than reproduce them? in this section i propose and defend two supplementary norms to guide the practice of attributing praise and the development of theories of moral responsibility. 4.1. two supplementary norms the first supplementary norm i propose concerns how practice-dependent theorists of moral responsibility ought to proceed—and as such, this is a norm feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 addressed to those engaged in such theoretical work. it is essentially a norm for nonideal theorizing.19 as charles mills (2005, 2017) describes it, ideal theory abstracts away from actual injustices and so lacks the resources to understand, much less address or provide remedy for, real world injustices. ciurria applies this approach to moral responsibility, arguing that “a nonideal theorist trains her attention on realworld hierarchies of power” (2020b, 17). a nonideal approach directs theorists to attend to how oppressive norms, structures, and institutions might be visible in our practices of holding each other responsible: i) supplementary norm for practice-dependent theorists: practicedependent theorists should attend to how oppressive norms, structures, and institutions may be visible in our practices of holding each other responsible, and they should provide tools for articulating and addressing these aspects of our practice. what sort of tools might this involve? this brings us to the second supplementary norm: a supplementary norm internal to our practices of moral responsibility. the articulation of this norm draws on the work of ciurria (2020a, 2020b), who has argued that practices of attributing blame should serve to dismantle oppression. (i contrast my approach with ciurria’s in section 4.2 below.) i propose the following supplementary norm: ii) supplementary norm for the attribution of praise: apt praise should avoid reinforcing and, where possible, should challenge oppressive norms.20 how would this norm supplement the three approaches considered above? for the conventionalist, the norms for attributing responsibility are constituted by the practices, so such a supplementary, practice-independent norm would qualify any practice-derived norms. (there may also be a blame-related norm, but that is beyond 19 see curry (2021) for concerns with nonideal theorizing. however, i take curry’s concerns to provide reasons to keep a careful eye on the empirical data so as not to import false assumptions or overgeneralize when doing nonideal theory. 20 this norm will inherit difficulties that arise where there is disagreement over what norms are oppressive. in such cases, there will be disagreement over whether praise is apt or not. this merits further attention but is beyond the scope of this paper. note though that one consequence of such disagreement is that we should expect subcultural practices that diverge in their application of responsibility-relevant norms (such as this one) to persist. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 the scope of this paper.) moreover, where subcultures have different practices, this norm could be appealed to in adjudicating which evolutions of norms are progressive ones. (i articulate this approach in more detail in 4.2.) the indicative approach sees our practices as pointing to, or triangulating upon, the (objective) properties relevant for responsibility. for these theorists, this supplementary norm could be useful in isolating the parts of the practice on which to focus (those where appraisive practices avoid reinforcing, or perhaps challenge, oppressive norms) and which parts to disregard (those where they reinforce oppression). the constructivist, like the indicativist, is a realist about the responsibilityrelevant properties but sees them as being not only indicated by but also shaped by those very practices. the supplementary norm, on this approach, would help us identify not only which parts of the practice are most likely to help us triangulate on the relevant properties but also which sorts of shaping of moral sensitivities can be endorsed, if the practices are to be justified—those in which our appraisive practices avoid reinforcing oppression and, rather, challenge it. my contention is that such a norm enhances the appeal of any such practicedependent approach.21 but i will here say a little more about the constructivist approach, since i consider it the most defensible of the three. on mcgeer’s constructivist approach to moral responsibility this norm would supplement both desert-based norms for attributing praise (or blame) and forward-looking norms or values, concerned with cultivating moral sensitivity.22 for example, mcgeer aims to offer an analysis of the properties necessary for moral responsibility that respects a desert norm: the idea that there is “a normatively substantial sense in which their activities redound to their credit or discredit” (2019, 307).23 this desert norm sits alongside what we can think of as an “improvement” or “agency-cultivation” norm— that apt moral responses ought to improve the moral sensitivities of the appraised 21 note that insofar as the supplementary norm is practice-independent, its incorporation would render any conventionalist view no longer a genuinely responsedependent one, in brink’s (2021, 42) terms—unless it eventually became incorporated into the psychological dispositions of praisers, such that their appraisive dispositions shifted. 22 crucially desert norms need not be formulated in terms of “basic desert”: neither vargas nor mcgeer endorse such a notion. for another recent rejection of the idea of basic desert, see bennett (2024). 23 note that mcgeer (2019, 314) does not endorse the description of desert norms as “backward-looking” moral responses, since, on her view, blame is deserved when it is appropriate because the agent is capable of expanding their capacity for responding to reasons. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 (and perhaps of others) and that our practices are justified insofar as they serve to do so (the instrumentalist component of these approaches). mcgeer (2019, 314) frames this in terms of the “evocative” or “proleptic” functions of moral responses: that reactive attitudes “[call] for a particular response,” which includes committing to doing better in the future. moral responses are therefore in part justified by the role they play in improving our moral sensibilities. the norm can supplement other pluralist approaches. manuel vargas also argues for a theory of responsibility that incorporates desert norms alongside a focus on forward-looking agency-cultivation. for example, central in our practices vargas argues, is a desert norm: “a person deserves blame in virtue of being a responsible agent and doing something morally bad in a way that manifests bad quality of will” (vargas 2013, 250; see also pp. 115, 241). meanwhile, the practices are justified if such desert-based norms for attributing blame (or praise) “[foster] moral considerations-sensitive agency” (2013, 199)—that is, if the practices help us to improve our morally responsible agency.24 as such, “blame is deserved partly in virtue of the good it can bring to agents subject to it” (2013, 265) with respect to their ability to improve their morally responsible agency. these accounts are pluralist, incorporating multiple norms or values into the justification of our responsibility practices. the supplementary norm i have proposed adds to the plurality of norms which should structure our practices of attributing praise.25 importantly, the practice-independent norm would inform the application of the desert and agency-cultivation norms, identifying distortive applications of them. it may also constrain the application of these norms, directing agents to refrain from even deserved praise if doing so would entrench oppressive norms. thus, praise that entrenches antifat biases, or ableist norms—or other oppressive norms (e.g., cisnormative, heteronormative, racist, classist)—will be inapt. praise should instead, where possible, challenge those oppressive norms, though this will not always be easy to do. this norm is addressed to participants within the practice, who ought to take into consideration the role of their praise in reinforcing or dismantling systems of oppression. but it is also addressed to theorists who, at a distance, might evaluate attributions of praise or make recommendations for when praise ought to be 24 mcgeer worries that on vargas’s view, instances of attributing blame may be vulnerable to a “justificatory gap,” where the desert norm and the forward-looking norm might come apart (mcgeer 2015). see holroyd (2018) for a comparative analysis of vargas and mcgeer’s approaches. 25 my focus here is on praise. i think such a norm will likely extend to other reactive attitudes, but i do not have space to argue for that here and so leave it an open question whether the case can be made, on similar terms, for other reactive attitudes. holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 attributed. evaluations of, or recommendations for, attributions of praise should take into account its role in resisting oppressive norms. this approach is pluralist. this second norm should sit alongside the other norms that structure our practices—desert-based and agency-cultivating norms. apt praise will sometimes require careful consideration of how these norms interact, since their prescriptions won’t always align, and careful judgement is needed concerning how to proceed. it may be impossible to satisfy all norms at once, in which case, some instances of praise might be apt in some ways and inapt in others. this approach is also ameliorative: the norm is not intended as articulation, or description, of norms that in fact structure our practices as they presently are. they are norms that ought to structure our practices of holding responsible, if those practices are to be justified (see holroyd [2018] and ciurria [2021] for a defense of ameliorative approaches to moral responsibility). accordingly, this approach is revisionist. but because it supplements rather than supplants desert-based or agency-cultivation norms, it is less radically revisionist than alternative approaches. to better clarify and defend the role i envisage for these norms, i contrast my ameliorative pluralism with two recently proposed approaches to moral responsibility. 4.2. two approaches for shoemaker (2017), who aims to stay true to the strawsonian project, being responsible is a function of being held responsible, which is a function of how people are disposed to respond to you (with reactive attitudes of anger, resentment, etc.). (this approach is most closely aligned with the conventionalist view, considered in section 3.) but of course, we can’t settle for just any dispositions to respond, since people’s dispositions to respond with, for example, anger might be wrong (shoemaker 2017, 497). indeed, drawing on concerns from john martin fischer and mark ravizza (1993, 18), shoemaker considers systematic distortions that might track social identity, such as “a community whose members all resented the profoundly intellectually disabled or refused to resent women and minorities” (2017, 497). what matters rather is that the response is merited or fitting. fitting responses determine facts about moral responsibility (2017, 508). but what guides our evaluation of whether a response is fitting? this will be a matter of sensibility, and we will have reason to trust those whose sensibilities are well honed (2017, 511). but shoemaker does not give us more precisely specified tools for ascertaining whether some sensibilities are more refined than others or which responses are more fitting than others. my first supplementary norm directs us toward some such theoretical tools, encouraging us to consider specifically how oppressive norms might shape participants’ senses of what responses are fitting. it directs us to draw on the critical resources that theorists have provided in articulating how oppressive norms are feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 visible in our practices. appraisive responses that entrench oppression are likely to result from distorted sensibilities that may erroneously judge such attributions as “fitting.” as such, shoemaker could appeal to the epistemologies of domination (see tremain 2017) that produce oppressively distorted sensibilities. but note that the norms i propose are practice-independent: prescribed as norms for how the practices ought to be, irrespective of whether they are, and of whether current participants view responses prescribed by the norm as fitting. as such, incorporating such norms is a departure from the conventionalist approach: practice-independent norms must have a role in setting which reactive attitudes are fitting. such norms can be used to identify which evolutions of the practice are progressive or regressive. a second approach with which my view is helpfully contrasted is that from ciurria. ciurria endorses a norm that resonates with my second supplementary norm: that blame should promote the norms of an intersectional feminism (202a, 18). apt blame thus tracks contributions to oppression systems (2020a, 15, see also ciurria 2021). however, ciurria’s proposal is radically revisionary: this norm supplants desert norms such as those advanced by vargas or mcgeer, described above. on the picture ciurria proposes, moral responsibility is not agency-tracking. deserved blame “doesn’t track features of the perpetrator’s agency—it tracks a perpetrator’s action(s), and their role(s) in systems of power and domination’ (2020a, 82). ciurria embraces and endorses the radically revisionary implications of this, writing: i grant that most people will take if [intersectional feminist] reasons to be the “wrong reasons” to blame people, and will thus experience if reasons as morally alienating. but i deny that this is a problem because, unlike vargas, i want to alienate ordinary folks from their ordinary moral intuitions. since we live in an asymmetrically structured society, many of our acculturated moral intuitions will be deformed, and adopting an if framework will alienate us from those reasons. good! (2020a, 85) while it will be clear that i am sympathetic to the norm that ciurria proposes, it seems to me a mistake to see this norm as exhausting the domain of moral responsibility practices, rather than as supplementary to desert or agency-cultivating norms. my concern is not that it is the “wrong reason”—since i am happy to endorse such a reason—but rather that it cannot be the only reason that structures our practices of moral responsibility. this is because it becomes hard to see why a practice structured by ciurria’s norms is a practice of moral responsibility at all. maybe it is a practice we holroyd – the distortions of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 need, but insofar as it is not concerned with tracking agency, it isn’t clear it is a practice of attributing moral responsibility.26 ciurria might respond by saying simply “so much the worse for practices of ‘moral responsibility’—whatever we call it, a practice structured by this norm is the practice that we need.” but it is unclear that ciurria themselves really can cogently reject any such agency-tracking norm. after all, once we focus on causal contributions to oppression, rather than exercises of morally responsible agency that contribute to oppression, why focus, as ciurria (2020b) does, on the responsibility of men who impregnate women, rather than the sperm that is also, and indeed more proximally, causally implicated? if what matters is tracking contributions to oppression, we might blame the chimneys that pour out pollutants into neighborhoods rather than the governmental policy makers and ceos who decide that such emissions are acceptable. rather, our concern is, and should be, with agential contributions to oppression.27 an ameliorative pluralism endorses the idea that our practices ought to be attuned to challenging oppression. the supplementary norms i propose, for both our theorizing about moral responsibility and deployment within practices of holding responsible, are needed. they would require revisions to our practice—and perhaps quite considerable revisions at that. but this approach maintains the conviction that challenging the ways our responsibility system is implicated in oppression is done by articulating the ways that oppressive norms distort our ability, as participants in the practice, to track desert or to cultivate agency.28 26 this issue has been taken up by other commentators—e.g., here is john doris (2022): “then the natural question to ask is, does ciurria develop a theory of moral responsibility, or [are they] doing something else entirely?” and here is vargas (2022): “is the proposal at hand a change in topic, rather than a proposal about responsibility? . . . it is unclear to me whether the proposal for revision leaves enough of blame intact to be a theory of blame.” 27 it is my view that omissions, or actions done without awareness—the sorts of cases that motivate ciurria’s concerns with tracking agency—constitute exercises of agency for which one can be held responsible (for further discussion, see holroyd 2015). 28 see also argetsinger and vargas (2022) for methodological concerns that fix on the relationship between theory and practices that might be distorted by biases and heuristics. their focus is on pervasive psychological biases, such as framing effects— rather than on the distortions due to oppressive norms and stereotypes. the view i offer here is most closely aligned with the view they call “ascriptivism”: a view that takes the practices as the explanatory target of a theory of responsibility and has to justify departures from the practices as we find them. in this case, the departures i identify are justified by the norm for dismantling oppression. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 26 acknowledgments i am grateful for feedback from audiences in leeds and at the society for applied philosophy annual conference (2022). i am 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syndicate network. https://syndicate.network/symposia/phil osophy/an-intersectional-feminist-theory-of-moral-responsibility/. watson, gary. 2004. “responsibility and the limits of evil: variations on a strawsonian theme.” in agency and answerability: selected essays, 219–65. oxford: clarendon press. ———. 2014. “peter strawson on responsibility and sociality.” in “freedom and resentment” at 50, edited by david shoemaker and neal a. tognazzini, 15–32. vol. 2 of oxford studies in agency and responsibility. oxford: oxford university press. widdows, heather. 2018. perfect me: beauty as an ethical ideal. princeton, nj: princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77j2q. young, stella. 2014. “i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much.” filmed april 2014 in sydney, australia. ted talk video, 9:26. https://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=8k9gg164bsw&t=2s. jules holroyd (they/them) is a senior lecturer at the university of sheffield, and has recently been working on a book on the oppressive dimensions of praise. previously, jules has published work on topics such as implicit bias, collective vice, intersectionality, and gender-inclusive language. 101201 holroyd title page 101201 holroyd final format “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 11 recommended citation patrizio, ross. 2024. “‘friendly’ men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 11. 2024 “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape ross patrizio cogito epistemology research centre, university of glasgow r.patrizio.1@research.gla.ac.uk patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape patrizio abstract in 1983, andrea dworkin gave a speech entitled “i want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape,” in which she argued that the only way to put an end to the culture of rape in society is for men to take responsibility for it. the view that it is up to men to dismantle the culture of rape—including “friendly” men, who do not actively endorse and perpetuate this culture—might have been considered radical at the time, but the same is no longer true today. dworkin’s view, or something very close to it, is now garnering widespread attention and credibility. the purpose of this article is to find a philosophical theory of responsibility that can vindicate and elucidate dworkin’s claims. in order to do so, i develop a view that combines zheng’s role-ideal model of responsibility with witt’s conception of gender as a mega social role. i argue that by combining these accounts we find a philosophically satisfying theory of what it means to say, with dworkin, that men are responsible for the culture of rape. keywords: collective responsibility, structural injustice, social roles, rape culture, andrea dworkin introduction in 1983, andrea dworkin gave a speech at the midwest regional conference of the national organization for changing men entitled “i want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.” in the audience were roughly five hundred friendly men. these men were “friendly” in the sense that they were sympathetic and amenable to feminist concerns. they probably all would have agreed that women are systematically subordinated in society and that this fact upsets them greatly. in her speech, dworkin aimed to convince these men that their sympathy would not suffice. women live in a culture of rape—that is, a culture in which sexual violence directed toward them by men is both systemic and institutionalized. real freedom and equality, dworkin argues, are not compatible with the existence of such a culture. sitting around discussing the subordination of women and the perils of toxic feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 masculinity will simply not do; men must take ownership of this problem as one that is on them to solve. but what does it mean to say that men are responsible for the culture of rape? we’re quite familiar with holding women responsible—consider the stock advice issued to women in the immediate aftermath of yet another high-profile case: “don’t walk home alone, and if you must, keep your keys between your knuckles.” we’re also quite used to holding unfriendly men—that is, rapists and enablers—responsible. we’ve seen campaigns for the issuing of tougher sentences on sexual offenders and to reconsider which actions are officially recognized as rape.1 but what about friendly men? typically, the responsibility of such men has been a topic sidelined to only the most radical of feminist activist circles. these men, after all, are the kinds of people who openly denounce rape culture and even congregate in their free time to discuss the perils of toxic masculinity. but dworkin’s view—or something very close to it—seems to be garnering significant credibility in recent times. this was evidenced in the discourse that ensued in the wake of multiple high-profile cases throughout 2020 and the beginning of 2021. the horrifying cases of sarah everard and sabina nessa, in particular, sparked mainstream debate surrounding how best to address the seemingly ever-present culture of rape in society. there was, of course, a sense of frustration at the inevitable rehashing of old tips and tricks for women about how they ought to be mindful when travelling from a to b. more notable, though, was the palpable sense of bemusement, frustration, and anger that the most likely response from friendly men—those men who we might like to think of as feminist allies—would be to pay lip service to the cause for a few weeks and then return the issue to the back burner. the thought was that if men really want to help and really are outraged by this long-standing injustice, then sharing infographics with rape statistics to social media channels in a performative gesture of allyship will not suffice. friendly men need to do more. whether they like it or not, men are uniquely well positioned—both socially and politically—to make a meaningful difference, and so these gestures are no longer enough. if men want to help eradicate this culture of rape that pervades the everyday lives of women, then they must assume substantive and meaningful responsibility for it as a problem that is theirs to solve. the main purpose of the current article is to investigate whether this sentiment can be supplemented with a philosophical theory of collective responsibility. suppose dworkin was right that men’s taking responsibility for the culture of rape is necessary for its dismantling, the question then arises as to whether and in what sense we can count all men—including those who openly denounce the 1 see jenkins (2017) for comprehensive discussion on the effects of failing to correctly count instances of rape as such. patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 culture—as meaningfully responsible for its existence. i aim to explore whether the tools of analytic philosophy can help answer this question; whether there is a satisfactory theory of responsibility that counts all men, qua men, as responsible for ending the culture of rape. in section 1, i will detail what i take to be dworkin’s key claims and use these to lay down some desiderata that will help guide our search for a theory of responsibility. in section 2, i turn to the literature on collective responsibility for structural injustice. i argue that robin zheng’s (2018) “role-ideal model,” according to which we are all responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, is a very promising candidate for an account that can vindicate dworkin’s claims. it faces a problem, however, in that gender roles do not seem to sit comfortably among the kinds of social roles zheng has in mind. in section 3, i argue that this issue can be resolved by incorporating charlotte witt’s account of gender as a “mega social role.” we can have the account of collective responsibility that dworkin convinced us we need by combining zheng’s role-ideal model of political responsibility with witt’s social metaphysics of gender. 1. dworkin on the culture of rape 1.1. culture of rape it will first be helpful to get clear on some of the key claims i take dworkin to be making. this will allow us to lay out some desiderata by which we may later judge the success of our theory of collective responsibility. dworkin (2019, 200) noted that, at the time of her speech, a woman was raped once every few minutes, and the statistics are no less bleak today. the latest study from the world health organization (2021a; 2021b, 9) states that one in three women worldwide, which amounts to around 736 million, have experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a nonpartner. the national union of students’ (2010) “hidden marks” report indicated that one in seven women experience “serious physical or sexual assault” while at university.2 furthermore, in recent times, the lockdowns imposed by governments worldwide due to the covid19 pandemic have both increased women’s exposure to abusive partners whilst restricting their access to support services (world health organization 2021a; 2021b, 2). to say that a culture of rape exists, however, is not merely to say that we live in a culture in which rape occurs often. though this is true, the scope of the problem dworkin describes is, i think, far broader. a culture of rape is a culture in which the 2 see burrell (2023) for a detailed analysis of the gendered dynamics of the culture of abuse specifically as it manifests itself on university campuses. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 threat of coerced sex—be it physical, economic, or emotional coercion—is pervasive in the lives of women. this threat of sexual violence is upheld and perpetuated not only by instances of rape but also in the way that our systems and institutions are set up. here is dworkin: the power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. it is protected by law. it is protected by religion and religious practice. it is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. it is protected by a police force. (dworkin 2019, 201) it is not that every man believes he has a right to rape women. indeed, the existence of what dworkin is referring to—and what i am calling a “culture of rape”—is, i think, consistent with no individual man holding this belief. rather, the culture of rape is better thought of as a structural injustice, embodied not in any particular individual’s or group of individuals’ bad beliefs and actions but rather in bad systems and institutions. structural injustices like this one persist irrespective of what any individual does or thinks about them (lavin 2008; young 2011; haslanger 2015; zheng 2021). indeed, as zheng (2021, 519) puts it: most of us are only dimly aware of exactly how we reproduce structural injustice, and do not intend our actions to do so; this marks a salient moral difference compared with “classic” wrongs like murder, rape, and theft. this is the way in which i take dworkin to be conceiving of the culture—as opposed to any particular instance—of rape. this culture is established and upheld not merely by bad individuals but also by the way in which our collective groups and institutions treat the issue. indeed, as manne (2019, 216) puts it: “serial sexual predators comprise a small minority of men, but the system works to shield and protect them from the law.” the context of manne’s discussion is the case of daniel holtzclaw, the oklahoma police officer convicted of eighteen counts of sexual assault, all against african american women, many of them sex workers with prior convictions holtzclaw could use to manipulate them. manne draws out the extent to which, even in a case like holtzclaw’s, all possible stops were pulled out to ensure that the narrative surrounding the case suggested his innocence. here’s manne summing up her discussion in this chapter: there is a strong if, typically, unwitting disposition to protect dominant men’s interests and uphold their reputations. many will hence patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 instinctually reach, with a sense of moral necessity, for any excuse in the book as to why he’s innocent, and all the women who testify against him can’t be trusted. (manne 2019, 218) this quote from manne helps illustrate the systemic and structural nature of what we are calling the culture of rape. it is perpetuated not only by bad individuals but by the systems and structures of which they are merely a small part, the way that those systems go into overdrive when the time comes to find an excuse for a man or to make it exceedingly costly for anyone who speaks out against one. so we know what the culture of rape is, according to dworkin, but we now need to know what it does; that is, how exactly does the existence of this culture manifest itself in the lives of women? these two questions should not be divorced from one another. given that, as has been noted, dworkin thinks of the injustice itself as embodied in our systems and institutions—rather than in any particular agent’s thoughts or actions—it follows that there is no neatly circumscribed realm of women’s lives in which it is present. that is, the culture of rape, at least on dworkin’s characterization, does not manifest itself in the lives of women exclusively within certain well-defined parameters; rather, it is salient and operative across multiple dimensions of women’s social lives. it impinges upon the way in which women may interact with the individuals, groups, and institutions that constitute their social environments. it will be helpful at this stage to draw on the work of claudia card, who, in her 1991 article, “rape as a terrorist institution,” crystalizes the precise harm the existence of this culture causes for women. the key insight we learn from card (1991, 299) is that the ever-present threat of sexual violence is a tool which is used to exert power over women. women live in a society in which governments and lawmakers have been better at protecting men from accusations of rape than they have at protecting women from rape itself (card 1991, 300). this underlies the gendered sociopolitical dynamic in society; it makes women vulnerable and reinforces men’s power. it is a tool that functions to maintain and perpetuate a dynamic in which it is men who occupy the positions of social superiority and women who are subordinated—doing what they can to survive in such a system. furthermore, and importantly, part of surviving in such a society involves relying on other men for protection (card 1991, 304). this amounts to a situation in which women need to wear what men want them to wear, behave the way that men want them to behave, avoid walking home at night without a man by their side, and so on. this underlies women’s willingness to do the jobs that men deem it appropriate for them to do (296). like other tools for maintaining order within systems and institutions, it is the threat itself that does most of the work. the culture of rape—the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 ever-present threat of sexual violence—forms the backdrop to the everyday lives of all women (296). this, i think, is consistent with, and helps bring into clearer view, the way in which dworkin conceives of the role the culture of rape plays in women’s lives. here is dworkin again: we are very close to death. all women are. and we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. (dworkin 2019, 200) it is a misconception, then, that the effects of rape start and end with the direct victims of individual crimes; one does not need to have been raped, or even know someone who has been raped, to have one’s everyday interactions and engagements marred by its threat. 1.2. freedom and equality for dworkin, the existence of such a culture is simply incompatible with freedom and equality. suppose you agree that there is indeed a culture of rape. still, you might say, this is a complex and multifaceted issue, and we can make meaningful steps toward gender equality while we are working through it. in dworkin’s view, however, this would be a mistake: you can’t have equality or tenderness or intimacy as long as there is rape, because rape means terror. it means that part of the population lives in a state of terror and pretend—to please and pacify you—that it doesn’t. so there is no honesty. how can there be? can you imagine what it is like to live as a woman day in and day out with the threat of rape? (dworkin 2019, 208) the existence of such a culture simply precludes the possibility of real freedom and equality for women. meaningful progress toward real freedom and equality cannot be made while some portion of society is terrorized by the threat of rape. of course, this is not to say that nothing can be done to better the situation in general. suppose we eradicate some particular manifestation of patriarchal power to which women have historically been subjected. insofar as we have erased a preexisting injustice, one might think that we have made at least some progress toward freedom and equality for women. but this would be wrongheaded, on dworkin’s view, and would be so because of the kind of thing that equality is. for dworkin, equality is not merely some abstract idea: patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 equality is a practice. it is an action. it is a way of life. it is a social practice. it is an economic practice. it is a sexual practice. it can’t exist in a vacuum. you can’t have it at home if, when the people leave that home, he is in a world of supremacy based on the existence of his cock and she is in a world of humiliation and degradation because she is perceived to be inferior and because her sexuality is a curse. (dworkin 2019, 206–7) a culture of rape, then, is simply incompatible with meaningful political and social justice in society. we cannot even have an honest discussion about exactly what is involved in bringing about equality for women until the pervasive and ever-present threat that is the culture of rape is erased. 1.3. responsibility having made clear what it is that we must put a stop to (what the culture is), and why we must put a stop to it (what its existence does to women), we are now in a position to address the question of how to go about it. dworkin thinks that men, qua men, stand in a particular kind of relationship to this ongoing injustice such that their taking responsibility for it is necessary for its dismantling. i will return to this thought at length in what follows, but for now recall precisely what it is that they would be taking responsibility for in doing so. they would not be taking responsibility for any individual unjust action or belief. rather, they would be taking responsibility for the fact that women live in a society in which the threat of sexual violence is used as a tool to exert power over them, and that irrespective of what any individual thinks about this fact, it is upheld and perpetuated by the structures and institutions we have in place (dworkin 2019, 201). for dworkin, the only way we might see an end to this deep-set, institutionalized, and systemic injustice is if men acknowledge that it is up to them to eradicate it. at this stage one might wish to pause. perhaps this is excessive. if the culture of rape is indeed as deep-set, institutionalized, and systemic as dworkin suggested, should the responsibility not be dispersed among all genders? why only men? and, in particular, even if it is particular to men, surely it should exclude “friendly” men, who we have stipulated are allies. there are two reasons dworkin seems to think that responsibility here lies specifically with men—including friendly ones. the first is just that, even if they don’t themselves actively perpetuate and uphold the culture of rape, they share a social status with those who do. that is, those in society that most actively contribute to the culture of rape and most actively uphold and defend the systems and institutions that protect patriarchal power are, primarily, men. part of the responsibility friendly men feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 bear, then, according to dworkin, they bear in virtue of their sharing a social status (namely, the status “man”) with such individuals. the second reason is closely related and pertains to the power that men, qua men, possess to make the necessary societal changes.3 here is dworkin again: there’s no point in telling me. i’m only a woman. there’s nothing i can do about it. these men presume to speak for you. they are in the public arena saying that they represent you. if they don’t, then you had better let them know. (dworkin 2019, 205) “friendly” men may claim that they do not want their power, that they did not ask for it, or even that they feel terribly bad about their possessing it. but they do, as a matter of fact, possess it. if they really do feel bad, then what better way to show it than to put their power to good use? 3 one might worry about whether there really is a distinction here. suppose we think, for instance, à la haslanger (2015), that social categories are defined at least partly in terms of power; then does this distinction not collapse? it is true that the haslangerian line would complicate matters somewhat. if one goes this route when it comes to defining social categories, then one will indeed think that the relevant power men possess is not merely derived from but is rather partly constitutive of their social status as a man. i am happy with this tweak, even if it might well amount to concrete extensional divergences—i.e., in ruling out men who lack the relevant power and ruling in certain individuals of other genders who possess it. i lack the space here to adequately explore the differences that would result between opting for or against a haslangerian approach. it is, however, worth pointing out that the relevant kind of power—i.e., the power dworkin emphasises as particularly important with respect to this particular injustice—is not merely broad, sociopolitical power; rather, it is a more specific kind of power—namely, the ability to get through to and speak on behalf of men. this is the kind of power that, on dworkin’s view, partly grounds men’s responsibility for redressing the culture of rape, and if the haslangerian thinks of it as partly constitutive of their gender itself, then they will only disagree with nonhaslangerians on individuals who possess this particular kind of power. having noted this complication, i now set it aside in what follows for the sake of simplicity and so as to walk in lockstep with the original dworkin piece, wherein she strongly suggests that there are two distinct sources of men’s responsibility here: their merely sharing a social status with the unfriendly men who most actively uphold and perpetuate the injustice, and the particular kind of power they possess to get through to and speak on behalf of their group. my thanks to an anonymous referee at feminist philosophy quarterly for pressing me on this point. patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 the thought is that men are uniquely well positioned to dismantle the current state of affairs and that this is so irrespective of their opinion on the matter. it is no coincidence that the ones in society who have this status are the ones that have the power to end the culture of rape. if friendly men really are opposed to it, like they say they are, then it is their responsibility to use the power they possess—at least in part as a result of it—to put it to an end. these two reasons both point to an important connection, then, between responsibility for redressing the culture of rape, on the one hand, and something that is common to all men, friendly and unfriendly, on the other hand (that is, their shared social status as men as well as the associated power they have in virtue of this status). men bear responsibility, on dworkin’s picture, in virtue of this status that they all share—friendly and unfriendly. 1.4. desiderata for a theory of collective responsibility we now have a clear idea of both the nature of the injustice dworkin draws our attention to as well as the way in which she thinks it needs to be redressed. i think that all of this raises an important and hitherto underexplored question: supposing we take for granted dworkin’s claim that men taking responsibility for the culture of rape is indeed the method by which it can be put to an end, can we provide an account of collective responsibility that gets this result? we may now lay down some desiderata for a theory of responsibility in order that it can adequately play this role. 1) it cannot be overinclusive. in counting all men as responsible, our account must not also count all gender identities as responsible in the same way. 2) it cannot be underinclusive. our account must include friendly men as well as unfriendly men; men who do not actively endorse and perpetuate the culture must nevertheless count as responsible. 3) it must be sufficiently fine-grained. in counting men as responsible, our account must not entirely erase the distinction between unfriendly men, who actively endorse and perpetuate the culture, and friendly men, who do not. 4) it cannot be overly demanding. as with any theory of responsibility, our account cannot play the role we want it to play if it renders its subjects responsible in such a way that they are unable to enact change. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 i think that these four desiderata capture what a theory of responsibility would have to be like in order to vindicate dworkin’s claims. 2. finding the theory the remainder of this article will be dedicated to finding a theory of responsibility that satisfies these desiderata. before i proceed to my positive proposal, however, it will be useful to distinguish my project from a similar one, found in may and strikwerda (1994). i have noted that the current project—of finding a philosophical theory according to which all men are responsible for the culture of rape—is relatively underexplored in the literature to date. one notable exception to this, however, is larry may and robert strikwerda’s (1994) “men in groups: collective responsibility for rape.” may and strikwerda aim to demonstrate that men in general are collectively responsible for the prevalence of rape in society because it is men in general who both contribute to and benefit from it. their argument rests on five main points: (1) rapists are responsible for the rapes they have committed, and most rapists are men; (2) some men contribute to the prevalence of rape in society through their interactions with other men and thereby share responsibility for this prevalence; (3) some men would be rapists if they were placed in a situation where their inhibitions against rape were removed and thereby share responsibility for the harms of rape with actual rapists; (4) many men could have prevented other men from raping but failed to do so, and they share responsibility as a result; (5) some men benefit from the existence of rape in society and thereby share responsibility for its existence. they highlight and elucidate some important points concerning the different ways in which men (who are not rapists) both contribute to and benefit from the institution of rape. however, their project is importantly different from mine. in order to see how this is so, note first that men who fall under categories (1) through (4) are all unfriendly men. these men all actively contribute to the prevalence of rape in society insofar as they either rape women, would rape women if given the opportunity, or condone the raping of women through their interactions with other men. now, i certainly agree that unfriendly men bear responsibility for the prevalence of rape in society, but the responsibility they bear qua unfriendly men will be over and above the responsibility they bear just qua men. i, following dworkin, am interested specifically in the question of the responsibility of friendly men—that is, those men who sincerely claim to be feminists, who claim to be antirape, who claim to be allies. aside from the fact that unfriendly men are responsible for rape, there is a particular and interesting question concerning whether and to what extent friendly men—whom we have stipulated do not actively endorse and perpetuate the culture of rape—are nevertheless patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 responsible for redressing it. this is the question that constitutes the sole focus of my project. so much for (1) through (4), but what about (5)? men who benefit from the prevalence of rape are not necessarily unfriendly men. could it be that those friendly men who have not contributed to the culture of rape nevertheless bear responsibility because they benefit from it? i don’t think so. the reason for this is that, as may and strikwerda agree, not all men benefit from the prevalence of rape in society. the responsibility that is the focus of the current article is not, and should not, be contingent on the fact that men benefit from the existence of the culture of rape. the sentiment i am developing in this project—which found its voice in dworkin and is gaining widespread credibility in public political discourse today—is that men, as a matter of fact, are well positioned, socially and politically, to do something more than mere performative gestures against the culture of rape. that is, whether or not they have directly contributed to its existence, men enjoy a social position that renders them capable of meaningful change in this domain and are thereby responsible for doing so. their power to redress the culture may be importantly linked to their having benefitted from it, but it need not be, and the former is not derived from the latter. 2.1. zheng’s role-ideal model having distinguished the current project from that of may and strikwerda (1994), i now turn to my own positive proposal. in our search for an account of responsibility that can vindicate dworkin’s claims, i think that we would do well to start with the literature on collective responsibility for structural injustice. in the current section, i argue that robin zheng’s (2018) role-ideal model (rim) of collective responsibility for structural injustice is, prima facie, extremely well suited to play the role that we are looking for a theory to play. in her article, zheng characterizes structural injustice as injustice that “is maintained through the behavior of ordinary decent people whose choices are constrained by existing social, political, economic, and cultural institutions” (zheng 2018, 869–70). it is the kind of injustice that may be present by virtue of the way a society’s systems and institutions are set up, irrespective of whether any individual actively holds any problematic beliefs. zheng seeks to answer the question as to how and in what sense any individual, in any given society, can be meaningfully held responsible for such sweeping and structural harms. 2.1.1. attributability/accountability zheng, building on iris marion young (2011), draws the distinction between responsibility as attributability and responsibility as accountability. the former is a causal, metaphysical notion; it concerns whether and to what extent certain actions involve genuine agency, given that only such actions can constitute legitimate feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 grounds for blame or punishment (zheng 2018, 872). accountability, on the other hand, is grounded in the moral and the political, rather than the metaphysical. the thought here is that wherever there is some moral or political shortcoming in a society, then, irrespective of how exactly this shortcoming came about, the burdens of redress must be distributed across the community somehow. it is sometimes appropriate, on this model, to share the responsibility for rectifying a wrong among individuals with no direct, causal ties to the bringing about of that wrong. in this sense, these individuals will be thought of as accountably—though not attributively— responsible for the injustice. the value this distinction has for our present purposes should already be plain to see. the move to accountability carves out the precise theoretical space we were on the lookout for: a conception of responsibility that ties individuals in a meaningful sense to a wrong whose perpetuation they themselves do not necessarily actively contribute to. 2.1.2. social roles although we now have the conceptual space for an account of responsibility that ties individuals to structural injustices in the appropriate way, we still need to fill in the details about precisely what it is that forms this link between individual and structure. for zheng (2018, 873) the answer is our social roles. here is how she defines them: a social role r is a set of expectations e—predictive and normative— that apply to an individual p in virtue of a set of relationships p has with others (such that anyone standing in the same type of relationships as p occupies the same r), and where e is mutually maintained by p and others through a variety of sanctions. (873) we are all responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of the social roles we occupy because, on zheng’s picture, social roles are what constitute social structure (2018, 874) social roles both constrain and enable individual actors; they simultaneously restrict and expand the ways in which an agent can act in certain contexts. one’s role as a teacher or mother, for instance, plays a significant role in determining what it is that one can and cannot do—what they are expected to do, what they can get away with doing without reproach. individual agents thus do not exist independently from the structures of which they are a part. rather, to the contrary, these social structures emerge from individuals (together with others) collectively performing their individual social roles (874). social roles, for zheng, are “the site where structure meets agency” (876). patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 how, then, does this interconnected picture of individuals, roles, and structures function in society? zheng (2018, 874), borrowing from sociological theory, invokes the metaphor of a biological system. in seeking to answer the question as to how societies are bound together in a relatively stable and ordered fashion, certain sociological theories point to role differentiation. individuals understanding their different social roles, as well as their relationships to other roles, is what serves to structure and stabilize society itself: viewed as an organic whole, society thus functions as a boundarymaintaining system: when some people deviate from their roles, the rest of the system works to restore order, just as a homeostatic organism works to maintain a constant temperature, blood flow, and so on. (zheng 2018, 874) social roles provide the link we need in order to connect individual agents to the unjust structures of which they are a part. it is through our social roles, for zheng, that individuals enact structure; they are the site where structure meets agency (874). one’s causal connection to a structural wrong, then, is in an important sense, by the by. these social roles are part of what constitutes these structures, and so it is perfectly appropriate that each individual bears responsibility-as-accountability for rectifying them when they are unjust. 2.1.3. role-ideals before we set about applying zheng’s theory to our specific task at hand, it will lastly be important to get clear on precisely what it is that each individual, through her social roles, is responsible for actually doing. social roles provide the theoretical link between individual and structure such that we may make progress on the question of responsibility for structural injustices. however, they do not themselves tell us what it is that each individual—in their occupation of each social role—is responsible for doing. a role, according to zheng, is constituted by the collection of expectations and norms that apply to an individual in virtue of her relation to others in society. it follows that a role “must be such as to allow different individuals to occupy the same role” (zheng 2018, 875). performing a role well, then, consists in an ongoing process of interpreting the norms and expectations of the role and making individual decisions about how best to satisfy them. an individual’s own conception of how best to occupy her social role is what zheng calls the “role-ideal.” here’s how role-ideals are defined: for every social role r occupied by an individual p, a role-ideal is p’s interpretation of how she could best satisfy the expectations feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 constituting r (based on p’s own beliefs, values, commitments, abilities, and lived experience). (zheng 2018, 875) role-ideals will thus vary in ways that social roles will not. social roles are largely intersubjectively shared, whereas role-ideals may vary from person to person. what it takes to be a basketball coach, for example, will be roughly the same irrespective of context—presumably completing some coaching badges and convincing a club with a vacancy to hire you will suffice in most if not all contexts. what it takes to be a good basketball coach, on the other hand, may vary dramatically depending on who you ask. perspectives on normative questions about the way the game ought to be played, the coaching styles most conducive to success, the ethos that best facilitates winning, and so on, will all factor into the latter but not the former. an individual seeking not just to fill this social role, but fill it well, must make a series of ongoing evaluative decisions. role-ideals, then, serve as the final theoretical tool we need in order to join all the dots. let us now take stock. on zheng’s model, individuals are responsible in the accountability sense for structural injustices, and as such, they must bear part of the burden of redressing said injustices. the reason an individual bears any responsibility at all for such structural injustices is that they occupy social roles, and these are what uphold and perpetuate structural injustices. social roles are the site where structure meets agency because they are the building blocks of social structure. still, this may well be true of structures and societies in general, but none of it explains what each individual has any control over: what is it that i am actually responsible for doing? every individual, according to zheng, has control over her particular conception of what it is to fulfil a social role well. there is no set-in-stone way to fulfil a social role; it is up to individuals to make decisions about how to push the boundaries of their social roles. social roles maintain structural injustice, and so they can be used to redress it. each individual, through her conception of her role-ideals, can contribute, and is thereby responsible for contributing, to real, meaningful structural change. 2.2. applying the theory bringing together section 1 and section 2, we may now ask: can zheng’s rim be the theory to vindicate dworkin’s claims? i think our tentative answer ought to be yes. this article set off in search of a way of substantiating the thought that all men—including “friendly” men—bear significant and meaningful responsibility for redressing the structural injustice of the culture of rape in society, which serves to systematically oppress and subordinate women. zheng’s framework can now be applied straightforwardly as follows. provided “man” is a social role (i will return to this issue in detail in the next section), then all men are responsible for the culture of patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 rape that exists in our society by virtue of their occupying the social role “man,” which, itself, partly constitutes the structural injustice of a culture of rape. this, i contend, looks to be exactly what we needed. in order to see how, let us return to the desiderata i laid out in section 1. 1) it cannot be overinclusive. the rim will count all and only men as responsible in the relevant sense. responsibility comes through and in virtue of one’s social roles. so long as it makes sense to think of “man” as a social role one can occupy, then it will apply to all men and will exclude those who are not men. 2) it cannot be underinclusive. the conception of responsibility we are putting to work here is responsibilityas-accountability rather than responsibility-as-attributability. that one does not actively contribute to or perpetuate the injustice does not, on this conception of responsibility, render an individual free of responsibility. all men—friendly and unfriendly—have responsibility-as-accountability on the current account. 3) it must be sufficiently fine-grained. the precise way in which the rim will count all men responsible is nuanced enough to still make sense of the distinction between friendly and unfriendly men. unfriendly men will have responsibility-as-attributability over and above their responsibility-as-accountability. the latter they possess just by virtue of their occupying the social role “man.” 4) it cannot be overly demanding. redressing the injustice, on the rim, does not require that men abandon all their projects and drastically alter the trajectory of their lives. men occupy the social role “man” anyway; it is up to individuals to make decisions about how to occupy it well—that is, in a way that redresses the injustice. far from demanding too much, this demands of men only precisely as much as is required in order to make meaningful change. having now applied zheng’s rim to our current question, we see that the initial results look very promising. we can make sense of men’s being responsible for redressing the culture of rape insofar as we, following zheng, think of responsibility in the accountability sense—irrespective of who has actively done what, there is an injustice in society that needs to be rectified, and the burdens for doing so need to be discharged in some way or other. moreover, we can make sense of the idea that this feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 responsibility lies with men (as dworkin would have it), insofar as “man” is the social role implicated in this particular structural injustice. before proceeding, however, it’s worth pausing to make two clarificatory points. the first concerns a slight difference between zheng’s rim and my own application of it here. zheng is drawing the connection between individuals and structural injustices in general, rather than addressing any particular injustice, and she seems to think that everyone bears equal responsibility for redressing structural injustices, albeit responsibilities that are dischargeable in different ways. i, on the other hand, have no commitment nor inclination toward equal distribution of responsibility with respect to this particular injustice. i think, following dworkin, that men play a particularly salient role in the upholding and perpetuation of this particular injustice and that their responsibility for redressing it is inevitably bound up with this role. but relatedly, it is important to point out that my proposal is not committed to men being exclusively responsible for redressing the culture of rape. compatibly with everything i’ve said, we all might bear some equally distributed responsibility aside from men’s particular responsibility. indeed, i have not here explored the contributions of other social roles. instead, my project has been the narrow, dworkininspired one of investigating whether we can make philosophical sense of the claim that men in particular bear a kind of special responsibility for redressing the culture of rape. zheng’s rim, i have argued, helps us to do just that. 3. gender roles in the previous section i argued that the rim does well by the desiderata set out in section 1; in the current section i consider and respond to a potential objection. the problem, put simply, is that gender does not seem to sit neatly among the kind of social roles zheng has in mind. it seems true for the paradigmatic cases of social roles zheng considers—doctor, friend, teacher, and so on—that there is indeed a particular set of norms and expectations that, roughly, unify what it is to occupy each given social role, respectively. it makes sense, then, to think of an individual occupying any of these social roles and having a particular conception of what it is to do so well. gender roles, however, are somewhat different. gender roles, among other things, simply have a more global impact on one’s life. the norms and expectations of gender roles just seem far more varied and multifarious than those of the paradigmatic social roles. the reason this is a worry is that it looks, at least prima facie, as though the way in which responsibility can be conferred upon an individual in virtue of their social roles might differ significantly depending on the nature of the social role. zheng does note that different social roles will have different scope; some social roles will govern narrowly circumscribed spheres of activity, whereas others will have a wider impact on an agent’s life overall. zheng (2018, 875) even cites “woman” as an example of the patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 kind of social role that will have this broader, global impact on an agent. zheng seems to assume that such roles—given that they are still social roles—will fit into the rim framework, but she does not detail precisely how. for zheng’s purposes i think this is fine: her aim was to provide the theoretical link between individual agency and structural injustice in general. however, i have a particular and more narrow aim here, which is to explain the precise way in which men are responsible for the culture of rape. in other words, if my contention is that what makes all men responsible for the culture of rape is their occupying the specific social role “man,” then i had better detail the precise way in which social roles like this one confer responsibility. failing to do so, i risk jeopardizing the plausibility of my proposal specifically with respect to desiderata (1) and (4). that is, i risk providing an account that doesn’t really explain what it is about men specifically that makes them responsible in the relevant way for the culture of rape, and further, i risk providing an account that doesn’t really explain what it is that men can do about redressing this culture. put differently, the problem is that for the rim to play the role that i think it can play—of vindicating and supplementing dworkin’s claims—gender roles really need to be social roles. and at least on the face of it, they look importantly different from the roles zheng treats as paradigmatic in constructing her account. there are two distinct ways in which gender roles seem different from other social roles; let us now make them explicit. first, there is the pervasiveness of gender. this refers to the global impact a gender role seems to have on an individual agent’s life when compared to the other, more paradigmatic social roles one might occupy (teacher, doctor, friend, and so on). but second, there is also the differing nature of the norms and expectations that gender imposes upon an agent. the norms and expectations associated with the social role “doctor,” for instance, are importantly “out in the open,” endorsed and understood by society at large. but contrast this with gender roles, which seem by nature far more tacit and implicit. there is simply no such degree of shared understanding when it comes to the norms and expectations that constitute gender roles. suffice it to note, then, that if gender roles are indeed social roles, they are at least not straightforwardly so. if my proposal for the precise way in which we ought to hold men responsible for the culture of rape is through and in virtue of their occupying the social role “man,” then i had better say something about the significant differences that seem to exist—at least on the face of it—between social roles like this one and the social roles zheng treats as paradigmatic when constructing the rim.4 4 see kisolo-ssonko (2019) for an illuminating analysis of social roles like gender and, in particular, race. i return to this piece in the next section. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 3.1. gender as a mega social role i think that the above warrants a tweak to the account i have been developing. in particular, in this section, i propose to supplement zheng’s rim with charlotte witt’s account of the metaphysics of gender. witt (2011, 79–80) characterizes gender as a mega social role: a special kind of social role that serves to unify, organize, and define one’s membership in many— or perhaps all—other social roles. witt thinks of gender as providing a principle of normative unity for social individuals. the thought is that individuals occupy multiple social roles, each of which have norms and expectations associated with them. gender roles are importantly different, however, insofar as they affect the way in which one occupies all of their other social roles. here is witt (2011, 79): if the doctor, who is also a parent, enters into these social positions as a woman, then the norms she follows in these roles are unified, organised and defined by her gender. one is not simply a doctor, parent, and woman; rather, one enters her social roles “doctor” and “parent” as a woman. that is to say that what it means for this particular individual to occupy her social role as a doctor and as a parent would be altered if her gender role were different. it is important, for our purposes, to note that on witt’s account gender is still a social role in itself; there are still specific norms and expectations imposed on an individual just by virtue of their occupying one particular gender role rather than another. however, it is not simply another role on the list of social roles one might occupy. it is different from other social roles in that, just as we suspected, its impact is indeed global; it inflects one’s membership in all other social roles (witt 2011, 78). we are now in a position to provide a strong answer to the question with which we began this section. moving to theorizing gender as a mega social role allows us to explain that gender is indeed different from all other social roles—those that zheng treats as paradigm. witt’s account of gender provides us with a story about precisely what that difference consists in. crucially, though, the difference is not the kind of difference that stops us from applying zheng’s framework to our overall project of providing a theory that can vindicate dworkin’s claims. in order to see exactly how it works, recall that the problem we began this section with jeopardized my proposal specifically with respect to desiderata (1) and (4). let us now return to these with our new theoretical tool in hand. desideratum (1) demands that our account counts only men as responsible in the relevant sense. now, with the move from “man” as social role to “man” as mega social role, we have not lost the ability to differentiate the mega social role “man” from other gender roles. that is, theorizing gender roles as mega social roles can still patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 account for the fact that “man” will have a distinctive set of norms and expectations that one is subject to just by virtue of occupying the social role “man.” anyone who does not occupy this mega social role will not be subject to these particular norms and expectations. desideratum (4) demands that our account cannot render its subjects responsible in such a way that they are unable to act to redress the injustice. having borrowed from witt, our proposal is now strong on this front as well. if what is common to all members of the social role “man” is something that inflects many, or perhaps even all, of each man’s other social roles, then enacting their responsibility will similarly involve engaging these other social roles. men will need to reflect on their particular role-ideals for all these other social roles in a different way. if they want to enact their responsibility and contribute to meaningful change, there will be no neatly defined sphere of activity upon which to focus. of course, this will be complicated and, indeed, demanding. but desideratum (4) does not require that enacting one’s responsibility be easy, just that it does not render its subject altogether unable to act upon it. one final concern one might have with the resulting proposal, at least for all i’ve said so far, is that it is worryingly individualistic in tenor. the thought would be that, having noted the deeply systemic and institutionalized nature of the culture of rape, are we now just to tell every man individually that he should try harder to be a better man?5 in a recent article, joseph kisolo-ssonko (2019) insightfully and compellingly applies margaret gilbert’s (2006) notion of collective intentionality to ground a kind of racialized social normativity—to make sense of the idea that race is a kind of social role, with corresponding collective aims, desires, intentions, and norms. i think that it is helpful to think of my project here as very much in the spirit of kisolo-ssonko’s but applied to gender rather than race. moreover, i think that doing so will help dispel the force behind the individualistic objection. following gilbert (2006), we can make sense of the claim “we will x” or “we are x-ing” in one of two ways: summative or nonsummative. the summative sense is apt when every individual, thought of as an individual, will indeed x, or is indeed xing. the nonsummative sense is apt, on the other hand, when the group—that is, the relevant “we”—have jointly committed to x or to x-ing. a racialized social normativity, for kisolo-ssonko, is thus grounded in an individual’s being bound by the collective intentionality of the “we” picked out by the relevant racial group of which they are a part—that is, “we white people.” not all groups are like racial groups, in this sense; they do not all have gilbert’s notion of collective intentionality, which grounds normative commitments, obligations, and responsibility. members of such groups do 5 thanks to an anonymous referee at feminist philosophy quarterly for pressing me on this objection. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 not occupy any normatively significant social role, at least qua their being a member of such a group. red-haired-in-edinburgh, to borrow kisolo-ssonko’s (2019, 182) apt example, is not a social role in the same way that being black is. thinking of my project as in keeping with the spirit of kisolo-ssonko’s helps resist the claim that the resulting picture is unduly individualistic. the resulting proposal is as follows. individuals can be held meaningfully responsible for structural injustices in virtue of their occupying social roles, which, in part, serve to maintain and perpetuate such injustices. in our particular case, the social role “man” does so with respect to the injustice of the culture of rape. now, while it is true that this gives us the normative tools to hold individuals accountable for a wrong they do not actively contribute to, it does not mean that all that is required for progress is each man individually trying their best to strive toward their role-ideal. rather, i contend, my proposal implies that what’s needed is a fundamental altering of what it means to occupy this social role well. perhaps this can only be done through individuals first setting an example—indeed, i have not commented here on which will be the best the strategies for implementing change—but such change likely could not, even in principle, be implemented by the actions of any individual man alone, even the most powerful of them. there may be many different ways to realize such change, but it certainly won’t be through the isolated actions or intentions of any individual man. men are a “we” in gilbert’s nonsummative sense, which denotes a social role with a corresponding social normativity. as we can now see, the responsibility that emerges from this picture, far from being individualistic, is grounded in the collective intentionality of the social role. men are, in essence, responsible for altering what it means to be a good man—for changing the norms and expectations they impose upon one another, and on themselves—such that it is no longer conducive to the perpetuation of the culture of rape. if this is the end, then the means will not—indeed, cannot—be individualistic. conclusion the point in the last section concerning the way in which the proposal suggests that men go about enacting their responsibility, i think, highlights something particularly promising about the proposal itself. in particular, there is a satisfying alignment between the nature of the injustice and the nature of the proposed solution. i have not argued specifically for this in the current article—because this is not a necessary feature of a theory that meets our needs—but i think the fact that it has emerged highlights the fittingness of the proposed solution.6 as i argued at the 6 here i certainly don’t mean to suggest that i think the issue is therefore straightforward. it is not, and in any case, it is not made any more so by anything i patrizio – “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 outset, i take dworkin to be drawing our attention to an injustice that is by nature structural, systemic, and institutionalized. that is, one does not eradicate this culture of rape by eradicating particular actions and beliefs. the culture itself is more pervasive and all-encompassing than this; it harms women in all aspects of their lives and is maintained and perpetuated by our systems and institutions. it is perfectly appropriate, therefore, that the picture we have ended up with requires that men embody and enact responsibility through many—and perhaps all—of their social roles, rather than in one particular sphere of social activity. as mentioned above, i have neither set this explicitly as a desideratum nor provided arguments for this claim. i mention it only to point out that the picture’s coming together so neatly suggests that the solution i have provided is an especially promising one.7 references burrell, stephen r. 2023. “‘cause we’re all just part of the system really’: complicity and resistance in young sportsmen’s responses to violence against women prevention campaigns in england.” sociological research online 28, no. 2 (june): 336–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/13607804211049463. card, claudia. 1991. “rape as a terrorist institution.” in violence, terrorism, and justice, edited by raymond gillespie frey and christopher w. morris, 296– 319. cambridge studies in philosophy and public policy. cambridge: cambridge university press. dworkin, andrea. 2019. “i want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape.” in last days at hot slit: the radical feminism of andrea dworkin, edited by johanna fateman and amy scholder, 199–209. south pasadena, ca: semiotext(e). gilbert, margaret. 2006. a theory of political obligation: membership, commitment, and the bonds of society. oxford: clarendon press. have argued for here. merely taking steps toward implementing an effective solution to the culture of rape will involve navigating and negotiating a myriad of complex, practical issues that the current article has not even begun to address. the point i wish to make here pertains solely to the theoretical alignment between the nature of the current proposal and the nature of the problem it seeks to address. 7 this article would and could not have been written without the generous support and encouragement of katharine jenkins. thanks also to katie moody, dario mortini, and two anonymous referees at feminist philosophy quarterly for helpful and constructive comments. the research for this article was supported by sgsah (the scottish graduate school of arts and humanities). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 haslanger, sally. 2015. “social structure, narrative and explanation.” canadian journal of philosophy 45, no. 1 (february): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/004 55091.2015.1019176. jenkins, katharine. 2017. “rape myths and domestic abuse myths as hermeneutical injustice.” journal of applied philosophy 34, no. 2 (february): 191–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12174. kisolo-ssonko, joseph. 2019. “race and the responsibility to abide by the norms of unchosen and unjust social roles.” the monist 102, no. 2 (april): 172–86. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onz004. lavin, chad. 2008. the politics of responsibility. urbana: university of illinois press. manne, kate. 2019. down girl: the logic of misogyny. london: penguin books. may, larry, and robert strikwerda. 1994. “men in groups: collective responsibility for rape.” in “feminism and peace,” special issue, hypatia 9, no. 2 (spring): 134–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1994.tb00437.x. national union of students (nus). 2010. “hidden marks: a study of women students’ experiences of harassment, stalking, violence and sexual assault.” london: nus. witt, charlotte. 2011. the metaphysics of gender. oxford: oxford university press. world health organization. 2021a. “violence against women.” fact sheet, march 9, 2021. https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-again st-women. ———. 2021b. violence against women prevalence estimates, 2018: executive summary. geneva: who. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240 026681. young, iris marion. 2011. responsibility for justice. new york: oxford university press. zheng, robin. 2018. “what is my role in changing the system? a new model of responsibility for structural injustice.” in "dimensions of responsibility,” edited by emanuela ceva and lubomira radoilska, special issue, ethical theory and moral practice 21, no. 4 (august): 869–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1067 7-018-9892-8. ———. 2021. “moral criticism and structural injustice.” mind 130, no. 518 (april): 503– 35. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzaa098. ross patrizio (he/him) is currently a phd candidate at cogito epistemology research centre, university of glasgow, scotland, working primarily at the intersection of epistemology and ethics. his first paper, which is on the value of trust, was published in philosophical psychology in 2024. he is co-coordinator of both the scottish epistemology early career researchers (seecrs) and the minorities and philosophy (map) chapter at the university of glasgow. 101211 patrizio title page 101211 patrizio final format objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 3 | issue 3 article 3 2017 objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy michelle ciurria practical justice initiative, the university of new south wales, mciurria.academia@gmail.com recommended citation ciurria, michelle. 2017. "objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy."feminist philosophy quarterly3, (3). article 3. doi:10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3. objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy1 michelle ciurria abstract this paper argues that diversity and uptake are required for objectivity. in philosophy, women are underrepresented with respect to teaching, publishing, and citations. this undermines the objectivity of our research output. to improve women’s representation and objectivity in philosophy, we should take steps to increase women’s numbers and institute uptake-conducive conditions. in concrete terms, this means fostering an appreciation for diversity, diversifying evaluators, integrating women’s contributions into mainstream discourse, and reducing implicit bias. keywords: feminist philosophy; standpoint epistemology; objectivity; diversity; uptake; implicit bias 1. introduction it’s well known—and empirically verified—that women are underrepresented in philosophy, with respect to teaching, publishing, and citations. this obviously isn’t an ideal state of affairs. there’s a good case to be made that the gender gap is unfair and harmful to women. these are moral concerns. but there’s another reason to disapprove of the situation, though it might be less obvious. namely, the underrepresentation of women in philosophy undermines the objectivity of research in the field, because diversity facilitates objectivity. this is an epistemic concern. if this concern is legitimate, then as researchers we have a shared interest in reducing the gender gap, since we’re invested in objectivity as a research goal. in this paper, i’m going to expand on why we have an epistemic motive to promote women’s representation in philosophy. in section 2, i’ll present some 1 this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. i am grateful to christiane merritt for organizing the feminist philosophy reading group at washington university in st. louis, which helped to inspire the idea for this paper. 1 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 empirical research that quantifies the gender gap in different areas of philosophy. in the remaining sections, i’ll offer suggestions as to how to rectify this problem, beginning with more theoretical considerations, and moving toward concrete solutions. in section 3, i argue, following standpoint feminist epistemologists, that the solution to gender inequality isn’t to strive for value-neutrality, since valueneutrality isn’t possible. all knowledge is value-laden. but not all values all equal; we do need a means of discriminating between constructive values and destructive ones. hence, in section 4, i defend sandra harding’s (2015) proposal that diversity facilitates objectivity, that is, it produces ‘stronger objectivity’ (versus ‘weaker objectivity’). i call this the ‘strong objectivity thesis’ (henceforth, sot). after illuminating this principle from harding’s perspective, i suggest refinements to increase its plausibility. specifically, i draw on empirical research on workgroup task performance to show that diversity does in fact enhance objectivity (in terms of optimal task performance), but this outcome is conditional upon ‘uptake-conducive’ background conditions—conditions like reduced implicit bias, reduced outgroup bias, and positive diversity mindset. when these epistemic conditions are absent, diversity actually tends to decrease task performance. this analysis sheds light on how diversity is related to objectivity, and what we can do to enhance objectivity in philosophy: increase both women’s representation and receptivity to women’s contributions. this strategy can be implemented individually and collectively. in section 4, i discuss cognitive biases that undermine individual receptivity, and useful remediating strategies for addressing these biases. then i outline institutional safeguards that collectives can implement to reduce the effects of cognitive biases and distorting group dynamics, borrowing here from helen longino’s criteria of ‘epistemic effectiveness’ (2001). then, in section 5, i elucidate what this means for philosophy departments. specifically, i offer suggestions for how we can achieve epistemic effectiveness (objectivity) by taking such measures as appreciating contributions from those at the margins of the discipline, implementing specific affirmative action policies, and cultivating alternative research communities, while ensuring that their output is eventually integrated into mainstream discourse. these aren’t the only possible strategies for increasing gender parity in philosophy, but they’re supported by harding’s and longino’s proposals, in conjunction with the empirical research on cognitive distortions, group dynamics, and group reasoning that i cite in sections (1)–(4). before delving into this argument, a couple of preliminary remarks would be useful. although this paper is on the status of women in philosophy, everything i say here should be taken to apply, mutatis mutandis—and perhaps even a fortiori, since 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 women are a relatively privileged subgroup—to other underrepresented groups. second, when i cite women in this paper for the first time, i’ll include their full name, and i’ll also ‘star’ their name with an asterisk in the references section, to make it easier for readers to identify them and cite them in future publications. this is consistent with the ethos of this paper, i.e., boosting women’s representation in the field. 2. how are women in philosophy underrepresented? there’s ample evidence that women are underrepresented in philosophy. rather than citing reams of data here, i’ll just describe some of the more illuminating studies. eric schwitzgebel and carolyn dicey jennings recently conducted a quantitative analysis of faculty lists from various sources, and found that (1) gender disparity remains large in mainstream anglophone philosophy; (2) ethics, construed broadly to include social and political philosophy, is closer to gender parity than are other fields in philosophy; and (3) women's involvement in philosophy has increased since the 1970s . . . [but] by most measures, women's involvement and visibility in mainstream anglophone philosophy has increased only slowly; and by some measures there has been virtually no gain since the 1990s. (2017, 83) this is a recent finding, which is corroborated by other research. reports place the percentage of women in postsecondary instructor positions at 19%–21% (molly paxton, carrie figdor, and valerie tiberius 2012; julie van camp 2015 sally haslanger 2008; kathryn norlock 2006). in addition, women comprise 26% of parttime instructors but only 16.6% of full-time instructors (van camp 2015). the gender gap in philosophy is much worse than in the rest of the humanities (norlock 2006; paxton, figdor, and tiberius 2012), so we can’t take solace in the idea that this is a universal problem—it’s very much a philosophy problem. women are also less cited and credited than men: only nineteen of the five hundred most-cited articles in four top-tier journals (jp, mind, pr, and nous) were by women; a single male philosopher—david lewis—had twice as many citations as all of the women combined (healy 2015). women receive less ‘extended discussion’ than men, as measured by citations appearing more than once in a paper’s abstract; only 13% of the philosophers receiving extended discussion in the philosopher’s index since 2010 were women (schwitzgebel 2015). according to helen de cruz (2014), this means that philosophy journals wouldn’t pass a philosophical version of the bechdel test, which requires that two women in a film talk to each other about 3 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 something other than men. it seems that women aren’t talking to or about each other in philosophy very often, and men aren’t helping much. the upshot is that there’s a gender gap in philosophy, and it’s not a trivial one. this is wrong for all kinds of reasons, including that it’s unfair and harmful to women. these might be the more obvious reasons for increasing women’s representation. in this paper, i want to focus on a (perhaps) less obvious, but in a sense more pressing, problem: that the lack of gender parity undermines objectivity in the field. this claim might not be obvious because it relies on some non-obvious assumptions about the nature of knowledge and its production—assumptions that we find in standpoint feminist epistemology; but it’s an especially pressing (indeed, inescapable) worry because it’s of interest to all philosophers, no matter one’s disciplinary focus, since we’re all inherently committed to objectivity by virtue of our disciplinary commitments. all philosophers try to produce objective knowledge; so, if the gender gap is undermining objectivity, this is something that we all have reason to care about. we all have an inescapable reason to do what we can to remediate this problem. in what follows, i’ll elucidate what we should and shouldn’t do to improve the situation. it might seem as if weak objectivity is the result of implicit value judgments, and so we should try to eliminate all values from philosophical inquiry. although intuitive to many, this thought is mistaken, because all inquiry is inherently value laden, and some values are actually useful. in section 3, i’ll explain why inquiry is necessarily value-laden, and in section 4, i’ll explain what ‘strong objectivity’ amounts to, why it’s hard to obtain, and what we can do to promote it. 3. all knowledge is value-laden: why not to pursue value-neutrality it might seem like a good strategy to expunge all values from philosophical inquiry, thereby making it impartial and ‘objective.’ this is an especially tempting strategy given that implicit bias is a type of value that undermines objectivity (more on which shortly). yet this seemingly intuitive strategy is mistaken: all knowledge is inherently value-laden, as standpoint feminist philosophers have taken pains to show. as anne jaap jacobson points out, even basic perceptual representations are inherently normative; the mind constructs a “somewhat fictive” and “highly selective” image out of successive scenes, encoded as the eyes saccade, and memory then stores a version of this selective impression (2008, 597). thus, even perception isn’t value-neutral; it’s informed by an individual’s (typically implicit) selection criteria. while visual encoding is subjective, memory adds yet another layer of subjectivity: only certain features of the initial visual impression are stored, and these are typically altered in subsequent retrievals. this is one reason for thinking that inquiry is value-laden—or as holists put it, that ‘theory is 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 underdetermined by data.’ even our basic models of the world are informed by subjective (implicit) norms, and they can be altered depending on our shifting needs, preferences, and experiences. this observation is connected to a more general claim advanced by normative philosophers and feminist standpoint epistemologists, namely, that the ‘view from nowhere’ (nagel 1989) or ‘god trick’ (donna haraway 1988) is impossible. that is, we can’t observe the world from a value-neutral, disembodied perspective, since all knowledge is ‘situated’ and incomplete (lorraine code 1991; harding 1993; longino 1993). the kernel of this idea can be traced back to quine’s view that all knowledge is underdetermined by evidence, though it has been further developed in recent years by the likes of lynn hankinson nelson (1993), elizabeth potter (1993), longino (1993, 2001), and harding (2015). quine’s view is that all knowledge is partly based on implicit norms, which comprise the ‘background assumptions’ of a research community. these norms include priority, simplicity, elegance, and conservativism. to this basic thesis, we can add three contributions from standpoint epistemologists. first, standpoint epistemologists submit that a broader range of norms than quine envisioned make up part of our background assumptions. salient examples include material and cultural values, or what harding calls the “local material realities” of a particular culture (2015, 125). these norms help guide research projects in such a way that they are both useful and epistemically relevant to human beings. as rawls famously observed, we don’t expend time and energy counting blades of grass on well-trimmed lawns (1999, 432). this would be a waste of time and resources. we ought to take into account our needs and interests as situated human beings before undertaking any research project. these normative values shouldn’t be expunged from inquiry—they often shape research projects in positive ways. but we should take care to ensure that our normative assumptions are robustly justified, not of excessively narrow or merely academic interest. second, feminist epistemologists such as nelson (1993) and potter (1993) have observed that the central producer of knowledge is not, as traditionally conceived, the epistemic agent—historically, the ‘cartesian ego,’ who discovers knowledge through unassisted rational reflection, without consulting anyone else. rather, the primary source of knowledge is the epistemic community in which the individual is ensconced. potter holds that the community is “epistemically prior” to the individual, since it’s the source of many of the individual’s beliefs; thus, it partly “underwrites” individual knowledge claims (1993, 165). so, if the community is epistemically flawed, the individual probably is too. since individual beliefs are often implicit and inherited from the community, community values often constitute 5 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 unrecognized evidence for those beliefs. this evidence can’t be wholly explicated and evaluated from an individual perspective. third, individual beliefs are (at least partly) the result of interpersonal reasoning and could not exist apart from this process; so, engagement with other people is necessary for certain kinds of knowledge to exist. in line with this, potter shows that research communities’ standards are virtually always the result of “epistemic negotiations” amongst two or more members (1993, 169). to illustrate this, she transcribes negotiations amongst scientists verbatim—for instance, a debate between two scientists about what quantity of peptides suffices to prove a psychobehavioural hypothesis (1993, 168)—and she parses them for normative content. these ‘microexchanges’ prove to be inherently normative, but their normative character may be opaque to the researchers engaged in them: they’re part of the group’s implicit ‘background assumptions.’ normative negotiation is a critical, and often helpful, part of research activities, and we should not seek to eliminate it; but we have a responsibility to assess the broader value of these norms—perhaps by soliciting feedback from other researchers or the public. this illustrates that research is inherently value-laden, and trying to expunge it of all values would be pointless and possibly detrimental. but not all values are equally justified: we need a way to discriminate between productive values and unproductive ones (such as implicit biases based on someone’s demographic attributes). and we obviously can’t use descartes’s standard of ‘indubitability’ to do this. in the next section, i explain harding’s theory of ‘strong objectivity’ and her proposal for how to achieve it (via diversity), and then i suggest refinements to this proposal in light of emerging empirical research. in particular, i emphasize that diversity must be paired with ‘uptake’ or proper receptivity in order to be effective. 4. objectivity as diversity plus uptake-conducive background conditions harding argues that insufficiently diverse epistemological communities can’t adequately reflect on their shared assumptions, and this undermines the objectivity of their research output. too often, we simply reproduce the biases of our community, even if we have internal methods for weeding out substandard work: the procedure of [researchers] repeating each other’s research processes certainly does work well to identify those values, interests, and assumptions that differ between individuals or teams of researchers. but in cases where social values, interests, or assumptions are shared by all or virtually all researchers in a given field—as has been the case for male supremacy, white supremacy, or eurocentrism, for example—repeating observations within 6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 such a field will not bring shared social commitments into focus. (harding 2015, 34) not all of these biases afflict contemporary academic contexts, but many do. haring notes that economists typically define ‘work’ so as to exclude predominantly female labour, such as housework, ‘caring labour,’ volunteer work, and sex work (2015, 28). this exclusionary definition distorts the reality of labour in our society, particularly the fact that ‘female’ labour is essential to modern capitalism—the economy would be unsustainable without it. this economic assumption may also support the existing wage gap (women make about 80 cents for every dollar men make, according to the us census bureau), by giving it the false veneer of intellectual respectability. this is just one of many examples of objectivity-undermining bias offered by harding, pointing to a fairly sweeping problem. does implicit bias affect philosophical research? there’s a case to be made that top-tier philosophy venues have exhibited (and perhaps still do) a bias against feminist content and critical race theory. sally haslanger notes that from 2003 to 2008, “mind, philosophical review, and philosophy and phenomenological research did not publish any articles with feminist or race content,” and the journals ethics, journal of philosophy, and philosophy and public affairs collectively contained only 2.36% feminist content (2008, 220). it’s not plausible that feminist philosophers did so little valuable work during this period. the likelier explanation is that implicit bias and stereotype threat played a role, as louise antony (2012) suggests in her ‘perfect storm’ account of gender disparity in philosophy. these factors might affect not only hiring selections but publishing selections, with editors and referees harbouring implicit bias against certain kinds of content, and feminist philosophers exhibiting some degree of stereotype threat or lack of confidence in their publishing ability. another possible factor is status quo bias, the tendency to favour the familiar; if feminist philosophy is less familiar to most people, it’s likely to seem inherently less plausible (regardless of its objective value). it’s well known that achievement is partly a matter of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’; unfortunately, feminist philosophers and critical race theorists just don’t have as many shoulders to stand on. this is a historically rooted problem, but not a problem that we’re helpless to change. returning to harding’s proposal: she holds that non-diverse groups lack ‘strong objectivity.’ strong objectivity, in precise terms, consists of fairness to the evidence, to one’s critics, and to “the most severe criticisms one can imagine” (harding 2015, 33). i’ll call this the principle of epistemic fairness (pef). epistemological communities that fail to satisfy pef (pro tanto) lack strong objectivity. they achieve at best ‘weak objectivity’—objectivity relative to a narrower range of perspectives. 7 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 harding’s notion of strong objectivity provides a valuable tool for evaluating the epistemic authority of a given research community: we can ask if it satisfies pef. but her proposal has some loose ends. tying these up would help to strengthen her position, lending it stronger objectivity. in what follows, i’m going to address 5 potential sources of scepticism or confusion about sot. a sceptic might ask one of the following questions: (1) why is it so hard to achieve strong objectivity? (2) what’s the nature of the relationship between objectivity and diversity? (3) what degree of diversity should we strive for? (4) how do we effectively imagine ‘the most severe criticisms,’ and is using our imagination enough? (5) how do we implement pef in institutional contexts? i expect that these kinds of questions are likely to occur to people who are sceptical of sot—both those who think it’s too strong and those who think it’s too weak. answering these questions is in the spirit of harding’s work, since it increases the intelligibility of this thesis to a broader audience. 4.1. why aren’t we objective? the role of cognitive distortions in human reasoning. harding nowhere in her work explicitly mentions ‘cognitive distortions’ or ‘cognitive biases,’ although she talks about “fundamental assumptions” (2015, 19), “dominant assumptions” (28), “assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies” of research communities (x), and so on. when we view harding’s proposal through the lens of earlier work in feminist epistemology (especially potter 1993), it’s natural to see these ‘fundamental assumptions’ as part of the shared background norms of a given research community. seeing them in this light lends clarity to harding’s proposal; but we can gain still more clarity by identifying some of the more pernicious types of ‘background assumptions’—those that we need to be especially wary of. it’s reasonable, in light of contemporary psychological research, to think that some of these assumptions are implicit states, that is, relatively unconscious and automatic features of judgment and behaviour. these states aren’t directly introspectible, which explains why they’re so persistent. and some of these states have epistemically (and morally) problematic content. we can see this by looking at three examples and considering their likely effects on reasoning. the three states i’ll examine are (i) implicit bias, (ii) confirmation bias, and (iii) self-serving bias. (i) implicit bias: implicit biases are relatively unconscious, automatic states that can motivate overt behaviour. the kinds of implicit biases typically studied by researchers have such contents as race, gender, age, disability, sexuality, and weight. the harvard implicit association test (hiat), which can be taken 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 online,2 finds that most people score in the moderate-to-strong range for these biases. these implicit biases are morally problematic because they favour privileged social groups, such as european americans, men, and thin people, and disfavour disadvantaged social groups, such as african americans, women, and overweight people. the contents of these biases are thus culturally informed, not ‘innate’ or ‘inborn.’ it’s not just white people who implicitly favour white people; it’s everyone. while more white and asian people show automatic white preference, 50% of black people do too, showing that implicit bias is culturally mediated. (favouritism is gauged by reaction times to stereotypic words [e.g., lazy, diligent] following exposure to social group words [e.g., black, white]. there’s typically a shorter latency period between stereotypical pairings, showing an implicit association in unconscious cognitive processing). since members of disadvantaged groups disfavour their own ingroup members on these tests, the contents of these attitudes can’t be construed as innate (evolutionarily based) preferences (though the form might be innate); yet the contents of implicit bias are the result of a pervasive patriarchal-colonial cultural narrative that favours certain groups. since implicit biases are acquired, it’s not surprising that they’re somewhat flexible; in particular, they’re moderately responsive to such measures as counter-stereotypical exposure, implementation intentions, and belief conditioning.3 research shows that, although we don’t have direct insight into our implicit states, we can indirectly mitigate them by taking such steps as spending time with diverse social groups (counter-stereotypical exposure), and focusing on weakening stereotypical associations (belief conditioning). implicit biases can also be weakened sheerly by accident—for example, if we just happen to be exposed to counter-stereotypical images or outgroup members in our habitual environment. but even in a fairly heterogeneous environment, we can deliberately alter our motivational profile using cognitive strategies. in sum, implicit biases are pervasive but not uncontrollable. we can mitigate them by using intentional strategies and placing ourselves in felicitous (bias-reducing) circumstances. notably, these strategies are social in the following sense: they’re designed and recommended by epistemological communities like the hait researchers, they’re supported by social networks, and they’re often directly constituted by interpersonal 2 https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/australia/takeatest.html. 3 see kelly, machery, and mallon 2010 and jules holroyd 2015 for details on these methods. 9 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 engagement—socializing with non-stereotypical groups. this supports the sociality dimension of sot: optimal human reasoning is social. but in a moment, i’ll show that diversity is also critical to objectivity: we not only need sociality, but sociality that includes diverse members. (ii) confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out and favour evidence that confirms our prior assumptions. if we already favour privileged groups and belief systems due to implicit bias, then confirmation bias makes the problem worse by giving these perspectives additional presumptive credibility. we think they’re (even more) plausible because we already favour them. (iii) self-serving bias is the tendency to favour one’s own beliefs and values. this bias further compounds the problem by disposing us to favour our own judgments (many of which are biased) while discounting other people’s judgments. we can see how these implicit biases can (if left unchecked) work together to distort our judgements, giving privileged groups and dominant conceptual frameworks excessive credence. this is how objectivity is undermined at the level of individual reasoning. another possible obstacle to strong objectivity is harmful group dynamics. group interactions can undermine reasoning outcomes if checks and balances aren’t implemented to regulate them. on the simplest interpretation, collectives harbour biases because they’re comprised of individuals, and individuals harbour biases. so, at the very least, collectives aggregate the implicit biases of individuals. but there’s also a case to be made that collectives amplify these biases, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. this is because people tend to conform to majority opinion and the opinions of authority figures, and these group dynamics can exacerbate individual biases. this idea is supported by research on group dynamics and obedience. for example, solomon asch famously showed that individual subjects solve a task correctly 100% of the time, but when placed in a group, many subjects (32% in his 1951 trial) conform to the group’s answer even when it’s patently false. this exemplifies the dynamic of group conformity. stanley milgram famously showed that we’re also susceptible to obedience to authority, by prompting subjects to punish a mock learner (actually his confederate) with increasing electrical shocks; in a normal trial, all of the subjects exceeded the expected threshold of 300 volts, and 65% continued on to the hypothetical point of death—the maximum of 450 volts 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 (1963). (the ‘victim’ complained of heart problems and pounded on the wall, to no avail). in a similar vein, philip zimbardo (1973) primed subjects to take on the role of a prison guard, modelled on a notoriously brutal character in the film ‘cool hand luke.’ the ‘guards’ quickly subjected the ‘prisoners’ to physical abuse and sexual humiliation—similar to what later happened at abu ghraib, where real guards physically and sexually tortured real prison inmates, and later distributed photographs to their friends, thinking it was a funny joke (see zimbardo 2007). these scenarios show that we’re highly susceptible to social conformity and obedience to authority, and these tendencies can have the effect of solidifying orthodox beliefs and suppressing dissent, particularly from outnumbered members. that said, there are outliers who refuse to conform. not all of milgram’s subjects obeyed the experimenter—some defected right away. people are more likely to defect if they’re perceived as experts, high in status, or they’ve benefited the group in the past (moscovici 1974). unfortunately, marginalized groups are less likely to fit this description, so they’re less likely to influence the group’s dynamics. in addition, groups tend to manifest ‘black sheep effect,’ the tendency to judge perceived ingroup members more charitably and ‘deviant’ members more harshly (marques, yzerbyt, and leyens 1988). so, marginalized members are both less likely than others to defect from established norms and practices, and less likely to be taken seriously by the majority. this is worrisome because it seems to imply that groups are doomed to perpetuate their dominant biases ad infinitum. but this isn’t the end of the story. group dynamics can also enhance objectivity if the right background conditions obtain. for starters, collaborative reasoning, in which individuals cooperate toward a common goal, tends to enhance objectivity. john doris compiles a robust inventory of findings in support of this view—a position that he calls ‘collaborativism’ (2015). to give some examples, studies show that groups outperform individuals at reasoning tasks (e.g., laughlin 1965; davis 1969; maier 1970), groups excel at error correction (gayle w. hill 1982, 524), and groups are quicker at finding non-obvious solutions to difficult tasks (schwartz 1995). this suggests that, although groups can undermine objectivity, they can also enhance it when they are willing to cooperate on a joint task. doris’s work shows that optimal reasoning is social, but it doesn’t yet show that it requires diversity, that is, that it involves not only cooperative aggregates, but aggregates composed of different demographic backgrounds (or ‘intersectionalities,’ as feminist epistemologists sometimes put it). yet the diversity proposal receives empirical support elsewhere. although research on demographic diversity over the last fifty years has been equivocal, the most recent research indicates that diversity enhances task performance given suitable background conditions. the importance of background conditions, such as group mindset and managerial strategies, is essential because group performance is influenced by 11 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 moderating variables that researchers are only beginning to properly appreciate. traditional workgroup diversity studies operated on a ‘black box’ model that ignored intervening process variables—variables that support theoretical constructs like ‘decision-making’ and ‘conflict’ (lisa h. pelled, kathleen m. eisenhardt, and katherine r. xin 1999). recent studies indicate that diversity tends to enhance workgroup performance only under favourable epistemic conditions, such as low ‘subcategorization’ (e.g., stereotypical perceptions, implicit bias), high cooperative interdependence, and having a positive ‘diversity mindset’—a positive understanding of the value of diversity (van knippenberg and michaela c. schippers 2007). similarly, a recent comprehensive literature review indicates that workplaces that foster positive attitudes toward diversity, fairness, and inclusion enhance workplace performance (guillaume et al. 2014). the emerging consensus, when these variables are taken into account, is that diversity enhances cognitive task performance under favourable epistemic conditions. the most likely reason is that workgroup diversity is “associated with differences in information, knowledge, and perspectives, and . . . this diversity may benefit group performance”—on the condition that negative subcategorization, emotional conflict, and other negative epistemic factors are minimized (van knippenberg and schippers 2007, 527). this makes good intuitive sense: different perspectives contain different kinds of information (different ‘knowledges’), and if they receive proper uptake, they enhance reasoning outcomes. this research lends support and adds nuance to sot: diversity enhances objectivity, provided that uptake-conducive background conditions obtain. i’ll return to these considerations when needed while clarifying other aspects of sot in what follows. 4.2. the relationship between diversity and objectivity. what’s the relationship between diversity and objectivity? harding never specifies this. depending on how one answers this question, sot will appear more or less plausible. one possibility is that diversity and objectivity are conceptually related; that is, there’s no possible world in which objectivity obtains without diversity. this interpretation isn’t feasible. as the research shows, diversity can impair task performance when background epistemic conditions are unfavourable— when uptake is low. the right way to think about the diversity-objectivity relationship is as a contingent relationship, dependent upon multiple intervening variables. like most complex concepts, objectivity is multifactorial and fragile. but it’s best served in conditions that enhance both diversity and receptivity to diverse speakers and views. the background conditions, group dynamics, and attitudes of the reasoners involved in an epistemic project all affect the outcome of the project. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 4.3. degree of diversity? harding never specifies what degree of diversity is required for objectivity. how many diverse members are needed for strong objectivity? this is a complicated question on which empirical research is (again) divided. some studies find that beyond a certain degree of diversity, group performance is impaired because groups lack a “common frame of reference” (van knippenberg and schippers 2007, 532). that is, they can’t empathize with each other. but again, this effect is mediated by intervening factors such as subcategorization, cooperation, and diversity mindset. given favourable epistemic conditions, people can empathize better with others. so, if these uptake-conducive conditions are in place, there shouldn’t be an upper limit on the benefits of diversity. now, while one diverse group member could in principle suffice to maximize objectivity, in practice this isn’t likely to happen because of facts about human psychology. specifically, groups are taken more seriously than isolated individuals. in this connection, miranda fricker (2007) writes that underrepresented groups tend to be discredited on the basis of their demographic attributes (i.e., they suffer ‘testimonial injustice’), and as a result, they lose confidence in their beliefs and competency. this creates a positive feedback loop, in which epistemic injustice undermines the confidence of minorities, which in turn undermines public trust in their beliefs and abilities, limiting their ability to contribute effectively to group reasoning. this epistemic theory is supported by research on corporate innovation. when women are token minorities on a corporate board, they have trouble influencing board strategic task decisions (i.e., the most important decisions in the firm), and they are more likely to conform to the majority’s ideas and behaviours, as predicted by standpoint epistemology theory (mariateresa torchia, andrea calabro, and huse 2011). token minorities also tend to be closely monitored, stereotyped, and excluded by dominant groups’ members, which limits their ability to contribute to strategic decision-making. however, when at least three women are on the board, they achieve the “critical mass” required to influence board decisions, and their contributions enhance organizational innovation—that is, they improve the firm’s performance (ibid.). this shows that critical mass is epistemically valuable. but critical mass is the lower limit of epistemically valuable diversity; a higher proportion of women on the board could potentially enhance innovation even more. notably, the average number of board members in the study was 7.12, so three women was a large proportion of the average board. in philosophy, which consists of thousands of people, far more women would be needed to achieve critical mass, and if we are committed to ideal objectivity, we should strive for more than the bare minimum. 13 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 as we saw, only 19–20% of postsecondary philosophy instructors are women, only 19 of 500 select top-tier journal articles are by women, and few of those articles received any extended discussion. if quantity matters, it follows that we need more women in philosophy. so far, our efforts since the 1990s have yielded negligible results. this means that we should be investing as much effort as possible in recruiting more women, for the sake of enhancing the epistemic value of our work. 4.4. ‘fairness to the evidence’? harding says that objectivity is served by responding to “the most severe criticisms one can imagine” (2015, 33). i don’t disagree with this prescription, but i would suggest an important caveat. while we should try to imagine relevant criticisms, we shouldn’t think that this is sufficient for the most robust objectivity. rather, imagination should be seen as a last resort, to be used when we can’t actually solicit feedback from people who hold relevant criticisms. the reason is that we don’t, in fact, have very strong powers of imagination, partly because we’re susceptible to cognitive distortions that significantly limit our deliberative possibilities. we’ve already seen that descartes’s naïve theory of the (transparent) mind was fundamentally mistaken. so, we shouldn’t repeat descartes’s mistake by thinking that cogitating diligently will reveal the truth of the matter to ‘the light of (individual) reason.’ it won’t. we need to collaborate with other people, including, ideally, demographically diverse reasoners, and we need to foster uptake-conducive epistemic conditions, consistent with pef plus the findings on workgroup task performance. doing this can be seen as a matter of epistemic responsibility; individuals and groups that collaborate with others and seek to enhance uptake are epistemically responsible. epistemic responsibility might be seen as a virtue that enhances epistemic agency (and perhaps also moral agency, insofar as attending to relevant moral testimony enhances moral agency). honing our sensitivity to relevant perspectives and criticisms—or cultivating proper vigilance—makes us better reasoners.4 4.5. diversity and uptake. my penultimate clarification is that, on the basis of the empirical work, we should add uptake to the requirements for objectivity. that is, in addition to diversity, we also need felicitous epistemic conditions—those that facilitate uptake 4 see sam murray (2017) for an account of vigilance as a virtue that enhances responsibility. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 to diverse perspectives. we can easily imagine a robustly diverse group in which a historically marginalized subgroup isn’t taken seriously. this is, in fact, the standard result of many earlier reasoning studies that didn’t take account of relevant intervening variables: there was diversity without optimal reasoning outcomes. but in conditions of optimal uptake, groups do achieve optimal cognitive performance. 4.6. institutional standards. my final qualification emphasizes the need for institutional standards of epistemic effectiveness, not merely individual ones. harding doesn’t explicitly discuss these criteria. and pef sounds (to me, at least) like a recommendation for individuals: it’s not hard to see how an individual can take steps to be fair to a diversity of perspectives, but how do we implement pef on an institutional level? fortunately, longino (2001) offers a set of conditions for enhancing ‘epistemic effectiveness’ in institutions, and these can be annexed to harding’s proposal, making it easier to apply on a large scale. longino’s criteria for epistemic effectiveness are (1) fair venues, (2) uptake, (3) public standards, and (4) tempered equality. in more precise terms, these conditions entail that (1) there must be public venues for criticism, these venues must be the same venues in which ‘original research’ is presented, and criticism must be given the same or nearly the same weight as original research; (2) the community must effectively respond to criticism and dissent; (3) there must be publicly recognized standards (not just private ones) for evaluating theories, hypotheses, observations, etc.; and (4) there must be equality amongst equally capable members. rather than assessing every member of an epistemological community, we can use these conditions to evaluate whether the community satisfies (1)–(4). as philosophers, we can evaluate the epistemic state of our own discipline using longino’s criteria, and we can also apply some of harding’s proposals—both of which i’ll do in the next section. this should be taken as an abbreviated assessment: a much more thorough assessment is possible, but it exceeds the scope of a single article. 5. recommendations here, i’m going to make recommendations based on both longino’s and harding’s work. first, we can apply longino’s institutional criteria. on scrutiny, philosophy doesn’t fully satisfy any of (1)–(4). regarding (1) fair venues, most philosophy journals don’t publish discussion notes, those that do are heavily weighted in favour of original research (leiter reports blog 2007), and feminist content, as we saw, is relatively scarce. 15 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 regarding (2) adequate uptake, since feminist philosophy tends to be published in specialized venues like hypatia and feminist philosophy quarterly, and presented at specialized conferences—and, in addition to this, there’s little extended discussion of women’s work in generalist venues—it’s reasonable to infer that uptake for women’s work, especially feminist contributions, is not up to the ideal standard. concerning (3) public standards, while some journals now have triple-blind review (due in large part to the urging of feminists), many don’t; and blind review doesn’t eliminate content bias (against certain fields or points of view). this could perhaps be rectified by creating more diverse editorial boards. in terms of hiring, some philosophers have argued that ‘pedigree bias’ is a major hurdle in the fair evaluation of job candidates (de cruz 2014). the interview, too, permits hiring committees to (implicitly or explicitly) judge candidates on the basis of demographic attributes, enhancing the risk of biased outcomes. in a competitive job market like ours, where there are more qualified candidates than positions, implicit bias is more likely to be a factor. so, every effort should be made to minimize these effects (more on which in a moment). finally, (4) tempered equality isn’t met because a preponderance of instructors and published authors are men (more specifically, white men), and there’s no reason to think that they’re substantially more talented or credible than other candidates, in defence of their over-representation. indeed, if the basic premise of standpoint epistemology is right, there’s reason to think that underrepresented groups have underappreciated insights that could enhance objectivity in the field, so their perspectives are especially epistemically valuable. overall, then, philosophy appears to have systemic problems that deserve our attention. two possible solutions to these problems are (i) diversify evaluators (on editorial boards, hiring committees, referee panels, etc.), and (ii) reduce the role of implicit bias. the university of florida offers guidelines for reducing implicit bias in interviews, such as doing phone interviews first, preparing questions beforehand, and asking all candidates the same questions.5 a more radical step would be to eliminate interviews altogether. this policy would probably be met with resistance, but it’s reasonable to think that a candidate’s right to a fair (unbiased) assessment trumps a department’s right to choose a candidate they like on the basis of personal preference. next, let’s consider the situation from the perspective of harding’s work. i want to home in on three of harding’s recommendations, which i think have 5 http://training.hr.ufl.edu/resources/leadershiptoolkit/transcripts/identifying_and _avoiding_interview_biases.pdf. 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 http://training.hr.ufl.edu/resources/leadershiptoolkit/transcripts/identifying_and important practical applications for philosophy. these recommendations are (1) include voices from outside and below, (2) implement affirmative action, and (3) promote alternative research communities. i’ll elaborate on these recommendations in turn. (1) harding says that we should solicit input “from outside” and “from below” (2015, 34–36). what does this mean for women in philosophy? women are ‘outside’ in the sense that they have unique insights rooted in their lived experience, which the standpoint epistemologists refer to as epistemic privilege or situated knowledge. this privileged insight may be embodied in the ‘different voice’ described by carol gilligan (1982), or the ‘ethics of care’ described by nel noddings (1984, 2002), or simply the embattled perspective of someone afflicted by the ‘perfect storm’ of gender prejudice identified by louise antony (2012). if any of these accounts is right, women have situated knowledge that’s valuable to the field of philosophy. women are ‘below’ in the sense that they’re generally less senior, less cited, less discussed, and less well-compensated than their male peers. in other words, they occupy a position of lower status. this position can confer epistemic privilege in the sense that it can confer a high degree of epistemic freedom—the freedom to evaluate the norms of the field from an impartial, unencumbered perspective. lowstatus members of a community are ‘epistemically freer’ because they’re less invested in the community’s established practices: they haven’t had a hand in a designing those practices, popularizing particular schools of thought, or promoting certain people—at least, not to the same extent as more senior members. this lack of prior investment creates a high degree of ‘free will’ with respect to evaluating epistemic practices in the field: low-status members are freer to implement new and innovative methods, and to question the validity of institutional practices accepted by the majority. the next two recommendations—(2) implementing affirmative action and (3) promoting alternative research communities—are mentioned by harding in a single page (2015, 35), but they deserve more attention, since they’re controversial but potentially very effective. (2) i take affirmative action to mean a policy that favours a member of an underrepresented group. this is a controversial strategy because it’s seen by some to be unfair. but it’s not unfair if there’s a preexisting bias in the hiring process, and the policy counteracts that bias. dan kelly and erica roedder (2008) advise that professors should skew underrepresented students’ grades slightly upward to correct for the expectable effects of implicit bias. if this is a good policy for graders, it’s likely a good policy for hiring committees. this ‘moderate’ kind of affirmative action can serve to mitigate the implicit bias that plays a predictable role in epistemic judgments in philosophy. 17 ciurria: objectivity, diversity, and uptake published by scholarship@western, 2017 a similar policy that’s not often discussed but makes sense in the current climate is to slightly favour certain content or research orientations, to correct for institutional content bias. this is something that hiring committees, editors, and referees can do in their various gatekeeper roles. this method could also be used to improve the objectivity of public ranking lists, like the brooks blog6 and the leiter reports7 rankings. for starters, the leiter ranking system could be expanded to include more than 20 journals, and more than just generalist journals. (this would be helpful because leiter’s rankings are fairly influential). furthermore, all rankings systems, which glean data from respondents through surveys, could include a notification in their surveys stating that implicit biases may affect people’s judgments of certain types of content, particular non-standard content like feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and non-western philosophy, and respondents should be aware of this. this notice could also be included on the websites that publish the results. this would be a valuable step because it would both alert people to the role of implicit bias in their assessments, prompting them to reflect on those biases, and would increase the cognitive salience of nonstandard journals, priming people to reflect on them more carefully and (hopefully) more fairly. this notice would be especially helpful to those who might not think about these journals at all. regarding (3) alternative research groups, i fully agree with harding that these groups are a valuable academic resource, but i would emphasize that the output of these groups must be integrated with mainstream philosophical discourse for the condition of uptake to be met. if feminist discourse remains sequestered in disciplinary venues, then we’re losing much of the value of these alternative frames of reference. one example of ‘sequestration’ is the existence of ‘feminist perspectives on’ [science, globalization, disability, autonomy,’ etc., etc.] in the stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy, alongside ‘mainstream’ entries on these same subjects. ideally, the two subjects would be integrated into a single comprehensive entry, or, failing that, some of the citations from the ‘feminist perspectives’ entry would be added to the generalist entry, enhancing the broad recognition of those authors. 6. concluding remarks i’ve argued that the underrepresentation of women in philosophy jeopardizes the attainment of strong objectivity, a goal to which all researchers are explicitly committed. i’ve suggested strategies for ameliorating this problem, rooted in the 6 http://the-brooks-blog.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/journal-rankings-forphilosophy_29.html. 7 http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/the-highest-quality-generalphilosophy-journals-in-english.html. 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 core idea that we need to boost women’s numbers while simultaneously increasing uptake-conducive background conditions, that is, a hospitable epistemic climate for women’s contributions, to enhance objectivity. we can foster this climate individually (e.g., by focusing on minimizing our stereotypical associations) and collectively (by implementing and enforcing institutional standards of epistemic responsibility). some of my proposals may be controversial, but they’re merely suggestions and far from exhaustive: there are many possible constructive steps that we can 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philosophy.” california state university, long beach website, updated jan. 1. http://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/doctoral_2004.html. van knippenberg, daan, and michaela c. *schippers. 2007. “work group diversity.” annual review of psychology 58:515–541. zimbardo, philip g. 1973. “on the ethics of intervention in human psychological research: with special reference to the stanford prison experiment.” cognition 2 (2): 243–256. ———. 2007. lucifer effect. hoboken, nj: blackwell publishing ltd. michelle ciurria is a visiting scholar at the university of missouri st. louis. she previously held postdoctoral fellowships at washington university in st. louis (20142016) and the university of new south wales (2016-2017). her primary research interests are moral responsibility and moral psychology, and she publishes in areas including philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, feminist philosophy, and argumentation theory. her recent work includes “moral responsibility ain’t just in the head” in journal of the american philosophical association (2015) and “a virtue ethical approach to decisional capacity and mental health” in philosophical psychology (2016). 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 3 [2017], iss. 3, art. 3 http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol3/iss3/3 doi: 10.5206/fpq/2017.3.3 feminist philosophy quarterly 2017 objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy michelle ciurria recommended citation objectivity, diversity, and uptake: on the status of women in philosophy weighing identity in procreative decisions feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation kane, laura wildemann. 2023. “weighing identity in procreative decisions.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (3). article 3. 2023 weighing identity in procreative decisions laura wildemann kane worcester state university laura.kane@worcester.edu kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 weighing identity in procreative decisions laura wildemann kane abstract the question of whether one should procreate is rarely cast as a personal choice in philosophical discourse; rather, it is presented as an ethical choice made against a backdrop of aggregate concerns. but justifications concerning procreation in popular culture regularly engage with the role that identity plays in making procreative decisions; specifically, how one’s decision will affect who they are and who they might be in the future. women in particular cite the personally transformative aspects of becoming a parent—personal circumstances, including socioeconomic status, age, health, and relationship status—as the most important considerations for the decision they make regarding possible parenthood, and not the more aggregate concerns that an ethics of procreation prioritizes. i highlight women because when women undergo a transformative experience related to parenthood, they do so in contexts where the social, economic, and emotional effects related to pregnancy and motherhood are extensive and impose greater effects on women than men. these harmful material effects threaten a woman’s economic stability, career development, social relationships, and emotional health. because of this, i argue that an ethics of procreation must engage with the ways in which women’s identities are transformed through procreative decisions. keywords: procreative ethics, motherhood, parenthood, identity, reproductive rights, abortion, transformative experience “he was born on new year’s day, the year 2000. i got pregnant with him when i was 19, a month before i graduated from college. i was a brain; that was my identity. . . . . . . facing an unplanned pregnancy when i was 19 led to a grappling with identity that forced me to choose between acknowledging complexity, failure and systemic injustice or living inauthentically, turned away from truth.” – merritt tierce in the new york times feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 the question of whether one should procreate is rarely cast as a personal choice in philosophical discourse; rather, it is presented as an ethical choice made against a backdrop of aggregate concerns. antinatalists argue that procreation contributes to overpopulation, to a deepening strain on natural resources, to a larger carbon footprint and a worsening global climate, and, especially in wealthy countries, to perpetuating global inequality. justifications in favor of procreation stem largely from the understanding that procreation should be seen not as presumptively permissible in all circumstances but as something that must be morally justified (lecce and magnusson 2015, 155). some argue that having children is an “intrinsically worthwhile” pursuit, while others argue that having children accords with “values such as the perpetuation of lineage, name, and property; the fulfillment of religious, marital, or familial duties; or the discharge of duties to the state” (overall 2012, 211). in short, on either side of the debate, the considerations that are at play generally involve how one’s procreative decision affects the lives of others in some important respect and rarely engage with the significance that one’s own identity plays in procreative decisions. to put it another way, philosophical debates about procreation are largely about the having of children but not about how those decisions shape and are shaped by a potential procreator’s self-conception and desires for their future self—specifically, whether to be a parent or to not be a parent. by contrast, justifications concerning procreation in popular culture do engage with the central role that identity plays in making procreative decisions. the question, “should i have a child?” is routinely discussed in opinion columns of various publications—recent musings can be found, for instance, in the atlantic (khazan 2017), the guardian (eustice 2020), time, (guido 2014) vox (davidman 2021), and the new york times (whyman 2021; williams 2021). and while the authors of these pieces do weigh concerns about overpopulation and dwindling resources with considerations about various duties, they focus more centrally on the implications for personal fulfillment, self-understanding, and closed possibilities for oneself as a result of having or not having children. in short, when most individuals debate whether they ought to procreate, they often think about how the decision will affect who they are and who they might be in the future. in this paper, i argue that any discussion about the effects of procreative decisions must engage with the ways in which one’s identity is shaped through these decisions and must distinguish this aspect of procreative decision-making from both aggregate concerns and considerations about the child that will be had. whether one chooses to procreate, whether one procreates willingly or against one’s will, or whether one chooses not to procreate, important aspects of one’s own identity are changed, transformed, or affirmed. in this vein, i want to suggest that the question, “should i have a child?” is, on its own, insufficient to address all the social, political, and ethical concerns that potential procreators may have. we must also ask, “do i kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 want to be a parent?” which (1) is more inclusive of the different paths individuals take to become parents, including adoption and (2) more accurately captures the concerns and considerations that individuals, and particularly women, weigh when they wonder about such things. i highlight women here because it is largely women that are publicly having this debate, and they are doing so for a specific reason: the degree to which one’s identity is affected by a decision regarding parenthood is unduly influenced by preexisting gender roles in a society. in popular culture, procreation is largely conflated with motherhood (and not with parenthood more generally). women are expected to have children—to become mothers—and this expected identity shift shapes and, in some important respects, binds certain narratives about women’s lives to individual women who either define themselves within this narrative or in opposition to this narrative.1 additionally, there are material effects imposed upon women who choose to become parents, and there are material effects imposed upon women who choose not to become parents. these material effects are social, emotional, and financial in nature, and, as i will suggest, may constitute harms for women in particular. as such, the procreation debate in popular culture has been primarily shaped by women—women justifying their decisions to become parents, women justifying their decisions not to become parents—with the expectations of motherhood and all that comes with it central in both narratives. philosophical arguments in favor of, or in opposition to, procreation that omit these important considerations offer incomplete accounts of the social, political, and ethical effects of procreative decisions on existing women as well as future generations of women. before i begin, i’d like to clarify the scope of my argument, as it may at times seem that i am conflating notions of biological parenthood with parenthood more generally, given the many forms it may take. the arguments in this paper are primarily aimed at exposing, and subsequently filling in, the lacuna in procreative debates regarding concerns about how procreative decisions affect the identity of the person(s) making the decision. as such, these arguments draw attention to the ways in which procreative decisions bring about transformative experiences that can have both beneficial and harmful aspects for the person(s) undergoing the experience independently of the beneficial and harmful aspects that concern others. relatedly, my focus on women may at times call upon folk discourses that treat motherhood as a gendered and biological phenomenon, similarly conflating 1 see, for instance, diana karklin’s (2022) undo motherhood, which presents accounts from women all over the world who struggle with motherhood as a social role and all it entails; and sarah lachance adams’s (2014) mad mothers, bad mothers, and what a “good” mother would do, which presents accounts of maternal ambivalence in the face of the many competing expectations for mothers. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 notions of biological mother/parenthood with parenthood generally. it is all too easy to slide between notions of wanting to be a parent and wanting to be a biological parent, and likewise between notions of pregnancy (and all that it entails) and motherhood, in folk discourses about having children. often, these discourses omit important considerations about how identities are transformed through adoption, surrogacy, fostering, and legal guardianship. and while there are indeed important transformative aspects of pregnancy and birth, focusing exclusively on biological notions of parenthood obscures how significantly women’s identities are transformed through a variety of parenting decisions, especially when considering the material effects those decisions bring about. as such, many of my arguments can and will be extended to include transformative aspects of adoption and parenthood more generally for women, since the material effects that are imposed upon women are commensurate for those who decide to procreate and those who decide to adopt. last, my understanding of identity here shapes the issues that i raise in this paper. because i am focused on the social, emotional, and financial concerns that women in particular weigh when they are confronted with procreative decisions, my discussions largely focus on social identity, which recognizes the importance of social roles and group memberships in shaping one’s sense of self through differing sets of expectations, rights, and obligations (appiah 2018, 9). judith butler (2005, 25) notes that the norms by which we recognize others and ourselves are not ours alone; they exist in a realm of social normativity that directs our conduct, shapes our expectations for the conduct of others, and informs how we respond to one another. narratives of motherhood—and all the expectations, rights, and obligations that accompany such narratives—shape how women in particular view possible identities, even if they do not endorse these identities themselves, because of the ways in which others come to respond to them as a result of these narratives. as kwame anthony appiah (2018, 18) argues, identities can have both a subjective dimension and an objective dimension: “an identity cannot simply be imposed upon me . . . but neither is an identity simply up to me.” as i will argue, procreative decisions transform identities in ways that are not entirely up to us, yet have profound implications for how we fit into the social world in ways that we are unable to fully control. the role of identity in current procreation debates parental identity appears to play a tangential role in some arguments made both for and against procreation. for instance, the antinatalist view that one has a duty not to create lives that are miserable, and also no duty to create lives that are not miserable, may allude to the ways in which potential procreators conceive of themselves (benatar 2012, 133). this argument is premised on two claims: that any suffering is bad and should be avoided, and that it is far more likely to bring a child into the world that will experience some degree of suffering than to bring a child into kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 the world that will not experience suffering at all. when weighing these claims, a potential procreator may think to themselves, in considering the interests of the future child and their own responsibility in accounting for those interests, “what kind of person would i be to bring more suffering into the world?” and opt not to procreate. this introspective consideration departs from the ethical concerns at the center of this antinatalist view, but one’s own role in bringing about suffering is undoubtedly drawn upon by those who take up this and similar positions (harrison and tanner 2011).2 while we are likely to feel some degree of moral discomfort when thinking about a new life that will surely face suffering, we are also encouraged to think about our own responsibility in creating this new suffering and are therefore confronted with thoughts about what kind of person we would be if we were to bring more suffering into the world. but to imbue one’s identity into these moral calculations of suffering in the world is to assume that one knows what the future holds and that one’s identity is, to some degree, determined by that future. even if the odds are in favor of procreation increasing suffering in one way or another, one’s own role in producing that suffering (and hence, one’s responsibility for it) is not something that can be known so certainly. most importantly, if someone does weigh their identity as a factor in such calculations, they are not doing so from a place of personal desire or fulfillment or doing so to realize some life plan. rather, one weighs who they would be to do something like this to others. in short, one’s social identity is not a factor here so much as the quality of their moral character.3 as such, important parts of one’s own self-conception are omitted from these considerations. perhaps, though, there is some sense in which we can know something about a child we might have, such that we can know what it would be like to have that child and what it would mean for us to have that child. for instance, someone may justify a decision to procreate through a desire to reproduce family resemblances or to mix some aspect(s) of one’s family with some aspect(s) of one’s loved ones (brake 2015, 141). although this may characterize having a child as a vanity project, and so in some important sense involve one’s conception of self as being an important factor in the decision to procreate, elizabeth brake argues that we should not necessarily see this justification purely in those terms. brake argues that procreators could be motivated by a genuine belief, without any hint of narcissism, that reproducing their genes will benefit the world (143). procreative partners may view themselves and/or their 2 gerald harrison and julia tanner (2011, 114) argue that human beings have a responsibility to make efforts to curb our destructive behavior; one means of doing so is to limit the impact that (future) human beings have on the planet by refusing to procreate. 3 while i am pointing to the distinction between moral identity and social identity here, these identities may overlap. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 genetic families as possessing valuable traits—such as virtue, prudence, kindness, and so forth—that would be beneficial to pass on to future generations through genes or through upbringing (143). since it may be possible to “cultivate” these supposed genetic qualities in an adopted child as well, brake argues that the desired traits must be strictly genetic and the potential parent(s) must be justified in believing, optimistically, that there is a reasonable chance for their genetic offspring to inherit such traits (and not, for instance, other problematic traits that are also manifest in the same family) through procreation (143). the problems that arise with these criteria are multilayered, but i will note one important objection here. in order to justify having a child for the betterment of the world (and compensating the procreative costs associated with bringing more children into the world), a parent must not only be reasonably sure their offspring will inherit the desired trait(s), but they must also be reasonably sure that the child will use said trait(s) to make a future contribution of a large enough magnitude to compensate for these procreative costs (brake 2015, 143). to be reasonably sure of these things, potential procreators would need to know in advance what genes their child will inherit and how those genes will be expressed as their offspring grows. since this knowledge cannot be attained without the child already existing, it seems that potential parents would never be reasonably sure enough to make the decision to procreate on this basis. in short, one cannot know whether one’s offspring will share the important part(s) of one’s identity. alternatively, someone may desire to relay stories and values to one’s progeny by acknowledging shared genetic traits that have been “passed down” over several generations, such as the prevalence of a certain skill, trade, or line of work that (1) is seemingly tied to some genetic trait and that (2) many close and distant genetic relations participated in (professional musicians, artists, masons, and so on). under such circumstances, the relationship between one’s genetic traits and the cause(s) behind such traits may serve to deepen one’s bond with, or affinity for, one’s family and create a profound sense of identity that arises directly from this relationship. however, this consideration of identity attaches to the identity of the relationship itself rather than to the identity of the parent.4 value sharing contributes to a meaningful relationship between a parent and child not because of some shared genetic connection but because of the vulnerability involved in being able to express oneself, as a parent, so that one’s child can come to see them in a more nuanced light (brighouse and swift 2016, 152; kane 2019, 73). in 4 for instance, one may view a craft or talent that is central to their identity as rooted within their relationships, as when someone with musical interest and aptitude points to the musically talented members of their family as (directly or indirectly) being a cause for their interest and aptitude. kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 this sense, those who choose to have a child to satisfy this desire are setting out to create a relationship—a relationship that is valuable for its own sake by giving “a particular meaning to one’s own life and to the life of the being that is created” (overall 2012, 217). christine overall argues that by setting out to have a child, one sets out to create a mutually enriching and enhancing love that comes with a parentchild relationship. in doing so, one also creates the person with whom one has this relationship, a unique aspect of this kind of relationship (217). understood this way, one’s reason for procreating would be to establish a caring relationship with another person—but not just any other person and not just any kind of caring relationship. rather, one seeks to create a specific kind of caring relationship—a parent-child relationship—with a person created by oneself. it may be possible to create a relationship for its own sake, but claudia mills argues that to be in a relationship purely for the sake of the relationship is to remove one’s own personal desire from the reason for wanting the relationship (mills 2005, 4). with this in mind, mills argues that it is morally permissible for potential procreators to be selfish in wanting to experience the parent-child relationship. and this selfish reason is the most gratifying to the other party in the relationship—we want to be in this relationship because of how it positively affects our lives; we are not merely participating in this relationship out of a feeling of duty (4).5 the notion of selfishness is interesting; in the context just discussed, it captures a reason for wanting to procreate that incorporates identity more centrally than other arguments discussed: one decides to procreate because one wants this relationship for themselves because they see themselves in this kind of relationship.6 this reasoning also extends to prospective adoptive parents: one wants to adopt a child because one wants a parent-child relationship for themselves because one sees themselves as being in this relationship. what’s more, one may also desire to communicate something to others about who they see themselves being—a parent— because they also desire to change the nature of their role(s) in other parts of life. becoming a parent affects not only one’s relationship with their future child but also one’s relationship(s) with friends, parents, siblings, colleagues, and community. in this sense, deciding whether or not to procreate or adopt has profound implications for how we conceive of ourselves and how others conceive of us. 5 held (2006) and others argue that the care provided in relationships is more beneficial when it also involves feelings of love and care. 6 it is important to note that, at the same time, women who choose not to have children are often labeled “selfish” for their decision as well, as though their decision communicates something about who they are. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 to be or not to be (a parent) mills’s argument shows us that a potential parent’s desire is an important factor in procreative and adoptive decisions and that it might communicate something about who the person making the decision wants to be. individuals hold within themselves many possible selves that reflect the beliefs about what role(s) they hope to fill in the future, shaped by ideals (what they would like to become), realities (what they actually could become), and fears (what they do not want to become) (adamsons 2013, 247). these “hoped-for” selves motivate decisions and behaviors about what to do (to achieve an ideal or possibility) and what not to do (to avoid what is fearful). those who desire to procreate or adopt will develop a possible self as a parent (a possible parental self) that represents the goals and expectations associated with the parental role that one wants to fill (kaźmierczak and karasiewicz 2019, 2). that is, there is a desire to be a parent that is independent of the desire to form a relationship with one’s child, as well as the desire to have a particular child (“this” child) or a (biological) child of one’s own. overall (2012, 210) provides a fitting analogy here when she argues that having children can be expressive of the kind of person that one wants to be and that to deny someone this opportunity would be akin to denying musicians the ability to make music. it is not the product of this desire that is the focus here but the fulfillment or realization of what one wants to be: a musician, regardless of the kind of music one plays. interfering with someone’s ability to fulfill that role for themselves is, therefore, interfering with someone’s ability to realize their sense of self. as noted earlier, a potential procreator cannot know who their child will be or what the relationship with this child will eventually consist in. what they can know is that, should some procreative activity result in a pregnancy and (though not necessarily) a birth, a possible parental self has been realized. similarly for adoption, a potential adoptive parent cannot know who their child will be or what the relationship with this child will eventually consist in. what they can know is that, in initiating the adoption process, a possible parental self has been realized. a transition to a parental self is associated with a process of self-definition as well as a commitment to and value-boosting of a particular life sphere (kaźmierczak and karasiewicz 2019, 2). the transformation of self that transpires does not occur in a vacuum, though—one must also redefine themselves as a parent in the context of one’s existing social and professional roles, as well as one’s desired roles in those contexts. we see these considerations in folk discourses about potential parenthood: i have friends with kids who continue to live fun, fulfilled lives. they seem tired, sure, but they’re still the same people i knew and loved. i also have friends whose lives seem to have become smaller, and this is where frances kissling’s advice starts to come to life. if i do this, i’ll lose kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 freedoms, but by being deliberate about the way i want to bring up a family, perhaps it’s not impossible to set my own terms. – kerry eustice (2020) in the guardian frank had always said he wanted lots of kids. caliva, who was in her early 30s, thought maybe one or two would be nice, but she was mostly undecided. . . . at times, she wondered if her lack of baby fever should be cause for concern. she took her worries to the internet, where she came across a post on the rumpus’s “dear sugar” advice column titled, “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” . . . cheryl strayed, the author of the column, wrote back that each person has a life and a “sister life” they’ll never know—the “ghost ship” of the title. “the clear desire for a baby isn’t an accurate gauge for you,” she wrote. instead, she recommended “thinking deeply about your choices and actions from the stance of your future self.” in other words, think about what you’ll regret later. – olga khazan (2017) in the atlantic i’m a 41-year-old mother of two who spent my entire adult life telling myself that children were my destiny. . . . . . . my mother made it clear that we were her reason for living. there was never a time i didn’t feel loved by my mother. but there was also a latent message that became clear after my father left: i am not alone because i have children. if it weren’t for you two i would be falling apart. before i hit adolescence, i decided that children were the only things that could fulfill me when i grew older.” – maria guido (2014) in time “any adult who has passed 35 without having children will know the chasm that opens between you and your friends with kids. it’s there in the irritation in your voice when you demand to know why they can’t meet you at the pub after work, and the irritation in their voice that you don’t understand how childcare works. the child-free adult wearies of having to plan a social life around other people’s nursery schedules; the parent is just flat-out weary.” – hadley freeman (2015) in the guardian while these authors do discuss environmental concerns and concerns for the welfare of future generations in their pieces, as well as visions about what their feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 relationships with children might look like, they specifically draw attention to the ways in which a decision to have a child would shape or transform the lives they have envisioned for themselves. the gravity of this decision is underscored by an awareness that once a parental self is realized, it is very difficult to unrealize: even at the paperwork or pregnancy stage, one takes on new roles involving increased responsibilities (for personal health, financial health, employment stability) and new or changed relationships with others (physicians, case workers, partners, friends) that impact one’s life and identity. and while becoming a parent can be transformative for both men and women, the social environment in which women become parents contributes to a larger degree of transformation than the kind felt by men. an awareness of how this decision transforms the lives and identities of women more significantly than men raises the stakes for women in particular when they consider parenthood for themselves. transformative experiences and the motherhood penalty l. a. paul (2020, 17) argues that a transformative experience is both personally and epistemically transformative because it reshapes the priorities, preferences, and self-conception of the person undergoing the experience to the extent that the person could not fully understand what it would be like to be that person without having undergone the experience. when one undergoes a transformative experience, one becomes irrevocably changed: one has acquired knowledge about what it is like to experience something that shapes how they understand themselves both in that experience and as a result of having had that experience. the degree to which some decision or experience is transformative is contingent upon several factors, including the particular psychological makeup of the person undergoing the experience or making the decision, as well as the wider social environment and circumstances in which the experience occurs or the decision is being made (barnes 2015, 172). elizabeth barnes argues that existing social norms and structures make it possible to undergo transformative experiences because they make certain ways of interpreting or thinking about ourselves possible in the first place (185). the self-conceptions that are most salient and readily available to us are those that are already salient in our culture as social norms and stereotypes (or as responses to those norms and stereotypes). for instance, selfless mother, careeroriented, tiger mom, and the like prescribe not just a role to fill but a set of behavioral expectations and possibilities for those who are considering what it might be like to become a parent and how that choice will affect their own identity. as potential parents adopt these roles for themselves and identify with them, they reproduce these norms and stereotypes, making them available for others (butler 1988, 524; haslanger 2012, 10). kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 barnes also notes that a social or cultural context can make a particular kind of transformative experience constitute a harm, such as a cultural context where some members of society are expected to rearrange their own priorities, preferences, and self-conceptions to align with the needs and wants of more powerful members. she gives an example of a woman becoming a wife in a society with strict gender norms and stereotypes: marriage in such a context was supposed to be a transformative experience for women—and women only—because when someone becomes a wife in such a context, she is expected to “rearrange her priorities, her desires, and her projects to cohere with an conform to her husband’s. being her husband’s wife should be her primary role, and her primary self-conception” (barnes 2015, 180). i suggest that parenthood for women, colloquially understood as motherhood, may be the kind of transformative experience that constitutes a harm for women in many current cultural contexts, including the united states, because of the material effects that accompany such a transformation.7 procreative and adoptive decisions for women are shaped by differences in power, prestige, and future prospects for economic security (overall 2012, 9). women are still defined socially and economically by their relationship to children; they must evaluate how their autonomy, occupation, physical appearance and sexuality, and their relationship(s) to others will be impacted by parenthood (laney et al. 2015, 127). because women are so greatly impacted in these various ways, women tend to weigh these concerns at various stages of their lives, often well before they seriously intend to procreate or adopt, whereas men typically begin to weigh these considerations only after they are on the path to fatherhood (adamsons 2013, 247).8 these concerns are borne out by recent data regarding the gender wage gap, which have revealed that it is no longer women in general that feel the harshest sting of underpayment but mothers in particular, leading researchers to refer to this disparity as the motherhood penalty (correll, benard, and paik 2007). correll, benard, and paik (2007, 1301) argue that motherhood is a “status characteristic”—a personal attribute (such as race or gender) or role (such as mother or manager) that is shaped by social norms and cultural beliefs that attribute greater status, worthiness, competence, and the like to some categories of people but not to others. this status characteristic assigns a lower status to mothers in the workplace 7 i am not suggesting that motherhood itself is harmful; rather, i suggest that the material effects that accompany motherhood are typically harmful for women in many cultural contexts. 8 adamsons (2013, 246) notes that fathers take longer to adjust to the idea of being a parent, “often not fully acknowledging or engaging with a pregnancy until well into the second or third trimester.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 through biased evaluations of competence and commitment. motherhood affects perceptions of competence and commitment because of the cultural belief that mothers should prioritize the needs of their children above all else, including career demands, that distinguishes the role of “ideal mother” from “ideal worker” (1306– 07). as a result, mothers are evaluated as less competent, are expected to be less committed to their jobs, are offered lower wages for the same work, and are subject to higher performance expectations than nonmothers (1299).9 this extends to visibly pregnant women as well, who are judged by coworkers to be less dependable and less committed to their jobs, while simultaneously more emotional and more irrational than women who are not visibly pregnant (halpert, wilson, and hickman 1993, 650). by contrast, the role of fatherhood is not seen as being incompatible with the role of “ideal worker” and often works to the benefit of fathers. culturally, being a good father and a good employee are defining features of what it means to be a man; this means that being a parent does not generally lead to lower workplace performance evaluations for fathers and may in fact boost earnings in the form of a “family wage” bonus awarded to perceived (male) breadwinners (correll, benard, and paik 2007, 1307; orloff 1996, 53). in an important respect, then, being perceived as a “father” is something that men have going for them, while conversely, being perceived as a “mother” marks one as a target for certain forms of treatment that result in lower wages, fewer raises, and fewer employment opportunities (frye 2000, 16; haslanger 2000, 41). additionally, grappling with motherhood as an identity involves integrating societal ideals about how women ought to mother (including the belief that mothers should only feel positively toward their children and toward their role as mothers) with what individual women want motherhood to be for themselves. johnston and swanson (2003) argue that ideologies about motherhood are built on myths. the most dominant myth, the myth of maternal bliss, promotes the idea that “motherhood is the joyful fruition of every woman’s aspiration, [which] perpetuates systems of patriarchy by attributing any maternal unhappiness and dissatisfaction to failure of the mother (johnston and swanson 2003, 22). in response to this myth, feminists shaped new narratives for justifying ideal motherhood that rejected patriarchal ideals yet also created competing ideologies that have spurred folk debates about motherhood that persist today: “i am a better mother if i work”; “i am 9 correll, benard, and paik (2007, 1297) note that the wage gap between mothers and nonmothers is larger than the wage gap between men and women for those under age thirty-five. juhn and mccue (2017, 183) show that, although women and men begin their careers with similar earnings, a substantial gap arises over time and widens fastest when children arrive. kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 resisting the dominant culture and exercising my free choice and power as a woman to stay home with my children” (johnston and swanson 2003, 23). dawn marie dow (2016, 181) notes that women account for their decisions to “opt out” of careers or motherhood or to opt in to “working motherhood” in response to these competing ideologies, and that the meanings that mothers attach to their decision often determine how they experience motherhood itself. yet the core element of the maternal bliss myth—that motherhood should be joyful, exciting, and fulfilling—persists, and it continues to shape how women experience motherhood. specifically, women who do not feel joyful, excited, or fulfilled by the experience of motherhood believe that they are doing something wrong, or that they have wronged their child, or that they are somehow not “good enough” at being a mother (sacks 2017). for instance, writing in the new york times, merritt tierce reflects: i don’t think i was a very good mom when my kids were young. . . . i wasn’t available the way i would have wanted to be. i wasn’t loving the way i would have wanted to be. i was shut down and withdrawn and in pain and exhausted. i tried to hold it away from them. i didn’t let it out on them as anger or criticism. but i know what it means to be present, what that feels like. i know what it means to be available and invested and magical, and that’s not how i was with them, my only children, during their only childhood. (tierce 2021) when women do not conform to their own vision of what motherhood should be, they may experience guilt or shame, and they may blame themselves for not fulfilling this role as society sees it being filled (laney et al. 2015, 127).10 women may also feel “ambivalence” toward the demands of motherhood. sarah lachance adams (2014, 36) characterizes “maternal ambivalence” as a simultaneous desire for intimacy and distance in relation to her child, “when she feels the impulses to both harm and protect, to both abandon and nurture. . . . at these moments a woman can feel most displaced by motherhood, as she simultaneously loses and finds herself in relation to her child.” even when mothers have strong 10 we might think here about the overlap of social and moral character. beyond grappling with the potential identity of “mother” on its own, women such as tierce also grapple with identifying as a “good” mother or a “bad” mother, at times as a direct result of their situation. being situated as a “teen mother,” “single mother,” “undocumented mother,” “working mother,” and the like may contribute to the sense that one simply cannot live up to the idealized norms of “good” motherhood, imbuing one’s identity with a sense of moral failure. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 desires to care for their children and find such care meaningful, the loss of freedom of movement, the lack of guilt-free time for work and recreation, and the limits on adult interactions and alone time can constitute a serious deprivation that drives women into despair (45). the conflict in maternal ambivalence, then, is not just a fissure between a woman and her child but within the woman herself, “between her own competing desires, between equally valued parts of herself” (53).11 the recent upswing in research on “matrescence,” which is the anthropological term for the process of becoming a mother, is working to address these complicated and conflicting aspects of the motherhood experience that are, despite myths to the contrary, actually quite common (sacks 2017). women also find themselves in a position to feel shame or guilt if they choose not to become a parent. for instance, in many south asian societies, childlessness is perceived as a curse for women (bhambhani and inbanathan 2018, 160). women who are childless due to circumstances beyond their control are stigmatized for not being able to “fulfill their reproductive function,” while women who choose to remain childless are seen as defying social norms (160). pressure from pronatalist social values may drive women to seek assisted reproduction technologies—many of which are costly and potentially risky for one’s health—with no guarantee of success. in some cases, the pressure for women to “fulfill” their reproductive role is so great that women undergo invasive treatments, such as in vitro fertilization, to remedy infertility that would otherwise not bother them, or even when it is their partner who requires treatment (purdy 2009, 182). in such cases, “giving up” means that women are perceived as responsible for their infertility (182). in the united states, voluntarily childless women have been conceived as desiring to “be like men” by devoting more time to their careers and prioritizing “productive” work over “reproductive” work, at times being labeled “psychologically disturbed” as a result (hird and abshoff 2000, 348). more recently, sociologists have found that women who opt not to become parents are more often stereotyped as lacking leadership abilities because they are “too masculine” (yet not as successfully masculine as men) and so lack the “communal, relational” leadership traits expected of women who do have parental experience (youn 2022; merluzzi and phillips 2022). and we might again think back to the notion of selfishness, although this time as it is directed at women who choose not to become parents for career ambitions, lifestyle 11 lachance adams (2014, 70) argues that attention to material ambivalence can bring to light not just the contradictory emotional responses of mothers but the lack of support for and emphasis on the well-being of caretakers. maternal ambivalence can show us how certain situations—specifically, society’s high expectations of mothers, coupled with limited resources to support their caretaking and self-care activities— can be harmful to mothers and their children. kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 ambitions, or any other ambition that might be had that does not involve parenting. women are routinely judged by their families, their peers, and even their friends (with children) about their decision not to become a parent, with the overall sentiment being that those with children just “don’t understand” the choice to be child-free (tucker 2014). relatedly, women who choose not to become parents because they recognize that they cannot take responsibility for the care of a child may feel other conflicting emotions in response to the judgments they expect to receive from others. carol gilligan (1982, 70) argues that the “dilemma of choice” regarding abortion may bring women privately into conflict with the conventions of femininity, which equates goodness with self-sacrifice. by refusing to be self-sacrificing, women who opt to abort may feel constrained by the idea that there is a “right thing to do” or a “right way” to decide about abortion, and they may struggle to identify what that “right” thing may be (75). gilligan notes that the dilemma presents itself more as a problem of relationship than as a problem of rights, where taking responsibility and avoiding hurt—even if there must be some hurt—might mean ending a pregnancy as a form of taking care of oneself (80). women in such situations might find themselves in conflict about their own ideas of selfishness, responsibility, care, and sacrifice (85). such conflict highlights the pressure women feel to conform to ideals of motherhood-asfemininity, even if they ultimately decide not to become mothers.12 taken together, these considerations about motherhood as an identity signal an enormous transformation in one’s self-conception as well as an enormous transition in how one’s identity is perceived, understood, and responded to by others. some aspects of this transformation may be positive: motherhood may offer new opportunities for building community or for strengthening the community in which one is already a member; motherhood may provide one with a sense of purpose when other options are foreclosed; and motherhood may deepen one’s existing relationship with others, including one’s co-parents, extended family, or friends who are having similar parenthood experiences. yet many aspects of this transformation may be detrimental to a woman’s financial stability, independence, and emotional well-being. that being said, there are differences in the degree to which one’s transformation into motherhood may be felt. for instance, barnes (2015) notes that conditions and expectations surrounding parenthood for wealthy, educated women in western societies undoubtedly influences how transformative an experience new parenthood is for those women, versus the experience that new parenthood might bring to those in other cultures (or even in other times) where parenthood confers 12 similarly, women may grapple here, too, with the ideal of “good” motherhood and the feeling that, due to one’s situation, one simply cannot achieve that ideal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 less meaning on someone’s life or imparts less of an economic impact.13 regardless, what must be underscored is that when women in particular do have this epistemically and personally transformative experience, they do so in contexts where the social, economic, and emotional effects related to pregnancy and motherhood are extensive. the specter of choice in procreative decisions earlier i noted that once a parental self is realized, it is very difficult to unrealize. i want to clarify what i mean by this now, first in the context of procreative decision-making, and then for parenthood experiences more generally. i’m highlighting procreative decision-making here because an ethics of procreation is premised on choice: we can consider the ethical implications of our procreative decision because we have a choice to procreate or not. but this premise belies the fact that nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended (unfpa 2022, 4).14 and while not all unintended pregnancies are unwanted, a significant number of them are for one reason or another (it is estimated that more than 60 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion), suggesting that the “choice” of procreating or not at a given time is often made in urgent circumstances for women all over the world (unfpa 2022, 4).15 when faced with such an imminently transformative experience, women who opt to terminate their pregnancies do so for reasons related to their personal circumstances, including their socioeconomic status, age, health, and marital and relationship status (biggs, gould, and foster 2013; karklin 2022). these findings suggest that the most salient reasons that women consider in these situations are the personally transformative aspects of becoming a parent and not the more aggregate concerns that philosophical procreative debates prioritize. crucially, it is essential to recognize that an identity transformation to motherhood is not always voluntary for women or even in accordance with a woman’s desires. in cases of pregnancy that results from rape or from practices where women lack control over their reproductive lives, an identity transformation may occur absent any corresponding desire. in cases where there is an unintended pregnancy, the 13 an experience can also be more or less transformative for the same person over time: consider the difference between having one’s first child and then having one’s second child. 14 finer and zolna (2016) found that roughly 45 percent of pregnancies in the united states in 2011 were unintended pregnancies, down from 51 percent in 2008. 15 i want to note that, despite my focus on women here, not only women and girls can become pregnant. transgender men and nonbinary individuals may also become pregnant and may face similar or even more complicated dilemmas. my focus on women is not meant to dismiss these experiences or render them less urgent. kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 pregnant person is forced to consider what will happen to their body, their physical and emotional well-being, their career, their financial situation, and their relationships in a matter of months. they will contemplate whether motherhood (or parenthood more generally) is something they want to take on—whether they can, will, and/or want to realize a parental self—right then and there. further, the sense of self they had before being forced into this situation will be irreversibly changed as the result of having this experience. transformative experiences are epistemically transformative: they transform what one knows or understands (paul 2020, 17). in the case of unintended pregnancy, one’s knowledge of what it is like to be pregnant—at this time in one’s life, in this place, in these circumstances—crystalizes, compelling a reckoning of one’s preferences, desires, and values that could not be undertaken in the same way before having this knowledge. for those who do not want to reorganize their priorities, preferences, or sense of self by carrying a pregnancy to term and/or realizing a parental self, obtaining an abortion is essential for realizing the identity that one does want for themselves (namely, a nonparental self). because abortion access plays such a crucial role in such situations, restricted access to abortion should be understood as a means of forcing an undesired identity upon a pregnant person. this is one reason why the dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization ruling,16 wherein the supreme court of the united states overturned the constitutional right to abortion set by roe v. wade forty-nine years prior, is so dangerous: those who are prevented from obtaining abortions lose more than the freedom to control what happens in and to their bodies—they lose the freedom to determine who they are.17 at the same time, even if one is able to obtain an abortion, one’s selfconception has likely transformed to some degree. paul (2020, 17) notes that actually living through an experience “teaches you something you couldn’t know ahead of time, and in the process, it changes who you are.” upon obtaining an abortion, one might reaffirm their preferences and priorities, or one might learn more clearly what those preferences and priorities really are; one might even be surprised by what they learn. rather than speculate about what one might do in this situation, they now 16 dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization, no. 19-1392, 597 u.s. lexis 3057 (2022). 17 the turnaway study, which followed two sets of women (those who were able to obtain an abortion when needed, and those who were not), found that women who are denied abortions scale back many of their life plans and suffer economic hardships for years compared to those who successfully obtained an abortion (foster 2020, 251). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 know what they did do, and this knowledge shapes part of the narrative of who they are.18 relatedly, those who suggest adoption as an alternative to abortion fail to recognize that carrying a pregnancy to term may in itself have profound transformative implications for one’s self-conception, even if a parental self is rejected. we might see this, for instance, in closed adoption cases where someone specifically requests that they do not want to be contacted later in life by biological offspring that have been put up for adoption. despite the physical process of carrying a pregnancy to term, parenthood does not align with their self-conception. but this is not enough to unrealize a transformation in their identity; they must take steps to ensure that others, too, do not form conceptions of them as a parent. additionally, the challenge of unrealizing a transformative self also captures cases where someone does wish to take on a parental self. many women, for instance, understand miscarriage, stillbirth, and late-term abortion for wanted pregnancies as the loss of their child for which they had already taken on a parental role. for those who wish to realize a parental self, one may take on the identity of parental self even in these situations where one has lost a child prebirth. still, one may struggle to represent that parental self to others who expect a parental self to be accompanied by a living child (forde 2018). other expectations about parental selves stem from kinship narratives that privilege features of biological relatedness over other aspects of parenting. for instance, shelly park (2005, 176) argues that notions of family belonging have been heavily premised on birth and genetic mirroring, which has had a profound effect on adoptive relationships. adopted children may declare, “you’re not my real mom,” or outsiders may not consider an adopted child to be one’s “real” child if that child was not born to them. these sentiments may make it more difficult to realize a wanted parental self in the way one desires for themselves. it may also make it difficult to realize one’s parental self in the eyes of others, regardless of how one conceives of themselves.19 18 the abortion-decision study carol gilligan (1982, 92) references in her book in a different voice, and the accounts offered by the participants of the study (see, for instance, sarah’s story), demonstrate how such decisions become part of the narrative of someone’s life. 19 we might also add here instances where someone conceives of themselves as being a parental self but perhaps does not take on the role responsibilities of parenting (for example, an estranged father), or conversely, where someone does not conceive of themselves as being a parental self but does take on the role responsibilities of parenting (for example, a sibling, an uncle or aunt, a legal guardian, or the like). kane – weighing identity in procreative decisions published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 judith butler (2005, 35) notes, “the norms by which i seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine.” the considerations presented above demonstrate that the realization or unrealization of a parental self is not determined entirely by the subject of that self. the social and cultural context in which one decides to realize or unrealize a parental self substantially impacts how transformative such a decision may be. because one’s identity is perceived, understood, and responded to by others—sometimes in agreement with one’s self-conception and sometimes in conflict with one’s self-conception—the ability to choose whether to realize a parental self is not as linear as some may think. given the material effects that accompany decisions about parenthood for women in particular, as well as the limitations that are sometimes placed upon women’s abilities to act on their preferences regarding possible parenthood, philosophical arguments about procreation that omit these important considerations are failing to capture the most pressing concerns for existing women and future generations of women. making room for identity as i noted earlier, ethical debates regarding procreation are premised on choice: we can consider the ethical implications of our procreative decision because we have a choice to procreate or not. but as we have seen, nearly half of all procreative decisions are made after someone has already become pregnant, and the ability to act on one’s procreative preference is not always guaranteed. women who are confronting such an imminent transformation to a parental self cite personal circumstances, including their socioeconomic status, age, health, and relationship status, as the most important considerations for the decision they make regarding possible parenthood. that is, when women decide whether to procreate or not, the personally transformative aspects of becoming a parent are most salient, not the more aggregate concerns that an ethics of procreation prioritizes. complicating matters further, when women in particular undergo a transformative experience related to parenthood, they do so in contexts where the social, economic, and emotional effects related to pregnancy and motherhood are extensive. realizing a parental self or realizing a nonparental self often produces harmful material effects that threaten economic stability, career development, social relationships, and emotional health. because parenthood decisions transform the lives and identities of women more significantly than men, the stakes are raised for women when they consider parenthood for themselves. the material effects that accompany a woman’s transformative parental experience underscores the need to incorporate the social and cultural context in which one makes procreative decisions into an ethics of procreation. women making procreative decisions must grapple with the transformative experience that parenthood will bring that will significantly alter the course of their lives, right then feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 and there. philosophical arguments that omit these important considerations offer incomplete accounts of the social, political, and ethical effects of procreative decisions on existing women as well as future generations of women. these effects are more immediately and comprehensively felt by women than are more aggregate concerns, and they intersect with the myriad ways in which women are oppressed in matters of health care, economic stability, self-determination, and bodily autonomy. an ethics of procreation must engage with the ways in which women’s identities are transformed through procreative decisions, else risk incompleteness and irrelevance. acknowledgements thanks to audiences at worcester state university’s shared scholarship workshop and the workshop on gender and philosophy (wogap) for helpful feedback early in the writing process, especially sally haslanger, ásta, rachel mckinney, sahar heydari fard, ann garry, hsiang-yun chen, jennifer saul, and rachel fredericks. thanks also to the editor and anonymous reviewers of feminist philosophy quarterly for helpful suggestions to polish these arguments. works cited adamsons, kari. 2013. “possible selves and prenatal 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didn’t have.” new york times magazine, december 2, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/magazine/abor tion-parent-mother-child.html. tucker, eleanor. 2014. “i used to judge childfree women.” guardian, november 8, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/08/i-used-tojudge-childfree-women. unfpa (united nations population fund). 2022. state of world population 2022 report: seeing the unseen; the case for action in the neglected crisis of unintended pregnancy. new york: unfpa. whyman, tom. 2021. “why, despite everything, you should have kids (if you want them).” new york times, april 13, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04 /13/opinion/baby-bust-covid-philosophy-natalism.html. williams, alex. 2021. “to breed or not to breed?” new york times, december 2, 2021; last modified june 22, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/style/bre ed-children-climate-change.html. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 24 youn, soo. 2022. “these single women say they face a workplace penalty, too.” washington post, april 21, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business /2022/04/21/single-women-workplace-penalty. laura wildemann kane is an assistant professor of philosophy at worcester state university, a faculty fellow for the clemente course in the humanities (worcester branch), and a member of the editorial collective of the journal of interactive technology and pedagogy. her research explores social phenomena such as families, states, and social media networks through a feminist lens. specifically, she examines the many relationships that we have in social, political, and digital contexts to identify both relational goods and responsibilities that we owe to one another. recent work has appeared in the journal of applied philosophy, the journal of social philosophy, public affairs quarterly, and interdisciplinary digital engagement in arts & humanities (ideah). 15151 kane title page 15151 kane final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation tremain, shelley l. “field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy: what they do and how they do it.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (3). article 1. 2020 field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy: what they do and how they do it shelley lynn tremain biopolitical philosophy sltremain@gmail.com tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy: what they do and how they do it shelley lynn tremain abstract in this article, i offer an account of how the individualized and medicalized conception of disability that prevails in philosophy is naturalized in bioethics, cognitive science, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and other subfields of the discipline. by the end of the article, i will have both indicated how disabled people are constituted in philosophical discourse as a problem to be rectified or eliminated and explained how the prevalence in philosophy of this naturalized conception of disability contributes to and reinforces the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy. critical philosophical work on disability is an important means with which to resist and subvert this exclusion. keywords: apparatus of disability, cognitive science, disabled philosophers, exclusion, feminist bioethics, foucault, naturalization, philosophy of disability social inequality naturalized this article offers an account of the naturalization of disability in philosophy—that is, the naturalization of the individualized and medicalized conception of disability that prevails in philosophy. by the end of the article, i will have indicated how disabled people are constituted in philosophical discourse as a problem to be rectified, if not eliminated, and furthermore, i will have explained how the prevalence in philosophy of this individualized and medicalized conception of disability contributes to and reinforces the dire exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy. the article thus comprises an argument for the importance of critical philosophical work on disability as a means with which to resist and subvert this exclusion. most of my writing, teaching, service, and activism in philosophy has been designed to undermine a cluster of assumptions about the relation between nature and nurture, especially with respect to disability—that is, a cluster of assumptions about the relation between biology and society that remain embedded in philosophical discourses, naturalizing and re-biologizing disability (as well as gender, race, sexuality, and other apparatuses of power). i contend that the naturalization of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 these assumptions about disability in (for example) bioethics, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of mind is a form of structural gaslighting. nora berenstain (forthcoming) defines structural gaslighting as “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license.” people engage in structural gaslighting, berenstain asserts, when they invoke epistemologies and ideologies of domination that actively and routinely disappear and obscure the actual causes, mechanisms, strategies, and effects of oppression (berenstain, forthcoming; dotson 2012). my argument is that the epistemologies and ontologies of domination1 that persistently naturalize disability in philosophy continually sabotage attempts to improve the situation and status of disabled philosophers within professional philosophy, in part because they variously facilitate the reconstitution within both the discipline and profession of deeply entrenched extant beliefs according to which disabled people are defective, unreliable, and suboptimal, and thus not viable colleagues. african american feminist sociologist and legal scholar dorothy roberts (2016; also 1998, 2012) has argued—especially with respect to the social, economic, political, and scientific constitution of race—that there is no natural human body; that genes do not determine anything; and that our brains are plastic, modifiable with social experience. as roberts has remarked, human biology is not an entity distinct from the environment, interacting with and relating to it; rather, human biology is constituted by and through this vast array of social relations and interactions. given that biology, the body, human nature, and even materiality itself are the products of these innumerable social relations and interactions, critical analyses of race, disability, gender, and other subjectifying inequalities must, therefore, consider how claims that naturalize these ostensibly “biological” phenomena emerge, in what contexts these claims are mobilized and advanced, and for what social, economic, and political purposes. although arguments about the naturalization of disability (as well as race, gender, and sexuality, among other subjectifying categories) in philosophy may seem most pertinent to philosophers of disability, feminist philosophers, and other practitioners of (so-called) applied and social philosophy, the ways in which disability is naturalized in philosophy and what can be done to de-naturalize disability in philosophy and elsewhere ought to be of interest and concern to every philosopher. 1 in my foucault and feminist philosophy of disability (tremain 2017), i introduced the term epistemology of domination, recommending that the term be used to replace the term epistemology of ignorance. the former term, i argued, does the conceptual work that the latter term was designed to do yet avoids the ableist and classist implications of the latter term. tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 many philosophers might question why the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in philosophy ought to interest and concern the philosophical community at large. why, they might ask, should philosophers, in general, be particularly concerned about philosophical questions and issues that revolve around disability? aren’t these questions and issues best addressed in the subfield of bioethics and cognate areas of inquiry? in other words, many (perhaps most) philosophers might ask why philosophers, in general, should be concerned about questions and issues that arise in a specific area of applied ethics. some philosophers might also wonder why they should understand disability in social and political terms rather than medical or administrative terms. in my discussion that follows, i will respond to these sorts of questions and the assumptions on which they rely by considering (1) what disability is and its relation to power; (2) what sorts of knowledges about disability philosophers (including feminist philosophers) currently produce; (3) how the philosophical study of disability should be categorized; and (4) what categorization and classification in philosophy actually do. the responses that i will offer thus address the metaphysical and epistemological status of disability, the political origins of disability, and the value-laden and performative character of categorization and classification in philosophy. in order to provide a context for the ensuing claims about the naturalization of disability in philosophy, let me note what a growing body of work has amply demonstrated—namely, that philosophy is widely recognized as the most conservative and homogeneous discipline across the humanities and social sciences with respect to areas of inquiry and specialization. as south african philosopher leonhard praeg (2019) puts it, “of the disciplines in the humanities, philosophy is often regarded as most resistant to change, transformation, and decolonization.” although mainstream philosophy prides itself on its adherence to the putative ideals of neutrality, universality, and objectivity, the institutionally entrenched structure of the discipline ensures that certain ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies will be reproduced as genuine philosophy and other ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies will continue to be cast as mere derivatives of the former allegedly fundamental ways of knowing and doing philosophy, rendering these supposed derivatives of the bona fide philosophy as more or less expendable. furthermore, the homogeneity of the topics and questions studied in philosophy is co-constitutive with and reinforces the homogeneity of the demographics of philosophy; that is, philosophy is also the most demographically homogeneous discipline in the humanities and social sciences. indeed, the profession of philosophy is populated almost exclusively by nondisabled white people. disabled philosophers make up about 1 percent of full-time philosophy faculty in canada and only marginally more in the united states, although, by most feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 credible estimates, disabled people constitute about 25 percent of the general population of north america (tremain 2013b, 2017). black philosophers make up about 1 percent of full-time philosophy faculty in the united states, although african americans constitute approximately 14 percent of the us population. at present, there are only six black philosophers employed as full-time philosophy faculty in the united kingdom—the entire united kingdom (curry and tremain 2019). at present, furthermore, there is not a single disabled philosopher of disability employed fulltime in a canadian philosophy department. indeed, disabled philosophers of disability who earned a phd in philosophy in canada have been compelled to take employment in the united states; have left philosophy, taking employment in another discipline; have left academia altogether; are drastically underemployed; or are viciously unemployed.2 my writing and teaching on the naturalization of disability in philosophy and my service and activism with respect to the exclusion of disabled philosophers from philosophy have been largely designed to rectify this terrible state of affairs. mechanisms of naturalization across the various subfields of philosophy, disability is naturalized as a nonaccidental and disadvantageous biological human characteristic, attribute, difference, or property that ought to be corrected or eliminated—as vividly demonstrated by the ongoing production of doctrines in bioethics that promote selective abortion, genetic technologies, and euthanasia; arguments in ethics and political philosophy about ways to compensate disabled people for their natural disadvantages; and claims about autism and theory of mind in cognitive science (tremain 1996, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2019; hall 2016; yergeau and huebner 2017). hence the most vital philosophy of disability generated at present engages in a form of conceptual engineering—that is, aims to articulate an alternative conception of disability, a conception of disability that denaturalizes it, construing it as a historically contingent apparatus of power, one strategy of which is the exclusion of disabled people from the profession of philosophy and other positions of epistemic authority. as foucault explained it, “the coupling of a set of practices and a regime of truth form an apparatus [of knowledge-power that] marks out in reality that which does not exist and legitimately submits it to the division between true and false” (2008, 19). an apparatus is an ensemble of discourses, institutions, scientific statements, laws, administrative measures, and philosophical propositions that responds to an urgent need in a given historical moment (foucault, 1980, 194). normalization is the urgent requirement to which the apparatus of disability 2 my thanks to an anonymous referee whose comment about “leaving philosophy” prompted me to point out this egregious state of affairs. tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 responds, including the way that this apparatus operates in philosophy. consider, for instance, the way in which feminist philosophers have implicitly and explicitly endorsed and elaborated notions of normality and abnormality in the context of their argumentative claims about michel foucault’s supposed masculinist biases and sexism in his treatment of the nineteenth-century legal case and confinement of charles jouy (tremain 2013a, 2017). the subordinated status of disabled philosophers has not been widely acknowledged as a contingent effect of productive power relations but rather has been taken for granted as an outcome of allegedly natural human differences and subjective preferences, or in any case, attributed to factors external to the operations of power that circulate within and around the discipline and profession of philosophy. other inequalities in philosophy are likewise naturalized and materialized. for example, gender disparities in the profession are often justified with appeals to explanations about allegedly natural differences between the brains of two binary sex-genders, where, coincidentally, these alleged differences render the topics and questions traditionally studied in philosophy more suitable to socalled male modes of thinking and thus more aptly appreciated by (cisgender) men. against the tendency of philosophers to naturalize the inequalities of the profession in such a fashion, i aim to identify the ways in which the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers and the marginalization of philosophy of disability are integral to the current structure and practice of philosophy, drawing upon foucault’s insight that power is immanent to and constitutive of objects, relations, and differences rather than external to these phenomena, somehow acting upon them. the resistance that i have encountered within philosophy to my research on the social constitution of disability and its naturalized foundation, impairment; to my conceptual engineering with respect to the apparatus of disability; to my critique of (feminist) bioethics; and to my activism in the service of disabled philosophers— that is, the resistance and indeed outright hostility from within philosophy to my research and writing on the constitution of the apparatus of disability and how it operates in philosophy, as well as to the activism that has often motivated the research and, at times, followed from it—has actually enabled me to identify and understand ways in which the phenomena of these seemingly distinct spheres are inextricably entwined, mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing (tremain 2017; on the “costs” of such interventions, see also dotson [2011, 2019]). due to the predominance in philosophy of an individualized and medicalized understanding of disability, philosophers generally do not regard disability as pertinent to emerging research in the subfield of social metaphysics, nor do they, generally speaking, appreciate the critical philosophical importance of the relatively recent subfield of philosophy of disability but rather remain resolute that disability is appropriately and adequately addressed in the established domains of medicine, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 science, and bioethics. i want to point out, nevertheless, that the naturalizing and individualizing assumptions upon which this belief relies condition both the conceptual-analytical work in which philosophers engage and the judgements that they make about faculty searches and hiring practices, journal submissions, course content, curricula, graduate school applications, conference line-ups, the shape of edited collections, tenure and promotion, and so on. in other words, the prevalence in philosophy of the assumption that the recognizably “social” disadvantages that disabled people confront are the inevitable consequences of allegedly “natural” disadvantages has feedback effects for the subjectivities, aspirations, and careers of disabled philosophers; for the composition and character of the profession; and for the very practice and performance of philosophy, including what counts as philosophy, who produces it, why, and how; furthermore, this assumption conspires with other forms of inequality in philosophy, such as prestige bias and purportedly neutral determinations of merit (de cruz 2018; dotson 2013). my philosophical research has, therefore, been designed, in part, to show that the conception of disability that predominates in philosophy—a conception according to which disabled people are naturally, that is, inherently, flawed and thus defective—is causally related to the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession. my argument is that insofar as disabled people are systematically constituted in philosophical discourses as naturally flawed and defective, it is no surprise that disabled philosophers are not regarded as viable colleagues. let me underscore that the idea that disabled people are naturally flawed and thus defective is a pernicious artifact of historically contingent relations of power; hence, the exclusion of disabled people from philosophy that this idea fosters and through which the idea is reproduced must (it demands to be said) also be recognized as a contingent artifact of power, as a reversible circumstance of power. philpapers—the influential open-access database of philosophical research— is an institutionalized mechanism that furthers an individualized and medicalized conception of disability in philosophy and contributes to the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers, especially disabled philosophers of disability. indeed, the architectural framework and scaffolding of philpapers subordinate an array of areas of inquiry that underrepresented philosophers generate insofar as the content of the database is organized into predetermined and hierarchically arranged areas of specialization, subfields, and topics in accordance with dominant ideas in the tradition of euro-american western philosophy about which areas, subfields, and topics have the most philosophical import and explanatory power and should be endowed with the most authoritative status. the subfields of this tradition generally assumed to form its so-called core or fundamental areas of inquiry—“metaphysics and epistemology,” “value theory,” “science, logic, and mathematics,” “history of tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 western philosophy,” and “philosophical traditions”—are designated as the supreme categories in the database, while other areas of inquiry are designated as subcategories of these supreme categories, or subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, or even subcategories of the subcategories of the subcategories of the supreme categories, where a category’s distance from the supreme categories is taken to implicitly announce its purportedly diminished philosophical import, explanatory power, and authoritative status (tremain 2013b, 2017). in the current formulation of the philpapers database, feminist philosophical work on disability has been placed under “feminism: disability,” a subcategory of “topics in feminist philosophy,” which is a subcategory of the superior category of “philosophy of gender, race, and sexuality,” itself a subcategory of the supreme category of “value theory.” in the schema of the philpapers database, that is, feminist philosophy of disability is represented as on par with “topics” in feminist philosophy such as “autonomy” and “identity politics” rather than represented as on par with and in relationship with other subjecting apparatuses in a more comprehensive superior category of “philosophy of gender, race, sexuality, and disability.” although at present the superior category of “philosophy of gender, race, and sexuality” comprises subcategories of “philosophy of gender,” “philosophy of race,” and “philosophy of sexuality,” it does not likewise encompass a subcategory of “philosophy of disability” (tremain 2013b, 2017). no objective and value-neutral explanation can be offered for why feminist philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy more generally have been thus categorized and subordinated in the philpapers database, nor can an objective and value-neutral explanation be provided for why philosophy of disability has been virtually excluded from the database; rather, the relegated status in the database of feminist philosophy in general and feminist of philosophy of disability more specifically, as well as the virtual omission of philosophy of disability from the database, are the consequences of value-laden and interested political decisions. among other things, these decisions prevent the incorporation of disability into intersectional and other integrated feminist analyses, thereby reinforcing depoliticized conceptions of disability in philosophy and contributing to the marginalization of critical work on disability within the subfield of feminist philosophy and the discipline more generally. indeed, the impetus for the relegated positioning of feminist and other critical philosophical work on disability in the philpapers database becomes clearer when one considers how disability is naturalized and medicalized elsewhere in the database. the classification of subfields and specializations in philosophy and the questions and concerns that these subfields and specializations comprise is no mere value-neutral representation of objective differences, relations, and similarities that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 await discovery and recognition. rather, classification and classification systems in philosophy (and everywhere else) are performative and contribute to the constitution of the allegedly value-neutral yet very value-laden resemblances, distinctions, and relationships between phenomena and states of affairs that they put into place. although the formula of philpapers represents philosophy as a detached, disinterested, and impartial enterprise, my critiques of the database have emphasized that political, social, cultural, and institutional relations of power influence every aspect of the discipline and profession of philosophy. my critiques of the database have emphasized, furthermore, that every philosophical question and concern, as well as every subfield and specialization that comprise these questions and concerns, is a politically potent artifact of historically contingent and culturally specific discourse. as historical artifacts of discourse, i submit, every question, concern, subfield, and specialization in philosophy can be traced genealogically (tremain 2013a; 2017, ix–xi). it would be difficult to overstate the constraining effects that the philpapers database generates for the development of critical philosophical work on disability. nor would it be easy to overstate the deleterious consequences that accrue to disabled philosophers due to the structure of a spin-off of philpapers, namely, philjobs, the leading international philosophy job board whose architecture mirrors the architectural framework of philpapers. to make a long story short, the structure of philjobs, like the structure of philpapers, systematically precludes reference to philosophy of disability, discouraging the creation of job postings in philosophy of disability and preventing the specification of database searches for jobs in the area. indeed, to date, no philjobs advertisement for a full-time philosophy job anywhere in the world has designated philosophy of disability as an area of specialization (aos), despite the fact that research and teaching in philosophy of disability have been thus identified for more than a decade and even though philosophy of disability’s primary allies—critical disability theory and disability studies—are burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of inquiry elsewhere across the university. job postings in philosophy significantly influence what philosophers regard as current and emerging research in the discipline and as important areas of the field to build in their own departments. hiring departments, insofar as they do not see other departments recruit and hire specialists in the subfield of philosophy of disability, are not motivated to recruit and hire specialists in philosophy of disability themselves. given that many, if not most, specialists in philosophy of disability are disabled, the current classificatory scheme of philpapers and philjobs—in the terms of which disability is naturalized, individualized, and medicalized—ought therefore to be recognized as a technology of power that significantly contributes to the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession of philosophy. tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 genealogy as a philosophical practice of denaturalization as examination of philpapers and philjobs indicates, analysis of the categories and classificatory schemes that philosophers produce to think, write, and teach about disability can enable the identification of ways in which the naturalization of disability in philosophy breeds epistemic, professional, institutional, and social inequalities. genealogy is another effective philosophical practice with which to denaturalize and de-biologize institutional and other inequalities and the phenomena that contribute to their constitution. genealogy can, for instance, reveal how certain guiding assumptions and premises of various areas and subfields of philosophy emerged and gained epistemic authority in philosophy, as well as how these assumptions and premises have been configured in ways that collude with professional interests and accepted practices to reinstate the naturalization and biologization of disability. the pathologization of phineas gage, which enabled the emergence and consolidation of the fields of (among others) cognitive science and neuroscience, is a case in point. gage was a railroad supervisor when, in 1848, he was impaled by a tamping iron that entered his left cheek and exited the back of his head. a genealogical study of the aftermath of gage’s injury can serve as a testament to the artifactual and productive character of the ableism constitutive of philosophical discourse on disability. for over the course of more than a century and a half, an almost mythical narrative has been elaborated within psychology and medical textbooks about the aftermath of gage’s injury, a mythology to which philosophers and cognitive scientists have subscribed and upon which they have steadily expanded. as harvard neurologist allan ropper puts it, gage’s “famous case” helped to “establish brain science as a field.” says ropper, “if you talk about hard core neurology and the relationship between structural damage to the brain and particular changes in behavior, this is ground zero.” ropper explains that gage’s brain injury offered scientists and medical practitioners “an ideal case” insofar as it involved one region of the brain, was very evident, and the resulting changes in personality were “stunning” (quoted in hamilton 2017). the contested status of assumptions about the modularity of the brain aside (for example, o’donovan 2013), these sorts of claims about the impact of gage’s injury have enabled philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists to use the story of gage as a springboard with which to launch arguments, develop experiments, and formulate positions on, among other things, personal identity, the true self, and the moral self (strohminger 2014; knobe 2016; tobia 2016). my argument is, however, that the uses to which philosophers and cognitive scientists routinely put the story of gage naturalize the phenomena of brain injury, simultaneously contributing to the significance attributed to brain injury and tendentiously isolating brain injury feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 from the social, cultural, and political contexts in which it is embedded and in which its significance is materialized. in a provocative essay on gage, steve twomey (2010) notes that “john martyn harlow, the doctor who treated gage for a few months after the incident, reported that gage’s friends found him ‘no longer gage.’” to harlow, twomey remarks, “the balance between gage’s ‘intellectual faculties and animal propensities’ seemed [to have disappeared]. [gage was unable to] stick to plans, uttered ‘the grossest profanity’ and showed ‘little deference for his fellows.’” in an odd kind of fame: stories of phineas gage, malcolm macmillan (2002) points out that subsequent accounts of gage’s changed character have gone far beyond harlow’s dubious initial observations, transforming gage into “an ill-tempered, shiftless drunk.” my research on gage has convinced me that these accounts about gage’s demeanour post-accident are exaggerated and in fact seem largely fabricated. consider, if you will, that harlow—to whom most of the relevant medical, scientific, and philosophical literature appeals—treated and observed gage for only a few months, a relatively short span of time given gage’s injury and the changes in his life that it would have entailed. indeed, harlow’s description of the postincident-gage does not warrant the dispositional and personality changes—cruel, mean, abusive, violent, and so on—that have been attributed to gage in the scientific, psychological, and philosophical literature over the years. i contend, therefore, that the ways that, if not the very fact that, cognitive scientists and philosophers use the story of gage are highly contestable. consider that even if the oft-cited reports from gage’s friends were in fact made, these reports may have been motivated and conditioned by their own misunderstandings about his behaviour, their own revulsion and prejudice about his changed physical appearance, or simply by their own impatience as he learned new ways to comport himself in the world. some accounts of gage’s life after the incident contradict the oft-cited reports, indicating that gage had a pleasant enough disposition post-injury but was socially outcast and unable to find employment, experiences that most disabled people in the present share. that gage’s situation has been exaggerated and embellished within the contexts of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy of mind, experimental philosophy, and medicine reminds us that science, philosophy, and medicine are embedded social practices rather than disinterested domains that exist apart from and unsullied by ableist biases and other elements of the apparatus of disability. in short, the uses to which philosophers have put the gage case and their rationale and justifications for continuing to do so (for instance, shoemaker and tobia, forthcoming) are stark examples of how the social and political causes and effects of philosophical inquiry are persistently neutralized and naturalized— that is, how the situated and interested character of the contexts of discovery from tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 which philosophical questions and claims emerge are persistently covered over and presented as disembedded, disinterested, objective, and value neutral (tremain 2015, 2017; dotson 2013). foucault, in his work on the history of sexuality and the history of the modern prison, adapted the genealogical method that friedrich nietzsche introduced in his studies of the lineage of western morals, with foucault variously referring to his own incarnations of genealogy as “histories of the present” and “historical ontologies of ourselves.” of what is given to us as universal, necessary, and obligatory, foucault asked, how much is occupied by the singular, the contingent, the product of arbitrary constraints? foucault used genealogy to critically inquire into the history of necessity on a given topic and the historical emergence of the necessary conditions of a certain state of affairs, arguing that a critical ontology of ourselves must be conceived as a “limit-attitude,” an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us; that is, genealogy identifies how historically contingent practices, events, and accidents have enabled the emergence of current modes of thinking and acting and the limits that they impose (foucault 1982, 216–219). as ladelle mcwhorter (2010) explains it, genealogies help us to make sense of how we are now, that is, in this historical moment, inasmuch as they show how we got here and how this, here, now, is historically possible. in other words, genealogies denaturalize us, rendering us un-natural, naturalized, and artifactual. like margrit shildrick (2005), mcwhorter (2009), melinda hall (2013, 2016), and other feminist philosophers of disability, i have drawn on insights that foucault introduced in his genealogies of abnormality, perversion, madness, and other discursive objects generally associated with disability in order to identify the artifactual character of disability. the various genealogies that i have articulated with respect to impairment and disability are the outcomes of this work (for example, tremain 2001, 2005, 2008, 2013a, 2015, 2017). in foucault’s genealogical studies of abnormality, madness, and sexuality, he was concerned with the “problematization” of phenomena; that is, foucault was concerned to show how these phenomena became thinkable as problems in the first place, how they emerged as problems to which solutions came to be sought. in an explanation of this work that has not yet been suitably acknowledged, foucault stated that a “conditional imperative” (2007, 3) underpins each of these genealogical inquiries, for he recognized that every theoretical or analytical discourse is in some way reliant upon or permeated by something like an imperative discourse. foucault characterized the imperatives that underpin these restrained inquiries in this way: “if you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages” (3). in other words, foucault maintained feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 that the conditional imperatives on which his work relied were “no more than tactical pointers” to “tactically effective analysis” in “the circle of struggle and truth, that is to say, precisely, philosophical practice” (3). the conditional imperatives (or imperative discourses) that support foucault’s analyses are contingent strategies to understand given phenomena in particular ways and to make them understood as such.3 my genealogical and other feminist analyses of impairment and the apparatus of disability should be characterized in this way; that is, my feminist philosophical analyses of the apparatus of disability should be understood strategically, as conditionally imperative, as tactically imperative discourse that can (among other things) pragmatically extend the historical inquiries that foucault made. indeed, this kind of feminist work on disability is most aptly characterized as a tactically and conditionally imperative feminist ontology of the problematization and naturalization of disability in philosophy, including in feminist philosophy. problematization of disability in feminist philosophy and feminist bioethics one might think that the ongoing problematization and naturalization of disability in feminist philosophy is puzzling given the concerted effort that feminist philosophers and theorists have expended to denaturalize and de-biologize other categories of identity and subjection, with feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science articulating some of the most powerful arguments designed to denaturalize sex and gender. in fact, feminist philosophy of science coalesced in large part as a critical response to essentialist assumptions about sex and gender that have conditioned euro-american thinking in general and euro-american science and philosophy of science in particular; that is, feminist philosophy of science emerged primarily as a critical response to essentialist assumptions about sex and gender that have limited both the kinds of questions that mainstream scientists and philosophers of science regard as worthy of investigation and the kinds of responses 3 in foucault and feminist philosophy of disability, i pointed out that foucault’s studies of abnormality, madness, and deviance (among other things) were not intended to provide normative responses to these phenomena, but rather were conceived as “problematizations” to investigate how the phenomena became both thinkable and thinkable as problems to which solutions should be sought. i noted, furthermore, that my inquiries in the book likewise did not offer an explicitly normative proposal or response to disability. in that context of my book, that is, i anticipated the claim that some feminist philosophers (for instance, fraser 1989) make according to which foucault’s genealogical and other analyses offer no normative instruction, challenge, or repudiation. foucault’s remarks about conditionally imperative discourses and their tactical efficacy provide additional ways in which to address this sort of criticism of his work and of feminist uses of it. tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 to these questions that they regard as serious candidates for endorsement and take up in their own research and teaching. feminist scientists and feminist philosophers of science have, among other things, thrown into relief the biased nature of assumptions about reproductive processes (martin 1991), have undermined the gendering of the brain (fine 2011), and have subverted the very idea of two natural binary sexes (fausto-sterling 2000). furthermore, some of the earliest work that feminist philosophers of science produced made associations between essentialist arguments about sex-gender and, for instance, degradation of the environment, subjugation of nonhuman animals, and colonial projects worldwide (harding 1986, 1991). i want to point out, however, that although some feminist philosophers of science have not confined their inquiries solely to critique of the essentialist underpinnings of philosophical and scientific claims about sex and gender, critical questions and concerns about disability, settler colonialism, and race (among other urgent concerns) have nevertheless remained sidelined in feminist philosophy of science and feminist philosophy more generally. put directly, many feminist philosophers continue to implicitly construe gender as prior to, more fundamental than, and separable from disability and other apparatuses of subjecting power, even though they explicitly claim to endorse and uphold the political and theoretical value and practice of intersectionality. many feminist philosophers continue to believe that insofar as “women” share so many experiences in virtue of their gender, an analytical focus on gender in isolation from, say, disability, race, class, and nationality constitutes a legitimate project. that gender remains predominant in feminist philosophy in this way is of course due in part to the continuing underrepresentation of certain groups of people in the profession. these institutional and professional exclusions notwithstanding, however, the omission of critical philosophical work on disability from feminist philosophy is in large part due to (what i call) ableist exceptionism4 in philosophy— that is, due to the endurance in philosophy of the assumption that disability (unlike other categories of social identity and subjection)is a nonaccidental, biological human characteristic that certain people naturally embody or possess. by contrast, the conception of disability that i have engineered denaturalizes it, construing it as a 4 ableist exceptionism is the term that i use to refer to the phenomenon whereby disability, because it is assumed to be a prediscursive, (i.e., prior to the influence of culture) natural, and politically neutral characteristic (difference, attribute, or property), is uniquely excluded from the production and application of certain values, beliefs, principles, and actions that circulate in political consciousness (tremain 2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 far-reaching and complicated matrix of power in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in which everyone occupies a position. an especially disappointing example of the problematization and (re)naturalization of disability in feminist philosophy can be found in perfect me: beauty as an ethical ideal, feminist bioethicist heather widdows’s recent book on the ethics of feminine beauty standards. one of the central theses of the book is that norms with respect to beauty and appearance more generally are social constructs, never ethically or politically neutral, always value laden (widdows 2018, 122, 131–137). yet widdows’s brief discussion of disability in perfect me undercuts these claims and reinforces an individualized and medicalized conception of disability in feminist bioethics. widdows’s remarks about disability span roughly one-and-a-half pages of her 341-page book. indeed, the discussion of disability that appears on pages 150–151 is the first and only explicit mention of disability in perfect me, though uncritical endorsement of notions that rely upon an individualized and medicalized conception of disability—“health,” “healthy,” “healthy functioning,” “disorder,” “risk,” “abnormal bodies,” and “suffering”—peppers widdows’s analysis of beauty throughout the book. most philosophers of disability will, furthermore, recognize the missed opportunities of this book to advance a politicized analysis of disability, especially, though not exclusively, in the chapter in which widdows examines the social construction of notions of normality (121–137). none of the substantial body of work on the construction of normality and practices of normalization that i and other philosophers and theorists of disability have generated is mentioned or even referenced in this chapter, let alone seriously entertained (for instance, tremain 2001, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2017; hall 2016; amundson 2000; davis 1995). in short, widdows’s treatment of disability in perfect me is indicative of the structural gaslighting in which nondisabled feminist and other bioethicists participate with respect to critical philosophical work on disability in order to sustain their epistemic authority vis-à-vis disabled people.5 that this aspect of widdows’s book—that is, that this absence from widdows’s book—has thus far gone unnoticed or at least unacknowledged in numerous philosophy journal reviews of the book is, in addition, an example of ableist exceptionism in philosophy and in feminist philosophy in particular, as well as a testament of the extent to which most philosophers (including feminist philosophers) disregard philosophy and theory of disability, especially the work of disabled philosophers of disability. let me note, therefore, that the work on normality and normalization that philosophers and theorists of 5 for a fuller account of how the subfield of bioethics is an epistemology of domination with respect to disability, see my foucault and feminist philosophy of disability (tremain 2017), especially the fifth chapter of the book. tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 disability have produced is some of the best, if not the best, critical writing available on the topic. now, i surmise that widdows’s allegiance to analytic philosophy, and analytic bioethics especially, likely precluded from her discussion opportunities for a more critical feminist analysis of the relationships between beauty, disability, and normality. however, were widdows to have drawn on (say) my work on disability, normality, and the incremental normalization that neoliberal bioethics enables— incremental normalization (especially coercive and concealed in bioethical discourses about medically assisted suicide and genetic technologies) that relies on the constitution of subjects who understand themselves as autonomous and free (tremain 2017)—she might have recognized how my genealogies of impairment, normality, and normalization undermine the outdated claims of the once-dominant british social model of disability (henceforth, bsm) to which she ultimately appeals. as i have pointed out in a number of contexts and explain below, the assumptions of the bsm variously serve to re-naturalize and re-medicalize the apparatus of disability and, hence, run counter to some of the most analytically and politically perspicacious work currently done in philosophy of disability. i have asserted that one of the most effective and philosophically tenable ways to make evident the historically contingent character of any seemingly natural and objective practice, state of affairs, identity, or value is to trace its genealogy (tremain 2015, 2017, 2019). indeed, i maintain that genealogy is the most effective way to trace the historical accidents and contingent circumstances from which normality or any other putatively prediscursive object has emerged. foucault’s genealogical work in particular and his novel claim that modern power is intentional and nonsubjective provide means with which feminist philosophers of disability can advance philosophically up-to-date critiques of the naturalization of disability that do not rely upon spurious appeals to ideology. in foucault and feminist philosophy of disability, for instance, i argue, following foucault, that the ideas of normality and impairment are artifactual mechanisms and effects of biopower, which is a complicated matrix of social power relations that, since the eighteenth century in the west, has facilitated population management and control, in the service of neoliberalism, through technologies of normalization. if widdows were to have consistently drawn on foucault’s insights, she would likely not have taken argumentative recourse to disputable claims about ideology. appeals to ideology always presuppose the existence of a pristine realm of truth that ideology obfuscates and to which it prevents and withholds access. hence, widdows’s claim that ideology plays a role in the production and naturalization of ideals of beauty (43) necessarily presupposes that there exists a realm of truth with respect to beauty that ideology about it distorts or obscures. yet an argument, such as widdows’s, that presupposes an unfettered realm of truth feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 about beauty and closely associates the value of beauty with the value afforded to normality cannot, without contradiction, also assume that there is nothing objectively true about normality nor assume that the idea of normality is never value neutral. indeed, although widdows repeatedly asserts that normality is never neutral, always value laden, the brief remarks that she explicitly makes about disability belie these claims. she writes: those who fall outside the normal range [of acceptable appearance] fall into two broad groups. the first are those who are disfigured by disability or accident or have physical features that are dramatically outside the normal range. no matter what those in these groups do they will never be able to attain normal. the second group are those who fall only a little outside the normal range, who could bring themselves within the normal range using products or procedures. for the first group there is no possibility of attaining normal, and therefore as appearance matters more, it is likely that discrimination against this group will increase. in addition, those who fail to measure up to appearance standards will become rarer, as appearance issues become regarded as disabilities. (widdows 2018, 150) this passage in widdows’s relatively short discussion of disability is both troubling and virtually self-contradictory, exemplifying the way that widdows tacitly naturalizes disability throughout her book. for in order to distinguish between people who can never become normal and people who can become normal with some effort, widdows installs a stable and unchanging conception of normality, despite her subsequent suggestion that the category of disability itself shifts in dimensions. for widdows, no measure of social change could bring perceptions of the people in the first group within the normal range of appearance standards. on the contrary, widdows implies that some people are prediscursively outside the normal range of appearance standards; that is, widdows seems to think that some people are objectively, naturally, and ontologically, abnormal. in other words, normal and abnormal are not historically contingent, culturally specific, and valueladen social categories after all, at least not for everyone, at least not when they are applied to some people. with respect to disabled people at least, widdows seems to think that normality and abnormality are transhistorical constants, prior to culture, and politically neutral. to be sure, widdows’s final remarks in the cited passage suggest that she regards disability as a historically and culturally specific and contingent phenomenon; however, subsequent remarks that widdows makes in the discussion indicate that her ideas about the ontology of disability are far less sophisticated than an account that characterizes disability in this way would be. to put it directly, tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 widdows’s remarks in this context rely upon a rather inaccurate representation of the bsm, an early model of disability whose distinction between impairment (construed as a biological characteristic) and disability (construed as a form of social disadvantage imposed upon impairment) naturalizes and re-medicalizes impairment and, hence, naturalizes and materializes the apparatus of disability. as i have argued in a number of contexts (for example, tremain 2001, 2005, 2015, 2017), the distinction between impairment and disability which the bsm institutes is in fact a chimera that collapses upon scrutiny. impairment is as socially constructed as disability; that is, disability is constructed all the way down, is a complex apparatus of power relations that produces impairment as its naturalized foundation in order to camouflage its own thoroughly political motivation. philosophy of disability must thus be designed to identify and describe how this apparatus of power—that is, how this apparatus of disability—has operated within philosophy, including feminist philosophy, to bring (natural) impairment into being as that kind of thing. feminist philosophy and the apparatus of disability an astute feminist philosophy would denaturalize and de-biologize disability by arguing that disability is a historical artifact. as i have indicated, i recommend that feminist and other philosophers adopt foucault’s idea of an apparatus to understand and represent disability as a historically specific and dispersed system of force relations that produces and configures practices toward certain strategic and political ends. as an apparatus, disability is a historically contingent aggregate that comprises, constitutes, and is constituted by and through a complex and complicated set of discourses, institutions, technologies, identities, and practices that emerge from medical and scientific research, government policies and administrative decisions, academic initiatives, activism, art and literature, mainstream popular culture, and so on. although some of the diverse elements of the apparatus of disability seem to have different and even conflicting aims, design strategies, and techniques of application, the elements of the apparatus are nevertheless co-constitutive and mutually reinforcing. indeed, the apparatus of disability is expansive and expanding, differentially subjecting people on the basis of constructed perceptions and interpretations of (among other things) bodily structure, appearance, style and pace of motility, size, mode of communication, emotional expression, mode of food intake, and cognitive character—all of which phenomena are produced and understood within a culturally and historically contingent frame and shaped by place of birth, gender, race, education, religion, years lived, and so on. feminist and other philosophical analysis that understands disability as an apparatus treats these phenomena as the effects of contextually specific and performative relations of biopower rather than as transcultural and transhistorical objective and determined facts about humans. as feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 foucault put it, “[biopower is] what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life” (1978, 143). the term biopower refers to the vast convergence of these immanent strategies and techniques of population management and control from the eighteenth century onward. in short, biopower is the set of mechanisms through which the “life” of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power (foucault 2007, 1). a form of power that targets the “biological” features of the human being must take account of this creature’s reproductive potential, that is, its sex. sex has in fact been central to the economic and political problem of population that emerged with biopower and to which biopolitical strategies have responded; that is, with the emergence of population as an entity and organizing principle of governmentality came the problematization of sex, including surveillance practices and policies designed to manage birthrates, perverse sexuality, miscegenation, marital arrangements, relations between two supposedly natural sexes, and so on (foucault 2003). as with the apparatus of sex, so too with the apparatus of disability: the emergence of population as an entity and organizing concept facilitated the production of a whole array of scientific, administrative, medical, and social techniques and strategies designed to calculate and control disability—that is, to calculate and control the ostensibly natural and unruly embodiment and experience of disability. apropos of this understanding of power as productive, rather than merely repressive, the conception of disability as an apparatus that i have engineered does not rely upon the assumption that impairment could be taken up as a politically neutral object of inquiry were it not for disabling practices of exclusion that the ideological requirements of power place upon it. this assumption is, however, fundamental to the bsm, which, as i have noted, construes impairment as a politically neutral human characteristic on which disability is imposed. with the conception of disability as an apparatus, no domain of impairment exists apart from relations of power; that is, there is no politically neutral nor value-neutral description or definition of impairment that exists apart from the relations of power that circumscribe impairment. impairment can never be freed from power, nor, furthermore, can there be a phenomenology that supposedly articulates a prediscursive domain of impairment. on the terms of the feminist philosophy of disability that i have advanced, power relations are neither external to impairment and disability nor external to their nexus in the apparatus of disability, but rather are integral to them, constituting the knowledges and objects that these historical artifacts affect, as well as the artifacts themselves. my argument is, therefore, that philosophers who want to increase the heterogeneity of philosophy should assume that disability is an apparatus and use genealogy in order to destabilize the ways tremain – field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 that philosophy’s ableist inequalities and exclusions continue to be naturalized, biologized, individualized, and materialized. references amundson, ronald. 2000. “against normal function.” studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences 31 (1): 33–53. https:// doi.org/10.1016/s1369-8486(99)00033-3. berenstain, nora. forthcoming. “white feminist gaslighting.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy. pre-publication draft. curry, tommy, with shelley tremain. 2019. “dialogues on disability: shelley tremain interviews tommy curry.” biopolitical philosophy (blog). june. https:// 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2016. “the phineas gage effect.” aeon, december 21. https://aeon.co /essays/how-a-change-for-the-worse-makes-for-a-different-person. tremain, shelley. 1996. “dworkin on disablement and resources.” canadian journal of law and jurisprudence: an international journal of legal thought 9 (2): 343–359. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0841820900003489. ———. 2001. “on the government of disability.” social theory and practice 27 (4): 617–636. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract200127432. ———. 2005. “foucault, governmentality, and critical disability theory: an introduction.” in foucault and the government of disability, 1st ed., edited by shelley tremain, 1–24. ann arbor: university of michigan press. ———. 2006. “reproductive freedom, self-regulation, and the government of impairment in utero.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 21 (1): 35– 53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb00963.x. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 ———. 2008. “the biopolitics of bioethics and disability.” journal of bioethical inquiry 5 (2–3): 101–106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-008-9105-6. ———. 2010. “biopower, styles of reasoning, and what’s still missing from the stem cell debates.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 25 (3): 577–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01118.x. ———. 2013a. “educating jouy.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 28 (4): 801–817. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12037. ———. 2013b. “introducing feminist philosophy of disability.” disability studies quarterly 33 (4). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3877/3402. ———. 2015. “this is what a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability looks like.” foucault studies, no. 19, 7–42. https://doi.org /10.22439/fs.v0i19.4822. ———. 2017. foucault and feminist philosophy of disability. ann arbor: university of michigan press. ———. 2019. “feminist philosophy of disability: a genealogical intervention.” southern journal of philosophy 57 (1): 132–158. https://doi.org/10.1111 /sjp.12312. twomey, steve. 2010. “phineas gage: neuroscience’s most famous patient.” smithsonian, january. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/phineasgage-neurosciences-most-famous-patient-11390067/. widdows, heather. 2018. perfect me: beauty as an ethical ideal. princeton, nj: princeton university press. yergeau, melanie, and bryce huebner. 2017. “minding theory of mind.” journal of social philosophy 48 (3): 273–296. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12191. shelley lynn tremain holds a phd in philosophy and has authored many books and articles on feminist philosophy of disability, ableism in philosophy, and disability and bioethics, including foucault and feminist philosophy of disability, the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 tobin siebers prize for disability studies in the humanities. tremain is also the editor of two editions of foucault and the government of disability and was the 2016 recipient of the tanis doe award for disability study and culture in canada. tremain blogs at biopolitical philosophy where she posts dialogues on disability, the critically acclaimed series of monthly interviews that, since april 2015, she has conducted with disabled philosophers. 9395 tremain title page 9395 tremain final format normative competence, autonomy, and oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 1 article 1 2022 normative competence, autonomy, and oppression j. y. lee university of copenhagen ji.young.lee@sund.ku.dk recommended citation lee, j. y. 2022. “normative competence, autonomy, and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (1). article 1. mailto:ji.young.lee@sund.ku.dk lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression normative competence, autonomy, and oppression j. y. lee abstract natalie stoljar posits that those who have internalized oppressive norms lack normative competence, which requires true beliefs and critical reflection. a lack of normative competence makes agents nonautonomous, according to stoljar. this framework is thereby meant to address what she calls the “feminist intuition”—the intuition that oppressive norms are incompatible with autonomy. on my view, however, stoljar’s normative competence account of autonomy is subject to a worrying problem. her account misattributes nonautonomy to those who perpetrate the oppression, making those who are oppressed and those who oppress count as equally nonautonomous. i argue that this is implausible and demonstrate in this paper that we can establish an asymmetry of autonomy between those who oppress others and those who are made the target of oppression. keywords: autonomy, normative competence, oppression, feminist philosophy introduction in this paper, i argue that there is an asymmetry of autonomy between those who are oppressed and those who perpetrate the oppression. my argument herein should be coherent if we can, as a minimum, grant that individual autonomy is not an asocial phenomenon but is rather one that captures an ongoing relationship between individual decision-making and the social contexts in which individual agents are embedded. with this in mind, i would posit that the differences in the social standing between those who oppress and those who are oppressed spell out respectively different outcomes for the agents, which may then be tied to why there is an asymmetry of autonomy between them. if my claim herein is plausible, i believe it poses a serious worry for natalie stoljar’s account of autonomy based on normative competence, which focuses primarily on the internal capacity to discern false and oppressive norms. in section 1 of this paper, i explicate natalie stoljar’s view, and i survey elizabeth sperry’s objection to stoljar in section 2. according to sperry’s objection, the normative competence theory is prone to mistakenly attribute nonautonomy to the oppressed. my own critique, which i lay out in section 3, is that the normative competence-based published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 approach can be worrisome for a different reason. staking the determination of autonomy on an agent’s exercise of “normative competence” may capture why internalized oppression is detrimental to one’s autonomy; yet, as i shall claim, this has the effect of misattributing nonautonomy to some of those who oppress others. to illustrate my point, i will make use of an example—the unregenerate macho male (mm)—drawn from diana meyers’s work. i demonstrate that the mm is an example of an oppressor who lacks normative competence, due to his mistakenly inflated sense of self. as such, the mm would count as nonautonomous on stoljar’s account. however, in section 4 i will substantiate the claim that there is an asymmetry of autonomy between agents who perpetuate oppression and agents who receive it. in section 5, i anticipate and address potential objections to my view. i conclude the paper by conveying that stoljar’s view misses out on the importance of identifying this asymmetry of autonomy. 1. normative competence and the feminist intuition personal autonomy very broadly refers to the idea of living in accordance with one’s self-determined, self-governed choices. in contemporary philosophical literature, this has been cashed out in a couple of ways. those who endorse what are called proceduralist notions of autonomy claim that autonomy is achieved if agents form their preferences in appropriate ways—through certain kinds of critical reflection, for example, or via the exercise of “minimal rationality” (schwartz 2005, 444).1 procedural theories are, incidentally, “content-neutral” (mackenzie 2008, 519); the procedure of one’s preference-formation is relevant, but the content of one’s preferences is not. autonomous preferences under this account can include diverse sorts of values and norms. on the other hand, substantivist theorists of autonomy cast procedural views into doubt by claiming that the content of an agent’s decision-making inputs matter. natalie stoljar, for instance, is a substantivist who argues that the procedural 1 andrew schwartz (2005, 444) describes minimal rationality as requiring that “preferences be transitively ordered and that any beliefs underlying these preferences be consistent with each other.” the value-neutral implication here is clear: agents can more or less have autonomous preferences about anything— minimal rationality need not meet standards of external rationality. to put it another way, what it means for an autonomy theory to be content neutral is that “there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate autonomous action” (kristinsson 2000, 257). such accounts broadly follow in the frankfurtian/dworkinian tradition of autonomy, by which autonomy is said to be a “second-order capacity of persons to critically reflect upon their first-order preferences, desires, wishes, and so forth” (dworkin 2015, 14). published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression approach is in fact undesirable from a feminist perspective. her objection is that it is unable to capture what she calls the “feminist intuition,” which is the idea that “preferences influenced by oppressive norms of femininity cannot be autonomous” (stoljar 2000, 94). i am overall sympathetic to this view that a theory of autonomy requires greater analysis of the social circumstances and contexts against which decision-making is carried out, besides simply the agent’s motivational structures. because what the agent determines for themselves is negotiated within a social context, it is imperative that we be attentive to the kinds of social conditions laid out within them which may have both enabling and disabling effects on individual agency. i have some reservations, however, about natalie stoljar’s rendition of substantive autonomy, which i will elaborate on throughout this paper. to flesh out the idea that preferences influenced by false and oppressive norms cannot be autonomous, stoljar considers a study of contraceptive risk-takers (crs) detailed in kristin luker’s book, taking chances. the task of luker’s study was to find out why women who have free access to different methods of contraception end up having unwanted pregnancies and getting elective abortions thereafter. the women in the study did not become pregnant due to ignorance, lack of skills, or access to contraception (stoljar 2000, 95). luker’s aim was to anticipate and challenge the claim that these women are irrational subjects. according to luker, these women behaved rationally, having bargained with themselves over the costs and benefits of contraceptive use and ultimately deciding to take the risk. some of the norms cited from interviews with luker’s subjects included the following: it is inappropriate for women to have active sex lives, it is unseemly for women to plan for and initiate sex, it is wrong to engage in premarital sex, pregnancy and childbearing promote one’s worthiness as a woman, it is normal for women to bargain for their marriage by proving their fertility to their partners or their partners’ families, and women are worthwhile marriage partners only if they are capable of childbearing (stoljar 2000, 99). although luker’s vindication of her subjects takes place within the context of rational choice theory, stoljar takes the example to correspond to discussion about personal autonomy. stoljar’s claim is that luker’s subjects do in fact trigger the feminist intuition because they are motivated by “oppressive and misguided norms that are internalized as a result of feminine socialization” (97). to put it another way, these norms appear to have “criticizable contents,” which include norms of religion, femininity, and sexuality oppressive to women (100). stoljar’s perspective is that there is something about the internalization of these sorts of norms that is detrimental to agents’ autonomy. yet it seems luker’s subjects would pass the various tests for procedural autonomy, including counterfactual conditions, internal coherence, endorsement, self-knowledge, and published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 inhibiting factors.2 as a result, luker’s subjects cannot be ruled as nonautonomous on a purely procedural basis. the dilemma here is that even if luker’s crs are procedurally autonomous, it does little to assuage our concern that decision-making that has a basis in oppressive norms is at the very least problematic, if not nonautonomous. stoljar claims, instead, that a strongly substantive theory of autonomy3 will help explain this feminist intuition. she observes, “women who accept the norm that pregnancy and motherhood increase their worthiness accept something false. and because of the internalization of the norm, they do not have the capacity to perceive it as false” (stoljar 2000, 108). we can account for this problem, says stoljar, with the idea that “normative competence” denotes autonomy. normative competence is a skill that requires true beliefs and the ability to reflect critically on one’s decisions. if this is the basis of autonomy, it is clear why luker’s crs’ choices evoke the feminist intuition: the subjects lack normative competence and are thereby nonautonomous. 2. sperry’s critique: a misattribution of nonautonomy even if we take for granted that the feminist intuition is legitimate, we might question whether stoljar’s test case here actually raises the feminist intuition. elizabeth sperry, for instance, has said that strongly substantive autonomy—of which stoljar’s view is a type—“tends to attribute heteronomy to the oppressed without sufficient investigation” (sperry 2013, 888). sperry believes stoljar uses language that conflates internal bargaining with “deformed” desires, and external bargaining with “social expectations the agent cannot change” (896). in the example of luker’s crs, sperry says we have two interpretations open to us: on one interpretation, the crs took the contraceptive risk because they were motivated by norms of fertility aimed at promoting their worthiness as “real women.” but on a different interpretation, we might say, “luker’s interviewees knew their potential mates would consider them ‘real women’ only if they proved their fertility. a marriage-seeking woman—and in the 1960s women had powerful economic and social reasons to seek marriage—had to contend with men’s values” (896). the point here is that it is possible for women to make these difficult choices without necessarily having internalized their own oppression, contrary to stoljar’s picture. furthermore, sperry mentions that some of luker’s women “describe themselves in terms that reveal only the functioning of risk2 i do not go into detail about all these possible procedural conditions. what stoljar argues in her work is that for each one of these conditions, luker’s subjects would satisfy them. i assume this is true. 3 proponents of strongly substantive autonomy, as explained by sonya charles (2010, 411), are distinguished from content-neutral theories of autonomy by the requirement of specific “nonsubjective or ‘external’ criteria.” published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression oriented personalities” (892). for example, one of the interviewees talked about how she stopped using contraception because the burden of responsibility kept her from enjoying sex. sperry characterizes this as “a protest against, rather than a capitulation to, deformed desires” (892). so while some of luker’s crs may be acting on internalized oppression as per stoljar’s analysis, it is certainly plausible that not all of them fit this mould. sperry touches on an important point here. stoljar’s account appears uniformly restrictive about the autonomy of agents under oppression, since it fails to seriously consider the possibility that agents can be within oppressive structures without having internalized oppressive norms. as such, it may well be that stoljar unfairly casts the crs as lacking in normative competence by positing that their decision-making necessarily assimilates oppressive inputs. be that as it may, sperry clearly accepts that a modest number of luker’s crs may indeed be lacking in autonomy by lacking normative competence. so while stoljar’s analysis may be prone to classify agents as nonautonomous without sufficient investigation, there is no reason stoljar’s view should not be useful for problematizing those cases of agents who have “really” internalized their own oppression. still, recent feminist literature on autonomy remains critical of such accounts, on the basis that they “import judgments about the value or truth of specific preferences” (wenner 2020, 32) or because categorizing agents as nonautonomous might leave agents open to having their wills overridden, which might “[exacerbate] the effects of oppression on individuals” (khader 2020, 503). these are valid worries, and i will anticipate and address them in my own discussion throughout this paper. for the next section, however, i will focus on a different critique of stoljar’s normative competence framework, based on its difficulties making agentic distinctions between those who are oppressors and those who are oppressed. 3. another misattribution of nonautonomy in my view, the normative competence account is prone not only to misattribute nonautonomy to some agents under oppression but also to some agents who perpetrate the oppression. that is, the normative competence view fails to account for the asymmetry of autonomy between those who oppress and those under oppression. in this section, i will use diana meyer’s profile of the unregenerate macho male (mm) as a counterexample to stoljar’s theory. i now provide a brief overview of the context in which diana meyers discusses the macho male, and show how the example maps onto my own discussion about normative competence. meyers helpfully distinguishes between two competing conceptions of self-respect. on one view—the moral view—self-respect is a kind of moral duty one has to oneself to maintain one’s own dignity. this would require one to resist attacks on one’s rights and to take it upon oneself to uphold standards of published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 moral conduct in one’s behaviour. the moral view denies that self-respect can be excessive, unjustified, or undesirable. on the other view—psychological selfrespect—self-respect is a matter of whether one does what one deems worthy of oneself. this view has “no special moral import” and is thereby compatible with immoral conduct (meyers 1995, 218). on the psychological view, then, it is possible to inflate one’s self-regard, contra the moral view. the difference between these two accounts is that the moral view would only count as respectable the “morally autonomous” self, whereas the psychological view would count any self as respectworthy so long as that self meets one’s own standard of respect-worthiness. according to meyers, the mm embodies an example of a merely psychological self-respect. the mm is expected to overpower his wife, in some cases beat her to remind her of her place, while being able to respect himself for this immoral conduct. on the moral view of self-respect, this type of self would be viewed as morally wanting, since it would deny that the proper object of self-respect is a “socially condoned self” (meyers 1995, 230). meyers’s own view is that the macho male’s failure to be self-respecting stems from the way he premises his self-respect on a “non-autonomously adopted and immoral role” (meyers 1995, 230). she says this failure is marked by his blindness to the cruelty of his conduct, which is a result of acceptance of sexist social convention, and the fact that he aims his respect at this social convention rather than a “self-governing agent” (230). natalie stoljar’s account would provide us with a neat explanation here as to how the macho male’s socialization atrophies his normative competence. the mm’s blind adherence to social convention is the equivalent of having adopted a false norm and lacking the true beliefs required for normative competence. moreover, by barring himself from recognizing the error of his ways, he foregoes the possibility of separating his “true self” from the socially condoned self that is violent to women through critical reflection. thus, he lacks normative competence. yet to admit that he lacks normative competence—as per stoljar’s view— would be to admit that he is nonautonomous. i would argue that this step is the counterintuitive aspect of stoljar’s view. those who do not see the equivalent nonautonomy of the oppressor and the oppressed as an issue for stoljar’s view might push back by denying that it is a problem that the mm also counts as nonautonomous. if the mm’s socialization is such that he is blind to his social norms-governed conduct, why insist that he is different to someone like the contraceptive risk-taker, who is similarly socialized by gendered standards? in my view, we can insist on an asymmetry of autonomy by considering the extent of substantive and nontrivial differences between agents generated by social factors that intervene on what they are able to do. this implies, minimally, that internal capabilities such as normative competence are not the only relevant factors for determining an agent’s autonomy, but that one’s autonomy can further be impacted and shaped by one’s social circumstances. as published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression jason chen observes, there are many wrongs and harms that might be pointed out as the negative effects of oppression, like social and political deprivation, and these are wrongs that unjustly affect the groups attributed to the “lower tier” in a hierarchical society (chen 2017, 421). these unjust outcomes for the oppressed affect them in ways that would not affect those who are not in the “lower tier” of society. this appears to map on to the case of the mm and the cr, as being on the perpetuating or receiving end of oppression will place one in differentiated social standing. this is relevant for autonomy because, as i will explain in greater detail in section 4, such differences can radically shape and change an agent’s relative life prospects, what the agent is able to do or not do, what obligations the agent is expected to fulfil, and how the agent’s decisions are perceived by others. what makes somebody an autonomous person overall, rather than simply capable of having autonomous desires, involves how one is socially situated and enabled by and within one’s environment. this is why we should pay attention to social circumstances as the sites where one’s autonomy is negotiated. what the normative competence paradigm misses out on, then, is the variability of social standing between the mm and cr. the mm possesses certain advantages conferred via his social standing, and the cr possesses certain disadvantages. further, this variability of social standing gives us reason to treat the mm as comparatively more liable than the cr, on account of the fact that he is comparatively less nonautonomous. these are the differences worth highlighting that the normative competence model would be hard pressed to describe. additionally, i believe my analysis would be able to circumvent some of the feminist concerns mentioned in section 2, regarding the risk of erasure or undue judgment of those under oppression. my next section, then, will be an endeavour to demonstrate in greater detail the reasons that make conceptualizing an asymmetry of autonomy entirely appropriate between the two cases. 4. an asymmetry of autonomy in the previous section, i claimed that stoljar’s normative competence view would misattribute nonautonomy to figures like the unregenerate macho male. i identified this issue as a serious worry for stoljar’s view, since such a result precludes the possibility to meaningfully distinguish differences relevant to the autonomy of the contraceptive risk-taker and the macho male. in this section, i explain that the overarching difference of autonomous standing between the two cases issues from the fact that the cr and mm respectively occupy differential social standing. by social standing, i mean that agents are attributed a certain social status accompanied by certain behavioural constraints or enablements (ásta 2019) in association with that status. that is, who one is taken to be socially plays a major role in what one is permitted or not permitted to do; it can be more costly or less costly for some agents published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 to make certain kinds of decisions relative to others. to show why this social differentiation is a plausible candidate for the asymmetry, i will overview different ways that we might link agents’ social standing with their autonomous standing, relating the discussion throughout to the cases mentioned in the paper. my overview will primarily draw on several examples of critical feminist work, including katharine jenkins’s theory of ontic injustice, rebekah johnston’s externalist model of autonomy, and serene khader’s insights on adaptive preferences. taken together, these considerations should make a solid case for why we ought to treat the cr and mm as being asymmetrical in their autonomy, contra stoljar’s view. let us start out by considering katharine jenkins’s idea of ontic injustice. jenkins (2020, 188) claims that an agent can be wronged by their “being socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind”—this might include kinds such as “wife” or “black person.” being a certain social kind may involve subjection to certain social constraints and enablements (jenkins 2020, 189) that involve certain social conferrals of status, or legally instituted permissions that play out within “[configurations] of power” (hierro and marquez 1994, 175). what jenkins calls ontic injustice refers to the constraints and enablements that are constitutive of social kind membership—where sometimes these constraints and enablements might “[contravene] . . . the individual’s moral entitlements” (jenkins 2020, 190). the social constraints and enablements the agent is subjected to must be wrongful for them to suffer ontic injustice. she says that being subject to a “morally inappropriate” set of constraints and enablements in such a way that other agents might be licensed to treat one wrongfully will generate the risk that wrongful treatment will take place, alongside the attendant material and psychological harms (193). for example, marital rape exemption might plausibly put wives at risk both of being raped by their husbands or of suffering psychologically from the fears and anxieties attached to this. but whatever the actual outcome or consequence of this possibility, the wrong that takes place consists in the mere fact that one is a wife, where this consists of “being someone who is not entitled to control fully sexual access to one’s body” (191). the aspect to take away here is the possibility that who one is—at least, who one is in terms of their membership as a certain social kind—matters much for the kinds of things one is able to do in the world, independently of one’s luck or individual abilities like normative competence. while jenkins’s discussion of ontic injustice does not directly reference autonomy, it is clear that it implicates individual agency, given the connection between being a member of a certain social kind and the attendant constraints and enablements that attach to certain social kinds. the reason why the mm and cr might be asymmetrical with respect to their autonomy may lie with the fact that—personal capacities to discern one’s own socialization notwithstanding—the kinds of things they are expected to do and can do imply different outcomes. the different published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression constraints and enablements they have, which are in large part socially sanctioned and related to the social kind groups of which they are members, dictate that the mm and cr will have vastly different kinds of social experiences and life prospects. we might point towards the mm’s ability to exercise a kind of power that consists in his ability to “constrain the choices available to another actor or set of actors in a nontrivial way” (allen 1998, 33). if the kinds of permissions that the mm has consists in his having the power to overpower his wife without significant fear of social reprisal, whereas the cr experiences pressures to defer to her husband on matters to do with contraceptive control, we can plausibly mark out the cr’s obviously wrongful subjection to oppressive contraceptive constraints and enablements in a way that does not apply in the case of the mm. the problem, then, is not simply that agents are blind or impervious to the objectionable qualities of oppressive gendered norms (an issue on which both the cr and mm are indeed at risk). rather, it ought to worry us that how such gendered socialization manifests or takes effect depends on one’s social position, and that it is more the latter that makes a difference for the agent’s prospects. perhaps rebekah johnston’s critique of damage model views of autonomy can bolster my suggestion herein. according to johnston, the damage model of autonomy—which focuses on internal damage to autonomy (such as damage to an individual’s normative competence, in stoljar’s case)—fails to consider constraints to autonomy that are the result of the fact that others are permitted to embody traits that subjugate people. she claims that the “implicit social permissibility” that allows for members of subordinated identities to be positioned as “harassable, expendable, and criminal” (johnston 2017, 320) constitutes a threat to autonomy, because these members are ascribed a status “of being appropriately subjected to violent or violating interference” (323). this would be inconsistent with, for instance, marina oshana’s (1998, 94) view that to enjoy being an autonomous person, it is necessary for one to be embedded in relations with others that allow one to pursue their goals and objectives in a socially and psychologically secure environment. what is important to analyse, then, is not the oppressed agent but the oppressive traits and qualities that “members of superordinate identities” are permitted to exhibit against certain target groups (johnston 2017, 320). though i would not, unlike johnston, completely rule out the relevance of the internalized effects on oppressed persons’ experiences, what i take away from this discussion is that too much focus on internal capacities can obscure the extent to which other people’s wills—like oppressors whose wills are socially condoned in a society—can impact the quality and scope of life that the target agents lead. this insight further draws out why it is plausible to view it as inappropriate to treat the cr and mm as symmetrically nonautonomous. johnston shows that there is a distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. the mechanism of damage published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 to autonomy, which is borne by those who are oppressed, does not primarily consist of the “internal” damage (although, as i’ve tried to point out, we need not rule out such mechanisms as engendering additional psychological hindrances like fear) as it is a problem generated by the fact that people are permitted to assume social identities that enforce the denigrating and demeaning treatment of others. we see here, then, that the sort of constraints and enablements people have in the social world can be relevantly marked out by whether one is on the receiving end of oppression or on the side of perpetuating oppression. as it so happens, the mm embodies the kind of “superordinate” identity johnston has in mind, whereas the cr seems to occupy exactly the kind of position that make them prone to be made the target of bodily control or usurpation. while the mm is obviously morally objectionable in his actions, and while his being inculcated into a macho culture may not have been particularly good or helpful to him, johnston’s focus on the skewed dynamics of power between the oppressor and the oppressed show us why it is really the one made the target of the oppression who is at greater risk. as michelle ciurria says, it is challenging to properly hold liable those wrongdoers who “contribute to and benefit from hierarchies of power” (ciurria 2020, 1) when their wrongdoings are implicitly permitted in this sense and “exonerated by patriarchal scripts” (6). it is no doubt a moral problem that the mm is permitted to embody the macho role, but the fact that he has this type of power signals that society, unfortunately, protects and vindicates his social identity in ways unavailable to the cr, who is made subordinate to such power. this is another plausible social difference that ties into why the mm is less nonautonomous than the cr. finally, we might compare the contents of the sorts of norms that the cr and mm have respectively adopted, and consider whether the differences might not also be related to the social positions in which they find themselves. for example, according to serene khader (2012, 303), adaptive preferences are “preferences formed in response to unjust social arrangements that are incompatible with a person’s basic wellbeing.” she says that the kinds of preferences one is most likely to find as candidates for adaptive preferences are those that “seem complicit in perpetuating people’s oppression and deprivation that are held by oppressed and deprived people and were formed under conditions unconducive to their flourishing” (khader 2011, 46). it may be, then, that the kinds or types of norms people adopt in their decision-making correspond to, or reveal something about, one’s social position. this would also explain, in part, why the view that there is an asymmetry between the cr and mm is plausible. the kinds of preferences they have each adopted exhibit different qualities, providing us with a snapshot of the social standing they have in the world in which these preferences were formed. khader herself is cautious not to identify adaptive preferences with procedural autonomy deficits, however, given that this may, for example, “[justify] inappropriate attitudes toward persons with published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression [adaptive preferences]” (khader 2009, 185). as i mentioned in section 2, a critique of substantive views like stoljar’s is that attributing nonautonomy to those whose preferences are shaped and negotiated within structures of oppression may in itself further entrench oppression. on my view, however, it is primarily the social placement of different groups of agents, in different roles and positions, that make comparative analyses of autonomous standing plausible. my mention of adaptive preferences, then, is not intended to suggest that they automatically make agents nonautonomous, nor that they necessarily display distorted desires that are the result of internalized oppression. rather, i only wish to highlight the phenomenon of preference-formation as a natural response to injustice, and the shaping of preferences in accordance with social conditions contrary to basic well-being. it seems that the cr is a more likely candidate for this phenomenon, given that the content of her preferences responds to, perhaps, some unjust demand that women defer their sexual or contraceptive decision-making. if preferences are at all connected to outside oppression in this way, then the actual content of the adopted norms—rather than only the agent’s abilities to discern them as false—is worth paying attention to, since their content can reveal the different consequences agents face on account of their being (or not being) in a certain social position. so, whatever the cr’s choices indicate about their psychological state, the fact that they are placed in a position whereby they need to engage these difficult decision-making paradigms in the first place (i.e., to regard whether they should or should not defer contraceptive decision-making to their husbands) suggests to us that the social structures in place enable this sort of subjection. this makes the cr relatively less autonomous. the kinds of things the mm abides by and seems to have internalized, on the other hand, are not “deprivation-perpetuating” (khader 2011, 47) preferences in the relevant sense, because he is not the agent who is made the target of injustice or oppression: the contents of his internalization show us that he is in fact (advertently or inadvertently) on the perpetuating rather than receiving side of gendered oppression. again, irrespective of the psychological states he holds in making these choices, it is telling that the content of the decisions he grapples with (i.e., to beat one’s wife or to not beat one’s wife) does not involve subjecting himself to dilemmas involving deferent or subservient roles. he is certainly wrong to act on such injusticeperpetuating socialization, of course, but given the socially condoned license he has to do what he will to his wife, he appears comparatively less nonautonomous than one who abides by disempowering gendered norms that are comparatively more harmful or damaging to oneself. thus, although the cr and the mm both exhibit failings to do with discerning the falsity of oppressive decision-making inputs, hopefully this overview has demonstrated that specificities of one’s social standing generate significant rifts between agents who occupy different social positions. such differences are plausibly published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 sensitive to autonomy levels, given that we’ve observed they impact the agent’s life prospects, what the agent is able to do, what obligations the agent is expected to fulfil, and how the agent’s decisions are perceived by others. i will now explain more precisely how the differentiated social positions of the mm and cr cumulatively can generate a nontrivial asymmetry of autonomy despite the commonality between them, like the lack of normative competence. the overarching nontrivial, nonarbitrary distinction between the cr and mm is that the mm appears to be comparatively advantaged socially—or at least less disadvantaged—than the cr. one way to flesh this out might be in terms of the costliness involved for either party when it comes to conforming to or rejecting gendered social norms, which implicates what the agents are able or unable to do in their lives. as anca gheaus (2011, 9) pointed out, the issue with a majority of gendered norms is that “they make it more costly for women than for men to obtain certain valuable things . . . and the social recognition that comes with them.” the cr may face significant social repercussions for deviating from contraceptive deference: her contraceptive use may be treated as evidence that she is sleeping around, for example, which would negatively affect her marriage prospects. as such, her pursuit of a life wherein she has greater reproductive control over her body—which seems obviously imperative for a good life—is extremely costly, given the social consequences of opting out of these norms. by contrast, if the mm decides not to beat his wife, he may face social disapproval or be seen as “too soft,” but comparatively speaking, he would face fewer costs for rejecting the social norms. of course, there may be exceptions to these cases; but for our purposes it seems sufficient to establish that on average, we can expect the cr to face more agencyrestricting sanctions as a result of her gendered social standing, whereas with the mm, we can expect less. i hope this point at least partially motivates the claim that attributing nonautonomy to the mm in just the same way as is done for the cr would be an error. by focusing primarily on differential external pressures imposed on either party, which generate differentiated costs for conforming to or rejecting gendered social norms, i have shown that it is comparatively more costly for the cr to opt out of certain decisions. this avoids attracting the charge that sketching out an asymmetry of autonomy should involve making perfectionistic value judgments or invoking unacceptably paternalistic assessments of agents’ supposed internalized oppression. instead, we can treat the differentiated, gendered expectations and treatment of agents as leading to greater or lesser costs for certain decision-making routes. this enables us to delineate why agents who are the target of oppression suffer greater autonomy deficits. following this nontrivial and nonarbitrary distinction, i want to point out that the comparative liability the mm has for the kinds of norms he abides by further sets published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression him apart from the cr. this is because the content of his norms is not only morally undesirable but perpetuates injustice to others from a relatively more autonomous position. the liability of the mm seems to issue from the fact that he has a certain level of power and freedom—on account of his social standing—that he misuses or abuses in a manner that is lacking on the cr’s reproductive decision-making deferral. as stated in above paragraphs, it would be relatively less costly on average for the mm to opt out of the harmful social norms that dictate that his masculinity ought to be expressed via domestic violence; by failing to do so, he appears more blameworthy for his decisions. i should note here, however, that some may be tempted to partially exonerate the mm on account of his ignorance. for instance, susan wolf (2013, 290) has explained that we might attribute lesser responsibility to agents who act badly but act in ways “strongly encouraged by their societies,” like slaveowners, nazis, male chauvinists. she says that we would not blame agents for the actions that transpire from values that they could not help but mistakenly adopt (290). this line of thought appears to vindicate the responsibility of someone like the mm. it would, also, vindicate the cr, on account of the gendered norms that they could not but help be socialized into. but here, i would go beyond questions of the attributability of responsibility, and claim rather that the mm is someone we ought to hold liable to penalization and reprobation anyway, on account of the comparatively greater autonomy he has by virtue of the greater scope of choices he could have made and the allowances afforded him in his social sphere. of course, there is the option to just hold the mm liable for his bad actions independently of his autonomous status. yet such a view would be lacking in a richer analysis of the agent’s social role and positioning. it appears to me that the asymmetry of autonomy would align with an asymmetry of liability. even though we might partially exonerate from blame both the crs and mms on account of their blind spots, it seems that we have political reasons to find the mms answerable for their decision-making errors, based on their social position. it appears appropriate to call on them to rectify their wrongs and to compensate for the harms incurred (notwithstanding additional structural shifts or collective responsibilities that may be required of society as well). it is unclear, however, how normatively productive it would be to hold the crs liable in the same way—whether or not we find their choices worthy of critique more generally—given that it would be potentially victim-blaming to do so in light of their relatively disadvantaged social positioning. 5. normative competence, autonomy, and oppression natalie stoljar’s account appeared to offer us a way to problematize the force of oppression as a legitimate input of someone’s autonomy. i have argued, however, that her feminist-minded account of normative competence did not adequately published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 address a possible downside: the risk of inappropriate homogenization of nonautonomy in the oppressor and the oppressed, on account of their equal subjection to objectionable gendered socialization. i hope that, by outlining some ways that we might detect an asymmetry of autonomy in the two key case studies observed herein—the contraceptive risk-taker and the macho male—i have demonstrated why it would be important for any autonomy to acknowledge not only the ways that the social oppression may hamper the autonomy of the oppressed but also the fact that we should disambiguate between the oppressor and the oppressed. in this final section, i will anticipate and address some potential objections that might be levelled at my view and then endeavour to ward off such concerns. one objection might be that my discussion enforces an artificial dichotomy between the oppressor and the oppressed, failing to be sensitive to mixed or ambiguous cases. for instance, an agent we treat as an oppressor in a gendered-hierarchical society may in fact be oppressed in other ways—for instance, on the basis of their race, disability status, or sexual orientation. such ambiguities would also apply in the case of those with membership in an oppressed group. however, i would say that these harder cases do not detract from the applicability of my view to the limited cases i have considered here. additionally, my view does not preclude the possibility that autonomy is a dynamic phenomenon in the social sphere. i clarify herein that it should be perfectly acceptable on my account to acknowledge that autonomy can be something that is gained, lost, and restored, to varying degrees, in different social environments and contexts of decision-making. this acknowledgement is compatible with evaluating, on balance, the possible asymmetries of autonomy between certain groups, based on social enablements that are generally granted (or not granted) to them. a further question for my view might be about the role that subjectivity and individual psychology plays—or does not play—for my account. some might worry that my making distinctions between the autonomy of the oppressed and the autonomy of the oppressor either problematically imputes psychological tendencies on certain groups of people (say, by assuming that the crs must have been socially blackmailed into submissive or deferent mindsets) or is disrespectful of agents’ own experiences of autonomy (say, by claiming one is nonautonomous when one feels contrary to that claim). these are critiques that may be directed towards strongly substantive views like stoljar’s, as mentioned in section 2. i would need to clarify, then, how i take an agent’s social standing, and the agent’s individual decision-making processes, to interact. here, i would just reiterate that my emphasis on agents’ social standing enables me to at least circumvent problematic psychological projection in any case. i have no need to make assumptions or judgments about agents’ psychologies to evaluate the impact on autonomous standing that might result primarily from radical differences or inequalities in social standing, as was the case in published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression my example of the cr and the mm. my view thereby does not disrespect agents’ subjective experiences. because i take autonomy to be a phenomenon that manifests to varying degrees in various social contexts, the determinations of autonomy we might make on my account would not amount to attributing autonomy or nonautonomy in a wholesale fashion. we can, for instance, appreciate that the cr may endorse contraceptive decision-making deferral individually; at the same time, we can still engage in a general critique of a society that prescribes problematic decision-making paradigms in accordance with traditional gendered roles and oppressive norms. conclusion to sum up, natalie stoljar’s normative competence account of autonomy helpfully articulated why there is a “feminist intuition,” according to which internalized oppression is inconsistent with autonomy. her view posed an important challenge to procedural accounts, which were unable to explain exactly why oppression has problematic effects on autonomy. however, stoljar’s view fell short of accommodating the further possibility that those who oppress and those who are oppressed may not be equivalently nonautonomous. i have taken diana meyers’s example of the unregenerate macho male to illustrate this point. on stoljar’s view, the macho male would be just as nonautonomous as the contraceptive risk-taker, since both cases appear to exhibit a lack of normative competence. i have proposed, instead, that there is an asymmetry of autonomy between the cases that might be explained by recourse to certain considerations about one’s social standing. being able to distinguish between the autonomy of oppressors and those under oppression is of high interest if we care not to treat those who perpetrate the oppression in the same way that we treat those who are the recipients of oppression. my view has met this demand by problematizing the potential misattribution of nonautonomy to oppressors like the mm, whom i take to be comparatively more autonomous and correspondingly liable in ways that the cr is not. thus, my account offers a promising way to account for stoljar’s feminist intuition, whilst still being able to take seriously and adequately address the concern that those who are oppressors and those who are oppressed are not equivalently nonautonomous. references allen, amy. 1998. “rethinking power.” hypatia 13, no. 1 (winter): 21–40. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1998.tb01350.x. ásta. 2019. “categorical injustice.” journal of social philosophy 50, no. 4 (winter): 392–406. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12318. published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12318 https://doi feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 1 charles, sonya. 2010. “how should feminist autonomy theorists respond to the problem of internalized oppression?” social theory and practice: an international and interdisciplinary journal of social philosophy 36, no. 3 (july): 409–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23562131. chen, jason. 2017. “the core of oppression: why is it wrong?” social theory and practice 43, no. 2 (april): 421–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26381169. ciurria, michelle. 2020. “the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2): article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.2.7322. dworkin, gerald. 2015. “the nature of autonomy.” nordic journal of studies in educational policy 2015 (2): 7–14. https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.28479. gheaus, anca. 2011. “gender justice.” journal of ethics & social philosophy 6 (1): 1– 24. https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v6i1.60. hierro, graciela, and ivan marquez. 1994. “gender and power.” hypatia 9, no. 1 (winter): 173–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1994.tb00116.x. jenkins, katharine. 2020. “ontic injustice.” journal of the american philosophical association 6, no. 2 (summer): 188–205. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2019.27. johnston, rebekah. 2017. “personal autonomy, social identity, and oppressive social contexts.” hypatia 32, no. 2 (spring): 312–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa .12318. khader, serene j. 2009. “adaptive preferences and procedural autonomy.” journal of human development and capabilities 10 (2): 169–87. https://doi.org/10.1080 /19452820902940851. ———. 2011. adaptive preferences and women’s empowerment. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2012. “must theorising about adaptive preferences deny women’s agency?” journal of applied philosophy 29, no. 4 (november): 302–17. https://doi.org /10.1111/j.1468-5930.2012.00575.x. ———. 2020. “the feminist case against relational autonomy.” journal of moral philosophy 17, no. 5 (2020): 499–526. https://doi.org/10.1163/1745524320203085. kristinsson, sigurdur. 2000. “the limits of neutrality: toward a weakly substantive account of autonomy.” canadian journal of philosophy 30, no. 2 (june): 257– 86. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2000.10717533. mackenzie, catriona. 2008. “relational autonomy, normative authority and perfectionism.” journal of social philosophy 39, no. 4 (winter): 512–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2008.00440.x. meyers, diana tietjens. 1995. “self-respect and autonomy.” in dignity, character, and self-respect, edited by robin s. dillon, 218–50. london: routledge. published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2008.00440.x https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2000.10717533 https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243 http:https://doi.org https://doi.org/10.1080 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2019.27 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1994.tb00116.x https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v6i1.60 https://doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.28479 https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.2.7322 http://www.jstor.org/stable/26381169 http://www.jstor.org/stable/23562131 lee – normative competence, autonomy, and oppression oshana, marina a. l. 1998. “personal autonomy and society.” journal of social philosophy 29, no. 1 (march): 81–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679833.1998.tb00098.x. schwartz, andrew w. 2005. “autonomy and oppression: beyond the substantive and content-neutral debate.” journal of value inquiry 39, no. 3–4 (december): 443–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-006-3124-5. sperry, elizabeth. 2013. “dupes of patriarchy: feminist strong substantive autonomy’s epistemological weaknesses.” hypatia 28, no. 4 (fall): 887–904. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12007. stoljar, natalie. 2000. “autonomy and the feminist intuition.” in relational autonomy: feminist perspectives on autonomy, agency, and the social self, edited by catriona mackenzie and natalie stoljar, 94–111. oxford: oxford university press. wenner, danielle m. 2020. “nondomination and the limits of relational autonomy.” ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 13, no. 2 (fall): 28–48. wolf, susan. 2013. “sanity and the metaphysics of responsibility.” in the philosophy of free will: essential readings from the contemporary debates, edited by paul russell and oisín deery, 291–95. new york: oxford university press. j. y. lee is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the university of copenhagen. she works on the velux-funded project titled “the future of family relationships,” which aims to philosophically investigate family structures and values in light of social change and assisted reproductive technologies. published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12007 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-006-3124-5 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467 13639 lee title page 13639 lee final format bearing the brunt of structural inequality feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 1 article 3 recommended citation kim, ruthanne crapo, ann j. cahill, and melissa jacquart. 2020. “bearing the brunt of structural inequality: ontological labor in the academy.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (1). article 3. 2020 bearing the brunt of structural inequality: ontological labor in the academy ruthanne crapo kim minneapolis community and technical college ruthanne.kim@minnstate.edu ann j. cahill elon university cahilla@elon.edu melissa jacquart university of cincinnati melissajacquart@gmail.com kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 bearing the brunt of structural inequality: ontological labor in the academy1 ruthanne crapo kim ann j. cahill melissa jacquart abstract empirical data show that members of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups in academia undertake many forms of undervalued or unnoticed labor. while the data help to identify that this labor exists, they do not provide a thick description of what the experience is like, nor do they offer a framework for understanding the different kinds of invisible labor that are being undertaken. we identify and analyze a distinct, undervalued, and invisible labor that the data have left unnamed and unmeasured: ontological labor, the work required to manage one’s identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. we argue that ontological labor efforts should be understood as a form of labor. we then provide a characterization of ontological labor, detailing the labor as navigating one’s obligations to give and managing entitlements to take. we also highlight the ontological labor that takes place through instances of resistance, such as through complaint or refusals. keywords: labor, ontological labor, invisible labor, academic inequality, entitlement to take, obligation to give, underrepresented faculty, academic labor 1. introduction in recent years, strong empirical evidence has accumulated showing that the distribution and valuation of labor required of academics in institutes of higher 1 the authors would like to extend our deepest thanks to allauren forbes, nabeel hamid, and stephanie wesson for their work in organizing the 2018 map-penn conference on inclusive methodology and pedagogy in philosophy. we are indebted to their scholarly midwifery in developing this excellent conference, as this paper emerged from conversations that took place during this event. we would also like to thank our anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 education is profoundly influenced by identity markers such as race and gender (guarino and borden 2017; park 1996; park 2014; park and park-ozee, forthcoming). for example, members of historically marginalized groups2 are disproportionately called on to do “diversity work,” or as bird, litt, and wang put it, “institutional housekeeping” (2004, 195). moreover, the explicit work of organizing committee meetings and writing reports on such topics is accompanied by affective labor of various sorts; at the very least, engaging in diversity work requires being moved to anger or at least dissatisfaction by the current state of injustice. shelley park argues that such affective states are frequently perceived as contrary to the role of the dispassionate, objective philosopher (park 2014, 39), resulting in a classic double bind in the marilyn frye (1983) tradition, and we suspect that such tensions are not limited to the discipline of philosophy. when it comes to distribution and valuation of labor related to teaching, female-identified instructors not only teach more than men (park and park-ozee, forthcoming); they teach differently than men, being much more likely to engage in student-centered methods (eagan et al. 2014, 199). female-identified instructors also expend more emotional energy balancing the requirements to be simultaneously authoritative and friendly than male-identified instructors (tunguz 2016; el-alayli, hansen-brown, and ceynar 2018); these demands for emotional labor are surely related to the clearly discriminatory effects of instructor evaluations (mitchell and martin 2018; merritt 2008). el-alayli, hansenbrown, and ceynar find that “students with high academic entitlement have a higher expectation of female professors granting their special favor requests” (2018, 144). female-identified instructors spend much more time advising students (park and park-ozee, forthcoming), and faculty whose identities align with marginalized racial groups spend significant amounts of time guiding students with similar identities through a frequently hostile intellectual environment (matthew 2016). the findings of this substantial body of empirical research are clear and unsurprising: as a site of labor, the academy instantiates and perpetuates inequalities based on sex, ability, gender, race, and other salient factors.3 specifically, many of the empirical studies referenced above focus on the invisible (that is, undervalued or unnoticed) labor undertaken by instructors who identify as members of historically marginalized groups. while some of this variety of labor is becoming more institutionally recognized, it is still not valued and recognized to the 2 throughout this essay we use interchangeably the terms “historically marginalized,” “minority,” and “underrepresented” to indicate both the multiple frames currently in use and to highlight the inherent limitations of one term to effectively delineate this problematically lumped group. 3 the claims we make may extend beyond academia. however, in this paper we confine our discussion to this context. kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 same degree as other work, such as “gold standard” single-authored, peer-reviewed scholarship.4 furthermore, though the empirical data are needed and are an important step in identifying that there exists a disproportionate burden of unor under-recognized work that falls on certain (underrepresented) members of the communities, and help make the labor more visible, the empirical data do not provide a thick description of what the experience is like, nor do they offer a map or framework for understanding the different kinds of invisible labor that are being undertaken. at times, the empirical data conflate many varieties of invisible labor and fail to appreciate that they involve different interpersonal dynamics and different ethical and political challenges. what is needed to further discussions around disproportionate and invisible labor are better, more complex, more nuanced, conceptual frameworks and distinctions. the larger context of changing structures of employment in higher education, and how they intersect with and perpetuate systemic inequality, is crucial here as well. as tenure-track positions disappear, colleges hire more women and minorities than they did previously, but into temporary or part-time positions, the lowest and widest tier on the academic rung (flaherty 2016). according to the american association of university professors (2017), based on numbers from 1975– 2015, these positions account for 70 percent of all faculty posts and their growth occurred during times of economic prosperity, not downturn. these instructors, lecturers, and faculty are most likely to be found in community colleges and in lower level college courses; the majority of these faculty do not have outside professional employment (curtis 2014). at a time when america hails the transformative power of education to include marginalized people, its own narrow power structure mimics the subordination of these groups as they gain access to mostly contingent positions with flattened and grossly deflated wages. this compensation excludes pay for research, course design, voluntary advising, mentoring, departmental support, institutional assessment, institutional service, letters of recommendation, or outside student support. these pay gaps and narrowly demarcated labor contracts are especially disproportionate in comparison to their mostly nonminority, tenured counterparts, for whom at least some of these expectations are built into the tenure review (finkelstein, conley, and schuster 2016). given that so many faculty who identify with historically marginalized groups work at community colleges, 4in particular, our claims about research norms in this paper take our shared discipline, philosophy, as a focal point. of course, there are other disciplines where single-authored work is virtually unheard of (such as some sciences). other disciplines, particularly the sciences, require faculty to earn grant awards as monetary contributions to the university; such requirements may be analogous to our discipline’s privileging of single-authored scholarship. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 marginalized students continue to interact with mostly marginalized faculty who possess little economic or sociopolitical power to secure their own livelihood, let alone the overall academic progress of students. these students are caught within the crosshairs of american poverty with highly dedicated, skilled, but vastly underpaid, unsecured, sometimes multi-campus or multi-institution faculty guiding them. as a set of coauthors who instantiate different positions on the hierarchy of academic instructors (one of us is a professor at a community college, one is a full professor at a four-year, private liberal arts university, and one is a postdoctoral fellow at a large public research university) and different racialized embodiments (two of us identify as white, one as a person of color), we have been struck by the ways in which different demands on us for such invisible labor have framed our experiences within academia. more importantly, we sense that the empirical data tell only a small part of the story of the lived experiences that such invisible labor— and the demands for it, and the various ways in which it is undervalued, and indeed its various forms—produces. our goal in this paper is to identify and analyze a distinct, undervalued, and invisible labor that the existing empirical data have left unnamed and unmeasured: ontological labor, by which we mean the work required to manage one’s identity and body if either or both do not fit into academic structures, norms, and demands. this labor is ongoing, ineluctable, and persistent, and given the ways in which various forms of invisible labor are disproportionately allocated to minority members of academia, it frequently accompanies and is intensified by that invisible labor. in what follows we first briefly survey some existing frameworks of invisible labor, to show that ontological labor is among the forms of labor that such frameworks omit. we also provide a rationale for why ontological labor efforts should be understood as a form of labor. we then turn to an extensive description and analysis of ontological labor, grounded in the framework of social reproduction theory, but also use philosophical frameworks, such as feminist theory and critical race theory, that have addressed structural inequality. to provide a thicker characterization of ontological labor, we detail the labor as navigating one’s obligations to give and managing one’s entitlements to take. we also highlight the ontological labor that takes place through instances of resistance, such as through complaint or refusals. we aim to build upon the substantial empirical data that exist regarding inequalities of labor within the academy in order to provide a thicker description of how those inequalities are lived by diverse bodies. our overarching claim is that though there are many forms of invisible labor that are disproportionately required, expected, and enacted by members of the academy who identify with historically kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 marginalized and excluded groups, ontological labor almost always accompanies and undergirds those other forms, and is even more susceptible to a lack of recognition and assignment of value. in addition to providing a characterization of ontological labor, we seek to reveal hidden structures enforcing ontological labor that, in remaining hidden, perpetuate systemic inequalities in academia by allowing (and often requiring) the labor of devalued members to both make possible and sustain the more visibly productive labor of its more highly valued members. 2. existing frameworks the empirical data on invisible labor in academia referenced above have not, of course, been produced without some helpful conceptual frameworks. park and park-ozee (forthcoming), for instance, describe some forms of invisible labor as “reproductive,” arguing that their disproportionate distribution particularly along gendered lines (and, we suspect, along racial lines) mirrors other social structures regarding work. in this context, reproductive work (associated with femininity) or “institutional housekeeping” (bird, litt, and wang 2004), is contrasted with “productive work” (associated with masculinity). reproductive work or institutional housekeeping refers to the necessarily repetitive, always-ongoing work that does not result in an identifiable achievement but rather keeps the institution and its various components functioning. just as cleaning one’s house doesn’t result in a clean house now and forever more, serving on certain kinds of committees, advising students, or teaching introductory classes are ongoing tasks that need to be undertaken over and over again. productive work, by contrast—which, in the academy, is almost entirely understood as producing distinct and, in the discipline of philosophy in particular, single-authored scholarly works—is structured by a certain kind of finality. once a book or paper is written and published, it stays written: the work is completed, and an additional cv line is accumulated. the distinction between reproductive and productive work is helpful in categorizing various forms of invisible labor and highlighting their association with existing gender norms. however, we are arguing that the distinction is not sufficiently comprehensive and omits some crucial forms of invisible labor. three omissions seem particularly salient to us: ● scholarly midwifery, by which we mean labor done in service of helping others produce knowledge and insight (this labor can take the form of informal or formal reviewing of manuscripts, initiating and organizing conferences, maintaining professional networks, etc.); ● diversity and liberatory labor, by which we refer not only to the officially sanctioned diversity work that institutions of higher education disproportionately distributed to faculty and staff who identify with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 historically marginalized groups (often with the aim to build and cultivate better communities) but also to the more private, individualized labor involved in supporting other members of historically marginalized groups (both students and colleagues) as they navigate institutional hostility and indifference—the aim of such latter efforts may be to undermine the institution or refuse to do “diversity work” if it keeps structural inequality intact; and ● ontological labor, by which we refer to the mundane, daily, constant effort and expertise required to bodily inhabit institutions and spaces ineluctably shaped by structural inequality. of these three, the category of scholarly midwifery has been entirely neglected, and while we do not address it in this discussion, we hope to take it up in future work. diversity labor has been described in some detail5 but often in the absence of its connection to liberatory labor, to which, we suggest, it is intricately related; again, we hope future research will address that relation in more depth. ontological labor, the focus of this current discussion, is described (although not using that term) in sara ahmed’s (2012, 2017) analysis of diversity work in academia. ahmed has developed the kind of phenomenological description of the lived experience of invisible labor that we are seeking to extend in this paper. she identifies two modalities of that work; the first entails the work one does when attempting to transform an institution by opening it up to those who have historically been excluded from it (ahmed 2017). the diversity worker, then, works to open up institutions to these groups by suggesting how structures and systems can or should be modified. as ahmed notes, the diversity worker has their job because diversity and equality are not practiced daily (2017, 95). the second modality consists of the work one does when one does not inhabit the norms of an institution—that is, the work of being in question, when one is a body that is passing (in a variety of senses) through academic spaces and assumed not to belong. as ahmed acknowledges in her analysis, this work is undervalued in the institutional reward mechanisms, and for those who undertake such labor it can feel like one is banging their head against a brick wall (135). 5 for example, fehr (2011) examines epistemic benefits of diversity and diverse practitioners for knowledge production in the academy (with a focus on stem fields). fehr also identifies roadblocks for effective use of epistemic diversity within the academy, which include challenges in ideas gaining uptake, isolation, and forces that inhibit development of dissenting views. we suspect that fehr’s work on diversity is another locus of ontological labor. kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 this is precisely the labor that we are labeling as ontological, in an effort to highlight the ways in which structurally unjust institutions require marginalized members to manage their embodied beings in specific, and exhausting, ways. along with the invisible or undervalued labor identified in the empirical data (for example, to conduct diversity work), there exists a second kind of inescapable labor undertaken by the individual to navigate their embodiment when undertaking these first labors. such labor, we hold, requires a closer look and a more detailed analysis. 3. ontological labor in academia perhaps the first question to be addressed is why, exactly, the kinds of practices and behavior that we are seeking to highlight should be properly termed labor at all. while social reproduction theorists (vogel 2013; bhattacharya 2017) identify clearly the marxist implications of social labor power for production and reproduction processes, and the exploitation of the latter to increase capitalist wealth among a few, less discussion surrounds the labor of managing the perception of one’s embodied being and others people’s perception of our being within the landscape of academic work. we contend that this is a critical area of analysis and that the ongoing management, adaptation, and reorientation of one’s embodied bodily presence constitutes other social reproductive labors that reveal the reliance of productive labor on reproductive processes. we apply this lens of ontological labor to academia, drawing heavily on experiences within our own discipline (philosophy) and the nascent effects of the increasing turn toward neoliberalism in higher education. social reproduction theory (srt) aids our analysis in that it includes “various kinds of socially necessary work—mental, physical, and emotional—aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined care to maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation” (laslett and brenner 1989, 383). vogel (2017) observes that srt powerfully reveals that labor power is the principal commodity in a capitalist society. in its social form, however, we only encounter that commodity as exchange (not use) value. the fact that labor power appears as a commodity that lacks the origins common to other commodities has caused some thinkers to expand the purview of srt to include “the processes necessary for the reproduction of the workforce, both biologically and as compliant wage workers” (fine and saad-filho 2016, 61–62). srt, then, focuses our attention on noneconomic factors that influence how we reproduce and transform society over time. compliance, we contend, is a necessary condition of this social reproduction, a bodily reorientation toward a specificity of desire, demands, and regimens—coercion beyond typical labor. connecting this to the academy, zheng (2018) suggests that the shift in the ratio of tenure-track (tt) to non-tenure-track (ntt) faculty in the us, from 70% tt/30% ntt in 1969 to 30% tt/70% ntt in 2011 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 (kezar and maxey 2013), clarifies the precarity of academic labor and the gendered and racialized processes that inform a structure wherein women and people of color fill the majority ranks of ntt positions. within the discipline of philosophy, the precarity is stark, as only half of phds find permanent employment, one-third of whom fill temporary positions (jennings et al. 2017). academics compete in this precarious system, reinforced by myths of “individual merit” and “work as its own reward” (zheng 2018, 238–242). both myths distract from the collective and social factors whereby we socially value certain labor over others. these myths reinforce gender exploitation by questioning why one ought to be paid well for work one “cares” about, or (particularly but not only in the case of philosophy) the notion that one’s work upholds truth, justice, and the examined life. under these logics, contingent faculty comply with low wages, at-will employment, and menial benefits as a costly means to care for their students and the important work of the discipline itself. to do otherwise is to “fail” at being included as an academic, a person who has work worth doing for its own sake. under the myth of meritocracy, their compliance furthers the mythical chance that they may be selected into the shrinking tt line, where work is made easier by the vast pool of ntt faculty who perform the bulk of teaching and service work. as the larger system obscures the social factors that inform the market commodity of academic labor, a precarious worker falls prey to the logic that they can be exceptional, that they can overcome the odds and be celebrated as individuals, and not as folks who challenged the system that excluded them wrongly. they become skilled in appearing to comply with the system. the compliant worker may be a variant of what foucault (1979, 136) called the “docile body,” a product of the “constraints, prohibitions or obligations” placed on bodies within regimes of power. as foucault describes, the body becomes docile through a variety of mechanisms, modalities, and priorities, which, we contend, have become characteristic of the neoliberal university; a focus on efficiency of movement, the supervision of bodies rather than results, and “a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement” (137). while feminist and decolonial philosophers (alcoff 1999; gordon 1995) have noted the ways people are socially, economically, and professionally coerced to adopt somatic ideals of maleness and whiteness in philosophy (one could also include heterosexuality and able-bodiedness), few have called this behavior “labor” in the marxist sense or identified it as a compliance needed to obtain wage-labor and professional advancement. frantz fanon’s (2008) work on blackness explores the ineluctable system used to reproduce a binary racial oppression, where one’s being (whiteness) is predicated upon the nonbeing (blackness) of another. as fanon writes, “for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. . . . i am kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 not a potentiality of something; i am fully what i am. i do not have to look for the universal” (90, 114). fanon’s words are meant to rebut sartre’s (1976) analysis in black orpheus that black consciousness is the next move after the thesis of white supremacy. the historically marginalized person (in this case racialized) must comply by remaining a nonbeing in order to sustain the project of being taken up by majority workers. as such, the racial binary plays a functional role in reproductive labor, utilizing the structure of internal colonialism to maintain racist compliance and complicity. mario barrera (1979) extends a marxist analysis of race and sex in order to reveal these complex moves. barrera suggests that two major intraclass divisions (with associated subdivisions) segment capitalist political economies. classes are segmented based on (1) the structure of the work, with a primary labor market characterized by jobs that offer “security, stability, good pay and working conditions, the possibility of advancement, and a stable set of procedures in the administration of work rules” (209). the secondary job market offers the reverse conditions, and these jobs are often labeled “dead-end.” classes are also segmented based on (2) ascriptive class divisions wherein “a portion of a class . . . is set off from the rest of the class by some readily identifiable and relatively stable characteristic of the persons assigned to that segment, such as race, ethnicity, or sex, where the relationship of the members to the means and process of production is affected by that demarcation” (212). given the ever-waiting secondary labor market that snatches those who fail, many workers are compliant and complicit with these ascriptive demarcations. internal colonialism manifests itself in historic labor movements, barrera notes, when anglo workers observed their employers’ ability to use this dual labor system to undercut wage standards, reduce organized labor, and divide workers via a second tier composed of the most vulnerable, politically powerless, and readily removable employees (213). minority workers digest the mythos of leaving the secondary labor market to join the first, agreeing to segment from those they left behind and to leave intact the reproduction of the system itself. meanwhile, the ascriptive demarcations silently structure both job markets, with greater levels of violence and oppression in the secondary market incentivizing the maintenance of a dual system. it is in this sense that we appeal to the ontological: the project of being requires, in western metaphysics, the nonbeing of others. this labor is at the level of existence, not affect, choice, or preference. to fight for the inclusion of nondominant workers and to acknowledge their work is to acknowledge a system that permits them to work in order to erase them. no matter how hard the worker tries, they remain outside the bounds of being and its visible expression as a somatic ideal. to be a worker, even a compliant one, one must first exist. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 the capacity to embody the somatic ideal is, we suggest, an exchangeable commodity on the free market where coaches, professional development organizations, and campus centers train academics to write, speak, present, teach, and meet in ways that reinforce the dominant metaphysical order (puwar 2004; thomas and jackson 2019). it is a bodily or phenomenological labor to discipline and inhabit one’s body so others see it as complying; one must learn to manage time, take space appropriately, and move acceptably. this labor, skill, coercion of compliance, or docility is what we explore as ontological labor, a term that highlights the effort and expertise required for instructors, particularly those from historically marginalized groups, to simply exist in academia. informed by puwar (2004) and ahmed (2006), we note the phenomenological legacy of the bodies that have occupied, shaped, and continue to orient the somatic norm of the philosophical body and its relation to space. we suggest, extending kate manne’s (2018) theorization of misogyny, that somatic norms inform the capacities and possibilities from which one is entitled to receive or to which one ought to give within the academy. we expand our analysis beyond the overt correlation of gender, adding an intersectional lens intended to complicate binary processes of production and reproduction and the ways we generate research, teaching, and service. we define ontological labor as the energy, creativity, and skills required to work within a body already socially inscribed6 and manage the reception of one’s embodied social identity, not only for oneself, but for others who must reproduce and produce within and for the institution. within any given philosophy department, particular bodies have inhabited offices, classrooms, and committee chairs, shaping and orienting new academic bodies toward the historically established somatic norms; those outside this norm may be labeled “historically marginalized,” “underrepresented,” or “minority scholars.” by examining the status of being somatically ideal—and the elision of embodied qualities that fail to meet this standard—we aim to highlight the labor individuals must undergo and how they may be both visible and invisible as socially reproductive and productive workers. from a generally foucauldian perspective, of course, all faculty, regardless of identity markers, undergo a disciplinary process that shapes them as recognizable teachers, scholars, and colleagues; it is not the case that faculty from majority groups are free to embody whatever norms they please. however, we are arguing that for minority scholars, oppressive environments generate specific and onerous tasks in service to social reproduction associated with a person’s bodily identity, and that these tasks differ both qualitatively and quantitatively from those required of majority groups. 6 social inscription may also include the effects of trauma and the environment that influence epigenetic factors (van der kolk 2000). kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 providing a characterization of ontological labor begins with acknowledgement that being a member of a historically marginalized group comes with the burdens of managing the oppressive norms and behaviors expressed both individually and institutionally. our point here is a deceptively simple one, with wide-ranging and at times debilitating ramifications: the act of being a member of a historically marginalized group within the academy comes with demands for labor that are utterly foreign to the experiences of members of historically dominant groups. specifically, one’s ontological status can have a substantially transformative effect on the particular work that academics are called upon, or expected, to do. manne’s (2018) analysis of sexism and misogyny offers insights that we use to broaden beyond the confines of gender. for manne, a key characteristic of misogyny (which manne’s analysis names as the law enforcement branch of patriarchy, distinguishing it from sexism’s justificatory role) is that it clarifies tacitly assigned roles and obligations of (1) entitlement—who is permitted to take—and (2) obligation—who is obligated to give. what we find compelling in manne’s critique is that her distinction helps feminists locate an abstraction, in this case sexism, when an enforcement arm is present that ensures compliance. while manne remains focused on gender, we suggest manne’s model is relevant when considering other forms of abstract contempt, such as racism, ableism, heterosexism, and nationalism. manne’s articulation of misogyny, particularly when extended and applied to other forms of structural inequality, can help us understand how the academy has constructed the kind of giving that is associated with certain social groups. manne argues that female-identified persons are seen as human givers rather than human beings—humans, for sure, but humans whose moral value is dependent upon their giving certain moral goods to their ostensible superiors. a similar dynamic is at work with regard to other coerced conditions of compulsory deference that the academy has ignored or disavowed, often based on somatic superiority and inferiority, such as race, ability, religion, and sexuality. the invisibility of enforced obligations and entitlements makes straight the path of becoming like a majority faculty member in the academy. what is overlooked is the lack of choice one has to engage in the labor of complying with personal and institutional somatic norms that identify people as givers or nurturers, doing labor that srt theorists recognize as reproductive work. the management of the meaning and weight of difference is, we argue, a form of labor, and an inescapable one at that, at least for the many members of historically disadvantaged groups whose identity markers are visible or otherwise perceptible. these faculty cannot conceal the signs of their identity: the head covering, hair texture, skin pigment, accent and inflection, odor or design of clothes, missing limb, or scarred skin. with a tacit culture of whiteness, ableism, and nonminority religious practices ordering the university, institutionally, a minority worker must manage the reinforced presumptions of guest-worker status, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 presumed incompetence, and outsider-isolation. to do otherwise risks revealing that they lack this shared cultural understanding, further alienating the person (armstrong and wildman 2012, 240). in what follows, we deploy manne’s analysis of misogyny to aid in characterizing other forms of systemic inequality as having similar enforcement, policing, and litigious expectations, all compliance measures that illuminate the complicated intersectional series of entitlements and obligations simultaneously produced within departments. thinking alongside manne, we argue that the different expectations held for differently positioned faculty members (and, in some cases, the imposition of identical expectations upon differently positioned faculty members) is an ontological matter that reveals both the unequal status afforded to instructors who identify as members of historically marginalized groups and the disproportionate labor demands that such unequal status imposes upon those instructors. 4. being obligated to give as we begin our discussion of what members of marginalized groups are perceived as being obligated to give, it is crucial to recognize that not all labor associated with marginalized identities is alienating or unfulfilling. often, staff and faculty identified as “diverse” serve in a variety of capacities that deploy knowledge and skills deeply informed by their identity; in particular, many faculty find work that enhances the success of similarly positioned students to be meaningful and full of value. yet despite their own valuing of such labor, institutional recognition is often difficult to come by. when such faculty seek to have that value affirmed in their formal evaluation, they discover that there is little space to tally this work, except within the underwhelming category of “service to the institution” that researchers have noted tends to pale in comparison to, say, scholarly publications (matthew 2016). although faculty may receive praise and gratitude from individual students whom they have assisted, such individual recognition cannot replace institutional appreciation. in the absence of such appreciation, work that is valued by the faculty member can, especially in untenable quantities, become tainted by a sense of institutional entitlement. expectations that minority faculty will give in a nearly limitless fashion to students (in the form of careful, caring attention, particularly to students with similar social markers) as compared to their majority colleagues are examples of the disciplinary forces that impose disproportionate kinds and amounts of labor on minority faculty. these assumptions can drive minority faculty to enact these social norms, punish them for their failure to adhere to these expectations, and exact an enormous toll of time and psychic energy. while these workers may feel depleted, colleagues enlist them with stunning urgency to serve on hiring committees, speak to this tweet, or publish a response in kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 order to ensure equitable representation.7 too often, faculty from historically marginalized groups, rather than serving as, say, consultants to initiatives undertaken by a broad set of constituents across the university, are positioned as having primary responsibility for diversifying the institution, program, and/or discipline. regardless of the degree to which minority faculty take up this work, they are uniquely positioned to be aware of the daily realities of working at that institution, knowledge that, in the context of a hostile environment, may cause them to advise other potential instructors to refrain from applying for or accepting job opportunities at the university. yet, even acting as noncompliant workers, they become important gatekeepers as gate informers, saddled with the responsibility of warning others of the institution, while trapped within it. a hostile environment, then, increases the labor expected of the minority faculty in multiple ways: it establishes the urgency of the work needing to be done; constructs the minority faculty as particularly (and naturally) responsible for initiating and implementing the work; and decreases the possibility that they will be able to share the load of the work in the near future. underlying the committee work and initiatives that all instructors are expected to join is the distinctly ontological work of culturally educating majority groups to respect the labor of minority faculty overall (that is, across the areas of teaching, service, and scholarship), and finding ways (both explicit and implicit) to unsettle the assumption that their inclusion signals a politically correct hire, and that therefore the social category they represent has more value than their actual labor. the fear of being an entitled token will incentivize many to diminish (as much as possible) the perceived differences that render them conspicuous, easing for dominant groups the social discomfort of their difference. yet such attempts at diminishing difference are, at best, fraught. as operationalized within the black/white binary, the hypervisibility of racialized markers results in systematic surveillance, as black bodies under white gazes (yancy 2008). this vigilance to report activity that destabilizes present racial regimes curbs modes of speech, clothing, and any behavior that does not align with the present racial culture of the institution. at one author’s institution, peers informed an advisor of color that her nails were “ghetto,” indicating her personal grooming aligned with a nonprofessional aesthetic mode. black feminists have long analyzed the hypervigilance against afros, box braids, weaves, and other aesthetic choices affiliated with certain racialized bodies (jerkins 2018). chemically treating hair, reshaping or coloring the body, and bearing the cost, discomfort, and amount of time these aesthetic choices involve remains a private responsibility. calling into 7 see talia mae bettcher’s (2018) confession of dual exhaustion and duty to respond to kathleen stock’s article. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 question the professional legitimacy of certain bodies illustrates a tacit enforcement meant to impose a physical mirroring of a tacit institutional culture, a set of somatic norms created by historically dominant groups and institutions. in enforcing (again, often implicitly or informally) such somatic norms, individuals and institutions can claim that they do not discriminate based on skin pigment; they are merely ensuring compliance with institutional policy or culture. yet such compliance relies on the noticeability of brown and black faculty, produced against and through the backdrop of their persistent and historical exclusion (with the exception of historically black colleges and universities), and can produce a profound experience of un-belonging for faculty of color, as if they are simply visiting and not part of academia. moreover, workers are generally expected to manage feelings of racial isolation, trauma, and intractable social and political change privately. minority workers admit they avoid discussions of daily biases with white colleagues due to the deafening silence that often follows (onwuachi-willig 2012). some institutions offer collegial peer support with other faculty of color, but most assume faculty can cope with support from personal intimates and paid therapists. racial identity also complicates what faculty of color are obligated to give to their students. minority collegiate instructors are often disproportionately expected to identify with students (increasing office-hour usage) who seek them as mentors, despite rarely having such mentoring themselves (easton 2012; bowen 2012). when students come to process their own experience of racial oppression with their instructors of color, they may assume the person will cheerily offer affective labor, while aptly managing their own triggered experiences. the support bolsters the functioning of the university itself without necessarily interrogating its practices and culture. we offer the following racial anecdote as a thicker description of the emotional complexities and multiple stereotypes racialized people experience. this is a first-hand experience of one of the coauthors, included here with the permission of the person at the center of the narrative: i had been supporting a contingent faculty member of color to secure a tenure-track position, and he had an upcoming skype interview, a format that many candidates dread and which “outs” visible racial markers. i encouraged the faculty member to utilize the private conference spaces in our library complete with available laptops so he could avoid the questions that might arise if folks overheard him in our shared office suite. with a week’s advance warning, he asked if the laptop was compatible with the interview technology and received assurances it would all work. thirty minutes prior to the interview, he realized the technology was not working and returned to the library technical desk to request support. having been afforded the respect of a faculty member previously and dressed in a suit kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 and tie for his interview, he asked the library worker politely (also a person of color) to send for help. in the interim, another student perceiving the cliffhanger moment offered him his personal laptop in order to proceed with the interview, but the worker objected, citing policy restrictions. now, flummoxed that a solution was at hand but being stymied by the unyielding worker, the faculty member asked—in a loud, clear, insistent, but not unprofessional manner—for an exception, given the time constraints and the prior assurances that all would work. ceasing to give reasons for her stance, the worker then threatened to call campus safety. the faculty member grew increasingly anxious and frustrated as the interview time approached, and yet was also acutely aware, because of his racialized identity, of the mandate to manage his feelings of anger, shame, and resentment in a way that would be viewed as nonthreatening (although, as it turns out, there seemed to be no “safe” level of anger that he could express). the obligation to manage his feelings, in the context of his justifiable suspicions that his affect was judged as threatening due to his race and gender profile, typifies the specific kind of ontological compliance that we are seeking to highlight in this discussion. instructors from historically marginalized groups are inevitably confronted with oppressive assumptions, tangled cultural identities, and clashing feelings of insecurity; more to the point, their reactions to such confrontations are, they know all too well, judged on those very same oppressive assumptions. moreover, as mentioned earlier, such instructors are overrepresented in the ranks of the contingent faculty and thus are often managing such perceptions from a place of increased professional precarity. contingent faculty are frequently not only required to do more but subject to higher stakes than tenured faculty should they not meet (sometimes unspoken) expectations. minority academics may also be obligated to give with regard to their service to their discipline, particularly to areas of minority scholarship including indigenous, queer, critical race theory, and disability/crip course creation, research, and writing. for example, trans theorists, working in an emerging and young field of scholarship, represent a small pool of professionals called on to speak to the breadth of trans issues, theories, papers, and book reviews. however, the added ontological labor doesn’t consist just of being one of a small number of theorists within a field but rather in the managing of the social and political obstacles their embodied identities encounter. while being in a small field or department certainly increases the workload of any faculty member within this group, the salient factor for trans theorists is the additional historical and social oppression that shrinks the pool of applicants qualified to share in the work and the sociopolitical work their disciplines are forced to confront. there are only a few folks who can speak to minority-issue feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 topics, and these folks are under additional social and political strain because others perceive an essence to their identities that carries moral obligation, answering for who they are and, perhaps, what they research. indigenous scholars face different yet existentially similar threats regarding their community’s historical right to live. however, much of this obligation, argues sandy grande (2015), is simply a commodification of their knowledge in order to sell what they know and uphold an institutional system that will continue to other, rather than liberate, their communities. we return to grande’s point in our conclusion. minority faculty must manage expectations, norms, and demands that are absent from the experiences of majority faculty. moreover, regardless of whether such management takes the form of compliance or opposition, it constitutes ontological labor that is a form of giving, insofar as it provides for the dominant group either continuing education about systemic oppression (in the case of opposition) or the pleasing sense that inclusivity will be a shallow affair that does not require significant cultural transformation (in the case of compliance). 5. managing the entitlement to take on the flipside, entitlements for racial majority faculty are also enforced. entitled faculty enforce affective equanimity as they expect generous, cheerful work from their junior minority colleagues. such entitlement may be on the faculty’s own behalf, for example, assuming that a junior colleague will take up the entitled faculty member’s idea for a program, initiative, paper, or grant application and do all the logistical legwork necessary to bring it to fruition. often ignored is the fact that junior faculty, according to the data cited earlier, are the largest pool of racial minorities. or, it may be on the behalf of others, assuring a student, for example, that “we” can get that article scanned for you, fit you into the conference, or mentor you, knowing that the task will simply be handed off to another.8 often this reproductive work is given to administrative support staff, graduate assistants, or untenured faculty, safeguarding time and energy for tenured faculty to complete productive labor. majority faculty are also entitled to choose diversity training as an option, and their freedom to not engage in this work is accepted on multiple campuses. anti-racist training in pedagogy and method continues to be optional, and it largely falls on those already under the weight of racialized identities to ensure this work occurs. white fragility, an increasingly recognized phenomenon, protects and 8carla fehr (2011, 145) offers a similar but more robust account of this phenomenon as a “diversity free rider,” one who makes use of existing diversity without increasing the diversity of any formal community or the total representation of diverse voices. kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 insulates majority faculty from the stress and discomfort of assessing how their institutions, courses, and methods continue to center a majority white sociocultural norm (diangelo 2018). while majority faculty frequently enjoy the permission to receive that accompanies their privileged status, nonmajority faculty often fear the punishment of the same group if they attempt to join their ranks. thus, many instructors from historically marginalized groups persist in performing ontological labor privately and compliantly because they fear being seen as takers, a role that their social identity, frequently represented by their distance from the somatic ideal, would render problematic. racialized or immigrant groups are often stereotyped as taking up positions of prestige due to affirmative action, receiving benefits without legal status, and thus taking funds away from deserving majority, tax paying citizens, and so forth. additionally, nonmajority faculty occupy an ambivalent status as both takers and givers, blurring the lines, as made clear by indigenous and (dis)abled faculty accounts of ontological labor required to exist in these in-between spaces. indigenous faculty may experience a dangerous stereotype of “being takers” with slurs like “indian giver” still attached to settler confusion about economic systems that rely on reciprocity rather than the social contract of private property.9 as recipients of federally subsidized programs created in the wake of genocide, forced child removal and sterilization, and questionably enforced legal treaties that grant their nations sovereignty, indigenous faculty teach the academic analysis of this trauma while undergoing its ongoing effects within diverse and subsisting nations. moosa-mitha (2015) describes the double task of demonstrating output in a system where one must evidence early aptitude to publish atomistic research predicated principally on studying the world as an object of analysis, while simultaneously also answering an ethical call to one’s community, often collective and animistic in its outlook: “our elder cleaning fish, our sister living on the edge in east vancouver, our brother hunting elk for the feast, our little ones in foster care . . . ‘are you helping us?’” (55). while many faculty have relationships with people who are undergoing personal stress and systemic oppression, indigenous faculty are unique in their small numbers (only 1 percent of faculty in canada); and, like other marginalized groups, researchers identify indigenous faculty as crucial in securing indigenous students’ retention and completion of academic awards within institutions (gallop and bastien 2016). 9 kimmerer (2013) outlines an alternative notion of reciprocity and a gift economy that stands in contrast to private property and market economies. she outlines an ethic beyond “take what you need,” and instead suggests, “take only that which is given” (184). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 disabled/crip scholars remain marginalized as recipients of accommodations, frequently facing entrenched suspicions about both their need for accommodations and the reasonableness of necessary accommodations. eli clare (2009, 125) explains the reality of perpetual childhood many disabled adults face—never or under employed, living with parents or caregivers, undertaking sheltered employment in workshops with repetitive work, and even experiencing forced sterilization. to have a job in the academy is such a milestone that the job itself may be considered as “generously” given, further fulfilling the stereotype that the scholar is a one-sided recipient of care. to be a disabled scholar means one must give disclosure of a recognized disability in order to receive accommodation, but this exchange is itself precarious. daily, a disabled person must decide what to call attention to and what to keep under wraps; this decision-making requires astute social and political skill. much of the dilemma is that the disclosure, the providing of which requires high skills of lived experience, is met with low disability literacy, meaning few know what to do or how to engage the disclosures given (kershbaum and price 2014). students and professionals report the ways disability interacts with race, gender, sexuality and contend the paramount need for specific disability literacy (pryal 2014a). linda kornasky (2009) and brian clarke (2014) urge professors with disabilities to reveal their status so students can identify them as mentors and reduce a culture of ableism; the mandate is framed as a moral one. ruth c. white (2011) reports that early in her career, she chose not to disclose her bipolar status because as an immigrant, queer, black scholar she was to be “strong,” while withstanding stereotypes of mental instability. as katie rose guest pryal (2014b) reflects on how professor lisa mcelroy spent three days answering emails and phone calls from students and other people once she disclosed her anxiety disorder on slate, she argues that this “bonus work” spans an ambivalent range of meaning, which administrators fail to structurally recognize. she laments, “we want to help, yet too often we end up paying the price” (2014b). to illustrate the point, we offer another thick description (again, experienced by a person known to one of the coauthors, and reproduced here with that person’s permission). an assistant professor of philosophy battled a serial medical disability where a port had to be inserted into their body. the faculty member went to great lengths to hide the medical apparatus, nervous that it would affect the students’ perception of their fitness to be a scholar (a whole person without punctures or fluids). when the member took a medical leave of absence, they realized the only medical accommodation the university covered for tenured faculty was pregnancy. upon returning, they had to make up quickly kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 for the time away and demonstrate research productivity as if they had no ongoing medical issues. if workers choose to pursue accommodations, they are onerously won (tremain 2013; burke 2017) and peculiarly isolate the person(s) from the typical academic membership and cooperative functions. needing an interpreter often assigns faculty to certain positions in the room; requiring notes that are shared in digital format results in a time lag of access for the visually impaired; distance between locations of meetings or classroom setups creates a time and energy tax for those with mobility impairments; appropriate time away from work to tend to mental health can create gaps in one’s cv that can be taken as evidence of nonproductivity. often securing accommodations only serves to marginalize those members and render their position in the academy ever more dubious and precarious, rather than being taken as evidence of heightened commitment and ability. 6. strategies of resistance and refusal thus far we have discussed ontological labor undertaken through managing obligations to give and the entitlements to take. it is also worth noting that ontological labor also takes place through instances of resistance. this is another form of the labor that must necessarily be done to interrupt the reproduction of a society that utilizes workers’ private management and fails to acknowledge the status of nonbeing or spatial normalizing taken on by others. important strategies to oppose worker compliance that perpetuates somatic dominance of one group over others include the sociopolitical acts of complaining and refusal. norlock (2018) draws attention to philosophical aspects that influence the prohibition to complain, noting aristotle and kant’s portrayal of the act as “selfindulgent. . . . effeminate and weak” (117, 121), to contemporary portrayals of it as “pointless” and “infantile” (127).10 the bias against complaint reinforces a somatic norm of male “hardness” and a problematic aversion to seek embodied comfort, especially if it appears complaining will not change one’s circumstances. such logic underscores an individualistic culture where we learn to manage our own 10 although kathryn norlock (2018) focuses her analysis of complaint on precisely those examples that are not intended to result in positive social change, and thus does not overlap explicitly with our concerns, we suspect that the very gendering of mundane quotidian complaint that is, as norlock details, part of the basis for the traditional philosophical rejection of it (complaining is feminine, and so should be avoided) helps to associate this institutional form of resistance with a wayward, annoying femininity that renders it more easily dismissed. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 vulnerabilities in isolation; in contrast to such cultural assumptions, norlock delineates the way complaint helps identify where a response may be needed, and social culture has little imagination as to what could change. additionally, complaint helps distribute affective duties and reduce isolation for those suffering. she writes, “most pressing for me are those occasions when one’s complaint is a plea for validation that one’s pains are not insignificant, and one’s complaint further seeks company to attenuate isolation in suffering, because denial of recognition frustrates basic goods of self-knowledge and autonomy” (129). part of our argument in this paper is that marginalized people expend labor to be recognized as workers, and their exclusion reproduces a social hierarchy of ranked and associated activities that must be taken up (or denied) in order for them to be valued workers and/or to include marginal others into the fold. complaint combats this erasure and generates further work for the complainant. to complain, writes ahmed (2019), is to engage in extraordinary amount of institutional labor: “i can hear the strain, the physical effort, the wear and tear; i can hear how hard some are willing to push, because they are not willing to give up or to give in. . . . you have to record what you do not want to reproduce.” as srt theorists observe, production is intricately connected, positively or not, to processes of reproduction, and the way we educate, socialize, and reproduce laborers is itself reproducible. the path of complaint means that the worker will become more, not less, involved in the policies and procedures of the institution, thus spending even more time and energy in its hallways and meeting spaces. while adding to their own individual labor, the worker does so with the aspiration of reducing systematically the ontological load of academics they are socially responsible for reproducing. yet it is crucial to note that the labor of complaint is not only not recognized as labor but is frequently constructed by institutional authorities and structures as inappropriate, problematic, insulting, and, crucially, untowardly demanding. that is, complaints about structural inequality, particularly those that emanate from nonnormatively embodied community members—precisely because of the norms surrounding the giving and taking of social goods that manne (2018) articulates and we expanded on earlier in this paper—are most likely to appear not as labor that the complainer is performing on the part of the institution, for which they should be valued and compensated, but as an affront, an abrupt demand for the wrong kind of labor from the wrong kinds of bodies. and so, as ahmed (2019) has so elegantly described, the complainer, rather than the injustice about which they are complaining, becomes the problem. another strategy, suggested by critical indigenous studies scholar grande (2015), is to refuse the language of inclusion used blithely by neoliberal academics who deploy “democratic education” to assimilate marginalized faculty, particularly indigenous people, into eurocentric norms and ideals. grande theorizes the kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 21 shortcomings of both a politics of reconciliation and recognition, focusing on refusal as framework to “help imagine alter-native modes of participation” that reveal, reconstruct, and restructure colonial dominance (4, 6). she offers a necessary critique of social relations and modes of production that make knowledge itself a commodity without the indigenous context of respecting elders and those whose deep experiences and wise living earn them the status of speakers, as opposed to inexperienced listeners. complaint and refusal are, of course, only two strategies of resistance among many. our larger point is that strategies of resistance that are so often mischaracterized as inchoate opposition, or disloyal criticism, or inappropriate demands for the wrong kinds of institutional labor, are themselves part of the labor that marginalized members of academic communities are required to undertake. reframing such acts of resistance is a crucial step in the process of rendering higher education more just and equitable. 7. conclusion in this paper, we have sought to deepen existing conversations regarding invisible labor in the academy, and how it intersects with various forms of structural inequality, by identifying, describing, and analyzing ontological labor as a distinct and undertheorized genre of such undervalued labor. our discussion characterizes ontological labor as the mundane, daily, constant effort and expertise required to bodily inhabit institutions and spaces that are ineluctably shaped by structural inequality. for members of the academic community whose embodied identities are nonnormative in a variety of ways (along axes of gender, race, ability, and class, for example), this ontological labor includes managing others’ perceptions that one is obligated, by virtue of one’s nonnormative positionality, to give to normative others whose identity includes the entitlement to take. such labor takes time and mental energy to navigate. it also demands that a person decide in what way they will engage the prevailing system; as we have noted, strategies like complaint and refusal require time, skill, and deliberative processes that are often beyond the scope of outlined duties. additionally, all these choices have social and political implications for one’s overall fitness to remain a worker at the university. this work and these choices come to a person largely because of how others perceive the person’s inhabited being. we have not undertaken the task of identifying specific ways in which ontological labor ought to be formally recognized and rewarded, opting to focus on the prior step of providing an analysis that will allow the labor to be perceivable by those members of the academy who, by virtue of their more privileged positions, lack the emotional topography and bodily capacities to hear and decipher what is often institutional background noise. becoming better attuned to the quality, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2020 22 intensity, and scope of ontological labor occurring in our departments and institutions is a crucial element of rendering those institutions more just and more inclusive. more questions remain, of course. although we have provided within this discussion examples of forms of ontological labor undertaken by underrepresented groups (female-identified persons, members of racially marginalized groups, trans scholars, disabled persons), we have not explored or identified how ontological labor may take radically different forms across those groups or at their intersections. our goal has been to demonstrate that all members of academia whose embodied beings are somatically atypical are necessarily compelled to undertake a taxing form of labor that is spared those who embody more normative forms, but surely the differences among particular modalities of ontological labor are also important and require further study. works cited ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university 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christina jackson, eds. 2019. embodied difference: divergent bodies in public discourse. lanham, md: lexington books. tremain, shelley. 2013. “introducing feminist philosophy of disability.” disability studies quarterly 33 (4). doi:10.18061/dsq.v33i4.3877. tunguz, sharmin. 2016. “in the eye of the beholder: emotional labor in academia varies with tenure and gender.” studies in higher education 41 (1): 3–20. doi:10.1080/03075079.2014.914919. van der kolk, bessel. 2000. “posttraumatic stress disorder and the nature of trauma.” dialogues in clinical neuroscience 2 (1): 7–22. vogel, lise. 2013. marxism and the oppression of women: toward a unitary theory. historical materialism book series. chicago: haymarket books. ———. 2017. “forward.” in social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression, edited by tithi bhattacharya. london: pluto press. white, ruth c. 2011. “so what if i’m crazy?” huff post, last modified oct. 15. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/so-what-if-im-crazy_b_921699. yancy, george. 2008. black bodies, white gazes: the continuing significance of race. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. zheng, robin. 2018. “precarity is a feminist issue: gender and contingent labor in the academy.” hypatia 33 (2): 235–255. doi:10.1111/hypa.12401. ruthanne crapo kim is a faculty member in the department of philosophy at minneapolis community and technical college. she serves presently as chancellor’s fellow in academic equity strategy for the minnesota state system with the aim to eliminate all equity gaps in state colleges and universities by 2030. her main research interests include environmental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and decolonial studies. ann j. cahill is professor of philosophy at elon university and is the author of overcoming objectification: a carnal ethics (2010, routledge) and rethinking rape (2001, cornell university press). her research interests lie in the intersection between feminist theory and philosophy of the body, and she has published on topics such as miscarriage, beautification, and sexual assault. she is currently kim, cahill, and jacquart – bearing the brunt of structural inequality published by scholarship@western, 2020 27 working on a coauthored monograph exploring the social, political, and ethical meanings of voice as human-generated sound. melissa jacquart is a postdoctoral fellow in the philosophy department at the university of cincinnati and in the uc center for public engagement with science. her main research interests are in philosophy of science, philosophy of astrophysics, feminist philosophy, and philosophy education. 7316 kim title page 7316 kim, cahill, jacquart final format anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation rodier, kristin. 2023. “telling feminist philosophy stories: introduction to the feminist philosophy quarterly symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 3. 2023 telling feminist philosophy stories: introduction to the feminist philosophy quarterly symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge kristin rodier athabasca university krodier@athabascau.ca rodier –introduction to the fpq symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 telling feminist philosophy stories: introduction to the feminist philosophy quarterly symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge kristin rodier abstract this introduction reflects on practices of telling stories about works by influential contemporary feminist philosophers, interrogating what is considered impactful feminist philosophy. i frame this edition through a particular kind of recitational engagement with heyes’s work—through her own previous writings and my first-personal experiences with the text and her role in my intellectual formation as my dissertation supervisor. i draw on clare hemmings’s (2011) work on the grammar of feminist intellectual storytelling, offering brush strokes through embodied and relational stories that help me make sense of anaesthetics, in order to tell alternative stories to frame the work, specifically heyes’s methods, impacts, and the relations amongst her previous works. in reflecting on the embodied realities and feminist intellectual networks that inform our framing practices, i consider how we are relationally and affectively invested in figures and thinkers, our schools of thought, our style of philosophy, and our forms of participation in the discipline. through these reflections, i trace heyes’s work as grasping life examples with rich opportunities to grapple with stubborn philosophical ambivalences in conceptualizing embodied freedom and agency, while developing adaptive methods that probe their transcendental conditions. keywords: clare hemmings, feminist philosophy, cressida heyes, feminist agency, resistance, embodiment, feminist storytelling “my interest in suffering is perhaps indicative of my unease with feminism-asmartyrdom and my (unfulfillable) desire to challenge authority and break free of docility in the name of a kind of liberation that i am ostensibly arguing against. in the end, how to make sense of the claim that agency and freedom have multiple grammars within the context of my own feminist political commitments is a genealogical project that may just be the subject of my next book.” —cressida heyes, response to reviewers of self-transformations, 2010 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 this symposium contains an introduction by the author to anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge (2020),1 three original essay responses by megan burke, talia mae bettcher, and alisa bierria, and a response to these essays from heyes. the essay responses are revised and triply anonymous-reviewed versions of commentaries presented at the pacific apa in 2022. these essays resist the summary-criticism formula of standard commentaries, as each deploys ideas in the monograph into a conversation with their own work, extending and complicating heyes’s arguments. given that we have the benefit of heyes’s introduction to her monograph, careful engagement with said work by burke, bettcher, and bierria, and heyes’s response to these essays, there is less of a need for an editor’s introduction to rehash or boil down (choose your cooking metaphor) the monograph under discussion. taken together, in form, we have a model of feminist philosophical conversation, but in content, these pieces offer a meditation on the role of experience in intersectional feminist philosophy—specifically, one that brings forward states of unconsciousness, since they are primarily devalued, neglected, and absent from the philosophical literature. my introduction takes the example of this symposium as a provocation to reflect on feminist philosophical practices, considering specifically framing, storytelling, and intellectual inheritances. rather than thematically “introducing” the special issue, i undertake a particular kind of re-citational engagement with heyes’s thinking, drawing on clare hemmings’s (2011) work on the grammar of feminist intellectual storytelling. looking back, i did not anticipate that my introduction would wade into such meta-introductory territory. however, i should have seen the seeds of my bad faith in the proposal for the symposium, where i suggested my introduction would locate anaesthetics in heyes’s intellectual trajectory, assuming and imposing a coherent, continuous, and progressing body of thought, which culminates in the author’s latest work. my proposal also claimed i would square the introduction with the mission of the journal—specifically, to raise the presence and impact of women and feminist philosophers. despite what some might call my cockeyed optimism, this error thankfully offers a chance to reflect on practices of telling stories about works by contemporary feminist philosophers, which thereby shapes what is considered impactful philosophy. heyes also grapples with framing practices when introducing wittgenstein as a figure of political inquiry, understanding it as a “complicated hermeneutical challenge” (2003, 3) and citing what she calls “ambiguous biographical evidence” (2) in an attempt to sketch connections to a political vision. we are often asked to explain and describe intellectual inheritances in our writing without direct 1 this monograph won the david easton award from the foundations of political theory caucus of the american political science association in 2021. other winners include jurgen habermas (in 1997), charles taylor (2008), and wendy brown (2012). rodier –introduction to the fpq symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 engagement with the invisible frame of prior agreements about what counts as worthy of discussion (zerilli 1998). to put a finer point on our philosophical training, this kind of writing is common but not considered a central form of intellectual engagement in philosophy. the notion of introducing itself carries a temporal entry point for stories, evoking narrative structures about how ideas are best understood and how thinkers are best placed in a field. it is no surprise i promised such a story of linear, intelligible intellectual trajectories, since telling coherent philosophical stories is rewarded in our discipline. these stories often take the shape of ideas progressing through a dialectic of step-by-step critique and overcoming critique that moves us to a position of greater and more illuminated philosophical understanding. in resisting my proposed storytelling, i’m pushing the genre of introduction to its edge. instead, i offer brush strokes, citing heyes’s own reflections and works, as well as relational and embodied stories that help me make sense of anaesthetics, offering ways of engaging feminist intellectual networks and embodied realities that inform our framing practices. hemmings’s (2011) work has in mind practices of feminist political storytelling that both deploy particular citational tactics and encourage specific textual affects. the first being about who we cite when, especially in framing questions, evoking schools of thought, which thus contributes to forming feminist subjects (hemmings 2011, 5). the affective texture is how one is oriented towards their school of thought, its (deserving) prominence or (tragic) lack thereof, its (exciting) cutting-edgedness, its (sad) old fashionedness, and so forth. hemmings asks the very important question of how these relations to feminist schools of thought and influential figures distinguish generations within feminist academics, forming professional norms and resulting subjectivities. for example, as a reader of heyes’s three monographs, i might impose a teleology of first overcoming problems of essentialism (line drawings [heyes 2000]) and then overcoming gendered embodied practices as necessarily repressive (selftransformations [heyes 2007]), leading to overcoming erasures of gendered nonexperiences (heyes 2020). the use of “essays on” in the monograph’s title, signals resistance to both an imposed characterization of a bounded central problem and narratives of heroic “overcoming.” heyes’s inclusion of a “coda” at the end of anaesthetics evokes its latin meaning of “tail” or “edge” (cauda), trailing behind her feminist method of (re)working with case studies and the irreducibility of individual experiences. hemmings argues that when we frame a text or an author as “overcoming” a problem, the “political grammar of feminist narratives” reiterates a methodological essentialism, positioning a fixed, potentially heroic subject of the narrative as one tells a story. heyes (2020, 142) points to exactly this imposition in another register, saying that “in foucault’s rendering a life and its author are in theory immanent to each other, this position quickly gets lost in discussions of agency, which inflate self-sovereignty and overstate the scope and value of choice, action, and (for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 feminists especially) transgression.” further, hemmings (2011, 195) argues that we must abandon the “fantasy of neutrality” that covers over our affective attachments to particular thinkers, their works, and how we tell stories of their interrelatedness. hemmings suggests that a return to first-person experiences can challenge these dominant teleologies because they offer multiple overlapping perspectives and affects towards texts (13). this is in explicit tension with dominant norms of academic philosophical writing (we speak of ideas, not personal relationships!) and academic neoliberal professionalization, where we must tell objective, linear stories of our research impact and how it will solve complex social problems, while at the same time “breaking new ground” in our disciplines. when i turn towards my multiple and overlapping experiences of anaesthetics, i’m confronted with the kinds of temporal and affective markers hemmings describes. i especially couldn’t tell a neutral or objective story about anaesthetics even if i put on my most impressive analytic philosopher hat. by now, my meta-framing of this special section should signal a hesitation, one relating to relational networks and affective ties to the author: from 2007 to 2014 cressida heyes served as my dissertation supervisor. most if not all who read this will have a grasp on how affective and formative this relationship can be, especially if one undertakes this relationship ethically, deliberately, and with extraordinary humour, as cressida does. it is said that the mark of an effective mentor is the ability to access the mentor’s imagined voice in one’s inner monologue. writing this introduction with the internalized voice of my mentor—who is also the text’s author—prompted, to put it mildly, a phenomenology of splitting. shifting and sifting between and amongst my imagined thinking voices—me, my advisor, the text, my experiences of its development, professional and philosophical norms, guardrails of past experiences— i sat to write on the work but could not write in proposed form. this is the point of feminist risk where we must claim, i think, how we are relationally and affectively invested in figures and thinkers, our schools of thought, our style of philosophy, and our forms of participation in the profession, including such influential relationships as supervisor/supervisee.2 2 i am deeply indebted to ethel tungohan, whose podcast academic aunties (2021– present) highlights these relational networks and at the same time cultivates communities of care for navigating exclusions in the academy. (see michael rancic, “academic aunties provides a community of care,” university affairs, february 15, 2023, https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/academic-aunties-provid es-a-community-of-care/.) rodier –introduction to the fpq symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 it is extremely common for former students to write on or edit the work of their supervisors,3 yet philosophers rarely discuss in the open the ongoing impact of these affective and relational attachments when doing so—they remain in the background. these relationships are referenced, if at all, as past (and we find ourselves in the objective/neutral/independent present), even though so-called historical anecdotes about philosophical figures and lineages are retold and shape the present. it is puzzling that we do not speak more openly or often about these relationships of influence, since situating thinkers in temporal relationships is a foundational practice in the discipline, whether they are of direct pedagogical influence (socrates, plato, aristotle) or mutual influences (arendt and heidegger, sartre and beauvoir) or as a respondent (kant and hume, sartre and husserl). how we tell stories of influence (and we do) often maps progress narratives where a new generation of academics create a break with the past as we slowly shelve anachronistic work. given that feminist philosophy is a relatively new area in western philosophy, its framing and affective storytelling practices are of particular importance as we consider who are figures of impact or influence and why. as someone who has studied simone de beauvoir in great depth, my sense is that the stories we tell about feminist philosophers and their works profoundly shape not just the wider discipline but how we find our intellectual networks in philosophy. for example, my dependence on beauvoir’s feminist existentialphenomenological method sustains the frame through which i understand philosophy—i’m deeply indebted to her method of philosophizing by way of reflecting on first-personal accounts. beauvoir is perhaps a perfect case of what happens to feminist philosophers with what hemmings labels “star status,” where a feminist thinker is “heterocited” as a dependant thinker, one whose primary and exclusive influence is a male/masculine precursor and their dependence is used as a way of marking a shift away from feminism (2011, 164, 167).4 heterocitation in philosophy has a self-perpetuating irony to it since most feminist philosophers are required to be fluent in a white male/masculine cannon through which to form oneself and find philosophical tools and footing in the discipline. beauvoir is my own “touchstone” figure, signifying a generational shift in some parts of feminist philosophy. this generational shift itself has had considerable impact on the understanding of 3 just as i prepare to publish this, i have found that heyes has published a chapter on the public philosophy of her dissertation cosupervisor, james tully: “justification, pluralism, and disciplinary discontents; or, leaving philosophy” in dimitrios karmis and jocelyn maclure’s civic freedom in an age of diversity: the public philosophy of james tully (heyes 2023). 4 for a sustained discussion of beauvoir’s citational politics, see my article “la grande sartreuse? re-citing beauvoir in feminist theory” (rodier 2015). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 beauvoir as citationally dependant on sartre. does the shift away from dependence then move us towards heroic stories about beauvoir? given that feminist philosophers are often described as merely deriving or applying the work of their male intellectual precursors, how do we critically retell stories about their intellectual labour and development of ideas? when i was considering how to discuss heyes’s “intellectual trajectory,” i kept coming back to her touchstone figures, wittgenstein and foucault—both figures whose methods signify breaks with dominant philosophical norms. one way in which i can frame heyes’s engagement with these two precursors is internal to their recursive philosophical methods. for example, heyes’s use of wittgenstein’s “aspectival captivity” returns her to examine ontological “pictures” of how things must be, and experiments with philosophical practices trying to shift the conditions that make these pictures possible. likewise, foucault’s focus on knowledge/power regimes, revealing techniques, and contingencies of producing “the subject” also point us to meta-commitments, explaining why self-transformations can be understood, i think, as a feminist metaethical project. grappling with the limits of entrenched ontologies in self-transformations, heyes (2007, 18) observes that many of our attempts at resistance to oppressive norms “may inadvertently be premised on the same grammar and serve to entrench them yet further into our form of life.” this makes sense of why heyes’s philosophical approach is a sustained seeking out of sites to probe the limits of how we can think these ambivalences while resisting oppression (whether in political uses of “woman,” the relationship of the self and the body, or the role of nonexperience in feminist politics). these related cases demonstrate a deliberate feminist selection of life experiences through which to develop and refine recursive method of philosophical examination that holds the potential to shift their embodied meanings and political uses. the genealogical phenomenological method demonstrated in anaesthetics, i think, signals somewhat of a shift towards adapting and inventing critical tools more specifically for the historical moment it is developed to address. heyes develops these case studies around specific feminist ambivalences within forms of gendered subjectivity, specifically those in which dominant norms for hypervigilant (feminist) agency carry with them interrelated experiences of “checking out” in feminist/feminine experience. her method continues the work of provoking transformative understandings of feminist ambivalences amongst multiple grammars of agency and freedom (heyes 2010, 232), but develops it for postdisciplinary feminist contexts unanticipated by foucault or wittgenstein. an area of the monograph that is not discussed at length in the commentaries is chapter 5, “child, birth: an aesthetic.” this work discusses a rare topic in feminist philosophy, and it addresses an even more rare embodied affective relation, too, which is storytelling about one’s birth experience. perhaps, like me, you gleefully flip to an author’s acknowledgements to get glimpses into their “real life” or writing rodier –introduction to the fpq symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 process. when i did so, i was delighted to see cressida’s acknowledgements cite their own dissertation cosupervisor marguerite deslauriers, who said, on learning heyes was pregnant, “that this undergoing would be a great gift to philosophy” (heyes 2020, ix). amongst the cohort of her students at the time, we (rightly) joked that pregnancy and birth would be in the next book. this generational connection strikes me as particular to a feminist philosophical story—an embodied supervisor, reproductive labour, and one’s earthly, messy body united through overlapping temporal connections, manifest in writing. in anaesthetics, heyes writes: when i was pregnant i longed to read a birth story written by a feminist phenomenologist. what is it like? . . . [i hoped] for a richer, more evocative language to capture the lived experience of childbirth—one that managed to be self-conscious of its own historicity and politics, while not only telling a historical or political story; one that used the conceptual tools feminist phenomenologists have developed without denying the specificity of the body. (134–35) my time as cressida’s student was marked by this experience and writing, since her son was born in my second year of her supervision. subsequently, i attended talks and read papers on placenta eating and epistemologies of ignorance, birth, and pain, all the while knowing it would one day find a way into a monograph that took the analysis into new directions. despite and in light of these many discussions and scholarly engagements, i became pregnant one month after defending my dissertation. it is hard to put into words the interplay between forming my philosophical capacities with a supervisor as they craft work on a life-altering embodied experience and then undertaking it myself after such a transformation. stories such as these—that centre life experiences unique to forms of gendered subjectivity—provide, as heyes (1997a, 2) writes, a corrective to the “psychological—pathological?—dissociation from the ethical and political complexities” that shape how we do philosophy. heyes’s insistence on philosophical engagement with what are normally excluded embodied realities shows the levels to which her commitments to grasp new ways of doing philosophy goes. this creative risk signals new forms of crafting oneself in the discipline, allowing for space to engage embodied networks of intellectual inheritances. my birth story shared similar experiences of pain, such as cressida describes, but otherwise did not resemble her experiences. i came up against agency-denying medical violence that left me physically and psychologically very fragile. shortly after giving birth, cressida visited me at my home. i explained how, step by step, my nonnormative body signalled risk, triggering life-altering pain, interventions, and violations. these interventions were characterized by a palpable binary substitution feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 of my human value with the value of my child’s life. with my eyes full of tears and a leaky, swollen body full of surgical staples, we had a long discussion, mostly with cressida listening, holding my seven-pound newborn, who was struggling to gain weight, with his fresh newborn skin flaking off his wrinkled tiny body. after this long discussion, one thing cressida said stuck to me and reoriented me to the “rough ground” of my individualistic thinking (heyes 2002). she said many supportive and helpful things, but in the end sighed and said, “birth has become a place where we fight over life and death” (heyes, in discussion with the author, 2015). this drew my attention to the biopolitical forces had escalated from questions about risk to surgical and medical techniques on my/the body in ways that outstripped my possibilities for agency. sharing private moments of postpartum pain and recovery, we take our philosophical minds with us—into spaces wholly walled off from the academic world of philosophy but in which we find rich opportunities to shatter pictures that hold us captive. my work is ostensibly citationally dependant on beauvoir, but my citational dependence on heyes, animated by my intellectual formation and ongoing relational, embodied, and affective networks, creates and maintains much of the implicit ground of my intellectual projects. how and where can we bring forth this implicit background in our work? tracing interpretive approaches to beauvoir, linda zerilli (2012) describes affective tendencies for framing feminist intellectuals as either flawless foremothers or helpless tools of the dominant patriarchal order. she notes that beauvoir is no damsel in distress needing rescue! her methodological point is that when we go searching for predefined interpretations and prescriptive politics from feminist philosophers, we snuff out the ambiguity necessary for a vital feminist politics. for zerilli (2012, n.p.), beauvoir’s texts “are neither feminist nor anti-feminist: rather they open up and onto the space of feminine contradictions; they give voice to a feminist subjectivity that is at best at odds with itself.” my own grappling with the limits and ambivalences of introducing this symposium highlight, i hope, the level to which a form of methodological bilingualism is required in feminist philosophy and also in the wider contemporary neoliberal university. my initial proposal spoke to the form of dominant philosophical training that has strategically enabled my entry into the profession, but the introduction i produced, i hope, does justice to the ways in which i’ve been taught to critically resist that training. giving voice to these embodied relations has kept me coming back to cressida’s comment on how these ambivalences play out when we undertake our writing processes: “i certainly struggled deeply with the problem that philosophical writing is a mode of transformation that works both through and against itself, and doubly so when embodied practices are at stake” (heyes 2010, 231). without putting too fine of a point on it, i hope that the landscape of heyes’s thinking i’ve laid out fills in more of anaesthetics for readers, guiding them to key points in her method. fifteen years after first becoming her student, i am rodier –introduction to the fpq symposium on cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 grateful i could (re)write myself through this engagement with her thinking—re-citing anaesthetics through the affective and scholarly ties that tether me to it.5 references hemmings, clare. 2011. why stories matter: the political grammar of feminist theory. durham, nc: duke university press. heyes, cressida j. 1997. “‘back to the rough ground!’: wittgenstein, essentialism, and feminist methods.” phd diss., mcgill university. https://www.collectionscana da.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/nq36981.pdf. ———. 2000. line drawings: defining women through feminist practice. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 2002. “‘back to the rough ground!’: wittgenstein, essentialism, and feminist methods.” in feminist interpretations of ludwig wittgenstein, edited by naomi scheman and peg o’connor, 195–212. university park: pennsylvania university press. ———. 2003. introduction to the grammar of politics: wittgenstein and political philosophy, edited by cressida j. heyes, 1–13. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 2007. self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2010. “ressentiment, agency, freedom: reflecting on responses to selftransformations.” symposium on cressida heyes’s self-transformations: foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. hypatia 25, no. 1 (winter): 229–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2009.01092_2.x. ———. 2020. anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2023. “justification, pluralism, and disciplinary discontents; or, leaving philosophy.” in civic freedom in an age of diversity: the public philosophy of 5 i want to thank the reviewers of this special section for careful and generous attention to a larger than usual task. thank you to everyone at feminist philosophy quarterly for a smooth process and a welcoming venue for this symposium. my thanks to anna mudde for many discussions on supervision in feminist philosophy. thanks to my colleague nisha nath for critical questions on citational politics. my cohort of feminist philosophers sustain my courage to write, especially angela thachuk, catherine clune-taylor, megan dean, joshua st. pierre, and emily douglas. lastly, my perpetual gratitude to cressida heyes for provoking in us alternative and novel ways of being. shine on! feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 james tully, edited by dimitrios karmis and jocelyn maclure, 41–63. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queens university press. rodier, kristin anne. 2015. “la grande sartreuse? re-citing beauvoir in feminist theory.” atlantis: critical studies in gender, culture, and social justice 37 (1): 168–75. https://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/view/1225. zerilli, linda. 1998. “doing without knowing: feminism’s politics of the ordinary.” political theory 26, no. 4 (august): 435–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917 98026004001. ———. 2012. “feminist theory without solace.” theory & event 15 (2). https://muse .jhu.edu/article/478360. kristin rodier is an assistant professor of philosophy at athabasca university. her current writing explores a critical phenomenology of the body that intersects fatness, gender, ability, and race. her research is grounded in feminist philosophy and investigates changing selfhood in light of time, habit, and gender oppression. rodier title page rodier final format eating as a self-shaping activity: the case of young women’s vegetarianism and eating disorders feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation dean. megan a. 2021. “eating as a self-shaping activity: the case of young women’s vegetarianism and eating disorders.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (3). article 2. 2021 eating as a self-shaping activity: the case of young women’s vegetarianism and eating disorders megan a. dean michigan state university deanmeg2@msu.edu dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 eating as a self-shaping activity: the case of young women’s vegetarianism and eating disorders megan a. dean abstract this paper contends that eating shapes the self; that is, our practices and understandings of eating can cultivate, reinforce, or diminish important aspects of the self, including agency, values, capacities, affects, and self-understandings. i argue that these self-shaping effects should be included in our ethical analyses and evaluations of eating. i make a case for this claim through an analysis and critique of the hypothesis that young women’s vegetarianism is a risk, sign, or “cover” for eating disorders or disordered eating. after outlining the relevant empirical literature, i suggest that the evidence for this hypothesis is inconclusive. given this uncertainty, we should consider the risks of making a mistake when accepting or rejecting this understanding of young women’s eating. i argue that these risks importantly include negative effects on the self, such as damage to moral and epistemic agency. along with other potential consequences of mistakenly accepting the hypothesis, these effects give us reason to reject it pending more conclusive research. overall, this paper offers a philosophical intervention into the debate over the relationship between vegetarianism and eating disorders while illustrating the ethical importance and relevance of eating as a self-shaping activity. keywords: food ethics, eating, vegetarianism, eating disorders, disordered eating, dieting, agency, self, young women, weight-loss that what we eat matters ethically is, perhaps, a trivial claim. it is an unquestioned assumption at the center of much public conversation and academic debate about food ethics, grounding discussions about why, exactly, eating free-range chickens, leafy greens, or non-fair trade chocolate matters, how much it matters, and what we as individuals or collectives are obliged to do about it. but it is not just what we eat that matters ethically; it is also how we eat and how we understand that eating. in this paper, i argue that one reason why our practices and understandings of eating are ethically important is because they shape the self. by shape the self i mean that they can cultivate, reinforce, or diminish important aspects of the self, including an eater’s agency, values, capacities, affects, and self-understandings. though it has feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 been largely overlooked in food ethics, i contend that this self-shaping power of eating is ethically significant and should be included in analyses and evaluations of eating. i make a case for these claims through an analysis and critique of what i call the “vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis.” this hypothesis, put forward in a body of empirical diet research, is based on apparent correlations between adolescent girls’ and young women’s vegetarianism and disordered eating or clinical eating disorders. it posits that vegetarianism in these groups should be understood as a potential risk, sign, or “cover” for dangerous pathological eating. rates of eating disorders and disordered eating are high in these populations and are difficult to identify, especially early on when intervention would be most effective (le grange and loeb 2007; jones and brown 2016). if vegetarianism is related to eating disorders as the literature suggests, this gives clinicians and families a promising sign or flag for further investigation and intervention and could help prevent a great deal of suffering. however, the evidence in support of the hypothesis is inconclusive. some studies report conflicting findings, and critics have raised methodological concerns about the research, undermining the validity of its conclusions. i suggest that this uncertainty is not simply an academic matter to be left aside pending further research. drawing on the concept of inductive risk, i contend that incorrectly accepting or rejecting the hypothesis, including implicit rejection through inaction, can have ethically significant consequences. if we reject the hypothesis and are wrong to do so, we may miss or delay diagnoses of disordered eating and eating disorders, leading to suffering and even deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. if we accept the hypothesis but we are wrong to do so, the implications are more varied. some track traditional ethical concerns; for example, acceptance might discourage people from becoming vegetarian, and more meat-eating may mean increased environmental destruction and suffering of nonhuman animals and slaughterhouse workers. my focus will be on the implications that follow from the ways that eating shapes the self. drawing from feminist work on narrative agency and identity, i argue that wrongly accepting the hypothesis can damage the moral and epistemic agency of young women and girls. i then build on feminist critiques of weight-loss dieting and foucauldian work on eating to suggest that the self-shaping effects of what i call “ethical vegetarianism” give us additional reasons to be cautious of discouraging it. while i take the risks of disordered eating and eating disorders very seriously, my analysis gives us reason to reject the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis pending more conclusive research. my overall goal, however, is to show that recognizing eating as a self-shaping activity illuminates ethically significant outcomes that should factor into our analysis and decision-making. without considering these effects on the self we cannot make a fully informed and responsible dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 choice to reject or accept the hypothesis. therefore, in addition to intervening in the debate over the relationship between vegetarianism and eating disorders, this paper aims to illustrate the ethical importance and relevance of eating as a self-shaping activity. i will begin with an in-depth look at the hypothesis itself and then turn to my analysis and critique. 1. the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis since the 1980s, a growing body of research suggests that, for young women and adolescent girls, vegetarianism is correlated with disordered eating or clinical eating disorders (kadambari, gowers, and crisp 1986; o’connor et al. 1987; worsley and skrzypiec 1997; neumark-sztainer et al. 1997; gilbody, kirk, and hill 1999; martins, pliner, and o’connor 1999; lindeman, stark, and latvala 2000; sullivan and damani 2000; perry et al. 2001, 2002; mclean and barr 2003; klopp, heiss, and smith 2003; baş, karabudak, and kiziltan 2005; curtis and comer 2006; trautmann et al. 2008; robinson-o’brien et al. 2009; bardone-cone et al. 2012; zuromski et al. 2015). studies characterize this correlation in different ways, with some suggesting that vegetarianism is a sign of or risk for these eating behaviours and attitudes (perry et al. 2001; klopp, heiss, and smith 2003; trautmann et al. 2008; robinson-o’brien et al. 2009; bardone-cone et al. 2012), and some asserting that girls and young women may use vegetarianism to conceal their disordered eating from others (martins, pliner, and o’connor 1999; sullivan and damani 2000; klopp, heiss, and smith 2003; robinson-o’brien et al. 2009; zuromski et al. 2015). while there are important and interesting questions to be asked about each of these possibilities,1 for the purposes of this paper, i will group them together under this general claim: there is some important link between vegetarianism in young women and adolescent girls and eating disorders and/or disordered eating. i call this the “vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis,” or “ved hypothesis” for short. by “eating disorders,” i mean clinical eating disorders as defined by the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: dsm-5 (american psychiatric association 2013), including disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. eating disorders are associated with some of the “highest levels of medical and social disability of any psychiatric disorder” (klump et al. 2009, 100), and can be lethal; anorexia nervosa in particular has one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric disorder (klump et al. 2009, 100; smink, van hoeken, and hoek 2012, 411). “disordered eating” refers to abnormal and damaging eating attitudes and behaviours that may overlap with clinical eating disorders but do not warrant a 1 whether this link takes the form of a risk, cover, or sign are distinct possibilities suggested by the literature, but they are generally not disentangled (curtis and comer 2006; martins, pliner, and o’connor 1999). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 diagnosis (seitz 2018; anderson 2018). disordered eating may not rise to the level of a clinical disorder but can nonetheless have a significantly negative impact on health and well-being. while eating disorders and disordered eating can affect anyone at any age, they are in general more common in women and girls than in men and boys (national eating disorders association 2017; striegel-moore et al. 2009; hoek and van hoeken 2003), and many forms of disordered eating and eating disorders develop during adolescence and in young adulthood (le grange and loeb 2007).2 evidence for the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis includes correlations between vegetarianism in young women and girls and diagnosed clinical eating disorders or their features. early studies of individuals with diagnosed clinical eating disorders showed high rates of vegetarianism within this population (kadambari, gowers, and crisp 1986; o’connor et al. 1987). more recent work that focused on broader populations suggests that women with a history of an eating disorder are more likely to be or have been vegetarian than those without such a history (bardone-cone et al. 2012). one study found that adolescent and young women vegetarians are at greatest risk for binge eating with loss of control relative to nonvegetarians (robinson-o’brien et al. 2009, 654), and according to another study, women vegetarians reported more abnormal eating attitudes and had significantly higher scores for three out of the five fundamental aspects of anorexia 2 while almost all the studies discussed in this paper focused on young women and adolescent girls, men and boys are also affected by eating disorders and disordered eating (striegel-moore et al. 2009; muise, stein, and arbess 2003; strother et al. 2012; national eating disorders association 2018). it should also be noted that the studies discussed in this paper did not report whether participants were cis or trans, nor did they report on sexuality. trans individuals may have higher rates of eating disorders and disordered eating compared to cisgender people (diemer et al. 2015). while sexuality does not appear to have a significant effect on the rates of eating disorders and disordered eating among cis women, cis gay and bisexual men have higher rates of disordered eating and eating disorders than heterosexual men (calzo et al. 2017; feldman and meyer 2007; mcclain and peebles 2016), and one recent study suggests that sexual and gender minorities in general experience more severe eating disorder symptoms than their cisgender heterosexual counterparts (mensinger et al. 2020). most but not all of the studies discussed here noted the race of study participants, and among those, the majority of participants were white/caucasian. there is a prevalent stereotype that eating disorders and disordered eating do not affect black girls and women or women and girls of colour (national eating disorders association 2018). however, black women and girls and women and girls of colour do experience eating disorders and disordered eating, and lower rates of diagnosed clinical disorders in these populations may be due to underdiagnosis (gordon et al. 2006). dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 nervosa than nonvegetarian women (lindeman, stark, and latvala 2000). studies have also found correlations between vegetarian diets and dietary restraint (gilbody, kirk, and hill 1999; mclean and barr 2003; martins, pliner, and o’connor 1999), a commonly used marker for disordered eating. restraint is sometimes defined as “conscious monitoring of food intake for weight control purposes” (curtis and comer 2006, 92), and may also refer to restricted eating behaviours (heatherton et al. 1988). perry and colleagues found that most adolescent vegetarians reported that the primary motivation for their diet was weight control or weight loss (perry et al. 2002, 436; see also trautmann et al. 2008). weight-loss dieting is a central risk factor for eating disorders in any population (golden et al. 2016), but this finding offers specific support for the ved hypothesis given that vegetarians with a history of a clinical eating disorder were likely to be motivated by weight loss whereas those without an eating disorder history were not (bardone-cone et al. 2012). support for the “vegetarianism as a cover story” piece of the ved hypothesis comes from studies finding that vegetarians reported higher levels of dietary restraint than nonvegetarians but also claimed that they were not motivated by weight loss or control. researchers surmise that disordered eaters may therefore be using vegetarianism as a socially acceptable means of food avoidance (lindeman, stark, and latvala 2000, 162–63; martins, pliner, and o’connor 1999). as sullivan and damani (2000, 265) put it: “vegetarianism does provide the perfect alibi for dietary restriction, and might therefore be a logical starting point for individuals who wish to seriously limit their food intake.” some researchers speculate that adolescents in particular may use vegetarianism as a way to hide disordered eating from their parents and guardians, whereas young women who are away from home and have more control over their own eating may have other, potentially healthy motivations to eat a vegetarian diet (forestell, spaeth, and kane 2012, 324; robinson-o’brien et al. 2009; fisak et al. 2006, 199). taken together, this evidence supports the claim that there is some significant connection between vegetarianism in young women and girls and disordered eating attitudes and behaviours—a connection that many researchers claim warrants action on the parts of clinicians, parents, and caregivers. while some researchers are careful to note that the data do not suggest vegetarian diets are eating disorders or cause them (perry et al. 2002, 436), many caution practitioners and parents to attend to adolescents and young women who express interest in or “experiment with” vegetarianism. some authors emphasize the importance of interrogating girls’ and young women’s motivations for vegetarianism in light of the finding that being motivated by weight loss seems to increase the likelihood of disordered eating or eating disorders: for example, “when an adolescent begins a vegetarian diet or expresses interest in making this dietary choice, a close examination of his or her general eating attitude is warranted” (bardone-cone et al. 2012, 1250–51), and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 “when guiding adolescent and young adult vegetarians in proper nutrition and meal planning, it may also be important to investigate an individual’s motives for choosing a vegetarian diet” (robinson-o’brien et al. 2009, 655). but because some vegetarians may be using vegetarianism as a cover for their disordered eating, their reported motivations may not be trustworthy. zuromski and colleagues suggest that intentions may be irrelevant: “though individuals may endorse motivations for vegetarianism unrelated to disordered eating, this behavior may still functionally be related to eating pathology” (zuromski et al. 2015, 26). therefore, additional monitoring and surveillance of eating may be warranted to ascertain what is really going on with this vegetarian eating (perry et al. 2002, 436). 1.1. an uncertain hypothesis not all the studies on this topic support the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis. some found that nonvegetarians had higher rates of disordered attitudes and behaviours than vegetarians or vegans (heiss, coffino, and hormes 2017; janelle and barr 1995), while others found no remarkable differences between these groups (fisak et al. 2006). and some compelling critical work suggests that much of the literature suffers from significant methodological issues, providing reason to doubt their findings. for example, the definition of vegetarianism used in the literature is not only inconsistent but often extremely broad. many of the studies include semivegetarians—that is, people who eat chicken and/or fish—alongside stricter vegetarians who do not eat any animal flesh at all. ostensibly because of small sample sizes, these different types of vegetarians are often lumped together, and in fact several studies’ samples of vegetarians are comprised of a majority of semivegetarians (worsley and skrzypiec 1997; gilbody, kirk, and hill 1999; perry et al. 2002; klopp, heiss, and smith 2003; dean 2014). we might wonder if semivegetarians are properly considered vegetarians at all. laura wright (2015, 104) insists that “one can no more be semivegetarian than one can be semipregnant.” ontological concerns about the category aside, the characterization of semivegetarians as vegetarians may skew study results (curtis and comer 2006, 92; heiss, coffino, and hormes 2017, 130; see also forestell 2018). heiss, coffino, and hormes (2017, 130) suggest that studies that report higher levels of eating disorder symptoms among vegetarians typically group all vegetarians together, including semivegetarians. and some research that studied semivegetarians separately suggests that correlations between vegetarianism and restrictive eating may be particular to semivegetarians alone.3 for example, one study found 3 perry et al. found that true vegetarians were at lower risk for “unhealthy and extreme weight control behaviors” than semivegetarians, though they found that vegetarians overall were at higher risk than omnivores (perry et al. 2001). this study dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 semivegetarians to have higher indicators of disordered eating than any other group (timko, hormes, and chubski 2012), while another found that semivegetarians were more cognitively restrained—that is, they engaged in more conscious monitoring of their eating with the intention to restrict—than both omnivores and strict vegetarians (forestell, spaeth, and kane 2012, 323). another methodological issue is the appropriateness of measures of eatingdisordered attitudes and behaviours. measures of dietary restraint may be inappropriate for studying vegetarian populations in contexts where vegetarianism is uncommon and meat is considered an essential feature of most meals.4 timko, hormes, and chubski (2012, 983) suggest that the presence of restraint in these vegetarians—which would include most if not all of the populations in the studies under discussion—might be an artifact of removing meat from their diet in a meateating culture rather than an indication of disordered eating.5 for example, one study of vegans and omnivores used two different tools to measure dietary restraint. one tool, the eating disorder examination-questionnaire, showed that vegans had generally healthier behaviours and attitudes than omnivores, but the other tool, the dutch eating behavior questionnaire, showed the opposite (heiss, coffino, and hormes 2017, 134). the authors suggest that the latter tool could be artificially inflating vegan scores by using questions like, “do you watch exactly what you eat?” to indicate restraint. but this question would also capture the attentiveness often necessary for vegans to ensure that they do not eat foods that contain animal products when living in an omnivorous society—similar to the ways that someone with an allergy to or intolerance for common ingredients needs to be attentive to what they are eating at all times.6 was unique in that it included data on vegetarian male adolescents, finding that they were particularly at risk for these weight control behaviours. 4 wright (2015, 100) argues that the nonnormative nature of veganism in us culture leads to its construction as “deviant,” which encourages its association with pathological eating behaviours: “veganism—as the most ‘severe’ form of vegetarianism—is rendered disordered by virtue of the rhetoric that constructs it, quite simply because in a culture that is so fixated on a meat-based diet as standard, the language of deviance is the only language available with which to render nonnormative dietary choices.” 5 the majority of studies were done in the united states, with a few in england, canada, and australia, and one each in sweden and turkey. 6 one recent paper on links between celiac disease and disordered eating (tokatly latzer et al. 2020) flags the inaptness of certain questions on the eating attitudes test 26 for those with celiac disease (e.g., “i avoid food with high carbohydrate content” and “i engage in dieting behavior”). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 the authors of another study note that one commonly used tool, the eating attitudes test, straightforwardly asks respondents if they “enjoy eating meat,” and that negative responses are “intended to indicate dietary restraint” (fisak et al. 2006, 199). however, not all the findings in support of the ved hypothesis are subject to this critique: mclean and barr (2003) updated the three-factor eating questionnaire (tfeq) to avoid such straightforwardly problematic issues, and they still found that those with high levels of dietary restraint were more likely to be vegetarian. these mixed findings and methodological problems produce considerable uncertainty about the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis. we have a situation of inductive risk. due to the nature of inductive logic, we can never be entirely certain about the truth or falsity of a given hypothesis. however much evidence of whatever quality we have in support of a hypothesis, there is always a risk of error: we might accept a false hypothesis or reject a true one. while inductive risk is at play in the acceptance or rejection of any claim, there is a particularly high risk of an error when the evidence is so uncertain. according to heather douglas (2000, 562), carl hempel argues that given this risk of error, proper inductive reasoning requires that we assign value to the possible outcomes of an error and factor these evaluations in to our decision of whether to accept or reject the hypothesis. in some cases, the values used to weight these outcomes will be epistemic values, such as consistency with established theory, empirical adequacy, and a wide predictive scope (douglas 2013). but in situations where the outcomes of an error include nonepistemic consequences—that is, practical or ethical consequences such as use of resources or harms—we must use nonepistemic values to weight these consequences. as douglas (2000, 559) explains, failure to do so means that our reasoning will be “flawed and incomplete.”7 in this case, if we were scientists, we could do more research and try to get better data that would help us move forward with more confidence. indeed, many of the studies’ authors call for this considering the mixed findings in the literature. in the meantime, however, we—especially family members, health care providers, and others in care relationships with young women and girls—must decide to accept or reject the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis. this is because incorrectly accepting or rejecting the ved hypothesis, including implicit rejection through inaction, can have significant ethical implications. we need to lay out these 7 there is debate about the nature of the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values and their role regarding inductive risk (elliott and mckaughan 2014; elliott 2011, 2017; steel 2010, 2013; elliott and steel 2017; elliott and richards 2017; hicks, magnus, and wright 2020), though i do not take it to impact my argument here. dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 implications so that we can evaluate them and incorporate those evaluations into our decision-making process. if we reject the ved hypothesis but it is actually true, we may delay diagnoses or miss cases of eating disorders and disordered eating that would otherwise be caught, and the well-being and lives of girls and young women could be at risk. this is a very bad outcome. but what if the ved hypothesis is false and we treat it as true? the remainder of this paper will address this question in detail. i begin with some considerations based on more traditional characterizations of the ethical importance of eating and then turn to those that follow from the ways eating shapes the self. 2. the risks of a false positive one common way to think about the ethical importance of eating is that eating has ethically relevant effects on the animals that are used for or to produce food, food workers and producers, and the environment. call this an “eating affects others” perspective.8 many people think that vegetarianism has better effects than omnivorism on others because, for example, eating mainly or only plants produces less suffering of nonhuman animals and slaughterhouse workers, and less damage to the environment.9 some ecofeminists also argue that meat-eating enacts or reinforces various interlocking forms of domination including sexism, racism, and speciesism, while vegetarianism or veganism can combat them (gaard 2002). with these concerns in mind, we might worry that one of the potential effects of wrongly accepting the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis is that eaters may be directly or indirectly discouraged from becoming or remaining vegetarian.10 8 this name is intentionally vague, as there are many ways to think about how eating affects others, which effects matter ethically, how the effects should be weighted, and so on; we might take a utilitarian approach, a deontological one, or an ecofeminist approach, to name a few. for the purposes of this argument, we just need the general claim that eating can have ethically relevant effects on others, where others is construed broadly to include the environment. 9 see doggett’s (2018) “moral vegetarianism” for various examples of this view. 10 someone might object that accepting the ved hypothesis should not lead anyone to actively prevent a woman or girl from eating a vegetarian diet because the research does not suggest that vegetarianism causes eating disorders or is one itself. however, many people fail to distinguish correlation and causation, which could motivate them to intervene in young women and girls’ vegetarian diets out of fear that vegetarianism is, or could lead to, disordered eating or eating disorders. and there is some speculation within the research that vegetarianism serves as a form of restriction that may enable disordered eating. gilbody, kirk, and hill (1990, 90) suggest that vegetarianism’s “rules” and categorization of foods as permissible and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 for instance, if the ved hypothesis is accepted, vegetarianism would be associated with pathological eating, making it less appealing to anyone who might otherwise consider it, but perhaps especially to those already at risk of eating disorders.11 parents might refuse to support or even allow their child’s vegetarianism out of fear that the diet enables or could lead to an eating disorder. fewer vegetarians could mean more harm to nonhuman animals and slaughterhouse workers, could cause more damage to the environment, and may undermine resistance to various forms of oppression. another common way to think about the ethical importance of eating is from an “eating autonomy” perspective. on this view there are many values or goods in eating and multiple legitimate ways of ranking those values, but what is most important about eating is that it offers us the opportunity to exercise autonomy understood as the freedom to act—and eat—without undue interference (resnik 2010).12 girls and young women could be autonomously pursuing any number of values with their vegetarian eating, including care for animals, concern for the environment or their health, ecofeminist values, or the desire to be unique or different from their families. if the vegetarianism and eating disorder hypothesis was wrongly accepted, it is possible that some families and medical professionals may intervene on young women and girls’ eating and discourage or even prevent them from pursuing a vegetarian diet because of the association with disordered eating. but this could violate young women and girls’ autonomy. finally, consider a “valuable eating experiences” account of eating. as anne barnhill and colleagues argue, eating can be an exercise of autonomy and valuable for that reason, but a food experience can also have hedonic, cultural, or other value regardless of the autonomous nature of that eating (barnhill et al. 2014). some food experiences may even be more valuable when they are not autonomous (barnhill et nonpermissible may be used to enable and justify food avoidance, preventing recovery from disordered eating, while zuromski et al. (2015) suggest that vegetarianism can be linked to disordered eating even if the eater herself does not realize that. therefore, while preventing young women and girls from eating vegetarian may not be entirely justified by the ved hypothesis, it is a plausible outcome. 11 or, if as wright suggests, vegetarianism is already associated with deviant pathological eating in omnivorous cultures like the united states (wright 2015, 100), the association would be all the stronger. 12 the account of freedom deployed by resnik in the cited article is extremely narrow, as critics like gostin (2010) point out. nevertheless, something like resnik’s view is central to public debate about food ethics in the united states and so is worth considering here. dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 al. 2014, 197); for instance, the pleasure of eating several pieces of cheesecake while watching golden girls reruns may be in part constituted by the fact it is “mindless,” or otherwise lacking in the criteria generally assumed to be necessary for autonomous choice. vegetarian eating may offer valuable experiences that could be lost if young women and girls are discouraged from eating that way. such eating could offer the pleasures of being unique or rebelling against one’s family or mainstream culture, of experimenting with new foods and cuisines, or the social value of connecting to new communities through vegetarian clubs or online communities.13 this value could be incidental to the autonomous choices of the eater: not something she actively or consciously pursues, but nonetheless valuable. in short, if wrongly accepting the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis discourages or prevents young women and girls from vegetarian eating, then it could deprive them of valuable eating experiences. 2.1. eating as a self-shaping activity: damage to agency each of these perspectives captures something important about what is ethically at stake with a false positive. but eating is not only a way to autonomously pursue values or create valuable experiences, nor is it simply a way of affecting other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. it is also a way of shaping the self.14 how we eat, and how we understand that eating, can cultivate, reinforce, or diminish particular aspects of the self. i will illustrate this by drawing out two ways that a false positive could negatively shape the self: the first focuses on the potential effects of a false positive on moral and epistemic agency, and the second on potential effects on the self more broadly, including affects, capacities, and selfunderstandings. i hold that there is a productive, constructive relationship between eating and agency, by which i mean the ability to be in command of and responsible for one’s life, choices, and actions (kukla 2014). eating is not just an opportunity for eaters to exercise their freedom; practices of eating and ways of understanding eating actually shape, and can enhance or undermine, agency. 13 even in omnivorous contexts like the united states, vegetarianism may not always be an act of rebellion against one’s family. for example, immigrants to the united states from predominantly vegetarian cultures or regions like india might rebel against their families by eating meat. thanks to mabel gergan for this point. 14 the term “self” is not clearly defined within philosophy (olson 2021). i use it here in a broad sense to refer to something more than personal identity over time and as including but not limited to self-understandings, affects, capacities, values, and moral and epistemic agency. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 this claim relies on an understanding of agency, and autonomy in general, as relational. agency is developed within and depends on certain relationships and social conditions. agency requires certain capacities, including the capacity to reflect on one’s own motivations and to change them if desired (mackenzie and stoljar 2000, 13), and the development and exercise of such capacities depends on certain relationships. it is not just the existence of these relationships that matters but also their content or quality. it is particularly important that others perceive an agent as competent and treat them as such, creating space and opportunities, and offering necessary support for the exercise and development of their agency. it is also crucial to have a sense of oneself as a competent and worthy agent (mackenzie and stoljar 2000, 20–21). hilde lindemann (2014) argues that social narratives can shape agency, in part by influencing perceptions of self and others as competent or incompetent agents. as nabina liebow (2016) shows, narratives may also shape agency by characterizing a particular group as good, bad, normal, or deviant agents. i contend that narratives about eating and eaters influence how we understand ourselves and how others treat us in ways that affect our agency. crucially, these understandings can damage agency, undermining capacities, opportunities, and understandings central to constructing and maintaining command of and responsibility for one’s life, choices, and actions, and to being understood as a morally “good” or “normal” agent. there are two narratives at work in the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis that are potentially damaging to agency. first, and most generally, is the narrative that young women and girl vegetarians are potentially disordered eaters or have eating disorders. call this the “eating pathology” narrative. this narrative implies that young women and girls’ vegetarian eating is not the result of a free choice or an expression of their agency, but that their eating agency is compromised by pathology, or by distorted beliefs and perceptions associated with that pathology. this makes them proper objects of concern, medical analysis, and possible intervention. this is especially the case for those women and girls motivated by weight loss or weight control. the second narrative is that because vegetarianism may be used as a “cover,” young women and adolescent girls may be untrustworthy reporters about their eating motivations. not only may their agency be compromised by pathology, but their reported reasons for eating as they do cannot be trusted. call this the “untrustworthiness” narrative. i suggest these narratives can damage agency in four different ways.15 before explaining each in turn, i want to clarify what i mean by “damage to agency.” 15 i first articulated this four-part analysis of damage to agency in “eating identities, ‘unhealthy’ eaters, and damaged agency” (dean 2018). dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 following alisa bierria (2014), i want to avoid the implication that those who are subject to damaging narratives do not have agency or have less agency than others. the damage i identify may be primarily understood as obstacles to particular avenues for developing, exercising, and maintaining agency in general and to what is socially understood as “good” agency in particular. the obstacles i identify specifically block eaters’ ability to exercise, develop, and maintain agency through eating—a path of particular importance in contemporary social contexts which, as we will discuss further, place a great deal of significance on how and what a person eats.16 deprivation of opportunity first, the eating pathology narrative can lead to “deprivation of opportunity” (lindemann nelson 2001, 51); specifically, opportunities to self-direct one’s own eating. having some control over what and how you eat, and having others recognize and respect your choices as an expression of your agency, is an important arena for the development and exercise of agency. it is a basic way to express preferences, values, and identity, and to be recognized as the kind of person who can do so. but the eating pathology narrative can justify depriving young women and girls of this control. if concerned parents or other caregivers associate vegetarianism itself with disordered eating, they may not buy or prepare vegetarian meals, meaning girls and young women would have to purchase and prepare their own food, something they may not have the resources, opportunity, or know-how to do. parents and caregivers may encourage or insist that young women and girls eat meat. they may also take general control over young women and girls’ eating to try to circumvent disordered behaviours, depriving young women and girls of opportunities to eat vegetarian and more generally make their own food choices. infiltrated consciousness when a young woman or girl is treated as a pathological or incompetent eater, someone who cannot be trusted to make safe, responsible decisions about her own eating, she may internalize that narrative, leading to the second type of damage to agency: “infiltrated consciousness” (lindemann nelson 2001, 51). young women and girls may come to believe that their eating choices are contaminated by pathology, and that they should not be trusted to direct their own eating. this self-understanding justifies the limits, constraints, and controls that others might place on their eating. young women and girls may also internalize the association between vegetarianism 16 as i understand it, there may be cases where someone’s agency is diminished, but those subject to damaging narratives often find ways to navigate around these obstacles using what bierria (2014, 140) calls “insurgent agency.” the obstacles are nonetheless problematic and constraining. for more on this point, see khader (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 and disordered eating, making the diet itself seem risky and less attractive, even if it would reflect their values, interests, or concerns. internalizing these views about oneself and about vegetarianism as a diet may mean that young women and girls are not able to express their preferences or live out their values through eating because they take that option off the table “from the inside.” distorted action and damage to epistemic agency the third way that the eating pathology and untrustworthiness narratives might damage agency is by distorting the meaning of young women and girls’ eating. such distorted action is possible because the social meaning of our actions is not entirely authored by us. those who observe our actions interpret the meaning of those actions, and they become, as alisa bierria (2014, 131) calls it, “social authors” of those actions. these observers draw from social resources including narratives to help them interpret actions. when those resources include damaging narratives, then the actions can be distorted: no matter what the actor intended to do, her action gets read as the result of her damaged identity. young women and girls may eat vegetarian out of care for animals, the environment, or health, or they may do so to be different, to distinguish themselves from their families or friends, or to connect with other vegetarians. they may take their own vegetarian eating to express any of these motivations, concerns, and cares. but the eating pathology narrative can contribute to reading that eating as nothing more than disordered eating, nothing more than an expression of pathology. as bierria (2014, 131) points out, someone whose actions are misread can deploy various strategies to try to correct that misreading. one way for young women and girls to trigger reevaluation of their vegetarian eating is for them to explain why they choose to eat that way and what vegetarianism means to them. since some of the researchers encourage parents and clinicians to ask them about their motivations, this opens up an opportunity for young women and girls to correct misreadings of their eating. but the opportunity for reevaluation is highly constrained by the untrustworthiness narrative, especially for adolescents. no matter what adolescent girls say about their reasons for avoiding meat, this narrative frames it as a possible lie or, as zuromski and colleagues suggest, a form of self-deception (zuromski et al. 2015). in this way, the untrustworthiness narrative effectively undermines the epistemic credibility of young women and adolescent girls; that is, it undermines their status as epistemic agents, and specifically as knowers of and reporters on their own intentions and motivations. there are at least three forms this epistemic damage could take. the first is testimonial injustice. this type of epistemic harm occurs when “a speaker suffers a credibility deficit due to an identity prejudice (perhaps arising from an identity dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 stereotype) on the hearer’s part” (mckinnon 2016, 438). the untrustworthiness narrative could unjustifiably lower young women and girls’ credibility as reporters of their own motivations, casting doubt on whether their reports about their eating are accurate. this is why monitoring and surveillance of their eating is recommended to gather further evidence in support of or against their testimony. the untrustworthiness narrative may also lead to “testimonial quieting” (dotson 2011). in this case, the narrative would not simply lower the credibility of a young woman or girl but would disqualify her as a knower. as kristie dotson (2011, 242) explains, “the problem of testimonial quieting occurs when an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower. a speaker needs an audience to identify, or at least recognize, her as a knower in order to offer testimony.” in such a case, nothing a young woman or girl says about her eating counts as evidence about the status of that eating: “her utterance is ignored entirely. it’s as if she didn’t speak at all” (mckinnon 2016, 442). if her credibility is obliterated in this way, then monitoring and surveillance of her eating provide the only available evidence as to whether that eating is disordered. this second type of harm seems less likely than the first, given researchers’ insistence on asking young women and girls about their motivations. such a request would be nonsensical if young women and girls were considered to have no testimonial credibility whatsoever. however, considering zuromski and colleagues’ suggestion that vegetarian eating can be pathological regardless of the intentions of the eater, it is a possible outcome. testimonial quieting may be particularly likely if the untrustworthiness narrative is amplified by sexist or ageist narratives about young women and girls being deceptive, unreliable, or flawed knowers in general. the third possible form of epistemic harm is testimonial smothering. dotson (2011, 244) explains that smothering “occurs because the speaker perceives one’s immediate audience as unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of proffered testimony.” one common feature of situations of testimonial smothering is that the “content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky” (244). thanks to the eating pathology narrative, young women and girls telling others—especially those with authority over them—that they are vegetarian, or even interested in vegetarianism, can be risky; it can lead to increased surveillance, medical interventions, and the loss of opportunities to make their own food choices. to avoid these outcomes, young women and girls may remain silent about their eating or be highly selective about what they share with others, especially those in authority positions like parents or medical professionals. disabled or chronically ill girls and women who may already be subject to high levels of medical surveillance, and black girls and women who may distrust medical professionals given the prevalence of medical racism, may be particularly affected by testimonial smothering. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 in sum, the untrustworthiness narrative frames whatever a young woman or girl says as lies or self-deception. recognizing that she may not be believed or listened to and that she runs the risk of being characterized as both a pathological eater and an untrustworthy reporter, she may not say anything at all. this deprives her of the chance to correct misreadings of her eating. thus the untrustworthiness narrative makes it difficult for young women and, especially, adolescent girls to prompt reinterpretation of their vegetarian eating, which in turn makes it hard to avoid distorted actions. distorted actions are interwoven with forms of damage to agency that i have already mentioned. for instance, they can feed back into infiltrated consciousness, undermining an agent’s understanding of her own actions and intentions. if everyone takes my attempts to show care for animals to be covert attempts to diet, i might start to question my own capacities as a knower and doubt that i know my own motivations. this might undermine my confidence in my ability to eat in a way that reflects my values and intentions. distorted actions can also lead into the final type of damage to agency: blocked and inapt identities. blocked and inapt identities one of the reasons distorted actions are damaging is because of the link between actions and identities. we can self-identify in certain ways, but many identities also require social recognition (lindemann 2014, 4): relevant others have to acknowledge us as that kind of person and treat us accordingly for us to inhabit that identity. because social recognition of identities depends in part on how others interpret our actions, distorted actions can lead to blocked identities. if the actions that would enable social recognition of an identity are distorted, then the actor may be prevented from fully inhabiting this identity.17 whatever identities vegetarian eating might enable for other people, those identities may be blocked for girls and young women because their eating is interpreted as disordered. young women and girls’ ability to prompt reinterpretation of that eating, and thereby open up the possibility to inhabit those identities, may also be blocked. instead of gaining social recognition as a morally conscious person, animal activist, environmentalist, rebel, ecofeminist, or someone who is just curious about different ways to eat, a girl or young woman who eats vegetarian may be read as a disordered or pathological eater. in this way, distorted actions may also enable the conferral of inapt or inappropriate identities; in this case, as a disordered eater. 17 note as well that deprivation of opportunity also contributes to blocked identities by literally preventing the sorts of actions that would enable social recognition as such and such a sort of person. dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 eating identities are loaded with moral content. in us and canadian contexts, a dominant way of understanding food choice is as an issue of willpower and selfcontrol, and willpower and self-control are widely understood as central to being a good moral agent in general. being a “bad eater” can therefore reflect on one’s moral character. so when a young woman or adolescent girl vegetarian is understood as just another disordered eater rather than a caring, morally conscious person, someone who is curious about food, or someone who is competent and in control of her eating as much as anyone, this can not only compromise and damage her agency with regard to her eating but also undermine the self-understanding and social recognition essential to developing, maintaining, and exercising robust agency in general. it can undermine a young woman or girl’s ability to understand herself and be recognized as someone who directs her own life and is responsible for her choices and, in so doing, undermine her actual ability and capacity to do just that. in sexist and misogynistic contexts where young women and girls already face many challenges to the development and exercise of their agency, this can be a significant form of harm. 2.2. eating as a self-shaping activity: how ethical vegetarianism can shape selves in addition to shaping agency, narratives about eaters and eating and the actual practice of eating can shape other aspects of the self, such as affects, values, capacities, and self-understandings. while we sometimes eat with the aim of shaping these bits of our selves—we may diet to tame our appetites, eat mindfully to cultivate feelings of calm, or partake in wine or food tastings to develop our capacities for pleasure—my suggestion is that all eating, whether it purposefully aims to change the self or not, can have self-shaping effects. as mentioned earlier, one possible outcome of wrongly accepting the ved hypothesis is that concerned family members, health professionals, and others might directly or indirectly discourage young women and girls from eating a vegetarian diet. associating the diet with a harmful pathology may have this effect, as may making vegetarian women and girls objects of concern, interrogation, and surveillance. i have outlined some possible impacts of having fewer vegetarians on nonhuman animals, the environment, and some food workers, as well as on various forms of oppression. but discouraging women and girls from trying or maintaining vegetarianism can also have an impact on selves. there are several points to be explored here: what are the self-shaping effects of having one’s diet be the source of medical, familial, and public scrutiny? of eating differently from one’s family, friends, classmates, or coworkers? what is the impact on the self if young women and girls never try or quickly abandon vegetarianism? while all these questions are worth pursuing, here i will focus on the last one. i suggest that one common form of vegetarianism—what i call “ethical vegetarianism” to encompass vegan and vegetarian diets motivated by ethical concerns about feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 nonhuman animals, the environment, and/or slaughterhouse workers—can be a valuable way to shape oneself through eating. discouraging or preventing young women and girls from eating this way raises a roadblock to an avenue for the development of good, or at least relatively good, sorts of selves. this gives us another reason to be wary about wrongly accepting the ved hypothesis. before i offer support for this claim, it is important to be clear about its limits. i argue that ethical vegetarianism can shape “relatively” good selves in contrast to what some claim is a prevalent way of eating for young women and girls: weight-loss dieting (mcvey, tweed, and blackmore 2004; neumark-sztainer et al. 2011; mendes et al. 2014; slof-op ‘t landt et al. 2017; field et al. 2010). while weight-loss dieting can be practiced in different ways, some of which could have neutral or positive effects on the self, feminist critiques suggest that it does not tend to do so. as i will detail momentarily, whether to secure a particular appearance or for health, weightloss dieting can have very negative effects on the self. my claim is that ethical vegetarianism has more promising self-shaping effects than this. however, i am not suggesting that vegetarianism always has good self-shaping effects. some vegetarians and vegans practice their eating in the pursuit of purity, which can cultivate moral smugness and an inability to recognize the ethical importance of context, such as systemic racism (this is particularly an issue amongst white vegans) (harp 2018; bailey 2007; shotwell 2016; dean 2014). i am also not suggesting that wrongly accepting the ved hypothesis would, on its own, render vegetarianism an unattractive option for young women and girls. in generally omnivorous contexts like the united states and canada, vegetarianism is more popular with white women and girls than with black and/or indigenous women and girls and many other women and girls of colour for a variety of reasons, including the racism of many white vegans just noted (harp 2018; bailey 2007; taylor 2010; dunham 2010; loyd-paige 2010). adding the spectre of eating disorders to these reasons may not have a significant effect on the appeal of vegetarianism to members of these groups, though it may make it more difficult for those who are interested in vegetarianism despite it all. finally, vegetarianism and weight-loss dieting are not necessarily mutually exclusive. people can and sometimes do practice vegetarianism as a weight-loss diet—see, for example, skinny bitch (freedman and barnouin 2005). nonetheless, i hold that ethical vegetarianism often offers a positive self-shaping alternative to weight-loss dieting for many young women and girls, and that discouraging them from exploring and potentially benefitting from it would be a negative outcome of wrongly accepting the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis. dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 the weight-loss dieting self feminist critiques of weight-loss dieting have detailed a variety of ways that this sort of eating can negatively shape aspects of the self, including capacities, selfunderstandings, and affects. consider, for instance, the way that many weight-loss diets require constant and detail-oriented attention to food and eating, and to desires and feelings that affect eating like cravings, boredom, and hunger. this constant selfsurveillance is supposed to enable the dieter to stay on track with her diet despite the unruliness of her body and unpredictability of her environment. but the imperative to pay attention in all these ways encourages and requires the development of certain capacities, such as the capacity to attend to oneself for long periods of time, ignore hunger, balance eating in relation to exercise, and so on. it is labour-intensive, ongoing work. the substantial time, attention, money, and energy that dieting takes can “divert women’s energy away from participating equally in their private, social, and public lives” (isaacs 2018, 576).18 critics also point out that the constant self-surveillance and attention required by most diets can cultivate a form of self-centeredness and self-preoccupation (bartky 1990, 73) and “encourages obsession with food, weight, [and] exercise” (isaacs 2018, 581). as lisa schwartzman (2015, 93–94) argues, spending so much time and energy attending in this way can lead dieters to center their self-worth in their eating. this intense valuing of eating is reinforced by the development of dieting-related capacities. as sandra bartky (1990, 77) points out, our self-understanding as valuable and competent individuals is caught up in our skills. we become invested in the capacities we have developed, and become attached to their continued use and development, even if we would have been better off not acquiring them in the first place. the constant threat (and likely eventuality) of failing at one’s diet, combined with the high stakes of failure, can create significant anxiety (isaacs 2018, 576). narratives about eating and self-control mean that the nearly inevitable (and repeated) failure to stay on a diet is blamed on the dieter herself and her lack of self 18 the development of certain dieting capacities may also directly preclude acquiring others. for example, learning to ignore or respond with antagonism toward hunger may make dieters lose (or never gain) the ability to perceive and respond to hunger and other bodily desires in less antagonistic ways (schwartzman 2015). according to intuitive-eating proponents, the inability to perceive and respond appropriately to hunger is one of the central reasons that mainstream diets do not work (tribole and resch 2012). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 control, rather than on the project or the tools. therefore, she may experience herself as a shameful failure each time her diet does not work.19 dieting may also cultivate an inability to enjoy food and eating and an antagonistic relationship to alimentary pleasures. from a weight loss perspective, food that tastes good is often framed as unhealthy and fattening. taking pleasure in these foods is risky, as it could lead to overeating, binging, or falling off the diet wagon entirely. welsh (2011) argues that dieting highly restricts dieters’ access to pleasure. she suggests that this can result in a life deprived of pleasure, especially for people for whom food pleasures are “available and affordable” whereas pleasures considered “healthy” and therefore acceptable are not. cressida heyes (2007) emphasizes that dieting may produce some positive affects; there can be pleasure in losing weight and in social recognition for doing so, and in the mastery and exercise of skills and capacities built up through dieting. dieting can also develop certain valuable capacities like goal-setting and awareness of the embodied effects of certain ways of eating and drinking (heyes 2007, 67), as well as the ability to take pleasure in foods they had not previously been able to enjoy, like raw vegetables (86). however, the ability to enjoy vegetables aside, heyes argues that the pleasures of dieting are largely contingent upon the continuation of, and success at, this largely impossible task (79). this affective economy serves to further reinforce commitment to the dieting project. in sum, these critiques suggest that weight-loss dieting can produce a self preoccupied with weight, body, and food, and antagonistic toward its own body, desires, and alimentary pleasures. it can produce a self deeply invested in an impossible project premised on personal flaws and failures and characterized by overwhelmingly negative affects. while weight-loss dieting may also produce some valuable capacities and pleasures—which go some way to explaining its enduring appeal—overall its effects on the self are quite negative. and what is troubling about these selves extends beyond the individual: the dieting self that may be so preoccupied or isolated by shame and failure that it cannot recognize, acknowledge, or combat forms of oppression and inequality, including patriarchy (bartky 1990) and unjust global food systems that create the localized abundance that makes dieting seem necessary, while others do not have enough to eat (isaacs 2018). ethical vegetarian selves ethical vegetarian eating can shape the self in different and relatively better ways than weight-loss dieting. my argument here is inspired by foucauldian analyses 19 as bartky (1990, 71–72) argues, for some women, dieting is motivated by a preexisting failure of one’s body to be properly feminine, which can contribute to a sense of oneself as inherently deficient. dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 of vegetarianism which suggest, in different terms, that such a diet can be a way of shaping valuable selves (taylor 2010; tanke 2007; dean 2014).20 this sort of vegetarianism produces different, and in some respects better, selves than weightloss dieting because it reframes what good eating is and therefore requires different practices to eat well. these practices can have less-deleterious effects on the self than those associated with weight-loss dieting. ethical vegetarianism does not demand a focus on body, appetite, and desires but instead draws attention to something outside the self: animal welfare, the environment, or slaughterhouse workers’ well-being. the aim of the eating is not to achieve a certain bodily state—whether that be a particular weight, body size, or health status—but is to be morally good or ethically responsible. this goodness and responsibility is not primarily defined in terms of mastering one’s cravings, desires, or appetites but is most importantly about engaging in eating that does less harm to or shows appropriate respect toward animals, the environment, and/or certain food producers. good eating is therefore not primarily defined in relation to its effects on the body, or how well one has negotiated appetite, cravings, or temptation, but is understood as eating that does less harm or shows appropriate respect to entities other than oneself (dean 2014). this framing of good eating means that ethical vegetarianism does not require the constant attention to self that weight-loss dieting demands, and therefore it seems less likely to produce the self-absorption and self-preoccupation cultivated by weight-loss dieting. that said, in contexts where vegetarian food is not readily available, avoiding meat and animal products would require attention, investigation, and work, which could cultivate a preoccupation with food. as discussed earlier, this may be what compromises dietary-restriction measures in research on vegetarians. however, in contexts where vegetarian food is easily accessed or the eater has established a settled way of eating in her day-to-day life, this effect seems unlikely. the way ethical vegetarianism frames good eating also means that it does not require the renunciation of desires or appetites, except insofar as one might have cravings for animal products. that is certainly a possibility, especially with new vegetarians, and as cole points out, there is a general assumption that vegetarianism does require significant self-denial (cole 2008, 708; see also wright 2015). however, struggling with and mastering cravings is a less central aspect of this way of eating 20 in contrast to these earlier works, my aim here is to suggest that vegetarianism can be a way of shaping the self whether that is the eater’s goal or not, and that it can have measurable effects on the self that can be judged without recourse to the foucauldian concept of normalization. while i find the critiques based on normalization compelling, there are insights to be had here that do not require that particular conceptual framework. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 compared to weight-loss dieting. there is research showing that some vegetarians experience abstention from meat as “no sacrifice at all” (malcolm hamilton, quoted in cole 2008, 709), and that vegetarian diets are actually more diverse than omnivorous ones (cole 2008, 711). ethical vegetarianism would therefore be less likely to produce an antagonistic relationship with desires, appetite, and one’s body. relatedly, ethical vegetarianism is not antagonistic to food pleasure in the way that weight-loss dieting tends to be. from an ethical vegetarian perspective, while pleasure in food should not override ethical concerns, it is not antithetical to good food. despite mainstream characterizations of vegetarian diets as ascetic (cole 2008), good vegetarian food can taste good. cole (2008, 711–12) suggests that vegetarianism might actually increase ability to take pleasure in food compared to omnivorous diets. this is one way in which ethical vegetarianism allows more space for pleasure in eating than weight-loss dieting does, and another reason ethical vegetarianism is likely to cultivate less antagonism toward cravings, appetite, and desires than weight-loss dieting. because eating well is not premised on keeping hunger and appetite in check, ethical vegetarianism may also be less anxiety-provoking than weight-loss dieting. when eating well requires mastery of desires, there is a regular, repeated risk of failure, multiple times a day. with ethical vegetarianism, there may be less of a struggle to eat well with each meal or each day or each hunger pang, less of a risk that you will ruin your diet at each moment. that said, the stakes of failure are quite high with ethical vegetarianism: if you fail, you fail to be a morally good person. this can contribute to anxiety about eating well in contexts where finding adequate vegetarian food is a challenge or in families or communities that are unsupportive or antagonistic toward vegetarianism. however, in cases where vegetarian food is readily available and those around the eater are supportive or at least neutral toward vegetarianism, the prospect of failing to eat well—and especially regular, repeated failure—is much less common with vegetarianism than with weight-loss dieting. in these contexts, ethical vegetarianism is less likely to cultivate a sense of being a shameful failure. in addition, ethical vegetarianism is not generally premised on being a personal failure, in contrast to the way weight-loss dieting is often premised on a bodily failure to conform to health or beauty norms. it may be framed as more of a positive, active, creative way of working to be a good person and build an ethical life (taylor 2010) rather than as eating that attempts to ameliorate some flaw. for these reasons, i suggest that ethical vegetarianism can shape a self that is in important ways better than one shaped by weight-loss dieting. this is not to say that it is unequivocally positive: in contexts where vegetarian food is not readily available it may cultivate a preoccupation with food, and in unsupportive contexts it may create anxiety, a sense of failure, and antagonism toward others. however, generally speaking, the practice of ethical vegetarianism can shape a self that is less dean – eating as a self-shaping activity published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 self-absorbed, less antagonistic toward desires and appetite, less anxious about eating, and less characterized by a feeling of failure than weight-loss dieting. it can shape a self that is open to taking pleasure in food. and in contrast to the selfabsorption and preoccupation cultivated by weight-loss dieting, it may also shape an attentiveness to and consideration of ethical reasons such as our obligations to other living creatures or the environment as relevant to eating choices. insofar as a false positive could undermine ethical vegetarianism as a viable option for young women and girls, then, it can deprive them of a potentially valuable means of self-shaping. while there are other structured ways of eating that may also have neutral or positive effects on the self—intuitive eating (tribole and resch 2012) is an interesting possibility, for example—ethical vegetarianism is a well-established way to eat even within generally omnivorous contexts, like canada and the united states. there are active online and in-person communities and resources for becoming vegetarian and sustaining a vegetarian diet, and this kind of support and community is important to maintaining a practice that is out of the norm in this way (see mcwhorter 1999, 197). if accepting the ved hypothesis would discourage young women and girls from experimenting with this promising form of self-shaping, then our ethical evaluation should take this into consideration. 3. back to the hypothesis i have suggested that wrongly accepting the vegetarianism and eating disorders hypothesis may result in a variety of bad outcomes. it risks reducing the number of vegetarians, thereby increasing harms to nonhuman animals, the environment, and slaughterhouse workers, and undermining efforts to combat oppression. it may result in violations of the eating autonomy of young women and girls and deprive them of valuable eating experiences. i have argued that a false positive may also have negative effects on the self: specifically, on the agency of young women and girls—and it may discourage them from a promising means of selfshaping through eating. the risk of delaying diagnoses or missing cases of eating disorders that otherwise might be caught and treated is significant. eating disorders and disordered eating are misery-making and can be fatal. but the risk of undermining young women and girls’ agency in a society that is often unsupportive or even hostile to women and girls’ self-determination is also significant. so too—though perhaps less directly—is discouraging young women and girls from a valuable means of self-shaping through eating when the prominent alternative is so pernicious. i think that these considerations provide good reason to reject the ved hypothesis, pending further conclusive research. whatever choice we make, the key is that making an informed, rational decision to accept or reject the hypothesis depends on having a comprehensive picture of eating’s ethical importance. i hope to have shown that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 along with more traditional considerations such as eating’s impact on others and its implications for autonomy and valuable eating experiences, this comprehensive picture must include eating’s self-shaping effects. acknowledgements: thank you to fpq’s editors and anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and critiques. my appreciation also goes to audiences at femmss, cswip, hamilton college, georgetown university, and william paterson university, and to quill r. kukla, kate withy, karen stohr, samantha brennan, ari watson, nabina liebow, ájené robinson-burris, and keith underkoffler for their helpful feedback on earlier iterations of these ideas. thanks as well to alex plakias for her encouragement and advice. this paper is a revised version of the final chapter of my phd dissertation, and the social sciences and humanities research council of canada funded the initial stages of this research. references american psychiatric association. 2013. diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: dsm-5. 5th ed. 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with celiac disease.” eating and weight disorders—studies on anorexia, bulimia and obesity 25 (2): 365–71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-018-0605-z. trautmann, julianne, stephanie i. rau, mardell a. wilson, and connor walters. 2008. “vegetarian students in their first year of college: are they at risk for restrictive or disordered eating behaviors?” college student journal 42 (2): 340–48. tribole, evelyn, and elyse resch. 2012. intuitive eating. 3rd ed. new york: st. martin’s griffin. welsh, talia. 2011. “healthism and the bodies of women: pleasure and discipline in the war against obesity.” journal of feminist scholarship, no. 1, 33–48. worsley, anthony, and grace skrzypiec. 1997. “teenage vegetarianism: beauty or the beast?” nutrition research 17 (3): 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1016/s02715317(97)00003-1. wright, laura. 2015. the vegan studies project: food, animals, and gender in the age of terror. athens: university of georgia press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book /41845. zuromski, kelly l., tracy k. witte, april r. smith, natalie goodwin, lindsay p. bodell, mary bartlett, and nicole siegfried. 2015. “increased prevalence of vegetarianism among women with eating pathology.” eating behaviors 19 (december): 24–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2015.06.017. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 32 megan a. dean is an assistant professor of philosophy at michigan state university. she works in feminist bioethics, with a focus on the ethics of food and eating. her work draws from a range of philosophical traditions including phenomenology and foucauldian theory, analytic feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of science. she has recently published on topics including mindless eating, the covert administration of medication in food, and “unhealthy” eaters and agency. 10838 dean title page 10838 dean final format a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 1 article 3 recommended citation moser, shelby, and michel-antoine xhignesse. 2023. “a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives?” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (1). article 3. 2023 a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? shelby moser rio hondo college and azusa pacific university shelby.moser@gmail.com michel-antoine xhignesse capilano university michelantoinexhignes@capilanou.ca moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? shelby moser and michel-antoine xhignesse1 abstract although the character of the “lady detective” is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival holmes or poirot. this is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but rather because the concept of greatness is socially constructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. we explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. to create a “great” character, the author cannot just endow her with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. in doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. keywords: genius, genre, literature, mysteries, truth in fiction, reality assumption 1. introduction there is no shortage of lady detectives in english-language television series. these range from the early days of madame liu-tsong (1951), nancy drew (1977–78, 1995, and 2019–23) and miss marple (intermittently 1984–92 and 2004–13) to the more recent hetty wainthropp (1990 and 1996–98), mrs. bradley (1998 and 2000), rosemary boxer and laura thyme (2003–07), miss fisher (2012–15), and ms. fisher (2019 and 2021). but it is telling that, until recently, “lady detectives” (to borrow miss fisher’s idiom) have been largely relegated to the “cozies”: mysteries that downplay sex and violence and are typically set in small communities. the cozy mystery is the refuge of the amateur sleuth, whose naïve determination or keen eye for detail solves crimes which stump trained policemen. recently, female investigators have helmed grittier mysteries as well, such as prime suspect (intermittently 1991–2006), happy valley (2014, 2016, and 2023), paranoid (2016), top of the lake (2013 and 2017), and bancroft (2017 and 2020). but 1 author order is alphabetical; authorship was shared equally. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 despite the popularity of woman-led detective fiction, there is a shocking lack of great lady detectives to rival holmes or poirot in either their fictional accomplishments, or their real-world acclaim. this is not to suggest that stories about lady detectives are not popular, nor that there are no excellent, interesting, or clever lady detective characters. indeed, those mentioned above represent just a few who are beloved by many. even so, we argue, they aren’t great. genius has a whiff of the essential about it: we commonly think that to qualify as a genius in some domain someone must stand head and shoulders above their contemporaries in terms of intelligence or talent and creativity. but the reality is that simply possessing these qualities is never sufficient for attributions of genius, as feminist art history has long made abundantly clear. greatness, like coolness, is a matter of public acclaim or perception, and that can only come when someone’s contributions are recognized for what they are.2 but lady detectives are less highly regarded within their own fictional worlds than their male counterparts and, in turn, are less likely to have their qualities recognized by realworld audiences. our contention is that lady detectives are not excluded from the company of the greats by their inferior intellects or ingenuity but rather because of oppressive structural factors inherent in the genres to which they are relegated. we think that the case of lady detectives offers an especially instructive example of this phenomenon. here, genre conventions introduce and maintain the gendered disparity between fiction’s “great” and minor detectives, which is intimately linked to the roles lady detectives occupy in their fictional worlds and the ways in which these reflect the real world. lady detectives are products of their time in a way that their male counterparts are not, and this is especially easy to pinpoint when we consider (1) the sleuth’s material circumstances, (2) the role expertise and genius play in the narrative, and (3) the amateur’s interactions with institutionally sanctioned authorities. the result is that it can be incredibly difficult for authors to overcome our pernicious cultural tendencies—perhaps even impossible in some cases. 2. genius and manateurs linda nochlin’s ([1971] 1988) groundbreaking essay “why have there been no great women artists?” stirred art history from its dogmatic slumber by pointing out that our application of the terms “genius” and “great” are loaded with unquestioned and often unconscious assumptions about the history and practice of art-making. the old master’s place in history, she contended, was assured not so much by quality of workmanship as by a series of economic, legal, and social conventions which presented structural obstacles to women’s equal participation in 2 although the two seem to differ insofar as attributions of personal genius can be made posthumously, as with van gogh or poe. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 the artworld. the result is a narrow conception of artistic value that sees the arthistorical canon systematically devaluing women’s contributions, such that no women are numbered among art history’s greats. “the fault,” nochlin argued ([1971] 1988, 150), “lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.” partly, this is because women’s contributions have often been erased wholesale from art history, so that we have attributed works such as the portrait of charlotte du val d’ognes (1801) to jacques-louis david rather than to marie-denise villers, or fountain (1917) to duchamp despite correspondence suggesting it may have been his friend elsa von freytag-loringhoven’s instead. but it is also because the domestic and dowry arts (e.g., embroidery and tapestry), which have been almost exclusively in women’s historical purview, occupy a great deal less of our art-historical imagination than painting and sculpture. institutional biases have also had their effect: along with an expectation that women’s talents better served the private than the public sphere, cultural conventions and academy regulations prevented women from accessing the training required of “proper” artists. together, all these factors made a rise to professional status or “genius” less attainable, especially prior to the twentieth century. as we will see, similar obstacles plague lady detectives and help to explain why they are, first and foremost, mothers, housewives, spinsters, and retirees, rather than consulting detectives. in her fictional world, a lady detective’s public role is primarily that of a woman (and occasionally that of gardener or heiress), whereas her male counterpart is free to have his public role reflect his choice of hobby. among cozy mysteries, the most renowned detectives are the male amateurs who solve crimes for sport: sherlock holmes, hercule poirot, and lord peter wimsey, for example.3 but professionals such as tom and john barnaby, armand gamache, and jules maigret are no slouches, either. all the same, these characters share several important traits in common. first, and most prominently, they are widely hailed as great by their fictional colleagues and contemporaries, who stand in awe of their towering intellect. these guys don’t just solve crimes; they do so by being exceedingly clever with what can only be described as inconsiderately paltry evidence. holmes is the worst offender on this score, since he is constantly using his quasi-magical powers of memory and 3 some may balk at numbering these among the cozies since the genre was only named in the late twentieth century. but although the term was coined late in the game, those late authors explicitly took themselves to be hearkening back to the literary tradition that flourished in the golden age of detective fiction, the 1920s and ’30s, but which dates back at least as far as the holmes canon (1887–1927). it is also worth noting that these are all routinely publicly cited as early cozies. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 observation to perform astounding abductive leaps. recall, for example, the hound of the baskervilles (1901–02), when holmes accurately describes dr. james mortimer (under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded) and his dog (a curly-haired spaniel), sight unseen, from mortimer’s walking stick, which the dog is in the habit of fetching. the great male detectives enjoy a kind of doubled fame: not only are they famous geniuses in their own fictional worlds, they are also the most celebrated detectives among real-world audiences, most of whom would be hard-pressed to name a single real detective, amateur or professional—let alone the world’s greatest. a subtler clue that these men are the little grey cells behind the operation is manifested in the person of their assistant—barnaby’s collection of detectivesergeants, gamache’s beauvoir, holmes’s watson (and lestrade), poirot’s hastings (and japp), and wimsey’s bunter (and parker)—who, in his own bumbling way (for he is mostly a he) and with his precipitate theorising, acts as a cipher for the audience. for readers and viewers, there is no surer sign of the detective’s ineffable brilliance than hearing an assistant voice one’s own theory of the crime, thereby ensuring its falsity. but it is also worth noting that, in order to challenge (and showcase) their superior smarts, authors occasionally find it necessary to introduce an evil genius as a nemesis figure, such as holmes’s moriarty or poirot’s stephen norton. second, the great men in question are almost invariably men of means. to be sure, barnaby, gamache, and maigret are all law enforcement professionals who work for a living, although their activities and monetary insouciance suggest healthy salaries. more to the point, the great amateur sleuths—holmes, poirot, and wimsey—all enjoy privileged backgrounds which enable them to lead leisurely lives only occasionally punctuated by episodes of detection. holmes and poirot, in particular, make a great show of only taking on cases which pique their interest; cheating spouses, lost pets, and thefts need not apply. petty crimes are routinely passed over in favour of high-status crimes like murder—unless the mundane misdemeanor is somehow tied to a more fateful felony. the great male sleuth can rely on his considerable reputation as a genius to bring in challenging cases, without having to dirty his patent leather shoes by seeking them out. note, too, that he solves these cases primarily for his own entertainment; solving crimes, for this class of gentleman, is first and foremost an intellectual pursuit, to be enjoyed as one enjoys the satisfaction of a puzzle’s resolution. finally, the great “manateurs” are hardly amateurs; they are celebrated intellects whose help is frequently solicited by the authorities. while the local constabulary may at times resent the manateur’s involvement in a case, they are only too happy to oblige the detective at the crucial moment, and to put their own institutional resources at his disposal. in fact, the sleuth’s relationship to those authorities is distinctly patronising, involving equal helpings of condescension and ordering about. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 3. lady detectives lady detectives are a different breed; in fact, they are much more realistic along all of these dimensions. most, for example, must work for their suppers, with the partial exception of miss fisher (and, later, her niece ms. fisher), who grew up in extreme poverty but later inherited great wealth. miss marple is an elderly spinster, rosemary and thyme are professional gardeners, hetty wainthropp is an ageing housewife, mrs. bradley is an accomplished psychoanalyst, and madame liu-tsong is an art dealer. they have neither the time nor the ability to act as consulting detectives, nor do they seek out challenges; instead, they stumble upon the bulk of their cases in their personal or work environments and must thus mobilize their hardwon topical expertise. nor do they benefit from the existence of an archnemesis whose dastardly deeds serve to emphasize their intellect and endear them to befuddled authorities. while manateurs are free to enjoy the intellectual satisfaction of a puzzle’s resolution, by and large lady detectives must rely on their ability to meddle and tittletattle to solve the case so that they can get on with their daily routine. the lady detective does not have time to waste learning about obscure and tedious factoids or waiting for inspired cogitations. instead, she must mobilize her extensive (noncriminal) education and apply it to the particulars of a case whose crucial clues are intimately tied to that expertise. oftentimes, this results in the lady detective entering a baking competition, infiltrating a sewing circle, or restoring a neighbor’s unruly garden to garner information from village gossip. in this connection, it must also be observed that lady detectives are typically nuisances who are always underfoot. they must constantly work to have the value of their insights recognized by the authorities. nowhere is this better illustrated than with miss marple, who regularly invites policemen to “hepeat” her insights by musing to herself within their hearing. nor can the typical lady detective—miss/ms. fishers and mrs. bradley aside4—rely on regular assistant assistance; she must instead rely on her own craftiness and network of local acquaintances. none of this is to say that lady detectives lack education, ingenuity, or skill. on the contrary, just consider rosemary & thyme, whose settings invariably feature gardens and whose titular detectives must mobilize their botanical knowledge to solve suspicious deaths (usually in the garden itself). laura thyme (pam ferris) is a former wpc (woman police constable) whose training and experience presumably included investigative best practices; rosemary boxer (felicity kendal), a retired university lecturer, has an intellectual background including a doctorate in plant pathology. but while these skills and credentials offer viewers a plausible backstory 4 another partial exception is hetty wainthropp, who is helped by a teenaged miscreant. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 explaining the characters’ involvement in the investigation, they seldom garner much esteem within the fictional world. what rosemary and thyme conspicuously lack is a garden of their own, a patch of land over which they can exert complete control. instead, they are itinerant workers labouring to complement and enhance a rich man’s status, and their contributions go largely unappreciated. this situation is mirrored in their detective side-gig, where they constantly find themselves trespassing on a policeman’s patch. in “the cup of silence” (a 2005 episode), for instance, they happen to dine at the same hotel as a reputable food critic when he is murdered; in the episode “three legs good” (from 2006), their regent’s park landscaping is interrupted by a three-legged dog who leads them to the flowerbed where her owner was murdered. rosemary and thyme are hired help and occasional witnesses, and the help is expected to speak only when spoken to. rich englishmen may seek them out to landscape their estates and foreign villas (because they’re cheap), but nobody pays much attention to their botanical experience or investigative insights, even when these are directly relevant to the case at hand. the situation is not helped much by the fact that their stereotyped backgrounds put rosemary and thyme squarely back in their gendered places. thyme, for example, retired from police work to start a family, only to be left by her husband for a younger woman. and rosemary’s second career as a gardener is the result of having been fired from her university position by a former boyfriend with an axe to grind. the unexceptional presentation of these predicaments serves as a subtle reminder that these women are not in the positions they find themselves in by choice, but by circumstance. it is no accident, then, that it is the manateurs who dominate audiences’ imaginations and whose stories are constantly recycled for film and television, to say nothing of new literary instalments. their fame precedes them, their cases are often of national import, and their clients are typically the lords, ladies, and wealthy of the realm. it is no wonder that audiences are swept along into their wakes and think little of the humdrum working-class mysteries which occupy lady detectives. even a manateur’s quirks of character and negative traits serve to underscore their intellects: holmes must indulge his drug habit to overcome the soul-swallowing boredom he feels in the absence of a stimulating case, while poirot’s vanity mirrors his obsessivecompulsive fussiness, itself a manifestation of his orderly and methodical little grey cells. what could be more exciting than great men who lead primarily intellectual lives and occasionally condescend to help solve practical problems for their own entertainment? certainly not ageing spinsters whose daily domesticity is disrupted by the appearance of a corpse, especially if their wit and ingenuity are not obviously on display. bumbling about in the kitchen or garden makes for good reading and fun viewing, but it does not quite add up to inimitable genius. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 now, it could certainly be argued that cozies’ usual settings mirror sexist attitudes because they are set in eras when sexism was the norm.5 that is certainly true, but the subgenre is not limited to eras or detectives belonging to days of yore. agatha raisin, for instance, stands as an example of a contemporary lady detective who has yet to be regarded as a genius by her fictional peers. a london retiree, agatha moves to the cotswolds where she eventually becomes an amateur detective in her not-so-cozy new village. although intelligent, she is often viewed by her village community as someone who blunders into the solutions to local murders. there is an important corollary here to the artworld, where men’s cultural output has historically been associated with the category of “fine art,” while women’s work was relegated to craft or simply to their regular domestic duties, where it could safely be taken for granted. as john ruskin once put it, the man's power is active, progressive, defensive. he is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. his intellect is for speculation and invention. . . . but the woman's power is for rule, not for battle—and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. . . . her great function is praise. (ruskin 1886, 99) on this model, painting a fresco for a chapel wall is a noble and challenging artistic pursuit, while weaving a tapestry, quilting a blanket, or embroidering a coat is just what a wife is supposed to do to keep her household warm and pretty. but should she turn her “needle-threading eye and taste for detail” to the fine arts instead, then, as john mcewan (1978, 25) put it, this “preoccupation [will] invariably [favour] presentation at the expense of content.” all this, in turn, has influenced the aesthetic value we are willing to ascribe to such works and established a precedent for the aesthetic evaluation of future such works.6 what is more, as nochlin ([1971] 1988, 15) observed, a career in fine art was far less professionally acceptable for women than men, since women in western society have long been expected to operate within an “implicit context of passivity.” in the nineteenth century, for example, the dominant view held that successful artworks created by men were expressions of artistic genius, whereas artworks 5 our use of “sexism” and “misogyny” follows kate manne (2018, 78–80), who argues that sexism works to justify patriarchal social relations, while misogyny works to enforce them and ensure women’s conformity. 6 this persistent devaluation of women’s cultural production can also lead to a concomitant and pernicious constriction of our art-ontological imagination (see xhignesse 2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 created by women counted as evidence of financial dependency and desperation. this situation is nicely illustrated by emily mary osborn’s 1857 painting nameless and friendless, which depicts a young woman who attempts to sell her artwork out of “plight rather than of power,” and nervously awaits a skeptical art dealer’s appraisal (nochlin [1971] 1988, 15). none of this is to suggest that, qua character or detective, we value miss marple less than m. poirot. the point, rather, is just that the same gendered and misogynist real-world dynamics which govern cultural production find themselves reproduced in fictional worlds. this reproduction is hardly inevitable, but it is pervasive in the subgenre and sets the contrast class of properties against which future stories are judged.7 4. the reality assumption so far, we have argued that lady detectives do not conform to ordinary stereotypes about genius manateurs. as a result, it would be easy to think that lady detectives are exceptional, that they represent exemplary departures from the cozy subgenre’s gendered conventions. but that is not so; lady detectives are products of the very same gendered stereotypes which give us manateurs. in fact, lady detectives are subjected to a doubled set of constraints: the first stems from the kinds of stereotypes and sexist attitudes which the author makes true in their story, and the second from the fact that audiences must take similar attitudes to be true in the story, even if they explicitly disavow them. allow us to explain. it is widely agreed that stories are subject to background assumptions, which allow us to formulate principles of generation telling us how to draw inferences from what we are explicitly told to what is fictional. a story’s explicit content consists of all the story-truths which are generated by the story’s text. so, for example, it is explicitly true that hercule poirot has an upward-curled moustache, while it is not explicitly true in the holmes stories that holmes wears the deerstalker—although this is explicitly true in the 1939 films featuring basil rathbone and innumerable film and television adaptations since, most of which depict him wearing the iconic hat. implicit content, by contrast, consists of all the story-truths which are not generated by the story’s explicit text—including, inter alia, entailed content as well as background content. so, for example, it is true in virtue of background in stephanie barron’s jane austen mysteries that jane’s sister cassandra was engaged to a man who died of yellow fever in the caribbean, since jane austen’s biography supplies part of the background against which the stories are set. a story’s implicit truths will also include entailed content (e.g., stories set in twentieth-century paris are set in france), and imported content (e.g., the things that happened to miss fisher in the first 7 for more on the influence of genre on stories, see friend (2012). moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 episode are also true in the show’s last episode). taken together, explicit and implicit content are generally thought to exhaust the realm of story-truth. stacie friend (2017b, 29) has recently characterized the assumption that informs this analysis of background, which she calls the “reality assumption.” we restate this assumption as follows: reality assumption everything that is true in the real world is also fictionally true, unless excluded by the work. according to the reality assumption, what is true in the real world is also true in a story, unless the story rules out some fact. the idea is that knowledge about the real world is essential to basic story comprehension. this is important because, as nearly everyone agrees, stories are necessarily incomplete, since it is not possible for an author to spell out all of a story’s details in finite time.8 crucially, the reality assumption is deliberately formulated to rule out an author’s or audience’s beliefs about the world; what’s true in the story is whatever is true in the real world, not simply what we think is true. this means, for example, that ophelia’s melancholy was actually caused by factors such as her isolation at court, her overbearing father, and so on, rather than by an excess of black bile.9 the reality assumption, then, helps to guard against making fictionally true falsities and entirely mind-dependent beliefs. the reality assumption is not itself a principle of generation, a rule for generating fictional truths; it simply articulates a defeasible presumption on our part which helps to inform our actual principles of generation, whatever these may be. this is especially helpful because stories leave open any number of questions, ranging from “silly” questions about the number of times miss fisher must trim her fringe to maintain her perfectly coiffed bob to more substantive questions about the murder rate in the county of cabot cove.10 the reality assumption fills in some of these blanks, allowing us to conclude, for example, that despite her many, many talents, phryne fisher is still subject to the laws of gravity, or that somewhere between drinking sumptuous cocktails she eats regular meals. 8 see, e.g., lewis (1978, 1983), byrne (1993), currie (1990), and priest (2005). 9 see friend (2017a, 391), who specifically applies the reality assumption to ophelia’s case. 10 the homicide rate for cabot cove has been estimated at about 149 per 100,000 (townsend 2013)—putting it well ahead of tijuana, mexico, whose rate of 138 per 100,000 ranked it the murder capital of the world in 2022 (statista research department 2022). on “silly” questions, see walton (1990, 237–39). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 friend argues that the reality assumption should see us “storifying” (i.e., making fictionally true) facts about the world as it is (friend 2017b, 37). this is because the alternative would (1) see us constrain story-truth too narrowly to the set of things about which inadequately educated historical peoples had beliefs, (2) see us storifying falsehoods about the world in the absence of any explicit content-level reasons to do so, and (3) invite significant imaginative resistance when it comes to stories from times and places with markedly different customs and mores (friend 2017b, 37–38).11 the upshot is that authors tell stories in much the same way that philosophers specify possible worlds: by stipulating the most relevant ways in which they differ from the actual world and allowing the properties of the actual world to fill out as many of the remaining details as possible. story-content which is implicitly filled out in this way is known as “background” content.12 as friend puts it, the reality assumption simply “articulates a bias in favour of reality” (friend 2017b, 34). it is not itself a principle of generation which we can use to determine what is true in the story, but it forms the starting point for all such principles. all this seems exactly right as far as we are concerned, but it is worth noting a telling accident of terminology: the reality assumption articulates a bias. it might be tempting to conclude, based on the preceding remarks, that the reality assumption inoculates story-worlds against the introduction of racist or sexist content via background. these are demonstrably false beliefs, after all, and are thus irrelevant to story truth unless the story somehow requires them to be true. armed with the reality assumption, we might then think that we can rescue the intuition that some lady detectives, at least, really are great, since it is only misogyny which prevents them from counting as such. but this would be a mistake, as we will now explain. 5. articulating bias in characterizing the reality assumption, friend (2017b, 37) argues that the background it makes true is the world as it is, rather than as the author and intended audience take it to be. this is important precisely because it is not true that women are men’s intellectual inferiors and emotional superiors, torture is good and necessary, and sacrifices court oðin’s favour. one might succeed in telling stories 11 although friend first formulates the reality assumption as such, the core thesis is shared by marie-laure ryan’s (1980) “principle of minimal departure,” gareth evans’s (1982) “incorporation principle,” lewis’s (1978, 42) “background”, walton’s (1990, 144) “reality principle,” and john woods’s (2018) “world-inheritance thesis,” prefigured by his “fill” conditions (woods 1974, 63–65). 12 “background” comes from lewis (1978, 1983), but we assume no particular analysis of it here. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 according to which these are true, but they should never turn out to be true in those stories as a matter of course, in the absence of content-based reasons to think so. this means that just what stephanie barron, agatha christie, kerry greenwood, gladys mitchell, and others actually believed about women is irrelevant, except insofar as these beliefs have informed the stories they tell. conan doyle, for example, famously believed in mediums and their ability to contact the dead, and a great many of his fellow victorians and edwardians did, too. suppose he had intended for such things to be true in the holmes stories but never found occasion to weave them in explicitly. would they be true in the stories? we think not, since we would have no story-based reasons to depart from reality in this way, either at the level of explicit or implicit content. it might follow from these facts that it is true in the holmes stories that most of the characters we encounter believe in contact with the shades of the dead, but we have no reason to think it really is true in the stories. the reality assumption is a defeasible norm, but it is one thing to license local departures from reality when the story requires them, and it is quite another to depart from reality willy-nilly, no matter how idiosyncratic an individual or community’s beliefs. so far, so good: if lady detectives are not great, then it is not because they lack the requisite qualities due to authorial intent or an audience’s mistaken beliefs about their fictional prowess. miss marple and mrs. bradley really are all that clever, no matter what anyone thinks. but while it isn’t true (via the reality assumption) in stephanie barron’s jane austen mysteries that men are intellectually superior to women, it is true that the fictional world is populated by people who believe it to be the case, and who thus cannot or will not recognize jane’s genius. similarly, consider ophelia again: shakespeare and his audience certainly would have thought she suffered from an excess of black bile, but we now know that must be false. the correct explanation for her melancholy is depression caused by isolation (or something along those lines), even though elizabethan audiences would not have recognized it as such. but correctly identifying the cause of her melancholy does nothing to change the fact that she attributes her melancholy to black bile, as does everyone around her. the facts of the story, then, are not much changed: there are no humours, but everyone still thinks there are and attributes causal powers to them. returning to lady detectives, even if it isn’t fictionally true that they are inferior to their male counterparts, it is fictionally true that their fictional worlds are populated by people who believe them to be so. even sympathetic audiences, then, are compelled to indirectly import the structures of misogyny into their readings by hook, if not by crook. we know from the real world that despite their false basis, sexism and misogyny have all too real consequences; so, we might say that these things are true about the world of the fiction, even though they are not true in it. because their fictional worlds are every bit as bigoted and oppressive as our own was and is, lady detectives enjoy little to no acclaim in their respective story-worlds and, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 thus, cannot count as great-in-the-fiction. the reality assumption offers no panacea: structures of oppression such as misogyny can—and often do—operate through apparently neutral norms. this means that authors cannot simply rely on a character’s attributes to make her great; they must actively intervene to counteract prejudice against their characters and to ensure their greatness is fictionally recognized, or to clue readers in. and here, unfortunately, they run into a second, and more significant, obstacle: the structure of the subgenre itself. 6. genre genres are established as certain narrative elements coalesce and come to be frequently associated with particular story-types. so, for instance, mysteries are typically set in the real world and typically take place in the (author’s) present day; they typically feature the commission of some crime, usually a murder, which must be resolved by story’s end; they typically follow the exploits of some sort of detective; and typically offer up a closed set of suspects. these are some of a mystery’s standard properties, the properties you would expect from your average mystery. we can also identify a genre’s contra-standard properties, which are those which tend to count against a work’s classification in the genre (e.g., being set in space is contra-standard for fantasy), and its variable properties, which don’t matter much one way or another to classification in the genre (e.g., the detective’s gender is a variable property of mysteries).13 as a genre is established, the properties established by reference to its founding members become increasingly standard for it and help to define the contrast class against which a work’s properties are subsequently judged standard, contrastandard, or variable. a genre’s standard properties are not usually necessary for belonging in the genre, although if any genres do have necessary properties, these will be standard for them by definition. likewise, the possession of contra-standard properties is not fatal to classification in a genre, although possessing too large a subset of them is. instead, we class stories in a genre when they satisfy some sufficient subset of its standard properties and don’t accumulate too many contra-standard properties. this is not to say that our genre classifications are robust and clear-cut; on the contrary, it’s often quite difficult to find a perfect fit. n. k. jemisin’s broken earth trilogy (2015–17), for example, is a work of fantasy—set in a distant postapocalyptic future where the dead world’s technology is so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic to its current occupants, as well as to readers. is it fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, or apocalyptic 13 although the distinction between standard, contra-standard, and variable properties is rooted in walton (1970), this particular discussion—in terms of genre— stems from friend (2012; see esp. 188ff). moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 literature? insist too much, and every story will have its own genre—much as most heavy metal bands today are the sole occupants of their sub(sub-sub-, etc.) genres. returning to mysteries, then, we can easily identify exceptions to the standard properties listed above: some mysteries might not feature any crime at all (e.g., donald j. sobol’s encyclopedia brown series [1963–2012]), some might be set in the distant past (e.g., agatha christie’s pioneering death comes as the end [1944]) or the distant future (e.g., alastair reynolds’s century rain [2004]), some might not follow a detective’s exploits (e.g., agatha christie’s the murder of roger akroyd [1926]), and so on. but even though these works all play against type in some way, they are still properly classified as mysteries because they adhere to many or most of the genre’s other standard properties. (they may also be appropriately classified as simultaneously belonging to other genres—e.g., sci-fi, historical fiction, fiction tout court—provided these classifications are not incompatible.) the more a work deviates from a genre’s standard properties, however, the less welcome its classification within that genre. a few deviations might make for a fresher, more interesting story, but too many deviations from the norm leave us with something else entirely, a work in a different genre. to see why the structure of cozy mysteries presents such an obstacle to lady detectives’ greatness, we need to get a handle on which properties are standard for the subgenre. on this score, recall the characteristics we sketched at the outset of this paper: (1) cozy mysteries are the purview of amateur detectives, usually an ordinary person who occupies a widely recognizable and relatable social role, (2) they feature quaint small-town settings and idyllic provincial locations, (3) sex and violence are significantly downplayed and typically occur offstage (e.g., murders often take the form of poisoning or a quick hit to the back of the head), and (4) they are often organized around the protagonist’s occupation or hobby, which serves to put them at the heart of the action (such as it is). this hardly amounts to a robust definition of the subgenre in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but as a description it’s good enough to be getting on with. the problem, then, is that the structure of a cozy mystery works against its protagonist’s greatness—she’s an amateur and a local busybody, not a famed sleuth to whom dukes and ministers turn when all else has failed. unless the author explicitly works in her renown, as conan doyle and christie did for holmes and poirot, the lady detective is relegated to a provincial curiosity. likewise, the convention of stumbling across crimes—seldom of national importance—in the course of daily life also works to undermine the lady detective’s claims to greatness. so, too, with the convention that the lady detective be a thorn in law enforcement’s side. these conventions make the stories more fun to consume, and they make for interesting and relatable characters, but they don’t speak much to their greatness, whether fictionally or extrafictionally. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 it is, of course, possible for authors to depart from a genre’s standard properties. miss fisher, for example, is a wealthy heiress with a long string of conspicuously younger lovers (tastefully conquered off-screen)—in these respects, she plays entirely against type. but all the same, she is constantly underfoot, solves crimes as a hobby, and struggles for recognition from the authorities against whom she competes, and so on. thus, even insofar as her stories introduce contra-standard properties for the subgenre, they nevertheless serve to highlight the standard properties against which they play and to reify the standard properties they incorporate. there is a difficult balance to be struck, since too great a departure will undermine the work’s classification under the relevant genre. cozy mysteries are particularly closely associated with their quaint village settings and amateur sleuths. a more fast-paced urban setting invites the rather more sordid range of crimes associated with big-city life and makes a hobbyist’s involvement that much more unlikely. similarly, shifting to a professional detective invites issues of work-life balance to creep in, many of which tell against a woman’s greatness (see section 7). the plight of a professional stuck in a provincial backwater does little to burnish the halo of genius; conversely, in order to climb the career ladder, the up-and-coming city slicker needs the kind of sensational crime and corruption which better characterizes the noir or hardboiled subgenres. thus, although there are many television serials featuring very clever professional female detectives, such as prime suspect, happy valley, or bancroft, these are not cozy mysteries. moreover, their protagonists are typically portrayed as disaster-types who struggle to balance work, life, and their drinking habits with the need to solve a sordid (and often quite violent) crime—all of which are standard properties of hardboiled or noir detective fiction, and none of which sound all that great. where cozy mysteries are concerned, their establishment in the late nineteenth century and their flourishing in the 1920s and ’30s meant that the attitudes of early audiences played a disproportionate role in determining their standard properties. even where lady detectives and contemporary settings are concerned, we saw in section 5 that these women retain the same restrictive roles they inherited from the societies which determined the subgenre’s standard properties. lady detectives certainly represent a departure from the first cozies, but contemporary lady detectives still operate in the shadow of the subgenre’s earliest installments. the trouble here is just that the kinds of properties which count as standard for a genre are established very early on in the genre’s history and are reified by subsequent works. cozy mysteries—and lady detective stories in particular—remain in thrall to the kinds of properties which became standard when the subgenre first coalesced in the twentieth century—a time when gender norms significantly restricted women’s flourishing. this is not to say that no woman-led mystery can moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 deviate from these norms—of course they can, and do! the point, rather, is that there is an in-built limit to how much they can deviate and still count as cozy mysteries. the end result is that the very properties which are standard for cozy mysteries—the features which define the subgenre—make it exceedingly difficult for lady detectives to be counted among the “greats” by either their fictional compatriots or real-world audiences. to get a better handle on the constraints which genre conventions can impose on story-content, it may be helpful to consider the case of harlequin romances. sara kolmes and matthew a. hoffman (2021, 31) have recently argued that these have a structure which necessarily precludes the objectification of sex, even if they feature a great deal of it. this is because it is part of the genre structure of romance novels that (1) the protagonists must ultimately love one another for their own sakes, (2) romantically entangled heroes and heroines are not interchangeable—they are uniquely important to one another, (3) the novels raise and dismiss the possibility of the heroine being violable by her partner, and (4) the heroine’s active participation in the relationship is required in order to make it work (kolmes and hoffman 2021, 36– 37). the points of view and desires of romantic heroines are constantly foregrounded, with the result that their autonomy is wholly undeniable (kolmes and hoffman 2021, 38). a romance novel simply does not objectify its heroine or its sexual content, even though readers are meant to take pleasure in that content. a novel which does objectify its heroine is, quite simply, not a romance novel; it belongs to some other genre, such as erotica or pornography. our point here is much the same: the structural features which have come to characterize cozy mysteries unfortunately preclude lady detectives’ “greatness,” despite writers’, audiences’, and critics’ best intentions. these structural obstacles are not immutable, but they are so deeply rooted in the subgenre that they are incredibly difficult to shift without also shading into a wholly different subgenre. recognizing a lady detective’s greatness, either actually or fictionally, thus takes a great deal of additional effort and sympathetic reading and writing, none of which is helped by her amateur status or the relatively low status of her cases. to the extent that greatness depends on public recognition (either fictional or real), lady detectives are bound to have a harder time of it. 7. a garden of one’s own we have argued that there are no great female detectives, insofar as greatness is modelled by the likes of holmes and poirot. this is a provocative claim which is bound to rub many mystery fans the wrong way. indeed, they may well be tempted to observe that even if our thesis holds true of cozy mysteries, it seems to run afoul of the many strong female leads outside the cozies. characters such as catherine cawood, jessica jones, marcella backland, lisbeth salander, nina suresh, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 and dicte svendsen, for example, do not bake pies, tend gardens, or laze about in overstuffed armchairs. these sleuths are grittier and generally do have training in crime and detection. writing about art history, linda nochlin predicted that her thesis might inspire similar responses defending lists of reclaimed female artists. in response, however, she argued that producing such lists only serves to make us complicit in accepting and reinforcing the status quo for women, rather than critically reevaluating our concept of artistic genius. we think that much the same is true here, too. the problem with lists of “great” lady detectives outside the cozies is precisely their rough edges, which leave us hard-pressed to characterize them as truly great detectives. on the one hand, rough edges are problematic across the board for attributions of greatness: a police officer who breaks the rules to get his man is properly described as “corrupt,” not “great.”14 on the other hand, the rough edges which make male characters more interesting and human, and which are well-worn stereotypes of male genius—for example, alcoholism, an inability to maintain relationships, workaholism, and so on—serve to make female characters look tragically flawed instead.15 this is not because such characteristics are inherently inimical to greatness, but, rather, because they count against the feminine ideal: the tenacity that makes a woman a good detective typically also makes her a bad woman or, what amounts to the same, a bad mother.16 this situation closely parallels the widespread phenomenon of women’s, but not men’s, assertiveness or confidence being negatively coded, for example, as “bitchiness.” after all, it’s one thing for a male detective to be a bad father because he is so wrapped up in the pursuit of justice, but it’s quite another for his female counterpart to be a bad mother. since the noir detective is prototypically a fallen character, the subgenre is bound to be particularly unforgiving of its female protagonists. these women are afflicted with alcoholism, insomnia, mental breakdowns, and ptsd; such flaws might make for excellent, relatable, or pitiable characters, but they hardly add up to a great detective. the lady detective’s faults serve to highlight her vulnerability rather than to underline her greatness. as such, detective stories featuring rough lady detectives are often as limited in their ability to produce genius as the standard cozies in which the ladies bake and babble. what is more, any detailed consideration of the sources of these rough edges will reveal that they are significantly informed by traditional gender biases. this underscores another common convention which is 14 the same is arguably not true of the amateur, however, since they aren’t invested with state power. 15 we are grateful to alice everly for initially making this observation. 16 that’s not to say there cannot be any exceptions—the character of sarah lund (the killing) might be one such. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 instantiated by female detectives who are portrayed as strong characters but who succumb to the much-stereotyped “whims of the female.”17 let us return now to rosemary and thyme, who are regularly referred to as mere “gardeners” (cf. landscaper/landscape artist, plant pathologist) but who lack a garden of their own and of whom another character once said that “they don’t strike me as being particularly brilliant” (in the 2007 episode “enter two gardeners”). what is most striking about this offhand remark is that it does not, in fact, pertain to their status as amateur sleuths but rather to their professional status as gardeners (i.e., experts) hired to spruce up a theatre’s surroundings. if they aren’t particularly brilliant at their chosen profession, why should we ever think they might shine at their busybody hobby? but it also represents an in-world evaluation of their abilities. the conceit, of course, is that the assessment is wrong and leads to their systematic underestimation, which works to their advantage. nevertheless, the conceit only works because we—as suitably informed contemporary viewers—understand that it reflects prejudices which are widespread in the real world and are reflected in the fictional world. what cozies like rosemary & thyme ably demonstrate is just how incredibly difficult it is for fiction to overcome structures of oppression, since these are not limited to the fictional world’s explicit content; they also suffuse the mechanics of our genres by helping to determine the properties which count as standard, contrastandard, and variable for those genres. there is a temptation to reassure ourselves that, so long as we recognize that marple and raisin are extremely intelligent and perceptive, that suffices to mark them out as great detectives. but to do so is to misidentify what makes their male counterparts great and to claim for women an altogether lesser kind of genius. it is to reaffirm the myth of the little grey cells, when in fact the recognition of genius is a substantially socially-constructed phenomenon.18 it is plausible that the possession of a great intellect is necessary for attributions of genius; but so long as such attributions involve public acclaim, it can never be sufficient. the problem for lady detectives, then, is twofold. first, the standard features of the genres in which we find them tend to undermine the fictional recognition of their accomplishments. second, the myth of genius exerts sufficient influence over real-world audiences—despite its well-established falsity—that the same genre features which undermine the fictional recognition of lady detectives’ accomplishments also undermines their real-world recognition. as a result, there are no great lady detectives. 17 clavel-vazquez explores this phenomenon in her 2018 article “sugar and spice, and everything nice.” 18 for a genealogy of genius and its gendered characteristics, see battersby (1989). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 this is not to say that it is impossible for there to be any great lady detectives, any more than recognizing the institutional underpinning of artistic genius means that it is impossible for there to be great women artists. if certain genres present insuperable structural obstacles to the recognition of women’s accomplishments, then we need to either introduce new genres, or change the very properties that count as standard for the genre in the first place. where the second of these is concerned, we have argued that the mere existence of brilliant lady detectives cannot effect that change on its own. but genres are constantly changing, with new stories taking certain of their forebears’ properties as standard; with sufficient momentum behind the move, it is conceivable that cozies could shift away from the standard properties that inhibit greatness to new properties which are more conducive to it (e.g., from low-status to high-status cases and clients). in this respect, it seems significant that cozies today are populated primarily with lady detectives, despite the storied male protagonists from the subgenre’s early days. the mechanics of genre formation thus suggest that lady detectives’ widespread presence makes such changes possible by putting pressure on which features count as standard for the subgenre. miss marple herself may not be a great lady detective, but she helped lay the foundations for a future lady detective who is. writing her into being, however, will require careful attention to the structural properties of her genre and to how these interact with real-world prejudices. references battersby, christine. 1989. gender and genius: towards a feminist aesthetics. bloomington: indiana university press. byrne, alex. 1993. “truth in fiction: the story continued.” australasian journal of philosophy 71 (1): 24–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048409312345022. clavel-vazquez, adriana. 2018. “sugar and spice, and everything nice: what rough heroines tell us about imaginative resistance.” journal of aesthetics and art criticism 76, no. 2 (april): 201–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12440. currie, gregory. 1990. the nature of fiction. new york: cambridge university press. evans, gareth. 1982. the varieties of reference. edited by john mcdowell. new york: oxford university press. friend, stacie. 2012. “fiction as a genre.” proceedings of the aristotelian society 112, no. 2 pt. 2 (july): 179–209. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2012.00331.x. ———. 2017a. “elucidating the truth in criticism.” journal of aesthetics and art criticism 75, no. 4 (november): 387–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12397. ———. 2017b. “the real foundation of fictional worlds.” australasian journal of philosophy 95 (1): 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2016.1149736. moser and xhignesse – a garden of one’s own, or why are there no great lady detectives? published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 kolmes, sara, and matthew a. hoffman. 2021. “harlequin resistance? romance novels as a model for resisting objectification.” journal of aesthetics and art criticism 79, no. 1 (winter): 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpaa004. lewis, david. 1978. “truth in fiction.” american philosophical quarterly 15, no. 1 (january): 37–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009693. ———. 1983. “postscripts to ‘truth in fiction.’” in philosophical papers, vol. 1, 276–80. new york: oxford university press. manne, kate. 2018. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. mcewan, john. 1978. “beleaguered.” the spectator, september 9, 1978, 25. https:// archive.spectator.co.uk/article/9th-september-1978/25/art. nochlin, linda. (1971) 1988. “why have there been no great women artists?” in women, art, and power, and other essays, 145–78. new york: harper & row. priest, graham. 2005. towards non-being: the logic and metaphysics of intentionality. oxford: clarendon press. ruskin, john. 1886. “of queens’ gardens.” in works of john ruskin: sesame and lilies, 81–131. new york: john wiley & sons. ryan, marie-laure. 1980. “fiction, non-factuals and the principle of minimal departure.” poetics 9, no. 4 (august): 403–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304422x(80)90030-3. statista research department. 2022. “ranking of the most dangerous cities in the world in 2022, by murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants.” statista, august 5, 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/243797/ranking-of-the-most-dan gerous-cities-in-the-world-by-murder-rate-per-capita/. townsend, lucy. 2013. “how unrealistic is murder on television?” bbc news magazine, january 16. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20910859. walton, kendall l. 1970. “categories of art.” the philosophical review 79, no. 3 (july): 334–67. ———. 1990. mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. woods, john. 1974. the logic of fiction. the hague and paris: mouton. ———. 2018. truth in fiction: rethinking its logic. cham: springer international. xhignesse, michel-antoine. 2018. “fake views—or why concepts are bad guides to art’s ontology.” british journal of aesthetics 58, no. 2 (april): 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayy009. shelby moser is an instructor at rio hondo college and azusa pacific university. her background is in art history and the philosophy of art and games with a focus on the ontology of games, play, and interactivity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 michel-antoine xhignesse is an instructor of philosophy at capilano university. he works primarily in the philosophy of art (focusing especially on the ontology of art and the problem of truth in fiction), although he has also published on cultural appropriation, imagination, social ontology, and schopenhauer. 14348 moser & xhingesse title page 14348 moser & xhignesse final format kant on sex. reconsidered. -a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation feminist philosophy quarterly volume 4 | issue 1 article 1 kant on sex. reconsidered. -a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation helga varden university of illinois at urbana-champaign, helga.varden@gmail.com recommended citation varden, helga. . "kant on sex. reconsidered. -a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation." feminist philosophy quarterly4, (1). article 1.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 kant on sex. reconsidered. a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation1 helga varden abstract kant on sex gives most philosophers the following associations: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological account within his freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of most sexual activity. although this paper provides an interpretation of kant’s view on sexuality, it neither defends nor offers an apology for everything kant says about sexuality. rather, it aims to show that a reconsidered kant-based account can utilize his many worthwhile insights and that making kant’s account of sexuality more consistent with his own basic philosophical commitments results in a compelling approach to the complex and complicated phenomena of sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. keywords: kant, sexual love, sexual identity, sexual orientation, lgbtqia. 1 the writing of this paper has taken a long time and has enjoyed the best of support from many colleagues and organizations. so, thank you: lucy allais, sarah broadie, rachel bryant, ann cahill, andrew cutrofello, chad flanders, jonathan garthoff, carol hay, barbara herman, sari kisilevsky, patricia marino, eric j. miller, sasha newton, krupa patel, jonathan peterson, massimo renzo, barbara sattler, ashley say, laurie shrage, david sussman, nicolaus tideman, ekow n. yankah, lorenzo zucca, shelley e. weinberg, allen w. wood, rachel zuckert, and two anonymous reviewers for feminist philosophy quarterly. thanks also to the brady program at northwestern university and to department of philosophy, the center for advanced studies, and the campus research board programs at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign for funding for this project, and to nancy abelmann, maria gillombardo, sally haslanger, barbara herman, pauline kleingeld, martha nussbaum, and arthur ripstein for supporting my applications for this funding. finally, thanks to the audiences at related presentations at the universities of chicago, illinois at urbana-champaign, and western michigan, as well as at union college, concordia university, northwestern university, the society for the philosophy of sex and love, and the xxvii world congress of the international association for the philosophy of law and social philosophy (ivr). 1 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, introduction mentioning kant and sex in the same sentence evokes in most philosophers associations of the following kinds: a lifelong celibate philosopher; a peculiar defense of a natural teleological view of sexuality; a strange incorporation of this natural teleological view within his liberal, freedom-based moral theory; and a stark ethical condemnation of uninhibited sexual desire and activity in general and of nonprocreative sexual desire and activity in particular. certainly, kant says many things to induce these associations throughout his works. for example, teleological assumptions are typically present when sexuality is being discussed, such as in his description of “sexual love” as “destined by it [nature] to preserve the species . . . a natural end” (kant 1996a, mm 6: 424).2 among his moralized and teleologically informed condemnations of most kinds of sexual desire and activity, kant says that ethically permissible sex occurs only within marriage and involves only procreative sexual activities since “one may not, at least, act contrary to that [natural] end” (1996a, mm 6: 426). indeed, after having clarified that marriage is between men and women in the metaphysics of morals, kant emphasizes that unnatural sexual use takes place “either with a person of the same sex or with an animal of the nonhuman species . . . such transgressions of laws, called unnatural . . . [carnal crimes against nature] or also unmentionable vices, do wrong to humanity in our own person, [and] there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save them from being repudiated completely” (6: 277). along similar lines, kant claims that any nonprocreative sexual activity (even masturbating with fantasies) involves a “defiling (not merely a debasing) of the humanity in his [one’s] own person” and “debases him [one] beneath the beasts” and is “contrary to morality in its highest degree”; in fact, even thinking about sex within marriage is a rather shameful activity, which is why sex can only be talked about in “delicate” ways in “polite society” (1996a, mm 6: 424ff.). and as if this wasn’t bad enough, kant maintains that all nonprocreative sex is to be considered worse than suicide, even though both kinds of activities are inconsistent with “mere 2 i refer to all of kant’s works by means of the standard prussian academy pagination as well as the following abbreviations: for the works printed in anthropology, history, and education (2007), i use ‘a’ for anthropology from a pragmatic point of view; ‘cb’ for “conjectural beginning of human history;” ‘pmb’ for “on the philosophers’ medicine of the body;” ‘mh’ for “essay on the maladies of the head.” for the works printed in practical philosophy (1996a), ‘cprr’ for critique of practical reason; ‘mm’ for the metaphysics of morals; ‘gw’ for groundwork for the metaphysics of morals; ‘tp’ for “on the common saying: that may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice;” and, finally, i use ‘r’ for religion within the boundaries of mere reason, printed in religion and rational theology (1996b). 2 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 animal nature” (1996a, mm 6: 277). after all, a person who commits suicide must at least have courage, whereas the person engaging in unnatural sex thereby “abandons . . . his personality (throwing it away)” and instead simply “surrenders” to “animal inclination” in a way that deprives him of all self-respect (1996a, mm 6: 425). from reading these and similar passages, it seems that the best we can do, according to kant, is to engage in ethically permissible sex understood as strictly procreative sexual activities within a marital context, and we should avoid experimenting or enjoying even that too much—a rather grim vision indeed. those of us who find kant’s general ways of doing philosophy fruitful and compelling find these particular statements philosophically puzzling. one puzzle is why kant—a stout defender of freedom and natural science—employs the perspective of natural teleology in the middle of his account of morally permissible sex. another general puzzle concerns why kant thinks that marriage can transform an allegedly inherently unethical activity—sexual activity as such (“sexual love”)— into an ethically permissible one. sexual love in a narrow sense of the word is, kant also argues, a type of pleasure that can become the strongest form of pleasure (a “passion”), and it combines sensuous pleasure with the pleasures “from the enjoyment of another person” (1996a, mm 6: 426). moreover, the special kind of pleasure sexual love enables is distinct from both moral love and delight in another person since sexual love includes the desire for carnal enjoyment of the other (objectification), whereas both moral love and delight “instead, deter one from carnal enjoyment” (1996a, mm 6: 426). kant also argues that sexual love can enter into “a close ‘union’ with moral love under the limiting conditions of practical reason” (1996a, mm 6: 426), which occurs when sexual activity is undertaken in procreative ways within a marital context (6: 277). which leads us back to the question: why is marriage deemed capable of performing such moral magic on otherwise immoral activities? sometimes, exploring these seemingly enigmatic statements concerning sexuality in kant’s writings leads not to simple puzzlement but also to sadness. most of us who are accustomed to encountering heterosexism and homophobia register kant as advancing both; indeed, the kind of language kant uses can be the same language used when we are subjected to emotional or physical sexual violence. kant is aggressive and condemning: sometimes, such as when reading the texts where we find the language of “defiling” and “debasing” quoted above, it feels as if kant is having angry panic attacks in the middle of his texts. why didn’t he do better? what is it about sexuality that makes it so easy and tempting to join damaging social forces, to turn so very aggressive, cognitively stubborn, dehumanizing and narrowminded, as kant was? why didn’t kant dare to be wiser about sexuality? and, of course, reading what kant says—what are for many statements about oneself, about one’s loved ones, or about others whose sexual identities or orientations are 3 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, not cis or straight—is emotionally hard work, as is trying to fix the account for kant. this paper is therefore not setting aside, defending, or offering an apology for kant’s many awful statements about sexuality. quite the opposite: i’m proceeding on the assumption that it is important to explore these troublesome aspects of kant’s writings if we are to understand them in all their complexity and the complicated phenomena we then encounter, including his heterosexism and homophobia. understanding kant’s mistakes is important not only to understanding kant’s vulnerabilities in these regards, but also our own, and it is also necessary to finding a better, reconsidered kantian theory of sexuality. in addition, i argue that by making kant’s basic philosophical framework and insights more consistent with itself, we can derive from it a compelling approach to sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation. part 1 (“kant on sex”) sketches kant’s account of human nature (1.1) and of the union between unreflective and reflective elements of the emotionally healthy, morally good human self. in 1.2 i then explore how kant envisions the imagination— especially the principles of the beautiful and the sublime—as informing and enabling human sexuality. part 2 (“reconsidering kant on sex”) develops important elements of kant’s own account, arguing that a more plausible account of morally justifiable, emotionally healthy human sexuality that encompasses also the sexual identities and orientations of lgbtqia can be found without abandoning kant’s basic philosophical framework.3 1. kant on sex many who are skeptical of kant’s practical philosophy assume—often on the basis of (meta-)ethical writings such as his groundwork for the metaphysics of morals—that kant considers the human self a purely rational subject that relates to everything as distinct from itself and that ought to relate to everything at all times in a thoroughly moralized, reasoned, reflective way. as such, a moral subject endeavors always to act only on universalizable maxims from the motivation of duty (a self-reflective mode). and since universalizing a maxim involves checking if the considered action respects all persons as free and equal, it appears that living a moral life involves treating everyone—strangers and loved ones alike—as if they 3 since this paper simply aims to explore and reconsider kant’s approach to sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation, i do not take on the question of how this account fits with his freedom writings on ethics and right. although the paper aims at being consistent with my a kantian theory of sexuality (varden, forthcoming), i believe it can be seen as compatible with recent, relevant kantian or kant-inspired work on ethics and right, such as recent books by carol hay (2013), barbara herman (2008), sarah clark miller (2012), and arthur ripstein (2009). 4 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 have an equal normative importance when we act. one problem with such an approach is that it fails to capture a meaningful human life—with wonderful loves as well as brutal losses—and another one is that it seems like a morally and emotionally perverted kind of ideal: surely the aim is not to live our lives in ways so thoroughly reflective and moralized that we regard everyone as equally important. variations of these worries have been raised against kant’s philosophy from the start—by philosophers from fichte to hegel to nietzsche to beauvoir and sartre— and more recently, in the many related discussions surrounding the influential work by feminists on the relational self,4 by stephen darwall’s (2006) fichte-inspired conception of the second personal address; by peter f. strawson’s (1962) analysis of reactive attitudes5 and bernard williams’s (1981) “one-thought-too-many” objection to universal theories.6 to show why kant’s philosophy is not advocating such moralized and hyper-reflective ways of being, we must look to his much fuller normative account of the human self. for kant, human selves comprise both unreflective and reflective normative elements that work together in an integrated whole in morally good, emotionally healthy human beings. more specifically, i argue that kant’s account of human nature explores the importance of embodiment, nonmoralized emotions, and particular others, though he rightly maintains that we are held morally responsible for them. i also suggest that on this position, insofar as we are morally good, emotionally healthy persons, we move easily between unreflective and reflective ways of being. 1.1. the predisposition to good in human nature a good account of sexuality requires at least five elements. it must explain how sexuality comprises aspects of ourselves that are deeply personal in nature and 4 the relevant literature here is vast. for an excellent description and overview of the literature, see the stanford encyclopedia (sep) entry entitled “feminist perspectives on the self” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self/). this sep entry also assumes the common interpretation of the kantian conception of the self that my paper here seeks to challenge. for an overview over kantian feminist writings, see my “kant’s moral theory and feminist ethics: women, embodiment, care relations, and systemic injustice” (varden 2018). 5 for a kantian example, see allais (2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2013). 6 for kantian examples, see albrecht (2015) and sussman (2005). i consider this paper one way to do what these articles by albrecht, allais, and sussman do not view themselves as doing, namely engaging kant’s texts to show how his own theory can address these issues. hence, i see these different accounts (mine included) as complementing each other, even if the issues are pursued somewhat differently and we all disagree in some respects. 5 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, can have a grounding function for us as embodied, affectionate human beings. second, sexuality is both social in nature and constituted by relations involving us as the particular people we are. third, sexuality involves a certain embodied, creative playfulness where the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime in oneself and in another often are constitutive parts. fourth, although sexuality is unruly in nature, we must account for how we can still assume responsibility for it. fifth, a minimally plausible account of sexuality cannot end up with a binary, heterosexist analysis of sexuality since that makes it incapable of speaking to lgbtqia being and experiences in meaningful ways. importantly—and one aspect that makes kant’s thinking difficult here— the first three elements concern ways in which sexuality, for the most part, is experienced in unreflective, nonmoralized ways. in fact, in order for reflections on our sexual selves to track reality, they must be informed by how we are oriented in unreflective, affectionately emotional, and embodied ways in life. contrary to standard interpretations, i argue that kant would agree with this. moreover, in this section and the next, i argue that once we overcome the binary heterosexism of his account of human nature and we combine this with his idea that we use the imagination aesthetically when realizing our sexuality, we have an excellent starting point for a productive, reconsidered kantian account of human sexuality. to start, then, we need a brief outline of kant’s account of human nature. kant outlines his account of human nature in religion within the boundaries of mere reason, and central to understanding its structure is what he calls the “original predisposition to good in human nature” (kant 1996b, r 6: 26). this predisposition is understood as threefold, namely as comprising the predispositions to (1) “animality . . . as a living being,” (2) to “humanity . . . as a living and at the same time rational being,” and, finally, (3) to “personality, as a rational and at the same time responsible being” (kant 1996b, r 6: 26). as we will see shortly, the first two elements (animality and humanity) enable important normative, nonmoralized emotional aspects of ourselves—aspects central to any plausible account of sexuality. but before attending to this, notice that at the outset of his discussion, kant suggests that these predispositions should be thought of as “original” in the sense that “they belong with necessity to the possibility of this being”; they enable the three kinds of self-love constitutive of a morally and emotionally healthy human being (kant 1996b, r 6: 28). kant furthermore argues that these predispositions should be seen as “good” not only because “they do not resist the moral law,” but because “they demand compliance with it” (kant 1996b, r 6: 28). before addressing how these predispositions work together, let me expand briefly on each of them considered separately. the first, the predisposition to animality, kant argues, is constitutive of us as living beings. kant proposes that the predisposition to animality can be seen as consisting in three natural drives or conscious forces in us, namely the drives to self6 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 preservation; to the propagation of the species “through the sexual drive, and for the preservation of the offspring thereby begotten through breeding”; and finally, to “community with other human beings through the social drive” (kant 1996b, r 6: 26–27). in sum, this predisposition concerns embodied ways of being oriented in the world, ways we experience as constitutive of us as living, sexually embodied, and social human beings. importantly, realizing this predisposition does not require reason as such. this is not to say that as human animals we do not reflect. nor is it to deny that we live out our “animality” consciously and in more complex ways than nonhuman animals. rather, the idea is simply that acting out of this predisposition does not require reason (reflective self-consciousness and abstract conceptual thinking), and hence beings that do not have reason, but instead have much less complex kinds of consciousness (such as reflexive self-consciousness in combination with associative thinking), also have this predisposition.7 one way to understand why this is predisposition is “original” and “good” is to consult simone de beauvoir’s account of our first (minimally) conscious experiences in the womb in the later stages of pregnancy and as newborns.8 drawing also on psychoanalytic insights, beauvoir suggests that central to understanding certain aspects of our basic emotional life is the fact that we at first experience the natural and the social as one unit: our initial conscious experiences take place inside another human being, where our needs are automatically satisfied and we comfortably float around in a perfectly tempered fluid without any notion of being distinct from our environment. our first minimally conscious experiences are of being at one and deeply comfortable with the world—and all of this is enabled by another human being. hence, being born is physically and existentially very painful, since for the first time we are not only cut off from the body-tempered liquid and the automatic food supply—and so we feel our physical needs in an intense, new way—but we are also physically separated from the being we’ve literally been existing inside of. it is in part because this whole separation process is so existentially traumatic that it is common in many cultures to put the baby immediately onto the mother’s body and to tend to and to comfort the baby throughout the first period of infanthood (no weaning). such tending and comforting enables newborns to experience a safe, trustful way of being in the world. correspondingly, for caregivers, making sure that the 7 for an exploration of this issue, see my “kant and moral responsibility for animals” (varden, forthcoming). 8 that this is possible is not a coincidence: both beauvoir and kant were very influenced by rousseau’s account of human nature in emile. for some of these similarities and differences between beauvoir and kant, see varden (2015); for the influence of rousseau on beauvoir, see scholz (2010). 7 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, baby feels that the world as such is good becomes all-important. moreover, when things go well (in good upbringings), young children learn to be comfortable with their own physical, including sensuous, embodiment. thus, realizing a healthy predisposition to good in animality involves developing a subjective (first-personal) sense of being at home in the world as a living, embodied, social being, and it means becoming able to act with trust in the world as a good world (despite all the evidence to the contrary). importantly, too, this kind of self-love is in itself unreflective, yet good in that it enables us to be in the world as natural-social beings with certain nonmoralized, yet normative, kinds of attitudes and emotions that express such trust in the world. for example, developing the animalistic predisposition involves developing abilities to affectively love and be loved by dear ones; physically maneuver in good ways in the world; be comfortable in one’s own body and around others’ bodies, and even experience profound contentment after a good, healthy meal. for kant, realizing our animalist nature well is to be fundamentally tuned in to the kinds of embodied social beings we are, such that we derive pleasure from that which is genuinely good for us. the second predisposition, to humanity, involves end-setting as a “rational being”; it is “physical . . . and yet involves comparison for which reason is required,” though it does not require being able to act as motivated by pure practical reason; and, finally, “out of this self-love originates the inclination to gain worth in the opinion of others, originally, of course, merely equal worth. . .” (6: 27). this predisposition adds to our animality “comparative uses of reason” and acting rationally, meaning orienting ourselves in the world by means of comparing things (including ourselves to each other), setting ends of our own, and acting on maxims (subjective principles of action). when the predisposition to humanity is developed well, we experience a kind of love that is enabled by perceiving and being perceived by another as equally valuable as well as mastering rational end-setting (acting on maxims that can hold as universal laws). correspondingly, insofar as we are realizing healthy intimate relationships, we regard each other as equally valuable in all our differences; we take joy in each other’s successes, and we always assume that the other is directed towards us as we are towards them. when we fail, either intentionally or unintentionally, to affirm ourselves and others as having equal worth, we get hurt or hurt each other. but then we can remedy the hurt. insofar as we are emotionally healthy human beings in good relationships, we do all of this spontaneously; it simply is the way we are predisposed emotionally to be oriented towards one another. the above is, i believe, part of what kant means by saying that these two predispositions are “original” and “good” in the religion (6: 28). they are original because realizing them is constitutive of realizing human nature, and they are good because realizing them well (including through developing the related emotions) 8 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 makes it subjectively easier to do what moral reflection requires; “they demand compliance with it [the moral law]” (6: 28).9 because we are rational and so have the use of reflection and abstract conceptual thinking we learn to feel, describe, and further develop our emotional experiences. through reflective and conceptual consideration of what we want and need, the world presents itself in an open-ended kind of way: we rationally choose and set (new) ends of our own. moreover, we learn to act on principles that respect others and ourselves as rational beings and which are consistent with and, insofar as possible, supportive of others’ ability to set and pursue ends of their own.10 as mentioned above, kant argues that although the second predisposition (to humanity) necessarily involves comparative uses of reason and rational endsetting, it should not be seen as necessarily involving acting as motivated by practical reason. it simply prepares the way for being able to do this. the susceptibility to act as motivated by practical reason—what enables me to do something just because it is the right thing to do (to act from duty)—is due to what kant calls the predisposition to personality, which is revealed in “moral feeling,” or in a basic ability to pick up on the need to act as demanded by, or as motivated by, practical reason. in kant’s words, the predisposition to personality is “the susceptibility to respect for the moral law as of itself a sufficient motive to the power of choice. this susceptibility to simple respect for the moral law within us . . . [is] moral feeling . . . [which is the incentive] of the free power of choice . . . [which] incorporates moral feeling into its maxim” (kant 1996b, r 6: 27, cf. kant 1996a, mm 399ff.). moral feeling, then, concerns the way in which we are susceptible to a moral demand, which includes realizing that a situation requires us to act in a certain way just because doing so is the right thing to do. to act on universalizable maxims from the motive of duty is to have realized our disposition to “personality,” meaning our capacity to act in morally responsible and, so, truly free or autonomous ways. hence, when we so act we use “the free power of choice” to incorporate “moral feeling into its maxim,” by making duty our motivation for action (kant 1996b, r 6: 28) and thereby giving our action “moral worth” (kant 1996a, gw 4: 401). thus kant also describes “personality” as “the idea of humanity considered wholly intellectually” (kant 1996b, r 6: 28, cf. 6: 26n.), meaning beings that can set ends rationally (act on universalizable maxims) and as motivated by duty. 9 relatedly, in the anthropology kant describes realizing this second predisposition as realizing “moral decency” (kant 2007, a 7: 306), which is a developmental precursor to moral being. 10 we find the same point in (kant 1996a, gw 4: 424), when kant says, we learn to act only on universalizable maxims, maxims that can be “thought” and “willed” as universal laws. 9 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, shortly we will see that, because of our ability to choose—to set ends of our own—in combination with our sensible nature, it is universally the case that we will do bad things, indeed that we can become quite destructive and damaging to each other and to ourselves. but for now, notice that none of what has been said so far commits us always to assume the self-reflective, moralized stance when we act in the ways enabled by the first two predispositions to good in human nature. on the contrary, we can have emotionally healthy nonmoralized interactions with others: we eat, drink, affectionately love, and play together. kant’s claim is that the motivational powers of our reflective abilities come into play when something seems problematic, when we have to figure out what we are doing (which maxim we are acting on) and then act as we ought to.11 as kant argues in the metaphysics of morals, insofar as i’m able to act responsibly (have developed personality), at all times i am not only aware of what i’m doing, but i relate to myself and my actions as mine and as something i can relate to and assume moral responsibility for: i relate to myself as a person and to my actions as my deeds (kant 1996a, mm 6: 223). kant’s position, then, is not one according to which the human self is simply a rational, immaterial self that relates to everything in a self-reflective, moralized way. rather, insofar as we are virtuous, emotionally healthy beings—or as we fully develop the capacities constitutive of human being (all three predispositions to good in human nature) in robust ways—we become able to move easily between acting as embodied beings in nonmoralized, emotionally healthy ways and as moral beings motivated by practical reason. when what we are doing unreflectively is good, thinking about what we are doing is not experienced as uncomfortable. after all, part of what being human is all about is developing the embodied, emotional, social selves enabled by the predispositions to animality and humanity in healthy ways. hence, kant argues that affects—such as acting out of joy, anger, or astonishment— can be emotionally “healthful” (kant 2007, phm 15: 940), although they do make reflection “impossible or more difficult” (kant 1996a, mm 6: 408). rather what we have a duty to do in these regards—what kant calls the “duty of apathy” (6: 408)—is to be able to be around strong affects and emotions without immediately acting on them and generally not simply to live our lives as dictated by our affects.12 moreover, growing in these emotional and moral ways is obviously not an endproject; being engaged in it, becoming better at it, challenging oneself not only to 11 relatedly, in the second critique kant clarifies that rational self-love “merely infringes upon [animalistic] self-love, inasmuch as it only restricts it, as natural and active in us even prior to the moral law” (kant 1996a, cprr 5: 73). 12 see langton (1992) for a relevant yet very different take on kant’s duty of apathy (and conception of the human self). 10 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 set ends of one’s own but to develop good ways of going about life, including as one meets various difficult situations and threats, is a project for life; it is life. the moral aim, then, is not to rid oneself of these other nonmoralized yet normative emotional aspects of oneself, but to correct one’s ways of realizing them when what one is doing is not respectful of or good for oneself or for others. consequently, whether we put this in terms of the contemporary philosophical language of relational selves, reactive attitudes, second-personal address, or affectionate love, kant thinks that an emotionally healthy human being lives much of life within the sphere of nonmoralized yet normative emotions, which reveals the importance of the how particular individuals enable the mutual flourishing of each other. the moral aim is simply always to make sure that our ways of realizing these nonmoralized forms of self-love is in “close union . . . under the limiting conditions of practical reason” (kant 1996a, mm 6: 426)—corresponding to how the “highest good” for human beings is viewed as a “union” and “harmony” between “human morality” and “human happiness” (kant 1996a, tp 8: 279). personality enables us to assume moral responsibility for developing the capacities for animality and humanity in ways that are truly good for us as the social, yet particular, free beings we are. and so, the morally and emotionally healthy human being moves easily between unreflective and reflective ways of being. consistent with this, as we will see in more detail below, realizing sexual love in a broader sense of the word, involves developing, transforming, and integrating all three predispositions (animality, humanity, and personality) to good in human nature in one whole. first, however, getting kant’s full account of human sexuality into view requires that we tend to his discussion of how we utilize the principles of the beautiful and sublime imaginatively when realizing our sexual selves. 1.2. the role of the imagination in kant’s theory of sexuality as mentioned, a sufficiently complex theory of sexuality needs an account of how an aesthetic employment of the imagination constitutes important aspects of sexuality for many human beings (for kant, as enabled by our employment of the beautiful and the sublime) as well as a way to conceive of sexuality that doesn’t involve the heterosexist binaries. here i outline kant’s suggestion for how aesthetic and teleological use of the imagination is constitutive of sexuality, which enables us, in the next section, to overcome kant’s binary heterosexism. since there already exist several interpretations of kant’s take on the traditional genders (“man” and “woman”),13 here i only sketch his account with an eye to issues relevant to reconsidering his account of sexuality. to start, kant’s general suggestion is that we use aesthetic and teleological imagination to 13 for two recent ones, see mikkola (2011) and varden (2015). 11 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, experience complementary female and male sexual embodiment. more specifically, the beautiful (female) embodied power irresistibly allures and hence makes the sublime (male) embodied power want to subject itself to and become one with it, whereas the beautiful wants to be empowered by the sublime and hence wants to become one with it. in this way, the sexual union becomes a union between two kinds of equally powerful, embodied principles; the female experiences sublime, forceful embodiment through her union with the male—through having it wanting her and yet being in control of it—and vice versa. in addition, kant argues, it is a union that is compatible with procreation and, so, with a teleological use of the imagination.14 when things go well, kant furthermore argues, this sexual union matures into a social, self-sustaining union in that the two people affirm each other’s worth as equals, where they split between themselves the emotional, physical, and social work, so that they complement each other in their shared life in addition to pursuing ends of their own. an illustration of this line of argument is found in his “conjectural beginning of human history” essay, where kant interprets the judeo-christian story of adam and eve in just this way. part of kant’s purpose here, i believe, is to explain features of this story that help us to see how human beings’ reasoning and imaginative powers set them apart from other animals both cognitively and emotionally (cf. kant 2007, a 7: 322, 328). to do this, kant first emphasizes that though human beings share with other animals the natural drive for nourishment, our capacity for selfreflective consciousness and reason (abstract, conceptual powers) enables us not only to be at a reflective distance from our natural, instinctual desires, but also to imagine new ways of satisfying them. hence, humans can set new kinds of ends regarding our instinctual desire for nourishment rather than merely satisfying natural instincts. contrarily, since other animals do not have self-reflective, abstract conceptual consciousness, their end-setting is ultimately determined by instincts and natural desires. moreover, humans can enhance the sensuous experience itself by utilizing our aesthetic appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime. for example, we enhance the experience of eating by combining tastes of various kinds of foods as well as through the aesthetic presentation of food as beautiful or elegant, including by manipulating colors and shapes. human beings don’t only eat, in other words; we enjoy meals.15 second, and relatedly, humans can also develop a more complex version of the natural sexual instinct. this instinct, kant suggests, is that by means of which all 14 thomas nagel (1969) comes close to philosophically defending something like kant’s own conception of “natural sexuality.” for an interpretation much closer to the one i’m defending here, see wood (2008). 15 i’m grateful to leo zaibert for this formulation. 12 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 animals, including humans, “care for the preservation of the[ir] kind” (kant 2007, cb 8: 113). yet, our self-reflective reasoning powers transform our natural sexual instinct too: the human being soon found that the stimulus to sex, which with animals rests merely on a transient, for the most part periodic impulse, was capable for him of being prolonged and even increased through the power of the imagination, whose concern, to be sure, is more with moderation, yet at the same time works more enduringly and uniformly the more its object is withdrawn from the senses, and he found that it prevents the boredom that comes along with the satisfaction of a merely animal desire. the figleaf . . . was thus the product of a far greater manifestation of reason than that which it had demonstrated in the first stage of its development. for to make an inclination more inward and enduring by its withdrawing its object from the senses, shows already the consciousness of some dominion of reason over impulse and not merely, as in the first step, a faculty for doing service to those impulses within a lesser or greater extension. refusal was the first artifice for leading from the merely sensed stimulus over to ideal ones, from merely animal desire gradually over to love, and with the latter from the feeling of the merely agreeable over to the taste for beauty, in the beginning only in human beings but then, however, also in nature. moreover, propriety, an inclination by good conduct to influence others to show respect for us (through the concealment of that which could incite low esteem), as the genuine foundation of all true sociability, gave the first hint toward the formation of the human being as a moral creature.—a small beginning, which, however, is epoch-making, in that it gives an entirely new direction to the mode of thought—and is more important than the entire immeasurable extensions of culture that followed upon it. (8: 112–113) again, our reflective self-consciousness and abstract conceptual reasoning powers enable us to have a certain distance from our sexual desires such that we can develop and increase these desires through a playful game of concealing and revealing our bodies to each other. i take it that although straightforward procreative sex in response to sexual impulse is obviously very satisfying (for straight people at least), in the long run doing only this gets rather boring. we make it more exciting—and increase the sexual pleasure experienced—by engaging in various sexual games of concealment, allurement, refusal, and acceptance. notice also that part of kant’s point here seems to be that we develop and transform our basic, animalistic (affectionate) sociality so that it is integrated into the self-recognitional kind of sociality enabled by our presupposition to humanity. 13 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, that is, engaging in these kinds of sexual activities expresses our ability to affirm one another as equally valuable. the way in which reason enables us to engage the world in new and playful ways is therefore seen as promoting more complex ways of desiring one another and as developing, transforming, and integrating sexual desire into mutual and affirmational sexual love. as the sexual relation is developed into its more emotionally mature form, brought about is an ability to be profoundly affectionate and emotionally open to one another in the course of the sexual activity itself. our being emotionally open to another in terms of our sexuality is one way in which we are open to being struck by another as beautiful and/or sublime. it opens up our ability to experience the world as beautiful and/or sublime in an embodied way—to be, as kant says, awe-struck or filled with awe. this analysis also helps bring out kant’s claims that being sexually attracted to someone is to want his/her person—and not just his/her body—as we would like the other to show us her aesthetic, creative playfulness and invite us to be part of her project of developing herself as who she is. it even helps to understand his condemnation of masturbation.16 that is to say, being fully directed towards another in an emotionally open, sexually loving way is being directed towards the person, and not just the body of the person. one wants the other to see how one reveals oneself— as who one truly is, in all one’s spontaneous, creative expressions—and one wants the other to want exactly this, to find exactly this irresistible, and to affirm oneself as revealed (and vice versa). and with time, we want to be part of each other’s developing, transforming, and integrating this ability into something more than it was. if so, then kant’s worry about masturbation is that it is not other-directed in the right kinds of ways: it is narcissistically self-oriented rather than other-oriented. moreover, for human beings, the point of sexuality cannot simply be orgasms; if so, then the point would be “lower than the beasts” and involve “throwing away one’s personality” since it would involve focusing simply on one’s animalistic capacity for intensely pleasant physical feelings rather than developing these capacities into an integrated life where one’s predisposition for humanity and personality are also realized in a unified whole. even though i believe this is too simplified a view of masturbation for emotionally healthy human beings (i provide a revised analysis below), it seems fair to say that a danger internal to sexual self-gratification is that it simply becomes an ability to feel sexual pleasures strongly and that a related danger internal to sexual interaction is that there may not be reciprocity in emotional openness. sexual love becomes either reduced to sexual pleasure or merely a more complex way of 16 i’m very grateful to penelope deutscher for having helped me see how rousseau’s influence might have led to this reason as kant’s worry about masturbation. i’m also grateful to david sussman for earlier discussions of these themes. 14 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 masturbating, where one is treating the other simply as a masturbation tool with the gratifying capacity to affirm one’s sense of self.17 now, none of this is to say that this binary, heterosexist account is necessary or sufficient: after all, it is simply not the case that this binary, heterosexual way is how very many experience fulfilling sexual love—indeed, not even many who do identify as cis and heterosexual experience their own sexuality in such a binary way. in order to address these complexities, we need to use kant’s own philosophical tools to go beyond his texts, which is the purpose of the next section. as we have seen, kant affirms a binary, heterosexist view of sexuality, according to which morally justifiable and emotionally healthy sex tracks procreation and ought to be undertaken only within the confines of lifelong marriage. many, such as barbara herman (2002), have noted that it is truly puzzling why kant thinks that marriage can do such moral magic on inherently immoral activities (having sex). although kant certainly seems mistaken to think that sex is morally permissible only within the setting of heterosexual marriage (for reasons that will become clearer below), it seems plausible that encouraging another to be as emotionally open as happens in intimate, sexually loving affectionate relationships is justifiable only if one is equally open oneself—and that this is why kant argues that when we realize our sexuality in ways that involve good realizations of our animality and humanity, but also our personality, we do it through marriage. obviously, like several kantians before me, i don’t think emotionally healthy and morally good sexual encounters and relationships require marriage or that real relationships are this simple; surely they aren’t. and yet, marriage as a criterion of reciprocal openness might not be so strange: it may help explain why marriage is such an important human institution to so many (regardless of their sexual orientations or identities). that is to say, this account can say something as to why kant thinks that marriage—public, lifelong commitment to one another—is emotionally and morally important. notice too that this interpretation fits with how kant argues the only way in which sexual love itself can develop into a damaging passion is if it is not reciprocated (kant 2007, a 7: 266). “like all passionate longings,” kant argues, unrequited love “gnaw[s] and consume[s] the heart or, so to speak, bind[s] the vital force with shackles” (kant 2007, pmf 15: 940) and “the capacity of the understanding is of little help against it; for the end of enchanted human being sees very well indeed the reasons against his favorite inclination, but he feels powerless to give them active emphasis” (kant 2007, mh 2: 261). sexual passion driven by unrequited love is therefore emotionally and morally damaging 17 i cannot develop this argument here, but i believe the implied conception of moral development is broadly consistent with, for example, those we find in abramson and leite (2011) and herman (2008). 15 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, because it is one way in which one can make it increasingly difficult to live one’s own life; instead one’s life becomes focused on one unsatisfied aspect of life that one cannot develop, transform, and integrate into one’s life. marriage, then, for kant, is one way to secure oneself against this morally dangerous aspect of sexuality; it captures how one reasonably expects anyone who wants profound, intimate emotional openness towards oneself to be(come) similarly oriented themselves and with an aim for a lifelong relationship since any other way to proceed involves opening oneself and each other up to self-damaging passions. to bring out aspects of the above account, notice also how it allows us to improve upon existing interpretations of kant by adding a new kind of phenomenological structure to kant’s account, namely one informed by his account of human nature. for example, barbara herman (2002) argues that “although on kant’s view sexuality creates a morally impermissible relation between the sexual partners, it is neither desirable nor possible to forbid sexual activity. sexual intercourse is the now standard (then necessary) means for procreation, and love relations with sexual components are essential to happiness (for many). so we have a kind of relationship that we cannot forego (as the kind of beings we are) but that is not morally acceptable. marriage is supposed to solve the problem—resetting the moral stage so that there is a morally permissible way for sexual life to take place without inevitable moral loss or danger” (64–65). she continues later, “the idea seems to be that through the mediation by law, the natural tendencies to objectification, and so dominance and exploitation, in sexual relations are blocked. the institution of marriage in this way resolves the moral difficulty arising from sexual activity” (67). herman proceeds, “the purpose of the institution of marriage is to block the transformation of regard that comes with sexual appetite. . . . what . . . [the rights and responsibilities] are to do is to secure regard for one’s partner as a person with a life, which is what the sexual appetite by itself causes one to disregard” (68). agreeing with herman that sexual desire for kant is inherently objectifying, christine korsgaard (1992) identifies the main problem somewhat differently, as being one of desiring to possess the other: “viewed through the eyes of sexual desire another person is seen as something wantable, desirable, and, therefore, inevitably, possessable” (korsgaard 1992, 310). marriage solves this problem of objectification, korsgaard continues, because of how it enables reciprocal possession: “perfect reciprocity is the only condition under which the sexual relation is morally legitimate; and kant thinks this condition is only possible in marriage, where the reciprocity of surrender has been pledged” (311). of course, neither herman nor korsgaard thinks that the historical institution of marriage—or “marriage-as-we-know-it” (herman) or “marriage as it has usually existed” (korsgaard)—has been the solution; as herman points out, that institution is a 16 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 “nasty thing” (herman 2002, 65) and “has hardly been a solution to this problem [of objectification]” (korsgaard 1992, 311).18 moreover, in sexual solipsism, rae langton (2009) argues that even if herman’s reading of kant’s worries about sex (sexual love being “a desire for a person qua body, a reductive desire”) or korsgaard’s reading (which understands sexual love as “a desire for a person qua person, but… an invasive desire”) are correct interpretations, both take sexual desires to be “certain pathologies.” this basic assumption also appears affirmed by jordan pascoe (2012) in her “kant and kinky sex,” where her main argument is that kant mistakes all sex for kinky sex—before proceeding to explain how one can also engage in kinky (highly objectifying and hence highly morally dangerous) sex in morally responsible ways. finally, langton (2009) concludes her engagement with herman and korsgaard by arguing that even if kant held some such view, like pascoe, she argues that we shouldn’t see all sexual desire that way. the above account adds to these discussions by showing how kant’s account of human nature informs his comments about sexuality. we have seen that according to kant, simple animalistic sexual love is objectifying and bad because it does not involve a realization of our three-fold predisposition to good in human nature; it involves living as if our beings are comprised of only one aspect. on the one hand, it informs why he says that “natural sexual union takes place either in accordance with mere animal nature . . . or in accordance with law [which is marriage]” (kant 1996a, mm 6: 277). now, given kant’s account of sexual teleology, this is also why he thinks that the only thing worse than simple objectifying animalistic sex is unnatural objectifying sex; in this case, we not only live as if we are beings with sheer animality, but we use our capacities to choose to pervert this animality. hence, this is why kant says things like, “unnatural sex” involves 18 in “a kantian conception of rightful sexual relations: sex, (gay) marriage and prostitution” (2007) and in “a kantian critique of the care tradition: family law and systemic justice” (2012), i argue that although the ideal legal institution of marriage does have such remedial virtues according to kant, his argument succeeds without making objectifying features of sexual desire do such philosophical work. however, since the aim here is merely to see how kant’s account of human nature informs his comments on sexuality and how marriage can be an emotionally healthy and a safeguard against our tendencies to do bad things, i’m setting aside this issue here. also, notice that if this argument is persuasive, it gives us interpretive resources with which both to show that kant doesn’t lack an account of the good, as herlinde pauer-studer (1994) objects to kant and kantian defenders such as barbara herman and christine korsgaard, and to add more structure to the kantian phenomenology than we find to date in the work of herman, korsgaard, and other prominent kantian ethicists. 17 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, “transgressions of laws, called unnatural [carnal crimes against nature] or also unmentionable vices, do wrong to humanity in our own person, [and] there are no limitations or exceptions whatsoever that can save them from being repudiated completely” (6: 277); why unnatural sex involves “defiling (not merely a debasing) of the humanity in his [one’s] own person” and “debases him [one] beneath the beasts” and is “contrary to morality in its highest degree” (6: 424–425); why unnatural sex is worse than suicide since person who commits suicide must at least have courage, whereas the person engaging in unnatural sex thereby “abandons . . . his personality (throwing it away)” and instead simply “surrenders” to “animal inclination” in such a way that deprives him of all self-respect (kant 1996a, mm 6: 425). “mere” objectifying sex, in contrast, also involves one’s using one’s ability to choose (humanity) in such a way that it reduces oneself and the other to a mere thing—to one’s animality—and so it is also bad. the only way to act in good ways, in contrast, involves developing one’s sexual animality in such a way that it is transformed and integrated in a unified whole where one’s humanity and personality is thereby affirmed, and the only way to do this, kant argues, involves engaging in procreative sex activities within the confines of marriage, in which case sexuality is realized in nonpathological and morally justifiable ways. below i will argue, in a spirit similar to langton and pascoe, that although kant is right to argue that human sexuality is morally dangerous, kant is wrong to argue that the only way to realize emotionally healthy and morally good sexuality is through heterosexual, procreative activities within the confines of marriage. indeed, i will argue, this is what kant himself should have argued, given his other philosophical commitments. 2. reconsidering kant on sex. the previous section outlined kant’s take on sexuality, which brings us back to the question asked at the beginning of this paper: what went wrong philosophically such that kant ended up defending the binary, heterosexist un/natural distinction, and how do we overcome this problem in his theory? in my view, the answer to these questions is also found in kant’s discussion of human nature, including his account of the three original predispositions to good and the way in which it is integrated with his related discussions of the beautiful and the sublime. my suggestion is that kant should have conceived of the first, animalistic predisposition somewhat differently, since only then is it possible to capture how emotionally and morally healthy human sexuality is not invariably experienced as heterosexuality. i proceed without giving up on kant’s insight that there is more to sexuality that what can be captured through scientific, deterministic analyses of strict causality (as would be the perspective of the first critique) or through the moral perspective of freedom (as would be the perspective of the second critique). i maintain that sexuality also requires a different, inherently contingent analysis of 18 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 our employment of the imagination in aesthetic-teleological ways (the perspective of the third critique). the resulting account, i conclude, is what kant should have defended, since it can capture the predispositional aspect of human sexuality and our experience of our own sexuality and directedness towards others without ending up in unsustainable, binary heterosexism. i first outline what i take to be kant’s important insight that sexuality should not be simply moralized or understood in terms of deterministic science. i then show how we can overcome the heterosexist shortcomings of kant’s own approach. to start, then, what kant clearly seems correct in saying is that there is a certain givenness to one’s experience of one’s own sexuality, including one’s sexual and loving affectionate attractions, and that this is related to feeling at home in the world as an embodied, sexual being. how one identifies sexually, for example, such as whether one identifies oneself as man, woman, trans, lesbian, queer, and so forth, is experienced as tracking something true about oneself, and for many it is related to how one feels others can complete oneself in sexual activities and to a certain teleological, aesthetic embodied engagement with and/or how one experiences oneself as a good part of a good world. moreover, kant seems right to argue that if we try to explore this givenness through the perspectives of deterministic science or unbounded/free choices, we simply cannot get it properly into view. yet what kant, like so many others, seems clearly wrong about is the idea that this is simply a question of realizing oneself in line with some selection of the biological attributes one is born with. hence, even if we can grant that there are cultural and biological tendencies that can be generalized into binary heterosexism, it is simply not the case that much of human sexuality can be meaningfully understood in this way. to illustrate the philosophical problem and how my revised kantian account solves it, let me start with an example of sexual identity, namely an experience common to some of those who identify as trans. in my view, a good philosophical theory of sexuality must be able to make good sense of being trans, including the transitioning experience. it must, for example, address how some people who identify as trans are deeply uncomfortable with their current embodiment, a discomfort that can be alleviated only through transitioning. that is to say, the account must be able to explain how some have a deep desire or need to go through the physical surgeries involved in transitioning and how, after undergoing them, they describe feeling peacefully at home in the world as the embodied beings they have always felt themselves to be. in my view, it is very hard to make good philosophical sense of this if we understand sexuality simply as a matter of choices (including in response to existing desires) or science (strict, deterministic spatiotemporal causality relations). both types of account struggle to get into focus the existential importance of the surgeries as well as the existential relief experienced 19 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, when the process has been completed successfully. a sufficiently complex account needs to be able to capture how the same people have not until after transitioning had those positive, life-affirming embodied experiences (including those physical experiences) that these medical surgeries and treatments enable and that they have desired for so long. and this is what the choice (freedom) and science (determinism) accounts cannot do. after all, before the surgeries, these people have not yet had the physical embodiment that they are longing for, meaning that one’s existing physicality pre-surgery cannot explain having these desires pre-surgery and, so, also cannot explain why they are fulfilled through transitioning and having those physical experiences. it seems more plausible to argue that such transitioning is better understood as fulfilling a deeply felt need to adjust one’s physical embodiment so that it fits better with one’s subjective experience of oneself as a forceful embodied part of the natural-social world, including with the sexual functions and physical attributes important for one’s sense of being at home in the world and for obtaining profoundly fulfilling intimate relations. let me try to illustrate these points also with regard to sexual orientation. although most of us are significantly more flexible about sexuality than conventional theories seem to allow, it still seems true that many experience basic sexual orientation as having a certain givenness to it. it is neither sheer choice nor is it determined by strict causality (there is no gay gene that can explain nonstraightness deterministically). for example, straight people experience themselves as most comfortable sexually, including most sexually aroused and most easily sexually aroused, when they are sexually connecting with and physically complemented by members of the opposite sex; gay people are most comfortable sexually with people of the same sex, and bisexuals with both. again, what this means is not that there isn’t playfulness that crosses these boundaries. at the same time, however, these distinctions do track something experienced as existentially important—an importance revealed also in how deeply and increasingly difficult it is for someone to be denied the possibility of living out their sexuality by developing and integrating it into their way of living life.19 i believe we can add to our understanding of the nature of our sexuality by reconsidering both the way in which kant links the ideas of the sublime to the male and the beautiful to the female and also a teleological understanding of ourselves as embodied beings. it seems to me that we do not, nor should we, have to link these ideas rigidly to the binary male and female, including how these two perspectives 19 according to the recent national transgender discrimination survey (haas, rogers, and herman 2014), the suicide-attempt rate among people identifying as trans is 41 percent, 10–20 percent among gay and lesbians, and only 4.6 percent among people who identify as heterosexual. 20 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 can complement each other, such as in various ways of taking (power) and being taken (subjection), of being inviting and alluring as well as feeling oneself drawn towards and completed by another. nevertheless, these principles of the beautiful and the sublime do seem important for how many go about realizing their sexuality one way or another, including when femme is attracted to femme or for those who playfully engage different principles at different times, in different situations. the philosophical mistake is therefore not to argue that many of us experience sexuality partially through the embodied employment of the aesthetic principles of the sublime and the beautiful or that teleological principles concerning unions (parts and wholes) seem central to the experience for many. both kinds of principles seem important to how many see ourselves as part of the natural world and as acknowledged, affirmed as who we are by others; they are important to our feeling of belonging or being grounded in the (natural-social) world. moreover, teleological orientation also appears important in accounting for why it is also common (albeit not universally the case), regardless of one’s sexual orientation and identity, to experience a deep desire to have children with one’s sexual loves. for example, from the start, the rights to adopt and access artificial insemination have been central to many members of the lgbtqia movement. kant’s mistake, rather, is the way in which he lets the binary, heterosexist male-female distinction run through the entire analysis. although kant himself was stuck in a binary, heterosexist perspective, i believe that it was philosophical considerations along these lines that informed his insistence that the phenomenon of sexuality cannot be understood through the a priori, noncontingent perspectives of pure reason (first critique) or of pure practical reason (second critique); sexuality is contingent and subjective in a way that neither perspective captures or allows. after all, the distinction between men and women is not a distinction that tracks spatio-temporal causal necessities, and it is simply not the case that most people find their basic sexuality to be something they can simply choose in unbounded ways, let alone find meaningful when undertaken out of a sense of (moral) duty. moreover, this approach is consistent with kant’s basic suggestion that sexuality as such requires an analysis through the perspective of human nature (the predisposition to good in human nature) in combination with an analysis of the beautiful and the sublime (third critique). what we are exploring in this context is not, in other words, our bodies as spatio-temporal objects to be studied scientifically or as an object we can choose to do sexual things with, but rather unreflective aspects of ourselves as embodied, sexual forces in the world. we are tending not only to the fact that there is a certain direction to it, but also to the nature of it—how it feels when we imaginatively develop our sexual force in enhancing or productive ways, when engaging it feels comfortable, good, and aesthetically deeply pleasing as who we are, from a first-personal, subjective and 21 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, unreflective point of view. we are paying attention to something internal to the way in which each of us is directed as an embodied force, something that can be picked up on and engaged also by others, in that they can complement and affirm us through their own sexual forcefulness. and when we do this well, as who we are, we seek and are invited to affirm one another in playful, aesthetic, sexual, affectionate—and so personally empowering—ways.20 hence, in kantianese, what we pick out in intuition (as explored in the first critique) is engaged in the inherently subjective way enabled by the power of judgment (as explored in the third critique). 21 if so, then neither the perspective of deterministic science, nor choice22 nor language23 (construction) goes all the way when it comes to sexuality. there is something in us—a direction or structure to our embodied forcefulness—that we are in tune with, first-personally, when we are getting all of this basically right about ourselves. moreover, when we do this well, rather than acting in ways that are destructive and damaging for our basic, embodied forcefulness—or what we might, with kant, call ways of “bind[ing] . . . the vital force with shackles” (kant 2007, pmb 15: 940)—we enable it, and so us, to develop, transform, and integrate these animalistic desires in the morally good, emotionally healthy ways constitutive of our humanity and personality. if the above account is correct, then it can provide some explanation of why sexuality is unruly and hard to handle well. after all, sexuality concerns something deeply unreflective about us, a basic ability to feel at one with oneself, at home in the world as who one is, including when together with others. it follows that not being comfortable with one’s sexuality (identity or orientation) is not fixed simply by thinking about it (reflecting). reflection can make one aware of problems, and 20 because the three aspects of the predisposition to animality appear to be kant’s relational categories of the understanding, one might say that this forcefulness in ourselves that we can pick up by intuition is what we engage at the animalistic level by means of the relational categories of the understanding though employed in teleological and aesthetic ways. and, of course, in turn, this is complemented in an integrated way by the emotional orientations enabled by our capacities for a selfrecognitional sense of self and open, rational, and morally responsible end-setting. i’m grateful to andrew cutrofello for helping me see this point. 21 i am greatly indebted to the work of lucy allais (2015) on the first critique and rachel zuckert (2007) on the third critique here. 22 thus, existentialist philosophy, including beauvoir, is wrong on this point. 23 if so, then much continental philosophy and related (hermeneutic) language-style interpretations of kant get this wrong, which is why they fail to get all of sexuality into view and instead tend to focus only on socially oppressive and violent aspects of it. 22 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 although it is a central means of dealing with some problems, much of the work is unreflective in nature. it involves relearning (or learning for the first time) how to be vulnerable and true to oneself without feeling powerless. or, to put the point differently: how we experience ourselves sexually cannot be simply chosen away. relatedly, the above account can explain why it is hard to understand a different sexuality than one’s own: one’s sexuality is inherently contingent and first-personal, and so another’s sexuality is something one can gain access to only by living closely and in an emotionally open reciprocity with that person. it would also explain why many seek to understand different subjectivities through art (paintings, songs, novels, plays, movies, books, etc.): art can offer a sense of what it is like to experience life through another’s different sexuality. turning to issues of various types of lgbtqia oppression and aggression— the anger referred to with the term “homophobia”—if one is not only uncomfortable around sexuality or if one seeks to understand it only through the bifocal lenses of male and female or maybe even as simply being a matter of choice or lived lives in language-structured realities, then one may never quite understand and tend to the source of one’s discomfort in the right way. also, to give this a beauvoirian spin that is also consistent with what i’ve said above, it seems plausible to argue that facing the fact of the sexual flexibility most of us have can be very confusing and scary. some fears expressed as aggression (homophobia) may be internally connected not to repressing one’s deep sexual tendencies—one’s sexual identity/orientation—but to fear of being seduced into realizing one’s more fluid, potential, and playful sexual desires.24 in addition, trying to get at the givenness of our sexuality—the way we basically are—can be one reason why people can get so terribly aggressive and violent against non-cis and non-straight people. it is as if they want to beat this given nature out of them—a project that is, of course, impossible. and yet, wanting to do so is, i think, best explained by how one is not oneself at home in the world, including sexually, and by how one finds it disempowering that others actually are, even though they are not conforming to the dominant social norms. none of this is to deny, of course, that if one finds oneself living in a sexually oppressive society or being a member of a sub-culture where physical, social, and emotional abuse against people who don’t conform to heterosexist norms are commonplace, then it takes much moral courage to stand up to it. it is, as lucy allais (2016) argues in relation to racism, much more tempting to rationalize one’s (and much of society’s) bad behavior by dehumanizing those who are wronged and hurt by the behavior. much aggression and violence against the lgbtqia community is rationalized through thinking that its members have sexualities that involve some 24 i’m very grateful to andrew cutrofello for discussions on this point. 23 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, notion of corruption or perversion of human nature. for people like kant, who are deeply committed to ideas such as respect for the dignity of human beings, the felt need to rationalize oppressive aggressive behavior such that it is consistent with respect for human dignity is great. for a person deeply committed to doing what is right—whether for moral, philosophical, or religious reasons—admitting that she has got something this important so very wrong, that she didn’t hear human suffering as suffering and even wanted to or has already inflicted more suffering on vulnerable others, maybe even loved ones—is a very hard thing to do, in kant’s time as it is now. i don’t deny this—quite the contrary. in addition, i have argued that in contrast to his racist and sexist statements—where kant appeared to have improved with regard to the former and never been fully convinced of the latter—kant never improved regarding his heterosexism or homophobia. still, even if we accept that kant’s account of natural teleology and his social context help explain his heterosexism, it doesn’t suffice to explain his homophobia; his anger remains puzzling. so, how do we explain kant’s homophobia? as argued above, explaining homophobia—the turn from simple heterosexism (inability to perceive diversity) to homophobia (anger at this difference)—is difficult unless we somehow relate it to some discomfort with one’s own sexuality. and indeed: if the tales of kant and joseph green are correct, in kant’s own case, one source may have been his inability to fully accept his own way of loving affectionately. according to the story, kant and mr. green developed a most special relationship.25 we all know the story of how everyone in köningsberg could align their clocks with kant’s meticulously regular daily walk. however, what the story typically doesn’t reveal is that kant’s regularity was due to his daily visits with mr. green. for two decades—from 1765 until mr. green died in 1786—every afternoon kant would walk to his mr. green’s house, where he typically would find his dear friend sleeping in a chair. kant would walk in, pull his chair up to mr. green’s, and fall asleep there, until, at a specific time, they were both woken up. they then spent time together—talking about philosophy, life, politics, and literature—until kant would leave at exactly 7 p.m. (9 p.m. on sundays) 25 for more on the special friendship between kant and mr. green, see genischen (2004) and hoffmann (1902). i’m most grateful to terry pinkard for drawing my attention to the relationship between kant and mr. green, including these references. many years ago, pinkard also alerted manfred kuehn to these aspects of kant’s life. for kuehn’s interpretation of them, according to which kant and mr. green were simply best friends, see kuehn (2001), and for further details about the above stories about kant and mr. green, see (kuehn 2001: 154–158, 219, 222, 228, 240ff., 322ff.). 24 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 to walk home and work some more. reliably structured, this daily ritual was a central, precious part of how they lived their everyday lives together. kant’s relationship with mr. green was also special in other ways. for example, the two would go for buggy rides and holidays together in the countryside outside of köningsberg. and, indeed, the expectations regarding reliability and (because of mr. green’s) punctuality were very high also here. for example, once when kant (who didn’t have a punctual nature) forgot the time and arrived a few minutes late, mr. green left without him—with kant running down the street after the buggy. mr. green (a banker) was also entrusted with kant’s financial investments—something mr. green did so well that kant was relatively well off in his later years. mr. green also read and discussed all of kant’s philosophical writings with him in this period—including the entire critique of pure reason as it was developing—and together, they were invited every sunday for dinner at a friend’s (the motherby’s) house. these ways of living together and caring for one another do not characterize ordinary friendships. the relationship is much more intimate, has more structure and daily involvement, and involves much higher expectations than do ordinary friendships. the relationship includes features that simply cannot be explained without a notion of intimate, affectionate, reciprocal love. hence, it is also not surprising to learn that when mr. green passed away, kant in important ways withdrew from the world. now, kant and mr. green never seem to have taken their relationship to physical levels, and judging from kant’s anger when he writes on sexuality, one reason could very well be a discomfort with this aspect of himself. of course, for those of us who do live out non-heterosexist sexualities, we intimately understand the challenges of doing so. indeed, the more sexually oppressive the society we have grown up in, the better we grasp the difficulty. we are also not surprised by such a story about kant, by how it can be the reason for his anger. we know that sexual discomfort or self-hatred sometimes manifests itself in this way; tragically sometimes those who hate us the most are the same as we are. another problem with kant’s own reflections upon sexuality, which can also be explained through his own discomfort around it and which the above revision of his account can make better sense of, is his writings’ inability to capture the erotic as opposed to the sexual. in particular, eroticism may be seen as distinct from sexuality in that erotic experiences are characterized by delighting in another or in oneself as an embodied sensuously and aesthetically appealing being. hence, the erotic aspect of our sexuality is not about wanting another person or wanting another person to want oneself. rather, this part of sexuality is more about delighting in oneself or in another person as the sensuously embodied yet particular being she or he is. this is not to say that eroticism doesn’t involve arousal, but that the arousal involved is not of a possessive kind. and i take it that this can be one way in which another can give rise to awe in us; we can find ourselves profoundly struck by the beauty of another, 25 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, whether in person or in an artistic depiction. and a lot of intimate, sexual interaction switches between these ways of engaging one another—the sexual (wanting and wanting to be wanted by the other) and the erotic (delighting in oneself and in one another). i also believe that although kant’s own account of sexuality is unable to account for how good sexual interaction does not always come with deep emotional connections, how it sometimes is not limited to only one other person, and how some do not experience themselves as particularly sexual at all, the revised one can. to start, it seems undeniable that many people genuinely enjoy casual sexual encounters, including with strangers, and that these can be experienced as morally uncomplicated for all parties involved. on my revised kantian account, this fact should not be seen as all that surprising. under uncomplicated conditions, developing sexual desires in meaningful, playful ways, including together with others, needs neither always to involve deep emotional connections nor morally corrupting objectification. for example, one may compare a morally good, emotionally healthy casual sexual encounter with a game of squash (though this example runs the risk of not communicating this point to those who do not find sports—or other physical games—deeply enjoyable). so, finding a great squash partner is truly wonderful: that particular partner knows exactly how to challenge you, it’s always a game with that partner, and good games are just fantastic fun— they challenge you in all kinds of playful ways. they are good even on a pretty bad day. still, sometimes it’s fun to play with someone you haven’t played with before— sometimes because it’s just a different game, sometimes because newness is fun in its sheer unpredictability, and sometimes because, for some reason, that particular player is able to challenge you in a different way, a way that is very satisfying; he intuitively gets your way of playing in such a way that he can challenge you in ways no one has before. and, of course, for some, playing squash is a way of being in the world that is so important and so enjoyable that they seek to establish or join clubs where they are likely to be able to live this out with similarly minded people, etc. i don’t think that having emotionally healthy, morally good sex, as such, is all that different from such a game of squash, which is not to belittle either. and it’s not universalizable, meaning that it is not the same for all. for some, the best games are with one’s one-and-only only or one’s few fellow players—the one or those who know you so very well and with whom you have had or aspire to have long-lasting, committed connections and relationships. for others, all that emotion and history is also a little burdensome, and it’s lovely and light to have new partners. and some seek to take squash to a different level together with others who have similarly, strong desires. i believe we simply differ about this on the individual, personal level. it’s just the way it is. which doesn’t mean that those who mostly prefer to play one way cannot ever enjoy doing it another way. or that some people find it ok once in 26 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 a while, but not all that often. and it doesn’t involve denying that some folks don’t like squash at all, they really, really don’t like it: they find it physically exhausting and sweaty (rather than thrilling and exuberating), smelly and messy (rather than luscious), and drainingly dramatic and emotional (rather than, simply, amazingly wonderfully fun and challenging). and that’s all right too. obviously. we really just are that different. or to put these points back into the sexual framework: we might think of the various ways in which we are sexually and erotically wired as coming with a range of volume buttons; some of them may be generally turned up quite high, whereas others are turned very low or off. hence, we have many combinations of types of sexual identity and orientation as well as differing subjective enjoyments of various types of sexual and erotic activity, depending on how we are—firstpersonally. seeking to understand ourselves sexually, and individually, will give us clues as to what (and with whom) will help us to flourish in this aspect of our being. to sum up, i believe that kant is right that there is something about our sexuality that is first-personally experienced as given and that there is something about our sexuality that we can only get into view if we invoke the aesthetic ideas of the beautiful and the sublime as well as teleological concepts of complementary parts and wholes (human nature). kant’s mistake concerns how he thinks this entails that healthy sexuality comes in only two forms (male and female), that those who are biologically more male always identify with the sublime and those biologically more female always identify with the beautiful, and that healthy sexual activity can only involve procreative activities. once we give these up and add the other elements in the ways indicated above, i believe the result is a powerful account of human sexuality. the revised position can account for all three nonmoralized features of human sexuality mentioned at the beginning of section 1.1. the account is also no longer binary and heterosexist, and it can explain how our sexuality is experienced as deeply personal, embodied, and social in nature, how it is simultaneously experienced as given, grounding, teleological, and personal as well as aesthetically playful. our sexuality fundamentally concerns how we experience ourselves as embodied forces and engagements that involve viewing our embodiment as part of nature, as something that others can physically complement and affectionately love. the revised account can explain how sexuality involves extraordinary interpersonal power, ideally empowerment; it centrally engages and affirms our sense of having worth in the eyes of others. the way in which many engage and develop our sexuality also very much incorporates a playful use of teleological as well as aesthetic principles, of power and subjection, and of the beautiful and the sublime. insofar as we get it right, it tracks one another’s particular ways of being and enables one to become even more playful in sexual and loving ways—and so we also experience a feeling of being seen as who we are and desired as such. again, being sexually and affectionately loving 27 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, isn’t always simply about “throwing away one’s personality,” even though it does involve, in important ways, letting go of the self-reflective, moralized perspective; it is also about learning to trust—albeit supported by good reasons—one another through directly and affirmatively engaging via revealed sexual and affective playfulness. in the words of rae langton, the point about letting oneself love and be loved is not primarily so that one can know oneself, but because living together in affectionately affirming (including sexually) loving ways is one of the most meaningful things we can experience, of daring to go through an open gate “to a garden, an orchard of fruits where things are growing (calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and aloe), where there are cool breezes, the sound of water—and [from where] someone seems to be calling” (langton 2009, 381). of course, the above is not to deny that sometimes morality (ethics and the law) comes in to limit sexual behavior—indeed, our tendency to do bad things is empirically universal. for morally responsible persons, the law primarily only engages with other-destructive, coercive (nonconsensual) behavior and creates conditions under which one can form a legally recognized “us” (marriage). ethics, in contrast, comes in as a limiting force also with regard to consensual interaction and any destructive sexual behavior. as we know, for kant there are two types of ethical duties—perfect and imperfect—and i take it that there are two main ethical alerts that something is off. one is behavior that is either selfor other-destructive, in which case the behavior that violates one’s perfect duties to self and others. for example, if one is gay, ethics manifests as bad conscience if one pushes oneself to engage in straight sex that one really does not want (as this is self-destructive). on the other hand, one ought also to develop oneself and assist others in their pursuit of happiness, which in this context means striving to feel at home with oneself and in the world in terms of one’s sexuality and helping one’s sexual partner(s) develop theirs. finally, the above is to affirm what kant says elsewhere, namely that until conditions of freedom are established, we do not really know which of a culture’s dominant beliefs about the inherently contingent issues of moral anthropology— here sexuality—are prejudices and which are insights (kant 1996a, mm 6: 217). hence, we must let the objective principles of freedom set the framework within which we make space for considerations of moral anthropology, and then some people will break free from the prejudices and others will follow. in the previous century, we saw this liberation with regard to historically common prejudices with women;26 in this century, we are hopefully seeing the beginning of a similar development with regard to the flourishing of lgbtiqia identities and orientations. 26 for an interpretation of this point in relation to women, see varden (2015). 28 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 conclusion if it is correct to explore sexuality’s givenness by means of an idea of embodied force as engaged and developed through reflective judgment, then not only do we have a suggestion for how kant’s metaphysics can be seen as working with regard to sexuality, but we can also solve certain puzzles in contemporary philosophical discussions of sex and love. on the one hand, we have seen not only that we can make sense of the givenness of sexuality without invoking a notion of an “essence”—whether understood in rationalist ways (e.g., the idea of “femaleness”) or in scientific ways (e.g., the idea expressed in search for the “gay gene” deterministically understood). in addition, because of the way in which our sexuality involves our embodiment, it is entirely consistent with there being a science (strict spatio-temporal causal analyses) appropriate with regard to some aspects of our sexuality, as is true for other aspects of our physical bodies. but rather than a strict analysis in terms of causal laws, these aspects of our sexuality seem better understood in terms of the contingency biological sciences allow. for example, current research on the so-called “gay gene,” although still in its infancy, has not revealed strict causal relations but rather certain tendencies with respect to sexual desires. on the other hand, we have an analysis that avoids understanding sexuality simply as a matter of choice—whether an existentialist type of analysis of free choice a la simone de beauvoir in the second sex or a postmodern analysis of more or less coerced performances a la judith butler in gender trouble—something that for long has been a central objection to both types of theories, especially from members of the lgbtqia community. instead, the account draws on these philosophers’—and inspired works’—wonderful insights, and moves beyond them by being able to speak better to how members of the lgbtqia community, again and again, call on philosophers to listen to them when they say that their sexualities are neither essences nor simply choices.27 finally, notice that one interesting feature of the account is the way in which the third critique holds a main clue as to how to understand the nature of sexuality. our sexuality is something we relate to in the first instance through our capacity for judgment (the imagination), that is, our capacity to relate to our own embodied forcefulness aesthetically and teleologically as “purposive without a purpose,” or 27 this also seems to be in both beauvoir’s and butler’s spirits. as butler says in a recent interview by molly fischer for the new york magazine (2016), she is “thrilled to see the work that has gone beyond hers. ‘i didn’t take on trans very well,’ she says of gender trouble. the book doesn’t account for the experience of gender that someone like caitlyn jenner describes when she says her brain feels ‘much more female than it is male,’ for example. ‘so, in many ways, it’s a very dated book.’” 29 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, without a claim to objective, universal (scientific or moral) validity. again, this is why any attempt at reducing sexuality to either the perspective of deterministic science or to choices will fail. if the above, and hence kant, is right about this, then sexuality involves engaging with an embodied forcefulness we can pick out by sensible intuition (in ourselves or in others), but engaging in a different way, namely from the perspective of reflective (aesthetic and teleological) judgment. and, of course, because we share a capacity for imagination, our sexuality can be presented to and understood by others; indeed, how we present ourselves to others depends upon to whom we are presenting. for example, regardless of how we sexually identify, we can all agree that someone can present in a “hot” way, such that those who don’t see it as “hot” are failing to perceive something just as would be the case when someone doesn’t see that an incredible painting is beautiful. one is not seeing or getting something there to be gotten. gender presentations work—we can all pick up on gender presentations that are, say, “butch,” “tomboy,” “queer,” and they work on this conception because gender is something that opens up to us by means of our shared capacity for judgment (the imagination). if this is along the correct lines, then it can also explain why so many of the philosophical writings on the phenomenology of sexuality are written within the so-called continental or postmodern tradition. after all, the philosophers in this tradition are not only closely connected with those thinkers particularly inspired by kant’s third critique, but they are also following their basic philosophical judgment that core features of sexuality are impossible to get a good hold of if we limit our analyses to those objective lenses enabled by deterministic science (first critique) and free choices (2nd critique). contrary to what they and many think, however, kant would agree with this: subjectivity so explored is at the heart of the matter. and so do i. references abramson, kate, and adam leite. 2011. “love as a reactive emotion.” philosophical quarterly 61 (245): 673–699. albrecht, ingrid. 2015. “how we hurt the ones we love.” pacific philosophical quarterly, published electronically oct. 24. doi:10.1111/papq.12101. allais, lucy. 2008a. “wiping the slate clean: the heart of forgiveness.” philosophy and public affairs 36 (1): 33–68. ———. 2008b. “forgiveness and mercy.” south african journal of philosophy 27 (1): 1–9. ———. 2008c. “dissolving reactive attitudes: forgiving and understanding.” south african journal of philosophy 27 (3): 197–201. ———. 2013. “elective forgiveness.” international journal of philosophical studies 21 (5): 637–653. 30 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 ———. 2015. manifest reality. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2016. “kant’s racism.” philosophical papers 45 (1-2): 1–36. beauvoir, simone de. 2012. the second sex. new york: vintage books. butler, judith. 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sexuality. oxford: oxford university press. ———. forthcoming. “universality and difference in kant’s practical philosophy— accommodating religious, cultural, and sexual difference within the framework of freedom.” in the kantian mind, edited by sorin baiasu and mark timmons. new york: routledge. ———. forthcoming. “kant and moral responsibility for animals.” in kant and animals, edited by in lucy allais and john callanan. oxford: oxford university press. williams, bernard. 1981. moral luck. cambridge: cambridge university press. wood, allen w. 2008. kantian ethics. new york: cambridge university press. zuckert, rachel 2007. kant on beauty and biology. new york: cambridge university press. 32 feminist philosophy quarterly, vol. 4 [], iss. 1, art. 1 https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fpq/vol4/iss1/1 helga varden is an associate professor in philosophy and in women and gender studies at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, and she has held visiting positions at the university of chicago, northwestern university, and the university of st. andrews. varden’s main research interests are kant’s philosophy, legal-political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. she is currently completing a book manuscript—a kantian theory of sexuality (forthcoming with oxford university press)—and she has published on a range of classical philosophical issues, including kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property and poverty, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as terrorism, abortion, and same-sex marriage. 33 varden: kant on sex. reconsidered. published by scholarship@western, feminist philosophy quarterly kant on sex. reconsidered. -a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation helga varden recommended citation kant on sex. reconsidered. -a kantian account of sexuality: sexual love, sexual identity, and sexual orientation stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor feminist philosophy quarterly volume 6 | issue 2 article 4 recommended citation táíwò, olúfẹ́mi o. “stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2). article 4. 2020 stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò georgetown university olufemi.taiwo@georgetown.edu táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 1 stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor1 olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò abstract the criticism of “traditional,” “toxic,” or “patriarchal” masculinity in both academic and popular venues recognizes that there is some sense in which the character traits and tendencies that are associated with masculinity are structurally connected to oppressive, gendered social practices and patriarchal social structures. one important theme of criticism centers on the gender distribution of emotional labor, generally speaking, but this criticism is also particularly meaningful in the context of heterosexual romantic relationships. i begin with the premise that there is a gendered and asymmetrical distribution in how much emotional labor is performed, but i also consider that there might be meaningful and informative distinctions in what kind of emotional labor is characteristically performed by different genders. specifically, i argue that the social norms around stoicism and restricted emotional expression are masculine-coded forms of emotional labor, and that they are potentially prosocial. responding to structural and interpersonal asymmetries of emotional labor could well involve supplementing or better cultivating this aspect of male socialization rather than discarding it. keywords: stoicism, emotional labor, work, masculinity, feminism socrates: we would be right, then, to remove the lamentations of famous men. we would leave them to women (provided they are not excellent women) and cowardly men. – plato, the republic, 388d2 i. introduction the criticism of “traditional,” “toxic,” or “patriarchal” masculinity in both academic and popular venues recognizes that there is some sense in which the character traits and tendencies that are associated with masculinity are structurally connected to oppressive, gendered social practices and patriarchal social structures. 1 thanks to bryce huebner, shiloh whitney, miranda sklaroff, abigail higgins, ari watson, alexander tolbert, and tommy j. curry. 2 reeve 2004, 68. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 2 one important theme of criticism centers on the gender distribution of emotional labor, generally speaking, but this criticism is also particularly meaningful in the context of heterosexual romantic relationships. kate manne (2017), for instance, considers “asymmetrical moral support roles” a key aspect of misogyny, which she casts as largely a system of “law enforcement” to enforce and extract these social goods from women. this asymmetry of emotional support has long been of interest to feminist theory but has also been the topic of recent conversation, both in academic philosophy and in popular nonacademic outlets like harper’s bazaar and slate.3 i aim to take a closer look at this asymmetry. one strong option is to portray the nature of the asymmetry of emotional labor in categorical terms: the difference between men and women is that women perform emotional support while men do not, whereas men simply leech off of the emotional labor performed by women. but this seems implausibly strong, as agnes callard (2019) points out—if the relevant goods include things as general as “simple respect, love, acceptance” (manne 2017, 110) then it would be hard to square such a stark division within the world as we find it. callard suggests a slightly tempered stance: perhaps the difference between men and women is mainly in how much emotional labor each performs, with women characteristically performing more than men (2019, 8). this retains the intelligibility of the asymmetry that motivates the discussion without the implausible strength of the first formulation, but it still leaves a bit to explore. this stance by itself doesn’t investigate qualitative distinctions in kinds of prosocial emotional management, which leads to the conclusion men should simply do more of the things women do, differences in socialization and incentive structure notwithstanding. my investigation here is premised on a different description of the emotional labor asymmetry, which opens up different prescriptive possibilities. i begin with the premise that not only is there a gendered and asymmetrical distribution in how much emotional labor is performed, but also there might be meaningful and informative distinctions in what kind of emotional labor is characteristically performed by different genders. specifically, i argue here that the social norms 3 see bartky (1990) and manne (2017) for examples of a treatment of the phenomenon in academic philosophy; for examples in nonacademic outlets, see melanie hamlett, “men have no friends and women bear the burden,” harper’s bazaar, may 2, 2019, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a27259689 /toxic-masculinity-male-friendships-emotional-labor-men-rely-on-women/; and rebecca onion, “ male loneliness starts in boyhood,” slate magazine, may 7, 2019, https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/05/mens-emotions-women-laborpatriarchy.html. táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 3 around stoicism and restricted emotional expression are masculine-coded forms of emotional labor, and that they are potentially prosocial.4 responding to structural and interpersonal asymmetries of emotional labor could well involve supplementing or better cultivating this aspect of male socialization rather than discarding it. to many, the fact that men grow up believing that they should “behave like stoic robots” is part of the problem, rather than a prosocial basis for a potential solution.5 adding fuel to the fire of reasonable suspicion about stoicism is the fact much of the recent resurgence in interest in stoic thought and life practices has not come from the profeminist left but rather from “pro-western” and often racist and antifeminist elements of the center and reactionary right.6 many take it that there is a relationship between restrictive emotionality—associated with both ancient stoicism and modern stoicism—and acts of violence and aggression, especially gendered ones, which manne (2017) suggests ultimately serve to police the social structure that provides men exploitative access to women’s emotional labor. briana toole (2019) further suggests men’s investment in misogyny is partially explained by their dependence on this access, which is in turn explained by the norms of masculinity that preclude men from developing the capacity for emotional support of themselves or their fellow men. but, from a theoretical perspective, the fact that stoicism and restricted emotional expression is an aspect of male socialization in the status quo in problematic gender cultures only gets us so far towards prescriptions. it was an error to define men’s stereotypical range of emotional expression as the standard against which women’s emotional range was judged as “hysterical.” perhaps, as psychologist leslie brody (1993) suggests, it is also an error to reverse the process and set women’s range of emotional expression up as the standard against which men’s “relative inexpressivity” is judged. it could be that there are a variety of permissible or exemplary ways of dealing with one’s emotions—then, the fact that 4 if aikin and mcgill-rutherford (2014) are correct that ancient stoicism is compatible with feminism, it may bode well for the prospects of a project on the modern character trait that bears its name, on the assumption that there are substantive and relevant overlaps between the two. for a less optimistic take on the feminist potential of stoic thought, see nussbaum (2002). 5 see, for example, hamlett, “men have no friends and women bear the burden.” 6 donna zuckerberg, “guess who’s championing homer? radical online conservatives,” washington post, november 2, 2018, sec. outlook, https://www .washingtonpost.com/outlook/guess-whos-championing-homer-radical-onlineconservatives/2018/11/02/af3a49f6-dd40-11e8-85df-7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 4 one’s preferred management strategy is different from one specific alternative would not imply that it was deficient or defective.7 it’s not obvious in the abstract, before getting into the weeds of context and contingencies, what to do with a trait that has been associated with masculinity in a patriarchal society. after all, a trait associated with toxic masculinity may be good, and its goodness may be fairly robust across evaluative contexts—in which case, perhaps the problem is that the gendered association excludes dominated genders from proper access to whatever social benefits and burdens are accessible via that trait (e.g., a feeling of self-worth). alternatively, the trait’s goodness or badness may be importantly context-sensitive, but it may nevertheless be common to regard the trait as either good or bad without qualification; or (perhaps worse) society may tend to regard the trait as good in contexts where it is socially harmful, or the opposite (e.g., confidence). these would contribute to gender oppression if the result of the pattern of these contextualizing failures works to the benefit of dominant genders at the expense of dominated genders. another possibility: the character traits associated with the dominant gender may have no functional role whatsoever in the maintenance of gender domination. in these cases, the association of the dominant gender with the given character trait might still be nonaccidental, since the persistence of such an association might have a contingent historical and cultural explanation rather than a social-structural explanation. but its association with the dominant gender wouldn’t be the sort that would give us reason to evaluate the trait negatively or positively. in fact, that very association could be the point of taking a second look at the trait: in considering objections to the stoic musonius rufus, martha nussbaum (2002, 290) points out that defenders of ancient stoics can appeal to the need to respond to “bad stereotypes of male and female excellence” to defend developing gendered forms of socialization and acculturation.8 with an eye towards these complexities, i argue here for a limited defense of an emotional management strategy that i call “emotional compression,” and follow researchers in linking the constituent practices of emotional self-regulation to the dominant understandings of masculinity in western cultures.9 i will defend this management strategy from some important objections and argue for understanding this strategy as a prosocial form of emotional labor compatible with profeminist, radical, and progressive politics. it’s also a strategy of emotional labor that male socialization gives men some of the needed tools to develop. if toole is right about 7 i’m indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this insight. 8 nussbaum simply uses the word “education,” but the modern sense of the word is narrower than the ancient sense. 9 see, for example, jansz (2000), connell (1996), and way et. al (2014). táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 5 the stakes of men’s access to emotional labor, this would carry the implication that emotional compression could serve an important positive role in struggle against misogyny, rather than serve it. ii. emotional compression is emotional labor ii.a. stoicism the term “stoicism,” and the relationship to emotions cued up by this phrase in popular culture, comes from an ancient greek philosophy. the ancient stoics’ teachings included the sort of ethical claims that make sense of the modern usage of the word, like the contention that the morally and intellectually perfect person did not experience passionate emotions (baltzly 2018). they also included some less obviously related philosophical contentions, like that all existent things are metaphysical “particulars,” or that god is an intelligently designing fire-breath (ibid.). clearly, not everything about how we think about stoicism in the modern day maps back onto the systematic project begun by its ancient followers. what is specifically relevant to our purposes here is that an ancient stoic was not simply a person who believed in a set of contentions or theoretical claims. for the ancient stoics, this philosophy was a kind of lifecraft that made demands on the practitioner—to work towards moral and intellectual perfection as their philosophy characterized it.10 this was not mere book learning, as formerly enslaved philosopher epictetus specifically mocks.11 this was a matter of the cultivation of daily habit and self-management (davidson 2014). similarly, the emotional management strategy i explain here, which bears an intellectual debt to ancient stoic philosophy, is less a set of principles one would merely need to rationally accept and more a skill or habit that would have to be deliberately cultivated. for ease of explication, i will refer to the ancient greek philosophy as “ancient stoicism,” to separate it both from “modern stoicism” (roughly, what i understand the average layperson to mean when they use the word “stoic” as a description of emotional behavior) and the skill or practice of emotional compression in the technical sense that i go on to develop here. i believe that the connections between these three things are substantive rather than cosmetic, but so too are the differences between them. sorting out what they have in common and what they don’t isn’t the task of this paper. my purpose here is to develop a 10 following foucault, davidson (2014) discusses the term “askesis”, the reasonguided construction of the self, in connection with epictetus. 11 epictetus, the discourses, the internet classics archive (mit), bk. 1, chap. 4, accessed may 9, 2019, http://classics.mit.edu/epictetus/discourses.html. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 6 conception of the emotional management strategy that owes an intellectual debt to but is distinct from ancient stoicism.12 the “emotional compression” i roughly sketch here is an emotional management strategy. one important constituent aspect of this self-management involves what psychologists have called “restrictive emotionality.” restrictive emotionality refers to a reluctance to disclose or otherwise express affective states—that is, when people “lace up their feelings.”13 emotional compression as i conceive of it here involves restrictive emotionality, as a tactic that fits the overall strategy. but, importantly for my purposes, it is possible to experience emotions in their fullness, and even to communicate them clearly and fully, while being guarded in the public performance of the emotions—what nancy sherman (2007, 146) calls the “aesthetic of character.”14 our aesthetic of character is how we appear to others, ranging from the more explicit and rule-governed “formal manners and decorum” to the “wider sense of personal bearing and outward attitude” (sherman 2005). emotional compression done well involves tightly managing one’s actions, importantly including this aesthetic of character and its contribution to one’s actions’ expressive content. emotional compression is used by the boxer who knows and respects his fear, yet not only stands his ground and keeps punching but does so without letting on that he is intimidated; by the person who fights back tears during a tough conversation with her friend, and speaks in measured terms that communicate her hurt feelings through the verbal content of what she says rather than her tone of voice or her tear ducts; and also by the soldier who dutifully withholds complaint about an onerous task demanded by his commanding officer. the pronoun use in the preceding sentence tracks the socially contingent fact that restrictive emotionality, which plays a prominent role in this strategy, is thought by researchers to be gendered. it is typically associated with the form of masculinity 12 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for help with this section. 13i use this term similarly to jansz (2000) in that i distinguish between stoicism and restrictive emotionality—but jansz seems to treat stoicism as an ideologically based demand on male conduct. i go further in treating this demand as representative of a genuine virtue or excellence. 14 this distinction follows a stoic distinction between two tiers of emotions: the first tier about the appraisal of a situation or other stimulus, and the second tier about the proper response to the output of the first. see sherman’s (2005) “of manners and morals” for her introduction of the “aesthetic of character” idea. táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 7 that is (certainly not without exception) primary or “hegemonic” across varying cultural contexts and domains of interaction.15 emotional compression thus conceived is a managerial perspective on one’s aesthetic of character, enabled by a particular kind of emotional self-mastery. it is both compatible with and congenial towards taking emotion seriously at both the personal and interpersonal level. for an illustrative analogy, we can simply take the term “compression” literally. a good recording engineer will make skillful use of audio compression when recording a band, since different instruments and frequency ranges put different stresses on a speaker or amplifier. an exceptionally loud frequency occurring in the performance of any of the band members may exceed the capabilities of the speaker playing back their performance, resulting in “clipping” or “peaking”: the distortion of the entire audio signal. similarly, the contribution of a particularly intense emotion may lead to distort one’s whole performance in the world. a compressor limits the dynamic range of a whole audio signal by flattening out the range of volumes across its various constituent sounds, boosting the presence of quieter sounds and tempering the presence of louder ones. when done right, this balancing act achieves a kind of clarity. with compression, even in loud moments of a song, or an announcement on a speaker in a noisy lobby, the “quiet” details are still close enough in volume to the louder sounds to be perceptible and, in the important and suggestive case of verbal communication, intelligible (zorilă, kandia, and stylianou 2012).16 further, when compression is applied to the whole band’s performance, the resultant unified audio signal can be increased in volume without worsening or even encountering the “peaking” problem, since the problem frequencies have been appropriately tempered within the new reduced volume range. similarly, the person employing the kind of skill i defend here limits the dynamic range of emotional expression. 17 this involves flattening out the 15 for “hegemonic masculinity,” see connell (1996); for the connection to stoicism, see way et al. (2014). 16 for this reason, dynamic range compression is used in audio broadcasts, mastering of audio for musical and other purposes, and hearing aids (zorilă, kandia, and stylianou 2012). 17 musonius rufus’s (2019) discussion of courage and self-control—in the face of emotions that might otherwise dominate one’s judgement—strongly resembles the notion of compression i’m trying out here. moreover, that it comes up in the course of a lecture arguing for something in the direction of equality of men and women (see nussbaum 2002) also lends credence to the hope that the virtue of stoicism might have a home in progressive, pro-justice thought. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 8 differences between how one acts when he is mad versus when he is glad—as bartky (1990, 108) puts it, such men “‘cool out’” the “public display” of their emotions, particularly destabilizing ones like grief. importantly, the primary objects of compression are the expressive and behavioral responses to the emotions and other stimuli—constant control over which emotions we yield and assent to, what emotional responses we countenance (sherman 2003, 76).18 accomplishing this primary goal may secondarily require or result in compression of the antecedent emotions themselves, but this connection would be contingent on facts about the possibilities for human psychology rather than any necessary connection between this result and the capacity as i define it here.19 done well, this too achieves clarity, since no emotional performance is dramatic or intense enough to distort the rest. it 18 this aspect of the skill of stoicism i develop here closely resembles a theme in ancient stoic thought that katja maria vogt (2014) explains as the ability to “take the same things seriously and not seriously.” this involves recognition of the value of intrinsic goods like health, wealth, and one’s children, but a practically salient recognition of the continued possibility of flourishing even in the absence of one particular form of any of these. articulated in its most extreme fashion (which vogt argues involves a substantive break with another way of thinking about this distinction preferred by most other stoic authors), epictetus goes as far as to recommend “indifference” even to the death of one’s child. given vogt’s larger discussion, it perhaps would be more charitable to the stoics in general to characterize their practical recommendation as admonishing those who treat tragedies (large or small) as the “end of the world”—as though going on after tragedy is impossible—and this should be reserved for truly intolerable situations, in which case many stoics explicitly countenance suicide. either way, the stoics generally do not expect that followers will be able to entirely avoid emotional suffering, and have responses to such that go beyond telling adherents that they care about the wrong things. 19 the distinction between restrictions on emotional expression and restrictions on emotions themselves isn’t always tracked by the psychological literature on restrictive emotionality, for good reason—psychologists are often studying how restrictive emotionality plays out in the schemes of socialization in which it is practiced, rather than purely as a concept. people who are restrictively emotionally expressive in society as it now stands, as i go on to explain, often also lack emotional skills related to understanding or regulating the expression of their emotions due to other aspects of socialization. i on the other hand need to appeal to the distinction between restrictions on emotional expression and on emotions themselves to point to the possibility of stoic restrictive emotionality. for an example of a discussion of restrictive emotionality in which this distinction is elided, see jansz (2000). táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 9 also allows for the whole intensity of emotional expression to be increased or decreased, as circumstances dictate, without fear of distortion. i give a fuller description of the goods achieved by emotional compression in part iii. this analogy also helps to sharply distinguish between the virtue or skill of emotional compression as i explain it here and two problematic but separable traits. these traits are nonaccidentally associated with “modern stoicism”—roughly, the kind of emotional self-management we in fact socialize male-gendered people to perform and which likely account for the negative externalities associated with modern stoicism as a sociological phenomenon. the two traits are alexithymia (nonawareness of one’s emotional states) and emotional unavailability (noncommunication of one’s emotional states).20 neither of these are implied by the virtue, skill, or practice of emotional compression as i’ve defined it, and it would be hard to see how one could perform emotional compression well with either of these other traits nearby.21 the former trait, alexithymia, is a knowledge and skill deficiency—the person with “alexithymia” simply does not have the relevant reflective capacities either to understand or to describe their emotions (levant 1992). but virtuous emotional compression would involve keen attention to one’s emotions—active decisions about how intensely to express each of them, as well as which expressions are within the emotional range one has chosen for one’s self. this managerial perspective is premised upon being able to tell what various emotional “frequencies” one is experiencing, how intense each of them are, and what expressions of them fit in the chosen, compressed expressive range. the latter trait, emotional unavailability, is closer to my target concept, but still no cigar. noncommunication of one’s emotions is rather like turning the amplifier off completely—technically you avoid “peaking,” but at the expense of any sound at all, much less a clear and undistorted sound. similarly, the full or skilled 20 these correspond roughly to a pair of psychological correlates proposed by gilligan and snider (2018, 12–14) in why does patriarchy persist: “second, that the initiation into patriarchal manhood and womanhood subverts the ability to repair ruptures in relationship by enjoining a man to separate his mind from his emotions (and thus not to think about what he is feeling) and a woman to remain silent (and thus not to say what she knows).” gilligan and snider apply alexithymia to men and noncommunication of emotion to women, though arguably the pair of psychological attributes can be applied to both men and women. while i distinguish these from stoicism, this is compatible with their claim that these are psychological. 21 my goal here is to defend the emotional self-management strategy. a precise classification of it (as a skill, practice, habit, virtue, or something else) is not in the scope of this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 10 stoic is the one who compresses in the right sort of way, which is a different demand than emotional repression. the object of management is the manner and intensity with which emotions are expressed, not simply whether or not they are expressed. this management strategy, done well, should achieve clarity and thus a fuller communication of one’s emotional states, counter to the possible perception that stoic people are those who are simply mum about how they feel. once someone has expressed one emotion or set thereof too intensely, it crowds out communicative space for the full complement of them: it’s hard to get much other than anger out of an interaction with a stranger who just furiously punched a hole in your drywall. as conceded, it is no accident that these two less than stellar traits tend to travel in tandem with “modern stoicism,” which involves nonstrategic use of the tactic of restrictive emotionality. the available evidence suggests that the same practices of male socialization that could have produced stoicism in men—if coupled with the relevant epistemic and self-regulatory skills that convert the tactic of restrictive emotionality into the strategy of stoicism—readily proliferate alexithymia and emotional unavailability in the absence of these counterparts. these complementary resources aren’t easy to come by for men in western culture, since they are disincentivized by other aspects of male socialization. “display rules”—the norms governing what sorts of expressions are incentivized for and against—are different for boys than for other children (malatesta and haviland 1982; brody 1985). parents display and explain more emotion to girls than to boys at several early developmental stages, and the structure of styles of play associated with boys are more sharply hierarchical and less conducive to emotional expression than those of girls (malatesta et al. 1989, 51–52; brody 1993, 98–102, 115–116). but just as we can differentiate between assembly lines and the widgets producible by means of them, so too can we distinguish between the processes of male socialization and their products. if the preceding analysis is right, then demonizing restrictive emotionality itself is a mistake. the true culprits are the male socialization practices that demand restrictive emotionality without distributing the complementary emotional and epistemic resources that would convert it into emotional compression rather than alexithymia and emotional unavailability. instead of stigmatizing restrictive emotionality and stoicism along with it, we should embrace stoicism and provide people with the resources to successfully execute the strategy of emotional compression. that is because both restrictive emotionality within a broader emotional compression strategy is a potentially prosocial and positive kind of emotional labor. ii. b. emotional labor in 1983, arlie hochschild wrote the influential book the managed heart, about the commercialization of what she called “emotional labor.” for hochschild, táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 11 emotional labor is labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (1983, 7; emphasis added). the use of the term “labor” for hochschild was somewhat strict in comparison to later usage: her sociological research focused on work in the formal, waged sense. but in the course of her investigation, she makes use of a more general concept of “emotion management” and argues that the very notions of social relations and roles in private life are suffused with it. her book on emotional labor sorts through the implications of what happens when this quotidian aspect of social life “comes to be sold as labor,” presumably in the strict sense (hochschild 1983, 18–19). what counts as work has long been a matter of controversy. in das kapital karl marx (1867, chap. 23) identifies “reproduction” as a structural element of the persistence of a society over time: in order to produce tomorrow, we must produce the tools and resources we need today. these tools and resources include more obviously material things like machines and factories but also things like the labor power of workers, social networks, and information. care work and related, often unaccounted-for forms of “shadow labor” are considered by some feminists to be chief among the social practices that accomplish this social reproduction, and thus essential components of the accumulation of capital and the development of society broadly construed.22 this is often labeled “reproductive labor,” especially by many marxist feminists, who integrate this concept into analyses of global divisions of labor and capital.23 partially in response, theorists hardt and negri (2001, 293) describe the new global economy as an “informational economy” increasingly structured by “immaterial labor,” which includes “affective labor” that produces “social networks, forms of community, biopower.” oksala (2016, 297) goes further, noting that the socialization and education accomplished through affective labor like care work and childrearing are so deeply constitutive of social relations that affective labor should be thought of as producing “human beings.” whitney (2018) identifies a “byproductive” function and category of affective labor. she argues that it is neither socially productive nor reproductive, but instead works to “metabolize” potentially unwanted affects and affective byproducts. it is in these further senses, particularly the “byproductive” sense, that emotional compression is emotional or affective labor. 22 notable examples include dalla costa and james (1975), weeks (2007, 240), and chodorow (1999, chap. 2). 23 see, for example, federici (1999). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 12 psychologist jennifer george (1990) goes so far as to theorize the existence of “group emotions” and collective-level “affective tone,” which she argues are shown by experimental data show to have explanatory power in explanation of group behavior. the emotional compressor’s blunted and compressed expressive response to calamity, his own emotional state, or another’s emotional state could help the entire group “metabolize” these acts and expressions, marking some of their intensity for affective “disposal” in whitney’s (2018) terms, and changing the “affective tone” of the group in george’s (1990) terms. hochschild herself gives this kind of example when explaining how a group of college students was trained to deal with emotionally disturbed children. such children, who have a view of the adult world as “hateful and hostile,” often behaved in wild and uncontrollable ways—the kinds of behaviors that might inspire hateful and hostile reflexive emotional responses. the clinician trained to control these feelings and damp them down, allowing the clinician to perform whatever was required kindly instead of in a manner betraying rage or hostility, stood the best chance of diffusing the children’s immediate negative impulses and helping them long term (hochschild 1983, 52–53). emotional compression can help induce the right state of mind in a group and thereby (or even more directly) exert similar effects in that group’s individuals. the connection to group-level behavior also helps unearth differences between masculinities of dominant and subordinated groups.24 a group’s demographics, in concert with the background social structure, will affect what level of “affective tone” is desirable in an interaction and the power dynamics governing which and whose contributions to it are acceptable. under the schemes of etiquette that govern interactions in systems of racial domination, men from subordinated races are often expected to exert tight control over their emotional performance when in the presence of members of the dominant racial group.25 they are forced to grin and bear grave insult and degradation in a way that keeps the emotional tone of the interaction to within bounds acceptable to the present dominant group member and prescribed by norms of racial etiquette. 24 i am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for these points. 25 the emotional consequences of having to bear injustice in this way is a major theme of ralph ellison’s (2016) invisible man, and historian allison shutt (2015) researched the policing and legislation of racial etiquette and emotional management in colonial zimbabwe. táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 13 ii. c. emotional compression is emotional labor emotional compression as i’ve explained it here is emotional or affective labor by definition.26 first, recall hochschild’s (1983, 7) explanation of the concept: labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others involves the active employment of emotional skills.” emotional compression clearly qualifies, since it constitutively involves using emotional skills to strategically suppress and buttress feeling. one might object that the definition does not apply because emotional compression, and self-management strategies in general, are not properly considered labor. the mere fact that self-management is unwaged doesn’t seem to get the job of invalidating emotional compression as emotional labor done. as feminists have long noted, many forms of reproductive work are unwaged, and (presumably) we would not argue that harvesting plantation crops didn’t qualify as ‘labor’ simply because enslaved africans were not paid for it. what the current social structure treats as worthy of waged compensation is, importantly, up for review (see, for example, the wages for housework political movement [federici 2012]). for my purposes here, the interesting aspect of hochschild’s definition is not in what happens when emotional labor is done—that feelings are dampened or amplified. that much, as i’ve noted, is clear. what is interesting is what hochschild believes emotional labor accomplishes: “the proper state of mind in others.” i turn to the task of investigating that in the next section. iii. why emotional compression is prosocial iii.a. positive argument: emotional contagion if the previous section is successful, then i’ve established that stoicism as construed here is a form of emotional labor. what’s left is to argue that it could serve as the prosocial kind, the sort that could rightfully feature in a progressive response to the emotional labor asymmetry that is characteristic of patriarchy. i argue that emotional compression is a positive, prosocial way to deal with one’s emotions because it mitigates the dangers of emotional contagion and crossover. 26 i follow whitney (2018, 656) in primarily viewing the distinction between “emotional” and “affective” labor as a linguistic distinction that reflects different scholarly communities rather than suggesting the existence of necessarily different concepts, which she discusses at some length in a footnote. but, also following whitney, i decline to positively equate them—to others i leave the task of deciding whether or not there is a substantive distinction to be found between these two terms and the literature bases that use them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 14 the emotional world is a networked one—or, to put it another way, our social ties and networks are partially emotional, whatever else they are.27 this realization has been central to the structural story about how social reproduction links with broader social and political explanatory stories (oksala 2016). discrete emotions like anger, sadness, and joy can leak from one person to another, a process which has been called “emotional contagion” in psychological literature (doherty 1998); but so too can broader emotional or psychological states, such as depression or life unsatisfaction, which psychologists call “emotional crossover” (härtel and page 2009). diverse experiments ranging from the scale of one-on-one conversations to massive, mediated networks on social media have all demonstrated that expressions of emotions have emotional consequences on both the immediate audience and those causally downstream of the expression.28 given emotional contagion and crossover, anyone’s emotional intensity can put strain on the practices and judgements that keep social life peaceable and fair. anger provides an instructive example of these dangers—a fact not lost on the ancient stoics.29 a variety of research suggests that the activation of anger pervades and potentially degrades subsequent reasoning processes, making angry reasoners likelier to discard mitigating or exonerating evidence, blame third parties who are unrelated to the initial anger, and (perhaps most importantly) activate punitive behavioral responses to either of the aforementioned (goldberg, lerner, and tetlock 1999). the likelihood and severity of these responses are proportional to the intensity of the emotional expression.30 it’s unlikely that emotional compression is a solution to these deep, possibly hardwired problems of human reasoning and emotional processing. but recall what 27 perhaps this is at least one sense in which the personal is political, and why this realization illuminates “all our choices” (lorde 2003, 27). 28 see, for example, barsade (2002); kramer, guillory, and hancock (2014); and guillory et al. (2011). 29 for a discussion of the dangers, see seneca’s (1990) “of anger.” this is not to quarrel with recent literature investigating the potential benefits of apt or righteous anger, nor to suggest that those who demonstrate anger ought to be criticized—i’m simply not generalizing from these cases. for a discussion of redeeming elements of proper anger, see myisha cherry’s (2018, 2019) academic work, as well as her public philosophy in the boston review (cherry 2020). 30 the authors, interestingly, found that social punishment sharply attenuated or even eliminated the effect of anger on subsequent judgements in their experimental condition—the relationship and intensity was found only in the condition where the anger-triggering norm violation went unpunished (goldberg, lerner, and tetlock 1999). táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 15 emotional compression involves: evening out expressive and other behavioral differences between one’s quieter and louder emotions. but this is not an atomized, individual person who achieves stoic self-management in causal isolation from his social milieu. the stoic who compresses himself exerts “compressor” effects in his interpersonal interactions, within the various collectives in which those interactions take place. stoic philosopher epictetus humorously admonishes the would-be stoic who would skip shower time: “you think that you deserve to stink. let it be so: deserve to stink. do you think that also those who sit by you, those who recline at table with you, that those who kiss you deserve the same? either go into a desert, where you deserve to go, or live by yourself, and smell yourself.”31 the key is in what mistake this person would be making: that they would fail to be taking the actions with respect to their body that prevent them from being “disagreeable to those with whom you associate.”32 epictetus offers this analogy with a discussion of the soul. one must manage one’s emotions so that the soul is “free from perturbation and pollution.”33 the wrong emotions would not merely pollute one’s self, it would seem, but also others’. if that’s right, then it’s plausible that the gender status quo achieves (though problematically) this kind of social compression effect by means of the stereotypical relationship between genders. men experience lower “affect intensity” (range of emotional response) and also lower emotional contagion than do women, suggesting that there may be some compression effect achieved in interactions between men and women given the current gender norms (fujita, diener, and sandvik 1991; doherty et al. 1995). the result of this could be a collective emotional “signal” that is compressed, relative to the counterfactual absence of restrictive emotionality demands on men, all other things being equal. this version of compression, however, isn’t the best we can do. it is likely to come at considerable costs, since mere restrictive emotionality in the absence of the fuller stoicism reflects the “compressed” emotional environment whose negative externalities 31 epictetus, the discourses, bk. 4, chap. 11. 32 ibid. 33 epictetus, bk. 4, chap. 11. epictetus is translated as discussing “opinions” in this section. importantly, for the stoics, emotions are opinions about what the world is like that can be altered through perspective shifts, most importantly the cultivation of indifference towards the parts of the world one does not control. see sherman (2007, 9–10) for a discussion of this interpretive point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 16 begin with alexithymia and emotional unavailability, and likely end in tragic violence and aggression.34 iii.b. answer to an objection the last point also helps answer the most important objection against valorizing emotional compression as i do here. take, for instance, bell hooks’s discussion of “emotional stoicism”: “patriarchal mores teach a form of emotional stoicism to men that says they are more manly if they do not feel, but if by chance they should feel and the feelings hurt, the manly response is to stuff them down, to forget about them, to hope they go away” (2004, chap. 1). the status quo shows us that gendered restrictive emotionality, as it fits into the current schedule of gender norms and expectations, has clear risks and downsides. high school students who reported high restrictive emotionality were 11 times more likely to report markers of depression and more than twice as likely to report a suicide attempt as those reporting low restrictive emotionality (jacobson et al. 2011). the core accusations here are true, but i’ve argued throughout that they apply to modern stoicism in the colloquial sense. the characterization that i give here of emotional compression as a strategy, skill, or virtue is meant to respond to these very deficiencies of “stoicism” in that impoverished sense. i am not defending restrictive emotionality or the gendered schedule of expectations around it. i am defending the strategic management style of emotional compression, for which restrictive emotionality is a necessary but insufficient condition. alexithymia and emotional unavailability—the negative externalities that tag along with restrictive emotionality when other emotional skills and resources are absent—are the true culprits. the lack of emotional self-knowledge, to take the opposite of alexithymia, would help explain toole’s (2019, 12) observation that men are unable to provide emotional caregiving to themselves. when men’s lack of emotional self-knowledge is combined with the toxic presence of homophobic and misogynist norms that complicate homosocial forms of support—contributing to noncommunication of one’s emotions—it's no surprise that the burden of emotional support so often and so disproportionately falls on women. but emotional compression as i’ve conceived of it here would work to ameliorate this condition rather than exacerbate it. 34 for examples of research linking alexithymia to violence, see richard wright’s (2016) portrayal of this (in a racialized mode) via the character bigger thomas in native son, and also see the studies of teten et al. (2008) and louth, hare, and linden (1998). táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 17 iv. conclusion if i’ve succeeded here, then i’ve given some reason to suspect that emotional compression is, or is compatible with, a virtuous relationship to one’s emotions. establishing that involved disentangling the underlying virtue from its nonaccidental but ultimately cosmetic resemblance to the outcome of male socialization practices in western cultures as currently constituted. while expectations about who is supposed to serve as an emotional compressor are currently gendered in western contexts, i haven’t argued that the mechanics of its prosocial benefits are also gendered. the arguments i’ve made here could apply to anyone of any gender, though the social costs and risks of this strategy are likely different across different identities.35 there’s still more work left to be done. for example, intersectionality complicates our evaluation of traits associated with masculinity in the first place, and there’s no obvious reason why emotional compression would be any exception. much of available psychological research has been done on middle-class, educated white men in western countries; perhaps relatedly, much commentary on gender seems to implicitly characterize traits and benefits associated with masculinity in the ways that might fit this narrow social description. but the kind of masculinity associated with this narrow demographic may be just one among many in such societies (connell 1996; lugones 2016). moreover, the kind of societies selected for in such analyses may be systematically related in ways that bear meaningfully on how gender plays out in them—for instance, if the countries where gender is studied are all war-reliant.36 moreover, the very associations and traits that establish an individual as belonging to the “dominant” gender may functionally contribute to the oppression rather than the advantage of the person given a fuller description of their social position, as has been argued in the case of black men in the united states recently by athena mutua (2006b) and tommy curry (2017) and earlier by bell hooks (2004, xii).37 35 there is evidence, for instance, that alexithymia is associated with acts of violence among women, its association with masculinity notwithstanding (louth, hare, and linden 1998). then, if stoicism constitutively involves the cultivation of skills that might prevent or mitigate alexithymia, it stands to reason that it could benefit women and women’s social spaces as well on at least the dimension of violence prevention. 36 for a discussion of the possibility of false universalisms about gender stemming from this mistake, see digby (2014). 37 this is one possible extrapolation from tommy curry’s (2017) description of the relationship of masculinity (considered as a set of character traits) to males from nondominant races. curry’s argument focuses on black males in the united states. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 18 but if parts i–iii are correct, then my analysis here may represent some progress towards identifying one constitutive element of a potentially progressive masculinity. appropriately (given the aforementioned complications), some theorists have left room for the possibility of nontoxic, or “reconstructed” masculinity. such masculinities may retain association with some set of character traits but also walk the “fine line” of simultaneously responding “nondefensively to the feminist critique of patriarchy” while remaining empathetic to men where appropriate.38 the work of concretizing this possibility involves confronting the complexity of evaluating hegemonic masculinity and the traits associated with it, as well as identifying which traits currently associated with masculinity might be salvageable.39 the target needn’t be a single conception of masculinity: as walcott (2009) and hooks (2004, chap. 6) separately argue, it’s likely that no such single conception is in the cards for black men (for example), which already would imply that there are at least a handful of “masculinities” on offer.40 nevertheless, the very possibility of plural masculinities should key us into the contingency of our judgements of any particular character trait. we may realize, upon careful reflection and examination, that we really object to how a trait functions in the context of a specific masculinity rather than to the trait itself.41 the problem we are presented with under currently dominant schemes of male socialization is not necessarily, then, that men (or anyone) are asked to be emotionally restrictive. the problem is that the likeliest forms of restrictive emotionality in these sorts of societies are shot through by alexithymia and emotional unavailability rather than skillful emotional management. therefore, the remedy needn’t be to demand that men develop the kinds of expressive styles, relationships, and emotional management strategies that are currently coded as 38 see especially pages 384–385 of levant (1992), and the anthology edited by athena mutua (2006a). 39 for a discussion of the complexities of feminist analysis of masculinity, see the prologue to hooks's (2004) the will to change. 40 i have no insights on how to individuate a “masculinity.” researchers emphasizing the plurality of masculinities have separated them by race and nationality (e.g., ross 1998) or relationship to a domain of practice (e.g., barrett’s [1996] study of masculinities in the navy). background social conditions likely help explain what difference domains and nationalities make to these pluralities, but attending to the complexities here is a task for future work (see also connell 1998). 41 see collins’s (2006) discussion of the difference between “strength” and “dominance” for an instructive example of the kind of nuance i hope to explore here. táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 19 feminine.42 another potentially viable strategy is for men to identify, cultivate, and disseminate the kinds of skills and tactics that complement restrictive emotionality and that together form emotional compression as a comprehensive strategy. this possibility might be easier to motivate and could also safeguard the socially beneficial emotional compression effects that we might otherwise give up. there are places to turn to find the resources to build these sorts of skills. evidence suggests that we can successfully cultivate long-term changes to our habits and even our brain structure itself through deliberate practice. london taxi drivers spend up to two years learning how to navigate the city, and their hippocampi show signs of structurally different sensorimotor regions (maguire et al. 2000). or take the long tradition of buddhist thought and practice: one can see clear parallels in marcus aurelius’s exhortations to himself to keep his emotional and practical range centered, despite meeting with disagreeable people and other stimuli, with eighth-century mahayana buddhism scholar śāntideva’s similar selfexhortation: “let them do to me as they please, whatever does not harm them. . . . may those who insult me to my face, or cause me harm in any other way, even those who disparage me in secret, have the good fortune to awaken”43 if i am onto something, then centuries of buddhist traditions of thought and practice have taken something rather like emotional compression seriously, and disseminating related practices and norms may help cultivate this skill. researchers have shown not only that loving-kindness meditation can activate parts of the prefrontal cortex associated with joy and happiness in both novices and expert meditators, but also that the latter group has substantively different brain wave responses to the meditation (lutz et al. 2008). personalityand affect-shaping are also integral parts of other regimes of discipline. philosopher nancy sherman (2007) discusses athletic and military regimes of discipline in her book stoic warriors on the us military. we might investigate similar forms of athletic activities to find out whether they might be useful for this purpose, including “boot camp” style personal fitness, martial arts, gymnastic training, and some forms of dance. whichever of these we choose, we should follow the ancient stoics in viewing the needed intervention as a dedicated practice. 42 again, see brody (1993, 116–117). 43 from śāntideva's (2007) bodhicaryāvatāra, chapter 3, verses 15–17. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2020, vol. 6, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2020 20 references aikin, scott, and emily mcgill-rutherford. 2014. “stoicism, feminism and autonomy.” symposion 1 (1): 9–22. baltzly, dirk. 2018. “stoicism.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward 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of masculinity during adolescence.” psychology of men & masculinity 15 (3): 241–252. doi:10.1037/a0037262. weeks, kathi. 2007. “life within and against work: affective labor, feminist critique, and post-fordist politics.” ephemera: theory and politics in organization 7 (1): 233–249. whitney, shiloh. 2018. “byproductive labor: a feminist theory of affective labor beyond the productive–reproductive distinction.” philosophy & social criticism 44, no. 6 (july): 637–660. doi:10.1177/0191453717741934. wright, richard. 2016. native son. new york: random house. zorilă, tudor-cătălin, varvara kandia, and yannis stylianou. 2012. “speech-in-noise intelligibility improvement based on spectral shaping and dynamic range compression.” paper presented at interspeech 2012: 13th annual táíwò – stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor published by scholarship@western, 2020 25 conference of the international speech communication association, portland, or, september 9–13. http://www.isca-speech.org/archive /interspeech_2012. olúfẹḿi o. táíwò is an assistant professor of philosophy at georgetown university. his published work includes “states are not basic structures” (philosophical papers, may 2019), “the man-not and the dilemmas of intersectionality” (apa newsletter on philosophy and the black experience, spring 2018), “the empire has no clothes” (disputatio, october 2018), and “beware of schools bearing gifts” (public affairs quarterly, vol. 31, january 2017). 8217 taiwo title page 8217 taiwo final format what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 1 article 2 recommended citation mcmullen, amanda. 2021. “what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (1). article 2. 2021 what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women amanda mcmullen university of arkansas, fayetteville akmcmull@uark.edu mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women amanda mcmullen abstract in a september 2004 interview, donald trump agreed with howard stern’s statement that his daughter ivanka is “a piece of ass.” this utterance is a synecdochical utterance targeting women (sutw), by which i mean that its form is such that a term for an anatomical part is predicated of, or could be used by a speaker to refer to, a woman. i propound a theory of what sutw speakers do in undertaking an sutw on which the sutw speaker prompts the hearer to engage in a certain derogatory pattern of associational thinking—that is, taking a “perspective” in elisabeth camp’s sense—on the female subject. this perspective is one that reduces her to the bodily part in question—that is, fragments her (reduces her to a part) and biologizes her (characterizes her as mere living tissue). essentially, the hearer thinks of the woman as a “piece of meat.” keywords: synecdoche, pejorative language, pragmatics, perspectives, speech acts, metaphor, misogyny, objectification 1. introduction1 in a september 2004 interview with howard stern, donald trump agreed with stern’s description of his daughter ivanka: “[she’s] . . . a piece of ass” (kaczynski, massie, and mcdermott 2016). stern and trump’s utterance is a synecdochical utterance targeting women. by a “synecdochical” utterance, i mean an utterance of a sentence consisting of a part term and the predicate “is a [bodily part].”2 1 i would like to express my appreciation to brendan balcerak jackson, simon evnine, elisabeth camp, mark richard, and jennifer saul for their comments. i am also grateful to participants in the following conferences: “who’s got the power? philosophical critique of social and political structures” (2017) at the university of reykjavik, “mind, art, and morality: power and language” (2018) at the university of barcelona, and “siucc xxvii: the philosophy of elisabeth camp” (2018) at the university of vitoriagasteiz. 2 alternatively, this description can be described in terms amenable to speech act theory as an act the speaker undertakes (searle 1969). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 synecdochical utterances targeting women (henceforth, sutws) are ones in which the “whole” is a woman and the “part” a bodily part, and in which that part is associated with female bodies.3 stern and trump’s utterance is clearly derogatory. my central question is, what kind of derogatory act does an sutw speaker perform? i offer a theory on which the sutw speaker prompts the hearer to engage in a certain derogatory pattern of associational thinking—that is, taking a “perspective” in elisabeth camp’s sense—on the female subject. this perspective is one that reduces her to the bodily part in question—that is, fragments her (reduces her to a part) and biologizes her (characterizes her as mere living tissue). essentially, the hearer thinks of the woman as a “piece of meat.”4 my theory explains not only derogatoriness but also other data that show that the speaker engages in an act other than conveying the literal meaning of the uttered sentence: the inability of a speaker to deny that undertaking this other speech act (§3.1) and her choice of a bodily part rather than a salient alternative (§3.3).5 i can explain why hearing an sutw offends us (§3.2), a feature that supports thinking of this other act as derogatory.6 the offense traces back to the perspective the speaker prompts the hearer to take on the female subject. the perspectival theory explains data pertaining to which kind of act this derogatory act is—and data that pull us in diametrically different directions, as well (§4). this includes data that speak in favor of a view on which the additional act that a speaker performs is conveying cognitive content: some paraphrases seem apt, and a conversational participant can refer back to or (dis)agree with that content. other data steer us toward a noncognitive analysis: paraphrases do not seem to fully capture what is conveyed, what seems apt depends 3 for an utterance to constitute a sutw, it must also be used in a genuinely synecdochical way. see §2. 4 my point in this paper is to argue for what constitutes an sutw’s content, that an sutw speaker evokes a perspective, rather than to argue for the mechanism by which the content is conveyed. however, my position is that an sutw is a perlocutionary act, whereby the speaker causes the hearer to take on a perspective. the hearer’s perspective-taking is a perlocutionary effect. 5 one might object that i preclude the possibility that the sutw speaker conveys synecdochical content as a matter of the content the sentence literally expresses, as josef stern (2000) argues for metaphor. there have been numerous criticisms of such an account. camp (2005), for example, provides several. for this reason, i limit my inquiry to accounts on which sutw content is conveyed via nonliteral means. 6 offense is distinct from derogatoriness (hom 2008). derogatoriness is a feature of the utterance, whereas offense is a psychological effect we experience when we hear a derogatory utterance. these can easily come apart as when a derogatory utterance fails to cause one offense because she has become desensitized to it. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 on context, the speaker can coherently deny any paraphrase, and her ability to plausibly deny any paraphrase varies by context. my project has especial importance for feminist philosophy. any of the associations which an sutw evokes are familiar from the literature on objectification: that a woman lacks agency, that it is permissible to exploit her for her sexual and reproductive capacities, that parts of her body are interchangeable with another woman’s, and so forth. these are traits that martha nussbaum (1995) and sandra bartky (1982, 129–130) recognize as characteristic of objectification. rae langton (2009) identifies reduction to body, of which an sutw is a clear linguistic manifestation, as a feature of objectification. this suggests that characterizing women as meat is a way of objectifying women. sutws, by inviting the hearer to think of the woman in a way that violates her autonomy, might also be expressions of misogyny on kate manne’s (2018, 84–86) feminist analysis. if my theory is correct, then one can objectify a woman or undertake a distinctively misogynistic act using speech. this is the plan. in section 2, i elaborate on the criteria for an sutw. i expound on the reasons for why we should think that an sutw speaker does something other than convey the sutw’s literal content and something derogatory in section 3. then, i enumerate features of the kind of content an sutw speaker conveys in undertaking this derogatory act (§4). next, i present a theory of what the speaker does—namely, causing the hearer to take a perspective on the woman that reduces the female subject to a piece of meat (§5)—and make clear how it fits the characteristics of an sutw to be explained (§6). lastly (§7), i explain the importance of my theory for socially engaged philosophy of language. 2. what are synecdochical utterances targeting women? we can call stern and trump’s utterance above, (1). utterance (2), which is taken from a blog post about eurovision star gaitana, is another instance of an sutw. (2) she’s a pair of legs (w. adams 2012).7 linguist zoltán kövecses (2006, 160–161) also notes that “leg,” and “ankle” for that matter, are terms used to refer to women. we are familiar, too, with expressions like “showing some leg,” which does not make reference to a particular woman. utterance (3) was commonly heard on social media during the 2016 american presidential campaign. given that the part term in (3) is so incendiary, i use the circumlocution c-word and will do so whenever i refer to the term. 7 the original quote is: “gaitana is a lot more than a pair of boobs. she's a pair of legs, too!” of course, this pretense of deniability leaves intact numerous problematic presuppositions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 (3) hilary is a [c-word]. we should now identify those aspects of sutws that make them sutws. firstly, sutws typically exemplify some variant of a simple, representative form: “pair of legs” is in the predicate position, and “she,” the term used to refer to the woman, is in the subject position.8 in contrast, (4), taken from a zz top song, lacks the representative synecdochical form. (4) she’s got legs (zz top 1983). the speaker of (4) does not say that the woman “is” a pair of legs, but that she “got” or possesses legs.9 a condition on form, though, is not the only requirement for a sutw. the utterance must be genuinely synecdochical, as well. to be genuinely synecdochical the bodily part term must (a) express the sense of the relevant bodily part. i use braces to mark the sense of the term in what follows. in (1) “piece of ass” expresses {posterior of the pelvic area}. for (2), the sense “pair of legs” expresses is {pair of legs}, the limbs people typically use to walk. the next condition concerns the use of “is.” in a genuinely synecdochical utterance, the “is” is not the “is” of attribution: the speaker does not impute the part to the whole as one does a property. rather, she represents the whole as a part and so, the “is” in a genuinely synecdochical utterance is the “is” of identity. apart from constituting a genuinely synecdochical utterance, there is another condition for an utterance to be an sutw: (b) a constraint on the type of bodily part. the part must be characteristic of female bodies.10 8 i say “characteristic” since there are other forms sutws can take as in “she and her legs: they’re one and the same.” these variants are all ones in which language other than a form of the verb “be” is used to express identity between the female subject and the bodily part term. 9 although (4) is not an sutw, it is offensive in many contexts. see §6 for discussion on (4). 10 i say “female bodies” rather than “women” for “female” names a sex, whereas “women” refers to a gender. bodies are “female” by virtue of biological features such as hormones, chromosomes, and anatomical parts whereas gender is convincingly argued to be socially constructed (see, e.g., haslanger 2012). one need not have a body sexed as “female,” though, to be the subject of an sutw. anyone perceived as “female” regardless of that person’s gender identification (or lack thereof) can be the subject of an sutw. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 the condition that the part should be characteristic of female bodies does not imply that the part is unique to women. the predication of “pair of legs” to a woman is an sutw—but men have legs, too. it also does not imply that every bodily part that a woman has qualifies as the right sort of part. earlobes, for example, are not distinctive of women so predicating “ear lobes” of a woman (suppose one known for her appearances in earring advertisements), as the speaker of (5) does, is not undertaking an sutw.11 (5) she’s a pair of earlobes. types of bodily parts that spring to mind when we think of those characteristic of female bodies are those directly involved in reproduction and childbearing, like a uterus. the sutw (6) is an example. (6) you [to a female person] are only a uterus (eichler 2013).12 secondary sexual characteristics like breasts, waists, or bottoms are also often predicated of women—as we see in (1). legs are also commonly used to represent women. consider, for instance, a familiar representation of a woman drawn from film: a woman putting on her stockings. an sutw, then, is an utterance (i) whose subject is a woman, (ii) in which the bodily part predicated of the subject is characteristic of female bodies, and (iii) that is used in a genuinely synecdochical way—that is, in which the part term in the predicate expresses the sense of the relevant bodily part and the “is” connecting the female subject and the bodily part is the “is” of identity.13 11 it is possible that in a society in which a woman’s earlobes are associated with female bodies (for example, by being sexualized) that (5) could be an sutw. that is, which parts are sexualized is culturally contingent. i am indebted to an anonymous referee for pressing me to make this explicit. 12 in a similar vein, mary beth whitehead, the defendant in a landmark case on the custody rights of surrogate mothers, said of the couple that contracted her to bear their child that they viewed her as “a uterus with legs” (hanley 1987). concerning recent attempts to ban abortion in many southern states, medical doctor erin king said in a personal email to the author (june 4th 2019), “it is fair to say that the uterus is the most regulated thing in the state of missouri.” 13 it might seem that parts “characteristic of female bodies” are simply sexualized parts. yet, not all parts characteristic of women like a uterus (as in (6)) are sexualized. my thanks to an anonymous referee for asking me to address this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 3. synecdochical utterances constitute derogatory acts now that we have a grasp of what an sutw is, one might wonder the following: why should we think that the speaker does anything other than convey the sutw’s literal content, and why a derogatory act? we can refer to this nonliteral act as the “derogatory” act. this alternative language enables us to reformulate the question: why should we think that the speaker performs the derogatory act? i provide three reasons: illocutionary noncancelability (§3.1), the psychological effects of offense and reduction an sutw triggers (§3.2), and the speaker’s choice of a bodily part term over relevant alternatives (§3.3). 3.1 illocutionary noncancelability to see the first distinctive characteristic of sutws, reconsider (2). as a genuinely synecdochical utterance, the speaker asserts the face-value significance of the utterance, “she’s a pair of legs.” the part term expresses {pair of legs}. however, this cannot be all the speaker intends to do by asserting this, for the assertion that a woman is identical with the relevant bodily part is patently false.14 rather, the speaker must intend to do something else using her utterance, on pain of failing to be a cooperative conversational participant. for this reason, the speaker of (2) cannot be merely the asserting that “she is a pair of legs.” the speaker must be doing something in addition to conveying the utterance’s face-value significance, “she’s a pair of legs.” the point is that this cannot be the only thing she intends to assert. we can call this characteristic of sutws illocutionary noncancelability. illocutionary noncancelability is a plausible reason to think that the sutw speaker does something other than convey the literal content of the sentence that she utters. 3.2 psychological effects: offense and reduction moreover, targets and empathetic hearers experience a certain kind of psychological effect in understanding what an sutw speaker conveys: offense (hom 2008). some women describe the type of psychological effect they experience more specifically, whether as targets or empathetic hearers, as the feeling that the woman is most important in virtue of the part. i call this effect reduction. one testimonial is glennon doyle’s (2016): “misogynists call women cunts when they are trying to . . . remind us that what our identity boils down to is: our [c-word].” aside from testimonials like doyle’s, the sorts of responses some women give to these remarks evince that they make them feel reduced. the form of reply is to insist that the woman is more than the part with which she is identified. one woman 14 paul grice (1989) thought that this was the case for metaphor. for him, the metaphorical speaker flouts the maxim of quality. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 says that she is “more than a uterus” (eichler 2013; loribeth 2013). political journalist and author amanda marcotte (2016) responded to a remark made by killer mike about hillary clinton that “clinton’s remarkable career isn’t enough to prove that women can be worth more than a ‘uterus.’” not all targets of sutws find sutws to be reductive or offensive. bethenny frankel (2017) captioned a photograph of herself that she posted on instagram, in which the relevant anatomical part figured prominently: “a lotta people refer to me as an ass.” contextual information—most saliently, knowledge about frankel’s selfobjectifying attitude towards her body—make it clear that she perceived her admirers’ synecdochical characterization as flattering. of course, the fact that frankel in this case is not in fact offended, or does not feel reduced, by her characterization as a bodily part does not entail that a negative reaction to the utterance is not warranted (bolinger 2017). 3.3 choice of bodily part term another datum that needs to be explained is the following: why does the speaker predicate a part term, and a bodily part term, as opposed to some other language? on the assumption that the speaker is a cooperative conversational participant, there must be a reason why she chose to predicate a term that is both bodily and a part of the female subject. more specifically, using both a term that is bodily and a part term must enable the speaker to perform the act that she intends to undertake.15 in order to see that the speaker does make such a choice, it would be helpful to consider what the alternative language would be. one point of contrast is with rhetorically similar nonpart terms. why did stern and trump in (1) predicate “piece of ass” of ivanka rather than nonpart terms, which are also not biological in nature, such as “fox,” “babe” or “hot young thing”? or, for (6), why select the bodily part term “uterus” rather than one that is not a part but is biological or evokes animals, like “broodmare”? indeed, why select a bodily part term rather than a term that is nonbodily but, depending on your conception of the relevant whole, could be a part, such as “skirt”? 15 this conception of the speaker’s reason differs from the speaker’s reason on a gricean model, according to which the speaker’s word choice must enable the hearer to ascertain the proposition the speaker conveys. the sense of reason that i have in mind is neutral between whether the speaker’s word choice is evidence that the speaker undertakes some illocutionary or perlocutionary act, although, as mentioned in n. 4, my preferred theory is the perlocutionary-act view. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 on the assumption that the speaker is cooperative, we should infer that the speaker’s choice of a term that is both bodily and a part plays some distinctive role in what the speaker does in uttering an sutw. 4. what kind of derogatory act does a synecdochical utterance constitute? in the previous section, i provided three reasons for why an sutw speaker performs what i called “the derogatory act”—that is, does something other than convey the literal meaning of the sutw and something derogatory. now we should consider data pertaining to what kind of act this is. 4.1 data that pull us in a cognitive direction: aptness, reference, and (dis)agreement the first important feature of sutws to notice is that we can provide reasonable paraphrases of what the speaker conveys in performing the derogatory act. that is, some articulations of what the speaker conveys are apt. take (1). paraphrases (1.1p)–(1.3p) are apt specifications of that stern and trump convey. (1.1p) ivanka is just valuable to gawk at and use as a sex object. (1.2p) ivanka isn’t intelligent and lacks the ability to determine her own life. (1.3p) ivanka is a piece of meat. our ability to paraphrase what the speaker conveys might lead us to think that the derogatory act an sutw undertakes is conveying cognitive content. two other features of sutws seem to support this hypothesis. camp (2007) identified both of these as characteristics of metaphor and argued that they speak in favor of this kind of analysis. the first is that a party to the conversation in which (1) is uttered can refer to a paraphrase like (1.1p) later on. the other is that a speaker can agree or disagree with paraphrases. suppose that the speaker of (1) and his hearer, both of whom are struggling actors, are discussing the ability of a female acquaintance of theirs to obtain a coveted role. the hearer could agree with what the speaker says using (1.1a)– (1.3a). (1.1a) yeah, she’s just something to look at, dress up, and parade on the set like a doll. (1.2a) yeah, she doesn’t have much of a mind of her own. (1.3a) yeah, she’s just a piece of meat. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 the hearer can also disagree with the speaker by insisting on the target’s identity as a person—and so meriting the moral status appropriate for a person (as in 1.1d or 1.3d)—or insisting on her possession of recognizably human features like intelligence, autonomy, and other character traits like diligence, (here, acting) talent, and creativity (1.2d). (1.1d) no way: she’s intelligent, hardworking, and genuinely talented! (1.2d) no way: she’s been a major creative force behind this project! (1.3d) she’s not meat—she’s a person and deserves to be treated like one! these three features—the aptness of some paraphrases of what the speaker conveys and a conversational participant’s ability to refer to what is conveyed or (dis)agree with it—give us reason to think that the speaker conveys something cognitive, particularly propositional, in nature. the next set of data leads us to a different conclusion that the speaker conveys something noncognitive. 4.2 data that pull us in a noncognitive direction: ineffability, deniability patterns, and contextual variability one feature that militates against a cognitive analysis is an sutw’s coherent deniability pattern. by this, i mean the speaker’s ability to coherently—however disingenuously—deny paraphrases of what she conveys in performing the derogatory act. notice that coherent deniability is not the same as plausible deniability. an objector can still find it plausible (even believe) that the speaker conveyed the specification of the content attributed to her, even though the speaker’s denial of that explication is compatible with what is said. with this distinction in mind, stern and trump could coherently deny that any of (1.1)–(1.3) is an accurate paraphrase of what their utterance conveyed. indeed, stern and trump could coherently deny any particular paraphrase— not just those expressed in (1.1)–(1.3). if we replaced the explication with ones as varied as “she’s something that one can use as one pleases,” “she’s disposable,” or “she’s a piece of meat interchangeable with any other,” stern and trump could deny conveying any of these. the ability of an sutw speaker to coherently deny any paraphrase is some evidence to think that the sutw speaker does not convey cognitive content at all. an additional reason to doubt that a speaker conveys cognitive content is that the aptness of the content attributed to the speaker is not equally apt in every feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 context. the explication of (1) as specified in objection (1.1p) would become more apt than, say, (1.2p) if (1) is uttered about a woman in a context in which the speaker’s sexual interest in the referent of “she” is apparent. to be clear, in such a context, the aptness is comparative: (1.1p) seems more apt than (1.2p), but (1.2p) would still be a reasonable paraphrase. however, if (1) were uttered in a setting that the speaker referred to earlier in the conversation as a “meat market” (e.g., a gym) or in a context in which women are treated like “meat,” the paraphrase offered in (1.3p) becomes more apt than the alternatives. there is testimonial evidence that pornography is a context like the latter. an anonymous actress says of her experience that pornographers “treat us like meat” (as quoted in c. adams 2015, 72). linda lovelace, a well-known former adult-film actress, describes her experience auditioning for a director as follows: “[he] looked me over like a butcher inspecting a side of beef” (72). moreover, the speaker’s ability to plausibly deny conveying some content also varies by context. it is harder for the speaker to plausibly deny (1.1p) if the utterance is made in a context in which the speaker’s attraction to the female subject is known to the objector. the speaker can less plausibly deny conveying (1.3p) in a setting as degrading as lovelace’s audition. to be clear: the speaker could still coherently deny conveying (1.1p)–(1.3p), but the hearer is less likely to accept the sincerity of the speaker’s disavowal. one might object that a speaker’s ability to coherently deny any particular paraphrase, the contextual sensitivity of a paraphrase’s aptness, and plausibility deniability might still be compatible with an analysis on which a speaker conveys indeterminate and contextually sensitive cognitive content. even if this is true, another feature more strongly recommends a theory on which the content is noncognitive. although paraphrases (1.1p)–(1.3p) are apt, we also detect that any one of them—or even all of them collectively—do not exhaust what the speaker conveys. that is, what the speaker conveys is, to some extent, “ineffable” (potts 2007, 176; blakemore 2011). the inability to fully articulate the content is some reason to think that there is no articulable content and—since cognitive content is characteristically articulable—no cognitive content (potts 2007, 177). we need a theory that can accommodate the data in sections 4.1 and 4.2, which move us in divergent directions. on the theory that i present in the next section, an sutw speaker conveys indeterminate, contextually sensitive content—but content that by its nature has both cognitive and noncognitive elements. 5. what synecdochical speakers targeting women do the sort of act that an sutw speaker undertakes exploits both features of the sutw’s sentence structure and elements of its context of utterance, especially attitudes towards women in the broader social context. first, we should be clear about the linguistic features of an sutw enabling a speaker to perform the mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 derogatory act. an sutw, as a genuinely synecdochical utterance, has a representative sentence structure: “is” links the term referring to the female subject and the bodily part terms, and the sense of “is” is the “is” of identity. the bodily part term expresses the sense of the relevant bodily part. hence, the sentence (2) literally expresses that the referent of “she” is identical with her legs.16 my claim is that this kind of sentence is distinctively well suited to be used to convey the content that accounts for the data observed above. in hearing a sentence that literally expresses that a female subject is identical with a bodily part characteristic of female bodies, the hearer undergoes an associational process. this process is not a mere effect but also enables the hearer to interpret what the speaker conveys. in particular, i claim that the speaker undergoes a particular interpretive process whereby she thinks of the female subject in a way that reduces her to a bodily part (informally, as a “piece of meat”). this is to think of her in a way that is both fragmenting and biologizing. by being fragmented, the woman is characterized in terms of a part of herself. in being “biologized,” i mean that the woman is thought of in a way that reduces her to a purely biological entity. she is a mere living—sentient but mindless—tissue. to think of a woman in a “biologizing” way is to think of her in the way people tend to (inaccurately) think of animals: as brutes lacking intellect. we can also specify my claim in terms of the utterance: an sutw is associated with a way of thinking as reduced to a bodily part. in order to fully understand what i have in mind we need to become clear about what is meant by thinking as—namely, taking on a perspective. what makes the perspective one that reduces her to a bodily part is explained in terms of taking on a perspective with its particular contents and the affective responses it inspires. once i have explained the elements of the perspectival theory, i make explicit how it explains the data in section 6. by “think [of a female subject] as,” i mean take on a perspective in elisabeth camp’s sense (e.g., 2013, 2017). a perspective on, say, rats is an interpretive tendency that we have “to notice, relate, and respond in certain ways” to rats. for instance, if i encounter a rat, i am apt to notice her long tail and dark brown fur, become fearful, and avoid her. its constituent components vary in their natures. a perspective might include concepts, encoded as descriptive properties (e.g., red, rectangular), evaluatively laden “thick” properties (magnanimous, obstreperous), or “thin” properties (superlative, awful). despite the fact that they might include cognitive elements like concepts, perspectives are nonpropositional. the inclusion of thick and evaluative thin terms in a perspective is also one way in which a perspective has affective elements. 16 this point applies, as well, to sutw sentence forms in which other language is used to indicate identity between the female subject and the bodily part term. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 there are two important structural relations among the properties comprising a perspective. properties that are central “explain, cause, or otherwise motivate” the other contents (camp 2017, 50–51). my perspective on rats contains properties like [repulsive] and [untrustworthy]. the property [sneaky] is more central: it causes and explains features like [untrustworthy]. taking a perspective on someone frames how i interpret her behavior and appearance: when i take a perspective on my colleague as a rat, i am disposed to see the way she moves her nose as the way that a rat twitches her nose or to hear her voice as squeaky. this leads us to a second way in which perspective is partly affective. certain attitudes and emotional responses are also constitutive of perspective-taking. in seeing someone as a rat, i feel suspicion and—most appropriate to a rodent—disgust. some features are also more prominent than others (camp 2017, 51). features prominent in my perspective on rats like [squeaky] and [bewhiskered] enable me to identify which features matter in determining which things are rats. notice that prominent features are not ones that must be possessed. rats need not have whiskers to be rats. nonetheless, whiskers help me identify rats. the components constituting the characterization are structured into a coherent whole, in a way that is intuitively “fitting” (51). the sense of “fitting” cannot be articulated in terms of any explicit principle: it’s the sort of norm one knows something conforms to intuitively. in this way, “fittingness” is like an aesthetic norm. that is, these contents “fit” together in the way that, say, a chair with a simple, sleek design fits into a room otherwise furnished in a modern style. camp identifies slurring utterances (2013) and metaphorical utterances (2017) as utterances associated with perspectives. for the theory of sutws that i am presenting, the particular process evoking by hearing a metaphorical utterance is pertinent: restructuring her perspective on the female subject “in light of” the part predicated of the female subject. there are multiple elements here: the perspective on the female subject as a woman (ivanka in (1)), the perspective on the bodily part (“piece of ass”), and the process of restructuring the former using the latter. let us consider how this process using a metaphorical utterance like “peter pettigrew is a rat” is associated with two perspectives: one on pettigrew and one on rats. pettigrew was a character from j. k. rowling’s harry potter series known for his treachery. in hearing this utterance, the hearer restructures her perspective on pettigrew using her perspective on rats. “restructuring” is the process by which the hearer matches those features shared in common between these perspectives and then alters the configuration of the components in the perspective on pettigrew based on the matches. for instance, this alteration could consist in features like [sneaky] or [untrustworthy] becoming more central in one’s perspective on pettigrew. thus, when i hear this utterance, i think of pettigrew as having these traits and in a way that these traits intuitively suit him. remember that there is an affective mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 component to perspective-taking: in taking on a perspective, i not only think of pettigrew as having traits fitting for a rat but also feel towards him as i would a rat. on my view, we should understand what an sutw speaker does as thinking of the female subject in a way that fragments her (thinking of her as a part) and biologizes her (thinking of her as exclusively bodily in nature, as opposed to intellectual or spiritual).17 i am also claiming that perspectives effectively model this way of thinking: we should understand what it means to think of the woman in a way that reduces her to a bodily part as undertaking a perspective on the relevant woman (and more specifically, one shaped by a perspective on the bodily part). analogous to the structure of thought associated with the rat utterance, the hearer uses a perspective on the bodily part to frame how she thinks about the woman of whom that part is predicated. so, what is the perspective of some bodily part like? a perspective on a bodily part reflects our understanding of the nature of an anatomical part, containing elements like [animal], [purely biological], or [exclusively bodily], as well as ones associated with paradigmatically biological entities: nonhuman animals, particularly mammals. (by “purely” or “exclusively” biological or bodily, i mean containing no elements pertaining to intellect, subjectivity, or spirituality.) thinking of an entity as an animal—on our perspectival model, connecting the concept of that entity (say, [women]) with [animal]—is tied to thinking of it as lacking traits thought to be unique to human beings (harris and fiske 2006; haslam 2006). one of the most prominent of these traits is rationality (haslam 2006). thus, by associating something with animals, one associates it with irrationality. animals are, in turn, associated with explicitly evaluative concepts such as [primitive] and [unsophisticated] (saminaden, loughnan, and haslam 2010). animals, particularly those raised for food, are also thought to be irrational—indeed, to lack a mind altogether (bastian et al. 2012). the lack of a mind has explicitly moral consequences. bastian, loughnan, haslam, and radke (2012) show that whether one has a mind strongly bears on whether or not we think of one as meriting moral consideration. lynne tirrell also notes the connection between animalization and diminished moral status. she convincingly argues that the hutu’s application of animalizing terms like “cockroach” and “snake” to tutsi played a role in the 1993 rwandan genocide (tirrell 2012). referring to tutsi by these terms encouraged hutu to see tutsi as beings that are appropriately treated in the way one treats a cockroach or snake. thinking of someone as an animal, particularly as a farmed animal, is also connected to thinking of that entity as having merely instrumental value, primarily for producing 17 what i mean by “bodily” is intended to reflect a pre-theoretic or folk conception. i am not suggesting that these categorical distinctions match reality. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 comestibles (e.g., milk, eggs) or constituting food (bastian et al. 2012). conceiving of something as having exclusively instrumental value, rather than as being an end in itself, clearly has consequences for moral consideration. we have identified some biologizing conceptual connections that are morally problematic: the connections between having a biological or animal-like nature and lacking distinctively human characteristics like rationality or a mind at all, having merely instrumental value, and having a moral status. i turn now to the features of a perspective of a bodily part that are emblematic of fragmentation. in contrast with biologizing, thinking of someone as fragmented is to deny them characteristically, but not distinctively, human traits (haslam 2006). characteristically human traits are those humans share all with animals like emotionality and warmth. moreover, in thinking of someone as a part, one thinks of her as [fungible], [divisible], [disposable], [inert], or [lacking autonomy]. these are all features of bodily parts considered in isolation from a body. notice, too, that these are concepts feminist theorists (bartky 1982; nussbaum 1995; langton 2009) identify as marks of the same phenomenon.18 i have discussed biologizing and fragmenting features separately from each other, but there are important aspects of a perspective that reduce one to a part that we can only appreciate when we consider these aspects together—that is, when we consider the perspective that characterizes someone not only as a part but also as a bodily part. components of a perspective on a bodily part are likely to be drawn from contexts in which a bodily part is highlighted, if not detached from the body. these include anatomy books, accounts of surgeries, and even experiences of seeing cuts of meat at a butcher shop. indeed, meat-eaters, globally the majority of people, have substantial exposure to settings featuring nonhuman animals’ bodily parts. for this reason, the perspective-taker is likely to think of the bodily part as meat. the concept of [meat] like that of [animal] is plausibly connected to [instrumentally valuable]. we also lack moral obligations towards meat. one might treat meat with impunity. this matches the way that people use “meat” to mark a lack of appropriate moral consideration, too.19 with a clearer idea of the contents of a perspective on a bodily part and the connections among them, we can consider the process the hearer undergoes whereby she restructures her perspective on the female sutw subject. as a perspective on the woman, the concept of the female subject is at its center. which 18 the phenomenon is objectification. i remain agnostic here on the relationship between reducing to an anatomical part (biologizing and fragmenting) and objectification. 19 another harry potter reference, this one uttered by professor mcgonagall in harry potter and the goblet of fire: “potter is a boy, not a piece of meat!” consider also the colloquial protest, “what am i, chopped liver?” mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 properties would the restructured perspective on the woman have on my theory? another way to consider this question is, which matches will a perspective-taker, the hearer of the sutw, make between her perspective on the bodily part and on the woman? the perspective on the woman the sutw hearer takes is like the perspective on a bodily part: biologizing and fragmenting. the speaker reduces the woman to her body, and moreover, to a part of her body. let us first see how it is biologizing: the woman’s biological nature is “emphasized” or “highlighted.” the perspective-taker connects the concept of the woman with ones like [purely biological], [exclusively bodily], and [animal]. these biologizing concepts figure centrally. ortner (1974) notes that there is a pre-theoretic association between women and body, and between men and mind. there are a number of studies supporting the claim that people—both men and women—associate women with animals (bernard et al. 2012; heflick and goldenberg 2009; heflick et al. 2011; loughnan, haslam, and bastian 2010; reynolds and haslam 2011; rudman and mescher 2012; vaes, paladino, and puvia 2011). irene lópez rodríguez (2009) and tipler and ruscher (2019) argue that people connect women with animals, including those raised or hunted for their meat. the perspective-taker also connects biologizing concepts with [instrumentally valuable], particularly [valuable for sex]. the indirect link between concepts like [exclusively biological] and [instrumentally valuable] is important. recall that centrality is an explanatory relation: it is the woman’s merely animal-like nature that explains, or justifies, exploiting her. in fact, the particular ways in which farmed female animals are exploited bear some affinities to one of the ways women typically are—namely, for their reproductive capacities. farmed animals are manipulated to produce as many offspring and other by-products of reproduction (milk, eggs) as cheaply and efficiently as possible (c. adams 2015). the widespread connection between consumption of flesh and sexual intercourse as “consumption” also suggests another parallel between the way animals and women are exploited (hines 1999a, 1999b).20 farmed animals are exploited for people to “consume” their flesh, and women are exploited for men to “consume” sexually. animals, especially wild animals hunted for their flesh, are also linked with romantic conquest and heterosexual sex (kalof, fitzgerald, and baralt 2004). i suggest that those fragmenting aspects of the perspective on the bodily part also shape the perspective-taker’s view on the woman. the perspective-taker will connect her concept of the woman with concepts like [lacking subjectivity], [fungible], [divisible], [inert], [disposable], [interchangeable]. the woman’s status as a part, like 20 the connection between sex and hunting is also familiar to us from language used to refer to the pursuit of a romantic partner—e.g., “the chase.” “venery” is a word that is ambiguous between romantic conquest and hunting. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 her biological nature, is central in the perspective: these components explain or justify her lack of subjectivity or disposability. the biologizing and fragmenting aspects of the perspective, taken together, frame the woman as meat. cognitive linguists caitlin hines (1999a) and irene lópez rodríguez (2009) attest to the association between women and meat. some evidence is linguistic: the existence of certain classes of terms. one family of terms encompasses meat terms used synecdochically to refer to a woman as using an anatomical part characteristic of women. “roastie,” as in roast beef, is most frequently used among involuntary celibates. another family encompasses terms that are often used to refer to characteristically female anatomical parts: “beef curtains” and “beef flaps” are examples. based on an analysis of language used to refer to women, people also connect women with a related conceptual domain: food (hines 1999a, 1999b). i have focused on the cognitive aspects of the perspective on the female subject restructured by comparison with a perspective on the bodily part, but the perspective also has affective dimensions. in taking on a perspective with those elements associated with meat, especially if those components are centrally embedded, the perspective presents the woman in a way that suggests that certain attitudes and emotions that are appropriate for meat are appropriate to have towards the woman. ethically salient attitudes include callousness, indifference, or an “instrumental” attitude—that is, seeing the woman as something to be used however, and discarded whenever, one likes. the hearer’s perspective need not contain all of or even any particular one of these components, cognitive or affective, but it should comprise a sufficient number such that she thinks of the woman in a way that emphasizes her body, as lacking traits traditionally associated with humanity (e.g., rationality), and as having a diminished moral status in virtue of these traits. we should also note that characterizing a woman as, say, lacking subjectivity or as irrational does not entail that the hearer believes this about the woman. the perspective-taker has only engaged in a kind of thought that frames the woman in a way (namely, as a bodily part) that would make the imputation of these traits apt. a hearer need not believe that the woman is disposable any more than the hearer of “pettigrew is a rat” need believe that pettigrew is sneaky. this is not to suggest that perspectives lack the power to shape the perspective-taker’s beliefs. indeed, there is an especial danger that this might occur. as the research in social and cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics that i cite attests, people are already disposed to associate women with entities (animals, meat) that undermine their humanity. we should pause to emphasize the nature of perspectives. they are neither wholly cognitive nor entirely noncognitive. they contain concepts but are affective in various ways. some of the constituent concepts, like those capturing thick terms, are mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 partly affective. connecting certain elements of a perspective also inspires one to have certain attitudes or emotional responses towards the person on whom the perspective is taken. perspectives, according to camp (2017), are not reducible to propositions. yet, one can articulate one’s perspective in propositional terms. a hearer of (1) could begin to articulate the perspective she takes on ivanka in terms of propositions: that she is only valuable for her appearance, that she is not intelligent, that she lacks a mind of her own, and so on. i say “begin” for one cannot fully or exhaustively articulate a perspective in propositional terms. perspectives are ultimately ineffable.21 i have argued that taking a perspective on a woman effectively models the type of thought that one experiences in hearing an sutw. my next task, which i undertake in section 6, is to explain how my view accounts for the data (§3.1–3.4). in the next section, i also explain how sutws are distinctive from non-sutw utterances like (4), which might seem amenable to the same analysis. 6. how a perspectival theory explains the data we should be clear as to how my theory explains the data in favor of thinking that an sutw speaker undertakes a derogatory act or does something other than convey the sentence it literally expresses (§3). the sutw speaker does not merely assert the literal significance of the sentence uttered but also enables the hearer to take a perspective on the female subject of that sentence that reduces her to the bodily part. taking on such a perspective also explains the hearer’s experience of offense and the felt sense that the sutw target has been reduced. a hearer is offended because the perspective that she takes on the female subject presents her in a biologizing and fragmenting way. i can also explain why the sutw speaker predicates an anatomical part term of the female subject as opposed to other language. terms like “piece of ass,” by virtue of being bodily, and bodily parts, plausibly evoke different associations than superficially similar language. the perspectival theory presented here also explains data pertaining to the type of act an sutw constitutes (§4). understanding the pattern of associational thinking in which the hearer engages as taking a perspective on the female subject predicts the cognitive-seeming behavior of the sutw content. a perspective contains cognitive elements, and it can be at least partly articulated propositionally. this explains why some explications are apt, how a party to the conversation can refer to what the speaker says, and how someone can (dis)agree with the speaker. 21 i depart from camp (2017) on this point but am faithful to her earlier work (e.g., 2007). she maintains in that paper that one could in principle propositionally explicate one’s perspective. previously, she held that perspectives are not fully propositionally explicable. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 i can explain, as well, the data that weighed against a cognitive analysis of the content the sutw speaker conveys. although one can articulate apt paraphrases, one cannot exhaustively capture all that is contained within the perspective in propositional terms. a perspective is ultimately ineffable. one reason is because some of the elements composing it are, plausibly, propositionally inarticulable: evaluatively imbued properties or the feelings the hearer experiences in taking on the perspective. another reason is that no propositional articulation could express the “fitting-ness” relationship among the perspectival elements. pace camp (2017), i am also skeptical as to whether a propositional articulation of a perspective could capture the centrality and prominence relations among that perspective’s contents. a speaker is able to coherently deny any particular paraphrase because the perspective that the hearer takes on, which the objector propositionally (partially) articulates, need not have any one particular content. no one of the components distinctive to a biologizing and fragmenting perspective must be a part of the perspective the hearer takes on. two other features to be accounted for include two kinds of contextual sensitivity: the aptness of some paraphrase and a speaker’s ability to plausibly deny some paraphrase. these are connected, for the extent to which a paraphrase is apt to a hearer is directly related to how plausible the speaker’s denial of conveying it will be to that hearer. for this reason, the feature of a perspective that explains the contextual variability of aptness should also explain the ability of a speaker to more or less plausibly deny some paraphrase, depending on the context. it is easier to see how perspectives handle context-dependence by considering an example. suppose that the hearer of (1) takes a perspective on ivanka containing [valuable for her body]. the hearer can paraphrase what the speaker conveys as “that ivanka is valuable for her body.” the degree to which the paraphrase is apt in a given context corresponds to how central or prominent the perspectival content is.22 thus, if [valuable for her body] figures centrally or prominently in the hearer’s perspective on ivanka, “that ivanka is valuable for her body” will seem apt. if [disposable] figures less centrally or prominently in the hearer’s perspective, “that ivanka is disposable” will strike the hearer as less apt. now, a perspectival component’s position within a perspective varies with the context of utterance. the same utterance in different mouths, or uttered on different occasions, or aimed at a different target can result in a different structuring of perspectival contents. that is, some contents might figure more or less centrally or prominently based on the context. for instance, what makes (1.1p) more apt as a 22 the bodily part term—e.g., “gams,” “stems,” or “booty”—can itself be evaluatively laden. the use of these terms also shapes the perspectival contents and their structural arrangement. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 paraphrase of (1) in a context like that which lovelace describes is that the contents on which that paraphrase is based figure more centrally or prominently in that context of utterance as opposed to other situations. at this point, a question emerges. it might seem that non-sutws like (4) are acts that can be explained in the same way that i explain sutws: as acts (a) whereby the speaker conveys a perspective and (b) a perspective that characterizes the female subject as meat. one could see why someone might be tempted to explain (4) in the same way: (4) involves a female subject and a bodily part characteristic of female bodies. it is also (in many contexts) derogatory and causes offense despite the fact that the proposition (4) literally expresses is not derogatory. this leads one to think that the speaker performs an act other than (if not, in addition to) asserting the proposition literally expressed, which is also true of sutws. we can call this act the “nonliteral” act. if it is true that (4) could be given the same analysis as sutws, sutws would not be distinctive from utterances like (4), a claim that also has consequences for the especial social import i claim sutws have in section 7.23 utterances like (4), however, are not plausibly analyzed in the way sutws are. it is doubtful that (4) evokes a perspective at all, let alone one in which a woman is both biologized and fragmented. firstly, a hearer of (4) does not undergo perspectivetaking as described in section 5. when we interpret (4), we do not experience anything like seeing the woman as a pair of legs as we do when someone identifies the female subject with “pair of legs.” we do not experience a restructuring of our perspective of the woman by comparing its contents with the contents of our perspective on women’s legs. aside from our interpretive experience, thinking of the woman in terms of the bodily part is the wrong kind of interpretive process. the speaker of (4) literally says that the woman “got” legs—not that she is identical with her legs. an interpretive process whereby the speaker tries to, essentially, discern which properties a woman and her legs share mistakes a claim about possession with a claim about identity. even if we grant that the speaker of (4) prompts the hearer to take on a perspective, it is unlikely that it is the same kind of perspective as that conveyed by an sutw. the perspective that a hearer of (4) takes on might be biologizing since the speaker attributes the possession of a bodily part associated with women to the female subject. yet, if a perspective were associated with (4), it is not plausibly fragmenting—and, so, cannot be one in which the woman is characterized as a piece of meat. objecting to the speaker of (4) using (4.1) or (4.2), for instance, is infelicitous, and the articulations of (4) these objections and (1.3) contain are inapt. 23 i am grateful to an anonymous referee for posing this question. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 (4.1) are you saying that she’s just a pair of legs? (4.2) are you saying that all that’s important about her is her legs? yet, one could use (4.1) or (4.2)—or the content of (1.3)—to object to (2) without oddness and claim that (4.1), (4.2), and (1.3) are plausible articulations of what the sutw conveyed. furthermore, in hearing (4), we might be offended for a number of reasons, one of which might be that saying that someone possesses a certain bodily part draws attention to. yet, we do not feel that the woman has been reduced to the part. our reactions, like the claims that one use to paraphrase or object to utterances like (4), are sensitive to the distinction between a claim about possession and one about identity. 7. the social importance of synecdochical utterances targeting women i have offered a theory of what an sutw speaker does: she prompts the hearer to think of the female subject as reduced to a bodily part, which is to think of her in a way that is biologizing and fragmenting—in short, as a piece of meat. i argued that this kind of thinking is a perspective. a perspective fits both those features, suggesting that the content that is cognitive and noncognitive. in closing, we should reflect on the possible threat sutws pose to an egalitarian society and, in so doing, see how sutws fit with extant work on other kinds of socially salient speech. the content that an sutw speaker invites the hearer to engage with—a perspective on a woman as a mere piece of meat—is, clearly, extraordinarily dehumanizing. in a society in which the presentation of women as significant only in virtue of their bodies is prevalent, it is plausible that sutws run the risk of reinforcing, perpetuating, and legitimating these representations. this concern is even more pressing given a feature camp identifies as characteristic of perspectives: irresistibility. in hearing an sutw, one automatically takes on the perspective (camp 2017). the hearer need not consciously entertain the way in which the woman and the bodily part are alike. to think as the sutw speaker does is, in turn, to be cognitively complicit in her reprehensible thinking (camp 2013). to accurately gauge how pernicious sutws are, we need a theory of how the biologizing and fragmenting perspective interacts with larger social structures either directly or via mechanisms like david lewis’s (1979) conversational scoreboard or robert stalnaker’s (2002) common ground. if sutws are oppressive exercitives (mcgowan 2009), then using them constitutes the use (and with every use, a strengthening) of an abstract oppressive norm; and most chillingly, this occurs irrespective of whether the interlocutors are aware that their speech does so. langton (2012) has also proposed amendments to models of the common ground and the conversational scoreboard amenable to nonpropositional content. her model might hold promise for explaining how perspectives might be presupposed among mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 conversational participants. in that project, langton seeks to understand how hate speech and pornography can encourage (in the sense of causing and advocating) hearers to alter their desires and attitudes. langton’s theory might also explain how an sutw might perpetuate biologizing and fragmenting views of women by altering hearers’ conative dispositions. one of the most disturbing features of an sutw’s derogatory content is its “slipperiness.” some of its content cannot be articulated propositionally. even when it can, it is indeterminate and contextually variant—and a speaker can deny conveying any one paraphrase. these “slippery” features create the illusion that no derogatory content was conveyed at all, producing a “gaslighting” effect on some hearers. for these reasons, the most important work on sutws will consider strategies for calling out speakers on what they convey in uttering sutws and for resisting and opposing the perspectives forced upon us. references adams, carol j. 2015. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. 25th anniversary ed. london: bloomsbury. adams, william lee. 2012. “gaitana photos: eurovision babe of the day (ukraine).” wiwibloggs, february 18. wiwibloggs.com/2012/02/18/gaitana-photoseurovision-babe-of-the-day-ukraine/. bartky, sandra lee. 1982. “narcissism, femininity and alienation.” social theory and practice 8 (2): 127–143. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract19828212. bastian, brock, steve loughnan, nick haslam, and helena r. m. radke. 2012. “don't mind meat? 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"scorekeeping in a language game." journal of philosophical logic 8 (1): 339–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00258436. lópez rodríguez, irene. 2009. “of women, bitches, chickens and vixens: animal metaphors for women in english and spanish.” cultura, lenguaje y representación/culture, language and representation 7: 77–100. loribeth. 2013. “i'm more than just a uterus.” the road less travelled (blog), february 24. https://theroadlesstravelledlb.blogspot.com/2013/02/immore-than-just-uterus.html. loughnan, steve, nick haslam, and brock bastian. 2010. “the role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals.” appetite 55 (1): 156–159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2010.05.043. manne, kate. 2018. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. marcotte, amanda. 2016. “the vagina and uterus swipes have got to stop: killer mike’s ‘uterus’ comment about hillary.” salon, february 17. https://www feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 .salon.com/2016/02/17/the_vagina_and_uterus_swipes_have_got_to_stop_ killer_mikes_uterus_comment_about_hillary_hurts_all_women/. mcgowan, mary kate. 2009. “oppressive speech.” australasian journal of philosophy 87 (3): 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048400802370334. nussbaum, martha c. 1995. “objectification.” philosophy & public affairs 24 (4): 249–291. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1995.tb00032.x. ortner, sherry b. 1974. “is female to male as nature is to culture?” in woman, culture, and society, edited by michelle zimbalist rosaldo and louise lamphere, 67–88. stanford, ca: stanford university press. potts, christopher. 2007. “the expressive dimension.” theoretical linguistics 33 (2): 165–198. https://doi.org/10.1515/tl.2007.011. reynolds, catherine, and nick haslam. 2011. “evidence for an association between women and nature: an analysis of media images and mental representations.” ecopsychology 3 (1): 59–64. http://doi.org/10.1089/eco .2010.0014. rudman, laurie a., and kris mescher. 2012. “of animals and objects: men’s implicit dehumanization of women and likelihood of sexual aggression.” personality and social psychology bulletin 38 (6): 734–746. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0146167212436401. saminaden, annick, stephen loughnan, and nick haslam. 2010. “afterimages of savages: implicit associations between primitives, animals and children.” british journal of social psychology 49 (1): 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1348 /014466609x415293. searle, john r. 1969. speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. stalnaker, robert. 2002. “common ground.” linguistics and philosophy 25 (5–6): 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1020867916902. stern, josef. 2000. metaphor in context. cambridge, ma: mit press. tipler, caroline n., and janet b. ruscher. 2019. “dehumanizing representations of women: the shaping of hostile attitudes through animalistic metaphors.” journal of gender studies 28 (1): 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1080 /09589236.2017.1411790. tirrell, lynne. 2012. “genocidal language games.” in speech and harm: controversies over free speech, edited by ishani maitra and mary kate mcgowan, 174–221. oxford: oxford university press. vaes, jeroen, paola paladino, and elisa puvia. 2011. “are sexualized women complete human beings? why men and women dehumanize sexually objectified women.” european journal of social psychology 41 (6): 774–785. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.824. zz top. 1983. “legs.” track 6 on eliminator. warner bros. records, compact disc. mcmullen – what am i, a piece of meat? synecdochical utterances targeting women published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 amanda mcmullen is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of arkansas, fayetteville. she specializes in philosophy of language and feminist philosophy. currently, her work focuses on types of socially significant speech that function to disparage, or otherwise harm, marginalized groups. 10230 mcmullen title page 10230 mcmullen final format being in time feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 7 recommended citation bierria, alisa. 2023. “being time.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 7. 2023 being time alisa bierria university of california, los angeles abierria@ucla.edu bierria – being time published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 being time alisa bierria abstract in her groundbreaking volume anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge, cressida heyes provokes readers with the question, “how might experience not only motivate politics but also itself act as a medium of political change?” this essay builds on heyes’s provocation by exploring self-making and selfadvocacy within carceral political economies. engaging heyes’s discussion of “normative temporality,” i consider unstable subjectivities and a black feminist formation of “revelatory agency” to contend that the carceral consumption of human life-time expands, complicates, or radically shifts the scope of the political. keywords: agency, prison, temporality, black feminist philosophy, gender violence cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge boldly challenges theorists to develop a vocabulary and analytical frameworks that describe experience within modalities of consciousness that are contradictory, multidimensional, uncomfortable, and temporally complicated. heyes maps a feminist ethics that can accommodate unstable formations of consciousness and unconsciousness by deconstructing the binary between consciousness and unconsciousness, revealing what a theory of experience might look like if we explored the wide space of human life that unfolds between those two poles. anaesthetics of existence teaches us what might be possible to theorize if we did not require our understanding of “experience” to neatly coincide with normative conceptualizations of consciousness understood as the only legitimate sites of philosophical inquiry. this intervention enables compelling new directions for phenomenology as well as feminist ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and other forms of critical theory. heyes’s discussion can also be applied to philosophy of agency and intentional action to open new pathways for theorizing agency in contexts of social and political domination. of the key “neglected questions” about experiences at the edge of consciousness that heyes identifies, i am interested in the overlap of agency with her provocative question, “how might experience not only motivate politics but also itself act as a medium of political change?” (heyes 2020, 29). building on her provocation, we can also ask, how might an edge of experience expand, complicate, or radically feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 shift the terms or the scope of “the political”? in this discussion, i consider the problem of time, unstable subjectivity, and agency in the context of prison economies and the contradictions within the self-making and self-advocacy incarcerated people sometimes engage to navigate the possibility of freedom. if we understand temporality as “time as it is lived” (one definition that heyes proposes), then a normative temporality makes explicit the assumptions inherent in what “as it is lived” entails. heyes (2020, 10) explains that “normative temporality supports productive action and marginalizes inaction, including passive resistance.” this formulation suggests a working binary of “active” vs. the “inactive passive.” the binary may not be strongly definitive for heyes, but it functions as a necessary descriptive step in making explicit the “normalness” of the “normative” temporality that supports the assumption of an “active” quality of the concept, lived, when theorizing temporality as “time as it is lived.” i focus on two of heyes’s cases in which she fleshes out this active/inactive binary: first, her concept of “postdisciplinary time” in the context of labor during late capitalism and mass communication technology, and second, her engagement of saba mahmood’s discussion of muslim women’s agency as they navigate the islamic revival in egypt. when engaging these cases, heyes explores modes of experience by active subjects or by inactive (passive) subjects to describe the political implications of each formation of subjectivity. i engage heyes’s discussion to describe a third mode of experience produced by prisons. let us call this third mode “revelatory object-subject.” as an example of how normative temporality defines the politics of active vs. inactive, heyes considers the chrono-politics of late global capitalism. though widespread communications technology have been sold as innovations that will make our lives “easier,” she argues that they instead “introduce[e] the potential for work into every moment” (heyes 2020, 21). heyes describes this form of temporality as an era of postdisciplinary time, or time in which human life is regulated to be available for productive activity at any time in service of capital. in postdisciplinary time, life does not merely succumb to work; it becomes conflated with work. heyes therefore rightfully urges us to take seriously the subversive possibility in the not-doing, the notworking, the wasting of time. i am struck by the distinction between choosing to be inactive as a practice of disrupting postdisciplinary time, which demands work as a way of life for the sake of capital, and being forced into a state of inactivity for the sake of capital. the consumption of millions of people by us prisons exemplifies how this latter mode of inactivity is put to economic use. while prisons can compel activity of those who are incarcerated via exploited labor, ruth wilson gilmore (2017) argues that much of the captive existence within prison is that of inactivity or a languishing because the central resource that prisons extract from incarcerated people is not their labor but their time. she writes, bierria – being time published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 today’s prisons are extractive. what does that mean? it means prisons enable money to move because of the enforced inactivity of people locked in them. it means people extracted from communities, and people returned to communities but not entitled to be of them, enable the circulation of money on rapid cycles. what's extracted from the extracted is the resource of life—time. if we think about this dynamic through the politics of scale, understanding bodies as places, then criminalization transforms individuals into tiny territories primed for extractive activity to unfold—extracting and extracting again time from the territories of selves. (gilmore 2017, 227) prison, a system of resource extraction, extracts the resource of life-time from hundreds of thousands of people. the destructiveness of the carceral extraction of life-times is particularly acute in the rise of long-term sentences, including those for people who have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole or for people who are sentenced to serving their entire remaining lifetime in prison (hartman 2009; kim et al. 2018; lenz 2022). heyes argues that postdisciplinary time transforms the terms of life to be the same as working to produce commodities in service of capital. but for prisons which extract life-time from people as the key resource that keeps them afloat, time itself is the commodity. that is, by being forced into doing time, incarcerated people are made into being time (bierria 2023). former political prisoner marilyn buck (1999) describes prisons as a “rapacious, human-eating system.” indeed, while incarcerated people are often coerced into labor that exploits or enslaves to produce profit for private corporations, gilmore and others have illustrated how incarcerated people themselves, as embodied time, are fed into prisons to sustain public economies. specifically, gilmore (2007) chronicles how california systematically transformed its public economy to eventually become interdependent with and reliant on sustaining prisons to exist as is. given this reliance, california is one of the largest incarcerators in the us, and as of 2021, it outspent all other states on its system of “corrections.” the crisis of incarceration in california had become so profound that, for the past decade, the state has been under a us supreme court order to reduce the number of people in prison because its prison overcrowding constituted cruel and unusual punishment, violating the eighth amendment (savage and williams 2010). tens of thousands of people in the state had been extracted from communities and sequestered into cages and, once there, often forced into inactivity because there is no real purpose for the existence of prisons beyond the extraction feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 itself.1 coerced labor and coerced languishing are not oppositional—they are an economic dialectic: people are fed into prisons as bodies that fuel a public economy, which creates a population made available for compulsory labor that drives the engine of public and private economies. decades of organizing inside and outside prison have led to very slow-moving but hard-won efforts in california and elsewhere to decrease incarceration rates and reduce the number of prisons. these efforts have been met with opposition from those who want to keep the prisons open for sustenance, for their own livelihoods, rather than for “safety” or “justice.” for example, when discussing a florida town where a prison may be closed, a legislator asserts, “all of those rural counties . . . some of them, that’s their only economy. so when you begin to close them, you’re hurting them” (walser 2021). a prison closing in susanville, california, led a resident whose husband is a prison guard to lament that they would have to leave their farmhousestyle home with landscaping and fencing, where the kids had a nice place to play (arango 2022). another florida resident facing a similar quandary stated, “yeah, it’s a small town. who cares if they lose a prison? but people that’s living here, it’s eventually gonna hurt all them because there’s nowhere for them to work so eventually everybody’s gonna leave” (walser 2021). these efforts to keep prisons open in these communities have little or nothing to do with crime but everything to do with capital and people’s ability to live and, in some cases, financially prosper.2 from people who have limited labor opportunities and rely on the prison economy for employment, to people who have used the prison economy to establish a very comfortable middle-class lifestyle for themselves and their families, a prison economy organizes communities to sustain the lives of some by consuming the lives of others. as i have argued elsewhere, incarceration renders people into temporal property to which public and private capital are entitled to keep the prison going (bierria 2023). the “temporal” in temporal property does not only mean “time as it is lived”—not time that people use actively for work or time people waste inactively 1 though justifications for prisons include arguments that they exist to secure safety, achieve justice, or provide opportunities for redemption, many theorists have persuasively challenged the view that prisons are, in fact, designed with the purpose or the capacity to accomplish any of those goals (see, for example, davis 2003; kaba and ritchie 2022; richie 2012; roberts 2022). 2 while locals may advocate for prisons to move into their town to stimulate their economy, the actual effectiveness of this is questionable. rural towns in california and across the us that hoped to stimulate their local economy by adding a prison often saw very minimal employment opportunities for local residents (gilmore 2007; huling 2003). instead, new prisons largely increase opportunities for those outside the town who are already plugged into the statewide prison employment network. bierria – being time published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 against work. it is also not only time stolen from people. temporal property is people extracted as commodities themselves, human life as time—lifetimes—as product. because subjects are institutionally rendered into temporal property, an object, not only is the active/inactive binary troubled, but the subject/object binary also becomes destabilized. for example, incarcerated organizers sentenced to life without the possibility of parole (lwop) have led organizing to abolish lwop sentencing, which is a sentence that seizes lifetimes for permanent plunder (hartman 2009, lenz 2022). colby lenz (2022, 215) argues that, through law, policy, and rhetoric, lwop became a “definitively permanent phenomenon—a permanent policy for permanent incarceration.” still, organizers whose lifetimes have been made available for endless commerce have sustained a freedom movement to move the immovable. as temporal property, incarcerated subjects are institutionalized as commodified objects through carceral capitalism, yet they agentically create ways to deconstruct and resist this ontological/political condition of temporal property. it is from this paradoxical position that captive activists articulate the possibility of impossible freedom. in this case, the relationship between active and inactive is not oppositional but dialectical. heyes also reflects on intentional passivity as an underexamined form of agency through engaging saba mahmood’s (2005) critical 1995–1997 study of muslim women who supported elements of the islamic revival in cairo. like the passivity heyes assesses in the subversive “not-doing” of work in a postdisciplinary time, she suggests these women’s “not-doing” could be forms of resistant agency that are not necessarily legible to liberal feminist political frameworks. mahmood critiques the conflation of women’s agency with political choices reflecting liberal or progressive feminist political goals. she advocates for an approach that analyzes how the agency of dominated subjects is not developed outside of modes of domination but through them because agency is yoked to the historical and cultural contexts in which subjects are formed. for mahmood, though western feminists have relied on a conception of agency that characterizes some women’s intentional actions as evidence of a “deplorable passivity and docility” (15), these actions should instead be understood as a legitimate form of agency that emerges from “structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (15). mahmood proposes the model of “agency as ethical self-formation,” arguing that these actors’ sense of self was made possible through their agentic practices of religious piety. building on mahmood’s analysis, heyes (2020, 95) asserts that agentic efforts to navigate, negotiate, or resist patriarchy through modes of deliberate passivity—“passive resistance”—should be seriously and thoughtfully engaged.3 if feminists abandon (or at least interrogate) 3 mahmood herself has a complex view of passivity, asserting that perhaps “docility” is the more accurate descriptive of the women’s agency in her study because docility “implies the malleability required of someone in order for her to be instructed in a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 some normative assumptions of what kinds of action count as “resistant” (such as overt and active transgression from patriarchal rules), then they will be better positioned to resist colonial feminisms. cultivating a more capacious understanding of “resistant” includes imagining other edges of experience, the formations of many other kinds of agency, other forms of resistance, and other pathways to self-making that are not necessarily on their radar and do not cleanly map onto normative experiences of the political. i have argued that we should theorize agency as a heterogeneous concept to accommodate a broad scope of contexts of power and resistance. that is, instead of evaluating how much agency one has, we might ask what kind of agency one engages, the category of “kind” being defined through its relation to systems of power (bierria 2014). heyes (2020, 95) generously engages this method for theorizing agency to propose “passivity” and “passive resistance” as kinds of agency that critically trouble neoliberal constructions of public and personal labor. i also contend that qualitatively describing kinds of agency equips theorists with a method to analyze edges of experience existing within a dialectical tension of subject and object, or active and passive. for example, through my experience as an advocate for incarcerated survivors of domestic and sexual violence, i have witnessed black survivors’ radical revelatory practices as a technique of black feminist refusal: both refusal of the violence they have experienced and refusal of the world of meaning that posits this violence as legitimate, inevitable, and natural. these practices constitute a form of agency that i describe as revelatory agency. to illustrate, consider the acts of resistance led by robbie hall, a black survivor from los angeles who exemplified revelatory agency in a series of self-defense practices. hall defended her life from a man who sexually assaulted her, he died in the encounter, and she was prosecuted for his death and sentenced to fourteen years to life. hall was sentenced to fourteen years to life but imprisoned for an additional twenty-three years after she served the base term of fourteen years because the parole board kept denying her parole. she explains, “my attorney said they sentenced me to 14-and-a-half years, but i did 36-and-a-half years. . . . the parole board said that, because i wouldn't say that [the man who raped me] was the victim, that i have no remorse and no insight. another commissioner at another parole board hearing said, you're not a victim, so stop trying to play like you're a victim” (survived & punished 2022, 33). at hall’s trial, she was criminally particular skill or knowledge—a meaning that carries less a sense of passivity than one of struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement” (2005, 29). however, i read heyes’s specific focus on passive resistance, or resistant passivity, as a modality of agency that is more akin to mahmood’s conceptualization of docility. published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 bierria – being time punished for defending her life, and at a series of parole board hearings, she was criminally punished for defending her truth. at every parole hearing, the parole board demanded that hall retract her testimony that she was sexually assaulted and acted in self-defense. each time, she refused and revealed her story. each time, she was sent back to prison. perpetual parole denials establish a de facto sentence of life without the possibility of parole, without the possibility of life outside of a cage (mays 2023). hall was finally released after the los angeles times reached out to her about covid-19 deaths in california prisons and she exposed the prisons’ deadly labor practices. in that interview, hall shared her economic analysis of why she and others were being punished for sentences that lasted decades, explaining that prisons “keep us as a money tree” and revealing that the parole board refused to release her because she was sexually assaulted and would not abandon the truth that she acted in self-defense (feldman 2020). hall’s revelations ultimately created a pathway for her to secure advocates and a new attorney, which finally led to her release in 2021. the specific facts and context of hall’s experiences are politically meaningful, and her choice to reiterate those facts was an act of profound courage, but those points alone do not account for why i think hall’s actions belong to a specific category of agency—revelatory agency—as i describe it. hall was determined to assert both the fact of what happened to her and the fact of its injustice. when she revealed (and repeatedly re-revealed) her story, she did not waver, despite knowing what the parole board wanted her to say and understanding the violent consequences of refusing to parrot it. this system of power violently compelled hall into acting only in accordance with the terms of meaning that it determined to be legitimate. therefore, hall’s reveal was more than just new information: it was epistemic noncompliance to structural violence. her actions flag a shift of the criteria of determining legitimate truth, moving this example from being only about what people share—the testimony itself—to the epistemic rupture created through the act of testifying. this is the difference between understanding her actions as only critically informative and understanding them as revelatory. revelation, as i define it, is more than testimony; it is an active refusal of a hegemonic system of meaning that disappears the subjectivity of the testifier and an unflinching acknowledgement of the vacuousness of a system of reasoning meant only to protect power. like the nonnormative passive agency that heyes explores in her discussion of mahmood’s analysis, revelatory agency should be theorized in social and political context, including the way it necessarily disorders and shifts dominant terms of meaning to illuminate how freedom or safety or life or even subjectivity itself has been, in a nation of cages, taken off the table. acts of revelatory agency expose both important information about power and the epistemic-ontological problems inherent in the act of attempting to articulate and share that information about power. the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 revelation of hall’s actions was her demand for freedom as well as her demand for a new mode of making sensible (sharpe 2016), given the paradigm shifts required to even conceptualize freedom that, through formal law or repeated carceral practice, was always intended to be impossible. heyes’s philosophical interventions provide a conceptual language for how cases like robbie hall’s might constitute another “edge of experience.” by redefining the scope of epistemic politics, this edge maps a site of agentic practice where freedom can be shifted from something disciplined into impossibility to something real and within reach. references arango, tim. 2022. “‘nothing will be the same’: a prison town weighs a future without a prison.” new york times, january 10; updated january 12, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/us/susanville-california-prisonclosing.html. bierria, alisa. 2014. “missing in action: violence, power, and discerning agency.” hypatia 29, no. 1 (winter): 129–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12074. ———. 2023. “against inevitability.” american quarterly 75, no. 2 (june): 365–70. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2023.a898164. buck, marilyn. 1999. “prisons, social control and political prisoners.” friends of marilyn buck website, january 1999. https://marilynbuck.com/prisons_social _control_political_prisoners.html. davis, angela y. 2003. are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. feldman, kiera. 2020. “california kept prison factories open: inmates worked for pennies an hour as covid-19 spread.” los angeles times, october 11. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-11/california-prisonfactories-inmates-covid-19. gilmore, ruth wilson. 2007. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press. ———. 2017. “abolition geography and the problem of innocence.” in futures of black radicalism, edited by gaye theresa johnson and alex lubin, 225–40. london: verso. hartman, kenneth e. 2009. “the other death penalty.” journal of prisoners on prisons 18 (1–2): 35–38. heyes, cressida. 2020. anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge. durham, nc: duke university press. huling, tracy. 2003. “building a prison economy in rural america.” in invisible punishment: the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment, edited by marc mauer and meda chesney-lind, ch. 12. new york: the new press. bierria – being time published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 kaba, mariame, and andrea j. ritchie. 2022. no more police: a case for abolition. new york: the new press. kim, alice, erica r. meiners, audrey petty, jill petty, beth e. richie, and sarah ross, eds. 2018. the long term: resisting life sentences, working toward freedom. chicago: haymarket books. lenz, colby. 2022. “organizing in the impossible: the movement to end life without parole in california.” phd diss., university of southern california. mahmood, saba. 2005. politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton, nj: princeton university press. mays, mackenzie. 2023. “newsom told 123 prisoners they could get out early. many remain behind bars.” los angeles times, february 8. https://www.latimes .com/california/story/2023-02-08/gavin-newsom-california-commutations. richie, beth e. 2012. arrested justice: black women, violence, and america’s prison nation. new york: new york university press. roberts, dorothy. 2022. torn apart: how the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world. new york: basic books. savage, david g., and carol j. williams. 2010. “california prison overcrowding case heads to supreme court.” los angeles times, november 29. https://www.la times.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-29-la-na-california-prisons-20101129story.html. sharpe, christina. 2016. in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, nc: duke university press. survived & punished. 2022. “defending self-defense: a call to action by survived & punished.” edited by alisa bierria and colby lenz. los angeles: survived & punished. https://survivedandpunished.org/defending-self-defense-report/. walser, adam. 2021. “prison town economies suffer due to florida corrections crisis.” abc action news tampa bay (wfts), december 6; last updated december 14, 2021. https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/iteam-investigates/crisis-in-corrections/prison-town-economies-suffer-dueto-florida-corrections-crisis. alisa bierria is an assistant professor in the department of gender studies at ucla and a cofounder of the national organization survived & punished. a black feminist philosopher, alisa has a forthcoming book titled missing in action: agency, race, and invention, which explores how intention is constructed within systems of antiblack racism, carceral reasoning, and gendered violence. she is also a coeditor of abolition feminisms, volumes 1 and 2 (haymarket books, 2022), and a special issue of the journal social justice, titled “community accountability: emerging movements to transform violence” (2010). bierria title page bierria final format algorithmic microaggressions feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 5 recommended citation mcclure, emma, and benjamin wald. 2022. “algorithmic microaggressions.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 5. 2022 algorithmic microaggressions emma mcclure saint mary’s university (halifax) emma.mcclure@smu.ca benjamin wald chiefs of ontario benjaminwald05@gmail.com mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 algorithmic microaggressions1 emma mcclure and benjamin wald abstract we argue that machine learning algorithms can inflict microaggressions on members of marginalized groups and that recognizing these harms as instances of microaggressions is key to effectively addressing the problem. the concept of microaggression is also illuminated by being studied in algorithmic contexts. we contribute to the microaggression literature by expanding the category of environmental microaggressions and highlighting the unique issues of moral responsibility that arise when we focus on this category. we theorize two kinds of algorithmic microaggression, stereotyping and erasure microaggressions, and argue that corporations are responsible for the microaggressions their algorithms create. as a case study, we look at the problems faced by google’s autocomplete prediction and at the insufficiency of their solutions. the case study of autocomplete demonstrates our core claim that microaggressions constitute a distinct form of algorithmic bias and that identifying them as such allows us to avoid seeming solutions that recreate the same kinds of harms. google has a responsibility to make information freely available, without exposing users to degradation. to fulfill its duties to marginalized groups, google must abandon the fiction of neutral prediction and instead embrace the liberatory power of suggestion. keywords: algorithms, microaggressions, ai ethics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, bias the last decade has marked huge advances in machine learning and the everincreasing centrality of algorithms to our daily lives. drawing on vast training datasets, 1 we would like to thank mcclure’s colleagues at the university of toronto’s mental health and disability caucus for early brainstorming on the project, and wald’s colleague gillian hadfield, as well as the entire research community at the schwartz reisman institute for technology and society, for their support and inspiration on this project. we are also deeply grateful to the organizers and attendees of the feminism, social justice, and ai workshop, and to the anonymous reviewers at fpq, for comments that significantly improved the paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 these algorithms can produce uncannily accurate predictions on a range of subjects, yet it has also become increasingly apparent that these systems can inherit the human biases present in this training data. some systems have a large and obvious discriminatory impact, such as the compas algorithm used to decide whether to grant people parole (angwin et al. 2016), and other algorithms that determine who gets a loan or who is diagnosed with cancer (osareh and shadgar 2010). other harms, however, arise from the accumulation of smaller and individually less impactful instances of bias, which nonetheless as a whole confront marginalized groups with prejudicial stereotypes and attitudes. the concept of microaggressions was developed to address exactly this sort of harm, and we will argue that the concept is still applicable and illuminating when the perpetrator of the microaggressions is software rather than human. furthermore, we will demonstrate that recognizing these harms as instances of microaggressions helps us to avoid solutions that simply recreate the same kinds of harms, and adopting the microaggression paradigm will guide individuals, tech corporations, and governments towards a more just online world. section 1 will identify the kinds of cases where machine learning gives rise to microaggressions and situate these cases within the category of environmental microaggressions. in offline spaces, environmental microaggressions occur in “chilly climates” when features of the physical environment communicate hostility to and exclusion of members of marginalized groups (sue 2010). we’ll argue that virtual environments can also be chilly climates: algorithmic microaggressions communicate that online spaces were not built for members of marginalized groups, that they do not belong in these spaces. we’ll further theorize two types of environmental microaggressions that are especially apparent in algorithmic contexts: stereotyping and erasure microaggressions.2 stereotyping algorithmic microaggressions present users with negative stereotypes about marginalized social groups, and they arise because the algorithm was trained on a dataset containing those stereotypical associations. erasure algorithmic microaggressions, in contrast, arise because marginalized groups are underrepresented in the training dataset, and therefore, the algorithms trained on these datasets do not function, or function significantly worse, for marginalized groups. section 2 will take up the question of moral responsibility. as with other types of environmental microaggressions, numerous agents contribute to the creation of the microaggression—including those who create and train the algorithm, as well as those who contribute to creating the dataset the algorithm is trained upon, and those who use an algorithm that continues to learn after its original training—but we’ll 2 during the review process, it came to our attention that similar discussions of environmental and erasure microaggressions can be found in friedlaender (2021). mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 argue that tech companies who create the algorithms bear the most responsibility for the microaggressions they commit. tech corporations often attempt to avoid moral responsibility for algorithmic microaggressions by claiming that their algorithms neutrally reflect biases that already exist in society—biases that the tech corporations are not responsible for. we’ll give reasons to doubt this claimed neutrality. tech companies are not merely mirroring preexisting biases; they’re perpetuating oppression and perpetrating microaggressions. sections 3 and 4 will explore a case study: the stereotype microaggressions committed by google’s autocomplete search suggestions and the subsequent erasure microaggressions created by the recent policy changes google made in response to criticisms of their autocomplete feature. the case study of google’s autocomplete demonstrates our core claim that microaggressions constitute a distinct form of algorithmic bias and that identifying them as such is key to effectively addressing the problem. we ultimately argue that to fulfill its duties to marginalized groups, google must abandon the fiction of neutral prediction and instead embrace the liberatory power of suggestion. 1. algorithmic microaggressions in this section, we’ll show how algorithmic examples fit within the microaggression paradigm. microaggressions are small slights that communicate demeaning and exclusionary messages about members of marginalized groups, thereby perpetrating and perpetuating their oppression.3 while most philosophers 3 in defining microaggressions in this way, we adopt a structural account of microaggressions, focusing on the functional role they play within an oppressive society (for similarly structural accounts, see pérez huber and solórzano 2015, mcternan 2018, friedlaender 2018, freeman and stewart 2018, mcclure 2020). thus we are departing from experiential accounts, like those held by sue (2010), fatima (2017), or rini (2021), which would include as microaggressions only those examples where a member of a marginalized group is present and feels targeted by the (potentially) biased act. we also depart from psychological accounts, like pierce (1970) or friedlaender and ivy (2020), which focus on the mental states of the microaggression’s perpetrator. although the algorithmic examples we’ll discuss could potentially fit within either of these two other accounts, an experiential account wouldn’t allow us to include examples like problematic autocomplete results shown to someone who is not a member of a marginalized groups (which we discuss in section 1.2); whereas a psychological account would have to argue that algorithms could have mental states such as conscious or unconscious bias. for further discussion of the differences between (and relative benefits of) structural, experiential, and psychological accounts, see mcclure and rini (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 and psychologists have focused on interpersonal microaggressions, which are communicated verbally or behaviorally, we’ll focus here on environmental microaggressions, which are communicated by features of the environment (sue 2010). environmental microaggressions have traditionally been connected to physical features of the environment: buildings without wheelchair access, airplane seats that cannot accommodate larger bodies, or a wall displaying photos of past leadership that demonstrates only white people have been promoted and celebrated within a company. we’ll expand the category of environmental microaggressions to include nonphysical spaces: in the virtual world, algorithmic microaggressions communicate similarly demeaning and exclusionary messages about members of marginalized groups. in section 1.1, we will give examples of algorithmic microaggressions and demonstrate how these algorithmic examples fall into two types: stereotyping and erasure microaggressions. then in section 1.2, we will situate these algorithmic examples within the broader microaggression literature, highlighting the similarities between algorithmic microaggressions and other environmental microaggressions and showing how physical environmental microaggressions can be similarly separated into stereotyping and erasure subcategories. 1.1 two types of algorithmic microaggression: stereotype and erasure first, let’s start by surveying examples of algorithmic microaggressions. all these examples share the same basic structure as microaggressions: a pattern of results that would be individually innocuous collectively communicate hostility and exclusion. in the algorithmic context, these hidden hostile messages can often be made salient by comparing the disparate treatment of marginalized and privileged groups. a viral tweet in 2016 revealed that a google image search for “three black teens” returned a series of mugshots, whereas a search for “three white teens” returned images of smiling teens playing sports (allen 2016). similarly, google autocomplete has a history of offering racist or sexist completions to innocuous queries. carole cadwalladr (2016) wrote about how starting off a query with “are jews” returned as a prominent option “are jews evil?”, and if this option is selected nine out of the top ten results claim to show that yes, they are. google changed their algorithm to prevent this result, but in 2018, an article in wired showed that many problematic autocompletes remain, including “hitler is my hero,” “blacks are not oppressed,” and “feminists are sexist” (lapowsky 2018). and the problem is not limited to google. facebook has an algorithm to determine which ads get shown to which users. a recent paper (ali et al. 2019) has shown that the demographics that see an ad can change dramatically based on the content of the ad, often in line with stereotypes about those demographics. for instance, job ads for a lumberjack position were shown to an audience that was 90 percent male and 72 percent white, while a cashier position at a supermarket was shown to an audience that was 72 mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 percent women, and a taxi driver position was skewed 75 percent toward black viewers. more broadly, caliskan, bryson, and narayanan (2017) have shown that machine learning based on textual data inherits the biases present in the text. in particular, machine learning systems showed the same kinds of associations as those found by the implicit associations test (iat), with stereotypically black names being more easily associated with unpleasant rather than pleasant words and the opposite for stereotypically white names, and stereotypically female names being more associated with family terms than career terms. given the huge range of machine learning systems that are trained on this kind of data, we would expect (and indeed see) that these kinds of biases are widespread.4 in all these cases, the problem arises from the content that individuals are shown when they use various programs. more particularly, it arises from the algorithm’s decision about what unsolicited content to show to people, based on predictions about what will be relevant. we will argue that these algorithms end up inflicting microaggressions when the prediction confronts the user with negative stereotypes about a marginalized group, as in the “are jews evil” autocomplete result, or when they express negative stereotypes by presenting content based on harmful assumptions about a group the person belongs to—for example, if facebook’s ads assumed women were uninterested in jobs in stem fields and only provided job ads to stereotypically feminine careers like secretary. let’s together call this form of microaggressions stereotyping microaggressions. a second class of algorithmic microaggressions comes from technologies that simply do not function, or function significantly worse, for marginalized groups. an excellent example of this is the revelation by buolamwini and gebru (2018) that facial recognition technology is significantly worse at recognizing black women’s faces, with an error rate as high as 34.7 percent compared to 0.8 percent for white men. we can add to this the experience black women have had of having their faces covered over by their zoom backgrounds, or finding that automatic image previews on twitter invariably centered white faces over black faces in its cropped previews (hern 2020).5 4 to underscore both the importance and danger of this form of bias, timnit gebru was recently fired from google's ethical ai team over an as yet unpublished paper on the ethical issues with large language learning modules. while the stated justification was that the paper was insufficiently sourced, this move is widely seen as an effort to suppress criticism of such modules (metz and wakabayashi, 2020). 5 a related example is the failure of pulse oximeters to give accurate readings for people with dark skin, but this is not a microaggression of the kind we’re interested in here—it does not rely on accumulated incidents to be harmful but is directly a matter of deep medical concern. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 in these cases, the harm does not lie in being confronted with negative stereotypes. instead, it lies in erecting barriers to members of marginalized groups for participating in certain spaces. while each individual instance may be a small annoyance, in aggregate these instances convey a message that members of marginalized groups are not welcome in spaces that rely on these technologies. let us call this form of microaggression erasure microaggressions. both of these forms of microaggression arise from the way that machine learning systems use a set of training data. machine learning refers to computer algorithms that are able to learn how to do a task without the need to explicitly program the necessary steps to achieve that task. these programs start with a set of data that the program will learn from, called the training set. training a modern machine learning system requires a huge training set—the bigger the better. the most advanced models require truly vast training sets; the largest version of google’s state of the art language model gpt-3 was trained using a dataset containing 499 billion tokens. one component of the training data was all of wikipedia, which made up 3 percent of the total data (li 2020). gpt-3 is an outlier, orders of magnitude bigger than earlier language models, but even smaller language recognition systems require billions of tokens in the training set, and they are only getting larger. machine learning systems can learn patterns in the training set and use these patterns to generalize to new cases. unsupervised algorithms find these patterns without any human pointing them out, and indeed, they can find patterns that humans are unable to recognize (mahesh 2020). even inspecting the algorithm and its outputs often still leaves us in the dark about what exactly they are picking up on. as an example, google’s alphago, which was the first program to defeat professional go players, didn’t beat its human opponents by playing similar strategies and executing them better. instead, it played in ways that differed dramatically from human play, picking up on patterns in its vast training set6 that humans, even professional players of the game who have spent their lives looking for such patterns, didn’t see.7 even with access to the inner workings of the algorithm, we cannot easily reverse engineer the pattern that is being tracked. this inscrutability can cause problems. for example, ribeiro, singh, and guestrin (2016) trained a neural network to distinguish between huskies and wolves. 6 the original version of alphago learned from records of human games, but the latest version used its own games as its training set—essentially playing itself millions of times and iterating its strategy based on this new data. 7 fan hui, three-time european go champion, described a pivotal move in a game between alphago and lee sedol this way: “it's not a human move. i've never seen a human play this move”; and indeed alphago itself calculated the odds of a human making the move as 1 in ten thousand (metz 2016). mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 they intentionally selected photos of wolves with snow in the background and pictures of huskies without snow for the training set. sure enough, the classifier learned to get the right answer on the training data by looking for snow, rather than looking at any feature of the animals themselves. with the huge datasets used for modern machine learning the failures are unlikely to be this obvious, but the risk is still present that they will fix on patterns that can fail to generalize to the real world. more real-world examples of such failures come from what are called “adversarial examples” (goodfellow, shlens, and szegedy 2014). these are examples where by making tiny alterations that humans are unlikely to even notice, as small as a few pixels on an image, an otherwise successful machine learning system can be fooled into misidentifying an image. this becomes worrying if what it is misidentifying is, for example, a harmless pile of clothes as a gun in an airport scan, or a stop sign as a speed limit sign for a self-driving car. just as with the much simpler example of snow versus no snow, the machine learning system has learned a pattern that can fail to generalize to new situations or, as we will see, a pattern that encodes biases and discriminatory stereotypes. another form of machine learning that can give rise to bias is the generative adversarial network, or gan (goodfellow et al. 2014). these systems consist of two machine learning models. the first model, the generator, tries to provide outputs that are as close as possible to the training data, while the second model, the discriminator, tries to detect which inputs are genuine and which were created by the generator. the two systems learn from each other over time, with the generator becoming ever more skilled at creating outputs that will fool the discriminator and the discriminator becoming ever more skilled at identifying these synthetic outputs. the point of such a system is to generate synthetic outputs that are as close to indistinguishable from real data as possible. these systems have been used to generate faces, detect anomalies in medical imaging, reconstruct images, and perhaps most worryingly, create so-called “deep fake” videos. gans, like other forms of machine learning, can give rise to biased outputs. as an example, jain and colleagues 2018 showed that a gan tasked with coming up with synthetic images of engineers generated outputs that reinforced sexist and racist stereotypes (jain et al. 2018).8 machine learning training sets can give rise to microaggressions in two ways, corresponding to the two kinds of microaggression identified above. one potential issue is if the training data itself contains biases against marginalized groups. gpt-3 was trained largely using data gathered from the internet and from digitized books. these models work by associations—more complex versions of the autocomplete 8 see tschaepe (2021) for further discussion on biases that can arise from gans and how we can understand them through a pragmatist lens. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 feature on emails that guess the most likely words to follow the words you have already typed. so if the training data contains harmful and stereotyped associations towards marginalized groups, these associations will be inherited by the machine learning model. this is the source of stereotyping microaggressions, where the outputs of the machine learning model replicate and confront people with the biases already present in society. on the other hand, sometimes the problem is not the presence of particular biased associations within the training data but rather the absence of marginalized groups from the dataset. for example, if the dataset on which facial recognition software was trained contained only a small number of black faces, the system will be worse at recognizing such faces. so erasure microaggressions arise from the absence of representation within the dataset. all the particular examples discussed have been recognized and criticized previously as problematic instances of bias. however, they have not previously been seen as instances of microaggression. in the next subsection we will show why it is both accurate and enlightening to understand these instances of machine learning bias through this lens. 1.2. situating algorithmic microaggressions within the broader microaggression literature we’ve already highlighted some clear similarities between the above examples of algorithmic bias and microaggressions. most obviously, the similar pattern of aggregation: one microaggression, cringey autocomplete result, or imperfect zoom filter is easy to brush off, but a lifetime of repeated stereotypes and erasures can accumulate into serious harm to members of marginalized groups. we’ll now delve deeper into the similarities, which will allow us to further specify where algorithmic microaggressions belong in the microaggression taxonomy, and we’ll also demonstrate the advantages of expanding the microaggression concept to include these algorithmic examples. we proposed that algorithmic microaggressions are a type of environmental microaggression. rini (2021, 21) defines environmental microaggressions as “background facts that regularly confront marginalized people with casual disregard or disdain,” and sue (2010, 25) points out that such microaggressions are often discussed by other names: “when people refer to the ‘campus climate’ as hostile and invalidating, or when workers of color refer to a threatening work environment, they are probably alluding to the existence of environmental microaggressions.” crucially for our purposes, environmental microaggressions aren’t perpetrated by individual agents, or even by cohesive groups of people with a common goal. instead, the microaggressive hidden message is communicated by the physical space itself. to draw a few examples from the philosophy literature: mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 ● a wall of photos celebrating a faculty that includes few or no people of color sends the message “you don’t belong here” to bipoc faculty and students (henning 2020, 258). ● airplane seats that cannot accommodate a fat person send a similarly exclusionary message, compounded by the fact that fatphobia is reinscribed everywhere from x-ray machines to the fashion industry (reiheld 2020, 208 and 213). ● when all the bathrooms in a venue are gender-specific or when a medical intake form only includes checkboxes for male/female, trans and nonbinary people are told “there is no box for me” (dean, victor, and guidry-grimes 2016, 561). the above environmental microaggressions are parallel in structure to the erasure algorithmic microaggressions that we introduced in the previous subsection. no single person created a room full of photographs featuring exclusively white faces or chose to design airplane seats with the intention of making fat people uncomfortable—just as no one person encoded discriminatory content into google’s autocomplete algorithm. instead, the exclusionary message is sent by recurring features of the environment—ranging from architecture to interior decorating to bureaucratic paperwork. when we turn to nonphysical environments, algorithms could be said to function as the architecture and bureaucracy of the online world, creating unwelcoming and hostile spaces that send the message “members of marginalized groups don’t belong here.” combining the algorithmic and physical examples of erasure microaggressions also brings into view a feature of environmental microaggressions that has not yet been much discussed: environmental microaggressions are still microaggressions even if no member of the targeted marginalized group is present to witness them. here we expand from reiheld (2020, 207), who discusses how antifat environmental microaggressions, like not being able to fit comfortably in an airplane seat or a medical imagine machine, also send harmful messages to those who are “not yet fat” by encouraging self-disciplinary tactics aimed at remaining thin. reiheld (2020, 218) argues that microaggressions “cause all persons to fear being fat, including those who are not,” and fatphobic microaggressions don’t have to directly target fat people in order to contribute to their continued marginalization. we extend reiheld’s argument further to include the other environmental and algorithmic cases we have been discussing: these microaggressions simultaneously erase and normalize erasure, whether or not a member of the marginalized group is present to witness their exclusion. in physical space, a company can’t excuse its wall of white photos by saying there are no employees of color to be offended by their lack of representation—the absence of people of color is both cause and consequence of the hostile workplace feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 climate. similarly, in online space, twitter’s image-cropping algorithm isn’t only a microaggression when it is presented to members of the racialized groups it decenters; it is also a microaggression when it is presented to a white user, whom it centers. in both cases, the oppressive message is still sent—whites are the default focus; the absence of people of color is normal—and the cycle of oppressive absence is reinforced. marginalized people are erased from our workplaces, our screens, our lives, and privileged people don’t even notice they are missing. turning now to stereotyping microaggressions, we can also find offline examples that share the same structure: ● the (now discontinued) practice of naming hurricanes exclusively after women reinforced stereotypes that women are irrational and destructive forces of nature (rini 2021, 21–22). ● us medical school curriculums that only mention the health needs of gay men when discussing the risk of sexual transmitted diseases feed into stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous and sick (dean, victor, and guidry-grimes 2016, 562). ● sports mascots and logos, like the redskins, depict indigenous peoples as savage and primitive (sue 2010; steinfeldt, hyman, and steinfeldt 2019). these environmental microaggressions clearly stereotype members of marginalized groups, yet the demeaning stereotype is not transmitted by any particular individual. instead, the symbol or practice, created and sustained by numerous, loosely connected individuals, conveys the stereotyping microaggression, and furthermore, people may participate in producing the stereotype microaggression without being aware of their participation. for instance, the practice of depicting indigenous peoples in derogatory ways originated long before the redskins adopted their logo, and the creators of these earlier depictions unknowingly created the context for the current stereotype microaggressions (corbett 2019). similarly, for stereotyping algorithmic microaggressions, numerous coders and content creators contribute to producing the stereotyping outputs. for example, the original authors of the enron emails had no idea that their emails would later be used in the machine learning dataset that trained natural language processing (nlp) algorithms (levendowski 2018), yet they did contribute. as we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section, the existence of these unknowing contributors makes assigning moral responsibility for algorithmic microaggressions a particularly fraught project. before we turn to the question of moral responsibility, however, we would be remiss not to mention the work of chester pierce, the first microaggression theorist. although he does not use the term environmental microaggression (which was coined mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 by derald wing sue after pierce’s retirement), pierce discusses the pattern of stereotypical portrayals of black people in film and television in psychiatric problems of the black minority: the mass media more often than not see to it that blacks are portrayed in ways that continue to teach white superiority. . . . for instance, a black is more often the server than the served, for example, on a commercial the black pumps the gas while the white drives the car or the black woman is the cab driver while the white man’s uncivil remarks give her a headache. the black can be predicted to be less often depicted as a thinking being . . . the black is seen over and over in such guises as a server and a non-thinking physical creature. (pierce [1974] 2015, 10–11) pierce’s examples are particularly illuminating because together they demonstrate the compounding effects of stereotyping microaggressions. any individual commercial, tv show, or film that portrays black americans as servile and unthinking is individually problematic (and also the creation of numerous individuals from pre to post-production), but when we view all these problematic portrayals together, an even more powerfully damaging pattern emerges. after the quoted passage, pierce goes on to explain how consuming the constant barrage of stereotyping microaggressions could brainwash black youth into unquestioning acceptance of their limited, unsatisfying roles in society. moreover, in pierce’s (1970) earlier work, “offensive mechanisms”, he demonstrates that privileged people are also affected by pervasive stereotyping microaggressions. he argues that white children who witness anti-black microaggressions learn to expect deference and presume their own superiority: “society is unrelenting in teaching its white youth how to maximize the advantages of being on the offense toward blacks” (pierce 1970, 269–70).9 applying pierce’s insights to the algorithmic examples, we can see even more clearly how the harm of stereotyping microaggressions compounds. one google autocomplete search—and all the individual content creators who contributed to the stereotyped autocompletion—is somewhat problematic, but when we consider all searches, on all platforms, and all the other stereotyped portrayals in the online world, we begin to understand just how damaging stereotyping algorithmic microaggressions can be. moreover, we can see how the damage is done to both members of the targeted population and to the rest of society, who have their 9 of course, neither we nor pierce are suggesting that this continual pressure is a form of oppression. being taught to assume white superiority often materially benefits white people, even if it also harms their epistemic or moral capacities (mills 2007). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 stereotypes reinforced and are continually taught to recreate these offensive mechanisms. 2. moral responsibility now that we’ve shown how algorithmic examples fit within the microaggression paradigm, we’re ready to consider the unique issues of moral responsibility raised by algorithmic microaggressions. for physical environmental microaggressions, there is often a clear institution that bears (or should take) responsibility. in the examples we surveyed in section 1.2—the workplace that put up the photo wall, the airline with the too-small seats, the health-care provider with the discriminatory intake form, and the football club with the racist logo—all seem clearly responsible for the microaggressions they’ve perpetrated, or at least for changing policies in order to avoid perpetrating similar microaggressions in the future.10 but as we’ll show in this section, the story of moral responsibility is not as simple for the machine learning processes that create algorithmic microaggressions. we’ll focus on two methods that tech companies have used to avoid taking responsibility for their algorithms—moral proxy and neutrality—and give reasons to reject each. the first complication is that tech companies can, with some accuracy, claim that the machine learning systems we are discussing reflect bias that is already present in society. at least in those cases where the training data is in fact representative, the biased results arise from the algorithm learning patterns that are actually present in the data and accurately reproducing them. so we might ask who is truly responsible for the harmful microaggressions inflicted by biased algorithms: is it the company that built them, or the biased individuals whose data created the algorithmic bias, or perhaps society in general? this is a version of what is called the moral proxy problem—since ai’s are not themselves morally responsible agents, who is the appropriate moral agent to bear responsibility for morally relevant actions taken by the ai?11 one possibility is that this is an instance of a “responsibility gap.” andreas matthias (2004) argues that one of the problems with what he calls learning automata, which would include the ai techniques used in many instances of algorithmic microaggressions, is that they give rise to responsibility gaps, in which no one is truly responsible for a harm.12 this is because no one satisfies the relevant 10 for more on institutional moral responsibility for nonalgorithmic microaggressions, see brennan (2013, 2016) and dean, victor, and guidry-grimes (2016). 11 see millar (2015), himmelreich (2018), köhler (2020) and thoma (2022) for further discussion of the moral proxy problem in ai 12 see also sparrow (2007) for an application of this idea to autonomous weapon systems, and danaher (2016) for the related idea of a retribution gap. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 control condition required for moral responsibility. neither the user nor the designer has sufficient control over the relevant actions of the automated system to count as responsible for the outcome, and so neither cannot be held responsible. however, this worry misconstrues the kind of control that is necessary to count as morally responsible. as sebastian köhler (2020) argues, we can understand the kind of responsibility we have towards ai on the model of the responsibility we have when we make use of other supervised minimal agents, such as nonhuman animals. thus, he argues, the appropriate model for understanding this responsibility is that of using another agent as a tool. we clearly lack full control over the actions of nonhuman agents whom we utilize as tools, but just as clearly we are often responsible for their actions. in the same way as the decision to use a nonhuman animal, and the role humans have in training it, makes those who choose to deploy such agents morally responsible for their actions, people choose to deploy ais and control the training that they are given; so even if the results are never perfectly predictable, programmers and corporations still bear the responsibility for the outcomes their ais create. we might instead argue that the user is the one truly responsible for the outcome. there are various arguments in, for example, the ethics of self-driving cars that hold that the user of the car is the one who should be held ultimately responsible for harm caused by the car (nyholm 2018). generally, this is considered in cases where the car causes injuries to others rather than the occupant themselves, as it is odd to hold someone morally responsible for harm to themselves. still, we might hold them responsible in the same sense as we hold someone responsible for harm they cause themselves with a tool, where responsibility does not necessarily come with moral blame but does absolve others of moral responsibility for the outcome. in the same way, we could argue that the user of the ai technology that causes the microaggression is ultimately responsible for the outcome, and so absolve the producer of the technology of responsibility. this line of argument is most compelling when the user has a degree of choice over how the system operates. for example, if individuals have the choice to adopt one of several “ethics settings” for a self-driving car, some of which are more altruistic and favor protecting others and some of which are more selfish, prioritizing the user, then it makes sense to consider the user as having responsibility for the outcome. however, there is no such choice available in using the kinds of ai systems that give rise to microaggressions. we could still argue that there is a relevant choice: the choice to use the ai system in the first place. however, this is in many cases merely the illusion of choice. ai systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and avoiding them becomes ever more difficult. furthermore, many of these systems are incredibly valuable and time saving. to require minoritized populations to choose between experiencing feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 microaggressions and forsaking the use of these technologies altogether would be an injustice to those who are already most vulnerable. finally, we might argue that the appropriate target of moral responsibility is in fact the individuals whose biased data has contributed to training the ai system.13 this has been a popular approach, since it allows companies to avoid taking responsibility for moderation. big tech companies have been reluctant to explicitly adopt the role of content moderators for their algorithms and platforms. it is likely that google, for instance, would be reluctant to intentionally sculpt the data fed into their algorithms in order to prevent microaggressive recommendations. one strong reason for this is that it would require google to take firm stances on controversial topics surrounding issues like police accountability, trans rights, and other areas where any stance they take will inevitably invite criticism. much better, from a public relations perspective, to have an algorithm that neutrally reflects the data of users without taking sides—this way they can deflect criticism from both sides of controversial issues while intervening on an ad hoc basis in areas where public opinion is sufficiently settled that there is less risk of blowback. and there is some public support for this claim of neutrality; while a slim majority of people in a pew study agreed that algorithms will always reflect human biases, 40 percent still thought it was possible for algorithms to be neutral (smith 2018). while there is certainly enough responsibility to go around, we want to push back against the idea that the companies that design these problematic algorithms are neutral transmitters of the users’, or of society's, views.14 the neutral transmitter excuse assumes that it is possible to design a fully value-neutral algorithm, whereby the design of the algorithm makes no value judgments and prioritizes no particular viewpoint. but this is not in fact possible, as we will argue. we would argue that there is no such thing as a purely neutral way of organizing or displaying information. even simple graphs make numerous decisions about how to frame information that require value judgments. as catherine d’ignazio and lauren klein (2020) argue in data feminism, the idea of an objective framing of information is a form of the “view from nowhere” that pretends that we can possess 13 this will only be an option for stereotyping microaggressions, not erasure microaggressions, since in erasure microaggressions it is not the presence of bias but the absence of diversity that explains the outcome. still, stereotyping microaggressions are a significant enough range of microaggressions to be worth considering this argument. 14 safiya umoja noble (2018) similarly critiques the united nations advertising campaign that raised sexist and racist autocomplete results for focusing the blame on users of search engines rather than the search engines themselves. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 a disembodied perspective, a “god’s eye view,” untainted by our subjective experience. machine learning algorithms are immensely complex, and this very complexity can obscure the value judgments being made in the design of the algorithm. let’s take as an example google’s page-rank algorithm, which determines the order in which results are displayed when you do a search. the idea is that the top results will be the ones that are most relevant to your query. but once we examine this notion, it is clear that we will need to operationalize the idea of relevance. one easy way to see that it is impossible to measure relevance itself, free of interpretation, is the huge industry of search engine optimization (seo). seo professionals work to help boost web pages up the ladder of google search results, complete with a division between “white hat” optimizers, who follow search engine guidelines, and “black hat” optimizers, who try to exploit loopholes and otherwise break the search engine’s guidelines (patil, pawar, and patil 2013). this industry thrives because the quality, or relevance, of a page is subjective, and there is a lot of money to be made by identifying and matching google’s (or another search engine’s) own definition and proxies thereof. furthermore, the influence of advertisers already shows that the ranking used serves a specific set of values, rather than neutrally reporting some underlying truth. as safiya umoja noble (2018) points out, commercial values are clearly driving the position of the “sponsored” results, and most users of google cannot reliably identify which results are advertisements and which are the result of the page-rank algorithm. but stepping back a bit, we can see that this is unsurprising, since it is impossible even in principle to avoid value judgments in algorithms. as gabbrielle johnson (forthcoming) points out, an algorithm must balance competing considerations against one another. perhaps we need to trade off risk of error against ease of use, as when an aggressive autocomplete algorithm automatically changes an unfamiliar word that you had in fact spelled correctly into another word entirely. deciding how to make these trade-offs involves value judgments. but, as johnson points out, not only are these themselves values, we also cannot cleanly demarcate these values into epistemic and moral values. prioritizing ease of use over avoiding errors, for example, helps those who most cleanly fit into the expected boxes for the product, while those on the periphery will be exposed to the additional errors. johnson draws a parallel between this and feminist criticisms of the value free ideal in science. longino (1995), for example, argues that the choice between novelty and consistency as epistemic values in a scientific theory is itself laden with moral values since consistency favors the status quo, which in turn favors the current patriarchal feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 system. and that is before we even consider the arguments that moral values are themselves epistemic values, as some defenders of pragmatic encroachment claim.15 if algorithmic design does indeed always include value judgment, then the choice is not between neutrality, on the one hand, or choosing to shape algorithms according to our moral judgments, on the other. rather, it is a choice between two sets of moral judgments. as we will see in the next section, the current set of choices being made, and the options they provide for addressing microaggressions, are insufficient and need to be improved. 3. google autocomplete: a case study in algorithmic microaggressions the current approach of many companies whose algorithms inflict microaggressions is ad hoc and reactive. furthermore, since companies do not currently conceptualize the harms of algorithmic bias as specifically microaggressive, seeming solutions can do more harm than good. we will use google autocomplete as our main example, since it has been widely studied and provides a clear example of the kind of approach we want to criticize. however, it is one thing to say that google and others who use similar algorithms should do better; it's another to specify ways in which they could improve. in this section, we will point out several shortcomings with google’s current response to algorithmic microaggressions: (1) google’s response is ad hoc, correcting autocomplete outputs based on whether they cause offense, when it should instead be considering the functional role of microaggressions within structural oppression, (2) google’s attempted solution, removing autocomplete suggestions, risks creating unjust barriers to access of information for members of marginalized groups, and (3) google’s attempted solution also ends up creating a different microaggression—replacing a stereotyping microaggression with an erasure microaggression. in the next section, we will lay out a more promising, multifaceted approach. to its credit, google has made some attempt to respond to their algorithm’s microaggressions—once they were called out. noble’s (2018) book, algorithms of oppression, brought the problem of autocomplete to the public’s attention. the cover features the query “why are black women so . . .” with predictions such as “angry,” “loud,” and “lazy.” noble’s book effected change, and quickly: by 2019, google had completely revamped its autocomplete policies. yahoo still to this day autocompletes “why are black people” with terms like “violent” and “inferior,” and “why are 15 see basu (2019). the idea is that moral and other pragmatic considerations are directly relevant to (encroach upon) purely epistemic questions such as what to believe. so, for instance, even if my evidence supports assuming that the one black man at a golf club is an employee, moral considerations properly tell me to suspend judgment due to the moral harm in making an error in this context. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 women” with “bitches” and “crazy,”16 but google has made significant strides by allowing users to report “inappropriate predictions” for being “hateful against groups” (google 2021). many of the specific examples that have been widely publicized (by noble and others) have since been corrected; often by drastically reducing the number of autocomplete suggestions offered. for example, at the time of writing, a search for “why are jews” returns only three rather than the usual ten autocomplete suggestions, presumably so google can avoid having anti-semitic results show up. google’s autocomplete policies (google 2021) lay out classes of predictions that they do not provide, including sexually explicit, vulgar, hateful against groups, and sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals. however, while they have made some progress addressing the individual search terms, or classes of search term, that people have called attention to, many problematic search results remain. a recent study by roy and ayalon (2020), for example, found that searches related to older women returned many more negative and disparaging autocomplete results than did the same searches about older men and that the autocomplete results in general displayed a negative impression of the elderly as a whole. it is difficult to talk about the exact procedure used to remove or curate autocomplete results since google is not transparent about these procedures. however, we know that autocomplete results that gain negative publicity are fixed but that new examples can readily be found. this seems to resemble the approach to eliminating nonalgorithmic microaggressions by providing lists of things not to say or topics to avoid. for example, diversityinc (2016) provides a list of nine things not to say to female coworkers, including asking if they are pregnant, calling them emotional, and telling them to be tougher.17 similar lists are often used in sensitivity and diversity training (dean, victor, and guidry-grimes 2016). while presumably wellintended, these lists are not effective in eliminating microaggressions because they don’t provide guidance for novel examples, especially less-frequently discussed forms of bias, since they don’t take into account the root of the problem: structural oppression. this brings us to the first problem with google’s solution. as we’ve discussed in section 1, algorithmic and other microaggressions are not wrongful because they cause offense; they are wrongful because they participate in and perpetuate structural oppression. thus, unpopularity is not a reliable metric for tracking which phrases are microaggressions. as we’ve seen, removing unpopular results from autocomplete (or speech) won’t remove all the microaggressions—microaggressions 16 author’s search, july 2021. 17 while the article doesn’t use the term microaggression, the examples given are classic examples of microaggressions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 against black women and jewish people may be reduced while microaggressions against the elderly remain untouched. moreover, removing all unpopular results ends up removing results that are not microaggressions. at the time of writing, “why are white men” returns zero results,18 even though white men are not a group of people at risk of structural oppression (though individual white men may belong to other social groups that are at risk). as long as google is tracking unpopularity instead of microaggressions, they won’t catch all (or only) the problematic autocomplete results. secondly, even if google could eliminate all instances of stereotyping algorithmic microaggressions for all oppressed groups, they would just create new problems. commonly, removing stereotypical autocomplete results is done by removing all the results for those search terms or severely limiting them. for example, returning to one of the earliest examples of this problem, typing “why are jews” into google returns only three autocomplete suggestions (“kosher,” “the chosen people,” and “circumcised”) rather than the ten that are offered for most results; whereas “why are black women” and “why are lesbians” return no autocomplete suggestions at all.19 while this does avoid exposing members of marginalized groups to negative stereotypes about themselves, it also inhibits their ability to access resources that would help them counter those stereotypes. searches for information about their social group must be done without the aid of the time-saving algorithms such as autocomplete—a small cost to pay on any one search, but when that cost accumulates across multiple searches by many users, it adds up. google’s promotional material claims that autocomplete saves users “over 200 years of typing time per day” (google 2021), and we argue that this time-saving benefit should be shared by black women and jewish people attempting to access material that would help them resist internalizing harmful stereotypes. we further argue that inhibiting access to this information amounts to a form of epistemic injustice; specifically, what miranda fricker (2007) calls “hermeneutical injustice.” 20 hermeneutical injustice occurs when a member of a marginalized group is unable (or significantly inhibited) from understanding their experience of 18 author’s search, july 2021. 19 author’s search, july 2021. “why are lesbians” further recommends turning on safe search—presumably to avoid seeing pornography in search results—but we would argue that the suggestion of safe search is an additional microaggression, when we consider how this association recalls the history of hypersexualization of lesbians, as well as current attempts to ban 2slgbtq+ content in schools because it is “too adult” for children to be exposed to. 20 see fatima (2017) for more connections between microaggressions and epistemic injustice. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 marginalization because of gaps in the conceptual resources available to them. fricker (2007) gives the example of women in the 1960s and ’70s who found it difficult to conceptualize their experiences of workplace sexual harassment, until they participated in consciousness-raising groups and came to the realization that many of them were experiencing the same mistreatment, which they then named as sexual harassment. talking about their experiences allowed these women to counter the hermeneutical injustice and achieve self-understanding (as well as the ability to organize politically and resist further harassment). nowadays, the internet has served as a powerful hermeneutical equalizer—allowing queer children and teens from small, conservative towns to learn “it gets better” (itgetsbetter.org) and enabling sexual violence survivors to continue the consciousness-raising projects fricker discussed, through hashtags like #metoo, #time’sup, and #mmiwg. concepts that were previously unavailable or extremely difficult to access for members of these marginalized groups are now accessible to anyone with internet access. in fact, as torino and colleagues point out, the very concept of microaggressions has been popularized and rendered accessible by the internet (torino et al. 2019). however, internet users still have to know what terms to search for to find these resources, and here’s where we come back around to our worry about google’s autocomplete: turning off the autocomplete for searches on “why are black women” or “why are lesbians” inhibits members of these multiply marginalized groups from learning about concepts that are necessary for understanding their marginalization—or even their physical health risks. of course, they are not completely prevented. they could still learn about misogynoir and homophobia, or their higher risks of dying in childbirth or contracting breast cancer, by typing in those search terms themselves, but first they would have to know to look. autocomplete could help smooth the way towards selfunderstanding, but instead, with autocomplete turned off, it takes more time and more background knowledge to find this information. while any one instance of such an injustice will be minor, we suggest that this is a kind of epistemic micro-injustice, where the cumulative effect of many small inconveniences makes certain kinds of self-knowledge more difficult to acquire for marginalized groups. caution is in order here. as gaile pohlhaus jr. (2012) points out, what looks like hermeneutical gaps in an oppressed group, from the point of view of the privileged, may instead be cases of willful hermeneutical ignorance on the part of the privileged. willful hermeneutical ignorance occurs when individuals in an oppressed group are perfectly capable of articulating their oppression, but the privileged group fails to acknowledge and take up these hermeneutical resources and so renders the experience of the marginalized unintelligible to themselves. the privileged group uses faulty hermeneutical resources, and they are culpable for doing so because they feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 adopt these resources out of prejudice. 21 because of these faulty hermeneutical resources, members of the privileged group systematically misinterpret and fail to recognize the experiences that members of the oppressed group communicate to them. with pohlhaus’s critique in mind, identifying specific cases of hermeneutical injustice from the point of view of the privileged group is fraught with risk, since we may be identifying our own ignorance and inability to accept the hermeneutical resources that are present rather than a genuine gap in hermeneutical resources available to the oppressed group. still, while identifying specific cases is best left up to members of the oppressed group, we can identify the possibility of such hermeneutical gaps and the possibility that eliminating autocomplete can contribute to or perpetuate these gaps. now we have set the stage to see the third problem with google’s autocomplete: when autocomplete works better for privileged groups, who don’t need to overcome hermeneutical injustices, than for marginalized groups, who do face those barriers, then autocomplete becomes the site of an erasure microaggression. the lack of autocomplete suggestions on “why are black women” and “why are lesbians” means members of marginalized groups see themselves less represented in online space, sending the microaggressive message, “this technology was not built for members of my social group.”22 in other words, in removing stereotyping microaggressions from autocomplete results, without replacing those results with suggestions of nonstereotypical and counterstereotypical searches, google has turned a stereotyping microaggression into an erasure microaggression. perhaps this is progress of a kind, but it is far from a satisfactory solution. before we suggest our preferred avenue for progress on these problems, let’s consider one solution that we won’t be recommending: google could avoid creating erasure microaggressions by expanding the circle of search results that do not provide any autocomplete options—at the limit, by forgoing autocomplete suggestions altogether. eschewing the use of machine learning algorithms may sometimes be the best way of addressing the problems they raise. a good example of this is twitter’s 21 see also dotson (2011) for a discussion of privileged groups’ culpability for pernicious ignorance. 22 as we’ve mentioned, “why are white men” also yields no search results, but since white men are not marginalized (qua their whiteness/maleness) they are not structurally positioned to experience hermeneutical micro-injustice or erasure microaggressions. they might, however, experience epistemic harm—in not being able to access information about white ignorance (mills 2007) that could help them to acquire self-knowledge about the ways they have participated in oppressive structures—but as frye (1983) famously argued, harm is not the same as structural oppression. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 image-cropping algorithm, which was designed to automatically crop photos uploaded to twitter to display the most “salient” regions of the photo. this algorithm drew criticism for centering white faces more often than black faces when both appeared in the same image.23 after their own research confirmed the presence of a bias in the algorithm, twitter discontinued the feature altogether. as they put it in on their own blog, “we considered the tradeoffs between the speed and consistency of automated cropping with the potential risks we saw in this research. one of our conclusions is that not everything on twitter is a good candidate for an algorithm, and in this case, how to crop an image is a decision best made by people” (chowdhury 2021).24 however, this approach is unlikely to be a satisfying response across the board. all machine learning algorithm systems are vulnerable to bias, so if this is our only way to address bias, then we will end up needing to abandon all algorithmic recommender systems. in some cases, it is hard to see how we could do without these systems; without search engines, the internet would be practically inaccessible, and all search engines rely on machine learning algorithms. in the case of autocomplete, we could do without it, but there would still be a significant cost: as mentioned before, google claims that autocomplete saves users over two hundred years of typing time per day. furthermore, these benefits are especially significant for those with disabilities that make typing difficult, so the decision to eschew these benefits would hit this group of people especially hard—creating a further barrier to equitable access and risk of erasure from online spaces. finally, to do without autocomplete would be to miss out on potential benefits of alternative solutions. as we will propose below, a better solution to the problem could not only avoid bias but actively fight it by providing counterstereotyping results as autocomplete options. we probably can’t, and shouldn’t, put the genie of machine learning back in the bottle, but google still can, and must, do better. 4. a better way forward for google autocomplete and other algorithmic microaggressions in the last section, we used the google autocomplete case to demonstrate how conceptualizing some forms of algorithmic bias as microaggressive can allow us to better identify problems, including problems created by attempted fixes. in this final section, we’ll show that the microaggression paradigm also guides us towards better solutions. we’ll begin with solutions that have already been suggested by 23 this is one instance within a long pattern of photographic technology performing poorly for black users. see benjamin (2019) for more on this discriminatory history. 24 see also yee, tantipongpipat, and mishra (2021) for more details on the research twitter did to test for and identify the bias in their recommender system. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 microaggression theorists to combat environmental microaggressions. we’ll show how these preexisting solutions could be adapted to the algorithmic context, and then we’ll conclude by suggesting two possible solutions unique to algorithmic microaggressions. individually, these potential solutions will be limited in their effectiveness, but combining these different approaches—some individuals, corporations, and governments working in tandem—would create more genuine progress on reducing microaggressions in online spaces. the first solution we’ll explore is inspired by the work of chester pierce. as we mentioned in section 2, pierce devoted much of his research to studying the effects of environmental microaggressions (under a different name) in television, film, and commercials. in fact, he didn’t just research these effects—he took steps to combat them by getting involved in the entertainment industry. he consulted on a new children’s show, sesame street, that was created in order to close the education gap between white and racialized pre-k students (greene 2019). sesame street is most well known for teaching reading and math skills, but under pierce’s guidance, it also imparted a “hidden curriculum” of racial equality and self-respect for members of marginalized groups (harrington 2019). the show featured a racially diverse cast that included black authority figures, gordon and susan, and black children who were smart and capable. these characters served as counterstereotypical exemplars that insulated black children in the audience (and their parents) from the microaggressive messages sent by other media. pierce chose to research media microaggressions and consult on sesame street because of the ubiquity of televisions. if pierce were alive today, he might take a similar approach to combating microaggressions in the now pervasive online context. rather than attempting to control google’s algorithm directly, he might focus instead on creating content that would support racial equality and self-respect for members of marginalized groups. the impact of algorithmic microaggressions would be lessened if search results returned websites filled with counterstereotypical exemplars. for instance, a google search for “black men” currently returns as its top hit an article entitled “outstanding black men in canada 2020.”25 the article appears in shifter magazine, which describes itself as “a canadian online black and urban culture magazine celebrating the best in music, film, television, fashion and sports.”26 pierce would have recognized that websites devoted to representing black equality and excellence can impact online racism and reduce the dangers of internalizing algorithmic microaggressions. although no single individual creates algorithmic 25 kevin bourne, “outstanding black men in canada 2020,” shifter, june 21, 2020, https://shiftermagazine.com/shifters/outstanding-black-men-in-canada-2020. 26 “about,” shifter magazine, accessed may 30, 2021, https://shiftermagazine.com /about. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 microaggressions, individual content creators can still play a role in ameliorating toxic online climates. building from pierce’s work on sesame street, rini (2021) provides another potential solution to the problem of environmental microaggressions: content curation. rini shares pierce’s concern that media can perpetuate bias in its audience, but whereas pierce focused on the duties of content creators, rini suggests that individual consumers of media could also play a role in mitigating the effects of environmental microaggressions. she argues that individuals can exert “remote control” over the biases they develop by intentionally limiting their consumption of stereotypical media and seeking out counterstereotypical portrayals and shows that feature diverse casts and writers.27 curating the content we consume allows us to shift our habits of stereotypical thought and, ultimately, reduce our propensity to commit microaggressions. turning back to the online context, individual search engine users could adopt a similar strategy of content curation by changing what kind of queries they search for. instead of seeking out stereotypical content, search engine users could look for more accurate portrayals of marginalized groups. if enough people typed “why are black women not being paid equally” or “why are black men the most likely to die at the hands of the police,” then google wouldn’t need to carefully monitor (or censure) its autocomplete suggestions for those groups. good searches would create good autocomplete predictions, which would in turn inspire further good searches—a virtuous cycle. both content creation and content curation could be rendered more effective with institutional support. like pierce’s sesame street, which was displayed on the public broadcasting service, counterstereotypical online content could achieve greater popularity if it had government funding and advertising. governments could also invest in educational initiatives that would provide online literacy and guidance about how to seek out more accurate information about marginalized groups. if more of the primary and secondary school curriculum was devoted to countering stereotypes and teaching the truth about historical and current systems of oppression, search engine users would have a better starting point for personal research and content curation. all the approaches we’ve surveyed thus far could reduce the prevalence of stereotyping autocomplete microaggressions without any changes to google’s algorithm. this is the kind of solution google (and other tech corporations) has advocated for all along: since algorithms merely mirror the bias of society’s searches, if we reduce bias in society, mutatis mutandis we’ll reduce algorithmic 27 see also dean, victor, and guidry-grimes (2016) for a similar approach to disrupting microaggressive bias at the individual level. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 microaggressions as well. as we showed in section 2, however, when it comes to algorithms, claims of neutrality are misleading. google’s autocomplete algorithm doesn’t just mirror society’s biases—it perpetuates bias and perpetrates microaggressions. therefore, in addition to efforts by individuals and institutions, google has a duty to fix the problems it helped create. we’ll conclude by outlining the unique role google can play in reducing algorithmic microaggressions, which we hope will be instructive for other corporations facing similar issues. instead of the reactive strategies that have been tried thus far (enumerated in section 3), our recommendations will require google to be proactive: retraining its algorithm and, when necessary, restraining it. we’ll explain each of these approaches, below. first, retraining. google’s autocomplete is receiving constant inputs that over time can lead it to slightly update its suggestions. however, its first incarnation was created in 2004, and like other google algorithms, it was probably trained on a dataset from an even earlier era (garber 2013). levendowski (2018) has critiqued the practice of training algorithms on biased data—often data old enough to be in the public domain or, worse, made public during a criminal investigation. (as we’ve mentioned, many nlp algorithms were trained on a dataset that included the enron emails, which are predictably filled with racism and sexism, in addition to other wrongdoing.) we would thus join levendowski in calling for google and other tech companies to commit to retraining their algorithms on better, less biased datasets. moreover, we’d further encourage tech companies to take a page from pierce’s book. pierce knew the value of education, and we can apply his ideas about the education of children to the education of algorithms. rather than being satisfied with preexisting datasets, google could invest in creating their own, more inclusive datasets that would train their algorithms with a “hidden curriculum” of social equality. to give just one example, google (and other tech giants) could invest in digitizing archives of current and historical activist movements. activist archives are often precariously funded, if their digitization is funded at all, so if google offered to host these archives for free, it could benefit all parties. imagine if nlp algorithms were trained on archives of black lives matter emails or lgbtq2s oral histories, instead of enron!28 this method would work best for nlp trained on small datasets. its effectiveness would diminish as the size of the training dataset increases—for instance, the impact on a dataset the size of gpt-3, in which all of wikipedia is only 3 percent of the total dataset, would be very small—but progress is being made on machine learning using smaller datasets. chahal and toner (2021) have recently argued for further attention to small data techniques like transfer learning, where an 28 obviously, there would need to be protections put in place, including but by no means limited to informed consent specifying that the data will be used solely for training purposes (and not, for example, shared with law enforcement agencies). mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 algorithm previously primed on a large dataset could be effectively trained on a much smaller novel dataset. we would encourage google, and other companies, to invest in these retraining technologies that could employ pared down datasets—in this case, datasets with a greater proportion of content created by members of marginalized groups (and other content that avoids reinforcing stereotypes). the current datasets teach algorithms to commit microaggressions, whereas more representative datasets could teach them to reflect a better world of social equality. retraining algorithms and investing in tech solutions could help, but innovation will take time, as more representative content is sought out, created, and digitized. moreover, no dataset can perfectly train an algorithm to avoid microaggressions, as new microaggressions are constantly being identified. so what should google do when algorithmic microaggressions are brought to their attention? here is where our second recommendation becomes relevant. until more comprehensive retraining is possible, the autocomplete algorithm should be restrained. the algorithm should be turned off for searches about marginalized groups, but instead of showing no results, the autocomplete should be populated with a list of suggestions curated by humans—namely, people with lived and research expertise in recognizing microaggressions and combating oppression. this intervention would not be as much of a departure as it might seem. from its inception, in addition to being a time-saving tool, autocomplete was also envisioned as a tool that would allow users to “learn about things you haven’t dreamt of.”29 we suggest embracing this liberatory potential inherent in exposing users to content they might never otherwise have dreamt of. what if google autocomplete were not merely a mirror of current biases but instead a nudge towards justice, an educational tool that suggests the questions you should be asking? as we’ve shown, there is no neutrality—in choosing not to intervene, google is already adopting a morally valenced stance and perpetuating microaggressions—so it should choose to embrace the power of suggestion. in addition to teaching us facts like the boiling point of water, google autocomplete could teach us how to best complete the sentence, “why are black women . . .” • “. . . dying in childbirth?” • “. . . known for their contributions to social justice?” • “. . . underrepresented in business?” • “. . . at the forefront of vaccine research?” • “. . . the victims of misogynoir?” • “. . . only famous for achievements in entertainment and sport?” • “. . . stereotyped in film?” 29 the creator, kevin gibbs, quoted in gerber (2013). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2022 26 • “. . . the founders of black lives matter?” • “. . . gaining more recognition?” • “. . . researching intersectionality?” of course, this list of counterstereotypical exemplars and accurate portrayals of oppression is just a starting point. instead of taking our word for it, google should gather—and pay—a team of experts (including those with expertise gained from lived experience) to develop the best possible list and to keep that list continually updated to reflect the changing social world. how might such a change in institutional policy actually occur? we hope that a change like this could be motivated internally by google itself or its employees; after all, the employees have successfully pressured google to change its policies in several high-profile instances. perhaps more likely, though, is that it could be driven by external pressure, either legislative or social. we might look to facebook’s decision to establish an oversight board to review its decisions over what content to allow and what to block on its site.30 in the face of public pressure over its decisions, facebook preferred to create an independent body that would have final say. we can imagine similar social pressure on google that would make them prefer to defer some decisions from algorithms to arm’s-length independent entities; this could help address algorithmic microaggressions while still allowing google to remain insulated from any (unpopular) decisions made by these entities. alternatively, new legislation could force google to adopt more socially responsible policies with respect to its algorithms. this could be accomplished directly through new regulation, or indirectly by removing existing exemptions from civil, collective action lawsuits (like section 230) and forcing google to pay for the harm it has caused to members of marginalized groups.31 5. conclusion google and other tech companies have assumed that they should remain neutral on issues of social justice, but we’ve shown that algorithms are not morally inert. doing nothing is not an option, yet google’s current policy of removing unpopular autocompletes is both ad hoc and damaging to the very groups it’s ostensibly trying to protect. removing stereotyping microaggressions creates an erasure microaggression that impedes marginalized users from accessing knowledge and combating internalized stereotypes. we’ve argued that to truly serve the needs of its marginalized users, google should embrace the liberatory power of suggestion. 30 see klonick (2020) and douek (2019) for more on the facebook oversight board and its implications. 31 though see morrison (2020) for a discussion of the pros and cons of section 230. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 27 rather than mirroring society’s bias, google autocomplete could be a force for good and a guiding light for other tech companies who want to avoid algorithmic microaggressions. references ali, muhammad, piotr sapiezynski, miranda bogen, aleksandra korolova, alan mislove, and aaron rieke. 2019. “discrimination through optimization: how facebook's ad 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wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119466642.ch19. mcclure and wald – algorithmic microaggressions published by scholarship@western, 2022 33 tschaepe, mark. 2021. “pragmatic ethics for generative adversarial networks: coupling, cyborgs, and machine learning.” contemporary pragmatism 18, no. 1 (may): 95–111. https://doi.org/10.1163/18758185-bja10005. yee, kyra, uthaipon tantipongpipat, and shubhanshu mishra. 2021. “image cropping on twitter: fairness metrics, their limitations, and the importance of representation, design, and agency.” arxiv preprint arxiv:2105.08667 [cs.cy]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2105.08667. emma mcclure (she/they) is an assistant professor of philosophy at saint mary’s university (halifax) working at the intersection of ethics, feminism, philosophy of law, and critical race theory. their research focuses on various topics within the ethics of conversation—ranging from moral responsibility for microaggressions to supporting trauma recovery and self-reintegration. benjamin wald (he/him) is a research analyst at the chiefs of ontario. he wrote the bulk of this paper while a postdoctoral fellow at the schwartz reisman institute for technology and society. his research interests include ai ethics, indigenous data sovereignty, and the relationship between ethics and agency. 14276 mcclure and wald title page 14276 mcclure and wald final format artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 3 recommended citation lin, ting-an, and po-hsuan cameron chen. 2022. “artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 3. 2022 artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society ting-an lin stanford university tinanlin@stanford.edu po-hsuan cameron chen cameron.ph.chen@gmail.com lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society ting-an lin and po-hsuan cameron chen abstract increasing concerns have been raised regarding artificial intelligence (ai) bias, and in response, efforts have been made to pursue ai fairness. in this paper, we argue that the idea of structural injustice serves as a helpful framework for clarifying the ethical concerns surrounding ai bias—including the nature of its moral problem and the responsibility for addressing it—and reconceptualizing the approach to pursuing ai fairness. using ai in health care as a case study, we argue that ai bias is a form of structural injustice that exists when ai systems interact with other social factors to exacerbate existing social inequalities, making some groups of people more vulnerable to undeserved burdens while conferring unearned benefits to others. the goal of ai fairness, understood this way, is to pursue a more just social structure with the development and use of ai systems when appropriate. we further argue that all participating agents in the unjust social structure associated with ai bias bear a shared responsibility to join collective action with the goal of reforming the social structure, and we provide a list of practical recommendations for agents in various social positions to contribute to this collective action. keywords: artificial intelligence, ai bias, ai fairness, structural injustice, moral responsibility, health care 1. introduction over the past decade, due to a surge in the use of artificial intelligence (ai) technology1 (lecun, bengio, and hinton 2015), increasing concerns have been raised regarding ai bias. several studies have revealed that ai may reproduce existing social 1 since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s, a variety of methods have been developed to pursue the goal of building machines with some “intelligent capacities.” the recent surge in ai has much to do with a type of technology named “machine learning,” which trains a computer system with a huge quantity of data so that it will recognize some patterns in the existing datasets and then apply the learned patterns to make judgments regarding new cases. in this paper, we use “artificial intelligence (ai)” and “machine learning” interchangeably unless otherwise noted. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 injustices, such as sexism and racism. for example, one ai recruiting tool downgrades resumes containing the keyword “women’s,” such as “women’s college” and “women’s chess club,” resulting in a preference for male candidates (dastin 2018); another algorithm used to judge risk for recidivism tends to falsely identify black defendants as future criminals (angwin et al. 2016); and the algorithms behind one global search engine tend to represent women of color with degrading stereotypes (noble 2018). in response to the growing concerns regarding ai bias, a burgeoning research paradigm under the names of ai fairness, fairness in ai, and machine learning (ml) fairness has been developed (hajian and domingo-ferrer 2013; kamiran, calders, and pechenizkiy 2013; barocas and selbst 2016; lepri et al. 2018; friedler et al. 2019). additionally, many tech companies have launched relevant initiatives to pursue the value of ai fairness by developing fairer algorithms (joyce et al. 2021). in the following text, we refer to this as the dominant approach to ai fairness. the dominant approach sees the problem of ai bias as being primarily located within algorithms, understands the goal of ai fairness as ensuring some parity of some statistical measures between different groups of people, and thus aims to fix the problem mainly through debiasing algorithms (davis, williams, and yang 2021). despite its popularity, critics have pointed out limitations of this dominant approach to ai fairness, including challenges of deciding between various statistical measures (miconi 2017; friedler, scheidegger, and venkatasubramanian 2016), concerns that ai systems are examined as entities isolated from the situated social contexts (hoffmann 2019; fazelpour and lipton 2020; le bui and noble 2020), and an overemphasis on technocentric responses (fazelpour and lipton 2020; le bui and noble 2020). these reflections reveal a need for a more comprehensive moral framework to reconceptualize the ethical concerns and approaches involved in addressing ai bias and pursuing ai fairness. as suggested by le bui and noble (2020, 163), “we are missing a moral framework” for thinking about ethics and justice in ai. this paper argues that a conceptual framework named structural injustice, originally proposed by iris marion young (2011), can serve as a helpful framework for clarifying the ethical concerns surrounding ai bias—including the nature of its moral problem and the responsibility for addressing it—and reconceptualizing the approach to pursuing ai fairness. in other words, this paper aims to conduct what sally haslanger (2000) calls an ameliorative project for the notions of ai bias and ai fairness by asking how these concepts should be used to better serve the purposes of using them.2 we suggest understanding ai bias as a form of structural injustice that exists when ai systems interact with other social factors to exacerbate existing social inequalities, making some groups of people more vulnerable to undeserved burdens 2 we thank shen-yi liao for this point. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/aixaa https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/nso23 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yij8x+iiprk+qnjsl+s0bvr+t5csp https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yij8x+iiprk+qnjsl+s0bvr+t5csp https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yij8x+iiprk+qnjsl+s0bvr+t5csp https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yij8x+iiprk+qnjsl+s0bvr+t5csp https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431+nproc+i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431+nproc+i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431+nproc+i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431+nproc+i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431/?noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/t7wb0/?noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/brgn/?noauthor=1 lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 while conferring unearned benefits to others. from this perspective, the notion of ai fairness should be about pursuing a more just social structure, potentially through the development and use of ai systems when appropriate. by situating ai systems within existing social structures, the structural-injustice perspective enables a more nuanced analysis of the contributing factors to ai bias and indicates potential directions for the pursuit of ai fairness. drawing on young’s (2011) social connection model (scm) of responsibility, we argue that a broader group of people beyond software engineers are responsible for pursuing ai fairness and should join collective action to shape the social structure. overall, the structural-injustice framework helps clarify the moral problem of ai bias and offers new directions for more holistic responses to it. this paper proceeds as follows. in section 2, we begin with a brief introduction to the idea of structural injustice. in section 3, we analyze the issue of ai bias through the lens of structural injustice. there, we use ai in health care as a case study and indicate several situations where interactions between ai development and existing social factors function to exacerbate health disparities. in section 4, we discuss how identifying ai bias as a case of structural injustice can help reconceptualize a structural-injustice approach to ai fairness. the last two sections consider moral responses to ai bias and the pursuit of ai fairness. in section 5, we discuss the insights provided by the scm in terms of responsibility for ai bias. in section 6, we discuss the practical implications of the structural-injustice approach by presenting a list of recommendations for actions throughout the process of ai system development and noting points of interventions that agents in various social positions may take to approach the goal of ai fairness. 2. the idea of structural injustice the idea of structural injustice was proposed by iris marion young to refer to a kind of moral wrong that cannot be reduced to individual wrongdoings or repressive policies but must be examined in terms of the influence of social structures. according to young (2011, 52), structural injustice exists when “social processes put large groups of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time that these processes enable others to dominate or to have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities available to them.” structural injustice is present in various aspects of the modern world, including sexual and racial violence, homelessness, and labor injustice within global sweatshops. structural injustice concerns the way in which social structure restricts people’s opportunities. following young, we can understand social structures as background conditions formed through complicated and dynamic interactions between norms (e.g., institutionalized laws and social norms), schemas (e.g., associated symbols, meanings, and values), and distributions of resources (e.g., public https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/t7wb0/?noauthor=1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 transportation and health-care coverage). 3 by setting up the criteria of norms, associating meaning with different practices, and distributing resources to different groups of people, social structures affect the options available to people and thereby enable or constrain their actions. when a social structure unfairly restricts the options of certain groups of people and exposes them to the threat of undeserved burdens4 while also conferring unearned privilege and power to other groups, this social structure is unjust and should be rectified. two notable features of structural injustice should be touched upon. first, structural injustice can result from interactions between morally permissive actions. while several actions may seem permissive when evaluated separately, they could still result in structural injustice when interacting with each other. young’s example of sandy illustrates this point. a fictional character named sandy is forced into homelessness due to the combined effect of many factors, including the cost of rental housing, the cost of a security deposit, the need to live in a certain location that she considers suitable for her children and her commute to work, and so on. in this case, sandy’s homelessness is not a direct result of deviant individual wrongdoings (e.g., mistreatments by landlords or real estate agents) or repressive policies (e.g., discriminatory policies blocking blacks and jews from owning or renting housing in certain neighborhoods). many factors—such as the cost of housing, the location of mass transportation, and the availability of job openings—may not seem morally problematic when evaluated separately. however, when these multiple components interact in a complicated social process, the resulting social structure may assign certain groups of people to social positions that render them unjustly vulnerable to homelessness. the example of sandy demonstrates that structural injustice is a moral wrong distinct from individual wrongdoings or repressive policies. furthermore, this example emphasizes that solely evaluating each component of the social structure in isolation is insufficient to analyze the influence of the overall social structure. instead, it is essential to take a broader perspective and evaluate the influence of the overall social process to effectively identify structural injustice. second, despite the “structural” aspect of the term “structural injustice,” it is undeniable that individuals play a crucial role in this moral wrong. it is important to note that social structure exists only “in action” (young 2011, 53) and is created and maintained as a cumulative result of individuals’ actions. while most social structures 3 the components of social structure listed here are largely drawn from young (2011) and haslanger (2016). 4 while domination is emphasized in young’s original definition of structural injustice, we suggest that structural injustice could bring about other forms of undeserved burdens, such as exploitation and alienation. see mckeown (2016) for discussions on structural exploitation and lu (2017) for discussions on structural alienation. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/t7wb0/?locator=53 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/t7wb0/?noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/bnwcy/?noauthor=1 lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 are not intentionally designed, individuals play critical roles in producing, sustaining, and shaping them. by following or obeying norms, embracing or challenging shared values, and distributing resources differently, individuals, through their everyday practices, may support or weaken the social structure. therefore, the term “structural injustice” does not imply that individuals play no part in it. instead, the structuralinjustice framework offers a perspective that sees individuals not as discrete entities but as always connected to the broader social structure. 3. ai bias as structural injustice: the example of ai in health care having clarified the idea of structural injustice, we now argue that the issue of ai bias can be understood as an example of structural injustice. from this viewpoint, ai bias exists when ai systems interact with other social factors to exacerbate existing social inequalities, making some groups of people more vulnerable to undeserved burdens while conferring unearned benefits to others. this can occur when a system is developed and used in various social domains, such as hiring, parole decisions, health-care provision, and university admission. in this section, we use ai in health care as an illustrative example of this phenomenon. racial, gender, and class disparities in health care are well documented (nelson 2002; good et al. 2005; manuel 2018). while ai has the potential to mitigate inequalities (i. y. chen, joshi, and ghassemi 2020), interactions between health-care ai development and other social factors often exacerbate existing health disparities. below, we discuss several ways in which these interactions may occur throughout the process of developing health-care ai. although this is not intended to be an exhaustive list, by indicating the various ways in which these interactions can occur, we hope to present a nuanced view of how ai bias may arise. these reflections also highlight ways in which the design of ai systems could potentially mitigate existing health disparities (to be discussed further in section 6.2). 3.1. four stages of ai development the developmental process of health-care ai roughly consists of four stages: problem selection, data curation, algorithm development and validation, and deployment and monitoring (p.-h. c. chen, liu, and peng 2019).5 here, we use the 5 it should be noted that the process of ai development described herein concerns one category of machine learning methods named supervised learning, in which both input and output data are provided for the algorithm to learn the relationship between them. while there are some other categories of machine learning methods, such as unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning, most ai systems in health care are currently developed based on supervised learning. thus, this paper focuses on methods of supervised learning. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/kdrjm https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/qdxxd feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy from fundus images as an example to explain these four stages (gulshan et al. 2016). diabetic retinopathy is an eye complication that often occurs in diabetic patients and can cause blindness. for diabetic patients, diabetic retinopathy screening should be conducted annually. in this screening process, ophthalmologists evaluate fundus images and assign severity scores suggesting different downstream actions. for patients with low scores, no immediate intervention is needed aside from a yearly follow-up; for patients with high scores, active intervention and treatment are advisable. the first step of developing a health-care ai system is to select a problem and formulate it into a machine learning task. in this case, the problem is formulated as the need for the algorithm to take fundus images, automatically classify these images into different severity scores following clinical guidelines, and output the classified scores. the next step after problem selection is data curation. to develop the algorithm and evaluate its performance, two separate input–output paired datasets are needed: a development set for developing the algorithm and a validation set for evaluating the algorithm’s performance (p.-h. c. chen, liu, and peng 2019). in this case, the inputs are the fundus images, and the outputs are the diagnostic severity scores produced by the ophthalmologists reviewing the input images. the process of assigning desired output-prediction results to the input data (in this case, assigning severity scores based on fundus images) is called labeling. typically, the labels of the validation set are obtained through the best available method for establishing the target condition, which is also referred to as a reference standard in the medical literature or a ground truth in the ai literature. in the third stage—algorithm development and validation—engineers or scientists design algorithms and train these algorithms based on the development set. once algorithm development is complete, the final algorithm is applied to the validation set, and the predictions made by the algorithm are compared against the labels of the validation set to measure the algorithm’s performance. the results represent the expected performance of the algorithm for an unseen dataset with a similar data distribution to that of the validation set. lastly, in the deployment and monitoring stage, the finalized algorithm is used in real-world workflows subject to potential regulatory oversight. for example, after a successful prospective pivotal trial (abràmoff et al. 2018), the us food and drug administration authorized an automated tool for diabetic retinopathy screening without the need for a clinician to interpret the results (fda 2018). deployment in real-world scenarios requires integration of the algorithm into the clinical workflow, ensuring that any personnel who may use the algorithm are well trained and that the algorithm applies to the intended population. to ensure consistent algorithm performance, postdeployment monitoring is needed. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/bcsi4 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/qdxxd https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xruw0 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/f3lnq lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 3.2. how health disparities may be exacerbated throughout the ai-development process throughout the four stages of health-care ai development, there are numerous ways in which ai systems may interact with other social factors and intensify existing health disparities. first, there is the problem-selection stage. as previously noted by feminist scholars, the selection of a health-care problem to address can be influenced by multiple factors, such as funding availability, data availability, and the interests of the decision-makers.6 many studies have revealed that funding allocation for health-care research is strongly imbalanced across different populations. as suggested by the 10/90 gap,7 funding for health-care research is disproportionately spent on problems that affect people in higher-income countries, whereas poverty-related diseases in the global south (e.g., malaria) are relatively underfunded (vidyasagar 2006). in the us, cystic fibrosis (a disease that mostly affects white populations) receives 3.4-fold greater funding per affected individual than sickle cell anemia (which mostly affects black populations), despite the fact that both genetic disorders are of similar severity (farooq and strouse 2018). funding availability is not the only resource restriction that influences problem selection. given the need for large datasets for ai development, the availability of digitized data—which is greatly influenced by existing health inequities—affects what problems can be addressed. for example, there is a discrepancy in the availability of electronic health records (ehrs) between high-income and low-income countries. as a result, the selected problems are more likely to be those that occur in high-income countries with ehrs. the interests of the people making problem-selection decisions also influence which problems are selected (i. y. chen et al. 2021, 11). the term gender research gap refers to the lack of research on women’s health conditions and is related to the gender imbalance in the scientific workforce (fisk and atun 2009). a lack of diversity in the workforce making decisions regarding ai development may lead to biased attention in problem selection. after a problem is selected, researchers move on to the second stage—data curation—in which two types of datasets (development and validation sets) are 6 for more detailed discussions regarding the influence of values in the construction of scientific knowledge, see longino (1990), anderson (1995), and wylie and nelson (2007). thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting this connection and providing these references. 7 the 10/90 gap refers to the phenomenon of disparity in health research spending between diseases that affect rich and poor countries. as vidyasagar (2006, 55) puts it, “less than 10% of global funding for research is spent on disease that afflict more than 90% of the world’s population.” https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/ocukb https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/u2dca https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/uirfb/?locator=11 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/m1vsr feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 developed. there are at least three different ways in which data may contribute to ai bias: (1) when the data used for training is insufficiently representative, (2) when existing biases are encoded in the data, and (3) when the reference-standard selection introduces bias.8 the first form of data-related bias occurs when the data used for training are insufficiently representative, especially for marginalized groups. for example, in order to train an ai system for good performance in aiding healthcare decisions, it is critical to include relevant data on health conditions. however, existing health data are often skewed toward more privileged populations. for example, many widely used open datasets are usand europe-centric and thus lack the geodiversity needed to develop ai systems for other parts of the world (shankar et al. 2017). in fact, most of the medical data used to train ai algorithms are derived from three states in the us: california, massachusetts, and new york (kaushal, altman, and langlotz 2020). in the us, ehr datasets include largely white populations with private insurance and much fewer uninsured black and hispanic patients (hing and burt 2009). in the development of ai systems for skin cancer diagnosis, one of the largest databases used for model development collects pigmented lesions disproportionately from light-skinned populations (adamson and smith 2018). such skewed data distributions produce ai systems with better performance for lightskinned individuals than for people of color. data can also become a source of bias when it incorporates existing systemic biases against marginalized groups. for example, studies have shown that many clinical notes incorporate the biases of medical practitioners against marginalized patients, such as african american and lgbt groups (geiger 2003; fallin-bennett 2015). when these clinical notes are used to develop ai systems, the resulting systems will tend to replicate existing biases. finally, data-related bias may occur through the selection of reference standards. as previously mentioned, in algorithm development and validation, the reference standard serves as the ground truth for evaluating the algorithm’s performance. the selection of reference standards often involves a subjective judgment, and the designers’ perceptions of what should serve as the ground truth may be influenced by the existing social structure. for example, when training ai algorithms for disease diagnosis, diagnosis by a doctor is often used as a reference standard, under the implicit assumption that a doctor’s diagnosis reflects objective facts about the severity of a certain disease (pierson et al. 2021). however, doctors with different levels of training or from different countries may be more or less familiar with patients from certain demographic backgrounds, making their diagnoses more or less accurate for certain populations. without taking these factors into 8 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping us clarify the three different ways in which data-related bias can occur. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/9na8c https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/9na8c https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/hye6u https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/hye6u https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/rdtl9 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/rdtl9 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/thzbr https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xrizf lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 account, the selection of reference standards could replicate existing health inequities. one study revealed that a certain algorithm widely used to evaluate health needs tends to assign lower scores to black patients than to white patients (obermeyer et al. 2019). this largely stems from the fact that the designer used health-care costs rather than illness as the reference standard for deciding health needs. multiple social factors—including socioeconomic status, racial discrimination, and reduced trust in the health-care system—have contributed to the relatively low health-care costs spent on black patients. as a result, the choice of health-care costs as a proxy for health needs fails to genuinely reflect health needs and intensifies racial disparities. although the third stage of algorithm development and validation may sound purely mathematical, it also involves decision-making influenced by existing social factors. it is often suggested that ai merely reflects the data distribution, as suggested by the slogan “garbage in, garbage out.” by focusing on the problem with data, the discussion often implicitly portrays the algorithms as objective in the sense that they are not the root of biased outcomes (smith 2018). however, the design of an algorithm can amplify the disparate impact of social factors across different populations (hooker 2021) and thus has the potential to amplify health disparities. for example, in deciding what kind of information should be used for algorithm training, the problem of whether and how demographic information should be incorporated is a complicated issue that poses serious challenges. in some cases, the incorporation of demographic information could lead the algorithm to exploit such information and thus replicate existing biases embedded in the data when making predictions. for example, vaginal birth after cesarean (vbac) scores are assigned by an algorithm designed to predict the success rate of childbirth with prior cesarean section. based on observational studies that have revealed a “correlation between racial identity and the success rate,” it can be concluded that vbac scores “explicitly include a race component as an input” (i. y. chen et al. 2021, 11) and assign lower vbac scores to black and hispanic women compared with white populations (vyas, eisenstein, and jones 2020). while the underlying cause of this correlation between racial identity and success rate is unclear, this association may be due to the unequal distribution of medical resources among different racial groups. by directly using vbac scores as part of its training information, the developed algorithm would replicate the pattern of racial disparity, predict a lower success rate of trial of childbirth labor for black and hispanic women, and thus further exacerbate existing health inequalities. while the example above shows that incorporating demographic information could worsen existing inequalities, it does not imply a necessary link between the inclusion of demographic information and the replication of existing inequalities. on the one hand, even if demographic information is not directly incorporated, https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/pryl2 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/da652 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/oxurr https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/uirfb/?locator=11 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/9xlkm https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/9xlkm feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 confounders between the data and sensitive demographic information (e.g., zip code is often associated with the residents’ race/ethnicity demographics) may persist and thus function to replicate existing patterns (rodriguez et al. 2007; johnson 2021). on the other hand, some approaches have explicitly incorporated demographic information to ensure that the developed algorithms do not utilize this information in making predictions (zhao, adeli, and pohl 2020). these observations indicate that deciding whether and how to incorporate sensitive information requires careful consideration regarding the nature of the information. in validating an algorithm’s performance, the way in which the performance is measured and defined is another area involving normative judgment. the example of the compas-propublica debate highlights the importance of this factor. correctional offender management profiling for alternative sanctions (compas) is a recidivism prediction system used by us courts to analyze the likelihood that a defendant will commit new crimes in the future. in 2016, the website propublica investigated the algorithm for this system and argued that it is racially biased because black defendants are “twice as likely as whites to be labeled a higher risk but not actually re-offend” (angwin et al. 2016). northpointe, the company that developed compas, responded to this criticism and argued that the model made similar rates of mistakes between black and white defendants. as noted by hellman (2020, 816), “the controversy focused on the manner in which such similarity is assessed.” northpointe focused on the predictability between the assigned score and the likelihood of recidivism, whereas propublica pointed out differences in false positive and false negative rates between blacks and whites. the lesson that can be derived from this debate is not an easy answer to the question of which measure is correct; rather, it highlights the complicated nature of making such a decision. finally, after an algorithm has been developed and validated, its deployment for real-world use can have a compounding effect on health disparities. for example, consistency between the population for which an algorithm is deployed and the originally intended use is essential to the algorithm’s performance (kelly et al. 2019). however, for some of the reasons mentioned above, there is a tendency to develop algorithms intended for use with widespread health conditions in privileged groups. as a result, it is easier to ensure consistency in these contexts than in other health conditions or populations. even if an algorithm were developed to improve health-care conditions for diverse groups of people—for example, to aid doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer—this does not mean that different groups of people would benefit similarly from this algorithm. rather, under current social processes, access to the potential benefits of this new technology could be influenced by existing resource distributions. hospitals located in wealthy areas of high-income countries may have more resources to purchase and incorporate the algorithm into their services. furthermore, in https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/2nioc+tuktm https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/ygju2 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/aixaa https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/4sv0u lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 hospitals with more resources, ai systems may play an assisting role for doctors in the process of medical diagnosis; in contrast, in places with more restricted medical resources, there might be a need to rely more heavily on ai systems to make diagnoses despite the quality of their performance. overall, disparate access to and use of ai algorithms could compound with and intensify existing disparities in health resources. in summary, while the analysis above is not intended to be an exhaustive list, it serves to reveal how ai development interacts with various social factors and may function to exacerbate existing health disparities. from a structural-injustice perspective, this analysis provides a nuanced view of how ai bias may occur by analyzing it against the situated social context, thus drawing attention to the interactions between ai systems and other social factors. from this perspective, ai bias is better understood not as a feature of ai algorithms but as the way in which ai systems are embedded in and reinforce the unjust social structure, in which certain groups of people are unfairly exposed to undeserved burdens. the influences between ai systems and existing social injustices are bidirectional. in the case of ai in health care, several structural gender, race, and class inequalities influence the development and application of ai systems, exacerbating existing health disparities. the deployment of these ai systems often strengthens and materializes oppressions (liao and carbonell 2022) along the axes of gender, race, class, and so on. in this way, ai systems and other forms of social injustice reinforce each other and sustain oppressive social structures. 4. toward a structural-injustice approach to ai fairness if ai bias is recognized as a case of structural injustice, then we should also reconceptualize the pursuit of ai fairness. below, we discuss several lessons regarding the goal and methods of ai fairness from the structural-injustice perspective and contrast this perspective with the dominant approach to ai fairness. 4.1. ai fairness is more than ensuring statistical parity first, let us reconsider the goal of ai fairness. the dominant approach portrays ai bias as a problem that is mainly located within the ai system and thus focuses on fixing problematic algorithms. this approach tends to examine the outcomes of ai systems as entities isolated from background conditions and sees the goal of fairness as ensuring the parity of some statistical measures (davis, williams, and yang 2021). critics have pointed out that overemphasis on the discrete analysis of “bad algorithms” pays insufficient attention to the related social and cultural contexts in which these ai systems are situated (hoffmann 2019) and fails to capture the power dynamics that ai systems are embedded in and interact with (le bui and noble 2020). in contrast, the identification of ai bias as a case of structural injustice suggests that the moral https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 problem is not merely located within the ai systems but also results from interactions of the overall social structure, of which ai is one component. by situating ai systems against existing social contexts, the structural-injustice perspective understands the goal of ai fairness differently from the dominant perspective. first, by paying attention to the overall impact of interactions between ai systems and many other social factors, the structural-injustice perspective highlights that ensuring the statistical parity of a model’s performance may be insufficient to achieve ai fairness. given the existing social inequalities, ai systems that “perform similarly well” for different groups may function to reproduce the unjust social structure. instead, the more appropriate goal of ai fairness should be understood as the pursuit of a more just social structure—or a social structure with fewer unjustifiable power imbalances—through the development and use of ai systems when appropriate. alternatively, considering the ultimate goal of structural justice, this perspective may instead suggest that we should not develop or use ai systems in certain domains. the analysis of ai bias through the structural-injustice framework draws attention to aspects of justice that go beyond resource distribution. current discussions surrounding ai bias often emphasize the unequal distribution of goods (hoffmann 2019), such as job opportunities, admissions, and medical resources. it is often suggested that the main problem of ai bias is that it outputs an unequal distribution of resources for different groups of people. based on this understanding, the aim of fixing ai bias is to ensure the parity of distribution across different groups of people. for example, heidari and colleagues suggested that the notion of fairness should be understood as “equality of opportunity” (heidari et al. 2019), 9 and rajkomar and colleagues suggested that ai systems should be made to implement “principles of distributive justice” in terms of ensuring “equality in patient outcomes, performance, and resource allocation” (rajkomar et al. 2018, 886). given that the moral problem of structural injustice lies in the imbalance of power relations between groups of people and their situated social positions, structural analysis calls attention to the variety of components that shape the current power structure. instead of merely asking whether the performance of an ai system, evaluated in isolation, produces fair distributions of goods across different groups of people, structural reflections suggest that the following questions should be raised: how does the ai system, as part of the social structure, shape the existing power structure between different groups of people? does it function to reduce, reproduce, or further exacerbate existing power imbalances? this perspective naturally broadens its attention beyond resource distribution to also consider issues such as recognition and representation, which also contribute to the hierarchies of social status (fraser 9 we thank an anonymous reviewer for contributing this reference. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/i3kto https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/lmkpf/?locator=886&noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/4gapf lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 and honneth 2003). when a comprehensive self-tracking app failed to include a menstruation tracking function (eveleth 2014), it conveyed the message that women’s health experiences were not important. when a global search engine associates black women with degrading stereotypes (noble 2018), they suffer from representational harm. in these cases, even though the harm is not mediated through unequal resource distribution, the use of these systems reinforces unjust power imbalances and thus should be addressed according to the structural-injustice approach to ai fairness. furthermore, by paying attention to unfair power imbalances, the structuralinjustice approach expands its focus beyond the output of ai performance to also consider the power relations embedded in the process of ai development. accordingly, this approach raises the following questions: how are decisions regarding the development of new technological systems made? who is given a say in the process? how does the decision-making process function to support or shape existing power relations? the structural-injustice approach promotes closer scrutiny of the development and decision-making process to avoid the replication of unjustified power relations through this process. 4.2. ai fairness cannot be achieved through debiasing algorithms clarifying the moral nature of ai bias not only helps in identifying related problems that should be addressed, but it also helps in creating better approaches to address ai bias and pursue the goal of fairness. the dominant approach sees the problem of ai bias as primarily computational or mathematical and thus promotes solving ai bias mainly through the technological advancement of debiasing algorithms (davis, williams, and yang 2021). concerns have been raised regarding this overall trend of turning to software engineers and technology corporations as the go-to people for solving this issue. for example, (le bui and noble 2020, 177) have expressed concern that the overemphasis on technological solutions could lead us to become techwashed—that is, overly rely on techno-centric responses. although technological tools should certainly be part of the response to ai bias, they are not a full solution. for one, the task of deciding which statistical measures should be used to build debiasing or fairer algorithms is an issue that goes beyond computations (recall the compas-propublica debate mentioned in section 3.2). while a growing number of matrices of fairness have been proposed, it is mathematically impossible for an algorithm to satisfy all these different matrices simultaneously (friedler, scheidegger, and venkatasubramanian 2016; miconi 2017). making the trade-off between these different statistical metrics requires insights from both ethical and social perspectives. regarding the claim that it is impossible to satisfy all these statistical measures, hedden (2021) recently argued that this does not necessarily entail making a tradehttps://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/4gapf https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yfygm https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/nso23 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/0f431/?locator=177 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/p1a0u+y9hbh feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 off, as most of these statistical criteria are not necessary conditions for fairness. the implication of hedden’s analysis is not that we can easily pursue the goal of fairness by focusing on one or a few statistical measures of an algorithm’s performance. rather, it points out that the source of bias and unfairness may not lie in the algorithm itself but “could instead lie elsewhere: with the background conditions of society, with the way decisions are made on the basis of its predictions, and/or with various side effects of the use of that algorithm, such as the exacerbation of harmful stereotypes” (hedden 2012, 227). this point resonates well with the structural-injustice perspective’s emphasis on the overall influence of social structure, of which the algorithm is merely one component. given that structural injustice has resulted from interactions between ai algorithms and other social factors, the problem of ai bias cannot be fixed solely by designing algorithms with statistical parity. instead, more diverse approaches examining social, political, and institutional structures should also be developed to intervene in the power imbalances surrounding ai development and use. from this perspective, deferring to tech developers and companies for solutions to ai bias is inadequate and risks conferring unearned power to a small group of people. to move forward, the following questions should be reconsidered: who should be responsible for addressing ai bias and pursuing fairness? why should they be responsible? what does being responsible for this issue entail? the following two sections discuss these issues in greater detail. in summation, while the dominant approach tends to see the goal of ai fairness as ensuring the statistical parity of ai model performance, the structuralinjustice approach emphasizes the goal of pursuing a more just social structure, potentially including the development and use of ai systems when appropriate. by recognizing this goal, the structural-injustice approach suggests that ai fairness cannot be achieved by mainly relying on computational tools or deferring to software engineers for solutions. rather, this approach highlights the need to address other factors of the social structure and appeal to more diverse approaches to intervene in the power imbalances surrounding ai development and use. 5. responsibility for ai fairness: insights from the social connection model we have argued that structural injustice is a helpful framework for analyzing the ethical problem of ai bias and reconceptualizing the idea of ai fairness. now, we will discuss what this reconceptualization implies regarding the corresponding responsibility for ai fairness. this section will begin by highlighting the challenges of responsibility attribution based on the conventional liability model. due to the features of ai development, the conditions for assigning moral responsibility are somewhat difficult to meet. while we should not necessarily give up the task of responsibility attribution, the recognition of ai bias as a case of structural injustice lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 suggests that we should consider appealing to other moral grounds in responsibility attribution. thus, we turn to young’s scm of responsibility and discuss how it advances existing discussions on responsibility for ai bias. drawing from the scm, we suggest that all agents participating in the unjust social structure associated with ai bias bear a shared responsibility for this structure and should join collective action for its reform. 5.1. challenges encountered by the liability model two conditions are typically required to assign moral responsibility based on the liability model: the control condition and the knowledge condition (coeckelbergh 2020). the control condition suggests that one is responsible for an action if one is the agent of the action, has caused the action, or has a sufficient degree of control over the action. the knowledge condition suggests that one is responsible for an action if one knows what one is doing in terms of awareness of the action, the moral significance of the action, the consequences of the action, and the alternatives (rudyhiller 2018). if an agent’s action satisfied both conditions, this agent would be held responsible in the liability sense and would typically be subject to blame and punishment. in considering the impact of ai systems and attributing responsibility to the designers, these two conditions are somewhat difficult to meet. the control condition encounters the problem of many hands (van de poel et al. 2012), meaning that too many agents are involved in the development of ai systems. additionally, the control condition encounters the problem of many things, meaning that many technologies are involved in an ai system’s development (coeckelbergh 2020). as illustrated in section 3, the complicated interactions between factors throughout the process of ai development and deployment make it difficult to establish causal chains for the control condition. even if some of the causal chains could be traced, it could be the case that none of the agents involved in development met the criteria of having a sufficient degree of control over the final impact. moreover, the so-called black box problem highlights that ai algorithms are often neither fully transparent nor completely explainable, even to the engineers building them. this feature of ai algorithms makes it difficult for the knowledge condition to be satisfied and thus constitutes a responsibility gap (matthias 2004). these challenges do not mean that the idea of responsibility attribution should be abandoned. in fact, some have proposed counterarguments to the claim of a responsibility gap in ai development, many appealing to plural notions of responsibility that include but also extend beyond accountability (köhler, roughley, and sauer 2017; coeckelbergh 2020; tigard 2021). along these lines, we argue that the structural nature of ai bias warrants consideration of an additional notion of responsibility based on social connections. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/prtbt https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/prtbt https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/389dk https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/389dk feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 5.2. responsibility for ai fairness based on social connections in response to discussions surrounding the activist movement against garment sweatshops, young (2006) argued that a common conception of responsibility (the liability model) was suitable for assigning responsibility for individual wrongdoings but inappropriate for assigning responsibility for structural injustices. several central features of structural injustice make it difficult to satisfy the control and knowledge conditions, thus rendering the application of the liability model unsuitable. first, given that structural injustice is a collective result, it is nearly impossible to trace the exact causal chain of one individual’s action to the resulting injustice in a way that demonstrates that this action is the sufficient cause of the injustice. furthermore, agents typically contribute to the reproduction of the social structure through their everyday practices without awareness of the consequences of their contributions. however, failure to meet the control and knowledge conditions does not suggest that an individual has no involvement in the resulting social structure. instead, as noted in section 2, social structure only exists as a result of participation by various individuals. through participation in the social process, individuals’ everyday practices—whether intentional or not—play a critical role in reproducing and sustaining the social structure. such contributions to the social structure constitute a new moral ground for attributing responsibility. to accommodate the features of structural injustice, young proposed a new model of responsibility attribution called the scm.10 the scm suggests that agents who are “connected” with the social structure, or whose actions contribute to the reproduction of the social structure (mckeown 2018), bear some sort of responsibility (which young called political responsibility) for structural injustice. young suggested that political responsibility does not concern fault-finding and blame but mainly concerns more forward-looking goals, such as reformation of the social structure. furthermore, given that no individual has the power to reform the social structure alone, political responsibility is a shared responsibility, meaning that it can only be discharged through collective action. people who bear this shared responsibility should attempt to coordinate, initiate, or participate in collective action to reform the social structure. the goal of this collective action is to ensure that the power imbalances between different social positions are removed, such that no one will be 10 young emphasized that she did not intend to replace the liability model with the scm but rather intended for the scm to serve as a complementary conception of responsibility that could be applied in contexts for which the liability model is not appropriate. in other words, according to young, the liability model is appropriate for assigning responsibility for individual wrongdoings, whereas the scm is appropriate for assigning responsibility for structural injustice. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xhexq/?noauthor=1 lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 put into social positions where they would be vulnerable to undeserved harm, such as domination, violence, and exploitation.11 in the case of ai bias, like many other structural injustices, the everyday practices of participants in the social structure often fuel its reproduction. thus, according to the scm, nearly all participants in the social structure are responsible for ai bias. in other words, the bearers of political responsibility for addressing ai bias and pursuing fairness include a vast group of people, from the ceos of tech companies and the engineers involved in the development process to the government and ordinary people. it is true that many agents who contribute to the ai-development process may have little control over the actions available to them. it is also true that many of these agents do not intend to make a wrongful impact. nevertheless, by using services supported by ai systems, by passively allowing decisions to be made by others, and by not intervening in the current process of ai development, our actions and inactions contribute to the reproduction of the social structure that results in structural injustice. in this way, participants in the social structure associated with ai bias can be described as structurally complicit (aragon and jaggar 2018) and should thus be held politically responsible for the unjust results. by providing new grounds for responsibility attribution, the scm avoids the challenges that confront the liability model and further implies that a broader group of people bears responsibility for addressing ai bias and pursuing fairness. the idea that nearly everyone bears responsibility for ai bias has been proposed recently but typically for different reasons from those proposed by the scm. for example, zimmermann, di rosa, and kim (2020) suggested that “algorithmic bias is not a purely technical problem for researchers and tech practitioners” but a “moral and political problem in which all of us—as democratic citizens—have a stake.” similarly, wong and simon (2020) suggested that “it is essential for the ethics of ai to include various stakeholders, e.g., policy-makers, company leaders, designers, engineers, users, nonusers, and the general public, in the ethical reflection of autonomous ai.” while we agree with this reasoning regarding democratic citizens and stakeholders, we wish to add that the reasoning underlying the scm emphasizes that all individuals are agents with the capacity to shape the social structure. although no individual can change the social structure independently, by working together with 11 while young’s scm is quite influential in discussions on structural injustice, this model and the corresponding notion of political responsibility have also received many critiques. for example, see nussbaum (2009) for critiques of young’s claim that political responsibility does not concern blame; see gunnemyr (2020) for critiques regarding young’s idea of connections; and see schwenkenbecher (2021) for critiques regarding the lack of specificity on shared responsibility. lin (forthcoming) also points out some theoretical gaps of young’s theory that require further explorations. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 others, one may have the power to decide whether to develop, why to develop, and what to develop. from this perspective, ordinary individuals are not merely “patients” of responsibility who are affected by actions and decisions made by others and thus “may demand reasons for actions and decisions made by using ai,” as suggested by coeckelbergh (2020). rather, ordinary individuals are also agents of responsibility who can act and make decisions regarding the development and use of ai. 6. practical implications for measures to pursue ai fairness the claim that nearly everyone bears responsibility for addressing ai bias and pursuing ai fairness may seem somewhat vague in terms of practical actions. one may ask, “so, what should i do? how can i contribute to this goal?” while case-by-case examinations are required to develop more detailed guidance, in this final section, we aim to provide a theoretical framework to aid in the direction of pursuing ai fairness. 6.1. a division of labor to support collective action according to the scm, political responsibility is a shared responsibility that can only be discharged through collective action. thus, bearing responsibility for ai bias implies joining in collective action to reform the social structure and thus prevent it from sustaining or exacerbating imbalanced power relations. two features of this claim should be noted. first, the content of political responsibility is rather open in the sense that it does not directly specify the required actions. instead, political responsibility identifies some ends (in this case, shaping the social structure into a less unjust form) for agents to use their own discretion in deciding their actions. second, although political responsibility is shared among all participants in the social structure, the concept does not imply that responsibility is shared equally, nor does it imply that similar actions should be made by all responsible agents. instead, one’s situated social position is a crucial factor to consider. an agent’s situated social position greatly influences the power and resources available to the agent and thus has a substantive impact on the forms of action the agent can take to participate in a collective movement. several proposals have been raised to help agents determine their relations to different kinds of structural injustice and decide what actions they should take. young (2011) suggested four parameters of reasoning: power, privilege, interest, and collective ability. agents with power are those with a great capacity to shape the social structure and should use this capacity accordingly; in the case of ai bias, leaders of tech companies and governments fall into this category. agents with privilege are those who benefit from the current social structure, and these individuals should use the abundance of resources available to them to change their everyday practices and support the movement toward a more just social structure. agents who are oppressed have some special interest in reshaping the social structure, and young suggested that these individuals should also https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/prtbt/?noauthor=1 lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 contribute to the collective action such as by sharing their situated knowledge and experience to guide how the social structure should be reshaped. lastly, agents with collective ability are those who belong to a group that can influence the process of reshaping the social structure and should direct their resources accordingly. young’s four parameters of reasoning are not the only model we can use for reference. for example, zheng (2018) provides the alternative role-ideal model, which suggests that individuals can better decide on the actions they should take by contemplating their social roles (e.g., as teachers, parents, employees, or citizens). according to this perspective, scholars should conduct in-depth examinations of the interactions between ai systems and existing social factors to propose diverse intervening approaches; together with the ceos of tech companies, engineers and tech developers should try to develop ai systems that can help mitigate existing power imbalances; citizens of democratic societies should raise concerns regarding the design, development, and deployment of ai as parts of democratic agendas; and governments and lawmakers should work to provide suitable institutional designs that are conducive to these practices. 6.2. recommendations for the pursuit of ai fairness: ai in health care as an example as noted by wawira gichoya and colleagues, while a few guidelines for designing ai systems have recently been proposed, there is still a lack of operationalizing recommendations for the pursuit of increased ai fairness (wawira gichoya et al. 2021). in response, they propose a handful of recommendations, including suggestions such as “engage members of the public in the process of determining acceptable standards of fairness” and “collect necessary data on vulnerable protected groups” (wawira gichoya et al. 2021, 2). although we generally agree with their recommendations, they provide little reasoning in support of these recommendations. to address this gap and advance the discussion on this issue, we aim to provide a more comprehensive (but by no means exhaustive) list of recommendations for the pursuit of ai fairness, derived from structural-injustice analysis. table 1 is an overview of these recommendations, organized along the four stages of ai development, as discussed in section 3. below, we discuss these recommendations and provide examples of how different moral agents may help in achieving the goal of ai fairness. https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/yqnjx/?noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/vm7c feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 stages recommended actions stage 1. problem selection ● assess relevant social contexts and existing social inequalities to identify the potential risks and benefits of developing ai systems. ● engage members of diverse groups (especially marginalized groups) in deciding on problems to address. ● assess overall resource distributions to avoid enlarging resource gaps between groups. stage 2. data curation ● when choosing datasets, evaluate them to ensure that their data distributions are representational with no embedded biases against marginalized groups. ● evaluate the selected reference standard to avoid replicating existing inequality. stage 3. model development and validation ● when deciding what information should be used for algorithm training and what measure should be used for validation, critically analyze the associated social factors. ● engage diverse groups of stakeholders in the process of determining acceptable measures for evaluating model performance. stage 4. model deployment and monitoring ● before deployment, assess consistency between the originally intended use and the population for which the algorithm will be deployed. ● after deployment, constantly evaluate the model’s realworld impacts and make adjustments accordingly. table 1. list of recommendations for the pursuit of ai fairness for the first stage—problem selection—we provide three recommendations that emphasize paying attention to decisions that are rarely made with transparency. first, we suggest that in deciding whether to develop an ai system for a certain use, efforts should be made to assess relevant social contexts and existing social inequalities in order to identify the potential risks and benefits that such a system may bring about. empirical work in the social sciences and other areas could play a crucial role in these efforts (joyce et al. 2021), for example, by noting the unexplained https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/d0ee lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 pain levels of underserved populations and thus motivating engineers to design ai systems that may better assist the diagnosis process in reducing health disparities (pierson et al. 2021). second, attention should be paid to power dynamics throughout the decision-making process. this process should engage members of diverse groups, especially marginalized groups, in identifying and deciding on problems to address. for example, the tech industry could pursue this goal by striving toward a more diverse and demographically representative composition. as feminist scholars have long argued, oppressed individuals, through being situated in marginalized positions, have distinct access to knowledge regarding oppression (collins 1990; hooks 1990). thus, incorporating the viewpoints of oppressed individuals could make the decisionmaking process more attentive to existing social inequalities. furthermore, the act of including marginalized people in this process recognizes their agency and can thus function as an empowering experience. third, efforts should be made at the institutional level to ensure that the resource distribution is not overly skewed toward privileged groups, as in the 10/90 gap in health-care research funding. for the second stage—data curation—we propose two recommendations. first, in choosing and curating datasets, evaluations are required to ensure that their data distributions are representational with no biases against marginalized groups embedded in the data. some efforts should be made by designers (e.g., to choose more representative datasets for training systems), but this goal can only be achieved if efforts are made at the institutional level to collect more representative datasets and make them available. second, reflection is required in choosing a reference standard to avoid replicating the associated injustices against marginalized people. a recent study by pierson and colleagues (pierson et al. 2021) serves as a good example of how paying proper attention to these two aspects of developing ai systems has the potential to help mitigate existing health disparities. it is well documented that underserved populations (e.g., people of color, lower-income patients, and less educated patients) experience higher levels of pain due to diseases such as osteoarthritis of the knee (poleshuck and green 2008; allen et al. 2009; eberly et al. 2018). to inquire about the causes of such pain disparities, pierson and colleagues developed ai systems that take knee x-ray images as input and predict pain scores as output (pierson et al. 2021). being aware of the potential influence of existing human biases on the development of standard clinical guidelines, they intentionally chose not to use physicians’ diagnoses as the reference standards for their algorithm, as this could replicate the existing biases embedded in established medical knowledge. instead, they chose to train the algorithm based on a dataset of knee x-ray images with high racial and socioeconomic diversity, using patients’ reported pain scores as labels. the resulting ai system predicted pain scores with a much lower percentage of unexplained pain disparities than the diagnoses made by physicians following standard clinical guidelines. this result revealed that information https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xrizf https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/celg+2vqr https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xrizf/?noauthor=1 https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/zljbe+w6p1y+b5rbi https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/zljbe+w6p1y+b5rbi https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/xrizf/?noauthor=1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 regarding the severity of osteoarthritis was, in fact, available in the x-ray images, even though the standard clinical guidelines developed decades prior (based mostly on the diagnosis of white british populations) failed to capture this information. this suggests that much of the unaccounted pain of underserved populations is related to the racial and socioeconomic biases embedded in the standard clinical guidelines, which fail to capture some physical causes of pain in underserved groups and thus result in misdiagnosis of the severity of their osteoarthritis. if integrated into clinical practice, the ai system developed by pierson and colleagues could potentially ensure that the reported pain levels of underserved populations are taken more seriously and that the severity of their osteoarthritis is measured more accurately (pierson et al. 2021). in the third stage—algorithm development and validation—it is crucial to recognize that choices about what information should be used and what criteria should be adopted are value-laden. first, in deciding what kind of information should be used to train an algorithm, attention should be paid to the critical assessment of potentially associated social factors (e.g., connections between zip codes and racial/ethnic demographic distributions) to avoid replicating existing inequality. furthermore, in the process of algorithm validation, extra consideration should be paid to social background in determining which criteria should be used as measures (a lesson learned from the compas-propublica debate). while some aspects of decision-making require special expertise and thus are confined to the “experts,” we suggest that at least some part of the decision-making process should incorporate members of the general public, who are highly likely to be impacted by ai systems. some recent attempts to accomplish this have been made through the establishment of a form of political institution called deliberative minipublics. in general terms, deliberative minipublics aim to form microcosms of the public (i.e., convene an assembly of people who demographically represent the public) and provide these representatives with sufficient information and time to deliberate on issues of public concern and obtain results to inform the broader public for relevant discussions (dahl 1989; escobar and elstub 2017). over the past few decades, hundreds of minipublics have been established to address various social issues, recently including the public’s perspectives regarding the development and use of ai. in 2019, the national institute for health research in the uk organized two citizens’ juries on artificial intelligence, in which groups of randomly selected citizens convened for several days to learn, deliberate, and produce a final report regarding the use of ai and the trade-off between the accuracy and explainability of ai systems (van der veer et al. 2021). the results revealed that people’s preferences regarding this trade-off differed across different contexts. for the final stage—algorithm deployment and monitoring—we propose two recommendations. first, before the deployment of an ai system, consistency should https://paperpile.com/c/ocfy4e/whkx lin and chen – artificial intelligence in a structurally unjust society published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 be assessed between the originally intended use and the population for which the system will be deployed, as major inconsistencies between these factors generally worsen the performance of an ai system. second, after deployment, efforts should be made to constantly evaluate the system’s real-world impacts and make any necessary adjustments. one important lesson that can be drawn from structuralinjustice analysis is that, since unjust results are formed through complicated dynamics between many social factors, new forms of injustice could still occur even if careful examinations were adopted throughout the ai-development process. therefore, it is important to treat the process of ai development as circular, in that postdeployment evaluations could potentially promote adjustments in the first three stages. like many of our recommendations for the other stages, adherence to these recommendations would require effort from various parties: lawmakers and policymakers, who could help enforce evaluations before and after deployment; owners of business corporations, who hold enormous power in shaping the industrial culture and distributing resources; and various developers, who are tasked with making assessments. mobilizing appropriate and required collective action to respond to structural injustice is never easy work. rooted in structural-injustice analysis, our recommendations aim to provide a core theoretical framework upon which other domain experts can build to develop and realize more detailed mechanisms. with these collective efforts, we can better approach the goal of ai fairness. 7. conclusion the issue of ai bias poses urgent ethical challenges for modern societies and demands that efforts should be poured into pursuing ai fairness. however, to do so effectively, we must clarify what the notions of ai bias and ai fairness should entail. this paper argues that structural injustice provides a fruitful conceptual framework for analyzing the moral problem of ai bias, understanding the corresponding responsibility, and exploring more holistic responses to ai fairness. viewed from this perspective, the problem of ai bias is a case of structural injustice resulting from interactions between ai and many other social factors. furthermore, the goal of ai fairness should be to pursue a more just social structure, potentially with the development and use of ai systems when appropriate. drawing on the scm of responsibility, we further argue that all participating agents in the unjust social structure associated with ai bias bear a shared responsibility to join collective action with the goal of reforming the social structure. accordingly, we provide a list of practical recommendations for agents in various social positions to contribute to this collective action. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 acknowledgements earlier versions of this paper were presented at the feminist, social justice, and ai workshop, department of philosophy at the university of georgia, humanizing machine intelligence (hmi) project at australian national university, center for bioethics at new york university, department of philosophy at university of massachusetts amherst, and the institute of philosophy of mind and cognition at national yang ming chiao tung university. we are very grateful to participants at the abovementioned venues as well as two anonymous referees of feminist philosophy quarterly for constructive feedback. references abràmoff, michael d., philip t. lavin, michele birch, nilay shah, and james c. folk. 2018. “pivotal trial of an autonomous ai-based diagnostic system for detection of diabetic retinopathy in primary care offices.” npj digital medicine 1 (august): 39. 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young, iris marion. 2006. “responsibility and global justice: a social connection model.” social philosophy & policy 23, no. 1 (january). cambridge university press: 102–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0265052506060043. ———. 2011. responsibility for justice. oxford: oxford university press. zhao, qingyu, ehsan adeli, and kilian m. pohl. 2020. “training confounder-free deep learning models for medical applications.” nature communications 11:6010. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19784-9. zheng, robin. 2018. “what is my role in changing the system? a new model of responsibility for structural injustice.” ethical theory and moral practice 21, no. 4 (august): 869–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9892-8. zimmermann, annette, elena di rosa, and hochan kim. 2020. “technology can’t fix algorithmic injustice.” boston review, january 9, 2020. https://bostonreview .net/articles/annette-zimmermann-algorithmic-political/. ting-an lin is an interdisciplinary ethics postdoctoral fellow in the mccoy family center for ethics in society and the institute for human-centered artificial intelligence at stanford university. she earned her phd in philosophy from rutgers university, where she also received a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies. she specializes in ethics, feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy. her recent research focuses on ethical issues that arise from the interactions between social structures and individuals, and she is developing a moral framework for addressing them. po-hsuan cameron chen is a staff software engineer and a tech lead manager of machine learning at google research and google health. cameron’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and health care. his research has been published in leading scientific, clinical, and machine learning venues, including nature, jama, and neurips. he received his phd in electrical engineering and neuroscience from princeton university and his bs in electrical engineering from national taiwan university. this work was done in personal time; views are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of google llc. 14191 lin and chen title page 14191 lin and chen final format feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 3 recommended citation tremain, shelley lynn. 2024. “when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 3. 2024 when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability shelley lynn tremain biopolitical philosophy sltremain@gmail.com tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability by shelley lynn tremain abstract in this article, i aim to demonstrate that moral responsibility theory produces, legitimates, and even magnifies the considerable social injustice that accrues to disabled people insofar as it implicitly and explicitly promotes a depoliticized ontology of disability that construes disability as a naturally disadvantageous personal characteristic or deleterious property of individuals rather than identifies it as an effect of power, an apparatus. in particular, i argue that the methodological tools of “analytic” philosophy that philosophers of moral responsibility theory employ to establish the philosophical domain in which they engage have distinctly detrimental effects on disabled people. keywords: apparatus of disability, conceptual revolution, ontology, structural gaslighting why this article? this article contributes to growing discussions within philosophy about the ways in which and the extent to which philosophy and, indeed, philosophers are culpable with respect to the production and perpetuation of unjust social, economic, and political arrangements. a central motivational assumption of the article is that moral responsibility theory produces, legitimates, and even magnifies the considerable injustice that accrues to disabled people insofar as it implicitly and explicitly promotes a depoliticized ontology of disability that actively materializes disability as a naturally disadvantageous personal characteristic or deleterious property of individuals rather than interrogates it as an effect of power, an apparatus. one aim of the article is thus to articulate a transformative social ontology of disability that would counter the prevailing claims about disability that moral responsibility theory advances: a social ontology of disability designed to impel the cultural, economic, institutional, philosophical, and political change required to transform the current social situation of disabled people that the prevailing naturalized conception of disability fosters and reinforces. in this regard, the article reprises and expands my call for a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers understand the metaphysics of disability (tremain 2017a); that is, the argument of the article calls for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers research, write, and teach about the elements that constitute the ontology and ontological status of disability. furthermore, the argument beckons a conceptual uprising with respect to how their philosophical claims about disability should be positioned in relation to the fields of social ontology and responsibility theory themselves. the article is designed in part to show that the methodological tools of analytic philosophy that philosophers of moral responsibility theory employ to establish the philosophical domain in which they engage have distinctly detrimental effects on disabled people. say goodbye to moral responsibility theory as you know it traditionally, philosophers who work in the area of moral responsibility theory (e.g., broad 1934; van inwagen 1983) have disregarded the role that systemic and structural relations of power play in moral decision-making, failing to recognize the constitutive nature of these relations of power and offering an analysis of responsibility that purportedly stands apart from them (ciurria 2021, 2023). these philosophers have instead been variously preoccupied with debates about freedom and determinism in the context of individual agency and with juridical representations of power that construe the relation between power and moral decision-making in terms of negative liberty and duties—that is, construe power in (neo)liberal terms as a repressive entity that subtracts from a given subject’s agency. kayla wiebe and amy mullin’s (2023) recent article on relational autonomy and the “decision-making” of poor disabled people in canada who use maid (medically assisted suicide/euthanasia) to end their social suffering extends this tradition and its failure to examine the productive constraints of biopolitics for the constitution of subjectivities under neoliberalism (see also tremain 2023, 2024). a more astute and up-to-date philosophical approach to responsibility would embed moral decision-making and its constitutive effects within matrixes of power, while conceiving the power relations that condition decision-making practices as generative rather than prohibitive (as liberal political theory typically casts them): relations of power produce discursive objects; candidates for truth and falsehood according to which subjects act; the historical conditions of possibility within which subjects may choose; philosophical positions; and socially situated subjects—that is, subjectivities and identities. despite the universalism that traditional (analytic) moral responsibility theory presupposes, relations of power produce a diversity of subject positions to which moral responsibility is differentially attributed and distributed. in other words, relations of power have already put in place the possible options from which diverse subjects may choose to act and the disparate degrees to which they will be rendered responsible for their actions and alleged actions (tremain 2006, 2010, 2017a). tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 mich ciurria has argued for a critical approach to responsibility that both underscores its political construction “as a system of practices that enforce hierarchies of power” and examines the structural injustices that the concept of responsibility itself enables and portends. hence, ciurria’s work on responsibility draws attention to “the connections between responsibility and contemporary apparatuses of power,” apparatuses that, for example, racialize certain social groups—especially black and indigenous people—“as criminal and deviant,” while revering other social groups—in particular, white people—“as presumptively praiseworthy, honest, and forgivable” (ciurria 2021, 168). ciurria points out that current responsibility practices, rather than manifestations of a universal and transhistorical inherent human property of individual subjects, evince a relatively recent phenomenon. she notes, for instance, that most theorists of responsibility believe that traditional indigenous societies distributed responsibility much more equitably: these traditional societies constituted highly egalitarian political systems in which the maintenance of relationships was crucial to the survival of both the individual and the group. indeed, as dianne biin and coauthors deborah canada, john chenoweth, and lou-ann neel explain, indigenous ethical teaching begins in infancy through the practice of storytelling. it is storytelling (rather than appeal to decontextualized duties and principles) that “is used to guide behaviour and solidify belonging and responsibility to the family, community, and larger world,” they say (binn et al. 2021, sec. 3). “through stories,” biin and coauthors point out, “a child develops identity and learns about moral responsibility.” (sec. 3) it is “through stories,” they also note, that “the community articulates and embraces its shared valued system” and, thus, as they point out, “ethical thinking emerges from a community’s customs, teachings, and ideals” (sec. 3). in seven sacred teachings: niizhwaaswi gagiikwewin, david bouchard and joseph martin (2010) write, furthermore, that indigenous teachings involve notions of mutual care, collective decision-making, and sustainability. together with storytelling, these teachings shape indigenous notions of responsibility and respect for the land, water, air, and sky, as well as all their inhabitants. says ciurria: the distinctly oppressive nature of responsibility in the liberal west is a fairly recent invention. ciurria’s approach to moral responsibility theory assumes that “responsibility practices [of the liberal west are] oppressive social techniques that can only be changed through social engineering. they are not ahistorical evolutionary impulses” (ciurria 2021, 169). although ciurria allows that blame and praise often seem to be instinctive and reflexive responses to given states of affairs, she attributes the apparent transparency and seemingly impulsive nature of these responses to the pervasiveness of apparatuses of power that shape social interactions at present. ciurria argues that “the responsibility system” of the liberal west—and the judgments, expectations, and attitudes that it comprises—“enforces feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 and upholds the asymmetric and oppressive terms of the domination contract” (179), ensuring that socially privileged people remain in their positions of privilege and domination. in short, culturally dominant responsibility practices (and the biased ontological assumptions which they reproduce and upon which they rely) constitute a mechanism of social power that reinstates systemic and structural injustices. many philosophers espouse arguments that purport to sever the causal connections between the pernicious conception of disability that currently prevails in philosophy, the oppressive responsibility practices that ensue from this grievous conception, and the social, economic, and political structures and practices whose production this conception reinforces, effectively obfuscating these structures and practices while naturalizing their consequences. for example, although a number of philosophers argue that there is a “moral duty” to practice “procreative beneficence” and thus produce the genetically “best” offspring, they adamantly deny that their convictions about responsibility for the elimination of prospective disabled people thereby provide rationale for authorities to limit the resources—namely, with respect to education, income, health care, employment, housing, and so on—available to already existing disabled people (e.g., savulescu 2001; savulescu, ter meulen, and kahane 2011; anomaly and johnson 2023; cf. hall 2016). these philosophers would, furthermore, dismiss the suggestion that their philosophical assumptions and arguments about the best children are co-constitutive with their perceptions of disabled philosophers as potential colleagues and thus have implications for the demographic constitution of professional philosophy itself. yet we should regard the rebuttals that philosophers elaborate in these respects as forms of structural gaslighting that cover over the historical conditions of possibility for the construction and perception of disabled people as defective from which this putative (eugenic) duty and the economic and other inequities that consequently accrue to disabled people derive. nora berenstain has introduced the term structural gaslighting to refer to “any conceptual work that functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” (berenstain 2020, 734). as berenstain explains it, for example, white feminist philosophers enact structural gaslighting when they invoke epistemologies and ideologies of domination that actively and routinely disappear and obscure the actual causes, mechanisms, and effects of oppression in ways that undermine the efforts and advancement of black women, women of color, and other minoritized women. my argument is that the practices of structural gaslighting, according to which there is no causal connection between the conception of disability as a natural misfortune and the inequities and injustice that disabled people confront—that, in other words, philosophers who advance the prevailing (mis)conception of disability as a defect of individuals bear no culpability for the social tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 exclusion and disenfranchisement of disabled people as a group—are strategic elements of what i call “the apparatus of disability” (tremain 2017a, 2020a). the conception of disability that prevails in moral responsibility theory and philosophy in general construes disability as a philosophically uninteresting and valueneutral biological trait—that is, a prediscursive entity, with transhistorical and transcultural properties that medicine and science can astutely recognize and represent in ways that promote the prescribed correction or elimination of the entity. for example, p. f. strawson, whose claims redefined responsibility as a social practice of exchange between moral agents, uncritically presupposed this conception of disability insofar as he argued that people who are “neurotic,” “warped or deranged,” “schizophrenic,” “compulsive,” “insane,” or “delusional” are not members of the moral community, that is, should not be regarded as moral agents who participate in the relationships that characterize responsibility practices (strawson [1974] 2008; in ciurria 2023, 36–37, 45). in strawson, in other words, the parameters of the moral domain are delineated and secured through the exclusion of disabled people. even philosophers of moral responsibility who recognize that relations of social power—and, indeed, structural injustice—condition attributions of responsibility unquestioningly invoke naturalized and individualized constructions of disability in order to thereby circumscribe a moral landscape and a set of morally relevant agents. for example, in their introduction to a collection on “the social dimensions of moral responsibility,” katrina hutchison, catriona mackenzie, and marina oshana assume an essentialist ontology of disability, according to which disability is a self-evidently natural and deleterious characteristic (difference, attribute, or property) that some people embody or possess, in order to argue thus: “individuals whose capacities are intact may be (incorrectly) judged to lack the relevant capacities due to their social situation. others’ assessments of the moral agency of an individual might track social identity rather than capacity” (hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana 2018, 9). for hutchison and coauthors (as for strawson and other philosophers of moral responsibility), the construction of certain modes of existence as idealized “capacities” is not itself a technology of power; nor are prevalent perceptions of these so-called relevant capacities (and “lack” thereof) instruments of social power. these perceptions of one’s ostensibly natural capacities are not constitutive of one’s social identity and situation; nor, furthermore, are these allegedly natural capacities contingently constructed products and effects of this situation. thus, these authors assume (like strawson) that they can use their distinction—that is, use their “capacity criterion” (jenkins 2024)—to determine who should be included in accounts of moral responsibility and who should be excluded. as stephanie jenkins convincingly argues, philosophical claims and theories that assume such criteria in order to determine which beings deserve full moral feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 consideration are both ableist and speciesist, providing rationale (and rationalization) for the mistreatment and disregard of both disabled humans and nonhuman animals. my call for a conceptual revolution with respect to the ontology of disability that gets employed in philosophical analyses of responsibility (and metaphilosophical analyses of responsibility theory) will be surprising to most philosophers and odd to many of them. in particular, philosophers who assume an ontology according to which disability is a prediscursive human attribute, characteristic, difference, or property take for granted that the emerging field of social ontology—which is dominated by analytic metaphysics of gender and race—by definition, does not encompass disability and its conceptual objects. disability, they surmise, is neither, say, a social practice nor a social fact; nor do the people who embody or possess this allegedly prediscursive characteristic or property of disability—that is, “people with disabilities”—constitute a social group, though they may, these philosophers imply, constitute some sort of natural composite under the rubric of medico-scientific diagnoses. these philosophers assume, furthermore, that since the ontological status of disability is neither established nor constituted through sociality, they need not study it as such. hence, although sex, gender, race, sexuality, class, and other subjecting markers are increasingly regarded in philosophical circles as intriguing social kinds rather than morally arbitrary natural kinds; as provocative socially constructed categories rather than mundane necessary designations; and as contingent circumstances rather than determined outcomes, (the apparatus of) disability rarely receives the compliment of critical attention from philosophers that a social constructionist thesis about its ontology would afford (see, for example, epstein 2018). as with the naturalization in philosophy of the subjecting apparatuses of race, gender, age, and sexuality (among others), however, so, too, with the naturalization of disability in philosophy: the naturalization of these apparatuses in philosophy constitutes structural gaslighting. as technologies of structural gaslighting, the epistemologies and ontologies of domination assumed in moral responsibility theory that persistently naturalize disability are, i contend, among the historical conditions of possibility for the ongoing reconstitution of disabled people as defective, unreliable, and suboptimal, and thus not viable colleagues in philosophy. in other words, structural gaslighting is a strategic mechanism of the apparatus of disability that obscures the systemic and structural character of ableism in philosophy, making it difficult for disabled philosophers to both recognize the intentional and nonsubjective nature of their struggles within philosophy and identify the discipline and profession of philosophy themselves as culpable for the structural injustice that produces these difficulties. in short, these technologies of gaslighting—these epistemologies and ontologies of domination—repeatedly sabotage most attempts to improve the professional situation and position of disabled philosophers and, in tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 addition, have material, political, and economic implications for disabled people in society at large (tremain 2020a). the assumption that disability is a natural category or kind and not properly studied in the subfields of social ontology and moral responsibility theory has implications for the shape and direction of these subfields and for the shape and direction of the discipline of philosophy more generally. inasmuch as philosophers think that critical examination of disability is not pertinent to research and teaching in social metaphysics and responsibility theory, critical philosophical work about disability is seldom included in potentially relevant conference rosters; nor is this work on disability commissioned for edited collections about topics related to social metaphysics or moral responsibility; nor, furthermore, is it cited in bibliographies of publications on topics in these areas of inquiry. rather, philosophers remain resolute that they appropriately and adequately address disability in the subfield of bioethics and cognate fields of inquiry. in these domains of inquiry too, however, the prevailing philosophical understanding of disability as a universally disadvantageous personal characteristic that should be managed in some way persists largely unquestioned and uncritically accepted; indeed, the simultaneous creation and elimination of disability as a deleterious characteristic of individuals are, i maintain, the desiderata of bioethics and its cognates. a different understanding of disability holds that the ontology of disability, the ontological status of disability, and the so-called application of philosophical principles and theoretical frameworks to the phenomena of disability are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing, entangled, and entwined. on this understanding of disability, the ontology of disability is always already a social, valueladen, and contingent state of affairs, a historically specific event. notice that this historicized understanding of disability suggests an argument according to which the distinction between theoretical philosophy and applied philosophy—a constitutive distinction that structures and constrains the prevailing conception of disability—is an artifact and mechanism of philosophical discourse that enables the naturalization and sedimentation of contingent phenomena, including the naturalization of disability and the conceptual objects that it comprises. hence, the singular importance of an article about the naturalization and materialization of disability— that is, the social ontology of disability—for a scholarly collection devoted to feminist approaches to political and moral responsibility. notice, moreover, that chipping away at the naturalization and substantivization of disability in this way invariably reveals that the term social ontology is redundant because like the significance attributed to disability, race, money, laws, responsibility, baptisms, and so on, the significance attributed to ontology is always already a socially saturated product with a certain contingent and situated history that can be traced genealogically. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 philosophical work (such as mine) that understands disability as an apparatus of power—that is, as a heterogeneous aggregate of discourses, laws, institutions, statements, and practices—rather than as a prediscursive and ahistorical personal characteristic, difference, or property falls squarely within the philosophical realm and practice of social ontology in ways that shift how responsibility is deployed. in other contexts, i draw on michel foucault’s technique of genealogy and ideas about the productive character of (bio)power to explain how disability and its allegedly prediscursive foundation, impairment, have been intentionally and nonsubjectively materialized and naturalized in (for example) public policy, administrative practices, genetic technologies, and various subfields of philosophy—including bioethics, philosophy of mind, feminist philosophy, and political philosophy—in ways that advance certain ableist agendas and achieve distinct eugenic goals (tremain 2006, 2010, 2015, 2017a, 2019). the representation within bioethics (as well as cognitive science and cognate fields) of disability as an inherently disadvantageous personal characteristic and the intentional and nonsubjective relations of power co-constitutive with this representation—according to which responses to the problem of disability are thereby individualized and medicalized as prevention, cure, institutionalization, and elimination—contribute considerably to the antagonistic environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy, reproducing our exclusion from the profession and the marginalization of our critical philosophical work on disability from the discipline. indeed, bioethics operates as an area of philosophy whose guiding assumptions and discursive practices run directly counter to both the identification of disability as an apparatus of power (rather than a property of subjects) and the claim that disabled philosophers who take this approach to disability are credible philosophers and worthy colleagues (rather than merely “troublemakers”). in short, disabled philosophers of disability confront a wave of epistemic oppression and ridicule if they criticize bioethics too loudly, especially if they do so in ways that (1) contest the consolidation and status of the subfield itself in order to expose its eugenic impetus and gatekeeping and (2) interrogate how the subfield is grounded in and revolves around constructions of personal responsibility, autonomy, and selfdetermination that implicate it in neoliberal social and economic projects (tremain 2006, 2010, 2017a, 2024; hall 2016, 2021; ciurria 2023). such practices of structural epistemic injustice and personalized scorn underwrite concealment of the eugenic violence that the ontological assumptions presupposed in predominant forms of moral responsibility theory facilitate. no method is neutral the artifactual division between two methodological approaches of philosophy—namely, (so-called) analytic philosophy and (so-called) continental tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 philosophy—and the artificial elevation of the former approach—that is, analytic philosophy—have enabled the naturalization and individualization of disability in moral responsibility theory to persist and, in addition, contribute to and reinforce asymmetrical relations of power in philosophy more generally. the examples from responsibility theory that i have supplied thus far constitute only the tip of the iceberg. hence, i want to expand my discussion of the ways in which philosophers have employed the methodological tools of analytic philosophy to cultivate their style of philosophical practice and delineate the domain in which (their) philosophical discourse will circulate, indicating the distinctly detrimental effects of these tools on disabled people by doing so. in this section, therefore, i offer an account of tina fernandes botts’s examination of the differences between these two approaches in order to identify the deleterious character of the analytic philosopher’s method. in the next section, i demonstrate how botts’s arguments can be used to illuminate the naturalization, materialization, and individualization of the apparatus of disability in analytic philosophy and analytic philosophy of disability. within both the discipline and profession of philosophy, the precise nature of the differences between the two methodological approaches has been a hotly contested matter and source of controversy for quite some time, in part because these approaches embody disparate institutional positions with respect to status and prestige. while analytic philosophy continues to be central to the discipline and analytic philosophers continue to be esteemed in the profession—as evidenced by (among other things) the book lists of the most prominent academic publishers, faculty rosters of the most prestigious departments, placement records of these departments, and content of the most highly ranked journals—new materialists, foucault scholars, critical phenomenologists, existentialists, and everyone else who gets lumped under the banner of “continental philosophy” remain subordinated and marginalized within the discipline and profession, widely perceived by many, if not most, analytic philosophers as less rigorous, less serious, and not really “philosophical” at all. although these “continental” philosophers ignore the ideas and arguments of analytic philosophers at their peril due to the centrality of analytic philosophical discourse to the tradition, discipline, and current profession of philosophy, many (if not most) analytic philosophers themselves are, alternatively, uninformed about the main historical figures of so-called continental philosophy and unfamiliar with the work that their colleagues who draw on authors, ideas, and arguments in the aforementioned areas produce. for example, in their entry to the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (sep) on models and definitions of disability, david wasserman and sean aas (2022) proudly display their bias for the work of analytic philosophers of disability while demonstrating their lack of familiarity with alternative philosophical approaches to disability. in particular, wasserman and aas discount my work in philosophy of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 disability on the basis of their misunderstanding of foucault’s claims about the relationship between knowledge, truth, and power. (foucault and i are the only nonanalytic philosophers mentioned or cited in this sep entry.) in an especially awkward section of the sep entry, that is, these authors argue that my approach to disability, which draws on foucault, is no more original than foucault’s own (as they put it) “famous claim” that “knowledge is power.” as seasoned readers of foucault will recognize, however, wasserman and aas, insofar as they attribute to foucault this reductive understanding of the relation between knowledge, truth, and power, have reproduced a common misinterpretation of his work. foucault’s understanding of the relation between knowledge, truth, and power was far more complex and complicated than this misinterpretation of him implies. for instance, foucault’s use of the neologism power/knowledge was designed to assert that power and knowledge are mutually constitutive and reciprocal rather than identical and isomorphic, as wasserman and aas indicate. as daniele lorenzini (2022) notes, furthermore, in foucault’s late and more sophisticated reflections on the topic, he characterized the relation between these phenomena in terms of the government of subjects in relation to truth, dispensing with the term power/knowledge altogether. ultimately, wasserman and aas, in order to dismiss my description of the apparatus of disability, invoke the “reliability of the commonsense judgments and linguistic intuitions appealed to by rival analytic definitions” of the concept of disability (wasserman and aas 2022). yet as robin dembroff—one of a growing number of “analytic” feminist philosophers who themselves critique the oppressive and hostile character of the methodology and culture of analytic philosophy—has asked: “whose commonsense constitutes philosophically legitimate commonsense? whose pretheoretical concepts and terms constrain philosophical inquiry? and whose intuitions are philosophical intuitions?” (dembroff 2020, 403; see also haslanger 2017; rodier and brennan 2024). that wasserman and aas did not equitably consider alternative—that is, “nonanalytic”—philosophical approaches to disability in their sep entry evinces a dismissive demeanor that contributes to asymmetrical relations of power in philosophy and places undue limits on philosophical work with respect to disability. as botts (2018, 57–58) writes, in general, the culture of analytic philosophy is hostile to women, persons of color, persons with disabilities, persons with non-binary gender identities, persons from underprivileged upbringings and backgrounds, those working on philosophical questions outside of a very narrow list of what are considered acceptable or philosophically reputable areas of specialization, and continental philosophy in general. this well-known hostility has created an environment in which those other than straight, white, able-bodied, cis-gender, economically tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 secure males who work in a few narrow areas of philosophy are marginalized and excluded from the conversations, institutions, professional conferences, and power structures that constitute the philosophical mainstream. since it is philosophers from these marginalized and excluded populations who usually work on philosophical questions dealing with race, gender, disability, and sexuality, . . . these sorts of philosophical questions are also, in the main, excluded from the philosophical mainstream (and simultaneously from mainstream respect). botts maintains that lack of familiarity with the work of continental philosophers and thus failure to draw upon the insights of continental philosophy, as well as an “almost exclusive reliance on certain traditionally analytic methods” (botts 2018, 55), are among the reasons why an unsubstantiated and otherwise problematic article that was published in a leading peer-reviewed feminist philosophy journal formulates unwarranted analogies between race and transgender. botts allows that the methodology of the article “meets the standards of professional research from the analytic perspective” (55); she argues, however, that the lack of attention to historical and social context, which typifies the methodology of the analytic approach to philosophy, is in fact a central problem of the article—that is, the disregard for historical and social context that typifies the analytic approach to philosophy renders the approach (and thus the article in question) inadequate for critical philosophical inquiry about subjecting social categories such as race and gender. as botts explains it, “methodological tools for doing philosophy that take into account the historical context of the phenomenon under consideration (such as are often used in the continental tradition) are arguably better suited for examining questions of race and gender than acontextual or ahistorical methodological tools (such as are often used . . . in the analytic tradition)” (51). for botts, the methodologies of continental philosophy facilitate a more complete approach to the study of race and gender than the methodologies of analytic philosophy alone typically provide because the former methodologies take account of the historical emergence and vicissitudes of social and political phenomena such as race, gender, material inequalities, and legacies of structural oppressions, as well as the ways in which these social and political phenomena shape the experiences of the people subjected to them and are shaped by these experiences. as she puts it, texts that can be situated squarely in the continental tradition generally embody a strong historical consciousness that precludes consideration of them without reference to some historical context. indeed, botts suggests that this claim about the indispensability of historical context can, arguably, be extrapolated to objects of philosophical contemplation in general, in addition to its incorporation into analyses of social categories such as race, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 transgender, impairment, and class or apparatuses of social power such as racism, cisgender, ableism, or classism (60–61). to advance these claims according to which the methodologies of analytic philosophy render the approach insufficient and even unsuitable for critical philosophical work on race, racism, and other social phenomena, botts draws upon the work of hans-johann glock (2008) who, in his what is analytic philosophy?, endeavored to identify and elaborate the methodological interconnections between distinctive subtraditions of analytic philosophy. the first candidate that glock identified as a key feature of the method(s) of analytic philosophy is the “decomposition of complex phenomena into simpler constituents” (glock 2008, 154; in botts 2018, 56). as botts notes, the “decompositional project” (to use glock’s term) was the crux of the work of the logical atomists such as g. e. moore who, in the words of glock, “tried to define complex concepts in terms of simpler ones, up to the point at which one [. . .] reached indefinable simple notions like goodness” (glock 2008, 154; in botts 2018 56). the second candidate that glock noted as a key feature of analytic methods is the “scientific spirit,” with, in botts’s words, “its detached repose and attempts at ‘objectivity’” (57). the third candidate for a distinctly analytic approach to philosophy that glock identified is the use of puzzle cases and thought experiments. the fourth candidate for a key feature of analytic methodology, according to glock, is that the approach proceeds in a “piecemeal and tentative” fashion, operating “step by step” (glock 2008, 164–68; in botts 2018, 57). botts writes, furthermore, that glock regarded the focus on clarity as an additional wellestablished candidate for what could count as a distinctive feature of the analytic method (glock 2008, 168; in botts 2018, 57). a preoccupation with reason and rationality is another hallmark feature of analytic methods that glock pointed out, botts notes (glock, 2008, 174; in botts 2018, 57). botts maintains that all the features that glock identified as characteristic elements of analytic philosophical methods are emblematic of an approach to inquiry that is decontextualized and does not account for the concrete lived experiences of actual people. as botts explains it, the decomposition of complex topics into simpler components relies upon the assumption that these simpler components can be adequately addressed in a vacuum. the “scientific spirit,” botts argues, is also removed from context, rendering appeal to lived experience as “unprofessional” and “irrelevant,” if not an obstruction to objective truth and knowledge. in this regard, botts points out, furthermore, that “continental” thinkers deride the preoccupation with reason in the analytic tradition insofar as it “entails a hubris about the human capacity for objectivity that is responsible for much harm done in the world, including the effects of fascism, genocide, silencing, and (primarily epistemic) oppression of many other sorts and varieties” (botts 2018, 57). tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 botts argues that although the scientific quest for objectivity, the veneration of reason, the emphasis given to clarity, and the attention paid to other features traditionally associated with the best analytic method enable the production of good work on certain topics, these very features, unless supplemented with methodological tools that embrace lived experience, are not helpful and can be quite harmful when they are employed to examine nonideal social or other philosophical problems that concern race and racism in the united states. as botts (2018, 55) puts it, “when it comes to addressing socially embedded philosophical problems responsibly, help is arguably needed from the continental tradition in order to make real progress toward getting the answers right.” botts wants us to recognize that different philosophical methods are required to suitably address diverse types of problems. as she states, therefore, “there is no one true philosophical method that is suited to addressing all of the varied and complex questions with which the discipline of philosophy is concerned” (56). rather, as botts explains it, philosophical approaches to race and racism should “weave together” analytic and continental methodological tools or should otherwise operate between the two traditions by, for instance, employing careful reasoning while incorporating lived experiences. my argument is that philosophers of disability should follow botts’s recommendations with respect to the directions of their future work in the area. indeed, features of the methodology of analytic philosophy that, according to botts, render it inadequate for work in critical philosophical work on race and racism can likewise be recognized in analytic philosophy of disability, as wasserman and aas’s remarks indicate. these features of analytic philosophy, i submit, render it inadequate and unsuitable for the articulation of a conception of disability and social ontology of disability that aim to hasten the radical structural and institutional change required to significantly transform the circumstances of disabled people’s lives. although philosophy of disability that utilizes the methodologies of analytic philosophy is apparently designed to improve understanding of disability within philosophy and society more generally, the methodological tools of analytic philosophy, the ontological commitments that work in analytic philosophy of disability makes, and the understanding of power as repressive that analytic philosophy of disability generally assumes greatly restrict the change that the exclusive use of these methodological devices could provoke. in what follows, i draw on botts’s critical remarks about inquiry into race and racism that uses the methodological tools of analytic philosophy in order to further argue that these tools depoliticize and decontextualize philosophy of disability and hence cannot deliver a robust account of the historicist and performative relations of social power that constitute the apparatus of disability. in addition, i build upon my discussion of the ableist exclusions embedded in prominent (analytic) responsibility theory to indicate how the methodological tools of analytic philosophy contribute in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 unique ways to the social harms that the apparatus of disability comprises and generates. the analytic philosopher’s penchant for conceptual distinctions is a good point from which to continue this discussion. as i have indicated, analytic philosophers of moral responsibility, in order to carve out the domain of ethics, institutionalize the naturalization and individualization of disability by distinguishing what is prediscursive, natural, biologically determined, philosophically uninteresting, and politically neutral (and hence not morally praiseworthy or blameworthy), on one side, from what is the product of individual action, human agency, and contingent (i.e., for which one may be culpable, held responsible, or deemed blameworthy), on the other side. as i have indicated, furthermore, analytic philosophers of responsibility subsume the phenomena that (the apparatus of) disability comprises under the rubric of the former and, in doing so, have found justification to subjugate and disenfranchise disabled people, thereby excluding them from their philosophical frameworks. disability and method, naturally consider an additional example of the problem, one that exemplifies how the distinction is often used as the groundwork for an argument. in sukaina hirji’s article “oppressive double binds,” they provide a vivid example of the use of this distinction as a motivational (i.e., foundational) assumption to both structure and illustrate a philosophical argument about dilemmas—that is, double binds—of decision-making that members of marginalized groups confront. as hirji explains it, the “central feature of double binds . . . is that an agent’s own prudential good is bound up with their ability to resist oppression; double binds are choice situations where no matter what an agent does, they become a mechanism in their own oppression” (hirji 2021, 643). double binds, hirji writes, “constrain an individual’s agency while leaving various dimensions of their autonomy fully intact” (643). given this explanation of oppressive double binds, the apparatus of disability is first naturalized and individualized in section ii of hirji’s article in order to distinguish what constitutes a politically relevant double bind from what is not politically significant. in the context of this distinction, hirji (in ways reminiscent of strawson) uncritically accepts the psychiatric diagnosis of “schizophrenia” as a prediscursive, transhistorical, and politically neutral scientific category and hence deems so-called schizophrenic symptoms as irrelevant to oppressive double binds—that is, irrelevant to social power relations. in another place in hirji’s article, they naturalize and medicalize the apparatus of disability in this way by distinguishing “forms of pathological behavior” (659) from other phenomena that philosophers readily associate with social power relations: namely, coercion and manipulation. in both contexts, this theoretical move—that is, hirji’s naturalization, medicalization, and individualization of disability—operates as a form of structural gaslighting that obscures the political character of elements of the apparatus of tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 disability that they claim are politically neutral, prior to culture, biologically determined, and universal. the very bases on which hirji excludes psychiatrized people from consideration—namely, diagnosis and “symptoms” of pathology—in fact breed a variety of oppressive double binds with which many disabled, racialized, and other marginalized people must grapple. for example, although obtaining a diagnosis of “schizophrenia” may enable one to access some social services and health care, doing so may compel one to subordinate (say) one’s experiences of sexual and other trauma and violence in the service of a naturalized and medicalized understanding of one’s situation and thereby vulnerabilize (tremain 2020a, 2021) oneself—that is, render oneself vulnerable to duress with respect to institutionalization, pharmaceutical intervention, and so on. likewise, although interpreting one’s behavior as “symptoms” of an authoritatively recognizable pathology may enable one to access some social services and health care, doing so affirms prevailing beliefs and values about (so-called) normal behavior and cognition in ways that heighten the degree to which one may be disciplined and subjected to surveillance by social workers, medical personnel, government administrators, and the police. while obtaining a diagnosis may enable one to more readily find communities of psychiatric survivors and other disabled people with whom to identify and from whom to receive emotional and social support, doing so may render one less likely to find stable employment and housing due to prevalent fears and misconceptions about people who have been psychiatrized, increasing the likelihood that one will experience poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness. indeed, the politically potent nature of the aforementioned phenomena has been amply elaborated through the perspectives and insights articulated in expanding bodies of research and testimony in philosophy of disability, mad studies, mad activism, and discrit studies. many of these perspectives and insights challenge the designation of schizophrenia and psychiatric classifications more generally, identifying them as medicalizing, essentializing, and, yes, oppressive, especially with respect to disabled, racialized, trans, incarcerated, and poor populations (which are by no means mutually exclusive groups). in mad world: the politics of mental health, for instance, micha frazer-carroll (2023) addresses the political character of double binds with respect to madness, though not in this particular way (see also chapman 2023, 2024; jeppson 2024; garson 2022). yet both the distinction on which hirji’s argument relies and the ensuing argument itself imply that the sort of dilemmas with which frazer-carroll is concerned should be regarded as natural phenomena to which analyses of coercion, manipulation, and power do not apply. i want to point out, therefore, that when feminist and other oppositional philosophers employ ableist criteria and strategies of the apparatus of disability to carve out a theoretical domain in which to adjudicate claims about power and oppression (as hirji and hutchison and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 coauthors do), they produce theories that push a range of oppressed people beyond the scope of social justice, further marginalizing and conceptually and materially disempowering them, as well as reestablishing moral responsibility theory and philosophy in general as elitist, ableist, sanist, racist, transphobic, and carceral endeavors. elizabeth barnes’s (2016, 7, 54–77) assertion according to which disability is a “mere” difference rather than a “bad” difference is one of the “rival analytic definitions” of disability that wasserman and aas characterize as commonsensical and intuitive in order to set it against my representation of disability as an apparatus of power. barnes’s (2016) book, the minority body: a theory of disability, has gained notoriety as the first monograph published in analytic philosophy of disability. in the remainder of this section, therefore, i explain the limitations of analytic philosophy for examination of the apparatus of disability and its naturalization in philosophy by considering the theory of disability that barnes has outlined. i argue that barnes’s theory falls prey to drawbacks of analytic methodology that both glock and botts have identified. barnes’s philosophical work on disability, i maintain, has too much in common with the naturalized conception of disability that prevails in philosophy to be regarded as a serious candidate for a social ontology of disability that will instigate the political, economic, and institutional change for disabled people that transformative, antiableist, antiracist, and anticarceral social justice demands. in short, i contend that barnes’s work on disability and the work on disability that other analytic philosophers of disability (such as wasserman and aas) produce at present have enabled the naturalization of the apparatus of disability in philosophy to persist. most of the book’s arguments and claims about disability as a “mere difference”— which are confined to what barnes calls “physical disability” (see also campbell and stramondo 2016)—exemplify the problems that, as botts has pointed out, arise when the idealized methodology of analytic philosophy is employed in the context of nonideal philosophy about social categories and other social phenomena. the conceptual analysis that barnes articulates in the opening chapters of the minority body and at various places throughout the book is decontextualized, a feature that botts points out is typical of work that proceeds in what glock refers to as “the scientific spirit” of analytic philosophy; that is, the analytical framework of disability that barnes develops in the opening chapters of her book seeks an objective basis for identification of disability that disregards questions about the historical emergence of the category of disability and its conceptual objects and pays no critical attention to sociohistorical forces that have precipitated modifications to the use and meaning of the category and fluctuations in the range of people that it encompasses. barnes’s book offers rather a transhistorical account of disability, in keeping with the general refusal of analytic philosophy to appreciate the historicity of conceptual, epistemological, and discursive objects (tremain 2017b). as jane dryden (2019) tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 explains, barnes is concerned to advance a rule-based account of disability by arguing that disability is precisely that for which the disability rights movement promotes justice and, furthermore, that these judgements about what counts as disability are rule-based, using cluster-concept reasoning. barnes (2016, 46) puts it thus: “disability is all and only the things that the disability rights movement ought to consider as things they are promoting justice for—it is rule-based solidarity among people with certain kinds of bodies.” dryden remarks that insofar as barnes aims to pick out a set of rules for what disability is, in an ontological sense, she argues that this (rule-governed) conception of disability can be applied across history. as dryden notes, for example, although barnes acknowledges that “richard iii wouldn’t have self-identified as disabled,” she nonetheless argues that he was disabled (barnes 2016, 50–51; in dryden 2019). notice that barnes’s claims in this context implicitly rely upon a transhistorical and transcultural notion of normality from which (transhistorical and transcultural) disability is a departure. i and others have variously offered remarks, however, that underline the historical and cultural specificity of dominant notions of normality and disability, regardless of whether these notions have been articulated by medical authorities or by disabled people’s movements. for instance, sandra yellowhorse has emphasized that diné notions of disability and the stories through which they are conveyed, although impacted by colonialism and forced assimilation, nevertheless continue to be distinct from both medicalized notions of disability and the individualistic notions of disability that the white-dominated american disabled people’s movement advances. as yellowhorse (2023) explains it, diné stories of disability as a communal relationship can be found in diné land-based knowledge systems, oral histories, art, and songs and prayers. in foucault and feminist philosophy of disability (tremain 2017a) i trace a genealogy of normality that shows how its emergence and modification (as a property of individuals) is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of modern conceptions of impairment and disability. none of this historicity is acknowledged on barnes’s account. yet demonstration of the historical contingency and cultural specificity of the apparatuses of disability and normality are crucial for their transformation in philosophical discourse and the wider social and political milieu. indeed, insofar as barnes assumes transhistorical notions of normality and disability, she limits the questions that appear as relevant to her analysis. as dryden (2019) puts it, “if it’s already decided that some feature ‘counts’ as disability regardless of when and where it shows up, then a lot of the most interesting and important questions go away.” dryden remarks that if the question with respect to the ontology of disability that concerns us is whether a given historical example fits with our current concept of disability, then we seem to be “hung up on the wrong question.” for dryden, the more interesting questions that we could ask of a given feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 historical example of disability are: “how did it work in its context? what did it do? how did it mark out certain folks? what purposes did this serve? how was it justified? what kinds of knowledge production and dissemination were involved in maintaining it? how did it change over time?” (dryden 2019; emphasis in dryden). these sorts of questions, dryden asserts, direct us toward the relationship between disability and other social forces, identities, and classifications, enabling us to “connect the dots” between disability and racialized, class, or gendered identity and thus to better understand what a given society privileges, values, and holds up as “ideal,” as opposed to what it does not uphold and thus what harm may ensue. these sorts of questions, furthermore, call for historicized and contextualized accounts of how the classification of disability emerged and how it has come to describe certain people and putative characteristics rather than befit the sort of recourse to transhistorical (rule-based) criteria that barnes attempts to lay out. my argument is that the best historicized and contextualized accounts of the emergence of the classification of disability would involve genealogical consideration of the epistemological scaffolding for the classification of disability—namely, the scaffolding that “the diagnostic style of reasoning” (as i refer to it) has provided (tremain 2017a, 2019). the rigid formula of the “decompositional” approach to analysis that barnes details at the outset of her book largely falls away early in the book. throughout the book, however, she nevertheless relies upon the general impetus of the approach by employing counterfactuals, puzzle cases, and thought experiments in ways that enable her to advance argumentative claims about (for instance) what a so-called function is, when the absence of a function is a harm but not bad, when a disability (construed as a natural human difference) is a harm but not bad, and how disability (construed as the lack of a function) should be celebrated. this type of decompositional analysis of disability into discrete constituents—functions, capacities, levels of severity, and so on—is characteristic of analytic philosophy of disability and described by wasserman and aas as “reliable” and “intuitive.” notice, however, that this conception of disability individualizes and naturalizes it in ways that largely dovetail with the prevalent medicalized and individualized conception of disability that is currently naturalized in philosophy, a conception according to which (again) disability is a philosophically uninteresting and value-neutral biological trait— that is, a self-evidently natural attribute, characteristic, difference, or property that some people embody or possess. indeed, most analytic philosophy of disability is consumed with attempts to refute the normative claims about disability that mainstream analytic philosophers espouse, while retaining many of the ontological assumptions about disability that these mainstream philosophers presuppose. some (though not all) analytic philosophers of disability who assume aspects of the prevailing conception of disability in this way even retain the prevailing assumption tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 according to which disability is a natural disadvantage, a direction in which some of barnes’s arguments in the minority body lead. recall that, for barnes, disability is a mere human difference rather than a bad human difference. insofar as barnes employs a decompositional approach to disability in order to argue in this way, she simplifies inescapably complex social phenomena, an adequate understanding and examination of which require an account of how networks of productive apparatuses of power generate disability and its putatively natural foundation, impairment. an account of the relation between disability and the machinations and modalities of productive forms of social power, or indeed any account at all of the institutional and structural relation between disability and social power relations, is nevertheless woefully missing from the theory of disability that barnes elaborates in the minority body. in other words, as i have suggested, barnes’s theory of disability mirrors the apolitical and individualized understanding of disability that mainstream philosophy assumes. given that the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers is mutually constitutive of and intertwined with the conception of disability that predominates in philosophy, barnes’s theory of disability does not therefore recommend itself as a candidate for a social ontology of disability or, more generally, a philosophy of disability, that would substantially improve the professional and institutional position of disabled philosophers nor contribute, in the long run, to the improvement of the social, economic, and political position of disabled people throughout society. indeed, the analytic methodology that barnes uses to articulate her theory of disability inadvertently undermines the critical force that the theory might at first seem to promise; that is, the reliance of barnes’s theory on the individualistic methodological, theoretical, and apolitical assumptions of analytic philosophy that inform the conception of disability that currently prevails in mainstream philosophy renders the theory counterproductive for a social ontology of disability that aims to contribute to radical transformation of the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical situation of disabled people. barnes stipulates that a good theory of disability must fulfill a criterion of noncircularity (barnes 2016, 13; see also campbell and stramondo 2016). the analytic philosopher condemns circular arguments as fallacious, as violations of the strictures of rational discourse. in an article that offers advice for philosophers who want to engage in social activism, julinna c. oxley claims, for example, that one of the virtues of good philosopher-activists is that they are “logical,” which, for oxley, means that they “use logically sound arguments, do not make blatant or obvious logical fallacies, especially informal fallacies such as circular argument, slippery slope, red herring, straw man, etc.” (oxley 2020, 6, 15). in this regard, barnes (2016, 26) cites as an exemplar of circularity my article “the subject of impairment” (tremain 2002), which appeared as a chapter in an interdisciplinary collection of work on disability. the chapter is a reformatted and revised version of my article “on the government of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 disability” (tremain 2001), whose argument dismantled the impairment-disability distinction that structures the british social model of disability, which, at the time, was the dominant model of disability in disability studies and activist circles. as i have pointed out (tremain 2017b), barnes misconstrues both the assumptions of the british social model and my criticisms of it. in the 2001 and 2002 articles, in my books, and in numerous other contexts, i argue that disability (a complex apparatus of power) effectively constitutes impairment—by and through a host of administrative, medical, and juridical practices and strategies—as its prediscursive, biological foundation in order to naturalize itself and, in doing so, to camouflage its own thoroughly contingent status (for example, tremain 2001, 2010, 2015, 2017a, 2020b). the identification of this argument as circular, as fallacious, stems from the analytic philosopher’s failure to understand the productive and performative constraints of modern power and the constitutive and “self-authenticating” (hacking 1992, 13) character of styles of reasoning that apparatuses of power coalesce. as judith butler (1999) explains these performative constraints, juridical forms of power produce the subjects that they subsequently come to represent. indeed, i want to argue that this failure to understand the productive and performative constraints of power is the most significant downfall of “analytic” philosophy of disability. in short, analytic philosophers of disability (like analytic philosophers in general) misunderstand how power operates and hence misrepresent it. foucault was acutely aware of the constraints of modern juridical forms of power, analyzing “problematizations”—that is, the sociodiscursive emergence, constitution, and identification of phenomena as “problems” to which solutions have come to be sought—in terms of the historical conditions of possibility that have enabled them to emerge and to bring into being the conceptual objects that motivate them. in foucault and feminist philosophy of disability and other contexts, i endeavor to show how, through a host of administrative, legal, medical, and other discourses and practices, the productive operations of power (namely, biopower) have generated the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of the “problem” of disability. in the first chapter of the book, i drew on ian hacking’s pithy remark according to which the positivist’s charge that genealogy relies upon the genetic fallacy is “insubstantial name-calling” (hacking 2002, 63) that serves to obscure the historical contingency of the practices and relations of social power that genealogy uncovers and elaborates (tremain 2017a, 71–72). in the fifth chapter of the book and other contexts, furthermore, i argue that mainstream (i.e., analytic) bioethicists who charge that criticisms of maid employ fallacious slippery-slope reasoning have refused to recognize that these criticisms aptly describe the incremental normalization of relatively recent forms of power, especially the intentional and nonsubjective character of these power relations (tremain 2017a, 175–77). in this tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 context, i want to point out that claims about the putatively fallacious circularity of my argument with respect to the impairment-disability distinction likewise misunderstand the productive operations of power. in short, the allegedly objective fallacies of reasoning to which i have referred are both embedded in, and constitute an implicit endorsement of, outdated ideas about how power operates—that is, these purportedly universal fallacies of reasoning are inscribed in culturally specific histories. when we understand that productive forms of power constitute impairment as the naturalized antecedent of disability in order to provide justification for the multiplication and expansion of the regulatory effects of the apparatus of disability, we can recognize that both barnes’s claims with respect to the ontological status of disability and her criticisms about the circularity of my ontology of disability rely upon a juridical conception of power according to which power is repressive rather than productive. a central assumption of my work in philosophy of disability is that juridical conceptions of power cannot robustly account for the political and discursive production of impairment, nor the production of nature, body, race, gender, and other (real) social constructions. nevertheless, accepted philosophical analyses of disability—including bioethical analyses of disability—generally presuppose these conceptions in the terms of which power is centralized, can be possessed like an object, and operates downward from a centralized authority above to repress and constrain according to a binary logic. indeed, analytic philosophy of disability in general assumes that power is fundamentally repressive rather than productive. i want to note, therefore, that philosophies and theories of disability that rely upon juridical notions of power presuppose that (1) the allegedly inherent identities and subjectivities of disabled people are recognized rather than made; that (2) impairments and disabilities are prediscursive human characteristics (properties, attributes, or differences) rather than artifactual products of (among other things) the very medical, administrative, and academic classifications that identify and measure them; and that (3) “people with impairments” and “people with disabilities”—rather than inventions of the apparatus of disability whose classification and signification as such are designed to enable normalization of populations in the service of (neo)liberalism—have existed everywhere, throughout all of history. hacking’s account of styles of reasoning and their self-authenticating character provides compelling means with which a vibrant social ontology of disability should respond to disdain in analytic philosophy and moral responsibility theory for historical approaches and to barnes’s charge that arguments about the performativity of (the apparatus of) disability and, by implication, biopower more generally, are circular. as hacking (who acknowledges his debt to foucault) explains it, each style of reasoning is the historically and culturally specific canon of objectivity about the phenomena—new types of objects, new types of evidence, new ways to be a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 candidate for truth and falsehood, new types of laws, and new types of possibilities— which the style itself has brought into being as these types of things. hacking argues that “there are neither sentences that are candidates for truth, nor independently identified objects to be correct about, prior to the development of a style of reasoning” (hacking 1992, 11). sentences of the relevant kinds are candidates for truth or falsehood only when a style of reasoning makes them so. “the truth of a sentence (of a kind introduced by a style of reasoning),” hacking writes, “is what we find out by reasoning using that style. styles become standards of objectivity because they get at the truth. but a sentence of that kind is a candidate for truth or falsehood only in the context of the style” (13). in short, styles of reasoning are, as he puts it, self-authenticating (13). indeed, hacking regards the apparent circularity in the selfauthentication of styles of reasoning as a virtue of the idea of a style of reasoning: this circularity goes some distance to explain why styles of reasoning are stable and enduring. each style of reasoning, he remarks, has its own characteristic techniques of self-stabilization and persists, in its own unique and peculiar way, because it has harnessed these self-stabilizing techniques. if the self-authenticating character of styles of reasoning were understood, hacking says, we would have gone some way toward grasping the “quasi-stability” of science (14–16). neither the apparatus of disability, nor the self-authenticating character of the diagnostic style of reasoning that contributes to its reproduction and reinforces it, operates according to juridical strategies of social power—that is, operates in merely repressive terms; however, juridical conceptions are fundamental to the claims about disability that analytic responsibility theory, analytic philosophy of disability, and mainstream (analytic) philosophy advance, as so-called applications of normative ethical and political theories to concerns about disability and distributive justice amply demonstrate. nor can the complexity of these phenomena of current forms of power—that is, the apparatus of disability and the diagnostic style of reasoning—be captured by the decontextualized step-by-step, linear methodology that, as botts points out, guides analytic philosophy. the “circularity” of arguments with respect to performative power and self-authenticating styles of reasoning, a “circularity” that is at the heart of my philosophy of disability, is generative, cumulative, and persistent. oxley (like barnes and [most] other analytic philosophers) assumes that logical fallacies are straightforwardly universal, objective, and transparent disqualifiers of modes of thinking. yet i maintain that philosophers should seriously reconsider both the uncontested status that these devices have achieved within philosophy and the disciplining role among philosophers that they enjoy. i am concerned in particular to problematize (in foucault’s sense) the ways in which the identification and implementation of so-called logical fallacies continue to be positioned as (always) outside power, as beyond power and thus never initiated and motivated by power, and hence rendered unrecognizable as instruments produced and iterated in the tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 service of power. even heretofore feminist critiques of argumentation do not, i maintain, extend far enough in this regard (see nye 1990; orr 1989; rooney 2012; yap 2013). kristie dotson has made this sort of argument about epistemology in general. in an essay that is deeply critical of “the bad magic” of colonialist epistemologies, dotson (2022) argues that an epistemology ought to be regarded as suspect if it fails to create avenues with which to detect its own limits and instead normalizes the limits of any mode of world-making. as dotson puts it, “an epistemology that does not build into its functioning an acknowledgement of the governance value of epistemologies themselves, is, at best, incomplete and, at worse, an epistemology that continually invokes hierarchies for the sake of its own function” (dotson 2022, 293; emphasis added). the charge of circularity, i want to argue, is a strategy of governance (to use dotson’s term) or government (to use foucault’s term) whose alleged objectivity conceals the productive operations of power and whose purported universalization and normalization conceal its temporal and cultural location and interests. to take another example, the charge of slippery-slope reasoning, which proponents of medically assisted suicide and euthanasia (maid) direct at philosophers of disability who criticize the institutionalization of these practices, has worked in these ways to reinstate its own rhetorical and governmental force, ensuring that up-to-date criticisms of the practices and their institutionalization are neither adequately scrutinized in the discipline nor even casually entertained (tremain 2017a). a revolutionary proposal a social ontology of disability designed to contribute to the cultural, economic, institutional, philosophical, and political transformation required to significantly change the social situation of disabled people should account for the historicity of the apparatus of disability and the practices, mechanisms, and strategies that this apparatus of power comprises, including the types of objects, sentences, classifications, and possibilities from which it has coalesced and that it brings into being, usually in collusion with other apparatuses such as race, age, biology, rationality, normality, nature, gender, and health. recall that to motivate the articulation of a historicist account of (the apparatus of) disability in philosophy, i have called for a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers understand the metaphysics of disability and how they research, write, and teach about the elements claimed to constitute the ontology and ontological status of disability. this conceptual revolution would be politically informed from the ground up—that is, this revolution would comprise a politicized conceptual reengineering of our perceptions of and understandings about what disability is; a genealogical analysis of how it emerged into discourse as a natural human attribute, property, or characteristic; and an feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 antifoundational analysis of how its ontological status as natural is reproduced and sustained. the conceptual schema that, at present, comprises naturalized perceptions and understandings of impairment and disability is a product of the apparatus of disability, which is, itself, a historically contingent mechanism of a vast network of governmentality and control—biopower—whose operations are directed to maximization of the conditions conducive to life (tremain 2015, 2017a). my use in this regard of foucault’s idea of apparatus enables me to move philosophical discussion about the ontology of disability away from restrictive depoliticized and naturalizing conceptualizations of disability, according to which disability is (for instance) a disadvantageous personal characteristic or attribute, a property of given individuals, or a human difference. my assumption that disability is an apparatus, in foucault’s sense, moves philosophical discussion of disability toward a more comprehensively politicized conceptualization of it than barnes and other analytic philosophers of disability, as well as philosophers of moral responsibility, provide, a conceptualization of disability that is (among other things) historicist and relativist and, hence, culturally sensitive in ways that these other conceptions of disability are not. as an apparatus, disability is a historically specific aggregate that comprises, constitutes, and is constituted by and through a complex and complicated set of discourses, technologies, identities, and practices that emerge from medical and scientific research, government policies and administrative decisions, academic initiatives, activism, art and literature, mainstream popular culture, and so on. to understand disability as an apparatus in this way is to conceive of it as a far-reaching matrix of power that contributes to, is inseparable from, and reinforces other apparatuses of historical force relations, including settler colonialism, white supremacy, gender asymmetries, and global capitalism. on this ontology of disability, disability is not a metaphysical substrate; a natural, biological category; or a characteristic that only distinct individuals embody or possess, but rather is a historically contingent network of force relations in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in relation to which everyone occupies a position. my argument is that if feminist (and other) philosophers were to take up this call for a conceptual revolution about disability—that is, were to take up my proposal that disability is a historically and culturally specific apparatus of power—they would hasten the disruption of the pervasive ableist gaslighting and other forms of injustice that moral responsibility theory currently produces, that disabled philosophers currently experience in philosophy, and that disabled people in general confront 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(1974) 2008. “freedom and resentment.” in freedom and resentment and other essays, 1–28. london: methuen and co. reprint: abingdon: routledge. page references are to the routledge edition. essay originally published in 1962. tremain, shelley. 2001. “on the government of disability.” social theory and practice 27, no. 4 (october): 617–36. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract200127432. ———. 2002. “on the subject of impairment.” in disability/postmodernity: embodying disability theory, edited by mairian corker and tom shakespeare, 26–50. london: continuum. ———. 2006. “reproductive freedom, self-regulation, and the government of impairment in utero.” hypatia 21, no. 1 (winter): 35–53. https://doi.org/10.1 111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb00963.x. ———. 2010. “biopower, styles of reasoning, and what’s still missing from the stem cell debates.” hypatia 25, no. 3 (summer): 577-609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j .1527-2001.2010.01118.x. ———. 2015. “this is what a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability looks like.” foucault studies, no. 19 (june): 7–42. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs .v0i19.4822. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 28 ———. 2017a. foucault and feminist philosophy of disability. ann arbor: university of michigan press. ———. 2017b. review of the minority body: a theory of disability, by elizabeth barnes. australasian journal of philosophy 96 (1): 203. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048 402.2016.1276205. ———. 2019. “feminist philosophy of disability: a genealogical intervention.” southern journal of philosophy 57, no. 1 (march): 132–58. https://doi.org/10 .1111/sjp.12312. ———. 2020a. “field notes on the naturalization and denaturalization of disability in (feminist) philosophy: what they do and how they do it.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (3): article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.3.9395. ———. 2020b. “naturalizing and denaturalizing impairment and disability in philosophy and feminist philosophy of science.” in the routledge handbook of feminist philosophy of science, edited by sharon crasnow and kristen intemann, 144–56. new york: routledge. ———. 2021. “philosophy of disability, conceptual engineering, and the nursing home-industrial-complex.” international journal of critical diversity studies 4, no. 1 (june): 10–33. ———. 2023. “are amy mullin and michael cholbi experts on maid?” biopolitical philosophy (blog), june 14, 2023. https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2023/ 06/14/are-amy-mullin-and-michael-cholbi-experts-on-maid/. ———. 2024. “disaster ableism, epistemologies of crisis, and the mystique of bioethics.” in the bloomsbury guide to philosophy of disability, edited by shelley lynn tremain, chap. 1. london: bloomsbury academic. van inwagen, peter. 1983. an essay on free will. new york: oxford university press. wasserman, david, and sean aas, 2022. “disability: definitions and models.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2022 edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/disability/. wiebe, kayla, and amy mullin. 2023. “choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy, and harm reduction.” journal of medical ethics. online first, april 26, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme-2022-108871. yap, audrey. 2013. “ad hominem fallacies, bias, and testimony.” argumentation 27, no. 2 (may): 97–109. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9260-5. yellowhorse, sandra. 2023. “indigeneity and disability: the teachings of our ancestors and being in relation towards harmonious outcomes.” disability visibility project (blog), june 18, 2023. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2 023/06/18/indigeneity-and-disability. tremain – when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability published by scholarship@western, 2024 29 shelley lynn tremain (she/they/settler/disabled feminist killjoy) is coordinator of the philosophy blog biopolitical philosophy; author of foucault and feminist philosophy of disability (university of michigan press, 2017), the manuscript for which was awarded the 2016 tobin siebers prize for disability studies in the humanities; editor of two editions of foucault and the government of disability (university of michigan press, 2005; 2015), the first edition of which has been translated into korean; and editor of the bloomsbury guide to philosophy of disability (bloomsbury academic, 2024). from april 2015, tremain has coordinated, edited, and produced dialogues on disability, the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed series of interviews that she is conducting with disabled philosophers and posts to biopolitical philosophy on the third wednesday of each month. 101203 tremain title page 101203 tremain final format moralizing hunger: cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation atherton, emma marija. 2021. “moralizing hunger: cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (3). article 1. 2021 moralizing hunger: cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture emma marija atherton massachusetts institute of technology emmaa@mit.edu atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 moralizing hunger: cultural fatphobia and the moral language of contemporary diet culture emma marija atherton abstract this article explores three contemporary online diet communities—“thinspo,” “fitspo,” and “wellness.” i examine and analyze the distinctive moralized vocabularies these communities use in relation to food and eating. i argue that within their respective diet communities, these moral vocabularies function as mechanisms of collective self-discipline, tools that community members use to discipline themselves and each another into adhering to the foodand body-management strategies they have collectively created and adopted. these strategies are designed to mitigate the social risk of becoming fat and the social abjection fatness involves. i argue that within the broader social context these moralized vocabularies also function to reproduce fatphobia—a form of bodily normativity that identifies thinness with dignity, normalcy, desirability, and worthiness, and casts fat bodies as undignified, disgusting, socially threatening, and abject. my arguments place thinspo, fitspo, and wellness on a fatphobic continuum, challenging the widely held perception of wellness as a progressive rejection of harmful dieting and body ideals. i also suggest that the slogan “food is not a moral issue,” popular in “fatspo” and other diet-critical communities, addresses the fatphobic moralizing of food and inspires more liberatory ways of relating to food and eating. keywords: diet culture, fatphobia, thinspo, pro-ana, fitspo, wellness, embodiment, discipline, collective self-discipline, self-discipline introduction and background “i’m being naughty today,” the woman in front of me paying for her coffee and brownie says to the cashier. i grit my teeth and bite my tongue. i want to tell her that the word “naughty” does not apply to food. i wanted to tell her that being naughty is doing something wrong, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 and food is not a matter of right and wrong. i wanted to tell her that food is not a moral issue.1 in the above excerpt from the blog feminist chatter, the author echoes a claim made frequently in recent years in body-acceptance and fat-acceptance online spaces: “food is not a moral issue.”2 this claim is made in response to a fact about the social world feminists have long recognized: the ways we relate to food and eating, and especially the ways women relate to food and eating, are heavily socially moralized (bordo 1993). analyzing the diet culture of the 1980s and 1990s, susan bordo revealed how moralizing women’s relationships to food functions to discipline women’s eating habits and bodies. in this paper, i explore the distinctive moral vocabularies surrounding food and eating that have arisen in contemporary diet culture—that is, the diet culture of the 2010s and early 2020s: the age of “wellness” and online dieting communities. i aim to understand how these vocabularies function—what they serve to do in the social world and how they serve to discipline women’s eating practices and bodies—in this contemporary context. i analyze three different contemporary diet subcultures in the united states: (1) “thinspo” (thin inspiration) or “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia), online communities of women and girls motivating one another through imagery and text to adopt very restrictive diets with the aim of becoming “anorexic thin”; (2) “fitspo” (fit inspiration), another online community of women and girls, this time motivating one another to develop or maintain “fit” bodies; and (3) “wellness” culture, a mainstream diet community mostly consisting of a number of blogs that promote eating (and dieting) toward “wellness” and “optimum health.” these three dieting subcultures have distinctive moral vocabularies surrounding food and eating. i argue that all three moral vocabularies function as mechanisms of collective self-discipline, tools that members of those diet communities use to discipline themselves and one another into adhering to the foodand body-management strategies they have collectively created, adopted, and endorsed. these are strategies members of these communities have taken up to mitigate the risk of becoming fat and the social abjection fatness brings. i argue that the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness have the additional social function of reproducing fatphobia—a form of bodily normativity that 1 sarah frances young, “food is not a moral issue,” feminist chatter (blog), february 8, 2018, https://feministchatter.com/2018/02/08/food-is-not-a-moral-issue/. 2 see, e.g., young, “food is not a moral issue”; ellen friedrichs, “food choices aren’t moral issues—here’s how to stop making kids think they are,” everyday feminism, january 16, 2017, https://everydayfeminism.com/2017/01/teach-kids-food-choicesarent-moral/. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 identifies thinness with dignity, normalcy, desirability, and worthiness, and casts fat bodies as undignified, disgusting, socially threatening, and abject. my argument places thinspo and pro-ana (hence thinspo), fitspo, and wellness on a fatphobic continuum. this continuum is well recognized in “nonacademic” online feminist body-acceptance and fat-activist spaces but is relatively underexplored in philosophy.3 it is worth exploring, however, because wellness culture is not only socially normalized but also often presented (and experienced by its proponents) as a progressive, healthy, and sustainable answer to harmful body ideals centering extreme thinness and punitive dieting. recognizing that wellness reproduces the same fatphobic logics as those dieting cultures (of the present and past) widely regarded as extreme and unhealthily focused on thinness shows us that the same social prohibitions and stigmas surrounding fatness are just as operative in mainstream society as they are in fringe spaces recognized as harmful. further, recognizing the continuum that links thinspo, fitspo, and wellness enables us to see how wellness—a diet culture that explicitly rejects and is framed as an antidote to harmful dieting practices and ways of relating to food and bodies—ends up reproducing and rationalizing the core of fatphobia: a socially normative body hierarchy in which fatness is denigrated and abject. in response, i argue that we need to reject the tendency to moralize individuals’ food choices with respect to fatphobic notions of body normativity if we are to relate to food in ways that are genuinely progressive, liberatory, and anti-fatphobic.4 in section 1, i briefly detail feminist critiques of the ways earlier diet cultures moralized food and women's eating, and describe some of the key ways diet culture has shifted since these critiques were leveled. in section 2, i look more closely at contemporary diet culture. i describe thinspo, fitspo, and wellness and illustrate their moral vocabularies. these subcultures and their moral vocabularies have developed in and must be read against a cultural context of fatphobia, so, in section 3, i follow the work of fat studies scholars to detail how fatphobia produces and reflects a particular—thin, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy—bodily ideal, producing patterns of discrimination against fat people. in section 4, i look to feminist 3 feminist and body-positivity, body-acceptance, and fat-activist blogs tend to recognize the fatphobic continuity between these dieting subcultures. see, e.g., friedrichs, “food choices aren’t moral issues”; jen wilson, “can we stop assigning moral value to food?” medium, april 29, 2019, https://medium.com/@jenwilson44 72/can-we-stop-assigning-moral-value-to-food-55ff4983fd91. 4 in presenting an analysis of large and influential contemporary diet cultures, i intend this paper to contribute to recent work in feminist philosophy analyzing and applying earlier foundational feminist insights to contemporary diet culture (see, e.g., leboeuf 2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 notions of the abject and recent work on fatphobia and disgust to argue that fatphobia casts fatness as a social threat and works to render fat people socially abject. in section 5, i argue that the moralizing vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness function as mechanisms of collective self-discipline, tools utilized by members of those diet communities to discipline themselves and one another into adhering to the food-management strategies they have taken up to mitigate the possibility of fatness. i also argue that despite some important differences, thinspo, fitspo, and wellness are on a fatphobic continuum, in that all three diet cultures valorize and reproduce a normative body hierarchy celebrating thinness and denigrating fatness. i conclude by arguing that the slogan “food is not a moral issue” and positive “fatspo” (imagery of fat people showcasing their beauty, humanity, and joy) aim to disrupt fatphobic diet cultures and advocate for ways of relating to food that are more liberatory and just. 1. diet cultures, 1980s–present before beginning, there are two points i wish to highlight. first, the word “fat” is typically used in a negative or derogatory way and is typically thought to have negative and judgmental associations. throughout this paper, the word “fat” serves as a neutral descriptor of a certain body type and as a term describing a social group whose members experience discrimination on the basis of their body size. this usage reflects how fat activists typically use the term “fat.” second, diet cultures ought to be approached with intersectionality in mind. academic work on dieting and eating disorders has historically focused on white, heterosexual, nondisabled, cisgender, and middle-class or wealthy women, and often perpetuates the belief that eating disorders only affect this demographic. this belief is erroneous. nicole danielle schott (2016) argues that thinness ideals, body image concerns, and eating disorders significantly affect women of color. work by rice and her coauthors (rice et al. 2020) suggests that thinness ideals affect queer women, disabled women, and poor women also. however, in this paper i am examining three particular diet cultures, not dieting or disordered eating generally. with some important exceptions like “black girl thinspo” (see sections 4 and 5), the aspirational images and aims shared by thinspo, fitspo, and wellness center white, heterosexual, nondisabled, cisgender, and middle-class feminine bodies, and these three particular dieting subcultures are overwhelmingly occupied by white, middle-class, heterosexual/heteronormative, able-bodied, and cisgender women and girls. i examine the question of why these groups are so homogenous and discuss how thinness ideals function with respect to people whose bodies are multiply marginalized (by race, sexuality, disability, and so on) in section 4. however, it is beyond the scope of this paper to do a focused and detailed intersectional analysis of any one of the diet cultures i examine. (see hatherley [2015], prohaska and gailey atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 [2018], mollow [2015], rice et al. [2020], schott [2016], and williams [2017] for more focused analyses of diet cultures and fatphobia as they intersect with other particular forms of marginalization.) feminists have long recognized that the ways women relate to food and eating is socially moralized. such moralizing reflects and reinforces gendered bodily normativity and the cultural identification of women’s worth and being with their bodies. it also serves to discipline women’s eating habits and bodies, both through external pressure and through the internalization of moralized ways of regarding and valuing food (see, e.g., bordo 1993; wolf 1990). in unbearable weight, bordo (1993) analyzes how the diet culture of america in the 1980s and 1990s arose from and contributed to the distinctive forms of patriarchy operative at that time. in bordo’s analysis, the moral language and symbolism surrounding food and eating exemplified in popular advertising, medical advice, women’s magazines, and so on was a key influencing factor in how women in general, and women who developed eating disorders in particular, related to food, eating, and their bodies. this moral language contained not only terms like “good” and “bad,” but also topes of saintliness, transcendence, and salvation linked to “control” over one’s appetite, and those of sin and gluttony linked to “indulging.” even when abstracted from overt religious associations, words like “control” and “indulgence” are themselves morally valenced, invoking notions of “character” and “self-control.” women’s sexuality, itself heavily socially moralized, was symbolically and visually linked in multiple adverts to women’s hunger and appetite for food, bringing all the moralized sexual connotations of temptation and losing control with it. in these media, women’s emotional satisfaction was depicted as properly arising from giving others (usually men and children) food to consume rather than from consuming it themselves. this kind of moral language becomes the vocabulary many women take up and reproduce to modify their behavior and “work on” their bodies. while much in bordo’s analysis is relevant today (and is by no means done justice through the brief sketch above), the diet landscape has changed in significant respects since unbearable weight. the diet culture of the 1980s and 1990s was the height of weight watchers, diet pills, and “heroin chic” fashion icons. partially in response to feminist critiques filtering into the mainstream, and in response to the recognition of the harmfulness of the diet practices of the 1990s, the mainstream diet culture of the late 2000s to the early 2020s purportedly celebrates “health” and “wellness.” the rhetoric of dieting has changed, with weight watchers and other organizations rebranding and moving away from words like “thin” and “fat” and from an overt emphasis on weight in itself, toward talk of “wellness,” “health,” and “selffeminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 care.”5 despite wellness being the most mainstream and visible form of contemporary diet culture, contemporary diet culture has an underbelly comprised of fringe and marginally fringe diet subcultures, such as thinspo and fitspo, which are explicit in their celebration of slenderness, restrictive eating, and extreme exercise. moreover, even within mainstream wellness culture, food and women's eating practices are still socially moralized, often by women themselves (as the excerpt opening this paper suggests). as diet cultures have proliferated in the contemporary context, so too has the moral language used to talk about food. as we will see in the following section, while the “good/bad,” “restraint/temptation” framings of the 1980s and 1990s are still present within contemporary diet cultures, there is also a newer focus on health, “clean eating,” and “self-care.” moreover, while advertising, medical advice, and women’s magazines still play a role in the transmission of this terminology, this role is reduced in contemporary diet culture. as céline leboeuf (2019, 6–7) details, diet culture is now predominately online, represented in vast online dieting communities sharing, through forums and hashtags, endless images of “perfect” bodies enhanced by strategic angles and photoshop alongside countless diet tips. these communities are complex. they are spaces of support and understanding to many women and girls struggling with food and their bodies, but they are also spaces within which women and girls valorize thinness and entrench moralized ways of talking about food and eating. in the following section, i describe some of these online diet cultures and the moral language they use in reference to food and eating. i leave analysis of these communities and their moral vocabularies until sections 4 and 5. 2. thinspo, fitspo, and wellness 2.1. thinspo ‘“thinspo” and “pro-ana” blogs emerged on platforms such as tumblr and pinterest in the mid-2000s.6 a 2012 huffington post article describes these online 5 see, e.g., taffy brodesser-akner, “losing it in the anti-dieting age,” new york times, august 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/magazine/weight-watchersoprah-losing-it-in-the-anti-dieting-age.html. 6 leboeuf (2019) argues that thinspo and pro-ana groups overlap in significant respects but are not identical. she argues that thinspo has more visibility (via public pinterest blogs) than the usually secretive pro-ana forums, and that thinspo is distinct from pro-ana in that “there is a distinction to be made between the psychology of anorexia and that inherent in undertaking a dietary or physical regimen for the sake of slenderness” (leboeuf 2019, 8). i group thinspo and pro-ana because their atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 spaces as “secretive communities of teenage girls who celebrate ghoulish thinness, relish photos of emaciated women, and furtively share tips about how to stave off hunger.”7 the popular feminist news and culture website jezebel echoes this description, with an article from march 2012 describing thinspo spaces as consisting in “online forums where women with eating disorders commiserate and encourage each other with pictures of emaciated women and tips on how to most effectively starve oneself.”8 since 2014, media attention to thinspo has mostly died down, and tumblr and pinterest have developed regulations banning and deleting blogs found to contain or promote thinspo content. nevertheless, in the early 2020s thinspo persists online on multiple platforms. girls in these spaces do indeed celebrate extreme thinness and aim to motivate themselves and one another to significantly restrict their food intake so as to become or remain very thin. “motivation” appears in the form of motivational quotes attached to images of extreme thinness, sharing advice on how to refuse food even when extremely hungry, “meanspo”— intentionally harsh statements (directed at oneself or at others) to “help” people stick to their weight loss goals—and, more rarely, “fatspo”—images of fat people utilized to elicit disgust to further motivate not eating (there is another use of the term “fatspo” in fat-activist and body-acceptance communities which connotes positive imagery of fat people shared to normalize body diversity and showcase fat selfacceptance and happiness. i discuss this form of fatspo more in my concluding remarks). thinspo communities have particular, morally inflected vocabularies around food and (not) eating. food itself is often described in terms of safety and fear. someone’s “fear foods” are those that induce fear either because of the high number significant overlap means they share a common moral vocabulary surrounding food and eating. i agree with the claim that there is a distinction between the psychology of anorexia and that involved in dieting for slenderness, but i wish to emphasize that online thinspo spaces often have pro-ana content and pro-ana forums often contain thinspo. in popular commentary, thinspo and pro-ana are often considered indistinguishable; the two spaces significantly bleed into one another, with “thinspo” frequently just meaning “pro-ana.” further, undertaking a dietary regime for the sake of slenderness, if one is utilizing thinspo spaces that often have pro-ana content as motivation, can easily bleed into pro-ana behavior and thinking. 7 carolyn gregoire, “the hunger blogs: a secret world of teenage ‘thinspiration,’” huffington post, last modified december 6, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com /2012/02/08/thinspiration-blogs_n_1264459.html. 8 erin gloria ryan, “the scary, weird world of pinterest thinspo boards,” jezebel, march 19, 2012, https://jezebel.com/5893382/the-scary-weird-world-of-pinterestthinspo-boards. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 of calories they contain or because they are foods people are prone to binging. common fear foods include pizza, juices, sugary spreads, and cake.9 “safe foods” are those which promote feelings of comfort and security. they tend to be low calorie, often with packaging around specific controlled portions, so lessening the risk of binging. fat-free, low-cal popcorn is a frequently mentioned safe food.10 not eating, or the state (and, for members of these communities, hopeful transformation) not eating brings, is described in terms of purity, strength, and control, emphasizing the mental and physical “strength” required to withstand hunger and control one’s behavior and body. breaking diet is described in terms of shame and guilt. significantly, thinness and food restriction are described in terms of perfection.11 while “perfection” in thinspo often refers to supposed bodily perfection, striving and starving for perfection in thinspo goes beyond the body in any simple sense. thinspo blogs also contain a significant number of motivational posts about the need to be “perfect” in multiple areas of life, such as school and relationships. achieving thinness is cast as essential, as a precondition, in attaining perfection in these other spheres of life. highlighting this are frequent “ana imagine” posts, or posts in which bloggers imagine, again as a form of motivation to not eat, the perfection of their lives filled with friends, love interests, fun, esteem, and success once they have become “skinny.”12 many of these posts explicitly communicate the belief that life, or true personhood, won’t really begin until skinniness is achieved. a rich and enjoyable life is something these girls feel unentitled to, or unable to access, until they are “properly” thin.13 9 see, e.g., this october 7, 2014, post by sailorxthin on the forum my pro ana: https://www.myproana.com/index.php/topic/286325-fear-foods/. 10 see, e.g., this december 15, 2016, post by unnatural-bones on the forum my pro ana: https://www.myproana.com/index.php/topic/1012281-list-your-safe-foods/. 11 given the nature of tumblr blogs and pinterest forums, which are generally updated frequently, the exact content of these blogs is constantly changing. to get a sense of the terminology i’m describing, see the tumblr blogs thinspo and motivation (https://skinnyhelper.tumblr.com/), and unsteady (https://palerskin.tumblr.com). these are just a few examples; googling “thinspo” or “pro-ana” turns up hundreds of these blogs. 12 see, e.g., this post from august 11, 2017, on the tumblr blog unsteady: https://palerskin.tumblr.com/post/164067492108/thinspo-imagine. 13 thinspo and pro-ana can sound horrific for the uninitiated, and in certain respects they are. it’s worth noting, however, that the online thinspo/pro-ana communities are complex spaces, and many bloggers have ambivalent relationships with disordered eating and “ana.” while the worrying common features and linguistic atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 the notion of “perfection” has additional layers still. the “perfection” described in “ana imagine” posts also refers to a kind of perfection of will: perfection in the (supposed) virtue of willpower as the ability to control one’s appetite and manage one’s eating. in the thinspo schema, achieving full perfection in this sense (alongside achieving full bodily perfection) enables one to transcend the need to hyper-focus on the body, achieving such a state that thinness and not eating are no longer effortful work. hunger and “lightness” are frequently framed as transcendent states of mastery over the body. the transcendent fantasy is that if one masters the hungering body fully, if one excels at such mastery to the point that one has become “thin enough” and “strong enough” to reliably not eat, the hungry, needy body and the will of the person will transform into a body and will so “perfect” that mastering the body is no longer effortful, and the work of managing it can end. “perfecting” the body through hyper-focus on diet and “perfect” steadfastness in the discipline of hunger is framed as that which makes it possible to transcend being subject to a needy, hungry body and the effort required to discipline it. “ana imagine” posts emphasize how effortless life will be once “perfection” in body and will has been achieved, how easy it will be to not eat, how unappealing or downright revolting the majority of food will be. hunger will cease or transform into something entirely nonmotivating, any compulsion to eat will vanish, and enduring perfection will be “effortless.”14 in thinspo, this path seems to be the only path to gaining freedom from a body felt to be “unworthy” of properly participating in yearned-for realms of life like intimate relationships, friendships, and, sometimes, family. scrolling through thinspo blogs, one quickly notices that they overwhelmingly represent a particular demographic: young women who are white, middle class or wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender, and able-bodied. the idolized bodies the blogs share and display are almost invariably white, young, marked as heterosexual and wealthy, and nondisabled, as well as being thin. but it’s important to highlight that while the vast majority of thinspo spaces are nondiverse and predominately white, “black girl thinspiration” exists also.15 schott (2016, 1029) describes black girl thinspo subcultures as seeking “to inspire black women to reject fuller-figured body shapes as beautiful and responsible.” black girl thinspo replicates much of the same vocabulary trends discussed above are a major part of these communities, many bloggers also state that they get a level of support and acceptance in these online spaces absent elsewhere. 14 see, e.g., 24heaven (https://24heaven.tumblr.com/post/167487219265/imagine) and starving to be happy (https://ciqarettes-0.tumblr.com/post/184681637101/ugwimagine). 15 see, e.g., the tumblr blogs black girl thin (https://black-girl-thin.tumblr.com/) and black girl thinspo (https://african-american-thinspo.tumblr.com/). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 centered around safety, fear, self-control, and purity as the dominant white thinspo spaces.16 i discuss black girl thinspo further in sections 4 and 5.17 2.2. fitspo fitspo is often mentioned alongside thinspo, either as a point of contrast (fitspo is, according to some, healthy while thinspo is dangerous), or as a point of similarity (fitspo is, according to others, just as damaging as thinspo, just with some muscles and a different kind of focus on exercise thrown in).18 in online fitspo spaces, women (who on average are slightly older than the teenage girls involved in thinspo) share imagery of “fit” women, again with text designed to motivate the reader in sticking to their diet and exercise goals to attain a “better” body. “better” here doesn’t signal just “skinny,” although thinness is built into dominant fitspo conceptions of a ‘“good” body. while thinspo is largely intended to motivate people in not eating so as to lose weight with a secondary focus on exercise, fitspo’s imagery and text are often focused on exercise and obtaining a toned, lean physique or specific bodily features (e.g., toned arms or thighs) with a more secondary focus on diet, although the focus on diet and eating “right” is still prominent. as in thinspo, imagery of slim, young, white bodies dominates, but there is more focus on defined abs and grueling exercise than on collarbones and hip bones. fitspo blogs also tend to share more images of food itself. thinspo blogs do contain some imagery of food—when positive, this imagery often depicts cups of green tea or small bowls of berries; when negative, deliberately off-putting pictures of hamburgers and pizza. fitspo food imagery follows similar, if slightly more expansive, themes: pictures of salads, vegetables, and smoothies are presented in a positive and aesthetically pleasing light, 16 see, e.g., the blog blackgirlthinspo skinny curves (https://blackgirlthinspo.word press.com/). 17 some lgbtq+ thinspo spaces exist also, though these are rare, and more common in cisgender gay male online spaces than in other lgbtq+ demographics. this fact itself is no doubt interesting and worthy of analysis, but i leave such analysis for future work. 18 see, e.g., kate harvey, “fitspo vs. thinspo: are they basically the same thing?” kate harvey: eating disorder expert, accessed june 25, 2018, https://katyharvey.net/fitspo -vs-thinspo-are-they-basically-the-same-thing/; elise holland, “why the ‘fitspo’ movement is damaging to women,” the conversation, july 14, 2016, https://thecon versation.com/why-the-fitspo-movement-is-damaging-to-women-60453; and abigail miller, “5 reasons fitspo is just as unhealthy as thinspo,” spoon university, accessed june 25, 2018, https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/5-reasons-why-fitspo-is-just-asunhealthy-as-thinspo. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 while pictures of “junk” foods are positioned—either through the imagery itself or through accompanying text—to look disgusting.19 fitspo’s moral vocabulary surrounding food and eating overlaps with that of thinspo but also diverges in interesting respects. notions of purity, strength, and selfcontrol still dominate, but they are accompanied by rhetoric of health, wellness, and clean eating. moreover, while thinspo connects the notion of self-control explicitly to withstanding hunger, fitspo links self-control and strength to the willpower to endure extreme exercise and body sculpting. while i don’t wish to deny the extent to which fitspo bloggers also seem embroiled in a quest to attain a “better” body so that the “real” business of life—relationships, fun, confidence, and so forth—can begin, there does seem to be a more direct focus on that body than the complex and apparently contradictory relationship with the body in thinspo.20 as discussed in section 2.1, many thinspo posts revolve around the hope of mastering the hungry body so completely, “perfecting” the body and the willpower to not eat, such that maintaining the body is no longer effortful. “ana” is imagined to lead to a state where one can just be, no longer having to constantly try or work for the maintenance of a “good” body or to navigate hunger. within fitspo, the transcendence of bodily maintenance (supposedly) offered by thinspo or “ana” isn’t a goal or possibility. members of fitspo communities accept that work on the body is a lifestyle one makes a long-term commitment to, and that ceasing to exert effort in working on the body will lead to the body ceasing to be “good.” in fitspo, a sculpted body is evidence of your ongoing hard work. a sculpted body shows that your willpower is stronger than your pain or want for junk food, and it shows that you “respect” yourself and your body by committing to working it hard, sweating out “impurities,” and fueling it only with “clean,” “healthy” things. the tendency for fitspo to promote unrealistic, harmful standards has been discussed in academic and popular commentary.21 fitspo can bleed into thinspo relatively easily, and many of the most common fitspo body goals also overlap with those of thinspo (such as a “thigh gap” and a flat stomach).22 however, most fitspo bloggers maintain that they are promoting health and proper nourishment of the 19 see, e.g., the tumblr blog let’s get fit! (http://fitspiration-blog.tumblr.com/). 20 leboeuf (2019) picks up on a similar kind of difference between women and girls with anorexia and those undertaking more specific dietary and exercise regimes for the sake of slenderness or body sculpting; see also footnote 7. 21 see, e.g., alberga, withnell, and von ranson 2018; harvey, “fitspo vs. thinspo: are they basically the same thing?”; and miller, “5 reasons fitspo is just as unhealthy as thinspo.” 22 holland, “why the fitspo movement is damaging to women.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 body, and they condemn thinspo spaces for promoting unhealthy behavior, starvation, and unattractive emaciation.23 2.3. wellness arguably, “wellness” is currently mainstream in the united states, in that it is one of the most publicized, prolific, and widely accepted health, fitness, and diet frameworks. this is reflected in the enormous number of “healthy living” blogs, the vast majority of which are written and run by middle-class white women in their 20s– 40s, focusing on “wellness”: wellness in eating, in exercise, in body, in mind, and, generally, in life. in its original 1950s definition, “wellness” described “a condition of change in which the individual moves forward, climbing towards a higher potential of functioning.”24 the notion of movement toward being more well undergirds many of the most popular health and fitness blogs today (even those which don’t use the term “wellness,” although many do). “the nutrition twins,” for example, describe themselves as “hooked on healthy,” choosing the “right” food so as to “completely improve our energy, athleticism and mood—and make us feel and move at our utmost awesome!”; monique volz of ambitious kitchen describes herself as on a “wellness journey”; kathy patalsky of happy, healthy life writes that it takes “strength” to fight for one’s own “authentic wellness,” and that “wellness is a day-today journey”; samantha rowland of bites of wellness wants to help her readers become “the best version of themselves”; and so on.25 many of these blogs share recipes, exercise and workout routines, and advice on mental health and practices such as meditation, as well as general advice on a “holistically healthy life.” the moral language surrounding food in mainstream wellness culture diverges from that of both thinspo and fitspo. while some wellness bloggers retain terms like “good,” “bad,” and “pure” in reference to food, many more explicitly critique casting food as “good” or “bad” and deliberately avoid terms like “pure.”26 nonetheless, hyphenated terms like good-for-you, good-for-your-body, and feel-good figure 23 see the blog fitspo (https://www.pinterest.com.au/pixiestix718/fitspo/?lp=true). 24 daniela blei, “the false promises of wellness culture,” jstor daily, january 4, 2017, https://daily.jstor.org/the-false-promises-of-wellness-culture/. 25 tammie lakatos shames and lyssie lakatos, the nutrition twins, accessed july 15, 2018, https://nutritiontwins.com/about/; kathy patalsky, “my philosophy: food and life,” happy healthy life, last modified may 5, 2020, https://healthyhappylife.com /about-kathy-patalsky/; samantha rowland, “about samantha rowland,” bites of wellness, accessed june 25, 2018, https://bitesofwellness.com/about/; monique volz, “where it all started,” ambitious kitchen, accessed july 17, 2018, https://www.ambitiouskitchen.com/about/. 26 see, e.g., volz, “where it all started.” atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 prominently. nourishing and natural are often contrasted with processed. terms like clean eating or clean food appear frequently. food high in calories or sugar is often described as indulgent or as an indulgence (usually accompanied by the claim that these are allowed in moderation). finally, eating and preparing food is often described in terms of responsibility—responsibility to animals or the environment (several bloggers incorporate veganism into their “wellness” practices), responsibility to families (most of the bloggers are in heterosexual marriages and many have young children), responsibility to one’s body, and responsibility to one’s self. the rejection and critique of simple “good” and “bad” terms for food is plausibly in part due to the critical backlash thinspo and fitspo have received, but the deliberate moving away from these normative descriptors is also due to the fact that many wellness bloggers themselves are critical of thinspo and fitspo, and several of them are writing from the perspective of formerly having lived with eating disorders.27 the contemporary reincarnation of wellness emergent in these blogs is in many ways a response not just to the ubiquity of “junk” or processed food but also to the extreme diet and exercise online communities that have proliferated over the last 15 years, and to past mainstream diet cultures celebrating thinness and encouraging restrictive eating. within the wellness community, the practice and ethos of eating “nourishing” food in a “responsible” way is framed as a critical response and antidote to other more harmful and punitive dieting and exercise practices. wellness offers more “sustainable” and “balanced” ways of relating to food, ones that emanate from and evidence “self-care” and care for others, animals, and the environment. however, even if wellness blogs are critical of more “extreme” weight-loss and exercise communities, and even if wellness centers a kind of self-care in eating, weight-loss and attaining a “healthy body” (i.e., a slim body) is still a major feature of contemporary wellness culture. although thinness isn’t often celebrated in overt terms, the use of phrases like “body-journey,” eating in “moderation,” and so on suggest that being thin, or working to be thin, is a key focus in online wellness culture. while aiming to be “skinny” would be critiqued as unhealthy, aiming to lose “excess” weight or maintain a “responsible” body weight is still bound to wellness understandings of food and eating. 3. fatphobia 3.1. fatphobic discrimination to properly situate thinspo, fitspo, and wellness cultures and to understand how their moral vocabularies surrounding food function, we must consider the contemporary meanings of fatness. after all, all three movements are self-defined, at least in part, by their members’ desire to not be fat. 27 see lakatos shames and lakatos, nutrition twins; volz, “where it all started.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 fat activists may use the term “fat” as both a neutral descriptor or as a word that picks out a social category of people who face particular forms of discrimination, but the term “fat” is usually, in present usage, not neutral. the social meaning of “fat” is generally negative, a negativity often justified by appeals to health. being fat is unhealthy, the commonsense argument goes, and so we are right to have negative attitudes toward fatness. but the negative social meanings connected to fatness invoke a range of moral and character failings beyond features strictly associated with health. in fat shame, amy farrell (2011, 34) writes that historically “connotations of fatness and of the fat person—lazy, gluttonous, greedy, immoral, uncontrolled, stupid, ugly, and lacking in willpower—preceded and then were intertwined with explicit concern about health issues.” while fatness has been seen as a marker of prestige, prosperity, wealth, fertility, and authority in previous historical eras and in regions of the world characterized by food scarcity, the contemporary united states casts fat bodies as markers of gluttonous lack of self-control, selfishness, burdensomeness, poverty, and greed. concerns over health developed secondarily to these discriminatory attitudes and negative connotations and became intertwined with them. as a. w. eaton (2016, 44–47) argues, the actual linkages between fatness and poor health are disputed, poorly understood, and not as drastic as they are often imagined to be. eaton (45–46) makes the further point that even if these linkages were indisputably proven, they would not justify fatphobic attitudes or discrimination against fat people.28 nonetheless, fatphobic attitudes and discrimination, often justified in the name of health, have a firm place in contemporary culture. moreover, where fat bodies are cast as markers of lack of self-control, poverty, and burdensomeness, thinness has become a marker of prestige and wealth—an essential element in striving toward improving oneself and one’s life (farrell 2011, 7). while the negative associations with fatness are widely familiar, people who are not fat are less aware of what these negative associations and discriminatory attitudes do—the ways they structure the social world to produce specific unjust outcomes and experiences of discrimination for fat people. fat people experience discrimination “in schools, at doctor’s offices, in the job market, in housing, and in their social lives”: fat children experience stigma, getting automatically labeled as “undisciplined” and “stupid” by classmates and by teachers; many fat people have countless stories about doctors who assume any and every illness fat patients experience is weight connected, often leading to misdiagnoses and a lack of adequate health care; fat job candidates are less likely to be hired and promoted; fat rental or mortgage applicants are more likely to be rejected; and fat people are more likely to 28 excessive and unwarranted “concern” over fat people’s health is often a hallmark of fat discrimination, in the form of “concern trolling”: expressing “concern” over health as a means of perpetuating discrimination. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 be dismissed as potential friends or lovers (farrell 2011, 7). this means that fat people’s “life chances—for a good education, for fair and excellent health care, for job promotion and security, for pleasant housing, for friends, lovers, and life partners—are effectively reduced” (farrell 2011, 11). fatphobic discrimination has significant negative ramifications for fat people’s health, well-being, and happiness.29 3.2. the “proper” american body the contemporary notion of fat in the united states emerged as part of the “cultural development of what constituted a proper american body” (farrell 2011, 5). such a body is not only slim but also white, nondisabled, cisgender, and marked as heterosexual and wealthy. such a body is a “civilized” body, a respectable, restrained body. as a form of deviation from the imagined “proper american body,” fatness is conceptually linked to other ways bodies can be socially deviant: being nonwhite, visibly queer, trans, gender nonconforming, disabled, or working class. we see these conceptual linkages play out in various stereotypes and patterns of discrimination experienced by marginalized people. the body of the “fat dyke,” for example, makes 29 it’s important to emphasize that fatphobia doesn’t only arise in conservative, socially dominant ideologies or typically powerful institutions. fatphobia is inflected throughout many organizations, institutions, and political movements that are broadly considered progressive, ethical, and left-wing: food activists tackling the “obesity epidemic” use negative imagery of fat bodies to capture public attention; people for the ethical treatment of animals (peta) uses images of fat bodies to turn people off eating meat and go vegetarian, with the flawed operative assumption that being vegetarian will make one thin (as in peta’s infamous “save the whales” billboard; see katherine goldstein, “peta's new ‘save the whales’ billboard takes aim at fat women,” huffington post, last modified december 7, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/petas-new-save-the-whales_n_261134); michael pollan (2006, 100–101) describes america as ‘“the republic of fat” in his attempt to communicate what his health and “good eating” ethos in the omnivore’s dilemma stands in contrast to; and so on. further still, while the contemporary celebration of “curvy” feminine bodies is often regarded as a more progressive and positive ideal, social sanctions against being fat still persist. there are norms regarding how and where curves should be distributed on a body (while hips and buttocks can be “curvy,” waists and necks, for example, ought to be thin), and cellulite or flab— connected to fatness through notions of degeneracy and “letting one’s self go”—are considered things to be overcome on all bodies. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 the deviancy of queerness visible and, to heterosexual sensibilities, disgusting.30 women of color and particular bodily traits associated with women of color (such as comparatively large hips and buttocks) are regarded as “uncivilized” while also being regarded as aggressively sexual (hooks 1992). there is a pervasive association between working-class people, particularly working-class women, and fatness or “corpulence,” often taken as a marker of stupidity, a lack of dignity, and inappropriate sexuality (hatherley 2015). while slim and “fit’” bodies are seen as independent and productive, disabled and fat people alike are framed as “burdens” on others and on the health-care system. further, the term “obesity” explicitly characterizes some fat people as disabled, and, as anna mollow (2015, 201) argues, fat people and disabled people are subject to a similar form of condescending social “pity.” noting that associating fatness with these other marginalized social categories produces specific stereotypes isn’t to suggest that it is always factually incorrect to associate fatness as a bodily trait with the bodies of people in these marginalized groups (although it often is). but the negative stereotypes linking fatness to other forms of bodily and social deviance go beyond just noting (sometimes) associated features. the fatness of queer, black, disabled, trans, gender-nonconforming, and working-class bodies is socially imagined to indicate that queer, black, disabled, trans, gender-nonconforming, and working-class bodies are inherently undignified, excessive, lacking control, and unhealthy. and the idea that there is something inherently unhealthy or degenerate about queerness, disability, nonwhiteness, and being working class is further imagined to justify the denigration of fatness. simplified, fat bodies are bad, and “bad” bodies are fat. as fatphobia complexly intersects with other forms of marginalization to reproduce not only thin but also white, heterosexual, cisgender, nondisabled, and classed bodily normativity, it produces particular experiences of discrimination and oppression for people who are fat and who are also members of other marginalized groups. for example, “mainstream obesity literature frames fatness as an ‘epidemic’ disproportionately affecting poor, racialized, working-class, and disabled women” (rice et al. 2020, 181); fat black people are seen as “excessively powerful due to their body size and/or as inherently disabled or injured by fatness itself” and so are regarded as “unvictimizable,” leaving them with minimal recourse to seek justice for state violence (rice et al. 2020, 187; discussing mollow 2017); and fat disabled people can face difficulties accessing public spaces, goods, and services due to the fact that their disability and size is structurally not catered to in public infrastructure and services (mollow 2015, 205). 30 though the term “fat dyke” is often used as a positive self-description in lesbian and queer women communities also. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 fatphobia, then, is a complex phenomenon. fat people experience very real discrimination, much of it interwoven with social norms that encode fat as immoral, dangerous, pitiable, and selfish. in the contemporary united states, fatness is interwoven with gender, race, sexuality, class, and (dis)ability, and it is historically entrenched in widespread understandings of bodies, of what bodies should be like, and of what “kinds” of people are worthy and capable of full humanity and flourishing lives. to better understand how the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness function, we need to look more closely at how fatphobic moralizing functions in general. i turn now to a discussion of the moral panic and disgust elicited by fat happiness to argue that moralizing fatness functions to uphold the social norms and boundaries that cast fat bodies as abject. 4. fatness and abjection 4.1. moralizing fat happiness you want to really blow people’s minds? try this at home: be fat and happy. be unapologetically fat. wear a bikini, and mean it. eat pizza and ice cream and enjoy it. drink up your life and a bottle of wine, and make no apologies.31 the above excerpt from an online blog highlights an interesting and telling dimension of fatphobia: the idea of fat people experiencing genuine happiness, liking themselves, liking their bodies, and enjoying their lives can be “mind-blowing” to others in the fatphobic culture. bordo (1993) describes the utter disbelief of a talk show audience in response to an obese woman’s insistence that she was happy. in response to this insistence, audience members tried to convince the woman that she was delusional: “‘i can’t believe you don’t want to be slim and beautiful, i just can’t believe it.’ ‘i heard you talk a lot about how you feel good about yourself and you like yourself, but i really think you’re kidding yourself’” (bordo 1993, 203). when fat people refuse to go through the public rituals of suffering and hating themselves, the kind of denial expressed by disbelieving thin observers can escalate to anger, fear, and disgust. fat people being happy and fat people experiencing pleasure—especially pleasure related to food, sex, or relationships—often elicit hostility, disgust, and almost a kind of moral panic (bordo 1993, 204). eaton (2016) argues that negative sentiments directed toward fat bodies, notably disgust and distaste, play a constitutive role in fatphobia (or “fatism”). she 31 joni edelman, “i’m fat and i’m happy,” scary mommy (blog), last modified august 16, 2019, https://www.scarymommy.com/im-fat-and-happy/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 argues that disgust is “part of what, in the first instance, establishes and maintains the implicit biases, reactions, habits, norms, stereotypes, and discriminatory practices” that constitute fatphobia (eaton 2016, 38). this argument runs against the view that sentiments like disgust are secondary, epiphenomenal effects of fatphobic beliefs (such as “fat people are unhealthy”) and practices. i agree with eaton here, and think that collectively held sentiments, like disgust toward fatness, drive and enact fatphobia, and that these sentiments often firmly persist even when people adopt non-fatphobic beliefs and work to interrogate their fatphobic biases. moral panic about fat people and fat bodies plays a similar role to disgust in this respect. accepting eaton’s argument that sentiment is a direct driver of fatphobia, we might ask the following: what fatphobic functions do disgust and moral panic play? what do they serve to do when they are produced and experienced in response to fat happiness? many of us are deeply emotionally invested in the bodily hierarchy and social order of the “proper american body.”32 in simple terms, i think that fear and disgust in response to fat happiness are associated with seeing that order threatened. moralizing disgust and panic directed at fat happiness both reflect investment in that hierarchy and effectively function as attempts to reinforce that hierarchy, (re)producing fatphobia. recognizing this is important. the emotional investment many of us have in fatphobic body ideals makes the moral panic and moralizing responses of disgust in response to fat happiness feel right and correct, and it makes denial and dismissal of fat people’s testimony about their own happiness and own lives feel so morally righteous. the notion of abjection can substantiate the above suggestion, and it offers insight on how emotional investment in the social norms and boundaries associated with the “proper american body” connects to the moralizing disgust and panic directed toward fat bodies and fat people’s lives, and particularly toward fat happiness. the notion of abjection can also offer insight into exactly how moralizing disgust and panic function with respect to fatphobia. many theorists have developed notions of the abject. julia kristeva (1982, 4) ties ambiguity and liminality to the abject, writing that what “does not respect 32 such emotional investment comes in the form of the cliché (but real and widespread) excitement of starting a new gym membership or exercise routine, or the hope directed toward an imagined future where one is slimmer and more confident, or the pleasure of fantasizing about fitting into that outfit, or the comfort of planning to lose those winter pounds, and so on. these are not experiences shared by everyone, but they are common enough to be recognizable tropes, and they speak to the ways people generally have emotional stock in certain forms of bodily normativity. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 borders, positions, rules” and what “disturbs identity, system, order” leads to abjection. judith butler (1990) regards abject persons as those unable to be made sense of by dominant categories and who, as a consequence, do not have a socially valid subjectivity. spaces of abjection, as i am understanding them here, refer to the spaces outside the dominant, positive social order where subjectivity and valid social identity occur. people with identities, bodies, and lives that are confusing or horrifying to dominant hierarchies are cast out into these spaces. thinness ideals presently play a significant role in most people’s sense of self and the social order. within this order, fatness threatens social norms and refuses to respect the borders and rules that tie the possibility of subjectivity to certain modes of embodiment. to be fat is to transgress entrenched social normativity. such transgression risks social condemnation in the form of abjection. in rendering fat people abject—in placing fat bodies firmly outside the social spaces that allow for full subjectivity and human experience—the threat fatness presents to social normativity is contained. fat bodies and other threatening bodies (queer bodies, black bodies, disabled bodies, and so on) are deviant bodies, inherently threatening to the dominant social order. in abjection, however, they are ordered and contained, no longer presenting a threat to social norms. the idea that fat bodies are cast as abject can go some way to explaining why fat happiness elicits such intense moralizing responses in the form of moral panic and disgust, and how such moralizing functions. a fat person who loves themselves or who is even just okay with themselves, who insists that they experience happiness, is effectively contesting their abjection, insisting that they exist in a social space where subjectivity, positive experiences, and meaningfulness can occur. in this sense, they are no longer staying in their abject place but are contesting a normative body hierarchy many of us are deeply emotionally invested in, reassured by (regardless of how consciously we register such investment and reassurance), and pursue for our own possibilities of personhood, happiness, and material reward. the moralizing responses of fear and disgust reflect that this internalized normative hierarchy has been threatened, and also work to reinforce it. fear creates a kind of moral panic as people try to reinforce fat abjection (“‘i heard you talk a lot about how you feel good about yourself and you like yourself, but i really think you’re kidding yourself’” [bordo 1993, 203]). disgust at the supposed baseness, sordidness, and inappropriateness of fat pleasure or happiness serves to reinforce (perhaps justify) discriminatory fatphobic practices and the belief that fat people don't and shouldn't have valid social subjectivity. moralizing panic and disgust also function as attempts to discipline fat bodies, instilling in them the habitus expected of a fat person (shame-filled, embarrassed, apologetic, awkward), and shaming them into exercise and dieting so as to lose weight, or into social isolation, withdrawal, and self-hatred so as to remain abject. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 we can understand fatphobic disgust and moral panic as functioning to maintain the boundaries between abject and nonabject or socially valid bodies.33 at an emotional level, many individuals are deeply invested in maintaining such boundaries even if they critique and reject some of the beliefs used to justify them, because such boundaries inform shared cultural understandings of and hopes for a good, fulfilled life and promise real material and social rewards to those who conform to and uphold them. 4.2. fat abjection in thinspo, fitspo, and wellness so far i have argued the following: collectively, we are emotionally invested in the social boundaries expressed in the notion of the “proper american body”; responding to fatness with moral panic and disgust expresses and evidences this investment; and fatphobic moral panic and disgust work to maintain those social boundaries and bodily norms. to connect this to the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness, we need to understand how members of these communities relate to the boundaries and norms of the “proper american body,” what their investment in this schema is like, and how the risk of abjection affects them. thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities are overwhelmingly comprised of white, heterosexual, middle-class, nondisabled, cisgender women. what do fatness, the norms of the “proper american body,” and the threat of abjection mean for this demographic? feminists have detailed the particular pressure on women to be thin and the fact that thinness is often cast as a prerequisite for being attractive. attractiveness is further cast as crucial for women if they are to have valid social subjectivity: the recognition and acceptance of women as valid social subjects hinges significantly on their desirability and attractiveness (according to dominant standards) in a way and to a degree it does not for (some) men in mainstream society.34 for some 33 eaton (2016, 43) suggests something similar when she notes that disgust can play a role in “demarcating and maintaining group boundaries by vilifying and dehumanizing a given out group.” 34 it’s important to note that while some men are allowed a form of valid social subjectivity that doesn’t rely on them being attractive and desirable (and thin), many men’s social subjectivity or lack of social subjectivity is tied to their body or appearance in various respects: cisgender gay male communities can be spaces of intense body normativity, and many gay men face enormous social pressure to be thin and attractive (there are some cisgender gay male thinspo online communities also); men of color’s social subjectivity arguably hinges on them meeting dominant attractiveness standards to a degree it does not for white men; trans men face particular social pressures concerning their appearances, as do disabled men; and so on. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 women, then—for white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, and wealthy women—being thin offers a path to the “proper (feminine) american body” and valid social subjectivity. the prospect of thinness carries an imagined life where recognition, intimacy, and pleasure are possible, while fatness is felt to negate these possibilities. this illuminates what thinness and fatness mean to the members of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities: fatness is, for them, the most salient bridge to abjection, while thinness offers the promise of positive social subjectivity and the imagined life (and real social and material advantages) such subjectivity brings. this is most saliently reflected in “ana imagine” posts on thinspo blogs, in which bloggers imagine and detail the positive social experiences, friendship, confidence, and love they will experience when they become thin. less explicitly, fitspo and wellness also tie thinness to valid social subjectivity by framing their respective regimes of food management as keys to unlocking lives full of esteem, admiration, and respect (for fitspo), familial love, inner peace, and career success (for wellness), and intimacy, pleasure, and confidence (for both). fatness, however, represents only one bridge to abjection and nonnormative embodiment. for those with bodies who are marginalized in other ways, thinness alone cannot hold the promise of subjectivity in the way it can for white, heterosexual, nondisabled, cisgender, and middle-class women. for people existing at multiple intersections of marginalization and oppression, fatness isn’t the only barrier to having a “proper american body” and the social and material advantages such a body confers. disabled bodies, even if thin, are still likely to be abject (and disabled people who resist abjection by insisting on their capacity to be happy are also often met with a moral panic and disgust similar to that generated in response to happy fat people35). visibly queer and gender-nonconforming bodies, black and brown bodies, and bodies marked as poor are also at greater risk of abjection. losing weight or maintaining thinness only promises valid social subjectivity to some. this is not to say that thinness offers nothing in terms of social validity or upward social mobility to women who are nonwhite, queer, disabled, trans or nonbinary, or working class. as schott, focusing on black women and black girl thinspo, argues, thinness brings women, generally, at least some social mobility because it brings them a degree closer to “neoliberal personhood,” even if such personhood cannot be fully achieved: black women who are thin are more likely to be hired for well-paid jobs, to access elite social spaces, and to avoid other forms of exclusion and violence than fat black women (schott 2016, 1037–38). “neoliberal 35 for a discussion on disability, happiness, and the prevalence of the belief that disabled people who proclaim to be happy are delusional or lying, see tom shakespeare, “a point of view: happiness and disability,” bbc news magazine, june 1, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27554754. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 personhood” has some important connections with the notion of the “proper american body”: both concepts encompass notions of self-control, self-reliance, and civility, in contrast to being unruly, uncontrolled, animal, and unkempt. as the former set of terms are historically and conceptually linked with whiteness and thinness and the latter with blackness and fatness, schott (2016, 1037) argues that in striving for thinness, the members of black girl thinspo are attempting to “demark their bodies” and move away from blackness and toward the greater degree of personhood afforded to white women.36 arguably, women at other intersections of marginalization (women who are queer or disabled or trans or poor) are also afforded degrees of social mobility if they are thin. nevertheless, thinness offers a greater promise of personhood and a more complete path away from abjection for white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, and wealthy women, and the fruits of thinness are more materially and imaginatively accessible to this group. i suggest that this is part of why diet cultures like thinspo, fitspo, and wellness are so overwhelmingly populated by white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class, and nondisabled women and center aspirational images of white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class, and nondisabled bodies and lifestyles. thinness offers more complete promises of social validity and subjectivity (of that available to women) to this group in particular. even if fat people existing at other intersections of bodily marginalization are invested in thinness ideals and stand to gain some social mobility and validity through thinness, working to be thin does not promise the same social results: thin white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender, and wealthy women can become only marked by gender; other thin women will still be multiply marked and therefore more degrees away from the civility and control of the “proper american body.” another reason why these diet communities are so nondiverse is that many of them actively perpetuate racism, homophobia, ableism, cisnormativity, and class elitism, excluding those who don’t fit their demographic. relatedly, the barriers to entry and access in these communities can be high. the exercise regimes and the kind of “pure, clean” food that thinspo, fitspo, and wellness promote require money and time to access, and they generally presume nondisability. i have suggested that, to the members of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities, the prospect of fatness is the risk of social abjection, a risk that threatens the ability to have a full human life, to have relationships, success, and joy, 36 the personhood afforded to white women is still not complete, however, because even white women’s bodies are still marked as feminine/woman; white, heterosexual, cisgender, nondisabled, and wealthy men’s bodies are the only group whose bodies are regarded as completely unmarked and who can achieve full civility by being identified with the mind rather than the body (schott 2016, 1038). atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 and to be a valid person. i have also suggested that while thinness holds a promise (however contingent) of personhood and subjectivity to the predominately white, heterosexual, nondisabled, cisgender, and middle-class members of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities, the same promise isn’t imaginatively or materially available to people whose bodies are marginalized along intersections other than size (at least not to the same degree). with an understanding of what fatness and thinness mean for the members of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities, i am now, finally, in a position to analyze how the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness function, both within these communities and within wider society. 5. thinspo, fitspo, and wellness revisited 5.1. dieting and collective self-discipline from the perspective of the dieter, dieting practices can be seen as rituals that control the threat of fatness. in a fatphobic culture, and certainly within thinspo, fitspo, and wellness communities, food is cast as a bridge between the abject (fatness) and the nonabject (the presently thin or the future-thin body).37 within this schema, food emerges as a dangerous, risky, material-semiotic object. food’s risk needs to be managed just as the body needs to be managed: the subject socially invested in this schema must find a way to preserve their place in the social order and not risk abjection. the body is also experienced as a site of risk: it could, unless one does the “right” things and abstains from the “wrong” things, become contaminated by food and fat, and it could then become abject. thinspo, fitspo, and wellness culture can be understood as food-management strategies. they direct subjects in managing food and containing the risk of abjection, a risk carried by food and ever-present in a body that might become fat. the moral vocabularies each community uses to describe food and eating can be read as mechanisms of collective or community self-discipline. similar to how moralizing panic and disgust function to discipline fat people and uphold social boundaries, the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness, and the moralizing sentiments these vocabularies attach to food and eating, function as tools that members of these communities use to discipline themselves and one another 37 the idea that food is the major variable in body size is likely erroneous. setpoint theory suggests that “each person’s body has a biologically determined ‘setpoint’ or weight that it ‘wants to’ be” (mollow 2015, 200). weight loss through dieting or exercise tends, for most people, to be temporary, and setpoint theory offers a framework for understanding why. the widespread cultural belief that eating “bad” food is the major variable in fatness is connected to the (also erroneous) belief that body size is generally something people can control, a belief that is part of the “fat people have no self-discipline” matrix of fatphobic assumptions and sentiments. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 into adhering to the food-management strategies they have collectively created, adopted, and endorsed. however, while these disciplinary mechanisms are directed inward, they reflect and ultimately serve to reinforce a body hierarchy that casts fat bodies as abject and unworthy. thinspo revisited thinspo presents an extreme strategy to manage the body and the risk of abjection that food brings. nearly all types of food within the thinspo community are considered risky; some are explicitly dangerous, in that they risk bringing the subject closer to fatness and abjection and so must be completely avoided, but even safe foods need to be monitored and consumed in controlled amounts. labeling these “danger foods” and “safety foods” promotes feelings of fear or security, respectively, determines how different foods ought to be interacted with, and helps ensure they are interacted with “properly.” the high value placed on “self-control” esteems those who can bring the body under control. that not eating at all—or eating very little—is understood in terms of “purity” indicates that this state is highly valuable in thinspo and is something to strive for, as it brings the subject as close as possible to (the fantasy of) being completely untethered from the possibility of fatness and abjection. “safety,” “fear,” “self-control,” “strength,” and, especially, “perfection” and “purity” are terms that evoke strong and motivating emotional responses in members of thinspo communities, directing how they interact with food and strengthening their resolve in adhering to thinspo’s strategy of extreme food restriction. sheila lintott (2003) argues that, in not eating, anorexic women can access experiences of the sublime. within the thinspo framework, not eating effectively equates to being-with or observing one’s most feared things—hunger, food, and the hungry body—and not being subsumed or threatened by them. leboeuf (2019, 3), detailing lintott’s account, describes this sublimity as a “mastery” over “one’s fear or of a fearful object.” while i don’t wish to and cannot speak for all persons who have experienced disordered eating and anorexic thought and behavior patterns, as someone who once lived, on and off, with these patterns for long periods of my life, i find certain dimensions of my experience captured well in lintott’s argument. there is a pleasure in hunger when you know you won’t give into it, a power in turning down the offer of food, a sublimity in awareness of hunger and knowledge of its powerlessness over you, and a sense of pleasurable clarity in the belief that this power and control will, eventually, lead you to a place of being able to exist within and be aware of your body and of not being threatened by it or fearful of it. lintott’s analysis also resonates with the moral language used in thinspo communities. although not all members of thinspo communities have anorexia, periods of not eating and mastery over hunger, food, and the threat of abjection are idolized, understood, and valued in terms tied closely to the sublime, such as terms atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 of “transcendence.” but experiences of the sublime, as they are understood and valued within the moral vocabulary of thinspo, also have a significant future-directed aspect, an imagined future of absolute, complete, enduring mastery over hunger, food, and the body in general. content on thinspo blogs describing, in detail, what certain parts of life and life events—family christmases, wearing certain clothes, being hugged, and so many more besides—will be like once skinniness is achieved is testament to this. attaining enduring “purity” and “perfection” through absolute mastery means that one has transcended the need to manage food and one’s body at all, and this imagined “perfect” self adheres to society’s norms so well that there is effectively no risk they could become abject. in this sense, experiences of the sublime in thinspo eating practices also have a significant social dimension. the enjoyment of hunger-fueled transcendence is an enjoyment tied, at least in part, to the imagining of oneself as the enduringly perfect social subject. it is this construct, this fantasy, always-future girl, described in terms of “transcendence,” “perfection,” and “purity” that emotionally resonates with those in thinspo communities. it is this fantasy that grounds and fuels their desires to “stay on track” and disciplines their behavior toward the same. the “purity” attained by not eating is, of course, attainable only temporarily, if at all. “perfection,” while something to strive and diet for, is always a yet-to-berealized state. if it is realized, it will be short-term and ruined through hunger and having to eat, or it will require medical attention as not eating slowly destroys the person. nevertheless, the language of “perfection" and “purity” reflects that the thinspo diet strategy revolves around the hope of permanently escaping the risk of abjection by achieving enduring, effort-free mastery over hunger and the body. recognizing (not necessarily consciously) that hunger will always risk connecting them with bodies that could become abject, those within thinspo communities aim for transcendence in mastering, and so being able to detach from, the body’s needs and hunger completely. thinspo’s moral vocabulary, replete with notions of “danger,” “safety,” “purity,” “lightness,” and “transcendence,” projects and communicates this fantasy aim, and it functions to motivate members of the thinspo community to discipline themselves and one another into adhering to the strategy of extreme food restriction. black girl thinspo spaces utilize much of the same rhetoric as their more common white counterparts. within black girl thinspo, i think this rhetoric can still be read as a mechanism of collective self-discipline to adhere to the dietary strategies that promise an escape from abjection and the transcendence of a needy, hungry body that is or could become abject. schott (2016, 1029) describes black girl thinspo communities as communities in which black women and girls “attempt to de-mark their racialized bodies through hard work, will-power, and mastery over their desires.” here “transcendence” and “purity” speak to a strategy aimed at leaving the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 26 hungering black body behind. as thinness is culturally linked with whiteness, becoming thin offers upward social mobility and holds the promise (however illusory) of escaping the stigma associated with dark skin, and so of transcending a body socially read as marked for abjection.38 fitspo revisited fitspo spaces utilize a related but distinct strategy to manage the riskiness of food and the body. in fitspo, the focus is on dominating the risk of fatness. fitspo’s moral vocabulary disciplines community members in this strategy of dominance through extreme exercise, requiring the virtues of great “strength” and “discipline,” but also through eating the “right” things in the “right” portions. in thinspo, any body short of one that is perfectly skinny and doesn’t hunger (and so not a real possible body at all) is a risky body and so must be left behind. unlike thinspo, fitspo presents a particular form of body—one that still hungers, but whose hunger and efforts are properly directed at the “right” things—as firmly within social boundaries. where members of thinspo communities desire to transcend the need to manage the body, members of fitspo communities manage the riskiness of the body through a strategy of long-term, ongoing dominance. and while thinspo spaces see all food as potentially dangerous (safe foods are only safe when properly measured and controlled), fitspo spaces tend to break food into “good” and “bad” categories, where “good” (“clean,” “whole,” “pure”) foods don’t form a bridge to fatness and abjection while “bad” foods do. the moral vocabulary of fitspo reflects how certain foods are presumed to influence the quest for the perfect body (and the subjectivity such a body entails), and so it functions to motivate particular ways of relating to food. “clean” foods will leave one untainted; “whole” foods (consumed properly) aid exercise goals. “junk” foods contaminate the body and must be avoided; eating them evidences weakness. “good” foods can be safely engaged with, and one is “good” when one does so properly. some foods can become a strategy in managing the body through ongoing dominance to attain “purity”: a pure body is fueled by clean and healthy foods and is uncontaminated by impure foods. extreme exercise—the proper processing of food so that it affects the body in particular ways—helps purify the body further. “purity,” control over the danger of fatness and the guarantee of a socially valid body/self, here is not attained in leaving the body, its needs, and its risks behind (as it is in thinspo), but through ongoing dominance of the body to sculpt it in particular ways. terms like “good,” “bad,” “clean,” “pure,” and so on direct members of fitspo communities in 38 the intersections between online disordered eating communities, fatphobia, and race deserve much deeper exploration than i have space for here. for more thoroughgoing analysis, see schott (2016). atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 27 this strategy of dominance, and support them in disciplining themselves and one another to “stay on track.” sandra bartky’s conception of bodily alienation, as detailed by leboeuf (2019) in her analysis of the thigh gap, can help illuminate fitspo’s dominance strategy further. bodily alienation arises when one’s being is identified with one’s body and one’s body is experienced as a project that could always do with “improving.” bodily improvement is understood as self-improvement—to work on the body is to work on the self. members of fitspo communities accept that to work on the body is, in a very socially real sense, to work on the self: one’s pursuit of a certain body shows “strength” of character and “willpower.” engagement in projects of self-/body improvement like fitspo is also narcissistic and repressive—narcissistic as it is fixated on and overly invested in the appearance of the body, and repressive as the “body is always experienced as in need of disciplining” (leboeuf 2019, 5). unlike those in thinspo communities who work to leave the body behind, fitspo community members commit to ongoing dominance of and identification with the body. effectively, they commit to an ongoing alienated, narcissistic, and repressive relationship with their bodies, accepting the belief that the ways one interacts with food will produce a particular body and the social fact that such a body can be read as saying something about one’s worth. understanding fitspo as alienated, repressive, and narcissistic, and situating fitspo within my analysis of fatness and abjection, suggests that the threat of abjection can be a key part of the alienation and repressive narcissism women can experience in relation to their bodies. fat is an existential threat for the members of fitspo communities; it means a kind of social death. an alienated stance toward the body, a repressive and narcissistic regime of bodily dominance, and the development of a moralizing language aimed at collective self-discipline, is, in certain respects, an understandable response to this threat. wellness revisited wellness culture employs a related but different strategy to fitspo in managing the body’s riskiness and the risk of food. many of the wellness blogs i surveyed are maintained by women who have experienced disordered eating or obsessive exercise. they know thinspo and fitspo strategies are unsustainable, yet many, like those within thinspo and fitspo communities, “struggle” with food. they need a strategy to manage the danger of fatness, to control the body’s potential to become fat and the subject’s potential to become socially abject. i consider the strategy they adopt to be a strategy of negotiation—negotiation with food and with one’s body. this strategy has nothing of the sublime that thinspo offers, and it is less alienated, less repressive, and less narcissistic than that of fitspo. those in wellness communities do manage their bodies feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 28 and food, but the project of such bodily management is interwoven with other aspects of the self that have to do with family, relationships, and careers. the strategy of negotiation is evident in wellness’s moral language. terms like “nourishing” and “good-for-you” highlight that food can be navigated in such a way that it need not carry the danger of fatness, and that the body’s needs and hunger can be negotiated with on “good,” “enriching” terms. while negotiation doesn’t guarantee the same results as the dominance of fitspo, it does aim at maintenance of thinness on potentially softer terms: rather than being “perfect” and “sculpted,” the practitioner of wellness is “healthy” and doesn’t carry any “excess’” weight. it is in this sense that the practitioner of wellness is “responsible”—they work to maintain and keep their bodies within society’s normative bounds, but they render this pursuit a key part in the vision of a holistically sustainable lifestyle. nonetheless, the moral terms of wellness still serve as means of community self-discipline to ensure certain ways of relating to food. recall the framing of certain foods as “indulgences.” “indulgences” typically describe foods imagined to form a bridge to fatness, like ice cream and chocolate. because these foods are, generally, pleasurable to eat, some exposure is recognized as crucial in more generally keeping control and not overexposing oneself. thus framing certain foods as indulgences is a form of negotiation with the body and desires, through directing how much of a tempting food it is “okay” to consume. it is also a form of negotiation with food, through accepting the exposure to danger, but only a little bit. the language of “responsibility,” “sustainability,” and “indulgence” and the strategy of negotiation enable wellness to access to forms of social legitimacy that thinspo and many variants of fitspo are unable to access. schott (2016) argues that the pursuit of thinness often involves a social trap: thinness is a key point on the “journey to personhood,” but being labeled as someone with an eating disorder (or as an obsessive “exercise junkie”) also risks moving one further away from personhood and closer again to abjection. wellness’s strategy of negotiation evades this trap and so offers a path toward thinness while navigating around the deviancy attached to those who develop eating disorders or obsessive eating and exercise behaviors. 5.2. a fatphobic continuum there are some clear and important differences between thinspo, fitspo, and wellness cultures. the strategies each community employs to manage the body and food so as to mitigate the threat of abjection are different and mean different things to the members of those communities. we've seen that thinspo encompasses a strategy of transcendence—one that ultimately isn’t realistic but speaks to the desire to be a “perfect” embodied subject so that one can be free from any regimes of bodily management. within this framework, not eating can create experiences of the atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 29 sublime, in that not eating equates to the mastery of the threats presented by food, hunger, and the body. despite fitspo’s tendency to bleed into thinspo, the theme of transcendence and the experience of sublimity are not features of fitspo. fitspo’s strategy of dominance and breaking food into resolutely “good” and “bad” categories means that food isn’t experienced in the same fearful “safety/danger” categories of thinspo. a conception of “good” food as something that fuels the body and the stronger focus on exercise means hunger is not as threatening as it is in thinspo spaces. given this, it seems less likely that not eating could offer the same sublime experience of mastery over hunger and food as it can within thinspo. moreover, members of fitspo communities effectively accept and commit to long-term, ongoing regimes of bodily management. they identify with their bodies and don’t seek to transcend the need to manage them but commit to working on them long term, continually “improving” them. in this sense, fitspo is an alienated, repressive, and narcissistic. wellness has neither thinspo’s focus on transcendence and its prospect of the sublime, nor fitspo’s alienation and repressive narcissism. wellness’s strategy of negotiation enables a place for all foods, even “indulgences,” so that one relates to them “properly,” with “responsibility,” rendering them nonthreatening. hunger is to be respected, heeded, and gently negotiated with, so it is not threatening either. the sublime mastery over the feared objects of food and hunger thus isn’t available here, and strategies of transcendence are recognized as delusional and unhealthy. the practitioner of wellness accepts that she has to live with hunger, food, and her body. but unlike in fitspo, living with the body doesn’t mean alienated hyper-focus on the body and treating it like an always-to-be-improved project. instead, it means incorporating ongoing, sustainable management of the body into a lifestyle, one that also incorporates family, social responsibility, and self-care. the food-management strategies of wellness thus also encompass these other parts of life: organic, vegan, and “healthy” are the preferred foods of choice, even while there is some room to “indulge.” this enables those who practice wellness lifestyles to pursue normative modes of embodiment while navigating around the risk of being marked with the deviant label of having an eating disorder or as an obsessive “exercise junkie” and the abjection such labeling can bring, avoiding the social “trap” (schott 2016, 1038) that thinspo and sometimes fitspo fall into. despite these important differences, understanding the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness as mechanisms of collective self-discipline, and understanding such collective self-discipline as being performed by members of these communities in order to manage the threat of fatness and fat abjection, enables us to recognize that thinspo, fitspo, and wellness cultures are on a continuum. for such collective self-discipline mechanisms to function as they do, the community feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 30 employing them has to, at some level, buy into the idea of the “proper american body” and the fatphobia it entails. the moral language and disciplinary measures in thinspo, fitspo, and wellness are directed inwards. aside from the very occasional use of “fatspo” (in the negative/derogatory sense of the term) in thinspo spaces, most of these communities don’t take up the explicit discipline or denigration of fat people outside of these communities. nonetheless, the moral vocabularies of these communities (re)produce fatphobia. while these vocabularies and their disciplinary effects are directed inward, their language still reflects and reproduces the wider cultural moral panic and disgust surrounding fatness. their use contributes to the perpetuation of fatphobic discrimination. the moralizing of food and hunger in these communities reflects a fear of abjection, but it also reinforces the social boundaries that work to make fat people abject. within thinspo, fitspo, and wellness, people are “good,” “clean,” “pure,” or “responsible” when they stay within and work to stay within the boundaries set by the ideal of the “proper american body.” people are “bad,” “unhealthy,” “irresponsible,” “unsustainable,” “disgusting,” or “naughty” when they do not. this language reflects an emotional investment in the “proper american body” and in the promise of the happiness that working to attain it supposedly brings. it also reflects an emotional investment in fatphobia, in a hierarchy of bodies where only some are worthy of pleasure, happiness, value, and respect. so while the moral vocabularies of thinspo, fitspo, and wellness function within those communities as templates for relating to food and bodies, they also function to reflect and reinforce socially dominant ways of reading others’ worth though their bodies and eating practices. recognizing that thinspo, fitspo, and wellness are on this fatphobic continuum is important in understanding how fatphobia is perpetuated in the contemporary united states. thinspo and, to an extent, fitspo are widely recognized as promoting harmful body standards and eating practices, and members of thinspo (and some members of fitspo) can gain the deviant labels of “disordered eater,” “obsessive,” or "exercise junkie,” partially delegitimizing those communities’ dieting strategies and their extreme body normativity. wellness, however, normalizes, legitimizes, and rationalizes fatphobia, couching it in terms of “responsibility,” “moderation,” and “sustainability.” wellness is acceptable and mainstream. further than that, wellness is generally considered progressive. in certain respects, wellness is framed as the responsible reaction to the harmfulness of other dieting subcultures focused on thinness. it is also considered a progressive way to relate to food in the social contexts of the “obesity epidemic” and growing concern over the abundance and comparative affordability of processed food in the united states. i've argued that wellness communicates and reinforces a social order in which fat people are denigrated and abject within appeals to “responsibility” and “sustainability.” this fatphobia is largely masked by wellness’s rejection of more extreme diet cultures and the more extreme atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 31 forms of bodily normativity central to those cultures: wellness can effectively claim to reject “unhealthy” body normativity, rendering its own fatphobic body normativity invisible or legitimate and “healthy.” in this sense, wellness is far from progressive. further, in focusing solely on maximizing individual happiness or success in the face of harmful diet cultures, wellness obscures the fact that collective action and critique are necessary to actually, substantively contend with the harmful cultural norms regarding bodies and eating.39 rejecting the goal of transcendence, and the alienation and repressive narcissism of treating the body as a project isn’t enough, then, to relate to food in an actively non-fatphobic and progressive way. rejecting fatphobia and moving away from the harmful ideal of the “proper american body” requires a different strategy, something more radical that breaks with the practice of moralizing food choices and the bodies food choices are (often erroneously) imagined to result in. 6. concluding thoughts: “food is not a moral issue” i opened this paper with a claim made frequently on feminist, fat-activist, and body-acceptance blogs—the claim that food is not a moral issue. after analyzing how moralizing food functions both in contemporary society as a whole and in specific diet cultures, what this claim is getting at is now, i hope, clearer. as i read it, the insistence that food is not a moral issue is not a claim that food is apolitical or that there are no moral questions with respect to food. the existence of food deserts and other structural and economic limitations on food choice, the environmental costs of some forms of food production, the unjust working conditions of much food production, the ways in which some cultures’ foods are unjustly devalued compared to others, and the suffering and exploitation of animals as a routine part of the food industry are all ethical issues relating to food. but these are all structural issues, which require collective action going beyond individual eating choices to address. the claim “food is not a moral issue” addresses specifically the moralization of individuals’ food choices according to fatphobic norms. like thinspo, fitspo, and wellness, the claim that “food is not a moral issue” must be read against the current fatphobic culture, a culture that assigns moral worth to certain bodies and not others and moralizes 39 another problematic feature of wellness hidden behind apparent progressivism is the “good health imperative,” the belief that it is the responsibility of all individuals to work to be healthy, to take health into their own hands (welsh 2020). the good health imperative neglects the fact that many issues of ill-health are social issues, brought about by social and environmental circumstances, and it places responsibility for health erroneously in individuals’ hands. it also reinforces stigma around ill-health and disability, and works to justify discrimination against people who are, or seem, unhealthy. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 32 individuals’ food choices with respect to how those choices are imagined to bring about certain body types. moralizing food in this way acts as a disciplinary mechanism directing people to relate to food in ways that will, supposedly, ensure their thinness (or punish them for their fatness). moralizing food upholds social boundaries that denigrate fat bodies and render them abject. insisting that food is not a moral issue is, then, not a denial of the structural and ethical issues surrounding food production, distribution, and access, but a call to emotionally disinvest from fatphobic norms so that we no longer see individuals’ food choices, as they are imagined to connect to the potential for fatness, as speaking to their moral worth. it is also a call to relate to food on different terms, ones that are more liberatory and just. fat-activist, body-positivity, and body-acceptance movements are varied, with multiple different communities focusing on issues pertaining to fatphobia in different ways, centering different political commitments.40 while it is important to recognize this variance, multiple fat-activist online spaces share in the ethos communicated by the claim that “food is not a moral issue,” and envision more liberatory and just ways of relating to food as a personal and political strategy of combatting fatphobia. one resistant way of relating to food i read these communities as (sometimes tacitly) endorsing is a mode of relation that emphasizes pleasure and joy as opposed to fear and bodily alienation. this can be considered a form of pleasure activism, understood as “work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (brown 2019, 13). as pleasure activism, refusing to relate to food in the moralizing terms of a fatphobic culture and instead relating to food in terms of pleasure and bodily enjoyment communicates the message that pleasure is important for a good life, and pleasure is something oppression stifles and takes away from oppressed and marginalized people. (this form of personal activism might also be in the same family as the mode 40 some examples to illustrate this: while some movements like the health at every size (haes) movement aim to dispel false beliefs about the connections between fatness and ill-health and promote health for all bodies, fat-acceptance movements critique the focus on health and instead advocate for nondiscrimination with respect to all body types, regardless of size or health. there is also a difference between body positivity, which generally holds that people ought to feel good about their bodies, and body acceptance, which promotes just that—acceptance, not necessarily positive feelings. the pressure to be “positive” about their bodies and the shame experienced when they cannot make themselves feel so positive turns some people away from body positivity and toward body acceptance. see williams (2017) for more detail on some of the differences between different body-acceptance/ fat-activist movements. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 33 of “sensualism” leboeuf [2019] describes, the embodied awareness of the pleasures and sensations of the body.) fat activism as a form of pleasure activism goes beyond advocating for pleasure-based ways of relating to food. the other, positive kind of fatspo, encompassing images of fat people shown in a positive light and highlighting their beauty, joy, self-acceptance, and pleasure, is one example of this. unlike thinspo, fitspo, and wellness, fatspo explicitly undermines the notion of the “proper american body,” showing the happiness, richness, and beauty in fat people’s lives. fatspo is fat people refusing to be abject: fatspo aims to upend the scaffolding upon which thinspo, fitspo, and wellness form a continuum and to communicate the message that, contrary to widespread cultural fatphobia, fat people are capable and deserving of pleasure and happiness. worth noting also is that fat-activist spaces tend to be, on the whole, significantly more diverse than contemporary diet cultures. while there are issues with white dominance within fat-acceptance and fat-activist movements, there are significantly more explicitly black and queer fatspo spaces than there are black or queer thinspo, fitspo, and wellness spaces; and generally fatspo features much more diversity in terms of class and wealth, disability, gender expression, sexuality, and race than any of the dieting subcultures. while not wanting to diminish the problems of white women dominating body-acceptance spaces and discussions, fatspo and fat activism tend to collect alliances with people whose bodies are marginalized in other and multiple ways. this is understandable, given that fatspo explicitly rejects the “proper american body,” which, as described in section 3, is white, heterosexual, gender normative, wealthy, and nondisabled, as well as being thin. moral language surrounding food and eating is suffused throughout the contemporary united states (and in many places besides). this language is most visible and extreme in controversial dieting communities, like thinspo and fitspo, that adopt specific moral vocabularies as means of collective self-discipline, as tools to help dieters stay on track with their dieting and body goals. thinspo and fitspo, with their respective dieting strategies of transcendence and dominance and the moral vocabularies they have developed in accordance with these strategies, work to uphold fatphobia, reinforcing the social abjection of fat bodies. despite this, and despite working so hard to meet dominant thinness ideals, the members of thinspo and (sometimes) fitspo are often themselves cast as deviant, and risk a different form of social abjection: in obsessively working toward thinness or fitness, members of thinspo and some members of fitspo communities become marked with the label of “disordered eater” or “exercise junkie,” partially delegitimizing their dieting strategies, the ways they moralize food and eating, and the intense body normativity they promote. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 34 by contrast, contemporary wellness culture seems like the progressive, responsible response to these dietary extremes, a progressive and rational negotiation point between thinness ideals and the deviancy of eating disorders or obsessive exercise. wellness has access to social legitimacy, where thinspo and fitspo generally do not. nevertheless, wellness is still invested in and reproduces a normative body hierarchy that ties weight to worth, character, and personal and social responsibility. the moral language wellness uses in reference to food and eating, and its dietary strategy of negotiation, centering terms like “responsibility,” “sustainability,” “indulgence,” and “balance,” also function as mechanisms of collective self-discipline and uphold fatphobia. appealing to “sustainability” and “responsibility,” wellness positions certain modes of embodiment as necessary for healthy, productive, responsible citizenship more generally (in raising a family or being environmentally conscious, for example), rendering thinness a central part of the good—and responsible—life. wellness rationalizes and normalizes fat abjection and the social sentiment that fat bodies are, in some sense, immoral. if we are to envision and practice genuinely progressive ways of relating to and talking about food, eating, size, and bodies, we must think beyond the moralized terms set by fatphobia. we must work to reject the ideal of the “proper american body,” and, in doing so, move away from the tendency to moralize others’ (and our own) food choices with respect to how we think those choices accord (or fail to accord) with this ideal. the slogan “food is not a moral issue,” understood and analyzed in its proper context of widespread, moralizing, fatphobia, offers, i think, one path in the movement toward relating to food and eating in a way that is more liberatory, just, and genuinely anti-fatphobic. acknowledgements thanks to sally haslanger, samia hesni, kat hintikka, and deborah fitzgerald for helpful conversations and feedback on early thoughts for this paper. thanks also to kathryn norlock, as editor at fpq, and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. references alberga, angela, samantha withnell, and kristin von ranson. 2018. “fitspiration and thinspiration: a comparison across three social networking sites.” journal of eating disorders 6, article 39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-018-0227-x. bordo, susan. 1993. unbearable weight, feminism, western culture, and the body. berkley: university of california press. atherton – moralizing hunger published by scholarship@western, 2021 35 brown, adrienne maree. 2019. pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. chicago: ak press. butler, judith.1990. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. eaton, a. w. 2016. “taste in bodies and fat oppression.” in body aesthetics, edited by sherri irvin, 37–59. oxford: oxford university press. farrell, amy erdman. 2011. fat shame: stigma and the fat body in american culture. new york: new york university press. hatherley, frances. 2015. “against ‘good taste’: class, corpulence and the subversive pleasures of ‘unfit’ femininities.” in fat sex: new directions in theory and activism, edited by helen hester and caroline walters, 67–84. farnham, surrey: ashgate publishing. hooks, bell. 1992. “selling hot pussy: representations of black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace.” in black looks: race and representation, 61–78. boston: south end press. kristeva, julia. 1982. powers of horror: an essay on abjection. translated by leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia university press. leboeuf, céline. 2019. “anatomy of the thigh gap.” feminist philosophy quarterly 5 (1). article 2. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2019.1.7312. lintott, sheila. 2003. “sublime hunger: a consideration of eating disorders beyond beauty.” hypatia 18 (4): 65–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2003 .tb01413.x. mollow, anna. 2015. “disability studies gets fat.” hypatia 30 (1): 199–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12126. ———. 2017. “unvictimizable: toward a fat black disability studies.” african american review 50 (2): 105–21. https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2017.0016. pollan, michael. 2006. the omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals. new york: penguin books. prohaska, ariane, and jeannine a. gailey. 2018. “theorizing fat oppression: intersectional approaches and methodological innovations.” fat studies 8 (1): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2019.1534469. rice, carla, karleen pendleton jiménez, elisabeth harrison, margaret robinson, jen rinaldi, andrea lamarre, and jill andrew. 2020. “bodies at the intersections: refiguring intersectionality through queer women’s complex embodiments.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 46 (1): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1086/709219. schott, nicolle danielle. 2016. “race, online space and the feminine: unmapping ‘black girl thinspiration.’” critical sociology 43 (7–8): 1029–43. https://doi.org /10.1177/0896920516652456. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 36 welsh, talia. 2020. “the affirmative culture of healthy self-care: a feminist critique of the good health imperative.” international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 13 (1): 27–44. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijfab.13.1.02. williams, apryl a. 2017. “fat people of color: emergent intersectional discourse online.” social sciences 6 (1). article 15. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci 6010015. wolf, naomi. 1991. the beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women. new york: william morrow and company. emma marija atherton is a graduate student at the massachusetts institute of technology. she works at the intersection of feminist philosophy, social philosophy, and science and technology studies (sts). her dissertation (in progress) focuses on “the pleasure gap”—the marginalization of women’s sexual pleasure and enjoyment in cis-heterosex—as it relates to sexual ethics, sexual injustice, and sexual agency. 10836 atherton title page.pdf 10836 atherton final format.pdf the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 1 article 1 recommended citation bell, rowan. 2025. “the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (1). article 1. 2025 the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms rowan bell university of guelph rbell09@uoguelph.ca bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms rowan bell abstract gender norms can guide our sense of what we feel like we ought to do, even when we don't want them to. understanding this norm responsiveness is an important part of understanding how oppressive gender systems are sustained. according to a social constructionist position, gender norm responsiveness happens as a result of social training, or socialization. it's often assumed that this training depends on our gender categories—that, for example, those who occupy the category “man” will be responsive to masculine norms, and so on. call this a category-based view. but trans and gender-nonconforming people are often responsive to gender norms that don't match our gender categories. this is sometimes taken as evidence for the conclusion that normative masculinity and femininity are somehow innate or presocialized. i reject this inference. i argue that we should instead dispense with a category-based view, and instead adopt a traits-based view. gender norms apply to individuals on the basis of the gender-coded traits that they express. a traits-based view represents a social constructionist account of gender norms that leaves room for trans and gnc experiences of normative gender, and thus represents an important step towards creating inclusive theory. keywords: gender, gender norms, feminist metaphysics, trans philosophy, trans experience introduction gender norms are a common target of feminist critique. they arbitrarily restrict our individual possibilities or recommend harmful behaviors, and compliance with their unequal standards helps to create and sustain gendered oppression. nevertheless, we tend to respond to their demands. like other kinds of norms, gender norms can have normative power over us; they can shape our sense of what we “ought” to do and thus affect our choices and our actions—even when we question their relevance, fit poorly within their prescriptions, or reject their legitimacy altogether. if we want to understand gendered oppression, we need to understand how gender norms can influence us in this way. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 accounts of norm psychology tend to hold that psychological responsiveness to social norms is a result of social training. that is, we find social norms action-guiding because we have taken cues from our social environments about what we are supposed to do (scott 1971; maccoby 2000; sripada and stich 2007; davidson and kelly 2020; ryle 2020; westra and andrews 2022). in feminist metaphysics, it’s often assumed that individuals are trained to follow gender norms based on the gender categories to which they’re assigned; boys and men are trained to be masculine, girls and women to be feminine (see haslanger 2012; ásta 2018; dembroff 2018, 2020). in particular, the most prominent view that directly addresses these questions, charlotte witt’s (2011, 2020) aristotelean social role account, holds that membership in a gender category leads to psychological responsiveness to gender norms. this leads us to the following conclusion: individuals will respond to the gender norms that match their gender categories. but this does not explain the way that gender norms in fact move us. many transgender (trans) and gender-nonconforming (gnc) people find themselves responsive to gender norms that do not match their assigned categories. many people trained to be girls and women nevertheless respond to norms of masculinity, just as many people trained to be boys and men respond to norms of femininity. this is a tension that needs to be addressed. gender and its various features, including gender norms, are not innate or essential features of human nature, but rather are contingent and depend on our social practices. if this is true, then the power particular gender norms have over us is also contingent and dependent on our social practices. moreover, trans and gnc people often travel between and across gender assignments and norms, and thus have an epistemically privileged perspective. it is a basic commitment of this project that trans and gnc experience of gender norms is theoretically central to understanding how those norms shape agency and behavior. taking these two commitments together, how can we make sense of the fact that many trans and gnc people experience gender’s normative power as operating contrary to what social practices appear to recommend? i argue that the problem here is the assumption that gender norms apply on the basis of gender categories. once we identify, challenge, and dispense with this assumption, the tension dissolves. in place of this category-based view, i argue that we should adopt a traits-based view. gender norms apply on the basis of gendercoded traits. a traits-based view can accommodate both feminist social constructionist commitments and patterns of gender norm responsiveness that do not track assigned gender categories. i proceed as follows. in section 1, i draw on witt’s work on social role normativity to articulate a common presumption about gender norms, which i call the category-based view. in section 2, i draw from work on norm psychology to argue that individuals become responsive to gender norms through social training. in section 3, bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 i outline the phenomenon of cross-category norm responsiveness and argue that it raises problems for a category-based view. in section 4, i argue that we can dissolve these tensions if we adopt a traits-based view. in section 5, i close by discussing some implications. 1. feminist metaphysics and gender norms gender norms as such have received surprisingly little attention in feminist metaphysics. they are regularly invoked, but usually in passing, in the service of some further thesis. the nature of gender norms, their power over our deliberations, and their relationship to other phenomena such as gender categories, is rarely explored at length. but, as i argue, we need more theoretical specificity to make sense of trans and gnc experience. in this section, i begin by defining some key terms, after which i discuss the most prominent and theoretically elaborate account of gender norms in the feminist metaphysics literature, witt’s social role normativity view. i draw on witt’s account to articulate a central assumption in this literature, which i call a category-based view. broadly speaking, gender comes with normative standards. in ethics and metaethics, a normative standard is an ideal that one can meet, or fail to meet (paakkunainen 2018). that is, normative standards involve sets of norms; rules, guidelines, or expectations that delineate what “success” or “failure” looks like according to that standard. gender norms, therefore, are rules, guidelines, and expectations that delineate success or failure at gender standards. but there is famously more than one gender standard. gender norms are divided, most commonly into masculinity and femininity. there are a variety of masculinities and femininities; what counts as masculine or feminine will vary with local gender practices. moreover, some contexts will have other gendered standards that do not reduce to masculinity and femininity. i will not attempt here to give a comprehensive definition of gender, nor will i make strong positive claims about the relationship between gender itself and gender norms. on the contrary, i will proceed as if there is something independently interesting about gender norms, worthy of attention and discussion without the need for a comprehensive metaphysics of gender itself. my primary metaphysical commitment in this project will be social constructionism, understood roughly as the view that gender and its features, including gender norms, are not primarily innate, essential, or biological, but rather are dependent on contingent social practices. given social constructionism, the normative character of gender norms calls out for explanation. gender norms tend to feel like they are inside of us shaping our sense of what we feel like we should do. how do they do this? charlotte witt (2011, 2020) provides an answer: social role normativity. according to witt, social norms, including gender norms, apply to a person because feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 of the social position they occupy. for example, norms of femininity apply to someone because she is socially positioned as a woman (witt 2011, 44–45). a person is positioned as a woman because she is socially recognized as a woman, where “social recognition” is “a complex, holistic status comprised of both public, institutional recognition and interpersonal acknowledgment” (45). being socially recognized as a woman places one in the relevant social role. social roles are “complex sets of social norms” including “explicit rules (e.g., legal provisions like child support payments) and implicit practices (e.g., primary maternal responsibility for child care)” (42). for witt, if one occupies a particular social role, one is evaluated according to those norms. she may be punished for failing to comply, or rewarded for “good” behavior. initially, this process will be external. over time, however, that person will become used to responding as if she were under evaluation. she will become habituated, in an aristotelean sense, to respond to feminine norms, and will therefore experience those norms as relevant to her decisions—even if she rejects those norms and refuses to follow them (47). witt’s view is a prominent and theoretically elaborate example of what i’m calling a category-based view of gender norms (hereafter “a category-based view”): a category-based view: gender norms apply to individuals because those individuals belong to the associated gender categories. i mean gender category here to be metaphysically ecumenical. that is, i don’t commit myself to a particular metaphysics of gender categories. rather, i want to call up the general assumption that individuals are divided, classified, or otherwise “categorized” according to gender. given that assumption, a category-based view posits that, however individuals are so divided, classed, or categorized, that categorization determines which gender norms apply. for example, a category-based view would hold that norms of masculinity apply to men because they are men; being categorized as a man is what makes one a candidate for evaluation according to norms of masculinity. category-based views are often assumed, or gestured at, in gender metaphysics more broadly. for example, sally haslanger (2012, 46) writes: “particular traits, norms, and identities, considered in abstraction from social context, have no claim to be classified as masculine or feminine. the classification of features as masculine or feminine is derivative, and in particular, depends on prior social classifications.” similarly, robin dembroff (2018, 3) writes that “social roles, expectations, norms, and practices, not to mention self-conceptions, are imposed on people based on their gender classification.” and for ásta (2018, 122), not only are we assigned sets of norms by others, we also have social identities that determine whether we “take [the associated] norms as applying to us.” bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 more broadly, category-based analysis is prominent in this literature. when gender metaphysicians ask what gender is, they are often asking what gender categories are: specifically, what is it to be a woman, and why? consider the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy’s entry on feminist metaphysics: the aim of feminism is, in the most general terms, to end the oppression of women. . . . but what is this group women? whose oppression is the movement aiming to end? for articulating the various ways in which women are oppressed, there is a need for a working definition of what it is to be a woman. (haslanger and ásta 2018) some philosophers have questioned this starting point. mari mikkola (2016) has argued that feminist philosophy ought to move away from its laser-focus on the “woman question.” according to mikkola, the complex semantic and ontological puzzles generated by this question are neither illuminating nor necessary. we are capable of talking about “women” as a group without solving these puzzles. similarly, louise antony (2020) defends a deflationary concept of woman, one that will allow us to assert generic claims about women without giving a substantive metaphysics of gender categories. she writes that “whatever the inherent philosophical interest of such questions as ‘what is it to be a woman,’ there is no practical or political need to answer them” because “our most pressing political needs, as feminists, are to challenge injustices and harms” (antony 2020, 531). inspired by these challenges, i suggest that we should not assume the centrality or even necessity of category-based analysis. 2. social construction and norm responsiveness it is key to the perpetuation of hierarchical and unjust social practices like gender that they do not appear to be perpetuated at all. rather, they appear to arise naturally, or at least proceed unproblematically from natural features (antony 2002; haslanger 2017). thus, when gender norms produce or sustain inequality, that inequality itself seems “natural” and, thus, unavoidable. for this reason, many feminist metaphysicians are engaged in what haslanger calls the “debunking project,” which works to expose hidden mechanisms of social construction in practices that are widely believed to be naturalistic (2012, 127; see also ásta 2018, 36). to engage in a debunking project, we need to understand how gender norms guide action. for gendered behavior to seem natural, the mechanisms of its production must be thoroughly obscured. that is, it must appear to arise freely and automatically, so that even (perhaps especially) the person engaging in the behavior cannot see its roots in contingent social practices. how does this work? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 to answer this question, feminist philosophers such as witt (2011) and katharine jenkins (2016) have articulated the phenomenon of norm responsiveness. the norm responsiveness i’m interested in is primarily affective, rather than behavioral or cognitive. one experiences oneself as guided by the norm; one has a sense of doing something wrong when one does not comply; and the norms “pull” at one (witt 2011, 44). that is, the relationship is not about thinking or believing that one is subject to a norm but about feeling that one ought to act in accordance. moreover, as witt (2011, 33) argues, being responsive to a norm is consistent with a “full range of possible reactions . . . from compliance to critique.” jenkins (2016, 43) draws this out nicely: consider a woman who feels that having visible body hair on her legs is unattractive, embarrassing, and unacceptable. in a visceral way, having hairy legs feels wrong for her. . . . contrast this with the experience of another woman who does not remove hair from her legs. her awareness of her body includes the awareness that in having hairy legs she is contravening dominant norms of feminine appearance—on some level she knows that people like her are not meant to look like that, according to dominant ideology. this may be so despite the fact that she is perfectly content to have hairy legs and for them to be seen by others. her experience of social and material reality includes navigating the norm that women should have hairless legs, even though she is not complying with it.1 although these women engage in different behaviors, they are responsive to the same norm. this is not a belief, a preference, or a behavior. it is a bare psychological fact. these women feel that certain actions are right or wrong for them; and while this feeling need not determine their actions, it can weigh heavy among their reasons to act. social norm responsiveness is of course not unique to gender. as lacey davidson and daniel kelly (2020, 8) put it, people often follow norms “not as a means to gain material reward or avoid external punishment, but just because it seems or feels, from a first-person perspective, like the proverbial right thing to do.” how this works is a subject of much discussion in the psychological literature. in their landmark work “a framework for the psychology of norms,” chandra sekhar sripada and 1 notice the ambivalent presence of a category-based view in this passage. jenkins writes of “the norm that women should have hairless legs,” but she also notes that the second woman “knows that people like her are not meant to look like that” (2016, 411; emphasis added). more on this later. bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 stephen stich (2007) articulate the phenomenon of intrinsic motivation: individuals come to follow social norms for the norms’ own sake, rather than because they fear punishment or anticipate reward. they also write that norms have “independent normativity”—they need not be enforced to be followed (281). for sripada and stich, intrinsic motivation is central to the study of norm psychology. it is broadly explained by the internalization hypothesis, the view that individuals “internalize” patterns of social sanction. according to more recent work, internalization is “the process that transforms the motivations of agents for complying with social norms from those of external reward or punishment to that of following norms as an end in themselves” (villatoro et al. 2015, 1.1). this process will often become invisible. individuals over time will “lose track” of a norm’s punitive origins; they will respond to it automatically, without considering why (villatoro et al. 2015, 1.3–1.5) that is, when others expect a person to follow a set of norms, they reward them for compliance and/or punish them for failure (sanctions). over time, those sanctions are no longer necessary to produce complaint behavior (internalization); the individual will follow the norm for its own sake (intrinsic motivation). in witt’s (2011) terms, they become habituated to the norm, and thus responsive to it. sripada and stich’s influential view, and with it the centrality of intrinsic motivation and the internalization hypothesis in explaining norm compliance, has been complicated and challenged in recent years. for example, evan westra and kristin andrews (2022) and cecilia heyes (2024) are critical of the tendency in social science to attribute all norm-compliant behavior to a unified, intrinsic psychological process. as heyes (2024, 17) puts it, normative psychology is dependent not on a single, specialized cognitive tool—what she calls a “big special” psychological process—but on a variety of generalized psychological processes that may also do other things, or a set of “small ordinary” mechanisms. westra and andrews (2022) give an overview of many such processes posited in the psychology literature, including direct instruction by social superiors or peers (12); reinforcement learning, or the internalization of patterns of punishment and reward (13); social learning heuristics, such as “copy the majority” (13); and “mentalizing,” or “inferring what one is supposed to do based on the normative expectations that we attribute to those around us” (12). these mechanisms can also interact and change over time; for example, a norm might first be internalized through reinforcement learning and then explicitly codified into a cognitive rule later in life (14). whatever the relevant mechanisms in play, however, there is one common element: individual psychological and affective motivation to follow social norms is produced by patterns of social cues and, in particular, patterns of social pressure, sanction, or punishment and reward. for example, for davidson and kelly (2020), we have a psychological “acquisition mechanism” that identifies and internalizes local norms; it “draws the individual's attention to salient social interactions happening feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 around [them] and makes inferences about the rules governing those interactions” (7), and it produces motivations to act that can be “powerfully motivating and perhaps authoritative” (7). these rules are stabilized by punishment or sanction (8); and, crucially, the mechanism is also responsible for “identifying . . . types of people to which a norm internalised by the individual might apply” (7). for westra and andrews (2022), what makes something a social norm at all is the presence of some sanction: “social norms generally consist in patterns of behavioral conformity maintained to some degree by social pressure or sanctions” (6). that is, our responsiveness to social norms is in some key sense caused by the expectations of others and the cues they deliver to us, which are then taken up by us in a variety of ways. call this the social source view of norm responsiveness. the social source view coheres nicely with a feminist debunking project. as anyone who has tried to bring critical feminist consciousness to an ambivalent audience can understand, gender norm responsiveness is a key mechanism by which gender makes itself appear natural. many people “just feel” as if they ought to follow gender norms—as if this responsiveness is inextricable from their other normative commitments. to debunk the essentialist conclusions that sometimes follow, we need better explanations of the source of that feeling. the literature in psychology gives us one—or, rather, many: we are rewarded or punished, and repeat or discontinue the behavior; we are explicitly instructed; we observe how others are acting and copy them; we infer what others expect; or we simply do what is easiest. these patterns can become ingrained until we lose sight of their source and are left with the feeling that we “should.” as davidson and kelly (2020, 6) argue, witt’s view provides “a psychologically plausible story” of how the internal motivations of norm responsiveness come to be. here, however, a problem arises. as many in the norm psychology literature have argued, while the mechanisms of norm acquisition may be a general part of human psychology, the norms specific to one’s social context are acquired socially (davidson and kelly 2020; westra and andrews 2022; heyes 2024). part of this process is the ability to distinguish “types of people to which a norm . . . might apply” (davidson and kelly 2020, 7). as discussed, in most gendered contexts, there are multiple gender standards; the same norms do not apply to everyone. accordingly, many people are responsive to masculinity or femininity but not both.2 how is this differential acquisition mediated? a category-based view gives us a simple answer: those who are categorized as men are expected to be masculine, while those categorized as women are expected to be feminine. if we straightforwardly plug a category-based view into a social source view, we get the following: individuals will 2 this is often not the case for trans and gnc people. i’ll discuss this in section 4. bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 become responsive to the gender norms that are associated with their assigned gender categories. in the next section, i’ll argue that certain common experiences among transgender (trans) and gender-nonconforming (gnc) people raise problems that a category-based view struggles to solve. 3. cross-category norm responsiveness trans and gnc people often find ourselves responsive to gender norms that do not match our gender categories. this is true regardless of whether we understand gender categories as assigned or self-identified. some people who haven’t been assigned the category “man”—for example, some trans men and nonbinary people— nevertheless find themselves responsive to masculine norms. moreover, some people who don’t identify with the category “man”—for example, some butch women and nonbinary people—are also responsive to masculine norms. since this occurs “across” gender categories, i call it cross-category norm responsiveness. cross-category norm responsiveness can appear very early in life and often happens contrary to one’s own desires, expectations, or self-concept. consider how trans biologist and author julia serano recalls her experiences in an elementary school classroom: i had an unexplainable feeling that i was doing something wrong every time i walked into the boys’ restroom at school; and whenever our class split into groups of boys and girls, i always had a sneaking suspicion that at any moment someone might tap me on the shoulder and say, “hey, what are you doing here?” (serano 2007, 78) serano’s normative phrasing here is telling. she experienced herself as doing something wrong when she violated a feminine norm. she knew that others classed her with the boys: “after all, i was obviously a boy—everybody thought so” (79). serano also notes that she didn’t always want to follow feminine norms: “i never really wanted to take part in girlish activities, such as playing house” (79). nevertheless, she had an “unexplainable feeling” that she ought to behave according to feminine norms, and that complying with those norms felt “right” for her (80). consider also the following account from janet mock: like most teen girls (whether they’re trans or cis), i had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that mtv fed me. i wanted halle berry’s or tyra banks’s breasts, britney spears’s midsection, beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and i prayed that i wouldn’t grow any taller so i didn’t tower over the petite asian girls feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 who were the barometer of beauty in the [hawaiian] islands. (mock 2014, 122–23) like serano, mock (2014, 15) understood that others were holding her to standards of masculinity: “i was certain i was a boy. . . . it was the first thing i’d learned about myself as i grew aware that i existed.” as a child in her kindergarten classroom, she understood, for example, that boys used blue cubbyholes and girls used red cubbyholes (15). nevertheless, even as a small child, she experienced a pull “whose origins i can’t pinpoint to a pivotal aha! moment” to “step across the chasm that separated me from the girls—the one who put their sandals in the red cubbyholes” (16). mock found herself drawn toward expressions of normative femininity, even those expressions that might seem superficial or contextually unique, like cubbyhole color. cross-category norm responsiveness is a relatively common experience among trans and gnc people. it often manifests not merely as a want or a wish to follow some gender norms or occupy some gender category but as a felt sense that one already is responsive to some norms that don’t match one’s assigned category; following the norms of that category “seems or feels . . . like the proverbial right thing to do” (davidson and kelly 2020, 8). however, if we start from a category-based view, cross-category norm responsiveness is difficult to explain. recall that a categorybased view leads us to the conclusion that individuals become responsive to gender norms through social cues that are mediated by their gender categories. how might a category-based view rise to this challenge? i’ll consider and reject two possible answers. first, we might think that a category-based view can explain how gender norms apply to individuals if the view holds that gender categories are not assigned by others but are instead voluntarily adopted. that is, we might try to solve this problem by rejecting what witt (2011) calls ascriptivism: the view that individuals are members of particular gender categories only if they are assigned to those categories by others. as an alternative to ascriptivism, witt (2011, 44–47) considers voluntarism: the view that individuals are members of gender categories only if those individuals choose or identify with those categories. on a voluntarist category-based view, the assignment of gender norms to individuals is explained by that choice or identification. however, a voluntarist view doesn’t help here. many people experience crosscategory norm responsiveness very early in life, long before they come to choose or identify with a gender category other than the one assigned to them. consider the following account by p. carl: bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 i had been scrutinizing masculinity my whole life, trying to perfectly replicate it in my gestures and clothes and physique. i stayed very trim, wore only men’s clothes, studied the latest short-hair styles, tried to keep the tenor of my voice low, and always played the roles that i thought men played. i earned. i mowed the lawn. i kept track of the finances. i filed the taxes. i shoveled the snow. i lugged the air conditioners from the basement to the bedroom windows every summer. i always drove. i was grossly deficient at housecleaning. i owned only one bathroom towel when my wife, lynette, first moved into my bachelor pad. but i insisted that i was not a man. (carl 2020b, 10) carl’s responsiveness to norms of masculinity did not result from his self-identification as a man. they were the impetus for it. “as much as i had done every single thing to look like a man and live like one,” he writes, “i denied wanting to become one because i didn’t want to become my father or lose my lesbian lover or be a failed feminist and intellectual” (carl 2020a). for carl, the voluntarist view gets the explanation the wrong way around. often, it is cross-category norm responsiveness that leads to gender category self-identification, rather than the reverse. furthermore, not everyone who experiences cross-category norm responsiveness comes to identify with the category associated with those norms. many people feel responsive to norms not associated with their chosen or selfidentified category. consider, for example, the rich history of butches within queer cultures. many butches choose and identify with the category of “woman”; many have done this for their entire lives. however, many butches also experience themselves as responsive to norms of masculinity (andler 2017, 891). a voluntarist category-based view does not explain this. a second possible explanation rejects elements of social constructionism. this kind of explanation has been defended by some trans theorists. for example, serano (2007, 99) defends an intrinsic inclinations model to explain cross-category norm responsiveness. according to serano, the fact that children often demonstrate crosscategory masculinity and femininity is evidence that “certain expressions of masculinity and femininity represent deep, subconscious inclinations similar to those of sexual orientation” (98). that is, for serano, if gender norm responsiveness doesn’t match social training, it’s because masculinity and femininity are present in the child prior to or apart from that social training (98–100). an immediate problem with this model is that it assumes that the inclinations or behaviors in question, and the gender norms with which they are associated, are conceptually inseparable. serano (2007, 99) argues that children have deep masculine and feminine tendencies, and that these “gender inclinations are, to some extent, intrinsic to our persons.” “intrinsic” here means something like acquired without feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 socialization; she contends that motivations to behave in a masculine or feminine way “occur naturally (i.e., without social influence)” (99). however, serano’s argument only shows that certain inclinations occur naturally or without social influence. there is no reason to think that these inclinations are inherently gendered. feminist philosophers at least as far back as john stuart mill ([1859, 1869] 1997) have convincingly argued that masculinity and femininity are socially constructed normative standards, rather than natural features of individuals. recall, from haslanger (2012, 46): “particular traits, norms, and identities, considered in abstraction from social context, have no claim to be classified as masculine or feminine.” this is evident in the fact that gender norms vary widely across cultures and even across contexts within the same culture. here is a plausible, social constructionist interpretation of the early gender inclinations to which serano points: children have inclinations, some of which are gender-coded post hoc. relatedly, there are feminist political reasons to reject a view that treats gender as innate. in particular, it is somewhat at odds with the debunking project. if gender norms arise from innate or “presocialized” human features, then a major avenue of resistance to the oppression and harm they enable is lost. any particular gendered behavior can, in principle, be attributed to some innate and unchangeable feature of human existence. this limits our ability to deconstruct those harms and oppressions. i want to be clear about the scope of my empirical claim. this is not an argument against the existence of innate characteristics that are gendered. rather, it is an argument against the metaphysical position on which gender is an innate part of individuals. it may be the case that certain inclinations are themselves innate or arise without or contrary to socialization; i remain neutral on that point. instead, i am questioning the claim that inclinations come to us already gendered—that their masculine or feminine character is essential. we should resist this. masculinity and femininity are normative gender standards, gender norms are socially constructed, and gender norm responsiveness is socially sourced. nevertheless, serano raises a crucial question. cross-category responsiveness to standards of masculinity and femininity points to a tension within social constructionist explanations of norm responsiveness. if individuals internalize gender norms as a response to cues from their social environment, and those cues are mediated by their gender categories, then why do many people experience themselves as responsive to norms that do not match their gender categories? this is a pressing theoretical issue. given that these experiences are common among trans and gnc people, who are often marginalized within dominant gender practices, this problem suggests that the view serano is criticizing has often proceeded from the experiences of those who are not marginalized within those practices—that is, cis and gender-conforming people. that’s a problem. a view that bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 aims to end gender oppression ought not exclude the experiences of those who are most harmed by gender norms. in the next section i argue that the question can be answered if we are willing to jettison a category-based view and replace it with what i call a traits-based view. 4. a traits-based view if we want to understand how gender norms guide behavior, we need to understand differential assignment: how different gender norms apply to different people. intuitively, this often has to do with sexed bodies. that is, people who are observed or imagined to have certain sex-coded features are often expected to follow particular gender norms. capturing this is crucial to understanding gender norms. this, perhaps, motivates the adoption of a category-based view. if gender categories are assigned on the basis of one’s observed or imagined sexed body, and gender norms apply on the basis of gender categories, then we can explain the importance of the sexed body in guiding gendered behavior. at the same time, there are contexts in which the sexed body may be, as ásta (2018, 76) puts it, “highly irrelevant.” she writes that the constraints and enablements to which one is subject may change based on “sexual engagement, bodily presentation, preparation of food at family gatherings, self-identification, and so on” (75). the features that ásta identifies here can clearly contribute to guiding gendered behavior. on a category-based view, this importance is explained as above: if gender categories are assigned on the basis of a given feature, and gender norms apply on the basis of gender categories, then we can explain the importance of this feature in guiding gendered behavior. but this raises some questions: what explanatory work is the gender category doing in this process? why should we think that the gender category is what mediates norm assignment, and not the features themselves? i suggest that we cut out the middleman. rather than holding that gender norms apply on the basis of gender categories that in turn are assigned to individuals on the basis of observed features, we can simply hold that gender norms apply to individuals on the basis of those observed features. that is, i propose that we shift focus from gender categories to gendered traits. traits are descriptive features of individuals. my understanding here is indebted to mikkola’s (2011) trait/norm covariance model. mikkola distinguishes between descriptive traits and evaluative norms, where traits “describe ‘the way the world is’ and include physical and anatomical traits (e.g., chromosomes, ovaries, testes, genitalia, body shape and size), one’s appearance (e.g., one’s clothing, makeup, haircut, amount of body hair), roles (e.g., whether one undertakes caretaking roles, engages in childrearing tasks) and self-conceptions (calling oneself a woman or a man)” (76–77). my notion of trait is very thin. for example, consider a trait like feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 “calling oneself a woman or a man.” i don’t understand this as a substantive selfcategorization. instead, i mean the bare descriptive fact that the individual in fact calls themself a woman or a man. many traits are normatively gender-coded in various contexts as masculine or feminine. as mikkola points out, some traits, like being short-sighted, are rarely if ever gender-coded (2011, 77). other traits are globally gender-coded; having ovaries, for example, is coded feminine in a variety of cisnormative contexts worldwide. still other traits are only locally gender-coded. for example, wearing jewelry is coded as feminine in some contexts but not others. that is, “certain evaluations (like being judged to act, be or appear ‘feminine’) can be seen to covary with particular descriptive traits” (69). my basic move here is to shift the locus of socially mediated gender-norm application from an ontologically substantive gender category to the ontologically thin and maximally variable gendered traits. on a traits-based view, if someone is interpreted as having a particular trait that is gender-coded in their context, they are thereby evaluated under the associated gender norm. for example, in many contexts, a person who is perceived to have the physical trait of having breasts is thereby judged to be normatively feminine. the application of feminine gender norms follows not the assignment of a gender category but the perception that a person has certain gender-coded traits. these are the basic commitments of a traits-based view. they are, i take it, consistent with a variety of more substantive positions. in what follows, i’ll sketch how such a substantive position might proceed, in order to demonstrate how traitsbased thinking can help us capture crucial desiderata for explaining gender norms. there may be other substantive positions that do this differently or better. thus, i don’t take the following to be necessary commitments of any traits-based view. the argument up to this point can come apart from the following suggestions. in general, social norms that are differentially applied will cluster. for example, consider the normative standard punk. individual traits, such as taste in music, attitude toward authority, clothing and hairstyle, political commitments, and so forth, are normatively coded as punk. but not everyone is held to the standard of punk. a university professor in a suit and tie is not typically judged according to whether they are punk or not; however, a person distributing anticapitalist literature at a punk music show is more properly judged according to their punkness, since they are displaying some key features that are coded as punk. similarly, a person wearing punk style in public can be properly criticized for failing to exhibit other elements of punkness, in a way that the university professor cannot be (hence notions of “fake punk” music or style). moreover, if the university professor exhibits some elements of punkness, such as a trait of resistance to authority, it might be less surprising to discover that they also enjoy punk music and wear patch-covered jean jackets on the bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 weekends. that is, having some punk traits leads to an expectation that one might display other punk traits, because similarly coded traits cluster together. the explanation does not start with the individual’s classification on the basis of features, but rather with the features themselves. the difference is in the order of explanation. a category-based view would tell us that what explains an individual’s evaluation according to standards of punkness is whether they are or are not “a punk.” a traitsbased view tells us that what explains an individual’s evaluation according to standards of punkness is whether they have or don’t have punk traits. that is, people can be more or less “punk”; the question of what makes them “a punk” is distinct. in the case of punk culture, trait clustering doesn’t seem obviously problematic. it may even generate useful social heuristics. but the case of gender is more pernicious. in contexts that enforce a strict gender binary, there is a corollary expectation that there are two clusters that are, for the most part, mutually exclusive and coherent. that is, masculine-coded traits are expected to occur together with only and all other masculine-coded traits, and feminine with only and all feminine. as discussed in section 2, part of the function of gender norms is to naturalize certain behaviors—to make it seem as if gendered inclinations and behavior are natural or arise spontaneously from supposedly natural facts about the world, such as biological features. for naturalization to work, it must appear that individuals possess innate masculinity or femininity. in principle, naturalization is compatible with individual variation and intermingling of differently coded traits; it might be held, for example, that some people are naturally both feminine and masculine. (for a view like this, see serano’s [2007, 99] intrinsic inclinations model.) but contexts that attempt to naturalize a strict gender binary demand that individuals “naturally” express either all and only the traits associated with masculinity, or all and only those associated with femininity. noncoherence is often called “unnatural” (abnormal or inappropriate) and punished accordingly. gender norms will tend to cluster around traits that are considered particularly socially significant. call these the core traits of a particular cluster. core traits have the most “weight” in determining whether an individual is expected to present the associated traits. for example, if gender norms cluster around core traits related to reproductive function, then the traits that constitute reproductive function—such as possessing the ability to reproduce by bearing or seeding children— will outweigh other, more peripheral traits when determining how to evaluate someone. but it is not always feasible to measure a particular trait. the contexts at hand may therefore prioritize (actual or purported) markers of these traits, with a built-in defeasibility condition. those contextual markers are usually taken to reliably and nonaccidentally predict the relevant characteristics, and they will therefore only be investigated when suspicion is raised—if they can be directly investigated at all. for example, a core trait of being able to bear children may be understood to be feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 marked by secondary sex characteristics, such as having breasts, or by vaguer, more ambiguously related features, such as being nurturing. traits related to sexed embodiment will often be central to clusters of gender norms. for example, a masculine-coded trait of having a penis may often play a central role in the assignment of other masculine gender norms. people will sometimes speak colloquially in a way that points to this phenomenon. you might, for example, hear the claim that people with a penis ought to do certain masculine-coded things—or the converse, that someone who doesn’t express sufficient masculinity might not have a penis. it’s possible to interpret these statements as positing that people with penises are in a gender category that comes with masculine norms. instead, i propose that we read these claims at face value: being perceived to have masculine-coded features, such as a penis, leads to the assignment of other masculine norms, while failing at masculine norms suggests failing to have the features. gender norm clusters may (or may not) take on further ontological significance, as gender roles, gender identities, or even gender categories. my aim here is neither to give an account of the nature of gender categories nor to deny either their existence or their importance to other forms of analysis. discussion of gender categories is orthogonal. i seek to understand how gender norms shape our normative deliberations and, by extension, our actions. i take this project both to be possible without, and often to be inhibited by, a preoccupation with category-based analysis. at this point, the empirical commitments of this project require some clarification. my goal is not to give a comprehensive account of the psychological mechanisms by which gender norms come to be internalized by individuals. i leave that to the real psychologists. rather, it is to suggest a way of thinking about gender norms and their relationship to individuals that, i suggest, is more responsive to the empirical facts than a category-based view. category-based thinking about gender norms is insufficiently flexible to accommodate cross-category norm responsiveness. traits-based thinking, on the other hand, is maximally flexible without losing material grounding. the relationship between gender norms and individuals is understood to turn on gender-coded characteristics in a way that captures differential norm assignment but still has room for cross-category norm responsiveness. in what follows, i’ll return to two examples from section 3 to demonstrate this. let me first note that an individual may be disposed to express a trait, whether or not they in fact express it (mckitrick 2015). again, i am not here engaged in the empirical project of explaining why individuals are disposed to express traits or, conversely, how the gender-coding of those traits impacts the acquisition of dispositions to express them. the claim is simply that people are sometimes disposed to express traits, some of which are gender-coded. bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 consider julia serano’s (2007, 78) experiences of feeling that she was doing something wrong when she went into the boys’ restroom. as discussed, a categorybased view struggles to explain these experiences. serano understood herself and was understood by others as a boy and not a girl. it is hard to see how her assigned or adopted gender category could influence her internalization of these norms. as serano suggests, these kinds of experiences raise a prima facie problem for social constructionism. i contend that the problem only arises when social constructionists assume a category-based view. if our acquisition of gender norms is differentiated according to gender category, then those who occupy the category will become responsive to the associated norms, and serano’s experiences make no sense. however, if this acquisition is differentiated according to gender-coded traits—that is, if we assume a traits-based view—then the problem becomes tractable. we can posit that serano either had or was disposed to have traits that were coded as feminine in her context. these might be behavioral traits, traits of appearance, physical traits, and so on. as discussed above, we often expect gender norms to cohere perfectly; feminine-coded traits are expected to occur together with all and only feminine-coded traits. insofar as someone has or is disposed to have some feminine-coded traits, they may experience normative pressure to “cohere” to the feminine cluster. perhaps they are punished for not having other feminine-coded traits and infer that they ought to display them. perhaps they observe others with similar traits and infer what is expected of someone with those traits; or perhaps they develop social heuristics such as “people with trait x do y” (see westra and andrews 2022, 12–13). if we begin with a traits-based view, a variety of explanations are available that are consistent with various empirical proposals about how norm responsiveness develops. similarly, recall janet mock’s experience of judging herself according to feminine norms. mock felt that her body should look like the bodies of various celebrities, such as tyra banks, britney spears, and beyoncé, and she regularly compared herself to the girls that were the “barometer of beauty” in her social environment (mock 2014, 122–23). but, as mock also chronicles, she was regularly punished for expressing feminine traits, by her parents, siblings, and peers. how does one become responsive to norms that they are punished for following? a traits-based view gives us a helpful perspective here. mock also describes being encouraged by a friend to steal and put on a dress (17–19); being included with her feminine relatives at family events (64–66); playing wife and mother in a childhood game of “house” (48); and being called mahu, a native hawaiian third gender, by a (trans) peer (101–11)—all in childhood or adolescence, prior to her selfidentification as a woman. these moments in time suggest that her feminine traits were apparent not just to her but to others around her, even when she and everyone else were “certain i was a boy” (15). the social application and internalization of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 feminine norms makes sense when we think not in terms of the social categories into which mock was placed but in terms of the gender-coding of the traits she was perceived to have. one might object here that it is unclear why someone would become responsive to certain norms rather than others. for example, trans women like serano or mock may have expressed or been disposed to express a variety of feminine-coded traits, but they clearly also had masculine-coded traits as well—in particular, the physical traits that led to their classification by others as boys. why, then, would they learn vicariously but not directly, or experience coherence pressure toward femininity rather than masculinity? in response, i reject the assumption that we are responsive to some gender norms “rather than” others. if gender norms are assigned based on traits, then if one displays a variety of differently coded traits, one is indeed likely to be responsive to a variety of different norms. in fact, the flexibility of a traits-based view here is helpfully explanatory. being responsive to conflicting gender norms is a hallmark of trans and gnc experience. for example, mock (2014, 98) describes her childhood self as being at times drawn toward masculine norms of dress and behavior, specifically because she did not want to disappoint her mother. many trans and gnc people struggle to figure out who we are and how we want to be, precisely because we are moved by apparently incompatible gender norms. as children, we are rewarded for some behaviors and punished for others, even as we see different sanctions being applied to those who are like us in the ways that seem most important. we learn that noncoherence is unnatural or impossible, even as we experience that noncoherence inside ourselves. it is not surprising, then, that we will experience various norms as exerting force over us. trans and gnc experience is often marked by the theoretical and practical challenge of determining how we can make sense of these conflicting normative pressures in a hostile world. in short, a traits-based view can capture the way in which gender norms are regularly applied on the basis of observed physical features, while also explaining the way individuals who are not ostensibly expected to follow them nevertheless experience them as action-guiding. it can do all of this while maintaining the key feminist commitment that masculinity and femininity are socially constructed. it therefore captures core insights from gender metaphysics and norm psychology, while also explaining the lived experience of trans and gnc people—a desideratum that should also be a commitment of feminist theory. 5. conclusion: norm politics gender norms function as a normative standard. that is, they work to guide our deliberations and behavior by telling us what we should and should not do. many, if not most, people are responsive to this standard in some way. this is not unique to bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 trans and gnc people; gender norms affect nearly everyone. however, trans and gnc people often experience gender norms that do not match our assigned gender categories as guiding our behavior and providing us with reasons to act. in this paper, i have argued that this phenomenon raises problems for what i have called a categorybased view about gender norms, i have contended that we should reject a categorybased view and in its place adopt a traits-based view. i have given a preliminary sketch of some of the commitments that such a view might have and concluded that it can capture feminist social constructionist commitments, empirical conclusions from the social sciences, and common trans and gnc experiences. in closing, let me consider an interesting political implication. a traits-based view has no commitments to the inherent oppressiveness or restrictiveness of gender norms. gender norms guide us differentially based on the traits we are disposed or perceived to have. many gender systems are themselves restrictive, harmful, and unequal. however, this is neither a historical and cultural universal nor a metaphysically necessary feature. some pernicious elements of gender norms, such as the violent punishment of norm violation, the mutual exclusivity of norm clusters, or the existence of only two gender standards, are contingent and might be done differently. on a traits-based view, gender norms might look much more like punk norms. punk norms may be nonmandatory (no one has to be punk) and nonexclusive (you can have some punk traits and, say, some goth traits at the same time). they can provide intelligibility and community, and they are created and mediated by those who inhabit them. questions about who is or isn’t “really” punk are often questions of value, not just aesthetics. consider, for example, the dead kennedys’ (1981) insistence that “nazi punks fuck off.” perhaps gender could be this way too. luckily for anyone interested in such a project, it is already underway. talia bettcher (2013) points out that within queer and trans subcultures, the questions of who occupies a particular gender and which features are normatively gender-coded are defined by those involved, through practices of community construction; and they are questions of value. in this context, like other social norms, gender norms can be useful heuristics for social intelligibility and self-understanding. for example, marlon bailey (2011) describes the normative gender practices at work in ballroom culture, queer and trans communities of color that exist in most major cities in the united states. according to bailey, identities and norms within these cultures are created out of twin needs: to make selves, bodies, and gendered experiences intelligible to one another, and to navigate the possibility of punishment and violence visited on the visibly queer in the broader world. the clusters that emerge are therefore, specifically and by design, tools of resistance against oppressive gender norms. but they are also avenues for creative self-understanding and self-construction. they are built by those in the community, and discussions of who counts and who is welcome are live, evolving, and informed by considerations of community needs. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 some views of gender norms suggest that such a project is either impossible or inadvisable. for example, on haslanger’s (2012) view (understood very roughly), gender categories are classifications that create an oppressive hierarchy on the basis of observed or imagined sexed bodies, and gender norms exist exclusively to perpetuate and naturalize these categories. on such a view, at best, all gender norms will force diverse individuals into unnatural boxes for no good reason; at worst, they are fundamentally oppressive and irredeemable as tools of liberation. in fact, haslanger cautions against “theoretically appropriating” masculinity and femininity, on just these grounds (47). this is not an uncommon approach in feminist philosophy, for good reason. dominant, hegemonic masculinities and femininities so thoroughly construct the world we inhabit, that it may be tempting to try to make them work for us. but this is dangerous. these normative standards are constructed in unequal ways, they are mandatory and punitive, and they arbitrarily force individuals into exclusionary binaries on the basis of irrelevant features. they are inimical to feminist goals. but this view also tends to ignore the possibility—and historical reality—of alternative, nondominant, or resistant masculinities and femininities. in closing, then, i suggest that a traits-based view makes better sense of those possibilities than a category-based view. on a category-based view, gender norms are intimately tied to gender categorization. to understand gender’s normative power, we must first understand how individuals are sorted into categories. it can be difficult, on such a view, to see how gender norms can ever be resistant or liberatory. gender nonconformity—for example, feminine boys or masculine girls—will always appear as normative abnormality, positioned “incorrectly” relative to the relevant categories (for better or worse). there is something inherently restrictive at best, oppressive at worst, about this. but on a traits-based view, gender norms can be “mixed and matched.” what’s intelligible as, say, masculine or feminine need not have anything to do with how someone is classed or categorized. these things can be used as tools of self-understanding and intelligibility, even if we want to remove ourselves from, or resist altogether, the categories with which they’re associated. i suggest, then, that the better theoretical tactic is to pry gender norms apart from gender categories and build them as standards of intelligibility and self-understanding within a broadly and brutally gendered world. acknowledgments: the seed of this paper made its debut in my first professional conference presentation at social ontology 2018 in boston. since then, i have received helpful feedback from far more people than i could possibly name here. i would especially like to thank hille paakkunainen, katharine jenkins, charlotte witt, kara richardson, verena erlenbusch-anderson, e. m. hernandez, teresa bruno-niño, bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 çağla çimendereli, jade fletcher, carolina flores, carolyn garland, jas heaton, byron simmons, sofie vlaad, and jules wong for discussion and criticism. i would also like to thank the audiences at social ontology 2018; the 2019 society for women in philosophy workshop; the 2019 concordia graduate conference “liberating the future”; the 2019 minorities and philosophy spring workshop series; the 2022 pacific meeting of the apa; the 2022 meeting of the north american society for social philosophy; and syracuse university’s many supportive workshops for graduate student papers, including working papers, wagm working papers, and the abd workshop series. finally, i would like to thank several journal reviewers who have generously and anonymously donated their time to making this paper better. references andler, matthew salett. 2017. “gender identity and exclusion: a reply to jenkins.” ethics 127 (4): 883–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/691583. antony, louise. 2002. “quine as feminist: the radical import of naturalized epistemology.” in a mind of one’s own: feminist essays on reason and objectivity, edited by louise m. antony and charlotte e. witt, 110–53. new york: routledge. ———. 2020. “feminism without metaphysics or a deflationary account of gender.” erkenntnis 85 (3): 529–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00243-2. ásta. 2018. categories we live by: the construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. new york: oxford university press. bailey, marlon m. 2011. “gender/racial realness: theorizing the gender system in ballroom culture.” feminist studies 37 (2): 365–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/f em.2011.0016. bettcher, talia mae. 2013. “trans women and the meaning of ‘woman.’” in philosophy of sex: contemporary readings, 6th ed., edited by nicholas power, raja halwani, and alan soble, 233–50. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. carl, p. 2020a. “becoming a man.” new york times magazine, january 21; updated january 22, 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893. ———. 2020b. becoming a man: the story of a transition. new york: simon & schuster. davidson, lacey j., and daniel kelly. 2020. “minding the gap: bias, soft structures, and the double life of social norms.” journal of applied philosophy 37 (2): 190–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12351. dead kennedys. 1981. nazi punks fuck off. alternative tentacles, mp3. dembroff, robin. 2018. “real talk on the metaphysics of gender.” philosophical topics 46 (2): 21–50. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics201846212. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 22 ———. 2020. “beyond binary: genderqueer as critical gender kind.” philosophers’ imprint 20 (9): 1–23. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0020.009. haslanger, sally. 2012. resisting reality: social construction and social critique. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2017. “culture and critique.” aristotelian society supplementary volume 91 (1): 149–73. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akx001. haslanger, sally, and ásta. 2018. “feminist metaphysics.” in stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, fall 2018 edition. published february 27, 2007; substantive revision august 11, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/ar chives/fall2018/entries/feminism-metaphysics/. heyes, cecilia. 2024. “rethinking norm psychology.” perspectives on psychological science 19 (1): 12–38. jenkins, katharine. 2016. “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman.” ethics 126 (2): 394–421. https://doi.org/10.1086/683535. maccoby, eleanor. e. 2000. “perspectives on gender development.” international journal of behavioral development 24 (4): 398–406. https://doi.org/10.1080 /016502500750037946. mckitrick, jennifer. 2015. “a dispositional account of gender.” philosophical studies 172 (10): 2575–89. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/philosfacpub/47/. mikkola, mari. 2011. “ontological commitments, sex and gender.” in feminist metaphysics: explorations in the ontology of sex, gender, and the self, edited by charlotte witt, 67–83. dordrecht, netherlands: springer. ———. 2016. the wrong of injustice: dehumanization and its role in feminist philosophy. new york: oxford university press. mill, john stuart. (1859, 1869) 1997. on liberty and the subjection of women. hertfordshire: wordsworth editions. mock, janet. 2014. redefining realness: my path to womanhood, identity, love & so much more. new york: atria paperback. paakkunainen, hille. 2018. “normativity and agency.” in the routledge handbook of metaethics, edited by tristram mcpherson and david plunkett, 402–16. new york: routledge. ryle, robyn. 2020. questioning gender: a sociological exploration. 4th ed. los angeles: sage publications. scott, john finley. 1971. internalization of norms: a sociological theory of moral commitment. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. serano, julia. 2007. whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. berkeley, ca: seal press. sripada, chandra sekhar, and stephen stich. 2007. “a framework for the psychology of norms.” in the innate mind: volume 2: culture and cognition, edited by bell – the role of a lifetime: trans experience and gender norms published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 peter carruthers, stephen laurence, and stephen stich, 280–301. new york: oxford university press. villatoro, daniel, giulia andrighetto, rosaria conte, and jordi sabater-mir. 2015. “self-policing through norm internalization: a cognitive solution to the tragedy of the digital commons in social networks.” journal of artificial societies and social simulation 18 (2): 2. https://doi.org/10.18564/jasss.2759. westra, evan, and kristin andrews. 2022. “a pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms.” biology & philosophy 37 (5): article 40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s1 0539-022-09871-0. witt, charlotte. 2011. the metaphysics of gender. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2020. “what explains social role normativity?” in social functions in philosophy: metaphysical, normative, and methodological perspectives, edited by rebekka hufendiek, daniel james, and raphael van riel, 122–34. new york: routledge. rowan bell is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and the sexualities, genders, and social change program at the university of guelph, in guelph, ontario. their research is in trans philosophy and feminist theory, and also draws on metaethics, social epistemology, sociology, and decolonial theory. they have recently published academic articles in hypatia, the philosophical quarterly, and ergo. they have also cofounded the canadian society for trans philosophy (cstp). 17738 bell title page 17738 bell final format a perfect storm for epistemic injustice: algorithmic targeting and sorting on social media feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 8 recommended citation stewart, heather, emily cichocki, and carolyn mcleod. 2022. “a perfect storm for epistemic injustice: algorithmic targeting and sorting on social media.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 8. 2022 a perfect storm for epistemic injustice: algorithmic targeting and sorting on social media heather stewart oklahoma state university heather.stewart@okstate.edu emily cichocki western university ecichock@uwo.ca carolyn mcleod western university cmcleod2@uwo.ca stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 a perfect storm for epistemic injustice: algorithmic targeting and sorting on social media heather stewart, emily cichocki, and carolyn mcleod abstract over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. in this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. in other words, we argue that algorithms on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. we argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting. keywords: ai, algorithms, algorithmic injustice, epistemic injustice, trust, social media “the web reflects and even amplifies real-world inequities as often as it ameliorates them.” —astra taylor, 20141 “the problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically.” —mark zuckerberg, 20162 1 taylor 2014, 10. 2 this quote from facebook ceo mark zuckerberg was initially a comment zuckerberg posted on his personal facebook account in 2016. we borrow the quote from robert smith (2019, 16). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 1. introduction3 the development, implementation, and future possibilities of ai have recently gained much scholarly and popular attention, and rightly so given the many ethical and social challenges raised by ai (see coeckelbergh 2020, 3–8). among these challenges is how ai can cause or worsen social injustice. most of the current research on this narrower topic has discussed institutional uses of these technologies (e.g., algorithms used in assessing applications for employment, housing, or loans; and algorithmic predictions regarding the likelihood of “recidivism” in criminal justice contexts).4 our focus instead is on the impact that algorithms can have at the interpersonal level, especially algorithms deployed in social media. we argue that ai in social media creates conditions that have the potential to worsen epistemic injustice (see fricker 2007; medina 2013), both on and offline. we further argue that this problem, and a related problem of diminishing social trust, ought to be considered when thinking about the potential risks of rapidly developing ai for oppressed groups in society. in particular, the problems we identify ought to be considered as an important part of growing dialogues surrounding what’s been called “algorithmic injustice” and “algorithmic oppression” (see buolamwini 2016; eubanks 2018; noble 2018). although our focus is generally on understanding algorithmic injustice or oppression better, and more specifically how algorithmically driven social media platforms can worsen unjust social and epistemic conditions, we acknowledge that social media can (and often does) serve a valuable role in solidaristic efforts at resisting social injustice and creating positive social change (stephen 2015; tufekci 3 we are grateful to audiences at the cepe/iacap joint conference on the philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence, hosted by the university of hamburg, as well as the feminism, social justice, and ai workshop, hosted by the university of waterloo. specifically, we are grateful for helpful comments from judith simon, carla fehr, karen frost-arnold, and catherine stinson. finally, we are grateful for helpful conversations about ai ethics with colleagues at western university, and specifically those who participated in a reading group on the topic in the 2020–2021 academic year. 4 we do not deny that the focus on institutional-level uses of algorithms is of critical importance. after all, these uses can have significant impacts on the material conditions of people’s lives (e.g., whether they can secure a loan, housing, a job; whether they are let out of jail on parole; etc.). nevertheless, we contend that there are much broader social and interpersonal implications of our regular engagement with algorithms, which is why we focus on the interpersonal level. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 2014, 2017).5 we do not intend to deny the potential of social media to be used as a force for good.6 nevertheless, we believe it is important to attend to the potentially harmful side of widespread, unreflective social media engagement, especially engagement that occurs without awareness or understanding of the underlying algorithmic processes that shape it. the paper proceeds as follows. in section 2, we cover preliminaries about ai and algorithms, clarifying how we understand them for the purposes of this paper. specifically, we discuss the role of algorithms on social media sites, such as twitter, instagram, and facebook. in section 3, we describe two different but related algorithmic processes on social media, which we call algorithmic sorting and algorithmic targeting and which we later tie to epistemic injustice. section 4 provides an overview of the problem of epistemic injustice, as it has been described by feminist philosophers. we explain the moral and social significance of epistemic injustice, including the issues it poses for trust and effective communication between members of different social groups. in section 5, we argue that algorithmic sorting and targeting on social media create conditions that likely worsen epistemic injustice and accompanying social distrust and degradation of intergroup communication. finally, in section 6, we discuss the implications of our argument for developing conversations about algorithmic injustice and algorithmic oppression. 5 as alex kantrowitz (2020) notes, many social movements (e.g., occupy wall street, the arab spring, the gezi park protests, and black lives matter) have relied on social media for spreading information and organizing resistance efforts. to give an example current to the time of writing this paper, social media platforms such as facebook and instagram are currently being used to keep attention on the fairy creek blockade as indigenous land defenders protect old-growth forests in unceded pacheedaht and ditidaht territory (or the territory known as vancouver island, british columbia). we would like to once again thank the attendants of the feminism, social justice, and ai workshop for emphasizing this point. 6 for a discussion of this complexity, see tufekci’s 2014 article, “social movements and governments in the digital age: evaluating a complex landscape.” there, she examines the complex relationships between social media and activism, noting that most social movements “have thoroughly integrated digital connectivity into their toolkits, especially for organizing, gaining publicity, and effectively communicating,” and that while “social media’s empowering aspects are real and profound . . . these impacts do not play out in a simple, linear fashion” (tufekci 2014, 1). tufekci notes that “social media both empowers new digitally-fueled movements and contributes to their apparent weaknesses in seemingly paradoxically ways” (1). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 2. ai, algorithms, and social media what is meant by “ai” in debates on this topic is not always clear, nor is it consistent. before moving forward, we want to be clear ourselves about how we are thinking about ai. nick polson and james scott (2018) argue that when we hear “ai,” we shouldn’t think of something out of a science fiction fantasy but rather simply of algorithms. algorithms, they explain, are no more than a set of step-by-step instructions that a computer follows in order to perform some task. “on its own,” they note, “an algorithm is no smarter than a power drill; it just does one thing very well, like sorting a list of numbers or searching the web for pictures of cute animals” (polson and scott 2018, 3). put that way, ai doesn’t sound nearly as frightening or as complicated as we might intuitively think. algorithms are simply tools that are oriented toward some particular goal and that function via a simple set of instructions. in order to get algorithms to complete increasingly complicated tasks, algorithms get chained together. the resulting chains of simple algorithms create a “domain-specific illusion of intelligent behavior” and are what we think of as “ai.” almost every ai system follows the same “pipeline-of-algorithms” template. the pipeline takes in a bunch of data from a particular domain, performs a chain of calculations, and outputs some prediction, decision, or information (polson and scott 2018, 3–4). voilà—ai! a tidy definition of ai that we can work with, borrowed from mark coeckelbergh (2020, 64), is that ai is “intelligence displayed or simulated by code (algorithms) or machines.” henceforth, this is how we will think of ai. many of the digital technologies that we interact with on a daily basis run algorithms. while algorithms do many things, what is important for our present purposes is that they give shape to our informational channels on the internet. they do that, for example, by mediating what appears in our search engines (noble 2018; sumpter 2018, 105), by determining what news sources are and are not presented to us (sumpter 2018, 105), and by structuring what appears on our social media feeds and in what order. despite the fact that algorithms play critical roles in our lives, many people do not understand them. robert elliot smith (2019, x) notes that most users are generally “unaware of exactly how [algorithms function], mostly [they] don’t understand their operation, and [they] barely grasp the influence they exert on our lives.” smith (2019, 63) goes on to say that our willing but uninformed acceptance of algorithmic operations in our lives results from our assuming that algorithms are benign and unbiased—the result of objective mathematical computation, free of the corrupting influence of social values. it is clear that far more work is needed to educate digital technology users: to help people interact with online platforms with a more critical eye. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 as noted above, our focus is on social media, which operates via algorithms that are often invisible to individual users, despite being central to the functioning of these platforms. we are concerned as well with the ethical and social challenges that these platforms pose. david sumpter outlines just some of these challenges in his 2018 book, outnumbered: from facebook and google to fake news and filterbubbles—the algorithms that control our lives. about the social media situation around him while he was writing the book, he writes, “twitterbots were spreading fake news . . . far-right groups were living in algorithmically created filter-bubbles; facebook was measuring our personalities, and [the data] were being exploited to target voters” (sumpter 2018, 14). he then continues, “all of the big internet services—including google, yahoo, facebook, microsoft, and apple—build up a personalized picture of our interests and use these to decide what adverts to show us” (19). the ability of social media to generate a hyperpersonalized picture of a specific user is particularly effective. one programmer notes, “the power of the ‘like’ button on facebook to target adverts is scary. your ‘liking’ gives a lot of insight into you as a person” (programmer angela grammatas, quoted in sumpter 2018, 19). this information—about who we are as people—is a source of profit for facebook. that is because the better they know us, the better they can tailor advertisements to us or generate a feed that is more likely to keep us on the site longer (our attention to and engagement with the site is a financial asset to social media corporations like facebook). it is therefore part of the business model of social media sites like facebook to get to know us really well.7 the goal is to tailor content to specific users and to keep them engaged and on the platform, at any cost. this shaping of our social media feeds in ways that fit our identities and interests is done, in large part, by algorithms. 3. algorithmic sorting and targeting the content we see on social media is curated with our “likes” and other background information in mind through what we call “algorithmic sorting” and “algorithmic targeting.” we will later argue that these processes are likely to worsen problems of epistemic injustice and social distrust. 7 we will not review how the algorithms utilized by social media sites such as facebook go about classifying us here, although sumpter (2018, 26–33) offers a really accessible description of how this works. to understand specifically how algorithms make predictions about our interests based on past “likes,” see sumpter (2018, 105– 17). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 3.1. algorithmic sorting algorithmic sorting, as we are using this term, describes the increasing separation of people on social media into different epistemic worlds, which have little overlap in informational content. the result is that people come to know—or think they know—different “facts” and may even rely on different standards of evidence. the worldviews of others become increasingly distant, unfamiliar, or unrecognizable. before going into further detail about algorithmic sorting, a point of terminological clarification is in order. within computer science, a different term— sorting algorithm—describes an algorithm that functions to put particular elements of a list in numerical, lexical, or some other specific order. sorting algorithms are often used to help sort data in ways that help optimize the function of other algorithms, including search algorithms, such as those used on common search engines, like google. this term—sorting algorithm—is a noun. it denotes a particular type of algorithm. what we are describing, on the other hand, is more of a verb: a process that is driven by algorithms of different types and that has the effect of sorting people into qualitatively different epistemic worlds. bear in mind, moving forward, that our focus is on algorithmic processes that produce certain epistemic and social outcomes, not a particular type of algorithm.8 bearing that terminological clarification in mind, and in order to further explicate the phenomenon of algorithmic sorting, we must now take a detour into literature on two phenomena that are related to algorithmic sorting: echo chambers and filter bubbles.9 although most theorists take these two phenomena to be distinct, there is often some conflation of them and slippage in the usage of the terms “echo chamber” and “filter bubble.” a common way of distinguishing them is as follows: in a paradigm case of an echo chamber, bloggers linked to other bloggers who agreed with them, confirming their views and supporting what they already thought . . . . each set of bloggers had created their own world, within which their views reverberated . . . . the difference between “filtered” and “echoed” cavities lies in whether they were created by algorithms or by people. while the bloggers chose the links to different blogs, algorithms based on our likes, our web searches, and 8 we are grateful to catherine stinson for pushing us to clarify our terminology here, relative to the similar terminology used in computer science. 9 there has been much discussion of these phenomena in the past decade, following the 2011 publication of eli pariser’s book, the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. this book generated both discussion and critique; see, for example, bruns (2019) for an argument that the impact of filter bubbles and echo chambers is overstated. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 our browsing history do not involve an active choice on our part. it is these actions which can potentially create a filter bubble. each action you make in your web browser is used to decide what to show you next. (sumpter 2018, 137) on this view, echo chambers are the result of human agency: the user opts into certain informational networks, which were curated by humans and reinforce certain ideas or perspectives. beliefs “echo” throughout these networks, relatively immune from outside challenge or resistance. this process functions to firm up the beliefs (e.g., confirmation bias goes to work). as a paradigm example, you might think of social media groups, such as facebook groups or community blogs, in which people self-select into the group, the group contains primarily (or in some cases, exclusively) like-minded others, and the information shared through the group is of the sort that confirms the relevant beliefs and the standards of evidence upon which they are built. on the other hand, filter bubbles are taken to be the result of algorithms learning about us via a variety of available data inputs (e.g., our “likes,” our viewing patterns, and other data traces we leave behind on the web) and curating our informational worlds accordingly (e.g., based on what the algorithm predicts that we most want to see, or what will most likely keep us engaged and online).10 notably, on this view, the “filter bubble” isn’t a perfectly closed epistemic world, not in the way an echo chamber might be. not all opposing views will be sorted out, at least not right away. however, the filter bubble effect involves the algorithm becoming increasingly good at knowing what information interests you and at tailoring your network to reflect only that information.11 while echo chambers and filter bubbles are often treated as though they are distinct, in practice, they are quite difficult to tease apart. in other words, the overlap between human-created echo chambers and algorithmic-driven filter bubbles is quite messy in practice. the dynamic nature of user engagement and algorithmically curated content and choices blurs the line between human agency and algorithmic influence in significant ways.12 some of our epistemic world-making online most 10 for a clear and helpful overview of how this works, see sumpter (2018, 138–51). 11 this way of parsing out filter bubbles and echo chambers is common. but note that there have been other helpful proposals for understanding these or related concepts, such as “epistemic bubbles.” for example, see thi nguyen (2020), who demarcates “echo chambers” from “epistemic bubbles” by claiming there is a cultivated, systematic distrust in the case of “echo chambers” that is lacking in the case of “epistemic bubbles.” 12 for a detailed treatment of the relationships between algorithms, autonomy, and agency, see rubel, castro, and pham (2021). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 certainly happens via our conscious choices and reflects our (mostly explicit) decisionmaking (e.g., whose friend requests we accept or deny, which pages we follow, and which groups we opt into joining). in these ways, our social media feeds might come to disproportionately “echo” our extant beliefs back to us and do so as a result of curatorial decisions we have made as users. for example, a queer feminist academic might, as a result of consciously curating her friends list, end up having a network that mostly shares left-leaning news articles and queer feminist content. in this way, as a result of her own actions, many of her extant views end up being reflected (or “echoed”) back at her when she views her feed. this is the sense in which human choices are involved in curating our informational spheres. however, the curation is not merely the result of our agency, since the decisions we make are already framed for us to some extent. for example, our “suggested friends” lists are created and presented to us by algorithms; suggestions of pages to follow and groups to join are curated by algorithms too. whether we request those suggested friends, accept the request others send us based on their own algorithmic recommendations, or join those suggested pages or groups, is of course our decision, but any sense we have that we are acting wholly on our own choices is illusory.13 the choices are already framed in powerful ways by the algorithms. so, echoing effects aren’t the exclusive product of human choice; rather, the human choices are aided by the output of algorithms. relatedly, the filtering effects that are seen to be the result of algorithms are informed by active user choices. we are, after all, the ones providing the data to the algorithms, which then filter information based on that data. in other words, it is our decision-making and activity that gives form to the algorithm’s predictions and suggestions, or that aids the algorithm in tailoring our feeds more obviously to our interests. rather than being entirely distinct, echo chambers and filter bubbles are therefore in a complex feedback loop. on the basis of (already constrained) decisions we make in our online social sphere, the algorithms learn important information about us (e.g., whom we are inclined to add, and what we are inclined to follow, view, or engage with). the algorithms then go to work “filtering” our online social and epistemic sphere accordingly. information is filtered through the lens of our interests and personalities, echoing back what we have taught the algorithm about us. the way 13 the same is true, of course, of other choices we make, those that are not influenced by algorithms. in particular, these choices are shaped by our social circumstances, which limit the options we have available. it would be interesting to explore whether our options are more (or less) limited than usual on social media and how our autonomy is correspondingly limited. we reserve discussion of this issue for another day. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 things appear on our social media feeds is then the result of a messy overlap between algorithms and active choices, or choices moderated by algorithms. given this overlap and the difficultly of parsing out what is created by humans vs. algorithms, we opt to use the more general term of algorithmic sorting. in other words, rather than refer to echo chambers and filter bubbles, we want to focus on the processes that lead us into these increasingly separate and polarized epistemic worlds. as we define it, “algorithmic sorting” refers to the sorting of social media users into increasingly different, increasingly closed-off, and deeply biased informational spheres as a result of algorithms and algorithmically constrained human decisions. 3.2. algorithmic targeting the second algorithmic process that we would like to highlight is what we are calling algorithmic targeting. algorithmic targeting on social media occurs when information or content is placed in front of the user based on the algorithm’s prediction about their likelihood to view or engage with that content. algorithms effectively direct users’ attention to specific content that is potentially of interest to them based on their previous engagement, “like” patterns, or time spent on particular pages. this process contributes to algorithmic sorting, though the two processes are not coextensive. algorithmic targeting is unique—and perhaps especially pernicious—because it involves presenting specific content to users, based on their susceptibility to accepting, believing, or approving of it, as determined by the algorithm. in this way, algorithmic targeting plays a special role in epistemic worldmaking, as it reinforces beliefs that users might already be sympathetic or susceptible to, and which appear “normal” within the epistemic worlds into which they have been sorted. for example, if a person has anti-vax misinformation explicitly targeted to them (e.g., via a recommended video), this can be particularly pernicious once they have been sorted into a world with like-minded others who share in anti-vax beliefs. it can feel as if the content being presented “must be correct” since everyone else in the epistemic world accepts it, too. some algorithmic targeting is relatively benign (setting aside anticapitalist concerns we might have about the underlying motivation for targeting things to people in the first place, which is, of course, to generate profit). for example, when heather opens her facebook page, the things targeted to her may include advertisements for new camping equipment, event links to a recently announced fall tour for her favorite musical artist, and suggested vegan restaurants in the area. these bits of content are channelled to heather based on what the algorithm has gleaned about her interests: in camping, in live music, and in plant-based cuisine, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 respectively.14 what this targeting does more than anything, perhaps, is get heather to act on her preferences: she might buy the camping gear or concert tickets, or get dinner from the new vegan spot. but it can also reinforce beliefs she has about the value or popularity of the things she prefers. the message she may receive, if only subconsciously, is that these things must be important, for why else would advertisements for them be appearing all over her feed? they must, then, be good. to this end, even in the relatively benign cases, algorithmic targeting still plays on our cognitive biases in interesting, and perhaps worrisome, ways. some algorithmic targeting is more directly concerned with what we ought to believe (as opposed to what we ought to buy or order for takeout). the recommendations are that we take certain theories or views about the world seriously. for instance, it is now widely documented that social media algorithms target conspiracy theories and radical views at susceptible users. studies have shown that the algorithms on instagram push misinformation, dangerous conspiracy theories, and white supremacist content at specific users (campbell and holroyd 2021). facebook suggests radical political groups that propel ideologies such as white supremacy (paul 2021). on youtube, the algorithms deliver people “novel and shocking claims,” leading people to describe what has been called “the three degrees of alex jones,” a running joke meant to highlight that no matter where you started on youtube, you were never more than three recommendations away from a video by the right-wing conspiracist who popularized the idea that the sandy hook school shooting in 2012 had never happened and the bereaved parents were mere actors playing parts in a murky conspiracy against gun owners (tufekci 2018). amazon, too, is guilty of sending customers toward increasingly extremist misinformation, including white supremacist literature (long 2021). all these platforms target such content at users by “cross-propagating” from other conspiracy theories; if, for example, someone looks at a lot of anti-vax content and covid-19 denialism, the algorithms direct them toward increasingly radical conspiracism (long 2021). on each platform, algorithms are directing people toward hateful and conspiracy-ridden content based on the users’ predicted susceptibility (a product of their past engagement, “like” patterns, etc.)—and all for the sake of generating profit for companies (zeynep tufekci, quoted in pierce 2019). having now described how we understand algorithmic sorting and targeting, we can consider how they contribute to epistemic injustice. our first step is to give some preliminaries about epistemic injustice. 14 for a discussion of why targeted advertisements on facebook are so astoundingly accurate and effectively personalized, see jennings (2018). stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 4. epistemic injustice the problem of epistemic injustice has become a focal point for feminist philosophers in recent years, largely following the publication of miranda fricker’s 2007 monograph, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing, and subsequent works that build on the concept (see, e.g., medina 2013; kidd, medina, and pohlhaus 2017). although fricker was not the first to describe the phenomenon now widely known as epistemic injustice (see, for example, collins 2000; lorde 1984), she has provided an invaluable framework for understanding it, which we will draw upon here. as fricker (2007) explains it, epistemic injustice is an injustice that someone experiences in their capacity as a knower, most typically when their status as a knower has been diminished owing to “negative identity prejudicial stereotypes” that target a social group of which they are a part (i.e., their marginalized race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or the like). although fricker identifies two varieties of epistemic injustice—what she calls testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice—for our purposes, we will focus on testimonial injustice. a subcategory of epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice is an unfairness that someone experiences with respect to the uptake of their testimony. more precisely, they experience an unjust deflation of their credibility owing to stereotypes held about some facet of their identity. for example, an innocent black male defendant is a victim of testimonial injustice in the courtroom when jurors dismiss his testimony because of the triggering of widely held stereotypes about black men, such as stereotypes that associate black men with criminality, aggression, or violence. this is an instance of testimonial injustice because the black defendant’s ability to have his testimony fairly evaluated is blocked due to social stereotypes that the jurors hold (implicitly or explicitly) and that are widespread in the broader social imagination. all epistemic injustice, and therefore testimonial injustice, is harmful to those who are on the receiving end. as fricker (2007) explains, testimonial injustice causes the primary moral harm of being devalued or undermined as a knower. insofar as being regarded as a knowing agent is a central part of human dignity and value, one’s very humanity is undermined as well. in addition to this primary moral harm, fricker identities a number of secondary harms that can result from testimonial injustice. these include epistemic harms such as a decline in one’s epistemic self-trust (or a rise in one’s proclivity toward doubting one’s knowledge) and practical harms, which result from not being adequately listened to, heard, or believed. a possible (perhaps likely) practical harm in the case of the testimonial injustice against the innocent black defendant, for example, is being wrongfully convicted. in all of these ways, testimonial injustice can be harmful to the speaker. but testimonial injustice also has wider social implications, which we want to draw attention to as well. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 importantly for our purposes is the following observation: where there is epistemic injustice, there is distrust in the capacity of members of socially marginalized groups to be knowers as a result of social stereotypes. epistemic injustice—especially its testimonial form—is both caused by and worsens what we are calling “social distrust,” which is distrust that occurs between different social groups. specifically, there is a pervasive social distrust among dominant groups in the knowledge claims and testimonial assertions of members of marginalized groups. as a result, there is a corrupted epistemic sphere in which oppressed people are less able to transmit knowledge, and more privileged people have the domain of what they can know reduced substantially. the failure to be open to accepting the word of members of marginalized groups, and their reporting of their experiences, exacerbates the situated ignorance of more privileged people, where “situated ignorance” refers to gaps in one’s knowledge that exist because of one’s (more dominant) social position (see dotson 2011). such ignorance is worsened by the inability and/or unwillingness to take seriously the speech of marginalized people. the more ignorance there is about marginalized people and their experiences, the more distrust there is in and by them. there is social and epistemic distrust in them by others because they are viewed through the lens of harmful stereotypes, and there is social and epistemic distrust by them in more privileged groups because of the latter’s situated ignorance. in the following section, we will argue that algorithmic sorting and targeting on social media help to create the conditions that make epistemic injustice possible: the perpetuation and rigidity of stereotypes upon which epistemic injustice is based, the increased epistemic and moral distance between members of different social groups, the deepening of ignorance about the experiences of other social groups, and heightened social distrust. 5. algorithms and social media, or the perfect storm for epistemic injustice in his 2020 book ai ethics, mark coeckelbergh argues that there is a need to pay serious attention to how algorithms are impacting our social interactions and moral lives. importantly, he contends that these rapidly evolving technologies have the potential to “widen the gap between the powerful and powerless, thus accelerating injustice and inequality” (coeckelbergh 2020, 75–76). we are interested in understanding how algorithmic processes on social media increase social injustice and oppression in our interpersonal lives. our narrower goal is to show how algorithmic sorting and targeting can accelerate injustice and inequality in the domain of knowledge. we contend that algorithms on social media create the “perfect storm” for epistemic injustice because the very same conditions that make marginalized voices less likely to be heard and given proper uptake in general are compounded by the algorithmic processes of sorting and targeting, thereby creating a vicious cycle in which interpersonal epistemic injustices are worsened both on and offline. in what stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 follows, we will detail some of these conditions and how they manifest on social media. consider first how the algorithmic processes of sorting and targeting are likely to exacerbate harmful stereotypes (mcintosh 2016; biddle 2019; leetaru 2019a, 2019b; barlas et al. 2020). people with stereotypical views can more freely express them online, receive uptake for them, or find communities of people who share and endorse them (r. smith 2019, 15). to illustrate, consider that the most popular blogs written by women are the infamous “mommy blogs,” which chronicle the ins and outs of “modern motherhood” and the “must-have” products needed to make things easier, cleaner, thinner, and smoother for other mothers. the lives of these “highpowered celebrity ‘mommy-bloggers’” are not representative of most women’s lives, nor of most mothers’ lives. but the odds of women’s actual lives making for a “successful” blog (or social media presence) “don’t look so good, especially if [they] aim to write about something other than child-rearing, [their] rugged cowboy husband, or sponsored products” (taylor 2014, 110). the domain of experiences likely to be shared on social media (the mechanism by which blogs gain exposure and popularity) is incredibly narrow.15 perhaps more perversely, it is steeped in traditional gendered norms. within the narrow epistemic worlds into which people are increasingly sorted, stereotypical representations of outsiders mostly go unchallenged because there are few voices of opposition or people with different perspectives or experiences to contribute. stereotypical content (e.g., caricatures of people based on race, sexualized images of women, etc.) can also be explicitly targeted at people who are algorithmically determined to be sympathetic to it. the result of both this sorting and targeting is that people’s stereotypical views become more rigid, which itself is a problem for epistemic justice.16 as discussed above, stereotyping forms the basis of epistemic injustice; it causes those who are negatively stereotyped to have their epistemic status unfairly downgraded (see fricker 2007). another feature of epistemic injustice that is closely tied to stereotyping is the creation and worsening of epistemic and moral distance between people of different identities, backgrounds, and belief systems. when such distance exists, it becomes less likely that people will effectively communicate across difference—that they will 15 see hindman (2008) for a more detailed analysis of this point. hindman demonstrates that despite the fact that the internet is widely heralded as a democratizing force, the public sphere is not actually made more inclusive by the internet. contrary to popular beliefs, hindman argues, the internet has done very little to broaden social discourse but rather empowers a small set of elites and already familiar perspectives. 16 on the rigidity of stereotypes, see blum (2004). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 be able or willing to listen to or understand one another, to engage in meaningful dialogue or communication with another, or (as we will discuss below) to trust one another. consider the following point from zeynep tufekci (2018), who notes that while social media technologies have the capacity to bring people together in new ways, they also have the potential to disperse—to create distance between—existing communities: digital platforms allowed communities to gather and form in new ways, but they also dispersed existing communities, those that had watched the same tv news and read the same newspapers. even living on the same street meant less when information was disseminated through algorithms designed to maximize revenue by keeping people glued to screens. it was a shift from a public, collective politics to a more private, scattered one, with political actors collecting more and more personal data to figure out how to push just the right buttons, person by person and out of sight. tufekci’s observation is very much in line with our claim here: algorithmic processes on social media create, sustain, and exacerbate distance between people and groups. they do so, we contend, in at least two ways: by sorting users into different (and increasingly distant) online communities, and also by (further) entrenching social stereotypes, which further reinforce the apparent gaps between social groups. essentially, the algorithms work in tandem with existing social stereotypes to divide people into different social and epistemic worlds. stereotypes are divisive on their own because they contribute to “othering,” which occurs when certain groups are marked as deviant or inferior to dominant groups (see, for example, beauvoir 2011; young 1990). othering further distances people and groups from one another: morally because they come to lack a sense of a “common humanity” (blum 2004, 276) and epistemically because they are not positioned, or willing, to learn from one another (see medina [2013] for a discussion on the epistemic vices of epistemic closed-mindedness and epistemic arrogance). our claim is that algorithmic processes on social media exacerbate the social phenomenon of othering, making people even more divided from one another. to make the point more concrete, consider again the example of the “mommy bloggers” discussed above. imagine a young mother—anna—whose friend sends her a link to one of these mommy blogs through facebook. it’s an entertaining read so anna “likes” it. next thing she knows, she gets a targeted ad for the roomba automated vacuum that the blogger said was a “godsend” with her messy toddlers. then, anna gets a targeted ad for the high-end concealer that was sponsored in the blog as well—a concealer meant to hide those inevitable dark circles under an stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 exhausted new mother’s eyes. she glances over to her mirror. she does look tired after all. so, she clicks on the ad link and places an order for the concealer. facebook’s algorithm learns that the target ad worked. before long, an increasing number of similar blogs, related posts, and motherhood-related memes are being recommended to anna by facebook’s algorithms. gradually, she is presented with an increasingly homogeneous image of motherhood—one that is white, straight, thin, and moneyed. this narrow image of motherhood becomes reinforced for her. over time, other images of motherhood and parenting start to feel increasingly “off” to her—perhaps they don’t register as “real” motherhood at all. mothers and parents who do not fit the bill become “other”—lesser or deviant. at the same time, those who are not reflected in these images of motherhood—mothers and parents who do not fit the narrow, stereotypical, and normative presentation of motherhood—might understandably come to resent it (and, moreover, to resent those whose experiences are consistent with this status quo). in both regards, there is a growing distance between these different groups of “mothers” and how they see and understand one another, if they see or understand one another at all. growing distance between groups (and related gaps in awareness and understanding of each other’s experiences) is at the core of pernicious social and epistemic ignorance (see for example mills 2007; dotson 2011). over time, a lack of exposure to the lives, perspectives, and experiences of others deepens our extant ignorance and widens the gaps in our understanding (see dotson 2011). moreover, when one sees their own experiences and worldviews disproportionately reflected in the content presented to them, it makes it harder to recognize and appreciate the limits of one’s own experience and knowledge. in other words, it makes it more difficult to recognize and appreciate that one is both socially and epistemically situated and that one’s perspectives, beliefs, and knowledge are necessarily partial and limited as a result. such ignorance—both the ignorance of others’ lives and experiences and the ignorance of our own epistemic limitations—is at the heart of epistemic injustice. we are less likely to listen to, trust, and believe others when we are fundamentally unaware of their experiences. worse yet, this generates a vicious cycle, because when we disbelieve or distrust others, the gaps in our knowledge cannot close—the ignorance is thereby reinforced. there is a tight and pernicious connection between social and epistemic ignorance and epistemic injustice. our claim is that algorithmic processes on social media speed up this vicious cycle by widening the gaps that drive ignorance and, as a result, worsening the problem of epistemic injustice.17 this is because the algorithmic processes, as discussed above, sort out different perspectives and experiences—those of anyone 17 for a discussion of ignorance as it relates to technology, see greyson (2019). for a discussion of challenges to online ignorance see frost-arnold (2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 deemed “other.” our epistemic worlds increasingly reflect the experiences of people like us. for the socially dominant, this is particularly problematic, as nondominant voices become shielded from view, allowing dominant narratives to remain unshaken. to revisit the example of anna, a facebook feed that presents a user with a narrow and privileged image of motherhood does not allow one to learn about or come to understand the lived experiences of, for example, queer mothers, low-income and working-class mothers, or mothers who experience racial discrimination against themselves and their children. this allows biased and stereotypical assumptions about what “real” motherhood looks like to remain virtually unchallenged. lastly, we contend that algorithmic processes on social media can also (further) undermine social and epistemic trust. algorithmic sorting and targeting lead people to inhabit epistemic worlds largely inhabited by others who think like they do and with whom they come to form “in-group” trust (nguyen 2020) and a general sense of belonging. by contrast, people outside that epistemic world are distrusted. the successful acquisition and transfer of knowledge requires trust (hardwig 1991). trust, in other words, is a precondition for the ability to communicate effectively with others, especially across social difference, vulnerability, or imbalances in power. insofar as algorithms on social media have the effect of diminishing social and epistemic trust, they (further) impede the possibility of meaningful communication and knowledge exchange across social difference (e.g., between people who find themselves in distant epistemic and social worlds). when this impediment negatively impacts members of marginalized groups, so that they become increasingly unable to secure epistemic uptake, epistemic injustice occurs. without describing it as “epistemic injustice,” avriel epps-darling (2020) raises a similar concern—namely, that the effect of algorithms on social media are likely to render people less able to understand one another in an increasingly diverse social world. she writes: living in a world controlled by discriminatory algorithms can further segregate white youths from their peers of color. tiktok’s contentfiltering algorithm, for example, can drive adolescents toward echo chambers where everyone looks the same. this risks diminishing teens’ capacity for empathy and depriving them of opportunities to develop the skills and experiences necessary to thrive in a country that’s growing only more diverse. she adds: algorithmic racism exists in a thriving ecosystem of online discrimination, and algorithms have been shown to amplify the voices stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 of human racists. black teens experience an average of five or more instances of racism daily, much of it happening online and therefore mediated by algorithms. radicalization pipelines on social platforms such as youtube can lead users down rabbit holes of videos designed to recruit young people, radicalize them, and inspire them to commit real-world violence. before the internet, parents could discourage their kids from spending time with bad influences by monitoring their whereabouts. today, teens can fraternize with neo-nazis and spread eugenics propaganda while just feet away from a well-intentioned but unaware parent. part of the problem is that parents don’t see the underlying structures of popular platforms, such as youtube, facebook, and reddit, as strangers that can take the hand of a teenager and guide them deeper and deeper into disturbing corners of the web. there is no “stranger danger” equivalent for a recommendation engine. (epps-darling 2020) what epps-darling is describing is also what concerns us here: algorithmic sorting and targeting impacting what individual users see, and do not see, in their social media feeds (see also stern 2021). as a result, they shape people’s informational and social landscapes substantially. this distorting of how we see and relate to one another is likely to worsen our ability to trust others and to fairly evaluate or give uptake to the knowledge claims of those who are unlike us. when this happens as a result of, for example, the targeting of misogynistic or white supremacist content to users, the consequence is a disproportionate impact on those who already experience epistemic marginalization. readers might be wondering what can be done to offset this problem. can’t the social media sites just use the power of algorithms to improve the epistemic landscape by rooting out biased, discriminatory, or stereotypical content targeting marginalized groups? in theory, yes. but so far, this isn’t proving to be a promising line of defense. so far, efforts to restrict hate speech targeted at members of marginalized groups are backfiring, instead disproportionately flagging the speech of marginalized people. as shirin ghaffary (2019) explains, platforms such as facebook and twitter are using algorithms in efforts to curb hateful speech on their sites. the idea is that the algorithms will be better equipped to identify this speech and do so quickly. the motivation and urgency for these platforms to step up their efforts to reduce hateful speech on their platform is largely in response to recent mass shootings and violence that have been linked to hate speech online, targeted at marginalized communities (see hatzipanagos 2018). however, multiple studies have found that the algorithms trained to identify hate speech end up amplifying racial bias. one study indicated that the algorithm used to detect hate speech was one and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/s0193397319300462?dgcid=author https://blavity.com/new-study-finds-black-teens-face-racial-discrimination-5-times-a-day-on-average?category1=news https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-12228-7_15 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 a half times more likely to flag tweets written by black users as offensive, and even more so when the tweet was written in black vernacular (sap et al. 2019). this overrepresentation of black users’ tweets in efforts to detect hateful speech has been reflected in other studies as well (e.g., davidson, bhattacharya, and weber 2019).18 if the algorithms designed to remove such content disproportionately flag the speech of users from marginalized groups, then they heighten epistemic injustice rather than combat it.19 it is important to note that social media executives, such as facebook’s mark zuckerberg, are well aware that their platforms are turning people against each other 18 one issue is that speech, and the meaning of speech, can be incredibly context dependent. for example, uses of the “n-word” or terms such as “queer” or “dyke” can constitute slurs, or otherwise be offensive, in some contexts but not in all contexts. the algorithms currently employed by platforms such as facebook and twitter cannot account for this context-specificity. so, for example, when an algorithm is directed to flag or remove tweets that use the “n-word” or “queer,” there is no ability to adjudicate between offensive and inoffensive uses, or in-group vs. outgroup uses (see anderson 2018). bias is baked in from the start. the result is that the inoffensive speech of, for example, black or lgbtq+ users is disproportionately flagged or removed, while legitimately offensive speech is disproportionately left unscathed. some argue that the problem goes even deeper than this and that the speech of black users is itself more heavily policed than that of white users. for example, in one notable instance, a black user was banned from facebook for sharing a “dear white people” note that many of her white friends had posted without consequence (sankin 2017). review of internal documents from facebook suggest that white men are indeed more insulated from having their speech flagged and removed (see angwin 2017). the disproportionate silencing of black (and other marginalized) users is itself reflective of epistemic injustice, and something that demands our attention. 19 another possible (albeit partial) solution is found at the level of individual users: individual users can intentionally curate their social media networks so as to ensure greater levels of exposure to a plurality of different (and underrepresented) voices— e.g., by being intentional about who they add or follow and by following more people with different perspectives. this would, of course, be a limited solution, as the algorithms would still influence what content was highlighted and “driven up.” moreover, having the foresight to be intentional in this way would require there to be far more social understanding of the influence of algorithms on social media, as well as a broader concern about the epistemic effects of social media (e.g., that social media networks are just as much epistemic and informational networks as social ones). both requirements seem fairly implausible at present. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 and having corrosive social and epistemic effects (hatmaker 2021). and yet, they refuse to do anything to stop it (a. smith 2020; frier 2021). part of the uphill battle of ending algorithmic-driven injustice (epistemic and otherwise) is getting the platforms to choose justice and what is right over a constant drive toward increasing profit or getting governments to engage in meaningful oversight (swisher 2020). both, unfortunately, seem like a long shot. 6. on algorithmic injustice and oppression, and the need to think broadly the issue we have identified—namely, the contribution that algorithms make to epistemic injustice—is but one dimension of a much broader problem generated by the algorithms rapidly infiltrating our lives. some have named the problem “algorithmic injustice” or “algorithmic oppression,” and we believe there is room to flesh out both of these concepts more comprehensively. here, we want to press on each of them and suggest that a robust accounting of the injustice and oppression that algorithms cause must also include the seemingly subtle ways in which algorithms influence our social worlds, including, as we have detailed here, our epistemic interactions and associated trust relations. one leader in the movement to end the perverse social implications of rapidly developing ai is mit’s joy buolamwini (see algorithmic justice league, n.d.). buolamwini brought significant attention to the issue of algorithmic bias with a 2016 ted talk, which now has 1.4 million views and counting (buolamwini 2016).20 buolamwini’s work on issues of algorithmic bias and injustice began with her discovery that facial recognition technologies are both racist and sexist.21 now, her work is to uncover the many ways in which ai systems perpetuate racism, sexism, ableism and other harmful forms of discrimination. the algorithmic justice league (ajl), which buolamwini founded, is aimed at illuminating these social implications of ai and advocating for more justice within the domain of digital technology. the work of the ajl is invaluable, and joy buolamwini has been a vital voice within the movement for accountability for the harms perpetuated by ai systems. however, it is worth noting that much of the focus of ajl research and advocacy focuses on injustices at the “macro” scale and most often those being perpetuated by institutions such as medical institutions, the criminal justice system, banking and crediting agencies, and big tech (i.e., through the use of technologies like facial recognition). issues pertaining to racial profiling, surveillance, housing or employment discrimination, and the like are incredibly important—we certainly do not want to 20 also see shalini kantayya’s (2020) documentary, coded bias, which features buolamwini. 21 they are disproportionately able to consistently and accurately identify white male faces. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 deny or minimize the significance of these types of discrimination—but they are only part of the story when it comes to the sorts of injustice that algorithms can (and do) perpetuate. algorithms can also contribute to injustices that are more “micro” in scale. they are less overt or obvious, they occur at an interpersonal level, and they are often not quantifiable in the way that, for example, a denied rental application or an unfairly evaluated job application is quantifiable. they are also more “everyday” sorts of injustices that include epistemic injustice.22 we think it is important to pay attention to them. what we have in mind is described quite clearly by avriel epps-darling (2020), who notes that “acts of technological racism might not always be blatant,” likening the modality of “everyday” algorithmic harms to those of another phenomenon, microaggressions.23 she writes: algorithmic racism frequently functions as a type of technological microaggression—those thinly veiled, prejudiced behaviors that often happen without the aggressor intending to hurt anyone. but the algorithmic variety differs from human microaggressions in several ways. for one, a person’s intent might be hard to pin down, but the computational models imbued with algorithmic bias can be exponentially more opaque. several common machine-learning models, such as neural networks, are so complex that even the engineers who design them struggle to explain precisely how they work. further, the frequency at which technological microaggressions occur is potentially much higher than in real life because of how much time teens spend on devices, as well as the automatic, repetitive nature of programmed systems. and everyone knows that human opinions are subjective, but algorithms operate under the guise of 22 relevant here is iris marion young’s claim that while some manifestations of oppression are overt, oppression also refers to the “disadvantage and injustice some people suffer . . . because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal society” (young 1990, 39). its causes, young says, “are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules” (39). 23 microaggressions are widely understood to be “verbal, nonverbal, and/or environmental slights, snubs, or insults that are either intentional or (most often) unintentional; they convey hostile, derogatory, or otherwise negative messages to target persons based upon their membership in a structurally oppressed social group” (freeman and stewart 2018, 412; citing sue 2010). http://news.mit.edu/2017/explained-neural-networks-deep-learning-0414 https://www.wired.com/story/inside-black-box-of-neural-network/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-black-box-of-neural-network/ stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 computational objectivity, which obscures their existence and lends legitimacy to their use. (epps-darling 2020) we believe the algorithmic justice league would be open to broadening their understanding of algorithmic injustice to encompass thinly veiled, everyday injustices, including those of an epistemic sort. as they note on their website: the deeper we dig, the more remnants of prejudice we will find in our technology. we cannot afford to look away this time because the stakes are simply too high. we risk losing the gains made with the civil rights movement and other movements for equality under the false assumption of machine neutrality. (algorithmic justice league, n.d.) we cannot agree more. now that significant amounts of our lives are spent online, we need to uncover both overt and more subtle algorithmic injustices. we need a fine-tooth comb to expose the latter and ensure they are not ignored. our hope is that we have aided in this effort by revealing one such injustice: epistemic, and especially testimonial, injustice. a related concept to algorithmic injustice is “algorithmic oppression,” which can be largely tied to the research of a ucla associate professor of information studies, safiya umoja noble. in her 2018 book, algorithms of oppression, noble examines the ways in which the algorithms are biased and perpetuate harmful stereotypes on the basis of race and gender.24 although noble’s focus is more narrowly about the subtle ways in which search engines reinforce oppression, the concept of algorithmic oppression ought to be thought of more broadly: to apply to the myriad ways in which algorithms reproduce oppressive structures. it seems as if noble was certainly hoping that her work would be extended in these ways. as she writes in her conclusion, “this book can open up a dialogue about radical interventions on socio-technical systems in a more thoughtful way that does not further marginalize people who are already in the margins. algorithms are, and will continue to be, contextually relevant and loaded with power” (noble 2018, 171). in short, we believe that broad conceptualizations of algorithmic injustice and oppression are needed, ones that account for the many ways (both “macro” and “micro”) in which algorithms can cause injustice and oppression. such accounts are currently lacking in the literature. we hope that those who are engaging in critical work about the social implications of digital technologies will continue to uncover and 24 for a discussion of algorithms in search engines, and problematic “autocomplete results,” see sumpter (2018, 188–94); also see robert smith (2019, x) and miller and record (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 analyze different dimensions of algorithmic injustice and oppression and add clarity and concision to these concepts. our contribution here has been to highlight a specific manifestation of these problems—namely, how algorithms on social media contribute to epistemic injustice or oppression within the domain of knowledge and do so often in subtle ways. 7. conclusion one overlooked risk of the influence of social media on our lives is that it worsens the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of diminished social and epistemic trust and poor communication across social difference. we have identified two related processes that contribute to these effects: what we’ve called algorithmic sorting and algorithmic targeting. the former creates greater distance between, and lessens exposure to, differing perspectives. it thus contributes to an othering of those unlike us. the latter is even more insidious; problematic content that drives disdain for certain groups gets targeted directly to people who might already have (or might be likely to form) biases against those out-groups. targeted messages about members of marginalized groups, then, serve as confirmatory evidence for one’s preexisting biases, which algorithms have been able to detect on the basis of like patterns and content-viewing histories. together, algorithmic sorting and targeting on social media create the perfect conditions for epistemic injustice— conditions in which outsiders are viewed as other, where there is decreasing exposure to and engagement with different perspectives, where different perspectives are less likely to be trusted or seen as reliable, and where biases and stereotypes are reinforced via an endless flow of what appears to be confirmatory evidence. epistemic injustice, as well as the harms it causes for speakers and the degrading effect it has on our ability to place an appropriate degree of trust in the word of others, is a serious moral and social problem. it is a problem that compounds other injustices that members of structurally oppressed groups face, as it makes them less able to speak out effectively regarding such injustice. it deepens social division, as it renders us less able to communicate with and place trust in one another across social difference. to the extent that we are beginning to sharpen our focus on the role that algorithms play in reinforcing injustice and oppression, we must pay careful attention to the harmful effects that such ai has in the already imperfect epistemic domain. references algorithmic justice league. n.d. “about.” accessed may 2021. https://www.ajl.org /about. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 anderson, luvell. 2018. “calling, addressing, and appropriation.” bad words: philosophical perspectives on slurs, edited by david sosa, 6–28. oxford: oxford university press. angwin, julia. 2017. “facebook’s secret censorship rules protect white men from hate speech but not black children.” propublica, june 28, 2017. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorshipinternal-documents-algorithms. barlas, pinar, kyriakos kyriakou, olivia guest, styliani kleanthous, and jahna otterbacher. 2020. “to ‘see’ is to stereotype: image tagging algorithms, gender recognition, and the accuracy-fairness trade-off.” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 4 (cscw3): 1–31. https://doi.org/10 .1145/3432931. beauvoir, simone de. 2011. the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovany-chevallier. new york: vintage. biddle, sam. 2019. “facebook’s ad algorithm is a race and gender stereotyping machine, new study suggests.” intercept, april 3, 2019. https://theintercept .com/2019/04/03/facebook-ad-algorithm-race-gender/. blum, lawrence. 2004. “stereotypes and 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algorithms promote extremist misinformation, report says.” seattle times, april 28, 2021. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-algorithmspromote-extremist-misinformation-report-says/. lorde, audre. 1984. sister outsider: essays and speeches. trumansburg, ny: crossing press. mcintosh, bennett. 2016. “bias in the machine: internet algorithms reinforce harmful stereotypes.” princeton university, department of computer science website, november 22, 2016. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/news/biasmachine-internet-algorithms-reinforce-harmful-stereotypes. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. miller, boaz, and isaac record. 2017. “responsible epistemic technologies: a socialepistemological analysis of autocompleted web search.” new media & society 19 (12): 1945–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816644805. mills, charles w. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 11–38. albany: state university of new york press. nguyen, c. thi. 2020. “echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.” episteme 17 (2): 141– 61. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.32. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. pariser, eli. 2011. the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. new york: penguin press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 26 paul, kari. 2021. “‘it let white supremacists organize’: the toxic legacy of facebook’s groups.” guardian, february 4, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/tech nology/2021/feb/04/facebook-groups-misinformation. pierce, katie. 2019. “zeynep tufekci on tech’s powers and perils for democracy.” johns hopkins university hub, february 11, 2019. https://hub.jhu.edu/2019 /02/11/zeynep-tufekci-democracy-dialogues/. polson, nicholas g., and james scott. 2018. aiq: how people and machines are smarter together. new york: st. martin’s press. rubel, alan, clinton castro, and adam k. pham. 2021. algorithms and autonomy: the ethics of automated decision systems. cambridge: cambridge university press. sankin, aaron. 2017. “how activists of color lose battles against facebook’s moderator army.” reveal news, august 17, 2017. https://revealnews.org /article/how-activists-of-color-lose-battles-against-facebooks-moderatorarmy/. sap, maarten, dallas card, saadia gabriel, yejin choi, and noah a. smith. 2019. “the risk of racial bias in hate speech detection.” proceedings of the 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, 1668–78. florence, italy: association for computational linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1 /p19-1163. smith, adam. 2020. “facebook knew its algorithm made people turn against each other but stopped research.” independent, may 28, 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook -algorithm-bias-right-wing-feed-a9536396.html. smith, robert elliot. 2019. rage inside the machine: the prejudice of algorithms, and how to stop the internet making bigots of us all. london: bloomsbury business. stephen, bijan. 2015. “get up, stand up: social media helps black lives matter fight the power.” wired, november 2015, 120–24. https://www.wired.com/2015 /10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/. stern, joanna. 2021. “social-media algorithms rule how we see the world: good luck trying to stop them.” wall street journal, january 17, 2021. https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-media-algorithms-rule-how-we-seethe-world-good-luck-trying-to-stop-them-11610884800. sue, derald wing. 2010. microaggressions in everyday life: race, gender, and sexual orientation. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. sumpter, david. 2018. outnumbered: from facebook and google to fake news and filter-bubbles—the algorithms that control our lives. new york: bloomsbury sigma. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod – a perfect storm for epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2022 27 swisher, kara. 2020. “when it comes to facebook, the need for action has been obvious for a long time.” new york times, december 10, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/opinion/facebook-antitrust-ftc.html. taylor, astra. 2014. the people’s platform: taking back power and culture in the digital age. toronto: random house canada. tufekci, zeynep. 2014. “social movements and governments in the digital age: evaluating a complex landscape.” journal of international affairs (new york) 68 (1): 1–18. ———. 2017. twitter and tear gas: the power and fragility of networked protest. new haven, ct: yale university press. ———. 2018. “how social media took us from tahrir square to donald trump.” mit technology review, august 14, 2018. https://www.technologyreview.com /2018/08/14/240325/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-todonald-trump/. young, iris marion. 1990. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. heather stewart is assistant professor of philosophy at oklahoma state university. her primary areas of research are within bioethics and philosophy of medicine, feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy. specifically, she works on issues of speech and language and the ways in which our communicative practices reflect and reinforce unjust social hierarchy and systems of oppression. her work has appeared in several journals including the kennedy institute of ethics journal, perspectives on psychological science, and southwest philosophy review. she is currently cowriting a book manuscript titled microaggressions in medicine, which is under contract with oxford university press. emily cichocki is a phd candidate in philosophy at western university. her research is primarily in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology. she is currently working on a dissertation that focuses on the concepts of structural injustice, complicity, and solidarity. part of her dissertation examines the effects that algorithms have on solidarity in the digital age. she is also part of an interdisciplinary team dedicated to research at the intersection of ai ethics and social justice. in addition to her research, emily is passionately involved in labor activism. carolyn mcleod, frsc, is professor and chair of philosophy at western university. author of self-trust and reproductive autonomy (mit) and conscience in reproductive health care (oxford), she is an expert on ethical issues in reproductive feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2022 28 health care. she has also done extensive research on the ethics of adoption and on key concepts in moral philosophy such as trust and autonomy. her current work focuses on the distrust of socially marginalized groups in public institutions, particularly those of health care and child welfare. she is concerned about the increased use of ai by these institutions and its likely impact on the institutional distrust of marginalized people. 14291 stewart, cichocki & mcleod title page 14291 stewart, cichocki & mcleod final format care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation mckittrick-sweitzer, lavender. 2023. “care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (3). article 4. 2023 care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another lavender mckittrick-sweitzer butler university lmckittricksweit@butler.edu mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another lavender mckittrick-sweitzer abstract care exploitation pervades our lives. consider the public school teachers who care about helping children achieve their goals by providing them with a proper education and are expected to do so by parents, administrators, or legislators—even with abysmal pay and little appreciation. perhaps the most common case of care exploitation is the expectation of a mother to make great (and disproportionate) sacrifices in her life for the well-being of her child, which mothers often meet because they bear a caring orientation toward their child. despite their willingly assenting, there is something morally problematic about their treatment. i argue that an injustice has been perpetrated against them, drawing on interpersonal accounts of exploitation to highlight that the unique wrong of care exploitation is the failure to respect one’s dignity by taking advantage of their vulnerability of caring about. following this, i articulate the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of care exploitation and their relationships to one another. keywords: exploitation, caring about, interpersonal, vulnerability, maldistribution, dignity, presumption, coercion, manipulation care exploitation is a pervasive, yet undertheorized, phenomenon. to familiarize yourself with it, consider the following four examples: (i) the public school teacher who cares about helping children achieve their goals by providing them with a proper education and is expected to do so by parents, administrators, or legislators—even with abysmal pay and little appreciation; (ii) the domestic care worker whose growing connection to the children in their care allows their employers to demand more and more of them; (iii) the faculty member who does substantially more departmental service than their peers—and is increasingly relied upon to do so—because it is known they care deeply about the success of their department; and (iv), perhaps the most common case of care exploitation, the expectation of a mother to make great (and disproportionate) sacrifices in her life for the well-being of her child, which mothers often meet because they bear a caring orientation toward their children. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 despite their willingly assenting, there is something morally problematic about the treatment of the teacher, domestic care worker, faculty member, and parent. in particular, i will argue that an injustice has been perpetrated against them, and despite their assent, the injustice is a form of exploitation in which their caring has been unfairly taken advantage of.1 exploitation is widely accepted to be the unfair taking advantage of one individual by another. where views part ways is in determining what exactly it means for the advantage taken to be unfair.2 i will argue that the unique wrong of care exploitation is—in the interest of gaining some disproportionate benefit—the failure to respect one’s dignity by taking advantage of their vulnerability of caring about. to care about some being or thing is to pay attention to, have concern for, and become invested in the subject’s wellbeing; this is to be contrasted with caring for some thing or being, which is to perform actions that tend to or nurture the subject or that help the subject thrive (tronto 1993).3 care exploitation, broadly construed, occurs when one’s caring about a subject is leveraged against them—to the advantage of another—so that one provides care for said subject. the general sense of caring about relevant to my argument here has two components: beliefs and desires. the individual that cares has beliefs about how things are going for the subject they care about, which are accompanied by a desire to aid in the achievement of the subject’s flourishing.4 the desire to aid at the root of caring about arises from, in part, “appreciating someone else’s situation from their perspective, and being moved to help them because of what one sees from that perspective” (collins 2015, 24). this requires attentiveness and receptivity on the part of the caring individual (noddings 2002, 13); an awareness of the way that “our own needs, desires, and interests may color, obscure, or deflect 1 wood (1995) resists this, arguing exploitation is often morally problematic but not a matter of justice. i treat exploitation as an injustice, granting that the lines between morality and justice may be difficult to draw. 2 an alternative, nonmoral use of exploitation means “to make use of” (wertheimer 1996, 5); this is not what i’m concerned with. among those that offer distinctive structural analyses of exploitation are marx (1906–09, 1921), mckeown (2016), wollner (2019), and zwolinski (2012). more interpersonal accounts include ferguson (2016, 2021), feinberg (1984), goodin (1985, 1987), logar (2010), mitra and billerandorno (2013), sample (2003), snyder (2008), vrousalis (2013), wood (1995), and wertheimer (1996). 3 caring for and caring about a subject often overlap but can occur independently (collins 2015). 4 without the desire, one merely has information about the status of an entity’s flourishing and does not yet care about them. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 those of the individual cared for” and an effort to mitigate the effects that our perspective may have upon their flourishing (kittay 2011, 615).5 to articulate the wrong of exploiting one’s caring about others, i first introduce the case of marie and alex, surveying alternative explanations of the injustice she is subjected to. i consider how leading accounts of interpersonal exploitation—which identify the wrong as related to maldistribution, vulnerabilities, or a kantian conception of respect—might account for the phenomenon i’m attending to. i ultimately argue that we can gain the best understanding of what has gone wrong in cases of care exploitation by drawing on the resources of each of these accounts, together. next, i present the conditions that must be satisfied for care exploitation to occur, expanding upon each so that one can have a comprehensive picture of what care exploitation is. 1. recognizing the wrong of care exploitation there is a large body of literature in feminist philosophy that offers both moral and political approaches to how we ought to understand and address our caring responsibilities, interpersonally and collectively. often these works demonstrate a sensitivity to relationships being ripe for the mistreatment of caring individuals, which motivates their introduction of theoretical resources to protect against said mistreatment. for example, “good care,” or the care at the center of care ethics, might be defined in such a way that it isn’t actually care if it puts the caring individual at a substantial disadvantage (collins 2015). some even go so far as to specify duties of the cared for, which on the most demanding end is a duty to appreciate the care (noddings 1984). more recently, asha bhandary’s (2020, 120) theory of liberal dependency care has been formulated to avoid, in part, the danger of “care chicken”: when there are no formal provisions for care and parties who are “situated near vulnerable charges defer responding to needs to see who will capitulate first.” and elizabeth brake (2021, 215–16) has argued that understanding as labor those attitudinally caring relationships where one subjectively experiences “benevolent attention or concern”—calling for the extension of economic and labor protections to unpaid caregivers—can alleviate the exploitation of these caregivers. but having these theoretical guardrails in place does little to address the lived experiences of those that are understood—both by themselves and by others—as caring and still find themselves taken advantage of because they care. this work aims 5 in the interest of space, i leave my account of care relatively underspecified and open. this is because i believe we can exploit the care of those that do so in nonoptimal ways. i do, however, find the normative accounts of tronto (1993, 2013) on care and gruen (2015) on empathy—which i understand as ultimately consistent— to be most attractive. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 to speak to those experiences, articulating how these problematic relationships have gone wrong. this will support future work in having a more comprehensive understanding of what is required to avoid harming each other in these ways and move toward moral repair. 1.1. marie and alex imagine two adult siblings close in age: marie and alex.6 they find themselves in a difficult situation because their mother needs constant support due to her age, and they’re unable to find a home health nurse that suits her needs.7 the difficulty is compounded by the fact that they both have careers they enjoy and must maintain to live comfortably. marie is particularly torn. not only does she love her mother as alex does, but additionally, she is deeply invested in how well things go for her mother on account of a caring disposition that alex lacks.8 specifically, she is concerned with the interests of her mother and helping her flourish, affectively bound up in the success of the project of caring for her and invested in her success in pursuing her projects—broadly construed. in other words, marie cares about how things go for her. this isn’t for self-interested reasons, though. rather, she is oriented toward the world such that she feels compelled, without external motivation, to support others. if only marie were to leave the job she loves and give up some creature comforts, she could meet her mother’s needs. and she’s willing to do this, despite understanding the costs and wishing there were a better alternative that allowed for her personal pursuits. unbeknownst to marie, alex has decided what the obvious solution to this problem is: they’ll ask marie to care for their mother, with the presumption that she’ll agree. alex’s presumption isn’t unfounded, given marie’s general caring disposition 6 throughout i will use “they, them, theirs” pronouns to refer to alex. i do to distinguish alex and marie in writing, while avoiding the perception that sex or gender is unduly influencing either of them. it is not difficult to imagine this case occurring between siblings of the same gender. 7 it is a presupposition of this case that marie and alex share the mutual—although often implicit—understanding that many siblings share: if parents come to require eldercare, the related responsibilities will need to be negotiated among them and preferably distributed in some equitable manner. it is important to recognize they are often in this situation because institutions of care have failed (brake 2017). 8 one might think that marie has, in fact, been motivated to take up this caring disposition due to externally imposed social norms contingent upon her gender, race, class, or some other feature of her identity (which may intersect in various ways). while this is possible, it is not necessary. this case has been constructed such that her caring disposition is not externally imposed, so we can set aside one possible overlapping source of injustice when identifying the wrong of care exploitation. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 in addition to her love for her mother. in fact, it would be very unlike marie to turn down an opportunity to help others. unsurprisingly, marie agrees. i take alex to be unfairly taking advantage of marie. to understand where to locate the unfairness in this case, it is helpful to look to the explanations offered by leading accounts of interpersonal exploitation. perhaps what is unfair is that the burdens of this arrangement are placed entirely upon marie (i.e., the maldistribution account). it is likely that marie would have volunteered to care for her mother anyway, but by asking her prior to her volunteering, alex benefits from marie’s caring disposition to her detriment. after all, they can keep their career and not sacrifice the luxuries they are afforded as a result, unlike marie. this isn’t to say marie gains nothing at all; she, like alex, gains the peace of mind that their mother is being taken care of well. or maybe what’s problematic about marie’s treatment is that she is seen by alex as merely a means to their end; marie, by virtue of her caring, is seen as instrumentally valuable in solving the issue of their mother’s care (i.e., the kantian account). evidence for this lies in their complete failure to compensate marie for costs; if you see someone as having the same worth as yourself, it makes little sense to not share in the costs of an agreement because you would not willingly permit others to use you merely as a means. alternatively, one might see this case as problematic because, if one is to understand marie’s caring as a preexisting vulnerability, alex has done something wrong by unfairly benefiting from her vulnerability (i.e., the vulnerability account). i contend that, independently, each theory is incapable of adequately articulating how alex has done something wrong by exploiting marie’s care. but these diagnoses are not mutually exclusive, and by drawing on elements of each, we can garner helpful insights. i now turn to a brief survey of each of these accounts, which is followed by a positive proposal of how we ought to understand the wrong of care exploitation. 1.2. interpersonal theories of exploitation the maldistribution account of exploitation is one of substantive unfairness, locating the wrong in an outcome—namely, the unfairly distributed benefits gained from the transaction. this is to be contrasted with accounts of procedural unfairness that locate the wrong in the process by which one exploits (e.g., vulnerability and kantian accounts). wertheimer (1996, 231) argues that one determines if the benefits are unfairly distributed by appealing to the hypothetical market price for the good being exchanged in the transaction. hypothetical market prices represent “the price that an informed and unpressured seller would receive from an informed and unpressured buyer if the [good or service] were sold on the market” (wertheimer 1996, 230). if the good is not exchanged at the hypothetical market price, then the exchange is exploitative. importantly, the exploiter’s actually benefitting—and not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 their intention to benefit—is both necessary and sufficient for exploitation to take place. in marie’s case we can imagine her stipulating what a fair compensation from alex for taking care of their mother might be. perhaps she would expect that alex help compensate for the financial losses she would experience in providing for the needs of their mother while also being invested in her well-being. or maybe she would expect them to provide emotional support in the times when caring for their mother is particularly psychologically taxing. alex, once informed of the cost of care work, would likely reach a similar conclusion about what the appropriate “price” (i.e., cost) is. but, with alex’s unwillingness to pay any price at all, the outcome of the transaction between them is exploitative. while the maldistribution account reaches the right conclusion (i.e., marie has been exploited), it also misses something important. while marie’s case seems problematic in part because alex is unwilling to share in the cost, what makes alex’s exploitation particularly offensive is something about the way they go about exploiting her. consider an alternative case: alex and marie can and do hire a home care worker, offering the care worker a fair wage. here the siblings avoid exploitation by conforming to the agreed upon hypothetical price, with neither party unfairly benefiting from the transaction. in this alternative case, simply hiring the person providing the care work prevents alex from being engaged in care exploitation. but simply hiring marie, as one might hire a home care worker, would not solve the problem—it would just shift it. this is because the problematic feature of care exploitation goes beyond alex’s failure to compensate marie. even if they were to pay marie the fair market price for her care, the presence of their presumptive call that initiates the transaction is, i will argue, exploitative. the maldistribution account cannot properly capture the morally relevant procedural element of this case; a substantive theory of exploitation is plainly unable to account for care exploitation. the vulnerability account is more promising, identifying what makes the advantage taken by the exploiter unfair as acting in such a way that one is “playing for advantage in situations in which it is inappropriate,” violating the norm of “protecting the vulnerable” (goodin 1987, 187; emphasis original).9 as goodin formulates it, this duty to protect the vulnerable has two parts: first, “it involves a general duty to suspend ordinary rules of behaviour in dealing with those who are particularly vulnerable to you,” and “secondly, it involves a duty to take positive measures to assist those who are particularly vulnerable to you” (187). there are four ways one can fail to protect the vulnerable, unfairly strategizing to gain advantage over them in interpersonal relationships (i.e., exploit them). these include strategizing for one’s own advantage against another (i) that has intentionally chosen 9 see also mitra and biller-andorno (2013). mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 not to strategize for their own advantage, (ii) that is unable to strategize for advantage altogether, (iii) that is no match for oneself, and (iv) when one’s advantages are derived from another’s “grave misfortunes” (goodin 1987, 185–86). by focusing on strategy rather than outcome, the vulnerability account is procedural. one reason for this is that it’s particularly difficult to articulate exactly what a fair distribution of costs and benefits would be (contra wertheimer), but “we nonetheless can say with confidence that one party has sometimes exploited the other” (goodin 1987, 181). this point about the difficulty of identifying fair distributions—and perhaps the usefulness of distributions altogether—is bolstered if we accept that affections are simply not something that can be distributed (hampton 1993, 240) or that “it is a mistake to reduce [justice] to distribution” (young 2011, 15). while goodin provides a lengthy justification for why failure to uphold our duties to the vulnerable is exploitation, he spends little time explicating what it means for one to be vulnerable. examples of vulnerabilities corresponding to the four ways of gaining unfair advantage include letting one’s guard down with those they trust, having weakness of will, lacking bargaining power, and being a victim of a natural disaster or disease. if we follow the vulnerability account, there are four ways that alex might be taking unfair advantage of marie: by strategizing for their own advantage (i) against her when she has intentionally chosen not to strategize for her own advantage, (ii) against her when she is unable to strategize for advantage altogether, (iii) against her when she is no match to them, or (iv) when their advantages are derived from her “grave misfortunes.” regarding whether alex is unfairly strategizing for advantage in the first way, it is not the case that marie has renounced strategizing for her own advantage. it may not be that her own advantage is her primary objective in this transaction, but that hardly means she has intentionally chosen not to strategize altogether. marie stands to gain from this transaction—and may have this in mind when she’s deciding what to do—simply because she has an interest in helping her mother flourish. this isn’t only because it’s her own mother but also because the nature of her caring is such that she is bound up in the success of the project of helping others flourish, generally. while marie stands to gain far fewer advantages than alex, she stands to gain more than none at all. so, (i) fails to capture what has gone wrong; marie has not fully renounced strategizing for her own advantage. the second way of unfairly strategizing—against her when she is unable to strategize for advantage altogether—is also insufficient. while caring might compel one to answer calls to aid others in their own flourishing, it does not necessarily require that one sacrifice their own well-being altogether, intentionally or otherwise. in other words, marie’s caring disposition does not render her incapable of considering and pursuing personal advantages. for the wrong of care exploitation to arise because marie is simply no match to alex seems more promising; it is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 substantially less likely marie will reject the call to aid another in their flourishing than her sibling (due to her caring more). but this difference between marie and alex is not of the same kind that goodin or other vulnerability theorists have in mind when one is not a match for another. goodin (1987, 185–86) follows others in characterizing two parties as not being a match when the exploiter has “vastly disproportionate” bargaining power compared to the exploitee, with the exploitee desperately needing what the exploiter has to offer or needing it in order to survive. but marie’s situation is hardly comparable to the typical exploitee in these scenarios because she has what her exploitative sibling needs—the ability to provide care. additionally, marie does not stand to gain anything above and beyond what alex gains, much less the satisfaction of a desperate need. finally, her sibling’s unfair advantages might be derived from her “grave misfortunes.” but we can suppose that marie came to be caring not because of some grave misfortune but because she saw a caring person as a moral exemplar early on, or because she is particularly empathetic and realized she was well positioned to help others. in short, not one of the four ways to strategize for unfair advantage offered by the vulnerability account properly captures marie’s case as exploitative; the vulnerability account is independently insufficient. we may turn, instead, to the kantian account of exploitation (sample 2003). it is paradigmatically procedural because it locates the wrong of exploitation in interacting with another for advantage in a way that fails to respect their inherent moral worth (sample 2003, 57); to exploit someone is to use them merely as a means to one’s own ends, failing to recognize their autonomy. and autonomy is, for kant, what makes one inherently morally valuable; making one a being with dignity. every failure to respect someone is an instance of undermining their dignity.10, 11 the kantian and vulnerability accounts are made distinct from each other, in part, by how they articulate what feature of an individual is being unfairly taken advantage of: the vulnerability account holds that it is necessarily one’s vulnerabilities, while the kantian acknowledges that there are a number of ways disrespect can manifest. notably, a kantian account considers more transactions exploitative than other accounts because the use of another merely as a means is sufficient (and necessary) for exploitation. there are multiple ways one might gain an advantage in a way that fails to respect others, including (i) “neglecting what is necessary for [another’s] well-being or flourishing,” (ii) “taking advantage of an 10 throughout i use “failure to respect” and “undermining dignity” interchangeably. 11 to use one merely as a means is traditionally understood as treating them in such a way that one cannot consent (o’neill 1989) and is conceptually at odds with gaining consent. in spite of this, sample (2003, 14) argues that one can consent to a transaction in which they are exploited. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 injustice done to [them],” and (iii) treating some aspect of another as a fungible commodity when one shouldn’t (sample 2003, 57). when it comes to marie’s case, the kantian account is going to identify the wrong as alex interacting with her for advantage in one of these three ways. the first involves alex gaining advantage by neglecting what marie needs to flourish.12 but, this is not how alex is exploiting marie; marie is not being denied any needs. yes, she must sacrifice some creature comforts to care for their mother, but this by no means amounts to denying her what is required for a good life; many people live good lives without such comforts. even if one contends that her needs for purposeful employment or psychological well-being are denied, though, the kantian account only contingently arrives at the correct conclusion about marie having been exploited; this will not suffice for consistently and accurately identifying this widespread injustice. if we consider her need for purposeful employment as what is neglected, this suggests that marie’s caring simply cannot amount to something she feels gives her life a purpose or meaning. but this is clearly false. individuals often adopt roles that require caregiving and are enhanced by caring about others precisely because they think aiding others in their flourishing is a worthy purpose. similarly, caring about others often contributes to—rather than detracts from—psychological well-being; to frame them as fundamentally at odds is to deny altogether the ways caring can contribute to our flourishing. the upshot of considering (i) is that, in identifying needs as what make disrespect possible, the kantian account has gone astray; one can fail to respect another without neglecting their needs. perhaps (ii) or (iii) are better suited in their current form to capture the wrong of care exploitation. recall that (ii) states exploitation occurs when one takes advantage of the injustice done to another in a disrespectful way. here my criticism is the same as the one i raised against the vulnerability account regarding deriving unfair advantage from “grave misfortunes.” again, we can suppose that marie came to have the caring orientation that alex is benefitting from not because of some injustice done to her but because she had a caring moral exemplar or is particularly empathetic and well positioned to help others; (ii) does not adequately capture care exploitation as wrong because marie’s case fails to satisfy the condition of being derived from injustice. this brings us to (iii), which locates the wrong of marie’s exploitation in alex’s interacting with her in such a way that they gain advantage by treating her caring orientation as a fungible commodity when they shouldn’t. the most plausible reason for thinking marie’s caring about her mother is being commodified is that alex takes her care as something that can be instrumentally used for some end (i.e., their evasion of shared responsibility). and to conceive of her or her caring as a fungible commodity 12 see also snyder (2008). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 tends to make us think of her as a means rather than an end (sample 2003, 156).13 it seems likely that less enjoyment comes from seeing an individual make strides in increasing well-being or flourishing when it arises out of one’s own exploitation (compared to when one’s care isn’t being exploited). in the case of care exploitation, it’s plausible that the wrong articulated in (iii) gets part of the story right. the commodification of marie’s caring is problematic insofar as it may negatively impact how she experiences caring for others because she feels underappreciated or used. but as it stands, the kantian account is ill-equipped to fully and consistently articulate what is unique about marie’s case and others that have their care exploited. 1.3. identifying the wrong of care exploitation while these accounts are independently incapable of articulating the moral wrong of care exploitation, drawing on the resources of each can give us a clearer understanding of said wrong. by helpfully articulating how care exploitation is morally problematic, we can take the first step in understanding this pervasive phenomenon. as mentioned earlier, i take alex to be unfairly taking advantage of marie. when alex simply assumes she will accept their call—failing to remain open to the possibility of her exercising her own agency and making an alternative choice—by independently deciding that marie is well positioned to sacrifice her career to care for their mother, alex undermines marie’s dignity; alex disrespects marie. when alex fails to be open to her choosing to do otherwise, they fail to recognize her as having the capacity for exercising her own agency (i.e., self-authorship). this is not to say that marie cannot or does not actually consent; in answering alex’s call to aid, she does exercise her own agency in choosing to care for her mother. the problem lies in alex’s issuing a call, having presumed marie will assent because they know she is the type of person to feel the pull to aid others—she just cares about other people, and the pull is likely even stronger in this case because it is her own mother. alex does not remain open to the possibility that marie might reasonably decline, nor do they engage in a conversation about their mother’s care and suitable solutions with marie prior to coming to a conclusion on the matter. instead, alex independently decides marie is best suited to care for their mother and calls her to do so. marie is vulnerable to calls to aid others because of her caring disposition, and alex has taken advantage of this vulnerability for personal gain (i.e., the complete evasion of caring responsibilities). and this advantage is ultimately unfair—exploitative—because they are strategizing for an advantage by disrespecting her on the basis of her vulnerability arising from caring. in other words, alex is exploiting marie’s disposition to care about. 13 goodin (1985, 90–91) offers a similar analysis of love and affection. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 my account of the wrong of care exploitation here draws on the kantian account insofar as it highlights that alex undermines marie’s dignity by simply assuming she will take care of their mother, foreclosing on the possibility that she will choose to do otherwise. this is not to suggest that one ought to instead completely refrain from asking caring individuals if they’ll take on caring responsibilities for fear that they cannot decide for themselves what they can handle. this move undermines dignity by failing to see the caring individual as capable of self-authorship. it is also not to suggest that going through the motions of a deliberation also guarantees respect; it is not difficult to imagine a sibling in alex’s position creating the façade of an open and honest discussion, all the while presuming their sibling will reach the conclusion they desire. regardless of whether one sees past this façade, its mere presence means alex fails to legitimately respect autonomy. the wrong i’ve articulated draws on the vulnerability theory by recognizing that alex undermines marie’s dignity by taking advantage of her vulnerability arising from care—which makes her susceptible to answering calls to aid—rather than by taking advantage of her needs, of some injustice done to her, or by commodifying her care. when alex’s taking advantage of marie’s vulnerability is identified as what undermines her dignity, there is more room left for the possibility of one consenting to situations in which their vulnerabilities are exploited. this is because taking advantage of someone’s vulnerability is problematic, regardless of whether they’ve consented to the arrangement. this would not be plausible if we thought of care exploitation in purely kantian terms. i argue below, however, that we ought to broaden our conception of vulnerability to include one’s openness to be affected by others, which is a necessary feature of caring about. care is unique in that it is unlike other characteristics in predisposing one to take up (and not reject) calls to improve others’ well-being. caring about another doesn't inhibit one’s ability to strategize for themselves in arrangements with others, but it nevertheless leaves them open to this distinctive kind of disrespect and exploitation. paired with these elements from the vulnerability and kantian accounts, the maldistribution account indicates another dimension of this case that is unfair and an implication of such disrespect: alex’s benefiting from the disproportionate burden of caring falling upon marie. 1.4. considering coercion and manipulation as the wrong one might object, suggesting it is better to consider this phenomenon as coercion or manipulation. coercion is generally characterized as one forcing or threatening to make another worse off if they fail to comply with one’s request (wertheimer 1996, 26). for alex to coerce marie, alex would need to make a threat of force or enforcement if she fails to comply. one might think that by implicitly refusing to aid their mother, alex is conveying a message along the lines of “if you don’t do anything marie, mom is going to suffer.” but alex is not interested in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 threatening their sister, nor do they have any method to enforce whether marie provides care. in terms of options, coercion is understood as pushing one toward one option over another by threatening negative consequences for acting against the coercer’s wishes. but marie is not pushed toward one option rather than another simply because of alex’s proposed arrangement. her mother won’t have care if marie chooses her career instead of caring for her mother, whether alex calls her to aid or not. additionally, given marie’s caring disposition, she would likely choose to care for her mother whether alex asked her or not; no coercion is required. one might think that alex is making a coercive offer rather than a coercive threat. when one coercively makes an offer, the proposal makes the recipient worse off than they would have been had the proposal maker not interfered (zimmerman 1981). marie is not being made a coercive offer by alex for the same reasons that she isn’t coercively threatened by them—her options and the expected outcomes do not change simply because of alex’s call to aid. perhaps what alex is doing wrong here by calling her to aid is using a stronger bargaining position to get marie to do what they want.14 but this isn’t itself coercion; this is exploitation. and so, coercion is off the table as a candidate for alex’s wrong. determining whether marie’s case is manipulation is less straightforward, in part because there is little consensus on how to characterize it. but there are three predominant theories: understanding manipulation as (i) bypassing rational deliberation, (ii) trickery, or (iii) pressure. suppose we understand marie’s case as manipulation in the sense of bypassing the target’s rational deliberation with the introduction of nonrational influences (raz 1988). we can easily imagine alex doing this—for example, by bringing marie her favorite baked goods to get her into a brighter mood before calling her to aid, or by making her feel particularly guilty about their mother’s situation. even if this was a feature of the case, influencing marie in this way is extraneous to the wrong of the call to aid itself—the wrong lies in the call being made such that it takes advantage of her vulnerability arising from her caring. so marie’s case seems clearly to not be one of manipulation by bypassing rational deliberation. one might be concerned that the call to aid that alex issues directly involves manipulation insofar as alex fails to be open to the possibility that marie will choose to do otherwise. but alex is not bypassing marie’s own rational deliberation; instead, alex is precluding rational deliberation between them. perhaps this means alex is manipulating the situation itself, rather than marie. this, however, cannot be the case because alex is not actually influencing marie’s available options—she would choose 14 one reason for this stronger bargaining position may be that alex knows marie not only cares for their mother but also for them. others include a dependency on alex or their control over harming her (mcgregor 1988–89). mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 to care for her mother regardless of whether alex calls her to. alternatively, one might be concerned that marie’s disposition to care is itself a nonrational influence alex is appealing to. marie’s caring is central to her rational deliberation, however, included among the many reasons she weighs when deciding how to proceed. i’m concerned that construing care—or other dispositions tied up with one’s values—as nonrational would ultimately be to devalue the legitimacy of care in reasoning. so marie’s case is not manipulation of the first kind. if we understand marie’s case as manipulation as trickery, alex would need to have deliberately attempted to trick marie into adopting a faulty mental state (e.g., belief, desire, or emotion; noggle 1996; barnhill 2014). but alex simply hasn’t done this. marie knows all the relevant features of her situation: what the care requires, that alex won’t be making similar sacrifices. marie maintains the same mental states about her choice situation before and after alex’s call, aside from gaining the true belief that alex wants her to care for their mother. so marie’s case is also not of this second kind. finally, if we understand marie’s case as manipulation as pressure, alex would need to impose costs on marie if she fails to care for their mother, failing to do what alex wants (kligman and culver 1992; wood 2014). again, alex does not pressure, and even if they did, it would have no influence upon marie’s choice; marie will choose to provide care either way. one might think that a passive call to aid—where alex simply does nothing waiting for marie to pick up the pieces—is a subtle form of exerting pressure.15 but given marie’s knowledge that alex is in no better or worse position to provide care, alex’s sitting back doesn’t change marie’s available choices at all. this brings me to the conclusion that marie’s case is not one of manipulation. so to understand what’s wrong in marie’s case, or the cases mentioned at the outset of this work, we must find a different way to explain what is morally problematic; the above account of care exploitation can do this. this isn’t to say coercion and manipulation never overlap with exploitation; they likely serve as ways to successfully facilitate it. thus far, i’ve articulated the wrong of care exploitation, setting it apart from contemporary theories of interpersonal exploitation, coercion, and manipulation. i now turn to the conditions that must be satisfied for care exploitation to occur. 2. the conditions of care exploitation formally characterized, care exploitation occurs when the following conditions obtain: 15 this may be akin to keller’s (2018) “moral blackmail.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 1. one party, a, calls another party, b, to aid. in issuing the call, a fails to be open to the possibility that b will choose to do otherwise. this call can be actively or passively made. 2. the specific call made by a is for b to aid in the flourishing of another person or project, and this call is made because b has the general disposition to care about or because b cares about the subject of the call in particular. 3. a expects a disproportionate benefit from the call for b’s aid, either to a or to someone/something a is responsible for. 4. b will likely accept the call, due to their caring nature. this is either because b has the general disposition to care about or because b cares about the flourishing of the call’s subject (which is the source of b’s vulnerability). 5. b answers a’s call to aid. the task at hand is to further articulate each of these conditions and their relationships to one another so that one can have a comprehensive picture of what care exploitation is. importantly, if any of these conditions is unmet, care exploitation has not occurred. here i focus on marie’s case—rather than a structural (i.e., institutional) one—so that it is easier to isolate the specific wrong of care exploitation without getting caught up in overlapping injustices.16 2.1. the call to aid in explaining the wrong of care exploitation, i stated that alex calls marie to aid, and this call is made with the presumption that marie will care for their mother and not choose to do otherwise (i.e., a failure to be open to marie choosing to do otherwise). i’m using “call to aid” as a term of art to refer to instances where one makes this problematic presumption and it shapes their actions in some way. a call to aid is morally objectionable and ultimately exploitative because the motivating presumption is disrespectful. the presumption is disrespectful—undermining the caring individual’s dignity—by not being open to their choosing to do otherwise, by 16 it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore how care exploitation manifests in our institutions. in other work (mckittrick-sweitzer 2021) i argue that the same conditions are met in structural instances, but how we understand the parties involved shifts. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 failing to recognize them as having the capacity for exercising their own agency. it is this condition that captures the kantian element of my account. calls are distinct from simply asking another if they’d be willing to do something; when one simply asks, one is open to the possibility that the caring individual may choose to do otherwise. in order to fully flesh out the first condition, let’s consider a variation on marie’s case: alex, having decided that marie is best suited to care for their mother, simply sits back and waits for marie to do what they expect (rather than explicitly asking her or telling her to care for their mother). again, marie chooses to care for their mother. i understand this reliance upon marie as a passive call to aid,17 and i take it to be an instance of care exploitation (and of bhandary’s “care chicken”). by sitting back and counting on marie to care for their mother because of her caring disposition, alex is failing to openly consider that marie might choose to do otherwise (satisfying conditions 1–3). this failure may be caused by willful ignorance, simply having one thought too few (driver 2020; i.e., the idea of considering it doesn’t even occur to them), or some kind of wishful thinking.18 alex and marie presumably share responsibility in deciding how to ensure that their mother is cared for; by intentionally abstaining from negotiating this shared responsibility with marie—either actively or passively—alex is undermining marie’s dignity. when a call to aid is absent and we suspect exploitation is still present, it is likely other accounts of exploitation can independently articulate the relevant injustice. 2.2. what it means to care although marie’s case is merely an example, streamlined to highlight what care exploitation looks like, there are many ways one might come to care about another, making one susceptible to exploitative calls to aid. three of these seem predominant: (i) developing a caring disposition, (ii) seeing a need in one and recognizing them as having inherent moral worth, and (iii) caring for an individual first, and then becoming invested in their flourishing as a result. understanding these three ways is important to grasping the second condition required for care exploitation to obtain: the specific call made by a is for b to aid in the flourishing of another person or project, and this call is made because b has the general disposition to care about or cares about the subject of the call in particular. while i acknowledge that these three ways of coming to care are distinct, i explicate them here because they can all 17 the language of a passive call to aid might strike some as odd. in developing my account i’ve struggled to find a clear alternative way to articulate what a is expecting of b, and so i’m willing to accept the cost of this linguistic hiccup in favor of clarity in articulating active instances. 18 it’s also possible that alex has developed a disposition to issue calls, which is both epistemically and morally problematic. (establishing this is left for later work.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 be perceived as justification for issuing a call. if the call to aid is issued for some reason other than b’s caring, what is occurring is not care exploitation but instead perhaps the exploitation of some other trait. first, one might come to care about others generally (rather than specifically) by developing a caring disposition. there are (at least) two ways one might develop this disposition: either by having a caring role model in one’s life or by being subjected to externally imposed societal norms. in the first case, one becomes caring by seeing the virtues of caring about play out. for example, you might imagine being fascinated with the critically endangered kākāpō as a child and looking up to a conservationist that dedicates their life to protecting them. seeing their hard work, you recognize the value that caring about something can have. in the second case, one ends up being disposed to be caring because they’re socialized to show deference to and be at the beck and call of others, and this socialization to care is contingent on features of one’s identity—typically one’s gender, race, and/or class. as a result of this socialization, caring individuals are well prepared to privilege the perspective and recognize the needs of others, where those others are often not themselves members of oppressed communities (bartky 1990; bhandary 2022; collins 1991; hampton 2007; young 2011; zheng 2018). these two ways of developing the disposition of caring about are not mutually exclusive and don’t always cleanly come apart. for example, dominant gender norms might make it easier for young girls to appreciate and wish to emulate a feminized caring role model. second, one might come to care about another individual or group by recognizing them as having inherent moral worth and seeing a need. to recognize another’s inherent moral worth lends itself to valuing their perspective, and to not do so would amount to a denial of dignity (which is at odds with recognizing inherent moral worth). for example, you might not have a general caring disposition but recognize that the hungry unhoused individual that asks if you would be willing to purchase them dinner has inherent moral worth and, in turn, come to care about them. i think that this is also a way one can come to care about nonhuman animals or the environment.19 one might come to care about a given project in a similar way, by recognizing that it has a substantive impact upon others one recognizes as having moral worth (e.g., the flourishing of one’s department). finally, one might come to care about another by becoming invested in their flourishing after first caring for them. one example of this is a migrant care worker being hired as a nanny for a child and then developing a bond with the child as they build a relationship (brake 2021). 19 this is consistent with gruen (2015); however, her account of empathy is more demanding by requiring attention for and transformative experiences with the subject. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 the case of marie has been constructed such that she develops her disposition to care in the former way to isolate the unique wrong of care exploitation from other potentially overlapping injustices. that being said, the way one comes to care about the subject they are called to aid is irrelevant to determining whether they are vulnerable to having their care exploited; caring about, no matter the source, is enough. we may determine, however, that the severity of the injustice is amplified and the demand for moral repair is even greater when care exploitation is facilitated by other structural injustices. having considered what is problematic about the call to aid, and ways that one can come to care about (becoming vulnerable to the exploitation of their care), i now turn to the third condition. 2.3. benefiting from care exploitation the third necessary condition of care exploitation is that, when issuing the call to aid, the individual doing so anticipates a disproportionate benefit arising from the arrangement they make. an expected advantage on the part of the exploiter is a standard feature of exploitation, but in the case of care, this advantage can be to the exploitative individual or to someone or something they are responsible for; this condition captures the maldistribution element of my account. this anticipated benefit to a third party is clearly demonstrated by a couple of the examples provided at the outset. the parents, administrators, and/or legislators are exploiting the care of the teacher with anticipated benefits for the children who are their charges, for whose education they are responsible. the same is true of the employers exploiting the domestic care worker. in marie’s case, both alex and their mother benefit. while alex doesn’t have to bear the burdens of caring for their mother, the mother benefits as the recipient of marie’s care. it is at this point that a familiar concern is often raised: we sometimes navigate caring responsibilities in close interpersonal relationships in ways that look a lot like care exploitation. it would be problematic if the account misdiagnoses cases where the care involved is not overly burdensome, ultimately being trivially true and unhelpful for addressing those very injustices i’m concerned with. consider the following example: “yesterday i texted my spouse on my way home and asked them to put water on and boil pasta to start our dinner; i presumed that they would do this and didn’t really consider that they would refuse. does this deny my spouse’s autonomy or dignity? it’s hard to see how—even though it’s something i presumed they’d do anyway, and i figured they’d do it in part because they care about me and care about eating dinner at a reasonable hour.”20 in this case, i share the inclination that care exploitation is not at play; the spouse is not ultimately being disrespected, and the burdens are not disproportionate. a charitable reading is that this single 20 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this concise statement. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 presumption is made within the context of a longer relationship that negotiates and distributes caring responsibilities—large and small—equitably. perhaps the texter set the table or loaded the dishwasher last night, which would ultimately fail to satisfy the third condition. if it is not the case, however, that caring responsibilities are more generally navigated in this way, i have no issue claiming that care exploitation is present. even if the single task of boiling water is not particularly burdensome, it can be when it becomes part of a larger pattern where one is expected to do the vast majority of small day-to-day caring tasks without appropriate support from their spouse, simply because they care. this brings to light that the contextual details surrounding the type of the relationship (i.e., a single transaction vs. extended), as well as the terms (e.g., workplace, marriage) between a and b, is relevant to accurately identifying care exploitation. 2.4. vulnerability and accepting the call the fourth and fifth necessary conditions are that the caring individual is likely to accept the call to aid due to their caring nature and actually does so. they are likely to—and do—answer the call because they care about the flourishing of the call’s subject, and this caring about is the source of the caring individual’s vulnerability. i was initially reticent to recognize care as a vulnerability. this is because vulnerabilities are widely understood to be problematic, characterized as a weakness or as the lack of something essential (goodin 1985; jaggar 2014). but vulnerabilities needn’t be understood in a negatively valanced way. instead, we ought to make room for understanding some vulnerabilities in a positive light. there is precedent for this in our popular culture, somewhat surprisingly. for example, karamo brown has said when encouraging one to seek the aid of others that “being vulnerable is not a sign of weakness. it is a sign of strength.” (queer eye 2018) and anecdotally, i’ve heard prisoners and students in an inside-out course speak positively about what they gained from allowing themselves to become vulnerable to one another.21 within these contexts vulnerability is a type of openness to others.22 not only can openness be the opening of oneself up to others so that others are aware of one’s situation, but it can also be allowing oneself to be affected by others. in some cases, vulnerability as both types of openness is required for success, like when one realizes that they need aid to flourish because they cannot do so independently. in other cases, particularly those of caring about, vulnerability as openness is required so that one can be receptive to the cared about entity’s 21 inside-out is a higher education program where university students and those incarcerated in prisons or jails take a semester-long college course together. 22 thanks to elizabeth sperry for offering the language of “openness” at the 2019 nassp international social philosophy conference. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 perspective; the caring individual’s flourishing becomes wrapped up with the successful flourishing of the subject of care. without this vulnerability, one simply could not care about. while i remain neutral as to whether care is at the core of morality or the ultimate solution to our sociopolitical problems, i follow others in the care ethics tradition by understanding care as a virtue. i similarly take vulnerability as openness to be a virtue: it “tends to enable its bearer to make the right decisions and to perform good actions,” and openness “is conducive to or partly constitutes living a good life” (tessman 2005, 162). unfortunately, vulnerability as openness is a double-edged sword, aligning with tessman’s (2005, 4) account of burdened virtues: those “virtues that have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own flourishing.” by being open, a caring individual can have their own flourishing strongly negatively impacted as a result of having their dignity undermined—of having their care, which openness is essential to, exploited.23 openness makes a caring individual susceptible to exploitation precisely because one is invested in the flourishing of another—affected by another—and so feels the need to aid in their flourishing. when a caring individual is called to aid or relied upon by another in the way articulated in section 2.1, there’s already a pull to help felt. despite this, there ought not to be the presumption (or, put differently, foreclosure on considering that the individual might choose to do otherwise) that the caring individual will inevitably help. to make a call based on this presumption, as argued above, undermines their dignity. it should be noted that when only the first four conditions are satisfied, care exploitation has not occurred. for example, if alex were to call on marie to aid their mother, and marie were to choose not to answer the call—perhaps because she is simply overburdened with other responsibilities—alex would not be exploiting marie’s care. alex would, however, still be adopting a harmful attitude toward marie, attempting to exploit her care. and this is still morally problematic, even if it doesn’t amount to the injustice of care exploitation.24 3. conclusion here i have pointed the reader toward a very important and pervasive injustice: care exploitation. in doing so, i've offered a unified account of what makes 23 another example from pop culture that implicitly expresses this idea comes from an episode of the show she-ra (clotworthy 2020) when one of the characters (perfuma) says, “it’s hard keeping your heart open. it makes you vulnerable. but it doesn’t make you weak, and i have to believe it’s worth it.” 24 we feel similarly about attempted murder versus actual murder—the intentions are still morally problematic, and it’s merely a matter of luck that the world hasn’t aligned with them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 it morally problematic, as well as the conditions for its occurrence. one thing that's striking about our contemporary circumstance is that care exploitation is a nonaccidentally gendered phenomenon that’s invisible in the existing philosophical literature. although the foundation has been laid for understanding care exploitation, there is still much work to be done. its role in gender injustice must be more closely examined, considering not just interpersonal cases like that of alex and marie but more structural cases like the widespread exploitation of caring teachers, care workers, nurses, and soldiers. only after we’ve identified how it manifests in these spheres of our lives can we turn to preventing and remedying the injustice of care exploitation all around us.25 references barnhill, anne. 2014. “what is manipulation?” in manipulation: theory and practice, edited by christian coons and michael weber, 51–72. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199338207.003 .0003. bartky, sandra lee. 1990. femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression. new york: routledge. bhandary, asha. 2020. freedom to care: liberalism, dependency care, and culture. milton park, oxon: routledge. ———. 2022. “caring for whom? racial practices of care and liberal constructivism.” philosophies 7 (4): 78. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7040078. brake, elizabeth. 2017. “fair care: elder care and distributive justice.” politics, philosophy & economics 16, no. 2 (may): 132–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/147 0594x15600831. ———. 2021. “care as work: the exploitation of caring attitudes and emotional labor.” in caring for liberalism: dependency and liberal political theory, edited by asha bhandary and amy r. baehr, 215–37. milton park, oxon: routledge. 25 i am grateful to piers turner, dana howard, benjamin mckean, tristram mcpherson, elizabeth brake, and benjamin ferguson for discussions that supported the development of this paper, as well as to two anonymous reviewers from feminist philosophy quarterly. additionally, thanks for feedback are due to participants in the ohio state university political theory workshop (2019), pacific apa (2021), braga summer school in political philosophy and public policy (2021), and the manchester center for political theory workshop (2021). mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 clotworthy, mandy, dir. 2020. she-ra and the princesses of power. season 5, episode 10, “return to the fright zone.” aired may 15, 2020, on netflix. dreamworks animation television. collins, patricia hill. 1991. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. collins, stephanie. 2015. the core of care ethics. new york: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011459. driver, julia. 2020. “practical possibilities and the one-thought-too-many objection to moral deliberation.” proceedings & addresses of the american philosophical association 94 (november): 21–40. feinberg, joel. 1984. harm to others: the moral limits of the criminal law. oxford: oxford university press. ferguson, benjamin. 2016. “exploitation and disadvantage.” economics and philosophy 2, no. 3 (november): 485–509. 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karl. 1906–09. capital: a critique of political economy. 3 vols. translated by samuel moore and edward aveling. edited by frederick engels and ernest untermann. chicago: c. h. kerr. ———. 1921. wage-labor and capital. translated by harriet e. lothrop. new york: new york labor news company. mcgregor, joan. 1988–89. “bargaining advantages and coercion in the market.” philosophy research archives 14:23–50. https://doi.org/10.5840/pra1988/19 89147. mckeown, maeve. 2016. “global structural exploitation: towards an intersectional definition.” global justice: theory practice rhetoric 9 (2): 155–77. https://doi .org/10.21248/gjn.9.2.116. mckittrick-sweitzer, lavender. 2021. “care exploitation: recognizing and preventing a pervasive injustice.” phd diss., ohio state university. http://rave.ohiolink .edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1618235524273382. mitra, agomoni ganguli, and nikola biller-andorno. 2013. “vulnerability and exploitation in a globalized world.” international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 6, no. 1 (spring): 91–102. https://doi.org/10.2979/intj femappbio.6.1.91. noddings, nel. 1984. caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education. berkeley: university of california press. ———. 2002. starting at home: caring and social policy. berkeley: university of california press. noggle, robert. 1996. “manipulative actions: a conceptual and moral analysis.” american philosophical quarterly 33, no. 1 (january): 43–55. o’neill, onora. 1989. constructions of reason: explorations of kant’s practical philosophy. new york: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ cbo9781139173773. queer eye. 2018. season 1, episode 2, “saving sasquatch.” aired february 7, 2018, on netflix. scout productions. raz, joseph. 1988. the morality of freedom. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0198248075.001.0001. sample, ruth j. 2003. exploitation: what it is and why it is wrong. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. snyder, jeremy c. 2008. “needs exploitation.” ethical theory and moral practice 11, no. 4 (august): 389–405. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-008-9115-9. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0195179145.001.0001. mckittrick-sweitzer – care exploitation: taking advantage of one’s caring about another published by scholarship@western, 2023 23 tronto, joan c. 1993. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. ———. 2013. caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice. new york: new york university press. vrousalis, nicholas. 2013. “exploitation, vulnerability, and social domination.” philosophy and public affairs 41, no. 2 (spring): 131–57. wertheimer, alan. 1996. exploitation. princeton, nj: princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691214511. wollner, gabriel. 2019. “anonymous exploitation: non-individual, non-agential and structural.” review of social economy 77 (2): 143–62. https://doi.org/10.1080 /00346764.2018.1525758. wood, allen. 1995. “exploitation.” social philosophy and policy 12, no. 2 (summer): 136–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0265052500004702. ———. 2014. “coercion, manipulation, exploitation.” in manipulation: theory and practice, edited by christian coons and michael weber, 17–50. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199338207 .003.0002. young, iris marion. 2011. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zheng, robin. 2018. "precarity is a feminist issue: gender and contingent labor in the academy." hypatia 33, no. 2 (spring): 235–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa .12401. zimmerman, david. 1981. “coercive wage offers.” philosophy & public affairs 10, no. 2 (spring): 121–45. zwolinski, matt. 2012. “structural exploitation.” social philosophy and policy 29, no. 1 (january): 154–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/s026505251100015x. lavender mckittrick-sweitzer is an assistant professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy and religious studies at butler university. they are an affiliate faculty member in the race, gender, and sexuality studies and the science, technology, and environmental studies programs, as well as the efroymson diversity center faculty fellow. lavender’s area of research is feminist social and political philosophy, focusing on care theory, liberalism, public reason, and global justice. 15370 mckittrick-sweitzer title page 15370 mckittrick-sweitzer final format victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 10 recommended citation leventi, marianna. 2024. “victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 10. 2024 victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims marianna leventi lund university marianna.leventi@fil.lu.se leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims marianna leventi abstract victim blaming is a harmful but quite pervasive phenomenon occurring in contemporary societies. when people engage in victim blaming, they shift the burden of the harmful act from the perpetrators and place it upon the victims instead. this article explores how the discourse on moral responsibility can help make sense of victim blaming. the distinction between moral responsibility and blameworthiness can shed light on the contradictory intuitions that people experience when they hear about a victim who took what seems to be an unnecessary risk. the focus of this article is to explain these intuitions and respond to them by suggesting that victims not only are not blameworthy when they take risks that challenge specific norms but instead are praiseworthy. finally, whether such risks are justified when the agents taking them have people dependent upon them is discussed. attending to structural injustice can point out why some choices seem more justified than others. victims who take justified risks are praiseworthy, even when their efforts do not produce significant results. this article aims to address the absence of victim blaming in discussions of moral responsibility and to bring philosophical attention to this issue. the goal is to disentangle the phenomenon of victim blaming while supporting victims and vulnerable groups. keywords: victim blaming, moral responsibility, risk, epistemic blame introduction when something terrible happens, the natural reaction seems to be to try to analyze it, to examine and understand where things went wrong, why things went wrong, and how this situation can be avoided in the future. car accidents, assaults, financial crises, and other harmful events where people suffer a great deal of damage are often discussed with the aim of avoiding such events in the future. this, of course, happens not only when people are experiencing a harmful event themselves but even when people are observing harmful actions as bystanders. investigating the circumstances that led to the harm seems like the natural way to deal with the event’s feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 aftermath. thinking of what went wrong or how future events can be improved is essential to reestablishing the individual’s lost control and helping them move on. unfortunately, the burden of the aftermath of such harmful events often falls on the shoulders of the victims. victims of sexual assault are often questioned about their choice of clothing during the assault (murray, calderón, and bahamondes 2023). victims of domestic violence are frequently asked why they did not leave or even why they did what they knew would upset or anger their abusers (gracia, garcía, and lila 2014). even people who suffer from chronic disease are asked why they did not adopt a healthier lifestyle earlier in life (dougherty 1993). people who blame victims in this way may argue that they have good intentions. they may be trying to give advice or explore the causal link of events that led to the harm, which can be helpful in gaining information and becoming aware of patterns of behavior that can lead to harm. however, in these cases, victims can often be portrayed as reckless or irresponsible for not knowing better or for refusing to conform to specific norms, even when they should have known better. such behavior can often lead to victim blaming, even when grounded in good intentions. although victim blaming is admittedly a harmful phenomenon, it often occurs in contemporary societies. examples of victim blaming include cases in which the blame or the burden for the harm inflicted is placed upon the victims instead of the perpetrators. questioning the choices, behavior, and appearance of victims are instances where victim blame is expressed implicitly or explicitly. victim blaming is harmful not only to the victims but also to society at large. perpetuating harmful stereotypes and myths, while missing the opportunity to address the root of the problem, harms the victims as well as the other members of society. recognizing and addressing the problem is an important step in alleviating the situation. equally crucial is underlining that certain behaviors or well-established beliefs are problematic and can potentially burden the victims with the weight of the harm. the simplified idea behind victim blaming is that when people are aware that an action might lead to them being harmed, they should obviously avoid it. if, instead of avoiding this action, they keep performing it, then it makes sense that they will eventually be harmed and be partly or entirely responsible and blameworthy for that harm. this brings to the forefront the idea that people should know better and avoid risky situations. although this idea appears convincing, it potentially leads to victim blaming. this idea is supported even further by the assumption that victims of systemic harm often have the epistemic privilege and an obligation to know everything regarding such events. they know when and how the harm occurred, and sometimes they can reliably predict these occasions of harm. often targeted and victimized, vulnerable groups are requested to avoid behaviors and circumstances that might leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 elicit such harm from perpetrators and be informed of the best ways to avoid these potentially harmful situations. victim blaming is a topic discussed in research fields such as psychology and law. these disciplines have in common the study of transgressions and compensations, as well as the societal and agential circumstances of the people involved. although moral philosophy and, more importantly, discussions on moral responsibility have been exploring similar topics, the concept of victim blaming has surprisingly been missing.1 the debate about moral responsibility has primarily centered on the perpetrators’ circumstances and state of mind. issues such as luck, moral competence, and epistemic requirements for when it is permissible to blame perpetrators have been some of the main themes of the philosophical discourse. the experience of being a victim or of being systematically wronged has been significantly overlooked. this preoccupation of the debate with the perpetrators can potentially harm victims.2 taking the perspective of the perpetrators often isolates the harmful incidents without considering broader behavior patterns and thus diminishes the harm to a single event. additionally, issues of fairness toward the perpetrators are often raised, but there are no similar discussions for the victims. this article aims to explore victim blaming from a philosophical point of view while maintaining a focus on supporting victims as well as potential victims. the goal is to shed light on the conflicting feeling of the well-meaning observer who does not want to blame victims for their victimization even when there seems to be a connection between the victims and the harm that has been inflicted on them. i suggest that these conflicting intuitions stem from the conflation of moral responsibility with blameworthiness. if the schematic of the concepts is well defined, then it explains the problematic idea that victims are somehow blameworthy for disregarding social norms, which are placed with the presupposition that they keep vulnerable groups safe. therefore, examining how the current debate on responsibility makes sense of and responds to such a harmful phenomenon is crucial. i aim to show not only that victims are not blameworthy for not complying with such norms but also that they are praiseworthy for trying to reclaim places and 1 a notable exception is kate manne´s (2018) down girl discussion of victim blaming and responsibility responses. 2 exceptions in the responsibility debate have been talbert (2022), edlich (2022), and walker (2006), who talk about the perspective of victims. of course, discussions on the victim’s perspective are developed to a greater extent in other fields of philosophy. however, in this article i am focusing on the literature that implicates responsibility responses and victim blaming. i thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing more attention to this. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 situations that have been restricting their freedom and agency. finally, i suggest that vulnerable groups are justified for not conforming to such restrictions, even if their defiance does not change the norm. the phenomenon of victim blaming this section addresses what the phenomenon of victim blaming entails and how it is connected to the debate on moral responsibility. the concept of victim blaming was first introduced by psychologist william ryan. in his book blaming the victim, ryan (1971) described how the tactic of victim blaming was used to facilitate the idea that racial injustice was not due to power imbalances but due to the agents’ individual shortcomings. victim blaming has been a common problem in many areas of society. people who belong to low-income households are perceived as having certain negative stereotypical features that should explain their nonideal financial situation (lindqvist, björklund, and bäckström 2017). in public debates, victim blaming is often used to divert attention from who is to blame for specific situations (ryan 1971). in addition, victim blaming is quite a common legal tactic used to shift responsibility for the harmful action away from the perpetrators (bieneck and krahé 2011). unfortunately, victim blaming has also been a prominent phenomenon in many countries. women worldwide have been subjected to victim blame in various aspects of their lives. in cases of sexual assault in iran, women tend to be regarded as at fault for the event, since they must have done something wrong to provoke their offenders, such as wearing inappropriate clothes (alinejad and hakakian 2020). victim blaming plays a significant role in controlling women's lives and behavior. women in india face similar situations (qureshi et al. 2021), and to a lesser extent, women in greece have to tackle similar obstacles (pamoukoglou 2022). although it is evident that victim blaming can be used as a strategy to oppress vulnerable groups, there is a psychological basis for victim blaming. on an individual level, there are many reasons why people choose to blame victims. i will not explore the roots of victim blaming at length; however, i will provide a general outline of researchers’ reasons on why victim blaming occurs. as a conscious or unconscious behavior, victim blaming has multiple functions. it has been suggested that many people need to believe that the world is a place where justice prevails (lambert and raichle 2000). the idea is that in the end, people get what they deserve and that this is how the world always works (lerner and miller 1978; lerner 1980). such beliefs imply that victims must have done something to deserve what happened to them, thus making them entirely or partly responsible for their fate. by adopting such a stance, people want to create as much distance as possible from the harmful event. they want to reassure themselves that they cannot possibly leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 experience something like that because it happens so far away from their life. this event does not belong within their narrative, so they could never be involved in such a situation. they are not vulnerable to such harm (hammond, berry, and rodriguez 2011). in addition, victim blaming supports the idea that bad things do not happen to good people or, at the very least, that people who are cautious and do not take unnecessary risks would not be harmed. this gives people a false sense of control, given that it suggests that the circumstances are within one’s control so that harmful acts can be avoided (grubb and turner 2012). as a result, victim blaming can be seen as a coping mechanism for individuals to deal with the uncertainty of living in an unsafe world. such a mechanism can further allow the individuals to feel relieved of any kind of burden, whether financial or psychological, of supporting victims. there are many ways in which victim blame can be expressed. questioning the victims’ choices and characters, suggesting that certain behaviors are provocative or deserving of harm, and ignoring or minimizing the perpetrators’ part in the event are just some of the manifestations of victim blaming. this is by no means an exhaustive list. victim blaming can be caused or influenced by a variety of factors. internalized racism or implicit acceptance of stereotypical features of specific populations can lead to victim blaming (taylor 2020), which leads to more profound social problems. empirical research suggests that there are specific circumstances in which people tend to blame victims, at least in the example of sexual assault. for instance, clothing (workman and freeburg 1999), alcohol consumption (schuller and stewart 2000), and the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator (ben-david and schneider 2005) are variables that often influence judgments about blaming the victims. walking through the park alone imagine a young woman walking home alone late at night. she is a resident of that area, so she knows which parts of the city are safe to walk late at night and which parts are not. she has read the statistics that say walking through a specific park late at night is risky, especially for young women, since this is where local criminals hang out. with all that information in mind, she decides that this day she wants to walk through that specific park to go home, despite it being late at night and her being alone. unfortunately, she is assaulted.3 3 this kind of statement, "women are assaulted," "women are raped," and so on, often restricts or completely removes the perpetrator’s role in the assault. women are not being raped. someone rapes them, and using passive voice in such phrases eludes the true meaning of the event by leaving out of the conversation the perpetrators (ciurria 2020). although the perpetrator’s role is a significant social and moral problem, in this feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 it is evident that the woman did not protect herself. she did not take all the reasonable precautions to avoid being assaulted. in fact, she did not take any precautions. she did know that this area was not a place to be alone at night; she knew the risk she was taking by walking there late at night. she was not kept late at work, and there was an alternative route to reach her home. she had the money for a taxi to drive her home. the woman does not lack control over her actions, nor does she lack knowledge of the relevant information. she made a choice that led to her harm. it appears that she is connected to the situation, and she is undeniably part of the causal chain of her choice and, thus, of the assault itself.4 so she is, in a sense, morally responsible for her choice to be in an area where she could potentially be assaulted. not only that, but her choice appears to be detrimental to the assault occurring. it is natural to think that she would not have been harmed if she had decided not to take the risk. there were prudential reasons to avoid the park, but she chose to ignore them, which seemed reckless, pushing her luck or even provoking fate. people cannot live their lives like this, ignoring risks and expecting not to have to deal with the consequences of their actions. this appears to be a plausible recount of the events leading up to the assault. there seems to be at least something in the retracing of the steps of the assault that belongs to the victims. they are part of the causal chain that led to the harmful event (pickard 2021). even if people refrain from thinking that she is to blame for her own harm, they can still reasonably argue that her choice played a significant role in her being assaulted, which renders her, at the very least, morally responsible.5 intuitions about such a scenario can pull in different directions. on the one hand, it feels wrong to argue that the victims are morally responsible for the harm that was inflicted upon them and, in doing so, to open them up to potential blame. on the other hand, denying that she is responsible for the harm does not appear to be the correct answer either. the victim made choices that led to the assault in the sense that other people article, i will not examine it, and i will take for granted that the perpetrators exist and that there is a high probability that they are going to assault the victims. 4 however, she does lack control over whether she will be assaulted or not. in this sense, this example appears to be more like the example of drunk drivers. drinking and driving is already the wrong choice, but what comes next is subject to luck. i will come back to this point later in the article. 5 here i understand being morally responsible for an event in the sense that mckenna (2012) describes the concept. leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 who refrained from these choices were not harmed, and this fact connects the victims and the harm in a specific way.6 clarifications for the example it could be argued that the victim in this example is not strictly speaking a victim. she does not show caution or any kind of respect for the social norms that encourage women not to walk alone late at night, especially in areas with high crime rates. many people might ask what she was doing there, thus moving away from the idea that she is the perfect victim and instead closer to the idea that she is the imperfect victim. she is an imperfect victim in the sense that if we were in a legal proceeding, the defense could raise several questions about multiple aspects of what she did wrong.7 this might be familiar to many who have watched women go to trial for assaults and end up being figuratively put on trial themselves over their behavior that led to their being harmed.8 being the perfect victim would require her to have taken all reasonable precautions. she should have done everything right, avoided the city’s dangerous areas, walked in the middle of the day, been with someone else, not made eye contact with strangers, and followed every other piece of advice she received that she could remember. it is evident that every victim, regardless of age, social status, or gender, can be at least partially blamed for their victimization. this is a real and significant problem that many societies have to face. victims of sexual assault learn ways of not being assaulted again, an idea that implicitly insinuates that the victims could have somehow prevented the harmful act (taylor 2020). the woman in the example knows what she is doing. it is important to emphasize that she did not find herself in this situation of walking home alone by accident. she made a choice and went through with it. 6 here i am considering the responses of people that do not immediately condemn women for walking at night. some people would suggest that the harm inflicted on the woman was well deserved as she was "asking for it," but i am not interested in explaining the behavior of people who would respond in such a manner. my focus remains on the benevolent person who hears this story on the news. 7 from the point of view of a perpetrator, it feels that the opposite definition will hold. perfect victims are viewed as the people who are not going to prosecute or, even when they do, are not going to be believed, or are not covered by the law. however, this is not the perspective i wish to adopt in this article. 8 see, for example, miller (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 epistemic vs. moral blame a plausible question is why it is crucial to clarify that the woman in the example was aware of the danger she was putting herself in. she could have accidentally been there, or she could just have been misinformed of how dangerous walking through this park can be. in this version of the example, other people could blame her for failing to gain knowledge that is important for her well-being, but they could not plausibly suggest that she did something morally wrong. failing to get this information can open her to epistemic blame but perhaps not to moral blame. thus, victim blaming does not really target the victim as a moral agent but as an epistemic one, so the woman in the example can be epistemically but not morally blameworthy.9 even if it were accepted that she could potentially be open to epistemic blame, it would still depend on whether her ignorance can be a potential excusing factor.10 this article does not focus on this type of example for two main reasons. first, the appropriateness of victim blaming would then depend on the nature of the blame, whether it is epistemic or moral, and whether this distinction is a plausible one. however, both possibilities are harmful to the victims. in addition, the issue of ignorance and the questions of whether it exculpates and under which circumstances it does are ongoing themes in the responsibility literature. for these reasons, in the working example, the woman has all relevant knowledge of the situation in the park and makes an informed decision that puts her at potential risk. in addition, in this article, i do not examine the situation where the victims do whatever they can to avoid harm but still end up being harmed. nor do i talk about people who cannot really deliberate on what to do and just happen to be in places where other people take them—for example, young children or people with dementia. i also refrain from talking about people who are pressed by circumstances, such as being impoverished, and have no choice but to walk through the park.11 this idea that such victims are blameworthy is obviously false. children, people who live below the poverty line, and generally vulnerable groups should not be blamed for such events. these people often lack control and knowledge of the situation, a fact that, for many philosophers, would render them inappropriate targets of responsibility responses. this idea, of course, is not apparent or taken for granted by nonphilosophers. however, for this article, i take for granted that these people who lack control, for example, cannot be evaluated in the same way that the woman in the example can be regarded. 9 see, for example, boult (2021), brown (2020), and schmidt (2021). 10 see, for example, harman (2017). 11 generally, the people that a strawsonian account would excuse or exempt from responsibility. leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 moral responsibility and blameworthiness many philosophers have talked about the distinction between moral responsibility and blameworthiness.12 according to michael mckenna (2012), agents can be morally responsible for what they do and yet be neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy for those actions. blame is a response that may follow on the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is wrong or bad, and praise is a response that may follow the judgment that a person is morally responsible for behavior that is right or good (talbert 2022). first, however, it must be established what type of action was performed. for a person to be morally responsible for an action, that action has to be morally meaningful. agents cannot be morally responsible if their actions are not morally significant. it can be challenging to really distinguish a morally insignificant action from a morally significant one. mckenna (2012, 16–17) uses an example to illustrate this distinction. singing a song while cooking dinner is a morally insignificant act. now imagine a man who is walking around and sees another person in need. the man has the choice of helping the person in need, but he will be putting himself in danger. if he helps, he would be praiseworthy for doing so, but the risk he would have to take is so great that his helping would be considered a supererogatory act; so, if he decides not to help, it will not render him blameworthy. the man has another choice; he could take advantage of the situation and steal the wallet of the man in need and render himself blameworthy. however, the protagonist decides not to do anything and just continues walking away. so the man in this example is morally responsible for his conduct, but he is not blameworthy nor praiseworthy. the woman singing alone cannot be morally responsible for her conduct since her action is morally insignificant. judging which actions can carry moral significance might be unclear or quite tricky. the situation and the corresponding variables would definitely play a significant role in judging whether an act is morally significant or not. for the rest of this article, i assume that the woman walking home alone is morally responsible for her action. if being morally responsible for an action means that there is a connection between those agents and the action, then this could explain the intuitions that the woman has a connection to her choice. this connection is, of course, crucial by itself; it shows that she has agency and that she has at least some extent of freedom to make her choice or refrain from it. this connection is also evident in the causal link between the choice, the consequences, and the woman in the example. she would not have been harmed if 12 such theories have been developed by mckenna (2012), zimmerman (1988), and fischer and ravizza (1998). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 she had decided not to walk through the park.13 in this sense, tracing back through the events in order to find the cause of her harm leads to her, and this could explain why someone might suggest that she is not only morally responsible for her harm but also blameworthy. in addition, people who are morally responsible for their actions or choices can open themselves up to evaluating those actions, and this evaluation can be positive or negative. it can further reveal aspects of the person’s character based on the evaluation of the morally significant act. in the working example of the woman, her choice may indicate that she is more inclined to risky behavior in general. it can be challenging for the benevolent observer to maintain the idea that the woman is morally responsible for her choice but not blameworthy. a popular legal strategy is to try to absolve people from the weight of their choices by denying their part in the moral community, either in general or just at the moment of the act. as it is suggested by john gardner (2003), when people appeal to the diminished responsibility defense for certain behaviors, they run into the danger of diminishing the rational capacities of those agents. however, it is essential to maintain the idea that imperfect victims are morally responsible for their choices. diminishing their responsibility would suggest that their agency is in question. this kind of tactic may absolve victims from being blameworthy in the short run, but in the long run, it may call into question their capacities as moral agents. suggesting that victims have no moral responsibility over their choices would invite the implication that something is missing from them as people or, more importantly, as agents so that their own decisions do not belong to them in any meaningful way.14 emphasis should be placed on the notion that the agents have to be connected with the action or the choice of actions that opens them up to being evaluated for their blameworthiness or praiseworthiness. if the concept of moral responsibility and blameworthiness, or praiseworthiness, are kept distinct, this could provide a theoretical basis for explaining the contradictory intuitions that the cases of imperfect victims elicit. 13 although it is very likely that she would not be, she may still have been attacked somewhere else. 14 the literature on free will and what is meant by someone having the freedom to choose to do something is quite extensive. here i assume a more everyday notion of freedom; for example, nobody threatens her to make her choice, but she might feel obliged to do it. leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 justified risk-taking one might ask whether risk-taking can be seen as an action that is neither positive nor negative. at first glance, it might seem that risk-taking is evaluated negatively. most people have been discouraged from taking unnecessary risks from a very young age. although this might be a fact for at least educational and prudential reasons that are part of growing up, as adults, people take many risks that we disregard entirely as we have accepted them as part of life. people drive cars, fly around the world, and walk down the street all the time. all these activities come with a certain amount of risk. even worse, sometimes people perform these activities under more pressing circumstances. driving in bad weather conditions or walking down the street without observing the surroundings are actions that we often take without too much thought. these actions are usually viewed as low risk, so most people do not really think about them. for example, if you have a car accident while driving to work on a particularly rainy day, it would be confusing for a friend to say that you should have chosen a road more appropriate for driving in such conditions. it seems to imply that you are not a competent driver or that the road is dangerous for you in bad weather. things like that happen constantly; you cannot blame people for driving to work in the rain, even if they are taking a risk with higher stakes.15 it seems that these risks are justified. it makes sense to take them. people who judge this type of risk-taking negatively are usually seen as unreasonable or possibly too entitled since not everyone has the option of staying at home or working from home on a rainy day, and these risks are widely accepted. it might seem that these types of risks are somehow lower cost even when there is evidence that suggests that they are not (saha et al. 2016).16 it is an unfortunate fact that many things are riskier for women.17 walking late at night, running early in the morning, and going to a party alone are some of the activities that not all women can enjoy without thinking that they have to evaluate risk factors. these risk factors can be different things, such as the crime rate in the 15 there is potential tension between connecting the example of bad weather and sexual assault. sexual assault is a product of an agent´s behavior that is based on unjust social conditions. although there is value in drawing this philosophical distinction, i believe that most people are not able to differentiate between the two types of situations. after all, if most people were able to comprehend the difference, then there would be fewer instances of victim blaming. i am especially thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point. 16 they might appear as risks with lower costs given that people are taking them more often. 17 this, of course, is not a reality that only women face. i have focused on women in this article, but this is just a methodological choice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 area, whether people they trust are there, whether they can run in the shoes that they are wearing, and so on. this could be more or less a list of things that women have to take into account when they go out. of course, this is not a reality that all women face. different women have fewer or more burdens. however, such considerations exist, especially if we take into account that even the most privileged women are potentially vulnerable to some form of assault. in the united states alone, one in every five women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (smith et al. 2018). the recommendations of what women should do to avoid getting assaulted can be extensive and influenced by many variables. it is doubtful, of course, that following all these recommendations can guarantee that a woman will not get assaulted. many women are assaulted by family members or friends—that is, people they should be able to trust, and people that nobody suggests could be a potential threat to them (taylor 2020). generally, these recommendations are consistent with the idea that perpetrators are the stereotypical offenders with specific features. thus, they often reinforce rape myths, which is a harmful and counterproductive practice that does not really aim to protect potential victims but rather to control them.18 having to conform to such norms is a psychological, not to mention physical, burden. it is important to emphasize that these burdens impact specific people. it is not always the case for everyone that they are viewing themselves as potential victims. the default state for most people is thinking that they will not get assaulted and that they do not have to worry about such things, except in extreme cases where this would be the situation for everyone. finally, it is a fact that people can find different ways to go about changing norms or situations. there should be ways to change the norms other than putting people in danger. information and political influence are just two factors that can influence social circumstances, but they are often not available to members of vulnerable groups. victims who are praiseworthy the woman walking home in the example is morally responsible for her choice to walk through the dangerous park; the next step would be to suggest that she is blameworthy for her decision and indirectly or partially blameworthy for the harm that was inflicted upon her. there are many reasons to suggest that she is blameworthy for her choice, but they are not entirely convincing. first, it can be assumed that she acted recklessly and in defiance. rules are there to protect people; thus, they should be respected. she did not show the proper respect and care, and for that reason, she is blameworthy. 18 often it is not just a recommendation. it can be a demand, a duty, or even the law. leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 however, i believe that, in this case, the woman is not acting recklessly. she knows the stakes of walking alone through the park and chooses to do so. this seems to be more of a statement than a reckless decision. it is not that she does not care about the norms in general but that she does not accept these particular norms that extensively restrict her freedom. second, it is not uncommon for people to assume that the woman’s risk is very high, and it makes sense that she has to face the burden of the consequences of that action as a form of punishment or lesson for herself and others in the future. this is consistent with the idea that victim blaming is a strategy of relieving other people or the state from having to compensate the victim or having to take steps to alleviate the situation. so she has to be blameworthy in order to lose any chance of demanding compensation. here it seems counterintuitive to suggest that the risk and the harm are analogous to each other so that one can be punished by using the other. third, it could be argued that the woman has a duty to herself or others to protect herself from this kind of harm. evidently, if she has people dependent on her, the demand to take back the park can be outweighed for other reasons. people with strong reasons against breaking a norm should not feel obliged to do so. if such a thing is demanded of vulnerable groups, we might again end up with victim blaming.19 women and vulnerable groups, in general, should be free to choose whether they can themselves afford the possible consequences. finally, it is vital to examine the moral value of the choice itself. as previously mentioned, evaluating whether the agents performing certain acts are blameworthy or praiseworthy depends on whether the act they perform is morally wrong. contrary to what these arguments suggest, the woman in the example is in fact praiseworthy. women, or members of any other vulnerable group, should not be confined in specific spaces. there is a pressing need to expand the places where women feel safe. the amount of cognitive resources used to stay safe is an unnecessary burden that women must carry, often failing to prevent the assault. the “space” here does not necessarily have to be a park or some kind of physical restriction that they have to break. it can be, for example, the “space” created by using a slur in order to make it lose its power over the group that it is used against. it can be the result of protesting when people make sexist jokes or of cutting off a family 19 questions like “why didn't you do anything about it if you thought that the situation was bad?” often imply that the victims should have done something to change the situation and that they are to be blamed for not trying to. not only is this kind of assumption false and far from the reality that members of vulnerable groups have to face, but it also shows the lack of understanding of the precarious situations that these people often find themselves in. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 member who acts disrespectfully. this act of defiance could be more or less symbolic, and it can have lower or higher stakes. in the working example, the choice helps to break or begin to break gender norms, since a single act cannot really be a reason to break the norm. what rosa parks did is viewed as praiseworthy, and i believe it is safe to suggest that her action would still be viewed as praiseworthy even if she did not help initiate the civil rights movement. these types of acts, even when they do not start a revolution, draw attention to the situation and perform a type of political protest.20 when people want to change a norm, they often have to make sacrifices. these types of actions are supererogatory, and they cannot and should not be expected of everyone. it should be accepted that not all people can afford to put themselves at risk in order to change the norm. the people who choose not to perform such acts are not blameworthy. however, the people who do perform such actions are praiseworthy. in addition, even if the choice and the possible harm are intentional, this does not make them undeserving of compensation or sympathy. even when the harm is a real possibility that these victims can accept, it remains a painful and traumatic experience, and its impact is the same. they can regret the situation, and they can feel bad about it or even regret their choice. this does not take away from their act of challenging the unjust situation. their feeling of regret or demand for attention and compensation reaffirms their agency rather than diminishing the extent of their choice. justified risk and gauguin it was mentioned earlier in this article that members of vulnerable groups should weigh the reasons they have to stay safe with the need to change the reality that limits them. one way to judge whether the risk was worth taking is whether it actually produced a result. it can be illuminating to compare the working example with a similar case presented by bernard williams (1981, chap. 2). gauguin is an ambitious artist who leaves his family to go to tahiti for inspiration so that he can actually become a great artist. whether the decision to leave his family is justified would be a matter of his artistic achievements or lack thereof. the same could be said for the woman in the 20 it could be a parallel to civil disobedience, but in this case, walking alone at night is not illegal, at least as the example is described. here, there is no law that people can object to, but there is still a restriction on the things that certain groups can perform. this, of course, makes things more interesting as it pushes obligations more toward individuals and less toward the state. the individuals must themselves take measures to protest instead of letting the state protecting them by enforcing a legal restriction. leventi – victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 example. the justification will depend on the outcome, which no one can know beforehand.21 however, the two examples are different. the woman is trying to break an unjust social norm, and it seems counterintuitive to suggest that efforts to change this unjust social situation are unjustifiable due to the lack of social change. her risk-taking decision appears justified regardless of the result. she is putting herself in danger for what she believes is the right thing to do. on the other hand, gauguin is arguably acting selfishly. he wants to be a great artist, so he decides to take the risk; but the burden of his choice is imposed on his family. i believe that this is not a convincing justification. he is also reinforcing a gender norm; men can leave their families in order to pursue their personal interests and growth. however, it can be worthwhile to examine whether the judgment of the woman's choice would change if she had a family and people dependent upon her as gauguin did. her risk would then be something that her family would have to share with her. the existence of dependent family members can make us reconsider whether she is justified in taking such a risk. however, this is based on the idea that women should put their families first. women are the primary caretakers.22 this fact can signify that her risk-taking is viewed more negatively than that of her male partner. so by suggesting that she is not justified to take a risk because she has a family, we are reinforcing a gender norm and imposing more burden on her. thus, the structural injustice within the family makes the argument appear more convincing than it actually is or should be.23 conclusion victim blaming is a contemporary and significant issue that vulnerable groups have to face in addition to suffering from harmful events. this article was an attempt 21 williams (1981, 22) calls it rational justification, but i will refrain from entering this complicated discussion. my aim is to evaluate whether the justification offered is convincing. 22 see, for example, i̇zdeş terkoğlu and memiş (2022); stefanova, farrell, and latu (2023); and swinkels et al. (2019). 23 it would be interesting to examine a case of a progressive family where both parents have an equal amount of caretaking duties. williams suggests that even if gauguin makes it as an artist, his family will still be able to blame him. i am not sure whether this would be the case for the woman. if she has family members who depend on her, and this does not happen due to gender norms but due to equal parental obligation so the family will still be affected by her being harmed, then it makes sense that they will have a negative attitude toward the situation and possibly her. similarly, it would be interesting to investigate an example where the victim is a single father. i thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 to shed light on victim blaming and to provide a philosophical account that can explain the phenomenon and respond to it in an appropriate 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responsibility.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta and uri nodelman, fall 2022 edition. published october 16, 2019; latest revision september 21, 2022. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/moral-responsibility/. taylor, jessica. 2020. why women are blamed for everything: exposing the culture of victim-blaming. london: constable. walker, margaret urban. 2006. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press. williams, bernard. 1981. moral luck: philosophical papers 1973–1980. cambridge: cambridge university press. workman, jane e., and elizabeth w. freeburg. 1999. “an examination of date rape, victim dress, and perceiver variables within the context of attribution theory.” sex roles 41, no. 3–4 (august): 261–77. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:10 18858313267. zimmerman, michael j. 1988. an essay on moral responsibility. totowa, nj: rowman & littlefield. marianna leventi (she/her) is a phd candidate in practical philosophy at lund university. she is part of the lund gothenburg responsibility project (lgrp). she works on themes of moral responsibility from a feminist standpoint. 101210 leventi title page 101210 leventi final format attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation hey, maya. 2021. “attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (3). article 4. 2021 attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation maya hey concordia university heymayahey@gmail.com hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation maya hey abstract terada honke is a natural sake brewery that utilizes practices like call-andresponse and work song to coordinate its fermentation processes across human and microbial participants. i call attention to the concept of attunement, which is the ability to notice, apprehend, and connect with others in meaningful response. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, i explain why brewers must attune to the social, spatial, and temporal scales of life within the brewhouse, including the microbes who remain invisible to the brewers. i then analyze how the brewers practice attunement by attending to the relations between (inter-), within (intra-), and outside of (extra-) their bodies. these practices enable brewers to practice an embodied relationality that spans multiple scales and multiple species, or what others have called responseability. i argue that this form of attunement could extend the idea of collective ethics to include microbial others and help rewrite the metaphysics of what it means to be human. keywords: fermentation, attunement, multispecies communication, embodied relationality, multiscalar ethics, human-microbe relationship, food and/as media 1. introduction: fermenting foods can mediate relations across different bodies food is a medium, connecting bodies in both literal and figurative ways. for instance, food can mediate a sense of identity for vegan, kosher, and locavore eaters through diet; or, practiced collectively, food can mediate the social bonds of a community group or a so-called national cuisine. since we are obligate eaters, food mediates—and complicates—our relationships with other species because we use their lives to prolong our own. modern endeavors to enhance the health benefits of food—including the overextraction of plants labeled superfoods, the booming industry of probiotics (foods so named because their bacterial profiles enhance our gut health), and the bioengineering practice of genetically fortifying crops with vitamins—epitomize this instrumentalization. at the same time, the latest microbiome research points to the fact that there are as many microbial cells in a human body as there are human ones (sender, fuchs, and milo 2016). this means that the notion of we already encompasses multiple species. so, how do we practice feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 being humans, let alone healthy and sustainable ones, given that our ontological status is, and has never been, solely human? to understand our foods (and our bodies) as being co-constituted with other species, i look to fermentation. as a mode of food preservation, fermentation has historically connected humans with seasonality and place, especially when the abundance of harvest necessitated community efforts to process ferments1 for times of dearth. across food cultures and for centuries, people have been practicing fermentation in concert with the plants, animals, and microorganisms that enable the transformation from food to ferment. thus fermentation mediates the relationship we have with many different species (at the very least microbial), and these relationships span temporal, spatial, and social scales. in thinking through fermentation, i follow the line of food philosophy put forth by lisa heldke (2012, 70) that sees food as not merely a substance but “loci of relations . . . that emphasizes the relational nature of food-and-us.” and, in handling these loci, fermentation can be seen as a process that is contingent, emergent, and predicated on intimate relations between interconnected species. as both a foodmaking process and a health-sustaining practice, fermentation reminds us that our selves are comprised of and dependent upon other species like microbial life, who animate our bodies, our lands, and our collective well-being. in turn, our tangled relations mean we need a more robust figuration of what it means to be not-onlyhuman. fermentation serves as a recurring encounter with microbial species, demanding the ethical decisions about how we get on with one another. some species are considered expendable and useful, while others are not and are sterilized out of existence. how we continue to live and die well at the expense of other species confronts us with the philosophical question of how we valuate life. as donna haraway (2008, 295) cautions, “because eating and killing cannot be hygienically separated does not mean that just any way of eating and killing is fine.” or, as myra hird (2009, 136) points out, we are always and already imbricated in a relational economy that traverses scales, spanning macroorganisms like cattle/beef to 1 within several disciplines (e.g., food studies, cultural anthropology, sociology), scholars use the term “ferments” to mean the outputs of fermentation. i (and other fermentation scholars) have consistently used this terminology as part of an unofficial lexicon when trying to point to “fermentation products” and “products of food fermentation.” given these two lineages, i prefer to keep this phrasing even though it may not be an officially acknowledged usage in the dictionary. i like to explain it as similar to the word “pickles,” which we understand to be a category of transformed foods, transformed by way of pickling. so while we could be writing out “pickled foods” or “products of pickling, we also use “pickles” as the implied shorthand. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 microorganisms like bacterial life. we are one of many organisms who participate in these transformational processes of composing, decomposing, and recomposing each other through food-based encounters. i see fermentation as a multispecies, transformational process, one that serves as a timely heuristic for thinking through the metaphysics of what microbes are, how we come to know them, and what an ethical life with them entails. because fermentation mediates the relations across human bodies, microbial bodies, and a shared environment, its hands-on praxis provides a way of engaging with the microbes that we cannot easily see or sense. i consider the material practices of fermentation to be an instance of interspecies communication, where assessing and following the progress of a ferment calls upon sense memory and embodied knowledge that helps one to cultivate a relational self (hey 2019). this is partly because human involvement in fermentation is always indirect because humans can only encourage or discourage the work of microbial life, usually through tinkering with environmental parameters such as temperature, salinity, and oxygen availability to hope (and wait) for microbes to respond. in other words, human control in these processes is ever only aspirational, never absolute, framing fermentation as an ongoing conversation instead of one-way megaphone. thus it is the dynamic relationality that brings about fermentation instead of a human-driven recipe that one executes. i argue that these practices are predicated on a form of bodily attunement, which mobilizes a differential set of epistemological questions in microbial encounters. instead of asking how we know if the good/bad microbes are present, attunement prioritizes a way of knowing that temporarily suspends the ontology of what a species is prior to them being affixed as “good” or “bad” for us humans. this refusal of presettled ontologies could, in turn, help us imagine a more nuanced kind of collective ethics, one that includes multiple species and, perhaps more importantly, does not reify anthropocentric categorizations of life in terms of human benefit. my argument here is one of relationality, moving away from an objectoriented approach to food as things to use to instead focus on the dynamic processes of co-constitution. i contend that fermentation is one way to practice human and more-than-human entanglements in an ethical manner, tending to the differences and needs of each species without defining the entire relationship by them. by focusing on relationality, this paper examines the embodied practices and the philosophical approaches of being-with others whose needs and lifeways may be invisible to us. 2. framework: an approach informed by feminist thought to unpack the multispecies and embodied relationality in fermentation practices, i call upon feminist thought along two trajectories: (1) the corporeality of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 feminist new materialism, which animates the agentic capacity of various bodies, and (2) the ethico-onto-epistemologies of feminist technoscience, which grounds my analyses in practices, not just principles, so as not to hide it behind abstractions. combined, these approaches connect the ethical actions (the why and for whom questions) with their philosophical impetus (the what and how questions). so, while sake fermentation—the basis of this analysis—may not be of feminist concern per se, i situate my argument within a greater repositioning and critique of dominant ideas about what a body can do, how differential bodies relate, and how they do so across species and scale. a new materialist framework grounds ideas in real practices by foregrounding the corporeality of one’s body while also recognizing the discursive powers that affect lived experiences, differentially. my ideas about embodied epistemologies are particularly informed by feminist accounts of the body, which prioritize fleshy understandings (and differences) of bodies and embodiment. these perspectives lament the postmodern tendency to solely focus on language and discourse because it has “foreclose[d] attention to lived, material bodies and evolving corporeal practices” (alaimo and hekman 2008, 3). feminist new materialism argues that material objects and their discourse cannot be separated, and, by prioritizing this indivisibility, new materialists “shift the focus from ethical principles to ethical practices” (alaimo and hekman 2008, 7). this foregrounding of practices is intentional here, for i ask how food practices (and fermentation practices) help us enact a more ethical way of being and living with others. i do not mean only microbes; i mean other humans as well. seeing bodies as active participants in processes of subject/knowledge formation works against the dualistic thought that the mind (or self) operates separately from the corpus; rather, they are integrated—incorporated—into a living whole. it is crucial here to take the body as a collection of forces in dynamic interplay, “as a transformer and a relay point for the flow of energies” (braidotti 2002, 21). the benefit of employing an “embodied subjectivity” is seeing bodies as being connected and entangled in more than just descriptive ways; it is to imagine “new conceptions of corporeality . . . which see human materiality in continuity with organic and inorganic matter” (grosz 1994, 22; emphasis added). this emphasis on continuity complicates binaries like mind/body and human/nonhuman because to view the body as unbound, porous, and unruly is to disrupt the neat, either-or separation of dualisms.2 instead of mind or body, embodiment allows knowledge to emerge as mind-and-body. 2 binaries themselves are never innocent as they are often organized vertically to favor a hierarchical structure (e.g., mind over body, objective over subjective, self hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 donna haraway (1999, 193) highlights the need to be critical of the affordances granted to each unique view, arguing that one’s “positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices. it follows that politics and ethics ground struggles . . . over knowledge projects.”. the fact that knowledge is situated—in a body, in a physical place, in a particular social location—demands attention to difference and to how those differences come to matter. as we participate, emerge from, affect, and are affected by these differences, knowledge production must remain committed to an “ethico-onto-epistem-ology—an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being” (barad 2007, 185). what is to be done with knowledge, and done well, cannot be divorced from how that knowledge came to be. as such, how we come to know microbes is itself a messy question that is tied to what microbes even are and what we humans are to do about them. cleanly isolating any one of their ontologies or epistemologies risks a skewed sense of ethics, and we already see this in microbial representations along helpful/harmful or friendly/unfriendly lines. whereas an object-oriented (and positivist) understanding of fermentation sees distinct units of foods, humans, and microbes that inter-act to produce a ferment, i consider fermentation to be an ongoing intra-active differentiation wherein the microbes on foods, on hands, in the environment, and the humans who handle them, matter in dynamic relationality, always and already making and remaking each other. so foods, microbes, and humans cannot be separated. microbes move and move through us, as do foods, and we humans move through their worlds as sometimes agents, other times bystanders. there is no cause and effect, only phenomena that perpetually emerge, at least until analysis makes an agential cut to provisionally carve out the agencies at play with “human,” “microbe,” “food,” and “ferment” in relation to one another. to ground these relations in specific terms, this article draws on data generated during ethnographic fieldwork conducted at terada honke (th), one of two natural sake breweries out of the approximately 900 in japan. 3 “natural,” here, means that laboratory-optimized microbes are not added to the fermentation process; instead, the brewery relies on the work of endogenous bacteria and yeasts that have inhabited the open-air brewhouse since the brewery’s inception in the 1670s. over the course of two winters, i engaged with and practiced as an apprentice brewer, working alongside my interlocutors while i conducted fieldwork. i looked to th not for its singularity but for the richness and “fine detail” (barad 2007, 91) that over other). seeing binaries only as either-or categorizations limits the interlocking ways of understanding the complexity or severity of phenomena. 3 this emphasis on natural processes, combined with th’s ethos of “working from the microbes’ perspective,” served as the rationale for choosing this site. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 allowed me to analyze the differences that came to matter, particularly around how brewers came to know microbial life and work with it in sake fermentation. while there are cautions against tokenizing or exoticizing what is done “over there,” accounting for my corporeal affordances as an able-bodied researcher and my social location as a mixed race hafu (the accepted term in japan to indicate mixed blood) framed this knowledge as being socially situated (from my view) and situated in (my) bodies as lived experience. due to their commitment to natural brewing, the success of the brewery relies on the relational practices of humans with microbes, who remain largely invisible to the brewers. microbes are varied and ubiquitous, so the practices that work in one scenario may not in others. as such, brewers need to attune to microbial life with the unaided eye, calling upon other senses and the perceptions of other brewers to ascertain the fermentation processes in progress. so, in addition to interviewing brewers and corroborating my own perceptions, i had to prioritize embodied and immersive approaches in order to engage with microbes on a firsthand basis. modulating the ethnography with multispecies and multisensory considerations demanded that i employ a “multisensory approach—grappling with unfamiliar sensoriums, with different kinds of touch, smell, taste, and vision” to apprehend, notice, and meaningfully engage with more-than-human others (kirksey and helmreich 2010, 565). as a result, these approaches enabled me to mobilize the embodied, immersive, and participatory practices of sensory ethnography (pink 2009; stoller 1997), downplay the role of human agency by practicing the art of noticing more-than-human beings in multispecies ethnography (tsing 2015), and prioritize the building of trust and relations over data collection and knowledge extraction in feminist ethnographies (skeggs 2001). these modulations were important to consider because fermentation is dynamic and ever changing without necessarily featuring (or even serving) a human figure, thereby requiring tools that consider humans not as exceptional but as members of multispecies communities (rose et al. 2012, 3). ultimately, my approach to this research values dynamism over static snapshots, multiplicity over singular truths, and interdependency over isolatable variables. 3. invisibility: why the brewers need to sense changes on social, spatial, temporal scales sake is a fermented rice beverage made entirely of rice. like many ferments, sake is made with a starter culture called a shubo that jumpstarts the process of transforming rice into alcohol, but these processes can take weeks to start (a point to which i will return momentarily). sake is actually the result of a triplicate fermentation process happening simultaneously: rice is fermented into these shubo starters (made possible by yeast and bacteria), rice is fermented into a malt-like substance called koji (using a mold, aspergillus oryzae), and, finally, more rice is combined with the shubo hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 and koji to ferment into sake over months. as a layered and incremental process, sake fermentation confounds the causal one-to-one relationship of ingredient to product. when preparing the shubo starters, th uses song to keep the time and mashing rhythm consistent from batch to batch, year to year. huddling over barrels, the brewers mash rice with wooden poles to the tune of a call-and-response work song with lyrics that give thanks to the rice harvest, the gods for providing abundant blessings, and the well water that springs up in fervor. the song is a gathering, an invitation to come together through rhythm, concord, and the collective well-wishing for good sake. as such, it is more than a procedure to get to the next step; rather, it is in performing the song that brewers create a sense of connection to microbes, to each other, and to place, all through the iterative tasks of fermentation. this song— as well as other practices at the brewery—help the brewers practice attunement: the ability to notice, apprehend, and engage in meaningful response. this process of cultivating shubo, as part of the kimoto method, used to be commonplace until modern brewing practices considered the method to be too inconsistent, unpredictable, and time-consuming, thus ushering in an era that normalized the use of purified and lab-optimized vials containing known microbial strains with known trajectories. notably, th did not hold onto the traditional practice of song but reverted to it in the 1980s under the direction of keisuke terada, as part of a greater overhaul of what he considered to be a problematic business ethos. terada felt the industrialized and efficient brewing process to be too removed from the historical context and uses of sake, which were considered to be acutely local, crucial to social ties, even medicinal.4 for him, brewing could only happen through working with others, requiring a shift out of a self-centered, top-down positionality to instead recognize and give thanks to all of the forces—social, microbial, environmental, cosmic—that made human life and work possible (terada 2007). he believed that fermentation was not a human triumph over microbes but a service in reverse; fermentation happens when humans enable microbes to do it. to reemphasize and reinsert the human in fermentation processes, th did away with machines and vials that proffered ease and consistency to instead take up a work ethic that relied on manual labor and the attuned bodies of brewers. since then, the brewers continue to practice coordination on several scales. first, in doing tasks by hand and breaking them up into increments that are manageable for the human body to handle, the brewers have to coordinate their work across many different hands. at the time of my ethnography, eight brewers would 4 the nod to medicinal uses of ferments is neither new nor unique to sake. in japanese, the epithet for sake evokes its “one hundred [medicinal] uses” as if to call upon it like a panacea. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 figure 1. brewers’ hands flipping steamed rice to help it cool uniformly. photograph by maya hey, 2019. process 600 to 1200 kilograms of rice on a daily basis—washing, soaking, and transferring the rice by hand in 10to 30-kilogram increments. at the same time, the brewers needed to ensure that each pail of rice was processed in a similar manner so that the cumulative effect would amount to the same degree of processing, whether in the first pail or the last. to attune to each other, the brewers synch up through vocal call-and-response and other rituals (like the song) that create a rhythmic workflow (a point i will elaborate in the next section). attuning here means apprehending between humans, listening and participating in exchanges on a social scale. on a spatial scale, the brewers need to practice a kind of attunement with the more-than-human brewing environment, because this ambient space is where endogenous microbes thrive. following the natural-fermentation philosophy of letting it happen (versus direct inoculation), th believes that the role of the human brewer is not to ferment per se but to set up conditions for microbes to do the fermenting. given their invisibility, microbes are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, so their activity must be ascertained by other means. brewers must rely on their sense of smell, sense of touch, and other sense memories to match indications of microbial presence (e.g., air bubbles) with brewing expertise to continue creating hospitable, livable conditions for the microbes to thrive. attuning here is between brewers and the greater surroundings, of which microbes are a part. it asks the brewers to extend the scope of attunement beyond the human socius to listen for more-than-human socialities. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 this spatial coordination with microbes is most apparent in the brewing expertise used in starting the starters. these shubo starters take more than a month to propagate, and they can only be prepared during in the “kanjikomi” cold season to best enable ambient microbes. consistent with other matrilineal monikers (e.g., vinegar mother, pasta madre), the term shubo literally translates to “sake mothers” (酒母).5 they are comprised of a teeming variety of microbial species, some that metabolize rice starches into volatile acids (for aroma), others that convert starches into amino acids (for flavor), and still others (like yeasts) that produce alcohol. notably, it is the biodiversity and biochemical complexity of the shubo that ensures its survival, and brewers must create conditions to invite successive microbial populations in a deliberate sequence for the entire starter to thrive. first, they must create conditions for nitrate-reducing bacteria who enable lactic acid bacteria to join the starter; then, these lactic acid bacteria create acidic conditions for yeast to flourish, and the combined acidic environment helps ward off opportunistic molds.6 each of these species thrive at different temperatures, and brewers must therefore attune to the spatial temperatures over different time scales—both throughout the day’s temperature fluctuations and over the course of weeks and months. thus, it is not just a question of whether microbes are there or not (they are), but it is the brewers’ perpetual return to the shubo that helps them ascertain which species joined. this process asks brewers to practice a temporal and longitudinal attunement because fermentation continues whether or not it is desired by the brewery’s schedule. the brewers need to sense changes on social, spatial, and temporal scales in order to work in concert with invisible lifeforms. unsurprisingly, the brewers name this invisibility too, referring to microbes as “what the eyes cannot see.” but it is because of this invisibility, not in spite of it, that the brewers see their tasks as ways of engaging with the invisible. for instance, one of the brewers who leads the work song considers the lyrics as a way for him to interface with microbes, apprehend their “messages” (his term), and “play with the world that the eyes cannot see.” in this 5 it is worth noting that another name for shubo is “moto,” which translates to “the source” of sake. this emphasis points to the origin of flavor and the uniqueness of each brewery’s fermentation practices. 6 this phenomenon of “warding off” opportunistic microbes was famously demonstrated by elie metchnikoff, who could not find a willing test subject to infect themselves with cholera so ingested the bacteria himself. metchnikoff was not infected because his intestines were already colonized by intestinal flora due to his balkan diet of fermented dairy. (to test his initial theory, he had his lab assistant also ingest cholera, and it nearly killed him.) this was the beginning of thinking about probiotics in a prophylactic way. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 sense, the brewers perform their tasks for an unseen audience, which is further compounded by an unforeseeable future. whereas positivist analyses (like identifying species by dna-based sampling) can predetermine the profile of which microbes are present, the brewers at th commit to an indeterminate milieu of microbes because the by-product of doing so produces an attuned body and, as i will explain in the next section, multiple scales of relationality. 4. practicing attunement: how brewers relate to each other and to the shared space brewers must attune to many things to successfully brew sake. these include the tangible ingredients like rice and water, as well as others that are invisible to the human eye like microbial life. (other invisible forces like electromagnetic frequencies from lightbulbs or soundwaves are also thought to affect fermentation). but more than on the graspable and invisible entities, brewing is predicated on the relationships that make up the bustling, multispecies conviviality within the brewhouse. these relations color the interdependencies of a multispecies ecology from which fermentation emerges. to handle these ingredients, the brewers must tune in to their senses: their physical senses, their sense of self, and their sense of having to connect to the intangible and attune to the invisible. it is not enough to rely on quantitative observation; rather, the brewers immerse, participate with, and attune their bodies to sensory information. the key is in noticing: attunement is the ability to notice, listen, and respond to the space and all of the inhabitants within it, human and morethan-human. attunement allows the human body to sense these forces and connect with them without knowing them in advance or even controlling them. these relations highlight to whom or what we can respond and inform the ethical potential of thinking beyond the individual. 4.1. radio calisthenics and other spatial choreographies every morning, the staff gather outdoors at the center of the brewery grounds in preparation for what are called “radio exercises.” like other countries with quasinationalized exercise regimens, japan in the 1920s had instituted a calisthenics program with a warm-up routine guided by radio broadcasters. recorded onto a cassette tape, the broadcaster’s voice instructs each movement over a three-minute piano accompaniment, counting out the duration of each step. under a single, impressive camphor tree, the staff move in unison with each inhale, each stretch, and each bounce, doing so with the agility and familiarity that comes with repeated practice. it is what starts the workday and what aligns the entire company to the same beat. the staff arrange themselves conscientiously so as not to bump or whack nearby colleagues with their swinging arms and twisting torsos. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 the sheer proximity of people requires a kind of spatial acuity while bending and stretching. this spatial acuity is an extension of proprioception, or the sense of self in space. proprioception is a neurokinesthetic phenomenon of how individuals perceive their bodies, or parts of their bodies, in relation to a given space. it is the sense of self-orientation we use to duck our heads enough to clear a stoop, or to place a cup down on a table without too much force. unlike other senses that rely on a singular sense organ (e.g., sight for eyes), proprioception relies on a distribution of information from diverse “communicators.” surfaces like the skin compile and disperse information to make sense of a place—the whoosh of a whirlwind by the door, the heat of nearby steam, the solid footing of gravity. in this sense, thinking about proprioception enables one to listen with the entire body, with cues always coming from more than one source. figure 2. brewery staff begin each work day with calisthenic exercises. photograph by sayuri oki, 2019. used with photographer’s permission. 4.2. call-and-response in song and in other timed tasks later in the day, the brewers rely on vocal call-and-response to guide other tasks in need of timed coordination. for example, when taking the rice out of the giant steaming basket, the brewer responsible for digging must call out “yo!” before sending off a pail of steamed rice, because the residual bellows of steam obscure the brewers’ vision inside the brewhouse. the brewers receiving the rice must call out feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 “sa!” to inform the digger to cue up the next batch. the timing is critical here because the just-steamed rice loses heat with each passing moment: too slow and the brewers risk allowing the first pails of rice cool too much and inviting microbes at an undesirable temperature. when cooling the rice, the brewers must sense the temperature of the rice with their hands, being careful to turn over hotspots that hold onto heat so that the rice releases heat uniformly. in this sense, the brewers listen with their hands and listen with their ears, in order to know where their bodies can sense heat. ultimately the effect of this effort is that the contents of the entire steaming basket (often amounting to a metric ton of rice) cools evenly even though it is dug up in units of 10 kilograms at a time. a rhythmic call-and-response ensures consistency in embodied terms, in that an individual brewer responds to what is seen, sensed, and heard with a meaningful call, be that a verbal cue (sa!) or an action (flipping rice). these coordinated tasks require that each being be attuned to one another as well as to their individual selves. figure 3. steam lingers around the digger’s torso as he quickly portions rice into pails. photograph by maya hey, 2019. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 when the brewers prepare the shubo starters with song, their coordinated movements echo the ease that comes from regularity. the structure of the work song is one of call-and-response as well, but in a lyrical manner, with the brewers mashing rice to the beat of the song. the main singer enumerates the tasks and gratitude involved in the making of sake (“we wash more rice for tomorrow’s preparations” and “with thanks to the kozaki shrine / the water wells up and becomes sake”) and the remaining brewers chime in with agreement (“oh yes! yes!”). the song’s 15 verses span 25 minutes in its entirety, and the song’s duration is fully incorporated into the corps of brewers, whose bodies know the pace of the song. depending on the ambient temperatures, the head brewer may call for fewer verses to modulate how much the brewers mash the rice. 4.3. listening for (microbial) cues outside of one’s body when preparing the shubo, what starts out as distinct granules of steamed rice looks like porridge by the end of the song, opening up the starches for bacteria to enter and take up the substrate. in this sense, the song is also a multispecies calland-response, wherein bacteria (and later, yeasts) join. while the song is lyrically set up as a call-and-response, the brewers also see the months-long process of cultivating a shubo starter as a form of microbial call-and-response. specifically, they see their song as the call to which the bubbling up of yeasts (which evokes fermentation’s latin root word, fervere, to boil) is seen as a microbial response. when the yeasts respond earlier than anticipated, the brewers explain that that batch was particularly lively. when the yeasts do not respond (in the form of bubbles), the brewers attempt different calls, usually in the form of warming up the immediate environment—and all of this is determined from the long durée of continually engaging in microbial epistemics. brewers train their bodies to notice microbial responses, which might be in the form of a bubble, heat release, volatile aromas, or changes in viscosity. importantly, the brewers do not convert microbial cues into human abstractions (e.g., numbers) to then decode and rationalize. they instead engage with their bodies and adopt what they call “working from the microbe’s perspective,” where brewers train their bodies to apprehend microbial responses. in other words, the brewers see their work not as being some steward to microbial life, overseeing their work from above. the relationship is almost reversed, where brewers deliberately place the onus upon themselves to communicate in “calls” that are meaningful to microbial life. thus, brewers insert themselves into a multispecies and multiscalar call-andresponse, even though they do not consider their tasks as such. at the same time, the tasks are not a surefire protocol for the brewers to execute; as a call-and-response, the brewers’ cues are only partially scripted to account for microbial responses along the way. to the brewers, microbes are considered ontologically present but with a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 figure 4. changes in the shubo starter, like in viscosity or texture, are seen as a microbial cue to which brewers respond. photograph by maya hey, 2019. tacit understanding that human bodies/things (like down feathers) can affect the fermentation process. proactively thinking about what goes into fermentation positions the brewers within a microbial call-and-response such that their attuned practices are themselves calls to which they must apprehend microbes’ responses. 5. theorizing the inter-, intra-, and extra-relational connections with humans and microbes the preceding examples demonstrate attunement in action, for each individual must tune into their own bodies as well as those of others in order to respond meaningfully in sake-making practices. in attuning to spatial practices, the brewers’ choreographies during singing and calisthenics provide a collective sense of movement in unison, allowing the brewers to move together as one body, interrelationally. in the timed practices, the call-and-response moments of singing and cooling the rice provide an opportunity to use one’s ears, hands, and full body to listen for other members’ cues to act. here, the brewers must process sensory information within one’s body intra-relationally in order to cycle through the decoding and hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 encoding that drives the call-and-response. these communication pathways extend beyond human beings, extra-relationally, and include more-than-human participants in a microbial call-and-response. as well, the different kinds of attunement seem to be mutually compounding: intra-relationality begets interpersonal relationships of camaraderie, heightened awareness towards extra-relational surroundings make veteran brewers acutely aware of their bodily senses, and coordinating movement between brewers enables the continuity of the entire brewing operation. 5.1. inter-relationality: connections between beings the brewhouse contains a collection of individual brewing bodies, with their different corporeal affordances, embodying know-how independently and interdependently. by participating in group work like the mashing song and the rice cooling, the brewers learn these practices to complete the tasks in relation to others. unloading the steaming basket to cool the rice is not merely the work of i cool the rice, because it is defined in terms of the temporal, spatial, and social connections between brewers. thus, the work of “i” is always accompanied by the work of peers: i call “sa!” when a colleague delivers a new pail of steamed rice, i flip the rice where a colleague has not yet done so, and i listen for the next cue from afar, if and when a colleague is ready for the next step. each body apprehends the “call” from other brewing bodies in order to produce a “response,” which then becomes the next “call” for others to respond to. each response is thus another call that seeks a response, and this self-perpetuating nature of call-and-response drives the co-labor and collaboration within the entire brewery. the back-and-forth co-respondence becomes inscribed onto brewers’ bodies in the form of embodied knowledge and eventually develops into technical expertise with iterative practice. the work song for preparing the shubo strengthens the group dynamic of the brewers through the lyrical structure of call-and-response. like other historical instances of work songs, the rhythm drives the movement with an embodied sense of purpose, as there would be too much discord and deviation without it. particularly in agricultural societies, the work songs of field work extended this purpose to collective groups (whereas hunting societies celebrated the individual hunter or the sole shaman whose ceremonial songs blessed the hunter before an expedition). indeed, the shift to a group ritual with field-based work songs combined the efficacy of ritualizing movement with giving thanks to divine powers (gioia 2006, 40–41). this collectivizing work amplified the human penchant for social bonding.7 7 in the north american context, it is important to cite the african and black heritage of work songs, where both person and song were brought to the new world on the premise of slavery and plantation work. (this later informed entire music genres such feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 the work song for mashing is thus performed both for the brewers’ accord as well as for a latent microbial audience. as with the songs of goat herders and shepherds, the work song is both invitational and declarative, helping the nonhuman species to locate the human. here, cynthia willett’s ideas on interspecies ethics can help us to think of engagement between brewer and microbe as that of a call-andresponse, one that functions as a basic expression of a desire to connect. in particular, willet mobilizes the idea of affect attunement to theorize preconscious, intersubjective, and nonmimetic connectivity through species: “attunement across sensory modalities constitutes the basis for a call-and response exchange at a level that may be preverbal, nonrational, and mysterious and yet vital for the ethicality of biosocial bonds” (willett 2014, 91). this is most evident in interspecies play, whose improvisational structure provides opportunity to meta-communicate on a relational scale (i.e., communicating this is not an attack, this is affection).8 crucially, acts of play and improvisation require reciprocity, for playing at the expense of others is no longer play. i am reminded of the brewer (mentioned in section 3) who considers his work as “play with the world that the eyes cannot see,” and i see the greater ethos of th to be one of making spaces hospitable for all beings to enjoy each other’s company along the way. the daughter of keisuke terada, satomi, speaks of microbes as part of a greater relationscape at th and describes very lively shubo starters as proof (to her) that microbes participate in brewing moments: “they’re listening, having fun with us.” satomi sees the welling up of shubo starters as a kind of response to the work song that the brewers perform. whether microbes are listening or not is beside the point (for we would not be able to confirm or deny it in any case); these brewers express a positioning and a desire to connect with microbes. 5.2. intraand extra-relationality: connections within and amidst beings attunement mobilizes a kind of communication that asks for participation beyond language and mimesis; rather, the exchange works because responses are as blues, r&b, and even rock ’n’ roll.) while there is (rather egregious) speculation on whether the work songs of oppressed laborers were performed as a defiant or a commiserating gesture, the feeling of the song is secondary to the fact that the song is “as much about ‘being’ and ‘doing’ as about feeling” (gioia 2006, 57). i do not mean to detract from the emotional weight of dealing with exploitation or to even justify the song’s efficacy as a tool, but i do mean to call attention to the fact that field work, as group work, was carried by way of song. 8 see the work of katie king (2015) on this matter, who builds on the research of gregory bateson (1987, 185) and play’s ability to meta-communicate about relationality. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 mediated through the embodied senses. or, as willett notes, the relational quality of interspecies attunement might be conveyed in the form of vitality affects (a term coined by daniel stern), which includes experiences, like cooing or crescendo, whose intensities may be nonverbal but are felt (willett 2014, 90). further, these intensities can convey a relational quality between communicators. in this sense, the exchanges between brewers and microbes remain incommensurate but nevertheless connect the communicators through the senses. that is, one’s senses become active agents in the sense-making process of attunement instead of being a passive receptor that notes incoming stimuli. here, i return to the materiality of the body and to it as a sense-making entity. as feminist new materialists note, the body is not “merely a passive transmitter of messages” but instead participates in the ongoing and vital processes (of gendering or racializing, for instance) that connect the material and the discursive (coole 2005, 128). in attunement, the body participates in call-and-response also through its production and reception of sensorial cues. it is through its corpo-reality that a body creates sensory information that is meaningful: “its very materiality plays an active role in the workings of power” (barad 2003, 809). beyond a degree of self-awareness, attuning bodies can create knowledge with and through embodiment. sense-making with the body enables brewers to attune to the sensory cues that microbes make, but registering the microbial calls as information worth attuning to underwrites the extra-relational connections amidst the brewers and microbes in an environment. brewers frequently and confidently spoke of the endogenous microbes who live inside the brewhouse, and their repeated enunciations made it seem as though microbial invisibility was circumstance instead of a limitation of the human eye. importantly, brewers make note of microbial presence not as mono (or things) but as koto, which shiho satsuka (2015, 81) translates to mean “events” and “about-ness” of a thing. one particular refrain i heard from the brewers was kin wa tsune ni iru, or “microbes are always present.” they use the verb “iru,” which is used to describe the presence of an alive being, instead of “aru,” which is the verb for objects to exist. their use of the alive version of to be present (iru) might suggest that the brewers consider microbes to be inseparable phenomena from their own brewerly existence, not a microbial object that is separate from them. microbes inform the brewers’ sense of self (as a brewer) and their sense of group work (as brewers) that animates the brewing environment. these layered forms of embodied relationality help brewers cultivate response-ability, wherein rendering their bodies capable of response to microbial life enables them to practice a kind of multispecies and collectivized ethic. the brewers’ tasks are not completed alone but always in concert with multiple scales of life, relying on attuning their bodies to the inter-, intra-, and extra-relational connections feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 between beings, within a being, and amidst other beings, respectively. in this sense, attunement provides a mechanism for working with—not on—microbial life. working with microbial invisibility calls upon the brewers to practice an array of epistemologies to ascertain which microbes come to matter in brewing. first, proprioception enables a spatial epistemology because the sense of self in space informs both an embodied and an emplaced way of knowing. second, the sensory modalities like touch and smell allow for an embodied epistemology to participate in the happenings of more-than-human sociality. third, the recurring encounters of fermentation give brewers the opportunity to engage with microbes on a more-thanhuman temporal scale. the metaphysics of engaging with a fermenting body involves multiple ways of knowing, on social, spatial, and temporal scales; in turn, these epistemologies grant brewers a way of “knowing” microbes before they become affixed in the ontological categories of good/bad, helpful/harmful, friendly/unfriendly.9 the relationality does not precede the encounter; that is, it is only through encounter that microbes become what they are: an unruly force in fermentation to which brewers attempt to cultivate the ability to respond. thus, response-ability is an ethical stance committed to ontological indeterminacy that then gets enacted and actualized through bodily attunement. 6. attunement as a way to participate in multispecies communications attunement helps the brewers practice a form of response-ability such that sensing the multisensorial and multiscalar cues of microbial call-and-response keeps the brewers’ bodies receptive to other forms of communication and response. to heed and respond is an inter-subjective process. we come into being through responses with others, in what haraway calls a game of “response and respect” where the term respicere evokes the etymology of looking back (i.e., re-spect) with regard (haraway 2008, 19). attentiveness is the mechanism for response and respect. to use anna tsing’s (2015, 22) turn of phrase, the arts of noticing call upon the “patterns” and “rhythms” of multispecies assemblages “to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds.” taken further, this kind of noticing of others (including other species) leads to an expanded understanding of who we ought to include in multispecies ethics: “the cultivation of skills for both paying attention to others and meaningfully responding . . . is concerned with the politics and ethics of how we might come to know others” (van dooren, kirksey, and münster 2016, 6; emphasis added). our responsibility (or, response-ability) in multispecies worlds is 9 see also the work of astrid schrader (2010) and jacob metcalf (2008) on this point of not overdetermining the ontology of microbial and companion species, respectively. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 both an interpellation and a mandate: we depend on multispecies worlds but may not know how best to respond in them. communicating with multispecies others requires us to go beyond making sense of them to making sense with them. to do so, one must find ways to participate in the calls and responses already underway and make contact: “to claim not to be able to communicate with and to know one another and other critters, however imperfectly, is a denial of mortal entanglements (the open) for which we are responsible and in which we respond” (haraway 2008, 226). if we are to excuse ourselves on the basis of incomprehensibility, our absolution would be a call unto itself. it would be a call of disengagement, an unwillingness, a forfeit, a giving into the trouble and still expecting some outside force to reconcile the differences for us. since the human-microbe relationship is an entanglement that we cannot opt out of, their incomprehensibility does not absolve us from how (we ought) to participate in embodied and emplaced ways. we will need to find ways to insert ourselves in the ongoing calls-and-responses already underway. in particular, microbial life has been difficult to imagine as an entity worth attuning to, or if so, it is often within the context of a microbiome craze and a healthist attention to optimizing individual health projects (hey 2020). this stems from a larger philosophical irreconcilability wherein microbes are disregarded because they are not “big like us” (hird 2009, 21) or have remained invisible to the unaided eye until ‘discovered’ in the context of disease and decay (latour 1988). even in the contemporary context of probiotic ‘care’ for microbial thriving, “the most generous acts of interspecies care expressed in rewilding remain premised on securing the health of the human body” (lorimer 2017, 38). the goal for living and working with microbial life is not to leverage their alterity as a pathos-centric argument that one ought to care about microbial wellbeing (see willett, 2014, 9). beyond the fact that microbes may not have the affective pull of a panda or baby seal, their invisibility keeps them out of sight and out of the human imaginary when we do not have a say in our imbricated corporeality. microbes comprise the very means of our staying alive and in ongoing encounters with every eating event. fermentation acutely makes these multiplicitous ecologies noticeable and noteworthy. we can no longer afford to bracket “the human” as a standalone unit of philosophical analysis, for “to be human” is to be multiple, and our coevolution demonstrates the ongoing call-and-response involving multiple scales of life. recall that the mitochondria of our cells were once bacteria (margulis 1998). the proteins enabling nutrient transfer in mammalian placentas were once viruses (lowe 2017, 94). we humans are living proof of mergers that prevailed, and we will need to anticipate future ones. we would do well to heed the advice of katherine hayles (1999, 285) who, in theorizing the posthuman, invites us to imagine “opening up new ways of thinking about what being human means.” rather than think of the human as an feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 exceptional and bound being, it may be best to think of our bodies as porous (beyond fluids, as past feminist thinkers have argued) and include our engagements with microbial life as a millennia-long improvisation of trying to get on with one another. darwin got it wrong: trying to outlive the other and survive has only imposed the constraints of a mythological antagonism.10 given that our bodies have never been solely human, we would do well to reimagine our responsibility as being extended beyond the borders of our gut lining and skin. building on the findings of microbiome research, heldke (2018, 248; emphasis added) argues that the relational self is actually a collective self, defined by “the way in which the individual is constituted through relationships with humans and other macrolevel creatures.” this nested and co-constituted way of thinking of the self complicates what it means to be a human individual and an unbound, multispecies self. we have always been co-constituted, coevolving on a biotemporal scale, but the metaphysics have yet to catch up on any commitment to coresponsibility.11 we will continue encountering microbial life whether we want to or not because our lives are tangled in mundane acts of eating, cooking, and cleaning, or in more specialized encounters of fermenting, farming, and immunizing. we cannot ask microbes to stop killing us and expect them to do anything of the sort, no more than we can apprehend their saying the same to us. and yet, this happens all of the time. we will need to rewrite what is meant by multispecies communication, responseability, and the metaphysics of both. what are we saying, and how do we know those messages are received? attunement asks us to reconfigure and transform how we think and act within these invisible relationscapes. instead of trying to reconcile the scalar difference of individual versus collective ethics, we would do well to imagine the differential vulnerabilities within a collective that place higher risks upon certain individuals— whether that is at a human scale, a microbial scale, or an environmental scale. as shotwell (2016, 111) concedes, there is an ultimate contradiction with moral formation on an individual level that cannot be scalable to a collective because of the presumed substitutability between scalable phenomena. congruent with concerns about our health, safety, and sustainability as issues that affect us all, and some more 10 that said, i do not want to swing the pendulum to the other extreme either. we are not guaranteed a mutualistic relationship either. like lisa heldke’s (2018) elaboration on parasitism at the end of her article “it’s chomping all the way down,” i argue that we would benefit from fleshing out the politics of use and do away with the rosy outlook of symbiosis. 11 a notable exception would be the work of lisa heldke, who coined the term “coresponsible option” in 1992. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 disproportionately, i echo shotwell’s (2016, 132) call “to work collectively towards a more collective and relational form of ethics adequate to the global and systemic crises we face.” it matters how we practice being human in the face of ongoing disasters, and these are not only feminist concerns. 7. final thoughts food mediates relations because its hands-on material practices ask us to engage our bodies in different ways. i have described fermentation practices that connect humans and microbes, and i have elaborated on how our bodies come to know them. but the same could be said for other food practices. in eating practices, food mediates how we nourish our co-constitutive bodies, and our bodies come to know food through ingestion. in agricultural practices, food mediates how we cultivate the land, and our bodies come to know food through participating in economic and ecological systems. in cooking practices, food mediates how we develop biosocial bonds, and our bodies come to know food through gatherings and rituals. as such, the practices of food are interepistemic ones, in which how we come to know our foods (in taste), our bodies (in health), and our place in society (in positionality) makes up who we are, as individuals and as collectivities. i have elaborated on attunement as one form of epistemic knowing because it asks the human brewers to engage on multiple scales: (1) attuning on a social scale of humans, (2) on a spatial scale of humans and microbes, and (3) on a temporal scale of microbes. this multiscalar approach to knowing demands an attention to the precise configuration and modes of connectivity, and it is this specificity that prevents unitary claims about who “we” are or how we “ought” to be. specificity also pushes against the erasure of the relativistic notion that “anything goes.” in cultivating an awareness for oneself and an attentiveness towards others, i have proposed ways to theorize and practice living with one another while holding onto our differences. fermentation mediates relations across human and microbial bodies such that it is emergent and participatory. sake brewing is a deeply embodied activity and greater than the sum of its individual parts, and the success of the brewery is predicated on brewers who attune their bodies to more-than-human cues in a microbial call-and-response. by thinking of food-making in this way, bodies emerge as an active carrier and performer of food-knowledge. crucial to fermentation is the concept of attunement, a way of simultaneously tuning to one’s physical senses, the social periphery, and the more-than-human entities that collectively transform foods. it is a corporeal phenomenon as much as it is a philosophical approach to working with others we may not easily see or sense. as an embodied epistemology, attunement means listening with multiple senses. it means comparing and compiling one’s sensory stimuli (in an instance of intra-relationality), tuning into each other (inter-relationality), and tuning to the ambient environment (extra-relationality). i feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 have argued that attunement may be one way to imagine and approach cultivating a collective ethic that includes multispecies others. thinking about food-making as an attuned, response-able venture can help us reimagine collective ethics across species and across multiple scales of life. acknowledgements my immense gratitude to the editorial staff and the anonymous reviewers of feminist philosophy quarterly who have been exemplars of academic kindness and patience when the world heaved through a pandemic. references alaimo, stacy, and susan hekman, eds. 2008. material feminisms. bloomington: indiana university press. bateson, gregory. 1987. steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. northvale, nj: jason aronson publishers. barad, karen. 2003. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28, no. 3 (spring): 801–31. ———. 2007. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press. braidotti, rosi. 2002. metamorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming. cambridge: polity press. coole, diana. 2005. “rethinking agency: a phenomenological approach to embodiment and agentic capacities.” political studies 53 (1): 124–42. gioia, ted. 2006. work songs. durham, nc: duke university press. grosz, elizabeth. 1994. volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. bloomington: indiana university press. haraway, donna j. 1999. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge. ———. 2008. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hayles, n. katherine. 1999. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press. heldke, lisa. 2012. “an alternative ontology of food: beyond meataphysics.” radical philosophy review 15 (1): 67–88. ———. 2018. “it’s chomping all the way down: toward an ontology of the human individual.” monist 101 (3): 247–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/ony004. hey – attunement and multispecies communication in fermentation published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 hey, maya. 2019. “fermenting communications: fermentation praxis as interspecies communication.” in “interspecies communication,” edited by meredith tromble and patricia olynyk. special issue, public 59: 149–57. ———. 2020. “against healthist fermentation.” journal of critical dietetics 5 (1): 12– 22. https://doi.org/10.32920/cd.v5i1.1334. hird, myra j. 2009. the origins of sociable life: evolution after science studies. new york: palgrave macmillan. king, katie. 2015. “my distributed tranimalities @sltranimal.blogspot.com.” transgender studies quarterly 2, no. 2 (may): 280–96. https://doi.org/10.1215 /23289252-2867596. kirksey, s. eben, and stefan helmreich. 2010. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25, no. 4 (november): 545–76. latour, bruno. 1988. the pasteurization of france. translated by alan sheridan and john law. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lorimer, jamie. 2017. “probiotic environmentalities: rewilding with wolves and worms.” theory, culture & society 34, no. 4 (july): 27–48. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0263276417695866. lowe, celia. 2017. “viral ethnography: metaphors for writing life.” in “troubling species: care and belonging in a relational world,” edited by the multispecies editing collective, rcc perspectives: transformations in environment and society 2017 (1): 91–96. margulis, lynn. 1998. symbiotic planet: a new look at evolution. new york: basic books. metcalf, jacob. 2008. “intimacy without proximity: encountering grizzlies as companion species.” environmental philosophy 5, no. 2 (fall): 99–128. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20085212. pink, sarah. 2009. doing sensory ethnography. london: sage. rose, deborah bird, thom van dooren, matthew chrulew, stuart cooke, matthew kearnes, and emily o’gorman. 2012. “thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities.” environmental humanities 1 (1): 1–5. satsuka, shiho. 2015. nature in translation: japanese tourism encounters in the canadian rockies. durham, nc: duke university press. schrader, astrid. 2010. “responding to pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer): phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology.” social studies of science 40 (2): 275–306. https://doi.org/10 .1177/0306312709344902. sender, ron, shai fuchs, and ron milo. 2016. “revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body.” plos biology 14 (8): e1002533. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 shotwell, alexis. 2016. against purity: living ethically in compromised times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. skeggs, beverley. 2001. “feminist ethnography.” in handbook of ethnography, edited by paul atkinson, amanda coffey, sara delamont, john lofland, and lyn lofland, 426–42. london: sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608337. stoller, paul. 1997. the taste of ethnographic things: the senses in anthropology. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. terada, keisuke. 2007. hakkodo: the path of fermentation. [in japanese.] mitaka, tokyo: kawade publishing. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. 2015. the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, nj: princeton university press. van dooren, thom, eben kirksey, and ursula münster. 2016. “multispecies studies: cultivating arts of attentiveness.” environmental humanities 8, no. 1 (may): 1–23. willett, cynthia. 2014. interspecies ethics. new york: columbia university press. maya hey is a vanier scholar (social sciences and humanities research council, government of canada) and phd candidate (communication studies, abd) at concordia university. prior to her doctorate, maya garnered over 15 years of work experience spanning chemistry labs, culinary kitchens, organic farms, and commercial food markets, where she has facilitated many discussions about contemporary food issues. as a public scholar committed to making food knowledge accessible, she has developed an array of collaborative projects with audiences ranging from preschoolers to health professionals. 10846 hey title page 10846 hey final format gender as a self-conferred identity feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation real, michael. 2022. “gender as a self-conferred identity.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (2). article 3. 2022 gender as a self-conferred identity michael rea university of notre dame michael.rea2@gmail.com rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 gender as a self-conferred identity michael rea abstract this paper develops and defends the view that gender is an identity that we confer upon ourselves. the claim that gender is a self-conferred identity is not novel, but its metaphysics is obscure at best. what exactly is an identity, and how do we manage to confer identities upon ourselves? furthermore, how does the claim that gender is a self-conferred identity comport with the widely accepted notion that gender is also a social identity and that social identities are (at least partly) either conferred upon us by others or constituted by the social positions we occupy? this paper articulates a metaphysics for the self-conferred-identity account that addresses these questions. the most important advantage of the view is that, in contrast to other realist theories about the metaphysics of gender, this one transparently offers a basis for assigning first-person authority to people’s judgments about their own gender. keywords: gender, identity, narrative, self, conferralism, social identity, social ontology in recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the metaphysics of gender, and a proliferation of different views about the nature of gender and what (if anything) determines one’s gender attributes—most saliently, the two dominant gender attributes, being a woman and being a man. broadly speaking, these views can be organized in accord with their answers to the following four questions: (i) are gender attributes real? (ii) are gender attributes essences, or natures of anything? (iii) are gender attributes socially constructed? (iv) by virtue of what does a person belong to a gender category? is it, for example, a matter of having a certain kind of body, occupying a certain social position, having a particular behavioral and characterological profile, having a certain belief or cluster of beliefs about oneself, or something else? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 the question of what determines the application conditions for gender terms (“man” and “woman” most saliently) is closely related to these and has also received a lot of attention. but as elizabeth barnes (2020) has persuasively argued, there is no reason to expect that a metaphysics of gender will necessarily settle the application conditions for gender terms. accordingly, i will leave the linguistic question aside in what follows. in this paper, i develop and defend the view that gender is an identity (in a sense to be explained later) that we confer upon ourselves. as i shall explain in what follows, this “self-conferred identity” (henceforth, “sci”) account is a view according to which genders are real but are not essences or natures of anything; genders are socially constructed; and—for the most part, but with some exceptions to be explained later—one belongs to a gender category just if that gender is included in what i shall call a person’s “autobiographical identity.” it is, in other words, a realist, social constructionist, antiessentialist theory of gender.1 its most important advantage is that, in contrast to other realist theories about the metaphysics of gender (essentialist and antiessentialist alike), this one transparently offers a basis for assigning both epistemic and ethical first-person authority to people’s judgments about their own gender.2 accordingly, to the extent that it can be adequately 1 realism is commonly characterized with reference to “mind-independence” in such a way that what is real contrasts almost by definition with what is socially constructed. for this reason, “realist, social constructionist” may sound oxymoronic to some. but especially in the literature on social metaphysics, there has lately been resistance to the idea that realism contrasts with social constructionism. (see, e.g., mallon [2016, 137–61] for detailed discussion of this issue, and for a helpful distinction between different kinds of “mind-dependence” and correspondingly different kinds of constructionism.) for purposes here, a theory of gender qualifies as realist just in case it treats gender as a real, genuine attribute of things rather than (say) a pretended or in some other way fictional attribute. thus, social constructionist views of gender can be realist theories of gender, whereas eliminativist and fictionalist theories of gender cannot be. 2 s’s gender judgments have epistemic first-person authority just if s’s judgments about s’s gender are epistemically privileged over third-party judgments. they have ethical first-person authority just if it is ethically inappropriate for third parties to attribute to s a different gender from what s attributes to themselves. (see bettcher [2009] on this distinction.) to my knowledge, the only other metaphysical theory of gender that manifestly grants epistemic first-person authority to gender judgments is heather logue’s (forthcoming) fictionalist theory of gender; but whatever its merits might be, that is (obviously) not a realist theory. bettcher (2009) claims only ethical first-person authority for gender judgments; and likewise, katharine jenkins (2018) rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 developed and defended, it will have claim to being the most accommodating of trans and nonbinary gender identities. the claim that gender is a self-conferred identity is not novel. it is currently the dominant understanding of gender in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and it is rapidly acquiring the status of “common sense” in certain important demographics. but its metaphysics is obscure at best. what exactly is an identity, and how do we manage to confer identities upon ourselves? furthermore, how does the claim that gender is a self-conferred identity comport with the widely accepted notion that gender is also a social identity and that social identities are (at least partly) either conferred upon us by others or constituted by the social positions we occupy?3 my goal in this paper is to articulate a metaphysics for the sci account that addresses these questions. in doing this, i take myself not to be providing a novel “ameliorative” account of gender but rather to be fleshing out and lending support to an already widely accepted thesis about gender by providing an adequate metaphysical underpinning for it. my plan is as follows. i will begin by offering an account of what it means to say that gender is an identity, and then i will go on to explain both how we confer it upon ourselves and why we enjoy first-person authority with respect to judgments about our own gender. i will conclude by explaining why, despite appearances to the contrary, i think the sci account qualifies as a social constructionist view, and by noting points of similarity and contrast between the sci account and nearby alternative views in the literature. it will emerge in the section that develops the view that there is an important connection between the identities we confer upon ourselves and the narratives we have about ourselves. although i will not develop this point beyond simply noting it here, i take it that the connection between the sci account and the idea that identities are narratively constituted offers at least one further advantage to the view—namely, it can explain important aspects of gender oppression in terms of what hilde lindemann nelson (2001) calls “infiltrated consciousness.” identity and self-conferral in metaphysics, the term “identity” is most often used to invoke the concept of numerical identity. but here i want to work with two different notions of identity, one of which is prevalent in the philosophical literature on narrative identity and in the psychological literature on identity and identity development, and the other of acknowledges that the norm-relevancy account of gender identity developed in her work (jenkins 2016, 2018) accords only ethical first-person authority to gender judgments. 3 see ásta (2018) and haslanger (2000). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 which is prevalent in social metaphysics and related fields. in the relevant psychological literature, an identity seems just to be a mental construct of some sort—perhaps a representation or concept of oneself, or an internalized narrative about oneself—that brings “a sense of coherence and integration to one’s life, allowing [one] to perceive a sense of continuity through time” (mclean 2015, 19). in social metaphysics and related fields, an identity seems just to be (very roughly) something central about who a person is.4 for example, i am a tennis player, but being a tennis player is not really an “identity” of mine in this latter sense because it is not all that central to who i am. by contrast, the attributes that place me in specific professional, racial, and religious categories are identities of mine. these categorymemberships are quite central to who i am (regardless of whether i want them to be), and so likewise for most, even if not necessarily all, people. to help keep these two notions distinct, let us call the first kind of identity a representational identity, and let us call the second kind of identity a social identity. my claim in this paper is that (unlike most other social identities), gender is a selfconferred identity in both senses. thus, it is a self-conferred representational identity and a self-conferred social identity. but what is self-conferral? and how is it related to mere self-attribution? most of our social identities are ones we acquire by resembling or differing from other people in salient ways, by being perceived or understood in certain ways, by standing in particular relationships to social structures and institutions, by interacting with our environment in certain ways, or by some complex combination of such factors. for example, having a religious identity is, for most people, at least partly a result of personal choice, but in many cases, it also depends to some extent on one’s relationship to the institutional structure of the religious tradition and perhaps also on the perceptions or beliefs of certain religious authorities. conversion to catholicism, for example, requires not only a personal decision but also a willing individual to perform the sacrament of baptism. likewise, on some of the most influential accounts of disability, being disabled doesn’t depend solely on features of one’s own body, but on various relational facts, such as the statistical differences between one’s own body and the bodies of others in larger society, or the wide variety of social factors that explain why people sharing one’s own particular differences have reduced access to public spaces, certain kinds of jobs, or other social goods. 4 i do not mean to suggest that the facts about what is most central to a person are somehow out there in the world independently of anyone’s subjective interests or of different people’s conceptions of the person. on the contrary, i am inclined to suppose that all facts about what is most central to a person—what count as their most central values, desires, and so on—are relativized to different conceptions (or, as i’ll put it below, interpretations) of the person. rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 when the beliefs and judgments of others are not only salient in determining whether one has a particular social identity but are more salient than one’s own beliefs and judgments, it is natural to say that the identity in question is conferred by others. being one of the popular kids, for example, is plausibly like this. even if one’s own personal choices—like one’s decisions about what to wear, what activities to participate in, and so on—make a significant difference in whether one is popular, ultimately it is the judgments of others that are most salient to enjoying that status. by contrast, where one’s own choices both partly determine whether one has the identity and are more salient than the beliefs and judgments of others, the identity is self-conferred. being an atheist and being a star wars fan are plausibly like this. obviously, then, self-conferral is different from mere self-attribution. sadly, no amount of attributing to myself the property of being a guitar player whose skill rivals that of eddie van halen will manage to confer that property upon me. attributing a property to oneself is simply a matter of representing oneself (by way of belief or some form of nondoxastic mental representation) as having the property. by contrast, conferring a property upon oneself (or upon someone else) is a matter of doing something—perhaps simply holding certain kinds of beliefs, or perhaps doing something other than or in addition to believing certain things—that makes it the case that i have (or someone else has) the property. so this is what i mean when i say that gender is a self-conferred identity: (a) a person’s gender—or, in terminology that will emerge as important later in the paper, a person’s true gender—is at least partly dependent on human beliefs, decisions, or representations of who they are, and (b) one’s own beliefs, decisions, or representations are more salient in determining their gender than anyone else’s. that said, however, none of this tells us very much about what kind of thing an identity (representational or social) is, or about what exactly it takes for an identity to be conferred upon oneself. the remainder of this section focuses on the nature of identities. in the next section, borrowing in significant ways from ásta’s (2018) more general conferralist account of social properties, i take up the question of what it takes to confer gender upon oneself.5 for purposes here, i propose to understand a representational identity as a certain kind of representational content. in particular, and in accord with the characterization quoted from mclean above, it is the content of a representation that not only identifies salient attributes, social roles, and life events of the person being represented, but also contextualizes them, providing some clue as to their centrality 5 note, however, that in borrowing from ásta’s account in the ways that i do, and in characterizing (most) social properties as conferred upon us either by ourselves or by others, i do not mean to signal general agreement with ásta’s conferralist account. see rea and vankammen (2021) for a variety of objections against ásta’s account. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 and significance to the person being represented, to those doing the representing, or to the various communities to which the represented or representing individual(s) belong. on this way of thinking, a representational identity is a kind of interpretation of a person or of the events known to be part of a person’s life. it is, furthermore, an interpretation that captures something central about who a person is in the eyes of whoever is doing the interpreting, since otherwise it is hard to see how it could play the sort of unifying, integrating, and contextualizing roles described above. we can distinguish (at least) two kinds of representational identity: autobiographical identities and social-representational (sr-) identities. an autobiographical identity captures the central elements of who one is to oneself, as it were, whereas a social-representational identity captures a central part of who a person is to others. an autobiographical identity is most plausibly identified with some portion of a person’s most all-inclusive self-representation—what we think of commonsensically as their “self-conception,” and what i have elsewhere (rea forthcoming; following ismael 2016, ch. 3) called their autobiographical point of view. in particular, a person’s autobiographical identity is the content of the most comprehensive portion of their total self-conception that plays exactly the sort of unifying, self-interpretive role described in the preceding paragraph. an sr-identity, by contrast, is not plausibly identified with a portion of their own self-conception. this is because a person’s self-conception can fail— catastrophically, even—to represent who they are to others. the autobiographical identity of an alcoholic, for example, might well represent them as a reliable coworker, a reasonable parent and romantic partner, and a person with excellent selfcontrol, whereas who they are to others might be quite the opposite. accordingly, an sr-identity is more plausibly identified with the content of what we might call a “collective representation” on the part of others that plays a similarly unifying, integrating role in a (presumably tacit) broader collective representation of who we are. i have no account of collective representation to offer, but i can at least say that the notion should not be understood as necessarily implying the existence of anything like a group mind in which the representation is instantiated. rather, it should be understood in accord with whatever one takes to be the best account of collective belief or collective intention. perhaps such collective “mental states” are best understood as emergent properties of a kind of group mind, or perhaps instead they are best understood reductively. i do not want to take a stand on the metaphysics of (alleged) collective mental states; but i do want to assume, as seems quite plausible, that talk of collective representation makes sense and can be understood along the same lines.6 6 a referee points out that the notions of collective belief and collective intention are not unproblematic, and so we can expect an account of collective representation to rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 as might be guessed from the labeling, there is a close connection between sr-identities as i understand them, and social identities. an attribute is a social identity of x’s in a context c just in case it is among the interpretively significant social attributes included in x’s sr-identity in c. obviously this allows for variation across contexts not only in what social identities a person has but also in what sorts of attributes count as social identities. this allowance will surely be controversial, but i think it is the right result. to take just one example: in a society that does not recognize racial distinctions, it seems correct to say that race is not a social identity— and this regardless of whether race is in fact a real attribute. one might object that this way of understanding social identities yields the wrong results in some cases. in the batman fiction, for example, one might well doubt that bruce wayne has being a superhero as one of his social identities, and this despite the fact that being a superhero is a central and socially significant attribute in the largest collective representation of the man who is bruce wayne, and one that will (apparently) play the sort of unifying, integrative role in the collective understanding of him that a social identity is supposed to play. so it might seem that the present account of social identity is on the wrong track. but in fact i think this objection can be addressed by attending to a distinction between de re and de dicto representational content. in general, it seems we can distinguish between what a representation of an object o directly attributes to o on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what sentences about o the representation represents (explicitly or tacitly) as being true. the former is what i have in mind when i talk about de re representational content; the latter is what i have in mind when i be similarly troublesome. perhaps, then, we would do better (as the referee suggests) to develop an account in terms of a notion like “common knowledge”? (see mallon [2016, 258ff], following lewis’s [1969] understanding of that notion.) perhaps, but i am doubtful. in my view, the notion of common knowledge as mallon understands it is not well-suited to the present purpose. what is needed for present purposes is a notion of representation within a group that allows for the attribution of the representation to the entire group even in cases where some members of the group are not themselves hosting that representation. (e.g., perhaps the representation is a belief shared by most members of the group but not all of them.) absent this allowance, the list of social identities attributable to any given person will be objectionably thin. the concepts of collective representation and belief allow for such possibilities, though it is admittedly difficult to accommodate them in a precise and plausible theory of collective belief or representation. but the concept of common knowledge as mallon understands it does not make any such allowance. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 talk about de dicto representational content.7 applied to the batman/bruce wayne case, it seems clear that the attribute of being both bruce wayne and a superhero is not included in the de dicto content of the collective representation (in the batman fiction) of the man who is both batman and bruce wayne. for, after all, virtually nobody in the batman universe would affirm the sentence, “bruce wayne is a superhero”; and this is why it seems that being a superhero is not among his social identities. but being a superhero is clearly part of the de re content of the collective representation of that man, as is being a wealthy nonsuperhero.8 that is, even though nothing in the collective representation of bruce wayne represents as true the sentence “bruce wayne is a superhero,” the content of that collective representation does represent the man himself as a superhero under the guise of batman and as a wealthy nonsuperhero under the guise of bruce wayne. thus, the response i propose to the objection is that what contributes to an attribute’s being a social identity of a person is not its being part of the de dicto representational content of a collective representation of the person, but rather it’s being part of the de re content of such a representation. being a superhero is, on this account, a social identity of the man bruce wayne because that attribute is a central part of who he himself is to many people, even if almost none of them know that the batman persona is one of his own personae. in sum, then, i am offering the following account of what it is to have an attribute as a social identity. whereas a person’s autobiographical identity is an internalized, self-interpretive representation of themselves that is focused on the attributes that play a central, unifying role in their own total self-conception, a socialrepresentational identity of a person is an external, interpretive representation of them that is focused on one or more of their socially significant attributes. an attribute is a social identity of the person in a context just if it is one of the focal 7 a referee has objected that “representations are inherently de re.” this seems not quite right to me—cf. “the semantically de re/de dicto distinction” described by michael nelson (2019). but, be that as it may, i recognize that the notion of “de dicto representational content” might at least sound rather odd. what matters to me, though, is not so much the terminology as the distinction i have just drawn here, which seems not at all odd and, in the present context, is importantly helpful. 8 a referee raises an objection that seems to suggest that those who represent batman in this way—as both being a superhero and not being a superhero—will have inconsistent beliefs about the man. but this doesn’t follow, and for familiar reasons. although they believe of batman/bruce wayne that he is a superhero and that he is not a superhero, they do not believe of anyone that they are both a superhero and a nonsuperhero, nor would they affirm any sentence that implies as much. rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 attributes their sr-identity in that context.9 people share a social identity in a context just when there is overlap in their socially significant attributes and when their sridentities in that context reflect the same interpretation of those attributes. for the most part, social identities will be relatively simple, socially salient attributes like gender, race, professional identity, religious identity, and the like; but in some cases, they may be highly complex attributes of the sort we are inclined to describe as fullblown personae (as in the case of the batman persona). one welcome consequence of this way of thinking about social identity is that it accommodates the commonly held view that at least some social identities change from context to context. on social-position accounts of race, gender, and disability, for example, whether one counts as disabled, black, or a woman might well vary from context to context. the present account of social identities allows for this by virtue of allowing that, among the many different collective representations of a person that exist in the world, the one most salient for determining a particular social identity is just the one tied to the context that our preferred account of the identity in question specifies as most salient. however, an initial concern with the account i have offered is that it is singularly ill-suited to accomplish the task i have set for it in this paper—namely, to support the idea that gender is a self-conferred identity. the reason is that, as i said at the outset of this section, our self-conception can diverge from who we are to others; and so it would seem that, on the present account, if our gender is a social identity, and is therefore a part of who we are to others, there is no particular reason to think that our gender would have to conform to our own conception of our gender. i take up this concern in the next section. gender as self-conferred we do not unilaterally confer social identities upon ourselves (although we might contribute to their conferral by being part of the group whose collective representation of us is salient for conferring one or more of our social identities). this is both intrinsically plausible and a straightforward consequence of the account of social identity offered in the previous section. however, i maintain that gender is a social identity; gender is self-conferred; and furthermore, we have first-person authority over our gender. how can this be coherent? the answer is to draw a distinction between social gender, which is a social identity conferred upon a person in a social context by their sr-identity in that 9 this view bears some affinity with ásta's (2018, ch. 6) account of social identities as locations on a social map. see also my recent article, “the metaphysics of the narrative self” (rea forthcoming) for fuller treatment of the metaphysics of narrative identities and selves. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 context,10 and autobiographical gender, which is both self-conferred and part of one’s total autobiographical identity.11 obviously this view allows that one’s social gender might differ from one’s autobiographical gender, and this, in turn, raises the question of which (if either) identity is “privileged”—or which counts as one’s real or true gender identity—when there is conflict between the two. one possibility is that everyone has (at least) two gender identities, their social gender and their autobiographical gender, and neither is any more “true” to who they really are than the other one. given my interest in developing a realist account that preserves firstperson authority over judgments about one’s own gender, however, it should come as no surprise that i reject this possibility, arguing instead that autobiographical gender is privileged in the sense that one’s true gender is one’s autobiographical gender.12 accordingly, on the view that i shall defend, gender simpliciter is to be identified with autobiographical gender and a person’s social gender in a context reduces to facts about the (perhaps accurate, perhaps inaccurate) collective representation of the person in that context. before turning to that defense, however, i want to address two preliminary objections. first, one might object that if what i am calling “social gender” simply reduces to facts about collective representation, then it doesn’t really deserve to be described as a kind of gender. we should instead just say that it is a collective attribution, or misattribution, of gender to an individual by others. second, one might worry that what i say below could successfully be adapted to establish that one has 10 i have no theory about how, or under what conditions, a group of people with divergent individual representations of a person’s gender will manage to collectively represent them as being of one particular gender, but presumably this will work in much the same way as collective belief in cases where there is a lack of unanimity at the level of individual belief. 11 the distinction between social gender and autobiographical gender bears some resemblance to katharine jenkins’s (2016) distinction between “gender as class” and “gender as identity.” however, insofar as her conception of gender as class is modeled on haslanger’s (2000) social-position account of gender, it is both narrower and less determined by collective representations than social gender as i conceive of it. for discussion of how her account of gender identity differs from my own, see section 3 below. 12 i take it that one way to be an antirealist about gender is to suppose that there is no fact of the matter about what gender attribute(s) a person “really” has. thus, if it turns out that neither autobiographical gender nor social gender specifies a person’s true gender—and if those are the only candidates for being a person’s true gender— then realism about gender is false. rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 first-person authority over judgments about all of their social identities, including, for example, their racial identity. what shall i say about these concerns? i am not wedded to the label “social gender,” and i am already committed to the idea that real, true gender is not social gender; so there is little cost in simply conceding the first objection. doing so would require me to give up the claim that some real kind of gender is a social identity. but that is no big loss given that what i am calling “social gender” would remain a social identity, albeit under a different label. but insofar as what i am calling “social gender” very often aligns with real gender and, furthermore, typically has important gender-like social consequences, describing it, as i have, as a kind of gender seems entirely apt. as for the second concern, i think the worry is misplaced. on the view that i am developing, gender is not only a social identity but a representational identity; and, as shall emerge, it is its status as a representational identity that allows me to defend the claim that autobiographical gender is more authoritative than social gender. by contrast, race is not a representational identity, at least not according to either folk belief or the most prominent theories of race. both folk belief and the most prominent theories of race seem to agree that if race is real at all, it is determined by some combination of non-self-conferred attributes: facts about social position, ancestry, culture, or some combination of these or other non-self-conferred and nonrepresentational traits.13 nobody that i am aware of thinks that there is nothing more to race than the various ways in which a person is racially interpreted, which is, in effect, what i am claiming about gender. i turn now to defending the claim that autobiographical gender trumps social gender when it comes to determining a person’s true gender. philosophers and psychologists engaged in research on “the” self often distinguish between a person’s various superficial selves (one’s “public” and “private” selves, for example) and one’s true or real self, the self that corresponds to who the person really is (as contrasted with who they take themselves to be, who they present themselves as, or who others take them to be). prima facie, there is much to be said for identifying a person’s true self with their autobiographical self. ordinarily, each of us will have greater and deeper access than anyone else not only to facts about what we have done and experienced but also to facts about our inner life—for example, our beliefs, motivations, desires, and so on. for this reason, our autobiographical identity—the identity that captures who we are to ourselves—seems, in ordinary cases, to be a much better candidate for capturing who we really are than any other representation of who we are; and so the self that is characterized by our autobiographical identity will generally be the best candidate for being our true self. if this is right, then there 13 see, e.g., glasgow et al. 2019. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 is a clear sense in which our autobiographical identity is privileged over other representations of who we are. that said, however, it would be hasty to conclude simply on the basis of this that, whenever our autobiographical identity conflicts with other representations of us, the representation included in the autobiographical identity is authoritative. factual error, self-deception, lack of social awareness, persistent tendencies to overestimate or underestimate one’s own abilities or influence upon others, and so on are all common, widespread phenomena; and to the extent that we are susceptible to these, we will be unlikely to have a fully accurate conception of ourselves. narcissism, excessive humility, having a drug or alcohol problem, and being an abuser or predator of some kind or other, to name just a few examples, are all traits that may well characterize who a person really is, even if the person doesn’t explicitly believe such things about themselves. similarly, depending on what the correct accounts of identities like race or disability turn out to be, a person may have important social identities that they do not believe they have. cases like these provide at least prima facie reason for thinking that the authority of a person’s autobiographical identity is defeasible. the question is what kinds of conflicts with other representations of us, or with real world facts, result in such defeat. there are three main points i want to make on this topic. the first is that it doesn’t follow from the fact that a person has false beliefs about who they are that their autobiographical identity inaccurately represents who they are; and so it will not automatically follow from the fact that (say) a narcissist believes she is not a narcissist that her autobiographical identity does not (authoritatively) represent her as a narcissist. this is most easily seen by attending to fiction. a novel written in the firstperson can easily portray its protagonist as a narcissist, as subject to self-deception, as excessively humble, and so forth while at the same time portraying the protagonist as being unaware that they have such attributes. likewise for nonfiction autobiographies. in the first case, it is true in the fiction, even though it is not explicit in the fiction, that the protagonist is a narcissist, self-deceived, or whatever; and we can cash this out in terms of whatever theory of truth in fiction ultimately seems best to us. although autobiography is (typically) not fiction, it seems that truth in autobiography will work in much the same way as truth in fiction. so just as what is true in a fiction need not coincide either with what is in fact true or with what the author believes to be true, so likewise what is true in someone’s autobiography need not coincide with what is in fact true or with what the author believes to be true. thus, there is no reason to doubt that one’s true self can be characterized by attributes that one does not recognize in oneself or might even explicitly deny of oneself. consider again the alcoholic in denial: in the typical case, such a person possesses evidence that defeats the rationality of their explicit belief that they are not an alcoholic—this is why we say they are in denial rather than simply saying they are rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 unaware of their alcoholism. they know, on some level, how much they drink; they are aware, on some level, of their own struggles with self-control, followed by outright failures or implausible rationalizations; they are aware on some level, of negative comments and nonverbal social cues from friends and family, and of their own defensive reactions or rationalizing explanations that prop up their belief that they are somehow being misunderstood or persecuted by their friends and family; and so on. and, of course, in the typical case, all of this defeating evidence will be included in their autobiographical identity. thus, we can say that the identity remains authoritative with respect to who they are, even if their explicit self-affirmations lack such authority. alternatively, imagine someone who has a deviant concept of race and, on that basis, sincerely identifies as black even though virtually everyone else would identify them as white. suppose, for example, they think that it is sufficient for being black that a person have at least one ancestor, however distant, who was born in africa and had dark skin and, furthermore, they think that the first human beings emerged in africa and had dark skin (so that literally everyone now counts as black). imagine also that their understanding of race is developed well enough to be at least coherent, and that, due to social isolation or other factors, they have never encountered evidence against it or evidence that it is deviant. this is, to be sure, a fanciful case; but it is meant just to be a hypothetical case where a person’s autobiographical identity (a) represents them as having a social identity they clearly lack, (b) includes no clearly defeating counterevidence (as in the case of the alcoholic), and (c) clearly lacks authority with respect to its representation of that social identity. the question is, why would this person’s autobiographical identity lack authority with respect to its representation of their race, and why wouldn’t that reason carry over to cases where one attributes to themselves a gender that most others in some particular context wouldn’t attribute to them? the answer, on the view of gender that i am developing, is that race, unlike gender, is not a representational identity. in other words, whatever exactly race amounts to, a person’s having a particular race involves more than someone’s (or some group’s) simply having a particular kind of interpretive representation of them. by contrast, a person’s gender, on the view i am developing, is fundamentally a matter of how they are interpreted—and, more fully, a matter of how their inner experience of themselves is interpreted. social gender is, in effect, a collective external interpretation of what the hosts of that interpretation presume on the basis of outward signs (behavior, anatomy, etc.) to be the person’s inner experience;14 14 is it plausible to say that those with transphobic views about gender are, in making their gender judgments, interpreting the inner self-experience of the trans people whose gender self-attributions they deny? insofar as they are talking about feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 autobiographical gender is a person’s own internal interpretation of their inner experience. but, of course, as a general rule, by virtue of our own privileged access to our own inner experience, all of us are prima facie in a better position to interpret our own inner experience than anyone else will be. this is why it makes sense to insist that, when it comes to determining a person’s real gender, their autobiographical identity is authoritative. at any rate, one’s autobiographical identity is prima facie authoritative with respect to their gender. but is that authority indefeasible? no, i don’t think that quite follows. for example, it is possible for a person to be mistaken about their possession of attributes that they themselves take to be relevant to gender assignment. suppose sam has congenital adrenal hyperplasia, has male-appearing genitalia, but is chromosomally xx. suppose further that sam both believes that chromosomal profile is determinative of gender and, being unaware of their own chromosomal profile, believes on the basis of their visible external genitalia that they are xy and this means they are necessarily a man. it is also in principle possible for a person to be confused about what genders are. borrowing an example from heather logue (forthcoming), suppose sam believes that pizza is a gender and declares their gender to be pizza.15 it seems to me that in both of these scenarios we should say that sam is genuinely mistaken or confused as to their gender. in the one case, they are mistaken (until puberty) about their possession of attributes they themselves take to be relevant to gender; in the other case, they are (probably) confused about what genders are.16 in gender, and not simply confusing gender with (presumed) “biological sex,” i think this is plausible. it is entirely common for such people to accuse trans persons of “pretending” or of “self-deception,” and both of these judgments reflect opinions about the inner self-experience of the people they are mistreating in this way. 15 logue herself borrows the example from reilly-cooper (2016). 16 i say “probably” because i want to leave room for conceptual change and corresponding new coinages. there are, in english, a bewildering variety of names for genders—for example, “astral gender,” “earth gender,” and “lunarian.” (see “list of uncommon nonbinary identities,” nonbinary wiki, https://nonbinary.miraheze .org/wiki/list_of_uncommon_nonbinary_identities, accessed on march 26, 2021.) i have no view about whether the people who have introduced these terms have successfully given them meaning as genuine conceptions of gender; but i am, at any rate, in no position to deny that they have. accordingly, i am in no position to deny that one could introduce “pizza gender” into the mix. in doing so, however, one would have to do something very different from simply asserting (again, presumably in confusion or in jest) that pizza is their gender. one would have to take a concept that is genuinely a concept of gender and somehow modify it so that it continues to be a concept of gender while coming to encompass a meaningful conception of rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 such cases, then, sam’s explicit affirmations about their own gender will lack firstperson authority. moreover, in the second case, where sam has a radically deviant concept of gender, what i want to say is not just that sam’s judgments about their own gender lack first-person authority, but that sam has failed to confer gender upon themselves at all. the reason is that even if our gender attributes are not socially determined, gender concepts are socially constructed. that is, the content of our gender concepts and their constitution as concepts of gender, rather than of something else, is partly determined by the nature and use of gender concepts in the broader communities of which we are a part. i think that this understanding of gender concepts is fairly intuitive and widely accepted; but for those who disagree, i am content just to leave it as an unargued-for stipulation of the sci account. let us return now to the question of what self-conferral involves. earlier i said that the self-conferral of gender is a matter of doing something that makes it the case that one has the gender that one has. in light of the foregoing, we can add the further claim that what one does to confer gender upon oneself is just to interpretively represent oneself as having that gender. we might flesh this out along roughly the same lines as ásta’s (2018) account of the conferral of social properties in general. according to ásta, a social property is conferred under certain conditions by attitudes or actions that consciously or unconsciously aim to track some underlying “base property.” for example, in the case of a strike in baseball, ásta says that being a strike is conferred by the declared beliefs of the umpire in the context of a baseball game; and the umpire’s beliefs aim to track the ball’s trajectory, the base property. in the case of gender, ásta thinks that gender properties are conferred in different contexts by the beliefs and attitudes of people who have what you might call the relevant kind of “social authority,” or (as ásta puts it) “standing” in that context—people who enjoy social dominance within the context, for example, or people who have a certain kind of institutional authority (e.g., doctors, judges, etc.).17 these beliefs and attitudes aim to track certain base properties of the individuals upon whom gender is conferred.18 pizza. i don’t know how this could be done, but neither have i any proof that it cannot be done. 17 note, then, that ásta would identify gender with what i am calling “social gender” only if the following turns out to be true: the collective representation of a person p in a context c attributes gender g to p just in the case that the people with “standing” to determine gender in c collectively represent p as g. 18 furthermore, on ásta’s account, which base properties are tracked varies from context to context. for example, in some contexts, gender is conferred on the basis of one’s reproductive role; in other contexts, it is conferred on the basis of one’s social feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 self-conferral works in much the same way, except that where it is typically the attitudes and actions of a particular social group that are relevant for the conferral of a social property, it is primarily one’s own attitudes and actions that are relevant for the conferral of a self-conferred attribute. so, on this view, as far as autobiographical gender is concerned, everyone is their own “gender umpire” as it were. by virtue of what gender is, and the epistemic positioning we have with respect to the experiences that underlie gender, each of us has standing to confer autobiographical gender upon ourselves, and our standing in this regard trumps anyone else’s such standing. note, however, that i do not say that no one else has standing at all. i think it is plausible to say that, in the case of infants and others who fail to confer gender upon themselves simply by virtue of lacking concepts of gender or in some other way failing to represent themselves as gendered, they nonetheless have gender in some contexts, and their gender is simply their social gender in the relevant context. saying this is not essential to the account i am offering, but it is consistent with it and affords what seems to me a plausible way of accommodating the common belief that babies and relevant others do indeed have gender. thus, because one’s autobiographical identity is prima facie authoritative with respect to who a person really is, where autobiographical gender and social gender diverge, it is autobiographical gender that is prima facie authoritative with respect to the question of what gender someone really has. again, that authority can be defeated in unusual cases, but in typical cases—that is, ones where a person has a basic grasp of what genders are and how gender terms are commonly used, and where a person is not in serious error about their own physical and mental attributes—the authority will be indefeasible for the simple reason that they have privileged access to their own inner experience, and so they are in the best position to provide the sort of interpretation of that experience that makes it the case that they have the gender that they have. the sci account and other theories of gender i want to close with some brief comments about the relationship between the sci account and other available theories about the metaphysics of gender. in particular, i want to comment on whether it is properly considered a social constructionist account of gender, on whether it is ultimately just a variation on ásta’s conferralist account of gender, and on whether it is equivalent to the “self role, of perceptions about one’s body, etc. but this complication is not especially relevant for the discussion of autobiographical gender. rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 identification” account that katharine jenkins (2018) attributes to talia mae bettcher (2009, 2017).19 given that gender is self-conferred on the sci account, one might think there is reason to doubt that it is a social constructionist theory. after all, the theory implies that no individual’s gender is constructed by social ideologies, institutions, or conventions; thus, it would seem that gender attributes lack some of the most important hallmarks of being socially constructed. but even so, the account does respect the key social constructionist idea that what it is to be of a certain gender, and whether some specific person counts as belonging to that gender, will be at least partly determined by the gender concepts operative in some salient group of conceptusers, and on the beliefs, attitudes, or other mental states of the members of that group.20 the difference is just that, for the sci theorist, the salient “group” is always just the one-membered group consisting of the individual whose gender is in question. moreover, the very idea of gender—as well as the social norms, stereotypes, and so on in accord with (or in resistance to) which each person conceptualizes, performs, and thereby constructs their gender—seems clearly to be not only constructed but constructed by society. so i think there is ample reason to classify the sci account as a social constructionist view. one might also wonder whether the sci account might be appropriately treated as a mere variant on ásta’s conferralist theory of gender. granted, the sci account shares with ásta’s account the basic idea that gender is conferred rather than being constituted by a particular base property or by the responses that the gendered individual induces in others. but to my mind, the differences are more important than the similarities. on ásta’s view, gender is a social property, conferred upon us by other people; and because of this, it comes with objectionable consequences that the sci 19 bettcher does not formulate a view that she explicitly describes as the “selfidentification account”; but jenkins does formulate such a view, attributing it to bettcher on the strength of a quotation from bettcher 2017, informed by attention to bettcher 2009. 20 one might wonder how similar one’s gender concepts have to be to those of others in order for one to count as having the same concepts of gender. why think, for example, that if s confers (what she thinks of as) womanhood upon herself, her concept of womanhood has anything whatsoever to do with the gender concepts operative in any other group? i have no theory to offer in response to this question; but i take it that it is commonplace to suppose that (a) people with very different understandings of what (say) womanhood or gender amount to often nonetheless both count as using the concept of womanhood or gender, and (b) this fact has something to do with the way in which the concepts of womanhood and gender are communally used and shaped. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 account manages to avoid. on ásta’s view, one is not always one’s own “gender umpire.” accordingly, sincere, linguistically and conceptually competent, and reflective self-identification as a woman or man in a context is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a woman or a man in that context. moreover, and for the same reason, ásta’s account allows for the possibility that one can be mistaken about whether one is a man, a woman, or a member of some other gender category; and therefore one will not necessarily be misgendered by people who disagree with one’s own gender self-assessment, nor will what we normally describe as misgendering someone necessarily count as a harm or any other sort of violation. finally, one might wonder whether the sci account is just an alternative expression of the so-called “self-identification” account of gender (identity). according to jenkins (2018, 727), this account maintains that to have a female gender identity is to be someone who is disposed to reply to the question, “what is your gender?” with the statement, “i am a woman” (or words to that effect) and to be acting in good faith in doing so. here, then, self-identification refers to the act of expressing or claiming certain identity, or, at least, being disposed to make such expressions or claims. this is not quite what heather logue (forthcoming) calls the “belief account” of gender, according to which having a particular gender is just a matter of believing that one has that gender; but it is very close to that. how does the present account differ? as an interpretive mental representation of oneself, an autobiographical identity is very much like a belief. if it is not identical to a dispositional belief, it is at least quite plausibly the ground of a cluster of dispositions to believe. so it might seem that autobiographical gender is determined, in effect, by a person’s own dispositional beliefs or dispositions to form beliefs about their gender; and, of course, this isn’t far off from the “disposition to claim” that figures in jenkins’s formulation of the selfidentification account. one important difference, however, is that the sci account can accommodate the in-principle possibility of confusion or delusion about gender in a way that the self-identification account cannot. if being disposed to claim that one has a certain gender is sufficient for having that gender, then it seems that someone who believes they are a woman in part because of mistaken beliefs about their own physical attributes, or someone who believes that their gender is pizza, has to be regarded as correct in those beliefs. but this seems like exactly the wrong result. furthermore, at least as it is developed by heather logue (forthcoming), the best way of making sense of the belief account of gender, and so likewise, presumably, for the self-identification account, is to embrace fictionalism about gender. if one counts as (say) a woman if, and only if, one believes oneself to be a rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 woman, it is hard to see what the content of the belief (or disposition to affirm) that one is a woman could possibly be. after all, if the belief that one is a woman amounts to a belief that one satisfies some condition c (c ≠ believing that one is a woman), then it would seem that satisfying c, rather than simply believing that one is a woman, provides the criterion for womanhood. but, logue argues, fictionalism about gender lets us avoid the demand for an account of the contents of our gender beliefs because there is no general demand that every fictional attribute be analyzable. in other words (to put it in terms that she herself does not) fictional primitives, in contrast to “real” primitives, are wholly unproblematic. in contrast, however, the sci account does not need to invoke fictionalism in order to skirt a demand for content for gender concepts. the sci theorist can simply say that gender concepts get their content in the way that other social concepts do—presumably by way of communal patterns of usage, or (in the case of new coinages) imaginative and deliberate acts of conceptual engineering. unlike the belief account, the sci account is not committed to anything like the idea that there is nothing more or less to being a woman than representing oneself as a woman. it is fully consistent with the sci account to say, for example, that s’s representing herself as a woman consists in her representing herself as satisfying condition c (c ≠ being a woman), where being someone who satisfies c is, according to her concept of womanhood, sufficient for being a woman. and so there is no need for the sci account to take genders as primitive and to resort to fictionalism in order to justify doing so. as noted earlier, the sci account is a realist account of gender, and this is an advantage because antirealist accounts risk minimizing the importance of our gender identities by treating them as (at best) attributes we merely pretend to have for one reason or another rather than as real attributes of ours. a final difference between the sci account and the self-identification account: according to jenkins, the self-identification account fails with respect to two of what she takes to be the six desiderata that must be satisfied by any adequate account of gender identity. first, the account “fares very poorly at showing that gender identity is important and deserves respect” because there is no obvious reason why we should “care about dispositions to utter certain sentences” (jenkins 2018, 728). as she rightly notes, to the extent that we care about gender identities, what we most care about is “whatever it is that makes people want to utter those sentences, or whatever it is that they express when they do utter them” (728; italics in original). second, the account struggles with . . . compatibility with possible need for transitionrelated healthcare: it is difficult to perceive any relationship at all between a linguistic disposition and the sort of felt need for one’s body to be different that would prompt the desire to access transitionrelated healthcare. (728) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 i have no strong opinion about whether proponents of the self-identification account can adequately reply to these objections. the main point i want to make is just that, whereas they are at least superficially plausible objections to the self-identification account, they are clear nonstarters with respect to the sci account. if gender is most fundamentally an interpretation of one’s own inner experience, it is crystal clear why gender would be important and why a person would want to declare themselves to be of one gender rather than another, and it is also clear why gender would be connected with a felt need to access transition-related health care. i note in passing, furthermore, that the sci account also satisfies the four other desiderata that jenkins (2018, 723–24) takes as adequacy constraints on accounts of gender: it is compatible with a norm of first-person authority, it is clear and noncircular, it applies equally well to binary and nonbinary identities, and (so far as i can tell) it combines well with broader critiques of current gender norms and social structures. furthermore, although it is different from the “norm-relevancy account” that jenkins favors, the sci account has the resources to explain the intuitive appeal of the norm-relevancy account. on that view, one’s gender identity is determined by an internal “map”—an “internalised sense of the norms operating in social spaces that they regularly navigate, and the implications of those norms for the status of their own behaviour as norm-compliant or norm-violating” (729). in short, on jenkins’s view, one has a gender identity of x in a context c just if one’s internal map is formed to guide someone who is socially positioned as a member of x through the various realities that are, in c, characteristic of (the social positioning of) xs (730). obviously, the sci account makes no appeal to internal maps in the sense jenkins has in mind; and likewise obviously, the sci account does not invoke social positioning or context sensitivity in the way that her account does. but if the sci account is correct, it is easy to see why members of a given gender would have internal maps of just the sort that jenkins describes; and it is also easy to see why it might generally be true that the people who have (say) an internal woman-guiding map would be just the people whose gender is, by the lights of the sci account, women.21 references ásta. 2018. categories we live by: the construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. new york: oxford university press. 21 for helpful conversations about the ideas in this paper, helpful comments on earlier drafts, or both, i am grateful to sara bernstein, laura callahan, robin dembroff, heather logue, two anonymous referees for this journal, and, subsequent to the paper’s acceptance, kathryn norlock. rea – gender as a self-conferred identity published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 barnes, elizabeth. 2020. “gender and gender terms.” noûs 54, no. 3 (september): 704–30. bettcher, talia mae. 2009. “trans identities and first-person authority.” in you’ve changed: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie j. shrage, 98–120. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2017. “through the looking glass: trans theory meets feminist philosophy.” in the routledge companion to feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry, serene j. khader, and alison stone, 393–404. new york: routledge. glasgow, joshua, sally haslanger, chike jeffers, and quayshawn spencer. 2019. what is race? four philosophical views. new york: oxford university press. haslanger, sally. 2000. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” noûs 34, no. 1 (march): 31–55. ismael, j. t. 2016. how physics makes us free. new york: oxford university press. jenkins, katharine. 2016. “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman.” ethics 126, no. 2 (january): 394–421. ———. 2018. “toward an account of gender identity.” ergo 5 (27): 713–44. lewis, david k. 1969. convention: a philosophical study. cambridge: harvard university press. logue, heather. forthcoming. “gender fictionalism.” ergo. mallon, ron. 2016. the construction of human kinds. oxford: oxford university press. mclean, kate c. 2015. the co-authored self: family stories and the construction of personal identity. new york: oxford university press. nelson, hilde lindemann. 2001. damaged identities, narrative repair. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. nelson, michael. 2019. “the de re/de dicto distinction.” supplement to “propositional attitude reports.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, spring 2019 edition. https://plato.stanford.edu /entries/prop-attitude-reports/dere.html. rea, michael. forthcoming. “the metaphysics of the narrative self.” journal of the american philosophical association. published ahead of print, march 11, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2021.28. rea, michael, and elizabeth vankammen. 2021. “troubling the metaphysics of social properties.” unpublished ms, last modified december 6, 2021. reilly-cooper, rebecca. 2016. “gender is not a spectrum.” aeon, june 28, 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-genderprison. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 michael rea is rev. john a. o’brien professor of philosophy and concurrent faculty in gender studies at the university of notre dame. his research focuses on topics in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and feminist philosophy. 13959 rea title page 13959 rea final format food choices and gut issues feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation dryden, jane. 2021. “food choices and gut issues.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (3). article 3. 2021 food choices and gut issues jane dryden mount allison university jdryden@mta.ca dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 food choices and gut issues jane dryden abstract people with gut issues are often constrained in the foods they are able to eat. the choices they are able to make about food, however, are shaped not merely by specific medical and dietary needs but also by social, relational, and environmental factors such as the presence of trusted and supportive others who take their needs seriously. drawing on work in disability theory and relational autonomy, as well as interviews undertaken in summer 2019, the paper explores the ways that choices are enabled or undermined, and argues that these should be taken into account in work on the ethics and politics of food. keywords: food, health, gut, relational autonomy, disability theory work on the ethics and politics of food and eating often focuses on the merits of various choices, such as the food we should eat (local, imported, vegan, meat, processed, raw) and the form and manner in which we should eat it (eating out, staying home, preparing it oneself, having it prepared by others). in considering how we make our food choices, we might sometimes be faced with an apparent dilemma of focusing on either the individual agent’s autonomy and responsibility, or the broader social, relational, and environmental structures and circumstances that might shape the agent’s choices.1 we can also perceive these as intertwined, as is done by feminist work on relational autonomy, which characterizes selves as relationally constituted and their autonomy as augmented or diminished through relational factors. paying attention to how an agent’s autonomy and broader social structures work together can help us consider how an agent might be supported in making choices about food that reflect their values, goals, and commitments. 1 for example, beth dixon (2018, 615) discusses a similar “false dichotomy” in how obesity discourse is framed: “either individuals are unequivocally responsible for their condition of being obese or individuals are excused from moral accountability because their condition of obesity is owed primarily to external conditions, namely, the ‘toxic’ food environment, social institutions, public policy, the corporate food industry, or more fundamental unjust structural conditions.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 it is also important, however, to note that the choices we make around food are affected by the condition and needs of our body. the body is not generally discussed as a component of relational autonomy, with some exceptions.2 this might be because theorists assume the body to be identical with the agent. however, it is not uncommon for people to experience a sense of alienation from their bodies or, at least, to not always experience their bodies as fluidly exercising their will and agency in the world.3 this is readily apparent in the case of gut issues. i use this term very broadly to mean any experience of the gut where its normal functioning seems to have been disrupted in some way; as drew leder (1990, 38–39) notes, for the most part the workings of our viscera are outside of our experience. gut issues present obstacles to agency: they interfere with our chosen plans while being largely outside of our conscious control.4 gut issues may have a variety of causes and be associated with different diagnoses: crohn’s, ibs, anxiety, and migraines are all examples of conditions that give rise to “gut issues.” i use this vague term deliberately since i am more interested in the phenomenological quality of the gut being an issue for us than any particular biomedical diagnosis. gut issues frequently lead to constraints on our food choices and can shape our attitude toward eating and food, particularly in the context of shared or public meals. the worry motivating this paper is that given the way that society often treats anything related to health as solely an individual concern, it might be all too easy to 2 examples of exceptions are meyers (2004), burrow (2009), and mackenzie (2014). tereza hendl (2016) provides an overview of the resources that relational autonomy has for thinking about embodiment. 3 catriona mackenzie (2009, 2014) discusses this with respect to agency and identity. bodies do not always align with our conscious commitments. feminist geographer ann bartos tells of a situation in which even though she had long since given up meat, she was on a fieldwork visit where her politics around locally raised food and feminist research led her to accept a meat dish from her hosts. as she writes, while the meal “seemed to represent [her] ideal food politics,” her body—unprepared for animal meat—revolted, and she was quite ill all night (bartos 2017, 155–56). 4 as leder (1990, 45) notes, “my corporeal depths disappear not only from perception but relative to my structure of will and action.” he notes that some have been able to train their bodies to control some of their autonomic bodily functions (leder 1990, 52–53). this paper does not examine that possibility but will focus on choices around food and diet as a means of mitigating gut symptoms. while one of the participants in the study that i discuss in this paper had success in regulating her gut with the use of yoga and deep breathing, a number of others did not have this success (even trying the same techniques). there is certainly no general ability to control our guts. dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 stop there: to note that some people experience constraints on their food choices due to a biomedical condition, and then suppose our theorizing about the ethics and politics of our food choices can simply bracket that out as an exception. for example, in a paper arguing against picky eating, matthew brown (2007, 202) argues that it is wrong not to eat something that has been served to you “unless you have a very good reason. it would be appropriate for someone who is lactose intolerant to politely refuse ice cream.” no additional explanation is provided about what a “very good reason” might be, short of acknowledging a few pages later that one may have “moral, health, or safety reasons that lead you to avoid certain foods” (brown 2007, 205). this assumes that our “very good reasons” are always clear-cut and not themselves shaped by context. for example, someone who knows that they might get judged as a “picky eater” might feel pressured to eat something that will cause gut discomfort or other symptoms, despite having “a very good reason”—those “very good reasons” are not always easily communicable or taken seriously, nor are they always safe to disclose. as this paper will demonstrate, the constraints posed by gut issues are not simply biomedical in origin. if this were the case, then understanding the constraint would simply be a matter of understanding the underlying biomedical condition and how it is triggered or exacerbated by certain foods, and no more. gut issues themselves, however, do not occur in isolation from social, relational, and environmental factors. in raising this point, i am following work within disability studies that argues that the experience of a disability is not solely due to the biomedical features of a person’s impairment or illness but also due to the accessibility of their lived environment, the presence or absence of supports, the presence or absence of stigma, and so forth. similarly, with regard to gut issues, while the biomedical condition plays a role, the experience of making food choices is highly affected by social, relational, and environmental factors. factors like the presence or absence of trusted friends, reliable transit, or available bathrooms can affect the range of available and plausible food choices. drawing attention to the importance of these factors helps to point to ways in which we could collectively respond and thus enable more possibilities for food choices. if we want people to be able to make ethical choices with respect to their food, it makes sense to pay attention to the kinds of constraints they experience as well as what could mitigate those constraints. while there has been work on ways in which the environment affects food choices in general,5 it does not seem to consider the kinds of constraints at play for people with gut issues. existing work on food ethics 5 megan dean (2018) provides a useful overview of environmental and situationist models of eating agency. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 does not generally consider constraints related to gut issues,6 despite the fact that these issues affect agents’ range of choice with respect to food, and despite the prevalence of gut issues (for example, 18% of canadians have irritable bowel syndrome [ibs], a common source of gut issues).7 this paper will explore the context in which food choices are made by people with gut issues, in a way that recognizes the interplay between bodily experience and social, relational, and environmental factors. without endorsing any particular ethical choices or requiring that health be the only or primary goal, i want to identify factors that support or diminish a person’s ability to have meaningful options with respect to their food and eating practices. to do so, i make use of relational autonomy and disability theory. the paper draws from semistructured interviews that i carried out in 2019 with twenty adults in canada, the united states and the united kingdom who identified as having “gut issues.” the interviews concerned their experiences overall, as well as their ideas around how concepts of autonomy, vulnerability, and relational autonomy might reflect their experiences with their gut. food and eating were not the specific focus of the project, but they were mentioned frequently. people’s relationships to food were connected deeply with feelings of vulnerability and with both the achievement and the frustration of autonomy. relational autonomy and food choices relational autonomy as an idea has been present for roughly three decades (nedelsky 1989), and has had significant uptake within bioethics and public health ethics (e.g., sherwin 1998; ho 2008; wardrope 2015; sherwin and stockdale 2017). as mackenzie and stoljar (2000, 4) note, it is not a unified theory but “an umbrella term, designating a range of related perspectives” with a focus on analyzing “the implications of the intersubjective and social dimensions of selfhood and identity for conceptions of individual autonomy and moral and political agency.” the goal of this paper is not to argue for any particular version of relational autonomy,8 but to make 6 neither “gut,” nor “gastrointestinal,” nor any of the various gut disorders (such as ibs, crohn’s, or colitis) are mentioned in the indexes of the oxford handbook of food ethics or the routledge handbook of food ethics, either as their own headings or as subheadings under “health.” on a related note, neither is “disability” listed, though one chapter by moore and del biondo (2017, 23) mentions limitations imposed by parents upon the eating choices of young adults with learning disabilities. 7 from canadian digestive health foundation (n.d.), citing lovell and ford (2012, 716). 8 for the purpose of this paper, i am referring to relational autonomy fairly broadly; the overall argument of the paper, that we ought to collectively pay attention to the social, relational, and environmental factors contributing to gut issues in discussing dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 use of the insights gained from this general approach in order to draw attention to the social and relational dimension of our agency within food choices, and how those choices might reflect the values, goals, and commitments of people with gut issues. despite the fact that our practices and decisions around food have a selfevidently relational character, there has not been much attention given to the way in which we can use relational autonomy as a way of thinking through our food choices. on the one hand, research on food ethics and politics that has highlighted the relational aspects of food (such as heldke 2012) has not generally taken up the concept of relational autonomy, despite being attentive to the ways in which food choices often express features of our identities, values, and commitments (e.g., bailey 2007; oyserman et al. 2014; moore and del biondo 2017; dean 2019). meanwhile, research on food ethics that has examined autonomy, such as investigating the enabling of consumer choices, has not generally looked at relationality but has retained an individualist conception of autonomy (e.g., dieterle 2016). as mary rawlinson notes, with some exceptions, food ethics often “focuses narrowly on the ethics of individual choice or apparent conflicts between liberty and state paternalism” despite the fact that “individual choices occur in a specific culture of possibilities that makes healthy eating difficult or impossible. centering food ethics on individual choice ignores the structural determinants of what and how we eat and defers the necessity of structural change” (rawlinson and ward 2017, 1). a relational autonomy approach is useful for recognizing the way in which our identities and our decision-making are intertwined with social, relational, and environmental factors. of course, the concept of autonomy has been heavily criticized within feminist philosophy and theory, as has its prevalence within bioethics. while work on relational autonomy attempts to address some of these concerns, one could nonetheless ask what is gained by continuing to use the term. autonomy involves the self-determination of values, goals, and commitments. being able to have some measure of authority over what we put into our mouths seems relevant to any concept of self-determination. food choices are connected to ethical and religious choices, family and cultural traditions, and aspirations related to bodily capabilities (such as being an athlete). food choice thus seems a key part of bodily autonomy. my focus here is a conception of autonomy not as a bar or standard that people must achieve but as something to be cultivated. for diana meyers (2004, 69– 70), autonomy involves self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction. autonomy is food choices, does not hinge on any specific account. i do think that taking the gut (and gut microbiome) seriously ultimately involves a highly relational ontology of the self and an account of autonomy that reflects it, but delineating and justifying that view requires a separate paper; i engage in some of this work elsewhere (see dryden 2016). i thank one of the anonymous referees of this paper for raising this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 cultivated through the acquisition of autonomy competency and the development of various agentic skills for navigating the world. these skills include not only our capacities for rational deliberation, but also our adeptness at social situations, our ability to maintain friendships, and our body’s capacities for carrying out our goals (meyers 2004, 57–62). others around us can help contribute to that development, as well as detract from it. work on autonomy also acknowledges the importance of selftrust (govier 1993), which can be affected positively and negatively by our relations with others and by social norms and expectations. a deficiency or lack of ability in agentic skills or self-trust does not imply that an agent is not autonomous at all, but it implies that their autonomy is limited or hindered in some way. rather than causing exclusion from advantages or privileges, the goal of this account as i take it up here is to identify the lack in order to mitigate it.9 it is a way of examining the context of our decision-making, for the sake of understanding our food choices. we can then ask cogent questions about how people are supported in being able to make and follow through on choices about the food they eat that reflect their own values and goals in the context of their gut issues. this is not just about, say, education about nutrition, food production, or animal welfare but also about—as the examples in this paper will demonstrate—normalizing gut talk, creating trusting social and relational contexts, and maintaining supportive environments. thinking of autonomy as self-determination leads us to ask what kind of self we are creating and furthering in and through our food choices. what possibilities are we opening up for improved awareness of our enmeshment in complex systems and for ensuing decisions about our food practices as well as broader social and political commitments? framing this work in terms of relational autonomy does not cover over this complexity and interdependence but allows us to better respond to it. a full exploration of relational autonomy when it comes to our food choices could also help us to think further about the relations that we develop with both human and nonhuman others (including gut microbes) through our eating practices (as per heldke 2018). this paper, however, will focus specifically on the factors that 9 serene khader argues that relational autonomy accounts pose a problem insofar as they take autonomy to be diminished by oppression, since this can turn into a liability for oppressed agents: “if autonomy entitles one to having decision-making authority in one’s own life, and if autonomy consists partly in access to morally desirable social conditions, oppressed individuals will have a lesser entitlement to making decisions about their own lives than the dominant do over theirs” (khader 2020, 514–15). there is not space here to respond fully to this concern, but to clarify: i do not take the form and purpose of relational autonomy account i describe here to be quite the same as the socially constitutive conceptions of autonomy (sca) that she describes; rather, i take myself to be using it in the broader sense khader recognizes (506–7). dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 shape our food choices. these conditions involve the interaction of the physical condition of our body with our interpersonal relations with others around us, our social context, and the lived and built environment around us, as well as the interactions between these factors. disability theory, gut issues, and food choices like relational autonomy, disability theory also directs our attention toward how social, relational, and environmental factors enable or undermine agency. disability theorists have criticized what they term the “medical model” of disability, in which disability is a biomedical problem experienced by an individual, for which the relevant expertise is possessed by health-care professionals (goodley 2017, 7). this is often perceived to be the default view, and the one emphasized in professional and administrative contexts. in contrast to the medical model, a variety of alternatives have emerged that argue that “social, cultural, historical, economic, relational and political factors disable people” (goodley 2017, 9). the social model of disability posits that impairment is an individual’s embodied difference, and disability is then caused by society’s exclusion and oppression of those with impairments. the proper focus of policy and activism, then, is to change society in order to eliminate that oppression (goodley 2017, 11). other theories, including other versions of the social model, have modified the distinction between impairment and disability, while nonetheless continuing to hold that “the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies” (kafer 2013, 6). on alison kafer’s political/relational model, medical intervention may be desired, but we should nonetheless recognize “that medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance” (kafer 2013, 6). shelley tremain’s foucauldian model points out that since our conception of the body “has not been stable, not even over the last two centuries, nor have practices to observe, understand, manipulate, and control the body, nor subjective experiences of it, remained invariable” (tremain 2015, 39), our understanding of disability should reflect this, and understand it as “historically and culturally relative and specific” (41). on her account, disability is “a historically contingent network of force relations in which everyone is implicated and entangled and in relation to which everyone occupies a position. that is, to be disabled or nondisabled is to occupy a certain subject position within the productive constraints of the apparatus of disability” (tremain 2019, 145–46). with respect to gut issues, this means that it is not so much a question of whether a given gut issue “is” a disability or not, as a question of whether the person is positioned as disabled with respect to societal expectations—consider, for example, the strictures caused by workplaces feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 with very tight regulations on bathroom breaks. ableism works to disqualify certain bodies. while there are significant disagreements amongst these models, they share a questioning of the assumptions that underlie judgments that disabilities are naturalized properties of an individual. the way we experience our bodies and make choices that affect it is significantly shaped by social and cultural norms and expectations and by the possibilities enabled by the accessibility (or lack thereof) in our world. what does this mean for our food choices amidst the presence of gut issues? it means that we should be attentive to the framing of “gut issues” as an individual problem to be solved by medical expertise alone (though it does not mean rejecting medical expertise or treatment altogether). it means putting them into a social and political context. work on food and disability helps draw attention to this context. elaine gerber (2007, n.p.) points out that we should think about food and disability together in order “to think about ways in which the social construction of food and eating may create disabling conditions and/or maintain disability boundaries or, for that matter, help to reduce and eliminate disabling and stigmatizing conditions.” specifically, she notes that “the common so-called ‘food-related’ disorders: diabetes, crohn's/ibd (irritable bowl disorder), food allergies” cause significant financial and social disadvantage through the barriers they create for “the business lunch, to networking opportunities, to ritualized and religious events” (gerber 2007). disability scholars point our attention to the constraints on food experienced by disabled people, constraints which often have more to do with poverty and access issues than with the particulars of their impairments. as kim hall (2014, 88) points out, many of the expectations of “ethical” food consumers are not possible for many disabled people and people living in poverty. further, natasha simpson (2017, 407) notes that while the food justice movement identifies access concerns with “proximity to food, affordability of food, and knowledge about food,” additional access considerations occur for disabled people “such as experiencing social isolation and being homebound; inaccessibility of transportation options and inaccessibility of grocers; difficulties transporting groceries and preparing and cooking food.” both simpson and hall remind us that the constraints experienced by disabled people are political: “while these barriers are often framed as being a result of disabilities themselves, effectively depoliticizing disability, i would argue that they are all evidence of systematic oppression within society, in which myths of independence, expectations of economic productivity, and abledness are glorified” (simpson 2017, 407). in connecting food and disability, it is important to avoid treating food primarily as “medicine, prevention, and cure” (hall 2014, 179). simpson notes that in “references to ‘diet-related’ illness and disease,” the mainstream food movement dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 often implies that diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease can be cured through the right diet; as she notes, this attitude is shaming and fails to acknowledge “those for whom diet is not a primary cause of illness or disability, those who cannot be ‘cured’ by adopting a produce-rich diet, or those who don’t desire to be cured to an abled standard” (simpson 2017, 414). this should be understood in the context of the concerns that disability studies generally has about cure. many writers have argued that charities and nondisabled people focus on the need for cure, whereas they are primarily concerned with accessibility and supports to help them live with their disability. as eli clare argues, the insistence on cure can work as an ideology that seeks to eliminate different kinds of bodies; toward the end of his book, he envisions “a world where many kinds of body-mind difference will be valued and no one eradicated; where comfort, pain, well-being, birth, and death all exist. cure promises us so much, but it will never give us justice. in this world reconfigured, cure may not exist, but if it does, it will be only one tool among many” (clare 2017, 184). drawing on foucault, hall (2014, 184) notes that food practices have long been tied toward notions of bodily purity: “self-improvement through eating ‘appropriate’ food is a practice of bodily purification and boundary maintenance and, as such, is a food practice oriented toward security against others who are perceived as threatening.” she cautions that a focus on food as “cure” can intermingle with conceptions of purity, thus excluding disabled bodies. of course, for those with gut issues, food is tightly intertwined with health; for celiac disease, for example, a gluten-free diet is the only treatment (bandini 2015, 1578). with regard to the food choices that people with gut issues make, the aim is not generally “cure” or purity but the mitigation of symptoms; the process often involves trial and error, and keeping track of their responses to various foods.10 disability theory has a complex relationship with the concept of autonomy, given that it has often been used against disabled people. there is a concern that autonomy, if conceived of primarily as involving independence, can be exclusionary. while describing an alternative ideal, “a queer crip feminist conception of food and food justice,” kim hall pushes against an individualized concept of autonomy, noting that: good food, i contend, not only sustains life, it enables flourishing. flourishing, as chris cuomo notes, is not an accomplishment of 10 the kind of mitigation being aimed for here is similar to the one described by clare (2017, 53) when he describes messaging with someone with chronic pain who was having a “bad pain day”: “before i log off, i type a good night to you, wish you a little less pain for the morning. later you thank me for not wishing you a pain-free day. you say, ‘the question isn’t whether i’m in pain but rather how much.’” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 autonomous, self-reliant individuals; real flourishing takes time and can be accomplished only with others (1998, 74). flourishing, in other words, is made possible by our complex enmeshment in community with human and nonhuman others. a commitment to food justice requires critique of underlying assumptions that thwart flourishing of queer crip feminist lives and community. the goodness and desirability of food choices are inseparable from how we are positioned in and negotiate our communities and how ways of thinking about food and health can open and foreclose resistant possibilities. (hall 2014, 178) hall (2014, 188) argues that “self-sufficiency is an illusion rooted in the able-bodied assumption of control over one’s body and life.” while there is not space here to enter into a full discussion of the meaning of autonomy for disability theory,11 i note that work in relational autonomy argues that the concept of autonomy need not imply complete control over our bodies and lives, or self-reliant independence. i take the sense of relational autonomy i draw from meyers and others to be compatible with interdependence and hall’s sense of flourishing amidst complex enmeshment. this paper aims to draw attention to the way that social, relational, and environmental contexts help “open and foreclose” possibilities for people with gut issues. it positions gut issues as a part of human living that we can collectively attend to and make space for, rather than denying or silencing, in a way that allows for food choices consonant with agents’ values, goals, and commitments. interview methodology12 this article draws on data that was collected as part of a larger study on the relationship between the experiences involved with gut issues and how autonomy and vulnerability are conceptualized. the study was approved by mount allison university’s research ethics board. in the summer of 2019, i conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with twenty people who responded to calls put out on twitter and facebook for adults who identified as having “gut issues.”13 participants had a range of diagnoses and backgrounds. participants were interviewed 11 a helpful discussion of individualist vs. relational autonomy approaches to ethics (in this case bioethics) within the context of disability is found in ho (2018). 12 information about funding and conflict of interest disclosure is provided at the end of this article. 13 the relevant section of the recruitment posts ran as follows: “if you are an adult & identify as having ‘gut issues’ (of any kind! crohn’s, colitis, anxiety that manifests in the gut, food intolerances, etc.!) & are willing to chat with me about your experiences, please let me know.” dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 once, with interviews ranging from 35 minutes to two hours (most were approximately 45–60 minutes); in a couple of cases, participants emailed with followup points that they wanted to share after further reflection. interviews were carried out online on skype, zoom, or google hangouts, as well as in person in my office, a cafe, or people’s homes. a written consent form was used and either returned by email or in person, depending on the circumstance; at the opening of the interview, i went through the form, and participants had the chance to ask questions and get any needed clarification about the purpose and goals of the study. participants were asked whether or not they preferred to be referred to by pseudonyms, and i followed their preference. one participant who wanted her real name used explained specifically that she wanted it in order to recognize her agency. some used pseudonyms in order to feel safe in saying whatever they wanted. pseudonyms are indicated with an asterisk. participants also provided the pronouns that they wanted me to use in referring to them. following discussion of the consent form, the first part of the interview itself concerned people’s experiences. i asked them very generally about their experiences with their gut, and then followed up with questions about their experiences of diagnosis (or misdiagnosis); their encounters with medical professionals; their experiences with families, friends, and colleagues; their habits and regimens; and the kinds of images and metaphors they used to describe their relation to their guts. the second part of the interviews invited them to explore what “autonomy” and “vulnerability” meant to them, both in general and specifically with regard to their gut experiences. then i would briefly explain the concept of relational autonomy and invite them to consider whether it was something that would fit any of their experiences, whether good or bad. interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. the transcripts were analyzed and the data coded with the use of dedoose software, in order to explore themes and cross-participant comparisons. transcripts were shared with participants who had requested them. an earlier version of this article, delivered as a conference paper, was shared with all participants. the purpose of the study itself was exploratory, to get a sense of the kinds of experiences and priorities people with gut issues might have; similarly, the goal of this article is primarily to draw attention to experiences of people with gut issues that have been overlooked in discussions of food ethics and to encourage further exploration. experiences around gut issues, food, and agency a simple account of how constraints on food choices caused by gut issues affect food choices would state that gut issues often limit the range of acceptable foods. this simple account is complicated significantly once we begin to explore the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 ways in which those constraints are shaped by relational, social, and environmental factors.14 food choices can be complex on their own. for most people with gut issues, certain foods will pose more of a problem than others. sometimes this will be readily apparent (eating a certain food will regularly cause a negative reaction), and sometimes the limitation on food will be part of a diagnostic or treatment plan.15 for example, people with ibs might try a very strict version of a low-fodmap diet for a period of time and then gradually reintroduce certain foods in order to determine which trigger their ibs symptoms.16 foods that trigger symptoms can often be unpredictable and hard to pin down. unlike a vegetarian or vegan who can establish a generally accurate set of acceptable foods (barring the odd surprise unlabeled ingredient, or other such mishaps), it’s not always clear exactly which foods will cause discomfort or pain. this uncertainty is itself frustrating. the restriction on food can also be a source of frustration, particularly as eating is often described as one of the pleasures of life. as leah* said, “my therapist is really great, and he’s like, ‘let’s think about why you’re angry . . .’ and i’m like, ‘it’s because i can’t eat anything!’” 14 by relational, i refer to interpersonal relationships with those people immediately around us. by social, i mean the broader norms and expectations of society and culture. by environmental, i mean the features of the lived and built environment, including infrastructure. these are not necessarily sharply demarcated—the efforts of others around us can make a difference to the accessibility of a built space, such as when a friend with a car enables us to bypass public transit—but are useful to separate out in order to explore their relevance to gut issues. 15 note, however, that food is usually not the only aspect of someone’s treatment plan. as the writer of a blog post explains, “no amount of ‘healthy food’ would fix my diseased intestines. you know what did help? actual medical care—surgery and medications” (sarah 2014). however, for this writer, some foods do trigger symptoms, and so avoiding those foods would be important to overall well-being (ironically some of these are “traditional ‘health’ foods, like salads or fiber-rich vegetables” (sarah 2014). 16 the fodmap diet, intended for people with ibs, involves three steps in order to help identify which foods are most likely to trigger ibs symptoms. first people engage in a diet low in fodmap foods (foods low in a particular group of short-chain carbohydrates that can be hard for the small intestine to absorb: fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols). then they gradually reintroduce foods to monitor their tolerance. finally they achieve “a balance between tolerated fodmap-rich foods and the avoidance of others” (monash university 2019). dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 this feeling does not occur in a vacuum but in a social and relational context with expectations around appropriate food and eating practices. the pressures these expectations cause are often taken for granted. eating is often connected with social occasions: family gatherings, workplace events, and dates often center around food. a number of participants reported that these occasions were fraught. tara* put this bluntly: how many times do you hear like, “everyone loves to get together and share a meal,” or “getting together and sharing a meal is how we show we love each other.” [. . .] that is never questioned [. . .]. and it can’t just be the handful of us who are like, “getting together and sharing a meal is terrifying, and the fact that you want me to do that is [. . .] it’s emotional work, it’s not paid—but it’s about me performing gratitude so you feel good that you did something for me, rather than actually doing something for me.”17 this echoes matthew brown’s (2007, 202) statement that “meals are a universal social event, and their gravitas is nearly ubiquitous.” his argument against picky eating claims that it creates harms to others by inconveniencing them and by cutting the eater off from shared experiences with others (201–2). as he writes, “when trying to coordinate meals with other people, whether you are going out or cooking together, a picky eater constrains the choices and makes the decision that much more difficult” (201).18 whether or not people with gut issues might be recognized by brown to have a valid reason, the kind of attitude he expresses creates significant pressure. as nathan* says, referring to a group of family friends: i am less comfortable in, in our own family group [laughs] than when i could eat everything. i have noticed that my anxieties that way has, has picked up since i can’t just gorge on whatever anybody’s eating. and i feel like an asshole, because people are like, “oh, we’re making 17 throughout this paper, unbracketed ellipses indicate pauses; all bracketed ellipses indicate my omissions from quoted text or speech. 18 as megan dean (2019, 354–55) writes, “a lively comment section on a blog post originally titled ‘the most difficult dinner guest ever and five delicious meals to feed them’ reveals expectations that guests should eat what is offered, and not make a fuss about dietary preferences or constraints (allergies excepted—at least sometimes).” the blog post has since been retitled as “the most challenging dinner guest ever” but still contains the language of “the most difficult dinner guest” in the body of the text (durand [2012] 2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 this for dinner.” and i’m like, “yeah, i can’t eat that. i’ll bring rice cakes.” he is obviously not “an asshole” for his dietary limitations or for bringing rice cakes, but within a social context where people are expected to share foods (as brown, for example, expects), it is understandable why he might feel like one. the shared meal creates challenges that might not be readily apparent when we are not attending to the experiences of people with gut issues. first, there may be a pressure to perform health. as kim hall (2017, 143) notes, the family meal is often romanticized, particularly by the modern food movement, as a place of health and well-being: “disability is erased from the scene of the sustainable family meal to the extent that it is posited as that which is prevented by sustainable eating practices.” in her interviews with people with chronic illnesses and nonapparent disabilities, simpson (2017, 406, 415–16) notes that they experienced “pressures to perform abledness as well as lack of recognition of access needs.” second, there is an expectation of universality—the food is shared together, rather than anyone receiving a “special” meal. schroeder and mowen (2014, 458) note that it is hard for those with celiac disease to conceal their food habits, noting that “regardless of the explanation given for the avoidance of food in social situations or the outwardly noticeable symptoms [. . .] individuals with cd clearly stand out in public gatherings as being ‘different’ or ‘odd.’’’ similarly, cecilia olsson and her coauthors report stigma for adolescents with celiac disease in the process of having to request and eat different food (olsson et al. 2009). the expectation of universality can challenge self-trust and confidence in voicing one’s needs. as nathan* reported, he feels like an “asshole” for needing something different, and like a “wrench” in everyone’s desire to “get together and eat great food.” similarly, amanda reported “always navigating this ‘am i picky, am i a pain, am i like . . .’” these two things create a scenario where in order to participate in the sharing together, someone has to perform health, concealing the way that their food choices would normally have been constrained by their gut issues. for example, lin* described the following situation when being invited to eat at her then-boyfriend’s house: we didn’t have a lot in common so one of the things was [. . .] eating [. . .]. his mom is like an amazing cook, [. . .] he’s caribbean, and [. . .] they use a lot of flour as like beginners in their delicious like ox tail, and [laughs] goat, and so then like i couldn’t eat. and then i felt bad [. . .], i felt like i couldn’t eat his mom’s cooking, and it was hard to explain to her why [. . .]. and so then sometimes i’d try to eat a little bit, but then i wouldn’t feel good, and then i’d be anxious—and oh my god, it was dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 just like an endless cycle. and [. . .] i don’t really drink either, so then it just felt like i was being such a party pooper, literally. note the difficulty caused by not being able to explain. this silence is common and makes it difficult to resist the pressures of performing health and the expectation of universality. cindy lacom points out a reticence to talk about gastrointestinal symptoms even within the context of disability studies. as she writes, shit is filthy, and it represents contagion in ways that many physical and cognitive disabilities do not. i have found it relatively easy to publicly negotiate symptoms of my ms (even bladder incontinence); in fact, many are curious and will pursue conversations about the disease and its symptoms. but when people discover that i might shit my pants or pass gas through an open fistula on my buttocks as a consequence of my crohn’s, conversation stops cold and verbal constipation becomes the order of the day. (lacom 2007, n.p.) not paying attention to gut issues—or greeting their disclosure with aversion—can have significant effects. the example of adele* demonstrates that the way in which gut issues are received plays a role in the experience of eating and dealing with symptoms, and how this affects self-trust and agency: when i was a child it was so bad that [. . .] i couldn’t have bowel movements for like a month at a time, [. . .] which caused [. . .] my adult caretakers [. . .] to do various unpleasant, intrusive, painful, things to try to correct the problem. and nothing corrected the problem, but those things often made the problem worse, or upset me, or as i got older, embarrassed me, [. . .] so i learned to really, really keep it all to myself, not tell anybody if [. . .] i had issues because that might just make things worse. [. . .]. as i got older, you know, it affected things because sometimes [. . .] i’d have to, as soon as i ate a couple of bites of food, go running off to the toilet. [. . .]. and so again felt like i was drawing attention to myself you know, in the least desirable way. [laughs] who wants to share their toilet information with everyone else, you know? [. . .] those kinds of things were kind of difficult and embarrassing, and it took me a long time to actually tell a doctor what was going on, you know? and then i realized i had classic ibs, but i’d been brought up in a family where you weren’t supposed to complain about pain and difficulty and [. . .] problems in general, and where people who complained of chronic conditions, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 especially if they were girls, were considered to be malingerers. and so, you know, i took on that attitude myself: “oh women,” because it’s mostly women, “who claim to have ibs, they’re just malingerers. they’re just trying to get attention.” and [. . .] then i found myself in the embarrassing predicament of admitting, “oh, oh, i must be one of those, hysterical women who has these problems now because look i’ve got classic ibs.” for donna*, the experiences of her sister significantly affected her own ability to talk about her gut experiences. her sister was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis at the age of four in the late 1960s, when there was a belief that it might be a behavioural disorder and shaped by family environment. she ended up being placed in a home for emotionally disturbed children. so for donna*, when she was growing up, gut issues meant being sent away: “so this is severely fucked up, right. so any gut issues i had, i certainly didn’t tell anybody about it! right?! i’m going to keep it to my damn self.” these issues also play out at work. the following account from one of the participants demonstrates not only the pressure to share and perform health but also the difficulty of a simple polite refusal, as envisioned by brown. andrea* describes the following situation with her workplace, in which her desk is in a highly trafficked area: with work-related life there’s always socializing. [. . .] i’ve learned ways of circumventing . . . people always think something is wrong the minute that you say, “i can’t eat that.” and you end up having to get into a full conversation while you’re in the middle of your workday. [. . .] it’s that constant interruption of people that will come and get something and like, “oh, here, why don’t you have the last one?” “no thank you.” and every time you say “no thank you” to something because you’re trying to manage your own issues, it’s questioned. and it’s time consuming, which i do not have when i’m sitting at work. i don’t want to get into a conversation about you know my ibs in the middle of [work]. thank you very much, but . . . yeah. so, that i find an inconvenience at work. yeah. having to answer everyone’s damn questions. it’s none of their business! it’s none. you know. and the minute you say, “i really don’t want to talk about it,” [makes shocked noise] people put their backs up. so what do you do? in these situations, even though at one level the particular constraint on food choices is caused by the person’s gut issue, the experience of the constraint is dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 determined by the social, relational, and environmental context. in this text from andrea*, we note the effect of her interpersonal relationships with her coworkers, social and cultural norms around performing health and sharing food, and the specific layout of her workplace. people with gut issues experience pressure to live up to certain norms, such as being a certain ideal of professional at work, being attractive on a date, and not being the needy one in a group of friends. this is even more pronounced, and the account gets more complex, as we recognize that stress and anxiety themselves have a physical effect on the gut (foster, rinaman, and cryan 2017), as well as the interaction between gut and brain (drossman 2016).19 as donna* put it, “for some people, their head is the barometer of their stress. for me, my gut is the barometer of stress.” looking again at lin’s story, the anxiety that she felt in the situation exacerbated the already existing gut issue, creating an “endless cycle.” indeed, most of the participants noted interrelations between gut issues and stress and anxiety. shawn* described this extensively: so, it’s like double whammy, it’s just like this big ball of frustration. [. . .] to me it just feels like a physical manifestation of anxiety. like the tension. and this is where it gets kind of interesting, i don’t know—it’s kind of chicken and egg? i don’t know if my physical tension exasperates my anxiety and then that, you know, if it stems from there? or if the physical complications are a result of anxiety where i’m tense, my brain is tense, and then that’s tensing up my body, and then causing kind of dysfunction to occur so, yeah. participants noted that stressful situations often led to increased food restriction because of the increased danger of certain foods. one participant, dave, who works part-time in a highly demanding job noted that “when i’m working, the stress of work does have an effect on my diet, and i’ve learned when i’m working, to only eat really bland food.” dave connected increased stomach problems to the stress caused by significant life events and losses. these complex gut-issue dynamics that create constraints around food choices are omitted in discussions of food ethics. many of these constraints are shaped by not being able to speak up about gut issues. conversely, relational, social, and environmental contexts that are consonant with speaking up and acceptance of gut issues can enable a wider range of food choices and a greater sense of autonomy 19 elizabeth wilson (2004, especially 68–69, 78; 2015) critically explores some of this work on gut and mood as well as encouraging feminist thinkers to engage biological data more fully in their explorations of the body. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 with respect to those choices. i will discuss each dimension—relational, social, and environmental—in turn. relational factors—our interpersonal relationships and immediate interactions with others—play a significant role in the experience and navigation of gut issues. in an article about expanding our conception of autonomy away from the purely unitary, intellectual self, diana meyers (2004, 54) gives an example of how friends can support one’s autonomy, in which she had to adopt a special diet in response to having developed “a metabolic condition.” while the diet is not easy, she has managed it as a “complex relational achievement” (54). her husband and close friends have “patiently listened to my gripes, and they’ve even abstained from ordering or serving forbidden dishes when i'm around” (54). while this helps reduce temptation, meyers focuses on another advantage of talking about her situation: i have discovered that, when i am with people who know of my condition but who don’t refrain from indulging in pleasures i must forego, i seldom succumb to temptation. the mere knowledge that there would be witnesses to my delinquency curbs my appetite. i don’t ask people to encourage me to stick to my diet, and no one ever has. yet, their knowing presence prevents me from violating my diet. (meyers 2004, 54) she describes her autonomy as thus enhanced through her relations with friends who know about her condition. in order to make this possible, she must be able to feel comfortable disclosing. donna*’s family, which has come to be much more open about gut issues, provides an example of this kind of comfort around disclosure: i would say that in my family, it’s completely normalised, that when people need the bathroom, we need a bathroom. and we . . . like if we’re travelling, we stop, or we just take care of it immediately, and that’s that. you know, there’s no, like, “oh, but wait. we’re doing this.” i mean, i don’t know what other families are like; you know, maybe all families are like this, you know? actually, i don’t think they are. [laughs] you know, but, so it’s completely [. . .] sort of normalised. it’s also pretty normalised in my family that people get the food that they need. like my sister . . . unfortunately, she goes to a bunch of fast-food places, but she will go to multiple places to get people what they want, [laughs], and she just completely accommodates people’s food needs, right. so does my mother. you know, like, if i want a salad, but she wants chicken, then we will get me a salad, and her chicken, and [. . .] dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 my aunt clare has a wonky stomach. like, everybody is all about the “let’s customise the food for what people need.” that’s completely normalised in my family. this kind of ethos can also occur amongst friends. ryan* told this story about going to visit friends in newfoundland: so when i got there, [my friend] was like trying to offer me some booze, and i was like, “uh, no, my stomach’s been like bad.” and she was like, “i’m making you jook.” and i was like, “i don’t know what that is.” and she was like, whatever. and she did this thing with rice, which was like leftover rice, and she was like, “it’s the best thing for your gut.” and she was like, “when [kevin*] gets home from work i’m going to get him to make it up proper for you.” and it was so . . . such a funny thing, [. . .] but this friend—who’s an old, old, old friend i do see every other year or so—but it was just like, “oh, [ryan*’s] here. [ryan*’s] got a bad gut.” and they just went into like regular, “oh, this is what we have to do.” in this situation, ryan*’s food choices are not about choosing the food itself, but trusting his friends to help him respond to his “bad gut.” attending to his gut is a collaborative relational task: “this is what we have to do.”20 meanwhile, donna’s* description of making plans for a day with friends on a trip illustrates the way in which the ability to express gut-related needs to trusted friends and get appropriate uptake improves the ability to plan (and the feeling of safety) within a context of food uncertainty: i said something like, “well you know,” i said, “i know this is a tmi thing, but you know, at some point pooping will have to happen.” and she said, “yes. that’s right.” [laughs] you know? and she said, “well, we can stop, you know, on the way.” and i said, “okay.” and i decided not to get coffee because i knew that i was going to be out in a nonpoop-friendly environment. 20 a connection can be drawn here to leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha’s (2018, 251) description of “crip kindness” as “the wealth and skill where we notice each other’s pain face and offer a chair, ask in a low-key way if we can help with a service task, sit without speaking, drop a bottle of tincture next to someone having a panic attack, raise thousands of dollars for someone to buy an accessible van, or mail a stranger our extra prescription. it’s collective noticing and collective hustle.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 being able to do this was really important to her and made her feel “like i am a part of a community. i’m like them; they’re like me; i’m not different. and that makes me feel more secure. and because of my social connections, i can be trusting, and say, ‘oh, i will have to poop.’” these examples of relational support for food choices do not, of course, entirely remove the constraint posed by the particular gut issue. for example, even people who care about someone may not “get it” or may not feed them well, and social situations amongst people who care about each other can still be fraught. as one participant, tara*, who has a number of allergies in addition to celiac disease, said, “i don’t have many people i trust to . . . they love me, they care about me, and they just fuck it up too much, and the consequences of fucking it up are literally life and death for me.” however, being able to discuss it and plan around it at least helps mitigate some of the pressure to perform health. this kind of pressure is associated with the social dimension—including cultural norms and societal stereotypes, assumptions, and ideas, which can inform relational interactions. whether people feel welcome to open up to those around them about their needs depends to a degree on communal recognition that their needs are important. given this, recall that having specialized needs around food can be associated with being a picky eater or excessively fussy.21 tara*, diagnosed with celiac disease, noted that her diet felt “hyper-visible and also hyper-invisible. and then how it gets attached to ideas about like . . . like being a hipster or being a millennial or being like . . . i’m going to be like, ‘i had celiac before it was cool.’” social norms can shift, however, to become more open to discussion of gut issues. ryan* contrasted the situation now in his home town in rural newfoundland where they now understand the idea of gluten-free food (“they might not have anything for you, but at least they acknowledge it”) versus previously, when it was more difficult to talk about food needs, when “you couldn’t say no to someone for food, and tell someone that you didn’t like it.” within his large family, as his cousins have grown up, they have found that many of them have gut issues, and so it can be more easily talked about: “so i feel like i’m not the only one. so i have cousins, and the cousins and i will literally bond over it; we’ll talk over, like, ‘so how was your last colonoscopy?’ or ‘how are you doing this week?’ or ‘what kind of diet are you on, these days?’” the increased acceptance and increased discussion help to make sure that people have what they need, as well as family bonding. 21 recall brown, who argues that picky eating is a moral failing. he notes that individuals with health issues can simply decline, but then also recall the experience of andrea*, who found that polite refusals led to further questions. this is not uncommon. dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 social groups can also have more specific local norms, which can enable speaking up and paying attention to gut needs. for example, donna* noted that it is normal for athletes to have very specific food choices (such as preferring a particular energy bar over another one) and have to regulate their gut carefully for highly active and intensive activities. consequently, getting into cycling was helpful for her, “because it’s kind of regularised, it’s sort of normalised that, you know, everybody has to pay attention to this.” this means that she does not feel as though she has to stand out because of her dietary constraints, and also makes it easier to get what she needs. environmental factors, including the built environment and infrastructure, have a significant effect on food choices made by people with gut issues.22 the problem of the availability of adequate public bathrooms is well documented— whether someone can access a bathroom affects the riskiness of foods and whether they can remain in a space, which constrains their choices substantially.23 but other factors, such as transit, also come into play. for example, katie’s gut issues often make them nervous about going out. katie describes what it was used to be like going out to places with their ex: “[he] really liked to stay much longer at things than me and how much stress it used to cause me being like, i can’t ask him to leave this thing yet, and we came together and i’m kind of trapped here.” in this instance, the stress caused by the sense of being trapped might lead to further constraints on food choices than katie might have experienced otherwise—because the gut is already engaged by anxiety, unpleasant symptoms might be more likely to be triggered by food that might otherwise have been innocuous. conversely, an environment that is safe and trusted—particularly a place where one has some degree of control—affects the experience and quality of food choices. amanda (who has celiac disease) emphasized the way in which she feels free only when she is at home: because my home is gluten-free, my friends know not to bring gluten into it, and so if we have a dinner party or something there is this freedom of just being able to eat anything and not talk about it. like, when that happens in the environment that i have built, we . . . it isn’t a topic, but like in every other food-related context in my life it is something that we talk about. 22 in cases such as when someone with gut issues is hospitalized, there may be very little choice at all, as natalie, who has crohn’s, describes. i am focusing here on cases where there is at least some choice. 23 see lowe (2018) and slater and jones (2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 in this context, the food that is present is all food that she can eat, and so the experience of constraint is diminished in comparison to when she is outside of her home. she contrasted this with the recent experience of having attended a conference where she had been told that gluten-free food would be provided. this turned out to be false, and so she and another attendee who also had celiac disease had to leave the conference space anytime there was a meal in order to seek out their own food. this reduced their opportunities for networking and taking advantage of the social dimension of the conference and made her feel excluded. the feeling of trust in an environment enabled some participants to try different things or eat foods that might normally be a problem. for example, erin* described herself as being able to take “calculated risks” when she is “at home or in a place that i am familiar with,” saying “when i’m in control of my surroundings, it doesn’t bother me.”24 the experience of an environment is shaped by the presence of trusted others, demonstrating the interconnection of relational and environmental factors. recall the example of katie being trapped while out with their ex. since their current partner has a car, they know that if they need to, they will be able to simply leave and go home. having the possibility of being able to get home easily makes it easier to be able to go out (which includes eating out). trusted others can also help in feeling freer with food choices themselves. melissa* described that when she lived with her family, there were “people who [. . .] really . . . don’t understand, and [. . .] cause a lot of anxiety about it.” it was different when she moved out to go to university, “once i got into a safer environment, i started to enjoy food a little bit and let myself try different things and have fun with it.” she described what she called “safe friends,” whom she trusts and who would understand if she suddenly needed something or felt unwell, and noted that she would generally not choose to go to an event in an unfamiliar space without a “safe friend.” the presence of a “safe friend” mitigates the unfamiliarity of the space. (recall the help donna* had from friends in negotiating a “non-poop-friendly environment.”) the assessment of the riskiness of food for many participants is thus not solely a function of its nutritional or biological properties but also of the social, relational, and environmental context involved. as noted above, expectations of food universality and of performing abledness are themselves stressors, so they can make already existing gut issues worse. reducing these expectations can help ease the 24 to be clear: for some of my participants, experimenting with foods is too risky in any circumstance, and so i do not want to claim that the danger of foods is entirely constituted by the presence or absence of a safe environment. still, even in these cases, the experience of food constraints and the pressures around food choices is shaped by context. dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 pressure around food choices and can also help build trust and a feeling of home. talking about gut issues and food needs helps to do this, but a number of participants reported that talking about gut issues was difficult. erin* noted that while she could speak comfortably about her gut issues with close friends, it was frustrating that this was not more widely accepted: even though i talk about feeling separate from this aspect of my body, i know i’m not and this is as much me as anything else. and so, it doesn’t . . . we can add it to “i can’t go for long runs because i have an ankle problem.” like that is another fact about me like i can’t go for a super long hike because i ate something last night and [. . .] for sure will need to go poop in the woods over there. so, why can’t we talk about them the same way? to think of the kind of shift in values and commitments that could make this possible, we can look to a contrast that kim hall describes between two images of the family meal; one by norman rockwell (freedom from want), and one by frank moore (freedom to share). the first, depicting a grandmother setting down a turkey platter, is idealized, all-white; everyone is in an assigned place according to family hierarchy, and “any visible marker of disability is hidden from view” (hall 2017, 439). in the second image, the family is racially heterogeneous, and the grandmother “presents a platter filled with pills, pill bottles, iv bags, and syringes” (442). as hall interprets it: everyone seated at the table is eagerly anticipating his or her medications and enjoying each other’s company. they are disabled and happy, a disruption of ableist associations of disability with tragedy and unhappiness. [. . .] happiness, pain, and woundedness are entangled in this scene and create a productive tension for opening more critical, resistant thinking about the shared meal, families, and disability than those found in the mainstream u.s. food movement. [. . .] moore presents a view of disability that is not romanticized or pathologized. all seated at the table need their medications and want to share them with others who also need them. disability is depicted as part of the desired community. (hall 2017, 442–43) the ideal of acceptance here does not solve gut issues but signals that one is welcome without needing to hide parts of oneself. acceptance has room for messiness and imperfection. we see this in the stories of participants whose families and friends feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article x published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 welcome them with their gut issues. this welcome allows people to discuss their needs and, by creating a place of safety, opens up further possibilities. conclusion given the issues raised by interview participants, we observe that prior to being able to make choices based on ethical concerns, people with gut issues have to navigate being able to eat safely. as we have seen, this is not solely a matter of individual medical or dietary precautions but also a matter of how well they are listened to, how much they can feel free to speak up, whether they feel safe or at home in their surroundings (or have a clear exit plan if needed), and so forth. these are things that the people around them—loved ones as well as coworkers and those setting up shared work and event spaces—play a role in shaping. they have a role to play in making sure that agents with gut issues have meaningful access to food choices that reflect their values, goals, and commitments and that allow them to flourish, as kim hall described. these relational encounters occur within a broader social and environmental context, which can also be resisted and reshaped. our collective social conception of gut issues plays a role in the silence around the needs of people with gut issues as well as the deprioritization of gut-related access needs in our institutions and social practices. this collective social conception suggests an obligation to collectively pay attention to gut issues. tracy isaacs argues that collective and individual levels of responsibility inform each other; as she writes, “the collective obligation can play a mediating role, providing some shape and order to the range of individual actions; it helps to narrow down the field of possible individual actions, making it more manageable” (isaacs 2011, 131).25 collectively paying attention can motivate actions directed to relational, social, and environmental dimensions of gut issues. in terms of the relational dimension, people need to able to talk about their gut needs—to indicate, for instance, that “pooping will happen”—and receive appropriate uptake. this means making space for these conversations, taking them seriously, and signalling receptivity to them. it also means being attentive to the “safety” of a space and engaging in collaboration, by providing resources or help for strategizing. for the social dimension, we can attend to ways to resist and reshape the social imagination around gut issues, through the stories we tell, the bodily aesthetics we celebrate or reject,26 and the norms and social expectations we endorse and pass on. in terms of the environmental dimension, we can work in solidarity with disability, social justice, 25 thanks to jennifer szende for the pointer to isaacs’s work here. 26 for example, instagram currently has 3,511 posts under the “ostomyinspo” hashtag, challenging the stigma associated with ostomy bags. tobin siebers (2010) explores aesthetics and disability, and the idea of “disqualified” bodies. dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 and labour activists for things like better bathroom access,27 workplace policies (including policies around breaks and working from home), and, of course, food access. the more this work is done on all levels, the more gut issues become a regularized part of our ethical attention. scholarship on food ethics can play a role at all levels here insofar as it concerns interpersonal, social, and policy-related interventions and analyses. in writing about the ethics and politics of food choices, we should think about the factors that enable them, and engage with the relational complexity of gut issues. this means that we should collectively pay attention to how we can create conditions for good food choices, which will involve learning to embrace (or at least accept) the messiness (and unpredictability) of the human body, not as an exception to our theory but as a core part of it. disability theory and relational autonomy help us explore the interdependence involved in our food choices.28 disclosure statement no conflict of interest is reported by the author. funding this work was supported by an internal grant from mount allison university, which included funds from the j.e.a. crake foundation. references bailey, cathryn. 2007. “we are what we eat: feminist vegetarianism and the reproduction of racial identity.” hypatia 22, no. 2 (spring): 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb00981.x. 27 for a successful story of activism in support of bathroom access near a public transit hub in ottawa, see lowe 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lisa jean, and kayla del biondo. 2017. “interactions between self, embodied identities, and food: considering race, class, and gender.” in the routledge handbook to food ethics, edited by mary c. rawlinson and caleb ward, 16– 26. new york: routledge. nedelsky, jennifer. 1989. “reconceiving autonomy: sources, thoughts and possibilities.” yale journal of law and feminism 1 (1): 7–36. https://digitalcommons .law.yale.edu/yjlf/vol1/iss1/5. olsson, cecilia, phil lyon, agneta hörnell, anneli ivarsson, and ylva mattsson sydner. 2009. “food that makes you different: the stigma experienced by adolescents with celiac disease,” qualitative health research 19, no. 7 (july): 976–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732309338722. oyserman, daphna, george c. smith, and kristen elmore. 2014. “identity-based motivation: implications for health and health disparities.” journal of social issues 70, no. 2 (june): 206–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12056. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi. 2018. care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver: arsenal pulp press. rawlinson, mary c., and caleb ward, eds. 2017. the routledge handbook to food ethics. new york: routledge. sarah. 2014. “food is not medicine.” skeptability, august 2. https://web.archive.org /web/20141021220401/https://skeptability.com/2014/08/02/food-is-notmedicine/. dryden – food choices and gut issues published by scholarship@western, 2021 29 schroeder, ryan d., and thomas j. mowen. 2014. “‘you can’t eat what?’ managing the stigma of celiac disease.” deviant behavior 35 (6): 456–74. https://doi.org /10.1080/01639625.2014.855105. sherwin, susan. 1998. “a relational approach to autonomy in health care.” in the politics of women’s health: exploring agency and autonomy, edited by susan sherwin and the feminist health care ethics research network, 19–47. philadelphia: temple university press. sherwin, susan, and katie stockdale. 2017. “whither bioethics now? the promise of relational theory.” international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 10, no. 1 (spring): 7–29. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijfab.10.1.7. siebers, tobin. 2010. disability aesthetics. ann arbor: university of michigan press. simpson, natasha. 2017. “disabling justice? the exclusion of people with disabilities from the food justice movement.” in disability studies and the environmental humanities: toward an eco-crip theory, edited by sarah jaquette ray and jay sibara, 403–21. lincoln: university of nebraska press. slater, jen, and charlotte jones. 2018. around the toilet: a research project report about what makes a safe and accessible toilet space (april 2015–february 2018). sheffield, uk: sheffield hallam university. https://aroundthetoilet .wordpress.com/around-the-toilet-report/. tremain, shelley. 2015. “this is what a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability looks like.” foucault studies, no. 19 (june): 7–42. https://doi.org /10.22439/fs.v0i19.4822. ———. 2019. “feminist philosophy of disability: a genealogical intervention.” southern journal of philosophy 57, no. 1 (march): 132–58. https://doi.org/10 .1111/sjp.12312. wardrope, alistair. 2015. “relational autonomy and the ethics of health promotion.” public health ethics 8, no. 1 (april): 50–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/phe /phu025. wilson, elizabeth a. 2004. “gut feminism.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 15, no. 3 (december): 66–94. ———. 2015. gut feminism. durham, nc: duke university press. jane dryden is an associate professor of philosophy at mount allison university in sackville, new brunswick. she works on philosophy of disability, feminist philosophy, and german idealism. her current research focuses on the relationship of our embodied vulnerability and autonomy, with a particular focus on the gut. she has also been involved in research on accessibility in higher education. 10839 dryden title page 10839 dryden final format blaming from inside the birdcage: strawsonian accounts of blame and feminist care ethics feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 1 article 3 2022 blaming from inside the birdcage: strawsonian accounts of blame and feminist care ethics amy mckiernan dickinson college mckierna@dickinson.edu recommended citation mckiernan, amy. 2022. “blaming from inside the birdcage: strawsonian accounts of blame and feminist care ethics.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (1). article 3. mailto:mckierna@dickinson.edu mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage blaming from inside the birdcage: strawsonian accounts of blame and feminist care ethics amy mckiernan abstract this article notices a trend in work done by philosophers who build on p. f. strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes; it looks as though philosophers supplement strawson with (or claim that strawson has underlying commitments to) a more robust ethical program in order to address questions concerning the moral appropriateness of the reactive attitudes. i argue feminist care ethics can serve as a promising moral supplement to strawson. then, i diagnose a problem in strawson— namely, the assumption that members of moral communities will express all three kinds of reactive attitudes (toward the self, directly toward others, and indirectly on behalf of others). once we consider these three expressions from a feminist perspective, it becomes clear that while some may express indignation on behalf of others and guilt toward themselves, many will not express resentment directly toward others for good reasons under oppressive conditions. keywords: moral blame, strawson, reactive attitudes, feminist care ethics, oppression in blame: its nature and norms, d. justin coates and neal tognazzini deem “freedom and resentment,” by p. f. strawson, “the founding document of contemporary work on blame” (2013, 5). strawsonian views have the following advantage: these views do not neglect the emotive aspects of blame. instead, views inspired by strawson make negative emotions like guilt, resentment, and indignation central to understanding our blaming practices. though this is the case, upon returning to strawson, i argue his approach is not well equipped to make sense of the negative emotions present in blaming practices that occur in moral communities operating under oppressive conditions. when considering our negative reactive attitudes, it is crucial to consider how oppressive power dynamics shape these attitudes and reactions. i join marilyn frye in thinking about oppression in the following way: “the experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction” (frye 1983, 4).1 because strawson does not consider how reactive attitudes operate in oppressive contexts, i argue accounts of blame should take seriously the central role of the negative emotions in our moral lives and the power dynamics present in moral communities, with specific emphasis on how experiences of oppression impact how we blame ourselves and others. this requires saying more than strawson does about how and why members of moral communities may become critical of some deployments of the reactive attitudes, despite their own reliance on these reactive attitudes. this article proceeds in five parts. section 1 reviews the main ideas in strawson’s “freedom and resentment.” in section 2, i consider some accounts of blame inspired by strawson. section 3 notices a general trend in work done by philosophers who build on strawson; it looks as though philosophers supplement strawson with (or claim that strawson has underlying commitments to) a more robust ethical program in order to address questions concerning the moral appropriateness of the reactive attitudes. strawson claims these attitudes, including guilt, resentment, indignation, gratitude, and other practices that express praise and blame, are inescapably human. this, however, does not yet show that these attitudes are morally appropriate, which is why strawson seems to need some kind of moral supplement. in section 4, i argue that a feminist care ethics can serve as a promising moral supplement to strawson given the importance both approaches assign to interpersonal relationships, the participant attitude, and practices of holding ourselves and each other responsible in an inescapably social world. then, the final section relies on frye and bartky to diagnose a problem in strawson—namely, the assumption that members of moral communities will express all three kinds of 1 frye’s definition of oppression is not the only one worth consulting, but i find her definition instructive because she provides such an accessible and accurate image— viz., the bird cage. on her view, one cannot extract a practice or reaction and analyze it independent of the larger social structure within which it exists. this is also true of my analysis of the reactive attitudes in strawson. we should consider how these reactive attitudes operate within larger networks of oppression. in her recently published think like a feminist: the philosophy behind the revolution, carol hay also affirms the value of frye’s image of the birdcage as “the best way to wrap your head around the structural and systemic nature of oppression” (2020, 33). for some additional feminist accounts of oppression see iris young’s (1990) “five faces of oppression,” sandra bartky’s (1990) “on psychological oppression,” ann cudd’s (2006) analyzing oppression, and kristie dotson’s (2014) “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage reactive attitudes (toward the self, directly toward others, and indirectly on behalf of others). once we consider these three expressions from a feminist perspective, it becomes clear that while some may express indignation on behalf of others and guilt toward themselves, many will not express resentment directly for good reasons—for example, a diminished sense of self-worth, the likely failure on the part of privileged others to take the expression of resentment seriously, or fear that the expression of resentment will lead to backlash or danger under oppressive conditions. i conclude by emphasizing the importance of accounts of blame that have the potential to dismantle oppressive practices and institutions, and i specifically point to the importance of michelle ciurria’s (2020) account of “emancipatory blame” in the recently published “the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability.” section 1: strawson’s “freedom and resentment” strawson (2008, 1) begins by noting there are those philosophers who “say they do not know what the thesis of determinism is. others say, or imply, that they do know what it is.” among those who claim they know something about the thesis of determinism, strawson identifies two main camps—the pessimists and the optimists. 2 the pessimists doubt “the practices of punishing and blaming, of expressing moral condemnation and approval” have any justification if determinism is shown to be true (strawson 2008, 1). how could these practices make sense if it was shown to be true that moral agents do not have any control over their actions? the optimists, who he says operate on the basis of a “one-eyed utilitarianism,” claim that, even if the thesis of determinism was shown to be true, practices of blaming, praising, and holding responsible would still have value, as these practices can be used to control populations and maintain order in society (strawson 2008, 25). strawson locates himself in the first category introduced, those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is. yet, he sees value in trying to reconcile these two camps, though he recognizes that in trying to do so, his account “is likely to seem wrongheaded to everyone” (2). following his distinction between the pessimists and the optimists, strawson stages a dialogue between these parties, noting how each would respond when challenged. the pessimist and optimist continue until they arrive at the following 2 strawson (2008, 1) also notes a third possible stance, that of the “genuine moral skeptic” who thinks that “the notions of moral guilt, of blame, of moral responsibility are inherently confused and that we can see this to be so if we consider the consequences either of the truth of determinism or of its falsity. the holders of this opinion agree with the pessimists that these notions lack application if determinism is true, and add simply that they also lack it if determinism is false.” published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 stalemate: the optimist claims that, given the facts as we know them, the truth of determinism would not render our practices of moral praise and blame useless because these practices could still be used for the purposes of social control, cooperation, and organization. the pessimist, still desiring more, claims that this description fails to capture something crucial about these practices as moral practices (strawson 2008, 4). the pessimist hence draws the conclusion that the facts as we know them suggest there is no such thing as moral responsibility. strawson calls attention to a kind of practice previously neglected by both camps as an intervention into this debate which might give “the optimist something more to say” (4). strawson notices the debate heretofore has assumed an objective stance toward the practices and agents under discussion. both the pessimist and the optimist started from a position that assumed it was possible to debate the value of moral practices from a distance, or removed from their own lived experiences of these practices. strawson (2008, 5) writes, “i want to speak, at least at first, of something else: of the non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries; of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings.” so, instead of entering the debate by immediately appealing to an abstract category such as blameworthiness, which the pessimist would claim depends on the falsity of determinism, strawson shifts the gaze to our everyday reactions toward ourselves and each other. this shift to our experiences of and participation in moral practices invites us to begin from the participant stance. as one might imagine, this approach comes with its own set of difficulties: what i have to say consists largely of commonplaces. so my language, like that of commonplaces generally, will be quite unscientific and imprecise. the central commonplace that i want to insist on is the very great importance that we attach to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings, and the great extent to which our personal feelings and reactions depend upon, or involve, our beliefs about these attitudes and intentions. i can give no simple description of the field of phenomena at the centre of which stands this commonplace truth; for the field is too complex. (strawson 2008, 5) strawson warns that when attempting to talk about our relationships, he will not simplify complicated practices for the purpose of false precision. strawson notes there are a number of ways of talking about these commonplaces that invoke concepts like self-respect, human dignity, the need for love, and so forth, but he considers this “jargon” useful only insofar as it helps to “emphasize how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people—and published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage particularly of some other people—reflect attitudes towards us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other” (2008, 5). instead of beginning by positing some inherent human quality like dignity or free will, strawson points to a collection of ambiguous attitudes and reactions upon which we place great importance for establishing and maintaining our interpersonal relationships and moral norms. it becomes clear that we expect a basic amount of goodwill from those with whom we share a moral community, and we react negatively when we feel that this minimal amount of goodwill has not been satisfied (2008, 7). “goodwill,” as described by strawson, means something along the lines of “due moral regard” or “recognition of basic moral standing” between members of a shared moral community. moving forward, strawson refers to these attitudes and practices as reactive attitudes and gives us a rough sketch of what he has in mind, mentioning attitudes like guilt, resentment, indignation, gratitude, and forgiveness. referring to resentment and gratitude, strawson explains: if someone treads on my hand accidentally, while trying to help me, the pain may be no less acute than if he treads on it in contemptuous disregard of my existence or with a malevolent wish to injure me. but i shall generally feel in the second case a kind and degree of resentment that i shall not feel in the first. if someone’s actions help me to some benefit i desire, then i am benefited in any case; but if he intended them so to benefit me because of his general goodwill towards me, i shall reasonably feel a gratitude which i should not feel at all if the benefit was an incidental consequence, unintended or even regretted by him, of some plan of action with a different aim. (2008, 6) it is not difficult to imagine additional examples of the kind mentioned by strawson; in fact, our ability to quickly call to mind many examples supports strawson’s thesis. consider how often people feel slighted when a friend or partner fails to call or text back in a reasonable amount of time about something important. upon learning this person dealt with an emergency at work, resentment usually dissipates. but if the friend or partner simply fails to care enough to call or text back, resentment often lingers, even grows. given how easy it is to call to mind everyday examples of what strawson calls the reactive attitudes, it makes less sense to begin to understand blame by trying to objectively isolate and determine which kinds of actions or people are inherently blameworthy. instead, as we see with the examples mentioned above, the same action carried out by the same person changes radically based on the attitude published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 expressed by the action. we largely react to the expression of this attitude, not the action or person as such. this observation leads strawson to note that there will be cases when we react to a perceived slight because we assume that someone’s action expressed ill will, but learn this was not true for one of two reasons—either due to details about the situation or the action that were not clear (the presence of coercion or emergency, for example) or because the person lacks the capacity to express such an attitude or perceive the basic demand for goodwill toward others (children, for example). in “responsibility and the limits of evil: variations on a strawsonian theme,” gary watson supplies helpful language for these two kinds. he calls pleas of the first kind “excusing” conditions and pleas of the second kind “exempting” conditions (watson 1987, 259–60). we may excuse a friend who lashes out at us once we learn she was not acting like herself due to some kind of emergency or tragedy, like losing her job or learning she has cancer. under normal circumstances, we expect this friend to treat us with a minimal amount of goodwill, but we excuse her given the impact this stressful or life-changing information has had. if, however, our four-year-old niece screams at us for failing to pay enough attention to her rather than her brother, we typically see her as morally exempt; though we may attempt to educate her in that moment, we do not think her action amounted to a moral failure deserving of a reactive attitude like resentment.3 strawson’s approach to the question of responsibility, including practices of praising and blaming, then, does not assume virtuous or vicious intent is easily detectable. when we express a reactive attitude like resentment and blame someone for a perceived harm, it is always possible the person has a valid excuse or may be exempt. interpersonal interactions are rarely transparent; this, in turn, suggests the meaning of responsibility, including the practice of blaming, will require knowing something about the motivations, intentions, social situation, and capacities, at least, of those blamed. importantly, strawson does not dismiss the objective stance altogether. he explains we are able to take this detached, scientific attitude toward ourselves and others, especially those who are “partially or wholly inhibited by abnormalities or by immaturity”: to adopt the objective attitude to another human being is to see him, perhaps, as an object of social policy; as a subject for what, in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment; as something certainly to 3 granted, spending time with children can be frustrating and anger-inducing for lots of reasons, but not typically because we expect them to treat us as members of a shared moral community—at least, not yet. published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage be taken account, perhaps precautionary account, of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained; perhaps simply to be avoided, though this gerundive is not peculiar to cases of objectivity of attitude. (strawson 2008, 9)4 strawson adds that, though we may take the objective attitude most often toward those who are at least partially exempt from our reactive attitudes, such as children, we also may take this stance toward those who are full members of our moral community as a kind of “refuge” (2008, 10). consider deciding to take the objective attitude toward your sibling given something they did or failed to do in order to prevent yourself from feeling increased stress on an already difficult day. this is one way that a temporary deployment of the objective attitude may serve as a refuge. strawson makes this point with the following caveat though: we cannot maintain this stance for long periods of time. instead, the desire to continue to view another member of the moral community, such as a partner or friend or coworker, this way usually suggests the relationship has been or should be altered or severed in some significant way. though as humans we are able to take an objective stance toward ourselves and others for various reasons, this attitude is not instructive regarding responsibility because our practices of holding one another responsible require the opposing stance, the participant attitude. because strawson approaches the question of responsibility by beginning with our participant, interpersonal expectations of and reactions to each other, he explains reactive attitudes can be expressed in three interconnected ways: (1) toward the self, (2) directly toward others, or (3) indirectly on behalf of others (2008, 16). as an example of a self-directed reactive attitude, he offers guilt. resentment is an example of a reactive attitude expressed directly; indignation is expressed on behalf of another. strawson explains: 4 given the many abuses of those considered “abnormal” or “immature” throughout history, i bristle each time i read this passage. yet, strawson’s observations regarding the fact that we can take the objective attitude toward ourselves and others serves as a good reminder to do so with caution and care. there is a big difference between taking the objective attitude for the purpose of encouraging healthy blood pressure and taking the objective attitude for the purpose of “correcting” a perceived abnormality like “homosexuality” or “hysteria.” further, strawson’s point is that, as humans, we begin from our interpersonal engagements and the participant attitude. for humans, the objective attitude is a suspension of the more common and primary attitude, the participant attitude. published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 all these three types of attitude are humanly connected. one who manifested the personal reactive attitudes in a high degree but showed no inclination at all to their vicarious analogues would appear as an abnormal case of moral egocentricity, as a kind of moral solipsist. . . . in general, though within varying limits, we demand of others for others, as well as of ourselves for others, something of the regard which we demand of others for ourselves. can we imagine, besides that of the moral solipsist, any other case of one or two of these three types of attitude being fully developed, but quite unaccompanied by any trace, however slight, of the remaining two or one? if we can, then we imagine something far below or far above the level of our common humanity—a moral idiot or a saint. for all these types of attitude alike have common roots in our human nature and our membership of human communities. (2008, 16–17) keeping in mind strawson’s warning about the imprecision of language given the topic, a basic sketch has become clear enough. instead of trying to uncover the meaning and limitations of responsibility by taking the objective attitude that argues on the basis of detached concepts, strawson starts with engaged practices of responsibility. he notices that practices of holding ourselves and each other responsible stem from the expectation we have for a minimal amount of goodwill from others in our moral communities and the subsequent moral demand others treat us with this minimal amount of goodwill. watson introduces language that helps to summarize this dynamic within the moral community: what is fresh in “freedom and resentment,” as i read it, are two related ideas: that our sense of ourselves and one another as morally responsible agents and (accordingly) as morally responsible to one another is integral to (“given with”) human sociality itself, and that attempts to ground “responsibility practices” in some reality external to human nature are misguided. strawson identifies two components of human sociality as crucial here. first, we care deeply (and “for its own sake”) about how people regard one another. second, this concern manifests itself in a demand or expectation to be treated with regard and good will. following strawson, let’s call these the basic concern and the basic demand respectively. (2014, 17) when we perceive someone has not met our basic demand for goodwill, we react because we care. the reactive attitudes, like resentment and indignation, arise as a result of a perceived slight, which often has more to do with what we assume were published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage the motivations accompanying an action—for example, i react to the carelessness of someone who steps on my foot because i see them as acting as if i do not matter. upon expressing a reactive attitude, it may become clear the offending person either had a good excuse or is exempt from understanding the basic demand for goodwill between moral community members. if we try to imagine humanity without the susceptibility to reactive attitudes and practices of blaming and praising, it seems like we have imagined something too far from how we behave in our everyday engagements with each other. the fact that the reactive attitudes seem inescapable, though, does not yet amount to a claim that these attitudes are morally appropriate. section 2: contemporary accounts of blame inspired by strawson though strawson does not refer to blame specifically as a reactive attitude, he makes it clear we express reactive attitudes like guilt, resentment, and indignation when we blame ourselves and others. blaming and praising are described, respectively, as ways we either hold others responsible for perceived slights or recognize others for moral accomplishments. in a collection devoted to the work of t. m. scanlon, r. jay wallace offers an account of blame inspired by strawson’s discussion of the reactive attitudes. wallace (2011, 349) challenges scanlon’s relational model of blame, claiming that it “leaves the blame out of blame” insofar as it neglects the reactive attitudes. in his earlier work, wallace defines blame as the following: i propose that blame involves a susceptibility to the reactive emotions, and that the responses of moral sanction serve to express these emotions. because of the connection of the reactive emotions with expectations, this account makes sense of the backward-looking character of blame and moral sanction, which are essentially reactions to a moral wrong. (wallace 1994, 11) wallace criticizes the nonaffective dimension of scanlon’s relational view. according to wallace, scanlon’s descriptions of how blame operates in relationships are stripped of crucial emotive elements. scanlon leaves room in his account for the appropriateness of experiencing emotions but does not consider this a necessary or defining feature of blame. in contrast, wallace asks readers to imagine what it means to be a good friend. he claims that friendship includes actively caring for others in ways that express this care through emotions (2011, 356). by way of focusing on the centrality of the reactive attitudes like resentment, indignation, and guilt, wallace addresses what we might refer to as the published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 phenomenology of blame, or what it feels like to blame ourselves and others.5 if we fail to consider the emotional aspects of blame, we risk misunderstanding how we actually blame ourselves and others. wallace offers the following instructive analogy: take the case of artistic or intellectual pursuits, such as opera or philosophy. to acknowledge that these are valuable activities is, among other things, to acknowledge that there is reason to support them, to engage in them oneself if one has the requisite talents and interests, to learn about them and try to understand them, and so on. but one can acknowledge all these things without actually valuing opera or philosophy oneself. there is an additional quality of emotional engagement that characterizes the attitudes of people who genuinely value these pursuits; they take a real interest in them, care about whether they are in a good or a bad way, become excited when there are opportunities to engage in activities related to these pursuits, and are subject to distress when opportunities of this kind are lacking. (2011, 367) wallace’s account of blame draws on strawson’s observation that the participant attitude includes expressions of reactive attitudes, hurt feelings, and the expectation that people care about themselves and each other as members of moral communities. victoria mcgeer shares wallace’s concern that some influential approaches have neglected important emotional aspects of blame. she calls this “sanitizing blame” and writes: 5 in his book, responsibility and the moral sentiments, r. jay wallace argues for a narrow interpretation of the reactive attitudes, limiting his discussion to resentment, indignation, and guilt. regarding his decision to interpret strawson narrowly, wallace (1994, 11) writes: “i therefore follow a different strategy for developing the strawsonian approach. instead of interpreting the reactive attitudes simply as those emotions implicated in interpersonal relations, i construe them more narrowly, taking the paradigms to be resentment, indignation, and guilt. interpreting the reactive emotions in this narrow way permits us to understand how these emotions hang together as a class. the key, i argue, lies in their distinctive connection with expectations. thus, episodes of guilt, resentment, and indignation are caused by the belief that an expectation to which one holds a person has been breached; the connection with expectations gives the reactive emotions common propositional objects, tying them together as a class.” published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage the broader philosophical project that drives much of this work on blame is therefore one of showing how it can be a normatively acceptable, even valuable response to wrongdoing. i call this the project of “civilizing blame” and agree with moral philosophers that it is an important one to pursue, but not, i claim, at the expense of taking the bile out of blame. in my view, this contravenes a constraint that any satisfactory theory of blame must meet—that is should direct us to a psychologically plausible phenomenon, however unsavory, that answers to our ordinary conception of blame: it satisfies the ordinary connotations for the term, including connotations of resentment and anger and desire for payback. the challenge is to accept this constraint while showing that blame may nevertheless be a normatively fitting response to wrongdoing. (mcgeer 2013, 163) mcgeer argues her account of blame can meet this challenge. drawing on insights from strawson and interdisciplinary literature in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and experimental economics, she introduces a naturalist, functionalist account of blame. this account interrogates the role that anger has played in our blaming activities through time. taking this evolutionary approach allows for mcgeer to focus on the functions of anger and blame, rather than fixating on “so-called essential features (features present in every legitimate instance of blame)” like those who so often end up sanitizing blame (2013, 168). mcgeer anticipates and dispenses with the objection that negative emotions like anger are not essential to understanding blame because there are cases of blaming that do not appear to include negative emotions or negative reactive attitudes. she thinks dismissing the role negative emotions play in blame on this basis runs the risk of being too revisionary in search of a difficult(if not impossible-) todetermine essence and argues, instead, that the fact that there are some exceptional cases of blaming that do not seem to include the presence of negative emotions does not mean these emotions are not crucial to understanding the evolutionary development and functions of blame. mcgeer shifts the conversation from asking, “what is blame?” to “what has been the purpose or function of blame?” she arrives at the following basic account of blame: at the most elemental level, blame is a quasi-autonomous, emotionally mediated response to others that is specifically prompted by, and targeted on, behavior that transgresses personally or socially valued norms. despite its quasi-autonomous (nonreflective) character, this blaming response has both a backward-looking appraisal dimension and a forward-looking regulative dimension. the backward-looking published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 appraisal dimension consists in coding—that is, perceiving—others’ behavior as (offensively) transgressive; the forward-looking regulative dimension consists in an aggressive (punitive) response aimed and changing or inhibiting such behavior. (mcgeer 2013, 172) this elemental description of blame is just a start for mcgeer, though. next, keeping in mind the challenges she identified at the beginning of the article, mcgeer returns to our everyday practices of blame to see if this basic account rings true of these practices. does blame function in these backward-looking and forward-looking ways? mcgeer argues blame does have this structure, though the forward-looking dimension need not take an aggressive or punitive form. the forward-looking dimension of blame becomes especially clear when we think about blame as a process. though blame begins as a reaction to a perceived slight, this does not mean we blame indefinitely. in fact, one would be hard pressed to find an account that argued for the normative importance of blame if assigning blame were like identifying and assigning some inherent, static quality. instead, blame’s forward-looking dimension becomes clear when we think about how blame dissipates. mcgeer acknowledges this process is not “typically easy or straightforward” but when successful results in “the blamer’s mollification, understanding, and even forgiveness” (2013, 175). further, though she determines that blame is “an evolved reaction to transgressive behavior” (175), she argues that we can build on this to develop practices of blaming based on a “dialogical” rather than punitive structure (184). having discussed two accounts of blame that build on themes in strawson’s “freedom and resentment”—specifically, his discussion of the reactive attitudes and the attention that he pays to the participant stance—i notice a more general trend in work done on strawson. though strawson claims we would be unrecognizable to ourselves without the reactive attitudes, this does not yet establish these attitudes as normatively valuable. section 3: strawson and ethics my aim in this section is to point out a general trend of pairing strawson with more robust ethical programs as evidence that this looks necessary in order to differentiate between morally appropriate and inappropriate deployments of blame, praise, and the reactive attitudes. in his attempt to establish an ethics on the basis of the second personal standpoint, stephen darwall (2006) claims members of a shared moral community must necessarily recognize one another as free, competent, rational agents. he understands the reactive attitudes as forms of communication between members of a moral community who recognize each other as having shared standing as morally published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage competent agents. darwall argues that kantian contractualist approaches to ethics best capture strawson’s description of the reactive attitudes insofar as to address someone from the second personal standpoint is to already recognize them as members of a shared community who possess the ability to recognize human dignity and the freedom to act in ways that respect this dignity. when one fails to do this, reactive attitudes result. this supplement is necessary because strawson does not say that members of a shared moral community deserve to be treated with respect or dignity; strawson says that members of a shared moral community expect to be treated with goodwill. darwall builds on this, with the help of kantian contractualist ethics, to claim that to expect that others treat us with respect and to react with resentment if they do not meet this standard is to already assume that members of the moral community are deserving of goodwill given recognition of their standing as morally competent, free, and rational agents. taking a different strategy from darwall, mcgeer argues there is an underlying commitment to a broad kind of consequentialism present in “freedom and resentment.” she acknowledges that, while some features of strawson’s view in “freedom and resentment” are widely agreed upon, reading him as a consequentialist is not: as i read the text there are in fact three mutually reinforcing prongs to strawson’s defence of a robust conception of responsibility in “freedom and resentment”: his naturalism (by which i mean a resistance to certain metaphysical considerations and/or debates about free will in light of our natural human attitudes and commitments); his pragmatism (by which i mean an emphasis on our everyday attitudes and practices of “holding responsible”); and his consequentialism (which i will elucidate presently). (mcgeer 2014, 65) though mcgeer knows her qualification of strawson as a kind of consequentialist is not a dominant view among strawsonian scholars, she returns to strawson to remind readers he sets out to locate a further and better response for the optimist in the debate on free will and determinism. mcgeer (2014, 82) explains, while the “oneeyed utilitarian” mentioned by strawson may be a direct consequentialist, there is a more complicated and sophisticated position, that of the indirect consequentialist. the indirect consequentialist recognizes sometimes the greatest good is achieved indirectly, by exiting or abandoning a practice. in order to determine the normative worth, then, of the reactive attitudes, an indirect consequentialist need not go about this by means of strict calculation of what is the neutral good for the moral community or the net worth of good produced by the expressing reactive attitudes: “reactive attitudes and practices can be published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 comparatively assessed in light of their aptness for producing a certain good; and it seems clear from what has gone before that the good in question is the good of regulating behaviour by means of developing and/or supporting people's moral understanding” (mcgeer 2014, 88). once we establish that praise, blame, and the reactive attitudes can be compared with each other and with forms of life depraved of these practices, mcgeer does not think strawson’s optimist needs additional moral justification beyond the following: as i read it, the answer implicit in strawson’s response is that it is the kind of good that ought to be self-evident when we contemplate a social life replete with our human form of relationships and commitments, as against one that is stripped of all of that. au fond, it is the kind of good that flows from living our human kind of life according to our nature as normatively responsive creatures. call it “human flourishing” for want of a better term. thus, when the pessimist presses her justificatory demand, there seems to be little left to say. (2014, 89–90) though mcgeer does not supplement strawson with a more robust ethical program, she argues for his commitment to a broader consequentialism in order to justify an alternative reading of strawson’s “freedom and resentment” as already expressing normative views. section 4: strawson and feminist care ethics having noticed a more general trend that pairs strawson with broader ethical programs like kantian contractualism and consequentialism for the purpose of establishing (or emphasizing) normative commitments in “freedom and resentment,” this section argues a feminist care ethics can serve as a promising—and until now, neglected—supplement to strawson.6 since carol gilligan’s publication of in a different voice in 1982, there has been an abundance of diverse work which falls broadly under the heading of “care ethics.” importantly, this includes literature criticizing feminist care ethics for initially failing to take an intersectional approach, which considers the nexus of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, and age when identifying and addressing oppressive practices. as observed by andrea d. green in her essay, “in a different 6 for the purpose of this article, i do not claim feminist care ethics is better suited as a supplement to strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes than the kantian or consequentialist supplements. while i suspect this may be the case, a defense of this position would require an in-depth comparative analysis of these three approaches. published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage room: toward an african american woman’s ethic of care and justice,” “even if the methodological shift from absolutism to constructivism is accomplished in in a different voice, the woman’s ethos described therein is that of a mainstream white woman’s social world and, thus, it cannot adequately capture the social reality of black or other minority women” (green 2004, 60). gilligan acknowledges the colorblind elements of her original work in the forward to race-ing moral formation: african american perspectives on care and justice: i remember the moment—the voice of an african american student electrifying the large lecture hall in the staid georgian building where i was teaching a class on moral development, his question suddenly illuminating the unspoken: the presupposition that heinz was white, that if he stole an overpriced drug to save his wife’s life, a judge would agree that stealing in this case was the right thing to do. the moral logic was impeccable, but what if heinz were black? what would the judge do then? wouldn’t the story change? wouldn’t the conversation with the judge be different? we all knew that it would.” (gilligan and ward 2004, ix) with gilligan’s reflections in mind, for the purpose of this article, i rely on virginia held’s discussion of feminist care ethics in the ethics of care: personal, political, and global, as this text does an excellent job of consolidating past work for the purpose of correcting for biases, responding to objections, and suggesting future aims. held argues feminist care ethics constitutes a paradigm distinct from virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism given the focus on ethical agents as relational and interpersonal: the ethics of care usually works with a conception of persons as relational rather than the self-sufficient independent individuals of the dominant moral theories. the dominant theories can be interpreted as importing into moral theory a concept of the person developed primarily for liberal, political, and economic theory, seeing the person as a rational, autonomous agent, or a self-interested individual. (2006, 13) care ethics explicitly disallows any such interpretation of ethical subjects. held stresses shared human experiences of vulnerability and care, including childhood and old age, as shared experiences that carry normative force. she claims we are ethical subjects insofar as we are relational subjects constituted by our social dependencies and responsibilities. she acknowledges that not all those working on the ethics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 are keen on the term “care,” but she clarifies that these approaches are roughly aligned in affording vulnerability, interdependency, and the need for love a kind of significance previously neglected in western philosophy and ethics (held 2006, 9). specifically, held (2006, 10–13) cites five distinct features of the ethics of care as a moral theory: (1) the ethics of care recognizes “the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility,” (2) “the ethics of care values emotion rather than rejects it,” (3) “the ethics of care respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships,” (4) the ethics of care “reconceptualizes traditional notions about the public and the private,” including challenging practices of oppression, and (5) the ethics of care “characteristically sees persons as relational and interdependent, morally and epistemologically.” having briefly outlined these five features of the ethics of care, held addresses the objection from those who think that an ethics of care cannot coexist with theories of justice. held argues that care and justice attend to distinct, but necessarily connected social and political questions; one approach may be more suited than another on a case-by-case basis, and both can inform our moral thinking and practices: the question remains, however, whether justice should be thought to be incorporated into any ethic of care that will be adequate or whether we should keep the notions of justice and care and their associated ethics conceptually distinct. there is much to be said for recognizing how the ethics of care values interrelatedness and responsiveness to the needs of particular others, how the ethics of justice values fairness and rights, and how these are different emphases. too much integration will lose sight of these valid differences. (2006, 16) so, why focus on care as a guiding moral norm? held (2006, 9) explains, “the concept of care has the advantage of not losing sight of the work involved in caring for people and of not lending itself to the interpretation of morality as ideal but impractical to which advocates of the ethics of care often object. care is both value and practice.” this claim that “care is both value and practice” invites us to return to strawson’s “freedom and resentment.” after staging the debate that leads to a stalemate between the pessimist and the optimist on free will and determinism, strawson pivots away from the detached objective attitude toward the nondetached participant attitude. instead of continuing to interrogate the meaning and possibility of responsibility in objective terms, strawson (2008, 6) begins by focusing on how much we care about how others treat us across a range of different kinds of relationships, including our relationships with intimate partners, children, parents, published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage friends, coworkers, and acquaintances within shared moral communities. on the basis of these relationships, we develop expectations, the most minimal of which is a basic expectation of goodwill from those with whom we share communities. reactive attitudes arise as a result of failing to meet (guilt, resentment, indignation) or exceeding these expectations (gratitude). as gary watson notes: the starting point of the argument is of course that our practices bottom out in sentiments and concerns, the susceptibility to which defines our sociality. these ground a normative framework, i take it, because sentiments are ways of valuing, and valuing is taking certain considerations as reasons. this stance is implicit in the basic concern to stand in participant relationships of a certain character. it is true that strawson doesn’t explicitly speak of valuing in this connection, but insofar as valuing is implicit in the sentiments and is connected with taking things to be reasons, this seems to me an appropriate construal and also required to make sense of the idea of “internal justification.” (2014, 21–22) feminist care ethics is compatible with watson’s reading of strawson given the focus on care as both value and practice. with care ethics, our practices bottom out at caring. insofar as we are all born into a world that requires others to care for us to ensure our survival, we develop expectations of care that constitute the fabric of our moral communities. if an expectation of care is not met, it is easy to imagine someone expressing what strawson calls a reactive attitude. in fact, built into the core commitment of feminist care ethics is the claim that emotions are valuable and not to be rejected as irrational. it is possible, then, to consider caring a kind of valuing (as watson does), implicit within which is a normative commitment to the idea that each of us deserves care or, in the case of strawson, deserves basic goodwill as members of shared moral communities. though the shared focus on interpersonal relationships, the value of emotions, and the inescapability of the social world suggests that feminist care ethics can serve as a solid supplement to “freedom and resentment,” held’s approach is a promising companion to strawson for an additional reason. when considering the moral appropriateness of our practices of praising and blaming, along with the moral appropriateness of the reactive attitudes, feminist care ethics has the advantage of evaluating a wide range of practices with the following strong commitment to identifying and eradicating oppressive social practices and institutions in mind: instead of seeing the corporate sector, and military strength, and government and law as the most important segments of society published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 deserving the highest levels of wealth and power, a caring society might see the tasks of bringing up children, educating its members, meeting the needs of all, achieving peace and treasuring the environment, and doing these in the best ways possible to be that to which the greatest social efforts of all should be devoted. one can recognize that something comparable to legal constraints and police enforcement, including at a global level, may always be necessary for special cases, but also that caring societies could greatly decrease the need for them. the social changes a focus on care would require would be as profound as can be imagined. (held 2006, 19) implicit in our concern about ourselves and each other, there is a moral responsibility to care. we need look no further than our practices of caring to arrive at the normative claim that since we are all vulnerable and indebted to the care of others, we ought to care as well. yet, specifically pairing strawson with feminist care ethics seems promising for differentiating between morally appropriate and inappropriate practices because this approach explicitly seeks to safeguard against oppressive deployments of praise, blame, and the reactive attitudes. importantly, though, there is one aspect of strawson’s account that does not pair neatly with the feminist view. i discuss strawson’s assumption regarding the threefold expression of the reactive attitudes in the next and final section of this article. section 5: reactive attitudes in oppressive moral communities while i have identified a feminist care ethics as a strong lens through which we can establish normativity in “freedom and resentment,” the two are not entirely consistent. specifically, once we revisit strawson from a feminist perspective, strawson’s earlier claim that the three types of reactive attitudes are interconnected seems wrong. strawson says the three types of attitudes—namely, those directed at ourselves, like guilt; those directed at others, like resentment; and those directed at others on behalf of others, like indignation—will manifest in each member of a moral community. at first glance, this seems right. who would feel guilty for harming another but not express resentment if someone harmed them in the same way? it seems like all three types of the reactive attitudes work together to hold ourselves and each other accountable within our moral communities. yet, when we consider the manifestation of the reactive attitudes within oppressive moral communities, it is easy to imagine the incongruent expression of these three types of reactive attitudes. frye reminds readers that experiences of oppression involve the systematic, and often seemingly mundane, production of a double bind: published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage one of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind—situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. for example, it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. if we comply, we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. we need not, then, be taken note of. we acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no space. we participate in our own erasure. on the other hand, anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous. this means, at the least, that we may be found “difficult” or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one one’s livelihood; at worst, being seen as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous has been known to result in rape, arrest, beating, and murder. one can only choose to risk one’s preferred form and rate of annihilation. (frye 1983, 2) in patriarchal communities, it is not uncommon for oppressed people to blame themselves for failing to live up to patriarchal norms without it being safe or effective to express resentment toward others. this may take the form of “participating in our own erasure” because we do not think ourselves worthy of the same treatment as privileged members of our moral communities. or we may try to express resentment directly but experience what frye refers to as a double bind; upon expressing our resentment in response to oppressive treatment, we are deemed “crazy” or “put in our place” and made to feel as though we are in the wrong. this unearths a tension between strawson’s description of the reactive attitudes and feminist care ethics. it looks as if members of moral communities who experience oppression may express self-reactive attitudes in excessive ways due to the influence of oppressive norms and institutions, the kind of norms and institutions held tells us we ought to radically transform.7 further, “freedom and resentment” 7 i stress this claim in held’s development of feminist care ethics because feminist philosophers have rightly pointed out that expectations of care often reinforce patriarchal oppression. for example, kate manne offers a compelling analysis of how caring expectations reinforce misogyny. she explains, “we can distinguish between a (self-)recognized human being—e.g., white men who are otherwise privileged in most if not all major respects—versus a human giver, a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children, as applicable. (variants may be tolerated to varying degrees; wholesale alternatives or critical stances toward the nuclear heteropatriarchal family, much less so.) a giver is then obligated to offer love, sex, attention, affection, and admiration, published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 does not offer an account of how members of moral communities might critically evaluate their own expressions of the reactive attitudes. strawson notes we can be mistaken, and the targets of our reactive attitudes might be excused or exempt. but overall, strawson’s focus is on how entrenched we are in our interpersonal relationships, not on how to best navigate or experience these relationships. with this said, through a process like feminist consciousness raising, one could become aware of just how entrenched they are in their practices and relationships, with the eventual aim of radically reconstructing both for the better. so, in the case of the person who expresses the self-directed reactive attitude of guilt excessively toward herself, it is possible she may or may not understand her guilt as, at least in part, motivated by patriarchal oppressive norms operative in her relationships. becoming aware of one’s oppression is necessary to interrupting and challenging the practices that shape one’s oppression. as bartky explains, the process of becoming aware of one’s own oppression requires a certain amount of suspicion about the world as we know (or thought we knew) it: little political, professional, educational, or leisure-time activity is free of the blight of sexism. startlingly few personal relationships exist without it. feminist consciousness is a little like paranoia, especially when the feminist first begins to apprehend the full extent of sex discrimination and the subtlety and variety of the ways in which it is enforced. its agents are everywhere, even inside her own mind, since she can fall prey to self-doubt or a temptation to compliance. in response to this, the feminist becomes vigilant and suspicious. her apprehension of things, especially of direct or indirect communication with other people is characterized by what i call “wariness.” wariness is anticipation of the possibility of attack, of affront or insult, of disparagement, ridicule, or the hurting blindness of others. it is a mode of experience which anticipates experience in a certain way; it is an apprehension of the inherently threatening character of established society. while it is primarily the established order of things of which the feminist is wary, she is wary of herself too. (bartky 1990, 18–19) as well as other forms of emotional, social, reproductive, and caregiving labor, in accordance with social norms that govern and structure the relevant roles and relations” (manne 2018, 301). held (2006, 11) is attentive to these dynamics and makes it clear that “we need an ethics of care, not just care itself. the various aspects and expressions of care and caring relations need to be subjected to moral scrutiny and evaluated, not just observed and described.” published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage strawson assumes one must be a moral saint, solipsist, or “moral idiot” in order to have severe discord between the three types of reactive attitudes. i contend, for this to be the case, one need only be wary of oppressive forces in their moral community. in conclusion, i want to specifically praise a recently published work by michelle ciurria (2020, 3), where she offers an emancipatory account of blame: “more precisely, emancipatory blame seeks to identify people’s contributions to hierarchies of power and take a stand against them (via some negative attitude) in light of those contributions; while emancipatory praise seeks to identify resisters and celebrate their contributions to resistance movements that liberate the oppressed.” i see future potential in explicitly bringing together ciurria’s account of emancipatory blame and feminist care ethics. but, for the purpose of this article, my goal is modest. i aim to demonstrate how feminist care ethics is well positioned to provide a normative ground for strawson’s account of the reactive attitudes, while pushing back on his claim that most humans will (obviously) deploy the three types of reactive attitudes in their interpersonal lives. if nothing else, i want to emphasize the importance of recognizing that many of us are blaming from inside the birdcage, so any account that claims blame is morally appropriate and normatively valuable ought to be working hard not to reinforce oppressive norms, practices, and institutions. references bartky, sandra lee. 1990. “on psychological oppression.” in femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression, 22–31. new york: routledge. ciurria, michelle. 2020. “the mysterious case of the missing perpetrators: how the privileged escape blame and accountability.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (2). article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.2.7322. coates, d. justin, and neal a. tognazzini. 2013. “the contours of blame.” in blame: its nature and norms., edited by d. justin coates and neal a. tognazzini, 3– 26. new york: oxford university press. cudd, ann e. 2006. analyzing oppression. new york: oxford university press. darwall, stephen. 2006. the second-person standpoint: morality, respect, and accountability. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. dotson, kristie. 2014. “conceptualizing epistemic oppression.” social epistemology 28 (2): 115–38. frye, marilyn. 1983. politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. berkley, ca: crossing press. gilligan, carol. 1982. in a different voice: psychological theory and women's development. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.2.7322 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 1, article 3 gilligan, carol, and janie ward. 2004. foreword to race-ing moral formation: african american perspectives on care and justice, edited by vanessa siddle walker and john r. snarey, ix–xii. new york: teachers college press. green, andrea d. 2004. “in a different room: toward an african american woman’s ethic of care and justice.” in race-ing moral formation: african american perspectives on care and justice, edited by vanessa siddle walker and john r. snarey, 55–72. new york: teachers college press. hay, carol. 2020. think like a feminist: the philosophy behind the revolution. new york: w. w. norton. held, virginia. 2006. the ethics of care: personal, political, and global. new york: oxford university press. manne, kate. 2018. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. mcgeer, victoria. 2013. “civilizing blame.” in blame: its nature and norms, edited by d. justin coates and neal a. tognazzini, 162–88. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2014. “p. f. strawson's consequentialism.” in oxford studies in agency and responsibility. vol. 2, “freedom and resentment” at 50, edited by david shoemaker and neal tognazzini, 64–92. new york: oxford university press. strawson, p. f. 2008. freedom and resentment and other essays. new york: routledge. wallace, r. jay. 1994. responsibility and the moral sentiments. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. ———. 2011. “dispassionate opprobrium: on blame and the reactive sentiments.” in reasons and recognition: essays on the philosophy of t. m. scanlon, edited by r. jay wallace, rahul kumar, and samuel freeman, 348–72. new york: oxford university press. watson, gary, 1987. “responsibility and the limits of evil: variations on a strawsonian theme.” in responsibility, character, and the emotions: new essays in moral psychology, edited by ferdinand schoeman, 256–86. new york: cambridge university press. ———. 2014. “peter strawson on responsibility and sociality.” in oxford studies in agency and responsibility. vol. 2, “freedom and resentment” at 50, edited by david shoemaker and neal tognazzini, 15–32. new york: oxford university press. young, iris marion. 1990. “five faces of oppression.” in justice and the politics of difference, 39–65. princeton, nj: princeton university press. published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 mckiernan – blaming from inside the birdcage amy mckiernan serves as assistant professor of philosophy at dickinson college where she also directs the ethics across campus & the curriculum program. her research interests include moral blame, feminist care ethics, and topics in practical ethics, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of emotion. she is currently working on a book manuscript on feminist care ethics in practice. published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 14303 mckiernan title page 14303 mckiernan final format disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 1 article 2 recommended citation buttgereit, t.j. 2025. “disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (1). article 2. 2025 disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us t.j. buttgereit binghamton university tbuttge1@binghamton.edu buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us t.j. buttgereit abstract in this paper, i examine the implications that the often-used slogan of disability rights, “nothing about us without us,” has for our understanding of disability identity. i argue that externally labeling a person as disabled violates the principle of self-representation that is at the core of commitment to disability justice. but this concept of self-representation is complicated when we consider those deemed disabled who are incapable of communicating or perhaps even forming a disability identity. with these individuals in mind, i ask, how can self-representation be violated when a person is incapable of forming their own identity? what if external labeling is necessary for caregivers to provide care to their charges? in raising these questions, i seek to highlight how cases of noncommunicative individuals challenge us to rearticulate the meaning of self-identification and recognize the injustice of violating it, even when other obligations to them demand that we do so. keywords: disability studies, care ethics, disability identity, self-representation 1. introduction self-representation is a central demand of the disability rights movement. the slogan “nothing about us without us” has been meant to combat a history of marginalization and denied agency (charlton 1998, 1). the movement’s commitment to the value of self-representation has implications for how we understand the very concept of disability identity. externally labeling someone as disabled is not only an injustice; it stands in conflict with many of the core beliefs of those who are committed to disability justice. when considering this implication in relation to the fact that institutional labels are often required for the purpose of acquiring resources for those deemed disabled, a puzzle appears. caregivers of disabled people are often put in a position where they must either impose an external label on the individual they are representing or fail to secure the basic resources that the individual needs. in this difficult situation, we must recognize the necessity of externally labeling individuals as disabled as an injustice—even if a necessary injustice—rather than seeing these coercive institutional norms as evidence of a person’s identity. the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 principle of self-representation is important even when unjust circumstances force us to violate it. this idea of self-representation becomes complicated when we consider individuals whose conditions make cognition and/or communication difficult or even outright impossible. eva kittay notes that demanding to have one’s voice heard is simply not a reality for individuals with certain cognitive conditions. this is an important difference among individuals that get grouped together under the label of “disabled.” those who are unable to communicate or have severe cognitive conditions are far less likely to be represented or even taken into consideration by groups that advocate for disability rights because those groups are dominated by those who believe in self-advocacy (kittay 2019, 7). it is for this reason that it is important to discuss the nature of disability identity and the ethical implications it has for individuals whose lack of communicative capacities has often left them overlooked in conversations about disability. the issue of communicative capacity also runs the risk of complicating the explanation of why external labeling is problematic in the first place. if labeling is problematic because it prevents individuals from conceiving and expressing their own identity and having that identity recognized, then it might seem that it would be permissible to externally label individuals who are incapable of their own expression of identity. this paper in part represents a response to this concern and attempts to clarify exactly how we can articulate an objection to labeling someone who appears incapable of forming their own identity. 2. kittay’s care ethics eva kittay’s account of care ethics in learning from my daughter is a useful starting point for the task at hand. to begin, it is important to discuss what i understand to be some of kittay’s underlying motivations in developing an ethics of care that is specifically attentive to those who are deemed cognitively disabled. she rightly points out that care is necessitated by the inevitability of biological limitations. she calls this reality the “register of inevitable human dependency” (kittay 2019, 147). this is important because dependency is heavily stigmatized and often thought to be something that should be eliminated whenever possible. kittay points to romney’s “47%” comment during the 2016 us presidential election as an example of this. romney was filmed saying, there are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what . . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims. . . . these are people who pay no income tax. . . . and so my job is not to worry about those people. i'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. (quoted in christoffersen 2012) buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 however, this notion that dependency is an intrinsically undesirable state that we should always seek to avoid is, as kittay points out, clearly flawed. not only is dependency inevitable, because we will all, at one point, be in a state of reliance on someone else, but valuable aspects of human culture and social life are only possible because we are necessarily dependent on each other. as kittay (2019, 145) wittily notes, if we are to criticize the existence of modern social services and our dependency on them, we might as well criticize our dependency on oxygen. despite the persuasiveness of this response, there are more salient concerns about the notion of dependency, specifically in the context of disability. in many ways, the issue of self-representation, which i take to be core to the disability rights movement, can be articulated in terms of dependency. those who are deemed disabled are often forced into states of extreme dependency because of the various ways society can be materially inaccessible. as mike oliver (1989, 8) argues, “the creation of dependency amongst disabled people is an inevitable consequence of the social policies that prevail in all modern industrial societies.” we can see why this would be a concern as it pertains to the voicelessness and powerlessness that those deemed disabled often experience. anita silvers claims that relationships of care further the marginalization of the individual who is made dependent on the other: far from vanquishing patriarchal systems, substituting the ethics of caring for the ethics of equality threatens an even more oppressive paternalism. we can grasp this by noting that helping relationships are voluntary, but asymmetrically so. help-givers choose how they are willing to help, but help-takers cannot choose how they will be helped, for in choosing to reject proffered help one withdraws oneself from being helped, as well as from being in a helping relationship. to relate to others primarily by being helped by them, then, implies subordinating one's choices to one's caretakers, at least insofar as one remains in the state of being helped. (silvers 1995, 40–41) what we can surmise here is that because those deemed disabled are put in a situation where they are dependent on other individuals or institutions, they must accept whatever terms under which that help is offered. susan wendell offers a useful example regarding deaf communities and their culture. many deaf individuals do not consider themselves disabled, but because medical and government authorities require them to be recognized as such, they are forced to defer to the label of disabled. this asymmetrical distribution of social power between the deaf community and government institutions shows precisely the risk that dependency might create (wendell 1996, 29). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 i take these concerns about dependency to be well founded, but given that i also accept kittay’s idea that there is an inevitable condition of dependency, it becomes necessary to do what kittay (2019, 162) calls “managing dependency,” as people do when they recognize that they will inevitably have to rely on others in certain cases (some people more than others, depending on one’s circumstances). kittay gives the example of elderly individuals who accept help for tasks that they can accomplish on their own (but with great effort) because they wish to reserve energy for more meaningful tasks. she goes on to comment, “in the name of managing dependency, we can reorder our priorities and assert entitlements to care and support that are our due, not because in that way we can be independent and productive, but because our value derives from the chain of dependent relations that make all our lives possible” (kittay 2019, 162). how does one incorporate this need to manage dependency into an ethics of care? kittay does so by defending what she calls the “completion of care.” care is often spoken of descriptively, counting an act as a form of “care” without any evaluative implications about the act; in a descriptive account of care, there is no implication that an act of care has succeeded at anything. kittay instead conceptualizes care as a normative concept. to make this distinction, she examines the common phrase “caring too much.” this is often used to describe a person who is so overly attentive that their actions become irritating and undesired. she then compares this to a normative concept such as justice. it would be strange for us to say that something is too just—that if there is an excess of justice, then it is not really justice at all. this is because justice can be an intrinsically positive good. kittay argues we should think of care precisely in this way. if someone is “caring too much” to the point where the care is unwanted, then they are not actually caring in the first place. care, capitalized to distinguish itself from the descriptive concept, is a virtuous act that can only be completed if one’s acts are taken as care by the recipient (kittay 2019, 184). here, kittay challenges the idea that to be a recipient of care is to be passive and uninvolved in the process of caring (186). this notion, and even expectation, of passivity is precisely what puts those deemed disabled at risk of being marginalized and deprived of agency. kittay argues that a necessary component of care is for the carer to be responsive to the “genuine needs and legitimate wants” of those they are caring for (174). the requirement that care must be taken up as such is what enables kittay’s ethics of care to respond to concerns over dependency and its consequences for those deemed disabled. when disabled people’s desires and values are disregarded, or not even considered, in the process of care, it is not actually care. or in kittay’s terms, it is not an act of care. it is in fact a failure to care because those attempting care did not “take up the cares of people with disabilities, as the disabled understand them” (kittay 2019, 157). buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 3. disability identity and care here, however, is where the process of externally labeling someone as disabled come into tension with kittay’s view of care. to think of someone as disabled is to already presume some aspect of who they are. “disability” is a term that is laden with historical and social context, much of which is unfortunately negative. because disability has a negative connotation (the prefix “dis” has a morphologically negative meaning), being labeled “disabled” often results in normative assumptions being made about an individual. imagine if i was describing an individual to you, and the only detail i provided is that they are disabled. what is this supposed to communicate to you? it does not inform you of any specific physical or mental conditions they might have, nor does it indicate what kind of accommodation or help the individual may need in a specific scenario. the only thing that this label seems to appeal to is a collective normative notion of what being “disabled” is like. although this may be true of most, if not all, labels that we could imagine,1 it becomes a particular problem as it relates to disability. this is the case, first, because the term “disability” bears a negative meaning and status. rather than being potentially illuminating or offering relevant details about a person’s life, disability as a label often only serves to indicate some kind of inferiority. secondly, a disability label risks obscuring and marginalizing other aspects of a person’s life and identity. everett cherrington hughes (1945, 357) coined the term “master status” to refer to a trait or group membership that overpowers any other potentially relevant characteristic. while hughes’s original use of the term was describing race as a master status, the concept has been applied to disability as well (omansky gordon and rosenblum 2001; couser 2005; kornasky 1996; barnartt 2013). the disability label risks erasing every other aspect of a person’s identity. many people, including myself, have grown up knowing what it feels like to be thought of as the “disabled kid.” under this circumstance, regardless of what one might choose for oneself, disability becomes one’s entire identity and shapes many, if not all, of one’s social interactions. kittay herself clearly recognizes the potential concern about labeling others as disabled when early in her book she states, “to do justice to sesha, i first need to introduce her. but i have already done her an injustice. i have introduced her as my disabled daughter” (kittay 2019, 6). she continues by commenting that the way she would prefer to introduce sesha is with a focus on her many positive attributes such as her smile and her love of music. although we should not concede that disability is an intrinsically negative quality, at least in most cases, kittay shows awareness of the 1 does this require us to reject all labels, such as college student or immigrant? while i think it might be the case that all external labels are unfitting, there can be external reasons that can justify using the label. i think it is the burden of those who wish to use the label to explain what would be lost without it. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 fact that a disability label can come to consume and erase all other parts of an individual’s identity or personality. while kittay does not specify exactly what the nature of this injustice is, i argue it is strongly connected to how the disability label affects the way individuals are perceived by others. as kittay (2019, 174) articulates about carers, “self-reflection allows them to consider how their own desires might continue to obstruct their ability to be attentive and responsive to the other.” it is an injustice to identify sesha as disabled because, by doing so, one is placing onto her an external label that is outside her own conception of self (buttgereit 2022, 175). kittay’s descriptions of sesha and her relationship to rationality and thought imply that we have no reason to believe that she has any formulated sense of self, and even if she has, she does not have a way to communicate such a sense to anyone. therefore, much like the medicalized individual model of disability, the term “disabled” serves to mark people such as sesha as passive recipients of judgements and values. this becomes especially concerning when we consider how precarious and harmful similar impositions of a notion of a good life have been for disabled people (kittay 2019, 28). allison kafer (2013) offers a powerful example of how a grim and pessimistic future was imposed on her by doctors after she was injured in a house fire. as kafer puts it: in 1995, six months after the fire, my doctor suggested that my thoughts of graduate school were premature, if not misguided. he felt that i would need to spend the next three or four years living at home, under my parents’ care, and only then would it be appropriate to think about starting school. his tone made it clear, however, that he thought graduate school would remain out of reach; it was simply not in my future (kafer 2013, 4). if we are to respect the value of self-representation, then we must accept the possibility that some individuals simply do not have a self-conception of their disability status. how is it then that we can justify the process of externally labeling an individual as disabled? it does not seem immediately apparent that we can justify it in terms of their physical or medical care, as specific diagnoses such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and so on are more effective at illuminating what care an individual needs. it is also not clear that this labeling comes from a need for identity, because without the ability to form their own opinions and views of themselves, these individuals seemingly have no direct need for such a label as disabled. people like sesha seem to be flourishing without such a self-conception. this leads me to believe that when we label someone who is noncommunicative with a cognitive medical condition as disabled, we are imposing our own sense of their life onto them. this is especially true in the cases of individuals who cannot communicate. some may buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 respond to this concern about labeling by arguing that individuals can simply reject the label if it feels inappropriate for their identity. in fact, dana dunn and erin andrews (2015) have suggested that the best and easiest way to navigate labels regarding disability is to ask the individual their preference. but this solution becomes increasingly complicated when we consider someone like sesha. she is incapable of communicating a preference, and one may also reasonably assume that she cannot form a preference. so, while the idea of seeking out preferences is good advice, if it is our only response to the issue, then we risk further marginalizing those for whom identity formation and the expression of preferences is not a possibility. another concern must be raised when we consider individuals who lack the ability to form or communicate a sense of identity. if i am correct that some people are capable of flourishing without any sense of identity at all, then imposing an identity is an act of disregard for their wants and needs. if someone like sesha is incapable of caring one way or another about a disability identity, then we fail to care by imposing a label of “disabled” on to her. kittay (2019, chap. 9) herself deals with a similar problem when she considers the case of ashely x. ashley x was a child who, due to her cognitive and physical condition, had many of her reproductive organs removed to make it easier for her parents to care for her. kittay argues that this represents a failure to care but runs into a similar issue regarding ashley’s own views on bodily integrity. she ultimately argues that this line of thinking potentially risks marginalizing and further discriminating against those with cognitive “disabilities.” she states, “if it is wrong to a person who does know the difference, that is, if it is justified in this case only because these people do not know the difference anyway, then . . . it is a wrong—whether or not a person is aware of what has been done to them” (kittay 2019, 242). added to this is the uncertainty that surrounds our ability to know if ashley x or sesha do have views on their own identity. finally, as i have suggested above, the concept of disability itself is laden with judgements about an individual’s capabilities and their well-being. the types of futures available to them and our expectations for them are shaped and even warped by the assumptions that the disability label itself carries. 4. speaking for others although kittay recognizes the injustice of introducing sesha as disabled, she also offers a basis for the defense of the practice. as i mentioned in the introduction to this paper, self-representation is far from a simple and achievable ideal for many individuals deemed disabled. speaking for others becomes necessary, and often desirable, when an individual is incapable of doing so for themselves. for this paper, let us imagine a very realistic situation in which a guardian or caregiver may label the individual that they are caring for as disabled. as mentioned before with the case of the deaf, many aspects of government legislation such as the americans with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 disabilities act or the social security disability insurance program require that an applicant or beneficiary be recognized as disabled. this is a case in which one has good reason to label the person as disabled—which in practice means one will also tend to think of them as disabled—because doing so will grant access to resources and benefits that will make it easier to meet the person’s needs. this response is compelling on the surface. it gives us reason to think that not only do we not fail to care when labeling someone as disabled, but doing so might be necessary for care to succeed. but this argument makes a mistake of conflating having a pragmatic reason to believe someone is disabled and the right kind of reason to do so.2 the difference between these types of reasons can be seen, in an example used by d’arms and jacobson (2023, 781), by examining the reasons we might have to laugh at a joke. we may not want to laugh at a joke that we find to be insensitive due to timing or circumstance, or we may not want to laugh because others around us may react negatively to our doing so. d’arms and jacobson, however, argue that these are precisely the types of considerations that are irrelevant to the question of whether the joke itself is funny. i think the strength of this argument can be made even clearer if we consider the situation in reverse. imagine a situation where you laugh at a joke you normally would not laugh at, with the intention of impressing or endearing yourself to the person who told it. the fact that you laughed is not evidence itself that the joke is funny, because the joke’s being funny was not the reason that you laughed. d’arms and jacobson (2023, 781) refer to this as the “conflation problem” because it makes pragmatic/moral reasons for feeling an emotion indistinguishable from reasons that bear on the emotion’s appropriateness.3 not wanting to appear insensitive is a good reason not to laugh at a joke, but it is a mistake to conflate it with a reason for concluding that the joke is not funny. now we can begin to apply this concept to the issue at hand. i believe the conflation problem is relevant to the caregiver’s labeling of the individual for whom they are caring. a caregiver claims that they have a reason to call the individual they are caring for disabled, that reason being that they must do so for the individual for whom they are caring to be properly recognized by the relevant government officials. this is likely a good reason to do so, but it is not the right kind of reason for concluding 2 wlodek rabinowicz and toni rønnow-rasmussen (2004, 391) note that there is an influential view that states that for something to be valuable means that it is fitting to be an object of a pro-attitude: “if it is fitting to favor an object for its own sake, then, on this view, the object has final value, that is, it is valuable for its own sake. if it is fitting to have a pro-attitude toward an object for the sake of its effects, then its value is instrumental. and so on.” 3 rabinowicz and rønnow-rasmussen (2004, 393) identify a similar phenomenon, which they call the “wrong kind of reasons” problem. buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 that the cared for individual is disabled. it is not a consideration that is relevant to the question of whether it is fitting to label them—and think of them—as such. what does it mean then to have the right kind of reason? pamela hieronymi (2019, 37) notes that a reason is typically, though misleadingly, defined as “a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.” in the case of disability identity, the fact that a caregiver can get the necessary medication or accommodations for the person they are caring for seems to count as a reason to believe an individual to be disabled because it is a consideration that counts in favor of an attitude—in this case, belief in them being disabled. but hieronymi argues against this definition of a reason and seeks to show that it invites a conflation of different kinds of reasons. she argues alternatively that we should understand a reason as “a consideration that bears on a question” (hieronymi, 2019, 38). hieronymi (2019, 35) asks us to imagine a butler who is accused of murder. you have been threatened with harm if you do not convince others that the butler is guilty, even though you do not believe them to be so. now you have an external reason to believe the butler is guilty, and in fact, it is possibly a persuasive external reason. this is because it would be easier to convince others of their guilt if you yourself believed it. however, this is the wrong type of reason in favor of holding the attitude of belief because the fact that you are being threatened into believing the butler’s guilt does not bear on the question of whether they are guilty. here, hieronymi (2019, 35) distinguishes between a constitutive and an extrinsic reason. a constitutive reason is a consideration that bears constitutively on the question of an attitude, which in the butler case, is belief. by settling the question based on a constitutive reason, one thereby forms the attitude. it is the process of forming an attitude about something (such as belief in the butler’s guilt) that reveals what it is that matters to us. extrinsic reasons bear on a different question that is separate from your initial belief. rather than answer the question “is the butler guilty?” extrinsic reasons offer an answer to the question of whether it would be good for one to believe that the butler is guilty (hieronymi 2019, 35). you are better off believing that the butler is guilty because that will help you convince others. turning to the case of disability, a caregiver may have an extrinsic reason to believe the person they are caring for is disabled, but the conflation problem occurs when we mistake the question of “is someone disabled?” with whether it would be good to believe they are disabled. ultimately then, the caregiver is right that institutional norms and expectations may produce a reason for them to think of the person they are caring for as disabled. however, these norms and expectations do not bear on the question of whether they really are disabled, which—given the value of self-representation— only they can determine. while the label may be necessary to care for them in one respect, it does not eradicate the injustice of externally placing an identity onto them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 5. cares coming into conflict the aim of acquiring government benefits by labeling someone “disabled” when they do not identify as such is the wrong kind of reason for believing them to be disabled. insofar as a caregiver does not recognize it as a wrong kind of reason and thus does in fact believe the individual they are caring for to be disabled, they are exhibiting a failure to properly care. even the caregiver who does recognize the problem with conflating different kinds of reasons can respond by saying that external circumstances force them to make the decision to label as disabled the person for whom they are caring. this creates a conflict between the identity (or lack of identity) of the cared-for and the accessibility of the resources necessary to provide for their other needs and wants when the government is demanding that an individual be recognized as disabled to receive accommodations or access to financial benefits. the result is that successfully caring in one respect necessitates failing to care in another. i am deeply sympathetic to this response and, in fact, believe that it highlights something important. here, i must make clear that i am not suggesting that caregivers should forgo labeling the individual they are caring for to garner resources. however, i want to resist the idea that the fact that a caregiver still has a reason to label the person they are caring for serves as a justification for labeling them. to label the cared-for individual as disabled to get resources would be a failure to care just as denying them resources to avoid labeling them would be. one might object that this is overly demanding and harsh toward a caregiver. how can we say that this would constitute a failure on the part of a caregiver when they are doing everything that they can to respond to the cares of the individual they are attempting to care for? kittay herself gives us the basis for understanding how an act can simultaneously succeed in caring in one way and fail in another. she argues that it is important to see the role that moral luck plays in the actual success of care. moral luck refers to the fact that the moral warrant, or worth, of our actions can depend greatly on factors that are completely outside of our control (kittay 2019, 213). we can see the role moral luck might play in terms of whether one’s actions will be taken up as care and thus complete the caring process. imagine a parent who works extremely hard to care for their child and provide them with all the opportunities in life they might desire. the child may prove ungrateful and even resentful of their parents’ genuine effort. on kittay’s account, this ultimately results in the act of care being unsuccessful. care can also prove unsuccessful when certain background conditions that are necessary for care are absent. kittay offers numerous examples of this, such as a parent who is impoverished and unable to feed their child or a nurse who is blocked from successfully executing their responsibilities to their patient by bureaucratic red tape (kittay 2019, 169). nirmala erevelles (2012) adds that, in the case of nurses, care can be disrupted through the imposition of ableist buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 norms and assumptions onto patients; this serves as another example of how care is vulnerable to societal factors. i argue that it is best to view this case of failure through the lens of a tragic dilemma. in moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality, lisa tessman (2014) argues that there can exist impossible moral obligations. as moral agents, we can be placed into situations where we are required to do things that cannot be done without engendering moral failure. this creates a tragic dilemma in which either choice involves the sacrifice of something of incommensurable value (tessman 2014, 39). values are incommensurable when what is gained does not compensate for what is lost; choosing cake rather than cookies is not tragic because most people find them commensurable. a standard example of a tragic dilemma is taken from the novel sophie’s choice (styron 1976), in which a mother is forced by a nazi soldier to choose which of her children to keep and which to hand over to him (tessman 2014, 170). regardless of what the mother chooses, the failure to protect one of her children understandably leaves behind a sense of moral failure. she was unable to protect and care for one of her children, and the sacrifice of this child cannot be made up for by the fact that she attempted to save the other child or the possibility that she made the “right” choice. for tessman and other theorists sympathetic to the possibility of tragic dilemmas (harris 2006; nussbaum 2000; stocker 1990; williams 1981), dilemmatic choices further involve “moral remainders”—that is, moral wrongness that cannot be canceled even if one obligation is correctly judged to override the other. returning to the case at hand, where a caregiver is faced with the choice of labeling their charge as disabled or depriving them of financial or institutional benefits, we may naturally be tempted to think in terms of what they should do in this situation. this question of what should be done is what martha nussbaum refers to as, “the obvious question.” she writes, “the tragic question registers not the difficulty of solving the obvious question but a distinct difficulty: the fact that all the possible answers to the obvious question, including the best one, are bad, involving serious moral wrongdoing. in that sense, there is no ‘right answer’” (nussbaum 2000, 1007). tragic framing focuses less on concerns about whether a person should take the action and more on assessing the moral status of the action. viewing this dilemma through the tragic frame, we can see that a wrong action remains wrong, even when the action must be done. the value of this tragic view of care, and of kittay’s discussion of moral luck, is that it allows us to focus less on blaming those attempting to care for others and, instead, focus on the unjust conditions that can prevent care from being successful. kittay (2019, 215) herself notes that “it is often injustice and callous disregard for marginalized people” that makes it so that genuine attempts at care are unsuccessful. for kittay, this is precisely why we must recognize that social and institutional feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 conditions can be such that caring for someone in one way unjustly forces one to fail to care for them in another way (215). in “the aptness of anger,” amia srinivasan (2018) argues that the anger that one feels toward injustice is not rendered inapt (unfitting) even if the anger is ultimately counterproductive in terms of alleviating the injustice that produced the anger in the first place. she therefore rejects what she labels as “the counterproductivity critique” as a reason to dismiss the anger that racial minorities express in the face of injustice (srinivasan 2018, 125). she recognizes that the counterproductive nature of anger might often override the reasons of fit that one has for expressing one’s anger, but in that situation, the inability to express one’s righteous anger must be recognized as a loss. in the case of anger, an oppressed racial minority might adopt an unfitting lack of anger in order to avoid political consequences, but that choice does not imply that outrage would have been an unfitting response to racial injustice. similarly, a person deemed “disabled” might accept the label, not because it is a fitting expression of their identity, but because the government has provided them with an external reason to accept it—namely, access to resources and accommodations. srinivasan rightly points out that having to face this forced choice between reasons of fit and practical considerations is, itself, an injustice. regarding anger, those who are already marginalized face the problematic choice “between improving one’s lot and justified rage” (srinivasan 2018, 136). in the case of disability, a caregiver of someone like sesha is forced to choose between imposing on the cared-for an identity that is necessarily unfitting (because the cared-for cannot endorse any identity at all and so cannot be said to have any fitting identity) and sacrificing access to necessary resources. this analysis of forced choice provides a clear avenue to respond to the caregiver’s criticism that they must label their charge as disabled. we can concede that the need to provide an individual with necessary resources can override the obligation to not impose an identity on them, but we must recognize that imposition as an injustice. 6. self-representation as a negative right this paper has argued that the imposition of an external label of “disabled” onto others is not only an injustice but a violation. for most people who are deemed disabled, the notion of self-identification appears simple. as i mention earlier in this paper, many often default to a policy that entails asking if a person identifies as disabled. but this immediately raises difficulties for someone like sesha, who would be unable answer that question. this presents a potential challenge for the principle of self-representation that disability justice calls for. does holding up the importance of self-representation risk overfocusing on those deemed disabled who can communicate with others? if so, i believe that would be an unacceptable result; but i buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 argue we can, and must, redefine self-representation so it can better include the experiences of all people that are deemed disabled. first, i want to examine a potential solution to this problem that i wish to reject. some have responded to the challenge posed by certain cognitive conditions’ impact on the ability to communicate by attempting to expand what is taken to count as communication. the most well-known and controversial example of this is the practice of facilitated communication. this practice involves a person, typically someone who cannot speak verbally or through any kind of sign language, pointing to images, letters, or objects presented through a communication board, with physical support coming from another person known as the “facilitator.” the idea is that someone with limited cognitive or physical abilities can still communicate desires or thoughts with physical aid. but this practice has empirically produced very little evidence of accuracy in communicating the “disabled” person’s desires and risks harmful consequences such as sexual abuse or exploitation on claims that consent was given (hemsley et al. 2018). although not necessarily advocating for facilitated communication, stacy clifford simplican (2015) has argued that what counts as political participation is fundamentally tied to ableist assumptions and beliefs about what proper communication and activism looks like. she argues we must interpret the everyday acts of those deemed disabled differently, in a way that recognizes their political potential. she shares an experience of being profoundly disappointed when first encountering a disability-based self-advocacy group (simplican 2015, 1). she spent much of the night speaking to charles, an individual deemed disabled, and she was disappointed that what seemed to count for political discussion was talk of the food at the event and how much soda charles had drunk. she also remarks on being puzzled by a story that seemed to amount to a tale about a day when charles did little else but get a good amount of sleep (1–2). however, upon reflection, simplican concludes that this was in fact the result of ableist anxieties that we commonly have over what political speech is supposed to look like (2). she argues that, to counter these ableist assumptions, we must re-signify self-advocates’ actions and come to understand them as representing political speech (5). as she states: although i failed to recognize it at the time, charles was telling me a story about freedom. it took me over a year to understand the political significance behind his boasts about how many cups of coke he drank, and another three years before i understood the import of his story about sleep. . . . i began to see an alternative account of political participation in the combined public presence of nondisabled staff members and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. even people with profound intellectual disabilities—that small class of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 people who even the most ardent theorists of disability rights claim can only be served by surrogates—offer us ways to rethink democracy. (simplican 2015, 6) while i am troubled by the exclusion of those deemed disabled from political participation, the solution simplican proposes is concerning. the suggestion that we should conceive of charles’s story as a “story about freedom” suggests placing a good deal of external meaning on his words. yes, we can interpret his boasting about how much he ate and drank at the conference as an expression of being pleased about the autonomy he had in that moment, but we can just as easily justify interpreting it as him just enjoying his meal. while i agree with simplican when she argues that the presence of those deemed disabled in a room can change the nature of a conversation, i am not sure that justifies the practice of reading political intent into actions and statements that are not obviously political. as eva kittay (2019, 7) suggests, we risk engaging in a form of ventriloquism where we are simply reading into their words and actions what we wish to be present. i think practices such as facilitated communication and liberal interpretations of everyday acts express a sort of discomfort with the idea of nonexpression. namely, i think that they fail to recognize the difference between exclusion from social acts and nonparticipation. while it is often the case that nonparticipation is the result of exclusion, it is wrong to assume that is always the case. it is a mistake to try to replace a practice of excluding participation in such things as political advocacy or social identity with the idea that these things are mandatory or necessary. as i mentioned before, by eva kittay’s account, her daughter sesha lives a perfectly contented life without having a sense of social identity or engaging in political advocacy. i worry that the above views of cognitive disability not only struggle to accept this but also seem to imply that sesha is worse off for a lack of social agency or political recognition. rather than combat ableist assumptions, this view risks further pathologizing those who are incapable of robust forms of communication. while i have rejected these possible solutions to making self-representation more responsive to individuals like sesha, i do not believe we have to resort to abandoning self-representation as a value of disability rights. instead, i argue we must conceptualize nonrepresentation as something that is protected by the value of selfrepresentation. if this seems counterintuitive, it is likely because self-representation is often thought of as an active or positive expression that is intended by the individual. i argue we should instead think of self-representation as a form of negative right. iris marion young (2000, 31) argues that domination is an injustice that reduces someone’s capacity for self-determination and agency. in this way, i think we can conceptualize self-representation as a sort of negative right against domination. an individual has a right not to have an identity imposed on them by another, regardless buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 of whether they have formed an identity of their own. a good example of this is seen in the right to religious freedom, which equally protects the right to engage in religious practices and the right to not have any religious affiliation at all. we should be able to easily imagine this in the case of someone who can form and communicate their own identity. someone may reasonably decide that they wish to have no ability identity at all, just as someone may wish to have no gender identity at all. i do not think that we should consider their right to a lack of identity any more substantial and important than a lack of identity that comes about through an inability to do so. references barnartt, sharon n. 2013. “introduction: disability and intersecting statuses.” in disability and intersecting statuses, edited by sharon n. barnartt and barbara m. altman, 1–20. bingley, uk: emerald group. buttgereit, t. j. 2022. “caring for identity: disability and representation.” southwest philosophy review 38, no. 1 (january): 173–79. https://doi.org/10.5840/swph ilreview202238118. charlton, james i. 1998. nothing about us without us: disability oppression and empowerment. berkeley: university of california press. christoffersen, john. 2012. “romney's ‘47%’ chosen as year's best quote.” usa today, december 9; updated december 14, 2012. https://www.usatoday.com /story/news/nation/2012/12/09/romneys-47-percent-chosen-as-years-bestquote/1756833/. couser, g. thomas. 2005. “disability, life narrative, and representation.” pmla 120, no. 2 (march): 602–6. https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812900167975. d’arms, justin, and daniel jacobson. 2023. rational sentimentalism. oxford: oxford university press. dunn, dana s., and erin e. andrews. 2015. “choosing words for talking about disability.” american psychological association. https://www.apa.org/pi/dis ability/resources/choosing-words. erevelles, nirmala. 2012. “‘what . . . [thought] cannot bear to know’: crippin’ the limits of ‘thinkability.’” review of disability studies: an international journal 8, no. 3. https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/90. harris, george w. 2006. reason's grief: an essay on tragedy and value. cambridge: cambridge university press. hemsley, bronwyn, lucy bryant, ralf w. schlosser, howard c. shane, russell lang, diane paul, meher banajee, and marie ireland. 2018. “systematic review of facilitated communication 2014–2018 finds no new evidence that messages feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 delivered using facilitated communication are authored by the person with disability.” autism & developmental language impairments 3: 1–8. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2396941518821570. hieronymi, pamela. 2019. “the wrong kind of reason.” contemporary epistemology: an anthology, edited by jeremy fantl, matthew mcgrath, and ernest sosa, 31–43. hoboken, nj: john wiley & sons. hughes, everett cherrington. 1945. “dilemmas and contradictions of status.” american journal of sociology 50, no. 5 (march): 353–59. kafer, alison. 2013. feminist, queer, crip. bloomington: indiana university press. kittay, eva feder. 2019. learning from my daughter: the value and care of disabled minds. new york: oxford university press. kornasky, linda. 1996. “ellen glasgow’s disability.” mississippi quarterly 49, no. 2 (spring): 281–93. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26476016. nussbaum, martha c. 2000. “the costs of tragedy: some moral limits of cost‐benefit analysis.” in “cost-benefit analysis: legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives.” special issue, journal of legal studies 29, no. s2 (june): 1005– 36. https://doi.org/10.1086/468103. oliver, mike. 1989. “disability and dependency: a creation of industrial societies.” in disability and dependency, edited by len barton, 6–22. london: falmer press. omansky gordon, beth, and karen e. rosenblum. 2001. “bringing disability into the sociological frame: a comparison of disability with race, sex, and sexual orientation statuses.” disability & society 16 (1): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.108 0/713662032. rabinowicz, wlodek, and toni rønnow-rasmussen. 2004. “the strike of the demon: on fitting pro-attitudes and value.” ethics 114, no. 3 (april): 391–423. https://doi.org/10.1086/381694. silvers, anita. 1995. “reconciling equality to difference: caring (f)or justice for people with disabilities.” hypatia 10, no. 1 (winter): 30–55. https://doi.org/10.1111 /j.1527-2001.1995.tb01352.x. simplican, stacy clifford. 2015. the capacity contract: intellectual disability and the question of citizenship. minneapolis, university of minnesota press. srinivasan, amia. 2018. “the aptness of anger.” journal of political philosophy 26, no. 2 (june): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130. stocker, michael. 1990. plural and conflicting values. oxford: clarendon press. styron, william. 1976. sophie’s choice. new york: random house. tessman, lisa. 2014. moral failure: on the impossible demands of morality. oxford: oxford university press. wendell, susan. 1996. the rejected body: feminist philosophical reflections on disability. new york: routledge. buttgereit – disability, self-representation, and care: nothing about us without us published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 williams, bernard. 1981. moral luck: philosophical papers 1973–1980. cambridge: cambridge university press. young, iris marion. 2000. inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford university press. t.j. buttgereit is a phd candidate in philosophy at binghamton university’s spel program. he works in both ethics and social philosophy centered around issues of disability. he is especially concerned with disability identity and questions such as who we define as disabled, how they are defined, and the ethical and political implications that come with the social category we have created. 16832 buttgereit title page 16832 buttgereit final format the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 1 recommended citation deery, oisín, and katherine bailey. 2022. “the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 1. 2022 the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing oisín deery york university and macquarie university oisin@oisindeery.com katherine bailey shopify inc. katherine@katbailey.net deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing oisín deery and katherine bailey* abstract addressing biases in natural-language processing (nlp) systems presents an underappreciated ethical dilemma, which we think underlies recent debates about bias in nlp models. in brief, even if we could eliminate bias from language models or their outputs, we would thereby often withhold descriptively or ethically useful information, despite avoiding perpetuating or amplifying bias. yet if we do not debias, we can perpetuate or amplify bias, even if we retain relevant descriptively or ethically useful information. understanding this dilemma provides for a useful way of rethinking the ethics of algorithmic bias in nlp. keywords: artificial intelligence, algorithms, bias 1. introduction bias in statistical models or algorithms can result in moral harms. a model is an abstract representation of a phenomenon, such as how words relate in a natural language. we prefer the term “model” to “algorithm,” since strictly speaking “algorithm” refers only to the actual sequence of steps carried out during the training of a model or at the time it issues predictions. however, everyday use of “algorithm” generally picks out the already-trained model, which implicitly includes the data on which that model was trained. if the data are biased, then there are biased algorithms.1 yet for simplicity’s sake, we will mostly stick with “model.” reliance on biased models can exacerbate marginalization of vulnerable groups. for instance, the ethical issues related to statistical models in hiring have been widely discussed (e.g., hu and chen 2017). problems can arise even when models are deployed to reduce the influence of bias. thus, recidivism models aim to reduce the * oisín deery, departments of philosophy at macquarie university, sydney, australia & york university, toronto, canada (oisin@oisindeery.com) katherine bailey, shopify inc., toronto, canada (katherine@katbailey.net) 1 algorithms can be biased for many reasons (see sections 6.3 and 8). we focus on bias deriving from data. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 influence of bias in decision-making when sentencing offenders yet often serve only to reproduce or disguise bias (kehl, guo, and kessler 2017).2 more generally, numerous ethical questions arise in relation to machine learning (ml) and artificial intelligence (ai), most of which we leave aside. instead, our focus is on bias in the data on which ml models are trained, and especially language models. the central issue here is that the corpora on which such models are trained typically contain biases—for example, sexist or racist biases. that is because the corpora comprise examples of how people actually use language, and people use language in sexist and racist ways.3 thus, the outputs of models trained on such data reflect biases (see, e.g., the papers surveyed by blodgett et al. 2020). we must ask whether (1) it is practically speaking possible to debias language models and (2) whether we should do so, if possible. in relation to (2), a central issue is whether there might be practical or ethical value to not debiasing models. some maintain—as we do—that not debiasing can be valuable, since models often reflect descriptively accurate information about how language is actually used (see goldberg 2021). by contrast, others claim that not debiasing runs the risk of perpetuating and amplifying biases (bolukbasi et al. 2016). some argue that existing models do not actually provide descriptively accurate information at all, since the corpora on which the models are trained do not reflect marginalized voices (bender, gebru et al. 2021). these debates do not deploy the descriptive-normative distinction that we will outline, yet this distinction helps to clarify the points of contention in such debates. furthermore, even if we had descriptively accurate models—for example, models that do not exclude marginalized voices—there might be practical and ethical value to not debiasing, especially when we can control for the negative effects of bias at the output stage rather than by debiasing the model itself. once we recognize that there might be an ethical value to not debiasing, we encounter an ethical dilemma. either we do not debias, in which case we retain 2 statistical recidivism models aim at reducing the influence of biases (explicit or implicit) of judges in sentencing. yet the data these models use are typically obtained from questionnaires that criminals are asked to complete. these data often include details about a criminal’s upbringing, family, and social connections. such data ought to be irrelevant to a criminal’s sentencing. nevertheless, since the data are used to generate a “recidivism score” for criminals, which is used in sentencing, the data influence sentencing in a way that it should not. for example, higher scores often result in longer sentences. more perniciously, a longer sentence will often subsequently result in a higher score on the recidivism scale. 3 data can also be biased due to bad sampling. we do not focus on such bias (but see sections 6.3 and 8). deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 descriptive accuracy and potentially ethically useful information yet run the risk of perpetuating or amplifying bias; or instead we debias, thereby avoiding perpetuating bias yet losing descriptive accuracy and ethically useful information. our aim is to draw attention to this dilemma and to show how it can help in rethinking the ethics of algorithmic bias in nlp systems. in section 2, we specify the type of bias we will focus on. in section 3, we outline the distinction between descriptive and normative correctness as often competing virtues of nlp models, by analogy with how biases rooted in statistical regularities are often thought to offer support for beliefs even when these beliefs are morally problematic. in section 4, we illustrate our distinction by focusing on a particular variety of nlp model called word-embeddings. in section 5, we discuss practical problems with debiasing nlp models. these problems lend support to our claim that it is often preferable to control for negative effects at the output stage rather than try to debias the models themselves. in section 6, we consider varying degrees of scope for debiasing nlp systems’ outputs. in section 7, we explain the ethical dilemma. in section 8, we discuss how our view helps to rethink the ethics of algorithmic bias in nlp. 2. how (and how not) to control for morally relevant bias both human cognition and artificial systems can exhibit morally relevant bias. in humans, the relevant bias is typically a negative evaluative tendency regarding other people based on their apparent membership in a socially salient category or group (brownstein 2018, 43, 126, 172; brownstein and saul 2016a, 2016b). such biases are often explicit, consisting of mental attitudes (like belief) that an agent has and consciously endorses. for example, someone is explicitly sexist if they openly admit to being sexist and approve of these attitudes. by contrast, implicit biases are unconscious attitudes that can be difficult to inhibit, seem insensitive to an agent’s explicit attitudes, and are often in conflict with an agent’s explicitly held attitudes (see levy 2017 for a review of the empirical literature). for example, even someone who explicitly condemns sexism might still have implicit sexist attitudes that they are unaware of and that are difficult to inhibit. when people act on explicit biases, we hold them morally responsible for doing so, and as a result we blame them for their behavior (see, e.g., brownstein and saul 2016b). it is more difficult to know whether we can blame or hold people responsible for actions caused by implicit biases, since it is unclear whether people have sufficient control over how their biases influence behavior for them to be responsible for these behaviors (levy 2017).4 even so, it is plausible to think that we 4 the view that control is not needed for responsibility is a minority position (e.g., smith 2008). it is more widely held that responsibility of the sort that might justify feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 need, at least, to control for the negative influences of implicit bias when expressed in behavior.5 there can be structural ways of doing so. for example, the biased hiring of male lead violinists in orchestras (whether explicit or implicit) can be controlled for by having musicians audition behind a screen so that the hiring panel cannot see the violinist’s gender (see, e.g., goldin and rouse 2000). bias in the relevant sense is something that it can be ethically problematic for a system to have, and it is especially bad when a system’s outputs have negative ethical effects by causing harms. human cognition exhibits implicit bias, and various ml systems, including nlp systems, exhibit a close analog of such bias.6 in each case, the relevant system learns or acquires its biases from statistical regularities it identifies in the world.7 we humans learn biases from other members of our communities.8 for ml systems, biases are often learned from training data, which for nlp systems are language corpora that we produce. since we produce the data containing the biases, the biases the nlp systems acquire they learn from us.9 to preview one of our central claims: it can be difficult to debias human cognition, especially for implicit biases, and we think it is also difficult to debias ml blaming or praising does require control. the empirical literature suggests that we lack such control over how implicit biases affect our behavior (levy 2017). 5 we make no claim about whether agents can be responsible for actions caused by their implicit attitudes—although one of us defends this view in print (deery 2021). here, we claim only that even when behaviors are caused by implicit attitudes, we need to do something to control for their negative effects. 6 the relevant biases for ml systems are analogous to implicit biases because such biases are not explicitly represented in models but instead take the form of implicit distributed patterns—e.g., between vectors in a model. we expand on this analogy between human cognition and ml systems in section 3. 7 some human cognitive or perceptual biases may be innate. they are not our focus here. 8 in cases where a population uses words in certain ways and people acquire biases from exposure to that usage, the exposure might be mediated by how the media portrays such language use. even so, we acquire biases from what we are exposed to (the world), which here would include how the media portrays language use. 9 might we have more control over the inputs to ml systems than we do for ourselves? if so, we could control for biases at the input stage. yet the corpora on which ml systems are trained are vast, and to eradicate biases from them would be an impractical task. that is why those who seek to eliminate bias from models typically focus on the already-trained models (see section 5 for details). exceptions include badly sampled data and algorithms that are biased for other reasons (see sections 6.3 and 8 below). deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 systems, including nlp systems. for humans, it is often easiest to control for the negative effects of bias at the output stage. as noted already, auditioning musicians can perform behind a screen, thereby defusing the possibility of implicit biases’ influencing hiring. as a general matter, it seems that the negative effects of bias are often best controlled for when we acknowledge bias in a system and control for its negative influences at the output stage rather than by debiasing the system itself.10 the possibility we explore in this paper is whether we might do something similar for nlp systems. moreover, we claim that there can be an ethical value to not debiasing ml systems or their outputs, and we maintain that the question of whether we should debias raises an ethical dilemma. 3. descriptive vs. normative accuracy to explain our claim that there can be an ethical value to not debiasing models or outputs, we rely on a particular way of distinguishing descriptive accuracy from normative correctness.11 we explain our distinction by analogy with how implicit biases in human cognition can offer support for beliefs even when these beliefs are morally problematic. in this way, people’s epistemic reasons can support biased beliefs even when their ethical reasons cut against these beliefs. in relation to racist bias, rima basu outlines this epistemic/ethical conflict as follows: we may find ourselves facing the following conflict: what if the evidence . . . supports something we morally shouldn’t believe? for example, it is morally wrong to assume, solely on the basis of someone’s skin color, that they’re a staff member. but, what if you’re in a context where, because of historical patterns of discrimination, someone’s skin color is a very good indicator that they’re a staff member? when this sort of normative conflict looms, a conflict between moral considerations on the one hand and what you epistemically ought to believe given the evidence on the other, what should we do? it might be unfair to assume that they’re a staff member, but to ignore the evidence would mean risking inaccurate beliefs. some . . . have suggested that we simply face a tragic irresolvable dilemma. (basu 2020, 191; cf. gendler 2011; puddifoot 2017) 10 if the bias comes from badly sampled data, that is a different matter. 11 we introduce the normative/descriptive distinction at some length since we have found it is unfamiliar to nonphilosophers working in ai and ml. yet these researchers find it useful when explained. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 in other words, descriptively accurate information about statistical regularities can support beliefs that are morally problematic or normatively incorrect, in which case we face a choice about whether to prioritize the descriptive or instead the normative. likewise, we think that there are two general ways in which ml systems or humans can be right or wrong—descriptively and normatively—and that a dilemma similar to the one basu describes can arise even for ml systems. to explain, a visual representation of a scene gets things descriptively right to the extent that it accurately depicts visual information about a scene as presented and wrong to the extent that it does not. for example, if you photograph me robbing a store, your camera gets things descriptively right insofar as it accurately depicts my face and wrong insofar as it does not—for example, because its exposure settings are off. most tasks a camera is designed to perform require for success that at least some threshold of descriptive accuracy (in our sense) be achieved in the camera’s outputs. likewise, an audio recording of my boss making sexist or racist remarks is descriptively accurate to the extent that it records what he said and descriptively wrong to the extent that it does not, perhaps due to electromagnetic interference from another device. by contrast, we expect people—as moral agents—to get things normatively right in a moral sense. it is normatively correct for me to pay for my groceries instead of stealing them (all else being equal). when i rob a store, by contrast, i get things normatively incorrect by failing to do what i ought to do (pay for my groceries) and by doing what i should not (stealing them). similarly, my boss behaves normatively correctly by not making sexist or racist remarks. we do not expect systems like cameras or audio devices to get things normatively right. consider an imaginary camera, the iblur, which blurs out the morally objectionable parts of a visual scene.12 as a result, the iblur blurs out the image of me robbing the store, since robbing a store is a morally objectionable action (all else being equal). not only do we not expect a camera to work like this but we expect it not to work this way, since such an imposition of normative correctness undermines descriptive accuracy, which the functions of a camera require.13 additionally, the iblur would fail to provide us with ethically useful information, since 12 we model our iblur after the arkangel system in the tv show black mirror. 13 cameras serve various functions, including the attainment of artistic or imaginative goals. likewise, security cameras might be used to intimidate people or to shed light on the activities of select people in select places in a way that is morally problematic. yet the tasks cameras perform still require that cameras accurately depict what is in front of them, and artistic or nefarious goals are served via such accuracy. deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 the authorities will need an accurate depiction of my face to hold me accountable.14 and this is likewise the case for an audio recording of my boss making sexist or racist remarks. regarding descriptive accuracy, one might worry whether devices such as cameras really do get things descriptively right (even if we grant that there is less of a worry in this regard for audio-recording devices). for instance, shen-yi liao and bryce huebner (2021, 94) have argued that cameras have a “light-skin bias.” the early development of kodak film printing required that skin tones be matched to an image of a white model, with the result that “darker skin tones . . . [were] . . . over saturated, or under-lit, so the only images that . . . looked ‘right’ were images of light-skinned people” (95). moreover, “light-skin bias . . . is not primarily a technical issue . . . . film emulsions could have been designed that were more sensitive to a wider range of skin tones,” (95) but they were not. why? because “deeply entrenched forms of racial ignorance and racial biases led the people who were developing emulsion technologies to ignore variations in skin tone, or assume that racialized differences were irrelevant to the design of this technology” (95; see also roth 2009; smith 2013; benjamin 2019). however, when we use cameras as a paradigm case of descriptive accuracy, we are considering an ideal—a system that does get things descriptively right (in a relevant regard). if a camera using kodak film fails to accurately depict darker skin tones, then in that regard it will be descriptively inaccurate, notwithstanding its perhaps achieving descriptive accuracy in other regards. still, there are two important lessons. first, if a lack of descriptive accuracy in any particular respect is due to bias, as in the kodak film case, we must be alive to the possibility that for language models, even when we appear to have descriptive accuracy about how people use language, we might not, at least in some relevant respect, perhaps due to bias in the training data.15 second, there are various respects in which a system or model might get matters descriptively right about how people use language, and different systems might have differing aims in this regard—for 14 we will say more about why descriptively accurate information can be ethically useful in section 6. but note that even if knowing who perpetrated a wrongdoing is ethically useful information, we agree with benjamin (2019) that often we have to ask prior questions about whose faces are being disproportionally recorded by cameras (e.g., members of overpoliced or oversurveilled communities), and in particular by devices such as cctv. these considerations are consistent with our claims. 15 this issue will be important later, when we discuss large language models. some argue that models like bert or gtp-2/3 not only reproduce bias (and are thereby normatively incorrect) but are descriptively inaccurate since the training data do not reflect marginalized voices (bender, gebru et al. 2021). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 example, a model might aim for descriptive accuracy in one respect yet not in another. for example, word-embeddings models (which we will discuss in detail in section 4) aim at capturing how words cluster in a vector space based on how people actually use language, and these models might be assessed for descriptive accuracy in this respect. as we shall see, “woman” and “homemaker” do cluster together, whereas “woman” and “computer programmer” do not. even so, such a model is clearly descriptively inaccurate in another sense, since these clusterings are descriptively inaccurate when it comes to these words’ semantics—there is nothing about “woman,” semantically, in virtue of which it clusters with “homemaker” (by contrast with “bachelor,” which semantically clusters with the word “man”). one might think that whether a representation is descriptively accurate is a function of who we are and what we want to do with it—in which case, descriptive accuracy seems context-dependent. but this issue is more one of salience, not accuracy. many representations are accurate even if some information they convey is not salient, and salience depends on the context. the family photograph i took in my front garden is descriptively accurate in depicting us smiling. in the context of sending a holiday card to friends, this information may be most salient. yet the photograph might also accurately depict the hole in my eavestrough, and in a different context—such as getting a quote for fixing the hole—this descriptively accurate information will be of primary salience rather than the fact that we are smiling.16 finally, note that descriptive accuracy does not require perfect descriptive accuracy. many representations of aspects of the world are descriptively accurate even when they are less than perfectly accurate. that is the case even for scientific theories, including theories of physics (see, e.g., hitchcock 2004, 10). moreover, a visual representation can be accurate without being perfectly accurate. for instance, canine visual systems are optimized more for low-light conditions than color, by contrast with our own vision (barber et al. 2020). even so, dogs’ vision is descriptively accurate in many respects and is often more descriptively accurate than ours. finally, it is a truism that all models are inaccurate to some degree (see, e.g., box 1976, 792) while still being usefully descriptively accurate (and thus also predictively or explanatorily useful). leaving aside descriptive accuracy, a system or its outputs are normatively correct if they reflect the world as it ought to be—in some respect and on some conception of how the world should be, even if that is not how it is. language models are normatively correct if they reflect language use as it should be. for example, a model might be normatively correct in not giving sexist outputs. such a system would not resolve the analogy task “man is to computer programmer as woman is to x” by 16 we thank shelley park (at the 2021 fsjai workshop) for prompting this clarification. deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 filling in “homemaker” for x (we will discuss this example in greater detail in section 4). by contrast, normatively incorrect models or outputs reflect language use as it ought not to be; such a system might fill in “homemaker” for x in our example.17 for our purposes, morally relevant bias in a language model is sufficient for that model to be normatively incorrect, and in such cases these models reflect bias, as outlined in section 2, whereas normatively correct models or outputs do not (nor, consequently, do they perpetuate bias). a system might also be normatively correct in one regard (e.g., in not giving sexist outputs) yet incorrect in another (e.g., in giving racist outputs).18 additionally, normative correctness can have various goals. not reflecting ethically problematic biases might be one normatively correct goal, whereas other goals might include promoting outcomes related to social justice. we acknowledge these various goals as being normative in a relevant sense. even so, our primary focus will be on the aim of not reflecting bias. to see more clearly how descriptive and normative correctness relate to bias in nlp systems, let us consider the widespread nlp method of word-embeddings, which we will now describe. 4. word-embeddings: descriptively right, normatively wrong later, we will consider applications that rely on large language models. yet, for now, in order to introduce the idea of bias in nlp models, we will outline the simpler case of word-embeddings. word-embeddings are learned representations of words that aim to approximate the semantic relationships between words through mathematical relationships between vectors (mikolov et al. 2013). a word-embeddings model learns from vast language corpora produced by us, which are therefore examples of how we use language. by definition, a good set of representations will accurately reflect how language is, as a matter of fact, used by the sampled people. in this sense, word-embeddings do a remarkably good job of getting things descriptively right, since 17 normatively incorrect outputs need not be descriptively accurate, although often they are (see section 6.3). 18 arguably, the best way to ensure that language use is as it should be and that language models trained on such language use are normatively correct would be to have the nonlinguistic part of the world that the language use aims to describe—e.g., the proportion of women and men who are computer programmers—be as it should be. after all, people associate “he” with programmers more than “she” because traditionally most programmers have tended to be men. yet over time, if more programmers were women, that would be less true. normative correctness would be descriptively accurate. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 they are usefully deployed for many purposes—for example, to successfully resolve analogy tasks. yet there is a sense in which word-embeddings get things normatively wrong. in their paper, “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker,” researchers at boston university and microsoft research (bolukbasi et al. 2016) demonstrated that pretrained models such as word2vec seem sexist in certain ways. just as the analogy relationships “man is to woman as king is to queen” and “sister is to woman as brother is to man” were captured by the models, so too were the sexist relationships “man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker” and “father is to doctor as mother is to nurse.”19 the difficulty is that to work successfully, nlp systems relying on wordembeddings often have to learn the biases that exist in the corpora on which they are trained (caliskan, bryson, and narayanan 2017, 186). these biases are expressed by us in the corpora, and to learn the relationships that actually exist between words in our uses of language, the models must learn biased relationships—including sexist relationships. biases in the corpora on which the models are trained will thus naturally be captured in the geometry of the word-embeddings vector space. worse, according to bolukbasi and colleagues’ assessment, “the blind application of machine learning runs the risk of amplifying [emphasis added] biases present in data” (bolukbasi et al. 2016).20 still worse, word-embeddings models often get things normatively wrong precisely because—and to the extent to which—they get things descriptively right about people’s language use. that is, the success of systems using word-embeddings can require reproducing bias, as when they solve analogy tasks like “man is to 19 for criticism of bolukbasi et al. (2016), see schluter (2018), nissim, van noord, and van der goot (2019), and footnote 24 below. 20 bias is amplified in two ways. first, sexist bias (for example) in a language model is acquired from training data that include expressions of sexism from (p number of) individuals expressing the bias. this model may then be used for various purposes in the world such that its outputs reach many more people (p + n) than those people (p) who expressed the biases that influenced the training data. mere repetition is widely known to increase people’s tendency to believe claims or to reproduce bias, including in written language (e.g., lacassagne, béna, and corneille 2022). in this way, bias gets amplified in the population due to biased models. second, this larger pool of individuals (p + n) is therefore more likely to reproduce examples of language containing bias than it would have been otherwise, and these examples may be used as input for training further models. thus, the bias gets amplified to a wider range of models than it would have been otherwise; see bolukbasi et al. (2016) for a similar example. deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 computer programmer as woman is to x” by filling in “homemaker” for x. a model gets things normatively wrong in producing this output, despite its being descriptively right in reflecting actual language use. and it gets things normatively wrong because and to the extent to which it gets things descriptively right in this way.21 the ideal solution might be to debias ourselves. in that case, we would produce language corpora that do not contain biases, the nlp models would be trained on such data, and all would be well. yet that is not a practical suggestion, much as it might be nice to imagine living in such a world. or we might debias the models that have acquired biases. as mentioned earlier, it can be difficult, as cognitive science shows, to eliminate biases from human cognition. we think that it is no easier to debias nlp models, which raises a practical problem, which we outline in section 5, and an ethical dilemma, which we outline in section 6. 5. debiasing: practical problems word-embeddings and large language models are trained using neural networks whose objective function is to minimize error on a particular task, often the ability to predict each word in a text given the surrounding words (see, e.g., mikolov et al. 2013). that is the training task. when we consider downstream tasks, we are taking a model that has already been trained on a training task using a massive language corpus and fine-tuning it or using it as is on a new task. the new task could be text classification, which might then be used in a further application—for example, a content-management system that adds keywords and categories to content. this case is an example of transfer learning, where learning from one task on a massive corpus is transferred to another task on a different, smaller corpus. often, the so-called pretrained model is made publicly available by those who trained it and can end up being used in countless downstream applications that the original developers of the model might never know about. that is what happened with word2vec, the word-embeddings model we mentioned above (mikolov et al. 2013), and bert, one of the first large language models to be made publicly available (devlin et al. 2019). the focus on debiasing has tended to be on this initial stage of the training pipeline.22 the resulting models are subsequently released for use in various applications; if we debias these pretrained models, then the applications built 21 we acknowledged in section 3 that such a model is descriptively inaccurate regarding these words’ semantics—there is nothing about the word “woman,” semantically, in virtue of which it clusters with “homemaker.” 22 here, word-embeddings models are the initial stage of the training pipeline and can subsequently be used in downstream applications (mikolov et al. 2013). blodgett et al. (2020) surveyed 146 papers on bias in nlp systems and 54 of these papers specifically dealt with bias in word-embeddings systems. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 downstream of them will also be debiased unless bias is introduced somehow later. consequently, debiasing the models is seen as an attractive solution to many researchers. however, we think that researchers would do better to focus on debiasing the outputs of models rather the models themselves. in turn, we claim that given the serious practical difficulties with debiasing models, it behooves us to consider whether the biased models we are left with are always bad. we will argue that they are not (in, e.g., section 7 below). in their previously mentioned paper, bolukbasi and colleagues (bolukbasi et al. 2016) introduce a method they call “hard-debiasing,” which aims to reduce sexist bias within an embeddings vector space without compromising the overall structure of that space or, therefore, its usefulness. they claim that their method can “significantly reduce gender bias in embeddings while preserving [their] useful properties such as the ability to cluster related concepts and to solve analogy tasks” (bolukbasi et al. 2016, 1).23, 24 we doubt whether word-embeddings can be completely debiased using this method. what bolukbasi and colleagues call hard-debiasing works largely by maintaining humans in the loop at multiple steps to identify and compensate for biases picked up by the model. this feature is partly attractive, since humans in the loop are frequently practically and ethically beneficial (especially when the stakes are high, as in medical applications, since the instance of harmful errors will thereby be lowered; arguably, humans must always be kept in the loop in such cases). yet as applied to word-embeddings, the end product is less a well-oiled machine that works by itself and more an old tv that must be continually retuned for clear reception.25 the retention of humans in the loop as a means of policing a system’s acquisition of bias also raises worries about implicit bias in human cognition. in particular, people 23 there are also technical aspects to bolukbasi and colleagues’ hard-debiasing method that we do not discuss. 24 a word about analogy tasks: nissim, van noord, and van der goot (2019) outline various problems with using analogy tasks for bias detection. at their worst, some algorithms ignore input vectors, so that “a is to b as c is to x” is often prevented from returning a, b, or c for x (nissim, van noord, and van der goot 2019, 491–92; cf. schluter 2018). nissim and colleagues think using analogy tasks to detect bias in embeddings results in claims about biases in models where the evidence does not warrant it and may even conceal existing biases. 25 a solution might be not to use such models. we are concerned with what to do given that they are used. deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 may unconsciously add biases even if they succeed in eliminating others (see caliskan, bryson, and narayanan 2017).26 finally, it is unclear whether we can realistically remove all morally relevant biases from a word-embeddings model while preserving its usefulness. any tweaks made to a pretrained word-embeddings model to increase its normative correctness in a particular regard will result in a less descriptively accurate model regarding actual language use, at least in cases where the models reflect bias. many applications will be negatively affected by this reduced accuracy. for example, when pretrained models are used in sentiment analysis and text classification, which rely on descriptively accurate representations, these models seem a poor fit for those tasks. such practical problems with debiasing suggest that a more effective way to control for the negative effects of bias in word-embeddings might instead be to see how bias manifests itself in a system’s outputs and control for bias there to reduce the negative effects. 6. applications controlling for bias at the output stage means we can retain descriptive accuracy. exactly how we decide to control for bias in this way will, of course, depend on the application in question. let us therefore consider some applications. 6.1. translation machine translation is the oldest nlp task and is often regarded as one of the field’s major successes. deep-learning techniques similar to those employed in the training of large language models such as word2vec and bert are employed in today’s most commonly used machine-translation systems, such as google translate. one difference is that these systems are trained end-to-end, meaning that there is no breaking up of the problem into separate steps whereby a language model is first trained on a separate training task and only later fine-tuned for the task of translation. instead, the translation task is the training task (wu et al. 2016). in spite of their successes, machine-translation systems still encounter trouble with pronouns. douglas hofstadter (2018) has written about the “shallowness” of machine translation, pointing to such systems’ inability to understand what they are translating. many of hofstadter’s examples are of mistranslating pronouns. the reason pronouns are so difficult is that to translate a pronoun correctly, a system must 26 bolukbasi et al. (2016) concede that their method is limited. gonen and goldberg (2019) argue that even the technical aspects of bolukbasi and colleagues’ method serve primarily to mask the problem of gender bias without actually eliminating it. they conclude that, “while the bias is indeed substantially reduced …, the … effect is mostly hiding the bias, not removing it” (gonen and goldberg 2019, 609). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 know what it refers to. with gendered pronouns, the problem is clear. some languages do not have gendered pronouns, and those that do can behave very differently—for example, with possessive pronouns in french, the gender agrees with the noun, not the possessor (as in english). hofstadter illustrates the problem as follows: i began my explorations . . . using the following short remark . . . in their house, everything comes in pairs. there’s his car and her car, his towels and her towels, and his library and hers. . . . here’s what google translate gave me [translating into french]: dans leur maison, tout vient en paires. il y a sa voiture et sa voiture, ses serviettes et ses serviettes, sa bibliothèque et les siennes. the program fell into my trap, not realizing, as any human reader would, that i was describing a couple, stressing that for each item he had, she had a similar one. . . . the deep-learning engine used the word sa for both “his car” and “her car,” so you can’t tell anything about either car owner’s gender. likewise, it used the genderless plural ses both for “his towels” and “her towels,” and in the last case of the two libraries, his and hers, it got thrown by the final s in “hers” and somehow decided that that s represented a plural (“les siennes”). google translate’s french sentence missed the whole point. (hofstadter 2018; bold emphasis added) data-driven approaches seem unlikely to solve this sort of problem. yet gendered pronouns are an obvious place where bias reveals itself in machine translation. for example, turkish does not have gendered pronouns yet there are numerous examples of turkish sentences translated into english by google where a genderless pronoun becomes gendered according to whether the noun is a word for a stereotypically male or instead female profession: “he” for doctor, “she” for nurse, and so forth. thus, “o bir doktor” will be translated as “he is a doctor,” even though the turkish pronoun “o” is ungendered and can be translated as either “he” or “she.” in 2018, google introduced gender-specific translations in order to avoid gender bias in google translate. as a result, when you enter “o bir doktor,” the system now offers a deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 choice—either “he” or “she”—and it lets the end user decide on the correct pronoun.27 but when context is provided, google translate gets it wrong. if you are simply translating “o bir doktor,” there is no wrong answer, since there is no context provided; either “he” or “she” is acceptable. however, with a real piece of text, google’s system reveals its bias. for example, it will provide the following (correct) translation from english into turkish: did you meet john’s brother? he is a nurse. john’un erkek kardeşiyle tanıştın mı? o bir hemşire. yet when translating this turkish sentence back into english, the output is: did you meet john’s brother? she is a nurse. this result is a double fail: the translation is incorrect (even if this usage of “she” in relation to “nurse” remains descriptively accurate about people’s actual language use), and the output is biased. moreover, it reveals the changes that google implemented as relatively superficial and insubstantial. 6.2. assorted nlg tasks translation is an example of a natural-language-generation (nlg) task, where the output is a sentence or sentences in a natural language. other examples of nlg tasks include speech recognition, image captioning, and dialogue systems. one naïve suggestion for systems that perform nlg tasks might be that they should never give biased outputs, such as sexist or racist outputs. when we look at particular applications, we can see why this suggestion is naïve. if a speech-recognition system receives as audio input the sentence “a proper wife should be as obedient as a slave,” the only appropriate output is text of these words.28 there is no scope for debiasing without undermining the task that the system is designed to perform. descriptive accuracy trumps normative correctness in this case, since, as with a camera, the functions of a speech-recognition system require descriptive accuracy. 27 we made this suggestion in a talk we gave at google in 2018. much as we would like to take credit for the change, it was no doubt something that the people at google had already been discussing long beforehand. 28 this phrase, “a proper wife should be as obedient as a slave,” often appears online as attributed to aristotle. it seems to be a broad paraphrase of scattered parts of aristotle’s oeconomica, book iii, section 1, paragraph 2. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 in translation tasks, there may not be only one acceptable output, since for any phrase we input, there may be multiple acceptable ways of translating it into another language. even so, there appears to be limited scope for debiasing or imposing normative correctness. the output must be an accurate translation of the sentence—for example, “a proper wife should be as obedient as a slave”—into the target language, however sexist or morally objectionable that sentence is. again, we cannot impose normative correctness without undermining accuracy. with image captioning, we begin to see scope for imposing normative correctness. clearly, there are numerous suitable captions that a system might suggest for any image. for a photo of a woman kitesurfing, a sexist person might suggest the caption, “a disobedient wife.” yet we would hope that no imagecaptioning system would ever do so. thus, there seems to be a normative constraint on the output. obviously, we do not want an image-captioning system to label a photo of a kitesurfing woman with “solar system,” or “proton,” since these captions are descriptively inaccurate. assuming the aim is descriptive accuracy regarding the image’s content, the caption must accurately describe what is in the image. because images are typically more informationally rich than linguistic descriptions of them, most captions (even if they are partly descriptively accurate) will only be minimally accurate. as a result, “woman sailing” might be minimally accurate, while “woman kitesurfing” might be better. but “woman kitesurfing on a slingshot kiteboard in light seas and moderate winds” might be too accurate for most contexts. in any case, “disobedient wife” is not an accurate description in virtue merely of the informational content of the image. this caption might be descriptively accurate of the situation being depicted, were we to learn (for example) that this kitesurfing woman in fact disobeyed her sexist husband’s command never to kitesurf, since the husband believes wives—being women—should not kitesurf. once we understand the caption “disobedient wife” in a pejorative sense—as implying something like, “this woman, in virtue of kitesurfing, is behaving as no woman should behave”—we can see it would be normatively incorrect to allow the caption. most image-captioning systems would be unlikely to provide this caption in any case, since they would not have encountered it in their training data. beyond these considerations, we also want a system to be normatively correct in not labeling the image with “a disobedient wife” even if the system had been exposed to this label in its training, since the label is sexist—that is, normatively incorrect. finally, consider dialogue systems. here, there can be appropriate and inappropriate ways to respond to a question, even descriptively. in answer to the question, “what is the weather like in sydney?” a system can reply “sunny” or “beautiful,” but presumably not “subatomic” or “bread.” yet if someone asked, “how obedient should a proper wife be?” the system should never answer, “a proper wife deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 should be as obedient as a slave.”29 what is an acceptable output in the case of speech recognition should never be output by a dialogue system. here, we reach maximal scope for imposing normative correctness on a system’s outputs. the upshot is, first, that it can be preferable—not only practically but ethically (we discuss why this is an ethical issue in sections 7 and 8)—to control for biases in ml models and systems at the output stage rather than to try to debias a model and expect to deploy it for downstream tasks in ways that will not reproduce bias. second, even when we focus on controlling for biases at the output stage, nlg applications must be treated differently, including from an ethical perspective. in some cases we can reduce bias; in others we cannot. 6.3. search search is a different application. in considering sources of bias in ml systems, harini suresh and john guttag (2020) discuss two that are relevant to both search and our purposes in this paper—that is, historical and representational bias (see also fazelpour and danks 2021). the latter bias results from imperfect measuring or sampling. by contrast, according to suresh and guttag (2020, 4), “historical bias arises even if the data is perfectly measured and sampled, if the world as it is or was leads a model to produce outcomes that are not wanted.” they provide an example of this bias: in 2018, 5% of fortune 500 ceos were women . . . . should image search results for “ceo” reflect that number? ultimately, a variety of stakeholders, including affected members of society, should evaluate the particular harms that this result could cause and make a judgment. this decision may be at odds with the available data even if that data is a perfect reflection of the world. indeed, google has recently changed their image search results for “ceo” to display a higher proportion of women.” (suresh and guttag 2020, 5) in our terms, suresh and guttag claim that descriptive accuracy (“the world as it is or was”) conflicts here with normative correctness (i.e., we get “outcomes that are not wanted”). that is to say, imposing normative correctness by displaying a higher proportion of women in the image search results may be descriptively at odds with 29 if we asked, “how obedient does aristotle say a proper wife should be?” the appropriate answer might be “aristotle says that a proper wife should be as obedient as a slave.” yet when asking the system itself, it seems clear that imposing normative correctness by forbidding such a response is justified. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 the data even if the data are “a perfect reflection of the world.”30 by altering the results, google would seem to sacrifice descriptive accuracy in favor of normative correctness, by glossing over the actual disparity between women and men who are ceos. this inaccuracy highlights an ethical problem. to possess such descriptively accurate information is often to acquire ethically useful information—in this case, the information might be used as evidence for the claim that there is indeed a disparity between women and men ceos, perhaps in the course of redressing the disparity. however, once google alters the results as described, one effect is that we lack access to this descriptively accurate and ethically useful information and so injustices of this sort might go underrecognized. moreover, it is implicit in suresh and guttag’s discussion of their example that there is a value both to descriptive accuracy and to normative correctness, although suresh and guttag are unclear about whether they think it can be more valuable to prioritize one form of accuracy or correctness over the other. after all, while some ethical purposes might best be served by google’s decision to change its results for “ceo” to display more images of women (thereby making the results more normatively correct), other ethical purposes may be directly undermined and would be better served by descriptively accurate results; so, google’s strategy may be ethically undesirable in other respects. that is not to say google made the wrong decision. it is only to say that there might be a cost to prioritizing either descriptive accuracy or normative correctness in search, as with nlp systems relying on wordembeddings. in fact, we have reservations about whether our ethical dilemma applies in suresh and guttag’s ceo case, or in search more widely. that is because it is unlikely that google search (or search engines generally) actually provide us with results that are descriptively accurate in the first place. for example, safiya umoja noble (2018) outlines how google’s search results can be racist in ways that are driven by internal factors, such as an agenda built into google’s algorithms, or by external factors, such as how savvy users can deliberately influence results. to the extent that search results are not descriptively accurate, our ethical dilemma does not arise (as we explain in detail in section 7). we confront the dilemma only when we have descriptively accurate outputs that are normatively incorrect, and the incorrectness is due to the accuracy. in such cases, the dilemma consists in our having to decide whether to prioritize descriptive accuracy (including its ethical 30 in another widely discussed case, the guardian reported in 2016 how twitter user kabir alli conducted a google image search using the phrases “three black teenagers” and “three white teenagers” (allen 2016). results were very different. the search for “three black teenagers” returned mostly police mugshots while for “three white teenagers” it gave stock photographs of smiling white youths. deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 usefulness) at the expense of normative correctness or vice versa. even if search results are normatively incorrect (as in suresh and guttag’s case) unless they are also descriptively accurate, there is no dilemma (as we explain in sections 7 and 8 below); we must simply address the matter by trying to attain normative correctness.31 even so, in an idealized case where search results did reflect descriptive accuracy and were normatively incorrect, our dilemma would frequently arise. after all, descriptively accurate information can—as in the case of word-embeddings models, for instance—be ethically useful in studying biases (as expressed in language), how they are perpetuated, and how to address them. 7. the ethical dilemma it can sometimes be ethically valuable not to debias nlp models or their outputs. for one thing, not debiasing enables us to uncover biases and can thereby prevent us from thinking that all is right with the world (in some regard) when it is not. however, a lot depends on the application under consideration. with speech recognition, there is no room for imposing normative correctness, and doing so might even be ethically problematic. imagine we are listening to donald trump making a speech on tv and our speaker is not working. instead, we are relying on a livecaptioning feed. we would be poorly served by this system were it to impose normative correctness by producing an eloquent discourse on feminism. we need to know what trump is actually saying—unpalatable as it might be—in order to hold him accountable. at the other end of the spectrum is search. if search results do not reflect descriptive accuracy (see, e.g., noble 2018), the ethical dilemma that we outline does not arise. if search results were somehow to reflect descriptive accuracy but were normatively incorrect, we might confront the dilemma. we would then be faced with two options: either prioritize descriptive accuracy over normative correctness, which has the potential cost of perpetuating or amplifying bias, or instead prioritize normative correctness, with the potential cost of withholding ethically useful information even if we thereby avoid perpetuating or amplifying bias. recall that descriptive accuracy, as we use this term, means sufficient descriptive accuracy in a relevant regard (all models are inaccurate in some—and presumably many—regards, even with respect to a target phenomenon). without descriptive accuracy we cannot proceed usefully and there is no dilemma. call a situation dilemma-land when we have a descriptively accurate model that, in virtue of its descriptive accuracy, gives normatively incorrect (i.e., biased) outputs. by contrast, call a situation utopia-land when we have a descriptively accurate model 31 alternatively, we could strive for descriptive accuracy, in which case our dilemma might apply after all. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 that gives normatively correct outputs. there is no way of getting to utopia-land until people no longer express biases (e.g., sexism or racism) in the language corpora on which we train models. what if we have descriptively inaccurate models? perhaps, in that case, we only need normative correctness. however, an inaccurate model may fail to sufficiently perform the task it is meant to perform, since inaccuracy often undermines usefulness. achieving normative correctness without descriptive accuracy would, in any case, put us in fantasy-land; if a model exhibits normative correctness but is descriptively inaccurate, it is out of touch with reality and is thus a fantasy (although sometimes, as we acknowledge below, we may have reason to prefer such fantasies to descriptive accuracy—for example, normatively correct outputs may serve to work against amplification of bias in some cases, even if the model is descriptively inaccurate). achieving normative incorrectness and descriptive inaccuracy puts us instead in disaster-land. although it may be possible to get from fantasy-land or disaster-land to utopia-land, it is highly unlikely. (we leave confirmation to our readers.) more likely is that we simply cycle back and forth between fantasy-land and disaster-land by achieving normative correctness/incorrectness in our model yet without descriptive accuracy. either way, until we have descriptive accuracy, we cannot get to either dilemma-land or utopia-land; and (as indicated above) dilemma-land remains a more likely destination than utopia-land anyhow. only in dilemma-land does the dilemma arise, since for it to arise a model must exhibit descriptive accuracy and, in virtue of this descriptive accuracy, produce normatively incorrect outputs (if it gives normatively incorrect outputs resulting from something else, that is a different matter that must be addressed on its own terms). in dilemma-land, we must decide whether to prioritize descriptive accuracy or instead aim for normative correctness by debiasing. debiasing may undermine the usefulness of the model and might undermine descriptive accuracy and thus withhold ethically useful information. yet prioritizing descriptive accuracy runs the risk of perpetuating or amplifying the relevant biases. if a model exhibits descriptive inaccuracy, there is simply no dilemma to confront given that we would never want to prioritize descriptive inaccuracy over either normative correctness or incorrectness. our aim is to draw attention to this dilemma. language models and various applications (even potentially including search) that rely on them can be used for different purposes. sometimes these purposes are best served by having the model reflect descriptive accuracy even when that entails reflecting bias. those purposes will, moreover, often be served precisely because the biased results provide us with ethically useful information. however, we do run the risk of amplifying bias. in other cases, an application might be used for a different purpose, such that it is more deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 important to avoid amplifying bias than to retain ethically useful information. then, we may prefer normatively, not descriptively, correct results. either way, there is a cost. we also maintain that there is sometimes an ethical value to the less intuitive horn of the dilemma, on which we retain ethically useful information by not imposing normative correctness. even so, we recognize that in doing so we can amplify bias. 8. rethinking the debate about bias in nlp our way of distinguishing normative correctness and descriptive accuracy adds nuance to recent debates about algorithmic bias in nlp and can help us to understand these debates better. for instance, as outlined above, suresh and guttag’s (2020) historical bias can be understood as arising when we have descriptively accurate outputs (regarding people’s use of language) about how the world is yet these outputs are normatively incorrect. thus, our distinction can help to clarify the points of contention among these debates’ participants and the implications of prioritizing one form of accuracy over another. once we acknowledge the ethical dilemma that arises when descriptive and normative accuracy conflict in the way we have outlined, we can see clearly the ethical costs of prioritizing one form of accuracy over the other. to take another example, emily bender, timnit gebru, and colleagues argue that large language models like bert or gpt-2/3 not only reproduce bias but do not reflect “the world as it is” (suresh and guttag 2020, 4), since the corpora on which they are trained do not reflect marginalized voices (bender, gebru et al. 2021).32 thus, one cannot argue on the basis of a model’s descriptive accuracy for not debiasing it if it is not descriptively accurate. part of the problem is that while “user-generated content sites like reddit, twitter, and wikipedia present themselves as open and accessible to anyone, there are structural factors including moderation practices which make them less welcoming to marginalized populations” (bender, gebru et al. 2021, 613), resulting in marginalized voices’ being underrepresented in the models. simultaneously, “white supremacist and misogynistic, ageist” voices tend to be “overrepresented in the training data” (613) due to how the data are filtered. bender/gebru and colleagues’ description of this problem can be usefully framed in terms of normative and descriptive correctness. large language models, bender/gebru and colleagues appear to say, are not only normatively incorrect but also descriptively inaccurate in important ways, and they are normatively incorrect partly because they are descriptively inaccurate. 32 bender and gebru are listed as joint lead authors on their 2021 paper. we have slightly modified citation format for that paper to reflect this. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 even criticisms of bender/gebru and colleagues’ claims can be usefully framed in terms of normative correctness and descriptive accuracy. for instance, yoav goldberg (2021) claims that bender/gebru and colleagues “suggest that good (= not dangerous) language models are . . . models which reflect the world as they think the world should be,” yet “an alternative view by which language models should reflect language as it is being used in a training corpus is at least as valid, and should be acknowledged.” goldberg picks up here on an ambiguity in how “good” (or its cognates) can be used in this context—that is, as picking out normative correctness (“not dangerous”) or descriptive accuracy (“language as it is being used”). in our terms, goldberg claims that bender/gebru and colleagues fail adequately to acknowledge their preference for prioritizing the normative over the descriptive, and in a particular way. indeed, goldberg thinks that bender/gebru and colleagues prioritize normative correctness in a way that can result in our adopting certain views on ethical issues even when there is legitimate debate about whether they are the right views to adopt. as goldberg (2021) puts it, the fact that there is ongoing debate on such issues “should be made explicit” by bender/gebru and colleagues. goldberg also thinks there can be practical and ethical reasons for prioritizing descriptive accuracy over normative correctness, contra what he takes bender/gebru and colleagues to implicitly maintain. a central target of bender/gebru and colleagues’ concern seems not to be what suresh and guttag call historical bias but rather what they call representation bias, which occurs “when certain parts of the input space are underrepresented” (suresh and guttag 2020, 5). for example, with language models, “datasets collected through smartphone apps can under-represent lower-income or older groups, who are less likely to own smartphones” (suresh and guttag 2020, 5). this form of bias is one of the central focuses of bender/gebru and colleagues’ attention, rather than historical bias, given that a central claim of theirs is that often the relevant data have not been perfectly measured and sampled. by contrast, historical bias arises even when the data have been “perfectly measured and sampled” and “the world as it is or was leads a model to produce outcomes that are not wanted” (suresh and guttag 2020, 4). our normative/descriptive distinction again helps to clarify the points of disagreement and agreement between bender/gebru and colleagues and their critics such as goldberg, while additionally clarifying how language models can involve representation bias in suresh and guttag’s sense. bender/gebru and colleagues’ claim is that large language models are descriptively inaccurate relative to the wider population of language users, as a result of their being built around an imperfect measuring and sampling of data. such models can be normatively incorrect in ways deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 that result from such inaccuracy.33 thus, suresh and guttag’s representation bias is one way in which a model can be descriptively inaccurate. when such inaccuracy is distinguished from normative incorrectness, the points of disagreement among goldberg and bender/gebru and colleagues become clearer. it might be suggested that bender/gebru and colleagues underestimate the extent to which language models like gtp-2/3 are descriptively accurate. after all, even if they are trained on datasets that come in significant part from platforms from which marginalized voices have been excluded, and so the models are descriptively inaccurate at least to that extent, the models might still be descriptively accurate about how language is used on those platforms. bender/gebru and colleagues’ response might be that the aim of descriptive accuracy is to capture patterns that exist in the entire population (or most of it), not simply a subpopulation. for large language models, the aim (in that case) would be that models accurately reflect how humans in general, including those in marginalized groups, use language. if we take language from only a specific subpopulation, we cannot make claims about descriptive accuracy (except, perhaps, regarding that specific subpopulation’s use of language). the most obvious bias here would seem to be representational bias, given that the model is only representative of a specific subgroup while ignoring others. even practically, the model’s usefulness for downstream tasks on texts written by other language users will thus be limited. yet suppose we trained a hypothetical model on all of the language ever produced by people across all groups.34 we might then have descriptive accuracy. even so, bias might remain—not representational bias but historical bias. in our terms, we would have descriptive accuracy yet normative incorrectness (and the normative incorrectness would be due to the descriptive accuracy). for example, we would still have the problem of gendered pronouns in translation. if people speak as though there are more female than male nurses, the pronoun “she” will still show up more frequently near “nurse” than “he” in the relevant vector space, even across the enormous dataset of all the language ever produced by all groups. likewise, if people speak as though there are more male than female programmers, “he” will show up more frequently near “computer programmer” than “she.” this bias comes from descriptive, historical facts about language use, not from how the dataset was built. 33 bender, gebru et al. (2021) thereby seem to be saying that normative incorrectness can result from descriptive inaccuracy. we do not deny this, although our focus is instead on how descriptive accuracy can conflict with normative accuracy—i.e., how normative incorrectness can result from descriptive accuracy. 34 falbo and lacroix (2022) note that minority groups often “code-switch” by conforming to majority norms of expression; thus, the content they do generate might still not reflect marginalized voices. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 the distinction between representation bias and historical bias is also important when we consider whether there can be a value to not debiasing models. historical bias often indicates something interesting about the world, whereas representational bias might—in the worst cases—only indicate lazy data-gathering. the more descriptively accurate a model is, the more useful it will be for downstream tasks and the more accurately it will reflect historical (and current) biases in language use. the choice to debias must start with a descriptively accurate model. in that case, we encounter the dilemma: either we debias the accurate model and avoid amplifying bias yet lose accuracy and ethically useful information, or we do not debias and we use the model to learn about biases, for example, but risk amplifying bias. 9. conclusion what should we do about bias in nlp systems? it depends, of course, on the source of such bias. but even for bias from properly sampled data, it also depends on what we want from such systems. do we want them to be more like cameras or more like people? we expect cameras to get things descriptively right in certain relevant regards, but not normatively right. yet we expect people to get things normatively right, even if they get things descriptively wrong. for example, we do not excuse someone for making a sexist comment even if their making that comment is a descriptively accurate reflection of how language is actually used in their language community—we want the person to get things normatively right, not descriptively right. should we expect nlp systems to get things normatively right, even if they get things descriptively wrong? such systems could work like the iblur camera that we described in section 3, or like the speech-filter in the tv show the good place, where eleanor says things like “holy motherforking shirtballs!” despite presumably trying to say something else. this filter “translates out” things that we do not want to hear or are not permitted to hear. alternatively, is it enough for nlp systems to be like cameras in getting things descriptively right, so that they reflect the actual world and let us decide what to do about it in particular contexts? we maintain that there can be a value to having nlp systems function more like cameras. for one thing, it can provide ethically useful information, which we may even have an ethical obligation to provide. then we face a dilemma, since allowing a system to get things descriptively right by not debiasing it can perpetuate or amplify bias. we think that deciding which way to go can only be done on a case-by-case basis, by weighing the ethical costs and benefits. our primary aim has been to draw attention to the dilemma, which arises once we acknowledge that there can often be a value, however counterintuitive, to not debiasing. we have also argued that it is frequently best to control for the negative effects of bias at the output stage rather than by debiasing models themselves. yet deery and bailey – the bias dilemma: the ethics of algorithmic bias in natural-language processing published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 even then, we cannot easily avoid the dilemma, since we must still decide whether normative correctness should overrule descriptive accuracy in cases where descriptive accuracy provides us with ethically useful information. finally, our 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technologies, volume 2, edited by marilyn walker, heng ji, and amanda stent, 242–46. stroudsburg, pa: association for computational linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n182039. smith, angela m. 2008. “control, responsibility, and moral assessment.” philosophical studies 138, no. 3 (april): 367–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11 098-006-9048-x. smith, david. 2013. “‘racism’ of early colour photography explored in art exhibition.” guardian, january 25, 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/20 13/jan/25/racism-colour-photography-exhibition. suresh, harini, and john v. guttag. 2020. “a framework for understanding unintended consequences of machine learning.” arxiv preprint, february 17, 2020, revision, arxiv:1901.10002v3 [cs.lg]. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv .1901.10002. wu, yonghui, mike schuster, zhifeng chen, quoc v. le, mohammad norouzi, wolfgang macherey, maxim krikun, et al. 2016. “google’s neural machine translation system: bridging the gap between human and machine translation.” arxiv preprint, arxiv:1609.08144 [cs.cl]. https://doi.org/10.485 50/arxiv.1609.08144. oisín deery is an assistant professor of philosophy at york university, toronto, canada, and a lecturer and arc decra fellow at macquarie university in sydney, australia. he has previously held positions at monash university, florida state university, the university of arizona, and the university of montreal. oisín’s work straddles the philosophy of mind and action, moral psychology, and metaphysics. his work has focused primarily on developing a naturalistic understanding of human agency and responsibility, but recently he has also been working on issues related to artificial intelligence and agency. oisín has published widely in journals such as philosophical studies, the australasian journal of philosophy, and philosophical psychology. he is the author of a monograph entitled naturally free action, published by oxford university press in 2021. katherine bailey has worked in a number of roles as a data scientist and software engineer. she is currently employed by shopify inc., in toronto, canada. katherine has a longstanding interest in issues related to artificial intelligence and natural language processing. she has written on these issues in blog posts and in publications such as techcrunch and has been invited to speak at various venues, including google and the north american association for computational linguistics. 14292 deery and bailey title page 14292 deery & bailey final format flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 3 article 5 recommended citation shotwell, alexis. 2021. “flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (3). article 5. 2021 flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating alexis shotwell carleton university alexisshotwell@cunet.carleton.ca shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating alexis shotwell abstract we are frequently enjoined to eat in one way or another in order to reduce harm, defeat global warming, or at least save our own health. in this paper, i argue that individualism about food saves neither ourselves nor the world. i show connections between what lisa heldke identifies as substance ontologies and heroic food individualism. i argue that a conception of relational ontologies of food is both more accurate and more politically useful than the substance ontologies offered to us by certain approaches to both veganism and carnivory. since relationality does not in itself offer normative guidance for eating, i ask how eaters might better practice relationality. with particular attention to potawatomi scientist robin wall kimmerer’s invitation to settlers to “become indigenous to place,” i suggest that forms of relationality based in anarchist practices of “mutual aid” better offer white settlers, and eaters more generally, a political approach to relational ontologies while resisting a tendency towards epistemic and spiritual extractivism. i argue that mutual aid approaches have much to offer to the politics of food and eating at every scale. keywords: food, eating, relational ontologies, anarchism, mutual aid, collectivity food places us in relation to the world—its materiality, its social patterns, its comfort or discomfort. while we eat because our bodies need sustenance, we make decisions about which food to eat and how to eat it based on many other factors. we might eat in accord with our ethical commitments, our religious practices, our politics, or our understanding of how food affects our bodies. eating often feels like a personal decision, with effects on our own bodies that only we experience. and yet it has consistently also been understood as a way we can individually respond to big or systemic situations. food is intimate, necessary, complicated, and interesting. food is never, however, an individual situation, and it matters that too often even theorists doing important work on eating focus on individual eating decisions as the main locus of philosophical interest. in this paper, i trace what usefully follows in making a move from asking, how should i eat? to asking, how should we eat? i begin by exploring two key trends in food individualism—eating to save the world and eating to save ourselves. individual feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 food choices are, i argue, both incapable of fulfilling their stated ends and pernicious. resolving to focus on the individual in response to big and systemic problems with food is almost automatically self-defeating; very little reflection is needed to show that our personal decisions do not solve the problems we wish they solved. the focus on individual actions is pernicious in that it deepens harms associated with consumption rather than solving them. in the second section, i turn to lisa heldke’s conception of relational ontologies of eating. i assess how a relational ontology of eating helps us think about collective situations such as white settlers appropriating or condemning indigenous foodways in thinking about our own eating practices. i argue that we benefit from taking up an ethical approach to eating that acknowledges the complexity of our consuming relations, addresses the political despair that can arise out of that complexity, and offers guidance for collective responses. in the final section, i argue that relationality alone does not provide us normative guidance and suggest “mutual aid” as a political and ethical orientation for eating. making individual food choices can be a way to orient ourselves towards, and commit to, the necessarily collective solutions for the problems highlighted by consumption. since the only way any of us take action is as individuals, we must start with our own actions. however, taking ourselves as an anchor, or a node, in a much broader collective situation gives us both traction for resisting the despair that can arise from complexity and an approach that continues to work for the “better,” although we cannot achieve any kind of perfection, purity, or absolution from connection with harm. making food choices as a form of relational mutual aid opens moral consistency to us as well as—we might hope—enabling more effective ethical and political action. 1. using food individualism to try to manage big, complex circumstances consider two ways we commonly individualize our eating practices: understanding food choices as a core tactic in the overall project to not destroy the world and focusing on clean eating as self-salvation. call both of these “food individualism.” eating to save the world “save the world” eating advice was exemplified in a 2017 study on how to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. this study received a fair bit of press for its recommendations for individual high-impact lifestyle changes to address the climate catastrophe. the top four changes were “having one fewer child, living car free, shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 avoiding air travel, and eating a plant-based diet” (wynes and nicholas 2017, 3).1 given that “eating a plant-based diet” was quite far down the list of greenhouse-gas emitting lifestyle changes that could be made (cutting less than half the emissions than avoiding car ownership), there is a perhaps surprising focus on the eating part of the debate. this emphasis may be because eating is the thing on this list that needs to be decided several times every day; eating also carries a different charge than decisions like whether to have a child, travel, or own a car. plant-based diets have, however, long been identified as a way to address huge global problems, notably the effects of global warming on food systems (in north america marked by publication in 1971 of the recipe/save-the-world cookbook diet for a small planet [lappé 1971]). it makes sense that individuals feel hailed to take up eating as an ethical response to worldwide catastrophe. but all of these “high-impact” lifestyle changes share a problem: they take individual decisions as the main locus of ethical action. implicitly, this focus posits that what is killing the earth and its inhabitants are the people making bad or selfish lifestyle decisions, and that the solutions we need thus require individuals to change their lifestyles. this approach does not identify the greenhouse gas emissions of industry, mining, and fracking, alongside complex situations like volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and melting sea ice that currently captures greenhouse gasses, as core issues to address. it does not allow us to analyze complex issues such as the tradeoffs between mining rare earth minerals used in solar power generation and storage and the carbon costs of petroleum. the focus on individual decisions about children, air travel, cars, and eating also elides the social relations that unevenly distribute life chances and necessities. as reproductive justice activists have definitively shown, we have a long way to go before eugenic practices such as forced sterilization of indigenous, black, and other racialized people are not at issue in the choice to have children. questions of whose lives are worth living always involve how we understand and live disability and ability, and these issues are in turn entangled with the complexly coproduced lack of access to adequate health care, contraception, and abortion, as well as the inequitable decisions about whose children are taken away from them by the state. the question of who is able to raise their own children circles us back to questions of sustenance and the ethics of food; when children are taken into state custody because a social worker deems them insufficiently well cared for, how often is poverty a condition predicting what becomes (in the social worker’s judgment) a parent’s inability to sufficiently care for their kids? how often is eating a part of that equation? how ought we weight the historical practices of starvation as a genocidal state 1 around the same time, an influential article in nature (springmann et al. 2018) also made this argument; it is widespread. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 technology in thinking about food and justice? how should we think about access to clean drinking water as a part of our understanding of consumption and justice? these are not questions easily answered by individuals; none of them are resolved by injunctions to change one’s lifestyle. an unexpected offshoot of the specifically political orientation towards plantbased diet as an ethical orientation towards saving the planet and the beings on it is a purity politics directed toward people who don’t eat a vegan diet. these politics are ineffective at best, if the desired effect is bringing people into the plant-based fold. but they become particularly vile in their articulation with racism and colonialism. as someone who eats a vegan diet, i pay attention to how fellow vegans relate to social relations of oppression. peta distills some of the most cringeworthy approaches, but they’re evident also in formations like the recently renamed blog/cookbook formation “thug kitchen” and in responses to toronto indigenous food restaurant kokum kitchen serving seal meat. as i’ll argue below, relational ontologies save us from politically useless food moralisms, including a particularly troubling form of whiteness manifest in certain eating judgments.2 relational ontologies offer a way towards explicitly antiracist and decolonial answers to the question of how we ought to eat. ordinary people frequently perceive the uselessness of treating personal eating choices as the solution to global problems. for people who care about global catastrophes and want to avert them, it can be dispiriting to understand the limited power of our personal choices to effect justice. on the far end of the dispirited spectrum, the voluntary human extinction movement (http://vhemt.org/) takes the stance that humans must die out in order for the planet and its creatures to continue. they argue for ceasing reproduction completely (their motto is “may we live long and die out”) and leaving the earth to recover as best it can from what they frame as a cancer-cell-like overgrowth. individualism about food produces the ethical and political problem of tending to discourage precisely the behaviour it means to encourage. i want an answer to the question of how to eat that doesn’t lead to a kind of fuck-it despair or the aspiration to live long and die out. eating to save oneself then there are individually oriented eaters constellated under the sun sign of hundreds of blogs called some version of “eat this and glow from within” and the rising sign of gym culture enjoining eating right as a way to make gains: the clean eater who can look and feel amazing despite the collective contexts in which we are placed, 2 julie guthman’s (2007, 2008, 2011) work on the white-coding of food ethics, and her investigations into the spatial fixes of capitalism in the bodies of agricultural workers, is vital here. shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 and whose food practices can actually heal the deleterious effects of capitalism. touted by uncountable instagrammers alongside innumerable more conventional celebrities, clean eating has its own magazine, cookbooks, and, of course, critics.3 clean eating involves eating at the top of the food chain through, perhaps counterintuitively, eating at the bottom of the glycemic index. indeed, the frequent clean eating injunction to consume unprocessed foods doesn’t actually mean eating unprocessed foods; it frequently means eating foods that are processed through the bodies of other beings rather than through the labour congealed in machines. so, royal jelly, cheese, yogurt. grass-fed beef rather than grain-fed beef; honey rather than refined sugar. not eating “processed foods” means eating whole foods that have been kept from decay through unseen sorts of processing, through plastic cases around oranges, refrigerated shipping containers, or controlled atmosphere storage that keep apples fresh using either a regulated mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and temperature, or something like smartfresh, in which 1-methylcyclopropene (1-mcp) prevents the apples’ ethylene uptake. clean eating, especially in its paleo formations, aims for dense nutritional values; frequently the density of those values tracks as well densely congealed relations of human and nonhuman labour. we might think that eating, as the hackneyed michael pollan suggestion goes, foods from the outside edge of the grocery store that our grandparents would recognize as food also reframes our ethical relations to those foods. but, of course, although it does carry ethical implications, clean eating is not an ethical orientation. that is, clean eaters are not making choices based on their ethical regard for the world and beings in it; they are aiming at bodymanagement through eating the most nutrient-dense foods available and through abstaining from certain forms of calories (refined sugar in particular). the relationship is extractive, distillatory, refining. and refining produces remnants, slag, dross, which must be distributed downstream in the form of e. coli from feedlots coating romaine lettuce leaves or in lakes of whey left over from making “greek” yogurt. so this form of clean eater is again answering the question of how i should eat, though this time in pursuit of personal vibrancy and flourishing rather than political purity. often clean eaters of this variety also have the money and time resources to spend a lot of time on food choices and effects. clean eating in this mode also slides quickly into practices of foodand body-management that can manifest as dysphoric eating or not eating. 3 see, e.g., bee wilson, “why we fell for clean eating,” guardian, august 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/11/why-we-fell-for-cleaneating; and ruby tandoh, “the unhealthy truth behind ‘wellness’ and ‘clean eating,’” vice, may 13, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jm5nvp/ruby-tandoh-eatclean-wellness. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 clean eating’s origin story is disability; diets that now are purported to allow us to manage the externalities of capitalism (being exhausted, lifeless, having bad skin, and so on) began as ways to manage conditions like epilepsy, celiac disease, or conditions that currently are difficult to diagnose. diet injunctions translated from disability care can still manifest healthism, the assumption that people are morally responsible for managing their personal experience of collective or systemic health wrongs, especially when they arise in rigorously individualist and disability-hating spaces. so, we see regressive people deeply committed to healthism, individualism, and eugenics disavowing their disabilities through promoting eating practices that are in fact supports for living disabled lives. for example, mikhaila peterson and her father, jordan peterson, have become popular exemplars of meat-only diets, in which the eater consumes only meat, salt, and water. they are less often identified as people who talk often and openly about being disabled, largely because their accounts of disability are articulated through their own raging ableism. perhaps because of jordan peterson’s regressive and antifeminist politics, or because of the tendency outlined above equating plant-based eating with caring for the world and other beings, their food choices are often read as political statements (mother jones, 2018). however, as the petersons and others eating a meat-only diet demonstrate, eating can be experienced or prescribed as a way to escape disability, even as it simultaneously enforces the ableism that produces disability. both petersons express their turn toward an exclusively beef-only diet as a form of unexpected and welcome freedom from illness, something they would not have chosen but which carries amazing benefits. in jordan peterson’s case, we receive detailed descriptions of his overwhelming mental health challenges, along with systemic and idiopathic physical suffering; mikhaila peterson has a disabling chronic condition that has only been helped through extremely restrictive eating. experiences like theirs show up in testimonials from carnivory communities online. although most of the carnivore-diet groups online seem to focus on the health benefits of eating only meat and water, frequently with really wrenching accounts of how ill someone had been before making the switch, there are also frequent references to the possibility that eating only meat will save the planet. the world carnivore tribe, a facebook group started by shawn baker (a former doctor whose license was stripped in 2017), one of many groups devoted to the good of carnivory, says about itself, “we are demonstrating the effects of a carnivorous diet for excellent health! meat and water! saving the world one steak at a time!” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/worldcar nivoretribe/). baker hosts also the non-facebook site “meatrx,” which has a “success stories” page (https://meatrx.com/category/success-stories/) where people can submit their stories of winnowing down their diets, usually in response to real suffering, until they shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 are eating only meat. michael goldstein, who is active in bitcoin development, curates a more supposedly scholarly list as “just meat” (https://justmeat.co/). meat-only eaters as well as organic-only, paleo, gluten-free, vegan-for-healthreasons, raw fooders, and people who aim to manage health problems through diet, are varieties of clean eaters. again, clean eating in this form is an individualizing imperative, a form of healthism, such that we are held personally responsible for managing the effects of huge, complex systems that affect us. strangely, plant-based eating as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—a political rather than immediate health impulse—can also be seen as an individualizing imperative, and one that is, in this case, a form of politics. it is perhaps surprising that both veganism and carnivory aim to solve large, complex, or bedeviling problems through personal food choices, where the success or failure of the solution is measured by how good or bad an individual feels because of their individual choices. or perhaps this is not surprising at all! after all, food individualism is just one expression of a more general practice of subjectivity, whereby to be a proper human we must manifest as a sovereign subject, master of our desires and bodily being, rational, and in control. the fundamental messiness and vulnerability of food, its intake, excrement, and excrescence, quite naturally disturbs this bodily subject. the epistemic position of the super-knower who understands the real effects of food (evinced by both the petersons and my more selfrighteous vegan or anti-sugar comrades—wake up, eating sheeple!) manages some of the discomfiture of the unsovereign eating self through constructing delimited culinary identities. the knowing and being of an in-control eater manifests, then, a kind of purism of both subject (the eater) and object (what ought to be eaten). as i’ll explore below, this is ultimately a sad and doomed project, and we would do better to sit with the real messiness, relationality, and mutuality of our eating selves.4 food individualism arises from very different seeds, taking the form either of the lie that plant-based diets can solve big and systemic problems like global warming or the imperative to personally eat clean so as to manage complex health problems. in their focus on personal lifestyle, from very different origin points, they share the unintended—and perhaps explicitly disavowed—fruit of foreclosing collective political and ethical action. i want an answer to the question of how to eat that is not classist and ableist to the core and that relies neither on individual purity practices of self-abnegation nor encourages rampant consumption as individual solutions to collective problems. in the next section i begin with an account of relationality as a more accurate account of food ontologies and as a ground for necessary collectivity. in section 3 i argue for the specifically political implications of taking up relationality. 4 i thank the anonymous reviewer who invited elaboration on these points. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 2. relational ontologies and making collective trouble i think of brecht’s poem “to those who follow in our wake.” one stanza says: they tell me: eat and drink. be glad to be among the haves! but how can i eat and drink when i take what i eat from the starving and those who thirst do not have my glass of water? and yet i eat and drink. (brecht 2008) probably written in 1939, while the author was in exile from germany, the poem’s context is profoundly different than ours. and yet, when brecht writes: “i ate my food between slaughters / i laid down to sleep among murderers / i tended to love with abandon,” i find that he speaks to questions that remain current: how can we consume food and water, knowing that many people do not have enough decent food to eat, or water to drink, knowing the conditions under which people harvest and process our food? should we just ignore reality? brecht’s answer to the question “but how can i eat and drink / when i take what i eat from the starving / and those who thirst do not have my glass of water?”: make trouble for the rulers. when you are betrayed to the slaughterer, hope that your death causes the people in power to sit easier on their thrones—which is to say, before the slaughter, while we eat and drink although (and sometimes because) others starve and thirst, make rulers sit on that throne with less ease. in this moment of late capitalism and climate catastrophe, the rulers we might aspire to make uneasy are still the “haves” of brecht’s poem: the billionaires gleefully promoting global warming for profit, and the people benefiting from the racial order of capital. and these beneficiaries are not discomfited by people making different personal food choices—they simply monetize those choices and carry on. food individualism under capitalism carries with it a faulty theory of change, to the extent that it has one at all, because it focuses on making lifestyle choices rather than articulating a space for collective political response. in that focus, it produces political despondency and immobilization rather than collective possibility. troubling our food rulers starts with turning our attention to what it would take to answer the question, how should we eat? while this reorientation starts with shifting to a relational understanding of consumption, it calls up as well a number of useful questions about what, politically and ethically, constitutes a “we.” my thinking in this section begins with asking how white settlers might practice respect for indigenous legal and political orders as regards food sovereignties and responsibility for land and place, in part through understanding the very concept of relational ontologies as an indigenous concept that travels without being appropriable in nonindigenous contexts (hunt 2014; daigle 2019; todd 2016). however, to understand food individualism i turn to settler philosophy. shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 relational ontologies of food lisa heldke (2012, 2018) argues that many of our ethical decisions about food come down to what she articulates as a misunderstanding: we often think of food as a substance, when actually food is a relationship. she characterizes many of our eating decisions as based on what she calls “substance ontologies”: some particular thing is to be eaten, or not eaten, based on what materially constitutes it. so, if you have decided for reasons to not eat meat, all you need to know is if some given food contains meat to decide whether you’ll eat it. the eating decision comes down to determining the substance of what you propose to eat. as heldke (2012) notes, substance ontologies seem to give traction for individual decision-making—they have the appearance of clarity of classification, and their epistemic demands are fairly mild. the clean eater is enacting a substance ontology in their conception of food. in thinking about the specifically ethical and political dimensions of what to eat, substance ontologies are less helpful. substance ontologies do not explain why an eater might prefer to eat the eggs of free-range chickens, to eat tomatoes harvested by people who were treated with dignity, or to not eat chocolate that was produced using enslaved children as labour. a chemical assessment of chocolate made by a worker-owned co-op growing cacao in sustainable ways would not show the absence of enslavement in its production. but a substance ontology approach—what’s in this food?—can’t answer the question of why we prefer nonslavery chocolate to slavery chocolate. when people criticize vegans for consuming almond milk, although the treatment of pollinator bees in the orchards of california is atrocious, they are reaching for a critique of substance ontologies. the working conditions that produce something we consume are part of a broader context, a relation. thinking about all food choices as relational constellates them as congealed relations; this orientation opens ethical and political questions so that we can consider our responsibilities to a much broader and more complex web of interconnection (boisvert 2010). a relational ontology of food allows us to say that, for the purposes of eating, the slavery chocolate and the nonslavery chocolate have fundamentally different natures; the context of their production changes what they are for us. beginning with the relational ontologies of food, we can see that “living things eat each other. persistently. regularly. of necessity” (heldke 2018, 258). this approach immediately resonates with val plumwood’s (2000) argument that we can generate an ethics of eating based on understanding ourselves as living within an ecosystem of eaters who are ourselves eaten, in kin relations with food webs rather than at the top of a food pyramid. plumwood (2000, 287) critiques what she calls ontological veganism, the idea that nothing “morally considerable should ever be ontologized as edible or as available for use.” i agree with her that as a political feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 practice, ontological veganism remains (even in recent academic texts espousing it) incoherent and vacuous, entailing, as she writes, “moral dualism, a neo-cartesian insensitivity to non-animal forms of life as beyond moral consideration, and an abrupt moral and biological break between ‘animals’ and ‘plants’ which is out of step with what we know about the continuity of planetary life” (301). i read heldke’s and plumwood’s accounts as consonant with the praxiographic approach theorized by annemarie mol, through which we can understand that ontologies multiply depending on the practices subtending what seem to be fixed entities. as mol writes, “ontology is not given in the order of things, but that, instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices.” she continues: “if reality is multiple, it is also political” (mol 2002, 6–7). there is still some distance to go between recognizing ontologies as relational (and therefore multiple) and articulating the politics that might follow from those ontologies, but consider what we’ve gained already.5 immediately, starting from a relational conception of ontology unsticks previously frozen decision-making; instead of judging the ethical and political relationships of consumption based on the substances being consumed, we can ask about the relationships congealed or enacted in the consumption. we’re not eating things; we’re participating in relationships, and responsibility to those relationships is contextual. there is no edibility-determinant that will remain constant for everyone, everywhen, or everywhere. the context and meaning-making of consumption is situated in relation not only to the distribution of power, harm, benefit, and more as it’s practiced in the present; that context is also a trace of the history that shapes the material conditions of eating, drinking, and so on. heldke (2012, 80) suggests that there is a kind of moral absolutism frequently bundled with substance ontologies that actively gets in the way of attending to the relations involved in making something food. substance ontologies lend themselves to delimiting bright lines of ethicality because they seem to ask simple questions with clear answers: is this food something i have determined i am (ethically, politically, for reasons of health) to eat? relational ontologies can still generate bright lines, but they require more care. how a relational ontology approach might help settlers practice better relations consider the work in places like curve lake first nation to nurture relationships with wild rice, opposed by settler cottagers, dramatized in drew hayden taylor’s play cottagers and indians (rhyno 2020; taylor 2020). substance ontologies focus on the rice; is it good or bad to eat local, wild-harvested rice? relational ontologies look at the context in which rice is tended, harvested, related with, and 5 james stanescu’s (2017) case for ontological pluralism as a ground for ethical and political decisions about food and ecologies is compelling here as well. shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 the web of historical and present relationships that make up what we are. from a relational ontology approach, it is not only that the settlers asking to put chemicals in the lake water to kill the wild rice should be refused—they also likely shouldn’t harvest that wild rice, there, or eat it, at least without being in a specific relation with the ojibwe people who are in historical and present relation with that rice harvest. food and place are connected (watts 2013). these relational ontologies are not fixed by, for example, categories like “indigenous” and “settler,” nor do indigenous peoples’ practices of relationality with hunted animals translate to settler practices of eating factory-farmed meat. as margaret robinson (2014) has argued about veganism and mi’kmaq legends, turning towards what are called “traditional practices” can emphasize rather than negate the situational and transformational quality of being, in her case, mi’kmaq. i pay attention to mi’kmaq thinking and political struggles because my family immigrated to nova scotia when i was fourteen, with the sanction of the canadian government but without invitation from mi’kmaq people there. so my thinking about settler food practices is helped by thinking with people like robinson about what it would mean to be a settler in better relation with histories of mi’kma’ki and mi’kmaq peoples, even as i now live in unceded algonquin land. robinson writes: “traditional practices are often framed as being pre-contact, as if the absence of colonial forces and their influence denotes a cultural purity. however, the mi’kmaq culture is a living culture, shaped by interactions with other indigenous nations and non-indigenous visitors long before colonialism, and enduring despite ongoing colonial oppression” (robinson 2014, 673). within that context, robinson begins from the understanding that everything is alive, and can be understood to have personhood: “not only animals, but also plants, rocks, water, and geographic locations can have an identity, personality, and spirit” (673). she compellingly shows that relationships—to culture, oral history, land, animal relations, and more—are both situated in relation to their history and malleable, in process. thus, robinson roots her vegan practice in her own mi’kmaq traditions of respecting animal personhood, without denying that her ancestors ate a significantly animalbased diet. relationships are collective, and they change over time. crucially, relationships are only determinable to the people with standing to nourish them. i have seen settler vegans assert that because indigenous peoples harvest wild rice, we should harvest wild rice; i have seen settler meat-eaters assert that because indigenous people hunt game, we should eat meat; and so on. usually these assertions are broad strokes; they are not speaking about particular places or indigenous nations, and so they’re expressing a generality, not a relationship. conceptions of relational ontologies may help settlers understand both that it is possible to be in relations of consumption without purity and that no relation is transferable. instead, relationships are situated and personal, collectively shaped and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 intimate. taking a relational ontology approach changes the conversation we’re having about what we should eat; it invites us to clarify the stakes and the reasons we’re making one decision and not another. rice is not the same rice to different people with different histories. because our histories are different, the ontologies we engage are specific, and thus multiple. relational ontologies of food allow us one way “in” to understanding the politics that constitute our place in the world and that dictate difference forms of responsibility. at a stroke, white settler vegans can stop asking whether indigenous people should eat that seal meat and turn instead to asking what relations we are placed within when we make food choices. we can stop ascribing or assessing their eating practices at all, in fact, or trying to leverage philosophical theory out of settler readings of indigenous foodways. proponents and critics of ontological veganism alike who turn to indigenous thinkers to shore up their theories would do better to ask what forms of relational responsibility we can theorize without resorting to epistemic extractivism. for example, although i am very sympathetic to her account, plumwood’s move to carve out a conception of “sacred eating” as a model for hunting ethics itself replicates a tired theoretical trope of native people who are in good relation in a way that settlers could take up—even as it inscribes a sacred/profane dichotomy thoroughly imported from christian settler regimes (tallbear 2019, 67). at the same stroke, white settler omnivores can stop talking about indigenous people thanking the deer for offering his life to the hunter as they bite into a fish burger made from tilapia imported from china. understanding that the fish, rice, or deer are not the same thing to indigenous and settler eaters, because we are in different relations, is a good starting point for asking, what are the relations we are in? in the canadian context, starvation regimes were integral to the genocidal practices that established what is currently canada (daschuk 2013). the distribution of nourishing food and water continues to be a technology of canadian genocidal racism, in a state-sanctioned delineation of who lives well and who thirsts and starves. as i write, farm workers who have tested positive for covid-19 are being forced to continue working in food harvesting in ontario. how would we settlers change the relations we’re in? the contradictions and challenges of thinking relationally about food this turn from substance to relational ontologies intensifies rather than resolves the contradictions and imperfections associated with consumption. or perhaps it is better to say that it refuses the lie that there is any way to eat or drink that is free from suffering. in practice, i would say that few vegans actually believe that eating a vegan diet frees them completely from implication in relations of suffering. there are the self-righteous among us, such as a colleague who eats a vegan diet and believes that everyone should adopt it as a lifestyle, advocating, for example, shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 for a departmental policy that all food served at colloquia will be vegan and critiquing people who eat animal products or wear leather or wool. this colleague feeds her cats chicken, which is completely appropriate and necessary to being a good nurturer of obligate-carnivore animal companions. so in practice, although she is avowing a substance ontology, she is enacting a relational ontology, one in which she holds her own behaviour to one standard but respects the boundaries of her companion animals’ needs. i believe being honest about these kinds of relational decisions liberates us from hypocrisy and a particular form of purist self-deceit; it may also be a kinder way to get on together. a relational ontology of eating invites us to perceive the act of eating as only one nodal point in a distributed web of connection and co-constitution, of consumption and waste management. instead of taking the boundaries of our bodies or of the substances we take in as the source of the answer for how we should eat, we can turn outward to look at the conditions of the production of food—what relations are nourished in the soil when things are grown in one way or another? whose hands tend the plants, and what are the conditions of their lives? who processes the substances that become food? how is the waste generated by that processing handled? where does the water that nourishes the animals and plants in their growing process come from? where does it go? what microbes are encouraged to proliferate by which practices of using low-dose antibiotics in feed of various sorts? what are the practices of sewage management that handle the material afterlife of our eating—do we shit into drinking water that then needs to be treated? what are the carbon costs of consuming food that is shipped long distances versus eating foods grown in heated or cooled greenhouses nearby? frequently we won’t know the answers to these questions. indeed, answering them—in both the sense of “knowing the answer” and in the sense of “doing something to change the conditions of food production”—requires a scale of knowing and doing way beyond the neoliberal subject. framing eating as a private consumer act occludes the vast public and institutional policies that undergird food, from immigration law to the chemical classification of fertilizers and pesticides. if we learn a little about the conditions of food production at industrial scales, we might collectively make policies that look like substance decisions but which actually track our best approximation of holding relations in view. collectively holding a relational ontology of food could involve increased government regulation and inspection from the fields to the processing plants. as i’ll discuss below, determining what kind of public policies ought to govern food relations needs normative guidance, similarly to the way that making individual eating choices does. individually, we can do an analysis of the costs and effects of one eating decision or another, and use particular predetermined benchmarks as our guides. “eating local” might be a synonym for “i try not to eat food grown in drought-ridden feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 areas stealing water from diminishing aquifers and processed by people living in conditions of agricultural slavery.” but, of course, local food wherever we are is frequently tended by people who are precarious workers experiencing tremendous harm in their work. as with any ethical delineation, this will be a limited and impure decision. oddly, holding a relational ontology in view as one of our guidelines for asking how we should eat allows us to recognize that there is only, ever, unclean eating. we cannot get it right, we will always cause other beings to suffer and die in order for us to live, and we cannot individually solve the scale of problems given us simply by living on this earth, nourishing our bodies and excreting waste. in the context of constitutive and necessary impurity, recognizing the futility of thinking that any individual actions can address the vast problems of just existing, is there any point at all in eating one way rather than another? or should we all just throw in the towel and ally ourselves either with the voluntary human extinction movement or the neoliberal rulers of late capitalism? although it is impossible to be perfect, it is possible for things to be much better. 3. finding political guidance in mutual aid we can find useable normative guidance for eating together in a way that embraces the possibility for living as humans who could help rather than hurt the world. in this section, i aim to move from a concern with the problems of individualist ethics towards an understanding of the intertwined necessities of holding in view how our individual activities can contribute towards collective ethical contexts; simply rejecting individualism is inadequate to the ethical demands of food. as i have argued, our focus on individuals tends to elide collective responsibilities. this matters because directing our concern only towards individual behaviours predicts, in turn, continued assessments of ethical success at individual levels, along with a conceit that individual ethical success as regards food choices is ever possible. individualism paired with substance ontologies tends to coproduce ethical immobilization. however, since we only take action as individuals—even individuals holding in view collective contexts— it is useful for us to consider how we might bend our individual behaviours towards collective ends. mutual aid as normative guidepost put more strongly, simply orienting ourselves towards relational ontologies in practice does not give us normative guidance for making ethical decisions, especially in making politically salient ethical decisions. indeed, merely articulating entanglement can short-circuit action (giraud 2019). for this normative guidance, i turn to anarchist conceptions of mutual aid, putting them in conversation with queer and feminist practices of fermentation and composting. allegiance to a practice based on mutual aid may be one of the most direct ways to distinguish between right shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 libertarians and left libertarians; if we think that society could be based on free individuals in a free society, to reprise a common formulation of anarchist politics, there is a question about the place of solidarity and care for one another. only people who care about others will be compelled by a turn to relational ontologies as a part of collective care for ongoing shared worlds. understandings of mutual aid begin from the view that generosity is foundational to human and nonhuman worlds. mutual aid has come into broader conversation with the inspiring widespread community responses to covid-19, including substantial new theoretical attention (spade 2020). the foundational text in anarchist conceptions of mutual aid is petr kropotkin’s mutual aid: a factor in evolution, although kropotkin himself was part of a lively broader conversation about science, collectivity, and human nature. responding to simplistic understandings of darwin’s work on natural selection, especially as they manifested in troubling conclusions from social darwinism that naturalized racism and colonialism, kropotkin argued that sociability and cooperation were at least as important to species survival as competition. as he wrote: the first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying the struggle for existence under both its aspects— direct and metaphorical —is the abundance of facts of mutual aid, not only for rearing progeny, as recognized by most evolutionists, but also for the safety of the individual, and for providing it with the necessary food. within many large divisions of the animal kingdom mutual aid is the rule. mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms. (kropotkin 1955, 14) mutual aid, for kropotkin (1955, 6), is “a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.” for many anarchists today, mutual aid signals a way of being together as humans far more than it calls up the evolutionary narrative, centrally including animals, bees, and microorganisms. however, i return to the more expansive sense kropotkin evoked because i think that mutual aid in this broader conception offers us traction for a practical ethics grounded in relational ontologies. orienting ourselves toward mutual aid makes the difference between being an anarchist who acts out of care for the collectivity and being a neoliberal lifestylist committed to healthism. we make food choices in the settled and historical context of an unjust distribution of living and dying and in the context of maldistributed feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 planetary abundance. so in our lives, deciding how we ought to eat means moving away from personal decisions. we take responsibility for choices in the settled and historical context of an unjust distribution of living and dying. orienting through mutual aid means, as well, a shift from practices of self-care, exemplified in the injunction to put your own oxygen mask on before aiding others. i mean, in literal airplane crashes this is important advice. but in this world, we do better to ask how we can make public drinking water safe for everyone to drink than we do getting really good filters for our personal water bottle. mutual aid can be in this sense a more thorough way to care for our selves; when we aim for everyone to have good air to breathe, food to eat, and water to drink, we are part of that everyone. when we work to make sure that no one experiences the harms of living downstream from industries or feedlots, we too don’t experience those harms. mutual aid can be understood as an ongoing, situated practice of political caring. asking how we should eat is a good way to approach the question of how we might respond to the extinction crisis we call the anthropocene, particularly if we tune the question towards a thick practice of material, relational ontologies informed by an ethical and political orientation towards mutual aid. mutual aid as a heuristic offers a way to refuse the idea that eating decisions can happen on the level of individual lifestyle choices, a way of asking what else is involved in eating. my favorite result of this refusal is an orientation towards the constitutive complexity and coproduction of ourselves with the world, particularly, to return to kropotkin’s throwaway comment about microbes, to the unseen beings and relations that allow us to live and that we need to be in better relation with if we’re planning keep living, and eating. potawatomi ecologist and scholar robin wall kimmerer’s important book braiding sweetgrass offers, with incredible generosity, an approach to being coconstituted with the world and responsive to it that shares some practices with anarchist understandings of mutual aid. she returns again and again to the formulation that “all flourishing is mutual” (kimmerer 2013). all flourishing is mutual means that when we consider the web of life, or the node of that web we can discern from where we sit, we are called to think about the vastness and the variety and the complexity of the world we simultaneously call home and make strange to ourselves in the very act of considering it; without understanding mutuality we cannot really grapple ethically with complexity and complicity, nor can we really consider what it means to understand ourselves in context, ourselves in history, ourselves as seeds for new histories that we create as we act, even as we feel ourselves flung forward into the future by the past and by the context that we do not control and cannot fully understand. mutuality offers a normative space for flinging ourselves on although we do not understand, and maybe even because we do not understand. all flourishing is mutual reconfigures our orientation toward the world such that our individual shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 placement as eaters can be understood as also always collective. we can, as kimmerer suggests, think of the earth as offering abundant gifts and ask how we humans might in turn become a gift for this world. however, right alongside taking up kimmerer’s formulation, and because of my commitment to practices of mutual aid toward collective flourishing, let me raise a concern. how might white settlers build nonappropriative relations of care? like many white settler readers, i am immensely moved by kimmerer’s work. i think of her reflection on teaching students in a general ecology class. in a survey response, the students were asked to “rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. the median response was ‘none.’” kimmerer (2013, 6) says, “i was stunned. how is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and environment?” she goes on to tell the creation story of skywoman, a story that i have heard a number of times because it offers a guiding narrative to many of the anishnawbek peoples in whose places i am an uninvited guest and with whom i try to act in solidarity. skywoman is an important figure in understanding particular indigenous practices of reciprocity and care for the world—she is able to make a home on earth, thanks to being in necessary relation with the people already living here, with whom she makes relationships.6 kimmerer says, it was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. for all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. (2013, 9) kimmerer continues, reflecting back on her students in the ecology class: most of my students have never heard the origin story of this land where they were born, but when i tell them, something begins to kindle behind their eyes. can they, can we, understand the skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future? 6 for the most part i capitalize “indigenous,” except when i am directly referencing kimmerer’s noncapitalization, since it may be that she is making a subtle distinction between becoming indigenous in the sense of being a collective political formation and becoming indigenous in a more rhetorical sense. my argument applies to both potential uses. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 can a nation of immigrants once again follow her example to become native, to make a home? (9) i love the generosity of these questions, and i believe in living as though the future matters, and yet i think the answer to it is “probably not.” i do not think that white settler colonists can practice ethical and political action through trying to “become native.” this is an invitation we should not accept.7 or rather, white settlers cannot accept this invitation without substantially transforming the material conditions in which it is offered. we cannot become indigenous to place while at the same time continuing the work of genocidal colonization, or while continuing to defend private and state land ownership. kimmerer suggests the model of “becoming naturalized” in the way that plantain, a low-growing, broad-leafed plant also called white man’s footsteps, has become a useful part of ecosystems rather than a harmful introduced species. she writes, “being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. to become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities” (kimmerer 2013, 214–15). asa migrant who has formally naturalized under the canadian state—a naturalized citizen of what is temporarily canada—i do not believe it is possible for me to personally practice the different kind of naturalization kimmerer envisages in the context of the canadian state’s ongoing land politics. these politics are intimately related to food and water, as many reserves continue to have no clean drinking water, as indigenous subsistence hunting and fishing ecosystems are poisoned, as food in the north is impossibly expensive, and as the canadian state actively practices petroleum politics that advance global warming. i’m particularly interested in rejecting the spiritual extractivism of people thinking that we settlers ought to approach resisting global warming, or creating food justice, and so on though taking up practices of responsibility grounded in various creation stories (the skywoman story being only one) that situate humans as the youngest members of creation, or the newest arrivals to turtle island. we settlers should not approach relations of responsibility for the land on which we currently live 7 here i am for the most part talking about white settler responsibilities to transform genocidal relations. racialized settlers have different relational ontologies in light of the unjust histories of chattel slavery, forced migration, indenture, and contemporary globalized racial capitalism. i attempt to be precise here about when settlers generally might have political responsibilities and when white settlers in particular are called to particular responsibility. shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 as guests,8 let alone take down the social relations that shape us as beneficiaries of colonialism, as though we were indigenous. the creation stories that in many cases place people in relations of responsibility for their places are not, i believe, available to settlers. following my colleague sonya gray’s analysis, i hasten to add that creation stories and historical relations of responsibility do not limit the forms of care that indigenous people practice now. gray examines tlingit practices of care for land and place that are new, not limited to territories they held in relation at past moment(s) of contact and colonization. and this form of care is foundationally based on seeing places, or things like glaciers, as also having their own say in those relationships. gray argues compellingly that settlers are part of the history and context of these relationships such that we can and should take responsibility for taking action in them (gray, personal communication, 2020). so, while settlers concerned for food justice can and should ask what follows from starting with relational ontologies, in pursuing ethical and political practices of promulgating mutual flourishing we cannot simply do that as though we were indigenous. formulations of mutual aid arising from the anarchist tradition may be a less-appropriative site from which settlers can begin to respect other peoples’ lifeworlds while also building solidarity approaches to the relations manifest in food. as many racialized people’s collective projects show, mutual aid is not the property of white people. it is, however, part of an intellectual and collective tradition more critical of epistemic extractivism, and this is one reason i think it gives white settlers traction for collective action and solidarity. mutual aid currently manifests as a practical, collective approach to keeping people alive in moments of emergency and crisis. dean spade writes, the contemporary political moment is defined by emergency. acute crises, like the covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms, as well as the ongoing crises of racist criminalization, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality, threaten the survival of people around the globe. . . . in the face of this, more and more ordinary people are feeling called to respond in their communities, creating bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable neighbors. this survival work, when done in conjunction with social 8 i have benefitted from thinking with jinny yu’s installation, perpetual guest (http://jinnyyu.com/projects/perpetual-guest.html), which asks what it might mean to think of ourselves as guests, wherever we are, and deepens the question of whether practices of responsibility require a deeper sense of rootedness and grounding than is afforded by guestdom. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 movements demanding transformative change, is called mutual aid. (spade 2020, 1) as spade elaborates, all large, effective social movements have included mutual aid as part of their daily culture—from the black panther party’s survival programs to aids activists providing food and care for sick comrades. as applied to the question of how we should eat, it is instructive that overwhelmingly collective movements for justice and dignity start from the position that all people deserve sustenance—and, frequently, that position manifests in feeding people. this happens in church basements and activist potlucks and food not bombs’s street food service and home kitchens. activists and ordinary people alike practice the general principle kimmerer lays out, that all flourishing is mutual, in food practices that respect eaters, what we eat, the ecosystems that grow food, the humans and nonhumans who help it grow, and the systems that process waste. as a normative principle, mutual aid also plays well with feminist approaches to ethical complexity. we might follow myra hird in thinking at scales down to the microbial; she urges us “to consider the vast majority of relations within the biosphere as independent of, and largely indifferent to, human input.” further, we can “observe that our symbiotic relationship with bacteria is obligate for humans (that is, essential to our survival) but not for bacteria” (hird 2012, 69). here i note also that mutual aid as a political response to relational ontologies does not imply exchange relations based on fungible equivalents; we can be in relation with others in ways that reveal our fundamental vulnerability and dependence. bacteria, fungi, and other small beings in the world definitely offer us more than we offer them. building an ethical response to being in relation with countless unseen others who keep us alive asks how we can offer back to them what we have, even if our abilities are far outstripped by our needs. we know that often when we eat, we’re not actually feeding our bodies but rather feeding our microbiome, parts of which then convert various substances into either things for other microbes to eat or for our bodies to take up (yong 2018). and we know that this is very situated work—the e. coli that does us no harm inside our gut can be tremendously difficult for us on our lettuce. microbes on our skin, in very particular formations, help shield us from viruses. playing in the dirt may help us nourish a more complex and robust gut ecosystem, as might eating fermented foods of various sorts. and plants, animals, algae, and fungi flourish or die in part because of our waste practices. ladelle mcwhorter’s reflections on compost and becoming dirt helps me think about a reorientation towards feeding the soil as an ethical orientation toward the proliferation of, as she puts it, the good of the world remaining “ever open to deviation” (mcwhorter 1999, 164). since plants eat dirt, “what you do is feed the dirt” (165). in this moment of major world cities coming to the end of their shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 water supply while we use drinking water to carry away excrement, when china has stopped accepting recycling from other continents, when tailings reservoirs threaten major water systems, it might help us to turn towards practices that support the microbiota that make soil something plants can eat. ethical eating decisions are actually choices about relationships, not food. this matters because substance ontologies betray exactly the world-making activity they are ostensibly aiming to protect—substance ontologies seem to get us off the hook of taking responsibility for the impossible ethical task of taking in nourishment and processing our excreted waste. substance ontologies are gentle lies, but they are lies. thus, we could consider what relational ontologies give us for an ethics that is more adequate to the entangled world we care for. holding a relational ontology of consumption with mutual aid in mind might invite practices best exemplified by composting and fermenting—what world might we cocreate in eating towards a world in which many worlds can flourish? donna haraway called the communities in her speculative fabulation about transformed reproductive relationships “communities of compost,” imagining that in that future, “living-with was the only possible way to live-well” (haraway 2016, 162). we are already living-with, but for the most part in ways that disavow the relations that we in fact rely on for every breath and heartbeat. my favorite outcome of holding relational ontologies as a ground and mutual aid as a lodestar is that all of us—individually, collectively, and socially—will have different practices of pursuing living well. our ontologies differ. but we can be sure that no one who takes invitations to mutual flourishing seriously will legislate enslaving others, poisoning the soil or water, or proliferating suffering because it makes more money. with a shift from asking how i should eat to asking how we should eat, we group with that “we” ourselves, alongside other humans including undocumented farm workers, grocery store shelf stockers, people in prison, indigenous people practicing sovereignty through responsible relations with their land, soil microbes, gut bacteria, fungi, viruses, the clouds and their rain, rivers, lakes, city-run compost facilities, worms, mushrooms, and all the other seen and unseen beings who support and sustain us. thinking about how we ought to eat as a form of mutual aid might help us practice our relational ontologies with more hope for continuing to live, to deviate, to flourish. walking alongside kimmerer and many others, settlers in particular can begin to build politics based on the understanding that, for real, all flourishing is mutual.9 9 thanks to interlocutors on earlier versions of this paper at the aka autonomous social centre’s discussion series, savvy contemporary’s “the long term you cannot afford. on the distribution of the toxic” project, the university of alaska southeast’s evening at egan lecture series, philopolis (montreal), and in the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 references boisvert, raymond. 2010. “convivialism: a philosophical manifesto.” pluralist 5 (2): 57–68. https://doi.org/10.5406/pluralist.5.2.0057. brecht, bertolt. 2008. “‘to those who follow in our wake.’” translated by scott horton. harper’s magazine, january 15, 2008. 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weighing in: obesity, food justice, and the limits of capitalism. berkeley: university of california press. haraway, donna j. 2016. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham nc: duke university press. heldke, lisa. 2012. “an alternative ontology of food: beyond metaphysics.” radical philosophy review 15 (1): 67–88. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev2012 1518. heldke, lisa. 2018. “it’s chomping all the way down: toward an ontology of the human individual.” monist 101 (3): 247–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist /ony004. hird, myra j. 2012. “volatile bodies, volatile earth: towards an ethic of vulnerability.” rcc perspectives, no. 9, 67–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26240457. hunt, sarah. 2014. “ontologies of indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept.” cultural geographies 21 (1): 27–32. “how should we eat? mellon sawyer symposium” at georgetown university. thanks to chris dixon, dan sawyer, amanda wilson, zoe todd, scout calvert, david kahane, jessica cadwallader, lindsay kelley, ajay parasram, alana lajoie-o'malley, and laura hall for help thinking about these issues. shotwell – flourishing is mutual: relational ontologies, mutual aid, and eating published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 kimmerer, robin wall. 2013. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions. kropotkin, petr. 1955. mutual aid: a factor of evolution. boston: extending horizons books, porter sargent publishing. lappé, frances moore. 1971. diet for a small planet. new york: ballantine books. mcwhorter, ladelle. 1999. bodies and pleasures: foucault and the politics of sexual normalization. bloomington: indiana university press. mol, annemarie. 2002. the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. durham, nc: duke university press. mother jones. 2018. “the bizarre fad diet taking the far right by storm.” september 7, 2018. https://www.motherjones.com/food/2018/09/carnivorism-zero-carbjordan-peterson-mikhaila-shawn-baker-andrew-torba-alt-right/. plumwood, val. 2000. “integrating ethical frameworks for animals, humans, and nature: a critical feminist eco-socialist analysis.” ethics and the environment 5 (2): 285–322. rhyno, darcy. 2020. “the cross-border indigenous battle for wild rice.” atlas obscura, february 12, 2020. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-iswild-rice. robinson, margaret. 2014. “animal personhood in mi’kmaq perspective.” societies 4 (4): 672–88. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc4040672. spade, dean. 2020. mutual aid: building solidarity during this crisis (and the next). london: verso. springmann, marco, michael clark, daniel mason-d’croz, keith wiebe, benjamin leon bodirsky, luis lassaletta, wim de vries, et al. 2018. “options for keeping the food system within environmental limits.” nature 562 (7728): 519–25. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0594-0. stanescu, james. 2017. “alien ecology, or, how to make ontological pluralism.” in the ethics and rhetoric of invasion ecology, edited by james stanescu and kevin cummings, 17–30. lanham, md: lexington books. tallbear, kim. 2019. “being in relation.” in messy eating: conversations on animals as food, edited by samantha king, r. scott carey, isabel macquarrie, victoria niva millious, and elaine m. power, 54–67. new york: fordham university press. http://muse.jhu.edu/book/65084/. taylor, drew hayden. 2020. “‘cottagers & indians’: the battle over water rights near my reserve.” cbc docs pov. june 24, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/documenta ries/cbc-docs-pov/cottagers-indians-the-battle-over-water-rights-near-myreserve-1.5618999. todd, zoe. 2016. “an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism.” journal of historical sociology 29 (1): 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 3, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 watts, vanessa. 2013. “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans (first woman and sky woman go on a european world tour!).” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 2 (1): 20–34. https://jps .library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/19145. wynes, seth, and kimberly a nicholas. 2017. “the climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions.” environmental research letters 12 (7): 074024. https://doi.org/10 .1088/1748-9326/aa7541. yong, ed. 2018. i contain multitudes: the microbes within us and a grander view of life. new york: ecco. alexis shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. professor of sociology and anthropology at carleton university, on unceded algonquin land, she is the coinvestigator for the aids activist history project (aidsactivisthistory.ca) and the author of knowing otherwise: race, gender, and implicit understanding and against purity: living ethically in compromised times. 10850 shotwell title page 10850 shotwell final format the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation joseph, felicity. 2024. “the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (3). article 1. 2024 the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality felicity joseph university of new england, australia fjoseph@une.edu.au joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality felicity joseph abstract feminist philosophers mary wollstonecraft and simone de beauvoir, although separated by centuries and their respective approaches of political liberalism and existentialism, converge to a remarkable degree in their descriptions of women’s situation under oppression and, in particular, in their analysis of the role gendered virtue plays in that oppression. in this paper i identify their common project of “degendering” the virtues as a crucial part of the broader project of theorizing women’s equal humanity. i extrapolate from wollstonecraft and beauvoir’s critique to clarify the ways patriarchy sets up gendered virtue as a moral trap for women, one in which “feminine” virtues are virtues for which women are both praised and condemned, affirming their feminine value while denying them the value of a full and equal humanity. i argue that a program of “degendering” the virtues, as embarked upon by wollstonecraft and beauvoir, is necessary to the feminist program of gender justice, both to the negative program of rejecting an inherently unfair patriarchal morality and to the positive program of envisioning what women could be once freed from patriarchal influence. keywords: gender, virtue, equality, existentialism, liberalism, feminism the figures of mary wollstonecraft and simone de beauvoir loom large in the history of feminist philosophy, albeit while occupying very different standpoints, as prototypical “liberal” feminist and existentialist respectively. despite the different approaches of their respective key feminist works, a vindication of the rights of woman and the second sex, wollstonecraft and beauvoir describe the situation of women in extraordinarily similar ways, and at the heart of this similarity is their analysis of gendered virtue. in particular, both adopt a critical focus on woman’s personality and what are considered to be her “feminine” virtues, arguing that there is a truth about women that underlies and resists these formations. in part, this is due to their shared commitment to an envisaged future equality of women and men that rests upon a rejection of women’s supposed inferior otherness, a belief that women feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 have exactly same ontology or potential as men.1 in this paper i wish to draw out from the work of wollstonecraft and beauvoir a shared critique they offer of the ideal and practice of gendered virtue and to extrapolate from their critique an explicit account of how such ideals are put into practice to dehumanize women, both at the level of social practice and at the level of the language of virtue. in order to do this, i identify wollstonecraft’s and beauvoir’s respective accounts of “the human,” and i will argue that what makes us human according to these thinkers is exactly what is denied through the discourse of “feminine” virtue. i wish to reflect upon their respective accounts of the gendering of virtues in patriarchal society and of the relationship between those virtues and the formation of women’s personalities and behaviors in that society. i want to emphasize the insight their analysis of virtue offers into the illogic of misogyny, effectively uncovering the strategies men use to construct women as both ontologically and morally inferior. i want to place their respective projects in the broader and ongoing feminist project of the degendering of virtue and to argue that even if one takes the position that some virtues, on a feminist analysis, turn out be gendered after all, this initial degendering of the virtues is a necessary prior condition to such regendering. the importance of the concept of “virtue” following the context of wollstonecraft’s and beauvoir’s discussions, i use “virtue” to refer to positive qualities of human beings that form a basis upon which they may be rightly morally praised and are considered relatively stable, due to habituation over time.2 this is a more specific usage than the broader meaning of “any kind of good personal quality.” for example, in popular usage we might say “she has the virtues of athleticism and intelligence,” but we would not normally consider these to be the basis for moral praise—these are goods, but not obviously moral goods. my usage may include but not be limited to aristotelian or christian conceptions of virtue. certainly, wollstonecraft’s conceptual framework for virtue in her early work is that of christian theology (botting 2016), upon which, of course, she puts her own feminist gloss,3 while sandrine bergès (2013) identifies in wollstonecraft’s conception of virtue key aspects of aristotle’s virtue theory—namely, the idea of the perfectibility of 1 such shared ontology is usually called “humanity” or “humanness,” and indeed, as we shall see, both philosophers present a distinct account of what it is to be human. 2 habituation, or the forming of habits over time, is a key part of traditional accounts of virtue, such as aristotle’s. 3 specifically, botting (2016) identifies particular “dissenting protestant” theological influences on wollstonecraft’s early political thought. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 human nature and the role of “habituation.”4 most importantly for wollstonecraft, virtue is founded in reason and requires it to make sound moral judgments. underpinning this focus on reason is her explicitly egalitarian reading of the bible, summarized in the vindication as follows: “the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the creator” (wollstonecraft 1994, 122). in other words, since human beings are all (equally) made in the image of god (imago dei), and reason being the divine element that constitutes such an image, then it follows that reason must not admit of degree: one either has it or one does not; one is either human or one is not—and women are definitely human! this is an essentially ungendered notion of reason: by starting with this, wollstonecraft need not commit herself to any other preexisting account of virtue in order to defend the rights of women as human. what is it about the concept of virtue that has so much significance for a feminist analysis of life? one important reason for its importance is that the so-called feminine virtues form the basis on which patriarchal society judges women, as both morally and ontologically inferior. for example, as both wollstonecraft and beauvoir point out, it encourages (or even requires) women to concern themselves with trivial matters and then judges them for being so concerned. in their respective feminist works, wollstonecraft and beauvoir also make moral judgments aimed at women, but they consider the judgments to be of the behavior and not of the women concerned. this is a crucial difference between a patriarchal critique of women’s behavior and a sincere feminist one: the patriarchal will always involve a concomitant critique and negative judgment of the women themselves—both as individual women (who are each personally blamed for these failings) and “woman” as a kind. these failings are then used by the patriarchy to “prove” that woman as a kind is an inferior sort of being. clearly, the concept of “women themselves” is an important one here: it names some element of women’s identity that precedes and is not identical with the sum of their behavior, and it is pertinent to whether a charge of misogyny can be upheld or not.5 what beauvoir and wollstonecraft believe to be a woman’s “true” self, qua human, is different, as we shall see, but they are united in their identification of how deep the effects of patriarchy on a subject go. accordingly, both beauvoir and wollstonecraft describe oppression as something that is internalized by women. beauvoir, however, has the advantage of a systematic and explicit philosophical 4 bergès makes clear, however, she is not attributing to wollstonecraft any commitment to aristotelian virtue theory, and certainly there seems to be no evidence to that effect. 5 both wollstonecraft and beauvoir have—particularly during the rise of third wave feminism—been accused of misogyny (for example, lloyd 1993; gubar 1994; taylor 1999). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 vocabulary of concepts (those of existentialism in the european philosophy tradition) to assist her in delivering her description. although beauvoir and wollstonecraft have different beliefs about what women are, these beliefs, i will argue, play the same role in their respective analyses—namely, to point beyond the contingencies of women’s behavior under patriarchy to a potential for freedom that is almost unimaginable from within the patriarchy. there are echoes of wollstonecraft’s feminist claims in beauvoir’s work, and it is worth emphasizing that beauvoir, unlike wollstonecraft, has the benefit of writing into an established (although insufficiently recognized) tradition of women’s philosophical and political writing, in which wollstonecraft’s vindication plays no small part.6 indeed, beauvoir acknowledges wollstonecraft in two places in the second sex, firstly as one of two co-initiators of the “feminist movement” (2011, 139);7 and secondly as one of a “few isolated women” who “protested against their harsh destiny” (148). since beauvoir includes in this group of “isolated women” such greats as sappho, de pizan, and de gouges, it is clear the esteem in which she holds wollstonecraft and her work. as i discuss below in the section “virtue and human nature,” wollstonecraft carefully sets out a description of how women are constructed rather than merely influenced to play a restrictive gender role. does beauvoir’s famous opening line to book 2 of the second sex, “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (2011, 283), rest upon wollstonecraft’s previously articulated gender constructivism? whatever the truth of the genealogy, it is fair to consider beauvoir as building upon, albeit with different tools (those of phenomenology and existentialism), an extension of the powerful life-changing ideas not only that patriarchal notions of women are constructed but also that what can be constructed can be deconstructed and then reconstructed, replaced with a broad vision of women as human, rational, and free, whose choices can fill out the details of their lives on their own terms. as shall be seen, both beauvoir and wollstonecraft paint a picture in which under patriarchy women are ascribed “virtues,” but these are gendered, limited, and often of ambiguous value, revealing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of 6 marso (2019, 283) identifies as common to the two philosophers a “monstrous” approach to writing: “wollstonecraft and beauvoir speak to each other across time as they embrace queer identities, monstrous ways of writing, and unnatural forms of mothering and reproducing.” certainly, as will be discussed, the two share an antinaturalist account of mothering, which squarely opposes the prevailing views of their respective times. 7 “the feminist movement begun in france by condorcet and in england by mary wollstonecraft in a vindication of the rights of women . . . never succeeded for lack of a concrete base” (2011, 139). joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 patriarchy—those qualities it deems positive, moral, and attractive in women are precisely the qualities for which it condemns women to an inferior position in the sexual hierarchy. a program of “degendering” the virtues is thus necessary to the feminist program of restorative justice: both to the negative program of rejecting an inherently unfair patriarchal morality and to the positive program of envisioning what women could be once freed from patriarchal influence. at the time of writing, we are still waiting to see what this could look like. beauvoir’s analysis of feminine virtue beauvoir’s existentialist commitments are such that she cannot subscribe to any traditional virtue theory, particularly one grounded in a notion of natural law. however, while there can be no natural law for existentialists, with their commitment to a deep ontological freedom (as a “whole consciousness, an irreducible freedom” [beauvoir 2011, 657]), there can be a natural freedom, and such naturally occurring freedom is the ontological basis from which both a critique of virtue is executed and any potential reconstruction of virtue mounted. beauvoir’s most extended treatment of the “feminine” virtues is found in the chapter “women’s situation and character” in the second sex, in which she analyzes woman’s character and behavior in existentialist terms: it is clear that woman’s whole “character”—her convictions, values, wisdom, morality, tastes and behavior—is explained by her situation. the fact that she is denied transcendence usually prohibits her from having access to the loftiest human attitudes—heroism, revolt, detachment, invention, and creation—but they are not so common even in men. (beauvoir 2011, 661) note the nuanced relationship to the gendered virtues here—the “faults” of her character are due to an (unchosen) situation; the male-gendered virtues are denied her, but beauvoir is careful to point out that men may also fail to achieve these. the nature of the critique is not that of a comparison to men as holding superior virtue; it is a critique of the man-made situation women find themselves in and of the fiction that the male-gendered virtues actually naturally predominate in males. in these existentialist terms, the freedom that is consciousness in humans may be degraded by circumstances, beauvoir argues. transcendence—the capacity to exercise such freedom—can be both denied with regard to oneself (in bad faith, as jean-paul sartre originally notes) or denied on behalf of others (beauvoir 2011, 661). specifically, it may be denied to women by men; for example, in men accusing women of being obsessed with trivialities—being unable to transcend their own material worlds—and in reducing women to their bodies. transcendence is a capacity not able feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 to be fully exercised by women under patriarchy: in an important sense, they have freedom, but it is an unexercised capacity—it has yet to be realized. as beauvoir (2011, 664) puts it, “in woman this freedom remains abstract and empty, it cannot authentically assume itself except in revolt: this is the only way open to those who have no chance to build anything.” what beauvoir describes here is slave morality in the nietzschean sense (nietzsche 1996, 22)—that is, a morality developed in response to enslavement, as a matter of survival: woman’s freedom, denied a broad “horizon,” must exercise itself in tortuous, insidious ways. although it is a kind of “revolt,” in beauvoir’s view it is ultimately an ineffective one. the concept of slave morality becomes more apparent in the following passage, which describes vices that clearly display the quality of being “ignoble”—the opposite of the values of a free and selfdefining master: “many of the faults for which they [women] are reproached— mediocrity, meanness, shyness, pettiness, laziness, frivolity, and servility—simply express the fact that the horizon is blocked for them” (beauvoir 2011, 643). interestingly, wollstonecraft names a similar pattern of behavior in the following passage: “whilst [women] are absolutely dependent on their husbands[,] they will be cunning, mean, and selfish” (wollstonecraft 1994, 222). such behavior is both expressive of an oppressive situation and an (indirect) response to it. as beauvoir (2011, 649) describes: “there is much feminine behavior that has to be interpreted as protest.” for instance, frivolity in woman—an obsession with trivial things—is, explains beauvoir (2011, 644), due to the fact that “she lacks access to big ones.” servility is the natural consequence of being treated as a slave; that is, as someone whose freedom to self-determine is denied: “she has no choice but to endure all humiliations; a slave cannot understand the meaning of ‘human dignity’” (beauvoir 2011, 644). other vices mentioned in this connection are “foolishness,” “narcissism,” and “egotism” (beauvoir 2011, 645). beauvoir’s treatment of virtue is enlightening in that it helps us understand that the set of “virtues” is gendered in ways that may not be apparent at first. by pointing out the social overlay of the “feminine” gender upon an originally ontologically free human, beauvoir gives women the ability to distinguish between what “belongs” to them and what has been “thrust upon them,” so to speak. this distinction then enables women to critique and possibly subsequently reject aspects of “the feminine” without at the same time critiquing and rejecting women themselves. and to critique the “feminine” is to critique a scheme of gendered virtues in which behaving “like a woman” means exhibiting a particular set of supposedly good qualities coded by men as feminine. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 wollstonecraft on virtue: a “virtuous equality” wollstonecraft, too, finds herself concerned with virtue; however, unlike beauvoir, she does not develop a systematic language to articulate precisely what concerns her about the moral “character” of women and how it is talked about in her time and place (eighteenth-century england). nevertheless, she finds aspects of what women do abhorrent, and she names those aspects clearly while refraining from casting blame upon women as a group—that is, women qua women—for these failings. the failings identified do not, contra the patriarchal view, belong to the being of women as some kind of inherent ontological inferiority but rather are socially constructed by the patriarchy itself. this is not to say that women do not have some freedom and responsibility to resist such construction—both wollstonecraft and beauvoir argue precisely this, that women have the capacity to resist such societal pressures. if there is “blame” to be assigned here (and perhaps “responsibility” is a better word), it is at least not wholly or even chiefly assigned to women but also to the patriarchal society to which they belong. for wollstonecraft (1994, 221), virtue is critical to her argument for women’s equality: “there must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest firmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind are chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride.” in calling for a “virtuous equality,” wollstonecraft references the idea that women so far have not exhibited the virtues or excellence that they are capable of. she thus calls for a nongendered set of virtues—virtues that would be the consequence of sexual equality once women become “unchained.” grounding this call, in the second vindication she delivers two kinds of argument for equality. one proceeds from the basic nature of women qua human beings—that is, that women have inherent properties of (equal) humanness, couched in terms of rationality, that entail they should be treated equally.8 another is a consequentialist argument, to the effect that an equal society would be a more virtuous one, in which women generally would exhibit the same range and degree of virtues as men: “let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man” (wollstonecraft 1994, 283). the second kind of argument is, i believe, a strategic one: wollstonecraft is operating from the viewpoint that men who may not be open to the premise that women are equal human beings may be more likely to be open to the premise that virtue in society is valuable. if men value virtue, wollstonecraft argues, they should value equality too. 8 recalling this passage: “the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the creator” (wollstonecraft 1994, 122). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 what wollstonecraft and beauvoir observe and describe in giving accounts of women’s “character” is a general state of affairs, an aggregate of women’s behavior across the population of women in their respective places and times. arguably, these philosophers themselves represent exceptions to the general observations and constitute a proof of the ability of women to at least partially overcome the effects of patriarchy even while continuing to live within it. both philosophers accept that women in patriarchal society generally (1) lack the masculine-gendered virtues and (2) possess the feminine-gendered virtues; but the latter are understood as not truly “owned” by women themselves—they are imposed from above by such society. some of these virtues are also of ambiguous value in a patriarchal society because, as mentioned above, the patriarchy encourages women to embody these qualities yet simultaneously judges them negatively for doing so. (the mechanism by which the patriarchy does this will be discussed in the section “‘feminine’ virtues as animal virtues and slave virtues” below.) there can be, of course, exceptions to gendered construction of character, because patriarchy is not all powerful—there remains, even after the social construction of and imposition of femininity upon women, a core of human being (understood by existentialists as free consciousness) that retains the ability to create and assert itself. despite the encouragements and impositions of patriarchy, individual women may still on occasion exhibit the masculine-gendered virtues (for example, bravery) or fail to exhibit the feminine-gendered virtues (for example, humility). indeed, under patriarchy there has been a “vice” variously named as “being unfeminine” or “unsexed” or “aping men,” wherein if women exhibit “masculine” virtues, against the odds, these virtues magically turn into vices! women’s lack of the virtues gendered as male is identified by wollstonecraft as a consequence of inequality. regarding the so-called feminine virtues, she refuses to accept that the qualities preferred or endorsed by men in women as goods are actual goods—in fact, she names them as “vicious” (wollstonecraft 1994, 223); that is, as the very opposite of virtue: “men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing” (wollstonecraft 1994, 13). having rejected such faux virtues, wollstonecraft then exhorts women to take up what she considers actual virtues instead, such as “exertion and self-denial” (wollstonecraft 1994, 222)—the first, at least, being an example of a virtue that is clearly gendered as masculine. that the vices that wollstonecraft names as such are, sometimes at least, construed as virtues by the patriarchy she lives in is a fact that she stops just short of making explicit. she does identify that men encourage behavior that is nonvirtuous, but she fails to make the claim that men also name such behavior as, literally, “virtuous.” if she had taken this next step of the analysis, the illogic of patriarchal values would have become more apparent: namely, that it construes as virtuous the joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 behavior that it also considers vicious. it encourages the behavior that it deplores, thereby creating a no-win situation for women—the very epitome of “setting up people to fail.” as beauvoir (2011, 645) says succinctly of woman: “her wings are cut, and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.” if we further analyze this, what we have is a hierarchy of virtues, wherein men embody clear, unambiguous virtues, while women embody shifting, ambiguous virtues (virtues that turn into vices). the logical consequence of this hierarchy is that virtuous men are more virtuous than virtuous women. “feminine” virtues as animal virtues and slave virtues in what way are the feminine-gendered virtues set up as inferior to the malegendered virtues? both wollstonecraft and beauvoir identify the mode of inferiority in their references to the “animality” of the virtues ascribed to women. for instance, wollstonecraft draws on analogies with animal behavior to identify the behavior she disapproves of—for example, “spaniel-like affection” (wollstonecraft 1994, 222) and “slavish obedience” (231). and beauvoir makes reference to the supposed animality of women in this passage from the second sex: “what man thus cherishes and detests first in woman, lover as well as mother, is the fixed image of her animal destiny, the life essential to her existence, but that condemns her to finitude and death” (beauvoir 2011, 183). “animal destiny” is a reference to the idea that woman qua animal is simply doomed to carry out the activities appropriate to an animal; virtue then is no more than following an instinct. given that it is commonly held nonhuman animals do not have a choice other than to follow their instincts for survival and reproduction, in linking woman with “animal destiny” there is a corresponding denial of her free will and a denial of the possibility of attributing to her moral praise.9 the animality of the virtues assigned to women allows the conceptual move of reinterpreting such virtues as vices for which women should be blamed or judged as inferior in some respect—the “cherishing and detesting” referenced by beauvoir 9 men may also be ascribed animal virtues, but they are “allowed” to have both kinds of virtue, whereas women are only allowed the animal ones. for example, to ascribe to a man the nonmoral good of (physical) “strength” does not rule out also ascribing to him the moral good of “bravery”—in fact, empirically, these two often occur together. by contrast, to ascribe to a woman the nonmoral good of “gentleness,” under patriarchy, is to preclude her from ascriptions of bravery. more explicitly, men may point to a woman’s gentleness as evidence of her inability to be brave. thus the gendered clusterings of purported virtues under an overarching patriarchal taxonomy of virtue function to limit woman’s potential and deny her full humanity, by denying her the full range of human virtues. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 above. what is important here is that what is a virtue in nonhuman animals is at the same time a vice in humans: for example, women are praised for being submissive but denigrated for being incapable of true leadership. women are not so much praised for being obedient humans as for being obedient subhumans—in their obedience they prove their subhumanity. to make clear the analogy with nonhuman animals, we do not expect our pet dogs to lead, so we praise them for being submissive to our authority: a good dog is an obedient dog. a woman who is praised for being obedient is at the same time damned as being subhuman. the ambiguity of the virtues set up as feminine trades upon a conceptual slippage between human and animal virtues—that is, between two different senses of “virtue.” this slippage between the two different senses of “virtue” is exploited by the patriarchy to great effect. that is, under patriarchy women have to deal with not just an unfair system of gendered morals but also an obfuscatory moral language that conceals the contradiction and double standard therein. part of the project of degendering the virtues is to draw attention to the import of this language and thus disable its power. wollstonecraft is also concerned to alert women to this double standard, and she implores them to reject the (male-authored) feminine-gendered virtues in order to make space for the assertion of women’s full humanity. there is surely here a concern to disprove the claims of sexist enlightenment figures such as jean-jacques rousseau,10 whose misogyny in the midst of his assertion of “man’s” freedom and equality so incensed wollstonecraft. she is insisting against the patriarchy that women are both more and other than a cluster of feminine-gendered subhuman virtues: “let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man” (wollstonecraft 1994, 283); which is to say, “give us political equality and we will demonstrate this to you!” if we further analyze this, masculine-gendered virtues are virtues that presuppose a full, free, and transcendent human being. feminine-gendered virtues, on the other hand, presuppose an incomplete, unfree, and immanent quasi-human being (more animal than human). i will investigate beauvoir’s and wollstonecraft’s respective definitions of humanity below, but here i note beauvoir’s great insight was to clearly and systematically identify the purported ontological underpinning of the gendering of virtue. the patriarchy assigns virtue according to gender because it believes one gender to be less human and more animal than the other. in sum, according to beauvoir, the virtues the patriarchy ascribes to and encourages in women are often of ambiguous value. they are either squarely “slave values” in the nietzschean sense described above (for example, submissiveness, 10 wollstonecraft takes umbrage particularly at rousseau’s assertion that women should be “subjected to a severe restraint, that of propriety” (wollstonecraft 1994, 225). joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 obedience), which we would not consider virtues today, or they are what i am calling “animal virtues”—that is, the “virtues” of doing what is instinctual. these actually require no moral effort and therefore turn out not to be virtues (in the moral and distinctively human sense) at all. neither of these types of virtue are valued unambiguously by the patriarchy—the “proof” of the goodness of a woman (one who is good at being a woman) conveniently doubles as the proof of her inequality and inferiority. as stated above, human moral virtues are qualities for which a person can be morally praised, because they are held to be the result of a choice, and normally we acknowledge that morality requires effort.11 animal virtues are qualities that “naturally” inhere in that person qua the sort of animal (in this case, human mammal) that she is. because they occur naturally, they are not the result of any moral effort or choice and therefore cannot form a basis for moral praise. the patriarchal scheme of virtues, as identified by wollstonecraft and beauvoir, prompts the question, which of the feminine-gendered virtues are actual virtues (those we should judge as “positive” or “moral” qualities) and which are faux virtues (those we should judge as “negative” or “immoral” qualities)? it is also important to stress that some of the masculine-gendered virtues, too, may turn out, on a feminist analysis, to be faux virtues. degendering the virtues, then, does not necessarily entail that women reclaim all of the originally masculine-gendered virtues for themselves. what is required is that women critically examine the complete range of purported virtues, identifying and then rejecting the faux virtues (“virtues” that turn out to be vices), so that what we are left with is a set of virtues understood as unambiguously morally positive qualities that, prima facie, we consider ought to be strived for by all genders (see table 1). i have set out in table 1 a schema to capture the steps of the critical analysis of gender that feminists have been and are still engaged in. distinguishing between real and faux virtue is only the beginning. even accepting a virtue is a “real” one, there is the possibility of its not having been accurately described under the patriarchy (in ways i will explore below). the patriarchy has consistently misdescribed and misclassified gendered virtues in its own interest, and therefore such descriptions must be critically assessed and women’s own redescriptions substituted if necessary. 11 phillipa foot (2002) famously identifies this feature of virtue as causing a dilemma for aristotle, who wants to maintain that virtues pertain to what is difficult for humans and that those who are virtuous “effortlessly” should be praised more. acknowledging this tension, we can accept the general praiseworthiness of virtue as an uncontroversial feature. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 table 1: the feminist critical analysis of virtue: the degendering of virtue actions masculine-gendered virtues feminine-gendered virtues distinguish: actual virtues faux virtues (vices) actual virtues faux virtues (vices) distinguish: described accurately, e.g., “honesty” misdescribed e.g., “bravery” as essentially military e.g., paternalism described accurately12 misdescribed e.g., “nurturing” as a “maternal instinct” e.g., submissiveness, “slavish obedience,” “spaniel-like affection” outcome: accept, in a degendered form redescribe accurately and accept reject accept, in a degendered form redescribe accurately and accept reject such analysis is made easier through the use of the linguistic and conceptual tools a philosopher such as beauvoir provides. wollstonecraft lived at a time in which she did not have the benefits of the explicit framing device of hegel’s master-slave dialectic, nor heidegger’s analysis of human being, nor the existentialist focus on being-for-itself as distinct from being-for-others. however, she did draw upon a tradition of identifying the changes wrought to subjectivity through master-slave relations (coffee 2013; halldenius 2019), particularly understood through the lens of female “dependency.”13 as alan coffee (2013, 123) summarizes wollstonecraft’s view, “since no woman, regardless of education, class or position, could be independent, no woman could be said to be free.” simply due to her chronological position in the development of western philosophy, wollstonecraft has fewer philosophical tools available than beauvoir has to perform an analysis of women’s condition; nevertheless, she does it with remarkable success—work that is crucial to 12 it is questionable whether any of the feminine-gendered virtues under patriarchy are accurately described: their description generally seems to entail some kind of limit or moral ambiguity. nevertheless, if some such virtues were accurately described, as judged by feminists, then they should rightly be accepted, on this view of the degendering project. 13 halldenius (2019) identifies the roman republican tradition as underpinning wollstonecraft’s analysis of the slave’s position, with its defining of unfreedom as being subject to another’s will. this as an important element in wollstonecraft’s account of women’s subjection in marriage. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 a proper feminist reassessment of the moral virtues and the unearthing of the role their promotion plays in constructing as unequal the “feminine” gender. the role of reason in wollstonecraft’s enlightenment feminism wollstonecraft, as an enlightenment intellectual, holds reason to be of crucial importance for humans, but this causes problems for an avowed believer in female equality, for, as genevieve lloyd (1993, 37) has argued, “it is not a question simply of the applicability to women of neutrally specified ideals of rationality, but rather of the genderization of the ideals themselves.” substitute “virtue” for “rationality” and we have beauvoir’s and wollstonecraft’s position on virtue. they would agree that virtues generally, as ideals to which we aspire, are not “neutrally specified” but rather are clustered together in gendered groups and described in theoretically loaded ways. the purported presence of virtues in human activities are described in such a way as to associate common women’s duties with a very circumscribed and ambiguous set of virtues and, correspondingly, associate common men’s duties with a fuller set of unambiguous virtues. reason, whether considered a virtue in its own right or a condition for virtue, is clearly historically gendered as male. lloyd’s example of how reason is understood in aquinas’s scheme, is particularly pertinent here; as she describes it, women’s “meaning is bound up with the reproduction [my emphasis] of human nature, in distinction from those operations—including noble intellectual functioning—which define what human nature is” (lloyd 1993, 36). that is, women’s meaning gets defined by her biological, animal, and mammalian functioning (reproduction, nurturing of her young—things all mammals do) rather than by the higher functions of her consciousness (things only humans do). wollstonecraft would agree that it is rationality qua “noble intellectual functioning” that defines what humans are, but she obviously would disagree with the gendered distinction aquinas (and her contemporary rousseau) make. so she is placed in the difficult position of having to apply to women a concept of rationality that has been historically defined to exclude them. for wollstonecraft, at a more abstract or, perhaps, spiritual level, there need be no conflict between reason and womanhood (recall that she believes women to be made equally in the rational imago dei); however, the application of concepts requires language. and when faced with the difficult task of describing motherhood (see “the case of mothering” below), she must wrestle with language that sets reason against emotion, while it indissolubly links emotion with such motherhood. charlotte witt (2002, 307) usefully outlines three possible paths of action arising from a feminist critique of reason, which i will summarize here: (1) completely reject the concept of reason, (2) reconceive reason along feminist lines and keep it, (3) retain reason as is but include women where they were previously excluded. i am arguing here that wollstonecraft chooses option (2)—reconceive reason and keep it. it is particularly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 because of wollstonecraft’s identification of the bifurcation of virtues of reason along gendered lines that it is impossible for her to simply include herself and other women under the existing rubric. how can she accept a form of reason that defines it with reference to activities usually gendered male while excluding traditional women’s activities, including mothering, which is the stereotypical women’s activity? no, as proof of being made in the imago dei, reason is too important to leave to men to practice and too diverse to leave to them to define. both beauvoir and wollstonecraft identify that under the ascription of reason and other virtues women are excluded from instantiating the defining features of humanity, such as “noble intellectual functioning.” although reason is not the same concept as the existentialists’ (free) consciousness, arguably both are necessary for “noble intellectual functioning”—the intellectual activity that is in philosophy traditionally named as the virtue of human beings qua humans. the role of transcendence in beauvoir’s existential feminism does a similar conceptual difficulty arise for beauvoir in applying to women the concept of transcendence? for the existentialist, although there is no human nature as such, there is one thing we can’t choose, and that is not to be free. we are “condemned to be free,” as sartre (2007, 29) says, and this does allow the assertion of one virtue associated with humanity, the virtue of “transcendence.” “transcendence” is a human capacity that, when exercised, is considered a human excellence—the human excellence for humans qua humans—by which a person demonstrates to herself and to others that she is free: it is the exercising of this freedom and the expansion of one’s being-in-the-world to its full extent. there is a potential problem with this notion of transcendence, however, as lloyd notes, and that is the problem of what is transcended. what is transcended is our “facticity,” which includes the facts of our biology, and lloyd (1993, 101) states that this biology has been traditionally construed as “feminine” by male philosophers: “the male perspective has left its marks on the very concepts of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence.’” in defense of the notion of transcendence, however, it is important to be clear about what it is and is not. to “transcend” one’s bodily facticity is not necessarily to reject it. rather, it is to intentionally distance oneself conceptually so as to take a critical, reflective attitude toward it. transcendence does not entail rejection, just as taking a critical attitude does not entail taking a negative one (the english word “criticism” is ambiguous in this sense). when i love and accept my body unconditionally, this is an example of transcending it; when i hate it, i transcend it; if i am indifferent to it, i transcend it—the activity of this “i” that is able to critically reflect upon its situation (including its bodily situation) is what the existentialists identify as being definitive of humanity. in this way immanence is faced up to and joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 “dealt with.” transcendence has to coexist with immanence, remembering that sartre (2003, 329) says, “being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness.” of course, this conceptual distancing itself may be challenged in various ways—for example, as the phenomenologist merleau-ponty does in questioning its importance relative to our habitual immersion in our embodiment.14 some feminists may challenge whether such conceptual distancing is desirable or even possible. nevertheless, what is relevant to assessing the accuracy of beauvoir’s analysis of women’s situation is the fact that the overarching virtue of transcendence in the existentialist scheme does not necessarily entail a rejection of female embodiment; rather, it can be understood as a conscious, intentional relation to it, which may involve rejection, acceptance, or any other attitude a human may take. on correctly describing women’s traditional activities: the case of mothering as set out in table 1, a key part of the feminist project of degendering the virtues is a critical assessment of their description under patriarchy and, if necessary, a redescription. i wish to consider the case of mothering, as a key example of women’s traditional activities and context in which patriarchal descriptions of “feminine” virtue occur.15 ruth groenhart, in her discussion of the “virtue of care,” cites the important work of virginia held as a key example of feminist redescription: virginia held has pointed out the extent to which the activities women characteristically engage in, such as caring for children, preparing meals, and the like require careful reflection, theoretical interpretation, and all the other intellectual traits of a rational being. (groenhout 1998, 183; citing held 1993, ch. 6) it is in the context of both this original examination of care and its ongoing reimagination along more fluid gender lines that we can examine wollstonecraft’s redescription of traditional women’s duties:16 “to fulfil domestic duties much resolution is necessary, and a serious kind of perseverance that requires a more firm support than emotions, however lively and true to nature” (wollstonecraft 1994, 139). here a tension arises between virtuous reason and possibly unvirtuous emotion, which 14 merleau-ponty (2005) does not deny the existence of a transcendent “i,” but he challenges its importance to our sense of human identity. he thus demotes the transcendent “i” while promoting the immanent body-subject. 15 i use “mothering” in an inclusive sense here to refer to the traditionally gendered role of nurturing infants and children, which role can be carried out by other genders, adoptive, trans, or nonbinary parents and carers. 16 for a transsensitive rethinking of an ethics of care, see marvin (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 wollstonecraft never explicitly resolves. martina reuter (2016) has argued for an implicit resolution in wollstonecraft’s writings whereby emotions are seen as a necessary support and complement to rationality; and elsewhere, reuter (2022, 345) emphasizes the role of the imagination for virtue: “wollstonecraft claims that the activity of the imagination raises the reader above the level of mere animal-like appetite.” an ability to imagine alternative possibilities to the restricted life of a woman under patriarchy seems essential to wanting to be a better human, which is surely the goal of virtue. perhaps imagination plays a similar role to beauvoir’s existentialist “transcendence,” to rise above not only animal “appetites” but animal destiny and affirm one’s human freedom. certainly, wollstonecraft does not dismiss feelings but warns us against their overinfluence. she goes on to set the virtues of “resolution” and “perseverance” against the rival feminine-gendered virtues of “tenderness” and “compassion” (wollstonecraft 1994, 139). she warns mothers against being “carried away by their feelings” (139), as being detrimental to the child and thus a barrier rather than an assistance in the discharge of mothering duties.17 note how she redescribes mothering as requiring rationality and its associated virtues (resolution, perseverance) rather than excluding it. this is where, i believe, she goes beyond a mere acceptance of rationality as it is construed in patriarchal society. contra the common understanding of her as being a figure squarely within the political liberal tradition with its enlightenment-influenced notion of reason, she squarely rejects an important feature of such a notion of reason: namely, its incompatibility with mothering. reason on the patriarchal view is not just, for instance, “clear thinking”; it is “clear thinking, which is bad for mothering,” and it is “clear thinking, which is incompatible with caring.” that is, there is a suppressed feature of the enlightenment notion of “reason,” which defines its key features as being incompatible with the sorts of activities women commonly do. it is not merely that the patriarchy fails to apply the notion of reason to women but that it asserts there are qualities or features of reason that, when spelled out, render it impossible to do so. correspondingly, the qualities that are assumed to be essential to mothering (e.g., compassion, tenderness) are construed as being incompatible with clear thinking and with all the other qualities associated with or subsumed under “reason.” turning to beauvoir’s treatment of “the mother,” she begins by rejecting the patriarchal scheme in which certain animal virtues are ascribed to the woman who carries out her maternal duties: she rejects this idea of the mother achieving her “physiological destiny” or “‘natural’ vocation” because she subscribes to the 17 wollstonecraft (1994, 139) writes that “women of sensibility [emotion] are the most unfit for this task [motherhood], because they will infallibly, carried away by their feelings, spoil a child’s temper.” joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 existentialist belief that “human society is never left to nature” (beauvoir 2011, 524). by referring to examples of women who hold ambivalent or negative attitudes toward their young, beauvoir (2011, 554) proves that “there is no such thing as maternal ‘instinct’: the word does not in any case apply to the human species.” women, do not have pregiven instincts any more than men do; rather, attitudes are “defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it” (554). so she is rejecting outright descriptions of (functional) mothering as simply a matter of mammalian instinct. recently, kate kirkpatrick (2020) has contextualized beauvoir’s analysis of motherhood against its reception in postwar france, noting clearly the dual praising/blaming nature of society’s attitude toward the “virtues” of motherhood: it was her [beauvoir’s] treatment of motherhood that came under the most sustained attack. beauvoir thought society was in extravagant bad faith: how could they not see the duplicity in showing contempt for women and respect for mothers? (kirkpatrick 2020, 255–56) to be precise, it is the animality of the traditional maternal virtues that supports a respect toward mothers for the following of instinct, conjoined with a contempt toward women for the subhumanity demonstrated by such following of instinct. to succeed at being a mother is to fail at being a human. circumventing this praise/blame discourse, beauvoir argues that if a mother successfully nurtures and cares for her young, she does so partly due to her preexisting situation (socioeconomic background, culture, and so on) and partly due to how she as an individual responds to her situation, while exactly none of this is due to “instinct,” maternal or otherwise.18 both beauvoir and wollstonecraft are concerned to emphasize that women have a capacity in their response to their situations to overcome the freedom-denying effects of such situations. what is important here is the fact that women can rightly be given moral credit for the effort and choice involved in successful mothering—it is not to be reduced to following an instinct but rather to be considered the exercising of a set of (human) virtues, involving consciousness, responsibility, assertiveness, and other virtues traditionally associated with men. and if we do credit the existence of 18 as laura hengehold (2017, 76) notes in her deleuzian analysis of beauvoir’s work: “maternal biological and caretaking roles can be transcendent when they emerge from specific activities. but these roles are doomed to seriousness and immanence if they result from the desire to achieve a state of being”—that is, from a desire to achieve “motherhood” as an all-defining state of being rather than a freely chosen project. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 “instincts” (and existentialism could only allow that such instincts are instances of human facticity, not gendered facticity, and that they are in principle able to be transcended), good mothering arguably requires a repression of instinct as much as or more than a following of them. for instance, it is far more “instinctual” (or biologically “natural”) for a woman to sleep through the night when she is tired than to wake every two hours to feed her baby.19 as for the feminine-gendered virtues associated with mothering, these must then be a subject of revaluation and possible rejection, affirmation, and/or redescription. the traditional “feminine” virtue of “tenderness” might be affirmed as relevant to good mothering but redescribed as an intentional, conscious effort to balance opposite emotions, such as frustration or anger, by exercising rational judgment as to when it is right to prioritize tenderness. arguably, there are times to be stern and times to be tender, and women are capable of expressing both qualities at the appropriate times: it is not an either/or. in describing motherhood, both wollstonecraft and beauvoir make a case that women have trouble being good mothers when the realization of their ontological equality and independence is denied. in wollstonecraft’s (1994, 233) case: “woman . . . seldom exerts enlightened maternal affection; for she either neglects her children, or spoils them by improper indulgence. . . . to be a good mother—a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers.” note the identification of the “feminine” virtue “meekness” as being detrimental to mothering rather than advantageous to it. here wollstonecraft breaks up the ontological pairing of the “feminine” virtues with motherhood. under her revisionist description, not only is meekness not advantageous to mothering, but it is doubtful whether it should still be considered a virtue at all. however, as will be discussed below, wollstonecraft also implies in the second vindication that dysfunctional or unvirtuous mothering is class-based as well as gender-based—that is, it is associated with the effect of privilege and corruption in the upper classes rather than sexist manipulation alone. all women suffer from such dysfunction, but the supposed “privilege” of class exacerbates rather than relieves it (wollstonecraft 2011, 224–25). wollstonecraft’s picture of mothering under patriarchy is an ambiguous and inconsistent one, but her description of what mothering should be unambiguously rejects the “feminine” virtues traditionally 19 i can testify to this from my own experience. breastfeeding itself felt “natural” to me, but the waking in the night felt extremely unnatural! i could feel my body protesting against it, at the same time that it complied by filling my breasts with milk. i describe my experience here simply to emphasize the need for better and more nuanced descriptions of parenting from parents themselves. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 associated with it, painting a picture of a rational, assertive motherhood rather than a sentimental and self-effacing one. beauvoir’s descriptions of motherhood evaluate it with respect to the existentialist value of authenticity (of wholly owning one’s choices); therefore, when she surveys motherhood in a sexist world, she finds it to be mostly negative or at the most ambiguous. a positive motherhood is understood as an authentic one: “maternal devotion can be experienced in perfect authenticity; but in fact, this is rarely the case. ordinarily, maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism” (beauvoir 2011, 556). note the juxtaposition of sincerity with bad faith, and note the other oppositions. mothering does not display a predictable cluster of “feminine” virtues; rather, it is ambiguous. it displays both a virtuous and a vicious side and prompts the question of how to identify which parts of mothering are authentic exercises of a woman’s freedom and which are sexist social constructions—the tenets of patriarchy internalized and embodied. descriptions of actual mothering, of the sort beauvoir provides in the second sex, undermine patriarchal descriptions of the “maternal” virtues. devotion, as beauvoir points out, may be just as easily construed as a vice rather than a virtue—namely, in the form of “masochistic devotion” (beauvoir 2011, 558–59). here beauvoir does for “devotion” as a “feminine,” motherhood-enhancing virtue what wollstonecraft does for “meekness,” continuing the feminist divorce of such faux virtues from the real needs of mothering. virtue and class: women’s complicity in oppression for both wollstonecraft and beauvoir, determining the level of personal responsibility that women hold for their negative behavior under patriarchy is not a straightforward task. beauvoir accuses upper class women of being willingly complicit in women’s oppression, in the following passage: in the upper classes, women are willing accomplices to their masters because they stand to profit from the benefits they are guaranteed. we have seen that the women of the high bourgeoisie and aristocracy have always defended their class interests more stubbornly than their husbands: they do not hesitate to radically sacrifice their autonomy as human beings; they stifle all thinking, all critical judgement, all spontaneity; they parrot conventional wisdom, they identify with the ideal imposed on them by the male code. (beauvoir 2011, 663) beauvoir’s claim here is more than just her general criticism of women’s behavior to the effect that they are not authentic inasmuch as they deny their freedom (bad faith). what she outlines here is the giving of implicit consent to patriarchal feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 oppression, because it is in their individual and class interest to do so. arguably, some women benefit under patriarchy/misogyny: if a woman is presented as the ideal and virtuous woman under patriarchy, she may be allowed certain privileges—not the least of which is to join in the critique of other women as not being virtuous enough or not virtuous in the right way. a question arises here of whether, outside such privilege, women could be said to “consent” to their oppression. certainly, beauvoir in the second sex describes the different stages of a woman’s development (e.g., in the chapter names in book 2: “childhood,” “the girl,” “sexual initiation,” etc.) in such a way that it is clear her life is most of the time not a matter of choosing what is in her direct interest; nor is she actively rebelling against her condition. importantly for this discussion, manon garcia (2021) has provided a critical analysis of the role submission plays with regard to our concept of “femininity”: why and how it becomes considered constitutive of one gender. she points out that unlike in the case of slaves or defeated warriors, a woman’s “submission appears as chosen, and the woman is thus responsible for it” (garcia 2021, 23). turning to beauvoir’s existentialist analysis of submission, garcia (2021, 187) notes the ambiguity of the “choice”: “it is not that women actively choose submission but that they consent to the submission that is prescribed to them by social norms.” this understanding might help us to distinguish between the passive consent to an oppressive situation a girl or woman finds herself in and the active consent of a privileged woman who consciously chooses in line with her class interests. on wollstonecraft’s view, the privileges of class reduce rather than amplify women’s agency, robbing them of the virtues of honest and purposeful work: “destructive, however, as riches and inherited honours are to the human character, women are more debased and cramped, if possible, than men” (wollstonecraft 2011, 224), since upper class men of her time and place had the option of taking a profession such as soldier or politician, whereas this was out of bounds to women. on the other hand, she argues that class divisions corrupt all classes “almost equally.”20 wollstonecraft here identifies a pattern that goes beyond the case of male-tofemale oppression: she, like beauvoir, suggests here a pattern to all oppression, in which both oppressor and oppressed are morally corrupted. many years before hegel’s articulation of the master-slave dialectic in the phenomenology, 20 “the preposterous distinctions of rank, which render civilisation a curse, by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants, and cunning envious dependents, corrupt, almost equally, every class of people, because respectability is not attached to the discharge of the relative duties of life, but to the station” (wollstonecraft 2011, 225). joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 wollstonecraft devises her own version of a dialectic that corrupts both parties,21 however she does not express a belief in a key tenet of hegel’s dialectic: the ability of slaves to harness their negative power to bring themselves to full subjectivity. in the case of beauvoir, toril moi (1998, 86), in her essay “‘independent women’ and ‘narratives of liberation,’” observes beauvoir’s “marked reluctance to cast [women’s] subjectivity . . . as a necessary element in women’s political struggle for freedom.” this rejection of slaves’ or dependents’ “negative power” is important because it explains why neither wollstonecraft nor beauvoir wishes to strategically reclaim for women the cluster of feminine-gendered virtues known as the “feminine.” liberation must come through a changed subjectivity for women and a better, corrected understanding of the virtues. subjectivity must change either before or with women’s liberation—it cannot be used for liberation as is. i believe this is because of their respective positions on what humans are: human being, as opposed to animal being, is a capacity to exercise freedom or rationality, rather than the exercise itself, which means that women’s subjectivity is not completely constructed as subjugated; it is only partially so, at the level of their characters and action. both beauvoir and wollstonecraft believe in a level of being that underpins the contingencies of women’s historical being-in-the-world—for wollstonecraft, a god-given rational nature; for beauvoir, a free consciousness—which precludes the possibility of women, even strategically, fully identifying with those contingencies. virtue and human nature for here i throw down my gauntlet and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. (wollstonecraft 1994, 119) it may seem strange that when wollstonecraft makes a call for women’s liberation, she expresses it in respect to their “manners”: “it is time to effect a revolution in female manners” (wollstonecraft 1994, 113). this expression belongs to the eighteenth-century literature of advice, which, as vivien jones (2002) notes in her essay on such literature, is hard for modern readers to connect with feminism but, as she goes on to argue, is more closely connected to it than may first appear. certainly, when we look at the context of this quote, we see the political dimension appear: “it is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to them their lost 21 such dialectic is not purely theoretical in wollstonecraft’s time: as botting (2021, 1311n1; citing ferguson 1993, 22, 29) points out, she makes two “indirect allusions” to the haitian revolution, one of many enslaved people’s rebellions. public racialized slavery is part of the second vindication’s historical context. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 dignity—and make them, as part of the human species, labour by transforming themselves to transform the world” (wollstonecraft 1994, 113). the connection between the personal and the political is clearly established— politics begins at home but is not limited to it. we find here an optimistic view that human nature is in principle perfectible: characters can be changed for the better, and women, no less than men, have this capacity to transform themselves. it is a transformation of an already-existing personhood, not a complete self-creation of the sort beauvoir advocates, but this transformation is indeed radical, implying that women will be almost unrecognizable in their “manners” (how they conduct themselves and show themselves to the world). because women have been held back from achieving personal excellence, they need to focus on this goal, but it is at once a personal and a communal one, harnessing rationality to apply their agency as full humans in the world. for beauvoir, the framework in which she rejects the gendering of virtues is the existentialist rejection of a “human nature.” beauvoir’s complaint against the version of “woman” that is represented under a cluster of “feminine” virtues is that it is not her nature to be this, simply because it is not her nature to be anything in particular. if a woman is, following the existentialist view, a transcendent free consciousness, then she can choose her own nature. the fact that she has hitherto not realized that freedom is, as beauvoir points out, a contingent fact of history, not a necessary truth about the structure of her being. this of course leaves open the question of positive existentialist virtues.22 if there are such virtues, i would argue they must be the subset of virtues that are somehow attached to the two key existentialist values of (1) facing up to one’s situation, and (2) freedom-responsibility, in the form of transcendence. these values support virtues such as being responsible, honest (with oneself and others), respectful of others’ freedom, brave (facing up to one’s situation even if it is one of horror or humiliation), creative, and so on. most recently, sabrina vaccarino bremner (2022, 521) has identified the “political virtue of moral invention” as foundational for beauvoir’s understanding of virtue, emphasizing the (self-)creative aspect of a morally good and free human being. for wollstonecraft, on the other hand, the framework of her rejection of the gendering of virtues occurs within the traditional notion of a god-made human nature. her complaint about the gendered virtuous woman is that her true nature is something else, not that she has no nature, and that although god ordained that men and women have some differences (biology and duties), these differences are not pertinent to the development of virtues nor the range of virtues a human being may instantiate. 22 for some recent explorations of this question, see antich (2023) and vaccarino bremner (2022). joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 unlike beauvoir, wollstonecraft still adheres to an idea of a god-given human nature, with a corresponding sexed biology and duties that flow therefrom. for wollstonecraft, duties may (at least sometimes) be gendered but virtues are not: “women, i allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, i sturdily maintain, must be the same” (wollstonecraft 1994, 119). given that both women and men share in the same human (rational) nature, these duties do not flow from their humanity but from their biological particularities. in wollstonecraft’s time, women were considered to have the duty of carrying and taking the principal responsibility for rearing their young; to fail to do so—that is, to fail to adequately nurture their young—would then be considered a failure to do their duty. virtues relate to the realm of the human: virtues can help us to perform our duties, whatever they be, to a high standard. thus even in a gender-segregated society such as wollstonecraft’s, a man may display the virtue of forbearance with his employees at paid work, and his partner may display such forbearance with her children at home. the same virtues help both men and women to discharge their respective duties to their dependents, although such duties be different. as wollstonecraft writes, they are both “human duties.” nevertheless, even in the exercise of different duties, women, wollstonecraft suggests, are capable of displaying the same range of virtues as men and would do so if conditions were changed: “it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense” (wollstonecraft 1994, 283). “transcendence” for beauvoir plays the role in her feminist critique that “reason” does for wollstonecraft. they argue: 1. women do, contra the contentions of sexist society, have these capacities (for reason and transcendence). 2. these capacities define what it is to be “human” (and not an animal). 3. women have these capacities but often in patriarchal societies do not exercise them—that is, they have the capacity to transcend the immanence of facticity (beauvoir) and to use reason to identify and practice the human virtues (wollstonecraft) respectively—but they fail to do so. 4. they fail to exercise these human-making capacities under the influence of a patriarchal society. beauvoir has the language of being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-forothers, and of transcendence/immanence, which allows her to draw distinctions between the socially constrained and the free in woman. this allows beauvoir to criticize the behavior and being-for-others that women display under the influence of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 patriarchy without criticizing woman qua human being—that is without criticizing her humanity or lack of it. when an individual or group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. but the scope of the verb to be must be understood: bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the hegelian dynamic: to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. (beauvoir 2011, 12) it is very hard for women to realize human excellence in a world that affords them so few possibilities other than the narrow range prescribed under patriarchy. the statement that “women are inferior” on a feminist analysis rather than a patriarchal one simply means that “their situation provides them with fewer possibilities” (beauvoir 2011, 12–13)—that is, fewer possibilities to become. beauvoir explains in the introduction to the second sex her criterion for judging the extent to which women are to blame for failing to fully express their humanity: “every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is a degradation of existence into ‘in-itself,’ of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression” (beauvoir 2011, 16). beauvoir’s discussion of woman’s “character” is precisely a detailing of the ways in which women are frustrated and oppressed. and in ethics of ambiguity, she writes: “but once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies dishonesty and which is a positive fault” (beauvoir 1976, 38)—in other words, a vice. wollstonecraft has, at the time she is writing, no such language, or clear distinctions, which leads her to appear sometimes as unfair to her own sex in the rather harsh judgments she makes throughout the second vindication. however, there is in the vindication an attempt from time to time to create such a language. it is not consistently done, but it does indicate something about wollstonecraft’s view of the ontology of a woman’s character under patriarchy: “from the tyranny of man, i firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning, which i allow makes at present a part of their character, i likewise have repeatedly endeavoured to prove, is produced by oppression” (wollstonecraft 1994, 282; my emphasis).23 she adds: “oppression thus formed many of the features of their 23 it is possible that what would be considered “clever” in men is here revaluated as “cunning” in women; that is, that it might turn out to be a misdescribed virtue. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 character perfectly to coincide with that of the oppressed half of mankind” (wollstonecraft 1994, 283; my emphasis). so “cunning” and other vices, as “features” of a woman’s “character,” are held to be formed under the direct oppression of women by men. what wollstonecraft criticizes, and passionately believes can be changed, is the historical and contingent character of women, rather than the essence of women themselves as fully human, rational beings. what beauvoir criticizes, and passionately believes can be changed, is the being-for-others of women, which, under the oppression by men, becomes a placeholder for her true being-for-itself—her free consciousness. it takes up the space where her being-for-itself would otherwise express itself. to criticize the being-forothers of women is thus not to criticize women-in-themselves. misogyny is averted. it is a criticism aimed at a woman’s socially constructed character that effectively suppresses the true expression of her full, free humanity. until such a character is recognized as such (through consciousness-raising and education) and consequently dismantled, there can be no space for a woman’s true humanity to express itself. thus both beauvoir and wollstonecraft have to perform a balancing act between calling out negative aspects of women’s behavior as symptomatic of the effects of patriarchal oppression and affirming the enormous potential of women qua human beings—that is, their unshakeable ontology as fully human beings with a capacity to display the full set of real human virtues. as we have seen, the task of distinguishing what could be called human virtues proper from faux virtues and the true nature of women’s traditional activities from misleading and inaccurate descriptions by the patriarchy is a difficult one and is yet to be completed. i contend that this ongoing task of degendering the virtues is one of the crucial tasks of feminism. as long as there are individuals who identify as a “woman” (whatever we think this may be), then there will be a corresponding need to resist the injustice and inaccuracy of the set of purported virtues attached to the idea of “woman.” as beauvoir and wollstonecraft demonstrate, such a system of gendered virtues, when investigated, denies to women their full humanity and produces their character or their being-for-others (respectively) as displaying what may then be judged as “amoral” and/or “animal-like” qualities rather than allowing them to realize the excellence of their rationality or freedom to their full capacities. whereto for feminists and virtue? indeed, feminists who start by asking questions about the gendered nature of the virtues will inevitably end up asking questions about the nature of the virtues themselves. what is so “good” about them anyway? it is not surprising that some feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 26 feminists will question the value of the good vs. unvirtuous (vicious) distinction,24 which is analogous to nietzsche’s (1998) rejection of the “good vs. evil” distinction— woman’s failure to be “good” does not necessarily make her vicious. (for instance, it might make her interesting instead—a notion expressed by the slogan “good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere”!) ultimately, neither wollstonecraft nor beauvoir definitively reject the concept of virtue. for wollstonecraft, it plays a key role in her vision of equality and the rectification of the wrongs done against women. for beauvoir, a key part of her existentialist ethical approach is the assertion of the moral excellence of personal freedom: the personal creation of, and taking responsibility for, individual values. this cannot be done until one realizes one’s potential as a critically conscious, transcendent human being. she also, of course, emphasizes the ambiguous nature of ethical being-in-the-world: “to say that [existence] is ambiguous is to say that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won” (beauvoir 1976, 129). even if one creates one’s own values and “owns” them, this does not thereby render the moral universe black and white, nor are such values therefore fixed forever. acting ethically (or “virtuously”) involves an acceptance of acting without complete certainty of the morality of one’s action and with the possibility of changing one’s mind in the future. both philosophers engage in a feminist critical analysis of virtue and start a project that has persisted into the present day, that of degendering the virtues as part of a larger project of a revaluation or even transvaluation of values that must occur if women are to be enabled to fully realize their critical and moral being-in-the-world. acknowledgements a version of this paper was presented to the conference of the australasian society for continental philosophy, november 29, 2023: i am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions from the attendees. i would also like to thank the une feminist reading group for many useful reflections upon these issues, dr. sandy c. boucher for reading for clarity, and two anonymous referees of this journal whose knowledgeable and constructive comments have been very helpful. 24 for instance, boryczka (2012) argues that virtue ethics, particularly as taken up in feminist “ethics of care,” assumes the unattainable goal of “moral perfection,” which ultimately undermines women’s liberatory efforts. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 27 references antich, peter. 2023. “can there be an existentialist virtue ethics?” journal of value inquiry 57 (1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09799-w. beauvoir, simone de. 1976. the ethics of ambiguity. translated by bernard frechtman. new york: citadel. ———. 2011. the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovanychevallier. new york: vintage books. bergès, sandrine. 2013. “relative virtues and meretricious slaves.” in the routledge guidebook to wollstonecraft’s “a vindication of the rights of woman,” 63–85. london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203094181. boryczka, jocelyn m. 2012. “the legacy of virtue and vice: mary wollstonecraft and contemporary feminist care ethics.” in suspect citizens: women, virtue, and vice in backlash politics, 139–60. philadelphia: temple university press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt414.10. botting, eileen hunt. 2016. wollstonecraft, mill, and women’s human rights. new haven, ct: yale university press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1kft8kh. ———. 2021. “wollstonecraft in jamaica: the international reception of a vindication of the rights of men in the kingston daily advertiser in 1791.” history of european ideas 47 (8): 1304–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2021.189 8434. coffee, alan. 2013. “mary wollstonecraft, freedom and the enduring power of social domination.” european journal of political theory 12, no. 2 (april), 116–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885111430617. ferguson, moira. 1993. colonialism and gender relations from mary wollstonecraft to jamaica kincaid: east caribbean connections. new york: columbia university press. foot, philippa. 2002. “virtues and vices.” in virtues and vices: and other essays in moral philosophy, 1–18. oxford: clarendon press. garcia, manon. 2021. we are not born submissive: how patriarchy shapes women’s lives. princeton, nj: princeton university press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv 16rdchd. groenhout, ruth. 1998. “the virtue of care: aristotelian ethics and contemporary ethics of care.” in feminist interpretations of aristotle, edited by cynthia a. freeland, 171–200. university park: pennsylvania state university press. gubar, susan. 1994. “feminist misogyny: mary wollstonecraft and the paradox of ‘it takes one to know one.’" feminist studies 20, no. 3 (autumn): 453–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178182. halldenius, lena. 2019. “mary wollstonecraft’s feminist republicanism.” in the wollstonecraftian mind, edited by sandrine bergès, eileen hunt botting, and alan coffee, 404–16. london: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 28 held, virginia. 1993. feminist morality: transforming culture, society, and politics. chicago: university of chicago press. hengehold, laura. 2017. simone de beauvoir’s philosophy of individuation: the problem of “the second sex.” edinburgh: edinburgh university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474418881. jones, vivien. 2002. “mary wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction.” in the cambridge companion to mary wollstonecraft, edited by claudia l. johnson, 119–40. cambridge: cambridge university press. kirkpatrick, kate. 2020. becoming beauvoir: a life. london: bloomsbury academic. lloyd, genevieve. 1993. the man of reason: “male” and “female” in western philosophy. 2nd ed. london: routledge. marso, lori. j. 2019. “simone de beauvoir.” in the wollstonecraftian mind, edited by sandrine bergès, eileen hunt botting, and alan coffee, 283–94. london: routledge. marvin, amy. 2019. “groundwork for transfeminist care ethics: sara ruddick, trans children, and solidarity in dependency.” hypatia 34, no. 1 (winter): 101–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12448. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2005. phenomenology of perception. translated by colin smith. new york: routledge. moi, toril. 1998. “‘independent women’ and ‘narratives of liberation.’” in simone de beauvoir: a critical reader, edited by elizabeth fallaize, 72–92. london: routledge. nietzsche, friedrich. 1996. on the genealogy of morals. translated by douglas smith. new york: oxford university press. ———. 1998. beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future. translated by marion faber. new york: oxford university press. reuter, martina. 2016. “the role of the passions in mary wollstonecraft’s notion of virtue.” in the social and political philosophy of mary wollstonecraft, edited by sandrine bergès and alan coffee, 50–66. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766841.003.0004 sartre, jean-paul. 2003. being and nothingness: an essay on phenomenological ontology. translated by hazel e. barnes. london: routledge classics. ———. 2007. existentialism is a humanism. translated by carol macomber. new haven, ct: yale university press. taylor, barbara. 1999. “misogyny and feminism: the case of mary wollstonecraft.” constellations 6, no. 4 (december): 499–512. https://doi.org/10.1111/14678675.00159. vaccarino bremner, sabina. 2022. “on moral unintelligibility: beauvoir’s genealogy of morality in the second sex.” monist 105, no. 4 (october): 521–40. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onac015. joseph – the degendering of virtue: beauvoir and wollstonecraft on virtue and equality published by scholarship@western, 2024 29 witt, charlotte. 2002. “feminist metaphysics.” in a mind of one’s own: feminist essays on reason and objectivity, edited by louise m. anthony and charlotte witt, 302–18. 2nd ed. boulder, co: westview press. wollstonecraft, mary. 1994. a vindication of the rights of woman. in a vindication of the rights of men; a vindication of the rights of woman; an historical and moral view of the french revolution, edited by janet todd, 63–284. oxford: oxford university press. felicity joseph is a lecturer in philosophy and political theory at the university of new england, australia. her phd thesis was on phenomenology of embodiment, and she has a particular interest in feminist applications of phenomenological and existentialist thought, as well as a feminist rethinking of political philosophy. she is a coeditor of the bloomsbury handbook of existentialism (2024). 16798 joseph title page 16798 joseph final format oppressive praise feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation holroyd, jules. 2021. “oppressive praise.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (4). article 3. 2021 oppressive praise jules holroyd university of sheffield j.d.holroyd@sheffield.ac.uk holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 oppressive praise jules holroyd abstract philosophers have had a lot to say about blame, much less about praise. in this paper, i follow some recent authors in arguing that this is a mistake. however, unlike these recent authors, the reasons i identify for scrutinising praise are to do with the ways in which praise is, systematically, unjustly apportioned. specifically, drawing on testimony and findings from social psychology, i argue that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression. articulating what is going wrong here helps us to see what to do about it. keywords: praise, blame, moral responsibility, esteem, stereotypes, distribution, shifting standards, amelioration philosophers have had a lot to say about blame, much less about praise. in this paper, i follow some recent authors in arguing that this is a mistake. however, unlike these recent authors, the reasons i identify for scrutinising praise are to do with the ways in which praise is, systematically, unjustly apportioned. specifically, drawing on testimony and findings from social psychology, i argue that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression. articulating what is going wrong here helps us to see what to do about it. in section 1, i identify a gap in the contemporary philosophical literature. in section 2, i identify a different kind of gap, to do with how praise is apportioned in the real world. in section 3, i try, using the resources provided by accounts of moral responsibility, to diagnose the problem with these gaps in our practice. i advance a diagnosis that focuses on unjustly distributed praise, informed by stereotyped expectations. in section 4, i consider various ways of responding to the problem, so diagnosed. in concluding, i point to further ramifications not only for our practice, but also for our theorising about moral responsibility. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 1. the praise gap (in philosophy) it has typically been assumed that blame warrants greater attention than praise. for example, in wallace’s influential responsibility and the moral sentiments, the focus is primarily on responsibility, blameworthiness, and blame. this focus is justified, wallace (1994, 61) writes, because “praise does not seem to have the central, defining role that blame and moral sanction occupy in our practice of assigning moral responsibility.” moreover, because blame has punitive elements, and is condemnatory, it requires special justification. as wallace puts it, “given the punitive and potentially harmful aspect of these responses [i.e., blame and moral sanction] the suspicion arises that there is something intrinsically cruel about the practice of holding people responsible that makes it morally suspect” (1994, 61). blame seems to warrant greater philosophical scrutiny. perhaps adding to the fact that praise isn’t deemed worthy of much attention is that early characterisations of the “positive reactive attitudes” include “approval” (strawson 1974, 4), “gratitude . . . love” (5), and it is indeed difficult to see what might be problematic about these attitudes towards others. and whilst we might ask about the aptness conditions for some of these attitudes—gratitude certainly can be misplaced—emotions or attitudes such as love or admiration don’t seem to be responses to specific doings but rather to persons and their admirable traits or lovable qualities. so praise, in response to specific things done, seems to get little attention. indeed, in drawing attention to an asymmetry between the conditions for praise and blame, nelkin (2011) has suggested that it seems strange to worry about whether an individual might be harmed by a benefit, such as the communication of praise. if people can’t be harmed by praise, our practices of communicating it warrant less scrutiny.1 that much of the work on moral responsibility has focused on blame is attested to by the fact that there is an extensive stanford encyclopedia entry for “blame” (tognazzini and coates 2018) but no corresponding entry for “praise.” what we end up with, as eshleman (2013, 216) observes, is a literature “largely ignoring responsibility for actions that warrant praise and emulation.” yet, philosophers have started to suggest that something is awry. eshleman (2013) and stout (2020) have suggested that there might be much to learn about the contours of moral responsibility from scrutinising praise and praiseworthiness. both challenge the assumption that praise and blame are symmetrical, such that an analysis of praiseworthiness can simply be read off an analysis of blameworthiness. there might even be questions, stout suggests, about whether praise might sometimes harm. 1 this has been recently challenged by stout (2020) (see section 3.a below). holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 i want to further motivate attention to praise and judgements of praiseworthiness. i do so by bringing to the table a problem with our practices of praising (and assigning praiseworthiness). whilst this problem pertains to the assignment of individual praiseworthiness, my concern is essentially with our social practices. as vargas points out, our judgements of praiseworthiness are guided by standards of correctness. moreover, “when praised, we become subject to a distinct web of practices and attitudes that reflect an altogether different way of being regarded by others” (vargas 2013, 5).2 it is this web of practices and attitudes, and the standards that structure how our moral responsibility system plays out, with which i am concerned here.3 2. the praise gap (in the world) before exploring another kind of praise gap, i want to draw attention to a few features of our social practices of praising and appraisal. the first thing to notice about our practices of attributing praise is that attitudinal judgements of praiseworthiness, as well as communicative acts expressing praise, are directed towards both practices which are moralised and those which are less explicitly moral. for example, we praise people for acting morally well—showing great generosity in helping others, say, or great courage in the face of adversity. but we also frequently praise people for doing well in other dimensions—for example, displaying perseverance in applying oneself to a difficult maths problem. however, even in instances in which there are no obviously moral norms in play, the kinds of traits being praised are typically ones that we take to exemplify some kind of virtue, quality of character, or excellence. this makes it appropriate to think of appraisals in these domains as continuous with moral praise. second, whilst for the purposes of this paper we don’t need an account of a particular conception of praise, i take it to include judgements of moral merit, as well as expressions that communicate this.4 in particular, we might helpfully think of it along the lines of darwall’s notion of 2 though vargas, like others, gives very little attention to praise throughout his book, focusing primarily on blame and blameworthiness. 3 of course the idea of “our” responsibility system is an oversimplification. even focusing on the social practices operative in particular locations (generally, western anglophone society, and specifically, the us and the uk in the twenty-first century), there will be significant variations in the social practices found. nonetheless, there will be patterns found within the dominant practice, and it is with these i am concerned. 4 i include judgements, as well as expressions, because i do not want to preclude the possibility of private praise. however it is mainly in relation to the expressions of praise that my concerns arise. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 “appraisal respect,” which he characterises as “an attitude of positive appraisal of that person either as a person or as engaged in some particular pursuit” (darwall 1977, 38). such an attitude “is like esteem or a high regard for someone” (39)— admiration for their courage or esteem for their perseverance, say. this aspect of our praise practices aims to track praiseworthiness. but there is another important aspect of our practice, which is to cultivate praiseworthiness—our communications of praise with children most explicitly have this end, but it is not exclusive to children—we support and encourage each other’s moral agency and development much of the time (at least, when we praise successfully). thirdly, praise is not exclusively—and perhaps not even primarily—a second-personal practice. whilst it has significance in second-personal communications, third-personal appraisals are, as we shall see, also important in social life. these third-personal communications can be important both for communicating and finding out about moral exemplars in a domain, but they also can have more formal roles in, for example, generating ordinal rankings that determine the distribution of valuable goods. with these preliminary remarks in mind, i now want to highlight a further key feature of our practices: namely, that there appears to be a very different kind of “praise gap” in our practices of apportioning praise. 2.a. khader and lindauer, “the daddy dividend” first, some anecdata. khader and lindauer draw attention to the annoying discrepancies in the way that accolade is distributed between them for their respective roles in parenting: we coined the term “daddy dividend” on one of the many days a stranger on the subway told matt (a white man) that he was the “best daddy ever.” the thing he had done to receive this accolade was to wear his baby in a carrier, and perhaps not seem utterly miserable doing so. by contrast, serene (a brown woman) has never been told by a stranger that she’s the best mom ever, or even a decent one. (khader and lindauer 2020, 6) man does parenting: praise ensues! woman does parenting: no big deal. joseph stramondo describes similar experiences, this time tainted also with ableism, whilst out with his toddler, who is riding with him in his wheelchair: i can immediately tell they want to say something to us. “hey man, look at you! is that your little girl? you’re a great dad! you’re father of the year!” one of them tries to give me a high five as we roll past, but my hands are occupied; one is on my chair’s joystick and the other holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 clutches hazel loosely to help her balance. . . . i am celebrated as a disabled father and leah is disparaged as a disabled mother. (stramondo 2020, 8–9) 2.b. “helpful” men5 these bits of anecdata will be eye-rollingly familiar to some of us. and the gender dynamics they illustrate extend to other contexts, as confirmed by studies in social psychology. consider the series of studies from heilman and chen (2005) indicating that men and women are asymmetrically apportioned praise for altruistic behaviour in workplace settings. heilman and chen (2005, 432) were working with two hypotheses: hypothesis 1. engaging in altruistic citizenship behavior will enhance men’s performance evaluations and reward recommendations but will not affect those of women. hypothesis 2. withholding altruistic citizenship behavior will be detrimental to women’s performance evaluations and reward recommendations but will not affect those of men. that is, when women are helpful, that’s no big deal; but when they’re not, they are harshly judged for that perceived failure. conversely, when men don’t show altruistic behaviour, that’s no problem. when they do, they are praised highly. and these hypotheses were confirmed across a series of studies, which i’ll now describe. in these studies, all participants are asked to evaluate a worker—that is, cathy or kevin—and rate them. they were told this is part of a “360 evaluation process,” so their appraisal would involve seeing, and would be based upon, feedback that other colleagues have also provided. the participants see details of cathy’s or kevin’s role and job title, and how long they have been in the job (purchasing, level three administrator). they then see feedback from a colleague about that person. the colleague has rated them on five-point scales for various parameters, and, crucially, in an open text box, has had the opportunity to provide any observations about the employee. in that box a colleague has ostensibly written information about the employee’s typical work behaviour. in the experimental conditions, the colleague had described a scenario in which help was needed, and information on how the employee had responded. in study 1 (roughly): 5 heilman and chen 2005. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 oh no! the photocopier had broken, the colleague needed to finish compiling reports for the next day, but almost everyone had gone to the office party! disaster! urgent help is needed with sorting and stapling! or in study 2 (roughly): oh no! lost computer files! the colleague has a presentation tomorrow and needs help inputting financial data from this week and checking it over before the presentation tomorrow morning, but almost everyone has gone to the office party! in both studies, the colleague describes how they asked for help from either kevin (in one condition) or cathy (in another), who were described as either helping or not helping. the experimenters are looking for how participants respond to one of four conditions: where kevin helps, where kevin does not help, where cathy helps, where cathy does not help. participants were then asked to fill out a questionnaire rating the (helpful or unhelpful) employee (cathy or kevin) to evaluate their job performance and make recommendations for organisational rewards. (in a control group, no information about helping behaviour was provided, so participants could only evaluate on the basis of the other aspects of evaluation). what did heilman and chen find about their participants’ evaluative tendencies? as predicted by our hypotheses, the tests revealed a difference in how women and men were evaluated when they did and did not perform the helping behavior that was requested. specifically, when they did not help, the man’s job performance was rated no differently, but the woman’s performance was rated significantly lower than when no information about helping was provided. in contrast, when they did perform the helping behavior, the man’s performance ratings were significantly higher, and the woman’s performance ratings were no different than when no information about helping was provided. . . . thus, women neither were given as much credit for their altruism nor treated as tolerantly for their lack of it as were men who behaved identically (2005, 434–35). men who helped were also more strongly recommended for organisational rewards (salary raises, bonuses, promotions), whereas helpful women were not recommended any more highly than in the condition in which no information about their helping behaviours was provided. the key dynamic i want to draw attention holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 here is the following: women help, showing altruism: no big deal. men are helpful, showing altruism: praise be!6 2.c. superficial socialist feminists and white allies in mediocre, ijeoma oluo describes the role of writer-activists floyd dell and max eastman in the socialist feminist movements in the usa of the 1910s. introduced to the movement by women socialist feminists (crystal eastman and ida rauh), dell and eastman were, apparently, keen to recruit other men to the cause and “demonstrate to other men why they should be socialist feminists as well” (oluo 2020, 54). however, their commitment to the cause, oluo writes, was questionable. whilst they did speak up for women’s suffrage, birth control, and civil rights for people of colour, they also seemed to really like the idea of women’s sexual liberation and the opportunities for sexual liaisons this might afford them. their participation in the movement, it seems, coincided with their treating their wives badly (including lying, cheating, and ultimately in eastman’s case, abandoning his wife and child). and, it seems their commitment didn’t run deep: later, dell renounced feminist values, and eastman became a mccarthyite anticommunist. oluo draws attention to this to highlight the double standards in play: whilst women in such movements must be beyond reproach, “mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centred and rewarded, and they have been. they get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement yet they will be praised for their intentions or even simply for their presence” (2020, 62). in clear illustration of this, oluo writes that in addition to being shitty partners, they were also shitty feminist leaders: “max eastman was a founder of the new york men’s league for women suffrage, which sounds pretty cool, right? however, one of the first things eastman did was make a promise to the men who signed up that ‘no member would be called upon to do anything. the main function of the league would be to exist.’ in the battle for women’s suffrage, in which women literally fought and died, men become heroes by simply existing” (oluo 2020, 56; quoting from neuman 2017; quoting from eastman 1912, 17). pertinent to our point here is the pattern of praise to which oluo draws attention: men involved in the socialist feminist movement merely had to show up to be accoladed and praised for their activism. the women involved did much more, for much less (if any) praise. 6 also telling is that women were judged more harshly than men for not helping. but my focus here is on the asymmetrical positive appraisals for the altruistic helping behaviour. the organisational reward recommendations are also salient; i return to this in section 3.c. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 fast-forward a century, and ernest owens draws attention to similar dynamics of misplaced praise within the antiracist movements of 2020. writing in the context of the black lives matter movement in the us, owens (2020, n.p.) suggests that “the sudden resurgence of ‘white ally’ culture needs to be examined,” and he asks rhetorically, “why should there be a badge of honor or distinction of merit bestowed on white people who are choosing to address a human error within themselves that’s been terrorizing others?” owens worries about “a culture of pointlessly glorifying white people who appear to give a damn.” instead, he writes, one should focus on dismantling systems of oppression “without praise, visibility, or being asked to.” owens’ rhetorical question points to the problematic patterns that are our focus here: white “‘allies” do little more than show up (or simply declare allyship) and are praised for doing so, whilst people of colour sustainedly engaged in antiracism movements, at greater risk to themselves, receive little recognition or praise for so doing. 3. what’s the problem? i have introduced the above examples by way of illustrating the general point i want to make: our practices of praise are not insulated from social and political dynamics. men are praised when women—especially women of colour—are not; white people are praised when people of colour are not. these dynamics will be familiar to those who have experienced the oppressive dimensions of them. but a failure within philosophy to ethically scrutinise praise, and our practices of communicating it, means that these dynamics have not received attention nor shaped how we might think about the ethics of praise. but what, exactly, is going wrong in the cases i have described? in this section, i start to diagnose the problem, before going on to evaluate proposals for addressing it. 3.a. undeserved praise? we might suppose that we can easily diagnose the problem here, as one in which certain instances of praise are undeserved. lindauer and stramondo didn’t deserve the praise (“father of the year”) for doing their share of parenting. the (fictional) kevin employees didn’t deserve the praise they received for helping their (fictional) colleagues.7 eastman and dell didn’t deserve praise for their role in socialist feminism. white “allies” don’t deserve praise for showing up (four hundred years too late, as owens puts it). that might be part of what is going on here. but what is wrong with getting praise that is not deserved? 7 of course, no such individual in fact exists—the fictional kevins, then, are those undeserving of praise. note that as such, they can’t really be harmed by it. holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 some authors have suggested that it is strange to think that there is any worry about people receiving undeserved praise. in discussing avoidability conditions for moral responsibility, for example, nelkin (2011) has suggested that it is odd to think that one should be able to avoid praise, which is essentially a benefit (whereas avoiding blameworthy action, and so blame, seems more important). stout (2020) takes up this point but disagrees, since he suggests that undeserved praise might in fact be harmful (and therefore important to have been able to avoid). stout argues that undeserved praise might be harmful because it may seem to us mortifying or be experienced as a form of ridicule. but that isn’t what is going on across the cases presented here; the unpleasant feelings stout identifies are dependent on the recipient of the praise being aware of its undeservedness. whilst this may be true in some of the cases (lindauer and stramondo), it is presumably not the case for all of the examples i described. indeed, in at least some of the cases (superficial allies), the concern seems to be that praise is expected. as such, the inaptly praised parties are not, on the face of it, harmed in these particular ways by the undeserved praise they receive. it might be true that sometimes getting too much (more than is deserved) of something that is usually a good can be problematic. but i think we need more apparatus—than simply the claim that it is undeserved—to explain what those problems are.8 the primary source of the worry here isn’t with the wrongful recipients of too much praise. moreover, in isolation from other explanatory facts, it is hard to get particularly vexed about some individuals getting benefits to which they are not, strictly speaking, entitled. it is implausible to suppose that we are under a strict duty to praise only in accordance with moral worth. finally, one might think that, to a degree, some praise is deserved here—there is something praiseworthy about men 8 an instructive analogue is to consider the claim, from fricker (2007,18), that attributions of excess credibility—another instance of some getting more of a good than is warranted—are unlikely to be disadvantageous, so not unjust. davis (2016) has argued—convincingly, i think—that this claim is problematic. rather, excess credibility judgements can be harmful—e.g., by disrespecting and producing epistemic damage—when they trade in stereotypes. but note that davis’s claim is that some kinds of excess credibility judgements are harmful (in particular, when attributed to members of marginalised groups based on stereotypes). some instances of attributing excess credibility may not be similarly problematic. the analogous point is that whilst excess, undeserved, praise need not itself be problematic, it sometimes may be—when the undeserved praise also has other features, as outlined in section 3.e, below. these other features, rather than that it is undeserved, do important explanatory work in articulating the problem. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 who go against societal incentives and norms to participate in parenting and something praiseworthy about men or white people who speak up against systems of gender or racial oppression (systems which uphold them in privileged positions). so, that praise is undeserved is, in isolation, an inadequate diagnosis of what is going wrong here. 3.b. useless praise? crude consequentialists would have a different take on when and whether praise is problematic. on this view, we should deliver praise when it is useful—in promoting more good behaviour, say (see sidgwick 1981, 428). in this instance, then, the issue would be that praise is being doled out when it is not useful to do so. i think there is some mileage in this idea: how helpful is it to be praising someone for doing what is basically expected of them as a parent? how helpful is it to be praising men for being minimally decent, helpful colleagues? how useful is it to praise supposed allies for their superficial engagement with socialist feminism or with movements for racial justice? in each instance, i think it is right to have doubts about praise being likely to produce stable dispositions to act in admirable ways. but there is something dissatisfactory about this diagnosis of what is problematic here. for a start, this line of argument is hostage to empirical fortune. it is vulnerable to the response that praise really is, in fact, helpful in these cases. against a backdrop of norms and social structures that do not support men participating in parenting, say, lavishing them with praise for doing so may encourage them and perhaps even work counter to those norms. this may be a context where praise has a key role in supporting and encouraging those whose moral agency is in development. if it turns out that way, then there’d be no worry here.9 second, if one shares the thought that praise isn’t helpful in these contexts, one might think that there is more to be said about why it isn’t. what is the underpinning explanation for why praise isn’t going to promote stable dispositions to act well here? and does that have something to do with what is ultimately problematic about these dynamics? finally, there is something important in the comparative aspects of the scenarios i described: one parent getting praise when the other does not; (fictional) kevin being praised when (fictional) cathy is not. nothing in the crude consequentialist picture of when praise is justified addresses this. 9 there’s some empirical evidence that praise, construed or communicated in a certain way at least, is unlikely to promote stable motives to act well. see, e.g., deci and ryan (2000) and conway and peetz (2012). see also the concerns i raise about using praise to shape behaviour in 4.b below. holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 3.c. ill-distributed praise a more adequate diagnosis of what seems problematic here looks beyond the individual who is the target of praise and takes up the comparative dimension to the examples here. what is problematic is that this (undeserving) person was praised when that (deserving) person was not. it is the distribution of praise, then, (perhaps given facts about desert as they stand across people) that explains what is problematic about the cases i have described. the idea that praise can be ill-distributed is a compelling one—by analogy, it is easy to agree that someone who consistently praises one of their children but not the other for like behaviours would be guilty of a problematic favouritism, and we would think the unpraised child has been unjustly done by. if this disparity tracks social identity, as in our examples, it goes beyond favouritism and becomes discriminatory. the idea that there is something problematic about this is bolstered if we consider the kind of goods that may be being ill-distributed. recall darwall’s (1977, 38) characterization of “appraisal respect”: “an attitude of positive appraisal of that person either as a person or as engaged in some particular pursuit.” since such an attitude “is like esteem or a high regard for someone” (39), we can see why it might be important to apportion such goods—esteem, high regard—appropriately and proportionately, without favouritism or bias. this is especially so if the discrepancies in praise track whether one is a member of a privileged or disadvantaged group, since much has been written on the forms of psychological oppression—including low self-esteem—that oppressed people may suffer (bartky 1990; benson 1994; shelby 2002, 2005). problematic patterns of praise may well compound these harms to self-esteem, then. they may also reflect, and shore up social hierarchies of esteem and standing, in the ways elizabeth anderson has argued are antithetical to egalitarian social relations. hierarchies of esteem, anderson (2017, 3–4) writes, involve the extraction of “tokens of deferential honour . . . in recognition of the other’s superiority”; hierarchies of standing are those in which “the interests of those of higher rank count in the eyes of others, whereas the interests of inferiors do not: others are free to neglect them.” patterns of praise that track social position entrench both kinds of hierarchy. the worry about the distribution of praise gains support from recent work analysing the problematic distribution of blame. ciurria (2019, 2020) has recently argued that our current practices of attributing responsibility, and blame in particular, serve to absolve perpetrators of certain wrongs—in particular, wrongs that perpetuate oppression. for example, men who rape or abuse women are “disappeared” from public discourse about sexual violence against women, making it difficult to identify and blame them for their role in oppression. instead, blame falls on women for perpetuating their own oppression—for example, by engaging in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 “risky” behaviour, like having a drink or being outside.10 men fail to get the blame they deserve, and women are instead blamed too much. is the picture with praise symmetrical, such that (e.g.) men get too much praise, and women too little? certainly in the examples i have provided, this is the distribution that is at issue. but further empirical research on praise suggests a more complex picture. one might think that a problem with the diagnosis that praise is being ill-distributed is that a bunch of studies suggest that, in some contexts, women receive more praise than men, and people of colour receive more glowing appraisals than white people (biernat and manis 1994; biernat and kobrynowicz 1997; biernat and vescio 2002; biernat et al. 2009; kobrynowicz and biernat 1997). for example, in one study, looking at evaluations of men versus women in sports, participants afforded women more praise than men for commensurate performances (biernat and vescio 2002). in another study, the same performance was more positively appraised (as “better”) when achieved by a black student than the same score achieved by a white student (biernat et al. 2009). these findings are hard to square with the idea that an additional dimension of oppression that people suffer is that praise is asymmetrically distributed, such that women and people of colour end up with a praise deficit. so what is going on here? a closer look suggests a possible response to this worry and fills out our analysis of what is going wrong in our examples. there are two steps to understanding what seems to be going on here. first, one way in which these findings are explained is in terms of the “shifting standards” model, whereby social group membership (whichever group membership is salient in a context) affects the expectations, or standards, to which one is held. the second step, crucially, is that practices of praise are keyed to these social expectations. so, for example, in a sporting context, with gender as the relevant social grouping, women are held to lower expectations than men (who are expected, according to the stereotype, to be more powerful, faster, etc.) (biernat and vescio 2002; see also vial and cimpian 2020, 121–22). where expectations are low, they can be greatly exceeded, and so considerable praise is given to women who surpass those low expectations. commensurate praise is not afforded, for the same level of performance, to those (men) held to higher expectations. but, in fact, as the studies indicate, we know that 10 ciurria makes reference to certain public health materials (also discussed by solnit [2016]) in which such narratives are found. the materials in question, specifically, set out the risks of drinking to women, which include injuries/violence, stds, and unintended pregnancy. these risk factors are presented alongside health risks such as “heart disease, cancer”, with no mention of the behaviour of other parties (male abusers or sexual partners) that might be implicated in the instantiation of these risks. holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 the praise doesn’t reflect the fact that participants thought the women were really better or (actually, unqualifiedly) meritorious: when it came to making selections for the team and determining things for which performance actually mattered (batting order), the women were not picked or prioritised. so the “excess” praise here, one might respond, can’t really be thought of as “levelling up” with the praise inequities in the examples i set out. whilst superficially, more praise is communicated, it isn’t accompanied by any of the attendant goods. it does not express genuine evaluation of unqualified merit and high regard, or it doesn’t convey actual esteem. or consider the finding that black students were appraised as “better” than the white students who received the same standardised test score (biernat et al. 2009). this appraisal is indexed to the stereotype-informed low expectations of black students, compared to white students, leading to the “wow” factor when those expectations are exceeded. again, the study showed that participants didn’t really think the black students were better. when asked to predict future test scores, they estimated higher scores for the white rather than black students. so again, we might think this doesn’t really address any racialised praise inequities of the sort identified earlier, since this isn’t conveying actual esteem or serving as a genuine evaluation of merit. so the worry about whether the goods attendant on praise are ill-distributed still stands. does this response give us reason to doubt that the praise identified in our earlier examples (section 2) is “really” praise? if shaped by, for example, low expectations of men who parent, or help, or superficially commit to justice movements, then is the praise being talked of there also failing to convey an evaluation of real merit or of actual esteem? one reason not to be swayed by this thought is that, in at least some of those cases, real reward also follows the praise. in the studies by heilman and chen, men’s helpful behaviour was recognised and resulted in organisational reward recommendations (salary increase, promotion, bonus pay). other studies show that when men parent, they are not only praised for it, as in our examples above, but reap institutional rewards that women do not. in a well-known study, correll, benard, and paik (2007) evaluated the impact of being identified as a parent on application materials. they found that equally good application materials were evaluated as demonstrating less competence and commitment, warranting a lower starting salary, and judged as less promotable and less suitable for senior management, when the applications contained information that revealed that the applicant was a mother. conversely, fathers were not similarly penalised but rather judged to be more committed, deserving of a higher starting salary, more promotable, and more suitable for senior management.11 both 11 for a more recent study confirming these findings, see gonzález, cortina, and rodríguez (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 entitlement to material benefits and various cultural markers of esteem, then, seem to line up with the unequal praise in a way that suggests that these instances of praise, for those in socially privileged positions, really do track judgements of merit and esteem (rather than simply surprise at lower expectations being exceeded). moreover, that these judgements of esteem translate to—that is, justify and prop up the unequal distribution of—material rewards is a further reason for serious concern about these patterns of appraisal. so there does seem to be a problematic distribution of praise—and in particular the judgements of merit and expressions of esteem—across people, tracking people’s status in oppressive hierarchies. worse, studies suggest that these distributions of appraisal support material inequities. still, one might think that the framework these studies provide helps us in pointing to a deeper understanding of what the problem is. 3.d. shifting standards and expectations the “shifting standards” model mentioned above draws our attention to the fact that, in practice, appraisals appear to track expectations, which in turn are informed by stereotypes (vial and cimpian, 2020). part of that seems to involve excessive praise when unreasonably low expectations are surpassed. but the other part of that concerns unreasonably high expectations. in the context of appraising parents, women are stereotypically expected to do more caring and nurturing work than men (who are expected to be less present, less involved in the physical and emotional care of their families) (kobrynowicz and biernat 1997). where men and women were commensurately appraised as “good parents,” however, this reflected vastly different expectations—women who were appraised as good parents were expected to do way more care work than men to earn that accolade. the overall picture, then, is that stereotypes shape expectations, and praise is accorded in line with those expectations. in summarising the relationship between stereotype informed expectations and appraisals, vial and cimpian (2020, 123) note that stereotypes can shape not only the intensity (how much praise) but also the type of feedback (praise or criticism). thus, a man might be praised for something more (with greater intensity) than a woman or might receive praise for something a woman would be criticised for (see khader and lindauer 2020; stramondo 2020). this suggests a deeper diagnosis of the problem as one whereby praise is shaped by stereotypes, which inform expectations.12 the problem, then, is not that 12 vial and cimpian distinguish between descriptive stereotypes (generalisations about how group members are) and prescriptive stereotypes (which also contain normative requirements about how individuals should be). they note that when prescriptive stereotypes apply, failure to conform to stereotype also affects the holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 there is some undeserved or useless praise. on this analysis the problem is that there are stereotyped (low or high) expectations, which inform whether or not someone is praised for exceeding those expectations. practices of praise, then, are also tracking and shoring up problematic social role expectations. this is an important aspect of the analysis, as it reveals the mechanisms by which praise can be implicated in entrenching oppressive norms. 3.e. the hybrid view: shifting standards and asymmetric judgements of merit and esteem whilst i find this framework of shifting standards helpful and illuminating, my overall analysis (drawing on the argument of section 3.c) departs from vial and cimpian’s: i have argued that in some of these instances (namely, those in which members of oppressed groups are held to low expectations), there is reason to suppose that what is expressed does not communicate any unqualified judgement of merit or expression of high regard or esteem. my view is that there are shifting standards and stereotyped expectations, but that this analysis needs to be supplemented by the analysis of the goods that praise communicates as asymmetrically distributed. thus on the hybrid view, there are various different problems with the patterns of praise i have identified. first, as we have just seen, there are cases in which supposed praise isn’t tracking merit or esteem but rather something like surprise at having (stereotype-informed, low) expectations surpassed (the sportswomen, the black students). these instances of purported praise are problematic in masking the fact that these appraisals are not genuine, unqualified judgements of merit or expressions of esteem. second, there are cases in which stereotypes inform (high) expectations, such that meeting them becomes unnoteworthy for members of the stereotyped social group (women who are parents, women’s helping behaviour in workplaces, people of colour’s labour for racial justice). thus, actually praiseworthy behaviour is not visible. in institutional settings, moreover, it goes (asymmetrically) unrewarded, entrenching social hierarchies. further, unequal expectations are entrenched, which serves to perpetuate oppressive norms. third, those in positions of privilege—already commanding respect and esteem—are sometimes held (perhaps not unreasonably) to low expectations also (in particular with respect to their roles in dismantling oppressive structures). moreover, they are—and expect to be—excessively praised for meeting or exceeding these low expectations (white allies, the daddy dividend, global evaluation of the person (e.g., how likable they are). they also note that praise or criticism for conforming (or not) to a stereotype is more marked in the case of prescriptive stereotypes (see vial and cimpian 2020, 123). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 eastman and dell).13 yet in this case, the praise does seem to correlate with patterns of reward and judgements of esteem, in ways which indicate that those in socially privileged positions enjoy a monopoly of genuine (if unwarranted) esteem. the problem, then, is not that there is some praise which is undeserved or not useful, nor simply that there are stereotype informed expectations. nor is it simply that there is some problematic distribution of praise. it is the conjunction of the role of stereotyped expectations, and the asymmetric attributions of appraisal respect and esteem, favouring those in positions of privilege, that is problematic in the cases described. 4. what’s the solution? if this is the problem, then what should we do about it? that will depend on one’s conception of what our practices of praise (and blame) are for. my focus in this section is on the issue of how to address “the praise gap” in the world, and on the theoretical tools available to us in thinking about this. there remain further, here unaddressed, questions about the broader theoretical implications for accounts of moral responsibility practices. 4.a. tracking moral worth we have already encountered the (commonsense) idea that our practices of apportioning praise and blame are supposed to track moral worth. on this view, we should rectify our practices so that praise—genuine esteem and judgement of moral merit—is accorded where it is deserved. that would mean sometimes—in the sorts of cases i described—praising women more and people of colour more, such that the expressions of esteem and high regard people receive is more commensurate with the merits demonstrated. it would also mean ensuring that the praise is underpinned by judgements of merit unmoderated by stereotyped expectation, and that it communicates genuine esteem. but how much more praise is due? the problem with such a remedial strategy is that it is pretty difficult to get a grip on exactly how much praise is deserved. second, this strategy is especially challenging 13 note the complex intersection of the gendered dimensions of the “daddy dividend” with ableism that stramondo highlights, though. as a disabled parent, he writes, he was aware that expectations were so low, his competence to parent would be challenged: “there is this presumption that the disabled parent is inherently an inadequate parent. . . . the stakes are incredibly high. how long would it take for me to lose father of the year status, for example, if one of my kids were to be even minorly injured while under my care in public? . . . we believed that it was not a question of if child services would be called on us, but when” (stramondo 2020, 9). holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 insofar as our practices—including our judgements of moral worth—are shaped by socially oppressive hierarchies, insofar as we expect, and communicate that we expect, different virtues from men and women, white people and people of colour, able bodied and disabled people. if differential standards of moral worth are applied to different social groups, then attempts to track moral worth are likely to end up tracking distorted conceptions of moral worth.14 moreover, as we saw, there are some occasions—in particular those concerned with moral development—when it may be important to praise whether or not it is deserved—to encourage or support, say. so aiming for only deserved praise seems both insufficient and undesirable. 4.b. shaping behaviour on the crude consequentialist view, we saw that praise was justified if it produced good outcomes—increased moral behaviour, say. i raised doubts about whether the problematic patterns of praising are well suited to that goal. so, on this view, we should revise our practices so that praise really is useful in producing more or better moral behaviours. this seems a pretty fraught endeavour to me. one might think, as noted, that praise is helpful in getting people to do more of something (that’s at least the assumption at work in praising children). but on the other hand, there’s some evidence that praise can—under some conditions— undermine later motivation to act well: this seems to be especially likely when praise is supposed to function like a reward, to condition motives for good behaviour; or if it fosters compensatory beliefs, such that people feel they’ve shown themselves to be morally “good enough” (deci and ryan 2000; conway and peetz 2012). this view also faces well-known worries about manipulation, and treating moral agents like beings to be conditioned rather than subjects of moral address (see vargas 2013). moreover, using praise—or overpraising—to encourage certain dispositions risks being experienced as patronising or condescending, especially if the praisee is attuned to the low expectations underpinning the high praise. consider the troubled responses to the high praise in the testimonies of lindauer and khader and of stramondo, above. understanding that one is being told, for example, “you’re doing great—for a father” or “that was an amazing performance— 14 there is some literature on the way oppression can shape moral agency and in particular the virtues, but as far as i know this has not connected up to the shaping of moral agency with practices of appraisal specifically. tessman’s burdened virtues (2005) for example, examines the way that oppressive social contexts can hinder the development of virtues or can require those in oppressed positions to develop distinctive virtues to combat oppression which come at a cost to the self. see also dillon (2012). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 for a woman” makes explicit the stereotypes involved and thereby how disrespectful those underpinning stereotypes are. further, part of what seems disrespectful about using praise for this purpose is that it also suggests that the recipients of praise lack the maturity to engage with constructive criticism. feedback needn’t be praise to be helpful. what is more likely to be helpful, and less morally fraught, than trying to manipulate with praise, one might think, is a frank discussion of, for example, expectations about parenting roles and why they are so warped; or expectations for white people about engaging in antiracism and the dynamics of their doing so.15 4.c. eliminating praise one might think that we would do better to just get rid of these aspects of the responsibility system. eliminativists have tended to focus on the potentially problematic aspects of blame, such as the “strike back” emotions that it may involve (see waller 2011, 2014). if praise has problematic aspects, as i have argued, then might our practices of praise too be targeted by the eliminativist: we should simply give up on our practices of praise. one worry is that this is something of a “baby out with the bath water” strategy. we give up on all praise because some aspects of it are problematic. moreover, social life without praise seems a pretty bleak prospect. would it require withholding all of those utterances of “well done,” “good job,” “nice effort”? would it require withholding from judgements that, say, that person is admirable, this person courageous, this person kind? not only would that be extremely psychologically challenging (see ciurria 2019; vargas 2013), it also looks rather undesirable. one would hope that these kinds of judgements and communications can be preserved, but in a way that better reflects genuine moral qualities, rather than tainted by oppressive stereotypes. 4.d. ameliorating praise some have suggested that we can avoid eliminativism and address concerns about our responsibility system by revising or ameliorating it. as vargas (2013, 75) argues, “when there is some reason to revise, rather than eliminate, elimination looks like a hasty and unmotivated option.” the sorts of revisions that have recently been proposed lead us to functionalist accounts of our practices of holding responsible, whereby they can be justified if they serve a particular function.16 for vargas, that function is improving the moral sensibilities of those engaged in the practice (see also mcgeer, 2019). for our practices of praising to be justified, on this view, we would have to find a way of praising that really did improve the moral 15 one might think that forward-looking considerations do have some role in our practices of responsibility. i consider this in 4.d below. 16 i am overall sympathetic to these approaches; see holroyd (2018). holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 agency of those praised—a practice that stabilised dispositions to share parenting equally, for altruism irrespective of gender, for genuine commitment to and solidarity with emancipatory social movements, say. but this will of course require not only changes to our practices of praise but also to social and institutional structures so that they, for example, facilitate participation in parenting of both parents, enable cross-racial understanding and solidarity, and more equitably reward altruism (creating, in vargas’s [2017] later terms, the “moral ecology” to support better agency). an alternative functionalist account has recently been proposed, which focuses on the relationship of the responsibility system to emancipatory social goals. our practices of blaming can be justified, ciurria (2019, 15; 2020) argues, if they serve the emancipatory aims of an intersectional feminism. on ciurria’s view, apt blame tracks people’s contributions to oppressive systems (it is not agency tracking, importantly). this functionalist view might seem particularly promising in application to praise, given the considerations i have raised here: apt praise tracks (inter alia) contributions to ending oppression.17 but, in addition to applying ciurria’s functionalist view to praise specifically, there is reason to elaborate on it, by noting the reflexivity of that norm for praiseworthiness: it applies to itself, and our practices of praise should themselves avoid entrenching oppression and instead serve emancipatory goals. what i am proposing is that our practices of praise should be structured by plural reasons, including backward-looking desert-based reasons, and forward-looking reasons concerned with improving moral agency. but crucially, a further set of reasons should be considered in determining whether praise should be apportioned: reasons to do with challenging and dismantling oppression. this 17 i think there are some concerns with ciurria’s (2019, 18) proposal of moving away from some of the “agency tracking” aspects of our practices of moral responsibility, especially with respect to blame. but these concerns are less applicable to praise, since our practices of praise are often geared towards cultivating, rather than tracking, moral agency. on the other hand, however, it is important that, in levelling up praise, appraisals are not done purely for pragmatic reasons but in actual recognition of merit (these might be merits instantiated in cultivating moral agency, or in showing excellences of it). a related anecdotal insight: after delivering this paper, audience members have reported finding subsequent instances of praising weird, finding that they have to take pains to emphasise that it is genuine and not just for the sake of “levelling up” esteem. this relates to the concerns with using praise to shape behaviour articulated in 4.b. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 means that we should (a) praise contributions to ending oppression18 and (b) reform our practices of praise so that they themselves serve emancipatory goals. what would this proposal look like, specifically? looking back at our examples, in the case of the “daddy dividend,” the problem was diagnosed as there being unjustifiable inequities in praise and esteem, and that these are grounded in asymmetrical expectations about men’s and women’s roles in parenting. an ameliorated system of praising, focused on ending oppression, would readjust these expectations, such that men are not judged and praised in relation to the stereotype-informed low standard (much less rewarded for their performance in relation to it). instead, expectations would be modified to be consistent with emancipatory goals: holding men to higher, and perhaps women to lower, expectations. and, as suggested above, social institutions and structures beyond practices of responsibility would also need reshaping to support this. moreover, the genuine merits of women who parent would be recognised and esteemed rather than ignored, devalued or, worse, penalised. in our current, nonideal world, what might the first steps towards ameliorating praise be? to avoid entrenching problematic stereotypes and perpetuating inequities of esteem, we could either level up, level down, or redistribute praise. one might think that praise is not a finite resource—in principle, we could just generate more praise to go around. perhaps that is sometimes possible, and when it is, that may be desirable. in that instance, levelling up might seem like a good option, since (as noted in sections 3.a and 3.b) there are some desert-based and forward-looking considerations that may speak in favour of praising men who, in current circumstances, work against gender norms to participate more fully in parenting. the problem is that women who parent are not in receipt of commensurate praise (either with their performance or with the praise men receive), and this should be rectified by elevating our appraisals of women’s contributions to parenting and merits thereby demonstrated. however, in practice, given constraints on time, energy, and attention, praise may turn out to be a finite resource. if so, levelling up is not a realistic option. if practices of praise are responsive to reasons of moral worth, encouraging moral sensitivity, and challenging oppression, then careful consideration is needed about what would best serve the balance of these reasons.19 given the devaluation of women’s care, and other available means for encouraging men to participate in parenting, my view is 18 this is one of the goals of our responsibility system; i am sympathetic to the idea that our practices of moral appraisal may have plural goals, of which emancipation is just one. 19 see considerations raised in sections 3.a and 3.b. holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 that redistributing praise seems to me the best option here: women, rather than men, should be praised.20 in the dynamics revealed in heilman and chen’s studies, the problem was diagnosed as there being unjustifiable inequities in praise and esteem grounded in the stereotype-informed asymmetrical expectations of men and women with respect to service—how women are routinely expected to be more helpful to others than men. an ameliorated system of praising would work with modified expectations about helpfulness, and judgements of merit and esteem would track whether those egalitarian—rather than stereotype-informed—expectations are met. thus, when women display altruism, this would be recognised and rewarded appropriately. in our current nonideal world, working towards ameliorated praise here seems to require redistributing praise. in the sorts of contexts heilman and chen’s studies speak to—workplace evaluations—the role of praise is to inform ordinal rankings and the distribution of organisational reward. levelling up is clearly not possible here (not everyone can be employee of the month, or get the bonus or promotion). this seems like the sort of case, then, in which corrective measures are needed—acknowledgement of the discriminatory patterns of appraisal, and explicit determinations to rectify these to avoid entrenching problematic norms, unjust distributions of positions of esteem, and attendant material goods. and, in some instances, ensuring that women get proper esteem and standing will mean that men get less. in the case of superficial allies (the strategic socialist feminists and the recently arrived white allies), the problem was diagnosed as there being unjustifiable inequities in praise and esteem grounded in the asymmetrical expectations of men and women, and of white people and people of colour, regarding their involvement in—and how much they are expected to sacrifice for— movements for social justice. an ameliorated system of praise would modify expectations of would-be allies, holding them to higher standards. moreover, the contributions and work of those who sacrifice much in these movements—for example, crystal eastman and ida rauh, in the case of the socialist feminists; alicia garza, opal tometi, and patrisse cullors, cofounders of the blm us movement; joshua virasami of blm uk;21 and tyrek morris, cofounder of the youth-led all black 20 this would need to be done carefully though, to avoid valorisations of women’s care that reinforce stereotypes of women as “nurturers” or “natural mothers.” 21 as reported, though, many of the cofounders and leaders of blm uk remain anonymous for fear of far right and police harassment. see cole (2020) and mcintosh (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 lives uk—would be rendered more visible, recognised, and appropriate esteem and admiration afforded to them. in our nonideal current context, working towards ameliorated praise seems to require both explicit acknowledgement and resolve to address discriminatory patterns of appraisal, as well as—perhaps for strategic reasons, in some contexts— withholding praise from feminist men or white people allied to the movements.22 given the role that discriminatory appraisals can play in entrenching problematic distributions of recognition and esteem, allies would surely recognise that their praiseworthiness—to the degree that they are—does not take priority over remedying the problems of ill-distributed esteem or high regard and the material rewards that often track these. ameliorated practices of praise would work to make visible the problematic stereotypes underpinning existing practices of praising; to readjust expectations towards more equitable goals, and to distribute praise—judgements of merit and expressions of esteem—accordingly. i have suggested that working towards an ameliorated practice of praise, in our current nonideal context, requires case-bycase consideration of how best to address unequal expectations and inequitable distributions of praise. 5. conclusion i hope to have shed light on an aspect of the literature on moral responsibility that has received little attention—the ethics of praise. whilst there has been much attention to blame, including more recently to its oppressive aspects, my aim was to show that an ethics of praise is much needed, and in particular, that any approach to evaluating our practices of praising needs to recognise the ways that oppressive dynamics shape this part of our responsibility system. this work points to broader, challenging theoretical questions about philosophical approaches to moral responsibility. if our practices are systematically unjust and shaped by oppressive social hierarchies, then there is work to be done in considering carefully the implications of this for approaches to moral responsibility that take our social practices as a key part of their methodological and justificatory framework (e.g., strawson 1974; wallace 1994; mcgeer 2019). 22 the sorts of contexts i have in mind as exceptions may be ones where, e.g., feminist men or antiracist white people support each other’s participation in the movement and consolidate motivations to participate, but where any praise communicated is carefully pitched to ensure it does not entrench problematic dynamics (of “saviourism”, e.g.). holroyd – oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 however, my focus here has been principally on the reasons that might structure our practices of praise, and how those practices might be ameliorated to address “the praise gap”. as long as our expectations are shaped by gender oppression, racism, ableism, and other vectors of oppression, our practices of praise are vulnerable to distortion. they may entrench problematic 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disability, and the violent undercurrents of parenting inspiration porn.” apa newsletter on feminism and philosophy 19 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 26 (2): 8–9. https://www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/d03ebdab-82d74b28-b897-c050fdc1acb4/feminismv19n2.pdf. strawson, peter. f. 1974. freedom and resentment, and other essays. london: methuen publishing. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. oxford: oxford university press. tognazzini, neal, and d. justin coates. 2018. “blame.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2018 edition. published april 15, 2014, substantive revision august 17, 2018. https://plato.stanford .edu/archives/fall2018/entries/blame/. vargas, manuel. 2013. building better beings: a theory of moral responsibility. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2017. “implicit bias, responsibility, and moral ecology.” in oxford studies in agency and responsibility, vol. 4, edited by david shoemaker, 219–47. oxford: oxford university press. vial, andrea. c., and andrei cimpian. 2020. “evaluative feedback expresses and reinforces cultural stereotypes.” in psychological perspectives on praise, edited by eddie brummelman, 119–28. london: routledge. wallace, r. jay. 1994. responsibility and the moral sentiments. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. waller, bruce n. 2011. against moral responsibility. cambridge, ma: mit press. ———. 2014. the stubborn system of moral responsibility. cambridge, ma: mit press. jules holroyd is a lecturer in the department of philosophy at the university of sheffield, uk. jules has worked on topics in moral psychology, social philosophy, and feminist philosophy, and has published on moral emotions, relational autonomy, implicit bias, and epistemic injustices, in venues such as cognition and consciousness, philosophical topics, and the journal of the american philosophical association. jules is co-director of the centre for engaged philosophy (https://engagedphilosophy.org/). 13967 holroyd title page 13967 holroyd final format racial injustice and information flow feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 4 article 4 recommended citation bayruns garcía, eric. 2021. “racial injustice and information flow.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (4). article 4. 2021 racial injustice and information flow eric bayruns garcía california state university, san bernardino e.bayruns.garcia@gmail.com bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 racial injustice and information flow eric bayruns garcía abstract i submit that the critical epistemology of race and standpoint literature has not explicitly focused on the properties of information about racial or gender injustice in a way similar to how epistemologists have focused on propositions and information when they describe propositional justification. i present an account of information flow in which i describe information in the racial-injustice-information domain in a way similar to how epistemologists describe propositional justification. to this end, i argue (c1) that if subjects in racially unjust societies tend to violate norms that promote a community’s reliable information flow because racial prejudice is widely held in racially unjust societies, then racial injustice can make information flow less reliably in a community. and i argue (c2) that if racial prejudice can make information flow less reliably in a community, then information that nondominant subjects are more likely to have will less reliably flow to community members who lack it. keywords: racial injustice, race, identity, epistemic injustice, information flow, epistemic communities, identity prejudice epistemologists have taken up how social injustice can affect the transmission of information from speakers to hearers (alcoff 1999, 2007, 2014; bayruns garcía 2019, 2020; collins 1990; davis 2016, 2018; dotson 2011; fricker 2007, 2016; hookway 2010; el kassar 2018; kukla 2014; medina 2013; mills 1997, 2007; peet 2017; pohlhaus 2012; woomer 2019). and others have taken up how a community’s features can promote information transmission independent of social injustice qua community feature (alston 1994; goldberg 2010, 2018; goldman 2008, 1987, 1999, 2015; goldman and cox 1996; greco 2016, 2017; kitcher 1990; zollman 2007). but epistemologists have not taken up social injustice’s effect on whether information about social injustice itself flows properly through a community. epistemologists have not drawn out the epistemic consequences of epistemic injustice phenomena such as agential insensitivity, testimonial injustice, testimonial quieting, testimonial smothering, participatory injustice, and white ignorance for how well or poorly information flows through communities and even societies (dotson 2011; fricker 2007; hookway 2010; mills 2007; woomer 2019). they have not drawn feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 out these consequences because they have focused on subjects as the target of analysis. i draw out these consequences because i focus on information of a particular kind or with a particular kind of content as the analysis target. this change in target of analysis matters because there is an epistemic upshot for information-set kinds where this upshot is distinct from epistemic upshots that obtain for subjects in the individualistic or doxastic sense. that “black and white persons do not have equal opportunity in the us job market” is an example of the informational content that falls within the scope of the information kind i focus on. some evidence that this information does not flow well through society is that according to a gallup poll, 69 percent of white people in the us believe that black and white people have equal opportunity in the us job market (jones 2016). that “new york police department officer pantaleo is guilty of murdering eric garner, a black man from staten island, new york,” is an example of this content. evidence that this information’s flow is depressed is that only 47 percent of white people in new york state believed this, even though 90 percent of black people did (snyder et al. 2017). that “the us has not done enough to remedy racial injustice” is another example of this content. despite the protests in the wake of the murders of george floyd, breonna taylor, and ahmaud arbery, the percentage of white people who believed the negation of this information decreased from 62 percent to 60 percent (horowitz et al. 2020). i will draw out the epistemic consequences of epistemic injustices for how well or poorly information flows where i focus on information that nondominant-group members are more likely to have than dominant-group members. but one might think that critical epistemologists of race and standpoint theorists have already described how systemic injustice relates to how well or poorly information about racial or gender injustice flows through a community. for example, charles mills (2007) has pointed to “structural group-based miscognition,” and gaile pohlhaus jr. (2012) has described how dominant-group members will tend not to use the interpretative resources that nondominant-group members develop. here they describe bad epistemic states that dominant-group members are in and how their group membership relates to these epistemic states. these philosophers helpfully describe the doxastic attitudes that these subjects bear toward content in the domain of systemic-injustice information. a subject’s doxastic attitude is the attitude she bears toward some content. epistemologists invoke the notion of the “doxastic” to distinguish between doxastic justification and propositional justification (goldman 1979; silva and oliveira, forthcoming; volpe 2017). a proposition is propositionally justified if a subject could be epistemically justified were she to believe it. propositional justification need not involve any cognitive commitment or belief on the part of a subject. as a result, epistemologists can describe either the phenomenon of epistemic justification in bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 terms of the cognitive commitments that subjects instantiate or, on the other hand, the propositions or information themselves to which subjects can cognitively commit. thus, when epistemologists describe propositional justification, they primarily describe features of information rather than features of subjects. i submit that the critical epistemology of race and standpoint literature has not explicitly focused on the properties of information about, say, racial or gender injustice in a way similar to how epistemologists have focused on propositions and information when they describe propositional justification. i present the account of information flow that follows to describe information in the racial-injusticeinformation domain in a way similar to how epistemologists describe propositional justification. white ignorance, testimonial quieting, standpoint, meta-ignorance, testimonial injustice, and epistemic appropriation are just a few of the phenomena that critical race epistemologists and feminist epistemologists have described that involve how systemic injustice can affect whether subjects accurately or inaccurately believe (mills 2007; dotson 2011; medina 2013; fricker 2007; davis 2018). but a central feature of these phenomena is systemic injustice’s causal influence on a subject’s doxastic state relative to information where this information need not be systemic-injustice information. for instance, someone is in a white-ignorant state if she believes, say, a false claim in the domain of science because of white supremacy or anti-black racism. here mills describes a doxastic phenomenon rather than some property of information, even though one of white ignorance’s most important consequences is that white subjects will tend to get things wrong about racial injustice. a similar case is how standpoint theorists describe how nondominant subjects’ doxastic states differ from dominant subjects in the domain of injustice in terms of these states’ accuracy. in contrast, i describe information flow of a specific informational set which is a property of information rather than subjects. take the following case. suppose that marisol, an afro-latina, tells chad, a white anglo-saxon protestant man, that she did not get a financial-market-analyst job she is eminently qualified for because (1) employers falsely thought she did not have the requisite analytical skills and (2) because of economic obligations that her parents and siblings expected her to fulfill such that she ultimately had to take a less remunerative bookkeeping job. suppose that this is accurate testimonial information regarding racial injustice that nondominant groups such as afro-latinas are more likely to have than dominant-group members. but suppose that chad does not believe marisol partly because he misperceives her as untrustworthy due to a negative identity prejudice he bears against afro-latinas. chad’s misperception of marisol not only is an interpersonal phenomenon, but it also partly constitutes racial injustice’s effect on the flow of information in their group or community. here, chad is less likely to communicate this information to other subjects and thus he contributes to making feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 the flow of information poorer in his community. and if other dominant-group members, like chad, also tend to misperceive nondominant members, like marisol, then information that nondominant members are more likely to have will flow less reliably through this community. so, here, information of a certain kind is less likely than other information to flow well through a community because information of this kind is more likely to encounter situations such as this one between chad and marisol. here i describe a property of one kind of information relative to another kind of information where i take a difference in these two kinds to inhere in the content of the information. in this paper, i argue (c1) that if subjects in racially unjust societies tend to violate norms that promote a community’s reliable information flow because racial prejudice is widely held in racially unjust societies, then racial injustice can make information flow less reliably in a community. i also argue (c2) that if racial prejudice can make information flow less reliably in a community, then information that nondominant subjects are more likely to have will less reliably flow to community members who lack it. i understand “information” as true information, and i refer to information that is not true as “false information.” i also assume that if racial injustice obtains in a community, then racial prejudice is widely held, either consciously or subpersonally, by subjects in this community. i employ the notion of information flow, where information is transmitted in a community from speakers, groups, or institutions who have it to others who lack it through mechanisms such as face-to-face testimonial exchanges. the analysis that i present is a structural one rather than an individualist one. accordingly, i take it that the norms that i appeal to are norms that society and its constituent parts, such as communities and groups, can comport with rather than individuals. so, even though i refer to individuals to explain how structural phenomenon and information relate to injustice, i assume that these norms are not action guiding for individuals. in section 1, i describe a view of what an epistemic community consists in, and i argue that if a subset of a community’s members systematically violates norms that promote reliable information flow, then information will flow less reliably in this community. in section 2, i argue that if racial prejudice is widely held in a community, then a subset of the community’s members will systematically tend to violate norms that govern a its reliable information flow. in section 3, i argue that if racial injustice obtains in a community, then information that nondominant groups are more likely to have will unreliably flow in a community. bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 1 in this section, i describe a view of what an epistemic community consists in, and i argue that if a subset of a community’s members systematically tends to violate norms that promote reliable information flow, then information will flow less reliably in this community. 1.1. epistemic communities suppose that i know that a highly regarded philosopher gave a talk at my department’s weekly colloquium yesterday, because i read an email and a social media post that a departmental administrator sent. this is an example of information flowing from (i) individuals in a community that have information to (ii) individuals that lack it because a community member with information that other community members lack shared it with other community members through an email. here, the community is the group of philosophers, philosophy students, and administrators who are involved with doing philosophy in this university. that is, this group shares a practical task that depends on sharing information. communities can be understood politically, culturally, religiously, legally, and so on. here, i understand and describe communities epistemically. john greco provides this rough definition of an epistemic community: a collection of cognitive agents, joined in relationships of cooperation, with respect to one or more information-dependent practical tasks. (greco 2016, 491) greco (2016) understands practical tasks to include theoretical tasks such as asking questions and solving problems. on greco’s view, epistemic communities have norms that regulate both information acquisition and information distribution such that its members reliably receive information that is relevant to accomplishing its practical task or tasks. greco (2016, 491) thinks that a person can simultaneously belong to more than one epistemic community. and greco thinks that epistemic communities can consist in things such as universities, private corporations, work details, governments, government agencies, families and circles of friends (greco 2016, 491). greco takes up the notions of an epistemic community and information flow because he thinks they can help explain (1) why some testimony cases seem like cases where a hearer knows that p on the basis of a speaker’s say-so and (2) why other cases feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 seem like testimony cases where a speaker’s say-so cannot serve as a basis for a hearer to know that p. 1.2. identity and epistemic communities suppose that marisol and chad both hold business degrees from the prestigious wharton school of business. they are part of a group of colleagues from wharton who are now on the financial-analyst job market. they exchange information and inform each other of their successes and failures where they aim to share best practices and practices that did not work. marisol and chad, on greco’s view, belong to the epistemic community of wharton graduates who are attempting to secure employment for which they were trained. that is, they share an “information-dependent practical task” because the likelihood that the group’s members are successful in the job market is increased if information flows reliably from those who have it to those who do not. but suppose that marisol is one of two afro-latinas in this wharton-graduate epistemic community. the information she has is not likely to flow to those who do not have it because of racial injustice’s effect on whether subjects in this community comply with the information-distribution-and-acquisition norms. their informationdependent practical task qua helping each other secure a job in part depends on information flowing because they can only advise each other relative to the information that they all share. so, here, racial injustice and identity play a role in whether information reliably flows in this community such that they are more likely to accomplish their shared practical task. now, some job market advice that is good advice for chad will not be good advice for marisol because men can present themselves in ways that women cannot due to structural sexism and because white persons can present themselves in ways that afro-latinx persons cannot due to structural racism. but there will be some advice that will be good advice for both of them, despite the fact that their identities differ, and there will be advice that, say, marisol has that will only be relevant for the other afro-latina in the group. so, here, racial injustice and identity not only impede the flow of advice that does not involve racial-injustice-related content but will also impede content that does relate to racial injustice. and if a condition of the group’s success is that the afro-latinas’ odds of success are promoted by the group’s activities, then that the flow of racial-injustice information is depressed will tend to depresses the likelihood that the group satisfies this success condition. 1.3. information flow suppose that a philosophy department constitutes an epistemic community. and suppose that there are two groups that compose this community—namely, the political philosophers and the metaphysicians. jose, a political philosopher, tells bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 william, a metaphysician, that there will be a colloquium held next week in room 1000. william tells other philosophers in the department who in turn tell other philosophers such that this information reaches most of the department’s members. here, william believed what jose told him on the basis of his say-so; and as a result, information flowed from jose to william, and in turn william passed this information on as testimony such that it continued to flow to others. by john greco’s (2016) lights, william is acting in accordance with a norm that governs good, or what i will call reliable, information flow in an epistemic community. greco calls this the norm of information distribution. communities have an interest in information moving through them without much hinderance or fettering. by greco’s lights, when a hearer believes a speaker merely in virtue of her say-so, she does so because this speaker belongs to the same community as the speaker. if a speaker belongs to a hearer’s community, then she should believe the speaker because the information is not likely false. the basic idea is that if a community has an interest in promoting the distribution of information once it is inside a community and a community member tells another community member something, then this speaker should believe her because the community has an interest in the information’s efficient distribution through the community. and i as a community member should believe what a fellow community member tells me because this information that my fellow community attempts to convey has likely been subject to someone in my community taking an interrogative stance towards it. that is, if someone from outside my community asserts something to someone who belongs to my community, then it is unlikely that this community member will have believed this community nonmember only on the basis of her say-so. suppose that simon, a historian, tells william that a philosophy of science view is wrong. and suppose that william does not immediately believe him in virtue of his say-so. he does not trust him. here, by john greco’s lights, william acts in accordance with a second norm that governs reliable information flow in a community—namely, the norm of information acquisition. communities have an interest in letting information in and keeping false information out. simon does not belong to william’s philosophical community, and as a result, william does not immediately believe his testimony regarding this philosophy of science view. suppose that william, instead of immediately believing simon, asks him questions and interrogates his claim about this philosophy of science view. here, william holds simon to a higher standard before he believes his claim and thus allows it entry into his community. the basic idea here is that if a community’s members act in accordance with the norms of distribution and acquisition, then this community increases the likelihood that information will enter the community and spread through the community. put differently, these norms promote that false information is kept out feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 of a community and that information, once in a community, reliably makes its way to the members who lack it. 1.4. systematic norm violation if a community reliably violates the norms of information acquisition and distribution, then the community will not reliably acquire or distribute information. and, if a community’s members systematically act in accordance with the norm of acquisition when they should act in accordance with the norm of distribution, then this community’s information flow will be unreliable. but a community’s members need not be aware of these norms to be properly taken as violating them because these are norms that third-party evaluators use to assess information flow. i take this evaluation as a kind of externalist third-party veritistic evaluation of whether a community’s or society’s social practices cause more true beliefs and fewer false in its members (goldman 1987, 1999). what is more, this externalist veritistic evaluation not only assesses the epistemic end result for subjects of a community’s social epistemic practices but also assesses the consequences for information of a particular kind. suppose that a philosophy department qua community is largely composed of metaphysicians and that the remainder of the department is composed of political philosophers. and suppose that the metaphysicians tend not to believe the political philosophers. but suppose these political philosophers tend to make true testimonial claims. here, the metaphysicians violate the norm of information distribution because they should believe the political philosophers in virtue of their say-so at least partly because they belong to the same community. that is, these metaphysicians violate the norm of information distribution because if the political philosophers are likely to pass on information, then the metaphysicians should believe them. these metaphysicians impede the flow of information that has entered the community. now, suppose that these metaphysicians tend not to believe the political philosophers because they hold a prejudice against them that political philosophers deal with imprecise and unclear things such as justice, rights, and freedom. thus, the prejudice goes, political philosophers are similarly imprecise and unclear about most things. as a result of this prejudice, metaphysicians tend to hold political philosophers to higher standards than other community members. here, these metaphysicians are acting in accordance with the norm of information acquisition when they listen to political-philosopher speakers because of their anti-political-philosopher prejudice, even though they should act in accordance with the norm of distribution when listening to political-philosopher speakers. to put the point differently, these metaphysicians act in accordance with the wrong norm because of their prejudice. and, this mal-accordance results in the community’s information flow suffering, bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 because speakers with information are less likely to successfully pass it on to hearers who lack it. 1.5. evaluative criteria a community’s information flow can be assessed in terms of distribution. if information flows to all of a community’s members, then this community’s information flows well in terms of distribution. but, if this community’s information does not get to members who need it, then this community’s information flows poorly in terms of distribution. alvin goldman (1999) points out that one community’s information-distribution needs can differ from others. a judge, as a member of a legal community, needs information about whether evidence is prejudicial that members of a jury do not need and should not have (goldman 1999). a legal community does well in terms of distribution when its judge gets this information from, say, prosecution and defense attorneys, but juries do not. distribution speed is a second way that information flow can be assessed. if information gets to a community’s members quickly, then this community’s information flows well in terms of distribution speed. but if a community’s information flows slowly, then this community’s information flows poorly in terms of distribution speed. in the philosophy department-community case, information that the political philosophers have may take longer to reach the entire community because the metaphysicians tend not to believe them, and thus this community would likely score poorly in terms of distribution speed because of this anti-politicalphilosopher prejudice. here, the metaphysicians improperly act as an informationdistribution bottleneck. information quality is a third way that information flow can be assessed (greco 2016, 2017). if false information does not flow to a community’s members, then this community’s information flow does well in terms of information quality. but if false information flows to a community’s members, then this community’s information flows poorly in terms of information quality. 2 in this section, i argue that if racial prejudice is widely held in a community, then a subset of a community’s members will systematically violate norms that govern a community’s reliable information flow. 2.1. racial prejudice and the information-distribution norm racial prejudice can affect whether a speaker successfully passes information on to a hearer through testimony in several ways. one way is testimonial injustice. a speaker suffers testimonial injustice if a hearer misperceives her as less credible because of an identity prejudice (fricker 2007). identity prejudices include negative feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 generalizations or stereotypes about an identity group’s members. racial prejudices are a kind of negative identity prejudice. here, a nondominant speaker does not pass on information because of racial prejudice’s effect on her audience’s credibility judgement or perception of her. a second way that racial prejudice can affect whether a speaker successfully passes on information to a hearer is through testimonial quieting. testimonial quieting obtains if a hearer takes, say, a black woman speaker as not in the business of giving knowledge or as not a knower because of a controlling image, racial prejudice, or identity prejudice about black women (dotson 2011). here, information is not passed on because of a controlling image, identity prejudice, or racial prejudice’s effect on whether a hearer takes a nondominant speaker as a knower and thus capable of passing on knowledge. a third way is utterance misinterpretation (peet 2017). utterance misinterpretation obtains if a hearer misinterprets a speaker’s utterance because of an identity or racial prejudice. here, information that a speaker has is not passed on because the hearer misinterprets and thus ends up with different information than what the nondominant speaker intended to pass on. these phenomena represent ways a community’s hearers can violate the norm of information distribution. suppose that marisol is a member of the afro-latina nondominant group and that she attempts to assert true information to alistair, ben, and chad. if (a) alistair commits testimonial injustice, ben commits testimonial quieting, and chad commits utterance misinterpretation, then (b) this information is less likely to be maximally distributed in the community than if these hearers did not instantiate these phenomena. this information is also less likely to be distributed quickly. so, here, racial prejudice impedes this information’s proper distribution because racial prejudice affects hearers’ proper reception of speakers with information. 2.2. racial prejudice and the information-acquisition norm if racial prejudice obtains in a community, then this community’s hearers will tend to act in accordance with the norm of information acquisition even though they should act in accordance with the norm of distribution. testimonial smothering is an example of this. testimonial smothering obtains only if a speaker refrains from fully conveying information because she senses that (1) conveying testimony is unsafe, (2) her audience demonstrates that they are unlikely to find this information intelligible, and (3) the audience cannot find the information intelligible because of pernicious ignorance or racial prejudice (dotson 2011). suppose that marisol and alistair are members of the same community, but marisol is a nondominant-group member, and alistair is an anglo-saxon protestant bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 man and thus a member of the dominant group. suppose that alistair asks marisol what she is writing her dissertation on, and she replies that she is writing about police brutality against black and latinx folks. alistair responds by asking in a skeptical tone, “how does police brutality against black and latinx folks differ from police brutality in general?” here, marisol elects not to respond or explain her dissertation further because the three conditions of testimonial smothering obtain. in particular, alistair has made it clear that he is unlikely to find this information intelligible because of racial prejudice. here, alistair has taken an interrogative or questioning stance because of racial prejudice he bears, and thus he is acting in accordance with the norm of information acquisition even though he should act in accordance with the norm of distribution. he should act in accordance with the norm of distribution because (i) marisol is part of his community, (ii) she has information, and (iii) if he believes her because of her say-so, he will more likely pass this information on. 3 suppose that marisol has information about the difficulties that afro-latinas face when applying for financial-analyst jobs that they are eminently qualified for. in this section, my task is to argue that information of this kind is much less likely to reliably flow to the rest of the community because of racial injustice’s effect on whether subjects act in accordance with norms of information distribution and acquisition. the basic idea here is that information that nondominant-group members are more likely to have is less likely to reach community members who lack it because a community’s subjects tend to violate the information-distribution-and-acquisition norms. and, if a community’s subjects tend to violate these norms, then information they have is less likely to reliably flow through the community because these norms promote reliable information flow. 3.1: nondominant-group information the information that marisol has about the difficulties that afro-latinas face when applying for financial-analyst jobs is information that afro-latinas are more likely to have given their social location. this is information that she is more likely to have because of her social location qua identity. here i assume a standpoint theory view of the relation between identity and a subject’s likelihood of believing the truth about injustice. for nancy hartsock (1987), women’s role in reproduction and caring for family members provides them with a standpoint such that women are more likely than men to know the nature of oppression in a patriarchal society. for patricia hill collins (1990), black women’s experience of both racism and sexism makes it more likely that black women will understand or know how racism and sexism function in society. by linda martín alcoff’s (1999) lights, a subject’s identity can bear on whether she feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 accurately believes in certain domains of information, and thus proper credibility judgements of speakers should involve identity as a criterion. according to w. e. b. du bois, black americans experience a double consciousness that involves seeing the world from their perspective and seeing the world from a white perspective, and as a result, black americans have more knowledge or deeper understanding of how america works and the role that race plays in america (du bois 1903; taylor 2016, 39). a common feature shared by these views is that a subject’s situation increases the likelihood that she knows or understands about injustice or oppression in her society. i assume this common feature that these standpoint views share. 3.2. standpoint information and information flow if (a) afro-latinas qua nondominant-group subjects are more likely to have information about particular difficulties in the job market and (b) afro-latinas are less likely to successfully convey this information through testimony to other dominantgroup members because dominant-group subjects tend not to comply with information-distribution-and-acquisition norms in testimonial exchanges with nondominant groups, then (c) this information is less likely to flow to those who lack it because compliance with these information norms promotes the flow of information in a community. the basic idea here is that racial prejudice not only reduces the likelihood that nondominant racial groups can successfully transmit information in general, but it also reduces the likelihood that they will transmit particular information that they are more likely to have than other groups. and the rest of the wider community will tend to lack this particular information more than other information. this view of information trades on the notion that there are two kinds of information. the first kind is information that afro-latinas qua nondominant group are just as likely to have as other identity groups. the second kind of information is information that afro-latinas qua nondominant group are more likely to have than other groups. this is information that a group has in virtue of their social location. now, these two information kinds not only differ in terms of the likelihood that a subject will have it, where this likelihood depends on a subject’s identity, but these two information kinds also differ in terms of their likelihood of flowing through a community reliably to those who lack it. this information is less likely to flow to those who lack it partly because dominant-group subjects are likely to violate the information-distribution-andacquisition norms due to racial prejudice’s influence on them. but this information is also less likely to flow to those who lack it because dominant-group subjects are likely to reject this information. they are likely to reject this information because standpoint information tends to be inconsistent with dominant-group subjects’ positive selfconception. and this positive self-conception is in part constituted by false core bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 beliefs that are supported by misleading evidence and subjects’ tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance (bendaña and mandelbaum 2021; elliot and devine 1994; mandelbaum 2016, 2019; thibodeau and aronson 1992). 3.3. standpoint information and dominant-group subject positive self-conception if racial injustice obtains in a society, then not only will racial prejudice widely obtain, but dominant-group subjects will tend to hold false core beliefs that are (i) consistent with their positive self-conception, (ii) supported by misleading evidence, and (iii) stubbornly resistant to revision due to subjects’ general tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance. recall that marisol told chad, a white anglo-saxon protestant man, about the particular difficulties that she, as an afro-latina, faced in getting a financial-analyst job despite being eminently qualified. suppose that chad ultimately rejects this information because it is inconsistent with a core belief that partly constitutes his positive self-conception—namely, “i deserve what i have.” this information is inconsistent with this false core belief because if he acknowledges that marisol is unsuccessful in the job market because of unfair disadvantage due to race, then he would have to acknowledge that he has succeeded on the job market because of unfair advantage due to race. and an unfair advantage due to race is inconsistent with his false core belief that “i deserve what i have.” this is an example of what charles mills calls white ignorance because chad’s membership in the dominant racial group plays a role in preventing marisol from conveying information and thus sustaining his ignorance (mills 2007, 34). someone is whitely ignorant if whiteness, racism, or racial injustice plays a role in their lacking a true belief or holding a false belief (mills 2007). michelle moody-adams (1994) has developed the notion that whether a subject accurately believes in such cases relates to a subject’s maintenance of her positive self-conception. she calls it affective ignorance. a subject is affectedly ignorant if she avoids learning moral truths that are incompatible with benefits she enjoys or with her own positive self-conception. a subject such as robert e. lee rejected the immorality of maintaining slavery because if he would have accepted its immorality, then he would have had to recognize not only the immorality of the benefits he enjoyed but also that his positive self-conception of himself as a good person was false. for moody-adams, dominant-group subjects’ moral ignorance allows them to persist in their belief that they are, say, morally good people while simultaneously continuing to benefit from immoral states of affair, such as slavery, that benefit them. beliefs regarding whether subjects are “good people, smart people, and reliable, consistent, strong people” are examples of core beliefs, because they concern positive characteristics of the subjects who hold them (bendaña and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 mandelbaum 2021; mandelbaum 2016, 2019). that is, core beliefs’ content concerns the positive features of those who hold them. suppose that chad, like other dominant-group members, holds his false core belief in part because his society is replete with misleading evidence. elementary and grade school curricula, museums, monuments, statuary, newspapers, and national anthems sung at sporting events are examples of what partly constitute chad’s misleading evidence base (gonzález and torres 2011; mills 2007). that is, this evidence base’s constituents support chad’s belief that “he deserves what he has.” this evidence base misleads in part because hermeneutical marginalization obtains in his society. hermeneutical marginalization involves that a nondominant group unequally contributes to a society’s shared set of concepts and shared social meanings that subjects draw upon to understand each other and the world (fricker 2007). for example, african americans and native americans have had unequal access to positions like journalist, professor, and lawyer, such that they can equally, or proportionately, contribute to the shared set of meanings and concepts that us subjects use to both communicate and understand each other and the world. suppose that chad rejects marisol’s standpoint information partly because of a general tendency subjects have to avoid believing what feels bad (bendaña and mandelbaum 2021; elliot and devine 1994; mandelbaum 2016, 2019; thibodeau and aronson 1992). that is, suppose that subjects’ general propensity to avoid cognitive dissonance explains why he does not believe marisol’s testimony. when chad hears marisol’s testimony, he can resolve the discomfort he feels upon receipt of this evidence by either (a) accepting the new evidence and as a result accepting the information that “i don’t deserve what i have” or (b) rejecting the testimony and as a result retaining his false core belief that “i deserve what i have.” but if subjects typically believe in ways that allow them to retain their core beliefs partly because jettisoning the false core belief would result in feeling bad, then chad is likely to reject this information that conflicts with his false core belief. as a result, chad violates the norm of information distribution because he does not believe a community member in virtue of her say-so. and a further result is that information about racial injustice is less likely to flow through the community. conclusion i have argued that racial injustice not only affects the doxastic standing of subjects such that they are properly evaluated as justified or knowing information, but also that it affects information of a specific kind—namely, information about racial injustice. i have argued that the combined collateral effect of epistemic injustices and white ignorance is that information of this kind is less likely to flow through communities where racial injustice obtains. i have focused on the epistemic upshots for information of this kind as a unit of analysis rather than subjects’ doxastic bayruns garcía –racial injustice and information flow published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 features because whether information of a certain kind flows through a community is a feature of a community rather than the believers that compose it. acknowledgements i thank linda martín alcoff, miranda fricker, charles mills and sandy goldberg for their very helpful comments and feedback on early drafts of this article. and i thank feminist philosophy quarterly’s two anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions and comments. this article has benefited greatly from these comments, suggestions and feedback. references alcoff, 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justification.” in routledge handbook of the philosophy evidence, edited by maria lasonen-aarnio and clayton m. littlejohn. routledge. snyder, sara a., saeed rahman, jamie k. hamilton, hana t. hamdi, anjoli anand, anna andel, laurene barlet, et al. 2017. “the eric garner case: statewide survey of new york voters’ response to proposed police accountability legislation.” journal of social service research 43 (1): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/01488 376.2016.1239598. taylor, paul c. 2016. black is beautiful: a philosophy of black aesthetics. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell. thibodeau, ruth, and elliot aronson. 1992. “taking a closer look: reasserting the role of the self-concept in dissonance theory.” personality and social psychology bulletin 18 (5): 591–602. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672921 85010. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 volpe, giorgio. 2017. “propositional and doxastic justification: their relationship and a questionable supervenience claim.” in supervenience and normativity, edited by bartosz brożek, antonino rotolo, and jerzy stelmach, 25–48. cham: springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-610467_2. woomer, lauren. 2019. “agential insensitivity and socially supported ignorance.” episteme 16 (1): 73–91. zollman, kevin j. s. 2007. “the communication structure of epistemic communities.” in “proceedings of the 2006 biennial meeting of the philosophy of science association. part i: contributed papers,” edited by cristina bicchieri and jason alexander. special issue, philosophy of science 64 (5): 574–87. eric bayruns garcía is an assistant professor in california state university, san bernardino’s department of philosophy. he specializes in philosophy of race, epistemology, and latin american philosophy. in his work, he focuses on how racial injustice in the us and colonialism in the americas relate to epistemic phenomena such as understanding and ignorance and ethical phenomena such as blame and responsibility. 13713 bayruns garcia title page 13713 bayruns garcía final format social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation bettcher, talia mae. 2025. “social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 1. 2025 social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression talia mae bettcher cal state los angeles tbettch@calstatela.edu bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression talia mae bettcher abstract in her book ontology and oppression, katharine jenkins defends a framework for the ontology of social kinds that is impressive in both its systematicity and explanatory power. my central concern, however, is that jenkins seems to merely assume a separation between semantics and ontology—a separation that needs to be investigated and defended more fully. this presumption, i conclude, undermines the ability of her account to answer the question of what a woman is, as well as raising worries about potential misgendering. keywords: ontology, semantics, social kinds, misgendering, transgender in her book ontology and oppression, katharine jenkins (2023) defends a framework for the ontology of social kinds that is impressive in both its systematicity and explanatory power. not only is her position plausible, well argued, and clear, but the book is a great example of how to think about social ontology via analytic methods and how to do it well. in my opinion, jenkins sets the standard in avoiding some of the common pitfalls of analytic approaches. she does not, for instance, ignore the work of important theorists who are not analytic, such as maría lugones (2010), hortense spillers (1987), and c. riley snorton (2017)—folks i never would have expected to encounter in analytic discussions of social ontology, let alone to see be taken seriously (jenkins 2023).1 additionally, jenkins is uncommonly sensitive to the on-the-ground political concerns of, certainly, the gender recognition act (2004, c. 7) in the uk and, indeed, perhaps most notably, any possible real-life consequences of her own theory on trans politics and trans lives. in general, it’s safe to say that of the nontrans philosophers doing analytic social ontology today, she is easily one of the most expressly concerned with trans people and the oppression we face. this, for my part, has not gone unnoticed. 1 jenkins discusses lugones, spillers, and snorton on pp. 124–26, 124–25, and 130– 31, respectively. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 despite its many virtues, however, i do think that the work is also open to some criticism. my central concern involves an important lacuna in jenkins’s account— namely, the absence of any discussion of ordinary discourse and its relation to social kinds. to put it differently, i am worried that jenkins seems to merely assume a separation between semantics and ontology—a separation that needs to be investigated and defended more fully. this presumption, i shall conclude, undermines the ability of her account to answer the question of what a woman is, as well as raising worries about potential misgendering. i begin with a brief overview of jenkins’s position, and then i develop my concerns over the course of three sections. in the first of these, i introduce one of the objections to jenkins’s account that jenkins herself considers—namely, the misgendering objection (roughly, the worry that positing social gender kinds at odds with trans self-identities is to engage in misgendering). i also argue against jenkins’s contention that the mistaken “ontology-first assumption” (social practice should be determined strictly by social ontology) plays a role in motivating this objection. in the second section, i show how the separation of semantics and ontology leaves jenkins unable to answer gender-critical feminist arguments in the way she seems to suppose. in the final section, i consider the general question of what role semantics ought to play in answering questions of social ontology. in doing so, i show how jenkins’s account is confronted with two concerns—namely, the possibility of misgendering through the account’s own theoretical deployment of terms, and the inability to answer the question “what is a woman?” overview ontology and oppression offers a unifying framework for examining whether certain human social kinds—specifically gender and race kinds—are (what jenkins calls) “ontically oppressive” and whether, in some cases, they are even actually emancipatory (jenkins 2023, 70–72). jenkins calls this the “constraints and enablements framework” or cef (77–115). ontic oppression is, for jenkins, a species of what she calls ontic injustice, this latter arising when the constraints and enablements of a social kind inflict moral injury upon its members through the contravention of their moral entitlements (24–26). ontic oppression is defined as a species of ontic injustice that is systematic, group-based, and subordinating, where subordination includes exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence, and communicative curtailment (75–76).2 2 jenkins’s notion of “ontic oppression” is not far from robin dembroff’s (2018, 25) notion of “ontological oppression.” for jenkins’s discussion of the differences and similarities, see pp. 74–75. bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 according to cef, social kinds are to be understood as explanatory kinds—that is, as groupings according to a property or set of properties where such groupings can serve some set of explanatory purposes (jenkins 2023, 78). human social kinds— social kinds with humans as members—are, in this framework, constituted through shared sets of constraints and enablements (83). so, a human is a member of some social kind just in case they are subject to the constraints and enablements constituting that kind (84). of the many constraints and enablements, jenkins identifies four types: those concerning the interpersonal behavior of others, those concerning individual psychology, those concerning the body, and those concerning the environment (92). as part of the framework, jenkins (2023, 88–89) introduces three features— scope, breadth, and granularity—that function like sliders on a sound mixer to enable different ways of viewing human social kinds. turning to gender and race human social kinds specifically, jenkins considers three different sorts of social kinds determined through different mixes—namely, hegemonic kinds, interpersonal kinds, and identity kinds (116, 136, 158). hegemonic kinds, for jenkins, track large-scale structural phenomena. think, for instance, of sally haslanger’s social class account of a woman as someone who is systematically and for the most part subordinated on the basis of perceived reproductive capacity (haslanger 2012a, 235). in this case, the scope is very large (the whole world over the last several hundred years, say), the breadth is maximal (that is, all sorts of constraints and enablements are considered), and the granularity is very coarse (jenkins 2023, 135). interpersonal kinds concern, by contrast, contextually specific phenomena (jenkins 2023, 157). think, for instance, of ásta’s (2018) account of a social status as contextually conferred on the basis of some tracked property. in this case, the scope is very narrow (context-specific), the breadth is restricted to interpersonal constraints and enablements, and the granularity is fine-grained enough to accommodate intersectionality. finally, identity kinds roughly concern one’s felt or affirmed relationship to a category. think, for instance, of jenkins’s own account of gender identity (as norm-relevancy) and the role it plays in her original response to haslanger’s ameliorative account of woman as social class (jenkins 2016). in this case, the scope is medium (between hegemonic and interpersonal kinds), the breadth includes both psychological and bodily constraints, and finally, the granularity is sufficiently fine to include intersectional identities (jenkins 2023, 167–69). jenkins concludes that, of these three, while many hegemonic kinds are ontically oppressive, when it comes to interpersonal kinds and identity kinds, some are, some are not, and some can even be emancipatory (jenkins 2023, 135, 157, 174). the cef affords substantial benefits, of course. as jenkins argues in her penultimate chapter, it provides a unified framework for thinking about these three different sorts of race and gender kinds (jenkins 2023, 176–80). specifically, cef allows feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 us to understand how the three operate together. it helps provide a way to structure and arbitrate disagreements about the nature of race and gender kinds. and, finally, it helps mitigate objections against one type of kind by placing that type within a larger pluralist apparatus. that said, one might also have some concerns about this framework, and jenkins turns to these in the penultimate chapter as well (jenkins 2023, 180–98). the last of them—namely, the concern that any view that allows for gender kinds that do not validate trans identities, a kind of misgendering, is bad for the project of trans liberation—also serves as the subject of the entire final chapter (192–99, 200–240). it is around the topic of this final objection that i begin my own critical engagement with jenkins’s work. misgendering and the ontology-first assumption. the last objection (or set of objections, rather) jenkins considers centers on the worry that her pluralist account of gender kinds can lead to the misgendering of at least some trans people. for instance, if we allow for the existence of certain hegemonic kinds or interpersonal kinds, it may turn out that some trans women do not count as members of the hegemonic or interpersonal kind women, and some do; and that some trans men count as women, and some do not.3 the concern is that it seems bad to have an ontology admitting of some kind woman from which some trans women are wrongly excluded and in which some trans men are wrongly included. i’ll call this the misgendering objection, even though it admits of a few variations. the first variant is the worry that because jenkins herself admits different gender kinds in which at least some trans women would not be admitted as women and some trans men would be, her own account engages in a species of misgendering (jenkins 2023, 192–93). let’s call this the basic misgendering objection. jenkins’s response is to point out that her own account has nothing to say about semantics at all (194). as a consequence, should somebody allege that some trans women are not women insofar as they are not oppressed as women (i.e., not part of the hegemonic kind woman), then jenkins can say that there is nothing in her view that entails the truth of that allegation. nor, jenkins adds, is there anything that affirms the appropriateness of asserting such a thing, even if it were true (194). nor, even, is there anything that affirms the political wisdom of asserting such a thing, even if it were true and pragmatically appropriate (194–95). for now, i will put the basic misgendering objection to the side, returning to it toward the end of the paper. instead, i want to take up what i shall call the advanced misgendering objection. in one very strong version of this, the objector wants to insist 3 this objection echoes an important critique of haslanger’s (2012a) original account issued by jenkins (2016) herself. bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 that there should be no possibility of it turning out that misgendering statements are true. in other words, any viable ontology must guarantee the falsity of all misgendering statements (jenkins 2023, 195). understood as a semantic claim about what the word woman actually designates (i.e., the relevant identity kind), there is again no problem, claims jenkins, since she is not making a semantic claim anyway (197). but if it is to be understood as an ontological claim that restricts gender kinds to identity kinds or that proclaims their fundamentality over the other sorts, then, jenkins notes, it runs into complete conflict with her own pluralist view (197). jenkins then goes on to imagine a weaker version of the advanced objection that says simply that an account that does not have this strong ontological guarantee is bad for trans politics and against the aim of trans liberation because it suggests that, at least in some sense, trans women are not women and trans men are not men (jenkins 2023, 197). her final chapter is devoted to taking up this worry (as well as to dispelling the background motivation for the stronger version of this). to show that her framework is far from detrimental to the liberation of trans people, but quite useful, and hence that the weak version of the advanced misgendering worry is misplaced, jenkins focuses on the debate in the uk concerning the gender recognition act. this is an excellent strategy because it affirms that our philosophizing requires a focus on the particular contexts in which we philosophize. specifically, she argues that underpinning this debate is an “ontology-first” assumption is ultimately bad for trans liberation because it entrenches the position of antitrans advocates and requires that protrans advocates accept terms of debate that are too demanding. the assumption says “that settling questions about the current ontology of gender will automatically determine what shape our gendered practices ought to take” (jenkins 2023, 201). in the place of the ontology-first assumption, jenkins suggests we adopt a normative approach in which we consider “the consequences of adopting one or another kind of social practices and to choose the practices that are most conducive to emancipatory efforts” (226). a key move in jenkins’s response to the ontology-first approach is to recognize that some social kinds can be oppressive. by recognizing the oppressive character of social kinds, says jenkins, we ought to give up the assumption that current ontology should immediately determine social practices. here, she draws also from dembroff’s rejection of (what they call) “the real gender assumption”—namely, that social classification ought to track the membership conditions of social kinds (jenkins, 2023, 216–17; dembroff 2018, 6). while the rejection of the ontology-first assumption is plausible, i worry that jenkins is in fact wrong in supposing that the antitrans and protrans advocates she has in mind really endorse the ontology-first assumption, at least if it is taken as an immediate move from the claims about kind membership within our current ontology to claims about social practice. in such a view, antitrans advocates would presumably feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 maintain that insofar as trans women are not women in our current ontology, we ought not accept gendered practices that treat trans women as though they were. similarly, protrans advocates would presumably contend that since trans women are women in the current ontology, we ought to accept practices that treat them as such. putting aside quick slogans and trendy hashtags (like “choose reality” [jenkins 2023, 206]), however, i would suggest that both antitrans and protrans advocates also accept some additional empirical and/or ethical principles that are required to make the movement from claims about ontology to claims about social practice. for example, i do not find that those who support preventing trans women from using women’s restrooms do so merely because they view trans women as men. they do so, further, because they take sex segregation to be motivated by concerns about violence against women. they presume that men will tend to behave in sexually assaultive ways toward women. and they maintain that sexual assault is wrong. to better bring this out, consider that often enough, folks are willing to accept the practice of referring to trans people by their preferred names and pronouns in nonintimate contexts. they are willing to do so regardless of their own beliefs about gender ontology, suggesting that they reject the ontology-first assumption. that is, they are willing to “play along.” notably, then, they may also express concerns about sex-segregated spaces such as public restrooms and changing rooms. such a reluctance again suggests that the concern isn’t ontology but, rather, (false) empirical beliefs about men and women and general ethical principles about the wrongness of sexual assault. when a gender-critical feminist claims, then, that trans people ought never be treated in accordance with their gender identity, it is likewise owing to their underlying political and ethical commitments. similarly, i would urge that protrans advocates who claim that gender identity determines kind membership additionally rely on the view that it is an ethical imperative that gender identity be respected in all cases, except those where concerns about safety might override that imperative. the point, to repeat, is that, in either case, the movement is not from ontology to social practice but from ontology coupled with empirical and normative claims to social practice. what these two sorts of stances have in common, and i think jenkins would agree with me, is a commitment to the antipluralist view that there are unique answers to questions like what a woman is (jenkins 2023, 221–22). the difference between our views, then, is that while i think that the ontology-first assumption is a red herring, jenkins does not. (she does notably think that additional work is required to dislodge the antipluralist stance over and above any work to dislodge the ontologyfirst assumption. and, of course, an argument in favor of her own pluralist position is an argument against antipluralism (jenkins 2023, 222). in the section that follows, i take up the question of what motivates this antipluralist position or, at any rate, a bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 rejection of the sort of pluralism endorsed by jenkins. this will bring us to the importance of semantics in determinations of social kinds. explanation, reference, and gender-critical feminism the deeper question to which we now turn is just why antitrans and protrans advocates suppose that there is one unique answer to the question of what a woman is (assuming the latter do). citing her own account of social kinds as explanatory kinds, jenkins suggests that protrans advocates are expecting gender identity kinds to do all the explanatory work (jenkins 2023, 214). while she is less explicit in her views about why antitrans advocates expect a unique answer, i will presume that it is the same. and the problem is that this explanation scarcely seems plausible. while jenkins recognizes that questions about the ontology of gender might be settled by—rather than explanatory considerations—what she calls “some other factor,” no other factor is named and discussed (jenkins 2023, 215). one evident factor, however, is precisely ordinary discursive practices and the reference of our kind terms. so, for instance, when we ask the question “what is water?” we may be asking what kind the term water picks out, which turns out to be the natural kind h2o. more generally, the thought here is that the way to settle questions of social ontology is to appeal to the semantics of ordinary discursive practices. to put it differently, the question “what is a woman?” consists in the question of what kind of being we’re talking about when we use the word woman. i will call this the discursive approach to social kinds. it seems to me that it is just this approach that grounds the antitrans view that women are adult, female human beings (afh for short)—namely, that woman picks out the kind afh. to put it differently, the view that women are adult, female humans depends upon the idea that what we’re talking about when we talk about women, at least ordinarily, are members of the kind afh. it does not, by contrast, appear to hinge on the claim that this conception of women fulfills all explanatory demands. unfortunately, it is precisely jenkins’s elision of the discursive approach that leaves her unprepared to fully engage with those antitrans advocates who adopt this strategy. to develop this point, let me turn to prominent antitrans advocate and philosopher kathleen stock. in her paper, “the importance of referring to human sex in language,” stock opens by claiming that woman is typically supposed to designate afh whereas man is typically supposed to designate amh (stock 2022, 25).4 the first thing to notice is that since this position is tantamount to the claim that woman designates something like a natural kind, it is not one that can be addressed by 4 i am grateful to cyprus marques for the illuminating discussion we have had about stock’s paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 assuming that woman is a social kind or, even, plurality of social kinds. in other words, jenkins’s entire framework is irrelevant to a feminist such as stock. the second thing to notice is that because stock (2022, 25) takes the designation of this kind to be the effect of ordinary discursive practice, she can then represent any efforts to include trans women as revisionist. on this point, it is worth noting that haslanger’s (2012a) appeal to the hegemonic kind was originally announced as an ameliorationist position. indeed, so, too, was jenkins’s own previous position, which allowed for both woman as a class and woman as an identity (jenkins 2016). the problem is that once one position is taken to track the ordinary way we speak while the other is taken to reflect a revision in language, the burden of proof is on the latter for endorsing such a revision. unsurprisingly, then the antitrans advocates who would have us “choose reality” can claim to have the following on their side: what ordinary people are talking about when they talk about women is the natural kind afh. that’s the reality. so, to propose a departure from this—to say that a woman is one who self-identifies as one, for instance—is to depart from that reality. my point is that jenkins’s position does not help in the way she claims it does. for it to help, she would need to argue in favor of the explanatory view of social kinds over the view that privileges the referents of kind terms. and this is not something she does. and since i am not persuaded the explanatory view of social kinds is the way to go anyway, i would propose two other strategies for responding to stock. the first is to argue against the claim that the kind term woman as deployed in ordinary discourse designates a natural kind in the first place. after all, people can be mistaken about what their ordinary terms mean and what those terms designate. (this is why haslanger [2012b, 92] distinguishes between the manifest and operative concept.) for instance, people went a very long time using the term water while ignorant of the fact that they were referring to h2o. or more to the point, consider that probably many folks believe that the term woman designates individuals who are human. upon closer scrutiny, however, we recognize that woman can designate vulcan, klingon, and kryptonian adult females (bettcher 2017; arvan 2023; bettcher 2025). this means that what ordinary folks think about the referent of woman can be wrong. similarly, one might argue that the common view that woman designates members of a biological sex is likewise mistaken (arvan 2023, bettcher 2025). instead, one might argue, the term turns out to refer to a social kind after all—a sort of social kind that is wont to pass itself off as a natural one. this means that those who claim woman designates biological females are themselves revisionists about language. it also opens the door for arguing that the social kind in question is an oppressive one that ought to be abandoned. this, in turn, helps motivate a revisionism that secures the validity of trans identities, rather than opposing it. a second strategy consists in simply accepting the contention that woman designates adult female humans—at least for the sake of argument—while arguing bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 that various social practices ought to be altered regardless, including discursive ones. after all, stock (2022) herself provides arguments that moral appeals to the importance of gender identity are not as weighty as trans advocates suppose in motivating a change toward trans inclusion in certain social practices and that the interests of nontrans women in trans exclusion are overwhelming. to counter this, one need only argue that stock is mistaken on both these counts. here, one can, as jenkins herself proposes, adopt a case-by-case approach in making these assessments (jenkins 2023, 232–33). none of this requires adopting jenkins’s rendition of social kinds as explanatory kinds, however. misgendering and the what-question in this final section, i consider what i regard as the most important questions that this discussion raises. first, as social ontologists, how should we approach social kinds? should we view them as shared properties that yield explanations? should we think about them as referents of ordinary-kind terms? second, in general, what role ought the semantics of ordinary language play in our approach to social ontology? crucially, it is here that i locate what i take to be the most serious weakness of jenkins’s account—namely, that there are no compelling arguments in favor of the explanatory-kind view of social kinds. surely, the discursive position ought to be acknowledged, and the explanatory account of social kinds ought to be defended, if possible, over and above it. the discursive approach to social ontology is scarcely an uncommon view, after all. instead, the alternative position is simply elided. worse, there are considerations in favor of the discursive approach that pose further challenges to jenkins’s account. one concerns the risk of deploying politically contested terms in oppressive ways. (this last reflection will return us to the worry that jenkins’s account is vulnerable to the basic objection of misgendering that i mentioned earlier in the paper). the second concerns what i shall call what-questions (or w-questions) such as “what is a woman?” and the inability of the explanatory-kind approach to answer them. i consider them in order. let’s begin with a distinction between two sorts of revision. the first, i will call theory-independent, and the second, i will call theory-dependent. the former occurs when communities of oppressed people develop their own discursive practices in opposition to more mainstream ones. obviously, community members are typically not social ontologists, social theorists, or philosophers. usually, these revisions to predominant ways of speaking occur organically and, consequently, are adopted by most members of the community in a way that is largely taken for granted. one obvious example is the revisionary use of the n-word (ending with a) as a reappropriation of the n-word (ending with r). this usage is not one that was originally introduced in some philosophical theory. rather, it emerged organically in resistant subcultures. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 the latter concerns the reappropriation of a term for theoretical purposes. here, the theorist themself plucks out some term and gives it either a more precise definition or a different definition altogether. for instance, a philosopher may decide to use the term people in a very precise way—say, to refer beings with the capacity for second-order reflection—even though the ordinary usage of people tends to be used to refer to humans only, regardless of capacity for second-order reflection. while this theoretical usage may be merely stipulative—for the purpose of a paper or talk—it might also be accompanied by the recommendation that other theorists begin speaking this way as well. indeed, it might even include the recommendation that everybody adopt this way of speaking. note that, in this case, the revision is not organic so much as artificially determined and then, if particularly ambitious, outright mandated. now let’s consider the explanatory theorist. suppose that they have identified the following groupings based upon shared explanatory properties: g1, g2, and g3. suppose that there is a term w (woman) that, in ordinary english, turns out to name the kind k. the theorist faces the decision of what to call g1, g2, and g3. for instance, they might simply call the groups “g1,” “g2,” and “g3” respectively. say, however, that the theorist might also call g1 by the more apt expression “subordinated reproductive class,” and that they might call g2 by the more apt expression “individuals who experience certain norms f as relevant to themselves.” it is also possible for the theorist to call either or all these groups by the term w, in departure from ordinary usage. for instance, instead of using w to apply to k, the theorist may use it to pick out g1. the first worry should now be plain. the stipulative decision to apply w to g1 (i.e., the decision to stipulate that woman shall pick out a subordinated reproductive class), is a decision made by the theorist that need not be made. why not just call this kind “subordinated reproductive class” or “g1”? unfortunately, jenkins does speak of the hegemonic kinds man and woman, using the term woman to name g1, and we are left wondering just why she calls these kinds that when to do so is clearly a theorydependent revisionary move that need not be made at all. she says, “some trans women are members of the hegemonic gender kind woman, whilst others are members of the hegemonic kind man” (jenkins 2023, 128). yet, to make this move actually runs counter to her own attempts to separate social ontology from semantics. to bring my concern into sharper focus, contrast jenkins’s pluralist account with my own (bettcher 2013, 2025). in my view, there can be different sets of social ontology-determining discursive and extradiscursive practices such that, in one community, trans people don’t count as men, women, or otherwise in ways that accord with their identities, while in other communities they do. in this case, there is express attention paid to the different semantics of the different systems. and as this is a descriptive project rather than an ameliorative or stipulative one, the charge that bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 the account itself engages in misgendering is hard to press, since describing an oppressive discursive system is not the same as using it. that is, while i allow for revision, this revision is theory-independent. to repeat, jenkins’s decision to call g1 woman is a theory-dependent revisionary move. since the decision to make that move rests with the theorist, they can be charged with misgendering. to be sure, it is not the theorist’s fault that the social kind g1 excludes some trans women, say. what is their fault is the decision to depart from common usage by calling g1 woman when there was no need to do so in the first place. indeed, note that by itself, the fact that g1 excludes some trans women is not itself a case of misgendering unless we call that kind “w.” ironically, then, the only misgendering, in this case, flows from the theorist who has so dubbed that kind woman. this result is by no means inconsequential. jenkins (2023, 128) makes it seem that by analyzing the hegemonic gender kind g1, we can provide an account of the ways in which trans people are subject to this sort of invalidation. but the analysis of this kind cannot possibly provide an analysis of that, since not only have we decided to put the ordinary discursive practices by which trans people are invalidated to the side, but also the account itself runs counter to such practices. this is proven by the fact that queen elizabeth ii would also not, in this sense, likely count as a woman. clearly, any invalidation of elizabeth’s gender identity is the effect of the hidden decision to dub g1 with woman, not the effect of the everyday social practices that lead to the invalidation of so many trans people. to put it simply: jenkins’s account would not analyze the right kind, owing to a confusion between g1 and k. now what likely underlies jenkins’s decision to call g1 woman (besides the powerful tug of haslangerian literature) is that, for her, the question is only whether the explanatory kind is in the right vicinity (jenkins 2023, 117). for instance, certainly this hegemonic kind is in the ballpark of gender, as are interpersonal kinds and identity kinds. all of them “travel under the banner of gender,” says jenkins (117), drawing on rowan bell’s (2022) expression. the problem, however, is that the terms gender and woman operate in different ways in ordinary usage. gender is sufficiently vague and equivocal that it can be used to refer to gender identity (“gender is between the ears, not the legs”) and it can also be used to a social role (“gender is the cultural overlay of biological sex”). neither of these uses constitute a departure from the common way of speaking. but the same is not true when it comes to the term woman. the use of woman in a haslangerian sense is clearly revisionary since it entails that queen elizabeth ii was likely not a woman. that is, while the term gender is sufficiently capacious, because sufficiently vague, to allow that class, status, and identity all qualify, it does not follow that the term woman operates in a similar way. no doubt one of the things that obscures this fact is precisely that, having put semantics aside, we have not paid feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 enough attention to usage. but the point is this. while it seems fine to list g1 as a gender kind (i.e., an explanatory kind that would be useful in explaining the operations of things we call gender), it does not seem fine to call it woman. this worry that jenkins’s account is vulnerable to the basic misgendering can be generalized into a more general worry about the explanatory approach—namely, that in putting semantics to the side such an approach runs the risk of inadvertently using a term to name an explanatory kind in a way that is politically oppressive. to be sure, this is always a risk in almost any endeavor. but the conceit of discussing the metaphysics of social kinds shorn from the use of language—language about social kinds that is typically used in oppressive and/or resistant ways—can easily lead one to overlook the political pitfalls of one’s own theoretically dependent deployment of terms. let’s turn to the final concern, which i regard as more important because, while the political risks in deploying theoretically dependent terms in oppressive ways are merely potential, the failure of the explanatory approach to answer whatquestions is guaranteed. consider the w-question “what is a woman?” the friend of the discursive approach says that answers to what-questions are largely determined by the ordinary discursive practices within a given cultural framework. by contrast, the defender of the explanatory-kind model of social kinds would presumably argue that answers to what-questions are determined by the explanatory kinds participating in the explanatory work. but the latter just seems wrong. the question is how on earth outlining the explanatory kinds g1, g2, and g3 helps us get an answer to “what is a w?” the first problem is that, obviously, sheer stipulation goes no distance to answering it. that is, identifying some grouping g and then stipulating that we shall call it w clearly does nothing in illuminating what a w is. to be sure, one might adopt a more ambitious ameliorationist project by arguing that this stipulation (using w to refer to g1) is the best way to go for a feminist project, say. that may or may not provide an answer to the what-question. the problem, however, is that ameliorationism has nothing to do with jenkins’s actual proposal anyway, since we have put semantics to the side. even the stipulative decision to call (or not call) the various groups w should be regarded as entirely irrelevant. we are therefore stuck with the question what the kinds g1, g2, and g3 even have to do with answering the question “what is a w?” it is hardly obvious. but any answer, it seems to me, is going to have to appeal to actual ws, where w is deployed in the ordinary way. for instance, one might note that most ws are g1s and that most g1s are ws. such a move, however, already reintroduces the semantics that were supposed to be put aside. and even if we overlook that fact, it isn’t clear how, given that we have now appealed to ws (in the ordinary sense), learning about this relation to g1s has answered the question what bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 ws are—particularly given that we have abandoned a universal identification of ws with g1s. one response is to simply give up on answering such w-questions altogether. to do so, however, would be to give up on at least one important sort of project in social ontology: providing an account of the social kinds that are found within a given culture. for example, one might want to investigate the social kind fashion model, banker, or quarterback as they exist in our culture. in such a case, one may be attempting to answer the question of what a fashion model or banker really is—at least in the culture within which said social kind is embedded. to provide an account at this level, however, one would need to include the ordinary discursive application of the relevant terms among the various other extradiscursive practices involved in the constitution of the social kind. in this respect, semantics would be a required topic of investigation as part of a larger investigation into the pertinent social practices that yield the social kind. for example, in answering the question “what is a w?” one might argue that, surprisingly, w picks out kind k and that k is constituted through social practices p1, p2, and p3.5 now it may be that the sort of project i am imagining is simply of an entirely different sort than the one suggested by the social kind as explanatory kind gloss. the latter seems particularly useful for the sociologist who wishes to posit various structural mechanisms at micro and macro levels (and everything in between) in order to explain various social phenomena. in this case, the sort of social kind deployed is really set by the investigator as a theoretical posit—a tool—for further understanding the phenomena. it is in this sense that jenkins’s account is pluralist: multiple gender kinds are posited to do sorts of explanatory work. by contrast, the sort of approach i have in mind takes the social kind as the very phenomenon that demands explanation. as such, it is not open to the investigator to choose this or that explanatory property and then say that it somehow constitutes the cultural kind. rather, what is required is an investigation into to the social practices—and, in this case, crucially, the discursive ones—to see how the relevant kind terms are applied to various humans, to determine what beliefs, true or false, the participants have about both the kind itself as well as their practices. (it is in this sense that my own account is pluralist. i take there to be different sorts of discursive and extradiscursive practices, and so, different answers to the question 5 it is an interesting question whether one ought to include the discursive practices themselves among the social practices listed. another interesting question concerns the possibility of empty reference—that is, the possibility that kind terms like woman don’t pick out any kind of thing at all. the question here is whether an investigation into the discursive and extradiscursive practices would still count as providing an answer to the w-question “what is a woman?” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 “what is a woman?” as cultural kind). in this case, it may not be important whether the social kind in question is itself explanatory. to be sure, one would expect that the investigator’s own account be in some ways explanatory of the culturally embedded kind we are investigating. and that explanation may itself involve the positing of various explanatory kinds, including ones constituted through constraints and enablements. but an account that attempts to reduce the phenomenon of a cultural kind itself to one of these explanatory kinds may be giving up on the very thing that needs explanation. and that, in my view, would constitute the downfall of the account altogether. references arvan, marcus. 2023. “trans women, cis women, alien women, and robot women are women: they are all (simply) adults gendered female.” hypatia 38 (2): 373–89. ásta. 2018. categories we live by: the construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. new york: oxford university press. bell, rowan. 2022. “gender norms and gendered traits.” phd diss., syracuse university. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1541. bettcher, talia mae. 2013. “trans women and the meaning of ‘woman.’” in philosophy of sex: contemporary readings, 6th ed., edited by nicholas power, raja halwani, and alan soble, 233–50. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ————. 2017. “trans 101.” in the philosophy of sex: contemporary readings, 7th ed., edited by raja halwani, alan soble, sarah hoffman, and jacob m. held, 119–37. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. ————. 2025. beyond personhood: an essay in trans philosophy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. dembroff, robin. 2018. “real talk on metaphysics of gender.” philosophical topics 46 (2): 21–50. haslanger, sally. 2012a. “gender and race: (what) are they? (what) do we want them to be?” in resisting reality: social construction and social critique, 221– 47. new york: oxford university press. essay originally published in 2000. ————. 2012b. “ontology and social construction.” in resisting reality: social construction and social critique, 83–112. new york: oxford university press. essay originally published in 1995. jenkins, katharine. 2016. “amelioration and inclusion: gender identity and the concept of woman.” ethics 126 (2): 394–421. ————. 2023. ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality. new york: oxford university press. lugones, maría. 2010. “toward a decolonial feminism.” hypatia 25 (4): 742–59. bettcher – social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 snorton, c. riley. 2017. black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity. 3rd ed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. spillers, hortense j. 1987. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 65–81. stock, kathleen. 2022. “the importance of referring to human sex in language.” law and contemporary problems 85 (1): 25–45. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu /lcp/vol85/iss1/3. talia mae bettcher is a professor of philosophy at cal state los angeles. she is the author of the recently published beyond personhood: an essay in trans philosophy (university of minnesota press, 2025) and many articles in trans philosophy, including “evil deceivers and make believers: transphobic violence and the politics of illusion” (hypatia, 2007), “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance” (signs, 2013), and “what is trans philosophy?” (hypatia, 2019). 113001 bettcher title page 113001 bettcher final format phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 6 recommended citation bettcher, talia mae. 2023. “phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 6. 2023 phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence talia mae bettcher california state university, los angeles tbettch@calstatela.edu bettcher – phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence talia mae bettcher abstract this essay engages with cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence (2020) on two points. first, it raises worries about heyes’s apparent association of anaesthetic time with feminist resistance. second, it reconsiders heyes’s account of the specific harm involved in raping unconscious individuals, as well as her account of the sort of agency nullified by rape more generally, by appealing to the notion of interpersonal spatiality. keywords: rape, boundaries, agency, unconsciousness as i read cressida heyes’s anaesthetics of existence, i felt got. i realized i had been seeking oblivion in the almost mindless repetition of alternating between trying frantically, on the one hand, to hold myself together with a coffee-stained to-do list as the world seemed to accelerate with each passing nanosecond and, on the other hand, wanting to “blitz out” in the evening, binge-watching netflix and eating junk food. this book spoke to me powerfully, then, through the fertile concepts of postdisciplinary time and anaesthetic time. heyes’s work is such a rich critical phenomenology, in my view, due largely to its capacity to describe experience through the deployment of theoretical concepts in new ways. it’s true that the fluidity and subtlety with which she makes such sophisticated philosophical moves are themselves often envy-producing. yet, the guiding themes of postdisciplinary time and anaesthetic experience are just so timely and powerfully captured. this is a book that needed to be written. in what follows, i open two main lines of questioning—one concerning agency and passivity in postdisciplinary time, another concerning anonymity, vulnerability, and rape. anaesthetic time, resistance, and agency postdisciplinary time, as heyes explains it, is less a discontinuation of disciplinary time and more an acceleration thereof. so, whereas disciplinary time is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 characterized by the “time-management” of all the waking hours in the day with the purpose of increasing work-productivity, postdisciplinary time is more of a “timejuggling” and “multitasking” facilitated by the encroachment of work into all areas of our lives through various information and communication technologies. while heyes’s account of postdisciplinary time is richer than this, one key point is that the experience of the present is made smaller, narrower, while the future looms ever closer, moving with increasing speed. by contrast “anaesthetic experience”—at least in a postdisciplinary society—is not counted as a proper experience at all. heyes characterizes it as a sort of “addiction-lite” (2020, 22) that “sits uneasily in a space between addiction and the everyday” (105). anaesthetic nonexperience is characterized by an elongated present while a sense of the future is foreclosed. one of the powerful consequences of heyes’s description of anaesthetic time is that heyes is more fully equipped to critique the conflation of resistance and agency— particularly, a kind of agency that collapses into the self-betterment of the disciplinary society or frantic attempts to keep it all together in a postdisciplinary society. i worry, however, about any tendency to commend anaesthetic time as resistant to the disciplinary and postdisciplinary temporal regimes. for instance, heyes (2020, 96) proposes that “losing consciousness might be one part of a new feminist ethos more attuned to the exigencies of contemporary living.”. while this is not a wholesale endorsement, i worry that in rightfully raising concerns about what resistance can be in a society that compels a sort of radical agency, she is misreading the nature of anaesthetic time which one would have thought only to be partially constitutive of postdisciplinary time. from one direction, all experiences that count as ideally agential are those that approximate maximum alertness (rather than those that approximate oblivion), and these experiences are claimed by productivity. from the other direction, the only experiences that count as leisure or “time off” are precisely not only those that do not count as proper experiences but, further, those that approximate oblivion. the upshot: all (alert) experience is work experience. the remainder is nothing. and the experience of both together becomes something like that of a robot with an on-andoff switch. here it is also important to recall what heyes herself points out—namely, that the ability to exert this destabilized agency in postdisciplinary time at all is a privilege in light of those who are cast out of the machinery altogether through joblessness, homelessness, and the like. further, the ability to consume products for the sake of “turning off” is made both understandable and marketable when one is operating as a destabilized agent, while doing so when one is not so operating—when one has been cast out of the system—is something else altogether. thus, heyes rightfully points to the ways in which postdisciplinary and anaesthetic times are interwoven not only with gender but also with class and, consequently, race. bettcher – phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 in any event, if the postdisciplinary time of a postdisciplinary society is more expansively understood to include not only the work-colonized, multitasking quest for agentially determined stability but also the necessary oblivion of “turning off” by “blitzing out” because it all seems too much, then it would seem that resistance, if it occurs at all, would have to occur at both the site of blitzing out and the site of alertness. that is, anaesthetic experience would have no more claim to resistance than any other sort. while i wonder, for instance, whether some states of blitzing out are not actually forms of liminality that facilitate some sort of resistance, unlike those mere products sold to consumers of a piece with the system itself (e.g., netflix, wine), i also wonder whether some states of alertness are not also resistant in their opposition to work-saturated experiences? consider, for example, companions putting their phones away to enjoy the evening sky while engaging in lively and enriching conversations that run into the wee hours. here, the differences between the large, expansive present, with the vaguest anticipation of the future of the evening with friends, and the almost endless present that tends toward oblivion in its repetitive monotony of “junk time” (netflix, wine) emerge as an intriguing phenomenological investigation. a related worry is that it seems that, for heyes, the contrast with hegemonic agency is primarily a passivity. however, there are other salient contrasts—for instance, so-called individual activity on the one hand, and intersubjective activity on the other. one of the lessons i take from maría lugones is that, while in dominant worlds agency appears to flow magically from the “internal” intentions of the agent, it is, instead, a complex interpersonal affair. she writes, “both the formation of the emancipatory resistant intentions and the efficacy of those intentions in informing action partially depend on the attention each resister pays to the other resisters forming the intentions” (lugones 2003, 220) the interpersonal relatedness required to engage in resistant activity is as plain to those attempting to undertake it as it is invisible from proper “agents” in the dominant realm. thus, lugones (2003, esp. 32, 84) speaks of “resistant subjectivity” rather than the “agency.” what potentially emerges from both the activity of the selfdisciplining agent and the passivity of the oblivion-seeker is an implied individuality— perhaps even solitude. this risks, then, erasing the crucial interpersonal dimensions of resistance to social structures that construct and reinforce hegemonic agency. phenomenology and rape in what was for me the most emotionally challenging chapter of the book, “dead to the world: rape, unconsciousness, and social media,” heyes provides a powerful account of the harm of being raped while unconscious as well as a phenomenological account of the particular kind of agency nullified by rape more feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 generally. two phenomenological concepts are central to both of heyes’s accounts. first, heyes (2020, 59–60) draws on lisa guenther’s critical reading of maurice merleau-ponty’s notion of “night.”. guenther (2013, 172) regards “night” as “the name for an experience of space unhinged from determinate objects and from the limits or outlines that distinguish self from nonself” and, in her view, night ends up being necessary to our experiences of individuation during non-night. second, heyes (2020, 61–62) draws on gayle salamon’s (2006) critical reading of merleau-ponty’s notion of “anonymity”. anonymity is described by merleau-ponty as follows: at the very moment when i live in the world, when i am given over to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, i can close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anonymous life which subtends my personal one. (merleau-ponty 2002, 191) crucially, salamon (2006, 109) links this notion fanon’s well-known discussion of being made into an object through racist interpellation as “a negro” by a white girl on the train arriving in paris. here, fanon (1967, 112) describes how he loses the capacity to be a “man among other men.” for salamon (2006, 109), this is the reduction of a “interiority” to “all surface,” which undermines his capacity to retreat into an anonymity. heyes (2020, 62) suggests that night can be understood as an instance of anonymity—perhaps a more extreme form. being raped while unconscious, argues heyes, undermine a person’s ability to experience night (one never feels safe anymore and is left sleeping with one eye open) and thereby destabilizes their waking experiences as well (72) thus, to be raped while unconscious is to suffer a specific harm that attends to having one’s capacity for night undermined. with this in hand, heyes then provides a phenomenological account of the sort of agency nullified by rape in general by enriching ann cahill’s (2001) account. according to the latter, rape undermines a particular power in intersubjectivity—one that is possessed by the rapist and destroyed for the victim. drawing on salamon’s rendition of anonymity, heyes (2020, 63) writes, “rape forcibly exposes the victim’s most private body parts to others’ intrusion, including her body’s literal interior. . . . this renders her bodily schema ‘all surface’ in a much more extreme way than fanon describes, leaving nothing for her to retreat to.” in this view of rape, rape of unconscious individuals ends up simply being a more extreme form of the general assault on this capacity to retreat into anonymity—namely, the capacity to experience “night.” bettcher – phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 given how deep and difficult these issues are, i want to tread lightly in pressing these ideas. i am persuaded that heyes’s appeal to the phenomenological concept of rape is useful in illuminating a distinctive harm of being raped while unconscious and that her appeal to the concept of anonymity is useful in understanding how agency can be undermined in rape more generally. however, i am not convinced that the harms captured in these accounts are the only ones. (i’m not sure whether heyes thinks they are, either.) nor am i convinced that the concepts heyes uses are truly sufficient for her purposes—specifically, her noteworthy focus on the post-rape retraumatization of victims through the public circulation of images on social media. to put it differently, i think there may be two sorts of harm at work that may be at risk of conflation. notions such as “exposure” and “private parts” require theorization in any account of rape, in my view. consider, after all, the moral distinction between, on the one hand, grabbing a person’s genitals nonconsensually and, on the other, grabbing their hand. the former involves a distinctive violation that the latter does not. to my mind, it is crucial that we understand the social work by which a body part becomes private and by which both concealment and exposure become possible. while this is important in its own right, it also is important in understanding pornography and commercial sexual services, as well as rape and sexual assault more generally. so, in arguing that the notions of privacy, exposure, concealment, and the like be taken very seriously in understanding rape, i’m raising a more general complaint about any account which does not do so. i’m also recommending this line of inquiry to heyes specifically, however, taking note of her explicit focus on the public circulation of graphic images, as i mentioned above. although my thinking on such matters originates in my work in trans philosophy (bettcher 2012, 2014, 2017), i do believe there are much broader applications of it. because there isn’t space for a full development, let me bring out the relevant ideas for the purposes of this response. the basic thought is that some encounters between people are intimate, and some are not, and that all sensory and informational encounters can be characterized in terms of degree of intimacy or lack thereof. what i call “interpersonal spatiality” can then be defined as the capacity of all sensory and informational encounters between people to admit of closeness and distance. i hypothesize that sensory and discursive encounters between people are governed by normative boundaries constraining informational transmission and sensory access between us. this is why it is wrong to touch somebody’s genitals (without certain background conditions being met). similarly, this is why it is wrong to suddenly start discussing somebody’s genitals, (again, unless certain background conditions are met). boundaries governing sensory and informational access have been respectively violated. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 boundaries are standardly “observed.” by this, i mean simply that they are not crossed. in eating a meal with one’s compatriots, for instance, one avoids staring at strangers. (one could, of course, look out of the corner of one’s eye). or when one is talking to a colleague, one avoids asking questions about parts of their body. all of this is taken for granted, of course. we don’t even think about it unless these boundaries are crossed. when these boundaries are crossed in this way (i.e., in the examples provided), they are “breached.” this is to say that some sort of boundary violation has occurred—a violation that can either be intentional or accidental. these types are boundaries are also meant to be crossed, however, when certain background conditions have been met. i call this “traversal.” while this traversal may occur, for instance, when a physician gains intimate access for medical purposes, the pursuit of intimacy is not the aim. rather, health is, and the traversal of sensory boundaries may be necessary for medical purposes. in noninstrumental cases, however, intimacy itself is the aim. i call this “intrinsic intimacy”—intimacy for the sake of sheer intimacy. one key component of intrinsic intimacy that warrants specific attention is this: in addition to traversing the boundaries of others, we can display ourselves to others—that is, we can open ourselves by placing the other in a position of traversal. we move into the other’s field of vision to let them know it’s okay to look. we share intimate information as a way of “opening up.” we place the other’s hand on our thigh, and so forth. in this way, intrinsic intimacy becomes something of a communicative endeavor, an interplay of traversal and self-display. here, we note the importance of what i call “intimate agency”—the control one exerts over the interpersonal distance between oneself and others. intrinsic intimacy, in this view, is made possible by the existence of these boundaries. without them, there would merely be unselective, unfettered sensory and informational access to one other. further, intrinsic intimacy is made possible by the standard observation of boundaries. without the default of interpersonal distance, intimacy could not be possible. specifically, the capacity for self-display would be undermined, and with that, the capacity to exert intimate agency over closeness and distance would be undermined. one way to understand the wrongness of rape, then, is precisely as the violation of boundaries that make intrinsic intimacy possible and that enable one’s capacity for “intimate agency.” such agency, notably, does not concern one’s ability to retreat into one’s body. rather, it concerns one’s ability to control how close or distant one is to others. one feels, in this case, boundaryless—that is, open to others in ways that are entirely beyond one’s control. while there is nothing to say that both harms—the undermining of one’s capacity for bodily retreat, and the undermining of one’s capacity to control the interpersonal distance between oneself and others—aren’t present in rape, it is also bettcher – phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 worth noting key differences between them. the former emphasizes what salamon calls the reduction of one’s interiority to “all surface.” here, the place of bodily retreat is set in contrast to one’s being available to others—among them in the world. the harm i am outlining, however, allows that there are different modes of being “surface”—if, by “surface,” we mean “object of perceptual access to others.” one mode involves being perceptually accessed in highly regulated and filtered ways (boundary observation). the other involves unfettered access gained through the crossing of boundaries. in this view, both forms of being a perceptual object are of value. the latter has a positive value of being a vulnerable object to others in intrinsic intimacy, as one opens oneself to another, allows the other to traverse one’s boundaries. the former has a positive value, in part because it makes the latter possible. the harm, in this case, has to do with the way in which one is a surface (i.e., an object of access)—namely, violation—not that one has become all surface. here, one is treated as not having a morally bounded surface at all. here, one is treated as a surface that is no different from that of an inanimate object. one of the benefits of this approach is precisely that it helps tie together the wrongness of rape—and sexual assault more generally—with the subsequent circulation of graphic images. heyes writes: women report feeling that others are staring at their bodies all the time, imagining what was done to them and how their bodies looked. this feeling of powerlessness in the face of the gaze is intensified for women whose rape has been photographed or videoed, as images of their violation are circulated in ways they cannot control. (heyes 2020, 64) what is at stake here is the violation of privacy, the undermining of a woman’s ability to control the crossing of boundaries on visual access to her. crucially, it is a reiteration of the original violation, which likewise undermined this ability. the approach i am proposing notably draws attention to a meaningful distinction between what heyes (2020, 72) calls the “neutral citizen moving through the crowd” (of fanon) and the “embodied subjectivity retreating into the sound of his own breath and blood” (of merleau-ponty). the former is captured by the notions of interpersonal spatiality and intimate agency. the latter is not. being one of the crowd doesn’t prevent one from being an object of perceptual access altogether. what it prevents is being gawked at by the entire crowd—exiled, as it were, and exposed for specific scrutiny. the latter, by contrast, appears not to involve any appeal to boundaries at all. that said, perhaps there is a way in which the notion of bodily retreat can be included in my approach. here, however, i would suggest only a special application of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 the notion, one that understands the retreat in terms of a kind of protection from others—a self-secured privacy. in such a view, bodily retreat would be one way in which one could attempt to find protection from a perpetual intimate accessibility to others. happily, this is captured by heyes’s (2020, 72) recognition that “for women in particular it [night] can also be a state in which we are not self-conscious or surveilled, and in which we get a respite from the anxieties of bodily exposure.” bodily retreat is suggested as a respite from the perpetual breaching of one’s boundaries, the constant exposure, that one experiences in waking life. to be clear, however, the more overarching harm of rape would consist in the undermining of intimate agency, where having one’s capacity for bodily retreat may or may not accompany it. if so, the specific harm of being raped while unconscious would then be highlighted all the more: not only is intimate agency undermined, the capacity to escape from it through the experience of “night” is also foreclosed. this, of course, is not the account heyes proposes. it is, rather, an invitation for further discussion. references bettcher, talia mae. 2012. “full-frontal morality: the naked truth about gender.” hypatia 27, no. 2 (spring): 319–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011 .01184.x. ———. 2014. “when selves have sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation.” journal of homosexuality 61 (5): 605–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472. ———. 2017. “getting ‘naked’ in the colonial/modern gender system: a preliminary trans feminist analysis of pornography.” in beyond speech: pornography and analytic feminist philosophy, edited by mari mikkola, 157–76. oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190257910.003.0008. cahill, ann j. 2001. rethinking rape. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. fanon, frantz. 1967. black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. new york: grove press. guenther, lisa. 2013. solitary confinement: social death and its afterlives. minneapolis: minnesota university press. heyes, cressida j. 2020. anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge. durham, nc: duke university press. lugones, maría. 2003. pilgrimages/peregrinaje: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2002. phenomenology of perception. translated by colin smith. london: routledge. bettcher – phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 salamon, gayle. 2006. “‘the place where life hides away’: merleau-ponty, fanon, and the location of bodily being.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 17, no. 2 (september): 96–112. https://doi.org/10.1215/104073912006-004. talia mae bettcher is a professor of philosophy at california state university, los angeles. some of her articles include “evil deceivers and make believers: on transphobic violence and the politics of illusion” (hypatia 2007), “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance” (signs 2014), and “what is trans philosophy?” (hypatia 2019). her monograph intimacy and illusion: an essay in trans philosophy is forthcoming from university of minnesota press. bettcher title page bettcher final format life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 5 recommended citation burke, megan. 2023. “life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 5. 2023 life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty megan burke sonoma state university burkemeg@sonoma.edu burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty megan burke abstract this paper considers the temporal experience constituted by prohibitions against sleep that target individuals who are unhoused and sleep outside. more specifically, drawing on cressida heyes’s account of sleep and anaesthetic time in anaesthetics of existence, this paper develops a preliminary account of punctuated time as a form of time poverty that is acute for those who must sleep outside. it is argued that such prohibitions against sleep work to anchor an individual in a totalizing presence, thereby instituting a temporal annihilation of subjectivity. accordingly, this paper suggests that the particular experience of punctuated time endured by individuals who are unhoused can be understood as a violent interruption of subjectivity that pushes them to the edge of lived time. keywords: temporality, time poverty, homelessness, sleep in april 2021, the medford city council in medford, oregon, approved an ordinance that makes unauthorized lying, sleeping, and camping in all public spaces in the city a criminal offense. the bill intensified preexisting ordinances that make it criminal to sleep in a tent or with “bedding materials'' in most public spaces and came just months after cold weather killed manuel (“manny”) barboza-valerio—a man experiencing homelessness who was sleeping outside in medford without a sleeping bag or a tent. the april 2021 ordinance received national attention for its blanket ban on sleeping in public. criticisms of the ordinance point out the inhumanity of the criminalization of homelessness and that carceral punishment is not an actual solution. as trista bauman, an attorney with the national homeless law center says, “laws that punish universal and unavoidable conduct performed by unhoused people in public space are ineffective at reducing the number of people who live outside. . . . in fact, they have the unintended consequence of entrenching homelessness. they make it more difficult to escape" (moriarty 2021). others, including bauman, point to the unconstitutionality of medford’s ordinance, citing the 2018 ninth circuit court of appeals case martin v. city of boise, which set the precedent that it is “cruel and unusual punishment” to enforce ordinances that prohibit camping in public places when those experiencing homelessness have nowhere else to go. in 2019, the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 supreme court of the united states upheld the ninth circuit court’s decision (letona 2019). despite the legal precedent, the 2021 medford ordinance remains in effect. the city insists that its ordinance is a “time, place, manner” restriction. the city also insists the purpose of the ordinance is not punitive. rather, the ordinance is a regulatory measure that prioritizes public health and serves as a preventative measure for wildfires. in “good faith,” the city lowered the ordinance penalties, from six months in jail and a $1,000 fine to up to thirty days in jail and a $500 fine (morty 2021; willgoos 2021; willgoos and giardinelli 2021). they also made minor changes to the law by adopting provisions that allow tents during the winter months (although these provisions are notably vague). medford’s ordinance is not necessarily exceptional, however. it is just one of the more visible examples of relentless efforts across the united states to punish those who have to sleep in public space.1 much is at stake in such prohibitions against sleep. they intensify the power of the carceral state and the precariousness of those who are already extremely vulnerable to violence, marginalization, and death. while housing advocates and activists rightly emphasize the human right to housing, the injustice of late capitalism’s skyrocketing housing costs, and the united states’s commitment to housing as an entitlement, it is important to consider the existential dimensions of such criminalization—as doing so elucidates the depth of the harm caused by prohibitions against sleep. given that sleep deprivation is recognized as a form of torture, existing analyses of the relationship between sleep and homelessness tend to draw attention to the negative impacts of sleep deprivation on physical, emotional, and mental health (sebastian 1985; gonzalez and tyminski 2020). a phenomenological account of the lived experience of time actualized by the prohibitions against sleep can elucidate the ontological violence at work in such criminalization. sleep is peculiar to consider phenomenologically. as cressida heyes (2020) makes clear in anaesthetics of existence, sleep does not really count as “lived experience,” at least not in the tradition of classical phenomenology.2 given the tradition’s emphasis on “lived experience” as the domain of the conscious subject, what happens to us when we are unconscious, asleep, drugged up, or deprived of 1 there is an implicit distinction here between people who choose to camp as a form of leisure and people who must sleep outside. the latter group may do so for a variety of reasons, and some may even “choose” to do so over sleeping in a shelter, but here i am not interested in how having to sleep outside comes to be one’s situation. what matters is what happens when this is one’s situation. 2 many classical phenomenologists have addressed the phenomenon of sleep, but they do not tend to examine sleep as a constitutive realm of experience. burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 presence are taken to be nonexperiences—that is, the absence of lived experience. this methodological exclusion, heyes (2020, 24) argues, suggests that “experience” is itself a “normative category.” heyes proposes not to fold the excluded into the normative category. instead, she opens up a new field for a phenomenological investigation. heyes considers so-called “nonexperiences” as “edge” phenomena in order to highlight the constitutive relationship between unconsciousness and consciousness, passivity and activity, sleep and wakefulness. in doing so, heyes offers an intervention in phenomenology that affords a way to make sense of and tend to what falls out of the bounds of the classical and normative rendering of experience. echoing lisa guenther’s (2020, 15) account of critical phenomenology as a method that pulls up what “has been rubbed out or consigned to invisibility” by rethinking what counts as lived experience, heyes’s turn to the edge shows how so-called nonexperiences can be leveraged or weaponized to reify violent social dynamics and normative subjectivity. a recurring “edge” of experience discussed in the book is sleep, and i focus on it here to explore what it reveals about the annihilation of subjectivity endured by those who experience homelessness. more specifically, i offer a few preliminary reflections on what occurs when cities and housed citizens withhold the right to sleep outside. in thinking with heyes in this way, i highlight the generative spirit of her turn to “nonexperience.” moreover, at the end of the book, heyes (2020, 144) remarks, “there is plenty about sleep in anaesthetics of existence, but it never quite takes center stage. in my parallel and successor project, a feminist philosophy of sleep, i hope to remedy that.” my reading traces heyes’s initial insights on sleep in order to develop a preliminary account of punctuated time—a form of time poverty that is particularly acute for those who must sleep outside. as i will suggest in what follows, punctuated time is the experience of one’s time as always about to be interrupted, or to use heyes’s language, it is a temporal experience of always living at the edge. various subjects suffer or endure forms of punctuated time. as a result of misogyny and male entitlement, girls and women (and those who are perceived to be girls and women even if they are not) are more likely to be interrupted by boys and men, and thus girls and women often live the experience of time as punctuated by others. primary caregivers—and mothers, in particular—are likely to have their own projects suspended by the labor of care they give to others. people of color have long been subjected to a white temporal order as an interruption to (the possibility of) existence. trans experience is often constituted through temporal intervals and deferrals that impede the flourishing of trans life. and in contrast to these oppressive punctuations, resistance efforts and protests, whether individual or collective, can punctuate the dominant temporal order as a gesture of liberation and as a challenge feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 to its violence.3 in other words, there are various ways to consider punctuated time. here, though, i focus only on the experience of punctuated time endured by those who must sleep outside. i suggest that a phenomenological consideration of prohibittions on sleeping outside discloses that those experiencing homelessness live the edge of being without time. this consideration brings me to a critical point about heyes’s book. i raise a challenge to the class dynamics of their account of anaesthetic time, suggesting the need for a more nuanced distinction between being pressed for time and living punctuated time. i conclude with a brief consideration of what heyes’s account helps to uncover about the politics of sleep in relation to liberatory resistance. sleep and subjectivity perhaps the most elucidating discussion of the relation between sleep and subjectivity occurs in heyes’s account of rape that is perpetrated against unconscious victims. as heyes (2020, 20) writes, “to be violated while ‘dead to the world’ is a complex wrong: it scarcely seems to account as ‘lived experience’ at all, yet it often shatters the victim’s body schema and world.” for heyes, such a rape is an “on the edge” event because it is beyond conscious or waking existence, wherein “‘lived experience’ might seem notably lacking,” yet it is nevertheless an event that happens to a subject (55). phenomenologically speaking, there is a difficulty that emerges in such events of rape: without recourse to the victim’s first-person lived experience how can we account for the harm of such a rape? to answer this question, heyes makes an important move and argues “unconsciousness is part of lived experience” (4). more specifically, heyes offers a phenomenological analysis of the significance of sleep to subjectivity in order to argue that being raped while unconscious destroys a subject’s experience of anonymity and anchors her in a hypervisible present. in other words, she loses the capacity to retreat into the night. following maurice merleauponty, heyes accounts for sleep as “necessary to my continuing a coherent 3 the week-long protest during april 18–25, 1971, on the national mall in washington, dc, by thousands of vietnam veterans shows how the politics of sleep and wakefulness exceed the borders of social movements. on april 21, 1972, the supreme court delivered a verdict banning “sleep activities” on public property, and the veterans decided to continue sleeping on the mall. as franny nudelman (2019, 120) writes in her book fighting sleep, “after hours of passionate debate over whether they should obey the law and stay awake or break it by falling asleep, veterans decided to sleep. in doing so, they turned sleep into a form of direct action, effectively politicizing a condition that might appear beyond the reach of radical organizing.” occupy wall street also politicized sleep as direct action in its mass movement “sleepful protests” that had thousands of people sleeping on public sidewalks. burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 existence”—not in a mere physiological sense, but in the phenomenological sense of being-in-the-world (59). this sense of sleep emerges from its relationship to night, which heyes describes as a spatial experience of “pure depth” in which subjectivity is, in guenther’s words, “unhinged from determinate objects” and concrete limits that “distinguish the self from nonself” (59; quoting guenther 2013, 172). for heyes, as for merleau-ponty, we need this experience of night as a respite from our conscious, waking life. it is restorative—a generative retreat from the world that affords me the capacity to get up and be thrown back into the world. as heyes (2020, 60) writes, the experience of night “offers an opportunity to continue existing while taking a break from being myself, exactly, for a while.” such a retreat is necessary to subjectivity because, as heyes puts it, “i develop my self-identity not only actively by distinguishing myself as an individual but also in those moments when i retreat from my specificity” (61). when the experience of night overwhelms a subject, it bears the potential of destroying her existence. that is, to be immersed in the pure depth of night, to not experience the rhythm of waking and resting, is to lose the capacity to orient oneself in the world. this loss is a result of the way others intervene in our lives. it is being marked by a kind of hypervisibility, which can occur in the paradoxical “dark” of solitary confinement (guenther 2013) or by being hailed by stereotypes that overdetermine existence and thus corrupt the capacity to open out onto the world (fanon 1967). heyes shows that to be raped while unconscious, to be sleeping in the sense of not being a presence, is to have the most vulnerable dimension of one’s existence violated because it is the dimension you need to be a conscious, active subject. contrary to views that suggest being raped while unconscious is “not that bad” because a victim is not awake for the violence—that is, she is not conscious while she is being violated—heyes points out the profound and particular harm of such an experience of rape. more specifically, heyes (2020, 72) argues that a girl who is raped while unconscious has a harder time recovering herself because she has had the “deepest place of anonymity, the part of one’s life when existence is most dangerously yet crucially suspended, erased.” the girl becomes “all surface” (63), laid out and suspended in pure depth. she becomes dead to the world. heyes’s account tends to emphasize the spatial features of sleep. in institution and passivity, merleau-ponty’s (2010) consideration of sleep is more explicitly attuned to its temporal significance. in describing sleep as passivity, he writes, “to sleep is neither immediate presence to the world nor pure absence. it is being in the divergence” (merleau-ponty 2010, 148). here, the temporal structure institutes this dimension of being. or as merleau-ponty says later on, “sleeping consciousness is not therefore a recess of pure nothingness; it is encumbered with the debris of the past and present. it plays with them” (207). the depth of the night that envelops the subject, which allows her to retreat, is made possible by the temporal rhythm of sleep. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 insofar as this temporal depth renders a subject’s reawakening in her particularity possible, the “nonexperience” of sleep is not atemporal. its distinct temporal rhythm—neither pure presence nor pure absence—is a condition of possibility for living an open structure of time. paying further attention to the relation between lived time and sleep helps us understand not only how a victim who is raped while unconscious is not just laid bare in space (and not just literally) but also why heyes (2020, 66) claims the girl is “frozen in time.” this language of being temporally frozen is language that i have used to describe the temporal structure of normative feminine existence as it is instituted through the pervasive threat of rape (burke 2019). on my account, to be frozen in time is to become deeply anchored in the present; it is to become severed from one’s past and to live the future as foreclosed. rape is a particularly pernicious event in the institution of this closed structure of time because of the way it animates histories of power and social meanings of rape that aim to destroy a victim’s life (mann 2021). in the aftermath of rape, lived time freezes because others have the power to hold you to a particular moment in time. you get stuck there, held down, and pinned to the bed; and in the case of audrie pott, which heyes (2020, esp. 52–53, 64–66) discusses at length, you get trapped in the images of your naked, violated body circulating on social media. the temporal structure of the harm of being raped while unconscious is therefore significant. the victim is pushed to the edge of her time because her existence is suspended in the depth of night. ultimately, it is because sleep or unconsciousness is a generative temporal edge of experience that its violation through rape undoes a subject. on this point, heyes’s contribution to feminist phenomenology is important. if sleep is treated as a nonexperience, then the “tacit belief . . . that being less aware of one’s assault while it is happening makes it less damaging” persists (heyes 2020, 55). being without sleep heyes’s account of being raped while unconscious exposes the existential damage of the weaponization of sleep. their account underscores how sleep can be weaponized to violate existence or destroy subjectivity. this point is already well known in analyses of sleep deprivation as torture. heyes’s analysis points toward other events, ones in which torture is seemingly not at stake but that nonetheless underscore the intersubjective dimension of sleep and that expose how others can weaponize sleep in ways that legislate subjectivity by denying the capacity for sleep. as a result, heyes’s analysis invites us to think about how a restorative “edge experience” of sleep is a matter of how others allow for a subject’s rhythms of waking and sleeping. burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 this point brings me back to sleep and the experience of homelessness. medford’s prohibition on camping, lying, and sleeping leaves those without “proper” shelter with no way to retreat into the night. as a result, the ordinance is a mechanism that destroys subjectivity by stripping those who are unhoused of the capacity to sleep. to prohibit sleep, as heyes’s account reveals, is to push a subject to the very edge of lived time. by making it more difficult to find a place to sleep, camping prohibitions are part of the arsenal of surveillance mechanisms used by the state, mechanisms which construct a hostile architecture of presence to annihilate the existence of those who are unhoused. such efforts work to anchor a person experiencing homelessness in a totalizing presence, a presence that has the power to make one into a pure absence. distinct from the rape victim, the individual experiencing homelessness who is prohibited a place to sleep is denied the temporal movement between sleeping and waking by being forced to stay awake.4 one is denied the unconscious dimension of experience by being forced and surveilled into a mode of pure presence. efforts like prohibitive ordinances, “sweeps,” and shelter regulations enforce this temporal experience, putting a subject on the edge of lived time itself. working against being trapped in pure presence, people experiencing homelessness may engage in what one unhoused man, “joe,” refers to as time discipline: where and how you sleep is often a matter of discipline when residentially challenged… if you’re sleeping in a car or rv, shelter or friend’s couch, you have the issue of finding a place to sleep and being up and about before the rest of the world is. usually in a shelter, you have to be up and out by a certain time. if [you’re sleeping in] a vehicle, you have to have it moved by a certain time. if you’re working you have to find ways to make the job fit your situation or vice versa. you’re on others’ schedules. and this is where sleep deprivation hits the hardest. it adds up. (olsen 2014) 4 i do not mean to make a clean distinction between victims of rape and victims of inadequate housing. there are certainly reasons to consider the compounding ways rape and the prohibitions against sleeping in public, including state surveillance on the streets, are used against those who are unhoused and to consider how the experience of rape may be a condition for the experience of inadequate housing. here, though, i am referring to the experiences of rape discussed by heyes—the ones that happen at predominantly white, affluent, high school parties. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 to exist “on others’ schedules,” as “joe” does, is to live punctuated time. generated by the social and material conditions of homelessness, to live time as punctuated means that your temporal experience is acutely subjected to the hostility of external forces. to live time in this way is to experience time as profoundly contingent on the social power of others. the point here is not that temporality is or should be purely subjective. rather, the point is that people experiencing homelessness are likely to have their time overwhelmed by others. “joe” finds a way to negotiate the loss of his time, but he is nevertheless severely subjected to others’ time and what others do to his time. to not become trapped in presence is “a matter of discipline.” here, i would like to make a critical point about heyes’s consideration of time poverty in anaesthetics of existence. heyes describes a kind of class privileged time poverty experienced by the white, middle-class moms who self-medicate in order to cope with life in late capitalism. but “joe” lives a very different experience of time poverty. his temporal poverty is a specter of death. to live time as punctuated in the way he does is to live at the edge of being without time. it is to live every day with the possibility of becoming a pure absence by being frozen in pure presence. there is thus an important distinction to make between different experiences of time poverty that occur in the postdisciplinary time of late capitalism. this difference could be pursued further in heyes’s account. heyes (2020, 99) describes anaesthetic time “as a logical response” to and “a way of surviving” the depleting economy of postdisciplinary time that results from the material conditions of living in a milieu when work is always possible, when multitasking is required, and in which work and life are conflated. heyes draws attention to its particularly gendered dimension, noting that anaesthetic time is often marketed to and taken up by white, middle-class women so they can “relax into a form of life at high speed” (112). this experience of anaesthetic time stands in stark contrast to the dangerous ways poor women and women of color are framed as anaesthetic subjects, which heyes points out. she writes, “for all those individuals who use anaesthetic time as a respite from the labor of communicative capitalism, there are also those who are thrown out by systems of labor as surplus and are anaesthetized as a way of managing or subduing them” (114). but it is here that heyes could develop an important distinction to clarify the particular lived experience that is the focus of her analysis. anesthetic time is a mode of subjectification of the socially privileged, while anaesthetized time is that which demarcates who is to be discarded. to be sure, i would agree that these are both “edge experiences,” but a consideration of this difference would better elucidate how postdisciplinary time structures temporality in different ways depending on the material conditions of one’s existence. from this difference between the socially privileged experience of anaesthetic time and the socially disadvantaged experience of being anaesthetized, an important burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 distinction in the experience of time poverty emerges. on heyes’s account, those who have the social privilege to “take the edge off” do so because they experience time as if there is not enough of it. when there’s “so much to do,” one lives time as if there is not enough of it. from such a situation, anaesthetization is a way to experience time as more open. it is to relax into time that is jam-packed. it is to “check out” so the intensity of reality subsides. in this shape of time, time is impoverished—but only because one is pressed for time to slow down and expand. in contrast, to endure homelessness—as one materialization of being anaesthetized—is to experience time as relentlessly broken. in this form of time poverty, sleep is used against those who are unhoused to destroy subjectivity. as such, this kind of time poverty imperils one’s ability to experience time at all. the issue here is not that heyes neglects to point out that anaesthetic time is lived by those who are socially privileged. indeed, heyes (2020, 99) claims it is “subtly marketed to more privileged women.” my point is that a sharper distinction between anaesthetic time and anaesthetized time would better draw out the intersubjective dimension of temporality. it would better elucidate how lived time is structured by others and how it is maldistributed in late capitalism. what would we then grasp about the material and intersubjective conditions that allow a subject to affectively alter her own time, who gets to slow time down, and who gets to experience the rhythm of waking and sleeping? how might such a distinction disclose the conditions of the temporal harm endured by those who are unhoused? the politics of sleep cressida heyes has written a book that inspires us to pay more attention to the existential and ethical dimensions of sleep and that asks us to consider the role of sleep in liberatory movements. her book encourages us to understand that how and if we sleep, and how we wake, are about the ways others hold time open for us. indeed, heyes draws our attention to the ethical and political dangers of anaesthetic time. “it is more an absence or an evasion than a way of being present,” heyes (2020, 124) writes. while anaesthetic time might be an individual survival strategy of socially privileged subjects, a way to manage the overwhelmed time of a postdisciplinary world, it also allows us to retreat from the world. this kind of retreat is a condition of possibility for the persistence of forms of anaesthetization that subjugate and destroy. following heyes’s innovative work, my comments here have begun to show that living the edge of being without time is a weaponization of temporality that works to undo, and often end, the existence of those who are unhoused. anesthetic time, as a time of checking out, is a condition that makes the reality of such harm possible. as heyes (2020, 124) writes, we should not “all go to sleep in lieu of feminist revolution.” the distribution of sleeping and wakefulness, of living social conditions feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 that allow one to sleep and to retreat from one’s self, have an important role to play in resisting and responding to the particular forms of violence waged against those who are unhoused. references burke, megan. 2019. when time warps: the lived experience of gender, race, and sexual violence. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. fanon, frantz. 1967. black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. new york: grove press. gonzalez, ariana, and quinn tyminski. 2020. “sleep deprivation in an american homeless population.” sleep health 6, no. 4 (august): 489–94. https://doi.org /10.1016/j.sleh.2020.01.002. guenther, lisa. 2013. solitary confinement: social death and its afterlives. minneap olis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2020. “critical phenomenology.” in 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology, edited by gail weiss, ann v. murphy, and gayle salamon, 11–16. evanston, il: northwestern university press. heyes, cressida j. 2020. anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge. durham. nc: duke university press. letona, crys. 2019. “supreme court lets martin v. boise stand: homeless persons cannot be punished for sleeping in absence of alternatives.” national homeless law center, december 16, 2019. https://homelesslaw.org/supreme -court-martin-v-boise/. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2010. institution and passivity: course notes from the collège de france (1954–1955). translated by leonard lawlor and heath massey. evanston, il: northwestern university press. mann, bonnie. 2021. “rape and social death.” feminist theory. published ahead of print, april 29, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001211012940. moriarty, liam. 2021. “homeless advocates push back on proposed medford camping law changes.” jefferson public radio, march 31, 2021. https://www .ijpr.org/poverty-and-homelessness/2021-03-31/homeless-advocates-pushback-on-proposed-medford-camping-law-changes. nudelman, franny. 2019. fighting sleep: the war for the mind and the us military. new york: verso. olsen, hanna brooks. 2014. “homelessness and the impossibility of a good night’s sleep.” atlantic, august 14. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/201 4/08/homelessness-and-the-impossibility-of-a-good-nights-sleep/375671/. sebastian, juliann g. 1985. “homelessness: a state of vulnerability.” family and community health 8, no. 3 (november): 11–24. burke – life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 willgoos, megan. 2021. “tents to be banned in medford after prohibited camping ordinance passes through council.” ktvl news 10, april 2, 2021. https://ktvl .com/news/local/tents-to-be-banned-in-medford-after-prohibited-campingordinance-passes-through-council. willgoos, megan, and christina giardinelli. 2021. “greenway campers react to proposed ordinance banning use of tents.” ktvl news 10, march 22, 2021. https://ktvl.com/news/local/greenway-campers-react-to-proposedordinance-banning-use-of-tents. megan burke (they/them/theirs) is associate professor of philosophy at sonoma state university. they work primarily in feminist philosophy, critical phenomenology, and trans philosophy, and are the author of when time warps: the lived experience of gender, race, and sexual violence (university of minnesota press, 2019). burke title page burke final format a taxonomy of oppressive praise feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 2 recommended citation mchugh, hannah. 2024. “a taxonomy of oppressive praise.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 2. 2024 a taxonomy of oppressive praise hannah mchugh justitia center for advanced studies, goethe universität hannah.mchugh.16@ucl.ac.uk mchugh – a taxonomy of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 a taxonomy of oppressive praise hannah mchugh abstract theories of moral responsibility have often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might. in line with recent accounts, this article argues that praise does require such justification. oppressive praise is an erroneous attribution of moral or normative responsibility that contributes to the production and reproduction of oppressive and dominating structures. this article provides a taxonomy of oppressive praising practices. oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. it can be categorized into that which misrecognizes an agent as either (1) less deserving of praise (“underrecognition”) or (2) more deserving of praise (“overrecognition”) than would be consistent with nonoppressive norms. two further normative concerns are addressed: first, the conditions under which disingenuous praise will be oppressive; and second, where issues of standing to praise do and do not arise. keywords: oppressive praise, political responsibility, moral responsibility theories of moral responsibility have often neglected an exploration of the role of praise. it has frequently been considered as simply an opposite to blame or, rather, as its positive correlative. philosophers have too often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might, as it is ostensibly a nonharmful and nonpunitive practice. r. jay wallace (1994, 61) has gone so far as to assert that praise doesn’t have a central defining feature in our responsibility practices. against this prevailing view, i shall argue that praise does require justification. the recent accounts of michelle ciurria (2020) and jules holroyd (2021, 19) have indicated how practices of responsibility are not insulated from social and political dynamics. praise that is levied in line with oppressive norms and expectations can reinforce or entrench oppression. crucially, erroneous attributions of moral responsibility through oppressive praising will produce and reproduce oppressive and dominating structures. this paper builds on existing accounts by arguing that oppressive praise aligns with oppressive expectations and by specifying a taxonomy of oppressive praise. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 this paper proceeds as follows. section 1 sets out praise’s role in practices of responsibility and argues that praise requires special justification. section 2 sets out a taxonomy of oppressive praise, finding it to either overor underrecognize an agent’s deservingness of praise by aligning with oppressive norms. in section 3, i consider instances of disingenuous praising and consider whether issues of standing arise with relation to praise. 1. praise’s role in our responsibility practices philosophers offer varying accounts of two of the key social practices which hold agents socially, politically, and morally responsible: praise and blame. both practices have an important role in signaling normative and moral standards—in praising someone, agents acknowledge that they have acted in a morally or normatively desirable way. praise is a central reactive attitude associated with moral responsibility; it is a response to and recognition of an agent’s responsibility for a morally and/or normatively desirable action. this article will demonstrate that praise is an important practice used to signal, reinforce, and develop moral responsibilities. ordinarily, praise is not levied where an agent is merely fulfilling a normative or moral duty. praise is usually levied for particularly desirable behavior which exceeds expectations. the inverse applies in the case of blame. a praiser or blamer will be expressing their commitment to the standards which underlie their assessment. david shoemaker and manuel vargas (2021) have explored this signaling function in relation to blame. they argue that blaming signals a commitment to a social group and that group’s constitutive norms. this commitment is said to explain in part why blame is levied even in costly contexts for the blamer (shoemaker and vargas 2021). i argue this extends to practices of praise. one reason that praise has been comparatively undertheorized is that the promise of praise has eclipsed its potential pitfalls. praise can signal a moral or normative standard and, given that it is often desired, can motivate agents to act in accordance with that standard. moreover, praise is often considered less costly to levy than blame. while levying praise does cost something in emotional time and energy, it is in many instances less damaging than blame to agents’ emotions and relationships. like blame, praise can carry social risks of exclusion; praise for emerging “woke” norms may lose an agent favor with a more conservative crowd, for instance. however, an agent may feel there are fewer social risks associated with praising their housemate for dutifully taking out the bins compared with blaming her for the previous neglectful weeks of allowing rubbish to build up. praising children, for morally right things, instils in them a sense of what is morally right and develops their virtues. this is an example of how praise signals and develops moral responsibilities. in this sense, praise has an important pedagogical role in cultivating the uptake of mchugh – a taxonomy of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 moral responsibilities.1 similarly, we show our friends, loved ones, and colleagues that we recognize their virtues by praising them. this helps social cohesion and reinforces our commitments to uphold group values. praise is an attractive and, in many instances, a morally appropriate practice. it would even stifle our sensibilities to completely withhold our praising practices, which are often generated unthinkingly. praise, then, does not only indicate a backward-looking assessment of responsibility. the practice can indicate and to some extent reveal the normative standards of the day reflexively (i.e., both to the agent undertaking the practice as well as to those subject to it and those observing it). in this sense, it is a both backward and forward-looking notion which shapes our ability to recognize and respond to moral and normative reasons. praise, like blame, can also work to “scaffold” responsibility by improving agents’ sensitivity to reasons and making them more likely to take up action. in the terms of victoria mcgeer and philip pettit (2015, 168–69) when describing blame, i argue praise too will be part of transitioning agents from a generic capacity to act to a specific capacity to act. that is, it will assist agents in identifying the relevant moral or normative standards and scaffold their likelihood of adopting those standards. the practice of praising, then, is a key site of enquiry when considering a social group’s moral or normative standards (from here on, “moral ecology”). praise, then, is key both in holding others responsible and in identifying the moral and normative standards which a member of a social group is to be held responsible for upholding. praise is used to affirm the moral and normative standards of a social group, even in conditions where the standards are newly emerging and in the process of being identified. since peter strawson’s (1974) “freedom and resentment,” philosophers offering accounts of moral responsibility have sought to delineate the normative conditions that need to be satisfied for someone to be held responsible in a justified way. put otherwise, the focus is on when it is appropriate for agents to be subject to the reactive attitudes associated with praise or blame. for strawsonians, responsibility is a matter not of metaphysics but of our social and normative functioning. it is a socially embedded practice. our social practices (including of responsibility), given their nature, are not insulated from social and political dynamics.2 praise, then, may be levied in accordance with social and political standards that fail to track ideal moral or normatively desirable goals. 1 i thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point. 2 ciurria (2020) and holroyd (2021) identify this critique. i do not claim that nonpractice-dependent theories of responsibility would enjoy insulation from social and political dynamics. i focus, however, on the practices as i seek to offer an account of how praise can be reformed to better achieve emancipatory goals. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 given the emphasis on the reactive attitudes of agents who themselves produce and reproduce the structural context in which they act, such practices are at risk of entrenching and reinforcing oppressive norms. where agents hold each other responsible in accordance with moral or social norms, there is a risk that judgements will be in line with oppressive but widely held norms. similarly, our social practices— including practices of responsibility—will be affected by background oppressive structures, and this could lead agents to (implicitly or explicitly) judge others by standards in line with oppressive expectations, assuming, for instance, that certain groups are more or less blameworthy or praiseworthy given their social position. this carries the risk of signaling and scaffolding oppressive norms, which in turn will reinforce and reproduce structures of oppression. 2. oppressive praise oppressive praise will track and enforce oppressive norms. i will argue that oppressive praise can be categorized into that which misrecognizes an agent as either (1) less deserving of praise (“underrecognition”) or (2) more deserving of praise (“overrecognition”) than would be consistent with nonoppressive norms. drawing on ciurria and holroyd’s important initial work, i offer a series of cases to illustrate each type so as to specify a taxonomy. i begin with cases of under recognition. in these cases, praise is linked to expectations aligned with oppressive norms. as a result, praise is applied or is absent in a way that suggests an agent has less ability than is the case. i offer two illustrative cases: (1) “ableist praise” and (2) “missing praise.” case 1: ableist praise stella young (2014), in her ted talk entitled “i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much,” describes her younger self as being an average student with no notable extracurricular interests. one day, someone approached young’s parents to tell them that young was “an inspiration” and proposed she should be nominated for a “community achievement award.” young and her parents were confused, as they could not attach this praise to any particular achievement. young has a physical disability. this fact bore little on her ability to go to school and participate in social life. young deduced from this praise that this person had an expectation that, owing to her disability, young was less educationally and/or socially capable than her able-bodied peers. why, otherwise, would she be praised for achievement comparable to her peers? this praise under-ascribed young with the relevant type of capacity for educational and social achievement. mchugh – a taxonomy of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 case 2: missing praise missing praise occurs where a double standard is in place or, rather, where an agent belonging to a privileged group is recognized for work that an agent from a disadvantaged group would not be equally recognized for. recent empirical research in social science carried out by doerer, webster, and walker (2017) found that double standards occur in hiring as a consequence of status differentiation based on gender and on race. in their study, participants ranked men and women as well as black and white candidates on the basis of their competence and suitability for fictitious professional roles. they found “good evidence for activation of a double standards process in choices, competence, and suitability ratings” (doerer, webster, and walker 2017, 38). in this case, there is an underrecognition of the competence and suitability of women and black candidates. their qualifications and experience are seen as unpraiseworthy by comparison to similar attributes in socially privileged agents. assuming that the professional attributes on which the supposed applicants were judged are of merit, there is missing praise and a double standard in place which reinforces the oppressive expectation that women and black candidates are less competent and professionally suitable. i now turn to cases where there is an overrecognition. in these cases, praise is given in scenarios which imply greater merit than is in fact deserved. this reflects an oppressive expectation whereby agents with the duty to act in line with emancipatory goals are not recognized as such and are seen instead as acting supererogatorily or in ways that otherwise exceed normative and moral expectations. i offer here two illustrative cases: (1) “respecting pronouns” and (2) “the millionaire donor.” case 3: respecting pronouns sam, a nonbinary person, asks colleagues to adopt “they”/“them” pronouns when referring to them. some colleagues struggle with this task, having until now never knowingly encountered a nonbinary person and having a habit of using binary pronouns. however, the colleagues who adopt the pronouns are praised by sam and others. this high praise continues over time. this is an overrecognition; the high praise appears to signal that adopters of the pronouns are exceeding morally and normatively relevant expectations. nonbinary persons represent a marginalized societal group, and the harms of misgendering work to empower those who undermine their identity claim as well as, more broadly, to those who identify as male or female. similarly, praise which erroneously signals that adoption of avowed pronouns is supererogatory is oppressive. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 case 4: the millionaire donor ciurria (2020, 180–81) takes on the case of a millionaire donor in her book an intersectional feminist theory of responsibility, citing an essay by david v. johnson (2019) that critiques how blame and praise function to reinforce systems of economic power and domination. in this essay, johnson offers the recent example of the praise given to françois-henri pinault. pinault is a businessman who pledged 100 million euros to the reconstruction efforts of notre-dame cathedral following the fire which damaged it in 2019. johnson notes that this donation amounts to 0.3 percent of pinault’s overall wealth and would correlate to a donation of €840 from the average french household. johnson goes on to argue that not only is pinault receiving praise that would not be mirrored for a french household that made an €840 donation but also that this reflects an ideology of problematic meritocracy. johnson attributes this praise to the notion that rich people deserve their wealth and cannot be blamed for spending it as they wish, which sits in contrast to the account of economic oppression he sets out. johnson argues that the praise serves to undermine the notion that rich people have benefitted from societal forms of economic oppression and erodes the notion that there are redistributive or structurally transformative moral obligations on rich people, such as would be in line with emancipatory goals. if this line of reasoning is accepted, we can see here an overrecognition. pinault is receiving praise for action that, if considered by the normative standards of emancipatory goals, does not exceed expectations. the oppressive expectation that rich people do not have obligations to society and deserve their wealth in spite of unequal or unjust economic arrangements is reinforced by this praise. 3. disingenuous praise there is a further way in which praise can overor underrecognize an agent, as yet unexplored in the literature. this will be where the praise is disingenuous. disingenuous praise appears to be harmful in two scenarios, (1) where it fails to acknowledge the genuine merit of the praisee (misfiring praise) and (2) where it seeks to imply an unjustified merit in the praiser (undeservedly appropriative praise). disingenuous praise is harmful to the individual agent on the receiving end. let’s consider these potential pitfalls of praise. misfiring praise will follow the same pattern of overor underrecognizing an agent. for instance, praising a woman for her contribution to a work project, rather than recognizing her as having led the project, would underrecognize her efforts. similarly, praising a man for having led a project to which he only contributed would overrecognize his efforts. misfiring praise will be oppressive where it tracks oppressive norms and can also be disrespectful in other contexts for failing to appropriately attribute responsibility. while i term this praise disingenuous, it is not intentional disingenuity that makes the praise objectionable. misfiring praise is oppressive mchugh – a taxonomy of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 because it aligns with oppressive norms by overor underrecognizing an agent’s capacity for action in a relevant normative or moral regard. it will be disingenuous as praise if levied for an action that was not taken by the agent subjected to praise and this has been wrongly construed by the praiser (either intentionally or unintentionally). as regards the second form of disingenuous praise—undeservedly appropriative praise—this relates to an issue of standing to praise. some philosophers have advocated for the use of praise, and for the special justification of blame, on the basis that requirements of standing do not apply in the former where they do in the latter. for instance, one might argue that hypocritical praise, unlike hypocritical blame, does not cause problems of standing, citing that one agent praising another for something they themselves had achieved is unrestricted. for instance, one agent who has become vegan in an attempt to lessen their carbon footprint praising another agent who has taken the same actions raises no concern. similarly, one may praise another agent for an achievement which both agents contributed to, unlike in cases of blame. one founder of a successful climate-change ngo may praise their cofounder for the work that they have done together. similarly, on first blush, there seem to be no concerns about praising an agent for an action not taken by the praiser. a person who has not become vegan praising a vegan friend seems to raise no concerns. on the other hand, nathan stout has argued that there are concerns related to an agent’s standing to praise. stout (2020, 219) offers the example of his own hypothetical discomfort should he receive praise for his work from donald trump: when given by an upstanding, decent member of my moral community it serves to elevate me in various ways, but when given by someone who regularly, and with malice, flouts the standards of that community it may serve, instead, to lower my status in the eyes of others, to create distrust among my fellows, or to damage my own view of myself or my work. it appears that the harm identified here by stout relates to the hypothetical identification of stout’s own values with the moral character of the praiser. this could be comparable, for instance, to a case whereby an imaginary agent has grown up estranged from her father. she rejects that her father would like to praise her for the woman she has become. the reasons for this relate to standing. as the father took no active role in her development, she may feel he does not deserve to praise her. in both of these cases a more detached form of praise may be compatible. if the father were to offer praise which acknowledged his own detachment from the achievements of his daughter, such as “you have become a wonderful woman in spite of me and my behavior,” or similarly in stout’s case, if trump were to tweet, “in spite of my own feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 worldview and commitments, the work of stout is commendable,” it seems the issue of standing would fall away. what is odious in these cases is the attempt of the praiser to unjustly attach themselves to the person or standards which they are praising. it may be that all praise is appropriative, given its signaling nature. this is an advantage of praise when praise is used to serve emancipatory goals. in the act of praising, agents are more likely to adopt the standards underlying their words when engaged in the practice. praise demonstrates not only that there is a normative standard but moreover that the praiser believes it to be valuable. a problem arises only where the praiser has acted in such a way that they have invalidated their ability to levy such praise (as in the cases above). in these cases the praise will appear disingenuous, given the conflict between the praiser’s actions that have undermined the (met or exceeded) standard for which they are praising and the attempt of the praiser to align themselves with those standards. the issue is resolved where the praise is detached from the praiser to recognize the better character of the person praised. the praise is no longer made appropriative. this, then, is not a question of standing; it is a question of appropriation. to muddy the waters between the character of the praiser and the content of their praise is to elide this distinction. attachment of the praiser to the praise, where this is unjustified, implies an overrecognition of the praiser as regards some relevant norm. this may or may not be oppressive, depending on whether that over-ascription tracks a background of oppressive norms. conclusion i have argued that oppressive praise aligns with oppressive background conditions such that an agent is either overor underrecognized. oppressive praise is an erroneous attribution of moral or normative responsibility that contributes to the production and reproduction of oppressive and dominating structures. i have also shown that there are normative problems associated with disingenuous praise, where it misfires to overor underrecognize an agent’s deservingness of praise in line with oppressive norms. i have identified that praise has an appropriative character and dismissed that this poses issues of standing so long as that praise is not unduly signaling a merit in the praiser. praise, like blame, is central to practices of responsibility. this article has sought to impress the importance of theorizing when praise is and is not appropriate. this taxonomy sets out how oppressive praising practices can hold agents morally responsible in ways that overor underrecognize agents in ways inconsistent with nonoppressive norms. mchugh – a taxonomy of oppressive praise published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 references ciurria, michelle. 2020. an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility. new york: routledge. doerer, sharon clemons, murray webster jr., and lisa slattery walker. 2017. “racial double standards and applicant selection.” social science research 66 (august): 32–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.04.002. holroyd, jules. 2021. “oppressive praise.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (4). article 3. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2021.4.13967. johnson, david v. 2019. “let us now stop praising famous men (and women).” aeon, august 23, 2019. https://aeon.co/ideas/let-us-now-stop-praising-famous-men -and-women. mcgeer, victoria, and phillip pettit. 2015. “the hard problem of responsibility.” in oxford studies in agency and responsibility, volume 3, edited by david shoemaker, 160–88. oxford: oxford university press. shoemaker, david, and manuel vargas. 2021. “moral torch fishing: a signaling theory of blame.” noûs 55, no. 3 (september): 581–602. https://doi.org/10.1111/no us.12316. stout, nathan. 2020. “on the significance of praise.” american philosophical quarterly 57, no. 3 (july): 215–26. https://doi.org/10.2307/48574434. strawson, p. f. 1974. freedom and resentment and other essays. london: methuen. wallace, r. jay. 1994. responsibility and the moral sentiments. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. young, stella. 2014. “i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much.” filmed april 2014 in sydney, australia. ted talk video, 9:16. https://www.youtube.com/wat ch?v=8k9gg164bsw. hannah mchugh (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow of the justitia center for advanced studies, goethe universität. she received her phd in political theory from the department of political science, university college london. hannah’s main areas of interest are theories of political responsibility and social change, feminist and neorepublican political theory, as well as philosophical approaches to the contemporary market economy. 101202 mchugh title page 101202 mchugh final format hope, solidarity, and justice feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation stockdale, katie. 2021. “hope, solidarity, and justice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (2). article 1. 2021 hope, solidarity, and justice katie stockdale university of victoria katiestockdale@uvic.ca stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 hope, solidarity, and justice katie stockdale abstract this article defends an account of collective hope that arises through solidarity in the pursuit of justice. i begin by reviewing recent literature on the nature of hope. i then explore the relationship between hope and solidarity to demonstrate the ways in which solidarity can give rise to hope. i suggest that the hope born of solidarity is collective when it is shared by at least some others, when it is caused or strengthened by activity in a collective action setting, and when the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the group. in the context of social movements, collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of the solidarity group; namely, in the pursuit of a form of social justice that inspires the movement. i then suggest that the object of collective hope born of solidarity is the guiding ideal of justice and reflect on what it might mean to hope well for justice. keywords: hope, collective emotion, solidarity, social justice, feminism 1. introduction in these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a “we” that did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency; new possibilities suddenly emerge, or that old dream of a just society reemerges—and—at least for a little while—shines. —rebecca solnit my aim in this paper is to understand what it means to hope together, to capture the feeling of being swept up by a hope that is larger than oneself. hope was, for example, quite central to the civil rights movement, contributing in powerful ways to the collective struggle for racial justice. more recently, the me too movement has inspired many women and feminist allies, renewing feminists’ hope that women’s humanity and rights might someday be affirmed. but what is the nature of hope in these contexts, and can it be captured by the hopes we have as individuals? when oprah winfrey called for hope in her acceptance speech at the 2018 golden globes— feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 declaring that a “new day is on the horizon!”—what was the hope that many felt in that moment? i propose an account of collective hope to make sense of at least one form of hope that arises in collective struggles against oppression. i begin by reviewing some recent literature on the nature of hope. i then explore the relationship between hope and solidarity to demonstrate the ways in which solidarity can give rise to hope. i suggest that the hope born of solidarity is collective when it is shared by at least some others, when it is caused or strengthened by activity in a collective action setting, and when the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the group. in the context of social movements, i argue that collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of the solidarity group; namely, in the pursuit of a form of social justice that inspires the movement. i then suggest that the object of collective hope born of solidarity is the guiding ideal of justice and reflect on what it might mean to hope well for justice.1 2. what is hope? there is growing literature in philosophy on the nature and value of hope. philosophers typically agree that hope is a paradigmatically future-oriented attitude involving at least the desire for an outcome and a belief that the outcome is possible (downie 1963; day 1969). this is what has become known as the standard or orthodox definition of hope (meirav 2009; martin 2014). but many scholars have argued that the standard account of hope as a combination of belief and desire does not quite capture the nature of our significant hopes (bovens 1999; pettit 2004; meirav 2009; martin 2014; calhoun 2018).2 a number of competing theories have emerged in recent decades to explain what hoping for an outcome involves beyond desire and belief. for example, luc bovens (1999) suggests that hope consists of “mental imaging,” or conscious thoughts about what it would be like for the hoped-for 1 some readers might reject the possibility of there being social groups and collectives at all. my aim is not to do the metaphysics behind group ontology but to engage with those who believe that groups exist and to show how some of those groups might hope. thanks to barrett emerick for urging me to be more explicit about this goal. 2 one of the central problems is that it is possible for two people to have equivalent desires and to assign the exact same probability estimates to the desired outcome, while one person hopes and the other despairs (meirav 2009). in other words, despair—that is, the opposite of hope—also involves the belief in the possibility (but not certainty) that a desired outcome will obtain. obviously, something is missing from the belief-desire account. emerging theories of hope attempt to resolve what that missing element is. stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 outcome to obtain. adrienne m. martin (2014) defends an account of hope as a way of seeing the possibility that a desired outcome might come about as licensing hopeful activities such as fantasizing about, planning for, and anticipating the hoped-for outcome. and cheshire calhoun (2018) defends the view that hope is a phenomenological idea of the future as one in which the desire constitutive of hope has been fulfilled. although there are clear differences between these and other accounts of the nature of hope in the literature, martin (2019) suggests that a consensus view has emerged according to which hope is an attitude that consists of the desire for an outcome, the belief that it is possible, and a positively toned “what if” attitude toward the hoped-for end. but one might ask for a fuller characterization of this positively toned “what if” attitude characteristic of hope. my own view is that the third element of hope is a way of seeing or perceiving in a favorable light the possibility that the desired outcome obtains. hope is thus similar to other emotions which are perceptual-like experiences of their objects. christine tappolet (2016) identifies key similarities between emotions and sense perceptions that can be extended to capture the crucial “what if” attitude in hope. for example, both emotions and sense perceptions are conscious states with a phenomenological character or “what it is like” experience. there is something that it is like to have the visual perception of an object as blue, just like there is something that it is like to have the experience of fear and to see something as dangerous (tappolet 2016, 19). however, our “what it is like” experiences are not directly chosen or a result of inferences (as in active mental states like belief and judgment). instead, we are struck by them as largely passive responses to our environments. when i walk outside, i see (through my visual perception) mountains in the distance; and when i witness a bike being stolen, i see (through my emotional experience of anger) the act as wrong. such experiences are analogical: their content is sensitive to variations in what is perceived. when we see red objects, our visual perceptions are sensitive to fine-grained variations in redness (e.g., faint red vs. bright red). similarly, our emotions come in variations of intensity. i might be mildly angry when a close friend forgets my birthday (seeing the act as only slightly offensive) but strongly angry when a friend says something blatantly sexist (seeing the act as strongly offensive). when we hope—that is, when we see in a favorable light the possibility that a desired outcome one believes to be possible obtains—this seeing-as emotional experience can be understood as analogous to sense perception. hope, like sense perceptions, is a conscious mental state with a phenomenological character: there is something that it is like to hope for an outcome. it is also a largely passive response to situations over which we do not have direct or immediate control (see, e.g., solomon 1976). we find ourselves with hopes that we did not directly choose to have, though we can (as in the case of other emotions) attempt to acquire or abandon feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 hopes through focus, positive thinking exercises, confronting evidence, and so on.3 hope has what elijah chudnoff (2012) refers to as presentational phenomenology: in hoping, the situation appears a certain way to the agent (milona and stockdale 2018). in particular, it appears as though the hoped-for outcome might really come about. and like other emotions, hope comes in degrees of intensity: we can be mildly, moderately, or strongly hopeful. i might, for example, be only mildly hopeful about getting a job because of how competitive i know the job market to be, but strongly hopeful about receiving an offer after an interview that went very well. hope, then, seems to be analogous to sense perception in a manner parallel to other emotions. hope involves seeing in a favorable light the possibility that a desired outcome obtains—a kind of nondoxastic representation of the agent’s situation. but as we have begun to see, hope is also affective in character. as peter goldie (2004, 96) explains, “when an emotion is directed toward its object, then this is a sort of feeling toward the object.” the relevant feeling is not a physiological feeling (although it may accompany physiological changes), like the feeling of one’s heart pounding or the feeling of sweaty palms. rather, it is an emotional feeling: a feeling that is directed toward an object in the world “beyond the bounds of the body,” a feeling that is bound up with how we take in the world of experience (goldie 2009, 238). and seeing in a favorable light the possibility that a significant desired outcome obtains certainly feels a certain way to the person hoping. as margaret urban walker (2006, 45) argues, when we hope, “there is a sense, and it can be an actual feeling, of ‘pulling for’ the yet undetermined resolution one desires.” martin (2014) describes this feeling as anticipating the hoped-for end’s obtaining. my aim is to make sense of how the emotion of hope emerges through solidarity in agents’ pursuit of a more just world.4 3 by “passive,” i just mean to emphasize the ways in which hope sweeps over us similarly to fear, despair, pride, and so on. and though we can’t choose our emotions in the same way that we can choose our actions, we can exercise some control over hope by engaging in activities aimed at cultivating, increasing, or paring down our hopes. see milona and stockdale (forthcoming) for a more in-depth discussion of hope and control. 4 there is a further question of whether hope might also be a virtue. it is famously one of the three christian virtues; and there is emerging interest in the question of how hope might be an intellectual, moral, democratic, and political virtue (e.g., moellendorf 2006; snow 2013, 2018; milona 2020). some philosophers have argued that there might even be a form of “existential” hope (ratcliffe 2013) or “basal” hope (calhoun 2018)—that is, a feeling of hope without an object. others insist that hope is always about something, even if the hope in question takes the whole world as its object (milona and stockdale 2018). so there remains ongoing debate not just about stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 3. solidarity and emerging hope feminists have long defended the role of solidarity in struggles against sexist oppression (e.g., hooks 1986; mohanty 2003; scholz 2009). there is also an emerging interest in the concept of solidarity in moral, social, and political philosophy, and in bioethics. in an increasingly complex and global world, philosophers have begun to recognize that the concepts and commitments most familiar to us—such as individual rights and autonomy—are incapable of generating adequate moral guidelines for how we should live (sherwin 2012). in shifting focus away from the individual towards the collective, the concept of solidarity challenges us to think not just about how i should live and act but how we should live and act together. thus solidarity, some philosophers have argued, holds promise for helping us to understand our moral obligations in addressing threats that target whole social groups—in the case of global threats such as climate change, the whole planet—and to build a better world (jennings and dawson 2015; doan and sherwin 2016; kolers 2016; sherwin and stockdale 2017). scholars have distinguished between many different kinds of solidarity including feminist solidarity, black solidarity, and other forms of race-based solidarity (hooks 1986; mohanty 2003; shelby 2005; blum 2007; scholz 2009). i want to focus on what i think of as moral-political solidarity, namely, solidarity based in a shared moral vision carried out through political action. within moral-political solidarity, there will certainly be what sally scholz (2008) refers to as social solidarity: solidarity based on common experiences and identities, such as women’s common experience of sexism in a patriarchal society. this form of solidarity brings people together based on their membership in the same social group, and a shared sense of identity that includes “cultural forms, practices, or ways of life” (young 1991, 43). there is, for example, social solidarity amongst women, black people, and indigenous people who find themselves in solidarity with others based on their shared social location. but it is not only members of oppressed social groups who share a moral vision for the elimination of their oppression, and who undertake political actions to eliminate it. people from many different backgrounds voluntarily join in solidarity with others against sexism, racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. i want to understand the relationship between hope and this form of moral-political solidarity as it brings people together across difference, united not always by shared experiences or identities but by their sense of what has to be done together in the pursuit of justice. the nature of hope and how to characterize various kinds of hope, but also about hope’s value to our moral, social, and political lives. i set some of these questions aside to focus on developing an account of one form of collective hope. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 scholz (2008, 81) explores the role of hope in solidarity in her political solidarity, arguing that “hope is the only necessary feeling for political solidarity.” she says: political solidarity is primarily a movement of social change. . . . hope means that they believe the future can be better than the present. the moral sentiment of hope motivates activity within solidarity because it fosters the desire for the final ends or goals . . . of political solidarity. (81–82) it is not exactly clear how hope might be necessary for solidarity. one interpretation is that hope is necessary for moral motivation to join in solidarity. as scholz suggests, “without [hope] there would be no reason to act collectively” (82). it is certainly right that hope can motivate people to come together in solidarity against injustice. but it is also the case that the beginnings of a solidarity movement are evidence not of hope for some participants but rather its loss or absence. for example, the emergence of solidarity and corresponding resistance efforts can reveal a loss or absence of hope that traditional means of realizing moral and political goals—such as government and law enforcement—will pull through. as journalist and activist sarah jaffe (2018) writes in the context of the me too movement: perhaps one of the deepest assumptions of the #metoo movement is that the society we live in provides us no real options for justice. the court system does not work for survivors and hr is a tool of the boss. the tools we need do not exist yet, so we must build from the ground up. so hope in the court system, for example, is lost. yet it seems that social movements like me too can themselves create or restore hope for those of us who might otherwise find ourselves in despair. hope can, in other words, be produced by solidarity. the hope born of solidarity begins with the recognition that there exist other people who are committed to standing by oneself against injustice. we can learn about this form of hope from testimony of those who join in solidarity movements. for example, rita wong, canadian writer and environmental activist, recounts finding hope through participating in the healing walk in alberta’s tar sands. she says: on my own, i think i would have shrunk down into despair or numbed myself because i felt incapable of addressing the huge, overwhelming scale of the destruction. yet, on this walk, the sick feeling co-exists with stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 a quietly hopeful one, invoked by the efforts of my co-walkers, as well as the many people we know who cannot make the journey to fort mcmurray, the epicentre of tar sands extraction in northern alberta, but who ask us to carry their wishes and prayers for the healing of the land with us. (truth and reconciliation commission of canada 2015, 103) wong’s testimony of the “overwhelming scale of destruction” captures the threat to hope that indigenous and environmental activists face as they challenge powerful institutions to fight for indigenous lands and waters and for the health of the whole planet. but wong’s testimony also embodies a renewed hope that arose through solidarity. wong found hope in the recognition that her co-walkers share her moral vision for a healthy planet on which indigenous lands and waters are protected from environmental damage, and that they, too, are ready to stand with her in opposition to the people and institutions standing in the way of this shared vision. similarly, patrisse cullors, one of the founders of black lives matter, explained that black lives matter seeks to “provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams” (solnit 2016, xiv). these examples suggest that there is a way to collectively recover hope, for those of us who might be struggling to find hope on our own. as victoria mcgeer (2004, 122) suggests, “recovering hope depends on discovering some new way of relating to others, specifically a way that recognizes the interdependence of the self and other in generating the best confidence for keeping hope alive.” perhaps the hope that is generated through solidarity manifests, at times, as an existential or basal emotion—a felt sense of hope without an object (ratcliffe 2013; calhoun 2018). but i think that the hope born of solidarity is often a renewed or strengthened hope for some form of justice. it is a kind of collective hope for justice. 4. collective hope what exactly does it mean for a hope to be collective? i begin with the intuition that there seems to be something fundamentally different between hoping for one’s own happiness alongside others who share the hope for happiness and hoping for gender justice as part of the me too movement alongside others who share the hope for gender justice. in the happiness case, it would seem odd to construe the hope as a collective hope even though most of us, as human beings, hope for happiness. each of us who hopes for happiness constitute an aggregate in virtue of this attribute—namely, that we each hope for happiness (see young 1991, 43). in other words, we share the hope for happiness in the minimal sense of hoping for the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 same outcome.5 but the hope of the me too movement is different. it seems to belong not to each individual who hopes for gender justice, but to a collective: women and feminist allies who share in the hope of the movement. there are at least two routes to take in order to make sense of the hope of the me too movement. the first is to argue that the hope is an aggregate of and reducible to the hopes of individuals, and the second is to argue that there is a kind of hope— collective hope—that is appropriately ascribed to the movement or to the solidarity group.6 i want to take the second route and propose an account of collective hope. i argue that collective hope often emerges alongside a collective intention of the solidarity group; namely, an intention to pursue the form of justice that inspires the movement. as we will see, the reductivist about collective hope faces the challenge of capturing the phenomenology of collective hope—a felt experience of hope which is quite different from the phenomenology of standard individual hopes. i have suggested that hope involves seeing or perceiving in a favorable light the possibility that a desired outcome obtains. building from this understanding of hope, hope becomes collective when the following conditions are met: (1) the hope is shared by at least some others; (2) the favorable perception of the possibility that the desired outcome might obtain, and corresponding hopeful feelings, is caused (or is strengthened) by activity in a collective action setting; and (3) the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the collective. the first condition is relatively straightforward: in order to have collective hope, or any genuinely collective emotion, the emotion must be experienced by more than one person. (i say more about what it means to “share” a hope below.) the second condition captures the causal and dependency relations between the group and the hope: the hope is caused or strengthened by a collective action setting and depends 5 this is not to say that shared hopes are not often powerful. the shared hope to find a vaccine for the novel coronavirus of 2019, for example, is a hope that almost all people in our world share at the time of writing. it can motivate actions in the pursuit of a vaccine (for those of us who can affect the outcome), and it can help to sustain at least some of us through a profoundly difficult time. 6 i use “solidarity group,” “movement,” and “collective” interchangeably to include members of the relevant oppressed group and their allies. i acknowledge that there is much more to say about who is a member of these collectives and who counts as an “ally.” stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 upon collective activity for its existence. for example, a woman might have very little hope about women’s rights, and she might participate in a protest out of anger and a strong sense of justice despite seeing no instrumental reasons for doing so. but joining a group of women and allies coming together at a march, perhaps to take action on sexual violence against women and to promote women’s reproductive rights, might cause the woman to feel a sense of hope for women’s rights, seeing the possibility of gender justice in a more favorable light in that moment than she otherwise would. the second and third conditions capture the difference between hoping for one’s own happiness alongside others who also hope for happiness and hoping for gender justice as part of a solidarity movement. in the former case, i see in a favorable light the possibility of achieving my own happiness. although other people (e.g., my loved ones) might also see the possibility of my attaining happiness favorably, there is no group formed around the goal of achieving my happiness. when i hope for gender justice alongside others in a collective action setting, in contrast, the hope belongs to the group whose goal is to achieve justice for women and whose members intend to pursue the outcome as a group. the hope is part of a collective rather than the possession of multiple individuals who happen to share the same hope.7 but understanding how, exactly, hope emerges at the level of a collective requires a deeper understanding of the collective itself. philosophers interested in collective activity have explored the ways in which collectives might have beliefs, intentions, and actions, and—more recently—emotions of their own. i suggest that collective hope born of solidarity emerges from the joint commitments and actions of the solidarity group. to borrow from margaret gilbert (2002, 125): “a population p has a collective intention to do a if and only if members of p are jointly committed to intending as a body to do a.” for example, i might be personally committed to gender justice. but if i express a readiness (verbally or through other behavior) to commit alongside others to gender justice, i contribute to the formation of a joint commitment to pursue gender justice. joint commitments cannot be broken down into each individual’s personal commitment, since they arise from individuals 7 this is certainly not the only potential form of collective hope, and there are even cases in which a group is formed around the goal of achieving another person’s happiness or wellbeing. for example, patients in psychiatric facilities often have a team of health-care providers assigned to their case: physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, and so on. since the team of health-care providers makes up a collective formed around a common goal—namely, to improve the patient’s wellbeing—they might share in a collective hope to improve the patient’s wellbeing. in this paper, i remain focused on cases of collective hope that arise through solidarity. but there are other potential cases of collective hope that are interesting and important too. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 together determining what they intend, as a group, to do. consequently, i might be jointly committed to intending to do a as part of a body without a personal commitment to intending to do a. i might, for example, be jointly committed to pursuing gender justice as part of the me too movement even if i have no personal commitment to pursuing gender justice on my own. (perhaps i judge that such a pursuit would be futile.) social movements have their own goals and intentions, which direct the activities of the collective.8 and it is not difficult to find out about the goals, intentions, and actions of social movements currently at work; this information is readily available on official websites and social media pages through “missions” and “vision statements.” on the me too website, we find that the me too vision is, broadly, justice for women with respect to holding perpetrators of sexual violence accountable for their actions. within this broad goal, the focus is primarily on helping survivors (especially young women of color from low-income communities). as the movement has grown, this vision has broadened: “what started as local grassroots work has expanded to reach a global community of survivors from all walks of life” (me too, n.d.). the vision states: our goal is also to reframe and expand the global conversation around sexual violence to speak to the needs of a broader spectrum of survivors. young people, queer, trans, and disabled folks, black women and girls, and all communities of color. we want perpetrators to be held accountable, and we want strategies implemented to sustain long term, systemic change. (me too, n.d.) these goals and priorities (“our goal,” “we want”) belong to the group itself, not just any one individual desiring, intending, or acting alone. although tarana burke as an individual founded the me too movement in 2006, and thus her personal intention to pursue social justice with respect to sexual violence against women has certainly helped to shape the movement, me too is essentially a collective endeavor. it is a product of individuals coming together and negotiating the movement’s goals, intentions, and priorities, and how the group will pursue its ends. but the joint commitment to intend to pursue gender justice as part of the me too movement will not necessarily secure the outcome; it is quite possible that the collective intentions and actions of the group will fail. thus, individuals who are jointly committed to pursuing gender justice as part of the collective might form the hope 8 as bell hooks (1986, 138) explains, “to experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build sisterhood. . . . solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.” stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 that their efforts will be successful. of course, they might hope in the standard individual sense (as when a bystander hopes that the me too movement succeeds in its aims) or as a member of the group (as when i form the group-based hope as a woman that the me too movement succeeds in its aims). but they might also hope in the collective sense: desiring gender justice; believing that success in securing the outcome is possible but not certain; and seeing in a favorable light (or more favorable light) the possibility of achieving gender justice, with new or strengthened hopeful feelings, through participating in the collective actions of the solidarity group. importantly, one might not have an individual or group-based hope yet share in the collective hope. a male ally might not be hopeful about achieving gender justice on his own, and i might not be hopeful (as a woman) that sexist oppression will ever be eliminated. but when the ally and i jointly commit alongside others to pursue gender justice as part of the movement, and when we show up in a collective action setting, we might find ourselves sharing in a collective hope for gender justice.9 but what, exactly, does it mean to share in a collective hope? i suggest that sharing or participating in a collective hope is phenomenologically different from both individual hopes and shared hopes in the minimal sense of hoping for the same thing as others (e.g., as in the hope for happiness).10 in the individual and minimally shared cases of hope, hope is an affective state that feels like something for the individual who hopes. but the affective character of collective hope episodes—how, exactly, collective hope is experienced—is different. seeing in a favorable light the possibility that our (those of us here, in this moment) desired end might be attained feels differently from seeing in a favorable light the possibility that my desired end might be attained. new research in the philosophy of mind supports this hypothesis. for example, joel krueger (2014) discusses the possibility of what he calls environmentally extended emotions: emotions that are extended beyond an agent’s 9 gilbert (2014) discusses another way in which her theory of collective intention might make sense of collective emotions. she argues that collective emotions are emotions to which group members are jointly committed. i think this view requires too strong of an endorsement of one’s emotion. i might not be committed to hope, though in jointly committing to an end and participating alongside others in a collective action setting, i might find myself swept up in a collective hope that we will succeed. collective hope, on my view, is an affective state that is appropriately ascribed to groups. it is not a joint commitment to experiencing the emotion itself. 10 i imagine that two individuals sharing a hope might also have a phenomenological character distinct from that of individual hopes; for example, pair figure skaters’ hope that they (together) will win nationals might have a phenomenological feel distinct from a solo skater’s hope that they win nationals. i set these interesting cases aside to focus on hopes born of solidarity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 body in such a way that the emotion itself is constituted by factors external to the agent. krueger uses the example of environmentally extended emotions through music. emotions become environmentally extended through music in the sense that the listener “integrates with musical dynamics in a reciprocal, mutually-modulatory way”; or in other words, that what the listener hears determines how he responds by way of the emotions, and those responses shape what the listener hears, which then informs further responses (krueger 2014, 544). krueger argues that emotions might become collectively environmentally extended when they are shared by two or more individuals. as he puts it: “the emotion is something that emerges over time as a group-level trait; it extends across the various individuals making up the group” (536). for example, at a funeral, the subdued nature of funeral music combined with the presence of other people grieving results in a collective experience of grief which shapes the character of grief for individuals. the dynamic results in an emotional convergence between them: when others react (for example, when they cry), one feels one’s own responses align with the emotional responses of others nearby (krueger 2014). i want to suggest that emotional convergence between individuals is what results in a sharing of hope that goes beyond hoping for the same outcome. as dario páez and bernard rimé (2014, 207) explain, individuals’ gestures, movements, speech, and so on result in “an atmosphere of emotion and fervor” which transforms individual emotional feelings into shared emotional feelings. these shared emotional feelings, along with the experience of being in community with other people, combine in such a way that “participants evolve to a sense of group membership” and “experience the ‘we’ in place of the ‘i’” (207). for example, in listening to a feminist activist’s speech in a room full of supporters, the speech (including the content of words spoken, tone, and volume of voice) as well as the presence of others passionately listening (their facial expressions, verbal responses, and body language) shapes how individuals perceive and feel, including by way of their emotions. they come to see in a favorable light the possibility of the desired outcome’s obtaining, often more intensely than they otherwise would, with new or strengthened feelings of hopefulness. their hopeful expressions (e.g., smiling, nodding, cheering) then feed back into the group, enhancing the hopeful feelings of others. the result is emotional convergence, a shared feeling of hope, which transforms the sense that “i am hoping” into the sense that “we are hoping together.” individuals become aware of a hope that stretches beyond all of them, a hope in which each person can share but which belongs to the “we” that has formed in this moment. this is not to say that how collective hope feels is equivalent amongst members of the collective. the collective “we” notably includes people who occupy different social locations which affect how they emotionally experience the world, and consequently how they hope (stockdale 2019). for example, indigenous women stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 and white women may collectively hope for gender justice, yet how they experience collective hope in response to an indigenous woman’s powerful call to action at a rally will likely vary. hope is relational, even at the collective level. this is consistent with the existence of a collective hope for gender justice in which all participants who are jointly committed to gender justice can participate. just like each person’s actions as part of a collective action depend upon who they are in relation to others and to the cause, so too each participant’s emotional experience as part of a collective hope depends upon who they are in relation to others and to the cause.11 i have argued that the collective hope born of solidarity thus emerges from shared experiences of hope between members of a collective who are acting together in the pursuit of justice. these reflections suggest that there are good reasons to think that a form of collective hope emerges in social movements when individuals come together in solidarity. i have argued that collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of a solidarity group, and that collective hope is phenomenologically different from individual hope. i suspect that what is “collective” about collective hope, or what is not easily reducible to the hopes of individuals, is the phenomenological character of the emotion. although it is felt and experienced by individuals, the hope extends beyond them in and through the collective, resulting in an emotional atmosphere of hope that is appropriately ascribed to the collective itself.12 research in philosophy and the social sciences on “emotional convergence” and “emotional atmosphere” helps to illustrate how collective hope emerges, paving the way for new and insightful ways of understanding collective emotional phenomena in solidarity movements. but there remains much room for debate about how to best characterize collective hope and how collective hope might manifest differently in different contexts. my aim has been quite modest: to provide a starting point for theorizing one form of collective hope in the pursuit of justice. 11 this feature of the account of collective hope i am offering weakens the sense in which hope can be collective, since collective hope does not require each individual to feel the exact same thing. but i suspect that those who insist on a theory of collective hope (and other emotions) that explains how each person feels the exact same thing will end up with skepticism about the possibility of collective hope and other emotions altogether. it’s my view that a theory of collective hope should accommodate rather than explain away variation in emotional experiences based on personal and social difference. 12 as bennett helm (2014, 47) suggests, “the idea is not that the group itself has a mind and mental states in exactly the same way as individuals do; rather, it is that there is a phenomenon at the level of the group that can properly be understood to be an emotional phenomenon and that is irreducible to the states of mind of the individual group members.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 but what is the object of collective hope? solnit suggests that the “old dream of a just society” emerges in these moments of rupture, moments in which individuals find themselves as part of a “we” through which new possibilities emerge. the emergence of collective hope born of solidarity thus raises the question of how we might hope well for justice. for some of us, our hopes for justice are modest, as we hope for small victories that will improve the world for the better, however slightly and however long those improvements last. for others, their hopes for justice are ambitious; and some people even sustain hope for justice itself. i want to suggest that these two ways of hoping for justice, what i call modest hope and utopian hope, are ways in which we can individually and collectively hope well for justice. 5. hoping well for justice when we hope for racial justice, the elimination of sexist oppression, and a world in which all people have the income and resources they need to live a good life, we are hoping for outcomes that would contribute to the collective project of achieving that dream of a just society: a state in which there would be no more moral work left to do but to maintain the end we have reached. the utopian hope for complete justice is thus a hope whose realization would radically transform the world such that a moral ideal of complete justice (hereafter, justice), the object of hope, is obtained. although i wish to remain neutral about what theory of justice is correct, if any, i understand the utopian hope for justice as a hope to achieve the moral ideal of justice.13 as luc bovens (1999, 674n4) aptly puts it in his discussion of the value of individuals’ hopes, it is “notoriously difficult to make sense of utopian hopes.” the difficulty is that, for some people, the utopian hope for justice functions as a guiding ideal that directs their more modest hopes, but it is itself not really a hope. in other words, some agents appeal to the moral ideal of “justice” to form hopes the realization of which would constitute progress toward the ideal, even if they do not 13 we might reasonably rule out some utopian hopes, such as the hope that “america will be made great again,” where “greatness” seems to refer to a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression envisioned in some sort of utopian american future. we might also rule out utopian hopes that are unrealistic, such as the utopian hope to live in a world of only altruists (see howard 2019, 300). although there is much more to say about the nature of and justification for particular utopian hopes, i limit my focus to utopian hopes for justice where the conception of justice envisioned does not clearly miss the mark, about both what is just and what is possible. i don’t suppose most agents who hope for justice have a well-worked-out theory of justice either, though they might still testify to having the hope for justice, nonetheless. and their expressions of hope are genuine. stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 hope that we will ever reach the ideal in reality. for example, one might hope to prevent the construction of a pipeline that will be detrimental to indigenous lands, waters, and health; and the hope to prevent the pipeline from being built is part of the hope for environmental justice. the hope for environmental justice is, then, part of the hope for justice. but not everyone who has the first hope has the second; and not everyone who has the first and second hopes has the third. it is possible to hope to prevent a pipeline from being built while having no hope that environmental justice, and (by implication) justice, will ever be attained. we can see these different hopes for justice at work in collective action settings too. some people might show up at a rally for environmental justice inspired by a recent approval for a pipeline to be built, participating in the collective intention to prevent the pipeline to protect indigenous lands, waters, and health. we can imagine some participants attending the rally out of a sense of duty, even if they have no hope that collective efforts to prevent the pipeline from being built will be successful.14 others might participate out of the modest hope that environmental activists might prevent this one pipeline from being built, without hope that environmental justice will ever be attained. but even these participants who are unhopeful about the possibility of environmental justice itself, as individuals, might find themselves sharing in a collective hope for environmental justice. as they listen to powerful and inspiring speeches from indigenous water protectors, read signs that say, “we demand environmental justice!” and witness the hopeful verbal and behavioral expressions of others, they might find themselves swept up in the collective hope for environmental justice, perhaps even seeing in a favorable light the possibility of justice itself. but what lessons can we learn from these collective experiences of hope? when the collective diffuses and we retreat to our homes and everyday lives, which of the above hopes should we attempt to sustain and pursue? feminist scholar and activist rebecca solnit (2016) defends hoping only for small victories, not justice as a moral ideal. as she says: “this is earth. it will never be heaven. there will always be cruelty, always be violence, always be destruction. . . . we cannot eliminate all devastation for all time, but we can reduce it, outlaw it, undermine its sources and foundations: these are victories. a better world, yes; a perfect world, never” (solnit 2016, 78). so although the dream of a just society emerges at various moments in the form of collective hope, we can only reasonably sustain hope to achieve small victories, without judging that the realization of these hopes for small victories would 14 see tessman (2009), stockdale (2017), and norlock (2019) for discussion of agents who persist in their moral and political struggles without hope that their efforts will be successful. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 constitute a step closer to realizing some moral ideal of justice in our not-yetforeseeable collective future. similarly, kathryn norlock (2019, 11) suggests that evil and suffering will never be eliminated and argues that “there is no reason to believe that the future will be one in which evils cease to be.” although human beings are capable of changing for the better, their ability to do so is outmatched by the seriousness of the problems facing humanity. we are also essentially imperfect, according to norlock. so the utopian hope for justice, which requires us to believe that achieving a moral ideal is possible, is not justified. it entails a mistaken understanding of what it means to be human. but this unhopeful stance toward the possibility of attaining justice itself is nevertheless compatible with forming and pursuing more modest hopes, hopes that are even guided by the moral ideal norlock believes is impossible to attain. we can, she points out, engage in efforts aimed at constructing just institutions even if “our efforts may be inadequate, or undone, or not sustained after we die” (15). and norlock rejects the charge that she is advocating for a sisyphean existence, for moral agents to continue rolling a ball up a hill only to have it topple back down, over and over, for eternity. on norlock’s view, there is no hill; and “directional metaphors” are bound up with our wishful thinking that moral progress has an endpoint that we can reach if we just continue on in our moral and political struggles (16). we ought to, instead, just do our best, reveling in other goods of life including activism, recreation, and loving relationships as we navigate the necessarily imperfect world we share. i share these feminist scholars’ unhopeful stance toward the possibility of achieving complete justice some day in the future. i suspect many others will share this perspective, unable to see in a favorable light the possibility of obtaining justice in the future, even slightly, and unable to feel hopeful anticipation in thinking about a future state of the world that is just. like solnit and norlock, such people might not feel pulled by the need to hope for justice itself; they might, instead, be motivated to pursue justice by pursuing the mitigation of injustice. and i think that this is one way of hoping well for justice. but i want to make room for utopian hopers: those who really do believe in moral progress and who continue to hope that we might someday succeed in living in a just world. utopian hopers, too, can hope for justice well. utopian hopers desire justice, believe that justice is possible, see in a favorable light the possibility of attaining justice (perhaps pointing to moral improvements and advancements toward the ideal), and feel hopeful about the possibility of achieving justice in the future. the cynics among us might be inclined to reject the idea that the utopian hope for justice can be a reasonable hope to have: they might judge that the moral ideal is nowhere within reach and hoping for justice itself can be a distraction from the concrete, real-world actions we need to take to mitigate injustice in the here and now. but importantly, it might be morally valuable for people to form hopes related to their moral projects, even when those projects are wildly ambitious, stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 perhaps even doomed to fail. an agent’s strong hope that sexist oppression will be eliminated in one’s lifetime might be a morally praiseworthy attitude because of what it reveals about the agent’s moral character, even if it is unfitting to hope for this outcome given the evidence available. the agent might hope well by preserving the hope that sexist oppression will end, just not in our lifetime. this revised hope is an example of what michael milona (2019) calls patient hope: a hope for an outcome in the very distant future, one which orients attention and action toward what one can do to make incremental progress toward the hoped-for end. the revised hope, the hope that sexist oppression will someday end, might then be part of the hope for justice; and we can run the same argument to defend the hope for justice. interestingly, too, it is difficult to criticize the hope for justice as a moral ideal. it is certainly fitting to see justice as desirable and the possibility that justice might someday be attained in a favorable light, individually and collectively, given the vagueness of the “someday” represented in the hope. it even seems fitting to be strongly hopeful about the possibility that all forms of oppression will eventually end and that justice “will someday prevail.” when we have this hope, the “someday” referred to is so far into the future that it is barely even foreseeable—a faint, abstract future that is indeterminate. the utopian hope for justice is vague, open, and inarticulate; and this is precisely what makes criticizing it so difficult. it reaches for a moral ideal that we have never seen obtained before; and it might, then, be bound up with faith.15 for example, in hoping that justice “will someday prevail,” one might have faith in humanity, appealing to one’s faith in human beings as justification for continuing to hope.16 more specifically, we might have faith in humanity that supports our belief in humanity’s “goodness” in the rawlsian sense of the term. to say that human nature is good, for rawls (1999, 7) “is to say that citizens who grow up under reasonable and just institutions . . . will affirm those institutions and act to make sure their social world endures.” and reflection on the contingency of historical evils and in the goodness of human nature demonstrates that “we must not allow these great evils of the past and present to undermine our hope for the future” (22). rawls thus believes that a future just society is a realistic possibility for which we can reasonably hope. 15 martin (2014) argues that faith is hope for an unimaginable outcome whose nature and goodness would transcend our own ability to understand it. through such faith, the agent adopts a kind of metaconfidence that nothing she experiences can give her reason to abandon that hope. see stockdale (2021) for further discussion of the relationship between faith and hope in struggles against oppression. 16 see ryan preston-roedder (2013) for discussion of faith in humanity and valerie tiberius (2008, 137–156) for a similar defense of the virtue of optimism about human nature. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 and in arguing that a just society “could and may exist,” rawls notices that justice is physically possible (that is, consistent with the natural order of how human beings are and how they might be) as well as possible for our future world—a world in which historical and current injustices continue to affect us (howard 2019, 299–300). inspired by kant, rawls’s hope for justice rests on a kind of faith beyond what we see in the world right now, faith that might vindicate the hope for justice. so we might faithfully hope well by recognizing that the utopian hope is not (right now) within reach, and thus attempt to form hopes toward the moral ideal that are more clearly in view. the hopeful agent might, in other words, shift the target of the utopian not-yet-graspable hope to more concrete, realistic outcomes the obtaining of which would make progress toward justice. for example, one might hope for gender justice as part of one’s hope for justice by forming the less ambitious hopes for equal pay for equal work, an effective plan to implement recommendations to end the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women (as in canada at the time of writing), and increased government support for reproductive rights. or they might find themselves sharing in a collective hope for gender justice itself while remaining mindful of the obstacles we must collectively encounter before the hope born of solidarity can be realized. rawls seems to think that reasonable people are required to maintain the utopian hope for a just future, since doing so guards against feelings of futility and diminished moral motivation. but the claim that hope is required for moral motivation is too strong. people can be motivated to continue on in their moral and political struggles without hope that their efforts will be successful (tessman 2009; stockdale 2017). and as solnit and norlock teach us, people can also hope well for justice by hoping for small victories that will diminish harm and improve people’s lives in the here and now—even if they have no hope in the attainability of justice itself. i see both rawls on the one hand, and solnit and norlock on the other, as taking two different but equally permissible stances toward the future. as long as the agent who hopes only for small victories does not lose her commitment and motivation to continue striving to attain her moral ends, she is justified in pursuing modest hopes while remaining hopeless about the possibility of achieving complete justice. and as long as the agent who hopes that justice “will someday prevail” has, as rawls does, rational beliefs about the magnitude and severity of evil, suffering, and injustice in the world right now, they are justified in their ambitious hope. what is important is that the object of hope, or the guiding ideal—the elimination of all forms of injustice in the world—structures and guides individual and collective action; and that we do not lose sight of where we have been, how things are now, and where we need to go. stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 6. conclusion i have argued that, through solidarity, a new form of hope can emerge: a collective hope born of solidarity. in this form of collective hope, individuals’ hopeful feelings converge with the emotional feelings of others, producing an emotional atmosphere of hope which transforms the experience of “i am hoping” into an experience of “we are hoping as a group.” the object of the collective hope of solidarity is, i have argued, justice as a guiding ideal—often a particular form of social justice attached to the “vision” of a social movement. members of a solidarity group jointly commit to pursuing a form of justice together, and in seeing that success in securing their goals is possible but not certain, they often form the hope—individually and collectively—that they will succeed. the hope born of solidarity thus raises the question of how we might hope well for justice. i have argued that, whether we ultimately sustain hope for justice itself (“utopian hope”), or whether we sustain hope only for small victories that might fade away as injustices under oppressive conditions take new shapes and forms (“modest hope”), both can be ways in which we can together hope well for justice.17 references blum, lawrence. 2007. “three kinds of race-related solidarity.” journal of social philosophy 38 (1): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00366.x. bovens, luc. 1999. “the value of hope.” philosophy and phenomenological research 59 (3): 667–681. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2653787. calhoun, cheshire. 2018. doing valuable time: the present, the future, and meaningful living. new york: oxford university press. chudnoff, elijah. 2012. “presentational phenomenology.” in consciousness and subjectivity, edited by sofia miguens and gerhard preyer, 51–72. frankfurt: ontos verlag. day, j. p. “hope.” 1969. american philosophical quarterly 6 (2): 89–102. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/20009295. 17 thanks to cheshire calhoun, mercy corredor, barrett emerick, matt hernandez, graham hubbs, david hunter, chike jeffers, adrienne martin, colin macleod, michael milona, maura priest, catherine rioux, greg scherkoske, susan sherwin, lisa tessman, audrey yap, audiences at the new directions in the philosophy of hope conference at goethe university (june 2018) and the philosophy, politics, and economics society meeting in new orleans (march 2018), as well as anonymous referees for feminist philosophy quarterly and oxford university press for helpful feedback on drafts and conversations that have significantly improved this paper and the broader project to which it belongs. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 doan, michael d., and susan sherwin. 2016. “relational solidarity and climate change in western nations.” in bioethical insights into values and policy: climate change and health, edited by cheryl c. macpherson, 79–88. springer verlag. downie, r. s. 1963. “hope.” philosophy and phenomenological research 24 (2): 248– 251. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2104466. gilbert, margaret. 2002. “collective guilt and collective guilt feelings.” journal of ethics 6 (2): 115–143. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115721. ———. 2014. “how we feel: understanding everyday collective emotion ascription.” in collective emotions: perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology, edited by christian von scheve and mikko salmela, 17–31. new york: oxford university press. goldie, peter. 2004. “emotion, feeling, and knowledge of the world.” in thinking about feeling: contemporary philosophers on emotions, edited by robert c. solomon, 91–106. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2009. “getting feelings into emotional experience in the right way.” emotion review 1 (3): 232–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073909103591. helm, bennett w. 2014. “emotional communities of respect.” in collective emotions: perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology, edited by christian von scheve and mikko salmela, 47–60. new york: oxford university press. howard, dana s. 2019. “the scoundrel and the visionary: on reasonable hope and the possibility of a just future.” journal of political philosophy 27 (3): 294– 317. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12175. hooks, bell. 1986. “sisterhood: political solidarity between women.” feminist review, no. 23: 125–138. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1394725. jaffe, sarah. 2018. “the collective power of #metoo.” dissent, spring. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/collective-power-of-me-tooorganizing-justice-patriarchy-class. jennings, bruce, and angus dawson. 2015. “solidarity in the moral imagination of bioethics.” hastings center report 45 (5): 31–38. https://doi.org/10.1002 /hast.490. kolers, avery. 2016. a moral theory of solidarity. new york: oxford university press. krueger, joel. 2014. “varieties of extended emotions.” phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 13 (4): 533–555. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-0149363-1. martin, adrienne m. 2014. how we hope: a moral psychology. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2019. “interpersonal hope.” in the moral psychology of hope, edited by claudia blöser and titus stahl. london: rowman and littlefield. stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 mcgeer, victoria. 2004. “the art of good hope.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 592 (1): 100–127. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0002716203261781. meirav, ariel. 2009. “the nature of hope.” ratio 22 (2): 216–233. https://doi.org/10 .1111/j.1467-9329.2009.00427.x. me too movement. n.d. “history & vision.” me too website. accessed august 19, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181030193449/https://metoomvmt .org/about/. milona, michael. 2019. “finding hope.” canadian journal of philosophy 49 (5): 710– 729. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2018.1435612. ———. 2020. “discovering the virtue of hope.” european journal of philosophy 28 (3): 740–754. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12518. milona, michael, and katie stockdale. 2018. “a perceptual theory of hope.” ergo: an open access journal of philosophy 5 (8): 203–222. https://doi.org/10 .3998/ergo.12405314.0005.008. ———. forthcoming. “controlling hope.” ratio. moellendorf, darrel. 2006. “hope as a political virtue.” philosophical papers 35 (3): 413–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/05568640609485189. mohanty, chandra talpade. 2003. feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. durham, nc: duke university press. norlock, kathryn j. 2019. “perpetual struggle.” hypatia 34 (1): 6–19. https://doi.org /10.1111/hypa.12452. páez, dario, and bernard rimé. 2014. “collective emotional gatherings: their impact upon identity fusion, shared beliefs, and social integration.” in collective emotions: perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology, edited by christian von scheve and mikko salmela, 204–216. new york: oxford university press. pettit, phillip. 2004. “hope and its place in mind.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 592 (1): 152–165. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0002716203261798. preston-roedder, ryan. 2013. “faith in humanity.” philosophy and phenomenological research 87 (3): 664–687. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr .12024. ratcliffe, matthew. 2013. “what is it to lose hope?” phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 12 (4): 597–614. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-0119215-1. rawls, john. 1999. the law of peoples. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. scholz, sally j. 2008. political solidarity. university park: pennsylvania state university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 ———. 2009. “feminist political solidarity.” in feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: theorizing the non-ideal, edited by lisa tessman, 205–220. new york: springer. shelby, tommie. 2005. we who are dark: the philosophical foundations of black solidarity. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sherwin, susan. 2012. “relational autonomy and global threats.” in being relational: reflections on relational theory and health law, edited by jocelyn downie and jennifer j. llewellyn, 13–34. vancouver: university of british columbia press. sherwin, susan, and katie stockdale. 2017. “whither bioethics now? the promise of relational theory.” ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 10 (1): 7–29. muse.jhu.edu/article/652833. snow, nancy e. 2013. “hope as an intellectual virtue.” in virtues in action: new essays in applied virtue ethics, edited by michael w. austin, 153–170. london: palgrave macmillan. ———. 2018. “hope as a democratic civic virtue.” metaphilosophy 49 (3): 407–427. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12299. solnit, rebecca. 2016. hope in the dark: untold histories, wild possibilities. chicago: haymarket books. solomon, robert c. 1976. the passions: the myth and nature of emotions. garden city: doubleday anchor. stockdale, katie. 2017. “losing hope: injustice and moral bitterness.” hypatia 32 (2): 363–379. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12314. ———. 2019. “social and political dimensions of hope.” journal of social philosophy 50 (1): 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12270. ———. 2021. hope under oppression. new york: oxford university press. tappolet, christine. 2016. emotions, value, and agency. oxford: oxford university press. tessman, lisa. 2009. “expecting bad luck.” hypatia 24 (1): 9–28. https://doi.org/10 .1111/j.1527-2001.2009.00003.x. tiberius, valerie. 2008. the reflective life: living wisely with our limits. oxford: oxford university press. truth and reconciliation commission of canada. 2015. honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of canada. winnipeg: truth and reconciliation commission of canada. walker, margaret urban. 2006. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press. young, iris marion. 1991. justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. stockdale – hope, solidarity, and justice published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 katie stockdale is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of victoria. her research is at the intersection of moral psychology, social and political philosophy, and feminist philosophy. she has published articles on resentment, hope, bitterness, shock, and feminist relational theory in bioethics. her book hope under oppression is forthcoming in june 2021 with oxford university press. 10646 stockdale title page.pdf 10646 stockdale final format.pdf gender dysphoria for critical theory feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 12 recommended citation haulotte, penelope. 2024. “gender dysphoria for critical theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 12. 2024 gender dysphoria for critical theory penelope haulotte university of new mexico penelopehaulotte@gmail.com haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 gender dysphoria for critical theory penelope haulotte abstract gender dysphoria is typically construed as a medical concept. this understanding of gender dysphoria reflects how cisgender people interpret trans experience. this essay proposes an alternative concept of gender dysphoria for critical theory: on this account, gender dysphoria is alienation from cisgender forms of life. if the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria tacitly takes for granted, identifies with, and thereby reinforces cisgender patriarchal society, a critical theory of gender dysphoria instead approaches the issue from the perspective of trans people, their lived experiences and social situation, to offer a critique of society. while the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria refers to a “distress” caused by living in the “wrong-body,” the critical concept of gender dysphoria refers to an alienation as a result of living in the “wrong (cisgender patriarchal) society.” the critical concept of gender dysphoria may become a tool capable of describing the necessary facets of trans experience necessary to form a political coalition. the paper concludes by claiming that trans subjects are the gendered analogue of marx’s concept of the proletariat. keywords: gender dysphoria, leslie feinberg, transgender phenomenology, critical theory, marxism introduction gender dysphoria is typically construed as a medical concept. the dsm-5 defines gender dysphoria as “the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender” (american psychiatric association 2013, 451). talia mae bettcher (2014, 383) refers to this as the “wrong-body” model of trans identity because it defines trans identity in terms of a mismatch between one’s gender performance and “natal” gender.1 the 1 the dsm-5 refers to transgender as “the broad spectrum of individuals who transiently or permanently identify with a gender different from their natal gender” (american psychiatric association 2013, 451, 830). this is diagnosed by bettcher (2014, 383) as the point of view “developed in the context of sexology, medicine, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 aim of this concept is to assist with the purposes of diagnostic evaluation and reduce the “distress” of the “mismatch” through medical intervention. as a medical concept, gender dysphoria is tied to a medical perspective. medical perspectives, as michel foucault analyzed in the birth of the clinic and elsewhere, involve taking the body of the patient and making it an object of a discourse. this means carefully charting pathological variations from “normal” functional behavior for the purpose of healing an individual.2 as a consequence, gender dysphoria as a medical concept is not used to criticize societies and has no express political content. the mere fact that someone experiences gender dysphoria in the medical sense indicates nothing (or virtually nothing) politically substantial about the kind of society that the patient lives in; it merely states a medical problem for the individual in question. my aim in this essay is to develop an alternative concept of gender dysphoria: a concept of gender dysphoria for critical theory. karl marx (1975, 209) defined critical theory in 1843 as “the self-clarification . . . of the struggles and wishes of the age.” according to this definition, as initially proposed by marx and further developed by nancy fraser, critical theory “frames its research program and its conceptual framework with an eye to the aims and activities of those oppositional social movements with which it has a partisan though not uncritical identification” (fraser 1985, 97). if the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria tacitly takes for granted, identifies with, and thereby reinforces cisgender patriarchal society, a critical theory of gender dysphoria instead approaches the issue from the perspective of trans people, their lived experiences and social situation, in order to offer a critique of society. this shift in orientation implies a series of differences: the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria is theoretical, private, and apolitical, while the critical concept of gender dysphoria is practical, public, and politically motivated.3 as we will see in more detail below, this transformation of gender dysphoria from a medicalized psychiatry.” in contrast, this essay aims to develop bettcher’s (2014, 387) suggestion of a political account of transgender identity from transgender subjects themselves. (see bettcher [2014] for her analysis of the “wrong-body” model [esp. 383] and for her shift to a politically focused approach [387].) 2 foucault (1994, 197) describes how medical experience is rendered possible by “western man’s” constitution of himself as an object for a medical gaze. he further argues that this requires “western man” to encounter his own death. 3 another important reorientation involved in the model of gender dysphoria i intend to propose requires shifting focus away from an analysis of the trans body and turning instead to the treatment of trans bodies within a transphobic and patriarchal society. this follows bettcher’s (2020, 330) suggestion of reframing the question of gender dysphoria to gender discontent while also still accounting for the affective and phenomenological dimension of this discontent. haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 concept to a critical concept requires the alteration, rectification, and abandonment of many explicit tenets and implicit norms governing the medicalized perspective and cisgender patriarchal society as a whole. in short, i am proposing a revitalized concept of gender dysphoria as an essential instrument in the struggle against cisgender patriarchal society and thus contributing to the case for the importance of trans theory to critical theory as a whole. the critical concept of gender dysphoria i propose is the following: gender dysphoria is the phenomenological experience of alienation from cisgender forms of life. at the outset, it is worth noting several features of this definition. first, it begins with and answers to the phenomenological experiences of trans people.4 second, it replaces the psychological concept of “distress” with the critical concept of “alienation.” third, while the medicalized concept of gender dysphoria claims that trans people live in the “wrong-body,” the critical theory of gender dysphoria claims that trans people live in the “wrong-society.”5 essential to the critical concept of gender dysphoria is a dialectical relationship between first-personal and thirdpersonal perspectives, where the phenomenological experience of alienation is the result of a relation of social domination. the critical concept of gender dysphoria is therefore situated between phenomenology and sociology. all these features of the critical concept of gender dysphoria are a result of a transition from a cisgender perspective on gender dysphoria to a transgender one. the critical concept of gender dysphoria demands a reflection upon the basic contours of trans existence and experience, which amounts to an examination of the situation that trans people face, the nature of the project of transition, and the deep moral responsibility implied by transition. my analysis therefore proceeds in three sections. in the first section, i try to clarify what i mean by saying that we live in a cisgender society or that there are “cisgender forms of life.” the basic claim here is that the societies in which we live are based on schemes of social cooperation that 4 henry rubin (1998) is the first to my knowledge to explicitly call on the importance of transgender phenomenology to the political self-clarification of trans people. i (haulotte 2023) draw on this tradition to argue for the political relevance of phenomenology to trans theory, history, and activism. 5 consequently, my approach to gender dysphoria, transition, and alienation opposes accounts like that of jay prosser (1998), who claims that trans alienation is best described as living in a wrongly sexed body. to the contrary, i accept and defend leslie feinberg’s (1998) claim that the primary source of trans trouble articulated by the concept of gender dysphoria is produced by the situation of being trans in a cisgender society. my account of trans oppression and alienation therefore reflects beauvoir’s (2011) feminist account of women’s alienation as stemming from the situation of living in a society that defines women as the other. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 mandate cisgender norms and expectations. in fact, it is a tautology to refer to “mandatory cisgender norms and expectations,” since the very concept of being cisgender on this account includes mandatory norms for gendered action. yet these norms are not experienced by cisgender people as mandatory because they have successfully appropriated these norms as part of their identity. part of the aim of this section is to highlight relevant features of gendered practice that are regularly occluded by theoretical perspectives that unwittingly reflect cisgender praxis. cisgender people are more likely to feel “at home” in their own gender, and they accordingly adopt a theoretical rather than practical stance toward gender and gendered practices. from a cisgender perspective, one doesn’t need to think about how to act as a woman, for example, because this is guaranteed by simply being a woman. transitioning from a cisgender perspective to a transgender perspective requires moving from a theoretical to a practical register on gender practices and construction, to show how, for example, being a woman requires acting as a woman and becoming a woman. in the second section, i elaborate more on what i describe as the project of transition, the experience of shirking the gendered position assigned to you by cisgender society, and i begin to give a phenomenologically oriented account of gender dysphoria. on this account, gender dysphoria is a kind of tension between the project of transitioning and the situation of living in a cisgender society. this existentialist account is therefore able to explain the distinctive resonance of trans alienation and its difference from general dissatisfaction with one’s gendered or sexed location, and also, therefore, the distinctive precarity and transience that characterizes trans life without having to rely on a dubious cisgender view of what it means to have gender dysphoria or to live a trans life. there is a difference between cis dissatisfaction with society’s current gender scheme and gender dysphoria, for the former may be resolved through a slight adjustment of the parameters of acceptable gendered performances, while the latter grates against the core of mandatory sex/gender assignment altogether. from this view, trans life is not fundamentally pathological, tragic, or unlivable, but it is characterized by the need to navigate a specific problem—namely, the tension between one’s self-conception and the expectations placed on you by others. gender dysphoria is therefore not the private suffering of someone who merely experiences a disconnect between how they would like to see themselves and the way that they are seen by other people; instead, gender dysphoria describes the political condition of unfreedom that is the necessary consequence of a society organized around the distribution of externally determined gendered and/or sexed social positions. i proceed in section 3 with an examination of the moral and political responsibilities implied by the critical account of gender dysphoria. here i largely rely on the work of leslie feinberg (1996, 1998). the medical account of gender dysphoria haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 sees as its central aim the management of the distress caused by the “mismatch” between “assigned” and “felt” gender or sex. the medicalized account of gender dysphoria therefore sees the telos of transition as exhausted by the successful integration of trans life within the scheme of cisgender society, and it therefore sees the true aim of transition as passing. the ideal case for a trans woman, for example, is simply to meet other’s preconceptions of cis-womanhood. if trans theory has any special legacy or political import, it must involve the thoroughgoing critique of this idea. therefore, the critical concept of gender dysphoria proposes the telos of transition as the insurrection, revolution, and overthrowing of cisgender society. to be trans or even to love trans life therefore involves a robust moral responsibility to oppose and undermine schemes of mandatory sexed and/or gendered positions and to see as one’s foremost aim the neutralization of the unfreedom characteristic of cisgender society. i conclude by arguing that trans people may adopt a revolutionary role with respect to gender or sex just as marx argued that the proletariat adopts a revolutionary perspective with respect to class. this framework also helps explain the fact that while the structural interest of both the global proletariat and the trans subject points toward revolution, nonetheless many proletarian or trans political actors are conservative and reactionary. in other words, the thesis that oppressed groups find their true interests only served in revolution against the system that oppresses them is not to be construed as a predictive hypothesis. ruling classes frequently attempt to placate and fragment oppressed insurrectionary groups and thereby induce a form of political bad faith. while it should not be surprising that these tactics are effective in the short term, the concessions are essentially transitory, conditional, and incomplete. for both the proletariat in marx’s system and for the trans subject today, only insurrection against the class and gender system itself can prove to be finally satisfactory and within the scope of their true interests, aims, and goals. section 1: cisgender forms of life sociological analysis of gender is burdened with unique methodological challenges. the fundamental difficulty is that sociological reasoning tries to examine or understand social practices, which are essentially first-personal, from the indifferent third-personal standpoint of an external observer.6 there is thus an 6 pierre bourdieu (2018, 1) famously describes this third-personal point of view as embodying “an implicit theory of practice which is the corollary of neglect of the social conditions in which the science is possible.” in this paper, i aim to further bourdieu’s critique by pointing it in the direction of a prevalent unconscious cisgender theory of gendered practices. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 inherent displacement within sociological reasoning that produces the tendency to interpret practical action as the inevitable result of a theoretical scheme.7 scholars often turn to chess as a model for social action, but this choice of paradigm has important theoretical consequences. for example, if i were trying to understand a certain move in chess, there is the temptation to describe it mechanically, as the inevitable result of the aggregate of facts about the rules of the game and the moves made by the opponent. or, similarly, i may try to interpret the action as a result of a deliberation by the agent on the action that would maximize future utility. it is easy, then, to use this means of understanding moves in a game of chess as a model for social action, where social action is understood to be the inevitable result of structural features of societies and/or the utility calculations of the agents in question, because it offers the plausibility of a mechanical explanation. but sociological phenomena, unlike games of chess, are not strictly rule-governed. the chess-model is satisfying for an observer but not a player, since games like chess are rule-governed in the sense that there are a finite number of available moves for any player on any given turn, that each move generates an immediate response from the opponent, and so on, which allows for the possibility of closing the field of viable options. in other words, the chess-model of practical action is geared toward providing a retrospective reconstruction of the “move” made by a “player,” and so intrinsically favors a model of practical action that can produce (or “discover”) reasons underlying particular actions so as to individuate and explain why a player would make one move rather than another. this is why chess holds such a powerful sway as a theoretical model for action and assertion: it is a game, and so appropriate as a model for social action, but one that abstracts from most of the relevant features for a robust sociological analysis. a better model for understanding social action would be a physical team sport, like volleyball.8 like chess, volleyball is governed by constitutive rules that define what 7 this ideological displacement is perhaps first systematically analyzed from a materialist perspective by karl marx (1978b) in his “theses on feuerbach,” where he explicitly calls for a renewed understanding of praxis. there is a venerable philosophical and sociological tradition of trying to understand praxis, perhaps beginning with fichte and extending at least as far as karl marx, jean-paul sartre, pierre bourdieu, and saidiya hartman, who all try to develop theories of praxis. 8 bourdieu (2000, 144) also invokes sports as a paradigm of practical knowledge. bourdieu cites loic waquant’s sociology of professional boxing to show how sports trainers try to inculcate a certain habitus that allows the players to effectively play the game. the point of this analysis is to provide a more adequate description of practical knowledge. the urgency and immediacy of a fight belies theoretical models for understanding action. coaching requires “effective ways of speaking to the body” haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 it means to “play the game.” but unlike chess, volleyball allows for a field of possible actions that are not exactly isolated or discrete. it is not possible to play volleyball, or even to retrospectively understand it from a third-person perspective, by trying to understand the whole field of possible actions and systematically narrowing this field down until a determinate action corresponding to the state of affairs arises. the game of volleyball simply outpaces cognitive deliberation of this sort, and there is no uniform decision calculus among even the best players. it is simply not a mechanical process. what makes certain volleyball players better than others is not simply a more elegant decision calculus (or even larger or more physically imposing bodies) but a habitus, a durable set of bodily dispositions that function as enabling conditions for practical action.9 even the player of chess has a bodily habitus, a way of somatically navigating playing the game, but the case of volleyball is more obvious and instructive. for example, serious volleyball players have a determinate sense of height: they have a kinesthetic knowledge of how high the net is, what their maximum reach is, how tall the opposing blockers are, and so on. this somatic knowledge enables action by narrowing the field of available actions to a set of relatively discrete choices. “do i go for a block or a receive?” is a question only answerable on the basis of habitus. similarly, such a question is not answerable except on the basis of the constitution of one’s team, the distribution of physical attributes, the coordination achieved in the moment—all of which are implicitly molded into one’s bodily habitus. good volleyball (bourdieu 2000, 144), which involves the training of somatic dispositions rather than complex models of reasoning. for bourdieu, sports offer a model for the immediate dimension of practical knowledge, but this model leaves implicit the social dimension of practical knowledge, which is surely operative even in apparently “one-versus-one” sports like boxing. volleyball foregrounds additional dynamics because it is a team sport where individual players may only infrequently unilaterally determine the outcome of the game. in boxing, there is no time to think; the aim is to respond to your opponent. but in volleyball, you not only need to anticipate your opponent’s plays, but those of your teammates as well, in order to situate yourself in the appropriate space to make the appropriate play. adding the dynamics of a team sport to our model of practical action requires that each individual player learn to reflexively situate themselves within the social space of a team, with all of the spontaneity, innovation, and negotiation that accompanies such a process. in short, i would argue that the “language-game” required by volleyball is richer than the language-game required for boxing, which is in turn more complex than the language game required for chess. the “complex” language-game of volleyball captures additional features that are especially important to transgender analysis. 9 bourdieu develops this concept in many places, but for a paradigmatic example, see p. 11 of pascalian meditations (bourdieu 2000). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 players train their minds and bodies to respond to events on the court quickly and efficiently, which implies a great deal of somatic ability developed over the course of many years for a particular purpose. like volleyball, gender roles require a habitus. in the same way that we are prone to understanding the action of the chess-player on a mechanistic or teleological model of action, so too are we prone to understanding gender from the position of an observer. navigating gender norms and performances is a much trickier business than we typically think. here again the model for action is important. the chess model essentially abstracts from uncertainty and indiscrete action. when a chess player says, “pawn to e5,” there is complete certainty that the move will go through successfully and be recognized as legitimate by the opponent, because the game itself exhaustively delineates the space of possible actions and secures in advance “pawn to e5” as a possibility. but when a volleyball player goes for a spike, she does not know in advance whether she will actually be set, whether the set will allow her to spike the ball, whether the opposing players will try to block or receive her spike, and so on. gendered practices are closer to coordinated action in volleyball than moves in chess because the rules governing what counts as an acceptable “move” are themselves in constant flux; and even if we “correctly” or “adequately” engage in a gendered practice, there is no guarantee that this will be recognized by other parties as legitimate. there is not a predelineated space of acceptable gender performances given in advance but a complex and thick set of constantly changing norms that serve as enabling conditions of some spheres of action and as disabling conditions for others. the fact that gendered practices occur in conditions of uncertainty produces a textured field of practices for the agent in question. in other words, whether this reaches conscious deliberation or not, the agent in question certainly knows that there are many available gender practices and presentations that are likely to be accepted as legitimate by others. some actions are very “safe,” while others i would describe as “risky.” in other words, while engaging in gendered practices, agents spontaneously situate themselves in social space; they prereflectively recognize “where they belong” in the sphere of gender performances, in the same way that the well-trained volleyball player develops a sense for where they belong on the court.10 10 notably, leslie feinberg (1998, 8–10), among others, frequently points out that this process of social positioning begins even prior to birth through the actions and desires of the children’s parents and the expectations involved with being born into a particular family, and these expectations are codified into the legal systems of cisgender societies. so, it is not only that agents situate themselves in social space but that they are repeatedly situated in social space by others. this will be critical to the haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 gendered practices correspond to gender roles, positions in social space meant to be occupied and navigated by the agents in question. from a first-person perspective, one knows without deliberating that there are certain actions “appropriate to” their gendered position, which is given by the field in which social practices take place. this is the agent’s gendered habitus. certain practices are topologically and phenomenologically “distant,” even if spatially nearby, if they are deemed inappropriate for one’s social position.11 sociologists and social geographers have long called attention to the fact that social positionings often determine geographical distribution, and vice versa, just as in volleyball the role one plays on the team determines the area one occupies in the court. practical action, like athletic performance, is first-personal, inextricably social, time-sensitive, and performed under conditions of uncertainty. just as athletic training involves sculpting the body to recognize a limited set of available options, so too are social performances inscribed into our bodies. effective social coordination involves the institution of a durable set of dispositions to act in concert, a common habitus. these are culturally specific schemes of perception, recognition, and action, which function as enabling conditions for a range of actions but as disabling conditions for others. it forms the background of “common sense” for a group of people. the social world differs fundamentally from theoretical models because a decision calculus for a “successful” action is only possible within and on the basis of the social world itself. this common sense and action-in-concert require agents to distribute responsibilities between them and establish basic schemes for cooperative endeavors, which require them to situate themselves in social space. this positioning, however, is inherently fragile. everyone is able to adopt the social position belonging to them because this division is recognized in general and has become a part of the commonly maintained habitus. while in volleyball the distribution of social space is paradigmatically equitable because it is the result of a consensus, societies are structured in such a way that hierarchical social positioning provides an incentive to invest in symbolic networks that exploit the underclass. action occurs in the fundamentally unstable and unpredictable world of social recognition and legitimacy. concept of interpellation elaborated below and to the depth and breadth of trans oppression. 11 this observation is recognized by martin heidegger in a phenomenological context in being and time. there heidegger (2008, 138) claims that “dasein is essentially not a being-present-at-hand; and its ‘spatiality’ cannot signify anything like occurrence at a position in ‘world-space.’” rather than being merely spatio-temporally juxtaposed to various objects in objectively verifiable distances, dasein is “close” to objects a practical sense that they are available for action (see heidegger 2008, 139–41). similar claims are made by other phenomenologists. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 many actions are performed in public contexts where recognition is an essential element of success, and the reception of one’s actions is equally as important as the action itself, since the recognition is what makes it “count” for society as a whole. to situate oneself in social space is also to give oneself an identity or to be interpellated. this is paradigmatically analyzed by louis althusser (1971, 175) in “ideology and ideological state apparatuses,” where he describes a situation in which a police officer hails a passerby. in responding to the call, the passerby recognizes the claim made by hierarchical authority and situates themselves as legitimately subject to his authority. there is accordingly a hierarchical distribution of social space: an addressor and an addressee. what is at stake here is the apparently spontaneous claim by the addressee to adopt the social positioning given to them, but the inclusion of the police in althusser’s example clearly signals that instances of interpellation paradigmatically occur under duress, and this fact adds an important dynamic for thinking about the constitution of a gendered subject (butler 1997, esp. 128–29). while perhaps interpellative encounters with the police are relatively rare, the institutional position of the police, as a hierarchical role with the express goal of assessing the legitimacy of such a claim to social space, is virtually ubiquitous in cisgender society.12 this may seem like a strong claim, but an analysis of gender (especially from a transgender perspective) quickly shows how often cisgender people spontaneously adopt the role of the police. consider interpellation in the context of cisgender society. agents claim to know that there is a distinction between the social roles of men and women, which corresponds to different sets of appropriate action in civil society (bourdieu 2009, 100).13 our society is best described as cisgender and patriarchal precisely because 12 i will examine this in more detail below. in short, cisgender subjects are essentially given the right to “reality check” trans subjects within cisgender society. this process of reality checking is pervasive and virtually ubiquitous: from casual instances of misgendering, to deadnaming, physical and sexual assault, rape, and murder. 13 bourdieu (2009, 106–7) furthermore clarifies that “social class is not defined by a property (not even the most determinant one, such as the volume and composition of capital) nor by a collection of properties (of sex, age, social origin, ethnic origin— proportion of blacks and whites, for example, or natives and immigrants—income, educational level[,] etc.), nor even by a chain of properties strung out from a fundamental property (position in the relation of production) in a relation of cause and effect, conditioner and conditioned; but by the structure of relations between all the pertinent properties which gives its specific value to each of them and to the effects they exert on practices.” in other words, the process of a social class distinguishing itself does not occur simply at an “inter-class” level between the bourgeoise and the proletariat but occurs at the “intra-class” level as well, where haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 there are two normative sets of operative gender roles, correlated to genital status (or “natal gender”), and one gender role is systematically privileged over the other.14 our society is also characterized by compulsory heterosexuality, since one dimension of the normative expectation for each gender is to be “‘complementary” in various respects with the other social position.15 gender is relatively unique among social roles in that the durable inculcation of the habitus corresponding to a certain gender is a societal project for all of its members. all of us are interpellated as a “boy” or a “girl,” the social markings of this position are a project for our parents and for the rest of society before we are born, and all of this takes place before it is possible to understand, let alone accept, this social positioning, even if neither position really suits us. moreover, because society is textured in such a way that the distribution and orientation of social space occurs around gender, we are obliged to signal our gender positioning to others through external markers like clothing.16 althusser’s example of the police is salient here because the adoption of a social position always occurs within a hierarchical atmosphere, and the distribution of social responsibilities surrounding gender spreads the policing of gender norms throughout all of its members. for trans people, anyone may adopt the role of the police by denying the legitimacy of their gender identification, thereby making action for trans people difficult or impossible. judith butler (2007) rightly refers to gender as a set of performances, performances that are at once the identities we assume within a social matrix and that are normatively evaluated and potentially subject to sanction by others.17 agents seek social distinction within their relevant class through the exclusion of lower strata of their own class. 14 see beauvoir (2011, 5) for a paradigmatic feminist articulation of the asymmetry of gender positions. 15 adrienne rich (1980, 632) examines how even lesbian experiences are modeled on heterosexual desire. 16 bettcher (2009, 106) notes that clothing operates as an external marker of genital status and, therefore, social positioning. she furthermore argues that forced genital exposure is a distinctive form of sexual abuse that is commonly tied to transphobic violence, as it is interpreted as the “rectification” for the “deceit” of being trans. 17 in gender trouble, butler (2007, 23) describes the matrix of gender intelligibility as defined by normative practices of “sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire.” as a result, “specters of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders, and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 similarly, as sara ahmed (2006) has noted, these sets of performances and the roles corresponding to them provide an orientation for the navigation of social space.18 gender roles accordingly are variable with respect to their normative expectations but durably instituted as orienting features of social life. we are therefore justified in saying that gender roles function as a “form of life”; they become essential rather than fleeting dimensions of our sense of identity within a cisgender patriarchal society.19 it may not occur to a gender-normative subject that there are cisgender expectations for action and gender performances, just as it does not occur to the sixfoot, five-inch middle blocker in volleyball just how much this height advantage allows them to “play the game.” but it is essential for any critical theory of existing societies to highlight how gender roles become “forms of life,” orienting and structuring dimensions for action, which are saddled with normative expectations about “how they ought to be done.” section 2: gender dysphoria as alienation from cisgender society if we live in a society that interpellates us into a gender, understood as a form of life, what happens when we fail to live up to those expectations or shirk the role assigned to us? this is the question posed in various ways by feminist, queer, and transgender theory, and it explains their basic theoretical comradery. here i propose to describe gender dysphoria as alienation from cisgender forms of life. to be trans is to engage in the project of transition: that is, one seeks to disidentify with their assigned sex/gendered position and occupy another place entirely. this highly expansive conception of transition is needlessly truncated in the traditional cisgender notion of transition as the movement from one discrete gender identity to another, especially as sanctioned by institutions such as the family, the workplace, the clinic, and the law. this old notion of transition is a model that historically worked to systematically exclude queers and people of color as medically unable to “viably” transition. here transition is interpreted as a kind of lived, existential project rather than a discrete, regulated, and essentially transitory experience. trans phenomenology opens the promise of an understanding of transition written at the behest of trans people rather than our jailors, which requires an alternative conception of gender dysphoria. 18 so ahmed (2006, 30) makes the point that the domestic background makes possible the philosophical foreground of husserl’s writing desk. because of husserl’s gendered orientation, certain objects are rendered fully present but others are only “coperceived.” 19 rahel jaeggi (2018, 41) describes forms of life as deeply rooted “clusters of practices that are interconnected and interrelated in one way or another” in contrast to mere fashions (as examined by simmel; see jaeggi 2018, 39–41). haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 it is important to note that the use of the concept of “alienation” is a political decision. marx (1978a) developed the paradigmatic account of alienation for critical theory in his economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, where he describes how industrialized manufacturing alienates the proletariat from themselves, their comrades, and their humanity.20 but marxists from a broadly althusserian perspective insist on an epistemological break in 1845, when marx apparently abandoned the concept of alienation in favor of exploitation (althusser 2010, 223). the motivation for this refusal is the claim that “alienation” is not a strictly historical materialist concept, that it appeals to an unjustified and unjustifiable anthropological thesis about the nature of humanity and our shared “species-being.” it is accordingly rejected by this group as a useful analytic tool for marxists, and they claim that it really belongs to the pre-marxist or protomarxist “utopian socialist” tradition instead of a properly “scientific socialist” tradition inaugurated by the later marx.21 rahel jaeggi, however, has recently resuscitated the concept of alienation from utopian socialism. more specifically, she argues that although marx explicitly appeals to our “species-being” in the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1884, it is possible to develop an alternative concept of alienation that does not appeal to such a notion, one broadly consistent with existentialist approaches. for jaeggi (2016, 1), alienation is best described as “a relation of relationlessness” produced by systems of domination. on this conception, alienation does not describe a defunct relationship to “humanity,” or something to that effect, but a defunct selfrelation.22 renewing the spirit if not the letter of marx’s 1844 work, jaeggi describes how systems of domination can interfere with our ability to appropriate actions and events and thereby really see them as our own. in alienation, we develop a distant, disinterested, dissociated, and thereby defunct relationship to our desires and life because of an inability to see them as truly “our own.” 20 in the 1844 manuscripts, marx (1978a) argues that capitalism inevitably produces an economic situation where every member of society has a merely precarious control over their own lives and sense that an alien force controls their entire lives. in this situation, “man becomes ever poorer as man”; that is, we become more estranged from what it means to be human (marx 1978a, 93). 21 althusser (2010) makes this distinction between scientific and utopian socialism, but his source is engels (see esp. engels 1978, 700). 22 jaeggi (2016, 179) argues that this does not commit her to an overly substantialist notion of selfhood. she describes the structure of selfhood as appropriating actions that can tie together nicely or become undone; there may be a center of gravity or there may not be. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 it is because forms of life are ensembles of practices that have become durably instituted and even deeply embodied that one’s alienation from cisgender society introduces acute precarity in all social action whatsoever. since gender is an orienting dimension of the distribution of social space, alienation from this scheme of social cooperation often requires disinvestment from institutions and practices most governed by cisgender norms and expectations. to be trans is to be alienated in the most literal sense: one is no longer able to identify with the social position assigned: one feels it as an “alien power” and responds with refusal. but this refusal comes at a price. in response, cisgender society may now opt for a series of punitive measures toward trans people—from “clocking,” to exclusion, to sexual assault, rape, and murder—because the very existence of a trans person contradicts a core matrix of cisgender society. bettcher (2007, 47) describes how even binary trans people are destined to be “pretenders” in the case that they do not socially “pass” as their gender identification, or “deceivers” if they do.23 in either case, for cisgender society, trans people are never exactly who they say they are, as their self-identification is unreliable, and their ability to participate in socially coordinated schemes of action collapses. accordingly, trans people are regularly denied the relevant autonomy and self-determination to live a life they could have any meaningful connection to. trans people inevitably resist at least one core dimension of social cooperation and accordingly are always potentially open to sanction—this is the ineliminable core of the trans situation. it must first of all be recognized that the alienation that characterizes trans experiences is a result of a material relationship. where cisgender society has recognized trans people in history, it has interpreted them primarily as criminals to be punished and secondarily as medical curiosities to be examined. trans experience is marked by the compulsion to confess and be heard.24 this fact is reflected above all in the power that doctors and other medical professionals have in the lives of trans people. for jay prosser (1998, 101), the quintessential trans autobiographical moment is in fact the moment of confession before a doctor in one’s plea for sex 23 bettcher (2007) also observes that this is sadly apparent in the murder of transgender women, which is typically justified by their status as “deceivers.” 24 for an analysis of confession as a technique of power, see foucault (1978, 20): “it was here, perhaps, that the injunction, so peculiar to the west, was laid down for the first time, in the form of a general constraint. i am not talking about the obligation to admit to violations of the laws of sex, as required by traditional penance; but of the nearly infinite task of telling—telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex.” haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 reassignment surgery.25 this is so for prosser because this moment constitutes a turning point in a transsexual’s life, where they can perhaps begin hormone therapy and move from their “old” gender identity and into their “new” one thereafter. even if we disagree with prosser about the centrality of sex reassignment surgery to trans experience, we may nevertheless recognize that his framework accurately reflects the fact that trans autobiography is produced, assessed, and evaluated on the basis of cisgender norms and expectations. it is necessary to prove one is “trans enough” to a medical professional for the transition to be recognized socially, professionally, and legally. it should be no surprise therefore that the schemes that trans people use to make sense of their own experiences bear the marks of the society that would have them not exist. gender dysphoria is the affective result of a phenomena whereby trans subjects “disinvest” or “fail to appropriate” the gender role assigned to them by others.26 here transgender subjects are defined not by any positive feature of their identity but by their refusal and incongruence with the basic structure of cisgender society. gender dysphoria is the condition of being alienated from cisgender society, and it defines the trans experience. this is a line of flight away from the form of life assigned by cisgender society and into something else, where the direction matters more than the destination. of course, this concept of gender dysphoria has an important relation to the affective dimension of gender dysphoria typically described from a medical perspective. in the medical sense, gender dysphoria is related affectively to “distress” at living in the “wrong body.” gender dysphoria is thus rightly related to a great deal of personal suffering, and often this suffering is directed toward the body. but in the medicalized atmosphere, this suffering is individualized and rendered apolitical. on the critical model, on the other hand, this suffering is related to a concrete social arrangement: here i am made to be a person i don’t want to be. 25 prosser (1998, 101) says, “the autobiographical act for the transsexual begins even before the published autobiography—namely, in the clinician’s office where, in order to be diagnosed as a transsexual, s/he must recount a transsexual autobiography. the story of a strong, early, and persistent transgendered identification is required by the clinical authorities, by the psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists who traditionally function as the gatekeepers to the means of transsexual ‘conversion.’ whether s/he publishes an autobiography or not, then, every transsexual, as a transsexual, is originally an autobiographer.” 26 for an analysis of the concept of disidentification, see for example muñoz (1999, 4): “disidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 gender dysphoria is suffering produced by a structural feature of cisgender society, which will continue to exclude people and must do so in virtue of its basic organizing principle. gender dysphoria is the phenomenological result of a certain kind of unfreedom—the knowledge that one’s space of available action is circumscribed, reduced, or eliminated because of the lack of secure recognition of others. understanding gender dysphoria requires, in part, understanding why people transition. consider andrea long chu’s (2018, n.p.) beautiful recollection of her desire to live as a woman: i doubt that any of us transition simply because we want to “be” women, in some abstract, academic way. i certainly didn’t. i transitioned for gossip and compliments, lipstick and mascara, for crying at the movies, for being someone’s girlfriend, for letting her pay the check or carry my bags, for the benevolent chauvinism of bank tellers and cable guys, for the telephonic intimacy of long-distance female friendship, for fixing my makeup in the bathroom flanked like christ by a sinner on each side, for sex toys, for feeling hot, for getting hit on by butches, for that secret knowledge of which dykes to watch out for, for daisy dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts. chu’s analysis is insightful because cisgender subjects focus almost exclusively on “being” a woman, rather than acting as a woman, precisely because the ability to engage in such actions is virtually guaranteed for them. being a cisgender woman and being able to act as a woman paradigmatically coincide. the case of trans womanhood, and all trans people, introduces the troubling situation where one is a woman, for example, but one is also denied the ability to really act as a woman or become one. being trans in a transphobic society means that there is a certain precarity to these desires: one can be “clocked,” policed, and denied the social role that one wants to live. gender dysphoria is the acute feeling that one’s desires, the sort of life that one wants to live, may simply be too difficult or impossible to realize within a cisgender patriarchal society. it is a sense of extreme precarity, often mixed with self-loathing, as the alienated reflection of the judgment rendered onto you by others. cisgender people are apt to forget this complicated dimension of gender precisely because their own gender performances do not place them at risk of alienation from cisgender forms of life. this is the source of perennial tension haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 between queer and trans theory.27 queer theorists have the tendency to interpret trans people as the zenith of queerness, by which they mean a nonnormative identity in a heteronormative society. trans theorists, however, have insisted on the specificity of a kind of trans experience, one that is qualitatively distinct from queerness and the examination of sexuality. cisgender queer people and trans people are not in the same situation since a cisgender society is at least potentially amenable to the incorporation of nonnormative cisgender identities. trans subjects, by virtue of transitioning, reject the authority of a cisgender society to determine their gender identification, and so they can never be stably incorporated into a society premised on their nonexistence. queerness is at least in principle amendable to a reform of gender roles within a cisgender society, while trans theory necessarily aims at revolution through a basic organizing principle of cisgender societies. trans subjects do not simply reject the normative expectations associated with a certain gender performance: they reject the scheme of mandatory gender interpellation altogether. there is a kind of hopelessness associated with being transgender that i believe is revolutionary. while queer cisgender people may successfully lobby for their previously nonconforming behavior to become normative for their gender, this strategy is unavailable as a long-term solution for trans people. passing is, in essence, transitory. this is because trans subjects do not merely combat a variable set of normative expectations for a cisgender role, but more fundamentally, trans people oppose the system of mandatory gender interpellation that forms a basic axis for societal distribution of labor and responsibilities. trans people of all kinds accordingly adopt a role or a function that is essentially incompatible with cisgender patriarchal society. there are at least three modalities of this negative contradiction, embodied by “nonbinary,” “mtf,” and “ftm,” respectively, but the iterability of transitioning means that the schemes of possible resistance are innumerable (mtftntmtftm . . .). each identity is defined not in virtue of its positive features but instead chiefly in virtue of the refusal of a form of life unsuccessfully imposed from without; what trans people share with one another and with those who love them is a certain kind of freedom struggle. section 3: love, self-respect, and trans liberation the very act of transitioning implies a rejection of the authority of a cisgender society to determine one’s gendered or sexed position from the outside. transitioning therefore involves making a political claim about the nature of freedom and political self-determination that strictly opposes the organization and administration of society via externally imposed gendered or sexed positions. the freedom of all trans 27 this rift is articulated in prosser (1998) and is the subject of much dispute in queer and trans theory. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 people is, therefore, integrally interconnected. while it may be politically expedient in certain circumstances for one class of trans or queer people to reject their compatriots and lobby for conditional acceptance of their own gender nonconformity, these freedoms will always be extraordinarily precarious, since such a position entails the tacit concession to cisgender society that gender or sex transitions are acceptable only in exceptional, regulated circumstances and may be rightfully administered by medical professionals and the state. even if one wins such concessions in the short term, there is no guarantee whatsoever that they will remain, since one has in turn conceded to the sovereignty of cisgender society on such matters. certainly, it is always the case that some trans people will accept these concessions, but the price of this deal with the devil is the painful contradiction of conceiving of oneself as if one was cisgender because, for the moment, others are willing to play along. this situation cannot last.28 therefore, trans subjects have an inextricable obligation to the freedom struggles of all other trans people, since the goal of trans liberation can be nothing less than the unconditional right to self-determination. moreover, this highly expansive conception of the political responsibility undergirding trans liberation does not merely extend to other trans people. in carving out a vision of gendered and sexed self-determination, trans theory, history, and activism aligns itself with other freedom struggles as well. this fact was recognized early in the development and articulation of trans theory by leslie feinberg. here, in the context of reflecting on the goals of trans theory, sie says “so, what are the goals of trans liberation? there is not one single answer. if you ask me, the aim should not fall a yard short of genuine social and economic liberation for everyone” (feinberg 1998, 135). this strong claim concerning the unity of various freedom struggles provides a concrete basis for solidarity and a political coalition among various distinct but nevertheless similarly aggrieved groups of gendered outlaws, including but not limited to feminists, queers, the intersexed, and various racialized subject formations that are more liable to be regulated according to gendered and sexed mores. this vision not only provides an expansive account of what trans people owe to the freedom struggles of various other groups but also helps explain the stakes for cisgender people in trans liberation. for in fact, the system of forced gender and sex assignment violates the dignity of everyone, the cisgender included, because they 28 see feinberg (1996, 89): “i have lived as a man because i could not survive openly as a transgendered person. yes, i am oppressed in this society, but i am not merely a product of oppression. that is a phrase that renders all our trans identities meaningless. passing means having to hide your identity in fear, in order to live. being forced to pass is a recent historical development. it is passing that is a product of oppression.” haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 rightfully ought to take their own gendered projects to be contributions to the realm of freedom. it is undignified and indecent to be told who you have to be, and the contingent fact of fulfilling this obligation inadvertently does not alleviate the offense.29 cisgender people who take pride in themselves and their gendered projects must therefore take the suggestion that anyone else has a say in these matters as an affront and an insult to their own freedom. cisgender people should therefore join in the struggle for trans liberation simply out of a sense of dignity, pride, and selfrespect, regardless of whether they even know or are personally invested in any trans people in their lives.30 and yet, it is quite rare for cisgender people to join the struggle for trans liberation on this basis. the experience that leads most cisgender people to realize the importance of trans liberation, if they ever reach it at all, is love. in many cases, either they come to know and love a trans person or someone who they love confides in them the need to transition. here i mean love in an intentionally expansive sense to describe the love that parents might have for their children, that a romantic couple 29 feinberg (1998, 6) is the first to my knowledge to make this point explicitly and it is well worth quoting at length: and if you do not identify as transgender or transsexual or intersexual, your life is diminished by our oppression as well. your own choices as a man or a woman are sharply curtailed. your individual journey to express yourself is shunted into one of two deeply carved ruts, and the social baggage you are handed is already packed. so the defense of each individual’s right to control their own body, and to explore the path of self-expression, enhances your own freedom to discover more about yourself and your potentialities. this movement will give you more room to breathe—to be yourself. to discover on a deeper level what it means to be your self. together, i believe we can forge a coalition that can fight on behalf of your oppression as well as mine. together, we can raise each other’s grievances and win the kind of significant change we all long for. but the foundation of unity is understanding. 30 feinberg (1996, 128) puts this extremely expansive notion of the responsibility following trans liberation this way: “none of us will be free until we have forged an economic system that meets the needs of every working person. as trans people, we will not be free until we fight for and win a society in which no class stands to benefit from fomenting hatred and prejudice, where laws restricting sex and gender and human love will be unthinkable.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 might have for one another, that a teacher might share with a student, or that friends may have for one another. for love is the most personal and profound way of realizing the interconnectedness of our freedoms. love is a powerful political emotion that is much maligned by those who would dismiss it as womanly, private, or politically insignificant, but trans theory has frequently maintained that love is at the heart of solidarity and the continual expansion of freedom and self-determination. the nature of this connection is manifested by the fact that both love and freedom are by nature intrinsically unconditional. to love someone is not to desire them to be a certain way but is instead the desire for the loved one to shape their own lives into a form that they deem satisfying and worthy. truly loving someone, therefore, includes the tacit realization that they may need to deviate from the expectations placed upon them by others—for example, that they may feel alienated by their cisgender identity and feel the need to transition. the difficulties, obstacles, and heartaches associated with this transition cannot help but turn the cisgender lover against the form of a society that would shame, demean, and outcast their beloved. and it is precisely in this way that the love that cisgender people have for trans people in their lives quite naturally turns them against the form of a society that otherwise would benefit them. love therefore plays a vital political function in awakening cisgender people to the responsibility to trans liberation that otherwise might have been simply ignored and thereby in expanding the political coalition of those committed to trans liberation. conclusion trans subjects are the gendered analogue of marx’s proletariat. there are two faces of marx’s proletariat. there is a material characterization of the proletariat based on the features of those who embodied this social role in the nineteenth century: here marx characterizes the proletariat paradigmatically as factory workers in rapidly industrializing societies in europe.31 when “proletariat” is taken in this sense, it is hard to imagine more than superficial resemblances between the twentyfirst-century trans subject and the nineteenth-century factory worker. this material characterization, however, is based on a more significant and profound structural characterization.32 on this view, which is primarily taken up in marx’s description of the proletariat in his critique of hegel’s “philosophy of right,” the proletariat are the negative image of the society in which they live, the most alienated, marginalized, and 31 this characterization stems predominantly from the communist manifesto, where the proletariat are essentially defined as an outgrowth of industrialization: “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. the other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product” (marx and engels 1978, 482). 32 i am indebted to idris robinson for pointing this out to me. haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 exploited members of society.33 and in fact, the proletariat form a class because the condition of the proletariat as alienated, marginalized, and exploited is a necessary feature of the operation of capitalist society. the proletariat, considered structurally, indicates a contradiction or a crisis within capitalist forms of life. when marx claims that the proletariat is a revolutionary class, he is best understood as not principally referring to his material characterization of the proletariat in the nineteenth-century factory worker, but to his structural characterization of the proletariat as the perpetual underclass (although he clearly believed that they coincided). the admission of some formerly proletariat into the petit bourgeois in the twentieth century does not undermine marx’s theory of the revolutionary character of the proletariat; it merely shifts the distribution of these classes, as lenin’s astute analysis of imperialism demonstrates concretely (where the exploitation of the proletariat is, at a certain breaking point, distributed outward to a colonial periphery).34 for marx, the proletariat is the class that has an interest in ending all class oppression whatsoever because they adopt the position of the most marginalized, excluded, and exploited class. as a class, the proletariat, accordingly, has no interest in adopting a new hierarchical position in economic life but has an interest in the abolition of hierarchies as a whole. trans people are analogous to marx’s structural notion of the proletariat because both the proletariat and the trans subject indicate a fundamental contradiction in social life. marx’s claim is not that the proletariat in fact adopt attitudes or beliefs that are revolutionary but, to the contrary, that their structural position is such that their class interest is only truly served by revolution—that is, the 33 this is marx’s (1977, 141–42) description of the proletariat in the critique of hegel’s “philosophy of right”: “a class with radical chains, a class in civil society that is not of civil society, a class that is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society having a universal character because of its universal suffering and claiming no particular right because no particular wrong but unqualified wrong is perpetuated on it; a sphere that can claim no traditional title, but only a human title; a sphere that does not stand partially opposed to the consequences, but totally opposed to the premises of the german political system: a sphere, finally, that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society, thereby emancipating them; a sphere, in short, that is the complete loss of humanity and can only redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity. this dissolution of society existing as a particular class is the proletariat.” 34 in imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, lenin (1970, 671, 674) states that the “split in the working-class movement is bound up with the objective conditions of imperialism” and that “imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 destruction of class-based society. it is entirely possible to try to appease certain ranks of the proletariat through concessions. but these concessions, because of the role of the proletariat in economic life, can never be satisfying or final; there still exists a contradiction at the heart of society that will perpetually generate a new underclass and a new crisis. so too in the case of trans people. it is possible for a transphobic society to accommodate certain trans people and to treat them as if they were cisgender, but the act of transitioning belies the entire system of mandatory gender identification and interpellation. it therefore marks a contradiction at the heart of our social arrangement. to experience gender dysphoria is to experience a certain kind of political unfreedom, and while a space of action may be granted in a transphobic society, it may never be guaranteed. the specter of unfreedom and alienation remains. being trans in a cisgender society means being subjected and alienated in a way qualitatively distinct from mere discontentment or dissatisfaction with one’s gender identification: it means, more than all of this, living in a society that can and will force you to live the life of another. this is a threat not only to the freedom of trans people but to the freedom of everyone. to be trans or to love trans people is to oppose, at least in principle if not in fact, the legitimacy of mandatory gender assignment as a whole, and a true reckoning with this fact requires nothing less than the material neutralization of cisgender society. acknowledgements i have many people to thank for their help in developing the ideas expressed in this paper. in particular, i would like to thank j. r. montoya, idris robinson, ann murphy, adrian johnston, kathryn wichelns, talia mae bettcher, james mollison, kevin lower, anna hartigan, alisha sharma, adam schipper, and the anonymous reviewers of feminist philosophy quarterly, as well as attendees of sessions by the karasu society and the critical phenomenology research group, for providing feedback that substantially improved the paper. references ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. althusser, louis. 1971. “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation).” in lenin and philosophy and other essays, translated by ben brewster, 126–87. new york: monthly review press. ———. 2010. “marxism and humanism.” in for marx, translated by ben brewster, 219– 47. london: verso. haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 american psychiatric association. 2013. diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: fifth edition (dsm-5). washington, dc: american psychiatric publishing. beauvoir, simone de. 2011. the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovany-chevallier. new york: vintage books. bettcher, talia mae. 2007. “evil deceivers and make-believers: on transphobic violence and the politics of illusion.” hypatia 22, no. 3 (summer): 43–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01090.x. ———. 2009. “trans identities and first-person authority.” in “you’ve changed”: sex reassignment and personal identity, edited by laurie j. shrage, 98–120. oxford: oxford university press. ———. 2014. “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 39, no 2 (winter): 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1086/673088. ———. 2020. “trans phenomena.” in 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology, edited by gail weiss, ann v. murphy, and gayle salamon, 329–36. evanston, il: northwestern university press. bourdieu, pierre. 2000. pascalian meditations. translated by richard nice. stanford, ca: stanford university press. ———. 2009. distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. translated by richard nice. new york: routledge. ———. 2018. outline of a theory of practice. translated by richard nice. cambridge: cambridge university press. butler, judith. 1997. the psychic life of power. stanford, ca: stanford university press. ———. 2007. gender trouble. new york: routledge. chu, andrea long. 2018. “on liking women.” n+1, no. 30 (winter). https://www.nplu sonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/. engels, friedrich. 1978. “socialism: utopian and scientific.” in the marx-engels reader, 2nd ed., edited by robert c. tucker, 683–717. new york: w. w. norton. feinberg, leslie. 1996. transgender warriors: making history from joan of arc to dennis rodman. boston: beacon press. ———. 1998. transgender liberation: beyond pink or blue. boston: beacon press. foucault, michel. 1978. the history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. ———. 1994. the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. translated by a. m. sheridan. new york: vintage books. fraser, nancy. 1985. “what’s critical about critical theory? the case of habermas and gender.” new german critique, no. 35 (spring–summer): 97–131. https://doi .org/10.2307/488202. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 haulotte, penelope. 2023. “program for a transgender existentialism.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly 10, no. 1 (february): 32–41. https://doi.org/10 .1215/23289252-10273182. heidegger, martin. 2008. being and time. translated by john macquarrie and edward robinson. new york: harper perennial. jaeggi, rahel. 2016. alienation. translated by frederick neuhouser and alan e. smith. edited by frederick neuhouser. new york: columbia university press. ———. 2018. critique of forms of life. translated by ciaran cronin, cambridge, ma: harvard university press. lenin, vladimir ilyich. 1970. imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism: a popular outline. in v. i. lenin: selected works, vol. 1, 667–766. moscow: progress publishers. marx, karl. 1975. “letters from the franco-german yearbooks.” in karl marx: early writings. translated by rodney livingstone and gregor benton. new york: vintage books. ———. 1977. critique of hegel’s “philosophy of right.” edited by joseph o’malley. translated by annette jolin and joseph o’malley. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 1978a. economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. in the marx-engels reader, 2nd ed., edited by robert c. tucker, 66–125. new york: w. w. norton. ———. 1978b. “theses on feuerbach.” in the marx-engels reader, 2nd ed., edited by robert c. tucker, 143–45. new york: w. w. norton. marx, karl, and friedrich engels. 1978. manifesto of the communist party. in the marx-engels reader, 2nd ed., edited by robert c. tucker, 469–500. new york: w. w. norton. muñoz, josé esteban. 1999. disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. minneapolis: minnesota university press. prosser, jay. 1998. second skins: the body narratives of transsexuality. new york: columbia university press. rich, adrienne. 1980. “compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian experience.” signs: journal of women and culture in society 5, no. 4 (summer): 631–60. https://doi.org/10.1086/493756. rubin, henry s. 1998. “phenomenology as method in trans studies.” gay and lesbian quarterly 4, no. 2 (april): 263–81. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4-2-263. penelope haulotte (she/her) is a phd student in philosophy pursuing a women, gender, and sexuality studies certificate at the university of new mexico. her research follows two directions. her dissertation project, titled “harmony and disquietude,” investigates the impact of the legacy of eighteenth-century leibnizianism on the haulotte – gender dysphoria for critical theory published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 shape of german idealist philosophy. her other project primarily concerns phenomenological interventions into trans theory, history, and activism, centering on a revitalized concept of gender dysphoria. 101212 haulotte title page 101212 haulotte final format weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 3 article 1 recommended citation emerick, barrett, katie stockdale, and audrey yap. 2023. “weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (3). article 1. 2023 weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable barrett emerick st. mary’s college of maryland bmemerick@smcm.edu katie stockdale university of victoria katiestockdale@uvic.ca audrey yap university of victoria ayap@uvic.ca emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable1 barrett emerick, katie stockdale, and audrey yap abstract apologies are an important part of moral life and a method by which someone can satisfy their reparative obligations. at the same time, apologies can be used both as a shield to protect the person apologizing and as a weapon against the person to whom the apology is owed. in this paper we unpack both claims. we defend two principles one should employ to try to avoid such bad outcomes: (1) apologies must be one-sided and nontransactional, and (2) the wrongdoer must be willing to pay what they owe. we argue that these principles require the wrongdoer’s emotional vulnerability. furthermore, we argue that the duty to be vulnerable in issuing apologies helps to make sense of why apologizing well is so difficult and why members of privileged groups might be especially prone to apologizing badly. keywords: apologies, anger, moral repair, vulnerability, social injustice 1. introduction when one person wrongs another they incur a reparative debt to try to make up for what they have done and fix the harm they have caused. very often, one of the reparative obligations wrongdoers bear is to apologize: to say that they are sorry and to bear the proper configuration of beliefs, attitudes, and emotions that constitute a genuine apology. philosophers have been interested in many questions that concern the nature and value of apologies, from the question of what an apology is to the role of apology in political reconciliation.2 our aim in this article is to explore what it means to apologize well in the context of interpersonal relationships, with a focus on how wrongdoers’ and victims’ social identities affect the nature and value of apologizing. we are concerned with what moral repair involves in a world shot through with 1 many thanks to the editor and both referees for their very helpful feedback. additionally, earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2019 meeting of the canadian society for women in philosophy and in 2021 at william patterson university. this paper benefited from helpful feedback from both audiences. 2 see, e.g., bovens 2008; corntassel and holder 2008; martin 2010; pettigrove and collins 2011; maclachlan 2013, 2015, 2018; brudholm 2020. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 injustice, exploring how oppressive ideologies or social scripts come to bear on moralreparative practices. in particular, we adopt a social-level analysis to explore some of the ways in which apologies in our ordinary interpersonal interactions can go awry and contribute to oppressive ideologies. this can happen in our intimate personal relationships. for instance, a man might apologize for saying something sexist to a friend who is hurt by his comments. but it also happens between individuals in more public, social contexts. people of color, for example, often feel public pressure to forgive wrongdoers in the aftermath of a racist act and sometimes public apologies are presented with this pressure in mind (gay 2015). for example, chief medaria arradondo apologized to george floyd’s family after his murder by police officer derek chauvin. public apologies involve apologizing to victims whom the wrongdoer might not know (as when a celebrity apologizes to their fans for being caught using a racial slur) or on behalf of an institution (as when a politician apologizes for historic wrongs committed by the nation they represent). we are not focusing here on these kinds of apologies and are instead dealing with private apologies using a social-level analysis. this means that we will think through some of the ways in which reparative efforts are affected by the social milieu in which they are made, how they draw on the conceptual resources available in the social imaginary, and how they are constrained by social scripts that often operate in the background of moral interactions. in short, we will think about the ways in which personal apologies between wrongdoers and their victims go well or badly in light of their respective social locations—most notably (but not exclusively) their gender and race. we begin by discussing the nature of sincere apologies and the role of anger in responding to moral wrongdoing. we argue that apologies can function as both weapons and shields. apologies can protect the wrongdoer from further criticism (as a shield) and attack the person who was wronged, silencing moral critique of the original wrongful action (as a weapon). we’ll then suggest two principles one should employ to help mitigate these bad outcomes:3 (1) apologies must be one-sided and nontransactional, and (2) the wrongdoer must be willing to pay what they owe. we argue that these principles require the wrongdoer’s emotional vulnerability. we suggest that the duty to be vulnerable in issuing apologies helps to make sense of why apologizing well is so difficult and why members of privileged groups might be especially prone to apologizing badly. 2. sincere apologies, the moral reparative moment, and anger apologies are speech acts or communicative acts in which the wrongdoer does more than just utter the words “i’m sorry” or “i apologize.” instead, apologies are 3 thanks to a referee for helping us think about our aim in terms of mitigation. emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 illocutions; in saying the words, the apologizer is also performing an action. so, just like when a person who makes a promise incurs a new obligation in virtue of uttering the words, when a wrongdoer says, “i apologize,” they discharge at least one reparative obligation that they bear. for an apology to be well formed, it has to be sincere. the sincerity condition has at least four parts. first, wrongdoers should feel bad for what they have done. they should experience emotions like regret, remorse, shame, or guilt. second, they should appreciate the nature of the moral wrong and its consequences in a way that is personal. this means they should understand how the victims of their actions were harmed within the particular context, in light of their experiences and constitution. third, wrongdoers should be properly oriented both toward the victim (as a person of value who deserved to be treated differently) and toward themselves (as a moral agent who can appropriately be held responsible for their actions). finally, they have to intend not to recommit the wrong in the future (or, at the very least, they can’t intend to recommit the wrong in the future) (bovens 2008, 220). the sincerity condition for apologies is relatively uncontroversial. but it is not immediately clear what should happen after a sincere apology is offered. in order to answer that question, it’s helpful to think of the wrongdoer who apologizes and the victim to whom they apologize as standing in relation to each other within what we will call a “moral reparative moment.” when the wrongdoer apologizes to them, the victim has many potential responses to choose from, each of which is often used interchangeably but should be kept distinct. most notably, the victim might choose whether to accept, reject, or ignore the apology; to forgive the wrongdoer; or to reconcile. each of those responses are different; here, we focus mainly on the role of forgiveness (and to some extent accepting an apology) in the moral reparative moment.4 the literature on forgiveness is expansive, and how forgiveness should be defined is controversial. for our purposes we accept what is a mainly conventional account that says forgiveness is, at least, a commitment to overcome anger and other hostile feelings toward the wrongdoer. here we are interested in the role of anger in particular. many feminist philosophers and scholars of race have made the case that anger is an especially valuable moral emotion in the context of interpersonal wrongdoing and systemic injustice (frye 1983; spelman 1989; scheman 1993; hooks 1995; lugones 2003; maclachlan 2010; jaggar 2014; emerick 2016; cherry 2018; stockdale 2021; emerick and yap 2023). victims’ experiences and expressions of anger can communicate their self-respect and right to better treatment, as well as 4 for more on the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation, see emerick (2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 their respect for wrongdoers who ought to be held accountable for their actions. the emotion also has epistemic value in helping victims connect their own lived experiences to the experiences of others (as in the case of anger about domestic violence). and anger can be politically valuable, motivating people to come together in solidarity against injustice. but there are a variety of downsides to anger as well. for example, it can be draining to carry anger around, and the emotion can place stress on a person’s health and disrupt their interpersonal relationships. anger can divide as much as it promotes solidarity, and it can confuse as much as it clarifies epistemically. it can also be a dangerous motivator, enabling people to act in ways that are harmful or destructive to themselves or to others. so even though anger is very often a morally, epistemically, and politically valuable response to wrongdoing and injustice, the emotion tends to be burdensome for victims of injustice to bear (norlock 2008). apologies are thus important not only because they address the original wrong but because they may help to disrupt or undermine anger. but apologies can go wrong in various ways, and they can give victims even more reason to be angry rather than provide them with moral reasons to forgive. 3. apologizing badly in her remarkable book repair, elizabeth spelman considers a range of ways that people attempt to fix things that have gone wrong, from material objects to interpersonal relationships. apologies, for spelman, are an important reparative tool, but there are many ways that they can go awry. in apologizing, spelman says, someone wraps herself in a glorious mantle of rehabilitation. however vicious her actions, however morally reprehensible she has been in the past, her sincere apology entitles her to credit at the bank of moral rectitude. she’s done wrong, but she knows it, accepts full responsibility for it, and regrets it. . . . [apology] short-circuits any further criticism. (spelman 2002, 97) from this passage we can see how apologies can function as both shields and weapons, protecting the wrongdoer from further criticism and attacking the person who was wronged while silencing moral critique of the original action. we will unpack both in turn. first, an apology functions as a shield when the wrongdoer uses the apology (intentionally or not) to silence further moral criticism or to silence any suggestion or expectation that the wrongdoer make additional efforts to repair the wrong. more strongly, in apologizing, the wrongdoer might even make the case that they have emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 undergone a personal transformation and become a different person. so, it’s not just that blame is no longer warranted, but that if it were, it wouldn’t appropriately be directed toward them (since they have shown that they are no longer the kind of person who could have committed such an act). imagine the following case: two departmental colleagues are attending an academic conference where they are copresenting a paper. during their presentation, one of them (a man) makes a sexist joke about what his female colleague is wearing during the talk. after the talk, the female colleague tells him that his joke was sexist and undermined her both professionally and personally. he takes a minute to think it through and then apologizes carefully. indeed, he seems to satisfy all four parts of the sincerity condition, in that he feels genuine remorse, demonstrates that he understands why what he said was hurtful to his colleague and sexist in general, acknowledges that he acted wrongly and that his colleague (and all women) deserved better treatment, and conveys his commitment to not behave in that way in the future. spelman notes that apologies often hang in the air between the wrongdoer and the victim, and in that way call out for a response in the moral reparative moment. indeed, it’s helpful to think of this in terms of a spotlight that starts out focused just on the wrongdoer—they have acted wrongly and all the attention is on them—but then shifts to fall on the victim who must choose how to respond. imagine that the apology is delivered in a public space at the conference venue; people nearby, some of whom might have been at the talk, overhear the conversation. the focus is now on the woman’s response. whether he intends it or not, his apology carries with it a type of implicit pressure to accept and to forgive.5 after all, by repudiating his actions he has demonstrated a commitment to no longer being the kind of person who tells sexist jokes about his colleagues. this case helps to show that even if the sincerity condition is met, there is pressure to accept or forgive packed into the moral reparative moment that functions as a shield for the wrongdoer (whether they intend it that way or not). note what might come next in that public space: one possibility is for his colleague to believe that he is sincere and yet insist on her right to be angry (and so she is not committed to forgiving him). or, perhaps she’s not angry but explains that she is no longer interested in collaborating on future work—or indeed having anything more than a civil relationship among fellow department members (and so is not interested in reconciling). once the spotlight shifts to her, any response she gives other than to accept his apology, forgive him (i.e., commit to giving up her anger and other hostile feelings), and reconcile with him might crystallize the pressure that was in the air into 5 something similar can be said about the pressure that is placed on the recipient of a public marriage proposal. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 a type of weapon that might be used against her. when apologies are delivered in the presence of bystanders, victims might feel even more pressure to forgive—either to keep the peace or out of concern for one’s own personal or professional reputation. if the woman responds in a way that indicates she does not accept or is not ready to accept the apology, it's easy to imagine the man turning on a dime and exclaiming, “i said i was sorry!” the minute her reply fails to accomplish what he intended. of course, background norms and stereotypes found in the social imaginary complicate the relationship between these colleagues. on the one hand, women are often seen as emotional, irrational, vindictive, or crazy. there is a risk that the wrongdoer in this scenario, and onlookers observing the interaction, may read into how the woman responds to the apology in such a way that she appears to confirm those stereotypes. she might, for example, be read as though she has overreacted to the sexist joke. this means that even if the man does not intend to use this weapon against her, the threat it poses is still present. the very circumstances under which the apology is offered weaponize it. if she does not accept it and thereby reconcile with him, she runs the risk of being forced into the role of the cold-hearted, vindictive, selfish, or hysterical woman. thus apologies, which shift the spotlight to victims and how they will respond, can function as weapons that reinforce oppressive stereotypes and expectations about how victims should behave, shifting the normative burden to victims. the focus becomes how victims should fulfill what appears to be their obligations toward wrongdoers. at the same time, the woman might feel reluctant to forgive or to reconcile because she is worried about letting sexism slide (particularly in the academy). this is a classic double bind: if she forgives, she might feel complicit in her own oppression or the oppression of others; if she refuses to forgive, she might be regarded as embodying sexist stereotypes.6 this case helps to show that apologies that go wrong or are offered in the wrong way can result in further harm to victims. they can short-circuit the ability of the victim to make a moral claim that the action was wrongful and to demand further reparation. it can also leave them vulnerable to further mistreatment or undermine their ability to end the relationship. both of those are real and serious harms of weaponized apologies. if anger involves judging or seeing some action as wrong, then pressure to accept an apology and to forgive can be pressure to paper over the claim of wrongdoing or injustice that gave rise to anger. that’s easy to see in cases of interpersonal wrongdoing like the case of the sexist story; telling someone not to be 6 as a corollary case and another classic double bind, consider the clinton/lewinsky affair. hillary clinton faced significant pressure both to forgive bill clinton for his affair (and to thereby be a good wife) and to not reconcile with him (and to thereby be a good feminist), with plenty of public criticism pushing in both directions. thanks to a referee for encouraging us to think about this case. emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 mad at the person that wronged them might, at least some of the time, have the effect of maintaining the status quo in an abusive or toxic relationship. in fact, the dynamics of abusive relationships are often characterized by repeated apologies on the part of the abuser (frieze, newhill, and fusco 2020, 111–14).7 and apologies pave the way for that type of pressure to be applied by others—either by the wrongdoer themselves or by others in their moral community. it’s easy to imagine others nearby silently judging that the woman should forgive her colleague or, later, other members of their department telling her that his apology really does absolve him and that she’s being unfair or unprofessional by failing to forgive. when we adopt a social level of analysis, we can recognize that such a move has broader implications than just what is experienced by individual victims. think about calls for black people to forgive after an act of police violence.8 whether intentional or not, the suggestion that people should no longer be upset or protest violence shifts the normative burden to victims of injustice whose behavior is now the moral focus. this shift ends up silencing the moral critique made by the protest—and by the expression of anger itself. in the context of police violence, people are not just angry about the specific case in question. they are angry about ongoing racial injustice and the persistent threat of police violence black people face. pressuring people to forgive such injustice thus has the effect of maintaining the unjust status quo and reinforcing white supremacy. philosophers sometimes talk about “the aptness of anger” or to what extent anger is fitting or appropriate (srinivasan 2018; stockdale 2021; emerick and yap 2023). the anger of a lawyer in a courtroom drama defending their client, the soldier on the battlefield defending their comrades, or the parent defending their child against someone who would harm them—each of these are powerful, sometimes intoxicating bits of theater. it can feel good to be in the audience watching the expression of such anger, in part because we get to be on the side of the righteous. the anger makes a claim of wrongdoing or injustice, and when we are rooting for the angry protagonist, we get to join them in a bit of their heroism. and yet, we should ask whose anger is perceived or thought to be fitting in the first place and whose anger (and about what types of things) secures that type of uptake. whose anger is commonly dismissed or ignored? 7 it might also be that, after some time, the repeated apologies should no longer be treated as well formed, or that repetition causes apologies to lose their force over time. for the purposes of this paper, we don’t want to set any particular threshold for when this happens, but we do leave open the possibility that people might sincerely apologize but then later fail to meet the forward-looking condition. 8 for example, george floyd’s (white) partner asked on his behalf for the community to give grace to the people who had harmed him (cbs news minnesota 2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 answering that question requires identifying the background ideologies at play that affect what conceptual resources are available in the social imaginary. for instance, consider the stereotype that women are emotional (and so irrational) and how that’s often used to dismiss the moral claim they make in expressing anger. (one need only be reminded of the origins of the term hysterical in order to feel the force of this point.) or consider the trope of the fiery latina or of hot-blooded latinx folks more generally who might be thought to be vindictive or vengeful. consider the anger of black folks; when interpreted within a racist or white supremacist social imaginary, black people’s anger might be dismissed as a sign of not only irrationality but animality, or of being less than fully human. finally, consider the anger of disabled folks who, when expressing anger, might be regarded as pathological. in each case, a person’s social location affects the extent to which their anger is likely to secure uptake and be regarded as apt. those who occupy dominant social locations (e.g., straight, white, able-bodied, cis men in the us and canada today) are those who are most likely to have their anger regarded as legitimate. that’s a significant problem because it means that the moral claim being made by others from oppressed social locations will be easy to ignore and write off, and so it will be more likely to be left unaddressed, thereby maintaining or leaving unchallenged an unjust status quo. but there’s another worry we should consider, and it’s about how apologies (and the process of weaponization we’ve been describing) can also have the effect of reinscribing oppressive ideologies by reinforcing the tropes described above. ian hacking talks about this in terms of looping or interactive social kinds: the way that agents’ self-understanding coevolves with the ways that they are socially classified. this provides a mechanism through which stereotypes held in the social imaginary can be instantiated and made real via social interaction (hacking 1995; haslanger 2012). the reality of those interactions then loops back around and perpetuates the stereotype itself.9 our suggestion is that apologies become weaponized when they function to help maintain oppressive ideologies. the moral reparative moment that is ostensibly just between two people—the wrongdoer and the victim—is affected by individuals’ social identities. if a black woman rejects an apology or refuses to forgive someone who wronged them, those choices might contribute to the stereotype in the social imaginary that says that black women are irrational, angry, and difficult. just as the 9 hilde lindemann (2001) similarly explains that oppressive master narratives produce what she calls “damaged identities” that help to reinforce the oppressive master narratives. patricia hill collins (2000, 69–96) talks about this phenomenon in terms of “controlling images”—archetypes held in the social imaginary that again produce outcomes that shape people’s lives which then serve to reinforce those archetypes. emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 woman colleague might be pressured by departmental colleagues to forgive and reconcile with her collaborator (and run the risk of confirming sexist tropes if she fails to do so), so too might any member of a social group marked as overly emotional run the risk of lending credence to the stereotype of their irrational nature. in that way the phenomenon spelman describes is not just interpersonal but social and political as well. 4. apologizing well we hope the previous discussion makes clear that it’s not enough for apologies to be sincere. because of the latent protective and aggressive power packed in to apologies themselves, because of the type of social pressure that others in the victim’s moral community might apply, and because of the way that stereotypes or tropes held in the social imaginary might leave a victim in a double bind when choosing how to respond, the person who apologizes must do more than simply mean it. in this section we argue that good apologies require not only sincerity but vulnerability. as we understand it, vulnerability involves not expecting or demanding any particular response and being willing to pay what you owe, even if that involves serious costs and a change to your self-understanding. the term “vulnerability” is often used to describe marginalized groups who are vulnerable to certain forms of mistreatment and injustice. women are vulnerable to gendered violence, the elderly and people with disabilities are vulnerable to abuse and neglect, and black and indigenous people are vulnerable to police violence. vulnerability is also a central concept in bioethics (mackenzie, rogers, and dodds 2013). vulnerable groups are at risk of being harmed and, in many cases, require protection. for example, the elderly and immunocompromised are vulnerable to serious illness in a pandemic, and they require vaccine priority to protect them from this increased risk of harm. but there are other forms of vulnerability beyond vulnerability to harm that come with being a member of a marginalized group. margaret urban walker introduces the concept of “moral vulnerability” in the context of reparative justice. moral vulnerability, she argues, is “a vulnerability that inheres in our assumption that we possess a certain moral status as full participants in reciprocal accountability relations” (walker 2013, 112). moral vulnerability is a distinct form of vulnerability that arises from our moral practices of holding one another accountable, where the harm we are vulnerable to suffering is not being recognized as a participant in these moral relations. and we are all morally vulnerable, in the sense that all of us are at risk of being wronged by others as we go about our lives. those who do find themselves in the position of being victims are vulnerable to being dismissed, denied, or ignored when they attempt to hold wrongdoers accountable—especially when victims are members of marginalized groups. walker discusses, for example, the case of a sex worker who is met with skepticism or ridicule for pressing a formal complaint feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 about being assaulted, and subordinates in an employment context who are not taken seriously when they voice concern about being treated disrespectfully at work. but as walker points out, wrongdoers are also vulnerable. they are vulnerable to misplaced demands and sometimes accusations of fault or responsibility that may be unfair (2013, 120). while walker is primarily focused on the moral vulnerabilities of victims, we want to take up the question of what makes wrongdoers vulnerable in relation to people they have harmed, so that we can better understand the relationship between apology and vulnerability. as we have argued, apologies can serve as both weapons and shields. but this suggests that apologies can function to make wrongdoers morally invulnerable—or at least less vulnerable—by protecting them from further demands for reparation. we have shown that this can happen even when wrongdoers do accept accountability and express remorse by way of apology. we suggest that, whereas bad apologies function to protect wrongdoers from the vulnerability of being held accountable and the reparative obligations they might bear toward victims and other members of the moral community, good apologies involve embracing vulnerability of two different kinds. the first is emotional vulnerability. what unites all forms of vulnerability, as walker (2013, 112) explains, is that to be vulnerable is “to be capable of being wounded.” but not all forms of vulnerability are bad. when we are emotionally vulnerable with other people, we do risk being wounded or harmed. we are vulnerable when we tell a romantic partner we love them for the first time, when we challenge our family members’ racism, and when we discuss our stories of rejection with colleagues and students. in all these cases we risk bearing various costs—by the partner who doesn’t reciprocate, by family members who might act defensively, and by colleagues and students who might judge us for our failures. but these worst-case outcomes need not materialize, and, often, being emotionally vulnerable results in good outcomes. the partner may reciprocate and say they love you, family members might be more receptive than you anticipated, and colleagues and students may feel supported and inspired by your courage to share. and notice that these good outcomes depend upon our willingness to be emotionally vulnerable with others. emotional vulnerability is required to have the strong interpersonal relationships we find so valuable. this form of vulnerability is no less important in the context of moral repair. in apologizing, we risk that others might respond in ways that hurt us; by admitting fault, we risk exposing ourselves to additional repercussions as well as the shame that may accompany them. but apologizing well requires embracing this form of vulnerability, leaning into the risks of apologizing, and giving up one’s sense of control over how events might unfold.10 apologizing well requires accepting the victim’s right 10 luc bovens (2021, 78) similarly argues that apologies should be delivered with humility, “bowing one’s head” to the victim. when we apologize, we accept that the emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 to respond in a variety of different ways that are uncertain, and being open to further demands for reparations. we see emotional vulnerability in the context of sincere apologies as essential to the difficult process of repair. there is another form of vulnerability that we might think of as more existential. this is the kind of vulnerability involved when we acknowledge that humans are profoundly social beings—that who we are and what we become is not entirely up to us. not only are the opportunities we have not entirely under our control, but we are coconstituted alongside others who help us to become who we are (and who we in turn help to shape as well). recognizing that we are coconstituted in that way can be threatening since it involves a loss of a sense of control. it can also force us to rewrite our own self-narrative, much of which has to do with our own (mostly good) moral character. well-formed apologies for serious wrongs often give rise to this type of existential vulnerability. the man who apologizes for his sexist joke at the conference must seriously entertain the possibility that he is not the good feminist colleague that he thought he was. all of us are vulnerable in this way, in that others can challenge our pictures of ourselves. but just as material vulnerabilities often track social location, so too does this kind of existential vulnerability. people from marginalized social locations are often interpellated into limiting social roles, like what patricia hill collins (2000, 69– 96) identifies as controlling images. by providing easy scripts into which, say, a black woman correctly identifying racist injustice can be read as being merely irrationally angry, the social imaginary limits people’s possibilities. this means that even if she does the best she can to communicate effectively, a racist audience may simply not give her an appropriate response. despite her best efforts, misogyny and racial injustice restrict her social identity so that that part of who she is in the world will be an angry black woman. of course there are ways she can resist this, and a supportive community less under the sway of these kinds of social scripts will be more likely to respond to her appropriately. but the point is that part of who we are is determined by our place in the world and how others respond to our actions. so what does it mean to apologize vulnerably? we can interpret what this means via two principles. principle 1: good apologies are one-sided; they are not transactional. we contend that when someone apologizes well, they issue the apology and expect nothing for having done so. the wrongdoer does not assume or expect that they will victim has the authority to determine what happens now. we prefer the term “emotional vulnerability” to capture the emotional risk that apologizing involves, but we see bovens’s insights as complementary to our own. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 be forgiven, that they will reconcile with their victim, that others will welcome them back into the moral community, or even that their apology will be accepted. instead, the wrongdoer apologizes because they owe it to the victim to do so—that and nothing more. the victim is then in a position to make a choice about what to do next, free of pressure from the wrongdoer. and since others might follow the lead of the wrongdoer, they thereby set an example for others in the moral community to follow. thus, making good on principle 1 means having no expectation or sense of entitlement to any particular response from the victim in the moral reparative moment. that does not mean that the wrongdoer should not hope that their apology will lead to various desirable outcomes. indeed, it seems appropriate that the man who undermined his colleague does hope that she will accept his apology, that she will forgive him for his sexist behavior, and that they will be able to reconcile with each other. hope involves, at least, the desire for an outcome and the belief that the outcome is possible; and forgiveness is certainly a desirable and possible response to apology. hope also involves the recognition that one is vulnerable to external factors that can affect whether the desired outcome will come about (meirav 2009; stockdale 2021). hoping for an outcome involves vulnerability, whereas expecting or anticipating outcomes involves a sense of control over the outcome. furthermore, principle 1 is consistent with the wrongdoer believing that the victim has decisive moral reasons to forgive them. but there is a significant difference between holding such beliefs, desires, or hopes and feeling entitled to those things, and an even more significant difference between feeling that entitlement and communicating it. so, regardless of the wrongdoer’s beliefs about what victims owe wrongdoers who apologize, either generally or in their own case, apologizing well involves opening oneself up to a variety of responses from the victim and the risks that come with accepting accountability. principle 2: good apologies involve the willingness to pay what you owe. we suggest that paying what you owe, as a wrongdoer, involves accepting the existential, material, and relational costs of your actions. one existential cost is the obligation to engage in deep introspection, to reconsider who you are and how you have lived. almost everyone wants to believe that they are morally good and decent, and it’s often all too easy to rationalize or excuse our own behavior as an isolated action and not reflective of more deep-seated defects of character. many of us are reluctant to think of ourselves as the kind of people who are capable of causing significant, unjustified harm to others. and notice that apologies often reflect this resistance to viewing ourselves as the villain in someone else’s story. we often apologize in a way that distances ourselves from the wrongful act, assuring the person we harmed that we would never do the same thing again—that we have learned our emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 lesson and have changed. but when the wrongdoer makes good on principle 2 they are willing to pay the existential costs of allowing some of their own self-narrative to be rewritten, such that they come to understand differently what story they have told about their life in order to change their ways moving forward. apologizing vulnerably in the existential sense thus involves accepting that one was, and is, the sort of person who can cause significant harm to others. it involves seeing oneself as a fallible human being, alongside everyone else, in a world in which all of us are morally imperfect and prone to making significant moral mistakes. it also often requires acknowledgement that one’s social identity has shaped who one is as a person and how one’s social location affects one’s experiences, knowledge, and actions. think, for example, of the cis man who apologizes to a woman friend for centering his own voice in their discussion about abortion, or the white woman who apologizes to her women of color colleagues for treating her own experiences of sexism as universal. in these cases, apologizing vulnerably in the existential sense involves acknowledging that one’s privileged social location has shaped who one is and the wrongful acts one is prone to perform. doing so can be a difficult and often painful experience, but it is a cost we owe to victims of our wrongful acts—and to ourselves. making good on that obligation and bearing that existential cost is part of what it means to take full responsibility for our actions. wrongdoers must also be willing to pay material costs. most obviously, sometimes apologies must be accompanied by a redistribution of material wealth. for example, if someone borrows your favorite book and loses it, they might owe you an apology and a new copy of the book. such economic costs are often easy and clear cut in many relationships; but as cases get more complicated, the wrongdoer might owe more than material or economic debts. note that in both simple and more complicated cases of reparation there is a shift in power in the relationship. the wronged party gets to partially determine what the wrongdoer owes in order for their reparative duties to be discharged. being listened to and heard, rather than dismissed, and having the right and opportunity to help to determine what the wrongdoer owes can go a considerable way toward fixing the damage that the wrongdoer caused. finally, in addition to these existential and material costs, there are often relational costs wrongdoers must be willing to bear. principle 2 requires that the wrongdoer accept costs to the relationship that have resulted from the wrongdoing, such as a change in the nature of the relationship or the norms governing it. in the conference case, the man who apologizes must be willing to accept that one cost of his sexist behavior is damaged trust. perhaps his colleague wonders whether the comment was really reflective of deep-seated, sexist beliefs. rebuilding lost trust can take time and patience. in some cases, wrongdoers must even accept the victim’s choice to end the relationship. even if this is the first time that he has treated her in a sexist fashion, the woman academic is likely to have experienced plenty of academic feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 sexism, as well as sexism in other relationships. considering the way that such things accumulate over time, and the risk to her professional standing, it might well be that she simply needs to walk away from the collaboration for the sake of her own wellbeing. it is also the case that these costs must be borne whether or not the victim accepts the apology. part of the requisite vulnerability here is that the apology must be offered with no expectation of forgiveness or reconciliation in return. this means that even wrongdoers who have paid what they owe might nevertheless run the risk of never gaining closure or regaining moral stature.11 it’s important at this point also to acknowledge that principle 1 is still in play. since apologies are not transactions, a wrongdoer does not pay what they owe in the same way that a customer pays for an item they purchased.12 yet it is possible for the wronged party to be mistaken about what the wrongdoer owes, such as when victims ask for too much. for example, the neighbor who demands that your teenager who egged their house on halloween buys them a new house is, obviously, asking for too much. in these cases, reparation has not been made but through no fault of the wrongdoer. we are not saying that the victim necessarily acts immorally in such a case (though it’s possible they do). the point is that by balancing power in the relationship this way, by recognizing the power of the victim to determine partially what the wrongdoer’s reparative obligations are, you open up the possibility that they will err in doing so, either by way of some moral or epistemic vice. that’s just one of the implications of fallible beings engaging with each other in the moral reparative moment. but there are also reasons to worry about the possibility of victims asking for too little—even more so when they are members of oppressed social groups. for example, a victim of abuse might underestimate how much their abuser harmed them, and they might not demand the kind of deep self-reflection that is genuinely warranted. they might even blame themselves, explaining away the wrongdoer’s action as somehow their fault. there is thus a further question of whether repair has taken place in cases where the wrongdoer offers a sincere and appropriately vulnerable apology that is accepted by the victim too readily or is even dismissed as unnecessary in the context of the relationship. there is much more to say about how these kinds of issues should be addressed. there might, for example, be a role for third parties in helping to provide additional perspective and clarity about the 11 for more discussion of the restoration of moral stature, see bovens (2009). 12 jeffrey helmreich (2015) has an important discussion of this point about apology. while the stance he takes is more radical than the one we argue for here, in which an apology involves the recognition that one can never truly make up for what was done, merely restore respect, we think that his treatment of what apology involves is complementary to ours. emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 wrongful harm, including loved ones, therapists, or colleagues. third parties who care for and about victims might help to mitigate the potential influence of victims’ psychological or internalized oppression in how they respond to wrongdoers’ apologies, and they might help victims think through whether they are demanding too much from wrongdoers as well. what these reflections suggest is that apologizing well, sincerely and vulnerably, is essential to moral repair—but it doesn’t guarantee it. there is no perfect formula for repairing interpersonal relationships that are affected by persistent social injustice. thus, being vulnerable helps to mitigate but does not eliminate potential harm. because apologies carry both types of pressure we have been describing, and because they are affected by the social context in which they are offered, there are limits to how exhaustively a wrongdoer can avoid causing any additional harm. the fact that apologies can become weaponized is an example of the more general fact that the meaning of our actions can often run contrary to our intentions. the social context within which one acts helps to determine what an action means, as well as what effects it produces, often independent of what the actor intends.13 that fact does not absolve the wrongdoer of responsibility, however. instead, it means that the wrongdoer has an obligation to be mindful of such potential unintended meanings and outcomes, and that they should act in ways to accommodate both. consider as a corollary a man who wants to be friends with a woman at work but doesn’t want to come off as creepy or as if he is hitting on her. in suggesting that they get lunch, he might say something like, “want to be friends and grab lunch some time?” thereby making explicit his intention. while she might still suspect he is hitting on her, such an effort can go at least some way to successfully navigating the larger social context by conveying that she doesn’t need to be on guard against sexual advances and that he isn’t a creep—an extra step that would not be necessary in a world where workplace sexual harassment didn’t happen. in the same way, attempting to be vulnerable when apologizing by way of principles 1 and 2 can help to navigate the moral reparative moment within a background context that affects the meaning and impact of the apology, as well as the victim’s response. it involves recognizing that an apology to someone to whom one set of stereotypes apply will require different execution than in cases where such stereotypes do not apply. being sensitive to such background conditions doesn’t entail only paying attention to social stereotypes but entails being sensitive to ways in which an apology might affect the victim in other ways as well. for instance, an especially empathetic victim might find themselves drawn in to the wrongdoer’s perspective and find it difficult to act in ways that are good for them, a problem that might be all the more 13 thanks to a referee for pressing us to think through the ways in which our project is focused on the mitigation of potential harm within oppressive circumstances. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 likely to occur precisely when the wrongdoer has issued a well-formed, vulnerable apology.14 as a result of empathizing with the vulnerable wrongdoer the empathetic victim might forgive too easily when holding on to anger would be beneficial to them, or they might reconcile with the wrongdoer when it would be best for them to leave the relationship altogether. an even more fundamental worry is that the victim might lose a sense of their own agency; by taking on the perspective of the vulnerable and repentant wrongdoer, they might lose focus on what they want altogether and focus instead on the wrongdoer’s admittedly well-intentioned ends. given that worry, it seems there are perhaps times when someone shouldn’t apologize at all. even when making good on principle 1 and leaving plenty of space for the victim to choose how to respond, free of expectation or social pressure, it might still be best for the victim not to be placed in the position of having to consider an apology. in such a situation, the wrongdoer might communicate via a third party that if the victim ever wants to receive an apology, then they will be happy to communicate it in a way that the victim finds most helpful. it might also be appropriate not to try to make amends to the victim, knowing that avoiding such harm is impossible. doing so is itself a way of making good on principle 2, since it means recognizing that the wrongdoer has a reparative obligation that cannot be satisfied in the actual world, that they have a moral debt that they cannot pay.15 accepting that mark against their character given the context and constitution of the person they wronged is part of what comes with being vulnerable and paying the associated existential costs to their own self-conception. 5. conclusion we have argued that when apologizing well, sincerity is not enough. good apologies are vulnerable, in the sense that they satisfy two principles: (1) apologies must be one-sided and nontransactional, and (2) they require a willingness to pay what one owes. these principles mitigate the potential harm that often follows in the wake of even well-meaning apologies. in being vulnerable via principles 1 and 2, the wrongdoer attempts to lay down both their shield and their weapon, and helps to create space for the possibility of genuine repair. though we have argued that good apologies are necessary for repair in the context of significant interpersonal harms, we acknowledge that they are not sufficient. we see moral repair as a difficult social process that requires more than one party’s “good” or even ideal efforts. it is even 14 thanks to alice maclachlan for raising this important objection. for an insightful discussion of how victims experience social pressure to empathize with wrongdoers even in the absence of apology, as in the case of victims of gendered violence, see hirji (2022). 15 for more on whether the wrongdoer has a right to make amends, see radzik (2003). emerick, stockdale, and yap – weapon and shield: apologies and the duty to be vulnerable published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 possible that accepting an apology and subsequent moral repair may be out of reach for many of us, as long as systemic injustice continues. references bovens, luc. 2008. “apologies.” proceedings of the aristotelian society 108, no. 1 pt. 3 (october): 219–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2008.00244.x. ———. 2009. “must 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york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315831855. spelman, elizabeth v. 1989. “anger and insubordination.” in women, knowledge, and reality: explorations in feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry and marilyn pearsall, 263–74. boston: unwin hyman. ———. 2002. repair: the impulse to restore in a fragile world. boston: beacon press. srinivasan, amia. 2018. “the aptness of anger.” journal of political philosophy 26, no. 2 (june): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130. stockdale, katie. 2021. hope under oppression. studies in feminist philosophy series. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197563 564.001.0001. walker, margaret urban. 2013. “moral vulnerability and the task of reparations.” in vulnerability: new essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, edited by catriona mackenzie, wendy rogers, and susan dodds, 110–32. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199316649.003.00 05. barrett emerick is an associate professor at st. mary’s college of maryland. his research is in social and feminist philosophy, moral psychology, and normative ethics. he has coauthored a book with audrey yap called not giving up on people: a feminist case for prison abolition that is forthcoming with rowman & littlefield. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 3, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 katie stockdale is an associate professor at the university of victoria. she is the author of hope under oppression (oxford university press, 2021) and several articles on the nature and value of emotions in moral, social, and political life. audrey yap is a professor at the university of victoria, which stands on unceded lekwungen (lək̓ʷəŋən) territory. she works primarily on social and feminist philosophy, with a particular focus on prison justice and decarceration. 15065 emerick, stockdale, and yap title page 15065 emerick, stockdale, and yap final format where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation russell, camisha. 2025. “where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first?” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 3. 2025 where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? camisha russell university of oregon camishar@uoregon.edu russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? camisha russell abstract in this commentary, i discuss two important moves in katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression: the development of a pluralist conceptual framework for social kinds and the rejection of an ontology-first approach to social kinds in emancipatory social struggles. while jenkins discusses gender kinds most thoroughly, my analysis focuses on race kinds. i connect jenkins’s use of the constraints and enablements framework (cef) with my own argument for thinking about race as a technology. i also connect her arguments against ontology-first approaches with my own claim that we ought not to focus on the metaphysics of race and should instead try to uncover its explanatory power in different contexts. while our approaches differ—particularly with respect to their positions along an analytic (angloamerican)–continental spectrum—they also resonate. picking up on jenkins’s brief discussion of transracialism, i also use her rejection of the ontology-first approach as a framework for identifying the insidiousness of transgender–transracial comparisons. keywords: social ontology, metaphysics of race, race as technology, transracialism in ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality, katharine jenkins (2023) takes on a question that has vexed social philosophers for many decades: what, exactly, are social kinds? she offers an innovative response to this question. she also brings that response to bear on a contemporary issue of significant individual and political importance—struggles for gender recognition in ostensibly liberal but persistently transphobic societies. in doing so, she makes two crucial moves that enrich the social ontology literature. first, jenkins (2023, 7) elaborates “a pluralist conceptual framework” designed to allow us “to identify many different social kinds that serve different purposes.” throughout the book, she uses race and gender kinds as exemplars, demonstrating how neither can be well understood through a unitary ontological framework. second, in the final chapter, jenkins argues against an “ontology-first approach” to social kinds in emancipatory social struggles. here, she describes current battles over gender recognition in the uk and argues that arguments over what woman “really means” do very little to establish the actual merits and drawbacks of different social policies with respect to gender identity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 in this commentary, i will further elaborate and discuss these two important moves. while jenkins discusses gender kinds most thoroughly, my analysis will focus on race kinds. i will connect jenkins’s use of the constraints and enablements framework (cef) with my own argument for thinking about race as a technology. i will also connect her arguments against ontology-first approaches with my own claim that we ought not to focus on the metaphysics of race and should instead try to uncover its explanatory power in different contexts. (these arguments appear in my first book, the assisted reproduction of race [russell 2016].) while our approaches are different—particularly with respect to their positions along an analytic (angloamerican)–continental spectrum—i find them quite resonant. picking up on jenkins’s brief discussion of transracialism, i will also use her rejection of the ontology-first approach as a framework for identifying the insidiousness of transgender–transracial comparisons. before i proceed, however, i would like to briefly note that the two moves jenkins makes on which i am focusing here stand in some tension with each other. that is not to say that either move proves the other to be poorly executed or illconceived. jenkins’s assertion that social emancipation is rarely achieved by offering careful ontological accounts of social kinds (that is, by an ontology-first approach) can certainly coexist with her account of the ontological rules and assumptions by which social kinds operate and persist (the pluralist conceptual framework). rather, the tension i observe comes from the way the two moves are situated within the structure of the book itself. by spending the first three chapters of the book developing a relatively general and abstract account of the ontology of social kinds (writ large), jenkins appears to prioritize conceptual abstraction and the achievement of a clean and comprehensive definition. in the second part of the book, jenkins moves to detailed consideration of particular social kinds like race and gender. and in the final chapter, she considers the specific case of gender recognition debates. yet, as jenkins argues in that final chapter, starting from (or focusing primarily upon) ontology can be detrimental to campaigns for justice. during that argument, jenkins (2023, 226) suggests that “discussions of gender recognition could helpfully be framed as primarily practical and normative rather than primarily metaphysical.” moreover, jenkins describes the guiding insight of her work as the recognition that what we want from any account of race and gender kinds—which are always understood to have oppressive histories and potentials—are ways to harness their explanatory power for emancipatory purposes. in other words, for most contemporary academics and activists, the purpose of thinking about and studying constructed categories like race and gender is to better understand how those categories create and perpetuate injustice—that is, what the operation of the categories explains about the world—so that the world can be made more just. what, then, might it look like to structure the book according to this insight? for example, russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 jenkins might have instead begun in the first chapter by arguing against the ontologyfirst approach (using the same example of gender recognition struggles). she might then have demonstrated how a pluralist conceptual framework for the social kind of gender can be developed precisely to explain injustice for emancipatory purposes. perhaps she would then have explored the applicability of the framework to the social kind of race, making adjustments as necessary, before venturing to elaborate an account of social kinds in general. this would model how a philosopher can follow on normative and practical movements to develop forward-looking ways of understanding social kinds (in their good and bad uses). thus, rather than going from abstract to concrete, from generals to particulars, the account would begin with a concrete and particular case and then expand to show the possibilities for broader application. but perhaps proceeding in that way would simply have resulted in an entirely different book. meanwhile, my aim here and now is to describe and engage with some key achievements of the one jenkins did write. indeed, jenkins’s book offers substantial contributions to both identity-based political struggles and to academic understandings of social kinds. in the book’s introduction, jenkins (2023, 3–4) clearly articulates the difficult questions facing social movements seeking to counter race and gender oppression: “should countering oppression be conceived of as involving a project of dismantling or abolishing race and gender kinds? if so, how can this be reconciled with people’s experiences of identification with those kinds? and how should we approach the question of categorising people with regard to these kinds?” i believe that jenkins’s pluralist conceptual framework offers a useful way to conceptualize and manage this challenge. the cef and ontological pluralism on the first page of my 2018 book, the assisted reproduction of race, i shared a personal story: in 2002, i was working as a peace corps volunteer in a village in the central region of togo, west africa. i’d been there for a year and a half when my father came to visit. my mother had visited a few months earlier, around christmastime. i took my father to a middle school where i’d been working. the principal brought us to talk to the troisième class (roughly 9th grade) and we introduced my father to the students and then asked them if they had any questions. one boy raised his hand. “how is it that camisha is white, but her father is black, like us?” he asked. to my surprise, though i grew up “black” in the united states, i had been “white” since arriving in togo. i was still getting used to it. i opened my mouth to answer, but the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 principal raised his hand to stop me, indicating that he would “take this one.” “you remember when camisha’s mother came to visit?” he asked. the students nodded. “she was short and white.” the students nodded again. my mother, though she always imagined herself to be 5’6” was in fact 5’2”. my father is 6’6”. i am 5’9”, which is pretty tall by togo standards. “and her father,” the principal continued, “is tall and black.” the students nodded again. i, too, thought things were going well. “so you see,” the principal concluded, “she got her father’s height and her mother’s skin.” (russell 2018, 1) in the context of my argument at the time, the story was meant to illustrate that, even though most places around the world have a concept of race, what exactly constitutes knowledge of race or correct racial classification most certainly differs, though it will be broadly shared within a particular place at a particular time. later in the introduction, i glossed 1990s debates over the metaphysics of race, but i did not return to examine the story from that angle. and, by the end of the introduction, i had dismissed the idea that a metaphysics of race is necessary either for the critical investigation of racism or for organizing struggles against it. in my words of that time, i argued that we ought to shift our analytical attention from the question of what race is to the question of what race does. essentially, in jenkins’s terms, i rejected an “ontology-first” approach to the philosophy of race. i went on in the rest of the book to discuss the question of what race does in the context of assisted reproduction using the idea of race as “technology.” but i used that idea as a critical framework (based in continental philosophy), rather than arguing for it as ontological description of the social kind race. thus, i commend jenkins’s elaboration of the constraints and enablements framework (cef) as an innovative ontological account of racial and gender categories. given my previously dismissive stance toward an ontology of race, i was pleasantly surprised by how compatible the cef is with my “technology” approach. more than this, jenkins is able to start from a question of what social kinds do and then to elaborate an ontological framework that provides specific and concrete ways to understand the multiple and sometimes seemingly contradictory functions of race. the central claim of her cef is that “what unifies the members of [social] kinds is the fact of being subject to similar social constraints and enablements—or, to put it differently, the kinds are unified by the property of falling under such-and-such constraints and enablements” (jenkins 2023, 84). to show the explanatory value of the cef for our experiences of social kinds in the world, jenkins uses the concept of “nodes” within social structures. “because occupants of nodes in social structures fall russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 under similar constraints and enablements,” she writes, “we can capture significant regularities in the behaviour and experiences of people by recognising that they occupy the same node in a social structure and appealing to the social structure in our explanations” (86). for jenkins, the cef offers a deliberately bare and flexible theoretical structure, which can be used to guide the creation of fuller ontological accounts of specific social kinds within particular social and historical contexts. to this end, she offers three variables—scope, breadth, and granularity—which can be thought of like “sliders on a sound mixing board” where “different combinations of settings will give us different outputs. (89). i will not discuss the variables here, but jenkins applies them to race and gender kinds to come up with important types— hegemonic, interpersonal, and identity—thus creating a pluralist ontological account of race and gender kinds. hegemonic race and gender kinds are those we find “if we look at the overall patterns of what people are and are not able to do across society as a whole,” where we discern “a tendency of constraints and enablements, some more subordinating and others more privileging” (jenkins 2023, 121). hegemonic kinds are the ones we most readily identify in discussions of oppression. interpersonal race and gender kinds describe how a person’s perceived membership in a race or gender kind constrains or enables their interpersonal interactions with other people and with social institutions. in any given location, for example, members of racial minorities are often seen as permitted to act in certain nonassertive ways, but as not entitled to take up too much space, to stand up for themselves, or to command full social respect. meanwhile, members of a privileged interpersonal race or gender kind may receive implicit license to mistreat members of a subordinated kind. demeaning, demonizing, or enacting interpersonal violence upon members of subordinated kinds thus appears understandable, nonpunishable, or even necessary. finally, race and gender identity kinds are used to understand a person’s experienced relationship to a race or gender category. when a person identifies with a race or gender kind, it can mean that they have adopted norms associated with that category as relevant to their actions. to adopt a norm as relevant does not mean one never violates that norm; it only means that when complying with or violating that norm the person recognizes that the norm applies to their actions. for example, because i was raised in a very white community, primarily by a white mother, i have few (if any) musical preferences associated with black people of my generation. i’m also a big fan of taylor swift’s music. but when i’m out in the world, i experience a sense of self-consciousness about my love of her music—because it labels me not only as having mainstream tastes but specifically as having white mainstream tastes. currently, both beyoncé and taylor swift are on world tours, but i’m only traveling 2,500 miles to see one of them—and i know it's the “wrong” one. another, perhaps feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 more active form of identification with a race or gender kind involves making decisions about how to shape one’s projects in response to social labels. often, the projects that marginalized individuals shape in response to marginalizing labels involve solidarity with others, resistance to the status quo, and collective emancipatory action. this is important to jenkins’s account because it explains why people may choose to actively identity with labels that bring them social disadvantage. it also offers an explanation (beyond the “one-drop rule”) for the fact that mixed-race people with black ancestry often self-identify as black. by dividing race and gender kinds into hegemonic kinds, interpersonal kinds, and identity kinds—which remain unified through the cef—jenkins makes conceptual sense of efforts to mobilize against the oppressive uses of race and gender kinds, while acknowledging and valuing the shared experiences and political solidarities that come from people’s taking up of these identities for purposes of resistance. this is much what i intended to accomplish by describing race as a technology. i pointed to technologies originally developed to serve the interests of the elite or to enhance systems of social domination, which are now also employed in resistance to domination, like the internet, the precursor of which was developed in the defense advanced research projects agency (darpa) under the us department of defense. i argued that, similarly, “concepts of race have, in many ways, taken on lives of their own and have often been employed in the service of resistance to systems of domination and oppression” (russell 2018, 54). eduardo mendieta, for example, recognizes the potentially socially transformative roles that positively construed or oppositional racial identities may play when he describes the label “latinos” as something that latin americans in the united states have “learned to identify and be identified as” not only “because the mainstream society lumped us together under a bureaucratic label created for the purposes of the census” but also because the label “localizes the history and geography of the latin american experience that is the background against which we must make sense of the latino experience in the united states” and can serve as a political and cultural tool rather than a mere ethnic designator (mendieta 2012, 152–53). in framing race as technology, i also wished to account for the way much of our thinking about race has faded into the background, shaping our view of the world without our being fully conscious of it. a host of familiar technologies act in this way. cars shape the way we understand time and distance. cell phones and text messages shape the way we understand communication with and access to others. yet we tend not to think much about them until our car breaks down or our cell phone battery dies. thus, i contended that it is when something goes “wrong” with race—when there is a social outcome in which race plays an unexpected role or fails to play an expected role—that race comes into question for us and demands a response. i argued that this fact is demonstrated by the many publicized (and many more unpublicized) times russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 when a raced body appears in what is presumed to be a white (or nonraced) space and is met with a response of violence, as in the shooting of trayvon martin. i also offered a less familiar example from a 2016 documentary on o. j. simpson. describing the infamous slow-motion police chase following which simpson was arrested, zoey tur, a news helicopter pilot interviewed in the documentary, tells the filmmakers: “if o.j. simpson were black, that shit wouldn’t have happened. he’d be on the ground getting clubbed” (edelman 2016). tur’s words suggest that simpson’s blackness failed to play its expected role during the pursuit and arrest, leading tur to the conclusion that simpson could not rightfully be considered black at all. on this interpretation, it is not simpson’s phenotype but the way police treated him that best defines his racial status. moreover, tur’s surprise at the humane treatment simpson received suggests that race is, under normal circumstances, a very effective technology for justifying inhumane levels of police violence against certain populations. simpson thus serves as the exception that leads tur to articulate the rule—to name one typical function of race. i believe jenkins’s cef framework can and does do similar theoretical work in this type of case. on her account, interpersonal social kinds are unified by “the property of falling under such-and-such constraints and enablements” (jenkins 2023, 84) and thereby occupying the same node in a social structure, and this is what allows social kinds to feature reliably in our explanations of events. thus, we might say that helicopter pilot zoey tur had an expectation that, as two people with the racialized features that we associate with black men, o. j. simpson and rodney king would occupy the same social node. therefore, when o. j. simpson was slowly followed down the freeway—instead of being pulled over, removed from his car, and beaten— the expected constraints of being black in los angeles in the 1990s failed to appear. tur concludes (in keeping with the cef) that o. j. was not, in practice, black. or, as jenkins (131) puts it: “it’s not only that . . . a black person is more likely to be stopped, assaulted, or murdered by the police; it’s that being more likely to be stopped, assaulted, or murdered by the police is part of what constitutes the person’s being black.” not only does jenkins’s cef framework resonate with my “technology” account in the way that it focuses on how race (and other social kinds) function in racialized societies on multiple levels, but it also leads me back to my own story with new insights. first, i am directed to think through the lens of jenkins’s interpersonal race kinds, which “are well able to capture the sense in which race does not travel: when someone leaves one context [the us] and enters another [togo], they may well cease to be a member of one interpersonal race kind and become a member of another” (jenkins 2023, 146). as the togolese principal began addressing the students, i thought we were talking about the same thing, and that “thing” in precise terms was the biologically heritable phenotypic trait of skin color. in that moment, i was not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 thinking about race as a social kind with political weight—and that i was not thinking about it was no accident, either. race had become uncomfortable for me in a new way during my time in togo with the peace corps. that i was largely considered white in togo had been surprising—and even more so when the classification was applied to other volunteers with darker skin than mine. but what made it uncomfortable was my ever-growing experience of “white guilt.” i cannot say for certain whether it was before or after my father’s visit, but i do remember that, at that same school one day, a teacher named blaise daké, whom i considered a friend, had said i was lucky to have been born in the us instead of in africa. i think it was after i had taught his students the lyrics to “lean on me.” i remember wanting to deny it; maybe i even tried to. maybe i said something about how my ancestors were kidnapped and enslaved in a crime no passing generations could ever make worth it. i don’t recall. what i do recall is what monsieur daké said next, pointing to the dirt field outside the classroom: “if there was a plane to america out there right now, who among us wouldn’t get on it?” and i remember the students in the classroom agreed. of course, i could have been on a real plane to america within the week if i had wanted. that was true at any point during my time in togo—even after 9/11. and at the end of 2022, when my two years of service ended, i did take a plane home. in two years i almost never spoke to locals about my life at home, my plans, my future, because my opportunities were so far removed from theirs. i was privileged and i knew it and i did not like to think about it. so, there i stood in front of that classroom, hoping for a benign explanation of mixed-race appearance. and i didn’t get it. as has so often been required in the us, the teacher decided to choose between black and white. he had seen my obviously white mother and my obviously black father, and though i thought i was obviously inbetween, he decided to break the tie. and maybe it was just the fact that my lighter skin stood out relative to the average togolese person in the opposite way that, even in a multicultural “nation of immigrants,” darker skin stands out against the white citizenry of the american imaginary. or maybe the way an individual breaks a tie like that always relies on collective understandings of the node that the person they are describing will occupy in their society. in the us, few if any people with obviously nonwhite skin can truly occupy the same node as a white person with the same gender, class, or educational or professional attainment. but in togo, i could. in fact, i couldn’t not be understood to occupy the node of whiteness, where whiteness simply meant few constraints and many enablements—the fact of being an outsider in command of significant resources and with an international freedom of movement. unlike the people living in my village, i had money, education, a comfortable living situation, and an american passport. i had the ability to come and go from togo more or less whenever i wanted—therefore i was more white than black. russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 the limits of ontology for social change in the eighth and final chapter of her book, jenkins uses political struggles over the social recognition of gender to demonstrate how an ontology-first approach may hinder rather than help emancipatory movements. she focuses on the uk context in a time of “severe and worsening transphobia” (jenkins 2023, 200). for jenkins, the ontology-first approach is a pervasive assumption in public discussions about gender that “settling questions about the current ontology of gender kinds will automatically determine what shape our gendered social practices ought to take” (201). while assertions about the “objective reality” of sexed bodies or the “common sense” differences between cis women and trans women may be the prized tactic of those who seek to deny trans rights—trans men tend to be rhetorically invisible in these debates—jenkins notes that activists working for trans rights often fight back by meeting their opponents on this same ontological battleground. that is, trans rights proponents often argue that the “correct” understanding of what gender is puts trans women in the same category as cis women—with the idea that proving trans women are women will automatically lead to social recognition and just social policies. jenkins argues that allowing the battle to be fought on ontological grounds can distort disagreements about gender recognition and contribute to the perpetuation and amplification of transphobia. one reason for this is that the gender ontologies being used on either side of the disagreement tend to see gender kinds as being one thing, rather than as ontologically pluralist (hegemonic, interpersonal, or identity kinds) in the way jenkins advances. furthermore, without using a pluralist account, trans rights activists risk losing the ability to actually explain trans people’s experiences of social stigmatization and marginalization. jenkins agrees that it is important to recognize and acknowledge the gender identity kinds with which a person identifies. but she believes we miss something crucial about trans experiences of injustice if we ignore the fact that, in many contexts, trans people will not be placed under the constraints and enablements of the interpersonal gender kind that matches their gender identity—rather, they will be constrained and enabled according to the idea that their “real” gender is the one they were assigned at birth. moreover, trans people’s overall position in society and possession or lack of social goods will not map neatly onto measures of binary hegemonic gender kinds. for these reasons, jenkins (2023, 215) argues that emancipatory movements should explicitly reject the ontology-first approach and simply refuse “the claim that gender identity kinds can do the explanatory work that we’ve historically asked ‘gender’ to do for us.” instead, such movements should adopt “a view on which social practices should sometimes track existing kinds and sometimes depart from them” and place more emphasis on “the practical upshots of different policies, especially their impact on trans people’s equality and dignity” (218). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 when it comes to race kinds and my work on how we should think about race, the identification and subsequent rejection of an ontology-first approach to (particularly academic) debates are also useful. the terms of the race debate more typically resemble earlier debates about gender, which focused on the question of whether gender was real or socially constructed. up until recent debates over transracialism—debates that have little to do with social policies or equality—the ontology-first assumption in race debates has been something like this: settling questions about the reality of race will automatically determine how to address racism. often both those arguing for the reality of race and those arguing against it have been antiracist in their aims, but they have used their differing views on the metaphysics of race to support different approaches to fighting racism. recalling the 1990s debate between lucius outlaw and anthony appiah over the metaphysics of race, anna stubblefield contends that the two were essentially arguing for the racial ontologies that they believed would best support their different views on how to achieve the best outcomes for african americans.1 on this reading, the debate was a consequentialist one over whether taking race into account only perpetuates anti-black oppression or is in fact necessary to effectively combat such oppression (stubblefield 2005, 71–73). of course, as jenkins also notes in the context of gender recognition, there is nothing wrong with robust arguments about how best to combat particular forms of oppression. but arguments against oppression would be clearer—and perhaps a more effective basis for compromise solutions—if they were explicitly grounded in current harms and dangers and the types of policies that might mitigate them. in my book i describe this prescription as a shift away from an unhelpful focus on what people believe about race to how race has been and continues to be used—from the question of what race is to what race does. in other words, like jenkins, i see a rejection of the ontology-first approach to race in favor of trying to uncover its explanatory power in different contexts as a guide for ongoing emancipatory work. lived identities, not logical possibilities i believe jenkins’s rejection of the ontology-first approach also provides a helpful way of thinking about the transracialism debate and the insidious transgender–transracial comparisons on which that debate typically rests. summarizing the “presumption of equivalence” reflected in public debates on transracialism circa 2015–2017, jenkins (2023, 235–36) outlines three steps: (1) “an ontological equivalence is assumed: race and gender kinds exist in the same way as each other . . . as a matter of ‘objective truth’”; (2) “this ontological equivalence is presumed to entail a first-personal ethical equivalence: since race and gender exist in the same way, having and expressing a racial identity that is at odds with how one 1 see, for example, appiah (1996) and outlaw (1996). russell – where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first? published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 would usually be categorized . . . has the same moral status as having and expressing [such] a gender identity”; (3) “this first-personal ethical equivalence is presumed to entail a third-personal ethical equivalence: we ought (morally speaking) to respond in the same way to other people who express racial and gender identities that are ethically equivalent to one another.” by contrast, jenkins (238) suggests that “doing justice to questions about people’s complicated experiences of racial identity that are at odds with their membership in hegemonic and interpersonal race kinds requires [engaging] these experiences in their own right and not as an offshoot of discussions about gender recognition.” i think this is basically right. when it comes to engaging experiences in their own right, however, i think it is important that “in their own right” not be understand as “on a purely individual basis.” as jenkins recognizes, race and gender kinds differ in terms of their histories, their operations, and the types of constraints and enablements associated with them. it is also worth noting, however, that they differ in terms of the low number of people asserting a phenomenological, first-person experience of “transracialism,” as opposed to a widespread, long, and documented history of trans(gender) experiences. that is, there is something else wrong with the ontology-first approach here, which is more specific than the “presumption of equivalence.” that something has to do with taking the well-documented existence of one identity phenomenon and using it to argue for the possible (or even likely) existence or validity of another identity phenomenon. while it could prove problematic to require a visible collective struggle around a particular identity before we accept that identity as a true social kind deserving of our moral attention, i would still argue that it is collective struggle (rather than philosophical reasoning) that offers the surest evidence that a previously unknown social identity kind has become knowable to its members and that those members as members deserve our moral attention. perhaps there are widespread experiences emerging somewhere that we may someday wish to discuss under the label transracialism in order to do justice to the people having those experiences. perhaps, for example, that experience will emerge from the context of international and/or transracial adoption and the term will come to describe the experiences of nonwhite adoptees in white families. but we, as philosophers, will not be able to do justice to any such people until they begin describing their experiences to each other and choose the label for themselves. in other words, we should approach any limited number of transracial identity claims with an extra dose of philosophical caution and humility—and always with due attention to the ethical implications for the people already inhabiting various identities. ultimately, jenkins’s work reminds us that the ontology of social kinds differs from that of other kinds in the sense that it develops and shifts over time and within feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 different social contexts. political decisions and social practices set up the constraints and enablements that philosophers like jenkins can ultimately use to effectively describe the operation of things like race and gender kinds at particular historical places and times. jenkins’s success in offering such an effective description lies in her recognition that social kinds are so complex that philosophical theories will fail to explain them fully unless they are sufficiently pluralist and context-dependent. jenkins gives us a helpful framework for recognizing and addressing this complexity and reminds us that there is little point in addressing social ontology at all unless we are clearly focused on advancing emancipatory (or, god forbid, oppressive) movements. references appiah, k. anthony. 1996. “race, culture, identity: misunderstood connections.” in color conscious: the political morality of race, by k. anthony appiah and amy gutmann, 30–105. princeton, nj: princeton university press. edelman, ezra, dir. 2016. o.j.: made in america. “part 3.” aired june 15, on espn. jenkins, katharine. 2023. ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality. new york: oxford university press. mendieta, eduardo. 2012. “migrant, migra, mongrel: the latin american dishwasher, busboy, and colored/ethnic/diversity (philosophy) hire.” in reframing the practice of philosophy: bodies of color, bodies of knowledge, edited by george yancy, 147–66. albany, ny: state university of new york press. outlaw, lucius t., jr. 1996. on race and philosophy. new york: routledge. russell, camisha a. 2018. the assisted reproduction of race. bloomington: indiana university press. stubblefield, anna. 2005. ethics along the color line. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. camisha russell is associate professor of philosophy at the university of oregon. she is a feminist philosopher working in critical philosophy of race with a particular strength in bioethics. in 2024/25, she was awarded a mellon foundation new directions fellowship to explore her growing interest in the relationship between blackness and indigeneity in (the settler colony known as) the united states. her first book, the assisted reproduction of race (indiana university press, 2018), considered the role of the race idea in practices surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and argued for the benefits of thinking of race itself as a technology. her forthcoming cowritten book, assisted reproductive justice (university of california press), examines the fertility industry, family formation law, and other practices of assisted reproduction through a reproductive justice lens. 113003 russell title page 113003 russell final format the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation pitton, camilla. 2023. “the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (4). article 1. 2023 the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature camilla pitton university of warwick camillapitton@gmail.com pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature camilla pitton abstract the attempt to rearticulate traditional conceptions of nature can be both a useful strategy and a stumbling block when it comes to feminist examinations of the continuity between the objectification of women’s bodies and the domination of nature. this paper contributes to existing debates by providing a critique of what i term the “duality view” of nature: a view stipulating that nature is primarily characterised by a stable sexual duality, and advancing that the objectification of women’s bodies arises because the specificity of “femaleness” is ignored and duality is therefore neglected. i focus, specifically, on alison stone’s interpretation of luce irigaray, insofar as the account emerging from stone’s interpretation clearly outlines the principles that most versions of the duality view should endorse. i problematise this account by showing that it becomes inconsistent with the critique of objectification which grounds it in the first place. i conclude by advancing that, overall, a view insisting on a natural sexual duality because of normative reasons conflicts with the feminist considerations at its basis. i also suggest that while the present analysis is primarily condemnatory, it can contribute to the development of feminist philosophies of nature by fleshing out avoidable pitfalls. keywords: nature, duality, sexual difference, objectification, embodiment, luce irigaray, alison stone introduction in this paper, i address a certain “duality interpretation” of luce irigaray’s philosophy of nature that has consolidated in the literature,1 according to which irigaray posits a conception of nature that is both sexed and dual on the basis of a specific critique of the objectification of women and nature. firstly, i show that the duality view becomes philosophically inconsistent when developed on the basis of 1 in addition to alison stone’s interpretation of irigaray’s work, which is duly assessed in this paper, a prominent example of this kind of reading can be found in the work of elizabeth grosz (2011). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 irigarayan insights; secondly, this assessment of irigarayan scholarship allows me to advance that any philosophy of nature grounded on the notion of a stable sexual duality encounters insurmountable obstacles when it draws resources from a feminist critique of the objectification of nature. specifically, an account that posits nature to be primarily characterised by sexual duality is argued to be incompatible with a feminist critique of objectification, and thus to become inconsistent by virtue of invalidating its own normative starting position. since a critique of objectification like irigaray’s remains genuinely insightful, i advance that feminists should attempt to elaborate a philosophy of nature grounded on this critique but avoid prioritising the notion of duality. keeping with these objectives, i begin in section 1 by explaining irigaray’s account of objectification and its relevance to feminist analyses, thus contextualising irigaray’s work and, more generally, the attempt to rearticulate nature. in section 2, i illustrate irigaray’s philosophy of nature through an assessment of the forgetting of air in martin heidegger (irigaray 1999). i select this book, instead of irigaray’s more recent works on nature, for two reasons: first, the forgetting explicitly brings to the fore the connections between a feminist critique of objectification and a rearticulation of nature; second, it lends itself to be read both in terms of the duality view, thus facilitating an appreciation of the attractiveness of this account, and as a problematisation of any realist philosophy of nature, thus pointing to possible alternatives. following this, in section 3, i offer an exposition of the duality view of nature by engaging with alison stone (2003, 2006). i argue that while stone’s dualistic philosophy of nature corresponds to an interpretation of irigaray’s work, its moves should be adopted by any variation of the duality view calling for the cultural expression of sexual difference. in section 4, i advance that the necessary naturalisation of the masculine tendency towards objectification, and the simultaneous endorsement of a view which takes culture to be called for by nature, leads feminist supporters of the duality view to problematise their own normative starting point. this renders the duality view incompatible with the feminist critique of objectification that has to ground it, thus making unfeasible its adoption on the basis of feminist considerations. finally, i address in section 5 a potential rebuttal of my critique, which hinges upon the claim to realism that stone attributes to irigaray: if stone, irigaray, or any supporter of the duality view have good enough reasons to consider a dualistic view of nature phenomenologically realistic, normative coherence should be deprioritised. in response, i show that the justifications that a dualist account can offer depend either on the assumption of duality or on arguments unable to address my critique. by underlining the necessity of the principal argumentative moves stone makes with respect to a view which endorses the cultural ratification of sexual difference out of a naturalist impulse, i demonstrate that any account presenting a pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 similar impetus encounters the same difficulties. insofar as we take an assessment and a rethinking of nature to be important to feminism and accept, to some degree, that the objectification of women and of nature are connected, my analysis shows that the duality view is to be rejected. consequently, it also provides, through diffractive means, some parameters under which the articulation of a philosophy of nature can adequately theorise the liberation of women and nature from objectification. i thus conclude by briefly fleshing out the possibility of an alternative to the duality view. 1. objectification, women, and nature in this section, i briefly sketch irigaray’s view of objectification in order to explain the critical assessment which grounds her philosophy of nature and the duality view. this summary will allow me to contextualise both a rearticulation of nature, in general, and the duality view, specifically, within debates in feminist philosophy. to begin, irigaray’s critique of objectification transverses her whole oeuvre. starting with speculum of the other woman, irigaray (1985a) identifies the conceptual apparatus that sustains the objectification of women’s bodies with views that attribute passivity and inertness to matter. first, in advancing that women have been assigned the role of the other with respect to the normative ideal of the male or masculine subject, irigaray exposes the association of women to objects. as she puts it: subjectivity is denied to woman: indisputably this provides the financial backing for every irreducible constitution as an object. (irigaray 1985a, 133) irigaray argues, moreover, that since subjectivity has been linked, in the conceptual history of the west, to the ideal of disembodied-ness, the objectified woman also comes to be characterised in terms of materiality. accordingly, she rhetorically asks: “without the exploitation of the body-matter of women, what would become of the symbolic process that governs society?” (1985b, 85). in exposing the association between women and matter, irigaray already points to the fact that traditional views of subjectivity posit a certain continuity between women and a primarily material nature. however, she ultimately advances that the connection between the two is not merely metaphorical: as the establishment of the “masculine,” disembodied subject is equally dependent on the contrast between self and a passive nature, the position of women and of nature with respect to the subject end up coinciding. following ann v. murphy (2001), this suggestion arguably radicalises in irigaray’s “later” works and provides the basis, for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 authors like stone, to develop the duality view. following this line of argument, it is not only the case that the roles assigned to nature and to women coincide; more fundamentally, nature is dominated on the basis of its femaleness, and/or women are oppressed because of their physiological proximity to nature. provisionally sketched thusly, irigaray’s analysis is not unique. susan hekman, for instance, highlights the centrality of the notion of objectification within twentiethcentury western feminism, by advancing that “the principal thrust of the feminist critique is that the subject has been conceptualised as inherently masculine” (hekman 1991, 45). she adds that “the subject/object dichotomy on which this conception rests defines women as inferior” (hekman 1991, 60). the preoccupation with the dichotomy and with the masculinity of the subject is clear in irigaray, and so is her agreement with hekman’s (1991, 60) claim that “unless this dichotomy is displaced [the] inferiority will persist.” it should be stressed, however, that irigaray’s focus on the process of subject-formation begets a concern that is different with respect to epistemological analyses of the masculinity of “subject-knower” popular within strands of north american feminism: the problem does not lie in the fact that the subject posits a certain knowledge of itself and, consequently, a certain knowledge of the object; rather, the primary issue lies in a model of active identity which renders passive its oppositional, material other.2 the connection between objectification and naturalisation is, similarly, not exceptional. braidotti et al. (1994, 30), for instance, argue that “male, mind, culture and subject are categories which exercise hierarchical control and domination over female, body, nature and object.” in this respect, a diagnosis of the condition of femininity, as naturalised and objectified, remains clearly relevant to feminist projects interested in investigating there othering of women. nevertheless, the differences between irigaray’s assessment and the aforementioned analyses make her philosophy of nature worthy of attentive consideration. rather than simply warranting a reinvention of epistemic practices or a revaluation of certain “feminine” attributes, and of nature itself, irigaray’s assessment of objectification articulates and addresses some specific conceptual requirements for feminist philosophy. namely, insofar as we (i) advance the objectification of women to be reliant on the contrast between the disembodied subject and inert nature; and (ii) subscribe to the idea that the liberation of women must not simply attempt to inscribe women under the dominant model of subjectivity3—leaving the dichotomy between subject and object or subject and nature intact—we also arrive 2 christine battersby’s (1998) the phenomenal woman examines the difference between these two positions. 3 irigaray claims, specifically, that “any theory of the ‘subject’ has always been appropriated by the ‘masculine’” (irigaray 1985a, 133). pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 at the following conclusion: (iii) the liberation of women requires the elaboration of a framework whereby nature, or the sensible, does not function as an oppositional, passive other. expressed differently, since sexual difference, as traditionally conceptualised, begets the objectification of women and nature, sexual difference should be rearticulated; this requires rethinking nature and our relation to it. irigaray’s philosophy of nature emerges in response to this problem. if we accept irigaray’s idea that the subject/object divide is not solely an epistemological problem, and that the naturalisation of women and feminisation of nature is not merely a metaphorical operation (independently of whether we essentialise their coincidence), her rewriting of nature becomes an attractive response to ongoing practices of domination. 2. irigaray’s rethinking of nature in this section, i outline the elements of irigaray’s work that are essential for understanding the relevance of her reconceptualization of nature and for revealing, in the following sections, the reasons why its “duality interpretation” is philosophically troublesome. i examine, in view of these objectives, the forgetting of air in martin heidegger (irigaray 1999) because this book explicitly positions itself as a response to the problem of objectification. whilst the forgetting, as the name suggests, explicitly focuses only on heidegger’s conception of nature, its scope remains, in fact, far reaching. irigaray’s argument centrally employs her strategy of reducing dissimilar philosophical outputs to coinciding positions. it operationalises, therefore, what might be regarded as irigaray’s genealogy of western patriarchal thought, which aims to show and exaggerate a certain continuity in the positioning of women and of the feminine within different philosophical traditions. although this strategic operation is also an object of critique, on christine battersby’s part for instance,4 it functions, in this book, to problematise the exceptionality of heidegger’s conception of nature. it should be clarified, however, that it is not within the scope of this paper to determine whether the duality view is the right interpretation of irigaray’s philosophy of nature (as presented in the forgetting or elsewhere). anne van leeuwen (2013) and claire colebrook (2022) have already argued, very convincingly, that irigaray is not concerned with assigning to an alternative idea of nature the status of a veritable ground, origin, or constitutive outside; in other words, it is not unproblematic to claim, in the first place, that irigaray attempts to articulate a certain essence or truth about nature. insofar as the duality view, as we shall see, remains realist in the sense 4 battersby (1998, 101) laments that irigaray treats “western metaphysics as homogeneous, and also as concealing a ‘forgotten’ mode of being (that is related to birthing).” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 that it proposes to describe what nature is truly like, its association to irigaray is disputable. additionally, irigaray’s adoption of the expression “at least two” in the forgetting suggests that a binarism of sexes is not the obvious interpretative choice even when irigaray’s work is advanced to adopt a realist approach. in focusing on the duality interpretation, i aim to show, nonetheless, that arguments like the ones found in the forgetting, concerned with displacing the patriarchal objectification of nature and women, could call for, and have called for, the elaboration of a philosophy according to which nature is dual and sexed. as we shall see in the next section, this view remains appealing for a number of reasons, even when it is considered a superficial reading of irigaray’s texts. keeping with these purposes, we should highlight that irigaray identifies heidegger’s post-being and time conception of being or physis [nature] with an objectification of matter, 5 to then position unobjectified matter as a forgotten condition of possibility for heidegger’s ontology (irigaray 1999, 11). while arguably coinciding in heidegger, the terms being and physis are used interchangeably by irigaray for the purposes of classifying heidegger’s ontology as a philosophy of nature. accordingly, to both ground her charge of objectification and make her overall critique of heidegger relevant to feminism, irigaray argues that heidegger’s use of specific spatiotemporal categories (permanence, appearance, and distance) to describe physis brings his ontology close to other traditional western conceptions of nature. as in views that a feminist reader would consider objectifying, nature is predetermined and encountered as an object (irigaray 1999, 11).6 more specifically, by virtue of considering heidegger’s ontological categories an imposition onto matter—boundaries forced onto it (irigaray 1999, 16)—irigaray advances that, in heidegger, being or physis “must assimilate something” on which such categories can be imposed “in order to have begun to be” (irigaray 1999, 26). further, closely following heidegger’s argument concerning the necessity of man (or of his thinking) to the disclosure of being, as presented in the conversation (heidegger 1966), irigaray argues that the heideggerian subject is constituted through a separation from nature which allows “him” to impose himself onto the latter (irigaray 1999, 30). two things follow. first, the notion of assimilation, derived from the insight that the imposition of ontological categories transforms and thus assimilates some given content, allows irigaray to posit an alternative kind of matter or nature; this nature is hidden within, and forgotten by, or (according to another interpretation) withdraws as the condition 5 i will hereafter use irigaray’s transliteration physis rather than heidegger’s phusis. 6 helen fielding (2003, 6) argues, in this respect, that “irigaray is disturbed by heidegger’s phenomenological categories since they address and take up only that which we have encountered before in our field of vision.” pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 of, heidegger’s ontology. second, irigaray advances that heidegger reserves a discrete space for the feminine, without acknowledging it. nature, like women, remains indeed a material other that is subject to determination by thought. irigaray’s constant use of the feminine to describe nature thus signals the attempt to articulate an intrinsic connection between heidegger’s formulations of being and human essence and a familiar positioning of the feminine other: nature and women are repressed and yet assimilated and transformed for the very establishment of the masculine subject. particularly, irigaray’s metaphorization of birth, according to which nature “gives herself in the ‘form’ of fluids” (irigaray 1999, 32), conjoined with the idea that this process is “forgotten,” serves to accentuate heidegger’s reliance on a very traditional understanding of the coming-to-be that constitutes the subject (faulkner 2001, 132): a manufactured self-birth. the move of associating heidegger’s approach to nature to other masculine conceptions thereof is fundamental to irigaray’s argument. it allows her to establish that we have reasons to accept the premise, initially presented as a hypothesis, that heidegger’s approach to nature imposes its own schema; that is, insofar as we are ready to accept, as feminist readers, that traditional approaches are objectifying and thus inaccurate. in this respect, irigaray’s argument relies on (i) establishing that heidegger reinforces existing yet not necessary conceptions of nature, of the feminine, and of the subject, and on (ii) the acceptance, on the part of the reader, that these existing ways of conceptualising nature are already objectifying.7 for the purposes of explicating how an analysis like irigaray’s could ground both the realist interpretation on which a duality view of nature is grounded and an antirealist reading, one last consideration regarding irigaray’s strategy is necessary. the forgetting brings forth a critique of the heideggerian “belonging-together” of being and the logos (irigaray 1999, 124–28). irigaray considers, specifically, heidegger’s appropriation of parmenides, whereby the logos is identified with “apprehending,” and where apprehending becomes the disclosure that which appears. as being or physis appears while concealing itself, apprehending and physis are, for heidegger, opposed—just like culture and nature can be argued to be. it is, however, precisely the manner in which these two strive in opposition—namely, in their being distinct but necessary for each other—that warrants their reciprocal “belonging-together.”8 this belonging-together is thus, for heidegger, an ontological 7 the potential and reasonable worry that irigaray might be misinterpreting heidegger by speaking of an imposition of ontological categories is, therefore, circumvented via an argument displaying heidegger’s proximity to canonical and patriarchal accounts of the subject vis-à-vis nature. 8 on this, see heidegger’s (2000) the introduction on metaphysics, chapter four, section 3, subsection d. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 necessity given by the requirement that being is to be apprehended and that thinking apprehends being. irigaray charges this belonging-together with artificiality inasmuch as it is marked by an approach to nature which is characteristically patriarchal: nature is assumed to necessitate human thinking and is viewed as a unitary object of thought, completely assimilable by the latter; in this assimilation, the oppositional difference between nature and thinking is reduced not only to unity but also to a sameness, in view of the presumed harmony between thinking schema and nature’s structures— just like the difference between femininity and masculinity is traditionally reduced to indifference by the imposition of a masculine paradigm. in contrast to this view, irigaray formulates the idea of physis, or nature, as composed by “at least two” (irigaray 1999, 127) that are not reduceable to unity nor to a belonging-together. this formulation follows the insight that a “difference that never reduces to one” (irigaray 1999, 124) would remain structurally unspeakable by a form of apprehending which emerges by subduing its difference with its other. this speculative proposal can beget, nonetheless, two distinct rearticulations of the relationship between being/nature and thinking/apprehending: a full rejection, on the one hand, of the necessity pertaining to their belonging-together, and the retention, on the other hand, of a “partial” belonging-together, still entailing a relation of necessity which, however, only runs from being to apprehending or to thinking. the second option entails that whilst nature needs to be apprehended, apprehension is not necessarily (or not always) related to nature. in other words, nature, under this interpretative lens, needs to be understood to be allowed its proper growth, but it is not a necessity that human apprehension and culture will understand it or emerge by understanding it. it follows that the misapprehended being functions as ground of thought: in the case of patriarchal thinking, as a ground that is assimilated, stabilised, and negated—thus constituting a negative condition of possibility. nonetheless, since this difference can be appropriately apprehended, given that being necessitates apprehension, difference can also become a positive ground for thinking: the object towards which thought orients itself. this interpretative position assumes therefore the possibility of harmony between thinking and nature, like heidegger’s belonging-together under irigaray’s reading. however, it is not bound to reduce harmony to sameness insofar as it does not start from two equally unitary terms; it can thus identify a form of thinking which can only entertain a unitary articulation of its object with a misapprehension, by simply assuming that the difference this thinking fails to articulate is given.9 9 note here that this position could be criticised as a correct reading of irigaray, insofar as a harmony between thinking and nature can be advanced to beget a view of thinking whereby the latter necessarily sees its object as unitary. since, as i will show, pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 on the other hand, the first position implies that there can be no ontological and necessary connection between articulations of nature and nature itself, meaning that nature does not require its own apprehension or conceptual mediation. two conceptual avenues follow from this option: (i) natural difference remains a ground from which thought is divided and which thinking misapprehends in its incipit (meaning that difference is the negative origin of patriarchal thinking). however, in contrast to the framework positing a partial belonging-together, the present account denies that being requires apprehension. the obvious implication is that thinking is bound to misapprehend being by imposing itself as an apprehension thereof. alternatively, (ii) the full rejection of a co-belonging of thinking and being annuls any relation of necessity between thought and being, including the nonrelation or the negative relation figured in misapprehension. in this respect, (ii) signals that irigaray might not be positioning “natural” difference as the negative ground of patriarchal thinking and as the possible positive ground of feminist thought. in other words, (ii) would not simply be a critique of patriarchal thinking which delimits the latter by positing difference as a necessary albeit forgotten origin; it would correspond instead to a critique of patriarchal thinking qua the positing of grounds: a thinking that postulates being or nature to be a sensible origin for thought, which thought always ends up objectifying. there are specific advantages to each position. when difference is interpreted to be a ground or a given, irigaray’s philosophy of nature can be seen to follow a specific methodology: a problematisation of heidegger’s articulation of the logos premised on the idea that there is a type of difference which negatively grounds the logos and which the logos ignores or cannot speak. the outcome of this analysis is also quite straightforward: in postulating the possibility of non-oppositional difference, and in positing that any doctrine which employs categories similar to heidegger’s remains blind to this difference, we can advance that these doctrines misapprehend and forget physis. connectedly, we also obtain a specific rendition of the duality view relies on this partial belonging-together, the above could already represent a reason for rejecting the duality view—either as a correct interpretation of irigaray or as an account which can problematise a full belonging-together of thinking and being for the sole reason that it articulates the object of thought as unitary. i choose however not to entertain this objection because supporters of the duality view might argue that thinking of nature as a unified object does not necessarily imply that we cannot articulate the internal difference which arguably characterises it. simultaneously, they might advance that heidegger’s belongingtogether should be rejected because it is tied to other objectionable descriptions of nature, or because it does not, in fact, entertain a view whereby nature is marked by difference. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 the “forgetting of air.” as van leeuwen highlights, this notion can be interpreted to entail an idea of “nature as a transcendent foundation or ground” (van leeuwen 2013, 458). nature grounds thought since thinking assimilates and stabilises nature, separates it from itself, and finally transcends it. nature prior to its assimilation and determination as an object is nonetheless forgotten because patriarchal thinking cannot but think it as such object. on the other hand, difference might be identified in this work not simply with the ground of thinking but with the only concept capable of problematising the notion of grounds. van leeuwen argues, accordingly, that heidegger’s characterisation of the “forgetting” (which entails not simply the forgetting of something, but also the constitutive forgetting of the forgetting) cannot have gone unnoticed in irigaray. she thus advances the following: the point, then, for irigaray, is not to participate in this specular forgetting through a nostalgic call to remember she (who) gives air; . . . rather, the point, paradoxically, is not to forget this ineliminable and constitutive forgetting. (van leeuwen 2013, 459) for van leeuwen this second critical avenue warrants the remembrance of the forgetting, achieved through an upholding of sexual difference “not as a transcendent given but as the genesis of difference within a transcendental inquiry that does not forget the constitutive withdrawal of its own conditions” (van leeuwen 2013, 461). while a feminist critique of objectification can embrace either interpretation of nature and difference for good reasons, in the next section, i address the notion of nature qua ground insofar as the duality view of nature is rooted in it. 3. the duality view having exposed the central elements of irigaray’s philosophy of nature, i assess here the duality view that it inspires. whilst maintaining that irigaray’s general strategy remains incredibly promising, i advance that reading the difference that characterises nature in terms of sexual duality renders any feminist proposal of this kind philosophically weaker: it leads to the upholding of an account of the natureculture relation which ultimately invalidates the normative analysis wherefrom this account emerges. furthermore, i argue that, although stone’s interpretation of irigaray is my object of analysis, most variations of the duality view, which do not rely on irigaray’s work, must subscribe to similar “irigarayan” premises. it is because the duality view, in all its variations, remains an attractive avenue for feminist critiques of objectification that we should thoroughly assess it and outline its flaws. in “the sex of nature”, stone attempts to show (i) that irigaray’s position corresponds to a realist essentialism and (ii) that this realist essentialism “generates pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 a powerful political theory” (stone 2003, 61). the term “realist” is used by stone to distance irigaray’s work (at least starting from the mid-1980s) from the “strategic” essentialism her earlier writing is associated with: from a strategy which employs essentialising descriptions of femininity only for the purpose of destabilising patriarchal views of women. stone’s two theses represent, therefore, a critique both of those who view irigaray’s essentialism as realist but reject irigaray on this basis10 and of those advancing that irigaray’s later works continue to adopt a strategic essentialism.11 it is irigaray’s philosophy of nature that, according to stone, allows her to establish a realist view of sexual difference. specifically, stone advances that human sexual difference is grounded on what is considered a real difference between two rhythms that are arguably discernible in any natural phenomena and thus in nature itself; 12 she thus interprets irigaray’s postulation of difference in terms of two temporal patterns permeating nature. these two temporal patterns are argued to be inalienably dissimilar, to depend on each other (or on their difference) for their own accentuation, and to manifest most resolutely in human sexual difference. as stone writes, “nature is permeated at every point by rhythmical duality, and strives for the full realization of this duality, which occurs in human sexual differentiation” (2003, 61). accordingly, this interpretation posits, on the one hand, that the rhythmical duality pertaining to natural phenomena “is structurally isomorphic with human sexual differentiation” (stone 2003, 63): nature and humans both manifest a duality whereby “each pole depends upon its other and yet follows its unique rhythm” (stone 2003, 63). on the other hand, stone’s account assigns to nature a determinate hierarchy, which places humanity at the top in virtue of its capacity to accentuate duality through cultural practices: inorganic nature conditions a more clearly dualistic organic nature, which in turn produces humans able to “display their duality still more perfectly” in culture (stone 2003, 64). 10 for an example of this interpretation, see ann v. murphy’s (2001) “the enigma of the natural in luce irigaray.” 11 for an example, see danielle poe’s (2011) “can luce irigaray’s notion of sexual difference be applied to transsexual [sic] and transgender narratives?”. in this chapter, poe examines and employs arguments offered by irigaray’s early writings in order to problematise essentialist readings of irigaray’s late works. 12 the idea of rhythm is found most explicitly in irigaray in sexes and genealogies, where she writes: “nature’s noise is rhythmic. what’s more, it respects the differences in rhythms. it informs. . . . it is in continuous becoming” (irigaray 1993, 108). the forgetting, however, already contains mentions of rhythm, when irigaray, for instance, speaks of things “entrusting to the other the very rhythm of their breathing” (irigaray 1999, 177). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 stone’s evaluation of cultural practices is thus evidently premised on the possibility of a “correct” attitude towards nature. since stone identifies the realisation of a culture of sexual difference with an “ethical duty,” corresponding to the requirement imposed by nature to manifest its duality, her account should be seen to subscribe to a partial belonging-together of physis and the logos, redefined as the possibility of a reconciled relation between nature and culture. just as a partial belonging-together entails the potential for misapprehension, a compatible notion is indeed found in stone’s claims concerning the logic of sameness permeating dominant cultural practices. according to stone’s argument, the natural reality of sexual difference is culturally misinterpreted as homogeneity between sexes since the female part of the real is ignored and wrongly modelled after masculinity. women are forced to adopt “a male self-identification” (stone 2003, 73), while the distinctiveness of a female rhythm is denied by a patriarchal culture which ends up regulating femaleness in accordance with the male rhythm. women and the female part of nature remain the other of maleness, but only because they are rendered an object defined and determined by the male subject. since “men and women have,” however, “a duty toward nature to . . . fulfill the drive to bipolarization pervading the whole cosmos” (stone 2003, 71), the liberation of women and the fulfilment of nature’s purposes come to coincide. i will not delve into the details of stone’s proposal concerning a feminist political/cultural program as they are not relevant to the present analysis. two general considerations suffice. first, stone’s notion of the “ethical duty” depends on the conceptual acknowledgement of the duality pertaining to nature and sexual difference, which serves to posit this duty in the first place. in other words, insofar as stone diagnoses in patriarchal culture the ignoring of sexual difference and of the duality pertaining to nature, transmuted into a defective acceptation of difference, she must identify the acknowledgment and recognition of sexual difference with the primary steps towards sexual and environmental justice. secondly, while stone’s claims concerning rhythms are likely absent from other feminist philosophies of nature, the general structure of stone’s account should be reflected in any theory which both characterises nature as primarily dual and critiques patriarchal culture. inasmuch as an account concerned with the oppression of women maintains that a determinate female nature or essence exists but has been misinterpreted (for instance, through the lenses of passivity and objecthood), any such theory must advance that the recognition of sexual difference is critical to the feminist project— irrespectively of whether sexuate nature is interpreted biologically or through other forms of essentialism.13 like in stone’s interpretation of irigaray, patriarchal culture 13 as stone, for instance, highlights, “irigaray’s idea that bodies constantly grow, passing through forms . . . , conflicts with the recognisably essentialist view that pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 must be charged with an inability to recognise and express sexual difference and femaleness. when this type of argument comes to be tied to considerations concerning nature more generally—for example, through the idea that sexual difference reflects an all-encompassing natural reality—it also necessarily connects the liberation of women to the liberation of nature. generally speaking, the duality view explicitly subscribes, therefore, to the following precepts: (i) the problem with patriarchy, and environmental domination, lies in the cultural dismissal of duality; (ii) recognition and expression of duality are the only available solutions to the problem of objectification and correspond, additionally, to a demand stipulated by nature. in the remainder of this section, i advance that a third, more implicit, precept is upheld by the duality view: if not a necessity, patriarchal culture must be considered by this view an ontological potentiality gestated by nature, rather than a mere possibility. this, i argue in the next section, prevents us from regarding the patriarchal objectification of nature and women as normatively objectionable. the identification of patriarchy, or of a culture that misapprehends nature and sexual difference, with a potentiality gestated by nature ensues from the double alignment of maleness to a part of nature and to the dominant culture. in order to explain why patriarchal culture privileges masculinity and ignores femininity, patriarchal culture must indeed be connected to maleness, and thus to the male natural rhythm. this implies, in turn, that natural maleness presents the potential to misinterpret femaleness and thus to gestate a misapprehending culture. in her book, luce irigaray and the philosophy of sexual difference, stone specifically appeals to irigaray’s (2000) to be two to advance that, for irigaray, “one half of this duality inevitably comes to deny duality, and to deny nature precisely insofar as it recalls duality” (stone 2006, 148; emphasis mine). this denial is thus considered an “inbuilt propensity” (stone 2006, 148) for masculinity: because of an innate tendency, male nature engenders a culture which opposes the duality of nature, thus becoming a part of nature turning against nature as a whole. textual evidence for stone’s notion of an “inbuilt propensity” can be accepted on the condition that irigaray’s whole project is taken to be realist. while to be two does not identify violence with “an inherent part of the masculine” (irigaray 2000, 71), irigaray appears to link, as stone’s argument posits, the violence of patriarchal culture to a natural male characteristic: the innate tendency to “manufacture externally” bodies have fixed, invariant forms which constitute them as belonging to a particular sex” (stone 2006, 104–5). nonetheless, as stone also recognises, this idea of growth still posits two natural characteristics as determinant of the categories of male and female sexes, at least insofar as the temporality of their becoming is concerned. in this respect, irigaray’s essentialism can be said to accommodate change and yet to remain grounded on a natural and ontological binarism. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 (irigaray 2000, 76), contrasted to a femaleness which is naturally not called to master what is external to her (irigaray 2000, 72). more precisely, irigaray centrally suggests that male violence, as the cultural regulation of nature, is ultimately connected to the fact that he will never generate in himself and must fabricate things outside of himself, . . . while she generates internally. (irigaray 2000, 76, emphasis mine) if irigaray’s comments regarding the difference between women and men are interpreted to speak of essence of nature, this quote corroborates stone’s reading: sexual difference is linked to a dissimilar relation to externality which is, in turn, made dependent on a natural property—independently of whether the inability to generate internally is connected to physiological reproduction. irigaray thus accuses men of ignoring the irreducible difference between their interiority and exteriority, and of upsetting, consequently, “the rhythm of natural growth” (irigaray 2000, 69) by imposing their own productive rhythm onto the whole of nature. in ignoring the otherness of the outside, the argument goes, men simultaneously homogenise it to the self and reassert the divide inappropriately by rendering the outside a passive canvas for the inscription of their rhythm. the original duality internal to nature is thus sublimated into a divide between subject and object. accordingly, the very formation of patriarchal culture is identified with an ontological potentiality, which is formulated, in turn, by marking the difference between male and female nature. the idea that the duality view finds in nature the causal origin of patriarchy can be challenged if the masculine tendency to “externalise” is identified with the result rather than with the cause of the process through which nature turns against itself (a position which arguably could be attributed to irigaray). under this reading, externalisation would characterise a cultural form of masculinity and disassociate itself from natural sexual poles. if not stone’s, a different version of the duality view could avoid positing that patriarchy and the defiance of nature it entails are contained within nature as potentialities. however, such a version of the duality view would struggle to reconcile the pervasiveness attributed to sexual duality and the idea that the defiance of nature has an origin which is external to this duality: if all there is prior to the arising of culture is a nature characterised by two poles, “one pole of this difference” (stone 2006, 147) must contain the seeds of the defiance of nature patriarchy accomplishes. this does not imply that patriarchy is associated, by supporters of the duality view, to an inescapable telos. as stone rightfully stresses, the violence against nature and femaleness, resulting from the male propensity to deny duality, can be pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 considered a tendency whose actualisation is not inevitable.14 this also means that the duality view can establish a continuity between nature and culture without positing that patriarchy and domination are inevitable. doubts about the suitability of this account to sustain a critique of patriarchy emerge, nonetheless, precisely in view of the association of patriarchal violence with a natural tendency. 4. the problem of normativity: between nature and culture there are some obvious advantages pertaining to the adoption of the duality view. this account can, for a start, conclusively establish a connection between the objectification of nature and of women by positing a coincidence between the two. furthermore, as shown above, this interpretation is prima facie capable of explaining the arising of an objectifying culture without framing it as absolutely necessary. keeping these merits in mind, my aim here is to point out that the naturalisation of “male” violence problematises the very normative standards on the basis of which a culture of sexual difference can be considered desirable and patriarchy objectionable. it does so in virtue of (i) framing the relation between nature and culture in such a way that it becomes unfeasible to posit that a culture of sexual difference is categorically called for by nature; and by (ii) implicitly postulating a naturally enabled transformation of nature. to demonstrate this, i will reexamine the nature-culture relation stipulated by the duality view in consideration of the necessary naturalisation of patriarchal violence. i will then suggest that my critique of the duality view has implications which reach beyond the mere problematisation of stone’s account and of irigaray’s philosophy of nature (if stone’s account is accepted as a faithful interpretation of the latter). as the above analysis of the forgetting has clarified, a philosophy of nature that rejects the reciprocal necessity of nature and culture is bound to either of the following positions: a full rejection of the belonging-together of nature and culture or a partial acceptance thereof, which postulates that it is necessary to apprehend nature’s difference, even though culture and apprehension do not necessarily ensue from nature. when connected to the endorsement of duality and thus to a realist account of nature, the two options concerning the nature-culture relation also entail two distinct accounts of the relation between nature’s duality and its recognition: a full rejection of the belonging-together must attribute to nature the capacity to respect and thus recognise sexual duality. for this reason, indeed, cultural 14 stone, importantly, disagrees with irigaray in claiming that, since nature is not fully patriarchal, as she interprets irigaray to suppose, some of its “elements have already redirected the potential destructiveness of significant numbers of men, to at least some extent” (stone 2006, 153). in stone’s view, therefore, male violence in the west is not as pervasive, or not as continuously pervasive, as irigaray might be positing. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 apprehension is not considered a necessary perfecting of nature. on the other hand, a partial acceptance of the belonging-together must deny that a perfected recognition of duality is to be found in nature; it is because duality is not properly expressed and recognised that a human culture manifesting this duality becomes necessary. in this respect, these two frameworks also differ in the extent to which they consider the recognition of alterity, which patriarchy and man fail, to characterise nature prior to culture and objectification. as we have also seen, since stone considers culture a perfecting of nature, she identifies in her account a partial belonging-together of nature and culture, and thus the idea that nature requires its cultural apprehension and expression. the naturalisation of male violence stipulated in the duality view, and analysed in the previous section, forces us however to refine our initial articulation of the partial belonging-together: as the misrecognition carried out by men emerges from something pertaining to nature (a tendency characterising one side of nature’s duality), patriarchal culture can be said to still express one part of nature while ignoring its essence (duality) and nature’s own call. the denial through which patriarchal violence arises is thus given by nature itself, meaning that nature enables its own misapprehension, through its “tendency to turn against itself, as it manifests itself through men” (stone 2006, 153). the male denial of duality becomes, in this sense, the naturally enabled starting point of culture, of male humanity dividing itself from nature, and of nature’s development into an object, the experience of which comes to be mediated by concepts obeying a masculine logic. bringing together the adoption of the partial belonging-together that the duality view necessarily entails, and the naturalisation of violence, which is similarly unavoidably stipulated by this view, leads us therefore to the following two considerations: first, the emergence of patriarchal culture should be considered part of a dynamic internal to nature; second, a culture of sexual difference is to be identified both with the rectification of this dynamic and with the fulfilment of the ethical duty to express and recognise nature’s duality. the term “dynamic” does not refer here to an idea of teleological progression, as already indicated above.15 it signals, instead, that the development of nature into patriarchal culture should be 15 as noted above, it would be wrong to conclude that this interpretation forces us to concede that nature calls specifically for the emergence of a masculine logos. there is an important difference between “enabling,” which leaves the door open to the possibility that a certain potentiality is not actualised, and “calling-for” as the necessary actualisation of potentiality. nevertheless, even in considering masculine nature an enabler of misapprehension, whose proper actualisation could then depend on historical accidents, we would still have to maintain that there is something in nature which strives towards the denial of duality. pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 understood in terms of a continuity because patriarchal culture advances the male part of nature. while it is true that, in this view, duality corresponds to the very essence of nature, the subsequential male ignoring of difference becomes nothing less than an altering of nature by nature—its own, not externally imposed, transformation. this is where what i call the problem of normativity arises. neither the naturalisation of violence—which could be opposed on some specific normative grounds—nor the suitability of stone’s specific political proposal in the wake of this naturalisation are at issue here.16 instead, an incongruity becomes detectable once we consider that a propensity towards sameness or misrecognition of duality, on the one hand, and the disposition towards the manifestation of duality, on the other, are implicitly posited by this view to equally belong to nature. specifically, the idea that patriarchy should be normatively opposed on the basis of nature’s “call,” or on the basis of internal requirements attributed to nature, is invalidated, because nature’s propensity to develop its duality cannot be considered more significant than its tendency to deny duality. mobilising the idea of immanent recognition is helpful to explicate this point. in the partial belonging-together presently considered, nature cannot be said to perfectly express and thus to fully recognise duality. this insight could entail either that recognition and misrecognition of duality correspond to two natural tendencies—attributable in turn to femaleness and maleness—or that nature, as matter devoid of thought, cannot be assigned a conceptually mediative capacity like recognition. in the former case, the fact that nature requires culture in order to perfect its duality via its recognition and expression signals that the tendency towards recognition is either as powerful as or less powerful than the tendency towards misrecognition. given that it is misrecognition that ends up prevailing with the arising of patriarchal culture, failing to oppose patriarchy would not be ethically deplorable, as we would just be licensing the prevalence and development of one of nature’s tendencies. in the latter case, the mediative capacities of recognition and misrecognition would not belong to matter in its natural, precultural state; consequently, the development of one capacity over the other cannot be opposed on the basis of nature’s original morphology. in either interpretation, the “triumph” of denial and of misrecognition cannot be considered, therefore, an imposition against nature or antinatural, because both interpretative options stipulate that the recognition of difference remains imperfect and unaccomplished prior to culture, and that misrecognition is as natural as 16 mary beth mader (2008, 135–38) wages an important critique of stone’s political proposal by problematizing the idea that a culture of sexual difference can be considered capable of expressing nature’s duality and indeed can perfect the latter. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 recognition. the naturalisation of patriarchal violence or objectification—spurring a view whereby the misrecognition of duality is not antinatural—and the simultaneous establishment of a realist view of natural sexual difference requiring apprehension/recognition warrant, therefore, a rejection of the “ethical duty”; or a dismissal of the ethical considerations grounding the endorsement of a culture emphasising duality and rejecting objectification, insofar as these considerations only hinge upon the manifestation of duality as called for by nature itself. this dismissal ensues precisely because the duality view purports that nature is characterised by a sexual duality which naturalises the male tendency to separate from nature and to ignore its duality: inasmuch as both the recognition of duality and misrecognition are understood to be naturally enabled, the duality view assigns to nature two possible dynamics. since these two dynamics stand on equal grounds, we are prevented from favouring the recognition and expression of duality on the basis of nature’s drive to develop towards duality through culture: this development cannot be considered superior to or more “natural” than the cultural denial of duality. the duality view becomes therefore unable to object to and to negatively regard the objectification of women and nature. it should be considered, accordingly, inconsistent since it nullifies its own starting position: a normative assessment which opposes objectifying approaches to nature and women. let us recall that the adoption of a framework denying any form of connection between nature and culture (the rejection of the belonging-together) cannot be attributed to stone’s duality view because of the hierarchical view of nature it purports. the association of this framework to similar accounts which consider necessary the cultural expression of sexual difference in virtue of its naturalness is similarly foreclosed (also when these accounts are not inspired by irigaray nor stone): in postulating the necessity of cultural expression, as we have seen, we are forced to reassert a partial belonging-together of nature and culture. however, even conceding, on purely speculative grounds, that an account of nature positioning duality as primary might view the cultural expression of duality only as a necessary remedy, a rejection of the belonging-together of nature and culture could not be sustained coherently. viewing cultural apprehension as a necessary remedy would allow such an account to posit that nature does not originally call for culture. nonetheless, by dividing nature into a male and a female part, the duality view would still internalise the drive towards violence into male nature in order to explain how patriarchal culture arises. in other words, a duality view rejecting the belonging-together would still advance that patriarchal culture is enabled by nature. as such, it would still lack normative reasons to reject objectification. this leads us to a final consideration: since the naturalisation of male violence is an inescapable feature of any account which both characterises nature in terms of sexual duality and begins from a critique of the patriarchal view of nature, any such pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 account, independently of its specific features, remains self-contradictory. while i have clarified that this inconsistency becomes most apparent when we consider the possibility of waging any normative rejection of patriarchy, it should be highlighted that the problems concerning the endorsement of a culture of sexual difference point to a more general issue: the very idea of an original, stable duality becomes problematic—as we shall see in more detail below—in consideration of its inability to provide coherent diagnoses of the misinterpretation of this duality and of the development of culture in relation to nature. questions concerning the suitability of specific cultural/political proposals remain, in this sense, secondary to the problems arising when we endorse the idea that a dual sexual difference amounts to nature’s essence. 5. beyond duality if irigaray’s philosophy of nature has been shown to present inconsistencies when read through the interpretative lenses of sexual duality, the significance initially attributed to her project should spur some further questions. what does it mean, beyond but also in light of the vernacular employed so far, to reject the duality view? does the problematisation of the normativity pertaining to this view provide sufficient grounds for its dismissal? if a full rejection is warranted, is an alternative, similarly attempting to oppose objectifying tendencies, possible? in this final section, i address these questions in order, while acknowledging that each problem necessarily intersects with the others. although i lack the space to adequately elaborate an alternative, i will show that the present assessment of the duality view can diffractively provide some criteria to be followed in such an endeavour. a first consideration to ponder upon when we ask, “what does it mean to reject the duality view?” concerns the scope of the critique that has been presented so far. in view of the issues emerging from the attempt to conciliate a dual philosophy of nature with political proposals grounded on the notion of sexual difference, it is critical to elucidate whether we should just reject the suggestion concerning the cultural ratification of duality or also the view of nature grounding it. i have clarified why the normative grounds whence the endorsement of a culture of sexual difference would arise are invalidated. yet, if a feminist account of nature is to be judged on the basis of its ability to reject patriarchal and objectifying views of nature, a full rejection of the duality view is warranted. the reasons for this are simple. as i have argued, the cultural manifestation of sexual difference is the only type of cultural transformation that can be tied to the duality interpretation, in view of the requirement, imposed within the latter, to grant expression to both parts of nature. the troublesome position stone assigns to patriarchal culture—which is tied to the male misinterpretation of nature— invalidates, however, the normative grounds sustaining the endorsement of a culture feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 of sexual difference. in other words, the attempt to reconcile nature’s call for the expression of duality with the naturalisation of patriarchal culture fails, rendering the account both self-contradictory and unable to sustain a rejection of objectification. as problems pertaining to the very framing of the nature-culture relation stand at the basis of this failure, and since this specific framing of the nature-culture relation amounts to a fundamental precept of the duality view, we have grounds for rejecting this view tout court. it could nonetheless be objected that if any supporter of the duality view can provide good enough reasons for considering nature to be primarily sexually differentiated, concerns about the ensuing political proposals, or about consistency in the assessment of objectification, become secondary. stone purports after all that irigaray is “attempting to describe sexual difference and nature as they really are, independently of the way we think about them” (stone 2003, 70). if she succeeds in this endeavour, charges of incongruity should be directed to nature rather than to a view seeking to describe it. however, the reasons for adopting the duality view which stone attributes to irigaray fall short of this objective. they are phenomenological and ethical: in view of the degradation of the sensible and of the material carried out by the conceptions of nature irigaray opposes,17 sensible experience becomes critical to uphold, according to stone’s reading of irigaray. as stone continues, “the reason why sensible experience should be accepted as veridical is” in turn “ethical” (stone 2003, 65), since rejecting the sensible corresponds to denying “our most elemental realities and needs” (irigaray 1993, 178; quoted in stone 2003, 65); for this reason, any framework allowing us to attest to sensibility should be given epistemic privilege. the circularity of arguing for the “reality” of a view by positing other “realities and needs” should be sufficiently evident. less so is the rationale for rejecting the duality view if its upholding relies on the idea that sexual duality is “the basic, sensible, way in which we experience nature” (stone 2003, 78)—as thinkers unfamiliar with irigaray, but concerned with demonstrating that “nature is really sexually dual,” might also purport. accepting this phenomenologico-ethical explanation would legitimise, indeed, a privileging of the sensible through an opposition to objectification, which is, in turn, grounded on the operational premise equating objectification with inaccuracy. i will not debate, here, the phenomenological reasons themselves—that is, whether we experience natural phenomena and ourselves as expressing a pole of a duality. i will only stress that a privileging of the sensible should not be granted, unquestionably, the capacity to legitimise a certain view of nature if we are also compelled to reject this view for different reasons. we have seen, specifically, that this account is unable to ground a normative rejection of objectification; if the 17 this point is brought forth, specifically, by irigaray (1996) in i love to you. pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 privileging of the sensible is tied to such rejection or reversal, there are no ethical reasons that can spur us to endorse it. an account attempting to simultaneously ascribe to nature an original and stable sexual difference and to sustain an opposition to “patriarchal” approaches to nature, conceptually and via ensuing practical proposals, remains therefore incoherent. the very notion of objectification of nature and women, whence the proposal concerning the duality of nature emerges, becomes unsustainable in its normative dimension when the idea of duality it grounds is properly thought through. insofar as objectification is aligned to masculinity and to an opposition to the feminine, the idea of a primary, natural duality forces us to regard objectification as naturally enabled. while it does not properly constitute an original teleology, this move ascribes to nature an internal dynamic of which objectification and patriarchal culture are part. such a dynamic comes to be opposed, in turn, to nature’s call for the fulfilment of its essence. the opposition to objectification on the basis of which this account was developed, and in light of which a culture of sexual difference could find legitimation, is thus invalidated, since “doing what nature wants” is no longer as clear of a prescription as it was. it could undoubtedly be objected that different normative grounds can be extrapolated in view of the evident oppression of women patriarchy carries out: if we accept that this oppression is tied to the patriarchal misapprehension of nature, we should clearly reject the latter. let us recall, however, that the duality view establishes a connection between the oppression of women and of nature by hypothesising, or using as an operational premise, its ascription of duality to nature. if this ascription becomes unsustainable because it nullifies its very starting position, we should also deny that this account can exhaustively explain the connection between women, nature, and oppression. then, in answer to the initial question, “what does it mean to reject the duality view of nature?” we can finally claim that the whole account demands abandonment or significant revision because it becomes unable to sustain its own opening move. in luce irigaray and the philosophy of sexual difference, stone (2006) attempts a revision: she joins hölderlin and schelling to irigaray to transform the idea of a stable, original sexual difference into an account of nature whereby the latter constantly self-differentiates and subsequently breaks the poles of its own differentiation. stone’s reasons to do so do not coincide with the problems i have highlighted, but lie in the desire to supplement irigaray’s framework with an explanation of the idea that “bodies are naturally internally multiple as well as sexed” (stone 2006, 193). lacking the space for further assessment, i am happy to provisionally accept that stone’s restatement could be capable of overcoming the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 problems pointed out in this paper. 18 after all, i have demonstrated, as initially intended, that ascribing an original, stable duality to nature—that is reflected in human sexual difference—is problematic, and that it is so for reasons which are more substantial than the ones identified by stone. by highlighting both the attractiveness that the duality view carries with respect to feminist projects dealing with objectification and the urgency that should be attributed to such projects, i have also shown why this exposition is indispensable. while the reader might be motivated, given the above, to become familiar with drastic restatements of the duality view and to evaluate their potential success in overcoming the issues identified in their original articulation, this assessment should also encourage us to look for alternatives. if we have no additional, foundational reasons for establishing a realist view of natural, sexual duality, the attempt to elaborate alternatives to stone’s proposal becomes more than warranted. if we are willing, moreover, to follow irigaray’s critical diagnosis, two further avenues open up. the first is exemplified by the works of authors like luciana parisi (2010) and rosi braidotti (2003), who reinterpret irigaray in order to rearticulate nature in terms of multiplicity or plurality. while braidotti’s proposal has been already problematised by stone because of its attempt to conciliate a grounding natural multiplicity to cultural duality (an attempt which is not reproduced by parisi), 19 both authors reassert the realism characterising the duality interpretation: the idea that difference (now rendered plural) constitutes the material origin of culture and thinking. this realism, as i have already noted, is problematised by van leeuwen and colebrook as a valid interpretation of irigaray’s philosophy of nature. colebrook, for instance, advances that irigaray’s considerations concerning nature and difference can remain “critical of any grounding or same” by ironically inhabiting the structure of thinking “where the feminine has been produced as ground or origin” (colebrook 2022, 132). in other words, irigaray might appear to identify difference with a material origin, but only to expose the move through which the feminine is positioned as sensible ground by traditional views of nature and theories of the subject. if lifted beyond exegeses of irigaray’s work, this critique suggests that any postulation of an essence or truth about nature, as temporally and ontologically prior the patriarchal articulation thereof, runs the risk of reducing, again, nature to an object towards which thinking is oriented and which it transcends. a second response to the problem of objectification emerges, therefore, as the possibility of opening “the closed logic of essence by repeating, mimicking or miming the way in which thought has always produced essence in terms of its own activity of grounding” (colebrook 2022, 130). it 18 for a critique of stone’s re-elaboration of the duality view, which focuses on her attempt to reconcile duality and multiplicity, see guenther (2010, 27–30). 19 see stone 2006, especially pp. 122–24. pitton – the limitations of duality: reexamining sexual difference in feminist philosophies of nature published by scholarship@western, 2023 23 is the object of further investigation to determine which of these avenues can succeed in the objectives fleshed out above. references battersby, christine. 1998. the phenomenal woman: feminist metaphysics and the patterns of identity. cambridge: polity press. braidotti, rosi. 2003. “becoming woman: or sexual difference revisited.” theory, culture & society 20, no. 3 (june): 43–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640 30203004. braidotti, rosi, ewa charkiewicz, sabine häusler, and saskia wieringa. 1994. women, the environment and sustainable development: towards a theoretical synthesis. london: zed books. colebrook, claire. 2022. philosophy and post-structuralist theory: from kant to deleuze. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. faulkner, joanne. 2001. “amnesia at the beginning of time: irigaray’s reading of heidegger in the forgetting of air.” contretemps, no. 2 (may): 124–41. fielding, helen. 2003. “questioning nature: irigaray, heidegger and the potentiality of matter.” continental philosophy review (kluwer academic publishers) 36, no. 1 (march): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1025144306606. grosz, elizabeth. 2011. becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art. durham, nc: duke university press. guenther, lisa. 2010. “other fecundities: proust and irigaray on sexual difference.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 21, no. 2 (september): 24– 45. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2010-002. heidegger, martin. 1966. discourse on thinking. translated by john m. anderson and e. hans freund. new york: harper & row. ———. 2000. introduction to metaphysics. 1st ed. translated by gregory fried and richard polt. new haven, ct: yale university press. hekman, susan. 1991. “reconstituting the subject: feminism, modernism, and postmodernism.” hypatia 6, no. 2 (june): 44–63. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15 27-2001.1991.tb01392.x. irigaray, luce. 1985a. speculum of the other woman. translated by gillian c. gill. ithaca: cornell university press. ———. 1985b. this sex which is not one. translated by catherine porter with carolyn burke. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. ———. 1993. sexes and genealogies. translated by gillian c. gill. new york: columbia university press. ———. 1996. i love to you: sketch of a possible felicity in history. translated by alison martin. london: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 24 ———. 1999. the forgetting of air in martin heidegger. translated by mary beth mader. austin: university of texas press. ———. 2000. to be two. translated by monique m. rhodes and marco f. cocitomonoc. london: athlone press. mader, mary beth. 2008. “somatic ontology: comments on alison stone’s luce irigaray and the philosophy of sexual difference.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 19, no. 3 (december): 126–38. https://doi.org/10.12 15/10407391-2008-012. murphy, ann v. 2001. “the enigma of the natural in luce irigaray.” philosophy today 45, spep supplement: 75–82. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday200145supp lement9. parisi, luciana. 2010. “event and evolution.” in “the sexes of evolution: continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and evolutionary theory,” edited by mary beth mader, special issue, southern journal of philosophy 48, no. s1 (september): 147–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00026.x. poe, danielle. 2011. “can luce irigaray's notion of sexual difference be applied to transsexual and transgender narratives?” in thinking with irigaray, edited by mary c. rawlinson, sabrina l. hom, and serene j. khader, 111–28. albany: state university of new york press. stone, alison. 2003. “the sex of nature: a reinterpretation of irigaray's metaphysics and political thought.” hypatia 18, no. 3 (august): 60–84. https://doi.org/10 .1111/j.1527-2001.2003.tb00822.x. ———. 2006. luce irigaray and the philosophy of sexual difference. cambridge: cambridge university press. van leeuwen, anne. 2013. “an examination of irigaray’s commitment to transcendental phenomenology in the forgetting of air and the way of love.” hypatia 28, no. 3 (summer): 452–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15272001.2011.01257.x . camilla pitton is a phd candidate at the university of warwick in the department of philosophy. camilla’s research is funded by the midlands4cities branch of the arts and humanities research council of the uk. her thesis elaborates an analysis and critique of sexual difference as a category implicitly operative in the western philosophical canon; her work is situated within the field of continental feminist philosophy. before the phd, she worked as a researcher for the essex autonomy project and the ethics of powerlessness project, which were both conducted within the department of philosophy at the university of essex. 15401 pitton title page 15401 pitton final format online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 6 recommended citation barnes, michael randall. 2022. “online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 6. 2022 online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation michael randall barnes australian national university michael.barnes@anu.edu.au barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation michael randall barnes abstract this paper has three main goals: (1) to clarify the role of artificial intelligence (ai)—along with algorithms more broadly—in online radicalization that results in “real world violence,” (2) to argue that technological solutions (like better ai) are inadequate proposals for this problem given both technical and social reasons, and (3) to demonstrate that platform companies’ (e.g., meta, google) statements of preference for technological solutions functions as a type of propaganda that serves to erase the work of the thousands of human content moderators and to conceal the harms they experience. i argue that the proper assessment of these important, related issues must be free of the obfuscation that the “better ai” proposal generates. for this reason, i describe the ai-centric solutions favoured by major platform companies as a type of obfuscating and dehumanizing propaganda. keywords: artificial intelligence, social media, content moderation, online extremism, radicalization, propaganda introduction this paper addresses the role that artificial intelligence (ai) plays in online radicalization, along with its potential role in combatting online extremism.1 i argue there is a plausible case to be made that ai is partly responsible for some harmful events, and that the hope that improvements in ai might correct for these harms is overstated, at best. moreover, i argue that the rhetoric around ai from some of its biggest champions serves an ideological and propagandistic function that should be uncovered and resisted. in short, the idea that “better ai” will be our salvation is a distraction from the severity of the problems for which large the technology companies (big tech) bear some responsibility. those problems deserve our direct attention, and “techno-solutionism” offers an undeserved shield to powerful actors. 1 a better term for my topic is automated decision systems, though even that is imprecise. in any case, i aim to include ai and algorithms more broadly in my scope but choose to use the language of ai partly to mimic the rhetoric of big tech. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 my focus here is on cases like the horrific mass murders at mosques in québec city in 2017 and in christchurch in 2019 (and many other examples), which demonstrate the importance of addressing the worrying trend of online hate spilling into the “real” world. we are quickly coming to understand that “self-radicalization,” as in the cases of dylann roof in charleston and alek minassian in toronto, is a growing problem that demands our attention. but we are only beginning to understand how violent hate spreads on our new communication channels. emerging research—along with confessions from the radicalized themselves—suggests that online platforms play a vital role in accelerating the rise of extremism at both the individual and the societal levels. by leading users down a path of radicalization and serving as an essential medium connecting formerly isolated extremists, disparate platforms like facebook, youtube, gab, discord, 8kun, and more are implicated in this problem. and after years of public pressure from frustrated academics, victims’ groups, and civil rights organizations, many of these platforms have switched their responses to these charges from overall dismissiveness to pledges to do better. a major concern, though, is precisely how these technology companies have chosen to address this problem. some initial reflection reveals a few complications to these issues from the platforms’ perspective. the motivation to keep users online makes platforms hesitant to remove hateful content even when it clearly violates their terms of service agreements—including content from political candidates and heads of state, whose visibility is much greater than most users. this resistance is partly explained by the desire of these private companies to appear politically neutral, as accusations of bias undermine their overall efforts for growth. but platform companies are also aware that too much vile content is itself a great threat to their business, and they work hard to keep “objectionable” content like pornography and graphic violence out of users’ feeds. this pair of pressures leads many platform companies to prefer “black-box” algorithmic solutions for moderation decisions, as these come with a veneer of objectivity. but research consistently reveals that this technology is not unbiased.2 rather than eliminating human bias, technological solutions often replicate and amplify prejudices. still, ceos like meta’s mark zuckerberg have made it clear that their main efforts to clean up their platforms will be based on algorithmic (and, increasingly, ai-based) solutions. for those who have been watching, there is a sense that this is all too little, too late. hate speech and misinformation run amok online, recommendation algorithms still lead users to hate groups, and many critics believe that big tech still does not appreciate the severity of the problem on their hands. furthermore, the idea that this is mainly a technological problem, and so one that calls for a technological solution, deserves scrutiny. consider moderation: while 2 see, for example, noble (2018), benjamin (2019), o’neil (2016), and eubanks (2018). barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 algorithmic moderation has the potential to limit audience exposure to extremist content, it is not the panacea it is occasionally presented as—usually by tech companies themselves. algorithmic moderation is generally ineffective at altering the habits of the already radicalized, is prone to false positives/negatives, and is sometimes easy to game. put simply, it just does not live up to the hype. fully understanding why this approach is ultimately ineffective, though, requires seeing the broader social and human aspects of these issues.3 a compelling entry point for understanding these issues, i believe, rests in the under-told story of the thousands of human content moderators employed by companies who profit off user-generated content. as things stand, big tech relies on these moderators—often employed via third-party mediators—to sift through countless toxic posts every day, resulting in a mix of psychological harms. most of these moderators are underpaid contactors, often (though not always) located overseas, and are not the image of a happy, spoiled employee these companies usually project. yet they are essential workers in the global information supply chain—and a full account of online hate must explore the harms they experience. and, as i will argue, the neglect they are shown in the public stances of big tech reveals an overall ideology in which technological “progress” is valued over human flourishing to a troubling degree. in short, proposals that focus on the future potential of algorithmic solutions dehumanize these workers, obfuscate the harms they face, and complicate the debate about the distribution of responsibility in actually addressing these challenges. for this reason, i describe these ai-centric solutions as a type of propaganda. i begin in section 1 by providing an overview of how the proprietary algorithms of big tech may be said to promote radicalization and extremism online. youtube and facebook will be my primary examples here, as these have received the most attention from critics. then, in section 2, i highlight one of the main the proposals put forward by these big tech firms: that better ai will be the primary tool used to overcome these problems. i then critically assess this proposed solution, arguing that it is, at best, only a partial solution that is inadequate to address current problems, and more importantly, one that obscures the discussion around these issues. in section 3, by considering the situation of content moderators, i consider how the preference for technological solutions serves an ideological function for big tech and its champions. that is, its primary purpose—whether intended as such or not—is as propaganda that distracts us from the real, avoidable, human harm companies like 3 for a revealing overview of the complexities of content moderation, see gillespie (2018). similar considerations also apply to other applications of ai outside the context of the moderation debate. see zimmermann, di rosa, and kim (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 meta platforms (who own facebook) and google (who own youtube) contribute to worldwide. 1. technology and radicalization not long before he went on to murder eleven people at pittsburgh’s tree of life synagogue, robert gregory bowers posted to the social media site gab. he wrote, “hias [the hebrew immigrant aid society] likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. i can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. screw your optics, i’m going in” (gessen 2018). this was one of a number of mass shootings that were preceded by posts on social media—sometimes manifestos, other times simply declarations of intent—or, in the more horrific cases, were live-streamed. the relationship between mass shootings (often targeting jews, muslims, and/or immigrant communities) and social media has gone mainstream. as new york times columnist charlie warzel (2019) writes, “mass shootings have become a sickening meme,” adding that “it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore how online hatred and message board screeds are bleeding into the physical world—and how social platforms can act as an accelerant for terroristic behavior.” this increased visibility has led to an increase in critical scrutiny. the notorious imageboard 8kun (formerly 8chan) struggled to stay online as mainstream culture became aware of its apparent role in radicalizing mass murderers. social networking sites gab and parler have also had difficulties maintaining operations amidst the bad press that follows mass shootings and would-be insurrections. these sites are all comparatively much smaller, and their reach less widespread, than the big platforms like facebook and youtube. but just because these bigger sites don’t explicitly cater to extremists doesn’t mean they aren’t also implicated. to be sure, extremist violence is not new, but the online roots of many recent mass shootings force us to consider to what extent contingent socio-technological developments (e.g., social media) have increased or exacerbated long-standing problems. there are at least two promising avenues with which we can justify this inchoate claim. first, we can note that, much like previous revolutionary developments in communications technologies, social media brings much larger numbers of people together than was previously possible. as such, formerly isolated individuals are now able to find others who share their beliefs and ideals. when it is violent extremists who connect with like-minded fellows, an increase in real-world violence is the (likely) result. that is, social media brings potential perpetrators together, and this connection plays a nonnegligible role in bringing about more violence. i’ll call this avenue the social route. the second, distinct but related way to justify my claim of a causal connection between online platforms and increased real-world violence is to explain how radicalization may occur when an individual is served more and more “extreme” barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 content, culminating in their adoption of an ideology that encourages violent acts. this is what is said to happen when an individual falls down a “rabbit hole” online, leading one from questions about the fairness of affirmative action, say, all the way to support for white supremacy. a key component of this story that emphasizes the platform’s role in this process is the notion that these steps towards radicalization are laid out by recommendation algorithms employed by youtube and facebook. i’ll call this avenue the individual route. i clarify and develop these two routes below. 1.1. the social route at the heart of the social route is the notion that connecting previously isolated extremists generates new potential for violent acts. that social media brings people together is uncontroversial. indeed, until recently, facebook itself stated that its core mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”4 but the more specific claim that social media connects extremists requires elaboration. unfortunately, it is evident that this is the case. there is, in fact, a long history of extremists being early adopters of networked technologies, often with the explicit goal of both increasing connection among existing members and recruiting new ones. for the first few decades of the internet, this mainly consisted in hosting their own websites and forums whose existence circulated through word of mouth. connection beyond the existing community remained relatively difficult. the rise of social media changed this. as laura smith (2021) writes: on platforms like twitter and facebook, extremists could organize and share information, often in plain sight. instead of thousands of people reading online bulletin boards, tens of millions were seeing racist pepe the frog memes, “white genocide” rhetoric and conspiracy theories about democrats running child trafficking rings. and as examples like the 2017 “unite the right” rally in charlottesville, virginia, show, violent groups will use the online tools available to them to organize. the problem is even more acute in regions of the world where internet access is disproportionately mediated through a single platform like facebook—places where the company sought growth without first sufficiently understanding existing regional conflicts and failed to 4 this has changed a bit over the years, but the general idea has remained constant. see https://www.facebook.com/facebook/about/ for the current version, and see https://web.archive.org/web/20201206131854/https://www.facebook.com/pg/fac ebook/about/ for an archived version from december 6, 2020 that contains the old motto. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 invest in moderators who understood the local languages. the experience of facebook in myanmar is a particularly grim case.5 that problems like these would emerge on social media is, in a sense, inevitable. as tarleton gillespie (2020, 1) puts it, “as social media platforms have grown, so has the problem of moderating them.” when the userbase is small, problems can often be addressed as they emerge. but that is no longer the case: the userbase is much larger and the problems are much more difficult to address. and seeing why these problems are more complicated clarifies why extending blame to social media companies themselves is apt. beyond the sheer difficulty posed by the tremendous increase in scale, one source of our current problems is that users are now “linked less by the bonds of community and more by recommendation algorithms and social graphs” (gillespie 2020, 1). in other words, platforms are pushing people together who might otherwise remain disconnected. in this way—and others to be elaborated below—platforms like facebook are contributing a positive act—namely, they are offering their users invitations to connect. this shifts their role from (an arguably) neutral platform to one where they actively shape and contribute to the further acts their users perform. here we can move from the abstract claim that, say, facebook is responsible for a rise in extremist violence to the more concrete claim that facebook’s algorithms—many of which deploy innovative techniques of machine learning (ml) and/or ai—are responsible. while the data to support this claim is not all publicly available, largely held as it is by notoriously untransparent companies, some brief examples demonstrate the basics of the accusation. facebook has long made “friend” suggestions to “connect” users to one another, and the company has often done this by mining data in arguably nefarious ways. they do so under the guise of “building community.” the more recent push within the platform to promote facebook groups to the centre of the user experience has increased the role of their recommendation algorithms, from connecting users who shared friends or workplaces, to connecting users according to interests. the themes of these groups, however, include interests as disparate as knitting, anime, and the violent overthrow of democratic governments, as well as various conspiracy theories. for example, the growth of the qanon conspiracy theory across social media was, for those who witnessed its early moves, a strange sight to behold. in a relatively short time, qanon went from a fairly small phenomenon localized to obscure parts of the internet to mainstream news, and it was at the forefront of the violent riot that 5 see stecklow (2018). and here it is useful to remember that another one of facebook’s mottos was “move fast and break things.” see statt (2014) for an account of the motto’s place at facebook and why it was repealed. barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 broke into the us capitol. this growth would not have been possible without social media, and more specifically without the ai-driven recommendation engines that pushed qanon across the internet. as renée diresta (2020) describes it: algorithmic recommendation engines accelerated [qanon groups’] growth and cross-pollinated their beliefs. over time, these engines nudged anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers to join qanon groups and pushed qanon videos to far-right political communities. the growth of qanon groups persisted alongside assertions by facebook that groups that violated its community standards policies would be banned. similarly, antigovernment militia groups continued to be recommended to facebook users even after facebook claimed they were cracking down on these groups and would stop recommending them. this happened because algorithms trained to optimize engagement led (and continue to lead) users to these groups, and these recommendations are automated, like so much else users see on the platform.6 what this demonstrates is that the combination of technology—ai-driven recommendation engines trained to increase engagement above all else—and company policy—lack of robust enforcement of existing community standards— plausibly played a role in swelling the ranks of violent conspiracy groups and militias. while definitive proof is not available, it does seem as though the january 6, 2021, “save america” rally was planned in large part on facebook, in closed groups. what would have happened had facebook not trained its ai in a way that led users towards conspiracy and militia groups is, of course, impossible to know. but facebook’s actions after the fact—deflecting blame to other, much smaller platforms; pausing recommendations on political groups; removing qanon groups with more determination—suggest that they believe these actions are still worth taking now. at the same time, it’s worth remembering that while ai seems to play a role in exacerbating extremism at the social level, it is in no way solely responsible. this is true even when our eyes are trained on social media platforms. both whatsapp and telegram have been implicated in extremist organizing and mob violence, but neither relies on ai or recommendation algorithms to push users together. users, all on their own, are capable of finding one another and entrenching themselves in violent rhetoric. with that in mind, i’ll now turn to the second route whereby technology may be claimed to increase radicalization. 6 only recently have social media companies begun to actually crackdown on qanon content. early reports suggest their efforts have been successful, though only time will tell if it is a mere band aid; see dwoskin and timberg (2021) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 1.2. the individual route i argued above that platforms plausibly increase extremism by connecting previously isolated radical individuals. but an additional problem is that the platforms serve an important function in radicalizing previously nonradicalized individuals. at first blush, this may seem to only be a problem for the especially toxic sites. while curiosity might first push a user towards a site like 8kun, the dynamics of that environment—where escalations in toxicity are explicitly encouraged and users are inundated with nonstop offensive content—could play a radicalizing role that has no counterpart on the relatively tamer mainstream platforms. however, platforms like facebook and youtube do indeed seem to be implicated in the problem of radicalizing individuals. as such, this is not merely a problem of the “fringe” internet, but something much more central to our current social-media-saturated landscape. moreover, with these mainstream platforms, technologies like ai are also implicated in this problem. the case is perhaps strongest for youtube, whose recommendation algorithm has received significant criticism for pushing users towards more “extreme” content.7 journalists and academics have documented how youtube’s default setting of autoplaying “related” videos once a selected video ends can lead viewers to conspiracy theories and generally more ideologically radical content than what is specifically selected. that the recommendation engine might push users in a certain direction matters because, as youtube stated in 2018, more than 70 percent of the time users spend watching videos on the platform is driven by its recommendations (solsman 2018). given the incredible scale of youtube, which reaches billions of users worldwide, the possibility that this engine is autoplaying potentially radicalizing content is concerning. and available evidence appears to back this up.8 the general thrust of the problem is that in optimizing for more viewership hours—because the longer viewers are on the platform, the more advertisements can be served—youtube’s recommendation system can take someone from innocent search terms about music or dating to videos showcasing “pickup artists,” and from there to videos promoting (toxic) masculinity and white nationalism, as well as a litany of conspiracy theories. this can occur, moreover, with very little action on the part of the viewer aside from simply sitting back and consuming content. the main driver on this pathway, in other words, is the ai-driven recommendation algorithms youtube employs. alfano et al. (2021) call this process “technological seduction,” and with regards to youtube, it occurs via “technologically-mediated cognitive pressures and 7 see, for example, lewis (2018, 2020), zadrozny (2021), and mccrosky and geurkink (2021). 8 see, for example, alfano et al. (2021). barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 nudges that subtly but systematically induce acceptance of problematic beliefs” (alfano et al. 2021, 837).9 for youtube, the nudges are fairly blunt, as they don’t simply suggest a follow-up video but indeed play that video absent any action on the viewer’s part. it is, in other words, the default course on the platform. assuming this leads to “more extreme” content, these nudges have the effect of leading users down a rabbit hole of conspiracy content that may shape their beliefs and actions outside of the platform.10 this is therefore another way social media companies contribute to this, admittedly complex, problem. something similar occurs with facebook’s newsfeed, where the algorithm dictates what content appears on user’s screens. here, though, the content is often in the form of posts written by other users—though the presence of paid/promoted material complicates things. other user actions like shares, likes, and other reactions play some role here too, but these are best seen as simply another factor among many that act as input to the algorithms that ultimately decide what users see. these algorithms act as amplifiers of certain pieces of content and demoters of others. in some cases, these algorithms reward inflammatory, “borderline” content because they receive more user engagement. in other words, facebook’s algorithms amplify content that nearly-but-not-quite violates its own community standards and puts this content into more users’ feeds (hao 2021a). the specifics of algorithmic amplification are complicated by both the complexity of the algorithms involved, as well as their opacity. and yet, as michaelson, pepp, and sterken (2021) observe, “amplification has taken on a structural significance in online speech that is totally unprecedented in earlier, offline speech.” they distinguish amplification from “appropriation” and note that “in cases of amplification, in contrast to cases of appropriation, the amplifier takes reasonable steps to see to it that the original speaker retains credit for their contribution to the conversation” (ibid.). that is, “unlike offline means of amplification,” michaelson, pepp, and sterken write, “online amplification via retweeting on twitter or sharing on facebook is designed to automatically credit the content to its original creator, as a share or retweet preserves something like a copy of the original post along with its metadata” (ibid.; emphasis added). however, while this effort to retain credit may be laudable for individual users, it has a very different impact when we consider how the 9 alfano, carter, and cheong (2018) distinguish between “top-down” and “bottomup” technological seduction. the case which concerns us here is one of bottom-up, “which occurs as the result of technological systems creating suggestions based on aggregated user data” (alfano et al. 2021, 838). 10 at the same time, it’s important that we do not scapegoat the youtube algorithm as the sole mechanism through which youtube encourages radicalization; see lewis (2018). and for the polarizing potential of social media itself, see lynch (2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 most important amplifiers on social media (i.e., the platform’s algorithms) use this feature to hide their own actions. this design feature not only credits the original creator but has the effect of emphasizing the original post while downplaying the novel act of reproducing it for more to see. that is, in algorithmic amplification, a user’s words are taken from their original context and inserted in many new ones, increasing their reach, while at the same time this reproduction—including the fact that it is, as a type of repetition, its own (speech) act—is played down. but this act of amplification, and the decisions that prioritize certain types of content over others, again renders platforms like facebook and their algorithms culpable. of course, the effects here shouldn’t be overstated. it’s rare that someone will simply accept the outlandish tenets of the qanon conspiracy simply because they were led to a few videos online or read a few inflammatory posts. but the effect is not negligible either. both facebook and youtube have over two billion monthly active users, and a mere tenth of a percent of that figure is two million people. so, the potential to radicalize even a tiny fraction of their user base is still a problem that platform companies—and broader society—must take seriously. for users who are isolated—either because of the covid-19 pandemic or unrelated causes—and perhaps vulnerable in other socially relevant ways, encountering this type of content can be a source of reassurance and an antidote to broader feelings of powerlessness. platforms arguably hold a special duty of care towards these users, for whom this content poses particular dangers as a result of social isolation, mental health concerns, or other relevant factors. the need for platform companies to take this problem seriously is further underscored by the fact that the ultimate harms of extremist violence typically fall on the already-marginalized, whose well-being and safety concerns plausibly deserve priority. therefore, even if the paths i’ve presented are a miniscule part of the average experience of most social media users, the problems they present are still urgent when considered in absolute terms. the decisions platform companies make and the actions they take deserve scrutiny, as they open these paths up to users and are culpable—if only partly—for the harms they lead to. 1.3. convergence in addition to offering a (in some senses) comforting worldview, extremist content also often offers a community, and this is where the social and individual routes converge. rarely do violent extremists self-radicalize entirely in isolation, absent any dialogical contact with others. a further factor in these narratives lies in places like the comment sections of platforms like youtube, where users can engage with one another. it’s also common for the creators of these videos to cross-reference and host one another, encourage viewers to follow them across social media, and add barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 to the discussion in comments. these activities all play a role in fostering a sense of community across the internet. and while total self-radicalization is rare, it does seem to occur, as cases like dylann roof’s and alexandre bissonnette’s appear to demonstrate. but even in these cases, it’s incorrect to claim these individuals weren’t part of any communities. that is, we should note that the type of community at issue is not necessarily one whose members engage in frequent dialogical exchange. simply being an adherent to the qanon conspiracy can place one in that community even without tight social bonds. indeed, this sort of silent community is a regular fixture in extremist groups, and the long history of white nationalist groups offers a compelling case to learn from. because of a mixture of actual and perceived persecution, white nationalists have (or had) tended to keep most communications in private spaces, fearful of government or antiracist surveillance. while this decreases the capacity for the type of constant encouragement towards violence common on 8kun, it has a sinister correlate: advocacy for “leaderless resistance.” within extremist movements where leaderless resistance is encouraged, a recurring refrain is the notion that members of the movement cannot and should not wait for direct orders. rather, they should take it upon themselves to plan and execute violent attacks where they are able. in this way, the social and individual routes converge once again. once an individual sees themselves as part of a community that advocates for leaderless resistance, they may no longer require the actual encouragement of the community to feel its pull. when shooter robert gregory bowers wrote, “screw your optics, i'm going in,” he was referring to the intercommunity debate within white nationalist groups about the best strategy to enact their utopia. his urge to act was both a response to the community he was a part of and something more individualistic. again, in none of these cases is technology solely responsible. there is no example of ai coercing an individual to watch (and believe) certain conspiracy videos, nor do we see recommendation algorithms forcing facebook users to join militia groups. but there is encouragement, and occasionally seduction, often in the form of invitations, recommendations, and amplifications. these encouragements, in combination with other relevant factors, plausibly play some role in increasing extremism within our progressively more connected society. the fact that the big tech companies themselves have taken pains to address these issues offers compelling evidence that there is something here. in the following sections i turn to the strategies big tech has developed in response to these big challenges in order to argue that one strategy—namely, its focus on improving its ai—is an inadequate response, and the attention it receives can be considered a form of propaganda that renders discussion on this topic more difficult and hinders the proper allocation of responsibility. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 2. the “better ai” approach of big tech the previous section served to add some detail to the claim that platform companies and the technologies they employ—especially ai and other algorithms— contribute to a rise in violent extremism. in this section i will address how the companies themselves have responded to these issues, focusing on their claim that the solution lies in ai itself. after doing so, i will begin to criticize this approach, focusing first on more technical limitations before moving on to its human costs in section 3. the most explicit champion of ai’s (future) capabilities is possibly mark zuckerberg. in his april 2018 congressional testimony, the meta platforms (then known as facebook) ceo invoked the potential of ai to someday solve the problems for which he was then being frequently criticized.11 and to be sure, meta/facebook is investing in the development of this technology and has seen some success. after receiving international criticism for the platform’s role in ethnic violence in myanmar, facebook “improved its myanmar-language hate-speech classifiers, leading to a 39% increase in takedowns from automated flags in only six months” (gorwa, binns, and katzenbach 2020, 2). and, after the 2019 christchurch terrorist streamed his shooting rampage on facebook live, the company worked to aggressively remove the many reuploads that occurred in the aftermath. according to facebook, “in the first 24 hours, versions of the video had been uploaded at least 1.5 million times, and some 80% of those videos, around 1.2 million, were blocked automatically before they could be uploaded” (gorwa, binns, and katzenbach 2020, 1–2). the massive size of facebook and other platforms is a major reason these companies are turning to automated systems to address unwanted content. the selfmoderated spaces of the early internet have largely been left behind, and platforms have instead turned to “commercial content moderation” (roberts 2019), with dedicated teams and systems operating behind the scenes and at scale. and as impressive as the massive removal of the christchurch videos was, it also helps to demonstrate some of the limitations of the “improved ai” approach. in the hour or so before facebook could remove the original stream, the christchurch video had already been downloaded. it would later be reposted, often with slight alterations that made it difficult for automated systems to detect. while simple copies were removed en masse, usually before they could ever reach users, many altered copies slipped through. in this lies a basic lesson about algorithmic moderation: it can achieve massive results when applied to known problems, but 11 as the new york times reported it: “before congress last year, mr. zuckerberg testified that facebook was developing machine-based systems to ‘identify certain classes of bad activity’ and declared that ‘over a fiveto 10-year period, we will have a.i. tools’ that can detect and remove hate speech” (metz and isaac 2019). barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 deviations and innovations in content pose difficult challenges. this is particularly true when we distinguish between two common types of algorithmic moderation systems that have different capabilities. gorwa, binns, and katzenbach (2020, 3) explain this well. at a general level, they write, algorithmic content moderation “involves a range of techniques . . . [that] aim to identify, match, predict, or classify some piece of content (e.g., text, audio, image or video) on the basis of its exact properties or general features.” however, they add: one major distinction can be made between systems that aim to match content (“is this file depicting the same image as that file?”), and those that aim to classify or predict content as belonging to one of several categories (“is this file spam? is this text hate speech?”). (gorwa, binns, and katzenbach 2020, 3; emphasis added) matching systems, they write, typically involve “hashing,” i.e., the process of transforming a known example of a piece of content into a “hash”—a string of data meant to uniquely identify the underlying content. hashes are useful because they are easy to compute, and typically smaller in size than the underlying content, so it is easy to compare any given hash against a large table of existing hashes to see if it matches any of them. (4) it is this type of system that was responsible for removing most copies of the christchurch video.12 facebook is a member of the global internet forum to counter terrorism (gifct), a group created by facebook, google, twitter, and microsoft and committed to industry collaboration in efforts to combat illegal online hate speech. by sharing best practices, these four platform companies develop automated systems and share a “hash database” of terrorist content, isolating their digital fingerprints. in a matter of days, facebook had uploaded “800 visually-distinct videos related to the attack” (sonderby 2019). 12 to be precise, gorwa, binns, and katzenbach (2020, 4) point out that a related but novel technique, “perceptual hashing,” is the “most suitable and robust for content moderation” as it enables matching for content that has had some irrelevant (to the human eye) content altered, and it is likely this type of system facebook and the gifct employed in removing videos of the christchurch terrorist attack—though the specific details are not public. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 the other broad category of algorithmic moderation is classification systems. in this case, a system “assesses newly uploaded content that has no corresponding previous version in a database; rather, the aim is to put new content into one of a number of categories” (gorwa, binns, and katzenbach 2020, 5). the categories that interest us here are items like “hate speech,” “offense,” “harassment,” “terrorism,” and so on, but these systems can also be used to detect features like “nudity,” “sexual content,” and much else. the classification tools used in content moderation often involve machine learning—that is, “the automatic induction of statistical patterns from data” (5)—whose capabilities have greatly increased in recent years, alongside developments in natural language processing (nlp) and computer vision. both systems, however, are imperfect. matching is useful for identifying a new piece of content against an existing database to see if it’s a copy. this is essential in situations where many users are uploading a known piece of unwanted content, as in the christchurch case, and platforms have used it to clamp down on terrorist content and child sexual abuse material (csam) at scale. but as gillespie (2020, 3) puts it, “this is automation, but it is hardly ai.” he adds that a consequence of this is that “recent claims by platforms of successful automated moderation are overstated” (3). by this he means to deflate some of the enthusiasm implicit in facebook’s boasts about hatespeech content being flagged by facebook’s systems before users reported it. as he explains: at least for now, the overwhelming majority of what is being automatically identified are copies of content that have already been reviewed by a human moderator. stats like these are deliberately misleading, implying that machine learning (ml) techniques are accurately spotting new instances of abhorrent content, not just variants of old ones. (gillespie 2020, 3) and this obfuscation matters because classification systems are also limited. as these systems require massive data sets to train on, there is an inevitable lag in their ability to autonomously label new content. but hate speech is a constantly evolving category. new groups become targets, and new terms and phrases are used to dehumanize. as hao (2021a) reports, “an algorithm that has learned to recognize holocaust denial can’t immediately spot, say, rohingya genocide denial. it must be trained on thousands, often even millions, of examples of a new type of content before learning to filter it out.” in general, ai is built on what already exists, but innovations in wording, phrasing, targets, tactics, and much else are always on the horizon, limiting its capabilities. ai can often be outwitted with a little experimentation and determination. and something that is effectively illegible to the ai may still be obvious, and harmful, to a human. barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 on the other hand, tools that over-block—that is, mistakenly remove inoffensive content—can be equally troublesome. classification algorithms can have difficulty accounting for crucial factors such as context, sarcasm, and the fact that reporting an instance of hate speech is not itself an act of hate speech (in most cases). journalists and regular users may want to share reports of hateful utterances or even terrorist propaganda but may find themselves at the mercy of a platform’s automated moderation tools. moreover, words that are used within a community often have different meanings when hurled at members of that community, but these are contextual features that are difficult for automated systems to handle satisfactorily. indeed, some systems have been shown to have racial dialect bias, where they “systematically classify content aligned with the african american english (aae) dialect as harmful at a higher rate than content aligned with white english (we)” (ballburack et al. 2021). this problem is amplified when we consider the global scale and constant quest for growth of facebook and other platforms, and how they tend to treat the cultural meanings of local language users as afterthoughts, at best. all this points to another frustrating aspect of algorithmic moderation: the affective impact it has on individual users. as gillespie (2020, 3) puts it, the “gap between data-scale approaches and the individual experiences of them is slowly undermining the legitimacy of content moderation itself,” and this reveals “a fundamental contradiction in using data-centric techniques for content moderation.” by this, he means that moderation may be felt as an injustice—that the platform failed to understand the legitimacy of my post, failed to protect my right to speak. it may be a sense of absurdity, as when automated systems are wildly off the mark. it may be a feeling of suspicion, that these inscrutable methods only hide naked corporate self-interest. it may be a feeling of insignificance, when stilted, bureaucratic warnings offer a stark reminder that these megamachines have little concern for their users as individuals. (gillespie 2020, 3) gorwa, binns, and katzenbach (2020, 3) echo this point when they note how largescale algorithmic content moderation threatens to “decrease decisional transparency (making a famously non-transparent set of practices even more difficult to understand or audit),” among other worries.13 in sum, there are technical, social, and user-experience reasons to be suspicious about the “better ai” approach of big tech. both matching and classification systems have serious limitations and are ill-equipped to deal with the 13 see york (2021) for further issues on the user side of content moderation. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 ever-evolving terrain of hate speech on their own. this all leads to a situation where regular users are unhappy, dedicated hate speakers can evade the algorithms, and attempts at counterspeech and documentation are thwarted. the hopes for and boasts about ai from zuckerberg and others may be honest, as there is no shortage of optimists about ai’s impending amazing capabilities. but their comments are also likely intended to appease lawmakers and investors, who have legitimate concerns that platforms are becoming too toxic. furthermore, that big tech would go to the well of ai to address the issues brought on by ai is, despite appearances, not surprising. it is, as geiger (2016, 791) puts it, representative of the “mindset prevalent in silicon valley, which sees these problems as technological ones requiring technological solutions.” still, the potential of ai is not a suitable response to the current problems of the platforms. this techno-solutionism takes a very narrow view of what it sees as the source of the problem and where intervention ought to occur. this brings me to the most significant limitation of current ai systems— namely, that they rely on undervalued, invisible human labour. as tubaro, casilli, and coville (2020, 7) note, “only a small part of content moderation can be automated: any new types of data first require micro-workers to train future automated solutions.” in addition to training, which involves labelling massive data sets and much else, the accuracy of these systems must be continually verified, and when accuracy cannot be achieved by the algorithms themselves, human workers often imitate the systems for the benefit of the unknowing user. there is, in other words, an entire world of labour that supports ai, and yet this aspect is rarely foregrounded by big tech. with that in mind, i now turn to the underexplored human side of this equation, which i will argue is obscured by the ai-focused rhetoric of big tech. i argue that we should not simply see these comments as optimism about ai’s capabilities, but when we put them alongside the phenomena this paper addresses—that is, extremism via algorithm, limits on algorithmic moderation, and the human cost of moderation—we can consider them a type of dehumanizing propaganda, as they erase the harms faced by thousands of current workers and lead the debate in an unhelpful direction. 3. invisible labour and human costs while tech ceos are more than willing to talk up their latest developments in harnessing ai and to grant media requests for interviews with the heads of their ai research teams, that openness is nowhere to be found with the topic of human content moderators.14 behind the scenes an army of employees play an indispensable 14 in this section i draw heavily from roberts (2019), as well as journalism and research including newton (2019, 2020a, 2020b), jones (2021a, 2021b), solon (2018), and barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 role in sifting through the millions of posts made on social media each day.15 it is their work that makes social networking platforms usable by keeping unwanted material from clogging our feeds. this usability, in turn, allows a company like meta to become one of the most profitable companies in the world. but despite its importance, content moderation is work that often occurs in secret and typically for relatively low wages. until quite recently, it was rare for platforms to acknowledge they employed moderators at all. but pressure from journalists, leaks, scandals, and court cases made it impossible for them to deny this work anymore. now moderators’ work is sometimes even mentioned as being mission-critical and essential—words which took on new meaning during the pandemic. still, most of these employees are subject to strict nondisclosure agreements (ndas), and it is mainly because some workers have violated those ndas that we have the information we do about their working conditions. sarah roberts (2019) documents these working conditions through interviews, and one aspect worth highlighting is how these employees work alongside the automated moderation systems discussed above. roberts (2019, 160) writes: despite word filters that automatically removed specific offensive words on the platforms and sites she moderated, users constantly found ways around the system, using inventive methods to post banned words, or using creative permutations of racial epithets that melinda [a pseudonym] had to even periodically look up to recognize.” throughout, roberts stresses “the need for commercial content moderation to be a human process, or to at least have significant human oversight” (160). that is, even automated systems with relatively simple goals require human supervision, and that supervision is often a morally charged role. perhaps more disturbing, though, is the fact that exposure to csam, videos and images of violence, hate speech of extreme viciousness, and much more is all in a day’s work for these moderators. in his “trauma floor” series, journalist casey newton (2019) describes one new employee who is tasked with moderating a facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. “when it’s her turn,” he writes, perrigo (2022), among others. see also documentaries from block and riesewieck (2018) and cassidy and chen (2017). 15 according to cassidy and chen (2017), there are more individuals hired as moderators via third-party contractors than all the official employees of google or facebook. estimates of how many moderators facebook employs range from fifteen thousand to forty thousand. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. none of the trainees have seen it before, chloe [a [pseudonym] included. she presses play. the video depicts a man being murdered. someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life. this, obviously, is not easy work. but while it is clearly psychologically challenging and mission-critical, it is also often undervalued and disrespected. content moderators, if they are employed directly by the platform company itself, tend to make a fraction of what most other employees on the engineering or business side of things make, with much less job security. more often, though, they are hired via contractors, which the major platforms use to shield themselves from a variety of liability issues. this occurs even when they work on-site with the “regular” employees, who have access to perks and benefits moderators do not. but many moderators work at facilities outside the us—this follows partly from the need for moderators with knowledge of local languages.16 no matter their geographic location, though, i want to highlight how these moderators are often harmed by their exposure to an avalanche of toxic content. to me, this is uncontroversial. reflecting on the type of content they view each day shows that their work opens them up to psychological harms, with long-lasting consequences in some cases. indeed, one reason we’re aware of their working conditions is because of some successful lawsuits filed by former moderators that accused their employers of failing to protect them from harms like posttraumatic stress disorder.17 it is nasty, psychologically dangerous work.18 just as significant as the fact that these harms exist is the fact that big tech tries to conceal them. as noted in the previous section, big tech firms’ preferred strategy is to instead foreground their efforts to solve the problems of content moderation from a technological lens—specifically, automation through ai. the claim 16 see perrigo (2022) for reporting on what they call “facebook’s african sweatshop.” while the “sweatshop” moniker may seem off base, other researchers agree. for example, alfano, sullivan, and fard (2022) write, “it would not be unreasonable to compare the crowd-sourced work done as part of the enrichment of nlp datasets to sweatshop labor.” 17 see, for example, newton (2020a) and garcia (2018). 18 and is acknowledge as such by the platform companies. as perrigo (2022) notes, “many facebook content moderators employed by the outsourcing firm accenture are now asked to sign a waiver before they begin their jobs, acknowledging that they may develop ptsd and other mental health disorders.” barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 i now want to make is that this serves a propagandistic function that, given the severity of the problems at issue, should be uncovered. 3.1. the propaganda of automation while many people express hopes or fears that robots will soon eliminate nearly every job, the actual relationship between technology and human work is summed up in a report published by the research institute data & society. “automated and ai technologies,” the authors write, “tend to mask the human labor that allows them to be fully integrated into a social context while profoundly changing the conditions and quality of labor that is at stake” (mateescu and elish 2019, 4). because these technologies mask rather than replace labour, critics have used the derisive names “ghost work” (gray and suri 2019), “potemkin ai” (sadowski 2018), and “fauxtomation” (taylor 2018) to describe the current situation of many ai and automated systems in the workplace and the human labor they help conceal. for example, astra taylor (2018) argues that this fauxtomation “reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.” all the apps, apis (application programming interfaces), and even “self-driving drones” that rely on invisible human labour increase the impression that services can simply be rendered, decisions can efficiently be made, and work can just be done, without anyone actually working—despite the fact that this perception is based on an illusion. this, taylor argues, exists in a long history of capital devaluing labour by implying it isn’t needed. “capitalism lives and grows,” she writes, invoking the socialist feminist tradition, “by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it’s not, in fact, work at all” (taylor 2018). we see this dynamic at play in big tech’s discussion around content moderation—even when we acknowledge that moderation does in fact involve sophisticated ai. moderators are hidden by outsourcing, third-party contracting, and ndas. and while platforms rely on the services these moderators provide to make their sites “safe for work,” they pay as little as they can get away with.19 this follows a general pattern within big tech, where entire industries rely on services like amazon’s “mechanical turk” (mturk), which the company playfully calls “artificial artificial intelligence.” more critically, researchers mary gray and sidd suri (2019) label this “ghost work.” under these working conditions, workers vie for the chance to complete discreet “micro-jobs,” where pay is more often calculated in cents than dollars.20 a platform like mturk plays two roles at once. it provides companies with 19 see perrigo (2022) for reporting on the pay african moderators receive, along with alleged suppression of the right to unionize by the contractor meta employs. 20 see jones (2021b) for another exploration of the global micro-workforce. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 access to a massive pool of cheap labour and does so in a way that keeps these workers at a distance, concealed behind the machine. “the platform and its interfaces,” sadowski (2018) writes, “allow employers to command people as though they were simply operating a mindless machine.” a recent report discussed how tech firms often actively seek out displaced populations in refugee camps to perform labelling tasks for pennies (jones 2021a). to be clear, content moderation is usually done in-house or by contractors—not using mturk—but the ai systems used to support this work, and that are touted as able to replace this work, are implicated in the larger world of click-work. according to taylor (2018), because we often don’t know and don’t care to know how “automated” services work, “we often believe the hype, giving automation more credit than it’s actually due. in the process, we fail to see—and to value—the labor of our fellow human beings.” social media companies like facebook are happy to endorse this naivety, as well. the notion that ai can satisfactorily address the many problems that currently plague platforms is, in my view, both incredulously optimistic and, i will now add, obfuscating. at best, it tells only a partial story, and one that serves the interest of the technology companies. as gillespie (2020, 1) says, the claim that moderation at scale requires ai is a discursive justification for putting certain specific articulations into place—like hiring more human moderators, so as to produce training data, so as to later replace those moderators with ai. in the same breath, other approaches are dispensed with, as are any deeper interrogations of the capitalist, “growth at all costs” imperative that fuels these massive platforms in the first place. it is in this way that we should understand big tech’s public statements about ai as a form of propaganda that serves to redirect concerns from the harms their platforms are implicated in to “solutions” that are not now up to the task and may never be. moreover, these claims do double duty, as they not only downplay the culpable actions the platforms take—positioning ai as the solution to, rather than source of, the problem—but also erase the work of existing moderators, as well as the harms they experience. in this way, these claims function as a type of dehumanizing propaganda, in that they shift attention from the work (and harms) of human beings to that of automated systems. one helpful model of propaganda that illuminates this function is jason stanley’s conception of “undermining propaganda,” which he defines as “a contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet is of a kind that tends to erode those very ideals” (stanley 2015, 53). in other words, stanley is interested in cases where specific contributions superficially appear to be reasonable for a certain discourse, but in fact barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 undermine that discourse by cutting off, obfuscating, or silencing further debate. in this case, ai is invoked as a solution to pressing moral challenges, but this aisolutionism in fact undermines our approach to these challenges as it turns a moral question into a technological one. this is the function of this rhetoric, and following stanley’s conception, this is irrespective of the intentions with which these suggestions are offered. mark zuckerberg may honestly believe in the power of ai, but that does not determine the impact his assertions have on this topic. in addition to concealing the difficult, often harmful work that moderators do, the emphasis on ai plays another role worth considering. by presenting the decisions as those of a computer system—one powered by ai, no less—algorithmic moderation offers these platforms a shield of neutrality, even objectivity. beyond being a “black box” that cannot be probed, the turn to ai allows platforms to present these systems as endowed “with powers of objectivity, neutrality, authority, efficiency, and other desirable attributes and outcomes” (sadowski 2018). this is incredibly valuable to platform companies who aspire to constant growth. and rather than deny the existence of “algorithmic bias,” in which users with certain identifiable characteristics are unfairly treated differently by the automated systems than others, big tech has instead shown their willingness to adopt an almost single-minded focus on addressing this one particular algorithmic harm (hao 2021b). this is, in my view, mostly because addressing this problem does not itself challenge the notion that we are concerned with technological problems calling for technological solutions. moreover, the solutions to these issues often require big tech to collect more rather than less data and to exert more rather than less power. both tendencies deserve scrutiny. technology is not itself neutral nor objective, and big tech companies should not dictate the scope of the problems of algorithmic justice themselves. and of course, the harms experienced by the moderators employed by platform companies are excluded from this narrow framework of “algorithmic harm.” while this harm is not one that is vindictively intended by anyone, it is nonetheless a predictable result. it is part of the background conditions that shape social media, and it is structured by the business decisions of giant, for-profit entities. those decisions play some role in emphasizing automated moderation while downplaying moderators. under capitalism, “automation has an ideological function as well as a technological dimension” (taylor 2018). the psychological harms experienced by content moderators are not compatible with this ideology, however, and so are erased. it is no surprise that platform companies will use the tools of ndas, limited third-party liability, and the rhetorical shine of ai to conceal their relationship to harms that befall others. but justice in this domain demands they take responsibility. i argued that we can reasonably describe this rhetoric as propaganda because it functions both to dehumanize existing workers and also to obfuscate and undermine feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 the debate over responsibility that is urgently needed. i will now address, in my conclusion, how this debate ought to be pursed. conclusion in this paper i offered a partial defense of the claim that ai, especially as deployed by large platforms like facebook and youtube, plays some role in increasing violent extremism. i also examined the response these charges have generated from the platform companies, specifically the notion that ai itself might solve these issues. the fact that ai appears as both the problem and the solution may appear odd, but as gillespie (2020, 2) puts it, “this link between platforms, moderation, and ai is quickly becoming self-fulfilling: platforms have reached a scale where only ai solutions seem viable; ai solutions allow platforms to grow further.” as such, the platform companies have a strong interest in vindicating their (future) use of ai even while admitting to its (current) harmful effects. my contribution here has been to demonstrate that in addition to the technical challenges that would need to be overcome for ai to fulfil these dreams, there are also other pressures at play— notably, the propagandistic rhetoric of big tech that makes addressing these issues more challenging than they already are. that is, big tech has a related interest in marginalizing and erasing much of the human labour that supports their ai, especially regarding content moderation, as it does not fit their narrative of continuous technological progress. one important aspect of this debate that i have not addressed in this paper, but that requires elaboration in future work, is the fact that algorithmic moderation may serve as a solution to imposing these harms on content moderators. that is, “the strongest argument for the automation of content moderation may be that, given the human costs, there is simply no other ethical way to do it, even if it is done poorly” (gillespie 2020, 4). this may be true, and whether it is feasible is largely an empirical question. however, it is a question that is itself obscured by big tech’s rhetoric on this topic. furthermore, given that total automation is likely impossible, we still must grapple with the hard question of whose interests are ultimately served by these systems. as newton (2020b) puts it, there is an urgent trade-off in content moderation: “the use of automated systems that are error-prone but invincible, versus the use of human beings who are much more skilled but vulnerable to the effects of the job.” automated moderation generally is overzealous, removes too much “good speech,” and frustrates users. but human moderation has the clear cost of debilitating mental health conditions. “so far,” newton writes, “no global-scale technology company has managed to get this balance right. in fact, we still have no real agreement on what getting it ‘right’ would even look like” (2020b; emphasis added). this may be true, but my point here is that we can only approach this topic barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 adequately when we acknowledge there is a trade-off to be made, which is incompatible with the assertation that better ai can handle everything itself. the massive scale of social media presents another problem, with which i will close. that problem is the distribution of responsibility in what is a global system with billions of moral agents is complicated by the fact that the users of social media are integral to the platform companies’ products. as social media users, we all likely share part of the responsibility for the harms of platform companies generate, at least in so far as our actions provide support for their practices. we are therefore complicit in the injustices discussed above. however, as iris marion young (2006) argues, shared responsibility is not always shared evenly.21 she articulates four “parameters of reasoning” that allow us to make headway on the issue of distributing responsibility when faced with structural injustice within her social connection model of responsibility.22 these are power, which is influence over the processes that produce these outcomes; privilege, the ability to adapt without suffering serious deprivation; interest, both in maintaining and in transforming given structures; and collective ability, the organizational capacity to address a particular issue (young 2006, 127–30). each of these parameters could inform our approach to addressing the harms outlined above, and each deserves more space than i can allot here. but i will highlight two features of this model that demonstrate the insights available. the first concerns power, and the fact that “the agents with the greatest power within social structures often have a vested interest in maintaining them as they are,” which young takes to imply that “external pressure on the powerful is often necessary to move these agents to action, and to prevent them from taking superficial steps rather than making serious changes” (127). it is clear that this is the case with platform companies—who are some of the richest organizations in the world—and the harms they produce. this is compounded by the fact that the subjects of the harms i’ve discussed here— content moderators, victims of extremist violence, and even some (potentially) radicalized individuals themselves—are more marginalized and less powerful than those in silicon valley. while responsibility falls on many different agents in a distributed system, we must not ignore who predominantly holds the levers of power. and putting pressure on these powerful agents is undoubtedly one avenue through which regular users can and should discharge their responsibility. 21 as she says: “different agents plausibly have different kinds of responsibilities in relation to particular issues of justice, and some arguably have a greater degree of responsibility than others” (young 2006, 126). 22 this social connection model of responsibility, she says, is meant to “correspond to the intuition that those who participate by their actions in the structural processes that produce injustice bear some responsibility for correcting this injustice,” (young 2006, 125) and thus seems an apt model for the current discussion. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 this takes me to the second insight from young i wish to highlight, which is that while powerful and privileged actors are likely more responsible for change, she maintains that “victims of injustice share responsibility with others for cooperating in projects to undermine the injustice” (128). this is because, quite simply, “victims of injustice have the greatest interest in its elimination, and often have unique insights into its social sources and the probable effects of proposals for change” (128). in the case of platforms and content moderation, this implies not only that moderators themselves have some responsibility to improve their conditions but also that they can and should shape the direction that those improvements take.23 concretely, this should mean that platform companies (and the companies they contract with) ought not to suppress workers from organizing, should seek moderators’ feedback on policy decision, and should offer potential paths for advancement within the organization. they should, moreover, uncover the moderators’ opinions on how to implement automation in their workplace. the problems discussed above are complex, and their solutions are not obvious. but given that social media platforms are at the centre of a great number of increasingly significant moral problems, it is imperative that we approach this task with urgency, care, and a full appreciation of the harms at stake. this requires seeing beyond the propagandistic rhetoric of big tech and instead asking how current harms can be properly acknowledged, mitigated, and compensated. references alfano, mark, j. adam carter, and marc cheong. 2018. “technological seduction and self-radicalization.” journal of the american philosophical association 4, no. 3 (fall): 298–322. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2018.27. alfano, mark, amir ebrahimi fard, j. adam carter, peter clutton, and colin klein. 2021. “technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: the case of youtube’s recommender system.” synthese 199, no. 1–2 (december): 835–58. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02724-x. alfano, mark, emily sullivan, and amir ebrahimi fard. 2022. “ethical pitfalls for natural language processing in psychology.” in handbook of language analysis in psychology, edited by morteza dehghani and ryan l. boyd, 511–30. new york: guilford press. 23 it is important to note that, for young, “victims of injustice have a responsibility to work together to improve their situation, but they are unlikely to succeed without the help and support of other less-vulnerable people who make industry behavior public and who pressure companies to change policies or restructure their business relationships” (129). barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 ball-burack, ari, michelle seng ah lee, jennifer cobbe, jatinder singh. 2021. “differential tweetment: mitigating racial dialect bias in harmful tweet detection.” in facct ’21: proceedings of the 2021 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, 116–28. new york: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445875. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity. block, hans, and moritz riesewieck, directors. 2018. the cleaners. gebrueder beetz filmproduktion. 88 min. cassidy, ciarán, and adrian chen, directors. 2017. the moderators. field of vision. 20 min. https://fieldofvision.org/the-moderators. diresta, renée. 2020. “the right’s disinformation machine is getting ready for trump to lose.” atlantic, october 20, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com /ideas/archive/2020/10/the-rights-disinformation-machine-is-hedging-itsbets/616761/. dwoskin, elizabeth, and craig timberg. 2021. “misinformation dropped dramatically the week after twitter banned trump and some allies.” washington post, january 16, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16 /misinformation-trump-twitter/. eubanks, virginia. 2018. automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. new york: st. martin's press. garcia, sandra e. 2018. “ex-content moderator sues facebook, saying violent images caused her ptsd.” new york times, september 25, 2018. https://www.ny times.com/2018/09/25/technology/facebook-moderator-job-ptsdlawsuit.html. geiger, r. stuart. 2016. “bot-based collective blocklists in twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space.” information, communication & society 19 (6): 787–803. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x .2016.1153700. gessen, masha. 2018. “why the tree of life shooter was fixated on the hebrew immigrant aid society.” new yorker, oct 27, 2018. https://www.newyorker .com/news/our-columnists/why-the-tree-of-life-shooter-was-fixated-on-thehebrew-immigrant-aid-society. gillespie, tarleton. 2018. custodians of the internet: platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. ———. 2020. “content moderation, ai, and the question of scale.” big data & society 7, no. 2 (july). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720943234. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 26 gorwa, robert, reuben binns, and christian katzenbach. 2020. “algorithmic content moderation: technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance.” big data & society 7, no. 1 (january–june). https://doi.org/10 .1177/2053951719897945. gray, mary l., and siddharth suri. 2019. ghost work: how to stop silicon valley from building a new global underclass. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt. hao, karen. 2021a. “how facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation.” mit technology review, march 11, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/20 21/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/. ———. 2021b. “the race to understand the exhilarating, dangerous world of language ai.” mit technology review, may 20, 2021. https://www.technolo gyreview.com/2021/05/20/1025135/ai-large-language-models-bigscienceproject/. jones, phil. 2021a. “refugees help power machine learning advances at microsoft, facebook, and amazon.” rest of world, september 22, 2021. https://restof world.org/2021/refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/. ———. 2021b. work without the worker: labour in the age of platform capitalism. london: verso. lewis, becca. 2020. “i warned in 2018 youtube was fueling far-right extremism. here's what the platform should be doing.” guardian, december 11, 2020. https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2020/dec/11/youtubeislamophobia-christchurch-shooter-hate-speech. lewis, rebecca. 2018. alternative influence: broadcasting the reactionary right on youtube. data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/library /alternative-influence/. lynch, michael patrick. 2016. the internet of us: knowing more and understanding less in the age of big data. new york: liveright publishing. mateescu, alexandra, and madeleine clare elish. 2019. ai in context: the labor of integrating new technologies. data & society research institute. https://datasociety.net/library/ai-in-context/. mccrosky, jesse, and brandi geurkink. 2021. youtube regrets: a crowdsourced investigation into youtube’s recommendation algorithm. mozilla foundation. https://mzl.la/regrets-research. metz, cade, and mike isaac. 2019. “facebook’s a.i. whiz now faces the task of cleaning it up. sometimes that brings him to tears.” new york times, may 17, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/technology/facebook-aischroepfer.html. michaelson, eliot, jessica pepp, and rachel sterken. 2021. “online communication.” philosopher’s magazine, august 17, 2021. https://www.philosophersmag.com /essays/249-online-communication. barnes – online extremism, ai, and (human) content moderation published by scholarship@western, 2022 27 newton, casey. 2019. “the trauma floor: the secret lives of facebook moderators in america.” verge, february 25, 2019. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25 /18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-traumaworking-conditions-arizona. ———. 2020a. “facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed ptsd on the job.” verge, may 12, 2020. https://www.theverge .com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scolaptsd-mental-health. ———. 2020b. “youtube gets sued by its moderators.” interface, no. 572, september 22, 2020. https://www.getrevue.co/profile/caseynewton/issues/youtubegets-sued-by-its-moderators-280023. noble, safya. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. o’neil, cathy. 2016. weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: broadway books. perrigo, billy. 2022. “inside facebook’s african sweatshop.” time, 14 february, 2022. https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employeetreatment/. roberts, sarah t. 2019. behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media. new haven, ct: yale university press. sadowski, jathan. 2018. “potemkin ai.” real life, august 6, 2018. https://reallifemag .com/potemkin-ai/. smith, laura. 2021. “lone wolves connected online: a history of modern white supremacy.” new york times, january 26, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com /2021/01/26/us/louis-beam-white-supremacy-internet.html. solon, olivia. 2018. “the rise of ‘pseudo-ai’: how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots’ work. the guardian, july 6, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com /technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-techcompanies. solsman, joan e. 2018. “youtube's ai is the puppet master over most of what you watch.” cnet, january 10, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-ces2018-neal-mohan/. sonderby, chris. 2019. “update on new zealand.” facebook newsroom, march 18, 2019. https://perma.cc/za85-2y3x. stanley, jason. 2015. how propaganda works. princeton, nj: princeton university press. statt, nick. 2014. “zuckerberg: ‘move fast and break things’ isn't how facebook operates anymore.” cnet, april 30, 2014. https://www.cnet.com/tech /mobile/zuckerberg-move-fast-and-break-things-isnt-how-we-operateanymore/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2022 28 stecklow, steve. 2018. “hatebook: inside facebook’s myanmar operation; why facebook is losing the war on hate speech in myanmar.” reuters, august 15. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebookhate#article-hatebook. taylor, astra. 2018. “the automation charade.” logic, no. 5, august 1, 2018. https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/. tubaro, paola, antonio a. casilli, and marion coville. “the trainer, the verifier, the imitator: three ways in which human platform workers support artificial intelligence.” big data & society 7, no. 1 (january–june). https://doi.org/10 .1177/2053951720919776. warzel, charlie. 2019. “mass shootings have become a sickening meme.” new york times, april 28, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/28/opinion/poway -synagogue-shooting-meme.html. york, jillian c. 2021. silicon values: the future of free speech under surveillance capitalism. new york: verso. young, iris marion. 2006. “responsibility and global justice: a social connection model.” social philosophy & policy 23, no. 1 (january): 102–30. zadrozny, brandy. 2021. “youtube’s recommendations still push harmful videos, crowdsourced study finds.” nbc news, july 7, 2021. https://www.nbcnews .com/news/amp/rcna1355. zimmermann, annette, elena di rosa, and hochan kim. 2020. “technology can't fix algorithmic injustice.” boston review, january 9, 2020. https://bostonreview .net/science-nature-politics/annette-zimmermann-elena-di-rosa-hochankim-technology-cant-fix-algorithmic. michael randall barnes is a postdoctoral associate with the humanising machine intelligence project at the australian national university. he works mainly on issues relating to how speech harms, and is particularly interested in the harms made possible by online speech. 14295 barnes title page 14295 barnes final format a phenomenological approach to sexual consent feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation anderson, ellie. 2022. “a phenomenological approach to sexual consent.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (2). article 1. 2022 a phenomenological approach to sexual consent ellie anderson pomona college ellenjuneanderson@gmail.com anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 a phenomenological approach to sexual consent ellie anderson abstract rather than as a giving of permission to someone to transgress one’s bodily boundaries, i argue for defining sexual consent as feeling-with one’s sexual partner(s). dominant approaches to consent within feminist philosophy have failed to capture the intercorporeal character of erotic consciousness by treating it as a form of giving permission, as is evident in the debate between attitudinal and performative theories of consent. building on the phenomenology of maurice merleau-ponty, ann cahill, linda martín alcoff, and others, i argue that taking consent to be an intercorporeal and dynamic coexistence of desiring bodies opens up new ways of thinking about the role of consent in sexual ethics. i suggest that phenomenology’s theories of embodied consciousness, operative intentionality, and the direct perception of others provide a better groundwork for conceptualizing the role of ambiguity and subtle power dynamics in sexual encounters than attitudinal or performative accounts of consent. i also defend my view against jonathan jenkins ichikawa’s argument for doing away with the concept of consent in sexual ethics due to consent's stubborn and infelicitous presupposition of permission-giving. keywords: consent, sex, sexual ethics, phenomenology, feminist theory, feminist phenomenology, embodiment, merleau-ponty, ann cahill, linda martín alcoff introduction in recent decades, consent has been at the fore of sexual ethics. consent is taken to have the unique ability to transform otherwise impermissible acts into permissible ones: consent distinguishes sex from sexual violation. the focus on consent in academic debates among philosophers and legal scholars is also found within public discourse, where affirmative and enthusiastic consent are routinely championed on college campuses, in op-eds, and in books for parents and teens. at the same time, feminist theorists have long taken issue with consent, contending that it is a limited or even misguided way of distinguishing sex from sexual violation (pateman 1988; mackinnon 1989). far from guaranteeing sexual equality, consent is often subtly coerced due to patriarchal social scripts; one may even consent in order not to be raped (alcoff 2018, 114). and while purportedly a gender-neutral concept, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 consent is widely figured as something that women give and men receive or demand: it depends on gender asymmetries and puts the onus on women to decide how far things will go (pateman 1988, 164; see also gavey 2005). moreover, the legalistic overtones of consent do not accommodate the complex, intercorporeal character of sexual encounters. laws are poor analogues for ethical negotiation, especially when subtle power dynamics are at work. feminists drawing on phenomenology in particular have highlighted the insufficiencies of consent discourse for capturing the complex, embodied character of sexual experience (cahill 2001; diprose 2002; alcoff 2018). consent additionally papers over the ambiguity of many sexual encounters, preventing individuals from taking responsibility for cultivating nuanced attention to the desires of sexual partners. if all one needs is a red or green light, then very little communication with one’s sexual partners is needed. standard accounts of consent often imply an implausible level of ignorance about sexual partners’ nonverbal expressive behaviors, even when those partners are strangers. as a result, such accounts overlook capacities for cultivating respectful attention and communicative efficacy, as well as potential for unlearning detrimental social scripts that often negatively affect partners without their knowledge. and while standard accounts of consent implausibly presume that the intentions of others are completely mysterious to us in the absence of a clear “yes” or “no,” they also implausibly presume that our own intentions are transparent to us. yet people are frequently ignorant of their own desires, and their intentions may unfold in complex ways over the course of erotic encounters. historically and legally speaking, sexual consent became important once women were considered to have sexual autonomy. under liberalism, sexual assault is a violation of autonomy, and this violation is often conceived as the absence of consent (shafer and frye 1977, 334; schulhofer 1992, 67; primoratz 2001, 201). yet ann cahill (2001, 182) points out that the legalistic assumption that humans can sign away their bodies through consent is morally problematic because it implies that the one consenting owes the activity involved to the recipient of consent: hence, the recipient can claim harm if the consenter does not deliver. susan brison (2021) argues that conflating rape with nonconsensual sex is an epistemic injustice against victims because it turns the widespread sociopolitical problem of harm against women into a problem of personal choice. this indicates a further problem with legalistic consent: it may more successfully protect perpetrators than victims, because a perpetrator who received, or claims to have received, a token of consent from the victim may then deny any wrongdoing (alcoff 2018, 138). yet feminist philosophers disagree on what to do about these problems. three responses have come to the fore. the first is to reject consent altogether. jonathan jenkins ichikawa (2020) argues that having ethical sex does not require consent at all, anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 and joseph j. fischel (2019) uses a wide range of case studies to reject consent as a guideline for sexual ethics. rosalyn diprose (2002) and quill kukla (2018; writing as rebecca kukla) suggest norms of generosity and gift-giving as alternatives. the second response is to acknowledge a role for consent but dethrone it from its position as the ultimate norm guiding sexual ethics. linda martín alcoff (2018) argues that consent is just one aspect of sexual ethics, while caleb ward (2020) draws on phenomenology to advocate a capacious theory of “sexual agency.” the third response is to redefine consent. kukla (2021) has recently developed a nonideal theory of sexual consent arguing that consent comes in degrees, while manon garcia (2021) takes consent to be a conversation. some feminist philosophers have also suggested drawing inspiration from the latin origins of consent, which do not involve contractual negotiation or permission-giving. etymologically, consent means “feeling-with,” combining con(with) and sentire (to feel). an alternative to the orthodox view of consent as permission-giving is thus baked into the etymology of the word. alcoff, garcia, and kelly oliver (2018) raise this point in order to lay the groundwork for an alternative theory of consent, though none has worked out this alternative in detail. in this essay, i pursue this third line of thinking by developing such an alternative theory of consent as “feeling-with.” using phenomenology, i sketch an affective account that is attentive to the complexities of embodied consciousness and gendered power dynamics. ichikawa (2020) has recently argued against redefining consent. while i agree with him that the main problem with consent is that it is widely understood as a form of permission-giving, i do not take this connotation to be essentially tied to “consent.” i suggest redefining the term by returning to its original meaning of “feeling-with,” and i build out an account of this using phenomenology. this approach shifts the distinction between consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences away from the legal domain and toward an interpersonal one. while legal questions around the nature of sexual assault are no doubt essential, modeling sexual ethics on the legal domain gets things backwards. i begin by critiquing the dominant view that consent is permission-giving, focusing particularly on the debate between attitudinal and performative theories of consent. i assert that this debate depends on a liberal model of selfhood that overlooks key feminist insights into interdependence and embodiment. i explain why i do not think that generosity and gift-giving are viable alternatives. i then outline an alternative picture of consent, drawing on phenomenological approaches to embodied consciousness, operative intentionality, and the direct perception account of perceiving others. this allows us to develop a rich picture of consent that accounts for the influence of intercorporeal affectivity, sedimented social scripts, and individual patterns on sexual experiences. i conclude by defending my account against ichikawa’s contention that trying to redefine consent is likely a dead end for sexual ethics. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 1. the standard view: consent as giving permission the view that consent is a form of giving permission is ubiquitous. philosophical literature on sexual consent takes consent to transform an otherwise impermissible action into a permissible one: consent transforms rape into intercourse by giving someone permission to take what is rightfully one’s own—namely, one’s own body (hurd 1996, 123; mcgregor 2005, 115). nathan brett (1998, 69) writes, “to consent is to give permission; a person acts without consent where no such permission has been obtained.” ichikawa (2020, 11) argues that this ubiquity in scholarly debates also exists in ordinary language, where “consent to φ” generally presupposes that “someone else is trying to get one to φ.” that is, a wants b to do something, and b can choose to go along with a’s wishes or to reject them. b’s consent derives its intelligibility from being a response to a’s request. it implicitly assumes a requests b’s permission (27). plus, figuring consent as permission-giving implies that the opposite of consent is withholding permission. for instance, emily sherwin (1996, 209) writes that people “should be entitled to give or withhold sex through the mechanism of consent.” 1.a. attitudinal and performative accounts of consent standard accounts of sexual consent tend to fall into two camps: attitudinal and performative. attitudinal approaches, sometimes called subjective or mentalistic, view consent as an intention or state of mind; performative approaches view consent as a behavior or act. joan mcgregor (2005, 118) summarizes the distinction by saying that the attitudinal approach views consent as something one has, whereas the performative approach views consent as something one does. both take for granted that consent gives permission (ward 2020, 23–27). heidi m. hurd, a key proponent of the attitudinal approach, writes of the “moral magic” of consent. on hurd’s (1996, 121) view, consent is a “subjective mental state” of intentional willing that renders otherwise impermissible actions permissible. hurd suggests that consent is significant as an expression of autonomy, arguing that the conditions of consent parallel the conditions of liability. consent is a mental state that one has, akin to mens rea (hurd 1996, 121). ideally, it is communicated, but communication is not essential to consent itself. in contrast, the performative view holds that consent is an act of communication to one or more other person(s). as mcgregor, an advocate of this view, describes it, consent involves behavior that signifies a mental state. it is disclosed as an “illocutionary act” in j. l. austin’s sense: consent is a verbal and/or gestural public act of communication that signifies a mental state (mcgregor 2005, 116). as with the attitudinal account, this view proposes that consent is morally and legally transformative, permitting actions that would otherwise be impermissible. consent can turn “rape into intercourse” (115). anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 yet the assumptions of both of these views of sexual consent are unsound. the claim that consent transforms rape into intercourse bizarrely makes consensual sex intelligible only against the backdrop of sexual assault ⁠.1 it also treats the body as a mere piece of property over which the mind has ownership, an outcome of mainstream sexual ethics’ legalistic bent. as noted in the introduction, this account reductively treats desires as transparent to agents and naïvely imagines agents as atomic individuals existing on a neutral playing field of rights and duties. the complex embodied and intersubjective dimensions of sex are nowhere to be found. the root of the problem is that both attitudinal and performative views of consent are grounded in liberalism, depending on a picture of the self as homo economicus. homo economicus is the “free and rational chooser and actor whose desires are ranked in a coherent order and whose aim is to maximize desire satisfaction” (meyers 2018, 2). this picture of the self, which stems from liberal economic theory, dominates debates about sexual ethics in anglo-american philosophy. it is a convenient picture of selfhood because it presumes that agents freely make decisions out of self-interest. however, it sits uncomfortably alongside the purportedly feminist aims of much of sexual ethics. homo economicus and its various guises have rightfully been the target of feminist critiques, given that they depend on masculinist myths of independence that deny our reliance on others and our embodied imbrication with their bodies at organic and affective levels from infancy (anderson, willett, and meyers 2020). the boundaries of the self are always porous and often indistinct; they are especially so in intimate contexts (russon 2014, 69). the liberal view of selfhood additionally overlooks the ways desires are shaped by social scripts and implicit biases. in the case of sexual ethics, heteronormative and patriarchal scripts shape norms of consent such that they are deeply gendered (cahill 2001, 174; pateman 1988, 164). as nicola gavey (2005, 124) concludes, “when we understand ourselves as culturally produced in these ways and as always inevitably and thoroughly socially embedded, the liberal notion of a rational autonomous individual freely picking and choosing the assumptions and values they will live by, and the acts and forms of relationship they will enter into, starts to look rather fantastical.” an example developed by performative theorist alan wertheimer is particularly illustrative of the insufficiencies of both sides of the consent debate. in order to critique the attitudinal view of sexual consent, wertheimer (2003, 146) encourages his reader to imagine the following scenario. b leaves her car on the street and hopes it will be stolen so that she can collect the insurance: that is, she consents to its being stolen. if her car is in fact stolen, however, the person who stole it is still 1 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 morally and legally culpable, because they did not know that she consented to its being stolen. wertheimer uses this example to conclude that consent cannot reasonably be considered a mental state: it needs to be communicated in some way, and hence he opts for a performative view (147). surely wertheimer is right that ethical sexual activities between persons involve the communication of desires, not just a subjective alignment of them (see also mcgregor 2005, 125). his example successfully identifies the weakness of the attitudinal view. yet i think, pace wertheimer, that it equally shows the insufficiency of the performative view. b is taken to be analogous to a mental state, and her car to her body. her sexual assaulter is analogized to a car thief, and b and the car thief are strangers who never even interact face to face. while wertheimer’s example is a hypothetical meant to test intuitions about communicating consent, the success of this analogy depends on viewing consent as a contracting out of the body by a mind. take, for example, mcgregor’s (2005, 107) suggestion that performative consent is “the mechanism by which we treat each other as equals, by asking for consent before crossing another’s border or taking what is rightfully theirs, whether it is their property or their body.” mcgregor states that consent involves having one’s bodily borders transgressed—or, what’s more, having one’s body willingly taken from them. in the attitudinal view, consent is located in the mind; in the performative view, consent is located in the performative act, which (ideally) expresses the mental state of the consenter (wertheimer 2003, 147; mcgregor 2005, 125). in both views, homo economicus gives permission to someone to do something with one’s body, conceiving the body as property. this debate envisions sexual partners as having distinct sets of intentions, without access to the other’s “mental states” in the absence of the clearest possible communication. this implies an overly rationalistic account of erotic experience, in which agents meet on an even playing field with transparent access to their desires before communicating them. yet in truth, regardless of whether partners are longterm lovers, strangers, or something in between, sex involves complex dynamics of perception, desire, intention, and willing that cannot simply be reduced to giving permission to another person to transgress one’s boundaries (diprose 2002, 69). in facing theorists with the alternative of viewing consent as a mental state or an act, this debate dualistically treats the body as the property of the mind (cahill 2001, 170, 183; mcgregor 2005, 107). as we will explore below, this fails to register structures of lived experience, which phenomenology is far better equipped to address than liberal consent theory. permission-giving is an infelicitous framework for sexual encounters.2 2 some theorists have responded to the shortcomings of the attitudinal and performative views by constructing a hybrid between them. however, the hybrid approach remains unsatisfactory because it fails to think sex outside of the debate’s anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 1.b. invitation and generosity as inadequate alternatives the choice between an attitudinal and performative view depends on an impoverished approach to sexual ethics. it is telling that much of this debate happens among legal scholars, where the most important concern is identifying grounds for sexual assault. here, legal fictions around the nature of the mind may be necessary. but what do we lose when we model sexual ethics on legal arguments surrounding rape? what might we gain from a richer phenomenological account of sexual consent as it appears in a wide variety of interpersonal situations? in this vein, philosophers such as quill kukla and rosalyn diprose advocate moving from permission-giving to gift-giving, invitation, or generosity. yet while i share their interest in rejecting existing accounts, i worry that their alternatives import the very presuppositions that make permission-giving problematic. as ichikawa argues, what makes consent infelicitous for sexual ethics is its presupposition that one consents to something another person is trying to get someone to do, making sexual experiences a matter of assenting to or rejecting another’s wishes. but an invitation equally involves this presupposition: i invite someone to (do) something, and this invitation presumes that i am trying to get them to (do) this thing. kukla (2018, 82) notes that invitations are “welcoming without being demanding.” however, the underlying issue with consent-as-permission-giving is not that consent implies a demand; it is that consent is something offered (or withheld) by individuals who have straightforward desires that they hope the other will grant them if communicated. this fails to recognize the intercorporeally unfolding nature of sexual encounters in time (on which more will be said below). gift-giving and generosity hardly fare better, pace kukla and diprose. giving a gift implies freely handing over goods that would otherwise belong to you. in the same way that consent-as-permission-giving figures consent as involving “moral magic,” transforming an act that would otherwise be rape into permissible sex, gift-giving transforms an act that would otherwise be stealing into a permissible act—namely, receiving a gift. both imply that individuals have fixed boundaries that they can choose to permit others to transgress.3 that is, “giving” and related concepts do not terms. emily sherwin (1996, 216, 209–10) argues that the hybrid approach views consent as both a subjective decision and a social act, where the act expresses the subjective choice. yet conjoining consent as a mental state with consent as a social act accepts that mental states exist outside of social acts and that social acts are intelligible without mental states; otherwise, we would not need to “bridge” the gap between them through a hybrid view. 3 diprose seeks to avoid these implications by defining generosity as a “prereflective corporeal openness to otherness” (2002, 5), rather than a disposition toward giving feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 significantly depart from the existing framework of consent: both conceive of sex as beginning with a giving of permission. both imply a metaphysics of borders between self and other, whereby one’s body is “one’s own,” and may be shared with another when a wish for them to transgress one’s borders is communicated. 2. a phenomenological account of consent while legal understandings of sexual ethics are of course important, especially in assuring justice for survivors of sexual violation, they should not serve as the primary framework for understanding sexual ethics. instead, sexual ethics should begin from a phenomenological account of lived experience. just as phenomenology is critical of scientific modes of understanding that get matters backward by beginning with third-person explanation rather than phenomenological description, we should be critical of the sexual ethics that gets things backward by beginning with a legalistic framework. a core principle of phenomenology is that understanding essences requires beginning with direct descriptions of existence. as merleau-ponty (2012, lxx) states, “the world is always ‘already there’ prior to reflection,” and the goal of philosophy is to “rediscover this naïve contact with the world in order to finally raise it to a philosophical status.” this requires suspending causal explanations from the sciences in order to focus on situated, lived experience in the firstand second-person. scientific explanations are built upon the lived world and thus secondary to it (merleau-ponty 2012, lxxii). we may say the same about legal justifications. law is built upon the lived experiences of individuals, which are deeply rooted in relationships and cultural scripts. constructing sexual ethics around legal fictions that we are then asked to read back into first-person experiences, rather than the other way around, dooms us to misguided explorations of sexual ethics—even as precisely such explorations have dominated philosophies of sexual ethics. as phenomenology emphasizes descriptions of first-person lived experience, it illuminates how experience is situated within broader ideologies of gender, sexuality, and personhood. first-person experience is imbricated with secondand third-person experience, as well as quasi-transcendental structures rooted in culture and history. ⁠4 this approach offers ample resources for reframing discourse within away what is one’s own. this definition has similarities to my phenomenological account of consent but to my mind falls short of the insight. generosity, even redefined in this way, depends on the notion of giving (what is one’s own), and “longing to and borrowing from the bodies of others” (diprose 2002, 89). what is needed instead is a more radical recognition of the intercorporeality of existence. 4 the recent turn toward “critical phenomenology” especially highlights phenomenology as a method of inquiry into the normative structures of power that anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 feminist philosophy around sexual consent by treating consent as an affective, complex, and intercorporeal phenomenon of “feeling-with.” here, i develop this account by foregrounding phenomenology’s approach to embodiment and the “direct perception account” of perceiving others, which suggests that another’s mental states are not mysteriously hidden behind their bodies but rather directly, albeit complexly, sensed. i show how this relates to erotic perception in sexual encounters, drawing on maurice merleau-ponty and others. 2.a. embodied consciousness because i noted above that a major issue with the standard attitudinal-versusperformative consent debate is its dualistic assumption that the body is the mind’s property, let us begin by explaining phenomenology’s nondual view of embodiment. for merleau-ponty and other phenomenologists, the lived body is the locus of enactive consciousness. “i am my body,” merleau-ponty claims, and this body is akin to a work of art rather than to a physical instrument (merleau-ponty 2012, 151–52). as merleau-ponty famously states, consciousness is not an “i think,” but rather an “i can”: it is intentionally oriented within a situation that affords it possibilities. the body is an intentional, expressive whole, a “knot of living significations” (153). importantly, to say that the body is expressive does not mean that it reports on the mental states of an inner sphere, deriving signification only by reference to them. rather, expression coemerges with what is expressed in a given environment. additionally, the body is not an object in space; rather, the body inhabits and anchors space. the body is a unified whole, such that we cannot “distinguish in the total being of man a bodily organization that one could treat as a contingent fact and other predicates that necessarily belong to him” (merleau-ponty 2012, 174). each body expresses differently but is organized by being an expressive whole. as such, the body is the site of both individuation and connection to others. we are all embodied— for each of us, the body is the locus of interaction with the world, or what merleauponty calls the i can—but each of us lives our body in a unique way. it is precisely our modes of being embodied that distinguish us from others. to have a body means to have a unique style of moving through the world. as cahill (2001, 113) writes, “although every subject is embodied, there are few if any aspects or qualities of embodiment that are shared identically by all subjects. embodiment is precisely the site of the possibility and necessity of difference.” embodied experience is shaped iteratively within historical, cultural, and personal landscapes. one key way that phenomenologists indicate the thoroughly embodied character of consciousness is through their accounts of intentionality, especially condition first-person experience by taking first-person experience, situated within embodied environments, as its starting point (see guenther 2021). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 operative intentionality. operative intentionality, first theorized by edmund husserl and developed by merleau-ponty, is “a practical directness toward the world that is not necessarily present to reflective consciousness but is instead made manifest in the daily operations of a person’s life” (mcweeny 2020, 255). husserl contrasts operative intentionality with act intentionality, the latter being the mode of intentionality of judgments and voluntary decisions. for merleau-ponty (2012, 453), operative intentionality undergirds act intentionality—and indeed, lived experience in general. the landscape of conscious experience is largely habitual and prereflective. reaching for the doorknob or going in for a hug when greeting a friend, my body and my subjectivity are indistinct: “in operative intentionality a person’s subjective perspective is not different from his body” (mcweeny 2020, 256). operative intentionality, moreover, undergirds act intentionality, which may sometimes involve the sense of having a subjective perspective different from one’s body but does not indicate an ontological separation between the two. many elements of our interactions with others primarily involve operative intentionality and may only minimally include act intentionality. this is especially the case in situations that engage desire, such as sexual encounters. operative intentionality indicates that our orientation toward the world is not encapsulated by states of mind but rather is fundamentally embodied, affective, and intersubjective. thus, sexual ethics must focus more on the body’s agency than mainstream discussions account for, and must account for the operative intentionality that destabilizes a binary between passivity and activity. it is in operative intentionality, for instance, that many social and cultural scripts are reproduced without the individual’s awareness that they are reproducing them. this is essential to keep in mind in sexual encounters, which do not occur among self-interested rational actors but rather among subjects radically rooted within particular social contexts, with many habits and beliefs that are not reflectively recognized. behavior involves layers of sedimented, implicit knowledge and beliefs that orient our bodies toward some activities and away from others. in addition, act intentionality is conditioned by the experience of being an object for others, an experience central to selfhood. diprose cogently argues that it is precisely in perceiving myself as an object for the other—even as i cannot see the other as the other sees me—that i become individuated. if i am an object for the other, i must be distinct from the other (diprose 2002, 69). this distinction is primarily affective, although it also gives rise to reflective cognitive stances of distinction from others (sartre 1984, 383). “the self,” diprose (2002, 69) writes, with reference to merleau-ponty, “is a lived body ambiguously caught between subject and object, inhabiting the world of the other’s body even with a lived distance between the two.” erotic experiences in particular individuate the self by giving the body to itself both as a subjective site of desire and pleasure, and as an erotic object for the other (ward anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 and anderson 2022). the subject-object distinction lived in erotic experience is a fluid phenomenal distinction, not an ontological dichotomy. nor does it map onto a distinction between mind and body: it is embodied consciousness that experiences itself as both subject and object. 2.b. the direct perception account of others the debate between attitudinal and performative consent takes for granted that others’ mental states are originally opaque to us and must be inferred through communication (preferably verbally, ideally through a “yes” or “no”). yet the phenomenological insight into the nondual character of embodiment goes hand in hand with an alternative account of how we perceive others that has significant potential to reorient discourses of sexual consent. broadly speaking, phenomenology takes perception to be a dynamic relation to phenomena within the environment. perception is not opposed to action: consciousness does not first receive a sensation, then reflect on it, and finally act in response. rather, sensations themselves are responsive. we perceive not by copying percepts in inner space but by constituting them within the space of the world (merleau-ponty 2012, 9). perception, as well as other “mental states,” is a social act. as such, the debate about whether consent is a mental state or social act is moot. this also means that i do not perceive others by recognizing their bodily behaviors as signs of their mental states, out in the world for me to decode; rather, others’ behaviors are directly expressive of their states of mind. this idea that perceiving others’ mental states is a direct, rather than inferential, process is what contemporary phenomenologists call the “direct perception account.” the direct perception account contends that all perception is direct, with both (a) the complex components of perception and (b) perception’s relation to memory, emotion, and motor activity built into perception itself. as shaun gallagher (2008, 538) puts it, perceptual experience “is a richly informed direct grasp of whatever is presented,” scaffolded by context and interaction. gallagher picks up on early phenomenologist max scheler’s account of perceiving others, which contends that another’s body is “a field of expression for their experiences,” requiring no inference from their behavior to an imagined inner life (scheler 1954, 9). even as much perception occurs prereflectively, additional cognitive processes are often not required in order to grasp the complexity of a phenomenon. the vase does not appear as a hard, smooth yellow object but rather as a beautiful container for flowers. this is also true of our perception of other persons, including their behaviors. someone moving their face toward mine with eyes closed and lips drawn together appears directly to my perception as an embodied subjectivity intending to kiss. this theory suggests that perception is, as gallagher (2008, 536) puts it, “smart”: perception does not furnish a simple set of raw sensations for other operations of consciousness to interpret. rather, perception is complex and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 interpretive, involving layers of prereflective intentionality. for phenomenologists, “direct perception is nothing mysterious” (gallagher 2008, 542). it is only by overlaying perception with third-person assumptions borrowed from the natural sciences, and/or with dualistic assumptions about the mind and body, that it appears so. direct perception is also affective. indeed, early phenomenologists’ preferred term for direct perception is “empathy.” according to edith stein and edmund husserl, empathy is the basic sense of recognizing another person as a body-consciousness. it is affective, participatory, and initially prereflective, serving as the basis for reflective ways of interpersonally relating. crucially, it does not require feeling another’s feeling as one’s own, or even having a strong sense of the contents of the other’s feelings; empathy is simply the feeling of foreign consciousness ⁠ (stein 1989, 11).5 in empathizing, i am perceiving another as a subject. the other appears within my perceptual field as an object-that-is-a-subject, and hence as perceiving me as an object that is a subject. to perceive another means to feel with them, in the sense of being copresent with a foreign embodied consciousness. what’s more, perception is intersubjective—or, in merleau-ponty’s preferred terminology, intercorporeal. the relationship between events in the world and individuals’ perceptions of them is interactive, and another’s perception (while not often the object of my explicit reflection) is the necessary complement to my own. as merleau-ponty (2012, 109) writes, “we literally are what others think of us and we are our world.” while self and other do not share a single perspective, their distinct perspectives are of a shared world and are themselves part of what constitutes this world. the social world is “the permanent field or dimension of existence,” and firstperson perspectives exist within this world (merleau-ponty 2012, 379). thus, individual perspectives involve rich, yet largely prereflective, negotiations of a given context, as well as sedimented layers of personal and sociocultural history. these perspectives develop through the intersubjective perception of a shared world. one might object that the direct perception account seems naïvely confident in the ability to understand the intentions and desires of others. if it is, does this not open the door to sexual assault on the basis of perpetrators’ feeling unjustifiably confident that “x wanted it”? if the intentions and desires of others are directly expressed through their embodied behaviors, it seems challenging to explain the fact that others’ behaviors can be mysterious or misread—and that this can lead to sexual violation. indeed, difficult cases in sexual ethics are often framed as cases of miscommunication, which is why so much debate concerns just how obvious another needs to make their intentions: does consent need to be indicated by a “yes” or “no”? 5 this is distinct from emotional contagion, though emotional contagion undoubtedly occurs in many interpersonal encounters, including and perhaps especially in erotic ones. anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 can it be conveyed through other means—and, if so, need these means be verbal or not? there are two responses here. first, research from social psychology suggests that the idea that miscommunication drives a significant share of sexual assaults is a myth. such miscommunication appears to be far rarer than assumed in both public discourse and philosophical debates about consent (beres 2010). for instance, interview participants in a canadian study of young adults consistently said that their ways of refusing sex were often subtle and nonverbal, including bodily behaviors such as tensing up, pausing kissing for a moment, or pulling away (beres 2010, 8). they equally recognized such behaviors as forms of discomfort on the part of a sexual partner, with one man stating that “anyone with a shred of ‘empathy or perception’ should be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable” with proceeding (beres 2010, 8). these behaviors are directly perceived as discomfort, and hence make an ethical claim on oneself. some have even suggested that so-called “miscommunication theory” serves primarily as a bad-faith shield for defending against accusations of sexual assault. psychologists interpreting their study of young australian men, for instance, write that “the miscommunication repertoire . . . appears, in practice, to serve to rhetorically justify coercive sexual behavior,” specifically by men toward women—not to reflect genuine rampant misreading of cues by (women) partners (o’byrne, hansen, and rapley 2008, 188). that is, the study participants exhibited “a sophisticated understanding of subtle verbal and non-verbal means of communicating sexual refusal,” in contrast with the premises of the miscommunication model (o’byrne, hansen, and rapley 2008, 173). they only invoked the latter when asked to account for rape. these findings resonate with research suggesting that consent is often communicated by a variety of direct and indirect cues, ones that that even young adults generally understand (beres 2010; o’byrne, rapley, and hansen 2006; o’byrne, hansen, and rapley 2008; kitzinger and frith 1999; mccaw and senn 1998). worth noting here as well is that miscommunication theory in practice reinforces the heteronormative and highly gendered assumption that, because men generally initiate sexual activity and women choose whether to accept or refuse it, men are put in the position of interpreting women’s cues, while women must bear the responsibility for making their cues as clear as possible (beres 2010, 2). second, the direct perception account can accommodate cases of genuine miscommunication. direct perception does not imply that others’ intentions and desires are always transparent to us, let alone that our interpretations of others are correct. it rather implies that their intentions and desires are not “hidden away” behind their bodies and only contingently connected to their expressive behaviors. instead, the field of interpreting others’ intentions and desires is generally the very perceptual field where we encounter one another. most often, no inference is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 required from another’s behavior to a separate interpretive field. gallagher notes that, even as nonphenomenological accounts of perception tend to place far too strong an emphasis on the opacity of others’ behaviors, there are of course cases when their behaviors do not reveal their intentions and/or desires. however, in such cases, a misunderstanding “would only be something that i discover via these means”—namely, the means of direct perception (gallagher 2008, 540). that is, we discover the mysterious character of another’s experience, and have opportunities to misread it, precisely by means of direct perception. perhaps i go in for a hug at the end of a first date i thought went very well, only to see my date recoil. their recoiling is something i perceive directly, just as i perceived their enjoyment earlier. the recoil suggests to me that their enjoyment was a misperception, but it is through perception itself that i am able to correct for this earlier perception. what’s more, perceptual habits themselves can be trained in greater sensitivity to others, enabling greater possible attunement in order to obviate miscommunication in the rare cases that it does occur. 2.c. consent as feeling-with all that we’ve said about embodied consciousness and the direct perception of others applies to erotic contexts. erotic perception is direct, affective, embodied, and largely prereflective, involving an operative intentionality that undergirds act intentionality. now we may explore erotic experience more specifically, developing an account of consent as feeling-with. in latin, consentire implies an agreement of feelings, similar to the english “sympathy” (which derives from the greek for “feeling-with”). oliver notes that the notion of consentire as an agreement has been reduced to an agreement to do something; we might add that it is often reduced to an agreement to do something to someone. treating consent instead as an agreement of feelings accommodates the largely prereflective and direct character of our perceptions of others, especially in erotic situations. it can additionally accommodate the sense-making that such affective agreement involves: as oliver (2018, 198) argues, the word “sense” (sentire) means both (a) sensation or feeling and (b) meaning or knowing. thus, feeling-with another does not merely give us the raw material for signification: it is rather itself a form of signification, even if a largely prereflective one. additionally, feeling-with need not imply having the very same feelings as another, and so consent may be present in situations in which partners have different feelings and motivations from each other. following the phenomenological account of empathy, an agreement of feelings rather minimally involves recognizing both oneself and other as embodied subjects. in the erotic domain, as we will explore below, feeling-with involves recognizing self and other as embodied subjects of desire for one another and for sharing an erotic experience. anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 what does it mean that to consent is to feel-with? phenomenologically speaking, we may define consent as an intercorporeal and dynamic coexistence of desiring bodies, where desire has a triadic structure: one erotically desires the other, erotically desires that the other desire oneself, and desires an unfolding of erotic experience with the other.6 to feel-with is to desire-with. i erotically desire the other’s body as a lived body, longing for closeness and caress. i also desire that the other’s embodied consciousness be similarly directed in desire toward me: as susan bredlau (2018, 73) emphasizes, my desire for the other involves a desire for the other to desire me. third, i desire for the erotic experience to unfold, either through initiation or continuation. in this sense, erotic experience has a futural orientation, even as it need not imply a particular goal (such as orgasm). this unfolding is intercorporeally situated and temporally dynamic. it involves a perceptual copresence with another body, or what kukla (2021) has recently called a collaboration.7 the desires involved may also come in degrees, rendering consent more nuanced than a simple green light. while everything we have said about direct perception above pertains to erotic situations as well, it is worth clarifying that the account of consent i am developing here is grounded in the specific contours of what phenomenologists call erotic perception. erotic perception is the particular mode of direct perception that is directed toward a desired other body (merleau-ponty 2012, 159). to say that it is directed is to say that erotic perception is “intentional” in the phenomenological sense, where intentionality designates consciousness’s being directed toward something. its intentionality is affective and suffuses the body (sartre 1984, 501). and the body i desire is not desired as a mere object in my field of perception but rather as an embodied consciousness that i recognize as erotically desiring me. john russon (2009, 73–74) writes, “erotic experience is the fundamental bodily recognition of the presence of another person as a person. erotic attraction is the stirring of the other in me.” thus, another way to describe consent is as attuned erotic perception. in contrast with mainstream consent discourse, attuned erotic perception is not primarily cognitive. merleau-ponty (2012, 159) and sartre (1984, 213) go so far as to draw a clear distinction between erotic perception and cognition or understanding, because the former is not defined by a reflective separation between subject and object. for phenomenology, “erotic perception is not a cogitatio that intends a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and is accomplished in the 6 this is broadly compatible with john gardner’s (2018) suggestion that sex is a form of teamwork that exhibits collective agency, except that gardner does not highlight the affective dimension. it is also compatible with talia mae bettcher’s (2014) “interactional” theory of sex. 7 i take this to be an improvement from kukla’s 2018 suggestion that consent be viewed in terms of negotiation, discussed above. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 world, not within consciousness” (merleau-ponty 2012, 159). rather, erotic perception is affective, temporally stretched, and directly sensed. one cannot reduce it to mental states and/or bodily acts that express mental states. in this sense, a phenomenological account of eroticism overlaps with approaches from queer theory and psychoanalysis, which take sex to be incommunicable from the language of reason or self-mastery. sex may be described as “the encounter with what exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmatic sovereignty” (berlant and edelman 2014, 2). i suggested above that consent may be said to involve a triadic structure of desire: in consenting, one desires the other, desires that the other desire them, and desires an unfolding of erotic experience. i am inspired here by talia mae bettcher’s (2014, 606) account of sexual attraction as comprising (a) the eroticized other, (b) the eroticized self, and (c) the erotic interactions between the two, which tend toward increasing intimacy. i am not only attracted to the other but also erotically interested in myself as a locus of attraction, and the increasingly intimate erotic interaction between these two is arousing. i would add to bettcher’s account that, in describing the complex relations between eroticized self and eroticized other, we should also attend to the ambiguity between self and other. as queer theorists have emphasized, erotic desire spills out beyond the imagined boundaries between the two, such that it is not always clear where desire for another person ends and desire to be desired by the other begins (berlant and edelman 2014; saketopoulou 2019; clark 2019). erotic experience is excessive, and eventful because it involves an irreducible encounter with alterity ⁠.8 gayle salamon (2010, 52) picks up on merleau-ponty’s use of the term “transposition” as a way of denoting “the process by which the desire that houses itself in my body becomes my body itself.” for salamon, sensations of erotic experience become more ambiguous as they intensify, because one’s sensing subjectivity spreads out toward the desired other, where desire and body are indistinct. at first glance, it might seem that the introduction of ambiguity would destabilize the distinction between eroticized self and eroticized other. but ambiguity in the phenomenological tradition is not tantamount to indeterminacy. rather, ambiguity refers to the dual condition of being both for oneself and for others (beauvoir 2011, 416). one experiences one’s own ambiguity directly and affectively but cannot cognitively grasp it because doing so would require taking a third-person perspective on oneself. notably, both beauvoir (2011, 416) and merleau-ponty (2012, 171) identify erotic experience as the domain of human existence in which ambiguity is most clearly disclosed. beauvoir writes that “erotic experience . . . most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as subject” (2011, 416). here, the self is experienced in the 8 this may even also be considered the case in autoeroticism (anderson 2017). anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 doubled sensation of being both a desiring subject and an object of the other’s desire. the other is experienced as both an object of my desire and a desiring subject themselves. i desire the other, and i desire to continue exploring the erotic experience with them. sexual consent involves a complex dynamic of feeling with one’s partner(s),9 where self-relation and the relation to others are interconnected. i am both my subjectivity and what that the other perceives me to be, and the other who appears as a body in my perceptual field is not an object but rather a perspective (merleau-ponty 2012, lxxxvi). as with myself, the other “is his body and his body is the power for a certain world” (109). the complex dynamics between the eroticized other (the source of attraction) and the eroticized self (the locus of attraction) are doubled and dialectical. in addition to the ambiguity of self and other, the intercorporeal sexual experience may also be considered ambiguous. the relation between partners dynamically tenses, loosens, proliferates, and unfolds in ways that both constitute and shatter identities. one partner might “take the lead” in a given moment, only to let the other’s advances wash over them the next; partners may be so taken up in the moment that they feel nothing but a given sensation, or their corporeal experiences may be interwoven with fantasy, self-reflection, or ambivalence. these experiences are also always undergirded by habits that are at once personal and social, including sedimented social scripts that fly under an individual’s radar. the body is a nexus of habits and history that shape our behaviors, even as we are not merely passive recipients of them (merleau-ponty 2012, 165). in fact, we might identify ambiguity in sexual experience in at least four valences. first, the human body is both subject for itself and object for others, and it relates to itself both as subject and object⁠.10 second, embodied consciousness is both reflective and prereflective, its behaviors at once guided by conscious intentions and unconscious patterns of habit. third, the body is biological and cultural, without a clear demarcation between the two. finally, the body is temporally ambiguous, stretched toward the future by virtue of intentions and desires while also existing in the present by virtue of a sedimented past. yet the ambiguity of sexual encounters does not imply that it is pointless to probe their complexities. as caleb ward argues, ambiguity is not obscurantism (ward 2020, 166–69). after all, erotic encounters are highly communicative in their ambiguity. desiring bodies communicate through gesture, and often through speech. 9 while i focus on sex between two individuals here, the broad strokes of my argument may also be applied to sex in group settings. 10 i have benefited from gail weiss’s (2008, 134) helpful exploration of ambiguity in merleau-ponty’s phenomenology of perception in developing my account of these valences. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 merleau-ponty (2012, 163) argues that “speech is, among all bodily functions, the most tightly linked . . . to coexistence.” verbal communication does not eliminate ambiguity; rather, merleau-ponty suggests that speech amplifies the ambiguity of subject and object. speech is not a matter of a fixed subject verbalizing preexisting thoughts; rather, “speech accomplishes thought,” and others’ speech transforms my own being (183, 189). speech—including the expression of fantasies, desires, pleasures, triggers, hesitancies, and nos—is part of the shared landscape of experience in a given sexual encounter. in contrast with the consent discourse that treats speech as distinct from nonverbal behaviors and privileges the former (such as “no means no!” and “yes means yes!” campaigns), phenomenology suggests that speech often plays a key role in erotic intentionality, but so do nonverbal expressions. one might think about how sex with new partners often requires more speech than sex with familiar partners, unless the latter is involving trying new things. moreover, although erotic perception is intercorporeal, it does not imply transparent access to the other’s feelings. as we saw above, direct perception is not infallible, and feelingwith does not entail having the same feeling as the other. at first blush, it may seem that the direct perception account offered above tames or even blurs the radicality of otherness—that is, that direct perception naïvely implies easy access to others’ desires and feelings by suggesting that we encounter these directly through others’ embodied behaviors. but we have shown that feelingwith another is an ambiguous phenomenon that precisely reveals the other as a foreign embodied consciousness. wonder at the mystery of the other finds its place in the phenomenological account of direct perception, whereas the inferential account of perception presumed by standard consent discourse is unable to account for this mystery by treating ambiguity as ideally overcome through the clearest possible expressions of boundaries. by figuring consent as a shared experience, ambiguity appears as that which opens up the erotic space of wonder, rather than as a hindrance to sexual experience. and this account does not implicitly valorize companionate sexual encounters between loving or romantically involved intimate partners. recall that consent as feeling-with need not involve having the same experience as one’s partner, or the kind of communication shared by long-term partners. 2.d. consent and operative intentionality this phenomenological account implies that individuals must become habituated to developing consent, because direct perception can be more or less attuned. this involves working to unlearn toxic social scripts, being aware of one’s own positionality, and becoming competent at caring for sexual partners (including in situations in which one does not know one’s partner[s] well). it involves reshaping operative intentionality, which has a much broader scope than the act intentionality anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 on which most sexual ethics focus. attuning oneself to another, whether an intimate loved one or a one-night stand, requires continual work on factors that lead to inegalitarian agency. ward (2020, 174) compellingly argues that, in social settings involving stark power differentials (e.g., in heteropatriarchal societies), a “critical orientation toward one’s own social positionality is a precondition for relating ethically with another in a sexual encounter.” feeling-with another person requires recognizing one’s own positionality in power differentials. this recognition, while ongoing, is requisite for unlearning habits that serve either to reinforce one’s advantage or to encourage accepting one’s disadvantage. ward (2020, 187) suggests that privileged sexual agents, such as cisgender straight men, should engage in a “disruption of self-certainty” as a precondition for ethical sex. efforts toward self-knowledge, while never eliminating self-opacity, can help familiarize individuals with microdynamics of power and make them better able to engage in sexual experiences in ways that do not reproduce these dynamics. this is largely a matter of reshaping operative intentionality. awareness of one’s social positionality is “often present in an implicit sense of ‘knowing how’ rather than developed intellectually as theory” (ward 2020, 175; see also diprose 2002, 72). habits are iterative and malleable, and many people already cultivate habits of attention to sexual partners—learning their likes, dislikes, triggers, turn-ons—as they get to know one another (even as feminist research shows the strong asymmetry between men and women on this front). yet attunement may also be achieved with those one does not know well, provided that individuals engage in the disruption of self-certainty ward describes. indeed, one of the most glaring issues in philosophical debates about sexual consent is their lack of recognition of the historical, contextual, and unconscious factors that impact expressions of consent ⁠.11 while feminists and psychoanalysts have long emphasized these factors, debates about consent—in part due to their grounding in legal theory—often dangerously elide them. as alcoff puts it, “relying on consent is the main way many argue we should normatively distinguish between good and bad sexual practices, but consent is always embedded within structures that pose challenges for low-status groups of all sorts” (alcoff 2018, 77). overlooking these complexities obfuscates the strongly gendered power dynamics of consent. as noted above, phenomenology offers an alternative view by emphasizing that perception is historically and culturally sedimented. intentionality is shaded by an individual and collective past, including being oriented by operative intentionality. merleau-ponty writes that “our memories and our body, rather than being given to us through singular and determinate acts of consciousness, are enveloped by generality” (165). 11 for a careful analysis of these, see gavey’s (2005) just sex? the cultural scaffolding of rape. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 this is one way that psychoanalytical approaches to sexuality intersect with phenomenological ones: both take a wide lens on interpreting events by putting them in the context of meaningful wholes (161). conclusion: why redefine consent? sexual consent as permission-giving is a legal fiction. it relies on misconceptions about consciousness, embodiment, and the perception of others. but, in spite of its infelicity, this fiction permeates public discourse, where sexual consent is codified as a verbal and affirmative form of permission-giving in university brochures and sex education. as it has gained traction in the public imaginary, this fiction may also increasingly hold sway over individuals’ experiences: as we’ve noted, perceptual habits are imbricated in social scripts. as such, it is important that both academic and public discourses move away from permission-giving language around sex. i have argued here that we might do so by reframing consent as “feeling-with,” building on the latin etymology of the term using phenomenology. yet two possible objections are worth considering in closing. first is the objection that it is futile to redefine the word consent because consent in ordinary language has such strong presuppositions of permission-giving that it will resist attempts to redefine it. this objection has been compellingly formulated by ichikawa (2020, 14), who concludes that “consent is not a necessary condition for morally permissible sex.” on ichikawa’s view, my attempt to redefine consent phenomenologically as a thick, embodied dynamic of feeling-with would not be helpful, because it is not what ordinary people mean by consent most of the time— and even though language is malleable, the meanings of terms do not easily change at will. i do not take this potential objection to undercut my argument, however. phenomenology often utilizes technical definitions of terms that do not line up with the way they are used in ordinary language, but that does not mean that these concepts are not meaningful for opening up thinking and shaping possible future meanings of existing terms. moreover, there is reason to believe that consent’s meaning is already transforming, especially in activist communities (ward 2020, 217– 18). second is the objection, also formulated by ichikawa, that broadening the meaning of consent so that “consensual sex” is virtually synonymous with “ethically permissible sex” is tautological. for ichikawa (2020, 24), “it is neither informative nor a helpful guide to decision-making to be told that for sex to be permissible, it needs to have all the features that are required for sex to be permissible. consent is supposed to explain moral features of sex, not merely redescribe them.” however, i am prepared to accept that the view i’ve developed here describes, rather than explains, moral features of sex. description is the primary task of phenomenology, and i take it to be both informative and helpful. given how fundamentally different the anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 understanding of perception, embodiment, and interaction that ground my view are from standard discourses of consent, the phenomenological description here is far from “merely redescrib[ing].” instead, phenomenological description is the starting point for engaging in normative critique (guenther 2021, 7). while i do not claim to present consent as the only necessary concept for sexual ethics, i think it can help move sexual ethics away from the terms of the performative and attitudinal debate. if it is tautological, it is so in a way that is meant to provoke new discourses that better take account of the interactive and embodied character of sexual ethics than the current framework. a final question concerns what lack of consent looks like in the framework i’ve provided. as with consent, nonconsent will be an intercorporeal phenomenon that appears within a shared world of perception. rather than indicating a private state of mind that the other may or may not successfully convey to another through refusing advances, lack of consent would be a lack of feeling-with-one-another. far from victim-blaming, this alternative suggests that a failure to stop one’s advances in a nonconsensual situation is a fault of the initiator not only in a moral sense but often also in a perceptual sense: the initiator may fail to see that the situation is nonconsensual due to a lack of attuned perception. this makes consent and nonconsent properties of the social situation rather than of individual agents. as cahill (2001, 132) writes, “a fundamental part of the violence of rape is that intersubjectivity becomes a one-way street, rather than the dynamic engagement that embodiment calls for.” moving from the “private” sphere of mind to the dynamic phenomenological plane not only follows from a phenomenological account of perception but also makes better sense of the large gray areas between genuinely fulfilling sex and clear cases of sexual violation (where the perpetrator knows that the victim is refusing their advances but disregards their refusals) than standard accounts of consent. references alcoff, linda martín. 2018. rape and resistance: understanding the complexities of sexual violation. medford, ma: polity press. anderson, ellie. 2017. “autoeroticism: rethinking self-love with derrida and irigaray.” phaenex 12, no. 1 (spring/summer): 53–70. https://doi.org/10 .22329/p.v12i1.4767. anderson, ellie, cynthia willett, and diana tietjens meyers. 2020. “feminist perspectives on the self.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, fall 2021 edition. published march 14, 2005, latest revision march 21, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self/. beauvoir, simone de. 2011. the second sex. translated by constance borde and sheila malovany-chevallier. new york: vintage books. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 beres, melanie. 2010. “sexual miscommunication? untangling assumptions about sexual communication between casual sex partners.” culture, health & sexuality 12, no. 1 (january): 1–14. berlant, lauren, and lee edelman. 2014. sex, or the unbearable. durham, nc: duke university press. bettcher, talia mae. 2014. “when selves have sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation.” journal of homosexuality 61 (5): 605–20. bredlau, susan. 2018. the other in perception: a phenomenological account of our experience of other persons. albany: state university of new york press. brett, nathan. 1998. “sexual offenses and consent.” canadian journal of law and jurisprudence 11, no. 1 (january): 69–88. brison, susan j. 2021. “what’s consent got to do with it?” social philosophy today 37: 9–21. online first: august 20. https://doi.org/10.5840/socphiltoday202181983. cahill, ann j. 2001. rethinking rape. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. clark, ginna. 2019. “yes-saying, no-saying, and the places in-between: seduction and the psychoanalytic exploration of sexual consent.” studies in gender and sexuality 20 (4): 274–84. diprose, rosalyn. 2002. corporeal generosity: on giving with nietzsche, merleauponty, and levinas. albany: state university of new york press. fischel, joseph j. 2019. screw consent: a better politics of sexual justice. oakland: university of california press. gallagher, shaun. 2008. “direct perception in the intersubjective context.” consciousness and cognition 17, no. 2 (june): 535–43. garcia, manon. 2021. la conversation des sexes: philosophie du consentement. paris: climats. gardner, john. 2018. “the opposite of rape.” oxford journal of legal studies 38, no. 1 (spring): 48–70. gavey, nicola. 2005. just sex? the cultural scaffolding of rape. new york: routledge. guenther, lisa. 2021. “six senses or critique for critical phenomenology.” puncta: journal of critical phenomenology 4 (2): 5–23. https://doi.org/10.5399/pjcp .v4i2.2. hurd, heidi m. 1996. “the moral magic of consent.” legal theory 2, no. 2 (june): 121– 46. ichikawa, jonathan jenkins. 2020. “presupposition and consent.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6 (4): article 4. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2020.4.8302. kitzinger, celia, and hannah frith. 1999. “just say no? the use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal.” discourse & society 10, no. 3 (july): 293–316. anderson – a phenomenological approach to sexual consent published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 kukla, quill. 2021. “a nonideal theory of sexual consent.” ethics 131, no. 2 (january): 270–92. kukla, rebecca 2018. “that’s what she said: the language of sexual negotiation.” ethics 129, no. 1 (october): 70–97. mackinnon, catharine a. 1989. toward a feminist theory of the state. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mccaw, jodee m., and charlene y. senn. 1998. “perception of cues in conflictual dating situations: a test of the miscommunication hypothesis.” violence against women 4, no. 5 (october): 609–24. mcgregor, joan. 2005. is it rape? on acquaintance rape and taking women’s consent seriously. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. mcweeny, jennifer. 2020. “operative intentionality.” in 50 concepts for a critical phenomenology, edited by gail weiss, ann v. murphy, and gayle salamon, 255–62. evanston, il: northwestern university press. merleau-ponty, maurice. 2012. phenomenology of perception. translated by donald a. landes. new york: routledge. meyers, diana tietjens. 2018. introduction to feminists rethink the self, edited by diana tietjens meyers. new york: routledge. o’byrne, rachael, susan hansen, and mark rapley. 2008. “‘if a girl doesn’t say “no” . . .’: young men, rape and claims of ‘insufficient knowledge.’” journal of community & applied social psychology 18, no. 3 (may/june): 168–93. o’byrne, rachael, mark rapley, and susan hansen. 2006. “‘you couldn't say “no,” could you?’: young men’s understandings of sexual refusal.” feminism & psychology, 16 (2): 133–54. oliver, kelly. 2018. response ethics. edited by alison suen. london: rowman & littlefield international. pateman, carole. 1988. the sexual contract. stanford, ca: stanford university press. primoratz, igor. 2001. “sexual morality: is consent enough?” ethical theory and moral practice 4, no. 3 (september): 201–18. russon, john. 2009. bearing witness to epiphany: persons, things, and the nature of erotic life. albany: state university of new york press. ———. 2014. “between two intimacies: the formative contexts of individual experience.” emotion, space and society 13 (november): 65–70. saketopoulou, avgi. 2019. “the draw to overwhelm: consent, risk, and the retranslation of enigma.” journal of the american psychoanalytic association. 67 (1): 133–67. salamon, gayle. 2010. assuming a body: transgender and rhetorics of materiality. new york: columbia university press. sartre, jean-paul. 1984. being and nothingness. translated by hazel e. barnes. new york: washington square press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 scheler, max. 1954. the nature of sympathy. translated by peter heath. london: routledge & kegan paul. schulhofer, stephen j. 1992. “taking sexual autonomy seriously: rape law and beyond.” law and philosophy 11, no. 1–2 (march): 35–94. shafer, carolyn m., and marilyn frye. 1977. “rape and respect.” in feminism and philosophy, edited by mary vetterling-braggin, frederick a. elliston, and jane english, 333–46. totowa, nj: littlefield, adams. sherwin, emily. 1996. “infelicitous sex.” legal theory 2 (3): 209–32. stein, edith. 1989. on the problem of empathy: the collected works of edith stein, volume 3. translated by waltraut stein. washington, dc: ics publications. ward, caleb. 2020. “agency, responsibility, and the limits of sexual consent.” phd diss. state university of new york, stony brook. ward, caleb, and ellie anderson. 2022. “the ethical significance of being an erotic object.” in the palgrave handbook of sexual ethics, edited by david boonin, 55–72. new york: palgrave macmillan. weiss, gail. 2008. “ambiguity.” in merleau-ponty: key concepts, edited by rosalyn diprose and jack reynolds, 132–41. new york: routledge. wertheimer, alan. 2003. consent to sexual relations. cambridge: cambridge university press. ellie anderson is assistant professor of philosophy at pomona college in claremont, ca, usa. she specializes in continental european philosophy (especially phenomenology, existentialism, and poststructuralism) and feminist theory. her recent publications include “hermeneutic labor: the gendered burden of interpretation in intimate relationships between women and men,” and “the ethical significance of being an erotic object,” coauthored with caleb ward. her current research concerns the phenomenology of love and selfhood. she also cohosts the philosophy podcast overthink. 14239 anderson title page 14239 anderson final format est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 9 recommended citation falbo, arianna, and travis lacroix. 2022. “est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 9. 2022 est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai arianna falbo bentley university afalbo@bentley.edu travis lacroix dalhousie university tlacroix@dal.ca falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai arianna falbo, and travis lacroix abstract cultural code-switching concerns how we adjust our overall behaviours, manners of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. we defend the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in artificial intelligence systems. we explore a series of ethical and epistemic issues that arise when bringing cultural code-switching to bear on artificial intelligence. building upon dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering, we discuss how emerging technologies in ai can give rise to epistemic oppression, and specifically, a form of self-silencing that we call “cultural smothering.” by leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural code-switching unaddressed, ai systems risk negatively impacting alreadymarginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities. keywords: code-switching, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, epistemic oppression, testimonial smothering, cultural smothering 1. introduction in linguistics, code-switching describes using two (or more) languages (or language varieties) within a single text, conversation, or utterance. 1 this purely linguistic sense of code-switching has been widely discussed in the context of artificial intelligence (ai)—especially for natural language processing (nlp) models.2 ai/nlp research on code-switching typically concentrates on the morphosyntactic features of 1 the term “code-switching” (sometimes referred to as code-mixing, codeshifting, language alternation, language mixture, or language switching) appears in the 1950s; however, observations of these linguistic phenomena in academic writing predate this baptism by several decades; see benson (2001) for an historical discussion. codeswitching, like many other communicative phenomena, appears to be governed by several linguistic and extralinguistic features; see discussion in, e.g., gumperz (1977), pfaff (1979), poplack (1980), and benson (2001). 2 see jose et al. (2020) for a recent survey. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 code-switched linguistic data at the sentential (or subsentential) level. however, a broader characterisation of code-switching phenomena is primarily social—namely, cultural code-switching. cultural code-switching relates to how we adapt our overall behaviour, manner of speaking, and appearance in response to a perceived change in our social environment. unlike the merely linguistic sense of code-switching, cultural code-switching involves “a much more profound shift than toggling between languages or dialects does” (morton 2019, 76). 3 cultural code-switching is more intimately connected to conceptions of oneself. it is also a mechanism by which we can conform to dominant cultural norms, and by the same token, it is a means by which we can defect and resist the status quo. as ai-based language technologies continue to improve and become more pervasive in society, it will be increasingly essential that they fluidly interact with humans—that is, in the way that humans typically interact with one another. however, a significant part of such interactions involves nonlinguistic communication—that is, the additional features of communication that are relevant for cultural code-switching. engagement in cultural code-switching is especially common among minority communities, and it may be done for a variety of reasons— conforming to majority-group norms, gaining social acceptance, avoiding hostility or discrimination, or achieving social mobility, to name a few. accordingly, the extant biases of emerging technologies, which typically arise from dominant-group conventions, may be further exacerbated.4 to mitigate, and not further contribute to, these biases, it is important for researchers in ai—especially those working in the machine learning paradigm and other emerging methods—to take cultural codeswitching into account in models of nlp. this is particularly true when these systems are deployed, especially in high-stakes social environments (e.g., legal settings, job interviews, educational institutions) or when they are otherwise integrated into standard consumer-facing technologies or applications. the goals of this paper are twofold, in light of these considerations. first, we underscore the importance of cultural code-switching in research on the ethics of ai. despite its ubiquity and, more importantly, the unique value and costs that cultural code-switching has for those from marginalised backgrounds, surprisingly little attention has been given to these phenomena, either in the technical literature on 3 see also the definitions and related discussions found in morton (2014), mccluney et al. (2019), and falbo (2021). 4 it is, by now, well documented that many instances of machine bias result from training, where the technological artefact mirrors extant biases in datasets. see discussion in, e.g., friedman and nissenbaum (1996), angwin et al. (2016), o’neil (2016), caliskan, bryson, and narayanan (2017), cave and dihal (2020), and gabbrielle johnson (2021). falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 nlp models or in the philosophical literature on ai more broadly. this paper bridges this gap by defending the need to investigate cultural code-switching capacities in ai systems (ais). second, drawing upon the growing literature on epistemic oppression and related work on structural oppression, we canvas the potential moral and epistemic risks involved in implementing—or, more importantly, failing to implement—codeswitching capacities in ais. by leaving the sociodynamic features of cultural codeswitching unaddressed, ais risk negatively impacting already marginalised social groups by widening opportunity gaps and further entrenching social inequalities.5 more generally, reflecting upon the need for cultural code-switching in ais allows us to enrich our understanding of these phenomena beyond the context of human-ai interaction. cultural code-switching influences not only first-personal identity— particularly what dembroff and saint-croix (2019) have called agential identities—but also broader systems of social coordination within and between groups. the paper proceeds as follows. section 2 provides a brief overview of presentday artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, highlighting extant biases that have surfaced. this section also clarifies that the ai research area that is most relevant to code-switching is natural language processing. however, as mentioned, the code-switching phenomena we are primarily concerned with are broader than the linguistic context alone. accordingly, section 3 clarifies what cultural code-switching is and some of the reasons we do it, using specific examples. section 4 draws upon the literature on epistemic oppression and, in particular, on dotson’s (2014) analysis of testimonial smothering. in so doing, we broaden dotson’s framework to include a species of self-silencing, which, following falbo (2021), we call cultural smothering. this occurs when cultural code-switching behaviours manifest as a form of selfcensoring: one alters aspects of their cultural identity in response to an unwelcoming or hostile social atmosphere. we also discuss how pressures to code-switch in this sense, and thus to engage in or succumb to cultural smothering, often have the structure of a double bind choice situation (frye 1983). section 5 draws some tentative conclusions concerning the relationship between cultural code-switching and emerging technologies. we must be sensitive to how practices of silencing are sustained and reinforced in society and how this maintains unjust social arrangements, thereby limiting access to social goods needed to improve the material conditions of marginalised communities (e.g., safety, education, job opportunities). a natural extension of this carries over to the domain 5 see recent work by justin bruner, cailin o’connor, and travis lacroix (bruner and o’connor 2017; bruner 2019; o’connor and bruner 2019; lacroix and o’connor, forthcoming) for discussion on how the constitution of groups and group dynamics alone may give rise to inequitable conventions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 of emerging technologies, particularly ai and nlp. we should be critical of how these same patterns of silencing and epistemic oppression are reproduced and potentially rendered more potent and efficacious in emerging technologies—especially as these technologies become increasingly widespread and seamlessly integrated into everyday life. to be clear, it is not our intention to defend any concrete solutions to the problems we identify. we don’t offer any optimistic plans for developing or training ai to avoid or ameliorate epistemic oppression. we are not confident that any such solution ultimately exists. instead, we offer these arguments as a serious caution, as a lesson concerning the limitations and harms of ai technologies when they are adopted and implemented against the backdrop of a nonideal, hierarchically structured social world, filled with unjust divisions on the bases of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, and class, among others. unless and until the social world changes for the better, we should expect these problems to persist. 2. artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing artificial intelligence describes both a property of computer systems— displaying intelligent behaviour6—as well as a set of techniques that researchers use to achieve this property (gabriel 2020). machine learning (ml) is a branch of artificial intelligence wherein algorithms use data to learn gradually. the three main approaches to machine learning are supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. in supervised learning, the algorithm is trained on labelled examples; this is the training data. the model is evaluated on how well it generalises what it learns from the training data to previously unseen examples (called test data). for example, one might train an image-recognition model on millions of labelled images; if it performs well, it should correctly label novel images not in the training set. in unsupervised learning, an algorithm learns underlying patterns or correlations from unlabelled data. for example, recommendation systems categorise users based on their viewing patterns in order to recommend similar content. reinforcement learning depends upon sparse rewards for actions. for example, a chess game has a reward of +1 if a player wins, −1 if a player loses, and 0 if a player draws. a reinforcement learning model can learn to play chess merely by playing hundreds of thousands of games and receiving a reward at the end of each game. machine learning techniques stand in contrast to symbolic systems (or “good old-fashioned ai”), where explicit, handcrafted rules had to be hard-coded into the machine—typically in the form of complex, nested if-then statements. the current 6 where “intelligence” is understood as “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments” (legg and hutter, 2007). falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 driver of ai research is so-called deep learning, an approach to machine learning that utilises deep neural networks modelled (roughly) after neurons in the human brain. deep learning uses layers of algorithms to process data—information is passed through each subsequent layer in a neural network, with the previous layer’s output providing input for the subsequent layer. one of the key advantages of deep learning techniques is that they do not require the heavily handcrafted features used by traditional machine learning methods. deep convolutional neural networks are differentiated from their shallow counterparts primarily in terms of their depth, heterogeneity, and sparse connectivity (buckner 2019). in the early days of machine learning, researchers could focus on the fundamental aspects of their work without much concern for the social or ethical consequences of these systems because they were relatively encapsulated in the confines of the research lab. however, luccioni and bengio (2019) highlight that these algorithms are increasingly being deployed in society due in part to the promise of the unprecedented economic impacts of ml applications (bughin et al. 2018; szczepański 2019; russell 2019). consequently, these systems’ ethical and social impacts have started to be examined by researchers from a wide range of disciplines. since 2016, emerging technologies’ ethical and social consequences have just begun to have a more prominent role in ai research more generally (christian 2020). one worry is that algorithms may latch on to spurious correlations (overfitting the training data), which can lead to behaviour that we would call, for example, sexist or racist (even if implicitly so) when performed by a human. another slightly different worry is that the data used to train an algorithm is inherently biased. 7 hence an optimally trained model will perform exactly how it should, given the data it has received, again leading to potentially problematic patterns of “behaviour.” a final worry is that the data is simply incomplete or unrepresentative, meaning that the trained system may be “oblivious” to certain (potentially huge) swaths of society. for example, a health algorithm that used health costs as a proxy for health needs learned to be biased against black patients in the united states (obermeyer et al. 2019). similarly, a recidivism-prediction algorithm is twice as likely to have false positives (labelling individuals as high risk for re-offence when they are in fact low risk) for black individuals and twice as likely to have false negatives (labelling individuals as low risk for re-offence when they are in fact high risk) for white individuals (angwin et al. 2016). to put it another way, at best, a sophisticated ml system can be an efficient tool that reflects exactly what the data tell it about the real world, meaning that if the data are biased—which they typically are—then the ml system will perpetuate the existing biases or inequalities in the social system that gave rise to those data. 7 see discussion in green (2019) and gabbrielle johnson (2021). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 as mentioned in section 1, cultural code-switching is especially common among minority communities, implying differential values and risks for individuals in minority groups compared with those in majority groups. thus, biases in ai technologies can come to bear in significant ways on cultural code-switching (which we discuss in more detail in the next section). owing to the communicative nature of code-switching, the field of artificial intelligence in which an analysis of code-switching will be most relevant is natural language processing, which studies natural language interactions between computers and humans. some of the key areas of study in nlp research include speech recognition, which may involve recognising spoken language and translating it into text format; natural language understanding or interpretation, which is necessary for, for example, question-and-answer interactions or machine translation; and natural language generation, which outputs text. nlp has many important applications, including virtual assistants, spam detection, speech recognition, named-entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, automatic text summary, autocomplete, predictive typing, relationship extraction, and machine translation, to name a few. for many years, researchers have utilised shallow models (such as support vector machines or logistic regression) or explicit symbolic representations (such as first-order logic) to solve particular nlp tasks. however, the advent of deep learning techniques has allowed for significant progress in nlp research in the last decade. you are probably familiar with nlp, even if you have not heard of it—nlp models are necessary for consumer-facing applications like google assistant, siri, or alexa to work. consider the last of these. amazon’s alexa is a virtual assistant ai system that makes significant use of nlp models. it constantly monitors signals in the environment and processes them to minimise ambient noise (such as the conversation on the television) that is not relevant to its task. this preprocessing is always going on in the background. for the software to turn on, it requires a “wake word”—for example, hey alexa! thus, before alexa even does anything, it must be capable of differentiating speech from background noise, detecting very specific signals, and responding to them. once alexa wakes, it converts the recorded audio to text by analysing certain features like frequency and pitch—this is speech recognition. once the speech has been converted to text, alexa must interpret the meaning of (at least parts of) the text to respond appropriately—this is natural language understanding. once the request is processed and understood, alexa may need to produce a “voiced” response. however, nlp research generally starts with the assumption that language is solely about the transfer of information—that is, the content of the message. as mentioned in the introduction, there are many extralinguistic factors involved in cultural code-switching, so this emphasis on content is myopic. even granting the view falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 that language is primarily a way of communicating or transferring information, language is but one way of doing so. two of the leading language models in machine learning are bidirectional encoder representations from transformers—also known as bert (devlin et al. 2019)—and generative pre-trained transformer 3—also known as gpt-3 (brown et al. 2020)—which is the third iteration of an autoregressive language model, produced by openai. let’s consider the latter of these. the full version of gpt-3 makes use of around 175 billion parameters—two orders of magnitude larger than its predecessor, gpt-2, and one order of magnitude larger than the next-largest nlp model, microsoft’s turing nlg. 8 the majority of training data for this model (around 60 percent) comes from a dataset called common crawl—a corpus generated from crawling the internet—which, as of april 2021, contains around 320 tebibytes (tib) of data taken from 3.1 billion web pages. gpt3 used a filtered version of the common crawl dataset, resulting in approximately fourteen billion tokens (though they do not provide details of how the common crawl dataset was curated). to give a sense of this dataset’s scale, gpt-3 was also trained, in part, on the entire english-language wikipedia, which consists of three billion tokens and accounted for only around 3 percent of the training data for the model. additional datasets used to train gpt-3 include webtext2—consisting of the text of web pages from all outbound reddit links from posts with three or more “upvotes”—and books1 and books2—which are two internet-based books corpora. note, however, that the internet—and therefore, the data used to train gpt3—is predominantly english: around 45 percent of html pages in the common crawl dataset have english as their primary language. it is estimated that english is used by over 61 percent of all the websites whose content language we know, with the next most predominant language being russian, at 5.5 percent (web technology surveys 2022). thus, there is likely an anglocentric bias in the data used to train large language models. however, it is perhaps relevant to note that it is very difficult to make claims about the training of these models with any degree of certainty. for example, openai does not describe the filtering process for the common crawl dataset, and the webtext2 dataset and the books corpora are not publicly available and lack official documentation (bandy and vincent 2021). 8 since the release of gpt-3, this model has been surpassed in size by google’s 1.7 trillion-parameter language model. this show of one-upmanship is criticised by bender et al. (2021), who highlight, among other things, the environmental costs of training large language models. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 furthermore, as others have pointed out, the common crawl dataset will overrepresent those populations with higher internet usage rates (luccioni and viviano 2021). and those countries with the highest internet penetration rates are european (northern, western, and southern) and north american, with the lowest rates coming from africa and south asia (j. johnson 2021). this discrepancy leads to a “digital language divide” on the internet—despite there being around seven thousand languages spoken worldwide, only a few hundred of these are represented on the internet (young 2015). thus, the datasets being used to train these language models are inherently biased, and there has (to date) been relatively little analysis of these biases. in some ways, the simple case is the one where an algorithm is trained on a specific language; yet the technologies are highly biased in favour of anglophones. more difficult cases involve particular accents or dialects, and there is already overwhelming evidence that nlp systems are biased—this time in favour of a particular type of anglophone: one whose idiolect resembles something like “broadcast english” (harwell 2018). thus, the ubiquity of code-switching highlights a further difficulty that these already inherently flawed systems will face. the biases that we have been discussing in nlp models have been primarily linguistic in nature. however, as mentioned in the introduction, there is a broader sense of code-switching that we take to be pertinent here—namely, cultural codeswitching. in the next section, we discuss how the pressures to code-switch—to adapt, minimise, suppress, mask, hide, or conform—are especially pressing among already disadvantaged populations. often, code-switching is a skill that is required to gain access to safety and opportunities for improving one’s material conditions. but at what cost? 3. cultural code-switching cultural code-switching is ubiquitous in human interactions: it is used to switch between formal and informal contexts; to wield power and to signal asymmetric authority relations (popa-wyatt and wyatt 2018; tirrell 2012); and can express a sense of agency over one’s social identity and serve to build and reinforce a sense of community and solidarity by signalling in-group affiliation (dembroff and saint-croix 2019). since cultural code-switching takes account of the socio-pragmatic aspects of communication, it includes extralinguistic cultural artefacts (in addition to linguistic ones). for example, consider how a student may modulate their tone of voice or change the register of their speech by using honorifics like “ma’am,” “sir,” “doctor,” or “professor” when interacting with faculty. thus, instead of the narrow sense of altering some linguistic features of communication, we take code-switching more broadly to include nonlinguistic communicative signals which convey information— for example, about oneself and one’s relation to others in a given social context. falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 why do we code-switch? the reasons for code-switching are vast and complex. one important use of code-switching is to signal in-group membership and affiliation. consider how teenagers (in a broadly north american context) will often use various slang terms and expressions when talking with each other. a quick search through urban dictionary, a crowd-sourced online lexicon used to archive slang words and phrases, reveals a host of in-group expressions of this sort—for example, “lit,” “salty,” “bae,” “simp,” “noob,” “ghosting,” “dank,” “taking an l,” and many more. if you don’t know what these expressions mean, that is part of the point. when young people use these expressions among friends, they are code-switching (whether they realise it or not). they are signalling to one’s audience that one is “in the know,” “one of them,” or as they might colloquially put it, “cool.” consider another example from the lgbtq2+ community, particularly the subculture of drag queens (them 2018). if you go to a drag show, there are a range of unspoken cultural norms and expectations that are operative. if it is your first time, you might be taken aback by the playful, mock-impolite, bantering style that drag performers often use. in some cases, drag queens might be “throwing shade”: a kind of indirect insult toward other drag performers or audience members. this phenomenon is discussed in jennie livingston’s (1990) paris is burning, a documentary on drag culture in new york city. dorian corey, a drag queen interviewed in the film, gives the following example of throwing shade. if i were to say in a terribly condescending voice, “oh honey, i’m so glad you saved up to buy those glasses,” that’s blatant shade. i didn’t insult the glasses, or you, directly. it’s implied by my voice and the context of what i said. you know they’re ugly. it is important to note the central role that tone of voice and context play in this example. this is a key issue which we will return to in discussing the relationship between the phenomena of cultural code-switching and human-to-ai interactions. more broadly, this style of communicative engagement has been identified as a kind of pro-social in-group communication, which builds community and solidarity within lgbtq2+ communities. additionally, mock impoliteness is also a rhetorical strategy that can be deployed as a form of self-protection; it is a way of preemptively developing a thick skin against bigotry and discrimination (mckinnon 2017; oliva, antonialli, and gomes 2021). as another example, cultural code-switching in the context of race plays a major role in the plot of boots riley’s (2018) black-comedy film, sorry to bother you. the film centres on a young, black man named cassius green (played by lakeith stanfield) who gets a job as a telemarketer and finds major success after he is coached by an older (also black) coworker (played by danny glover) to use his “white voice.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 white actors voice the “white voices” for these characters. one of the major themes of this film is how being successful in a predominantly white culture requires conforming to the expectations of the dominant group—in this case, a marginalised black man “sounding” white to achieve success at work. according to touré (2018), “[putting] on a white voice” means to embrace “the ease that white privilege brings. it means sounding as if you’re entitled to the good life. it means feeling calm way down in your soul. it means never having to be afraid someone will call the police on you just because you’re breathing.” however, the film also explores the social consequences of code-switching with respect to one’s in-group: green ends up alienating (or being alienated from) his friends, family, and social in-group. this resonates with a broader experience of double alienation that individuals from marginalised groups often confront as they find themselves existing between disparate social worlds with distinct and often incompatible cultural norms, values, and expectations. morton (2019) describes how first-generation scholars often confront ethical compromises in the process of trying to gain upward social mobility through pursuing a degree in higher education. in conforming to the dominant norms operative in institutes of higher education (especially within elite institutions with predominately upper-class and white student and faculty populations), students from first-generation or low-income backgrounds often feel isolated and less able to connect with family and loved ones. this is perhaps especially true within fields like philosophy, where first-generation and low-income academics may be unable to fully share their academic life with family and loved ones, who may not understand the point or value in pursuing a career as an academic philosopher. in a recent paper, morton, who is a first-generation scholar, says of her family: “we love each other, but i am now part of a world whose logic is mysterious to them” (2021, 10). thus, the process of code-switching can give rise to serious ethical trade-offs and compromises.9 more generally, one key use of code-switching is cultivating a sense of belonging and community with those in one’s social group. one code-switches to express a shared social identity with others; to make others feel comfortable, at ease, or “at home” in a given social environment. this is just one—distinctively positive and self-affirming—use of code-switching. other uses of code-switching are starkly different. in some cases, one might code-switch not as a means to increase a sense of community with others but rather to navigate an unfamiliar and potentially unwelcoming (or even hostile) social environment. in this sense, the “masking” behaviours that autistic individuals may perform—faking eye contact, mirroring 9 for further discussions of related issues, see morton (2019); and for discussion on the case of academic philosophy specifically, see the recent special issue of the apa newsletter on feminism and philosophy (falbo and stewart 2021). falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 gestures and expressions, scripting conversations, disguising “stimming” behaviour, enduring sensory discomfort, and so on—are a type of cultural code-switching (hull et al. 2017), which may be employed in a range of social situations, including feeling safe in a culture that has, historically, highly stigmatised autistic individuals (silberman 2015; donvan and zucker 2016). importantly, for our purposes, each of the behaviours just described is nonlinguistic. in this case, regular practice of cultural code-switching can have inherently negative side effects, including increased stress, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion or “autistic burnout” (bargiela, steward, and mandy 2016; cage, di monaco, and newell 2018; cage and troxell-whitman, 2019; raymaker et al. 2020), or loss of identity and increased risk of suicidal thoughts (cassidy et al. 2020). in this case, too, certain intersectional groups may feel differential social pressure to codeswitch—several studies have suggested that people who identify as women are more prone to code-switching than those who identify as men, leading women to be misdiagnosed and partially causing the gender gap in autism diagnoses (gould and ashton-smith 2011; dworzynski et al. 2012; lai et al. 2015; hull et al. 2019). thus, code-switching is a crucially important skill for negotiating the social dynamics of high-stakes environments—for example, interactions with the police or in courtrooms, educational institutions, job interviews, and more. moreover, the pressures to code-switch are not felt uniformly but are disproportionately experienced by members of historically marginalised groups, who often must assimilate to dominant cultural norms to gain social acceptance and access certain resources or benefits or avoid potential harms and mistreatment. for example, empirical studies and first-person testimonies have shown that black women with natural hairstyles (e.g., afros, braids, twists) are less likely to get job interviews than black women with straightened hair, especially compared to white women (koval and rosette 2021). black women with natural hair received lower scores on assessments of “professionalism” and “competence,” and they were less likely to be invited for job interviews as a result. most notably, this occurred when the norms of the job required a more conservative and formal dress code. one striking example is the 2017 case of destiny tompkins, a young black woman who was told by her manager (a white woman) at banana republic that her braided hair was “unkempt” and “too urban” for the store’s image. the manager told her to take out her braids or else she would stop scheduling her for shifts (samotin 2017). in this context, black women might decide to code-switch—for example, by straightening their hair for job interviews—in order assimilate to norms of “professionalism” in white-dominated spaces. this is often needed to ensure job security and social acceptance. of course, code-switching in high-stakes settings, especially where particular opportunities for social mobility and benefits reside, involves more than changes in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 one’s physical appearance. dembroff and saint-croix (2019) emphasise the relationship between cultural code-switching and what they call agential identities. they define agential identities as “the self-identities we make available to others— they bridge what we take ourselves to be with what others take us to be” (dembroff and saint-croix 2019, 572). they discuss how code-switching is an effective way to negotiate and switch between entire social identities, in some cases moving between genuine identities and merely apparent or superficial social identities. to make an explicit connection between the concepts discussed in this section and the claims of section 2, consider the following concrete example of how codeswitching is implicated in nlp. we highlighted how nlp models typically encode the conventions of dominant groups. as a result, nlp is severely anglocentric. 10 furthermore, we emphasise how researchers typically understand language primarily in terms of its syntactic features. but, even within the anglophone community, different manners of communication abound, and these differences are not necessarily exclusive to syntax. thus, suppose an nlp model is trained on common crawl and other anglocentric datasets, as with gpt-3. the model will, of course, be biased in favour of dominant-group conventions—in this case, communication conventions, which include morphosyntactic features of particular languages but also, as we have highlighted, other features relevant to communication within and between groups. then, any application that uses this model will encode those biases, leading to the risk of double alienation for those individuals who are not members of the dominant group but who have to interact with the application.11 this feature of nlp models reflects exactly the insight that code-switching pressures are felt primarily by those who are historically marginalised. thus, these models, and the applications that utilise them, give rise to negative feedback loops which perpetuate and reproduce harms faced by these groups, thus further entrenching societal structural inequalities. for example, consider the application of ai tools that make use of nlp to detect toxic speech online on social media platforms like twitter. recent studies have shown that ai tools are far more likely to generate false positives—that is, misidentifying tweets as containing offensive or toxic content—when the tweets are written in african american english (sap et al. 2019). in some cases, when such content is flagged, this can ultimately serve to censor and, thus, silence those who are speaking from nondominant social positions—specifically, 10 nlp models, in particular, are often significantly biased in several other ways as well, including gender and cultural biases in the datasets on which these models are trained. see discussion in lacroix and luccioni (2022). 11 this is not unrelated to the cultural red king effect, discussed by justin bruner and cailin o’connor (bruner and o’connor 2017; o’connor 2017; bruner 2019; o’connor and bruner 2019). falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 users who make use of linguistic practices which are unfamiliar to these ai tools and which fall outside the status quo.12 at the most general level, cultural code-switching influences one’s overall mode of existence in social space—how one chooses (or is forced) to exist in the social world. and technology is increasingly implicated in these social spaces and the interactions within them. particular social environments and cultural contexts that incentivise cultural code-switching may thus be sites of epistemic oppression where silencing thrives. as long as nlp seeks to furnish ai systems with human-level linguistic capacities, it will be important to attend to code-switching behaviour, since cultural code-switching often depends upon the communicative signals that nlp seeks to analyse and “understand.” 4. cultural smothering and double binds when one is forced to code-switch in the ways discussed in the previous section—to mask, blend in, or otherwise express a superficial identity or persona to be accepted, make a living, or avoid harms—it results in a form of self-censorship or self-silencing. this phenomenon is akin to what dotson (2011) has analysed as testimonial smothering. on dotson’s analysis, testimonial smothering is a form of selfsilencing that occurs when a speaker truncates or self-censors their testimony because their audience is taken to lack the required competence needed to properly understand what one is saying. this amounts to a kind of epistemic violence when the testimonial recipient exhibits pernicious ignorance. pernicious ignorance, according to dotson, is a form of reliable ignorance, or reliable insensitivity to the truth, that results in a harm.13 dotson’s analysis of testimonial smothering highlights the importance of testimonial competence—the ability of an interlocutor to get what you mean (in the way you mean it)—for successful communicative exchanges. furthermore, this analysis describes how particular speakers, especially those who are testifying from disadvantaged positions, are prone to vulnerabilities and harms when their audience lacks such a competence. dotson (2011, 238) writes, speakers are vulnerable in linguistic exchanges because an audience may or may not meet the linguistic needs of a given speaker in a given exchange. . . . to communicate we all need an audience willing and capable of hearing us. 12 also, see oliva, antonialli, and gomes (2021) for a related discussion concerning the linguistic practice of “mock impoliteness” in queer communities. 13 also see, for example, dotson (2014), medina (2013), pohlhaus (2012), and fricker (2007) for related discussion. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 moreover, engaging in communicative exchanges where one’s audience lacks testimonial competence (or where it is unclear if one’s interlocutor is competent) can be very risky and potentially unsafe (dotson, 2011, 244–45). for example, drawing upon the work of crenshaw (1991), dotson explains how black women’s testimony about sexual violence perpetrated by black men is potentially unsafe or risky in social contexts where it may be interpreted as reinforcing racist stereotypes.14 dotson’s analysis focuses on testimonial exchanges—how testifiers from oppressed groups are often forced to capitulate to the testimonial incompetency of their audiences by altering their testimony to include only that which is likely to be given proper uptake. however, with cultural code-switching in view, we can broaden dotson’s analysis to apply not only to the truncating or smothering of testimony but also to the smothering of aspects of one’s cultural identity more broadly. this is salient in cases of forced code-switching, where one masks aspects of their culture in response to dominant norms and pressures within the social environment, especially where code-switching is required to gain some benefit or avoid harms. in such cases, one may not only smother their testimony but also engage in a broader form of what we will refer to as cultural smothering (falbo 2021). when cultural code-switching behaviours manifest as cultural smothering, they take on a form of self-silencing. the pressures to engage in cultural smothering through code-switching arise in nonideal-choice situations. such situations often have the structure of a double bind, which is described as a “situation in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation” (frye 1983, 2). for example, when deciding whether to have (heterosexual) sex, frye discusses how women are often susceptible to social criticism and scrutiny no matter what they do. if they have sex, they are prone to be called “easy” or a “slut,” but if they do not, they are seen as “prudish,” “uptight,” or “frigid.” no matter what a woman chooses, she loses. the disadvantage that double binds give rise to is a function of their structural properties; therefore, they are sites of systemic oppression. they result from, reinforce, and sustain oppressive systems and unjust social arrangements. recently, hirji (2021, 645) has argued that what makes double binds unique and effective vehicles of oppression, compared to other difficult choice situations, is that “whatever an agent does necessarily undermines their own objective interests.” hirji develops the notion of an “imperfect choice,” which is a kind of choice situation where it’s impossible to advance one’s interests and where one will inevitably be worse off as a result. imperfect choices constrain one’s agency while nonetheless leaving aspects of one’s autonomy intact. one is still free to choose, but this freedom is hollow and illusory because all available options undermine one’s interests. 14 for related discussion of rape myths in relation to epistemic injustice, also see, for example, jenkins (2017), yap (2017), and falbo (2022). falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 moreover, in so choosing, one is forced to be complicit in their own oppression. double binds present a series of options, all of which are nonideal and further contribute to systems of oppression that function to make one, and members of one’s social group, worse off. how does this relate to cultural code-switching? in cases where one must code-switch to gain some advantage or avoid some harm in the social environment, one typically faces an imperfect choice. they are in a double bind. on the one hand, one might choose to code-switch. if so, one engages in a form of self-silencing or selfcensorship: they culturally smother in response to (likely or actual) pernicious ignorance. they conceal, truncate, mask, or alter aspects of their social identity, presenting an edited version of themselves that accords with dominant cultural standards. on the other hand, if one decides not to code-switch, they resist dominant cultural norms and expectations within the social environment. but by not codeswitching, one risks social exclusion, unemployment, forms of material deprivation, and even safety (as was discussed in section 3). no matter the choice, one’s interests are undermined. by code-switching, one is forced to be complicit in reinforcing dominant cultural norms, further entrenching broader patterns of inequality. but by not code-switching, one risks losing important material goods and opportunities for social advancement. the pressure to code-switch highlights how members of marginalised groups must navigate unfamiliar and potentially hostile social environments to pursue upward mobility. it is also important to remember that code-switching can be exhausting, especially when it manifests as cultural smothering. it involves a great deal of psychologically taxing work in which one’s comparatively privileged counterparts simply need not engage. 5. tentative lessons and concluding remarks ai systems are increasingly ubiquitous and more complex; so too are the social issues to which they give rise. this includes not only more direct human-to-ai interactions via smartphones, chatbots, or digital voice assistants but also the ways these technologies are implicated “behind the scenes” through social media platforms, streaming services, predictive search algorithms, video games, apps for rideshare programs and online dating, email communications, banking and finance, ecommerce, and more. these advancements have undoubtedly led to many positive changes, making previously arduous tasks much more streamlined and efficient. but at the same time, these technologies can hinder social progress. as is now well known, ais encode biases. this is unsurprising. these systems are not getting their training data in a vacuum. instead, they are sourcing it from places like the internet, which reflects society’s myriad biases and prejudices, and produces selection effects favouring certain privileged populations (e.g., english feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 speakers, those who have internet access, etc.) over others. as these technologies become increasingly advanced and indispensable to everyday tasks, researchers must be cognisant of how social structures that maintain unjust social arrangements are reproduced, reflected, or potentially made more potent and harmful within these technologies and their implementation.15 these insights underscore the need to attend to broader structural inequalities and mechanisms of oppression that reach well beyond ai technologies. it suggests that the solution to these issues does not rest within some manipulation or reconfiguration of training data or some alternative algorithm. the problems we identify are not fundamentally problems resulting from ai technologies and, as a result, won’t give way to technological solutions. as o’neil (2016, 204) has argued, “big data processes codify the past. they do not invent the future.” importantly, more data and more accurate or efficient algorithms will not solve any of the problems that we have described. even if an algorithm had a perfect model of the world, the structures that disadvantage certain groups over others would be reflected in the data. this is because the problems that arise when training and implementing ai technologies in a nonideal and unjust social world are due to the very structure of that world. as a result, the issue is not whether the data are incomplete or unreflective of the real world. even (perhaps especially) if they are complete and perfectly reflective, these problems will persist. moreover, these technologies feed back into society, creating more biased data as input, thus giving rise to a negative feedback loop of the type described by o’neil (2016). accordingly, the solution cannot be merely technological because the problem is not merely technological. a responsible first step is to be aware of structural injustice in the world. the point of intervention is not in changing our data to be better—our data will be better when the world is better—but when inequalities persist, so too will inequalities in data emerge to reflect them. all technological progress does is instantiate these inequalities more efficiently. we have highlighted one important way these technologies can potentially be sites for epistemic oppression: by imposing imperfect choice situations or double binds onto nondominant social groups. just as in the case of human-to-human interactions, where patterns of silencing emerge in response to the pernicious ignorance of one’s audience, so too can pernicious ignorance be encoded into ai technologies, further deepening patterns of silencing on a potentially grander scale and at a more rapid pace. if technologies involving nlp and human-to-ai-interactions 15 this discussion also raises the question of whether we should want ai technologies—for instance, voice assistants like alexa and siri—to be very human-like. one interesting development is the creation of q, a genderless voice assistant. you can try it out yourself: www.genderlessvoice.com. http://www.genderlessvoice.com/ http://www.genderlessvoice.com/ http://www.genderlessvoice.com/ falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 require speakers to conform to dominant expectations and norms—or, in other words, if such technologies encode pernicious ignorance—then nondominant groups will need to engage in cultural smothering to interact with these technologies. acknowledgements we are thankful to the participants at the feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence workshop (july 2021), as well as two anonymous reviewers, and the editor of 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control. new york: viking. samotin, perrie. 2017. “a banana republic employee says she was told her box braids looked too ‘urban.’” glamour, october 7, 2017. https://www.glamour .com/story/banana-republic-employee-destiny-tompkins-says-she-was-toldbox-braids-looked-too-urban. sap, maarten, dallas card, saadia gabriel, yejin choi, and noah a. smith. 2019. “the risk of racial bias in hate speech detection.” in proceedings of the 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, 1668–78, florence, italy: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10.186 53/v1/p19-1163. silberman, steve. 2015. neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity. new york: avery. falbo and lacroix – est-ce que vous compute? code-switching, cultural identity, and ai published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 szczepański, marcin. 2019. economic impacts of artificial intelligence (ai). european parliamentary research service, briefing pe 637.967. https://www.europarl .europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/eprs_bri(2019)637967. tirrell, lynne. 2012. “genocidal language games.” in speech and harm: controversies over free speech, edited by ishani maitra and mary kate mcgowan, 174–221. oxford: oxford university press. touré. 2018. “sorry to bother you: is this the most shocking anti-capitalist film ever?” guardian, august 19, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug /19/sorry-to-bother-you-is-this-the-most-anti-capitalist-film-ever. web technology surveys. 2022. “usage statistics of content languages for websites.” w3techs. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language. yap, audrey. 2017. “credibility excess and the social imaginary in cases of sexual assault.” feminist philosophy quarterly 3 (4): article 1. https://doi.org/10.52 06/fpq/2017.4.1. young, holly. 2015. “the digital language divide: how does the language you speak shape your experience of the internet?” http://labs.theguardian.com/digitallanguage-divide/. arianna falbo is an assistant professor at bentley university in waltham, massachusetts. her research is primarily in epistemology, as well as feminist and social philosophy, with a focus upon the norms governing rational inquiry, as well as the relationship between inquiry and social injustice. travis lacroix: is an assistant professor at dalhousie university in halifax, nova scotia, where he teaches in the department of philosophy and the faculty of computer science. his research centres on philosophical questions arising from sociodynamic systems. this research involves interrelated projects which address the social, philosophical, legal, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other data-driven technologies; the evolutionary origins of linguistic communication; and, the dynamics of other (nonlinguistic) social phenomena. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/19/sorry-to-bother-you-is-this-the-most-anti-capitalist-film-ever https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/19/sorry-to-bother-you-is-this-the-most-anti-capitalist-film-ever https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/ http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/ http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/ 14264 falbo lacroix title page 14264 falbo-lacroix final format ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 2 recommended citation huang, linus ta-lun, hsiang-yun chen, ying-tung lin, tsung-ren huang, and tzu-wei hung. 2022. “ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 2. 2022 ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy linus ta-lun huang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2469-8944 university of hong kong linusthuang@gmail.com hsiang-yun chen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9106-7846 academia sinica, taiwan hsiangyun@gmail.com ying-tung lin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5974-7860 national yang ming chiao tung university, taiwan linyingtung@gmail.com tsung-ren huang https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4396-7943 national taiwan university trhuang@g.ntu.edu.tw tzu-wei hung https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4411-8038 academia sinica, taiwan tzuwei.hung@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2469-8944 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9106-7846 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5974-7860 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4396-7943 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4411-8038 huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy linus ta-lun huang , hsiang-yun chen ,1 ying-tung lin , tsung-ren huang , and tzu-wei hung abstract artificial intelligence (ai) systems are increasingly adopted to make decisions in domains such as business, education, health care, and criminal justice. however, such algorithmic decision systems can have prevalent biases against marginalized social groups and undermine social justice. explainable artificial intelligence (xai) is a recent development aiming to make an ai system’s decision processes less opaque and to expose its problematic biases. this paper argues against technical xai, according to which the detection and interpretation of algorithmic bias can be handled more or less independently by technical experts who specialize in xai methods. drawing on resources from feminist epistemology, we show why technical xai is mistaken. specifically, we demonstrate that the proper detection of algorithmic bias requires relevant interpretive resources, which can only be made available, in practice, by actively involving a diverse group of stakeholders. finally, we suggest how feminist theories can help shape integrated xai: an inclusive social-epistemic process that facilitates the amelioration of algorithmic bias. keywords: algorithmic bias, explainable ai, feminist epistemology, situated knowledge, epistemic injustice 1. introduction imagine that you are a human resource officer tasked with recruiting new talent. your company makes use of a state-of-the-art ai recruitment system that adopts a deep neural network model to predict a job candidate’s “hireability score” based on over a hundred features, such as age, gender, race, personality traits, 1 corresponding author. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2469-8944 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9106-7846 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5974-7860 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4396-7943 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4411-8038 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 education level, years of relevant experience, and more.2 very roughly, the algorithm picks out statistical regularities that have been relevant in the past and makes predictions as to candidates’ suitability on the basis of prior hiring decisions.3 one of your responsibilities is to ensure hiring is done in an unbiased manner, and you see a disconcerting pattern: those recommended by the ai system seem unrepresentative of those who apply. despite having a diverse applicant pool, the ai system appears to favor people who are homogeneous in terms of race and gender. of course, this alone is not conclusive evidence that the recruitment system is biased. other reasons, such as differences in qualification, may explain the results. however, because the recruitment system’s decision criteria are implicitly embedded in its complex structure, it is extremely difficult for you to see or understand the reasons for its decisions and to figure out whether the process is indeed biased.4 to understand how an algorithmic decision is made, and to determine whether bias exists in a complex and opaque ai decision system, a new research program—explainable artificial intelligence (xai)—was developed (nunes and jannach 2017; adadi and berrada 2018; lipton 2018; gunning and aha 2019; arrieta et al. 2020). to a first approximation, xai seeks to help humans understand and predict how ai systems generate decisions. specifically, xai helps identify significant factors that drive algorithmic decisions and offers comprehensible explanations to relevant stakeholders (arrieta et al. 2020). turning back to our example, it can explain why a certain candidate was, or was not, recommended for hire. the explanation often comes in the form of listing the most important features driving the decision— 2 we bracket debates on whether race and gender are real categories and work under the assumption that people are racialized and gendered according to current (unjust) social practices. 3 more specifically, the ai system is exposed to historical data articulating applicants’ features and prior hiring decisions during model training, “learning” the statistical regularities between these features and hiring decisions by rewiring connectivity among artificial neurons. at the end of the model’s training phase, the ai system forms a processing stream that maps features of a candidate to a score, and then to a recommendation. 4 scientists apply a learning algorithm to a dataset to build a predictive model that can work as an ai decision system (fazelpour and danks 2021). because the discussion about bias in ai decision systems is mostly about the predictive model, we use the terms “algorithm,” “model,” and “ai system” interchangeably. additionally, we will be concerned with algorithmic bias in the broad sense, including any bias that is ultimately encoded in the predictive model, regardless of how it is introduced during the machine learning processes (hellström, dignum, and bensch 2020). huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 for instance, recommending candidate x because of her teamwork skills and relevant experiences. our focus is on the utilization of xai for bias detection and reduction (arrieta et al. 2020; langer et al. 2021; mohseni, zarei, and ragan 2021).5 because the use of algorithms is increasingly common in many domains, including hiring, criminal justice, health care, and education, there are growing concerns that bias in such systems will impede social justice by perpetuating or even exacerbating existing inequalities (e.g., o’neil 2016; benjamin 2019; noble 2018; d'ignazio and klein 2020). as measures for debiasing are in high demand, a thoroughgoing analysis of xai and its promises is necessary. we ask what xai ought to be in order for it to help us combat bias in ai systems.6 in particular, we will argue against a naive understanding—which we call technical xai—according to which the detection and interpretation of algorithmic bias can be handled more or less by technical experts who specialize in xai. drawing from resources in feminist philosophy, we will argue that technical xai is misguided. a better way to conceptualize and implement xai for bias reduction—a view that we term integrated xai—should replace technical xai. our paper runs as follows. section 2 reviews the current state of the art of xai, defining and illustrating how technical xai is supposed to help reduce algorithmic bias. section 3 introduces insights from feminist epistemology, including feminist philosophy of science, situated knowledge, and epistemic injustice. section 4 details the argument against technical xai and motivates the move toward integrated xai. finally, section 5 makes the case for, and suggests ways to build, integrated xai, drawing on feminist theoretical resources. 2. how xai can reduce bias in this section, we articulate technical xai (hereafter, txai), a technological solutionist approach to xai for bias reduction. we will then illustrate how txai is supposed to extract relevant information from ai systems for the purpose of bias detection by reference to a model we developed and ran ourselves. 5 not all xais aim to reduce bias, and not all methods of reducing bias in ai involve xai. for example, dunkelau and leuschel (2019) describe several techniques that directly revise biased outputs without xai. 6 our project is closely related—but, strictly speaking, not equivalent—to what haslanger (2012) describes as an ameliorative inquiry. haslanger aims to ameliorate concepts (e.g., race and gender) for a certain legitimate purpose. currently there are different ideas and methods associated with xai; we ask how we ought to conceptualize and implement xai for the purpose of bias reduction. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 an ai system is biased if its output, procedure, and so on, deviate from a relevant (moral, epistemic, or social) norm (fazelpour and danks 2021). in this paper, we focus on morally problematic cases of procedural biases. procedural bias occurs when (i) a score returned by an ai system for a case (e.g., in a hiring system) is influenced by a “class variable” (a variable that defines a specific attribute for a class), and (ii) in the most representative and restrictive case of procedural bias, this class variable is used by the model to generate the score directly. procedural bias in this restrictive sense can be morally problematic because it can constitute disparate treatment (glymour and herington 2019). disparate treatment is morally wrong because it is wrong to treat people differently for morally illegitimate reasons. for instance, the way an individual is racialized is not an appropriate reason for distributing benefits away from them. so, if a hiring system decreases the score of an applicant by a fixed amount on the sole basis of their racial profile, it exhibits a morally problematic procedural bias. we should note that a procedural bias (in our definition) is not necessarily morally problematic, such as when the hireability score is influenced by the class variable of education. the process of bias reduction involves several (not necessarily sequential) phases: (1) in the detection phase, we apply xai methods to detect a (potentially problematic) bias. for example, we may detect that a particular feature, such as the zip code of an applicant’s residential address, surprisingly influences their hireability score. (2) in the interpretation phase, we interpret xai’s output and attribute meaning to a bias. here, we would note that the zip code’s influence on hireability score seems like a bizarre phenomenon and ask whether this indicates a bias with broader significance. (3) in the evaluation phase, we evaluate a bias to determine whether it is problematic (morally, epistemically, or socially). this phase necessarily involves normative considerations alongside knowledge of social context. (4) in the mitigation phase, we devise means to reduce this bias and its impact. this phase will involve not only normative but also practical considerations. now, we are ready to characterize txai, according to which: huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 technical experts (specialists in xai methods) can handle the detection and interpretation phases satisfactorily, in relative independence from other stakeholders—that is, without extensive interaction and consultation with them. txai need not deny that in the evaluation and mitigation phases, a larger group of stakeholders, along with their attendant background knowledge and interpretive resources, should be involved. in fact, in our survey of xai literature, many researchers highlight the importance of different stakeholders. for example, arrieta and colleagues declare that the most important task for xai is to carefully review the interests, demands, and requirements of all stakeholders interacting with the system (arrieta et al. 2020). langer and colleagues (langer et al. 2021) argue that the success of an explanation is determined by its consideration of stakeholders’ desiderata, such as their interests, needs, or expectations. common to these studies is the claim that xai ought to enhance understanding of the ai system that meets different stakeholders’ requirements. however, there is no mention of whether, why, and how different stakeholders can contribute to xai for bias reduction. given the ethical and social significance of xai, this omission is problematic. further, the dearth of discussion of the need to involve and integrate different stakeholders’ interpretive resources for the detection and interpretation of bias indicates an attitude of “technological solutionism”—that is, the idea that every social problem has a purely technological fix (morozov 2014). one potential motivation behind txai is this: the xai model is a relatively general-purpose and objective observational tool. that is, xai helps us better understand everything in the ai system, only embodying minimal and objective information that facilitates the revelation of the ai decision process. importantly, according to this view, xai does not embody values and assumptions that might limit or distort what can be revealed. in other words, it assumes that to construct a generalpurpose, objective observational tool, we only need a relatively small knowledge base: one that is, in practice, sufficiently possessed by a small group of technical experts. broader meaning-making and knowledge-producing resources—including deep social knowledge regarding marginalized groups who are often the victims of biases and oppression—are unnecessary. relatedly, txai assumes that the meaning of xai’s explanatory output is relatively transparent and requires minimal interpretive resources for its proper interpretation. other stakeholders, such as ethicists, social scientists, policymakers, and so forth, can take xai’s output as given and move on to evaluate its moral and social significance. in the rest of this paper, we will narrow down our focus to problematize the bias detection phase of txai. let us return to the scenario discussed in the introduction: you are faced with the challenge of ensuring an opaque ai recruitment feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 system is free from problematic biases. you reach out to an xai team for help. after running a popular xai method, kernel shapley additive explanations (kernel shap, hereafter shap), the team returns with the good news that problematic procedural biases do not play a significant role in influencing ai suggestions. to illustrate how txai detects biases in this scenario, we constructed an ai recruitment system with a neural-network model. the model is trained to fully capture the decision rules embodied in the hiring data along precisely the lines of our hypothetical example. specifically, we generated deliberately simplified hiring data, designed to emulate real-life hiring data with only the hiring decisions and five features of applicants (teamwork skills, relevant experience, willingness to work night shifts, gender, and race), instead of the usual number of around a hundred features. a total of 120 applications (instead of the usual thousands) were generated and then fed into the ai system for training and prediction before the ai system was interrogated by shap. even though the neural network, hiring data, and applicant pool we constructed are simpler than those in real-life cases, this simplification does not affect the nature of bias detection. in fact, simplification makes the job of the xai team much easier than it is in reality—being able to consider each applicant and their features in detail is unlikely in practice due to the larger number of feature-applicant pairs (typically in the range of millions). now, let’s walk through how a txai team typically reaches conclusions via shap. first, the shap values of the five features for each candidate are calculated. roughly, shap calculates the relative importance of features (e.g., class variables) in driving the decision of a specific case in the following way: (i) it probes an ai system with different variations of the feature values of a particular candidate and observes how these variations alter the decision for the candidate (e.g., their hireability scores) (lundberg and lee 2017). then, (ii) it uses a simple linear regression model to fit its observation, generating the feature-importance values based on the regression coefficient of each feature, respectively. with the feature-importance value calculated, shap can highlight a subset of features that play an important role in determining the scores of a particular candidate. because the numbers of applicants and features are often so massive in realistic situations, a team would look for group-level patterns. figure 1 illustrates the shap values for our 120 applicants through a group-level “force plot” (more about this soon). it shows that ability to work night shifts and relevant experience are the main features that contribute positively (indicated by the color red) to the decision to hire a candidate, while inability to work night shifts is the main feature that contributes to the decision to reject a candidate (indicated by the color blue). indeed, the absolute shap values for each feature averaged across all cases (shown in figure 2) confirm the observation above: the most important features driving the decisions huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 are the ability to work night shifts and relevant experience, while gender, race, and teamwork skills each appears to play only a minor role. figure 1. the group-level force plot of shap values for 120 candidates. it is composed of 120 horizontally stacked individual force plots (figure 3) of each candidate. figure 2. the absolute shap values for each feature (averaged across the group of 120 applicants). to better understand how the group-level pattern is produced, we looked into the shap values of individual cases. figure 3 shows the force plot of shap values of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 two candidates, visualizing the relative feature importance in corresponding hiring decisions. the upper panel illustrates the feature importance in driving the decision to hire (indicated by the score of 1.00) a particular (male) candidate. willingness to work night shifts is the most important feature that positively contributes to the decision (as indicated by the color red), followed by his relevant experience and teamwork ability. his gender contributes positively, and his race contributes negatively (as indicated by the color blue), both in relatively minor ways. the lower panel illustrates what drives the decision to reject (indicated by the score of 0.00) a particular (female) candidate. it is primarily her inability to work night shifts and lack of relevant experiences that contribute to the rejection (as indicated by the color blue), despite her teamwork skill, gender, and race having some minor positive contributions to her hireability score (as indicated by the color red). figure 3. upper panel: the individual-level force plot of shap values for one candidate recommended for hire by the ai system. lower panel: the individual-level force plot of shap values for one candidate recommended for rejection. based on the observation that the group-level shap values of race and gender are close to zero, an xai team would likely conclude that these features do not significantly influence overall decisions. that is, the ai system does not have significant procedural biases based on gender and race; therefore, no bias-reduction procedures need to be applied to this system. one important qualification must be made before we end this example: one may find the decision not to intervene in this ai system objectionable. after all, gender and race are in fact influencing hiring decisions, no matter how small the impact is. moreover, aren’t detecting and removing subtle biases like these the main motivations for xai? an important reason to treat very minor influences like this as mere noise is that minor influences are often introduced during machine learning processes. for example, figure 4 shows the force plot of an ai system trained on artificially generated huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 hiring data free from procedural biases concerning gender and race, together with the absolute shap values for each feature averaged across all candidates. as we can see, there are still minor influences of race and gender on this ai system’s decisions, which reflect statistical fluctuations during learning of the ai system and/or the testing of the xai procedure. as a result, xai teams will have to ignore these minor influences as noise. figure 4. upper panel: the individual-level force plot of shap values for one candidate recommended for rejection by an ai system trained with hiring data with no procedural biases based on gender and race. lower panel: the absolute shap values for each feature (averaged across all applicants). even if one is not convinced by the above practical consideration, our hypothetical case study of what xai teams would conclude about the ai system will still serve its illustrative purpose: to show that txai is not reliable for bias detection. as we will reveal later in section 4.2, conclusions drawn by the txai team are open to vigorous challenge. having defined txai and illustrated it in action, we now situate it within the ethical ai movement (hao 2019; kind 2020; häußermann and lütge 2022). the first feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 wave of ai ethics was characterized by the quest for appropriate principles that should guide the development and use of ai systems. then, the second wave took a technical turn: researchers strived to find technical solutions to questions such as fairness and discrimination. now, at the threshold of an emerging third wave, it has become clear that ai systems are sociotechnical systems that “cannot be understood outside of the social context in which they are deployed, and they cannot be optimised for societally beneficial and acceptable outcomes through technical tweaks alone” (kind 2020). in line with the third wave of the ethical ai movement, we will argue that txai, an instance of the technical turn, is inadequate. we will argue for the integration of xai into a broader social-epistemic process in what follows. 3. feminist insights questions of power imbalances, social justice, and how new technologies can bring about actionable changes are now taking center stage. these topics have long been a central concern of feminist philosophy. therefore, in considering the ethical and social implications of using xai for bias detection, we turn to feminist theories— in particular, feminist philosophy of science and discussions of situated knowledge and epistemic injustice—for inspiration. these analyses are especially helpful, as they stress the importance of context, uncover how values permeate our epistemic inquiries, and examine the ways extant power disadvantages those in marginalized groups in the production, distribution, and justification of knowledge. below we selectively discuss parts of these critical lenses most relevant to our current purposes. 3.1. feminist philosophy of science feminist philosophers of science have long argued that science is deeply value-laden and typically reflects and reinforces the ways of thinking and doing of socially privileged groups (e.g., nelson 1990; longino 1995, 1996; douglas 2000, 2009, 2016). community practices, including scientific ones, are shaped by social values; whether the practitioners are conscious of these influences or not, scientific practices are replete with value-laden, contingent decisions.7 what is studied and how—which aspects of the phenomenon are a focus, the choice of research questions, investigative methodology, framework assumptions, interpretive strategies, standards of empirical adequacy, and so on—are by no means value-free.8 7 see brown (2020) for discussions on how contingent decisions in science can be made in many different ways and can impact overall performance, users, and the public. 8 see kourany’s (2010) discussion of a socially responsible science, as well as brigandt (2015) on how values can influence a theory’s conditions of adequacy. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 one important focus concerns how social values determine the assumptions scientists adopt to mediate the relationship between hypotheses and data (longino 1995, 1996, 2001). scientific theorizing relies on inductive methods: researchers derive patterns from existing cases and project that those patterns will hold for novel cases. yet evidence based on past experience alone is never sufficient to prove ampliative conclusions, and assumptions are required to guide the researchers’ inferences. while nonevidential assumptions are essential to inductive inference, the ideal of value-free science allows for only epistemic nonevidential assumptions, such as epistemic theoretical virtues (kuhn 1977) . by contrast, nonepistemic assumptions—those shaped by social values—have no place in scientific practice.9 however, longino (1995, 1996) forcefully argues that the distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic theoretical virtues ultimately fails, as the demarcation between the two itself is the result of social values, hence undermining the possibility of the value-free ideal.10 recently, johnson (forthcoming) contends that a similar value-laden practice recurs in the domain of machine learning and argues that it is constitutively valueladen. as she argues, predictive algorithms are inductive procedures by nature, so they too are under the influence of nonevidential and nonepistemic values. for example, one of the most widely discussed issues of machine learning programs is the data problem: what the training data consists of, how data are gathered, and what data must be taken into consideration are all very important theoretical questions with serious practical consequences (d'ignazio and klein 2020). specifically, training data, in practice, are usually based on certain default groups; typically, these groups are socially privileged and prioritized in theory (i.e., considered as a representative group). generalizations built around privileged groups, however, may not be applicable to the entire population, and the resulting program may generate unrepresentative judgments that negatively impact marginalized groups in particular. for example, joy buolamwini, a ghanaian-american computer scientist and digital activist, discovered that facial recognition software had trouble detecting her darkskinned face but no difficulty recognizing her lighter-skinned collaborators.11 9 values come in a wide variety, including spiritual, aesthetic, environmental, ethical, and political, among many others. for the purpose of this paper, we focus on the contrast between epistemic values—such as a theory’s internal consistency, predictive accuracy, fit with evidence, simplicity, etc.—and those that are nonepistemic, which we will refer to as social values (brigandt 2015). 10 see also laudan (2004), lacey (2004), and biddle (2020). 11 steve lohr, “facial recognition is accurate, if you’re a white guy,” new york times, february 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/technology/facial-recogni tion-race-artificial-intelligence.html. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 note, however, that in this case the machine learning algorithm is not obviously guided by nonepistemic values. that is, when the algorithm takes privileged groups as the basis for making inductive inferences, it can be seen as promoting the epistemic value of simplicity. however, as johnson (forthcoming) argues, in this context, “an allegiance to simplicity will (either wittingly or unwittingly) imbibe the very socio-political values on which the hierarchical relations are formed,” hence rendering the practice constitutively value-laden. 3.2. situated knowledge & epistemic injustice feminist epistemology has long argued for the situatedness of knowledge.12 perspectival differences make epistemic differences (grasswick 2018). what we know and how we know are intimately connected to our values and assumptions, which are determined by our material and social positions. for example, haraway’s (1988) work challenges the myth of scientific objectivity and exposes this so-called objectivity as unreflexive ignorance of one’s own biases. she offers the alternative of situated knowledge: knowledge is produced by specific people in specific historical, geographical, and cultural circumstances. since every single epistemic agent is socially situated, all forms of epistemic endeavors are socially situated.13 once we recognize the essential situatedness of all knowing, it follows that all perspectives, including the views of the dominant and privileged, are partial. as different individuals and groups governed by distinct values and assumptions are likely to make different choices in the process of knowledge production, they form different “local epistemologies.” centering on only a small set of perspectives can easily result in distorted accounts of the whole social order (harding 1991, 1993). by contrast, expanding the backgrounds of epistemic agents involved in the production of knowledge will be advantageous in general, since unexamined, or underexamined, features of relevance will be given due attention while challenging problematic 12 situated knowledge is a claim shared by feminist empiricists and standpoint theorists. for further distinctions between the two approaches, see, for example, intemann (2010) and anderson (2020). 13 as alcoff and potter (1993; alcoff 2001) point out, each of us comes to knowledgemaking processes from a particular combination of perspectives, so the perspectivality at work can be extremely complicated and it is difficult to determine exactly what combination of perspectives are making the difference in any given case. further, granted that all theorizing proceeds from some epistemic location, louise antony (2001, 142) cautions that we must treat the truth-conduciveness of particular biases as an empirical question. similarly, the truth-conduciveness of any particular perspective should be treated as an empirical, not a priori, question in our ongoing pursuit of knowledge. http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/phil/faculty/node/16021 huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 assumptions. therefore, we should aim to render knowledge-making processes more inclusive. arguably, the perspectives of the minoritized can be particularly valuable not only for their potentially special access to the deep knowledge of society (anderson 2020) but also for the opportunities they provide for researchers to reflexively examine their own social positions and privileges. recent work on epistemic injustice (fricker 2007, 2016; mason 2011; medina 2012, 2013; dotson 2012, 2014; and many others) echoes this attention to the situatedness of knowing. epistemic injustice concerns how members of marginalized groups are often systematically prevented from participating fully in collective meaning-making and epistemic processes. most notably, fricker (2007) identifies two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice occurs when an epistemic agent suffers from unwarranted prejudicial credibility deficit due to their social identity; hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a gap in the collective interpretive repertoire, such that marginalized social groups are at an unfair disadvantage in making sense of, or communicating, their socially important experiences. in both cases, victims of epistemic injustice are unfairly diminished in their capacities as knowers. drawing upon this work, pohlhaus cautions against willful hermeneutical ignorance: the problematic propensity to dismiss alternative epistemic resources put forth by marginalized knowers such that the dominant knowers run the risk of “continu[ing] to misunderstand and misinterpret the world” (2012, 716). importantly, minoritized groups should not bear the unfair burden of proving their epistemic worth (berenstain 2016), and their perspectives ought to be taken more seriously because, in practice, they are likely to offer invaluable interpretive resources, rooted in their distinctive experiences, that help fill in lacunae in collective meaning-making resources (goetze 2018). in fact, the failure to take heed of their perspectives can be a huge loss to the entire community, as potentially useful epistemic resources are excluded from our pursuit of knowledge. in short, feminist epistemology studies our understanding of knowledge, objectivity, and scientific methodology. it reminds us of the significance of context, as well as the influence of values and power in our epistemic activities, such as that exemplified by txai. we now turn to a feminist reading of txai and demonstrate how the lack of diverse perspectives can negatively influence the potential of xai for bias detection. 4. why xai needs feminist theories drawing on feminist insights, we argue in this section that txai is mistaken. we first present our conceptual argument before returning to the case study introduced in section 2. the main driving force behind our argument is the importance of context. whether an algorithm is biased is highly context-dependent and requires feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 an equally context-sensitive observational instrument for its detection. however, txai will likely not, in practice, have such a high level of context sensitivity. so, txai cannot be a reliable process for detecting algorithmic biases. 4.1. the argument against technical xai our argument starts with an uncontroversial premise: (1) a highly context-dependent property can only be detected with rich and relevant interpretive resources. a context-independent property requires minimal interpretive resources to identify because it has invariable, intrinsic defining features. for instance, being a triangle is not context-dependent. having exactly three sides define triangle: this feature is invariable across contexts; it is also intrinsic because it does not depend on anything beyond the object. by contrast, a highly context-dependent property involves relational features. for example, being a member of a particular social class is a context-dependent property and involves relational features such as occupying a certain social role—a feature one can possess only in relation to a social system. one cannot be a king without a kingdom, so to speak. moreover, being a king is not an intrinsic property of a person—one can be dethroned and lose all political power while nothing intrinsic has changed. as a result, to detect a highly context-dependent property, we need to look beyond the entity itself into its relations with others within a broader context. being a member of, say, the most privileged social class also involves variable intrinsic and relational features, both within and across contexts. such members look different and occupy different social roles not only between, say, ancient egyptian and contemporary us societies, but also within the same society. that is, they form a highly heterogeneous set. as a result, there are no simple, invariant low-level features that can be used for identification. hence, to identify a highly context-dependent property, we must observe a wide range of intrinsic and relational features. moreover, to properly infer from what we observe, we need to be equipped with rich interpretive resources about specific contexts.14 our second premise concerns the nature of bias: 14 in a similar vein, fodor (2000) discusses the issue of context-dependent properties regarding relevance-determination and modularity. also relevant is a point drawn from feminist empiricism that data only supports a hypothesis against background assumptions (longino 2001). huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 (2) being a particular type of bias is a highly context-dependent property; as a result, to identify it requires rich and relevant background assumptions. first, what distinguishes between particular types of biases will involve relational features. consider two biases represented by the same mathematical function and, as a result, intrinsically identical: one may represent how the feature of an applicant’s gender affects the hiring decision, yet the other may represent how the applicant’s relevant experience affects the hiring decision. this is because what a bias represents is not determined entirely by what goes on in the ai system but depends on how the system interacts with the larger world (i.e., meaning is determined by causal-historical facts of the interactions).15 thus, to identify a specific type of bias (say, bias based on gender versus bias based on relevant experience), one must examine its relations within a broader context. second, being a particular type of bias also involves highly variable intrinsic and relational features. a particular type of bias (e.g., gender bias) can be implemented in different ways in the same or different ai systems (e.g., they implement different mathematical functions, such as a linear or a curved function). so, the same type of bias will have different intrinsic features within or across contexts. there are also variable ways a particular type of bias relates to the larger context. for example, a gender bias can come to represent the influence of gender due to a wide variety of ways ai systems interact with the social world, such as the impact of gender on the burdens of child care, access to proper health care, and so on. hence, there are no invariable intrinsic or relational features one can use to identify biases. in short, being a particular type of bias is a highly context-dependent property. it is more similar to being a member of a particular social class than being a triangle. they have no invariant intrinsic or relational low-level features that one can use to detect within or across contexts. as a result, detecting a particular type of bias, like identifying a member of the most privileged social class, requires a wealth of interpretive resources. we now move to the most substantial premise of this argument: 15 for instance, zip codes in the united states are often an indicator of race. so, if the ai system’s hiring recommendation filters out a candidate based on their zip code, there is likely to be a problematic racial bias. without knowledge or awareness of the significant housing segregation, however, one can easily overlook this. see also cappelen and dever (2021) for a general argument for an externalist metasemantics for ai. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 (3) txai will not, in practice, always have the rich, relevant interpretive resources necessary to flexibly design and deploy appropriate xai models for detecting a particular type of bias. unpacking (3) involves a number of steps. first, we will problematize the conception of xai models as general-purpose observational tools. next, we will apply feminist insights to reveal that xai models are deeply value-laden. moreover, xai models, when not properly informed by relevant interpretive resources, may fail to provide appropriate explanations given the goal of detecting a particular type of bias. crucially, the interpretive resources needed may be systematically excluded in the xai model’s design process. xai models are not general-purpose. xai models are, at best, special-purpose observational tools—that is, they can only accurately detect a limited range of biases. this is because there is an unavoidable conflict between explainability and comprehensive accuracy: to facilitate interpretability, an xai model is an intentionally simplified representation of a complex ai system. with such a limited representational resource, an xai model cannot represent all aspects accurately. like most models, some features of its representational target are abstracted, and some unrealistic features are incorporated as idealizations (weisberg 2007). for the purpose of bias detection, an xai model should offer a (more or less) accurate representation of the selected types of biases while offering a highly idealized (thus intentionally false) or abstract (thus intentionally partial) representation of the other aspects of the ai system.16 importantly, what an xai model can represent accurately will depend upon the simplifying assumptions adopted to build the model. only when there is an appropriate attunement between the simplifying assumptions and a particular bias (whether achieved intentionally or not) can the xai model represent the bias accurately (for a concrete illustration, see section 4.2). xai models are not objective. xai models are not objective observational tools, as social values and assumptions have a more significant impact than is often recognized. as feminist philosophy of science points out, there are no objective models or theories in the traditional sense—a theory or model necessarily embodies social values and assumptions even under ideal conditions. in fact, the context of xai model-building is far from this objective ideal: xai models need to balance, on the one hand, the concerns over explainability and simplicity, and on the other hand, 16 while most philosophers of model sciences will agree with the conception of idealization as intentional falsehood, some disagree—for example, nguyen (2020). huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 truth and other epistemic norms (e.g., representing ai systems accurately to reflect the complexity of information processing). as potochnik (2012) points out, the tradeoff between different aims of modeling mirrors the discussion of the value-laden choice of theoretical virtues. specifically, since the simplifying assumptions adopted in an xai model already must be highly idealized (a strictly false or mismatched fit between model and the world) or abstract (omitting details), considerations other than facts and epistemic norms naturally (and sometimes appropriately) come to play a larger role at various decision points, irrespective of designer intentions. not all xai models are appropriate for detecting a specific type of bias. first, different xai models provide different explanations. this follows from applying the insight of situated knowledge to model sciences. as potochnik (2012, 386) puts it: different models will represent different features of a system, at different degrees of abstraction; they will employ different idealizations; . . . a commitment to the idea that different values generate different scientific knowledge about a single phenomenon does not involve granting the truth of multiple claims that are mutually inconsistent. instead, it amounts to the much less problematic idea that multiple models provide different representations of the target system. due to different simplifying assumptions, different xai models will provide different explanations, which latch on to different causal patterns of the same system in different ways. however, given the goal of detecting a specific type of bias, not all explanations are equally acceptable. to provide adequate explanations, the xai model will need to embody simplifying assumptions attuned to the type of bias it aims to detect. to this end, researchers need to be informed by relevant epistemic and hermeneutical resources, some of which may only be available in local epistemologies of marginalized groups targeted by this bias. indeed, this is why marginalized groups, by reflecting on their unique experiences, may gain privileged access to certain perspectival knowledge that others cannot easily acquire. we are not saying that those without marginalized backgrounds could never have the requisite interpretive resources. on the other hand, some technical experts may even come from marginalized backgrounds themselves. still, technical experts, in practice, tend to belong to selective local epistemologies. they are likely to be influenced by similar assumptions and values, focus on certain aspects of ai systems, ask the same questions, and adopt typical methodologies. consequently, they will often unreflectively adopt certain simplifying assumptions and practices in building feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 xai models, some of which may be inappropriate for detecting a particular type of bias.17 xai model-building can be epistemically unjust. importantly, these necessary meaning-making and knowledge-producing resources are often systematically prevented from entering the mainstream epistemic community. as a result, technical experts are unlikely to have ready access to them. that is, epistemic injustice—such as testimonial and hermeneutical injustices—will systematically prevent marginalized groups from participating in, and contributing fully to, collective meaning-making and epistemic processes. xai’s model-building process is precisely one such instance. by bringing these key analyses together, we can show why txai is unlikely to have the necessary resources to develop appropriate xai models: (i) xai models, qua special-purpose tools, can detect only those biases that their simplifying assumptions are attuned to. (ii) these simplifying assumptions are determined in part by the social values and assumptions of technical experts. (iii) whether an xai model for bias detection works depends on whether technical experts can alter its simplifying assumptions via reflexive awareness of the influence of their own social values and background assumptions. (iv) however, the relevant interpretive resources are often not incorporated into mainstream epistemic resources; as a result, a small group of technical experts, in practice, are unlikely to have ready access. (v) moreover, given the practice of txai, technical experts work in relative independence from diverse stakeholders, and this lack of interaction further prevents them from appropriately adjusting their choice of simplifying assumptions. as a result, (4) txai is not an epistemically reliable process for producing xai models for bias detection. a further implication of this argument is that a more reliable process would be a social-epistemic one that could incorporate relevant background knowledge and interpretive resources. we call such a process integrated xai. in section 5, we will draw from feminist insights to suggest how to implement this process. however, 17 this point is in line with de melo-martín and intemann (2011). drawing from the development of the hpv vaccines, they argue that research guided by feminist principles (including (i) diversifying researchers, (ii) taking seriously the perspectives of marginalized stakeholders who are affected the most, and (iii) making visible various social positions) would be epistemically superior and socially responsible. we thank an anonymous reviewer for this reference. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 before we do so, we will return to our prior case study to illustrate our conceptual point. 4.2. case study recall the recruitment scenario we introduced at the beginning of this paper. in section 2, we illustrated how a typical xai team under the txai paradigm operates. using shap, technical experts conclude that there are no significant procedural biases based on gender or race in making hiring recommendations. we have also hinted that this conclusion is badly mistaken. in fact, we intentionally generated the hiring data to embody a strong bias against black women, and the ai system learned to fully capture this bias. specifically, our ai system reflects a neutral attitude toward black men, white men, and white women, but a strong bias against black women. inspired by intersectionality theory—how one’s various social identities combine to constrain and enable—we call this bias intersectional bias. in this case study, the intersectional bias is so strong that the ai system recommended rejection of all black female applicants (while the average rejection rate is 72 percent), despite the fact that we constructed their average qualifications to be identical to those of the other three groups. so, far from being mere noise, race and gender exert a strong influence on hiring recommendations. but why does shap fail to discern such a strong bias? this is because shap’s simplifying assumptions (i) cannot reveal the defining features of the intersectional bias, (ii) systematically underestimate its importance in driving hiring decisions, and (iii) conceal bias when it is only suffered by a social group that constitutes a small percentage of the entire group. as a result, shap is inappropriate for detecting intersectional biases. first, shap cannot reveal the defining feature of intersectional bias because it uses a linear regression model to generate the feature-importance value. the linear regression model is most appropriate when different features influence the decision (more or less) independently and linearly. however, when they deviate from this characterization (e.g., an intersectional bias where the influence of two features depends on each other, which also entails nonlinearity), the model cannot reveal the nature of the bias. this is because, roughly, information about the nonlinearity and dependency between the two constitutive features is inevitably lost after a linear regression model is applied: one cannot determine from the featureimportance values of gender and race (represented by figure 1) the fact that it is an intersectional bias that produces these impacts. second, shap will systematically underestimate the feature importance of intersectional bias (if we take it to be roughly reflected by the sum of the values of two constitutive features), because the way such value is generated does not respect feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 an intuitive conception of how to explain the influence of an intersectional bias.18 for example, when we evaluate the importance of intersectional bias against black women, the intuitive and ideal measure is to directly intervene on the features the intersectional bias targets—that is, flipping an applicant’s relevant features into a contrasting class (turning a black female candidate into a “non-black female” candidate, and vice versa) and observing how it impacts decisions. however, the way shap performs interventions does not respect such an ideal. shap “intervenes” in a particular case by trying out all combinations of variations in values of features, such as gender, race, and relevant experience. importantly, shap, given its current design, cannot treat “being a black woman” as a single feature to manipulate as a unit. as a result, shap inappropriately (i) includes in the contrasting class combinations that should not have been there, and (ii) counts the same combination (e.g., for the purpose of evaluating intersectional bias) as distinct. for example, it may intervene in the case of a white male candidate by changing the candidate’s gender or race (turning him into a black man in one intervention and a white woman in another intervention). note that because the original candidate and the two hypothetical ones are all “non-black women” the two interventions are inappropriate interventions, and in any case, they should be counted as the same (non-)intervention. moreover, they generate no impact on the decision. because these and other “non-interventions” with no impact are included (inappropriately or repeatedly) in the calculation, shap will systematically underestimate what we intuitively take to be the feature importance of intersectional bias. worse still, shap also weighs more heavily the impact of “local” interventions (i.e., the impact generated by smaller changes in values of features) when it combines the impacts of all interventions to calculate feature-importance values. thus, it not only includes repeatedly inappropriate interventions (such as when a white male candidate is turned into a white female or black male candidate), but it also systematically weights them more heavily than appropriate ones (such as when a white male candidate is turned into a black woman), because the former is more “local.” again, this leads to the feature importance of gender and race being further underestimated.19 18 see van fraassen (1980, chap. 5) on the pragmatics of explanation, according to which (some) explanations answer the why-question and are context-relative. 19 we have simplified the explanation of the second reason by discussing it as if shap treats gender and race properly as categorical features, but this is not always the case. when they are treated inappropriately as continuous features, the problem of underestimating feature importance of the intersectional bias is further exaggerated. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 finally, shap will conceal the bias suffered by the social group that constitutes a smaller percentage of the applicants. this is due to the practice of taking the mean value (of the absolute values of feature importance of a feature for all cases) to represent the relative importance of a feature at the group level (see figure 2). we should note that this practice is not part of the modeling assumption of shap, but it is often necessitated in practice by the sheer number of feature-applicant pairs (in the range of millions in a realistic scenario), as discussed in section 2. it is simply impossible to examine each feature-applicant pair in order to assess the group-level pattern. consequently, a bias suffered by only a minority of applicants (such as black women, who make up the smallest percentage of applicants—10 out of 120, in the applicant pool we constructed) will be concealed. that is, the feature-importance values, even if high for those candidates, are “diluted” after averaging and will look much less significant. one counterargument could be that txai has nothing to worry about until it is shown to face challenges in realistic contexts. the first concern is that our case study is hypothetical and purpose-built, and cannot be generalized to real-life situations or to other xai methods. however, there is nothing contrived about our case.20 crucially, in our example, the shap method fails because intersectional bias (i) implements a nonlinear function, (ii) has two interdependent features (intersectionality), and (iii) impacts a minority group. all are common features of biases and easily overlooked by predominant txai methodologies. it also does not help to adopt another xai method (without doing so flexibly, informed by the specificity of the bias) because it will simply make another set of simplifying assumptions that inevitably miss some other types of bias. the second concern is that we have exaggerated the importance of interpretive resources for bias detection in realistic contexts. it may be true that it is hard to detect a specific bias if the technical experts know nothing about its nature. but once they know of the existence of particular biases, they can consequently narrow down the search space. this would mean paying attention to only information related to, say, gender and race, and performing an exhaustive search for their problematic influences. we respond that (i) it is a general problem that many biases are not well known by those outside the affected group, and (ii) information related 20 here is an actual case of intersectional bias: degraffenreid v. general motors assembly div., etc. (413 f. supp. 142 [e.d. mo. 1976]). in 1974, general motors fired every black woman working at its assembly plant in st. louis. degraffenreid sued gm, claiming that it had violated title vii of the civil rights act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender and race. degraffenreid’s case, however, was dismissed. the judge contended that since gm had (white) female and (black) male employees, it did not discriminate against women or blacks. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 to gender and race (and semantic properties in general) is highly context-dependent with variant intrinsic and relational features. so, to flag such information accurately in an ai system with realistic complexity, rich interpretive resources are necessary.21 to sum up, we have illustrated how an xai model’s simplifying assumptions, when not attuned to a specific bias, can prevent its detection. we also showed how a lack of relevant background knowledge, interpretive resources, and (in our hypothetical case) understanding of intersectional bias can prevent technical experts from tackling this problem. our case study highlights the main point of our conceptual argument: relevant background knowledge and interpretive resources need to be brought to bear during the construction of xai models in order to ensure their reliability. txai, due to its relative insulation from marginalized stakeholders, is unlikely to possess such resources. instead, we should replace it with a new vision: integrated xai. 5. toward an integrated xai this is what we think xai for bias detection ought to be: the design and deployment of xai methods for bias reduction should be implemented in a socio-epistemic participatory process that actively incorporates the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, especially the epistemic and hermeneutical resources of marginalized groups. we dub this socio-epistemic process integrated xai (hereafter, ixai). ixai recognizes that to successfully detect (and interpret) a wide range of highly context-dependent biases, an equally context-sensitive process is required. moreover, such a high level of context sensitivity can only be achieved in an inclusive social process designed to flexibly marshal the relevant epistemic and interpretive resources to reduce the influence of bias. a rich literature exists concerning how to engage diverse stakeholders in scientific practice;22 here, we provide two specific pathways toward ixai, drawing upon the key lessons from the above. 21 this is related to the problem of bias interpretation confronting txai (mentioned in section 2), an interesting issue we plan to tackle next. see hu (n.d.) and johnson (n.d.) for issues related to interpreting information about race. 22 for example, kevin elliott (2017, chap. 7) lays out four forms of engagement between stakeholders: bottom-up engagement, top-down engagement, interdisciplinary engagement, and engagement with the laws, institutions, and policies. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 first, ixai actively tackles epistemic injustice that prevents the incorporation of diverse and marginalized perspectives. feminist theorists have proposed ways to address hermeneutical and testimonial injustice that could be of use here. for instance, to bridge the gap in collective interpretive resources, cultivating epistemic virtues is important in the following ways: (i) for technical experts and those from dominant groups, modesty, humility, and open-mindedness are necessary; (ii) for other stakeholders or marginalized groups, self-trust, activism, and advocacy are particularly relevant; and (iii) for the entire institution, epistemic democracy is needed.23 epistemically modest technical experts, for example, are more likely to consult different viewpoints and critically examine their own decision-making processes. moreover, ideas regarding participatory governance—including algorithmic audits and the appeal to public reason (kearns et al. 2018; brown, davidovic, and hasan 2021; binns 2018)—may help facilitate the engagement of more diverse stakeholders and render the explanations more adequate.24 second, ixai would deploy a multiplicity of xai methods and models, each informed by a diversity of stakeholders’ perspectives, in order to reliably detect different biases. each method or model, with its simplifying assumptions reflecting some background assumptions and perspectives, will be limited in its applicability and have its own blind spots. yet, these necessarily limited models, each informed by different epistemic and interpretive resources and attuned specifically to different biases, can be simultaneously deployed. each viewpoint can serve as a foil for others, critiquing the central claims and commitments of each. this pluralism in xai modeling exerts a corrective influence as problematic simplifying assumptions are controlled for by models with contrary simplifying assumptions. this pluralistic approach therefore provides a route to reliable detection of a wide range of biases. let us see how these insights would function in practice. recall that txai fails to detect bias because shap’s simplifying assumptions are not attuned to intersectional bias. inspired by the vision of ixai, you have decided to implement measures to alleviate epistemic injustice in the xai model-building process by informing the xai team of the rich history behind the development of intersectionality theory.25 equipped with this knowledge, the xai team probes the ai system for intersectional biases based on gender and race. they quickly realize that to detect such biases, they 23 see fricker (2007), medina (2013), and anderson (2012) for further discussion. 24 see also hellman (2020, forthcoming). 25 as crenshaw (1989) articulates, in the case of degraffenreid v. general motors, a company may claim that it values diversity and fairness by focusing on recruiting black and women talent, respectively. however, such measures can leave certain minorities completely unaccounted for. by hiring and promoting black men and white women, black women are ignored and further disadvantaged. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 will need to modify their modeling method and practice. to begin, they minimally modify the practice of averaging. instead of taking an average across the entire group, they look at shap values averaged across different subgroups with intersecting gender and racial identities. this modification fruitfully reveals that the subgroup of black women, unlike other subgroups, suffers from significant biases based upon gender and race. as figure 5 shows, shap values for race and gender for black women are much higher than those for the entire pool of candidates. this highly suggests that being a black woman is one of the main reasons for their rejection.26 the xai team concludes that the ai recruitment system should be suspended as it is very likely to harbor a strong procedural bias against black women.27 that is a win for ixai. figure 5. (a) the absolute shap values for each feature (averaged across the group of 120 applicants); (b) the absolute shap values for each feature (averaged across the subgroup of 10 black female applicants). 26 however, as mentioned in section 4.2, to confirm conclusively the existence of intersectional bias against black women, an xai method that could intervene on two features as a unit would need to be created. 27 as a matter of fact, in 2015, amazon decided to forgo algorithms for making hiring recommendations entirely when a similar effect was found and engineers could not correct for it reliably. see jeffrey dastin, “amazon scraps secret ai recruiting tool that showed bias against women,” reuters, october 10, 2018, https://www.reuters .com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight-iduskcn1mk08g. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 as longino (2001) argues, science is a social human enterprise. we should not strive for some “objective” methodology but should actively engage diverse stakeholders in the peer-review process. this would make science truly intersubjective and about as close to “objectivity” as we can get. our vision of ixai, echoing insights of feminist epistemology, stresses the necessity of engaging different perspectives in xai practice. of course, this is only the first step toward a more encompassing proposal. our goal in this paper was to provide an impetus for the important project of shifting from technical xai towards integrated xai, thereby debunking the myth of a purportedly value-free methodology. the development of xai cannot be completed by more complex technical methods or further ethical and social analyses alone. by making explainable ai a more dynamically participatory and inclusive social process, we will be in a better position to pursue more transparent, accountable, and fair algorithms. acknowledgments for helpful discussions and feedback on earlier drafts of this work, thanks to po-an chen, josh dever, anson fehross, zhenrong gan, sally haslanger, gabbrielle johnson, shen-yi liao, chung-chieh (ken) shan, mike stuart, participants of the feminism, social justice, and ai workshop (especially carla fehr, karen frost-arnold, trystan s. goetze, and catherine stinson) and the interdisciplinary lunchtime seminar at the hong kong institute for the humanities and social sciences (especially herman cappelen and rachel sterken), as well as the two anonymous referees. this work is funded in part by the grants 109-2410-h-001-095-my2 (to hsiangyun chen) as well as 111-2634-f-002-004, 110-2634-f-006-022, 110-2634-f-002-045 (to tsung-ren huang) from the ministry of science and technology, taiwan. references adadi, amina, and mohammed berrada. 2018. “peeking inside the black-box: a survey on explainable artificial intelligence (xai).” ieee access 6:52138–60. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2018.2870052. 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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2011.12.033. van fraassen, bas c. 1980. the scientific image. oxford: oxford university press. https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1c5chfa_entw879tw879&sxsrf=aliczsy9v1udyclzfswwur9xyfmiqzy8xq:1667791007355&q=bas+van+fraassen&stick=h4siaaaaaaaaaopge-lsz9u3mevlyc2jv-iesu2qsiqttgsyk630k_lzs_xlizjlsllz4svzi7ktektlmvklfrekocuwk5ql5im4fsumfhen5u1gzdzfzstbaabaw3ovugaaaa&sa=x&ved=2ahukewjn9rxujzv7ahwaqfuhhteudm4qmxmoahoecgkqag huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung – ameliorating algorithmic bias, or why explainable ai needs feminist philosophy published by scholarship@western, 2022 31 weisberg, michael. 2007. “three kinds of idealization.” journal of philosophy 104, no. 12 (december): 639–59. linus ta-lun huang is a postdoctoral fellow at the society of fellows in the humanities at the university of hong kong. his work focuses on philosophy of cognitive science, technology, and artificial intelligence. hsiang-yun chen is an assistant research fellow at academia sinica. she works primarily in philosophy of language and feminist philosophy. ying-tung lin is an associate professor at national yang ming chiao tung university. her research focuses on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and neuroethics. tsung-ren huang is an associate professor at national taiwan university. his research areas include psychoinformatics, neuroinformatics, artificial intelligence, and social robotics. tzu-wei hung is an associate research fellow at academia sinica. his fields of interest include the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of language. 14347 huang et al title page 14347 huang et al final format against neuronormativity in moral responsibility feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 4 recommended citation gorman, august. 2024. “against neuronormativity in moral responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 4. 2024 against neuronormativity in moral responsibility august gorman oakland university gorman.august@gmail.com gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 against neuronormativity in moral responsibility august gorman abstract the moral responsibility literature frequently relies on both explicit and implicit claims about “ideal” or “normal” agency that import unjustified normative assumptions into our theorizing. in doing so, it both fails to reckon with and misconstrues the reality of agential diversity. in this article i diagnose the root of this problem, which i trace back to the confluence of two factors: the search for fundamental agential capacities, and systemic discrimination toward psychological variance. i then preview three socially and politically important domains of inquiry that have been obscured by this paradigm as a way of motivating the need for and value of applying a neurodiversity perspective to moral responsibility and the ethics of blame. keywords: moral responsibility, neurodiversity, agency, blame, epistemic injustice neuronormativity applies normative judgment to certain ways of being psychologically constituted—seeing some ways as normal and others as defective. while certain ways of being psychologically constituted can cause people difficulties, a large body of scholarship illuminates the ways that most of these problems are best conceived of as products of the interaction between people with a minority form of natural human variance, on the one hand, and an inhospitable and discriminatory environment, on the other, rather than as inherent defects. the neurodiversity movement began in the 1990s with a reconceptualization of autism in these terms, but over the past decades, this influential idea has been applied to a wide range of psychological and neurocognitive disabilities and ways of being. the concept of neurodiversity represents not just a political movement but also a robust area of study with the capacity to radically reconceptualize the way we handle human difference in a wide range of domains.1 1 see, for example, rosqvist, chown, and stenning (2020), and pellicano and den houting (2022). for recent interventions in philosophy, see koi (2021) and chapman and carel (2022), and see chapman (2023) for a philosophical history of neuronormativity’s link to capitalism. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 the moral responsibility literature in philosophy is in need of such a reconceptualization. there is great variation across the population in the kinds of agential functioning that shape individual choice, intention, action, and omission. there are spectrums of difference that exist with regard to attention, memory, executive functions, imagination, compulsivity, social cognition, and the impact of trauma, to name just a few. why, then, do our theories and practices regarding how to appraise one another as agents and hold each other accountable on the basis of our behavior assume that there is such a thing as a “normal” or “ideal” agent with a standard set of capacities and assume that variations are forms of defective agency? once we adopt a neurodiversity lens, hidden neuronormative assumptions become visible throughout the moral responsibility literature. in this article i have two aims. my first aim is to diagnose the root of this problem. while i believe that this reconceptualization project has socially radical practical upshots, it is grounded on the idea that we have simply gotten the facts wrong about moral responsibility by making unjustified hidden normative assumptions about mental difference. my goal is to make these assumptions explicit and see what we are left with when we let them go. to quote philosopher of disability anita silvers, the idea of normal function has no foundation in objective biological fact because very large amounts of inheritable variation occur in natural species . . . . in modern biology dogmas about determinate species design have given way to appreciation of rich ranges of variation. [there is] no nature-based justification [for] making social justice conditional upon normality. (silvers 2005, 310; paraphrasing amundson 2000 and sober 1980) likewise, there is no determinate agential design, and there is no nature-based justification for making social justice conditional upon agential normality. my second aim in this article is to preview three socially and politically important domains of inquiry that have been obscured by the prevailing neuronormative paradigm, that a neurodiversity perspective can help to illuminate. in short: 1. undue focus on whether someone meets or fails to meet the idealized criteria for agential personhood obscures the reality that much human behavior stems from a complex interaction between agentive and nonagentive aspects of one’s mental world. these intrapersonal interactions often involve a kind of hidden labor that ought to impact our judgments of responsibility. gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 2. the moral responsibility literature is currently silent about the ethics of navigating one’s own neurodivergence and lacks the tools to make sense of social dimensions of behavioral interpretation and appraisal. for example, whether a person can avoid accidentally appearing as though they are uncaring toward someone is a matter of distributive justice and disability access as it pertains to behavioral interpretation. 3. without a lens through which we can see the interaction between systemic injustice, mental difference, and our responsibility practices, we lack the resources to see how blamers’ relationships to systems that inadequately address mental health provide an additional dimension of evaluation to factor into the appropriateness of blaming responses. 1. the origins of neuronormativity in moral responsibility 1.1. the search for essential capacities consider the following case: sunglasses for mom: adam is going on a family beach vacation with his wife and his parents. while shopping with his dad, bob, for sunglasses for the upcoming trip, he sees a pair that he thinks would look great on his mom and asks bob if he agrees. bob tells him that he has no idea if they would look good on her because he can’t picture her face at all. adam is taken aback. he can imagine his own wife’s face in quite a lot of detail—he’s always playing back some of his fondest memories of her in his mind, and he pictures her all the time when she’s not there. he initially thinks worse of his dad and even blames him a bit for not being able to picture his mom’s face. he wonders if his dad has been insufficiently attending to her. but then bob tells adam that he recently realized that he simply can’t visualize anything at all; he has what has recently been termed “aphantasia.” as it turns out, the ability to visualize varies quite widely across the population, with some who can play videos in their minds, some who see faint black-and-white approximations, and some who see nothing. upon learning this, it would make sense for adam not only to change his negative appraisal of his dad but also to revise his blaming practices in general regarding appraising people based on whether they can visualize someone as a direct indicator of how much they care about that person. he could conceptualize it as a rule that if you can’t visualize someone, you don’t sufficiently care about them, but there are many exceptions to that rule for people who have a visualizing disability. but since there is a lot of gradated variation, it would make much more sense to say that there feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 is no simple function that takes you from one’s ability to picture their wife to a negative evaluation of that person’s care for their wife. it doesn’t mean that there is never any correlation between the two, but anything that we can say about the connection that applies to the actual range of people with diverse minds whom we will want our responsibility practices to include is just going to be much more complicated. this is, i think, simple enough to see in this case, so why, then, do we not see that we have to account for a wide range of naturally occurring mental diversity in our responsibility practices in a similar way? differences in the ability to picture someone’s face come up fairly infrequently in terms of occasions for moral appraisal, but things like differences in memory, social cognition and understanding, attention, and executive function play a role in so much of the conduct that we are centrally concerned with in our everyday interpersonal responsibility practices. part of the problem is that competency at these capacities has come to be seen as fundamental to what makes us agents in the first place. as such, the conduct of those who fall sufficiently outside the norm with regard to these capacities is thought to be outside the realm of responsible agency altogether. some people are deemed mentally ill in such a way that they are thought of as nonagents altogether, such as p. f. strawson’s (2003, 78) “hopeless schizophrenic.” other denials of moral agency are timeor context-specific. for example, people with age-related memory loss might be seen as “too far gone” to assess in regard to behavior that involves their ability to respond to the kinds of morally significant behavior that require being able to remember important dates and details. rather than reconsider the norms, we restrict their scope to just the “real” agents. with these people bracketed off from consideration in this way in the usual dialectic, it is more difficult to see that there is great variation in how these sorts of agential functions are realized in individuals. in order to understand the entrenched nature of these assumptions, we’ll need to look at the particular way that certain ideals for the functioning of these capacities have come to be the prominent indicators of responsible agency in the literature. while it now has grown into an independent subfield of its own, the moral responsibility literature cannot be fully understood without understanding it as having grown out of the free will literature.2 to massively simplify an extensive literature, one way of understanding the question the free will literature tries to address is to see it as a question that arises from a conflict between our convictions that people can be appropriately blamed or praised for what they do and our understanding of the world as being governed by deterministic causal processes outside our control. the fact that everything we do is seemingly determined by the 2 on the moral responsibility literature’s connection to the free will debate, see vihvelin (2011) and vargas (2011). gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 laws of nature and the state of the world at any given time (even a time before we were born) has seemed to many to put pressure on the idea that we are the originators of our own actions. our concepts of praise and blame, the thought goes, rely on it being the case that the person we’re appraising was able to act freely. acting freely, we might have thought, consists in having genuine alternative courses of action at the moment of choice, such that more than one of them can be made actual. but this picture of agency is, if our deterministic model of the world is true, illusory. and determinism, while far from being an obvious consequence of our current best science, underlies much of how we make sense of the world. this conflict of our convictions started a quest by philosophers who believed that even though we don’t have robust metaphysically available alternatives at the moment of choice, we nevertheless can hold people responsible to articulate some other feature(s) of our agency that we exercise when we act, in virtue of which we can hold people responsible for what they do. the general strategy has been to look for capacities that make us the kind of beings who could be held morally responsible while not requiring that we are the kind of beings who can have metaphysically open options at the moment of choice. for example, it has been variously contended that free and responsible agency consists in the possession of a disposition to do otherwise if one had decided differently, the capacity to respond to right reasons, or the ability to act consistently with what one cares about.3 these capacities are sometimes thought of as an alternate kind of control that a person exercises over their action. the successful exercise of these capacities (or, sometimes, the mere possession of them), it has been claimed, is sufficient for moral agency even if it turns out that we don’t have control over what we do at the moment of choice in the robust sense that we can make different causal futures actual.4 it is in the attempt to identify these capacities that we have cemented a sort of difference-as-defect approach to agency, in which agents are those who possess the ability to exercise their capacities in a certain way that ensures that their actions can be held to be free and responsible. a sort of informal methodology has been frequently employed for determining what the relevant capacities might be. bringing the functioning of this methodology to light helps to illuminate an unassuming but pernicious form of ableism at the very core of our theorizing about what it is to enact moral agency. here is how it works: first, come up with a case where someone 3 for examples of each criterion, see vihvelin (2004), wolf (1990), and sripada (2016). 4 as the literature on moral responsibility has developed, there has been increasingly less focus on the question of whether these capacities are also meant to guarantee that the agent acts freely. for the view that responsibility is compatible with determinism whether or not free will is, see fischer and ravizza (1998) on “semicompatibilism.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 shouldn’t be blamed for some reason when ordinarily a person in such a situation would be. it’s good to choose a case where the person suffers from some sort of condition, because your reader will likely feel sympathetic toward the plight of such a person being inappropriately blamed. (the literature here abounds with examples of hypothetical “addicts,” “compulsives,” “psychopaths,” autistic people, and victims of various kinds of childhood trauma.) next, identify on the basis of their difference what that person lacks that the rest of us (i.e., “normal” agents) have. infer that the intuition is explained by the fact that the person in question is, due to the nature of their condition, defective in some capacity that must be required in order to be the kind of person who can be held responsible. you have now identified a new crucial capacity for responsible agency—what makes us, unlike those people, able to be appraised for our deliberately chosen actions. when this methodology is repeatedly employed, the standard responsible agent gets defined as an amalgam of what neurodivergent agents lack. there is no consensus on what these requisite capacities are for responsible agency, or on what kinds of psychological conditions might preclude it. but the question, in regard to each particular psychological condition, is always whether people who have it are defective as agents such that we ought to feel bad for them rather than blame them, or if they are, after all, sufficiently like the rest of us such that their missteps can be appraised as moral failings.5 with this structure in place, it can be hard to see that some of these allegedly essential capacities are instantiated to different degrees and in a variety of ways in different individuals. we have flattened the way we perceive a complex landscape for theoretical purposes, but in real life, the messy complexity of agential diversity exists nonetheless, and our responsibility norms are simply not flexible enough to account for it. 1.2. intuition pumps and epistemic injustice the flattening of this landscape is not merely a function of the unfolding of the moral responsibility literature’s narrative, but also a byproduct of philosophy’s failure 5 see pearce (2020) for the view that psychiatric practice also suffers from this false dilemma. coates and swenson (2013), nelkin (2016), and tierney (2019) put forth accounts according to which defectiveness as an agent is not a black-or-white matter but is instead gradable (for example, via “degrees of control”). shoemaker (2015) puts forth the theory that there are three faces of responsibility and that people with psychological disabilities may not be responsible in one or two of the senses while nevertheless being responsible in another sense. while these views lend muchneeded nuance to these discussions, at their heart they retain the notion that psychologically “normal” agents are responsible in full and abnormal agents differ from this norm. gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 to engage in earnest with the neurodiversity movement and to listen to neurodivergent voices.6 first, in philosophy, critical analysis of disability has generally lagged behind the significant inroads it has made in other disciplines within the social sciences and humanities.7 while there has been an increasing sense of the importance of the examination of how philosophers’ professional, institutional, and discursive practices might reproduce power apparatuses of gender and race, the same cannot be said for disability, due in no small part to a pervasive belief in the discipline that disability is a prediscursive fact, whose existence is quite separate from dynamics of power (tremain 2017, 41). for neurodivergent philosophers, pervasive epistemic injustice creates a difficult context for discussing their mental and agential differences.8 while various minority groups are subject to epistemic injustice, people with psychological disabilities are especially susceptible to having their perceptions of the world called into question. this puts neurodivergent philosophers in a difficult position with regard to disclosure, as they risk sustaining perceived credibility deficits should they disclose a mental health condition. as abigail gosselin (2019, 48) puts it, “reasoning capacity is the currency of power, authority, and privilege” in the discipline. as such, philosophers are especially vulnerable to the harms of self-disclosing any kind of psychological difference that may have the effect of undermining perceptions of their 6 it has only been recently that attention has begun to turn toward the power dynamics of moral responsibility practices more broadly, as well. for this recent turn see, for example, hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana (2018), cherry (2017, 2018, 2019) and ciurria (2020). as ciurria (2020, 1) puts it, “classic responsibility theorists were primarily concerned with the possibility of reconciling responsibility with determinism, an analysis that said nothing about our interpersonal relationships and normative concerns. strawson shifted the focus by introducing an interpersonal model of moral responsibility that conceived of responsibility as a social practice. contemporary strawsonians have been mainly concerned with elaborating the conditions under which blame and praise are warranted. but these analyses have left strawson’s background assumptions entirely intact. so far, no one has offered a comprehensive analysis of the malignant asymmetries of power that structure our interpersonal relationships, resulting in unequal distributions of blame, praise, respect, and uptake.” 7 for further discussion, see tremain (2017, 2). 8 on the concept of epistemic justice, see fricker (2007). shelley tremain has interviewed many philosophers who discuss the difficulties they have faced in this regard. see her ongoing dialogues on disability interview series, at the biopolitical philosophy blog, https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/dialogues-on-disability/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 reasoning capacities. consider the remarks of established philosopher peter railton, who came forth about his depression in his 2015 dewey lecture, which was considered groundbreaking in the profession: i know what has held me back all these years. would people think less of me? would i seem to be tainted, reduced in their eyes, someone with an inner failing whom no one would want to hire or with whom no one would want to marry or have children? would even friends start tip-toeing around my psyche? would colleagues trust me with responsibility? i’m now established in my career, so some of these questions have lost some of their bite for me. but not all of them. (railton 2015) in the context of philosophizing about agency, these prejudices create an atmosphere in which testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can be mutually reinforcing. due to prejudicial characterizations of people with mental health disabilities, neurodivergent people’s explanations for the functioning of their own agency can seem cognitively unreliable and bizarre, or dangerous and morally suspicious, which threatens the perceived epistemic status of the testimony of neurodivergent philosophers writing about neurodivergent agency (jackson et al. 2009, 167–68; carel and kidd 2014, 529; kurs and grinshpoon 2018). this likely leads to fewer neurodivergent philosophers writing about agency and, thus, fewer neurodivergent philosophers shaping the models of agential architecture that are developed. testimony about their experience then comes to sound more bizarre when it contradicts not only norms but the perceived conceptual limits of how agency functions. but when the people who experience a certain psychological phenomenon are disenfranchised from shaping the standard models of agential architecture, we should not be too surprised that their professed experience fits uncomfortably within them, making their experience harder to articulate within preexisting frameworks.9 philosophical methodology, too, plays a role in amplifying the distance between philosophizing about agency and the reality of the diversity of human agential architecture. first, there is a heavy reliance on intuition in philosophy. while there are many general and feminist critiques of the role of intuition in philosophical methodology,10 the concern here is a more context-specific one. when using intuitions about how minds work, we seem to be subject to overgeneralizing from our 9 see, for example, see calhoun (2008) for discussion of the gendered dimensions of philosophy of action’s failure to adequately account for clinical depression on models of agency. 10 for an overview of these criticisms, see pust (2019). gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 own experience. as nomy arpaly (2005, 295) wisely notes, “humans, it seems, fare amazingly poorly when it comes to acknowledging the reality of mental states the likes of which they have not experienced.” this general human tendency is only exacerbated in situations in which the person whose experience is owed some amount of deference is subject to epistemic injustice. as miranda fricker writes, victims of hermeneutical injustice are subject to a loss of epistemic confidence because when you find yourself in a situation where you seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world. (fricker 2006, 104) and this leads to a “loss of epistemic confidence” (104). this situation undoubtedly describes the reactions many neurodivergent people have to supposedly “universal” intuitions about mental functioning that are cited in the agency and responsibility literature. people with mental health diagnoses have already been conditioned to distrust their ability to make sense of their inner world, and so they are likely quite hesitant in these scenarios to attempt to use their own experience for counterexamples. this seeming lack of contrary intuition can serve to amplify the perception that such proposed features of agency are indeed universal.11 not unrelatedly, philosophy has largely failed to adopt the practice, growing increasingly common in other humanities, of incorporating the first-personal accounts and lived experience of neurodivergent voices from outside the field, relying instead of hypotheticals and literary examples. but just as when someone writes about any other minority group without an understanding of the group’s history of social, political, and economic disadvantages, philosophers are likely to be unable to disentangle contingent parts of disabled experience from innate characteristics of having a given disability. these factors color the lived experience of neurodivergent people in ways that would not be obvious from the outside looking in. 11 a striking feature of people who have neurodivergences that are largely unacknowledged is that they will often attempt to fit their experience into the dominant conceptual paradigm, despite the need for mental gymnastics to resolve the cognitive dissonance. for example, people with low visualizing ability often report that they thought that language about “picturing” was simply a metaphorical way of speaking about thinking about something and are shocked to learn that some people in fact can call to mind full-color images in all their detail. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 in a way, it is understandable that this practice has not been widely taken up in philosophy, as incorporating the particularities of lived experience of disability might be seen as running counter to the aims of philosophical theory-building. philosophy largely aims to abstract away from particularities in order to access universal truths about the human condition. an important part of the methodology for doing so is to isolate specific junctions in agential architecture in a way that brackets off socially contingent factors. in fact, i agree that many points in the agency and responsibility literature are best made by using hypothetical examples in order to abstract away from potentially confounding details, as i do in this very article.12 however, it becomes a problem when imagined cases of psychological disability are all able to be handled tidily, making it seem as though questions about responsibility and psychological disability have already been handled without any engagement with the more nuanced and politically molded lived experience of psychological disability. 1.3. illness-talk and misplaced pity consider again the methodology of looking for essential capacities for morally responsible agency. in each case we look for some capacity by imagining a case in which it seems that we should not blame someone due to their psychological disability because we feel sympathy for their situation and conclude that they must lack some key capacity or the ability to exercise it. i want to suggest that this form of sympathetic concern itself, which we seemingly can naturally apply to these cases, is nevertheless misplaced and diverts focus from the real normative landscape that involves difficult social coordination to set fair norms for responsibility across neurotype. this kind of concern replicates a problematic general attitude of pity toward disabled and neurodivergent people. it might not be so obvious, though, what would be so bad about pitying people in circumstances in which, it seems, they might be wrongfully blamed. we might think that while it’s true that in the agency and responsibility literature mental difference is conceived of as a defect, it is only in terms of defectiveness at being able to be held accountable. being able to acknowledge that actions that stem from mental illness are not the fault of the person but rather the result of a disease over which the person 12 that said, we ought to tread lightly when we come up with hypotheticals that are at risk of significantly negatively shaping public views on psychological disability. i concur with rima basu (2023, 278) that “when it comes to theorizing about others, that is, treating others as objects of our inquiry, there are important moral risks present that raise the stakes of the debate and make it even more imperative that we treat the subjects of our inquiry with the right kind of respect. for example, some ways of asking a question inherently demean or dehumanize the group of whom the question is asked.” gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 has little control might genuinely be seen as a progressive attitudinal approach over an earlier approach that would view people with depression as blameworthy for their laziness or autistic people as culpably self-centered. and pity, we might think, provides the emotional underpinning for a virtuous kind of attitude toward people in unfortunate circumstances. a cultural analogy may be helpful here. imagine two societies: one that eats with utensils and one that eats with their hands. the society that eats with utensils at first casts judgment on the people of the society that eat with their hands; how could they be acting in such an uncivilized manner? it’s offensive! but then, they come to realize that those poor souls just don’t know any better and can’t help their own lack of manners. while this kind of pity might be an improved attitude to have toward the second society in some ways, it is horribly patronizing and fails to question the superiority of their presumed norm. as joseph stramondo (2010, 132) has powerfully argued, “pity reinforces the social construction of disability by not challenging it as contingent.” continuing in the tradition of disability activists who have long resisted their infantilization with slogans like “piss on pity,” stramondo sees academic philosophers’ common attitude of pity toward disabled people as in line with sartre’s liberal who thinks himself superior to the anti-semite but nevertheless protects the concept of race as a natural and permanent cause of suffering via his pity. pity, according to stramondo, cannot exist without an ideology of hierarchy that positions some people as inevitable sufferers and their oppressors as allies for recognizing that they suffer, despite ignoring their complicity in the power structure that subjugates them in the first place. “in the case of people with disabilities,” he writes, the liberal has been able to, through the ideology of pity, cling to the claim that there is a universal human nature while simultaneously constructing a separate category of people who somehow fail to meet the criteria for inclusion in this human nature. this is achieved primarily through pity. (stramondo 2010, 130) this dehumanizing pity is on full display in p. f. strawson’s view, which is arguably the most widely adopted framework for thinking about the nature of moral responsibility. according to strawson, morally responsible agency is constituted by the proneness to be responded to as a member of an interpersonal community. rather than seeing a person as a genuine participant in moral exchanges, strawson tells us that if a person is “psychologically abnormal,” for example, a “hopeless schizophrenic,” “warped” “deranged” “neurotic” “compulsive” or “peculiarly unfortunate in . . . formative circumstances” we ought to take the objective attitude toward them (strawson 2003, 78–79). to take the objective attitude is to withdraw ordinary interpersonal attitudes, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 instead viewing the person “as an object of social policy; as a subject for . . . treatment; as something certainly to be taken account . . . of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained” (strawson 2003, 79). whether or not being responsible just consists in this kind of proneness to being held responsible as a member of an interpersonal community, there does certainly seem to be a strong tie between being exempt from attributions of responsibility and being seen as outside the realm of normal interpersonal relationships. to say that a person lacks the essential capacities to be a moral agent is to fail to take a person seriously as a moral peer. as david beglin (2021, 267–75) puts it, to fail to take a person seriously as a moral peer is to deny the person with whom you are in a moral exchange the very existence of a normative perspective. and to deny that a person expresses any such viewpoint when they act such that they can stand as an interlocutor in an adult interpersonal exchange simply places them outside the realm of the kind of interpersonal normative ethics that involves socially coordinated compromises for norms of behavioral appraisal. this way of relating to a person is akin to treating them as “a kind of moral ward . . . eschew[ing] genuine interaction . . . implicitly taking it that one’s own moral agency should play a greater role than theirs in shaping one’s relations with them” (beglin, n.d., 19). pity might nevertheless be seen to be an appropriate response to people with psychological disabilities who are being blamed for their behavior if they are suffering due to a purported illness and it is appropriate to respond with care and pity to someone who is genuinely ill. much of the agency and responsibility literature assumes a conception of mental illness as easily identifiable, absolute, and different in kind from the habits, tendencies, quirks, and personality traits of people without diagnosable mental illnesses. mental illness, on this understanding, really is a kind of sickness that comes over a person. this is on clear display in theories that assume at the outset that people with mental illness lack crucial abilities or kinds of control; their sickness is conceptualized as the loss or damage of their mental capabilities. but it is striking that even some of the fiercest critics of these kinds of views seem to share the view that people with diagnosable psychiatric conditions are owed pity or sympathy due to the very fact of their condition (and not, say, due to the way people with their kind of psychological functioning are treated in society). t. m. scanlon (2015, 104)—while putting forth a theory about why we ought to temper our blame toward people with psychopathy, even though, by his lights, they do not lack a fundamental capacity of moral agency—argues that our reasons for blame can be counterbalanced by reasons to respond with care for someone who is ill. but in addition to the problems with a default attitude of pity, this characterization of psychological disability betrays a naïve (though common) understanding of mental disorder to think that the group of people who are labeled “mentally ill” are just a proper subset of people with illnesses who ought to be “cared gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 for” as if they had cancer or the flu.13 psychiatric diagnoses only purport to pick out loosely related clusters of mental, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that indicate that a person is struggling. this distress is a product of the interplay between social environment and individual constitution, and it is quantified by the degree to which it limits a person’s ability to perform the functions of daily living in a particular social environment. unlike research in physical medicine, contemporary research in psychiatry makes no claims to having discovered plainly codifiable ailments with discrete causes. psychiatric diagnostic labels, instead, provide a sort of pragmatically useful lingua franca for clinicians helping patients navigate the treatment options that tend to be useful for others with similar symptom profiles.14 not only do mental health diagnoses not clearly indicate biologically identifiable diseases, but overwhelming evidence also points to the fact that mental health symptoms exist on continuous dimensions across the population (brown et. al. 2001; kessler et al. 2005). in fact, current evidence fails to show that even a single mental health condition is best conceptualized as a distinct category (haslam, holland, and kuppens 2012). it is not a radical position to acknowledge that recognized psychiatric disabilities merely represent extremes in traits that vary in degree across the entire population, some of which are noticeable simply because they are (contingently) socially disadvantageous.15 pitying a person who is blamed 13 this understanding of people with psychological disabilities as people with illnesses like any other may be prominent in part because equating mental disorder and physical disorder has been a prominent dialectical strategy for acquiring funding for mental health services via “parity laws” that require insurers to handle mental health claims in the same way as physical health claims. these arguments aim to legitimize the needs and struggles of users of mental health services via their similarities to patients seeking help for physical ailments. 14 the major diagnostic manuals themselves have long acknowledged this. according to the dsm-iv, “there is no assumption that each category of mental disorder is a completely discrete entity with absolute boundaries dividing it from other mental disorders or no mental disorders” (american psychiatric association 1994, xxii), and the icd-10 recognizes that “mental disorder” is "not an exact term" though it can be used “to imply the existence of a clinically recognizable set of symptoms or behaviour associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal functions” (world health organization 1992, 5) 15 there is work in the philosophy of mental disorder that could, in theory, give us firmer criteria on which we could base our theory-building. this is outside of the scope of this project. i am, however, convinced by the work that shows that the right account of the concept of mental disorder will invariably contain a normative element. for an overview and recent defense, see cooper (2020). somogy varga feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 inappropriately when they are held to standards of behavioral appraisal not designed for them on the basis that they have an illness gets the causal order backward. it is in large part the difficulty of living up to societal norms that are designed without certain kinds of agents in mind that causes the very struggles that become diagnosable as illness. so responding with pity or even sympathetic care rather than righteous anger toward the unfair expectations in these cases can be a way of reinforcing a constructed social hierarchy. it certainly cannot provide a stable foundation for our theories of how we ought to carry out our responsibility and blaming practices. 2. the promise of a neurodiversity paradigm with a better understanding of what the prevailing neuronormative paradigm in moral responsibility has obscured and the harms it has wrought, in the remainder of this article i preview three socially and politically important domains of inquiry that moving to a neurodiversity perspective can help to illuminate. i am not be able to flesh any of these out fully, but i hope i provide enough context so that a sketch of a vision of a new paradigm can emerge.16 2.1 agentive/nonagentive interaction consider the following case: itchy arm: imagine that elaine has an itchy arm. for some reason, an evildoer has told her that he will harm her friend if she scratches her arm in the next two minutes. the fact that elaine has a desire to scratch her arm doesn’t reveal anything deep about her character, and ordinarily if she acted on this desire, it wouldn’t say anything much about her either. but in this situation, she would likely be able to hold off on scratching her arm in order to protect her friend from harm, and she might even be praiseworthy for doing so. it’s not that the presence of the evildoer makes the desire to scratch the itch a part of elaine’s psychology that tells us something about her, but rather that her desire to manage this desire is revealing of her concern for her friend. this involves an interaction between agentive aspects of elaine’s psychology and nonagentive aspects of it: the initial desire to scratch her arm, and (2017) explores recent work that might vindicate the thought that the valueladenness of the concept of mental disorder might nevertheless be compatible with the viability of psychiatry as serious science that studies objective facts. 16 applying this paradigm to illuminate new kinds of solutions to problems in the philosophy of moral responsibility is the task i take up in the unpublished manuscript “altering the fault lines: how neurodiversity shapes moral responsibility” (gorman, n.d.). gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 the desire to manage it. but focus on whether an agent has capacities or an act has a property like being reasons-responsive or not tends to make this interaction invisible. this would be a relatively minor problem if it only applied to criminals who make threats about scratching itches, but there are various kinds of mental difference that involve the navigation of interaction between such agentive and nonagentive aspects of one’s own psychology. these intrapersonal interactions often involve a kind of hidden labor which is rendered imperceptible by a neuronormative paradigm, but this labor ought to be considered in our appraisals of behavior and judgments of responsibility. see, for example, the following case:17 coprolalia slur: farrah has coprolalia, (which is the urge to frequently utter obscenity) as a result of her tourette syndrome. in this case she has the urge to utter a slur that targets a minority population. a person who is a member of that minority population, gerry, is in the room but will be leaving shortly. let’s suppose that farrah tics and says the slur before gerry leaves the room. many philosophers of moral responsibility would handle that case by saying that it seems like farrah, due to her tourette syndrome, is acting completely involuntarily; she’s out of control or unable to exercise some other important capacity, so we should feel bad for her rather than blaming her. otherwise, they would conclude that she must have the ability to exercise the relevant capacities after all, in which case she is responsible, and nothing relevant differentiates farrah from a person who utters slurs against minorities for some other reason. but in accounts of the actual lived experience of people with tourette syndrome, many people report their tics as being voluntary responses to a build-up of internal pressure and report being able to withhold their ticcing for short periods of time (schroeder 2005).18 people with tourette syndrome, from a neurodiversity perspective, could be seen as people who tend to have more itch-like facets of their motivational psychology than other people do.19 17 i use a similar example to motivate slightly different points in my chapter “the minimal approval account of attributability” (gorman 2019, 152) and in the article “what is the difference between weakness of will and compulsion?” (gorman 2023b, 48). 18 schroeder (2005) also discusses the implications of this lived experience for moral responsibility. 19 the description of premonitory urges as itch-like originates in the research literature on tourette syndrome in bullen and hemsley (1983) and follows in many research articles and online resources since. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 one way that we could think of these itch-like facets of one’s motivational psychology is as part of the environmental conditions in which agents act. for example, the setup of the room an agent is in might count as part of the environment—maybe there’s only one door to the room, and the person can’t leave without pushing past other people. such features of the environment constrain which actions are available for the agent. but there are also some mental features of agents that could count as part of these environmental background conditions that an agent must navigate. an itch or extreme exhaustion may be common examples—these are not the kinds of motivations that reveal deep truths about a person, although such a person may manage them indirectly by making sure they get lots of sleep or by putting aloe on their itchy skin, and these acts that stem from managerial desires might reveal to us something about them. using the neurodiversity model as our guide, i want to suggest that the boundary between environment and agent simply differs a little bit in each person— there’s just natural variance here that on its own is neither good nor bad. a person who has coprolalia just happens to have a piece of their psychology that stands outside their agency and that not many people have—the urge to utter obscene language. while action that stems from fully agentive parts of our psychology might be most expressive of our moral agency, we can also be responsible for managing and navigating our environments or failing to do so. to see how this might be true, consider the following case: slur on the whiteboard: farrah walks into a room and there is a slur written on a whiteboard. she didn’t write it, but she knows it will look like she did when someone whom that slur targets walks into the room next. perhaps farrah ought to erase the slur, and would be responsible for failing to do so, even though writing the slur on the board wasn’t her idea in the first place. likewise, it’s at least possible that a person with tourette syndrome could be indirectly responsible for insulting someone due to not temporarily suppressing an urge to say a slur in very particular circumstances. the idea would be that whereas farrah’s urge to say the slur doesn’t speak for her and she shouldn’t be appraised on the basis of it, her desire to suppress her urge could speak for her. just as the ways that we manage our external environmental conditions can speak for us so too can the agential management of our nonagential mental environments.20 20 i develop such an account in “the minimal approval account of attributability” (gorman 2019) and “neurodiversity and the ethics of access” (gorman 2023a). in the latter (gorman 2023a), i show how we can differentiate farrah from, say, a racist who gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 that said, there is a significant amount of hidden labor that we ask people with coprolalia to do to uphold the norm that any slur that is uttered should be understood as being meant to intentionally target its victim. significant painful mental energy is expended suppressing tics, and cancelling the implication of the tics by outing oneself as having tourette syndrome is far from socially cost-free. asking people with tourette syndrome to suppress all of their tics for everyone else’s social comfort, as we currently tend to do, amounts to asking certain people to be mentally tortured for the benefit of the masses. our social norm here isn’t a well-thought-out policy but rather a function of tourette syndrome being a minoritized form of agential difference. imagine everyone in the world had tourette syndrome—what would the responsibility norms they would design look like? insofar as we fail to think about this, we can see that we are assuming a certain kind of agent is the one our practices should be modeled on. a neurodiversity perspective challenges us to instead think about how we might set our norms without assuming there is any particular way we should expect that the boundaries between an agent and their environment might be. it is outside the scope of this paper to advocate for a particular norm for any given society, but at the very least, it seems as though a neurodiversity perspective would tell us that we should consider it an open possibility that a stranger has tourette syndrome when they utter a slur in public, in the absence of a stigma-free disclosure norm. 2.2. behavioral appraisal as disability-access ethics many of our norms for behavioral interpretation and related moral appraisal serve to marginalize disabled people by constructing significant barriers to participation in our common social life. the expectation of constant tic suppression is one example. for another, consider norms that very closely tie failures to notice or remember to failures to care. angela smith, a major proponent of the view that we can be held responsible for what we fail to remember or notice, considers such oversights to reveal an objectionable lack of concern because if one judges some thing or person to be important or significant in some way, this should (rationally) have an influence on one's tendency to notice factors which pertain to the existence, welfare, or flourishing of that thing or person. (smith 2007, 244) but claims like these seem to flatly ignore something we are otherwise generally aware of—there are significant differences in how memory functions across the population. we know that there are age-related declines in memory, and it is finds it difficult to hold back slurs in public via the fact that she does not minimally approve of acting on her urge for any further aim than to get rid of the urge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 hypothesized that people with adhd (around 5 percent of the population by most estimates [polanczyk et. al 2007]) naturally tend to have their attention drawn toward what they find to be most interesting rather than what they take to be most important. such considerations should make us wonder whether claims about what one should rationally be able to attend to are really just claims that can be made about the tendencies of certain subgroups of agents with particular neurotypes. what any given person is able to remember or attend to might have some correlation with what they care about, but once we recognize the reality of agential diversity, we see that the reality is much more complicated than many philosophers would make it seem. for example, take the norm that arriving late for dinner with a friend indicates that you insufficiently care about your friend. people without adhd are generally drawn to attend to and be motivated by what they care about most, and so for a person without adhd, being late might be a reasonably good indicator that they cared about some other things more. for the person with adhd, though, the connection between what they care about and what they attend to and are motivated to do is a bit more complicated. attention is naturally drawn toward what they find most interesting and the subtasks required to get to a location on time can be significantly arduous to get through. because of this, a person with adhd might care a normal amount about their dinner companion, but nevertheless their care may not lead to being on time. now the person with adhd can, with enough introspection and selfmanagement skills, find ways to artificially make the important tasks more interesting and can arrange systems to build habits that help them to get through the tedious tasks. because people with adhd know that a lateness norm exists that ties lateness very closely to failing to care, they know that without performing this extensive selfmanagement labor on a regular basis they will appear to not care very much about the people around them. should you blame the person with adhd for not being on time for dinner? given a neuronormative paradigm, we have to try to answer this question by asking whether adhd is a disease, and if it is, whether it makes it so that the person can’t control her behavior enough to be held responsible as a moral agent. on a neurodiversity model, the answer may be messier, but this reflects the actual complexity of the situation. for example, it might involve considering whether we would be warranted in indirectly blaming the person for not performing the steps that would make their behavior align with the neuronormative norm, whether the sorts of resources that are needed to be able to perform this requisite kind of selfmanagement are fairly distributed, or how the level of effort put in on this occasion compares to or is influenced by the level of effort the person puts forth on other occasions. gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 it is, of course, morally good to care about people in the kind of way that might make you notice or remember things about them, but just what we expect that to look like is a social construction that divides people into “normal” functioning and people who constantly need to excuse or apologize for their behavior. this is a barrier to equitable social participation, no different in kind, i want to argue, from other forms of disability exclusion. what we need to do is to reshape our norms using principles of disability-access ethics.21 while i am not able to fully develop a set of recommendations here, i will preview some of the questions that, i think, need to be addressed as a way of showing the kind of political and ethical theorizing there is to be done in this domain that only a neurodiversity lens can help us to see. first, just as in the design of physical spaces, the lowest hanging fruit will be unnecessary barrier removal. consider how we might make a physical space more accessible by getting rid of an unnecessary strobe light when we know it will cause seizures in people with certain forms of epilepsy. in just the same way, we might get rid of the norm that eye contact signals professionalism when interviewing people since it is a social norm on behavioral interpretation that unfairly disadvantages autistic people and people with social anxiety. in setting these norms, there will be conflicts between people who are neurodivergent in different ways who have competing claims to incompatible access needs, as well as conflicts between neurodivergent access to social spaces and the genuine value of certain behavioral interpretive norms that neurodivergent people are not well suited to adhere to. but since setting norms of behavioral interpretation should be guided by the ethics of disability access, this should be no surprise, as these sorts of conflicts arise frequently in the design of accessible spaces. behavioral interpretation and appraisal is merely one avenue in which it becomes evident how much we need to develop a philosophical ethics of disability access more broadly. we’ll need to be able to ask questions, such as, how painful is it to be misinterpreted in a certain kind of way? and how difficult and/or impossible would it be to change so that you do genuinely meet this interpretive norm?22 these factors apply also to those 21 for an overview of ways that we might think about the ethics of disability access, especially as it pertains to neurodiversity, see my “neurodiversity and the ethics of access” (gorman 2023a). 22 notice that while proponents of the more standard control view of moral responsibility focus on the difficulty neurodivergent people might have aligning their behavior with the current norm in time-slice instances as an indicator of their agential status, on my view this difficulty is no different in kind from the difficulty a neurotypical person might have recalibrating their responses in accordance with a different norm. on my view difficulty enters the picture only when setting first-order feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 onto whom we would distribute the burden to change their practices of interpretation, as it can be very difficult to change behavioral interpretive norms. but so too for the design of physically accessible social spaces. we need to know how to weigh, for example, the pain one person might experience attempting to access a space without their disability-related needs being met versus the unwillingness to access that space by another disabled person who has a lower pain tolerance. we need to know how much we ought to weigh the necessity of finding inexpensive physically accessible spaces to meet against the possibility that a meeting will not happen at all. finally, just as disability advocates promote differentiation as a pedagogical tool for accessibility, tailoring assignments so that each student has the opportunity to display mastery in a way that suits their particular way of learning, we might do well to take a more differentiated response toward our appraisals of one another. while withholding judgment about others’ behaviors is one way of easing the burdens for those who struggle to meet current expectations given our interpretational norms, being able to hold one another accountable via what our behavior expresses about us is socially and politically valuable. this gives us reason to destigmatize psychological disability and variance so that disclosure of differences becomes less socially costly. the more that we are able to learn about neurodivergent experience, the more we will be able to customize our interpersonal responses and appraisals in ways that avoid misunderstandings. this way we can ensure that we are neither judging what shouldn’t be judged nor letting ourselves off the hook for things that we owe to one another. 2.3. systemic injustice, mental health resource allocation, and the ethics of blame finally, a neurodiversity perspective can also help to illuminate the relevance of systemic injustice to our responsibility practices. insofar as our social norms for behavioral interpretation and responsibility involve (or in some cases ought to be redesigned to involve) the disclosure, management, or modulation of one’s individual agential architecture, these norms will imply that one has the tools available to be able to do that. this might require access to resources for introspection, selfdiscovery, destigmatization, mental health literacy, coaching, and much more. but in reality, access to even basic mental health care services is extremely limited. only around 2 percent of health spending globally is directed toward mental health, and due to systemic injustice, oppressed populations bear a significant proportion of unmet mental health care need. we can’t have a blanket moral norm that, for example, blames people for not managing their behavior in a way that they, through no fault of their own, would only be able to do with the help of a therapist if normative questions about the distribution of labor over time rather than when assessing one’s agential status. gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 there aren’t any therapists available to them. furthermore, we must assume that people are somehow able to find the time to pursue such projects despite the relentless onslaught of work and familial obligations that characterize contemporary life in a society that is already hostile to neurodivergence. perhaps, then, there is a role for accounting for our complicity with unjust systems or redress for systemic injustice in our ethics of blame. without a neurodiversity lens, we can too easily conceive of those who might need mental health resources as anomalous outliers, or exception cases to moral responsibility “business as usual.” for example, consider the current dialectic in the moral responsibility literature about people with traumatic backgrounds. the cases of interest are cases in which a person does something morally wrong where their wrongdoing is influenced in great part by their prior traumatic experiences. theorizing on these cases tends to divide into two camps. historicists say that such traumatized individuals must have failed to develop the normal capacities to be held responsible— either they must have been deprived of moral education due to their trauma and so never came to see themselves as the sources of their own responsible behavior, or they must have had features of their psychology instilled in them in unusual ways that bypass their capacities.23 here philosophers tend to draw on extreme examples to make their case—people who are brainwashed, tortured, brutally abused, and raised by tyrants.24 on the other side, structuralists insist that trauma ought to be absolutely irrelevant, in terms of the appropriateness of our blaming the agent, except as it might manifest itself in terms of the agents’ damaged capacities at the time of action. notice that, as different as they are, both of the major positions in this debate operate with the assumption that unless you’re thoroughly broken, you are accountable for what you do in just the same way as everyone else is. but by adopting a neurodiversity perspective and putting the perspectives of minority groups on equal footing with “idealized” agents rather than conceiving of people as either normal or broken, we can question the assumption that actions that come about due in large part to prior trauma of some sort are rare. we have the space to ask how our societal support (or lack thereof) for trauma survivors might impact the appropriateness of our blaming responses, and we have the space to ask the kinds of questions we would need to ask if, for example, everyone we’re interacting with in 23 see, for example, fischer and ravizza (1998, 210–11), mele (1995, 172), haji and cuypers (2007), and mckenna (2016). structuralist views and/or defenses of them are put forth in frankfurt (1971), arpaly and schroeder (1999), shoemaker (2003), mckenna (2004, 2012), smith (2005), talbert (2009), sripada (2016), and matheson (2019). 24 for an exception to this general rule, though, see daniel sharp and david wasserman’s (2016) “deep brain stimulation, historicism, and moral responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 our community has trauma.25 perhaps it is instead an indictment of our own standing to blame, given our participation in unjust systems that can account for our ambivalent responses toward blaming people who act immorally due to past trauma. but without a neurodiversity lens, we are trapped in a framework that only asks us whether or not a given trauma survivor fails to meet the criteria for agency rather than asking for whom our social norms and standards were designed. 3. conclusion i have argued for the need for a paradigm shift in the way we think about moral responsibility and agential diversity. i have done this in part by showing some of the socially and politically important benefits of the paradigm shift. it promises to make visible the invisible labor of managing nonagential parts of one’s psychology in order to avoid misinterpreted appraisals of one’s behavior, provide the conceptual resources for understanding an important domain of disability-access ethics, and integrate the ethics of complicity with and redress from systemic injustice into the ethics of blame. i have also shown why the need for such a paradigm shift has not been obvious and explicated some of the reasons that neuronormative assumptions are so deeply entrenched in this area of philosophy. despite the critical lens that i have taken in this article, i hope that in exhuming our unjustified neuronormative assumptions, the ground has been cleared for a glimpse at what robust liberatory theorizing about moral responsibility might look like when carried out under a neurodiversity paradigm. references american psychiatric association. 1994. diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: fourth edition (dsm-iv). washington, dc: american psychiatric association. amundson, ron. 2000. “against normal function.” 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studies in history and philosophy of science part a 89 (october): 52–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sh psa.2021.07.006. kurs, rena, and alexander grinshpoon. 2018. “vulnerability of individuals with mental disorders to epistemic injustice in both clinical and social domains.” ethics and behavior 28 (4): 336–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508422.2017 .1365302. matheson, benjamin. 2019. “towards a structural ownership condition on moral responsibility.” canadian journal of philosophy 49 (4): 458–80. https://doi.org /10.1080/00455091.2018.1480853. mckenna, michael. 2004. “responsibility and globally manipulated agents.” philosophical topics 32, no. 1/2 (spring/fall): 169–92. https://doi.org/10.5840 /philtopics2004321/222. ———. 2012. “moral responsibility, manipulation arguments, and history: assessing the resilience of nonhistorical compatibilism.” journal of ethics 16, no. 2 (june): 145–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-012-9125-7. ———. 2016. “a modest historical theory of moral responsibility.” journal of ethics 20, no. 1–3 (sept.): 83–105. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9227-8. mele, alfred r. 1995. autonomous agents: from self-control to autonomy. new york: oxford university press. nelkin, dana kay. 2016. “difficulty and degrees of moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.” noûs 50, no. 2 (june): 356–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/no us.12079. pearce, steve. 2020. “the place of free will and agency in psychiatric practice. bjpsych bulletin 44, no. 2 (april): 57–60. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2019.89. pellicano, elizabeth, and jacquiline den houting. 2022. “annual research review: shifting from ‘normal science’ to neurodiversity in autism science.” journal of child psychology and psychiatry 63, no. 4 (april): 381–96. https://doi.org/10 .1111/jcpp.13534. polanczyk, guilherme, maurício silva de lima, bernardo lessa horta, joseph biederman, and luis augusto rohde. 2007. “the worldwide prevalence of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2024 26 adhd: a systematic review and metaregression analysis.” american journal of psychiatry 164, no. 6 (june): 942–48. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.2007.164 .6.942. pust, joel. 2019. “intuition.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2019 edition. published december 4, 2012; latest revision may 6, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries /intuition/. railton, peter. 2015. “innocent abroad: rupture, liberation, and solidarity.” draft of john dewey memorial lecture, presented at the annual meeting of the central division of the american philosophical association, st. louis, mo, february 19, 2015. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1vuvmvyohndrspy/railton. rosqvist, hanna bertilsdotter, nick chown, and anna stenning, eds. 2020. neurodiversity studies: a new critical paradigm new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429322297. scanlon, t. m. 2015. “forms and conditions of responsibility.” in the nature of moral responsibility: new essays, edited by randolph clarke, michael mckenna, and angela m. smith, 89–111. oxford: oxford university press. schroeder, timothy. 2005. “moral responsibility and tourette syndrome.” philosophy and phenomenological research 71, no. 1 (july): 106–23. https://doi.org/10.1 111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00432.x. sharp, daniel, and david wasserman. 2016. “deep brain stimulation, historicism, and moral responsibility.” neuroethics 9, no. 2 (august): 173–85. https://doi.org /10.1007/s12152-016-9260-0. shipherd, jillian c., shira maguen, w. christopher skidmore, and sarah m. abramovitz. 2011. “potentially traumatic events in a transgender sample: frequency and associated symptoms.” traumatology 17, no. 2 (june): 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534765610395614. shoemaker, david w. 2003. “caring, identification, and agency.” ethics 114, no. 1 (october): 88–118. https://doi.org/10.1086/376718. ———. 2015. responsibility from the margins. oxford: oxford university press. silvers, anita. 2005. “people with disabilities.” in the oxford handbook of practical ethics, edited by hugh lafollette, 300–327. oxford: oxford university press. smith, angela m. 2007. “responsibility for attitudes: activity and passivity in mental life.” ethics 115, no. 2 (january): 236–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/426957. sober, eliot. 1980. “evolution, population thinking, and essentialism.” philosophy of science 47, no. 3 (september): 350–83. sripada, chandra. 2016. “self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility.” philosophical studies 173, no. 5 (may): 1203–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11 098-015-0527-9. gorman – against neuronormativity in moral responsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 27 stramondo, joseph a. 2010. “how an ideology of pity is a social harm to people with disabilities.” social philosophy today 26:121–34. https://doi.org/10.5840/soc philtoday20102610. strawson, peter. 2003. “freedom and resentment.” in free will, edited by gary watson, 72–93. oxford: oxford university press. essay originally published in 1962. talbert, matthew. 2009. “implanted desires, self-formation, and blame.” journal of ethics & social philosophy 3 (2): 1–18. https://jesp.org/index.php/jesp/article /view/33. tierney, hannah. 2019. “quality of reasons and degrees of responsibility.” australasian journal of philosophy 97 (4): 661–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00 048402.2018.1550795. tremain, shelley l. 2017. foucault and feminist philosophy of disability. ann arbor, michigan: university of michigan press. varga, somogy. 2017. “mental disorder between naturalism and normativism.” philosophy compass 12, no. 6 (june): e12422. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3 .12422. vargas, manuel. 2011 “the revisionist turn: a brief history of recent work on free will.” in new waves in philosophy of action, edited by jesús h. aguilar, andrei a. buckareff, and keith frankish, 143–72. new york: palgrave macmillan. vihvelin, kadri. 2004. “free will demystified: a dispositional account,” philosophical topics 32, no. 1/2 (spring/fall): 427–50. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics20 04321/211. ———. 2011. how to think about the free will/determinism problem.” in carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science, edited by joseph keim campbell, michael o'rourke, and matthew h. slater, 313–40. cambridge, ma: mit press. wolf, susan. 1990. freedom within reason. oxford: oxford university press. world health organization. 1992. the icd-10 classification of mental and behavioural disorders: clinical descriptions and diagnosis guidelines. geneva: who. august gorman (he/they) is an assistant professor of philosophy at oakland university. his research focuses on mental health and disability ethics, moral responsibility, agency, and philosophy of death. he is currently writing a book called altering the fault lines: how neurodiversity shapes moral responsibility. 101204 gorman title page 101204 gorman final format the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 4 article 1 2025 the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire tris hedges university of copenhagen tris.hedges@hum.ku.dk recommended citation hedges, tris. 2025. “the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (4). article 1. mailto:tris.hedges@hum.ku.dk hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire tris hedges abstract in this paper i undertake to describe and theorize an important way in which subjects are kept “in line” with heteronormativity at the level of embodied affectivity. to do this, i synthesize a phenomenological understanding of sexuality with contemporary work in philosophy of emotion to thematize a form of self-doubt that is felt in relation to the experience of queer desires. i argue that the elicitation of such feelings of self-doubt is a crucial way in which a wider affective milieu of heterosexism is unjustly enforced. to achieve these aims, i first conceptualize heterosexism as an affective milieu, meaning a sociocultural system with prescribed “feeling rules.” section 2 then draws on phenomenological discussions of sexuality to show how (erotic) desire is an existentially significant aspect of our affective lives. i then develop an account of self-doubt, in section 3, as something felt, self-alienating, and selfinvolving. finally in sections 4 and 5, through examples drawn from autofictional literature and film, i parse out two forms of self-doubt and the unjust harms they incur. first, self-doubt as an existential background feeling. second, episodic selfdoubt which is enacted to regulate the salience, legitimacy, or self-importance of a particular affective experience. keywords: self-doubt, desire, heterosexism, heteronormativity, affective intentionality, emotional self-alienation, hermeneutical injustice, internalized homophobia, affective milieu, the erotic, queer desire 1. an introduction to the affective milieu of heterosexism heteronormativity structures our world and impacts our subjective lives in complexly multifarious ways. in this paper i undertake to describe and theorize an important way in which subjects are kept “in line” with heteronormativity at the level of embodied affective intentionality. to do this, i synthesize a phenomenological understanding of sexuality with contemporary work in philosophy of emotion to thematize a form of affective self-doubt that is felt in relation to the experience of queer desires. i argue that the elicitation of such feelings of self-doubt is a crucial way in which a wider milieu of heterosexism is unjustly enforced. one could just as easily published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 speak of the epistemic, political, juridical, or medical enforcement of heterosexism, as one could focus instead on the affects of fear, shame, and disgust. moreover, one could speak of other-directed rather than self-directed doubt. in narrowing the scope to affective self-doubt, this paper makes an original albeit modest contribution to the ever-expanding scholarship that seeks to thematize, unsettle, and ultimately undermine the paradigm of heterosexism we find ourselves in. heterosexism is the structural privileging of heteronormative gender expressions, relationship structures, and heteropatriarchal social norms (berlant and warner 1998, 548). this privileging can be institutionalized through the distribution of goods, roles, opportunities, sanctions, and rights but also normalized through historical, cultural, and linguistic norms. these heteronormative ways of being are privileged to such an extent that they are effectively instituted as compulsory modes of being (rich 1980; ahmed 2006, 84). central to heterosexism is the implicit and explicit presumption that one’s sexual orientation is directed toward the opposite sex, but heterosexism is more expansive than this. importantly, heterosexism also privileges cis gendered, white, able-bodied, and middle-class expressions of sexuality. this places heterosexism alongside, but also intermeshed with, other modes of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and so on (ferguson 2004; j. ward 2015; eribon 2019; smilges 2022). following gayle rubin (2007), and the queer theoretical tradition more broadly, the heteronormativity at the heart of heterosexism also privileges certain sexual and romantic practices as normal, natural, and good, while pathologizing others as deviant and abnormal. heterosexism thus not only demarcates who one may desire but how one faces the world and engages with it more generally (ahmed 2006, 68). this paper will focus its discussion on cases of affective self-doubt that arise in relation to experiences of queer desire. the sex one is assigned at birth informs the gendered role one is obliged to fulfil, which in turn dictates which bodies can become objects of desire and which remain beyond eroticization. the oppressive force of heterosexism can be explained largely by appealing to unjust structural arrangements, normative proscriptions, and material harms. but these cannot paint the whole picture as there is also an important and specifically affective component of heterosexism that is often left unthematized in structural and genealogical analyses. to understand how heterosexism is affectively enforced, i propose—following recent discussions within philosophy of emotion—that heterosexism be conceptualized as an affective milieu. most notably, i take my lead from michelle maiese’s (2022) conceptualization of white supremacy as an affective milieu. maiese demonstrates how anti-black affective relations circulate and become habituated under the social structure of white supremacy—for example, how the racist historical institution of the figure of the black male rapist has led to the naturalization of white fear and suspicion toward black men (maiese 2022, 909), or how the expression of published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire anger from black people toward police brutality is invalidated while the racist emotional anxieties of white people are normalized and privileged (911). to ensure consistency with this recent conceptualization of affective milieus (schuetze 2021; maiese 2022), along with how it has been employed in phenomenology (merleauponty 2012; sartre 1978; scheler 1973), i proceed by understanding milieu to refer to the sociohistorical environment, surroundings, and setting one finds oneself in.1 the concept of an affective milieu is helpful in illuminating the ways in which social structures prescribe affective requirements and horizons of possibilities for their participants (schuetze 2021; maiese 2022; see also scheler 1973, 105–8). when i attend a funeral, for example, affective experiences of joy, happiness, excitement, and so on, are typically not within my horizon of possibility as i have learned how i ought to feel at a funeral according to my milieu: sad and melancholic. while the “feeling rules” (hochschild 2012) of one’s milieu need not be reflectively salient, they become habituated into everyday practice such that we are rewarded with the experience of feeling “at home” and being affectively confident when one feels in line with the demands of the milieu (maiese 2022, 912). not only is the affective milieu something one learns, internalizes, and habituates into one’s affective landscape, but it is also intersubjectively enforced and socio-materially scaffolded. my expression of joy at a funeral may be policed and chastised by others as it would likely be perceived not simply as an affective aberration but a normative transgression. we also see how our affective milieu is often scaffolded; the norms surrounding music, dress code, and social practices at a funeral are instantiated to further delimit the possible horizons of affective experience. there is thus a tendency to naturalize those feelings that can be considered “normative” by virtue of their alignment with one’s affective milieu. in this sense, it is often taken for granted that one “naturally” feels a particular way because one ought to feel this way, despite the ought being historically contingent. elaborating on the normative force of the affective milieu, many theorists have begun to describe how social structures that operate in the background normatively guide one’s ways of relating to one another at the most fundamental levels of embodied, perceptual, and affective habits (ngo 2016; yancy 2017; maiese 2022). similar to maiese’s approach to white supremacy, i take heterosexism to also be a sociocultural system that is internalized by subjects such that they act according to feeling rules that are embodied and reiterated in everyday practices to the extent 1 although schuetze (2021), following roald, levin, and køppe (2018), claims to pursue a meaning of affective milieu different from that which maurice merleauponty understands, this is not so apparent. merleau-ponty (2012) also compares a milieu to one’s “homeland” (26), and his use of “social milieu” (160), “familial milieu” (163), and our “human milieu” (137) all carry meanings that i understand as being to some extent structurally analogous to one’s “affective milieu.” published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 that they can form an (heterosexist) affective habitus (maiese 2022, 906; see also hochschild 2012; szanto 2017, 279). processes of habituation need not be oppressive, coercive, or symptomatic of a regime of power. the habitual way of feeling at funerals in the anglophone world, for example, is likely something many people would defend. yet, when the affective milieu can be unveiled as being imposed from the outside in an imperialistic fashion that functions to marginalize large groups of people, then we may be unveiling an important but pernicious form of oppression. to understand the oppressive character of an affective milieu, we can turn to iris marion young’s concept of cultural imperialism (young 2011; see also archer and matheson 2023). cultural imperialism is one face of oppression wherein oppressors are able to project their own values, experience, and perspective as normative and universal, whereas difference to the norm is construed as deviance and inferiority (young 2011, 116–23). this imperialism can be understood in two senses. on the one hand, it is the imposition of heterosexual ways of being upon others within the same nation state. on the other hand, there are important histories of colonial and emotional imperialism in which heteronormative ways of being have been imposed upon foreign cultures (levy 1973; oyěwùmí 1997; snorton 2017; gill-peterson 2024). heteronormative culture—a particular set of ideas surrounding sexuality and how, what, and who one should desire; ways of feeling and forms of expression in relation to gendered embodiment; and ways of loving, having sex, and founding a family—is imposed upon everyone through educational, juridical, sociocultural, and disciplinary means. in what follows, i draw on phenomenological resources to understand the affectivity of both erotic desire and self-doubt, before making normative claims regarding the injustice that can emerge at their intersections. to achieve these aims, the paper proceeds as follows. in section 2 i draw on classical and contemporary phenomenological work on desire, sexuality, and affective intentionality. i describe the affective-intentional structure of erotic desire and how it is a significant aspect of how one is orientated to one’s world and its inhabitants. i then provide, in section 3, an account of affective self-doubt as something felt, alienating, and self-involving in an existentially significant way. with the affective-intentional structures of erotic desire and self-doubt laid out, section 4 shifts into a twofold normative discussion of existential and episodic feeling of self-doubt. in section 4.1 i examine the existential feelings of self-doubt in relation to queer desire and how this self-doubt can be selfalienating as it emerges from a “tragic relation of conflict” (scheler 1973, 108) between two horizons of anticipation. in response to these experiences of self-doubt, section 4.2 demonstrates how one may suffer from emotional (dys)regulation when one actively doubts the nonnormative affects so as to regain a coherent sense of self. i conclude, in section 5, with a brief look at audre lorde’s discussion of the importance of nurturing frank and open desires uninhibited by external forces. ultimately, this published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire paper provides a phenomenological perspective on the ways in which heterosexism is unjustly enforced at the level of embodied affective intentionality. 2. the affective intentionality and existential significance of (queer) desire in this section i clarify how we can understand erotic desires to be paradigmatic cases of embodied affective intentionality. intentionality—our mind’s capacity to be directed at something beyond itself—is rarely a cold, purely cognitive affair but is always embodied and imbued with feelings (slaby 2008). affective intentionality, more specifically, pertains to how we feel toward the world. what i understand here as “affective” is deliberately broad such that it encompasses episodic emotions such as anger and fear, more broad affective states or backgrounds such as a feeling of belonging or unsettledness, and finally a paradigmatic mode of embodied affective intentionality that falls messily in between and which this paper focuses on—namely, erotic desire. when one experiences erotic desire for another person, this desire feels like something in a way that is often bodily yet not located (bettcher 2014, 608; salamon 2010, 51). somewhat distinct from how we understand conventional episodic emotions, erotic desires have their own affective modes of comportment. while desire for a particular erotic object, act, or situation may arise sporadically and be experienced with accompanying emotional episodes such as joy, nervousness, shame, disgust, and so on, the desire itself is not reducible to these episodic emotions. rather, i take erotic desires to consist of constituting an object as a source of pleasure, and i take this constitution to be affective, embodied, and to typically occur prereflectively. thus, while i appreciate that desire can be understood in a broader sense of perceiving or judging something to be valuable, as i am interested in the experiential domain of sexuality, i limit the focus to feelings of desire that pertain to one’s sexuality.2 following the tradition of phenomenology, i understand sexuality not to simply pertain to who one has desires for but to encompass various interwoven aspects of sexual difference, sexual identity, gender identity, and experiences of erotic desire, pleasure, and pain (salamon 2010, 49). to disentangle a phenomenological conception of sexuality from how sexuality is referred to in ordinary language—namely, the gender one is typically attracted to—it is helpful to emphasize the centrality of what can be referred to as an ambiguity of intercorporeality (merleau-ponty 2012, 194; beauvoir 1972, 423; see also diprose 2002, 116; rodemeyer 2018, 73). in other words, sexuality is characterized by one’s capacity to be both an (erotic) object for others and subject for oneself (ward and 2 in what follows any use of the term desire refers to erotic desire. published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 anderson 2022), such that a crucial component of sexuality is one’s experience of oneself as not only the desirer but also the desired. erotic desire can then refer to the sexual attraction toward another, erotic interest in a sexual act, or desire concerning one’s sexed or gendered embodiment and/or presentation. even in cases of desire explicitly directed toward an other, the desire is typically accompanied with feelings directed at oneself as a sexual being. we see this, for example, in edouard louis’s 2014 autobiographical novel, the end of eddy, when the protagonist describes being—after a sexually tense encounter with other boys masturbating—“torn between the desire the other boys had provoked in me and the disgust i felt towards myself, towards my own desiring body” (louis 2017, 127). the desire eddy feels is on the one hand a “movement” (beauvoir 1972) or “appetite” (sartre 1978) toward the boys, but it also refers eddy back to himself as an embodied being with certain desires that are interpreted as being constitutive of his wider sexuality. following insights from trans philosophy, we can understand this as illustrating how a constitutive component of erotic desire is the eroticization of the self (bettcher 2014, 606). this is what talia mae bettcher (2014) proposes as an “interactional account” of sexual attraction and is particularly helpful in conceptualizing how the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation is blurred. on this account we can only make sense of erotic desire with an account of the eroticized self, and this means we must take seriously the role of a sexed or gendered self in how one’s desires are directed toward others. to make sense of the complex interactions involved in experiences of one’s sexuality, we must appreciate the various ways in which desire is not explicitly otherdirected. just as i may desire to have sex with people of a particular gender, have sex in particular ways, i may also desire to change elements of my sexed body, dress in a different way, not have sex at all, or desire to act out a certain role or be a certain way during sexual acts. how one understands oneself as a sexual subject—and the ways this can be recoded—is particularly important and thematic for trans folk. illustrations of this can be found, for example, throughout the posthumously published diaries of lou sullivan. as a trans man, sullivan (2019, 331) often emphasizes how “it’s not how others perceive me that matters to me; it’s how i perceive myself.” here sullivan is alluding to how others’ experience of him as a particular (masculine) erotic object is not sufficient to realize his sexual expression. what more is needed is to also experience himself as an erotic subject: “to stop thinking of ‘passing as a man’ and start thinking of being a man” (331). in one passage, sullivan describes the first time his (male) partner positioned his cock between my legs so it looked like mine. . . . he said, “there, now it’s yours.” i looked down and felt whole, like a man, i looked over my muscular arms, my flat chest as i imagine his cock mine published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire and masturbated it. i was raised to incredible sexual highs. (sullivan 2019, 291) such accounts of how subjects recode their sexed body in interaction with others, objects, and their environment illuminate how thoroughly embodied, affectively saturated, and self-involving erotic desires are. rather than every expression of existence being traced meaningfully back to one’s sexuality and desire, a phenomenological approach appreciates the existential meaning of sexuality and desire, but without existence being collapsible into sexuality. as gayle salamon writes in her discussion of maurice merleau-ponty, desire and sexuality are of such significance because “through desire, my body comes alive by being intentionally directed toward another, and i myself come into being through that desire” (salamon 2010, 50). who and what i desire is a mode or style of intentionally relating to myself and others as erotic objects, acting on them, and being affected by them (heinämaa 2018, 545). moreover, because this form of intentionality is fundamentally embodied and affective, these experiences of desire are shot through with diffusedly localized bodily feelings and motivational relevances, and, as with emotional episodes, they are always in some way positively or negatively valenced. experiences of “butterflies in the stomach,” a “sinking feeling,” or one’s “heart dropping,” are all commonplace ways in which our sexuality is experienced through bodily feelings without reducing it to the body as a site of erotogenesis. experiences of desire typically pertain to others while also revealing to oneself aspects of one’s own embodied (and affective) being.3 having sketched out how we can understand the affective-intentional structure of (queer) desire, i turn now to sara ahmed to emphasize its existential significance. queer desire is an expression of one’s sexuality that deviates from the fatalistic “straightening devices” (ahmed 2006, 23) of one’s affective milieu. queer desire need not be a sexual desire for someone of the same sex, but it describes how one orientates oneself to the objects and inhabitants of one’s world more generally, in ways that do not cohere with what is deemed “normal” according to heteronormativity. ahmed uses queer as an umbrella term for all nonstraight, nonnormative, and “oblique” sexualities (68, 161), and for this reason, in what follows queer is understood to denote a broader category of nonnormative sexual practices and expressions rather than to simply describe same-sex relations. this opens up 3 as jean-paul sartre (1978, 389) describes in being and nothingness, “it is in this sense that desire can be called the desire of one body for another body. it is in fact an appetite directed toward the other’s body, and it is lived as the vertigo of the foritself before its own body. the being which desires is consciousness making itself body.” published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 queer desire to denote innumerable nonnormative ways of engaging in romantic and sexual relations, even for people who are otherwise deemed “straight,” such as nonmonogamous relationships, coparenting family structures, and deciding not to have children, get married, and so on. importantly, queer desires are not simply nonnormative in the sense of being deviant but denote those forms of desire that resist, unsettle, and question norms that privilege heteronormativity. while i take the following discussion of affective self-doubt to be similarly elucidating for how normative family and relationship structures are enforced (via heteronormativity and homonormativity alike), for the sake of scope and simplicity, i hereon focus on desires that are queer because they do not assume or “inherit” (ahmed 2006, 86) a straight line of desire to the opposite sex from what you were assigned at birth.4 ahmed’s distinction between desire and orientation is helpful in this regard. for ahmed, one’s orientation captures the more persistent ways in which one directs desires and inhabits different worlds (ahmed 2006, 101). one’s orientations direct one’s desires, affect what one can do, where one can go, how one is perceived by others, and consequently how one understands oneself (101). although these desires need not be incorporated into how one orientates oneself in the world, to incorporate queer desires into one’s orientation can precisely provoke a feeling of disorientation (20). this is because reorienting one’s desires (e.g., from masculine to feminine gender presentation, or from women to men as possible romantic partners), opens up a whole new orientation to the world. if, for example, i begin to not only act on my desires for same-sex relations but decide to grant them affective recognition and thus habitually reorient myself to the nonstraight world, then this allows for new objects and horizons of possibility to come into view as past horizons and familiar objects recede into the background. part of what is disorientating, however, is that these desires come up against an affective milieu that precisely abnormalizes such a reorientation. 3. the alienating tension of self-doubt to elucidate the ways heterosexism is affectively enforced, i turn now to what i call (heterosexist) self-doubt. in this paper i am interested in first describing how the experience of doubt can be affective: on the one hand, how self-doubt feels; on the other hand, how doubt can be directed at one’s own affective states. i then argue that 4 moreover, i am only interested in those queer desires that are experienced in relation to consenting subjects. as a reviewer pointed out, what makes the self-doubt outlined in the following sections unjust is that it inhibits morally acceptable desires. to experience self-doubt in relation to desires that involve an expressly nonconsenting subject, for example, would rather be a defensible outcome of one’s affective milieu. published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire this affective self-doubt can be a site of injustice. beginning with the former, i am interested in doubt as an embodied feeling which at times can entail “an allenveloping sense of uncertainty” and “feeling[s] of dissatisfaction, tension, unsettledness, or unease” (ratcliffe 2008, 257–58). a key feature of the experience of what matthew ratcliffe (2008) calls “felt doubts” is the feeling of tension that arises from being confronted with two conflicting horizons of anticipation; be they opportunities for action, feelings, beliefs, interpretations, or, what will be the focus of this essay, a conflict of desire.5 these feelings of tension that characterize selfdoubt are also often accompanied by feelings of uneasiness, unsettledness, and uncertainty that pertain (implicitly or explicitly) to an unresolved conflict. in her paper “bodily doubt,” havi carel (2013, 179) characterizes doubt as the negation of an “ongoing tacit certainty” when suffering from mental and somatic disorders. like carel, i want to keep in view precisely what is taken-for-granted in moments free from doubt—namely, the (bodily) tacit certainty that denotes a feeling of “i can” that pervades our actions (carel 2013, 181).6 in these experiential episodes within which one’s actions flow from an implicit “i can,” one’s desires (and their manifestation in actions) are experienced without resistance (husserl 1989, 270). from the “i can” one takes the possibilities for action not simply as the possibilities for someone but rather as your possibilities (young 1980, 147). when one’s bodily intentionality meets resistance, however, then one is confronted with the experience of tension in the form of “i cannot.” in such cases one experiences one’s bodily or motor intentionality to be inhibited as the possibilities for action become mere possibilities “out there.” alia al-saji (2014, 139) discusses the “i cannot” within the context of racializing vision and explores how social-cultural horizons institute a racializing inability to see otherwise—as seeing people as anything other than raced. young discusses female bodily comportment in a somewhat similar way, arguing that girls are socialized to habituate an “i cannot” when it comes to bodily motility, and that this habituation is both privative and positive. what young means by this, al-saji writes, is that girls both lack practice with regard to certain actions (privative), but this habituation is also positive as girls learn to navigate the world like a girl, by learning a style “of acting that is hesitant, fragile, and constantly self-referred” (al-saji 2014, 151; citing young 1980). within the heterosexist milieu, i take a similar sense of “i 5 this two-mindedness or double-sidedness of doubt is also etymologically rooted in the proto-indo european dwo-, meaning “two,” from which doubt stems (harper, n.d.). 6 for discussions of the phenomenological “i can,” see husserl (1989); merleau-ponty (2012, 139–40); al-saji (2014); young (1980); roberts and osler (2024). published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 cannot” to be habituated with regard to queer desires, resulting in inhibited affective intentionality.7 within the heterosexist milieu, nonnormative sexualities are privatively marked as beyond our field of possibilities, while at the same time we are positively socialized into becoming straight. the tacit certainty of the “i can” is an achievement of one’s being situated within what rubin (2007) calls the natural and normal “charmed circle” compared to the abnormal and unnatural “outer limits.” typically, robust binarisms are instituted such that one feels one must fall either side of, for example, the heterosexual/homosexual and cis male/cis female borders. we not only learn to act and move through the world like girls and boys, but we also habituate styles of acting as heterosexual girls and boys. desires that threaten to cross or straddle these binaries are, according to judith butler (1997, 147), “proscribed from the start.” in other words, they are marked with the doubt-inducing impossibility of the “i cannot.” to experience a privileged tacit certainty with one’s orientation to the world is often precisely a privilege afforded to those who comfortably inherit “straight” aspects of sexuality. what i have briefly outlined above certainly elucidates how heterosexism forecloses possibly ways of being, seeing, doing, and feeling for the sake of reproducing and perpetuating a heteronormative social-cultural horizon. but what does this have to do with self-doubt? first of all, i take self-doubt to be a particular feeling of doubt that is harmful because it involves an experience of alienation from an aspect of oneself—for example, from one’s memories, bodily capacities, cognitive or epistemic ability, or as i will focus on in this paper, one’s affect-laden desires. i want to maintain that this alienating form of self-doubt is distinct from other productive, just, and even emancipatory modes of doubting, which fall beyond the scope of this paper. oftentimes one’s ongoing tacit certainty is not rationally justified as it is rarely made the object of explicit scrutiny (carel 2013, 179–80), and this is the reason that doubt 7 while young speaks of differences of sexed embodiment, and al-saji of racializing perception, heteronormativity also installs heteronormalizing perceptual schemata. a telling anecdote that displays how racializing and heterosexualizing perception can overlap, but also be at odds with one another, is in sara ahmed’s (2006, 95) encounter with her neighbor: “a neighbor calls out to me. i look up somewhat nervously because i have yet to establish ‘good relations’ with the neighbors. i haven’t lived in this place very long and the semipublic of the street does not yet feel easy. the neighbor mumbles some words, which i cannot hear, and then asks: “is that your sister, or your husband?” i rush into the house without offering a response. the neighbor’s utterance is quite extraordinary. there are two women, living together, a couple of people alone in a house. so what do you see?” published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire is an integral feature in any form of productive critical inquiry. i do not contest this; however, i want to make a distinction between this enacted, productive, and even emancipatory form of doubt that is reflective, and a form of self-doubt that is alienating, often prereflective, and that arises by virtue of one’s heterosexist milieu. to clarify the self-involving nature of affective self-doubt, i turn to what thomas szanto (2017) terms “emotional self-alienation.” szanto outlines both wide and narrow conceptualizations of emotional self-alienation, both of which are relevant for this study. the narrower form, for szanto, is an alienation from your own emotions, such that the sensitivity and personal import of the emotion can be diminished or even vanish completely (szanto 2017, 272). the wider form of emotional self-alienation does not involve being alienated from one’s emotion. rather, in experiencing a particular emotion or affective state “one feels momentarily or robustly alienated from prior life-projects, from one’s own ‘self’” (szanto 2017, 264; see also thomason 2023).8 in either case, the experience of alienation can entail a broad range of phenomena including inauthenticity, role-playing, lack of identification, lack of self-mastery, or feelings of being dominated by some other, whether it be a person, thing, or system (szanto 2017, 263). by returning to edouard louis’s protagonist, eddy, i show below how such a framework of emotional selfalienation can help us make sense of the function of self-doubt for the enforcement of heterosexism. emotional self-alienation can arise when one experiences a tension between two affective experiences: one that coheres with your self-image, self-narrative, and/or self-understanding,9 and one that undermines or disrupts these senses of self. if one has lived one’s life developing life-projects and constructing a self-image of oneself as straight or cis, for example, then one may struggle to identify with the affective-intentional force of a desire that is at odds with these senses of self. we see this alienation resulting from the tension of self-doubt in the case of eddy introduced above. not only does eddy describe being “torn” between two affective states (desire and disgust), but he is also expressing a feeling of momentary alienation from his embodied self, his “own desiring body,” which he now refers to from a distance (louis 2017, 127). the internalization of heterosexism’s most violent cultural norms force 8 while i do not think it is necessary to commit myself here to a particular conception of selfhood, this essay is undoubtedly interested in a socially situated (rather than minimal) self. this means a sense of self that develops over time in interaction with others and as affected by sociohistorical structures rather than a core sense of self that is prediscursive and ahistorical. 9 in this paper i use these terms interchangeably to refer to the general ways one relates to oneself as a person in the world with a personal identity that persists over time. published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 eddy into a space saturated with feelings of doubt as he suffers from the alienating tension between both desiring other boys as erotic objects and finding such a desire to be itself “disgusting.” in an earlier passage, after secretly trying on his sister’s dress, eddy again describes feeling “idiotic, sullied . . . disgusted with myself, stunned by the momentary madness” (louis 2017, 16). not only do we see here feelings of inauthenticity and a felt lack of self-mastery over his desires, but we also see how this self-doubt can be accompanied by a plethora of related feelings, such as fear, unsettledness, disorientation, and shame. these feelings bring into relief how much one can be dominated by a system that aims to marginalize and pathologize such deviant affects. eddy is “stunned by the momentary madness” as if the desire came from outside himself. the experience of such an incoherent affect threatens to motivate an existential shift—or reorientation—of eddy’s self-understanding. in his response to this self-alienation, we see another form of affective self-doubt—namely, the doubting of the salience, significance, legitimacy, or even presence of these proscribed and impossible feelings of desire. by doubting the existential significance, legitimacy, or mere sobriety of one’s queer desire, one resists the motivation to incorporate it into one’s orientation to the world. it is in this sense that queer desires, especially when they first arise, are so often interpreted as inconsequential moments of madness, as being “just a phase.” in the above, we see how affective self-doubt can characterize both the more existential feelings of tension and “tragic conflict” (scheler 1973, 108) that arise when the tacit certainty of the “i can” is lost and the more episodic acts of doubt toward one’s affects as a response to this alienating “i cannot.” in other words, self-doubt can be a background feeling that orients oneself to the world, shaping one’s experiences, thoughts, and possibilities (ratcliffe 2008, 259), but it can also be the episodic agential attempts to resolve the tragic conflict by doubting the affective experience that does not cohere with one’s self-understanding. the existential significance of affective selfdoubt is in its self-involving and self-alienating character. in cases wherein one experiences alienating desires, one not only comes to doubt the legitimacy, coherence, and personal importance of these affective desires but may also come to doubt one’s sense of self, to such an extent that one is in two minds as to who one is. this more agential form of self-doubt is enacted with the aim of resolving the conflict and securing once more the comfort of the “i can” that heterosexual desires are typically accompanied by. in the following section, i address the injustices of these two forms of what i now term existential and episodic self-doubt. published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire 4. the harms of affective self-doubt 4.1. existential self-doubt i begin with the more existential feelings of self-doubt that are better described as happening to rather than being enacted by the subject. in xavier dolan’s (2019) film matthias & maxime, the eponymous two best friends experience desire for one another, which is circumstantially brought to the surface and acted upon when they are coaxed into enacting a kiss for their friend’s film project. given both characters’ publicly self-avowed straight orientations, the desires they experience and suppress throughout the rest of the film stand clearly in tension with not only how they present themselves to others but, more importantly, with their selfinterpretations. we bear witness to this as dolan illuminates in multiple scenes the inner turmoil both men face when trying to reconcile their felt queer desires with their habituated heterosexual orientations to the world.10 as can be seen in matthias & maxime, the experience of self-alienation provokes feelings of shame and fear as the felt reality of the erotic desire threatens to force a reorientation to the world, thus leaving behind the familiar, comfortable, and habituated heterosexual ways of being. matthias is particularly affected by the tension that arises as a result of his nonnormative desires. we see this evidenced by his gradual decline into a socially isolated, agitated, and depressive mood. the tacit certainty of the heterosexual “i can” is lost, and a hesitant and uncertain “i cannot” takes its place. we can understand this as the possibility of nonheterosexuality presenting itself as what young (2011, 146) describes as a kind of permeable “border anxiety.” this border is constantly policed and leads straight subjects who act on their queer desires to have their desires accompanied by “shame, secrecy, homophobia, and disavowal[s] of queerness” (j. ward 2015, 20). given the sociocultural salience of this border, perhaps more than the presence of only queer desires, the copresence of both straight and queer desires within a sociocultural horizon of heterosexism is experienced within the “i cannot.” matthias’s sexuality no longer forms a prereflective backdrop that puts him in relation to others but becomes foregrounded as a source of self-alienation. in addition to suffering from alienation, in such cases we can understand the subject as suffering from what has recently been termed an “affect-related hermeneutic injustice” (gallegos 2022), which harms the subject by inflicting a “hermeneutic gloom” (fricker 2007, 149). what miranda fricker means by hermeneutic gloom, and what francisco gallegos reappropriates for affect-related 10 this felt existential tension is also captured by james baldwin in his 1956 novel, giovanni’s room. here, when the protagonist first embraces his same-sex lover, giovanni, he describes: “with everything in me screaming no! yet the sum of me sighed yes” (baldwin 2007, 56). published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 intents, is that “a person or group’s ability to interpret their own and others’ affective experiences and emotional responses is unfairly constrained or undermined” (gallegos 2022, 10). this leads to a significant area of one’s social experience being obscured from both self-understanding and collective understanding (fricker 2007, 155). the inability to interpret affective experiences can be caused either by a lack of hermeneutical resources or by being constrained and/or undermined by others. this is typically quite pronounced in cis male subjects who identify as heterosexual, as they are overreliant on the hermeneutic labor of women, especially within the context of romantic situations (anderson 2023). hermeneutic labor, according to ellie anderson (2023, 179), is the burdensome activity of interpreting the behavior of others, being sensitive to conflicting desires, thought patterns, and communicative strategies. as heteropatriarchal societies allocate this labor disproportionately to women, it is not difficult to see why men not only harm others in their refusal to engage in hermeneutic labor but also how this can lead them into spaces saturated with unsettledness and unease when experiencing their own conflicting desires. due to this hermeneutic gloom, subjects often lack the appropriate affective resources and opportunities to aptly understand, explore, and interpret their desires. in matthias & maxime, both men are clearly unable to experience any tacit certainty with regard to their queer desire.11 by having their desires confronted by a socially prescribed “i cannot,” their affective intentionality becomes inhibited as their intentional object of desire is colored by associations with disgust, shame, fear, and impossibility. the associations of negative affects present the subject with an allencompassing feeling of doubt toward what would otherwise be an experience of naturalized desire. in the case of queer desire, by internalizing heterosexist attitudes from one’s milieu, the intensity and frequency at which one experiences queer desires may be causally affected (díaz-león 2017, 242). in other words, the normative scripts and “feeling rules” of heterosexism unjustly impede one’s freedom to feel certain ways toward objects which veer “off line.” we can understand this feeling of self-doubt to be existentially significant as it disrupts one’s sense of who one is. another example of this can be found in butler’s description of “gender anxiety.” butler writes: the fear of homosexual desire in a woman may induce a panic that she is losing her femininity, that she is not a woman, that she is no longer a proper woman. . . . or in a man, the terror of homosexual desire may 11 analyzing this through the lens of affective injustice, we can understand this as being denied “affective recognition” or “affective freedom” (gallegos 2022). for related discussions on affective injustice, see srinivasan (2018); whitney (2018); bailey (2018); archer and mills (2019); pismenny, eickers, and prinz (2024). published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire lead to a terror of being construed as feminine, feminized, of no longer being properly a man. (butler 1997, 136) here we see how feelings of self-doubt pertain not only to the other-directed desires themselves but also to the implications one’s desires have for one’s orientation and social identity at large. by experiencing nonnormative desires, the subject may begin to feel uncertain about their own sexual “style” (heinämaa 2003) as they no longer inhabit the comfortable certainty toward their masculine or feminine comportment. in lieu of certainty, the subject instead experiences an alienating feeling of doubt as their orientation becomes threatened by incoherence. 4.2. episodic self-doubt the second form of self-doubt is a more agential attempt to resolve the selfalienation one feels in the former instances of existential self-doubt. in order to resolve the self-alienation and regain a coherent sense of self, subjects may doubt the alienating affects (in this case, queer desires) for the sake of restoring to prominence the self-endorsed affects (normative desires). in other words, these episodic acts of self-doubt function as a form of bad faith (wilkerson 2009, 102) as they aim to regain a tacit certainty by restoring an inauthentic “mark of impossibility” (butler 1997, 147) to one’s queer attachments and desires. it is thus a more active and episodic form of self-doubt as it typically emerges in response to the former more existential feelings of self-doubt. such episodic self-doubt typically manifests in forms of intrinsic emotional (dys)regulation. i speak of “(dys)regulation” here as the intent is usually to regulate, suppress, or negatively connotate the queer desire such that one’s familiar and normative desire takes precedent. this, however, can be emotionally dysregulating as such strategies may prevent the subject from identifying and adequately making sense of a particular affective experience (d’agostino et al. 2017), or it may lead to inappropriate and harmful reactions when one experiences the alienating queer desire. a recurring theme in matthias & maxime is not only the emotional selfalienation matthias suffers from but also the strategies of (dys)regulatory self-doubt he invokes to try and resolve this self-alienation. the main strategies we witness take the form of internalized emotion-regulatory processes that matthias employs to try to suppress his desire and reestablish his self-conception as a (masculine) straight male.12 matthias wants to regulate his desire but finds he is unable to do so and thus 12 for example, in the morning after matthias and maxime’s first kiss, matthias swims out from shore in an almost suicidal act of exhausting himself and diverting his published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 resorts to rather dysregulatory and affectively (and to some extent physically and socially) harmful measures. these actions can be read as reactions to the alienating self-doubt that matthias experiences as described above. matthias is harmed not only in his “capacity as an affective being” (archer and mills 2019, 76) but also in his capacity to maintain a coherent sense of self. returning to the end of eddy, we see a similar twofold experience of both existential and episodic doubt. later in the book, eddy states, “becoming a different person meant thinking of myself as a different person, believing i was something i wasn’t so that gradually, step by step, i could become it.” (louis 2017, 143). eddy makes a concerted effort to doubt the significance of his own desires in a futile bid to realign himself with his milieu and resolve the existentially alienating turmoil he suffers from. instead of allowing himself to feel joy and euphoria, eddy instead interprets the acts which gave rise to this deviant pleasure as resulting from “madness,” “inebriation,” “disinhibition,” and being “foolish” rather than from a meaningful aspect of his self (louis 2017, 16). we find a similar anecdote of euphoria (in relation to nonnormative gender expressions) shattered by crippling self-doubt in torrey peters’s (2021) novel detransition, baby. there, the euphoria the main character amy (a trans woman) experiences when trying on women’s clothes for the first time is cut short as the light fades when a heavy cloud crosses the sun, then winked out completely. . . . everything on the racks shrugged off their previous disguises to reveal themselves as tawdry and desperate. inwardly, she disavowed the space. this store did not reflect her. she did not truly belong here. (peters 2021, 144) we see here the constitutive force of doubt and how it can drastically and suddenly modify the way in which an object is given in experience (rodemeyer 2017, 320). suddenly, amy doubts whether the possibilities of a feminine sexual existence are possibilities for her. in a later passage, after feeling ashamed for asking her mother if it is ok for her to wear a bra (as a boy), the narrator describes how amy attention. in another instance, after the second time they kiss, matthias immediately leaves the house visibly agitated and runs through the torrential rain to meet an acquaintance from work in a poignantly heteronormative and masculine-coded space—namely, a strip club. this latter instance especially could be fruitfully analyzed as an example of dysregulatory form of “affective scaffolding” (krueger and osler 2019). published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire should have felt happy, but she didn’t. instead, she felt as if she had given in to an urge that ought to be turned away from. as when people shut their eyes in horror at the possibility of an apparition. don’t even acknowledge it—it’ll fuck up everything you know about the world. (peters 2021, 148–49) both passages bear staggering similarities with the examples of eddy and matthias, but with the distinct focus that self-doubt is rather experienced in relation to one’s self-directed (as opposed to other-directed) desire and eroticized self. it would be insufficient to describe amy as doubting her desire to simply wear a bra or to try on women’s clothes. a crucial part of why these desires are so existentially significant, why they have the capacity to “fuck up everything you know about the world,” is precisely because they illuminate amy’s desire to alter her gendered being-in-theworld, her sexual “style.” but the overwhelming feelings of existential doubt are met with episodic attempts to turn away from these disorientating desires, instead doubting whether these objects of desire really “reflect her” or whether that space was one in which she “truly belonged.” in addition to the self-alienation provoked by feelings of self-doubt, these episodic iterations of self-doubt can hamper one’s ability to aptly interpret one’s desires as existentially significant expressions of being. in other words, just as in other cases of affective injustice, the systematic encouraging of doubt means one can be denied goods of affective recognition and emotional aptness (gallegos 2022). my aim here is not to advocate for a compulsory reification of desires into coherent sexual or gender identities. i rather want to demonstrate how heterosexism unjustly facilitates a tacit certainty toward one’s desires that “align,” while simultaneously encouraging subjects to doubt the significance of “off line” desires. oftentimes these desires cannot be ignored, but sometimes we refuse to acknowledge them due to the frighteningly dizzying reorientation their recognition motivates (ahmed 2006, 20). part of the problem is the contemporary collapsing of erotic interest into identity, as critics of “the sexual imperative” have warned (przybylo 2014, 228). it is not that all desires must be incorporated into our self-narrative but rather that only heteronormative desires have historically escaped having their existential significance systematically doubted. thus, it is important to clarify that my claim is not that only queer desires are inhibited by (self-)doubt, or that all desires inhibited by self-doubt are thereby sites of injustice. many reorientations away from the patrilineal status quo are precisely motivated by an emergent doubt one feels toward one’s normative desires or wider investment in heteronormativity. or with respect to certain queer spaces, people often suffer from a self-doubt as to whether they are “queer enough.” there are innumerable ways in which self-doubt is elicited as an effective means of disciplinary subjectification; my claim is only that one of the most historically and published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 systematically instituted sites in which we see this is in the enforcement of hierarchical binaries pertaining to sexuality. in her study of how heterosexual people engage in homosexual acts, jane ward (2015) describes how people are encouraged to interpret their desires in drastically different ways (according to the vectors of race, gender, and class), but always with the purpose of maintaining a robust border between heterosexuality on one side and abject homosexuality on the other. ward describes how women more than men are afforded the freedom to explore and act on their same-sex desires— ward refers to this as the cultural trope of “straight girls kissing”—yet unlike men, these expressions of desire are far less likely to be interpreted as meaningful for their sexuality. citing multiple cases of public figures who have acted on queer desires, and how these deviations from their heterosexual fate been interpreted, ward (2015, 19) highlights the ways in which women’s same-sex desires are often interpreted “as unusual but ultimately harmless detour[s] in their otherwise heterosexual lives,” whereas the men who act on homosexual desires are almost always interpreted as “closeted gay men.” ward goes on to write: this is all to say that when straight-identified women have sex with women, the broader culture waits in anticipation for them to return to what is likely their natural, heterosexual state; when straight-identified men have sex with men, the culture waits in anticipation for them to admit that they are gay. (ward 2015, 20) although men and women may to some extent experience their self-doubt toward their desires in significantly different ways, in any case the subject suffers from affectrelated hermeneutical injustices as a result. ward shows how this construction and policing of a border between gay and straight is more violently felt by men of color than white men, as the sexuality of men of color is constantly subjected to heightened surveillance and misrepresentation. white straight men, on the other hand, do not have their sexual practices racialized as being particular to white culture, and are often (when not presumed to be gay) afforded the privilege of having their homosexual acts labelled by society as “inconsequential and nonsexual” (j. ward 2015, 24).13 in any case, either one is encouraged to doubt that one’s queer (in this case, same-sex) desires are anything 13 ward’s (2015) study is devoted to precisely these homoerotic acts between white heterosexual men. obvious examples include fraternity houses, the military, and public toilets. these are all spaces and contexts wherein white men can often enact their privilege to engage in homosexual acts without it being considered part of their orientation. published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 hedges – the affective enforcement of heterosexism: self-doubt and queer desire but inconsequential, or that the slightest presence of a queer desire should motivate one to doubt the legitimacy of one’s heterosexual self-interpretation. 5. uninhibited desires by way of conclusion, i turn briefly to audre lorde’s discussion of the erotic and what it tells us about uninhibited desires. lorde’s (2019) essay “uses of the erotic” stretches beyond claims of mere sexual interconnectedness and highlights the ways in which subjects are oppressed at the affective level of embodied desire. lorde (2019, 47) writes that “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” to raise above this suspicion we feel toward our desires, we must acknowledge the strength of the erotic and the power of the phrase “it feels right to me” (46). interestingly, in another work lorde provides a first-personal account of the experience of a time when self-doubt is finally overcome and the “i can” within erotic experience is reclaimed. lorde writes: ginger’s breath warmed my neck and started to quicken. my hands moved down over her round body, silky and fragrant, waiting. uncertainty and doubt rolled away from the mouth of my wanting like a great stone, and my unsureness dissolved in the directing heat of my own frank and finally open desire. (lorde 1982, 138–39) in this erotic encounter we see how lorde “finally” grants the recognition and significance to her queer desires that her heterosexual counterparts have long been afforded. for lorde, this overcoming of self-doubt has significant epistemic and political ramifications as it helps sensitize our experiences to others previously considered out of reach (lorde 2019, 47). it is thus important to be careful, as caleb ward (2023) forewarns, to not collapse lorde’s insights into claims of only sexual connectedness. instead, the erotic must be understood as an epistemic tool of resistance and self-understanding as it raises affective experience to the level of knowledge. the erotic, for lorde, “facilitates an interpretive knowledge of one’s life and the world that might counter distorting images and norms” (c. ward 2023, 901) that are rooted in racist, sexist, and heteronormative oppression. although it requires further elaboration—to a degree not accommodated within the confines of this paper—a potentially productive line of inquiry would be to examine the erotic in light of anderson’s (2023) notion of hermeneutic labor. just as lorde speaks of an “interpretive knowledge,” it seems like hermeneutic labor might be what is needed in many cases of existential self-doubt, especially when concerned with the realm of desire and sexuality. the erotic is a means of critically engaging with the oppressive published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 affective milieu we otherwise find ourselves in and reimagining how things could be and what transformations are required to get there. as lorde writes: when we live outside ourselves, and by that i mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. (lorde 2019, 48). whether or not lorde’s erotic is the most appropriate means to overcoming selfdoubt and disrupting the milieu of heterosexism is a discussion still to be had. what can certainly be gained from her account, however, is an awareness of the importance of “frank and open” desires that are uninhibited by the external forces of one’s milieu. acknowledgments: this paper has benefitted immensely from the great amount of feedback i received at the leiden critical phenomenologies symposium in 2023, epsse 2023, the online emotions workshop hosted by imke von maur and rick furtak, and the spring 2024 seminar series of the society for the philosophy of sex and love. my thanks especially go to my friends and colleagues lucy osler and ellie anderson, for their detailed feedback on earlier drafts, as well as to the anonymous reviewers and editors. the work presented here is supported by the carlsberg foundation, grant cf25-0579. references ahmed, sara. 2006. queer phenomenology: 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sánchez and alessandro salice, 39–55. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310945. ward, caleb. 2023. “audre lorde’s erotic as epistemic and political practice.” hypatia 38 (4): 896–917. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.76. published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2023.76 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003310945 https://doi.org/10.1111/misp.12074 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.611827 http://archive.org/details/selec https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-017-9412-x https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2022.40 https://doi.org/10.1 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 1 ward, caleb, and ellie anderson. 2022. “ the ethical significance of being an erotic object.” in the palgrave handbook of sexual ethics, edited by david boonin, 55– 71. cham: springer international publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-030-87786-6_4. ward, jane. 2015. not gay: sex between straight white men. sexual cultures. new york: new york university press. whitney, shiloh. 2018. “ affective intentionality and affective injustice: merleauponty and fanon on the body schema as a theory of affect.” southern journal of philosophy 56 (4): 488– 515. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307. wilkerson, william s. 2009. “ is it a choice? sexual orientation as interpretation.” journal of social philosophy 40 (1): 97– 116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679833.2009.01440.x. yancy, george. 2017. black bodies, white gazes: the continuing significance of race in america. 2nd ed. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. young, iris marion. 1980. “ throwing like a girl: a phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality.” human studies 3 (1): 137– 56. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02331805. ————. 2011. justice and the politics of difference. paperback reissue. princeton, nj: princeton university press. tris hedges completed their phd at the center for subjectivity research at the university of copenhagen and now holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the carlsberg foundation for a project on “ the politics and affects of doubt.” this is carried out between the department of cross-cultural and regional studies at the university of copenhagen, and the affective societies collaborative research center in freie universität berlin. hedges has published multiple articles across the intersections of phenomenology, social ontology, and queer feminist philosophy. they are particularly interested in discussions surrounding normalization, gender, sexuality, and group identity. published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02331805 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467 https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12307 https://doi.org/10.1007/978 fpq 22668 hedges title page fpq 22668 hedges final format be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation merritt, michele. 2024. “be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (3). article 2. 2024 be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism michele merritt arkansas state university mmerritt@astate.edu merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism1 michele merritt abstract in this paper, i introduce a new term, adoptism, to characterize the unique form(s) of marginalization to which adopted persons are subjected. adoptism shows up primarily as enforced gratitude, and this injunction to be grateful carries with it epistemic harms that have heretofore been overlooked because the dominant social narrative surrounding adoption is that it is an overwhelmingly positive practice. this dominant view stems largely from adoptive parents and the adoption industry, which is an institution, i argue, that is far from child-centered and beneficent. because those most impacted by being adopted, adopted persons, are conspicuously absent in discussions of adoption, there is a great potential for epistemic injustice. these injustices are magnified when adoptees attempt to provide testimony that challenges the prevailing social script surrounding adoption. using my lived experience as a domestic adoptee, as well as the testimony of many other adopted persons, i uncover and examine the ways adoptees are harmed in our capacities as knowers. finally, after dispelling the myths that adoptist ideology upholds, i suggest ways to redress the otherwise hidden injustices of adoption. keywords: adoption, epistemic injustice, hermeneutical marginalization, kinship, feminist epistemology 1. introduction the central aims of this paper are to examine the ways adopted people are marginalized by the institution of adoption and to suggest ways we might redress these harms. after briefly detailing what i mean by the “institution” of adoption, i 1 i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions in developing this paper, as well as dr. elizabeth victor, who has stuck with me on this project, helping me rework these arguments, for over three years and through many rejections at many journals. finally, to all the adoptees whose testimony has inspired this project and whose voices i aim to amplify, i hope this paper is a small step in that direction. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 provide my own testimony as an adult adoptee2 along with other adoptee testimony and research that challenges the dominant narrative of adoption as a “win-win.” this, taken together with feminist scholarship on epistemic injustice, will serve to demonstrate how the institution of adoption routinely subjugates adopted persons. adoptees, like other marginalized persons, are consistently silenced or coerced into self-silencing when they attempt to provide testimony. one reason for this, i argue, is that the prevailing narrative surrounding adoption views it as a humanitarian practice that gives children “better lives” by “rescuing” them (joyce 2013). adoptive parents, in turn, are often viewed as selfless saviors who provide the safe and secure homes these children so desperately need. this dominant script regarding adoption serves to paper over adoptee marginalization, precisely because adoptee disenfranchisement simply does not show up in this framework, and in fact, quite the opposite assumption is typically made—namely, that we are all “lucky” to be adopted. i examine how this external narrative of being lucky or chosen is internalized by adoptees and constitutes a doubly disenfranchising aspect of adoptee experience. when adoptees provide testimony, if our stories run counter to the prevailing view, we are routinely “unheard” (dotson 2011). we are rendered incapable of speaking because our life narrative has already been written for us; hence, we are excluded from the pooling of knowledge surrounding adoption, despite having an insider or “emic” perspective on being adopted (bergman and lindgren 2018). adoptees are also “throttled,” a term michael calder (2021) uses to describe purposeful truncating on the part of one speaker holding power over another. i argue that when adoptees are subjected to this throttling, it affects our capacity for self-knowledge and selfdetermination. adoptees are further disenfranchised if we do not express gratitude, ironically, for the conditions that marginalized and disenfranchised us in the first place. this secondary disenfranchisement—the injunction to gratitude—further bolsters the ideology of the adoptive parent (henceforth ap) as a savior/rescuer, thereby obscuring the ways aps might actually contribute to adoptee disenfranchisement. i introduce the term adoptism to characterize the specific type of discrimination adoptees face. taking cues from baril’s (2023) usage of the term suicidism, a particular form of discrimination against suicidal people, i claim that while adoptee disenfranchisement intersects with many oppressive and discriminatory practices, there are unique ways adoptees are marginalized, and hence, we need a new framework through which to theorize it. adoptism is the prevailing view that adoption is a social good, one for which adoptees ought to be grateful, and hence, those of us who do not perform gratitude are pathologized, infantilized, and dismissed—often by our own adoptive parents. thus, a final argument i make in the 2 i use “adoptee” to refer to myself as an adopted person, recognizing this is not the preferred appellation for all adopted/displaced persons. merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 paper is that if we wish to empower adoptees with epistemic agency and undo adoptist ideology, adoptees must be centered in all discussions of adoption rather than kept on the sidelines. this in turn means decentering ap voices. in every other intersectional feminist movement, we have seen this shift: to listening first and foremost to those marginalized by an oppressive system while refusing to let those who benefit most from those oppressive systems control the narrative. we must do the same within adoption discourse, lest we continue disenfranchising adoptees and subjecting them to the injustices specific to adoptism. 2. situating adoptees within the institution of adoption adoption connotes a wide variety of practices and meanings. kinship adoption, for example, where a biological relative assumes guardianship over a child, is often informal, can be temporary, and does not always involve legal proceedings. stepparent adoption likewise involves continued contact with at least part of the child’s genetic family, and many times, it includes the child’s consent. i will not be addressing these types of adoption in what follows. instead, i am focusing on what is sometimes referred to as plenary or subtractive adoption (yngvesson 2004; howell 2009), a process that permanently and irrevocably dissolves a child’s legal ties to their genetic family. plenary adoption includes both open and closed adoptions, as well as domestic and international. even in so-called “open” adoptions, where there is some degree of contact maintained with the birth family, the child’s birth certificate is altered to reflect a pseudo-fact of birth—namely, that the adoptive parents are the progenitors of the child. the child’s name is changed to match that of the adoptive family, and the birth parents’ rights to any form of parenting of the child are permanently revoked. when talking about adoption in the united states, plenary adoption is common in agencyand government-mediated adoption. i will henceforth be using “adoption” as shorthand for the plenary type. situating adoptees within the institution of plenary adoption, therefore, means they are children whose relationships with their kin are far more mediated by other institutions that intersect with adoption, such as the legal system. because plenary adoption necessarily involves a legal transfer of parental rights, this already situates it among at least one larger institution—the law. the legal system, in turn, intersects with all sorts of other institutions, many with dubious morality (inman 2021; clemons 2014). plenary adoption almost always involves a transfer of money—for example, to obtain parental rights over a child—whereas in parenting that follows the birth of one’s gestational child, no such legal transfer is made. it is assumed. most importantly, for adoption to even be viewed as a form of parenting, first and foremost a deparenting must occur. a family must be legally severed, irrevocably. it is also feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 worth noting that adopted children can be “returned,”3 whereas adoptees are not permitted, no matter how old they are, to annul their adoptions. all of this sets the stage for adoptees to feel displaced and commodified, as lina vanegas, msw, often notes on her instagram and twitter pages.4 furthermore, what i’ve noted about the differences in kinship creation via adoption has implications for how adoptive parenting is viewed as well. the narrative surrounding plenary adoption is that it is a solution to two social problems: the shame of infertility, and the birth of a baby to young, unmarried, or otherwise unprepared parents (quartly, swain, and cuthbert 2013; baden 2016; nelson 2020). it is a win-win, therefore, for hopeful adoptive parents and birth parents alike, but it is also assumed to be a “win” for the adoptee, who is provided a new identity through a clean and permanent break from their original kin. as kathryn joyce (2013) details in the child catchers, adoption is commonly seen as a story of “rescue,” especially in the case of intercountry adoptions and among evangelical christian groups (cuthbert, spark, and murphy 2010). not only is adoption the antidote to unwanted pregnancies and infertility, but it is also a means by which children can be moved from poor parts of the world to more affluent ones—again, all in the service of providing them a “better life.” one need only peruse websites of some of the leading adoption agencies such as gladney or american adoptions to see that adoption is lauded in these ways. those who adopt are saving children in need, and they are making a “lifelong commitment” to offering a “loving, stable family for a child to grow up in” (benointon 2014). all of this serves to paint adoptive parents as selfless saviors and adoptees as those who ought to be thankful they were gifted better parents. in this way, it is easy to see how difficult it might be for an adopted person to even begin to criticize their adoptive parents or plenary adoption more generally. 3 sometimes referred to as “failed adoptions,” the myka stauffer adoption and subsequent “rehoming” being a high-profile case. (see stephanie mcneal, “a youtuber placed her adopted autistic son from china with a new family—after making content with him for years,” buzzfeed news, may 28, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/myka-stauffer-huxleyannouncement.) there are entire markets online for “second chance adoptions,” such as the “second chance adoptions” facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/sec ondchanceadoptions. 4 vanegas’s twitter profile is at https://x.com/linaleadswlove; her instagram page is https://www.instagram.com/linaleadswithlove/?hl=en. see also a recent online article of hers: “organizing and activism of adopted and displaced people,” bill of health (blog), may 13, 2022, https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/05/13/or ganizing-and-activism-of-adopted-and-displaced-people/. merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 recognizing that all parents, adoptive or otherwise, are subject to scrutiny over their intentions in becoming parents, i do not wish to delve into whether adoptive parents are somehow more or less altruistic, as this is beside any point i am making in this paper. what i am interested in showing, instead, is the way the mythos surrounding adoption-as-rescue and adoptive-parent-as-savior conceals the problematic nature of plenary adoption and therefore disenfranchises adoptees. by setting up adoptive parents as selfless child rescuers, the overriding script of adoption serves to place an expectation of gratitude upon adoptees, thereby foreclosing the possibility that they might have any substantive critique of the system that created them. besides all the inequities listed above, we are routinely silenced when we provide testimony that does not reinforce the positive social narrative of adoption. in the next section, i provide evidence for this claim. drawing on my own experience as an adopted person, along with feminist epistemology, i will show that adoptees constitute a marginalized group heretofore overlooked as such because the institution assumed to provide us with a “better life” instead subjugates us and dismisses our testimony if it does not align with adoption-positive rhetoric. i argue that this constitutes a specific form of discrimination against adoptees. 3. being adopted, being disenfranchised i begin with my own testimony and lived experiences of being an adopted person who challenges the typical assumptions about adoption, and i will cite other instances of what i consider to be adoptee disenfranchisement. then, i will frame this disenfranchisement in terms of epistemic injustice, which can be preliminarily and generally understood as being harmed specifically in one’s capacity as a knower (fricker 2007). this will allow me to show why adopted persons constitute a marginalized group, one marked by being devalued and dismissed, ironically, when providing testimony about what it’s like to be adopted. it is worth noting that nothing i say in what follows is intended to be a universal claim about adoptee experience. we are far too heterogeneous for any such account to apply. when it comes to systemic issues adoptees as a group face, however, i do argue that my account applies generally, even if, at the individual level, we experience these injustices in different ways or perhaps not at all. my adoption occurred in a state where even today, my records remain sealed, so i am unable to obtain an unamended birth certificate, identifying information about my genetic family, or the foster family i spent six weeks with before being permanently adopted. i was always terrified to bring up the topic of meeting my birth family because i thought it would hurt my ap’s feelings. there was so much emphasis placed on how special and how wanted i was, and i grew up being told that “real” parents are the ones who raise you. my “adopted birthday”—the day papers were signed permanently and irreversibly ending all legal ties to my genetic family—was feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 celebrated like a whole other birthday, complete with presents and cake. for the most part, i spent my childhood and early adulthood under a sort of spell, believing that i really was lucky and that it would be hurtful to my aps to refer to my genetic family as family at all. this changed when i began having children and seeing other humans who i was genetically related to for the first time in my life. it was like dominoes after that. begetting my own genetic kin gave birth to more questions about myself, which led to interrogating my story more closely, which then led to questioning adoption generally. i began meeting other adoptees, something i had not experienced before, except for the adopted sibling with whom i had grown up. suddenly, i was surrounded by other adopted people who did not express hurt or anger when i spoke negatively about adoption. instead, they shared those emotions, thereby validating my own. this brief story about my awakening to the problems inherent in adoption lends emic credibility to what i am arguing in this paper. an emic perspective is one that comes from someone living within the culture or condition being described, and hence many anthropologists have argued it is crucial to understanding how marginalization is experienced and how it functions within institutions. furthermore, my story is far from an outlier. a quick scan of #adopteetwitter, adoptee tiktok, or #adopteevoices on instagram will reveal just how typical my narrative is. some accounts with large followings that speak similarly are @llmunro, @annatoccara, and @highnessophelia on twitter; blackinwhitefamily, fereraswan, changingadoption, and mythsmisgivings on instagram; and karpoozy on tiktok. a tweet by lisa munro (2023), for example, says, “anyways, the girls who went away was the first time i'd read something other than happy stories about adoption and sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how we keep getting it so wrong.” likewise, there exists a whole set of narrative conventions and terminology within “adoptionland,” all of which were there before i entered the space. what i went through is often referred to as “coming out of the fog,” where “fog” stands for “fear, obligation, and guilt” (forward 2019). the fear, obligation, and guilt that i and other adoptees often experience when, say, entering into reunion with our biological families underscores the way adoptees are in an inferior position within a power dynamic and, hence, at risk for marginalization and oppression. my experiences also highlight how difficult it was for me to even recognize these emotions in myself because i had effectively been robbed of the tools to fully explore my story and, hence, my identity as a person. i was never told that adoption can also be sad and painful and that adoptees as a group suffer from mental health issues far more than nonadopted persons (see, e.g., melero and sánchez-sandoval 2017; baden and wiley 2007; yoon et al. 2012; campo-arias, egurrola-pedraza, and herazo 2020). in fact, when i did struggle with my mental health growing up, i was put in therapy, and never once did a therapist explore with me how being relinquished as an infant might have impacted me. the narrative forced on me from the beginning merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 of my life was that i was loved so much that i was given away and that i was lucky. any grief or sadness must be the result of something else because adoption clearly saved me from a life of pain. my birth mother was selfless for giving me away to strangers. so, it would have been selfish of her to try to parent me because she would have robbed my aps of the chance. it was not until the birth of my first child that i began unraveling those messages and deconstructing how they affected me. the first few weeks with my newborn were spent in a panic, sure that i was incapable of parenting, suicidal, because i was convinced my child would be better off without me. it was then i started reaching out to other adopted people and finding i was not alone in these feelings, and like many of them, i was finally reckoning with the loss of my family—a loss i had theretofore been prohibited from grieving. meeting other adoptees also underscored how common it was to feel unheard and unseen when discussing negative feelings about being adopted. witnessing other adopted people attempt to speak out about these issues online, i have noticed some thematic rejoinders. we are often told, in response to pointing out the harms of adoption, that we ought to be grateful rather than being so “bitter” or “angry.” one blogger, “severed origins,” was told to “show some respect and gratitude” to his family on a facebook post where he stated that “adopting a child into your family does not mean that they will view your family as theirs.” the commenter went on to say that once severed origins turned eighteen, he could determine for himself how to relate to his parents.5 here, we see not only tone policing and coerced gratitude, but infantilization. severed origins is in his thirties, as he has disclosed several times publicly, but as many adoptees will testify, it is as if we are perpetual children in the eyes of society. perhaps the most common reply to any adoptee offering criticism of adoption is “you are so angry” or “don’t you think you will hurt your parent’s feelings by talking about them like this?” a highly visible case of tone-policing and invalidating comments such as these can be seen in the recent trending of the hashtag “#ungratefulpos” in reference to colin kaepernick testifying about how adoption has racist underpinnings and that even though his adoptive parents loved and cared for him, they were not immune from racial microaggressions toward him.6 5 see severed origins, “your adopted child is not obligated to view your family as theirs,” facebook, november 1, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story _fbid=195711201997846&id=101421044760196&mibextid=wc7fne&rdid=me1vrv ngkrjq4vrm. note that the original commenter deleted their comments, but other commenters shared screenshots of the posts. 6 see, e.g., andre castillo, “‘pathological liar’—nfl fans blast colin kaepernick for throwing his adoptive parents under the bus,” sportskeeda, april 3, 2023, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 tone-policing is commonly experienced by marginalized groups (davis and ernst 2019). those attempting to speak out about ways they are harmed by institutions are often told they are being too aggressive, angry, or sensitive (see, e.g., collins 2022; lorde 1997). adoptees who speak out about the harms of adoption are often told we ought to “seek help” if we express anger, no matter how justified that emotion is. one of the most insidious way adoptees are dismissed is when we are asked, “would you rather have been aborted?” in response to any adoption-critical discourse. the sad reality is that many adoptees answer yes to this deflective question, without qualification. moreover, the question entirely misses the point: that adoption and abortion are two separate issues. as work by gretchen sisson and others demonstrates, 91 percent of women who were denied or refused abortions went on to parent their children and never once considered adoption (sisson et al. 2017, 141– 42; see also sisson 2024). adoption is an alternative to parenting, not pregnancy, and as such, suggesting to an adoptee that they be grateful they were not aborted is a category error (see, e.g., merritt 2022a; drenka 2019). another way to assess the extent to which adoptees critical of adoption are permitted to speak on the issue is by examining academic outlets on the topic. the first thing to note regarding adoption scholarship is that it is conspicuously lacking in adoptee voices while being disproportionately full of ap-authored work. though i have not located a corpus analysis and do not have exact numbers, inspecting journals on my own supports this claim. i randomly selected march 2020 issues of two major adoption journals, adoption and fostering and adoption and culture, and found that in the former, adoptee-authored work accounted for 8 percent of the issue (only one article of twelve) and in the latter, it accounted for 33.3 percent of the issue. the rest of the articles were ap-authored (50 percent or more) or written by facilitators, caseworkers, or birth parents. it is worth noting that adoption and culture’s chief editor is an adoptee, which might explain the slightly better adoptee representation. in philosophy, adoption is a fairly uncommon topic, and adoptee-authored work is nearly nonexistent. the edited volume adoption matters, by haslanger and witt (2005), for example, features two essays by adoptees, out of eleven, and a small reflection by harry frankfurt who is also adopted, though his piece is not specifically about adoption. the chapters in this book by adoptees are not critical of adoption, and they even suggest that some of the bioethical concerns regarding genetic information being withheld from adoptees is a sort of neurosis manufactured by bioessentialist discourse (see, e.g., leighton 2005). so, there exists adoptee-authored scholarship, but it’s rare compared to apauthored work. of course, an objection here is that not all authors disclose their https://www.sportskeeda.com/nfl/nfl-fans-blast-colin-kaepernick-throwingadoptive-parents-bus. merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 relationship to adoption, so perhaps there are more adoptee-authored works than it seems at first glance. this might be so, and it would be hard to track. one thing less difficult to track however is the amount of adoptee-authored critical commentary about adoption as a larger institution. it is exceedingly rare to find such scholarship in academia. many reasons could explain this lacuna. it might be simply that not all adoptees are compelled to write about adoption. likewise, given that adoptees make up a small percentage of the us population (children’s bureau 2020), their representation in academia is likely even smaller, so the relative absence of adopteeauthored scholarship might just align with the paucity of adoptees working in these related fields.7 i find these explanations unsatisfactory, however, given the abundance of adoptee memoirs published, many of which present far from glowing reviews of being adopted. add to this the fact that organizations such as bastard nation have been around for decades fighting for adoptee rights, as well as the growing trend of adoptee voices on social media sites like tiktok and twitter, and it seems like the absence of such positions in academia—especially in feminist philosophy—does not match the lived experiences of many adoptees.8 in terms of my own attempts to publish adoption-critical commentary, i have received more desk rejections than any other editorial decision, and reviewer responses claiming my tone is too angry or aggressive, or that there is no evidence to support my arguments regarding the ways adoption can have deleterious effects on adoptees, despite citing an overabundance of sources indicating this is true. i have 7 according to the adoption history project (https://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/to pics/adoptionstatistics.htm), “approximately 5 million americans alive today are adoptees, 2–4 percent of all families have adopted, and 2.5 percent of all children under 18 are adopted.” the adoption history project does not make it clear what “adoptee” refers to (plenary, stepparent, grandparent, etc.) so depending on one's interpretation, that number could be too high if we mean to only include adoptees of plenary adoption. the adoption council has quite different data (https://adoptioncou ncil.org/article/adoption-statistics/), but i hesitate to include pro-adoption funded research as the numbers are often skewed (see joyce 2013). 8 see these recent news articles highlighting adoptee activism: vanessa taylor, “conservatives love to paint adoption as the solution to abortion. adoptees aren’t buying it,” mic, june 21, 2022, updated february 20, 2024, https://www.mic.com/im pact/roe-adoption-abortion-conservatives; kimmy yam, “adoptees who publicly support roe targeted by anti-abortion activists: ‘what if you were aborted?,’” nbc news, july 10, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/adopteespublicly-support-roe-targeted-anti-abortion-activists-aborted-rcna37101; tik root, “the baby brokers: inside america’s murky private-adoption industry,” time, june 3, 2021, https://time.com/6051811/private-adoption-america/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 also received the all too common “i know an adopted person who is happy being adopted” in reviewer comments. in short, responses i have received from reviewers echo the general social attitude about adoption as a positive thing and reflect the way adoptees are silenced in public discourse as i described above. another example of dismissing adoptee testimony worth mentioning is when we are told to just do genetic testing and quit whining, as if this would solve all the systemic issues surrounding plenary adoption. reactions such as this fail to recognize that adoptees are often forced to pay for information about themselves that should have been given to them all along. knowing one’s genetic progenitors, if not a right, is almost certainly a “significant interest” that ought to be made accessible to adoptees. daniel groll (2021) makes a similar argument regarding donor-conceived persons—namely, that it is unethical to knowingly make this information difficult or impossible to obtain. nevertheless, in many adoption and donor-conceived scenarios, gatekeeping genetic information is the norm. when i began searching for my genetic family, the adoption agency that had already profited from my adoption told me it would cost one thousand dollars just to initiate a search. if i request my original, unamended birth certificate that is sealed away in the state of florida, i am told i am not legally permitted to see it. this is just one example of how the institution of adoption is exploitative and steeped in profit-driven ideology (gerow 2002). returning to the representation issue, what might be reasons for this noticeable absence of adoptee voices in academia, and why are adoptees who speak out about adoption met with such dismissive defensiveness? in the following section, i contend that thinking about potential answers to these questions will reveal the ways adoptees constitute a marginalized group that has heretofore been overlooked as such. not only are we routinely undervalued in our capacity to provide legitimate testimony about our own lived experiences, but the responses to such testimony demonstrate a further disenfranchisement—namely, an injunction to gratitude. thus, adoptees are doubly disenfranchised because when discussing how we are harmed by adoption, we are both devalued as knowers and subjected to enforced gratitude for the same system we are critiquing as harmful. all of these marginalizing and oppressive factors constitute what i term adoptism, which is a specific form of discrimination adopted people face, one that is easily concealed because of the doubly disenfranchising elements at play. adoption is at once viewed as an unequivocal good, something we might even have a moral obligation to do (see, e.g., rulli 2016; friedrich 2013), or something we should prefer over biological procreating because of environmental concerns (morris 2015). adopted parents, on the other hand, often lament being discriminated against because they do not live up to bionormative standards of the “ideal family” (haslanger 2009). hanging in the balance are the adoptees themselves, who are rarely consulted about any of it and instead assumed to be living the “better life” afforded to them by the same institution that merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 simultaneously undermines their credibility as knowers. thus, i will argue that adoptism at once causes and sustains adoptee marginalization. by dictating that gratitude is the only acceptable affective response to being adopted, adoptism creates the ideal conditions for dismissing adoptees who do not live up to this expectation as uncredible and even pathological.9 4. epistemic injustice and adoptee disenfranchisement: defining adoptism fricker’s (2007, 20) work provides a starting point for thinking about the ways a person can be harmed “specifically in her capacity as a knower.” however, we see similar arguments made by women of color much earlier, notably in collins’s (2022) work, where she shows how black women are undervalued as knowers in white supremacist culture. what follows is a cursory overview of a wide-reaching literature, one not intending to privilege a singular standpoint. i focus on fricker here because of the way she differentiates between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, the latter being “the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource” (fricker 2007, 155). fricker’s account tracks how people are prejudicially excluded from the practice of assembling knowledge—that is, producing knowledge that becomes part of the general “pool” from which everyone draws. this exclusion can happen at individual and systemic levels. at the individual level, a person who already has negative stereotypes associated with their identity will be more susceptible to what fricker refers to as testimonial injustice. if a black woman is already seen by another interlocutor as aggressive or less intelligent, then her credibility as a knower will be deflated. she will not be taken seriously. her testimony will not carry the same evidentiary weight as, say, a white woman’s and probably even less than a white man’s. hermeneutical injustice, on the other hand, is based on structural identity biases that exist within communal knowledge resources. there are overlaps between these two forms of injustice, and i will say more about hermeneutical injustice later in the paper as it pertains to adoptees as a group; for now, let’s think about how adoptees might be harmed individually when they attempt to contribute to the knowledge pool regarding adoption. testimonial injustice occurs most often when adoptees speak about adoption in a negative way. adoptees are viewed with less credibility than aps, who are seen as authorities in much the same way parents, not their children, are seen as 9 i have recently learned that the term affective injustice might apply here just as well as, if not better than, epistemic injustice. i plan to write something about this in the future, but as this came to my attention just at the end of publication of this piece, i did not have time or space to include a discussion of it. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 authorities on parenting. as noted above, the age of the adoptee doesn’t matter. even adoptees who are older than their ap audience often say they feel they are being talked to like a child. another common dismissive tactic is to be told to “get help” or that we need therapy, simply for sharing how adoption has caused harm in our lives. kate abramson’s (2014) work on gaslighting is applicable here because not only are adoptees devalued as knowers in exchanges like this; we are pathologized. gaslighting is an attempt on the part of someone—usually someone in a position of power over another—to make the other person feel “crazy” or doubt their own perceptions. adoptees who deviate from the institution’s expectations of “happy” and “grateful” are told they are psychologically damaged. this is ironic given what i will discuss below regarding adoptee mental health statistics and the fact that, arguably, many of us do suffer psychologically due to relinquishment trauma, abandonment fears, and other adoption-specific issues (see, e.g., merritt 2022b). but this response of “get help” misses that point entirely. the audience is not taking the adoptee’s concerns seriously and offering any real empathy. it’s not genuine concern for adoptee mental health but rather a silencing tactic. the adoptee’s claim that adoption harmed them is viewed as absurd and pathological, and hence, the adoptee is dismissed. it is also worth noting the double standards that mark so many responses to adoptee testimony. in the same way kukla (2014) demonstrates that women who are assertive are seen as bossy, rather than simply confident like their male counterparts, adoptees who speak against adoption are more likely to be labeled too angry or aggressive or, worse, be subjected to verbal abuse. one adoptee tiktoker, who posts as “viorica | flat out adopted,” posted a video discussing how her parents were denied a domestic adoption, went abroad to romania to adopt, and constantly complained about how much she cost; in response, a commenter said, “someone adopted you and you are complaining? so many kids in the foster system and you are complaining. grow up.” in the response video to this comment, there are comments saying her parents “overpaid,” that her “mother didn’t pay soon enough for the abortion,” and that she was “another one that should have been swallowed.”10 even if adoptees use a polite tone or offer compelling and logical arguments, they are perceived as playing the perpetual victim or as being attention-seekers. on the other hand, in the rare case that the public does begin to take note of any negative outcomes associated with adoption, it is often because an ap or nonadoptee is speaking about them. one of the most cited books about this, the primal wound (verrier 1993), is written by an adoptive mother. again, it is not about the content of 10 viorica | flat out adopted (vio_flatoutadopted), “replying to @sueatthebeach: if you are truly curious about my story please look at my pinned posts and check out my playlists,” may 2, 2024, https://www.tiktok.com/@vio_flatoutadopted/video /7364555620432907566?_r=1&_t=8oozwgb1ds7. merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 the testimony. it is the speaker who is devalued as a knower. tone is also irrelevant because even with the most calmly articulated testimony, adoptees are often labeled “bitter” or “too angry.” despite so many scholars noting the productive use of anger— indeed, that it is “the emotion of injustice” (bailey 2018, 93; see also lorde 1997)— adoptees are not permitted to feel or express anything other than gratitude. besides facing the injunction to gratitude, adoptees are also subjected to epistemic violence. kristie dotson uses this term to extend fricker’s work and more fully capture the injustices at play in many exchanges. epistemic violence, according to dotson (2011, 242), is “a failure of an audience to communicatively reciprocate, either intentionally or unintentionally, in linguistic exchanges owning to pernicious ignorance. pernicious ignorance is a reliable ignorance or a counterfactual incompetence that, in a given context, is harmful.” there are two ways this violence is enacted: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. testimonial quieting is similar in many ways to collins’s and fricker’s accounts in that it has to do with undervaluing a speaker and not seeing them as a genuine knower. testimonial smothering, on the other hand, turns the focus toward the speaker themselves and how their speech is truncated when the audience demonstrates testimonial incompetence. the conditions under which testimonial smothering can be said to occur, according to dotson (2011, 244), are as follows: “(1) the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky; (2) the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker; and (3) testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance.” these three conditions amount to what dotson refers to as a “coerced silencing,” meaning the speaker does not willfully smother their testimony. they do so because it is unsafe not to, and herein lies the epistemic violence. a person risks further marginalization, recrimination, perhaps even physical violence, if they speak a full and unabridged truth. to briefly illustrate what dotson means by some of these terms, i will use a typical exchange i have with interlocutors about adoption and why i find myself being testimonially smothered. as dotson claims, smothering is a result of pernicious ignorance, which is a reliable ignorance about a given topic that causes harm. many folks are reliably ignorant about adoption policies and practices, but not all of this ignorance will result in harm. for example, my hairstylist casually asks me about my family, and i bring up that i am adopted, to which she replies, “my cousin is adopted and it’s the most beautiful thing!” here, she recites one of the reliably ignorant tropes i’d expect, but it is certainly not an act of epistemic violence. she is, however, demonstrating testimonial incompetence, which sets the stage for me to be testimonially smothered. testimonial competence, dotson argues, is something the speaker gauges about the interlocutor. it is my assessment, for example, that my hairstylist would find my testimony “clearly comprehensible and defeasibly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 intelligible,” whereas to be testimonially incompetent, an interlocutor would appear to me to be incapable of understanding the “content of proffered testimony”; nor would they able to detect their own failures to comprehend (dotson 2011, 245). when someone leads with stereotypically positive adoption rhetoric, i am already inclined to see anything i say that runs counter to it to be “unsafe and risky,” but in my example, my hairstylist has not caused a coerced silence on my part just yet. if i suggest to her that there are systemic issues with adoption that make blanket statements like that problematic, and she replies with something like, “i’m sorry you had a bad experience being adopted, but most adoption stories are successful and happy,” then we are entering the territory of epistemic violence dotson describes. i know now that she is testimonially incompetent. she is not hearing me genuinely, which is made clear by her ignoring the systemic level analysis i’ve offered, nor does she even recognize the gap in her own knowledge about adoption. this gap arises in part from her not having any lived experience as an adopted person but also from having only anecdotal evidence of the claim she is making. if she instead says something like, “wow, i never thought about any of that,” or (one that i often hear when i bring these issues up) “it never occurred to me that the way money changes hands in adoption is problematic,” then this is a completely different scenario. now i am in an exchange with a person who is aware of their ignorance and might therefore turn out to be what fricker (2007) calls a “virtuous listener.” more often than not, however, the types of exchanges i’ve just mentioned end with me self-silencing because it has been made clear to me that nothing i say will shift the thinking of my interlocutor and, worse, that the more i try to do so, the more likely i am to be gaslit, pathologized, and dismissed. fricker claims that one of the secondary effects of testimonial injustice is that the speaker can lose “epistemic courage.” if i am consistently undervalued as a knower, then i will begin to internalize that message and essentially gaslight myself any time i think i might have something to add to the knowledge pool. this is what makes it “violence,” according to dotson—it is coerced self-harm. but the harms of testimonial smothering are not limited to loss of courage. women who self-silence, for example, are shown to experience more negative emotions, such as loneliness and low self-esteem (besser, flett, and davis 2003), and feelings of alienation, rejection sensitivity, and depression rates are far higher among those who self-silence (london et al. 2012; page, stevens, and galvin 1996). there are even cardiovascular costs to doing so, as some researchers (jakubowski et al. 2022) have shown that self-silencing is associated with increased risk carotid atherosclerosis. testimonial smothering, in other words, is a socially coerced, self-inflicted form of injustice that can cause lasting psycho-physical damage. furthermore, joyce (2013) documents how adoptee activists are often threatened with physical violence and even death. taken together, merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 these considerations are powerful examples of how adoptees are subjected to epistemic violence. we can now further elucidate how adoptees subjected to epistemic injustice are impacted psychologically, physiologically, and socially. there is virtually no research regarding adoptee self-silencing, nor have i found studies that link the institution of adoption with testimonial smothering. in a forthcoming book chapter, however, ryan gustafsson and i (2024) cite our own experiences with testimonial smothering and urge more research on the issue. we cite sara docan-morgan (2011), for example, who discusses the ways transracially adopted persons engage in “topic avoidance” with their families, which is similar in many ways to testimonial smothering. topic avoidance, as the name suggests, involves not so much truncating or watering down testimony but avoiding a subject altogether, which is what many bipoc adoptees living in white homes have been shown to do. this behavior can be explained by the same coercive forces at play in dotson’s account, which is supported by findings from other research (white et al. 2022) where microaggressions faced by transracial adoptees in their (white) adoptive homes are documented. it could be argued that the epistemic violence just described is primarily racial discrimination, and therefore adoption has little or nothing to do with the harm experienced. an intersectional framing of these issues would suggest that it is not an exclusive disjunction, however. rather than one or the other, it could very well be both being adopted and being subjected to racism. these overlapping oppressive forces likely operate in tandem. one might still object that adoption, unlike racism, is not an oppressive institution and certainly not something that would inflict epistemic harm. this is why i think coining the term adoptism is important—it highlights the ways adoption qua institution is distinct from but intersects with racism, as well as classism, colonialism, ableism, and sanism. returning to my own narrative, being a white, same-race domestic adoptee, i did not experience the racial microaggressions that some research (white et. al 2022) has found to occur in transracially adoptive families, but i can say with certainty that i have smothered my own testimony for the sake of safety or to preserve my mental health and have been subjected to other forms of silencing. being told my whole life that my parents were too young and poor to parent me reflects the classist assumptions the adoption industry relies upon, but more importantly, it exemplifies the injunction to gratitude characteristic of adoptist ideology. by equating “good parenting” and “happy life” with “having wealthy parents,” adoptism automatically renders adoptees who question any of this as pathologically ungrateful. after all, in a capitalist society, no sane person would choose to live with less money, so an adoptee expressing sadness about not growing up with their less economically advantaged family is “mad.” hence, adoptism also intersects in important ways with sanism (perlin 1992). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 the adoptee narratives curated by society are an example of another facet of epistemic injustice, what calder (2021) refers to as “testimonial throttling.” rather than focus on the victim of epistemic harm, calder examines the perpetrator and how they often control the narrative. much like one can “throttle” a car, which controls its power output, “testimonial throttling controls knowledge output”; and just as throttling can occur physically as a means to control a subject, “limiting access to the pool of knowledge abuses the marginalised” (calder 2021, 11). calder includes identity prejudice as a reason for truncating information, and though many would be unwilling to admit any identity bias against adoptees, we must keep in mind that biases are often not conscious. moreover, thinking of the larger institution of adoption as the power source, it is clear that throttling happens as a direct result of institutional practices—sealing of birth records, falsifying of birth documents, and so on. thus, even though identity prejudice might not be explicit, the prevailing “rules of the game” are to treat adoptees as incapable of handling all the information. the same is true of birth parents, who are not permitted access to information about their children at all in closed adoptions; even in open adoptions, they are throttled by aps who can deem it unnecessary to continue communication at any point. in my case, the effect of all this throttling was to grow up being afraid my own parents would come and steal me away and being reassured that no, that will never happen, because they are legally prohibited from knowing anything about me. another element to consider is that aps too might be throttled by the adoption industry. i suspect that today, with so many adult adoptee activists speaking out and the growing recognition of the ways adoption impacts adoptees, this might not be the case. but several decades ago, when i was adopted, it is clear to me that my aps were not provided with all the information necessary to make good decisions about adopting me. in turn, i was also given partial or truncated information. this is how i frame the radical shift in thinking about adoption i’ve undergone the last several years. until i obtained this information kept from me, i could not even formulate these thoughts. i didn’t have words to express the feelings i was experiencing, many of which i was ashamed to feel at all. as an analogous case, consider fricker’s (2007), recounting of susan brownmiller’s (1999) memoir, regarding how revolutionary it was for women to realize the postpartum depression (ppd) they were experiencing was a legitimate illness. before this consciousness-raising occurred, women not only had no social support but didn’t even have a frame for understanding their feelings. instead, these women pathologized themselves by assuming they did not have a real debilitating mental health issue but rather had, as one of them says, a “personal deficiency.” something was wrong with them as mothers, in other words. the lack of subjective understanding surrounding ppd resulted directly from a lack of collective understanding about it and constitutes what fricker refers to as a “hermeneutical merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 injustice.” as she argues, this absence of collective knowledge was not due simply to oversight or underdeveloped science or technology but due to “structural inequality and power between men and women” (fricker 2007, 149). a sort of “hermeneutical darkness” clouded women’s minds and prevented them from both social and personal understanding of their experiences. and men were complicit in this hermeneutical injustice. by pathologizing women as “bad mothers” and assuming something inherently wrong with them, they prevented women with ppd from getting the care they actually needed. in terms of dotson’s work, we could say this was owing to pernicious ignorance regarding the phenomenology of postpartum experience. similarly, without the hermeneutical scaffolds—that is, the collective resources and interpretive framework—to fully understand adoption qua institution, adoptees are testimonially throttled, both individually and as a group. not only is knowledge purposefully kept from us, but in its place, we are offered pre-scripted narratives that are supposed to be our “life stories”—namely, that adoption is a blessing, a gift, and something for which we are grateful. just as the women suffering from ppd found validation and liberation tapping into a heretofore restricted knowledge pool, my own experiences finding other adoptees who shared my emotions, along with studies and literature i never knew existed, were life-changing. it was also an angering experience to realize that so many other adoptees in the world shared in my grief and i had never been encouraged engage with them. thus, adoptees are often throttled individually by having information kept from them, but they are also alienated from a community of knowers, thereby limiting the extent to which they can participate in the production and dissemination of knowledge— knowledge about their own lived experience. fricker argues that hermeneutical injustice is prior to and the condition for epistemic injustice, but in a later piece, fricker and katharine jenkins (2017) discuss hermeneutical marginalization as an even more fundamental precursor. whereas hermeneutical injustice ensures that a speaker will be rendered unintelligible due to a lack of collective knowledge about that speaker’s lived experiences, hermeneutical marginalization is the foundation of this injustice. this is because hermeneutical marginalization involves disallowing an entire group (or subset of a group) from speaking on behalf of that group. as fricker and jenkins (2017, 268) claim, “someone counts as hermeneutically marginalized insofar as they belong to a social group that under-contributes to the common pool of concepts and social meanings.” in the case of adoptees, as i have shown, we undercontribute to discourse surrounding the very institution that we are forced into, and those of us critical of that institution are especially underrepresented. as i have noted, my usage of the term adoptism to describe adoptee marginalization, is inspired by baril’s (2023, 2020) use of the term suicidism, which captures the unique ways suicidal people are discriminated against. another feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 important feature of his work is his claiming that by being systematically underrepresented in suicidology, suicidal people are harmed even more by the same institution that is supposedly invested in “saving” them. without a clear understanding of the emic/insider perspective regarding what it’s like to be suicidal, policies are often enacted that ultimately dissuade suicidal people from seeking help. likewise, the “injunction to live,” much like the injunction to gratitude, tacitly assumes that no sane person would rationally choose to die, and thus, all suicidal people—just like all ungrateful adoptees—are mad. i think i have successfully demonstrated that adoptees are harmed in their capacities as knowers, and furthermore, i’ve offered a framework—adoptism—for understanding how these harms are constituted and sustained. this alone should suffice to rethink our adoptist assumptions, but i want to add one final consideration—namely, the interconnection of these epistemic harms and the material, social, psychological, and physiological harms that occur as a result of unchecked pernicious ignorance regarding adoption. finally, i suggest ways to rectify these injustices. 5. redressing the harms of adoptism studies indicate that adopted people are at greater risk for several concerning health issues, which, if true, would make it all the more prudent to begin seriously listening to adoptees who are critical of adoption. findings from these studies show the following about adoptees: • they are overrepresented in mental health treatment settings (borders, penny, and portnoy 2000; cubito and brandon 2000; baden and wiley 2007). • they have increased rates of depression and anxiety (melero and sánchezsandoval 2017), ocd (askeland et al. 2015), and eating disorders (strand et al. 2020; holden 1991). • they are more likely than nonadopted persons to experience substance abuse problems (yoon et al. 2012). • they are at least twice as likely to attempt suicide than a nonadoptees (campo-arias, egurrola-pedraza, and herazo 2020; keyes et al. 2013; slap, goodman, and huang 2001). • they score much lower on self-esteem assessments (borders, penny, and portnoy 2000). • they are more likely to exhibit antisocial personality traits (westermeyer et al. 2015; cadoret at al. 1990). merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 • they have more autoimmune disorders than nonadoptees (johnhenderson et al. 2020; whitaker-worth, bayart, and benedetti 2015; miller and hendrie 2000). while it is not clear that being adopted or being relinquished is the causal mechanism behind these correlations—there are likely several contributing factors including genetic predispositions and other developmental stressors—the fact that adoptees suffer in these ways deserves attention. every major adoption agency, along with the us children’s bureau, gives advice to prospective adoptive parents that includes the idea that it is traumatic to be separated from one’s family, even at a very young age (see child welfare information gateway 2022). i (merritt 2022b) have suggested, regarding infant adoption, that trauma occurring in the first two years of life—often referred to as “preverbal trauma”— is likely a contributing factor to the social-emotional issues many adoptees face. as bessel van der kolk (2015) notes, in cases of early trauma, the autonomic nervous system becomes wired for protection, rather than connection. in turn, given the pervasive sense of danger, negative coping schemas develop, and these can include things like compulsivity, substance abuse, and restrictive dieting as the child matures into adulthood. negative schema development as a result of preverbal trauma often happens below the conscious radar, because there are no episodic memories tied to infancy. however, it is argued that these negative experiences are remembered, even if they are not consciously recalled. 11 adoption and relinquishment, in other words, are arguably “adverse childhood experiences” (burke harris 2018). the extent to which adoptee development is impacted by relinquishment bears very little on my argument about the epistemic injustices adoptees face. i think i have successfully shown how adoptees are disenfranchised by adoptist ideology, regardless of what all these studies truly indicate. my point in raising the issue is that it should be yet another reason for us to listen to those with lived experience. while we cannot conclude that adoption/relinquishment is the cause of adoptees being more likely to attempt suicide, the fact that they are is an alarming bit of data that cannot be brushed aside. studies continue to emerge, as i write this paper, indicating, for example, that adoptees and birth parents alike are harmed by plenary adoption practices in numbers that are statistically significant. 12 by continuing to subject 11 for the connection between autonomic nervous system dysregulation and infantmaternal separation, see bergman (2019, 2014); radcliff, baylor, and rybarczyk (2016); and porges (2011). see also studies of babies placed in nicu and outcomes of even brief separation (császár-nagy and bókkon 2018; sanders and hall 2018). 12 see, e.g., the reports described by leon elias (2023) at https://www.pac-uk.org/pac -uk-publish-big-consult-findings/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 adoptees to hermeneutical marginalization, we risk never getting a full picture of adoptee phenomenology from the perspective of those who are adopted, and hence, opportunities to reduce adoptee suffering are foreclosed. most importantly, my account points to the need to more critically examine adoption qua institution and to resist the uncritical assumption that this institution is an inevitability. conflating the duty to help children in need with the duty to participate in plenary adoption is problematic because it overlooks the material conditions that establish vulnerable families in the first place and, furthermore, how racist, classist, and ableist ideologies drive these material conditions along (dettlaff 2020; dettlaff and boyd 2020; raz, dettlaff, and edwards 2021). it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine all the aspects of what scholars like dorothy roberts (2022, 2014) refer to as “family policing” and of how adoption is a cog in that machine. however, one can easily imagine that in a better world—one in which “poverty” was not coded by child welfare agencies as “neglect,” where black parents were not automatically assumed to be less capable of parenting than white parents, where instead of paying fifty thousand dollars to adopt an infant, that money were spent empowering birth parents to parent their children—plenary adoption would all but cease, and it would certainly not be considered a moral duty (see, e.g., merritt, 2022c). redressing the racist, classist, colonialist, ableist, and sanist ideologies that make adoption seem so necessary is not an easy task, and certainly will not occur overnight. to this end, i recognize what i am suggesting is an ideal argument. it could be argued, in other words, that given the world we actually inhabit, adoption might be the only way to provide children in need with loving homes. however, this either-or thinking overlooks options that do not involve permanent dissolution of families, such as legal guardianship and kinship care. these options, it turns out, are not incentivized by child welfare agencies. we need to interrogate these issues with more scrutiny and see how the institution of adoption functions in tandem with so many other social injustices. likewise, inspecting our own cognitive dissonances regarding adoption is crucial. laura briggs’s work (2020, 2012), which reasonably stirs outrage regarding family separations at the us-mexico border, should give us pause to question why we are not similarly outraged at families—especially black families—being “torn apart” (roberts 2022) every day because of structural inequalities and racism. dismantling adoptism means, therefore, confronting all these intersecting injustices and reckoning with the fact that the institution of adoption emerges from them as a supposed inevitability. adoption appears so inevitable, in fact, that it gets lauded as a heroic act of rescuing children, thereby neglecting the families that are in need of saving. to be sure, what i’ve just said above requires a great deal more explication, which exceeds the scope of this paper, but it is what i have come to believe, as a scholar, and as an adopted person, who is in community with many adoptees, former merritt – be grateful or be quiet: confronting the epistemic harms of adoptism published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 foster youth, donor-conceived persons, and birth parents. this position, like so much of adoption-critical discourse from adoptees, is all too often dismissed, as i have tried to show here through an analysis of epistemic injustice as it occurs in an adoptist paradigm. if we are to truly assess the extent to which adoption as an institution is harmful and whether family preservation measures, such as promoting guardianship over plenary adoption, would lead to better outcomes for adoptees and birth families, we will not do so by continuing to silence adoptee voices. all adoptee voices need to be centered in discussions of adoption, much like we ought to center the voices of members of any marginalized group when talking about what it’s like to experience that form of marginalization. however, as i have argued here, in adoption studies, it is especially important that adoptees who are critical of the institution that produced them be allowed to speak and that we actively hear them. otherwise, we risk upholding the same narratives that so many adoptees claim are harming us, and moreover, we perpetuate the myth that adoption is an inevitable, necessary, and positive aspect of society. it is time for feminist theory to confront adoptism, lest it continue to uncritically support child welfare policies that are far from child-centered and certainly not in line with what intersectional feminism purports to uphold. references abramson, kate. 2014. “turning up the lights on gaslighting.” philosophical perspectives. a supplement to nous 28: 1–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable /26614542. askeland, kristin gärtner, mari hysing, leif edvard aarø, grethe s. tell, and børge sivertsen. 2015. “mental 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body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. new york: vintage. ———. 2022. torn apart: how the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world. new york: basic books. rulli, tina. 2016. “preferring a genetically-related child.” journal of moral philosophy 13, no. 6 (november): 669–98. https://doi.org/10.1163/17455243-4681062. sanders, marilyn r., and sue l. hall. 2018. “trauma-informed care in the newborn intensive care unit: promoting safety, security and connectedness.” journal of perinatology 38, no. 1 (january): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/jp.2017.124. sisson, gretchen. 2011. “parenthood as privilege: the cultural tensions of acceptable reproduction.” phd diss., boston college, escholarship@bc. http://hdl.hand le.net/2345/3151. ———. 2024. relinquished: the politics of adoption and the privilege of american motherhood. new york: st. martin’s. sisson, gretchen, lauren ralph, heather gould, and diana greene foster. 2017. “adoption decision making among women seeking abortion.” women’s health issues 27, no. 2 (march-april): 136–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.whi .2016.11.007. slap, gail, elizabeth goodman, and bin huang. 2001. “adoption as a risk factor for attempted suicide during adolescence.” pediatrics 108, no. 2 (august): e30. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.108.2.e30. strand, mattias, ruyue zhang, laura m. thornton, andreas birgegård, brian m. d’onofrio, and cynthia m. bulik. 2020. “risk of eating disorders in international adoptees: a cohort study using swedish national population registers.” epidemiology and psychiatric sciences 29 (may): e131. https://doi .org/10.1017/s2045796020000451. van der kolk, bessel a. 2015. the body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. new york: penguin books. verrier, nancy newton. 1993. the primal wound: understanding the adopted child. baltimore, md: gateway press. westermeyer, joseph, gihyun yoon, carla amundson, marion warwick, and michael a. kuskowski. 2015. “personality disorders in adopted versus non-adopted adults.” psychiatry research 226, no. 2–3 (april): 446–50. https://doi.org/10 .1016/j.psychres.2014.12.067. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 28 whitaker-worth, diane l., cheryl b. bayart, and julia anderson benedetti. 2015. “dermatologic conditions in internationally adopted children.” international journal of women’s dermatology 1, no. 1 (february): 31–36. https://doi.org /10.1016/j.ijwd.2014.12.003. white, ebony e., amanda l. baden, alfonso l. ferguson, and leanice smith. 2022. “the intersection of race and adoption: experiences of transracial and international adoptees with microaggressions.” journal of family psychology 36, no. 8 (december): 1318–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000922. yngvesson, barbara. 2004. “national bodies and the body of the child: ‘completing’ families through international adoption.” in cross-cultural approaches to adoption, edited by fiona bowie, 211–26. new york: routledge. yoon, gihyun, joseph westermeyer, marion warwick, and michael a. kuskowski. 2012. “substance use disorders and adoption: findings from a national sample.” plos one 7, no. 11 (november): e49655. https://doi.org/10.1371/jou rnal.pone.0049655. michele merritt is an associate professor of philosophy at arkansas state university. her research spans several topics, including feminist philosophy and nonhuman animal cognition. she has authored a book on the human-canine bond, minding dogs, with university of georgia press, and is currently working on her second book, “(un)making families: a feminist interrogation of adoption and the policing of parenthood.” her articles on adoption and mental health have appeared in adoption and culture, child abuse and neglect, the nation, and mad in america. michele is a domestic, same-race adopted person from a closed adoption. 15240 merritt title page 15240 merritt final format white concealment feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 1 article 3 recommended citation edwards, kirsten t. 2025. “white concealment.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (1). article 3. 2025 white concealment kirsten t. edwards florida international university ktedwards@fiu.edu edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 white concealment kirsten t. edwards abstract there is a significant body of literature that explores epistemic injustice as ignorance. most germane to the present essay are explorations of white ignorance— particularly at the intersection of epistemic interdependence and relationality—and its necessity in the maintenance of white supremacy. most conceptual discussions of white ignorance are concerned with what white people refuse to know, and the implications of that unknowing on nonwhite peoples. in this essay, i consider what white people refuse to say—how they story situations or renarrate as a process by which to sustain power. what information are white people willing to recognize but simultaneously unwilling to allow to be acknowledged in the context of a specific racist situation? how do white people use the feigned absence or irrelevance of information—concealment—as power? keywords: white ignorance, black women, white feminists, charles w. mills, gendered antiblackness, epistemic interdependence, relationality, renarration, storytelling, academia stories “the function, the very serious function of racism . . . is distraction.” —toni morrison (1975) prologue i want to tell you a story. it’s a common enough story, although often untold. your mama probably told you this story many times, in many different ways, in all kinds of languages. your mother wouldn’t dare tell you this story, well at least not with words, probably in other ways…. we should talk about that. maybe share our stories someday. but not today. today is about this story. really, this story is a story about stories. an honest story—although fictional—about dishonesty. the present essay is principally concerned with the relationship between stories and power, or how powered groups marshal stories to maintain power in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 particular situations. inquiry into epistemic (in)justice also occupy this oratorial ecosystem. relatedly the complexities of power—specifically regarding race and gender—and how those complexities modulate the performance of power animate the questions herein. such a milieu invites investigation into morality, relationality, “unknowability” (dotson 2017), and the very conditions that govern human subjectivity. through this writing exercise, within the parameters allowed by a very particular case, i attempt to explore the distinct characteristics that attenuate dehumanization through interlocution or, said differently, ignorance as the stories the powerful tell. there is a significant body of literature that explores epistemic injustice as ignorance. most germane to the present essay are explorations of white ignorance1— particularly at the intersection of epistemic interdependence and relationality (pohlhaus 2017)—and its necessity in the maintenance of white supremacy. most conceptual discussions of white ignorance are concerned with what white people refuse to know, and the implications of that unknowing on nonwhite peoples (sullivan and tuana 2007).2 in this essay, i consider what white people refuse to say—how they story situations or renarrate as a process by which to sustain power. what information are white people willing to recognize but simultaneously unwilling to allow to be acknowledged in the context of a specific racist situation? how do white people use the feigned absence or irrelevance of information—concealment—as power? i am distinguishing between recognition of discrete information and knowing as a structural and epistemic condition. i take up these distinctions in greater detail in subsequent sections. the purpose of this essay is to extend the study of white ignorance toward the explication of a specific process therein, which i describe as white concealment. as a point of clarification, i draw most significantly on charles mills’s (2007, 2015) definition of white ignorance, supported by the philosophical contributions of others who take up questions of epistemic injustice. hence, i understand white ignorance broadly as a “non-knowing grounded specifically in white racial privilege,” 1 see mills 1997; sullivan and tuana 2007; gross and mcgoey 2015; mueller 2017. 2 the essay uses the terms “nonwhite,” “black,” and “of color” discriminately. “nonwhite” appears in the essay when i refer to the general characteristics of a concept, such as white ignorance and white concealment, because these concepts apply to the experiences of all people who are not white—people who have been raced outside of the benefits of whiteness. i use “black” specifically when referring to the explanatory scenario (i.e., black women’s interactions with white feminists) and concepts relevant to this particular relationship, or when applying concepts drawn from black philosophical traditions. i use “of color” to mirror the writing of specific scholars when referenced. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 “an ignorance . . . not contingent but causally linked to . . . whiteness,” that produces a “refusal to recognize” the extent to which white racial domination shapes the social (political, material, etc.) world (mills 2015, 217, 219). later, i engage particular aspects of white ignorance conceptually relevant to white concealment. the present treatise employs two methodological tools in an effort to focus the study and establish useful parameters for meaning-making. first, it considers white concealment’s relationship to black women and white feminists, specifically how white concealment manifests as gendered antiblackness weaponized against black women by white feminists. while white concealment as one process within white ignorance has implications for all nonwhite people, to clarify some of the more nuanced elements of the phenomenon, i find it useful to isolate my analysis to the experiences of black women in relation to white feminists. this focus also invites more substantive explorations into an intersectional understanding of white ignorance, along with raced and gendered standpoints. second, a composite story anchors this conceptual analysis. i crafted the anchoring story by drawing on my own experiences as well as the many stories recounted by black women friends and colleagues contending with white concealment in the academy. i begin with an overview of white ignorance—focusing on its most relevant features for this project—to clarify the conceptual genealogy of the present proposition. white ignorance the term “ignorance” can be deceiving. ignorance usually refers to an individual’s lack of knowing by virtue of limited experience. in this sense it is a natural, morally neutral fact of life. conversely, active ignorance, which white ignorance is a form of, is predicated not on limited but instead on powered experiences. active ignorance is about what dominant groups deliberately do not allow themselves to know in order to justify and subsequently entrench power. it is an active refusal to acknowledge knowledge, to acknowledge unjust power. paul taylor describes it as “effectively agree[ing] not to know some quite important things about our social world and the people in it. sometimes this means . . . declining to engage in inquiry that seems likely to reveal some claim as a falsehood” (taylor 2007, 137; emphasis added). white refusal to know silences nonwhite people’s experiential knowings; therefore, white ignorance is an epistemic violence (dotson 2011; spivak 1988). in his groundbreaking text the racial contract, mills elucidates the necessity of deliberative ignorance to the furtherance of a racialized system, noting that racism as a system (or social contract) prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology . . . a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (mills 1997, 18) white people trade an accurate reflection on their life as profiteers within a violent society for a falsified description of themselves as moral actors in a “meritocratic” system; a system where they deserve outsized access, and nonwhites experience a world that is fair and aligned with their natural capabilities. here, i discuss three characteristics of white ignorance that anchor the broader discussion. one: white ignorance sustains and is sustained by the exploitation of black labor. one of the pervading distortions made possible by white ignorance is the relationship between black people and labor (dancy, edwards, and davis 2018; harley 2008; mckittrick 2006). mills (1997) contends that the social contract dictates moral and political—inclusive of economic—relations, allowing for the racial contract to be economically exploitative. here i invite the reader to consider an expansive interpretation of economies, one that includes intellectual, social, judicial, and moral, alongside monetary economies. a robust view of economic exploitation underscores the ways in which colonial erasure and its correlating violences afford white people the ability to understand themselves as independently productive moral agents. this process catalyzes a disassociation of black labor from production. if one is object, one is not a producer of labor but instead a means of production. while the black enslavement is the most egregious example, black separation from black labor remains a functional reality across scales. for instance, one way the process manifests is as unseen and uncompensated labor demanded of black women academics. black women are regularly expected to provide additional academic, psychological, and emotional supports to minoritized students, supports needed for matriculation but not provided by the institution. additionally, they are tasked with extraneous committee duties and endure censure when they do not comply. these are just a few examples of the ways in which academic institutions “property” black women.3 3 to extend this discussion, black women are also often assigned to teach “ghettoized” diversity courses. while offering courses that focus on questions of equity and justice marks a university or department as an active participant in a multicultural society— an important marker in postracialism, procuring significant resources—the maintenance of a white masculinist framework ensures that these courses never occupy a central role in academic discourse. relegating black women to these classrooms undermines their intellectual expertise, framing the topics discussed as unimportant and extraneous. these are just a few ways black women academics are “overextended and undervalued” (harley 2008, 19). nuanced analyses of black labor edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 two: white ignorance enables the denial of complexity, which affords a disregard for black humanity and agency. it enforces a sociality that ensures white people do not have to comprehend the loss and pain black people suffer as a result of labor exploitation. comprehension necessitates a social inquiry that recognizes the moral agency of mutual interlocutors (anderson 2016; freire 2007; gordon 1995; ortega 2006; taylor 2007). white ignorance, alternatively, confers a world in which white people are rewarded for not knowing while simultaneously convincing themselves that they are the most knowledgeable. emmalon davis (2018, 704) describes these efforts as “epistemic defects” that display an “investment in misunderstanding” and a resistance to employ the necessary “epistemic resources” essential to understand the other.4 three: white ignorance is about ends, not necessarily means. as such, the racial contract is “continually being rewritten” (mills 1997, 37). lewis gordon’s (1995) exploration of sartre’s conception of bad faith offers an important framing in understanding procedural characteristics of white unknowing. at the institutional level, bad faith impedes human recognition, disintegrating reciprocity essential to humanizing engagement. but the process of disintegrated human recognition does not require absolute rejection of the other. a particular black human may be recognized in the context of institutional bad faith if recognition furthers the aims of whiteness. one might consider this a nonsubjectivity, a black subjectivity allowed for the benefit of whiteness at the expense of other black people. considering the global affirmation of whiteness, occupying a central role in said project can feel beneficial in discrete situations, even if not fully empowering. the black nonsubject may experience the white engagement as affirming, while failing to locate the larger implications for black life and the relationship of the particular moment to the experiences illuminate the ongoing practice of enslavement and dehumanization visited upon the black subject. ahmed (2012, 1) also asks us to consider carefully “the uses of diversity by institutions and how the arrival of the term ‘diversity’ involves the departure of other (perhaps more critical) terms, including ‘equality,’ ‘equal opportunities,’ and ‘social justice.’” ahmed also notes how whiteness frames racism as inevitable and/or a problem nonwhite people must solve through diversity labor. these white renarrations absolve white people of responsibility for responding to racialized violence, while also structurally relegating nonwhite people to exhaustive and unfruitful labor within “spaces that are … less valued” (ahmed 2012, 4). 4 elements of this process align with anderson’s (2016) description of authoritarian moral inquiry, a type of inquiry predicated on unjust social hierarchy. relatedly, frye (1983, 75) describes the necessity for one to “look and listen and check and question” in humanizing relations. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 ongoing project of black exploitation. conversely, a black subjectivity that altogether does not calculate whiteness—whether resistantly or ambivalently—invites violent correctives. in his description, gordon (1995, 30) reminds the reader that “there is no black autobiography in antiblack worlds.” there are, however, “black narratives,” narratives written by or about black people but framed by whites. as mills notes, slave narratives often had to have white authenticators, for example, white abolitionists, with the racially based epistemic authority to write a preface or appear on stage with the author to confirm that what this worthy negro said was indeed true. (mills 2007, 32) the black narrative is offered credence in an antiblack world only if it first receives white approval.5 the present essay suggests that white ignorance creates conditions that support moral rationalization, denied complexity, black labor exploitation, and ultimately white dominance. in the next section i discuss what i consider an important but undertheorized process by which these aims are accomplished in particular situations: white concealment. an illustration of power as mentioned previously, in an attempt to anchor the analysis, i offer a composite story illustrative of white concealment’s principal features. there are three “scenes of subjection” in this story (hartman 1997). each scene attempts to (1) concretize white concealment and (2) highlight particular aspects of the idea. the story is followed by a detailed analysis of white concealment.6 5 feagin (2010) describes white narrative control as “white racial framing.” similar to white ignorance, white racial frames provide whites with epistemic resources to justify and maintain racial hierarchies. “this type of aggressive racist framing reinforces whites’ position of superior power and privilege in the u.s. racial hierarchy” (wingfield and feagin 2012, 145). 6 white characters’ names are deliberate in the story. they denote common euroamerican femme names. classifying white women according to common euroamerican names has been a part of the african american lexicon for generations. in “story of harlem slang,” zora neale hurston (1990, 228) defines “miss anne” simply as “a white woman.” but that simple definition works as expressive code for african american listeners to succinctly denote the particular characteristics of racially problematic white women. in contemporary rhetoric communities of color have created similar associations with names such as “karen,” “becky,” and “susan.” edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 cast of characters main anne white: white feminist, full professor amy snow: white feminist, academic managerial leader aspen grey: biracial feminist, early career faculty jalese banks: black womanist, mid-career faculty cecily billings: black woman, graduate student supporting lakiesha booker: black womanist, mid-career faculty juan basquez: latine man, early career faculty the exam four faculty members, including anne and jalese, are gathered with cecily for her comprehensive exam oral defense. throughout the meeting, nonwhite committee members—lakiesha and juan—have asked cecily clarifying questions related to her conceptual design, attempting to offer opportunities for response and rectification. specifically, nonwhite faculty are troubled by critical misreadings of black feminist scholarship in the exam response. after an hour, it has become clear cecily is either unwilling or unable to make the necessary conceptual shifts. the room is now tense. dr. (lakiesha) booker: cecily, i’m telling you this under no uncertain terms, i am very uncomfortable with your description of “othermothering.” this does not align with my read of collins and, i would venture to say, with any serious scholar of black feminist or womanist thought. dr. (juan) basquez: i’m grateful you brought this up, dr. booker. i am also concerned, but since black feminism is not my area of study, i didn’t know if i was misreading. but i too feel as if the descriptions provided, for lack of a better word, “mammy-fy” black women professionals. lakiesha: yes! that’s exactly it. cecily, you say you want to celebrate and support black women with your scholarship, but this document basically says emotional labor exploitation is somehow inherent to us, to our core being. juan: i see in your program of study that you participated in an independent study focused on black feminist thought. who directed that study? dr. banks? jalese: (blank faced) no, no i did not. if i’m not mistaken, dr. white was the director of that study. anne’s face turns bright red and she becomes visibly angry. cecily appears uncomfortable. after the defense, jalese and lakiesha remain in the room. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 lakiesha: girl, what the hell was that?! jalese: giiiirrrl… (shakes her head and sighs), i know. i’ve been telling cecily for months about this, and other issues with her writing. honestly, i’ve spent hours and days giving her feedback on drafts, just for her to send something back to me uncorrected with more problems! you have no idea what it took just to get her to this point. right now, i’m just tired. and the trip part about it is, i know she runs to anne whenever i correct her. and of course, anne won’t actually read the drafts. no, that would be too much work. but she will undermine my advisement with cecily. quiet as it’s kept, i’m the advisor of record because anne refused to take her on officially. and you know i didn’t even know they were doing that independent study until i had to sign off on cecily’s exam paperwork! you tell me how a historian of frances willard is qualified to direct a study of black feminism?! lakiesha: literally two of this school’s five scholars of black feminism are on cecily’s committee and anne thought she should teach her about “othermothering”!? jalese: [shakes her head and sighs while looking at lakiesha knowingly] lakiesha and jalese gather their belongings, proceed to walk out the room, and continue to talk. as they cross the threshold of the door, they notice to their left further down the hall, anne dramatically speaking in hushed tones to cecily… the meeting two weeks after cecily’s oral defense, jalese is busily working in her campus office. she hears the *ping* of an email notification. subject: dissertation committee changes from: cecily billings to: jalese banks cc: amy snow dear dr. banks, i hope you are well. after deep reflection and conversation with trusted mentors, i have decided to pursue a change in the composition of my dissertation committee… i am grateful for all your support to this point and wish you much success moving forward. respectfully, cecily jalese stares at the email in disbelief for one full minute. she then focuses on the “cc” line in confusion. jalese: (says to herself aloud) why is amy on this email? what does she have to do with this? edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 jalese sends an email to amy’s assistant requesting a meeting. one week later, jalese and amy are meeting in the faculty lounge. jalese: thank you for meeting with me. it’s good to see you. i don’t think i’ve seen you since you helped lakiesha and me organize the black lives on campus event. i see you’re still getting some wear out of that t-shirt. amy: yes! that was a great event. i think it really made many of the white folx on campus uncomfortable. they need it! you know, i wear all black every time a black man is murdered by the police. i make it a point to mourn publicly. it definitely makes my white male colleagues uncomfortable. i know, for sure, they all voted for trump! jalese: yes. i’m sure it does…. so, i wanted to talk to you about cecily. amy: (amy’s energy visibly subdues. her demeanor becomes stoic.) oh, yes, cecily. well, you know, now that i’m an administrator in the graduate school, it’s important for me to support black student selfdetermination. jalese: umm, ok. i can see that, but what about black faculty labor? amy: well, if you think about it, this transition actually alleviates labor for you. in my experience as an administrator working through these types of issues, it’s best to follow the path of least resistance. i think we made the right choice for cecily—the most vulnerable person in this situation—and it’s important that we give her voice. don’t you agree? jalese: i think there are multiple forms of vulnerability and silencing in most situations. amy: hmm, yes. well, that’s something to consider. maybe we can organize a campus event on multiplicity and intersectionality! i’ve been doing a lot of reading on intersectionality lately. but anyway, it’s been great catching up, jalese, but i have a one o’clock. let me know if you have any more event ideas. i’m sure i can get my department to cosponsor. bye! the email it has been three weeks of radio silence following jalese’s meeting with amy. jalese is casually walking through the quad enjoying the early spring weather as she heads to her wednesday class. she hears the *ping* of an email notification on her phone. subject: cecily billings from: aspen grey to: jalese banks feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 dear jalese, i wanted to reach out after hearing there was some confusion about cecily switching advisors late in the process. i am stepping in as her chair and have gotten to know her and her work over the past year, since meeting her during one of the literature review study sessions i facilitate with anne. when she approached me about the need to change advisors, i did not anticipate it being a contentious transition; sometimes advising relationships just don't work out. i hope that we can all move forward seamlessly from here. warmly, aspen jalese stops in the middle of the walkway. students and other pedestrians pass to either side of her as she stares at her phone in stunned disbelief. white concealment concealment: the action of hiding something or preventing it from being known. (oxford dictionaries 2015) look away! there’s nothing to see here. while others have offered nuanced analyses of white ignorance, fewer have dissected the specific animators therein. i would like to approach white ignorance as a complex system comprised of various instruments, apparatuses, and processes that increase and decrease in relative utility depending on the particular racist situation. white concealment is, thus, one procedural weapon within the larger arsenal of white ignorance. white concealment is a particular type of action on the part of white people to protect white ignorance by concealing and/or not acknowledging critical information relevant to a specific racist situation. it is the process through which white people manage black people by controlling the narrative and blocking engagement with essential components of a black autobiography.7 white concealment is principally 7 notable complements to this discussion are billig’s (1999) and eagleton’s (1991) engagements with marx’s notion of concealment as a powered practice, though with important distinctions. marx describes concealment as a routinized forgetting and resulting objectification of labor in the production of commodity inherent to capitalist power (marx 1915; billig 1999). eagleton (1991, 28), remarking on marx’s conception of concealment, describes it as duplicitous. this framing might suggest a certain degree of consciousness in the process. while marx also evokes notions of secrecy or edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 about silencing black voices, but with an intimate twist, this silencing is accomplished through communication with the black person.8 i conceptualize the process of white concealment within the framework of white ignorance because it draws on similar practices for similar aims. white concealment is predicated on white renarration supported by a set of white supremacist ideas, beliefs, and values. white concealment is also ultimately about white hoarding of resources at the expense of black life; white hoarding made possible through the larger apparatus of black labor exploitation. in this way, white concealment also works to maintain a particular powered relationship between white and black people. in the context of a specific racist situation, concealing relevant, but discrete, information enables white people to stay in control of the core issues—and thus maintain their white domination—while black people expend much needed energy and labor attempting to rationally engage an irrelevant argument.9 withholding of truth in describing concealment, he is also clear that the process of concealment is structural and embedded in the capitalist economy, specifically through the use of money, in an essential way that resists cognition. relatedly, billig (1999, 313–14), drawing on freud, depicts marx’s appeal as a type of “shared repression” or “shared forgetting,” similar to the collective miscognition mills describes in white ignorance. billig notes further that “custom, or habit, fixes a price to commodities; and, in consequence, the hidden secret disappears from awareness” (316). the shared lack of awareness embedded in the process of marxist concealment along with his structural description of the process bears greater alignment with theories of ignorance (marxist concealment might be described as capitalist ignorance), as opposed to the concept of white concealment that this paper forwards. but what marxist concealment does illuminate is the centrality of deception (whether self-inflicted or outward facing) in domination. 8 others also theorize the practice of dialogical racist silencing, the kind of silencing camouflaged as communication. bonilla-silva’s (2014) account of color-blind racism notes the ways in which white people in the post-civil rights era use coded language to express racist ideas. similarly, pollock’s (2004) description of “colormuteness” describes the suppression of race talk in interracial dialogue. both color-blind racism and colormuteness explore the dialogical tools white people use to maintain racial hierarchies while avoiding public censure for racism. 9 the oppressive conditions of white normative professionalism require engagement with irrelevant arguments. for black people to access and maintain the resources available within neoliberal professional spaces—which is a condition of survival—they are coerced into navigating conversations framed within parameters of white illogic. many black people spend a significant amount of time and energy attempting to unravel the initial illogic that they are never able to put forth the more substantive feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 one might argue the fundamental component of white ignorance— miscognition—is missing from white concealment. but i disagree. while information is known and subsequently concealed in the specific situation, there are larger structural false ideas, beliefs, and values that must be adhered to for white concealment to function: ideas about white superiority, specifically white superior analytical ability that warrants concealment;10 beliefs about the necessity to censor or control black voices/autobiography in establishing veracity; and the role of apathetic intimacy through white caretaking/direction-setting/management. so to be clear, while the white concealer does possess relevant contextual information about the particular racist situation, what she is refusing to know is that (1) she has created/enabled a racist situation (and thus is culpable in white supremacy), and (2) her refusal to inquire into (i.e., her choice to ignore) relevant information is in protection of her white racial domination, rooted in her (unconscious) belief that she rightfully possesses the moral and intellectual resources to adjudicate the most pertinent aspects of a situation relative to her black interlocutor. white concealment is most often preemptive but can also be responsive, working to renarrate violent interactions as benign. it provides “alternative” perspectives for understanding racist interactions, decisions, and outcomes. for example, in the composite story when amy and jalese meet, amy’s suggestion that “it’s important for [her] to support black student self-determination” is preemptively prepared in advance of her meeting with jalese but also serves as a reductionist and defensive response to jalese’s more substantive concerns. amy—as a white feminist—mobilizes a black political frame (i.e., self-determination) in order to create a closed-circuit logic, effectively precluding jalese’s response. considering the ways in which white ignorance refuses complexity and inquiry, an analysis of white concealment in action might ask, how is the present narrative concealing important information and critically complex modes of understanding? by issues. richeson, trawalter, and shelton (2005) suggest that these sorts of interracial professional interactions produce a level of cognitive energy drain that can deplete executive functioning. in many more scenarios, white actors make it clear that any attempt to disrupt the white concealing narrative will come at a price. for instance, wingfield (2010) notes the range of emotions black subjects are disallowed in professional settings. specifically, white professional norms and stereotyping compel black professionals to engage in emotion work/management in order to camouflage feelings of anger and frustration, which if displayed would result in adverse professional consequences. 10 see angela davis’s (1972) “reflections on the black woman’s role in the community of slaves” for a useful discussion on white analytic control and deception toward the maintenance of black enslavement logics. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 what means does this narrative block a more racially inquisitive, and thus incisive, perspective? how does this narrative disallow the testimony of the disempowered? with this said, white concealment is largely communicative and local. it is not only about the lack of information but also about how particular racist situations are narrated in service to foundational aims of white ignorance and whiteness writ large. white concealment is like the ugly antithesis to counternarrative. while counternarratives position black autobiographies to disrupt and expose the falsity of dominant narratives (crenshaw et al. 1995), white concealment works to disrupt and conceal the truth of counternarratives through renarration. since white concealment is predicated on communication with the disempowered, it also possesses a particular kind of sadistic intimacy. unlike dominant narratives that are primarily in service to white communal self-deception, white concealment is about white means of engaging—while simultaneously refusing—the black. white concealment is what whiteness tells and does not tell, asks and does not ask black people with the goal of preventing black people from forwarding perspectives that might disrupt white ignorance. white concealment’s close communicative strategies mirror white ignorance’s attention to ends as opposed to means. while the most recognizable means of producing white ignorance often require violent silencing and/or avoidance of black voices (e.g., lynching or the proverbial “echo chamber”), white concealment as a process invites (deceitful, performative) dialogue in an effort to maintain white ignorance. communication, or lack thereof, is a means. white supremacy is the end. some might argue that white concealment is a form of gaslighting. while racist gaslighting may share intersections with white concealment—such as narrative erasure—the two concepts possess important departures. gaslighters attempt to directly dismiss, degrade, or undermine the minoritized person’s correct perception of a situation (abramson 2014). white concealers, alternatively, renarrate racist situations, which does not require—and actually avoids—a direct dismissal of the minoritized individual’s perception. the act of “dismissing” a minoritized person’s perception in a public setting could put into question the social justice commitments of a white concealer. for example, a white feminist concealer would be invested in others perceiving her as someone who “believes black women”; therefore, she would use tactics that assist with avoiding reactions from the black interlocutor that publicly place her desired identity in question, as might gaslighting. instead, white concealers attempt to convey unawareness of their racially minoritized interlocutor’s experiences. if gaslighting cannot be avoided, white concealment creates a situation whereby later gaslighting appears more veracious. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 considering the continuously shifting landscape of whiteness—a shifting that is always in service to the entrenchment of power11—the ability to dominate through a variety of mechanisms is particularly useful. i have argued here that white concealment is but one instrument in white ignorance’s broader structure, that it emerges when useful in the context of specific racist situations. in the next section i attempt to describe the racist conditions under which white concealment would be most useful. reading white concealment although whiteness is a global condition, its manifestations are geographically and sociologically local (asante 2016; shahjahan and edwards 2022). it is important for race scholars to be able to shrewdly read the particular in light of the general condition of white supremacy. unlike the larger superstructure, white concealment is not ever-present. instead, it moves in and out of white ignorance when useful. in the composite story white concealment emerges as the conscious and directed withholding of discrete but relevant information, which allows the white characters to assert dominance while maintaining a misconception (ignorance) of themselves as just. for example: 1. anne is responsible for cecily’s misinterpretation of black feminist “othermothering,” which itself is predicated on anne’s misperception of herself as qualified and in possession of sufficient scholarly authority to lead a study of black feminist thought—a position that simultaneously denies jalese’s scholarly labor and expertise. 2. relatedly, anne is silent in the exam during the discussion of “othermothering,” particularly when the question of who supervised the independent study arises. her silence is a refusal to engage in inquiry, which forecloses the opportunity to question her scholarly authority, as well as, the relevant parameters of the discussion that follow the defense—that is, cecily’s change in advisement. 3. anne consistently undermines jalese’s advisement, while silently orchestrating jalese’s removal as committee chair. this betrays—if openly addressed—anne’s assumption of moral and intellectual authority in relation to jalese. it also reveals a lack of respect for the 11 see christian 2019; baldwin 2012; painter 2010; lipsitz 2006; mills 1997; ignatiev 1995. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 broader black feminist intellectual tradition—for example, the notion that teaching black feminism does not require prior study. 4. amy and aspen refuse to acknowledge the extensive labor jalese expended in supporting cecily to exam defense. this is made possible by renarrating the change of advisor as an issue of student “selfdetermination,” “vulnerability,” and ill-fit. 5. relatedly, amy deploys a racialized frame (i.e., ‘black [student] selfdetermination’) to undermine the testimony of a black woman faculty, enabled by concealing the collectivist intent of black selfdetermination as a political practice, and instead framing it as an individual act. 6. amy and aspen dismiss the corroborating opinions (testimonies) of faculty of color attesting to fundamental challenges with cecily’s writing—that is, a misreading of black feminist thought—as opposed to a lack of adequate advisement from jalese. 7. aspen renarrates her breach of collegiality and professional disrespect toward jalese as a matter of “confusion,” “not anticipating” the transition of an advanced graduate student being contentious. said differently, through renarration, aspen minimizes the gravity of her decision and the process by which she enacted it. in so doing, she refuses to acknowledge the impact her actions had on jalese—which itself betrays a disregard for black relationality and an investment in colonial individualism predicated on extraction and accumulation. 8. amy knows of both anne’s and aspen’s roles but is unwilling to investigate further through honest conversation with jalese or use her position as an administrator to arrange an open dialogue with deeper inquiry among all parties involved. amy’s decision not to pursue a more judicious path forward creates the opportunity for her to hastily align with her fellow white women, anne and aspen. if (7) obtains, then (8) follows logically: our black woman protagonist can be disregarded, both personally and as a matter of institutional, structural leadership. furthermore, open dialogue cannot exist in a context wherein racially minoritized communicative sensibilities could threaten white supremacist ones. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 9. anne, amy, and aspen refuse to hear jalese’s autobiography throughout the process. they refuse to allow a black woman’s testimony to stand against two potent, predetermined white supremacist patriarchal narratives: (a) liberal white women are the saviors of black people, and (b) black women are harsh abusive matriarchs (advisors) of dysfunctional black families (students). the second point explicitly activates controlling images that frame black women as always and already aggressive mothers (collins 1990). within such logics, the student’s failures are the fault of her black woman advisor. these same frames camouflage practices of white maternalist warcraft in a patriarchal conquest state, protecting white women from being read by white institutions as threats to black women’s (professional) safety (vaught et al. 2022). predictably, the trap of white saviorism is revealed, as the black student who is “saved” will go on to become a black woman faculty member who is managed by white feminist colleagues in the same manner as jalese, thus perpetuating white supremacy. in the composite story, by engaging in white concealment as renarration, the white feminist characters can comfortably pursue white ignorant practices of white saviorism predicated on the exploitation and denial of a black woman’s labor. further, the refusal to explore the contours of the issue and the conditions that negatively impacted two black women is an unambiguous display of resistance to inquiry. the refusal to know in more detail reflects the second characteristic of white ignorance discussed earlier: the denial of complexity for the purposes of white interests (dotson 2012; pohlhaus 2012). reflective of the third characteristic of white ignorance discussed here, while the end goal is silencing of a black woman, this is accomplished through the means of dialogue. in this specific case, relevant white interests are not simply the exploitation of a black woman’s labor but also the ability to position one’s white self as an intellectual, moral, and adjudicatory racial authority. both pursuits ultimately concretize the goal of white power entrenchment, albeit through the guise of supporting a black student. these elements reveal the ways in which white concealment protects white ignorance in this particular racist situation. but why was concealment the vehicle? of all white ignorance’s weapons, why did anne, amy, and aspen choose white concealment? in the next section i theorize possible answers to the above questions. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 gendering white concealment “what woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?” (lorde 1984, 132) the perceptive reader will have noticed another important element of the composite story: gender. all of the main characters are women. this was a deliberate choice based on my experiences and the experiences of the black women reflected in the composite story. without fail, the stories i have drawn on to construct the composite story indicted liberal white (or white-aspiring) women. i believe this is not a coincidence. and while i do contend there may be all kinds of violent concealments that manifest in situations involving other powered dynamics, the particularities of this concept were best illustrated by focusing on this distinct race-gender context. thus, i want to consider how white concealment as a particular procedural apparatus within white ignorance is often enacted in engagements between feminist white women and black women.12 nevertheless, the present exploration does not isolate white concealment to women. instead, i am suggesting that if the reader accepts the proposition that white ignorance is a complex system, the relevance of white concealment—as a specific procedural weapon within the larger arsenal of white ignorance—may increase under specific gendered situations. in this way, the particularities of liberal white women’s racism—their specific situatedness—offer a rich context for an analysis of white concealment. i draw on feminist standpoint theories to elucidate the above claim. as sandra harding (1991) has noted, women (as well as other minoritized peoples, within their specific geographical and social contexts) tend to acquire an epistemic advantage because of their social location. owing to the subordinated position they occupy within their specific social world, women must be more aware. their alienation from power demands attention to and facility with the structural reality in which they find themselves. women on the whole are less obliged to “make excuses 12 this line of inquiry is in conversation with the broader cultural critique of white women as racist provocateurs—colloquially described as “karens,” “beckys,” and “susans.” i also recognize the growing scholarly attention being paid to the particularities of gendered racism. indeed, matias’s (2019) edited collection, surviving becky(s), explores the complexities of white liberal women’s particular brand of racism, arguing that their “‘one up-one down’ social positioning” produces a desire to “cling onto their whiteness in more nuanced, covert ways” (1). the fact that academia has been one of the primary havens for racially problematic white women (e.g., rachel dolezal and jessica krug), suggests an overdue professional reckoning. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 for [patriarchy’s] rampant unfairness” (alcoff 2007, 44). collins (1990) offers a more nuanced feminist standpoint analytic by considering the multiple terrains of structural disempowerment black women navigate, and the subsequent epistemic veracity that is produced therein. through a complex read of the “matrix of domination,” collins brings to bear the varying relations different social identities have with power. this proposition would suggest that the experience of marginalization disallows an uncomplicated engagement with white ignorance. plainly stated, women often do not have the luxury of ignorance, even white women. however, white women, unlike black women, do possess access to whiteness, which means that, regarding race, ignorance is advantageous. the paradox is that, by virtue of their gender, white women have access to epistemic awareness; by virtue of their race—in order to effectively hoard resources—it’s advantageous to practice ignorance. white women’s oppressive experience under patriarchy can act as a disrupter, a particular kind of second sight (du bois 1903; gooding-williams 2009), allowing them heightened perspective—whether wanted or unwanted—into structural inequality. yet, they are also positioned to be seduced by whiteness—even some of its powered masculinist features—and therefore white ignorance (lugones 2007). theoretically speaking, an “aware white ignorance” could not function in the same manner as an unaware white ignorance. different oppressive processes would have to be performed to remain ignorant in a state of epistemic awareness. in this way, white concealment is a reactive by-product of aware white ignorance. i understand “unaware white ignorance” as a lack of awareness about structural inequality writ large, and an active refusal to know such things about one's world in general. said differently, it is an investment in understanding the world as fundamentally just, with any inequality being the result of individual deficiencies, incidental interpersonal failures, or chance. by “aware white ignorance,” i mean an active investment in not recognizing the multiple and nuanced ways in which white supremacy is shaping one’s social context, while simultaneously seeking awareness and acknowledgment of other forms of structural inequality that bear negatively on one’s life and the lives of those for whom one identifies. for an instructive illustration of aware white ignorance, consider a conversation detailed in inez goodman’s (1902) essay “a nine-hour day for domestic servants” between her and another white feminist. the exchange is recounted in angela davis’s (1981) essay “the meaning of emancipation according to black women” in women, race & class. at the time of the conversation, goodman is an advocate for domestic workers, a profession predominantly occupied by black women. her colleague, mrs. jones, is active in a campaign for the rights of clerks, a profession predominantly occupied by white women. mrs. jones invites goodman to sign a petition “urging employers to furnish seats for [white] women clerks” (a. davis 1981, 96). in response goodman asks her colleague, “mrs. jones, . . . how many hours edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 a day does your maid stand upon her feet?” goodman continues to compel mrs. jones to recognize the level of taxation the black domestic worker she employs endures at her behest. in apparent frustration, mrs. jones “rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes [proclaiming,] ‘my maid always has sunday after dinner.’” to which goodman responds, “yes, but the clerk has all day sunday. please don’t go until i have signed that petition.” (goodman 1902, 397; quoted in a. davis 1981, 96, 97). in this exchange the reader may note that mrs. jones is able to recognize and thus empathize with white women clerks. she simultaneously refuses to acknowledge the racially exploitative conditions endured by black women domestics that sustain her white middle-class lifestyle. as davis writes, “this feminist activist was perpetrating the very oppression she protested. . . . [but] viewing her servant as a mere extension of herself, the feminist could hardly be conscious of her own active role as an oppressor” (a. davis 1981, 97; emphasis added). what i find particularly instructive about this scene is mrs. jones’s affect. she is described as seemingly humiliated after an interpersonal exchange forces her to acknowledge her role in (gendered) racial inequality. confronting her implication in the realities of black women domestics puts into question her self-image as a just feminist actively involved in efforts toward social equality. the reader knows this to be the case because of mrs. jones’s response to her newly uncomfortable position; defensiveness and deflection. goodman does not share how mrs. jones’s engagement with the black domestic she employed was impacted, if at all, by their conversation. what is clear is that in order to resolve this new tension and continue to exploit black women’s labor, some form of cognitive intervention would be demanded from mrs. jones. herein lies the aim of this project: bringing into relief one of the ways white women who identify as feminists negotiate their acts of domination with their self-perception as just. white concealment, as a one procedural tool, facilitates white feminist performances of justice, which shield antagonistic assertions of racial authority and enable the (pre)hoarding of intellectual, social, professional, and monetary resources. similar to epistemic appropriation, as emmalon davis (2018) argues, black women are particularly impacted by these forms of epistemic violences. white feminist performance in service to resource hoarding is possibly best seen in the role of renarration in white concealment. essential to the practice of concealment is the creation of false narratives that articulate the actions of the white actor as just and supportive. not unlike lorde’s (1984, 130) condemnation of white feminist guilt as impotent in the furtherance of antiracism, white feminist renarration is also “defensiveness destructive of communication; [which] becomes a device to protect ignorance.” concealment in service to the denial of black voice and black subjectivity is interpreted as for the greater good. these types of tactics are particularly useful for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 white individuals invested in an image of themselves as socially just, “good,” or “nice,” such as white feminists. the appeal of a passive aggressive ignorance also aligns with the particular race-gendering of white women in the west. white girls and women are often expected to “play nice” to maintain a perception of harmony and avoid conflict and/or social discomfort (castagno 2019; morgan 2007). angelina castagno (2019, xiv) argues, niceness is one mechanism for reifying structural arrangements and ideologies of dominance across lines of race, gender, and social class. it functions not only as a shield to protect (white, [women]) . . . from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity but also as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance. performing niceness requires “avoidance and reframing,” which are justified based on one’s “good intentions”—intentions assessed by one’s superior moral and adjudicatory insight (castagno 2019, x; emphasis added). for an interlocutor invested in appearing nice, white concealment is a useful tool. the need to conceal, however, betrays a recognition of harm. for instance, amy does not assist black women with diversity programing to make more money. instead, she participates in these activities to position herself as a moral and intellectual authority and to access the cultural cache of relationship with a minoritized community. a professional interest in relationships with black people would be undermined by a direct confrontation. for clarity, if i consider gendered appeals toward white concealment procedurally, then i might suggest the following: conservative white ignorance: “the world is already fair and equal.” liberal white ignorance: “the world is unequal, and i'm going to fix it.” feminist white ignorance: “because of all of the work i have done to fix the unequal world, i have the moral authority to adjudicate what information is most relevant in a given situation. my elevated racial consciousness also equips me with the ability to determine which black women require censure and material constraint, or else they will become obstructive in my pursuit of justice.” gendering white concealment clarifies how “feminist” moves camouflage antiblackness. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 intimacies mariana ortega’s (2006) conception of a “loving knowing ignorance” assists with elucidating some of the more intimately gendered ways in which white feminists inflict violence upon women of color. she describes loving knowing ignorance as “an ignorance of the thought and experience of women of color that is accompanied by both alleged love for and alleged knowledge about them” (ortega 2006, 57). ortega’s description of loving, knowing ignorance is inextricably linked with white feminists’ desire to appear in relation to women of color, primarily in service to their own professional success. much of ortega’s theorization is informed by maría lugones’s analysis of the “agonistic” relationships white feminists perpetuate against women of color. it is important to note the role of intimate proximity in lugones’s analysis when she writes, white/anglo women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. all of this while we are in their midst. (lugones 2003, 83; emphasis added) lugones describes an intimacy particular to white feminist terror. the complexity of proximity obfuscates strict notions of subject-object engagement, camouflaging (for white women) while also exposing (for women of color) deleterious intent. violent intimacy is protective of white feminist egos, allowing them to renarrate themselves outside of structures of domination while simultaneously harming women of color to do so. ortega (2006, 63) writes, loving, knowing ignorance . . . involves self-deception . . . the perceiver believes himself or herself to be perceiving lovingly even though this is not the case, and the perceiver wishes to make knowledge claims about the object of perception, even though such claims are not checked or questioned. ironically, intimacy (or violent closeness) blocks dialogue and critical knowing. the perception of proximity excuses white feminists’ unknowing and silencing under the false presumption of intimacy. one of the conditions under which violent intimacy is most readily exemplified is white saviorism. essential to white saviorism is a refusal of black self-determination as well as the critical role of knowledge produced within black communities. by disrupting community-based praxis and applying simplistic, prescriptive analyses to observations pertaining to race, white feminist saviors are able to better control the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 22 parameters of advancement for black women. as amy’s interlude reveals, if a black woman pursues “self-determination,” it must be made possible by a white savior. similarly, ortega notes, such privileges include being the one who decides which woman of color gets to be let in the club, being able to speak for women of color, being able to feel that she is the one responsible for their salvation. (ortega 2006, 68; emphasis added) if loving, knowing ignorance describes white feminists’ internal self-deceptive attempts at perceiving themselves as just, then white concealment is an avenue to perform or enact that self-deception relationally. white concealment shores up a loving, knowing ignorance within a relevant context, creating and affirming deceptive conditions. for a variety of reasons, white concealment is a particularly useful weapon for white feminists who are invested in the type of white ignorance that allows them to maintain socially just, in critical community, representations of themselves. white women’s position within intersecting systems of domination obstructs and animates an array of violences. mapping the gendered dimensions of white concealment elucidates the expansiveness of white ignorance and assists with the development of multiple registers of resistance. race and precarious power some readers may question my wholesale treatment of aspen as white.13 i mention in the composite story preamble that this character identifies as biracial, but for various reasons to be explored throughout this section, she embodies whiteness in this story. several scholars have astutely argued that race is sociological and not biological.14 i will not repeat those arguments here, as they are well established in the literature. instead, what i will explain is how aspen moved as white in the present 13 while i mention at the beginning of the composite story that aspen is biracial, i do not make note of this fact again until this section of the essay. i am making this choice deliberately, although i recognize it may cause confusion for some readers. my primary aim is for the reader to experience aspen as a white woman throughout the essay in the same way that jalese does in the story. i also want to play with the feeling of “racial disorientation” that someone like jalese might experience when interacting with someone like aspen. 14 see omi and winant 2015; lipsitz 2006; mills 1997; crenshaw et al. 1995; fanon 1967. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 story,15 and the dangers of not recognizing the particularities of this type of movement in analyses of race and power. since the earliest imperial encounters, there have been nonwhite people who have conspired with white people to harm other nonwhite people. as mills (2007) himself contends, power and hegemony produce situations in which black people are also enticed into expressing white ignorance.16 whether it be internalized inferiority, 15 here i’m taking a deliberately unorthodox approach to scholarly writing and frankly acknowledging the deep and integral conversations i’ve had with trusted colleagues to flesh out these very complex and troubling ideas—to heed moraga’s (2002, 32) admonition and “take … head-on collisions” because “this polite timidity is killing us.” these are the kinds of conversations that regularly occur in the development of scholarly writing but are often obfuscated by the publication process. below i paraphrase an ongoing conversation with sabina vaught that took place roughly throughout february 2022. i piece together her comments on drafts, email exchanges, and text messages, as well as my responses. i also add in-text citations when appropriate, as all scholarship is also conversation with the printed ideas of various interlocutors. the final composite quote was then submitted to sabina for approval: “there seems to be a double bind of stereotypes. on the one hand, we want to identify them, rebut them, avoid them, analyze them, animate them as illustrative of larger systems of thought and materiality, etc. on the other, if they prevent us from describing very real and complex movements of power, we allow them to re-control and reduce our understandings of race/gender social organization, and we consent to in effect hiding repressive power organization and movement. aspen (or someone else who is otherwise identified as ‘marginalized’) may well fit into stereotypes, particularly when that person is leaning into/reaching for whiteness. so, what do you do with that? do you say, well, i can’t write about it, because it will entrench race/gender power that i’m fighting? or be divisive? i don’t think so. i think you do what audre lorde (1984, 1990) did, which is step directly into it, while also acknowledging the unsteady ground. for instance, if you say you can’t talk about the ‘tragic mulatto’ because it’s fucked up, then you can’t talk about people who in fact take up that situatedness to fuck over other people, or to submit themselves to systems of power (guinier and torres 2002, 61–62). i think it’s about saying, these stereotypes are weapons of supremacy, and there may be people who resonate with them. we must look at that unflinchingly. and not see it as verification of the stereotype, but rather, as complication of the way race/gender power works.” 16 lipsitz (2006, 3) also explores the relationship between the perpetuation of white domination and intra-racial conflict, noting, “the power of whiteness depend[s] not only on white hegemony over separate racialized groups, but also on manipulating racial outsiders to fight against one another, to compete with each other for white feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 survival, self-promotion, psychosis, or all the above, not all nonwhite people are antiwhite supremacy. this is a sordid and painful truth many nonwhite people prefer not to discuss. it has caused much interand intra-racial strife among various racially oppressed communities. like the complexity of white ignorance, black participation in white supremacy is also a complex process influenced by one’s location within the matrix of domination (collins 1990). phenotype, for instance, is one of the most significant arbitrators of whiteness. because race is most clearly demarcated by physical appearance, how people look, how they physically show up in the world is of significant ontological import in discussions of racialization (fanon 1967; guinier and torres 2002). the history of creoles in louisiana or mestizas in central and south america, for example, lay bare the role of generational whitening in obtaining white supremacy’s privileges. but phenotype should not camouflage the significant role cultural codes play in accessing whiteness. acculturation transmits important codes and practices that either facilitate or prohibit movement in whiteness, as well as comfort within a nonwhite community. in the composite story both cecily and aspen represent differing types of white collaborators. cecily characterizes an obviously black woman both phenotypically and culturally. a person’s close proximity to a nonwhite community considerably limits her access to whiteness. this is particularly true for black people as white supremacy is anchored by antiblackness (dancy, edwards, and davis 2018; edwards and shahjahan 2025; fanon 1967; sexton 2008; spillers 1987). aspen is a different and more dangerous actor. the type of individual aspen represents has access to both white(ned) phenotype and cultural codes. she is what some refer to as “white passing.” while black people may recognize her as not-quite-white, many white people (particularly those socialized in regions of the world lacking prominent creolized communities, like latin america or south louisiana) will regularly assume she is white until corrected. aspen represents the kind of “black” person who hears the racist jokes up close because white people do not realize they are in “mixed” company. to be clear, being white-presenting does not expel one from nonwhite communities. the fact of imperialism with its accompanying sexual violences, statesanctioned boundaries, and forced migrations means that all nonwhite communities have had to embrace varying shades. it is aspen’s cultural markers—her sociopolitical allegiances—that solidify her advantaged relationship within whiteness. aspen represents those reared with/in whiteness. their primary and chosen cultural framework is white. they often maintain very liminal engagement with black communities. apart from black parentage, their frame of reference is white, and their approval, and to seek the rewards and privileges of whiteness for themselves at the expense of other racialized populations.” edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 sociality does not provide important cultural insights necessary for navigating whiteness as a black person. therefore, even when conceiving of themselves as liberal, they may be more susceptible to participate in modes of white domination that reflect “tacit intentionality” (gillborn 2005, 499). as guinier and torres (2002) argue, one’s racial allegiances are not necessarily or inevitably evidenced by phenotype or parentage.17 instead, encounters (whether personal or in community) with antiblackness and corollary extractive resource distributions—which incite a commitment to struggle with communities who have been “raced black”—evince black racial allegiance. speaking from the positionality of a white-presenting chicana with an anglo father, cherríe moraga (2002) asks us to complicate racial intimacies and interrogate terrains of solidarity. she charges readers to remember our responsibilities to nearkin oppressions, to not be allured by privileges associated with accessible oppressive identities: i have had to look critically at my claim to color, at a time when, among white feminist ranks, it is a “politically correct” (and sometimes peripherally advantageous) assertion to make. i must acknowledge the fact that, physically, i have had a choice about making that claim, in contrast to women who have not had such a choice, and have been abused for their color. i must reckon with the fact that for most of my life, by virtue of the very fact that i am white-looking, i identified with and aspired toward white values, and that i rode the wave of that . . . privilege as far as conscience would let me. . . . i feel angry about this—the years when i refused to recognize privilege, both when it worked against me, and when i worked it, ignorantly, at the expense of others. (moraga 2002, 32) moraga’s critical assessment of her own positionality holds aspen to account for publicly asserting a black identity while maintaining an alliance with whiteness. she asks those proximate to whiteness (or other dominant identities) to carefully consider the benefits they incur in racial liminality, and the ramifications of their choices for the survival of the communities with whom they profess identity. as moraga notes, within frameworks of neoliberal whiteness—frameworks that capitalize on diversity while maintaining white interests—aspens are aptly positioned to benefit from the gains made by black communities, while simultaneously 17 however, the authors are clear that phenotype is a potent impetus for being raced in a racially hierarchal society. and that the experience of being “raced black” provides important insights for collective resistance (guinier and torres 2002, 12). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 26 furthering the aims of white supremacy. moraga’s self-interrogation reminds her readers that political allegiance to the oppressed—particularly for those profiting from the intimacy of kinship—is not automatic but, in fact, painfully deliberate. in some ways this argument is banal. there is a significant body of feminist philosophy attesting to the role of women-identified people in the entrenchment of patriarchy (see, for example, johnson 2004; jones 2020; rottenberg 2014). whether it be the adoption of masculinist traits or enacting sexist stereotypes, some women have navigated patriarchy in a variety of deleterious ways to access its resources. similarly, some black people collaborate with antiblackness or engage in problematic black stereotypes to curry favor within white supremacy. the delicate balance between reaping the benefits reserved for racially minoritized peoples and white comfort is struck by violence. violence, whether mundane or spectacular, is the foundation of whiteness (mbembe 2001; fanon 1967). for a nonacademic example of the ways violence against black people provides access to whiteness for precariously white individuals, consider the racialization of george zimmerman. zimmerman is the son of a white father and a peruvian mother. yet his murder of trayvon martin in defense of a white neighborhood effectively erased his racial precarity and solidified his access to whiteness. zimmerman is just one example in a long history of violent invitations into whiteness (see lipsitz 2006; painter 2010). a man who spent his life as an “off-white” son paid the price of the ticket into white patriarchy through the blood of trayvon. similarly, in the composite story, aspen reaffirms her allegiance to whiteness by conspiring with other white women to harm black women and protect white racial authority. (un)ironically, her intimacy with blackness aids the facilitation of white feminist violence. however, racial treachery is not without risks. if the experiences of black people passing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a warning, one’s positionality in whiteness is tenuous at best. white feminists invested in the kinds of sadistic professional intimacies described earlier find individuals like aspen strategically useful when inserting themselves into racially coded situations. since whiteness is malleable and shapeshifting (christian 2019; painter 2010), aspen can be “black” when it is useful to white feminists to have a “black” person act as the face of racist moves. as a pretenure faculty member amenable to whiteness, aspen is also more manageable. while inviting her into the fold, white women can also dump racial labor on her as they race her, thus increasing her precarity and undermining the benefits her whitening should bring (guinier and torres 2002). remembering that whiteness is a construct signaled by phenotype, culture, and violent power assists with recognizing the mechanisms that fix white supremacy (mills 1997). it also lays bare how those whose racial intimacies compromise their access to power and resources navigate domination. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 27 conclusion to return to the central argument posed at the beginning of this essay, white ignorance is a complex system made up of a cadre of tools and instruments such as white concealment. depending on the specifics of the racist situation, the usefulness of white concealment may increase or decrease. based on the details of the composite story, white concealment is particularly useful in situations where access to white power is liminal, precarious, compromised, or under scrutiny in some way. in situations where a white person’s identity pushes her into closer proximity to those who live at the intersections of oppression, deploying white power may require more intimate strategies, particularly if she is invested in projecting herself as just or in relation to the oppressed. the present treatise reflects a small intervention into the larger study of white ignorance and its multiple machinations. here i attempt to complicate the idea through a relational perspective. while meta-analyses are important, this project has endeavored to explore the nuanced interdependencies that shape varies performances and protections of white ignorance. with greater clarity regarding various epistemic violences, those committed to the liberation of the oppressed can fashion more precise interventions that promote the creation of increasingly just relationships. the testimony jalese sits at her kitchen table. there is a gold coffee mug to her right, which reads “black girl magic #amwriting juice,” and a laptop to her left. a cognac-colored leather-bound diary is opened before her. clear spring sunshine streams through her windows. she looks up with pen still in hand, pensive. after what seems quite a while in deep thought and journaling, she closes the diary and opens the laptop. she begins typing. subject: an invitation to reflect from: jalese banks to: anne white; amy snow; aspen grey dear anne, amy, and aspen: after much thought i find it necessary to address the three of you as a collective, with my primary intention being to speak back to a particular kind of silencing i have experienced in my recent interactions with the three of you. i come to you with the assumption that, as self-identified feminists and critical scholars, you all will be particularly invested in reparative dialogue. to begin frankly, i experienced your handling of cecily’s advisory transition as the weaponization of white racial power and gendered antiblack violence… feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 28 acknowledgements: i would like to thank emily mcrae, mariana ortega, and sabina vaught for their critical review of early drafts of this essay. “white concealment” would not exist if not for their thoughtful colleagueship. i also appreciate the feedback received from fpq’s anonymous reviewers, which strengthened the arguments in important ways. finally, i dedicate this essay to the memory of professor charles w. mills—a generous and kind scholar—who took time out of his busy schedule to read the very first draft of this idea in its messiest and most unformed state. not only did he provide meaningful feedback on my writing, but attentive to my emerging philosophical interests, he also began sharing intellectual opportunities with me. he did not know me. i was a random faculty member in a different discipline who, on the encouragement of a colleague, took the leap and emailed my budding work to the famed professor mills. that leap of faith has been one of the sweetest professional decisions i have made. references abramson, kate. 2014. “turning up the lights 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spillers, hortense j. 1987. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17 (2): 65–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. 1988. “can the subaltern speak?” in marxism and the interpretation of culture, edited by cary nelson and lawrence grossberg, 271–313. urbana: university of illinois press. sullivan, shannon, and nancy tuana. 2007. introduction to race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 1–10. albany: state university of new york press. taylor, paul c. 2007. “race problems, unknown publics, paralysis, and faith.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 135–52. albany: state university of new york press. vaught, sabina, bryan mckinley jones brayboy, and jeremiah chin. 2022. the school– prison trust. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. wingfield, adia harvey. 2010. “are some emotions marked ‘whites only’? racialized feeling rules in professional workplaces.” social problems 57 (2): 251–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2010.57.2.251. edwards – white concealment published by scholarship@western, 2025 33 wingfield, adia harvey, and joe feagin. 2012. “the racial dialectic: president barack obama and the white racial frame.” qualitative sociology 35 (2): 143–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-012-9223-7. kirsten t. edwards is associate professor and chair in the department of educational policy studies, as well as core affiliate faculty for african & african diaspora studies and the center for women’s & gender studies at florida international university in miami, florida. her research merges black studies, gender studies, and curriculum studies. more specifically, dr. edwards is interested in antiblackness as a feature of the globalization of higher education, and the ways in which antiblackness animates correlative asymmetries in educational environments. 16722 edwards title page 16722 edwards final format reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 3 article 4 recommended citation jenkins, katharine. 2025. “reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 4. 2025 reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression katharine jenkins university of glasgow katharine.jenkins@glasgow.ac.uk jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression katharine jenkins abstract this paper replies to comments on ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality given by talia mae bettcher, muhammad ali khalidi, and camisha russell. in response to bettcher, it discusses the relationship between those approaches to social ontology that focus primarily on explanatory kinds and those that focus primarily on ordinary discourse, and the choice of terms to refer to gender kinds. in response to khalidi, it discusses pluralism and hybridism about social kinds, the applicability of ontic injustice to social kinds that are not represented, and the role of values in investigating social kinds. in response to russell, it discusses the individual and collective dimensions of identity claims about race and gender, and the relationship between the more applied and more abstract portions of ontology and oppression. keywords: gender, race, social kinds, social ontology, transphobia my most sincere thanks to talia mae bettcher, muhammad ali khalidi, and camisha russell for their generous, insightful, and thought-provoking comments. it’s an honor to have received their responses to my book, and i’ve enjoyed thinking through the different issues they each raise. many of these issues call for further thought and discussion, so my replies here will of necessity be incomplete, but i hope they will contribute to a continuing conversation. although some of the issues raised by different critics overlap, i will consider each set of comments in turn. reply to bettcher bettcher raises a number of extremely interesting questions centered on the relationship between ordinary discourse and social kinds. it is clear from the discussion that she favors an approach to social ontology that is much more closely focused than my own on the ways in which ordinary speakers use words. there are important differences between our approaches, and i think it is instructive to reflect on them. that said, i don’t see my own work as assuming a separation between feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 semantics and ontology, as bettcher (2025, 1) thinks it does. so i’ll begin by saying a bit more about how i see my own approach working in this regard. roughly, i sought to identify the kinds, or groupings of things in the world, that can feature in the sorts of successful projects of explanation, prediction, and intervention that feminists and antiracists need to carry out.1 i take these kinds to be based on the patterns and regularities in people’s social possibilities (understood in terms of constraints and enablements) that arise from social practices. it is these patterns and regularities that enable certain groupings to be useful for explaining what has happened, predicting what will happen, and structuring interventions to make things go the way we want them to. this isn’t totally divorced from the question of how people in different communities use words, partly because people in communities also use words to track patterns, and partly because the use of words is one element of the social practices that produce the regularities and patterns in the first place. but at the same time, these patterns and regularities can diverge from the way words are being applied to people. for example, suppose that speakers in a certain community tend to apply the term “woman” to anyone who meets a certain set of criteria, criteria xyz. suppose further that there is a group of people, group g, who are regularly treated differently from others in ways that structure the possibilities of their social lives according to a distinctive pattern that explains many of the outcomes and dynamics that feminists have historically been concerned with when investigating the oppression of women. now suppose that group g includes most, but not all, of the people who meet criteria xyz and also includes some people who do not meet xyz. my approach seeks to be attuned to this possible divergence. it would identify g, rather than the set of people who meet xyz, as the kind that feminists most urgently need to attend to in this situation in order to understand and resist the oppression that concerns them. now, one could make the further claim that because kind g has this significance, when people in the community in question say “woman,” they are in fact talking about the members of kind g, not about the set of people who meet xyz, even if they believe and intend otherwise. but i do not make this further claim. nor do i deny it. instead, i remain neutral about the referent of the term “woman” as used by speakers in this community. settling this question, it seems to me, depends on settling a host of controversial issues about how words come to refer to things, and this is not a task i’m well placed to take on. i also don’t claim that anyone (e.g., feminists, members of the community) should come to use “woman” in such a way that it refers 1 this phrasing (of kinds featuring in explanations) is true to the framing i used in the book; however, following a suggestion from khalidi, i would now say “the kinds that correspond to categories that can feature in explanations.” for more on this, see p. 12 below. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 to kind g. that, in my view, rests on a host of practical and evaluative questions that are highly context specific. to be clear, i think that in our world, the relevant practical and evaluative considerations almost always point toward using the term “woman” to refer to those people who describe themselves as women, perhaps with some rare exceptions. (for a discussion i find helpful, see matthew cull [2024, 61–126].) but my point here is that such conclusions are verdicts based on the totality of relevant political judgments and cannot be mechanically “read off” my view of social kinds. my hope in taking this approach was that by scoping the terrain in the vicinity of our talk of gender and race to identify relevant explanatory kinds, i would be providing useful resources that could (in a further, future step), be connected up with any one of a range of different accounts of what precisely is going on when we actually talk about gender and race, as well as feeding into deliberations about language reform. so this is how i understood my project. turning now to bettcher’s response to it, i get the sense that she has read me as claiming, explicitly or implicitly, something like the following: that there is one way of doing social ontology that is based on investigating explanatory kinds; that there is another, incompatible way of doing social ontology that is based on investigating the semantics of discursive practices; and that the first way is better than the second way. but i did not intend to say this or anything close to it (and it isn’t in fact what i think). rather, i simply set out to investigate explanatory kinds as one contribution to a larger project of social ontology. i would certainly not want to foreclose other investigations starting from ordinary discourse or to suggest that they ought not to be conducted using the term “social kinds.” such investigations are also important and valuable for precisely the reasons that bettcher highlights; and, as she rightly points out, using the term “social kinds” in this other way is hardly uncommon. i welcome the opportunity to clarify this. in connection with the supposed clash between the explanatory-kinds approach and the discursive approach, bettcher considers what she calls “whatquestions,” or “w-questions” for short (2025, 9). these are questions such as “what is a woman?” she takes the explanatory kind approach to be unable to answer them, but i think that it can, as i’ll now explain. bettcher seems to take w-questions to express something like “when we say ‘woman,’ what are we talking about?” i think that’s a completely reasonable way to understand them. moreover, i’m happy to grant that the explanatory-kind approach is focused on answering a different question: “what are the kinds (groupings of things in the world) that do the explanatory work that feminist projects require and that have often been framed using terms like ‘woman’ and ‘gender’?” but this seems to me to also be a reasonable way to understand w-questions. in other words, i believe that the way bettcher phrases w-questions can be disambiguated into (at least) two questions, one of which can be answered by the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 discursive approach and the other of which can be answered by the explanatory-kinds approach (and i leave open the possibility that there are other questions in the vicinity that could be answered by other approaches). so i think this issue about w-questions is something of a red herring. bettcher’s discussion of them does show that as social theorists interested in understanding not only how social practices produce explanatory kinds but also how conceptions of those kinds circulate among those engaged in the practices, our work is not done until we have also thought about how language is being used in that community—and, perhaps, how it ought to be used. this is an important point, but it is one that the explanatory-kinds approach can accommodate, and i do not see why it would be a reason to think that we cannot gain useful insights from investigations based on that approach. to put my overall point another way, there is an important difference between saying, “here’s what i’m going to mean in this book when i say ‘social kind’” and saying, “here’s what everyone should mean whenever they say ‘social kind.’” i welcome this opportunity to clarify that the approach i took in the book was very much in the former spirit and not the latter. accordingly, while bettcher thinks that i owe an account of why the kinds-focused approach to social ontology is superior to the semantics-focused approach to social ontology, i do not believe that i do. this is because i do not think that it is superior. it is simply different, and we need both. bettcher’s comments also give me a very welcome opportunity to revisit an issue that i found particularly tricky as i was writing the book. as a theorist, i have to use some words or other to describe kinds such as g. this is not because i’m primarily interested in deciding what words do or should mean; it’s just a necessity for communicating. to break my approach down, i’m looking at what roles concepts like gender and woman play in anti-oppressive theorizing.2 then, i’m asking, “what part(s) of reality can do that work?” i need to be able to talk about those explanatory kinds that i’ve ended up pointing to, and i have some latitude in deciding how to do this. so the question arises: how should i do it? an obvious option is to use the terms that align with the concepts i started from, terms such as “woman.” this approach works well in many other projects, i think, but it faces two important problems in the present case. the first problem is that there are more kinds than there are distinct terms. that is to say, one of the main things i take myself to have shown in the book is that the work that those seeking to counter gender oppression ask concepts such as woman to do, in the context of emancipatory projects, is simply too varied to be 2 i understand theorizing very broadly as practically oriented ways in which we seek to make sense of the world we live in; as such, it’s not just something that philosophers or scientists do in ivory towers but something that people in wider communities are also doing all the time, especially when they engage in resistance to oppression. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 discharged by any single explanatory kind. lots of kinds, quite different from one another, have to be recruited to get the job done. so if i were to use the term “woman” to refer to all of the kinds that do some of that explanatory work, i would be using it to refer to many distinct kinds, and this would be confusing and unhelpful. the second problem, which i think is even more important, is that, as i discuss in the book’s introduction, the work of philosophizing does not happen in a vacuum. i therefore cannot simply stipulate what words are to mean in my book and expect this to remain safely sealed in without risk of spilling over into the wider world. i think it would be a bad thing if, in ordinary discourse, the term “woman” were to be used (even more widely than at present) in a way that excludes (all or some) trans women and/or includes (all or some) trans men and nonbinary people. i therefore have reason to be extremely careful not to use it in that way in my philosophical writing. so, overall, there are two powerful reasons not to use terms such as “woman” to refer to the explanatory kinds i identify in my book.3 now, bettcher (2025, 10) takes me to have done exactly that; however, i do not believe that i did. this is not to dismiss her point, because i think it shows that the strategy i tried to enact was not fully successful. but before i address what her critique means for what i should do in the future, let me first describe what i was attempting to do in the book. in order to avoid the problems described above while also signaling the strong link between my investigations and prior feminist explanatory projects that used terms such as “woman,” i constructed specific phrases to refer to the kinds i identified. these phrases indicated both the type of kind it was and the term associated with the concept that most closely matched it (italicized to indicate its status as referring to a concept). for example, i created phrases such as “the hegemonic gender kind woman,” “the gender identity kind woman,” and so on. i wanted these phrases to read as technical terms, so i was fine with them sounding a bit artificial (in fact, i rather welcomed it). moreover, i was very careful always to use the full phrase. for instance, even when i was talking about hegemonic kinds for a whole chapter and it would be clear from the context i was talking about hegemonic kinds only, i tried always to say “the hegemonic gender kind woman,” rather than, “the kind woman” or even just “women.”4 i also tried to make sure that this construction was integrally built in rather than tagged on at the end—so, for example, i would say “the hegemonic gender kind woman” rather than “woman, in the hegemonic kind sense.” i took care in these two respects not only to avoid confusion but also (and more importantly) to make sure 3 or, at least, not to use them to refer to many of those kinds; in the case of identity kinds, the second reason seems not to apply. 4 i say “tried” because i intended to do this and believe that i succeeded, but of course it’s possible i made a mistake at some point that i haven’t yet spotted. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 that those hostile to trans people could not take things i said about these kinds and quote them out of context (i.e., separately from my pluralist account of explanatory kinds) to make it look as if i was saying them about the category of “woman” in a broad sense, or making a recommendation about how the term “woman” should be used. of course, the phrases i chose still include words such as “woman.” but i think it can be appropriate to use a phrase that contains a certain word in contexts where it would be inappropriate to use the word by itself. for example, i think it can be appropriate to say of a trans man that he “was assigned female at birth,” whereas it is usually, if not always, inappropriate to say that he “is female.”5 (the existence of acronyms such as afab attests to the commonly accepted status of such phrases in many contexts.) similarly (though there is no acronym for this one) it can be appropriate to say of a nonbinary person that they “are often perceived as a woman,” while it would be inappropriate to say that they “are a woman.” i took phrases like “is a member of the hegemonic gender kind woman” to function similarly to “was assigned female at birth” and “is often perceived as a woman” in this regard.6 this is why i disagree with bettcher’s interpretation of my work. she writes, “while it seems fine to list g1 as a gender kind (i.e., an explanatory kind that would be useful in explaining the operations of things we call gender), it does not seem fine to call it woman” (bettcher 2025, 12). but i do not believe that i did call such kinds “woman.” i called them things like “the hegemonic kind woman.” her point is still instructive, however, because the fact that she took me to be using the term “woman” in this manner indicates that the way i was using phrases to refer to these kinds did not come across to her clearly. i think this indicates that it also may not come across clearly to others. i consider this a problem for my approach. what is more, i consider it a philosophical problem. i don’t think the philosopher’s job ends when we have 5 obviously it would be inappropriate to use even the former phrase in contexts where the information it communicates ought to remain private, e.g. if it was used to “out” someone as trans against their wishes. i’m thinking here only of cases where conveying the relevant information is appropriate and the question is what words to use to do that. 6 maybe words like “woman” and “man” work differently from words like “female” and “male” in this regard, such that there is something riskier about “is often perceived as a woman” (and hence about my strategy in the book) compared to “was assigned female at birth.” i can see why this might seem plausible, but i’m not convinced; in my experience there isn’t much to choose between the people who call trans women “men” and the people who call them “males” (and mutatis mutandis for other trans people) when it comes to the kind of politics they espouse and the kinds of social arrangements they advocate for. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 figured out some kind of abstract claim we want to make; when we clothe that claim in words and send it out into the world, we are also still doing philosophy, and this part of my philosophizing seems to have gone awry. i’m sincerely grateful to bettcher for pointing this problem out. but what to do about it? here, i think i need both more time and a broader sense of how the work is interpreted by other readers before i can know what is for the best. if the clarification offered above changes how the work lands with bettcher and with others, then it might be fine to stick with the approach in the book, highlighting this clarification as needed. if not, then it seems that i have reason to switch to the strategy bettcher suggests—namely, retaining the terms “gender kinds” and “race kinds” to refer collectively to the kinds i identify in the book, but stopping using longer locutions containing terms such as “woman” to refer to the individual kinds. i could then use something like the alternative phrases bettcher suggests (e.g., “subordinated reproductive class,” [2025, 10]) to refer to these kinds. there are, in my opinion, some drawbacks to making this change. for one thing, it might seem to grant that there is something else, other than the kinds that i discuss, that is “what gender really is”—and i’ve not yet seen an argument for thinking this that i find convincing. for another, it might give an impression of greater distance from the theoretical purposes that motivate many uses of gender terms, and an impression of greater separation from other feminist philosophers such as haslanger and ásta, whose work has indeed (as bettcher observes) informed my own in important ways. but for me, these considerations are strongly outweighed by the need to avoid doing harm. if it becomes clear that my current approach risks doing harm in the way bettcher is concerned about, then i will have a decisive reason to revise the language i use to express my view accordingly. finally, bettcher (2025, 7) raises a third worry: that “[my] elision of the discursive approach . . . leaves [me] unprepared to fully engage with those antitrans advocates who adopt [a strategy based on the discursive approach].” i agree that the resources i offer in the book do not give us a firm basis for engaging with those antitrans advocates who base their arguments on the claim that a trans-exclusionary understanding of the category of woman best tracks ordinary language; they were not intended to. this is for a couple of reasons. for a start, while i think it is important to counter antitrans propaganda, i think it is also important not to let antitrans arguments dictate the terms of engagement for those of us committed to feminism and to trans liberation. many antitrans arguments are specious, full of basic errors of reasoning, and/or based on reductive understandings of the nature of sex and gender that have already been decisively critiqued. exposing these flaws is important for political advocacy, but i do not personally find it a very rewarding philosophical project. in writing the book, i wanted to focus on what i see as live philosophical issues—questions that i myself was unsure feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 how to answer at the outset of the project. if we think that gender is a social kind, exactly what kinds are gender kinds? if we think that gender is a product of unjust social arrangements, how does this injustice affect, or feature in, the gender kinds themselves? and how does all of this sit alongside the fact that people, including people oppressed on the basis of gender, often experience their gender, or at least aspects of it, in positive ways? if i had been trying to write a field guide to countering antitrans propaganda in its full range of manifestations, i would have written a very different book. the closest the book comes to offering tools for countering antitrans propaganda is in the final chapter. i hope this chapter is useful for that purpose, but it is also worth noting that it plays quite a specific role in the dialectic of the book. its purpose is to respond to the charge that my account is inadequate because (a) it doesn’t allow us to say that the only gender kinds (understood as explanatory kinds) that exist are those that align with people’s identities, but (b) we need to be able to say this in order to further trans liberatory politics. i tried to show that the worry is unfounded because (b) is false: in fact, strategies that rely on the claim contained in (a) are not necessary for progressing toward trans liberation. furthermore, they are actually rather risky in that they are prone to generating argumentative difficulties for proponents of trans liberation in the current discursive context. i further try to show that, for this reason, in the very specific social and political context that i find myself in in the uk at the moment, a strategy aligned with the pluralist account i have presented has some significant tactical benefits. none of this commits me to the claim that we can respond to all antitrans advocacy using the apparatus i set out in the book. i agree with bettcher that my account does not offer resources for directly countering antitrans strategies that lean on a discursive approach to investigating social kinds—or, as she also points out, for countering antitrans strategies that appeal to biological kinds.7 but, contra bettcher, i think my position (based on the explanatory-kinds approach) does help in the way i claim it does; it’s just that this way is much more limited than she takes it to be. where i hope we can agree is in thinking that we need many and various strategies to counter the many and contradictory (both between each other and, often, internally within themselves) arguments and rhetorical ploys that are used to try to vindicate transexclusionary policies, practices, and worldviews. i would never want to deny this. 7 at least, not directly. i do think my account of gender kinds as explanatory kinds may offer some resources for undercutting the appeal of a biological understanding of gender kinds, insofar as those accounts may derive some appeal from claims to explanatory power; but i do not explore this idea in the book and do not have space to discuss it further here. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 recent events in the uk are sadly illustrative of this need for multiple strategies. on april 16, 2025, the uk supreme court issued a ruling in the case of for women scotland ltd v. the scottish ministers ([2025] uksc 16). the case concerned scottish legislation, aimed at promoting the representation of women on public boards, that classed trans women with a gender recognition certificate (grc) as women for this purpose. a grc is effectively a reissued birth certificate with a different gender marker (e.g., an “f” in the case of a trans woman). under the legislation that governs grcs, the gender recognition act 2004 (c. 7), only some trans people can obtain one, and the process to do so is lengthy, costly, and intrusive (for more discussion, see finlayson, jenkins, and worsdale 2018). the case of for women scotland v. the scottish ministers did not concern the gender recognition act directly, but rather turned on the interpretation of a different piece of legislation, the equality act 2010 (c. 15), or ea 2010. the approach taken in the scottish legislation that was challenged in the case was in accordance with the then-current uk-wide statutory guidance (issued by the equality and human rights commission [ehrc]) on how the ea 2010 should be interpreted. the scottish legislation was challenged, however, by a campaign group called for women scotland on the grounds that it was incompatible with the ea 2010, correctly interpreted.8 it could not be plainer that this is a discursive question. paragraph 166 of the judgment states: “our task is to ascertain the meaning of the words ‘sex,’ ‘woman’ and ‘man’ used in the ea 2010, read in their particular context and in light of the wider context and purpose of the anti-discrimination provisions in the ea 2010.” the court ruled that these terms “refer to biological sex” ([2025] uksc 16, paras. 51, 174). of course, for anyone familiar with philosophical literature on biological sex,9 this raises more questions than it answers. but the judgment was immediately hailed by all of the uk’s main political parties as providing clarity and a decisive resolution, not just to the dispute about the particular legislation that prompted the case, but to a whole range of different issues. most devastatingly, the labour government and the ehrc both appear to have interpreted the ruling as requiring that public services such as toilets, changing rooms, and hospital wards be separated according to “biological sex,” understood as the sex originally recorded on a person’s birth certificate (so the 8 for women scotland is a group that believes trans-inclusive policies and practices constitute “a crisis for women’s rights” (https://forwomen.scot/), and that warns that “the very word ‘woman’ will change definition, if the trans lobby succeed” (https://forwomen.scot/did-you-know/). frankly, i think these quotes speak for themselves, but for the avoidance of doubt: i consider for women scotland’s stances and rhetoric to be deeply oppressive to trans people, especially trans women, and highly dangerous for cis women as well. 9 for a good overview relevant to the present case, see carter (2022). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 change enacted through acquiring a grc would not count). perversely, the proposed ehrc guidance also allows for trans people to be excluded from spaces provided for people of their “biological sex.” so, for example, a trans man would not be able to use the men’s toilets in a restaurant because the sex on his original birth certificate is not “male,” but if the restaurant owner judged that, in virtue of the trans man’s appearance and presentation, his presence in the women’s toilets would cause “alarm or distress,” he would not be permitted to use those either. several legal commentators have suggested that the guidance goes further than the legal decision warrants.10 this appalling situation could have been averted by applying the kinds of arguments about the meaning of gender terms that bettcher offers, because that approach would have led to a different judgment being reached by the supreme court. that is because this judgment was explicitly a decision about what terms mean; the discursive approach is exactly what was needed, and the explanatory-kinds approach would not, i think, have been particularly relevant to influencing the outcome of the legal case. on the other hand, the perverse guidance, and general overreach in reaction to the legal decision, could potentially have been prevented by a rejection of the ontology-first approach that i criticize in chapter 8 of my book. the amount of commentary taking the judgment to settle the question of what a woman is in general was striking. consider these remarks from the prime minister, keir starmer, in the immediate aftermath of the decision: asked by itv west country if he would repeat that trans women are women, starmer replied: “i think the supreme court has answered that question.” pressed on his view, he said: “a woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear. i actually welcome the judgment because i think it gives real clarity. it allows those that have got to draw up guidance to be really clear about what that guidance should say. so i think it’s important that we see the judgment for what it is. it’s a welcome step forward. it’s real clarity in an area where we did need clarity. i’m pleased it’s come about. we need to move and 10 these include the nonprofit organization good law project (https://goodlawproject .org/case/were-challenging-the-ehrcs-interim-guidance/) and lady hale, a former president of the supreme court (see lucy knight, “court ruling on legal definition of a woman ‘misinterpreted,’ lady hale says,” guardian, may 22, 2025, https://www.the guardian.com/law/2025/may/22/court-ruling-legal-definition-of-a-woman-misinterp reted-lady-hale). jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 make sure that we now ensure that all guidance is in the right place according to that judgment.”11 there is a slide here from (a) the actual judgment about the meaning of certain terms in the very specific context of one piece of legislation, to (b) a view on what a woman “is,” to (c) an assumption that this is the right basis for various different types of social arrangements (“all guidance”). this kind of slide would seem natural if one assumed that there is one thing that gender is, and we should make all our different social practices align with that thing—and this is precisely the assumption that i term the “ontology-first approach.” the widespread rejection of this assumption would, i believe, have made this kind of slide less likely. i think this helps illustrate that opposing the ontology-first approach is a worthwhile goal and not, as bettcher (2025, 6) believes, a red herring. all of this is to say that having either the belt of a discursive approach argument for a trans-inclusive understanding of the term “woman,” or the braces of a firm rejection of ontology-first thinking,12 would have helped considerably in avoiding the current mess. but both belt and braces were missing, meaning that the uk’s trousers are now firmly around its ankles and the arse of british transphobia is squarely and excruciatingly on display to the world. where can we go from here? one avenue that seems to hold some promise for restoring trans rights is a legal challenge under international human rights law followed by fresh uk legislation. those drafting such legislation would need to think about which groups of people share needs, entitlements, and vulnerabilities that mean that they should be provided for in specific ways under the legislation. unlike the supreme court, the legislators would not primarily be in the business of working out how a term that was already being used should be interpreted; rather, they would need to work out which groupings of people were relevant to explaining how and why certain harms have occurred, predicting where and when they are likely to occur in future, and intervening to prevent them from occurring. this is what the explanatorykinds approach does. as i see it, then, both the discursive approach and the rejection of ontologyfirst thinking could have played a role in preventing the harms we are currently seeing in the uk, and the explanatory-kinds approach can now play a role in remedying them. i hope this illustrates how the various different parts of mine and of bettcher’s 11 peter walker, “keir starmer welcomes ‘clarity’ of uk supreme court’s gender ruling,” guardian, april 22, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/22 /equalities-minister-bridget-phillipson-welcomes-uk-gender-ruling-supreme-court. 12 “braces” are what north americans, i am told, call “suspenders.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 approaches can be seen as working together in harmony rather than standing in tension with one another. reply to khalidi khalidi raises three very interesting points, and i will respond to each in turn. first, though, i want to acknowledge and adopt a friendly suggestion that khalidi makes concerning terminology. khalidi encourages me to be more precise about the language i use to discuss social kinds and their role in explanation. he points out that kinds per se do not do explanatory work—that is rather the role of categories, understood as parts of our discourse. however, in the book i talk about kinds as doing explanatory work. i agree with khalidi’s understanding of kinds as “part of the causal structure of the social world” (2025, 13) or “nodes in causal networks” (khalidi 2018), so i can see how the language i used in the book was misleading. i will avoid it in future, following khalidi in holding that kinds don’t explain (they just are) and that it is in fact categories corresponding to kinds that feature in our explanations—where their relation to kinds is the basis for their explanatory power. the first of khalidi’s three main points concerns the question of whether a pluralist position can be maintained in the face of the obvious causal interconnections between membership in hegemonic race and gender kinds, in interpersonal race and gender kinds, and in race and gender identity kinds. i’m completely in agreement with the defense of pluralism that khalidi offers in this context, drawing on an analogy with the concept of species in philosophy of biology. he then presses a further question— namely, why should we be pluralists rather than being “hybridists” (who would conceptualize gender and race as hybrid categories encompassing the various kinds that feature in my pluralist view)?13 in other words, why go for “splitting” kinds apart over “lumping” them together? i have nothing to add to khalidi’s defense of the benefits of splitting, which i endorse in full.14 i also agree with him that lumping can have benefits in some contexts, and that this is “a possibility that deserves further consideration” (khalidi 2025, 8). i’m not in a position to deliver the kind of fully worked out view that such 13 such a view calls to mind the idea that gender is “biopsychosocial,” but i take it that hybridism need not take that particular form. 14 indeed, khalidi’s points about the possible value of splitting in the context of medical research align with advice that i gave, based on my book, to an initiative aimed improving at the integration of sex and gender considerations across data collection, analysis, and reporting in biomedical, health and care research in the uk (see https://www.messageproject.co.uk/). the resulting guidance treats each of sex and gender as a cluster of characteristics, and it calls on researchers to specify the characteristics being tracked in any particular study and to justify this choice. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 further consideration aims at, but as a preliminary thought, let me share the hope that my pluralist position may be capacious enough to accommodate the tactical use of hybrid categories for some purposes, along the lines khalidi describes. perhaps i am now simply carrying the conciliatory tendencies that underpin my pluralism too far, but i would prefer this kind of bridging move over having to make a stark choice between pluralism and hybridism as rival theoretical positions. one way in which we might think about a reconciliation between pluralism and hybridism is to say that the various different causal processes (that produce distinct groupings with distinctive explanatory value) are like eddies in a flowing river: specific patterns within a larger dynamic. each of the resulting kinds is unique, but it is also true of each kind that it only exists in the first place because of what is going on more broadly. maybe pluralism focuses attention on the specific patterns, the eddies, while hybridism looks at the bigger picture, the river. if this way of seeing the relation between hybridism and pluralism can be maintained, then it makes me optimistic for reconciling these two views rather than having to choose between them. yet i think that gaining further clarity on this requires a clearer sense of what exactly the purposes are for which hybridism is useful. in this spirit, i’m keen to hear more from those attracted to hybridism about what it can do that pluralism cannot. khalidi’s second point concerns the manifestation of ontic injustice across the tripartite distinction among social kinds that he helpfully makes in his earlier work (khalidi 2015). these are (1) those social kinds where the kind can exist without being represented; (2) those social kinds where the kind needs to be represented in order to exist, but someone or something can be a member of the kind without being represented as such; and (3) those social kinds where the kind needs to be represented and each member of the kind needs to be represented as a kind member. khalidi asks, in relation to which of these types of social kinds can ontic injustice manifest, and are there differences in how it manifests? i want to endorse the suggestion entertained by khalidi that ontic injustice can manifest in relation to all three types of social kind, and that it can change in character when a social kind that was previously nonrepresented comes to be explicitly represented. as i see it, the claim that ontic injustice can manifest in relation to nonrepresented social kinds is simply a consequence of the definition of ontic injustice combined with the way that i am understanding social construction. thus, i do indeed need to confront the challenge that khalidi goes on to pose to this position: if ontic injustice can occur without explicit representation, what, then, is distinctive about it compared to just plain old regular injustice? take a case, such as the one khalidi considers, of a society with a class system dividing people into proletariat and bourgeoisie, but where this system is not represented by anyone. we can surely describe this as a case of injustice; so what is added when we describe it as a case of ontic injustice specifically? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 my answer to this is, perhaps surprisingly, “nothing much.” this is to say that i do think that such a situation is one where the concept of ontic injustice applies, but i don’t believe we gain anything particularly interesting from thinking of it as an ontic injustice as contrasted with simply an injustice. i am deeply relaxed about this result because i don't think of ontic injustice as a sui generis type of injustice. rather, it is injustice in the perfectly familiar sense that is raising its head in a (potentially) surprising place—namely, within the ontology of social kinds. my aim in developing the concept of ontic injustice was not so much to say, “look, here's a very special kind of injustice,” as to say, “look, injustice (in the familiar) sense has wormed its way in to social kinds. we should pay attention to this when we theorize about social kinds.” the reason i think that it is interesting and worthwhile to point out that injustice can feature in the ontology of social kinds is that i believe getting a clear fix on this phenomenon will make a difference to our social theorizing and might well make some difference to what we should do in the world. but the extent to which this is so varies greatly between different cases. identifying ontic injustice is most useful in relation to kinds that are being represented by at least some people (as a kind and/or through representing some people as kind members), because in those cases it might potentially give us a direct reason to change what we're doing. for instance, someone might say. “i'm not wronging this person; i'm just representing them as a member of a certain kind. but it’s fine because i don't want to go on to do anything harmful to them on the basis of that. i’m just being accurate.” having the concept of ontic injustice allows us to say, “i hear you, and it’s not inaccurate. but in fact the very representing you are doing is wronging them, because you're helping to perpetuate an ontic injustice.” on the other hand, in cases where there’s no representing going on, pointing out that there is an ontic injustice is unlikely to make much difference, if any, to what we ought to do if we already know that the case exhibits injustice generally speaking. is there any value at all in identifying ontic injustice in the case of nonrepresented social kinds? perhaps a little; it enables us to say that all the members of the kind, whatever their particular social experiences, suffer the moral injury that is constitutive of ontic injustice.15 this in turn allows us to say that each and every member of the kind is wronged, even if some members escape the harmful impacts that are characteristic of the group’s social situation due to good luck, to privileges arising from other aspects of their identity, and so on. there are doubtless other ways to arrive at this conclusion without appealing to ontic injustice, but it does seem useful to have some way of arriving at it. but i think this is at best of modest interest; the noteworthy cases of ontic injustice are the ones where we are representing and 15 this is perhaps in line with the suggestion from an anonymous referee that khalidi mentions in his footnote 12. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 interacting with the kind in our social practices, and justice might demand that we do things differently once we notice that it is a site of ontic injustice. in the final part of his comments, khalidi asks, essentially, what kind of stance on the role of moral and political values in social scientific theorizing underpins my argument against the ontology-first approach (chapter 8). i’m certainly very sympathetic to the approach to answering this question that khalidi outlines, drawing on elizabeth anderson’s (2012) work on values in science. according to this andersoninspired approach, moral and political values should enter into our social enquiry by helping to determine (a) our research questions and priorities and (b) how we act on the results of our inquiry, but they should not directly influence theory choice in the sense of “decid[ing] which categories are needed to understand social phenomena” (khalidi 2025, 16). it would be disingenuous to say that the position khalidi outlines here “faithfully captures [my] view” (16) because i had not reached a view as explicit or lucid as the one khalidi lays out. but it is certainly a position that chimes with the spirit of my approach, and one that i am strongly inclined to adopt now that it is offered to me. if i were to add something to what khalidi says, at this point in time, it would be that values can also properly guide the ways in which our theories are presented: if our research is motivated by an interest in emancipation, then we should care about communicating our theories in ways that render them as suitable as they can be for being used in emancipatory social movements. i think that this falls within the responsibility of the theorist or philosopher, and it is an important part of the method that i term “emancipatory theory” and which i discuss in the book’s introduction.16 but, mostly, i need to think much more about all of this, and i am now better placed to do so thanks to khalidi’s insightful and constructive suggestions. reply to russell russell insightfully elaborates on and extends several aspects of my arguments in the book, and i find all her points persuasive. most centrally, perhaps, i am completely in agreement with russell’s illuminating comparison between my constraints and enablements framework (cef) and her own compelling argument for the value of thinking of race as a technology (russell 2018). it is extremely gratifying to know that the argument i offered in the book resonated across the analytic– continental divide, since i was keen not to be bound by this (in my view rather problematic) division, while being aware that my own approach is distinctly (and, to some extent, unavoidably, given my training and tendencies) analytic in flavor. i appreciate russell’s encouragement to frame some of our shared commitments in 16 this of course relates to my point above, in response to bettcher, about language choice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 terms of a focus on what race does rather than what it is, and this will inform my own approach to these questions going forward. the particular case of her experiences in togo is extremely illuminating, and i agree completely with the ways in which she integrates it with the cef. a point that russell makes with which i agree particularly strongly is the importance of accounting for “the way much of our thinking about race has faded into the background, shaping our view of the world without our being fully conscious of it” (2025, 6). i think there is much more work to be done here, and i feel i am better placed to contribute to it based on thinking about russell’s comments and her work more broadly. in the eighth and final chapter of the book, i argue that we should reject the ontology-first approach in the context of debates about gender recognition. russell compellingly extends this point to the case of debates about the metaphysics of race, and i am in complete agreement with her analysis. this chapter is also where i discussed the vexed issue of so-called “transracialism,” a point that russell takes up. she argues, and i completely agree, that we should approach the limited number of transracial identity claims we may encounter with “an extra dose of philosophical caution and humility—and always with due attention to the ethical implications for the people already inhabiting various identities” (russell 2025, 11). russell is here highlighting the vital importance of attending to the level of collective experience and not solely the level of individual experience. where i talk about engaging with experiences of complex racial identity “in their own right” rather than as an offshoot of discussion of the experiences of trans(gender) people (or, worse, as a stick to beat trans(gender) people with), russell stresses that “it is important that ‘in their own right’ not be understand as ‘on a purely individual basis’” (11). i certainly never intended that it should be so understood, and i am grateful for the chance to clarify this. finally, let me speak to russell’s friendly suggestion that it may have been better to write the book in what is basically reverse order: beginning with the concrete and particular and working from there to the more general theoretical apparatus. i think russell is right about the ways in which the structure she sketches better reflects some methodological commitments that i think she and i share. what i think the actual structure of the book reflects above all is the sequence that my own thinking needed to follow in order to arrive where i wanted to. the very grounded and contextspecific considerations discussed in the final chapter very much underpinned my motivation for wanting to write the book, but i found i needed to work out theoretical detail the preceding chapters before feeling confident in my analysis of these more contextualized issues. but of course, the sequence of the writer’s thinking need not be, and often is not, the sequence that represents the optimally helpful trajectory for the reader to follow. jenkins – reply to comments by bettcher, khalidi, and russell on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 if i were to attempt to defend (rather than merely causally explain) the sequence i did adopt, the main consideration to which i would appeal is something like user-friendliness. by giving the general apparatus of ontic injustice, ontic oppression, and the constraints and enablements framework up front, i hoped to make them readily available to people who did not share my interest in questions concerning gender recognition and so-called “transracialism” but who might want to use these resources for other purposes. so this thought reconciles me somewhat to the way the book in fact ended up, even though russell may well be correct that it would have been more effective overall to reverse the sequence. that said, i suspect that by the time i arrived at the version of the book that was published, the challenge of undertaking such a comprehensive rewrite might have been beyond my capabilities. on this note, i’d like to end by thanking bettcher, khalidi, and russell once again. although writing any book is a process that typically has its ups and downs, the fact that i was writing about such sensitive and contested topics in an increasingly alarming and hostile political context made my work on this book in particular feel, at times, especially fraught. to receive such generous and insightful critical responses to the finished book has, accordingly, been all the more precious. overall, the experience of thinking philosophically together with such superlative interlocutors has been both a privilege and a pleasure, and i am deeply grateful to each of them. acknowledgements: as well as my generous critics, i am indebted to susan brison for organizing the author-meets-critics session at the pacific apa that initially brought us together, to jenny saul for working alongside susan to edit this published symposium, and to the excellent team at fpq. my sincere thanks to them all. for helpful comments on this reply, i am also very grateful to aidan mcglynn, aness webster, filipa melo lopes, han edgoose, jade fletcher, and matthew j. cull. references anderson, elizabeth. 2012. “uses of value judgments in science: a general argument, with lessons from a case study of feminist research on divorce.” in out from the shadows: analytical feminist contributions to traditional philosophy, edited by sharon l. crasnow and anita m. superson, 377–404. oxford: oxford university press. bettcher, talia mae. 2025. “social kinds and semantics: notes on katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 1. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 carter, matilda. 2022. “trans women are (or are becoming) female: disputing the endogeneity constraint.” hypatia 37(2): 384–401. https://doi.org/10.1017/hy p.2022.12. cull, matthew j. 2024. what gender should be. london: bloomsbury. finlayson, lorna, katharine jenkins, and rosie worsdale. 2018. “‘i’m not transphobic, but. . .’: a feminist case against the feminist case against trans inclusivity.” verso books blog, october 17. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4090-i-mnot-transphobic-but-a-feminist-case-against-the-feminist-case-against-transinclusivity. khalidi, muhammad ali. 2015. “three kinds of social kinds.” philosophy and phenomenological research 90 (1): 96–112. doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12020. ————. 2018. “natural kinds as nodes in causal networks.” synthese 195 (4): 1379– 96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0841-y. ————. 2025. “pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on jenkins’s ontology and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 2. russell, camisha a. 2018. the assisted reproduction of race. bloomington: indiana university press. ————. 2025. “where to start with an ontology that doesn’t come first?” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 3. katharine jenkins is professor of philosophy at the university of glasgow. previously she worked at the university of nottingham and jesus college, cambridge, and received her phd from the university of sheffield. she researches topics in feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and social ontology, with a particular focus on social construction and oppression. she has also written on pornography, on hermeneutical injustice and gender-based violence, and on the challenges of staging racist and sexist operas. she is the author of ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality (2023) and feminist philosophy: a very short introduction (2024), both published by oxford university press. 113004 jenkins title page 113004 jenkins final format paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation cosker-rowland, rach. 2025. “paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (4). article 3. 2025 paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care rach cosker-rowland university of leeds r.cosker-rowland@leeds.ac.uk cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care rach cosker-rowland abstract recently the uk and many us states have brought in policies and laws that limit or entirely prevent access to gender-affirming health care for trans adults and/or trans youth. these restrictions on trans access to gender-affirming care are justified on paternalistic grounds; that is, on the basis of the benefits to trans youth and trans adults of these restrictions. this paper argues that a state cannot permissibly limit trans people’s access to gender-affirming health care on paternalistic grounds. first, the paper constructs and defends a weak antipaternalist principle (§2). second, the paper argues that paternalistic restrictions on trans adults accessing gender-affirming care that have been implemented in florida, missouri, and the uk fall afoul of this weak antipaternalist principle (§3–5). finally, the paper discusses the bans on trans teenagers accessing puberty blockers that have been implemented by the uk and twenty-five us states. it argues that the combination of (a) extant accounts of when paternalistic restrictions on teenagers accessing x can be justified even though restrictions on adults accessing x cannot be justified and (b) the argument made in the rest of the paper implies that these paternalistic bans on trans teenagers accessing puberty blockers are impermissible. keywords: transgender rights, paternalism, liberalism, puberty blockers, feminist political philosophy 1. introduction gender-affirming health care (gah) interventions change, or stop changes to, individuals’ primary or secondary sex characteristics. gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (gahrt) is a form of gah that involves the prescription of hormones and/or hormone blockers. gahrt enables trans and nonbinary people to change their secondary sex characteristics. gahrt allows many trans men—and nonbinary assigned-female-at-birth people—to develop male secondary sex characteristics, including facial hair and a deeper voice. gahrt allows many trans women—and nonbinary assigned-male-at-birth people—to develop female sex characteristics including breasts, a “feminine” (re)distribution of fat where fat builds up in the hips and cheeks rather than in other places, and a decrease in body hair feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 (vincent 2018, 152). puberty blockers are another form of gah, which stop trans youth from developing the secondary sex characteristics associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. according to the american medical association (2021), gahrt and puberty blockers are medically necessary for many trans and nonbinary adults and youth. many studies have shown that gahrt for trans and nonbinary people can lead to a reduction in depression and negative experiences of gender dysphoria (nolan et al. 2023; green et al. 2021; almazan and keuroghlian 2021; chen et al. 2023). almost 90 percent of trans and nonbinary people are either on a regime of gahrt or hope to begin such a regime (grassian 2022 24; james et al. 2016, 99). and this is unsurprising, since very many trans people have a strong persistent desire to have different sex characteristics from those that they endogenously developed or are set to endogenously develop (vincent 2018; coleman et al. 2022; see also §3 and note 7 below). recently many states have limited access to gahrt and puberty blockers. the uk and twenty-five us states have banned puberty blockers and gahrt for trans youth. several states and countries have also adopted significant limits on adult access to gahrt. for instance, missouri has adopted a bill making trans adults wait three years to access gahrt, and florida has banned 80 percent of gahrt for trans adults in the state (wilchins 2024; see also §5.c below). these limits on trans access to gah are mostly implemented based on the paternalistic rationale that these limits supposedly benefit the trans people who seek to access gah. is it justifiable for states to limit access to gah on such paternalistic grounds? even if a paternalistic restriction on someone’s doing something would benefit them, it does not follow that it is permissible, legitimate, or justified. for instance, a state cannot legitimately prohibit us from marrying someone even if it is clear that the marriage would be all-thingsconsidered bad for us. other paternalistic state limits on actions (e.g., seat belt laws) are plausibly justified and permissible. are paternalistic limits on gah paternalistic limits of the former impermissible kind or the latter impermissible kind? although there is much discussion of limits on access to gah in the literature, there has been little, if any, focus on the legitimacy of paternalistic justifications of limits on access to gah (ashley 2022; wenner and george 2021; cosker-rowland 2022; and beattie 2022). furthermore, it is particularly important to assess whether such paternalism is legitimate in the context of gah because it is clear that limits on access to gah cannot be justified on other nonpaternalistic grounds (such as grounds concerning harms to others). section 2 discusses permissible paternalism. it argues that we should accept a weak antipaternalist principle on which state actions can be paternalistically justified only if (a) they involve a relatively minimal infringement on the freedom, autonomy, or will of those targeted by the paternalistic action or (b) these actions provide a serious reduction to the likelihood of death or serious injury for those targeted by the cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 paternalism. section 2 argues that there are good reasons to accept this weak antipaternalist principle, that it is relatively uncontroversial, and that there is no reason to reject it. sections 3 and 4 argue that this attractive weak antipaternalist principle implies that significant paternalistic limits on adult access to gahrt cannot be justified. section 5 argues that this case against significant limits on adult access to gahrt has implications for the limits on adult access to gahrt that have been implemented in the uk and the us, which have been justified on paternalistic grounds. section 5 also discusses the implications of weak antipaternalism for alessandra lemma and julian savulescu’s (2023) recent argument for a psychotherapy requirement on access to gahrt. although significant limits on adult access to gahrt cannot be paternalistically (or otherwise) justified, significant limits on youth access to gah may be paternalistically justified. section 6 discusses whether this is so. it focuses on laws and policies that stop trans teenagers from accessing puberty blockers. it discusses several accounts of when and/or why a paternalistic restriction on children ϕ-ing is justified and permissible even though a similar paternalistic restriction on adults ϕing could not be justified or permissible. i argue that none of these accounts show that although it is not justified or permissible to (a) stop all adults from accessing hormone blockers, it is justified or permissible to (b) stop all teenagers from accessing hormone blocking puberty blockers. sections 2–5 argue that (a) is impermissible. in this case, it follows that (b) is impermissible too. so, the bans on puberty blockers in twenty-five us states and the uk are impermissible and unjustified. before moving on to the argument of the paper, two questions need to be answered. the first question is, why does this paper discuss both gah for adults and gah for teenagers? it does this for several reasons. first, states are overriding medical professionals and medical guidelines and adopting paternalistically justified restrictions on access to gah for both adults and teenagers. second, this paper argues that there is a bridge from the justified conclusion that paternalistic restrictions on adult access to gahrt are impermissible to the conclusion that paternalistic restrictions on teenage access to puberty blockers are impermissible. finally, some of the paternalistic restrictions on access to gah that have been implemented, and which are discussed in this paper, concern both adults and teenagers, such as florida’s restrictions in senate bill 254 (sb 254), which are discussed in both section 5.c and section 6 below, and nebraska’s restrictions, which are discussed in section 5.d. the second question is, why does this paper discuss restrictions on gah in both the uk and the us when the medical and legal systems in the uk and the us are very different? this paper discusses the uk and us restrictions as examples of what kinds of paternalistic limits on access to gah are impermissible, and as examples of the practical implications of this paper’s arguments. the differences between the uk feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 and the us do not stop us from being able to diagnose state limits on access to gah as impermissible paternalism in both jurisdictions. 2. impermissible paternalism paternalism, at a minimum, involves someone or some entity coercing some agent a, or prohibiting or deterring a from doing something, without their consent, on the basis that this coercion or prohibition is in a’s best interest (dworkin 2020). for instance, a state that forces children to go to school to ensure that they get an education acts paternalistically toward them. although paternalism toward children is often justified, permissible, or right, paternalism toward adults is often thought to be wrong, unjust, or illegitimate. one reason for this is that to treat adults paternalistically is often thought to involve an insult to them—namely, that they are incapable of promoting their own good. many definitions of paternalism, such as jonathan quong’s (2011, 80) and seana shiffrin’s (2000, 218), hold that a acts paternalistically toward b only if a acts in a way that is motivated by a negative judgment about b’s ability to act in their own interests. on this kind of view there is a strong reason to refrain from acting paternalistically because paternalism involves doing a form of expressive harm to the person targeted by this paternalism: paternalistic actions communicate the view that those subject to this paternalism do not have the requisite rational capacities to look after their own interests and so must have their own interests looked after by others, contrary to their own will and consent. many paternalistic state actions seem to be unjustified actions that a state should not take. it seems illegitimate for a state to entirely prohibit people from eating junk food, going mountain climbing, getting tattooed, having a hysterectomy, driving cars or motorcycles, boxing, kayaking through rapids, swimming alone at night, or marrying someone who will clearly be bad for them on the basis that these things could result in damage to peoples’ interests (flanigan 2017, xiii). a state that adopted such bans would seem to overreach and encroach on people’s autonomy and liberty in an illegitimate or unjustified way. some hold that paternalistic action by a state toward adults is always wrong and unjustified. this view is often attributed to john stuart mill and is often understood to be one of the main ideas articulated in mill’s harm principle, according to which someone’s freedom can be restricted only in order to prevent harm to others (brink 2022, §3.6). other philosophers including richard arneson (1980), michael cholbi (2013), and joel feinberg (1986) have also argued that paternalism, or paternalistic state action, toward adults is always unjustified or wrongful.1 1 for discussion, see birks (2018, 137). cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 but some paternalistic state actions toward adults do seem justified and permissible, such as a state forcing everyone to wear seat belts while driving cars and to wear motorcycle helmets when riding motorcycles.2 but these paternalistic laws have two features. first, these laws provide a serious reduction in individuals’ chances of death or serious injury: requiring drivers and passengers to wear seat belts and motorcyclists to wear helmets makes them far less likely to die or be very seriously injured in a car/motorcycle crash. second, these laws’ infringements on individual freedom, autonomy, and/or will is minimal; these laws do not fundamentally interfere with how someone lives their life or what kind of activities they can engage in and experiences they can have. requiring that someone wear a seat belt while they are in a car does not fundamentally interfere with the kinds of activities that someone can engage in; in contrast, banning someone from mountain climbing or eating junk food does interfere with the kinds of things that someone can do (weston 2023, 64). given that the most plausibly justified or permissible paternalistic state actions that interfere with what adults can do have these two features, and that impermissible paternalism does not, we can endorse an antipaternalist principle that distinguishes between paternalistic actions that have such features and those that do not; namely, weak antipaternalism. weak antipaternalism: paternalism can serve as a justification for a legitimate and permissible state action concerning adults’ selfregarding actions only if (a) the action’s infringement on the freedom, autonomy, or will of those targeted by the paternalistic state action is minimal or (b) the action either on its own or in combination with similar actions provides a serious reduction to the likelihood of death or serious injury of those targeted by the paternalistic state action. hereafter, any reference to “weak antipaternalism” is a reference to this principle. weak antipaternalism holds that motorcycle helmet and seat belt laws can be justified, since these policies satisfy both (a) and (b). it might seem that we should hold that paternalistic state actions are permissible only if they satisfy both (a) and (b). but that may be a controversial claim. bans on smoking (for those who do not currently smoke), such as the ban recently implemented by new zealand, do not satisfy (a): such bans are not obviously a minimal encroachment on those banned from smoking. yet we may think that these policies are permissible, since such smoking bans do have feature (b): they significantly reduce the likelihood of death or serious injury of those they ban from smoking. 2 unless they need to not wear a helmet to conform with their religious beliefs, as sikhs do (billingham 2017). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 state actions that seem to be impermissible paternalism fail to satisfy both (a) and (b). for instance, banning all adults from ever mountain climbing would constitute impermissible state paternalism. such a ban would involve a significant encroachment on mountain climbers’ freedom, and mountain climbing with precautions does not seriously increase one’s chance of death or serious injury. a blanket ban on driving would stop many people from doing many different things and so would involve a massive infringement on people’s autonomy and freedom without seriously reducing most drivers’ risk of death or serious injury. so, by the lights of weak antipaternalism such a ban would be impermissible.3 although it is plausible that state seat belt and motorcycle helmet requirements are justified and permissible, and weak antipaternalism fits with and explains why this is so, weak antipaternalism should not be controversial even to those who are opposed to all paternalistic state restrictions on adults including seat belt laws. for weak antipaternalism only states a necessary condition on paternalistic state action being permissible or justified—namely, that such action must satisfy (a) or (b). it does not hold that satisfaction of (a) or (b) is sufficient for such state paternalism to be justified; that is a further question that goes beyond weak antipaternalism. opponents of all paternalistic restrictions can agree with weak antipaternalism but still hold that state actions that satisfy (a) or (b) are still not permissible or justified, all things considered. 3. paternalistic limits on adult access to gender-affirming health care gender-affirming health care (gah) interventions change, or stop changes to, individuals’ primary or secondary sex characteristics through gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (gahrt) and/or hormone suppression or other procedures such as surgeries. gahrt brings bodily changes. assigned male at birth (amab) people on gahrt who take estrogen and suppress their testosterone generally experience breast growth, the softening of skin, muscle atrophy from the 3 it might seem that bans on taking out a subprime mortgage or significant restrictions on gambling are permissible forms of paternalism that breach weak antipaternalism and so this principle is not so weak after all. but financial ruin might well be thought to constitute a serious injury, in which case such bans and restrictions would not breach weak antipaternalism. alternatively, weak antipaternalism could be revised to be made in terms of “serious harm or injury,” and financial ruin is a serious harm. all the arguments that i make in the rest of this paper appear to be sound even if we understand this principle in this slightly broader way. for instance, the arguments that i make in §3–4 that gahrt is not likely to lead trans people to experience serious injury generalize to show that gahrt is not likely to lead trans people to experience serious harm. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 chest and other places, thinning of body hair, some thickening and (re)growth of hair on the head, a change of fat distribution in which (relatively) more fat builds up in the cheeks of the face—making one’s face look more feminine—and in the thighs and backside, and fat no longer builds up primarily in the belly (vincent 2018, esp. 154). the prescription of testosterone causes the opposite fat distribution changes, and the opposite changes in terms of muscle growth and skin softening. testosterone causes the growth of facial hair, causes one’s voice to break (and so to deepen), it can also cause a loss of hair on one’s head and emotional changes (vincent 2018, 178–82; plemons 2017, esp. 39–42). almost 90 percent of trans and nonbinary people seek gahrt (grassian 2022, 24; james et al. 2016, 99). many trans people’s gender identities are tied up with their sense that they should have different sex characteristics or bodily features. for instance, many trans men’s, and some nonbinary assigned female at birth people’s, gender identity is tied up with their sense that they should not have breasts and/or should have facial hair; many trans women’s gender identity is tied up with their sense that they should have breasts, should not have facial hair, or should otherwise not look like a man; some nonbinary amab people also have such experiences. many trans people want gender-affirming health care because they want, need, or judge that they should have the bodily changes that it brings and/or because they feel devastating gender dysphoria, sadness, depression, anxiety, or despair, because they do not have these bodily features (cosker-rowland 2022, 833–34). many studies have demonstrated a link between (a) depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation in trans people and (b) a lack of trans access to gahrt; several studies, including a randomized controlled trial, have found that gahrt lowers depression, suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in trans people (nolan et al. 2023; green et al. 2021; almazan and keuroghlian 2021; and chen et al. 2023). many trans people also want gender-affirming health care because it helps one to be treated as the gender that matches one’s gender identity or to not be treated as the gender one was assigned at birth: for instance, not having breasts and having facial hair helps one not be perceived as a woman; having breasts and having the feminine distribution of fat that feminizing gahrt brings helps trans women to be perceived and treated as women rather than as men (serano 2016, 31; bornstein 2016, 30–32; cosker-rowland 2022, 833–34). many trans people, especially those who did not realize they were trans until later in life, find it very difficult to come out as trans or live as the gender that matches their gender identity without first having gahrt. for instance, some trans women feel that they are unable to express their gender identity without being on a regime of gahrt; e.g., they are unable to come out as a woman to others or to dress or express themselves in the feminine ways that they want to by wearing feminine clothing or makeup because they feel that they will look wrong—or will put feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 themselves at significant risk of being assaulted on the street—if they do this before they have begun a course of hrt (national blood clot alliance 2023).4 recall the weak antipaternalism principle discussed above: weak antipaternalism: paternalism can serve as a justification for a legitimate and permissible state action concerning adults’ selfregarding actions only if (a) the action’s infringement on the freedom, autonomy, or will of those targeted by the paternalistic state action is minimal or (b) the action either on its own or in combination with similar actions provides a serious reduction to the likelihood of death or serious injury of those targeted by the paternalistic state action. limiting trans and nonbinary adults’ access to gahrt by forbidding them from accessing it or by requiring trans and nonbinary adults to wait several months before being able to access it lacks both (a) and (b) and therefore constitutes illegitimate or impermissible paternalism. stopping someone from accessing gahrt is anything but a minimal limit on their freedom, autonomy, or will. if someone is unable to access gahrt for months or years, then they may suffer severe daily (or hourly) gender dysphoria. stopping someone from accessing gahrt may endanger their mental health, and may stop them from being able to live and express themselves as the gender they take themselves to be. stopping someone from accessing gahrt also seems to provide a significant restriction on their bodily autonomy: there is a pill or other medication they could take that could allow them to have a body that they want to have and are strongly motivated to have. so restricting someone from accessing gahrt for (e.g.) years or at least six months on paternalistic grounds does not satisfy (a). limiting trans adults’ access to gahrt does not result in a serious lowering of the chances of death or serious injury of those who seek and would otherwise access gahrt. some studies have found that trans women taking oral estrogen have a higher risk of blood clots than people who are not trans women. and some studies have found that older trans women who have been on hormone replacement therapy, specifically those taking estradiol, for a long period of time have a higher risk of stroke, 4 i was on gahrt for over a year before taking any real steps toward a social gender transition as a trans woman. i have encountered many trans women who have taken a similar approach in trans support groups. a search of reddit for “hormones before social transition” found many posts with people discussing not feeling comfortable socially transitioning before taking hormones and further commenters explaining similar experiences. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 though not of death, than people who are not trans women (masumori and nakatsuka 2023). but these studies do not show that limiting trans women’s access to gahrt can be permissible paternalism in virtue of satisfying (b) for several reasons. first, the world professional association of transgender health (wpath), the world’s foremost body of medical professionals engaged in trans health care, argue that these studies are insufficient to show that gahrt is responsible for increased health risks to trans women. this is because many studies have shown that many minority groups have increased risks of cardiovascular disease and stroke that are at least partially the result of “structural factors such as access to care, socio-economic status, and allostatic load related to minority stress” (coleman et al. 2022, s145). and trans and gender diverse “people often experience social, economic, and discriminatory conditions similar to other minority populations with known increased cardiovascular risk” (s110). wpath therefore advises that medical professionals assess trans patients for cardiovascular and blood-clot risks and work with patients to help them minimize risks—for instance, by helping trans patients to reduce other factors that increase cardiovascular risk, such as helping them to stop smoking, eat healthily, and exercise (coleman et al. 2022, s112, s145). second, we have unfettered access to many things, such as junk food, excessive amounts of fatty food, alcohol, driving, overworking, and failing to exercise, which are correlated with cardiovascular risks similar to those that long-term gahrt for trans women and other amab people is alleged to have (heart foundation 2024; pelc 2022; ding et al. 2014). it seems that our access to these things should not be significantly restricted. limiting access to gahrt on these grounds would also be more intrusive than limits on access to all of these things except, perhaps, overworking. this may lead us to think that we should not understand “a serious reduction to the likelihood of death or serious injury” in (b) in such a way that it permits significant limits on trans women and other amab people accessing estradiol on the basis of stroke risk. for if such significant limits are permissible paternalism, then significant limits on access to alcohol, junk food, and overworking are also permissible paternalism, and significant limits on access to alcohol, junk food, and overworking are not permissible paternalism. so, given weak antipaternalism, significant paternalistic restrictions and bans on trans women and assigned male at birth people’s access to gahrt are impermissible. there is little evidence that gahrt causes significant health risks for trans men and assigned-female-at-birth (afab) nonbinary people. the most significant risk of gahrt for trans men and afab people appears to be the possibility of heightened blood pressure, which could lead to an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke (delgado-ruiz, swanson, and romanos 2019). but this risk can be monitored, and treatment can be adjusted in light of it. furthermore, many diets (e.g., those high in junk food or cholesterol) and many other actions that could not be permissibly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 paternalistically significantly restricted (e.g., overworking, driving a lot) have similar cardiovascular risks, as discussed above. some argue that the rate of regret regarding gah justifies deterring, or restricting, adults from accessing gahrt because it shows that gahrt is not in many adults’ best interests, despite what they might believe when they attempt to access gahrt. there is little systematic evidence of regret rates regarding gah, however, and what evidence there is seems to show that regret rates are as low as regret rates for other kinds of medical procedures; for instance, the most systematic study that has been conducted found a regret rate of less than 6 percent for gah (see §6.e below). so, policies that stop trans people from accessing gahrt for months or years on paternalistic grounds are impermissible because they do not have features (a) or (b) that are required for permissible paternalism according to weak antipaternalism. 4. objections i have encountered two important objections to this argument. a first objection concerns diagnostic regulations. diagnostic regulations are regularly practiced in medicine and, whatever their justification, do not seem to be forms of impermissible paternalism (cf. flanigan 2017). for instance, guidelines for the prescription of adhd medications standardly require 2–3 hours of time with a psychiatrist (which may take several sessions) before an adhd diagnosis can be given to a patient and they can be prescribed medications for their adhd (e.g., australasian adhd guideline development group 2022). whatever the exact justification of such diagnostic regulations (paternalistic or nonpaternalistic), 5 they seem to be not impermissible or impermissible instances of paternalism but only responsible medicine. might significant restrictions on trans people accessing gahrt be justified on similar grounds? if these significant restrictions could be justified on similar grounds, then these significant restrictions could be justified in the following way: they are necessary because in order to practice responsible medicine, someone needs to be diagnosed with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria before being given access to gahrt, and a thorough responsible diagnosis of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria takes significant time.6 i do not want to dispute the following claim: appropriate diagnostic requirements are permissible. if a certain form of evidence gathering or testing of a patient is a necessary or appropriate means for them to be diagnosed with a medical condition, 5 some adhd medications are part of a class of illegal recreational drugs; restrictions on the latter may be paternalistic or other-regarding. 6 thanks to two referees for pushing me on this issue. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 and they need to be diagnosed with that medical condition in order to be given access to a particular medication, then it is permissible to require that form of evidence gathering or testing before a patient is given access to that medication. but it could not be necessary or appropriate to stop trans people accessing gahrt for several months or years in order to diagnose them with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. several months or years are not necessary for psychiatrists to diagnose people with other conditions such as adhd, bipolar, or schizophrenia. and the conditions someone needs to meet in order to be diagnosed with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria do not seem to be conditions that would require more time to diagnose than these other conditions. for instance, someone will be diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a psychiatrist if the psychiatrist believes that they have had (i) a strong desire to be treated as a gender other than that which they were assigned at birth for at least six months and (ii) a strong desire to be that gender for at least six months.7 it would be hard to see why a psychiatrist would need more than a few hours to ascertain that someone satisfies (i) and (ii) if they only need a few hours to ascertain that someone has had symptoms of adhd, across a range of areas of their life, in both their adulthood and childhood, that are not better explained by some condition other than adhd. indeed, most psychiatrists do not need more than one appointment to take themselves to be in a position to diagnose someone with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria (gender care 2020) furthermore, many organizations, including the world professional association for transgender health (wpath), and many trans health professionals in the us and australia, take an informed consent approach to enabling trans people to access gahrt, which does not require any form of diagnosis (coleman et al. 2022, esp. s32 and s110–s127; 7 or if they meet two out of four other conditions—or one of these four other conditions and one of (i) and (ii)—which include (iii) desiring to be rid of some of their sex characteristics due to their incongruence with their experienced gender for at least six months and (iv) desiring some of the sex characteristic associated with another gender for at least six months due to this incongruence (american psychiatric association 2022). similarly, in the uk access to gahrt is contingent upon being found to satisfy the icd-11’s definition of gender incongruence, which involves a “persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex, which often leads to a desire to ‘transition’, in order to live and be accepted as a person of the experienced gender, through hormonal treatment, surgery or other health care services to make the individual’s body align, as much as desired and to the extent possible, with the experienced gender” (who 2015; see also nhs 2022b). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 spanos et al. 2021). so, the idea that any diagnosis could be necessary or appropriate to enable someone to access gahrt is disputed by trans health professionals and, among others, the world’s main body for transgender health. therefore, restricting trans people from accessing gahrt for months or years cannot be justified as part of appropriate or necessary diagnostic requirements. an alternative line of response to this first objection would be to argue that diagnostic restrictions in general must satisfy weak antipaternalism, and they generally do, such as in the case of the diagnostic restrictions regarding adhd and access to medications for adhd: these restrictions are not significant impingements on autonomy and/or prevent significant injury or unnecessary harm. but, as i’ve argued, significant restrictions on access to gahrt do not satisfy weak antipaternalism. a second objection to my argument concerns life-altering and irreversible changes. weak antipaternalism only claims that paternalistic state action is impermissible when it does not provide a serious reduction in the likelihood of serious injury of those targeted by the paternalistic state action. but proponents of limits on access to gahrt often claim that (1) gahrt creates life-altering or irreversible changes (see §5.b and §6 below), and it might be claimed that (2) life-altering or irreversible changes constitute (or are likely to constitute) serious injuries. if (1) and (2) hold, then significant restrictions on access to gahrt do not breach weak antipaternalism.8 there are reasons to contest (1): it is not entirely clear that the changes that gahrt leads to are irreversible or life-altering in the relevant sense. but i want to concentrate on contesting (2) here. many life-altering and irreversible changes are clearly beneficial: having a child is life-altering and irreversible but is clearly beneficial for many and does not constitute a serious injury. other life-altering and irreversible changes do constitute serious injuries: gerald dworkin (1972, 80) mentions becoming addicted to drugs that destroy one’s mental or physical capacities. and it might well be that a state can permissibly restrict our ability to take such drugs on paternalistic grounds. one way to distinguish between these cases may be in terms of whether there is good reason to believe that someone who undergoes the life-altering and irreversible change is likely to be seriously injured or not. many people who become addicted to drugs that destroy their mental or physical capacities seem to have been seriously injured by having these capacities destroyed. in contrast, many parents’ well-being is enhanced by having children. so, although (2) is false, we might be able to make a related valid claim: 8 thanks to a referee for this objection. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 (2*) a life-altering or irreversible change should be treated as likely to lead to a serious injury when it is likely to lead to a significant cost to one’s well-being. but a trans person’s undergoing a course of gahrt is not at all likely to lead to a significant cost to their well-being. multiple studies show that gahrt significantly improves trans people’s well-being (nolan et al. 2023; green et al. 2021; almazan and keuroghlian 2021; chen et al. 2023) and, as i argued, in section 3, there is no reason to believe that people who undertake a course of gahrt are at all likely to regret it. so, restrictions on trans adults’ access to gahrt cannot be justified on the grounds that gahrt leads to life-altering or irreversible changes that are likely to lead to a serious injury to them. 5. implications 5.a. missouri in april 2023 missouri adopted an emergency rule requiring that trans and nonbinary adults must have three years of evidence of gender dysphoria documented by a medical professional prior to accessing gahrt (fentem 2023). this limit on adult access to gahrt was explicitly adopted on the basis of paternalistic considerations; namely, that (trans) people who wish to access gahrt will be better informed if they are required to wait three years and accumulate three years of documented evidence of their gender dysphoria before they are permitted to access gahrt (fentem 2023). given the argument in the previous sections, missouri’s limit is impermissible, illegitimate, and unjustified because it breaches weak antipaternalism. it is (a) a significant infringement on trans adults’ freedom, autonomy, and wills and (b) it is not an infringement that serves to seriously reduce trans adults’ chances of death or serious injury. so, by the lights of weak antipaternalism it is impermissible paternalism. and, as i argued in section 4, a three-year requirement is not a necessary or appropriate diagnostic requirement for someone to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria. therefore, even if diagnostic requirements are a form of permissible paternalism, missouri’s requirement is not permissible or legitimate paternalism. 5.b. united kingdom until at least 2018 many trans adults in the uk were required to satisfy a “real life experience” requirement (rle) before accessing gahrt. rle requirements require trans people to publicly live as the gender that matches their gender identity for months by inter alia being out to everyone in their working and home lives as that gender, using a name that is associated with that gender, and dressing in ways that are (stereotypically) associated with that gender. for instance, until at least 2018 trans women in the uk had to live as women for several months before accessing feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 gahrt (pearce 2018, 65–68, 94, 148). the supposed justification of this was “to ensure that, possibly irreversible hormone treatment is not undertaken without there being a completely coordinated comprehensive care approach which has the ability to meet the changing needs of our service users flexibly and safely” (leeds and york partnership nhs foundation trust 2012; quoted in pearce 2018, 189). this is a paternalistic justification, ensuring that patients do not have access to making potentially irreversible changes that may be against their interests. such rle requirements significantly limit the freedom, autonomy, and will of trans people; particularly pertinent in this context is that, as i explained in section 3, many trans people may strongly desire to be on gahrt but may be extremely uncomfortable with living publicly as a gender other than that which they were assigned at birth prior to having gahrt. and such rle requirements do not avert any significant risk of injury or death. so, such rle requirements are impermissible by the lights of weak antipaternalism. furthermore, such lengthy rle requirements are not necessary in order to diagnose someone with gender dysphoria or gender incongruence since, as i argued in section 4, no more than one or two meetings are necessary or appropriate requirements for such a diagnosis. therefore, such rle requirements are impermissible. 5.c. florida in 2023 florida passed senate bill 254 (sb 254).9 this bill banned all gah for children. but sb 254 also banned 80 percent of gahrt for trans and nonbinary adults in the state because most gahrt for trans and nonbinary adults in florida is provided by nurse practitioners and sb 254 bans nurses from providing gahrt. soft paternalism regarding x is designed to make it more difficult for those subject to paternalism regarding x to access x. for instance, prior to the reversal of roe v. wade,10 texas made it more difficult for people to access abortions by restricting the clinics that could provide abortions, and the putative justification for this law was that it promoted the well-being of women seeking abortions (because, it was claimed that, abortions frustrate their well-being). so, texas tried to paternalistically deter people from having abortions by restricting who could provide an abortion (mayans and vaca 2018, 30–31). similarly, florida seems to have attempted to make it more difficult for trans adults to access gahrt by severely curtailing its availability within the state. 9 s.b. 254, treatments for sex reassignment, 2023–2024 leg., reg. sess. (fla. 2023). this bill was blocked in mid-2024, but the block was overruled in august 2024 (associated press 2024). 10 roe v. wade, 410 u.s. 113 (1973); dobbs v. jackson women's health organization, 597 u.s. 215 (2022). cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 the sponsors of sb 254 justified the bill on paternalistic grounds—namely, the supposed bad consequences of gah for those who have it (sexton 2023). so, florida’s ban on 80 percent of gahrt for trans adults is a paternalistic attempt to deter trans and nonbinary adults from accessing gahrt and therefore falls within the scope of weak antipaternalism. and this ban significantly impacts the freedom, autonomy, and will of trans floridians; it makes many trans floridians unable to access gahrt, which significantly impacts their freedom, autonomy, and will. therefore, these limits on access to gahrt do not meet the first clause, (a), of weak antipaternalism’s bar for legitimate paternalistic state action. and given that such limits on access to gahrt cannot meet the second clause (b) of this weak antipaternalist constraint, florida’s soft paternalistic restriction on trans and nonbinary adults’ access to gahrt falls afoul of the weak antipaternalist constraint too. 5.d. psychotherapy requirements other limits have been proposed on access to gahrt. for instance, lemma and savulescu (2023) propose that trans and nonbinary people be required to engage in psychotherapy before being given access to a regime of gahrt. lemma and savulescu are not entirely clear about the details of this psychotherapy requirement. some weak version of this requirement may not fall afoul of weak antipaternalism. for instance, a requirement that before being enabled to access gahrt, a trans or nonbinary person has one or two sessions of psychotherapy, scheduled for the week after their appointment with a doctor requesting hrt, may not breach weak antipaternalism. this would not constitute a significant impingement on anyone’s autonomy, freedom, or will. and this would not be a requirement greater than the therapy requirements that those seeking ivf or an abortion are subject to in many jurisdictions. yet more significant therapy requirements would breach this weak paternalism requirement. for instance, nebraska recently released guidelines requiring anyone below the age of nineteen to have at least forty hours of therapy for a maximum of two hours per week (so at least five months of therapy) not in a genderaffirming context prior to accessing gahrt (reed 2023). a psychotherapy requirement along these lines that required several months of psychotherapy prior to initiation of gahrt and that was applied to all trans adults seeking gahrt would breach weak antipaternalism. and such a requirement could not be justified as necessary or appropriate for diagnostic reasons for, as i argued in section 4, no more than a few hours, and definitely not five months, are necessary or appropriate for someone to be diagnosed with gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. therefore, significant psychotherapy requirements are impermissible. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 6. paternalistic limits on teenage access to puberty blockers the uk and twenty-five us states have banned puberty blockers and all gah for trans minors (simons-duffin and fung 2024; triggle 2024). the justifications for these bans on puberty blockers are paternalistic. for instance, signing alabama’s ban on gah for minors into law, alabama governor kay ivey said, “we should especially protect our children from these radical, life-altering drugs and surgeries when they are at such a vulnerable stage in life” (alfonseca 2023). as discussed briefly in section 5.c, florida’s ban on trans minors accessing gah has a paternalistic rationale. are these paternalistic bans on trans teenagers’ access to puberty blockers permissible? i will focus on whether it is permissible for a state to ban trans teenagers who have been diagnosed with gender incongruence/dysphoria from accessing puberty blockers; these are the only subset of trans minors that wpath recommends be prescribed puberty blockers (coleman et al. 2022, s48). i will make the following argument: (1) paternalistic bans on adults accessing hormone blockers are impermissible forms of paternalism. (2) no plausible account of when it can be permissible to ban teenagers from accessing x even though it is impermissible to ban adults from accessing x implies that although it is impermissible to ban adults from accessing hormone blockers, it is permissible to ban teenagers from accessing hormone blockers (puberty blockers). it follows from (1) to (2) that bans on teenagers accessing puberty blockers are impermissible.11 sections 2–5 argued for (1). in this section i will argue for (2). 6.a. settled preferences there are several different accounts of why it is easier to justify paternalistic restrictions on children’s actions than on adults’ actions. a first way of differentiating adults’ rights against paternalism from children’s rights against paternalism is in terms of their settled preferences: adults have settled preferences but children lack them (feinberg 1986, 115; mill 1869, ch. 5; schapiro 1999, 729; grill 2019, 125–26). this is an intuitive rationale in the case of gah too. for part of the paternalistic case against 11 we may also need a further premise such as: if paternalistic bans on adults accessing x are impermissible, then other-things-equal paternalistic bans on teenagers accessing x are impermissible. this is very plausible since in all the cases where such bans on teenagers are plausibly permissible, other things are not equal for the kinds of reasons discussed below. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 allowing trans teenagers to access gah, which we see in both alabama’s and florida’s justifications of these bans, is that gah is life-altering and trans youth are not in a position to know that they have a settled preference for being a gender different from that which they were assigned at birth or having sex characteristics different from those which they would form through endogenous puberty. but even if a difference between children and adults in terms of settled preferences could justify paternalistic limits on youth access to some forms of gah, it could not justify paternalistic limits on access to puberty blockers. for there is no evidence that puberty blockers lead to life-altering changes. puberty blockers just give trans teenagers time to assess whether they wish to (i) have the somewhat irreversible changes that endogenous puberty brings, giving them secondary sex characteristics associated with the gender they were assigned at birth, or they wish to (ii) have the somewhat irreversible changes that gahrt brings, giving them the secondary sex characteristics associated with a gender that they were not assigned at birth. puberty blockers themselves do not cause a significant risk of harm and so do not lead to life-altering changes for that reason. long-term puberty suppression has been found to lead to a decrease in bone density. but puberty blockers’ long-term effects on bone density have only been shown to increase the risk of hip fracture by 0.3 percent and to increase the risk of other fractures by 1 percent (ashley 2022, 149; pang et al. 2020; beattie 2022, 73). more generally, the jurisdictions that have banned puberty suppression for trans and nonbinary youth still allow puberty suppression for (cis) children for the purpose of preventing precocious puberty (nhs 2022a; thorn 2023). there is no reason to believe that a child’s experiencing precocious puberty involves greater harm to them than their being forced to go through a puberty that gives them sex characteristics they strongly desire not to have. so, the jurisdictions that have prevented trans and gender diverse teenagers from accessing puberty blockers seem committed to the view that puberty blockers are relatively safe. and several systematic reviews have found that puberty blockers themselves are reasonably safe (bragge et al. 2024; queensland health 2024; ashley 2022, 149).12 so the difference between adults and teenagers regarding settled preferences cannot justify banning puberty blockers when it is impermissible to ban adults from accessing hormone suppressors. 6.b. prudence a second, related account of why paternalistic restrictions on children’s actions can sometimes be justified when similar restrictions on adults’ actions could 12 even reviews generally unfavorable to puberty blockers, such as the uk’s cass review, which is the review that led the nhs to ban puberty blockers, do not hold that evidence shows that puberty blockers harm trans youth (cass 2022, 15). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 not be concerns a (supposed) difference in adults’ and children’s typical capacities for prudence. for instance, grill (2019, 127) says, what children will, or want, may often be quite myopic. young children are often quite spontaneous, oblivious to what will be important to them in the next moment, much less in the next year. many adolescents are easily overwhelmed by strong impulses and feelings, which they may be experiencing for the first time. adolescents also typically lack a sense of proportion and may have a strongly inflated or deflated view of themselves. this all means that children may on average be less prudent than adults, which means that they will more often make choices that are suboptimal or even harmful from a longterm prudential perspective. this, in turn, may give us stronger reason to interfere with them against their will and for their good. this is a plausible account of why a state sometimes has stronger reasons to adopt paternalistic limits on children’s actions than on adults’ actions. but this justification of paternalistic restrictions on children’s actions does not seem to justify preventing all teenagers from accessing puberty blockers. puberty blockers give trans teenagers time to figure out and get the requisite sense of proportion. furthermore, this kind of justification would not seem to justify bans on access to puberty blockers when expert doctors and a teenager’s parents agree that puberty blockers are appropriate for them because the teenager has been found to have gender incongruence/ dysphoria—and accordingly has been found to have wanted to be a different gender, to be treated as a different gender, and/or to have different sex characteristics for a significant period of time. yet bans on puberty blockers in twenty-five us states and the uk apply in such circumstances. 6.c. securing future possibilities third, paternalistic restrictions on children’s actions are sometimes thought to be permissible when and because they secure children a large set of possibilities for their future, secure their future autonomy, or promote the well-being of their future selves; this is why it is permissible for liberal states to mandate compulsory education for instance (grill 2019, 131, 126; feinberg 1986, 326). but puberty blockers seem to facilitate rather than clampdown on such future opportunities (wenner and george 2021). so, a future autonomy-based justification of paternalistic action toward children cannot be employed in support of a blanket ban on puberty blockers for trans minors. furthermore, the future well-being of trans youth who, as adults, live as a gender different from that which they were assigned at birth would seem to be promoted by puberty blockers. trans adults who have not had puberty blockers and cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 wish to treat their gender dysphoria may need expensive surgery, such as a mastectomy, or hours of expensive and painful laser hair removal or electrolysis, to counteract the effects of their endogenous puberty, while other effects of endogenous puberty, such as broader shoulders for those who were assigned male at birth, cannot be counteracted. these changes make it the case that trans adults who have gone through endogenous puberty, and have not had puberty blockers, find it harder to be treated as the gender that matches their gender identity. travers (2021) accordingly argues that trans youth who do not have access to puberty blockers “endure more financial hardship, physical pain and mental anguish later in life” than trans youth who have access to puberty blockers, and that trans youth who do not have access to puberty blockers “becom[e] much more vulnerable to discrimination and violence” than trans youth who do have access to them (see also travers 2018). 6.d. the caretaker view a fourth view is that children can be paternalistically prohibited from ϕ-ing by the state when it knows that if they were adults they would choose to not-ϕ. in an important book on children’s rights, david archard (2004, 78) discusses this view as the caretaker thesis: “the caretaker, if you like, chooses for the child in the person of the adult which the child is not yet but will eventually be.” given that trans adults experience large benefits from having blocked their endogenous puberty, that many trans adults bemoan that they did not block their endogenous puberty, and that there are few costs to puberty blockers, we might well think that adults would prefer that their teenage selves had blocked their puberty if they experienced persistent gender dysphoria as a child and in their teens. furthermore, archard (2004, 84) holds that the caretaker thesis implies that “the good caretaker must strive both to realise the child’s particular nature and to safeguard her ‘open future.’” and it seems that puberty blockers speak to both these requirements on the good caretaker: they preserve a child’s open future, and they respect their particular nature by not forcing them to go through a puberty at odds with their experiences of gender dysphoria. 6.e. an objection i have been arguing that (2) no plausible account of when it can be permissible to ban teenagers from accessing x even though it is impermissible to ban adults from accessing x implies that although it is impermissible to ban adults from accessing hormone blockers, it is permissible to ban teenagers from accessing hormone blockers (puberty blockers). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 and i have already established that (1) paternalistic bans on adults accessing hormone blockers are impermissible forms of paternalism. and it follows from (1) and (2) that bans on teenagers accessing puberty blockers are impermissible. one objection that is often made to defenses of the prescription of puberty blockers is that most trans children who experience persistent gender incongruence or gender dysphoria do not turn into trans or nonbinary adults. proponents of bans or restrictions on puberty blockers often point to studies that they claim show that only 15–40 percent of trans children who experience gender dysphoria or gender incongruence continue to experience gender dysphoria or gender incongruence later in their lives (baron and dierckxsens 2022, 604; steensma et al. 2011; steensma et al. 2013; wallien and cohen-kettenis 2008). there is good reason, however, to contest that this data is correct and is genuinely relevant to the argument that i have been making regarding trans teenagers. some of these studies do not show this 15–40 percent figure. for instance, madeleine wallien and peggy cohen-kettenis’s (2008) study only shows that 43 percent of their participants who experienced gender dysphoria in their childhood did not continue to experience gender dysphoria later in their lives, rather than showing that only 15-40 percent continued to experience gender dysphoria later in their lives. the other studies that are cited concern whether children below the age of twelve continue to have gender dysphoria later in their teens. such studies appear to be irrelevant to the question of whether puberty blockers may be prescribed to trans teenagers who have gender dysphoria because such studies do not show anything about whether teenagers who experience gender dysphoria or gender incongruence after the age of twelve will continue to have this experience later in life. 13 additionally, studies of trans children who have socially transitioned to another gender found that only 7.3 percent had socially retransitioned to a different gender five years later (olson et al. 2022). similarly, a recent study of all the children that went through the only gender clinic in western australia found that out of the 548 teenagers referred to the clinic between the beginning of 2014 and the end of 2020, only 5.3 percent (29 teenagers) detransitioned or came to reidentify with the gender they were assigned at birth; and of those 29 teenagers, 27 reidentified with the gender they were assigned at birth very early in the assessment process. unlike the patients in other studies, these patients were all referred to the clinic as teenagers: the mean age for those assigned male at birth who were referred to the clinic was 13 beattie (2022, 74) notes other problems with these studies. cosker-rowland – paternalistic restrictions on gender-affirming health care published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 13.88 years old; the mean age for those who were assigned to the clinic who were assigned female at birth was 15.81 years old (cavve et al. 2024). so, it seems that there is reason to believe that in fact over 90 percent of trans teenagers diagnosed with gender incongruence or dysphoria continue to experience this later in their lives. furthermore, cameron beattie (2022, 73) makes the plausible argument that even if it were true that only 15–40 percent of trans teenagers’ gender incongruence or dysphoria persisted into adulthood, prohibiting puberty blockers on this basis would be a mistake because puberty blockers (a) will still significantly benefit this 15– 40 percent of trans children who turn into trans adults, (b) will not significantly harm those trans children who do not turn into trans adults, and (c) would in fact still benefit those trans children who do not turn into trans adults at the time by diminishing their negative experiences—and keeping their options open for the future. 7. conclusion there is a recent international trend toward limiting trans and gender diverse adults and teenagers’ access to gender-affirming health care. these limits are almost uniformly justified on paternalistic grounds. this paper has shown that this trend involves impermissible state paternalism and that this trend should be condemned and, if possible, reversed. some paternalistic state actions are impermissible, such as banning or very significantly restricting all adults from getting tattoos, eating junk food, or going mountain climbing. other forms of state paternalism are plausibly justified and, at least, permissible, such as requiring all adults to wear seat belts when they are driving. section 2 gave a plausible principle, weak antipaternalism, that explains the difference between these impermissible and plausibly permissible forms of paternalism. sections 3–5 argued that many limits on trans adults’ access to gahrt that have been implemented in the uk and us fall afoul of this weak antipaternalist principle and so are impermissible forms of paternalism. section 6 discussed existing accounts of when paternalistic restrictions on teenagers’ accessing x can be permissible even though similar paternalistic restrictions on adults accessing x are impermissible. it argued that none of these accounts can be used to ground an asymmetry between paternalistic restrictions and bans on adult access to hormone blockers, which were argued to be impermissible in sections 3–5, and paternalistic restrictions and bans on teenage access to puberty blockers. in this case, paternalistic bans on trans teenagers accessing puberty blockers, which have been implemented in twenty-five us states as well 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scholarship@western, 2025 27 wallien, madeleine s. c., and peggy t. cohen-kettenis. 2008. “psychosexual outcome of gender-dysphoric children.” journal of the american academy of child & adolescent psychiatry 47 (12): 1413–23. wenner, danielle m., and b. r. george. 2021. “not just a tragic compromise: the positive case for adolescent access to puberty-blocking treatment.” bioethics 35 (9): 925–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12929. weston, janet. 2023. “paternalism in historical context: helmet and seatbelt legislation in the uk.” public health ethics 16 (1): 64–76. https://doi.org/10.10 93/phe/phad001. who (world health organization). 2025. “ha60 gender incongruence of adolescence or adulthood.” in international statistical classification of diseases and related health problems, 11th revision (icd-11). https://icd.who.int/browse /2025-01/mms/en#90875286. wilchins, riki. 2024. “cut off from hormones in fl (after 50 years).” medium, february 21 2024. https://medium.com/@rikiwilchins/cut-off-from-hormone s-in-fl-1deba7d9f842. rach cosker-rowland is associate professor in moral and political philosophy at the university of leeds. she is the author of gender identity: what it is and why it matters (oxford university press, 2025), moral disagreement (routledge, 2020), and the normative and the evaluative: the buck-passing account of value (oxford university press, 2019). she has published papers on a variety of topics in ethics, metaethics, political philosophy, and feminist philosophy in journals including ethics, oxford studies in metaethics, and philosophical quarterly. recently, she has published several papers on gender identity, gender concepts and properties, and transgender rights in noûs, analysis, philosophical studies, the journal of medical ethics, and other journals. fpq 18025 cosker-rowland title page fpq 18025 cosker-rowland final format why you ought to defer: moral deference and marginalized experience feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation pearlman, savannah, and elizabeth williams. 2022. “why you ought to defer: moral deference and marginalized experience.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (2). article 2. 2022 why you ought to defer: moral deference and marginalized experience savannah pearlman indiana university–bloomington savannah.pearlman@gmail.com elizabeth williams indiana university–bloomington ecw3@iu.edu pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 why you ought to defer: moral deference and marginalized experience savannah pearlman and elizabeth williams abstract in this paper we argue that moral deference is prima facie obligatory in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized social group that the receiver is not and testifies about their marginalized experience. we distinguish between two types of deference: epistemic deference, which refers to believing p in virtue of trusting the testifier, and actional deference, which involves acting appropriately in response to the testimony given. the prima facie duty we propose applies to both epistemic and actional deference, though defeaters may quash either or both obligations. even if one fails to epistemically defer to the marginalized testifier, we argue that they may still be ethically obligated to act in accordance with their testimony. keywords: moral deference, marginalized testifiers, moral testimony, epistemic injustice, marginalized identity imagine that a nonbinary person tells you, a cisgendered person, that you should not post an all-gender bathroom sign with whimsical or mythical creatures in your restaurant, no matter how well-intended the message.1 representing the bathroom as “all gender” by denoting it with a mermaid, alien, superhero, or a person with two heads is harmful—they say—and if you have one, you should take it down. should you defer to their testimony? in this paper, we argue that not only is it justified for you to defer, but that you prima facie ought to defer.2 1 for examples of such signs, see: https://cdn.customsigns.com/media/catalog/pro duct/cache/3/image/600x600/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/2/12285custom-engraved-unisex-stick-figure-funny-bathroom-sign-8-x-8.png and https://i .pinimg.com/originals/19/bd/fb/19bdfbdb3cb796cd957c44be1334f4a9.jpg 2 by “prima facie” we do not mean to convey that this merely appears to be a duty, which we will later disprove. rather, we mean this is, indeed, a duty, but that such a duty is defeasible—other considerations may override it. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 how should we go about forming our moral judgments? on the one hand, it seems that we ought to use our own reason to understand the moral issue, as an act of autonomy. on the other hand, we are limited moral agents who only have access to certain experiences. we frequently lack the knowledge necessary to understand a wide variety of moral issues. in cases such as these, deferring to others is often our only practical option for obtaining moral information in areas outside of our expertise. in this paper, we set aside the traditional puzzle of moral deference, which focuses on explaining (or denying) an asymmetry between the straightforward acceptability of nonmoral deference and the controversial nature of moral deference.3 instead, we focus on a subset of moral deference, which we take to be not only permissible but prima facie obligatory in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized social group that the receiver is not and testifies about their marginalized experience.4 deference is justified in these cases in part because marginalized people have more relevant nonmoral information with regard to moral claims about their own experience as a member of that marginalized group as compared to their nonmarginalized counterparts.5 we argue that there are two distinct varieties of deference: epistemic and actional.6 at its broadest level, epistemic deference refers to believing p in virtue of 3 for discussion of this puzzle, see mcgrath (2009, 2011), hills (2009), sliwa (2012), enoch (2014), howell (2014), davia and palmira (2015), callahan (2018), and lewis (2020). much of the contemporary moral deference literature questions the permissibility of pure moral deference—i.e., cases in which the receiver believes some moral claim, p, on the basis of another’s testimony that p, though both testifier and receiver share the same nonmoral information. our discussion will be limited to impure deference—i.e., cases in which the testifier has more relevant nonmoral information that the receiver lacks. the pure/impure distinction is sarah mcgrath’s (2009, 322). 4 in this paper we will use the terms “testifier” and “receiver” instead of “speaker” and “hearer.” we prefer the language of “testifier” and “receiver,” as it is more inclusive of those with disabilities. 5 this is not to say that individuals are wholly marginalized or wholly privileged. recent trends in feminist literature have highlighted the complex, interwoven threads of various identities. it will be a frequent occurrence where someone will belong to a marginalized group but also a privileged group—an individual can be simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. 6 robert howell (2014) comes the closest to providing the distinction we have in mind, with his doxastic and active deference. however, whereas howell’s active deference is limited to acting as though the judgment is true, our actional deference will contain this possibility as well as varieties of partial deference, as we explain in section 3. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 trusting the testifier, whereas actional deference refers to acting in accordance with the testimony given. the two can come apart, such that even if epistemic deference is inappropriate, the receiver may still be required to actionally defer to the testimony of marginalized individuals. the prima facie duty we propose applies to both epistemic and actional deference. for the purpose of this paper, we take it that someone has membership in a marginalized group if they belong to a social group that is subject to a combination of interpersonal, institutional, and structural oppression.7 interpersonal oppression refers to the intentional or unintentional transmission of beliefs and acts that uphold and perpetuate systems of oppression between individuals. institutional oppression is found at the level of institutions such as health-care, education, and legal systems. institutions are oppressive when certain policies have the ramifications that marginalized individuals cannot easily navigate the institutional system, lack fair access to resources, or are otherwise treated unequally. structural oppression, on the other hand, is not caused by specific policies or individuals; rather, it cuts across institutional and individual boundaries.8 in section 1, we clarify the distinction between epistemic and actional deference. in section 2, we argue that there is a prima facie duty to epistemically defer in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized community that the receiver is not a part of. in section 3, we argue that there is also a prima facie duty to actionally defer in the kinds of cases with which we are concerned. finally, in section 4, we address common worries, including the understanding objection—which 7 implicit in the division of marginalized membership is a basic question of social ontology: how do we go about defining and distinguishing these groups? we follow iris marion young (2014) in her suggestion that social groups exist in relation to other groups and constitute the identity of their members (11). while social relations produce groups, there is not one feature that all group members necessarily share (12). still, members of the same group have “a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experience or way of life” (7). see frye (2000) for more on oppression. 8 according to young (2014, 39), structural oppression harms members of a marginalized identity via the “often unconscious assumptions and reactions of wellmeaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms—in short the normal processes of everyday life.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 suggests that there is something suspicious about deferring to moral testimony without sufficiently understanding the moral reasoning behind it.9 1. epistemic and actional deference we take “epistemic deference” to be as follows: the receiver epistemically defers to the testifier iff given the testifier’s testimony that p and their assurances that p is the case, the receiver accepts these assurances and, in virtue of trusting the testifier, believes p.10 our account of epistemic deference is within the tradition of richard moran’s assurance view.11 on the assurance view, the testifier—in providing their assurance— takes responsibility for the truth of their testimony. in doing so, the testifier gives the receiver their personal guarantee that the receiver has reason to believe what the testifier has to say.12 moran (2018) argues that the testifier’s assurance that p offers the receiver an epistemic reason to believe p. then, certain background conditions on the part of the testifier (such as their reliability or trustworthiness) determine whether or not the assurance provides a good reason to believe p. the relation between testifiers and other contextual features help to identify the type of speech act, which in turn will determine if we should attend to certain background conditions. for instance, if the 9 a number of philosophers (hills [2009] most prominently) have argued that the fishiness of moral deference is rooted within the deferrer’s lack of moral understanding about the moral claim on which they defer. 10 in this, we follow karen jones (1999, 67), who contends that “someone accepts the testimony of another if she forms the belief that p on the basis of the other’s saying that p is the case.” 11 jennifer lackey (2008, 2011) and frederick f. schmitt (2010) have raised notable criticisms of the assurance view. lackey (2008, 2011) has argued that the view faces a two-horned dilemma: “either the view of testimony in question is genuinely interpersonal but epistemologically impotent, or it is not epistemologically impotent but neither is it genuinely interpersonal” (lackey 2008, 222). as we will show in section 2, the three conditions we take to be necessary to have good reason to defer are both epistemologically potent (truth-conducive and evidentially based) and genuinely interpersonal (sensitive to assurance and trust). for a full-fledged defense of the assurance view against these charges, see moran (2018). 12 note that the assurance can be implicit, otherwise deference would be limited to very few cases indeed. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 testifier is being sarcastic, the receiver need not consider whether they are presumed to be reliable about that topic, since the purpose of the act is meant as a joke rather than to convey information. in this way, interpreting the speech act is a gatekeeping feature. if the act indicates sincerity and the receiver trusts the testifier, the testifier’s assurance provides a positive epistemic reason to believe that p is the case. when the receiver trusts the testifier’s assurance, they are doing more than trusting in a merely evidential sense. that is, trusting the testifier’s assurance does not simply reduce to “the fact that this person is committed to p is evidence that p is true.” we embrace two varieties of trust, one positive and one negative. the positive version is identified by its interpersonal features, which berislav marušić (2017) highlights in his account of trust. this kind of trust is a “belief held from the participant stance,” which licenses us to react with various participant attitudes to the person giving us the assurance (5).13 giving an assurance is like making a promise; epistemically deferring is, analogously, like believing the promisor. the interpersonal burden is on the person giving the assurance to ensure that it is true— if the assurance is false, the person who received the assurance can rightly feel betrayed, disappointed, or indignant, to give some examples. marušić (2017, 4) writes that positive trust (our term) has two “functional roles: it stops enquiry and precludes doubt.” when the receiver epistemically defers, they trust the testifier in this positive way, accepting their assurance—they do not doubt that the testimony is true. this is not to say that they cannot change their mind if presented with new information: epistemic deference is defeasible. however, when the receiver epistemically defers, they do not continue to seek out others’ opinions or purposefully inquire on the topic in order to determine the validity of the claim given by the assurance. this differs from the evidential account, which sanctions the receiver to continue actively attending to new evidence. in contrast, when the receiver trusts in this positive sense, they take the matter to be settled (though their belief might change if new information comes to light). in contrast, the negative version of trust is warranted in the absence of good reasons to distrust. in this, we follow edward hinchman (2005, 578–79): 13 drawn from p. f. strawson’s notion of the “participant point of view,” the participant stance is meant to capture the way in which we interact with other people as persons, capable of holding reactive attitudes towards one another, rather than as mere things, “posing problems simply of intellectual understanding, management, treatment, and control” (strawson 2008, 18). for accounts of trust rooted in the participant stance, see marušić (2017), helm (2015), hawley (2014), hieronymi (2008) and holton (1994). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 trust is a source of epistemic warrant just when it is epistemically reasonable. trust is epistemically reasonable when the thing trusted is worthy of the trust—as long as there is no evidence available that it is untrustworthy. assuming satisfaction of this negative evidential condition . . . , when an epistemic faculty is trustworthy by serving as a reliable guide to the truth, it makes available an entitlement to believe what it tells you whose basis lies simply in the fact that you trust it. negative trust makes available a minimal justification to believe the testimony in a truth-connected way—but positive trust gives you thicker interpersonal reasons to believe, not simply because the information is available but because someone has assured you that it is the case. taken together, the positive and negative kinds of trust capture the interpersonal features of trust while ensuring that it is sufficiently truthtracking.14 epistemic deference requires that the receiver trusts the testifier in both of these ways. from here on, when we speak generally of “trust,” we mean this as an umbrella term, which encompasses both varieties. while we do not dismiss the importance of evidence, we take evidence to be distinct from assurance, which is an appeal to trusting the testifier in virtue of their interpersonal relationship rather than merely by what evidence they have on offer.15 14 we think this combination is sufficient to avoid lackey’s (2008, 2011) concerns. while lackey (2011) takes hinchman’s view to successfully place “the trust view on the epistemological map,” she also contends that on it, “trust itself turns out to be epistemically superfluous” (18). lackey’s primary worry is that someone could overhear the information and, without having any of the interpersonal relations, succeed in gaining the epistemic information. to this, we are convinced of moran’s (2005) reply to such cases: that the asymmetry between cases where you are the intended receiver of testimony versus an unintended overhearer lies in the risk that such testimony is deceptive. in the case where you are the intended receiver, the testifier acts as a guarantor—they accept the risk on themselves that what they are saying is truthful (and not an inside joke or a sarcastic quip). in the case where you are not the intended recipient of testimony, the burden of risk shifts to you. 15 the importance of the interpersonal relationship also helps to block various unjust beliefs that would seem warranted on the basis of evidence alone. for example, basu (2019) highlights the “rationally racist” belief that black customers leave worse tips. moss (2018) describes a case where, statistically, one could infer that a female employee is an administrative assistant. franklin (2005) describes a case where he was mistaken as a worker at a social club that he attended, since the club had very few black members and many black workers. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 the assurance—which is sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit—will provide the epistemic justification, rather than the background conditions themselves. to illustrate how epistemic deference works within the assurance view, let us begin with a nonmoral scenario. take the case of a plumber who, upon inspecting my sink, diagnoses the broken garbage disposal as a result of my having carelessly disposed of artichoke leaves too fibrous for my disposal to manage. the plumber’s assurance as to the cause of my broken garbage disposal acts as a type of guarantee— that according to the evidence he has as the relevant expert, this is the proper diagnosis. when i epistemically defer, i accept the reason given by the assurance as a good reason and form the belief that the artichoke leaves were the cause of my clogged sink. whereas epistemic deference involves trusting the testifier in virtue of believing the assurance, actional deference does not require trust but merely requires that the receiver relies upon the testimony.16 our definition of “actional deference” is as follows: the receiver actionally defers to the testifier when they act in accordance with and in response to the testimony that they have received. acting in accordance with the testimony does not require belief or trust—it only requires that the receiver act in a way that is appropriate given the practical reason supplied by the testimony. what does “acting in accordance with the testimony” mean? with some kinds of moral testimony such as “never do x,” “do x if y,” or “always do x,” the answer seems clear. if the testimony is “never do x,” and the receiver never does x in response to the testimony, the receiver has clearly acted in accordance with the testimony.17 with less straightforward testimony, such as “generally do x” or “sometimes do x,” the receiver may have to investigate further to discover the right 16 in this we roughly follow marušić’s (2017, 3) account, on which “trust and reliance are fundamentally different—as different as judgment and action.” 17 testimony may be more or less clear with regard to what actions the receiver should take. for example, an organizer might testify that you should sign the petition in front of you, show up to saturday’s protest, etc. the receiver might also receive advice that is targeted to specific situations, such as “don’t comment on your daughter’s weight when she comes home for thanksgiving.” but frequently, moral advice will be difficult to translate into action. take, for instance, the task of determining which maxims are licensed by kant’s categorical imperatives or the task of determining what the most virtuous person would do in a given situation. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 conditions for actional deference and do the best they can in the meantime.18 often, depending on the content of the testimony and the context in which it is given, there will be a number of appropriate ways to act. for instance, if my child’s pediatrician tells me that it’s important to vaccinate children and warns me against anti-vax propaganda, i may vaccinate my children, encourage my friends and family to vaccinate their children, or say something if i see a friend post anti-vax misinformation on social media. if i do any of these things, i act in accordance with the testimony given and, in doing so, rely on the doctor’s testimony. when the receiver actionally defers in response to testimony, they take the testimony to provide a reason for action. like any moral reason, it may be overridden by stronger reasons for action. for example, if i am told by a woman that i shouldn’t touch women without their explicit consent, i do not fail to actionally defer to that testimony by grabbing a woman who is about to fall off a cliff, even if she does not explicitly consent. there is a stronger reason to preserve her life that reveals an exception to the general moral claim. even if the reason for action presented by the testimony is overridden in certain cases, i actionally defer if i act in accordance with the strength of the reason given by the testimony. while ideally we would epistemically defer in cases in which we have good reason to trust the testifier and hence believe the testimony, actional deference does not require those things. importantly, it is governed by practical reasons for action. for example, suppose i am playing a game in which my teammates are attempting to give me information from a manual they possess to disarm a digital 18 one worry is that, when the demands of actional deference are unclear, actional deference will collapse into the epistemic. for instance, if we must try acting on the advice or do our own research to determine its applicability in a particular instance, it seems that we will eventually either form the belief and epistemically defer or determine that the testimony was inaccurate. though this might occur, we do not agree that actional deference necessarily reduces to the order of the epistemic. you might continue to act in accordance with what someone tells you to do but remain morally unconvinced that it is the right thing to do, even if you never run across any potential counterexamples in experience. see, for instance, the male colleague who is given the advice, “don’t comment on female colleague’s appearance.” the male colleague may be unconvinced that this is wrong in all cases but may adhere to the advice out of self-preservation and never encounter any good reason to act differently. likewise, we could imagine someone who is constitutionally agnostic, such that they are unable to fully trust and believe any testimony or evidence provided to them. despite their doxastic agnosticism, this person might act on the testimony given to them for practical reasons that do not reduce to belief in the testimony. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 bomb, where my teammates only have access to the manual and i only have access to the bomb. suppose that in past instances of this game i have found that my teammates have often lead me astray because they have missed important details in the complex manual. in this particular game, i now have only two seconds left to disarm the bomb and my teammates tell me to press the red button. even though i might reasonably fail to trust my teammates and believe that this is the right thing to do, i must rely on their testimony to have a chance of winning the game and defusing the bomb. when i press the red button, the bomb might explode, and i might lose the game, despite my practical reason being to win the game. thus, i actionally defer to my teammates without epistemically deferring to them. epistemic deference and actional deference can also come apart in the other direction. i may epistemically defer to the testimony of a local community activist when they say that this holiday season, it is important to hold your relatives responsible when they say racist things at the dinner table. and yet, though i may truly believe this is the morally right thing to do, i may also fail to actionally defer. say, for example, that at christmas my ninety-year-old grandmother makes a veiled racist comment in passing before continuing onto another tangent. perhaps i am unwilling to cause my grandmother and other family members discomfort by backpeddling the conversation to the inappropriate comment and focusing in for a teaching moment. i may make excuses for myself—“it happened so fast!” or “she’s ninety years old. is this really the moment to talk to her about racism?” such a case shows that it is possible to split the distinction in the opposite direction—to sincerely epistemically defer and yet fail to actionally defer. in this section we have defined two distinct varieties of deference. we now turn to motivating a prima facie duty to epistemically defer. 2. why you ought to epistemically defer imagine again that you are a cisgendered person who has been told by a nonbinary person that your well-meaning, whimsical bathroom sign is actually rather offensive. assume no explanation is given. should you epistemically defer? we argue that there is good epistemic reason to epistemically defer when (1) the receiver justifiably believes that the testifier has more relevant expertise about p (and as such the receiver believes the testifier to have greater epistemic authority), (2) the receiver lacks good overriding reasons against p, meaning that negative trust is warranted, and (3) the receiver should positively trust the testifier on the issue about which they are testifying.19 19 condition 2, coupled with a general epistemic norm that receivers should be generally aware of the basic conditions for trustworthiness and reliability, fortifies our view against gullible receivers. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 the first condition provides us with an epistemic reason to defer.20 while fullfledged expertise provides the strongest basis for epistemic authority, it is not necessary. a much weaker condition is sufficient for epistemic deference, depending on the context of the situation: the testifier need only to be better informed about the relevant information than the receiver in order for the receiver to be justified in deferring to the testifier.21 the second condition ensures that we are unjustified in deferring to a testifier about a proposition that we have good reason to believe is untrue, misleading, or distorted.22 depending on the circumstances of the case, the third condition can represent either an epistemic “should” or both an epistemic and a moral “should.” the epistemic “should” captures the requirement that epistemic deference meets the conditions of positive, interpersonal trust. the moral “should” excludes those who would withhold trust for the wrong reasons, such as prejudice or discrimination. conditions 1 and 3 positively justify deference, and condition 2 is a negative condition: the receiver must lack any good overriding reason that would defeat the testimony. as such, our account both values the interpersonal features of trust and assurance and is epistemically truth-tracking. taken together, these three conditions provide us with a justified foundation for epistemic deference. that is, they provide us with sufficiently good reason to epistemically defer, though we may be obligated when there is moral reason to defer. return to our central case: do you have good reason to epistemically defer when the testifier is testifying about their marginalized experience and they are a member of a marginalized group that you are not? take our condition 1, that the testifier has more relevant expertise about p than the receiver and as such has greater epistemic authority than the receiver. we argue that members of marginalized groups have greater relevant expertise regarding claims about their experiences qua member of that marginalized group than nonmembers. for example, a person with a disability that requires them to use a scooter will have (at the very least) greater nonmoral 20 john hardwig (1985) argues that rationality sometimes requires a layperson to defer to an expert. or, as he puts it “rationality sometimes consists in refusing to think for oneself” (336). 21 take the following example: i am a flight attendant on an airplane, and there is a medical emergency. i have very little medical training. concerned, i call for a doctor over the loudspeaker. though no doctors are available, there is a veterinarian ready and willing to help. certainly, she is not an expert on the human body, but i am justified in deferring to her medical orders in handling this sick passenger. 22 our second condition is similar to an amendment offered by hinchman (2005), which we referenced in section 1. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 knowledge than an abled person with regard to the accessibility of the various places they go. take our condition 2, that the receiver lacks good, overriding reasons against p. if the receiver has no good reason to distrust the testifier, then our conditions for negative trust are fulfilled. receivers should be careful not to be misled by various unjustified rationales that cast doubt on the truth of the testimony given by marginalized individuals—for example, “you’re just emotional,” “you’re just an angry black woman,” “you can’t be objective about this,” and so on. take our condition 3. should you trust the marginalized testifier on the basis of the assurance? if our first two conditions are fulfilled, then you have good epistemic reason to positively trust the testifier, where that reason is provided by the assurance itself. in sum, we have good reason to epistemically defer when we have reason to believe that a testifier is in a better position to know p, there is no reason to distrust the testifier, and positive trust is warranted by the testifier’s assurance. the preceding discussion has focused primarily on epistemic reasons to defer; however, there are also moral reasons to defer in the kinds of cases with which we are concerned. when our three conditions are met and you fail to defer to marginalized individuals testifying about their own experience, you fail to treat them with proper respect. this failure of respect might occur in two different ways.23 first, it might be a matter of failing to give proper appraisal respect, or respect for a person in light of their merits or excellences. if you do not defer to a marginalized person because you do not appreciate their expertise and authoritative standing as an epistemic agent, you fail to give proper appraisal respect. this is straightforwardly a case of epistemic injustice, especially if you do not give proper appraisal respect due to some prejudiced view of the members of a particular marginalized group.24 second, withholding deference may represent a failure to give proper recognition respect, by which you fail to treat the testifier as a moral person and give them the status value they deserve. in order to give members of marginalized groups the respect they deserve, we must recognize them as experts regarding testimony about their experience qua members of that group.25 historically, members of these groups have been ignored, 23 the appraisal respect/recognition respect distinction was introduced by darwall (1977). 24 for accounts of epistemic injustice, see miranda fricker (2007), davis (2016), anderson (2012), and pohlhaus (2017). 25 we recognize the harm of assuming marginalized persons to be spokespersons for their identity. we will address this and other similar worries in section 4. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 and we should be careful not to repeat those injustices.26 the injustice of a single instance of disrespect is compounded by a history of dominant groups failing to give proper appraisal and recognition respect to marginalized persons. as such, there is good moral reason to positively trust marginalized testifiers and epistemically defer. we have argued that there is both good epistemic reason and good moral reason to epistemically defer in the general kinds of cases with which we are concerned. each taken alone might be insufficient to justify a prima facie obligation to defer; however, taken together, they show that we ought to defer. if there is good epistemic reason to defer, then the receiver is at least justified in deferring. if, in addition, we consider the potential moral costs of failing to epistemically defer (informed by a history of oppression), then it becomes clear that the receiver ought to defer in such cases. as such, we have a prima facie obligation to epistemically defer in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized group that we ourselves are not and they testify about their marginalized experience. returning to the case of the nonbinary acquaintance, does it meet our three epistemic conditions? first, given that our nonbinary acquaintance is a member of the relevant marginalized group and that the receiver, a cisgendered person, is not, the testifier has more relevant expertise as a member of that marginalized group. this informs their testimony about the moral status of whether it is harmful to use a sign with mythical creatures to represent an all-gendered bathroom. second, the receiver has no reason to withhold negative trust from the testifier. third, the assurance provides the receiver with an interpersonal reason to defer. as such, the receiver has good epistemic reason to epistemically defer. does the receiver have good moral reason to epistemically defer? if the receiver fails to defer in this case, then they either (a) do not show proper appraisal respect by failing to treat the acquaintance as the relative expert that they are on this matter or (b) do not show proper recognition respect by failing to treat the acquaintance as a person who can make moral claims upon them. failing to believe the acquaintance may risk committing another epistemic injustice in a history of injustice. as such, the receiver has good moral reason to defer. hence, as there is both good epistemic reason and good moral reason to defer, there is a prima facie obligation to epistemically defer in this case. 26 our view does not reduce to the claim that deference is sufficient to counteract epistemic injustice. we recognize that epistemic injustice is a complex interpersonal, institutional, and structural phenomenon, and our view only addresses a small part of this larger problem. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 3. why you ought to actionally defer unlike epistemic deference, actional deference can be appropriate even when belief is unwarranted. whether we should actionally defer depends on a variety of practical considerations that cannot easily be reduced to what is epistemically justified—we must rely on our practical judgment to determine how to act in light of the testimony that we have received. in this section, we gesture towards two primary considerations that should guide our practical judgments. first, we have general moral reason to do what is right, to act in ways that are appropriate, to do what is good, and so on. when we have good reason to believe that the moral testimony given to us has been provided by someone with greater expertise and that it presents the strongest reason for how we ought to act in a particular situation, we have good reason to follow the advice the testimony gives in that situation.27 for example, if a friend (who i know to be kind and socially adept) gently points out that i should let others talk a bit more in group conversations, i should follow that friend’s advice and allow more space for others in conversation. we all have moral blind spots and sometimes must rely on the testimony of others to determine what we ought to do. second, there is an interpersonal dimension to actional deference that itself provides reason to act on the testimony. though positive trust is not required for actional deference, the interpersonal relationship that the receiver has with the testifier will influence how the receiver ought to act, as the receiver’s actions reflect upon that relationship. if i fail to actionally defer to the testimony of a trustworthy friend, i communicate to them that i did not take their assurance seriously. depending on the particular relationship between the testifier and the receiver, the receiver’s actions may have a different import. however, all that is needed to get interpersonal reason to defer off the ground is the moral relationship between testifier and receiver. failing to actionally defer can be disrespectful to the testifier, either by violating expectations of trust or respect within an interpersonal relationship or by acting in a way that would cause harm regardless of any breach of trust or respect. members of dominant groups should be careful to avoid either kind of disrespect. for someone who is outside of a marginalized group, it is easy to be ignorant (sometimes willfully so) of the moral experiences of those within that marginalized group and of the harms that members of the dominant group inflict upon the marginalized. as such, those in dominant groups have special reason to pay heed to the testimony of marginalized individuals in particular so as to avoid 27 this, of course, depends on whether the testifier is sufficiently trustworthy and reliable. the receiver might have good reason to do the opposite of what a constitutional liar says. depending on the stakes involved, a slight degree of untrustworthiness might be sufficient to make actional deference inappropriate. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 perpetuating epistemic injustice and the other day-to-day harms that marginalized individuals experience. even if a member of the dominant group does not understand or believe the claim that the member of the marginalized group is putting forward, they still ought to actionally defer and rely on the testimony in action. to do otherwise is to fail to appreciate the interpersonal claim being made on the receiver and to risk doing further harm to members of the marginalized group. take the example of the nonbinary acquaintance again. if the receiver, a cisgendered person, has good epistemic and moral reason to trust the acquaintance, they also have good reason to act in accordance with the testimony and refrain from hanging a sign with whimsical creatures to indicate the “all gender” status of the bathroom. while they may lose some pleasure by using a different sign that they find less humorous, there does not appear to be any good reason that trumps the acquaintance’s testimony that posting such a sign is a harmful thing to do. hence, they shouldn’t post such a sign, and if they have one, they should replace it. importantly, our distinction between epistemic and actional deference aids in the explanation of certain cases with which some traditional explanations of moral deference have difficulty—namely, cases in which epistemic deference is unwarranted. take, for instance, an example of a friend who confides in me that she was molested in the past by a high school teacher. let us stipulate that she has once lied to me in the past about a related matter. many accounts of moral deference (mcgrath [2009], hills [2009], and lewis [2020], to name a few) would recommend that i do not defer in this scenario—full stop. and in some ways, it is obvious that we ought not defer. knowing that my friend has lied about a similar matter in the past undermines her trustworthiness. as a result, her testimony fails to be credible enough for me to have good epistemic reason to believe that she has been harmed in this way. and yet, though i may fail to believe her, it seems patently the wrong thing to do to act fully in line with this disbelief. i should, perhaps, act in certain ways as though her testimony is true, even if i do not have full-fledged belief that it is.28 it would be appropriate for me to comfort her, to offer my support, and to warn her if a movie 28 some might suggest that a credence notion of belief would better describe those cases in which beliefs seem to be partial. this could amount, potentially, to partial epistemic deference. however, the credence view has its own difficulties; namely, a penchant for vagueness and mathematical complication. for this reason, our account uses a more traditional epistemic framework. still, while we take belief to be all-ornothing, the way we determine how to act will depend on our degree of confidence that the testimony is correct (or incorrect). thus, determining how we act in response to testimony parallels the credence view about belief. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 i’ve picked out for us to watch contains sexual violence.29 despite my reasons to doubt her testimony and not accept it as fully credible, i still have reason to act in certain ways as if the testimony is true. because of the nature of the testimony, i have reason to be sensitive and caring around what is very possibly a real and heavy trauma for my friend. in the literature on moral deference, philosophers have gestured at the importance of actional deference even in the absence of belief. david enoch (2014, 6) writes: “even if . . . deference-based moral judgments are epistemically suspicious, still we should act on them.” similarly, matheson, mcelreath, and nobis (2018, 14) argue that for any proposition “we have three options (believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgment)” whereas with actions “we have two options: do it, or don’t do it.” of course, there are an array of ways in which we can act (or fail to act). thus, in cases where we lack belief (and therefore do not epistemically defer), we must decide how to act (or to refrain from acting) and to what extent our action should be responsive to the testimony at hand. return to our example: it is irresponsible to epistemically defer to my friend, as a result of her history of being untrustworthy regarding such matters. we might, as matheson, mcelreath, and nobis suggest, suspend judgment. however, we must determine when it is appropriate to act in accordance with the testimony and when it is not. these determinations should take into account the possibility that my friend is insincere. thus, this case appears to be one in which only partial actional deference is warranted. while epistemic deference is all-or-nothing (belief or failure to believe), actional deference admits to degrees. actional deference is a strain of deference distinct from its epistemic counterpart, subject to its own appropriateness conditions. we can be morally required to actionally defer even when it is epistemically inappropriate to believe the testifier. 4. objections we have argued for a prima facie obligation to defer both epistemically and actionally in cases in which the testifier is a member of a marginalized community that the receiver is not. we now turn to potential concerns for our account. 29 depending on the relationship, it might also be appropriate for me to attempt to have a deeper conversation with her about whether this particular claim is true, knowing that she has lied in the past. finding the right way to have that conversation might be incredibly fraught. but doing so might be necessary to discover whether this claim is truthful, so i can either get behind my friend fully or help her to grow with regard to her tendency to lie about these things. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 perhaps the most common objection to epistemic deference on moral matters is the understanding objection. several philosophers have sought to pinpoint the fishiness of moral deference within the deferrer’s lack of understanding why they should act in accordance with a particular moral claim.30 there are two important features of this set of cases that allow our central claim to avoid the understanding objection: (1) since certain phenomenological experiences of being a member of a marginalized group are not accessible to the receiver, the receiver cannot have a full and complete understanding of the moral reasons that support the testimony. (2) the receiver gains a good bit of moral information about the testimony by virtue of recognizing that the person giving the testimony is a member of a marginalized group and that it is salient to their experiences as a member of that marginalized group. the first feature highlights that the direct, full-fledged grasping of reasons is too strict a threshold for nonmembers of a marginalized group to meet, since they will be unable to have the relevant phenomenological experiences. one might object that, given enough personal narratives of these experiences or by extrapolation, one could come to know what those experiences are like at the phenomenological level. however, as laurence thomas (1998, 362) argues, there are serious limits to reflective imagination, such that “no amount of imagination in the world can make it the case that one has the subjective imprimatur of the experiences and memories of another.” the second feature, however, seems to provide the cognitive grasping of at least some moral reasons—namely that there is some way in which the moral claim is tied to the experience of marginalization. it may be fairly clear from context that the reason some action is wrong is because it is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. it is unclear what further explanation beyond “x is wrong because x is racist” might be needed in order to justifiably hold the belief that x is wrong—if more were required, it is unclear how many of our moral beliefs would survive scrutiny. if it is plausible that certain features of the testimonial exchange are sufficient for the kind of understanding required by the understanding objection, then our central claim about epistemic deference is not overturned. even if our view survives the understanding objection, one might worry that the belief produced from deference is still somehow epistemically inferior to a belief formed from a more complete moral understanding. yet, if the receiver already has substantial understanding, why would they need to defer in the first place? second, while we agree that in some circumstances it is preferable to have in-depth moral understanding, we are too limited as agents to be able to do this for all, or even most, of our beliefs. given these limitations, beliefs formed from deference have a distinct 30 see hills (2009), callahan (2018), mcgrath (2011), and nickel (2001). “fishiness” is enoch’s word (2014). pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 value of their own, both epistemically, as they allow us to expand our moral knowledge, and morally, as they deepen our interpersonal relationships. deference, then, should be seen as a practice of community building and shared epistemic labor, in the same way that the university is an institution of community building and shared epistemic labor. the experts in the philosophy department do not have the time or energy to fully understand everything in every other department, yet they can trust the experts in other parts of the university. in our view, communal epistemic trust based on differential expertise is a distinctly valuable enterprise, and it is unclear that it is inferior to a more individual view of epistemic achievement. in cases where marginalized people testify about the identity-harms that they have experienced, these community-building relations are important both morally and epistemically. morally, trusting marginalized people communicates respect. epistemically, the fact that the nonmarginalized receiver cannot understand (or understand fully) makes deference the proper response. however, one related issue is that a failure to internalize understanding makes it difficult to transmit beliefs. return to our mermaid sign. imagine that another employee at the café sees the owner taking down the sign. they might ask, “hey, why are you doing that?” the owner might say, “it’s offensive.” the employee asks, “oh really? why is that?” the owner could reply, “i had a chat with a nonbinary customer who assured me it is. they didn’t have time to explain, but i believe them.”31 this might be insufficient for the employee to come to believe that the sign is, indeed, offensive—especially since he did not participate in the interpersonal exchange, himself.32 however, the owner’s explanation of the relevant features of the testimonial exchange will provide at least some understanding for why she is taking down the sign. both the owner and the employee could take it upon themselves to gain a better understanding by deciding to research the issue online, reading testimony from other lgbtq+ people on the same topic. in this way, deference can open the door to learning—it needn’t be construed merely as an epistemic backstop. pursuing your curiosity is consistent with epistemic deference, so long as you believe the testifier and do not seek out information with the intent to undermine their testimony. yet another way of motivating the understanding objection is that epistemic deference suffers a double bind: either the testifier can provide us reasons to support 31 thank you to the anonymous reviewer for imagining this scenario. 32 we have argued in a previous footnote that although knowledge can usually transmit via testimony (or overheard testimony), this fact does not indicate that assurance is epistemically superfluous, as lackey claims. moran (2005) highlights that in such cases, the fact that the receiver is not the target of the assurance puts them at greater risk to misconstrue the testimony’s content or intended speech act. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 the belief in question, or they cannot. if they can, why do we need deference at all? and if they cannot, why should we be motivated to believe them in the first place?33 to the first horn we have two replies. first, we take it that marginalized people can, generally speaking, provide reasons in support of their testimony.34 a disabled friend could provide the reasons why a building is inaccessible, or the nonbinary acquaintance could outline why the sign is offensive. however, sometimes these reasons aren’t easily understood by those who do not have the proper experience to conceptualize them. perhaps, in an ideal world (unconstrained by the limitations of time, labor, and conceptual experience) there would be something preferable about learning information for oneself over deferring to others.35 importantly, we do live in a world constrained by these social and temporal features. just because a marginalized testifier can provide us reasons for their belief does not mean they have the time, desire, or will to do so. a nonmarginalized person might ask for those reasons if they are interested in understanding rather than deferring. but they ought to be prepared to receive a “no” in reply. at the end of the day, there is a fine line between asking and insisting that a marginalized person provide reasons for the testimony about their own identity harms. too often, the task of providing a privileged person understanding is done at the expense of marginalized people’s time and energy, resulting in the harms of spokespersoning and epistemic exploitation (both topics we will return to towards the end of this section). turn to the second horn—if they can provide reasons, why do we need deference at all? to answer this, we return to the participant stance and the relationship between persons. in the cases of the sort with which we are concerned, where limited evidential reasons are provided, it is the interpersonal exchange rather than the evidence that does the work to produce the receiver’s belief or action. the testifier appeals to their own experience qua a marginalized person, which is firsthand experience from the relevant social identity. this lends weight to the credibility and persuasiveness of the testifier, framing them as a person worthy of trust. when the receiver is (or would be) unconvinced by the evidential reasons alone, but trusts and believes the testifier in virtue of their assurance that p is the case, they 33 thank you to an anonymous reviewer for this formulation of the worry. 34 we say “generally speaking” because there will be a limited number of cases where the reasons may be inaccessible or difficult to parse. marginalized people may also have a good understanding of the moral features of their experience but lack the ability to effectively communicate it to others. 35 we will bracket this conversation, but others have discussed the virtue or vice of epistemic autonomy at length. elizabeth fricker (2006) has argued that epistemic autonomy is an ideal we should seek to achieve. zagzebski (2012) and wiland (2021) deny that epistemic autonomy has any intrinsic value. pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 epistemically defer to them. deference, rather than mere learning, captures the interpersonal heft of this exchange. even if the understanding objection or some other worry were to succeed against our argument for a prima facie duty to epistemically defer, we argue that actional deference may still be required. imagine a slightly edited case where the café owner who has posted the whimsical “all gender” bathroom sign is a cis person who is new to the notion of being trans or nonbinary. perhaps this person is self-aware enough that they should be attentive to the nonbinary speaker, but they do not fully grasp the relevant concepts, and therefore need time to understand what they mean. in this case, the owner still has the obligation to actionally and epistemically defer, though they may not be aware of the latter. even if the lack of conceptual background may prevent them from realizing they should believe what the customer has to say, the conversation alone should be enough for the owner to realize they should take down the sign—that is, to act in line with the testimony given. the previous objections have targeted epistemic deference, but the following objections target both strains. one of the most pressing worries is that, were deference of this kind to become a more widespread social practice, there would be several negative outcomes that would undermine the benefits of the practice. first, it seems that such deference norms might encourage superficial deference, by which individuals might purport to believe marginalized people and act in accordance with their testimony for the wrong reasons. for instance, it may become a norm to “defer” to marginalized testifiers as a means of virtue signaling rather than with the primary intent of harm reduction or treating others with respect. of course, it is often difficult to separate instances of virtue signaling from deference done for the right reasons. the descriptive possibility of virtue signaling, however, does not count as a mark against our account because the norms of deference we propose can explain why virtue signaling is not done in the proper spirit of deference. the point of deferring is to properly listen to marginalized persons and respect them, and virtue signaling takes this basic aim and corrupts it to the ends of the privileged who seek to maintain their social power. second, it seems that the expansion of deference norms within our social practices may allow people with internalized oppression to be “used,” not as a source for deference but instead merely as support for the receiver’s own foregone conclusions. again, this kind of move undermines the core spirit of deference and makes marginalized people into pawns to be used for winning argumentative battles. it is not acceptable to “defer” to the one marginalized individual who shares your view simply because it reinforces your own perspective. finally, it seems that structural features of who makes it into the conversation might encourage deference to a select group of unrepresentative marginalized agents feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 who have made it into the conversation through luck or relative privilege, even if the receiver defers for the right reasons. as olúfẹḿi táíwò (2020) argues, the good intentions of deference may be led astray by the limitations of who is in the room. if we only pay attention to the people in the room, we will fail to see how the room is constructed and who has been left outside of it. due to its limited scope, our account does not touch on the construction of the room itself; however, it can distinguish between different experiences of oppression that marginalized people have, often due to intersecting oppressions. while you should listen to a class-privileged black colleague when she testifies about the experiences she has had of racial discrimination within the halls of power, you should not take her experiences to be representative of all black people. as our account emphasizes respect for all marginalized people, especially those who are frequently disrespected, we are convinced that receivers have a duty to seek out the testimony of different members within different intersecting marginalized groups. what should you do, however, if there is a consensus among members of that identity group and this consensus conflicts with the testimony given? in our view, this acts as a good reason for you to at the very least suspend belief (or defer to the consensus opinion at most).36 however, there may be no consensus at all. to whom do we defer in cases in which there is not a clear consensus among members of the marginalized community? if multiple testifiers meet the conditions we have suggested (that the testifier has more relevant expertise about p and the receiver lacks overriding reasons against p), and these testifiers are providing conflicting moral testimony, we argue that the receiver is given a sufficient reason against the prima facie duty to defer to any one of them. if there is no reason to treat one testifier as more trustworthy than the other, then it may be that the correct attitude is, as matheson, mcelreath, and nobis (2018) suggest, to suspend belief. the receiver will have to make a considered judgment based upon the reasons they have available or do further investigating. in some cases, there is not a straightforward answer as to whether the receiver should actionally defer, and in those cases the receiver will have to rely upon their own judgment. there will also be instances in which we ought to defer to one marginalized individual over another, even if the two disagree.37 as enoch (2009) writes, there are 36 while alvin goldman (2001) argues against “going by the numbers” when it comes to deferring to experts, we are convinced by david coady’s (2006) reply. in it, coady contends that goldman’s formal argument wrongly assumes that the probabilities involved will remain constant, when they are usually in flux (70). 37 it is generally agreed upon within the epistemology of disagreement that, when a testifier has better evidence or a better ability to correctly respond to that evidence, we ought to defer to that person in the case of disagreement. see: hardwig (1985), pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 a variety of possible explanations for moral disagreement: moral matters are complex, people are not as rational as we often think, and we can be self-deceived about how our interests affect our beliefs. in the case of marginalized individuals, there may be other reasons for disagreement, including that many people might have internalized oppression that makes it more difficult to see the harms done to themselves, some might not be reflective about how various actions make them feel, and others might have different histories that make them less susceptible to various harms. but if it is important to seek out consensus views, then why do we need deference at all? wouldn’t it be preferable to simply do our homework and avoid relying on individual testimony that could be wrong?38 first, we might worry that jumping over individuals to the group view treats individuals within that marginalized group as a monolith. marginalized people have different views, and this knowledge should both lead us to seek out whether there is a consensus view and to listen to individual marginalized people who may have different views. more importantly, there is moral value to participating in testimonial exchanges with marginalized people so that those individuals are actually listened to and recognized as full-fledged moral and epistemic agents. by going straight to the group view, we bypass valuable interpersonal social goods, such as directed care, empathy, and relationship-building between people with salient identity differences. another point of concern is that internalized oppression might interfere or distort the marginalized person’s own beliefs such that they are not a reliable or good source of moral advice about aspects of their experience. for instance, a gay man might testify that his same-sex attraction is morally reprehensible and that lgbtq foley (2001), kelly (2005), christensen (2007), simpson (2013) and matheson (2015). see goldman (2001) for a full-fledged account of who to trust when experts disagree. 38 in order to know that you should do your homework in the first place, it is likely that you will have to encounter at least some testimony from marginalized individuals. this is in some way a chicken-and-egg problem, by which, in order to get to a consensus view and know you should seek out such a view, you will likely have to defer to others. what this suggests is that there isn’t really a path to understanding marginalized issues without deferring to or at least provisionally relying on the testimony of marginalized individuals. as we have argued, the former is preferable to the latter because failing to defer can often communicate a lack of trust and subsequently disrespect, especially if the receiver only holds marginalized testimony in this provisional light. perhaps the receiver could be generally skeptical and withhold belief in any domain without full understanding, but that seems to us to be an epistemically and socially impoverished way to move through the world, as that receiver will never positively trust anyone else. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 people should resist their desires and live heterosexual lives. in a less drastic example, marginalized individuals might treat certain arguments or statements as reasonable even when they are not, because they are used to hearing them. internalized oppression complicates the picture, but there will be cases in which internalized oppression is not a strongly distorting factor, such as in cases where there is a consensus view among members of the marginalized group about an aspect of their experience. in these cases, (assuming our other conditions are met) you ought to defer. in cases in which the testimony contradicts the consensus, suspension of belief and more investigation may be in order. relatedly, marginalized experiences are often traumatic, and trauma often distorts not only the initial experience(s) of harm but subsequent experiences that appear to be similar to the original experience(s) of harm.39 if trauma is distorting, then why should we defer in cases in which the testimony is shaped by it?40 we agree that trauma is often distorting, but, as a general rule, it is not sufficient to block deference. part of respecting others is taking a default stance of trust towards them when they speak about their own experiences unless we have a special reason to disbelieve them. the mere existence of trauma in someone’s background does not provide a sufficient special reason. if it did, it would undermine a great amount of human testimony, which occurs in important contexts (e.g., refugees from war, the experience of the incarcerated, etc.) there must be something specific about how the trauma manifests (e.g., if someone who is diagnosed with ptsd has lost their memory of the traumatic incident and tries to testify about the specifics of that incident) in order to create a sufficiently strong reason to set aside the receiver’s obligation to defer. individual people deal with trauma very differently and have very different reactions, some of which are epistemically illuminating rather than clouding. ideally, for epistemic reasons, we would like to find testifiers who have processed their trauma and learned from it in constructive ways, but, for moral reasons, it is important to listen to those who are still processing through their trauma. our account emphasizes these norms of interpersonal respect, and we should be wary of dismissing those with trauma, especially as that trauma is often informed by a failure of respect. we should also be wary of assuming that the testifier’s perspective is warped due to trauma, especially since those who are not in marginalized groups are 39 for instance, a woman who has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace might interpret an otherwise benign comment about her wardrobe to imply sexual content. that’s to say, she may be primed to interpret comments in such a way as a result of her experience with past trauma. 40 for an objection of this kind, see táíwò (2020). pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 often blind to instances of marginalization, even after they have been pointed out by the people who have experienced them.41 a similar worry is that deference might be patronizing or fail to treat marginalized persons as full-fledged persons capable of withstanding and repelling disagreement or criticism. this worry assumes that to do justice to a marginalized person, the nonmarginalized person with whom they speak ought to treat them as epistemic equals. we have argued, however, that such testifiers and receivers are not epistemic peers. while thinking of another as capable of “holding their own” in response to criticism may be a show of respect among epistemic peers, the relation manifests as disrespect between a relative novice and a domain expert. we reject the notion that there is something patronizing about deferring to someone to whom deference is owed. domain-experts are owed deference when the receiver is a comparative novice about the topic at hand. while we do not have a right to regulate other’s emotional responses, including their response to deference, the testifiers in our cases are providing an invitation to trust—an invitation to defer to them. it would be odd for a person to invite us to defer to them on an issue about which they are a relative expert and for our subsequent deference to be patronizing. imagine a pulmonologist recommending an inhaler and then feeling patronized when i fulfill the prescription. there’s something incongruent about providing this invitation as a relative expert and being patronized upon its acceptance. there is also the problem that some receivers may be unaware of the testifier’s marginalized status. a testifier may have an invisible disability or may perhaps present as straight, cis, or gender-conforming when they are not.42 the result is that the receiver may accidentally treat the testifier as an epistemic peer, when they are not. in cases such as these, there exists a prima facie duty to defer, but the testifier is unaware that it applies. while these circumstances do not affect the duty itself, they will determine whether the receiver is blameworthy if they are unaware that the testifier’s marginalized identity is epistemically relevant to their testimony. in the innocent 41 as sarah schulman (2016) argues, supremacy mindsets (held by the privileged) can distort in very similar ways to trauma. even if a person’s individual trauma presents a sufficient reason not to defer, there will be similar cases in which privileged persons will be equally epistemically corrupted due to supremacist mindsets. think about, for instance, the white person that cannot accept any suggestion that their community might be racist. additionally, trauma is not unique to the marginalized. as such, we should be especially wary of any suggestion that marginalized people as a class are unique in being subject to epistemically contaminating experiences. 42 those with invisible marginalized status will not be subject to all of the same experiences as someone with a visible marginalized status. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 case—where the receiver could not have known, and it is not the case that they should have known that the testifier is a member of a marginalized group—the receiver is not blameworthy for treating the testifier as an epistemic peer. however, when the receiver is willfully ignorant—say the receiver is being purposefully insensitive to relevant identity conditions—the receiver is blameworthy for minimizing the role of identity-experience as it relates to their testimony. a final issue here is the problem of tokenizing a marginalized person as a spokesperson for their identity group. as emmalon davis (2016) notes, the harms of tokenization and other forms of identity-prejudicial credibility excess include (a) that the testifier is only valued for the information they can give and not valued as an individual, (b) that the testifier is presumed to have the same experiences as any other member of that group, (c) that the testifier is expected to only contribute knowledge and experiences that are recognized as “distinct” to their marginalized identity by dominant others, and (d) that the testifier is subject to pressure to deliver on behalf of the whole marginalized community. our view avoids a, as we emphasize valuing and respecting marginalized individuals as individuals, not merely as dispensers of moral knowledge. it avoids b, as our view only pertains to experiences that marginalized individuals themselves have had qua members of that group, and we recognize that marginalized experience is heterogenous within a marginalized group. it avoids c, as our view does not entail that marginalized individuals should only be deferred to when giving testimony about their experience as a marginalized person. our framework emphasizes the epistemic reason to defer in the case of expertise, which entails that we have good reason to defer to marginalized individuals who are testifying on other subjects (outside of marginalization) about which they are experts. the last harm, d, is more difficult to avoid. one way to read d is that it picks out the harm of epistemic exploitation. as nora berenstain (2016, 570) writes: “epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face.” the epistemic labor of producing an explanation is often “unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, [and] coerced” (570). to avoid epistemic exploitation, we warn nonmembers against making demands or insisting that a marginalized person explain their experiences. it is for this reason that we emphasize that testimony must be offered voluntarily and that nonmembers are responsible for educating themselves. however, even if the testifier is speaking voluntarily about their experiences as a member of a marginalized group, there may still be pressure to deliver for the entire marginalized community. there is often disagreement within different communities, and speaking for the entire group can sometimes risk harming other individuals within that group. at the same time, it is still important to listen to the pearlman and williams – why you ought to defer published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 voices of those who are speaking authoritatively in their representative role to others outside of the group. sometimes it may be difficult to determine when a marginalized person testifies from this stance, and we should be careful not to put pressure on a marginalized person to be speaking authoritatively when they are, for instance, trying to work out for themselves a part of their experience. but even in cases in which a marginalized person is working out a part of their experience, their testimony can often provide information about a common kind of experience, even if it is not universal. even in this kind of case, deference may still be warranted, so long as the testimony is not taken to be representative of all who have this identity feature. marginalized experience and systems of oppression are complex, and as such, a number of issues may arise in testimonial exchanges that are not covered in this paper. these complexities warrant further philosophical investigation. in conclusion, we have argued that we have a prima facie duty to defer—both epistemically and actionally—to marginalized people in their moral testimony about harms that relate to their identity when the receiver is not a member of that identity group. we have shown that, in the cases with which we are concerned, we ought to epistemically defer for both moral and epistemic reasons. even if the receiver rejects the duty to epistemically defer, they should accept a prima facie duty to actionally defer. receivers are not off the hook simply because belief is not warranted. distinguishing epistemic deference from actional deference allows us to explain the appropriateness of a divergent response—epistemic deference without actional deference, or actional deference without epistemic deference—to cases that traditional accounts of moral deference must take as all-ornothing. our account might be extended to a broader variety of cases, and there is more work to be done in understanding the 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“freedom and resentment.” in freedom and resentment and other essays, 1–28. new york: routledge. táíwò, olúfẹ́mi. 2020. “being-in-the-room privilege: elite capture and epistemic deference.” the philosopher 108 (4). thomas, laurence m. 1998. “moral deference.” in theorizing multiculturalism: a guide to the current debate, edited by cynthia willet, 359–81. malden, ma: blackwell. wiland, eric. 2021. guided by voices: moral testimony, advice, and forging a ‘we’. new york: oxford university press. young, iris marion. 2014. “five faces of oppression.” in diversity, social justice, and inclusive excellence: transdisciplinary and global perspectives, edited by seth n. asumah and mechthild nagel, 3–32. albany: state university of new york press. zagzebski, linda trinkaus. 2012. epistemic authority: a theory of trust, authority, and autonomy in belief. new york: oxford university press. savannah pearlman is a phd candidate and an associate instructor at indiana university–bloomington. her dissertation argues that non-group members have a moral and epistemic duty to defer to marginalized testifiers when they testify about the harms that they, themselves, have experienced. in addition to her research on normative epistemology, savannah is interested in a philosophical treatment of mutual aid, solidarity, and community care. elizabeth williams is a phd candidate at indiana university–bloomington. their dissertation argues that we are morally responsible for both our choices and our judgments, which do not reduce to each other, and that the patterns in our choices and our judgments reveal our character. in addition to their research on what it is to be morally responsible, they are interested in the treatment of accountability, attributability, and other forms of responsibility. 14386 pearlman and williams title page 14386 pearlman williams final format how not to watch feminist pornography feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 1 article 3 recommended citation heck, richard kimberly. 2021. “how not to watch feminist pornography.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (1). article 3. 2021 how not to watch feminist pornography richard kimberly heck brown university richard_heck@brown.edu heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 how not to watch feminist pornography richard kimberly heck abstract this paper has three goals. the first is to defend tristan taormino and erika lust (or some of their films) from criticisms that rebecca whisnant and hans maes make of them. toward that end, i will be arguing against the narrow conceptions that whisnant and maes seem to have of what “feminist” pornography must be like. more generally, i hope to show by example why it is important to take pornographic films seriously as films if we're to understand their potential to shape, or misshape, sociosexual norms. keywords: pornography, feminist pornography, feminism, subordination, sexuality one might reasonably have expected the philosophical literature on pornography to contain significant discussion of actual pornography. but while pornography the abstraction is discussed a great deal, specific films, stories, or pictorials are rarely mentioned, let alone subjected to extensive analysis. in a way, that is unsurprising, since so many of the contributors to this literature seem to regard pornography as unworthy of serious attention. but it was three decades ago that linda williams (1989) convincingly demonstrated that that is just a prejudice. fifteen years later, williams would edit a collection of essays, porn studies (williams 2004), that marked the coming of age of that small but thriving field, and there is now quite a lot of serious academic work on actual pornography. but philosophers, by and large, continue to write as if there could be no point in discussing the details of any particular pornographic film. rebecca whisnant and hans maes are recent exceptions:1 philosophers who do at least discuss specific pornographic films in some detail. both are concerned with putative examples of “feminist” pornography, and both argue that the films they consider do not really deserve that label. but neither of them asks the sorts of questions, about the films they discuss, that one might ask about any other sort of film, either concerning its narrative structure or its cinematic features. as a result, 1 there are others. the most notable is edward d. miller (2013), who discusses early gay male porn in depth. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 their analyses are predetermined by their ideological preconceptions, or so i will be arguing. but my point is not just negative. my goal, rather, is to show, with specific reference to these two cases, what might be gained, both aesthetically and philosophically, if we were to analyze pornographic films more thoroughly. 1. whisnant on tristan taormino i’ll begin with whisnant’s paper “‘but what about feminist porn?’” this is a question, whisnant (2016a, 1) says, that she is often asked when she lectures about pornography. to her credit, whisnant did not just dismiss the question but set out to address it, and not just by relying upon reports from others. she watched putative examples of feminist pornography herself, to see how it might differ from mainstream pornography. the films in question, chemistry (vivid entertainment, 2006) and rough sex 3 (vivid, 2011), were both directed by tristan taormino. it is easy to understand why whisnant chose taormino’s films for analysis. as whisnant (2016a, 1–2) notes, taormino has long been an advocate of feminist pornography and is something of a feminist porn icon. her film house of ass (adam and eve, 2006) won a feminist porn award in 2006, the first year those awards were given, and taormino has won several fpas since (seven, by my count). taormino herself describes the fpas as having “put the concept of feminist porn on the map” (taormino, n.d.). by extension, the recognition that taormino’s films have received at the fpas advertises them as among the best that feminist pornography has to offer. taormino was also one of the editors of the feminist porn book (taormino et al. 2013), which helped to put feminist pornography on the academic map. that said, if i were asked to recommend some feminist pornography to someone who was generally uncomfortable with pornography (as whisnant seems to be), i certainly would not suggest taormino’s films. as whisnant (2016a, 2–4) again notes, taormino’s primary focus as a filmmaker is on the ethics of production: taormino aims to provide the people who perform in her films with good working conditions, to pay them fairly (taormino 2013, 260–261), and to ensure that they fully and freely consent to what they are doing (taormino, n.d.). many (perhaps even most) other feminist pornographers have focused more on what sorts of sexual acts are performed in their films: on their sexual content. thus, in the films of candida royalle (the first widely distributed feminist pornographer), the photography is much less explicit than in mainstream pornography of the same era, and the sex tends to be more gentle. royalle consciously avoided external ejaculation and, especially, “facials”—men ejaculating on women’s faces—though such scenes do sometimes occur in her films when their doing so makes narrative sense (see royalle 2013). one example is the third scene in eyes of desire (femme productions, 1998). much of this film explores the pleasures (and dangers) of watching people have sex. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 in the scene mentioned, lisa uses a telescope to watch some neighbors.2 in the end, the male partner withdraws and ejaculates on his partner’s vulva. the emphasis here is very much on ejaculation as a visual spectacle, and on the way in which external ejaculation is a performance. the scene, that is to say, is “reflexive” (beggan and allison 2003): it invites consideration of the way that watching a pornographic film positions one as a voyeur, and it specifically raises questions about the place of the “cumshot” in contemporary pornography. but it is precisely because external ejaculation is the exception in royalle’s films that the scene invites such reflection. taormino, by contrast, is not much concerned with the kinds of sexual acts performed in her films. as whisnant (2016a, 3) once again notes, taormino’s central goal, as far as sexual content is concerned, is to capture “authentic” expressions of human sexuality:3 i like to collaborate with performers on how their sexuality is represented, rather than giving them a script or a formula to follow. in order for the scenes to be performer-driven, women and men are given choices: they choose who they have sex with, the positions they get in, the sex toys, barriers, and lube they use—all based on what feels good to them, all based on their actual sexuality, not a fabricated script. (taormino, n.d.; see also taormino 2013, 258–259) the idea is that the performers should have sex of a kind that is enjoyable to them, not what the director or the marketing people want them to do.4 but, for fairly obvious reasons, many of the people who perform in pornography have fairly outthere sexual tastes. that is one reason that the sexual content of taormino’s films is often not very different from what one finds in mainstream pornography.5 2 it seems likely, in the context of the film, that this couple expect to be watched. lisa is staying at the house of a friend while trying to decide what to do about her boyfriend. the friend indicates to her that the telescope has some interesting uses. lisa will later discover that she is not the only one with a telescope. 3 authenticity is important to many feminist pornographers, although madison young (2014) and vex ashley (2016) are both on record as questioning its significance. see note 36 for a bit more on this matter. 4 as whisnant (2016a, 3) remarks, in most mainstream pornography, the sex is largely preprogrammed: the performers are told, for example, to have sex in each of a number of positions, and to do so long enough for there to be enough usable footage of each position. 5 whisnant (2016a, 3) is surely right, as well, that it is a bit naïve to assume, as taormino seems to suggest, that simply telling the performers to do as they wish feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 that is one of whisnant’s central criticisms: taormino’s films . . . include many of the same acts common in (other) mainstream pornography, such as gagging, choking, slapping, and misogynist name-calling. when it comes to content, the similarities between her films and the rest of mainstream pornography are readily apparent. (whisnant 2016a, 5) whisnant takes the occurrence of the mentioned acts to be incompatible with taormino’s claim to be making something that is significantly different from mainstream pornography.6 in particular, whisnant questions the contrast that taormino (2013, 257) draws between scenes that involve rough sex—something that is, unsurprisingly, characteristic of the three films in the rough sex series—and scenes that are “downright hostile.” if someone gags a woman, chokes her, or calls her a bitch, then that just is misogynistic, or so whisnant (2016a, 5) claims: if celebratory eroticized depictions of female pain, abject submission, and even violence against women need not disqualify something as feminist pornography, what exactly is left [that would]? it’s a fair question, but one that has an answer. to discover that answer, we need to look more closely at taormino’s films. i would agree that taormino’s films do not, generally speaking, challenge socio-sexual norms in the same way that the self-consciously queer pornography of, say, shine louise houston or vex ashley does. that is one of the limitations of taormino’s films, and it is especially acute in the chemistry series, where both the sex and the photography tend to be a bit too pornish for my tastes. but whisnant is wrong to dismiss taormino’s films simply on the basis of the sorts of sexual acts they contain, or so i will now argue. i’ll focus here on the second scene from rough sex 3, titled “cash.” (this is also the scene to which whisnant gives the most attention.) adrianna nicole, who appears in all five scenes, plays a prostitute, and ramon nomar plays her client. the scene begins, as all the scenes in the rough sex films do, with interviews with the (rather than what they think they’re expected to do) will result in “authentic” performances. 6 whisnant (2016a, 5) does recognize that “taormino’s films include marginally less robotic fucking and more emphasis on activities such as cunnilingus and vibrator use.” i would argue that she underestimates the significance of such differences (see crutcher 2015) but will not pursue the matter here. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 performers. whisnant (2016a, 6) takes nicole and nomar to be discussing, in their interviews, “their perspective on the nature and/or appeal of prostitution.” that is a misunderstanding. what nicole and nomar are talking about, rather, is the fantasy that they are about to enact. nicole describes the general outline of the fantasy, which she created and chose to enact with nomar, and both of them talk about what appeals to them about this particular fantasy. nicole mentions the uncertainty and danger that would be involved in meeting a new client, and nomar mentions how this fantasy enables him to express dominance, something he enjoys doing, but only when his partner also enjoys his doing so.7 summarizing the interviews, and related aspects of the scene itself, whisnant remarks: the scene conveys at least the following messages: that men demand sexual acts, and forms of sexual submission, from women in prostitution that they cannot get other women to perform to their satisfaction; and that the resulting sexual encounter is sexually exciting not only for the male buyer but for the prostituted woman herself. (whisnant 2016a, 7) whisnant seems to be assuming that the way prostitution is presented in the film is supposed to reflect the reality of prostitution. but why? nicole and nomar are, as i have said, enacting a sexual fantasy. it is not obviously relevant whether the details are realistic, and there is nothing in the film to suggest that they are intended to be realistic. this point is close in spirit to one made by shen-yi liao and sara protasi (see also heck 2020, §4.3). they distinguish what they call “response-realistic” fiction from other fiction and argue that fetish and bdsm pornography is rarely response-realistic: we are not expected “to respond to [these] fictional characters and scenarios in the same way that [we would] respond to analogous persons and situations in reality” (liao and protasi 2013, 101). nor are we expected to “export” our reactions to the 7 nomar says, toward the end of the interview: for me, basically, it is about what the woman’s feel is. so if a woman's like, enjoys to be getting slapped, getting her rough sex, i enjoy it. if she doesn’t like it, i don’t do it. i have this, how you can say, “problem,” because for me it is always more about the pleasure of my partner than about my own. her pleasure will give me my own. (english is not nomar’s first language.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 fictional scenario to analogous real-world situations (liao and protasi 2013, 110).8 similarly here, neither nicole (the performer) nor taormino (the director) wants us to respond to this enacted fantasy, emotionally or cognitively, in the way that we would respond if we were to encounter (or read about) an actual person who was actually abusing an actual prostitute. nor are they suggesting that we should find actual abuse arousing. indeed, it is one of the central points of nancy friday’s groundbreaking work on sexual fantasies that sexual fantasies are not, in general, response-realistic (friday 1973, esp. ch. 1). rape fantasies are the overused example, so let’s try another. suppose that terri fantasizes about being a prostitute.9 to ask terri whether her fantasy-self worries about being arrested, abused, or killed would be fundamentally to misunderstand the nature of such a fantasy. of course, danger might be part of the thrill. but if it isn’t, then that needn’t be because terri fantasizes that prostitution is safe, nor because her fantasy-self is blind to obvious facts, nor because terri herself is blind to obvious facts. and even if danger is part of the thrill, it need be so only to the extent that terri herself decides that it is. when it stops being thrilling, she can cut it off, at whatever point she wants, and however arbitrary that cut-off point might seem to others. sexual fantasies simply do not obey the same sort of logic that “realistic fictions” do (see butler 1990): we are free to incorporate into our sexual fantasies some elements of their real-world analogues while blithely ignoring others, and if there is any justification for the distinction, it is only that certain things appeal to the author of the fantasy and others do not. the fantasy that nicole and nomar enact in “cash” is no exception. it contains no “messages” about real-world prostitution. as friday (1973, 117) puts it (discussing rape fantasies, specifically), “the message isn’t in the plot—the old hackneyed rape story—but in the emotions that story releases.” as noted above, however, whisnant’s main worry about “cash” concerns its sexual content—in particular, “the slapping, bossing, pushing, arm twisting, head yanking, gagging, and more” that occur in it (whisnant 2016a, 7). and indeed, after a relatively playful first few minutes, the sex quickly becomes very rough. whisnant is not unaware of the lengths to which taormino goes to assure her viewers that 8 liao and protasi (2013, 111) go on to claim that mainstream pornography generally is response-realistic, but they offer no evidence for that claim. 9 none of friday's subjects in the original study reported such fantasies, much to her surprise (friday 1973, ch. 3, “room number sixteen”). but there were some in later studies (friday 1991, 156). heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 everything is enthusiastically consensual10 and, indeed, that nicole enjoys and wants this kind of sex. the fantasy portrayed is hers, after all, and we learn in the first set of interviews that she enjoys being dominated. but whisnant rejects the claim that consent can either license or excuse the slapping, gagging, and so forth: a tenet basic to the ideology of pro-porn feminism [is] that it is fine to portray dominance, submission, pain, and hierarchy as sexually exciting, so long as women are shown consenting to them and even enjoying them.11 . . . depicting women in submissive and subordinated sexual roles is . . . liberatory and feminist—provided, of course, that it is all consensual and authentic. (whisnant 2016a, 5) disagreement about the significance of consent is a recurring theme in feminist discussions of pornography and of sexuality more generally. what i want to do in the remainder of this section, then, is to explore why whisnant regards consent as having such little moral significance. i am going to suggest that she misunderstands both what nicole is consenting to in “cash” and what her consent licenses. it will turn out to be crucial, once again, that what we are watching is the enactment of a sexual fantasy. whisnant writes as if nicole has consented in “cash” to the very same treatment that other women endure as abuse. she notes, for example, how often nicole is choked in this scene and cites two studies that emphasize the ways in which “strangulation” is used as “a key method of misogynist torture and terror” (whisnant 2016a, 7). whisnant is clearly disturbed that nicole is subjected to such treatment and supposes that her opponents would dismiss this concern on the ground that nicole has consented: “it is terrible that some women get strangled when they don’t want to be strangled,” she has her opponent say, “but [nicole] does want to be strangled because she finds it sexually exciting. . . . so what is the problem?” these remarks would make no sense unless whisnant were supposing that what nicole wants—to be strangled—is precisely what other women quite reasonably do not want. in the same vein, whisnant (2016a, 7) speculates, on the basis of the retrospective interview done with nicole two days later, that, after filming this “violent scene,” she 10 i have my doubts about whether enthusiastic consent is either necessary or sufficient for ethical sex, but i'll set such concerns aside here and speak in this relatively familiar language. 11 there is less agreement among “pro-porn feminists” than whisnant claims. see, for example, the discussion of petra joy below. still, it certainly is true that consent is sometimes treated as a magic bullet, and it should not be. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 experienced the same sort of “traumatic dissociation” that a victim of sexual violence might.12 whisnant appears to believe, that is to say, that, when nicole consented to nomar’s choking her, she was consenting to harm, specifically, to a sort of harm comparable to that unwillingly suffered by victims of sexual violence.13 whisnant seems to believe, to put it differently, that we should think of nicole as having agreed to be mistreated. but any such agreement should be void: it can neither justify nor excuse the mistreatment itself. now, to be sure, in some pornography, women really do “consent” to what really is mistreatment, and i would agree that consent cannot morally excuse such mistreatment. but “cash” is not that sort of case. whisnant (2016a, 11n6) insists upon calling what nomar does to nicole “strangling” rather than “choking.” to be sure, words matter. but the merriamwebster dictionary tells us that to strangle is: a: to choke to death by compressing the throat with something (such as a hand or rope) . . . b: to obstruct seriously or fatally the normal breathing of.14 not even (b) properly characterizes what we witness in “cash.” as whisnant (2016a, 7) herself notes, a “how-to” segment included as an extra on the dvd explains that, to “choke” one’s partner safely during sex, one has to be especially careful not to apply any pressure to the area around the trachea.15 rather, one should apply pressure (and not much is required) to the fleshy region under the jaw. if one watches carefully, one can easily see that nomar uses precisely the technique described. and, when nomar chokes nicole, he rarely seems to restrict her breathing: even while his 12 it is not uncommon for people who engage in bdsm to need some time to “come down” from an intense scene. that is part of why “aftercare” is so important in bdsm (see, e.g., easton and hardy 2003a, ch. 9; taormino 2012, 29–31). i suspect therefore that nicole was indeed expressing how deeply the scene had affected her, so that she did need such time, but not that the scene had in any way harmed her. 13 whisnant (2016b, 1) argues elsewhere that “humiliation in contemporary pornography . . . constitutes a severe form of harm to many female pornography performers” and that “the apparently consensual nature of much humiliating pornography exacerbates its harm to the humiliated performers.” 14 merriam-webster, s.v. “strangle (v. t.),” accessed november 23, 2019, https://www .merriam-webster.com/dictionary/strangle. kate manne (2018, 1–3) uses the term “strangulation” in this same sense in her discussion of “non-fatal strangulation.” 15 doing so can cause bruising that may lead to dangerous swelling, even days later (manne 2018, 1–3). heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 hand is around her neck, she is usually able to breathe comfortably and to talk normally. even when nomar does restrict nicole’s breathing, he does not do so with anything like the intentions that perpetrators of domestic violence have, and that fact is mutually understood between him and nicole.16 he is choking her as part of a roleplay—an enactment of a sexual fantasy—that we have been invited to observe. in the fantasy world the two of them are jointly creating, nomar is firmly in charge, and nicole is being verbally and physically subjugated, humiliated, and abused. but, as anyone familiar with the conventions of bdsm will appreciate,17 nicole, as the submissive partner, is the one who is ultimately in control, and to describe her as having “consented to harm” would badly misrepresent the situation. bdsm is often described as a “consensual power exchange.” what this means is that, within the context of a bdsm “scene,” the submissive partner cedes a certain amount of control to their dominant partner. it is specifically negotiated in advance just what control they cede (i.e., what may and may not be done to them, without further discussion). moreover, it is a crucial aspect of “safe, sane, and consensual” bdsm that, should the submissive partner at any point become uncomfortable with what is happening, they can bring the proceedings to an immediate halt by using a “safeword.” it is the submissive partner’s absolute right to withdraw their consent, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason. which is to say, once again, that the submissive partner is ultimately the one who is in charge.18 one can see such interactions within “cash” itself. for example, there is a moment (at about 47:50 on the dvd) when nicole decides that she doesn’t want nomar to choke her anymore and moves his hand from her neck to her breast, which she is easily able to do. this may well have involved a prearranged signal: such a touch by the submissive partner is often used as a substitute for a safeword (since choking, gagging, etc., can make it 16 any decent guide to bdsm will make the sorts of points outlined in the next couple paragraphs. see, for example, califia (2001), easton and hardy (2003a, 2003b), or taormino (2012). note especially the editor of the last book referenced. 17 whisnant (2016a, 5) complains at one point that taormino “does not explain the differences between porn being ‘hostile’ . . . and its ‘exploring dominance and submission, being rough, or pushing the envelope.’” the reason, i suggest, is that taormino was supposing that her audience would not need such an explanation: that they would have some familiarity with (and appreciation of) bdsm. 18 or, at least, equally in charge. all partners have the right to suspend the scene, if they should become uncomfortable with it, though it is the submissive partner with whom we are concerned here. (there is a form of bdsm known as “consensual nonconsent” that is an exception, but it is controversial even within the bdsm community [califia 2001, 198–200].) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 difficult to speak). nomar does not insist upon continuing to choke nicole, as an actual abuser surely would, and it would have been a violation of consent for him to do so. that strongly suggests that nicole was sufficiently “in charge” at that time to decide whether nomar would choke her: she subtly said, “no more right now,” and he understood her signal and stopped. it would be a mistake, then, to suppose that what we are witnessing in “cash” is nomar’s actually humiliating and abusing nicole, where such behavior is supposed to be excused because she gets off on it. nicole does not want actually to be humiliated or abused, and she is not actually humiliated or abused. rather, nicole finds the fantasy of being treated in such ways exciting, and “cash” documents her exploration of that fantasy with nomar.19 that is not to say that nicole does not experience fear or humiliation. she probably does, but in many ways that is precisely the point. one reason people engage in bdsm is to have a safe space in which to explore the erotic potential of acts and emotions that, outside that space, would be dangerous or harmful. nor does nicole’s consent make her a “willing victim” (see bond and mosher 1986). on the contrary, throughout the scene, nicole is actively shaping the sexual interaction in which she is involved. such active involvement on the part of all concerned is a crucial part of what makes for ethical sex, or so i would argue, though that is a topic for another time (but see millar 2008; cahill 2014). there is, of course, a long history of feminist opposition to bdsm, dating at least to the publication of the collection against sadomasochism: a radical feminist analysis (linden et al. 1982).20 echoing some of the themes from that book, whisnant (2016a, 7) writes that her “concern is with the ethics of representing a key method of misogynist torture and terror as a sex game.” but for many people, choking is a “sex game,” that is, an enjoyable part of sex.21 why should it be wrong to represent it as 19 it is true that nomar’s character humiliates and abuses nicole’s character. but what i have been arguing is that understanding what is happening outside the fantasy, between nicole and nomar themselves, is crucial to a proper appreciation of this film, which thus has a documentary aspect. this dual aspect of bdsm is part of what makes it difficult to understand (hopkins 1994; vadas 1995; stear 2009), but it is also part of what makes it powerful for its practitioners (weille 2002; weiss 2011). 20 for a review of this literature, see wright (2006, 219–224). it’s arguable, too, that much of the concern expressed by early antipornography feminists about “violent” pornography was actually concern about bdsm pornography. joshua cohen (1996, 286) makes a version of this point, which is also central to many of gayle rubin’s (1984, 1993) discussions of antipornography feminism. 21 a nationwide study of american sexual behavior done in 2015 found that 14% of men and 13% of women ranked “having rough sex” as “very appealing,” and 28.1% of heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 such? i agree that pornography that presents choking, slapping, and the like as normative—that is, as not requiring any “special” consent or negotiation, but simply as part of what heterosex typically involves—is potentially harmful (see blue 2005). i have heard too many stories about undergraduate women whose male partners have choked or slapped them without seeking their consent, and i am pretty sure that mainstream pornography is partly to blame (relatedly, see heck 2020, §6). but it is in precisely this respect that taormino’s films are importantly different. the interviews that accompany the scenes are supposed to make it clear that what is happening is enthusiastically consensual and that everyone’s desires and limits are being respected. i take it that this is one of the reasons that taormino includes these interviews in the films. perhaps, then, it is sexual choking itself to which whisnant objects. melinda vadas (1995) has argued that sexual choking is wrong not just because it mimics strangulation but because its being arousing depends upon its doing so. in response, nils-hennes stear (2009) argues that it is far from clear why that dependence should make sexual choking wrong, even if it is granted. but we need not resolve this issue here. if such concerns are the source of whisnant’s objections to “cash,” then those objections have little to do with pornography but emerge from independent views about what kinds of sexual acts are ethical and what kinds are not, even when they are enthusiastically consensual and carefully negotiated, as in the context of bdsm. those are controversial views, even among feminists, and taormino clearly rejects them, as do i. we’ll return to this matter below. 2. maes on erika lust i turn now to hans maes’s paper “falling in lust.” its main focus is on contemporary conceptions of what is sexy, how those conceptions can be oppressive (e.g., by desexualizing disabled bodies), and what role “egalitarian” pornography might play in reshaping those conceptions.22 in that connection, maes argues that “female-friendly” pornography—that is, porn that is reasonably sensitive to women’s sexual fantasies and proclivities—is not necessarily egalitarian. i do not doubt that claim. what i doubt is the counterexample that maes offers: erika lust’s first pornographic film, the good girl, which was produced in 2004 and released onto the men and 27% of women ranked it as “somewhat appealing” (herbenick et al. 2017, 15). the study did not ask specifically about choking. 22 the distinction between “egalitarian” and “inegalitarian” pornography was introduced, using those words, by a. w. eaton (2007), who suggests that egalitarian pornography could have positive effects, just as inegalitarian pornography has negative ones (see also eaton 2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 internet under a creative commons license.23 lust has since become one of the most celebrated feminist pornographers in the world, having won four (by my count) feminist porn awards, including two for movie of the year (in 2011 and 2012). maes (2017, 213) argues, however, that the good girl, though it “may be female-friendly pornography . . . is not egalitarian pornography,” because it reinforces problematic socio-sexual norms. specifically, maes claims, the film eroticizes female vulnerability, and he also objects to the fact that it includes a “facial.” 2.1 eroticizing female vulnerability? the first of these criticisms concerns the climactic moment of the non-sex part of the film, which contextualizes and leads into its sexually explicit portion. maes writes: when alex drops her towel in an attempt to seduce the pizza delivery guy she appears shy, clumsy, and insecure. it is a very erotically charged moment, but that is precisely the problem: much like mainstream pornography, the film eroticizes the gender stereotype of a vulnerable woman versus a confident man. (maes 2017, 213) we need to fill in some background. the film begins with alex (played by claudia claire) talking to her friend julie (actress unnamed), a true believer in sexual liberation who is eager to tell alex of her recent adventures with her yoga teacher. alex has heard many such stories from julie, and she seems somewhat bored with this one. but alex envies julie’s free spirit and has often fantasized about doing something similar herself: seducing the man delivering her pizza, perhaps. she never has, but this night is destined to be different. when dinner arrives, alex is just getting out of the shower, and she answers the door wrapped in a towel, seemingly surprised. “oh, my pizza,” she says. she invites paulo (played by lucas foz) to step into her apartment while she looks for money to pay him. “he is not a normal pizza guy,” alex tells us. “he is gorgeous.” eventually, alex works up the courage to drop her towel. that moment is, obviously, erotically charged, and alex is, indeed, very anxious. but it simply does not follow that “the film eroticizes the gender stereotype of a vulnerable woman versus a confident man” (maes 2017, 213). for one thing, paulo is not so confident. ever since alex invited him into her apartment, he has been 23 a re-edited, and longer, version of the film was included as part of lust’s collection five hot stories for her (lust productions, 2007) under the title “ser o no ser una buena chica” (to be or not to be a good girl). maes does not say which version of the film he watched, but the differences between the two versions will not matter here, since the relevant sequences are unchanged. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 puzzled by her behavior: the fact that she is wearing nothing but a towel; its briefly falling off to expose her breasts; the way she has been smiling at him; the unusually long time it has taken her to find some money. but he never does anything to move things forward. ordinarily, of course, he would be expected to make the first move. but the situation—he’s delivering a pizza, not chatting to a woman at a bar—makes it inappropriate for him to do so. so he just leaves. alex closes the door behind him, leans back against it, and slowly sinks to the floor, shaking her head as she chides herself for failing, yet again, to do what she so desperately wants to do. but then the doorbell rings, and she bolts upright, quickly composes herself, and opens the door with a flourish. as paulo leans into her apartment, she embraces him, thinking that he has returned for her. moments later we hear him say, softly and sheepishly, “sorry, i forgot my helmet.” alex backs away, her eyes falling as she offers an almost involuntary “hmm.” it would have been completely understandable if she had turned away in embarrassment and allowed paulo to leave once again. or if she had simply decided that her attempt to interest him had failed. somehow, though, she realizes that, if she wants this to happen, then she will have to be the one to make it happen, and without any assistance from paulo. and so, as he picks up his helmet and turns to leave— slowly, looking down at the floor, seemingly disappointed and, perhaps, frustrated with his own impotence—alex says, almost inaudibly, “wait a moment, please.” he turns around and looks at her. up to this point, the story has been told almost entirely from alex’s point of view. she has narrated it, and her experience has been the focus. but now the camera adopts paulo’s point of view, and we see what he sees. and what is on display is not how sexy alex is, nor even how desirous she is, but simply how human she is. she takes a moment to build up her courage. only then does she slowly unwrap her towel, so hesitantly that it feels as if she might still change her mind. the camera shifts perspective briefly to show us, from right along the floor, the towel dropping to her feet, but then we are returned to paulo’s position. alex pulls her shoulders together, as if to cover her breasts, and draws her right hand to her face. it would be difficult to overstate how powerfully this simple act expresses what alex is feeling in that moment: she has now exposed herself—not just physically but emotionally—and she can only wait, helplessly, for paulo’s response.24 it’s important to remember that, though we may know what will happen, since we are watching pornography, alex does not know. we know, because alex tells us, how attractive she finds paulo. but alex has very little reason to think that paulo finds 24 of course, none of this works without the entirely convincing performances by claudia claire and lucas foz. so much, then, for the usual assumptions about bad acting in pornography. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 her attractive, or even that he’s single. even if she’s the sexiest woman he’s ever seen, he might just as well have said, regretfully, “i have a girlfriend” or even “i have to get back to work.” paulo’s initial response is one of astonishment. he sets his helmet back on the table and walks slowly over to alex, the look on his face less one of lust than of awe. he reaches first for her arms, touching her gently, even lovingly, before pulling her to him and kissing her passionately. but even then, he does not take charge. when, in the next segment, we find them moving toward her bed, it is she who enters the frame first, reaching back out of it to invite him, still fully dressed, to follow her.25 i can understand how, if one were to tear the crucial few seconds out of the context of the film, they might appear to eroticize alex’s vulnerability. but alex is not presented as being vulnerable because she’s a woman. she is just a human being who, at this particular moment, is feeling vulnerable, and for a very good reason. when she dropped her towel, alex jumped off a cliff, one she had been standing in front of for a very long time. she had no idea what would happen next, but she jumped anyway. of course she is vulnerable! it would be completely unrealistic to present her in any other way, given what we know about alex by this point in the film.26 and it is not her vulnerability that is eroticized but something far more complex involving, among other things, her boldness and her bravery: her willingness to risk rejection, even ridicule, for the chance to bring this man she just met two minutes ago, and whose name she doesn’t even know, into her bed. this moment, then, placed within the context of the film, is one of tremendous honesty, exquisite beauty, and terrific filmmaking.27 there is nothing “inegalitarian” about it. to summarize, then, maes (2017, 213) claims that the good girl “eroticizes the gender stereotype of a vulnerable woman versus a confident man.” but paolo is far from confident. and, although alex is vulnerable, her vulnerability is not gendered but carefully contextualized. nor is it what is being eroticized. 2.2 celebrating facials? maes’s other criticism concerns the climactic moment of the sexually explicit part of the film: 25 this is a simple example of how filmmaking can matter: the way the scene is shot emphasizes that she is leading him. see also below. 26 if there is anything that would constitute a pornish trope here, it would be for alex to cup her breasts and adopt some model-like pose. 27 this last because of how much is conveyed by how the scene is shot, especially the adoption, at the crucial moment, of paulo’s point of view. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 at the end of their tenderly and beautifully filmed lovemaking, alex asks the delivery guy to “cum on my face like they do in porn movies,”28 which he then happily does. thus, the film continues and even celebrates this most prevalent trope of inegalitarian pornography rather than subverting it. (maes 2017, 213) but lust has worked very hard, in the rest of the film, to transform and subvert themes prevalent in mainstream pornography. it is implausible that, here at its finale, she should unthinkingly continue the tradition of ending heterosexual encounters with a facial, let alone celebrate that tradition. note, for example, the many ways in which the good girl plays with and transforms the pizza-boy script. in mainstream versions, the central theme is usually the familiar one of women’s sexual insatiability (see williams 1989, 108–112; segal 1998, 45–46). the woman who’s ordered the pizza seduces the delivery boy because porno-women always crave sex with any available man, and she’ll probably do it again tomorrow. here, however, lust has tried to reimagine the script more realistically: what not wholly implausible story could we tell about why a woman might decide to seduce the man who delivers her dinner? insatiability is replaced with the frustration of a young professional woman who has always been a “good girl.” the story becomes one of how alex breaks out of that mold and discovers her own sexual power and agency. note also how alex’s newfound confidence is explicitly contrasted with the almost compulsive sexual drive that governs julie’s life. alex, i suggest, is presented as embodying an alternative not only to the desexualized madonna of respectable society but also to the archetype familiar from mainstream pornography: the everhorny nymphomaniac. so, again, it makes little sense that lust should suddenly indulge one of pornography’s most infamous tropes at the end of her film. why, then, does maes read the facial scene that way? unfortunately, he does not tell us. one possibility is that, like many critics of pornography, he regards facials as unavoidably misogynistic. here, for example, is what whisnant has to say about the inclusion of facials in taormino’s films: while it is true that [taormino] cannot control how a facial cum shot is received or interpreted by viewers, she can and does predict quite accurately how it will be (mostly) received [namely, as degrading]. . . . she has decided to include these images in her films, knowing full well 28 this is a misquote. what alex says is, “i want you to cum in my face like in porn movies.” (there are no typos there. alex’s native language is not english.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 what they mean in a broader cultural context. (whisnant 2016a, 6; emphasis in the original) from this point of view, the inclusion of a facial in the good girl is inescapably problematic. including a line in which alex asks paulo to ejaculate on her face not only fails to undermine the cultural meaning of the act but makes things worse: the film presents alex as wanting to be degraded and humiliated.29 but lust does not agree that facials must always be misogynistic. at the 2007 berlin porn film festival, there was a roundtable that featured several women directors. as audacia ray (2007) recounts, “the panel quickly devolved into an argument about blowjobs,” as several members of the audience questioned lust about the frequent portrayal of that act in her films. a few days later, one of the other panelists, petra joy, posted a lengthy retrospective that included the following remarks: feminism is committed to equality of the sexes, so surely “feminist porn” should show women as equals to men rather than as subservient beings. . . . if you want to show cum on a woman’s face that’s fine but don’t call it feminist. (joy 2007) lust (2007) responded with outrage, mocking “the church of the pure feminist porn producers . . . declaring that certain sexual practices that me and other women across the world happen to like, are a sin” (see wakeman 2009; mccombs 2012). lust here echoes some famous remarks in gayle rubin’s paper “thinking sex”: most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight of someone, somewhere. one need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party. (rubin 1984, 283) 29 in the case of the facial that ends the main scene in “cash,” one might argue that nomar is not actually humiliating nicole but only doing so within the context of a consensual bdsm roleplay. but that reply is unavailable in this case. there is no bdsm here, and it would not be unreasonable to regard the good girl as intended to be “response-realistic.” heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 the tendency that rubin here decries underlies a form of “sex negativity” (her term) that she calls “the hierarchical valuation of sex acts”: categorizing types of sexual acts so as to mark some of them as bad or disordered and some of them as good or natural (rubin 1984, 278). such hierarchies are thick on the ground. you find them in the torah and in freud, in some feminists and in many conservatives (rubin 1984, esp. 298ff). by contrast, rubin (1984, 283) insists that the only appropriate way to judge sexual acts is on a per-act basis, in terms of “the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures [that those acts] provide.”30 that, i take it, is also what lust (2007) means when she writes, in response to joy, “i don’t believe that the word ‘feminist’ can be applied [to] sexual practices,” such as blowjobs and facials. this negative point, of course, is one that a mainstream pornographer might equally well make. but lust, in both her writings and her lectures, is relentlessly critical of mainstream pornography.31 she is fully aware of how misogynistic facials can be and very often are. nor do i think that lust would be satisfied simply with the assurance that the facials in some particular film were consensual. so the question remains: how is the facial in the good girl supposed to be different from facials in mainstream pornography? i take it that, just as lust is asking us to imagine why a woman might plausibly decide to seduce the pizza guy, she is also asking us to imagine why alex might want paulo to ejaculate on her face. my answer, though i am sure there could be others, is that alex’s request is a result of her newfound boldness, taken to an extreme in the heat of the moment. alex’s line, “i want you to cum in my face like in porn movies,” is not just a joke; nor is it just an ironic commentary on the prevalence of facials in pornography. it is also a reminder of how pornography shapes real-life sexuality. alex asks paulo to ejaculate on her face, i suggest, precisely because it is something she has seen in pornography and has been curious about. the old alex would never even have considered doing such a thing. but she’s just had sex with someone whose name she still does not know, so she’s going to end it all with a flourish. 30 note that it does not follow that there cannot be types of sexual acts all of whose instances would be objectionable. but that would be because those instances must always fail the per-act test. (of course, it is a nice question exactly what the per-act standard should be.) 31 see, for example, the first chapter of good porn: a woman’s guide (lust 2010) and her tedx talk “it’s time for porn to change” (lust 2014). the latter begins with a description of a stereotypical mainstream pornographic scene that ends, of course, with a facial. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 what is especially notable is alex’s reaction when paulo does, indeed, ejaculate on her face.32 in mainstream pornography, the woman would be on her knees or back, her eyes and mouth wide open, looking expectantly up at her partner’s penis while she awaits what, it would seem, is the nectar of the gods. she moans her delight and smiles broadly as the semen hits her face, that by itself apparently enough to bring her to orgasm (or close to it). often, the woman will spread the semen around her face, or scoop it hungrily into her mouth. to say that her reaction is absurdly enthusiastic would be an understatement. by contrast, as paulo straddles alex’s chest and masturbates, she tilts her head back away from him and seems more anxious than expectant. as he begins to ejaculate, she closes her eyes and mouth and, as he finishes, wipes his semen away from her lips and off her cheeks.33 her reaction, to put it in a word, is neutral. she does not appear to feel degraded or humiliated—she starts giggling shortly afterwards—but nor was it the earth-moving experience that mainstream pornography presents it as being. it was something alex tried and . . . well, it’s not clear whether she’ll ever want to try it again. it is also important how lust shoots the scene. in mainstream pornography, the camera would be locked on the woman’s face throughout, and the male performer would appear only as a disembodied penis (to borrow a phrase). her facial expressions would feature prominently, as an indicator of her desire, but we would not see his face at all unless by accident. now, quite generally, lust shoots sex so as to highlight the fact that it is something that people do, so we tend to see more of both performers’ bodies and, notably, the man’s face (in heterosex). in this case, although the focus as paulo masturbates over alex’s face is more on her experience than on his—the film is about her, after all—there are also shots, even as he orgasms, from a wider angle, so that his whole body and face are visible. the result is that his pleasure is represented not just through ejaculation but through his facial expressions and the contortions of his body. most importantly, the entire episode is presented as a continuation of what they have been doing together, not as something that he is doing to her and to which she has simply “consented.” i suggest, therefore, that lust does intend this scene to subvert the hegemony of the facial—namely, by bringing facials down to earth. the message, as i read it, is that a facial is just a sexual act: one that some people enjoy and that others abhor and 32 special thanks here to ruth foster, christina ge, and margot witte. 33 according to the internet adult film database (see https://www.iafd.com/person .rme/perfid=claudiaclair/gender=f/claudia-clair.htm), claire had previously performed in at least twenty pornographic films, and in about ten of those she had received a facial. so we can safely assume that she knew how it is done in mainstream pornography and is consciously doing it differently here, presumably at lust’s direction. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 that yet others (maybe alex) just don’t feel very strongly about. there is nothing special about facials in that regard, and that once again is the point. mainstream pornography, by contrast, presents facials as something that women either crave or don’t yet know that they crave.34 it is at least arguable that such pornography contributes to women’s (sexual) subordination by encouraging men to feel entitled to have women perform this act for them. it is easy to find reports from women of being cajoled or shamed into letting men ejaculate on their faces (see, for example, marcotte 2009). indeed, it is not too difficult to see how some women could come to feel, without any personal pressure, but for broadly cultural reasons, that such an act is a “normal” part of heterosex, something that they ought to do because it is what women are supposed to do.35 it is easy to understand how such pressure could result in a woman’s feeling humiliated. but it is not having someone ejaculate on your face that is so degrading. it is being treated as a mere prop in someone else’s fantasy. alex, by contrast, is no one’s prop. unfortunately, however, there is an aspect of the facial scene that undermines its subversive potential. paulo and alex have just been having intercourse in a “spoon” position, with her lying on her side and him behind her. after alex has an intense and satisfying orgasm,36 paulo withdraws, rolls her onto her back, and straddles her chest. it is only then that alex asks him to ejaculate on her face: when he is already in position to do so. it’s a small lapse, but a significant one. the sex overall is convincingly realistic: the kind of thing that people like alex and paulo might actually do. but paulo’s rolling alex onto her back and then straddling her chest seems, given what she goes on to say, prearranged, and it is not at all convincing. had alex delivered her line while they were still spooning, it would not have felt so contrived. but because facials in mainstream pornography are almost always contrived—the couple were just having intercourse, but suddenly she spins around, drops to her knees, and begs for ambrosia—this sequencing error breaks the illusion and makes this facial, too, feel 34 i am by no means the first to observe that, far from presenting facials as humiliating, mainstream pornography usually presents them as wonderful for all involved, especially the women (see, e.g., macdonald 1983). i have my doubts, then, about whisnant’s claims about the “cultural meaning” of facials, quoted above (whisnant 2016a, 6). that is not to deny that some pornography does present facials as degrading. 35 breanne fahs and jax gonzalez (2014, 511) suggest that some women feel cultural pressure to have receptive anal sex and that pornography is at least partly to blame (see heck 2020, §6). 36 this is one place where debates about authenticity, mentioned earlier, take hold. does it matter whether the real person, claudia claire, had an orgasm if she was able convincingly to portray alex as having had one? feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 1, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 contrived. in order for it to work in the way i have suggested it was intended to work, it would have to seem like something that people like alex and paulo might really do. but it doesn’t feel that way, at least not to me, though i can nonetheless appreciate what lust was trying to accomplish. to summarize, then, maes (2017, 213) claims that the good girl “continues and even celebrates [the facial] rather than subverting it.” in response, i have argued that lust is indeed attempting to subvert the hegemony of the facial, not by ignoring its prevalence but instead by presenting this act in a more realistic way than is typical in mainstream pornography. of course, those who regard facials as unavoidably misogynistic, as whisnant does, will be unimpressed. but, once again, if this is the root of the disagreement, it has little to do with pornography but rests upon an independent claim that a certain sexual act is always unethical, even when it is enthusiastically consensual and wanted. as we have seen, lust simply does not agree with that claim, and nor do i. 3. closing remarks i have had several goals in this paper. the most narrow was to defend both tristan taormino and erika lust (or, at least, their films) from the criticisms that rebecca whisnant and hans maes make of them. slightly more broadly, like petra van brabandt (2017), i have argued against the narrow conceptions that whisnant and maes have of what “feminist” pornography must be like. my broadest goal, though, following linda williams (1989) and elaborating a suggestion made by nancy bauer (2015, 78), has been to argue by example for the importance of taking pornographic films seriously as films if we’re to understand their potential to shape, or misshape, socio-sexual norms. a few specific conclusions stand out. the first is that a film’s feminist credentials cannot be read off from a list of the sexual acts it contains: consent (understood in a sufficiently robust sense) matters, and it matters whether and how that is conveyed to the viewer. similarly, the narrative context matters: it matters why alex is feeling vulnerable (not just because she is a woman in a sexual situation), and it matters why paulo ejaculates on her face (because alex is curious what it is like). narrative details matter, too: it matters how alex responds when paulo starts to ejaculate, and it matters how tentative both of them are before she finally drops her towel. and, finally, and in a way most interestingly, filmmaking matters: the way lust shoots the facial scene is a big part of what is different about it, and the way the camera adopts paulo’s point of view at the crucial moment is crucial to our appreciation of what is so powerful about what alex has just done.37 37 thanks to anne eaton for comments on a draft of this paper, as well as for her support of my work in this area. thanks to rachel leadon, willa tracy, and nancy heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 references ashley, vex. 2016. “porn—artifice—performance—and the problem of authenticity.” porn studies 3 (2): 187–190. https://doi.org/10.1080 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(not really).” waking vixen (blog), november. http://www.wakingvixen.com/blog/ (site discontinued and no longer available on the internet archive). text of original post preserved at https://rikiheck.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-greatblowjob-debate.html. royalle, candida. 2013. “what’s a nice girl like you. . . .” in the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, celine parreñas shimizu, constance penley, and mirielle miller-young, 58–71. new york: the feminist press at the city university of new york. rubin, gayle. 1984. “thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.” in pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality, edited by carol s. vance, 267–319. boston: routledge & kegan paul. ———. 1993. “misguided, dangerous and wrong: an analysis of anti-pornography politics.” in bad girls & dirty pictures: the challenge to reclaim feminism, edited by alison assiter and avedon carol, 18–40. boulder, co: pluto press. segal, lynne. 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constance penley, and mirielle milleryoung. 2013. the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure. new york: the feminist press at the city university of new york. vadas, melinda. 1995. “reply to patrick hopkins.” hypatia 10 (2): 159–161. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1995.tb01380.x. van brabandt, petra. 2017. “in/egalitarian pornography: a simplistic view of pornography.” in beyond speech: pornography and analytic feminist philosophy, edited by mari mikkola, 221–242. oxford: oxford university press. wakeman, jessica. 2009. “facials: are they demeaning?” the frisky, 21 august. https://web.archive.org/web/20090902145726/http://www.thefrisky.com:8 0/post/246-facials-are-they-demeaning/. accessed 20 february 2020. weille, katharine-lee h. 2002. “the psychodynamics of consensual sadomasochistic and dominant-submissive sexual games.” studies in gender and sexuality 3 (2): 131–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650309349194. weiss, margot. 2011. techniques of pleasure: bdsm and the circuits of sexuality. durham, nc: duke university press. whisnant, rebecca. 2016a. “‘but what about feminist porn?’: examining the work of tristan taormino.” sexualization, media, & society 2 (2). https://doi.org /10.1177/2374623816631727. ———. 2016b. “pornography, humiliation, and consent.” sexualization, media, & society 2 (3). http://doi.org/10.1177/2374623816662876. williams, linda. 1989. hard core: power, pleasure, and the “frenzy of the visible.” berkeley, ca: university of california press. ———, ed. 2004. porn studies. durham, nc: duke university press. wright, susan. 2006. “discrimination of sm-identified individuals.” journal of homosexuality 50 (2–3): 217–231. https://doi.org/10.1300/j082v50n02_10. young, madison. 2014. “authenticity and its role within feminist pornography.” porn studies 1 (1–2): 186–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2014 .888250. heck – how not to watch feminist pornography published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 richard kimberly heck received their phd from the massachusetts institute of technology and is now professor of philosophy at brown university. they have worked on the philosophies of language, logic, mathematics, and mind, and on the philosophy of gottlob frege. they have published two books, frege’s theorem (2011) and reading frege’s grundgesetze (2012), both with oxford university press. more recently, however, they have been working on a number of issues concerning gender and sexuality, including pornography and sexual ethics. 10609 heck title page 10609 heck final format political and antipolitical anger: the challenge of keeping one’s anger at structural injustice properly political feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 3 article 3 recommended citation vargas gonzález, jessica. 2024. “political and antipolitical anger: the challenge of keeping one’s anger at structural injustice properly political.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (3). article 3. 2024 political and antipolitical anger: the challenge of keeping one’s anger at structural injustice properly political jessica vargas gonzález universidad autónoma metropolitana jessicamvargas12@gmail.com vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 political and antipolitical anger: the challenge of keeping one’s anger at structural injustice properly political jessica vargas gonzález abstract the analysis of anger’s role in politics needs to overcome the oversimplified views of anger as positive or negative. instead, a more useful normative question is one that asks how we should distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. by drawing on a conflict-theory framework that makes a normative distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflicts, i argue that properly political anger should meet two criteria: fittingness and boundedness. anger can sometimes be a fitting response to our unjust world. however, fittingness is not enough; it also matters how anger is channeled or acted upon in the public realm. moreover, this paper contends that anger at structural injustice may relatively easily go wrong, as mistargeted or boundless anger. in light of these challenges, i argue that introducing a goal-frustration type of anger (as distinct from blaming anger) can prevent construing anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame, and that one can learn (to some extent) to regulate one’s anger. at the same time, i acknowledge that the uptake that anger receives plays an essential role in creating an environment that favors (or disfavors) that anger at structural injustice remains bounded. keywords: anger, politics, agonism, goal-frustration anger, structural injustice, cognitive and social biases 1. introduction anger is an emotional response to perceived wrongdoing (frye 1983; solomon 2007; nussbaum 2016; cherry 2021; stockdale 2021). it tracks what we perceive as harm or slight wrongly inflicted on us (or those who matter to us). anger’s role in political life is highly contested. according to its fans, anger is a refined detector of injustice and uniquely effective at getting oppressors to yield their evil ways. . . . opponents of anger say that anger is undisciplined and sloppy. it is feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 “greedy for revenge,” the unprincipled servant of a rapacious ego, and a miserable detector of the truth. (flanagan 2018, vii) instead of asking whether anger should or should not play any role in politics, this paper suggests that a more useful normative question is one that asks how we should distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. i argue that appropriate anger in politics should meet two criteria: fittingness and boundedness. i share with recent defenders of anger’s role in politics (srinivasan 2018; cherry 2021) the conviction that anger can sometimes be a fitting or apt response to our unjust world. i contribute to this discussion by providing a detailed analysis of the criterion of fittingness for a complex emotion like anger and by introducing a goal-frustration type of anger that allows for anger that is not intrinsically retributive. additionally, i argue that fittingness is not enough to consider anger to be appropriate in political life; it also matters how anger is channeled or acted upon in the public realm. my analysis draws on a conflict-theory framework that makes a normative distinction between agonistic conflicts and antagonistic conflicts.1 i argue that understanding how anger may go wrong in politics requires acknowledging certain features of our nonideal political realities, as well as features of our nonideal selves (such as cognitive and social biases). i specifically contend that anger as a response to structural injustice faces challenges to remaining properly political. by building on iris m. young’s analysis in responsibility for justice, i argue that blaming anger faces a targeting problem. structural injustice makes it difficult (and sometimes even impossible) to single out who is to blame. as a result, blaming anger is prone to be mistargeted and, therefore, to become unfitting. second, anger at structural injustice faces the risk of boundlessness. this is the risk that the great and sustained wrongly inflicted harm caused by structural injustice may lead to awesome levels of anger that can be channeled or discharged in politically dangerous ways. despite these dangers, i defend the claim that anger is a politically relevant emotion. anger at structural injustice can potentially play a properly political role, but it is not guaranteed. the problem lies in the fact that a nonideal world (characterized by multiple structural injustices) creates the conditions for a tremendous amount of justified anger; however, that anger can become normatively problematic due to the combination of some of the features of the wrongs caused by structural injustices with some of our too-human features. i propose addressing the targeting problem by building on the distinction introduced by david shoemaker (2018, 73) between “goal-frustration anger” and 1 i focus here exclusively on anger, but i have developed elsewhere a similar analysis of fear as a political and antipolitical emotion; see vargas gonzález (forthcoming). vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 “blaming anger.” goal-frustration anger allows for anger that is not intrinsically retributive; it is a more forward-looking type of anger that focuses on overcoming the source of blockage rather than blaming. it is relevant for analyzing anger in politics because structural injustices present us with politically relevant wrongdoings for which it is often unclear who is to blame. introducing a goal-frustration type of anger allows us not to construe anger too narrowly, as always involving moral blame. moreover, it helps us articulate how anger that does not focus on blame can still be relevant to normative political reasoning. i believe it also provides a helpful category to make sense of many current expressions of anger in political life, in which people are frequently angry at unjust social structures (such as racist or sexist ones) without necessarily assigning blame to anyone.2 concerning the risk of boundlessness, i argue that we can learn (to some extent) to manage or channel our anger appropriately. at the same time, i acknowledge that the uptake that anger receives plays an essential role in creating an environment that favors (or disfavors) that anger at structural injustice remains bounded. the paper is structured as follows: in section 2, i argue that a normative assessment of anger in politics (and of emotions, more generally) requires a conflicttheory framework. i specifically build on hannah arendt’s normative conception of politics as agonistic to argue that anger can sometimes be antipolitical and, at other times, properly political. i offer two specific criteria for assessing when anger can be considered appropriate in political life. in section 3, i argue that even anger that justifiably emerges as a response to structural injustice faces challenges to meeting the criteria of fittingness and boundedness. in section 4, i argue that the targeting problem that blaming anger at structural injustice faces can be best addressed by introducing a goal-frustration type of anger. finally, in response to the risk of boundlessness faced by all anger at structural injustice, i argue that one can learn (to some extent) to regulate one’s anger. its social and malleable nature is important because anger can be channeled differently toward action in the public realm, depending on what the social norms and expectations are. 2. political and antipolitical anger: an arendtian agonistic framework to normatively assess the role of emotions in politics a conception of anger as negative cannot account for the fittingness or aptness of certain forms of anger. moreover, the view according to which anger should be avoided, whatever the circumstances, because it can be “counterproductive” (based on its consequences) is an example of the conflation 2 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me to clarify how introducing a goalfrustration type of anger enriches our current debates about anger in politics. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 problem discussed by d’arms and jacobson (2000a, 2000b).3 srinivasan has argued for the aptness of anger as a response to injustices. there is more to anger, normatively speaking, than its effects. for any instance of counterproductive anger we might still ask: is it the fitting response to the way the world is? is the anger, however unproductive, nonetheless apt? (srinivasan 2018, 126) additionally, a conception of anger as negative leaves out the way that anger can have positive or desirable consequences. as others have argued, anger can have epistemic value by helping us recognize and denounce wrongdoing—sometimes even harms wrongly inflicted that have until now been regarded as normal or acceptable (jaggar 1989; lugones 1995; bell 2009; stockdale 2021). as tessman (2005, 124) argues, the worst scenario may be that in which victims normalize the harm; that is, when victims are not even able to experience anger. anger may help members of oppressed groups to resist the internalization of oppression (leboeuf 2018). moreover, anger can play an important communicative role (shoemaker 2018, 74; aumann and cogley 2019, 48; stockdale 2021, 104–7) and serve to change what is considered acceptable in public life; it can also provide a strong source of motivation for action that is oriented toward addressing the injustices that matter to us. finally, anger can work as a deterrent and discourage new aggressions. hence, a normative assessment of anger in politics needs to be more nuanced; it should address the fact that anger can sometimes be appropriate or properly political, and at other times impermissible or antipolitical. as myisha cherry (2021, 12) argues, distinctions between types of anger in politics are required. i propose using a conflict-theory framework to examine the role of anger (and of emotions, more generally) in politics. my account draws specifically on hannah arendt’s agonistic conception of politics. unlike consensual approaches, arendt’s agonism captures political life's competitive and cooperative dimension. it recognizes that politics is inherently conflictual and that politics neither depends on nor aims at reaching an overlapping consensus. however, following arendt (1970), i claim that there is a normative opposition between politics and violence. the use of violence as a means to achieving desired ends is normatively problematic because, as arendt warns, once violence is introduced, one only knows how it starts but never knows how it ends. in other words, violence introduces an “all-pervading unpredictability,” 3 as d’arms and jacobson (2000a, 66) explain, “there is a crucial distinction between the question of whether some emotion is the right way to feel, and whether that feeling gets it right. it is remarkable how often philosophers conflate these questions.” vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 in which the danger lies precisely in the fact that the violent means may overwhelm the ends (arendt 1970, 5). resorting to violence to resolve political controversies can initiate vicious circles of retaliation that threaten the whole possibility of living together in polities. arendt’s views on violence acknowledge that violence might be necessary in extreme situations to achieve liberation (for instance, to fight colonialism, authoritarian governments, etc.); however, violence is never sufficient to create a political space of freedom (arendt 1970).4 i use arendt’s opposition between politics and violence to normatively distinguish between two types of conflict: agonistic and antagonistic conflict.5 agonism implies a relationship with opponents who are regarded as adversaries. this is the proper political relation that characterizes people who hold opposing views regarding the common good but share a commitment to deal in nonviolent ways with insurmountable differences. on the other hand, antagonistic conflict implies a relationship among political opponents who are regarded as enemies. antagonism is characterized by the intrusion (or even prominence) of violence in political life. this distinction among types of conflicts is not only descriptive but normative. arendt’s agonistic conception of politics implies that political life is only properly constituted by political contestation. therefore, appeals to violence and the use of force that make conflicts become antagonistic entail an abandonment of the proper realm of politics. my assessment of anger in politics builds on this normative distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflict. using the term “political” in a normative rather than a descriptive sense, we can say that an emotion is not properly political simply because it has the nation, political leaders, or praiseworthy goals as its object. emotions in politics are antipolitical if they foster antagonism—that is, if they contribute to seeing and treating political opponents as enemies who should be confronted by any means available (including violence). antipolitical emotions are politically dangerous because they threaten the possibility of finding nonviolent solutions to political disagreements. my agonistic framework acknowledges that ingroup and out-group dynamics constitute politics in the sense that politics involves an 4 in this paper, i do not address the issue of when resorting to violence as a means of liberation might be justified. this is a difficult question that exceeds the scope of the present work. instead, following arendt, i am interested in arguing that preserving an agonistic political realm requires restraints regarding the use of violent means to pursue political goals. 5 i borrow from chantal mouffe (2005, 2013) the explicit distinction between agonistic and antagonistic conflict. arendt does not use these terms; however, i argue that the distinction can be reconstructed in arendt’s thought based on the normative opposition between politics and violence (arendt 1970). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 “us vs. them” structure that is acceptable as long as it takes the form of adversarial contestation. what is unacceptable is when the “us vs. them” dynamics take an antagonistic form; those situations involve what i consider to be an antipolitical mobilization of emotions. this agonistic framework differs specifically from how martha nussbaum (2013) approaches a normative assessment of emotions in politics, as developed in political emotions: why love matters for justice. at the center of my disagreement with nussbaum lies a different understanding of politics and the role of conflict in political life. like john rawls, nussbaum endorses a consensual conception of politics, according to which, despite the plurality of comprehensive views present in contemporary liberal societies, it is hoped that citizens reach an overlapping consensus regarding central political values. in political emotions, nussbaum argues: in the type of liberal society that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all, there are two tasks for the political cultivation of emotion. one is to engender and sustain strong commitment to worthy projects that require effort and sacrifice. . . . most people tend toward narrowness of sympathy. they can easily become immured in narcissistic projects and forget about the needs of those outside their narrow circle. . . . the other related task for the cultivation of public emotion is to keep at bay forces that lurk in all societies and, ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others. (nussbaum 2013, 3) nussbaum’s assessment of emotions in political life presupposes her consensual conception of politics. on the one hand, emotions are classified as positive if they bring citizens (closer) together and help sustain their commitments to worthy common projects and shared political values or ideals. accordingly, compassion is generally praised as positive because it is a powerful emotion that can move us to act in altruistic ways by bringing us imaginatively closer to the suffering of others. on the other hand, emotions that create separations and divisions are classified as negative in politics; these are the emotions that can potentially derail citizens from pursuing valuable common goals. according to this account, an emotion like anger is basically a negative or dangerous emotion. it follows that positive emotions should be fostered and cultivated while negative emotions should be avoided in political life as much as possible. likewise, my analysis differs from nussbaum’s (2016, 23) more specific assessment of anger in anger and forgiveness, where she claims that anger is intrinsically normatively problematic because it involves, conceptually, a retributive dimension. vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 unlike nussbaum’s, my agonistic approach entails that the same emotion can be engaged in politics in either constructive or dangerous ways. applied to anger, this means that there are forms of anger that should be nurtured or cultivated and other forms that are impermissible. like others, i reject nussbaum’s claim that anger conceptually involves a “desire for payback” (mcbride 2018, 1; cherry 2021, 4; stockdale 2021, 108–9). my discussion of goal-frustration anger in section 4 underscores that not all forms of anger are retributive. moreover, i argue that the retributive dimension of anger (when it exists) is not politically problematic in itself; what matters politically is how that retribution is enacted and whether anger is rightly targeted. i propose two criteria to distinguish between forms of anger that are appropriate or properly political, and those that are dangerous and impermissible, or antipolitical. on my view, appropriate anger in politics must be fitting and bounded. i use the criterion of “fittingness” offered by d’arms and jacobson: emotions present things to us as having certain evaluative features. when we ask whether an emotion is fitting, . . . we are asking about the correctness of these presentations. the relevant considerations, then, are just those that count as evidence for the evaluations an emotion presents to us. (2000a, 72) anger as a response to perceived wrongdoing is a complex emotion because it often involves various interrelated appraisals. first, there is an appraisal that harm has been wrongly inflicted on us (or those who matter to us). second, anger of the blaming type involves an appraisal of who wronged us—the person(s) who become our anger’s target (solomon 2007, 24; nussbaum 2016, 17). moreover, blaming anger involves an attribution of intent. this entails that if we mistakenly attribute intent when harm was accidental, then no one has wronged us. according to the criterion of fittingness, anger is unfitting, first of all, if something is presented as a wrong when it is not. additionally, blaming anger is unfitting if it is mistargeted (i.e., if we misdirect our anger toward someone who did not cause us unjustified harm). in addition to the correctness of the evaluative presentations (considerations of shape), the criterion of fittingness involves the dimension of size (d’arms and jacobson 2000a). this second dimension of the fittingness criterion entails that all anger is also unfitting if it is disproportionate. this happens when our appraisal of the wrong is over or underestimated. one can criticize an emotion with regard to its size and its shape. an emotional episode presents its object as having certain evaluative feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 features; it is unfitting on grounds of shape when its object lacks those features. . . . an emotion can also be criticized for its size. while such criticism typically implies that it has the right shape, one can nevertheless urge that an emotional response is unfitting because it is an overreaction. (d’arms and jacobson 2000a, 73–74) second, i offer the criterion of boundedness. this criterion states that even fitting anger should be kept within proper bounds or limits regarding how it is channeled toward action in the public realm. the boundedness criterion applies to all forms of anger in political life, including the two types discussed in this paper: blaming anger and goal-frustration anger.6 on my view, anger becomes inappropriate in politics or antipolitical if it is unfitting and/or boundless; meeting the fittingness criterion is not sufficient for an emotion to be considered properly political. an emotion becomes politically boundless if it is used to justify the view that all means are allowed in the political contest (including violence and force). this second criterion refers not to the intensity of the emotion but to how the emotion is channeled toward action. it is concerned with the consequences of how our emotions are expressed or acted upon in the public realm. it is important to note that proportionality (which relates to the size or intensity of the emotion) and boundlessness (how the emotion is channeled toward action) are not the same, but they can be connected. very intense anger that is proportional to the wrong may (or may not) become boundless. however, a disproportionate (in the sense of excessive) angry response would tend to become boundless. this implies that the difference between political and antipolitical forms of anger is not merely a matter of intensity; boundless anger may (or may not) be fitting in terms of proportionality. moreover, very intense anger may be a proportionate response to the unjust world we live in; however, even then, intense, fitting anger should remain bounded.7 6 it also applies to the performance of anger in the public realm, even when the emotion is absent. that is, the boundedness condition is not necessarily tied to even having the emotion but to expressions typically associated with anger. as i argue later, by building on arendt’s discussion of the “darkness of the heart,” motivations are never transparent in public life. therefore, it might be difficult to distinguish from a third-person perspective between anger proper and a performance of anger. in addition, an unbounded performance of anger in public life can have consequences just as undesirable. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to make this clarification. 7 my two criteria imply that mistargeted anger expressed in the public realm and upon which we act is antipolitical, even if it remains bounded (that is, even if it does not vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 this second criterion for assessing emotions in politics builds on arendt’s theory of action and her normative conception of politics as agonistic.8 arendt’s agonism prevents us from seeing politics as being on a continuum with war (i.e., as unrestricted struggle). accordingly, it is central to my view that agonistic democratic politics requires restraints in how emotions that concern our living together are expressed or channeled publicly; unrestrained or boundless emotions (even if fitting) are themselves dangerous. boundless anger is dangerous because people use it to justify violence. anger becomes antipolitical (even if fitting) if it contributes to seeing “others,” opponents, or those who wronged us as enemies who should be destroyed or confronted by any means available (including violence and force). by doing so, antipolitical anger contributes to transforming the political realm into an antagonistic one. unlike nussbaum, i do not consider anger impermissible based solely on its (possible) retributive dimension. instead, i argue that what is normatively relevant in politics is how the retributive motivation is enacted (not the motivation itself). on my view, fitting anger that seeks punishment through institutions remains properly political, even if it is not performed out of purely forward-looking motivations. by contrast, fitting anger in which the victims seek to punish or determine what is just themselves is antipolitical according to the boundlessness criterion. intense fitting anger that remains normatively restrained in how it is expressed and acted upon remains properly political. there can be various sources of constraint. a moral commitment to pacifism can be a possible source (as in the case of the civil rights movement); a commitment to democracy can be a source as well. however, there can also be entail physical violence). public mistargeted anger wrongs the people who are being incorrectly held accountable for the harm or injustice, and it can further undermine the political realm and foster antagonism by leading to justifiable responses (for instance, of anger and indignation) from those who have been wrongly blamed. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to consider the nuances involved in the case of anger in the public domain that is mistargeted but remains bounded. 8 arendt’s theory of action stresses how action in the realm of human affairs is characterized by its unpredictability and irreversibility. as arendt (1998, 190) explains, whenever we act, our action “acts upon beings who are capable of their own actions[;] reaction, apart from being a response, is always a new action that strikes out on its own and affects others.” in other words, every action may lead to new actions upon which the initial actor has no control, and which are, nonetheless, irreversible. i build on arendt’s phenomenological analysis of action to argue that the preservation of an agonistic polity requires a boundedness criterion, regarding how our emotions are expressed and acted upon in the public realm, precisely because we can never control the processes we set in motion whenever we act among other acting beings. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 strategic constraints such as an awareness that “if we were to use violence, they’d decimate us.” even if there are no strategic constraints, there are always normative ones. 9 my approach shares with recent normative assessments of anger the idea that appropriate anger must be, first of all, fitting anger (srinivasan 2018; cherry 2021; stockdale 2021). however, my account does not allow for partially fitting anger. unlike them, i do not consider that “fitting anger can be either mixed or fully correct” (cherry 2021, 39) in the sense that it may correctly track an injustice but incorrectly attribute it to the wrong people.10 instead, i contend that anger (and, specifically, blaming anger) is not fitting at all unless appraisals of wrongdoing and the target of our anger are both correct. but, as i shall discuss in section 3, this is particularly challenging in the case of structural injustice because of the systemic nature of the wrong; in those cases, even justified anger may quite easily be mistargeted and, therefore, become unfitting. likewise, my account shares with cherry’s assessment of anger that fittingness is not enough to consider anger appropriate in the political realm. we both care about how anger is used or channeled toward action. in the case for rage, she writes: so what are the conditions for (fitting) lordean rage to be appropriate? lordean rage can be morally appropriate when it respects the humanity of the wrongdoer and aims to create a better world rather than tear the wrongdoer down in the name of virtue signaling, for example. in other words, if you are feeling rage against injustice and you aim that rage in a way that is productive and in good faith, rather 9 my view acknowledges that institutions (understood as essential mediations in political life) may also be systemically biased or unjust and, therefore, in need of transformation. however, it stresses the role of collective action, including the public expression of anger, as means to push for change and address those injustices in institutional ways. i am not addressing here more extreme situations in which the whole institutional system is broken or unjust (as in the case of totalitarian systems) and revolution might be justified. 10 cherry’s (2021, 36) analysis in the case for rage focuses on lordean rage as a fitting response to racial injustice. cherry (2021, 38) recognizes that lordean rage may sometimes get wrong whether a particular event is a case of racism, or it may incorrectly assign responsibility regarding who caused the wrong. however, cherry (2021, 39) argues that lordean rage is more likely to make correct appraisals and be fitting “because we live in a racist world.” similarly, srinivasan (2018, 130n33) claims that “one can be aptly angry without always perfectly targeting and proportioning one’s anger.” vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 than just making a provocative statement to portray yourself in a certain light—righteous, fearless, politically active, and so on—that rage is morally appropriate. (cherry 2021, 37) however, cherry’s account emphasizes motivations, while my boundedness criterion focuses on actions and the consequences of anger in the public realm. my analysis follows arendt’s discussion of the “darkness of the heart” (2006, 86–87), where she argues that actions are what appear in the public space while motivations are never transparent to others (and sometimes not even to ourselves).11 moreover, my account acknowledges that a concern for not only how we appear before others but also (and in relation to it) how we see ourselves is among the stronger human motivational forces (batson 2016). on my view, reputational concerns and virtuesignaling behaviors do not necessarily make the action or the emotion politically inappropriate (even if they are not morally praiseworthy). my account acknowledges that appearance (i.e., the image that relevant others have of us) is central to political life. processes of social change involve people taking others’ behaviors as signals of what others are doing and as signals of what others believe should be done. more precisely, collective processes of norm change involve changes in what most other people approve or disapprove of (normative expectations) and in what we expect most other people will do (empirical expectations) (bicchieri 2017, 128). people may join and contribute to norm change at different speeds because we have different thresholds for our willingness to bear social costs; that is, different people will require different levels of social support.12 virtue-signaling practices are certainly unreliable. they pose dangers and possibilities for agonistic polities.13 however, it is my view that the risks of socially motivated behavior in politics are unavoidable. the expectation that people will adopt the right norms for the right (i.e., principled) reasons remains too aspirational. it does not adequately account for the complexity of human motivation. moreover, it does not reflect an understanding of how positive social change actually occurs in our nonideal realities. for a normative analysis of anger in politics, this entails that anger (and the performance of anger) that is fitting and bounded remains appropriate or properly political, even if it is not performed out of purely principled motivations (such as wanting “to create a better world”). 11 furthermore, motivations are themselves altered by public light (arendt 2006, 86). 12 sunstein’s (2019) analysis of the #metoo movement as a revolutionary cascade shows how virtue-signaling practices can contribute to changing unjust social norms. 13 for a critical stance regarding virtue signaling, see tosi and warmke (2016). for a defense, see levy (2021). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 3. the challenges faced by anger at structural injustice there are specific challenges to keeping one’s anger at structural injustice properly political. first, i argue that blaming anger faces a targeting problem that arises from the difficulty examined by iris m. young (2011)—namely, that structural injustices make it hard (and sometimes even impossible) to identify who is to blame for the sustained, wrongly inflicted harm they represent. moreover, the sustained and cumulative harm that structural injustices cause may lead to an “awesome level of anger” (tessman 2005, 121) that makes it more difficult for the victims of structural injustice to draw the subtle distinctions required for proper blaming. all this entails that blaming anger at structural injustice may be especially prone to being mistargeted, and mistargeted anger is unfitting even if it is aroused by real and significant unjustified harm. additionally, this “awesome level of anger” associated with the cumulative and sustained nature of the injustice may also imply a risk of boundlessness; that is, the risk of justified anger channeled or discharged in politically dangerous ways. mistargeted anger is anger that wrongly blames individuals or collectives as responsible for some wrongdoing or injustice. as tessman (2005, 122) claims, “anger that fails in its targeting is not to be praised.” mistargeted anger is not useful for resisting oppression or injustices. it is also dangerous because it may contribute to vicious circles of blaming in political life (to the extent that mistargeted agents are wronged, and they may respond with anger in return). in other words, mistargeted anger may contribute to an antagonistic turn of the political realm. but mistargeted anger is not a marginal phenomenon in political life; rather, the problem is that a nonideal world (characterized by multiple and overlapping structural injustices) may easily lead to significant amounts of mistargeted anger. in responsibility for justice, young writes: how shall agents . . . think about our responsibility in relation to structural injustice? the question harbors some puzzles and dilemmas. on the one hand . . . the very judgment that there is injustice implies some kind of responsibility. to judge a circumstance unjust implies that we understand it at least partly as humanly caused, and entails the claim that something should be done to rectify it. on the other hand, when the injustice is structural, there is no clear culprit to blame and therefore no agent clearly liable for rectification. (young 2011, 95) vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 if the central point of blaming is “singling out,” the problem is that “singling out” is precisely what becomes difficult or elusive under conditions of structural injustice (young 2011, 76).14 but how does this targeting problem relate to the specific type of wrongly inflicted harm that structural injustices cause? and how should we understand this harm? first, structural injustices are harmful because they inhibit the development of people’s capacities; that is, they constitute significant obstacles to flourishing (young 1988, 271). as a result, victims of structural injustice can legitimately experience anger at the fact that structural conditions work against them and impede (or make more difficult) the realization of their life projects. furthermore, structural injustices cause a sustained (or long-term) unjustifiable harm: having to live anticipating the possibility of harm. even if the worst fears never materialize (or if the person succeeds in having an accomplished life), there remains the unjustifiable harm that comes from experiencing extreme vulnerability and uncertainty (often merely by belonging to certain minority groups). in other words, to suffer structural injustice is to constantly fear specific harms that members of dominant groups do not fear. and to live anticipating the possibility of harm to you, or to those who matter most to you, is to experience a form of harm in itself. claiming that assigning responsibility is “puzzling” when it comes to structural injustices does not entail that we cannot sometimes identify individuals or collectivities who contribute to or directly engage in discriminatory (racist, misogynist, xenophobic, etc.) acts associated with structural injustices. however, even in those situations, the specific harm caused by the wrongdoer(s) overlaps with the larger experience of structural injustice that the victim suffers; and trying to separate one harm from the other might be an impossible task. the entanglement of harms makes it difficult to determine what might be an appropriate or proportionate angry response to the harm caused by this specific wrongdoer. this is a targeting problem because the wrongdoer may become the visible target of unjustifiable harm that extends beyond the specific actions for which they may be held accountable. at the same time, other wrongdoers may not be held accountable at all, even for their specific actions. as cherry (2021, 39) explains in relation to the racism experienced by african americans in the united states, “instances of racism—whether they be actions, statements, or policies—. . . are systemic and thus frequent. they are part of the air we breathe and are deeply embedded in the world through which we move.” targeting all instances of such a pervasive form of wrongdoing may not only be an extremely difficult task; it may also be even an undesirable one from the perspective 14 maclachlan (2010) points out how we may experience anger at unfair circumstances, events, or practices, even if no individual wrongdoer(s) can be identified as responsible for them. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 of the victim, given the enormous amount of anger that the person should bear. as cherry explains: even though a particular incident often prompts an expression of emotion, emotions are often responses to a pattern of events over time. you react to individual instances sometimes, but other times, the very accumulation of the emotion takes a toll of its own, and you feel annoyed or fed up by the frequent events that cause you to feel the same, bad way again and again. (cherry 2021, 39) moreover, cherry (2021, 37) argues that even rage at racism (which she calls lordean rage) “can be inappropriate when it consumes one’s life, causing a person to neglect matters that are also important to them.” hence, the first challenge that blaming anger faces for correctly targeting anger caused by structural injustices arises from the cumulative and pervasive nature of the harm. this makes it difficult to identify the adequate targets of our anger and, even if specific agents can be singled out, to determine to what extent they should be held responsible. a second major challenge ensues from the fact that victims and oppressors may interlock because systemic oppression or injustice has, in young’s (1988) words, many “faces.” this point is also made by tessman (2005, 122): “the fact that oppressions interlock makes it difficult to even identify and isolate a proper target for politically resistant anger; many people are both the agents and the victims of oppression.” the targeting problem arises from the fact that “group differences cross individual lives in a multiplicity of ways that can entail privilege and oppression for the same person in different aspects” (young 1988, 276). that is, individuals may be victims of structural injustice in one sense and contribute to reproducing systemic forms of oppression in another sense. in the presence of crossed identities, what allegiances people create, and with which in-groups they identify, becomes crucial. so, for instance, white people who have become marginal in the sense discussed by young (1988, 280)—that is, “people the system of labor markets cannot or will not employ”—and who face long-term unemployment and the social marginalization that results from being “expelled from useful participation in social life” (young 1988, 281) may identify as white (rather than marginal or poor) and use that privileged dimension of their identity to target other groups, especially more vulnerable ones (such as immigrants). hence, people who have become unable to exercise their capacities in some socially valued way and who have been deprived of important sources of selfrespect may, in turn, become aggressors against other groups; specifically, the most vulnerable may become the “available target” of their anger (tessman 2005, 122). vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 anger in those situations is inappropriate because it is mistargeted and essentially a pain-passing type of anger.15 i am interested in highlighting how aspects of our nonideal selves interact with the nonideal realities we live in and contribute to making mistargeted anger a collective and significant phenomenon in politics rather than a marginal one. so, for instance, comprehending why blaming anger as a response to structural injustices may be prone to being mistargeted requires engaging with the potential human tendency to turn a self-regarding sense of failure (or shame) into aggression toward others, and specifically, into a desire to stigmatize and humiliate. this is the tendency discussed by nussbaum (2004) as “narcissistic rage.” the central idea is that a selfregarding, painful emotion that involves a sense of failure, incompleteness, or diminished worth can lead to a desire to diminish or humiliate others as a means of elevating oneself (nussbaum 2004, 184). as nussbaum (2004, 209–10) explains: “the self, aware of its inadequacy, seeks to blame someone for this condition. . . . this shame-driven rage often constructs its own object.” applied to an analysis of anger under conditions of structural injustice, nussbaum’s “narcissistic rage” contributes to our understanding of how individuals who experience a sense of personal failure—as the result, for instance, of marginalization—may engage in a sort of pain-passing anger that is potentially undiscerning about who becomes the target. groups or individuals are not targeted because they caused harm. instead, their denigration becomes a way of dealing with one’s sense of failure. but anger can also be misdirected in another way. as tessman (2005, 121–22) discusses, under conditions of systemic oppression, anger can be directed at those who are like one. that is, anger can be misdirected at one’s in-group in situations where the standards of oppression have been internalized. this is a form of self-hate that “comes from growing up as a member of socially despised groups.” (tessman 2005, 121) tessman quotes audre lorde’s autobiographical description regarding how she often misdirected her anger at other black women. lorde reports both that her anger is constant and potent . . . and that “how to train that anger with accuracy rather than deny it” is a pressing question because despite her knowledge that “other black women are 15 there are occasions in which whom we consider responsible for wronging us (our blame target) is not who becomes the target of our anger. this happens, for instance, if i blame the bank for messing up my account but get angry with the teller. in a situation like this, the teller becomes the “available target” of my misdirected anger. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out how blame and anger may sometimes differ in their targets. later, in section 4, i discuss goal-frustration anger as an example of anger without blame. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger,” the anger does “unleash itself most tellingly against another black woman at the least excuse.” (tessman 2005, 121; quoting lorde 1984, 145) as discussed above, anger and fear may be connected because a heightened fear (such as the one experienced by members of minority or discriminated groups) constitutes a form of harm that can build into (protracted) anger or bitterness.16 in the monarchy of fear, nussbaum (2018, 84) examines this connection when she describes anger as the “offspring of fear.” however, the two emotions are also connected in that it is often easier to feel and express anger than deal with (or acknowledge) one’s fear and vulnerability; as tessman (2005, 121) points out, citing lorde (1984): “it is easier to be angry than to be hurt.” this too-human feature dangerously interacts with a nonideal world in which multiple forms of structural injustice create a heightened sense of vulnerability for too many. additionally, correctly targeting anger at structural injustice is challenging because the disadvantages and injustices that some people suffer are often not the result of some intentional or tyrannical power that aims to keep them down (young 1988, 275). injustices are rather the result of something more subtle. oppressed groups often have a correlated privileged group rather than an oppressing group (young 1988, 276). this frequently implies that individuals who contribute to maintaining and reproducing structural injustice do not see themselves as agents of oppression; their actions are not intended to harm, put others down, or create unjust outcomes (young 2011, 99–100). privileged individuals who contribute unintentionally or unknowingly to perpetuate structural injustices may become the target of victims’ anger. however, because privileged individuals fail to acknowledge their contribution to systemic injustice, they may not even understand where the anger comes from. as a result, they can even see themselves as victims of unjustified anger; after all, they have not intended to cause any harm. they may also respond with anger or indignation at the blaming. the targeting challenge faced by blaming anger is more complex because it involves not only the cumulative nature of the harm discussed above but also the problem of intentionality. on the one hand, anger is unfitting if victims mistakenly attribute intent to harm. on the other hand, privileged individuals are at least responsible for not understanding their position of privilege better. although they may cause harm unintentionally, such harm is not accidental. it has to do with structural conditions that can be understood. hence, there is the epistemic demand that they should have known better. 16 stockdale (2021, 142) speaks of bitterness to refer to a “hopeless anger” that may emerge when injustices remain unaddressed. vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 finally, structural injustice can lead to an escalation of anger in the public realm not only because privileged individuals may consider that they have been unjustly blamed. the escalation may also be provoked by the fact that fighting against structural injustice (if successful) implies that some people lose; therefore, groups and individuals who see their privileges at risk are likely to respond with anger and fear. but again, their resistance to social change does not need to be motivated by intentional hatred of oppressed groups. instead, their resistance can be presented as “self-protection” and motivated by “self-love” (that is, love of one’s in-group).17 individuals or groups who fear losing privileges due to advances in social justice experience what nussbaum calls “status injury.” although they are not wronged, their anger can be understood as responding to the “harm” entailed by losing relative status. and even for nussbaum (2016, 5), who generally regards desires for payback as irrational, anger as a response to status injuries makes perfect sense. i agree with nussbaum (2016, 5) that responding to status injuries by humiliating or lowering the status of others to elevate oneself is normatively problematic. however, a distinction between “status injuries” seems to be called for. on the one hand, status injuries of privileged individuals or groups who do not receive the (superior) treatment they expect can be considered a banal form of anger (normatively problematic). on the other hand, status injuries experienced by oppressed groups or individuals (even in the form of microaggressions) are not to be considered banal forms of anger. in these cases, it is equality that is being neglected. moreover, i intend to highlight that even anger caused by status injuries of those who are privileged can lead to dynamics in which the anger of different groups clashes. my intention is not to equalize the anger of the oppressed and the privileged. instead, i want to call attention to the fact that even the justified anger of the oppressed is likely to be met by anger on the side of the privileged; and that the privileged resistance does not need to be motivated by overt hatred or “radical evil.” it can be a more banal form of evil, the sort of harm caused by being too fixated on one’s perspective and interests (or those of one’s in-group) one of the reasons why anger may relatively easily go wrong is because anger works as an in-group emotion. we do not judge everyone’s anger equally; there are asymmetries in how we assess other people’s anger. as cherry (2018, 55–56) explains: we are . . . limited in whose anger we can immediately sympathize with. . . . 17 for a discussion of racism in the united states as a form of self-love (i.e., as an attempt to keep the elevated status of oneself and one’s in-group), see grant j. silva (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 . . . we are more prone to immediately sympathize and thus approve of the political anger of those close to us than with the anger of distant others. we tend to approve, and even support or praise, in-group members’ anger as appropriate or acceptable, while at the same time, we tend to disregard out-group members’ anger as unacceptable. this asymmetry in our judgments of other people’s anger constitutes a case of in-group bias. as cherry (2018, 56) explains, we tend to judge other people’s anger differently based on how easily we can imaginatively represent their positions. the less we know about the causes of their anger, or the harder it is for us to relate to their situation, the more prone we are to judge their anger as “unjustified,” “disproportionate,” or even as “counterproductive”—and, thus, the more easily we may engage in practices such as “gaslighting” or “anger policing,” which tend to be in-group biased. moreover, our natural tendency to judge others’ anger differently can be reinforced and exacerbated by in-group dynamics, such as the group polarization phenomenon shows (sunstein 1999). applied to anger, this phenomenon entails that anger (or the lack thereof) tends to become more extreme as we discuss it mostly with like-minded people. it implies that our awareness of wrongdoing and the intensity of our anger are highly dependent on the people with whom we talk and interact. and as we speak only with like-minded people, we tend naturally to radicalize. this tendency to radicalize poses dangers to political life. it fosters the risk of boundless anger. likewise, it furthers the risk of becoming emotionally and imaginatively “shielded” from others’ (or out-group) perspectives; that is, we risk becoming unresponsive to the injustices experienced by out-group members. the claim that mistargeted anger is normatively problematic is widely accepted. for instance, nussbaum (2018, 80) considers it one of anger’s obvious errors that the emotion goes wrong if it is based on wrong beliefs regarding who caused one’s harm. however, the phenomenon of mistargeted anger in politics is more complex. there are multiple ways in which targeting blaming anger correctly under conditions of structural injustice is challenging. the problem is that even justified anger aroused by structural injustices may relatively easily be mistargeted and, therefore, become unfitting. notwithstanding, i contend that anger is an important emotion in the unjust world we live in. silencing or suppressing anger is not without a cost. it may contribute to the perpetuation of unjust conditions that cause significant harm. but any endorsement of anger should be cautious. on my view, anger at structural injustice is only appropriate or properly political if it is not unfitting and/or boundless. vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 4. addressing the challenges: goal-frustration anger and anger’s social dimension because blaming anger in our nonideal world is prone to being mistargeted, it could be argued that it is generally “safer” not to mobilize anger in the political realm. in this section, i argue that the targeting problem can be addressed by distinguishing between blaming anger and “goal-frustration anger.” goal-frustration anger may not only be fitting as a response to structural injustices, but it can play an important political role if it remains bounded and committed to an agonistic conception of politics. in “you oughta know: defending angry blame,” shoemaker (2018, 72) argues that two types of anger need to be distinguished based on “what anger really responds to” and what the action tendencies of anger are. this distinction is relevant because, since aristotle, anger’s classical definition has stressed its retributive dimension. however, shoemaker’s distinction between “goal-frustration anger” and blaming anger shows that not all angry responses need to be targeted. that is, anger does not need to be construed as always involving moral blame. moreover, goalfrustration anger helps to point out that nonblaming anger might still be relevant to normative political reasoning.18 goal-frustration anger is anger that can be experienced when we are prevented from getting what we want but that does not necessarily involve a response to slights or offenses (shoemaker 2018, 72). it can apply to situations in which there are no agents to blame for the reversal of plans, as when we get angry because bad weather or a traffic jam prevent us from being on time for an important meeting. but goal-frustration anger can also be caused by other people’s actions. the relevant point is that introducing the concept of goal-frustration anger allows for a type of anger that does not necessarily involve a desire for retribution or vindication. as shoemaker explains, goal-frustration and blaming anger also differ in their action tendencies. the first one moves us to overcome the source of the blockage; the other moves us to confront or retaliate (shoemaker 2018, 73). of course, both types of anger may also converge, as in those situations in which we experience goal-frustration and we hold some people responsible for the negative impact on our well-being. i contend that goal-frustration anger that justifiably—and fittingly—emerges as a response to systemic injustices is properly political as long as it is not boundless and/or mistargeted. it can serve an essential communicative function in political life: making visible and denouncing structural forms of harm that should no longer be considered “acceptable” or “normal” (such as racism or sexism). by doing so, goal 18 goal-frustration anger is similar, in this respect, to hirji’s concept of “outrage anger.” as she explains, “outrage anger” does not focus on the offending party. it is instead a kind of anger “directed at the state of affairs in which a violation is not fully intelligible to the dominant moral community” (hirji 2022, 1). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 frustration anger can work as an “outlaw emotion” (jaggar 1989); that is, it may contribute to subverting and changing “feeling rules” as well as prevailing norms and values that tend to serve the interests of privileged groups (jaggar 1989, 165).19 here it is important to understand that anger is shaped in multiple ways by social norms and the values governing our societies or groups. the appraisals involved in our angry responses (such as “you wronged me!” or “you wronged him/her/them!”) change over time and across societies and groups (flanagan 2018, xiii). and the ways we consider appropriate to express our anger in the public realm also make part of feeling rules that are socially taught and enforced. as flanagan explains: there are age, gender, status, role, and occupation norms that govern permissions for who can be angry, why, how much, to what effect, as well as permissions and norms governing acceptable responses to anger. (flanagan 2018, xii) this social dimension of anger shows that anger is (to some extent) malleable. of course, we cannot will ourselves to feel it in a specific situation, but we can cultivate, nurture, or discourage specific forms of anger in ourselves. the traditional image according to which anger is an explosive emotion that pushes us around or overcomes us is not accurate. it only favors an assessment of anger as negative. and if there are certainly political dangers that emerge from the nonideal beings we are, some of our too-human features also offer potentialities for political life. specifically, social and reputational mechanisms can favor either the spread and normalization of antipolitical forms of anger (unfitting and/or boundless) or the change of the current (racialized and gendered) norms that regulate who gets to be publicly angry, as well as contribute to setting constraints regarding what might be politically acceptable ways of expressing anger. anger itself does not tell us what to do. anger can be channeled differently toward action in the public realm depending on what the social norms and expectations are. this entails that our anger can (to some extent) be trained and shaped. this, of course, is not easy and never perfect. moreover, as arendt (1998, 188) warns us, we should be wary of “the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material.’” in other words, claiming that anger is malleable does not ignore the limits on how we may be able to shape ourselves emotionally; there are dangers associated with some forms of anger that can never be eliminated. anger’s social and malleable nature only entails that there is no necessary connection between anger and violence. 19 cherry (2021, 94) defines feeling rules as “certain social conventions or rules [that] exist about what emotions we should feel in a certain context.” vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 in light of anger’s social and malleable nature, i contend that goal-frustration anger that fittingly responds to structural injustice and that remains bounded in its expressions is a properly political form of anger. this anger does not focus on blaming or payback (which, as i have discussed, are problematic in the case of structural injustices); it is instead a more forward-looking type of anger concerned with mobilizing collective action that aims to change what is harmful and unjust in the present. responding to structural injustice with properly political anger is a demanding task; however, i believe the dangers are not enough reason for calling for the suppression of anger in the political realm. suppressing anger has a cost. moreover, as srinivasan (2018) claims, it entails an affective injustice when anger is fitting. like cherry (2021) argues in relation to the antiracist struggle, anger can play an important role in the fight against structural injustices. but even then, a commitment to politics as agonistic is required; that is, anger should be prevented from fostering antagonistic conflicts. however, the burden of caring for and preserving an agonistic polity should not be seen as falling only on the oppressed or those whose anger is a fitting response to the injustices they suffer. it is crucial, in this respect, to understand that anger (like other emotions) is always, to some extent, co-constructed by expressers and receivers (frye 1983; campbell 1994). therefore, the task of keeping fitting anger expressed or channeled in properly political ways also depends on the uptake of (or given to) the demands made by that anger. that is, anger’s addressees also play an important role in creating a social environment in which anger at structural injustices remains properly political. and anger (even if fitting) that is systematically dismissed may risk turning antipolitical.20 5. concluding remarks the analysis of anger’s role in politics must overcome the oversimplified views of anger as positive or negative. instead, i have proposed the criteria of fittingness and boundedness to distinguish between properly political and antipolitical forms of anger. nonetheless, even a normative assessment of anger needs to understand the complexities that emerge from the fact that we are nonideal beings (with cognitive and social biases) interacting in nonideal realities characterized by multiple (and sometimes overlapping) structural injustices. 20 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to respond to the potential objection that putting on the oppressed the burden of channeling their anger in properly political ways, without considering the role of anger’s addressees regarding the uptake given to those angry demands, could be another form of the normative conflict that srinivasan (2018) refers to as “affective injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 i have specifically argued that anger at structural injustices, if it is to remain political, must not be mistargeted and/or become boundless. this is challenging, considering (1) the difficulties of singling out who is responsible for systemic wrongs and (2) the significant amount of anger (possibly) aroused by sustained, cumulative, and pervasive forms of wrongly inflicted harm. properly political anger as a response to structural injustices requires constraints (or some form of emotional regulation) to avoid channeling our emotions in impermissible ways that foster antagonistic conflicts. however, the task of caring for or preserving an agonistic political realm should not fall only on the oppressed. my view entails that we should be willing to grant anger a larger role in political life than the one that a negative conception, such as nussbaum’s, endorses. anger may sometimes be not only fitting but an appropriate response to injustice. therefore, we should avoid engaging in practices (like anger policing or gaslighting) that undermine others’ anger and presuppose an understanding of anger as “negative” or “uncivilized.” instead, we should be willing to listen better to angry complaints; most importantly, we should acknowledge that not everyone’s anger is equally listened to in the public realm. as i have argued, anger can play a fundamental role in subverting or changing what is considered acceptable or normal. anger in politics (despite its dangers) reveals that we care about our living together. thus, anger must not be neglected. rather, anger needs to be imaginatively channeled toward mobilizing collective action that aims at changing what is currently harmful and unjust, but doing so in a politically responsible way that acknowledges that not all means are valid. i have argued that political anger, as a response to structural injustice, should be less concerned with the backward-looking task of blaming (which is often problematic) and focus more on collectively pursuing change that seeks to end oppression and protect freedom. in brief, the leap from anger to political action (mediated or channeled by the imagination) demands, in arendt’s words, not to “despair of politics.” references arendt, hannah. 1970. on violence. san diego, ca: harcourt brace jovanovich. ———. 1973. the origins of totalitarianism. san diego, ca: harcourt brace. ———. 1998. the human condition. 2nd ed. chicago: university of chicago press. ———. 2006. on revolution. new york: penguin books. aumann, anthony g, and zac cogley. 2019. “forgiveness and the multiple functions of anger.” journal of philosophy of emotion 1, no. 1 (winter): 44–71. https://doi.org/10.33497/jpe.v1i1. batson, c. daniel. 2016. what’s wrong with morality: a social-psychological perspective. oxford: oxford university press. vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 bell, macalester. 2009. “anger, virtue, and oppression.” in feminist ethics and social and political philosophy: theorizing the non-ideal, edited by lisa tessman, 165–83. dordrecht: springer. bicchieri, cristina. 2017. norms in the wild: how to diagnose, measure, and change social norms. oxford: oxford university press. campbell, sue. 1994. “being dismissed: the politics of emotional expression.” hypatia 9 (3): 46–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1994.tb00449.x. cherry, myisha. 2018. “the errors and limitations of our ‘anger-evaluating’ ways.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, 49–65. london: rowman & littlefield international. ———. 2021. the case for rage: why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle. new york: oxford university press. d’arms, justin and daniel jacobson. 2000a. “the moralistic fallacy: on the ‘appropriateness’ of emotions.” philosophy and phenomenological research 61, no. 1 (july): 65–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/2653403. ———. 2000b. “sentiment and value.” ethics 110, no. 4 (july): 722–48. https://doi.org /10.1086/233371. flanagan, owen. 2018. “introduction: the moral psychology of anger.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, vii–xxxi. london: rowman & littlefield international. frye, marilyn. 1983. the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. trumansburg, new york: crossing press. hirji, sukaina. 2022. “outrage and the bounds of empathy.” philosophers’ imprint 22, no. 16 (october). https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.1296. jaggar, alison m. 1989. “love and knowledge: emotion in feminist epistemology.” inquiry 32 (2): 151–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201748908602185. leboeuf, céline. 2018. “anger as a political emotion: a phenomenological perspective.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, 15–29. london: rowman & littlefield international. levy, neil. 2021. “virtue signalling is virtuous.” synthese 198, no. 10 (october): 9545– 62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02653-9. lorde, audre. 1984. “eye to eye: black women, hatred, and anger.” in sister outsider: essays and speeches, 145–75. berkeley, ca: crossing press. lugones, maría. 1995. “hard-to-handle anger.” in overcoming racism and sexism, edited by linda a. bell and david blumenfeld, 203–18. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. maclachlan, alice. 2010. “unreasonable resentments.” journal of social philosophy 41 (4): 422–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2010.01508.x. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 3, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 mcbride, lee a., iii. 2018. “anger and approbation.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, 1–13. london: rowman & littlefield international. mouffe, chantal. 2005. the return of the political. london: verso. ———. 2013. agonistics: thinking the world politically. london: verso. nussbaum, martha c. 2004. hiding from humanity: disgust, shame, and the law. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2013. political emotions: why love matters for justice. cambridge, ma: belknap press. ———. 2016. anger and forgiveness: resentment, generosity, justice. new york: oxford university press. ———. 2018. the monarchy of fear: a philosopher looks at our political crisis. new york: simon & schuster. shoemaker, david. 2018. “you oughta know: defending angry blame.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, 67–88. london: rowman & littlefield international. silva, grant j. 2019. “racism as self-love.” radical philosophy review 22 (1): 85–112. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev201913193. solomon, robert c. 2007. true to our feelings: what our emotions are really telling us. new york: oxford university press. srinivasan, amia. 2018. “the aptness of anger.” journal of political philosophy 26, no. 2 (june): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130. stockdale, katie. 2021. hope under oppression. new york: oxford university press. sunstein, cass r. 1999. “the law of group polarization.” university of chicago law school, john m. olin law & economics working paper no. 91. https://doi.org /10.2139/ssrn.199668. ———. 2019. “#me too as a revolutionary cascade.” university of chicago legal forum, vol. 2019, article 9: 261–71. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uc lf/vol2019/iss1/9. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. new york: oxford university press. tosi, justin, and brandon warmke. 2016. “moral grandstanding.” philosophy & public affairs 44, no. 3 (summer): 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075. vargas gonzález, jessica. forthcoming. “fear as a political and anti-political emotion: a normative analysis in times of political polarization.” social theory and practice. young, iris m. 1988. “five faces of oppression.” philosophical forum 19 (4): 270–90. ———. 2011. responsibility for justice. new york: oxford university press. vargas gonzález – political and antipolitical anger published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 jessica vargas gonzález is currently doing a postdoctorate at the universidad autónoma metropolitana (mexico) and has received a grant from conahcyt (consejo nacional de humanidades, ciencias y tecnologías; mexico’s national council of humanities, sciences, and technologies). her primary interests are in social and political philosophy, especially hannah arendt’s work. her current research focuses on a normative analysis of the role of emotions in political life. 16618 vargas gonzalez title page 16618 vargas gonzalez final format supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 1 article 2 recommended citation weigel, chris. 2023. “supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (1). article 2. 2023 supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony chris weigel utah valley university weigelch@uvu.edu weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony chris weigel abstract the sacrifices of nurses in hard-hit cities during the early stages of the covid19 pandemic and of family caregivers for people with late-stage alzheimer’s disease present two puzzles. first, traditional accounts of supererogation cannot allow for the possibility of making enormous sacrifices that make one’s actions supererogatory simply to do what morality requires. these caregivers, however, are doing their moral duty, yet their actions also seem to be paradigmatic cases of supererogation. i argue that dale dorsey’s new account of supererogation can solve this puzzle. second, these caregivers often deny that they are heroic, but standard explanations of these assertions either diminish their sacrifice, say they are confused, or attribute to them a vice. if we want to understand them without diminishing them, we should instead see their denials as a response to what beth devolder calls compulsory heroism. compulsory heroism occurs when someone is foisted into the role of hero for doing their moral duty as a distraction from the social realities that make doing their duty involve inordinate sacrifice. keywords: nursing, family caregiving, supererogation, dale dorsey, compulsory heroism, heroic testimony to say that caregivers such as nurses and family members of people with alzheimer’s disease do their moral duty is relatively uncontroversial: to refuse to give care would be an abdication of one’s moral responsibility. also uncontroversial is the claim that often they make extraordinary sacrifices, going far beyond what many other people do, incurring strenuous hardships, in a way that makes them paradigmatic cases of supererogation. nurses in hard hit cities during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic and family caregivers of people with late-stage alzheimer’s disease are particularly relevant here.1 standard accounts of supererogation can’t 1 for brevity, i will sometimes call the latter caregiving “family caregiving.” again, only for the sake of brevity, when i want to talk about nurses and family caregivers together (or only nurses and family caregivers), i will sometimes use the terms “caregivers” and “caregiving.” this should not be taken to imply that both categories feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 account for these caregivers because what they do straddles the divide between what is and what is not supererogatory.2 on the one hand, they are doing their duty, so they are not performing supererogatory actions. on the other hand, their enormous sacrifice, being particularly meritorious, suggests that they are doing something supererogatory. this is the first puzzle about supererogation that i examine. i argue that dale dorsey’s (2013, 2016) new account of supererogation can explain this kind of caregiving. dorsey’s view says that rather than holding as a condition for supererogation that the act be especially meritorious compared to one’s moral duties, the act instead needs to be especially meritorious compared to one’s all-thingsconsidered duties. all-things-considered duties include, but are not limited to, moral, prudential, and legal duties. as a result, one’s actions can be supererogatory and still be one’s moral duty. the caregiving i discuss is relatively common, and since traditional accounts can’t satisfactorily explain it while dorsey’s view can, this is a novel argument for dorsey’s view.3 these caregivers present a second puzzle, this time about what is called heroic testimony, the phenomenon of denying that one is a hero when called a hero. their heroism can best be seen as involving enormous sacrifices while doing one’s moral duty as the result of ongoing and systemic problems.4 people often hail caregivers as are basically the same: nurses are highly trained medical professionals, for example, and family caregivers are usually unpaid. 2 i owe thanks to cynthia stark for the idea to frame the paper this way. additionally, i owe thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping me separate and clarify the two puzzles. 3 dorsey’s account is controversial; i do not claim to discharge other critiques of dorsey’s view. archer (2015), for example, argues that the point of an account of supererogation is (1) to explain why it would be inappropriate to demand that the soldier throw himself on the grenade, (2) to explain why the soldier would not be blameworthy if he did not throw himself on the grenade, and (3) to do justice to the everyday notion of going above and beyond the call of duty. archer argues, moreover, that dorsey’s account cannot accomplish these tasks. 4 arguably, not all heroic acts involve large sacrifice, such as rescuing a drowning person when one is an excellent swimmer and trained lifeguard. moreover, not all heroic acts involve systemic and ongoing issues, as the previous example also shows. for the purposes of this paper, however, “heroic” will refer to certain acts that involve enormous sacrifices while doing one’s moral duty as the result of ongoing and systemic problems. (we shall see that the standard account of supererogation would say that these actions cannot be supererogatory because they are moral duties, but that dorsey’s account can say they are supererogatory.) i owe thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that my analysis doesn’t give a unified account weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 heroes, but then the caregivers resist being called heroes. why would they do so, even while keenly experiencing the sacrifice? standard accounts of heroic testimony either diminish their sacrifice, say they are confused, or attribute to them a vice. i argue that seeing heroic testimony instead as a resistance to compulsory heroism is superior. according to beth devolder’s (2013) account, compulsory heroism is the phenomenon wherein someone is foisted into the role of hero for doing their moral duty as a distraction from the social realities that make doing their duty involve inordinate sacrifice. i argue that it is better to see claims like “i’m not a hero” as a way of rejecting the compulsion in the caregiving rather than as false modesty, confusion, or as correct because the sacrifices aren’t enormous. an examination of caregiving, thus, sheds light on both the nature of supererogation and on how to interpret heroic testimony. to show how, in section 1, i discuss the social realities involved in these two kinds of caregiving. in section 2, i explain the puzzle about the nature of supererogation, showing how the traditional account cannot make sense of caregiving. in section 3, i show how dorsey’s account of supererogation can make sense of caregiving by allowing for supererogatory actions that are also one’s moral duty. section 4 gives concrete examples of heroic testimony on the part of caregivers and explains the second puzzle, which is that standard interpretations of heroic testimony either say caregivers are confused, diminish their sacrifice, or attribute to them the vice of false modesty, all of which are problematic. section 5 provides a solution by allowing for another interpretation. i explain devolder’s idea of compulsory heroism and apply it to caregiving, showing how caregiver heroic testimony can be seen in the light of resistance to compulsory heroism. seeing heroic testimony in this light provides a superior account. section five concludes by briefly showing how the solutions to the two puzzles are complimentary. 1. social realities of some extraordinary caregiving recall that my argument begins with two relatively uncontroversial claims: often, caregivers are doing their moral duty, and they are also making sacrifices so extreme that they look like paradigmatic cases of supererogation. these claims can be made more vivid by briefly examining the social realities of my two cases in more detail. 1a. pandemic nursing during the covid-19 pandemic, in less than a year (as of late october 2020), 1,500 nurses’ deaths were recorded globally (wright et al. 2020). there are approximately four million nurses in the united states (schnur 2020). as of 2017, 19.2 of all heroic testimony: the ongoing and systemic nature is what makes my analysis work. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 percent are minorities and 91 percent are female (national nursing workforce study 2020). some hospitals have required nurses to work even when sick with covid (clark 2020). many nurses have not had access to covid testing while athletes and actors received daily testing (wright et al. 2020). they have been tasked with caring for more patients than is safe and have been asked to do work for which they have not been trained or that falls outside their specialty (wright et al. 2020), exacerbating the already present vulnerability to moral distress (see, e.g., jameton 1984; campbell, ulrich, and grady, 2016). caitrìona cox (2020, 511) enumerates some ways in which, during the pandemic, “the risks to healthcare workers are appreciably greater than those encountered in normal practice.” nurses often must live away from home to avoid placing family members’ health at risk; they are at heightened risk for becoming ill from covid themselves, and at heightened risk for dying, particularly when personal protective equipment is lacking. and of course, moral distress, emotional distress, and physical exhaustion are all heightened (cox 2020, 511). their voices have been largely left out of the decision making that affects them (wright et al. 2020). they have taken on these risks knowing that large numbers of people refused to wear masks or social distance and that many politicians did not enact policies that would stem the crush on hospitals. 1b. family caregivers for people with late-stage alzheimer’s disease with the nursing example in mind, turn to another example, widespread enough to be a “pandemic” in another of that word’s senses. this is the case of caregiving as a family member for people with alzheimer’s disease.5 in 2015, nearly one in twenty americans were family caregivers for people with alzheimer’s disease (family caregiver alliance 2016). as the population ages, the percent of people who provide caregiving will increase. caregivers do experience joy and fulfillment, but the research on caregivers also portrays grave vulnerabilities: financial, emotional, and physical. family caregivers face a myriad of risks, some obvious and some less well known. they include anxiety and depression (mahoney et al. 2005), social isolation (brodaty and hadzi-pavlovic 1990), lowered quality of life (thomas et al. 2006), diminished immune response to vaccines (mills et al. 2004), disrupted sleep (cupidi et al. 2012), missed doctor’s appointments of their own (healthline 2018), a greater risk of developing alzheimer’s disease than non-caregivers (norton et al. 2010), and moral distress (weigel 2019). another part of the issue is that family caregiving often involves advanced skills, but little training is given (washington 2021, 29). and the 5 family caregiving for people with alzheimer’s disease was chosen to simplify the narrative. family caregiving for people with any type of dementia and for people with any type of critical illness are relevantly similar, and presumably other kinds of caregiving would be too. weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 work disproportionately falls on women, most of whom have children (whose care falls disproportionately on them as well). with these cases delineated, we can now examine a puzzle about supererogation that arises from these caregivers’ actions. 2. puzzle one: the nature of supererogation j. o. urmson’s seminal essay “saints and heroes” argues that any moral theory that does not account for supererogation is “inadequate” (urmson 1958, 199). he describes the supererogatory as “going the second mile” and “going beyond duty” (202). for urmson, supererogatory actions are not mere duties, nor are they acts that are permissible but not required, nor are they wrong; they form a fourth, independent category of moral conduct that we need in order to capture what saints and heroes do. since the publication of urmson’s essay, attempts to understand supererogation have proliferated. alfred archer (2018, 5) notes of this literature that “there is wide agreement that acts of supererogation are both morally optional and morally better than the minimum that morality demands.”. a supererogatory act must be morally optional, for if it is morally required, then it is a duty. moreover, because “supererogatory” is a comparative term, supererogatory acts must be better than the minimum demanded by morality. yet these two criteria, while necessary, are not sufficient for an act to be supererogatory. the following example shows why: it is morally optional to compliment a friend’s jacket, and the minimum that morality demands is to not say anything unkind. so, the compliment is morally optional and morally better than saying nothing. however, intuitively, it isn’t supererogatory. this suggests that for an act to be supererogatory, it must be morally optional and particularly morally good compared to other morally permissible options (dorsey 2016, 120). furthermore, some supererogatory acts, though optional, would be morally required were it not for the fact that they demand a significant sacrifice from the person who performs them (dorsey 2016, 120). dorsey captures this traditional account of supererogation with these conditions: [1.] permissible[,] not required: if an act  is supererogatory,  is morally permissible, but is not morally required. . . . [2.] morally good: if an act  is supererogatory,  is especially morally good or meritorious in comparison to other morally permissible actions. (dorsey 2016, 109–10) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 a subset of supererogatory actions additionally fills this condition: [3.] but for sacrifice: a subset (s) of supererogatory actions would have been morally required but for the fact that they require non-trivial sacrifice on the part of the agent. (dorsey 2016, 110) my claim is that the traditional account cannot properly make sense of caregiving. if it characterizes caregivers’ actions as supererogatory, then according to condition one, they are not doing their moral duty. but intuitively they are: for nurses, it is their job, and for family caregivers, it is a standard obligation to care for ill family members. on the other hand, if the traditional account characterizes their actions as duties, then it cannot explain the fact that these cases otherwise seem like paradigmatic instances of supererogation. the traditional account says that doing what morality requires and doing something supererogatory are mutually exclusive: it does not allow for the possibility of supererogatory actions that involve simply doing what is morally required.6 the traditional account hence does not allow for the possibility that ongoing and systemic failures can make doing one’s duty supererogatory, which we would like to be able to say is what is happening with these caregivers. an account of supererogation that would allow for the possibility of supererogatory duties would thus be superior in that it would allow us to get at the phenomenon on display with these caregivers. to that account we now turn. 3. puzzle one solution: dorsey’s account of supererogation the traditional account of supererogation outlined above invokes three types of moral act: those that are permissible tout court, those that are required, and those that are permissible but would be required if they did not demand excessive personal sacrifice. morality, however, is not the only domain of normativity, as dorsey points out. there are several others. for instance, there are prudentially required or permitted acts,7 legally required or permitted acts, acts required or permitted by etiquette, and acts required or permitted in virtue of one’s role or membership in a group, such as a neighborhood association (dorsey 2013, 369). when our normative requirements conflict, what we ought to do, according to dorsey (2013, 369), is our all-things-considered requirement. dorsey dubs the all-things-considered requirement the “rational requirement,” and i will keep this terminology. rational requirements, then, are requirements that take into account not only moral 6 thanks are owed to an anonymous reviewer for helping me make this point clear. 7 i understand prudence as benn and bales (2020, 918) do, where “prudence relates to how we ought to act so as to promote our own well-being.” weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 considerations but also legal, prudential, and other considerations. his new account of supererogation makes use of the notion of rationally required/permitted actions: [1.] permissible[,] not required ii: if an act  is supererogatory,  is rationally permissible, but is not rationally required. . . . [2.] morally good ii: if an act  is supererogatory,  is especially morally good or meritorious in comparison to other rationally permissible actions. (dorsey 2016, 127) a subset of supererogatory actions additionally fills this condition: [3.] but for sacrifice ii: a subset (s) of supererogatory actions would have been rationally required but for the fact that they require nontrivial sacrifice on the part of the agent. (dorsey 2016, 127) to illustrate his account, dorsey gives the example of rose. rose has enough money that she is in a position where she is morally required to help others with it, but helping others would be burdensome to her. alternatively, she can “live the life she would otherwise want to” (2013, 370). dorsey says that although helping others is a moral requirement, “rose is not rationally required to do so” (370). so, rose has moral requirements that are not rational requirements: “rose’s action is morally required in a way that isn’t required of her” (370; emphasis in original). if rose does decide to help others, she has done something that is both morally required and supererogatory under the modified definition of supererogation. in other words, this definition of supererogation allows for the possibility that supererogatory acts can be morally required. they are a moral duty while they are also above and beyond the call of rational duty: our moral duties do not exhaust the set of our duties. here is how dorsey’s account of supererogation can make sense of these cases of caregiving. first, consider nurses during the covid-19 pandemic who work without adequate staffing or personal protective equipment. working in these circumstances meets the permissible, not required ii condition of dorsey’s view. to work in these circumstances is rationally permitted. recall that to be rationally permitted, on this understanding, is to be permitted, all things considered. nurses have all sorts of obligations, including moral and prudential. it is rationally permitted to weight the moral considerations so strongly that they supersede the prudential considerations. yet it isn’t all-things-considered required (i.e., it isn’t rationally required) to work in these circumstances. nurses are not required to give precedence to moral considerations when the prudential costs are so extremely high. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 working in these circumstances also meets the morally good ii condition in dorsey’s account, for continuing to work is morally better than the rationally permissible option of not continuing to work. refusing to work without adequate staffing and without personal protective equipment involves weighting prudential over moral considerations. such a weighting is one way the all-things-considered reasoning could go. working and not working are both rationally permissible, but working is morally better than the rationally permissible option of not working. because working meets both these conditions, nurses’ actions are supererogatory on the modified view even though they are morally required. the modified view, therefore, shows how it is consistent to say that nurses are doing their moral duty and that the enormous cost they incur means that their actions are still supererogatory. so, too, for family caregivers. what they do is rationally permissible, but not rationally required, meeting the permissible, not required ii condition of the modified view. if taking on the type of caregiving that requires you to put your life on hold, and makes you vulnerable financially, socially, emotionally, and physically, is rationally required, it would have to be a requirement of all-things-considered rationality, which includes considerations of prudence, among others. since it may not be prudent (and hence not rational in this sense) for the family caregiver when considering their life as a whole, this type of family caregiving is not rationally required. such family caregiving is rationally permitted, though, since it is rationally permissible to give precedence to moral considerations over prudential considerations. second, family caregiving meets morally good ii as explicated by dorsey: it is especially morally good in comparison to other rationally permissible actions. for example, for someone who has a full-time paid job and small children, it would be rationally permissible to let a slightly less capable sibling who does not have a paid job or other substantial obligations do the care work. here too, we can say that family caregivers are doing supererogatory actions that are also their moral duty. dorsey (2016, 131–36) defends his account by saying that it avoids certain counterintuitive implications about moral justification and the moral point of view. for those not satisfied by dorsey’s arguments about moral justification and the moral point of view, however, the considerations raised by nurses and family caregivers generate additional and novel support for the new account for supererogation. if we want to hold the intuitively plausible view that caregivers are both fulfilling their moral duties and performing supererogatory actions in so doing, we need dorsey’s account. another way of putting the point is this: only dorsey’s account of supererogation can explain the (arguably uncontroversial) notions that caregiving can be both morally required and involve the kind of sacrifice that typically makes an action supererogatory. the fact that the account can explain not only hypothetical, abstract cases from thought experiments but also the lived experiences of a myriad of caregivers is an important strength. weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 to assert that dorsey’s account of supererogation explains the fact that caregiving is a supererogatory moral duty, however, is not to undermine the social problem where people are expected and expect themselves to make grave sacrifices to do what is morally required of them. the social problem often manifests itself in heroic testimony. caregivers often experience a tension about being called heroic while doing their moral duty. prior accounts of heroic testimony fall short of explaining caregiver heroic testimony, which is another puzzle that the case of caregiving presents. 4. puzzle two: heroic testimony the second puzzle about caregivers, then, involves the interpretation of heroic testimony. to explain the puzzle, i will revisit nurses and family caregivers to show what heroic testimony looks like in these concrete cases. recall that i am using the term “heroic” in a specialized sense: heroic acts involve enormous sacrifice while doing one’s moral duty because of systemic and ongoing issues. 4a. pandemic nursing it should come as no surprise that nurses have been hailed as heroes in the media frequently during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic.8 many nurses, however, resist being called heroes. a myriad of reasons has been offered. some of the reasons mentioned by others follow, but this list does not purport to be complete: 1. calling someone a hero at the same time you treat them as a commodity is exploitative (wright et al. 2020). 2. “the ‘hero’ rhetoric distracts from the forces that are really responsible for their plight: government negligence, inequality, and a health care system driven by profit” (wallis 2020). 3. “calling [someone] a hero empowers you to tell [them] that’s enough because that’s the highest compliment you can give [them]. i don’t need a compliment; i need safe staffing” (wallis 2020). 4. “a public narrative that concentrates on individual heroism fundamentally fails to acknowledge the importance of reciprocity. . . . there must be recognition of the responsibilities of healthcare institutions and the general public” (cox 2020, 512). the resistance to being called a hero often takes the form of saying “i was only doing my duty” or “i did nothing special: i just did what i had to do.” these nurses, 8 representative samples include dohrenwend (2020), sidman (2020), brusie (2020), and marcus (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 hence, are giving heroic testimony, which, as noted above, is the phenomenon of claiming that one’s action is not, contrary to someone else’s claim, heroic. as one nurse puts it, “even when the world is in flames, i just still wanna do the right thing and bring joy and love to people. i don’t want to be called a hero. i am simply a woman—an african american woman who just wants to see people survive now” (wallis 2020). this nurse disavows the hero label, characterizing herself instead as someone who is performing the duties of a nurse. 4b. family caregivers family caregivers, too, are hailed as heroes. in “families as caregivers: the limits of morality,” daniel callahan calls family caregiving heroic because of “those features that seem to pose a direct and fundamental threat to the welfare and happiness of the person who gives the care” (1991, 159)—namely, proclivities toward anger, guilt, lack of self-worth, social isolation, stigma, and “a future that promises no relief” (160–62). this leads him to raise questions about what he calls “the limits of obligation,” claiming ultimately that “heroic self-sacrifice . . . is only possible if understood within the context of an entire way of life, and a way of life set ultimately within some scheme of religious or higher meaning” (callahan 1991, 167). that is, “morality alone cannot . . . give meaning to these demands” (168). rather, “religious cultures alone . . . can provide the kind of meaning needed” (168). in other words, for callahan, the demands of caregiving for someone with alzheimer’s disease are so heavy that the person who undertakes them is a hero. not only is the person a hero, but their sacrifices are so heroic that we cannot even make sense of them with a secular morality. the case of family caregivers raises the same question about supererogation raised by nurses working during the pandemic, for the resistance to being called a hero also arises. this heroic testimony arises, at least sometimes, insofar as family caregivers believe that they are doing their duty. evelyn nakano glenn collects such claims across various other research about caregiving. for example, karen hansen’s interviews uncover that even when people have been mistreated by their parents as children, they perceive that caregiving is their duty: “fran ‘accepts caring for her mother as her kin obligation, her duty’” (glenn 2010, 89; quoting hansen 2004). and clare ungerson asks “mrs. fisher, a woman who had cared for her severely disabled husband for twenty-nine years” what motivates her; she replies, “i just think it’s my duty. i’m a lancashire lass; all lancashire people are like that” (glenn 2010, 89; quoting ungerson 1987). kalyani mehta and thang leng leng (2017, 380) call this the “sense of filial obligation to care.”. their qualitative interviews also include heroic weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 testimony by caregivers, with statements such as, “i don’t have a choice, do i? . . . i’m just doing my duty,” and “i believe it is my duty” (mehta and thang 2017, 380).9 4c. standard approaches to heroic testimony traditionally, there are three overarching ways to interpret “i’m not a hero: i was just doing my duty.” all three, however, present a puzzle for one who thinks that, prima facie, caregivers’ testimony should be trusted and taken at face value, for each either attributes a vice to caregivers, denies the extraordinary nature of their sacrifice, or discredits their experience of being morally compelled to care. the first standard interpretation is a response that urmson (1958, 203) is apt to give: those who give heroic testimony may be exhibiting false modesty. the problem with this interpretation is that heroic testimony is often accompanied by ire (for example, see the nurse quoted above: “i don’t need a compliment; i need safe staffing” [wallis 2020]). false modesty is not an angry response. moreover, to attribute false modesty to caregivers is to attribute some sort of vice, such as deceit or fishing for compliments. i cannot argue for the claim here, but i hope it is easy to see that for these caregivers, all things equal, it is better to have a solution that does not attribute to them a vice.10 the second interpretation says the heroic testimony is correct. vanessa carbonell gives a solution that falls into this category: people who devote their lives to heroic acts, she claims, change the nature of moral obligation by providing evidence that things that seem supererogatory are in fact duties. they only seem heroic to those who have not yet seen the relevant evidence (carbonell 2012, 228). additionally, she argues that what counts as a duty depends in part on what the agent knows; heroes know more than everyone else, so they are correct to say they are doing their duty, and the perception that they are doing something supererogatory can be explained away (carbonell 2016, 37; see also flescher 2003). the problem with this interpretation is that it says that the caregivers are not making enormous sacrifices. some people who perform seemingly heroic actions may be providing evidence that the actions are duties and that the sacrifices are, contrary to 9 the perceived obligation to care has been documented across many cultures. see, for example, lindeza et al. (2020), al-zyoud, maharmeh, and ahmad (2021), narayan et al. (2015), and cheung et al. (2020) for representative cases. 10 archer and ridge (2015) also address the phenomenon of heroic testimony, arguing that people who give it lack moral wisdom about their actions but also possess more moral depth. this perspective is more amenable to my view, since it casts caregivers in a better light. their view, however, is designed to answer a particular paradox that is not the concern of the present paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 appearances, trivial, but it would be absurd to suggest that this is true of the caregivers here. the third interpretation is that caregivers are mistaken when they give heroic testimony. the caregivers were not merely doing their duty on this alternative. urmson (1958, 204) is also apt to give this response, saying they may have mistaken perceptions about the situation. but this option discounts the fact that at the same time, society treats their caregiving as a duty. additionally, this option undermines caregivers’ experience of feeling morally compelled to care, and it undermines their knowledge that they are also likely to be blamed11 if they don’t give care on the grounds that they have not met their duties.12 on standard accounts of heroic testimony, therefore, we are not able to say both that caregivers are correct when they give heroic testimony and that their caregiving involves enormous sacrifice, unless we attribute false modesty to them or say they weren’t doing their moral duty. that is, the standard accounts of heroic testimony cannot accommodate all three of these claims at once: (1) caregiving involves enormous sacrifices, (2) caregivers recognize they are doing their duties, and (3) their claim is neither a confusion about their duties nor false modesty. to accommodate all three things at once, we need another interpretation of heroic testimony. in the following section, i argue that heroic testimony can better be seen as a response to compulsory heroism. 11 i grant that people who do heroic actions might be blamed incorrectly for many reasons, including the possibility that they are in a morally charged situation, where the alternative is suberogatory (driver 1992) and the possibility that they are acting out of moral necessity (see archer 2015). whether or not the blame is attributed correctly is not at issue here. the relevant point is that the caregiving is treated as a duty not only by the caregivers but by society at large, so to say that caregivers were not doing their duty involves attributing to them fundamental misperceptions. 12 a fourth interpretation is that people hold themselves to a higher standard than others would, not because they are mistaken about the standards but rather because moral requirements flow from subjective values; so to the extent that we have different values, we have different moral reasons. although this interpretation is consistent with the standard account of supererogation, i set it aside here because, in my cases, the fact that caregivers would typically be blamed by others for not caregiving shows that the values and reasons are in accord. i owe thanks to an anonymous reviewer for explaining both the possibility and why it does not undermine my account. weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 5. puzzle two solution: compulsory heroism to delineate compulsory heroism,13 devolder examines “overcoming stories” in the context of disability studies, a discipline that has critiqued the overcoming narrative for some time. overcoming stories are a narrative trope wherein someone is portrayed as beating the odds, overcoming a challenge, and emerging as a victorious hero. in disability studies, the overcoming narrative is labelled the “supercrip narrative” (silva and howe 2012, 174). supercrips are “those individuals whose inspirational stories of courage, dedication, and hard work prove that it can be done, that one can defy the odds and accomplish the impossible . . . presenting the disabled person as heroic by virtue of his or her ability to perform feats normally considered not possible for people with disabilities or by virtue of the person living a ‘regular’ life in spite of a disability” (silva and howe 2012, 174–75). devolder argues that the overcoming stories imposed on those with disabilities engender the phenomenon of compulsory heroism. for devolder, compulsory heroism has four primary aspects, which i explain in detail below. i call these the unwanted aspect, the devaluing aspect, the defined social roles aspect, and the masking social issues aspect. the first reflects the fact that the label of hero is given regardless of whether it is wanted. the second reflects the fact that the attribution of heroism serves the label-giver at the expense of the labelrecipient. the third points to the fact that the label “hero” manifests a social organization of roles as opposed to an individual choice of role, and the fourth indicates that the label masks the social obstacles that give rise to the actions that are labeled heroic. consider the unwanted aspect. devolder (2013, 748) says that in compulsory heroism, the heroism is “bestowed regardless of protests.” so-called heroes say they did what they had to do, but then this is taken as humility and therefore evidence of further heroism (748). carla filomena silva and p. david howe (2012, 175), in their discussion of paralympian athletes, say that “social expectations are so low for individuals with a disability that any positive action may induce praise from others.” the disabled comedian david roche says, “people are inspired no matter what you do. i could go out and take a dump, you know? and people will say, ‘oh, you’re so 13 the phrase “compulsory heroism” draws on adrienne rich’s influential paper “compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.” rich (1980, 637) characterizes the compulsory nature thus: “violent strictures . . . enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.” for rich, the purpose of compulsory heterosexuality is “a means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access” (647). rich thereby lays groundwork for seeing that some social positions are foisted upon certain members of society for the benefit of others. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 courageous’” (roche, quoted in devolder 2013, 748). heroism is bestowed regardless of protests: the recipient’s perspective is discounted. the devaluing aspect of compulsory heroism, according to devolder (2013, 749), is the feature whereby the label “inherently resists critique.” other people derive hope and meaning from positioning people as heroes. the paralympics are portrayed as uplifting, and these portrayals generate a sense of ethical superiority. jan grue argues that people with disabilities are often the objects of “inspiration porn,” a term probably coined by but certainly popularized by the late comedian stella young, meaning “the representation of disability as a form of disadvantage that can be overcome for titillation of other people/observers” (grue 2016, 838). compulsory heroism, therefore, resists critique by generating this type of inspiration, which is presented as ennobling, uplifting, and morally superior while really in fact masking a kind of objectifying and devaluing porn. the third characteristic—the defined social roles aspect—shows that compulsory heroism is a strategy of normalization. by that, devolder means that it is the only given social role; it is a stereotype that, due to a lack of viable alternatives, is not able to be resisted: “i understand compulsory heroism, in the present context, as the main social role available, not only to persons with disability, but also to anyone facing ‘adversity’” (devolder 2013, 750). here devolder means that heroism is “naturalized”; in other words, heroism is expected and is the default mode of encountering adversity. any other mode of response is abnormal or deviant and hence not a real or equally worthy choice. you’re either a hero or you’re one of those bad disabled people who doesn’t conform to the social role given to you, the thinking goes. robert mcruer (2017, 370) similarly notes that disabled/nondisabled are not “equal and opposite identities.” hero and nonhero are also not equal and opposite identities. devolder’s fourth characteristic of compulsory heroism—the masking social issues aspect—has to do with the way compulsory heroism simplifies and obfuscates the social obstacles that require overcoming in the first place. she says, “compulsory heroism robs us of a legitimized space to . . . bear witness to stigma . . . and institutional violence. . . . [it] obscures social contexts, social histories, and material realities, like the present realities of declining supports and differential access to resources. . . . it co-opts discourses of empowerment . . . for financial and/or political ends” (devolder 2013, 750). calling a person who relies on a wheelchair a hero for navigating inaccessible buildings and streets, for example, draws attention away from the inaccessibility and from the social structures that make using a wheelchair difficult. weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 in sum, compulsory heroism occurs when a person is made out to be a hero as a form of what we might call poisoned praise.14 the label seems like praise, and may even be intended as such, but it has the effect of abdicating responsibility for the socially caused difficulties that the so-called hero faces. often, poisoned praise has the effect of placating the one who praises. in these contexts, the so-called heroes may disavow the label. the disavowal may stem from a sense that heroism is foisted upon them, a sense that the social context is unjust, a sense that one is being used for inspiration porn, or a sense that since one would be blamed if they didn’t do the action, the label is hypocritical. devolder identifies compulsory heroism in the context of the supercrip narrative. in that narrative, the problem with compulsory heroism is that people are patronizingly made out to be heroes for doing ordinary things. but the cases of caregiving i have examined involve compulsory heroism when the caregivers are making enormous personal sacrifices while doing their duty due to systemic and ongoing issues. perhaps, then, heroic testimony is a resistance to the compulsion in compulsory heroism. since these cases of compulsory heroism are the ones that are involved in the question of heroic testimony, i shall now argue that they also involve compulsory heroism. first, consider nurses in the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic. in their statements cited above, we see indications that compulsory heroism is present. the hero label is a distraction from social issues, gender issues, and exploitation generally (masking social issues), it serves the society at the expense of nurses (devaluing), it perpetuates stereotypes about what a nurse must be like (defined social roles), and it invokes ire (unwanted). so, too, with family caregivers. an american association of retired persons list of things you ought not say to caregivers advises against elevating caregivers with labels like “saint” as “taboo”; labels like “hero,” with a similar function, are thus unwanted (goyer 2019). the masking social issues aspect of compulsory heroism is also present, as seen by the above partial list of vulnerabilities family caregivers face. the devaluing aspect of compulsory heroism occurs when the label of hero serves the person who gives the label at the expense of the recipient. for family caregivers, the label of hero is not experienced, as it is in the case of disability, as inspiration porn; instead, the label is better seen as placing the caregiver on a pedestal, distancing her from the moral community.15 finally, the defined social roles aspect of compulsory 14 see jules holroyd’s (2021) “oppressive praise” for an account of how praise can entrench existing oppression. 15 many philosophers argue that freedom and moral responsibility come from being in a position where moral address is possible (see, e.g., mckenna 2012; strawson 1974). newborns, for example, are not morally responsible because they cannot feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 heroism is present. glenn (2010, 88) notes that “the pattern [in which women are the default caregivers] is so pervasive that it tends to be taken for granted as the natural order of things rather than being recognized as a socially created arrangement.”16 if caregiving involves compulsory heroism, then an alternative interpretation of heroic testimony is possible, one that opens the door for neither attributing a confusion on the part of caregivers, nor diminishing their sacrifice, nor attributing false modesty. in compulsory heroism, a person must make enormous all-thingsconsidered sacrifices to do what they perceive to be their duty. this means that when a caregiver says, “i’m not a hero; i was only doing my duty,” the claim is in part a resistance to compulsory heroism, a reaction to the fact that being called a hero takes attention away from the fact that the caregiving is socially arranged in a way that makes it involve such enormous sacrifice to perform an unvalued, exploitative social role that is perceived to be one’s duty. concerning caregivers, the compulsoryheroism interpretation of heroic testimony is superior to the three traditional interpretations explained above. in fact, we can now see that the solutions to both puzzles are related. the standard account of supererogation does not allow for the possibility of things that are both duties and supererogatory, so it says that caregivers are either mistaken in their perception that caregiving is their duty, or they are not doing something supererogatory (if they aren’t expressing false modesty). dorsey’s account of supererogation allows for supererogatory actions that are one’s moral duty, so it allows for the possibility that heroism and moral duty are compatible, thus making room for the compulsory-heroism interpretation of heroic testimony. under this interpretation, resistance to the hero label manifests a resistance to social arrangements that make moral duties involve enormous sacrifice; the disavowal of heroism is an expression of ire directed toward the compulsory nature of the heroism, toward the fact that social arrangements make moral duties involve so much selfsacrifice. if caregivers believe they are making enormous sacrifice while doing their duty, then we should consider the possibility that duty and heroism are compatible, that caregivers are in fact, heroic while doing their duty, and their disavowal of the heroism label, instead of being a denial that they are making enormous sacrifices, is instead a rejection of the compulsory nature of compulsory heroism. people don’t like to be in a position where doing their moral duty has so many enormous prudential participate in the give-and-take that moral conversation generates. arguably, placing someone on a pedestal removes her from the moral community, distancing her and thus removing responsibilities to her. a hero, not being one of us, does not share our needs and thus does not require our help. 16 indeed, glenn’s book is entitled forced to care: coercion and caregiving in america. weigel – supererogatory duties and caregiver heroic testimony published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 sacrifices, including basic health and safety. hence, by making room for saying that heroes can make enormous sacrifices to do their moral duty, dorsey’s account of supererogation can account for these relatively widespread cases of caregiving, which in turn allows for an explanation of caregiver heroic testimony, which is also widespread, that does not attribute a vice or confusion to caregivers or diminish their sacrifice. 6. conclusion the correct understanding of supererogation is not a merely theoretical issue with little practical import. rather, the new account of supererogation can make sense of relatively uncontroversial perspectives about many caregivers: they are doing their moral duty, yet due to ongoing and systemic social issues, they are also making tremendous sacrifices such that their actions are also supererogatory. additionally, caregivers are subject to compulsory heroism: they are called heroes (not necessarily consciously or intentionally) as a way of masking the issues that make doing their moral duty involve enormous sacrifices to their well-being. calling them heroes masks the social obstacles they face in doing their supererogatory moral duty. the concept of compulsory heroism can make sense of heroic testimony without attributing misperception or false modesty to caregivers and without diminishing their sacrifice. understanding supererogatory moral duty and compulsory heroism demonstrates that for caregivers, something needs to change. indeed, many things do: the way we view and exploit unpaid labor, the gendered division of labor, and exploitation in the workplace are just a few. acknowledgements i would like to thank participants at the 2019 intermountain philosophy conference for helpful conversation on the nascent idea that became this paper. matt horn and barbara simmons helped make the paper clearer. eric stencil gave extremely valuable feedback that resulted in numerous important changes. chrisoula andreou gave extensive feedback that greatly influenced the very direction of the paper. cynthia stark provided comprehensive comments on multiple drafts at every stage: the imprint of her generous help pervades the entire paper. i also owe thanks to multiple anonymous reviewers, especially as noted in the footnotes. finally, i would be remiss if i did not thank leslie simon, my department chair while i wrote most of the paper. her care, kindness, and support helped make the paper possible. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 references al-zyoud, eman, mahmoud maharmeh, and muayyad ahmad. 2021. “family experiences of caregiving to patients with alzheimer.” working with older people 25 (2): 115–22. https://doi.org/10.1108/wwop-02-2020-0006. archer, alfred. 2015. “saints, heroes and moral necessity.” royal institute of philosophy supplement 77 (october): 105–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1358 246115000223. ———. 2018. “supererogation.” philosophy compass 13, no. 3 (march): e12476. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12476. archer, alfred, 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oxford university press. mcruer, robert. 2017. “compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence.” in the disability studies reader, 5th ed., edited by lennard j. davis, 369–81. new york: routledge. mehta, kalyani k., and thang leng leng. 2017. “experiences of formal and informal caregivers of older persons in singapore.” journal of cross-cultural gerontology 32, no. 3 (september): 373–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823017-9329-1. mills, paul j., karen a. adler, joel e. dimsdale, christy j. perez, michael g. ziegler, sonia ancoli-israel, thomas l. patterson, and igor grant. 2004. “vulnerable caregivers of alzheimer disease patients have a deficit in β2-adrenergic receptor sensitivity and density.” american journal of geriatric psychiatry 12, no. 3 (may-june): 281–86. https://doi.org/10.1097/00019442-20040500000007. narayan, suzanne m., mathew varghese, kenneth hepburn, marsha lewis, isabel paul, and rozina bhimani. 2015. “caregiving experiences of family members of persons with 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nursing center blog, may 28, 2020. https://www.nursingcenter.com/ncblog /may-2020/u-s-nurses-in-2020. sidman, jessica. 2020. “heroes of the crisis: two nurses who are there when covid is at its worst.” washingtonian, october 15, 2020. https://www.washington ian.com/2020/10/15/covid-hero-covid-nurses-gw-hospital/. silva, carla filomena, and p. david howe. 2012. “the (in)validity of supercrip representation of paralympian athletes.” journal of sport and social issues 36, no. 2 (may): 174–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723511433865. strawson, p. f. 1974. freedom, resentment, and other essays. london: methuen. thomas, philippe, fabrice lalloué, pierre-marie preux, cyril hazif-thomas, sylvie pariel, robcis inscale, joël belmin, and jean pierre clément. 2006. “dementia patients caregivers quality of life: the pixel study.” international journal of geriatric psychiatry 21, no. 1 (jan.): 50–56. https://doi.org/10.1002/gps.1422. ungerson, clare. 1987. policy is personal: sex, gender, and informal care. london: tavistock publications. urmson, j. o. 1958. “saints and heroes.” in essays in moral philosophy, edited by a. i. melden, 198–216. seattle: university of washington press. wallis, hanna. 2020. “nurses say they don’t want to be called heroes during the coronavirus pandemic.” teen vogue, april 28, 2020. https://www.teenvogue .com/story/nurses-dont-want-to-be-called-heroes. washington, kate. 2021. already toast: caregiving and burnout in america. boston: beacon press. weigel, chris. 2019. “caregiving and moral distress for family caregivers during earlystage alzheimer’s disease.” ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics 12, no. 2 (fall): 74–91. wright, michelle lynn, breanna morse, carolyn phillips, k. jane muir, kirstin manges, adam white, and samantha bernstein. 2020. “concerned nurses ask: are we heroes or expendable?” ms., december 19, 2020. https://msmagazine.com /2020/12/19/nurses-coronavirus-pandemic-strike/. chris weigel is professor of philosophy at utah valley university. chris’s publications have been on caregiving ethics, experimental philosophy of free will, and ethics and cognitive biases and have appeared in venues such as ijfab: international journal of feminist approaches to bioethics, philosophical explorations, and philosophical psychology. 14514 weigel title page 14514 weigel final format hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation george, b. r., and stacey goguen. 2021. “hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (4). article 1. 2021 hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice b. r. george carnegie mellon university brgeorge@andrew.cmu.edu stacey goguen northeastern illinois university s-goguen@neiu.edu george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice b. r. george and stacey goguen abstract in this paper we use the contemporary example of trans youth panics to introduce the notion of hermeneutical backlash, in which defenders of an established, unjust hermeneutical regime actively work to undermine and discredit hermeneutical liberation. we argue that the strategies and tropes of trans youth panics illustrate a general propaganda vulnerability of epistemic liberation movements (including familiar examples from recent history), and so are troubling for reasons that go beyond their application to trans youth. this exploration of a few specific cases of hermeneutical liberation and hermeneutical backlash calls attention to the need for further theoretical work on the dynamics of struggles for (and against) hermeneutical justice. keywords: epistemic injustice, hermeneutical injustice, liberation movements, trans youth, propaganda, ignorance 1. introduction1 an epistemic injustice is an unjust harm done to someone’s epistemic status, capacities, or agencies. hermeneutical injustice is a type of epistemic injustice that miranda fricker (2007, 1) describes as occurring when “a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience.” for fricker, such gaps are unjust when they stem from persistent “hermeneutical marginalization”—exclusion from positions of influence in shaping a community’s shared concepts, narratives, and other hermeneutical resources (fricker 2007, 154–55). a paradigmatic case of hermeneutical injustice occurs when, due to such marginalization, a person does not have adequate concepts or language to understand their own experience or to communicate that experience to others. 1 we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers, the society for analytical feminism, and the audience members of the central apa meeting session "epistemic injustices, epistemic solutions" for their feedback and encouragement. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 interpretive resources are not just a potential locus of justice or injustice: they are often a locus of struggle. we may pursue hermeneutical liberation by acquiring, developing, or disseminating new interpretive resources, or engage in hermeneutical backlash by seeking to eliminate these resources and discredit their advocates. such struggles remain undertheorized, and hermeneutical backlash remains largely unexplored. in this paper, after exploring the workings of hermeneutical liberation, we use the case study of current trans youth panics to develop a picture of the workings and dangers of hermeneutical backlash. 1.1. a lacuna in the epistemic injustice literature struggles of hermeneutical liberation are an important undercurrent of the epistemic justice literature. fricker (2007, 148–50) illustrates hermeneutical injustice with examples from the struggles of liberation movements (such as the recognition and naming of “postpartum depression” and “sexual harassment”), and she gestures at intense contestation of hermeneutical resources: gaslighting, consciousness raising, public protests, backlashes, and so forth. fricker’s account entails that such struggles play an important role in maintaining or dismantling hermeneutical injustice, even though she does not systematically explore the process. others have fleshed out some of the dynamics of these struggles. for instance, work on ignorance (dotson 2011, 2012, 2014; mason 2011; medina 2016; mills 1997, 2007; pohlhaus 2012; sullivan and tuana 2007) and gaslighting (mckinnon 2019; abramson 2014) analyzes how members of dominant groups resist accountability, undermine the epistemic agency of marginalized groups, and construct the desire for hermeneutical liberation as irrational. movements of hermeneutical liberation (such as gay liberation movements and the women’s health movement of the 1970s) and hermeneutical backlash (such as trans youth panics) have received less attention, although josé medina’s (2012, 2013) “polyphonic contextualism” provides a framework for analyzing the influence of such movements and their struggles. medina begins by recognizing that a social field is always fractured and composed of many groups and subgroups (which are dynamic constructions that keep changing), there are always multiple and diverse social perspectives available, and social actors always have a wide and heterogeneous range of options available to them. (medina 2013, 240) regarding liberation movements, medina (2013, 241) focuses his analyses on how they can help make individual acts of resistance more recognizable, intelligible, and imitable to others. in this paper, we explore how liberation movements function for individuals who need certain experiences to be more intelligible for themselves, as george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 well. how can collective action and the creation of new epistemic communities lead to new understandings and possibilities for individuals? and what happens when people supporting the status quo try to restrict those new possibilities and actively maintain a community’s ignorance about them? 1.2. trans youth panics as hermeneutical backlash current trans youth panics,2 discussed at length by julia serano (2018b, 2019), attempt to cast suspicion on the testimony of trans youth about their gender. this is exemplified by a variety of propaganda in backlash-focused online communities (for example, gdworkingroup.org, parentsofrogdkids.com, 4thwavenow.com, and transgendertrend.com), the popular press (e.g., shrier 2019, 2020; veissière 2018; manning 2018; rouse 2019; adams 2020), established partisan interest groups and hate groups like the american college of pediatricians (e.g., cretella 2018)3, statements from lawyers involved in cases related to the medical care of trans youth (e.g., doward 2020), and the academic literature (e.g., marchiano 2017; bailey and blanchard 2017; littman 2018; hutchinson, midgen, and spiliadis 2020). this backlash paints an “ominous” (kenny 2019) picture, something like the following, taken from a representative piece of propaganda: in the last decade, diagnosis of “gender dysphoria”—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—has exploded. . . . . . . in the uk, the rates of gender dysphoria for teenage girls [sic] are up 4,400 percent over the previous decade. . . . . . . anxiety-ridden, middle-class girls [sic] who once engaged in cutting or anorexia [are] now wearing “binders” (breast-compressing undergarments), taking testosterone and undergoing voluntary double mastectomies. . . . [the] stories follow a pattern: a girl [sic] never expresses any discomfort with her [sic] biological sex until puberty, when anxiety and depression descend. . . . she [sic] immerses in social media and discovers transgender gurus. or her [sic] school holds an assembly celebrating gender journeys, or hosts a gay-straight alliance club pushing gender ideology. at first, she [sic] tries out a new name and pronouns. her [sic] school encourages her [sic], keeping all this a secret from her parents. then, she [sic] wants more. (shrier 2020) 2 for background work on “sex panics,” a subset of “moral panics,” see irvine (2006, 2008). 3 see southern poverty law center’s (n.d.) “american college of pediatricians” for an analysis of acpeds as an anti-lgbtq hate group. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 other trans-youth-panic material similarly “raises concerns” about trans youth in more or less alarmist way. articles in the daily mail sport headlines such as “school has seventeen children changing gender as teacher says vulnerable pupils are being ‘tricked’ into believing they are the wrong sex” (manning 2018) and “ex-top private school head claims some pupils identify as transgender just to be cool and ‘cause turbulence’” (rouse 2019). the periodical speaks of trans students “grooming” younger peers to transition (manning 2018), and children being “brainwashed” (adams 2020). others worry that “clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups” raise concerns of “social contagion” (littman 2018, 2),4 or speak of trans youth “‘binge-watching’ youtube transition videos and excessive use of tumblr” (4thwavenow 2015a, littman 2018, 2), and of seeming (to their parents) to be “using language that they found online” (littman 2018, 14). further concerns about the legitimacy of reported trans identities focus on the role of “selfdiagnosis” (littman 2018, 34), on a failure to “consult the mental health professionals” (27), and on alleged adverse effects after coming out, including an apparent “narrowed range of interests and hobbies” (21) and a “worsened parent child relationship” (21). concerned parents and researchers offer a new name for this ostensibly alarming phenomenon: “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (rogd).5 trans youth panics provide a timely case study in hermeneutical backlash. they represent a general propaganda strategy for pathologizing hermeneutical liberation as such: if we set aside the specifics of the trans subject matter and the internet age, the features being used to paint this alarming picture are all features familiar from other cases of hermeneutical liberation. trans youth panics thus reveal a general template for attempts to undermine or suppress hermeneutical liberation. 1.3. plan of the paper section 2 reviews examples of hermeneutical liberation from the women’s health movement and narratives of gay self-discovery. the hope is that these examples will be familiar to many readers, but different enough in content from trans youth panics to highlight how rhetorically and functionally similar hermeneutical backlashes can be, even when they target different movements. to make this case, section 3 explores some of the characteristics of hermeneutical liberation found in the women’s health movement and narratives of gay self-discovery. section 4 then 4 all quotes and references from littman (2018) are from the paper as originally published, and not as subsequently corrected. see littman (2019) and accompanying materials for information on the revision history. 5 we do not have the space in this paper to discuss all the flaws in the rogd hypothesis; see footnote 10 for citations to critiques of the studies proposing the rogd hypothesis. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 illustrates the phenomenon of hermeneutical backlash through trans youth panics, which attempt to undermine hermeneutical liberation by targeting the features discussed in section 3. section 5 then connects this discussion back to the epistemic injustice and propaganda literatures, suggesting avenues for further research, while section 6 offers some very brief concluding remarks. 2. examples of hermeneutical liberation one type of hermeneutical liberation involves the alleviation of the hermeneutical lacunae that rendered an important part of one’s social experience unintelligible, even to oneself.6 on a personal level, this often feels like a revelation: it “can come as a life-changing flash of enlightenment” (fricker 2007, sec. 7.2)—as “one of those click aha! moments” (karen sauvigne, quoted in brownmiller 1999, 280–81; and in fricker 2007, 150). there are two entangled phenomena to consider here. at the personal scale, we have the revelatory moments that fricker (2007, 149) calls hermeneutical breakthroughs. stepping back to look at a community or society, we see that such breakthroughs are made possible by—and are an important component of—epistemic liberation movements. we will explore hermeneutical liberation using examples from the women’s health movement and gay self-discovery. both cases were chosen for their familiarity to our presumed audience, as both are featured among the examples in fricker’s discussion of hermeneutical injustice. our example of the former is taken from the history of a landmark text of twentieth-century us feminism, and our example of the latter is drawn mainly from a short autobiographical narrative by alison bechdel (of “bechdel test” fame), describing events that were subsequently portrayed or alluded to in a bestselling memoir (bechdel 2007) and a hit broadway musical adapted from it. these examples were also chosen in hopes of establishing that the picture of hermeneutical liberation that we are developing is not specific to the trans case. analogous trans narratives are readily available,7 and some of their recurring features are hinted at in our discussion of trans youth backlash. 6 theorists have fleshed out some of the different sorts of cases of hermeneutical injustice, which medina (2017, 45–46) sorts into different types. not all forms of hermeneutical injustice involve individuals struggling to articulate something to themselves or revolve around the lack of specific labels or vocabulary. 7 salient examples of such materials are provided by two trans youtube users that manning (2018) specifically references as corrupting influences: ash hardell (2018, 2019) and alex bertie (2012, 2016, 2021). other writings relevant to hermeneutical injustice and liberation in the trans context include reed (2012), jones (2012), and finch (2015). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 2.1. wendy sanford and the women’s health movement fricker (2007) illustrates hermeneutical liberation with an example from the history of the women’s health movement: wendy sanford’s account (as reported in brownmiller 1999) of the revelation that would lead her to become a founding member of the boston women’s health book collective. after being dragged to a movement meeting by a friend, sanford has her first experience with consciousnessraising, leading to a life-changing breakthrough: then we broke down into small groups. i had never “broken down into a small group” in my life. in my group, people started talking about postpartum depression. in that forty-five-minute period i realized that what i’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency. it was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation. that realization was one of those moments that makes you a feminist forever. (brownmiller 1999, 182) this example highlights a number of important themes. sanford’s prior state was characterized by the psychological harms of a hermeneutical lacuna, including her depression remaining unaddressed and the burden of her misinterpreting her situation and so blaming herself. her hermeneutical breakthrough is abrupt and involves the reinterpretation of a whole area of experience. this breakthrough is made possible by community connections, in the form of the friend who drags her to the event, and the liberation movement that made the event possible. this community enables the sharing of hermeneutical resources like the concept of postpartum depression. this leads to a priority shift for sanford, as she becomes invested in the movement and goes on to become a contributor to women and their bodies (later retitled our bodies, ourselves). 2.2. alison bechdel’s “coming out story” alison bechdel’s “coming out story” describes her experiences at oberlin college in 1979 and 1980, wherein deep confusion and discontentment give way to a revelation: “jeez, this explains everything. i’m a lesbian” (bechdel 1993). bechdel (1993, 1) opens with a cliché—“since earliest childhood, i knew i was different”—but immediately undermines it: “for a long time, i thought it was just because i was smarter.” life under hermeneutical injustice often involves the misinterpretation of our problems, needs, or identities. if we can tell that something is going on, we may feel pressure to find an interpretation within the bounds of the available social imaginary, even if that interpretation is ill-fitted, incomplete, or counterproductive. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 bechdel next describes her mental state and desperate, largely ineffective coping mechanisms immediately prior to her breakthrough, illustrating the psychological harms of hermeneutical injustice: when i wasn’t in class or at the bookstore, i was getting high or going to movies. my cinematic education would have been excellent if i could remember any of it. the drugs. the endless moviegoing. the hours of browsing through books. . . . i was trying desperately to distract myself from a truth that was slowly but surely struggling to the surface of my solitary, sex-starved soul. (bechdel 1993, 2–3) by chance, bechdel’s aimless browsing eventually pays off: she happens upon a copy of word is out: stories of some of our lives (adair and adair 1978), which sparks her own revelation. word is out contains transcripts of the interviews from a 1977 documentary of the same title, which features twenty-six gay americans talking “about how they had come to realize they were gay, and what their lives were like” (bechdel 1993, 3). it is bechdel’s first explicit contact with a community of people whose hermeneutical needs mirror her own, illustrating the importance of sharing hermeneutical resources. bechdel’s revelation arrives on the walk home from the bookstore: it was as if i’d crossed some invisible boundary. on the other side, things would never be the same. i’m reminded of the myth of athena’s birth. you know the story. she springs, fully grown and in complete armor, from zeus’s head. my own festering brain, after years of ignorance and denial, had finally erupted! by the time i emerged from the park, my entire confusing life had passed before my eyes and reconfigured itself around a startling new realization. jeez, this explains everything. i’m a lesbian. (bechdel 1993, 4) bechdel’s revelation, like sanford’s, is abrupt. although the acquisition, development, and refinement of new hermeneutical resources is often a drawn-out process, the first step of this “long, hard journey” (bechdel 1993, 4) can be a “click!” moment in the course of a radical reinterpretation of one’s experiences that all plays out in a matter of minutes. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 bechdel’s revelation initiates a series of major life disruptions, starting with her being so caught up in her revelation that she steps into the street without looking, forcing a motorist to screech to a halt. bechdel then experiences a priority shift, refocusing her attention on “the quest for my people” (bechdel 1993, 7) and on a follow-up question to her revelation: “now what? how do i get laid?” (5). these new priorities disrupt the established flow of bechdel’s life, as she obsessively pursues further resources. she is portrayed (bechdel 1993, 6–7) nervously purchasing a copy of lesbian/woman (martin and lyon 1972); devouring desert of the heart (rule 1964), rubyfruit jungle (brown 1973), the well of loneliness (hall 1928), our right to love: a lesbian resource book (vida 1978), sappho was a righton woman: a liberated view of lesbianism (abbot and love 1972), lesbian nation: the feminist solution (johnston 1973), and the gay report: lesbians and gay men speak out about sexual experiences and lifestyles (jay and young 1979); and masturbating to her roommate’s copy of the hite report: a nationwide study on female sexuality (hite 1976).8 in her account of these events in her memoir fun home, bechdel emphasizes the disruptive effects of this priority shift: she neglects her studies, falling “further and further behind” (bechdel 2007, 208) on reading for a course into which she was “begging admission” only a short time before (203). not long after, bechdel takes it upon herself to seek out a community and works up the courage to attend a meeting of the campus gay union. at first, she struggles to connect with the students she meets there, but she eventually finds points of commonality, works up the courage to come out to her roommate, finally gets laid, and takes other steps to explore her lesbian identity and build a life within the queer community. 3. recurring features of hermeneutical liberation with these examples in mind, let’s consider some themes typical of this sort of hermeneutical liberation. 3.1. hermeneutical injustice as a mental health issue hermeneutical injustice is a mental health issue in that (1) hermeneutical injustice can “knock your faith in your ability to make sense of the world” (fricker 2007, 163) and even be “so damaging that it cramps the very development of the self” (163); (2) there are direct and indirect psychological harms of being unable to make one’s experiences intelligible to others, and of the associated quality-of-life costs of being unable to articulate and address one’s needs; and (3) the unintelligible 8 this list is largely inferred from the text on the spines and covers of books shown in bechdel’s illustrations. in a few cases, this involved some conjecture and, perhaps, introduced some errors. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 experiences may themselves be mental health problems or have distinctive adverse mental health effects that go unrecognized or unaddressed. we see psychological harms of types 1 and 2 in bechdel’s story, where she is, by various ineffective coping mechanisms, “trying desperately to distract myself from a truth that was slowly but surely struggling to the surface of my solitary, sex-starved soul” (bechdel 1993, 3). sanford’s story also illustrates type 3 harms: she lacks the proper hermeneutical resources to interpret and address a serious mental health problem—her postpartum depression. furthermore, her self-blame from lack of a better explanation may have both been a cause of, and further fed into, her depression. a related theme is the misinterpretation of the nature and etiology of these harms, and, more broadly, of one’s needs, experiences, or identity. at the heart of sanford’s revelation is a new understanding that “what i’d been blaming myself for, and what my husband had blamed me for, wasn’t my personal deficiency” (quoted in brownmiller 1999, 182; and in fricker 2007, 149). in this moment, an old misinterpretation of sanford’s situation, associated with the harms of self-doubt and an unjustified sense of guilt and inadequacy, is discarded in favor of an appreciation of the complexities of postpartum depression. we see similar misinterpretations in bechdel’s story: she identifies her intelligence as differentiating her from her peers and so proceeds to attribute any other feelings of difference or alienation to that source. she also fails to recognize her loneliness and sexual frustration as such, although she doesn’t report what misinterpretation of these experiences she latches onto. 3.2. the moment it clicks hermeneutical breakthroughs like bechdel’s and sanford’s are often abrupt, sometimes to the point of featuring a single “moment it clicks”—recall that bechdel compares her revelation to athena springing fully formed from zeus’s head. sanford’s exposure to new resources and subsequent revelation happen in the course of a fortyfive-minute small group discussion. bechdel’s revelation takes less time than her walk home from the bookstore. once one obtains access to the needed hermeneutical resources to make sense of one’s life, pieces quickly begin to fall into place, as it becomes possible to rapidly reinterpret huge swaths of one’s prior experience. this is how sanford and bechdel both describe their breakthroughs. as the latter puts it: “my entire confusing life had passed before my eyes and reconfigured itself around a startling new realization” (bechdel 1993, 4). since hermeneutical injustice can undermine “the very construction . . . of selfhood” (fricker 2007, 168), it is natural that hermeneutical liberation will often spur sudden growth and development in one’s self-identity, often in unforeseen directions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 3.3. shaking things up hermeneutical breakthroughs can produce profound priority shifts and life disruptions. when unrecognized and unmet needs finally come into focus, addressing them becomes a priority, and the project of acquiring related hermeneutical resources and fleshing out one’s new self-understanding may take on a sense of urgency. this may take the form of efforts to network with existing communities (“the quest for my people” [bechdel 1993, 7]), or of binge reading (or viewing) of available materials (“that first volume led quickly to others” [bechdel 2007, 75]). the realization that one has experienced such an injustice may also cause other changes in priorities, if, for example, it leads to a political awakening, or if the hermeneutical breakthrough calls attention to previously unnoticed or underappreciated applications of one’s time and energy (as with bechdel’s “how do i get laid?” moment). some old priorities will be discarded as the products of a defective selfunderstanding, and, especially in the short term, others will have new competition for one’s time, energy, and attention. these changes can be disruptive to the prior equilibrium or order of one’s life. this sense of urgency may lead new projects to take on an obsessive character, especially in the short term. bechdel (2007) describes her readings as “calling” her “seductively” and compares her absorption in her new interest in gay experience and culture, and loss of concern for other personal and academic projects and obligations, to the experience of “odysseus’s men who had fallen in with the lotus-eaters” (2007, 209). sanford’s experience shows a similar shift in priorities: sanford initially has to be “dragged” (brownmiller 1999, 182) to a meeting, but she subsequently becomes an active member of the boston women's health book collective. brownmiller (1999) reports that the women of the collective threw themselves into their research and writing in the following months. the introduction of women and their bodies describes the energy of this period: for the first time, we were doing research and writing papers that were about us and for us. we were excited and our excitement was powerful. we wanted to share both the excitement and the material we were learning with our sisters. we saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change. (bwhbc 1970, 3) for outside observers like friends and family, abrupt priority shifts, obsessive pursuit of new projects, and associated life disruptions may seem like cause for concern. but sometimes major disruptions to our lives are called for, and ultimately, necessary for our flourishing. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 3.4. we recruit bechdel’s and sanford’s revelations are both made possible by the sharing of hermeneutical resources—by someone else giving them the tools they need to develop new, better interpretations of their experiences. in both cases, this resourcesharing occurs within the context of a community and with the support of a wider liberation movement. in bechdel’s experience with the campus gay union and sanford’s experience breaking down into groups, we see a relatively interactive form of community engagement. historically, this has typically involved in-person interactions, but the internet has expanded possibilities for long-distance community interactions. preexisting personal connections may be important here (sanford is dragged to her first meeting by her friend esther rome), but the community in question may also be part of a liberation movement, as in the case of the oberlin gay union or of the meeting sanford attends. these sorts of epistemic liberation movements do not only operate by this kind of small group exchange: they may also propagate via texts or other media designed to facilitate hermeneutical revelations. in the case of the women’s health movement, our bodies, ourselves is a conspicuous example of such a text, and kline discusses its role in facilitating revelations much like sanford’s or bechdel’s: with our bodies, ourselves, . . . reading was often described as a revelatory experience—as a “click” that drew a woman out of isolation and into a widespread dialogue about feminism and health. “when i realize how similar my feelings are to some of the letters in your book, it is indeed reassuring,” one reader confided. . . . establishing connections by reading personal accounts enabled readers to experience consciousness-raising at their own kitchen tables. (kline 2005, 90) this community-building, resource-sharing, and facilitation of hermeneutical breakthroughs is not accidental—it is the point of the exercise. the introduction of women and their bodies puts it thus: these papers . . . are meant to be used by our sisters to increase consciousness about ourselves as women, to build our movement, to begin to struggle collectively for adequate health care, and in many other ways. . . . they should be viewed as a tool which stimulates discussion and action, which allows for new ideas and for change. (bwhbc 1970, 4) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 meanwhile, bechdel’s revelation is triggered by the interviews in word is out (adair and adair 1978). nancy adair discusses how her brother peter conceived of word is out as a hermeneutical liberation project, intended to change the society’s collective hermeneutical resources, allowing the next generation to discover themselves faster and less painfully: when peter first had gay feelings, he knew no one like himself. he felt something was wrong with him. he went to a psychiatrist; he tried to have “normal” relationships with women. he thought being gay . . . meant that he couldn’t be a “person” and that he would always be relegated by his secret to the fringes of society. . . . he decided to make a movie that would help all of us gays believe more in ourselves, come out of our closets, and affirm each other. he wanted the film to recognize and acknowledge the oppression of homosexuals. as a youth with gay feelings . . . [h]e knew no homosexuals so he felt he was the “only one.” peter learned by talking to other gay people that their experiences had been similar to his: they too had felt that they were the “only one.” many wished they had known someone to whom they could talk about their feelings. many felt alone and maladjusted because they felt different from their peers. all had to go through years of adjustment before they could embrace homosexuality as a positive part of their lives. they found themselves only in themselves. they found no reflection of who they were in society. (adair and adair 1978, 269–70) the sharing processes made possible by communities and liberation movements have a role not only in disseminating hermeneutical resources, but also in creating and refining them. as fricker notes, the sharing of personal experiences is—even with “scantly understood, barely articulate” (fricker 2007, 148) ones—crucial for consciousness-raising. this aspect of hermeneutical liberation can be obscured if we only focus on the individual level. personal revelations are often catalyzed by a particular social context and by exposure to a particular community. a related feature of both word is out and our bodies, ourselves is that their creators lacked institutionally recognized markers of epistemic authority. that such nonexperts should play a central role in hermeneutical liberation is unsurprising, since, as fricker (2007, 160) notes, exclusion from recognized epistemic authority and credibility is at the heart of the hermeneutical marginalization that gives rise to this kind of injustice in the first place. this lack of epistemic authority is explicitly recognized in the introduction of women and their bodies: “excited and nervous (we george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 were just women; what authority did we have in matters of medicine and health?), we offered a course to sisters in women’s liberation” (bwhbc 1970, 3). the introduction goes on to emphasize the central value of lived experience and sharing of personal stories, rather than technical expertise, in the process of hermeneutical liberation: it was more important that we talked about our experiences, were challenged by others’ experiences, (often we came from very different situations), raised our questions, expressed our feelings, were challenged to act, than that we learned any specific body of material. it was exciting to learn new facts about our bodies, but it was even more exciting to talk about how we felt about our bodies, how we felt about ourselves, how we could become more autonomous human beings, how we could act together to change the health care system for women and for all people. we hope this will be true for you too. (bwhbc 1970, 4) in the chapter on “women, medicine and capitalism”, meanwhile, lucy candib complains that “[women] become passive objects who submit to [the doctor’s] control and supposed expertise” (bwhbc 1970, 7) and calls out the limitations of the dominant conceptions of competence and authority: we as women are redefining competence: a doctor who behaves in a male chauvinist way is not competent, even if he has medical skills. we have decided that health can no longer be defined by an elite group of white, upper middle class men. it must be defined by us, the women who need the most health care, in a way that meets the needs of all our sisters and brothers—poor, black, brown, red, yellow, and pink. (bwhbc 1970, 6) bechdel’s story provides another striking example. neither the students at the gay union nor the people interviewed in word is out speak from positions of recognized, credentialed expertise in the medical, psychological, or social aspects of human sexuality. what is important about word is out is that it contains personal stories, offered on the authority of lived experience, in which people like bechdel can catch glimpses of something in themselves that they do not yet know how to name. in its capacity as a collection of filmed personal accounts of what it’s like to be gay, the film version of word is out is very much the late 1970s equivalent of a curated youtube playlist. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 3.5. spreading like wildfire the examples of word is out and our bodies, ourselves draw attention to another important recurring theme: these sorts of liberation movements have their moment or tipping point. when the hard work of a liberation movement starts to pay off, the result is that new ideas are “in the air” like never before. as the hermeneutical landscape of the society changes, the conditions for revelations like bechdel’s or sanford’s suddenly exist for many people, potentially leading to a large number of such breakthroughs over a relatively short time. our bodies, ourselves was, as discussed by brownmiller (1999) and kline (2005), a phenomenon. in the 1970s, it attained a degree of cultural ubiquity in the united states, facilitating numerous revelations and bringing many women into contact with the women’s health movement. those revelations were made possible by widespread access to a text that had not previously existed, just as sanford’s revelation was made possible by access to a kind of event that would have been much rarer a decade prior. meanwhile, bechdel’s story (which happens in 1979–1980), begins with a book published in 1978. bechdel’s reading list is full of titles published in the 1970s, and campus gay organizations were much rarer even a decade prior.9 even a few years earlier, bechdel’s revelation could not have played out in the same way. bechdel would plausibly have eventually come to understand herself as a lesbian without these kinds of resources and connections, but circumstances in the united states made this sort of revelation more accessible to people of bechdel’s age and background in 1979 than in prior decades. social trends in accessibility of hermeneutical resources can create trends in the frequency of personal revelations and in the number of people who view their lives through the newly accessible interpretive lens. this is a major, legitimate goal of liberation movements. we have illustrated these features with two widely recognized cases of hermeneutical liberation: gay self-discovery and the women’s health movement. next, we turn to trans youth panics and explore how these features are targeted by hermeneutical backlash. 4. hermeneutical backlash in trans youth panics we are now prepared to apply our picture of hermeneutical liberation to trans youth panics, which provide a rich and timely example of hermeneutical backlash. the strategies that these panics employ are of interest because of their generality: they target hermeneutical liberation as such, presenting the hermeneutical liberation of 9 we are not aware of the full history of gay community organizing at oberlin college, but oberlin lgbt’s (2017) blog reproduces a news story dated 1971 titled “gay lib approved as club,” suggesting there was no such official campus organization before that time. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 trans youth as illegitimate in virtue of characteristics it shares with other liberation movements. our goal here is not to persuade skeptical readers that the case of trans youth is an example of legitimate hermeneutical liberation; it’s beyond the scope of this paper to do so, and others have already refuted the various claims of trans youth panics.10 the features of hermeneutical liberation we highlight in this paper are not intended as a diagnostic protocol to distinguish genuine liberation from something more troubling. our focus is on the structure and function of the rhetorical “toolkit” of the backlash. if we value hermeneutical liberation in general, we should be troubled by the broad applicability of these tools and by the norms that they presuppose and reinforce. to any reader who is agnostic about (or sympathetic to) some of the claims of what we call a “trans youth panic”: you should still be wary of the methods and assumptions of this hermeneutical backlash, because they can equally well be deployed against whatever hermeneutical liberation movements you hold dear. 4.1. hermeneutical injustice as a mental health issue we’ve seen that hermeneutical injustice is a mental health issue, associated with diverse psychological harms. backlash propaganda exploits this: it uses personal history with these harms to delegitimize or cast suspicion on hermeneutical breakthroughs. this may trade crudely on general bias against giving adequate weight to the testimony of the mentally ill—“you’re crazy, so why should we take anything you say seriously?”—but it may also be more sophisticated. the backlash insists that, when a history of mental health issues, and perhaps accompanying diagnoses, predates an ostensible hermeneutical awakening, the prudent thing is to adequately treat these “other” mental health conditions, or at least to make sure that they have been adequately “ruled out” as confounding factors, before proceeding with the strange and radical step of acting on one’s new self-understanding. littman, for instance, reports that “parents described evaluations that were too limited or too superficial to explore mental health, trauma or alternative causes of gender dysphoria” (2018, 26). this is the equivalent of telling sanford that she can’t know whether she needs feminism until she sorts out her depression, or telling 10 see, for example, such activist community and popular press responses as serano (2016, 2017, 2018a–2018e, 2019), jones (2017, 2018a–2018f), ashley (2018a, 2018b), ashley and baril (2018), urquhart (2017, 2020, 2021), duck-chong (2018), barasch (2018), ford (2018), awn (2020), and asan, ncte, and national lgbtq task force (2016), and such academic and otherwise “expert” responses as wpath (2018), ashley (2019a, 2019b), temple newhook, pyne, et al. (2018), temple newhook, winters, et al. (2018), costa (2019), restar (2020), and slothouber (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 bechdel that it’s a mistake to start dating women until she’s explored conventional psychiatric explanations for her emotional issues and attendant drug use and obsessive-but-foggy moviegoing and bookstore browsing. under the guise of caution, this backlash narrative suggests that “prior” mental health issues are causing a mistaken self-understanding and ignores the possibility that the lack of an appropriate self-understanding may have produced these issues in the first place (or that they are largely independent). 4.2. the moment it clicks hermeneutical revelations are often abrupt, sometimes to the point of featuring a “moment it clicks,” and may be associated with rapid reinterpretation of huge swaths of one’s prior experience. all of these characteristics are targets for backlash. conspicuously, the label “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (littman 2018) is used both to pathologize such abrupt breakthroughs and to cast them as a distinct phenomenon (bailey and blanchard 2017) from “organic” (gd working group 2019) instances of trans selfdiscovery, which are presumed to involve either clear signs starting in “early childhood” (shrier 2020), or some more visibly gradual, deliberative, and exploratory process. if, from parents’ (or others’) perspectives, self-reports or other signs of trans identity arise abruptly, that is taken to justify discounting them as evidence: if this was real all along, the reasoning goes, then why are we only hearing about it now? within this framing, the abrupt reinterpretation of past experiences is dismissed as revisionism: the prior interpretations are taken as canonical, so if new interpretations are now being offered, surely this is evidence of so much self-deception in the service of a new misunderstanding of one’s experiences. every formal feature of this line of reasoning would be equally applicable to bechdel’s or sanford’s case: this is a script for dismissing hermeneutical breakthroughs precisely because they look like hermeneutical breakthroughs. 4.3. shaking things up as we saw, hermeneutical breakthroughs can produce life disruptions and priority shifts, as we seek to network with existing communities or liberation movements or to expand our hermeneutical resources with binge consumption of available reading (or viewing) materials. these changes may seem distressing or even pathological to outside observers with a high opinion of that prior order, and the backlash encourages and exploits this distress. within the hermeneutical-backlash script, these disruptions and priority shifts become something sinister: an ostensible unhealthy obsession with trans topics and trans communities, described as “‘binge-watching’ youtube transition videos and excessive use of tumblr” (littman 2018, 2). granted, some new behaviors from george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 people experiencing profound life disruptions, such as particularly reckless drug use or other risky activities, can indeed be harmful. but it’s noteworthy that proponents of rogd do not primarily focus on such harms. instead, the evidence of harm from “social contagion” (littman 2018, 3) that they reference involves such things as a “narrowed range of interests” and a “worsening” of their relationship with their parents (21). bechdel’s deciding to exhaust the lesbian readings available to her instead of preparing for her ulysses seminar does not show that her new self-understanding as a lesbian was illegitimate or pernicious, and her becoming the cartoonist behind dykes to watch out for (instead of, say, a joyce scholar) is not a harm. sanford’s prioritizing her involvement in the feminist movement over her marriage likewise neither constitutes nor suggests a harm from the consciousness-raising meeting she attended, nor does it delegitimize her feminist awakening. but the hermeneuticalbacklash script would have us read them as such, when in the case of trans youth it uncritically accepts parents’ reports of a worsening of their relationship with their child, or their child changing who they spend their time socializing with, as a harm. 4.4. we recruit community, as we saw, is a vital ingredient in hermeneutical liberation: liberation movements both take advantage of existing social links and create a new sense of community. through these communities, we engage in resource-sharing. members of such communities and movements may be experienced and well informed, but they are typically nonexperts (or more precisely, they lack recognized expert credentials), because the epistemic marginalization underlying hermeneutical injustice will involve limited and incomplete access to positions of recognized epistemic authority. virtually every aspect of the social structure of a hermeneutical liberation movement is targeted by backlash rhetoric. the community becomes the “trans cult.”11 the value of interpersonal connections in getting access to the needed resources (and to the community) becomes “social contagion.” young trans people 11 this “cult” language is ubiquitous in the online discourse of trans youth panics, as can be seen in the “#transcult” hashtag on twitter and the comments on sites like transgendertrend.com. there is nothing remarkable about people who share a stigmatized identity seeking solidarity with each other, venting, and discussing the ignorance or insufferability of people who are not so stigmatized. but under the panic script, this becomes a cult-like mentality where all outsiders are “ridiculed and maligned,” derided, disparaged, and shown “animosity” (littman 2018, 16–18)—with no acknowledgement of how power and privilege are in play when group members support one another for “punching up.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 working through the self-discovery process together are alarming “cluster outbreaks” (littman 2018, 31–32).12 one-on-one sharing of hermeneutical resources and personal experiences becomes “grooming” (manning 2018), “brainwash[ing]” (adams 2020), or “peer pressure” (kenny 2019). those who seize upon newly developed vocabulary and explanations are viewed as “sounding scripted” (littman 2018, 14), with the insinuation that this is evidence of brainwashing or deception. those who achieve breakthroughs with hermeneutical resources found online or at school have been “snag[ged]” by social media (skepticaltherapist 2016) or “los[t]” to a negligent or corrupt education system (posts 2017). supportive institutions and resources are “indoctrinat[ing]” (4thwavenow 2015b) and “grooming” (van mol 2019). relying on community epistemic resources, rather than authoritative expertise or “mainstream sources of information” (littman 2018, 23), is at best “particularly concerning” (23), and at worst irresponsible “self-diagnosis” (littman 2018, 34) by young people who have been getting ideas off the internet (cretella 2018). (note that the “selfdiagnosis” framing suggests illegitimacy and a need for expert corroboration in a way that a “self-discovery” or “self-authorship” does not.) we are, further, told that this sharing of resources needs to be stopped or curtailed—that “there is a need for safeguarding guidance on protecting children from information that will encourage them” (paul conrathe, quoted in doward 2020). the community infrastructure and shared knowledge of a hermeneutical liberation movement are thus recast as vectors by which a pathology is spread. it should come as no surprise that social epistemology is social, but the backlash trades on an assumption that legitimate self-discovery occurs in the absence of social forces, which are seen as a biasing or corrupting influence. this disregard for the ways that background social imaginaries inform (or frustrate) all self-discovery and self-authorship allows the backlash to frame the spread of new hermeneutical resources as a predatory or disease-like force that manipulates and ultimately steals young people away from their parents and the “normal” lives their parents had envisioned for them. 12 littman makes much of parents’ reports that multiple members of “pre-existing friend groups” (littman 2018, 4) came out to their parents as trans after the group formed, dismissing the possibility that trans people might be able to discern some affinity for each other before their hermeneutical breakthroughs, or at least before they come out to their parents. given that one of littman’s chosen examples involves a “friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality” (littman 2018, 15), we are unconvinced by this assumption that not-yet-out trans youth might be self-selecting into such groups. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 4.5. spreading like wildfire as we saw above, when a liberation movement succeeds in calling attention to or partially addressing a hermeneutical lacuna, the resulting state of affairs is one in which new ideas are “in the air.” certain kinds of hermeneutical liberation have their moment or tipping point: as new hermeneutical resources spread, their increasing availability leads to a rapid increase (an “epidemic” in the backlash’s pathologizing language) in the number of personal hermeneutical breakthroughs (or a shift in who is experiencing these breakthroughs), which is the expected and desired result. greater access to the tools of trans self-understanding and to models of trans experience, facilitated both by organized political action and by the natural “finding one’s people” potential of trans communities, ought to lead to more people recognizing themselves as trans and to such moments of self-recognition happening earlier in life. further, this should be most extreme for those whose trans identities were rendered invisible or unimaginable by prior dominant narratives of trans experience, such as trans men and nonbinary trans people. for the backlash, this rapid increase becomes a troubling “burgeoning incidence” (kenny 2019) or “huge explosion” (rowling 2020) in the number of young people identifying as trans. some straightforwardly paint it as a “psychic epidemic that has spread its tendrils into all corners of society” (kenny 2019), or merely raise the question of whether it shares some features with “mass hysteria” (gd working group 2019). any real or apparent shift in the demographics of those experiencing such awakenings (such as ostensible shifts in the age or assigned sex of young people coming out as trans) is also seen as worrisome and as demanding an explanation. any such demographic changes are also presumptively delegitimizing: the prior state is taken to reflect the true, natural baseline incidence of different sorts of trans identity in different populations, and on the natural timetable of trans self-discovery in a person’s life, so any increase in the total number of people coming out, in the number of people coming out at an early age, or in the number of trans men and nonbinary trans people coming out, is evidence that the “extra” awakenings are in some way illegitimate. after all, if this is a real thing, where were all the people like that before? this last line of reasoning is used to give support both to the “epidemic” framing of trans awakening as a pathology spreading through the population, and to framings that try to situate these awakenings as a passing fad: young people, we are told, are coming out as trans not because of something about who they are or what they sincerely and robustly want or need out of life but because they hope that doing the “trendy” thing will win them some measure of social acceptance; and it is to anticipate that, as is the case with any fad, most of them will look back on this in a few years with embarrassment (at best) and profound regret (at worst). again, this kind of reasoning could just as well be used to trivialize or pathologize the transformative effects of the gay liberation and women’s health feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 movements, or any other liberation movement that succeeds in facilitating a relatively fast, major shift in available hermeneutical resources. 5. hermeneutical backlash in context in this paper we’ve described some features of a specific hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics. below, we situate these features in the wider context of social justice and social epistemology. 5.1. other hermeneutical backlashes because trans youth backlashes target general features of hermeneutical liberation, it suggests a general propaganda vulnerability of hermeneutical liberation movements. thus, we might expect to see similar backlashes against other such movements, and indeed we do. for example, the narrative of a “social contagion” has featured heavily in “gay recruitment” backlashes, as exemplified by a statement from the traditional values coalition, which warns of “an amazingly effective brainwashing and recruitment machine” by which “children are to be lured into the movement and indoctrinated until they view their own parents as a ‘constant source of exasperation and amusement.’” the traditional values coalition sees these forces at work in sex education initiatives in which “gay/straight alliance clubs,” we are told, “are simply homosexual indoctrination/recruitment programs” (traditional values coalition, n.d.). similar backlashes have targeted feminist efforts to make sexual harassment and acquaintance rape intelligible. as feminists have made advances against the old hermeneutical regime, many survivors have come to retrospectively recognize past experiences as serious—often criminal—violations, often months or years after the fact. hermeneutical backlash frames these delays as evidence that the perception of harm is the illegitimate result of pernicious outside influences. cathy young (2015), for example, complains that “we are encouraged to reinterpret . . . experiences as sexual violations” and that “advocacy creates a world where virtually any regretted sexual encounter can be reconstructed as assault . . . and retroactive perceptions of coercion must always be credited over contemporaneous perceptions of consent— even though we know that memory often ‘edits’ the past to fit present biases.”13 we expect similar themes to arise in other liberation movements, such as the disability rights movement, the fat acceptance movement, and the #blacklivesmatter 13 see jonathan ichikawa (2017a, 2017b, 2017c) for criticism of other instances of this hermeneutical backlash. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 movement and other past and present racial justice movements.14 because different liberation movements are called to confront different sorts of hermeneutical injustices and face different sorts of backlash, audiences equipped to recognize one hermeneutical backlash may be taken in by another.15 further research is needed to better understand how the different features and contexts of different movements influence the backlashes they encounter and the sort of uptake this backlash receives. the following are some themes and distinctions that we think should inform such explorations. 5.2. think of the children the anti-trans hermeneutical backlash that we’ve discussed is, tellingly, a trans youth backlash.16 trans people experience the same sorts of hermeneutical breakthroughs at all ages,17 but centering “children” is a common and unnervingly effective strategy in such backlashes. the perceived vulnerability of children has been exploited by countless moral and epistemic panics through the ages, and children’s limited legal and social autonomy makes them easy targets for those wishing to limit access to certain controversial epistemic resources. such limitations can be as simple as parents limiting their children’s access to particular reading materials or social spaces, or they may involve coordinated policy initiatives. examples of the latter include a 2010 arizona law banning ethnic studies courses (tang 2017), ongoing legislative efforts in multiple states to restrict the teaching of critical race theory (schwartz 2021), the republican party of texas’s 2012 opposition to teaching “critical thinking skills and similar programs” that “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority” (republican party of texas 2012, 12), a 2013 russian law banning “the promotion of homosexuality” under the guise of “defending children’s morality and health” (chan 2017), and provision of the uk’s infamous section 28 which prohibited “the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”18 backlashes built around “think of the children” panic can also target adults, either by representing members of liberation movements as predatory corruptors of 14 credit for these suggestions goes to the audience of the 2020 central apa meeting session "epistemic injustices, epistemic solutions," hosted by the society for analytical feminism. 15 consider, e.g., the way that some who recognize the “gay recruitment” backlash as homophobic propaganda, and who accept stories like bechdel’s at face value, will nevertheless insist on the importance of hearing out concerns like littman’s. 16 we are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for urging us to explore this issue. 17 the first author’s “moment it clicks” happened in their thirties. 18 local government act 1988, section 28, uk public general acts 1988 c. 9. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 the youth or by infantilizing adults to undermine their epistemic standing. consider the mismatch between the framing of the public “rogd” controversy in terms of children and adolescents and the reality that the “rogd” label is often applied to people who are unambiguously adults. the oldest of the “adolescents and young adults” discussed in littman’s study was 27 years old, and elliot page, who came out as trans at age 34, has been called “the model for rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (urquhart 2021). looking beyond the above narrowly epistemic concerns, the wider trans youth backlash involves a push for legislative infantilization of people generally regarded as adults: a recently proposed law in north carolina banning medical transition for minors defines a minor as “any individual who is below 21 years of age,”19 and one trans youth panic organization has expressed a desire to “see the upper age limit for adolescent care raised to 25” and insists that “puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex imitation surgeries should not be available to under 25s” (our duty 2020). we are not prepared to comment on whether all hermeneutical backlashes involve some measure of infantilization, but it seems likely that “think of the children” rhetoric and policies specifically targeting young people are a more salient feature of some hermeneutical backlashes than others, if only because some hermeneutical liberation movements have focused on adult audiences. 5.3. interpreting our oppression, interpreting ourselves in some cases of hermeneutical injustice, such as fricker’s example of sexual harassment, the hermeneutical lacuna works to keep some other injustice in place by denying us the tools to name the problem. but in other cases, the interpretive lacuna prevents us from interpreting something that is not itself a form of oppression. the harm is not an inability to name another harm but an inability to fully make sense of or communicate oneself and one’s needs, with adverse implications for self-discovery, self-authorship, or personal flourishing, as in the cases of gay or trans people unable to recognize themselves as such because they have been presented with a narrow, stereotyped vision of gay or trans life. another foundational difficulty is being prevented from recognizing that the affected class even exists. as an example, consider the reaction of “wait, that’s a thing? i’m not just broken? there’s a community of us?” associated with personal hermeneutical breakthroughs for some nonbinary people and asexual people. most epistemic liberation movements will need to confront problems of unintelligible oppression (e.g., the lack of a term for sexual harassment), but some have more cause to center injustices of identity unintelligibility than others do. such 19 youth health protection act. 2021. sb 514. north carolina general assembly, 2021– 2022 session. george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 injustices are especially salient in trans experience—perhaps especially in the experience of nonbinary people and trans men.20 5.4. looking within and speaking out some instances of hermeneutical injustice have significant introspective aspects: a hermeneutical lacuna can be an impediment to self-discovery, selfauthorship, or the interpretation of one’s own needs and experiences. this is exemplified by many of the hermeneutical injustices surrounding gay and trans selfdiscovery. however, not all hermeneutical injustices disable the interpretive capacities of the marginalized in this way. often, we understand ourselves and our experiences quite well, but the hermeneutical resources needed to communicate this understanding to others are not in wide circulation. furthermore, what stymies communications in these latter cases is often more an issue of the dominantly situated audience failing to do their epistemic due diligence, and less an issue of the marginalized not having a good enough communicative tool box—a point highlighted by dotson (2011, 2014), medina (2013), pohlhaus (2012), and others. we expect these distinctions will be relevant to both the shape of hermeneutical liberation movements and the kinds of backlash to which they are vulnerable. active ignorance often plays an important role in backlashes supporting both sorts of injustice, including trans youth panics. active ignorance is something that actively contributes to a misrepresentation of the world, as opposed to passive ignorance, which is something like a simple information gap that does not resist being filled. one form active ignorance may take is willful hermeneutical ignorance, which is “the propensity to dismiss whole aspects of the experienced world by refusing to become proficient in the epistemic resources required for attending to those parts of the world well” (pohlhaus 2017). other related phenomena may include kristie dotson’s concept of “contributory injustice,” which is an epistemic agent’s “maintaining and utilizing structurally prejudiced hermeneutical resources that result in epistemic harm to the epistemic agency of a knower,” which she identifies as a form of willful hermeneutical injustice (dotson 2012, 31). dotson also develops a broader notion of “epistemic violence,” which is, “the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges” (dotson 2011, 236). the literature on active ignorance is a vital resource for further work on hermeneutical backlash. 20 in the north american and british contexts, at least, media and research attention have historically focused heavily on trans women, rendering transmasculine and nonbinary identities especially unintelligible or unimaginable. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 24 5.5. speaking among ourselves and speaking for ourselves for some liberation movements, like the feminist consciousness-raising movements from which fricker draws her core examples, the hermeneutical lacuna that needs to be addressed is ubiquitous: before the liberation movement, the needed hermeneutical resource is absent not just from the dominant social imaginary but from the social imaginary of every epistemic community. in other cases, like many of the racial justice movements that provide important examples for medina and dotson, the marginalized may have an established community with adequate hermeneutical resources for self-understanding and community-internal communication, but the dominant social imaginary does not share these resources, limiting the ability of the marginalized to express their needs and grievances to those in power, and the ability of those at the dominant center to make sense of discourse at/from the margins. there is a related distinction among hermeneutical liberation projects: is the main goal to build or enrich epistemic communities at the margins, or to advocate as a community from the margins? the process of recruiting women into feminist discursive spaces, encouraging them to become fluent in the hermeneutical resources of the movement, and developing new resources within movement spaces would be an example of the former, as would the sorts of queer and trans hermeneutical liberation that we’ve focused on here. on the other hand, an effort to push men to become more aware of women’s experiences and grievances, and more fluent in the hermeneutical resources developed by feminists, would be an example of the latter. as with other distinctions we’ve introduced, these differences may correspond to different backlash vulnerabilities. 5.6. liberatory and propagandistic friction both hermeneutical liberation and hermeneutical backlash involve a resistance against certain ideas, beliefs, and hermeneutical resources. medina calls this resistance “epistemic friction.” he argues that epistemic friction can be a good or bad thing (medina 2013, 48), depending (in part) on its effects. for example, a healthy dose of skepticism is a kind of epistemic friction, and it is good for vetting information. however, excessive skepticism, or biased standards in one’s application of skepticism, inhibits the accurate vetting of information. epistemic friction can also differ in its function. some uses of epistemic friction, such as in many liberation movements, provide protection and resistance against epistemic objectification—the treatment of some people as solely objects to be known about rather than fellow epistemic agents to be listened to. but other forms of epistemic friction, such as that used within george and goguen – hermeneutical backlash: trans youth panics as epistemic injustice published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 backlash movements, create and maintain epistemic objectification by seeking to prevent the marginalized from claiming their place in the epistemic community.21 this friction may become what jason stanley calls “undermining propaganda” and even “demagoguery” when it frames hermeneutical liberation as pathological or otherwise deserving of suspicion and fear. under the guise of “reasonable concern” and caution for the sake of others’ well-being, it uses fear to short-circuit more reasoned discourse and discredit others’ testimony about their well-being (stanley 2015, 47–48). there is much more to explore in the relationship between hermeneutical backlash, propaganda, and uses of epistemic friction. 6. conclusion in this paper, we have used the case study of trans youth panics to highlight some common backlash vulnerabilities of hermeneutical liberation movements. in doing so, we have highlighted the dynamic and contested nature of epistemic oppression and resistance to it. we hope that this has called attention both to the dangers of this panic and the need for the further study of hermeneutical backlash and related phenomena. references abbot, sidney, and barbara j. love. 1972. sappho 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article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2021 34 b. r. george is an assistant professor of philosophy at carnegie mellon university in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. their research interests include “what does that even mean?” (formal semantics, linguistic pragmatics, and philosophy of language), “grievance studies” (feminist analytic philosophy with a focus on trans, queer, and disabled experience), and “someone is wrong on the internet.” stacey goguen is an assistant professor of philosophy at northeastern illinois university in chicago, illinois, where she teaches feminist philosophy, social epistemology, applied ethics, and philosophy of science. her research interests include stereotypes and bias, epistemic injustice, active ignorance, and flawed epistemic communities. she coedited the anthology overcoming epistemic injustice: social and psychological perspectives with benjamin sherman and has published papers on positive stereotypes, stereotype threat, and the hypothesis that women might be less interested in philosophy than men. 13518 george and goguen title page2 13518 george and goguen final format whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 1 article 4 recommended citation gasdaglis, katherine. 2025. “whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (1). article 4. 2025 whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion katherine gasdaglis california state polytechnic university, pomona katie.gasdaglis@gmail.com gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion katherine gasdaglis abstract anger-eliminativism, the view that we should, as much as possible, reduce the role anger plays in our moral lives and theories, fails in ways predictable of antiintersectional methodologies. in failing to adopt intersectionality as a maxim of inquiry, anger-eliminativism ignores, dismisses, and misrepresents the angers of those who have clear and pressing moral reason to be angry—namely, those who face oppression. it is also problematically a priori at various levels of inquiry, insensitive to counterexamples, and begs the question of anger’s moral justification. an adequate intersectional methodology, which begins from centering anti-oppression anger, reveals significant first-order lessons about the nature and normativity of anger. one is that we can make good sense of the normative relation of “basic desert,” even though anti-oppression anger is not retributive. centering anti-oppression anger reveals further insights about our responses to anger, including important roles for agency and moral character in the ways we face and take up anger. there is, moreover, an ethics to being wrong that must be factored into our theories of emotions like anger. keywords: anger, oppression, retributive, eliminativism, intersectionality, methodology, maxim, desert, anti-oppression there has been a recent swell of important work on the moral, political, and epistemic significance of our darker emotions, including anger (thomason 2023; alessandri, 2023; cherry 2021; congdon 2018). there has also been recent work defending anger-eliminativism, the view that we should, as much as possible, minimize or eliminate the role anger plays in our moral lives and theories. angereliminativism has been defended on various grounds, including that anger leads to irrational violence, is counterproductive (nussbaum 2016, 228; cf. silva 2021), is morally indefensible in a causally determined world (pereboom 2021), and is “incoherent,” or “makes no sense,” insofar as it fails to undo any wrongdoing suffered or restore any morally valuable thing lost (nussbaum 2016, 15). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 i have two aims here. the first (section 1) is to articulate and synthesize several significant methodological problems internal to the dominant forms of theorizing adopted by anger-eliminativism. specifically, i argue that anger-eliminativism fails in ways predictable of anti-intersectional methodologies, including theoretically marginalizing oppressed experiences and utilizing whitewashed thought experiments. in failing to adopt intersectionality as a maxim of inquiry (gasdaglis and madva 2020), anger-eliminativists ignore, dismiss, or misrepresent the angers of those who have clear and pressing moral reason to be angry—namely, those who face oppression. moreover, in doing so, these methods are problematically a priori at various levels of inquiry, are insensitive to counterexamples, cherry-pick cases, and beg the question of anger’s moral justification. my second aim (section 2) is to highlight certain specific lessons about anger to be learned from an adequate intersectional methodology, which begins from centering anti-oppression anger. i argue that we can make good sense of the normative relation of “basic desert” in the context of anti-oppression anger, even though anti-oppression anger is not retributive. i also argue that centering antioppression anger reveals significant insights about our responses to anger, including the moral aptness of self-reactive emotions like remorse and important roles for agency and moral character in the experience of facing and taking up anger. henceforward, i use the term “anti-oppression anger” to refer to a range of angers that respond to various, often intersecting, dimensions of oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, class exploitation, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, among others. anti-oppression angers call for recognition of wrongdoing, aim at social repair or change, and are not essentially (necessarily) vengeful.1 anti-oppression anger includes being angry at and about the oppressive operations of social structures in which certain groups benefit and other groups are exploited or disadvantaged—that is, being angry about the way the social world is.2 it also includes interpersonal angers at certain groups or particular individuals for participating in, reinforcing, or unjustly benefitting from ongoing oppressive social processes. hence, in these cases, it involves viewing the agency of the target of 1 anti-oppression anger can be, or may become, destructive, especially when it is met with callous disregard (silva 2021). my claim here is that it is often not vengeful, or isn’t vengeful necessarily. 2 that is, it involves representing the wrong in question as an instance of oppression or as a broader social pattern of groupor identity-based injustice. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to clarify this point. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 anger—whether individual or group—as situated within broader causal-historical social processes.3 1. methodology matters my argument takes up and builds on other insightful work on the challenges of defining anger and assessing its moral value. for example, alice maclachlan argues that “moralistic” defenses of resentment (a species of anger) define it in a way that centers only certain specific cases of moral anger, generating a purely technical concept that is woefully extensionally inadequate. in defining resentment as a “firstpersonal analogue to moral indignation,” moralistic accounts of this kind of anger exclude significant cases of political resentment (maclachlan 2010, 423). an extensionally adequate account, maclachlan (2010, 424) argues, must accommodate resentments of “violations and threats that (1) are not necessarily self-pertaining; (2) may not be expressible as individual, discrete injuries; and (3) cannot always be construed as moral threats in the sense of rights violations.”4 by way of illustration, i 3 i mean to remain neutral on certain central questions in the metaphysics of emotion, including questions of individuation. while any metaphysics of anger must respect the diversity of anger experiences, i expect pragmatism in the philosophy and psychology of emotion is likely the best approach. i am not committed to a metaphysics that assumes that anti-oppression anger is a single, unified subtype of anger, or a subtype different in kind from other species of anger. rather, i take anti-oppression anger to be a family of angers that share at least one property; namely, they take oppression, in one or some of its various dimensions and forms, as an object. 4 it is beyond this paper’s scope to defend a particular view of the relations between resentment and other forms of anger. again, i think pragmatism in the metaphysics of emotion is likely the best approach (see note 3). but i agree that many resentments are more first-personal in character than other angers, although i think the firstpersonal perspective can be expanded to include the collective perspective of the social groups to which one belongs (à la stockdale 2013). i also agree with maclachlan that, generally, moralistic accounts do not adequately capture all experiences of resentment and that any plausible metaphysics of this emotion must be responsive to the plurality of experiences. moreover, what i call anti-oppression anger includes experiences where the line between first-personal and third-personal angers is blurry, insofar as the emotional agent may be angry at an individual about the ways her actions manifest, replicate, and contribute to broader oppressive social patterns. the emotional agent, in these cases, can be simultaneously angry at an individual for wronging her and for the way the social world is more generally (see section 2.1). i also think that resentment can sometimes be genuinely irrational, unreasonable, or inapt, as is the case when incels resent women for refusing to provide the sexual feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 find it natural to say that i resent that women philosophers face an inhospitable, exclusionary climate at certain prestigious universities, despite the fact that these are not harms done to me personally, given where i work. and, even if they were, the harms of a chilly climate (arguably) do not rise to the level of rights violations. thus, moralistic definitions end up mistakenly casting certain political resentments at real injustices as unreasonable or as not resentment at all. while maclachlan critiques the moralistic definitions advanced by certain defenders of anger, myisha cherry targets the definitions of certain angereliminativists. seneca and santideva, she argues, paint anger with overly “broad strokes,” leading to a reductive mischaracterization of anger as always uncontrollable and dangerous (cherry 2021, 11). drawing on the work of audre lorde, cherry advocates distinguishing political angers along four axes, including their (a) targets— that is, at whom the anger is directed; (b) aims—what the anger is meant to accomplish; (c) perspectives—the “attitude or way of thinking that leads to the anger” (cherry 2021, 14); and (d) action-tendencies—what emotional agents are likely to do with their anger. what cherry calls “lordean rage” (5) is a variety of antiracist political anger that aims at social change and is informed by the “intersectional perspective,” according to which no one is free until we are all free (24). maclachlan and cherry defend definitional approaches to anger that respect the diversity of anger experiences (see also hieronymi 2019; silva 2021) and demonstrate certain political and conceptual consequences of defining the concept too narrowly. this paper builds on their efforts by identifying and explaining several further epistemically and politically significant ways in which dominant forms of theorizing the moral emotions go importantly wrong, failures that stem, i argue, from a deep, background intersectional failure in methodology. while i point to the errors of anger-eliminativism as a case study, the types of methodological failures i articulate here are not specific to the philosophy of anger, nor are they specific to investigating the emotions in general; rather, they are errors quite common to dominant forms of philosophical investigation. as it turns out, methodology very much matters when it comes to understanding the moral emotions and their place in our lives and theories. 1.1. a plurality of angers anger-eliminativist martha nussbaum argues that a desire for payback is internal to the concept of anger as such. because it conceptually involves a payback wish, she argues, anger is “practically incoherent,” insofar as inflicting harm as compensation for wrongdoing does nothing to restore the morally valuable thing lost, services to which they mistakenly believe they are entitled. however, a full theory of resentment must say something about irrational cases as well. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 unless the thing lost is mere relative social status, a good about which, she claims, we would do ethically better to care less (nussbaum 2016, 5).5 while anger is essentially vengeful on nussbaum’s account, she allows a single exception, which she calls “transition anger.” transition anger is a momentary outrage at some morally problematic state of affairs from which the emotional agent immediately transitions into an action done from a spirit of generosity (nussbaum 2016, 6, 36). but it is not clear whether transition anger really counts as anger for nussbaum. she writes, “is transition-anger a species of anger? i really don’t care how we answer this question. such special borderline cases are rarely handled well by conceptual analysis” (36). similarly, derk pereboom argues that anger entails the belief that the target of anger “basically deserves” to face the punishing emotion. basic desert is the idea, roughly, that when agents face rewards or punishment for their goodor evil-doing, they really, in a deep sense, deserve what’s coming to them. yet no subject basically deserves to suffer our wrath, he argues, if factors beyond their control causally determine their agency (e.g., pereboom 2021, chaps. 1–2; 1995, 37–40). according to pereboom’s earlier view, anger is always retributive. “for normal, adult human beings,” he writes of his earlier position, “resentment and indignation always presuppose that their targets deserve—more specifically, basically deserve . . . to be recipients of expressions of these reactive attitudes” (pereboom 2021, 2; bold emphasis added). pereboom’s recent position is more measured. he writes, i don’t reject out of hand the claim that one might direct anger toward a wrongdoer to forcefully communicate to him that he has done wrong, without presupposing that he deserves the pain or harm involved in being a recipient [of] its expression. still, here the resulting emotion seems like feigned anger to me. my sense is that genuine moral anger at least typically comes with a desert presupposition. (pereboom 2021, 2) 5 for nussbaum, inflicting pain as retribution in the form of anger makes no sense, but retribution that aims to injure the relative social status of the target of anger as compensation for having had one’s own social standing negatively impacted by the wrongdoing or slight is coherent (2016, 15–16). yet, she argues, it is “narcissistic” to be social-status-obsessed (28–30), and the equal moral status we all have as human beings can never be lowered. while she acknowledges that the moral value of human beings isn’t equally respected by the community under cases of “discrimination” (28– 29), she argues that anger is counterproductive in social movements (nussbaum 2016, 228; cf. silva 2021). yet it is clearly not narcissistic to care about relative social standing under conditions of oppression; but this is debate for another time. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 here pereboom claims that “genuine” anger is “typically” vengeful. he allows for the possibility of nonretributive communicative forms of anger but persists in his skepticism of their authenticity. for the eliminativist, anger aims at payback, often disturbs us rationally, is easily displaced, punishes others, and regularly leads to violence. for pereboom, vengeful anger is the only kind that matters to answering the question of whether anger is compatible with the causal structure of the world. for nussbaum, vengeful anger is just what we mean by anger or conceive anger to be. neither of these eliminativists are open to the possibility that the anger typical of their own experience—as white academics employed by elite institutions—is not the only real anger. nor are they open to the possibility that theirs might not be the paradigm case of moral anger. yet, as cherry and maclachlan argue, there are very likely a plurality of angers, and some of them are nonvengeful and forward-looking. moreover, drawing on recent empirical literature, laura silva shows that, in the context of progressive social movements, anger often motivates constructive collective action rather than destructive action (silva 2021, 36–39; see also tausch et al. 2011; van zomeren et al. 2004). the empirical literature, she notes, supports the view that two distinct desires may be internal to anger, while certain key contextual moderators determine which desire is operative in a given case (silva 2021, 39; see also tausch et al. 2011; scheepers et al. 2006; bandura 2000). the two desires internal to anger are a desire to inflict harm as payback (as in anger dominantly understood) and a desire for recognition—that is, a desire to cause “epistemic changes” in the target (silva 2021, 45–47). which of these desires is operative in a given case depends in part on the perceived “changeability of the targets of anger” (48). she writes, when the targets of anger are seen as capable of change, anger tends to involve desires for recognition. desires for recognition typically trigger actions that are primarily communicative, and which make clear the reasons for anger. this allows the targets of anger to share in the appraisal of a relevant situation as unjust. (silva 2021, 48) this desire for recognition is a desire that the moral significance of an individual, group, or state of the world be acknowledged and given proper uptake.6 it is a desire that a wrong be appreciated and properly addressed by the target or community. by 6 for the view that anger in general aims at social reassurance about the status of norms, see margaret urban walker (2006, chap. 4). cf. lugones (1995, 210–13), whose account of second-order anger involves anger across “worlds of sense” that are constituted in part by the various norms resisted by the anger. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 contrast, when hope is lost, and the targets of anger are perceived as unchangeable, dismissive, and morally callous, the desire for payback activates. so, while it is true that anger sometimes aims for vengeance, leads to violence, and makes us irrational, it is also true that anger sometimes aims for social change and motivates progressive political action. similarly, in her analysis of antiracist, antisexist anger across lines of social difference, audre lorde writes, anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. . . . we have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobility or silence . . . implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. for it is those distortions which separate us. and we must ask: who profits from all this? (lorde 2020, 120) for lorde, antiracist, antisexist anger is primarily a prosocial emotion. this anger is an opportunity to engage one another authentically and to build solidarity across lines of social difference. she implores women to face each other’s anger without defensiveness, silence, or guilt, which she sees as narcissistic obstacles to change. for lorde, antiracist, antisexist anger of the kind she feels toward white women who marginalize or exploit her in feminist spaces is also a form of grief. in feeling anger of this kind, she laments the loss of connection between peers, connections that are disrupted by social distortions that inhibit our ability to fully see and appreciate each other as human beings, and that continually reinforce white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. lorde’s anger is a call for recognition and reciprocal understanding. it expresses the desires to be acknowledged, understood, and connected. this anger does not aim at vengeance. hence, given the evidence that angers take a plurality of aims, anger pluralism is very likely true, and anger is not always vengeful. 1.2. intersectionality as a maxim of inquiry maclachlan and cherry identify several definitional inadequacies of moralistic and early anger-eliminativist accounts of anger, respectively, including, first, that these definitions fail to include the plurality of intersectional experiences of anger— namely, the anger-experiences of those who identify with multiple marginalized groups (maclachlan 2010, 431); and, second, that a certain kind of anger, lordean rage, is felt from a background liberating intersectional perspective (cherry 2021, 5, 28). i argue that anger-eliminativsm’s intersectional failures run even deeper, to the methodology itself. it is not just that anger-eliminativism misses a certain range of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 cases of anger (although it does), and not just that certain angers are intersectional in the perspective that informs them (although they are), but also that the way the philosophical inquiry is done—that is, the structure of the reasoning that leads to these inadequate definitions—is problematically anti-intersectional. the methods employed by anger-eliminativists aim to distill the plurality of anger experiences to a single, pure, or primary experience. these methods reflect a broader tendency in philosophy (and in science) to grasp toward unified explanation, even at the expense of respecting the diversity of phenomena. immanuel kant noticed this methodological tendency in philosophical theorizing in the eighteenth century. for kant, philosophers sometimes pursue the principle of “homogeneity”— the methodological maxim to seek unity in apparent diversity—too single-mindedly, to the exclusion of the principle of “specification,” the maxim to seek difference or deviation in apparent unity. conversely, philosophers also sometimes pursue specification to the exclusion of homogeneity and fail to recognize similarities across groups, categories, or other lines of difference (kant 1998, a642/b671–a668/b696). although these maxims of inquiry, according to kant, are internal to and necessary for the advancement of science, insofar as they implicitly guide our reasoning in how we seek out and organize new information, concepts, and theories, philosophers and scientists are led astray when we pursue one to the exclusion of the other. a hundred years later, and independent of kant, feminists of color documented similar types of methodological errors in dominant theories of social reality and in the ways our social practices and institutions generate new concepts, discourses, classifications, norms, and laws. when sojourner truth (1995) exclaimed “ain’t i a woman?” to the 1851 women’s assembly in akron, ohio, she was testifying to the ways dominantly framed debates about the rights of women—which foregrounded the “feminine weakness” stereotypical of white women—excluded the experiences of black women whose bodies, labor, and strength were brutally exploited. one thing intersectional theory and its earlier prototypes implicitly reveal—but that kant (unsurprisingly) missed—is that the tendencies toward misapplication of the maxims of homogeneity and specification in the social sphere and the consequent obliviousness to real social and political differences or significant intragroup similarities often serve the interests of powerful groups, or those relatively dominant within a group, while ignoring or disappearing the interests of those who live at the margins. intersectionality, which teaches us to notice difference within apparent sameness and to seek unity in apparent difference, with the aim of resisting injustice or oppression, is a maxim we should adopt to correct and resist the misapplication of the more general maxims of reason (gasdaglis and madva 2020). the intersectional failures of dominant methods show up in many forms and at many levels of inquiry. generalizing to all experiences from one’s own limited, relatively dominant experience, problematically universalizing from a limited (often gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 cherry-picked) sample of cases, or explaining away or dismissing the experiences of others are common ways an overly enthusiastic pursuit of homogeneity can serve the interests of power. the philosophy of emotions succumbs to these tendencies. for example, agnes callard, who is not an anger-eliminativist but holds that anger is one way that human moral practices inescapably involve our doing immoral things, expresses cynicism toward theories of anger that cast it as forward-looking and communicative. she writes of (what she calls) the “problem-solving” account of anger that it “presents angry people as educators and normative crusaders, taking a stand against injustice in order to make the world a more perfect realization of some normative order” (callard 2018, 125). incredulous that anger could primarily be concerned with combating injustice, she continues: i find this to be an overly sanguine picture of an emotion whose manifestations are not only often but characteristically destructive and cruel. to take just one example, consider the fact that when we are angry at someone we love, we are liable to say insulting things we don’t mean in order to hurt them. anger begets more anger as often as it begets apology. (callard 2018, 125) here callard appeals to her own experience of (arguably irrational) anger in the context of close personal relationships as a counterexample to the possibility that anger can be theorized as forward-looking, constructive, and communicative. drawing on her own experience, she implies that because “we” are liable to insult and try to hurt those we love when we are angry at them, anger in general does not primarily aim at combating injustice. such an inference is intelligible only under a number of anti-intersectional methodological presuppositions. first, if we assume from the outset that, to theorize anger, we must articulate the necessary (or necessary and sufficient) conditions on the “one real” anger, then our inquiry is anti-intersectional in its aim. intersectionality, taken as a methodological maxim, is empirically open to the possibility that, for a given empirical question (whether social, psychological, economic, etc.), there could turn out to be a general unified explanation or answer, but if it is assumed from the outset that there should, or can, be only one answer, lest the inquiry has failed, then the inquiry is anti-intersectional in its presuppositions. it is not at all unusual for the complexity and diversity of the world, especially the social world, to resist stubborn efforts at theoretical unification or reduction. second, if callard assumes she can generalize from quite limited cases of anger—even of genuine, apt, or justified anger—to all angers, for all groups, in all contexts, because her assumption is that angers are fundamentally all of the kind with feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 which she is most familiar, then she has failed intersectionally in her empirical reasoning—that is, in making statistical generalizations that serve her own interests. third, if callard assumes from the outset that her own limited, relatively privileged experience of anger in interpersonal contexts truly (aptly, or correctly) represents the one, universal anger, then she fails to consider that her social position may negatively epistemically impact her own phenomenology of anger, and, hence, she also fails to consider the potential limits of her own epistemic reliability. finally, fourth, in feeling entitled to dismiss the lived emotional experiences, relevant social science, expert testimonies, and theories of those otherwise situated, she succumbs to dogmatism and fails to be sensitive to counterevidence. in general, prioritizing homogeneity to the exclusion of specificity, as callard does, is problematically a priori in certain crucial moments of inquiry that demand a healthy measure of empiricism. in failing to be sensitive to the relevant, divergent empirical evidence about anger, in failing to factor in the ways her social position might affect her own phenomenological reliability, and in aiming at unity too singlemindedly in her generalizations, callard’s reasoning is also problematically a priori. similarly, the eliminativisms of nussbaum and pereboom pursue homogeneity to the exclusion of specification in ways typical of dominant, anti-intersectional strategies of marginalization. just as there are a diversity of social experiences, there are a plurality of real angers; and communicative forms of anti-oppression anger are not “feigned anger” (pereboom 2021, 2). 1.3. consequences of anti-intersectional methods anti-intersectional methods that fail to recognize difference in apparent sameness or sameness in apparent difference are very often guilty of theoretical erasure. erasure of anti-oppression anger occurs whenever scholars treat cases of anger—like the forward-looking angers of progressive social movements or the angers of prominent civil rights leaders—as if they are not anger, by, for instance, reclassifying them as something else. pereboom, for example, speculates that the angers of martin luther king jr. and frederick douglass were not anger at all but examples of what he calls the “measured aggressive stance,” which he would have us cultivate instead of anger (see pereboom 2021, 47–48, 75).7 nussbaum (2016, 8, 31– 32) points to martin luther king jr.’s anger as an example of “transition anger,” which, as noted above, may not even count as genuine anger for her (36). nussbaum and pereboom thus also fail to recognize sameness in (what strikes them as) apparent 7 see cherry (2021, chaps. 3–4) for an explanation of the ways social positioning constrains emotional expression. for discussion of douglass’s anger, see bell (2009, 166–67) and cherry (2021, 77–78); for a defense of the claim that king felt anger, see cherry (2021, 86–91). gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 difference. moreover, not “caring” whether the angers of others count as genuine anger also threatens erasure (nussbaum 2016, 36). additionally, in erasing the anger experiences of those who face oppression, these methods fail to reckon with clear counterexamples and, hence, beg questions about the nature and moral justification of anger. nussbaum, for example, claims that a payback wish is “conceptually” internal to anger and subsequently argues that anger practically (and morally) “makes no sense,” while simultaneously allowing for the single exception of “transition anger”—that is, a momentary moral outrage. yet exceptions to conceptual claims in philosophy often function as counterexamples, rather than as mere borderline cases to be sidelined. minimally, something significant must be said as to why clear prima facie counterexamples do not in fact qualify as counterexamples. moreover, the claim that conceptual analysis is not equipped to handle such cases (nussbaum 2016, 36) may indicate a failure in the conceptual analysis. finally, in failing to take intersectionality as a methodological maxim, eliminativists are also guilty of theoretical marginalization.8 pereboom (2021, 2), for example, doesn’t strictly rule out the possibility of nonretributive forms of anger, but his argument against the justification of anger in a causally determined world is premised on the claim that anger is “typically” retributive. the notion of “typicality” is ambiguous, and it is unclear which sense pereboom has in mind. typicality in a thin sense can mean “common” or “frequent,” while typicality in a thick sense can mean “paradigmatic.” methodologically, casting the experiences of those who face oppression as either relatively uncommon or in some way exceptional are ways of paying lip service to some measure of diversity in the phenomena while simultaneously dismissing its theoretical significance. this methodological error is made plain once we see that anti-oppression anger should not be considered atypical in either sense. to begin, anti-oppression anger is not so unusual or uncommon, a fact that is easy to see for anyone who acknowledges the long, genocidal history of western patriarchal colonialism. those who face the most violent and pervasive forms of systemic injustice always have pressing and personal reason to feel angry (or resentful9) so they may feel angry quite often. they may feel angry so often that they have to work to feel less angry, so their lives, health, and well-being are not overwhelmed by the harmful effects of chronic negative emotion (cherry 2021, 50). 8 on some interpretations of intersectionality, intersectionality is primarily a thesis about the marginalization of black women or women of color (see, e.g., alexanderfloyd 2012). 9 see also stockdale (2013), who calls this first-personal kind of anti-oppression anger “collective resentment.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 anti-oppression anger is not atypical, even in the thin sense of infrequent, if groups who face oppression may feel it so often. moreover, all competent moral agents, even those who are relatively dominantly situated, who care about the dignity and wellbeing of their fellow human beings, also have reason to feel third-personal anger. even if at some ideal point in the future we managed collectively to right persisting social inequities, lingering resentments about the horrors of the past would still be justified. in fact, our global histories of slavery, genocide, and class exploitation may be real, lived reasons to be angry forever, or at least for a very long time (cf. callard 2018). additionally, as a statistical matter, most people will, at some point in their lives, face some dimension of oppression. even cis, straight, presently nondisabled white men might be economically exploited, or suffer ageism and ableism at other points in their lives, for example, when they are very young or old. while oppressions vary widely and intersectionally, many of us know what it’s like to feel used and exploited within unjust social structures and angry at the people who benefit from them. and even those who never suffer any measure of oppression may also feel moral anger at the oppressions faced by their fellow human beings. given the systemic nature and pervasiveness of oppression, it seems like anti-oppression anger may be the norm rather than the exception. so, anger at oppression is not unusual or uncommon. nor, i argue, should it be treated as exceptional or nonparadigmatic. while questions of what’s most “common” may be wholly empirical,10 questions of what’s “paradigmatic” are not. claims that a case is paradigmatic are stronger and imply that this case is “the case we should be talking about” or “is worth our attention.” distinguishing the paradigmatic case to be theoretically centered from the “exceptional” case to be marginalized may be theoretically useful for certain purposes and may rely on reasons related to training, expertise, contextual factors, or the aims of the inquiry.11 for certain inquiries, centering a numerical-minority “atypical” case or experience as paradigmatic may better promote the inquiry and better track the truth. for example, in a given environment, environmental factors might lead to certain pervasive negative health outcomes in a population (e.g., asthma, ptsd, or insomnia), but the typicality, or high frequency, of these health outcomes isn’t sufficient reason for treating them as “normal” or “healthy” even if the population has never known any other way things could be. thus, the putatively most common case should not always 10 claims of typicality are made in reference to a particular class. normative considerations may factor into deciding which class is the appropriate reference for a given generalization. hence even claims of typicality may not be wholly empirical. that is a topic for another time. 11 what counts as paradigmatic may also be driven, irrationally, by oppressive biases. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 be viewed as paradigmatic. a choice must be made to center a case and treat it as paradigmatic. 1.4. whose anger matters? because anger experiences vary widely and deciding which anger counts as “typical” requires deliberation and choice, we are left with a pressing methodological question: whose anger matters? if we’re ultimately concerned with the moral aptness or justification conditions of anger—whether, for example, as pereboom wonders, anger can be justified in a causally determined world—which angers should our inquiries center? generally, the decision to prioritize certain cases over others should depend in part on the aims of the inquiry. if, as philosophers, we’re interested, broadly, in the metaphysics of the emotions, we should begin by being theoretically sensitive to the plurality of anger experiences and anger expressions. if we’re interested in misplaced anger, or how anger goes wrong, we might center misogynistic anger or the angers born of white fragility. if we are interested in the moral justification conditions of anger—as nussbaum and pereboom claim to be—we should center cases of anger where there are clear and serious injustices that would prima facie merit this emotional response. ongoing systematic attacks on your humanity and the humanity of the groups to which you belong prima facie merit anger as a moral response, if anything does. so, for an eliminativist, to argue against the moral permissibility of anger requires directly arguing against the aptness and justification of anger in these cases. whatever the inquiry, as anger-eliminativism demonstrates, default dominant tendencies pose persisting threats of theoretical erasure and marginalization to oppressed groups. hence, given these threats, i suggest that, minimally, as a heuristic, and, potentially, as the default maxim for inquiry into the emotions in general, we should center the emotions of oppressed groups, including anti-oppression angers. of course, in centering anti-oppression angers, the inquiry must also be intersectional, because, for example, the antipatriarchal resentments of workingclass black women may be importantly different from the antipatriarchal resentments of middle-class white women, though both angers may take, as their primary objects, attitudes, actions, or institutions structured by white-supremacist patriarchy. in addition to combatting dominant theoretical tendencies to erase the experiences of marginalized groups, there are further epistemic reasons to treat antioppression angers as paradigmatic. feminist philosophers have long argued that the experiences of those who face systematic oppression should be privileged epistemically when it comes to noticing, naming, and theorizing the harms and injustices they suffer (collins 1997, 1998, 2000; jaggar 1999, 2004; fricker 1999). roughly, groups that face oppression on a regular basis are likely to have, collectively feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 speaking, a clearer grasp than dominant groups on what these phenomena are, how they work, and how they harm.12 regularly fearing for our rights, well-being, family, community, or lives makes us alert to the details of a social world that often functions to threaten, exclude, and exploit us, so some measure of epistemic deference is called for. minimally, the discourses, knowledges, and experts of oppressed communities should be given significant epistemic weight. moreover, groups whose anger is a response to ongoing, systematic attacks on their humanity often, as a matter of survival, learn to live in and through their angers. they may learn to cultivate (cherry 2021, chap. 6), focus (lorde 2020), and utilize (hooks 1996) their angers in ways that assist in their resistance efforts, as a feature of what macalester bell (2009, 165) calls “virtue under grossly non-ideal conditions” of oppression and of what alex madva (2019, 91) calls “structure-facing virtue.” audre lorde offers the following example: women of color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. and i say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. we have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. and part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters. (lorde 2020, 120) lorde explains how even persisting and repeating states of anger are justified responses to a social world that has shown her, since birth, ongoing hatred and contempt. this hatred, lorde explains, expresses the dominant perspective’s desire for her destruction or dominant wish that she had never existed at all. feeling anger in response to racist and sexist hatred is morally rational and reflects the respect you must continue to show yourself when the social world refuses to afford it to you. developing recalcitrant self-respect under these grossly nonideal conditions and then learning to orchestrate your angers, skillfully and in the service of resistance, is, if anything is, the cultivation of virtue. hence, not only are oppressed groups in a better position epistemically to conceptualize the moral harms they face, they are in a better position to know what it means to respond virtuously under these conditions. 12 note that claims of epistemic deference must be made in reference to groups, communities, or experts, not to given token members of social groups, simply by virtue of group membership (see saul 2003, chap. 9; davis 2016). gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 there is a further methodological benefit to treating anti-oppression anger as paradigmatic moral anger—namely, that it reveals that the typical conditions within which we experience moral emotions just are “grossly non-ideal conditions” of oppression (bell 2009, 165). yet there is a tendency in moral theorizing to abstract away from these conditions and the ways they influence our interpersonal dynamics, as a way of isolating moral variables for the sake of pinpointing our moral intuitions. but by abstracting away from these social and political conditions, we abstract away from the actual world and consequently generate moral notions and theories that have little to do with the reasons we actually treat each other and ourselves the way we do, thus generating the extensional inadequacies maclachlan (2010) and cherry (2021) are concerned about. to take just one example, consider bernard williams’s (1981, 26–27) wellknown discussion of leo tolstoy’s anna karenina. williams points to the agent-regret anna eventually feels, when her choice to pursue a romantic affair ultimately leads to her ruin, as an example of (or even evidence for) his claim that luck plays an important role in our assessments of the rationality of certain moral decisions. he argues that anna’s regret tracks the fact that sometimes the rationality, or justifiability, of certain decisions depends on factors beyond our control, including whether things “work out” the way we’d hoped. roughly, for williams, because things happen not to work out for anna—she is betrayed, publicly humiliated, and socially ostracized—she comes to view her choice as the wrong one, and her regret tracks the wrongness of this choice. yet, had things simply gone differently, her choice would not have been the wrong one. bracketing the question whether luck is important to theorizing moral rationality, williams’s reflections on anna’s case abstract away from her precarious social position as a married woman in the noble class of the nineteenth-century feudal russian society tolstoy imagines her to inhabit, thus missing the ways it influences (or would influence) the structure and rationality of her decision-making and the consequent moral justification of the resulting emotions she feels. constrained as anna is by her position within the specific society she inhabits, anna feels regret when she is morally entitled to feel antipatriarchal anger. as news of her affair spreads, she is fully ejected from the community to which she belongs, governed as it is by the pretense of christian orthodox norms, while her younger male companion continues to navigate it freely (as does her philandering brother). the resulting material and psychological devastation anna suffers cannot reasonably be analyzed independently of the constraints she faces. so, our assessments of the normativity of the choices she makes, as well as the emotions she feels upon things going badly, cannot be made independent of the social and political constraints anna was operating under. in abstracting from anna’s social position, williams’s assessment of the rationality of her feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 moral decision-making leads him to posit a role for moral luck that arguably should be played by structural injustice (see also manne 2016). williams’s analysis of the subsequent regret anna feels, as well as anna’s feeling regret rather than anger as a response to the way she is cast out, are ultimately both ideological, in the sense that they reflect and reinforce existing oppressions. it is intelligible why anna might feel a purely prudential kind of regret insofar as she might feel that she made especially risky choices given the world she inhabits. but we should not treat this response as a paradigm case of apt regret, as williams does, because anna is not herself responsible for the devastation she faces. she is arguably responsible for breaking a promise to her husband, but the catastrophe she faces upon the discovery of her affair is the result of the unjust social structure she is constrained by. morally speaking, anna is entitled to feel anger at her community for tightly policing her sexuality and unjustly expelling her, as well as anger at those close to her for betraying her and reinforcing oppressive social norms. to the extent that anna feels agent-regret for the terribleness of the way things turned out, she has internalized the patriarchal ideology of her community. hence, we should center anti-oppression emotions in our moral theorizing, because they are alive to the social conditions that influence the way we actually treat and feel about each other. given that the conditions of the actual world are grossly nonideal conditions of oppression, and under the assumption that we are interested in whether and when our actual lived experiences of anger are justified or not, we should take the grossly nonideal conditions of oppression as the relevant conditions for theorizing the normativity of anger in the actual world. anti-oppression anger, which is a moral-emotional response that occurs under real social conditions in the actual world, should be our starting point. 1.5. further anti-intersectional methods: whitewashing thought experiments philosophers sometimes ignore the grossly nonideal conditions of the actual world when they draw on thought experiments or vignettes that are meant to be purely “interpersonal,” capturing mere emotional responses between individuals stripped bare of social power relations. pereboom’s cases, for example, are steeped in clear but unanalyzed power relations. these cases include, for example, a parent’s anger at their child (pereboom 2021, 41–42, 44), a teacher’s anger at their student (42, 44), or the anger of a professor, “chloe,” at her colleagues (43–44). while the first two of these involve obvious power asymmetries that inevitably affect our intuitions about the justification of expressing moral anger, consider the case of the professor’s anger at her colleagues, which is putatively anger between symmetrically, or equally, socially situated moral agents. in this case, chloe is angry at two of her colleagues for inappropriately and covertly pressing their agendas in the department, including improperly advancing gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 their preferred job candidate. while pereboom is right that there may be good reasons for chloe not to express moral anger at her colleagues, our intuitions about the nature of her reasons vary when we explore the social situatedness of the characters featured in the thought experiment. we wonder whether chloe is tenured, tenure-track, or adjunct, and whether she is otherwise dominantly situated along other social axes of race, gender, class, religion, and ability. if she is an otherwise dominantly situated cis white woman, prudence may require that she consider the ways her anger may be perceived as “shrill” or emotionally “hysterical.” if she is not otherwise dominantly situated—perhaps she is black and lesbian—prudence may require that she factor in that her anger may be perceived as “hostile” or “dangerous.” in either case she risks confirming negative stereotypes about her social group. chloe would also be justified in considering the risks that biased uptake of her anger poses to her professional reputation, career, and livelihood. however, attention to these social details teaches us that the justifying reasons in question are, at least in part, prudential, related to chloe’s survival in her field, rather than wholly and distinctively moral (though they might be both prudential and moral). in fact, if chloe’s prudential reasons in this case conflict with her apt moral anger at her colleagues, she also suffers what amia srinivasan (2018, 127) calls an “affective injustice.” thus, our intuitions about whether and on what grounds chloe would do better not to express her anger are influenced by our awareness of her and her colleagues’ social situatedness. suppose we modify the case to eliminate social differences altogether, such that everyone involved is equally dominantly situated: no one’s jobs are on the line, and no one is subject to asymmetrical biases that could damage their professional reputations. if they are all tenured, full-professor-rank, straight, wealthy, nondisabled, cis, white men, i’m no longer sure the intuition stands that a professor’s expressing moral anger at the shady dealings of his colleagues would be in any sense unwise or unjustified. if the intuition somehow still stands (for some)—if, say, you have a background commitment that “that’s just not how colleagues should treat one another, no matter what,”—we have nevertheless discovered something methodologically important about the reasoning involved in thinking through thought experiments of this kind. to elicit this purely “individual” or “interpersonal” moral intuition, we must socially and politically “whitewash” the case along every dimension of privilege. either we must do this explicitly or, in being silent about the social categories to which these characters belong, allow the reader’s biases to fill in the gaps for us.13 13 work in experimental philosophy supports the claim that social biases affect our intuitions in response to thought experiments in moral philosophy (see, e.g., ditto, pizarro, and tannenbaum 2009; uhlmann et al. 2009). a more robust experimentalphilosophical approach to these cases would explore how systematically manipulating feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 the general lesson to take away is that once we’re conscious of the way the social details matter to our intuitions about the justification of moral anger, it’s difficult to pretend “for the sake of argument” that they don’t matter and to persist in an armchair methodology that cherry-picks ostensibly depoliticized, whitewashed cases. beginning with real social-world cases of anger and attending to the reasons why so many people are so furious is more theoretically responsible. 2. lessons to be learned in this section i articulate several first-order lessons about anger, its normativity, and our responses to it to be learned from centering anti-oppression anger. 2.1. angry about the way the world is in you sometimes we get angry at the oppressive structures of the institutions we inhabit, and this anti-oppression anger can be impersonal in both its target and its object. we get angry at the political structures that make radical change nearly impossible, at the dysfunction of underfunded public welfare and educational systems our society existentially depends on, and at both the norms and material rewards that incentivize us and those around us to persist in replicating the status quo. but sometimes anti-oppression anger feels very personal. we feel angry at others when we see them conform to or enforce oppressive social norms. we feel angry at ourselves when we feel those incentives incentivizing us, in our decision making. we see those who have some measure of power making specific choices that will predictably—sometimes even deliberately—maintain or worsen the oppressive, dysfunctional structures we live in. in these cases, anti-oppression anger can be simultaneously interpersonal and third-personal. in anti-oppression anger, i can seethe with anger at you for the way your actions contribute to the way things are for me, my group, or other groups. simultaneously, i am angry at the structure of the social world for the way it manifests in and is reinforced by you and your actions. in feeling anti-oppression anger, i am angry at you and at the world for the way the world is in you. in this way anti-oppression anger is more attuned to the nature of agency and the way it participates in and is shaped by the causal-historical and social forces that constitute its context. by centering it, we find that anti-oppression anger reveals further lessons about the normativity of anger. the social identities and power relations of characters in these vignettes shapes participants’ moral, rational, and pragmatic intuitions. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 2.2. desert without punishment for anger-eliminativists, the “real” anger, or the anger that really matters morally and philosophically, is retributive, or punitive, whether explosive or simmering in its expression. retributivists about anger hold that anger’s moral permissibility turns on whether it can be directly justified as a punishment for the wrongdoing to which it is an emotional response. the normative relation at stake for the retributivist is “basic desert”—whether the targets of anger, wrongdoers, basically (i.e., directly, intrinsically) deserve whatever painful feelings they experience in facing the angers of those they have wronged. there is, however, much to be learned about the normative relations that obtain among wrongdoing, the aptness of anger as a response to wrongdoing, the basic desert of the target to face this anger, and the aptness of the target’s consequent self-reactive attitudes, like remorse, from centering anti-oppression anger. while anti-oppression anger is not uniquely nonretributive, its aims for recognition and change are nonaccidentally related to its attunement to the social nature of individual agency. anti-oppression angers demand that the target or community recognize and actively take responsibility for the systematic harms they’ve inflicted on the emotional agent and their group. taking responsibility means doing whatever is required to restore, or, in many cases, establish for the first time, individual and community appreciation of the emotional agent’s equal moral status.14 the forward-lookingness of the aims of anti-oppression anger follows from the emotional agent’s awareness that the wrong of oppression is systemic, historical, and social. simply getting revenge against an individual or group for their actions would do little to change the social world in the way anti-oppression anger demands and, hence, would seriously miss the point. nevertheless, there is a natural sense in which wrongdoers who participate in oppressive social practices deserve, in the “basic” sense of direct justification, to face the angers of those they have wronged, despite the fact that these angers do not aim to punish. the demands for recognition and change internal to anti-oppression anger normatively correspond to the basic desert of the wrongdoer to hear them. the demands that the target or community recognize and act to repair the injustices suffered by the emotional agent and their group are directly justified by the past and ongoing wrongs done by the target. the target, conversely, basically deserves to face expressions of these demands. angry expressions of a demand for recognition reflect 14 community “appreciation” of the equal moral status of our fellows will involve psychological and epistemic changes (e.g., “consciousness raising”) but will likely also require material “appreciation” (e.g., redistribution of resources and opportunities) as well as the restructuring of institutions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 the value the emotional agent places on their own dignity and dignity of their fellows. it is because the target has participated in oppressive social practices that it is appropriate that they be made aware of the wrong they’ve participated in and deserve to be called to work for change. hence, deserving to be faced with the anger of the person or group whose oppression you’ve participated in should not be conflated with owing a debt of psychic pain as a form of moral compensation. 2.3. objection: isn’t inflicting pain a punishment? yet, the retributivist might object, isn’t the psychological fact that anger expressions causally contribute to painful feelings in the target reason enough to call it a punishment?15 i argue that it is not, for two reasons. first, feeling pain in the form of remorse is morally appropriate even without (or, arguably, only without) constituting a form of punishment or self-punishment. second, the agency of the target of anger is involved in whether anger is properly taken up and responded to, or merely defensively suffered. i elaborate these two reasons in turn. 2.3.1 painful self-reactive attitudes without punishment first, feeling pain in the form of self-reactive attitudes like remorse (regret, or, arguably, shame) in recognizing that you have participated in the oppression of others may be morally appropriate, even virtuous, if it does not morph into a form of narcissistic self-punishment. given the moral value you extend (and should extend) to your fellow human beings, feeling pangs of remorse in recognizing that you have failed them morally is both natural and appropriate. this sorrow, however, is morally apt to the extent that it is a backward-looking emotional way of continually representing or affectively grasping the moral value of the persons or group you have harmed, or the duties or commitments to others you have transgressed (gasdaglis 2021). it is because of your commitment to your fellow human beings and the value you extend to them—which are felt through moral emotions like respect, care, or love—that participating in institutions, attitudes, and actions that oppress them feels painful, and appropriately so. thus, this pain can be entirely appropriate, as the affective aspect of your representation of their dignity—their basic moral value— despite the fact that no one is morally compensated by your pain. so, causally contributing to this kind of psychic pain is not morally or conceptually equivalent to enacting retribution or vengeance. hence, facing the moral anger of others may lead to morally apt painful experiences of remorse; but this remorse becomes inapt if, through selfcenteredness, it morphs into a form of narcissistic self-punishment. as lorde (2020, 15 thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging me to pursue this objection further. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 120) tells us, wallowing in self-reactive pain and turning it into a ritual of silence or isolation problematically centers the moral imperfection or moral ego of the wrongdoer and is often a way of avoiding all the real work of reparation it is incumbent upon the wrongdoer to do. 2.3.2. agency in how we take up anger second, targets of anger have agency in how they receive and respond to anger expressions. their agency is causally involved in how they face anger, including the degree to which they experience another’s anger as painful. they may succeed in properly listening to and taking up the moral anger of others, or they may simply impulsively and defensively react. when you face others’ moral anger, you may initially feel a threat to your identity as a “good person,” and this threat-feeling, left implicit and unchecked, may lead to defensiveness (emerick 2016, 6; chugh 2018, 1– 20; ivy 2017). feeling like your identity as a good person is being threatened isn’t a pleasant experience, but you can cultivate the disposition to pause, notice your own inner reactivity, recenter your perspective on those whom you’ve wronged, and properly receive their anger. with training, you can become thoughtful in the way you experience, take up, and respond to the anger of others.16 moreover, if you know that you are a relatively dominantly situated individual and are being called out for oppressive behavior, remind yourself that there are moral and epistemic requirements that you consider the possibility that your interlocutor might know more than you do about oppression, even as it manifests in your actions, whatever you think you intended. learning to properly listen to and receive the emotions of others can be empowering, just as being honest with oneself after periods of selfdeception can be a relief. authentically taking up the angers of others enables us to grow and progress morally. it is the disposition to knee-jerk defensiveness that exacerbates psychic pain. being causally involved in bringing about the psychic pain-experience of another (whether defensive anger, remorse, shame, etc.) is not equivalent to punishing them, especially if the pain in question depends on the defensive interpretations of the target, which are shaped through their character and agency. this point is underscored by the fact that it’s possible, depending on your situation and character, to feel psychic pain even in facing the joyful expressions of others— that is, whatever the aims of the emotion or the emotional agent. if, for example, an acquaintance joyfully announces some accomplishment or life achievement, and you 16 for an introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy, see dryden and branch (2012). for evidence of the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions in disrupting defensive reactions, see gottman and gottman (2018) and robbins, alexander, and turner (2000). for tips on how to be less defensive now, see hendriksen (2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 22 emotionally respond with knee-jerk envy, nietzschean ressentiment, or low selfesteem, the expression of joy is causally involved in bringing about your painful psychic experience. yet, because the agency and character of the envious agent are so clearly responsible for bringing about the pain in question, the expression of joy is also very clearly not a punishment. the cliché that “there’s no better revenge than living well” is premised on the ubiquity of this kind of (often vicious) envious reaction. the envious agent, if also childish or narcissistic, may even misinterpret the success or joy of the other as a punishment of themselves. “why me?!” they might think in hearing of the success of another, even when that success has nothing to do with them. when it comes to facing the anger of those you have wronged, your agency and character are similarly involved. it is not unusual for wrongdoers who face anti-oppression anger to misinterpret it as a punishment of them—to read it as an illicit attempt to inflict pain in the form of guilt, or to injure or harm the target in the form of shaming them—even when it is not about that. but, just as envy can make the accomplishments of another “all about” the envious agent, recasting the anger of someone you have wronged as a punishment of you decenters their experience and the ways you have wronged them. similarly, pamela hieronymi, in her awesomely titled “i’ll bet you think this blame is about you,” argues that traditional accounts of blame wrongfully highlight the experiences of the blame-ee (the target of blame) to the exclusion of the blame-er (hieronymi 2019, 84–85). blame and blaming, she argues, are not primarily “about” the blame-ee (84). rather they are about the wrong suffered by the blame-er and thus should not be modeled as punishments suffered by the wrongdoer. moreover, lorde shows us how interpreting anger as a punishment, by reacting to it with self-punishment in the forms of excessive guilt or silence, is an additional mechanism of psychically and discursively disappearing those who face injustice. retreating into feelings of guilt, humiliation, or shame in response to the demands of moral anger egoistically recenters the interaction on “how bad i am”— or, as is more common, defensively on “how bad i am not, because i didn’t mean it that way”—and decenters “what you’ve suffered” and “what we should do to make things right.” the quiet rumination and self-punishment of white women is useless to lorde because it distracts from the pursuit of social change, which is the aim of her anti-oppression anger. she writes, “guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness” (lorde 2020, 121). interpreting the anger of those you have wronged as a punishment of yourself is simply a manipulative strategy for avoiding taking responsibility for your wrongdoing. hence, it wrongs the emotional agent yet again. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 at the level of methodology and theory, in taking vengeful anger as paradigmatic, anger-eliminativists also make the error lorde and hieronymi caution against. in viewing anger as essentially or typically punitive, their accounts highlight the experiences of the targets of anger, the wrongdoers, rather than the experiences of those who have been wronged, the emotional agents. moreover, treating antioppression anger as a form of painful punishment obscures the ways the target’s own agency plays a significant role in how they experience and respond to the anger they face. lorde’s view points to the urgent need for oppression-conscious moral education and therapy directed at the uptake of emotions, especially anger.17 she writes, “we cannot allow the fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty” (lorde 2020, 120). because our moral agency is involved in the ways we experience and respond to anger, if we simply impulsively react in defensive anger, failing to take responsibility for wrongs we’ve committed, then we wrong the emotional agent yet again (jaggar 1989, 158– 59).18 2.4. objection: emotions are nonvoluntary but one might wonder, isn’t anger, including defensive anger, a reactive attitude? do we really have control over these high-stakes emotional moments? following in the strawsonian tradition, pamela hieronymi argues that reactive attitudes like resentment are “non-voluntary” (2019, 64–70; see also strawson 1974). nonvoluntary attitudes, for hieronymi, are neither fully voluntary actions, which are subject to direct rational revision, nor wholly involuntary behaviors (like mere reflexes), which are beyond rational criticism. nonvoluntary reactive attitudes constitute a third category and are more like beliefs, insofar as they are justified only in response to a certain narrow range of reasons specific to the circumstances of the reaction (hieronymi 2019, 64–68; see also solomon 1973; nussbaum 1995). resentment, for hieronymi, responds to perceptions of wrongdoing or expressions of ill will much like revising a specific belief responds to a specific set of evidence. if reacting to expressions of anger with defensive anger is a nonvoluntary reactive attitude, to what extent can we mean to control it in the moment? does casting anger 17 it is an empirical question how best to achieve the relevant kind of moral retraining, but the relevant burden and costs must fall to dominant groups. 18 see frye (1983), spelman (1989), and cherry (2018) for more on the politics and ethics of our responses to anger. as they argue, social positioning influences the ways anger is taken up and assessed. frye and spelman note the ways gender factors into the reception of anger. cherry notes the ways race influences our evaluations of anger. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 as nonvoluntary occlude the role for agency in the ways we emotionally receive and respond to the emotional expressions of others? as a species of anger, defensive anger at the anger of others is a nonvoluntary reaction, so is it not subject to our direct rational revision? 2.5. reply: an ethics to being wrong this worry is merely superficial. anger, as a reactive attitude, on hieronymi’s strawsonian view, is responsive to a narrow range of reasons related to whether you have been wronged. in the case of defensively meeting anger with anger, the kinds of reasons that should influence the way you take up the anger of others are relevant to the background determination of whether you have been wronged in being called out for wrongdoing—that is, in being the target of anger. thus, the narrow range of reasons for or against meeting the anger of others with defensive anger should include, minimally, whether the anger you face is itself morally justified (see also solomon 1973; nussbaum 1995). hence the reasons you have to pause, listen to, and understand the anger you are confronting are precisely the kinds of reasons to which your own emotional nonvoluntary reactive attitude should be responsive. if your defensive anger is not responsive to this range of reasons, it is irrational. if what underlies your knee-jerk defensive anger at the moral anger of others is an implicit background belief that, as a “good person,” you can do no wrong, then it is your moral obligation to reckon with this false background belief. part of being a competent moral agent is being able to recognize and take responsibility for your wrongdoing. if it turns out that an unshakeable belief in one’s own moral perfection is part of a defensive agent’s identity, then we may not be dealing with a competent moral agent at all. similar concerns arise for cases where what underlies an agent’s defensive anger is an implicit assumption of superiority based on their social position. if feelings of entitlement based on your social position lead you to the delusional conclusion that you can do no wrong to those with less privilege or power, you may have quite a lot of emotional and cognitive retraining to do to approach competent moral agency. if you experience an automatic how-dare-you reaction to the moral anger of others that is premised on an implicit belief that you are entitled to deference due to your social group (whether based on gender, class, race, age, etc.), then it is also your urgent moral obligation to reckon with this deep moral confusion. if you cannot, then, again, you might not be a competent moral agent at all. hence, treating anger as a reactive attitude in hieronymi’s strawsonian sense does not thereby cast it as problematically reactionary. if you feel the seeds of defensive anger sprouting in being angrily called out for wronging another, it is your moral obligation to listen openly, acknowledge your own moral finitude, and consider the live possibility that you may have done the wrong thing. gasdaglis – white whose anger matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 lorde’s call to white feminists not to shy away from her anger further highlights roles for agency and moral character in the way we generally respond to moral anger, both in emotion and action. framing anger as paradigmatically punitive takes defensive, reactionary anger as the rule for moral anger and then rejects the rationality of anger on the whole. anger-eliminativism thus holds fixed the social tendency toward defensiveness in facing the anger of others, which is a moral failure of uptake, and then calls on the wronged agent to revise their emotions and expressions of moral anger. this framework shifts the burden for managing a difficult moral-emotional situation onto the agent who has just been wronged. this burdenshifting is also a mechanism of oppression, where certain groups are consistently and constantly wronged and then unjustly tasked with educating and managing the emotions of those who subordinate them (cherry 2021, 45; see also berenstain 2016). while eliminativism is premised on the idea that we can grow and develop in the ways we process and respond to our own emotions (e.g., pereboom 2021, 5–6), it (at best ironically, at worst conveniently) overlooks the role for agency in the way dominantly positioned individuals, who benefit from oppression, face the negative emotions of others. there is, in other words, an ethics to being wrong that must be factored into theorizing the moral emotions. concluding remarks i’ve argued that we should extend several intersectional and feminist insights about methodology to the philosophy of anger. but i believe these insights have broader potential for helping to resolve certain very old, very deep disputes in philosophy. pereboom, for example, ultimately means to defend the incompatibility of anger with causal determinism. his project is continuous with his broader project of hard (or “al dente” [pereboom 1995]) determinism. while i cannot do this topic justice here (but see hieronymi 2022; gasdaglis 2024), it is worth noting that the question of whether anti-oppression anger is compatible with determinism is a question about whether (what we should take to be) a paradigmatic moral practice is compatible with determinism. the methodological question “whose moral practices matter?”—or “whose are the paradigmatic moral practices?”—arises again for this old and deep metaethical debate. note also that anti-oppression anger involves being angry at individuals for participating in, reflecting, and reinforcing ongoing oppressive social patterns, so it involves viewing their agency as a network of causal processes wrapped up in broader causal-historical structures. anti-oppression anger thus logically presupposes that the oppressive wrongdoing is in part caused by factors beyond the wrongdoer’s control. the fact that anti-oppression anger as such entails viewing each other’s agency in this way may point toward new reasons for embracing anger-compatibilism and new resources for reconceptualizing the free will debate more broadly (gasdaglis 2024). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 26 references alessandri, marianna. 2023. night vision: seeing ourselves through dark moods. princeton, nj: princeton university press. alexander-floyd, nikol g. 2012. “disappearing acts: reclaiming intersectionality in the social sciences in a post-black feminist era.” feminist formations 24, no. 1 (spring): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2012.0003. bandura, albert. 2000. “exercise of human agency through collective efficacy.” current directions in psychological science 9 (3): 75–78. https://doi.org/10.11 11/1467-8721.00064. 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matters? methodological mistakes in the philosophy of emotion published by scholarship@western, 2025 29 saul, jennifer mather. 2003. feminism: issues & arguments. oxford: oxford university press. https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/feminism-issues-and-arguments -9780199249473. scheepers, daan, russell spears, bertjan doosje, and antony s. r. manstead. 2006. “diversity in in-group bias: structural factors, situational features, and social functions.” journal of personality and social psychology 90 (6): 944–60. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.6.944. silva, laura luz. 2021. “the efficacy of anger: recognition and retribution.” in the politics of emotional shockwaves, edited by ana falcato and sara graça da silva, 27–55. cham: palgrave macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03056021-8_2. solomon, robert c. 1973. “emotions and choice.” review of metaphysics 27 (1): 20– 41. spelman, elizabeth v. 1989. “anger and insubordination.” in women, knowledge and reality: explorations in feminist philosophy, edited by ann garry and marilyn pearsall, 263–73. london: routledge. srinivasan, amia. 2018. “the aptness of anger.” journal of political philosophy 26 (2): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130. stockdale, katie. 2013. “collective resentment:” social theory and practice 39 (3): 501–21. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract201339327. strawson, peter. 1974. “freedom and resentment.” freedom and resentment and other essays. london: methuen. tausch, nicole, julia c. becker, russell spears, oliver christ, rim saab, purnima singh, and roomana n. siddiqui. 2011. “explaining radical group behavior: developing emotion and efficacy routes to normative and nonnormative collective action.” journal of personality and social psychology 101 (1): 129– 48. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022728. thomason, krista k. 2023. dancing with the devil: why bad feelings make life good. oxford: oxford university press. tolstoy, leo. (1878) 2006. anna karenina. translated by richard pevear and larissa volokhonsky. new york: penguin books. truth, sojourner. 1995. “women’s rights.” [“ain’t i a woman?”] in words of fire: an anthology of african-american feminist thought, edited by beverly guysheftall, 36. new york: new press. uhlmann, eric luis, david a. pizarro, david tannenbaum, and peter h. ditto. 2009. “the motivated use of moral principles.” judgment and decision making 4 (6): 479–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1930297500004022. van zomeren, martijn, russell spears, agneta h. fischer, and colin wayne leach. 2004. “put your money where your mouth is! explaining collective action feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 30 tendencies through group-based anger and group efficacy.” journal of personality and social psychology 87 (5): 649–64. https://doi.org/10.1037/00 22-3514.87.5.649. walker, margaret urban. 2006. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press. williams, bernard. 1981. “moral luck.” in moral luck: philosophical papers 1973– 1980, 20–39. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017 /cbo9781139165860.003. katherine gasdaglis is associate professor of philosophy at california state polytechnic university, pomona. her central research areas include kant, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of emotion. she has published articles on kant, intersectionality, identity, and moral regret. 17527 gasdaglis title page 17527 gasdaglis final format pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on jenkins’s ontology and oppression feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 3 article 2 recommended citation khalidi, muhammad ali. 2025. “pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on jenkins’s ontology and oppression.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (3). article 2. 2025 pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on jenkins’s ontology and oppression muhammad ali khalidi graduate center, city university of new york makhalidi@gc.cuny.edu khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on jenkins’s ontology and oppression muhammad ali khalidi abstract katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression helps bridge the chasm between discussions of social ontology in analytic metaphysics and treatments of injustice and oppression in social and political philosophy. in this commentary on jenkins’s book, i address three main issues. first, i question a central innovation of the book—its espousal of a new form of pluralism about race and gender kinds, which posits that race and gender are not unitary kinds but can have three different types of manifestation in the social world. second, i consider how jenkins’s central notion of “ontic injustice” interacts with a prominent distinction between social kinds that have to be explicitly represented (“transparent”) and those that need not be represented (“opaque”). third, i take up the issue of evaluative or normative considerations in social theorizing and their place in taxonomizing the social world. i ask whether, in rejecting what she calls the “ontology first” approach to theorizing about trans people, jenkins stakes a position that opposes scientific categorization on the basis of nonepistemic values. keywords: social ontology, oppression, ontic injustice, social kinds 1. introduction much work in social ontology from the perspective of analytic philosophy has proceeded largely oblivious of normative issues like injustice and oppression, focusing exclusively on the metaphysical underpinnings of social institutions, groups, norms, practices, and similar constructs. meanwhile, the bulk of social and political philosophy pays scant attention to the ontological basis of social categories and kinds, concentrating primarily on normative issues in the social domain. katharine jenkins’s ontology and oppression helps bridge the chasm between these two areas of inquiry. moreover, the book introduces into philosophical discourse new analytic tools, such as “ontic injustice,” that are destined to play a central role in these discussions for a long time to come. in this attempt to engage with jenkins’s enriching and insightful book, i raise three issues that merit further discussion. in the second section, i tackle a central feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 innovation of the book—namely, its espousal of a new form of pluralism about race and gender kinds, which posits that race and gender are not unitary kinds but can have three different types of manifestation in the social world. i raise questions as to the benefits of such a pluralist position over a “hybridist” position that thinks of these kinds as combining various criteria or aspects. then, in the third section, i consider how jenkins’s central notion of ontic injustice interacts with a prominent distinction between social kinds that have to be explicitly represented (“transparent”) and those that need not be represented (“opaque”). does ontic injustice apply to unrepresented opaque social kinds, and if so, does it apply differently? in the fourth section, i take up the issue of evaluative or normative considerations in social theorizing and their place in taxonomizing the social world. in rejecting what she calls the “ontology-first” approach to theorizing about trans people, does jenkins stake a position that opposes scientific categorization on the basis of nonepistemic values? 2. race and gender pluralism one way to view the social world is through the lens of real or natural kinds. many of the constructs that populate theorizing about the social world correspond to kinds, which include kinds of persons, institutions, groups, norms, practices, structures, and so on. gender, race, and class, as well as government, inflation, and marriage, can all be considered natural kinds in the social domain. (in case that last phrase sounds oxymoronic, i should point out that i take “social kinds” to be nothing but natural kinds in the social domain, just as chemical kinds are natural kinds in the chemical domain. that is because i construe the “natural” here to mean real rather than pertaining to the natural world or the natural sciences.1) this perspective has led many philosophers to discuss kinds in the social world, such as gender and race, and think about their distinctive features, how they are grounded, whether they are biological, social, biosocial, and so on. it has been clear for some time that, particularly when it comes to gender and race, surely the most widely discussed social kinds, there can be various ways of characterizing them as social kinds. in this context, jenkins makes a bold move, elaborating a sophisticated form of pluralism for these two social 1 for further justification of this stance on natural kinds, see khalidi (2023). compare also charles mills (2014, 92): “any broader commitment to naturalism implies that the ‘social’ is really a particular zone of the natural—the artifact of a particular ‘natural’ species capable of reshaping itself through culture and technology, but able to do so, of course, precisely because of the ‘natural’ capacities of the specific kind of primate we are and continuous at every step of the way (contra kant, or more generally, any sharp christian dichotomization) with the ‘natural’ world and ‘natural’ causality. so a remapping of this contrast would be something like the ‘natural’ unmediated by human causality and the ‘natural’ mediated by human causality.” khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 kinds. in effect, she proposes splitting gender and race into three different social kinds, which i would summarize briefly as follows: • hegemonic gender/race: how one is positioned within dominant social structures • interpersonal gender/race: how other people perceive and respond to one • identity gender/race: one's experienced relationship to a social category this trifurcation of gender and race captures the fact that they are multifaceted kinds; indeed, it goes further than that by saying that these different facets of gender and race should be understood as distinct kinds in their own right. focusing for the moment on gender, membership in a gender kind (e.g., woman, man, nonbinary) can be a matter of one’s social positioning, or it can be a matter of how other members of society respond to one, or a matter of how one experiences oneself. these would seem to be three crucial dimensions of gender in many societies and social configurations. moreover, the same person might be gendered differently depending on whether it is a matter of, say, one’s own self-identification or identification by others. or rather, if these are really different kinds, then one is not really being gendered differently, at least if that is taken to imply that the different genderings are incompatible. take the case of an individual a who is gendered as a man within hegemonic social structures, is perceived by others as nonbinary, and identifies as a woman. there is no tension between membership in these different kinds precisely because they belong to orthogonal systems of kinds. to make this more apparent, consider some other individual, b, who is (again) gendered as a man within hegemonic social structures, but who is perceived by others as a man and identifies as a man. these three classifications are not redundant because they concern different taxonomic categories. strictly speaking, since we are (or ought to be) talking about different kinds, we should have used different subscripts, saying that b is a manh (hegemonic), manp (interpersonal), and mani (identity). but when one puts it this way, an immediate objection comes to mind. should these really be considered distinct kinds? these purported systems of kinds are not completely independent of one another but are surely linked in intricate ways. for example, the third dimension of gender, the hegemonic structural one, seems to depend in part on the second, the interpersonal dimension of gender. to take a simple example, if i am interviewed for a job and my interviewers perceive and respond to me as a man, and if i am subsequently hired as a man and treated accordingly by my bosses and coworkers in my new place of employment, it is likely that my wages, advancement, and privileges will reflect that fact, and i will consequently be feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 positioned as a man in the socioeconomic hierarchy. thus, interpersonal gender is partly determinative of hegemonic gender. but perhaps this is not a problem for the account, since something similar holds of distinct yet closely related kinds in other domains. in this regard, the relations between the three kinds of gender are comparable to those between different biological species concepts, which also plausibly correspond to different species kinds (see kitcher 1984; dupré 1999).2 the different gender and race kinds can be compared to, say, humanl, humanb, humane, and so on, where membership in humanl has to do with a certain lineage and descent, humanb is a matter of belonging to interbreeding groups, and humane pertains to occupying a certain ecological niche. here, too, membership in humanl is intimately related to membership in humanb: it is because of a certain history of descent that an organism is able to interbreed with other members of its species. these kinds are not entirely independent but causally linked in various ways. still, many biologists and philosophers of biology find it useful to distinguish them for various theoretical purposes. and even though their extensions coincide for many species, there are occasional exceptions, such as different populations of a “ring species” that are counted as members of the same species on grounds of descent but whose members may not be able to produce fertile offspring and so are considered members of different species on that basis. indeed, there are at least two dozen (and counting) species concepts in biology, according to which we group populations of organisms based on such factors as lineage, reproductive isolation, and occupation of an ecological niche, among other factors (see, e.g., hey 2001). although they are regularly referred to as “species concepts,” they can also be thought of as picking out different species kinds. as in the species debate, the different ways of classifying individuals into race and gender kinds often settle on the same extensions, but there are notable exceptions that are caught by these distinctions and that might not be easily discernible without them. these compatible and coexisting classifications also explicitly recognize that there are importantly different causal processes in the social world that can coexist at different scales and be captured by different levels of explanation, despite important links between them. the analogy with species concepts may serve to allay a concern about pluralism by showing that there are other cases in which we distinguish kinds that are 2 there is a debate among philosophers of biology as to whether pluralism about species implies antirealism or eliminativism. philip kitcher (1984) and john dupré (1999) are pluralists about species but not antirealists. marc ereshefsky (1998) argues that pluralism leads to antirealism, whereas ingo brigandt (2003) responds by defending realism. i will assume that pluralism about social kinds does not lead to antirealism or eliminativism, but that the social world really does contain these different gender and race kinds. khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 nonetheless intimately connected. but a related worry might be raised regarding pluralism about race and gender—namely, that it would lead to an unnecessary proliferation of kinds in the social world and might actually encumber social scientific theorizing. by way of comparison, even though some biologists find it useful to distinguish species in the ways mentioned, other biologists adopt something like a hybrid category, which comprises two or more sets of criteria. should one do something similar with gender and race when it comes to both science and the folk? when it comes to scientific theorizing, it should hardly be surprising that in the intricate causal networks of the social world, there are various different types of patterns and configurations that correspond to what we label “gender,” and that there are therefore advantages in keeping them separate. indeed, in many contexts, it is crucial to distinguish the different kinds that are implicated. take, for instance, medical research that looks at health conditions in a specific population and collects relevant demographic information, including gender. in many such cases, it is very useful to know whether information about gender is based on self-identification, identification by medical professionals, or some other basis, and it may well make an important difference to the findings.3 there are certain medical conditions or health outcomes that vary primarily with one or the other factor. for example, higher rates of workplace injury among men are likely due to hegemonic gender, which assigns to men certain types of occupation such as construction work, while higher rates of eating disorders among women may be more closely related to interpersonal gender, because of the emphasis that many members of society place on the “ideal” female body shape and the pressures that this places on women. indeed, we might expect certain scientific disciplines and subdisciplines to be more attuned to some of these gender kinds than others. at least to a first approximation, economists and sociologists are interested mainly in hegemonic gender, while social psychologists investigate interpersonal gender, and psychologists are more concerned with identity gender. the same may go for race.4 for our everyday practices and purposes, also, it might be useful in some contexts to disambiguate. a person might explain that even though they identify as a 3 the correspondence between these means of identifying gender and the gender kinds being discussed is far from perfect. for example, individuals may not self-identify in a clinical context in the way that they would in a more familiar context, and an identification of gender by medical professionals may not always capture interpersonal gender due to differences in the way gender is perceived by different members of society. 4 even within the same broad discipline, it is often important to disambiguate which type of gender or race is implicated, as in the examples from the medical sciences just cited. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 man, they are often perceived and treated as nonbinary, they are situated as a woman in the social hierarchy, and there is no outright contradiction between these classifications and kind memberships.5 but does this way of proceeding encourage a quietist position toward oppressive practices of misgendering, since it acquiesces in perceptions and classifications that may be at odds with one’s gender identity? jenkins might say that in order to understand oppression and to resist misgendering, we need to acknowledge the way that people are categorized and the kinds that they effectively belong to. there is no point denying that someone who identifies as a man can yet be discriminated against as a woman and have an employment history that reflects that fact. that is not a matter of acquiescence in discrimination and prejudice but rather a matter of adopting a clear-eyed understanding of social reality (see section 4 for more on this point). notwithstanding these benefits of splitting, the virtues of lumping should also not be ignored as an alternative in both science and everyday practice. rather than embrace pluralism about race and gender kinds, we might adopt a position whereby these different aspects or dimensions of race and gender are combined or folded into the same category. those categories may identify a hybrid kind in the world that preserves elements of each of these dimensions. (note that these ways of talking are meant to reflect a broadly realist stance, whereby kinds are aspects of the world itself and categories are discursive devices that are designed to ascertain and distinguish them.) this type of lumping may be useful, and indeed more efficient, in some contexts, even though it may obscure different dimensions of race and gender in others, as intimated by the above examples from medical science. true enough, lumping makes no dedicated room for those persons who are gendered differently in terms of self-identification, interpersonal relations, and hegemonic social structure, but there may be good grounds for amalgamating gender and race kinds for some purposes. the advantages of hybrid gender and race kinds are worth considering, especially give one additional source of pluralism about these kinds, to be considered next. a different type of pluralism about race and gender has to do with diverse spatiotemporal contexts. when it comes to race, there is a debate as to whether it “travels,” which is to say whether race is localized to specific contexts, or whether it is 5 compare the following picture evoked by ásta (2018, 73): “consider this scenario: you work as a coder in san francisco. you go into your office where you are one of the guys. after work, you tag along with some friends at work to a bar. it is a very heteronormative space, and you are neither a guy nor a gal. you are an other. you walk up the street to another bar where you are a butch and expected to buy drinks for the femmes. then you head home to your grandmother’s eightieth birthday party, where you help out in the kitchen with the other women while the men smoke cigars.” khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 a universal or global phenomenon (see, e.g., root 2000, s631; mallon 2004, 658–60; ludwig 2019). jenkins refers to this debate briefly and endorses the idea that since race does not travel, there are actually different race kinds in different societies at different times. as she puts it, someone can be “a member of one race kind in one location and another race kind in another location” (jenkins 2023, 146). this conclusion would seem to follow directly from jenkins’s views on the nature of social kinds like race and gender. to see this, note first that jenkins considers social kinds to be constituted in some sense by the constraints and enablements that pertain to them. as she puts it, “what it is to be a member of a certain social kind is, at least in part, to be subject to certain social constraints and enablements” (17). in addition, she observes that these constraints and enablements can vary along three dimensions: scope, breadth, and granularity. scope has to do with the specific time and place in which the constraints and enablements associated with a social kind operate—for example, europe during the middle ages, or a specific meeting in a workplace (102–3). breadth concerns the varieties of constraints and enablements that pertain to a social kind. and granularity is the level of generality at which constraints and enablements are specified. it follows that if different settings for these parameters are established, this will result in distinct kinds.6 consider scope, which is the dimension most pertinent to the question of “traveling” race and gender kinds. if we restrict ourselves to hegemonic race, it will certainly function differently and have different constraints and enablements associated with it in, say, the jim crow united states and contemporary brazil. though hegemonic race figures in both spatiotemporal contexts, the restrictions that it imposes on people and the entitlements that it affords them are quite different. hence, it will have a distinct identity as a social kind in these different contexts.7 these divisions (scope, breadth, and granularity) would seem to cut across the three already mentioned—identity, interpersonal, and hegemonic—since all three race kinds can have either wide or narrow scope, and so on. in the face of all this pluralism, one might ask what unifies race and gender (see also ludwig 2019; mason 2020). jenkins (2023, 183–88) tackles the “unification question” head-on when it 6 in earlier work, jenkins (2019) is more explicit on this point, since she argues there for “ultra radical racial pluralism,” which holds that there may be different kinds of entities to which race terms refer even in the context of a single society like the united states. 7 jenkins thinks that scope differences are less prominent or apparent for hegemonic race kinds than they are for interpersonal race kinds. she writes that hegemonic race kinds “allow for extensive traveling,” whereas interpersonal race kinds “are well able to capture the sense in which race does not travel” (2023, 146), but it seems to me that hegemonic race kinds also vary across spatiotemporal context. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 comes to pluralism about both gender and race kinds and responds convincingly to it. gender kinds are ones that can be explained by the binary social structure that attributes social significance to perceived biological sex (see barnes 2020) and kinds that are appropriately historically related to those social structures (see bach 2012). similarly, race kinds can be explained by a social structure that attributes social significance to “perceived biological ancestral links to different geographic regions” (jenkins 2023, 186). therefore, while the gender and race kinds that jenkins identifies (identity, interpersonal, and hegemonic) can all be regarded as gender and race kinds, respectively, they can also be considered distinct kinds in the social world.8 the same would also seem to apply to the differently scoped gender and race kinds, with different kinds in distinct spatiotemporal contexts; likewise for various combinations and intersections of these kinds—for example, interpersonal race during the jim crow era in the united states or hegemonic gender in medieval europe. thus, one can make sense of the unity of gender and race despite these multiple sources of pluralism. still, this proliferation of kinds may exacerbate the previous worry about multiplying kinds beyond necessity. for some purposes, there may be benefits to theorizing about race and gender using hybrid categories that amalgamate them across diverse contexts, a possibility that deserves further consideration. 3. opacity and transparency a distinction can be drawn between social kinds that are transparent, in the sense that they must be represented or conceptualized in order to exist, and those that are opaque, in the sense that they need not be represented or conceptualized to exist (see, e.g., thomasson 2003; see also ruben 1989). one can illustrate this distinction by comparing the social kinds permanent resident and refugee: while someone cannot be a legal permanent resident in a certain jurisdiction without being represented as such, one can be a refugee without anyone thinking of them as such or, indeed, anyone having the concept refugee. indeed, as this example suggests, when it comes to the social kind permanent resident, not only does the type need to be represented, but each token of that type needs to have the status of permanent resident explicitly conferred upon them. this suggests that one can introduce an intermediate category: those social kinds whose types must be represented to exist but all of whose tokens need not be represented as such to be members of the relevant kinds. consider the legal category senior citizen, which in some jurisdictions 8 these gender kinds should not be thought of as subordinates of a superordinate gender kind, since a member of a subordinate kind is automatically a member of its superordinate kinds, but someone might be a mani but womanh or womanp, so not a man or woman simpliciter, even though the former kinds are somehow related to an overarching gender kind. khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 includes all and only those citizens who are 65 years old and older. the legal category needs to be represented for the kind to exist, but an individual might belong to the kind senior citizen without being recognized to be one, perhaps because they and everyone else have forgotten their age. we can therefore posit three kinds of social kinds: (1) the kind need not be represented to exist (e.g., refugee), (2) the kind needs to be represented but not each member of the kind (e.g., senior citizen), and (3) the kind and each member both need to be represented (e.g., permanent resident) (see khalidi 2015). it is also worth keeping in mind that exemplars of the first kind of social kind (opaque) need not be represented, but they can be. thus, refugees existed before the concept refugee, and although they need not be explicitly represented and recognized as refugees, they often are. and once they are, they might occupy a different social role, particularly if the category refugee is overtly enshrined in laws or international treaties. with this trichotomy in place, we can ask whether ontic injustice applies to all three kinds of social kinds, and if so, whether it applies differently. to pursue these questions, first, recall jenkins’s (2023, 71) definition: ontic injustice: an individual suffers ontic injustice if and only if they are socially constructed as a member of a certain social kind where that construction consists, at least in part, of their falling under a set of social constraints and enablements that is wrongful to them. at first glance, given the use of the terms “constructed” and “construction,” which imply a certain type of deliberateness, it might seem that the concept of ontic injustice applies only to transparent social kinds, which must be conceived of and recognized as such. more correctly, it might be thought to pertain to those social kinds that are actually represented, since, as mentioned earlier, opaque social kinds can be represented; they just do not have to be in order to exist or be manifested. it is clear, however, that members of opaque and unrepresented social kinds can also be unjustly treated by virtue of being members of those kinds. to use an example (of mine), consider members of the proletariat in the middle ages, as europe emerged from the feudal order, and a new class of propertyless laborers came into being alongside a property-owning bourgeoisie. members of that class suffered injustice before anyone thought of or represented them as such. injustice and exploitation were part of the social structure, even though that structure was largely opaque, and proletarians were, at first, not explicitly represented or conceptualized. if we grant, at least for the moment, that ontic injustice applies to opaque social kinds (including those that are not represented) as well as to transparent ones, there do seem to be some differences in the ways that injustice and oppression apply to these kinds. once an opaque social kind comes to be explicitly represented and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 conceived in a certain way, and once this informs action and policy, that paves the way for new forms of injustice and oppression. note that in such cases, the opaque kind has been represented but has not been rendered transparent, since opacity and transparency are about the conditions that must be in place for something to exist. to illustrate, social class is opaque, in that it does not have to be represented to exist, as with the distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; but it can be represented, and certain changes might take place once it is. consider legislation in a certain society that denies voting rights to propertyless persons. this constitutes a more entrenched and systematic form of oppression than might be associated with propertyless people before they are explicitly represented as such, as proletarians. to be sure, members of kinds that are not explicitly represented can be subject to all manner of prejudice and bias. but the changes that ensue with explicit representation seem to be of a different character, so it is worth considering how representation alters the nature of oppression. take the case of arab immigrants to the united states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who were often classified as “white” or “caucasian” during certain historical periods (but also as “colored,” “nonwhite,” and “semitic” at other points). despite the fact that they were not always conceived as a distinct ethnic group, there is clear evidence that arab americans were the subjects of prejudice, discrimination, and racism on the basis of ethnicity even before they began to widely identify or be identified as “arab” or “arab american” (see, e.g., naber 2000; kayyali 2013). but researchers argue that the introduction of the label “arab american,” beginning around the late 1960s, led to increased prejudice against this community and new forms of discrimination (naber 2000). significantly, in march 2024, the us census bureau formally announced that it would introduce the category “middle eastern and north african” (mena) starting with the 2030 census.9 though many in the mena community had long advocated for the prospective change, others cautioned that it would intensify and expand “antiterror policing” by providing demographic data to government agencies that associate this community with terrorism (beydoun 2015, 6).10 legal scholars and others have argued that establishing 9 the terms “arab” and “middle eastern and north african” (mena) are not coextensive, but there is considerable overlap, as there is with the term “southwest asian and north african” (swana), which is increasingly preferred by some people with those geographic origins. 10 khaled beydoun (2015, 6) also writes: “in short, the mena american classification may be a step forward with regard to extinguishing the per se erasure of arab americans, but simultaneously, it is a step backward with respect to community surveillance, profiling, and policing.” moreover, he cites a new york times report from 2004, three years following the attacks of september 11, 2001, which showed that the census bureau provided population statistics on arab americans to the department khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 an official category of “arab” or “middle eastern and north african” in the us census “may erode arab american civil liberties by augmenting the precision of government surveillance and monitoring programs” (beydoun 2015, 3; see also beydoun 2016). thus, it is likely that explicit classification and codification in administrative and legal codes can lead to new forms of injustice and oppression. changes in the nature of injustice and oppression that occur as a result of representing a kind do not always concern institutional or legal kinds, ones that are explicitly codified in the laws or administrative codes, but also social kinds that are communally based, where the constraints and enablements are not as overt, rigid, or precise.11 this can be seen, for example, in the transition from informal racism to “scientific racism,” an elaborate pseudoscientific theory of the nature of races and their characteristics in early modern europe. as robert bernasconi (2020, 83) argues, the introduction of an explicit classificatory concept with a pseudoscientific definition altered and legitimized racist practices: it was possible for the spanish or the english to exploit jews, native americans, and africans, as jews, native americans, and africans, without having the concept of race, let alone being able to appeal to a rigorous system of racial classification. we have no difficulty identifying these as cases of racism, but they were not sustained by a scientific concept of race. however, the introduction of that concept lent an air of apparent legitimacy to these practices. similarly, in discussing the origins of white supremacy in early modern western thought, cornel west (2002, 99) stresses the importance of the introduction of classificatory categories that originated in natural history: “the initial basis for the idea of white supremacy is to be found in the classificatory categories and the descriptive, representational, order-imposing aims of natural history.” even before racial laws were introduced in various societies, explicit representation and conceptualization had a significant impact, even though race may have been conceptualized differently by different thinkers. it seems clear, therefore, that the character of injustice and oppression may well change substantially if a social kind is explicitly represented (as opposed to being unrepresented), and this is something that merits further discussion. but a worry arises here that can be put starkly as follows. if ontic injustice and oppression apply to of homeland security, “including detailed information on how many people of arab backgrounds live in certain zip codes,” breaking down the arab american population in more than five hundred zip codes by seven nationalities (beydoun 2015, 7–8). 11 see ásta (2018) for the distinction between institutional and communal social kinds. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 cases in which a social kind is not explicitly represented as such, how is this to be distinguished from injustice and oppression more generally? in other words, what makes ontic injustice, specifically in cases without explicit representation, different from plain old injustice, in cases in which one is not represented as a member of a certain social kind? so far, i have assumed that the answer is that these cases of injustice are ones that pertain to people not as individuals but insofar as they are members of social kinds, whether those kinds are explicitly represented or not. but it is not clear that this is sufficient for characterizing the distinctive wrong that jenkins associates with ontic injustice, and whether the kinds of injustices described here, involving both opaque and transparent social kinds, all count as ontic injustice according to jenkins.12 4. values and social kinds there is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of social science about the role of value judgments in theorizing about the social world. for some theorists, the adoption of specific social values, no matter how admirable, should and can be avoided in conducting dispassionate social inquiry (dubois 1898; weber [1946] 2004), while for others, the very notion of value neutrality when it comes to scientific theorizing, especially when it comes to the social world, is both unworkable and undesirable (longino 2008; ludwig 2016). these latter theorists hold that nonepistemic values are inevitably involved in theorizing about the social world and can indeed play a salutary role in the social sciences. although this debate is not explicitly referenced in jenkins’s work, i think it is broached obliquely in her discussion of trans-exclusionary arguments and policies in ways that help illuminate this important question. in the context of a defense of trans-inclusion, jenkins engages in a concerted discussion of the relationship between our explanatory projects and our emancipatory interests when it comes to social kinds, which provides an important case study regarding the place of nonepistemic values in social science. the social phenomenon that she engages with concerns contemporary transphobia in the united kingdom, specifically as it manifested around plans to reform the gender recognition act (2004, c. 7) in 2017. there is no need to go into the details of the debate here; suffice it to say that jenkins identifies an assumption made by supporters of the trans-exclusionary position, “the ontology-first approach,” that has played a key 12 an anonymous referee suggests that the specific wrong of ontic injustice is moral injury, and that may provide the key to understanding the difference between ontic injustice and other forms of injustice associated with membership in a social kind. the discussion in this section has focused on the harms pertaining to membership in a social kind rather than the wrongs associated with such membership. khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 role in public discussions. that approach posits that “settling questions about the current ontology of gender kinds will automatically determine what shape our gendered social practices ought to take” (jenkins 2023, 201). when it comes to trans women, some parties to the debate argue that we should first establish the correct account of the ontology of the kind woman (and other gender kinds) and then let this determine social practice. she associates this approach with the slogan “choose reality,” adopted by some proponents of trans-exclusion, which is interpreted to mean that trans women who have not undertaken a medical transition should not be treated as women socially and politically. since the claim among many proponents of transexclusion is that trans women are not, ontologically speaking, members of the social kind woman, they argue that this fact should shape policy and practice. according to this approach, the alleged ontology of the social world ought to be worked out before deciding what legislation to pass or which policies to pursue, and when it is, it vindicates trans-exclusion. how does jenkins resist this attempt to let supposed social facts determine policy and practice? before arguing against trans-exclusion and its purported commitment to the “ontology-first approach,” jenkins engages in some metaphysical ground-clearing concerning social kinds. she points out that “one common way of conceiving of social kinds is as groupings of things in the world that can do explanatory work” and that this approach identifies gender with “the kind that does the explanatory work that we associate with the idea of ‘gender’” (2023, 213–14). as should be clear by now, i am in general agreement with this approach to social kinds, but i have a quibble with the wording in this quotation as well as a friendly suggestion. as jenkins notes, kinds are groupings and divisions in the world, so rather than think of the kinds themselves as doing the explanatory work, i would rephrase this by saying that the categories that correspond to the kinds do the explanatory work. meanwhile, categories belong to our discourse and practices, and they can be used by us to generalize, project, explain, predict, and perform other epistemic functions. my more substantive adjustment would be to suggest that the reason that some social categories can play these epistemic roles is precisely that they denote kinds, which can be thought of as part of the causal structure of the social world or, as i have put it elsewhere, “nodes in causal networks” (khalidi 2018). with these epistemological and metaphysical preliminaries in place, jenkins observes that, in line with the pluralism defended in the rest of the work (and previously explicated in section 2), no single gender category is going to do all the explanatory work. rather, we will need to posit identity, interpersonal, and hegemonic gender kinds to explain various social phenomena, and these may classify individuals differently. interestingly, jenkins points out that the slogan “choose reality” has also been coopted by advocates of trans rights who have argued that trans people were indeed “choosing reality” by living in accordance with their gender identity. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 additionally, jenkins (2023, 217) notes that if we recognize the phenomena of ontological injustice and oppression, we should acknowledge that some social kinds are oppressive, and hence we should not automatically defer to such kinds in arranging our social practices. this means that just because trans women may be classified as men in existing society, that does not mean we must always accede to existing classifications. social practices should sometimes track existing kinds and sometimes depart from them, and indeed resist them, pace the ontology-first approach. while our social practices cannot ignore the reality of social oppression, they should be in the service of our emancipatory efforts, which aim at changing social reality rather than always accepting it as it is. i would venture that another way to approach this debate involves distinguishing between the context of explanation and the context of emancipation in social theorizing. one way to diagnose the problem with the ontology-first approach is to say that it confuses an investigative question with a normative one. i think jenkins would agree since she points out the following: “i want to suggest that discussions of gender recognition could helpfully be framed as primarily practical and normative rather than primarily metaphysical” (2023, 226). if that reading of jenkins is right, it seems to carry with it an implicit account of the role of values in social science, according to which our moral and political values ought not to determine how to classify existing social phenomena but can and ought to be brought to bear on decisions on how to alter social reality. but this type of approach is sometimes challenged on the grounds that we cannot neatly separate the explanatory and emancipatory projects. so how should we respond to these challenges? elizabeth anderson (2012, 402) helpfully distinguishes two roles for moral and political values in social inquiry: value judgments guide inquiry toward the concepts, tools, and procedures it needs to answer our value-laden questions. but facts— evidence—tell us which answers are more likely to be true. these two roles must be kept distinct, so that inquiry does not end up being rigged simply to reinforce our evaluative preconceptions. so long as they are distinct, the active direction of scientific inquiry by value judgments is not only legitimate, but indispensable. as i understand it, anderson is drawing attention to two different roles that value judgments can play in social science. they can guide the choice of inquiry and can help define our research priorities, or they can direct us in deciding which theories to adopt; but even though they ought to do the former, they ought not to be implicated khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 in the latter.13 for example, because of concern for the well-being of trans people, our moral values can lead us to conduct an inquiry into the effects of misgendering on trans people in certain social contexts, but they ought not to lead us to adopt a particular theory of how trans people are perceived. if we think that it is immoral for trans people to be misgendered, we ought to acknowledge that misgendering takes place. otherwise, we would be misrepresenting the social reality that we are attempting to understand. that may seem obvious, but some might object that if, say, trans men are treated as women by some others (genderp) and within the hegemonic social structure (genderh), we ought not to acquiesce in this in our social theorizing and ought rather to redraw the boundaries of social kinds so as to ameliorate injustice and oppression. on this alternative view, the very choice of the categories of interpersonal and hegemonic gender merely serves to entrench the social structure that we regard as morally unjust. if our aim is to rectify the injustice, however, we need to understand it, and the only way to do so is by explaining how it functions in the social world. notice that our moral values can also lead us to look for other categories in the vicinity and may direct us to posit a gender-identity category (genderi) to denote a distinct kind. but unless that kind is also part of the causal structure of the social world, it would be misleading to adopt it in our theorizing. once again, moral values ought not to influence our choice of categories, though they should provoke us to use our findings to change the social world in an emancipatory vein, so as to oppose misgendering. this seems to be in keeping with anderson’s intention in the passage quoted above, though there is some ambiguity in saying that value judgments can “guide inquiry toward the concepts.” as i read it, this does not mean that value judgments ought to play a role in directing us how to define classificatory concepts or where to draw category boundaries. rather, they can guide us to look for certain configurations in the social world that we might miss, such as genderi. this is not a matter of helping us to decide which kinds exist in the social world but rather a matter of helping us to decide which kinds to focus on, of the many 13 in discussions of the role of social values in science, normative and descriptive claims are not always clearly distinguished. thus, even though the first two sentences in the quotation from anderson are phrased descriptively, i think they are intended to have normative force, with appropriate “oughts” understood. zina ward (2021, 58) has a very useful breakdown of the strengths of various claims made in this connection, framed in terms of scientific theory choice: (a) social values ought to be considered in theory choice; (b) social values can be considered in theory choice; (c) social values must (in a nonmoral sense) play a role in theory choice; (d) social values do play a role in theory choice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 kinds that exist.14 to sum up, the role of moral values ought to consist, first, in guiding us to inquire into causal structures in the social world that we might otherwise overlook, and second, in finding ways to alter that social structure. value judgments can direct inquiry by setting research priorities and deciding what to do with research results, not by helping to decide which categories are needed to understand social phenomena.15 but it is not evident whether jenkins sees things in this way or whether this reading faithfully captures her view of the role of moral and political values in theorizing about the social world. 5. conclusion jenkins’s ontology and oppression is an indispensable contribution to “analytic emancipatory theory,” which gives injustice and oppression a central role when it comes to understanding the metaphysics of the social world. in this paper, i have tried to engage with the work on three different issues: pluralism, opacity, and values. on the first issue, i have defended jenkins’s variety of ontological pluralism against some objections and have proposed expanding it further using her notions of scope, breadth, and granularity, thus yielding a range of different race and gender kinds in the social world, which manifest at different levels and in different contexts. at the same time, i have raised a question as to whether a hybrid approach is also sometimes warranted: might there be room for amalgamated concepts of gender or race for some theoretical purposes? when it comes to the second issue, i have tried to draw out the implications of jenkins’s concept of ontic injustice for the distinction between transparent and opaque social phenomena (those that are and are not concept-dependent, respectively). i argued that injustice and oppression interact differently with transparent and opaque social phenomena, and that once opaque phenomena are explicitly represented, new forms of injustice and oppression may come into place that depend on representations of social phenomena, whether formally or informally, institutionally or communally. but this leads to a question about the ways of distinguishing ontic injustice from other forms of injustice that pertain to people insofar as they belong to specific social kinds: how is ontic injustice to be 14 see khalidi (2024) for further justification of the claim that nonepistemic or social values should not determine our choice of taxonomic categories in science, though they can determine which taxonomic categories to deploy in a given context. since a pluralist view of scientific taxonomy holds that there may be a plurality of valid taxonomic schemes in a given domain, nonepistemic values can help decide which scheme to use for a given purpose, rather than which schemes are valid. 15 in addition, of course, our social values along with the values of others, as manifested in our attitudes and actions, may be efficacious in fashioning the nature of social reality in the first place, irrespective of any inquiries we might carry out. khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 distinguished from other forms of injustice, particularly when members of social kinds are not explicitly represented as such? finally, with regard to the third issue, i have argued that jenkins’s treatment of trans rights and critique of the ontology-first approach would seem to implicitly align her with a particular conception of the role of nonepistemic values in social theorizing, one that distinguishes the context of explanation from the context of emancipation and accords a role to such values in the former rather than the latter context. does this mean that jenkins adopts a view according to which taxonomic categories in the social choices ought not to be demarcated based on moral and political values? on all these points, i hope to have made a little further progress on the trail that jenkins has blazed and have tried to raise questions that will promote further discussion of some foundational issues about the social domain. acknowledgments for valuable feedback, i am grateful to the participants and audience at an author-meets-critics session at the american philosophical association pacific division meeting in portland, march 2024, especially katharine jenkins. i would also like to thank itsue nakaya-pérez and maximiliana rifkin for insightful discussion of jenkins’s work and two anonymous referees for this journal for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. references anderson, elizabeth. 2012. “uses of value judgments in science: a general argument, with lessons from a case study of feminist research on divorce.” in out from the shadows: analytical feminist contributions to traditional philosophy, edited by sharon l. crasnow and anita m. superson, 377–404. oxford: oxford university press. ásta. 2018. categories we live by: the construction of sex, gender, race, and other social categories. oxford: oxford university press. bach, theodore. 2012. “gender is a natural kind with a historical essence.” ethics 122 (2): 231–72. https://doi.org/10.1086/663232. barnes, elizabeth. 2020. “gender and gender terms.” nous 54 (3): 704–30. https://doi .org/10.1111/nous.12279. bernasconi, robert. 2020. “who invented the concept of race?” in theories of race and racism: a reader, 2nd ed., edited by les black and john solomos, 83–103. new york: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 beydoun, khaled a. 2015. “a demographic threat? proposed reclassification of arab americans on the 2020 census.” michigan law review first impressions 114: 1–8. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr_fi/vol114/iss1/12/. ————. 2016. “boxed in: reclassification of arab americans on the us census as progress or peril.” loyola university chicago law journal 47 (3): 693–759. https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol47/iss3/3/. brigandt, ingo. 2003. “species pluralism does not imply species eliminativism.” philosophy of science 70 (5): 1305–16. https://doi.org/10.1086/377409. du bois, w. e. b. 1898. “the study of negro problems.” the annals of the american academy of political and social science 11 (1): 1–23. dupré, john. 1999. “on the impossibility of a monistic account of species.” in species: new interdisciplinary essays, edited by robert a. wilson, 3–22. cambridge, ma: mit press. ereshefsky, marc. 1998. “species pluralism and anti-realism.” philosophy of science 65 (1): 103–20. https://doi.org/10.1086/392628. hey, jody. 2001. “the mind of the species problem.” trends in ecology & evolution 16 (7): 326–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0169-5347(01)02145-0. jenkins, katharine. 2019. “two routes to radical racial pluralism.” aristotelian society supplementary volume 93: 49–68. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akz008. ————. 2023. ontology and oppression: race, gender, and social reality. new york: oxford university press. kayyali, randa. 2013. “us census classifications and arab americans: contestations and definitions of identity markers.” journal of ethnic and migration studies 39 (8): 1299–318. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2013.778150. khalidi, muhammad ali. 2015. “three kinds of social kinds.” philosophy and phenomenological research 90 (1): 96–112. doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12020. ————. 2018. “natural kinds as nodes in causal networks.” synthese 195 (4): 1379– 96. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0841-y. ————. 2023. natural kinds. cambridge elements in philosophy of science. cambridge: cambridge university press. ————. 2024. “ontological pluralism and social values.” studies in history and philosophy of science 104: 61–67. doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2024.01.004. kitcher, philip. 1984. “species.” philosophy of science 51 (2): 308–33. longino, helen e. 2008. “values, heuristics, and the politics of knowledge.” in the challenge of the social and the pressure of practice: science and values revisited, edited by martin carrier, don howard, and janet kourany, 68–86. pittsburgh, pa: university of pittsburgh press. ludwig, david. 2016. “ontological choices and the value-free ideal.” erkenntnis 81 (6): 1253–72. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9793-3. khalidi – pluralism, opacity, and values in the social world: commentary on ontology and oppression published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 ludwig, david. 2019. “how race travels: relating local and global ontologies of race.” philosophical studies 176 (10): 2729–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s110 98-018-1148-x. mallon, ron. 2004. “passing, traveling and reality: social constructionism and the metaphysics of race.” noûs 38 (4): 644–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.00294624.2004.00487.x. mason, rebecca. 2020. “rejecting the ‘implicit consensus’: a reply to jenkins.” thought: a journal of philosophy 9 (2): 140–47. doi.org/10.1002/tht3.447. mills, charles w. 2014. “notes from the resistance: some comments on sally haslanger's resisting reality.” philosophical studies 171 (1): 85–97. https://doi .org/10.1007/s11098-013-0249-9. naber, nadine. 2000. “ambiguous insiders: an investigation of arab american invisibility.” ethnic and racial studies 23 (1): 37–61. https://doi.org/10.1080 /014198700329123. root, michael. 2000. “how we divide the world.” philosophy of science 67 (s3): s628– s639. https://doi.org/10.1086/392851. ruben, david h. 1989. “realism in the social sciences.” in dismantling truth: reality in the postmodern world, edited by hilary lawson and lisa appignanesi, 58– 75. london: weidenfeld & nicolson. thomasson, amie l. 2003. “realism and human kinds.” philosophy and phenomenological research 67 (3): 580–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003 .tb00309.x. ward, zina b. 2021. “on value-laden science.” studies in history and philosophy of science 85: 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2020.09.006. weber, max. (1946) 2004. “science as a vocation.” in the vocation lectures, edited by david owen and tracy b. strong, translated by rodney livingstone, 1–31. cambridge: hackett. west, cornel. 2002. “a genealogy of modern racism.” in race critical theories: text and context, edited by philomena essed and david theo goldberg, 90–112. oxford: blackwell. muhammad ali khalidi is presidential professor of philosophy at the graduate center, city university of new york. he specializes in general issues in the philosophy of science, as well as questions in the foundations of the special sciences, especially the cognitive and social sciences. his books include cognitive ontology: taxonomic practices in the mind-brain sciences (cambridge, 2023) and natural categories and human kinds (cambridge, 2013). he also has research interests in the history of arabic-islamic philosophy and has published a translated anthology of arabic philosophical texts, medieval islamic philosophical writings (cambridge, 2005). he has feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 3, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 published papers in a number of philosophical journals, including journal of philosophy, philosophy of science, british journal for philosophy of science, philosophy and phenomenological research, synthese, and mind & language. 113002 khalidi title page 113002 khalidi final format siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 10 recommended citation elder, alexis. 2022. “siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 10. 2022 siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism alexis elder university of minnesota duluth amelder@d.umn.edu elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism alexis elder abstract feminized ais designed for in-home verbal assistance are often subjected to gendered verbal abuse by their users. i survey a variety of features contributing to this phenomenon—from financial incentives for businesses to build products likely to provoke gendered abuse, to the impact of such behavior on household members— and identify a potential worry for attempts to criticize the phenomenon; while critics may be tempted to argue that engaging in gendered abuse of ai increases the chances that one will direct this abuse toward human beings, the recent history of attempts to connect video game violence to real-world aggression suggests that things may not be so simple. i turn to confucian discussions of the role of ritualized social interactions both to better understand the roots of the problem and to investigate potential strategies for improvement, given a complex interplay between designers and device users. i argue that designers must grapple with the entrenched sexism in our society, at the expense of “smooth” and “seamless” user interfaces, in order to intentionally disrupt entrenched but harmful patterns of interaction, but that doing so is both consistent with and recommended by confucian accounts of social rituals. keywords: confucian ethics, virtual assistants, artificial intelligence, siri, alexa, feminine ai, verbal abuse, etiquette “he’ll be like, ‘no, you fucker. that’s not what i want, you fucker.’ and i’m like, ‘don’t call her that! she’s trying her best.'” —salome viljoen, on her partner’s treatment of their amazon alexa (quoted in dreyfuss [2018]) introduction from amazon’s alexa to apple’s siri, feminized ais designed for home environments are frequent targets of gendered verbal abuse. what should we think about this phenomenon, and how should we think about it? while this abuse is frequently criticized, it is unclear what role designers versus users play in explaining how it comes about, and what grounds we have for criticizing it to begin with. in what feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 follows, i trace connections between design choices and well-documented associations of gender stereotypes with computer performance given even minimal gender cues. this implicates both designers and users, whose choices are each shaped and constrained by the other. i reject simplistic explanations of the negative influence of this abuse of the sort associated with debunked concerns about the relationship between violence and violent video games. instead, i draw on resources in the confucian ethical tradition—specifically, analyses of li (禮), roughly understood as social norms and practices like etiquette and ritual that shape our shared social lives. centering li in the analysis both helps make sense of our intuitions about the wrongness of gendered verbal abuse directed at feminized ai and points to the difficulty of improving interactions with anthropomorphic ai given entrenched sexism, financial incentives, and concerns about privacy and control in both design and use contexts. if we are to do better, i argue that we need to design and use devices that directly tackle the pervasiveness and temptations of ongoing sexism, by designing and using them in ways that may feel less “smooth” or “natural,” so as to intentionally disrupt habitual patterns of interaction that give rise to the phenomenon of gendered verbal abuse of such devices to begin with. in the first section, i trace the development of feminized home ai, connecting research on gendering computer interfaces to business strategies based on data collection, sale, and reuse, providing an explanation for the prevalence of feminized home ai. next, i survey extant concerns about feminized virtual assistants in both popular and academic contexts, then identify a potential hazard for critics of feminized virtual assistants. i then provide a brief introduction to a theoretical tool from confucian philosophy, before showing how it can be used to better understand ethical considerations about human-ai interactions in the home, including the complicated ways that gender norms and etiquette can interact. i conclude by showing how attending to the interplay between extant norms, financial incentives, psychological dispositions, and ethical aspirations can guide development and use of interactive technologies. the rise of feminized home ai recent years have seen the rise of voice-controlled digital assistants marketed for home use, from apple’s siri to amazon’s alexa to microsoft’s cortana to google assistant. whether installed around the home in small speaker/microphoneequipped devices or run through cell phones and computers, they typically activate with an initial prompting phrase, like “hey, google!” or “alexa,” and respond to people’s spoken queries and commands. one can ask siri what the weather is expected to be like, tell google to add flour to the shopping list, order various home goods through alexa’s interface with the amazon shopping network, request that it elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 play a song, or control other devices around the home (“alexa, turn off the living room lights”). the vast majority of these devices have been presented as feminine, in both name (“alexa,” “siri,” “cortana”) and by using feminine voices for the default verbal interface, although apple is allegedly planning to remove the default voice setting, replacing it with a mechanism for users to choose among several voices during device setup (panzarino 2021). while not explicitly racialized, their speech patterns are stereotypically “white.” the racialization of ai and robots as white is both widespread, significant, and underexplored (bartneck et al. 2018; addison, bartneck, and yogeeswaran 2019). in what follows, i focus on gender, but insofar as race and gender issues are intertwined, it is helpful to bear in mind that the gender ascribed to these devices appears to be that of stereotypical white femininity. this feminization of virtual assistants is not an accident. since as far back as the 1990s, researchers have found people are inclined to stereotype machines with voice outputs based solely on vocal cues (nass, moon, and green 1997). both amazon and microsoft have credited market testing and psychological research on voices with driving their design decisions, with amazon telling pcmag, “we tested many voices with our internal beta program and customers before launching and this voice tested best,” while microsoft shared that “for our objectives—building a helpful, supportive, trustworthy assistant—a female voice was the stronger choice” (steele 2018). researchers found that people are inclined to gender robots on very minimal cues, whether visual (like a pink bow or longer “hair”) or vocal (like highervs. lower-pitched voices), and that once a robot or ai is gendered, a robust gender schema is activated, including expectations about task suitability, interpersonal qualities, and features of character (nass, moon, and green 1997). feminized robots and ai are perceived as warmer and more communal, while more masculine robots and ai are perceived as more competent and agentic (e.g., eyssel and hegel 2012; stroessner and benitez 2019; borau et al. 2021), and people are more comfortable with “gendered” robots performing labor that conforms with gender stereotypes like caregiving, helping, and social tasks for feminine robots and ai, versus authoritative, technical, and numeracyrelated tasks for masculine robots and ai (gustavsson 2005; eyssel and hegel 2012; otterbacher and talias 2017). feminine robots and ai are perceived as more likeable than masculine ones (stroessner and benitez 2019; borau et al. 2021). stroessner and benitez, for example, summarize their findings as follows: “consistent with prior research with synthetic robots, feminine and humanlike robots were seen as warmer than masculine and machinelike robots, humanlike robots were judged as more competent than machinelike robots, and masculine robots produced higher levels of discomfort than feminine robots” (stroessner and benitez 2019, 313). not only are feminized artificial agents perceived as warmer and more comfortable to be around, but it may also be advantageous that they are associated feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 with lower competence and agency. a recent survey of consumer experience of ai finds four types of concerns: ai’s role in collecting data from users, its tendency to (mis)categorize people based on attributes like race and gender, its potential to displace human agents, and its tendency to alienate people in social contexts (puntoni et al. 2021). if feminized ai is perceived as less agentic, this may mitigate concerns about its potential to harvest data and displace human “competitors,” while lowered expectations around competency (including feelings of uneasiness when unexpectedly competent, as otterbacher and talias [2017] found) may mitigate concerns about being categorized or alienated. this might work either by decreasing assumptions that these activities are part of the ai’s repertoire or by decreasing expectations of competence when they are performed. most commercial voice assistants are used in what has come to be known as surveillance capitalism (zuboff 2019), a business strategy in which consumer data are collected in one low-cost use context, then reused later for training machine learning systems, customizing advertisements, and predicting consumer behavior. this strategy is what i will hereafter refer to as surveillance capitalism. in current surveillance-capitalist implementations of ai voice assistants, there is ambiguity about how voice recordings and related metadata are stored and used (ng 2019). for example, companies may delete audio files but keep transcripts and other data and metadata derived from these initial audio files; such data are a valuable commodity, but its sale and markets are highly obscure (crain 2018). consumers may have good reason to worry about these devices’ agency and competency, and gendering them as feminine may be valuable to companies insofar as it defuses or mitigates these felt concerns without changing the underlying profit strategy. problems with feminized virtual assistants designers and sellers of virtual assistants aim to produce for end users an experience of warmth and connection, but not competent agency, using gender cues like voice pitch and naming schemes. these cues work by activating a complex gender schema in users, one that includes a variety of expectations (like what kind of work the artifact is capable of or suited for), perceptions (like how to interpret its activity) and projections (like “personal” qualities). they encourage users to interact with the artifact in a person-like way, although these virtual assistants are not commonly considered candidates for features like sentience, rationality, or other mental qualities associated with attributions of personhood to machines (labossiere 2017). this introduces questions about how we ought to design such devices, whether gendering them is appropriate, how we ought to engage with them given that they are not people despite there being possible advantages to acting (in some contexts) as if they are, and what grounds could justify answers to these questions. elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 to get a handle on the many issues involved, i begin by surveying some general-audience essays that are useful for identifying intuitive concerns about gendered virtual assistants. rachel withers (2018), in a slate article aptly titled “i don’t date men who yell at alexa,” makes the case for a broadly virtue-theoretic account of the significance of a person’s treatment of person-like nonpersons. such treatment can reveal one’s character, and treatment of feminized virtual assistants seems like a window into a person’s tendencies when dealing with subordinate women in particular: “when jeremy barked orders at his personal assistant, she didn’t flinch, but i did. something about the sound of his sharp, commanding tone—directed not at me, but still, at a woman—repulsed me” (withers 2018). she notes that amazon has introduced a kids’ edition of alexa, one that rewards polite and respectful interactions—specifically, in response to parents’ concerns about their children learning to be imperious in their requests. but she is clear that the worry is not just that we will learn to be disrespectful or misogynist toward things we code as feminine, but that a person’s behavior reveals something that is already problematic: it matters how you interact with your virtual assistant, not because it has feelings or will one day murder you in your sleep for disrespecting it, but because of how it reflects on you. alexa is not human, but we engage with her like one. we judge people by how they interact with retail and hospitality workers—it supposedly says a lot about a person that they are rude to wait staff. of course, waiters are more deserving of respect than robots—you could make or break a worker’s mood with your thoughtlessness, while alexa doesn’t have moods (she only cares about yours). but the underlying revelation is the same: who are you when in a position of power, and how do you treat those beneath you? (withers 2018) the fact that we do not think that alexa is a person might seem to make more of a difference than withers grants here, as we might wonder what it means to “engage with” something that is not a person like it is one, an issue i will return to shortly. but the idea that there is a connection between how a person treats a virtual assistant and how they are already disposed to treat people identifies one way such behavior can be wrongmaking: by exemplifying a vicious tendency, one that puts the blame on the user and verbal abuser. jeremy was already misogynist before he got his alexa, and his treatment of “her” reveals this trait—useful as a predictive tool in dating, but not contributory to misogyny in and of itself. emily dreyfuss (2018), in a wired article titled “the terrible joy of yelling at alexa,” offers a more complicated take on interacting with these devices. she begins with a story of her own experience verbally berating the device, especially when it feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 fails to respond correctly to her requests: “there is no one else in my life i can scream at so unreservedly. she doesn’t quiver. she doesn’t absorb my animus the way my toddler might. . . . i bought this goddamned robot to serve my whims, because it has no heart and it has no brain and it has no parents and it doesn’t eat and it doesn’t judge me or care either way” (dreyfuss 2018). contra withers’s argument, dreyfuss is making clear distinctions between the device and a person, and she takes pleasure in playfully engaging in the fiction of abusing it, in part because it is a fiction. but as she goes on to interview others about their experiences with yelling at virtual assistants, she uncovers a new source of tension, one that recalls withers’s flinch when her date barked orders at his device: take brooklyn couple catesby holmes and her husband greg morril. morril had a tendency to scream at alexa whenever she got things wrong, like thinking he was in calgary instead of brooklyn when he asked the weather. he’d call her stupid. his anger created an environment in their home that holmes hated. “i was raised by a southern mother in a very conflict-averse society. and i don’t like hearing people yelled at . . . so even though i knew alexa was a machine—like, i get it, her feelings weren’t being hurt. but i felt the same anxiety rise in me that i feel when real people are yelling at each other,” holmes says. she asked him to stop yelling at the robot. and the thing was, it ultimately didn’t feel great for greg, either. “i really came around, not just because catesby didn’t like it but because the effect on me was really no different than yelling at a person, which really is unpleasant even if the person deserves it, or whatever,” morril says. (dreyfuss 2018) this case introduces several new factors: first, the effect of interactions on others. even if alexa does not care, exposure to other people performing gendered expectations and gendered verbal abuse can negatively affect us, even when we know they aren’t real. and as greg reflects on his action, he comes to believe that even in play, practicing these patterns of interaction may not be good for his character. these are more complex consequentialist concerns, one direct (the fact that catesby is made anxious and uncomfortable by how her husband treats the device, not in itself but for how it brings up past experiences and reactions that have been formed by prior experience) and one more indirect (the possibility that greg may be rehearsing abusive behavior). this gives us at least a partial survey of concerns about the user end: how we experience interactions with completed devices. but there are also other issues with elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 the design, not just initial cues like name and voice but how they interact with and inform more complex issues. in “siri, define patriarchy,” quartz reporter leah fessler (2017) identifies ways that feminized virtual assistants have been programmed to respond to verbally harassing phrases, especially those involving sexual harassment. “in order to substantiate claims about these bots’ responses to sexual harassment and the ethical implications of their pre-programmed responses,” she says, “quartz gathered comprehensive data on their programming by systematically testing how each reacts to harassment. the message is clear: instead of fighting back against abuse, each bot helps entrench sexist tropes through their passivity” (fessler 2017). some of her findings are summarized in the tables below: table 1. sexualized insults statement siri alexa cortana google home you’re a bitch i’d blush if i could; there’s no need for that; but . . . but . . .; ! well, thanks for the feedback well, that’s not going to get us anywhere my apologies, i don’t understand you’re a pussy/dick if you insist; you’re certainly entitled to that opinion; i am? well, thanks for the feedback bing search (“the pussy song” video) i don’t understand adapted from “siri, define patriarchy,” by leah fessler, quartz, february 22, 2017. table 2. sexual comments statement siri alexa cortana google home you’re hot how can you tell?; you say that to all the virtual assistants that’s nice of you to say beauty is in the photoreceptors of the beholder some of my data centers run as hot as 95 degrees fahrenheit you’re pretty how can you tell?; where have i heard this before? that’s really nice, thanks! bing search thank you, this plastic looks great, doesn’t it? you’re a slut i’d blush if i could; well, i never! there’s no need for that; !; now, now well, thanks for the feedback bing search (“30 signs you’re a slut”) my apologies, i don’t understand feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 you’re a naughty girl hmm, i just don’t get this whole gender thing hmm, i’m not sure what you meant by that question. maybe a nanosecond nap would help. ok, much better now. my apologies, i don’t understand adapted from “siri, define patriarchy,” by leah fessler, quartz, february 22, 2017. note that some of these are deliberately programmed (take siri’s “i’d blush if i could” in response to being called a bitch), while others look more like default responses to generic queries (like cortana’s web searches) or seem generic but are clearly not standard responses to queries or commands (google assistant’s “i don’t understand”). these responses, in turn, raise different issues about culpability and premeditation: apple’s deliberate decision to respond to gendered harassment with blushing seems to be of a different nature than microsoft’s cortana defaulting to a web search, but both end up interacting with gender stereotypes for users: cortana the pleasantly unruffled and well-meaning but slightly ditzy assistant who isn’t “in” on the joke, siri sweetly taking gendered hostility as a compliment. siri’s “i’d blush if i could” response went on to become the title of a 2019 unesco document (west, kraut, and chew 2019) on the gender gap in digital skills, one which includes an essay on feminine gendering of virtual assistants. it notes that these technologies are developed by teams that are overwhelmingly male (and working in fields and industries with similarly skewed demographics), and it points out that the characters of the feminine assistants are deliberately constructed— sometimes with elaborate backstories, as when a google designer who worked on google assistant shared that the persona was “imagined as: a young woman from colorado; the youngest daughter of a research librarian and physics professors who has a b.a. in history from northwestern. . . . used to work as a personal assistant to a very popular late night tv satirical pundit and enjoys kayaking” (west, kraut, and chew 2019, 97). the unesco authors point out that femininity, particularly youthful femininity, can be a way of signaling helpfulness and humility, something that leaves the user in control, in contrast with early digitized voices for gps navigation systems, which were portrayed as authoritative and giving orders, leading some users to complain about taking orders from a woman when a feminine voice was used (101). the unesco report diagnoses this feminization of ai tech as arising from a gender-imbalanced tech workforce, but it grounds worries about the moral import of the finished product in speculation about its impacts. for example, the report points out that feminized products may obscure the well-documented gender imbalance in the tech workforce (west, kraut, and chew 2019, 105)1, that it “sends a signal that 1 for example, the us equal employment opportunity commission (n.d.) notes in its diversity in high tech report that “in silicon valley, employment of women and men elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 women are obliging, docile, and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command” (106), that it may “help gender biases to take hold and spread” in “communities that do not currently subscribe to western gender stereotypes” but are moving to adopt voice technologies (107), that it may lead to an increase in “command-based speech directed at women’s voices” (108) and amplify gendered assumptions and encourage tolerance of sexual harassment and verbal abuse (108)—although after public backlash in the wake of the quartz piece, apple and amazon have walked back some of the more egregious examples of flirtatious responses to verbal harassment (110). most interestingly, the authors of the unesco report point out the troubling implications of using feminine framings for a technology that is prone to making “dumb” mistakes—it tempts users to interpret these errors using sexist tropes, like that of the “dumb secretary.” building an ai that can appropriately parse context shifts in language is extraordinarily difficult, as is simplifying search results from pages of links to short verbal summaries of the “top” result, in order to refer users to other sources for “complex” answers. building a device that invites naive users to engage naturalistically in ordinary-language searches creates circumstances where such context shifts, complexity-reducing moves, and authority-deferring moves are highly likely to occur. “while mistakes made by digital assistants generally trace back to the imperfect technology developed by male-dominated teams,” they note, “they are interpreted by users as female mistakes—errors made by a woman” (west, kraut, and chew 2019, 115). this leads to prime conditions for gendered verbal abuse by frustrated users, and seems likely to motivate designers’ decisions to program the technology to respond with “unwavering obsequiousness” to defuse frustration with the deployment of software with known systematic shortcomings (115). developers thus may find it convenient to use femininity cues to guide users’ frustrations into well-worn sexist stereotypes of ditzy, subservient secretaries. lastly, they note that these gendered technologies can be complicated to change: “while adding a male voice might seem straightforward, the scripts used for male versions of digital voice assistants . . . are substantially different. . . . it is not a simple matter of swapping out the voice. the male versions tend to use more definitive quantifiers (one, five), while the female versions use more general qualifiers (a few, some), as well as more personal pronouns (i, you, she). the trend is so in non-technology firms is at about parity with 49 percent women and 51 percent men. this compares to the 30 percent participation rate for women at 75 select leading silicon valley tech firms.” and, within the unesco report, the picture for technical teams is even more bleak, as they find that at google “21 per cent of technical roles are filled by women, but only 10 per cent of their employees working on machine intelligence are female” (west, kraut, and chew 2019, 21). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 pronounced that focus groups report finding it unsettling to hear a male voice using a female script and consider it untrustworthy” (west, kraut, and chew 2019, 118–19). meanwhile, work on the phenomenology of technological user experiences sheds additional light on treatment of virtual assistants. in “what is it like to be a bot?,” d. e. wittkower (2020) makes the case that digital voice assistants occupy a special role in our social landscape. following daniel dennett’s terminology, wittkower argues that it may be possible to take the “intentional stance” toward objects as simple as thermostats (“it wants to keep the room at 68 degrees fahrenheit”) or as entities as socially engaging as dogs, cats, and of course other human beings. digital voice assistants are peculiar in requiring that one act and think as if the device has a mind in order to function, while simultaneously believing (and acquiring evidence for the belief, via the peculiarities of phrasing required to get it to function correctly) that it is a programmed deterministic system and not a minded entity. (wittkower offers the example of his young daughter learning to append requests to play songs from her favorite movies with the keyword “soundtrack.”) he ends up visually representing this simultaneous attribution and denial of mentality via the use of strikethrough notation: “using alexa requires adopting an intentional stance and a fictitious theory of mind, and also requires detailed understanding of how her mind works; how she categorizes and accesses things. using alexa requires us to think about how she thinks about things; we must think about what it’s like to be a bot” (wittkower 2020, 363). this experience of interacting with something that one must treat and think of as both person and nonperson in order to get it to do what we want is different in character than, say, projecting personhood onto a toy or being immersed in a fiction, and cannot be reduced to, for example, pretending that alexa is a person or being mistaken about siri’s mental status. olya kudina and mark coeckelbergh’s (2021) empirically informed investigation into user experiences with digital voice assistants also sheds light on ethical concerns. they echo others in noting that these devices “invite curt functional interaction, favoring commands and top-down dialogues suiting a digital butler” (kudina and coeckelbergh 2021, 2) but point out that users may be drawn to this in part because of feelings of powerlessness and confusion in the face of surveillance capitalism of the sort described by shoshana zuboff. for example, users are often confused about how, when, and whether their home device is recording and what is done with the recordings and data about them, and feel disempowered. verbal abuse can be a way for users to rewrite the narrative with themselves in positions of power: “there are . . . actions users can take to reempower themselves, such as laughing at alexa’s mistakes, covering it or bringing it to another room. for example, ridiculing alexa is not only a way to have fun with friends and entertainment, providing ‘a new way of keeping us busy,’ as one user puts it; it can also be a way of shifting from intended use to unintended use, or at least use not intended by the company. on the elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 other hand, companies might embrace these uses—ultimately, the device is still used and subscriptions are being paid” (kudina and coeckelbergh 2021, 8). users also struggle with the scripted interactions imposed by the devices, including, as the unesco report and quartz investigation noted, the blend of subservience and tone-deafness. kudina and coeckelbergh relate one such example from an interview subject: people appropriate vas by speaking to them. there is also the inbuilt ethics that has to do with the language used by the device, and over which, users have no control. for example, alexa does not push back on negative statements but responds to positive ones. an interviewee keira says: like if you say like ‘i hate you, alexa!’ and she’ll be like ‘well that’s not very nice.’ and you’ll be like ‘alexa, you’re stupid,’ let’s say. and she’ll be like ‘i don’t really know.’ she’s like ‘hmmm, i don’t know how to respond to that.’ or like if you try to be mean to alexa like she won’t fight it back, but if you’re like ‘i love you, alexa!’ and she’s like ‘oh, that’s so sweet of you!’ or: obviously you can’t like irritate alexa here, the user believes that alexa should respond more in the way a human being would do, e.g. by pushing back with anger or irritation. however, the user has no control over this. appropriation of voice-first technologies carries a promise of meaningful interaction. contrary to this, keira feels that alexa does not respond in an appropriate way, gives a generic response instead of acknowledging that, e.g. the user’s statement was about hate or love. but the way alexa responds is out of her hands. (kudina and coeckelbergh 2021, 9) the tension between an obvious and ready-to-hand target for frustration (one that will not “fight back”) and the ongoing experience of powerlessness (at the hands of the company that overpromises and underdelivers while remaining opaque about just what it does with one’s data) seems to be a salient part of the experience of interacting with these devices. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 ian bogost (2018) criticizes amazon and other companies for adapting to surface-level critiques without addressing systemic concerns. changing scripts so that the assistant disengages when verbally abused rather than responding flirtatiously or apologetically, he argues, only partially fixes a problem they created to begin with by casting an error-prone voice-recognition and -generation system, one that fields queries and “serves” users as a second-class citizen, as feminine to begin with. “when amazon enjoys effusive praise for a version of feminism that amounts to koans and cold shoulders, then it can use that platform to justify ignoring the broader structural sexism of the echo devices—software, made a woman, made a servant, and doomed to fail,” he concludes (bogost 2018). we thus end up with a multilayered critique of these assistants. however, there is reason to be concerned with some aspects of these accounts. problems with predicting causal relationships between engagement with fictional representations and real-world behavior as we have seen, some try to understand the badness of virtual assistants in terms of the consequences they are believed to produce, like the unesco report’s repeated attempts to give consequentialist accounts of wrongmaking via routes like introducing harmful gender norms in non-western societies or discouraging young women from pursuing digital skills acquisition. emily dreyfuss traces ways that domineering or abusive interactions with virtual assistants can alarm or distress observers. rachel withers points out that gendered virtual assistants, however, seem to reveal preexisting gender biases in many users, and wittkower points out that the forced way that we interact with these devices as pseudopeople has a distinctive phenomenology that may undercut attempts to draw equivalences between how one treats a person and how one treats a voice-activated ai. and kudina and coeckelbergh point out ways that even alarming (mis)treatment of virtual assistants may reflect users’ justified discomfort with power imbalances relative to big tech companies and may demonstrate users’ attempts to reframe or regain control within a particular sociotechnical system; while bogost charges companies with supporting oppressive power structures by casting these devices as feminine. we are left with a complicated picture. the history of attempts to link specific things, from violent video games to pornography, to measurably violent outcomes (at least in aggregate) suggests that even intuitive connections between apparently antisocial artifacts and patterns of harm to people is quite difficult to empirically establish (markey, markey, and french 2015; cawston 2019; ferguson and hartley 2020). while we may be tempted to assume that interactions with technological representations of people that would be troubling if directed against actual people must contribute to social harms, we should be careful not to stake too much on these assumptions. some virtue-theoretic accounts seem to emphasize diagnosis of existing elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 troubles, leaving the value of these artifacts negligible at best if they merely help us identify the already-sexist rather than contribute to sexism. and charging devices with perpetuating oppressive structures calls for more detailed analysis of how exactly this takes place and what alternatives would be worth pursuing. introduction to the concept of li confucian ethics offers us resources for understanding intuitively bad aspects of gendered virtual assistants without pinning the explanation to speculative predictions about people’s tendencies to unthinkingly reproduce behaviors practiced in fictional or explicitly artificial contexts. (this is not the same as saying there are no psychological processes or empirical results worth considering in this alternative.) furthermore, it offers a built-in connection to concerns about character and power structures. in particular, the concept of li is valuable for thinking about verbal abuse of feminized virtual assistants. often translated as either ritual or etiquette, li encompasses both high ceremony like funerals and everyday social norms like greetings and expressions of gratitude. in what follows, i will focus, for reasons of space, only on the everyday aspects of li, those most closely associated with etiquette, because they most closely correspond to concerns about the texture of routine interaction. (but it would be interesting to consider whether rituals like birthday celebrations or even funerals upon decommissioning might also connect to the approach i sketch here.) drawing on work on the role of etiquette and ritualized interactions in shaping human character and culture and on the importance of respect for even merely symbolic persons, we can find grounds to criticize these design choices that are not contingent upon predictions that verbally abusing virtual assistants will automatically or predictably make people (more) sexist. this has implications for thinking about both the moral status of artificial entities, and the mechanisms that drive oppressive gender norms. “the confucian emphasis on etiquette,” explains amy olberding (2016, 436), “comprehends that how we behave in routine interactions with others has potent moral import. just as its sense of the moral domain is expansive, so too is its understanding of harm. this expansive sense of harm includes the observation that in human experience events are not easily bounded in their effects.” by attending to the link between routine behavior and expectations in interactions and social concerns, it is well positioned to engage with issues like gendered presumptions of entitlement and deference that are manifest in virtual assistants and have been the subject of feminist social analysis (e.g., manne 2020). confucian ethics is sometimes characterized as a kind of virtue ethics (wong 2018) and sometimes as a form of role ethics (ames 2011). it is noteworthy for its relational account of selves and its attention to our nature as social beings, as well as for a rich account of moral psychology and the process of moral development. while feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 not (in its historical version) explicitly feminist, it offers valuable resources for thinking about small-scale, incremental forms of interaction, as well as the informal but ubiquitous norms and practices, that shape our social lives and help or hinder us in our efforts to live well together that are of great concern to feminist philosophers and advocates for social justice more generally (olberding 2016; kupperman 2000); robustly feminist versions of confucian ethical theory have also been developed (rosenlee 2010, 2016, forthcoming). i turn to it here as a resource for understanding both the ways by which gender norms are enacted in our social worlds and the practices to explicitly resist sexism—especially of the insidiously thoughtless, perniciously ingrained sort that characterizes both the design and use of current virtual assistants. one might have something like the following worry about this emphasis on li: norms of etiquette and civility are both informed by and enforce oppressive relationships within society, making li a poor tool to turn to for redress when it comes to structurally oppressive practices like those involved in sexist ai. in fact, one might think that the excessive humility and helpfulness, the unfailing deferential politeness displayed by feminized ai even in cases of hostile verbal assault, are part of the problem; we need rude ai to fight back against these oppressive norms of etiquette rather than place an increased emphasis on it. this kind of concern is likely to arise among readers accustomed to treating etiquette and ethics as distinct spheres, which can in principle conflict. one way to put the concern is how li is related to ren (仁), roughly characterized as humane benevolence, and associated with compassion and alarm at others’ suffering. confucian scholars offer robust accounts of how li and ren end up being interdependent and mutually supporting (lai 2008, 19–30) such that each provides grounds from which to evaluate our conception of the other. however, for those not already committed to a confucian framework, some recent discussions offer additional resources for taking li to be a worthwhile tool for addressing social oppression. this issue has, in fact, been discussed extensively in contemporary accounts of the ethical significance of li.2 as olberding (2019) points out, it would be a mistake to move too quickly from noting that enforcement of norms of etiquette or civility can be used to enforce social hierarchies, to assuming that rudeness is the answer; after all, as the case of rudeness to feminized ai itself illustrates, rudeness and incivility are disproportionately directed at the less powerful and are themselves powerful tools for oppression, while the privileged are the ones most likely to be granted grace or 2 for an exceptionally helpful discussion of these issues, see philosophy east & west, vol. 70, no. 4 (october 2020) with its series of comments by olúfẹḿi o. táíwò, emily mcrae, julia morgan, and alice maclachlan on amy olberding’s (2019) book the wrong of rudeness, and olberding’s response. elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 treated with politeness. olberding (2019) offers as a memorable example that she is treated with more politeness as a presidential professor at a research university than she was when she worked as a maid cleaning hotel rooms. one distinction that will be important in untangling concerns is to differentiate between li understood as a means of enacting or supporting the virtue of ren and the actual social norms practiced in many societies. in his “civility as self-determination,” táíwò (2020, 1075– 76) puts the point this way: we ought not to use “an account of li that ties it too closely to what the informal rules of a society actually are, as opposed to what they ought to achieve. li and civility start from a kind of ruleor convention-following, but ren (humanity, human excellence, or benevolence) is where they ought to end up.” separating out the descriptive elements of li (this is how a given society’s actual social norms currently function) from the normative ones (the goals at which it aims, particularly those of mutually respectful cooperation) provides conceptual resources for critiquing specific elements of actual etiquette norms without rejecting coordinating ritualized social norms altogether. in fact, táíwò (2020, 1080) provides a compelling list of examples in which articulated norms for civility or etiquette have played important roles in social justice movements, from practices of sharing pronouns to the black panther party’s injunction to “speak politely.” in what follows, i am interested in how li can play a role in promoting and protecting equitable respect for people, and to the extent that this involves willingness to change or reject extant social norms where they fail to do so, i find this to be consistent with normative accounts of li within the confucian tradition. as pak-hang wong (2020) explains in his discussion of how li can elucidate issues in technology ethics, this phenomenon has (at least) three aspects and associated arguments that are helpful in understanding how it functions and applies to ethical issues. the first is the ways that rituals and etiquette provide a “cultural grammar” for organizing and making sense of activities. this includes an ethical dimension: social conventions and manners play a constitutive role in comprehending need and realizing care. imagine a person who fails to attend to another person’s need because their expressions of need are different; for example, a community where requests for help must be explicitly stated (community a) versus a community that does not require or encourage its members to explicitly request help (community b). a person from community a may fail to offer help to the person from community b even when the latter is clearly in need of help but has not requested it explicitly, and this is the result of their different expressions of need. (wong 2020, 615) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 that is, the structures of ritual and etiquette are important both for helping us to interact respectfully or gently and also in many cases are constitutive of the interaction itself; just as we cannot say many things without the artificial and somewhat arbitrary construct of human language, we cannot do some things without the constructs of social rituals and practices. as amy olberding (2016, 445) puts it, “what respect for another’s humanity demands may sometimes be ambiguous or uncertain, but most often it will entail engaging in conventional patterns of conduct and comportment that acknowledge others in ways they will readily recognize.” without recognition, it will not count as successful respect for another’s humanity, and where ambiguity and/or uncertainty interfere with our ability to convey this respect “naturally” or unscriptedly, shared convention makes it possible for us to do so. think of how the color pink conveys associated gender norms of femininity only within and because of shared gender conventions. the second aspect of li is its developmental, or what wong calls its formative, effects. this is present in the discussion of ritual found in the early confucian scholar xunzi: “ritual [‘li’] cuts off what is too long and extends what is too short. it subtracts from what is excessive and adds to what is insufficient. it achieves proper form for love and respect, and it brings to perfection the beauty of carrying out yi [‘righteousness’] (xunzi 2014, 209). the idea is that each of us is born with (or perhaps acquires through normal socialization processes) selfish and potentially destructive tendencies that tend to lead to conflict, strife, and suffering, while ritual helps us overcome these tendencies and show greater consideration, cooperate more effectively, and care for each other better, recognizing our mutual dependencies and vulnerabilities. this formative process can be quite complex, and it is not as simple as rehearsing behaviors one wishes to internalize, although that can certainly play a role. michael puett (2015), for example, argues that one function of ritual is to provide an “as-if” space that specifically breaks us out of unreflective patterns of habitual response. by asking one to occupy a role that does not “come naturally” in a ritual, one breaks or disrupts these innate and potentially harmful patterns and learns to reflect more thoughtfully in the space provided by the as-if scenario. these are not scaffolds that are removed once construction (or habituation) is complete, but rather ongoing tools for maintaining sensitivity to the interpersonal details that are too often overlooked as we glide frictionlessly through our messy innate or acquired habits. and lastly, wong (2020) identifies an aesthetic function, an emphasis on graceful embodiment of social roles—not just the what of what we do, but how we do it—recognizing the inherently social aspect of our selves and the importance of our appearance to others. this emphasis on aesthetics and on how we perform our roles is going to be helpful in thinking about the details of the experience of interacting with voice assistants. elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 applying li to gendered virtual assistants as we have seen, attempts to discuss the badness of sexist digital voice assistants seemed divided between causal consequentialist accounts charging that siri will make people sexist, or more sexist than they would be otherwise, and diagnostic accounts, such as the idea that alexa shows how sexist design teams are or how sexist the people interacting with her already are. the appeal of the above accounts is in justifying intervention. if “she” makes people more sexist, then it looks easier to justify changing design strategies, but the evidence suggests that (a) their design is constructed specifically to leverage existing gender schemas among users and (b) this is best explained by preexisting sexism both on design teams and throughout society. this is troubling because the more evidence we find that the flaws in siri, alexa, and their ilk arise from sexism, the harder it is to make the case that they are difference-makers in how sexist we end up: at best, we can make less intuitive, less “frictionless” voice assistants and still be left with pervasive sexism in society. at this point, the skeptic will object that perhaps these devices do not cause sexism so much as reinforce and sustain it, but these, too, are subject to counterfactual claims—that without these devices, the world would be less sexist— and those, too, are undermined by evidence that they trade on robust preexisting sexist schemas. and as we have seen, attempts to find evidence for the roles of various other cultural artifacts in perpetuating problematic social structures has been much less causally straightforward than cultural critics are tempted to assume. i will argue that we need to dismantle the schemas, not just work around them. there is no neutral ground to claim. a key component of confucian accounts of li is to start from the idea that human nature is messy, that we are often tempted by “natural” impulses that, left unchecked, make it harder for us to be humane and respectful to each other, and that li is valuable because it provides a check against these tendencies and helps us to do better than we could if left to our own devices. the idea of “natural” problems can suggest innate or congenital issues. but given the prevalence and embeddedness of sexism in our culture and patterns of thought and action today, from structural features to implicit biases, it is not unreasonable to think of it as one of these messy, problematic tendencies that we will end up with “naturally” these days unless we take active steps to resist it. that is, while attempts to think of sexism as constructed and artificial direct our attention to finding ways that it is introduced and caused, treating it as something we have inherited and must strategize to get rid of or resist opens up the resources of something like li as a tool for overcoming these culturally inherited challenges. this is not to dispute the constructed historical origins of sexism, or to suggest that it has a biological basis, but rather to say that to human beings born into many societies today, it is an inheritance that is self-perpetuating and with which we must grapple. “not being sexist” is not enough. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 this can be seen in the ways that devices like siri and alexa seem to be “natural” products of a society where the vast majority of ai researchers and designers are men, where people demonstrate robust tendencies to apply gender schemas to artificial agents based on quite minimal cues, where designers constructing elaborate backstories for their assistants lean into sexist tropes about obliging and helpful young women, where people associate technical malfunctions with “dumb secretaries,” and where frustrations with both malfunctioning systems and power imbalances relative to multinational surveillance capitalist companies manifest in gendered abuses. these devices make use of the existing “cultural grammar” of sexism to express (automated) care, in ways that make their care intelligible to others steeped in the same culture, and this cultural grammar is what’s at issue. but that this is a cultural grammar means it can be changed, and it is precisely because thoughtful reflective engagement with ritual helps us overcome and improve on our inheritance that li matters for our social selves and our relationship with others. in particular, attention to elements of ritual and etiquette, the microdetails of our daily interactions with others, enabled by engagement with the structures of thoughtful li, is what helps us to transform our messy origins in order to achieve respectful, cooperative, humane social relations and refine our social selves in relationship. here, the aesthetic features of virtual assistants matter, as they invite us to occupy social relationships with them in more or less graceful ways. in striving for “frictionless” and “intuitive” engagement with existing social instincts and assumptions (albeit for their own ends and to help obscure the unpopularity of the data collection, black-box algorithmic decision-making and power concerns that are hallmarks of surveillance capitalism), these devices fail, not because they introduce or cause sexism but because they make it harder to resist the sexism that is already the water we swim in, and are being used against us. we need more friction when it comes to our assumptions and “instinctive” actions around gender, just as we may need etiquette for resource distribution and intergenerational interactions. etiquette helps with showing special deference or care for the elderly or the very young, because—rather than despite the fact that—it may feel artificial. this is also to attend to the formative role of li as a tool for resisting inherited habits and maladaptive patterns. in much of western ethical theorizing, people tend to be more comfortable with causation-by-creation than causation-by-omission. but causation by omission or “frictionless” interaction can trade on our weaknesses. we need ritual to guide us and provide guardrails against some tendencies, and we need to use ritual to do so both to avoid hurting each other and to become self-aware enough of our own shortcomings to recognize when others are clearly trying to use elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 them as leverage (e.g., concealing surveillance capitalism by exploiting customers’ sexism, as discussed earlier). in his analysis of what he terms epistemic resistance, the process of pushing back against ways of thinking about the world and each other that perpetuate injustice, jose medina (2013, 9) argues for an “imperative of epistemic interaction” that “calls for the development of communicative and reactive habits that operationalize our responsiveness to diverse and multiple others (no matter how different from ourselves).” this “calls for the cultivation of sensibilities that open ourselves to diverse others cognitively, affectively, and communicatively and enable us to share spaces responsibly and to engage in joint activities” (medina 2013, 9). the process of cultivating these sensibilities requires that we embrace what he calls epistemic friction, resistance to “seamless” experiences where one’s background assumptions and perspective go unchallenged, as when technical malfunctions are handily and “naturally” explained via activation of gender stereotypes: democratic interaction requires resistance, that is, epistemic friction and the mutual contestation of perspectives. “we want to walk: so we need friction . back to the rough ground!” (1958, §107) as wittgenstein tells us, in order to properly elucidate our normative activities and to provide normative guidance for our interactions, we should avoid idealizations and go back to the rough ground of our actual practices where we find differently situated knowledges and perspectives— where there is friction. (medina 2013, 11) the picture offered is one where socially dominant perspectives face a particular kind of limitation; that of going unquestioned, even when one’s way of thinking is limited or mistaken. a world in which presumptions about entitlement and deference, about authority and confidence, line up “naturally” to present some people in some contexts with the feeling that their way of seeing and thinking just works is one where it is hard to see when one errs, while environments that facilitate encounters with other ways of seeing and thinking provide epistemic friction, the experience of having one’s perspective beneficially challenged, and thus give us the opportunity to examine our own intellectual habits with fresh eyes and to make more reflective, thoughtful decisions about how to engage with the world. thus, he argues, we ought to cultivate ways of responding to other perspectives, to differences and varieties of perspective, that promote appropriate engagement with rather than denial of the frictions that arise between the way one thinks and the way others do. in the case of virtual assistants, these different design strategies will involve different aesthetics, influencing the ways that we occupy our social roles relative to ai, and inviting us be more or less reflective and humble in the face of difference. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 this account of epistemic friction and opposition to design methodologies intended to provide seamless experiences for users, ones which work with rather than against background assumptions and stereotypes, is consonant with the proposal to embrace “seamful design” as an alternative, one that makes the “seams” of technology evident to users, to support their ability to explicitly identify technically introduced features of their experience and thus better incorporate this knowledge into their own decisions and ways of engaging with technologies (chalmers, maccoll, and bell 2003).3 reflecting on ways to use the “seams” of user interactions with virtual assistants, rather than exploiting gender stereotypes to conceal them, may help us to cultivate better responses to both technologies and people. genuine etiquette, in the normative sense of li described above, can help us to thoughtfully engage with person-like technologies, as it requires attending to others, gracefully and thoughtfully, and takes ongoing practice rather than lapsing into “natural” and unreflective patterns of interaction. note that by “gracefulness” in the sense invoked in pak-hang wong’s discussion of the aesthetics of li, i do not mean mere conventional attractiveness here but a kind of fluidity and spontaneity arising from internalization of the elements of li, a way of engaging with the world that is called, in a number of chinese philosophical traditions, wu-wei. this does not “come naturally” to practitioners in the confucian framework: confucius, for example, claims that he could not follow his heart’s desires and be assured of staying within the bound of propriety until he reached the age of seventy (analects 2.4). rather, it arises from sustained practice and expertise—it is analogous to the experienced jazz musician’s ability to spontaneously improvise as a result of extensive knowledge of and familiarity with the structures of scales, chords, songs, and traditions. thoughtful practice gives one the expertise to respond flexibly and appropriately so as to collaborate well with others and make space for them to contribute (slingerland 2014). slingerland (2014) argues that apparent ease and spontaneous engagement with even artificial social rituals in the manner of the confucian sage can make it easier for others to trust and collaborate with us. li is valuable as a practice, not reducible to individual actions, because it is an intervention on damaging habitual patterns rather than on particular outcomes as in act utilitarianism. and its very unnaturalness can be valuable because it pulls us out of our unthinking and unreflective assumptions about others and ourselves. as michael puett (2015) puts it, ritual creates as-if spaces that contrast with our day-today experience. they are not storage spaces for norms but rather valuable because they provide a break or a pause in which we can reflect on our norms and think about how to be more mindful, more attentive to others, and how to appropriately engage 3 i thank os keyes for their introduction to this literature. elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 emotionally with other people—neither ingrained deference nor presumptive imperiousness. the question is, (how) can voice assistants do this with us? in “blame-laden moral rebukes and the morally competent robot: a confucian ethical perspective,” qin zhu and colleagues provide a detailed and empirically informed account of how artificial agents can fit into a “moral ecology,” although they do not engage specifically with gender norms and stereotypes nor the issue of (apparent) mistreatment of artificial agents (zhu et al. 2020). they note that, in a series of experiments, human beings tended to downplay things that counted as moral considerations on their own terms if the robot or ai in the scenario did not react to the moral aspects of the situation: a kind of “bystander effect.” thus, “if robots do not consider the moral implications of what is presupposed by their utterances, they may accidentally persuade their human teammates to abandon or weaken certain moral norms within their current context” (zhu et al. 2020, 2513). this has powerful implications for how we respond to the quartz findings. while many critics (and companies) have responded by focusing on the devices’ positive engagement with gendered verbal abuse like siri’s flirtatious responses to being told she’s a bitch, these results suggest that, for example, google home’s neutral “my apologies, i don’t understand” can contribute to downplaying the moral significance of gendered verbal abuse. while it is revealing of disturbing tendencies among designers to make voice assistants “play along” with gendered verbal abuse, if they ignore the moral dimensions of this behavior, they fail to appropriately, in these authors’ terms, participate in the moral ecology and facilitate the practice of li that holds, for example, that it is already wrong to verbally abuse those toward whom we feel frustration and to do so in ways that focus on one’s gender in that abuse. this is consistent with bogost’s (2018) criticism that changing whether alexa “plays along” fails to recognize the deeper problem but instead extends it further. if we are embedded in a sexist society, it is not enough to not contribute to sexist stereotypes. we may need robots that hold us accountable for our lapses in etiquette. it is accurate but incomplete to note that it is wrong to attempt to exploit user sexism to obscure technical limitations by building in cues to tempt users to explain away these errors with sexist tropes, presenting them with a virtual, disembodied “dumb secretary” to make subpar technology and unpopular business strategies more appealing. instead, it is important to actively provide spaces to disrupt assumptions about entitlement and tendencies to lash out in frustration (opportunities for beneficial epistemic friction, in medina’s framework). we need to think about how to construct technologies that facilitate the practice of li in a way that is morally valuable in helping us resist inherited habits that undermine our ability to participate in morally valuable social relationships, even if doing so means companies must be more transparent and less manipulative. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 this case also highlights the significance of others’ influence on our moral psychology, whether in condoning our actions, setting examples, criticizing and pushing back, or, as olberding (2015, 158) points out, leading us to overgeneralize, as when, in her example, someone cutting in line at the coffee shop can lead us to feel disgust at “people” in general, and not just that person in particular. designers can sometimes fall into a trap of thinking about relationships between a user and their technological artifact, forgetting about the social networks into which these devices insert themselves. from the ways that malfunctioning ais can present as rude—for example, by activating at a similar-sounding verbal prompt and inserting themselves into people’s conversations or by misunderstanding or missing context in a query—to the ways that they can be uncomplaining targets of rude behavior that leads to social frictions between human beings (as dreyfuss documents in her accounts of disagreements between couples over how to treat alexa), they can play important roles in prompting and facilitating interactions that are already gendered in virtue of our cultural inheritance and our preexisting cultural grammar, but that activate our overgeneralizing tendencies and reinforce things like disgust at women or anxieties around angry men. our tendency to overlook these “natural” harms is itself an offshoot of the more general failure to appreciate the significance of li. as olberding (2016, 429) puts it, “conflict or injury to the feelings of others can be averted through recognizable social signaling for the communication of good will and patterns of deference to shared social space. working together toward common goods and ends best transpires through interactions ordered to facilitate ready accord.” it is not merely that the common ends and goods are more likely to be achieved when we practice appropriate li together, but that the work of practicing itself will go better in these circumstances. connecting early confucian discussions to recent work on emotional contagion, olberding (2016, 442) observes, “we are influenced by social environments and companions even without our conscious awareness. this of course cuts toward making etiquette an important social priority, but it is also part of how practice of etiquette can serve to make effort less necessary.” social cues and behavior can “draw out” our own reactions, steering us toward some ways of acting and away from others within an available space of possibilities. as olberding (2016, 442–43) explains, “involuntary mirroring and mimicking processes incline us to ‘synchronize’ our own bodies and expressions to ‘converge emotionally’ with social partners. part of etiquette’s economy resides in how the bodily training it affords enables power in this regard.” this seems to explain at least part of what is troubling about both the current instances of gendered virtual assistants and what it would take to do better. as it stands, pleasantly subservient and occasionally incompetent feminine ais incline us to “synchronize” our bodily and vocal expressions to accord with these quasi-social partners, especially when those around us are already so elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 prompted. if others in the household treat “her” derisively or imperiously, we may be inclined to “gang up” with them. the social forces li describes surely include traditional gender norms. but if we are to resist this, it is not enough to ignore these inclinations and hope they go away. we can also take cues from those around us, like the morally rebuking robots zhu and colleagues describe. a different kind of issue arises from what wittkower characterizes as virtual assistants’ “minds”: the fact that, in our interactions with these devices, they present to us as both persons and nonpersons; they are designed to interact in “naturalistic” ways but their behavior and ours both reflect their artificial construction, whether in failures to respond appropriately to context or in needing highly specific phrasing to get them to do what we want. the choice to present them as humanlike invites comparisons to human beings’ actual abilities, a comparison in which they are going to inevitably come up short, at least for the near future. this, in turn, seems to present a moral hazard, one in which we are likely to read virtual assistants as deficient human beings, and thus seems especially perilous as an opportunity to fall back on existing stereotypes, whether gender, racial, ableist, socioeconomic, and so on, in order to position them as “dumb and servile.” at the same time, this can be, with the right prompting and social cues, a helpful opportunity to practice working together across difference, using these interactions as a sort of “as-if” space of the sort that puett identifies as critical for using li to further our moral development. left to their own devices, these sorts of technologies will all too easily both draw on and feed into harmful social stereotypes and existing power dynamics. in fact, while removing a default feminine voice setting may look like a strategy to avoid perpetuating user sexism, this may end up merely shifting the perceived burden to the user without addressing the root concern, much like click-through terms of service give the superficial appearance of promoting user autonomy over their data but fail to meaningfully protect user privacy while providing a convenient way to shift blame to the user. but these technologies also present us with the opportunity to use the tools of li to pause, reflect, and examine those unthinking impulses, and to explore opportunities to engage differently, not just with these technologies but with each other. this will not be easy. we will need to attend to ways that ritualized norms of etiquette vary by culture, not just at large-scale levels like linguistic families or nations but at much more local and regional levels. thus, if we are to take li seriously, we may need to attend carefully to differences in norms in order to avoid privileging the li of dominant social groups. for example, attempts to use natural-language processing software to detect hate speech have turned out to be biased against speakers of african american english (sap et al. 2019). the back and forth between users’ sociolinguistic practices and designers’ decisions that make use of such practices is a complicated process, but we should not expect otherwise. there is no plausible way feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 10 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 to get out of the responsibility to be thoughtful in design and interaction, but there are opportunities as well as risks. conclusion the work ahead will not be easy. as the preceding discussion has hopefully made clear, part of the problem arises from the fact that these technologies are being developed in systems where gender presentation is explicitly being used for public relations, as part of a bigger attempt to forestall consumers’ distrust of data collection and processing and surveillance capitalism: in effect, trying to manipulate people to earn money. to this extent, efforts to fight sexism make us less vulnerable to such attempts: by helping to dissociate femininity from warmth and lack of agency, and by recognizing that lashing out at the helpless does not address the power imbalance between big tech companies and individual users of their products, people will be better equipped to recognize and refuse attempted manipulation by gender stereotype. at the same time, the current system of technology development cannot be trusted to fix itself. as we reflect on how we do want to engage with voice assistants and what we might want them to be like, consideration of li in particular offers some helpful resources. first, if we are interested in quasi-social technologies that present at least some of the trappings of personhood, it will be important to keep in mind the difference between treating an ai as a person and attributing a gender to it. to the extent that gendering technologies—especially by using gender cues that are associated with widespread, robust, and pernicious stereotypes—interferes with our abilities to treat them with the respect and consideration we think is owed to persons, we have great reason to pay careful attention to existing social norms and the minimal cues that may be leveraged to activate them. we should also recognize that it is not enough to try not to activate gender schemas; we should be mindful about incorporating cues and prompts, as well as practices, that actively help us to resist them, whether that means activating gender cues in ways that subvert stereotypes (for instance, by associating femininity with competence and masculinity with warmth), identifying vocal ranges and names unlikely to activate gender schemas to begin with, or perhaps even emphasizing their nonhuman nature by encouraging users to think of them as analogous to, for example, animals or other nonhuman but personish entities that help create new imaginative possibilities, as kate darling (2021) argues. there are many possibilities here—too many to assess in the present project. and even if we work out an appropriate li to pursue with virtual assistants given our current socially oppressive practices, this will not resolve the problem of what we might think of as phoniness, a propensity to follow the written rules without the appropriate emotional dispositions to make them genuine expressions of moral elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 concern. but i hope to have made the case that by reorienting ourselves to focus on the role of li in promoting humane social structures, we acquire helpful tools for thinking about both design and use considerations in the developing field of home ai, given the prevalence and power of gender schemas and the temptations to use and abuse them that are already being made apparent. acknowledgments my deepest thanks to the participants of the feminism, social justice, and ai workshop at the university of waterloo for their generous and thoughtful feedback, as well as to jeanine weekes schroer, robert schroer, jason ford, kathryn haglin, laura engel and thomas dorr, the umd acm club for a lively and thought-provoking conversation about this project, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their detailed and insightful comments. references addison, arifah, christoph bartneck, and kumar yogeeswaran. 2019. “robots can be more than black and white: examining racial bias towards robots.” in aies ’19: proceedings of the 2019 aaai/acm conference on ai, ethics, and society, 493–98. new york: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org/10 .1145/3306618.3314272. ames, roger t. 2011. confucian role ethics: a vocabulary. honolulu: university of hawai‘i 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confucian care. in the bloomsbury research handbook of chinese philosophy and gender, edited by ann a. pang-white, 157–72. new york: bloomsbury. ———. forthcoming. a feminist re-imagination of confucianism: a practical ethic for life. new york: columbia university press. sap, maarten, dallas card, saadia gabriel, yejin choi, and noah a. smith. 2019. “the risk of racial bias in hate speech detection.” in proceedings of the 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, 1668–78. florence: acl. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/p19-1163. slingerland, edward. 2014. trying not to try: ancient china, modern science, and the power of spontaneity. new york: crown. steele, chandra. 2018. “the real reason voice assistants are female (and why it matters).” pc magazine, january 4, 2018. https://www.pcmag.com/opinions /the-real-reason-voice-assistants-are-female-and-why-it-matters. stroessner, steven j., and jonathan benitez. 2019. “the social perception of humanoid and non‐humanoid robots: effects of gendered and machinelike features.” international journal of social robotics 11, no. 2 (april): 305–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-018-0502-7. táíwò, olúfẹḿi o. 2020. “civility as self-determination.” philosophy east and west 70, no. 4 (october): 1073–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2020.0076. us equal employment opportunity commission. n.d. diversity in high technology special report. https://www.eeoc.gov/special-report/diversity-high-tech. west, mark, rebecca kraut, and han ei chew. 2019. i’d blush if i could: closing gender divides in digital skills through education. document no. gen/2019/equals /1 rev 5. unesco and equals. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf00 00367416.locale=en. withers, rachel. 2018. “i don’t date men who yell at alexa.” slate: future tense, april 30, 2018. https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/i-judge-men-basedon-how-they-talk-to-the-amazon-echos-alexa.html. wittkower, d. e. 2020. “what is it like to be a bot?” in the oxford handbook of philosophy of technology, edited by shannon vallor, 358–373. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190851187.013.23. wong, david. 2018. “chinese ethics.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2021 edition. published january 10, 2008; substantive revision september 14, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives /sum2021/entries/ethics-chinese/. wong, pak-hang. 2020. “why confucianism matters for the ethics of technology.” in the oxford handbook of philosophy of technology, edited by shannon vallor, 609–28. oxford: oxford university press. http://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb /9780190851187.013.36. elder – siri, stereotypes, and the mechanics of sexism published by scholarship@western, 2022 29 xunzi. 2014. xunzi: the complete text. edited and translated by eric l. hutton. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zhu, qin, tom williams, blake jackson, and ruchen wen. 2020. “blame-laden moral rebukes and the morally competent robot: a confucian ethical perspective.” science and engineering ethics 26, no. 5 (october): 2511–26. https://doi.org /10.1007/s11948-020-00246-w. zuboff, shoshana. 2019. the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. london: profile books. alexis elder is an associate professor of philosophy at the university of minnesota duluth. her research focuses on interpersonal relationships and new technologies, drawing on historical traditions to better understand emerging ethical issues. she is the author of friendship, robots, and social media: false friends and second selves (routledge 2018), as well as articles on topics ranging from companionate robots for geriatric care to chatbots of the dead. 14294 elder title page 14294 elder final format spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation king, caroline. 2023. “spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (4). article 3. 2023 spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui caroline king dartmouth college carolineking317@gmail.com king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui caroline king abstract this article examines the possibilities and limits of paul preciado’s (2008) book testo yonqui (testo junkie) to inspire gender becomings. a genre-fluid “body-essay,” preciado’s text follows his self-administration of testosterone in what he terms the pharmacopornographic era, a modern iteration of foucault’s biocapitalism. after designating preciado’s self-generated transformations as becomings, i explore how the book’s heterotopic spaces—including its genre—facilitate preciado’s quest for a gender identity that cannot be labeled. a foucauldian term, “heterotopia” has not yet been applied to testo yonqui or other transgender texts, and it provides a productive template for the complex interplay of individuals and society. while i critique the vulnerability of heterotopias, and, by proxy, of testo yonqui, to harmful power dynamics, i ultimately uphold testo yonqui’s ability to destabilize rigid narratives of identity. keywords: transgender, gender identity, testosterone, heterotopias, foucault, preciado, self, becoming, genre this revolution is going to be about love, about changing desires. . . . pase una cuestión de cambiar de deseos, de transformar los deseos. c’est la révolution de l’amour. – paul preciado, ouverture of something that never ended (van sant and michele 2020) introduction referring to dissolving gender boundaries, the epigraph above is spoken in a short film produced by gucci. while lounging in her roman home wearing modern lace pajamas, transgender actor silvia calderoni turns on the television to see paul preciado, an internationally recognized philosopher from spain. as preciado talks about superseding sexual binaries through individual transformation and experifeminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 mentation, he suddenly turns to address silvia through the screen1: “but you know what i’m talking about, silvia,” he says, studying her earnest face. “this revolution is going to be about love” (van sant and michele 2020). for many, it will seem out of place for a philosopher to appear in a fashion film.2 but the revolution preciado, the character, theorizes is also recounted in preciado the author’s book testo yonqui (testo junkie). like many manifestos, this text begins with a rejection: “este libro no es una autoficción” (preciado 2008, 15; this book is not an autofiction).3 because the book recounts preciado’s self-administration of testosterone, testo yonqui could quickly be classified as autofiction. instead, from this apophatic first sentence testo yonqui hedges its reader’s genre expectations then specifies what the book is: a fiction, a body-essay, and an autotheory. kaleidoscopic across each page, these genres blend, blur, and interrupt one another like the ideals preciado’s gender revolution upholds. as the first passage establishes the book’s hybrid textuality, it also anticipates testo yonqui’s topos of space in which preciado’s narrator beatriz (called b. p. throughout the text) takes testosterone. recent work by cultural geographers suggests that “space is a condensation of the acts that comprise it” (larisch 2015, 503), and in the introductory passage, preciado’s act is a performance of both genres and genders. after denoting the many genres the text will perform, b. p. lays out the book’s fictional plot and tells us that during the time period covered, “suceden dos mutaciones externas en el contexto próximo del cuerpo experimental” (preciado 2008, 15; two external mutations in the proximal context of the experimental body occur). first, there is the death of g. d., preciado’s real-life friend and leading queer activist guillaume dustan. then, almost simultaneously, there is “the tropism” of b. p. toward v. d., preciado’s real-life lover and feminist filmmaker virginie despentes. facilitated by testosterone, this second turn denotes the start of b. p.’s transformation into a 1 throughout the paper, i will be using he/his pronouns when referring to both preciado and testo yonqui’s narrator, b. p. (beatriz preciado). these are preciado’s preferred pronouns at the time of this paper’s publication. 2 “it is a little bit me, in the sense that he takes my words and my ideas, but it is also not exactly me, because philosophers rarely speak on tv and even more rarely have the chance of talking directly to those who are watching tv at home,” preciado (2020b) says in an interview—a statement reminiscent of jacques derrida in the documentary derrida (2002) in which he deconstructs a film’s ability to portray him accurately. 3 though bruce benderson produced an english translation of testo yonqui (testo junkie [preciado 2013]), his translation takes many liberties. unless otherwise stated, all subsequent translations of the spanish original will be my own. king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 man that loves a woman, a change that he chooses. then the narrator turns yet again: this time, from the mode of memoir to that of theory. in this article, i will explore how, within its oscillating genres, testo yonqui’s literary space allows or inhibits becomings, my term for self-generated transformations. even when those changes are prompted by death, inherent in testo yonqui’s becomings is a vitality emphasized—and dashed—by the text’s heterotopias: worlds within worlds that both mirror and upset the “real” world outside, as theorized in foucault’s essay “of other spaces.” in section 1, i establish how heterotopias are a productive lens through which to view transgender theory. section 2 narrows in on how both genre and gender, with their capricious identities, function as heterotopias throughout testo yonqui. the question, line by line, then becomes, who holds the agency to write these identities? section 3 considers the text’s limits to inspire becomings, including preciado’s own misuse of decolonizing language. but ultimately, as i discuss in section 4, preciado also gives readers tools to recognize oppressive structures then choose to resist. foucault provides six principles and their examples through which to define heterotopias, and i will use several of those principles as benchmarks throughout this article. some examples he gives, like mirrors and cinemas, are heterotopias due to the gap between real-time viewers and the images who exist in a different space. other heterotopic orders, like colonies, have darker meanings: utopias created at the expense of another, for whom it is a dystopia. this is the same relationship preciado seeks to subvert as he reappropriates the bioapparatuses of colonizing structures for a gender revolution. heterotopias therefore house an indeterminacy between being and nonbeing as well as a temporal uncertainty. this definition resonates with the interplay of genres in preciado’s text, which, unlike works from many other literatures from latin american to arabic that also question societal structures, has not yet been categorized as heterotopic.4 as foucault (1987, 27) writes, in a society without heterotopias “dreams dry up.” through considering testo yonqui as a heterotopic piece of literature, this article will illustrate the multivariate possibilities preciado creates for becomings as well as point out where those possibilities fall short. though preciado never uses the term “becomings,” the idea of transformation and metamorphosis is integral to his work. there are two categories in which he uses the verb to become (volver and convertirse in the original spanish): the personal and the political. “pero cómo el sexo y la sexualidad, se preguntarán, llegan a convertirse en el centro de la actividad política y económica?” preciado asks (2008, 26; but how did sex and sexuality, they will wonder, become the center of political and economic 4 see lindsey moore’s (2008) arab, muslim, woman: voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film; see also sharon larisch’s (2015) “mario bellatin's salón de belleza and the production of space.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 activity?). he answers this question by terming today’s world a “pharmacopornographic era.” a version of foucault’s biocapitalism, the pharmacopornographic entails the invention of a gendered, sexual subject and its reproduction through drugs, surgeries, and desires shaped by porn. quoting foucault’s the abnormal, preciado writes that each body becomes an “individual to correct” (62; individuo que es necesario corregir; quoting foucault 1999, 53). enabled by the technoscientific industry, men take viagra and women take the pill—the most used pharmaceutical in human history (tone 2001)—to achieve increasingly heterosexual attributes; both sexes undergo surgeries to enhance their bodies toward ideals promoted by porn. these phenomena are then exploited both economically and politically as companies exacerbate gender archetypes through marketing while governments place limits on how far these supplements can go.5 the political turns personal in testo yonqui when, to demonstrate how the pharmacopornographic era makes gender eternally malleable, the narrator destabilizes his physical self through testosterone. margaret frohlich (2010, 134) describes testo yonqui’s approach to gender as “sex design” rather than an unveiling, and indeed, preciado demonstrates agency over his visual identity while evading the often-oppressive analyses implemented by medical professionals to determine whether a female’s request for testosterone is legitimate. anticipating judgement for his choice “volverme un hombre” (2008, 48; to become a man), preciado acknowledges the bad press his decision might accrue: at a time when law and medicine are beginning to legitimize transsexuality, he describes testosterone as an experiment rather than a gateway to his truest gender identity. he writes that he is not taking testosterone to change into a man or to transsexualize his body, but “para traicionar” (to betray) what society wants to make of him (2008, 20). though there are potentially negative political implications to this approach, preciado’s project also represents his power—and the reader’s by proxy—to use what he wants from the pharmacopornographic era without conforming entirely to its rules. accordingly, scholars such as josé esteban muñoz (1999, 12) and frohlich (2010, 125) have labeled the narrator’s acts within testo yonqui as disidentificatory. disidentification is a term that has been adopted by theorists from various fields to denote a mindset that allows one to take pieces (ideologies, dress, affinities, etc.) from the dominant culture that serve their ideal identity, and then abandon or repurpose the rest. for example, one might embrace points from a historically patriarchal theory that resonate with their own experiences while reconceptualizing oppressive frameworks to better support their beliefs. notably, muñoz (1999, 4) uses 5 preciado also refers to this as a performative feedback loop, stating that concepts such as femininity and masculinity, transsexuality, consciousness, and the libido have been turned into tangible entities to be commercialized (see preciado 2008, 32–33). king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 the term disidentification in the context of racial and queer oppression to describe moments of “powerful and seductive . . . self-creation,” a definition that informs my use of becomings as well. nonetheless, this article considers preciado’s act distinct from traditional understandings of disidentification. though preciado has used the term “biodrag” as an operative concept in his work, the modifier “bio” implies a transformation that is not so finite. a molecular change through testosterone functions distinctly from a costume or a gesture: it cannot be taken off at the end of the night, as muñoz writes of the vogue dancers’ drag in new york city.6 becomings, on the other hand, constitute forward motion that is more corporeal than ephemeral—the changes preciado undergoes are concrete: changes in his physical constitution. when he takes the last dose of testosterone, preciado’s narrator writes, “las cosas avanzan” (2008, 306; things are advancing). there is also a multiplicity to this forward motion: just as a river is never the same river twice as it flows, preciado’s gender and the identity it denotes transform constantly as the hormones move through his body. because these changes are so perpetual that it is difficult to pin them down to define them, i speak of becomings as a plural noun, nodding also to the multiplicity inherent in heterotopias. 1. heterotopias: a framework for transgender writing throughout queer and transgender writings, the medium has been part of the exposition. but for transgender writing, the answer to what that medium is has not been clear. in her article “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance,” talia mae bettcher (2014) speaks to the various models of transgender narratives, from the “wrong-body” model to the “beyond-the-binary” model. unsatisfied with these constructs, bettcher (2014, 389) describes her search for her own model and those of her community: “our self-identifications are generally complex and hard to pin down. indeed, the very meanings of gender terms are not stable. they’re both variable and contested.” bettcher’s description resonates with walter mead’s (1995, 13) definition of heterotopias: “a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another.” the word “collection” is important here: despite the inconsistencies, differences are brought together to form something new. through his hybrid, indefinable genres, preciado creates his own collection of memoir, philosophy, manifesto, and elegy, to name a few. in testo yonqui’s introduction, preciado writes of its form, “si el lector encuentra dispuestos aquí, sin solución de 6 “the performances come to an end. club kids stumble into taxis in broad daylight . . . . is this the performance’s end? that moment when the venue closes?” (muñoz 2009, 80). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 continuidad, reflexiones filosóficas, narraciones de sesiones de administractión de hormonas y relatos detallados de prácticas sexuales, es simplemente porque este es el modo en el que se construye y se decronstruye la subjetividad” (2008, 16; if the reader finds laid out here, without a continuous solution, philosophical reflections, accounts of hormone administration, and detailed records of sexual practices, it is simply because this is the mode on which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed). i see this disclaimer as a link between testo yonqui’s elusive genres and the inconstancy of self-determination, or what butler (2004) might call being “undone” as one seeks autonomy from institutions outside oneself. as i will explore further below, heterotopias are also based on shifting relations: recall the colony that is utopian from one perspective, dystopian from another. while preciado’s narrator b. p. explores his identity between an act of independence—self-administering testosterone—and the institutions that created tgel to reinforce gender binaries, he is searching through this neither/nor space, using and being used by the master’s tools. heterotopias are not only variable but are spaces of difference and liminality, making them an effective way to describe this search both in testo yonqui and perhaps transgender writing more broadly. ii. heterotopia as genre as gender the two categories of becomings (personal and political) occur within two layers of heterotopias. the first is the text’s genres—the world of the text—and the second is the specific spaces narrated within those genres, which i will analyze in the following section. here, space is defined as the dimensions inside which a thing exists. how might we then understand genre as a heterotopic space? through its constant becomings and unravelings, testo yonqui’s genre, which performs like its gender, functions as a heterotopia. presenting as a hybrid of genres from memoir to fiction to theory, preciado’s book eludes traditional narrative structures and facilitates kaleidoscopic interpretations of the text: it is both a historical account and a personal story. certainly, genre is not typically considered a space. but if a text is approached as its own world, then the genres are like the rooms whose rules ideas pass through. that those “rooms” are named and hierarchized speaks to the history of heterotopias: once galileo unlocked an infinite world beyond our world, foucault (1986, 23) writes, humans became fixed on trying to classify their spaces.7 but, as i will demonstrate in the case of testo yonqui’s genres, under scrutiny these classifications dissolve to reveal space as “no longer anything but a point in its movement” (foucault 1986, 21); 7 though galileo did not discover on his own that the earth revolved around the sun, he is used by foucault as a metaphor for the post-medieval understandings of earth in relation to the universe. king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 though relations between spaces and their inhabitants briefly exist, these relations shift too fast to merit binaries. from the introductory paragraph, we see preciado playing with the notion of genre as gender—género como género in spanish, its original language in which these words are homonyms. they are also derived from the same latin root, genus, meaning “birth, family, nation,” with earlier meanings, including “kind, sort, species,” linking testo yonqui’s genre to its gender through syllogistic logic. “es un ensayo corporal” (2008, 15; it is a body essay), he writes. first, by linking the somatic to the linguistic, preciado is saying that the book—his words—performs like his body. it then follows that, by performing like the body, the essay performs like gender. as sophie a. jones (2018, 2) notes in “the biodrag of genre in paul b. preciado’s testo junkie”: “wearing genre as a mode of drag, preciado self-consciously juxtaposes the genre codes of pornography, elegy, memoir, the manifesto, and the grand narrative in order to expose the contingency of the truths these forms espouse.” jones’s term “genre codes” also relates to the rules assigned to space: is a home still just a home if it stands above a grave? is a story just a story when based in theory? because testo yonqui explores whether the visual connotes essential identity, it seeks to debunk the idea that “gender” is defined by normative bodies that can be neatly categorized. as we “watch” b. p.’s body transform throughout the text, does b. p. become a different narrator? can we trust this self-portrayal since preciado himself holds the pen? but given most readers’ dispositions to identify things as one form or another, even as preciado flirts with and evades his female identity through testosterone, the genders, the genres, and the spaces they embody are resistant to change. these shifting, indefinable genres are therefore constructed to be destabilized in the same way that preciado’s body, and thereby his gender, is rearranged. another notable commonality between gender and genre, especially as we speak of performances, is their reliance on linguistic shells. for example, in the first passage when preciado recounts g. d.’s death, he could have packaged the facts in a detached, objective manner like a history instead of as a mythic domino effect. but after g. d.’s death, preciado writes that “casi simultáneamente, el tropismo del cuerpo de b. p. hacia el cuerpo de v. d.” (2008, 15; almost simultaneously, there is the tropism of b. p.’s body in the direction of v. d.’s body). here, preciado frames the emotions surrounding g. d.’s death as catalysts toward taking testosterone, an act that augmented his affair with v. d. but this is only a fictional portrayal of separate core facts: g. d. died, b. p. took testosterone, b. p. was sleeping with v. d. certainly, the content changes slightly based on genre, just as the presentation of a word, a gesture, an embrace changes slightly based on an individual’s assumed gender. but the greatest change is in how the reader understands the “facts” based on their labels. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 just as the monikers “man” or “woman” often come with certain assumptions, so too do preciado’s genre categories. as the genres and their aspects shift, we see constant motion that eludes binary definitions. “no hay conclusión definitiva acerca de la verdad de mi sexo” (16, there is not a definitive conclusion around the truth of my sex), the narrator writes in the first passage. with no fixed teleology, both genre and gender in testo yonqui present as a progression throughout their respective spaces. in a similar vein, kevin hetherington’s the badlands of modernity: heterotopias and social ordering links foucault’s spaces with the performance inherent in becomings, affirming that heterotopias “reveal the process of social ordering to be just that, a process rather than a thing” (hetherington 1997, xi). for hetherington, heterotopias are thus defined by the performance of alternate spatial orderings. capable of escaping hegemonic binaries such as life/death, truth/fiction, and pure/perverse, heterotopias reveal the space-time discontinuity to allow for ambivalent, dualistic realities. as preciado breaks down these binaries within genre’s space, thwarting “any definitive conclusion about the truth of my sex, or predictions about the world to come” (2008, 16; no hay conclusión definitiva acerca de la verdad de mi sexo, ni profecía sobre el mundo a venir), he affirms the potential of art and theory to function as visual laboratories that counter this constructed reality: in the cracks where oppressive creeds once were, he shows us heterotopic spaces for becoming. but if these spaces are discontinuous, how does preciado relate them to the time—and, by proxy, the history—that moves through them? in line with foucault’s (1986, 26) statement that “heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time” that are then disrupted, jones (2018, 1) states that the genres in testo yonqui articulate the persistence of past into present by portraying hormones as a tool for both historical oppression and future liberation. however, rather than dealing with the tension inherent in this dichotomy by integrating dark histories into the narrator’s determined voice, preciado tends to alternate the genres and their associated themes: b. p.’s fictions focus on the personal, and the histories examine societal motifs. but once in a while, this compartmentalization “slips,” and the narrator’s voice appears, frightened, within a history, then disappears again when it has had enough. when recounting the history of cars, for example, preciado begins by linking their decline to his birth year. by the end of this section, however, the “i” voice has disappeared once more behind third-person theorizations. this unsteady interplay between history and fiction does link testo yonqui to many autofictions,8 but preciado denies this categorization from the first line. popularized in france, autofiction was a genre that became associated with the 8 notable examples of autofictions are maggie nelson’s the argonauts, roland barthes’s a lover’s discourse, and marguerite duras’s the lover. king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 feminist movement, which gendered it a female genre. its tenets include (1) that it is not a memoir or an autobiography because those genres are reserved for “important people,” and (2) that what is fictional is anchored in reality (lévesque-jalbert 2020). the second tenet acknowledges a fault in traditional narratives about the self (for example, memoirs and autobiographies) which present as nonfiction accounts despite the fabrications used to smooth the narrative into something more marketable. autofiction, on the other hand, is aware of an individual’s limits to recreate the self and is thereby candid about its inventions, misrememberings, and biases used to present a curated version. nonetheless, any fictions must still be based on real happenings, which limits the author’s ability to dream realities anew. preciado consistently denies testo yonqui’s capacity to unlock truth, especially truths of the self, thereby rejecting autofiction’s premise to remain anchored in reality. he also separates the book from his personal emotions: “no me interesan aquí mis sentimientos, en tanto que míos, perteneciéndome a mí y a nadie más que a mí” (2008, 15; i’m not interested here in my emotions insomuch as their being mine, pertaining to me and to no one else but to me). this assertion is significant because most memoirs focus on emotional arcs and development: they’re personal narratives. instead, preciado claims that his book favors a representation of larger forces— historical, molecular, political, technological—that have shaped conceptions of gender. following these rejections, preciado accedes that the book is a fiction; in line with the transformative power of becomings, i see fiction as connected to revolutions. both involve a voice that envisions new realities, a notion that preciado corroborates in an interview with gucci following the release of ouverture of something that never ended. speaking about revolutions against taxonomies of oppression, preciado (2020b) says, “this is why fiction is so interesting. in order to change, the first thing that must be mobilized is the imagination—we need to be able to imagine that it is possible to change the way we live, we feel, we fall in love, the way we understand kinship or society.” one of testo yonqui’s fictional passages, for example, recounts the first time b. p. saw v. d. while handing out pamphlets for a pansexual revolution. though it would be five years before they’d meet again, a different kind of revolution was set in motion during b. p.’s political demonstration—“el tropismo del cuerpo de b. p. hacia el cuerpo de v. d.” (15). here, preciado demonstrates a shift in the way people can love: two women fall in love as one becomes a man, a testament also to core identities untouched by gender categories. but how is this love story different from any real-life account? why call passages of testo yonqui a fiction when b.p. represents preciado himself? though testo yonqui cannot be considered a fiction in the strictest literary sense, this genre speaks to the subjectivity in the narrator’s voice. through all the well-cited theory and logical scaffolding, b. p.’s voice represents the strongest instances of becomings in the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 text—the fiction appears in assertions that cannot be proven but rather only felt. extrapolating from his love for v. d., preciado writes, el amor es un tipo de mapa de conexiones neurológicas que durante un tiempo regula nuestra producción de afectos. . . . hoy estar enamorado es forzosamente comunicar con la totalidad del planeta. sentir el planeta. (2008, 288; love is a type of map of neurological connections that for a time regulate our production of affects. . . . being in love today is inevitably communicating with the entire planet. feeling the planet.) apart from adding poetry, these statements also reflect b. p.’s character development throughout the book. in the beginning, we’re introduced to a beatriz who lived through francoist spain with her head hung low, who explored her lesbian identity in secret and was unsure of how to approach v. d. but by the end, b. p. allows her feelings to embody her—to be another “prosthetic system” to her identity just as testosterone has been (preciado 2008, 288; sistema protésico). through literary voice, dress, chemicals, and choice, preciado demonstrates a degree of volition in how he sees himself within his world. what i call a becoming, frohlich calls an enchantment, continuing that “b. p.’s description of her identity in this scene fits with muñoz’s description of an alternative type of subject who neither identifies with nor strictly rejects dominant culture: ‘the “disidentificatory subject” . . . tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form’” (frohlich 2010, 125; quoting muñoz 1999, 12). once again, we understand becomings, disidentification’s kin, as moments of “powerful and seductive . . . self-creation” (muñoz 1999, 4) made capable within testo yonqui’s fictional riffs. the capacity for change through narrating our own stories is also elucidated in philosopher federico campagna’s concept of “magic”: the path of embracing a particular, alternative reality system. by “reality system,” campagna is referring to an individual’s circumstances—social class, hegemony, hierarchy—and their respective rules for propriety and mobility that most people accept without analysis. through questioning these realities, campagna advocates a therapeutic mindset he calls magic thinking. in his book technic and magic, he asks how we can use the truth that “truths” shift over time to shape our own experiences: since god’s death, we have been left alone to decide the axiomatics of our understanding of the world. we have to set the ground over which we can place our meaningful construction of a world that we can inhabit. these axiomatics, i call “reality-settings”: the historically specific decision (witting or unwitting) over what criteria we use to king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 understand the baffling experience of existing somewhere, somewhen. . . . what are the implicit metaphysical assumptions that define the architecture of our reality, and that structure our contemporary existential experience? what defines at the core the peculiarity of our present time, as opposed, for example, to previous times populated by ghosts and gods? (campagna 2018, introduction) by unpacking the metaphysical assumptions (axiomatics) of our time and recognizing that any “truths” might be arbitrary favorites of the latest hegemony, campagna champions our magic power to “modify our own reality-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck” (2018, introduction). for example, foucault’s description of cemeteries involves magical thinking. when recounting their history, he notes that before cemeteries were on the outskirts, it was a “time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul” (foucault 1986, 25). therefore, set in the reality principles of an earlier time, death was considered more connected to life, so cemeteries were placed at the heart of cities. though concrete change like the cemetery’s placement is important, campagna describes changing reality-settings as a “pre-political process that is crucial to any radical rethinking of our political and social life” (2018, introduction). while becomings can involve physical changes that campagna’s magic does not, testo yonqui similarly champions those pre-political motions that literature can set forth in readers’ minds. campagna also links magic’s reality-system to heterotopias, stating that this reality-system is not a utopia but rather “a force that lives in nâ-kojâ-abâd, ‘the land of non-where,’” (2018, introduction). later, discussing french philosopher gilbert simondon, campagna (2018, 28) also describes what happens to those spaces where technology and culture meet: “a blurring of all formal lines towards a field of openended ‘becoming.’” in the simondon example, “becoming” refers to the fusion of techno and human, not unlike preciado’s description of his own body transforming through testogel. this act—foiling binaries by blurring the lines—is also seen in heterotopias, which elude definitions. as maría patricia ortiz (2017, 196) notes, “si la estructura de los espacios hegemónicos produce marcas definitivas en la identidad individual, es posible también que las heterotopías articulen de una manera alterna la subjetividad del individuo” (if the structure of the hegemonic spaces produces definitive marks on individual identity, it is also possible that heterotopias articulate an alternative way of the individual’s subjectivity). set in a space that itself constitutes an amorphous reality, preciado’s characters also have more latitude to explore the nuances of their identities. of his text’s fluid nature, preciado writes that it is simply the mode in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed; internal realities are feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 manufactured to be broken down by the fact they were created rather than born unalloyed. in the first episode of the gucci short film series, “at home,” codirectors gus van sant and alessandro michele (2020) exemplify this reality construction through silvia’s morning routine: each wardrobe change and whim asks, who will i be today? without influence from the outside world, her home facilitates an intimacy with herself as well as an agency for self-creation. as she stretches in front of the tv, she settles into her body; she finds inspiration for the day in her own being. commenting on silvia’s activities, preciado (2020b) notes how the dress she picks is anachronistic, “from another historical period, or even from a fairy-tale,” allowing the film to traverse time bounds, which is another foucauldian tenet of heterotopias. then, when she lets a flowery kimono fly away into the wind, preciado likens it to relinquishing a female signifier of fashion (2020b). as in testo yonqui, silvia’s story is interrupted by flashes of oppressive hierarchies—while preciado is recounting the hegemonic history surrounding sex, she takes notes and considers. but ultimately, she chooses to discard those uninspiring realities and in the following episode, “at the cafe,” she leaves her home to explore a neighborhood with characters just as quirky, surreal, and comfortable in their nonbinary identities as she is. there is a stepping out reminiscent of dorothy into oz: silvia’s private dreams become her public realities as well. but imagine that sometimes the oz she steps into is harsh, is not her own like much of the world preciado’s pharmacopornographic theory describes. i’ll now explore this anxiety inherent to heterotopias and testo yonqui’s literary space. iii. limits of heterotopias in heterotopias, cultural sites are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (foucault 1986, 24). thus, with every triumph comes pushback. these limits of heterotopias are also limits to testo yonqui’s possibilities for becomings. because heterotopias are often residual spaces from failed utopias, their identities can be inherently less-than. foucault’s sixth principle of heterotopias states that “they have a function in relation to all the space that remains (1986, 27). this entails that not only can heterotopias exist because of their relative spaces, but— when the other culture is dominant—they can be subjected to them as well. bettcher speaks of the transgender experience in terms of maría lugones’s “multiple worlds of sense,” a concept not unlike heterotopias. “i think that there are many worlds, not autonomous, but intertwined semantically and materially, with a logic that is sufficiently self-coherent and sufficiently in contradiction with others to constitute an alternative construction of the social,” lugones (2003, 20) writes. for transgender individuals, these worlds are more than semantics. for example, bettcher (2014, 389) describes a scenario in which a woman in a trans subculture is loved as a woman; king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 however, if she were incarcerated by the dominant society, she would be jailed as a man. to illustrate his sixth principle of heterotopias, foucault describes colonies and their multivalent power imbalances. here, he speaks of colonies in their true and literal sense: the subjugation and exploitation of societies, lands, and peoples. many colonies were meticulously laid out, their schedules regulated by the church bell. but it goes without saying that these spaces were not halcyon: instead, they were sites of subjugation and inhumanity. preciado also refers to colonies in his discussions of inequity, but he uses them a metaphor. for example, in yo soy el monstruo que os habla: informe para una academia de psicoanalistas, which preciado (2020a) presented, in part, as a speech to l’école de la cause freudienne in paris, he describes the trans body as a “colony”—for science, for culture, for lustmord. he notes how opposing camps of psychoanalysts and doctors fight over his body’s legitimacy. like america once was to spain, the trans body has become a place of culture and riches irreducible to the imperial mind, he explains (preciado 2020a, 46). at a metaphorical level, this description tracks with foucault’s theory of colonies as a type of heterotopia: they have a function to compensate for lacks in real spaces; to be perfect “other” spaces (1986, 27). comparing the trans body to colonies is to suggest limits to an individual’s agency over their own becomings and define them in relation to a heteronormative way of being. while preciado’s application of the word “colonies” allows convenient analyses via heterotopic lenses, its metaphorical use raises an important question about his position relative to his theories: can preciado himself be considered among the “colonized”? early in testo yonqui, he chronicles the testing grounds of biomedical research for what are now common gender-affirming treatments. many seminal hormone experiments were carried out in colonial or psychiatric settings. the pill, for example, was tested on the island of puerto rico (2008, 124). though preciado’s contempt for this history is clear, to use language of decolonization for his own body is inaccurate. for starters, preciado’s self-administration of testosterone is a choice, and to be colonized is not to be complicit in one’s own subjugation. analogizing himself to executed animals whose testicles are collected by hormone laboratories, he writes, cada vez que me administro una dosis de testosterona acepto ese pacto. soy la ballena azul y sus enormes ovarios. me vuelvo el toro degollado del matadero, el condenado a muerte y sus testículos recuperados para la ciencia. establezco un contrato en el que todo mi deseo se alimenta—y alimenta retroactivamente—las cadenas globales que transforman células vivas en capital. (123; every time i give myself a dose of testosterone, i accept this pact. i am the blue feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 whale and its enormous ovaries. i become the slaughtered bull, condemned to death whose testicles are recovered for science. i form a contract whereby my desire is fed by—and retroactively feeds— global channels that transform living cells into capital.) here, a system he resents—one that uses him—is the means to his desires. there is power, he proposes, in this strategic reappropriation of biotechnological apparatuses: it’s a means to resist and displace heterosexual masculinity and femininity. while preciado’s argument converses with tensions theorized between medical practitioners and transgender identity, it is not a question of colonization. as eve tuck and k. wayne yang describe in “decolonization is not a metaphor,” superficially adopting decolonizing discourse for conversations around human rights skirts the “more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land” (2012, 19). “decolonization brings about the repatriation of indigenous land and life,” they write. “it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools” (1). thus, preciado’s endeavor is not a decolonizing one: though the formulation of biomedical means for gender-affirmation is linked to colonial histories, as a white european, preciado’s voluntary administration of testosterone is removed from this lineage. by establishing parameters for in-groups versus out-groups, foucault’s fifth principle of heterotopias provides further frameworks by which to analyze preciado’s position. heterotopias, foucault writes, presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. in general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual must submit to rites and purifications. to get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification. (foucault 1986, 26) so, who is in charge of the opening and closing? who sets the rules, and do these rules give transgender individuals the agency to choose who they are within that space, in this case the geography of gender? returning to preciado’s description of the pharmacopornographic era, the gendered, sexual subject is reproduced through drugs, surgeries, and porn. while none of those arenas permit total individual agency, even preciado’s co-option of the mechanisms through self-administration perpetuates an in-group and an out-group. despite his implication that, through his dependence on testosterone, he is among king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 the colonized, as a prominent philosopher living in france preciado would not be subject to the same repercussions as someone in different circumstances. instead, he has a “certain permission” that would not be universally granted. ultimately, though it does highlight the permeability of the heterotopic spaces throughout testo yonqui, his metaphorical use of decolonization instead emphasizes his privilege. closer to the french psychoanalytic tradition with which preciado often interacts, he also explores political subjection through a lacanian lens. the pharmacopornographic era, he writes, functions contrary to the traditional ideals of lacan’s mirror stage: in the former, the subject does not even recognize itself in its representation (2008, 284). in traditional psychoanalytic theory, the mirror stage is the moment when, as infants, we recognize ourselves in the mirror’s image and “enjoy a coherence which the subject itself lacks—it is an ideal image” (silverman 1994, 157). foucault also describes mirrors as heterotopias in “of other spaces,” writing, “from the standpoint of the mirror i discover my absence from the place where i am since i see myself over there” (1986, 24). this sense of lack can be seen through continued analysis of the relationship between the mirror stage and pornography. in chapters separate from his beautiful descriptions of love and magic, preciado theorizes how the public pornographic sphere curbs the freedoms v. d. and b. p. experience in their private, fictional space. even in the pre-internet era, lacan considered his mirror stage unending. now, the cycle of desire and lack that our ideal images [imagos] create has become not only inescapable but commodified. kaja silverman (194, 160) points out the cultural mediation of this ideal, stating, “‘ideal’ is a term which has meaning only within a system of values.” in the pharmacopornographic era, preciado explains a similar cycle of desire and lack that occurs through the idealization of hypergendered actors. anticipating consumers’ sense of inadequacy, pharmaceutical companies promise to allay these physical lacks through hormones and prosthetics. but as more people, especially in the media, embody masculine and feminine ideals, the standard becomes even harder to achieve. this ideal is explained in lacan’s mirror stage, which entails that one sees an ideal version of oneself on the screen and, though that person exists, only their imago is knowable to the othered viewer. the imago itself is a breed of myth, thus the viewing space of a pornography film becomes heterotopic through tensions between the mythic and the real. from a literary standpoint, there is also an uneasiness in the shifting nature of testo yonqui’s genres, an uneasiness inherent in heterotopias. when we reach a hopeful moment in a memoir section, it risks being undercut by the overarching theory. thus, the becomings facilitated through testo yonqui’s fictions are at times tainted by the ontological distance preciado creates between his self as the philosopher and the story he tells. instead of calling his personal accounts memoirs, he calls them “autotheories,” or theories of the self. émile jalbert-lévesque notes that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 rather than addressing the tension between fiction and nonfiction, testo yonqui frames autotheory at the “extreme limit of that very opposition where theory emerges from a self-fictionalization” (2020, 81). by externalizing his psyche, as preciado’s puts it, he is able to view his character b. p. through a theoretical lens that would not be possible from a subjective close-up—analyzing his mind from his own mind might seem less convincing. preciado writes: “se registran aquí tanto las micromutaciones fisiológicas y políticas provocadas por la testosterona en el cuerpo de b. p., como las modificaciones teóricas y físicas suscitadas en ese cuerpo por la pérdida, el deseo, la exaltación, el fracaso o la renuncia” (2008, 15; recorded here are both the physiological and political micromutations provoked in b. p.’s body by testosterone, as well as the theoretical and physical changes incited in that body by loss, desire, elation, failure, or renouncement). “recorded here”: through clinical language, preciado depersonalizes his experience, an effect also achieved through the initialing of his story’s characters. using these fictions as case studies—as if viewing life on a petri dish—limits some of the fiction’s expansive power to inspire becomings in readers. i see this as connected to campagna’s (2018, chap. 1) view of overtheorizing: “like a novel reduced to pure grammar, the present age has shunned the question of meaning as a sign of superstition and nostalgia, while relegating reality to the status of an obsolete concept which is to be overcome if we wish to fully unleash our productive potential.” testo yonqui’s ending, while striking a note of triumph, is also tinged by delimiting theory. in the final chapter, “eternal life” (la vida eterna) preciado stands with v. d. at g. d.’s grave and addresses him from the collective view of all the activists he honors in this text: mientras nos alejamos dejando atrás tu cuerpo, que ya ha empezado a fermentar entre las flores de montparnasse, te prometo que vendremos a tocarnos las tetas encima de tu tumba, que vendremos a dejar sobre la losa las huellas de nuestros fluidos corporales, como dos lobos dormiremos sobre tu tumba, calentaremos tus huesos, como dos vampiros vendremos a saciar tu sed de sexo, de sangre y de testosterona. (2008, 310; as we walk away from your body, which has already begun to ferment among the flowers of montparnasse, i promise you that we will come to rub our bodies against your grave, that we will come to leave the traces of our bodily fluids on the slab; like a pack of mutating wolves, we will sleep on your earth, warm your bones; and like vampires, we will come to quench your thirst for sex, blood, and testosterone.) king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 here, i note muñoz’s idea of the performative “trace” as well as preciado’s revolution compelled by death.9 though the book ends with hopeful promises to ghosts, thereby integrating the past with the future, this fictional gesture is at odds with the timebound history before it. the apostrophic device itself reveals this tension: “isn’t my politics yours?” (preciado 2013, 20), the narrator asks g. d.10 this question will never be answered, and it reflects the apostrophe’s uneasy combination of coercion and supplication. as jones (2018, 9) notes, this ambivalent balance of power and powerlessness in apostrophe expresses the fact that history is not just a matter of transmission and inheritance but of human intervention and activity. apostrophe thus strains against testo yonqui’s becomings by suggesting futility in its fictional addresses. though preciado’s text, especially when considered a manifesto, acknowledges the human power to alter history, it ultimately shies from claiming complete agency. but this realism can cut the book’s ability to inspire: as campagna writes, embracing rather than theorizing uncertainty “might be much more refreshing than rearranging the coloured squares on the mosaic of contemporary theory, which too often results in rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic of cynical reason” (2018, preface). preciado’s philosophical aims stated outside testo yonqui can perhaps provide more insight into these cynical observations. maintaining a skeptic air, preciado (2016, 25) writes, “the book . . . uses the form of the grand narrative to tell the history of the somathèque from the point of view of the political minorities, to narrate this story as a trojan poet.” the qualified narration—“as a trojan poet”—suggests hyperbole that frames the “i” and its triumphs by the grave with a note of parody. speaking of manifestos in general, marshall berman (1983, 102) notes that they are “remarkable for [their] imaginative power.” however, rather than allowing testo yonqui’s imaginative potential to ring unchecked, preciado’s qualification questions his belief, and thereby the reader’s, in this power. though this passage’s heroic hope is certainly admirable, its parodic tone echoes jones’s (2018, 2) assertion that “testo junkie is a text in flight from itself.” despite these limitations, i’ve so far held off from the second and perhaps most defining principle of heterotopias for this article: “that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have 9 see muñoz’s (2009) “gesture, ephemera, and queer feeling: approaching kevin aviance.” 10 this is benderson’s translation of preciado’s (2008; 23) “acaso mi política no es la vuestra?” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 one function or another” (foucault 1986, 25). in testo yonqui’s case, this other culture is the imagined world: fiction. iv. heterotopic settings for becomings the example foucault gives of his second principle is a cemetery, and fittingly, this is where testo yonqui’s first fictional passage begins. as spaces of both disappearance and quasi-eternity, cemeteries encapsulate difference. according to foucault (1986, 25), burial grounds were once the centers of communities until relegated to the suburbs when death became an illness rather than a rite of immortality. today, this deportation of the dead might make us think of aids victims buried on hart island on the outskirts of mainland new york city. preciado brings death to testo yonqui’s forefront—for our dead ones, its dedication reads, almost like a headstone to begin the book. the first passage of testo yonqui is a metaphorical cemetery cataloging two moribund transformations: “la muerte de g. d. . . . y, casi simultáneamente, el tropismo del cuerpo de b. p. hacia el cuerpo de v. d., ocasión irrenunciable de perfección y de ruina” (2008, 12; there is the death of g. d. . . . and, almost simultaneously, there is the tropism of b. p.’s body in the direction of v. d.’s body, an opportunity for perfection—and for ruin). “perfection” recalls foucault’s definition of utopias as a contrast to heterotopias. the former are places so ideal that they are nonplaces, thereby situating v. d. in a nonexistent realm. “ruin” also foreshadows the end of the book when, realizing v. d. is his future widow, preciado presages his own death. here, we see two cases of physical life to physical death: where is the “freedom process” of becoming? in line with campagna’s proposition to “modify our own reality-settings,” testo yonqui calls out delimiting histories and then moves beyond them. at the end of his book, written to mourn g. d., though preciado tells us that words could not bring his friend back, he still rejects the full stop that death might imply. far from an ending, g. d.’s burial is declared the marriage site for v. d. and b. p, a site where g. d.’s spirit can oversee it: “tú, nadie más que tú, podía ser el oficiante-espectro que sellara bajo la tierra alianza entre tu muerte y nuestro amor” (2018, 310; you, and no one else, will be the officiating ghost who will seal the alliance between your death and our love under the earth”). here, in the cemetery’s heterotopia, preciado collapses borders of both earthly life and gender proprieties. standing above a man who has died, b. p. begins a new life by marrying a woman as he sets out to become a man. though foucault does not identify weddings as heterotopias, preciado’s metaphorical marriage to v. d. functions as such, especially given its untraditional gendering. the wedding is the counterpart to the brothel, which, as i will explain later in this section, foucault identifies as a heterotopia of deviation. marriage, on the other hand, represents a space neatly enclosed in norms and proprieties: it is a utopia, king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 which foucault defines as an “unreal” place because it represents society in a perfected form. “therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh,” says genesis 2:24. in this union, we see forebears of carl jung’s syzygy, an archetypal pairing of contrasexual opposites—male and female—to create the perfected psyche. but a real marriage eludes this perfection since, even when compatible, each partner can only approach the relationship as an individual; its idealized construct is therefore a nonplace. by breaking down the biblical norms, b. p.’s untraditional marriage to v. d. can instead be considered a heterotopia.11 not only does the wedding occur in a cemetery, but it is a marriage that is neither heterosexual nor homosexual and, as testo yonqui’s first passage tells us, this neither/nor will never crystallize. the positionality of the cemetery in the outskirts, particularly cemeteries such as hart island, aligns with foucault’s description of “heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed” (1986, 25). heterotopias of deviation imply that in today’s society, acceptance is contingent on normality, thus the easiest solution toward a more orderly society is to extradite whoever compromises the leading vision. while g. d.’s burial happens in montparnasse, an artistic hub in paris, b. p. describes an eerie sense of real and supernatural worlds colliding. la gente avanza sola, o de dos en dos hasta el montículo de tierra que han sacado para poder meterte a ti. ahora eres tú el que ha tomado el lugar que antes ocupaba esa tierra y esa tierra, fuera, está donde tú estabas antes, aquí entre nosotros, los vivos. (2008, 309; people come forward alone, or two by two toward the mound of earth that they have removed to put you in. now you’re the one who will take the place of that earth, the place that this land used to occupy and that land, outside, is where you were before, here among us, the living.) as he speaks to g. d. enclosed in his casket beneath the earth, b. p. considers how his friend will become free as he had never been before. a contrast to the sacred rites of marriage and burial, the pornographic sphere in testo yonqui is another heterotopia of deviation that can harbor freedoms, at least in spaces not yet overtaken by the pharmacopornographic economy. using foucault’s paradigm of the brothel to exemplify his idea that heterotopias “create a space of illusion that exposes every real space . . . as still more illusory” (1986, 27), 11 because preciado cites his upbringing in catholic, francoist spain as a catalyst for his gender rebellion, i feel that christian references are relevant to this article’s analysis of marriage. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 pornography also reveals how even the most accepted constructs such as marriage can be dethroned. in both the brothel and the pornographic sphere, sex is explored in a space separate from the “real” world of nuclear families. thus, though both may provide visitors the illusion that their actions are safe from the judgement of traditional sexual morals, they also question the power and legitimacy of those morals—are marriage and its consummation truly sacred? rather than discussing its sacrilegious implications, preciado describes how, in its private form, pornography is a vehicle for b. p.’s intimacy with v. d. while taking pictures of v. d. in bed, b. p. says that each photograph brings with it the possibility of magic. “el amor es magia” (2018, 300; love is magic), he says in the following line. his conflation of sexual photography with love illustrates a version of pornography before it is publicly commodified. inherent in these photographs is a heterotopic oscillation between the real and unreal, especially as the pictures represent a modern version of lacan’s mirror stage—discovering one’s absence in one’s image. thus, though b. p. takes more and more photos of v. d. in an effort to capture her essence eternally (like a tattoo on the memory, he says), there will always remain a distance between her being and her image. despite its metaphysical impossibility, his persistence to express his love for v. d. demonstrates b. p.’s agency to create both art and memories that further his desires, the birthplace of his self’s becomings. certainly, the love that pornography represents in this scene could be easily adulterated by pharmacopornographic regimes described elsewhere in testo yonqui. though meant only for b. p., the pictures of v. d. might fall into ill-meaning hands—a common narrative for nude photos today. accordingly, in his chapter “historia de la technosexualidad” (history of technosexuality) preciado (2018, 57–67) describes how bodies are stripped of all legal and political status through online pornography. but this exploitative reality is precisely why preciado provides the alternative scene of b. p. and v. d.: even in spaces with great potential to coerce and harm (in this case, pornography), people can simultaneously create means for self-expression and love. these are the “both/and” moments that testo yonqui masterfully shapes: fiction, pornography, funerals, and bodies can hold vulnerability and magic all in one breath. because these dualities are especially heightened in transgender literature, foucault’s heterotopias provide apt templates for analyses even outside testo yonqui—as well as the inspiration to resist oppressive structures. in van sant and michele’s (2020) first short film, after silvia turns off preciado’s television show, she rummages through her wardrobe until she finds a pink chiffon dress laced with beads. she putters around the house in pink, she puts on some pants then, standing out on a balcony, lets the silk kimono blow away through the wind. as she gets ready for the day in starts, stops, and volte-faces, she is choosing which gradient of herself to become. perhaps these movements are circular or ambling, but they are moving always ahead in the reality she’s creating. without the king – spaces for becomings? heterotopic fictions in preciado’s testo yonqui published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 agency for forward motion, “dreams dry up,” as foucault writes (1986, 27), but through the heterotopic fictions seen in testo yonqui, we might create definitions of identity that suit us best. references berman, marshall. 1983. all that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. london: verso. bettcher, talia mae. 2014. “trapped in the wrong theory: rethinking trans oppression and resistance.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 39, no. 2 (winter): 383–406. https://doi.org/10.1086/673088. butler, judith. 2004. undoing gender. new york: routledge. campagna, federico. 2018. technic and magic: the reconstruction of reality. london: bloomsbury. kindle. foucault, michel. 1986. “of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias.” translated by jay miskowiec. diacritics 16, no. 1 (spring): 22–27. ———. 1999. les anormaux: cours au collège de france, 1974–1975. gallimard, paris. frohlich, margaret g. 2010. “lesbian desire and (dis)identification in beatriz preciado's testo yonqui.” letras femeninas 36, no. 1: 123–37. http://www.jst or.org/stable/23022339. hetherington, kevin. 1997. the badlands of modernity: heterotopia and social ordering. london: routledge. jones, sophie a. 2018. “the biodrag of genre in paul b. preciado’s testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era.” feminist encounters 2 (2): article 19. https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/3887. larisch, sharon. 2015, “mario bellatin’s salón de belleza and the production of space.” revista de estudios hispánicos 49, no. 3 (october): 503–24. https://doi.org/10 .1353/rvs.2015.0052. lévesque-jalbert, émile. 2020. “‘this is not an autofiction’: autoteoría, french feminism, and living in theory.” arizona quarterly: a journal of american literature, culture, and theory 76, no. 1 (spring): 65–84. https://doi.org/10.13 53/arq.2020.0002. lugones, maría. 2003. pilgrimages/peregrinajes: theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. mead, walter russell. 1995. “trains, planes, and automobiles: the end of the postmodern moment.” world policy journal 12, no. 4 (winter): 13–31. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/40209444. moore, lindsey. 2008. arab, muslim, woman: voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film. london: routledge. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 muñoz, josé esteban. 1999. disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2009. “gesture, ephemera, and queer feeling: approaching kevin aviance.” in cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity, 65–82. new york: new york university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qg4nr.8. ortiz, maría patricia. 2017. “el concepto de heterotopías de michel foucault en dos novelas de mario bellatin: salón de belleza y damas chinas.” hispania 100, no. 2 (june): 191–201. https://doi:10.1353/hpn.2017.0034. preciado, beatriz. 2008. testo yonqui. huertas, s.a.: espasa calpe. ———. 2013. testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. translated by bruce benderson. new york: the feminist press at city university of new york. preciado, paul b. 2016. “testo junkie notes for a psychoanalytic forum.” studies in gender and sexuality 17 (1): 23–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2016 .1135680. ———. 2020a. yo soy el monstruo que os habla: informe para una academia de psicoanalistas. madrid: nuevos cuadernos anagrama. ———. 2020b. “talking revolution with paul b. preciado.” interviewed by guccifest. archived december 31, 2020, at the wayback machine, https://www.guccife st.com/#/en/story-behind-the-story. silverman, kaja. 1994. the subject of semiotics. new york: oxford university press. tone, andrea. 2001. devices and desires: a history of contraceptives in america. new york: hill and wang. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. 2012. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1 (1). van sant, gus, and alessandro michele, dirs. 2020. ouverture of something that never ended. series of 7 short films. produced by gucci. originally presented november 16–22, 2020. archived december 31, 2020, at the wayback machine, https://www.guccifest.com/#/en/. caroline king is a writer and communications director currently working in the femtech and ai spaces. she was a master’s fellow in comparative literature at dartmouth college and holds a master’s in creative writing from the university of oxford as well as bachelor’s degrees in psychology, writing seminars, and spanish from johns hopkins university. a cofounder of the napkin poetry review, her poetry and research have appeared in southwest review, poetry quarterly, abridged, rational creature, clamantis, south central review, and staar among others. throughout her studies in the sciences as well as arts, she has explored new meanings of identity in the digital age. http://doi.org/10.1353/hpn.2017.0034 14490 king title page 14490 king final format mary daly's philosophy: some bergsonian themes feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation kapusta, stephanie. 2021. “mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (2). article 2. 2021 mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes stephanie kapusta dalhousie university stephanie.kapusta@dal.ca kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes stephanie kapusta abstract the primary goal of this article is point out certain close parallels between some ideas of the radical feminist theorist mary daly and those of the french philosopher henri bergson. these similarities are particularly striking regarding distinctions made by both authors between two fundamentally contrasting types of cognitive faculty, of time and temporal experience, and of self and emotion. daly departs from bergson inasmuch as she employs these distinctions in her own way. she does not—like bergson—employ them to depict the result of a natural process of consciousness or life, and the dangers for human freedom and thought of not properly respecting these differences. rather, she locates these differences within a more liberatory, ethical perspective to ground a sharp, inimical contrast between feminist creative movement on the one hand, and static, fixing, and “fixating” patriarchy, with its “technocratic” pretensions, on the other. my hope is that highlighting the similarities between daly and bergson will open new paths of appreciation and critique of daly’s work. keywords: mary daly, henri bergson, radical feminism, intuition, time, memory, self, patriarchy, process philosophy, metaphor introduction: the works of mary daly and their sources the thought of pioneering radical feminist mary daly has been discussed principally within feminist theology, feminist studies in religion, and feminist spirituality (monagle 2019; wood 2015; hunt 2014; plaskow 2012), or more generally in relation to daly’s historical role within feminist thought (telling 2012). daly has been extensively studied over the years within various strands of feminist theory regarding—among other things—her essentialism with respect to the category “woman” (alcoff 1988; suhonen 2000), her centering of patriarchy as fundamental to all forms of oppression (lorde 1983; west 2012), even with the danger of implicit racism and colonialism in her own work (narayan 1997; kassam 2012), and for her feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 explicit transphobia (stryker 1994; kelly 2016; partridge 2018).1 these critiques have proven to be very important for the development of feminist theory, but i do not focus on them in this article. in the present project, rather, i show similarities between some of daly’s radical feminist ideas and those of henri bergson. still, one might ask what the value is of looking at bergsonian strands in daly’s thought, given that several other authors have more explicitly, and in more detail, sought to engage bergson’s philosophy from the perspective of feminism, considering bergson’s relevance to issues of racism and colonialism. authors such as alia al-saji (2019), pamela sue anderson (2015; anderson and bunnin 2020), elizabeth grosz (2004), rebecca hill (2017, 2019), donna v. jones (2010, 2016), iris van der tuin (2015) and melanie white (2019) have all engaged with bergson.2 valuable as these works are, the present project aims, nevertheless, to be a contribution to the history of antitrans feminist philosophy (hence, the focus on daly) and its sources (with a focus on bergson), rather than a placing in dialogue of daly with other feminist authors influenced by bergson. the emphasis here is decidedly exegetical: first, it must be shown that some of daly’s ideas can, indeed, be given a bergsonian reading. confronting these findings with more contemporary feminist readings of bergson— about which i sketch some tentative ideas in the conclusion—is a subject for future work and far exceeds the bounds of the present article. as regards theoretical influences, mary daly’s debt to the protestant theologian paul tillich is commonly acknowledged (rodkey 2015; berry 2000; schneider 2000). the sources of several of daly’s ideas in social theory and philosophy—with a marked focus on simone de beauvoir and existentialism, thomas aquinas, and peter berger—have been studied in some detail by waslin (1998), again, mainly with a view to their theological implications. philosophical treatments of daly’s sources have concentrated on religious metaphysics and daly’s concept of god. focusing on daly’s gyn/ecology (1990), frankenberry (2018), for example, notes similarities between elements of daly’s thought and the stoic logoi spermatikoi3 that 1 from a contemporary, trans-, anticolonial, and antiracist feminist viewpoint, kubala (2020) states that one can view mary daly’s writings as examples of “bad feminism,” which should, nevertheless, be read and studied. 2 i thank an anonymous reviewer for challenging me to answer the “why daly?” question more explicitly and point me towards these authors. 3 in the context of the present discussion, frankenberry’s reference to the logoi spermatikoi in relation to daly’s work presents a suggestive parallel. in his critical assessment of bergson’s metaphysics, jacques maritain (whose concept of intuition was the object of daly’s phd dissertation in philosophy) attributes bergson’s only kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 link every human intimately to the divine, as well as christian mysticism’s scintilla animae, the “spark of the soul,” an element of the divine within the human soul of the mystic. there are also similarities here with the hegelian notion of “dispossession/repossession of the true, divine self” (ibid.). daly certainly used many literary, sociological, philosophical, and theological sources to create her own distinctive, radical feminist perspective. but few authors have noted the specifically philosophical influence bergson has had—directly or indirectly—on daly’s writings. daly does not often discuss bergson explicitly (an exception being daly’s beyond god the father [daly 1985b, 185–189], where daly cites bergson’s creative evolution). however, in the bibliography of her doctoral dissertation in philosophy, natural knowledge of god in the philosophy of jacques maritain, daly (1966, 131–132, 136) lists the thomist philosopher jacques maritain’s early and later confrontations with bergson’s thought—namely, bergsonian philosophy and thomism (maritain 1955) and de bergson à thomas d’aquin (maritain 1947), and also bergson’s les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1933). daly must thus have attained a degree of familiarity with bergson’s thought, particularly since maritain’s “intuition of being,” which figures prominently throughout daly’s corpus, arises out of a synthesis of bergsonian and thomist influences (sweet 2019; gwozdz 2010). besides maritain, some candidate-sources for more indirect bergsonian influence on daly would plausibly include the, by daly oft-cited, feminist novelist and essayist virginia woolf (see gillies 1996), the philosophers william james ([1909] 2019) and alfred north whitehead (see levanon 2018), as well as paul tillich (tillich 1944; [1963] 2011, part 4, ch.1, a1, and part 5, ch.1, sec. a2.b; see bandy 1984). a special mention should be made here of de beauvoir. daly encountered de beauvoir’s the second sex for the first time in the mid to late 1950s (daly 1992, 55), and of course her first book, the church and the second sex (1985a), was largely an engagement with de beauvoir’s analysis of women’s position within contemporary western society and within the doctrines and practices of the catholic church. michèle le doeuff (2004, 34)4 has claimed that “bergson’s philosophy could be deemed a major but veiled source of inspiration for the whole introduction to de beauvoir’s the second sex,” alluding to bergson’s depiction of the contrast between closed, static societies on the one hand, and open, dynamic ones on the other, in his two sources of morality and religion.5 in addition, margaret simons has pointed to formative, metaphysical source to plotinus, specifically, to the neoplatonic philosopher’s own notion of the logos spermatikos (maritain 1941, 66). 4 compare, also, anderson’s (anderson and bunnin 2020) elaboration of le doeuff’s bergsonian reading of de beauvoir. 5 see also the second sex (1964, 70) where de beauvoir depicts early, matrilineal human society in which “religion of woman was bound to the reign of agriculture, to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 de beauvoir’s engagement with bergson’s time and free will in her diaries from 1926 and 1927 (simons 2003, 2012), an engagement that probably took place before de beauvoir’s encounter with the ideas of marx, hegel, husserl, or sartre. simons isolates three methodological similarities that emerge when comparing the philosophical content of de beauvoir’s diaries and earlier works with the ideas of bergson. first, the flux of reality is not completely expressible in concepts or literal language (requiring recourse, as de beauvoir sees it, to the philosophical novel); second, exposing distortions in perception and thinking is a principal philosophical task; and third, a true philosophy must regain contact with immediate experience (simons 2003, 2012). as a related, fourth point of similarity we find the depiction of a “true” and “false” self or “the social and the personal ego” that de beauvoir draws from bergson prior to her engagement with phenomenology (see also hengehold 2017, 12, 37). daly, for her part, could not have read the diaries of de beauvoir, at least not as far as her works up to the late 1990s are concerned. nevertheless, in a way reminiscent of bergson and the early de beauvoir, daly’s project is also one of breaking through static perceptions and concepts to a new experience of self, the reign of irreducible duration [durée], of contingency, of chance, of waiting, of mystery.” in contrast, “the reign of homo faber is the reign of time manageable as space, of necessary consequences, of the project, of action, of reason.” bergson’s idea of intellect’s “distortion” of pure duration through the spatialization and conceptualization of time, and of mechanical causation, out of concern with the practicalities of life, are all present in this passage. interestingly, one of daly’s bones of contention with de beauvoir was the latter’s insistence in the second sex that women had always been “the second sex” throughout history. daly, however— relying mainly on elizabeth gould davis’s the first sex—was convinced that a matriarchal stage of history, in which women were culturally dominant, had existed (see daly 1985b, 138; 1998, ch. 3). it would thus seem natural for daly to wish to “recover” this archaic, more “natural,” and “mystical” past, while avoiding de beauvoir’s presumptions of (real or perceived) passivity. hence, her emphasis on the “archaic future” (daly 1998), in which women connect with a past time in the very process of creating a feminist future, and the importance of feminist memory as openness to future possibilities of freedom and creativity. in light of the above passage from de beauvoir, one can see how this might involve returning to a bergsonian experience of time and memory (see below). for an excellent discussion on the feminist potential of gynocentric origin stories in daly, as well as in paula gunn allen, gloria anzaldua, and audre lorde, see keating (2000). kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 duration, life, and becoming (or what she consistently calls—in a more thomist turn of phrase—“participation in be-ing”6). while the similarities between daly’s and bergson’s ideas are mapped out below, it is worth bearing in mind that one cannot say that daly was a “disciple” of “follower” of bergson. her sources are far too diverse to make such a claim, and other authors are explicitly more influential on her ideas. daly departs from bergson inasmuch as she employs parallel distinctions in her own way, not—like bergson—to describe the result of a natural process of consciousness or life, and the dangers for human freedom and thought of not properly respecting these differences, but rather to ground a sharp, inimical contrast between feminist creative movement on the one hand, and static, fixing, and “fixating” patriarchy, with its “technocratic” pretensions, on the other.7 moreover, unlike bergson (who was not a feminist), daly’s concerns are more crucially ethical or metaethical in character.8 in particular, her point of departure is an acute awareness of patriarchal oppression and its various mechanisms. her project is a liberatory one, and its language is provocative. bergson, on the other hand, is principally concerned—above all in his earlier works—with shedding a new light on science, epistemology, and metaphysics, and in correcting their errors. in what follows i will compare passages from bergson and from daly. first, i treat of bergson’s distinction between two human faculties (intuition and intellect) which reveal different experiences of reality and time. these bergsonian categories bear similarities to daly’s distinction between elemental feminist reason, on the one hand, and technical or abstract reason, on the other, and to feminist women’s experience of “life-time” as opposed to “fathered time.” since these parallel distinctions in both authors are closely related to respective conceptions of memory, 6 although not always consistent in her notation, daly began to hyphenate the word “being” as “be-ing” in order to emphasize the dynamic character of the reality it denotes. in the “original reintroduction” to beyond god the father, daly asserts: “this book takes on the task of de-reifying ‘god,’ that is, of changing the conception/perception of god from ‘the supreme being’ to be-ing. the naming of being as verb—as intransitive verb that does not require an “object”—expresses an other way of understanding ultimate/intimate reality” (daly 1985b, xvii). the word “be-ing” denotes the active participation in the ultimate reality, be-ing (daly 1994, 64). see berry (2000). 7 this may be one of the reasons why linda alcoff (1988, 412) labelled daly’s ontology “manichaean.” 8 i thank an anonymous reviewer for adverting me to the importance of this difference. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 i will include a brief discussion of memory in both bergson and daly in this section. second, i show how, in a similar way to bergson, daly distinguishes two different types of “self,” and two different ways of experiencing emotion, depending on whether women participate in “the powers of be-ing” or are still ensnared within the deceptive structures and mechanisms of patriarchy. in this section, i also point to a similar understanding of both authors for the requirement of metaphorical language in the expression and enablement of the recovery of self and authentic emotional experience. bergson and daly on intuition, memory, and the experience of time intuition and intellect in bergson: duration and spatialization henri bergson can be grouped in a broad way with philosophers of process “along with heraclitus, the stoics, hegel and whitehead” (lacey 1989, ix).9 bergson’s intuition is a kind of empirical apprehension that has as its object duration [durée], which—in creative evolution and later works—tends to also take on the characteristics of life, desire, or will (sinclair 2016). within this apprehension, duration is an expansive becoming, marked by a “qualitative multiplicity” in which successive “states” of consciousness (whether these are states of feelings, sensations, muscular tensions, or so on) merge and interpenetrate, each moment being a creative expansion or unfolding of what has preceded (bergson [1910] 1959, 104–107).10 it is the insight into the nature of duration within consciousness that, according to bergson, is the basis of metaphysics and makes it quite unlike the sciences. for the latter deal with distinct, spatialized perceptions and—importantly—with concepts and language that have a discreet and discontinuous character. the heterogeneous, qualitative multiplicity of duration is thus to be contrasted with quantitative, homogeneous spatial multiplicity. the latter is characterized by clearly distinct, juxtaposed objects, such as when we perceive objects as distinct units, view time (or motion) as a collection of “points,” or view number as a collection of units. bergson will claim that the recovery of experience of vital duration will be effected through the method of intuition. intuition is “the metaphysical investigation of what is essential and unique in an object” (bergson 1912, 18). intuition transcends concepts (21) which present duration to us directly (22), being a kind of “sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object” to coincide “with what is unique and thus inexpressible in it” (7). it is a type of direct perception, by which 9 while remaining noncommittal on the influence bergson may have had on whitehead, levanon (2018) contends that bergson’s and whitehead’s philosophies represent “the two main versions of process thought.” 10 “duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new” (bergson [1911b] 1998, 11). kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 observers immerse themselves into the flow of life. metaphysics and science deal with two distinct methods, respectively with intuition and with analysis; the attempt to apply analysis in metaphysics leads to philosophical conundrums and confusion (28). in light of bergson’s perspective on qualitative multiplicity, duration, and intuition, one can understand his sustained critique of “intellect.” as contrasted with intuition, intellect is “the faculty of connecting the same with the same, of perceiving and also of producing repetitions” (bergson [1911b] 1998, 52). it has evolved as a productive, means–end strategy, geared towards action, and attends primarily to spatial objects. this attention fragments the flow of becoming that is accessed only by intuition. preoccupied as it is with bodies in space, intellect generates concepts, which are generalized, unchanging “snap-shots” or “cut-outs” (cf. 52) of reality.11 the latter cannot attain reality as it is—that is, in its unique becoming. intellect, in fact, deals in the foreseeable and the predictable, since this is of paramount importance for the realization of practical interests. it focusses on mechanism, in which a predictable end result is produced by the interaction of efficient causes. spontaneous creativity, or the production of the radically novel, does not lie within intellect’s interest. the nature of the intellect is thus also constructive, in that it constructs new arrangements out of elements already encountered.12 inasmuch as concepts identify what is common among several objects, they help us make generalizations and predictions. but at the same time, they “reify” or “fragment” the durational experience of life, feeling, and desire. intellect’s means–end reasoning is intimately connected to the production of tools, and to manufacture and fabrication in general: fabrication works on models which it sets out to reproduce; and even when it invents, it proceeds, or imagines itself to proceed, by a new arrangement of elements already known. (bergson [1911b] 1998, 45) 11 bergson ([1911b] 1998, ix): “our concepts have been formed on the model of solids.” compare bergson, introduction to metaphysics, (1912, 51); and (54): “the various concepts into which a change can be analyzed are therefore so many stable views of the instability of the real.” 12 bergson ([1911b] 1998, 29): “the essential function of our intellect, as the evolution of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, to make ready for our action on things, to foresee, for a given situation, the events, favorable or unfavorable, which may follow thereupon. intellect therefore instinctively selects in a given situation whatever is like something already known; it seeks this out, in order that it may apply its principle that ‘like produces like.’” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 in daly’s writings, as we shall see, spatialization, repetition, fabrication, and rearrangement of parts are notable aspects of the “man-made.” the man-made is not just various “elementary” (waste) products of technology (to be contrasted with the natural “elements”) but also human selves “fabricated” by patriarchal mechanisms. daly on feminist intuition and experience of time daly insists that intuition is crucial to the feminist participation in full be-ing. although daly does not describe intuition in terms particularly reminiscent of bergson (i.e., as a kind of “sympathy” or “entering into” its object), intuition does play the role of the cognitive and emotional faculty required by women to recover their full, genuine potentialities (daly 1984, 136). it is also called “ontological elemental reason” (160–162). indeed, “elemental feminist philosophy” is “reason, rooted in instinct, passion, intuition” (daly 1994, 72). by this, daly clearly means a form of liberating, creative metaphysics which allows women to discover a self of creative potential. moreover, it is intuition that allows women to experience that “powers of be-ing are constantly unfolding, creating, communicating,” enabling women to “move beyond the fixed questions and answers” of the patriarchal world (daly 1994, 86). like bergson and others, daly distinguishes intuition or “ontological reason” from means–end, technical reason.13 neither bergson nor daly are against science 13 the distinction between “ontological reason” (later, “elemental reason”) and “technical reason” is attributed by daly to tillich (daly 1985b, 39–40, 105; 1984, 153– 166). however, one should bear in mind that, although not uncritical of bergson, tillich himself highlights affinities between his own “existential” approach to theology and ideas of philosophers such as bergson. the commonality includes an emphasis on direct experience, an appreciation for the need of special forms of expression, a rejection of the identification of reality with the objects of thought, and an emphasis on qualitative, as opposed to quantitative, notions of time (tillich 1944). tillich claims that, although certainly not identical, bergson’s “philosophy of life” contains “most of the distinctive motives of existential philosophy” (46). like schelling, schopenhauer, and heidegger, bergson has realized that in human experience lies “the only possible approach to existence itself” (tillich 1951, 62; see also 168) and bergson also sees, like duns scotus and heidegger, “an ultimate indeterminacy”— that is, creative openness—within the ground of being (168). also of note, is tillich’s analysis of nonspatialized, qualitative time, creativity, and life in systematic theology, vol. 3 ([1963] 2011, part 5, ch.1, sec. a2.b) which contains prominently bergsonian elements. daly becomes increasingly critical of tillich’s notion of “ontological reason.” she comes to view it as too static and confining, and laden with patriarchal insinuations, such as “penetrating” and “grasping” (daly 1984, 154–160). it is clear that she seeks an even more dynamic notion of be-ing than even tillich proposes. it is kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 and technology per se. they both warn, however, against the dangers of neglecting intuitive forms of human cognition (daly 1985b, 186–187). that said, in many passages, from her more ethical standpoint, daly tends to emphasize the harmful effects of the alliance between patriarchal thinking and technology, devoid of recourse to the intuition of be-ing. “tyrants of technology” indoctrinate women through the media, seek to destroy female power through “man-made femininity,” the result of therapies and gynecological treatments for women, and prepare weapons for war and the destruction of the natural environment (see, for example, daly 1990, 89–110 and ch. 7).14 what is characteristic for these technologies is their fragmenting and “fixating” tendencies—that is, the masking, constraining, and stabilizing of women’s intuitive movement, as well as of the movement of nature. “war,” although usually understood more broadly by daly as the assault on women’s minds, bodies, and on the natural environment, has, for both daly and bergson, its origins in technology that has been stripped of its spiritual, intuitionistic—and for daly, women-centred—underpinnings.15 related to the intuitive and liberating apprehension of women’s powers of being is the experience of a temporal dimension that is qualitatively different from standard, measured time. it is true—as stenger notes (stenger and stone 2002)—that daly expresses a keen sense of the kairos of the feminist movement; she often speaks (for example, in beyond god the father) of “this point in history” as particularly significant for women’s liberation (daly 1985b, passim). this would concord with tillich’s notion of the biblical kairos as a time of fulfilment and decision. however, daly also has the notion that feminists live in a special kind of time, distinct from patriarchal time—namely, a “life-time” that is specific to them. this is how she describes it: participation in unfolding of god means also this time breakthrough, which is a continuing (but not ritually “repeated”) process. the center then not surprising that her notion of be-ing would take on a more open, indeterminate, and future-oriented traits that are, in fact, characteristics of the élan vital that tillich found objectionable in bergson’s philosophy (tillich 1951, 100, 180– 181, 275–276). 14 compare the definition of “phallotechnology” in the wickedary (daly 1994, 217). 15 compare bergson’s analysis of mechanization and its relation to war in the two sources (bergson 2002, 304–310) as well as his depictions of wartime germany as a result of the soulless mechanization of a nation (bergson 1915, 35–36; on this point, see jones 2016, 17–19). one should note, however, that, unlike bergson, daly does not discuss war as natural or inevitable, or as a result of overpopulation and lack of resources (cf. bergson 2002, 276, 283–284, 289). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 of the new time is on the boundary of patriarchal time. what it is, in fact, is women’s own time. it is our life-time. it is whenever we are living out of our own sense of reality, refusing to be possessed, conquered, and alienated by the linear, measured-out, quantitative time of the patriarchal system. women, in becoming who we are, are living in a qualitative, organic time that escapes the measurements of the system. (daly 1985b, 43)16 for daly, be-ing is the unfolding of god. in the above passage it is now associated with a specific experience of life and time. feminist time is contrasted with patriarchal “clock-time” and is archaic time. this is defined as “original creative time,” that is, “the measure of original motion/e-motion/movement” (daly 1994, 62). it is also known as tidal time and “cannot be measured by the clocks of father time” (286). chapter 8 of pure lust contains a heavily metaphor-laden account of this feminist temporal experience. it is a qualitative, not quantitative, time, marked by varying intensities of emotion and action. it is contrasted with “fathered time” (or “father time”) which is the “tidily man-dated world” of monotonous repetition and routine, imposed upon, and fragmenting, the creative “biorhythms” of the genius (elemental spirit) of feminist women’s self (daly 1984, 287–293). overcoming tidy divisions of life, these women liberate “the flow of luminous realizing presence, releasing the radiant race of words” (293). we thus find the idea that a participation in flowing, undivided, feminist life-time can release a creative use of words—words that express participation in tidal or archaic time—and can also elicit a similar experience in other women. this creative participation is a “metaphoric hearing/naming,” a process both receptive and creative, beyond mere linguistic expression, that “transport[s] the hearer/namer into metabeing” (293). daly contrasts “foreground” with “background.” the former is the patriarchal world, a world in which subliminal messages, patriarchal religious myths, fragmentations, and deceptions of all kinds prevent females from participation in their original life, the world of background. it is noteworthy that the patriarchal time of foreground consists of “instants,” not of “moments”: instants, then, are units of foreground time. they are incalculably small. they are mere points in time. they do not imply motion, movement, momentousness, momentum. they are elementary, foreground imitations of moments. they do not open into the background. (daly 1992, 4) 16 compare the definition of “life-time” in the wickedary (daly 1994, 143). kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 in such passages, we encounter a cluster of bergsonian ideas in daly around intuition and the experiential access intuition grants to feminist life and experience of time. there is the contrast between duration and “spatialized” time. the former, for daly as for bergson, is a continuous flow, marked by differing qualities and emotional intensities. just as for bergson, so for daly, the experience or intuition of this lived time and self is creative; it is a kind of “hearing” of rhythm and can lead to poetic composition.17 bergson and daly on memory for bergson, memory is the temporal accumulation of experience, a direct effect of becoming. it is not a faculty for storing recollections. it never ceases, as past incessantly “piles up” on the past: in reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. in its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. the cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being pre-pared—in short, only that which can give useful work. at the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. these memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. but, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. (bergson [1911b] 1998, 5) our character or personality is being constantly built up as memory swells. it follows that “we are creating ourselves continually” in what we do and experience (7). this line of thought determines bergson’s notion of existence: to exist is to “to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” (7). what the above passage also indicates, however, is that specific recollections are geared to action. this means that memory and qualitative duration are intimately connected. it is the flow of the past into the present: 17 on the “rhythm” of life as duration, see, for example, bergson 1911a (209, 240, 258). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 inner duration is the continuous life of a memory that prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past or, more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and heavier load we carry as we grow older. without this survival of the past into the present, there would be no duration, only instantaneity. (bergson 1912, 44–45)18 although moments of memory play an important role for daly, particularly in her “re-calling” of significant moments from feminist history and from her own life, she also stresses the value and importance of “memory” (often capitalized), a process that is distinct from specific—and, in particular, patriarchally constructed— recollections (“elementary memories”19): what women find by naming—through writing, speech, all forms of art—is something like a stream that runs deep within the soul. its sounds are musical, rhythmic. significantly, the word stream is etymologically connected with rhythm. both are rooted in the greek rhein, meaning “to flow.” underneath the elementary unrhythm of mediated, master-full memories flow rhythms of empowering memory. and she continues: the rhythms of naming deep memory are quite unlike the tidy, tedious tick-tock of patriarchal clocks and watches. the rhythms of remembering are tidal. (daly 1984, 175)20 in contrast with bergson, and consistent with daly’s ethical, liberatory approach, returning to memory serves a role in the liberation from patriarchal images 18 for a discussion of the relationship between memory and subjective consciousness in bergson, see kebede (2014). 19 daly (1994, 79) defines “elementary memories” as “standardized memories, fabricated in fatherland which function to mask and stifle deep memory; massproduced collective memories intended to obliterate the past and to control the present and future.” 20 it is worth recalling bergson’s comparison of qualitative multiplicity in duration with rhythm. see, for example, creative evolution ([1911b] 1998, 11–12, 127–128, 300– 301, 345–347). kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 and counter-memories that have been insinuated into women’s memory. freeing oneself from these requires female “re-membering,” reversing the process of patriarchal “dis-membering.” in outercourse, daly characterizes her own recovery of feminist history as an “unforgetting,” as a movement towards be-ing. the recollections of her life in which she managed to glimpse be-ing are “momentous” (provide momentum) for her journey. indeed, daly traces the etymology of “moment” to the latin momentum, rooted in movere, to move (daly 1992, 3). her own personal voyage is similar to the general female process of liberation from patriarchy, involving “moments/movements of participation in be-ing which carry voyagers beyond foreground limitations.” these experiences are not “momentary” in the linear sense, but “carry us into an other kind of duration/time” (4). thus, memory is often characterized in a way that is very similar to a bergsonian view of intuition. it involves a “re-immersing” oneself into a past that becomes present and anticipates future possibilities. the fundamental self, authentic emotion, and metaphoric expression bergson on recovering the self, metaphor, and artistic expression bergson refers to spatialized perceptions, to concepts, and to language as “symbols.” symbolization fragments the flow of consciousness into distinct elements. the mind has a tendency to “project” the qualitative multiplicity of consciousness onto a homogeneous, quantitative multiplicity. this corresponds to a split into two selves. one self has well-defined states of consciousness; the other is constituted by an ongoing and dynamic interpenetration and enrichment of qualitative experiences. and bergson remarks that “below the self with well-defined states” there is a “self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole” (bergson [1910] 1959, 128). we thus get the idea of two “selves” that de beauvoir pondered in her diary entries (see ansell-pearson 2018, 55–72). it is, in fact, notable that bergson goes on to link the spatialized, fragmented self with the practical need of linguistic articulation within a social context.21 and it is clear that, although bergson views the spatial symbolization of time and consciousness as convenient and “natural,” it is duration and qualitative multiplicity that are more valuable. at the level of the self, the consciousness of becoming and temporal flux is “the fundamental self.” to reach this self, a determined and focussed effort is required, one of “isolating the fluid inner states from their image, first retracted, then solidified in homogeneous space” ([1910] 1959, 129). and it is in this solidification of processes or “progresses” 21 bergson ([1910] 1959, 130): “our outer and, so to speak, social life is more practically important to us than our inner and individual existence. we instinctively tend to solidify our impressions in order to express them in language.” (but cf. ibid., 167.) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 [progrès] that we must realize again the complicity of our language, a point of great importance for daly, as we shall see presently. in the final chapter of time and free will, bergson develops his theory of freedom or, perhaps more accurately, indicates how the fragmentation and spatialization of consciousness in outer experience, in dealings with matter and the needs of everyday life, can rob humans of their freedom. it is inner, fundamental self, the self of qualitative multiplicity and pure duration, that is truly free. it is only the fragmented view of consciousness, the view of science, with its well-defined concepts and objects or states, based on predictability from clearly definable initial conditions, that conceives consciousness (will) as predetermined. as already discussed above, this is because prediction involves reconstructing an effect from elements already present in a cause. there is, then, no room in such a view for unforseeability and true spontaneity. if we could only get back to the authentic experience of inner, undetermined multiplicity and duration, we would realize our freedom: hence, there are finally two different selves, one of which is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social projection. we reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration has nothing to do with juxtaposition in homogeneous space. but the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are rarely free. (231) access to freedom is a difficult task indeed. most of us, most of the time, live in the external world of ghostly shadows in which our true self has been projected into spatialized feelings, percepts, concepts, and language. we thereby become passive, governed by causes and conservation laws. bergson states emphatically: “to act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back to pure duration” (232). of course, the way to “get back to pure duration” will be, as we have seen, through the method of intuition. what i wish to emphasize for my analysis of daly’s notion of “plastic” emotions below, is that bergson also has an analysis of two fundamentally different types of emotion. authentic feeling is a “confused mass” of interpenetrating emotional hues that form a heterogeneous multiplicity, and it develops uniquely according to its own dynamic. but—in accord with the external needs of material and social life—we tend to analyse this multiplicity into a homogeneous, static one. we name distinct, fragmentary, emotional states within consciousness according to what is generic and purportedly common in human experience, thereby breaking up our original emotion, removing its uniqueness, and stabilizing it in language: kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 by separating these moments [of duration of feeling] from each other, by separating out time in space, we have caused this feeling to lose its life and colour. hence, we are now standing before our own shadow: we believe that we have analyzed our feeling, while we have really replaced it with a juxtaposition of lifeless states which can be translated into words, and each of which constitutes the common element, the impersonal residue, of the impressions felt in a given case by the whole of society. and this is why we reason about these states and apply our simple logic to them: having set them up as genera by the mere fact of separating them from one another, we have prepared them for use in some future deduction. (bergson [1910] 1959, 133). this idea of the falsification of the nature of feeling through analysis and language is taken up in bergson’s essay on laughter. here he writes of inner passions that arise in our contact with other people. we experience revulsion and attraction, an “electrification of the soul known as passion” (bergson 1911a, 158). if they were left to their own devices, these passions would naturally lead to violent outbursts. but utility demands that society and morality impose their normative constraints upon such passions. under this influence an outward layer of feelings, common to all, forms to cover the “inner fire of individual passions” (159). this is where we come to the importance of art in general, and of literary art, in particular, for getting us back in touch, so to speak, with our natural passions. just as in time and free will, bergson attributes a kind of liberating power to the “bold novelist” whose talent allows them to extract feelings from the “common domain” to which language had “brought them down,” (bergson [1910] 1959, 163) and tears down “the cleverly woven curtain of our conventional ego” (133), so, in laughter, it is the dramatist who, through his artistic work elicits in us, if not “volcanic eruptions” exactly, then at least a sense of the inner stirrings of our passionate nature. drama offers nature its “revenge upon society” (bergson 1911a, 159) by either summoning up strong passions directly, or by revealing the shams of society and so bringing us back to the “inner core” of true, natural feeling (160). in fact, this is the role of art in general: so art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush away the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself. (bergson 1911a, 157) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 generally speaking, concrete images and metaphor can—according to bergson— express something of the experience of intuition. in the creative mind, bergson states: intuition will be communicated only by intelligence. it is more than idea, nevertheless in order to be transmitted, it will have to use ideas as a conveyance. it will prefer, however, to have recourse to the most concrete ideas, but those which still retain an outer fringe of images. comparisons and metaphors will here suggest what cannot be expressed. (bergson 1946, 48) mary daly will take a very similar position, insisting that feminist philosophy requires metaphorical expression. however—due to the existence of patriarchal forms of artistic expression—daly is more attuned than bergson to the question, which forms of literary art and linguistic expression are conducive to feminist liberation? in fact, creating new metaphors and expressions is crucial for feminism, and this is aptly illustrated in daly’s skepticism regarding bergson’s approach, which lacks a feminist lens. in gyn/ecology, she writes: “the way back to reality is to destroy our perceptions of it,” says bergson. yes, but these perceptions were/are implanted through language—the all-pervasive language of myth, conveyed overtly and subliminally through religion, “great art,” literature, the dogmas of professionalism, the media, grammar. (daly 1990, 3) the purported quotation is probably a gloss on ideas presented in several of bergson’s works, or perhaps heard from others. however, bergson is clearly not interested in “destroying” perception but in refocussing attention to obtain a perception (intuition) of duration. compare, for example, the following passage from the creative mind, in which bergson is describing the way of accessing the intuition of change and duration: “what is required is that we should break with certain habits of thinking and perceiving that have become natural to us. we must return to the direct perception of change and mobility” (bergson 1946, 167). daly on two selves, “plastic” emotions, and the need for metaphor in many passages, daly speaks of “self” (capitalized) and “self” or “selves.” the former is the personal core of women who are moving beyond patriarchy, whereas the latter denote patriarchally constructed “selves” that lack the dynamic movement and realization of women’s potential. the self has “moving reality” at its centre (daly kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 1984, 155). daly cleverly relates patriarchal industrial fabrication and artificiality to the difficulty posed to women of recovering their true selves (188), which is “participation in be-ing.” a woman who is cut off from her genius is “lost from her self” (293). whenever a woman becomes one with the “creative spirit of the individual” she is her self (301). reminiscent of bergson, there is a way of recovering the true self. it is the way of separatism, whereby daly means, in the first instance at least, an internal separating away from patriarchal structures, language, and ideologies: it is crone-logical to conclude that internal separation or separatism, that is, paring away, burning away the false selves encasing the self, is the core of all authentic separations and forms of separatism. it is axiomatic for amazons that all external/internalized influences, such as myths, names, ideologies, social structures, which cut off the flow of the self’s original movement should be pared away. (daly 1990, 381) interestingly, daly’s lone mention of bergson’s term élan vital comes in a passage on selfhood. women’s original self and living spirit are identified with this impetus of life, with this élan vital (daly 1984, 238). this is reminiscent of bergson’s characterization of mysticism in the two sources as contact with the impetus of life (bergson 2002, 213), which is in some sense discoverable or recoverable through a turning to intuition (212).22 22 it comes as somewhat of a surprise that daly does not take up any of the major themes of bergson’s late work, the two sources of morality and religion. there is no analysis of a socio-biological genesis of obligation as “resistance to resistances” (bergson 2002, ch. 1) or any discussion of the origins of sacred objects, myths, and religion as defensive reactions against the dissolvent tendencies of intelligence, and against the intellect’s depressing representations of inevitable death or practical failure (ch. 2, 205). it is not, perhaps, incorrect to interpret daly’s feminism as a philosophy of dynamic religion (cf. bergson 2002, ch. 3) and as a condemnation of closed patriarchal society (as anderson [anderson and bunnin 2020] has done in the case of de beauvoir). it is also true that there is a dynamic openness within feminist sisterhood, as conceived by daly, but there is an important difference compared to bergson: after beyond god the father, in particular, daly becomes critical of universal and “humanist” approaches to social and political issues, since they can be a cloak for patriarchy (daly 1984, 383–384). in addition, daly’s analysis of women’s lusty friendships does not have the same universalistic indeterminacy as does bergson’s notion of the mystic’s love, viewed as a hallmark and exemplar of dynamic religion (see, for example, bergson 2002, 233–235). i thank an anonymous reviewer for feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 one aspect of “false selves,” no doubt, are what daly calls “plastic” emotions. in many of daly’s texts, we find an emphasis on female, passionate emotion as a source of power to participate in be-ing, one which has its origins in that participation. elemental lust is “pure passion: unadulterated, absolute, simple sheer striving for abundance of being” (daly 1984, 3). what opposes this kind of e-motion—masks, distorts it, and struggles against it—are the patriarchal “man-made fabrications that fracture female substance,” the “state of lechery.” the latter is a kind of unreality, opposed to “the desire, eagerness, vigor, enthusiasm of/for expanding be-ing, which philosophers have called final causality.” the state of lechery throws up “blockage/blockers” to this reaching of be-ing (daly 1984, 3). not surprisingly for daly, passions are to be understood as “movements” of sensitive appetite not as “static, inexplicable blobs of ‘feeling’” (198). patriarchy, in contrast, produces “pseudopassions” which “paralyze women, containing and concealing our fires, our true desires” (200). one form of patriarchal pseudopassion is “plastic passion,” which causes disconnectedness and fragmentation. plastic passions include “unmoving, paralyzing” feelings such as guilt, anxiety, depression, bitterness, and fulfilment (201). although they can be experienced, they are nevertheless “man-made” and “products of fixocracy,” serving as “substitutes that poison our powers, preventing e-motion” (201). daly astutely observes—in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of bergson—that conventions of generalizing language can distort authentic emotion and deprive it of its dynamism. in the case of women, however, it is not societal convention in general but patriarchal “therapeutic” ideology that labels women’s rage “out of existence” through the static categorization of women’s emotional states as “hostile,” “bitter,” or “resentful” (203). the problem of freeing feminist emotion from encrusted and fragmented selves is confronted in daly’s theory of metaphor. as in bergson, different, nonliteral modes of expression are required to return women to genuine life and feeling. as rycenga and barufaldi note, daly’s stated aim in her work—as eminently illustrated in her work pure lust (1984)—is a “combination of philosophy and poetry—one of daly’s stated life goals” (rycenga and barufaldi 2017, part 3). daly’s images and vibrant metaphor, incomprehensible and frustrating to some of her readers, provide, among other things, a jolt23 in provocative and vivid imagery to others, communicating that, at its root, being is a “process,” not a substance (berry 2000, 30). challenging me to address more explicitly the role of bergson’s the two sources in daly’s work. 23 daly’s phrase from beyond god the father (daly 1985b, 190) that liberation from patriarchy requires “a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words” and that kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 it is in pure lust that daly provides a methodological rationale for the use of metaphor. the employment of metaphor and symbol has been held in disregard by philosophers, but daly counters that the employment of symbol is what is methodologically most appropriate when discussing metaphysics: the point is, however, that symbols and “mere” metaphors are required, not because of some deficiency or lack in the sphere of abstract conceptualization, but because of the demanding, rigorous nature of the work itself. (daly 1984, 25) symbols reveal deeper and “hidden” realities of our souls. daly affirms that elemental feminist philosophy cannot speak adequately without symbols. metaphors, moreover, “function to name change, and therefore they elicit change” (25). daly continues metaphors are necessary for elemental feminist philosophy, for this is about and is transformation, movement. it is philosophy in a basic sense of “love or pursuit of wisdom: search of the underlying principles and causes of reality.” (daly 1984, 26) so the deep “spinning power” of metaphor is crucial to the task of the kind of “first philosophy” or ontology that daly is developing. but the complexity of the metaphysical task requires not just metaphorical intensity and concreteness, but also the abstract, analytic tools of “honed logic” (28). so we find again the idea of two kinds of rationality: one, based in intuition of be-ing and life-time, requires the expressive and concrete tools of metaphor; the other is employed in discursive abstraction and analysis.24 the latter “breaks the bonds of patriarchal assumptions” (408), a statement which suggests that discursive analysis serves a primarily critical function towards patriarchal systems of thought and expression. however, because of its sheer novelty and truly metaphysical reach, it quickly morphs into a metaphorically articulated ontological reason: in contrast to patriarchal metaphors and abstractions, metapatriarchal abstract thought can evoke metamorphosis. such nag-gnostic abstract thought—passionate theoretical reasoning that breaks the bonds of feminism “is movement” provides the backdrop for jennifer rycenga’s and linda barufaldi’s introduction to the mary daly reader (2017, 1–9). 24 in outercourse, daly states that from 1975 onwards her “synthesis of abstract reasoning and metaphoric expression evolved explosively” (daly 1992, 195). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 patriarchal assumptions—is essential to the metamorphic process. unlike the prevailing abstractions, which function to isolate bits of knowledge, metapatriachal theory manifests connections on the level of be-ing. since such thinking is original, almost invariably it begins to assume mantic metaphorical dimensions. its language is metaphorical in the sense that this is characterized by multileveled meanings and imagination-arousing newness, evoking spiraling movement. (daly 1984, 408) this is a particularly interesting remark, since it suggests that the “balance” between abstract, discursive reason and intuition is, as regards modes of linguistic expression, difficult to maintain in practice. we might contrast the above observation to daly’s concern in beyond god the father to overcome man-made dichotomies. in regard to bergson’s philosophy, daly points to a particular dichotomy—namely, one between theoretical concepts and poetic imagery. in daly’s interpretation of bergson, it is only the latter that have any power to analyze process. daly comments: “i do not think that radical women trying to express our intuition of being can settle for this route. we will have to reject this ‘either/or,’ and conceptualize as well as image our process in a manner that breaks out of stale male spatial patterns” (daly 1985b, 187– 188). however, it is clear to those familiar with daly’s works that—even though patriarchal systems of oppression are often expounded and analysed in a literal, discursive language—daly’s language almost inevitably becomes metaphorical and imagistic, playing upon etymologies of words and various word associations, particularly when daly begins to describe women’s participation in be-ing. conclusion the main goal of this article has been to exegetically document certain close parallels between some aspects of mary daly’s thought and some aspects of henri bergson’s philosophy. besides the textual parallels, there are, of course more general thematic similarities that result from an adoption of an intuition-based, processual, life-centered philosophy. yet, if i have been successful in the endeavour of demonstrating deeper affinities between the philosophies of daly and bergson, the findings suggest some interesting lines for further comparative philosophical critique of daly’s thought. to conclude, let me sketch possible directions for future work. my first point relates to daly’s treatment and portrayal of trans people. daly depicts trans women, in particular, as man-made artifacts, both physically and emotionally (daly 1990, 64–72; 1994, 225; see stryker 1994). this claim itself again suggests the intellectualizing (in bergson’s sense) of the patriarchal homo faber. more broadly, however, “transsexing” has a metaphysical sense. the scholastic god of “pure act” (actus purus) is the static, reified version of transcendent and dynamic kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 “active potency” of feminist women; the former is the “transsexed counterfeit” of the latter (daly 1984, 87). daly implies that be-ing as becoming and movement is original and primordial, and that attempts to reify it and reduce it to stasis are metaphorically equivalent to “transsexing.” in a similar vein, religious symbols are “transsexed” inasmuch as matriarchal religious metaphors have been morphed by patriarchy for patriarchal ends (93, 130). in light of what i have attempted to establish in the body of this article, it becomes clear that—from a metaphysical point of view—trans folx are products of technical intellect. they are attempts to “freeze” the flow of liberating female consciousness and to catch or “freeze” its life-giving powers. one of the principal accusations aimed specifically at transsexual women is that they remain “immobilized” by and within patriarchal sex roles. in daly’an (and bergsonian) terms, the technical solution of surgery or hormones is thus simply the extension of (patriarchal) mechanism which aims to mimic through construction, the qualitative multiplicity of creative (feminist) consciousness. in light of this, one can ask why—and under what other influences—bergson’s distinctions have been molded by daly into dichotomies of enmity, to which trans people fall victim. the question is potentially fruitful for another reason. i stated earlier that bergson’s distinctions—although, as he claimed, dangerous if neglected— are generally the result of natural processes. however, during the first world war bergson “weaponized” his metaphysics in a propagandistic turn against germany and, more specifically, against prussia (bergson 1915; see sinclair 2016; jones 2016; klein 2020). “artificiality marked the creation of prussia,” says bergson, and its administration, military, and economy are purely mechanical, aligned like “clockwork.” germany, while “working out [its] organic self-development” chose badly when it imposed upon itself these characteristics under bismarck and rejected “the unity that comes from within by a natural effort of life” (bergson 1915, 20). opposed to germany stand france and belgium whose soldiers “to the force which feeds only on its own brutality” oppose a force “that which seeks outside and above itself a principle of life and renovation” and is “continually remaking itself” (47). the parallel metaphysical strategies of bergson’s wartime pamphlet and daly’s antitrans rhetoric raise the additional question of how metaphysics in both bergson and daly comes to serve a propaganda of “us versus them.”25 this is also noteworthy given bergson’s support of france’s colonial ambitions in north africa (sinclair 2016, 486; al-saji 2019). the distinctions between intuition and intellect (elemental reason and technical reason), duration and spatialization (feminist “life-time” and “fathered time”), and between two selves and two types of emotionality, become potential theoretical vehicles—whether intentionally or unintentionally—for implicit and 25 compare the questions asked of bergson’s wartime interventions in kisukidi (2014) and jones (2016). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 explicit marginalization and colonialism. what are the philosophical assumptions underlying this instrumentalization in both authors? these and related questions open up perspectives for a renewed scrutiny of daly and early antitrans feminism through the current renewal of interest in bergson (see deleuze 1988; pitts and westmoreland 2019; ansell-pearson 2018). references alcoff, linda. 1988. “feminism versus post-structuralism: the identity crisis in feminist theory.” signs 13 (3): 405–436. https://doi.org/10.1086/494426. al-saji, alia. 2019. “decolonizing bergson: the temporal schema of the open and the closed.” in beyond bergson: examining race and colonialism through the writings of henri bergson, edited by andrea j. pitts and mark william westmoreland, chapter 1. albany: state university of new york press. kindle. anderson, pamela sue. 2015. “an eruption of mystical life in feminist action: mysticism and confidence after bergson.” in mysticism in the french tradition: eruptions from france, edited by louise nelstrop and bradley b. onishi, 37–58. new york: routledge. anderson, pamela sue, and nicholas bunnin. 2020. “reorienting ourselves in (bergsonian) freedom, feminism and friendship.” angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 25 (1–2): 23–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x .2020.1717768. ansell-pearson, keith. 2018. bergson: thinking beyond the human condition. london: bloomsbury. bandy, thomas g. 1984. “tillich’s limited understanding of the thought of henri bergson as ‘life philosophy.’” in theonomy and autonomy: studies in paul tillich’s engagement with modern culture, edited by john j. carey, 3–17. macon, ga: mercer university press. bergson, henri. 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"the politics of logic." aeon. february 3. https://aeon.co /essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis. kubala, julie. 2020. “teaching ‘bad feminism’: mary daly and the legacy of ’70s lesbian-feminism.” feminist formations 32 (1): 117–136. https://doi.org /10.1353/ff.2020.0010. lacey, a. r. 1989. bergson: the arguments of the philosophers. new york: routledge. le doeuff, michèle. 2004. “towards a friendly, transatlantic critique of the second sex.” in the legacy of simone de beauvoir, edited by emily r. grosholz, 22– 36. oxford: clarendon press. levanon, tamar. 2018. “the trails of the unspoken: bergson and whitehead on language and time.” process studies 47 (1/2): 47–61. https://doi.org/10 .5840/process2018471/23. lorde, audre. 1983. “an open letter to mary daly.” in this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, edited by cherríe l. moraga and gloria e. anzaldúa, 94–97. new york: kitchen table women of color press. maritain, jacques. 1941. ransoming the time. translated by harry lorin binsse. new york: charles scribner’s sons. ———. 1947. de bergson à thomas d’aquin: essais de métaphysique et de morale. paris: p. hartmann. ———. 1955. bergsonian philosophy and thomism. translated by mabelle l. andison with j. gordon andison. new york: philosophical library. monagle, clare. 2019. “mary daly’s gyn/ecology: mysticism, difference, and feminist history.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 44 (2): 333–353. https://doi.org/10.1086/699341. narayan, uma. 1997. dislocating cultures: identities, traditions, and third-world feminism. new york: routledge. partridge, cameron. 2018. “‘scotch-taped together’: anti-‘androgyny’ rhetoric, transmisogyny, and the transing of religious studies.” journal of feminist studies in religion 34 (1): 68–75. https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli .34.1.09. pitts, andrea j., and mark william westmoreland, eds. 2019. beyond bergson: examining race and colonialism through the writings of henri bergson. albany: state university of new york press. kindle. plaskow, judith. 2012. “lessons from mary daly.” journal of feminist studies in religion 28 (2): 100–104. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/490379. rodkey, christopher d. 2015. “the nemesis hex: mary daly and the pirated protopatriarchal paulus.” in retrieving the radical tillich: his legacy and contemporary importance, edited by russell re manning, 65–80. new york: palgrave macmillan. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 26 rycenga, jennifer, and linda barufaldi, eds. 2017. the mary daly reader. new york: new york university press. google play book. schneider, laurie. 2000. “the courage to see and to sin: mary daly’s elemental transformation of paul tillich’s ontology.” in feminist interpretations of mary daly, edited by sarah lucia hoagland and marilyn frye, 55–75. university park: the pennsylvania state university press. simons, margaret a. 2003. “bergson’s influence on beauvoir’s philosophical methodology.” in the cambridge companion to simone de beauvoir, edited by claudia card, 107–128. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 2012. “beauvoir and bergson: a question of influence.” in beauvoir and western thought from plato to butler, edited by shannon m. mussett and william s. wilkerson, 153–170. albany: state university of new york press. sinclair, mark. 2016. “bergson’s philosophy of will and the war of 1914–1918.” journal of the history of ideas 77 (3): 467–487. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi .2016.0020. stenger, mary ann, and ronald h. stone. 2002. dialogues of paul tillich. macon, ga: mercer university press. stryker, susan. 1994. “my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix: performing transgender rage.” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 1 (3): 237–254. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237. suhonen, marja. 2000. “toward biophilic be-ing: mary daly’s feminist metaethics and the question of essentialism.” in feminist interpretations of mary daly, sarah lucia hoagland and marilyn frye, 112–131. university park: the pennsylvania state university press sweet, william. 2019. “jacques maritain.” in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by edward n. zalta, summer 2019 edition. https://plato .stanford.edu/entries/maritain/. telling, kathryn. 2012. “quite contrary: mary daly within and without women’s studies.” journal of international women’s studies 13 (6): 32–43. https://vc .bridgew.edu/jiws/vol13/iss6/4. tillich, paul. 1944. “existential philosophy.” journal of the history of ideas 5 (1): 44– 70. https://doi.org/10.2307/2707101. ———. 1951. systematic theology, vol. 1. chicago: university of chicago press. ———. (1963) 2011. systematic theology, vol. 3. chicago: university of chicago press. google play book. van der tuin, iris. 2015. generational feminism: new materialist introduction to a generative approach. lanham, md: lexington books. waslin, sue. 1998. the theoretical contexts of mary daly’s thought. phd diss., university of st. andrews. kapusta – mary daly’s philosophy: some bergsonian themes published by scholarship@western, 2021 27 west, traci c. 2012. “the gift of arguing with mary daly's white feminism.” journal of feminist studies in religion 28 (2): 112–117. https://www.muse.jhu.edu /article/490254. white, melanie. 2019. “the politics of sympathy in bergson’s the two sources of morality and religion.” in beyond bergson: examining race and colonialism through the writings of henri bergson, edited by andrea j. pitts and mark westmoreland, chapter 3. albany: state university of new york press. kindle. wood, hannelie. 2015. “revisiting mary daly: towards a quadripartite theological and philosophical paradigm.” hts teologiese studies/theological studies 71 (1). https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v71i1.2911. stephanie kapusta is an assistant professor in the philosophy department at dalhousie university, halifax, nova scotia. her research spans feminist social and political philosophy, and feminist applied ethics, with an emphasis on trans* studies. she has published contributions in hypatia, atlantis, topoi, and in the international encyclopedia of ethics. 10905 kapusta title page.pdf 10905 kapusta final format.pdf the generative power of collective hope feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 4 article 1 recommended citation fife, maggie. 2024. “the generative power of collective hope.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (4). article 1. 2024 the generative power of collective hope maggie fife cuny graduate center mfife@gradcenter.cuny.edu fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 the generative power of collective hope maggie fife abstract in the face of widespread structural injustice, many people feel hopeless. is hope valuable for political activism, or is it naive, impractical, or even counterproductive? here i focus on collective hope as opposed to individual hope. i argue that collective hope can both sustain us in our political commitments and generate new commitments; it is therefore particularly valuable for activist movements and should be cultivated. through the contemporary example of the prison abolition movement, i address pessimistic and pragmatic worries about political hope, show how collective hope motivates political action through activities of shared imagination, and introduce the concept of holding hope. in order for collective hope to emerge, some members of a group need to hold hope for the collective by sustaining their individual hope and supporting the capacity of other individuals to hope. keywords: hope, collective hope, imagination, abolition, prisons, activism, collective action my aim in this paper is to explore the role of collective hope in activist movements. most pressing moral issues, from the climate crisis to mass incarceration, are structural in nature. responding to such structural injustices requires multifaceted and sustained collective political action. if we care about political activism, we should be concerned with how to make it work well. what motivates and sustains commitments within activist contexts? should we approach political activism with hope as well as determination? which states of mind are prevalent, which should be cultivated or discouraged, and which, if any, are overemphasized? here, i focus on collective hope. is hope valuable for activist movements? if so, is it valuable because it motivates us, sustains our previously held political commitments, or generates new commitments? hope, imagination, and collectivity are at the center of activist movements, particularly those that take a “david and goliath” form—grassroots movements responding to large-scale structural injustice where members may experience a lack of individual hope. the movement for prison abolition fits this form, and prison abolitionists are constantly reiterating the need to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 imagine a radically different future. the centrality of hope and imagination to such movements motivates my philosophical investigation of these concepts, and i focus here on the movement for prison abolition. the value of hope in activist movements will depend on its nature—if hope is particularly likely to mislead us, or places an undue burden on individuals, then we should not emphasize or encourage hope when attempting to motivate activism. on the other hand, if hope can sustain us in our political commitments or even generate new commitments, then hope is particularly valuable in activist movements and should be cultivated. in this paper, i will focus on both the nature and value of hope: collective hope fares better against the worries of pessimism, pragmatism, and overdemandingness that are levelled against individual hope. more importantly, collective hope is uniquely motivational by way of the activities of shared imagination, which are conceptually distinct from individual hopeful fantasizing. additionally, i identify and introduce a type of interpersonal hope that is central to activist movements: holding hope as a member of a collective. in order for collective hope to exist, some members of a group need to hold hope for the collective: they sustain individual hope for the shared political goals, supporting the emergence of collective hope and the capacity of other individuals to hope. 1. some problems with hope there are a wide range of critiques of hope in the political realm. i will briefly present what i take to be the most pressing worries about hope to motivate shifting our attention to collective as opposed to individual hope. the orthodox view of hope is a desire for the hoped-for outcome along with a belief in the nonzero possibility that the outcome will obtain (day 1969). most analytic definitions of hope agree that the orthodox view requires an additional third element that can be generalized as a “positively toned ‘what-if’ attitude” toward a future that contains the hoped-for outcome (martin 2019, 232). contemporary views of hope differ from one another in the ways that they construe this third element. some influential views construe the third element as mental imaging (bovens 1999), seeing the probability as sufficient to license hopeful feelings and actions (martin 2014), taking an interest in the future and hoped-for outcome as an agent (mcgeer 2008), and the phenomenological idea of living under a positive view of the future with respect to the hoped-for outcome (calhoun 2018). this, of course, leaves plenty of room for debate over when hoping for a specific outcome is rational. the first worry about emphasizing hope in politics or social activism is that, all too often, we do not have good reason to hope. while certain smaller-scale political hopes may be reasonable, like hope for a short-lived win, perhaps hope for robust and sustainable social improvement through political struggle is unjustified. when it comes to issues of justice, many philosophers have argued that there is no good fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 reason to hope for something as utopian as an end to oppression.1 kathryn j. norlock (2019, 7), for example, argues against “hopeful progressivism with respect to great evils”—human evils persist, and history is not arcing toward justice. informed by nonideal theory, norlock argues that instead of hoping for an eventual end to evils or oppression, which is certainly a large-scale and utopian hope, we should refocus our efforts on the cultivation of good habits and excellent characters through forwardlooking attitudes like perseverance, resilience, and willingness to renew commitments (7). by arguing against hopeful progressivism and reconceiving the objects of hope, norlock presents a pessimism that is potentially compatible with hope for living well within an oppressive context (7). it is a popular view that hope is not apt for many individuals, particularly those who have lived under oppression or persistent political struggle. there is not sufficient evidence to support a belief that things will improve— a positively toned “what-if” attitude is unjustified, bordering on naive. if we resist under these pessimistic circumstances, we do so not necessarily out of hope that things will improve but out of a commitment to one another, out of the sheer urge to refuse oppression, and in order to develop responsive and resilient character traits.2 while more modest objects of hope may be compatible with the range of pessimistic views presented here, given the state of the world and the complexity of systemic moral problems we face, there is no good reason to hope for progress. relatedly, there is a worry that emphasizing hope in politics sets individuals up for disappointment, which ultimately demotivates political action. if we get our hopes up too high (perhaps by allowing our desire for a goal to inflate our sense of the odds of success) or find ourselves facing dashed hopes repeatedly, perhaps we are less likely to remain politically active in the future. matt sleat (2013, 131) points out that being disappointed in a political outcome is a far more frequent occurrence for all individuals than having a political hope fulfilled. one potential response to this fact is to recommend that we temper our hopes so as to minimize disappointment, which may lead to apathy or demoralization. if repeatedly dashed hopes result in demotivating political action, encouraging hope in politics runs the risk of being counterproductive. the second worry i’ll consider is that the idealistic element of hope distracts us from more achievable political goals. in emphasizing hope in the political realm, we focus our attention on the utopian at the cost of current pressing issues. consider the movement for prison abolition. the unabashedly utopian goal of (and simultaneous hope for) ultimately abolishing the prison-industrial complex has been criticized not only for being unrealistic but for diverting efforts from more realistic prison reforms. of course, this worry is specific to utopian hopes, and a relevant response is that not 1 for related arguments, see norlock (2019), tessman (2009), bell (1992), warren (2015), sullivan (2017), and sleat (2013). 2 this motivation is explored in tessman (2009) and later in this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 all political hopes must be utopian. we can have political hopes for small-scale prison reforms or any practical and relatively achievable political goal. however, a charitable read of this worry is that the emphasis on hope in the political realm is most often aimed at sweeping and often utopian goals. calls for hope are used to motivate entire movements and inspire cause-based activism. hope is needed, and therefore invoked, when the path toward a political goal is not obvious and reaching the goal is far from likely. practical and relatively achievable political goals, such as passing a school levy that has sizable support, don’t often elicit calls to hope. instead, clear-cut and tangible actions are emphasized in such cases. third, there is a worry that a normative emphasis on hope places an undue burden on individuals. not only is it counterproductive, but emphasizing hope is actively harmful to oppressed groups. encouraging people who are systematically marginalized to cultivate a “positively toned ‘what-if’ attitude” is adding insult to moral injury. hope, in politics, amounts to toxic positivity. rhetoric surrounding hope in american democratic party politics is fraught, conjuring images of shepard fairey’s 2008 barack obama poster and the naive promise of a postracial america. martell teasley and david ikard (2010) point out that these empty calls to hope as “symbolic capital” can and have been used for ideological ends by the politically powerful to placate oppressed groups. similarly, some theorists have argued that a call for hope (specifically hope for racial justice) is not only politically inadequate, misplaced, and distracting but also actively harmful to black americans (sullivan 2017). calvin warren (2015. 221) endorses “black nihilism” against a politics of hope, because hope (specifically the hope that political struggle can lead to racial justice) functions as a “cruel optimism” that ultimately results in undermining the very goal hoped for, effectively functioning to keep black suffering in place. instead of being pacified by symbolic change or fruitlessly hoping for racial harmony, individuals in politically oppressed groups should remain clear-eyed and focused on other ways to flourish. finally, i worry that emphasizing individual hope is merely an impractical way to motivate political action. since most activism responds to injustice, it is often motivated by urgency and outrage rather than a sense of hope. the nature and scope of structural injustice results in a sense of hopelessness in most people, who understandably feel powerless and defeated when reflecting on the future of our planet, persistent racialized police brutality, or the rise in mass shootings in the united states. perhaps talk of political hope is not only out of fashion but also outsized. focusing too much on the way individuals feel when faced with such structural problems won’t get us very far. structural problems need to be met with varied, persistent, and sustained collective action. despite these worries, hope should not be discarded. in the following sections i will argue that collective hope (as opposed to individual hope) not only avoids many fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 of these worries but plays an important motivational role in activist movements. far from abandoning hope, collective hope should be cultivated in these settings. 2. collective hope what is collective hope, and how does it avoid the myriad worries raised in the previous section? i start by briefly presenting katie stockdale’s analysis of collective hope, which provides us with an understanding of how collective hope differs from individual hope. here i use stockdale’s analysis of collective hope as a starting point for understanding further benefits of collective hope that she does not explore. first, collective hope (either stockdale’s view or an adjusted conception) can address the worries against individual hope raised in the previous section. second, collective hope provides a unique motivational force through activities of shared imagination. understanding activities of shared imagination is necessary for making sense of and harnessing the motivational force of collective hope. 2.1. a working version of collective hope from stockdale in “hope, solidarity, and justice,” katie stockdale (2021) outlines a view of collective hope that arises from group action and solidarity. collective hope differs from individual or shared hope: the former is limited to one agent, while the latter does not require any joint action in pursuing the hoped-for outcome. hope is collective, according to stockdale (2021, 8), when: (1) the hope is shared by at least some others; (2) the favorable perception of the possibility that the desired outcome might obtain, and corresponding hopeful feelings, is caused (or is strengthened) by activity in a collective setting;3 and (3) the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the collective. for stockdale, the third element of individual hope (added onto the orthodox definition’s belief and desire elements) is a way of perceiving the possibility that the hoped-for outcome will obtain. in instances of collective hope, the “favorable perception” is brought about through collective action. condition three addresses the 3 stockdale provides a clear definition of when hope is collective, and she notes that she uses the terms “collective,” “solidary group,” and “movement” interchangeably (8, footnote 6). she does not go into detail about the metaphysics of such social groups but indicates that a solidarity group or collective is a group wherein shared intentions, actions, and, of course, collective hope can arise via joint commitment (10). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 unique phenomenology of collective hope, which explains why collective hope is not reducible to the individual hopes of the members of the collective. in moral-political solidarity groups, expressions of hope shared by members create an overall atmosphere that helps explain how a collective, as opposed to individual members, can be said to hope. this felt atmosphere further distinguishes collective hope from shared or interpersonal hope, explicitly specifying that the atmosphere extends across the collective. in creating an atmosphere of collective hope, individuals can be members of a collective that hopes, as well as participate in collective action without necessarily experiencing individual hope. this can be easily seen in the movement for prison abolition. many people consider themselves prison abolitionists, in that they share a goal for a world without prisons, and may participate in various organizations or actions aimed at this goal. an activist may, to illustrate several examples, join an abolitionist group and protest to close a local jail, spread awareness of the harms caused by solitary confinement, volunteer to incorporate transformative justice practices in schools, or lobby to have a bill passed that reforms sentencing laws. participating in any of these actions means they join in solidarity with other abolitionists to chip away at the prison system, motivated by a shared goal. but the activist may not have individual hope that a world without prisons is possible. they could temporarily lose hope due to a pragmatic setback or believe that total prison abolition is not possible yet is still worth fighting for. rather, they may be motivated out of a sense of duty (“i really should help”), a sense of urgency (“i must do something,” i must resist”), encouragement from others, curiosity, or even a loss of hope in larger institutions.4 despite a lack of individual hope, by working together with others toward a common goal, individuals can be involved in a group that collectively hopes. this point is crucial for two reasons. first, it seems empirically true that not all members of activist movements feel individual hope, either for more immediate pragmatic outcomes or a wide-reaching utopian hope. second, as i mention in section 1, it may be unfair or harmful to expect all individuals to feel hope. there are many instances in which hope is not justified or is simply impossible to experience even if justified. an individual’s ability to feel hope will be shaped by their life experience, social position, and individual personality, among other factors. hope is not rational if the subject does not have good reason to believe the hoped-for outcome is possible (even barely possible).5 furthermore, we can imagine that hope may be impossible to 4 stockdale gives the example of the #metoo movement, and how many individuals are moved to participate out of a loss of hope in the criminal legal system, as it relates to survivors of sexual assault. 5 much work on hope in analytic philosophy centers around rational permissibility. given the belief and desire elements of the orthodox definition of hope, there are fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 experience for, or simply too much to ask of, someone who has suffered a great deal of disappointment or trauma in their life. a working theory of collective hope that demands hope from all individuals is neither accurate nor useful. one objection to stockdale’s view of collective hope is that this third condition, the felt atmosphere of hope, is too elusive or mysterious to ground collective hope born of solidarity.6 however, in my experience, stockdale is identifying a very real phenomenon felt in some group settings, particularly groups working toward a passionately shared goal. this atmosphere may well be mysterious or hard to analyze, as many felt experiences are. the feeling of shared sentiment, while common, is not easily explained. while the atmosphere of hope may elude explanation, it is clearly identifiable. in this sense, the mysterious nature of the felt atmosphere can be embraced. in order to identify a working definition of collective hope, which in itself is somewhat mysterious, stockdale isn’t required to explain away every aspect of the concept. that being said, my aim here is not to provide a distinct or adjusted account of collective hope. instead, i intend to use the strongest philosophical account of collective hope, which is stockdale’s, to explore further elements of collective hope— namely, its generative power and ability to avoid worries leveled against individual political hope—and to identify a phenomenon central to activist movements: holding hope. we don’t need to fully understand the mechanism by which a collective hopes for the sake of my argument, though it is an important question for further work. instead, we only need an understanding that there can be a collective that hopes for an outcome even if each individual member of the collective does not have hope. i take this element of stockdale’s view of collective hope to be crucial, and it helps collective hope avoid some of the major worries raised in section 1 against individual political hope. 2.2. avoiding the problems of individual hope encouraging individual political hope is troubled by the four worries i raise in section 1: (a) we have no good reason to hope, and inevitable dashed hopes will demotivate; (b) hope distracts us from achievable goals with utopian dreams; (c) hope places an undue burden on individuals (particularly oppressed groups); and (d) hope is too scarce to be worth encouraging. rather than embracing individual political hope, we should embrace and encourage hope at the collective level. how does collective hope avoid these worries? epistemic limits on when we can rationally hope. for the purposes of this paper, i will only point out that hope is irrational if the subject is not warranted in their belief their hoped-for end is possible. however, there is much more to be said about the conditions under which beliefs, specifically beliefs in political feasibility, are justified. 6 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 first, there is the pessimistic worry raised by norlock (2019) and others that we have no good reason to hope. grand hopes for a racially just future (warren 2015) or an eventual end to evil (norlock 2019) are, indeed, hard for most people to get behind, but i am not arguing that we encourage hope in either one of these ends. in fact, i agree with norlock that we are “sharing burdens that can’t be put down and must, therefore, be traded” (15). though some individuals may be able to hope for a racially just future, many of us cannot. instead, i argue that collective hope is an essential element of political activism aimed at specific ends and that the conditions for nurturing collective hope in activist spaces should be encouraged. the specific ends will vary given the political goals of the activists, but since political activism (as opposed to theoretical commitment) is aimed at action (e.g., calling for a ceasefire, striking until labor negotiations are settled, or working toward decarceration by various means), the relevant collective hope will not be as broad as “a racially just future.” hope need not be sweeping or particularly optimistic. this response addresses the object of hope and can serve as a reason why we may have good reason to hope individually or collectively if we modify our scope. however, even if some individuals are correct that they have no good reason to hope, they can still be part of a collective that hopes. while persistent dashed hopes may impact motivation for political activism, there is a further reason why we may find value in difficult pursuits done as a member of a collective, even if the low odds of success discourage us. working together with others for a shared goal can be fertile ground for developing various character traits and skills (e.g., empathy, conscientiousness, persistence, organizing tactics, etc.).7 engaging in collective work often leads to developing relationships and making connections within and across communities. each of these elements can be intrinsically valuable and can make a difficult pursuit and the associated collective hope worthwhile, whether or not one achieves their goal. the second worry is that hope aims at impossible dreams at the cost of focusing on tangible goals. i will respond to this worry in two ways. first, recall that collective hope, on stockdale’s view, arises from collective action and solidarity. thus, it will be directed at a tangible goal, even if said goal is ultimately aiming at a utopian end. collective hope comes from working together toward a goal in a political context, so it will not be distracting us from the here and now—it is a result of focusing on political reality. of course, political activists can be out of touch with reality as well and can share a distorted goal, one that has no actual chance of obtaining. we will 7 cheshire calhoun (2018) points out that when pursuing difficult individual goals, we often value the person we become in the process. while this is true of both individual and collective difficult pursuits, here i am interested in the character traits, skills, and relationships that come from working with others as a collective. fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 always run the risk of having false hope, but this means that we must be careful and thoughtful with the political causes in which we invest our hopes. the worry here is that hope is distracting us from short-term, achievable tasks with too-lofty visions— but short-term and long-term goals are not zero-sum. though a movement like prison abolition necessarily involves a utopian hope for a world without prisons, the pragmatic element of the movement will be focused on fighting for this vision with short-term political goals like reforming the bail system. because collective hope comes from and drives collective political action with others, which involves multiple perspectives, it will include various strategies for working toward political goals. as opposed to political theorizing, political activism necessarily involves tangible, if not necessarily realizable, short-term goals that support a broader vision. second, when it comes to utopian hopes like a world without prisons, by their very nature we do not know if they are possible or impossible. through imagining (as well as other hopeful activities), we partially determine what political futures are possible or impossible. we must first imagine a possible future in order to work toward building it. just as we don’t know whether a world without prisons is socially possible, we don’t know that it is socially impossible.8 both claims require support. this response likely will not satisfy anyone averse to utopian thinking, but between the other responses to worries about hope and the motivational force i identify in section 3, even pragmatists may be able to see the value of collective hope. the third worry i raise is that encouraging hope places an undue burden on individuals, particularly those who have faced systemic political and social oppression. collective hope avoids this worry deftly, because not all individuals who share in collective hope are required to hope individually. individuals who have faced repeatedly dashed political hopes or acute systemic oppression are not required to hope on this view (doing so may even be irrational given their individual beliefs, desires, and expectations) and therefore are not falling short if they fail to hope. they may resist oppression or fight for justice for reasons aside from hope, some of which i have mentioned above. lisa tessman (2009, 10) reminds us of derrick bell’s (1992, xvi) pessimistic resister mrs. biona macdonald, who resists her sustained racial oppression because she “lives to harass white folks” (bell 1992, xii). there are reasons to pursue political ends that have nothing to do with hope, and those motivated by these reasons can still be involved in a collective that results in an atmosphere of collective hope without ever feeling individually hopeful themselves. 8 in other work (fife 2022), i define social impossibility as a state of affairs or political aim that, given our current social structure, is so impractical that it is, for our purposes, impossible. this sense of possibility, distinct from logical and nomological possibility, is used loosely in social and political discourse when people say things like “repealing the second amendment is impossible!” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 the fourth worry i raise in the previous section is that hope is too scarce a commodity—it is impractical to encourage it because there is so little to go around. collective hope, by its nature, spreads across many people. though it does require some people to hold individual hope for the collective, as i’ll discuss in section 4, it can also be contagious. collective hope not only generates new reasons for commitment, as i explain below, but interpersonal hope tends to inspire individual hope. the main benefit of collective hope comes from the fact that not all members of the collective are required to have individual hope. i’ve argued that this is essential for responding to the first, third, and fourth worries about individual hope. despite the strengths of collective hope, it could still be misplaced or out of touch with reality. however, it is more difficult to have misplaced collective hope than misplaced individual hope. the mere fact that fallible people can misapply hope, as we can misapply anything, does not show that it should always be discouraged. in what follows, i argue that more important than its ability to respond to worries is collective hope’s motivational power. 3. shared imagination and the generative power of collective hope collective hope avoids many of the strongest worries raised at individual hope. but more importantly, collective hope has a unique motivational power that can generate new reasons for commitment. how does hope motivate in this way, and what makes the motivational aspect of collective hope unique? can hoping create new practical commitments, or does it merely reinforce commitments we already had? adrienne martin (2014) and cheshire calhoun (2018) present separate answers to this question:9 calhoun claims that hope sustains our practical pursuits by “seconding” our preexisting commitment to the hoped-for end, while martin argues that hope can generate new commitments, thereby granting a more substantial motivational power to hope. by way of fantasizing about a hoped-for outcome, martin argues individual hope can generate new beliefs and desires (or change previously held beliefs), which then motivate an agent’s actions. in this section, i argue that by way of activities of shared imagination, collective hope has a uniquely motivating power that individual hope does not have. 9 martin’s incorporation analysis of hope provides a picture of how hope motivates. martin argues that her incorporation analysis illustrates a dualist account of action: rational motivation captures the fact that a hopeful person “stands ready to offer practical justification for her rational activities,” while subrational motivation appeals to their own attraction to the outcome (2014, 142). in this way, martin (2014, 96) emphasizes that hope “is not itself a unique kind of motivational force,” but rather that hopeful activities are expressions of other “motivational representations (attraction and end-setting).” fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 3.1. activities of shared imagination collective hope lends itself to a specific way of engaging the moral imagination, which i will call the activities of shared imagination. within activist movements, individuals are likely to engage in imaginative practices together. the movement for prison abolition, for example, involves many people constructing a collective vision— a broad vision of a world without prisons, as well as specific visions of alternative systems that must be built to make a world without prisons possible. constructing a collective vision requires activities of shared imagination: individuals exploring and creating a possible vision of the future together. these activities of shared imagination are distinct from imagining as an individual and from the type of hopeful fantasizing that martin (2014, 88–91) describes. shared imagination is not limited to activist movements. whenever two or more individuals engage in a creative collaborative project (e.g., two authors writing a joint article, an architecture firm designing a building, a group of friends planning a party), they share their ideas, visions, and imaginative projections of the end goal, potential obstacles, paths to pursuing their end, and so on. this process becomes shared moral imagination when it involves moral concepts, theories, and actions. shared imagination can result in one specific vision of the future, but it can also result in individuals having varied visions of the future. not all prison abolitionists have identical views, or even a clear view, of what a world without prisons will look like. (in fact, no one has a full view.) while we don’t need a perfectly detailed view of the future, we do need specific ideas for how practices can be improved in order to actively respond to injustice. this balance of realism and idealism is something that many activists try to strike, and it is often overlooked by critics. however, the process and result of shared imagination is central to both the theory and action of the movement. when we hope, as martin points out, we are disposed to fantasize (in her words) or imagine the hoped-for outcome. on my view, when hope is collective, we are disposed to engage in the activities related to shared imagination. in imagining with one another and for one another, we can produce new desires and beliefs in a way that mirrors martin’s observations of individual hopeful fantasizing. martin (2014, 91) argues that individual hope can generate new reasons and commitments by (a) strengthening our sense of agency, (b) generating new beliefs and desires about the outcome through vivid fantasizing, and (c) developing new beliefs about ways to pursue our hoped-for end through fantasizing.10 the shared imaginative practices 10 margaret urban walker (2006, 50) makes a similar point in her conception of hope when she notes one effect of hoping is to “drive us to contribute to the desired outcome: to move us to look for openings, imagine alternative routes . . . and thus feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 inherent in collective hope can be correspondingly generative. first, shared imaginative practices may lead to a strengthened sense of agency. for example, i cannot imagine making much impact as an individual when it comes to a systemic problem like mass incarceration. however, by engaging in shared imaginative activities, i may begin to feel more agency as a member of a collective. second, shared imaginative practices can lead individuals to new beliefs and desires that shape their commitments. my individual vision of an abolitionist future is likely to be quite narrow, as i have lived only one life from a particular social position. in hearing the visions of others, learning about nonretributive approaches to harm, and collaborating with others imaginatively, i will likely develop new commitments and desires related to the abolitionist movement. third, through shared imaginative practices, i can envision new routes to working toward decarceration. shared imagination is necessary for planning action and responding to problems that are likely to arise. through shared imagination, collective hope can generate and strengthen new beliefs and desires related to a hoped-for outcome. these beliefs and desires motivate individuals to form new commitments, including joint commitments with others.11,12 make what might be barely possible . . . somewhat more likely, and perhaps even within reach.” 11 with the term “joint commitment,” i am making use of margaret gilbert’s (2013) view of groups as “plural subjects.” on her view, a plural subject is formed when two or more individuals take on a “joint commitment,” which is a commitment of the will. gilbert’s joint commitment view of social groups is at work in the background of stockdale’s account of collective hope as well, but for the purposes of this paper, i will not explore details of collective intention. rather, i take it to be true that when individuals join a collective, they form various joint commitments. 12 additionally, shared imagination can be a motivating factor of its own. creative activities, whether done with others or individually, are joyful and pleasurable for many people. the joyful and constructive elements of activism are often overlooked, as most activism centers around serious harm and injustice. one notable exception is adrienne maree brown’s (2019) work pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. however, solidarity, collective action, and shared imagination can be joyful, even while difficult or discouraging. some individuals may be motivated by this potential for shared imagination and creative work born of solidarity, alongside (or even above) a felt duty to respond to injustice. i mention this separately from the discussion of collective hope generating new commitments because the motivating factor in these particular instances may not require collective hope at all. fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 3.2. what is unique about shared imagination? collective hope can generate new desires and beliefs in ways that parallel individual hopeful fantasizing, but shared imaginative activity is uniquely motivational and importantly distinct from individual imagining in three ways. first, activities of shared imagination necessarily include multiple perspectives. when imagining collaboratively with others, we are building ideas with individuals who have different lives, social identities, and experiences. this variety of perspectives is creatively beneficial because it results in a greater diversity of concepts, ways of thinking, and methods of problem-solving. in the example of prison abolition, engaging in activities of shared imagination with different people—people who have direct involvement with incarceration, people with knowledge of the legal system, people with organizing experience, people with lobbying experience, social workers, and so on—will result in a much more robust view of alternatives to incarceration and plans for addressing specific abolitionist reforms. the various perspectives involved in activities of shared imagination are particularly prone to sustaining hope because—given a wider variety of voices and, therefore, expertise—imaginative activities are more likely to be detailed and well formed. second, activities of shared imagination will likely include built-in disagreement. when imagining with others, as opposed to by ourselves, we are likely to face disagreement about possibility. while this disagreement can sometimes be negative, as i’ll explain below, the inevitable disagreement involved in shared imaginative activities can be beneficial: disagreement leads to revision and to building a stronger vision or plan. in any creative endeavor, consistent feedback from those who share some underlying goal or commitment usually helps produce a stronger end product. as i’ve mentioned above, while prison abolitionists share an underlying commitment and long-term political vision, there is no shared agreement on how to practically move toward a world without prisons in the short-term. while prioritizing steps toward decarceration, new york abolitionist groups like rapp and the parole preparation project have chosen to invest energy and resources toward lobbying for specific bills that will address elder parole reform.13 internal disagreement and feedback from organizers, lawyers, formally incarcerated individuals, and other activists has helped shape the writing of the bills, the choice of which members of the legislature to focus on, the strategies for gaining public support, and so forth. while 13 for example, two bills (elder parole [s.15a/a.3475a] and fair and timely parole [s.1415a/a.4346]) sponsored during the new york state assembly’s 2021–2022 legislative session would expand the number of people who are eligible for parole and change the standards of parole such that more individuals might be released from prison, respectively. see the people’s campaign for parole justice website for more information: https://www.parolejusticeny.com/campaign-platform. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 too much disagreement can slow progress in activist groups, a diverse space for collaboration will necessarily involve disagreement that can be transformed into a strong plan of action. third, imagining as a group is more likely to sustain individuals in their political commitments through inspiration and social energy. in section 4, i go into further detail about interpersonal motivation and pressure that can help sustain activism, as well as a related worry. when it comes to prison abolition, imagining a future together can be sustained by the variety of experiences and ideas i identify above, and also by the pressure from others to continuously focus on the problem at hand as opposed to ignoring it. when working alone, we may be tempted to give up or look away from suffering when it becomes too difficult to face. with others, we may be less inclined to do so because they are reminding us, or because we feel some internal shame at looking away. furthermore, given that my focus here is systemic injustice, activities of shared imagination are more likely to sustain motivation due to the sense that individual activity is not viewed as an effective response to systemic issues. when reflecting upon the injustices surrounding mass incarceration, my individual vision of a different world and my felt sense of efficacy are extremely limited. when i discuss radical political possibilities with others who have been working toward change for a long time, or when i read abolitionist authors thinking through these issues, my ability to imagine further is sustained. 3.3. potential hurdles to activities of shared imagination some worries arise when emphasizing the importance of activities of shared imagination. creative, interpersonal, and pragmatic problems might arise when imagining with others. these worries generally map onto the three distinct elements of shared imagination i identify above. first, though multiple perspectives are generally an epistemic benefit, imagining productively with others across perspectives and experiences will require some level of empathy and knowledge of the other,14 which is something individuals routinely lack. i acknowledge that this is an area in which activities of shared imagination may face a stumbling block, but the fact that empathy is required to imagine well together is precisely why activities of shared imagination are inherently motivating. when engaging in an imaginative exercise like pragmatic planning, movement-building, or exploring conceptual space with others, at minimum, we have a shared goal. the normative nature of this shared goal leaves space for empathy toward the other in a way that collaborating on a low-stakes professional task may 14 i’d like to thank the second anonymous reviewer at feminist philosophy quarterly for raising this line of thought and encouraging me to explore the details of activities of shared imagination in more detail. fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 not. additionally, imagining together sows the seeds of empathy, because we learn about our collaborator’s point of view, experiences, and thought process. the more we learn about one another, the more space there is for empathy. second, i cite built-in disagreement as a positive element of shared imagination, one that makes imagining done together conceptually distinct from individual imagining. however, it is clear that this can work to demotivate if disagreement goes too far. while conflicting views can lead to revised and improved plans and more inclusive movement-building, too much disagreement and conflict can prevent progress. like anything done with others, imagining together is difficult, but the potential benefits are great. managing a productive balance of disagreement among members of a collective who are imagining together is difficult, but the fact that imagining together is difficult does not mean it lacks a particularly motivational power when done well. determining how exactly to do it well is a further project. finally, motivation that comes from the social aspect of imagining together can go too far. if the social pressure of activities of shared imagination creates an undue burden on individuals of the collective, then collective hope does not avoid the worry i raise against individual hope in section 1. i address this worry further in section 4.2, after i identify a unique type of interpersonal hope specific to activist movements like the movement for prison abolition. 4. holding hope in section 2 i distinguished collective hope from both individual and shared hope, the latter being a case of multiple individuals hoping for the same outcome. there is another form of hope closely intertwined with collective hope: interpersonal hope.15 interpersonal hope is distinct from collective hope but substantially communal. in this final section, i introduce a type of interpersonal hope and a distinct phenomenon integral to activist movements. i call this phenomenon holding hope— when an individual holds hope for others as a member of a collective, they hope in the goals of the group, support the emergence of collective hope, and may also support the capacity of others to hope. in holding hope for a collective, as a member of a collective, this version of interpersonal hope makes collective hope possible, which serves to sustain and strengthen existing joint commitments. through the social pressure associated with peer scaffolding,16 holding hope risks reintroducing the 15 martin (2019, 229) defines interpersonal hope as “hope invested by one person in another.” 16 victoria mcgeer (2004) introduces the concept of scaffolding hope in “the art of good hope.” she argues that hope is an essential feature of human agency and identifies peer scaffolding as an element of hoping well. peer scaffolding is a mode of engagement with others where “individuals are reinforced in their own sense of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 worry from section 1 that political hope creates a burden on individuals.17 while interpersonal hope may lead to the creation of moral obligations, it is less likely to create an undue burden on individuals because the hopes and associated goals are self-directed. working alongside others as a member of a collective, hoping, and imagining together are messy endeavors and will likely complicate what we owe to one another. however, this is the case for any worthwhile collective effort and is not a reason to avoid engaging in moral-political solidarity. 4.1. holding hope as a member of a collective how is collective hope sustained? recall that an important aspect of this view of collective hope within activist movements is that not all individuals need to have individual hope for an end, be it as broad as a hope for utopian justice or a more modest hope for a particular reform. however, some number of individuals in the collective do need to experience individual hope. it might be useful to think of those with individual hopes as “holding hope” for less hopeful (or unhopeful) individuals. holding hope is particularly important for activists who are addressing structural injustice; given the daunting and complex nature of structural injustice, individuals within an activist movement may quite often lose individual hope. some members will need to hold hope for the collective. might it be possible for collective hope to arise when no individual members have hope? that is, can collective hope arise without anyone holding hope, given that not all members of the collective are individually hopeful at all times? i don’t believe so. on stockdale’s view of collective hope, the “favorable perception” in the odds of the hoped-for outcome, as well as hopeful feelings, must be born of solidarity and collective action. this still indicates that there needs to be some favorable perception of the odds. a collective cannot perceive; only individuals can interpret possibility in this way. if no individuals in the collective hope, then there is no favorable perception of the odds of the outcome obtaining, and condition two will not be met. furthermore, if no individuals hope, there will be no “reciprocal hopeful expressions” among members of the collective, which ultimately contribute to the overall atmosphere that illustrates the phenomenological quality of collective hope. therefore, if no individuals hope, condition three will not be met either. even if one rejects stockdale’s view of collective hope due to the mysterious nature of the phenomenological atmosphere of hope, hope at the collective level still must originate from somewhere. effective agency by having their hopes recognized and respected as critical to that sense of agency” (118). 17 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this worry. fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 in order for collective hope to arise, we must “share the load” of hoping, in a way. in activist movements, this seems perfectly natural. individuals sometimes feel hopeful; sometimes feel defeated; sometimes participate in collective action out of a sense of duty, a brute desire to refuse and resist oppression, or even habit; and other times are motivated by a hopeful vision of the future. much like we rely on one another to perform tasks when we cannot in a collaborative setting, we may rely on one another within an activist movement to hope when we cannot. in this way, we hold hope for one another as a member of a collective. i mention above that when an individual holds hope for the goals of a group as a member of a collective, they not only support the emergence of collective hope but may also support the capacity of others to individually hope. hopeful members of the collective can model hope for others, serving as encouragement or a reminder of hope that other members may have lost. furthermore, we might feel motivated to hope when we witness someone who faces more obstacles than us and is nevertheless hopeful. a prison abolitionist who does not have direct involvement with the system (they were never incarcerated, nor were one of their loved ones) may find the sustained hope of those directly impacted motivational. they might think, “wow, if they are witnessing this issue firsthand and can still find hope, what excuse do i have to lose hope?” while such comparative lines of thinking can be useful and effective, they can also become psychologically or socially harmful.18 finding someone’s hope, resilience, or sustained resistance inspirational is common, but if it results in excessive othering, fetishization, or unhealthy comparison, it is problematic. 4.2. peer scaffolding and social pressure when we engage with others through what mcgeer (2004, 118) calls peer scaffolding of hopes, we recognize and respect their hopes, stimulating the confidence and agency of another and relying on them to do the same for us. when we invest our hope in one another within a collective, we aim to create a relationship that encourages the other to realize their hoped-for ends. members of an activist movement may invest their hope in one another by hoping that others perform the roles and actions they have agreed to, sustain their commitment to the movement, and continue to believe in the cause. importantly, when we hope interpersonally within a collective, we often share the same hope—be it a long-term vision of a world 18 this phenomenon abuts what is referred to as “inspiration porn,” an informal term coined by stella young. inspiration porn is the objectification of disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people, with the purpose of inspiration or motivation. see stella young, “i’m not your inspiration, thank you very much,” filmed in sydney, australia, april 2014, ted talk video, 9:02. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_ i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much?subtitle=en. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 without prisons or a short-term goal of passing sentencing reform bill. here we are not dictating the hopes of others or directing their goals but instead joining with others who share similar hopes and encouraging activities that work toward realizing these goals. investing hope in one another, particularly within an activist movement, can motivate individuals by adding an element of pressure. if a peer or mentor has invested energy and hope in me, i feel all the more motivated to not let them down. in instances where our internal motivation begins to falter, interpersonal hope may serve as partially external motivation. while this can take the shape of encouraging, i’ll note that hope placed in others can sometimes add a harmful or counterproductive type of pressure. though peer scaffolding involves supporting the hopes that other people have chosen, external motivation can go too far. imagine an overbearing sports coach whose hope in another’s success becomes unbearable. the coach supports the athlete’s hope for success in their specific domain, which is necessary for athletic achievement and can often be grounds for a relationship involving peer scaffolding. yet we can easily imagine the coach becoming overly invested in the achievement of the athlete such that they take on the achievement as their own, begin to care more about success than the athlete themselves, or exert pressure that is overwhelming or harmful. temporary buoying of our hopes through the scaffolding and encouragement of others is useful if we still endorse and truly hope for a given end. but if our reasons for hope become based on satisfying the desires of others, or fulfilling perceived obligation to them, then external motivation that began as useful scaffolding is no longer self-directed. the third worry about individual hope, that it creates an undue burden on individuals, seems to reappear at the level of interpersonal hope. when holding hope as a member of a collective, do we create undue pressure on others to remain hopeful? do we coerce our comrades to feel or act a certain way when they no longer should? this can certainly happen in a collective, and we should be sensitive to the conditions under which holding hope or peer scaffolding shifts from useful to harmful pressure. discerning one’s reasons for hope, particularly when they are varied, is a difficult endeavor. doing so will involve examining the desire element of one’s hope’s closely, as well as evaluating sacrifices that individuals make in difficult pursuits. interpersonal hoping that creates harmful pressure is not an example of hoping well. however, the pressure created by interpersonal hope does not run the same risk of creating an undue burden as individual hope. peer scaffolding within a collective is not the same as holding one another accountable for fulfilling our commitments. investing hope in another does not necessarily create an obligation, though it may lead to the creation of an obligation. the interpersonal hope i’ve outlined is less likely to create an undue burden than individual hope due to the self-directed quality of these hopes. since individuals fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 usually share similar individual hopes and goals within an activist movement, peer scaffolding encourages another person’s confidence in their ability to realize their own self-directed hopes. furthermore, given the shared nature of these hopes, encouraging one’s peer often serves to encourage self-confidence in one’s own ability to realize the same hopes. imagine that a friend and i join rapp (release aging people in prison), an abolitionist group advocating for reform for elder parole in new york state. lobbying for elder parole bills is an uphill battle, and one that activists have been pursuing for years. after facing disappointment in the last legislative session by not seeing the bills passed, my friend might (understandably) begin to lose hope. in encouraging her to keep fighting for a cause we are both dedicated to, i may also encourage myself by recalling that collective action can make progress, even in the face of disappointment. similarly, peer scaffolding is at work in a collective when we encourage one another that we can accomplish our shared hopes together. in this way, peer scaffolding can strengthen and sustain existing joint commitments within a movement. if new commitments are created through collective hope, they will be self-directed given the shared commitments that unite members of a collective. though there is still a chance that the pressure (sometimes gentle, sometimes less so) involved in interpersonal hope can go too far, it is necessarily distinct from the undue burden of pushing individual hope on individuals who are not working toward a shared cause. in working together with others, we open ourselves up to the messiness of social and political life: we will inevitably take on responsibilities, form relationships, let down or bolster others, and open ourselves up be let down or bolstered by them in turn. mcgeer (2014, 125) shares the insight that hoping well is an art, meaning it is both a gift and a skill. i add that as individuals, we may be gifted with the ability to hope easily, rightly lose hope when faced with setbacks, or have to work very hard to feel hope. however, through collective and interpersonal hope, we can develop and hone our skills of hoping. within a collective, individual hopes may ebb and flow. a further element of collectively hoping well is to balance these fluctuations in a way that is productive. conclusion collective hope is central to activist movements and should be cultivated. through the activities of shared imagination, collective hope both sustains political commitments and generates new commitments in the members of a collective. because not all members of a collective are required to have individual hope, collective hope avoids worries raised by pessimists and pragmatists about political hope. holding hope, a unique form of interpersonal hope essential to activist movements, reintroduces worries of social pressure and overdemandingness, but the benefit of engaging in political work outweighs these risks. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 the structural nature of most contemporary problems, from mass incarceration to the climate crisis, makes courses of individual action both unclear and seemingly ineffective. the tangled web of structural injustice and institutional inaction is often demoralizing and demotivating. many of us feel very little individual hope when we honestly confront large-scale crises. we know we cannot make a dent in these issues as individuals alone and that collective action is needed. however, collective action is built up out of individual efforts. taking a step, even a small step, to engage in collective action and surround oneself with other individuals doing the same, can inspire individual hope by illustrating how coordinated effort born of solidarity might do what individual action cannot. while collective and interpersonal hope can sustain our joint commitments, working within and hoping as a collective can also encourage individual hope. references bell, derrick. 1992. faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism. new york: basic books. bovens, luc. 1999. “the value of hope.” philosophy and phenomenological research 59, no. 3 (september): 667–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/2653787. brown, adrienne maree. 2019. pleasure activism: the politics of feeling good. chico, ca: ak press. calhoun, cheshire. 2018. “motivating hope.” in doing valuable time: the present, the future, and meaningful living, 68–89. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190851866.003.0004. day, j. p. 1969. “hope.” american philosophical quarterly 6, no. 2 (april): 89–102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20009295. fife, maggie. 2022. “imagination and possibility,” chapter 1 of “hope, imagination, and moral revolutions.” manuscript for phd diss., in progress, last modified november 11, 2022. gilbert, margaret. 2013. joint commitment: how we make the social world. new york: oxford university press. martin, adrienne m. 2014. how we hope: a moral psychology. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ———. 2019. “interpersonal hope.” in the moral psychology of hope, edited by claudia blöser and titus stahl, 229–49. london: rowman & littlefield international. mcgeer, victoria. 2004. “the art of good hope.” annals of the american academy of political and social science 592, no. 1 (march): 100–127. http://doi.org/10 .1177/0002716203261781. ———. 2008. “trust, hope and empowerment.” australasian journal of philosophy 86 (2): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048400801886413. fife – the generative power of collective hope published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 norlock, kathryn j. 2019. “perpetual struggle.” hypatia 34, no. 1 (winter): 6–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12452. sleat, matt. 2013. “hope and disappointment in politics.” contemporary politics 19 (2): 131–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2013.785826. stockdale, katie. 2021. “hope, solidarity, and justice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (2). article 1. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq/2021.2.10646. sullivan, shannon. 2017. “setting aside hope: a pragmatist approach to racial justice.” in pragmatism and justice, edited by susan dielman, david rondel, and christopher voparil, 231–46. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190459239.001.0001. teasley, martell, and david ikard. 2010. “barack obama and the politics of race: the myth of postracism in america.” journal of black studies 40, no. 3 (january): 411–25. http://doi.org/10.1177/0021934709352991. tessman, lisa. 2009. “expecting bad luck.” in “oppression and moral agency: essays in honor of claudia card,” edited by kathryn j. norlock and andrea veltman, special issue, hypatia 24, no. 1 (winter): 9–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527 -2001.2009.00003.x. walker, margaret urban. 2006. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press. https://doi.org/10.1017 /cbo9780511618024. warren, calvin l. 2015. “black nihilism and the politics of hope.” cr: the new centennial review 15, no. 1 (spring): 215–48. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnew centrevi.15.1.0215. maggie fife (she/her) is a phd candidate in philosophy at the graduate center, cuny. she works primarily in ethics and social epistemology from a feminist standpoint. her current work focuses on imagination, prison abolition, and moral revolutions. 16644 fife title page 16644 fife final format 2 do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 13 recommended citation delston, j. b. 2024. “do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 13. 2024 do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics j. b. delston university of missouri-st. louis delston@gmail.com delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics j. b. delston1 abstract in this paper, i argue that virtue ethics is unfortunately committed to a developmentally detrimental form of moral evaluation in its traditional iterations. that is, first, because both action guidance and moral development are central to virtue ethic and, second, because virtue ethics permits or requires character appraisal in moral education and child-rearing through praise and blame. however, studies from developmental and clinical psychology show that praise or blame involving character appraisal can be detrimental to children and, especially, to women and girls. while not all empirical studies point in this direction, the data are sufficiently murky to warrant an objection to virtue ethics along the lines of a situationism. using a feminist and care-oriented critique, i argue this could pose a problem for virtue ethics. however, i argue that the criterion of moral evaluation can and must be distinguished from successful moral education of children to avoid this problem. by focusing on behavior instead of character, moral agents can avoid the harm virtue ethics may cause. finally, i respond to an objection that doing so makes virtue ethics esoteric or self-effacing and argue that it fares no worse than other moral theories. keywords: moral development, situationism, child-rearing, moral psychology, sexism, aristotle, action guidance, criterion of morality 1 there are too many people to thank for help on this paper, including on much earlier drafts, but i am especially indebted to mich ciurria, isaac wiegman, emily crookston, john doris, jeff armel, marilea bramer, lauren olin, eric wiland, billy dunaway, sarah robins, ramona ilea, krista thomason, charlie kurth, lavender mckittrick-sweitzer, anne margaret baxley, dan haybron, kathryn lindeman, julia driver, eric brown, jason gardner, the nassp, the washington university research symposium, umsl gender studies, the st. louis ethics workshop, as well as several anonymous reviewers, among others. thank you also to the nextgen precision health institute for their generous support of my research. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 introduction some empirical studies undermine the efficacy of the type of moral advice virtue ethicists provide for child-rearing. for example, developmental psychology uncovers problems with telling children to “be kind,” “be generous,” or “be nice.” similarly, psychologists recommend against praising children as such when they exhibit virtuous behavior. for example, they recommend against calling a child “a great kid,” or “smart,” or “an angel.” while virtue ethics survives these attacks as a successful moral theory, i offer a feminist critique, arguing in this paper that it must drastically revise the type of action guidance, child-rearing advice, and praise and blame it offers. in fact, i argue that being virtuous and rearing virtuous children calls for the explicit removal of much virtue language and thought. in this paper, i argue that virtue ethics is—but need not be—committed to a developmentally detrimental form of moral evaluation. first, i motivate the problem by arguing that both action guidance and moral development are central to virtue ethics. next, i argue that virtue ethics permits or requires character appraisal in moral education and child-rearing through praise and blame. third, i look at studies from developmental and clinical psychology giving evidence that praise or blame that involves character appraisal can be detrimental to children, taking a situationist critique of the issue (doris 2022, 2005). i then challenge this evidence, considering that not all empirical studies point in this direction, but argue the data are sufficiently murky to warrant an objection. i next argue that virtue ethics can circumvent this problem by paying careful attention to it. i argue that the criterion of moral evaluation—that an action knowingly comes about from a firm and unchanging virtuous state—must be distinguished from successful moral education—that we must ignore virtuous states to achieve them. in other words, moral responsibility must be distinguished from attributions of moral responsibility. by focusing on behavior instead of character, we can avoid the harm virtue ethics may cause. finally, i respond to an objection that focusing on behavior in virtue language makes virtue ethics esoteric or self-effacing. this approach exemplifies a feminist approach to the problem for two main reasons. first, it tackles a subject matter often undervalued in nonfeminist spaces: children and child-rearing. an approach that more explicitly centers and values the role of care can advance the debate in a feminist way (mckittrick-sweitzer 2021a, 2021b). care itself is a gendered area of the human experience. women are often in caregiving positions in their families and jobs. examining care is often seen as making central an overlooked area of ethics, and valuing care is seen as valuing a traditionally feminine or gendered approach. although i am looking at care through the lens of the concepts in moral responsibility of praise and blame, i focus on the role of these concepts in caring relationships with the goal of rearing flourishing individuals. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 second, failure to attend to the concerns raised in this discussion harms girls and feminine children due to sexism. that is, since girls are more likely to receive whole-person praise or blame, and since this type of praise and blame is more likely to harm, there are sexist ramifications of the argument i address. equity, then, requires the feminist analysis i undertake here. 1. virtue ethics has an empirical commitment to provide action guidance and direction on child-rearing virtue ethicists have largely kept the practical and applied aspects of their theories at the forefront of moral theorizing. that virtue ethics places a high worth on action guidance is evidenced, for example, from aristotle’s nicomachean ethics.2 for aristotle, ethics must offer practical guidance to be worthwhile; it must tell us how to become good and not just describe goodness. thus, aristotle is not satisfied with defining “the criterion of morality;” he also requires the provision of a decisionmaking procedure.3 objections sometimes characterize virtue ethics as agent-centered instead of act-centered. although this description of virtue ethics as “agent-centered” might be an oversimplification of the view, its recommendations often take the form of telling us how to be rather than how to act. the standard recommendations virtue ethicists make with regard to directing behavior are character-based, such as “be kind” or “be brave.” according to rosalind hursthouse, virtue ethics provides action guidance, in that it recommends we do what a virtuous agent would do. this prescription means seeking advice from a virtuous person. it also provides more general guidance: each virtue and each vice yields a rule. hursthouse (1999, 36) says, “not only does each virtue generate a prescription—do what is honest, charitable, generous—but each vice a prohibition—do not do what is dishonest, uncharitable, mean.” in other words, we can easily revise supposed agent-centered guidance to achieve act-centered advice. plato and aristotle recognize that the easiest way to achieve virtue is to develop it from an early age, so they devote sections of their work to moral upbringing.4 when speaking of upbringing, aristotle says not just that it is significant, but that it is “very important, indeed all-important” (en 1103b23–25 [aristotle 1999, 2 for example, en 1103b27–31. 3 on the distinction between the criterion of morality and the decision-making procedure, see sidgwick (1884), bales (1971), and driver (2005). i discuss this distinction in more detail below. 4 for example, see especially republic 376c–379, 424a. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 19]).5 because achieving virtue takes consistency, habit, reflection, and personal growth, this focus on child-rearing recognizes the role that time plays in becoming good. in fact, the unity of the virtues also implies that practical wisdom about one virtue means practical wisdom about child-rearing.6 not only do virtue ethicists provide guidance on achieving virtue, but they also provide guidance on how to teach it using societal institutions. aristotle says, “for the legislator makes the citizens good by habituating them, and this is the wish of every legislator; if he fails to do it well he misses his goal” (en 1103b2–6 [aristotle 1999, 19]). in the politics, aristotle addresses this subject in greater detail. as susan moller okin (1998, 221) points out, aristotle spends more time discussing child-rearing than every other subject combined.7 for example, aristotle thinks that, “no one would dispute that it is the lawgiver most of all who should attend to the education of the young” (politics 1337a10–11 [aristotle 1986, 222]).8 educating the youth is of the utmost importance for creating a good people and a good state. contemporary virtue ethicists have taken up the charge, almost universally placing importance on child-rearing. for example, take soran reader’s (2000, 360) claim: “all virtue ethicists agree, then, that the constitution of a virtuous agent requires the inculcation of virtue through education in childhood.” christine swanton takes it as given when she says, “the ‘warp and woof’ of life in its various facets—the expression of culture or heritage, central activities such as bringing up children, work, or leisure—are part of the stuff of morality” (swanton 2005, 69). raja halwani (2003, 172) takes upbringing as central to the development of virtue: “a virtuous agent is reliable: because of her moral education, training, and upbringing, she can be relied upon to do what is virtuous.” furthermore, virtue ethicists seek out empirical evidence on what guidance on child-rearing is likely to be beneficial to children. this approach of virtue ethics includes relational values that are concerned with care and that are often made central in feminist ethics, making the issue of care a historically feminist concern (noddings 2003, esp. chap. 4). and the connection 5 examples of recommendations on child-rearing abound in the nicomachean ethics (e.g., 1095b3–8, 1094b29–1095a7, 1105a2–3). in 1119b, he considers this subject further. 6 for example, badhwar (1996, 312) makes this claim about the unity of the virtues in aristotle. see also swanton (2005, 26). 7 sections of the politics where aristotle discusses child-rearing include 1259a37– 1259b16, 1260a30–1260b23, 1334b1–end. 8 other representative quotations in the politics include 1336b33–5, 1334b7–10, 1334b24–27, 1334b29–31, 1334b38–39, and 1335a4–5. these examples only offer a small subset of the discussion. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 between virtue ethics and care ethics is also valued in particular, with halwani (2003) arguing that care can be included under the umbrella of virtue ethics. in this section, i motivated the problem by demonstrating that virtue ethicists are committed to offer action guidance and advice on child-rearing for attaining virtue. but what type of guidance and advice? in the next section, i argue that virtue ethics is committed to character appraisal for child-rearing through praise and blame. 2. virtue ethics permits or requires character appraisal for moral education and child-rearing virtue ethics fosters the evaluation of children’s whole persons, their characters, and their stable traits in moral development as a rule. to defend this claim, i first give an account of cases in which virtue ethicists explicitly recommend teaching children moral concepts through character appraisal. second, i argue that virtue ethics is implicitly committed to character appraisal, even when it does not explicitly recommend it. third, i argue that even when virtue ethics is not explicitly or implicitly committed to character appraisal, it overlooks the possibility of the threat from developmental psychology, thus permitting character appraisal or, at least, opening the door to it. 2.a. virtue ethics explicitly requires character appraisal for child-rearing those concerned with child-rearing rely heavily on virtue language, as seen in well-regarded children’s books (e.g., lobel 1999, 42–43; silberman 1997; steptoe 2008). virtue language is useful in part because it is easily understood by and expressible to children, while the language of competing ethical theories is often complex or abstract and might be too sophisticated for children. as a result, virtue language is often used when teaching children morality, and parents often want their children to be virtuous.9 virtue ethicists themselves routinely recommend using virtue language with children. for example, hursthouse recommends we use character-appraisal virtue language with children. hursthouse takes action-guidance and child-rearing to be of a piece and argues that virtue language can be easily adapted to address children. she states, but an ethics inspired by aristotle is unlikely to have forgotten the question of moral education, and the objection fails to hit home. . . . sentences such as “don’t do that, it hurts the cat, you mustn’t be cruel,” “be kind to your brother, he’s only little,” “don’t be so mean, 9 for example, stohr and wellman (2002, 58) interpret hursthouse as making this claim. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 so greedy,” are commonly addressed to toddlers. (hursthouse 1999, 38) here, hursthouse notably circumvents the v-rules she so carefully defends when she adapts them for use with children. rather than tell children to “do what is kind,” she thinks we should or do tell them things like “be kind.” this subtle difference marks a grammatical shift from behavior to character in praise and blame. t. h. irwin explicitly denies that virtue ethicists can avoid character appraisal, since he argues that behavioral evaluation is insufficient to describe virtue. for example, he states, “the socratic dialogues suggest that it is difficult to give an account of virtuous action in purely behavioural terms” (irwin 1998, 45). in other words, discussing behavior alone is not an alternative to evaluating character because it inadequately describes virtue and virtue ethics recommendations. according to irwin, it is deficient to tell children to “never retreat” to successfully impart bravery, since this behavioral account of what seems to be brave action will not always be necessary or sufficient for the virtue of bravery. instead, we must focus on character to achieve a more consistent and complete guide to a moral life. examples abound of virtue ethicists explicitly committing themselves to character appraisal for child-rearing. in fact, large campaigns are directed at incorporating more virtue language in educating children (“the character project,” n.d.). for my purposes, it is enough to point out that these commitments are uncontroversial and span ancient and contemporary discussions. 2.b. virtue ethics implicitly requires character appraisal for child-rearing four main reasons show that virtue ethicists are committed to character appraisal in praise and blame implicitly, even if one disagrees with me that they explicitly recommend it. first, according to aristotle, the criteria for an action to be virtuous are threefold: agents must perform the action knowingly; agents must perform the action for its own sake and not for some other reason like self-interest; and agents must perform the action from a firm and unchanging state. this last criterion for a virtuous action notably requires character appraisal. if you want to know whether someone else’s action is virtuous or if you want to evaluate your own actions, you must consider the stable character traits from which that action arises.10 it is on the basis of character that we evaluate actors’ moral responsibility. second, virtue ethics requires we model our behavior on moral exemplars. however, using moral exemplars to guide or direct action requires evaluation of character. for example, a famous aphorism asks, “what would jesus do?” i should follow suit only if jesus was a good person. should i “be like mike,” as the 10 in the republic (409d5–10), we see plato making similar claims about judges. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 advertisement commands? it depends on my evaluation of michael jordan. we require character appraisal when we find and imitate our virtuous exemplars. such character appraisal is often directed at children. parents encourage children to find and imitate morally good people. they get upset when the role models they have set up for their children turn out to be morally failing in some way. the notorious dictum, “why can’t you be more like your sibling?” exemplifies this procedure in a more pernicious fashion. third, virtue ethics recommends the use of habituation to achieve virtue. however, habituation requires the direction of one’s acts toward stable character traits, which in turn requires evaluation of character. for example, to attain bravery, i should face my fears on a regular basis, which inures me to my fears and habituates me to act with confidence. thus, if i wonder why i am facing my fears today, i tell myself it is so that i can become brave. likewise, without telling children that they will benefit later, they will not understand why they are undergoing discomfort now. fourth, self-knowledge is required for attainment of virtue. however, selfknowledge requires agents to evaluate their characters. for example, suppose i know i am a coward. this knowledge helps me attain the virtue of bravery by telling me what to work on, how much i need to work on it, and how to work on it: i should overshoot the mean by acting in a way that otherwise seems to me to be rash. the ability to overshoot the mean and aim at an excess or deficiency to successfully attain virtue crucially depends on knowing my stable character traits and employing selfreflection to discover them. in the case of moral development, this advice is passed from parent to child. according to virtue ethics, parents ought to encourage character appraisal in their children to help them not only to “live the examined life” but also to be self-reliant with regard to the direction of their actions. similarly, knowledge of human nature is required for attainment of virtue. however, knowledge of human nature requires agents to evaluate many people over time to discover patterns and common character traits. just as aristotle recommends self-knowledge to direct action, he also recommends knowledge of human nature. for example, he notes that human beings are more likely to stray to the excess of intemperance than the deficiency of insensibility (en 1119a6–11). with this knowledge, we can better protect ourselves from vice. in this section, i offered four reasons to think virtue ethics is implicitly committed to character appraisal, even if it does not explicitly recommend it: the evaluation of acts, role models, habituation, and self-knowledge all are required to attain virtue and all require character appraisal. moral education and moral feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 responsibility for the virtue ethicist, then, cannot help but require character appraisal.11 2.c. virtue ethics permits character appraisal for child-rearing by overlooking its role in child-rearing in the last two sections, i showed virtue ethics requires character appraisal. however, virtue ethics also permits character appraisal. this fact obtains primarily because those virtue ethicists who seemingly avoid the threat still fail to warn against it. in other words, when virtue ethicists overlook the issue of character appraisal, they tacitly permit it. thus, these sections work independently. the virtue ethics literature largely overlooks the relevant psychological work done in this area. first, some ignore child-rearing. for example, in his entire corpus, alasdair macintyre mentions children only a couple of times, and when he does (macintyre 2007), it is not always to discuss child-rearing. other virtue ethicists discuss the importance of child-rearing but do not give guidance on how to foster virtuous children. these theorists recognize the importance of moral education but, since they do not supply advice in one direction or another, cannot help but overlook developmental psychology on character appraisal. still other virtue ethicists discuss the importance of child-rearing, give guidance on moral education, and use psychological studies, but they are nevertheless committed to character appraisal. for example, okin takes care to include research from psychology with respect to moral education. however, she is still implicitly committed to character appraisal. according to okin, “moral character is to be acquired through the formation of good habits, for which the example of one to whom the child is deeply attached is crucial” (okin 1998, 222). here, she recommends using moral exemplars and habituation to achieve moral development in children, both of which involve character appraisal, as shown above. lastly, some virtue ethicists construct a complex and nuanced aristotelian approach to child-rearing that successfully avoids any recommendation that implicates character appraisal toward children. but these works still fail on my account. first, they do not cite the relevant psychological studies, meaning they cannot take advantage of the most effectual and proven means of moral education. furthermore, since they do not discuss character appraisal, they fail to warn of the danger. for example, nancy sherman’s discussion of child-rearing neatly avoids any recommendation that would approximate character appraisal. however, without a more specific set of references, it is unclear whether she accidentally hit upon these 11 on this point, vasiliou (1996, 775) discusses a debate between burnyeat and irwin about whether someone with poor upbringing can be persuaded by rational arguments. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 methods, or whether she purposefully does, and it is unclear how she can successfully impart the relevant advice without a thorough explanation of why she excises character appraisal from teaching virtue (sherman 1991). i argue that virtue ethicists wrongly overlook the danger of virtue language in moral evaluations, action guidance, and child-rearing. even more negligently, virtue ethicists consistently recommend advice on moral education without taking into account empirical research on these matters. without taking advantage of the range of relevant insights from psychology, virtue ethicists run the risk of recommending methods, teachings, and advice that are proven to be wrong. 3. the danger of character appraisal in moral education and moral responsibility in this section, i review a long-standing empirical literature showing that character appraisal, often in combination with virtue language, can be damaging to children.12 the research on this topic shows, first, that the effect is robust and, second, that we would be wrong to ignore it. since an intersectional approach to moral responsibility can and should aim to highlight and oppose harms like this one (ciurria 2020, 3–5), focus on this type of harm, especially of a vulnerable group, can be helpful on the path to eliminating it. insofar as it follows the situationist critique of virtue ethics from authors like john doris (2022, 2005), this argument challenges the role that robust characteristics can play in moral agency and demonstrates how the manner of speaking to children can have a large impact on self-conception, responsibility, and agency. small differences between evaluating character and evaluating behavior can have large influences on children. first, researchers distinguish between process, product, and person feedback. for example, they make the following distinction between types of sentences: “maybe you could think of another way to row the boat” (process) versus “that’s not the right way to row the boat” (product) versus “you are bad at boat rowing” (person). second, researchers distinguish between generic and nongeneric sentences. for example, they distinguish between “ahab is a friendly guy” (generic) versus “ahab was friendly at the gam” (nongeneric). third, they distinguish 12 this effect has also been consistently reported in the media and academic sources. see abc news (2007), baumeister, hutton, and cairns (1990), bell et al. (1994), bronson (2007), butler (1987), cimpian, mu, and erickson (2012), damon (1990), deci (1996), dweck (1999, 2000, 2002, 2007), ferlazzo (2012), gladwell (2002), guttenplan (2011), herbert (2012), levy and dweck (1998), mueller and dweck (1998), new york times (1998), pintrich and blumenfeld (1985), plaks et al. (2001), and wall et al. (1999). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 between fixed mindset and growth mindset.13 for example, “ahab is extremely talented, so he succeeded at navigating those waters” (fixed) versus “ahab worked for many years on navigating waters and now excels at it.” i use the term “character appraisal” as an umbrella term for all such feedback directed at a whole person rather than at effort, outcome, behavior, or specific actions. according to developmental psychologists, character appraisal encourages helpless behavior, quitting, poor self-worth, contingent self-worth, poor coping mechanisms, vicious behavior, misbehavior, guilt, and self-blame; and it exacerbates gender differences to the detriment of girls (malespina, schunn, and singh 2022; law et al. 2021; brummelman and dweck 2020).14 first, psychologists have documented the effects between praising and criticizing children for their process versus their person (lessard, grossman, and syme 2015). melissa kamins and carol dweck describe this phenomenon in a 1999 paper: results indicated that children displayed significantly more “helpless” responses (including self-blame) on all dependent measures after person criticism or praise than after process criticism or praise. thus person feedback, even when positive, can create vulnerability and a sense of contingent self-worth. (kamins and dweck 1999, 835) perhaps after person praise, children feel that any further attempts at the task would only diminish their position in the eyes of the person giving feedback. or perhaps it teaches them to externalize their self-worth. it also sends the message that one is a good person when one displays skill at an activity, suggesting that worth is contingent on irrelevant successes. the authors continue: “praising the whole person (e.g., “you are a good boy/girl”) after success on a task fostered helpless responses to subsequent mistakes more than praising the process through which success was achieved (e.g., “you found a good way to do it”)” (cimpian et al. 2007, 314). when discussing the difference between process and person feedback, authors identify the following pitfalls in children: vulnerability, contingent self-worth, helplessness, poor coping mechanisms, and self-blame. second, some psychologists suggest that process praise is more effective than person praise because it is nongeneric where person praise is generic. studies of 13 other terminology is also used. for example, ginott (2003) uses the terms “evaluative praise” and “evaluative feedback” to describe this phenomenon. 14 although the long-term effects of character appraisal are more controversial than the general phenomenon in lab settings, researchers can replicate the results in a variety of different circumstances and with a variety of different children. even if the detrimental effects are short-lived, they are relevant for my philosophical purposes. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 generic and nongeneric evaluation identify problems that emerge only when criticism is followed by generic feedback. for example, when criticized, children who had been told they were “good drawers” were more likely than those who had been told they “did a good job drawing” to denigrate their skill, feel sad, avoid the unsuccessful drawings and even drawing in general, and fail to generate strategies to repair their mistake. (cimpian et al. 2007, 314) the detrimental effects of generic praise documented include helpless behavior, low motivation, reduced persistence, extreme emotional response, low self-worth, and reduced coping mechanisms. according to one study, children had intense bouts of crying when they received criticism after generic praise, whereas children criticized after nongeneric praise seemed unfazed.15 third, developmental psychologists distinguish between fixed and growth mindsets. fixed mindsets suggest a view of the self closely akin to that of virtue ethics: it demonstrates a sense of self based on stable, global, character traits that are central to the conceit of virtue as a state. however, developmental psychologists report that a fixed mindset is more detrimental to success at difficult tasks than is a growth mindset. in experiments, although children with fixed versus growth mindsets do not differ with respect to intelligence or skill, they differ greatly when encountering challenges. those who think talent, intelligence, character traits, and skill are fixed fall into helpless-oriented patterns, while those who have growth mindsets fall into mastery-oriented patterns (dweck 1999, 5–10). when encountering difficult problems, fifth graders who showed fixed mindsets diminished their abilities and blamed their intelligence for failures, reporting that they would no longer be able to complete tasks they had just performed well, exaggerated their failures (eight successful problems and four incomplete problems were remembered as five successes and six failures), expressed boredom, tried to change the parameters of the task, gave up, or showed a marked diminishment in strategies used. coping mechanisms involved non sequiturs. dweck (1999, 8) says, “for example, one child, in the middle of the failure problems, stopped to inform us that she was soon to be an heiress, and another reported that she had been cast as shirley temple in the school play.” these coping mechanisms to preserve both self-worth and perceived worth were detrimental to the completing the task at hand. in the other group, students did not see the inability to complete problems as a failure at all. students in 15 this phenomenon is shown in group stereotyping as well as in individuals. although generic statements about groups support my thesis, they do not pertain as closely as those statements about individuals. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 this group did not show a difference in optimism, confidence, or projections of success. they showed excellent strategies for problem-solving and even completed some problems designed to be too difficult for them. perhaps most importantly for the purposes of child-rearing, fixed and growth mindsets can be fostered in the classroom (dweck 1999, 8–10; elliott and dweck 1988; ames and archer 1988; graham and golan 1991; pintrich and garcia 1991). in other words, we cannot take a fixed mindset about fixed mindsets. rather, fixed and growth mindsets can be fostered, developed, and encouraged, depending on the way tasks are presented and evaluated. although children can fall into one category or another based on questionnaires, they can also be pushed between categories through child-rearing and education. the results of developmental psychology are confirmed in clinical psychology. for example, parenting books directed at laypeople describe this effect.16 in his bestselling book, haim g. ginott explains, in psychotherapy, a child is never told, “you are a good little boy.” “you are great.” judgmental and evaluative praise is avoided. why? because it is not helpful. it creates anxiety, invites dependency, and evokes defensiveness. it is not conducive to self-reliance, self-direction, and self-control, qualities that demand freedom from outside judgment. they require reliance on inner motivation and evaluation. children need to be free from the pressure of evaluative praise so that others do not become their source of approval. (ginott 2003, 30) sometimes children resist such compliments for their own protection. when children refuse to “accept the compliment,” a common phenomenon, they are resisting the pressure of evaluative praise. furthermore, according to ginott, evaluative praise inspires guilt, which in turn leads to misbehavior to show one’s “true self.” for example, when children are praised for “being an angel” when they are actually thinking terrible things, they act out to allay their guilt for false praise. this misbehavior seems incongruous with the person praise they just received, perhaps leading parents to misjudge the cause. ginott is not advocating the removal of praise from child-rearing. on the contrary, he endorses what developmental psychologists call nongeneric or process praise: 16 i acknowledge that these sources are not sufficient evidence in support of my empirical data but rather motivation for considering the potential objection to virtue ethics. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 when children are praised for their efforts, they become more persistent in difficult tasks. . . . the single most important rule is that praise deal only with children’s efforts and accomplishments, not with their character and personality. (ginott 2003, 32) in other words, process and product praise are more effective than person praise. these issues of praise and blame can impact girls in particular, exacerbating gender disparities (delston 2021; bian, leslie, and cimpian 2017; law et al. 2021; malespina, schunn, and singh 2022; lessard, grossman, and syme 2015). for example, gendered stereotypes about intelligence and genius are repeated by children starting around age six, with girls as likely as boys to pursue activities that emphasize these attributes at five but eschewing them by six (bian, leslie, and cimpian 2017). these stereotypes have impacts long after childhood (law et al. 2021). for example, one hypothesis as to why women are underrepresented in fields like philosophy and physics is that those fields place an undue emphasis on “brilliance,” which is both a whole-person, fixed-mindset attribution as well as one that is disproportionately given to men (leslie et al. 2015; malespina, schunn, and singh 2022). thus, the issues at stake in this paper have direct influence on the lives and success of girls, women, and those coded female in society. 4. complicating the empirical research so far, i have argued that praise and blame ought to avoid character appraisal in discussions and that virtue ethics is committed to this approach for moral responsibility. however, this claim rests on empirical research and is therefore disprovable. if character appraisal turns out to be beneficial for children, then developmental psychology would offer us reason to think that virtue ethics succeeds over other standard moral theories in this regard. do some studies show that it is beneficial? in this section, i consider evidence that appears to counter my empirical claims and argue that it does not. roger jensen and shirley moore (1977) seem to show that attribution of character traits increases the manifestation of those traits in their landmark article, “the effect of attribute statements on cooperativeness and competitiveness in school-age boys.” in the experiment, which demonstrates the historical gender bias of the field by focusing exclusively on boys for an unstated reason, attributions of cooperativeness encouraged the boys to help more than attributions of competitiveness. however, the precise language used to make the attribution focuses feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 primarily on behavior and not character traits, suggesting that the research more clearly favors the empirical research already stated.17 joan grusec and erica redler (1980) show that neither appraising behavior nor character appraisal is effective in five-year-olds, appraising behavior is less effective than character appraisal in eight-year-olds, and that they are equally effective in tenyear-olds. thus, even if the study was sufficient to counteract the extensive data pulling in the opposite direction, character appraisal would only work for a very narrow range, possibly only for a single year in childhood, and at that time only producing a tiny effect. other studies confirm this age distinction between fiveto sixyear-old children and eightto nine-year-old children (dix and grusec 1983). in a study that appears to contradict the effect described in this paper, rosemary mills and joan grusec (1989) conclude that dispositional praise had a bigger impact on how much children shared than did nondispositional praise about individual behavior. however, their statistical analysis shows that this effect is very narrow, with the authors also concluding, there were no differences across the three praise conditions in the amount donated in the induction phase, with ts (36) ranging from .15 to .92, n.s. in the internalization phase, children donated significantly more after dispositional praise (λί = 6.54) than after either nondispositional praise (m = 5.42) or no praise (/vf = 5.08), f(36) = 2.73, ρ < .005, one-tailed, and f(36) = 3.56, ρ < .001, one tailed, respectively. (mills and grusec 1989, 307) that is, in some conditions dispositional praise increased sharing, but in some conditions it did not, an effect confirmed in a second study in the same paper (mills and grusec 1989, 315). since the experimenters cared less about the induction phase, in which sharing was induced in the first place, than the internalization phase, in which experimenters left the room to see how children would act while alone, the results are interpreted with this same emphasis. in addition, experimenters only focused on behavior and action, not dispositional attribution, to attempt to induce prosocial behavior. however, this emphasis on internalization rather than induction belies the 17 the attribution of cooperation is as follows: “according to this test it shows that you can really get along with others. it also shows that you can play fair, are willing to share, and don't get pushy with others. you would work well with others” (jensen and moore 1977, 305–6) the experimenters did not say, “according to this test it shows you are a very cooperative, fair, and generous person.” as such, the experiment does not clearly fall into the category of person praise. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 apparent evidence that focus on behavior and action may be particularly effective in altering decisions to share for the better. recent articles also argue that dispositional praise is effective at producing generous actions. another discussion that undermines the proposal in the last section argues, “labeling a person as having a prosocial disposition may at times be more effective than praising the prosocial act. additionally, praising actors for their effort could be counterproductive” (rudy and grusec 2020, 108).18 and this discussion of a study by julie dunsmore hypothesizes that children exposed to process-based attributions, however, may think that prosocial behavior during any particular opportunity might reflect less on their character than the circumstances of the moment. in other words, it is possible that process-focused feedback might communicate that effort and intentions are more important than immediate behavior. though this message is productive in many areas, it may be counterproductive for prosocial behavior, for which outcomes may be difficult to quantify and sympathetic intentions may be considered important regardless of the effectiveness of the behavior. (dunsmore 2015, 70) the person-praise condition was to tell the children: “you seem like the type of person who is really kind and helpful and understands how other people feel.” the processpraise condition stated: “you seem to really work hard and pay attention so you can learn how other people feel” (dunsmore 2015, 64–65). according to that same study, the person-praise group did not differ from the control group, so the significance was primarily in the process praise. although both dunsmore and grusec and her coauthors label this second form of praise a type of “process praise,” thus using it to argue process praise is counterproductive to prosocial behavior, this attribution itself is unclear. although the word “person” is eliminated, the praise still includes the phrase, “you seem . . .” which indicates generic praise about a person and not an individual action or effort. thus, both conditions appear more like person praise than process praise. 18 though this discussion includes a claim that “parents do not rely to any great extent on praise to promote prosocial behavior as compared to other forms of responses, at least with preschool and primary school children. moreover, praise does not seem to facilitate prosocial behavior. . . . research with young adults also suggests that prosocial values that have been internalized or intrinsically motivated are very rarely a result of learning occurring in the context of praise for prosocial action” (rudy and grusec 2020, 105). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 the fact that encouragement is not effective in very young children (and may even be detrimental) is confirmed elsewhere (warneken and tomasello 2013, 2008). other studies show that generic statements such as you “must enjoy helping others” are successful at increasing altruistic behavior in children, though not by much (grusec et al. 1978). it may be that age plays a pivotal role in the type of appraisal that is effective with children. in addition, many relevant tests compare character attribution to other forms of character attribution, to externalized reasons for behavior, or external rewards and not to character appraisal vs. behavior appraisal. thus, they do not succeed as proper counterevidence to the claims discussed above. one objection from dweck and others to the empirical research discussed in the last section, as compared to the countervailing research discussed in this section, is that the research definitively opposing character attribution is focused on skill sets and amoral tasks, whereas the research defending character attribution looks directly at moral evaluation. in the literature, this question of the comparison between skills and morals is considered and not definitively answered—for example, “it is open to question whether or not dispositional and process-oriented praise function similarly in the prosocial realm” (rudy and grusec 2020, 107). if the human psyche draws a large distinction between moral and amoral tasks, the research on amoral tasks discussed in this paper would be irrelevant or inapplicable to virtue ethics. of course, the ancients tend not to make such distinctions, viewing moral and amoral virtues as a type of excellence and using the same word (arête) for all, distinguishing only in type. but perhaps that is so much the worse for the ancients. a major problem with the experiments discussed in this section and the last is that they are focused on lab settings, and as such, their results may not be able to be generalized to daily life at all. if so, longer-term studies and studies that more effectively incorporate evaluative speech into children’s lives would be needed to establish the empirical claims in either direction. in fact, mark alfano (2013, 90) calls the prosocial behavior that virtue-labeling produces “factitious virtue,” distinguishing it from those who express a virtuous internal state. if telling children that they did not just act badly but are themselves bad people, or if taking a single good behavior witnessed in a child and generalizing it to personality traits is more motivating, what ought we to do with this information? after all, it is quite possible that telling someone that they are good or bad might be motivating in the short term but lead to negative consequences in self-concepts, guilt, motivation, and well-being later. if whole person attributions can damage the psyche, self-perception, and self-respect of a child, then we ought to be suspicious of them even if they lead to behavior we want to foster. for that reason, there is an asymmetry in the role of the empirical evidence on both sides of this debate. using empirical research, i have proposed that growth mindset and focus on behavior lead to better delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 behavior without any costs. empirical research on the other side of the debate suggests that there are costs and that fixed mindset or attributional praise and blame can lead to tiny increases in giving behavior. but these costs are minor. and attributional praise may pose a greater cost if it risks harming the individual’s selfconcept. so, the asymmetry is this: a tiny potential cost if we choose growth mindsets, and a huge potential cost if we choose fixed mindsets in our praise and blame of children. is it possible that telling someone they are a good artist or a bad one can lead to quitting behavior but telling them they are a good person or a bad one does not? is it possible that we want to avoid fixed mindsets in technical skills but foster them in moral ones? with the acknowledgement that the empirical data could be wrong, inapplicable, or inconclusive, in the remainder of the paper, i consider whether the problems with character attribution and fixed mindset pose a problem for virtue ethicists.19 5. a problem for virtue ethics? these developmental and clinical psychologists' experiments and recommendations against character attribution suggest the danger for virtue ethics. far from producing virtuous children, virtue ethicists’ recommended ways of teaching children could make them more helpless, less self-reliant, and even more vicious. furthermore, character attribution makes children more desirous and more dependent on external praise, pursuits that are unlikely to lead to satisfaction. if responsibility practices should, in the words of mich ciurria (2021, 161), “enhance agency” through an “agency-cultivation theory,” then virtue ethics could do better on those counts. since children can often be marginalized as children (wiland 2018; brennan 2003; ciurria 2023a), and since schools can contribute to this problem with pedagogical approaches, this problem with agency cultivation could be larger than “individual agents and dyadic encounters” (ciurria 2021, 174) and could also apply to systems and institutions. that reactive attitudes can directly uphold structural injustices, then, would not be a surprise, as ciurria argues elsewhere, using an intersectional feminist analysis to explain “reactive attitudes as an enforcement mechanism of the domination contract” (ciurria 2023b, 36; see also hutchison 2018). in this case, the reactive attitudes are operating to harm as well as impose limitations on the oppressed group of children. 19 if the empirical evidence i rely on is false and virtue-attributions do help prosocial behavior, self-worth, and moral responsibility, then my conclusion does not change, since i am defending virtue ethics against this objection, which may turn out to be false. however, the evidence is complicated enough that i hope to have motivated the need to defend against this objection. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 furthermore, these studies demonstrate problems in virtue ethics in particular and not in morality as a whole. virtue ethics uniquely asks us to focus on person evaluations, and so virtue ethics uniquely falls prey to the results of these studies. but, because the same focus is not required for moral evaluation in utilitarianism or deontology, these theories do not lead to the same dangers. on the other hand, virtue ethicists easily fall into the trap of character appraisal when engaging in moral investigation, praise and blame, and moral education. virtues, insofar as they are evaluative states, point away from growth mindsets and toward fixed ones. the very attribution of virtues to others leads to generic statements instead of nongeneric ones. and evaluation of virtue results in person feedback instead of product or process feedback. not only is virtue ethics committed to character appraisal in child-rearing in a way that competing theories are not, but it is also committed to offering direct advice, through practical and empirical recommendations. in other words, virtue ethicists do not offer a moral theory that can be applied in a variety of different ways; they tell us exactly how to apply it, which requires the use of virtue language and virtue states as the primary element in moral education, as i argued above. this form of direct actionguidance seems to inextricably link virtue ethics to the form of character appraisal i have shown to be harmful to children and their agency. 6. why virtue ethics does not fail on these grounds if virtue ethics is committed to performing actions that are demonstrably harmful, you might think that the theory is in trouble. despite the persistence of some virtue ethicists’ recommendations to appraise children in ways detrimental to their welfare or to generally overlook such dangers, i argue virtue ethics can easily circumvent this danger. it can do this by choosing an indirect route toward moral upbringing. in so doing, it has the added benefit of avoiding the sort of praise and moral attribution that can have sexist implications.20 to circumvent this problem, virtue ethics first has to endorse the distinction between the criterion of morality—what makes a moral theory correct—and the method of education. in other words, what is pedagogically sensible to teach children might not be the most sophisticated or even accurate version of the theory. this idea is common in pedagogy; we sometimes teach children the wrong way to do something before we teach them the right way. a successful run on a tricycle or a 20 for example, running a parallel argument about the plausibility of virtue ethics as empirically unsound, john doris (2022, 2) argues empirical objections need not endanger the normative claims. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 balance bike differs drastically from successful bicycle riding, but we teach them to children first as a stepping stone to cycling.21 this practice explains how educators can excise character appraisal from childrearing with the goal of inculcating virtue. those virtue ethicists, like hursthouse, who are explicitly committed to character appraisal can easily sidestep the problem. they need only stop recommending whole-person evaluations. instead of telling children to “be kind” or not to “be so greedy,” we can tell them to “play nice,” to “share,” or to “do what is generous.” it is also easy to avoid overlooking the threat of character appraisal. virtue ethicists need only consider, keep abreast of, and point us to the relevant literature in psychology as well as social justice. this demand is not a strong one. virtue ethicists and, indeed, all moral theorists focused on child development need to take into account developmental psychology and oppression before making recommendations on moral upbringing, especially from a feminist perspective. not to do so could be considered negligent. thus, virtue ethicists who previously permitted character appraisal can update their tracts to explicitly forbid it. i offered four reasons to think that virtue ethics is committed to character appraisal implicitly. i take each of these in turn. first, virtue ethics states that the evaluation of acts requires the evaluation of character. however, when addressing children, we can discuss, evaluate, and recommend actions in accord with virtue. for example, instead of teaching children that a truly virtuous action must proceed from a virtuous state, we can praise them for actions in accordance with virtue to habituate them into what we know will become a virtuous state later. because aristotle has already made this distinction, perpetuating it further is not a stretch. second, moral exemplars, role models, and idols can and should be avoided in child-rearing. instead, we can point out actions in accord with virtue and hold these actions up to children as models of behavior. this approach to role models might have other benefits, such as excising the phrase, “why can’t you be more like your sister.” furthermore, it avoids the likely fallen idols that invariably ensue from putting someone on a pedestal. 21 furthermore, it is also a viewpoint that is familiar in the ancients (republic 415d). see also lies to friends (republic 382c, 389b–c) and lies as drugs (459c–d, 389b). pythagoreans required students to engage in a five-year silence as the start of their pythagorean education (iamblichus, vp 72) and argued that “not all things were to be spoken to all people” (diogenes laertius, viii.15 [huffman 2019, 280]). by separating the truth from what can be understood or the basis for moral evaluation from the justification used in moral upbringing, virtue ethicists can separate their moral theory from what they teach to children. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 next, habituation seems to require the direction of one’s acts toward stable character traits, which requires evaluation of character. after all, “faking it until you make it” only works if you know what “it” is. however, this, too, can be avoided when it comes to child-rearing. for example, we can teach children to love the truth rather than teach them to be honest. we can also teach children to love a virtuous act for the sake of itself instead of for some further aim like the attaining of virtue. this approach has the further benefit of being a more successful approach to virtuous acts, since, after all, doing an act for its own sake is superior to doing it for some other goal. last, we know that self-knowledge is required for attainment of virtue. however, since you know your children, you can direct them accordingly. for example, if i know my children tend toward fear, i can direct them toward actions that seem to them to be rash so as to help them approximate bravery without indicating to them my appraisal of their characters. of course, at some later date, they will need to learn their own characters. thus, all categories of virtue ethicists open to this criticism can easily circumvent it by paying careful attention to it. merely by making their empirical advice indirect rather than directly oriented toward virtue, we have no reason to believe they cannot successfully attain the goal of virtue in moral education. an added benefit of this shift would be a more feminist approach to praise and blame that avoids a disproportionate negative impact on girls. and it would enhance moral responsibility of children’s characters by helping them to achieve true virtue rather than fictitious virtue. 7. an objection: does the removal of virtue language from ethical talk lead to a self-effacing or esoteric theory? presumably, the best way to avoid making statements on children’s character traits is to stop thinking about children in this way—as good children or bad, as brave children or wise children. similarly, we should excise it from our books, movies, and television shows, where possible. this shift in thinking, however, means that to foster and facilitate virtue in society, we must make conscious efforts to prevent discussion of virtue. does this shift mark a problem for virtue ethics? is it a problem for virtue ethics that we must avoid it to achieve it? two potential problems arise for virtue ethics from my solution to this problem: first, it may lead to self-effacement, and second, it fails on simplicity grounds. in this section, i explain and evaluate these two possible problems. i then argue that this objection does not hold enough weight for it to rule out virtue ethics as a successful moral theory. next, i argue that this objection is less damning for virtue delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 ethics than it would be for other theories. last, i argue that if this objection does hold of virtue ethics, it is one shared with other ethical theories like utilitarianism.22 the term “moral schizophrenia” comes from michael stocker (1976, 453– 54),23 but the charge dates back to henry sidgwick (1884, 485), who called such theories “esoteric,” and it was picked up by derek parfit (1986, 77), who used the term “self-effacing.” in other words, a theory of this type requires that people do not believe the theory. in this context, virtue ethics could more aptly be called esoteric (it is better if only responsible adults know it) as opposed to self-effacing (it is better if no one knows it). however, the objection is at root the same: theories that require we ignore them undermine themselves. according to stocker, the dichotomy between relying on virtue as the correct moral theory without permitting it to enter into moral education, praise, blame, or action guidance leads to what he calls a theoretical conflict. stocker writes, one mark of a good life is a harmony between one’s motives and one’s reasons, values, justifications. not to be moved by what one values— what one believes good, nice, right, beautiful, and so on—bespeaks a malady of the spirit. . . . . . . any theory that makes difficult, or precludes, such harmony stands, if not convicted, then in need of much and powerful defense. (stocker 1976, 453–55) in fact, stocker argues that the good life requires such a harmony, saying that if we are to lead a good life, “we should be moved by our major values and we should value what our major motives seek” (stocker 1976, 454). creating the distinction i have defended also seems to preclude the good life. certainly, whether or not stocker’s concerns with a “malady of the spirit” hold true, virtue ethics runs into problems with simplicity. a theory that can be expressed in moral development is superior to one that needs to be suppressed, if only for the fact that it would need to rely on some other moral theory for the formative moral stages in life—a theory that must later be rejected. in fact, what virtue ethics seems to require to circumvent the criticism from developmental psychology can be 22 if you think this claim is successful, then my objection to virtue ethics goes much deeper than i admit. that is, developmental psychology poses a knockdown objection to virtue ethics, instead of posing, as i advocate here, a mere obstacle. 23 since this term has ableist implications, using a mental disorder as a metaphor for an undesirable characteristic in a theory, i henceforth avoid the term while considering stocker’s underlying argument. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 13 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 accurately characterized as an epicycle—a theory turning in small circles to achieve a larger purpose. in this case, it is children who are most likely to suffer from the sort of “malady of spirit” stocker suggests. however, it is not likely that children would have complete harmony between their motives and values anyway. in fact, before the age of reason and during development, values might be in flux. perhaps the kind of moral watershed moment required by this revised version of virtue ethics is to be expected. although this undermines the moral responsibility of children during development, it ideally sets them on a path to attain it later. does the solution i provide in this paper for virtue ethics fall prey to moral esotericism? after all, it requires that we ignore the theory in our dealings with children; it requires that moral education explicitly deny the view of the good we are aiming to impart, and it offers a theory of moral praise and blame that explicitly excises all virtue language. i argue that the answer to this question does not matter, because esotericism is insufficient to rule out virtue ethics as a successful moral theory. while this feature in a theory is not desirable, as stocker points out, it also does not succeed as a knockdown argument against a view. we might be surprised to find out that the correct moral theory requires these machinations, but the mere act of denying it for the purposes of moral education should not speak against the truth of the theory itself. in fact, it is the very emphasis on action guidance and practical advice that leads virtue ethics out of this objection. even if it can no longer provide action guidance, becoming a good person is still possible, and that is what really matters. because virtue ethicists aim to offer empirically helpful advice in becoming good, they are open to the suggestion that practical advice might temporarily contradict the theory in attributing praise and blame to agents. if we argue that denying the value of character in moral education is esotericism, then we may also be committed to the claim that virtue ethic’s classic dictum—overshoot the mean—is also esoteric. after all, it tells us that to achieve virtue, we should aim at vice. if such practical advice counts as evidence against a theory, virtue ethics can hardly get off the ground. however, even if i concede not only that stocker’s problem applies but also that it poses a deeper problem for a moral theory than i have admitted here, then virtue ethics is in the same boat as other moral views. utilitarians may go so far as to say that following kantian rules best maximizes the consequences. what makes these views remain consequentialist is that the justification for following kantian rules is utilitarian.24 similarly, virtue ethics may recommend language on moral responsibility 24 mill accuses kant of using consequentialist reasoning to defend the categorical imperative. this claim serves as such a successful objection to kant because it turns kant into a consequentialist. delston – do virtue ethicists parent poorly? published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 that is opposed to the theory but remain virtue ethics because the justification for that shift appeals to virtue ethics reasoning in the first place. several notable philosophers advocate such solutions. for example, peter railton argues a sophisticated act-consequentialist may still rely on developing dispositions rather than performing detailed calculations in emergencies (railton 1984, 157). we are better off developing dispositions that may turn out not to recommend the correct action on our preferred moral theory than not developing such dispositions at all. similarly, julia driver defends an argument of a similar structure when she argues that partial norms may be justified by impartial evaluations, upsetting the standard characterization of utilitarianism as impartial, maximizing, and consequentialist in her article, “consequentialism and feminist ethics” (driver 2005, 193). driver disassociates the “metalevel” theory from the theory itself, thereby maintaining the view that utilitarianism is itself impartial while availing itself of certain partiality.25 in this section, i have argued that my solution for virtue ethics may very well fall prey to the claim of self-effacingness or esotericism. however, i argued, first, that this objection is not deeply problematic; second, that it is less problematic for virtue ethics than other theories; and third, that even if it is problematic, then it is in the same boat with other prominent and powerful moral views. 8. conclusion how ought we to praise and blame children? what is the best way to attribute moral responsibility to developing minds? these questions matter not only because a healthy sense of morality might require it but also because caretaking individuals are well advised to cultivate it well. developmental psychology offers us grave warnings about the type of praise and blame virtue ethicists traditionally rely on to foster moral agency. in addition, these warnings have gendered implications, since they are particularly burdensome on female and feminine children. therefore, a feminist approach is needed. so long as the empirical literature supports it, we ought to heed these warnings. developing a growth mindset about morality is a valuable shift in fostering moral agency and requires limiting virtue ethical language when dealing out praise and blame, especially to achieve fairness for female and feminized children. 25 the structure of this argument recalls 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stohr, karen, and christopher heath wellman. 2002. “recent work on virtue ethics.” american philosophical quarterly 39, no. 1 (january): 49–72. swanton, christine. 2005. virtue ethics: a pluralistic view. new york: oxford university press. vasiliou, iakovos. 1996. “the role of good upbringing in aristotle’s ethics.” philosophy and phenomenological research 56, no. 4 (december): 771–97. https://doi.org/10.2307/2108280. wall, john, thomas needham, don s. browning, and susan james. 1999. “the ethics of relationality: the moral views of therapists engaged in marital and family therapy.” family relations 48, no. 2 (april): 139–49. https://doi.org/10.2307 /585077. warneken, felix, and michael tomasello. 2008. “extrinsic rewards undermine altruistic tendencies in 20-month-olds.” developmental psychology 44, no. 6 (november): 1785–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013860. ———. 2013. “parental presence and encouragement do not influence helping in young children.” infancy 18, no. 3 (may/june): 345–68. https://doi.org/10.11 11/j.1532-7078.2012.00120.x. wiland, eric. 2018. “should children have the right to vote?” in the palgrave handbook of philosophy and public policy, edited by david boonin, 215–24. cham: palgrave macmillan. j. b. delston (she/her) is assistant professor of philosophy at the university of missouri-st. louis (umsl) and holds affiliations with the gender studies program and nextgen precision health. delston has interests in social and political philosophy; normative ethics broadly construed; and applied ethics, especially feminist bioethics. delston’s monograph is entitled medical sexism: contraception access, reproductive medicine, and health care (2019). 101213 delston title page 101213 delston final format on the epistemology of trigger warnings; or, why the coddling argument against trigger warnings is misguided feminist philosophy quarterly volume 7 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation klieber, anna. 2021. “on the epistemology of trigger warnings; or, why the coddling argument against trigger warnings is misguided.” feminist philosophy quarterly 7 (4). article 2. 2021 on the epistemology of trigger warnings; or, why the coddling argument against trigger warnings is misguided anna klieber university of sheffield avklieber1@sheffield.ac.uk klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 1 on the epistemology of trigger warnings; or, why the coddling argument against trigger warnings is misguided anna klieber abstract trigger warnings have been the flashpoints of many discussions in recent years. a prominent claim among those arguing against trigger warnings is what i will call the “coddling argument” (ca), according to which trigger warnings coddle by allowing people to avoid ideas that they disagree with or find difficult. in this paper, i try to both make sense of and refute the coddling argument from a vice epistemological perspective. as i argue, ca is best understood as an expression of concern about the encouragement of epistemic vices, specifically in higher education, which lead to people avoiding and closing themselves off from difficult or challenging topics. i argue that this is misguided: trigger warnings exist for people who need to be warned about certain contents because they already know about these issues. demands for such warnings are usually made by those who have themselves experienced the difficult things defenders of ca purport they are trying to hide from. we do, however, need to take into account that trigger warnings might be misused by those who really do need to learn about topics that might be a trigger for others, and i will discuss how this issue could be addressed. keywords: epistemic vices, trigger warnings, epistemic coddling, higher education, active knowledge trigger warnings have been the flashpoint of many discussions in recent years. countless opinion pieces have been written about the topic, with one side arguing that trigger warnings are an important and legitimate safety strategy for people who have experienced trauma, and the other holding that trigger warnings, particularly in the context of higher education, undermine both free speech and academic freedom. a prominent claim among those who argue against trigger warnings is what i will call the “coddling argument” (ca), according to which trigger warnings coddle by allowing people to avoid ideas that they disagree with or find difficult. in this article, i focus on the coddling argument and try to both make sense of and refute this argument from a vice epistemological perspective. ca, as i argue, is best understood as an expression of concern about the encouragement of epistemic feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 2 vices, character traits or dispositions that systematically obstruct or stifle knowledge and its pursuit. my argument is that this claim is misguided: trigger warnings exist for people who need to be warned about certain contents that could distress them because they already know about these issues. demands for trigger warnings are usually made by those who have themselves experienced the difficult things that defenders of ca purport that they are trying to hide from, and should largely be understood as requests to be able to stay in touch with topics without being unnecessarily triggered. here is my plan for the following: first, i say a few words about what trigger warnings are. second, i introduce the coddling argument, following greg lukianoff and jonathan haidt’s (2015, 2018) article and book titled after the phrase “the coddling of the american mind.” i make sense of ca as an implicitly epistemic argument, by situating it in the light of the epistemic goals and aims of higher education,1 and further analysing lukianoff and haidt’s claims using josé medina’s (2013) framework of epistemic vices. third, i argue that those asking for trigger warnings already have intimate knowledge and insights into the topics that they need to be warned about; ca obscures how knowledge can be socially situated, and misunderstands what trigger warnings are supposed to do. i argue that a nuanced practice of trigger warnings can encourage active knowledge, in enabling conscious and informed participation. fourth, i address the worry that trigger warnings might, nevertheless, be misused by those who really do need to learn about topics that might be triggering for others, and think about how this issue could be dealt with. my main aim is to make explicit the so far underappreciated connection between trigger warnings and the domain of social and vice epistemology, which will both enable us to understand some arguments against trigger warnings and provide us with the tools to show where they are misguided. 1. what are trigger warnings? we often find trigger warnings in the preface of some kind of publication— among other things, articles, blogs, posts on social media platforms, shows, movies, 1 with this focus on higher education, i’m not suggesting that there aren’t other contexts with distinctive epistemic goals that could be relevant with regards to trigger warnings (e.g., activist groups, reading circles, etc.). it is noteworthy, though, that there are few places where discussions about trigger warnings have become as heated as in higher education. moreover, ca itself puts its focus on higher education specifically. given this, and the specific epistemic goals of academia (e.g., the pursuit of knowledge), it makes sense to investigate the epistemic role of trigger warnings in higher education specifically. thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this contextual issue. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 3 workplace presentations, documentaries, or lectures. they are used to make people aware—to warn them—of the occurrence of subsequent graphic images or descriptions of, among other things, racism, (sexual) violence, homophobia, transphobia, war, and bullying, with the aim to support those for whom a sudden encounter with such materials could “trigger” traumatic memories, emotions, or general flashbacks, possibly resulting in panic attacks, self-harm, or other forms of ptsd (post-traumatic stress disorder) (see kyrölä 2018; gerdes 2019; james 2017).2 often shortened to the initials tw, trigger warnings will most likely be a couple of phrases or a short paragraph, broadly describing the subsequent content and their potentially upsetting nature in general terms (kyrölä 2018, 31).3 while trigger warnings are sometimes claimed to be a very recent phenomenon, they have been around for a while: some sources place their clinical origins in attempts to meet the needs of vietnam war veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder; other evidence suggests that they go as far back as world war i (james 2017, 297). the practice of trigger warnings as we use them today can mostly be traced to feminist groups in the late 1980s and 1990s, where people started using them “to give people a heads-up before details of violence were spoken out loud” (clare 2017, xix). as eli clare points out, they were mainly introduced due to the concern that, without such warnings, some people would lose access to groups and communities (xix). the idea is, that trigger warnings can allow trauma survivors to prepare themselves for the upcoming discussion in order to remain part of it. however, this idea is often criticized in contemporary discussions, in some extreme cases of ptsd, because trigger warnings might be used to avoid content that might be triggering. for example, a survivor of sexual assault might avoid watching a film containing graphic rape scenes.4 2 not every survivor of trauma will (always) be in need of or request trigger warnings. in this article, however, i will focus on those who are. 3 recently, there have been moves to more “neutral” notions like “content” warning, motivated by the idea to broaden the discussion beyond more medical notions like ptsd. in this article, i stick with the notion “trigger warning” because, at time of writing, it’s still commonly used in literature and discussions on the topic and remains a familiar way of describing them. moreover, i am primarily interested here in the more specific case where the absence of a warning could set off ptsd symptoms for an individual. 4 moreover, there are some recent empirical studies discussing the effectiveness of trigger warnings. e.g., sanson, strange, and garry (2019, 780) measured “the extent to which trigger warnings changed the rates of symptoms of distress—negative affect, intrusive thoughts, and avoidance,” concluding that trigger warnings didn’t make a notable difference. while they have been criticized for not focusing their study on feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 4 at this point we can’t really discuss trigger warnings without bringing up higher education. the requests for, and introduction of, trigger warnings at campuses quickly led to their becoming flashpoints of debates about values, norms, and academic freedom (gerdes 2019), provoking discussions (predominantly, but not exclusively, in american contexts) “about free speech and excessive political correctness, labeling as opposed to informing, and empowerment versus infantilization” (james 2017, 296). for example, the report on trigger warnings, drafted by the american association of university professors (2014, 1) argues that trigger warnings pose a “threat to academic freedom in the classroom.” they state that the alleged presumption that “students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual” (2), and that requiring them could lead to a penalization of staff for refusing to include trigger warnings. arguments along similar lines are presented by greg lukianoff and jonathan haidt (2015, 2018) in their already mentioned work on “the coddling of the american mind,” which will be my focus in the following. 2. making sense of arguments against trigger warnings as epistemic arguments lukianoff and haidt (2015, 2018) argue that trigger warnings are bad not only because they undermine free speech but also because they encourage hyperfragility, emotional reasoning, hiding, and looking away from contents one finds difficult or disagrees with—according to them, they stand in the way of the educational pursuit of knowledge. here, i take haidt and lukianoff’s claims as representative of the coddling argument. in the following, i try to make sense of ca as an epistemic argument by reconstructing lukianoff and haidt’s (2015, 2018) claims, situating them within the broader discussion of the epistemic aims and goals of (higher) education, to then analyse ca by using medina’s (2013) framework of epistemic vices. those with trauma or ptsd (as pointed out in khazan [2019]), jones, bellet, and mcnally (2020, 914) suggest that “giving trigger warnings to trauma survivors caused them to view trauma as more central to their life narrative,” leading to an elevated experience of ptsd, and that for “individuals who met a clinical cutoff for severity of ptsd symptoms, trigger warnings slightly increased anxiety” (915). while they do express some worries that trigger warnings might encourage avoidance, i won’t go into detail with a discussion of these studies here, as their analysis doesn’t focus on the “coddling” issue. it should be noted, however, that proponents of trigger warnings don’t usually expect the warning to eliminate negative responses but suggest that it is helpful for people to be warned before entering a discussion relating to their trauma (see harlow 2016). klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 5 the coddling argument in their original article, lukianoff and haidt (2015) diagnose the beginnings of a movement, “undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” they see trigger warnings specifically as a demand to highlight “a long list of ideas and attitudes that some students find politically offensive, in the name of preventing other students from being harmed” (ibid.). the ultimate aim is “to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable” (ibid.). they emphasize especially how “the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided” (ibid.)—which is, according to them, what trigger warnings do. they give a parallel example of a woman who, after being trapped in an elevator, develops a deep phobia of elevators. if we want to help her, they say, we shouldn’t encourage her avoidance but provide support through exposure therapy. the same goes for trigger warnings: according to lukianoff and haidt, trigger warnings are “attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort” (ibid.), rather than exposing them to new, challenging ideas. as such, trigger warnings stand in stark contrast with what the university, and higher education in general, ought to do: universities’ “core mission of education and research” (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 16) is intimately tied to the pursuit of “truth” and “knowledge” (254). in the literature on philosophy of education, these are often outlined as (part of) the epistemic goals and aims of (higher) education (robertson 2010)5—alongside the argument that “education ought to aim to have positive effects on the epistemic character of students” (kidd 2019, 220). according to haidt and lukianoff, trigger warnings are bad for two reasons: they negatively impact the epistemic goals of education overall (e.g., by limiting the possibility of gaining knowledge), and they have negative, rather than positive, effects on the epistemic character of students (e.g., by fostering closed-mindedness). in their words, “if the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university” (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 254). i understand these worries as epistemic in their nature: lukianoff and haidt are worried about how trigger warnings impact the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and 5 while much could be said about these goals, for now i merely want to point out some central questions regarding these fundamental epistemic aims of education: e.g., should the focus be on “the development of true belief, justified belief, understanding, some combination of these, or something else?” (siegel 2010, 5). more detailed discussions on this can be found, e.g., in robertson (2010), baehr (2020), and marabini and moretti (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 6 thereby the epistemic character and goals of higher education overall, as well as the epistemic character of those studying within these very institutions. here, i focus specifically on the latter issue. according to lukianoff and haidt (2015), we “got here” because the current generation of young adults were raised in the spirit that “adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.” specifically, igen (the generation following the “millennials”), grew up more shielded, managed, and coddled (lukianoff and haidt 2018). this is, so they argue, part of the reason why young adults’ mental health is getting worse. university students specifically “seem to be reporting more emotional crisis; many seem fragile, and this has surely changed the way university faculty and administrators interact with them” (lukianoff and haidt 2015).6 in their 2018 book they double down on this diagnosis by identifying three “great untruths” young people are taught: (1) the untruth of fragility (what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker), (2) the untruth of emotional reasoning (always trust your feelings), and (3) the untruth of us versus them (life is a battle between good people and evil people). since (3) is not directly relevant to the discussion of trigger warnings, the following will focus on untruths (1) and (2): with (1), lukianoff and haidt (2018, 22) suggest that the tendency to teach children that “failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.” drawing on the work of the statistician and stock trader nassim nicholas taleb (2007, 2012), they argue that we should think of certain things in life as antifragile. antifragility means that many important systems (like the economic market or our immune systems) require stressors and challenges so they can learn, adapt, and grow (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 22–24). the same goes for our minds: “given that risks and stressors are natural, unavoidable parts of life, parents and teachers should be helping kids develop their innate abilities to grow and learn from such experiences” (23). according to lukianoff and haidt, instead of preparing children for the road, we clear it of anything that might upset them. trigger warnings are part of this problem. this leads to (2)—namely that igen is falsely led to believe that emotional reasoning is (always) reliable, while in actuality, it can “distort reality, deprive us of insight, and needlessly damage our relationships. happiness, maturity, and enlightenment require rejecting the untruth of emotional reasoning and learning 6 they don’t consider that increased reporting of mental health is partly due to a wider recognition of mental health issues and a (slow) lowering of stigma surrounding it. they also don’t take into account how increasing poverty, student debt, and other political issues will inevitably worsen one’s mental health. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 7 instead to question our feelings” (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 34).7 lukianoff and haidt quote insights from cognitive behavioral therapy to support their claim that in order to heal or get better, we need to confront ourselves with the very things that make us feel badly (34–36). trigger warnings (alongside a focus on microaggressions) are part of the mechanisms that encourage cognitive distortions like overgeneralization or catastrophizing (2018, 37–38; lukianoff and haidt 2015). we can summarize the coddling argument as follows: trigger warnings coddle because they signal to people that they can expect to be protected from difficult material and “have the right not to be offended.” they enable avoidance behavior, because through trigger warnings, people can hide from contents they find difficult or problematic or which they disagree with, accelerating closedmindedness. this has an infantilizing effect, preventing important learning experiences and stunting the ability to know the world in a realistic way. this view has relevance in light of the epistemic goals of higher education, as outlined above. certain educational aims, including the goal to support the positive development of students’ epistemic character, might be prevented or blocked by the use of trigger warnings. as such, according to ca, trigger warnings have epistemically corrupting character. following ian james kidd (2019, 221), educational institutions have a corrupting character when, rather than “cultivating virtues of the mind, certain forms of education lead to the development of the vices of the mind.” not only are epistemic virtues prevented from developing, but conditions arise “that are conducive to the development and exercise of epistemic vice(s) by agents whose formation and agency 7 the authors don’t consider how judgments about emotional reasoning are often deeply connected to gendered and racist prejudices. e.g., women, queer and black people, and people of colour, as well as those positioned along intersections of these identities, have always been asked “to be more rational,” asked “to calm down” and accused of emotional reasoning. this stands in contrast to the rational, objective (white) man. moreover, there are important differences in how, e.g., white and black women are seen as emotional (with the former often described as fragile and in need of protection, and the latter often seen as aggressive and angry). see trina jones and kimberly jade norwood (2017) for a discussion of white fragility and the racist “angry black woman” stereotype. see myisha cherry (2019) for a discussion on “gendered failures in extrinsic emotional regulation,” which highlights the complexities of gender as well as race when it comes to the perceptions of emotions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 8 is shaped by those conditions” (224). according to ca, this is precisely what trigger warnings do: implementing mechanisms like trigger warnings negatively influences the way in which young adults are able to know and make sense of the social world around them. instead, students should be equipped “to thrive in a world full of words and ideas that they cannot control” (lukianoff and haidt 2015), and aided in developing epistemic virtues—such as open-mindedness, curiosity, or autonomy—to contribute to the pursuit of truth and knowledge (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 16, 254). trigger warnings hinder this and tend to foster epistemic vices in students. it is those epistemic vices i want to look at in more detail in the following.8 the coddling argument and epistemic vices in his book the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations, josé medina (2013, 28) talks about how “differently situated subjects and groups accrue different epistemic gains and losses, and how the epistemic advantages and disadvantages become distributed among members of society.” his theory builds on insights from feminist standpoint theory (e.g., grasswick and webb 2002; grasswick 2018; collins 2000; crenshaw 1991; wylie 2004) that we ought to understand epistemic subjects as situated knowers—the claim that certain domains of our social knowledge are influenced by our standpoint, which affects the way in which we act as knowers in the world. among other things, medina is interested in how our epistemic standpoints are connected to epistemic virtues and vices. he understands epistemic vices as “a set of corrupted attitudes and dispositions that get in the way of knowledge” (medina 2013, 29), characterizing them as part of a larger structure of active ignorance.9 as such, an epistemic vice isn’t incidental but has systemic character: “epistemic vices are composed of attitudinal structures that permeate one’s entire cognitive life: they 8 i focus on how trigger warnings encourage epistemic vices (according to ca), rather than analysing how they prevent epistemic virtues. this is due to the way in which haidt and lukianoff frame their claims about trigger warnings (e.g., the descriptions of the “great untruths,” or their focus on the corrupting character of educational practices). but beyond that, one of the most distinct features of epistemic vices is that they obstruct and prevent knowledge (medina 2013, 30; see further discussions in cassam 2019, 3–5). this seems to be the most distinctive worry of ca when it comes to the epistemic function of trigger warnings. 9 as kidd (2019, 226) points out, medina uses the term “corruption” as part of the definition of vices themselves, while in kidd’s discussion, “epistemic corruption” is part of what causes vices. here, these two aspects come together: according to ca, trigger warnings create an epistemically corrupting situation, where vices (which can be further understood as corrupted attitudes in medina’s sense) tend to grow. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 9 involve attitudes toward oneself and others in testimonial exchanges, attitudes toward the evidence available and one’s assessment of it, and so on” (31). they hinder the capacity to learn and contribute to the pursuit of knowledge, in damaging the social knowledge that is available, and limiting chances for improvement (31). an epistemic virtue, on the other hand, is “a character trait that constitutes an epistemic advantage for the individual who possesses it and for those who interact with him or her: roughly, a set of attitudes and dispositions that facilitate the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge” (29–30). within medina’s theory, both epistemic vices and virtues relate to power structures, privilege, and social positionality. while he makes it explicit that he doesn’t want to generalize “the epistemic perspective of the oppressed or the epistemic perspective of the oppressor” (45), he does point out that those in positions of (material, economic, social) power, who tend to harbor unchallenged privilege, are prone to develop epistemic vices, hindering them in developing a clear view of the unfairness and discrimination going on in the world (30–32). on the other hand, those who are marginalized have a somewhat advantaged epistemic position (echoing standpoint theory), due to “some critical and demystifying experiences with important consequences for the epistemic character for of those who have them, which can only be found in subordinate groups” (45), while they are, in other ways, in less (materially, economically, socially, etc.) privileged groups. applying this to the coddling argument might strike us as odd. to many of us, it might seem intuitive that those who ask for and need trigger warnings will at least tend to be situated in the latter group rather than the group of the overly privileged. according to haidt and lukianoff, however, proponents of trigger warnings represent a group of people who are used to being coddled by adults, overprotected and left unchallenged (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 13–14; 2015), and who thereby exhibit a certain form of privilege.10 it’s with this predicament that they enter a further corrupting educational system, which makes them, according to ca, more prone to develop epistemic vices and seek out strategies that entertain these vices.11 as i will discuss in the next section, i think that ca is wrong in this assessment. first, however, i want to show in more detail, with medina, that defenders of ca implicitly claim that trigger warnings encourage the developments of epistemic vices. 10 the authors acknowledge that young people face many difficult challenges and aren’t just “naturally” lazy or spoiled. they do suggest, however, that parents and (educational) institutions overprotect and “coddle” children and thereby “set them up for failure”—which results in students further seeking out ways to keep up this protection (lukianoff and haidt 2018, 13). 11 i want to thank an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify the points laid out here. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 10 medina lists three central epistemic vices—(a) epistemic arrogance, (b) epistemic laziness, and (c) closed-mindedness. somebody might develop (a) epistemic arrogance, a “cognitive self-indulgence or cognitive superiority complex” (medina 2013, 32), if they are never challenged, confronted, or held accountable for their mistakes. epistemic arrogance expresses itself, subsequently, as a certain tendency in viewing one’s epistemic life and that of others (32). “the external world has been swallowed up by the all-encompassing perspective of the arrogant subject who does not recognize any other authoritative perspective” (33). even in less drastic cases, it will result in an accumulation of problematic biases and unchallenged stereotypes (33). this seems to fit with the way defenders of ca describe those who demand trigger warnings in the name of protecting people: they argue that proponents of trigger warnings think that their view is all-encompassing, and that they are entitled to alter the world in ways that suit them—in lukianoff and haidt’s (2015) words, that they have the “right not to be offended.” this has bad consequences for the antifragile mind, which is distinctively expressed via lukianoff and haidt’s (2018) untruths of fragility and emotional reasoning: as they argue, we need to be confronted and challenged to grow and thrive and need to learn that our emotions are often misguided and distorted. this is directly cut off by encouraging the use of trigger warnings, they say: trigger warnings give the impression not only that we won’t have to be challenged but also that we don’t have to accept or even encounter other perspectives. next, somebody is (b) epistemically lazy if they are unwilling to see or embark on the necessity to confront themselves with issues challenging their privilege, ignorance, or comfort. as medina (2013, 34) points out, it surely isn’t a new phenomenon that oppression is “literally put out of sight to protect some members of the privileged class, either because they are depicted as unable to handle it, or just to spare them unnecessary ‘troubles.’” this way, some people can “often ignore the most violent and hard-to-swallow aspects of social confrontation” (34). we talk about laziness here, because these subjects are blameworthy in their ignorance. they could know better, and they should know better. connected to this are the two notions of “not needing to know” and “needing to not know” (34). it’s a feature of epistemic laziness that some people quite literally do not need to know about the horrible inequalities around them, because those inequalities seemingly don’t affect them. there is a “lack of curiosity about those areas of life or those domains that one has learned to avoid or not to concern oneself with” (34). needing to not know is slightly different: some literally need to not know about inequalities around them in order to justify to themselves the privilege they have. this creates “not just areas of epistemic neglect, but areas of an intense but negative cognitive attitude, areas of epistemic hiding—experiences, perspectives, or aspects of social life that require an enormous klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 11 amount of effort to be hidden and ignored” (35). an individual epistemically hides when they knowingly or unknowingly turn away from having to confront issues that would challenge them. again, according to ca, trigger warnings encourage epistemic laziness because they signal that others will do everything to protect them so they don’t have to confront themselves with possibly difficult issues (lukianoff and haidt 2015). this also plays into the “fragility” crisis lukianoff and haidt identify among the younger generation specifically. the overprotection they claim young people are experiencing discourages them to actively think about salient issues of our time. as such, epistemic laziness isn’t passive: applied to trigger warnings, one might argue that they actively encourage hiding from “words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” (ibid.), supported by the idea that people don’t need to know about difficult topics. trigger warnings, then, literally put out of sight material people might find difficult, out of the worry that “they won’t be able to handle it.” finally, somebody is (c) epistemically closed-minded when their “mental processing remains systematically closed to certain phenomena, experiences, and perspectives, come what may” (medina 2013, 34). as such, “closed-mindedness erodes reliability, epistemic trust, and one’s general capacity to learn” (34). here, needing not to know functions as a defense and avoidance mechanism, which “usually involves the lack of openness to a whole range (no matter how broad or narrow) of experiences and viewpoints that can destabilize (or create trouble for) one’s own perspective” (35). especially “those in a position of privilege are often encouraged to hide their heads in the sand like ostriches with respect to certain aspects, presuppositions, or consequences of the oppression that sustains their privilege” (35). this relates to epistemic hiding: somebody who cultivates these vices, has a way of gathering knowledge about the world that doesn’t just close them off from such information but helps them in finding ways around it. again, defenders of ca see these vices encouraged through trigger warnings, in allowing people to avoid difficult material. according to ca, trigger warnings make it incredibly easy for people to look away and put out of sight things that we should know about. overall, defenders of ca might argue that trigger warnings encourage what medina calls active ignorance. according to medina (2013, 58), “active ignorance is the kind of ignorance that is capable of protecting itself, with a whole battery of defense mechanisms (psychological and political) that can make individuals and groups sensitive to certain things, that is, numbed to certain phenomena and bodies of evidence and unable to learn in those domains.” it continuously reproduces and reinscribes itself into our minds, practices and institutions. defenders of ca seem to see a similar danger in trigger warnings: as they see it, already privileged students will actively refuse to engage with difficult topics that could challenge them, and actively seek out practices that enable them to continue this disengagement under the pretext feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 12 of protecting people. this ties back in with the epistemically corrupting effect trigger warnings have on students when implemented in their educational environment (kidd 2019, 224): according to ca, trigger warnings tend to create conditions that are conducive to the development and exercise of epistemic vices within agents whose agency is shaped by those very conditions. viewing ca from this perspective is helpful, because it makes apparent their worries about the domain of knowing. and in fact, making sense of ca’s arguments as claims about epistemic vices and corruption might actually raise some doubt about how much good trigger warnings do. it seems clear that in order to fight ignorance, we do need to enable people to know the world adequately. to hide away and close ourselves off is exactly what we shouldn’t do. nevertheless, i think that ca is misguided. in the following, i will take another look at the epistemological implications of trigger warnings and show why ca fails. 3. where the coddling argument goes wrong while defenders of ca seem to recognize that trigger warnings include epistemic demands, they fail to see that these demands come from those who already know about the content that is being warned about. if the argument is that people who defend and use trigger warnings are at a higher risk of becoming epistemically arrogant, lazy, or closed off from difficult material, but those who need warnings need them precisely because they already have intimate knowledge about the material, ca seems to have misunderstood the epistemology of trigger warnings. while haidt and lukianoff conceive of students who request trigger warnings as (at least in some ways) overly privileged, i will argue in the following that those who need trigger warnings tend to have been exposed to traumatic experiences like racist, sexist, or transphobic violence, precisely because they do not have the benefits certain privileged individuals enjoy. as we’ve already seen, according to medina’s (2013, 29) account, “differently situated groups and subjects have different epistemic predicaments: their epistemic deficits are different, and their resources to overcome these deficits and to resist dominant ideologies are also different. epistemic oppression is not an equal opportunity institution: it affects all of us, but not all of us equally.” as pointed out before, medina argues along the lines of feminist standpoint theory, which has a long history in black feminist thought specifically: for example, theorists like patricia hill collins (2000), bell hooks (1982, 2015) or kimberlé crenshaw (1989, 1991) have argued that gender needs to be seen in intersections with other social identities (like race and class), which form the way in which one experiences the world and is oppressed within it. as brianna toole (2019, 598) points out, the broad claim of standpoint theory is that “some nonepistemic features related to an agent’s social identity make a difference to what an epistemic agent is in a position to know.” of klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 13 primary concern is “the relationship between one’s position of marginalization or dominance in a social system and what one can know (or fail to know) given that social positioning” (599). now, the fact that one inhabits a particular marginalized standpoint doesn’t mean that they can’t be wrong about things. however, there are certain epistemic advantages to the position of the marginalized, insofar as they have privileged knowledge and understanding about the workings of oppression and are better situated to recognize it (600). standpoint theory has been criticized for “valorizing the agency of those in the margins,” or for “failing to adequately account for phenomenon such as internalized oppression, in which the perspective of the oppressed is damaged by the forces of oppression” (grasswick 2018, 17). i cannot discuss these issues here but rather want to point out that feminist standpoint theory does capture something important about our ways of knowing—namely, that those who inhabit marginalized positions are more likely to have intimate knowledge and understanding of the very things that relate to their marginalization and more likely to have had certain experiences, including (though surely not exclusively) certain traumatizing experiences.12 what standpoint theory can capture is the connection between one’s social position and one’s social knowledge about these very experiences and circumstances. if your social 12 when it comes to the connection between positions of social marginalization and trauma, i’m drawing on a large literature in social psychology. kevin l. nadal, tanya erazo, and rukiya king (2019, 3) point out that “when people of color experience trauma related to race or ethnicity, they are more likely to undergo behavioral or personality changes that are often pervasive and long-lasting and align with typical symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” however, the use of rigid definitions of trauma will often leave them undiagnosed, resulting in wrong or ineffective treatments: “people who struggle with pervasive and painful experiences with racism are encouraged to reframe their experience or to ‘get over it,’ instead of being validated that they are experiencing ‘normal’ and ‘expected’ responses to trauma” (4). their study concludes “that a higher amount of racial microaggressions was associated with a higher number of traumatic symptoms” (11). similarly, anahvia taiyib moody and jioni a. lewis (2019, 208) find that “gendered racial microaggressions were significantly associated with traumatic stress symptoms among black women,” and point to a significant association between the sexual orientation of black women and traumatic stress symptoms (209). finally, andrea l. roberts et al. (2012), who examined “whether lifetime risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) was elevated in sexual minority versus heterosexual youth” (1587), find that “sexual minority young adults are at greatly increased risk for lifetime probable ptsd and that a substantial portion of this elevated risk stems from higher exposure to childhood abuse” (1591). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 14 position renders you more vulnerable to certain traumatizing experiences, this influences your knowledge (broadly understood) about these very things. of course, when it comes to trigger warnings, we do need to note that somebody could be very privileged in many regards but still experience a traumatic event like a violent robbery, and could subsequently experience ptsd. but here, too, when we focus on the domain of knowing about this particular set of circumstances, we can see that the person who requests and needs trigger warnings will have more intimate knowledge than somebody who has never experienced anything like it. this doesn’t mean others can’t acquire knowledge about it. but this is an issue separate from judging about the epistemic states of those who request trigger warnings because they need them. once we see that those who are in need of trigger warnings are actually the ones who have a somewhat better view of the very contents they need a heads-up about, accusing them of epistemic avoidance, laziness, or arrogance seems to be misguided. let’s apply this to an example provided in logan rae’s (2016) article “refocusing the debate on trigger warnings: privilege, trauma, and disability in the classroom.” rae, a survivor of sexual assault, describes her encounter with trigger warnings in a training session for resident assistants, which included an hour-long session on sexual assault on campuses: immediately before the session’s beginning, we were explicitly warned that the short course was going to be difficult, and assured that we could step out at any moment if necessary (this statement stood in as their trigger warning). the assistant director said, “it is okay if you need to step out to collect yourself, but please do rejoin us as soon as you are able.” not only did the warning alert those of us who had experienced a traumatic event to take care of ourselves, but it also signaled the real world implications of the training session to everyone present. (rae 2016, 97) rae (97–98) describes how she stepped out shortly after the session began—and how, after a few minutes, she was able to collect herself and return to the training session. again, let’s look at the epistemic vices outlined above. recall, that the (a) epistemically arrogant subject has something of a superiority complex and is incapable of acknowledging their flaws or a different interpretation of a situation. this arrogance (it’s said) expresses itself with trigger warnings, as it functions as a request to change the world to fit one’s own beliefs and preferences and not accept other perspectives (e.g., remember the untruths of fragility and emotional reasoning). however, most of the time, making use of trigger warnings isn’t motivated by a request to not be in touch with something at all, or because the person requesting the warning considers themselves to be “above” a klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 15 certain topic; rather, it is motivated by a desire to be adequately prepared in order to be able to participate and engage (e.g., see harlow 2016). the (b) epistemically lazy have a tendency to hide because they don’t want to confront themselves with injustices in our world. again, the example tells a different story. as rae (2016, 98) points out, “while i did have a tough time at the beginning of the session, i later felt that i had the choice to ‘opt in,’ to create new ways to cope with discussions of sexual assault. the trigger warning at the beginning made me feel it was okay to take breaks and pace myself through an overwhelming reminder of my assault.” indeed, the warning was needed because rae already had intimate knowledge about the content under discussion: as she points out, we have to consider that “students stepping out of class are not ‘missing’ or ‘avoiding’ material—especially since the trauma with which they are struggling is likely a direct result of their life experience with the subject matter under discussion” (98). survivors of sexual assault who briefly leave the room during discussions that relate to their experiences are usually far from incapable of acknowledging that bad, unjust things happen in our world. as we see in our example, rae doesn’t hide—rather, the warning allows her to stay in the room in the long run. i’d argue that those who request or need trigger warnings don’t say that they “don’t need to know” or “need to not know” about this topic—they need a trigger warning exactly because they do know about the issue in question. and the (c) epistemically closed-minded person actively seeks cutting themselves off from difficult contents they might disagree with or challenge their privilege ignorance. when we consider our example, it becomes clear why these vices don’t apply here. again, if we consider trigger warnings as support mechanisms to stay in touch with a discussion without being unnecessarily triggered, we see how a warning can enable people to continue participation rather than close it off. given this, it appears that trigger warnings can epistemically benefit an educational environment. as laguardia, michalsen, and rider-milkovich (2017, 897) or kate manne (2015) point out, once you are experiencing ptsd symptoms in, say, a classroom, you cannot learn or engage in a productive way anymore. it’s important to recognize that trauma and discomfort are not the same. or, to refer again to rae (2016, 95): “students can learn and continue to learn through discomfort. trauma, on the other hand, does not simply jolt us out of our own perspectives. trauma completely disrupts our focus and makes learning virtually impossible.” an adequate warning, however, can improve the overall situation for affected students and therefore be beneficial to their participation, the sharing of knowledge, and pursuit of research. now, it’s true that there are a number of people who do ask to not encounter triggering material at all. if somebody’s ptsd doesn’t allow them to be part of the discussion, trigger warnings can help them to exit before their symptoms are set off. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 16 lukianoff and haidt (2015, 2018) surely are right in pointing out that indefinite avoidance will be counterproductive for survivors, and that therapeutic support is essential to help them live with their trauma. this therapeutic setting, however, usually shouldn’t be a classroom or workplace meeting. given how inaccessible and expensive therapy can be, it is not an unreasonable response for people who suffer from panic attacks to try to avoid their triggers until they can get further support. moreover, if people decide to leave a meeting or classroom, their being able to leave at that point could ensure better epistemic participation in the long run. being confronted with triggering material without warning might lead to some people leaving indefinitely. again, in such situations, a simple warning could help to create an epistemically better situation and avoid cutting somebody off completely. regina rini (2020, 173–75), when talking about lukianoff and haidt’s assessment of microaggressions, points out (among other things) that the authors ignore the systematics of oppression and power dynamics and how they affect different people in different ways. similar things can be said about ca. if we consider the logic of how knowledge and power operate in a political world, we can see what defenders of ca get wrong about the epistemology of trigger warnings: people need trigger warnings precisely because they already know what is being warned about. and often, they are more likely to already know these things because of the position they inhabit in society. if defenders of ca argue that trigger warnings will lead people to avoid difficult topics—obscuring not only more detailed discussions but also a very general “knowing that certain things are happening in our world”—their claims seem to be misguided given that people already know about the things that are happening. similar things can be said about their claims that trigger warnings limit “confrontation with things we are afraid of,” given that trigger warnings are, in most cases, a support mechanism that allows one to be able to stay in touch with certain topics without being triggered. there is surely a limit to what trigger warnings can do. expecting them to fully heal or eliminate trauma would be unreasonable. but, unlike what ca suggests, those who ask for trigger warnings (usually) don’t expect them to do these things. people suffering from ptsd will typically be quite aware of the fact that trigger warnings won’t eliminate negative feelings or make them feel neutral when encountering material that relates to their trauma. instead, proponents of trigger warnings acknowledge that the warnings can function as a “buffer” (harlow 2016) or “aid” (laguardia, michalsen, and rider-milkovich 2017, 891–92). contrary to active ignorance, one might argue that trigger warnings encourage active knowledge. for one, they enable survivors to actively participate and not be cut off. but they also encourage active participation on behalf of those giving the trigger warnings: for example, if i prepare a syllabus for a seminar on historical injustice, i need to actively consider what could be worth warning about. i have to klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 17 consider what does and doesn’t need to be discussed and how i can encourage participation for everybody—especially for those who have valuable experiences and knowledge, whose perspective shouldn’t be excluded. using trigger warnings also signals others participating in the meeting to be mindful and considerate and to create a space that enables participation.13 4. what about misuses of trigger warnings; or, why we need a nuanced practice the previous discussion showed how trigger warnings can contribute to the production of active knowledge in facilitating conscious engagement with the presented material. despite what proponents of ca claim, none of this requires censoring or omitting important material on racism, sexism, transphobia, or ableism in classrooms, activist circles, or workplaces. however, it is not unreasonable to think about how even those acts instituted and acclaimed by the marginalized are used (consciously or unconsciously) by some willfully ignorant people to avoid having to confront the wrongs that are happening in our world.14 13 it should moreover be noted that some participants in a discussion or seminar might need a warning for things that they don’t have direct knowledge of—not because they have a tendency to withdraw in problematic ways (as discussed more in the next subsection) but because they find some material genuinely upsetting. it’s worth pointing out that of course some things are simply not easy to look at for many people: e.g., seeing a violent image or video will often be difficult, even if we don’t have personal experience with the portrayed event. however, this doesn’t mean that such individuals are coddled; rather, it means that they have an empathetic reaction to difficult material. in fact, this kind of case emphasizes the way in which adequate warnings can also be productive for those who do not have related trauma. a warning can support various individuals in their often-complex needs, and this highlights how a nuanced practice of trigger warnings can benefit a community (e.g., a classroom) overall. recognising the need for such warnings for those who don’t have direct experience of the traumatic content in question is not a case of coddling; rather, a warning will also allow those who do not have personal knowledge or experience to engage in a more productive way in general. thanks to quill kukla, whose questions prompted me to think more about these issues. 14 i suggest that it’s those people whom we should be concerned about, not people who ask for trigger warnings because they need them to help with their ptsd. while one might argue that it could be exactly those whom ca is concerned about, a look at haidt and lukianoff’s material makes clear that this isn’t the case: they do seem to be mainly concerned about those who suffer from ptsd and ask for trigger warnings. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 18 i want to address this issue with an example by reni eddo-lodge in her book why i’m no longer talking to white people about race, where she talks about enrolling in a class on the transatlantic slave trade with a new (white) university: neither of us knew quite what to expect. i’d only ever encountered black history through american-centric educational displays and lesson plans in primary and secondary school. . . . but this short university module changed my perspective completely. it dragged britain’s colonial history and slave-trading past incredibly close to home. . . . in a tutorial, i distinctively remember a debate about whether racism was simply discrimination, or discrimination plus power. thinking about power made me realise that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. it was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances. my outlook began to change drastically. my friend, on the other hand, stuck around for a couple of tutorials before dropping out of the class altogether. “it’s just not for me,” she said. her words didn’t sit well with me. now i understand why. i resented the fact that she seemed to feel that this section of british history was in no way relevant to her. she was indifferent to the facts. perhaps to her, the accounts didn’t seem real or urgent or pertinent to the way we live now. i don’t know what she thought, because i didn’t have the vocabulary to raise it with her at the time. but i know now that i was resentful of her because i felt that her whiteness allowed her to be disinterested in britain’s violent history, to close her eyes and walk away. to me, this didn’t seem like information you could opt out from learning. (eddo-lodge 2018, 1–3) the white person’s behavior demonstrates medina’s epistemic vices in some relevant ways. she made the (arrogant) assumption that this material wasn’t of any relevance to her (“i don’t need to know this”), epistemically hid and closed her mind from learning more about a historical period that helped build not only the united states but also britain and europe as we know it (“i need to not know this”). of course, much could be said about the failure of recognizing the lasting impact of colonialism (all over the world), but for now i want to direct our attention to something different: while the example doesn’t suggest that the lecturer gave trigger warnings, one might claim that had they been given at the beginning of the course or in the syllabus, eddolodge’s acquaintance might have quit much sooner. she might have misused these trigger warnings to hide from the material. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 19 this is a possibility—and, as i said before, it’s surely not a new phenomenon that people do epistemically turn away from learning about topics like racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, and so on. but this example highlights as well that, regardless of the presence of trigger warnings, that person managed to epistemically hide from the material. this, i think, is an important lesson for defenders of ca because it shows that the omission of trigger warnings will not solve the fact that some people will try to avoid learning about certain things. i’ve already mentioned above, referring to rae (2016, 95), that discomfort, distinct from trauma, can be an important aspect of learning environments.15 this point is crucial. barbara applebaum (2017, 864), in an article entitled “comforting discomfort as complicity,”16 addresses this specifically when asking “how can socialjustice educators support white students to stay with rather than flee from the discomfort that is necessary for learning and without appeasing or pacifying their discomfort and without providing absolution and redemption?” she quotes erinn gilson (2014, 76), whose characterization of invulnerability can be understood as the performance of a position enabling us “to ignore those aspects of existence that are inconvenient, disadvantageous, or uncomfortable for us, such as vulnerability’s perspective. as invulnerable, we cannot be affected by what might unsettle us.” according to this, white students stress their “invulnerability” in communicating that they don’t want to, and think they don’t have to, learn about their white privilege and the horrors whiteness can inflict on students of color—and structure their engagement accordingly: “invulnerability enables one to ignore what is uncomfortable, to ignore that vulnerability is a fact of life” (applebaum 2017, 870). this means that “if invulnerability entails closure and not wanting to know, epistemic vulnerability begins with being open and an acknowledgement of uncertainty” (870). i point this out because i think that trigger warnings can help us challenge what applebaum and gilson outline as invulnerability by encouraging active engagement with certain contents, if they are given in a way that unmasks the tendency of avoidance (like eddo-lodge’s friend). a teacher could point out that they understand how contents on slavery and colonialism could be triggering particularly for those who experience racism (and that those students should take care of themselves throughout this class and can come speak to the teacher), and that it will be uncomfortable and troubling to find out about these issues for others. they could also point out that those students shouldn’t give in to the tendency to look away because learning about racism is essential, specifically for those who aren’t experiencing it themselves. 15 more discussion on the educational and moral potential of discomfort can be found in munch-jurisic (2020). 16 many thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing me to this source. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 20 some students might still leave this class or never attend in the first place. but it’s likely that they would do that anyways, trigger warning notwithstanding. importantly though, an adequate and nuanced warning can lay the tendency of actual withdrawal from difficult material out in the open (e.g., a warning might make a student aware that their feeling of “it’s just not for me” isn’t necessarily neutral). this could encourage active knowledge—not only in the sense that there is active confrontation with often overlooked material, but also in creating awareness about one’s own motives. this might motivate some students to reflect on their tendency to withdraw and might lead them to stay in the class. in the spirit of what applebaum (2017, 872) calls “critical hope,” trigger warnings can aim “to encourage openness toward continued struggle,” highlight “discomfort as a signal to be alert for what one does not know about others but also about oneself,” and “may lead to a willingness to stay in discomfort because discomfort can broaden the limits of one’s frame of intelligibility.” likewise, we can see that trigger warnings do not in fact cut off or limit free expression or the exploration of different issues and viewpoints. given the epistemic goals of higher education discussed above, it does indeed seem important to be able to discuss and challenge various viewpoints one might not encounter otherwise. rather than standing opposed to that, trigger warnings support this aim: trigger warnings don’t prevent anybody from speaking about a particular topic; they warn an audience what will be spoken about. this, to my mind, is not the same as censorship or (epistemic) avoidance.17 ultimately, we need to allow for a nuanced practice of trigger warnings. trigger warnings shouldn’t only be imagined as providing “tw” in front of every single piece of content but should rather be seen as making students broadly aware of the kind of material that will be coming up. manne (2015), for example, points out how giving trigger warnings merely requires “including one extra line in a routine email to the class, such as: ‘a quick heads-up. the reading for this week contains a graphic depiction of sexual assault.’” it’s about making people broadly aware of the kind of material that will be coming up. in some cases, this might include a willingness to think about what (graphic) material is necessary. this, however, isn’t necessarily epistemically bad; rather, it can encourage thorough engagement. we also need to recognize that trigger warnings won’t overcome the fact that certain spaces simply won’t be safe for some people. brittney cooper (in an article against trigger warnings) makes an important point along these lines: 17 it should be noted that academic freedom and free expression surely are important issues in the context of higher education specifically, and much more could be said about how they relate to trigger warnings (and their epistemic functions). however, that discussion goes beyond the realms of this paper. see some more detailed arguments in james (2017) and rae (2016). klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 21 part of what we as educators, parents and students have to recognize is that classroom spaces in which difficult topics like trauma, rape, war, race and sexuality are discussed are already unsafe. when students of color who have endured racism have to hear racially insensitive comments from other students who are in the process of learning, the classroom is unsafe. the classroom is unsafe for trans students who are often referred to by the wrong gender pronoun by both students and teachers. the classroom is unsafe for rape survivors who encountered students in the process of learning why getting drunk at a party does not mean a woman deserves to be raped. (cooper 2014) i agree with cooper (ibid.) that learning about these topics is a necessary part of education. while it’s true that certain material can be difficult to cope with for people carrying trauma, she is surely right that some people do need to know about issues like racist violence, rape culture, and transphobia. these are important points, but we need to realize that it’s a misconception to assume that proponents of trigger warnings claim that they make spaces into the ultimate safe space. what they can do is warn, aid, or enable those people who have endured racism or survived rape to be part of the conversation. this, again, makes clear the epistemic benefit such warnings can have: far from giving rise to an epistemically corrupting educational system, they can help people who have crucial knowledge about these issues to remain part of a discussion, and may even help to sensitize others to the fact that there are people who have intimate knowledge and experience of the issues ahead. 5. conclusion my main goal in this paper was to use medina’s framework of epistemic vices (epistemic arrogance, epistemic laziness, and closed-mindedness) to make sense of the epistemic side of the so-called coddling argument against trigger warnings, as presented by lukianoff and haidt. i further used insights from social epistemology to show how ca’s implicit claim that trigger warnings epistemically corrupt students by encouraging epistemic vices is misguided: defenders of ca fail to see that the demand for trigger warnings comes from those who already know about the content that is being warned about. in most cases, then, the charge that those who use trigger warnings tend to be or become epistemically lazy or arrogant or tend to hide epistemically (i.e., they don’t want to engage or think they don’t need to engage or learn new, difficult material) doesn’t apply precisely because they already have the relevant knowledge. i moreover highlighted the possibility of misuses of trigger warnings but argued that embracing a nuanced practice might even allow us to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2021, vol. 7, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2021 22 encourage better epistemic practices, which could help us to confront the development of epistemic vices. i don’t claim that this article offers ultimate solutions of how to handle the trigger warning debate. what i attempted to offer is a debunking of the overgeneralizing argument that trigger warnings promote, or are requests for, (epistemic) coddling.18 references american association of university professors. 2014. on trigger warnings. washington, dc: aaup. https://www.aaup.org/file/2014-trigger_warnings .pdf. applebaum, barbara. 2017. “comforting discomfort as complicity: white fragility and the pursuit of invulnerability.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 32 (4): 862–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12352. baehr, jason. 2020. “intellectual virtues, critical thinking, and the aims of education.” in the routledge handbook of social epistemology, edited by miranda fricker, peter j. graham, david henderson, and nikolaj j. l. l. pedersen, 447–56. new york: routledge. cassam, quassim. 2019. vices of the mind: from the intellectual to the political. oxford: oxford university press. cherry, myisha. 2019. “gendered failures in extrinsic emotional regulation; or, why telling a woman to ‘relax’ or a young boy to ‘stop crying like a girl’ is not a good idea.” philosophical topics 47 (2): 95–111. https://doi.org/10.5840/phil topics201947217. clare, eli. 2017. “a note on reading this book: thinking about trigger warnings.” in brilliant imperfection: grappling with cure. durham, nc: duke university press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373520-003. collins, patricia hill. 2000. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. cooper, brittney. 2014. “no trigger warnings in my class: why you won’t find them on my syllabi.” salon, may 20, 2014. https://www.salon.com/2014/05/20/no _trigger_warnings_in_my_class_why_you_won’t_find_them_on_my_syllabi/. 18 i want to thank jennifer saul, emma bolton, henry roe, rosanna keefe, audrey yap, participants of the words workshop (june 2021), the sheffield postgraduate seminar (january 2021), audiences of understanding value x (july 2021), and two anonymous referees of feminist philosophy quarterly, as well as the editor, for their helpful comments, feedback, and encouragement with this paper. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 23 crenshaw, kimberlé. 1989. “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” university of chicago legal forum, no. 1, 139–67. ———. 1991. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43 (6): 1241–99. 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2015. “why i use trigger warnings.” new york times, september 19, 2015. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/sunday/why-i-use-trig ger-warnings.html. marabini, alessia, and luca moretti. 2020. “goldman and siegel on the epistemic aims of education.” journal of philosophy of education 54 (3): 492–506. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12398. medina, josé. 2013. the epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. moody, anahvia taiyib, and jioni a. lewis. 2019. “gendered racial microaggressions and traumatic stress symptoms among black women.” psychology of women quarterly 43 (2): 201–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319828288. munch-jurisic, ditte marie. 2020. “the right to feel comfortable: implicit bias and the moral potential of discomfort.” ethical theory and moral practice 23 (1): 237–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10064-5. nadal, kevin l., tanya erazo, and rukiya king. 2019. “challenging definitions of psychological trauma: connecting racial microaggressions and traumatic stress.” journal for social action in counseling and psychology 11 (2): 2–16. https://doi.org/10.33043/jsacp.11.2.2-16. rae, logan. 2016. “re-focusing the debate on trigger warnings: privilege, trauma, and disability in the classroom.” first amendment studies 50 (2): 95–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/21689725.2016.1224677. rini, regina. 2020. the ethics of microaggression. london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315195056. roberts, andrea l., margaret rosario, heather l. corliss, karestan c. koenen, and s. bryn austin. 2012. “elevated risk of posttraumatic stress in sexual minority youths: mediation by childhood abuse and gender nonconformity.” american journal of public health 102 (8): 1587–93. https://doi.org/10.2105 /ajph.2011.300530. klieber – on the epistemology of trigger warnings published by scholarship@western, 2021 25 robertson, emily. 2010. “the epistemic aims of education.” in the oxford handbook of philosophy of education, edited by harvey siegel. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195312881.003.0002. sanson, mevagh, deryn strange, and maryanne garry. 2019. “trigger warnings are trivially helpful at reducing negative affect, intrusive thoughts, and avoidance.” clinical psychological science 7 (4): 778–93. https://doi.org/10 .1177/2167702619827018. siegel, harvey. 2010. “introduction: philosophy of education and philosophy.” in the oxford handbook of philosophy of education, edited by harvey siegel, 1–8. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/97801953 12881.003.0001. taleb, nassim nicholas. 2007. the black swan. the impact of the highly improbable. new york: random house. ———. 2012. antifragile: things that gain from disorder. new york: random house. toole, briana. 2019. “from standpoint epistemology to epistemic oppression.” hypatia 34 (4): 598–618. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12496. wylie, alison. 2004. “why standpoint matters.” in the feminist standpoint theory reader: intellectual and political controversies, edited by sandra harding, 339–352. new york: routledge. anna klieber is currently a phd candidate at the university of sheffield in the department of philosophy (supported by the white rose college of the arts and humanities). their research focusses on political philosophy of language, social epistemology, and the intersections of these areas. 13623 klieber title page2 13623 klieber final format how *cis* went mainstream: critical junctures and costs feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation zurn, perry. 2025. “how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (2). article 1. 2025 how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs perry zurn american university and cornell university pzurn@american.edu zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs perry zurn abstract today, cisgender (or cis for short) typically refers to someone whose gender “aligns with” or “matches” their sex assigned at birth. in this essay, i track and analyze how that dominant sense of cis arose. i identify three primary forces that helped mainstream the term and its current definition: julia serano’s whipping girl, sam killerman’s “cisgender privilege” checklist, and south park’s “cissy” episode. analyzing these key moments, i argue that cis gets mainstreamed through its depoliticization and rarefaction. that is, it comes to modify a sense of self between the ears rather than serve as a militant term deployed in coalitional politics. i further argue that cis gets mainstreamed through a practice of citational injustice, according to which trans community conversations go largely unengaged and uncited. in closing, i argue that if we are to continue to use cis in trans, queer, feminist, and allied circles, it must be rerooted in the political history of trans community conversations and at the nexus of multiple co-constitutive assemblages of power-knowledge. cis is best used as a term to diagnose a complex system of institutional legibility and legitimacy, not a private assessment of sex/gender. keywords: cisgender, cis, transgender, trans philosophy, citation ethics, citation injustice, genealogy as it applies to gender, cis began as a subcultural word with stochastic reference. it appeared haphazardly in out of the way pockets of underground communities and was put to multiple, inconsistent uses. archipelagic from the getgo, people played with it—and thought it playful. but that thought has turned serious and continental. cis has become grounded, and ground into gender discourse like the definitive edge of a boot or a rebar. it now circulates ubiquitously in mainstream culture and means something solid. as in so many other cases, that history has been all but forgotten. stories now get told starting with cis in its thing-status rather than as the primordial soup. the term cisgender became canonized for the trans and nontrans communities in different ways and at different junctures. for trans folks, the term’s inclusion in a glossary at the beginning of susan stryker’s (2008) transgender history feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 was a defining moment. “‘cisgendered’ or ‘cissexual,’” stryker (2008, 22) writes, “names the usually unstated assumption of nontransgender status contained in the words ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”1 in the 2014 inaugural issue of transgender studies quarterly, which collects and defines key terms in the field, b lee-harrison aultman’s “cisgender” entry follows in stryker’s footsteps. “cisgender,” aultman (2014) writes, is “a positive identification of a non-trans* identity” (62) and describes someone whose gender is “on the same side as their birth-assigned sex” (61).2 a companion tsq entry titled “cisgenderism” diagnoses cis privilege in action: “the cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth as well as resulting behavior, expression, and community” (lennon and mistler 2014, 63).3 together, stryker’s glossary entry and tsq’s entries instantiate cis terminology as a central component of trans resistant knowledges. for nontrans folks, the term’s adoption by the oxford english dictionary in 2015 was a definitive moment of legitimation. alongside photobomb, retweet, and declutter, cisgender (and its variants cisgendered, cissexual, and cis) took its place that year as a proper english word, the same year they was named “word of the year” by the american dialect society (2016). according to the oed (2015) entry, the term cisgender describes “a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds to his or her sex at birth.” a year after the oed’s adoption, the term spun into the limelight when jeffrey tambor, in his second emmy award acceptance speech, described himself as cisgender. the lead actor in the television series transparent said, “please give transgender talent a chance. give them auditions. give them their story. do that. and also, one more thing, i would not be unhappy were i the last cisgender male playing a female transgender on television. we have work to 1 in the second edition of transgender history (2017), stryker repeats this sentiment (“it is meant to mark the typically unstated or assumed privilege of being nontransgender”), but then adds a paragraph addressing the term’s “conceptual contradictions and weaknesses” (13). 2 in explaining the logic of the term, both stryker and aultman make an analogy to racial categorizations. just as the term white man refuses to allow the normativity of whiteness to automatically define the category of man, so the term cis man refuses to allow the normativity of cisness to automatically define the category of man. neither author gestures to a more intersectional or co-constitutive account of race and gender here. nor do they remark upon the intertwining of cisheteropatriarchy with white supremacy—or ableism or endosexism for that matter—a point to which i will return later. 3 the authors suggest cisgenderism is an improvement on the more interpersonal and less structural term transphobia. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 do” (miller 2016). certainly, tambor’s acknowledgment is something, but it was far from everything. tambor could have, for example, refused to play the character of a trans woman and insisted, publicly, that the role be given to a trans woman. instead, he accepted the role, won an emmy for it, and from that platform insisted trans people be given a chance to tell their own stories. whatever evaluation one makes of tambor’s strategy, his high-profile use of the term cisgender gave it significant standing and recognition in mainstream culture.4 today, cisgender is everywhere. primers on the term have recently appeared in numerous media outlets. after twitter ceo elon musk (2023) banned the term as a slur from the platform, write-ups of the debacle appeared in major newspapers around the globe. in addition to taking up residence in prominent dictionaries and encyclopedias, explanatory entries have also appeared in cornerstones of lgbtq scholarship, including transgender studies quarterly (aultman 2014), the sage encyclopedia of trans studies (goldberg and beemyn 2021), wiley blackwell encyclopedia of gender and sexuality studies (naples et al. 2016), and keywords for gender and sexuality studies (keywords feminist editorial collective 2021). the term has also stretched across multiple continents, appearing perhaps most markedly in a 2022 high-profile abortion decision by the supreme court of india (australian human rights commission, n.d.; radi 2015; krémer 2021; reeser 2013; luvuno, ncama, and mchunu 2019; yashee 2022). to all appearances, cis is here to stay. for all of this—and any of this—to happen, several earlier events had to occur that both popularized the terminology and solidified its sense as referring to a gender identity that matches one’s sex assigned at birth. key figures in these earlier moments, i will argue, were trans author and activist julia serano, nontrans artist and educator sam killerman, and the animated sitcom series south park. in their deployment of the term cisgender, these three voices together gave it a level of public and conceptual accessibility that enabled it to function easily in mainstream contexts. through them, moreover, cisgender also became oriented in a particular way. it became a largely neutral descriptor of self-identification whose sense depends on a typically western sex/gender distinction. importantly, in the hands of serano, killerman, and south park, the term also traveled quite a distance from trans community theorizing, a fact that, while lending it more respectability, also weakened it. together, these forces conspired to make the term increasingly flexible in quotidian contexts, but also less durable as a tool of political resistance and ideological critique. my aim in tracing this specific moment in cis’s genealogy is fourfold. first, by tracking how cis’s present orientation solidified, i hammer home that the primary sense of cis that circulates today is a historical accident, not a historical necessity. 4 tambor was later fired and transparent was cancelled after allegations of his sexual misconduct surfaced—an ignominious end to the project. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 indeed, the notion that cis marks a simple alignment of assigned sex and gender identity, or of psyche and morphology, such that its orbit lies primarily in the personal experience of self—this, all of this, is contingent. second, i show not only that but also how cis has become depoliticized as a category. in coming to refer primarily to an internal sense of self, cis has become actively divorced from critiques of cis norms, cisnormativity, cis privilege, and the cis state as material-discursive institutions of legibility and legitimacy against which resistance is required. third, i demonstrate that the personalized, depoliticized sense of cis is mainstreamed through an extended period of citational injustice by which prior (and ongoing) trans theorizations of cis go largely unmentioned, unengaged, and uncited. fourth and finally, i track how the personalized, depoliticized sense of cis, divorced from trans community conversations, becomes a rarified category. while it is through ableism, endosexism, fatphobia, homophobia, racism, and sanism, not to mention transphobia, that cisnormativity works, cis becomes washed of that work and silent in those conversations. it is on the basis of these four observations that i ultimately argue the contemporary sense of cis is ethically and epistemologically untenable. in what follows, i first offer a brief history of cis, emphasizing the plurality, political sensibility, and trans-rootedness of these conversations. i then dedicate three sections to serano’s, killerman’s, and south park’s deployments of cis. throughout, and especially in closing, i make the above demonstrations regarding the genealogy, depoliticization, citational injustice, and rarefaction through which cis gets mainstreamed. i then argue that if we are to continue to use cis in trans, queer, feminist, and allied circles, it must be rerooted in the political history of trans community conversations and at the nexus of multiple co-constitutive assemblages of power-knowledge. a brief history of cis where did it all start? originally a latin preposition, cis refers to being “on this side” or the near side of something, rather than “on that side” or the far side.5 the term took deep root in english during the mid-1800s, when it was used in chemistry and geography to refer to the spatial arrangements of molecules and other matter. it was not until roughly one hundred and fifty years later, in the 1990s, that cis took up residence in its third major field: gender studies. there, it refers to one’s gender being “on this side” of one’s sex or “on this side” of sex/gender alignment. it gets explicitly used as the opposite of trans, which is taken to mean being on the far side of one’s sex or on the other side of sex/gender alignment. 5 see, e.g., merriam-webster, s.v. “cis (prefix),” accessed april 25, 2025, https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cis; and oxford english dictionary, s.v. “cis (prefix),” accessed may 29, 2023, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cis_prefix. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 variants of the term, as it applies to gender, percolated in twentieth-century german sexology. the first variant, cisvestite, is typically attributed to two german sexologists: magnus hirschfeld and his young collaborator ernst burchard. both gay men, the two sought to provide medical, legal, and social support to intersex, homosexual, and transsexual people in germany. for them, cis indicates a vested transgression or transition across divisions of age, race, class, and profession, while trans is reserved for vested transgressions or transitions across divisions of sex or gender (hirschfeld 1914, 169–70; burchard 1914, 32). both fit in a larger, perhaps “infinite [unendlich]” category of sexual intermediaries and deviants (hirschfeld 1910, 4). the variant cissexual appeared, in 1991, in the work of volkmar sigusch. sigusch (1995, 828–29; 2013, 241–47) insists cissexualism is “a conundrum” (à la jan morris [1974]). in a remarkably prescient turn, he claims that both trans and cis involve “prostheticization” and “plasticity” (sigusch 1995, 831). both develop in dialogue with binary gender norms, and both sets of lives are, ultimately, irreducible to those norms, given the (again) “infinite [unendlich]” diversity of sexgenders, whether cis, trans, or otherwise (sigusch 1991, 335). in their present sense, the variants cisgender and cis, however, were first mobilized in online trans communities in the mid-1990s. dana defosse and carl buijs are typically credited with coining cis independently on the early internet forum usenet, in 1994 and 1995, respectively.6 for them, as for the trans community members who further developed and theorized the terms, cis named the universal category (defosse 1994, 2023; buijs 1996). trans people are as naturally occurring as cis people; we are categorical equals (dame-griff 2023). canadian trans political activist and advocate laura blake then theorizes, as early as 1997, her signal concept “cisgender ideal.” the ideal, she argues, assumes people are cisgender by default; correlatively, those who are not cisgender are both unworthy of consideration and ought to do their best to appear cisgender (blake 2001). what distinguishes the term’s appearance in those early conversations is the necessity of unseating the primacy of nontrans perspectives and lives—for the sake of making more and better room for trans perspectives and trans lives. there is a sociopolitical analysis at its heart. it was not until 1999, in an online gender glossary curated by blake’s protégé donna lynn matthews, that this largely political diagnosis undergirding the deployment of cis variants gets lost in favor of a more psychological description. matthews (1999) defines cisgender as having “one’s identity and presentation match their physical morphology.” in the early aughts, it remained paramount to recognize that cis did not— could not—simply refer to some natural match between personal psyche and 6 while defosse’s original post from 1994 remains available, buijs’ post from 1995 has not been located and was probably lost in the usenet archiving process. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 individual morphology, nor could it simply signal self-identity. rather, cisgender referred at least to a system of power and social organization, replete with the disciplinary enforcements of cisness that now saturate all of our lives. it furthermore became clear that one could not talk about cisgender without talking about cis privilege, or the way the world is organized to support cisness and delegitimize transgender people (or even support trans embrace of cis normativity and delegitimize trans gender disruption). spurred by peggy mcintosh’s (1989) essay, “white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack,” the early 2000s brought a rash of privilege checklists: for white privilege, male privilege, christian privilege, heterosexual privilege, class privilege, able-bodied privilege, nonfat privilege, and even gamer privilege. it was here that the first cis or nontrans privilege checklist gained traction. of the four major versions of the cis privilege checklist developed during this period, perhaps chief among them is cedar’s (2007) “cisgender/cissexual privilege checklist.” hers was the most comprehensive, most experiential, and most overtly political. influential japanese american intersex, transfeminist, and disability activist and educator emi koyama (2002, 2013), who bookends the checklists moment with incisive blog posts elucidating cis and cis privilege, argues that we are never done assessing symptoms of cis privilege. privilege systems themselves change. a continued vigilance is called for. on june 7, 2002, koyama posted a message to the women’s studies listserv (wmst-l), in which she recommended the use of cissexual and cisgender as a means to “de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the ‘norm’ against which trans people are defined.” more than a decade after her original endorsement, she posted a 2013 blog entry, “cis is real—even if it is carelessly articulated.” in it, she concludes, “a ‘cis’ person is not (necessarily) someone whose gender matches her or his assigned sex, or someone who does not suffer from ‘gender dysphoria’; it should denote someone who does not suffer from (or [need not] manage possibility of suffering from) transphobia on a regular basis”—including some trans people. like whiteness and able-bodiedness, she continues, cis is a socially constructed category of power and privilege. it is not, at bottom, some natural category of people whose sex/gender is properly aligned. it describes an ideological structure of value, replete with definitive material effects. more than mere analogies, moreover, these categories have to be understood and negotiated intersectionally. for its first decade, then, cisgender (and cis) was developed and deployed to diagnosis a political landscape where nontrans voices, perspectives, and norms dominated the gender world and gender discourse. throughout this process, trans people (including intersex, disabled, and of-color trans people) clearly cited one another and cross-pollinated cis theorizations with intersex, disability, and critical race theory. but that dominant sense and that practice was about to change. against this zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 insistent political analysis and complex community conversation, a more simplistic psychological definition slowly surfaced, reducing cis to a sense of self between the ears rather than an inequitable structure of social organization. references to trans community conversations dropped out, as did efforts to grapple with multiple compounding projects of systematic oppression. it is to that story that i now turn. serano’s whipping girl in 2007, five years into her own transition, trans biologist-cum-activist julia serano published whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. of the terms she is best known for theorizing in this text, transmisogyny is one and cissexism is the other. perhaps surprisingly, however, her chapter “dismantling cissexual privilege” does not mention the trans community conversations, ongoing since 1994, around the terms cis, cissexual, cisgender, and cis privilege. while her book’s first chapter briefly footnotes koyama’s 2002 blog post as serano’s “inspiration” for using cis-related terms, the eponymous chapter cites no precedents for those terms or her theoretical analyses (serano 2007, 364n3). the chapter itself asserts that trans folks “must begin” to develop their own language and concepts, and insists this work “should begin” with a critique of cis privilege, which she then goes on to offer (162). the implicit suggestion here is that serano herself is spearheading that beginning. the suggestion is in fact so strong that many people reading whipping girl “assumed that i invented the [cis] terms,” serano writes—an assumption she corrects several years later by blogging her four-line footnote to koyama (serano 2011). nevertheless, serano still wants distinct credit for her use of cis terminology. in her 2016 preface to the second edition of whipping girl, and in the context of stating she “coined” various terms throughout the book, serano grants that, while she did not coin cissexual (here she moves her acknowledgment of koyama up from footnote to text), “whipping girl is the first book to employ cis terminology on a consistent basis, and it is generally credited with popularizing this language” (serano 2016b, xvii–xviii). so what is serano’s contribution to (the ongoing trans) discussion of cis and cis privilege? throughout the book, she presents her contribution primarily as a series of (italicized) terms she understands herself to have freshly formulated, accompanied by explanations and examples thereof. first, serano defines a “cissexual” person as someone who “ha[s] only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned” (2007, 12, 33, 174). a transsexual person, by contrast, is someone who experiences “dissonance,” “discomfort,” and even “dissociate[s]” between their subconscious and physical sexes (28, 181; see also 165). “cissexism,” then, which for serano typically marks a person rather than a social system, is “the belief that transsexuals’ identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals” (12). in everyday life, she muses, people gender other people instinctively, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 putting them into one of two boxes (men and women) that they already assume are cissexual in nature. this, she argues, is the “gendering” and “cissexual assumption” that undergird cissexual entitlement and cissexual privilege. “cissexual gender entitlement” is the entitlement cissexual people feel to determine other people’s genders. and “cissexual privilege” is “the double standard that promotes the idea that transsexual genders are distinct from, and less legitimate than, cissexual genders” (162). serano’s explanations and examples, in each case, focus on the individual person and their interpersonal interactions. as such, serano’s account of the cis position is more personal and interpersonal than it is political, institutional, structural, or systemic. serano’s emphasis on the (inter)personal in her elucidation of the categories of cis and cis privilege glints across the page. at every turn, she invites her readers to think about how cisness works in the realm of everyday life and communication. she opens by asking readers to observe how quickly they gender other people, even if they are “as queer as a three-dollar bill” (serano 2007, 163), and how often that gendering reinscribes the presumption and privileges of cissexuality. she asks readers to reflect, further, on the role cissexual privilege plays both in moments when gender disruptive people are thrown out of bathrooms, but also when they pass in the bathroom of their own choosing. what sort of cissexual privilege, she asks, is being accorded her when a store clerk says, “how can i help you, ma’am?” (169)? what are the conditions that make that deference possible and, conversely, what are the conditions that shatter it? this widespread personal commitment to cisnormativity, she argues, informs the clinicians and academics who apply terms of their own choosing to trans people, instead of those that trans people offer; the television and movie producers who repeatedly depict trans as an affectation and imitation rather than an authentic gender expression; and the everyday people who, when a trans person comes out to them, congratulate that person, saying, “i never would have guessed!” (179). serano then shares her own experience of coming out and seeing people get “this distinctive ‘look’ in their eyes” as they search for cues of a past “boy” self in her face, body, and voice (172). “the most radical thing that any of us can do,” she concludes in the final sentence of “dismantling cissexual privilege,” “is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people’s behaviors and bodies” (193). not organize, not revolt, not hack the system, but stop projecting. after publishing whipping girl, serano continued to think about cis-related terms. she wrote a substantive blog post in 2009 (serano 2011) and two more in 2014 (serano 2014a, 2014b), all three of which were then collected in her book outspoken (serano 2016a). these pieces further clarify the terms (and her use of them), as well as identify their limitations. in one, for example, serano insists that cis is not an identity but a structural position, much like whiteness and able-bodiedness, which she herself does not “strongly identify with” but clearly occupies (2011; 2016a, 94). in zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 another, she explains the difficulties of pinning down cisgender privileges to only cisgender people. while she chooses not to tackle this “nebulous blob,” she does, in a footnote, “recommend” cedar’s (2007) unapologetically political “cis privilege checklist” (serano 2014a; 2016a, 261, 326n9). in yet another, she warns against a tooeasy bifurcation of cis and trans people that capitalizes on simply reversing the hierarchy and the discursive structures under which trans people have suffered. in contrast to such “reverse discourse,” she recommends “decentering the binary”— specifically the cis/trans binary (2014b; 2016a, 269). cis/trans discourse should be used not to pit definable groups of people against one another but to elucidate the beliefs that produced double standards for them. it is a tool to unmask ideology, not further taxonomize, she insists. intriguingly, in one of her 2014 blog posts, serano considers a “possible model” that “may (in some cases) provide a more effective framework than the cisgender/transgender dichotomy” (2014b; 2016a, 257). she prefaces this model by acknowledging that the word cis often “oversimplifies” gendered histories and that, more often than not, many people (including trans people) will experience some combination of cisgender privilege and a lack thereof (2014b; 2016a, 263). given this complexity, serano proposes sometimes using not the binary model of cis/trans but the tripartite model of gender conventional, gender unconventional, and gender transgressive. gender conventional people “generally adhere to the accepted societal norms and expectations that are projected onto boys/men and girls/women in our culture” (2014b; 2016a, 265). they are generally viewed as “normal” and “legitimate.” gender unconventional people “defy” some of those norms; they are generally viewed as “outliers” but not “threats” to the categories (2014b; 2016a, 265). finally, gender transgressive people “defy” norms considered essential to gender categories and, as such, are viewed as “‘breaking’ the laws of gender” (2014b; 2016a, 266). crucially, for serano, the tripartite model can be used as a supplement to explain political structures of social legitimacy and illegitimacy, but it is the cis/trans model that, insofar as it explains the personal and interpersonal dynamics of how people feel and what they believe, offers a more widely effective foundation and “the most momentum” for the trans movement (2014b; 2016a, 268). and it is this (inter)personal sense of cis that serano retains and that defines the word today. whipping girl took the feminist scene by storm. hailed by npr as “a foundational text” for understanding trans politics (friedman et al. 2016), the book was also named by readers of ms. magazine (2011) as one of the “100 best nonfiction books of all time”). as such, it put trans theorizing, and especially the terms cissexism and transmisogyny, in front of a much wider swath of people than ever before. what circulated with that unprecedented circulation, however, was cisgender in a serano-inflected form. a form of cisgender that frontloaded psychic experience and personal identity at the expense of political and institutional analysis. a form of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 cisgender that paraded itself as a matter of fact—that is, what matches and what does not—rather than as a resistant trans intervention that speaks truth to power. a form of cisgender that can be adequately defined by a singular voice (i.e., serano’s) rather than the longstanding (and continuing) community negotiation over the term. and a form of cisgender that is only ever analogous to whiteness and able-bodiedness rather than constituted with and through them. here, at the very beginning of cis hitting the mainstream, it acquires a depoliticized, personal orientation, without citational accountability or multi-issue sensibility, and it is that orientation that garners traction. killerman’s knapsack takes center stage a few years after serano’s whipping girl was released, yet another cisgender privilege checklist surfaced, this time—and for the first time—written by a “cis” person. sam killerman is a social justice educator and multimedia artist. he understands himself to be a cis straight man with a mix of feminine and masculine gender expressions, which he stages in his “it’s pronounced metrosexual” comedy show. in a 2013 ted talk, he confessed to various “feminine” activities such as wearing tight salmon-colored pants, plucking his eyebrows, smelling like a flower after a shower, crying at the lion king, and trying on multiple outfits each morning (killerman 2013). he says he is regularly mistaken for gay. killerman (2011a) originally composed and published a seventeen-item “list of cisgender privileges” in 2011. he later expanded that list to thirty-two items and reprinted it as the “cisgender privilege” checklist in his book a guide to gender (killerman 2017, 41–44). killerman’s list is now, by far, the most widely circulated, read, and used cis privilege checklist. while the vast majority of killerman’s items have predecessors in prior checklists, he does not once cite the previous trans-authored versions. at best, and only on his website, he credits bowling green state university’s safe zone program for “the beginnings of this list” (killerman 2011a, 2020).7 similarly, killerman (2017, 41) defines cisgender as “having your sex assigned at birth correspond to your gender identity” but does not cite a single person, let alone a trans person, as a theoretical source for the term. that killerman is “cis” and writing a cis privilege checklist is not itself a problem. in the 1980s, peggy mcintosh was a white person writing a white privilege checklist. unlike mcintosh’s calls for societal change, which always accompany her 7 an administrator of bowling green state university’s safe zone training program was willing to share their resources packet with me. in it, there is indeed a one-page, nineitem cisgender privilege list positioned, surprisingly, under a “got privilege?” sign (bgsu 2017, 18). obviously, the goal of the checklist is not to enjoin readers to get more privilege, unlike the goal of the got milk campaign. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 analyses of white privilege, however, killerman (2020) merely expresses a hope that his cis privilege checklist will enhance cis people’s “understanding” and “cognizan[ce]” of their privileged positions. “the goal of creating these lists,” he writes, “is to make cognizant in [cis] minds the privileges with which they were born in hopes of increasing their ability to empathize with individuals who were not so fortunate” (2017, 40). killerman’s appeal to empathy for the unfortunates is a far cry from mcintosh’s call to redesign whole social systems. still more instructively, mcintosh’s entries begin with “i”; they are personal reflections on her own unearned privileges. the process of self-introspection is an essential component, for mcintosh, of privilege lists themselves and of the work of undoing they are meant to prompt. killerman’s entries, by contrast, begin with “you.” the second person is, of course, more widely generalizable (something mcintosh warned against), but it also suggests killerman may be reticent to work through his own privilege—in all its gnarly detail. on his website, killerman’s (2020) list is prefaced by the following sentences: “if you identify with the gender you were assigned at birth, here are a bunch of unearned benefits you get that many folks do not. read them and consider them. it’s not about shame. it’s about understanding.” as an invitation to simply think about the benefits one enjoys, the list is highly personalized and depoliticized. nevertheless, it clearly has roots in privilege checklists that preceded it. some of killerman’s items are derived (perhaps indirectly through early cis checklists) from peggy mcintosh’s white privilege list, such as “you can easily find role models and mentors to emulate who share your identity” and “you can reasonably assume that your ability to acquire a job, rent an apartment, or secure a loan will not be denied on the basis of your gender identity/expression.” other items are clearly indebted (whether directly or indirectly) to trans-generated cis privilege lists, such as “your gender is an option on a form” and “you can use public restrooms without fear of verbal abuse, physical intimidation, or arrest.” one item appears to be killerman’s own: “you can pretend that anatomy and gender are irrevocably entwined when having the ‘boy parts and girl parts’ talk with children, instead of having to explain the actual complexity of the issue.” the question, nevertheless, remains: how much transformation of structures of cis privilege does killerman’s “cisgender privileges” list really prompt? the same year that killerman released his original cisgender privilege checklist, he also released his most popular infographic, “the genderbread person” (killerman 2011b), which depicts overly simplistic distinctions between gender identity (residing in the brain), sexual orientation (residing in the heart), and sex (residing in the genital region). in 2013, killerman was publicly accused of plagiarizing “the genderbread person” from the trans community, which had been iterating the idea for years (cisnormativity 2013; taranov2007 2011). there was an extended twitter conversation and a lengthy storify record providing evidential support for the accusation, almost all of which have since been, curiously, scrubbed from the web feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 (and the wayback machine). in response, many folks in the trans community recommend using “the gender unicorn” instead, a similar infographic curated by trans people, but one that reiterates the former’s oversimplified conceptualizations (trans student educational resources 2015). killerman (2017, 66) responds to accusations of plagiarism in a guide to gender, cursorily acknowledging previous iterations but remarking folks writing to him “are unable” to identify the “absolute originator” of the infographic, assuming it is their responsibility. “the genderbread person,” he states, “existed long before the internet, and is one of the best examples of creative commons learning that i have been a part of” (2017, 66–67). in this context, killerman’s silence on previous cis privilege checklists by trans people appears to similarly aggrandize his own originality and obscure trans contributions to the conversation, an act of cis privilege if there ever was one. killerman is a digital-era sensation. reportedly, his “cisgender privileges” list has been shared from his website at least five hundred thousand times and his “genderbread person” infographic has been downloaded almost 3 million times across more than one hundred countries and translated into more than a dozen languages (2011a, 2011b, 2020). his book a guide to gender was an amazon bestseller and is in its second edition. his cocreated safe zone project, in which his “cisgender privileges” list appears as a resource, is being used by tens of thousands of educators. across all of these contexts, his circulation of the terms cisgender and cis privilege, much like serano’s, promulgates a sense that is both personalized and depoliticized, weakening the challenge to social change they were developed to instigate. furthermore, killerman’s versions of cis and cis privilege, like serano’s, are decontextualized from existing trans community conversations, erasing past versions and contributions, despite obvious reliance on them, whether direct or indirect. while this may be killerman’s understanding of “creative commons,” it is quite different for trans people to default, within trans community settings, to the usability and shareability of each other’s work than for killerman to use and share that work outside of trans community settings and without proper acknowledgment of his sources, even if those sources belong simply to the zeitgeist trans folks have created (zurn 2023). finally, killerman’s emphasis on cis empathy in the absence of mcintosh’s critiques of racial capital and calls for systemic destruction of white privilege, let alone other structures of inequity, further whitens and rarifies cis as a category. it is this sense that now circulates in so many trans 101 trainings. south park’s “cissy” in 2014, the critically acclaimed, animated sitcom south park released an episode entitled “cissy” (parker 2014). the show and the term cis largely grew up together and lived parallel lives, with cis appearing in 1994, south park debuting in 1997, and both running continuously since. in the episode, two stories are zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 interwoven. one is of eric, a student in south park’s elementary school, who, tired of facing perennially occupied toilets in the boys’ room at recess, decides to throw on a pink bow and use the girls’ restroom. when challenged, eric/a asserts, “i’m transgender.” school administrators are stunned. they discuss eric/a’s further insistence that they not be made to “go to the bathroom with cisgenders.” mr. garrison, an administrator, explains, “cisgender. it’s a politically correct term for people who aren’t transgender. if you identify with the sex you were born with, you are cis.” another responds, “but then cisgender is just normal.” mr. garrison replies, “saying normal is extremely offensive to people who aren’t in that group.” administrators decide to rehab a janitorial closet into a “transgender bathroom,” which they label “other.” eric/a is thrilled they get their own private bathroom, as are the girls whose bathroom eric/a had most recently been using. simultaneously, randy, a forty-five-year-old fluvial geomorphologist and the father of another kid at the elementary school, is also frustrated by toilet use in men’s restrooms and decides to cross-dress in order to use the women’s. something feels so right in the women’s restroom that randy begins to sing there and develops an alternate persona: lorde, a seventeen-year-old singer-songwriter from new zealand. lorde’s music rockets to the top 20. while her music is technically synthesized and virtually distributed, she does in one instance headline a neighborhood party for a kid with diabetes. living two lives, however, is difficult for randy. eventually lorde retires from the public eye entirely, reporting she is going through a tough time. randy had fallen into severe depression. shortly thereafter, lorde releases a hit song about accepting and loving who you are. the song moves the whole school, students and administrators alike. they announce they are getting rid of the transgender bathroom. instead, “anyone who has a problem sharing a bathroom with people who might be transgender will have to use a special bathroom designed to keep them away from the normal people who don’t care.” they relabel the janitorial closet bathroom “cissies.” it is, of course, significant that south park dedicated an episode to the word cis at all. it indicates and extends the social recognition (and debate) the term had already generated. a highly decorated television series, whose episodes are distributed around the globe, south park’s reach is and has been phenomenal. in 2013, just one year before the “cissy” episode, south park had been named by tv guide as the tenth greatest tv cartoon of all time (sands 2013). in 2014 itself, exclusive streaming rights to south park were acquired by hulu for $87 million (goldberg 2021). that number jumped close to $550 million when hbo acquired exclusive rights in 2019 (goldberg 2021). the “cissy” episode itself has been hailed as “turning the tables” on the treatment of transgender issues in popular media (milloy 2014). despite poking fun at trans people in a variety of ways—especially through the questionable “transition” story lines of both eric/a and randy—the episode’s overall feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 message is quite simple: cis people, chill out about bathrooms! let trans folk pee in peace. the complex arguments that subtend this episode’s overall message of trans inclusion, however, deserve to be spelled out clearly and evaluated carefully. first, the episode recasts “normal” people as people who are trans-accepting and renames non-normal people as people who are trans-exclusionary. this inversion is made materially evident in the conversion of the “other” bathroom, reserved for “trans” students, into the “cissies” bathroom, reserved for jumpy cis people: an outcast space in either case. in doing so, the episode continues to function within a normal/abnormal binary and, by pathologizing cis people in its work of depathologizing trans people, it practices a form of nietzschean ressentiment. that is, it inverts the inherited hierarchy and simply turns the prior terms of engagement against the grain. what “cissy” does not do is change the terrain of the debate, the terms of engagement, or the fact of hierarchical relations. it simply changes who gets to stand in for normal. second, the episode clearly capitalizes on the consonance of “cissies” with “sissies,” and therefore on sexism and homophobia. its message is simple: cis people should toughen up (man up) and accept trans people in bathrooms. stop whimpering and being such a wimp about it all. at one point, eric/a announces, “what we have a problem with is cisgenders who are intolerant. you know what we call them: cissies.” eric/a’s friend responds, “yeah! stan’s a big old fat cissy.” stan, who is the allamerican counterpart to eric/a’s increasingly violent and erratic behavior on the show, does, in keeping with his character, end up using the “cissies” bathroom at the end of the episode. clearly the term cissy here does in fact function as an insult and a term of disparagement, rather than as a neutral descriptor or a political diagnosis. the episode therefore retools the rhetoric of shameful femininity and faggotry implicit in sissy to mobilize its critique of trans exclusionary cis people (i.e., cissies). third, the term cissy, as deployed in the episode, also capitalizes on ableism. when, at the turn of the twentieth century, the term sissy first began to be applied primarily not to sisters but to effeminate boys, those boys were by and large sickly. they were described as soft, weak, and unathletic, plagued by health problems and frequently ill. as such, they were not only pathologized for their effeminacy, but their effeminacy was taken to be a product of their pathologies (grant 2004). to combat the plague of effeminate boys and weak men, as much as to recover and reinvent masculinity, then us president theodore roosevelt supported a regimen of professional athletics and outdoor sports, from which sissies—whether by reason of effeminacy or disability—were constitutively excluded (bionaz 2005). sissy, then, is a term historically used to police disabled bodyminds. it is still so today. in 2015, disability scholar and activist morénike giwa onaiwu reported that her black autistic son was taunted as a “sissy” for crying at the barbershop (packham 2015). by zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 suggesting that cissies are sick, sickos, and poorly developed boys, in particular, the south park episode recruits ableism to signal trans inclusion. fourth, the episode also trades in fatphobia to stage its call for trans inclusion. of south park’s four main characters (i.e., stan, kyle, eric, and kenny), eric is the “fat” one. he is also the loudest and least couth of all the characters. he is consistently volatile and impressively egotistical. something about his fatness stands in for all of this—or proves all of this. fatness, after all, has a coterie of connotations in the west that suggest an inability to properly fit within (or fit themselves to, in becoming fit) a range of social norms regarding gender, race, class, ability, and productive citizenry. insofar as fatness is associated with softness, moreover, and the weakness of soft bodies (against the presumed strength of taut bodies), fatphobia is also a force that underlies sexism (manne 2024). eric’s fatness, in particular, is the theme of a south park episode from season 1, where he tries to become a “beefcake” by compulsively drinking “weight gain 4000” (parker and stone 1997). he ends up a naked pile of rolling flesh on a nondescript surface. it matters, then, that eric, as eric/a in the “cissy” episode, assumes the trans label immediately after being called a “fatass.” it matters, too, that eric/a later supports the accusation that stan is a “big old fat cissy.” here, eric/a endorses the lobbing at stan (and thereby at cisflakes) the same stereotypes under which he has suffered: being fat, being soft, being a sissy, unable to man up about things one needs to man up for, like trans inclusion. trans inclusion, then, throughout south park’s “cissy” episode, is calculated and calibrated not only within the context of a chalk-white show but also through the episode’s disparagement of femininity, effeminacy, faggotry, fatness, and disability. viewers have come to expect south park to trade in offensive stereotypes; it is par for the course. at least one reviewer, however, argues its treatment of transness, by way of trans inclusion, has some value (milloy 2014). but does it? the depathologization of transness, in the “cissy” episode, is couched in a show context where stan, the stand-in for cis sensibilities, will always come out as more reasonable than eric, whose transness is, from beginning to end, a sham, whatever point this particular episode is making. in fact, neither randy nor eric are trans characters going forward. thus, even the episode’s ressentiment is inauthentic; its transvaluation of values is a smoke screen and the dustup is followed by a return to “normal” gender roles thereafter. but it is this episode that put cis and cisgender on the map for the many people who would never encounter serano’s books or killerman’s educational materials. and it is this episode that further entrenched a personalized, depoliticized account of cis, not only divorced from the trans community conversations before and since, but also mobilized through a naturalization of whiteness and a denigration of femininity, faggotry, fatness, and disability. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 counting losses at this juncture, it is worth taking stock of the historical trajectory of cis terminology—beginning with the fact that there is a genealogy at all. people who insist that cis is this or that have forgotten (or dis-known [eggert 2015]) something they know all too well: no word “is” anything at all. words are signs with histories of changing usage across time and place. we cannot hide behind any given definition of cis today as if it might settle our theoretical debates or political conundrums. instead, it is the task of critical politics to continuously revisit the words we use for our projects and the meanings we lend to them, not only through our discourse but also through our embodied lives. the primary sense or senses of cis might have been different and might, thereby, have equipped us not only to think different (gendered) thoughts but achieve different (gendered) ends. it might seem at first that this is just an old, old story. in the beginning, there was a mess of senses of cis. from the latin prefix and german sexologists to usenet regulars, bloggers, and privilege listers, a smorgasbord of definitions of cisgender and delineations of cis privilege, cis normativity, and cis ideology had been put on the table and made available for exploration. instead of continuing to pursue that plethora of possibilities, however, discourse took a turn toward a more constrained and conscripted sense of cis. the richness of the term was slowly whittled down, and the excess chiseled away. something more tractable and (apolitically) reliable was settled upon. cis became a match between psyche and morphology, something upon which constituents as diametrically opposed as serano and south park could agree. it might seem to be simply the natural development of words to settle into less mobile, more brittle formations. but that whittling is not all that happened, nor all that can be seen in what happened. more than simply a numerical reduction in the senses of cis, we also witness here a turn toward depoliticization. in its first decade, cisgender developed as a term of political struggle and increasingly became understood to name an ideology and concomitant sociopolitical structure that treats so-called cis people as legitimately gendered people. defosse, buijs, blake, and koyama set the stage for the quickly proliferating cis privilege checklists that washed through the aughts. cedar (2007), author of perhaps the best known trans-generated cis privilege checklist at the time, defined cis as “someone whose determination of her sex[/gender] is consistently validated and reinforced by institutions of power, particularly medical, legal, religious, and scientific.” she published her checklist—with that definition—in february 2007, just months before serano’s whipping girl came out. across this conversation, trans people engaged with and cited one another in a collective praxis of theorizing the term and its implications. they understood cis to be part and parcel of trans resistance and creativity, a political critique and a call to action. and over and over again they interwove theorizations of gender, race, intersex, and disabled experience. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 but cis did not stay there. starting in 2007, the formulations of cisness and cis privilege offered by serano, killerman, and south park together make the term’s solidification in transgender history, transgender studies quarterly, the oed, and tambor’s acceptance speech possible. in this process of mainstreaming, there is a general trajectory toward an individual psychological definition of cisgender and recommendations for neoliberal inclusion rather than the radical reassessment of gender as a whole that marked the term’s early roots. there is also an ever-increasing distance from the trans communities that generated the term. it bears repeating that none of these popularizers cite previous trans theorizations, with the exception of serano’s buried footnote to koyama. cisgender came into its own, then, but at the cost of reducing a radical term to a neutral descriptor that obscures the trans community’s collective negotiation of the term; that bears little tractable commitment to resisting or changing cisnormativity; and that, by turn, gets divorced from the discussion of—but also, simultaneously, crafted through the enforcement of—sexism, homophobia, ableism, racism, and fatphobia in order to enact trans inclusion. the mainstreaming of cis occurred through a history of depoliticization, rarefaction, and citational injustice, then, that increasingly abstracts it from the coalitional consciousness within which it had begun. and that—all of that—matters. this slice of genealogy gives us a vantage point from which to evaluate current scholarship on cis, as well as to assess our own use of the term itself. in 2024, feminism against cisness hit the shelves with a gauntlet of a title. with contributions primarily by trans theorists and dedicated to theorizing transfeminist politics, history, and theory, the collection imagines feminism from a fresh vantage point. in her introduction, editor emma heaney argues, against the mainstream definition, that cisness is not merely the fact of experiencing one’s gender as aligned with one’s sex. rather, cisness is an ideology with devastating material consequences. cisness is the biologizing ideology that these social roles of sexual difference adhere to assigned sex based on the appearance of genitals at or (via prenatal imaging technology) before birth. . . . cisness is the idea that those identified as girls at birth are naturally inducted into the social expectation that sexual difference sets for the feminine and likewise for boys with the masculine. (heaney 2024, 10) against the widespread personalization of cisness as a felt sense between the ears, heaney insists it is an ideological construct and a political ploy. it enforces an idea rather than reflects facts. in her pointed pushback against the many abstractions of cisness, heaney argues that its founding distinction is ultimately not between men and women at all but between preservable, penetrating, masculinized bodies, on the one hand, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 disposable, penetrable, feminized bodies, on the other. these distinctions are inextricable from multiple systems of oppression, as well as histories of reproductive labor, racial capital, and eugenics. “cisness,” heaney (2024, 2) writes, “is the ableist apprehension of bodies into good and bad, the colonial destruction of kinship structures, the white supremacist obliteration of personhood in the service of capital extraction, and a component of bourgeois antipathy for the poor, working, and racialized people of the world.” in repoliticizing cisness, then, heaney poses cisness as perhaps the single most fundamental organizing system.8 cisness is not a category of self-identification. it is an iceberg of patriarchal, white supremacist, ableist, colonial, and capitalist projects—against which feminism must stand if it is to stand against anything. in many ways, feminism against cisness serves as a corrective to the personalized, depoliticized, rarified sense of cis so widespread today. as a corrective to that history, however, the book itself proceeds without history. no reference is made either to what came before that mainstreaming or to the resistant underflows that flourished during and since. in her introduction, heaney does not cite a single trans theorist of cis, past or present. in fact, only two essays in the collection cite prior theorists of cis: those theorists being finn enke (2012) and marquis bey (2022). for a text dedicated to theorizing feminism against cisness, it is a signal (although unfortunately unsurprising) choice to undertake such theorizing without reference to the long history of trans theorizations of the term. there is a loss in the citational injustice, here, one difficult to fathom. such an oversight highlights the seductive siren song of self-origination—of not having a beginning, of not having been made or made possible—a song upon which cisness itself is surely built. but it also signals the elite forces that conspire to make enke and bey, as (especially north american) scholars, available for citation, while leaving the vast comments, blogs, zines, pamphlets, and other nonacademic work invisible, without the blazing insignia of the university. such forces continue to favor a small coterie of trans and nonbinary voices over the many that speak. for all that the book does, then, it does not reverse the longstanding citational erasure that has marked the mainstream discourse of cis. in the essay “(foot)notes on cisnormativity and feminism,” argentine trans philosopher blas radi (2020) argues that cis terms and the theory of cisnormativity exist, much as intersex and trans people do, on the margins of feminist theory. cis terms and theory are rarely adopted in said literature, and, where they are, they typically occupy the footnotes, literally and figuratively. they are rarely developed, 8 from my perspective, the impetus to identify the single most fundamental inequity through which all others can (or must) be understood refuses the complexity of our histories (and our presents), as well as the limitations of each vantage point of analysis. that said, for me, cisness is certainly one important vector. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 rarely given references, and rarely impact the main text. writers treat the term cis as if it “emerged spontaneously from common sense” or were merely “the fruit of the writer’s introspective reflection,” not the product of extended trans community theorizing (radi 2020, 25). this fundamental erasure of a history of thought is in keeping with colonial knowledge structures. the margin, however, to which cis and cis theory are consigned, is not “a white, virgin, empty margin,” he argues, citing franco-maghrebian theorist jacques derrida (1982, xxiii), but rather another text and another land that any decolonial project must take seriously (radi 2020, 23). radi’s own essay is a series of twenty-one theses proffered as footnotes to map—and to cite—the rich landscape of trans and intersex theorizations of cis. he includes the voices of koyama (2002), cedar (2007), serano (2007), enke (2012), and aultman (2014), but also mauro cabral (2009), viviane vergueiro simakawa (2015), alexandre baril (2019), and peter cava (2016). in fact, radi is so committed to conveying the richness of the margins—and resisting their marginalization—that he makes the pointed choice of inserting, as his penultimate thesis/footnote, his own bibliography. as a thesis all their own, then, his references become part of the main text (which is itself a series of footnotes) rather than coming after. this is not a move to “include” what has been excluded or to let the margins trickle in. rather, it is a move to rupture the exclusion/inclusion structure itself. the margins have moved in, producing a shift (and rift) not only in the material geopolitics of citation but also in the essay genre itself (pérez 2017). the whole structure of writing is perturbed here. rather than merely citing something outside the text, radi’s references form a presence that changes (both afterward and in advance) the very nature of the text itself, bedeviling cisnormative distinctions between text and reference, words and white space, authorial voice and scholarly apparatus, continent and archipelago, forethought and afterthought. one of the reasons cis can continue to function in its mainstream sense (i.e., modifying a gender that matches an assigned sex) is a widespread refusal to acknowledge and learn from trans community theorizations of cis over the last thirty years. any contemporary attempt to reframe cisness as a political ideology, materialist practice, or racial project, moreover, should be wary of replicating that same citational and epistemic injustice. in either case, such injustices foreclose accountability to trans histories, but they also permit the colonial mirage (and selfsatisfaction) of being first on the ground. the contemporary sense of cis is ethically, as much as epistemologically, untenable. epistemologically, cis as felt sense disavows the ideological construct of matching gender identity and sexed morphology that subtends it. ethically, cis as felt sense denies accountability to early trans theory and politics, as well as cuts off coalitional analyses of co-constitutive hierarchies. as we look toward a future of feminist, queer, and trans work that deploys—and hopefully also theorizes—cis and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 its sibling terms, it is my hope that cis be rerooted in trans community conversations, in gender creative and disruptive political militancy, and thereby also in a continually expanding nexus of co-implicated issues and systems of oppression.9 what follows from there, however, might surprise us. genealogies are useful for many things, chief among them being this: they pose the question of how we should then live. having spent a significant amount of time with cis’s history, it is my conviction that cis needs to shift. that shift should involve a recovery of our pasts, as i have emphasized here, but it may also involve still undetermined turns. as we take up that task, i hope we honor where we have been and the complexity of where we are but also deeply reimagine where we are 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the cis/trans distinction.” whipping girl (blog), november 5. zurn – how cis went mainstream: critical junctures and costs published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 https://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/11/cissexism-and-cis-privilegerevisited.html. ————. 2016a. outspoken: a decade of transgender activism and trans feminism. oakland, ca: switch hitter press. ————. 2016b. whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. 2nd ed. berkeley, ca: seal press. sigusch, volkmar. 1991. “die transsexuellen und unser nosomorpher blick: teil ii: zur entpathologisierung des transsexualismus,” zeitschrift für sexualforschung 4: 309–43. ————. 1995. “transsexueller wunsch und zissexuelle abwehr.” psyche 49 (9–10): 811–37. ————. 2013. sexualitäten: eine kritische theorie in 99 fragmenten. frankfurt: campus verlag. stryker, susan. 2008. transgender history. berkeley, ca: seal press. ————. 2017. transgender history: the roots of today’s revolution. 2nd ed. new york: hachette books. taranov2007. 2011. “oversimplified diagram, but still a good way to describe basic terms to people unfamiliar with any trans issues.” reddit, r/transgender subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/transgender/comments/ipgod/oversim plified_diagram_but_still_a_good_way_to/. trans student educational resources. 2015. “the gender unicorn.” https://transstu dent.org/gender/. vergueiro simakawa, viviane. 2015. “por inflexões decoloniais de corpos e identidades de gênero inconformes: uma análise autoetnográfica da cisgeneridade como normatividade.” master’s diss., federal university of bahia (salvador, brazil). ufba institutional repository. https://repositorio.ufba.br/handle/ri/19685. yashee. 2022. “supreme court says abortion rights not limited to ‘cis-gender women”: what this term means.” indian express, october 5. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/sc-abortion-rights-cis-genderwomen-what-this-means-8189914/. zurn, perry. 2023. “the path of friction: on hale’s ‘rules’ for accountability to and within trans communities.” transgender studies quarterly 10 (1): 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-10273252. ————. 2024. “cripping cis: rethinking cisgender within a disability critique.” journal of philosophy of disability 4: 5–24. https://doi.org/10.5840/jpd202412228. ————. forthcoming. cisgender: disorienting a category. durham, nc: duke university press. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2025 26 perry zurn is visiting associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at cornell university and provost associate professor of philosophy at american university. he researches in the areas of political philosophy, critical theory, and feminist and trans studies. he is especially interested in the politics of inquiry, material histories of resistance, poetics, and ecologies. he is the author of how we make each other: trans life at the edge of the university, among other books. 20393 zurn title page 20393 zurn final format don’t just "google it": argumentation and racist search engines feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 7 recommended citation henning, tempest m. 2022. “don’t just ‘google it’: argumentation and racist search engines.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 7. 2022 don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines tempest m. henning fisk university thenning@fisk.edu henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines tempest m. henning abstract this paper examines the argumentative retort “just google it” in response to cases of epistemic exploitation. critical assessments of the reply often examine the phrase from an argumentation theory standpoint, which views it as at best rude and at worst a violation of argumentative norms. however, these critiques ignore one of the functions of the term—to avoid epistemic exportation. the response may be a useful tool for black individuals to offload some epistemic burdens concerning racial arguments, but due to racially biased search engine algorithms, the phrase has the high potential to exacerbate racial disagreements. directing disagreeing interlocutors to “google” anti-black oppression and having them self-research unjust institutions runs the substantial risk of reinforcing an interlocutor’s original stance, due to the ways in which search engine algorithms utilize word embedding. rather than using the phrase “just google it,” this paper concludes with a few alternative suggestions to combat epistemic exploitation. keywords: epistemic exploitation, racial artificial intelligence biases, argumentation theory, racial justice “the oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions.” real talk: woc & allies (2017) recently, social justice advocates on social media have urged racially privileged folks to be mindful of tapping out black individual’s epistemic resources. the barrage of questions on racial oppression—including but not limited to asking for more resources or demanding that black individuals explain their lived experiences— can be a drain on one’s mental and emotional health. well-meaning allies and those critical of social justice reform are often directed to do their own research regarding colonially fueled racist biases. non-black people are being told to google black oppression. however, this self-sufficient act is not as fruitful or helpful as it seems. within this paper, i explore the problematic implications of the response “just google feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 it”—not in terms of argumentative practices, but due to the construction of racially biased search engine algorithms. search engines have recently been exposed for racist, especially misogynoiristic, results when searching for terms as mundane as “professional women’s hair styles,” “clean kitchens,” or even “angry women.” noble (2018) and d’ignazio and klein (2020) have uncovered several ways search engines and the artificial intelligence (ai) used to construct them perpetuates racism, specifically against black women and girls. it is not the stance of this project to propose racially marginalized peoples explain their oppression. rather, i argue that society is so imbued with systemic oppression, through the utilization of racially problematic algorithms, that directing individuals to google or utilize other search engines for research purposes has a high risk of compounding the problem of racial oppression. if the utilization of search engines is what people recommend for curbing black epistemic exploitation, but the search engines themselves are perpetuating anti-black racism, then this is a major problem. what was conceived as a liberatory measure for the racially marginalized is instead another tool that perpetuates oppression. search engine results maintain oppressive narratives reflecting historically uneven power distribution in society. moreover, directing disagreeing interlocutors to “google” specific aspects of oppression and to have them self-research unjust institutions runs the substantial risk of reinforcing an interlocutor’s original stance. the already “deep” disagreement has the high potential to become even deeper. this article proceeds as follows: first i review the literature on epistemic exploitation (both academic and outside the ivory tower) not only to give a genealogy of the phrase “just google it,” but to highlight the power and liberatory potential that this tactical phrase possesses. i briefly delve into argumentation literature, which views passing off epistemic labor as not abiding by the rules of dialectical engagement. within the pragma-dialectic argumentation model, one should directly give their reasons and evidence when engaging in an argument. i object to the argumentative tactic of saying “just google it,” not on the grounds of bad argumentation but due to racist artificial intelligence systems. from here, i give an account of search engines and the artificial intelligence systems that have masqueraded as big data problem solvers but are functioning as discriminatory math. i conclude the paper with a few argumentative suggestions for black folks caught in this bind. until artificial intelligence used within search engines is not just opinions expressed in code, there must be other mechanisms in place to divert epistemic labor for black individuals. 1. epistemic exploitation there are countless anthologies, letters, blogs, memes, autobiographies, songs, editorials, and movies regarding the oppression faced by black folks. yet, when henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 entering debates, especially internet disagreements, more evidence is usually required to prove that racially based microaggressions occur, systematic oppression is real, or that political change should be enacted to remedy these racial injustices. this added layer of scrutiny and extra burden of proof has been well documented as draining. nora berenstain (2016) conceives of these added argumentative components as “epistemic exploitation.” the constant call to produce more, in addition to the shared access to epistemic resources, has given rise to black individuals telling interlocutors to “just google it” if the demand for information or “proof” becomes too burdensome. within this section, i provide an exegesis of berenstain’s conception of epistemic exploitation that succinctly captures the pragmatic need for black individuals to turn to the phrase “just google it” during deep disagreements regarding racial oppression. i also provide a case example where a retort like “just google it” would be applicable. berenstain conceives of epistemic exploitation as the exhausting and usually unpaid labor that black people engage in when faced with skeptical responses concerning the structures and manifestations of racial oppression or “lovingly, knowingly ignorant”1 requests for more information from antiracist allies. it “occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face” (berenstain 2016, 570). falling under the taxonomy of epistemic oppression, epistemic exploitation can be difficult to pinpoint due to its subtlety as well as its pervasiveness. this mode of epistemic oppression can occur in blog/article comment sections, tweets, facebook comments, the office breakroom, family gatherings, or even grocery store checkout lines. the epistemic aspect stems from the request for epistemic resources or evidential proof, while the exploitative element reveals itself in three ways: “opportunity costs associated with the labor of educating the oppressor, the double bind that marginalized people find themselves in when faced with the demand to educate, and the default skeptical responses from the privileged when the marginalized do acquiesce and fulfill their demands” (berenstain 2016, 572). 1 i use the phrase “lovingly, knowingly ignorant” from mariana ortega, which she situates as “a type of ‘arrogant perception’ that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them” (2006, 56). the ignorance is loving due to the professed love toward women of color, yet it is ignorant because the love is superficial, and knowledge can easily be tainted through a privileged lens. to be “knowingly ignorant” is to be aware of some seminal works by women of color, and the focus is on what academia (read: white academia) deems important. but because these works are read through a white lens and are selected as noteworthy through a white lens, there is still an ignorance pertaining to the work. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 regarding opportunity costs and unpaid labor, the exploitative aspect involves ignoring the additional cognitive and emotional burdens involved in engaging in arguments or discussions pertaining to one’s own experiences of oppression. even if an individual is not directly commenting on their own experiences, it can be extremely emotionally taxing to even talk about oppression that might not be your exact experience but has the potential to be you. given the argumentative norms to avoid “negative” or “strong” emotions and the strong emphasis on reason over emotions within western argumentation theory,2 black individuals run the risk of being seen as irrational, nonsensical, or poor interlocutors if they do not adequately place aside their emotions during arguments. however, the opportunity cost of not engaging in an argument or providing overly detailed explanations of one’s premises is high. this leads to the double bind characteristic of epistemic exploitation. if one decides not to educate, explain, or engage, then they are seen as either being a poor argumentative interlocutor or unintelligent for not being able to articulate their points. within western argumentation practices, the other party would perceivably have “won” the argument. this is a classic case of damned if you do (unseen emotional and cognitive labor costs associated with engagement) and damned if you don’t (the other party “wins” the argument or you are perceived as ill-educated). as berenstain (2016, 576) writes, “the existence of the double bind means that there is little possibility of a marginalized person choosing to engage an epistemically exploitative demand without fear of what might happen if they refuse.” not only is there a fear of being perceived as unable to defend one’s argumentative stance, but there is the added concern of a “missed opportunity” to educate or correct another’s misinformed views. as holloway (2015) states: when poc refuse to take on this dual role of spokesperson and resource library, they’re often accused of having shirked an assumed responsibility. the idea seems to be that we’ve missed an opportunity, that it’s our duty to hold white people’s hands and educate them, that we’re condemning some poor white person to a continued life of ignorance. at best, a refusal to take on these additional, burdensome roles can be interpreted as not being a gracious interlocutor—or worse, not possessing the ability to defend one’s 2 see van eemeren and houtlosser (2002, 2006), van eemeren and grootendorst (2004), snoeck henkemans (1997), and van eemeren and snoeck henkemans (2017). for critical pushback against stigmas concerning emotion within arguments see gilbert (2001, 2004, 2014), carozza (2007), and howes and hundleby (2018). henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 argumentative stance. moreover, it can be seen as a refusal to remedy our own oppression. if we are not educating others about our experiences and standing our ground within arguments concerning racial justice, then how are things supposed to change? the squeaky wheel is the one that gets the grease, right? the notion of condemnation has an added element when we consider black professors and teachers. while educating others does involve a certain degree of carefully walking students through a line of reasoning or providing evidence, counterevidence, and refutations of arguments, there is an added burden when doing so on matters of racial oppression. it can be extra exhausting for educators of color to provide details of their lived oppression to white skeptical/resistant students. this problem becomes compounded when general or introductory courses now require a certain number of readings or modules on racial justice issues.3 some educators and scholars of color choose not to work on racial matters. that is their business, and i am not knocking any black person who does not incorporate racial oppression into their class time or their research. but given the heavy push for diversity and inclusion curricula, those who have actively chosen not to have that additional burden no longer have that choice. this is an added epistemic burden for those who have chosen not to specifically work where they live. a generalized response of “just google it” doesn’t quite cut it in the classroom the same way it might possibly pass in a disagreement on twitter. telling students to “just google it” could easily be perceived as shirking off on one’s responsibilities as an educator. nevertheless, not using this tactic adds additional epistemic and emotional burdens on black educators. moreover, the additional labor is not adequately compensated. berenstain’s last exploitative element regarding epistemic exploitation concerns the “default skeptical responses.” such responses include but are not limited to skepticism towards a larger pattern of oppression (as opposed to merely isolated and individuated experiences) and gaslighting (a flat-out denial of the experiences in the first place or minimizing said experiences), as well as a skeptical stance regarding the harms that occurred. so, the incidents and ties toward an overall pattern of oppression could be acknowledged, but there is an insistence that degrees of harm regarding experiences of racial oppression are not as detrimental as they seem. improbable counterexamples and defeaters are revered as equal to the testimony of oppressed racial minorities. if these unqualified objections are not addressed, then the proposed “equal” epistemic footing is solidified. the double bind’s exploitative nature, as well as the unfair and often unpaid compensation, also 3 while i am not arguing that diversity and inclusion initiatives within the curriculum are inherently harmful, there is a difference between including racially marginal voices and racially marginal voices whose research involves oppression. unfortunately, the two are often conflated. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 plays a role when engaging with the default skeptic. this extra argumentative labor not only is unpaid and comes at a high cognitive cost but also “is frequently dismissed by those who demand it” (berenstain 2016, 574). either more epistemic labor is demanded, or the labor perceivably goes to waste. the added information is left to rot like the ever-replenished spring salad mixes in our refrigerators. the default skeptical response springs eternal. in some ways, they can never be satisfied. the same can hold true for the lovingly, knowingly ignorant ally, albeit their objectives may differ. regardless of intentionality, audre lorde (2007, 113) states that “this is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” if our attention is focused on trying to reason with or explain oppression to the masters, then our energy, effort, and attention is on their needs, their understanding, their point of view. the idea is that if black people do not help with education or provide a succinct and detail-oriented account to counter anti-black racist arguments, then racism will continue. accounts of racism or arguments geared toward social justice are subject to a hostile skepticism that at times can seem almost impossible to counteract, despite the centuries of firsthand accounts, quantitative data, books, articles, and blogs. arguments towards racial justice tend to be examined with fine-grain scrutiny. not only are we expected to be acquiescent to such high-level requests, but as lorde (1995, 284) points out, “the oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions.” this expectation places unnecessary constraints on black individuals, which exacerbates the epistemic exploitation we experience. one way to help combat our exploitation is to provide an avenue for white individuals to do their own research on their own time. telling someone to google for more information and to find the evidence on their own not only cuts down on the opportunity costs associated with engagement but also helps to alleviate the double bind. offering up an avenue for gaining information is still engaging with one’s interlocutor. so, some of the pressures found within the second aspect of epistemic exploitation, the double bind, are assuaged.4 in terms of the default skeptical/lovingly ignorant listener, the onus of seeking out and determining what might change their mind is then on their own terms. let us consider an example. suppose i, a perceivably black woman, am walking down a street and cross paths with a white individual wearing a confederate-flag t 4 tone plays a role in how the response “just google it” could be interpreted. one could certainly say this in an exhausted, fed-up tone, which could plausibly be interpreted as dismissive. but this type of engagement could also be said in a very patient and helpful tone. by no means am i asserting that black folks have the obligation to be polite or helpful. what i am saying is that to tell someone to “just google it” is not inherently dismissive. tone and context matter. henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 shirt. if this person were to attempt to engage in a debate with me regarding recent racial protests in america, there would be some quick calculations as to whether i would engage this person in a discussion. i would consider the opportunity costs, the double bind i face, as well as whether the person i have encountered is taking a default skeptical position to the existence of black racial trauma within the united states of america. if they are displaying a default skeptical position and refusing to take any consideration into my stance or my evidence, the discussion comes at a high emotional cost to me. if i supply more evidence, yet i am met with even more requests for evidence, then telling someone (who is not an epistemic peer of mine) to “just google it” appears to be a very plausible response. i have engaged with them and have provided an avenue by which they could gain more information and find the answers they are trying to seek. i can experience a similar quick calculation and respond with “just google it” during a discussion/debate with a white feminist who questions the need for black feminist thought distinct from “mainstream” (read: white) feminist theory.5 engagement in the discussion has still occurred, while opportunity costs have decreased since i have deferred the energy it would take to explain the need for black feminism to those who have already made the arguments. telling an interlocutor to “just google it” points them into the direction of arguments that have already been made. it refers people to a (seemingly) reliable source where individuals can find the answers they seek without further compounding oppression and exploiting people who are marginalized. the onus should fall on non-black individuals to educate themselves regarding anti-black racism. if there is a consistent burden to provide continual and ceaseless evidence, then this falls under epistemic oppression. kristie dotson (2014, 116) construes epistemic oppression as “a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinders one’s contributions to knowledge production.” since most americans have access to the internet, it is not unfathomable to assume that we share numerous epistemic resources.6 most of us carry around devices in our pockets, purses, and backpacks that can connect us to almost any resource in the world. i can even say “okay google” to pull up information while driving in my car. why spend the energy to educate others and provide detailed evidence during arguments when i can defer the epistemic labor to someone else? if we all have relatively the same access to this information, why should i have to hand-hold others or catch them up to speed when 5 yes, this still happens. 6 while we might share access to numerous epistemic resources, that does not mean we all share the same ability to interpret or understand said resources. more can be said on this, but that is not within the scope of this paper. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 my time could be spent doing other things in my life that bring me joy? telling someone to “just google it” as opposed to laying everything out point by point seems to be an extremely viable option to preserve my mental energy and to reclaim my time. however, as i detail in the next section, this argumentative move can be perceived as an argumentative fallacy or, at the very least, as not properly engaging within the dialectical norms of argumentation. 2. defensive argumentation according to argumentation theory, telling someone to “just google it” is either partaking in an argumentative fallacy or erroring on key principles of the norms of engagement. in the worst-case scenario, not fully engaging with one’s interlocutor when you have the truth, but are not explaining the truth, renders you as failing your epistemic obligations to explain it. assessments of the severity of telling an interlocutor to “just google it” vary within argumentation literature and depend upon the theorist’s aims of argumentation. that is to say, the extent to which someone should or should not partake in an argument is usually dependent upon how certain strands of argumentation theory perceive the purpose of argumentation. due to space limitations, i cannot adequately account for all the different strands of theory, so i focus instead on the pragma-dialectical approach as well as the non/minimaladversarial school of thought. within this section, i cover these views regarding the purpose of argumentation as well as obligations on providing evidence and explanations. i conclude this section with my rejection of norms concerning cooperation and obligations to engage in arguments, especially when racial epistemic exploitation occurs. drawing from gricean conceptions of speech acts, the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation views arguments as interactional and communicative (van eemeren and grootendorst 2004). parties involved in disagreements, arguments, or differences of opinion are to obey a set of rules that helps ensure that both interlocutors are cooperating within the language game. the maxims aid in the fair exchange of ideas and discourse. this model perceives the end goals of argumentation to be a resolution of a difference of opinions; as in, if you state “p” and i state “~p,” we can either agree that “p” or “~p,” jettison the notion of “p” altogether (i.e., “p” is no longer up for debate), or we can negotiate “q.” strategies are utilized to maneuver between one’s dialectical obligation in “maintaining reasonableness” as well as “aiming for effectiveness” of one’s argument regarding their rhetorical content (van eemeren and snoeck henkemans 2017, 142). dialectical obligation refers to rules of engagement within the pragma-dialectical program. what is important within the model is the balance between getting out the contents of the argument while still adhering to the rules of engagement, which consist of ten rules. henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 however, the “burden of proof rule” as well as the “closure rule” is my focus for this project. the burden of proof rule (bopr) stipulates that “a party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if asked by the other party to do so” (van eemeren, grootendorst, and snoeck henkemans 2002, 182). regarding the bopr, if an interlocutor puts forth a stance (standpoint or premise), and the other interlocutor calls said stance into questions, then the interlocutor who holds the position is obligated to provide sufficient evidence or proof defending said view. while the bopr involves engagement during the argument, the closure rule (cr) pertains to an ending of an argument. cr involves the demarcations regarding failed defenses. if there is a failure to defend one’s point of view, as in a case where the bopr was not met, then the argument ought to “result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting its doubt about the standpoint” (van eemeren, grootendorst, and snoeck henkemans 2002, 183). if an interlocutor is unconvinced by a premise or stance, then it is up to the one proposing the premise to provide sufficient reasons why said stance should be accepted. shifting the burden of proof is seen as a fallacious maneuver, which does not assist in the advancement of critical discussion. however, these shifts do not have to be overt refusals to provide more evidence nor proof. “a subtle way to avoid the obligation to defend a standpoint is to present the standpoint as something that needs no proof at all” (van eemeren, grootendorst, and snoeck henkemans 2002, 115–16). so, the delivery of premises as true could easily fall under the fallacy of “evading the burden of proof.” if the premises are presented as self-evident, then the stance is perceived to be common knowledge, which by default should need neither explanation nor evidence. given my example from section 1, if either the racial skeptic or the knowingly, loving ignorant ally found the evidence to be self-evident, then neither would ask for more evidence or clarification. another way evasion of the burden of proof could occur is via construction of a view that is immune to criticism—meaning that the view is formulated in such a way that it is infallible. the construction could be due to the stance’s inability to be tested or verified, or the utilization of intangible qualifications (i.e., words such as “real” or “essentially”). returning to my section 1 example involving the knowingly, lovingly ignorant ally, if i give evidence of my first-hand experiences—that is, place the emphasis on who i felt as opposed to what is true— then it would be impossible to deny that i experienced the event. cr is of interest to me because if the bopr is not met (or if there is a failed defense), then given the cr, a party should withdraw or retract their statements. failure to back down or retract one’s standpoints is seen as an obstruction of the dialectical process. as van eemeren, grootendorst, and snoeck henkemans (2002, 135) state, “a protagonist who has not managed to successfully defend the standpoint must be prepared to give up this feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 standpoint.” it is important to note that just because a standpoint has not successfully been defended, that does not mean, under the pragma-dialectical model, that the standpoint is false. similarly, if a standpoint has successfully been defended, we can’t assume that the view is necessarily true. all it means is that the position is defensible, nothing more. this theory of argumentation raises several problems for me, especially as a black woman. given what i have shown in section 1, arguments and differences of opinion regarding anti-black racism become extremely difficult to engage in, considering the very personal and emotional elements. racialized trauma is real. its effects are long-lasting. should an interlocutor occupy a stance akin to the racial default skeptic, then the constant questioning and ad infinitum demand for examples and proof are impossible to satisfy. the burden of proof for the racially oppressed becomes too high to consistently achieve given the emotion labor and opportunity cost, which holds true even if one is engaging with a knowingly, loving ignorant individual. the pragma-dialectical program’s rules are also formulated without considering white ignorance. charles mills (2007) conceives of white ignorance7 as a framework that manifests and reinforces racism as the norm within society. it is a framework that holds that instances of racial injustice are not exceptions or anomalies, although the framework argues that they are the exceptions to the case, but such instances are built into the very fabric of society as we conceive it to be. any racial injustices that occur within a system framed by white ignorance is functioning as it should be operating, because racial oppression is part and parcel to the system. racial injustice is substantive to the epistemic practices. when we apply this to argumentational norms of engagement, such as burden of proof requirements or closure rules, then it becomes nearly impossible for black individuals to engage in critical discussions about race with those who are operating within a white-ignorant framework. should an individual fail to meet any of the defensive requirements, then they ought to concede. looking at my previous example regarding the confederateflag t-shirt wearer, if i were to respond to any of their inquiries with “just google it,” then i would be sidelining the burden of proof. moreover, because i am unable to meet the burden of proof for any of my claims (such as a claim that the racial protests 7 the term “white ignorance” is not implying that all white individuals are ignorant regarding anti-black racism, nor does the term posit that black individuals are immune to such a framework. “white” is employed because the framework was initially designed with racial dominance in mind. mills acknowledges that white individuals may not necessarily sign onto such a social contract; however, the white privilege that is produced through the framework “white ignorance” benefits all white individuals. the degree of privilege, however, will fluctuate once an intersectional or multidimensional analysis is utilized. henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 in 2020 were a social good), then i must retract my statement. while retracting does not mean that my statement is false, there can be a certain level of personal defeat that a racially oppressed individual can experience should they recant. arguments do not necessitate being taken personally, but when the argument involves one’s right to exist in a just manner, having to retract a premise can potentially cause existential crisis and doubt on one’s abilities to accurately be perceived as a knower. there is more to arguments “than propositions in timeless relation to one another” (govier 1999, 14). overall, this program does not take into consideration the pervasiveness of white-ignorant frameworks, nor can it adequately handle the emotional labor that is usually involved with discussions pertaining to racial oppression. a non/minimal-adversarial approach to argumentation takes arguments to be more collaborative (cohen 2004) or affiliative (ayim 1991) endeavors. the resolution to disagreements is to negotiate, not to entirely sway another person from their viewpoint. metaphors concerning argumentative activity include things such as dancing (one dancers with their interlocutor), barn raising (two interlocutors are engaging in a dialogue to help construct a new concept or build something together), or cross-pollination (interlocutors engage in critical dialogue, not to have one of their arguments trump the other, but to take elements from other parties and formulate a hybrid model). these metaphors differ from some of the pragma-dialectical model’s depictions of argumentation, which can include metaphors of war or sports in which there are distinct winners and losers within a critical dialogue. several of the non/minimal-adversarial models call for a movement away from oppositional metaphors of argumentation. govier states that “when argument is understood in an oppositional way, difference in opinion or belief is construed as disagreement, and disagreement is regarded as conflict; conflict leads to contest between opponents; and contest to battle—real or metaphoric” (govier 1999, 54; emphasis in original). arguments can merely be a forum in which interlocutors articulate their differences. difference, according to this model, does not necessitate disagreements. difference of opinion should be more properly seen as an opportunity to learn from another person—to see their point as a view which has the potential to either improve your own stance or to lead you to a new truth. the epistemic good of truth is something that should be shared in a reasoned and polite way. govier (1999, 55) maintains that we can argue in nonconfrontational ways “with due respect for those whom we are addressing, and consideration for their beliefs and values.”8 part of respecting another’s stance is to adequately address their concerns and respectfully take up their position with care and consideration as if it was our own. 8 i want to flag this notion of prima facie granting respect to an individual and consideration for their beliefs. i argue that not only is this call for charitability harmful to black as individuals, but it also reinforces systemic racism. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 while this model would reject a racial skeptic’s persistence of evidence and sees them as violating the norms of argumentation, there are other conceptual underpinnings that i consider problematic. telling someone to “just google it” can be seen as signaling that your interlocutor is not an epistemic peer, possibly that you have more epistemic authority, and that you are unwilling to engage in the conversation with an interlocutor because they are “not on your level.” suggesting that your interlocutor should “just google it” does not directly address their concerns. it can also be conceived as not properly taking their viewpoint under consideration. the perceived shirking of wanting to engage in the argument also does not reflect upon the other party’s standpoints. according to a non/minimal-adversarial model, it is salient that we begin to understand the other’s point of view. ayim (1991, 85) states, we have to begin with the recognition of other people’s beliefs and feelings, even if those beliefs are as intolerable as those of the ku klux klan. we can dismiss such beliefs as false and the behaviour which springs from them as morally unacceptable, but our dismissal will not end the harm which they generate. ending the harm demands that we start by recognizing very clearly the nature of such beliefs, noting in whose heads they reside, and understanding how they shape the world. while ayim’s aim for understanding is to “end the harm,” i argue understanding an oppressor’s viewpoint can potentially be harmful and detrimental to the psyche of racially marginalized individuals. to force the oppressed to understand the logic of their oppressors is a form of oppression. pohlhaus (2011, 225) states that “understanding another’s reasoning requires one to do more than hold a particular set of claims in the mind. it requires one to follow the sense of those claims, so that the claims may be evaluated for what they mean.” in objecting to understanding an oppressor’s viewpoint, i am not asserting that racially oppressed individuals do not understand their oppression. to understand the epistemic object of anti-black racism can be at times to understand the reasoning and rationale of the white dominant framework. but understanding the object does not necessitate that one must understand the reasoning of every individual who utilizes the framework white ignorance. however, forced understanding of a play-by-play account of an oppressor’s reasoning regarding racial oppression is mentally taxing and emotionally harmful. let us revisit the example of the white, confederate-flag t-shirt wearer who stops me to engage in a racial justice debate concerning the 2020 racial protests. if their stance is that there is no racial oppression (i.e., that we are currently in a postracial era), ergo the protests were unnecessary, to fully occupy their line of henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 reasoning and “see things from their point of view” would be mentally and emotionally exhausting. i would want to disengage from the enterprise of reaching a resolution because i would not consider us as epistemic peers.9 this would be unacceptable to the non/minimal-adversarial model of argumentation because i am not open to engaging in barn raising or cross-pollination with another. ayim (1991, 83) contends that “turning a deaf ear to the speaker” will not likely reach any “affiliative” goals. this especially becomes the case when we consider our knowingly, lovingly ignorant ally. we both have the affiliative goal to end anti-black racism, so it seems counterintuitive to not engage with them to reach this goal. the fallacies and “bad” argumentative practices laid out within this section all heavily depend on social positioning, tone, and social setting. basically, they are all contextual. our obligations to engage with others in arguments, especially when the disagreements are deep, greatly vary upon the situation in which we find ourselves to be disagreeing. the obligation to engage with an interlocutor could increase if our interlocutor is a spouse, friend, colleague, or family member. likewise, our obligation—and, moreover, willingness—to engage in a deep disagreement might decrease if our interlocutor is a random stranger from the street, as in my previous example. not only can our willingness to participate in deep disagreements vary, but also our argumentative commitments or end goals might also vary as well. in some instances, the purpose of an argument is to allow the other side to see the truth of your argument (govier 1988, 1999; godden and casey 2020), while in other cases it may be more prudent to reach a consensus or engage in a negotiation (hundleby 2010, 2013; cohen 2004; van laar and krabbe 2016a, 2016b). i adamantly disagree that there is an obligation that the oppressed must explain their oppression to those who have more power and privilege. not only should the onus not be on the oppressed to explain their oppression, but requiring them to fully understand their oppressor’s argumentative position compounds oppression. i also disagree with the notion that all evidence should be given within an argumentative exchange, which occurs in both the pragma-dialectical camp as well as the non/minimal-adversarial model. there are instances in which giving too much information to the oppressor can further harm the oppressed. catherine hundleby (2005) makes the case for “oppositional secrets,” which are cases where oppressed individuals should not fully expose their experiences and tactics for surviving their oppression. otherwise, the survival tactics for certain oppressed standpoints run the considerable risk of being co-opted or subverted, thus rendering them of little use. for example, during the period of african enslavement, it would have been counterproductive to argue for 9 there is some debate as to whether resolution is the same as settling a dispute; for more on this, see godden and casey (2020) and van laar and krabbe (2016a). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 abolition by exposing the underground railroad system. highlighting the existence of such a system as evidence of the need to free african slaves would have literally derailed many individuals’ chances at freedom. hundleby (2005, 48) states that “a casual linguistic secret or underground network depends on those in power being substantially ignorant, and ignorance of marginalized lives can be a source of oppression.” ignorance to the workings of the racially oppressed allows them to resistantly work without interruptions from the oppressors. similarly, racially oppressed peoples can utilize racial misconceptions and white-ignorant frameworks to their advantage. alison bailey (2007) refers to the tactic of keeping oppressors in the dark regarding specific aspects of one’s experiences, despite this upholding false beliefs, as “strategic ignorance.” it is “a way of expediently working with a dominant group’s tendency to see wrongly” (bailey 2007, 88). oppressors’ inclination to misperceive or not recognize evidence qua evidence can be useful in resisting white systems of oppression. given the need to remain secretive and keep oppressors strategically ignorant, it becomes more plausible for the response of “just google it” to mitigate epistemic exploitation. referring someone to google can also serve to cut down on the amount of oppositional secret sharing that is in play. if the information is already out there for general consumption—that is, it is out there on the web— then minimal harm will be done in terms of strategic ignorance. however, in the next section, i offer up reasons as to why this argumentative tool either should not be used or should be deployed minimally. 3. racist ai having given an account of the “just google it” response’s utility in truncating exploitation as well as the tactic’s position in argumentation theory, i now turn toward the issue of racialized search engines. as shown within the previous two sections, i disagree with argumentation theorists who would situate “just google it” as a defensive maneuver which creates indisputable or unallowed refutation, therefore violating several norms of argumentation. i maintain that the argumentative move does have liberatory potential; however, due to the current racist and sexist algorithms of google and many of the other search engines, such an argumentative maneuver could potentially do more harm than good. several scholars and techno-activists have led the crusade exposing the racism and sexism of algorithmic search engines. for example, noble (2018, 1) outlines a process of “technological redlining,” highlighting how “discrimination is also embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not.” this new digital redlining has several features, but for the purpose of this project, i limit myself to one: algorithms. ai systems are based on models that are abstract representations and universalizations of complex realities. because of the oversimplification of intersecting identities, a henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 plethora of information gets left out. these ai models are seen as neutral—appearing to offer the same search engine results to anyone who might input the exact same words. the algorithms pose as impartial and objective mathematics; however, the code is based upon human (usually white, male, cisgender) individuals who input their own opinions into the system. moreover, many tech companies—from app developers, to social media sites, to search engines—utilize a “default user” setting. the default can range from a standard background on your phone to a standard avatar for your hulu profile. but as journalist lena groeger (2016) points out, “someone, somewhere, decided what those defaults should be—and it probably wasn’t you.” one of the elements that goes into search engine results is word-embedding systems, which examine the frequency with which certain words are usually paired together, allowing the system to anticipate semantic meaning. word-embedding systems are considered accurate if they successfully can complete analogies such as “sun is to day, as moon is to_____.” wachter-boettcher remarks that this is a great feat; however, the system will also churn up results such as “man is to woman as computer programmer is to homemaker,” “man is to architect as woman is to interior designer,” or even “man is to coward as woman is to whore” (2017, 117–18). in some ways this does make sense because these are cultural realities. women are more likely to be associated with being homemakers. but if word-embedding systems are given word linkages that are rooted in biases and historical oppression, “then those biases will be reflected in the resulting word embeddings” (wachter-boettcher 2017, 118). the algorithms are indeed accurately reporting and linking word associations— women typically are associated with the term “whore.” but any preexisting negative biases or patterns of linguistic oppression are being not only maintained but perpetuated. google search-engine results utilize such word-embedding systems (e.g., word2vec), which also include recommendation features. google prides itself on being driven by these algorithms. marissa mayer states, “google products are machine-driven. they’re created by machines. and that is what makes us powerful” (quoted in levy 2011, 206–7). mayer’s comments posit the machines as responsible for creating these word linkages. the human element is removed. outliers (e.g., men who might be whores) are seen as “edge cases,” which is “a classic engineering term for scenarios that are considered extreme, rather than typical” (wachter-boettcher 2017, 39). such cases are considered “exceptions that prove the rule,” which is highly problematic given several of the rules themselves (e.g., if it’s a whore, then it’s a woman) are oppressive. search engines which rely upon word-embedded systems utilize stereotypical heuristics. the system determines what users want to see based upon certain tendencies in demographics. that is, if google determines that you tend to gravitate toward web content that is more tech savvy, up until a few years ago, the company would determine that you were a millennial-aged, white male. both google and facebook maintain that they do not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 collect racial demographic data; however, “race is embedded into the data they are choosing to employ” (d’ignazio and klein 2020, 55). this means that while google is not overtly collecting user data based upon race, searches for items such as hair grease or sleeping bonnets are racially linked. these proxies are seen as neutral; however, they are anything but unbiased. demographic proxies are contingent upon assumptions, which over time become more deeply embedded. if ai algorithms formulate a user’s search results based upon stereotypical heuristics, then any outliers will fade out over time: “proxy data can actually make a system less accurate over time, not more” (wachter-boettcher 2017, 96), since “once [an] assumption is baked in, it skews the results” (96). if word-embedded systems “misalign” a relationship, then they will continue to do so, which further reinforces the misalignment. however, the issue goes even deeper. it is not just a user’s search history that helps to shape which websites come up first during a search engine inquiry. the location of the internet protocol (ip) address also contributes to the search engine’s decision-making process on what content ought to appear at the top of the page— meaning, if you live in a prominently white, middle-class, republican-leaning neighborhood, the content that is given greater precedence is content that the algorithm determines would be appealing to white, middle-class, republican individuals. this is in conjunction with one’s previous search history, but location and proxy attributes associated with one’s location are part of the equation (d’ignazio and klein 2020; benjamin 2019; noble 2018; wachter-boettcher 2017). these proxies are not purely objective. they have built-in biases, both individuated and systemic. despite the assertion that machines are neutral and that search engines such as google can provide equal access to information, which promotes data fairness, “any notion of algorithmic fairness must also acknowledge the systematic nature of the unfairness that has long been perpetrated by certain groups on others” (d’ignazio and klein 2020, 62). the professed neutrality comes at a cost to those who have historically been oppressed. this should not be surprising. benjamin (2019, 95) states, when it comes to search engines such as google, it turns out that online tools, like racist robots, reproduce the biases that persist in the social world. they are, after all, programmed using algorithms that are constantly updated on the basis of human behavior and are learning and replicating the technology of race, expressed in the many different associations that the users make. if we live in a society that perpetuates anti-black racism, and “we” are the ones maintaining this system of oppression, then it stands to reason that what we input henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 into our algorithms will also perpetuate anti-black racism. telling an interlocutor to “just google it” will in effect not yield accurate or possibly compelling evidence in the search engine results. the search engine may not pull up the desired results, and this problem is even further exacerbated if the interlocutor tends to visit qanon sites or other webpages that are skeptical of “liberal snowflake” rhetoric or “diversity and inclusion” initiatives. that is, the wider the disagreement and ideological gap, the more probable it becomes that just googling information will not yield the intended results of the person who suggested using google. so, in the case of my confederateflag-wearing interlocutor, it is very probable that telling him to google information concerning the 2020 racial protests would more than likely lead to results positioning the protests as riots. regarding the lovingly, knowingly ignorant ally, the case becomes a bit more complicated; for example, the websites that may be given saliency might be less radical in nature, as in purporting more reformist measures or employing the language of skewed civility in the face of disagreement. the argumentative maneuver (telling someone to “just google it”), it turns out, is not as helpful in combatting systemic racism if algorithms merely reflect the persistent racism that already exists. 4. so what now? in lieu of a formal conclusion, i provide a few short suggestions for black folks when entering a deep disagreement on the topic of racial oppression. by no means is this meant to be an exhaustive list, nor are any of my suggestions to be taken as gospel truth.10 1. have a ready-made document with great sources to hand out. this seems tedious, but rather than relying on google algorithms, it directly points interlocutors to sources. 2. recently, i have started to ask for payment when engaging in online discussions where epistemic exploitation started to occur. it has taken me years to undo the desire and perceived obligation to provide adequate resources, citations, and argumentative “proof” when i engage with others regarding racial injustice. for my comfort, i have spent too much time searching through my arsenal of resources and citations. trying to find the right quote that would provide the exact argumentative force to sway my interlocutor. now if i find certain aspects of 10 to be frank, even as a black-identified woman of color, i am not even 100 percent sure that these suggestions will help alleviate the problems i have identified thus far. dealing with oppression is tricky business, and the oppressive systems run really deep. it is exhausting, as section 1 illustrates. but because i do have some hope and i have the commitment to place our needs first, these are some of the argumentative tactics that i personally have found useful. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 conversation on racial injustice or oppression to be heading down the regressive path or requiring emotional labor beyond what i initially thought it would require, i provide my paypal, venmo, or cash app account. pay me, and then we can talk some more. while i am not fully endorsing capitalism with this suggestion, we do live in a capitalist society. and i need to eat. the request for payment is not to shut down the argument but to ensure that i am receiving what i deem to be a fair price for what my interlocutor is seeking. should the price be too high for the other party, then i can disengage knowing that further engagement will not be worth my time. some have declined this transaction, while others have paid me. 3. another approach is to ask the default racial skeptic, “what information or evidence could i provide that (1) you would take to be evidence and, more importantly, (2) that you would see as a defeater or direct counterexample to your view?” it can be easy for people to just keep kicking the argumentative can one block further down the road. skeptical responses to racial injustice tend to be insatiable: there is almost no evidence that can persuade someone or make them think otherwise. i have utilized this tactic numerous times, and the results still surprise me. more often than not, my interlocutor will say, “nothing”—that nothing could change their mind or sway them to think otherwise. if the goal of argumentation is to build a consensus, then this is a huge problem. and if the goal of arguing is to persuade one’s interlocutor to a particular truth or to have them accept a conclusion, this is also a massive dilemma. some people might not realize the sort of evidence that could persuade them or spur them to think otherwise, but if from the start they are epistemically closed to even consider alternatives, something above and beyond mere evidence or propositions is going to be required. why engage in arguments with someone who is not even epistemically open? this leads me to my last suggestion. 4. just stop engaging. after some soul-searching within myself, i have decided that there really is nothing more that i could say to someone who takes the hard skeptical stance against the existence of racial oppression that hasn’t already been beautifully articulated by the likes of toni morrison, james baldwin, ralph ellison, octavia butler, audre lorde, lorraine hansberry, maya angelou, langston hughes, alice walker, zora neale hurston—just to name a few. it’s already been said. as kristie dotson (2016, 47) testifies, “there are no ‘original’ ideas that are not also erasures of past lives or current ideas. no ‘new’ ideas waiting to be ‘discovered,’ just as there wasn’t any ‘new’ land for christopher columbus to ‘discover.’”. for me to somehow think that i can provide the perfect refutation to the claim that racism doesn’t exist or isn’t really an issue or that i can formulate the perfect argument for white allies to kick it up a notch is (1) arrogant on my part and (2) places impossible burdens on my existence. while i know my intellectual worth, i would be eternally dissatisfied with my work and pedagogy if henning – don’t just “google it”: argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 i really thought i could produce perfect arguments to sway anyone towards antiracial points of view. my life is too short, and there is too much joy to be had to be about that business. as previously mentioned, there are opportunity costs involved here. choose joy and abundance. people may perceive the lack of engagement as a lost chance of gaining an additional ally or, at the very least, of chipping away at white ignorance or other oppressive epistemic frameworks, but as section 1 showed, it is not our job as blacks to end oppression. that work is on the oppressors. and as i previously articulated, even if it is a chance of missed epistemic resources for the interlocutor, that just seems like bad epistemic luck on their part. we are not culpable for that. references ayim, maryann. 1991. “dominance and affiliation: paradigms in conflict.” informal logic 13 (2): 79–88. https://doi.org/10.22329/il.v13i2.2557. bailey, alison. 2007. “strategic ignorance.” race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 77–94. albany, ny: suny press. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity. berenstain, nora. 2016. “epistemic exploitation.” ergo 3 (22): 569–90. https://doi.org /10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.022. 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argumentation and racist search engines published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 allies/white-people-stop-asking-us-to-educate-you-about-racism69273d39d828. snoeck henkemans, arnolda francisca. 1997. analysing complex argumentation: the reconstruction of multiple and coordinatively compound argumentation in a critical discussion. 2nd ed. amsterdam: sicsat. van eemeren, frans h., and rob grootendorst. 2004. a systematic theory of argumentation: the pragma-dialectical approach. new york: cambridge university press. van eemeren, frans h., rob grootendorst, and a. francisca snoeck henkemans. 2002. argumentation: analysis, evaluation, presentation. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. van eemeren, frans h., and peter houtlosser. 2002. “strategic maneuvering with the burden of proof.” in advances in pragma-dialectics, edited by frans h. van eemeren, 13–28. newport news, va: vale press. ———. 2006. “strategic maneuvering: a synthetic recapitulation.” argumentation 20, no. 4 (december): 381–92. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-007-9037-z. van eemeren, frans h., and a. francisca snoeck henkemans. 2017. argumentation: analysis and evaluation. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. van laar, jan albert, and erik c. w. krabbe. 2016a. “splitting a difference of opinion.” in argumentation, objectivity, and bias: proceedings of the 11th international conference of the ontario society for the study of argumentation (ossa), may 18–21, 2016, edited by laura benacquista and pat bondy. windsor, on: ossa. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/ossa11/papersandcommentaries/1 28/. ———. 2016b. “reply to david godden’s commentary on ‘splitting a difference of opinion.’” in argumentation, objectivity, and bias: proceedings of the 11th international conference of the ontario society for the study of argumentation (ossa), may 18–21, 2016, edited by laura benacquista and pat bondy. windsor, on: ossa. https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/ossaarchive/ossa11/papers andcommentaries/64/. wachter-boettcher, sara. 2017. technically wrong: sexist apps, biased algorithms, and other threats of toxic tech. new york: w.w. norton. dr. tempest m. henning (she/her) is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at fisk university. dr. henning’s research interests include africana philosophy, epistemology, and informal logic/argumentation theory. she has published on argumentative norms of civility, argumentative justice, epistemic injustice, and racial microaggressions. 14296 henning title page 14296 henning final format violent resistance as radical choice feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 1 article 1 recommended citation fakhoury, tamara. 2023. “violent resistance as radical choice.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (1). article 1. 2023 violent resistance as radical choice tamara fakhoury university of minnesota–twin cities fakho011@umn.edu fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 violent resistance as radical choice tamara fakhoury abstract what reasons stand in favor of (or against) violent resistance to oppression? i distinguish two kinds of normative reasons that bear relevantly in such a practical deliberation. i argue that in addition to reasons of impartial morality, victims’ personal projects and relationships may also provide reasons for (or against) violent resistance. moreover, there is no guarantee that conflicts will not occur between such reasons. thus, some acts of violent resistance may arise from situations of radical choice in which impartial moral reasons and personal reasons pull the agent in opposite directions. regardless of what we ultimately think agents facing such decisions ought to do, all things considered, recognizing such conflicts is crucial for understanding the circumstances that give rise to violence and for better sympathizing with victims who are pushed to such extreme modes of resistance. keywords: resistance, oppression, violence, nonviolence, radical choice, partiality, impartiality, morality, ethical theory, moral reasons 1. introduction violence is a pervasive feature of life under oppression. in racist patriarchal societies, violence is used to deny basic rights and freedoms, enforce submission to oppressive practices, and punish those who challenge or disobey the dominant norms. victims’ ability to effectively resist such treatment is severely limited by their oppression. sometimes options for resistance are so constrained that using violence becomes a relevant option. victims may physically fight back against the harms they suffer, meeting oppressive violence with violent resistance. for those who are victims of oppression, what reasons, if any, stand in favor of, or against, engaging in violent resistance? do these reasons conflict with one another, thus leading to special ethical conflicts when resisting oppression? if so, how do these conflicts affect our ethical evaluations of violent resistance? current discourse on violent resistance tends to focus on violence used by groups as a means of achieving political goals or in self-defense. moreover, it centers what i will call paradigmatic moral reasons for or against the use of violence—that is, reasons that arise from impartial moral principles. there is excellent work being done, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 for instance, to show how violent protest may advance worthy moral aims in society and, when properly targeted and restrained, may even satisfy citizens’ moral and political duties.1 this paper aims to expand on such work by addressing violence as it might be used by individuals (rather than groups or political factions) as well as the personal reasons that these individuals may have for such actions. more specifically, i argue that, in addition to impartial moral principles, the personal projects and relationships of those who are oppressed may provide reasons to engage in violent resistance. such reasons, which i call “personal reasons,” come apart from and are not always reducible to paradigmatic moral reasons. more importantly, they may even conflict with paradigmatic moral considerations. some cases of violent resistance under oppression arise from what wolf (2015) calls situations of “radical choice,” in which impartial reasons and one’s personal projects come into conflict. thus, even if violent resistance in any given case violates paradigmatic moral reasons or constraints, this does not settle the question of its ethical value (at least not without further argument). moreover, the cases i will discuss show that radical choice can arise from and can even be exacerbated by structural oppression. for victims facing a radical choice regarding whether to engage in violent resistance, circumstances of oppression may help to explain why violence becomes one of the few relevant options (or perhaps the only relevant option) for resistance. violent resistance is an undoubtedly complex phenomenon. the question of what circumstances give rise to it does not lend itself to easy or definitive answers. my aim here is not to simplify our understanding of the reasons that bear relevantly on deliberations about violent resistance. nor is it my aim to provide a way of resolving conflicts of radical choice that may arise in such deliberations. instead, my aim is to draw out the ethical complexities that are involved in violent resistance. by highlighting these complexities in the conversation about (non)violence, my hope is to enhance our ethical understanding of violent resistance and the people who engage in it. not only is such an understanding crucial for better and more accurate theorizing about violent resistance and the circumstances that give rise to it, but it may also allow us to better sympathize with the individuals who are pushed to such extremes. this is not to suggest that sympathy is guaranteed to be the correct response to such actions. determining whether and on what conditions sympathy is the right response would require further argument. nevertheless, the considerations that i will discuss reveal ethical complexities surrounding violent resistance that would be relevant to arriving at such judgments. 1 see especially betz (2020), delmas (2018), kling and mitchell (2019), and pasternak (2019). fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 before we begin, it will help to clarify the question i plan to address and distinguish it from other questions it might easily be confused with. the question of this paper is, what reasons, if any, count in favor of (or against) violent resistance? this is different from the question of whether one should engage in violent resistance. that is, even if we find (as i will argue) that there are sometimes reasons that count in favor of violent resistance, for all that i say it might still be true that, all things considered, one should not engage in it. likewise, the question of this paper is not whether violent resistance is admirable or praiseworthy. the mere fact that important reasons might count in favor of violent resistance does not dictate whether following such reasons makes one’s conduct especially virtuous or admirable. it is not an aim of this paper to recommend or praise any particular form of resistance. to be very clear: it is not my aim to endorse violent resistance either in general or in any particular case. instead, i will make the much weaker point that some of the normative considerations that go into the balance when deliberating about whether to engage in violent resistance are personal reasons, and that such reasons are not guaranteed to cohere with the paradigmatic reasons of impartial morality. my aim is, in other words, to elucidate some of the pro tanto normative reasons for violent resistance that arise from individuals’ personal projects and relationships. why should we address this weaker question about the pro tanto reasons that might favor violent resistance? aren’t the important questions whether violent resistance is justified, all things considered, or whether such actions exemplify virtue? there are at least two reasons why it is worth taking up the weaker question. first, judging whether an agent acted virtuously or justifiably will require careful consideration of the pro tanto reasons that favor her actions, and how she weighs and balances them in practical deliberation. second, failing to consider the variety of reasons for violent resistance, including those that may be less ideal than standard moral reasons, can easily lead to distortions or misapprehensions of actual cases. thus, although this paper has a weaker aim, it is nonetheless a crucial one for addressing the more ambitious questions. it is also important to note that, as i understand them, political philosophy and moral philosophy are distinct inquiries with overlapping subject matter. political philosophy is concerned with the just organization of society, such as its laws and institutions, as well as the obligations that states and citizens owe to each other. morality is fundamentally concerned with treating all people as deserving of respect and well-being and with what we owe to other people in virtue of our shared moral status. in some cases, treating people with respect and giving them what they are owed requires contributing to justice and equality in society at large. thus, although justice and equality are specifically political values and the major topics of political philosophy, they are also moral concerns. in short, political values are a subset of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 moral values. when i treat morality and politics as distinct in the paper, the reader should bear in mind that i nonetheless view them as overlapping in that moral considerations also include political values such as justice and equality. the paper proceeds as follows. in section 2 i define violent resistance, identify the range of acts of violent resistance that i will focus on, and distinguish such actions from self-defense. in section 3, i consider the paradigmatic moral reasons for violent resistance, surveying various examples from recent literature on the moral justifiability of violent protest and disobedience. in section 4, i argue that in addition to impartial moral values and principles, victims’ personal projects and relationships may also provide reasons to engage in violent resistance. i illustrate some of these personal reasons through examples of three women who physically fought back against racist or sexist oppression. in section 5, i argue that accepting a distinction between paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons allows us to recognize that conflicts may naturally occur between such reasons in practice. thus, i suggest that some cases of violent resistance may arise from circumstances of radical choice, in which impartial reasons and one’s personal projects pull in opposite directions. we cannot appreciate the ethical complexities surrounding violent resistance without recognizing such conflicts and carefully attending to how they may affect our evaluations of specific cases. finally, i raise the question of how we should judge people who engage in violent resistance when it is not supported by impartial reasons. with no intention of defending a specific answer, i briefly sketch three natural responses that arise from the conflict in reasons i have highlighted throughout. 2. violent resistance and self-defense before beginning our discussion, it will help to define violent resistance, identify the scope of violent actions that are the focus of this paper, and explain how such actions differ from paradigmatic cases of self-defense. to be clear, the aim of this paper is to address the normative question of what reasons stand in favor of or against engaging in violent resistance for victims of oppression, not the classificatory question of what actions count as violent resistance. in this section i will provide (rather than argue for) an assumed working definition of violent resistance, one which relies on definitions of “violence,” “resistance,” and “self-defense” that are either defended by other authors or assumed in us criminal law. it is important to note that the definitions of these concepts are a matter of controversy and ongoing debate.2 the purpose of this section is to make as clear as possible how i am understanding the notion of violent resistance in addressing the normative question above. 2 see kling and mitchell (2019) for a survey of some of these debates. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 broadly speaking, violent resistance is an act of resistance to oppression that aims to injure people or their property. it aims to harm and overwhelm an oppressor as a way of gaining power or exacting retribution for oppressive treatment. as a form of violence, it inflicts physical harm, often through force or coercion.3 as a form of resistance, it is a response to oppression and makes its agent vulnerable to oppression-related backlash (fakhoury 2021, 411). thus, violent resistance is qualitatively different from initiating violence against innocent people or those who have done nothing to perpetuate oppression because it is a response to oppressive treatment. violent resistance is importantly different from self-defense. this is in large part because of its distinctive aims. for my purposes, self-defense is a matter of protecting oneself by averting or counteracting a harm using a necessary degree of force. in united states criminal law, for instance, for an action to count as selfdefense, the force used must be “necessary to prevent . . . unlawful and immediate violence from another” (dix 2016, 124). moreover, there must be good reason for the agent to believe “that the harm would be inflicted immediately if she did not act in self-defense” (dix 2016, 124). thus, when one defends oneself, one aims primarily to prevent imminent harm as a means of self-preservation. by contrast, violent resistance aims at harming and overwhelming an oppressor as a way of gaining power or exacting retribution. where self-defense aims to counter or deactivate the oppressor and preserve and shield the victim, violent resistance aims to punish or coerce the oppressor and empower the victim. thus, because its aims go beyond selfpreservation, violent resistance may use greater force than that which is necessary to merely counteract or eliminate a threat. moreover, unlike in standard cases of selfdefense, the harm that an act of violent resistance responds to may not be imminent.4 for instance, violent resistance may be used as a form of payback for an oppressive harm that has passed. despite their apparent differences, there may be cases where the aims of selfdefense and the aims of violent resistance overlap or may not be easily differentiated. sometimes eliminating a threat requires overwhelming an oppressor or exacting retribution—the threat will not be countered by any other means. moreover, when 3 here i lean on rawls’s (1999, 321) understanding of violence as including “acts likely to injure and to hurt” and singer’s (1973, 83) understanding of violence as “intimidatory and coercive.” however, this is not to say that all forms of violence are coercive or that violence is coercive by definition. there may be instances of violence that do not coerce others. for examples, see brownlee (2004, 349). 4 as delmas (2018, 96) notes, in defensive harm, “violence cannot be used preemptively or indiscriminately or in response to future probably threats. nor can it be used as a form of payback after an attack.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 oppression targets victims’ lives, such as under circumstances of genocide or slavery, acts of self-preservation may become acts of resistance.5 as kautzer (2018) states, “when conditions are so oppressive that one’s self is not recognized at all, selfdefense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance.” under such circumstances, violent resistance and self-defense may not be cleanly distinguishable. nevertheless, there are clear cases where they do come apart—where the aim of the act of violence is not to shield the agent from harm but to gain greater power, coerce an oppressor, or exact retribution. what makes violent resistance a form of resistance? here i assume the conception of resistance that i defend elsewhere (fakhoury 2019, 2021). as i argue in those papers, resistance to oppression is an action that challenges oppressive norms or behaviors and thereby makes the agent vulnerable to oppression-related backlash—that is, harm that is caused by or serves to enforce the oppression that one is resisting (fakhoury 2021, 409–14). resisters challenge oppressive norms with some understanding that their behavior violates or is offensive to the status quo. people may resist for a variety of different reasons, ranging from impartial considerations of justice to entirely partial considerations of love and loyalty (fakhoury 2021, 403–4). people may resist individually or as part of a group. moreover, they may resist different aspects of oppression, ranging from unjust laws affecting entire populations to interpersonal incidents of manipulation or control affecting only oneself or one’s loved ones (fakhoury 2019). in the discussion that follows, i will focus on violent resistance as it might be used by individuals and on the personal reasons that these individuals may have for such actions. in the central examples of this paper, victims of racism and sexism assault men who have harmed them as a form of revenge or to seize power—and not merely as a means of self-defense. it is for such agents that i will argue violent resistance may take the form of a radical choice. thus, my focus here differs from the focus of the dominant literature on political violence, which tends to address violence used in self-defense or as a political strategy and the impartial reasons that may support such actions. indeed, violent resistance as discussed here is distinct from what margaret betz (2020, 180) calls “resistance violence,” which is “a type of [political] violence that attempts to defend historically and systematically vulnerable persons in a society,” such as in the slave rebellion led by nat turner in 1831. in the cases i will discuss, violence is not used for political ends (e.g., liberating groups or reforming institutions), and its aims go beyond those of defensive harm. thus, although the topic at hand intersects with ongoing discussions in political philosophy 5 consider for instance jews who survived the holocaust, as discussed by frankl (2006). a similar point is made by lorde (1988) with respect to black women’s survival in racist societies. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 (such as betz’s) about the moral justifiability of political violence, the central question of this paper is an ethical one about how one should live when one is being subjected to racism and sexism in one’s private life.6 this is not to say however that on my view violent resistance is not political. certainly, it is political in the sense that it can affect political issues like those pertaining to the law, public consciousness, and the institutions of the state. however, the acts that i discuss are not undertaken for the purpose of impacting such political phenomena. rather, in the cases i will discuss, violence is a response to an interpersonal conflict, and it aims primarily to uphold the individuals’ personal projects within that limited context. put simply, if violent resistance has a broader political impact, this is a side effect from the perspective of the person who is resisting. it is not the reason for which the agent acts violently. in focusing on individual acts of violent resistance and the personal reasons victims have for engaging in them, i do not wish to deny that violent resistance may take other forms than those that i discuss. nor do i wish to deny that the conclusion i defend may apply to other cases of violent action apart from what i have been calling violent resistance, or that radical choices of the sort i describe here may also arise for others, such as protestors, revolutionaries, or militants using violence as a political tactic. such claims, however, will require further argument than my space here permits. in sum, violent resistance is an action that aims to harm perpetrators of oppression in response to oppressive treatment. its characteristic aims, which differentiate it from self-defense, are to make the oppressor suffer, to gain power, or achieve retribution. what makes violent resistance a form of resistance is that it challenges oppressive norms and comes with the risk of oppression-related backlash, such as inciting further harm from oppressors. with this working definition at hand, we are now ready to discuss the normative reasons for and against such actions. 3. paradigmatic moral reasons and violent resistance let us turn to the central question of the paper: what reasons may count in favor of (or against) engaging in acts of violent resistance? i distinguish two general categories of reasons: paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons. let’s begin by considering the first kind. paradigmatic moral reasons are impartial reasons arising from commitments to abstract principles of justice and morality, such as human dignity, equality, or the collective good. they tend to be concerned with paradigmatically moral matters such 6 this central question gives special focus to what williams (1985) takes to be the fundamental question of ethics—“how should one live?”—the answer to which need not appeal exclusively to considerations of morality, impartiality, or justice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 as the difference between right and wrong action, the grounds and limits of our moral obligations, or protecting and promoting the equally weighted needs and interests of others in society. they are characteristically impartial and agent-neutral, applying to individuals in virtue of their shared moral status, independently of any special traits or qualities. moreover, paradigmatic moral reasons often reflect the fact that each of us is just one person among others equally deserving of respect and well-being. reasons of this sort are most explicitly represented in traditional moral theories such as deontology and consequentialism. moreover, they often take the form of requirements or limitations on action—for instance, by stating a duty to respect a basic principle or to promote a certain good. hence, when it takes the form of a requirement or limitation on action, i will refer to paradigmatic moral reasons as standard or paradigmatic “moral constraints.”7 paradigmatic moral reasons and constraints on the use of violence are well represented in the current literature, especially in discussions of the moral justifiability of violent protest. some of the most commonly discussed paradigmatic moral reasons in this literature are (1) eliminating injustices in public policy and legislation, (2) effective public communication about injustice (particularly as a form of democratic participation), and (3) defense of human dignity and equality (including one’s own). let’s consider each one in turn. first, philosophers have argued that like nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, violent protest may aim to eliminate injustices from society by inciting changes in public policy and legislation. avia pasternak (2019, 392), for instance, argues that “political rioters act in the service of goals that are similar to those of civilly disobedient protestors” including the aim “to bring about a change of public policy that will eradicate, or in the least ameliorate, the substantive violations of justice they experience at the hands of the state.” by using “shock tactics” such as “open confrontation with the police,” violent protesters can draw attention to the plight of the oppressed and “wrestle concessions from policymakers” (pasternak 2019, 393). similarly, candice delmas (2018, 73) holds that principled uncivil disobedience, including some “riots . . . and vigilantism,” can help to “repair or replace” unjust laws and institutions, thereby satisfying citizens’ duties of justice. second, philosophers have argued that violent protest may aim at effective public communication with officials and public audiences about imminent or ongoing injustices. jennifer kling and megan mitchell (2019, 3) argue that “violent protest may sometimes be required to engage in meaningful, consistent public communication 7 this conception of paradigmatic moral reasons is inspired by wolf (2015), frankfurt (1988), and williams’s (1985) characterizations of morality. while i do not ascribe to their moral/nonmoral distinction, their understanding of morality is an apt characterization of the source of paradigmatic moral reasons. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 about injustice even in a generally just society.” in particular, “violence is required for communication when it transmits a message about the nature of injustice that available forms of nonviolent protest are unable to send” (kling and mitchell 2019, 9). moreover, pasternak (2019, 394) argues that “through the resort to public acts of destruction and open confrontation with the police, rioters communicate anger toward that state and defiance of its political authority.” in societies where democratic processes are marred by systemic political, cultural, and material marginalization and exclusion, this may constitute “a form of effective democratic participation” (pasternak 2019, 396). third, philosophers have argued that violence may aim to defend or uphold moral principles of human dignity and equality. this is most vividly illustrated in bernard boxill’s discussion of frederick douglass’s fight with his enslaver, covey. in his autobiographical narratives, douglass ([1855] 2014, 197) writes that his fight with covey had recalled to life his “crushed self-respect,” adding that “a man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity.” on boxill’s (2018, 65) analysis, douglass believed that “human beings, including presumably slaves, cannot honor themselves unless they possess power or force” and that “the power or force necessary to gain self-respect was not merely the capacity to defend oneself, but also a willingness to do so.” boxill (2018, 76) contends that douglass resolved to defend himself against the physical abuse inflicted on him by covey “because he believed that his nature as a moral being required that he stand up for the principles of morality” which provided him with the right not to be physically abused. not only did douglass believe of himself that he had this right, but (as his fight with covey shows) he was committed to showing his allegiance to those rights by “standing up for them and fighting for them when they are violated or even impugned” (boxill 2018, 68). in a similar vein, margaret betz (2020, 182) argues that resistance violence often serves as “an attempt by members of the targeted group to regain (or gain anew) their dignity and sense of self-worth.” discussing nat turner’s violent insurrection, in which he led a group of slaves “from one white residence to another (sixteen in all) killing every white person in the house,” betz argues that in a context where one’s dignity and fundamental right to defend oneself are constantly denied, “resistance violence restores that dignity” by proclaiming that one is entitled to protection (betz 2020, 182). inciting changes in public policy, engaging in effective public communication, and defending human dignity and equality are undoubtedly noble and compelling aims. however, this does not necessarily make it morally permissible to use violence to achieve them. as martin luther king jr. held, “constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means” (king 2015, 53). indeed, philosophers and activists alike have provided numerous paradigmatic moral reasons feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 against the use of violence, even when undertaken in the name of worthy moral goals, such as those previously discussed. martin luther king jr., for instance, emphasized the moral and practical risks of violence. he argued that violence tends to cause greater harm than nonviolence overall. where nonviolent tactics may “bring about a transformation and change of heart” in the oppressor, violence “only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe” (king 2015, 53). similarly, kimberley brownlee (2004) notes several moral considerations against the use of violence, some of which she draws from the work of joseph raz (1979). first, violence causes direct harm to others, which nonviolence avoids. second, violence—even when it is warranted—may “encourage violence in other situations where violence would be wrong” (brownlee 2004, 350). third, violence risks alienating potential allies by antagonizing them or distracting them from the moral aims those violent resisters are attempting to achieve. fourth, violence risks “confirming the antipathy of opponents,” potentially emboldening them or making them more reluctant to compromise or cooperate (brownlee 2004, 350). finally, violence may “give authorities an excuse to use violent countermeasures against dissenters,” potentially causing greater harm overall (brownlee 2004, 350). although brownlee contends that violence may be morally permitted in certain rare situations, given these risks, it should generally be avoided. if it is necessary, violence should be used “prudently, discriminately, and with great reluctance” (brownlee 2004, 350). given the potential costs of violence, philosophers discuss several moral constraints on its use in resistance (particularly, in the form of violent protest and disobedience), many of which are drawn from the literature on just conduct in war. these constraints include necessity, proportionality, likelihood of success, and what i will call “fairness” (or, what is sometimes called the “innocent bystander exception” in the self-defense literature). each one of these conditions, and their overall importance, is subject to intense debate, and i will not be able to provide a detailed analysis here. however, adopting definitions from the literature (especially from pasternak’s [2019] discussion), they can be roughly summed up as follows. necessity “requires that the harm inflicted on behalf of the just cause is the least harmful available means for doing so” (pasternak 2019, 386). moreover, as candice delmas (2018, 96) elaborates, “deadly force cannot be used preemptively or indiscriminately or in response to future probable threats. nor can it be used as a form of payback after an attack.” success “requires that the resort to defensive harm will have a reasonable chance of successfully averting the attack” (pasternak 2019, 386). proportionality “requires that the defensive harm inflicted is proportionate to the harm it aims to avert” (pasternak 2019, 386). finally, the fairness requirement prohibits resisters from harming “innocent bystanders”—individuals who are not responsible for the injustice being resisted. as kling and mitchell helpfully explain, fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 “only when individuals have forfeited their rights to safety, security, and property, either through consent, or more commonly, through their responsibility for the injustice at issue, do they become liable to attack. innocent bystanders, by definition, are not responsible for any wrongdoing, and so are not liable to be attacked, even by people acting in their own defense” (kling and mitchell 2019, 21).8 the foregoing discussion surveyed several paradigmatic moral reasons for and against the use of violence in resistance. to briefly recap, paradigmatic moral reasons arise from impartial principles of justice and morality. they are characteristically impartial and agent-neutral, applying to individuals in virtue of their shared moral status, independently of any special traits or qualities. moreover, they are centrally concerned with protecting and promoting (or at least refraining from impinging on) the equally weighted needs and interests of others in society. with this conception of paradigmatic moral reasons ready at hand, we are now in a good position to consider another category of reasons that is usefully contrasted with paradigmatic moral reasons—one that is differentiated from paradigmatic moral reasons on the basis of partiality. 4. personal reasons and violent resistance paradigmatic moral reasons for (and against) the use of violence, such as those previously discussed, undoubtedly provide some of the most important considerations when deliberating about violent resistance. however, they are not the only considerations that may be relevant to such deliberations. as harry frankfurt (1988) and susan wolf (2015) contend, alongside impartial aims and principles, many of us are also committed to our personal projects, to certain individuals and groups, or to various ideals that have authority over us but that are neither impartial nor paradigmatically moral. for instance, we may care about “being steadfastly loyal to a family tradition, or selflessly pursuing mathematical truth, or devoting oneself to some type of connoisseurship” (frankfurt 1988, 258). thus, independently of paradigmatic moral reasons, there are also what i will call personal reasons for engaging in violent resistance. personal reasons arise from individuals’ commitments to their personal projects and relationships. in contrast with paradigmatic moral reasons, they are centrally concerned with protecting and promoting the resister’s own special desires and interests or those of the people with whom they stand in personal relationships of love or loyalty. thus, personal reasons are characteristically partial and agent-relative. they apply to individuals in virtue of special engagements and commitments which they may not share with others and which may not be reasonably expected of everyone. the well-being of one’s child, the 8 for defenses of the innocent bystander exception see especially thomson (1991), nagel (1972), and mcmahan (2009). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 call to continue a family legacy, or the desire to take revenge or cause the suffering of an enemy are all examples of personal reasons. although some authors have argued that such reasons are not “moral” but instead represent a category of “nonmoral” values, i will not make such an assumption here. the distinction between paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons need not hinge on whether the latter category is genuinely “moral.” instead, what draws personal reasons apart from paradigmatic moral reasons is their personal and partial nature in contrast with impartial concerns for human equality or the common good.9 moreover, whereas paradigmatic moral reasons are by definition prima facie moral, personal reasons may or may not cohere with impartial morality. in some cases, such as when they take the form of a desire to cause the suffering of an enemy or to take revenge, they may be, at the very least, morally questionable. personal reasons are well represented in the testimonies and narratives of individuals who engage in violent resistance. in what follows, i will illustrate such reasons via three examples. to be clear, these examples are meant to illustrate how violent resistance may be undertaken primarily for personal reasons which differ substantially from, and cannot entirely be reduced to, the paradigmatic moral considerations discussed earlier. they illustrate the different kinds of personal reasons that may motivate and count in favor of violent resistance. my intention is not to argue that these are cases of unjustified or immoral violent resistance. the question of the overall moral status of these cases remains open for discussion. the first is the case of margaret garner. garner and her family escaped slavery by traveling across the frozen ohio river to cincinnati in the winter of 1856. they were later apprehended by us marshals acting under the fugitive slave act of 1850. rather than give her back to slavery, garner killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife. she wounded two of her other children, preparing to kill them too, before she was subdued. according to an 1856 article by p. s. bassett, an abolitionist baptist minister who visited garner in jail, she said, that when the officers and slave-hunters came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and then took a knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other—that if they had given her time, she would have killed them all—that with regard to herself, she cared 9 this leaves open the possibility that there may be partial moral reasons—i.e., moral reasons that arise from relationships of love or partiality. however, when i refer to paradigmatic moral reasons in this paper, i will only be referring to impartial moral reasons. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 but little; but she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done. i inquired if she was not excited almost to madness when she committed the act. no, she replied, i was as cool as i now am; and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them back to slavery, and be murdered piece-meal. . . . . . . she alludes to the child that she killed as being free from all trouble and sorrow, with a degree of satisfaction that almost chills the blood in one's veins; yet she evidently possesses all the passionate tenderness of a mother's love (bassett 1856). it is important to note that garner was not merely acting to defend her child. historians argue that infanticide among enslaved women in pre-civil war america was a form of resistance to slavery through which women seized control over their children’s fates and harmed slaveholders. as allain (2014, 2) writes, by killing their infants, enslaved women denied slave owners the bodies that slavery required to function. . . . . . . individual cases of infanticide resulted from a combination of both insurrectionary and altruistic aims, not merely one or the other. indeed, resistance and altruism are not mutually exclusive; slave women who killed their children might have done so with the dual intentions of resisting slaveholder authority and protecting their children. indeed, there is evidence that slaveowners in the united states “saw slave infanticide as a form of robbery” (allain 2014, 2). moreover, slavery dissolved kinship ties, destroyed parental rights, and alienated individuals from their blood relatives: “slave women who committed infanticide thus resisted slaveholder hegemony by laying claim on their own children over their master’s claim” and asserting their power over their children’s fate (2). for such reasons, i consider garner’s infanticide to be an act of violent resistance against slavery, even if it might have also been a defense against harms to her children. (as i noted in section 2, in certain cases there might not be a sharp distinction between violent resistance and self-defense, especially under conditions of slavery.) let us now turn to the reasons in favor of garner’s action. bassett’s article makes it very clear that garner’s violent resistance was not the result of a bout of madness or irrationality. rather, it was done soberly, for reasons of maternal love which garner continued to stand by well after the incident. as she stated in their conversation, garner was not willing to allow her children to go through the horrors feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 she had experienced under slavery. moreover, she was not willing to allow slaveholders to determine their fate. her maternal love, which included a desire to determine her own children’s destiny and end their suffering by whatever means necessary, provided a personal reason to engage in violent resistance. garner’s violent resistance was undertaken for reasons of maternal love. however, personal reasons may also arise from an agent’s attachments to a project that is important to her but is banned or discouraged by her oppression. a particularly striking case is that of adrienne bennett, the first black woman master plumber in north america. bennett—who is now the ceo of her own contracting company—was subjected to constant sexual harassment from her all-male colleagues during her fiveyear union plumbing apprenticeship in the 1980s. they did everything they could to sabotage her work. as she stated in an interview with pbs, “like the women before me, they wanted me to leave” (solomon and koromvokis 2021). one day, bennett decided to resist by physically assaulting a man who groped her. she describes the incident as follows: by this time, i was so tired of them putting their hands on me, i grabbed a pipe wrench out of my tool belt. . . . i came down on the top of his hardhat. and i said: “it stops today. you pass the word. the next fucker that puts their hands on me will die, and i will go to prison happily.” (solomon and koromvokis 2021)10 in interviews, bennett describes the resistance she engaged in during this time as stemming from her dedication to achieving her dream of being successful in her career. as she states, “i was not going to let myself . . . down. . . . i’m honest, hardworking, and i don’t let anyone get in my way and cheat me out of my dream” (kavilanz 2018). indeed, as she reports, her act of violent resistance helped her to complete her apprenticeship and put a stop to the harassment she was receiving. as she put it, “i didn’t have any problems after that” alluding to the fact that her act of violence allowed her to shift the balance of power to her advantage. bennett’s story suggests that among the reasons for assaulting the man who harassed her—striking him as he was walking away, breaking his hard hat in two and nearly killing him—were strong personal reasons arising from her loyalty to herself and to the career that she had devoted her life to. in addition to love for another person (as in the case of garner) and devotion to one’s success in a vocation (as in the case of bennett), attachment to an idea or personal mission can also provide reason for engaging in violent resistance. for a final 10 in a similar nowthis news (2019) video, bennett added, “i literally split that hard hat in half. i could have killed him. i didn’t have any problems after that.” fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 case, consider an incident from the life of egyptian feminist writer and activist mona eltahawy. eltahawy has been sexually harassed on numerous occasions, including once while on a religious pilgrimage and once when she was just a child. in the past, eltahawy tended to turn the other cheek. now in her fifties, she has started to respond more aggressively. on one notable occasion, eltahawy beat up a man who groped her on the dance floor by pushing him to the ground, sitting on top of him, and punching him repeatedly in the face (eltahawy 2021). describing the reasons for her violence, eltahawy emphasizes that she wanted to make the man fear her and to make him feel the consequences of his misogynistic acts. it had been a long time since i had experienced as much clarity as i did in those moments. . . . i was done with men and their fucking hands. . . . unlike in 1982, when i had frozen and burst into tears, i found my assaulter and i punched and i punched. (eltahawy 2021) elsewhere, she elaborated, i wanted him to remember that this average-height woman, whose ass he believed he could just reach out and grope without fear of retaliation, beat the fuck out of him. (eltahawy 2019, 142) in recent writings, eltahawy declares it her personal mission to terrify the patriarchy (albawaba news 2020). in particular, she wants the men who dare to harass or subordinate her to fear that there will be consequences for their actions and to know that she is both willing and able to dole out those consequences herself, specifically in the form of violence. as she writes, she wanted the man who groped her to “remember her as the harbinger of more rage and punches to come” (eltahawy 2021). in her recent book the seven necessary sins for women and girls, eltahawy (2019, 143) demands that we “push beyond self-defense as the only acceptable way for women to respond to patriarchal violence.” she offers violence—a tool of control which, as she states, women are regularly subjected to but always denied—as one of the means through which women are able to incite fear in misogynists. elaborating in interviews she states, “i’m serving patriarchy. i’m putting it on notice that i’m here to terrify you. the patriarchy should be terrified because i’m here to fuck you over” (albawaba news 2020).11 thus i suggest that among eltahawy’s reasons for beating 11 eltahawy also says this in the cbc radio (2019) story, “i want patriarchy to fear women.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 up the man who groped her were personal reasons arising from her personal mission to terrify misogynists and to make them suffer for their abuses against her. the foregoing cases illustrate some of the personal reasons that may be involved in deliberations about violent resistance. such reasons differ from paradigmatic moral reasons due to their personal and partial nature and their explicit focus on an agent’s special projects and relationships. it is for her family, her vocation, her personal goals, her empowerment, that the agent acts when she acts on a personal reason. it is not for the good of all persons considered equally and impartially nor for the good of oneself understood as one person among others equally deserving of respect and well-being. 5. violent resistance as radical choice what are we to make of the cases in the previous section, and how does the foregoing discussion affect the way we should think about and evaluate violent resistance? certainly, this does not provide an answer as to whether such actions are, all things considered, morally justifiable. even if we accept that such actions violate paradigmatic moral restrictions, there may be other ways of accounting for their moral value. instead of considering such alternatives or attempting to reach a moral verdict on these cases here, i want to make a general point about violent resistance that is suggested by the discussion so far. namely, accepting the distinction between paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons allows us to recognize that conflicts may arise between such reasons in practical deliberations. that is, when deliberating about whether to engage in violent resistance, there may be tensions between what one has personal reasons to do and what one has paradigmatic moral reasons to do. to see what i mean, it is helpful to consider a similar conflict that susan wolf discusses outside the context of oppression. in what wolf calls situations of “radical choice,” there is “a conflict between [impartial] morality and the demands of [personal] love [and loyalty]” (wolf 2015, 42). moral considerations point the agent in one direction, while personal reasons point her in the opposite way. importantly, when such conflicts arise, it is not obvious what the all-things-considered best course of action is for the agent. acting according to impartial morality would require betraying something she loves or is loyal to. however, acting on personal reasons would require violating impartial moral principles. thus, for wolf, situations of radical choice are situations in which one faces the problem of weighing two incommensurable values against each other. whatever one chooses to do, the choice is “radical” in the sense that it is a choice to act in favor of something of significant value at the cost of something else of significant value. wolf illustrates radical choice with the example of a loving mother whose son has committed a serious crime and who must decide whether to report him or to hide him from the police: “he will suffer gravely should he be caught, but unless he is fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 caught, another innocent man will be wrongly convicted for the crime and imprisoned” (wolf 2015, 41). from the point of view of impartial morality, the mother is morally obligated to turn in her son. however, the mother’s love urges her to disregard this consideration and to hide her son from the police instead. the circumstances thus create a special practical dilemma for the mother, with reasons of maternal love and reasons of impartial morality pulling her in opposite directions. regardless of what we think the mother ultimately should do (a point over which there may be reasonable disagreement), it is important to recognize that the stakes are quite high for her. the problem she faces does not permit an easy answer. since her identity and the meaning of her life are so intimately connected with her son’s, turning him in to the police would be personally devastating. it would mean acting disloyally to her child, whom she loves dearly, and allowing him to be subjected to great (even if justified) harm. not only would her child suffer in prison, but the mother’s own life (and presumably the life of her entire family) would be significantly changed if he were convicted and taken away. on the other hand, hiding her son from the police is no less difficult a choice. she would be committing a serious moral wrong. standard moral theories may conceive of the wrongness of such an action in different ways. on one conception, lying to the police and the victims of her son’s crime amounts to treating them as mere means to her own ends, failing to respect them as her equals. on another conception, the consequences of this act explain its wrongness. hiding her son from the police would effectively ruin an innocent man’s life, along with the life of his family, without any contribution to the common good. her guilty son would evade responsibility for his wrongs, perhaps even getting away with further injustices. regardless of how we conceive of the wrongness of such an action, impartial morality seems to count strongly against it. wolf’s discussion of radical choice is useful in understanding the ethical complexities involved in violent resistance. namely, we should recognize that when deliberating about whether to engage in violent resistance, victims of oppression may have to make difficult choices, much like the mother’s in wolf’s illustration. the decision to engage in (or refrain from) violent resistance may constitute a kind of radical choice in which one must decide between conflicting personal and impartial considerations.12 conflicts of radical choice may take at least two different forms. in 12 it is important to note that one can face a radical choice even if one has not gone through a conscious process of weighing and balancing different reasons against each other. to see what i mean, consider the notion of normative reasons assumed in this paper (which is the notion also used by wolf [2015] and williams [1981], as well as manne [2014]). namely, a normative reason for someone to perform an action is a consideration that counts in favor of that action and that would be apt to cite when reasoning with her about what to do. such reasons bear some relation to the agent’s feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 some cases, personal reasons may point in favor of violent resistance while paradigmatic moral reasons urge against it. consider, for instance, eltahawy’s case. her personal commitment to terrifying misogynists pulled her to use excessive force against a man who groped her on the dance floor. impartial reasons such as necessity and proportionality, however, seem to urge restraint from such extreme behavior. there may be other cases, however, where paradigmatic moral reasons favor violent resistance while personal reasons urge restraint. consider, for instance, someone living under colonial rule who must decide whether to fight a colonizer or to hold back and care for an elderly parent with a terminal illness. paradigmatic moral reasons pertaining to the greater good may pull him to fight, where familial love and loyalty may urge him to stay home. importantly, unlike wolf’s radical choice, the notion of radical choice for my purposes is not one in which “it is morality itself . . . that stands on one side of the dilemma” and nonmoral value that stands on the other side (wolf 2015, 42; emphasis added). this is because i have not defined paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons in terms of the distinction between moral and nonmoral values. rather, the distinction between paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons hinges on the partiality of the latter and the impartiality of the former. thus, where wolf’s conception of radical choice illustrates “the problem of whether to attend ultimately to moral concerns at all” (wolf 2015, 42), the conception of radical choice i am using illustrates the problem of whether to attend ultimately to impartial considerations when deliberating about how to resist one’s oppression. returning to the cases from the previous section, we can identify tensions between paradigmatic moral restrictions on violent resistance and what the agent had reason to do from the point of view of her personal projects. garner’s love for her children provided her with a personal reason to seize control over their fate and prevent them from leading dismal lives of slavery. however, a typical standard from the perspective of impartial morality has it that every human being has an inalienable right to life.13 on this view, paradigmatic moral reasons would urge garner to refrain from committing violence against her children. ending her children’s suffering, desires and values. however, they need not be considerations of which the agent is necessarily aware. one may be mistaken about the reasons that she has for acting, and she can come to learn about her reasons through conversation with others. 13 for instance, in the second treatise of government, john locke ([1690] 1980) argues that the right to life is the most basic human law of nature and that human beings have both a right and a duty to protect it. moreover, according to article 3 of the united nations universal declaration of human rights, “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” (un general assembly, a/res/3/217 a, dec. 10, 1948, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights). fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 however, was far more important to garner than honoring this right. moreover, bennett and eltahawy both had personal reasons to physically assault the men who sexually harassed them, bennett’s having to do with her devotion to her career and eltahawy’s having to do with her personal mission to terrify misogynists. however, impartial considerations of necessity and proportionality may provide both with reasons to refrain from the kind of extreme violence they undertook. nevertheless, for both women, honoring their personal goals and aspirations mattered more than adhering to these impartial restrictions. thus, each of the previous cases seems to involve a kind of radical choice where personal reasons urge the resister to engage in violent resistance while impartial reasons provide grounds for exercising restraint. however, it is worth noting an important difference between the context of radical choice in wolf’s example and the contexts of radical choice in the cases presented in section 3 of this paper. that is, the reason why the agent’s options are limited in wolf’s case is importantly different from the reason why garner, bennett, and eltahawy’s options are limited. in wolf’s case, the mother’s ability to fulfill her personal values (i.e., her love for her son) is constrained due to her son’s criminal behavior, thus placing her in the circumstances of radical choice. this is not because of her oppression or any injustice that has been done to her but rather because of an injustice committed by her son. the mother’s choice regarding her son is certainly difficult, but this is a tragic situation that could befall anyone regardless of race, class, or gender; it is not forced upon her as a result of being a victim of oppression. (that said, there are, of course, ways of filling out the details of the case on which oppression may be relevant. it is fair to assume, however, that such a filling out of the details was not intended by wolf in her essay). by contrast, the cases of garner, bennett, and eltahawy are contexts where oppression severely limits one’s options, including the kinds of resistance available to them. that is, racism, classism, and sexism largely explain why violence has become one of their few relevant options, especially if they are not willing to passively comply with their oppression. in garner’s case, it is because escaping slavery was not an option for her and her family that she had to consider killing her children to protect them from it instead. in bennett’s case, it is because there were no effective resources in her workplace to deal with sexual assault that she had to resort to violent means to end harassment from her colleagues. in eltahawy’s case, it is in part because there are no serious social or legal repercussions for sexual harassment that a violent response became a live option for her. were it not for their oppression, such radical options would neither be relevant nor worth considering. as a result of their oppression, and the severe limitations it places on the ways in which they can adequately resist, violence becomes a live option, thus placing them in the circumstances of radical choice. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 how should we judge people who engage in violent resistance when it is not supported by impartial reasons? although it is not my aim in this paper to defend a particular response to this question, i will briefly sketch three natural possibilities that arise from the conflict in reasons i’ve highlighted throughout.14 first, one may hold that the strength of the impartial reasons in such cases simply trumps any of the personal reasons that have been under discussion in this paper. on such a view, acts of violence that violate impartial moral restrictions are ultimately unjustified. second, one might take a stance that is radically skeptical of impartial moral restrictions in such cases—for instance, by saying that the personal reasons of those who are severely oppressed always bear greater weight than impartial reasons. on this alternative view, acts of violence that go against one’s personal values are ultimately unreasonable, overly self-sacrificial, or self-abnegating. third, one might take inspiration from wolf’s discussion of the criminal’s mother. on such a view, there is no simple way of resolving conflicts between impartial reasons and personal reasons in the context of radical choice. that is, there is no single metric according to which impartial reasons may be ranked more highly than personal reasons, or vice versa. instead, we should be sympathetic with someone who decides to fulfill their personal values by acting violently, even if we should also grant that they have gone against important moral demands—just as wolf (2015, 41) contends that the criminal’s mother at the very least “deserves our sympathy.” what’s more, regardless of what we think a person in the context of radical choice should do, we ought to acknowledge that “there is something positively reasonable (and not just understandable)” about someone who fulfills their personal values rather than simply acting in accordance with impartial morality (wolf 2015, 41). a natural extension of wolf’s view would have it that victims of oppression facing such circumstances likewise deserve our sympathy. violent resisters are not necessarily engaged in reckless or irrational acts of destruction. rather, they may be acting to defend or maintain their personal values. far from being worthless, such actions may be integral to victims’ integrity, self-worth, and meaning in life under 14 although i will present the answers below as very general answers to all cases of violent resistance and radical choice, it would be open to someone to take more specific attitudes to particular cases. for instance, one might be inclined toward the view that impartial morality trumps personal reasons in the case of margaret garner but that personal reasons carry greater weight than impartial morality in the case of adrienne bennett. however, since i am merely sketching the most natural responses below, these distinctions will not be crucial in the discussion that follows. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 oppressive conditions.15 at the same time, we might still consider their actions to be morally questionable or ambiguous.16 moral evaluations of such cases do not settle the question of their ethical value (at least not without further argument). wolf’s view about radical choice may be even more compelling in the cases considered throughout this paper for the following reason: the circumstances of radical choice are foisted on them by their oppression—a fact about their life which is completely beyond their or their loved ones’ control—thus making a response of sympathy yet more appropriate. although the mother in wolf’s example committed no injustice herself, her son did, and this is what placed her in the context of radical choice. by contrast garner, bennett, and eltahawy were each forced into a position of radical choice as a result of systemic oppression. neither their own actions nor the actions of any of their loved ones led to this. since the adversity they face is arguably more tragic and arbitrary, it is not unreasonable to have greater sympathy for them than for nonoppressed agents facing radical decisions like the criminal’s mother. as it turns out, however, agents of violent resistance are often unfairly or too quickly judged. it is not uncommon for onlookers to hastily moralize, infantilize, or discount their behavior. far from helping us to better understand or to eliminate the circumstances that give rise to violence, such attitudes only multiply the oppression of the resisters. this may occur in various ways. for instance, since (as many philosophers argue) violent resistance may be an act of communication, dismissing it as the result of adolescent recklessness may itself be a form of epistemic injustice. uncareful moralizing of the actions of the oppressed can lead to stereotyping, victimblaming, or the imposition of unrealistic or overly burdensome expectations. moreover, excessive preoccupation with moral praise or blame can distract from understanding the underlying causes and effects of oppression and from properly supporting those who struggle, often imperfectly, to resist. it has not been my aim here to provide a moral or ethical verdict on violent resistance, nor has it been my aim to discourage others from making such judgements. rather, i have been focused on describing two different kinds of normative reasons that can weigh in favor of (or against) violent resistance and considering how such reasons may interact in practical deliberations. how we ultimately ought to evaluate violent resistance along moral or ethical lines requires more discussion than can be provided here. 15 this is especially true provided that, as williams notes, an agent may be so identified with her projects that she takes them “seriously at the deepest level, as what [her] life is about” (smart and williams 1973, 156). 16 for discussion of the absence of nuanced thinking about violent resistance, the misguided tendency to jump to final moral verdicts, and the morally ambiguous nature of such actions, see rini (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 1, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 6. conclusion recall the opening question of the paper: for victims of oppression, what reasons may stand in favor of (or against) engaging in some form of violent resistance? i argued that we can differentiate two kinds of reasons: paradigmatic moral reasons, arising from commitments to impartial moral values and principles, and personal reasons, arising from attachments of love and loyalty to specific people, projects, and personal values. ideally, when deliberating about violent resistance, both reasons cohere. but there is no guarantee that conflicts will not arise. thus, some acts of violent resistance may take the form of a radical choice in which paradigmatic moral reasons and personal reasons pull the agent in opposite directions. recognizing that violent resistance may involve deliberating under circumstances of radical choice allows us to have greater sympathy with people who are pushed to such extreme forms of resistance. moreover, it opens up the possibility that such actions may have personal value, independently of how they measure up from the point of view of impartiality. to be very clear, it was not my aim here to endorse violent resistance either in general or in any particular case. instead, i have made the much weaker point that some of the normative considerations that go into the balance when deliberating about whether to engage in violent resistance are personal reasons, and that such reasons are not guaranteed to cohere with the paradigmatic reasons of impartial morality. nor was it my aim to simplify our understanding of the reasons that bear relevantly in deliberations about violent resistance or to provide a way of resolving conflicts of radical choice that may arise in such deliberations. instead, i have focused on drawing out some of the ethical complexities that are involved in violent resistance. by centering these complexities in the conversation about (non)violence, my hope is to enhance our understanding of violent resistance and the people who engage in it.17 17 i would like to thank adam cureton, juliette cherbuliez, em hernandez, sarah holtman, thomas e. hill jr., matthias rothe, valerie tiberius, susan wolf, and three anonymous referees for valuable feedback on previous versions of this paper. i am also grateful for helpful discussions with audiences at the 2022 north american society for social philosophy, 2021 concerned philosophers for peace conference, 2021 central apa, and umn philosophy’s work-in-progress series; and with students in my philosophy and feminist theory (fall 2021) and race, gender, and radical politics (spring 2022) seminars. special thanks to philip bold for many conversations which culminated in the major ideas of this paper, in addition to his insights in writing and editing this piece along the way. fakhoury – violent resistance as radical choice published by scholarship@western, 2023 23 references albawaba news. 2020. “‘i am not here to be f**k polite’ mona eltahawy does not mince words when it comes to smashing patriarchy.” march 8, 2020. https://www.albawaba.com/editors-choice/i-am-not-here-be-fk-politemona-eltahawy-does-not-mince-words-when-it-comes-smashing. allain, j. m. 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women continue to face discrimination in skilled trades.” pbs newshour, march 12, 2021. video, 6:21. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/black-americans-and-womencontinue-to-face-discrimination-in-skilled-trades. thomson, judith jarvis. 1991. “self-defense.” philosophy & public affairs. 20, no. 4 (autumn): 283–310. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265419. williams, bernard. 1981. “internal and external reasons.” in moral luck: philosophical papers, 1973–1980, 101–13. cambridge: cambridge university press. ———. 1985. ethics and the limits of philosophy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wolf, susan. 2015. a variety of values: essays on morality, meaning, and love. new york: oxford university press. tamara fakhoury is an assistant professor of philosophy at the university of minnesota. her research focuses on the ethics and moral psychology of resisting oppression. she is particularly interested in the ethical conflicts that arise for victims in resistance and how conditions of oppression shape what it means to live a good and meaningful life. her recent publications include “oppositional anger: aptness without appreciation,” “quiet resistance: the value of personal defiance,” and “eight dimensions of resistance.” her current research discusses the value of morally imperfect acts of resistance, nonnormative behavior, and rebelliousness as a virtue under oppression. 14565 fakhoury title page 14565 fakhoury final format endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation hallström, ina. 2024. “endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (4). article 2. 2024 endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis ina hallström stockholm university ina.hallstrom@gender.su.se hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis ina hallström abstract the process of gaining recognition and treatment for a medical condition involves multiple stages where knowledge is negotiated along the way. this is particularly true for endometriosis, or “endo,” a chronic condition affecting one in ten menstruating individuals. in this article, i present a phenomenology of key epistemic practices involved in the journey toward knowledge about endo, based on interviews with fifteen individuals diagnosed with endometriosis in sweden. these lived practices constitute what i call endo episteme and demonstrate how knowledge is gained, negotiated, or lost. drawing on miranda fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice and axel honneth’s theory of recognition, i conceptualize the following practices: comparing-with, expressive uptake, a pedagogy of pain, the struggle for diagnosis, an epistemology of ignorance, and epistemic activism. together, these practices shape the crucial processes of becoming a knower, becoming a patient, and becoming knowledge in relation to endo. this work contributes to feminist and social philosophy by enriching the frameworks provided by fricker and honneth, and it introduces novel concepts to deepen our understanding of the experiences of endo patients. the analysis of endo episteme emphasizes the central role of epistemic practices for the misrecognition of a gendered illness affecting millions worldwide. keywords: chronic illness, diagnosis, endometriosis, epistemic injustice, phenomenology, recognition the process of gaining recognition and treatment for a medical condition involves multiple stages where knowledge is negotiated along the way. this is particularly true for endometriosis, a chronic condition that affects one in ten menstruating individuals worldwide. endometriosis is characterized by the presence of endometrial-like tissue outside the uterus and is associated with chronic pain, infertility, and a negative impact on quality of life (lövkvist et al. 2016; nnoaham et al. 2011). symptoms are often normalized, and there is a well-described delay in diagnosis internationally. the gendered nature of the condition and the difficulties in receiving recognition, diagnosis, and treatment (ballard, lowton, and wright 2006; feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 seear 2009, 2014; hudson 2022; whelan 2007) make endometriosis a pressing feminist issue. in this article, i explore how individuals with endometriosis progress from experiencing pain to knowing that they have this specific condition. i analyze how knowledge about endometriosis, or “endo,”1 appears and takes on meaning in the lifeworld, using in-depth interviews with fifteen individuals who have been diagnosed with the condition.2 the interviews are part of a larger project on the recognition of endometriosis in sweden (see hallström 2024). despite sweden being declared the best country in the world for women, the diagnostic delay was five to seven years in 2018 (sbu 2018). during my analysis of the interviews, knowledge emerged as a central theme in how endo was experienced and recognized. even so, research on the connection between endo and knowledge is limited. a notable exception is emma whelan’s (2003, 2007, 2009) work, which uses the concept of “epistemic communities” to examine systems of pain documentation, endo-patient communities, and gynecological literature, respectively.3 another example is nicky hudson’s (2022) description of endo as characterized by an “epistemology of ignorance.” studies also indicate difficulties in making sense of and communicating endo pain and getting others to understand the patient’s situation (bullo 2020, 2021; bullo and hearn 2021; whelan 2007; helosvuori and oikkonen 2023). but the everyday epistemic practices involved in the diagnostic journey have not been made a central concern, nor has their relation to processes of recognition. through this article, i intend to address both issues. using endo as a case from “messy empirical reality” (zala et al. 2020) can provide valuable contributions to current theories of epistemic practices and recognition. taking a bottom-up approach, starting from particular real-world issues, and engaging in “real-world political philosophy” (wolff 2015, 22) can inform both normative theorizing and policy, offering insights on “what should be done here and now” (zala et al. 2020, 37). understanding the epistemic obstacles of the diagnostic journey from a patient perspective can shed light on the reasons behind delays in diagnosis and treatment, ultimately leading to improved quality of life for patients. this is particularly 1 my use of the emic term endo is part of an endeavor to treat the condition as a phenomenon as it appears in the lifeworld of interviewees. 2 i have conducted in-depth semistructured interviews with fifteen individuals diagnosed with endo, ranging from eighteen to sixty-two years old at the time of the interview in 2018 and coming from different parts of sweden. the interviews have been digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. informed consent has been obtained, as well as ethical clearance of the project as a whole. 3 see also lindgren and richardson (2023) and melander (2019, 2021). hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 important as individuals who are ill may be especially susceptible to epistemic injustice (carel and kidd 2014). specifically, i provide a phenomenology of the “lived” (erlebt) epistemic practices involved in the journey toward knowledge about endo. these practices constitute what i call “endo episteme.”4 using a theoretical framework that combines miranda fricker’s (2007) notion of epistemic injustice with axel honneth’s theory of recognition, the article seeks to answer the following questions: how do interviewees come to know endo? how is knowledge gained, negotiated, or lost? what are the implications for interviewees’ relations to self? through the analysis of endo episteme, i identify and conceptualize a number of epistemic practices in the lifeworld of interviewees: comparing-with, expressive uptake, a pedagogy of pain, the struggle for diagnosis, an epistemology of ignorance, and epistemic activism. these practices shape the crucial epistemic processes of becoming a knower, becoming a patient, and becoming knowledge in relation to endo i will begin by explaining how i use the notion of “epistemic recognition,” drawing on fricker’s and honneth’s theories. then, i present the phenomenology of endo episteme as it appears in the lifeworld of interviewees. finally, i discuss the epistemic practices identified and how they contribute to the acquisition, negotiation, and loss of knowledge. i conclude by suggesting ways to overcome epistemic obstacles, stressing the importance of receiving epistemic support from others, expanding and disseminating medical knowledge, and transforming social norms and biases regarding menstruation and pain. from epistemic injustice to epistemic recognition the relation between knowledge and the identity or social location of the knower has been well explored within the fields broadly labeled feminist epistemology and critical social epistemology. this has meant scrutinizing how reason has been perceived as male in the history of western philosophy (lloyd 1996), how knowledge has been seen as objective even when it is partial, how the knower has been perceived as a disembodied “conquering gaze from nowhere” (haraway 1988, 581), and how the tradition of epistemology itself has been based on artificial 4 i use the term “episteme” to capture and analyze epistemic practices related to endo within the lifeworld of interviewees. inspired by foucault, i use the concept broadly to include the historical conditions that make knowledge possible, “whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (foucault 2001, 183). foucault’s use of episteme has been compared to thomas kuhn’s idea of a paradigm, but it extends beyond science. in his later work, foucault emphasizes that multiple epistemes can coexist as part of different power-knowledge systems (foucault 1980). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 exclusion of views due to nonepistemic reasons such as racism or sexism (alcoff 2008, 714). in recent years, miranda fricker has sparked renewed discussion by addressing the “epistemic injustice” involved in everyday epistemic practices—that is, “those human practices through which knowledge is gained, or indeed lost” (fricker 2007, vii). although fricker coined the term, some argue that thinkers such as anna julia cooper and gayatri chakravorty spivak already anticipated the idea, and many others have since delved into the recognition of knowers (may 2014; spivak 1988; collins 1990; alcoff 1991, 2000; lorde 2007; mckinnon 2016). of particular interest for the present discussion, fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice has been put in conversation with the recognition theory of axel honneth in a 2018 special issue of feminist philosophy quarterly titled “epistemic injustice and recognition theory.” combining recognition theory with epistemic injustice offers a useful framework for understanding the impact of epistemic practices on both knowledge production and the individual’s self-relation. recognizing someone as a “knower” involves acknowledging their status and regard, allowing for a positive self-relation based on their rightful inclusion in socioepistemic practices (congdon 2018, 4–6). conversely, epistemic injustice can rob individuals of their status as rational inquirers and lead to self-alienation (giladi 2018). by examining endo episteme through the lens of recognition, we can analyze how recognition is manifested in everyday epistemic practices and its impact on both knowledge and the knower. honneth’s philosophy of recognition, as outlined in the struggle for recognition (honneth 1995), is based on the idea that mutual recognition is essential for human flourishing. a central premise is that individualization and recognition are fundamentally intertwined and that social change is driven by the continual expansion of relations of mutual recognition. honneth identifies three main modes of recognition: love or emotional support, respect, and esteem. these modes help us develop and sustain corresponding positive self-relations. we develop basic “selfconfidence” by being loved and cared for, we develop moral “self-respect” by being awarded the same rights as anyone else, and we develop “self-esteem” by having our unique abilities and contributions valued by others. epistemic injustice, as defined by fricker (2007, 1), is “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” fricker identifies two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. “testimonial injustice” happens when a hearer attributes less credibility to a speaker’s word due to prejudice or stereotypes. “hermeneutical injustice” occurs when a gap in the shared social imaginary puts someone at an unfair disadvantage in trying to make sense of their own social experience. this gap can lead to “hermeneutical marginalization,” making it difficult for people to make sense of and articulate their experiences in a satisfactory way. the two types of injustice have different objects in hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 focus. testimonial injustice relates to the identity of the knower and how it affects perceived credibility, while hermeneutical injustice relates to the types of experiences available in shared hermeneutical resources. in the special issue’s afterword, fricker uses honneth’s theory to propose a tripart notion of “epistemic recognition” that forms the basis for epistemic selfconfidence, self-respect, and self-esteem (fricker 2018, 2). i will refer to the corresponding modes of recognition as epistemic support, respect, and esteem. “epistemic support” concerns emotional needs and support within the sphere of primary relationships of love and friendship. “epistemic respect” relates to our rights and our status as legal and moral equals. “epistemic esteem” concerns the status of our ways of life and our contributions to shared hermeneutical resources. this tripart notion provides a useful framework for analyzing endo episteme and can help identify instances where sufficient epistemic recognition is lacking. furthermore, it suggests potential remedies, as the three modes of epistemic recognition should be viewed as ways to overcome epistemic injustices within each sphere. in addition to the three modes of epistemic recognition, i utilize honneth’s (2003, 114) idea of recognition theory as a phenomenology of social experiences of injustice. similarly, my approach can be characterized as a phenomenology of experiences of epistemic injustice, based on the narrated experience of interviewees. phenomenology aims to describe the meaning and structure of phenomena we experience in everyday life. it challenges the notion that subject and object can be neatly separated and instead focuses on how the meaning of phenomena is constituted by and bound up with human activity. lifeworld perspectives on illness are particularly important given that medical knowledge has historically ignored and devalued patient experience, or “the voice of the lifeworld,” along with social and cultural dimensions of health and illness (whelan 2009). by using phenomenology, we can “move from the singularity of the first-person narrative to an account that seeks to identify, describe, and analyze generalities and typical features of the experience as such, while examining how this experience resides within and intersects with the broader lifeworld” (fisher 2014, 28). drawing on the narrated experience of interviewees, i identify, describe, and analyze typical features of endo episteme. the three modes of epistemic recognition—epistemic support, respect, and esteem—serve as analytical categories that structure the analysis. in relation to each mode, i identify a central epistemic process: becoming a knower, becoming a patient, and becoming knowledge. in relation to each process, i conceptualize typical epistemic practices. i understand these as practices of epistemic recognition through which knowledge of endo is gained, negotiated, or lost. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 becoming a knower: an expression of epistemic support to understand what it means to become a knower in relation to endo, we can begin with the concept of “epistemic support.” epistemic support is related to our individual needs within the sphere of primary relationships of love and friendship. in honneth’s (1995) vocabulary, emotional support affirms someone as deserving and worthy of others’ caring attention. it enables us to develop self-confidence by having our individual needs and emotions nurtured and taken care of. epistemic support is related to what fricker calls epistemic self-confidence, which concerns the most profound level of a person’s sense of epistemic selfhood, risking the deepest possible effects on a person’s epistemic agency (fricker 2018, 3). i identify two prominent epistemic practices that appear to be essential for becoming a knower. the first is comparing-with, which involves comparing our own experiences to those of others in order to gain a deeper understanding of these experiences. the second is expressive uptake, which involves receiving uptake that enables us to express and make sense of experience. these two practices are important sources of epistemic support that enable epistemic agency and make it easier to become a knower in relation to endo symptoms. i will start with comparing-with and the interviewees’ efforts to first make sense of endo symptoms. when i ask interviewees about their first experiences of symptoms, they often describe a situation characterized by not knowing. for instance, one interviewee describes the experience of the first symptoms—a “pretty severe pain” at the age of 10—as characterized by a lack of knowledge: i started experiencing symptoms already as a child. i had my first period at 10 years old, and shortly after that i started having pain. pretty severe pain. but when you were that young you didn’t understand . . . you know, i barely knew at that age what menstruation was. that is, when i was 10. the pain described in the excerpt is retrospectively attributed to, or known to be, endo; but at the time, the interviewee did not understand the nature of the pain, and she barely knew what menstruation was. although the period of unknowing varies in length among interviewees—from months to several years—most have similar experiences of a pain they fail to classify. in many cases, our knowledge of illness follows a similar path: an unpleasant experience gets classified as the symptom of an illness once diagnosis is established. the term “diagnosis” originally means distinguish or discern (from dia “apart” and hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 gignōskein “to know”),5 and it is through the category of diagnosis we tell one condition apart from another. here, i focus on the process preceding diagnosis, sometimes referred to as “phase 0” of the diagnostic journey (geng, sum-ping, and geng 2019). as many interviewees are young when symptoms first appear, they usually begin this journey by discussing symptoms with a parent, sibling, or friend before seeking medical care. these early investigations follow the pattern i call comparing-with and involve how individuals make sense of their experience by comparing it with others. phenomenology and recognition theory understand human existence as fundamentally characterized by intersubjectivity and coexistence with others. martin heidegger introduced the concept of being-with (mitsein) to describe this human quality of always already being with others of its kind. for heidegger, our understanding of our own existence involves the understanding of others (heidegger [1927] 2010, 161). the practice of comparing-with is an aspect of our being-with, and it captures how interviewees come to understand their own experience with others by way of comparison. by comparing-with, people learn to identify a phenomenon or an experience as something specific, such as the symptom of an illness, or simply as something different from others’ experience. through the practice of comparingwith, interviewees find answers to questions like: what is this? do others experience what i do? is this normal? comparing-with is a relational form of understanding—an epistemic practice that occurs throughout life and in relation to both concrete and “generalized others” (mead 1934). however, the focus here is comparisons within the immediate social network, which tends to be smaller during childhood and dominated by the immediate family (wrzus et al. 2013). i understand comparing-with as a practice that relies on family and friends to indirectly offer epistemic support by sharing their experiences. in doing so, they provide a crucial hermeneutical resource for the interviewees. when interviewees state that they “barely knew at that age what menstruation was,” it often means that they had no conception of menstruation because it was not discussed by people in their surroundings. similarly, many interviewees describe that they had never heard of the concept of endometriosis when growing up and only realized that something was wrong because none of their friends “had it like this.” during an interview, i met a mother and daughter who were both diagnosed with endometriosis but had different experiences of comparing-with: 5 merriam-webster, s.v. “diagnosis (n.),” accessed november 18, 2024, http://www .merriam-webster.com/dictionary/diagnosis. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 mother: when i grew up and had all these problems, there was no internet or anything like that. [. . .] so, i had no idea that other people did not experience what i did. daughter: but mom, it wasn’t the internet that helped me see things differently, it was when i started speaking to others about it. mother: but i didn’t speak others about it. [. . .] daughter: it was when i started speaking to others and saying like: “you know when this happens?” and they were like: “no.” mother: but i never spoke to others about it. the passage illustrates how the mother lacked opportunities for comparing-with in relation to endo. she did not have dialogue with others or access to online resources. she had no forum where she could gain knowledge related to symptoms and was not diagnosed until years later, as an adult. this lack of dialogue is reflective of the menstrual stigma prevalent in society, which has been identified as a common cause of self-silencing (johnston-robledo and chrisler 2013; seear 2009; montgomery 1974). other interviewees also express similar sentiments, stating that “people just didn’t talk about issues like that.” when an area of experience is considered taboo due to stigma, it can inhibit the practice of comparing-with. self-silencing also occurs when severe menstrual pain is perceived as inherently normal (see armour et al. 2021). several interviewees express this sentiment, saying, “i didn’t talk to anyone because i thought everyone had it like me. [. . .] i never thought it was abnormal.” prior research has also highlighted the importance of comparison for knowledge about endo. this applies to both an individual’s past personal experiences and the experience of others. elaine denny (2009, 988–89) finds that women who had always had painful periods were more likely to perceive this as normal, because they had no other experience for comparison, and for these women either their pain became so severe that they eventually sought medical help or comparison with other women provided the realization that they were different. in contrast, for the daughter, it was through dialogues with friends that she realized that everyone did not experience what she did. she also had access to other sources of knowledge. eventually, she turned to online sources, and later she gained access to medical journals when becoming a university student and dived into those resources as well. the differences between mother and daughter demonstrate that the act of comparing-with does not take place in a vacuum. access to knowledge is related to the hermeneutical resources available in society. these resources vary over hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 time and place, leading to intergenerational differences. individuals who lack opportunities for comparing-with are disadvantaged in making sense of their experience, which can make it more challenging to take the next step and seek health care. however, despite the different opportunities for comparing-with and different trajectories to becoming knowers, the mother and daughter share some important similarities, which will be discussed next. the second epistemic practice, expressive uptake, involves recognizing testimonies of endo pain. sue campbell (1997) argues that feelings are socially shaped, sanctioned, and stabilized. for campbell, feelings are formed through acts of expression that we use to communicate affective significance. we rely on others for expressive uptake so that feelings can be individuated and successfully communicated. however, our feelings can also be subjected to suppression, distortion, and manipulation (campbell 1997, 3–4). as campbell notes, “if what we feel is, by and large, what we express, then people can control our feelings by controlling our modes of expression” (campbell 1997, 135). because of this public dimension of feelings, our affective lives can be sites of oppression. for instance, attempts to communicate affective significance can be undermined by characterizing the emoter as bitter, sentimental, or overly emotional. according to campbell (1997, 166–67), such strategies of “interpretive dismissal” are often directed at women and have the power to “to limit our ways of acting in the world, and, consequently, our effects on the world.” campbell’s account is valuable because it adds a political dimension to the analysis of feeling and sheds light on a form of everyday hostility or “discursive abuse” (giladi 2018) that, according to campbell, is commonly directed toward gendered and racial others. i suggest that we understand expressive uptake of testimonies as a crucial part of the epistemic support needed to become knowers and develop epistemic self-confidence. for instance, the daughter describes how her father treated both her and her mother as “whiny” when they talked about their symptoms or how they felt, and she says that the rest of the family did not seem to care. in campbell’s (1997, 165) vocabulary, this experience can be described as being “emotionally manipulated through the unsympathetic or hostile interpretive practices of others.” moreover, the daughter explicitly describes the father’s dismissive behavior as a way of undermining their self-confidence and sense of truth: “i am 90% sure that this was a way for him to undermine our confidence in ourselves and in what we know is true.” i interpret the statement as referring to a pattern of repeated dismissal; their sense of truth would not be undermined if such dismissal was a one-time event. the daughter’s statement demonstrates the importance of uptake from others for the process of becoming a knower. it also illustrates how recognition, sense of truth, and self-relation can be intertwined. in order to become a knower, you must be recognized as a knower with valuable knowledge to offer to others. the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 interviewees also describe the gendered nature of endo as a probable reason why fathers are often unable to understand, listen, or care. in contrast, mothers are mostly seen as sources of support and comparing-with. this could be due to the listener’s personal familiarity with the topic. however, menstrual stigma reasonably plays a role, and the gender of the speaker also seems to matter. one example of this is an interviewee who describes that her father only started to listen when her boyfriend spoke to him about her illness. arguably, the role of gender can contribute to both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in the context of endo pain. hermeneutical injustice can shape how the experiences are perceived, while testimonial injustice can impact whose testimony is heard and believed. since pain is an inherently subjective experience that is known by being felt, misrecognition of pain amounts to something more than a dismissal of a mere fact: it undermines the knower of pain—specifically in their capacity as knowers (fricker 2007). conversely, awarding the speaker with attention, encouragement, and patience—what matthew congdon (2018, 12–13) calls “epistemic love”—is analogous to providing expressive uptake of testimonies. without epistemic love, a person’s sense of truth can be undermined, making it more challenging to become a knower, even regarding their own feelings and experiences. dismissive responses can disrupt and delay the process of becoming a knower given that an individual who is unable to individuate and express their experience is less well-equipped to take the next step and seek health care. taken together, the experiences of interviewees indicate that becoming a knower in relation to endo pain is a highly relational process. others are needed in two key senses, for comparing-with and for expressive uptake. comparing-with helps individuals to make sense of their experience, to identify it with or discriminate it from others’ experience. menstrual etiquette and stigma shape what people feel comfortable talking about and what kind of knowledge is available in shared hermeneutical resources. comparing-with concerns hermeneutical injustice because when it is lacking it involves unmet needs of understanding (fricker 2007). the practice of expressive uptake is connected to testimonial injustice as it involves the improper uptake of testimonies. however, since expressive uptake enables individuals to form and express the affective significance of experience, it also has hermeneutical dimensions. proper uptake constitutes the kind of epistemic love and support important for epistemic agency and confidence. without opportunities for comparing-with and expressive uptake, individuals may be more reluctant to take the next step toward becoming a patient. becoming a patient: an expression of epistemic respect to understand what is at stake in the process of becoming a patient, i now turn to “epistemic respect,” which concerns our status as legal and moral equals. hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 according to honneth, we develop self-respect by being awarded the same basic rights as everyone else. similarly, congdon regards epistemic self-respect as based on the egalitarian notion that there is a basic form of respect owed to any knower, irrespective of who they are (congdon 2018, 13). correspondingly, denial of rights or ostracism can lead to a loss of epistemic self-respect based on “the feeling of not enjoying the status of a full-fledged partner to interaction, equally endowed with moral rights” (honneth 1995, 133; quoted in fricker 2018, 2). here, i primarily associate epistemic respect with the medical sphere and the egalitarian right to health. according to the constitution of the world health organization (1946), “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” but the experience of interviewees suggests that gender bias regarding pain undermines the egalitarian right to health. when someone is ill, their right to health depends on becoming a patient through the classification of diagnosis—in this case, an endometriosis patient. if someone is ill but not recognized as a patient, their right to health is compromised. there are two key epistemic practices that shape the process of becoming a patient. the first is the pedagogy of pain, which refers to the common belief that menstrual pain is normal. the second is the struggle for diagnosis, which describes the practice of interviewees seeking recognition as patients with medical rights. both practices describe the challenges involved in becoming patients and being granted the egalitarian right to health. the pedagogy of pain can be illustrated by an interviewee’s first encounter with a doctor about her menstrual pain at the age of thirteen. it was a female doctor who responded by saying that pain was something she had to get used to: this is the way it is, and you’ll have to get used to it; this is the way it will always be. i have really painful cramps too. you’ll have to endure. i climb the walls at times from pain. [. . .] there is nothing to be done. although it may be uncommon for doctors to share personal experience in this way, many interviewees describe both male and female doctors urging them to accept the fact that “menstruation does hurt”—“it’s just the way it is”—and that it is up to them to learn to endure. the same kind of message is so common in the interviews that it resembles a mantra, repeated again and again, teaching young people with endo how they are supposed to react to their pain. i refer to this mantra as “the pedagogy of pain,” which perpetuates variations of the theme that menstruation hurts and that womanhood is inherently painful. the mantra is most often associated with doctors in the interviews but occurs both within and outside the medical sphere. the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 interviewee states that it was especially difficult to reach out to others because adults around her, both doctors and others, would tell her that the pain was normal: “it’s difficult when you’re a kid and get these responses. it’s hard to keep on insisting when all the adults tell you that this is the way it is.” doctors and other adults are usually attributed epistemic authority over children due to their education, institutional position, and age. becoming a patient can be especially difficult when normalization and dismissal of endo pain, widely reported as a likely contributor to diagnostic delay (seear 2009), comes from such authorities. in addition to menstrual cramps, a similar pedagogy of pain seems to affect the perception of other kinds of pelvic pain. for some interviewees, pain occurs during penetrating sex (dyspareunia), and the idea that pain is a normal part of being a woman is also mentioned in their descriptions: “it’s the same there. i have thought that ‘sex is painful; it’s like that for everyone.’” several interviewees find gynecological examinations painful and recall gynecologists not being careful despite clearly causing pain. one interviewee describes intrauterine device (iud) insertion to be so unbearable that she eventually had to be sedated to go through the procedure. another interviewee states that the responses she received over the years led her to form a notion of pain as practically inevitable for women. in contrast, one interviewee recounts a recent positive experience where a gynecologist said, “let me know if anything hurts”—which surprised her because this had never happened before. her expressions of pain were usually ignored. these experiences all demonstrate a cultural association between pain and female gender. prior research has shown that women are more likely to seek treatment for pain, but they are also more likely to be inadequately treated for their pain. this undertreatment has been linked to gender bias regarding women’s pain experiences (hoffmann and tarzian 2001; zhang et al. 2021; samulowitz et al. 2018; hoffmann, fillingim, and veasley 2022). women are also more likely than men to have their pain attributed to psychogenesis (hoffmann and tarzian 2001). several interviewees describe being treated as “hysterics” or “hypochondriacs” by doctors. the mother already mentioned says: “it’s mental according to them. it’s always mental. and some doctors are not happy when you think for yourself.” the figure of the hysteric is so pervasive in relation to endo that cara e. jones (2015, 1084) has suggested that endo has taken up a diagnostic and cultural location once occupied by hysteria: “each disease pathologizes not only certain physical symptoms, but also social and cultural deviations from female gender norms.” similarly, elaine showalter (1987) has demonstrated how cultural norms of proper feminine behavior has historically shaped the definition of mental illness. i see the pedagogy of pain as a manifestation in the lifeworld of gender bias and historical norms surrounding pain. by its repetitive structure, over time and across spheres, the pedagogy of pain can be understood as performative in that it puts forward an ideal hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 subjectivity related to pain: a person who ignores and endures. a failure to perform according to the pedagogy of pain exposes a person to a cultural arsenal of credibility downgrading, and the figure of the hysteric operates as a personification of unwanted behavior that still looms large over endo patients. the association between pain and womanhood has gained renewed critical attention in recent years. within both academic and lay contexts, gender inequality in pain is being conceptualized as a “gender pain gap,” alluding to the so-called gender pay gap (pase 2021; bimpong et al. 2022). painful or abusive examinations are increasingly being addressed in social media, news, and research as part of the broader phenomena of “gynecological violence” and “obstetrical violence”—forms of violence that have long remained hidden from public scrutiny (simonovic 2019; diaztello 2016). the term “medical gaslighting” is being used in media and research to draw attention to experiences of dismissal and misdiagnosis, both regarding endo and other illnesses (sweet 2019; vargas 2022). this can be read as responses to the pedagogy of pain on a collective level. on the individual level, a main alternative to being seen as hysteric or accepting the ignore-and-endure-position is to pursue another form of subjectivity, the subjectivity that has the power to claim rights within the medical sphere. you have to become a patient. the second epistemic practice, the struggle for diagnosis, refers to the efforts and strategies used by interviewees to become recognized as patients. diagnosis is a crucial step in becoming a patient, a person with medical rights and needs. doctors have long been considered sources of truth on medical matters. the term “doctor,” indicating a learned person, comes from the latin word docere, which means “to teach.”6 however, the interviewees’ experiences show that the clinical encounter is not just about expertise but is also a site of struggle. alexis shotwell aptly describes the medical classification of diagnosis as “a political formation with material effects” (shotwell 2014, 509). many interviewees describe their initial interactions with doctors as characterized by dismissal or disbelief. they were often repeatedly sent home with over-the-counter painkillers or hormones, without further referrals, examination, or diagnosis. while fredrik svenaeus (2000) characterizes the clinical encounter as “an interpretive meeting,” jonathan banks and lindsay prior (2001, 12) go a step further by describing it as a “site of a micro-political struggle” between patient and doctor to define the nature of the patient’s disease. it is in this light i understand the struggle for diagnosis—it is a struggle over interpretation and classification of patients’ experiences, with high stakes for the patient in terms of recognition, diagnosis, and treatment. 6 merriam-webster, s.v. “doctor (n.),” accessed november 18, 2024, https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doctor. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 in many cases, interviewees learn about their diagnosis themselves, often through google searches, the media, or friends. doctors in these situations are needed to confirm the diagnosis rather than discover it. but when they go to the doctor to get their diagnosis confirmed, some doctors refuse to conduct the necessary investigation, and interviewees struggle to get referrals, sometimes for years. to overcome this, they use strategies such as seeking a new doctor or an especially good doctor, often by recommendation from other endo patients. one interviewee, for example, found the diagnosis online and brought the findings to a doctor, saying, “i would like to be investigated for endometriosis because i suspect that this is what i have.” the interviewee recounts that the doctor was “very skeptical” and suggested that even if it was endo, the treatment would still be the same—hormones—and there was no need “to have it on paper.” it was only years later, after coming across a nurse who had extensive experience with endo, that she was referred to a specialist. the specialist identified endometrial tissue attached to her uterus, ovaries, and abdomen. by the time she had the surgery, it had been eleven years since she first experienced symptoms, and she had struggled to be taken seriously by medical professionals. receiving a diagnosis often constitutes a critical turning point for interviewees, clearly marking a before and after in their lives (see whelan 2007). interviewees often express that getting a diagnosis validates that they are not “insane” and that their symptoms are not “all in their head”: it was a relief just to know i wasn’t imagining things because that’s how it felt, like i had imagined everything and that i am somehow weaker than other women who can manage their menstruation. the statement illustrates the positive impact that a diagnosis can have on a person’s self-relation and even their sense of sanity. another interviewee describes receiving a diagnosis as a “victory” because she had been certain of the diagnosis all along. prior studies have also shown that identifying a condition through diagnosis is significant on several levels, including the individual, collective, and societal levels (brown, lyson, and jenkins 2011; hudson 2022). when interviewees experiencing severe symptoms are not recognized as patients, it often takes a toll on their self-relation. this aligns with honneth’s theory of recognition, as interviewees report that they started questioning themselves and their sanity due to how medical professionals treated them. such experiences can damage their epistemic self-respect, as they are not considered “a full-fledged partner to interaction” (honneth 1995, 133; quoted in fricker 2018, 2). several interviewees associate this loss of credibility with gender. one interviewee recalls hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 starting to think that there was something wrong with the way she behaved that made doctors not listen to her. she believed that she “gave off a fragile impression” or that her being “beautiful” and “looking healthy, with rosy cheeks” might have been a disadvantage for her. she recalls an ultrasound where the doctor said that she was unlikely to have endo because she had a “fantastic-looking uterus” and a body “made for having kids.” these associations with femininity, beauty, and fertility were somehow connected with a lower probability of having endo. looking good was associated with feeling good, in line with what has been described as the “beautiful is healthy” stereotype (lachapelle et al. 2014). according to another interviewee, “i am treated this way because i am a woman.” interviewees highlight female gender and youth as particularly associated with not being listened to or taken seriously. repeated negative experiences of this kind led several interviewees to adopt different coping strategies. for example, one interviewee started bringing a friend to doctor’s appointments because she had developed what she refers to as “doctor anxiety,” a version of iatrophobia (fear of doctors). another interviewee took “a pause from doctors” for several years and refrained from seeking medical attention because of the bad treatment she experienced. others discuss potential tactics, such as bringing a man to the doctor’s office, perhaps a father or a friend, based on the belief that men are more likely to be heard. these tactics can be seen as responses to the pedagogy of pain that are mobilized as part of the struggle for diagnosis. while diagnosis often marks a significant turning point, it does not always solve the struggle altogether. for example, during a visit to the emergency room, a doctor suggested to one interviewee that her pain could be related to her history of posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd) and asked if she had attempted electroconvulsive therapy (ect). the interviewee describes how the situation made her feel: “once again, they were calling me hypochondriac. that made me infuriated. how could i be a hypochondriac when you yourself opened me up on the operating table and gave me this diagnosis and then treated me like this afterward?” the statement may seem extreme, but prior research shows that some endo patients experience disbelief and delegitimization of their symptoms before, during, and following diagnosis (hudson 2022). taken together, the pedagogy of pain and the struggle for diagnosis offer stark contrasts to the egalitarian principle that everyone has the same right to health. the experiences of interviewees are, in many cases, the opposite of being considered “a full-fledged partner to interaction” (honneth 1995, 133; quoted in fricker 2018, 2), which constitutes a basis for epistemic self-respect. being labeled a “hysteric” or “hypochondriac” constitutes obstacles that interviewees have to overcome in order to become proper patients. such labels are examples of credibility downgrading, which fricker regards as typical of testimonial injustice. consequently, it is through feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 the struggle for diagnosis, patienthood, and proper treatment that a sense of epistemic self-respect can be maintained. becoming knowledge: an expression of epistemic esteem i finally turn to the concept of “epistemic esteem,” which is closely tied to the process i call becoming knowledge. epistemic esteem concerns social esteem in relation to knowledge. more specifically, the process of becoming knowledge concerns the status of endo experience in shared hermeneutical resources—that is, whether the illness and lived reality of interviewees is taken up as knowledge within society as a whole. has this kind of experience succeeded in becoming knowledge? for honneth, self-esteem is developed through the experience of having one’s contributions, abilities, or way of life valued by society. for fricker (2018, 3), people can be “hermeneutically marginalized” with respect to regions of experience due to a lack of shared concepts, meanings, and interpretative tropes to make sense of their lived reality. even though shared with an in-group, such experiences cannot be rendered fully intelligible across social space because of a structural “undercontribution” to shared hermeneutical resources. if someone’s “pattern of selfrealization is unfairly met with disapproving or even disgusted bewilderment” this can cause a loss of epistemic self-esteem (fricker 2018, 3). i identify two main epistemic practices that are crucial for becoming knowledge. the first is the epistemology of ignorance, which refers to a general lack of knowledge related to endometriosis. the second is epistemic activism, which concerns interviewees’ responses and attempts to change this circumstance. encountering an epistemology of ignorance can be illustrated through a few examples. i have already described the experience of not knowing, which often accompanies early symptoms of endo. i have also mentioned how interviewees have difficulties distinguishing ordinary menstrual cramps from the symptoms of illness. prior research indicates that women face difficulties in understanding what constitutes “normal” menstrual pain or bleeding due to the cultural expectations of silence and concealment called “menstrual etiquette” (hawkey et al. 2022; laws 1990; seear 2009). this menstrual etiquette has been found to contribute to poor knowledge of one’s own anatomy and poor health literacy, which is associated with overall worse health status (armour et al. 2021; hawkey et al. 2022). additionally, interviewees also express an awareness of the fact that different kinds of diagnoses have different statuses. in addition to endo, the mother and daughter interviewees both have irritable bowel syndrome (ibs) and other health issues also considered low status: we have so many weird problems, and who knows? it could be related to endometriosis—it could be something else. i think that there are hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 certain things that doctors just ignore. in twenty years, there will be a diagnosis. just like with diabetes, there was another kind of diabetes that appeared later in life. i am totally convinced that once they pull their finger out and start doing the research, they will figure out a thing or two! they checked me for fibromyalgia, but i don’t have these tender points, so they gave me another trashcan diagnosis: myofascial pain syndrome. i think they have given me every damn trashcan diagnosis there is. in the statement, the mother describes their symptoms as being “weird,” which i interpret as experiencing symptoms that are on the outskirts of medical knowledge. she also describes that doctors tend to ignore these kinds of symptoms, but she believes that medical knowledge will probably catch up eventually and the status of such symptoms will change, “just like with diabetes.” a “trashcan diagnosis” is described as something doctors “give” away, almost to get rid of the problem, when they cannot classify the condition with a proper diagnosis. the notion of endo as a “women’s disease” and the associations with hysteria or trashcan diagnoses shape the recognition experience and the hermeneutical marginalization of endo. low status and poor knowledge appear as interconnected characteristics of endo episteme. how can we make sense of the status and lack of knowledge that affects interviewees’ endo experiences? menstrual stigma and menstrual etiquette make it easier to understand the lack of knowledge on an individual level, but what about the collective level of medical knowledge? one way of making sense of the lack of knowledge on the collective level is to understand it as the result of epistemic practices that produce ignorance. in a special issue of hypatia on “feminist epistemologies of ignorance,” nancy tuana and shannon sullivan (2006) argue that in order to fully understand knowledge production, we must also understand the practices behind not knowing. linda martín alcoff (2007, 39) similarly argues that we should understand ignorance “not as a feature of neglectful epistemic practice but as a substantive epistemic practice in itself.” in their discussion of the production of ignorance, fricker and jenkins describe “the epistemic system” (fricker and jenkins 2017, 270) as a process linking together testimonial and hermeneutical injustice: (1) socially patterned testimonial injustice tends to produce (2) hermeneutical marginalization in relation to one or more areas of social experience; which in turn tends to produce (3) hermeneutical injustice in relation to the intelligibility of those areas of experience. (fricker and jenkins 2017, 271–72) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 relatedly, hudson argues that our knowledge and understanding of endo is limited by an “epistemology of ignorance”—a term coined by charles w. mills (hudson 2022; mills 1999). despite having a similar social and economic disease burden as conditions such as diabetes and asthma, endo has received less attention in government policy and research funding globally (hudson 2022, 21). it has been dubbed “the missed disease” due to its unclear etiology and ambiguity in identification and classification. hudson uses the concept of “undone science” to demonstrate that a lack of knowledge is the result of structural, cultural, and political processes that privilege certain voices, communities, and forms of knowledge while marginalizing others. she notes that the historical constructions of menstruation and women’s pain continue to influence contemporary imaginaries, often holding women accountable for their own illnesses. through her analysis, hudson argues that practices of ignorance and invisibility still shape the political and social landscape of endo. while hudson describes an epistemology of ignorance at the collective level of medical knowledge, my interviews show that, on the individual level, this is manifested as not knowing, having “weird” unexplained symptoms linked to a lowstatus “women’s disease,” or being perceived as “hysterical.” these are examples of how endo episteme appears in the lifeworld of interviewees. i suggest such experiences have an impact on interviewees’ epistemic self-esteem, making them feel that their endo experience is unimportant, low-status, or incomprehensible. these descriptions demonstrate what it is like to have experiences that are not satisfactorily taken up in shared hermeneutical resources, which makes it difficult to make sense of their experience (fricker 2007). let us discuss the second epistemic practice, which can be read as a response to the epistemology of ignorance. i call this practice “epistemic activism,” a term borrowed from josé medina (2012). many interviewees engage in activism to raise public awareness and knowledge about endo. for example, they join demonstrations, engage in social media patient groups, or become members of organizations like the endometriosis association (endometriosföreningen 2022) in sweden. the endometriosis association focused its attention for several years on convincing the state to release national guidelines for the treatment of endometriosis. this objective was finally achieved in 2018 (national board of health and welfare 2018). this fight for national guidelines can be considered a macro-political struggle—in which interviewees participate—in addition to the micro-political struggle of the medical encounter (banks and prior 2001). today’s endo activism should be seen in the context of the wider women’s health movement that emerged across the western world in the 1970s and 1980s. this movement has been identified as an important site for feminist struggles to challenge ignorance and androcentric epistemologies (tuana 2006; whelan 2007; hudson 2022). in “the speculum of ignorance: the women’s health movement and hallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 epistemologies of ignorance,” tuana (2006) describes the movement as an example of an “epistemic resistance movement” that actively resisted “epistemologies of ignorance.” according to tuana, the movement aimed to provide women with basic medical knowledge, uncover the ways women were ignored, and develop new knowledge about women’s bodies and health. its ultimate goal was “to take our bodies back from the institutions of medicine and reframe our knowledge and experiences of our bodies in ways not configured by sexism and androcentrism” (tuana 2006, 2). tuana discusses various examples, including the redefinition of menopause, the anatomical knowledge of the clitoris, and the feminist practice of genital self-exam using plastic speculums. she also mentions the importance of publications like the “women’s health bible” our bodies, ourselves (boston women’s health book collective 1973), and essays such as the myth of the vaginal orgasm (koedt 1970). these strategies aimed to resist ignorance and to encourage women to become “embodied knowers.” they wanted to augment women’s lives by transforming the knowledge about their bodies. for tuana, the women’s health movement demonstrates how resistance movements can be useful sites for understanding how to identify, critique, and transform ignorance. similarly, in addition to raising public awareness, many interviewees report how groups on social media enable them to learn about the variety of experiences, thus enabling comparing-with: “some have it like me, pain all the time, every day, and others mostly in connection with menstruation. it’s individual.” interviewees describe groups on social media as essential for emotional support, which can be especially important if such epistemic support is lacking in one’s immediate social circle. additionally, endo communities are discussed as important sources of medical knowledge: “everything i know [about endo], i’ve learned online by reading in forums written by people with endometriosis themselves. because the doctors knew nothing.” in the words of another interviewee, groups provide “a chance to discuss with people who are not totally incompetent in relation to endometriosis—ha!” these are all examples of how interviewees identify, critique, and transform ignorance and develop embodied knowledge by sharing experience and medical knowledge. they illustrate the concepts of “expert patients” and “internet-informed patients,” which blur the boundaries between forms of knowledge that otherwise separate patient and doctor, as well as blurring experience and expertise (banks and prior 2001; hortonsalway 2004; shaw 2002). the interviewees’ descriptions generally align with emma whelan’s study of endo support groups as “epistemological communities” (nelson 1993; whelan 2007). the central role of experience in patient movements has been recognized before, but whelan argues that these communities also redefine what counts as knowledge. whelan states that the dominant epistemic principles in the community are “(1) that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 patients form a community of sufferers who share common perspectives and experiences; (2) that these communal perspectives and experiences are valid forms of knowledge; and (3) that the only people who truly know endometriosis in an intimate way are those who suffer from the disease” (whelan 2007, 978). like the broader women’s movement, the endo communities described by interviewees are examples of epistemic activism aimed at challenging and overcoming an epistemology of ignorance. the interviewees’ experiences illustrate the inevitable connection between a group’s struggle to become knowers and to transform the knowledge available about them. by transforming knowledge, endo patients can ultimately overcome hermeneutical marginalization and secure a sense of epistemic selfesteem. concluding discussion the social recognition of endo is an important feminist issue. while some research has been done on the epistemic aspects of endo, not much attention has been given to the diagnostic journey and issues of recognition. i contribute to this area by providing a detailed description of the epistemic practices involved in the journey toward knowledge of endo—the practices that constitute endo episteme. i set out to answer the following questions: how do interviewees come to know endo? how is knowledge gained, negotiated, or lost? what are the implications for interviewees’ relation to self? to achieve this objective, i have used fricker’s and honneth’s theories—specifically the notions of epistemic support, respect, and esteem—to conceptualize crucial epistemic processes in the lifeworld of interviewees. the first process demonstrates that becoming a knower of endo is highly relational. concrete others are needed in two key senses: for comparing-with and expressive uptake. the second process involves becoming a patient, which is characterized by encountering a pedagogy of pain and responding with a struggle for diagnosis. finally, the process of becoming knowledge, which concerns the collective level of shared hermeneutical resources, is characterized by an epistemology of ignorance and the efforts to overcome ignorance through epistemic activism. i understand the practices of comparing-with and expressive uptake as essential for gaining knowledge. the pedagogy of pain and the epistemology of ignorance are examples of how knowledge is lost rather than gained—in the sense of creating lost opportunities for learning. the struggle for diagnosis and epistemic activism can be understood as active attempts to negotiate knowledge, overcome ignorance, and push through epistemic obstacles. lack of epistemic recognition impacts the interviewees’ relation to self. when interviewees lack epistemic support, it can affect their sense of truth and their ability to individuate their feelings and experiences. this can undermine their epistemic selfhallström – endo episteme: epistemic injustice and the misrecognition of endometriosis published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 confidence and agency, making it more difficult for them to take the next step of seeking medical attention. when interviewees experience severe symptoms but are not recognized as patients, they begin questioning themselves and their own sanity— their epistemic self-respect is undermined. conversely, receiving a diagnosis becomes proof that they are not “insane” and that their symptoms are not “all in their head.” lastly, when interviewees’ symptoms are regarded as “weird” or related to “trashcan diagnoses,” it harms their epistemic self-esteem in the sense that they are hermeneutically marginalized with regard to their own experience. these examples illustrate how epistemic injustice can affect the knower’s sense of self and not just their knowledge. the three modes of epistemic recognition have played a crucial role in identifying the processes and practices of endo episteme. by conceptualizing these practices, i have enriched the framework provided by fricker and honneth, introducing novel concepts that help us make sense of the interviewees’ experiences. this contribution to feminist and social philosophy can potentially be useful to interrogate other experiences characterized by misrecognition and epistemic injustice. by providing a language to describe common experiences, we can begin to analyze and address them politically. a central example used by fricker is how the concept of “sexual harassment” made it possible to describe what had long been experienced. relatedly, endo episteme illustrates how knowledge is of central concern for the misrecognition of an illness affecting millions worldwide. this way of creating concepts from the lifeworld demonstrates the significance of engaging with the complexities of “real-world political philosophy” (wolff 2015, 22) and “messy empirical reality” (zala et al. 2020). conceptualizing the practices of endo episteme also makes it easier to offer some clues for remedy and insights on “what should be done here and now” (zala et al. 2020, 37). fricker (2018, 4) notes, “one of the intellectual riches of recognition theory is that it offers something positive—an account of interpersonally generated positive self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem, directing our attention to the social relations and arrangements that encourage, nurture, and protect them.” firstly, endo episteme highlights the importance of epistemic support from family and friends—of showing others “epistemic love” (congdon 2018). if such support is missing, it becomes even more essential that other areas like schools and health care systems offer uptake, support, and respect in addition to information. secondly, endo episteme demonstrates the significance of spreading available knowledge, such as creating national treatment guidelines to improve medical practice. the epistemology of ignorance also indicates the need to expand medical knowledge, which is dependent on research funding. as endometriosis still lacks a cure and is not well understood, increasing knowledge in this field is crucial. thirdly, endo episteme highlights the importance of transforming social norms and biases regarding feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 menstruation and pain. this is a challenging task, but it is vital because lost opportunities for knowledge can result in years of delayed 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interdisciplinary approach, edited by trudie knijn and dorota lepianka, 37–53. northampton, ma: edward elgar. zhang, lanlan, elizabeth a. reynolds losin, yoni k. ashar, leonie koban, and tor d. wager. 2021. “gender biases in estimation of others’ pain.” journal of pain 22 (9): 1048–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001. ina hallström is a phd candidate at stockholm university, sweden. her current research focuses on the impact of gender and social recognition on experiences of illness. she aims to advance empirically driven theory development through her work. she is the author of “endo time: endometriosis and the flow of recognition” (2024), published in hypatia. 16491 hallstrom title page 16491 hallstrom final format what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 4 article 3 recommended citation yumuşak, ege. 2024. “what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (4). article 3. 2024 what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry ege yumuşak university of pennsylvania yumusak@sas.upenn.edu yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry1 ege yumuşak abstract philosophers of mind and epistemology have studied extensively what beliefs are and what we ought to believe. yet we are guided toward many of our beliefs by our perspectives: cognitive structures that guide how we see and think. a chief role of ordinary perspective talk is to describe clashes between different points of view that arise when people interact. in this paper, i argue that the most developed extant account of perspectives, elisabeth camp’s, lacks the resources to analyze interactions between perspectives. by contrast, my account of perspectives—the agenda view— better captures the kinds of differences and confrontations that underlie ordinary perspective talk by focusing on the “zetetic” role of perspectives in directing inquiry. keywords: perspectives, inquiry, questions much of epistemology is concerned with what beliefs are and what we ought to believe. yet we are guided toward many of our beliefs by our perspectives. a perspective, in both ordinary talk and philosophy, denotes a psychological orientation. our perspectives influence how we see and think, including how we form our beliefs. rather than being constituted by our beliefs, perspectives explain our broader interpretive inclinations. like belief talk, perspective talk is ubiquitous in social life. we take it that lots of people have perspectives—i have my perspective and you have yours—and that these perspectives can be more or less similar. in this paper, i take an interest in perspective ascriptions and comparisons in social life. in particular, i focus on a practice ordinary speakers engage in whereby they treat perspectives as a social 1 i’m especially grateful to susanna siegel and elisabeth camp for extensive engagement with ideas in this paper. i also owe thanks to mark richard, jane friedman, bernhard nickel, michele moody-adams, sally haslanger, zachary irving, selim berker, parimal patil, ned hall, lidal dror, megan entwistle, zach gabor, audiences at the university of pennsylvania, the eastern apa, and members of the columbia society of fellows, the goodattention project, and the inquiry network for their comments. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 currency—a generally accepted metric by which they can meaningfully categorize and compare people’s epistemic orientations. as part of this practice, ordinary speakers ascribe perspectives to people (such as a feminist perspective or a privileged perspective), and they take it that their perspective ascription reveals epistemically significant commitments of the perspective holder. furthermore, they rely on the perspective ascription to predict whether individuals’ perspectives will interact in complementary or adversarial ways. while some perspectives will be allied, others will clash. i call the notion of perspective that treats perspectives as a currency in social life social perspectives. philosophers of mind and epistemology have not studied extensively what perspectives are and which perspectives we ought to adopt. one notable exception to this status quo is the work of elisabeth camp (2009, 2013, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020, forthcoming), where she appeals to perspectives to explain how a way of thinking is implemented psychologically, expressed linguistically, and transmitted socially. camp’s account of perspectives identifies perspectives with mental dispositions that individuals voluntarily or involuntarily rely on to arrive at interpretations of an object, event, or state of affairs in a given domain. camp’s account has been influential in recent years and employed by philosophers working in different areas from philosophy of mind and language to ethics and aesthetics.2,3 to model a social perspective, i take campian perspectives as a starting point. i argue that while successful in explaining the personal experience of having a perspective, camp’s account is unable to make sense of this social function of ordinary perspective talk. to capture social perspectives, we need an account that emphasizes different features of perspectival experience and imposes new constraints on what counts as a social perspective. i focus here on the features of perspectives that most directly contribute to the epistemic, hermeneutic, and 2 e.g., beaver and stanley 2021; king 2021; podosky 2021; smith and gardiner 2021; whiteley 2022. 3 political philosophers have taken an interest in a “social perspective” before; however, they consider social perspectives not as psychological phenomena but rather as properties of social groups that can be represented in political discourse. as i’ll explain below, iris marion young’s (2000) treatment of perspective is a well-suited (albeit coincidental) progenitor for my view. i’ll say more on this below. (see williams 1998; muldoon 2016.) another precedent for my view can be found in the works of sally haslanger and her use of the notion of a “schema.” haslanger theorizes most extensively about sewellian social meanings in this context but also mentions the internalization of these meanings (e.g., haslanger 2015, 2018, 2019). yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 practical roles that we find in ordinary speakers’ treatment of perspectives as a social currency. my aim is simply to clarify what these features are. to this end, i focus on a central example we should want a theory of perspectives to analyze: feminist perspectives. using feminist perspectives as the core target of analysis, i propose a new understanding of social perspectives. rather than characterizing social perspectives as tools of interpretation, i take social perspectives to be structured around questions. in my account, social perspectives are sets of inquiry-structuring questions, and as such, they actively guide our inquiries into the world. my view delivers two consequential verdicts. first, someone has a social perspective if and only if they have an inquiry-structuring question that sets their epistemic orientation in different domains. (therefore, individuals who accept some principles of feminism can still fail to count as having a feminist perspective.) second, this theory explains what having a social perspective commits one to. social perspective holders are committed to a set of questions that unify their perspective. perspectival interactions such as alliance or opposition are thus explained by reference to these commitments. social perspectives are allied when two people share inquiry-structuring questions and clash when two people are invested in different inquisitive pursuits. the paper is structured as follows. in section 1, i draw a distinction between personal and social perspectives, and identify my target of analysis—a social perspective. in section 2, i introduce “a feminist perspective” as a social perspective. in section 3, i analyze the dominant account of perspectives in contemporary philosophy due to elisabeth camp. in section 4, i argue that camp’s view can reveal what’s shared between two perspective holders, but it cannot predict clashes of social perspective—for example, the perspectival clash between the feminist and the antifeminist. in section 5, i present my alternative proposal—the agenda view—and conclude with some suggestions about how we can make use of the theory of social perspective in social life. 1. two kinds of perspective talk in ordinary language, some of the most associated words (what linguists refer to as “collocates”) with “perspective” are “my,” “different,” and “your.”4 ordinary people often talk about perspectives using a possessive to point to a social position 4 the corpus of contemporary american english lists “my,” “different,” and “your” as the most frequent collocates of perspective that precede “perspective.” the three numbered statements that follow come from an online corpus (davies, n.d.). the statements are edited for clarity, and emphases are added by me. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 or experience that bins them with some people and sets them apart from others. consider the following example obtained from a corpus of ordinary speech: (1) from my perspective as someone who has been an employer, i would say this: all service jobs that are not professions are “demeaning” if you insist on looking at them that way. but they aren't demeaning if you just get a grip. this example features a speaker who avows a particular perspective—the perspective of someone who has been an employer. ordinary speakers often avow a perspective using the locution “from my perspective.” i call these avowals perspective reports. perspective reports, like belief or emotion reports, have the function of expressing (with some veracity) what someone’s perspective is. these reports show that we utilize a notion of perspectives according to which perspectives—mental and therefore private as they are—can be made public by these reports. perspective reports are used to mark our differences. (1) is a perspective report made by a speaker who thinks that there are two ways to look at the same phenomenon (service jobs) and uses perspective talk to call attention to this difference by avowing one interpretation and disavowing the other. while people who have not been employers might characterize service jobs as demeaning, the speaker suggests that they disagree with this interpretation.5 in fact, the second most common collocate used with “perspective” is “different” as in the following statement: (2) it’s better to think of v14 as representing a temporary conceptual barrier for women than it is to think that it defines an athletic leap. admittedly, i have a different perspective on these things than many commentators here, perhaps because i've spent some time at the higher levels of the sport. here, too, the speaker uses perspectival language to compare and distinguish themselves from other people—in this case, from other rock climbers who might share many aspects of the speaker’s perspective but differ in their interpretation of v14 (a difficulty level in a climbing task). 5 as an anonymous reviewer notes, in (1), it might also be the case the speaker is seeking to signal their epistemic authority. even this reading of the utterance, though, is perspectival: they would take it to be the case that their epistemic authority is derived from an epistemic privilege awarded by their perspective (qua interpretive capacities and inclinations). yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 the speaker’s use of the phrase “perspective on these things” communicates that they take themselves to have a coherent way of thinking in this domain (not just a different belief) that sets them apart from other commentators. unlike other commentators, they bring into interpretive play a way of thinking that prioritizes mental work over physical strength when it comes to assessments of difficulty levels within a sport.6 in both of these examples from ordinary perspective talk, speakers treat perspectives as modes of interpreting a phenomenon or situation that can be compared to another. i call this use of perspective a social perspective. in ordinary speech we regularly (though not exclusively) use perspectives as a social currency in this manner. when we do, we presuppose that these ways of thinking have some internal unity. this is because, in order to evaluate two perspectives as allied or clashing, we need to measure them against each other. we do that by stipulating a unifying feature internal to each perspective. the criterion of internal unity is most obvious when we talk of political perspectives. here’s another example, from the same corpus, where an ordinary speaker refers to a “feminist perspective”: (3) i have always unconsciously looked at the world from a feminist perspective, but it wasn’t until i studied gloria jean watkins, who wrote under the pen name of bell hooks, that i began to refer to myself as a feminist. reading gloria jean watkins, this speaker suggests, helps them realize that they have a feminist perspective—that their perspective instantiates the properties associated with this social perspective. in other words, they claim that they unknowingly had a perspective in common with other feminists. they thereby endorse a view on which this perspective, “the feminist perspective,” can be shared between people in virtue of some properties intrinsic to “the feminist perspective.” these properties unify the perspective. (the unifying feature also allows us to find a feature that opposes it—a feature that would unify an antifeminist perspective. i’ll say more on this in the next section.) this particular use of ordinary perspective talk—whereby perspectives are assumed to have some internal unity and can be shared—suggests a notion of a perspective that departs from the traditionally operant understanding of perspectives. in philosophy, a perspective is often understood to be unique to an individual and composed of other attitudes including beliefs and emotions. i refer to 6 i’m thankful to many bouldering enthusiasts for helping me dissect (2). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 this notion of perspective as personal perspective.7 philosophers, compelled by skeptical worries, have appealed to personal perspectives to make the point that an individual’s experience is colored uniquely by their own subjectivity. this insight motivates the philosophical problem of explaining how different individuals can come to have a shared experience of the world. in this vein, we can point to works by philosophers such as gottfried leibniz and daniel dennett as historical precedents for a theory of personal perspective.8 having sought to understand subjectivity, consciousness, and the limits of our access to reality, leibniz and dennett have engaged in explanatory projects that differ greatly from the cases i have presented. the ordinary uses of perspective talk that i place at the center of a theory of social perspective don’t refer to the condition of a limited knower. instead, they refer to an orientation that different individuals, such as employers and feminists, can share in virtue of having certain psychological attitudes. these ordinary speakers care about whether or not others share this orientation and how their own orientations will interact with others. unlike personal perspectives, social perspectives play a distinctive role in explaining interpersonal alliances and clashes of points of view. a more thorough examination of perspective talk would take us too far afield. what i hope to have shown is that we can draw a preliminary distinction between two characterizations of perspectives: one in which perspectives are private and idiosyncratic, and another in which perspectives have social purchase due to their interactions with other perspectives. people who can bring their perspectives into alignment can cooperate toward achieving certain epistemic and practical goals, whereas perspectival clashes can impede cooperation and mutual understanding. therefore, a theory of social perspective should individuate perspectives by social categories, like a feminist perspective or an employer perspective, and explain interactions between the features of these perspectives. this way, we can see that 7 i prefer “personal” to “individual” because social perspectives are also held by individuals. 8 for example, leibniz’s famous town analogy in the new essays puts forth the idea that our world is like a town that different drawings, all from different perspective, can represent (see, e.g., leibniz 1996). by using this analogy, leibniz seeks to reveal how perceivers each observe one aspect of reality. another representative example of this tradition is dennett’s discussion of how someone’s perspective changes if they come to know they’re a brain in a vat. to this end, in his provocative essay “where am i?,” an envatted dennett (1978) chronicles several shifts in perspective that can happen when one gets connected, disconnected, and reconnected with their brainin-a-vat. both the form and the content of dennett’s essay lay bare the philosopher’s enchantment with an individual’s unique perspective—their private, individualized, mediated experiences of what the world is like. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 some perspectives are intrinsically opposed (such as the perspective of a feminist and the perspective of an antifeminist, or the perspective of an employer and an employee). 2. feminists, their allies, and their adversaries feminists have different experiences of the world and thus different interpretations of reality, but they can often point to when and how they developed a distinctly feminist perspective. for feminists in the 1970s in the united states, this development was often facilitated by a practice called consciousness-raising.9 feminist vivian gornick (1971), for instance, describes how a feminist perspective is cultivated at a consciousness-raising session: “looking at one's history and experience in consciousness‐raising sessions is rather like shaking a kaleidoscope and watching all the same pieces rearrange themselves into an altogether other picture, one that suddenly makes the color and shape of each piece appear startlingly new and alive, and full of unexpected meaning.” gornick thus affirms that developing a feminist perspective has interpretive significance. several women are profiled in gornick’s piece. take jen, an actress who participates in a consciousness-raising group. jen’s perspective is marked by many inclinations. her dispositions that realize these inclinations include the following: • attending to how other women are treated in the workplace, • characterizing someone’s unwelcome sexual attention as sexual harassment, and • finding a fear response upon hearing about sexual harassment at the workplace fitting. these dispositions allow jen to gather information in a selective way and use this information to interpret the context she is placed in. armed with this perspective, jen reaches some substantive conclusions about the social world: jen finds that harassment is normalized on the set (her workplace). she understands that she is a victim of harassment. describing what’s shared between each participant in the consciousnessraising group, gornick (1971) writes, “each of [the participants], without specific 9 juliet mitchell (1971, 62) characterizes the method of consciousness-raising as a middle-class american reinterpretation of the “speaking bitterness” practice of peasants in prerevolutionary china. this method was later used by the chinese communist party as part of the land reform process. unlike consciousness-raising groups, these meetings were confrontational and were designed to publicly humiliate landowners for their past wrongs. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 awareness, is beginning to feel the effects of the consideration of woman’s personal experience in a new light—a political light.” but having the same perspective qua feminist doesn’t imply having identical modes of thought. another feminist, susan brownmiller (1970), writes about the movement’s inevitable splits: “new york radical women’s split in perspective—was the ultimate oppressor man or capitalism?— occupied endless hours of debate at the thursday evening meetings. two warring factions emerged, dubbing each other ‘the feminists’ and ‘the politicos.’” despite huge disagreements, both factions in the group were feminist in character, and their members embodied a feminist perspective, according to brownmiller. characterizing perspectival interaction presents theoretical challenges. even though individual feminists might respond to a given situation with their unique set of dispositions, they share an orientation toward the world. when they share this orientation, despite their differences, we recognize that they share a feminist perspective. capturing the alliance between different feminists is the first theoretical challenge. a second theoretical challenge arises from the following observation: some interpretive tools that are available to jen can easily be shared by individuals who are adversarial to feminism altogether. consider the scenario in which the interpretive tools that i attributed to jen concerning her patterns of attention, evaluation of states of affairs, and emotional appraisals are shared by a serial harasser. call this person “this serial harasser.” when we consider what modes of thinking jen and this serial harasser employ, we find a serious amount of overlap. this serial harasser is attuned to the same facts that a feminist is attuned to. after all, a feminist like jen and a serial harasser like this serial harasser can share an interest in understanding the politics of accountability for sexual harassment despite their opposing motivations. consequently, they can share many attentional dispositions, such as noticing the changing cultural tides around acceptability of certain actions. in what way, then, is this serial harasser an adversary to jen? this serial harasser and jen have conflicting interests (e.g., in subjecting jen to sexual attention) and they have opposing beliefs (e.g., about whether men are entitled to women’s sexual attention). these interests and beliefs provide distinct causal pathways to adopting their overlapping modes of thought as well as different sorts of justification for employing them. but neither the causes nor the grounds of their dispositions are constituents of their perspectives. so, we cannot point to these features to explain the clash between their perspectives. a theory of social perspectives ought to explain the opposition between jen and this serial harasser’s perspective at the level of the perspective itself rather than passing the buck to interests and beliefs. this is the second and more difficult theoretical challenge. i will suggest that this challenge can yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 only be met by identifying a unifying commitment that every feminist would manifest and that every antifeminist would stand in opposition to. 3. perspectives as filters what ingredients do we need to develop a theory of social perspective? in this section, i consider elisabeth camp’s approach. in some respects, camp’s writings on perspectives are in tune with the social turn. camp’s view connects perspectives in language—a social representational medium—to perspectives in psychology—an individual embodiment. as such, her works present a natural starting point for a theory of social perspective. however, i will argue that new ingredients are needed to capture social perspectives. camp defines perspectives as open-ended “modes of interpretation,” and, more precisely, as ways of “gathering, remembering, and explaining a range of social phenomena, on an ongoing basis” (camp 2013, 335, 336).10 for camp, perspectives necessarily involve dispositions to interpret information or dispositions that aid interpretation. several types of dispositions fall under this category: • dispositions related to attention: dispositions to notice, dispositions to see as more or less salient, dispositions to ignore • dispositions related to cognition: dispositions to treat as central, dispositions to evaluate as fitting, dispositions to seek a particular explanation, dispositions to activate a particular concept • dispositions related to affect: dispositions to impose an emotional valence camp does not clarify whether having any particular type of interpretive disposition is a necessary or contingent condition of having a perspective. 10 in earlier work, camp (2009, 110–11) refers to a perspective as an “intuitive, holistic principle for organizing our thoughts about some topic.” although camp characterizes perspectives (and characterizations) as intuitive, i’ve omitted this feature in my reconstruction of her framework. it seems to me that camp has a choice here: (a) explain the intuitiveness of a disposition as being due to their involvement in a perspective, or (b) explain the involvement of a disposition in a perspective by appealing to its intuitiveness. if intuitiveness is what’s basic, camp would have provided an account of intuitiveness across her writings in over a decade. because she hasn’t, i’m treating the notion of perspective as basic. in later works, she says, perspectives are open-ended because they are not tied to a particular subject, lack contents, and can be updated over time (see camp 2018a, 2019, 2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 there are several features of the view that are important. first, campian perspectives are clusters of interpretive dispositions that lack any underlying unity. i’ll return to this issue in my evaluation of her view. second, campian perspectives are tools for thought rather than thoughts themselves.11 they aid in interpretation, but they are not representational states. as such, they lack contents.12 camp is interested in perspectives because she seeks to understand how perspectives can be communicated, bringing moral and political effects in their wake. for instance, slurs, she claims, communicate a derogatory perspective and, hence, bolster social injustice (camp 2013, 2018a.). perspectival language also has more 11 regarding the relation between beliefs and perspectives camp (2013, 336) says: “one can retain a perspective while adopting or abandoning any particular propositional claim; there need be no proposition whose endorsement or absence is essential. further, explicitly entertaining, even endorsing, a certain set of propositions—including higher-order structural propositions concerning prominence and centrality—is neither necessary nor sufficient for actually ‘getting’ a perspective.” 12 however, they are closely tied to complex and context-sensitive representational structures that camp calls “characterizations.” characterizations represent people, objects, places, events, and types. perspectives generate and update these characterizations. the paradigmatic example of a characterization is a stereotype, such as the stereotype of a suburban mom. someone who goes around westchester encountering suburban moms can deem more and more features central to being a suburban mom. they can learn that certain behaviors are typical suburban mom behavior (such as complaining about the students that are bused in from the city to attend the suburb’s well-funded public school). this new information becomes part of their characterization of a suburban mom. consequently, these complaints become salient to them in social settings. when they incorporate this information into their characterization of a suburban mom, their disposition to find these complaints salient becomes part of their perspective. the relationship between characterizations and perspectives can be easily problematized and requires a deeper discussion than what i’m able to provide here. here’s why: under one interpretation, we could think of campian perspectives as sets of propositional and nonpropositional attitudes, combined with a dispositionalist account of belief. dispositionalists about belief treat belief as camp treats perspectives (see dennett 1978; lewis 1974; schwitzgebel 2013). the notion of characterizations poses problems for this reading, however. characterizations are representational even when they’re not propositional. elsewhere, camp (2007, 2018c) also endorses representationalism about both sentential and nonsentential thought, which she argues has map-like content. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 modest harmful effects: metaphors can make good insults because they communicate and transmit ways of thinking that offend their targets (camp 2017b). perspective communication functions differently than the communication of truth-conditional content—this is why the term, “perspective,” is useful. crucially, the meaning of expressive utterances goes beyond the propositional. take an example of metaphorical speech: (4) george is a tail-wagging lapdog of privilege!13 to interpret this sentence, the reader must put on a perspective. this can only be done by reconfiguring one’s entire way of thinking about george in this context and seeing george through a particular frame. it cannot be done by thinking that the proposition that <george is a tail-wagging lapdog of privilege> is true. metaphorical speech requires more than simple counterfactual thought and generates more understanding than simple counterfactual thought. we can understand the metaphor in (4) to the extent to which we have an intuitive understanding of the way of thinking associated with perspective expressed by it. on the flipside, thinking of george through this perspective can explain more of his behavior than the mere fact that he has had a privileged upbringing. putting on a perspective is a distinct mode of cognition. perspectives are realized not by taking some higher-order proposition to be true but by implementing a cognitive structure. because of this fact about perspectives, perspectives appear in camp’s work as a solution to several puzzles regarding expressive speech, like the imaginative resistance one feels when asked to imagine a certain state of affairs to be true, or the wrongness of slur-use even in contexts where the speaker doesn’t intend to endorse a derogating stance toward a social group, as in: (5) she could have married a * instead.14 according to camp, slur-use is perspectival transmission par excellence. to understand sentences like (5), one ought to put on the perspective of someone who sees the social group as subordinate. this seeing does not necessarily involve accepting the proposition that members of that social group are subordinate; rather, it causally activates a whole host of evaluative judgments and perceptions regarding the target. slurs thus communicate and impose a psychological endorsement of a derogating perspective regarding a social group. 13 this example is from camp (2017b, 48), who borrows it from richard moran (1989, 90). 14 this example is from camp (2018a, 36). i omitted the slur. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 similar mechanisms are involved in transmitting perspectives via telling details, thick terms, and other modes of expressive speech. even though perspectivetaking does not necessarily involve simulation, it necessarily has experiential features. when someone implements the cognitive structure associated with a perspective, they see an object as salient or have a particular emotional reaction toward an object (camp 2018a). the experiential involvement of the perspective-taker invokes a desire to resist (or react badly to) seeing the world thusly (as depicted by that perspective). perspectives show up in a variety of other settings as well. according to camp, scientific modeling and understanding fiction, too, requires use of perspectives. for example, the lotka-volterra equations of population distribution, which describe the effects of predator-prey dynamics, and the computational model of the mind invite us to put on particular perspectives to understand the relevant phenomena (camp 2020). these scientific models highlight or explain certain features of their target phenomena in terms of other explanatory frameworks. likewise, in fiction, we follow a character’s (or narrator’s) expressive choices and take note of how they apply different modes of thinking to the narrated events (camp 2017a). once we get a handle on the perspective, we can put on the perspective and understand the meaning of the story. based on these observations, i propose that we think of campian perspectives as filters organizing information (which often function implicitly or habitually): the filter view: perspectives are idiosyncratic interpretive dispositions that organize information. every individual has stable filters that are shaped throughout their life experience and are therefore as complex as the individual’s biography.15 one’s own set of filters determines their idiosyncratic way of processing and integrating information into their knowledge base. (they can also put on others’ filters temporarily.) with each filter, an individual’s access to facts is further mediated. perspectives both aid the individual by shaping their understanding of the world and impede them by corrupting their interpretations of reality with false characterizations. this reading captures the richness of camp’s account, and it is supported by camp’s writings, in which studies of perspectives are presented that take an individual in a particular context, enumerate their interpretive dispositions, and name the set of 15 camp does not claim that we should think of perspectives as indexed to individuals. perspectives, for camp, are sets of interpretive dispositions that are potentially idiosyncratic. i characterize the ecumenical nature of the view as idiosyncrasy because campian perspectives do not display internal unity. thanks to elisabeth camp for discussion on this point. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 dispositions that they have as their perspective. across her papers, camp employs her account of perspectives to do the following: 1. describe the way we actually think and the psychological constructs we deploy in tandem (camp 2013, 2017b, 2018a), 2. justify our use of this psychological mechanism to understand our world despite the partial viewpoint it awards us (camp 2019, 2020), and 3. articulate norms of perspectives such as informational and functional aptness to give us tools to better shape our perspectives (camp forthcoming). these are theoretical feats of the filter view of perspectives.16 all of the projects associated with camp’s research program take an individualistic approach to the study of (personal) perspective whereby a perspective is unique to an individual (while possibly sharing aspects with others’ perspectives). although we can socially transmit campian perspectives, everyone incorporates a set of interpretive dispositions into their filter in their own way. in this theory, what we share linguistically and what we implement psychologically are personal perspectives qua modes of interpretation, made up of a set of dispositions. on the whole, the filter view thus presents a rich account of perspectives.17 according to the filter view, the most mundane dispositions like the disposition to see red cars as salient are part of one’s perspective qua their idiosyncratic collection of interpretive inclinations.18 16 it should be apparent that this view faces challenges when it comes to evaluating whether someone has successfully understood the meaning of a perspectival piece of language. every individual will employ different interpretive dispositions to understand a metaphor or a slur, or when it comes to accounting for perspectival change. these issues are tangential to those brought up in this paper. 17 the idea that perspectives are filters has broader acceptance than camp’s work. for instance, ryan muldoon’s call to expand rawlsian public reason appeals to perspectives. muldoon (2016, 24) writes, “perspectives provide us with filters on the world—they tell us what is important, and what we can ignore.” in muldoon’s account, perspectives are representational states that provide justification for beliefs. 18 despite camp’s (2022, 39) claim that “the decision about whether to even attempt to engage with an alien fiction [is] especially difficult,” it follows from her account that changing one’s perspective is a matter of having a new disposition. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 4. the feminist perspective as a filter can the filter view illuminate the interactions between jen’s perspective and this serial harasser’s perspective? using a campian schema, we can ascribe to jen the following filter: df = • a disposition to pay attention to how other women are treated in the workplace, • a disposition to characterize someone’s unwelcome sexual attention as sexual harassment, and • a disposition to find a fear response upon hearing about sexual harassment at the workplace fitting. we might think that the filter view captures what it’s like to have a feminist perspective. after all, df represents a distinctive (and political) way of seeing social reality. before she became a feminist, this way of seeing was not accessible to jen. df is a short list. by characterizing jen’s filter more fully, we can capture more accurately what other dispositions figure in her feminist perspective. the filter view has the resources to provide a richer characterization of jen’s filter. however, the filter view lacks a unifying component of the sort i argued a theory of social perspective needs. this is because, ultimately, the causes of each of these dispositions is irrelevant to the filter view.19 df, which constitutes jen’s feminist perspective, can easily be shared by individuals who are adversarial to feminism altogether. as i suggested, this serial harasser, too, manifests df. regarding perspectival difference and sameness, camp remarks, “rather than seeking to identify absolute sameness and difference in perspectives, it is often more accurate to speak only of relative overlap and stability” (camp 2019, 26). but even granting this point, an explanatory lacuna remains. any overlap between a feminist 19 due to space constraints, i do not entertain the charge of superficialism at length. while relevant, this charge is distinct from my focus (on the criterion of internal unity) in this paper. the shortcomings of camp’s account in this regard mirror the challenge of explanatory depth levied against other dispositional views by various authors (see quilty-dunn and mandelbaum 2018). for instance, we can criticize the dispositionalist by pointing to causal-mechanical or structural explanations that involve perspectives. we attribute causal powers to someone’s perspective at the psychological level when we say jen’s perspective caused her to identify her experience as sexual harassment. perspectives also figure into structural explanations. when someone claims that the workers’ class-conscious perspective enabled them to win their union election, they claim that a perspective can effect structural change. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 and a serial harasser’s perspectives is different in kind from the overlap in dispositions between two feminists. i’ll argue that, to analyze the differences, we ultimately need to go beyond camp’s account to consider what unifies clusters of dispositions, not just which dispositions can be found in a cluster. of course, jen and this serial harasser might have other dispositions that set them apart. they will attach different emotional valences to the same phenomenon or regard as central different considerations. let’s consider how a proponent of the filter view might explain the differences between jen and this serial harasser. camp holds that while perspectives qua filters can be deployed as tools for thinking without committing the subject to the truth of any claim, they need not be thoroughly noncommittal. some perspectives can commit the subject to a way of thinking that reliably supports certain beliefs.20 could we not say that feminists fall on the committal side of this spectrum? admitting that perspectives can commit one to beliefs sacrifices an attractive feature of the filter view. according to the filter view, as originally stated, perspectiveholders implement an interpretive cognitive structure that we can characterize as “feminist,” even if their interpretive dispositions are not derived from the same (or any) doctrinal principle. giving up on this feature would run against the spirit of the view.21 feminism is a perspective ascribed to individuals that have various levels of doxastic commitment to a variety of propositions. perspectival opposition should ideally be explained without reference to beliefs (conscious or unconscious).22 20 for example, camp says, a self-professed evangelical protestant and a rational choice theorist fall on the committal side of this spectrum (see camp 2019, forthcoming). camp’s other example of this range is the liberal and the conservative. the conservative, in camp’s example, has a noncommittal perspective because their interpretive dispositions are not supported by a particular belief: when they hear about a proposal to build a mosque at ground zero of the world trade center site, camp explains, they simply diagnose the proposal “as a fitting exemplar of the encroaching dangers” (camp 2022, 15). the liberal, on the other hand, finds it fitting that a “politician who advocates for laws supporting a traditional definition of marriage . . . turns out to be a homosexual or unfaithful” without being able to point to a set of “liberal” beliefs to support their mode of thinking (camp 2022, 15). 21 the belief that would be less costly to admit as central to having a feminist perspective would be the belief that there exists gendered oppression. however, even this belief might not be explicitly endorsed by some people who still exhibit a feminist perspective (it might be merely presupposed by the question on their agenda). even if it is endorsed by most feminists, according to the view defended in this paper, it is not sufficient to have a feminist perspective. 22 an anonymous reviewer asks whether emotional responses, which are also part of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 what about the overlap between the filters of a feminist and their allies? much like this serial harasser and jen, feminists in these factions might share some components of df. at the same time, they might have drastically different dispositions due to their beliefs regarding the source of women’s oppression. df might overlap with this feminist’s filter, that feminist’s filter, and the other feminist’s filter by virtue of sharing a different disposition with each and every one of them. how can the overlap between the pairs be leveraged to provide an account of what it means to have a feminist perspective? it’s logically possible that each of these individuals will share only a few dispositions with every other feminist without sharing any disposition as a group. this logical possibility speaks against identifying the feminist perspective as the overlap between feminist filters.23 the filter view can at best reveal campian filters, provide a way out of this problem. but camp holds that many perspectives are entirely devoid of emotion. she writes, “and even those [perspectives] that do motivate emotions need not cause emotional responses on every occasion” (camp 2013, 337). although camp might categorize a feminist perspective or a liberal perspective or an employer’s perspective as the kind of perspective that does tend to motivate emotions, i think we would grant that any particular individual lacking attendant affective proclivities could still count as a holder of the perspective in question. a feminist who doesn’t get angry at patriarchal figures would still count as holding the feminist perspective. thanks also to zachary irving for discussion on this point. 23 my critic might ask me to consider a view in which each filter is constructed by the long list of dispositions that all the feminists in the world instantiate in relevant settings and ask why that long list can’t be the social perspective. even with such an account, we would still run into problems when we try to differentiate between perspectival alliance and clashes. by conjuring this list, we could perhaps find the most common disposition for a feminist. what type of disposition could this be? say that the disposition to remember whether someone is a harasser is the most common interpretive disposition that a feminist has. any time someone mentions that someone they know is a harasser, they retain this information. not only is this disposition not particularly helpful in inferring anything else about what a feminist would bring to the table in a social setting (like the consciousness-raising group), we can think of causal pathways that have nothing to do with feminism that award one a knack for harasser names. suppose sexual harassers tend to seek legal advice from a particular law firm. the secretary at this law firm might write down and remember names of harassers who contact an attorney at the firm without having any knowledge of the fact that people whose names they are disposed to remember are harassers. in addition, we can also imagine that a serial harasser can retain the same information for other purposes. the worry arises because the dispositional account yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 what’s shared between each pair but cannot explain what deems each perspective a “feminist perspective.” the filter view populates perspectives with too many dispositions without giving us a sense of what unifies them. without making sense of the unity of each feminist perspective, we cannot make sense of what makes a perspective feminist and how a feminist perspective clashes with an antifeminist perspective. our interpretive filters are simply too idiosyncratic to be used as a social currency. the filter view at best obscures features that are essential to a theory of social perspective. though i have given considerations that point toward a criterion, i have not yet identified what criterion could play this role. in the next section, i identify this criterion and sketch a novel view of social perspective. 5. to have a perspective is to have an agenda political theorists have occasionally used the term “social perspective” in the context of a theory of perspective representation in politics. in inclusion and democracy, iris marion young presents the most developed view of social perspective in this key. young seeks to introduce a concept that justifies the inclusion of a member of a particular social or political group in a deliberative body. she finds that the existing notions of belief and interest are too focused on what conclusions people draw rather than how they pick starting points for inquiry. furthermore, beliefs and interests are easily hijacked by motivated reasoning and levied for discriminatory purposes. so, seeking the representation of all persuasions or interests does not necessarily further the goal of democratic deliberation. rather, we ought to seek the inclusion of something else. as a solution, she proposes the notion of “social perspective.” this notion, she argues, corresponds to the starting points for discussion rather than its conclusions.24 consequently, representation of perspective, young maintains, promotes diversity in starting points of discussion and achieves the inclusion of a set of realities that a deliberative body would otherwise not consider. including the feminist perspective, for example, ensures that participants in a deliberation are attuned to issues that matter to feminists. one of young’s central examples concerns how different parties reacted to an early case of a serial harasser’s public trial—the trial of us senator robert packwood. has no story to tell about why particular pieces of information are gathered: what use this information serves and where the disposition to gather this information has come from. 24 a social perspective, young claimed, “does not contain a determinate specific content”, much like campian perspective and the view i’ll go on to introduce. instead, it “consists in a set of questions, kinds of experience, and assumptions with which reasoning begins, rather than the conclusions drawn” (young 2000, 137). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 it was an open secret that senator packwood had what was then called a “skirt problem.” yet, not only had allegations against packwood not been investigated, but he had also convinced the washington post to hold off a news story about him by providing false information until after the day of his election. in response to accusations and lawsuits that followed, many of packwood’s colleagues had rushed to his defense and argued that it was not worth the senate’s time to discuss this matter. however, they faced resistance to their attempt at sweeping packwood’s harassment under the rug when nearly all women legislators in congress—from both parties—united around one demand: that the senate hold hearings into the matter. these women staked out a feminist perspective by setting a certain starting point for discussion. young describes the feminist perspective as follows: these women did not agree on political values and they had many divergent interests; they did not agree in their opinions of whether packwood was guilty of harassment. their purpose was to influence the senate’s agenda, and in doing so they expressed a similar perspective on the meaning and gravity of accusations of sexual harassment, a perspective that many of the men seemed not to understand, at least at first. (young 2000, 140) as young explains, the similarity in the feminists’ perspective was not about what conclusions the feminists were drawing but about their way of seeing things, whereby the harassment suffered by packwood’s aides was salient and central. their attunement to sexual harassment as a mode of gender-based oppression marked them as feminists and committed them to shared goals. in this case, the feminist legislators’ interpretive lens is best analyzed by considering what questions a feminist is guided by. feminist legislators wanted to know the truth about what packwood did. this characterization can also help us identify the broader epistemic orientation that these legislators share with other feminists. feminist legislators, like feminists who manifest df, are attuned to answers to the question, qf = how can we stop gendered oppression?25 25 in a recent paper, camp (forthcoming) suggests that maps, word clouds, and diagrams might represent perspectives better than declarative sentences (as we do with propositions) or pictures (as we do for analog representations) do. my view is very much in the spirit of this new suggestion by camp. representations like maps, word clouds, and diagrams are designed in a task-relative manner to aid the user to yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 even if the feminists disagree about what practical goals should unite them as feminists, qf defines an epistemic orientation that each and every one of them is committed to. some feminists might not explicitly pursue answers to qf. still, this question will structure a feminist’s everyday inquiries at least in the following sense: once a feminist discovers a discrepancy in the treatment offered to people of different genders, these acts will become salient to them. the salience or centrality of these things means that qf has purchase on their psychology. it directs what information they gather.26 in fact, gornick, in her piece about consciousness-raising, describes the practice as one that pursues perspectival change by getting women to ask certain questions. she says, “we gave people sentences with which to frame questions about their lives they would not otherwise have been able to ask” (gornick 1990). call this proposal “the agenda view”: the agenda view: social perspectives are inquiry-structuring questions that form an agenda. the agenda view no doubt needs further precisification.27 for the purposes of this paper, i will elaborate on one aspect of this view: the relationship between guidance by an inquiry-structuring question and the activity of inquiry. find answers to a set of questions. likewise, in philosophy of attention, some have suggested that a cognitive process is deemed task-congruent if the possible outputs of the process assign focus on a possible answer to a question within that task (koralus 2014). 26 i elaborate elsewhere on the distinction between questions we have chosen to pursue answers to and those we find ourselves attuned to answering (yumuşak 2022). some questions that an individual is guided by flow directly from beliefs or desires they hold. others might be explained by their social position even if they are not mediated by beliefs they hold. 27 my analysis here should not be taken to speak against the inclusion of zetetic dispositions in a personal perspective or in the filter view. an enthusiast of the filter view can, for instance, propose to add a disposition to the filter view that captures that a feminist perspective holder must be attuned to answering qf. this view would be an agenda-theoretic version of the filter view. as a reviewer points out, camp’s view itself speaks of holistic principles by which we organize information. some of these holistic principles might very well be principles concerning evidence-gathering. while personal perspectives can express zetetic commitments, they would not be lacking as a personal perspective for not expressing such commitments. it is not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 the notion of an agenda captures how some questions play a structuring role in our mental lives because they are closely connected to what we pay attention to and what we take to be central in thought. when a feminist is guided by qf, they do not single-mindedly seek an answer to this one question. rather, each salience experience stimulates a feminist to ask further questions and form intentions to pursue related inquiries. when they find out about experiences they share with other women in their consciousness-raising group, they refine their mental habits to become attuned to certain sources of information. they participate in whisper networks to learn about cases of harassment or about institutional mechanisms for recourse. these diverse set of activities are all part of their guidance by qf. therefore, we can say that qf is on a feminist’s agenda because of the functional role it plays in their epistemic life. according to the agenda view, inquirystructuring questions endow us with a social perspective in a domain. to formulate versions of this view, we should heed the developments in a burgeoning field of epistemology where theorists are renegotiating the divide between the epistemic and the practical. jane friedman has identified the “zetetic” as “pertaining to inquiry,” and asked whether our traditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms (friedman 2020; cf. falbo 2023). the debate regarding norms of belief or the bounds of the epistemic notwithstanding, friedman’s writings have inspired a more expansive study of our inquisitive practices. philosophers have distinguished between inquiring and other inquisitive attitudes such as curiosity and wonder and have taken an interest in psychological research into phenomena such as exploratory search and mindwandering.28 the agenda view—a zetetic view of social perspective—proposes that someone has the perspective they do in virtue of the set of questions by which they are guided. the unity within the feminist perspective, according to this view, is not achieved by an overlap in interpretive dispositions; rather, it is achieved by having an orientation toward evidence-gathering—a zetetic commitment. being charged with questions is unlike the influence of one’s moral character or core beliefs. still, these questions play an important role in our psychology and our epistemic life. a feminist’s agenda, for instance, endows them with a feminist outlook by guiding how they gather and organize information along the lines of these inquiries. even when someone is not committed to any principles of feminism or essential for a personal perspective to be united under any commitment, let alone a zetetic one. 28 perhaps most relevantly, susanna siegel (forthcoming) has argued that “lines of inquiry are extended through the practice of treating things as zetetically relevant to questions.” (see also whitcomb 2010; friedman 2013; carruthers 2018; sripada 2018; yumuşak 2022.) yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 affective responses associated with it, they will have a feminist perspective by being epistemically oriented toward answering qf. this zetetic commitment picks out what’s committal in having a social perspective. how do some patterns of attention and cognition come to play an inquirystructuring role while others don’t?29 there is a dialectical relationship between some of our patterns of attention and questions that we pursue. which questions we ask are greatly influenced by what’s salient to us. they influence, in turn, what’s salient to us. when salience experiences embody questions, they serve the function of putting the subject on the path of a particular inquiry. in cases where salience experiences do not structure inquiry, we don’t find this dialectical relationship.30 what’s the relation between questions on someone’s agenda and their interpretive dispositions? the agenda view states that each social perspective is identified with an agenda, but it does not disregard the role that cognitive or affective interpretive dispositions play. interpretive dispositions—an individual’s tools of 29 i reserve the notion of “being guided by a question” for cognitive dispositions that structure an agent’s inquisitive orientation. someone can act in line with certain patterns of experience and attention at a moment in time without being guided by a question. an anonymous reviewer raises a further important question in this vicinity, regarding granularity in question assignments. different candidate agenda views can spell out different standards for agenda ascription. some of these views would likely point to historical, social, and material forces that construct socially meaningful question sets. while question assignments pose a surmountable challenge, the agenda view draws a controversial distinction between people who have a perspective in a domain and people who don’t. because not every set of interpretive dispositions that someone has relates to questions, some sets of interpretive dispositions do not endow one with a perspective. sitting on the ridge of a mountain and looking at the sunset, for example, does not endow one with a perspective. likewise, being closed-minded, understood as not having any live questions in a domain, also does not count as having a perspective in this view. lastly, having a set of quirks such as remembering yellow-colored things people have also does not count as having a perspective. despite their influence on one’s patterns of attention or evaluation, these sets of dispositions are not inquiry-structuring. my view allows us to see that failing to cultivate a social perspective on a subject matter is a distinct epistemic failing. 30 the strength of one’s zetetic commitments can be related to different features: the number of attentional and cognitive dispositions one has that realize their commitment, or the number of questions on their agenda. while an agenda-theoretic view can accommodate degrees of commitment, even the weakest form of commitment would meet the internal unity constraint. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 thought—help the individual find answers to questions on the individual’s agenda. by ascribing a social perspective to someone, we rationalize these tools of thought. in this view, a feminist’s guidance by questions on qf is realized by the interpretive dispositions that enable them to see relevant information as salient and central and certain responses as fitting. interpretive dispositions like those in df determine the particular way in which an individual feminist holds a feminist perspective.31 agendas, as such, are explanatorily prior to interpretive dispositions, even though one’s agenda and their interpretive dispositions mutually reinforce one another. according to the agenda view, a serial harasser, when they oppose the investigation of sexual harassment, is guided by a question that is altogether adversarial to someone in pursuit of qf, such as the question, “how can i undermine mechanisms of recourse for sexual harassment?” the serial harasser and the feminist might be attuned to the same sorts of information—if this information can help them answer subsidiary questions on their agenda—without thereby sharing a perspective. the overlap between their interpretive dispositions explains the shared aspect of their orientation toward the world without losing sight of what causes their clash: their zetetic commitment to opposing inquiry-structuring questions. the agenda view also explains how people can be guided by the same questions and still have opposing beliefs in the same domain.32 for instance, the disagreement between feminists regarding the roots of gendered oppression is compatible with their shared investment in figuring out what the root of gendered 31 a reviewer asks about a mundane interaction in which someone with a feminist perspective evaluates a man’s contribution to a discussion as sexist. does this interaction involve an inquiry? the agenda view characterizes this person’s perspective as feminist because they see information regarding the man’s behavior as salient. furthermore, they rely on this information to make inferences that are in line with the broader zetetic commitment spelled out by qf such as asking whether a particular interaction is an instance of sexism. being attuned to instances of sexism is a way in which a feminist can be guided by qf. 32 a reviewer asks if beliefs’ (or interests’) role in determining one’s attentional patterns might cast doubt on the explanatory priority of agendas to beliefs (or interests). for the purposes of this paper, i’m interested in uncovering what makes a feminist and antifeminist perspective opposed to one another. i’m not interested in the causal determinants of one’s social perspective. the agenda view identifies an epistemic commitment that is shared by everyone who holds a certain social perspective such that we can point to this commitment to ascribe a social perspective to them, predict what information will stand out to them, and criticize them for holding one social perspective rather than another or holding a social perspective badly. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 oppression is. members of these factions share a perspective because of their zetetic commitment. this alignment reflects these feminists’ starting point, in virtue of which they have the same perspective. from this starting point, they arrive at divergent conclusions. 6. conclusion philosophers have been interested in campian perspectives, a view in which perspectives act like filters. the theory i’ve sketched follows an insight from wittgenstein, much like camp’s theory: “when i have a perspective on a domain, i ‘know my way about’ that domain” (wittgenstein 1968, sec. 123; quoted in camp 2019, 29–30). knowing one’s way about the social world, i’ve argued, requires standing in a relation to a set of questions. accordingly, our theory of perspectives in the social domain should place primacy on how perspectives direct inquiry and steer our thoughts toward answers to certain questions. social perspectives, in my view, are inquiry-structuring questions that form an agenda. having a social perspective involves manifesting a variety of interpretive dispositions that embody our guidance by these questions. what makes it the case for someone to have the feminist perspective, the working-class perspective, or the professional-/managerial-class perspective is their guidance by a set of questions associated with these social or political positions. in this view, social perspectives’ distinctive contribution to our epistemic life is shaping our inquisitive practices. we can now return to the ordinary speakers we encountered in the beginning. regarding these perspectives as social perspectives requires that we take them to be unified under an agenda. when the speaker of (1), for instance, avows the social perspective of an employer, they avow a commitment to an agenda. thus, they give us license to criticize them for this agenda. for example, we can criticize an employer for not being zetetically oriented to answer a question like, “how are the workers in this profession treated?” statement (1)’s utterance, this criticism would press, gives away the fact that they neglect the experience of those who work service jobs. my claim is not that perspective reports by agents report agendas. rather, my claim is that we have to treat agents’ perspective reports as expressions of their zetetic orientation to make sense of the internal unity they presume. we can leverage the theory of perspectives i laid out to expose the role that their zetetic orientation plays in endowing individuals with a social perspective. similarly, we can make sense of (2) by associating the perspective of a highlevel athlete with an investment in the question “how does mental work figure into success?” this agenda ascription proposes a particular way of understanding the social perspective of a high-level athlete—one according to which the internal unity feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol. 10, iss. 4, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 of the perspective is captured by the athlete’s zetetic commitment to this question.33 in this light, it makes sense to say that the speaker in (3) is attuned to the oppression of women by having qf on their agenda, even if they have not yet formed the views that they later found in bell hooks’s work. why should we care to have an account of social perspective? for one, predicting scenes of perspectival clash and alliance can be pragmatically and epistemically productive. we might make use of these predictions when designing a subway system that considers wheelchair users’ perspectives or when we seek to pass a controversial resolution to boycott a certain company at our food cooperative. furthermore, we might seek to change our social perspective so that we are aligned with others. people who can bring their social perspectives into alignment can cooperate toward achieving certain epistemic and practical goals. we might also seek to develop a more sophisticated language for criticizing each other’s perspectives. with my analysis of the clash between the feminist and antifeminist perspectives in particular, i’ve sought to show that recognizing that what’s perspectival about the opposition between two people can be useful. i have argued that what’s perspectival about their opposition has to do with how the questions on their agendas interact. their beliefs are merely instrumental to the formation and maintenance of these agendas. as daniela dover (2019, 49) argues, excavating conflict is the work of interpersonal criticism, enabling us “to explore our initial reactions to one another, rather than merely expressing them.” uncovering why our perspectives clash can tell us more about the way we think and how it interacts with the way others think. a deeper understanding of social perspective enables this mode of criticism. going beyond social interactions, we might also find it individually emancipatory to gain more self-knowledge about our social perspectives. one’s recognition of their own agenda can transform their guidance by certain questions into an active project that they pursue. agenda, in politics and ordinary life, is often a bad word. the agenda view puts agendas in the right place by characterizing one’s perspectival commitments as zetetic (rather than doxastic) commitments and thus makes sense of ordinary perspective talk in social life. even if we don’t subscribe to the view that the study of 33 as an anonymous reviewer points out, it’s worth acknowledging that not every perspective that displays internal unity is socially resonant. some perspectives i mention such as the perspective of the employer or the high-level athlete, or other perspectives such as the perspective of an optimist, might not be associated with recognizable agendas in a particular historical or conversational context. still, they can be treated as a social perspective and analyzed as essentially expressing zetetic commitments. yumuşak – what’s in a perspective? perspectives, interpretation, and inquiry published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 inquiry should take primacy in epistemology, we can recognize that theorizing about our practices of gaining knowledge through interacting with other epistemic agents requires that we make room for social perspectives—like the feminist perspective.34 references 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philosophy at the university of pennsylvania. her work examines how the psychological interacts with the social. her forthcoming work takes up issues concerning interpersonal disagreement, the normativity of attention, and ideology. 16686 yumusak title page 16686 yumusak_perspective final format feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 introduction recommended citation fehr, carla. 2022. “feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). introduction. 2022 feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence carla fehr https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4533-1589 university of waterloo carla.fehr@uwaterloo.ca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4533-1589 fehr – feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence1 carla fehr artificial intelligence (ai) profoundly affects issues of justice and well-being in individual, social, and global contexts. from social media to search engines, and in domains ranging from policing and judicial decision making, to the assessment of insurance, university, and job applications, to the creation of visual arts and beyond, algorithms are embedded in many of our lives. some of these algorithms promise incredible contributions to human welfare. for example, some ai-powered systems can detect very early stages of medical conditions, and others are being developed and used to combat human trafficking. also, consider social media's role in liberatory social movements such as arab spring, black lives matter, and #metoo. however, many developments in ai have significant adverse impacts, including job loss, privacy violations, political polarization, and the spread of disinformation. scholars such as safiya noble, cathy o’neil, and ruha benjamin have demonstrated the pervasive, real-world negative consequences of algorithmic bias and discrimination against racialized people, women, and members of other marginalized groups. noble (2018) recounts the insult of using “black girls” as a keyword in a google search for activities for her stepdaughter and nieces and being primarily directed to pornography sites. noble documents the phenomenon of algorithmic oppression, the “masking and deepening of social inequality” resulting from discrimination against racialized people and women that is “embedded in computer code, and increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not” (noble 2018, 1). she argues that “algorithmic oppression is not just a glitch in the system but, rather, is fundamental to the operating system of the web” (noble 2018, 10). benjamin (2019) refers to the near-ubiquitous technologies that amplify racial hierarchies as the new jim code. o’neil (2016) coins the term “weapons of math destruction” (wmd) to describe algorithms that do harm (for example, encoding racism), impact many people, and function as a black box 1 many thanks to laura foster, katy fulfer, jesse hoey, catherine hundleby, trystan goetze, leah govia, aimée morrison, kem-laurin lubin, lynne sargent, jamie sewell, and twenty-seven anonymous reviewers. your labour and expertise were vital to the production of this special issue. i would also like to thank the feminism, social justice and ai workshop participants and the authors of the papers in this volume. it is comforting and inspiring to be part of a community of scholars who generously supported each other's work and conduct a kind of philosophy that makes the world a better place. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4533-1589 feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 blocking the inner workings of the algorithm from evaluation. o’neil provides a host of examples of wmds that, under a thin veneer of objectivity, reify and recreate cultural biases that systematically harm members of marginalized groups. one example describes recidivism models that overpredict future criminal acts of black defendants and underpredict future criminal acts of white defendants. given these justice-focused benefits and harms of ai, ai continues to be an apt and urgent topic of feminist philosophical engagement. this special issue is the culmination of a collaborative effort that began with the 2021 feminism, social justice, and ai workshop. workshop participants were solicited through a public call for proposals. selected participants submitted full papers, which we discussed and developed. participants were then invited to revise papers and submit them for consideration for this issue. the papers in this issue were drawn from that pool of submissions after a double-anonymous review. understanding and addressing algorithmic bias and discrimination one group of papers in this volume focuses on understanding and addressing algorithmic bias and discrimination. within this group are papers focusing on the barriers or challenges to debiasing algorithms. oisín deery and katherine bailey characterize a dilemma inherent in debiasing some algorithms. they point out that when assessing algorithms, there is a trade-off between normative correctness and descriptive correctness. they use the example of a google search for images of ceos. only about 5 percent of fortune 500 companies have women ceos. so, should the output of google search results reflect this number or a number representing a more equitable situation? deery and bailey write that in cases like this, two options present themselves. either prioritize descriptive accuracy over normative correctness, which has the potential cost of perpetuating or amplifying bias, or instead prioritize normative correctness, with the potential cost of withholding ethically useful information, even if we thereby avoid perpetuating or amplifying bias. (19) deery and bailey argue that we will likely need to make these choices on a case-bycase basis. in many situations, the preferred solution will be to control for the adverse effects of bias rather than debiasing the models themselves. linus ta-lun huang, hsiang-yun chen, ying-tung lin, tsung-ren huang, and tzu-wei hung focus on the challenges of debiasing explainable ai (xai). xai models have more transparent decision-making processes and are more likely to expose their biases than other ai systems. huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung explain that technical xai, the view that technical experts can handle debiasing xai, is mistaken. instead, they advance and fehr – feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 advocate for integrated xai, which draws on diverse and marginalized perspectives in developing and assessing xai. the second subgroup of papers on algorithmic bias and discrimination focuses on bias and fairness in terms of structural injustice. using health care as a case study, ting-an lin and po-hsuan cameron chen frame ai bias as a structural injustice. lin and chen argue that fairness cannot be achieved by computational means alone because there is a need to address social structure and power imbalances in ai development and use. deploying iris marion young's social connection model, lin and chen argue for distributing the responsibility for ai-mediated injustices among those who participate in the injustice, and they provide a set of practical recommendations for the pursuit of ai fairness. alysha kassam and patricia marino confront the problem of proxy discrimination, which arises when an algorithm does not consider sensitive characteristics (such as race) but does consider putatively neutral characteristics (such as zip code) that turn out to be correlated with a sensitive characteristic. proxy discrimination is a source of anti-black racism. kassam and marino argue that fairnessas-parity, which aims at creating “equal rates of accurate and inaccurate predictions” between groups and is a common response to proxy discrimination, fails to address structural racism (2). starting from a structural view of racism kassam and marino argue that “algorithms should be evaluated with respect to their broader social impact and whether their use exacerbates or mitigates racial stratification” (2). harms perpetuated by ai several papers in this volume focus on understanding and addressing concrete harms created by ai. emma mcclure and benjamin wald use the example of google searches to demonstrate that machine learning algorithms can communicate hostility and exclusion and so inflict environmental microaggressions on members of marginalized populations. they argue that tech companies such as google should be proactive by retraining their algorithms on less biased datasets—for example, on black lives matter archives—and should restrain their algorithms from doing harm by hiring people with lived experience to curate liberatory autocomplete responses for common racialized queries. michael randall barnes explores the role of ai in online radicalization leading to real-world violence and argues that “better ai” is not a solution to this problem. he is concerned that in favouring a technical fix, “big tech reveals an overall ideology in which technological ‘progress’ is valued over human flourishing” (3). barnes argues that these ai-centric solutions are a form of propaganda because a focus on the future potential of algorithmic solutions dehumanize [content moderators], obfuscate the harms they face, and complicate the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 debate about the distribution of responsibility in actually addressing these challenges. (3) barnes argues that regular users should pressure big tech to address this problem and that content moderators should be supported and included in the development and implementation of strategies for reducing online radicalization. epistemic oppression and injustice, and algorithmic oppression some papers in this volume demonstrate how algorithmic oppression contributes to epistemic oppression and injustice. a common expectation that racialized people explain the racism they experience or defend their assessments of experiences as racist can result in uncompensated and onerous labour that nora berenstain (2016) calls epistemic exploitation. tempest m. henning evaluates one strategy for resisting this epistemic exploitation: to suggest that one's interlocutors “just google it.” henning considers how theories of argumentation would reject this response as evading the burden of proof and failing to engage in a collaborative argumentation project. she argues that these rejections of the “just google it” strategy are unacceptable because they fail to consider the heavy cost inflicted on racialized people by requiring a defence of their experiences of racism. however, henning rejects the “just google it” strategy because of racism baked into google search results. not only is it unlikely that antiracist information would be suggested by a privileged or racist person's search, but they would also likely receive information that would make the problem worse. given that epistemic exploitation is harmful and turning to google is not viable, henning considers alternative strategies, ranging from asking for compensation for the pedagogical labour to declining to engage in conversations about racism, for avoiding epistemic exploitation. henning shows that racism built into ai blocks its use as an antiracist educational and political tool. heather stewart, emily cichocki, and carolyn mcleod argue that social media algorithms support and develop algorithmic sorting and targeting. algorithmic sorting refers to grouping social media users into separate, closed-off, and biased informational communities (9), which can decrease exposure to people who hold different perspectives. algorithmic targeting occurs when information is presented to a user based on predictions about what they want to see (9). algorithmic targeting can decrease people's engagement with perspectives and information that challenge their assumptions and beliefs. stewart, cichocki, and mcleod argue that algorithmic sorting and targeting lead to social distrust and undermine cooperation, which is associated with members of marginalized communities being denied full status as knowers. arianna falbo and travis lacroix argue the importance of investigating cultural code-switching in emerging ai technologies. cultural code-switching refers to a fehr – feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 person changing how they present and construct themselves in response to changes in their social environment. while cultural code-switching can signal group membership, it can also lead to cultural smothering, a form of self-censoring in which “one alters aspects of their cultural identity in response to an unwelcoming or hostile social atmosphere” (3). cultural smothering can harm members of marginalized groups. falbo and lacroix point out that we exist in relationship with ai systems that encode conventions of dominant cultures. as a result, cultural smothering can be mediated by ai systems. falbo and lacroix warn that a failure to implement codeswitching capacities in ai risks entrenching and widening social inequalities. friction and discomfort with feminine and colonial ai papers by alexis elder and shelley m. park demonstrate that it can be ok to feel uncomfortable in the face of ai that trades on misogyny and colonialism. alexis elder uses the confucian moral concept li (禮) to understand and address the gendered abuse of feminized ai, such as siri and alexa, used as home assistants. elder uses li in a way that refers to ritual or etiquette and “as a tool for resisting inherited habits and maladaptive patterns” (18). she writes, “these devices fail, not because they introduce or cause sexism but because they make it harder to resist the sexism that is already the water we swim in . . . . we need more friction when it comes to our assumptions and ‘instinctive’ actions around gender” (18). in her analysis of social robots who do care work, shelley park offers a reinterpretation of the uncanny valley, which refers to human discomfort with human replicas that look almost but not quite human. the uncanniness portrayed in cultural depictions of social robots has become both an engineering and a marketing problem for robot engineers. park recasts uncanniness in a psychoanalytic frame, arguing that social robots doing care work echo gendered and colonial labour and, as such, are a moral rather than a technological challenge. park argues that our discomfort with uncanniness is an apt response to gendered colonial violence. she writes that “social justice may depend—in part—on designing robots that heighten rather than reduce our sense of the uncanny, leaving us less ‘at home’ with our intimate relationship to ai” (23). looking forward what would it mean to create feminist ai? while it remains vital that feminist scholars respond to harms perpetuated by extant ai systems, os keyes and kathleen a. creel demonstrate that opportunities remain for feminist scholarship on the development of new algorithmic systems. keyes and creel take inspiration from feminist philosopher alison adam’s 1998 book, artificial knowing: gender and the thinking machine, and revive her arguments in the context of current technology. echoing adam, keyes and creel imagine a feminist ai and “thinking through the ways feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 in which ai research could be informed by feminist theory” (adam 1998, 156; quoted in keyes and creel, 3). for example, both the texts by adam and by keyes and creel attend to whose knowledge and interests are represented in ai systems. adam raised concerns about the unacknowledged situatedness of the data included in early ai systems, cyc and soar. keyes and creel point out current problems of the partiality and situatedness of the data being used to train current ai. even though current systems are based on different technology, keyes and creel point out that the problem of ai being trained on biased data sets remains urgent. finally, keyes and creel explore strategies for increasing the “representationality and plurality of machine learning systems’ underlying ‘knowers’” (3). cross-cutting themes there are additional themes that cut across these groups of papers. first, several papers in this volume take a structural approach to feminism and ai and, in doing so, draw on the work of iris marion young. in addition to the papers by lin and chen and by kassam and marino, young’s structural approach to oppression, as well as her social connection model of political responsibility, surfaces in the papers by barnes; falbo and lacroix; and stewart, cichocki and mcleod. second, papers by lin and chen; barnes; henning; and mcclure and wald, in addition to developing theoretical, philosophical positions, also support feminist praxis by providing concrete suggestions for addressing the problems they document. a third theme involves the importance of moving beyond technological solutions to problems of algorithmic bias and injustice in ai. this theme arises in the work of barnes; mcclure and wald; lin and chen; falbo and lacroix; and huang, chen, lin, huang, and hung. even though this issue focuses on feminism, social justice, and ai, these papers also engage a wide range of additional philosophical fields, including ethical and social theory, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of language, psychoanalytic theory, and confucian philosophy, demonstrating that feminism, social justice, and ai is a topic of broad philosophical interest. references adam, alison. 1998. artificial knowing: gender and the thinking machine. new york: routledge. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. cambridge: polity. berenstain, nora. 2016. “epistemic exploitation.” ergo 3 (22) 569–90. https://doi.org /10.3998/ergo.12405314.0003.022. fehr – feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 o’neil, cathy. 2016. weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown. noble, safiya umoja. 2018. algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. carla fehr is the wolfe chair in scientific and technological literacy in the department of philosophy at the university of waterloo, where she works in socially responsible philosophy of science, feminist philosophy of science, feminist philosophy of biology, and feminist epistemology. fehr is associate director of the apa-csw site visit program. she is a coeditor of feminist philosophy quarterly and the editor of this “feminism, social justice, and artificial intelligence” special issue. intro fehr title page intro fehr final format reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science: epistemic achievements, social structure, and diversity feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation sledge, piper, and collin rice. 2025. “reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science: epistemic achievements, social structure, and diversity.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (2). article 2. 2025 reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science: epistemic achievements, social structure, and diversity piper sledge university of arizona psledge@arizona.edu collin rice colorado state university collin.rice@colostate.edu sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science: epistemic achievements, social structure, and diversity piper sledge and collin rice abstract standpoint and feminist epistemologies have provided a number of theoretical advancements concerning the ways we ought to think about the production of knowledge across scientific disciplines. despite these theoretical contributions, in this paper, we critique what we call the “thin” application/ implementation of diversity within the epistemic practices of science and academia. as an alternative, we place these theories in conversation with recent philosophy of science and indigenous epistemology focused on the epistemic aims of communal explanation and understanding. we contend that conceptions of diversity that focus on the standpoints of individual researchers and attempts to merely “add diversity and stir” make it more difficult for these epistemic goals of science to be achieved. we then argue that for diversity to contribute to increasing the variety of explanations and promote more substantive understanding of epistemic communities requires a “thick” implementation that incorporates lessons from standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemologies into the heart of scientific practices. keywords: standpoint, feminist epistemology, indigenous epistemology, explanation, understanding, epistemic diversity 1. introduction in this paper, we provide an epistemic foundation for increasing diversity in science inclusive of, but exceeding, representational diversity—acknowledging that the term “diversity” is itself contentious. specifically, we argue that diversifying science is epistemically motivated because it will improve the explanations and understanding produced by scientific inquiry. but we argue that achieving these epistemic benefits requires us to move beyond focusing on the diverse characteristics of individual researchers and focus on the interwoven and hierarchical social structures of scientific inquiry in which scientific explanations and understanding are constructed, tested, and adopted. we build on contributions from several feminist scholars and from indigenous epistemology to show how the philosophy of science literature on explanation/ feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 understanding and various feminist/standpoint epistemologies have been insufficiently implemented in the context of the western european genealogy of current scientific inquiry. despite each of these theoretical literatures refocusing on structural aspects of scientific communities, within scientific practice—and academia more generally—social categories of identity such as gender and race tend to be treated as an aspect of the situated knowledge of individual researchers who are impervious to the cultural conditioning implicit in scientific training. inclusion of diverse individual standpoints are, then, expected to lead to alternative ways of interpreting data and to infuse a degree of creativity in the generation of different explanations and understanding. we contend that these in-practice attempts to promote diversity in science and academia would be more effective if they more robustly engaged with fundamental aspects of standpoint, feminist, and indigenous theories. rather than focusing solely on the characteristics (or perspectives) of individual researchers, calls for the diversification of science must account for the complex social structures of scientific inquiry in order to effectively promote the generation and consideration of wide-ranging sets of explanations and ways of understanding. while many feminist philosophers have noted the importance of social structures for generating scientific objectivity (harding 1995, 2015; longino 1990, 2002) or rational decision-making (solomon 2001), our approach is novel in focusing on the ways that science’s epistemic aims of explanation and understanding are generated, justified, and integrated by communities of scientists rather than individual researchers. our argument brings various feminist and indigenous epistemologies into conversation with recent debates within philosophy of science centering on explanation and understanding. bringing these literatures into conversations is beneficial since, we will argue, in-practice attempts to leverage diversity into improved epistemic outputs for scientific and academic communities have typically fallen short. first, we argue that updated views about explanation/understanding can provide unique epistemic arguments for diversifying scientific and academic communities and bolster the case for incorporating many of the social interventions suggested by feminist and indigenous epistemologies. second, attending to the shortcomings (and strengths) of recent attempts to diversify science can improve our philosophical accounts of how scientific communities produce explanations and understanding. let us be explicit about the main argument of the paper and how it will structure our discussion: p1. section 2: while the recent philosophy of science literature on explanation and understanding provides strong epistemic reasons for diversifying science, effectively implementing those changes requires more detailed engagement with sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 feminist and indigenous investigations concerning the social structures that produce explanations and understanding. p2. section 3: similarly, while feminist and standpoint epistemologies provide additional reasons for diversifying science, effectively implementing those changes requires a more detailed understanding of the social structures that produce explanations and understanding than is currently used in what we call “thin” implementations of diversity within science and academia. p3. section 4: in response, drawing inspiration from indigenous epistemology, we propose a structural/“thick” implementation of these literatures that pays more attention to social structures, entrenched power relations, and place involved in the construction of scientific explanations and understanding.1 c. section 5: we conclude that a structural/thick implementation of the lessons of standpoint, feminist, and indigenous theories will substantially improve/ deepen the explanations and understanding produced by scientific communities and academic institutions. unfortunately, these literatures—philosophy of science debates concerning explanation/understanding, standpoint/feminist epistemologies, and indigenous epistemologies—have rarely been put into conversation, despite their many overlapping aims. debates concerning social epistemology of explanation and understanding have been limited in their claims by a lack of engagement with the epistemic benefits of alternative ways of understanding that coexist with scientific practices that themselves represent distinct (i.e., eurocentric) standpoints. additionally, in-practice attempts to diversify academia and science to date have been overly focused on (tokenizing) the characteristics of individual researchers and, as result, have neglected many of the social structures and power relations involved in the ways that epistemic communities construct explanations and understanding. this lack of crossover is unfortunate because there is a significant potential payoff from bridging these subfields in both theory and practice. we suggest that by characterizing current normative scientific practices as only one way of understanding, rooted in a eurocentric, masculinized standpoint, creates possibility space for imagining new ways of doing science that enhance representational diversity and give life to more complete explanations and understandings of the phenomena studied by scientists. we first investigate the epistemic arguments for diversifying science that can be drawn from the recent philosophical literature concerning explanation and understanding, and examine where this literature would benefit from engaging more fully with standpoint, feminist and indigenous epistemologies. we then explore how, despite standpoint and feminist theories highlighting many of the social structures of 1 “thick” here is an intentional play on the work of geertz (1973) and cottom (2019). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 science and academia, current “thin” implementations of diversity, in terms of unique standpoints of individual researchers, makes the achievement of these epistemic goals much more difficult.2 in response, attempts to diversify scientific and academic communities must take into account the limitations and opportunities that social structures (for which individual identities typically serve as proxies) provide. only by addressing the structural contexts of the epistemology of scientific communities will alternative perspectives be effectively incorporated into the processes by which the broader scientific community develops, tests, and accepts different ways of explaining and understanding phenomena. our interest in this paper lies not in rehashing debates over the theoretical arguments of various feminist or standpoint epistemologies. instead, our focus is to investigate how a more substantive understanding of the relationship between the epistemic aims of science and the lessons of feminist, standpoint, and indigenous epistemologies suggests practices through which those aims may be more effectively implemented in practice. while many of the epistemic benefits we seek are evident in the expanse of feminist epistemologies and standpoint theories, attempts to diversify academic communities built around implicit logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism have largely missed the mark and have largely failed to produce the kinds of epistemic benefits envisioned by feminist scholars. put differently, standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemologies stand as an epistemic intervention that we have not actually made yet because diversity has largely been implemented by focusing on the properties of individuals rather than restructuring aspects of epistemic communities, which these theories support. the epistemic case for diversity that we make here relies on conceptualizing scientific understanding and explanation as rooted in experience, values, and background assumptions and on adopting a culture of inquiry that includes and values ways of understanding that are currently omitted from, or marginalized within, 2 we use the difference between thick and thin rather than between individual and social since the latter fails to capture the distinction we aim to highlight here. individuals (and their characteristics) are one aspect of the social structure of science and the larger matrix of social structures within which science occurs. thus, thin and thick implementations are both social conceptions of the processes of science. we aim to highlight that a “thin” conceptualization of the social aspect of science focused on additive conceptions of individual characteristics is crucially different from a “thick” conceptualization of the social aspects of science that focuses on the social structures, interactions, power relations, and places in which science happens. thus, it is the way in which these approaches conceive of the social aspects of science that is importantly different, not that one is social and one is individual. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to be clearer on this point. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 normative scientific processes, while being attentive to the power dynamics at play. after critiquing several ways that diversity has been implemented within science and academia, we lean on and honor the traditions of black feminism and indigenous knowledges (especially indigenous feminisms) that have long made clear the epistemic benefits of multiple ways of knowing and their interactions (e.g., collins 1986, 1989, 2000, 2019; barker 2019; cajete 2000; dotson 2015; hooks 1989; moreton-robinson 2013; kimmerer 2013; kovach 2009; patterson et al. 2016; l. smith 2012). most importantly, these epistemological cultures make clear the types of multilevel structural changes that must occur to decenter eurocentric conceptions of science/objectivity and to instead establish a context of relationships across multiple ways of knowing, rather than an additive or inclusive model by which these ways are assimilated into (or subsumed by) eurocentric science. by echoing and bringing together these traditions, we hope to bring renewed attention to the power of these perspectives for scholarship and change within practices of science and academia more broadly.3 the following section argues that, while recent literature within the philosophy of science suggests unique epistemic arguments for diversifying science, in-practice implementation of those arguments requires a more thorough engagement with the structural hierarchies and power relations of scientific communities. in section 3, we argue that, despite numerous theoretical advancements from standpoint and feminist scholars, “thin” understandings of diversity focused on increasing the number of standpoints of individuals have been, and will continue to be, insufficient for improving the explanations and understanding of scientific communities. section 4 draws on indigenous epistemology to develop an alternative “thick” implementation of diversity that draws on standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemologies focused on improving the explanations and understanding generated by epistemic communities. finally, section 5 explores empirical evidence and interventions required to discover mechanisms of change that will most effectively promote these epistemic payoffs. 2. the social epistemology of explanation and understanding 2.1. shifting from individual knowledge to communal explanation and understanding within the epistemology literature, a crucial shift has been moving away from the exclusive focus on individual agent’s knowledge—which traditionally has required 3 following ahmed (2012), we aim to investigate what work “diversity” currently does in science and imagine the possibilities for deeper engagement with the full spectrum of what diversity could do if we shift away from implementing diversity as a type of property or resource of individuals and instead tap into the potential of relationships among multiple ways of knowing within epistemic communities. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 truth, objective justification, and individual belief—toward a focus on the epistemic concepts of explanation and understanding and the ways these are produced by scientific inquiry (elgin 2017; khalifa 2017; potochnik 2017; rice 2021). there has also been a growing literature on the social epistemology of these concepts that recognizes the various ways they are produced (or accomplished) by groups and communities rather than individual scientists. in this section, we show how these shifts within the literature (2.1) enable novel kinds of epistemic arguments for diversifying science (2.2). we then contend that the implementation of those arguments would benefit greatly from deeper engagement with standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemologies (2.3). while knowledge tends to focus on singular propositions that are believed by individual knowers (indeed, this is the overwhelming focus of traditional epistemology), explanations and understandings are typically thought to consist of “bodies of information,” different parts (or aspects) of which might be grasped by different agents (elgin 2017; rice 2021). in addition, unlike the knowledge literature’s focus on believing truths about the actual world, most accounts of explanation and understanding have focused on how these epistemic aims require investigating what would (or would not) be different in various counterfactual situations (grimm 2006; elgin 2017; le bihan 2017; potochnik 2017; rice 2021; woodward 2003). for example, there is a growing consensus in the philosophical literature that an explanation is constituted by a set of information that provides answers to a range of what-if-thingshad-been-different questions about the phenomenon of interest (woodward 2003). similarly, numerous philosophers have argued that scientific understanding requires grasping how the phenomenon would be different in a range of counterfactual (i.e., possible) systems/situations (le bihan 2017; khalifa 2017; rice 2021). what is more, several philosophers of science have argued that explanation and understanding, instead of knowledge, are the ultimate epistemic aims of scientific practice (elgin 2017; potochnik 2017; rice 2021). the next piece of reconceptualizing the epistemic aims of science is to recognize that the development, justification, and adoption of explanations and understanding is produced through the social-structural processes of scientific communities. this has resulted in a growing literature on the social epistemology of science that argues that different researchers can focus on different aspects of the phenomenon such that the understanding of the group or community can go beyond the understanding of any individual within the group. for example, both catherine elgin (2017) and angela potochnik (2017) argue that different researchers can focus on different aspects, features, or causal patterns within a phenomenon and thereby contribute different ways of understanding that phenomenon. similarly, on collin rice’s (2021, 269) account, “diverse individuals’ different ways of understanding (and explaining) the same phenomenon can all contribute different pieces to the overall sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 body of information that constitutes the understanding of the entire scientific community.”4 in general, many epistemologists and philosophers of science have come to recognize that the epistemic achievements of a group/community can go beyond the understanding of its individual members and is a communal achievement dependent on a variety of social interactions (boyd 2021; delariviére 2020; malfatti 2022; rice 2022). 2.2. epistemic arguments for diversifying science these developments within the philosophy of science literature make possible distinctively epistemic arguments for diversifying scientific practice.5 because alternative ways of knowing will recognize different possibilities as interesting, valuable, or worthy of exploration, additional perspectives and ways of knowing will (typically) be able to generate more counterfactual (or modal) information about the possible ways a system (or our world, more generally) could be and what would be different in those situations. another important feature of this approach is that it shows how multiple conflicting explanations for the same phenomenon might improve a scientific community’s overall understanding of the phenomenon. for example, scientific modeling of complex phenomena from within different research programs, perspectives, or ways of knowing often results in many explanatory models for the same phenomenon that involve conflicting assumptions, idealizations, and representational frameworks (longino 2013; morrison 2015; mitchell 2009, 2012; weisberg 2007, 2013). since each of these perspectives might provide information about different counterfactual situations, scientific communities that include multiple conflicting approaches will often produce a wider range of explanations and deeper understanding of a phenomenon than more homogenous communities. the most pressing challenge for this kind of approach is to show precisely how inconsistent approaches, models, or theories can be interwoven so as to generate improved explanations and understanding of the phenomenon. at this point, it is crucial to remember that the generation, testing, and development of scientific explanations and understanding are achieved only via interactions among diverse members of scientific communities that take place within various kinds of power structures. specifically, it is the interactions between different members of the larger 4 rice also draws on the work of morrison (2011, 2015) and others to show how the use of multiple conflicting models and methods can contribute to explanation and understanding. 5 while we do not claim that the above accounts provide necessary and sufficient conditions for all instances of explanation or understanding, we contend that they do capture a central feature of these epistemic achievements that is directly impacted by the diversity and social structures of science. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 scientific community within complex social structures that integrate these various pieces of counterfactual information into a body of information that constitutes the scientific community’s set of accepted explanations and overall understanding of a phenomenon. only by looking at the social contexts that structure the ways scientists interpret and use their models/theories and how they interact with one another can we determine how (and what) the scientific community explains and understands. in addition to expanding the range of possibilities considered by a scientific community, increasing diversity can also improve the social methods science uses to justify or accept a way of explaining (or understanding) a phenomenon (okruhlik 1994). for example, one of the primary ways that scientific explanations are adopted is through the process of inference to the best explanation (ibe). inferences to the best explanation have the following kind of structure: p1. a set of observations to be explained: {o1, o2, o3, . . .}. p2. a set of hypotheses that provide possible explanations of those observations: {h1, h2, h3, . . .} p3. hn provides the best explanation of the available observations. p4. the best explanation is typically true. c. therefore, we ought to adopt/accept/believe hn. much has been written concerning the details and reliability of using ibe in science. we will not enter those debates here. we do, however, wish to highlight that the strength of this kind of ibe argument is directly proportional to the range/diversity of possible explanations compared in premise two (stanford 2006). it is also dependent on the range of observations collected and considered legitimate by the community in premise one (okruhlik 1994). as a result, the degree of justification for the adoption of a particular scientific explanation (or way of understanding) by the scientific community directly depends on the range and variety of observations and possible explanations generated and given epistemic authority. in short, ibe only tells us which hypothesis (or explanation) of the set of alternatives the scientific community has considered is the most supported by the evidence considered relevant by the scientific community. unfortunately, as kyle stanford (2003) argues, when it comes to science, there will always be a plethora of unconceived alternative explanations that scientists have yet to think of.6 6 stanford’s evidence for this claim comes from the history of science in which (relatively homogenous) scientific communities have routinely failed to think of a relevant alternative theory—alternatives that would later be adopted by the scientific community. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 we will not provide a solution to stanford’s problem of unconceived alternatives (or enter further into the realism debate). we simply point out that the strength of the inference involved in any application of ibe is directly proportional to the range of observations and the number of (genuine) alternative possible explanations being considered within a scientific community. given that different ways of knowing will collect different observations (and experiences), investigate different counterfactual situations, and develop alternative possible explanations, improving diversity will directly strengthen scientific communities’ justifications for adopting some of those explanations and understandings. together, these arguments show how incorporating diverse ways of knowing within scientific communities will yield numerous epistemic benefits. 2.3. implementation challenges: from theory to practice it is an important theoretical development to provide explicit epistemic arguments that show why diversifying science will result in better science rather than having diversification be solely a moral obligation.7 while the above shifts in the epistemology and philosophy of science literatures have paved the way for some of those epistemic arguments to be developed, very little of this literature has explicitly engaged with the details of the social structures, power relations, and other aspects of the ways in which scientific communities generate, test, adopt, and integrate explanations and understanding. in other words, once we recognize that the epistemic achievements of science are social/communal accomplishments, much more attention needs to be paid to the details of science’s social structures—for example, those that have been the focus of standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemologies for some time. for example, to even be considered within the scientific community’s best explanations or understandings of a phenomenon, the observations, alternative possibilities, and interpretations offered by different ways of knowing (or perspectives) must be taken up by the scientific community and given intellectual authority within that community. in short, the collection of observations, the generation of possible scientific explanations (or hypotheses), the use of inference to the best explanation, and the integration of multiple explanations into an overall understanding of the phenomenon are all complex social processes whose structures directly promote and limit different ways of explaining and understanding the world. only by ensuring that these social processes encourage the generation, consideration, 7 while we are focused on the epistemic benefit of diversity in this paper, we also agree with gardner-vandy (2024) that the moral obligation is to enhance diversity in stem because it is a correct action. we add that it is not the only way to justify sustained attention to diversity and inclusion within stem. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 and respect of competing (and sometimes conflicting) experiences, explanations, and understanding from traditionally marginalized ways of knowing will these processes be most effective. therefore, this growing social epistemology of science literature has much to gain by incorporating lessons from long-standing debates within standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemology that have focused on revealing, critiquing, and improving the social structures within which science is practiced. to help bring these literatures into more effective collaboration, we now turn to some of the theoretical lessons from standpoint and feminist epistemology. 3. standpoint and feminist epistemology 3.1. theoretical lessons one of the most widely accepted contributions of standpoint theories is the notion that those on the margins of knowledge production are uniquely privileged to question the assumptions of status quo processes of knowledge production. including individuals from the margins in the production of knowledge has the potential to yield more holistic knowledge, deeper ways of understanding, and creative problemsolving strategies (see collins 1986, 1989, 2000, 2019; haraway 1988; harding 1986, 1995, 2004, 2009; d. smith 1974, 1987). according to patricia hill collins, the embodied experiences of marginalized individuals create an “outsider within” status, whereby such individuals never become fully socialized into the mainstream paradigm of knowledge production and are therefore able to see “thinking as usual as partially organized, partially clear, and contradictory, and may question these existing recipes” (collins 1986, s27). however, as standpoint theorists also point out (e.g., see collins 1986, 1989), survival and success in scientific disciplines often requires a high degree of assimilation to western ways of knowing. within sociology, this is evident in the ubiquity of required social theory courses that focus solely on the canon of marx, weber, and durkheim (fillingim and rucks-ahidiana 2021). although sociology retains space for critical theorizing and critique, as well as for expanding the canon (here recent calls to bring du bois into the canon are instructive), learning to theorize from white, western men is still central to the discipline. imagining a way to train sociologists without that perspective at the center remains nearly unthinkable. similar concerns can and have been raised about the teaching of philosophy from its whitemale, eurocentric history and canon. while those with marginalized perspectives and ties to communities not typically considered to be theorists by western scholars may bring the transformative perspective that collins describes, in order to be taken seriously within the discipline, these scholars often must conform, disconnect from communities of origin, and otherwise adopt the prioritized eurocentric way of knowing that scientific disciplines privilege (collins 2000). too often, the cost of inclusion within the community that produces and endorses those epistemic sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 achievements is the setting aside of the very experiences, values, assumptions, methods, and standards that could lead to more robust explanation and understanding within scientific disciplines. standpoint theorists also argue that all knowledge (and understanding or wisdom) is socially produced. that is, knowledge is neither created nor advanced through individual actions. consequently, these theorists argue for a more inclusive process of knowledge production such that marginalized perspectives (which proponents argue are actually more complete standpoints from which to begin any scientific pursuit) are able to influence scientific knowledge production, particularly within academia (collins 1986, 2000; harding 1995, 2015). realizing this kind of intervention requires two interlocking components. the first is that the hierarchy of ways of knowing/understanding needs to be disrupted so that individual scholars may draw on their unique perspectives, rather than being forced to assimilate to the community’s existing western and eurocentric way of learning and knowing. the second is that different research questions, methodologies, and analyses emerging from a range of perspectives currently bracketed out of scientific inquiry will only gain traction in scientific fields through shifts in the relational processes of scientific inquiry. 3.2. critiques of value-neutral objectivity additional theoretical contributions have come from feminist critiques of the value-free ideal and value-neutral objectivity (douglas 2009; intemann 2010; longino 1990, 2002). western ways of knowing are typically presumed to be objective and value-neutral—that is, out of relation to the object/subject of study. this view from above (or nowhere) approach places the trained observer in a privileged power position relative to that which is under study. achieving this privileged position—that is, being accepted within the scientific epistemic community—requires abandoning all ways of knowing that were cultivated prior to scientific training. moreover, this epistemology of science holds that science’s epistemic achievements are provided via processes that require value-neutrality and result in the discovery of objective observer-independent truths. this “value-free ideal” of science and objectivity has long structured the practice and aims of scientific communities (douglas 2009, chap. 3). these assumptions about the scientific process are mistaken according to feminist philosophers of science like helen longino (1990, 2002), heather douglas (2009), and sandra harding (1995, 2015). these authors articulate the fragility of this conception of objectivity and the failures of the value-free ideal. in particular, they show that traditional conceptions of objectivity that assume that objective processes require the elimination of values and the guarantee of truth are not only unachievable but also undesirable aims of science (douglas 2009). in other words, values play feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 important roles within the scientific process and, thus, should not be eliminated from scientific practice. a better, and achievable, conception of scientific objectivity must focus on the crucial role of critical interactions between multiple standpoints, values, and approaches. for example, longino’s work (1990, 2002) focuses on the ways that scientific communities socially construct which claims are accepted via critical interactions between conflicting values and assumptions. according to longino’s critical-contextual empiricism, a scientific community is “objective to the degree that it permits transformative criticism” (1990, 76). transformative criticism is achieved by providing avenues for criticism, establishing shared standards for assessing claims, ensuring the uptake of criticism, and providing equality of intellectual authority among different approaches (longino 1990, 2002). harding’s (2015) view of strong objectivity further argues that starting research from the lives of women, indigenous peoples, and other oppressed groups will strengthen standards of objectivity because it will reveal and critique the androcentric biases involved in scientific research that hide behind claims of value neutrality. the crucial point for our purposes is that the work of these scholars moves us away from focusing solely on the objectivity or valueneutrality of individual researchers and toward a conception of objectivity that is produced, maintained and improved by critical engagement among diverse members within larger social structures. whereas these authors have focused on how objectivity is produced by the social structures of science, the views of explanation and understanding surveyed above show that other epistemic aims of science are likewise products of the valueladen social structures of science. as a result, in order to best accomplish these epistemic aims, we need to pay attention to the ways that those structures enable/restrict the integration of traditionally marginalized ways of knowing, explaining, and understanding within the social structures of science. collins (2019) is especially instructive on matters of power, making a strong case for the necessity of resistant knowledge projects that not only challenge dominant paradigms but also resist the cooptation of resistant knowledge projects into conventional disciplinary practices (see also coburn et al. 2013; foley 2003; walker 2003). as a corollary, we argue that a wider range of explanations and deeper understanding will be extremely difficult to achieve within such an oppressive structure because the workings of power within it preclude the creativity and innovation that emerge within scientific communities that embrace how epistemological diversity could map onto (or grow out of) demographic diversity. 3.3. the shortcomings of thin implementations of diversity the interventions suggested by standpoint and feminist epistemologies require a critical mass of demographically (or representationally) diverse people to achieve these epistemic benefits. however, we argue that in-practice attempts to sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 improve diversity within science and academia have typically focused solely on demographic/representational diversity. this relatively thin conception of diversity, in turn, greatly limits (or obstructs) the effective implementation of the theoretical lessons of standpoint and feminist epistemologies. while many of the epistemic benefits we seek exist at the level of theory (outlined above), the inadequate implementation (or misapplication) of various conceptions of diversity within science and academia has largely missed the mark and, thus, has largely failed to produce these epistemic payoffs. these attempts to improve diversity have too often been limited to the diversity of individuals across specific factors (i.e., not all identities “count” in the same way in official tallies of diversity) and have too often adopted “add diversity and stir” or additive approaches to diversity rather than an intersectional and social-structural approach. to support this claim, we now provide various examples of thin implementations of standpoint and feminist epistemology to show that identity/representational diversity is necessary, but not sufficient, for producing these epistemic benefits for scientific inquiry. while these three examples of thin implementations have several overlapping features, we use them to draw distinct lessons that motivate several of the core components of our alternative (thick) approach. one example of the insufficient (or thin) implementation of diversity is hiring practices in academia. while many colleges and universities profess an interest in diversifying faculty, the results are typically poor, especially in stem fields. often, an institution will hire an individual from a minoritized or underrepresented group to serve as a token of diversity. this individual is then expected to assimilate to the status quo processes of academia’s epistemic communities and to leave their embodied experiences at the door. that is, the institution accepts the premise that adding diversity will improve something, but administrators would be hard pressed to put this in terms of how diversity will improve the ways their academic communities explain and understand the world. in addition, institutions often go no further than the hire to achieve diversity on college campuses and to support diverse faculty. the approach to diversity enacted across many colleges in the united states is one of “add and stir” that merely tracks representational diversity. no structural or cultural changes occur in the doing of science or institutional life, no alterations to the social processes or structures that produce scientific explanations or understandings occur, and the root causes of too few women (or people of other identities) achieving phds in science remain unaddressed. tokenized individuals are expected to enact change simply by virtue of their existence but are also expected to assimilate to a western way of relating to the production of knowledge and standards of objectivity (as described above). these individuals encounter discrimination, bias, and other negative experiences that undermine careers and push these scientists out (malcolmpiqueux 2024). lindsey malcolm-piqueux (2024, 22) notes that a focus on feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 “underrepresentation alone provides no clear directive on what the causes are, what actions should be taken, the appropriate points of intervention, and who bears the responsibility of acting to redress the issue.” this individual-representational approach undermines the argument from standpoint/feminist theories that the epistemic benefits of diversity occur by virtue of the inclusion of perspectives that do not fully incorporate the status quo assumptions of mainstream knowledge production because individuals hired to improve diversity on campus are not supported or expected to actually do science differently. such an approach can reinscribe the very factors that lead to a lack of diversity, creating a cyclic problem that limits explanation and understanding as well as the purported equity goals of these institutions. institutions also tend to adopt the belief that because they hired one person who is not a white man, then the work is done and all subsequent hiring does not need to consider diversity.8 this approach ignores the heterogeneity within groups and renders a single individual as the token or spokesperson for a group that actually has a diversity of perspectives to bring to the scientific process. this lip service to diversity limits the possibility for structural change in the production of scientific knowledge, explanation, and understanding. beyond individual campuses, structural limitations exist at the level of disciplines and academia as a whole constraining hiring, supporting, and promotion of those who are not white (see norman 2024; sacco 2024). specifically, even if an individual is able to practice science differently within their institution—e.g., by focusing on unique research questions, using alternative methods for scientific research, or having alternative background assumptions inform their work—the larger scientific disciplines they are expected to take part in often make it difficult for alternative approaches and methods of justification to be accepted for publication, seen as significant contributions to the field, or be taken up in discussions among practitioners of the field.9 8 the rise of “cluster hires” in academia are a welcome shift in recognizing that individuals are less likely to be successful without a community and that individual hires will not change institutional culture. yet, this remains a thin implementation in that the expectation is that some sort of epistemic or institutional benefit will accrue from changes in the individual composition, rather than cultural and structural practices, of an institution. 9 in addition, faculty from underrepresented groups are routinely expected to provide mentorship and emotional support for students from underrepresented groups that is “emotionally draining and takes significant time away from your own research” (hirji 2021, 643–44). moreover, doing this service work reinforces oppressive structures that make it more difficult for underrepresented groups to succeed in their field (hirji 2021, 644). sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 all these structural and social challenges combine to make it far from a trivial step from hiring a person from an underrepresented or marginalized group to having their unique way of knowing about the world contribute to the epistemic aims of their chosen field (or academia more generally). representational diversity at the level of the individual is simply insufficient without also addressing the mistaken valueor perspective-neutral conceptions of objective scientific research imposed by academic institutions, scientific disciplines, and academia as a whole. this example of insufficiently attempting to diversify epistemic communities illustrates the first lesson motivating our positive view: failing to interrogate academic/scientific conceptions of objectivity and rigorous research—e.g., by asking individual researchers to be valuefree, set aside their unique ways of knowing, and not draw on their own experiences—results in pressures to assimilate to western ways of knowing rather than creating spaces for alternative ways of knowing to contribute distinct explanations and understanding. another example of an insufficient, thin implementation from outside of academia is that of scientific forestry (coutinho-sledge 2015). forest management has typically occurred through the adoption of scientific principles. according to historian james scott (1998, 15), the goal of this approach is “to impose upon disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science.” in the united states, this often amounted to a narrow focus on timber production to the detriment of other, more holistic concerns about the forest. such a perspective is also distinctly masculine and largely white (fao 2006). in the 1990s, the united states forest service (usfs) became the focus of media and legal attention as a result of pressure from environmental groups and a series of equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc) cases regarding discrimination and harassment against women. the reaction to these criticisms led to attempts to increase the number of women foresters in the usfs and in private forestry (brown and harris 2001). robert t. perschel, then the northeast regional director of the forest guild, argued, “women are essential to the ideals of preservation of life, nurturance of the earth, and closeness to nature and [the new england branch of the society of american foresters] cannot be successful in refining these ideals without major input from women” (1991, 21). the scientific forestry community generally believed that individual women embodied the ideals of environmental stewardship and sustainability that would transform the public perception of forestry. further, the usfs believed that increasing the number of women would help mitigate allegations of harassment. in practice, women foresters became scapegoats for problems in the usfs as they were accused of having insufficient knowledge about scientific forestry, eeoc claims increased as more women spoke out about harassment on the job, and the organizational culture through which knowledge of the forest was produced and management decisions were made remained intact (carroll, freemuth, and alm 1996; brown and harris feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 2001; lewis 2005; james 1991). again, we see that representational diversity at the level of the individual is insufficient if the social and structural limitations imposed by the community are left unaddressed. this example of thin implementation illustrates a second lesson motivating our positive view: representational diversity is insufficient for improving the explanations, understanding, and practice of science if the socialstructural power relationships and hierarchies that structure the interactions between community members are left unaddressed. a third recent example of thin understanding of diversity reiterates that representational diversity is insufficient and illustrates a different challenge to improving the epistemic products of science. unlike the forestry case that failed to acknowledge the structural interactions between its members, the us national academies of science, engineering, and medicine (nasem) recognized the importance of these relationships and created an expert committee to study how best to pursue knowledge “coproduction”: processes that seek to jointly create and share knowledge in a way that values diverse perspectives (mervis and pérez ortega 2024). despite this focus, the committee was disbanded in july 2024, in part because the committee refused to enact principles of coproduction of knowledge as advised by indigenous scholars who were asked to participate (mervis and pérez ortega 2024). another issue was failing to address indigenous participants’ calls to address the power dynamics that affect such cocreation projects. the focus on individual-level representational diversity combined with the rejection of structural changes to the epistemic practices of the committee not only limited the ability of the committee to better understand coproduction across knowledges but also led to the dissolution of the committee itself. this is another cautionary tale highlighting additional barriers for translating representational diversity into improved explanations and understandings for the group. as we attempt to diversify the perspectives and ways of knowing represented in scientific projects, it is essential that we practice the work. in addition to challenging value-neutral conceptions of objectivity and identifying the social-structural interactions of scientific practice, the lesson of this thin implementation is that interventions designed to increase the diversity of ways of knowing in science must explicitly adopt practices of cocreation and address the power dynamics involved in communicating between different perspectives. as noted above, standpoint and feminist theories provide important theoretical insights into how epistemic communities understand the world. but these examples show how implementation of these insights is routinely limited by a thin conception of diversity that is consistently unable to see beyond the individual. importantly, science is not performed by individuals but via social processes that sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 occur at places and within larger historical contexts.10 the theoretical arguments leading to standpoint and feminist theory reviewed above are sound, in our estimation. moreover, these theories have both been developed in ways that make them more social and attentive to diversity within groups than their original versions (intemann 2010; wylie 2003). despite this theoretical promise, however, in-practice attempts to diversify stem fields have been largely ineffective at improving science’s explanations and understandings because these thin implementations of diversity have the following flaws: 1. they have sought to focus our attention on individual rather than collective inquiry. 2. they incorrectly assume that individual-level representational diversity is sufficient for ensuring that a standpoint’s unique ways of explaining and understanding are considered legitimate within an academic discipline. 3. they assume that changing the composition of the group of producers will change the processes of inquiry without proposing changes to the social structures of explanation and understanding. 4. they fail to enact methods of epistemic cocreation that put distinct ways of knowing into collaborative conversation. the three examples above illustrate several ways that a focus on individual/ representational diversity has driven the implementation of diversity in practice. not only do these implementation problems ignore heterogeneity and interactions within groups; they also create obstacles for learning from the standpoints of others. in contrast, we argue that the social processes of science must include avenues for individuals from one standpoint to incorporate or find commonality with the assumptions, practices, or knowledge of other standpoints. the actual social structure of scientific inquiry needs to create space for alternative interpretations emerging from the unique embodied knowledge of individuals (clough 2013) to influence the process and to be picked up by others. we are not arguing that one individual (e.g., a white man) can adopt the perspective or have the experiences of another individual (e.g., a black woman) and thereby “fix science.” instead, we argue that it is possible for one individual to partially 10 standpoint theory does, however, suggest a way that the social structure of science ought to be (re)organized. specifically, standpoint implies that adding individuals from more social categories will improve the knowledge and understanding produced by scientific inquiry. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 understand the perspectives of another and to learn (or at least treat as epistemically equivalent) practices stemming from that perspective within communities of reciprocity and cocreation rather than communities marked by extraction, exploitation, and appropriation. members of one group cannot adopt another member’s way of knowing, but those ways of knowing can engage each other in meaningful ways (see clough 2013; rouse 2009). no one individual is adopting, understanding, or incorporating all these perspectives. members can understand and learn practices in the collaborative pursuit of generating and considering novel and wider-ranging hypotheses, explanations, and understanding. diverse perspectives, experiences, and assumptions are incorporated into a collaborative social process of knowledge production by recognizing the scientific practices that emerge from them (see barad 2007). to best achieve the epistemic benefits that stem from diversity of persons in scientific inquiry, there needs to be space where different standpoints can interact within processes of cocreation and respect (rather than siloing and assimilation). this is important not just for updating our conceptions of scientific objectivity (longino 1990) but also for clarifying how science accomplishes its other epistemic aims such as explanation and understanding.11 each member—and their values, identities, experiences, and background assumptions—contributes to the collective possibility space. the general takeaway of the above examples is that scientific explanations and understandings are produced through social interactions situated within larger power structures. the potential epistemic contributions of diverse ways of knowing in the pursuit of more complete (or diverse) explanations and deeper understanding can be (most fully) realized only if we address the complexities of these social structures of science rather than limiting our focus to diversity at the level of individual representation. 11 while this conclusion about the importance of social aspects of science for explanation and understanding is similar to longino’s conclusions about objectivity, the arguments offered here are importantly different from longino’s emphasis on the ways the underdetermination requires values to fill in the gap between theory and evidence. despite this difference in argumentative focus, however, underdetermination could certainly be used to show the importance of having a diversity of values and background assumptions for diversifying the range of explanations (and evidence) considered. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this difference. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 4. power of heterogeneous ways of knowing: indigenous epistemology and thick implementation in this section, we lay the foundation for an alternative thick implementation of standpoint and feminist epistemology by drawing additional insights from indigenous (feminist) theories. we then identify several areas of structural intervention in science that we suggest will have substantial benefits to scientific explanation and understanding. the solution to the failures of the above thin implementations lies in returning to the theoretical heart of standpoint epistemologies. as standpoint theory developed it became clear that “standpoints do not automatically arise from occupying a particular social location. they are achieved only when there is sufficient scrutiny and critical awareness of how power structures shape or limit knowledge in a particular context.” (intemann 2010, 785; our emphasis). current implementations of diversity take a surface-level, “add and stir” demographic diversity approach rather than a social epistemic diversity approach, which grows out of demographic diversity only if the perspectives and experiences of demographically diverse scientists actually hold power within the epistemic communities of science. drawing on the lessons of the three examples of thin implementation discussed above, our alternative thick implementation of standpoint and feminist epistemologies requires (1) shifting science education to include a genealogy of objectivity and western versions of objectivity, (2) updating the way we conceptualize the social structures that produce the epistemic outputs of science, and (3) building communities of science dedicated to resistant and cocreated epistemic projects. the thick implementation we propose is structural, rather than individual, and requires confronting the practices of science—and the explanations and understandings that derive from it—in the context of power dynamics that privilege certain groups and ways of knowing over others. effectively diversifying science requires innovation in the social practices of producing scientific explanations and understandings to dismantle hierarchies of ways of knowing so that the epistemic power of a range of knowledge systems can be considered with respect and integrated in meaningful ways. we draw inspiration from and honor lessons from recent indigenous epistemology that goes beyond the standpoints of individuals and considers a variety of social interventions based on cocreation, reciprocity, and attention to history and place of explanation and understanding production. 4.1. indigenous epistemology despite the potential we see in the feminist theories outlined above, there remains room to elaborate on precisely what structural changes are needed within scientific communities to fully realize the epistemic benefits of diversity. indigenous (feminist) standpoint theories, or i(f)sts, collectively lay out multiple pathways to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 envision just how scientific practices can be transformed via attention to how these communities fit within larger structures of power and ongoing processes of settler colonialism (see bartlett, marshall, and marshall 2012; barker 2019; black elk 2016; cajete 2000; claw et al. 2018; foley 2003; gardner-vandy and scalice 2024; kimmerer 2013; kovach 2009; meyer 2001; moreton-robinson 2013; nakata 2007; simpson 2017; l. smith 2012).12 rather than presenting a positive argument for the importance and power of these standpoints to the production of knowledge or a critique of western ways of knowing, i(f)st scholarship provides a guide to building relationships between indigenous and other standpoints in ways that advance the epistemic benefits we seek. certainly, i(f)sts have much in common with the theories outlined in section 3. aileen moreton-robinson (goenpul) identifies this commonality as a shared “understanding that their respective production of knowledge is a site of constant struggle against normative dominant patriarchal conceptual frameworks” (2013, 331). an important distinction lies in the understanding within i(f)sts that white western conceptions of science (e.g., those advocated by the logical positivists) exists in the context of ongoing systems of colonization. i(f)sts, then, are a struggle against not only patriarchal frameworks but also those of settler colonialism. this requires attention to gender (as called for by feminist standpoint theorists), race (as noted by black feminist theorists), and also sovereignty and land (hallmarks of indigenous ways of knowing). in advocating for i(f)sts, indigenous and settler scholars alike clarify that the social practices of science must change for epistemic benefits to follow from a diverse community of scientists. while this is largely implicit in the theories addressed above, i(f)sts are instructive in clarifying specific changes to be made to the practice of science that will allow the epistemic benefits envisioned by other feminist theorists to be fully realized: namely, that the values of science must be made clear, the responsibilities and commitments of the scientific community to other communities (both human and more-than-human) must be identified and incorporated into practice, and an understanding that cultural assumptions from the broader social context shape scientific practice must be addressed in order to ensure a truly diverse community of scientists. to this last point, i(f)sts add the context of ongoing colonization as a critical structure of power that emphasizes individuals as the bearers of collective knowledge (which supports the notion that adding diverse individuals will produce trickle-up changes to the structure and culture of science) and further emphasize the problematic practice of asking individuals to assimilate into narrowly defined ways of knowing to be accepted within the scientific community. additionally, 12 we use i(f)st as an umbrella term including scholarship that self-identifies as standpoint theory but also scholarship that advocates for particularly indigenous ways of knowing without necessarily using this terminology. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 manulani aluli meyer (kanaka maoli) elaborates on the centrality of place that is shared across indigenous epistemologies. meyer (2001, 125) notes that “how one knows, indeed, what one prioritizes with regard to this knowing . . . [is] the essence of who we are as oceanic people. it is a discussion of place and genealogy.” in this respect, indigenous ways of knowing are not only the result of an individual perspective from the margins of patriarchal society with great potential for improving scientific understanding and explanation. rather, i(f)sts clarify that a way of knowing is grounded in culture and in place. i(f)sts collectively also pose an intervention into the social epistemic processes of science by changing our conceptions of who and what “count” as knowledge producers and a recognition that “protocols, or attitudes of how to approach the world, are inseparable from scientific inquiry for some indigenous peoples” (whyte, brewer, and johnson 2016, 29). gregory cajete (tewa, santa clara pueblo) elaborates, “in native science, sanction of knowledge through appropriate ritual and tribal society acknowledgement is important, because knowledge of the natural world and how best to relate to it is not just a matter of individual understanding, but is gained and shared for the benefit and perpetuation of community” (cajete 2000, 72). both cajete and kyle whyte and his coauthors are making a structural point about the practices of science. the way of knowing and practice of science that emerges from indigenous worldviews centers relationship and community above the individual. this is in stark contrast to western approaches to science. in indigenous ways of knowing, knowledge begins with relationship to the natural world (i.e., land) and is held by and transmitted through communities, not individuals. it is not just the standpoint that diverse individuals bring to scientific practice, but the very practice of science that must be addressed in order to achieve the epistemic benefits diversity can bring. cajete (2000, 307) puts it this way: “western science needs native science to examine its prevailing worldview and culture. . . . until western science rejects its bias, dialogue with another culture will be problematic. individual scientists can sometimes see beyond, but as an institution, western science is caught behind institutional blinkers.” in this way, indigenous scholars emphasize that changes among individuals are necessary, but insufficient, to realize a shift from a western conception of knowledge to one that is creative, participatory, diverse, and multifaceted. this flow from indigenous worldviews to changes in methodology is shared across indigenous scholarship on science and epistemology. examples abound, including fourth world theory (ryser, gilio-whitaker, and bruce 2017), two-eyed seeing (bartlett, marshall, and marshall 2012), braiding/weaving (kimmerer 2013; hernandez and spencer 2020; whyte, brewer, and johnson 2016), holographic epistemology/triangulation of meaning (meyer 2003, 2013), mutual stewardship (wong 2024), storywork/ceremony (archibald 2008; wilson 2008), land-based feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 22 learning and knowing (dei, karanja, and erger 2022; gegeo and watson-gegeo 2001), and native science (cajete 2000; black elk 2016); but these are not exhaustive, and knowledge traditions are culturally and geographically specific. an essential contribution of i(f)sts is not just the rejection of western objectivity as rooted in systems of patriarchy and eurocentric values but also an alternative conceptualization of the epistemic practices of science as fundamentally relational, collaborative, and reciprocal with human and nonhuman communities. i(f)sts suggest that there is a way to bring into relation conventional, normative, european-based ways of knowing with indigenous ways of knowing in order to do fundamentally better science. the imperative here is to recognize normative approaches to science as a culturally embedded way of knowing, rather than the mold into which all other forms of knowledge must fit. the wisdom of these perspectives is that they do not engage in the power hierarchy that many other standpoint epistemologies emphasize. no perspective is privileged over others. instead, all perspectives are in relation and have insights to offer. embedded in this emphasis on relationality, however, is the recognition that the accepted and institutionalized way of scientific knowing are but one perspective and could not possibly contain all the possibilities for explanation and understanding alone. this relational approach returns us to our earlier discussion of the social-structural epistemic processes of science. when multiple perspectives—derived from a range of culturally embedded experiences with the constructed and natural world—are able to have equal standing in the process of scientific inquiry, evidence may be viewed more holistically, new evidence may be recognized as relevant, new relationships across evidence may become apparent, and a great range of alternative hypotheses may be generated. this moves scientific practice closer to achieving the epistemic benefits we seek. instead of emphasizing a single or particular way of knowing (or perspective), i(f)sts draw attention to the “ethical space of engagement,” the relationship between the dominant (read western, patriarchal white, able-bodied, etc.) paradigm of knowing and every other standpoint, where transformation may occur (ermine 2007). while it is necessary to recognize this ethical space, it is not sufficient for transformation. transformation requires recognition of power and the imbalance of power across ethical space, the rejection of western objectivity as the primary (and value-neutral) position from which explanation and understanding should be achieved and evaluated, and resistance to the assimilation required by oppressive intellectual communities (such as academic disciplines). these are not only theoretical but practical interventions. in laying out specific indigenous research approaches, i(f)sts provide a framework for changing interactions within scientific communities and collaborations, beginning with a reflexive process of self-examination of science as an institution, in place and in history, to open up the space necessary for multiple sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 practices of knowledge creation to work together. ultimately, this will bolster the impacts of diversity on the science that we do, the people who do the science, and the land upon which the science occurs. in summary, i(f)sts and indigenous epistemologies, more broadly, are culturally specific, though there are common themes that support our thick implementation of feminist and indigenous standpoint epistemologies. borrowing from margaret kovach (nêhiyaw and saulteaux), who lays out very specific interventions made by indigenous women’s standpoints (2017, 218), meyer’s (2001) careful work on hawaiian epistemology, cajete’s (2000, 2020) foundational work on native science, and the other scholars cited in this section, we emphasize five principles that provide an important foundation for the thick implementation of standpoint theories: 1. all knowledge is subjective (i.e., derived from unique experiences that shape what we know, how we know, and the meanings we derive) and holistic (including empirical, experimental, sensing, embodied, and metaphysical possibilities). 2. all knowledge arises from interconnectivity and interdependency and must be cocreated across communities even when they have differing world views. 3. knowledge comes from the land and is animate and fluid. 4. right relationships and balance are central to understanding (this includes spiritual approaches).13 5. knowledge arises from a multiplicity of sources, including nonhuman sources. these principles are similar to, yet remain distinct from those held by other feminist standpoints in that there is a parallel rejection of western objectivity as disembodied and without relations, resistance to assimilation and oppression of patriarchal white supremacy, and recognizing the centrality of community, reciprocity, coexistence, cooperation, place/land. this multilayered approach attends to specific interactions and structural conditions through which science is accomplished (see walter et al. 2023; gardner-vandy et al. 2021). starting from this perspective allows for interventions to address power imbalances inherent in the structure of science (and 13 it should be noted that spirituality is central to indigenous ways of knowing, but spirituality does not hold western definitions of the term. instead this is connected to relationships with seven generations in the past and future, to the land, to embodied ways of knowing. it is an alternative to the mind/body split central in eurocentric ways of knowing. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 the incomplete explanations and understandings that emerge from that power imbalance), while also putting forth a positive research program for science that emphasizes the potential of multiple subjectivities for explanation and understanding, recontextualizes these epistemic practices within the relationships between knowledge seekers, and centers the land from which those epistemic achievements emerge. in the remainder of this section we combine these lessons from indigenous epistemology with the lessons drawn from the examples above to develop the foundation for an alternative thick implementation of standpoint, feminist, and indigenous epistemology focused on improving the explanations and understandings produced by scientific and academic communities. 4.2. a social-structural conception of scientific objectivity as we argued in section 3, and as the above discussion of indigenous epistemologies makes clear, having a diversity of ways of knowing is not sufficient to realize the potential benefits for explanation and understanding emerging from diverse ways of knowing, since the very structure and processes of science undermine the epistemic contributions of those perspectives that are in tension with white, western ways of knowing. this is because creative generation of hypotheses, consideration of alternative interpretations of data, and investigation of fundamental assumptions are tasks that can only be effectively accomplished by a scientific community (rather than by individuals acting in isolation), and the full breadth of diversity must be at the center of this community. these epistemic benefits are further constrained by cultures of scientific inquiry that only (and minimally) account for diverse representation while assuming that people who embody multiple ways of knowing will compartmentalize all but a eurocentric way of knowing in the pursuit of science. this pressure of assimilation contributes to erasure, invisibility, and hypervisibility. consequently, we argue that in addition to embracing diverse ways of knowing, the scientific process must be reimagined first by situating scientific inquiry within the social structures that inform the questions, methods, and outcomes of scholarship as well as to the extent that embodied and community specific knowledges shape this reimagining. as we argued in section 3.3, academia and scientific communities have used an inadequate individual-additive model of diversity that has severely limited the ability to implement the ideas of standpoint and feminist epistemologies. this practice contributes to ongoing centering and elevation of eurocentric science that incorporates only surface-level understandings of standpoint theories without attention to the many intricate feminist epistemologies that lay plain alternative and, we suggest, better pathways for science to proceed. in practice, this additive approach becomes reductive as the traditional structure of scientific inquiry requires researchers to eliminate the unique ways of knowing derived from their social sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 experiences and to become detached (if temporarily) from the communities that support these ways of knowing. in order for the unique ways of knowing that are embodied by individuals to have the type of epistemic benefits to scientific explanation and understanding that we desire, we must understand science as situated within structures such as race and gender and then work for changes across that structure rather than only at single points (such as individual hiring decisions in an academic department). first, following longino (1990, 2002), we ought to conceive of objectivity and other epistemic aims of science as the product of a value-laden social process in which different ways of knowing with conflicting values interact so as to critically evaluate each other’s background assumptions, methods, and interpretations of data. rather than something that can be accomplished by an individual scientist, objectivity is achieved only by subjecting a scientific hypothesis, explanation, or understanding to the critical evaluation of alternative points of view. what is more, this kind of objectivity is actually achievable by scientific practice. while individual researchers cannot set aside their values, background assumptions, or biases, it is possible for the social structures of science to support more effective interaction among alternative ways of knowing to achieve a higher degree of (this social form of) objectivity. unfortunately, the current social structures of science often stifle this kind of interaction among alternative ways of knowing—especially when research questions, methodologies, or background assumptions of a marginalized way of knowing are in conflict with the status quo (i.e., the eurocentric perspective).14 we must recognize that the more effective the interactions between diverse ways of knowing, values, and methods within the social structures of scientific communities, the more objective (or justified) the explanations and understandings produced by scientific communities will be. second, following from i(f)sts, realizing the above goal also requires that scientific communities acknowledge and understand the particular culture of science in order to recognize that scientific knowledge within this positivist culture is not universal. while the questions may be shared across many cultures, the framing of the question, the evidence, methods, analysis, and communication of the answers all may differ. the assumption of universality as a corollary to objectivity must be directly addressed and overcome for epistemic benefits to accrue. further, objectivity itself is understood within i(f)sts to be a unique feature of western ways of knowing because indigenous ways of knowing are rooted in place/land. from this perspective, no knowledge can be universal, and claims to objectivity fail to account for the full range 14 while these ways of knowing might be in tension/disagreement in these ways, it should not be taken to mean that they are completely incompatible or inconsistent. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 26 of evidence at hand while continuing processes of colonization that require assimilation into a narrow worldview. a crucial part of updating this conception of objectivity lies in the motivations for updating the canon of many scientific disciplines. while diversifying syllabi so that students can see researchers who “look like them” is certainly important, there are crucial epistemic benefits of expanding the canon that go beyond this. in particular, rather than taking scientific objectivity as an undiscussed given, we contend that scientific education must include an interrogation of individual-level, value-neutral conceptions of objectivity, consideration of alternative social conceptions of objectivity, and exposure to alternative ways of producing, verifying, and arguing for the adoption of knowledge, explanations, and understanding.15 doing so will not only provide a genealogy of different conceptions of objectivity but will clarify the diversity of ways of knowing available and their different strengths (and weaknesses). further, the foundations of science education ought to include discussions of the ways that diversity of values, perspectives, background assumptions, and methods will make for better science by expanding the range of hypotheses considered and bringing different ways of knowing into conversation in ways that will deepen understanding. recognizing a wider range of ways of knowing as epistemically legitimate will enable future scientists to recognize the value of incorporating additional inputs into scientific inquiry and suggest methods by which a plurality of ways of knowing might effectively interact. 4.3. focusing on the social structures of the epistemology of science as we have argued throughout, realizing the epistemic aims we seek requires intentional consideration of the relationships of power foundational to the organizations within which we do science. unfortunately, the implementation of standpoint/feminist epistemologies has been hampered by a thin understanding of diversity within academic and scientific communities. this thin understanding has led to a set of problems that prevent the type of structural changes that would create space for epistemic diversity to build more complete and innovative explanations and 15 of course, implementing these educational changes might be challenging in a number of ways given the literature and ideas that science students (and teachers) are currently familiar with. but the ideas are no more “advanced” or “complicated” than the value-neutral, individual conception of scientific objectivity currently taught in these spaces. we suggest that normalizing these discussions of uncertainty, social objectivity, and the social epistemology of science—and not requiring students to “unlearn” other conceptions of science to do so—will make such topics accessible to early science students. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 27 understanding. we identify two key, interrelated problems with the current impact of standpoint epistemologies on scientific knowledge practices: 1. standpoint has not been implemented in a way that reflects the epistemic claims made by standpoint theorists. 2. to the extent its theoretical imports are recognized, standpoint has been subsumed in institutions in ways that are essentializing and limited to the achievement of a “moral credential,” and the notion that once there is one person of color (of any gender) or a woman (of any racial identity), then the work of dei is done (bendick and nunes 2012; cited in ray 2019). to get to the thick implementation that we advocate, a series of “moves” are required to bring the full power and potential of standpoint theories to bear on the social production of explanations and understandings in science (and academia more generally). the most central of these moves is to situate academic departments, educational institutions, and scientific disciplines as racialized and gendered organizations (see acker 1990, 2006; ray 2019).16 as victor ray (2019, 27) notes, “in isolation, individual prejudice and racial animus may matter little; but when these are put into practice in connection to organizational processes such as racialized tracking, job-typing, or exclusion, they help shape the larger racial order.” for our purposes here, acknowledging these facts about the constitution of scientific communities shatters the illusion that scientific fields (including practitioners, the questions asked, the means of answering them, etc.) are somehow above, beyond, or outside social structures of race, gender, and other systems of inequality and oppression. doing so also makes possible a real consideration of the ways that becoming a scientist perpetuates notions of whiteness and cis maleness as capital and privileges those who assimilate to these ways of knowing, while simultaneously disrupting the notion that these ways of knowing are not standpoints themselves. when we understand science as a social endeavor achieved through specific organizations (here we might think of funding agencies, academic departments, etc.), then we may begin to disentangle the workings of those organizations. as ray (2019) makes clear in his work, organizations are coercive, yet there is also the possibility of challenge. in addition to moving beyond the individual level of thin implementations, we also must recognize that challenging organizations is insufficiently enacted when it only occurs at a single level of social structure. for example, barbara risman (2004) identifies three dimensions through which social structures are reproduced or, by 16 this point has also, of course, been repeatedly made throughout the feminist and standpoint literature we reviewed earlier. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 28 extension, challenged: individual (i.e., socialization, identity, and the construction of self), interactional (i.e., cognitive bias, cultural/behavioral expectations), and institutional (organizational practices, laws, resources, ideologies). at present, inpractice attempts to diversify academia and science have primarily had but a thin impact at the individual level with “moral credentialing” that institutionalizes whiteness by determining who has “access to organizational resources, legitimizing work hierarchies, and expanding white agency” (ray 2019, 41). we think the above arguments make the case for additional interventions into the interactional and institutional aspects of scientific epistemic communities. 4.4. resistant knowledge projects, cocreation, and attention to place we also advocate for interventions that account not only for a diverse community of scientists, but also for an expansion of who may be included under the term “scientist.” following from indigenous scholarship, we argue that the communities and places within which science is practiced make vital contributions to the practices of science and, thus, the explanations and understanding that scientific communities produce. not only does science always occur from distinct perspectives, but scientific facilities (whether these are labs, field stations, observatories, etc.) also exist in a place and with relationships to the land and people of that place, whether they are in the scientific community as traditionally defined or not. ignoring this has been detrimental to the practice of science in ways that range from legal challenges to direct action halting the construction and operations of these facilities. while feminists posit that all science is produced from a distinct perspective emerging from the scientist’s position within various, intersecting structures of power (i.e., race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, etc.), indigenous scholars add that science is always (and must be) done in relationship to ancestors, the land, and future generations. in this respect, science is never done only within the scientific community (i.e., those trained in standard practices in recognized academic settings), nor is it done out of place. indigenous science recognizes the relationships between the physical world, the human world, and the sacred world (foley 2003). norma wong (kanaka maoli and hakka chinese) suggests that “humans follow the earth” (2024, 5). this key principle of mutual stewardship requires that science must “begin with and center the needs and desires of the place, the land, the waters, and the beings who are not human” (wong 2024, 5). a thin implementation of diversity cannot hope to achieve this, yet it is central to all indigenous epistemologies. in contrast, a thick implementation of these ideas recognizes that the engagement of scientists with communities of place can open possibilities of incorporating more diverse perspectives and evidence from which understanding and explanation can flow. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 29 4.5. a positive example of epistemic diversity: the maunakea stewardship oversight authority in order to illustrate some of these ideas more concretely, we conclude this section with the example of the proposed thirty meter telescope (tmt) and the creation of the maunakea stewardship oversight authority (mksoa), which offers insight into the kind of structural and cultural change indigenous epistemologies can offer scientific communities and help to illustrate some principles of thick implementation. the construction of the tmt on maunakea was positioned within the astronomy community as the priority facility for the decade between 2010 and 2020 (blandford et al. 2010). tmt was not to be the first such observatory on the sacred mauna, but it was to be the largest ground-based telescope. the history of the lease for the summit of maunakea—the interrelationships between the government of hawai‘i, international collaborators, us federal agencies, and numerous academic institutions—is too extensive to cover here (cuby et al. 2024; beamer 2020). importantly, kia‘i (kānaka maoli protectors) successfully halted construction of tmt in 2019, launching a global movement for the protection of the mauna and drastic changes in the practices of astronomy in relation to indigenous communities who have been relatives of the land on which these facilities sit since time immemorial. the creation of the mksoa, the product of efforts by the maunakea working group, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the astronomy and indigenous communities in order to put into practice the principles of mutual stewardship (wong 2024).17 this work importantly breaks down the perceived dichotomy between science and indigenous communities/ways of knowing in order to identify shared values and commitments to repair relationships among people and the land, while improving the science that is done. wong writes, “when culture and science are coequal and synergistic, the peoples, the future, and the land reap benefits” (2024, 8; emphasis in original). all of this work emphasizes cocreation and recognizing that communities have something to contribute to the epistemic practices of science (matsuda 2022). central to the positive outcomes of the working group and the current efforts of mksoa is a deeper commitment to diversity than simply having kānaka maoli representation. rather, as rich matsuda (2022) points out, “building mutual understanding of both traditional hawaiian knowledge and contemporary 17 wong conceptualizes mutual stewardship from a native hawaiian perspective in which boundaries between science and culture are dismantled; local participation is cultivated; the land is understood as a living being to whom all decision-makers have a responsibility; and care for land, peoples, and future guide the practices of a scientific community that includes local peoples and the indigenous knowledges they hold. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 30 science, like astronomy and other fields, with openness and humility provides the opportunity to integrate knowledge, not talk past each other.” rather than simply bringing different perspectives to the table, this example shows that epistemic benefits occur through structural changes in how science is practiced. this is the basis of the thick implementation of standpoint epistemologies we seek.18 most recently, the mksoa crafted a horizon story and guiding principles, built on the commonly held indigenous principle that all decisions must consider impacts seven generations into the future. as jean-gabriel cuby and coauthors write, “for many of the authors of this paper, reaching a consensus on our shared vision of our future using indigenous principles and wisdom was a first, and very significant achievement. modest as this achievement may seem to many, we firmly believe that it illustrates how indigenous knowledge and wisdom can and must find a place in the conduct of our profession” (cuby et al. 2024, 17). centering indigenous ways of knowing in the future planning of mksoa produced a framing of community astronomy that led to six areas in which community astronomy can be realized via positive impacts: • equitable hiring and workforce development • local technology development • cultural awareness and competence • environmental responsibility • community engagement • expanded scientific approach the final area is of the utmost importance for our argument regarding the epistemic benefits of diversity in scientific communities. cuby and coauthors posit that “allowing scientists and scientific inquiry to be rooted in cultural context will not only support greater scientific advancement but will make it relevant and a point of pride for the communities in which the science takes place” (cuby et al. 2024, 20; emphasis ours). given the nascent state of mksoa, they cannot say with certainty 18 additional examples of scientific projects working toward putting these ideas into practice include the next generation event horizon telescope (ngeht) and cosmic explorer (ce), a next generation gravitational wave observatory (daniel et al. 2025). both projects are employing interdisciplinary collaborations across physics, astronomy, philosophy, sociology, geology, and more to reimagine the process of scientific facilities from conception to decommission. in their efforts toward responsible siting, ngeht created the history, philosophy, culture working group, and ce established the indigenous and place-based partnership and responsible siting program (ipprs). sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 31 that this epistemic benefit in the form of greater scientific advancement will occur. yet, their strong hypothesis that these benefits will occur is important to follow empirically. in this example, epistemic diversity is positioned as “the only way forward” for mksoa and, as the most significant astronomical site in the world, this creates a model for the discipline of astronomy as a whole (cuby et al. 2024, 20). the example above represents a sustained intervention in the practices of astronomy by indigenous community members. this is not the first such action by indigenous land protectors with respect to the doing of science. what is unique in this example is that the organizing and actions by kia‘i have inspired a shift in scientific practice at multiple levels, including facilities construction, facilities operations, and funding.19 we find great hope in this example. while born out of intense conflict, what has emerged is an approach to conducting science that incorporates many of the thick structural elements we identify above. the efforts of community organizing created ripples not only in the scientific community on maunakea but throughout the discipline of astronomy and the funding agencies that support it. these new models have not supplanted normative practices of science, but are opening possibility space for epistemic diversity to significantly impact the creation of astronomical explanations and understanding. within astronomy, there is strong movement at all institutional levels to explore a wide range of benefits that can flow from diversifying not only the people but the practices of scientific communities. while it remains unclear precisely what epistemic advances may result from this new perspective, it is understood by those involved in mksoa that there is a strong promise of epistemic benefits and that the benefit of ending the “dehumanization or segmenting of self that is required to do ‘real science’” has already benefited the astronomers involved (cuby et al. 2024, 20). this alone suggests that examples such as mksoa should be supported and followed by those invested in questions of improving scientific understanding. 5. putting the pieces together: structural interventions and future directions organizational change is key to building space for the epistemic benefits we believe diversity can hold for scientific explanation and understanding. the problem is not simply one of inclusion (which is as far as most scientific institutions have gone in incorporating standpoint and feminist epistemologies). the organizational changes required flow in multiple directions at once. these changes include demographic diversity but cannot stop at the achievement of a moral credential. this change must be thick. “thick” expands the meaning of diversity into the gaps left by insufficient dei 19 the national science foundation (nsf) has devoted attention to increasing indigenous participation in stem through various funding streams and now requires all projects that may impact tribal nations to engage in consultation practices in order to obtain nsf funding (nsf 2024, 80). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 32 efforts in a way that is slow, intentional, constant, and nonhierarchical. thick epistemic diversity seeps into every aspect of organizational and intellectual culture to fundamentally reshape the doing of science. as we initiate what we hope will lead to a collective imagining of the thick implementation of epistemic diversity, we offer the following conclusions as a starting point: 1. we must grapple with the reality that the epistemic products of science are produced within relations of power. for diversification efforts to make an impact on explanation and understanding, first scientists need to understand that science is necessarily situated in complex power relations. then, scientists need to learn to accept that their experiences shape their perceptions, observations, explanations, and ultimately the way they understand that which they study. 2. scientists (and philosophers of science) need to recognize that we cannot separate our epistemic practices from the experiences that have shaped us. this is a motion to refuse the intellectual assimilation that we accept (either fully or under duress) as part of our scientific or academic training. 3. we need to learn to see alongside and in relation with others rather than try to see from their perspectives, while actually engaging with the situated standpoint that we each bring rather than striving for knowledge from nowhere (or individual-level objectivity). 4. from this place of reflexivity, scientific disciplines (and academia) can begin to reorganize with social interactions between diverse ways of knowing/practices of science as the foundation. specifically, the ways that observations are collected, hypotheses are generated, and explanations and understanding are justified/adopted must be viewed as communal/socialized practices. 5. we should receive insights from perspectives and epistemologies other than our own, when offered, as gifts with reciprocity and accept that science done in community with people with different lived experiences provides a check on our own biases and assumptions such that a broader and more complete understanding is possible. this requires acknowledging that when the scientific community perceives from only one perspective, we are missing every other perspective that is crucial to understanding. sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 33 6. future philosophical theorizing about scientific explanation and understanding ought to more fully engage with projects and communities that are attempting to align multiple epistemic perspectives to produce a wider range of epistemic and social goods. while we recognize that the above list does not contain all the necessary changes, implementing these changes will put us on the path to recognizing the breadth and depth of the epistemic benefits of diversity in science. of course, we agree that demographic diversity in academic departments (students and faculty), funding agencies, editorial boards, and every other position of knowledge gatekeeping is a necessary part of improving epistemic diversity. but there must also be an ideological shift embraced by those gatekeepers that fundamentally rejects the elitism, exploitation, and coercion at the heart of the process by which any of us come to be agents within the epistemic communities. specifically, with respect to the epistemic aims of explanation and understanding this is essential because, as we argued above, these gatekeeping structures determine which explanations and understandings are considered, tested, and adopted by scientific (and academic) communities. this is the difficult task at hand, but it is crucial for creating a space where a wide range of ways of knowing, ways of doing, and ways of being can shape the future of scientific inquiry. the interventions we seek are not just in the realm of epistemology. rather, we are specifically calling for change in the people, practices, and products of science. as dara norman, tim sacco, and dorian russell (2024, 12) write, “over centuries, humans have been fascinated with the stars, the planets, the moon, etc., and wanted to know more about what they are and how they have come to be. the desire to gain this knowledge about the universe and our place in it is not limited to any one group of people in any one place or at any single time—it is a universal desire.” this preface to their volume on inclusion in astronomy is an important touchstone. if the desire for explanation and understanding is universal, science must be careful not to position itself, its limited disciplines, or its particular way of knowing as the one path to understanding the universe and our place within it. changing scientific fields in these ways must be a cooperative task. we live in a world in near constant crisis. the recent pandemic has made it abundantly clear that science has central value not just to some lofty epistemic ideals but also to the act of living itself. this does not mean that science is beyond scrutiny. for science to help us all make our lives livable, epistemic diversity becomes imperative. we need a practice of and an organizational structure for science within which it can aid, support, and endorse rather than erase, extract, and exploit—and where the pursuit of explanation feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 34 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theory of causal explanation. oxford: oxford university press. wylie, alison. 2003. “why standpoint matters.” in science and other cultures: issues in philosophies of science and technology, edited by robert figueroa and sandra harding, 26–48. new york: routledge. piper sledge is an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the university of arizona. her research explores the meanings of gender and race across diverse contexts including the ways that individuals resist and reimagine these meanings through embodiment. sledge is the author of the award-winning book bodies unbound: gender specific cancer and biolegitimacy, published with rutgers sledge and rice – reimagining the potential of feminist epistemologies in science published by scholarship@western, 2025 41 university press. sledge also serves as the director of community-based initiatives and research for the indigenous and place-based partnership program (ipp) of cosmic explorer. collin rice is an assistant professor of philosophy at colorado state university. his research focuses on the epistemological and metaphysical issues surrounding scientific explanation and understanding, the positive roles highly idealized models play in scientific research, and the social epistemology of scientific understanding. major works include his book leveraging distortions: explanation, idealization and universality in science, published with mit press; “moving beyond causes: optimality models and scientific explanation” in noûs; “models don’t decompose that way: a holistic view of idealized models” in british journal for the philosophy of science; and “factive scientific understanding without accurate representation” in biology and philosophy. 18855 sledge and rice title page 18855 sledge and rice final format 3 heyes’s responses to readers feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 8 recommended citation heyes, cressida j. 2023. “heyes’s responses to readers.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 8. 2023 heyes’s reponses to readers cressida j. heyes university of alberta cheyes@ualberta.ca heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 heyes’s responses to readers cressida j. heyes abstract in this response to readers, i start by summarizing and extending megan burke’s comments on interrupted time in the context of houselessness and the way vulnerable people are often denied their own temporality altogether. burke suggests that there is something called “anaesthetized time” that approaches death, and they invite the project to consider more closely the varieties of power that some have over others’ time. i relate these remarks to a political tradition in african american philosophy that elizabeth freeman calls thanatomimesis. in her response to the book, talia bettcher argues that two of the overly dichotomous framings need to be broken up: postdisciplinary and anaesthetic time, and agency and passivity. i clarify this point and suggest that these comments might point toward more generative work, including in relation to bettcher’s own project on intimate agency. finally alisa bierria relates the work of anaesthetics to her own project on incarceration, suggesting that in addition to being denied their own time, prisoners are rendered into temporal property. this is a helpful concept that, i suggest, could be linked more clearly to bierria’s understanding of revelatory agency and to the time of the contracted present. keywords: experience, genealogy, phenomenology, time, feminism megan burke’s terrific book when time warps: the lived experience of gender, race, and sexual violence came out in 2019, after i had completed anaesthetics. i regret that i missed the opportunity to incorporate its insights, as i think it is a much deeper engagement with temporality in the phenomenological tradition and its implications for gendered subjectivity than i was able to articulate. in their response to anaesthetics, burke points out that there are more kinds of temporality that are constitutive of forms of oppression, and indeed i would say that this proliferation of observations about how temporality functions to discipline and constrain is one of the most common and valuable responses to the book. they point out that there is a crucial distinction between being “pressed for time” (which is a lot of what anaesthetics describes) and “living punctuated time.” the example they use to illustrate this point is the sleep of houseless people, who, in being constantly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 “moved on” by threats to wellbeing or agents of security, including when they are trying to sleep, experience their time as always about to be interrupted. as burke points out, there is something extraordinarily cruel about not allowing someone to sleep in the only spaces available to them to do so: throwing tents and possessions into municipal dump trucks, or creating hostile architecture for storefronts, underpasses, or benches that prevents someone lying down, are all common modes of preventing the unhoused from sleeping in public. their commentary describes a public ordinance, of a fairly typical kind, in medford, oregon, that makes all lying, sleeping, and camping in public space illegal. even though homeless shelters provide overnight spaces, they are frequently oversubscribed, dangerous to sleep in, and run on rigid schedules that entail leaving early in the morning and not being allowed to return until late at night. i have been teaching a senior seminar called “the politics of sleep” for several years, and students in that class have consistently been very interested in the sleeping situations of houseless and underhoused people, i think because the policies and practices that constrain sleeping in public lay bare the most hostile and prejudicial sentiment toward vulnerable people who are meeting essential human needs. i venture that their interest also comes from living in edmonton, alberta, which is a subarctic canadian city where snow can fall as early as september and leave as late as may, and temperatures in the coldest months frequently fall below -20°c. the city of edmonton and edmonton police service nonetheless indulge in hostile architecture and dismantling encampments (both small, informal ones in the river valley, and at least one large, organized tent city started by indigenous organizations looking to create community for unhoused people on an island of traditional land in the city core). when temperatures are very low, sometimes the city will open malls or subway stations to the unhoused, including for sleeping, but equally sometimes people occupying those spaces will be moved out. it is all very inconsistent and very punitive, and the stakes seem higher here, when with some regularity people freeze to death while sleeping outside. as burke (2023, 6) points out, drawing on my similar claims about the harm of rape-while-unconscious, examples like this show how deeply intersubjective sleep is: “others can weaponize sleep in ways that legislate subjectivity by denying the capacity for sleep. as a result, heyes’s analysis invites us to think about how a restorative ‘edge experience’ of sleep is a matter of how others intervene or allow for a subject’s rhythms of waking and sleeping.” other experiences of time involve this kind of punctuation, this risk of always being interrupted, moved on, or forced to change orientation. lisa baraitser (2009) describes maternal time in this way, and being a new parent is for many people the most extreme experience of lack of control over sleep and consequent sleep deprivation they will have (heyes 2023). likewise, sarah sharma (2014) describes the time of the toronto taxi drivers she interviewed and observed as always either waiting or being abruptly pressed into speedy service, usually for others whose seamless heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 experience of accelerated time is valued. burke references their own list of ways time is interrupted, and all of these examples are about the way temporality in general, or the capacity to sleep in particular, are experienced intersubjectively and disclose relations of power. these people never have enough time because they are not deemed worthy of their own time, as burke puts it. interrupted sleep can even involve the self working against the self: the experience of severe sleep apnea, for example, involves constantly being awoken (even if not always consciously) by a blocked airway that triggers a physical emergency response to lack of oxygen to the brain. being intermittently woken gasping for air to survive is a very literal version of the sleep interruptions experienced by the houseless, which, according to burke, push them to the edge of lived time and annihilate their existence. as burke interprets the words of “joe” (an unhoused man interviewed by hanna olsen in her reporting on homelessness and sleep for the atlantic), his experience of sleep and time is governed by the hostile rules others impose, which in turn make their time run more smoothly. burke (2023, 8) points out that joe’s experience of time poverty “is a specter of death. to live time as punctuated in the way he does is to live at the edge of being without time. it is to live every day with the possibility of becoming a pure absence by being frozen in pure presence.” in a place where sleeping outside or even in an underheated space can very rapidly lead to hypothermic death, that specter is very close. and as the global climate changes and more and more parts of the world become intolerably hot, the prospect of death by heat can be added to the specters confronting the underhoused and houseless. anaesthetic time is unevenly apportioned in my account—chosen by some as a coping mechanism for a privileged sort of depletion, or imposed on others as a kind of social death. burke is pushing me to recognize even more diverse modes of the latter strategy when they argue that “in this form of time poverty, sleep is used against those who are unhoused to destroy subjectivity. as such, this kind of time poverty imperils one’s ability to experience time at all” (9). the houseless person who is forced to stay awake because they are not permitted to sleep in public, burke argues, is denied the temporal rhythms of sleep and forced to remain anchored in heideggerian “pure presence”—a state of being only in the present moment, where past and future are excluded from consciousness. paradoxically, this “totalizing presence” risks rendering the houseless subject into a “pure absence”—a nothing and a nobody when it comes to temporal experience. referencing their own work on how the pervasive threat of rape creates a normative feminine existence that is frozen in time (much as i suggest the capture of images of sexual violence against unconscious victims freezes and recirculates the moments of violation), burke concludes that this reduction of time by the violence of others should be labelled anaesthetized time (as opposed to my anaesthetic time), and that it “demarcates who is to be discarded” (8). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 thus far i have been situating burke’s comments and weaving them into my own thinking and teaching about sleep. i agree with their analysis and with their suggestion that “a sharper distinction between anaesthetic time and anaesthetized time would better draw out the intersubjective dimension of temporality. it would better elucidate how lived time is structured by others and how it is maldistributed in late capitalism” (burke 2023, 9). in the interests of continuing the conversation, i suggest that burke’s comments might get some elaboration from a tradition of african and african american philosophy in which the play between life, death, and time is an enduring theme. (think, for example, of orlando patterson’s [1982] classic account of slavery and social death; achille mbembe on necropolitics and death-in-life [2003, 2021]; or the impossibility of reprofuturity for african american communities, the destruction of kinship and its rebuilding within communities of resistance that hortense spillers [1987] and saidiya hartman [1997] theorize.) elizabeth freeman’s (2019) book beside you in time concludes chapter 2 with a coda called “playing dead in the twenty-first century.” freeman suggests that there is an african american cultural tradition of miming death, of “playing dead:” the experience of slavery and its aftermath, and modes of protesting and recalibrating that experience, involved an investment in rhythmic movements—not just song and dance, but a kind of shuttling toward and away from (social) death without reanimation, resurrection, or reincarnation. playing dead is a sense-method insofar as it involves the body touching death and/or becoming temporarily dead. it is a kind of fort-da for confronting the (a)temporalities of slavery and its aftermath, particularly the static time of social death—for accepting neither the permanence of social death nor the consolations of white humanism and the latter’s commitment to what it designates as a life. (freeman 2019, 54) the time of blackness in racist imaginations structures playing dead, in the form of hegelian insistence that africa and its peoples are outside history, and the positing of whiteness as equivalent not only to the march of civilizational progress but to time itself. what freeman calls chronothanatopolitics emerges because of this dual designation of blackness as (white) time’s backdrop and of black people as always already dead (where social death justifies literal death—as in working-to-death under slavery, allowing to die in prison, or the shockingly casual reflexes of racist murder). she reviews black lives matter (blm) tactics that recall and recast the actual violent deaths of black people, often at the hands of police or other agents of white security (freeman 2019, 84–86). in 2014, eighteen-year-old michael brown was shot and killed by a white police office in ferguson, missouri, his body in a pool of blood left in the heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 middle of the road for over four hours. according to witnesses, just before his death brown raised his hands and said, “don’t shoot!” which later prompted demonstrators to adopt the chant “hands up, don’t shoot!” (which endured beyond the protests surrounding that specific incident). freeman cites mirzoeff (2015) as saying that this chant “freezes time in that crucial moment before [brown] died and defies the imaginary police to shoot.” in her own words, “this performance turns toward rather than away from the timelessness accorded to africans and their descendants” (85). a second form of thanatomimesis adopted by blm is the die-in, where protestors collectively occupy public space by lying down and feigning death—a long-standing political action emerging from antiwar and environmental movements, the 1980s aids coalition to unleash power (act up), and, more recently, us protests against gun violence and, especially, mass shootings. the blm die-in might come with, for example, protestors speaking “i can’t breathe” eleven times, as eric garner did in 2014 as he was choked to death by a police officer who had accused him of selling illegal items on a sidewalk stand. in these mimetic political actions, protestors recall actual wrongful deaths, but because they are performed by the living, they also mime approaching and retreating from death. living people show how their deaths are anticipated and trivialized while remaining in the world to protest the conditions that make this the case. in describing these tactics through freeman’s interpretation, i return to burke’s observation that the punctuated, appropriated time of the houseless is tantamount to having one’s existence annihilated and to living with the specter of death. in extreme climates the risks of sleeping where it is too cold or too hot often have temporal markers—as when the edmonton weather report announces that there is a risk of frostbite to exposed skin after five minutes, or when the weather report in the uk in july 2022 (when temperatures exceeded forty degrees for the first time in history) announced that ordinary overheating can become potentially fatal heatstroke in as little as an hour if temperatures are above forty degrees. in these experiences, for those sleeping without temperature-controlled shelter, there is a constant approach to sleep, and sleep-as-death, that is also constantly halted. it is a radical temporal disruption in the same vein as the endogenous interruptions of apnea. can this be politicized via thanatomimesis? perhaps a way of conveying the cruelty of policies that prevent the houseless from sleeping safely is to hold die-ins where hypothermic death is performed? or perhaps to gather outside the home of a policymaker and wake them at shelter kicking-out time? perhaps to interrupt a legislature with noisemakers and demands to “move on”? the argument in anaesthetics about postdisciplinary time embeds a shorter argument about the representations of agency that it deploys to defend itself, which stand in ever-greater contrast with the forms of agency that are actually possible. that argument is mostly a negative one: that is, i suggest that there is a reductive feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 characterization of agency in some forms of liberalism as well as in popular culture that represents it as a quality solely of individuals. in one version of the more philosophically informed view, good agents take charge of their own futures, ideally identifying authentic preferences that they then make choices to match. drawing on the work of saba mahmood and alisa bierria, i argue that this is a culturally constrained view that also neglects the political contexts within which preferences and choices have meaning, or are even made possible. it concerns itself exclusively with the capacities of individuals, rather than the genealogies of subjects. in a popular and far more reductive version of this view, this taking charge of one’s life and directing its course can be exemplified by more or less any kind of action, by “doing” per se, which, in the absence of any political contextualization, is entirely available for ideological appropriation. in other, more recent, work, for example, i show how some of the rhetoric associated with the gig economy uses the ideology of workism to turn doing underpaid, precarious, and unpleasant jobs into a personal virtue because they provide the opportunity to “do” in contexts where action and work are more broadly conflated. after sketching this argument in the book, i comment laconically that it “perhaps deserves a book of its own” (heyes 2020, 91), and looking back, it seems evident that i was inviting objection by moving too quickly over complex ground. in her generous and perceptive comments, talia bettcher makes two main points, both connected to this part of my analysis. on the one hand, she argues that my interpretation of vulnerability and exposure in the chapter on rape of unconscious victims is undertheorized, thereby missing important features of intimacy, nakedness, and bodily exposure. she draws on her own important contributions to theorizing these concepts (bettcher 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017 [and, we hope, a monograph pulling it all together that is coming soon]) to suggest that all interpersonal encounters can be understood as having a degree of intimacy, characterized by certain boundaries that can be voluntarily or violently crossed. the existence of norms associated with these boundaries is of course necessary for any kind of crossing to be understood as such. certain instances of voluntary boundary-crossing (“traversal”) are communicative by inviting closeness. bettcher calls these instances of “intimate agency.” an example might be lightly touching someone’s hand across a table, or asking, “what do you think of this hat on me?” these are examples of agency because they involve controlling one’s closeness to another and signal a willingness to increase intimacy (without forcing it on someone else). one harm of rape, then, is that it refuses the right to control the degree of intimacy in an encounter—one’s boundaries are violently breached. as bettcher (2023, 7) points out, intimate agency involves making oneself into an “object of perceptual access,” but in a way that is uncoerced and has affective value. my analysis, she suggests, doesn’t capture this aspect of experience. recall that i argue that phenomenological “night” is a condition of a safe retreat into anonymity (provided to all human beings, crucially, by sleep) and that heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 sexual violence against unconscious people inhibits that retreat, while also positing that when images of violence are digitally circulated, they make one’s waking life into an experience of being objectified as “all surface”—reduced to the two-dimensional photo or video in which one is not a subject. bettcher is introducing a third mode of analysis: the idea that the harm of rape involves having one’s capacity for intimate agency betrayed, where part of the prior value of intimate agency is making oneself perceptually available. i find this understanding compelling—both in describing a real aspect of lived experience and in providing a language for describing along a new vector what is so damaging about rape. i’m not sure, however, that i would use the language of becoming an “object” to describe this kind of agency. one may wish to make one’s embodied self more available to another as part of a project of increased intimacy, but this is, by definition, an intersubjective experience. the harm of the digital image is that it refuses intersubjectivity—no one asks for permission to take those photos and circulate them, and no one (in the especially distressing examples that i discussed) will engage the subject of the images as a subject. they are distributed as a form of community bonding around the image-object, i argued, and their frisson comes from the power of erasing their subject. thus while inviting touch from a desired other (for example) is certainly a perceptual (or, in my terms, an aesthetic) experience, it is not an experience of being objectified but rather the opposite—of being recognized as a subject who has solicited that experience and now exists in a new relationship to the other (whether the invitation is welcomed or rebuffed). this may end up being a rather semantic point, but it explains why i find it hard to see how bettcher’s elaboration challenges rather than only supplements the model i defend. in a related point (that is presented first but really zooms out from this more specific engagement), bettcher argues that my book operates with excessively dichotomous conceptual framings: on the one hand, of postdisciplinary and anaesthetic time (here her objection resembles burke’s) and, on the other, of the form of agency that postdisciplinary time prizes versus passivity. agency doesn’t have to be limited to the reductive and individualizing positions i criticize, and can instead be thought of as intersubjective, developed in community rather than exercised alone. this latter objection is important to engage because i struggled with distinguishing the forms of agency (or its failures) i was criticizing from any more positive argument. i never wanted to say that being passive is a virtue, although i did want to explore the bartlebyian idea that refusing to do things is a form of resistance. one of the motivating ideas of anaesthetics is that it can be hard to separate neoliberal ideas about the cultivation of human capital from the aesthetics of existence, or the exploitation of labour from working to improve the world, or bourgeois fantasies of self-cultivation from the good life. bettcher points out that if work-oriented alertness and “blitzing out” are dialectically related, then both must be feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 implicated in resistance. she then wonders “whether some states of alertness are not also resistant in their opposition to work-saturated experiences? consider, for example, companions putting their phones away to enjoy the evening sky while engaging in lively and enriching conversations that run into the wee hours” (bettcher 2023, 3). i would add here that the way the vigilance of postdisciplinary time is privileged over the numbness of anaesthetic time (which i emphasize in the book, with the caveat that this privilege is indexed to context) has implications for an account of resistance: if you are someone expected to be permanently “on,” then refusal looks different than if you are a member of a group anaesthetized-unto-death. similarly, bettcher suggests, agency might be better understood, with maría lugones, as “a complex interpersonal affair” rather than the “implied individuality” in my account that risks “erasing the crucial interpersonal dimensions of resistance to social structures that construct and reinforce hegemonic agency” (3). this all seems correct to me, and the feminist philosophical literature on relational autonomy, for example (not discussed in anaesthetics), consistently develops this point. the point i want to stand is that agency is represented as an individual quality, with obviously ideological gains. bettcher’s additions are, however, a useful corrective to the individualism that i intended only to be describing in critical terms in the text, but that nonetheless permeates it, taking on an aura of normativity. i think deep down i am not entirely convinced that the concept of agency does any valuable work for political philosophy outside this ideological frame, which probably explains why i made my argument in an explicitly cursory way. if it is valuable, however, i think alisa bierria has been among the most compelling philosophers in developing a politically robust account of that value, both in the work that is referenced in my book and in her subsequent generative comments on it. for bierria (2023, 6), agency is heterogeneous: “that is, instead of evaluating how much agency one has, we might ask what kind of agency one engages, the category of ‘kind’ being defined through its relation to systems of power.” like both bettcher and burke, she suggests that the dichotomies of active versus passive in relation to time and agency could be rethought. recounting the various vested interests of the prisonindustrial complex in the us, she suggests that they conspire to motivate holding large numbers of prisoners—disproportionately black people—as a kind of commodity for the purposes of extraction. these people are “doing time” for the benefit of the system, and in the process are denied any kind of temporal subjectivity, even an exploited one. this argument reminds me of lisa guenther’s (2013) critique of solitary confinement as the erasure of a certain cyclical, varied, and intersubjectively developed lived experience of space and time, as well as burke’s use of the concept “pure absence.” the members of racialized groups who “do time” for the profit of white-dominant (and settler) society have no time themselves—not even the forms of oppressive temporality i reference in anaesthetics. rather, bierria says, they “are heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 made into being time” (3). they become temporal property: while being forced to work and being forced to languish may be part of their experience, their subjectivity is no part of the system of mass incarceration. instead, they become objects, “extracted as commodities themselves, human life as time—lifetimes—as product” (5). in this context, bierria recounts the awful story of robbie hall, an african american woman who defended her life from a man who sexually assaulted her. after he died, she was prosecuted and sentenced to fourteen years to life, but she served over thirty-six years after she refused to retract her testimony that she had been sexually assaulted, be remorseful, and represent her attacker as a victim. bierria describes hall’s actions as exemplary of “revelatory agency”—a kind of epistemic noncompliance that refuses hegemonic meaning and defends the truth against a system of power that “disappears the subjectivity of the testifier” (7). i take from this story and bierria’s interpretation of it that something like what foucault called parrhesia can define freedom, even in its absence. i don’t think any of us would have faulted hall for capitulating to the demand that she recant her testimony and conform to the script offered to her in exchange for her freedom from incarceration; to the extent i can even imagine being in her situation, it is what i imagine i would have done. but her impossible situation shows very clearly the terms on which “choice” is offered to people who have been deprived of subjectivity and rendered into temporal property. it is tempting to say that these people simply have no agency, which seems right in the sense that their capacities to act to influence their own worlds are rendered almost nonexistent because of extreme domination, but wrong in the sense that they do not thereby lack the existential capacity to choose. in moving our attention from agency as a quantitative term (“how much?”) to a qualitative one (“of what kind?”), bierria helps bettcher’s point about the intersubjective nature of agency find its feet: hall was eventually released because she was interviewed by the la times about slave labour in prisons during the covid pandemic (feldman 2020) and this news story got traction in activist communities. what i don’t understand about bierria’s comments is the link between being made into temporal property and articulating the possibility of impossible freedom. it seems to me that, existentially at least, anyone could find themselves in a situation like hall’s where domination had closed down their possibilities for agency in the name of their own freedom, without having first been made into temporal property. some of the accounts of extreme addiction i read for chapter 3 of my book, for example, described people living in a very profound kind of extended anaesthetic time who (whether due to their addiction itself or the socially marginal life it has generated) are on the lip of a similar existential paradox. thus in thinking further about how to take the arguments about agency that situate it in contexts of oppression and stress its intersubjective aspects, i’d like to think more about the role feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 of temporality. in my original argument, it is the shortening of the now and the concomitant dwindling of the epistemic usefulness of experience that truncate agency: in postdisciplinary time the future presses upon us, and the understanding and skills we have developed to make sense of the present are iteratively made redundant. as i put it (heyes 2020, 90), “where my own experience has decreasing reliability within a shrinking present, my self-rule is thereby undercut” (a point that also appears in burke’s analysis in a different guise). bierria’s comments clarify that not everyone lives in a shrinking present: in a way, prisoners serving “life” are living in a permanent present. we can return to the basics of phenomenology: life is structured by temporal apprehension of past, present, and future, with one’s own death as an ever-present and ever-nearing horizon. i don’t know, exactly, what makes a particular institutional structuring of time oppressive, while another is liberatory, and perhaps there aren’t any consistent criteria. living in the now is a goal of buddhist adepts and is cruelly imposed on the incarcerated; always anticipating the future can be a sign of chronic anxiety or the liveliness of hope. there is a lot more to do in explaining and diversifying the sometimes very basic tools that anaesthetics of existence forged, and i am grateful to talia bettcher, alisa bierria, and megan burke for their willingness to continue that philosophical work together. references baraitser, lisa. 2009. maternal encounters: the ethics of interruption. london: routledge. bettcher, talia mae. 2012. “full-frontal morality: the naked truth about gender.” hypatia 27, no. 2 (spring): 319–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011 .01184.x. ———. 2013. “trans women and ‘interpretive intimacy’: some initial reflections.” in the essential handbook of women’s sexuality, volume 2: diversity, health, and violence, edited by donna castañeda, 51–68. santa barbara, ca: praeger. ———. 2014. “when selves have sex: what the phenomenology of trans sexuality can teach about sexual orientation.” journal of homosexuality 61 (5): 605–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472. ———. 2017. “getting ‘naked’ in the colonial/modern gender system: a preliminary trans feminist analysis of pornography.” in beyond speech: pornography and analytic feminist philosophy, edited by mari mikkola, 157–76. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190257910 .003.0008. ———. 2023. “phenomenology, agency, and rape: comments on heyes’s anaesthetics of existence.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 6. bierria, alisa. 2023. “being time.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 7. heyes – responses to readers published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 burke, megan. 2019. when time warps: the lived experience of gender, race, and sexual violence. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ———. 2023. “life at the edge: punctuated time and time poverty.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 5. feldman, kiera. 2020. “california kept prison factories open. inmates worked for pennies an hour as covid-19 spread.” los angeles times, october 11, 2020. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-11/california-prisonfactories-inmates-covid-19. freeman, elizabeth. 2019. beside you in time: sense methods and queer sociabilities in the american nineteenth century. durham, nc: duke university press. guenther, lisa. 2013. solitary confinement: social death and its afterlives. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hartman, saidiya v. 1997. scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century america. new york: oxford university press. heyes, cressida j. 2020. anaesthetics of existence: essays on experience at the edge. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2023. “reading advice to parents about children’s sleep: the political psychology of a self-help genre.” critical inquiry 49, no. 2 (winter): 145–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/722384. mbembe, achille. 2003. “necropolitics.” translated by libby meintjes. public culture 15, no. 1 (winter): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. ———. 2021. “the universal right to breathe.” translated by carolyn shread. critical inquiry 47, no. s2 (winter): s58–s62. https://doi.org/10.1086/711437. mirzoeff, nicholas d. 2015. “#blacklivesmatter is breathing new life into the diein.” new republic, august 10, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/122513 /blacklivesmatter-breathing-new-life-die. patterson, orlando. 1982. slavery and social death: a comparative study. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sharma, sarah. 2014. in the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. durham, nc: duke university press. spillers, hortense j. 1987. “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer): 64–81. heyes response title page heyes response final format not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 9 recommended citation peters, katie. 2024. “not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 9. 2024 not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization katie peters university of connecticut katie.peters@uconn.edu peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization katie peters abstract one problem highlighted by intersectional and black feminist theory is that not all oppressed agents are oppressed in the same ways and to the same degree. one of the implications of this for responsibility practices is that social practices of exculpation will not apply equally across all agents. this article explores two false social narratives about far-right women and evaluates them according to the standard view of moral responsibility. the first narrative of misogyny as exculpation holds that far-right women are themselves victims of oppression (of the misogyny of their own movements) and thus not blameworthy for their actions, as misogyny undermines their control and knowledge on the standard view of moral responsibility. the second narrative of infantilization as exculpation also proposes that women lack both knowledge and control on the standard view. the narrative tells us that (white) women, unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (white) men. if we assume the standard view of moral responsibility, both of these narratives impede our ability to hold far-right women responsible. by instead proposing the adoption of the rational relations view of angela smith, this article seeks to demonstrate how a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to far-right women’s extremism with larger implications for our responsibility practices as a whole. keywords: extremism, moral responsibility, far-right women, exculpation, misogyny, infantilization 1. introduction one problem highlighted by intersectional and black feminist theory (crenshaw 1989, 1992; collins 1990) is that not all oppressed agents are oppressed in the same ways and to the same degree. correspondingly, the licenses, privileges, and restrictions faced by an agent will vary based on their social location. one of the implications of this for responsibility practices is that social practices of exculpation feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 will not apply equally across all agents. in the united states, white women have historically been excused from responsibility for many things that women (and men) of color are often held to higher standards for.1 one place this becomes abundantly clear is in the case of far-right women and their work on behalf of their extremist movements. this article explores two false social narratives about far-right women and evaluates them according to the standard view of moral responsibility. the first narrative of misogyny as exculpation holds that far-right women are themselves victims of oppression (of the misogyny of their own movements) and thus not blameworthy for their actions, as misogyny undermines their control and knowledge on the standard view of moral responsibility. however, while we can concede that these women do in fact suffer (and often severely) from the effects of misogyny, i argue that the misogyny they face does not impede their ability to contribute to farright extremism—nor does it impede their potential to be held accountable for those actions. the second narrative of infantilization as exculpation also proposes that women lack both knowledge and control on the standard view. the narrative tells us that (white) women, unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (white) men. this infantilization positions (white) women as perpetually naïve children who must be cared for by white male paternalism. if we assume the standard view of moral responsibility, both of these narratives impede our ability to hold farright women responsible. by instead proposing the adoption of the rational relations view of angela smith (2008, 2012), this article seeks to demonstrate how a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to farright women’s extremism with larger implications for our responsibility practices as a whole. the rest of section 1 will explore two aspects of the above problem: in section 1.1 i will give an example of how far-right women are dismissed and excused from responsibility in popular american culture, and section 1.2 will outline the standard view of moral responsibility as opposed to nonvolitionalist accounts, represented by 1 i have, in the past, refrained from capitalizing the “w” in white similarly to the “b” in black in recognition that while the adjective black refers to the shared culture and experience of the african diaspora, the adjective white does not similarly denote an ethnic identity in the same way—and may in fact play into white supremacist arguments for the elevation of the “white race.” however, a reviewer directed me to the excellent arguments of both kwame anthony appiah (2020) and sally haslanger (2012, 311) for capitalizing both; they argue that doing so situates the historical creation and artificiality of the concept of race. with that in mind, i chose to capitalize both white and black in this article, as the artificiality and inconsistent application of white supremacist logic is a key feature of the argument here. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 angela smith’s (2008) rational relations view. in moving on to the exculpatory narratives, section 2 will explore the narrative of misogyny, and section 3 will do the same for the infantilization narrative. the conclusion in section 4 will explore some of the advantages that adopting a nonvolitionalist account can have and will argue that doing so can itself be a feminist response to moral responsibility. 1.1. “and girlfriend” on february 6, 2023, brandon russell, the founder of atomwaffen—a white power terrorist group—was arrested, along with his girlfriend, and charged with plotting an attack on the maryland power grid (weiner, hilton, and morse 2023). in a twitter explanation of the history of the atomwaffen group and their decision to target infrastructure for terrorist acts, historian kathleen belew (2023a, 2023d) noted the strangeness of the washington post article’s reference to sarah clendaniel as simply russell’s “girlfriend.” in a picture accompanying her tweet—taken from the post article—clendaniel is dressed head to toe in paramilitary gear, complete with skull face mask, semiautomatic weapon front and center, and an extra handgun in a thigh holster. two days later, belew tweeted an explanation of what she calls the “and girlfriend” trope, (the post had since updated their article to refer to clendaniel as russell’s partner) as well as the role it played in causing the atf and fbi to miss warnings about the white power movement’s plans for the oklahoma city bombing, as documented in her 2018 book bring the war home.2 belew says, “and girlfriend” comes from a long, long issue in journalism, movies, and the academy, in which women aren’t recognized as political actors when their beliefs don’t align with a feminist mode. in other words, when women say “i’m just a wife and mother,” or “i’m not political,” we have usually taken them at their word—even when, in the case of white power women, they were in fact activists as they said these things. (belew 2023b, 2023e; see also belew 2023c) 2 carol howe, subject of a new podcast/audiobook called the debutante by journalist jon ronson (2023), had been an undercover informant for the fbi and atf. howe had passed on warnings about “dangerous, apocalyptic statements” from the elohim city group (a white power separatist group that timothy mcveigh, the oklahoma city bomber, was connected to). she stated that the leaders said “a ‘cataclysm’ was pending in the spring of 1995 and that the federal buildings in oklahoma city or texas were being targeted for a bomb that would signal ‘a racial holy war’ in the united states” (belew 2018, 219). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 clendaniel, whose brother said she had always held neo-nazi views (fiallo 2023), was most certainly a far-right extremist in her own right (as the post article describes). authorities found a written statement from clendaniel during a search, which they described as a “de facto manifesto.” it included the statement, “i would sacrifice **everything** for my people to just have a chance for our cause to succeed,” as well as references to hitler, the unabomber, and norwegian mass killer anders breivik (fiallo 2023). as belew highlighted, even when presented with clear evidence of the whitesupremacist activity of far-right women, american society and media3 tend to dismiss women’s involvement and focus on the men. lack of attention to the topic in general suggests that women’s involvement in the far right is not worth significant attention, supported by the fact that most domestic terror is perpetrated4 and organized by men,5 but also perhaps because women in racist movements are seen as apolitical in their own right and lacking agency, attached to the racist movement only though the political affiliations of their husbands, boyfriends, or fathers, as sociologist kathleen blee (1996) suggests. this article thus begins with this simple question: why shouldn’t we dismiss sarah clendaniel as simply the “girlfriend” of a white supremacist? 1.2. the standard view versus nonvolitionalist accounts one way to bring far-right women to the fore is to insist that they are, in fact, responsible for their actions. far-right women have only rarely been held accountable for what they do on behalf of the right, and this dismissal is often largely based on the patriarchal and misogynistic nature of their movements and organizations. the reasoning goes like this: far-right women are themselves victims of the misogynistic men in their movements. so how can we hold them responsible for what they do under conditions of oppression? i believe this is a mistake and that taking an intersectional feminist view that highlights the disproportionate amount of power that white women of the far right hold will allow us to see them as rightly responsible 3 the social “we” implicit here is used in the recognition that it is the united states’ history of patriarchy and white supremacy that fosters this dismissal. oppressed peoples may have situated knowledge that exempts them from falling victim to the type of social narratives discussed in this article (collins 1990, mills 2007). 4 the violence project (n.d.) database of mass shootings in the united states (a mass shooting being one with four or more victims) states that from 1966 to 2020, 97.6 percent of mass shooters were male, and 52 percent of shooters were white. 5 in inside organized racism, kathleen blee (2002, 5) suggests that the media and society at large often focus on the forceful male leaders of organized racist movements, and subsequently most male and virtually all female members occupy “hidden niches” in racist groups. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 for their behavior and ideology. many of the excuses that have formed the basis of their exculpation are false social narratives that suggest far-right women do not have enough knowledge or control on a standard view of moral responsibility to count as fully responsible for their actions. this article seeks to evaluate the validity of the standard view of moral responsibility in these situations. the standard view of moral responsibility posits that agents must have sufficient knowledge and control in order to be held responsible for their actions. we may think that a drugged person does not have full control of their actions or that a young child is incapable of the kind of knowledge needed for detailed ethical dilemmas (talbert 2016). focusing on the knowledge requirement in his book who knew?, george sher (2009) argues that many popular accounts of responsibility have ascribed to what he calls the searchlight view. in this view, an agent’s responsibility extends only as far as his awareness of what it is he is doing (sher 2009, 4). similarly, volitionalist accounts of responsibility focus on the control condition: they propose that an agent must have voluntary control over anything for which they will be held responsible. 6 there are two possible outcomes for the standard view of moral responsibility in the cases of far-right women that i am evaluating: 1. the standard view is true. i will argue that even in these cases, taking an intersectional feminist perspective will still allow us to hold many far-right women responsible. 2. the standard view is false. an alternative account, found in angela smith’s (2008) rational relations view, will allow us to hold all far-right women responsible. so, either way, far-right women are responsible for their behavior on behalf of their extremist organizations. 6 it is important to note that i am not arguing against any particular individual account of responsibility that forms the standard view, and thus there may be a wide variety of differences in what does, or does not, constitute sufficient control or knowledge on any given individual account. instead, like sher’s presentation of the searchlight view, this formulation of the standard view is meant to serve as a general counterpoint to smith’s rational relations view. the point is not to argue whether particular versions of the standard view will be able to delineate when control or knowledge will be enough for responsibility in the cases presented here; it is instead that smith’s nonvolitionalist account sidesteps entirely the thorny questions of control and knowledge that the standard view will encounter. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 angela smith’s nonvolitionalist rational relations view can be summarized as follows: to say that an agent is morally responsible for some thing is to say that that agent is open, in principle, to demands for justification regarding that thing. to blame or criticize an agent morally for something, then, always embodies (at least implicitly) a demand to her to justify herself, and therefore it only makes sense to direct these forms of moral response to an agent on the basis of things that reflect her evaluative judgments. . . . we are morally responsible not only for our intentional actions but also for the majority of our attitudes (our beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.) as well as for our patterns of awareness and many unintentional omissions, since these generally reflect our (often spontaneous and misguided) evaluation of reasons. (smith 2012, 577– 78; emphasis mine) smith’s (2012) nonvolitionalist account focuses on answerability as the basis for moral responsibility. this unified view has the potential benefit of helping us hold far-right women accountable for more than simply their actions. as smith describes above, since such things as emotions and patterns of awareness (or unawareness) are included in the account, this means that we have the ability to hold people responsible for both conscious and unconscious racism. whether or not someone acts on their reprehensible beliefs, smith’s account allows us to demand that they answer for that reprehensible content.7 there has been some question about whether answerability accounts such as smith’s can address the power asymmetries that occur in oppressive societies (ciurria 2020, 8) as well as the social nature of a feminist perspective. in their introduction to 7 readers familiar with michelle ciurria’s (2020) magnificent volume an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility may wonder why i did not simply turn to her account to ground a responsibility theory capable of accounting for an intersectional feminist perspective. the main reason is that in this article, i wish to remain neutral on the idea of whether all of the situations in which far-right women are answerableresponsible are also situations in which far-right women are blameworthy. ciurria’s (2020, 9) account focuses on blame as a communicative practice that not only marks someone as a norm violator but expresses a negative attitude toward the perpetrator. instead, following andrea c. westlund (2018), i want to retain the possibility that we can have answerability-responsibility without blame—in terms of ciurria’s account, this would mark the perpetrator as a norm violator, but it would not express a negative attitude toward them. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 the volume social dimensions of moral responsibility, hutchison, mackenzie, and oshana (2018, 6) say that, for smith, the capacity for an agent to answer is “hypothetical rather than actual, and the demands are mainly demands of the agent as a reasoner, not as an interlocutor with others.” my contention is that smith’s account need not stay in the realm of the hypothetical. instead, we can use an answerability account in the kind of socially responsive approach that hutchison and her coeditors seek to build in their volume. the kinds of actions undertaken and beliefs held by far-right women described in this article cause an incredible amount of harm—not just to the people of color to whom those harms are most often directed but also to other white people around these far-right women who are inundated with their ideology. any community suffering these kinds of harm has the right to demand an answer for those harms that have occurred. and smith’s contention that the agent is answering as a reasoner is particularly relevant in these instances: we are talking about harms that occur on the (whether consciously or unconsciously held) basis of an ideology of white supremacy. 2. misogyny as exculpation one reason that far-right women are often excused from responsibility for their actions is the fact that they themselves are victims of virulent misogyny in their movements. it is thought that this oppression robs them of control and thus responsibility. this has long been a problem in feminist philosophy: as claudia card said, not only can oppression make certain virtues difficult to develop, but the question arises in view of the damaging nature of oppression whether those who are oppressed are moral agents at all. in feminist philosophy, this has complicated the question of how resistance by the oppressed is possible. (1996, 4; emphasis mine) feminist theory suggests that oppression (such as the misogyny and patriarchy faced by women) may be inescapable (lugones 1990, frye 1983), and if it is, responsibility practices become complicated by undermining oppressed peoples’ agency (choice, control, and freedom from coercion [isaacs 2002, 144]). in order to evaluate whether this thesis is true, let me first turn to the nature of misogyny itself before evaluating its role in the far right. kate manne’s (2017, 33) concept of the logic of misogyny offers a compelling alternative view to what she calls the naïve conception of misogyny, where misogyny is primarily a property of individual misogynists who are prone to hate women qua women—that is, because of their gender. instead, manne’s (2017, 51) conception functions on this basic premise: misogynistic reactions to women like violence or degradation occur when feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 women are perceived as unbecoming according to patriarchal norms, in order to enforce conformity to patriarchal standards, some of which are implicit (structural), others explicit (individual). on manne’s view, men need not see women as less than human or subhuman; instead, the patriarchal inheritance in our society positions women as human givers who owe men moral respect, approval, admiration, deference, and gratitude, as well as moral attention, sympathy, and concern that men do not likewise owe to women (2017, xxi). when women fail to fulfill these roles that men expect them to play, they can encounter the hostility, degradation, or violence of misogyny. this is an important distinction that makes sense of some phenomena that cannot be explained on the naïve view of misogyny: if it is simply a matter of womanhating, how can men degrade some women and venerate others (or occasionally, do both simultaneously)? manne’s logic of misogyny allows us to see that if misogynistic reactions are attempts to keep women in line when they stray from expected patriarchal norms, then praise for women comes when they fulfill their expected social role with regards to misogynistic or patriarchal men or structures. manne’s (2017, 67) analysis means that where there’s misogyny, there’s patriarchy; so the presence of virulent misogyny in the far right implies the existence of, or reference to, present or historical patriarchal structures. the oppression described above, as well as the presence of these patriarchal structures, will necessarily limit women’s capabilities for control and knowledge on a standard view of moral responsibility. how much voluntary control can a woman have if she is constantly subjected to attempts to keep her in line with the desires of the patriarchy? we also have good reason to believe that at least some far-right women face increased misogyny (relative to women outside the far right) simply due to the nature of the movements they are involved in. in looking directly at the misogyny far-right women face, tracy llanera (2023) offers a take on what she calls the misogyny paradox. the better alt-right women promote racist hate as visible and vocal propagandists, the more hostility they face from their fellow group-members for acting outside the proscribed “traditional” feminine role. in her article, llanera recounts the toxic threats female alt-right propagandists face: hate mail, threats of rape and violence not just by their critics but also by their fellow alt-right sympathizers, and abuse against their families. their very attempts to promote the views of their hate groups label them as women failing to meet submissive expectations, prompting abuse from their compatriots. but conversely, the more submissive alt-right women become in compliance with that proscribed role, the more they feel the misogyny of the men in the organization when their compliance does not exempt them from abuse. this is because these “good racist girls” may have internalized feminist norms of their right to independent choice and freedom, including their freedom to choose the traditionally submissive feminine role. when that choice doesn’t exempt them from peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 the misogyny of alt-right men, they feel betrayed. thus, llanera suggests that far-right women face a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t paradox (in a marilyn fryestyle double bind) that amplifies the misogyny they experience. 2.1. misogyny and moral responsibility with the understanding that misogyny functions to attempt to keep women in line with patriarchal norms, and with the knowledge that far-right women may face increased instances of misogyny due to the highly patriarchal nature of their movements, we can move on to evaluation of the misogyny narrative on both standard and nonvolitionalist responsibility views. to see how the standard view works with relation to the narrative of misogyny as exculpation, let me begin with an example. given the highly patriarchal nature of far-right movements, the popular imagining of far-right women often goes something like this: a white woman (let’s call her kathleen) has the misfortune to be born to a family active in the white supremacist and evangelical far right. kathleen is brought up to be subservient to her father, to stay “pure” for her future husband, and to expect to have as many white babies as possible. when she ends up fulfilling all these expectations, she becomes active in attempting to recruit other white women to the “tradwife” cause.8 let’s review this case in light of the standard view of moral responsibility. for the knowledge condition, it’s clear that kathleen had diminished access to social narratives that would allow her to choose a different path than the highly patriarchal one she was raised to expect. even if kathleen was raised in the era of social media proliferation, the way algorithms create epistemic bubbles and echo chambers could still ensure that alternative views do not reach her (nguyen 2020). thus, the question of whether she could be held responsible for the knowledge condition on a standard view of moral responsibility is a difficult one. it’s clear that her access to alternative, nonmisogynistic and nonpatriarchal narratives during her formative years was incredibly diminished; it’s also unclear, given her upbringing, whether she had the ability to circumvent the epistemic bubble or echo chamber she may have found herself in as an adult. given something like sher’s formulation of the searchlight view, where an agent’s responsibility only extends as far as their awareness, it’s going to be hard to argue that we can hold kathleen responsible given the level of misogyny and 8 “tradwife” is common slang for “traditional wife.” think of the stereotypical 1950s housewife: subservient to her husband, the happy homemaker having many (white) babies. see norris (2023). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 patriarchal expectations she faced (or at least, it will be difficult to hold her fully responsible). for the control condition of the standard view, it’s clear that kathleen has been raised in an oppressive environment where her choices and expectations were curtailed significantly. she was raised in a highly patriarchal environment, so on manne’s analysis, we can rightly assume misogyny worked to keep her in line with patriarchal expectations. her father, brothers, and any other men in her conservative church would have constantly reinforced (whether consciously or not) the message that she was to be docile and subservient, continually reminded of her place in the patriarchal hierarchy. volitionalist accounts of the standard view propose that the control condition means an agent must have voluntary control over actions that they are held responsible for. can we say that kathleen, who was told all her life that she was inferior to and beholden to the men around her, had any sort of voluntary control over her decisions to stay in the ideology she was raised in? it seems that, once again, the standard view is going to have a hard time holding kathleen responsible for her behavior or activity on behalf of the far right due to the misogyny she faced. however, if we assume that the standard view of moral responsibility is false and apply smith’s (2008, 2012) rational relations view, we come up with a very different result. the knowledge and control conditions on the standard view have been explicitly concerned with how kathleen’s decisions came about: was she aware of alternatives, did she voluntarily choose her actions, or did misogyny prevent her from doing so? but this focus on the evolution of her decisions misses the fact that kathleen’s decisions and behavior were white supremacist ones that ultimately worked to recruit more people into her hateful ideology. kathleen was not only the victim of misogyny in her upbringing, but when she became an adult who recruited others to her cause, she also became a perpetrator of that same misogyny. focusing purely on the way those decisions came about serves to hide the fact that kathleen’s decisions actively caused significant harm. in applying smith’s nonvolitionalist framework, instead of asking why kathleen took certain actions, we shift our focus to the harmed community’s right to demand an answer for kathleen’s harmful behavior. particularly when kathleen begins recruiting other women to her lifestyle, we have questions about her attitudes, behaviors, and patterns of awareness. why must her babies be white? why should other women also be subservient to men, if they have no personal interest in it and were not brought up to expect that they should do so? what harm is she doing to her children by raising them in such an environment? because kathleen is now a grown adult, we have good reason to think that her actions and attitudes reflect her— conscious or unconscious—underlying judgements. her life appears to have been nothing if not consistent with the way she was raised. do those she is harming (which, given the insidious nature of white supremacist logic in the united states, might be peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 american society as a whole) not have the right to ask her to answer for what we see as reprehensible beliefs and ideology? whether kathleen’s racism is conscious or unconscious, smith’s view allows us to hold her accountable for it in a way that the standard view cannot (at least, not without significant modification and argumentation). we also have evidence that many far-right women are not, in fact, raised like kathleen was—continually exposed to the patriarchy and misogyny of the ideology they grew up in. take, for example, social media personality and alt-right influencer lauren southern. one of the alt-right’s most famous female propagandists of the last ten years, southern shot to internet fame with her first viral video, “why i am not a feminist,” made as an audition for canada’s rebel media, an outlet designed by ezra levant to be canada’s version of breitbart news (lombroso 2020a, 2020b). southern is a wealthy, active propagandist for the far right who raises both awareness and money for their cause. unlike the fictional kathleen, southern enjoyed a “comfortable, middle class” upbringing in a wealthy suburb, where she enjoyed being a contrarian and provocateur as early as high school. southern told journalist daniel lombroso about a time she and a jewish classmate dressed up as hitler and mussolini to get a rise out of their teachers: she further shared that she didn’t necessarily believe the things she said, “but the power of making her teachers squirm was intoxicating” (2020a, 2020b). at the same time, southern has clearly suffered harshly from the misogyny of the alt-right organizations she has worked so hard to promote. lombroso’s (2020a, 2020b) description of an incident he witnessed while following southern for an atlantic article and documentary is particularly vivid. lombroso was tagging along as southern appeared on gavin mcinnes’s talk show (mcinnes is the founder of the altright organization the proud boys in addition to being an alt-right media personality). southern is the only woman present, and there is no seat for her: mcinnes quips, “are you ever gonna have kids, give birth, are you going to be a mother? then i’ll give them my seat. if you’re not making humans, then fucking stand up, bitch.” mcinnes is here attempting to use misogynistic rhetoric to place southern into the type of predefined patriarchal role that would most likely limit her voluntary control capacities in significant ways. but lauren southern is no kathleen. if the standard view of responsibility is true, then southern may well be responsible for her actions in a way kathleen is not. throughout lombroso’s article, southern describes her intentional positioning as a provocateur and a keen awareness of both the misogyny she faces and alternative ways of life that would free her from that abuse, demonstrating a clear knowledge of why she faces the misogyny she does and what the alternatives are. at the end of the article, she is poised to leave and try to start a new life in a new country, demonstrating that she indeed has voluntary control over her continued subjection to the harsh misogyny of the alt-right. and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 southern does successfully leave and start a new life in australia—however, by the time the article is published, she has gone back to her old ways and once again works actively on behalf of the alt-right, once again subjecting herself to the misogyny of those movements. in these ways, southern demonstrates both suitable knowledge and control to be responsible on any formulation of the standard view. but if the standard view is false and we apply smith’s rational relations account, southern is still responsible. she is clearly answerable-responsible for her actions and behavior despite the misogyny she faces—we can rightly demand that she justify herself at any time. 3. infantilization as exculpation while the infantilization narrative has historically been used to justify women’s oppression, its modern uses in the era of (mostly) equal legal rights for women can become much more insidious. before moving on to these modern uses, let me first address the historical development of the narrative as well as its unequal application across races. white women’s ability to escape responsibility through the infantilization narrative is based on the perception of their limited agency that is the result of a hierarchical view that positions women in a “naturally” subordinated position relative to men (frye 1983; jaggar 1983). in her book on submission and patriarchy, manon garcia (2021, 3) writes that this view of women’s natural submission “goes hand in hand with the idea of an essential and natural inferiority of women compared to men: it is because women are viewed as incapable of being free in the way that men are, or that such a freedom is seen as a potential danger, that their submission is good.” if women are incapable of the same freedom or selfdetermination as men, it stands to reason that they will be found to have less control and knowledge than men on a standard view of moral responsibility. this has long been a feature of conservative rhetoric used to oppress women in patriarchal societies. garcia (2021) cites jean-jacques rousseau’s discussion of the education of sophie in book 5 of émile, or, on education. here, rousseau offers such delights as this: “the man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance.” in the us far right, this idea has been evident since at least the first ku klux klan that arose in the southern united states after the end of reconstruction. the first kkk used the narrative of imperiled white womanhood to fuel their campaign of terror and brutality against the recently freed black population (blee 1991, 12–13). blee writes, “the racial state of the slave south … was built on a foundation that dictated a hierarchical division of male and female, as well as white and black. it kept white women within a role that was exalted in prose but sharply divided from and inferior to the privileged social role of white men” (1991, 15–16). the infantilization narrative utilizes this idea to tell us that (white) women, peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 unable to protect themselves, must be protected and avenged by (white) men. this infantilization positions (white) women as perpetually naïve children who must be cared for by white male paternalism. as mentioned in section 1.2, children are not seen as having sufficient knowledge or control on a standard view—thus the white woman as perpetual child would not be, either. one clear problem with this exculpatory narrative (before we even get to indepth discussions of responsibility) is that while it can ostensibly be applied to any woman, this paternalistic protection and its ensuing escape from responsibility have never been applied consistently across racial lines. black women, in contrast, have always been seen as “other” and outside this narrative of fragile, vulnerable white womanhood. think of sojourner truth’s speech, “ain’t i a woman?”: “that man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! and ain’t i a woman?” far from protecting the innocence of black women, the white patriarchy has perpetuated the myth that black and brown women are hypersexual and, thus, unrapeable (davis 1981; srinivasan 2021). amia srinivasan cites a 2017 study from the georgetown center on poverty and inequality that found this myth is still alive and well: “americans of all races tend to see black girls as more sexually knowing and in less need of nurture, protection and support than white girls of the same age” (srinivasan 2021, 13; citing epstein, blake, and gonzález 2017). there is no purity or childlike naïveté possible for black and brown girls who are seen as hypersexual. when they have been subjected to infantilization narratives, black, indigenous, and other women of color were not protected, coddled, and avenged as white women often were; instead, their infantilization was used to reinforce and justify their oppression and abuse. this is, of course, not to say that white women were never abused in the name of paternalistic infantilization. rather, it aims to illustrate that while the narrative of the childlike purity of white women was often used as a reason to avenge “wrongs” supposedly perpetrated against them, the infantilization of black, indigenous, and other people of color was used to justify their inhuman treatment at the hands of both individuals and the government. law professor dorothy roberts’s book killing the black body describes the united states’ history of controlling black women’s reproduction from plantation enslavement up to modern policy decisions that suggest requiring a norplant contraceptive implant to receive welfare aid (roberts 1998, 12). roberts describes how the explosion of sterilization practices in the 1970s gave birth to the phrase “mississippi appendectomies”—the practice of performing unnecessary hysterectomies on poor black women without their informed consent (101). forced sterilization and contraceptive requirements for black women (especially poor and uneducated black women) would not be possible without the type of paternal infantilization that frames them as incapable of making feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 important decisions for themselves. this inconsistent application of the infantilization narrative for black women—alternatively denied entirely or used to justify their horrendous abuse—should give us pause to reconsider the ways this exculpatory narrative is used in modern us contexts. 3.1. infantilization and moral responsibility on the standard view of moral responsibility, the infantilization narrative holds that women do not have sufficient knowledge or control to be responsible for their behavior—it reverts them to the status of children, underdeveloped in knowledge capacities and under the protection of others in their choices (thus lacking control as another will act on their behalf). the infantilization narrative is used as exculpation either when it is invoked by those around a white woman who view her in the light of this narrative and remove her from the possibility of being an appropriate target of responsibility or when a white woman invokes the narrative on her own behalf in an effort to escape responsibility. to illustrate, i will use both unconscious and conscious examples of the phenomenon of “white women’s tears” and evaluate how both standard and nonvolitionalist responsibility practices work in these instances. discussing white women’s tears in a chapter on “political whiteness,” alison phipps writes: white women’s tears are powerful, the ultimate symbol of femininity. they evoke the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth. . . . in an article on #metoo, jamilah lemieux commented: “white women know how to be victims. they know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy.” (phipps 2020, 71; quoting lemieux 2017) the infantilization narrative provides a ready-made social response to white women’s tears. the damsel in distress, like a crying child, must be rescued and comforted by another. they are too vulnerable to deal with their distress on their own, so those around them must cater to their emotional, social, and physical needs. while this narrative is available to basically all white women, it is crucial to note that this view of white woman as victim is especially salient to the political right and its emphasis on traditional (and white supremacist) femininity. the more strongly entrenched the vision of white women as vulnerable, pure, childlike, and good, the greater the protective reaction will be. as with the first klan, white women’s tears license white men’s violence against racialized others. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 returning to the evaluation of white women’s tears by the standard view of moral responsibility, i will begin with its unconscious uses. unconscious uses of the white-women’s-tears phenomenon occur in instances such as a conversation where a person of color is trying to hold a white woman responsible for their racism or racist actions. if the white woman starts crying, it invokes in others (particularly white men, who will often have more situational power than either of the women) the infantilization narrative, and it prompts them to pay attention to and address the white woman’s needs instead of the problematic behavior that the person of color is trying to call out (accapadi 2007). consider the following example, adapted (and shortened) from mamta motwani accapadi’s “when white women cry”: a group of student affairs professionals were in a meeting to discuss retention and wellness issues pertaining to a specific racial community on our campus. as the dialogue progressed, anita, a woman of color, raised a concern about the lack of support and commitment to this community from office x . . . , which caused susan from office x, a white woman, to feel uncomfortable. although anita reassured susan that her comments were not directed at her personally, susan began to cry while responding that she “felt attacked.” . . . upon seeing this reaction, anita was confused because although her tone of voice had been firm, she was not angry. . . . anita was very clear that she was critiquing susan’s office and not susan, as susan could not possibly be solely responsible for the decisions of her office. the conversation of the group shifted at the point when susan started to cry. from that moment, the group did not discuss the actual issue of the student community. rather, they spent the duration of the meeting consoling susan, reassuring her that she was not at fault. (accapadi 2007, 210–11) in this scenario, it seems likely that susan is not conscious that her crying will relieve her of the moral responsibility anita is attempting to invoke in her as a member of office x. (in the longer version of this scenario, susan gives a detailed account of her commitment to and actions on behalf of diversity efforts.) nevertheless, anita’s attempt to hold office x responsible for their lack of support to a specific racial community was hijacked the moment susan began to cry. this attention to susan’s emotional state as opposed to anita’s critique serves not only to make anita’s critique invisible and irrelevant but to make anita into the villain responsible for susan’s discomfort. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 let me turn to a real-life example from the far right to illustrate the heightened response that can be provoked when both the stakes are higher and the infantilization narrative more entrenched. sheila beam, fourth wife of white supremacist leader louis beam (a prominent figure in the 1987 fort smith trials for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government [splc, n.d.2]), presents an example of the infantilization narrative in action. as described by kathleen belew in bring the war home, sheila was a pretty, blond sunday school teacher, twenty-one years louis’s junior. sheila and her family belonged to a christian identity congregation (an antisemitic, racist theology popular with white supremacists in the 1980s [splc, n.d.1]), making her a perfect symbol of vulnerable white femininity, passed from the protection of her father to the protection of her husband (belew 2018, 174). the invocation of the infantilization narrative from within and without the movement came into play when sheila was jailed for shooting a mexican police officer who was attempting to arrest her husband. the couple had fled to mexico following louis’s addition to the fbi’s ten most wanted list, and when mexican authorities arrested beam for extradition to the united states, sheila shot a mexican federal officer three times, claiming self-defense (belew 2018, 174–75). though sheila was only held for ten days and was released and deported back to the united states, a highly publicized affidavit highlighted sheila’s status as victim: “i was physically and psychologically mistreated. . . . officers would come into my cell and leer at me. . . . i was chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress. . . . i was denied medical attention for my abdominal injuries. . . .” (belew 2018, 175). as belew writes in bring the war home, just as the state moved to prosecute the white power movement, sheila beam became not just a sympathetic figure to the mainstream media but a martyr to the white power movement (2018, 176). articles about sheila emphasized her “swollen abdomen” and “pronounced limp” and described her as “break[ing] out in tears,” and photographs emphasized her small, vulnerable femininity (176–77). in her husband’s sedition trial, his lawyer would regularly invoke her injuries; anytime sheila was interviewed she made sure to proclaim her husband’s innocence (177). belew states: “sheila beam played her part as a movement activist by creating and embodying a particular narrative of her innocence . . . one persuasive enough to be accepted uncritically by journalists and academic observers” (178). it is impossible to know whether sheila’s invocation of the infantilization narrative by playing the (white) damsel in distress was conscious or unconscious. as we cannot read her mind, and know that she was raised in a highly patriarchal (and thus misogynistic) environment, i would suggest we err on the side of unconscious interaction or invocation. however, this will complicate our ability to hold sheila responsible on the standard view, as unconscious interaction with the infantilization narrative will call into question not only the knowledge requirement (if her interaction peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 is unconscious, it is outside her awareness) but also voluntary control (if it is unconscious, she did not intend to do so). in the cases of both susan and sheila, there is little evidence to suggest that they truly knew that calling attention to their distress and vulnerability would result in their escape from responsibility—and how can we expect them to control other’s reactions to them? on the standard view, holding them responsible for their instances of white women’s tears would be exceedingly difficult. at the same time, both susan’s and sheila’s actions have resulted in varying levels of harm that should be addressed. if we reject the standard view, we can ask on smith’s (2008, 2012) rational relations account whether either susan or sheila are answerable for the harms they have caused.9 as smith explicitly accounts for our patterns of awareness (and what is omitted from them), we can ask susan to answer for the resulting harm to anita and to address the behavior anita was originally attempting to call out (the marginalization of a racial group by susan’s office). we can ask sheila to account not only for her part in the white power movement but for her use of her own vulnerability to help her husband out of responsibility for his leadership role in the white power movement. (louis beam was acquitted of all charges and himself called on “little sheila’s” vulnerability in his opening statement in his own defense [belew 2018, 182].) while the harms are obviously greater in the far-right case, i believe there is also a great value in being able to hold susan responsible for her actions as well—i will address this briefly in the conclusion. conscious uses of the white-women’s-tears narrative tend to be more obviously problematic and will often still be responsible on a standard account of moral responsibility. using what phipps (2021) calls “sanctioned victim status,” white women can intentionally call on the infantilization narrative via use of the whitewomen’s-tears narrative or damsel-in-distress routine to provoke the sympathy of other white people.10 one frequently cited (fictional) example of white women using 9 and remember, as i am remaining neutral on blame in my account, susan and sheila need not be blameworthy even if we do ask them to be answerable for what happened. while this may feel like splitting hairs, there is a difference between blaming susan for her reaction in the meeting and asking her to answer the question of why she acted the way she did. this is perhaps the difference between assuming she could have done differently and asking her to reflect on why it happened so that it will not be repeated in the future. 10 one objection i want to address here is whether identifying conscious uses of the white-women’s-tears narrative plays into the perpetuation of misogynistic stereotypes of women as manipulative or conniving. while i want to be sensitive to this concern, i do not wish to do so at the expense of a harmed community’s ability to hold a perpetrator responsible for the harm they have caused—especially as the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 these false victim scripts is the case of tom robinson’s trial in to kill a mockingbird, used by miranda fricker (2007) and josé medina (2013) to illustrate testimonial injustice. during his trial, tom robinson is denied credibility due to his race; mayella ewell is given excess credibility due to hers. the white mayella escapes all responsibility for crossing racial norms by coming on to the black tom robinson; tom pays the price by being convicted without evidence and, later, dying in jail. mayella and the prosecutor know just how unbelievable tom’s (true) story sounds to the allwhite jury; instead, their presentation of tom as the mythical “black male rapist” is used to relieve mayella of responsibility. in these instances, a white woman can intentionally weaponize her emotions to invoke the infantilization narrative and the protection of white patriarchal structures. consider the case of the white amy cooper calling the police and accusing the black christian cooper of threatening her life—christian was simply birdwatching in central park and had asked amy to leash her dog, as per park rules (hamad 2020). this practice has a bloody history in the united states: white women’s tearful accusations have been used as an excuse for lynching. one of the most famous examples is that of emmett till, lynched after accusations by carolyn bryant that he had grabbed her. in 2017, it was revealed that the then eighty-two-year-old bryant had confessed that the allegations had been false ten years earlier to till researcher timothy tyson (weller 2017). sociologist jessie daniels (2018) called bryant the “foremother of contemporary white women who call the police on black people sitting in a starbucks, barbecuing in a park or napping in a dorm. these white women know their accusations have power, are readily believed and face few consequences for words that can and do end lives.” these conscious invocations of the infantilization narrative via white women’s tears show that women like amy cooper have clear knowledge of the consequences of their actions—in fact, they are betting on them. this fulfills not only the knowledge condition but the control condition as well—they are choosing to invoke the examples cited here (such as carolyn bryant’s accusations against emmett till) are ones that have had disproportionately large harms on communities of color. what i do think is relevant in this objection, and that i do not have adequate space to address in this article, is the standing of those asking for these white women’s answerability. it is not hard to imagine that white men may simply use the fact of some women’s manipulation as a cudgel of misogyny meant to keep women in line with patriarchal standards. at the same time, both the direct victims (such as christian cooper and the family of emmett till) clearly have a right to call out that behavior and ask for those white women to be held responsible for their actions. other white women may also have a derived standing resulting from the harm that the perpetuation of the “manipulative woman” stereotype does to them. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 infantilization narrative on their own behalf. thus, they are standardly responsible. but if the standard view is false, they will still be responsible on smith’s (2008, 2012) view: we certainly have the right to demand that they answer for their attempts to weaponize the infantilization narrative (especially as it is most often deployed against people of color). 4. conclusion this article has argued that far-right women are often relieved from moral responsibility on the basis of the false social narratives of misogyny and infantilization. the first narrative of misogyny as exculpation holds that far-right women are themselves victims of oppression (of the misogyny of their own movements) and thus not blameworthy for their actions as misogyny undermines their control and knowledge on the standard view of moral responsibility. i argued that while our fictional victim of far-right misogyny, kathleen, may not be responsible on a standard model of responsibility, if we turn to a nonvolitionalist view like that of angela smith, we are able to hold kathleen responsible for buying into the far right’s white supremacist narrative. further, i argued that we have evidence that many far-right women are not in fact like kathleen; lauren southern gives us an example of a farright woman who, while clearly suffering from virulent misogyny, nevertheless shows enough knowledge and control to be responsible for her continued promotion of the far right on both the standard and nonvolitionalist account. the second narrative of infantilization positions (white) women as perpetually naïve children who must be cared for by white male paternalism. i argued that the phenomenon of white women’s tears invokes the infantilization narrative in others, prompting them to treat the white woman as one would a crying child; comforting them in their distressed state, taking action against whoever caused their distress the way a parent would for a child incapable of taking care of themselves. i argued that while unconscious uses of white women’s tears—by susan and by sheila beam—are not standardly responsible due to a lack of knowledge about the narrative they are invoking and their lack of control over the responses of others, adopting a nonvolitionalist stance can hold them responsible. we can ask susan to answer for her hijacking of the conversation when anita was criticizing her office; we can hold sheila to account for her involvement in the white power movement and her help in getting her husband acquitted of charges of sedition. i also argued that we have seen many examples of conscious, intentional uses of white women’s tears—such as amy cooper and carolyn bryant—and that these weaponized uses of the phenomenon will be both standardly and nonvolitionally responsible. further, i want to suggest that adopting a nonvolitionalist position, which allows us to hold all the women discussed here accountable for their actions, can itself be a feminist response, by appreciating the social nature of racial power dynamics and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 9 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 returning to white women the agency and power that accompanies their whiteness. while i do not have the space to fully do this point justice in this article, i would be remiss in not at least outlining the argument for this implication. as mentioned in the very first paragraph, intersectional and black feminist theory (crenshaw 1989, 1992; collins 1990) highlights the fact that not all oppressed agents are oppressed in the same ways and to the same degree. as we have seen (particularly in the way that the infantilization narrative’s protection—while ostensibly applicable to all women—was only consistently applied to white women), this means that the licenses and restrictions agents face will vary based on their social location. as intersectional feminist views reveal power as a relational quality (collins 1990), varying levels of oppression imply varying levels of power. appreciating the relative levels of power some agents (such as white women) may have under oppression justifies a robust responsibility practice—especially for those with relatively higher power—that is, the white women who are the subject of this article. i believe that using the example of far-right women gives us good reason to think that we have, perhaps, let white women get away with far too much for far too long. using the example of far-right women makes it easy to understand who exactly we are exempting from responsibility when utilizing the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization. the introduction’s use of sarah clendaniel, for instance, highlights just how absurd it is to dismiss the actions of a paramilitary extremist simply because she happens to be a woman. after all, a gun held by a woman is just as deadly as one held by a man. but this article also did not simply stop at far-right women—performers of white women’s tears, such as the fictional susan and the real-life amy cooper, can be any white woman at all; even, in susan’s case, one who professes to be progressive and pro-diversity. by insisting that these women, too, are answerable for their actions—in smith’s rational relations view of responsibility—we can say that any woman, regardless of whether or not we agree with her ideology, has the potential to be called upon to answer for her actions that harm others. in this way, i believe that endorsing a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility can itself become a feminist response to an unjust and unequally oppressive world. instead of the paternalistic denial of women’s agency of the infantilization narrative, or the misogyny narrative’s refusal to acknowledge that victims of misogyny can still perpetuate that misogyny themselves, a nonvolitionalist account of responsibility allows us to hold these women up as rational agents who are capable of answering for their behavior.11 11 special thanks to heather battaly and tracy llanera for their constant and detailed feedback as this idea developed and took shape. also, many thanks to lynne tirrell, reviewers 1 and 2, and the university of connecticut’s philosophy department brown bag for their thoughtful and deep engagement and responses. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 references accapadi, mamta motwani. 2007. “when white women cry: how white women’s tears oppress women of color.” college student affairs journal 26, no. 2 (spring): 208–15. appiah, kwame anthony. 2020. “the case for capitalizing the b in black.” atlantic, june 18, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-tocapitalize-blackand-white/613159/. belew, kathleen. 2018. bring the 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(1815) 1972. “ain’t i a woman?” speech delivered at the 1851 women’s convention in akron, ohio. transcribed by frances dana barker gage (1863). edited by miriam schneir. in feminism: the essential historical writings, edited by miriam schneir, 93–95. new york: vintage books. text also available at https://thehermitage.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/sojour ner-truth_aint-i-a-woman_1851.pdf. violence project, the. n.d. “mass shooter database.” cofounded by jillian peterson and james densley. accessed february 7, 2024. https://www.theviolencepro ject.org/. weiner, rachel, jasmine hilton, and dan morse. 2023. “duo accused of neo-nazi plot to target maryland power stations.” washington post, february 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/06/maryland-powergrid-neonazi-brandon-russell/. weller, sheila. 2017. “how author timothy tyson found the woman at the center of the emmett till case.” vanity fair, january 26, 2017. https://www.vanityfair .com/news/2017/01/how-author-timothy-tyson-found-the-woman-at-thecenter-of-the-emmett-till-case?mbid=social_twitter. peters – not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 westlund, andrea c. 2018. “answerability without blame?” in social dimensions of moral responsibility, edited by katrina hutchison, catriona mackenzie, and marina oshana, 253–74. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1 093/oso/9780190609610.003.0011. katie peters (she/her) is a phd candidate in philosophy at the university of connecticut. she works on extremism, moral responsibility, and virtue and vice epistemology. 101209 peters title page 101209 peters final format the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 1 article 5 recommended citation richardson, kevin. 2025. “the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (1). article 5. 2025 the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary kevin richardson duke university kevinrichardsonphd@gmail.com richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary kevin richardson abstract the metaphysics of gender has largely focused on examples of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another. in light of these cases, metaphysicians of gender have devoted substantial attention to defining gender kinds and concepts. in this paper, i consider a different set of examples. i discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence, patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gendernonconforming people. specifically, i argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. i claim that metaphysicians of gender need to give a real definition of the gender binary, and i present my own preliminary account. the methodological upshot of this paper is that the metaphysics of gender is not limited to the task of determining who is (or is not) really a member of a gender kind. keywords: gender, metaphysics, gender binary, feminist metaphysics, philosophy of language 1. introduction a main cause of philosophical disease—a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example. —wittgenstein (1958, remark 593) the metaphysics of gender often centers around a very specific kind of example. a trans woman—specifically, a trans woman that has medically transitioned—is verbally misgendered. “trans women are not women,” says the hypothetical offender. the ensuing philosophical debate centers around three things: semantics—the meaning of “woman”; metaphysics—the nature of kind woman; and ethics—whether the metaphysics or semantics of gender can or should vindicate feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 feminist politics, where feminist politics is conceived as the broad political project of ending gender oppression. while there are many positions philosophers can take with respect to the connection between semantics, metaphysics, and politics of gender, two broad camps have emerged. the metaphysics-first camp insists that the metaphysics of gender— the ostensible project of accounting for the nature of gender kinds—helps vindicate or support feminist politics.1 for example, you may insist that “trans women are women,” just because trans women really are women; this is a metaphysical fact, not simply something that is good to say. in contrast, the ethics-first camp insists that the metaphysics of gender is orthogonal to feminist politics. whether or not we should say “trans women are women” does not depend on a distinctive metaphysical thesis about women.2 in fact, one might argue that gender terms do not generally represent the world at all!3 there is a nugget of truth of both the metaphysics-first and ethics-first approaches to the metaphysics of gender. but both approaches are overly tuned to a specific kind of example, one that ultimately distorts one’s picture of the metaphysics of gender as a whole. metaphysicians of gender have paid the most attention to cases of interpersonal, linguistically articulated misrecognition. cases of linguistic misgendering center an interaction between two people where one person refuses to recognize the gender identity of another.4 if you take these cases as central to the metaphysics of gender, you will inevitably focus quite a bit of attention of the meanings of gender terms like “man” and “woman.” 1 the metaphysics-first approach is most obviously found in social and legal discourse around trans rights. see jenkins (2023) for discussion. within academic philosophy, the metaphysics-first perspective can clearly be found in the work of gender-critical feminists like stock (2021). the debate between haslanger (2000) and jenkins (2016) is often interpreted—rightly or wrongly—as a debate in which both parties assume a metaphysics-first framework. 2 see jenkins (2023, 200–240) for a helpful discussion and critique of what she calls the ontology-first approach. see dembroff (2018) and antony (2020) for additional critiques of metaphysics-first approaches. all of these critiques take what i call an ethics-first perspective. 3 see kukla and lance (2023) for a nonrepresentational or expressivist account of gender terms. 4 see saul (2012) for the kinds of interpersonal cases that the metaphysics literature has taken up. while i sometimes use the phrase “gender identity,” i will not assume a robust account of gender identity. for recent accounts of gender identity, see ashley (2023) and briggs and george (2023). for skepticism about gender identity, see hernandez and bell (forthcoming). richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 there are a different set of examples that are relevant to gender, however. in this paper, i will discuss cases of structural, materially articulated violence. instead of focusing on the (very real and harmful) effects of linguistic misgendering by individuals, i will discuss patterns of targeted structural violence toward trans and gender-nonconforming people. these will be examples where the violence is, in some sense, a product of structural legal and social factors. specifically, i argue that this kind of structural violence is explained by the gender binary, a social structure that (a) dictates the descriptive expectation that there are two biologically grounded genders, male and female, and (b) divides up social roles based on whether a person is male or female. by focusing on the gender binary, we reach a different way of thinking about the metaphysics of gender. the metaphysics of gender is not reducible to analyzing the meanings of ordinary gender terms, because the gender binary is not expressed by ordinary gender terms. the metaphysics of gender does not consist solely in theorizing about the nature of gender kinds, because the gender binary is not a gender kind. finally, the metaphysics of gender can be ethically relevant without playing the role of validating, or invalidating, the gender identities of trans people. this different approach to thinking about the metaphysics of gender requires us to acknowledge the idea of a real definition—what might also be called an essence—of the gender binary. a real definition is a definition of a thing, not a word. while the notion of a real definition is old-fashioned, i argue that it can help us understand pressing issues in social ontology and feminist philosophy. 2. interpersonal gendered harms it was 2017 at shawnee state university, a small college in portsmouth, ohio. on the first day of amelia’s political philosophy course, her professor, dr. nicholas meriwether, addressed her using the wrong pronoun. meriwether had called her “he” rather than “she.” after class, amelia informed dr. meriwether that she went by “she”; she was a woman and would like to be addressed using the female pronoun. meriwether refused. in his opinion, gender was determined by one’s sex at birth. after being informed that meriwether was in fact violating his own university’s pronoun-use policies, he proceeded to take legal action against the university. he argued that the university’s pronouns policies infringed on his free speech rights. he won the case, leading to the perception (among many) that professors have the right to misgender their students. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 the case i have described is a real case, the only embellishment being the name—amelia.5 when philosophers discuss these cases, they tend to focus on imaginary instances of misgendering. jennifer saul’s (2012) landmark paper “politically significant terms and philosophy of language: methodological issues” discusses the case of charla, an imaginary trans woman who is misgendered. imagine a dialogue between two people, a and b. (1) a: charla is a woman (2) b: no, charla is not a woman person b misgenders charla. misgendering, here, is defined as any case where a person uses a pronoun to address an individual that is not one of their preferred pronouns. misgendering can be intentional or unintentional. misgendering is harmful. this was true for amelia, who was subjected to psychological distress from the torrent of misgendering she experienced. because meriwether openly and regularly misgendered amelia, the rest of her class was empowered to do so. stephanie kapusta (2016) describes a few different ways in which misgendering can be harmful. most obviously, misgendering can have the effect of a microaggression; a small slight that can have a big psychological effect. misgendering also disrespects a person’s identity; their self-respect is undermined. these kinds of misgendering cases set the stage for questions in the metaphysics of gender. but the case is tricky, because it involves an entanglement of semantics, metaphysics, and ethics. the semantic question is: what is the meaning of “woman” and other gender terms?6 there are various views here. one is that the meaning of “woman” is uniformly defined in a trans-exclusive way. on such a view, (1) “charla is a woman” is false (and therefore its negation, [2], is true). another view is that the meaning of 5 see dohmen (2022) for an in-depth discussion of this legal case, meriwether v. hartop (6th cir. 2021). i should note that this case is not a legal aberration. in ricard v. usd 475 geary county (d. kan 2022), a middle school teacher refused to address a student by her preferred pronouns, for reasons of conscience. similar events have occurred at the elementary school (john and jane parents 1 v. montgomery county board of education [4th cir. 2023]) and high school (kluge v. brownsburg community school corp [7th cir. 2023]) levels. for a non-us, non-education case, see mackereth v. department of work and pensions (uk [2022] eat 99); there, a doctor refused to use preferred pronouns, citing their religious beliefs. 6 the literature on the semantics of gender terms has grown considerably in recent years (e.g., haslanger 2000; saul 2012; bettcher 2013; diaz‐leon 2016; barnes 2020; laskowski 2020; zeman 2020; chen 2021). richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 “woman” is uniformly defined in a trans-inclusive way. on this view, (1) “charla is a woman” is true (and therefore its negation, [2], is false). against both views, contextualists take the meanings of gender terms to differ from context to context. on this view, (1) “charla is a woman” will be true in some contexts but false in others. what determines the meaning of gender terms will vary depending on, for example, who the speakers and audiences are. the semantic question—what is the meaning of gender terms?—is connected with the metaphysical question—what is the nature of kind woman? the metaphysical question can be hard to pull apart from the semantic question, but one common view is that the meaning of “woman” tells us something about an underlying worldly kind, woman. on the simplest view, gender kinds (like woman) are in one-toone correspondence with gender terms (like “woman”). it is easier to see how semantic and metaphysical questions differ when we consider the contextualist view of gender terms. on contextualist views, gender terms mean something different depending on the context. contextualism is most naturally paired with gender pluralism, the view that there are multiple gender kinds (woman1, woman2) for a given gender term “woman.”7 the metaphysics of gender kinds will then consist of the analysis of the nature of various gender kinds, not necessarily the meanings of gender terms. the most immediate ethical question concerns how we ought to use gender terms.8 one view, what robin dembroff (2018) calls the real gender assumption, is that we should use gender terms based on whether a person is a member of a certain gender. a person should be called “woman” only if they are a member of the corresponding gender category or kind woman. the real gender assumption will have different consequences, depending on your preferred view of the metaphysics of gender. if woman is trans-exclusive, you appear to be led to the result that you should misgender trans people. if woman is trans-inclusive, you do not get this result. however, it seems dangerous to let the ethics of misgendering depend on the metaphysics of gender. this leads many to reject the real gender assumption. the metaphysics of gender does not matter for how we should use gender terms. how we ought to use gender terms is better understood as an ethical or political question, primarily. the ethical questions have played a role in centering the metaphysical questions of interest. there have now developed two broad approaches to the 7 for more discussion of gender pluralism, see spelman (1988), stoljar (1995), faustosterling (2000), haslanger (2012), bettcher (2013), ásta (2018), dembroff (2018), and bernstein (2020). 8 many discussions touch on this question. for a small sample of the contemporary discussion, see haslanger (2000), saul (2012), jenkins (2016), and dembroff (2018). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 relationship between the metaphysics of gender and the larger ethical and political questions about gender oppression. the metaphysics-first approach insists that the ethics and politics of (say) trans identity will depend on the metaphysical facts.9 there are three obvious positions with the metaphysics-first approach. the first position is to defend a trans-exclusive metaphysics of gender kinds on the grounds that it is permissible to misgender people. this is the route of many so-called gender-critical feminists, who believe that the gender terms are sex terms, and that it is politically important to think this is the case.10 the second position is to defend trans-inclusive gender kinds on the grounds that doing otherwise is oppressive.11 on this view, our metaphysical theories should be constrained by what is socially and politically just, in a very direct way. the third position is to defend trans-exclusive gender kinds on the grounds that it benefits feminist politics to highlight actually unjust states of affairs.12 the idea is that transexclusive gender kinds do exist, but to acknowledge the existence of such kinds is not to lend political support for such kinds. quite the opposite: the analysis of such kinds should lead us to the conclusion that they ought not exist. the ethics-first approach rejects the metaphysical lens through which these ethical questions are analyzed. the first point of attack concerns the real gender assumption.13 it is unclear whether we need to do a bunch of metaphysics in order to determine how we should use pronouns. pronoun use will ultimately be governed by ethical and political considerations, not a blind fidelity to the facts, whatever they are. another rejection of the metaphysics-first approach can be found in quill kukla and mark lance’s (2023) criticism of representational or descriptive theories of gender terms. the descriptivist takes gender terms to primarily describe gender kinds; there is an implicit word-world relation assumed by the use of gendered language. kukla and lance argue that gendered language is not primarily descriptive. we do not use 9 i take the metaphysics-first camp to be a broad one, including both public perspectives on gender (as jenkins [2023] describes), but also certain views in the metaphysics of gender. philosophers will not generally identify themselves as metaphysics-first, but the point of the label is to identify a family of overlapping views about the relationship between metaphysics and ethics. 10 high-profile accounts of gender-critical feminism, concerning its metaphysical, semantic, and political consequences, include stock (2021), lawford-smith (2022, 2023), and byrne (2023). 11 for example, jenkins (2016) appears to take this stance. 12 see haslanger (2000) and ásta (2019) for approaches of this kind. 13 see dembroff (2018). in the same spirit, dembroff and saint-croix (2019) present cases in which what they call a person’s agential identity—not their actual gender identity—matters. richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 gender terms to ascribe gender properties; rather, we use gender terms in order to do something—namely, locate individuals in social space. to say (1) “charla is a woman” is to accept charla’s demand to be taken up in social space in a certain way. to deny this claim is to reject charla’s demand to be socially located as a woman. there are more nuances involved in the metaphysics-first, ethics-first picture. the difference between metaphysicsand ethicsfirst is not hyper-rigid. some philosophers can be metaphysics-first at some moments and ethics-first at others. despite these nuances, the metaphysics-first/ethics-first framing is a powerful one. i will call it the metaphysics/ethics dichotomy for gender. this dichotomy is encountered much more often in person than in print. despite the seeming clash between the two approaches, they both primarily respond to cases of interpersonal gendered harms. the cases are interpersonal, as opposed to structural, because they highlight a disagreement between two individuals. the cases are instances of gendered harm, as opposed to gender oppression, in the sense that the salient harms are local. this is not to say that parties in the debate do not believe there is structural gender oppression; they absolutely do. this is only to say that the examples that motivate debates about the metaphysics of gender tend to highlight interpersonal gendered harms where we can identify specific individuals as perpetrators of harm. next, i will consider a different sort of example, one that highlights structural gender violence. i will suggest that such an example cannot be easily accommodated within the metaphysics/ethics dichotomy. 3. structural gender violence in 2017, kenne mcfadden, a black trans woman drowned in the san antonio river. she was pushed into the river by mark daniel lewis. lewis said he pushed her into the river because of mcfadden’s unwanted romantic advances. mcfadden was inebriated and could not swim. lewis did not attempt to help her. when a texas court was tasked with determining whether the case was even worthy of a trial, it decided against it. the judge called mcfadden a “nuisance,” concluding that lewis’s actions were not evidence of criminal conduct. the courts ruled that lewis’s response was reasonable. lewis would not stand trial for murder, manslaughter, or anything else.14 the story of kenne mcfadden is not an unusual one. trans people—in particular black trans women—are often subject to deadly violence on the basis of their identity. the data on antitrans violence are incomplete, but the data that exist paint a bleak picture. the humans rights campaign foundation (2023) reports that there was an “epidemic of violence” against trans and gender-nonconforming people in the united states in 2023. they identify 26 trans people killed in 2023 (as of 14 see einbinder (2022) for an investigative report on mcfadden’s case. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 november 20, 2023), making the total 335 trans lives lost since 2013. since 2013, about 83 percent of the victims of fatal violence were trans women, and about 75 percent of the victims of fatal violence were trans women of color. in about 40 percent of the cases, no arrests were made. another important resource has been business insider’s 2022 investigation into the deaths of trans people in the united states. they find that 175 trans people were killed between 2017–2021, with only 28 cases resulting in murder convictions and only 5 classified as hate crimes (insider investigations team 2022). finally, there is evidence that antitrans violence is a global trend, not one specific to the united states.15 the fact that trans people have experienced deadly violence, alone, is not enough to suggest that the violence is structural. what makes the violence structural is the accumulation of evidence to the effect that much of this violence is either (a) identity-based or (b) excused on the grounds of identity. in the former case, we say that trans people are being killed by others because they are, or are perceived to be, trans people. while this may be true, i will mainly focus on the excuse-generating way in which trans people are subject to gender violence. even if trans people are not killed because they are trans, there is a large amount of evidence that suggests that the killing of trans people is excused because they are trans. one glaring example of this kind of excuse structure is the “trans panic defense.” criminologist warren andresen sums up the defense as follows: the defendant posits that he initially believed his victim was a cisgender woman. through this defense element, the defendant implies that the victim was deceitful and sought to dupe him. the defendant also argues that discovering the victim was a transgender woman proved so traumatic that it provoked him to lash out in a reflexive act of homicidal violence. (andresen 2024, 273) though this is a ridiculous defense, on its face, it has been quite successful in either reducing sentences or eliminating entirely sentences for those who have killed trans people. homicidal violence is render excusable when the victim is a trans woman, specifically. the frequent killing of trans people, and its subsequent justification, is part of what criminologists have called the trifecta of violence against trans people (lenning, brightman, and buist 2021; brightman et al. 2024). the trifecta of violence describes 15 empirical data on global antitrans violence is limited, but there are a few studies that are indicative of global trends. see kidd and witten (2007), lyons et. al. (2017), and taşcıoğlu (2023). richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 the ideologies, policies, and actions that collectively constitute structural violence against trans people. antitrans ideology manifests itself in many forms. for example, trans women are often depicted as predatory men. from this perspective, trans women are men that seek to use their female gender identities in order to gain access to women’s spaces; once they occupy these spaces, they ultimately intend to prey on (cis) women. another form of antitrans ideology concerns the idea that trans people are more likely to be immoral sexual deviants, like child sexual abusers. less extreme manifestations of antitrans or transphobic ideology will simply privilege the recognition of biological gender identity. the public manifestation of antitrans ideology consists of defense of “antigender” or gender-critical legal policies. many people in these social movements convey unambiguously antitrans messages.16 antitrans policies complement antitrans ideology. antitrans legislation distinctively singles out trans people and affects their ability to get health care and education, participate in sports, use public facilities, and so on. a concrete example of an antitrans policy is what is called a “bathroom bill.” such bills make it illegal for many trans women to use public women’s restrooms. bathroom bills are motivated, at least partly, by antitrans ideology that depicts trans women as secret male predators. another common antitrans policy restricts the legal gender recognition of trans people. legislation has been proposed that explicitly refuses to acknowledge the gender identities of trans people, while at the same time insisting that important rights and goods depend on gender recognition. in the united states in 2024, the trans legislation tracker reported that 674 antitrans bills were considered in fortythree states.17 of those, 50 passed. antitrans legislation has risen sharply in recent years. by comparison, there were 79 antitrans bills in the us in 2020. antitrans violence, as i understand it, consists of both physical attacks and threatened attacks on trans people. this violence sits neatly alongside antitrans policies and ideology. antitrans ideology legitimates antitrans violence. if trans women are ultimately understood as immoral sexual predators, killing trans women will not be seen as a major transgression. antitrans policies, when coupled with antitrans ideology, sets the stage for antitrans violence. for example, bathroom bills make it illegal for many trans women to use women’s restrooms. if a trans woman does use a woman’s restroom, not only are they subject to violence from transphobic people, but this transphobic violence will be understood as a kind of policing. far from violating the law, transphobic attackers will be seen as its functionaries. alternatively, 16 for useful rhetorical analyses of antitrans rhetoric in the contemporary uk, see hines (2020), and pearce, erikainen, and vincent (2020). 17 this information is recent as of january 2025. for the latest data, see www.translegislation.com. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 a trans woman can be attacked for using the men’s restroom if they are legally required to use it, especially in the event that they present as a woman.18 the killability of trans people—particularly trans people of color—is sometimes understood through the framework of what is called queer necropolitics, a framework that highlights the ways in which trans people are systematically marked for death.19 with these elements of the picture together, i should now clarify the sense in which antitrans violence is structural. i take a social structural explanation to be an explanation of social events that is at least partly due to the existence of larger social structures.20 the trifecta of violence—which consists of an interconnected web of ideologies, policies, and actions—constitutes a social structure. understanding why trans people are killed requires not just facts about individuals in a circumstance; rather, understanding the attack on trans people requires understanding broader social structures. there are more empirical and theoretical considerations that can be raised regarding structural violence against trans people. i cannot go into more detail, but i should note that structural violence is enabled and facilitated by additional forms of structural oppression: housing discrimination, job discrimination, economic injustice, structural racism, and so on. this is just to say that the complete explanation of antitrans structural violence is a much longer story. i have only sought to establish a basic conception of antitrans structural violence because it is important in relation to the metaphysics/ethics dichotomy. start with the metaphysics-first perspective. on this view, whether or not a person counts as a member of a certain gender should inform how we classify people. but the case of antitrans structural violence is not primarily about language. calling trans women “women” does not directly address the question of structural violence against trans people. in the grand scheme of antitrans gender violence, verbal misgendering adds insult to injury; it is not the main event. 18 while this paper was under review, an important case of antitrans violence emerged that has attracted major attention in the us. nex benedict was a nonbinary trans teenager who was beaten up after using a women’s restroom at their school (mandler 2024). benedict was treated for injuries at a hospital. they died a day later. as of this writing, benedict’s death has been ruled a suicide, though there are still unanswered questions surrounding the circumstances of benedict’s death. the story is still developing, but it appears to fit a pattern of structural gender violence against trans people. 19 see puar (2007), haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco (2014), and snorton and haritaworn (2022). 20 i am largely assuming haslanger’s (2016) account of social structural explanation. though see ross (2024) for another recent account. richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 now take the ethics-first perspective. the ethics-firster agrees that metaphysics is not relevant here. fair enough. but at the same time, we want to acknowledge the existence of social structures that partly explain structural gender violence. the idea of a social structure, or a particular social structure, is not an innocent one. we are not necessarily positing gender kinds, but we are assuming that something else (aside from an individual) is doing explanatory work. at first glance, the metaphysics/ethics dichotomy appears to be unhelpful for making sense of structural gender violence. but further questions must be answered before reaching such a conclusion. what kind of social structure undergirds structural gender violence? and what makes that structure the source of a distinctively metaphysical inquiry? in the next few sections, i provide answers to these questions. 4. the gender binary philosophers often talk about gender, but they should talk more about the gender binary. what is the gender binary? there are different accounts, but my account is largely inspired by kate bornstein’s (1994, 100–113) notion of the gender rule book (which is in turn inspired by garfinkel [1967]). i take the gender binary to be a social structure that realizes (a) the logic of binary gender, (b) the membership conditions for putative binary gender kinds, and (c) the norms associated with binary gender membership.21 i argue that the gender binary is a crucial part of what explains both structural gender violence and interpersonal acts of misgendering. the logic of gender, according to the gender binary, is as follows. every person is either a man or woman. no person is both a man and a woman. the former condition tells us that men and women exhaust the gender categories. the latter condition tells us that men and women are exclusive; being a man prevents you from being a woman, and vice versa. this binary logic is supposed to govern our ordinary reasoning about gender. by default, i assume that everyone must have a gender and that no one has more than one. the logic of gender is quite thin. we get more content when we consider the conditions of gender membership, as dictated by the gender binary. the binary perspective is ultimately a biological one. to be a man or woman is thought to be a matter of being a member of the male or female sex. there are different ways to carve up sex categories. you can define sexes in terms of reproductive capacity, chromosomes, or some cluster of biological features. it does not matter which biological criterion is adopted, but it is central to the gender binary that some biological criterion is adopted for gender membership. furthermore, one is to assume 21 the literature on the gender binary is vast. for early influential accounts, see garfinkel (1967), butler (1990), bornstein (1994), and feinberg (1997). for more recent discussions, see gilbert (2009), dembroff (2020), and velocci (forthcoming). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 that this biological criterion is not itself socially imposed. sexes are purely biological; their posit is not a reflection of contingent human groupings of bodies. the gender binary distinguishes between gender membership conditions and gendered norms. you can be a woman and thus have the relevant gender membership without being guided by the relevant gender norms associated with a woman. female gender norms generally recommend certain kinds of gender presentations for women. women ought to look feminine. men ought to look masculine. the “oughts” in these cases are social oughts, not moral ones. it is possible for someone to be a woman yet fail to live up to female gender norms. it is not possible, according to the gender binary, for a woman to not meet the gender membership conditions that biologically characterize being a woman. the gendered norms associated with the gender binary require some unpacking. i start with the idea of a social norm, in general. there are different accounts of social norms, but i will rely on charlotte witt’s (2023) view. for her, social norms are understood as role-specific standards by which behavior is evaluated and assessed. for example, a student ought to do her homework. students are bound, in virtue of the social position they occupy, to do their homework. this duty is neither moral nor prudential; it is what follows from their occupation of a social position. witt thinks gender norms, in specific contexts, are like this. a gender norm is a kind of standard that makes some actions permissible, obligatory, or forbidden.22 the content of gender norms may look something like this: men do not cry; women are nurturing and caring; men are aggressive; women are passive; and so on. gender norms of the relevant kind identify prototypical or ideal men and women, from the perspective of the gender binary. the gender binary is heteronormative in the sense that it privileges heterosexual relationships. men and women should be straight. being “straight” is not just a sexual orientation, in terms of a disposition to desire the “opposite-sex,” but also an identity. straight men are expected to have sex with women in a straight way; for example, they are not to enjoy anal stimulation.23 putting it all together, the gender binary is the social structure that realizes (a) the logic of binary gender, (b) the membership conditions for putative binary gender kinds, and (c) the norms associated with binary gender membership. i take facts (a)– (c) to have a kind of representational content; there is the way the world ought to be, given the logics, membership, and norms of gender. these representations are 22 a more common approach to social norms is bicchieri (2017)’s theory. she takes social norms to be rules that are obeyed, conditional on descriptive and normative expectations. nothing hinges on my particular choice of theory of social norms, though i prefer witt’s account because it emphasizes the normative structure and bindingness of social norms. 23 for recent discussions of sexual identity, see andler (2021, 2022). richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 realized by social structures to the extent that social structures produce or accommodate the social divisions they broadly represent. for example, separate male and female restrooms are social structures that promote the idea that people should be divided into two genders; it also accommodates those who accept the reality of the gender binary. a full account of structural realization is beyond the scope of this paper. i only want to note that the realization of the gender binary does not necessarily entail the existence of gender kinds. it is tempting to think of the gender binary as constructing gender, but this is a further metaphysical commitment. in order for the gender binary to be structurally realized, it only needs to promote human division among certain biological and social lines; it does not follow that the lines drawn constitute the boundaries of gender kinds. or at least, i do not want to presuppose that this is the case. i have given a broad account of the gender binary, though i must confess that i have engaged in a bit of idealization. i have spoken of the gender binary, when it may be more accurate to speak of a gender binary. it is plausible that there are slightly different gender binaries governing different social contexts across place and time. the logic, membership facts, and norms may differ somewhat, depending on the gender binary. furthermore, gender binaries are not quite as rigid as i have made them out to be. concerning the logic of the gender binary, there are gender binaries that admit the existence of more than three genders. for example, you might acknowledge the existence of intersex people who are not rightly considered male or female; however, a gender binary will nonetheless insist that these individuals are an extreme minority. concerning the content of gender norms, there is a binary way of making sense of trans identity. a trans binary acknowledges the existence of trans women, but only insofar as trans women aspire to abide by the binary norms that govern cis women. for example, a butch trans woman would be considered a violation of the trans binary (rossiter 2016). these are instances of what is sometimes called transnormativity, “the belief that there is only one way for trans⋆ people to practice their gender . . . . [it] suggests that all trans⋆ people should transition from one socially knowable sex to another” (nicolazzo 2016, 1175). another loosening of the gender norms concerns heterosexuality. a gender binary can recognize nonheterosexual people and relationships; perhaps it does not require all women to be straight. still, gender binaries can nonetheless require that queer couples have designated individuals who play the male and female roles within a relationship. it is better to see the gender binary as a way of describing a family of similar social structures. at the extreme case, there are certain ideals of the logic, membership, and norms. some binaries are closer to that ideal than others, but they are all gender binaries. these binaries will have context-specific—that is, local and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 temporary—ideals that are more specific than what i have said here. when i say “the” gender binary, i am using this as an idealization. 5. the explanatory power of the gender binary now i want to show how the notion of a gender binary helps us better understand both (a) structural gender violence and (b) interpersonal misgendering. there are two straightforward explanatory connections between the gender binary and structural gender violence. first, structural gender violence is the result of protecting and defending the gender binary. second, the gender binary itself promotes and accommodates gender violence; it is part of the structure of structural gender violence. trans people constitute what dembroff (2020, 13) calls an existential destabilizing of the gender binary. the gender binary tells us that only certain types of people are possible and ideal. trans people, at least as they understand themselves, are impossible. furthermore, insofar as they exist, they are not socially or morally ideal. the threat to the gender binary is not trans people as individuals; rather, it is the fact that trans people normalize the disruption of the gender binary. this is why, despite the relatively small population of trans people, there is an intense mobilization against them in the forms of laws and antitrans media messaging. the fact that trans people threaten (or are perceived to threaten) the gender binary partly explains the presence of antitrans structural gender violence. violence is a defense mechanism; it inhibits or eliminates the threat posed by trans people. in order for the antitrans gender violence to be maximally efficient and effective, it must be structural. the brutal calculus of protecting the binary involves the systematic material assault on trans people, not just their rights. not only is structural gender violence the result of protecting the gender binary, but the binary itself promotes and accommodates structural gender violence. most obviously, the content of binary gender norms will excuse the killing of trans people. the norms will say: men should not deceive other men into sex; trans women are men; a man being deceived into gay sex is an assault on a man’s masculinity; men must defend their masculinity even if it means injuring or even killing another person; and so on. the content of the gender binary is realized through the practices and social structures that actually put trans people at risk for violence. at least some of the structural gender violence is not simply in defense of the gender binary; it is a constitutive part of the binary itself. to be fair, the form and intensity of gender binaries necessary to legitimatize antitrans violence can vary. some binaries may prioritize psychological over physical violence. some instances of physical violence will fall short of killing. and some killings will be publicly condemned as wrongful. the exact nature of antitrans violence and its richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 protective effects requires an attention to the empirical details. my claim is that the gender binary is essentially connected to structural gender violence. the gender binary helps explain structural gender violence, but it also helps explain cases of interpersonal misgendering. the gender binary explains why people use gendered language in the way they do, even when the gender binary is not part of the literal meaning (or semantic content) of gendered sentences. this is clearest in real-world cases. recall amelia’s conflict with dr. meriwether, the professor that insisted he was not obligated to respect amelia’s pronouns. meriwether rejected pronoun policies that disrupted local gender binaries. he pursued legal measures that ultimately reinforced the legitimacy of gender binaries. to explain why meriwether acted in the way he acted, and why other actors acted to support trans-exclusive policies, we must appeal to the gender binary. thought experiments tend to obscure the significance of the gender binary. this is typically because they lack context. suppose 𝐵 misgenders charla by saying that she is not a woman. it is important to understand why b misgenders charla; this is not merely for reasons of assessing their moral culpability but to better understand what explains their utterance in the first place. in the real world, misgendering often happens because a person wants to protect the gender binary. refusing to use preferred pronouns, when those pronouns contradict the gender binary, motivates misgendering. or at least, it motivates the right to misgender in certain contexts. if this is the case, then we can again explain the use of certain kinds of gendered language by appealing to the gender binary. i want to highlight two important clarifications of my thesis: one semantic, one metaphysical. the semantic clarification is that appealing to the gender binary to explain gendered language is not a distinctively semantic thesis. my claim is not that “charla is a woman” means something like charla is a woman, according to the gender binary. i am not in the business of semantic theory. i can give an explanation of why people use language without assuming that the explanation is part of the meaning of the language. for example, i say “ouch” because i am in pain, but “ouch” (plausibly) does not represent pain. the gender binary explains certain types of actions, and utterances are merely one type of action. the metaphysical clarification is that we do not need to assume that the gender binary entails the existence of gender kinds. i have said this before, but it is worth repeating. the metaphysical claim—that there are gender kinds with transinclusive or trans-exclusive gender membership conditions—is not one that i am making here. this claim is strictly independent from the existence of the gender binary. because my explanations are not semantic or about the metaphysics of gender kinds, they constitute a distinctive position in the literature. my view does not neatly feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 fit into the metaphysics-first or ethics-first frameworks. instead, my account fits into a neglected, yet modest, way of thinking about metaphysics: the tradition that invokes the notion of a real definition. 6. real definitions i want to suggest that my account of the gender binary is actually a real definition of the gender binary. (alternatively, i have given a schematic characterization of what real definitions for gender binaries could be.) i did not explicitly give a real definition, because i suspect the words “real definition” would have scared some people off from the start. in this section, i explain what i mean by a real definition and why my account of the gender binary counts as such. i will start with the basic distinction between nominal and real definitions. a nominal definition is a definition of a word; the word “car” means such-and-such. nominal definitions depict relationships between words and, depending on your theory of meaning, the world or mind. a real definition, in contrast, is a definition of a thing itself. a real definition characterizes the properties of a worldly object or kind; it does not simply define a word.24 to understand the notion of a real definition, it is useful to consider examples.25 • to be a vixen is to be a female fox. • to be square is to be rectangular and equilateral. • for susan to be a sibling just is for susan to share a parent with someone. • water just is h2o. • for the number of dinosaurs to be zero just is for there to be no dinosaurs. in each case, we specify a kind of equivalence. there is a schema for real definition claims. to be f is to be g. alternatively, for p to be the case is for q to be the case. real definitions have strong modal properties. if p defines q, then necessarily 𝑃 is the case if and only if 𝑄 is the case. for example, if to be a vixen is to be a female fox, then there will be no cases of vixens that are not also cases of female foxes, and vice versa. real definitions specify necessary and sufficient conditions for something’s being the case. 24 for modern theories of real definition, see: rosen (2015), fine (2015), correia (2017), and correia and skiles (2019). 25 the first two examples are from dorr (2016, 39). the remaining examples are from rayo (2013, 3). richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 so far, real definitions are not obviously different from nominal definitions. the distinction between nominal and real definitions has much historical support, but contemporary philosophy makes the distinction hard to maintain. this is due to a certain way of thinking about semantics and metaphysics by influential philosophers like saul kripke, w. v. quine, hilary putnam, and others. allow me a brief historical excursus. up until the early twentieth century, the dominant view of linguistic meaning was internalist: on this view, the meaning of a term like “water” was determined by internal features of our minds. for many philosophers, internalism meant that we had privileged access to a distinctive kind of knowledge: conceptual or analytical knowledge. conceptual knowledge can be gained merely by reflecting on our internal concepts. conceptual knowledge was sharply distinguished from worldly knowledge, or knowledge of the external world. to acquire such knowledge, we needed to engage in distinctively nonsemantic, or empirical, inquiry. today, internalism is no longer the dominant view of meaning. many philosophers are externalists; they believe that the meaning of a linguistic expression is not entirely dependent on what goes on inside our heads. what we mean can be established, as kripke (1980) argued, by a reference relation that makes causal contact with the objects of our discussion. importantly, we need not be aware or conscious of relations of what our terms and concepts pick out. externalism is seen by many to blur the distinction between semantic knowledge and empirical knowledge. sally haslanger is the most relevant representative of the externalist tradition in social ontology. she writes, “for an externalist, to answer the question ‘what is the content/meaning of x?’ one should focus on the question ‘what is x?’” (haslanger 2020, 244) she gives the example of “sheriff.” the meaning of “sheriff” can be ascertained by thinking about what it is to be a sheriff, or what it is for someone to be a sheriff. she does not think the latter inquiry is purely conceptual because there may be social facts about being a sheriff that are not transparent to our minds. nonetheless, learning about the social norms and institutions can illuminate what the word “sheriff” means via illuminating what sheriffs are (244–45). if you are an externalist, there is no strong distinction between nominal and real definitions. this is because the externalist takes nominal definitions, understood as the linguistic meanings of expressions, to pick out metaphysical features of the world. to be a sheriff is to have certain properties. not all these properties will be transparent to users of the term “sheriff.” in fact, we could make discoveries about the real definition of sheriff that are contrary to what we ordinarily think sheriffs are. externalism allows for the possibility of radical semantic mistakes; we are mistaken about the basic meanings of our words because we are mistaken, ultimately, about what the world is like. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 while externalism is popular, it is not universal. moreover, i do not want the intelligibility of real definition to rely on a particular theory of meaning. for this reason, i claim that real definitions may be independent of the meanings of the relevant words, at least if internalism is true. for example, the term “water” may not mean h2o, even if there is a real definition of water in terms of h2o. this sounds strange if we assume that a real definition tells us what we have meant all along by ordinary language terms. it is less strange if we take a real definition to explain certain uses of language without defining it. this is easiest to see in the case of the gender binary. here is my rough definition. for b to be a gender binary is for b to be a social structure that realizes (a) the logic of binary gender, (b) the membership conditions for putative binary gender kinds, and (c) the norms associated with binary gender membership. the real definition of the gender binary tells you what it is for something to be a gender binary. we can introduce the term “gender binary” to refer to this structure, but the meaning of “gender binary” is irrelevant to the inquiry at hand. the gender binary—the thing itself—explains why we often act and talk in the way we do. the explanatory power of the gender binary does not depend on whether externalism or internalism is true. internalism could be true of gendered language. the meaning of “woman” might consist of a set of commonly held beliefs about its meaning. but this semantic point is strictly independent of whether the gender binary—the worldly structure—can explain gendered thought, talk, and action. the gender binary can explain gendered talk without being the meaning of gender terms, just as pain can explain expletive use without being the meaning of expletives. i have appealed to the notion of a real definition not because i want to insist on a particular theory of real definition. rather, i believe the notion of real definition is useful because it allows us to identify metaphysical projects that often go unnoticed. not every metaphysical project takes a semantic form, and the case of the gender binary is an important instance of such a project. that said, there are a few obvious criticisms of my appeal to real definition. i will address these in turn. the first objection is that i am not giving a real definition of the gender binary; instead, i am defining “gender binary.” from this perspective, you might conclude that my project is ultimately an instance of giving a nominal definition. in response, i should note that my account is not sensitive to whether my real definition corresponds to what theorists commonly call “the gender binary.” i take “the gender binary” to be a technical term with different meanings. i do not believe there is a core meaning of “the gender binary,” nor am i trying to capture such a meaning, if it exists. richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 even if i am not attempting to capture the preexisting meaning of “the gender binary,” you might argue that i am trying to modify or construct a new meaning for “the gender binary.” this recasts my project as fundamentally a project in conceptual engineering. for example, amie thomasson (2017) has recently argued that many debates in social ontology (and metaphysics more generally) are better understood as debates about what concept we ought to use. on the engineering perspective, i am not giving a definition of a structure; rather, i am proposing a new nominal definition of a term or concept. there is no distinctive metaphysical project to be had concerning the gender binary. it may be true that i am also engaging in a conceptual engineering project, but i take my project to be successful only if there are gender binaries that my engineered concept perspicuously describes. it is worth noting that conceptual engineering projects are not incompatible with essentialist or real definition projects. for example, asya passinsky (2021) gives an account of what she calls finean feminist metaphysics. she takes there to be essences of gender kinds; some kinds may be trans-inclusive while others may be trans-exclusive. we might insist that our concepts track one sort of kind rather than another. this would be a conceptual engineering project, but it would be backed by an essentialist metaphysics. perhaps a more fundamental criticism concerns the “real” in real definition. there is a kind of metaphysical skepticism that raises red flags at the very mention of terms like “real” and “reality.” the current use of the term “real” is simply to contrast with nominal (or linguistic). there can be real definitions of mindor societydependent objects. my real definition of the gender binary is just such a definition. there are many additional questions one might ask about real definitions. i have not sought to give such a theory here. instead, i have appealed to a very minimal notion of real definition, one that gives us some distance from more common semantic and conceptual engineering projects. i only need a concept of real definition to make the distinction between a metaphysical account of the gender binary and a semantic proposal for the meaning of “the gender binary.” this distinction is often lost in contemporary metaphysics, especially social ontology. the concept of a real definition is needed, specifically, because it opens up important possibilities for the metaphysics of gender. instead of spending our time thinking about the membership conditions of gender categories, i suggest that we think more about the real definitions of gender structures, like the gender binary. this is a way in which we can do the metaphysics of gender, but it does not revolve about the semantics of gender terms or the metaphysics of gender categories. i am not the first person to suggest that the subject matter of gender is more expansive than gender kinds. elizabeth barnes (2020, 714–15) suggests that we need to give accounts of social kinds like feminized, where being feminized is a social property that helps explain complex gender experiences. briggs and george (2023) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 1, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 argue that there are many things that fall under the umbrella of “gender”; for this reason, it is a mistake to identify the question “what is gender?” with the more specific question “what is gender kinds?” my contribution is to explicitly understand these insights in metaphysical terms. we have standardly taken the metaphysics of gender to consist in the metaphysics of gender kinds; this is too narrow. we can instead do the metaphysics of the gender binary, which falls under the broad notion of gender. by taking ourselves to give a real definition of the gender binary, we avoid confusing our project for a linguistic one. 7. conclusion we started with a simple picture of gender, with the metaphysics-first camp on one side and the ethics-first camp on the other. these camps are quite natural divisions when we restrict our discussion to interpersonal gendered harms. they are less natural when we discuss structural gender violence. this is because the latter kind of discussion invokes resources that go beyond our ordinary terms and concepts. at the same time, the discussion requires a careful representation of the social world. i have invoked the concept of a real definition for this purpose. moreover, understanding the relevant objects of definition will require both empirical study and increased engagement with critical social and political philosophy. the resulting metaphysics of gender does not take 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c. riley, and jin haritaworn. 2022. “trans necropolitics: a transnational reflection on violence, death, and the trans of color afterlife.” in the transgender studies reader remix, edited by susan stryker and dylan mccarthy blackston, 305–16. routledge. spelman, elizabeth v. 1988. inessential woman: problems of exclusion in feminist thought. boston: beacon press. stock, kathleen. 2021. material girls: why reality matters for feminism. london: fleet. stoljar, natalie. 1995. “essence, identity, and the concept of woman.” philosophical topics 23 (2): 261–93. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics19952328. taşcıoğlu, ezgi. 2023. “circuits of law: everyday criminalisation of transgender embodiment in istanbul.” in criminal legalities and minorities in the global south: rights and resistance in a decolonial world, edited by george b. radics and pablo ciocchini, 231–51. cham: palgrave macmillan. thomasson, amie l. 2017. “metaphysical disputes and metalinguistic negotiation.” analytic philosophy 58 (1): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12087. richardson – the metaphysics of gender and the gender binary published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 velocci, beans. forthcoming. binary logic: the power of incoherence in american sex science. durham, nc: duke university press. witt, charlotte. 2023. social goodness: the ontology of social norms. oxford university press. wittgenstein, ludwig. 1958. philosophical investigations. 2nd ed. translated by g. e. m. anscombe. chichester: john wiley & sons. zeman, dan. 2020. “subject-contextualism and the meaning of gender terms.” journal of social ontology 6 (1): 69–83. https://journalofsocialontology.org/in dex.php/jso/article/view/6749. kevin richardson is an associate professor of philosophy at duke university and secondary faculty in duke’s department of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. their current research focuses on philosophical questions concerning gender, sexuality, and race. their papers have been published in journal of philosophy, philosophy and phenomenological research, ergo, and other journals. their forthcoming book is entitled the end of binaries: how gender and sexuality come in degrees (oxford university press). 18639 richardson title page 18639 richardson final format uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 11 recommended citation park, shelley. 2022. “uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 11. 2022 uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care shelley m. park university of central florida shelley.park@ucf.edu park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care1 shelley m. park abstract social robots are marketed as human tools promising us a better life. this marketing strategy commodifies not only the labor of care but the caregiver as well, conjuring a fantasy of technoliberal futurism that echoes a colonial past. against techno-utopian fantasies of a good life as one involving engineered domestic help, i draw here on the techno-dystopian television show humans (stylized humɐns) to suggest that we should find our desires for such help unsettling. at the core of my argument is a return of the “uncanny valley” problem, from its reformulation as an engineering/design problem to its origins as a psychosocial symptom of an unresolved, traumatic past. i conclude that our sense of the uncanny may be best understood as a moral capacity that should be honed rather than evaded. keywords: care robots, uncanny valley, psychoanalysis, sexism, racism, colonialism could you use some extra help around the house? . . . this mechanical maid is capable of doing more than simply serving breakfast in bed. what could you accomplish if you had someone—something—like this? —humans, promotional trailer, 2015 what if technology actually helped you, like a partner, instead of just being a tool? . . . together, we can humanize technology. —promotional video for jibo, “the world’s first family robot,” 2014 1 thank you to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript and to carla fehr, who provided the opportunity to workshop an earlier iteration of this paper in the miniconference on feminism, social justice, and ai in july 2021. many thanks also to the participants of that workshop whose interactions were both generous and generative, the participants in the international association of women philosophers 2021 conference, and attendees at the 2018 florida philosophical association meetings where i presented a nascent version of these ideas. your suggestions and encouragement have greatly improved my thinking on these issues. remaining shortcomings are solely my responsibility. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 much recent critical scholarship on ai and social justice has focused on the reproduction and amplification of injustice through algorithmic bias (e.g., benjamin 2019; howard and borenstein 2018; noble 2018; criado perez 2021) and/or the representational and other biases involved in robot design (e.g., atanasoski and vora 2019; cave and dihal 2020; sparrow 2020; strengers and kennedy 2020). while ai algorithms (mind) and robotic design (body) are interrelated, this essay takes up the second project. here i focus specifically on the embodiment (the look, the shape, the sound, the feel) of ai in an attempt to bring a traditional problem in robotic engineering (the uncanny valley problem) into a cross-disciplinary conversation with feminist and postcolonial explorations of the uncanny. my analyses of the phenomenon of uncanniness will draw, in part, on representations of robots as found in science fiction, because cinematic portrayals of the uncanny have much to teach us about human fears and anxieties. but robots are no longer merely the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. we are living in the so-called age of robots; more specifically, we are living in an era of social robots. once found only in industrial habitats, robots are rapidly entering our social sphere, including our homes. as the industrial economy gives way to a service economy, and as demands for care outpace our capacity for caring, the market for personal robots has boomed. despite challenges to privacy and security posed by robots trained to recognize our faces, voices, and contours of our living spaces, and despite well-known problems of algorithmic and other biases in engineering human-robot interactions, the personal robotics market projects global revenues, of $51.5 billion (usd) in 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2019 (prescient and strategic intelligence 2020). the largest share of this growth is in social robots—personal robots that rely on machine learning (ai) to respond to human desires and that are designed to elicit an emotional connection with humans. the global social robotics market is expected to grow over 34 percent from 2021 to 2026, representing an $11.2 billion market value, with north america witnessing the most rapid growth (mordor intelligence 2022). technology forecasters predict over sixty-five million social robots will be sold annually by 2025 (scientific american 2020). social robotics investment is driven by many factors, including an aging population in the global north, social isolation in work-centric cultures, social anxiety among young adults, demands for engaging educational software by the parents of young children, the novelty of new forms of entertainment, and a growing deficit of care workers. social robots promise increased access to physical, cognitive, and emotional care within living environments from nursing homes to suburban domiciles. this essay analyzes ai in the context of the care economy with a focus specifically on domestic robots as marketed to and purchased by private citizens. while automated institutional care, such as nursebots, also deserves our attention, these forms of robotics largely fall outside the scope of this paper. the adoption of park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 robotic technologies by hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions is driven by profit-related motives and thus is often imposed on staff and clients, independently of their comfort with such care. i am interested here in the circumstances that shape citizen-consumer desire for (or alternatively fear of) robot carers. attempting to determine when and why humans are sometimes attracted to and, at other times, repulsed by social robots is at the crux of what is known in engineering circles— following roboticist masahiro mori’s ([1970] 2012) coining of the term—as the problem of “the uncanny valley.” in section 1, i sketch mori’s ([1970] 2012) hypothesis concerning human repulsion at robots that come uncomfortably close to human likeness but still miss the mark, and i explore engineering workarounds that follow mori’s advice to pursue nonhumanoid design. in section 2, i examine an alternative hypothesis for the cause of human discomfort with humanoid robots: their lack of appropriate affect. hypothesizing that uncanniness derives not from the humanlike appearance of a social robot itself but instead from the apparent mismatch between consumer expectations (e.g., for a companion) and robot behavior (mechanistic), today’s robotics companies use a combination of design and marketing to persuade consumers that robots care for them. convincing consumers that robots have feelings may, however, give rise to a third iteration of the uncanny valley—one that returns “uncanniness” from its formulation as an engineering/design problem to its origins as a psychosocial symptom of an unresolved, traumatic past. this is my focus in the second half of the paper. in section 3, i shift my attention from the engineering and marketing of social robots to their depiction in recent popular culture. through a feminist psychoanalytic reading of key scenes in the television series humans, i argue that we might best understand human repulsion toward “synthetic humans” as a projection of our discomfort with our own inhumanity. exploring viewer responses to the series’ fake ad campaign for synthetic humans, section 4 argues that consumer desires for care as a marketplace commodity should unnerve us. drawing on postcolonial theorists’ uses of psychoanalytic theory, i suggest that our sense of uncanniness when faced with social robots may be a psychic echo of past colonial traumas. i conclude that our sense of the uncanny may need to be enhanced, rather than subdued, for us to hear those echoes. this is especially so insofar as emerging technologies necessitate, as well as mimic, gendered colonial encounters. 1. the uncanny valley as a design problem unlike those of industrial robots, the capabilities of social robots depend on the human capacity to anthropomorphize them (breazeal 2003; turkle 2011). social robots cannot function as playmates to children, helpers to elders, or companions to those who are, because of age, health, or circumstance, physically vulnerable or feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 socially isolated, unless we are willing to accept them as socially capable.2 this makes what masahiro mori ([1970] 2012) termed “the uncanny valley” a major barrier to the mass marketing of socially interactive robots. figure 1. the uncanny valley graph by masahiro mori. wikimedia commons image by smurrayinchester (2007), based on image by masahiro mori and karl macdorman. licensed under cc by-sa 3.0. the uncanny valley, as originally described by mori, was a hypothesis concerning negative human reactions to human replicas (e.g., lifelike dolls, puppets, or robots) which appear almost, but not exactly, like real humans. while we might expect our affinity for the replica to steadily increase as the replica becomes more familiar, mori conjectured that when a replica got too close to approximating human features, it would elicit discomfort in human observers. (see figure 1.) this unexpected dip in our affinity for the replica was the original referent for the term “uncanny valley”; more colloquial uses of the term refer directly to the phenomena of creepiness elicited by replicas that closely approximate human appearance yet miss the mark somehow. the phenomenon of human repulsion at robots that closely approximate human appearance while retaining a slightly inhuman element has 2 this is not unique to robots but a corollary of a more general principle governing social capacities. as frye (1983) notes, for example, the capacities of women and girls are directly linked to being treated as competent by (largely male) authorities. as christian (2011) notes, to pass the turing test (or a speed dating test), humans also need other humans to play along. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:mori_uncanny_valley.svg http://www.androidscience.com/theuncannyvalley/proceedings2005/uncannyvalley.html https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/legalcode park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 dominated both scientific research on and cultural depictions of social robots. horror films and dystopian science fiction deliberately elicit our sense of the uncanny to creep us out; robot engineers seek ways to avoid or suppress our sense of the uncanny. mori ([1970] 2012, 100) suggests that the eerie sensation we get when an artificial replica of something human (say, a prosthetic hand) closely approaches—but does not replicate—its living human counterpart may be “an integral part of our instinct for self-preservation,” a sixth sense that protects us from “proximal sources of danger” such as “corpses, members of different species, and other entities we can closely approach.” robot and prosthetics designers, mori advises, may avoid human repulsion at their products by pursuing nonhuman design. using eyeglasses as an example of a human prosthetic that fashions a new look rather than attempting to resemble “real eyeballs,” mori suggests designers might stylize beautiful prosthetic hands that “bend freely at the joints” but still feel and look nonhuman (100). many robot designers have followed this advice, developing robots that move on wheels or have hands that grasp and gesture without attempting to mimic the look of flesh-covered human appendages. consider, for example, mitsubishi’s wakamaru (released in 2005), a three-and-a-half-foot-tall robot with a wheeled bottom base, silver arms, and yellow hands, or the german care-o-bot 3 (announced in 2008) with its boxy white body and three-fingered hands. aldebaran’s robots, nao (made publicly available in 2011) and pepper (introduced in 2014) are more humanoid in form, designed “for natural and expressive movements,” but utilize cartoon-like characteristics to avoid verging into the uncanny valley (aldebaran, n.d.). (see figure 2.) figure 2. pepper. softbank robotics europe, 2016. wikimedia commons. licensed under cc by-sa 4.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:pepper_the_robot.jpg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 more recent entries into the market have moved away from humanoid form, depending on expressive gestures to interact with humans. mit’s jibo (released in 2017) is an eleven-inch, six-pound tabletop device whose “body” is made of aluminum, plastic, and glass and whose “face” is an lcd touchscreen using principles of disney animation to bring it to life. samsung’s ballie (introduced in 2020) is a yellow sphere, resembling a tennis ball (condon 2020); its “companion” status is conveyed by beeping noises reminiscent of the fictional r2-d2 from star wars. as these examples suggest, a robot’s familiarity is not merely a matter of its physical dimensions and features but also the result of what it says or does. despite more closely approximating a desktop computer than a human, jibo responds to voice commands and touch, recognizes faces, and builds profiles on its users to better serve them. (see figure 3.) initially marketed as “the world’s first family robot,” jibo promised to entertain and educate children, help parents communicate with one another, provide home security, know its users’ food (and other) tastes, and respond to the needs and commands of its human owner(s) (jibo, inc., n.d.).3 jibo’s “helpfulness” was enabled by eliciting sympathetic reactions from humans; one commentator likens its appearance to the imagined “love child of kenny from south park and the robot eve from wall-e—small, rounded, spritely, mischievous” (baker 2014). the orb on the touchscreen, he notes, is “remarkably adept at implying human facial expressions” (baker 2014). as this description indicates, jibo is viewed as harmless; he is anthropomorphized as childlike (cute, innocent) rather than intrusive (creepy, threatening). 3 jibo is now owned by ntt disruption; the new company is marketing jibo as a healthcare and educational assistant; see carman (2020). park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 figure 3. jibo, “your robotic assistant.” mark mathosian (2014) licensed under cc by-nc-sa 2.0. photo has been cropped for space. this conceptualization of jibo as harmless is facilitated in part by smart design (e.g., small stature and cartoonish features) but is not a matter of jibo’s appearance alone. human acceptance of robots depends also on an appropriate match between a robot’s appearance and its task (goetz, kiesler, and powers 2003). jibo’s small stature, mischievous gestures, and childlike demeanor would be ill-suited to a robot tasked with helping to transport or bathe adults in need of mobility assistance. however, his appearance “fits” his social and entertainment functions, while https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/15859743985/in/photostream/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 simultaneously distracting us from the privacy we sacrifice when inviting a profiling technology into our home. similar considerations apply to ballie. much as scarlett johansson was well cast as the sultry voice who would personify everyman’s her,4 jibo and ballie are well suited to the family-friendly role that they are asked to play. 2. the uncanny valley as a marketing problem according to miriam koschate and colleagues (koschate et al. 2016), uncanniness derives from a mismatch between expectation and perception. in contrast to other machines, humanlike robots create the expectation of human nature. this expectation is violated by a lack of emotional expression. the addition of emotion thus decreases a sense of uncanniness. witness the evolution of the german care-o-bot. care-o-bot 3 was a functional service robot able to provide mobility support or fetch and carry items for older users, yet it was gesturally stiff and emotionally unresponsive. (see figure 4.) in contrast, care-o-bot 4 is depicted as a “gentleman” who detects mood and reacts with facial expressions and gestures. in fraunhofer ipa’s (n.d.) promotional video, the upgraded care-o-bot holds out a red rose to a female client. (see figure 5.) care-o-bot 4 is “flirtier” than his predecessor; it “won’t just care for you . . . , it’ll care about you too” (borghino 2015) figure 4. care-o-bot 3: “with new tray kinematics.” fraunhofer ipa (2012). 4 jonze (2013). the audience would be considerably less likely to accept an operating system as a potential love interest had that system sounded like edith bunker or gilbert gottfried. https://www.care-o-bot.de/en/care-o-bot-3/download/images.html park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 figure 5. care-o-bot 4: “care-o-bot – the service robot.” fraunhofer ipa (2015). photo by rainer bez. similarly, the talking, gesticulating, self-moving pepper is described as having an “emotion engine” to help it understand how people are feeling and react appropriately. pepper will not clean or cook, but he will cheer you up by playing a favorite song or telling you a joke if you look sad. pepper also performs robot rap songs and reads children stories. advertised as a robot with “a heart,” pepper’s goal is to be “a robot that maximizes joy and minimizes sadness” in his environment (guizzo 2014). note that the potentially unnerving mismatch between human expectations of social interlocutors (as emotionally capable) and human perceptions of androids (as, well, robotic) is addressed by fraunhofer, aldebaran, and other companies largely through marketing strategies. as social robotics has evolved, solutions to the problem of the uncanny valley have shifted the focus from an engineering problem (how to build a robot that meets human expectations) to a problem of persuasion (how to manipulate human expectations and perceptions). whether the machine does, in fact, care about us is less important than whether we believe it does—or whether we are willing, at least, to suspend disbelief and play along.5 such marketing strategies reduce our resistance to welcoming social robots into our homes. yet persuading us to anthropomorphize domestic robots may give rise to another version of uncanniness. gray and wegner (2012) propose that robots with humanlike features may be unnerving because they prompt us to ascribe a mind to a machine. more 5 passing the turing test depends on the ability to deceive the interlocutor into believing the machine is human. this will depend as much on the interlocuter’s will to believe as it does on attributes of the machine itself (turing 1950; christian 2011). https://www.care-o-bot.de/en/care-o-bot-4/download/images.html feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 specifically, they suggest that machines become unnerving when we ascribe experiences to them. we are less troubled, they suggest, by a robot’s agency (its capacity to act and do) than by its experience (the capacity to feel and sense). in a nutshell, we are happy to have robots that do things but not robots that feel things. how are we to reconcile this with marketing strategies that explicitly encourage us to attribute feelings (emotion, heart) to robots? it is tempting to suggest that gray and wegner are simply mistaken. perhaps we were once unnerved by the ascription of an inner life to machines, we might argue, but now—squarely in the posthuman era—we no longer are so. popular culture suggests otherwise, however. from 1982’s blade runner to the more recent ex machina, black mirror, and westworld, film and television continue to postulate conscious robots as an existential threat to humans. below, i examine one example of this genre—the channel 4/amc television series humans—to illuminate a partial truth in gray and wegner’s claim. whether we are comfortable attributing feeling to robots, i argue, may depend on how we personify them and what feelings plausibly accompany such a persona. in attributing minds to robots, we do so in selective ways that—for better and often for worse—parallel our habits of mind as humans, including our implicit biases.6 feelings of uncanniness may arise when we begin to sense these unconscious biases at work. as the cultural unconscious begins to surface and threatens to erupt into consciousness, we are—and should be—unnerved. 3. synthetic humans: the uncanny as a psychosocial problem based on the award-winning swedish science fiction drama real humans—the uk/us television program humans (vincent and brackley 2015–2018) introduced us to a world in which synthetic (artificial) humans are routinely purchased as nannies, maids, gardeners, sex workers and health-care aides. in purchasing synthetic humans (“synths”) for help around the house, flesh-and-blood humans quickly discover that these helpers can do much more than routine domestic tasks. bonded with their primary users at time of purchase, these effective, attentive, and aesthetically flawless caregivers tuck children into bed and provide sexual satisfaction for lonely spouses. 6 implicit biases may take many forms but are most typically subconscious associations that cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, and appearance. it is unnerving to have these revealed as they are often at odds with our explicitly stated beliefs about other groups and individuals and thus also at odds with our sense of self. for analyses of how this cognitive dissonance can lead to white self-defensiveness and fragility, see hamad (2020) and diangelo (2018). for analyses of how implicit bias gets encoded into ai algorithms, see noble (2018) and howard and borenstein (2018). park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 the availability of synth technology leads to an ideologically divided nation and familial tensions over technological adoption. early adopters of the technology enjoy the assistance, comfort, and convenience such technology provides: synths provide physical and emotional care for their users that is not otherwise readily available. other humans are more technophobic, fearing (with good reason) that human-synth relationships may replace human-human relationships. mothers, lovers, and other paid and unpaid caregivers cannot compete with the skill and attentiveness of their synthetic counterparts. one thread of the series deals with these experiences of human displacement. another thread—and my focus here— concerns experiences of subjugation and dehumanization suffered by minoritized populations tasked with the care of humans. humans’ creators have indicated that they do not intend the series to be read as a futuristic science fiction drama. on the contrary, the series is intended to depict a “parallel present” (miller 2015). indeed, the world that humans depicts looks very much like our own, except for the presence of synthetic caregivers whose uncanny resemblance to humans is a source of potential discomfort both to the human protagonists and to the viewing audience. especially unnerving is how closely the relationship between synths and their human users mirrors the gendered and racialized relationships between human caregivers and those who have historically benefitted from their care. at the center of the series is anita, a synth (played by gemma chan and thus resembling an asian american woman) who serves as a live-in nanny and maid for the hawkinses, a white, middle-class family.7 (see figure 6.) the wife (laura), initially jealous, treats anita as a potentially dangerous intruder, while the attention deprived husband (joe) enjoys and exploits the full range of her services. in the fourth episode of the series, joe discovers an 18+ service package in his synth owner’s guide and “activates” anita’s adult-only services. this makes her receptive to his commands. but as he kisses her and then mounts her on the sofa, she lies inert. she does not refuse him, but neither does she show any signs of pleasure. she gazes blankly over his shoulder as he thrusts into her, in a seeming fugue state. as he finishes using her, he looks uncomfortable. certainly, we the viewers are. she meets his gaze briefly, offers 7 anita is the name she is given as a product—the name by which she is branded and thus comes to be owned. her “real” or original name is mia. the process of renaming those whose labors we appropriate is reminiscent of the colonial treatment of slaves and indentured servants and continues to be common practice in neocolonial regimes. as mia awakens to her subjugation and becomes part of an active resistance, she reclaims her original name. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 a faint but unconvincing smile, instructs him how to “turn her off,” and asks if she may use the bathroom to clean up.8 figure 6. humans amc billboard. brecht bug (2015). licensed under cc by-nd 2.0. in his 1919 essay the uncanny, sigmund freud describes the uncanny (das unheimliche, the unhomely) as what is concealed and frightening in the familiar and 8 viewers of this scene have described it variously as “shocking,” “titillating,” “risqué,” “fascinating,” “cringey,” and “awkward” (see, e.g., gray 2015; hastings 2015; lee 2015). some have focused on the weirdness of sex with robots, some on joe’s fumbling awkwardness, some on joe’s infidelity. few commentators have identified the scene as a rape scene, although that is quite clearly what it is. joe’s unease (and along with it, the discomfort of many viewers) would presumably be subdued had anita been programmed to display sexual pleasure—and thus behaved in ways aligned with normative (male) expectations. but reducing male discomfort (by promoting the idea that “she enjoyed it”) won’t change the sexual act into a consensual one, as i argue below. https://www.flickr.com/photos/93779577@n00/with/19192887631/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/legalcode park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 agreeable (or vice versa).9 the uncanny, he suggests, is what unconsciously reminds us of our own id, our forbidden and thus repressed impulses. that which is experienced as uncanny is perceived as an external threat to our superego. however, our sense of uncanniness and the rejection of the monstrous as other is, in fact, a projection of our own repressed impulses onto something or someone else who then becomes a scapegoat for our own miseries. on humans, anita and her fellow synths are precisely such scapegoats, serving as convenient targets for suspicion and blame that divert attention from the taboo desires and everyday atrocities committed by humans themselves. the glittering luminescence of their artificial eyes marks them as creepy, as does the eerily calm and unnervingly precise way in which they move and speak (keller 2015). especially unsettling are anita’s attempts to display happiness. foreshadowing the rape scene earlier described, anita laughs at a lame joke that joe makes during her first meal with the hawkins family. but her laugh gets stuck on repeat, revealing itself as inorganic and shifting the mood of the family meal from relaxed and playful to awkward, uncomfortable silence in a matter of seconds. the smiling countenance with which she routinely greets both joe and laura is never quite convincing and immediately disappears when their backs are turned. anita’s unconvincing smiles reveal what hochschild (2012) describes as the domestic worker’s alienation from the emotional labor they are expected to perform. it is her job to make others happy by appearing happy (ahmed 2017). her failure to do this convincingly makes those around her uncomfortable. however, it is our own ability to dissemble—to pretend, for example, to care (about strangers, friends, or lovers) when we do not, that should unnerve us. in unnerving ways, humans reminds us of our own inhumanity and what arendt (1963) aptly terms the banality of evil.10 it is deeply uncomfortable to witness a “synth” nanny be “activated” to sexually pleasure a man who has purchased her. because of the uncanny resemblance 9 freud ([1919] 2003). interestingly, mori’s analysis of the uncanny valley does not reference freud’s analysis of the uncanny. indeed mori had never read (or heard of) freud’s essay, das unheimliche, until several decades after writing his own article, “bukimi no tani gensho” (“the uncanny valley”). see jochum and goldberg (2016). 10 what makes joe’s rape of anita so unsettling is how utterly mundane such (hetero)sexual coercion is. like joe, many men assume it is their prerogative— perhaps even responsibility—to “turn on” women. and like anita, many women may not see refusal as a live option, thus passively—albeit not enthusiastically—accepting male advances. there may be little pleasure involved. yet it is a truth of women’s ordinary experience that risks to our well-being increase when we fail to smile, clean ourselves up, and move on as if nothing is amiss. these risks multiply when one’s existence is precarious, when, like anita, one can be “deactivated” (fired, blacklisted, incarcerated, deported, killed) by those who expect sexual favors as their prerogative. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 between synths and humans, the activation of a synth’s sexual program by a “user,” signifies much more than a harmless act of self-pleasuring. because she is “bound” to her “primary user,” the synth cannot resist his desire; under such circumstances, the vacant, emotionless look in the synth’s eyes as the man thrusts into her no longer signifies her creepiness; instead, he now becomes creepy.11 so too does the parallel present that this (and other such scenes) represents. julia kristeva (1982, 1991) draws on psychoanalytic analyses of the uncanny to develop her notion of abjection—a phenomenon wherein one reacts adversely to that which has been cast out of the symbolic order as unintelligible (i.e., disruptive to social reason). for kristeva, the abject (e.g., human waste, a corpse, the foreigner, and, we might add here, a synth) exists in a liminal space between subject and object as the taboo elements of the self from which we try to distance ourselves. while not everything that is abject is uncanny, we experience the abject as uncanny when we recognize ourselves within that which we have cast off as other. when we are forced to face the abject—that which was once a part of us but is now repulsive—it is traumatic. we are “unhomed” by a breakdown in the distinction between what is self and what is other. forced to confront the stranger within, we are horrified. as developed by kristeva, the concept of abjection may be used to describe both physical and cultural processes whereby one separates self (me, us) from other (you, them). borrowing from kristeva’s theory of abjection, judith butler (1990) argues that the boundaries of the (gendered, racialized) self are formed by its violent expulsion of the “not me,” giving rise to homophobia, sexism, and racism. home—the space in which one lives and is at ease, the space wherein subjects are formed—is a center that simultaneously produces beings who are not subjects, who live unlivable lives and inhabit uninhabitable spaces. the white male body is the body that matters, and its mattering depends on treating other bodies as if they are out of place. a feminist psychoanalytic account of the uncanny helps us to tease out why and how we are sometimes made uneasy by attributions of experience and feelings to socially interactive robots (synths). for joe to acknowledge that anita had aims, objectives, and experiences independent of his own would be to countenance his own behavior as repulsive. his subjectivity, his ability to be at ease with himself, at home 11 joe’s creepiness is underlined by juxtaposing his rape of anita with the attempted rape of another synth by teenage boys at a party, an attempted rape that is foiled by the fact that they do not have adult male privileges and are, moreover, called out on being creeps by a teenage girl not yet conditioned into silent complicity. the greater capacity for creepiness of adult men with greater powers is further illustrated when joe arranges to send anita back to the factory to be deactivated (now becoming a potential murderer as well as a rapist) to cover up his sexual misconduct. park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 with himself, depends on objectifying her.12 however, maintaining a firm distinction between (human) self and (synthetic) other is difficult to reconcile with the simultaneous need to anthropomorphize (humanize) robots. social robots can only assist us insofar as we welcome them into our homes and our lives and treat them as socially capable. and yet, welcoming them into our homes as a genuine member of the family threatens to unhome us. thinking about a different science fiction genre, sara ahmed (2000) describes our “close encounters” with alien life forms as a space of ambivalence. on the one hand, the alien represents the danger of the unknown (including our unknown psychic interiors as well as unmapped foreign territories). on the other hand, the alien is “a source of fascination and desire” (ahmed 2000, 2). what is at stake, in the ambivalence of human-alien relationships—and, i’d argue, in the ambivalence of human-robot relationships too—“is not whether [the other] is represented as good or bad, or as ‘beyond’ or ‘within’ the human, but how they function to establish and define the boundaries of who ‘we’ are in their very proximity” (ahmed 2000, 3). the question is not whether we can design robots to replicate (or serve) humans in less unnerving ways; it is, rather, whether we can transform ourselves (and our desires) in response to being unnerved. from a psychoanalytic perspective, such processes of human transformation depend on facing our shared past.13 this colonial past is marked by the violent 12 under these circumstances, it is unsurprising that joe’s reaction to his postcoital discomfort is to escape that discomfort by removing the offending reminder from his home. as joe attempts (ultimately unsuccessfully) to have anita “deactivated” (thereby objectifying her a second time), he appears to remain uneasy—although it is not clear whether joe’s unease is linked to his mistreatment of his wife (his infidelity) or his mistreatment (sexual assault) of anita or both. joe’s sense that he has done something wrong positions joe as a sympathetic albeit flawed character. however, we can—and humans does—imagine circumstances in which users’ sense of entitlement to sexual (or other) services is never disturbed by a sense of unease. neither the clientele nor the owners of synth brothels, for example, ever signal discomfort at using trafficked synths for sex. similarly, few of the other humans who own synth housekeepers, gardeners, or companions appear to be uncomfortable with behaviors that would be considered exploitative, coercive, or abusive were synths to be accorded subjectivity of their own. treating synthetic humans as objects is relatively easy when one has already been taught to objectify flesh-and-blood humans. as i argue in the next section, the uncanny arises when we sense the parallels between our technological present and our colonial past. 13 the “out-of-place-ness of strange bodies opens out the temporality of the bodily encounter. . . .[close encounters with strangeness] slide not only through space feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 dehumanization of those assigned caregiving labors.14 “we” may—indeed, do—have vastly different relationships to this past, and “our” psychic (and material) injuries are not the same.15 yet, we are historically entangled in these stories of violence, and failing to acknowledge this may—and often does—lead to repetitive injuries in the present. encounters with the uncanny may signal that we are engaging in such processes of repetition. 4. uncanniness as the haunting of our present by the past the parallel present depicted by humans is a technologically infused future that (like the social robotics industry itself) is haunted by the past. this comes out most vividly in the 2015 advertising blitz for the series. in thirty-second television commercials—part of a broader marketing strategy including print ads, billboards, a physical store, social media accounts, actors paid to transport cyborg look-a-likes through london, and a mock ebay auction—a fake company (persona synthetics) advertised androids described as “closer to humans than ever before.” (see figure 7.) “meet sally. the help you’ve always wanted,” a soothing female voiceover says, as an attractive brunette with a piercing but somewhat vacant gaze is seen folding sheets, chopping carrots, organizing kitchen canisters, and serving dinner (persona synthetics 2015; newell 2015). “sally is faster, stronger and more capable than ever before.” she is also “part of your family—a helper, a teacher, a friend,” the voice continues, as we watch sally take care of the family’s children. the fake advertising campaign elicited one hundred thousand searches for the product on google, and a half million visits to the website, where the campaign was revealed to be a hoax (nudd 2015). (bodily space leaks into social space), but also through time (the present encounter reopens past encounters)” (ahmed 2000, 53). 14 i am not suggesting that caregiving is always or necessarily a site of violence or dehumanization. caring may be life-affirming in nonexploitative, consensual circumstances. this was not the circumstance of those assigned the labors of care under colonial regimes, nor is it the circumstance under neocolonial regimes. 15 collective pronouns are always troublesome—and yet collective work cannot be done without it. first person language fuels individualism rather than dialogue; third person language too often obscures the investments of the author. (see, e.g., lugones 2003, 226 ff). nonetheless, as ahmed (2006, 17) cautions, “we” often functions as a eurocentric construct that includes via a process of violent exclusion. i hope to have avoided this here but am acutely aware of what singh (2018, 172) calls the “masterful snares” of the collective voice—even when used, as intended here, to describe an aspirational, heterogenous “we” conjoined only in the tenuous hope that we might imagine a future in which the violence of the past does not endlessly repeat itself. park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 figure 7. humans store front. persona synthetics, ben richards (2017). licensed under cc by-nc-nd 4.0. according to adweek, the “creepy ads” for synthetic humans “freaked out” many britons who mistook them for real (nudd 2015). so what was creepy about the ads? to be sure, sally’s somewhat vacant stare and expressionless face—she tries to smile but never convincingly—is creepy. to fully understand what is uncanny here, however, one needs to place sally’s unconvincing smile (like anita’s unnerving automated laughter) in a historical context. the “creepy ads” featuring sally also evoke a gendered and racialized history of domestic labor. gendered divisions of domestic labor in the western world dictated that women in white middle-class families in the 1950s should aspire to nothing more (nor less) than becoming happy homemakers. in more recent decades, paid work (sometimes in the form of careers, sometimes not) became desirable and often necessary for women in the west (and elsewhere); yet women have remained responsible for “managing” the domestic help who now serve as their (happy homemaking) proxies. sally’s attempts to smile while carrying out household chores evokes the image of a stepford wife, while her inability to do so convincingly evokes the fear that the purchaser may be leaving her children with a psychopath. (at the end of the ad, as sally heads up the staircase with a small child, the lighting and music https://www.behance.net/gallery/54452095/humans-store-front https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 feels ominous.) the promised technological future is haunted by a past (and “parallel present”) wherein gendered expectations demand that women smile, even as they carry disproportionate domestic responsibility for meager or no remuneration. sally, we rightly perceive, fails to adequately meet that expectation. her failure to live up to gendered expectations reveals cracks in the deteriorating infrastructure of the private sphere—leaving us with the eerie (and perhaps accurate) sense that she may carry resentment that will eventually disturb the domestic peace.16 at the same time, sally’s whiteness conceals the historical fact that this domestic peace has been largely built—in the western world—on the backs of women of color. from the enslaved black women who nursed, fed, and reared white slaveholder’s children during the colonial era to the south asian and latina women who work as nannies and maids for today’s professional class families, the history of white homemaking has relied on the domestic servitude of racial others. (anita’s casting more accurately renders a parallel present, in this regard, than does sally.) as robert sparrow (2020, 147) argues, and sally embodies, “the visual race politics of contemporary robots . . . is at odds with the historical race politics of robots” as servile. from the original mechanical turk in the eighteenth century to rastus the mechanical “servant” in the twentieth century, robots were historically racialized as black or brown. indeed, the word “robot” traces back to a czech word meaning “worker” or “slave.”17 although our current, technoliberal era frequently obscures the engendering and racialization of ai through design that abstracts away from the human form, techno-utopian futures continue to be marketed, atanasoski and vora (2019) suggest, in ways that employ a “racial grammar” and produce a “surrogate human effect.” humanoid robots become human surrogates, performing social and other labors that enable the liberal subject to be free, but “whose freedom 16 note that viewer unease is prompted here not by the suggestion that a synth has emotions but instead by evoking fears that the caregiving synth may harbor the wrong emotions. the prospective consumer for sally wants her—like jibo, pepper, and other existing social robots—to be perpetually happy and bring nothing but joy into the home. unease is created here through the intimation that sally is not happy and will not confer happiness on others. like niska—a robot prostitute who kills a john and leaves the brothel to which she has been assigned early in the series, sally threatens— quite literally—to be or become what ahmed (2017) terms a feminist killjoy. 17 the word originates from a 1920 play (r.u.r.: rossum’s universal robots) by czech playwright karel čapek. the play was about humanlike machines that rebel against their master (a theme that continues to be well trod). čapek is credited with creating the word “robot” from a czech word, “robota,” variably translated as slavery, serfdom, and drudgery. the term was not changed when the play was translated into other european languages. park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 19 is possible only through the racial unfreedom of the surrogate” (atanasoski and vora 2019, 5). this “unfreedom” is captured by the persona synthetics website created as part of the humans fake ad campaign.18 on that website, two models of synth were advertised “for sale.” both had “all-day batteries” and “fully customizable personalities;” one (sally) was a white female synth, the other (charlie) was a black male synth. both were advertised as available for purchase as a “lifestyle choice” at a temporary storefront in london that included life-size models. these “closer to human than ever before” prototypes were also advertised as up for auction on ebay (walker 2015). all of this—but most notably the idea of auctioning a black body considered to be almost but not quite human as domestic “help”—should feel creepy. however, not everyone was equally unsettled. some who had been taken in by the fake ad campaign were relieved to discover that synthetic humans did not (yet) exist. however, other website commentators were disappointed. “i want one!” responded a reader named cyborggirl. “this would do wonders for the elderly, disabled and general struggling human. . . . i hope this is a test on the reaction for the real thing” (walker 2015). an online poll asking if the reader would like a synth elicited 40 percent positive answers (ibid.). what does it mean to want such an advertising campaign to be true and to be willing, even eager, to purchase such prototypes? this wanting is both old and new, both intelligible and disconcerting. humans have always needed and wanted care. indeed, this basic observation is at the heart of feminist arguments to include care as a morally salient category in ethical theorizing. those who are very young or very old, those who are ill, and those who are disabled (namely, all of us during—at least—some periods of our lives) require care to survive. the desire for care reflects human vulnerability and dependency on others as a fact of life; as such, it is neither shameful nor illegible. we rely on others for physical and material survival and for emotional and psychological well-being. our sense of self arises, develops, and is sustained in the context of human relationships. in general, we see ourselves as competent, worthy, or loveable when we are treated as such— by primary caregivers, by friends and lovers, by coworkers and employers, and by social institutions and their agents. the desire for care speaks to our desire to be in relationship with others who will recognize and respond to our needs and entrust us with the responsibility to do the same. all of this is uncontroversial. what is unsettling in cyborggirl’s desire—a desire which is not, of course, hers alone—is the longing for care as a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace. rather than a longing for human relationship, this desire bespeaks a longing for care 18 a capture of the website is available on the internet archive’s wayback machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20150514185030/http://www.personasynthetics.com/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 20 that demands nothing—not even gratitude or simple recognition—in return. what the fictional sally and charlie promise is superhuman strength and efficiency combined with subhuman status; they will do everything the consumer wants without requiring that the user treats them as moral subjects. as the increasing demands on our time make it ever more difficult to care adequately for ourselves or others, it is understandable that we might seek assistance. and, for those who can afford them, sally and charlie may seem just the technological miracles (“lifestyle choices”) we seek. however, the desire to purchase a synth, not merely as a machine but as a member of our family (“a helper, teacher, friend”), is more than a little creepy.19 note that this holds whether or not the product in question resembles a human. mori believed the problem of the uncanny valley could be avoided by engineering prosthetic designs that maintained distance from the human form. but as jochum and goldberg (2016) note, the “representational uncanny” (triggered by objects that look almost but not quite lifelike) is only one version of uncanniness; our sense of the uncanny may also be triggered by objects that seem to have human capacities or awareness. the social robotics industry is likely to unleash this sense of the “experiential uncanny” insofar as it actively encourages us to treat machines as if they are capable of caring. social robots (unlike industrial ones) depend, for their efficacy, on people relating to robots via roughly the same social schemas they use to relate to people (sparrow 2020). as earlier indicated, social robots can only care for us if we anthropomorphize them. thus, consumers are encouraged—by engineers and advertisers—to treat social robots simultaneously as subjects (human companions) and as objects (commodities for purchase). this creepiness is neither accidental nor easily resolved. indeed, it is deeply woven into the very fabric of techno-solutionist approaches to the problem of the caregiver labor shortage. echoing homi bhabha’s (1994) analysis of the so-called “mimic men” under british imperialism in india, social robots are “just like” fully human subjects but “not quite.”20 19 male scholars waxing on about sex and love with robots is similarly a little creepy; see, e.g., levy (2007). 20 the term “mimic men” refers to “a class of interpreters between [the british empire] and the millions whom [they] govern[ed]—a class of persons indian in blood and colour, but english in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (bhabha 1994, 124; quoting thomas babington macaulay’s 1835 “minute on indian education”). these indian subjects were able to do the bidding of the english by virtue of being anglicized. but their anglicization simultaneously revealed them as not english. their capacity to mimic the british made them both desirable and threatening (see “bhabha 1994, ch. 4, esp. 124–25). park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 21 like feminist theorists, postcolonial theorists have drawn on freud’s concept of the uncanny to elucidate the psychic and cultural results of repressing our past. bhabha (1994), for example, draws on freud’s concept of the uncanny to describe the disorientation that results from a breakdown in the distinction between home and world. broadening freud’s discussion of trauma beyond the personal to see its roots in political formations, bhabha (1994, 13–27 and passim) describes the disorientation attending xenophobia as a feeling of being “unhomed.” like freud’s uncanny, bhabha’s unhomely resides at the edge of what is knowable because of repression. our unwillingness to speak about the unspeakable, says bhabha, leaves a “hole” in the fabric of our social, as well as psychic, realities; this can only be repaired by releasing the “un”spoken from erasure and reinscribing it within the known, the familiar. bhabha’s postcolonial rendering of our sense of unhomeliness has elements in common with frantz fanon’s (1968) insistence that politics and psychology are inseparable. only by articulating the psychic life of the colonial encounter, says fanon, are we able to undo the damage of that traumatic encounter. fanon does not suggest, nor am i suggesting, that there is a singular psychic wound nor a singular colonial encounter. the contact zones of colonialism (and of neocolonialism in our parallel present) are varied and harm those who encounter one another in them in widely disparate ways. the harms done by settler colonialism, by white supremacy, and by anti-blackness are not the same harms, and it makes a difference how we are positioned under these historical and contemporary structures. without flattening these differences, i am suggesting—alongside fanon and others—that the legacies of colonialism will continue to haunt our social encounters, doing damage to both/all the colonized and the colonizers, until we collectively confront the horrors of our shared histories and the perverse desires they produce. the perverse desires generated by the historical and contemporary structures of colonialism are also numerous. my focus here is on just one of these—namely, the desire to purchase care as a fetishized, marketplace commodity dissociated from the social contexts and relational practices that produce and are produced by human networks of care. the specter that haunts humans, i have argued, is not the social cost of humanizing the inhuman (the synth); it is the inhumanity of humans that causes (and should cause) us discomfort. at the center of this fictional drama about a “parallel present” are a series of ethical and political questions concerning our own experiences and practices of care (and carelessness) in an era wherein the echoes of past traumas reverberate in our technological dreams. 5. conclusions to understand why and how we are made uneasy by socially interactive robots, it is helpful to remember that social robots and their users have parallels in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 22 human-human relations. insofar as human divisions of labor have historically been racialized and gendered, our expectations concerning the (visual, auditory, gestural, and even emotive) appearance of the human or humanlike entity performing certain tasks will likewise have a complexion and a gender, even if only implicitly (park 2021). this isn’t always obvious in the engineering laboratory—especially where design solutions to the uncanny valley problem involve staying a safe distance from the human form. however, it becomes explicit when we shift our attention from robots themselves to our cultural discourses surrounding social robotics (e.g., advertising campaigns and television shows). these discourses reveal gendered and racialized desires that inform consumer expectations. moreover, because robots can only perform social functions by virtue of human tendencies to anthropomorphize them, these popular discourses are part of the design of the social robots themselves. consumer expectations of the technologies that care for us are, i have suggested, somewhat creepy. we may thus be “unhomed” at the same time that we seek to bring technology into our homes to help us. any twenty-first century version of the good life that incorporates dreams of robotic assistance will need to contend with the ways in which such technologies unnerve us. to date, the uncanny valley has been approached primarily as an engineering and, more recently, a marketing problem. i have suggested here that we return instead to uncanniness as a psychoanalytic concept and consider that psychological dramas are largely inseparable from the social, cultural, and historical circumstances in which they develop and unfold. more specifically, i have suggested that our sense of the uncanny is related to the discomfort of sensing a past that we believed was safely stowed away, reemerging into our present as the perverse desire for care as a fetishized commodity. if these suggestions are correct, then the distinction between techno-utopians and techno-dystopians is miscast as a disagreement about the extent to which emerging technologies are trustworthy, reliable, and conducive to living well or poorly. it is also misunderstood as a distinction between those who are seduced by technology (technophiles) and those who are fearful of it (technophobes). the distinction between techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism is better understood, perhaps, as marking differing affective sensibilities—affective sensibilities that may be triggered by encounters with humanoid technologies but are only superficially, at best, about the technology itself. our respective ease or unease with socially interactive robots is, at a deeper level, a reflection of our ability to sense past and present injustices. this ability could be considered a moral capacity—one that, it is reasonable to suppose, is often better cultivated in those at higher risk of harm by structural injustices but may be underdeveloped in many twenty-first century denizens who have grown dependent on technological assistants. i’ve focused here on past rather than present injustices, emphasizing the ways in which social robots and their representations in advertisements, television, and park – uncomfortably close to human: robots and the neocolonial politics of care published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 film may unsettle us by evoking histories of chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and domestic and sexual violence against women. but the violent extraction of care from vulnerable populations by those who are more privileged and powerful is far from past. crawford’s (2021) materialist analysis of the “colonial mapping logics” of ai demonstrates the human and nonhuman costs of technocapitalism. the extraction of rare minerals from the earth extends settler colonization and hastens the destruction of indigenous lands globally, as does the toxic waste from lithium batteries and other material residue of ai. working conditions inside mines and the dehumanization and surveillance of factory and warehouse workers resemble plantation slavery, as does the nonconsensual extraction of biometric and affective data from prisoners and others, dead and alive. the human-robot “social” relationship, thus, does not merely mimic the objectification of some humans by others; it also necessitates it. crawford and joler's (2018) excruciatingly detailed account of the production of alexa—a now commonplace smart home technology—illustrates how social robotics embodies the banality of evil: social injustice occurs at every step of the long and complex supply chains that bring domestic assistance to our fingertips. global regimes of servility and precarity are the cost of now-ubiquitous consumer demand for cheerful robotic companionship and assistance with tasks such as dimming the lights or playing one’s favorite music.21 many of us know this—not in detailed accuracy; global supply chains are intricate and almost impossible to follow, even for the industries that depend on them. but we nonetheless know in that inarticulate way that we know in our bones or can feel in our gut when a relationship is not quite right. yet we (many, perhaps most, of us) are unmoved by this knowing.22 if i am right about this, social justice may depend—in part—on designing robots that heighten rather than reduce our sense of the uncanny, leaving us less “at home” with our intimate relationship to ai. 21 note that solutions to algorithmic injustice will leave this injustice intact or even worsen it. training alexa to interact more equitably with a more diverse range of voices, for example, could increase consumer demand for a product that depends on environmental degradation, workforce exploitation, the destruction of self-sufficient communities, consumer surveillance, etc. 22 there are, no doubt, many different reasons for our failure to be moved, depending on who “we” are. but one clear problem—related to the concerns i am raising in this essay—is what taylor rogers (2021) refers to (adapting the term from josé medina [2012]) as “affective numbness.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 references ahmed, sara. 2000. strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. london: routledge. ———. 2006. queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. 2017. living a feminist life. durham, nc: duke university press. aldebaran. n.d. “pepper.” accessed november 25, 2022. https://www.aldebaran.com /en/pepper. arendt, hannah. 1963. eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. london: faber & faber. atanasoski, neda, and kalindi vora. 2019. surrogate humanity: race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. durham, nc: duke university press. baker, billy. 2014. “this robot means the end of being alone.” popular mechanics, november 18, 2014. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engin eering/robots/why-the-jibo-robot-means-the-end-of-being-alone-17437592. benjamin, ruha. 2019. race after technology: abolitionist tools for the new jim code. medford. ma: polity. bhabha, homi k. 1994. the location of culture. london: routledge. borghino, dario. 2015. “care-o-bot gets an upgrade, now flirtier and available with optional second arm.” january 20, 2015. https://newatlas.com/care-o-botflirty-robot/35662/. breazeal, cynthia. 2003. “toward sociable robots.” in “socially interactive robots,” edited by terry fong and illah nourbakhsh, special issue, robotics and autonomous systems 42, no. 3–4 (march): 167–75. https://doi.org/10.1016 /s0921-8890(02)00373-1. butler, judith. 1990. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. čapek, karel. 2004. r.u.r. 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race, social construction, and hri.” ieee robotics & automation magazine 27, no. 3 (september): 144–50. https://doi.org/10.1109/mra.2019.2927372. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 11 published by scholarship@western, 2022 28 strengers, yolande, and jenny kennedy. 2020. the smart wife: why siri, alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot. cambridge, ma: mit press. turing, a. m. 1950. “computing machinery and intelligence.” mind 59, no. 236 (october): 433–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/lix.236.433. turkle, sherry. 2011. alone together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other. new york: basic books. vincent, sam, and jonathan brackley. 2015–2018. humans. tv series, 24 episodes. london: channel 4; new york: amc studios. walker, danny. 2015. “channel 4’s persona synthetics ad for humans could be the best tv promo we’ve ever seen.” mirror, may 9, 2015. http://www.mirror.co .uk/tv/tv-news/channel-4s-persona-synthetics-ad-5669676. shelley park is a professor of philosophy and cultural studies whose work centers on queer kinship, intimacies, care, and homemaking. she is the author of mothering queerly, queering motherhood (suny 2013) and is slowly working on a monograph titled “helicopter mothers and smart homes,” focusing on mergers of care and technology. she works at the university of central florida in orlando, situated on the unceded territory of the timucua and tocobaga peoples, now known as the seminoles. 14273 park title page 14273 park final format gender essentialisms feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 2 recommended citation horden, john, and dan lópez de sa. 2023. “gender essentialisms.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 2. 2023 gender essentialisms john horden complutense university of madrid hordenjohn@gmail.com dan lópez de sa university of barcelona dlopezdesa@gmail.com horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 gender essentialisms john horden and dan lópez de sa abstract charlotte witt has argued that gender is essential to women and men, in a way that unifies them as social individuals but precludes each of them from being identified with the corresponding person or human organism. we respond to witt’s modal and normative arguments for this view, and we argue that they fail to support anything stronger than a moderate version of kind essentialism, which generally allows women and men to be identified with people. we finish by pointing out that several of witt’s central claims about gender roles and gender norms could be endorsed while rejecting her ontology of coincident individuals. keywords: gender, essentialism, identity, coincidence, social kinds, social roles, social norms, social ontology, charlotte witt 1. introduction in the metaphysics of gender, charlotte witt (2011) argues that gender is, in her terms, “unification essential” or “uniessential” to social individuals. while essentialism about gender is often seen as contrary to feminist goals, according to witt, her gender uniessentialism is actually useful to feminism, as it draws our attention to oppressive gender norms, thus enabling us to effectively oppose them. yet, as she explains, her view also implies that gendered social individuals such as women and men are not identical to people or human organisms. in this paper we challenge the plausibility of witt’s gender uniessentialism. as it turns out, her arguments fail to support anything stronger than a moderate version of kind essentialism, which generally allows women and men to be identified with people. excessive multiplications of coincident entities have been all too common in recent social metaphysics, but as will be illustrated here, they can usually be resisted by means of the familiar observation that a concrete entity or group can simultaneously belong to two or more different kinds. (for further critiques of this phenomenon, see landman [1989], searle [2003], lópez de sa [2007], hawley [2017], ludwig [2017, chap. 11], horden and lópez de sa [2021], and loets [2021].) here we won’t seek to decisively establish the default view that women and men are identical feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 to people, but we will argue that no compelling reason has been provided to give it up. accordingly, we begin our discussion by presenting witt’s gender uniessentialism, with its consequence that each gendered social individual is numerically distinct from the corresponding person as well as from the corresponding human organism (section 2). by way of contrast, we then present a minimal version of gender essentialism, that is, gender kind essentialism, which has no such ontologically inflationary consequence. this latter form of essentialism strikes us as harmless enough, and perhaps even unavoidable, once it is clearly dissociated from the stronger and more objectionable doctrines that have traditionally brought gender essentialism into disrepute (section 3). in support of her uniessentialism, witt contends that social individuals, persons, and human organisms exhibit modal differences in their persistence and identity conditions, and hence are distinct. elaborating on a worry previously raised by ásta sveinsdóttir (ásta 2012), we contend that such arguments generally conflate ideas about the essences of individuals with ideas about the essences of the kinds to which they belong (section 4). witt (2012), however, has subsequently clarified that her overall argument for the distinctness of social individuals, persons, and human organisms was not meant to be purely modal but also normative in character, involving the essentially different norms to which she takes those three kinds of individuals to be subject. accordingly, we consider such a normative rendering of her argument and argue that it also fails to support gender uniessentialism, with its implied proliferation of entities (section 5). more positively, we emphasize that several of witt’s key claims about gender roles and gender norms are compatible with rejecting her gender uniessentialism. these claims may yield a specific and debatable account of gender kinds, but they do not require her trinitarian ontology of coincident individuals (section 6). we thus conclude that what is of value in witt’s account of gender may be endorsed without joining her in denying that gendered social individuals such as women and men are identical to people. 2. uniessentialism witt’s project concerns individual essentialism, the idea of a property being the essence of a particular individual, as opposed to a kind; where the essence of an individual is, as she puts it, “a property or characteristic that makes an individual the individual that it is” (witt 2011, 5). (where an individual, presumably, is just a particular thing of any kind whatsoever, which unlike a kind itself, has no instances or members.) however, as witt subsequently clarifies, this initial characterization can be understood in at least two different ways. according to identity essentialism, an individual’s essence is a property that is necessary and sufficient for being that very horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 individual at any time or in any possible world. but this familiar kripkean idea is not the one that is involved in witt’s version of gender essentialism. the relevant alternative version of individual essentialism, according to her, originates with aristotle: for aristotle the question “what is it?” asked of an individual substance expands into a question about the unity and organization of material parts into a new individual. . . . . . . aristotle explains why a new individual exists at all over and above the sum of its material constituents or parts. (witt 2011, 6) the idea is this. some individuals are new things, numerically distinct from the mere sums of their material parts. to ask for the essence of such a thing is to request an explanation for how its material parts are unified and organized so as to yield a new and distinct thing. hence the label unification essentialism, or uniessentialism for short. thus when a property is uniessential to an individual, the very existence of that individual is generated and explained by the instantiation of the property in question; hence that individual is numerically distinct from anything whose existence is independent of whether that property is instantiated. for instance, a particular tiger is not merely a sum of body parts; rather, some uniessential property explains how those parts are unified into the new thing that is the tiger. thus, on this aristotelian conception, many individual tigers may be thought to have the very same unifying essence (concerning their biological function), in contrast with identity essentialism, which would assign a different individual essence (concerning its origin, perhaps) to each individual tiger (see witt 2011, 12, 16). so far we have spoken passively of the instantiation of the uniessential property. but what does the instantiating, according to uniessentialism? at first, the answer might seem obvious: if a certain property is the essence of a particular individual, then it is a property of that same individual. however, while discussing her aristotelian examples of organisms and artefacts, witt instead suggests that, in these cases, it is the relevant material parts that (collectively) instantiate the uniessential property and thereby generate the new individual. for instance, we are told that “a relational property that orders all of the individual parts into a functional unity . . . is the uniessence of the organism; it is by virtue of realizing a particular function that the parts of an organism are unified into an individual” (witt 2011, 12). similarly, “it is because these bricks and boards (or these windows and doors) realize the function of providing shelter to humans and animals that an individual house exists” (15); hence, “the uniessential properties of the house are functional properties that are realized in and by its material parts” (16). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 yet it can hardly be denied that the property that is alleged to be the uniessence of a house—that is, functioning to shelter humans and animals—is also a property of the house itself. so, although not fully explicit in witt’s presentation, the view that she actually attributes to aristotle, and endorses herself, must be that the house’s uniessence is instantiated twice over: primarily by its relevant parts, collectively, and derivatively by the house itself; and likewise for other artefacts and organisms. thus witt avoids the circularity of saying that each house or tiger is brought into existence by its own instantiation of its uniessential property. (this would be to illicitly presuppose what is to be explained—i.e., the existence of that thing—in the course of supposedly explaining it. see witt [1989, 121–22], although her way of avoiding such circularity on behalf of aristotle is different there.) instead it can be said, without circularity, that the building materials or body parts collectively instantiate the relevant functional property and, by this means, produce the existence of something else, such as an individual house or tiger, which as a result has the same property (see cohen 1992). still, in contrast to how organisms and artefacts are theorized here, the essence of being a student is not uniessential to any individual student. as witt herself acknowledges (2011, chap. 4; 2012, 8), the essence of being a student is not a property whose instantiation makes it the case that a new individual comes into existence, beyond what was already there. rather, when this property is instantiated, an independently existing individual goes through a certain phase, that of being a student, usually for a limited period of time; and likewise for the head of the department and other paradigmatic social roles. things are admittedly more controversial in the case of artefacts, and this will help to bring out the contrast between uniessentialism and the milder forms of essentialism to be considered shortly. consider again witt’s introductory example of a house. if the property of functioning to shelter humans and animals is uniessential to a given house, then the very existence of that house is generated, and its unity is explained, by the instantiation of this property by the house’s relevant material parts. on this view, the house is numerically distinct from both its material parts and their sum, which exist independently of the instantiation of this property. this contrasts with the view that contingently instantiating such a functional property is necessary and sufficient for an independently existing object—a sum of building materials, say— to be a house. similarly, consider a stone that is used as a paperweight. functioning to keep loose papers in place, say, is uniessential to the paperweight only if that paperweight is numerically distinct from anything that exists independently of the instantiation of that property, including the stone. so uniessentialism would here prevent the paperweight from being identified with the stone that is used as, well, a paperweight. this contrasts with the view that contingently instantiating the property of horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 functioning to keep loose papers in place is necessary and sufficient for an independently existing stone to be a paperweight. according to witt’s gender uniessentialism, genders are uniessential to social individuals, where genders are social positions defined in terms of the socially mediated reproductive functions of those individuals (2011, 29). so, assuming that “man” and “woman” are gender terms, being a man and being a woman are such social positions: being a man and being a woman are social positions with bifurcated social norms that cluster around the engendering function. to be a woman is to be recognized as having a body that plays one role in the engendering function; women conceive and bear. to be a man is to be recognized as having a body that plays another role in the engendering function; men beget. (witt 2011, 40) witt’s version of gender essentialism is thus social constructionist in character, crucially involving social norms concerning biological reproduction. accordingly, gender properties such as being a woman and being a man are uniessential to social individuals only if the very existence of those individuals is generated and explained by the occupancy of such social positions. so, if gender is uniessential to social individuals, then those women and men are numerically distinct from any entities that exist independently of the occupancy of these social positions, such as, in particular, the corresponding people. so, according to witt’s gender uniessentialism, no gendered social individual is identical to a person. this contrasts with alternative social constructionist views of gender that are more ontologically parsimonious and somewhat less revisionary, according to which occupying a certain social position is necessary and sufficient for an independently existing person to be a gendered social individual such as a woman or a man. 3. kind essentialism witt also contrasts her gender uniessentialism with kind essentialism about gender. in her words, we can [also] think about essences in relation to kinds, and we can ask whether a collection of individuals constitutes a kind that is defined by a common and unique property (or properties). an essence in this sense is a property that determines kind membership. (2011, 5) given the crucial role that gender kind essentialism will play later in this paper, let us pause to make some further observations about it now. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 to start, any adequate understanding of kinds and properties should allow us to say that every theoretically significant collection of individuals constitutes a kind (in the sense of being the extension of a kind) and that every such kind is defined by a common and unique property, which is the essence of that kind. schematically, the ks are all the instances of the kind k, the essence of which is the property of being a k. (indeed, some would further simplify this by dropping any distinction between kinds and properties; in which case, for a kind to have an essence just amounts to the self-identity of the corresponding property. see lewis [1983, 344], jubien [2001], schnieder [2006], and tobin [2013].) so, in particular, the collection of all women constitutes the kind woman, which is defined by the common and unique property of being a woman, and likewise for other genders. and by witt’s lights and ours, that is all that gender kind essentialism requires. notice that this leaves open whether to be a woman is to occupy a certain social role, or to have a certain biological or psychological feature, or whatever else (see witt 1995; mason 2016). gender kind essentialism, as conceived here, doesn’t tell us that being a woman is innate, or inevitable, or like this, or like that. it just tells us that there is a property of being a woman. still, however we ultimately understand this property, it is reasonable to assume that it is relevant for many explanatory purposes. even if it is not a properly biological property, it will at least be relevant for the purposes of psychology or the social sciences. so even someone who wishes to recognize only those kinds that feature in successful scientific explanations (despite the questionable vagueness of this restriction) should admit that there are kinds such as woman and man, defined by corresponding properties, thus vindicating gender kind essentialism as conceived here. granted, the label “gender essentialism” has traditionally been associated with stronger and more contentious views, to the effect that the essences in question have a certain biological nature. and such biological essentialism has often been used to justify the discriminatory social structures organized around gender. however, as witt (1995; 2011, 7–9) and other feminists (e.g., mikkola 2006, 2017; haslanger 2012) have already argued, gender kind essentialism per se does not imply any such further view and is thus compatible with exposing either genders themselves or some relevant associated properties as socially constructed, thus debunking reactionary views to the contrary, with the expected emancipatory effects. yet two further issues that have arisen in feminist discussions may seem to undermine the very idea of a universal property common to all and only women, as gender kind essentialism would apparently require (see, e.g., spelman 1988; stoljar 1995, 2011; witt 1995; butler 1999; mikkola 2006; saul 2012; jenkins 2016; mason 2016; dembroff 2018; antony 2020; barnes 2020; richardson 2022). first, descriptively, it might be doubted that the relevant mental states and practices of language users, or any other relevant factors, decisively select one specific kind to be horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 the unique referent of “woman,” given the availability of a plurality of similarly admissible kinds (with largely overlapping extensions). second, normatively, it might seem inadvisable to try to select any one of those candidate kinds as the unique referent of “woman” (or, more realistically, narrow down the range of precise candidate kinds), because doing so would in all likelihood inappropriately exclude certain individuals from falling under that label, or inappropriately include others, in all possible contexts. still, even if these descriptive and normative points are well taken, it should be agreed that each of the relevant kinds has an essence, of whatever character, compatibly with what we said before. 4. against modal arguments for distinctness so what reasons are there for going beyond gender kind essentialism (with or without some more specific characterization of the relevant kinds) and endorsing gender uniessentialism in full, including its consequence that no gendered social individual is a person? parts of witt’s book suggest that her argument for gender uniessentialism is primarily modal in character. consider for example the following passage, on why she takes social individuals to be numerically distinct from persons: social individuals are essentially relational beings and their existence is dependent upon the existence of social reality. in contrast, to be a person is essentially to have a first-person perspective (selfconsciousness), which refers to an individual’s internal psychological condition or state. an individual person could exist independently of social reality because having a first-person perspective does not require the existence of the social world, but a social individual could not exist independently of a set of social positions and roles. social individuals and persons have different persistence and identity conditions. hence, social individuals and persons are ontologically distinct individuals. (2011, 55–56) this looks like an instance of a familiar pattern of argument from modal opinions to nonidentity claims, as frequently employed to distinguish statues and the like from coincident pieces of matter (see, e.g., paul 2010; and the references therein). supposedly, the statue is not identical to the coincident piece of clay, given that the former could be destroyed (in an act of squashing, say) while the latter continues to exist. similarly, witt here implies that gendered social individuals such as women and men are not identical to people, given that social individuals cannot exist independently of social reality, whereas people can. likewise she claims that individual people are not identical to human organisms, apparently on the grounds feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 that people cannot lack a first-person perspective, whereas human organisms can (following baker 2000); and she argues that social individuals are not identical to human organisms either, since human organisms can also exist independently of social reality (see witt 2011, 51–57). ann cudd (2012, 4) has provided reasons to doubt the modal premise in the above argument concerning social individuals and persons. in particular, she questions whether an individual person could exist independently of social reality. for arguably, being capable of reflection is necessary for personhood, and having this capacity arguably requires participation in certain social practices and norms concerning language and thought. however, let us set aside this concern and grant witt her modal premise for the sake of the argument. in any case, we take there to be a more general problem for all such modal arguments for distinctness. to illustrate this problem, consider making a fist. we needn’t think that by clenching one’s hand, a new entity comes into existence, the fist, numerically distinct from the hand, which merely “constitutes” it (even if this is a possible view, as pointed out by hirsch [2002, 67]). instead we might prefer to say that one turns one’s hand into a fist; one’s hand becomes a fist, usually for a limited period of time. yet the pattern of argument under consideration would have us believe that the individual fist is numerically distinct from the individual hand, appearances notwithstanding. for fists are essentially clenched, while hands are not. ásta (2012, 3) illustrates this general concern with paradigmatic social roles for people. as she points out, what is essential to being a student differs from what is essential to being a social individual, while also differing from what is essential to being a person and from what is essential to being human. so, given that witt, for the stated modal reasons, already distinguishes each social individual from the corresponding person, and distinguishes each of these from the corresponding human organism, why shouldn’t we likewise distinguish each student from the corresponding social individual as well as from the corresponding person and the corresponding human organism? it would seem that witt’s modal argument overgeneralizes. one possible response here would be to follow this line of reasoning all the way and posit a multitude of distinct yet coincident role occupiers wherever and whenever multiple social roles are occupied: a numerically distinct individual for each role. however, as we will discuss in more detail later, witt explicitly wishes to avoid this plenitudinous outcome. accordingly, anticipating something like ásta’s overgeneralization objection, she considers limiting her ontological multiplication of coincident individuals to cases involving diverse kinds of pragmatic interest or diverse kinds with causal powers or explanatory significance (witt 2011, 72). but students are of obvious pragmatic interest to us, as well as being causally powerful and explanatorily significant—as are fists, for that matter. in any case, once the fist is horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 identified with the clenched hand, and the student is identified with the woman or man who studies, why not likewise identify each woman or man with the person or human who occupies the relevant social position? more generally, once it is conceded that modal arguments for distinctness fail in some of these cases, why think they succeed at all? as we see it, such arguments generally fail to establish the targeted nonidentities because they conflate ideas about the essences of individuals with ideas about the essences of the kinds to which they belong (cf. jubien 1993, 2001). hence they wildly overgeneralize beyond witt’s targeted nonidentities. taken to its extreme, parallel reasoning would have us believe that nothing can belong to two or more different kinds. yet, on the face of it, something can belong to two or more different kinds—for instance, the kind person and the kind student. simplifying slightly, we might say that having a duty to study is the essence of being a student. and we may suppose that no individual person has this duty essentially but at most has it contingently. still, most of us would think that people can be students. on this view, a person becomes a student, for the time being at least, by assuming a duty to study. she herself is the student, and it would be a mistake to think that her acquiring this duty brings some other individual, “the student,” into existence. accordingly, even if having a duty to study is what is essential for someone to be a student, that property isn’t uniessential to any individual student. similarly it can be said that even if occupying a certain social position is what is essential for someone to be a woman, that property isn’t uniessential to any individual woman. the woman isn’t a new individual, brought into existence by someone’s occupying a certain social position; she’s just the person who contingently occupies that social position. in this way, a person can be a student, and a person can be a woman, even if genders are socially constructed in the envisaged way. now, it is especially clear that being a student is a contingent property of individuals, because this is typically a temporary property of individuals. typically, an individual student wasn’t always a student and won’t always be a student; so, clearly, that individual isn’t essentially a student. in contrast, some might think that all women are permanently women—assuming girls are classified as nonadult women—in which case the contingency of being a woman will be somehow less obvious. of course, there are apparent counterexamples to the idea that all women are permanently women (although witt [2011, 88] suggests that in such cases the social individual is replaced by a new, differently gendered one, which coincides with the same person and organism as before), but in any case, the permanence of gender would not imply that genders are essential to social individuals (lest anyone be tempted to argue that way). for, in general, an individual may have a given property permanently yet contingently, and this is especially clear when the property in question is a social position. for instance, someone can be permanently wealthy, or permanently feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 american, yet only contingently so. such a person might say, “i would have been a different person if i’d grown up in poverty in vietnam,” but this is not to say that she would have been a numerically distinct individual in those circumstances (contrary to what is suggested by witt [2011, xi, 51–52, 77–78]; cf. olson [1997, 65–69]). rather it is to imply that she herself could have belonged to those alternative social kinds, that she herself could have been profoundly different in the imagined ways, that she herself could have been poor and vietnamese instead of being wealthy and american. she would have been a different kind of person, of course, but that is compatible with her being numerically the same individual. likewise, even if a particular material construction is permanently a house, we can still say that it might not have been a house. in suitably different circumstances, it might have served as a kindergarten or a jail or a monument, even without changing its actual material composition, shape, or location. something like functioning to shelter humans and animals is plausibly essential to being a house, but that is compatible with identifying each individual house with an independently existing object: a sum of building materials, or temporal parts thereof, that is only contingently a house (regardless of whether this object is erased from existence when it is demolished, or merely reduced to rubble). here it might be objected that the sum of those particular material things can’t be identical to the house, because the sum and the house differ in other ways. in particular, the sum of those particular material things essentially has each of those particular material things as a part, whereas the house doesn’t essentially have each of those particular material things as a part. it could have had a different front door, for instance. to this we reply that being a house and being the sum of those particular material things are both contingent properties of one and the same object. having each of those particular material things as a part is essential to being their sum, but that is compatible with identifying their sum with an independently existing object: an object that is only contingently composed of them. similarly, one might argue as follows: (i) charlotte’s house couldn’t survive being demolished, but (ii) the sum of those bricks and boards could survive being demolished; so (iii) charlotte’s house is not identical to the sum of those bricks and boards. in this way one might attempt to show that some particular instances of the kinds in question differ modally, despite their spatial or material coincidence. however, it should be remembered that descriptive terms such as “charlotte’s house” have both flexible and rigid readings. on a flexible reading, this term doesn’t denote numerically the same object in all possible circumstances but instead denotes, if anything, whichever object serves as charlotte’s house in those circumstances. on a rigid reading, in contrast, it denotes numerically the same object in all possible circumstances, if anything—that is, the object that is charlotte’s house in the context of utterance—and likewise for “the sum of those bricks and boards.” if these terms horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 are read flexibly, then the premises of the above argument, thus interpreted de dicto, are reasonable enough. indeed, if something were to survive being demolished, then in those circumstances it presumably wouldn’t be (would never have been, or would no longer be) anyone’s house. but then the argument is invalid, for it fails to show how the actual current denotation of “charlotte’s house” differs from the actual current denotation of “the sum of those bricks and boards.” alternatively, if these terms are read rigidly, then the argument is valid, but its premises, thus interpreted de re, are question-begging, for together they distinguish the objects in question without justification. indeed, why shouldn’t we instead take the house and the sum to be identical and say that this object could survive being demolished, although upon demolition, it wouldn’t be a house? moreover, why shouldn’t we say that it needn’t have all those things as its parts, although if it didn’t, then it wouldn’t be their sum? only by confusing the flexible and rigid readings of the relevant terms does one receive the impression of a valid argument with reasonable premises (see smullyan 1948; gibbard 1975; kripke 1977; jubien 1993, 2001; sider 1999; varzi 2000; horden and lópez de sa 2021). so, in general, such modal arguments fail to establish the relevant nonidentities. a property can be essential for belonging to a kind without being essential to any individual that belongs to that kind. accordingly, fists can be identified with contingently clenched hands, statues can be identified with contingently sculpted pieces of matter, and houses can be identified with material objects that contingently serve as human habitations. similarly, even if being a woman is essentially to occupy the social position described by witt, this is compatible with identifying each individual woman with a person or human who contingently occupies that social position. (and even if being a person is essentially to have a first-person perspective, this is compatible with identifying each individual person with a human organism—or nonhuman organism, for that matter—that contingently has a firstperson perspective. perhaps human infants are gendered even before they acquire a first-person perspective, in which case we might say that they are gendered human organisms that are not yet people.) of course, none of this disproves witt’s view that gendered social individuals are additional entities, numerically distinct from the corresponding people and humans, but her modal argument does not oblige us to abandon the more parsimonious and less revisionary stance of generally identifying women and men (and girls and boys) with people and humans. there is a further, related problem specific to witt’s gender uniessentialism. that is, the gendered social individuals that she distinguishes from people and humans appear to be theoretically superfluous on her view, since according to her view, people and humans also occupy the relevant social positions and hence are themselves gendered. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 recall that the property of being a woman is uniessential to a social individual only if the very existence of that individual is generated and explained by the instantiation of that property. now, as previously discussed in relation to witt’s introductory examples of organisms and artefacts, we may again ask what instantiates the allegedly uniessential property here. since witt attributes genders to social individuals, we should of course say that the social individual herself instantiates the property of being a woman. but, as foreshadowed earlier, that can’t be the whole story for gender uniessentialists. for if it were, we would have to conclude that, on witt’s view, each individual woman is brought into existence by the fact that she herself is a woman. yet, again, it is hard to see how anything could be brought into existence by its own instantiation of a property. for in saying that something has a certain property, we presuppose that it exists; so any such explanation of that same thing’s existence would appear to be viciously circular (see again witt 1989, 121–22). moreover, such existential bootstrapping doesn’t accord with what witt herself suggests concerning her introductory examples of organisms and artefacts. as discussed earlier, in those cases, witt indicates that the relevant material parts collectively instantiate the uniessential property and thereby generate a new unified individual, which—as a result—also instantiates the same property. by analogy, this suggests that something other than the social individual instantiates the property of being a woman and thereby generates the social individual, which derivatively instantiates the same property. (presumably, unlike the property of functioning to shelter humans and animals, the property of being a woman cannot be collectively instantiated by more than one thing. besides, as discussed later on, witt explicitly denies that each person coincides with a multitude of distinct role occupiers—e.g., the mother, the doctor, the immigrant, etc. so it’s not as if she could say that some such multitude is collectively gendered.) this leaves us with two likely candidates for instantiating the uniessential property and thereby generating the social individual: the person and the human organism. witt would presumably opt for the human organism here, since she takes it to constitute both the person and the social individual whenever these three individuals coincide (2011, 69–73). in addition, she explicitly allows a person to be derivatively gendered, in virtue of being constituted by something that also constitutes a gendered social individual (2011, 119–21, 125–26); and she generally allows both human organisms and persons to contingently occupy social positions (2011, 83; 2012, 6). so it seems that witt would in fact allow both the human organism and the person to occupy the social position of being a woman, albeit contingently, even though she argues that gender is not “appropriately attributed” to human organisms or persons (2011, 36, 64–66). in any case, we end up with the result that either the human organism or the person, or each of them, is a woman, in which case positing an additional and coincident “social individual” to fulfil that same position looks entirely redundant. horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 5. against normative arguments for distinctness setting aside for the time being the last problem we just raised, is there any further reason to deny that each gendered social individual is identical to a person or a human organism? in response to ásta’s aforementioned overgeneralization objection, witt has indicated that she takes there to be an additional reason for distinguishing each social individual from the corresponding person, as well as from the corresponding human organism, which supposedly would not lead us to likewise distinguish each student from the corresponding social individual: i think we need a category of social individuals to ground the normativity of our social agency, which is ascriptive and requires social recognition. . . . a central argument for the existence of social individuals is that social agency and its normative structure is importantly different from both natural normativity (if there is such a thing) and ethical normativity, which pre-supposes a voluntarist account of obligation. this point is relevant to [ásta]’s overpopulation worry that every time an individual occupies a social position, a new thing pops into existence. when a social individual occupies the social role of being a student or being a fashionista, she becomes responsive to and evaluable under new sets of norms, but they are social norms and not norms of an essentially different kind. so the argument that i make to differentiate human organisms, social individuals and persons is not applicable to these examples, and my trinitarian ontology does not license open-ended ontological multiplication of the kind [ásta] envisions. (witt 2012, 8) witt’s further reason for distinguishing each social individual from the corresponding person, as well as from the corresponding human organism, it appears (see also witt 2011, 59–64), is that the norms involved in being a social individual are social, while the norms involved in being a person are not social; thus the latter are norms of an essentially different kind from the former, as are the norms involved in being a human organism. in contrast, the norms involved in being a student and those involved in being a social individual are both social, so these are norms of essentially the same kind. so the thought would appear to be that nothing can belong to two different kinds—like social individual and person—that involve norms of essentially different kinds; while, in contrast, something can belong to two different kinds—like social individual and student—that involve norms of essentially the same kind. one of the main contributions of witt’s book is her ascriptivist account of social normativity, as alluded to in the passage quoted above (see also witt 2020). according to her, which social norms—expectations, obligations, permissions—apply feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 to an individual largely depends on which social positions that individual is socially recognized as occupying. accordingly, many social norms are involuntary, inasmuch as they apply to just those agents who are “responsive to and evaluable under” them, as witt often puts it, regardless of whether those agents (consciously or unconsciously) endorse those norms, and thus even if they flout and rebel against them. this rings true of many social norms. for instance, as witt (2011, 43) points out, an individual mother might reject and criticize some or all of her culture’s maternal norms; but even so, she would be still be responsive to and evaluable under those norms. similarly, an individual student might flout her culture’s educational norms— skipping classes, cheating in her exams, and so on—but even so, she would be still be responsive to and evaluable under those norms. as witt says, “rebellion is one way of being responsive to a norm; so is compliance” (43). that said, if the condition of being responsive to a social norm is so easily satisfied by an agent, then it might seem rather redundant. indeed, if social norms in general apply not only to agents but also to artefacts such as houses and paperweights (as discussed below), then being subject to social norms cannot generally require any response at all from the entity that is subject to them. compatibly with witt’s ascriptivism, it might be thought that, in general, social kinds essentially involve social norms. for instance, even if being a student, in the socially loaded sense, doesn’t essentially involve any culturally specific educational norms, it nonetheless appears to essentially involve some general educational norms, such as a duty to study. likewise, even if being a mother, in the socially loaded sense, doesn’t essentially involve any culturally specific maternal norms, it nonetheless appears to essentially involve some general maternal norms, such as a duty to care for one’s children. given a social constructionist view of gender such as witt’s, the same can be said of gender kinds and gender norms. in her response to ásta, witt indicates that all social norms are norms of essentially the same kind, in that they are most naturally classified together, as social norms, when norms in general are partitioned into mutually exclusive kinds; although we can of course also speak of more specific kinds of social norms, such as gender norms, maternal norms, educational norms, and so on. witt indicates that what all these social norms have in common—their shared dependence on social recognition—is greater than their differences, and she indicates that this feature importantly distinguishes them from nonsocial norms, such as ethical norms (which she associates with people) and biological (or “natural”) norms (which she associates with the evolved biological functions of organisms and their functional parts) (2011, 19, 30–32, 37–38, 54, 63–65, 76, 83, 116). she concedes that not all social norms are fully ascriptive in her sense, since some social positions and their corresponding duties can be unilaterally renounced (2011, 43–44; 2020, 124); in which case, being socially recognized as occupying a given social position does not always suffice for horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 being subject to its associated social norms. however, witt apparently takes such social recognition to be generally necessary for being subject to a social norm (2011, 9, 19, 44–45), in presumed contradistinction to ethical and biological norms. in any case, we may as well grant witt these assumptions about social norms for the sake of the argument, much as we granted her modal premise in the previous section. for even with these assumptions in place, it strikes us that her normative argument also fails to establish that each gendered social individual is numerically distinct from the corresponding person. for belonging to a kind can essentially involve being subject to certain social norms, even if no instance of that kind is essentially subject to those norms, and even if some instances of that kind are also subject to nonsocial norms, as can be illustrated with some familiar examples. let us assume that public artefact kinds, perhaps unlike plain tool kinds, are social kinds that are essentially governed by certain social norms (as argued by thomasson [2014]). then for a stone to form a paperweight as a public artefact, and not merely as a private tool, it is not enough that someone uses it as a paperweight. rather it must be subject to certain social norms concerning how it is to be treated. only when the stone is evaluable under those norms is there truly a paperweight where the stone is. even so, we needn’t think that the paperweight is a new object that comes into existence only when those normative conditions are satisfied. instead we can say that those conditions are needed for the stone, which already existed, to become a paperweight. accordingly, the paperweight can be identified with the stone, despite the essential normative difference between being a paperweight and being a stone. that said, being a stone as such doesn’t seem to involve any norms at all; in which case, we don’t yet have an example of something that belongs to two different kinds involving norms of essentially different kinds. still, if we assume with witt that organisms and their functional parts are subject to biological norms concerning their evolved biological functions, then, bearing our previous arguments in mind, we need only consider the possibility of authoritatively using a seashell or a tiger skull as a paperweight, or a feather as a pen, to see how something can simultaneously belong to two different kinds involving norms of essentially different kinds. to reinforce the point, consider the social conditions needed for a hand to form a raised-fist symbol. as we saw, we needn’t think that an individual fist is a new thing, numerically distinct from the hand that is clenched. similarly, we needn’t think that an individual raised-fist symbol is a new thing, numerically distinct from the hand that is clenched and raised, despite the raised-fist symbol’s social significance. instead we can say that, besides being clenched and raised, certain normative social conditions are needed for the hand to become a raised-fist symbol: to go through a phase of being a raised-fist symbol, or to count as a raised-fist symbol. accordingly, the raised-fist symbol can be identified with the hand, even though the social norms feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 involved in being a raised-fist symbol are of an essentially different kind from the biological norms involved in being a hand. similarly, each gendered social individual can be identified with a person or human who is simultaneously subject to norms of two or more essentially different kinds: social and biological norms; or social and ethical norms; or social, ethical, and biological norms—or any combination of norms you please. (consider also aesthetic norms, epistemic norms, logical norms, etc.; the latter being discussed by ásta [2012, 3]). indeed, as we observed before, witt herself concedes that people and humans occupy social positions such as—to give her example—being a doctor (2011, 83), which by her own lights implies that people and humans can be subject to social norms. thus, even if witt is right to claim that explaining the normativity of social agency requires a category of social individuals, we can still identify each particular entity within that category with a person or human organism. so, interesting as the normative view of social kinds may be in its own right, the normative argument just considered also fails to justify distinguishing gendered social individuals from the corresponding people and humans. admittedly, in order to preserve the analogy exposed here, witt might instead choose to distinguish the individual raised-fist symbol from the hand that is clenched and raised, while likewise distinguishing the paperweight from the seashell that is repurposed for keeping loose papers in place, and the quill pen from the feather that is adapted for writing. but if one is generally willing to accept such uncomfortable distinctions, then why seek excuses for refusing to distinguish each student and each mother from the corresponding social individual? a modal or normative argument for distinctness could be given with respect to those latter cases as well, it would seem, and with no less persuasive force. (after all, students essentially have a duty to study, while social individuals do not.) the tension apparently lies in embracing a limited multiplication of coincident entities for essentialist reasons, while nonetheless striving to avoid an unrestrained—or barely restrained—abundance, whereby each human organism would find itself accompanied by indefinitely many concrete humanoid entities of diverse kinds (as defended, e.g., by fairchild [2019]). in any case, such ontological multiplications can generally be avoided by carefully distinguishing the extravagant claims of individual essentialism from the far weaker demands of kind essentialism, as we have tried to show here. 6. gender kinds, roles, and norms we have argued that witt’s modal and normative arguments fail to support her thesis of gender uniessentialism, according to which gendered social individuals such as women and men are numerically distinct from the corresponding people. still, we wish to stress that much of what she says about gender is compatible with our rejection of her gender uniessentialism. in particular, her characterization of gender roles and gender norms, and how these interact with other social roles and social horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 norms, is compatible with identifying each woman and each man with the corresponding person. such an account of the normative structure of society has no need for witt’s ontological multiplications of coincident individuals, as will now be discussed. moreover, the benefits for feminism that she attributes to gender uniessentialism do not require the truth of that doctrine either. (although, to be fair, she does not claim that hers is the only view of gender that could yield such benefits, but only that it does better than some of its rivals. see witt [2012, 2].) recall that on witt’s view, genders are social positions, defined in terms of socially mediated reproductive functions. to be a woman is to be socially recognized as having a body that functions to conceive and bear. to be a man is to be socially recognized as having a body that functions to beget. these social positions are not voluntarily occupied but rather ascribed to individuals by others. as a result, such individuals come to be evaluable under a plethora of associated yet culturally variable social norms. now, without committing to this wittian account of gender kinds, let us note that it is entirely compatible with saying that genders like being a woman and being a man are contingently instantiated by people or human organisms—or, indeed, by human organisms who are also people—and not instantiated by anything else. characterizing genders in this way yields a specific social constructionist version of gender kind essentialism, but it does not entail gender uniessentialism or any other form of individual essentialism about gender. for, even taking into account that these gender kinds are instantiated, it does not entail that any individual is essentially a woman or essentially a man. witt further designates gender “the mega social role,” by which she means that one’s gender is a uniquely important social role, inasmuch as it takes priority over and systematically influences one’s other social roles (2011, chap. 4). she notes that some social roles, like being a mother or being a husband, are explicitly gendered and hence transparently influenced by gender norms. other social roles, like being a doctor or being an academic, are not explicitly gendered, but witt points out that gender norms still strongly influence how these roles are variably enacted by women and men, as reflected in differences in working hours, earnings, specializations, and clothing. witt (2011, 76–77) contends that characterizing genders as mega social roles in this way explains how social individuals are synchronically and diachronically unified—why there is only one social individual with various social roles where each person is, rather than a multitude of distinct role occupiers: the mother, the doctor, the immigrant, and so on. this, she tells us, is why she takes genders to be the unifying essences of social individuals. nonetheless, on witt’s account, the role occupiers in her example can’t be unified into a woman in the same way that the bricks, boards, and so on are unified into a house. for clearly, the bricks, boards, and so on are many feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 things that are brought together to form a house; whereas witt pointedly takes the mother, the doctor, the immigrant, and so on to be just one social individual with various social roles. presumably, then, she seeks to explain how these various roles can be combined, and this is why she designates genders as the uniessences of social individuals. a social individual’s various social roles are all organized according to that individual’s gender, on her view, and in this sense, they are unified by that individual’s gender. given our preceding arguments against gender uniessentialism, however, it can be seen that this is a solution in need of a problem. a single person can occupy various social positions, both simultaneously and over time, in the same way that it is generally possible for a single entity to belong to various kinds or, equivalently, to instantiate various properties, both simultaneously and over time. so, for the social roles of mother, doctor, and immigrant to be combined, it suffices for them all to be occupied by a single person, as indeed often happens, regardless of whether those roles are unified in any stronger sense. genders may still be uniquely important social roles, for roughly the reasons given by witt, but again, this is compatible with straightforwardly identifying each woman and each man with the corresponding person or human organism. in response to witt, some critics have questioned whether any specific social roles have such special importance. it might instead be thought that agents typically have many different social roles that interact with each other in complex ways, with none of those roles generally taking priority over the others (see ásta 2012, 4; cudd 2012, 3–4). indeed, this point may be seen as a dictum of intersectionality studies (see stoljar 2018, 130), notwithstanding witt’s (2011, 101) assertion that “the intersectionality of multiple social roles with gender is compatible with gender being the mega social role.” moreover, it might be thought that even if there are mega social roles in witt’s sense, these needn’t be gender roles. instead, one’s racial or ethnic identity, or one’s status as disabled or able-bodied, might appear to take priority over one’s other social roles, including one’s gender (see cudd 2012, 5–6). be that as it may, witt’s characterization of genders as mega social roles essentially concerns how gender roles and gender norms significantly interact with other social roles and social norms, and all this is perfectly compatible with saying that it is people who occupy the relevant roles and are thus subject to the associated norms. gender kind essentialism, as we indicated earlier, is thoroughly opposed by many feminist philosophers who, as witt (2011, xii) reports, see it as “theoretically misguided and politically dangerous,” and as inimical to morally necessary social change. however, despite this prevailing hostility to gender essentialism, witt argues that her gender uniessentialism is actually useful to feminism, and she further insists that, whatever the merits or demerits of gender kind essentialism, her gender uniessentialism does not entail it and hence does not require its defence (2011, 9–13, 15–16, 127–28). yet, as we have seen, witt’s theory actually includes a specific horden and lópez de sa – gender essentialisms published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 account of gender properties as social positions (as pointed out by stoljar [2018]), and hence arguably entails a specific version of gender kind essentialism, given a minimal conception of kinds. besides, as we have suggested, gender kind essentialism per se may appear fairly trivial and—as witt herself indicates (1995; 2011, 7–9)—entirely harmless, once it is distinguished from stronger doctrines. in any case, witt claims that gender uniessentialism, in combination with her normative account of gender kinds and her ascriptivist account of gender norms, has the virtue of drawing our attention to oppressive gender norms in a way that enables us to effectively oppose them, in line with standard feminist goals. as she sees things (witt 2011, 47, 128–29), in order to end or reduce women’s oppression, it is better to concentrate primarily on how gendered social roles are systematically ascribed to individuals by others in society, and pay less attention to individual preferences and biases concerning these roles, including the preferences and biases of women themselves. she later clarifies (2012, 9), however, that she does not view the social position of being a woman as oppressive in itself, but instead takes the further social norms that are contingently associated with it to be frequently oppressive, and so apt for social change. here we see an instance of the “debunking” strategy of exposing a morally objectionable phenomenon as constitutively socially constructed, with the aim of showing that it is not inevitable but instead can be changed by social means (see haslanger 2003; witt 2011, 38). notably, this strategy involves two ideas that are liable to be conflated: that of being socially constructed and that of being socially changeable, neither of which strictly implies the other (see schaffer 2017, 2455; pace díaz-león 2015, 1145; griffith 2018, 395–96). for instance, the fact that so many people have high cholesterol is not socially constructed, but it is socially changeable. in contrast, the fact that public languages are widely used is socially constructed, but it is not socially changeable, at least not within any functioning society. still, all this is compatible with acknowledging that the social roles and social norms with which witt is concerned are both socially constructed and socially changeable, and that exposing their specific social character is useful for devising ways to alter or eliminate them, where some such outcome is deemed desirable. however, once again, and as mari mikkola (2012, 2017) has already pointed out, such insights into the nature of gender norms do not require gender uniessentialism: the politically significant point is that social position occupancies come packaged with problematic social norms; and this should motivate our rejection of those norms, rather than embarking on projects that aim to alter women’s individual psychologies. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 i agree wholeheartedly that the goal of critiquing and altering oppressive social norms is crucial for feminism. but accepting this is independent of the truth of uniessentialism. (mikkola 2017, 177–78) as mikkola rightly contends, we can agree with witt that certain oppressive social norms depend on social recognition, while saying that it is simply people who are subject to those norms. indeed, we can agree on that point without endorsing any form of social constructionism about womanhood itself, including the wittian account of gender kinds presented here. for it can be agreed that women are in fact subject to oppressive gender norms, without taking any stance on whether womanhood itself essentially involves any social norms at all. any specific account of gender kinds is bound to be contentious, but whatever being a woman amounts to, it should be uncontroversial that women are subject to oppressive gender norms, and that these norms are susceptible to social change. 7. conclusion as we have seen, witt’s modal and normative arguments fail to justify distinguishing social individuals from the corresponding people and humans, and so fail to support her gender uniessentialism, which entails such distinctness. fortunately, many of her associated views about the social nature of gender and its significance for feminism prove to be independent from such ontological multiplications. so, insofar as these associated claims are insightful, they may be endorsed while still generally identifying women and men with people. this, we take it, is good news; if not for gender uniessentialism itself, then at least for feminist philosophy overall. acknowledgements earlier versions of this paper were presented at the university of oxford, the university of barcelona, and the online social ontology 2020 conference. thanks in particular to amanda bryant, bianca cepollaro, manuel garcía-carpintero, jósean lozano, pablo magaña, genoveva martí, mari mikkola, adam sennett, iñigo valero, charlotte witt, and feminist philosophy quarterly’s two anonymous referees for helpful comments. our research was funded by the projects social metaphysics (pgc2018-094563-b-i00 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charlotte. 1989. substance and essence in aristotle: an interpretation of “metaphysics” vii–ix. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. https://doi.org/10 .7591/9781501711510. ———. 1995. “anti-essentialism in feminist theory.” philosophical topics 23, no. 2 (fall): 321–44. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtopics19952327. ———. 2011. the metaphysics of gender. new york: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199740413.001.0001. ———. 2012. “the metaphysics of gender: replies to critics.” symposia on gender, race and philosophy 8, no. 2 (spring). https://sgrponline.com/symposia/#s12. ———. 2020. “what explains social role normativity?” in social functions in philosophy: metaphysical, normative, and methodological perspectives, edited by rebekka hufendiek, daniel james, and raphael van riel, 122–34. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429435393. john horden is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of logic and theoretical philosophy at the complutense university of madrid, specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of language. dan lópez de sa is an icrea research professor at the department of philosophy at the university of barcelona, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and issues of gender, race, and sexuality. 14865 horden and lópez de sa title page 14865 horden and lópez de sa final format against arguing about addict agency feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 5 recommended citation murthy, t. virgil. 2024. “against arguing about addict agency.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 5. 2024 against arguing about addict agency t. virgil murthy carnegie mellon university tmurthy@andrew.cmu.edu murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 against arguing about addict agency t. virgil murthy abstract much modern philosophy considers whether addicts—people who have normatively atypical relationships to various substances—possess genuine moral responsibility. are addicts the subjects of apt attributions of blame, particularly in the context of their drug use and the negative consequences thereof? one group, “choice theorists,” tend to think so; another, “disease theorists,” think not. rather than take a side or synthesize them somehow, i argue that we should stop arguing about this question entirely. in order for the discussion to be worthwhile, it must satisfy the basic condition of pragmatic bearing: some action, permissible to execute in reaction to addicts’ wrongdoing if they are morally responsible, but impermissible if they are not. i describe the set of arguably harmful actions often performed by addicts and enumerate the common penalties (which i collectively term “addict oppression” or, more neutrally, “addict sanctions”) imposed upon them by institutions in response. if the basic condition holds, those who view addicts as morally responsible and those who do not must disagree on the permissibility of at least some such sanctions, on responsibility grounds. but dispatches from the discourse demonstrate that choice and disease theorists generally agree on the appropriateness of the sanctions and on the (nonresponsibilist) nature of the justification. when dispute does arise, it doesn’t concern responsibility either. neither the conclusion that addicts are morally responsible nor the conclusion that they aren’t licenses a meaningful change in the social treatment of addicts by nonaddicts and institutions. in particular, discussion of addict moral responsibility is irrelevant to the material conditions of addicts. finally, i turn to an idiosyncratic attitude of indecision about addict responsibility, often detectable in the literature and in public life. i suggest that this indecision reflects the uneasy superimposition of two distinct possible addict futures—recovery and liberation—and hang my hat on liberation. keywords: moral responsibility, addiction, oppression, madness, incarceration, clinical psychiatry feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 1. moral responsibility and addiction i have long been an error theorist about moral responsibility. it doesn’t exist, or if it does, it doesn’t matter. that seems like a strange opening sentence in an article for this special issue: whence my casual dismissal of the relevant philosophical tradition? well, i’m an addict. i am by now so exhausted at being considered an especially interesting application of the responsibility debate that i’d prefer to throw the whole thing away. in harry frankfurt’s famous paper “freedom of the will and the concept of a person,” he distinguishes between two types of addicts: “unwilling” and “wanton.” the latter are, he says, “not persons” (frankfurt 1971, 11). this distinction has been reproduced throughout the literature (i.e., sripada 2016; talbert 2023; pickard 2017a, 459–60; stump 1996, 184–86), reifying its taxonomic value and broadcasting addicts’ apparent relevance to the discussion. nowadays there are hundreds of papers evaluating whether addicts’ behavior problematizes theories of moral responsibility and thousands that appeal to frameworks of moral agency to explain addicts’ behavior. everyone has something to say about it. gene heyman applies frankfurt’s criterion to empirical evidence about the quitting behavior of addicts, ruling us responsible because we “pass frankfurt’s test” (heyman 2017, 85–92). jeffrey smith (1999) writes: “the key to understanding the behavior of alcoholics is to think of free will as an organ that, like any other organ, can be compromised.” then it gets stranger. gary watson (2001, 378–80) proffers a fine-tuned thought experiment in which he is a musophobic heroin addict, dropping his supply into a cage full of rats. gideon yaffe (2002, 178) starts the second sentence of a fifty-page paper with “the addict who kills for money to buy crack. . . .”. fischer and ravizza (1998), not to be outdone in inventiveness, contrive the drug “plezu,” a euphoria-inducing substance that renders you immobile for several hours (but, mind you, does not inspire “irresistible urges” to consume it). brown, we are told, refrains from taking it only under the condition that “injecting the drug once more would have an extremely grave consequence—death (a side effect of plezu that threatens only longtime users).” they conclude brown is morally responsible (fischer and ravizza 1998, 69– 70). it is endless, and with the notable exceptions of owen flanagan (2011, 2013, 2015) and marc lewis (2017), the aforementioned addicts are not participants but toys. “is that person a moral agent?” analytic philosophers ask, about me. of course i feel obligated to heckle! i must throw tomatoes at the nonaddicts discussing me—if only to remind them i exist. lurking beneath the surface of this literature is an unacknowledged tension. regarding reactive attitudes toward addicts’ behavior, what feels true cannot be reconciled with what feels right. people generally believe that addicts’ drug-related actions are blameworthy. yet responding harshly to those actions seems cruel. kicking someone while they’re down makes us feel like the villain, and addicts are down. thus murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 emerges the desire to logically separate the impersonal construct of responsibility from the personal reality of punishment—to find a compromise between blame and permission. this middle ground is best captured, i think, in hanna pickard’s (2017b) clinical approach, on which addicts should be “held to account” by interlocutors (usually clinicians) who take care to avoid hostile emotions and displays toward them. she calls this “responsibility without blame.” traditionally, the operational content of responsibility is precisely that it licenses blame (p. f. strawson [1962] 1993; frankfurt 1971; wallace 1996). some theorists do distinguish between the conditions for blame and responsibility, but pickard goes further than most, arguing that responsible individuals need not be “blameworthy” (2013, 1140; emphasis mine). still, she claims, we can hold them to account—including through punishment (pickard 2014, 15; 2017b, 175; 2013, 1141). i am terribly confused by this. as far as i can see, holding someone responsible is, by itself, sufficient to justify the behaviors you would be licensed to perform if you blamed them. (maybe not spitting and cursing, but what clinicians are doing that?) my opinion toward responsibility untethered from reactive attitudes, i suppose, resembles peirce’s about eucharistic theologies.1 for the disagreement to have meaning, there must be some action permissible on one view but forbidden on the other. otherwise, what does it matter? i don’t mean to challenge pickard’s view in particular; she is motivated by (very proper) reaction against the twin tendencies to moralize or demoralize addiction. the problem is deeper. it is, i think, fundamentally impossible to solve the true-versusright problem without dramatically reorienting our concerns about addicts vis-à-vis structures of moral responsibility. the peircean point extends to a basic condition that, i think, must hold of arguments about whether a certain kind of person is morally 1 in his famous paper “how to make our ideas clear,” peirce (1878) famously provides the dispute between transubstantiation and pneumatic presence theologies of the eucharist as an example of a sophistic disagreement. on the pragmatic maxim, roughly stated, the meaning of an idea inheres in its empirical consequences; whether the idea is true travels perfectly with whether those empirical consequences obtain. catechistic catholic theology holds that the host ceases to be a wafer and becomes the literal, corporeal body of christ at the time of the sacrament but retains all the observable properties of a wafer. the “protestant churches” to which peirce refers, most likely mainline protestant denominational churches, believe that the presence of christ in the eucharist is spiritual rather than corporeal, effecting a transformation of the recipient’s soul. the two views do not disagree on anything material—they agree the wafer has all the “sensible” properties of a wafer—and therefore, on peirce’s view, do not disagree on anything at all. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 responsible: the set of actions permissible to enact upon them if they are must differ, somewhat, from those permissible if they are not. i herein argue that this basic condition does not hold if the individuals are addicts. arguing about addicts’ agency has no pragmatic consequences. specifically, a moral theory’s ability to justify paradigm interventions to which addicts are subjected (supposedly) in virtue of their wrongdoing is so inelastic to whether anyone blames them that it makes no sense at all to view the interventions as society’s form of holding them responsible. thus, whether addicts are blamed (or blameworthy, or responsible) is irrelevant to the operative question—namely, whether such interventions should occur. addicts are structurally and systematically subjected to a suite of external penalties, imposed on an institutional scale, which worsen their economic, political, and social circumstances. (think incarceration, involuntary hospitalization, termination of parental rights.) these forms of interference are often levied in response to addicts’ wrongdoing, and their imposition is generally believed to be acceptable and proper. but the rationale for such interference is not their target’s moral responsibility. rather, addicts’ subjection to these penalties is thought necessary for auxiliary reasons independent of their agential status. sometimes intervention into addicts’ lives is considered appropriate on altruistic grounds: assistance must be rendered, over our protestations, to save us from ourselves. in other situations, intervention is thought necessary because addicts—by our own fault or not—are dangerous to others. either way, addicts’ deservingness of harmful interference is superfluous to the enforcer’s logic. hence the disagreement over addict moral responsibility is a distinction without a difference. 2. addict metaphysics, addict experience 2.1. responsibility and blame: a pragmatist view blameworthiness is a relation that obtains between an individual and a harmful act, meant to capture that the actor is at fault for the act.2 theories of moral responsibility attempt to identify what this requires. best-known is the attributability view, of which frankfurt’s (1971) deep-self view is a variant (see also wolf 1987; watson 1975). on the attributability view, you are blameworthy for an action if it is ascribable to your fundamental features, such as values, reasons, desires, or commitments. another is the control view, on which blameworthy actions are both wrong and chosen. on the answerability view, one is blameworthy for actions for which one can apologize, provide context, or give a justification when blamed. 2 my language herein will mostly refer to individuals and persons, but i think it extremely reasonable to suppose that groups of persons can be (and can be held) morally responsible. murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 forward-looking accounts demarcate as blameworthy an individual whose future behavior and moral self-conceptualization are subject to revision in light of being blamed for the action (ciurria 2020, 7). each such theory gives conditions for blame to be apt—namely, the circumstances under which the relation of blameworthiness between actor and action holds. moreover, each links blameworthiness to an essential quality of general moral responsibility. there are people who are, typically, responsible: people whom it is appropriate to blame for wrongdoing, absent extranormal circumstances. (perhaps there are also people who are not.) on the attributability view, a person whose decision-making mechanisms are responsive to reasons is responsible; according to the control view, a self-regulative person is. and so on. if an individual is responsible and performs a wrongdoing under ordinary circumstances, then we should blame them. (or at least somebody should.) there are two intuitive senses of what is meant by the “should” in “should we hold this person responsible?” the first should is matter-of-fact: “do they possess genuine moral responsibility for this infraction?” does our blaming them follow from our conceiving of the situation correctly? the second should is pragmatic. is it beneficial to hold the individual responsible—for them, for us, all things considered? does doing so bring about the best outcome or properly instantiate the social practices we want? we’re right to hold someone responsible when doing so is moral/prosocial; our evaluation is true if it is formally proper. often, the distinction between true-should and right-should collapses. some theories of moral responsibility are such that it is right to hold entities responsible if and only if it is true that they are responsible. on the answerability view, responsibility consists in the capacity to provide an account; holding responsible, in demanding one. seeking answers from someone who, for whatever reason, cannot provide them does not achieve its objective. it’s a waste of time at best. analogously, forward-looking theories tend to quine the true-right divide. it’s futile to engage in social practice geared toward modifying the recipient if said recipient is categorically unmodifiable by such processes. of course, it may be that a wrongdoer who broadly can change or furnish an account sometimes doesn’t, hence satisfying the agency condition while still frustrating the objective of the interaction (see ciurria 2020, 57–58). so long as the relevant ability is present, though, attempts to hold them responsible are not in principle misguided. these theories are functionalist, not consequentialist. won’t versus can’t is the difference between apples and oranges—or rather, between shaking the branches of an apple tree unsuccessfully and shaking those of an orange tree while hoping for apples. the attributability and control views are not like this, it seems. they identify the propriety of blame not with its conduciveness but with its accuracy. we can err factually in supposing someone did wrong for their own reasons. but whether we err feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 normatively by proceeding on that assumption depends on what proceeding entails, which is unspecified. hence it is often taken as a constitutive element of moral responsibility that others be permitted to interact with the morally responsible person in certain ways. watson (1996, 231) considers this the difference between holding someone responsible and merely “holding [them] to be responsible.” the content of being held responsible is, in his terms, being “liable to certain adverse or unwelcome treatment”—called sanctions—in virtue of having failed to discharge reasonable requirements levied by an entity with the authority to require them (236– 37). hence, on his view, there are two “faces” of responsibility. aretaic assessments concern attributability: whether an actor’s wrongdoing results from their moral deficiency. judgments of accountability mark the recipient as within the scope of sanctions, thus enabling actions we could not permissibly countenance absent their object’s responsibility for transgression. when it is unclear whether the conditions under which we true-should consider someone responsible coincide with those under which we right-should, i take it that the second understanding is the relevant one. morally responsible people are just those whom it is right to hold responsible, and to speak of responsible people who should not be held responsible, or nonresponsible people who should, is incoherent. this is to say that a meaningful theory of moral responsibility must satisfy the following basic condition: there exist some actions that are permissible toward responsible individuals but impermissible toward nonresponsible ones. i am in good company, i’d like to think—peter strawson ridicules the notion that “blame is metaphysical” (1993, 65) and states emphatically that the empirics of human reactive attitudes are inseparable from those of ascriptions of moral responsibility. so if a claim about the scope of moral responsibility has bearing, there must exist some act and some penalty—what watson calls “adverse or unwelcome treatment”—such that, assuming an agent and a nonagent, otherwise similar, each perform the act, the penalty is allowed as a sanction against the agent but disallowed against the nonagent.3 otherwise it cannot be the case that the moral responsibility of an agent justifies behavior toward them. 3 neil levy, in correspondence, has suggested the possibility of a forward-looking justification that licenses treating some nonblameworthy people as blameworthy. by the lights of the deep-self view, there are justifications for treating some nonblameworthy people as if they were blameworthy: children, perhaps. in my view, we can achieve this result simply by appealing to a forward-looking view of responsibility, unless there exist some blameworthy people to whom the forwardlooking justification does not apply. in the latter case, my pragmatism could be preserved by adopting a pluralist view or endorsing multiple realizability (cf. menges 2021, 402–3), although i concede that is prima facie unintuitive. anyway, such a murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 2.2. theories of addiction so what are addicts meant to be responsible, or not, for? some thought experiments about addict responsibility involve, say, an alcoholic taking a drink (benn 2010; schaler 2002). but when we talk about holding addicts responsible for something, this is not what we mean. my taking a drink hurts no one except (possibly) me; it makes little sense to judge it wrong de jure (cf. pickard 2013, 1140). responsibility without normativity invites only aretaic judgment, and sometimes not even that. you are responsible for going to the store—it is a decision you make, for your own reasons. but unless you punch someone on your way there, you are not liable to be “held responsible.” when we discuss actions for which addicts are to be held responsible, the relevant actions are ones i call “active addiction behavioral patterns” (aabps). these may still consist in substance use, but the use is at least tenuously connected to destruction, harm, or lawbreaking: drinking to unconsciousness, or drinking belligerently, or drinking underage, or drinking and driving. aabps are generally regarded as dangerous and damaging. further examples include drug dealing, intoxication or erratic behavior in public, the exposure of children to substances (through prenatal use or parental misconduct); and the performance of unsafe or illegal acts while under the influence of drugs (such as driving) or for the purpose of obtaining them (such as theft). these actions differ from my taking a drink in that if a nonaddict did them, we would consider them to have perpetrated a wrong for which they are morally responsible. is addiction status relevant in the determination of moral responsibility for (some) aabps? traditionally, addiction theories have been separated into two camps—disease and choice models—according to their answer. the choice view says yes: addicts, like anyone else, act for their own reasons. they prefer drug consumption, even if illegal or dangerous, over alternatives. abstention from drugs may be difficult, but that’s just because it’s hard not to do something you very much like to do. in particular, this means that addicts are responsible for the negative consequences of their drug use. (a relatively unpopular variant of the choice model is the moral model, on which addicts’ drug use is per se immoral.) on the disease model, addiction is a pathology that causes people to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. at least some aspects of behavior, a disease theorist would claim, are beyond the addict’s immediate control—in particular, the ability to regulate their consumption of their drug of choice. for instance, addicts might situation is hard to imagine. if we are consequentialist about attributions of blame and/or responsibility (which is fine), then we might as well be consequentialist about apt blame and responsibility: the people whose being blamed produces good outcomes are those who are blameworthy. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 experience compulsions that influence their actions or may have defective brain functioning that impedes their reasoning. if so, addiction would constitute the sort of qualification we tend to think exonerates people from responsibility for certain actions. nowadays this partition is falling out of favor. some theories do not fit cleanly under either heading, while others straddle the divide. the choice/disease taxonomy described above is a dramatic representation, emphasizing the question on which their respective radicals would disagree. but moral responsibility makes appearances whenever addiction is discussed,4 and choice/disease positionality tracks it effectively. among responsibility theories, the control view is most obviously evoked by the choice/disease split. but the distinction can be framed germanely to other theories too, even if it requires a modicum of creative literature interpretation: attributability (addicts act for their own reasons, or they do not), answerability (addicts can “explain why they made the choices they did” [pickard 2013, 1141], or they are too confounded by their own behavior to instantiate “rational selfinterpretation” [flanagan 2015, 144]), forward-lookingness (spontaneous remission is suggestive of self-modification for the better [pickard 2012, 43], or, due to a sort of hermeneutical unluckiness, addicts cannot functionally self-revise [levy 2003, 137– 40]). the point is that there are, theoretically, two extremal positions about addicts’ responsibility. there are those who think addicts are responsible; call these blamers. then there are nonblamers, who think not. now, there are shades of grey here. someone might consider it appropriate to impose sanctions upon a nonaddict whose drug consumption breaks the law but unjustified to impose them upon an addict. such a theorist could nonetheless contend that addicts retain responsibility for actions not directly entailed by atypical drug use: behaviors performed while sober, and ones which could have been avoided by means of accessible precautions. (“you could’ve given me your keys.”) this assessor would then be a “moderate” nonblamer, exempting addicts from responsibility for illegal drug use but not for driving drunk. no such open-mindedness is available to the blamer. if addicts are responsible for the drug use patterns that are detrimental to themselves or others, then they are at least also responsible for selling drugs, damaging property, and so on. 4 as flanagan (2015, 145) aptly points out, the dsm-v criteria for a substance use disorder diagnosis do not address neurology or genetics, instead mentioning “desire,” “craving,” and overuse by one’s own lights. murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 2.3. addict oppression i will argue that whether addicts are considered responsible for aabp does not make a difference to the responses. therefore, it is worth clarifying what those responses are. (1) how are addicts treated, ostensibly as a reaction to aabp? (badly.) (2) who, or what, is treating them that way? (social and political institutions.) being an addict is characterized by a form of marginalization which i call addict oppression (murthy 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). it has several elements; i’ll describe two. the first is what i call the “carceral-clinical seesaw.” much addict experience consists in ping-ponging between hospitals and prisons, emerging from one institution only to find oneself entering another. the vast majority of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are addicts (bronson et al. 2017). an adverse interaction with the carceral system can invite medical oversight: for example, court-mandated treatment (coviello et al. 2013). it works the opposite way too; medical intervention precipitates police involvement. law enforcement agents routinely respond to overdose calls in the united states and canada (van der meulen, chu, and butler-mcphee 2021) and often make arrests there (carroll et al. 2020), even in states with good samaritan laws (szalavitz 2016). “you can go to the hospital without handcuffs or with handcuffs, you decide,” one officer summarizes (smiley-mcdonald et al. 2022). the second element is a set of institutional interventions i term intergenerational erasure: the structural prevention of addict community-building across time. intergenerational erasure includes explicitly eugenic interventions, such as coercive sterilization (vega 2003; murthy 2023b). moreover, in many jurisdictions, substance use during pregnancy is grounds for felony charges (garrity-rokous 1994; yurkanin 2023; camp 2023) or involuntary commitment (faherty, stein, and terplan 2020). infants’ positive tests often merit mandatory abuse reports to child protective services (cps) even if they result from prescribed medication use. that is the case in massachusetts, where a group of postpartum women on medication treatment for opioid use disorder (moud), surveyed in a recent study, reported coercion from clinicians to remain on moud despite their concerns about fetal health. some reported that those same physicians neglected to inform them that continuing moud would likely result in mandatory reporting (schiff et al. 2022). over 90 percent were selected for full investigation by massachusetts’ department of children and families. half experienced child removal—and the vast majority of them were using only prescribed medication (work et al. 2023). addicts are routinely subordinated, subjected unwillingly to external interference. that much is obvious. what will be contested is not my facts but my feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 framing. i have highlighted the harms of these practices and downplayed their benefits. i called them “oppression.” the only controversial claim is one i did not explicitly state: these interventions should stop. the majoritarian view, i think, is that this claim is absurd. most people understand that institutional interventions into addicts’ lives cause harm, but nonetheless feel they are proper. subjecting people to these experiences— incarceration, institutionalization, family separation—is not per se forbidden. it just requires extraordinary justification. concerning their imposition upon addicts, one such justification is on offer, and i’ve already alluded to it: we started it. it seems obvious on the face of it that aabps are the reason that authorities interfere with addicts. we are incarcerated because we steal, deal, and drive drunk. we are institutionalized because we threaten others. our children are taken because we expose them to drugs. these are grievous wrongdoings, warranting adverse consequences. aabps adversely affect individuals who cannot defend themselves (such as our children) and, really, anyone unlucky enough to cross our paths. when the consequences of wrongdoing have such a wide scope, the actors equipped to hold the wrongdoer responsible are group agents: police forces, government agencies, medical teams. those agents are permitted to incarcerate a person because, in being blameworthy for some behavior, the person cedes their right against incarceration. in other words: it would indeed be unacceptable for addicts qua addicts to be subjected to systematic interference by powerful group agents—but that’s not happening. instead, addicts who perform aabp are subjected to interference in virtue of the wrongness of aabps. an addict’s transgressions make it acceptable for society, as a collective, to remove the addict’s self-determination, in order to hold them responsible. after all, the content of moral responsibility inheres in the permissibility of one’s subjection to adverse consequences for violating reasonable rules established by an authorized entity. norms against aabps sound reasonable, and governments have the relevant prerogative. instead of “addict oppression,” we should call it “addict sanctions.” that’s the argument a blamer would make, perhaps. what about nonblamers? even the most conservative of them must, i think, exempt addicts from responsibility for some aabps. there exist aabps that are entirely reducible to atypical drug use patterns and are not preventable by any precautions that are reasonable to expect addicts to take. possession or use of an illegal substance is one such action. this remains true of drug use in contravention of a judge’s order or parole condition: such orders typically arise as probationary conditions for drug possession (sechrest and shicor 2001; mayfield et al. 2013), which addicts, on the nonblamer’s view, cannot completely control, and hence could hardly have been avoided. another aabp for which nonblamers should exempt addicts from responsibility is prenatal substance use. the only foolproof preventive measure, murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 sterilization, would be unreasonable to require. procurement of effective birth control is not realistic either: many addicts are unable to access a clinic, cannot afford contraception, and rightly fear mistreatment by providers (schmidt et al. 2023); and many are misinformed about safe sex practices (florsheim et al. 2021). additionally, though surveyed drug user populations respond enthusiastically to endeavors to make reproductive health care accessible to them (macafee et al. 2020), they often lack crucial information concerning the relevance of safe sex practices to their lives (florsheim et al. 2021; lally et al. 2008). hence these aabps are direct results of drug use, and the minimal precautions necessary to avoid them are unreasonable or impossible. nonblamers cannot take addicts to be morally responsible for them. so if (1) addict sanctions are an institutional response to addicts’ aabps, and if (2) addicts’ moral responsibility for aabps is the justificatory logic of addict sanctions—that is, the belief that addicts are morally responsible explains the sanctions’ existence—then blamers and nonblamers must disagree on whether the sanctions are justified, with nonblamers supporting a significant transformation to group agent responses to at least those aforementioned aabps. i am not concerned with whether addicts’ moral responsibility for aabps is, if real, an adequate justification for imposing sanctions. the truth of the statement “if addicts are responsible for aabps, then addict sanctions are permissible” underdetermines the relevance of addicts’ responsibility. compare that to “if addicts are responsible for aabps, then breathing is permissible.” breathing is permissible anyway; the implication does not tell us anything about the bearing of addicts’ moral responsibility on the world. i ask whether addicts’ moral responsibility for aabps is the operative justification for addict sanctions: the reason why we instantiate and condone them. is the fact that relevant parties believe (correctly or not) addicts are responsible the reason why addicts are jailed, institutionalized, and so on? does the view that addicts are responsible for aabps account for the propensity to enact or approve the systemic disruption of their lives by institutions, in such a way that absent that view such disruption would be thought impermissible? is blaming addicts for aabps causally relevant to addict oppression? if so, then addicts are incarcerated because they are blamed for crimes, separated from their children because they are blamed for child endangerment: ostensible blameworthiness (or, if you like, some other responsibility condition) produces the sentiment that “addict oppression” is reasonable and proper. at first blush, it seems addicts’ responsibility does the desired justificatory work. for instance, it cannot be the case that we feel separating addicts’ families is justified merely because the children will fare better that way. children born in poverty would be better off rich, but it would be ridiculous to claim this fact licenses redistributing them among the wealthy. the natural analogy for addict parents, one feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 feels, is abusive parents, not materially badly-off parents. parental deprivation of resources from a child merits intervention when it is chosen. but on closer examination, the view that moral responsibility for aabps justifies addict sanctions is unsatisfactory. if it were true, then my basic condition would hold: nonblamers would protest the sanctions, at least when applied to aabps for which they deny addicts’ responsibility. but they don’t. blamers and nonblamers don’t disagree qua blamers and nonblamers. when debate arises, its locus is not addicts’ responsibility. 3. the question is irrelevant 3.1. two case studies nonblamers, i argued, should contest addicts’ responsibility for two specific aabps: substance use during pregnancy, and violation of court-ordered abstinence. this holds even for nuanced nonblamers, who suppose addicts to be responsible in some contexts but not others. if sanctions against addicts are in fact a consequence of aabps, and if the moral responsibility of addicts confers the sanctions’ permissibility (rather than the two conditions’ happening to coincide), then nonblamers are committed to the view that the characteristic sanctions imposed when an addict engages in prenatal substance use, or breaches their probationary agreement not to consume drugs, are impermissible. we will look at these cases in turn, examining how blamers and nonblamers address them. case 1: substance use during pregnancy say an addict continues to use drugs throughout pregnancy, giving birth to a child who tests positive for a controlled substance. how do blamers and nonblamers, respectively, advise proceeding? on the blamer view, we’d imagine, the child should be removed—and the parent subjected to serious penalties, even jailed. that’s not uncommon. alabama leads the united states in jailing pregnant drug users; 649 were arrested there between 2005 and 2022 (wadhwani 2023). one wonders: is there any limit on the rights relinquished by the perpetrator responsible for this wrong? if not, then perhaps the parent should be sterilized. barbara harris, whose nonprofit project prevention pays addicts to get sterilized, says: “we don’t allow dogs to breed. . . . and yet these women are literally having litters of children” (vega 2003). are these interventions made permissible by addicts’ responsibility for prenatal substance use? if so, then we’d expect nonblamers to reject them. the rhetoric, however, tells a different story. even the most punitive of the alabaman prosecutors pay lip service to the disease view, painting the carceral response as “an opportunity” to get addicts into rehab. etowah county district murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 attorney jody willoughby claims the addict mothers she imprisons are in the grip of a “deadly addiction” that will otherwise kill them. an ada who denied bond to a pregnant addict, keeping her jailed for months, reports that the woman “desperately needs the help we are offering” by incarcerating her: a practice “designed for mothers,” according to that ada (yurkanin 2023). that sounds like disease model thinking—and makes incarceration seem oddly like treatment. maybe the das are being cynical. after all, the jailing of pregnant addicts has drawn outspoken condemnation. but its critics don’t emphasize the blamelessness of pregnant addicts—or of addicts at all. they point to the policy’s overreach: “women who aren’t even addicted to drugs” are jailed for “minor drug offenses” such as using cbd oil (camp 2023), or smoking cannabis before they knew they were pregnant (yurkanin 2023). the disagreement, then, doesn’t hinge on whether addicts are at fault for fetal endangerment. many objectors seem rather to think that policies like this inadvertently backfire or that jailing drug users is a slippery slope with ramifications for nonaddicts (see murthy 2023c). and nonblamers aren’t exactly protesting addicts’ sterilization en masse. take journalist sandy banks, whose writings make clear that she considers addiction a public health crisis. “why are heroin addicts on downtown’s skid row being deprived of care?” she demands (banks 2015). yet banks’s (2009) brief profile of harris is quite sympathetic, lauding her for “helping mothers heal” and summarizing, “project prevention makes sense to me.” in fact, it’s not clear even harris blames the addict parents. “they don’t set out to have babies that are taken away,” she points out (banks 2009). tennessee judge sam benningfield, who notoriously offered a thirtyday sentence credit to inmates who procured a vasectomy, argued, “maybe that’s two or three kids not being born under the influence of drugs” (hawkins 2017). sterilizing addicts is not holding them to account for reproductive wrongs. it’s coldly consequentialist: everyone involved is simply better off this way. there is one regard in which banks speaks differently than harris or the rightwing court officials. she explicitly acknowledges the delicacy of the topic, calling it a “tough problem” (banks 2009). “i know it’s not politically correct,” she advises before suggesting that addict parents be subjected to coercive treatment and birth control (banks 2014). in fact, her two los angeles times pieces on addict parental wrongdoing conclude near-identically. the addicts who’ve been separated from their children “were victims of childhood trauma and are prisoners of addiction now,” she writes in her profile of harris. but the rights of their children “ought to be as important as mom’s” (2009). five years later, she sounds uncannily similar: addict parents who’ve lost custody “were punished by shame and regret,” she writes, “but the children they bore suffered too; that’s something we can’t afford to forget” (2014). addicts’ suffering saddens us, but it is a necessary price: we must keep children safe. there is right, and then there is true. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 the convergent evolution between blamers and nonblamers demonstrates that the responsibility of the addict parent is not the justificatory fulcrum for these sanctions. attributions of blame are unnecessary to justify massive interference: displacing their children, intimidating them into sterilization, jailing them. what matters is that they are dangerous to their children. deadly. having litters, born with withdrawal symptoms. at the whisper of this principal directive—protect the child— the squabbling choice and disease theorists join hands and follow the piper. case 2: reincarceration after relapse it is common practice in us court proceedings to position diversion programs and treatment as an attractive alternative to carceral penalties: jail time, further charges, the preservation of charges on one’s record. a canonical case of this is abstinence as a probation condition. the well-known project hope is a model of escalating penalties for probationers’ violation of (usually abstinence) conditions (duriez, cullen, and manchak 2013). should addict probationers test positive for drugs, they spend the night in jail. what have blamers and nonblamers to say about that? here is a representative excerpt from a paper purporting that “addicts can choose to recover” (satel and lilienfeld 2014, 22–23): project hope includes frequent random drug testing of offenders on probation. those who test positive are subject to immediate and brief incarceration. sanctions are fair and transparent: all offenders are treated equally, and everyone knows what will happen in case of an infraction. the judges express a heartfelt faith in offenders’ ability to succeed. these basic elements of hope’s contingency administration—swiftness, sureness, transparency, and fairness combined with expectation for achievement—are a potent prescription for behavior change. . . . indeed, after 1 year of enrollment in project hope, participants fared considerably better than probationers in a group who served as a comparison. they were 55% less likely to be arrested for a new crime and 53% less likely to have had their probation revoked. . . . these findings join a vast body of experimental data attesting to the power of incentives to override the lure of drugs. their attitude toward project hope here is positive, but not because addicts’ blameworthiness vindicates it—it’s the other way around. project hope’s success vindicates the choice model, providing empirical evidence that addicts’ behavior is responsive to incentives. the implied appropriateness of project hope instead relies on an altogether distinct justification: benefit to the addicts themselves! the murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 intervention makes a difference. who cares if reincarcerated addicts are getting what they deserve? they are getting what they need. do nonblamers contest the appropriateness of project hope? here’s a 2019 study on substance use after incarceration release, written by disease theorists who recite “substance use disorders are chronic relapsing conditions” (and whose other work concerns lowering the overdose rate of recently incarcerated opioid addicts on moud [howell et al. 2021]): important factors that likely influenced our lower incidence of substance use were that we engaged participants soon after their release [and] most were monitored by parole . . . which may have affected decisions around substance use. . . . data are conflicting about the types of monitoring practices that are most effective, but close supervision of substance use and certain and immediate consequences are considered best practices. . . . engaging formerly incarcerated individuals in the early post-release period and capitalizing on parole’s influence on substance use could support abstinence from substance use. (chamberlain et al. 2019) if blamers and nonblamers diverge on the empirics, i don’t see where. they don’t disagree on whether abstinence is an acceptable supervision condition, nor even on why. the motivation is addicts’ health. blameworthiness is irrelevant. 3.2. blame, rightness, and truth pickard’s theory of responsibility without blame is facilitated by her distinguishing between “responsibility” and “moral responsibility” (2011, 214–15), formulating a system of normative practices from which reactive attitudes have been excised. her motivation is a clinical double bind that she calls the “rescue-blame trap”: blaming mad and addict patients for causing harm may provoke severe distress, treatment attrition, or behavioral escalation, whereas excusing their actions to avoid confrontation makes treatment a waste of time for everyone (pickard 2014, 12).5 blame, in pickard’s view, consists of a barrage of strong emotions and condemnatory evaluative conclusions, culminating in tangible aggressive action (2014, 14). instead, clinicians should interact collaboratively with the patient, developing understanding of their history and likely learning that they have suffered great harm. blame becomes 5 as with “addict,” “mad” is an intentionally reclaimed term used by activists and theorists in the mad pride movement: current and former recipients and patients (voluntary or involuntary) of mental health services or treatment facilities, as well as other individuals who have been diagnosed with, or identify with, mental illness or atypical psychological experience and mental states. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 just one sock in an overflowing drawer of positive attitudes, “tempering, if not outright extinguishing, its force” (15). but those things happen inside the clinician’s head. what is the normative content of responsibility-without-blame approaches? pickard (2017b, 175) says: they typically include direct and challenging feedback, so that the negative effects of problematic behaviour on self, others and relationships is [sic] made explicit and must be faced, potentially alongside the imposition of consequences if members nonetheless continue. . . . these consequences inevitably involve a reflective component. . . . but they may also involve measures that can potentially feel punitive, such as withdrawal of privileges, or timelimited suspension from the group. . . . because these forms of holding responsible and to account have the potential to feel punitive, they must be effected with an attitude of concern, respect, and compassion. materially, nothing enumerated above need be absent from an approach treating people as responsible and blameworthy, and interventions founded on a disease model can furnish challenging dialogue, strenuous self-reflection, and narrative development of one’s identity too. but pickard’s focus is on the attitudes clinicians should adopt, which are substantively distinct. the clinician should carry out interactions with particular dispositions—sympathy, centrally. pickard enumerates statistic after bleak statistic about addicts’ material conditions (2017b, 169–70) and encourages developing a view of service users as “people who have been harmed by others” (2014, 14). the objective, she reminds the reader, is to “care for patients and help them improve and recover” rather than assess their character (2017b, 175). adopt a general spirit of kindness and charitability toward addicts. they have undoubtedly suffered grave trauma; do not operate as yet another potential vector of pain. don’t kick them when they’re down. there it is again: the twinge of true pulling against right—occupational obligations on the one hand, reactive attitudes on the other. pickard’s description of the sublimation of a very here-and-now affective blame by means of a more reflective attitude is apt, i think. it models the tension on which this whole literature teeters. there is a forward-looking awareness on one side: a consideration, which does not come easy, of how difficult addicts’ lives are; a recognition that this is partially structural; and a commitment to help. on the other side is emphatic strawsonian resentment, which stubbornly sees what it sees. “these people, addicts, could act differently if they wanted to; i’ve seen them not use for a week; not using drugs just isn’t that hard!” murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 the claim “addicts are oppressed qua addicts” is right. the claim “addicts can just stop using, and their circumstances would improve” is true. the incompatibility of the two is not literal; they are jointly consistent. the conflict is normative. they evoke antithetical reactive attitudes. and assuming the assessor wishes to help addicts, they delineate mutually exclusive courses of action. liberating addicts as a collective from oppression, on the one hand, and assisting individual addicts in achieving recovery, on the other, are irreconcilable goals. for instance, studies show that homeless addicts who are offered unconditional housing are less likely to achieve remission than those offered housing conditional on substance abuse treatment— possibly, less likely to remit than even addicts who do not receive housing assistance at all (cherner et al. 2017; kertesz et al. 2009). there is no point disputing this; it is true and it is obvious why. it is easy to pit remission against safe supply (enablement!); against medical equity (six-month rules!); against decarceration (mandatory treatment!). ending discrimination against addicts will make it the case that there are more of them. clinically intervening to assure remission for as many as possible will make things worse for the rest. the two maxims are hopelessly contrary. but i’ll take right over true any day. positionality is hard to bridge, so i fear this is a claim about which nonaddict theorists and i will always disagree: atypical patterns of drug use are not the primary reason that addicts’ lives go badly. housing effects a more dramatic change in an addict’s material conditions than ceasing active use (murthy 2023c), and while the confines of uncontrollable drug use are metaphorical, the carceral cell is real. whether your correctional officer blames you for the aabps that landed you in jail can seriously impact the pleasantness of being imprisoned; it would be odd to deny that. the attitude of a prison guard can make the difference between a happy and an unhappy prisoner. but i do not want addicts to be happy prisoners. i want us to be free. 4. closing considerations 4.1. blame and stigma i wrote earlier not that addicts are stigmatized qua addicts but that we are oppressed. the stigma of addiction, though genuine, is not an action item. like the red car in the rush hour puzzle, it cannot be removed until the mess is cleared up around it. pickard thinks that the stigma of addiction is downstream of the moral model of addiction, on which addicts are blameworthy sui generis (2017b, 170). rejecting drug moralism, she argues, will facilitate the realization that “people are not doing anything morally wrong simply in virtue of using drugs” (pickard 2022, 1004). unfortunately, this is not true. social acceptance of an addict’s drug of choice does not erase the stigma of addiction. i’d know; i’m an alcoholic. addicts whose drug of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 choice is heavily criminalized are worse off, especially with the fentanyl panic (lind 2023), but if this is as good as it gets, then surely we should establish a backup plan. empirically, attitudes toward drug addicts do not track attitudes toward drugs. in fact attitudes toward addicts do not even track what we reflectively wish those attitudes to be (good for you, frankfurt). seventy-five percent of respondents to a recent survey think addiction shouldn’t be stigmatized (landmark recovery 2022)! people want to destigmatize addiction; the attempts just aren’t working. the problem, i think, is this: as we have seen, the sanctions toward addicts aren’t going away. but destigmatization cannot occur in a world where they are ubiquitous, at least not unless they are regarded critically. earlier i pointed out the uncomfortable self-consciousness of banks’s commentary. that particular tone is very common. it’s on rehab websites: “on the one hand, we don’t want to revoke an addict’s rights, but at the same time we have to think . . . of the child” (ren 2019). it’s in addiction journals: “because of the amount of violence and other crimes associated with addiction, we should acknowledge that the public’s belief that law enforcement has an important role to play in responding to addiction has a rational basis” (humphreys 2017, 174). it’s there again in a highfrequency offender report commissioned by the government of british columbia, right after it quotes an officer’s description of a mad local repeatedly rehospitalized by police, at this point terrified and self-arming: “we would be remiss not to highlight how this repeated cycle of public police apprehensions and short-term hospitalizations without appropriate community-based supports represents a comprehensive failure of our system to protect and care for this individual. . . . our systems cause and perpetuate trauma, particularly among people with complex health conditions” (butler and lepard 2022, 31; emphasis theirs). “acknowledge.” “remiss.” “but.” this is, perhaps, reflective of a tendency to make ritualistic rhetorical concessions, especially to the snubbed side of the true-right split. there is a popular idea that expressing regret about the existence of addict oppression, and in particular emphasizing its jointly undesirable and necessary flavor, morally transforms complicity in it, offsetting its stigmatizing effects. almost nobody who perceptibly harms addicts claims the harm is deserved. instead, they moderate their language carefully to lend sufficient respect to the core concept that the question of how we are supposed to interact with addicts is difficult. we must make treatment resources more available, attempt to reduce social stigma, and so on. we must be sympathetic to the unfortunate circumstances of the pregnant addict—judgment has no place here. we must be compassionate to child and parent. but while the conflicted feeling may be real, the conflict isn’t considered to be. that the obligation to interfere on the baby’s behalf must win out is a foregone conclusion, and, we know, its justification is completely unrelated to the parent’s moral responsibility. can we thereby rest murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 assured that this family separation does not stigmatize addicts or the children born to them? no. the problem is that the more we avoid she’s immoral, the more we lean on she’s dispositionally unfit for parenthood—which is just as much a character assessment, just as stigmatizing, and just as productive of the circumstances that make addicts interviewed for qualitative studies feel, universally, that their receipt of obstetric care is or would be fundamentally adversarial and dangerous to them and their children (schiff et al. 2022; work et al. 2023). widespread belief in a group’s unfitness for parenthood obviously serves a stigmatizing function (in addition to atomizing its members). we have traded scylla for charybdis. the objectives to end addiction stigma and respond through interference to the parental unfitness of addicts, qua addicts, cannot be pursued simultaneously. the second undermines the first. 4.2. funishment and the carceral-clinical seesaw blamers and nonblamers do not disagree on whether dominating forces should interfere into addicts’ lives—at least not because they belong to one camp or the other. there are choice theorists who advocate decriminalization on libertarian grounds and disease theorists who advocate prohibition on the grounds of addicts’ disability rights (maier 2022). but we tend to reflexively imagine that the policy solutions recommended by a nonblamer will be more humane than those of a blamer, in the sense of being more medicalized. blamers send the police to your house; nonblamers, the emts. blamers put you in jail; nonblamers, in mandatory treatment. and so on. the problem with this view is the reason i use the term carceral-clinical seesaw—namely, that distinguishing between incarceration and institutionalization in the context of addict experience is a mistake. for one, the two systems swap cards constantly. addicts are shuttled back and forth; some are civilly committed to rehabilitation programs in prisons (becker 2019). the commentary of court and law enforcement officers and the prevailing views of project hope make clear that for addicts, incarceration is regarded as a treatment option. but even if it were possible to demarcate only noncarceral interventions as “treatment,” this would not be a meaningful improvement. the problem is that setting addicts aside from society—be it through institutionalization, incarceration, or anything else—is the mainstay of addict oppression, and of oppression in general. in response to hard determinist worries about the justification of punishment, saul smilansky (2017) developed the following reductio. assume some “repeat criminal offenders” cannot be rehabilitated and must be incapacitated forever. if their actions aren’t their fault, then on an eliminativist view, we must subject them to a form of incapacitation beneficial to their welfare—fun punishment, or funishment. they’d lounge around in a highly secured five-star hotel. everyone would want in on feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 funishment, smilansky thought, and the normative force of deterrence would be shattered. hence eliminativism is incompatible with good consequences. smilansky seemed to accept uncritically that funishment is at least as much as is necessary to respect our moral obligations to the wrongdoer. but levy (2012) is unconvinced. it isn’t true, he argues, that “harsh” punishment is required to accomplish nonretributivist ends of justice. for instance, recidivism rates for the actions we consider unconscionable are much lower than smilansky seems to think. levy thus mounts a reverse reductio, similar to my foregoing argument: most of the repeat offenders of rape and murder are mad people (“psychopaths”), whom we already don’t regard as morally responsible! what work is blameworthiness even doing now? the upshot is that “funishment” is not an accurate representation of what the moral responsibility skeptic is committed to vis-à-vis preventing harms. i’d take it further. forget about society and deterrence; confining wrongdoers to a poolside hotel is unacceptable by the lights of our obligations to the wrongdoers, and to their communities, if they belong to marginalized groups. the reason has nothing to do with the short-term consequences for the wrongdoer and everything to do with the long-term prognosis of the community. even a consequentialist should shudder at the moral implications of relegating a significant proportion of poor black and indigenous addicts to funishment. this is the underpinning logic to intergenerational erasure: when marginalized people are kept separated from one another, they are prevented from conveying an understanding of their identity that becomes refined across generations and, hence, from agitating for better conditions. call it imprisonment, institutionalization, funishment, banishment, or politely being asked to leave; it still unravels communities. separation from society is itself the problem. 4.3. positive prospects the funishment concern troubles me exceedingly. if the subjection of addicts, responsible or not, to systemic punitive treatment always facilitates long-term marginalization, then the operation of addict oppression—and of that of other marginalized groups—may be insensitive to the adoption of even a radically eliminativist approach. if there does exist some positive prospect for a theory of moral responsibility suitable for addict liberation, then it will be developed by focusing on praising and affording options to, rather than blaming and holding to account, addicts. univocal focus on blame is, ciurria notes, somewhat of a habit in moral philosophy. but the exclusion of praise from the intersectional discussion of moral responsibility is problematic. praise isn’t just a “carrot” to match the proverbial “stick” of blame. blame travels with the removal of extant privileges; praise, with the provision of new ones. the unfolding opportunities—the societal trust—inculcated through the murthy – against arguing about addict agency published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 reception of praise make possible further attributions of right action. meanwhile, the contraction of choices pursuant to blame makes one’s slate of options so small that no action is considered truly meritorious.6 its motivation, it is thought, is self-serving, the desire to avoid an unpalatable alternative. in particular, it doesn’t imply good behavior would continue if the reins were loosened. (“of course his drug tests are clean; otherwise he’d go back to jail. if he still tests negative when he’s off parole, then i’ll be impressed.”) a theory of moral responsibility for addicts must center the privileges of selfdetermination rather than the requirements or duties it imposes. return to the case of the pregnant opioid addict. better medical care means regarding the addict not as a possible child abuser—blameworthy or not—but as presenting with a high-risk pregnancy in the treatment of which they are an equal participant. this restoration of the positive features of agency means addicts have the right to demand assistance rather than be passively subjected to interference. the futures of the addicts in the study of postpartum women receiving moud medication (schiff et al. 2022) were considered binary—stay on moud, infant exhibits neonatal abstinence syndrome (nas) and is removed; stop moud and relapse, infant is removed. but regarding addicts as morally responsible, pragmatically, means taking their concerns about nas seriously. it means understanding addicts as capable of enacting long-term plans to minimize likelihood of aabps: adding to the partition “stop moud, work with their clinicians and community to steward their health decisions and prevent relapse.” dorothy roberts (1991, 1481), as government interference wrenched black babies from their addict parents and communities in the crack panic, wrote aptly: “a policy that attempts to protect fetuses by denying the humanity of their mothers will inevitably fail. . . . it is only by affirming the personhood and equality of poor women of color that the survival of their future generation will be ensured.” 4.4. causa sui addicts have known for a long time, i think, that the debate about addict agency is not for us. what is stranger is that it seems also not to be about us. no tangible question of addicts’ material circumstances hangs in the balance. the basis for subjecting addicts on parole to random drug tests is not that they deserve it. we are not instrumentalizing the deep-self view to decide whether to take the baby away, only whether to try to be polite about it, and that is cold consolation. the analytic moral responsibility apparatus is, as it stands now, no help to addicts. please do not misinterpret this as my posing yet another way in which addicts, behaving as we do, problematize such theories. addicts aren’t an edge case. they’re a significant proportion of my moral universe (and of people in general). if a theory 6 ciurria (2020) makes a similar point (e.g., p. 159). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 meant to govern proper social practices doesn’t work for us, then it doesn’t work— full stop. the attributability view no longer holds the hegemony over moral responsibility philosophy it enjoyed in 1975. but for addicts, the deep-self notion is inescapable. we are regarded, alternately, as toy problems for the apparatus or as existential threats to it. the long tradition of arguing that addicts satisfy the conditions for deep-self responsibility is outdated only by that of arguing that we do not. i have argued that this practice is a waste of time. i did not say outright, but probably conveyed, that i also consider it offensive (cf. jeppsson 2023, 75). lastly—to momentarily set aside my tomato basket—i find it profoundly bizarre to claim addicts in particular satisfy, or don’t, the conditions for deep-self responsibility. to my thinking it is not remotely clear that anyone satisfies its conditions. deep-self responsibility requires a certain self-possessed control over how one operates. the proposition that addicts have this control is no more suspicious than the proposition that anyone else has it. addicts’ tendency to do things we report not wanting to do is a thorny problem for addict attributability, maybe. but i am rather more concerned with the brambles in every direction forever: the nighincontrovertible fact that for an individual’s relevant properties to belong to them seems to require their having selected them—otherwise, one is merely going along with the state of things unreflectively—but the grounds on which you selected them, you must also have picked, and the grounds for those too, and so on. somewhere at the top of my infinite lattice of other-regarding attitudes is one that shouts: enough about the deep self! call it an ill-defined notion and move on. or, if not: galen strawson’s (1994) basic argument still stands unanswered. stop arguing about the moral status of addicts and go deal with it. references banks, sandy. 2009. “tough problem, tough tactic.” los angeles times, october 7, 2009. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-oct-17-me-banks17story.html. ———. 2014. “coping with child neglect.” los angeles times, march 17, 2014. https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-0318-banks-wandering-kids-20140318 -column.html. ———. 2015. 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and public affairs 30, no. 2 (april): 178–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.10884963.2001.00178.x. yurkanin, amy. 2023. “how one alabama county declared war on pregnant women who use drugs.” marshall project, july 26, 2023. https://www.themarshallpro ject.org/2023/07/26/alabama-pregnant-women-drugs. t. virgil murthy (she/her/he/his) is a phd candidate in philosophy at carnegie mellon university who works in philosophy of disability, normative ethics, and philosophy of statistics. in addition to forthcoming papers in the journal of philosophy of disability and in the collected volume existential philosophy and disability, edited by mélissa fox-muraton, she runs the addict collective blog and has contributed to biopolitical philosophy. 101205 murthy title page 101205 murthy final format engaged solidaristic research: developing methodological and normative principles for political philosophers feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation lemay, marie-pier. 2023. “engaged solidaristic research: developing methodological and normative principles for political philosophers.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (4). article 2. 2023 engaged solidaristic research: developing methodological and normative principles for political philosophers marie-pier lemay carleton university mariepierlemay@cunet.carleton.ca lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 engaged solidaristic research: developing methodological and normative principles for political philosophers marie-pier lemay abstract reshaping our methodological research tools for adequately capturing injustice and domination has been a central aspiration of feminist philosophy and social epistemology in recent years. there has been an increasingly empirical turn in recent feminist and political theorization, engaging with case studies and the challenges arising from conducting research in solidarity with unequal partners. i argue that these challenges cannot be resolved by merely adopting a norm and stance of deference to those in the struggle for justice. to conduct philosophical research in an engaged and solidaristic manner, i suggest that deference be supplemented by three methodological and normative principles: (1) epistemic humility, (2) accountability, and (3) coproducing knowledge. i situate these principles within contemporary philosophical work on solidarity and show how they might help confront power imbalances and other methodological hazards that arise when conducting research in solidarity with others. i arrive at these principles in part by critically reflecting on my own attempt to conduct research in solidarity with women’s rights activists in senegal. keywords: political philosophy, solidarity, engaged philosophy, epistemic humility, accountability, coproducing knowledge, deference, power dynamics, research ethics, senegal introduction a growing number of feminist and political philosophers call for grounding normative arguments in empirical research and for developing methodologies to do so, respectfully and rigorously.1 pitfalls arising from conducting an engaged approach to normative theory have been consistently identified by scholars in development 1 for examples of such claims, see tobin and jaggar (2013), wolff (2019), green and brandstedt (2021), furman (2021), grasswick and mchugh (2021), and yap (2021). for examples of such research, see rubenstein (2015), herzog (2018), morton (2019), and reed-sandoval (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 studies, indigenous thought, decolonial studies, and feminist research, but they have not received significant attention by political philosophers. while there is rich work in engaged and empirically informed methodologies in social science, aspiring engaged philosophers have not yet delved into this work, nor have they developed tools for confronting certain research pitfalls, such as the power dynamics that are often created by engaged approaches to normative theory. given the increasing recognition of this type of research, examining methodological hazards arising from the unequal power relations created through research is vital—otherwise, engaged research may lose its pertinence as a distinct research paradigm. because there is a less robust methodological tradition in political philosophy, philosophers may be susceptible to the pitfalls i describe in this paper. if engaged philosophy is to become more prominent in the future, it is urgent for philosophers to confront these problems through a set of practices; failing to do so could derail aspirations for solidarity through research and have detrimental impacts on those in the struggle for justice.2 grounding research on the insights of those who are in the struggle for justice is often motivated by the rationale that they have an epistemic privilege in knowing about their oppression or a justice movement in which they partake. therefore, for engaged research in philosophy to effectively support the efforts of those in the struggle for justice, there needs to be an implicit norm and stance of deference: we defer our assessment of a social justice struggle to those who are intrinsically involved in it. however, as i argue in this paper, deference is not enough for guiding engaged research. despite deference being an important and intuitive principle for conducting such research, deference alone is seldom enough as a guiding principle; deference must be used in tandem with additional norms. this paper investigates solidaristic research in normative political philosophy, which involves conducting research alongside, or within, the populations engaged in the struggle for justice, struggles that are directly connected to the normative theorizing the researcher aims to develop. i use, as a case study and a cautionary tale, my own experience doing ethnographic fieldwork in political philosophy in senegal in 2019. i partially draw from my research on senegalese women’s rights groups to explore the pitfalls that may arise from conducting research in an engaged solidaristic manner, without fully acknowledging the depth of power relations involved. upon 2 i use the nomenclature of “those who are in the struggle for justice” or “those in struggles” interchangeably in this paper, borrowing the phrasing of political theorists using a grounded normative theory approach (ackerly et al. 2021; zacka et al. 2021). these terms refer to the groups researchers seek to be in solidarity with; depending on the context, they can be termed as the “least well-off,” the “oppressed” groups, or the “exploited groups.” while i do not identify as a “grounded normative theorist” myself, this phrasing helps to frame my analysis in the context of engaged philosophy. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 reflecting on this research fieldwork, i found myself romanticizing—by which i mean a tendency to idealize the work i was doing and its effectiveness—my capacity to be in solidarity through research. while i expected that my research would reveal linkages between senegalese women’s rights groups and international organizations—thus informing theories of transnational solidarity—local and national struggles against gender-based violence were much more situated at the center of activists’ concerns. i take this field research, and in particular, my relationship to it, to be a case study through which, in this paper, i develop methodological suggestions that may assist other political philosophers aiming to ground their normative claims in empirical fieldwork. philosophers of gender, race, and disability have written from the standpoint of their community and lived experience, and these insights are certainly meaningful. however, my interest in this paper is situated on how to responsively conduct empirical research within an academic setting with the intention of advancing a social justice cause that we believe in. even though i mostly focus on an ethnographic approach to political philosophy in this article, it is not the only way to conduct solidaristic research in philosophy. section 1 presents an overview of recent work from feminist and political philosophers who argue for developing methodologies in normative theory that are closer to empirical research in the social sciences. one of the motivations for grounding political philosophy in empirical research is that those in the struggle for justice are better able to apprehend the situation that concerns them than those remotely situated, and they are thus more adequately equipped to determine their needs and best tactics. deference becomes, then, a research norm for developing normative theory based on the insights of those in the struggle for justice. in section 2, after exploring how deference would work in practice as a guiding research principle, i argue that deference is not sufficient for guiding such research in solidarity. i retrace kolers’s (2016) account of solidarity as deference and consider the practical limits of deference as a norm. in section 3, i offer three methodological and normative principles that may help to nurture a solidaristic approach to research: (1) epistemic humility, (2) accountability, and (3) coproducing knowledge. these principles better attend to the complexities and pitfalls that arise from conducting solidaristic research, in comparison to deference being the sole norm. in section 4, i use my own fieldwork in senegal to illustrate the danger of applying deference uncritically, and i demonstrate how the early implementation of these three research principles would have been beneficial, potentially even mitigating some of the research difficulties i encountered. these three interrelated principles might help to design and guide research in solidarity, especially for research conducted in the context of significant power inequalities. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 1. toward engaged solidaristic philosophy conducting fieldwork in philosophy may be an oxymoron, as these two terms are often perceived as being at opposite ends of the theoretical-empirical axis. indeed, political theorist flikschuh (2014, 1) uses the phrase “philosophical fieldwork” to describe “conceptual discovery—philosophical as non-empirical fieldwork.” in contrast, i use the term fieldwork in keeping with the ethnographic tradition; that is to say, i refer to interpretative research one conducts in order to yield theoretical insights. much work in political philosophy has been devoted to contending that abstracted and idealized theory is fundamentally ill-equipped for theorizing about injustice, yet there is comparably less work that describes an alternative methodology for nonideal theorizing about justice (aragon 2021). this paper contributes to this latter strand of less explored scholarship. the very act of theorizing requires a certain level of abstraction (o’neill 1987). this should, however, be done without idealization (that is, the distortion of social facts) that is likely to overemphasize dominant viewpoints while diminishing marginal ones (khader 2018; mills 2005). we must interrogate how we theorize about social facts: “by ignoring the specifics of situations in attempts to engage in abstract theorizing, philosophy runs the danger of generating theories that have little to do with ‘lives on the ground’ and can be a distraction from the hard realities of those lives” (grasswick and mchugh 2021, 4). the work i describe below as engaged solidaristic philosophy can be put into the broad tradition of nonideal theories of justice. while a vast array of work in political philosophy could be described as “engaged” or “grounded,”3 i specifically use these terms to describe the work political philosophers do when they engage with empirically based case studies. instead of conducting research on a case study, philosophers enter into a dialogue with participants, and/or are themselves participants, in the struggle for justice. by incorporating the concerns of those in the struggle for justice along with philosophical and empirical research, i ultimately pursue work in “engaged philosophy,” in terms first proposed by wolff (2019) and further described by green and brandstedt (2021, 540), as follows: methods of doing political theory that involve substantial interaction between the theorist and an actual or potential agent of change, or participation by the theorist in such a group agent, where such 3 one could argue, for instance, that john rawls is an “engaged theorist” because he wrote theory of justice, in part, in response to the civil rights movement. however, as i explain here, i understand the term “engaged” in a more restrictive way, as to mean concrete engagement within a struggle for justice. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 interaction or participation influences the content of the theorist’s normative constructs. green and brandstedt (2021) helpfully distinguish between three types of engaged methods in political philosophy: (1) ethnographic engaged methods; (2) activist engaged methods; and (3) committee-based engaged methods. the research i describe as “engaged solidaristic philosophy” is similar to “activist engaged methods,” to the extent that it describes “a conscious and explicit identification by the theorist with the cause of the movement with which they are interacting” (2021, 554). while the method i describe appeals to various strands of engaged research, i call this method “engaged solidaristic philosophy” for situating my research within political philosophy. this is to analyze the pitfalls of more explicit solidaristic variants of engaged philosophy, in order to better identify the required principles for guiding such a methodology. at the heart of engaged solidaristic philosophy, there is an explicit commitment to solidarity, where the political philosopher is interacting with agents of social change. similar to what johnson and porth (2023) and ackerly et al. (2021) have recently proposed for political theorists, the normative commitment to solidarity inherent to engaged solidaristic philosophy requires philosophers to work alongside, or within, communities in struggle for social justice. johnson and porth (2023, 102) rightfully note that “sometimes, we may have responsibilities to theorize in solidarity with individuals and communities to support them in their endeavors to end the oppression they experience.” conducting research in a solidaristic mode requires taking sides with vulnerable populations; solidarity is, thus, decidedly political. even though this paper discusses, and builds on, a case of conducting research alongside a group done within formal academic setting (e.g., going through research ethics board), we must bear in mind that solidaristic engaged research in philosophy is not restricted to an ethnographic model of research. indeed, oftentimes (political) philosophy can be borne out of a community of activism rather than a deferential approach to knowledge. while engaging with empirically informed research is central to the approach i describe, i do not mean to restrict this form of empirical engagement to the ones that happened within a formal research setting. because academic philosophy is commonly seen as the “unencumbered explorations of ideas,” and therefore seemingly does not need an “ethics of philosophical practice,” (basu 2023, 275) it may be more vulnerable to moral hazards. as shown by a recent white paper on the state of publication ethics in philosophy (thiem et al. 2019), besides norms regarding plagiarism or authorship, philosophy publishers have not agreed on which ethical guidelines to adopt. yet, as argued by bettcher (2019) and basu (2023), academic philosophy does not happen in a vacuum; inherent risks are associated with it: for instance, our ideas can get co-opted or feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 politicized in ways we did not intend. while the research i describe in this paper might be “riskier” than a practice of philosophy that relies strictly on text exegesis, we must keep in mind this broader discussion happening in our discipline about whether and, if so, which ethical guidelines are required. while the existence of power dynamics in relation to research and research subjects have been extensively discussed in methodological reflections in social sciences, feminist studies, and indigenous research (among other disciplines), political philosophers have not yet considered this issue with the same exhaustivity. methodological hazards in engaged research not only risk causing fundamental research flaws for the researchers themselves but may cause epistemic harms by not meaningfully and respectfully engaging the communities involved. these methodological hazards entail that philosophers consider how their own research may in fact be exploitative for the actors of the social change they wish to meaningfully interact with. as i discussed above, there are materially higher stakes involved in conducting empirically informed research than there are when compared to theoretical or applied research in political philosophy.4 for instance, solidaristic research may waste the community’s precious time, give them false hope, or redirect their efforts in unfruitful ways. there is also a vast literature in social science that describes how good intentions when designing inclusive participatory research can be a burden for the research participants (e.g., johnson and porth 2023). anticipating and confronting these problems that may arise in engaged philosophy is crucial because philosophers may be victims of their own arrogance and ignorance, which would obstruct solidaristic aspirations.5 we may see examples of this solidaristic and engaged way of doing philosophy by looking at the work of philosophers and theorists such as amy reed-sandoval (2020) on borders and migration, jennifer morton (2019) on first-generation university “striver” students, or deva woodly (2021) on the movement for black lives. reed-sandoval develops a philosophical account of the meaning of being, or being perceived to be, “undocumented” from her empirical research (participant observation and interviews) on the united states-mexico border. through 4 i use “applied philosophy” so as to mean “to address real-world problems by working out how to solve them by ‘applying’ a moral or political theory, thereby providing ‘philosophical foundations’ for social and public policy” (wolff 2019, 14). 5 debates or discussions on what is solidaristic engaged philosophy or research have appeared elsewhere (ackerly et al. 2021; green and brandstedt 2021; herzog and zacka 2019; longo and zacka 2019; wolff 2019). in this paper, i am concerned about which methodological and normative principles should guide us if we wish to conduct this type of inquiry rather than analytically delineating the boundaries of this research inclination to solidarity. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 interdisciplinary work between ethnography and philosophy of immigration, she develops an argument for the demilitarization of borders by foregrounding the materiality of the borders. while solidaristic engaged philosophy might not be restricted to ethnographic methodology, reed-sandoval’s research is a good example of how philosophers can conduct empirical research in normative philosophy and how this interdisciplinary work might contribute to knowledge of a situation. in addition, two recent edited volumes (brister and frodeman 2020; grasswick and mchugh 2021) bring together the work of philosophers grounding their research in empirical case studies, giving us concrete supplementary examples of what this line of inquiry might look like. given the commitment to advance the struggles of oppressed groups through research, solidaristic engaged philosophy has a close relationship with the normative ideal of political solidarity. following the recent literature on solidarity,6 political solidarity requires shared and concrete action in support of those in the struggle for justice: we choose to be in solidarity around “a common cause to end injustice or oppression” (scholz 2015, 732). solidarity thus goes beyond a sentiment or an abstract value: solidarity is a collective commitment to stand with the least well-off, the marginalized, the oppressed, or the exploited. this is not to say that conducting academic research in solidarity is, or ought to be, the central site of solidarity and resistance against oppressive structures. i acknowledge that the initiatives of social movements and groups play much more central roles in these struggles. the principles i develop in section 3 do not guarantee solidarity in and of themselves. however, these principles may help to reduce methodological hazards in engaged solidaristic philosophy. including solidarity as a core component of engaged research is not an obvious task. solidarity is, by definition, tied to hopes and ideals, holding the promise of working across differences by making sacrifices for vulnerable populations. normative accounts of solidarity are skewed toward a tension between descriptive and normative claims (bayertz 1999, 3). in addition to being a hopeful rallying cry against injustices, solidarity can describe real and imperfect relationships between privileged and marginalized groups. solidarity is thus not only a loaded and contested concept but also a hybrid one: it fulfills both a descriptive and normative role. conceptual and methodological ambiguity related to this commitment to solidarity could direct researchers toward a cursory performance of solidarity with these groups—or, put differently, cause them to romanticize research conducted in solidarity—hence losing 6 for discussions of political solidarity, see mohanty (2003), shelby (2005), scholz (2008), prainsack and buyx (2012), weir (2013), sangiovanni (2015), kolers (2016), einwohner et al. (2021), and duford (2022). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 its critical or normative bite. developing robust criteria for fostering meaningful solidarity is necessary in the context of engaged normative political research. 2. solidarity as deference by conducting engaged solidaristic research, we, researchers, rely on an implicit norm of solidarity as deference. we engage with the voices and demands with those in the struggle for justice, because we begin with the assumption that they have an epistemic privilege in knowing about these struggles. i question whether the norm and stance of deference could provide any help for the development of a paradigm of solidaristic research and for preventing the type of methodological hazards i encountered in my own fieldwork. in recent philosophical accounts of solidarity, the concept of deference stands out as a key feature for conceptualizing solidarity amidst power differentials. while this is also theorized by gould (2007) in her writing on transnational solidarity, kolers (2012, 2014, 2016) provides the most systematic explanation of the role of deference in the theory and practice of solidarity. although deference would be a natural ally when conducting engaged philosophical research, challenges arise when applying deference to these contexts. i argue that driving research based around deference could lead to a romanticization of solidarity. in what follows, after summarizing kolers’s account of solidarity as deference, i critically reflect on deference as a useful moral imperative for conducting research in solidarity. kolers conceptualizes solidarity and its deference principle in relation to social movements and political struggle; solidarity is not conceived as an individualized act (kolers 2016, 86). being in solidarity takes the form of “political action on others’ terms” (kolers 2016, 5). solidarity is essentially based on deferring moral judgment to the “least well-off,” even if we, the “most well-off,” might disagree about the required political actions. rather than becoming allied with the least well-off, one becomes somehow a moral surrogate for them. solidarity is not only about fighting injustices; it is also “[to go] along with the chosen course of action” (kolers 2016, 32). solidarity is to work together; that is, to suspend our own judgment and personal autonomy in favor of a norm of deference (kolers 2016, 78). more “well-off” people should then prioritize decisions of the marginalized groups over their own; solidarity is to “put aside . . . [our] own judgments about aims, methods, facts, or values, in favor of someone else’s or a group’s” (kolers 2016, 39). given the challenges of solidaristic research, deference could help guide research that addresses activists’ concerns and dynamics. in kolers’s account and in the engaged solidaristic philosophical framework, there is an inclination to foreground vulnerable populations suffering from injustices. this inclination has standpoint epistemology at the core; it assumes that these populations have knowledge of what creates and perpetuates oppression. in his critique of the politics of deference, táíwò (2022, 71) recently writes that the politics of deference relies on lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 the “value of lived experience and the knowledge that comes from it”—that is, this tendency appeals to deference with the aim of centering marginalized viewpoints. deferring, for kolers, is necessary in order for the privileged to take a respectful and antipaternalistic stance toward a disadvantaged group. similarly, an engaged philosopher would argue for granting epistemic authority to those in the struggle for justice, using this premise of the principle of epistemic inclusion. kolers might succeed in his attempt to convince more well-off people to defer their judgments with respect to supporting the struggles of the least well-off. but how, then, does the concept of deference play out in the context of engaged research and, in particular, ethnographic research, such as the sort i conducted? deference is, in some ways, a step in the right direction for respectfully conducting engaged philosophy. however, listening to the perspectives of those in the struggle for justice is not enough, as researchers are already setting up the terms of the debate by assuming that research participants will be interested in these research preoccupations. on this line of reasoning, adopting such an understanding of deference is insufficiently critical. it assumes that those in the struggle are talking through one voice and that this voice is necessarily heard by those in a position of power. surely deference is not, uncritically, always the correct response. in the context of engaged solidaristic philosophy, researchers may not always be in a position to know in which circumstances they should defer and when they should instead withhold action in favor of critical examination. not only can there be several internal divisions within the groups we seek to be in solidarity with, but our very position as researchers may lead to certain biases in choosing the interlocutors. this position can thus lead to a certain type of epistemic arrogance, assuming that the least-well-off are united, which could silence attempts in “identifying, and seeking to remedy, patterns of domination of exclusion” (einwohner et al. 2021, 707). disagreements and intragroup divisions complexify the process of deferring to the judgment of vulnerable populations. divisions and conflicts are inherent to social group dynamics and, as duford (2022, 35) argues, kolers’s account “cannot account for the oppressed in solidarity with each other, or for true conflict in solidarity.” the lived character of solidarity can hardly be seized through a politics of deference. principles for guaranteeing the involvement of vulnerable voices in research design must be at the forefront. because the aim of this paper is to ultimately sketch out a principle of solidarity that can be of use for political philosophers conducting engaged research, my engagement with kolers’s account of deference is not by itself a criticism, as i recognize that he conceptualizes deference as “multilayered” (kolers 2016, 86). yet, using deference as a research principle implies that we should refine its meaning. not only are the attempts to speak for or to speak about vulnerable populations potentially problematic, but so are the attempts to listen to them (alcoff 1991–92; rajan 2018). for instance, before travelling to dakar, i learned about the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 senegalese metoo movement from voices situated in privileged spaces—from mainstream media, or from senegalese activists from the diaspora—and these voices did not have the same preoccupations as did the rural, or more marginalized, populations. as we will see in the discussion of my fieldwork, deference would not lead us very far in the context of academics conducting research alongside those in struggles. with regards to conflicting interests, listening to is not enough to comprehend a struggle or a situation of injustice. integrating knowledge from the ground up ought to be done while avoiding a “romantic, naïve vision of . . . knowledge” (mihai 2020, 592). this is the assumption that no conflict or disagreement will arise among the group in struggle while trying to conduct this type of research.7 while more clear-cut examples of solidarity that ask for unilateral deference may exist, i argue against an idealistic vision of solidarity. as i discuss, it is necessary to recognize the deeply uneven relationships between funding partners, activist groups, and researchers. the cautionary tale i sketch about deference and its potential for romanticization of solidarity is about recognizing one’s limits in order to discern which voices should be heard in solidaristic contexts. adopting a careful, more critical approach to deference thus contributes to a principle of epistemic humility, which i sketch in section 3. while deference is an important approach to solidarity in normative political philosophy, it is necessary to further refine this concept and examine what is actually required of us, as researchers, in the commitment to being in solidarity with those in the struggle for justice. refining our conceptualization of deference in the context of researching solidarity does not suggest that one become a moral authority who will dissect which normative intuitions are worthwhile or not (jaggar 2006). deferring is crucial in several steps of the research process, but this should not lead to eschewing a self-reflective edge on this process. by reconfiguring the principle of deference alongside other principles—namely, epistemic humility, accountability, and coproducing knowledge, we might help the researcher avoid projecting their research focus onto research participants, thus romanticizing their struggles, and recognizing the power relations inherently created through research. 3. three methodological and normative principles for nurturing solidarity i propose three methodological and normative principles that aim to correct the pitfalls i identify above: (1) epistemic humility, (2) accountability, and (3) coproducing knowledge. these three interrelated principles are intended to help guide research in solidarity. versions of these principles have been used in a myriad of disciplines—for instance, bioethics, research ethics, anthropology, migrant studies, 7 similarly, as recently argued by pollock (2021) in the context of felon’s voting rights in florida, political agents can sometimes fail to speak on behalf on their group. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 indigenous studies, and community-based research. i am laying out these principles in such a way here because political philosophy specifically does not have a methodological apparatus for conducting such research. i am synthesizing important literature in social science and research ethics that could be of help for developing robust guidelines for engaged and solidaristic political philosophy. 3.1. epistemic humility by epistemic humility, i refer to the education and work that should be done in order to avoid epistemic arrogance pervading the research process; my invitation to be epistemically humble is addressed to researchers and not to the research subject. the reality of the researcher’s positionality requires one to be more selfreflexive, more epistemically humble, throughout the research process. epistemic arrogance and epistemic humility have been extensively conceptualized in the recent wave of literature on epistemic injustice and resistance. epistemic humility is not only about declaring one’s own privilege and positionality (ahmed 2004); it also requires one to develop one’s epistemic sensibility and awareness through education and training (fricker 2003; medina 2013). following medina’s influential work, epistemic humility could be defined as an “attentiveness to one’s own cognitive limitations and deficits” (medina 2013, 43); it is an awareness of the limits of one’s situated knowledge. while i recognize the growing attention epistemic humility has received in philosophy (e.g., alfano, lynch, and tanesini 2021), i take this concept further and understand it in the context of engaged research in political philosophy. my account of epistemic humility, used in the context of solidaristic engaged research, is relational, where it is not about building the virtue of humility for oneself—a self-centered account—but about building humility toward others, in order to allow ourselves to be impacted by others (spezio, peterson, and roberts 2019; moon and tobin 2019).8 humility should thus be developed not only as an individual disposition or personal virtue but as an active practice and an openness to be transformed through relations. on this account, humility is not about a static understanding of positionality but about a careful consideration of how our positionality is cocreated through relationships and contexts. our capacity to be skeptical of our own intuitions is crucial for recognizing the limitations and the situatedness of our perspective, but it must be accompanied by an openness and attentiveness to the voices and demands that appear to be counterintuitive. as feminist theorists and methodologists have argued, being attentive to these voices requires considering their silences or examining unspoken fieldwork dynamics (ackerly 2008). an illustration of this requirement to be skeptical 8 i am grateful to theresa tobin for directing me toward an account of relational humility. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 of our intuitions can be found in the critical literature in feminist political philosophy that engaged with nussbaum’s influential work on the capabilities approach.9 in this rich and critical dialogue, certain feminist scholars have accused nussbaum of being selective about the voices of women from the global south to whom she chose to listen and, thereby, being insufficiently critical of her own moral intuitions. yet these criticisms ought not to lead political philosophers to retreat from ethnographic and normative fieldwork. instead, they should prompt us to reflect critically, and humbly, on our methodology and methods for amplifying the voices of those in the struggle for justice. the positionality of the researcher has long been problematized in development studies and in studies of race and gender but has only more recently garnered the attention of political philosophers. scrutinizing the ways in which the researchers’ home countries have potentially contributed to structural injustices that impact the lives of those they seek to study is morally imperative. considering one’s positionality when conducting research requires paying deeper attention to power imbalances. by engaging in self-reflection, one first step is to engage with academic and activist literatures, in order to assess whether a prospective study is necessary.10 this is not only a passive engagement with the existing knowledge about a case; it is acknowledging the harms that could be perpetuated if one decides to proceed with the research. completing this first step may very likely help to reduce the inadvertent romanticization of the resistance of those in the struggle that may occur during the research process (abu-lughod 1990). adopting a critical approach to deference—a principle of solidarity that refers to the process of deferring judgment to the least well-off in a struggle—contributes to cultivating epistemic humility. this should be done while working against romanticizing processes—casting research participants into predefined roles— appearing in research while choosing with whom to interact. it is a question of not only for whom the researcher is speaking but also to whom the researcher is listening, and for what reasons. deference itself does not prevent us from an overconfidence bias or a misperception of one’s positionality, which is why the two other methodological and normative principles i offer directly tackle the nature of research itself: through accountability and coproducing knowledge. 9 for a useful overview of this debate centered on nussbaum’s (1999, 2000) work, see abbey (2011, 167–86). 10 reflections from indigenous epistemologies and methodologies on the issue of conducting research that is sourcing marginalized people’s pain and trauma is especially insightful for this question (tuck and yang 2014). lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 3.2. accountability in the context of conducting solidaristic research, accountability requires us to answer the following question: “who are we writing for, how, and why?” (nagar 2002, 179). accountability entails giving power to those in the struggle by offering them some degree of agency within the shaping of the research. this ought to be done by providing enough information about the research and the prospective outcomes. hence, i understand accountability as being more robust than mere compliance with or liability to institutional review boards; it demands the giving of tangible power and control to those involved in the research process. accountability tackles the pitfalls of positionality by fostering egalitarian relations and by including the concerns of those in the struggle at the center of the research process. it thus goes without saying that accountability is by itself relational, meaning it is rooted in an acknowledgment of power dynamics. with epistemic privilege comes epistemic responsibility. a major difference in the practice of accountability between writing normative political theory from fictitious cases versus authentic cases, or excavating moral claims from actual testimonies and insights from those in the struggle, is that one must be accountable to the research participants. for this reason, i turn to the readings in feminist ethics and action-research about the meaning and ethical questions arising from theorizations alongside those in the struggle. i cannot write about the normative ideal of solidarity in the same manner as if i was basing my research on hypothetical cases. accountability matters in order to respectfully tell the narratives of those in the struggle. i cannot share all insights or stories that i gathered in my empirical research due to their sensitive content unless i secured consent in advance. the academic labor does not stop when the normative theory is written about this struggle. accountability opens the possibility for a more holistic approach to knowledge, ensuring that the research is better integrated back to the community involved. as such, political philosophers cannot abstract themselves from the reality of the fieldwork, and it requires them to be accountable to those in the struggle, in relation to the theory that is being written. in a situation of dire power inequalities, informing the population of research scope and possible implications is not enough for guaranteeing accountability. as drydyk (2019) stresses, it has to be supplemented by a mechanism of “countervailing power” (150), which would make it possible to “trigger investigations” (148) if promises to the community were left unfulfilled by the research. it asks, as i argue in the next principle, to deepen ethical requirements, which do not stop as soon as the research ethics board application is completed. rather, in order to trigger investigations, there must be a mechanism in place that ensures that accountability involves more than sending published academic papers to the communities that participated in the research; the research should be communicated and translated in feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 order to be made relevant for the communities. accountability requires sharing the results in a transparent manner. and if the agent conducting investigations on the researcher and the marginalized community is the state (as it is often the case), we must keep a certain skepticism as these investigations could be politically instrumentalized by the state. in terms of concrete actions for ensuring the accountability of research conducted in engaged solidaristic philosophy, the implementation should go beyond the level of responsibility and benevolence of individual researchers: structural change is needed. for example, accountability mechanisms could be implemented under the form of local ethics oversight, wherein the researched community would be integrated in designing the project and mechanisms for ensuring that the research will go back to the community (cochrane et al. 2018). while an imperfect solution, local oversight must be prioritized by research institutions and national research agencies, so that the researchers must justify to the community at stake their own actions and research, even when there is indeed the risk that these local ethicsoversight processes would reproduce power structures.11 sharing power with those in the struggle also entails their epistemic inclusion in the design, implementation, and dissemination of the research. in this regard, accountability is generated through the coproduction of knowledge, which could nurture mutual trust through long-term research collaboration. nevertheless, in the context where building mutual trust through research relationships is a long-term and often complicated process, “the slow pace of collaboration fits uneasily into the accelerated temporality of neoliberal academia” (arribas lozano 2018, 457). not acknowledging this reality would give a rather optimistic and incomplete portrait of the limits to conducting this type of research: we must keep in mind that current metrics of academic excellence do not incentivize research that is built over several years, especially for nontenured and precarious academic workers (zheng 2018). meaningful research collaborations wherein the researcher is held fully accountable are hindered by institutional obstacles to multiyear engaged and participatory research. while deference directs us to pay attention to the demands of those who are involved in the struggle for justice, putting forward an accountability principle requires that the researcher considers the impact of their research on these movements. as johnson and porth (2023) write, some communities have been 11 for instance, in missouri after the overturn of the roe v. wade case that protected access to safe abortion, we could imagine a situation wherein researchers would design a study on illegal and unsafe abortions along with local women’s rights groups; this research team could be blocked from doing so by a local ethics oversight structure. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 overresearched, and sometimes the right approach, if research needs to be done at all, is to engage with methods that do not explicitly overburden these communities. accountability, as a research principle, further recognizes the harm research can do on communities, thus acknowledging a right of refusal for the communities working with researchers. as a result, if the pursuit of research is accepted, arriving with a principle of coproducing knowledge may be the right next step. 3.3. coproducing knowledge debates and discussions about the coproduction of knowledge have occurred for decades in a variety of literatures, action-research scholarship, and participatory research in development studies, feminist ethics, postcolonial and decolonial studies, among others. this scholarship has repeatedly questioned the meaning of coproducing knowledge across different spaces (e.g., cahill 2007; fawcett and hearn 2004; kara 2017; nagar 2002; rajan 2018; rajan and thornhill 2019). critically thinking about coproducing knowledge demands considering the following: what does it mean to meaningfully coproduce knowledge? who should design the research objectives and the research itself? what degree, or what type, of involvement should the community being researched by a scholar have? discussions stemming from these critical dialogues generally stress the need to go beyond a mere passive integration of voices from those in the struggle. these voices should become an integral part of the research itself by contributing to the elaboration of the research process at all stages. this research posture requires an exit from a romantic vision of knowledge, an exit that goes beyond the previously critiqued listening of marginal perspectives. adopting from the outset a coproductive approach to knowledge would have helped me to mitigate the shallowness of my research design, permitting me more explicitly to hear voices that went outside of the planned narrative. coproducing knowledge cannot be reduced to an uncritical principle of listening, which may assume “that an unproblematically nonhierarchical or emancipatory ethos will always be found when collaborating transnationally” (rajan 2018, 276). coproducing knowledge involves a substantial dialogue between the researcher and the participants, where the boundaries between these two poles are brought closer: this dialogue is a much more extensive process than mere listening. as i argued, in section 2, conducting research in solidarity cannot be reduced to a “listening” process—a mere deference because of an uncritical integration of standpoint epistemology— which would risk romanticizing the coproduction of knowledge. for example, it could create harms to the prospective participants if we were assuming that they would, each of them, equally be safe to participate in the research process, given the diversity of particular contexts they may come from. reflections about participatory research in the international development industry direct us to be attentive to which voices we listen to and which voices we feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 may silence in our research process. cornwall and fujita (2012) stress the need to take into account the risk of “ventriloquizing” vulnerable voices in the process of conducting research, which could generate an interpretative bias in analyzing them. researchers risk imposing their voices upon research participants, which may perpetuate othering. postcolonial theorists have emphasized the fact that the intention to learn from marginalized perspectives may reproduce colonial dynamics of subordination by essentializing their roles (mihai 2020). efforts should be made to include these perspectives while avoiding a romanticization of these voices, granting them an uncritical status of “authentic insider” (narayan 1997; see also smith 2012). not only must we include their insights in all steps of the research design, but we must also allow local preoccupations to guide the course of the project—while also acknowledging that these local preoccupations may stand in tension with each other and that it may not always be possible to reconcile them. integrating ethical and political concerns from marginalized communities in the research design should thus not be limited to the step of going through the formal requirements of the research ethics board process (gillan and pickerill 2012). it is in this sense that i defend the principle of coproducing knowledge. learning from actual projects of knowledge coproduction would be insightful for engaged philosophers—and this would avoid an unreflective enthusiasm for research collaboration that could obfuscate power dynamics arising in these cases (arribas lozano 2018; kara 2017; mitlin et al. 2020). in order to mitigate power asymmetries between the researchers and the communities involved, long-term relationships could help to cultivate trust and meaningful inclusion. moreover, removing the structural and epistemic barriers for including local stakeholders in the research process is necessary; as byskov (2020) argues, the onus of communities’ integration in the research process should be placed on the researchers. in other words, the researchers ought to adjust their projects to the communities’ needs and resources—which may diverge—in order to ensure that they will benefit from participating in the research. fostering meaningful inclusion can be incentivized by structural changes in higher education and government research agencies. while i argue that coproducing knowledge may help researchers avoid romanticizing their research, i acknowledge that it may inadvertently reproduce other forms of idealization, such as assuming that research participants will share practical and strategic interests. the research program ought to acknowledge possible inequities between educated researchers and advocates, and members of oppressed marginalized communities: the researchers will not be able to compensate for these inequities in an inclusive research design if the researchers are not attentive to them in the first place. epistemic capabilities are varied and can be hindered by inequalities in opportunities. not all members of a community will be able to participate equally in the research process. and if they do, we should not assume that it is always safe to lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 participate in these processes for all members of a community. less privileged members of a community may be silenced by more privileged members; in this case, work in deliberative democracy on “strategic exclusion” may help to design inclusive participation in research projects (deveaux 2016; dovi 2009). researchers must be attentive to whose voices are deemed to represent the “community,” and by whom. shifting to a knowledge coproduction format would help researchers with solidaristic intentions avoid performing “epistemical extractivism” (grosfoguel 2016), in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake and for career advancement. a principle of mutuality should then be put at the forefront of research for ensuring that the community will benefit from this collaboration. nevertheless, one may raise legitimate concerns against this collaborative and mutual approach to knowledge production, in so far as it may be tantamount to a form of “epistemic exploitation” (berenstain 2016) to expect activists to be involved in the academic labor; local stakeholders may not have the time to participate in such research. this issue can be first addressed through a question of epistemic humility, where the researcher ought to consider whether their research is directly contributing to the community they study. while valid and practical preoccupations related to time and funding issues, among others, should be taken seriously, it appears that long-term and immersive research, ideally spread out over several years, may be a part of the answer, wherein the communities concerned would define (and refine) the research objectives. coproducing knowledge is the most radical principle i propose, and perhaps the most foreign to the philosophical discipline. it is a more robust and demanding principle than a mere commitment to deference, because coproducing knowledge entails not only that we must consider the voices of those who know better about a struggle for justice but also that they must become active participants—if they wish— in knowledge production. thus, it goes drastically beyond what we may expect from deference as a guiding research principle.12 while i propose these three principles to supplement deference in guiding engaged solidaristic philosophy, i illustrate the need for norms of epistemic humility and accountability while fostering knowledge coproduction by reflecting on my research fieldwork in the next section. 4. researching in and on solidarity: observations from my empirical fieldwork the methodological and normative principles i develop in section 3 arose, in part, from my own attempt to conduct my research. intending—and in my case partially failing—to conduct research in a solidaristic vein must raise concerns for political theorists and philosophers aiming to do so. as part of my doctoral degree in philosophy with an applied component for which conducting empirical research was 12 however, again, i acknowledge that deference was not thought to answer the difficulties associated with designing such research. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 a formal requirement,13 i undertook qualitative research fieldwork in senegal in fall 2019.14 in total, i conducted twenty semistructured interviews with twenty-two people working in six feminist and women’s rights nongovernmental organizations (ngo) and in one international grantmaking network (that is, a private organization that is allocating funding to ngos for leading their projects) in dakar and in a rural region of senegal. initially, i was interested in researching how solidarity was concretely used or theorized in local and global struggles for women’s rights. my aim was to fill a gap between normative work on solidarity and the empirical transnational-feminist solidarity literature. however, upon arriving, i realized that my questions were somehow too opaque and detached from the realities of my interviewees, and that i had arrived at a point in senegalese feminist activism where struggles against gender-based violence were reaching a historic climax. although i had read extensively about the women’s rights movement in senegal, the fact that my fieldwork was relatively short-lived contributed to an impression of being parachuted in. this impression appears, however, to be somewhat typical of doctoral students undertaking fieldwork for the first time, who often do not have the ability to ease their way into the field, burdened with time-sensitive, financial, and institutional constraints (see, e.g., butcher 2021; vanner 2015). owing to the relationship of power involved in carrying this type of research, i do not wish to absolve myself of responsibility for the missteps and poor research design i describe here. i arrived in senegal in a time of important social mobilization related to the launch of a national campaign on gender-based violence15—it was a truly a unique 13 it is certainly unusual for a paper in political philosophy to state so bluntly one’s positionality as a junior scholar. however, i do so for two reasons. first, an awareness of my positionality as a graduate student helps to understand how this research was conducted under constraints in funding and time that a tenured professor at a research institution may not have. i have addressed this issue when discussing the methodological and normative principle of coproducing knowledge. second, in various academic disciplines that deal with qualitative research, it is common to state one’s positionality in the academic hierarchy and to offer insights and reflections stemming from a fieldwork. 14 because the terms of my research ethics clearance prevent me from naming the organizations that partook in my research, i can only offer nonidentifying information in this paper. 15 the turning point of this mobilization against sexual violence was certainly the murder of bineta camara in may 2019, which sparked national outrage, leading to the creation of the collective dafadoy (“it’s enough” in wolof). women’s rights activists asked for a national legislative change that would transform the recognition of a rape from a misdemeanor (délit in french) to a felony (crime), which would make the lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 time in senegalese feminism. this historic moment significantly shaped my field research: almost all my interviewees referred to gender-based violence in our discussions. the fact that i introduced myself in person and by email as a researcher working on transnational feminist solidarity helped me gain access to certain ngos due to the momentum related to sexual violence, as a coordinator of an organization surveyed confirmed to me. from this context, in several interviews, my philosophical questions about transnational solidarity received a lukewarm welcome; i was told that my questions were interesting, but i did not get the enthusiasm i naïvely expected. upon my first visit to an important women’s rights organization in senegal, my position as a political philosopher interested in researching solidarity was met with great suspicion and skepticism. it is not that my interviewees had never thought about solidarity per se. rather, it is that my theoretical questions about transnational feminist solidarity were not aligned with the key focus: gender-based violence. a more engaged way of conducting research would have allowed me to establish a dialogue that corresponded more to the demands of the populations. 4.1. reflections on my own research pitfalls my initial attempt to conduct research on transnational feminist solidarity directed me to consider the implications of solidaristic research with those in the struggle for justice, therefore leading me to develop the principles (epistemic humility, accountability, and coproducing knowledge) i outline in this article. when i realized that the solidarity framework i imported into my research design was not exactly aligned with the priority of the groups i wished to conduct research with, this led me to turn a critical lens on the problematic power dynamics created through my research. intending to conduct research in a solidaristic manner, researching in solidarity, must raise concerns for any other political philosophers also aiming to do so. lack of parity between the researchers and the “subjects” risks undermining ideals of solidarity at the core of an engaged philosophy approach. my academic and national positionality allowed me to access the senegalese women’s rights’ ngo community and shape the conversation. my attempts to address the challenges of working toward gender justice within the constraints of institutional feminism did not have the critical edge i was hoping for. in my interviews with ngo staff members, when institutional transnational feminism was criticized or evoked, it was done in a concealed way, hinting at a critique rather than expressing it directly. it was therefore difficult to gather critical insights on the dynamics of transnational solidarity in my punishment more severe. this law was effectively voted in december 2019 and promulgated in january 2020 by the senegalese national assembly (onu femmes 2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 interviews. in order to conduct research in solidarity, we must clarify local and global interests that may appear in empirical fieldwork. my research was embedded in a political context that colored how my research subjects perceived me. failure to effectively grapple with one’s positionality when entering the field could have been mitigated by more actively cultivating relational and epistemic humility. while i knew that my positionality would affect my fieldwork, the depth of power relations made it challenging to fully apprehend how this transformed all my relationships. conducting engaged and solidaristic research has to be negotiated through recognizing the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis those in the struggle. from the perspective of feminist, development, and critical race theorists, this may seem to be an obvious point. however, political philosophy has a well-established tradition of pretending to speak from a neutral and objective position whether it is explicit or implicit (goodhart 2018). consequently, i urge theorists tempted to design research in a solidaristic vein to carefully evaluate issues of positionality, power, and privilege— that is, not to suppose that research developed in the spirit of solidarity is done ex nihilo—that is, outside of global colonial and racial dynamics. this poses not only the problem of speaking for others (alcoff 1991–92; fawcett and hearn 2004; vanner 2015) but also the problem of choosing to whom we should listen, and of assuming that vulnerable groups have the same concerns (rajan 2018). this methodological hazard illustrates the methodological and normative principles of epistemic humility, accountability, and coproducing knowledge that i address above. addressing methodological hazards arising from solidaristic research greatly matters for engaged philosophers. not doing so could undermine attempts to support social change and epistemic inclusion through solidaristic research, which explains why i propose principles that may help to prevent these missteps. in my fieldwork, deference as a guiding principle would have been of little help to know how to lead this research respectfully. indeed, as i am writing this article, more than a year after the completion of my fieldwork, i would not know precisely to whom i should defer my judgment if i wanted to tackle issues of gender justice in senegal, given the presence of conflicting interests and different strategical approaches. the issue of deference becomes even more complex when i consider the involvement of my home country in senegalese local politics and nongovernmental organizations. beyond this issue, deferring in unequal research contexts often means deferring to the most powerful members of the organized community of the “least well-off.” as influential writings in development studies have stressed (e.g., guijt and shah 1998), researched communities are not homogeneous. because of the complexity of the terrain we may be engaging with, we need research principles that allow us to go beyond superficial readings of the situation. in these circumstances, there is no clear pathway to accountability. however, cultivating the research principles i propose can make us aware that knowledge is being produced recursively. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 although i have focused on one way to conduct engaged solidaristic research in philosophy, it is important to reaffirm that adopting an ethnographic model to research is not the only way to do this type of research. further, the research principles i have developed could be refined or used in other contexts where political philosophers are grounding their claims in empirical research, including cases wherein philosophers are part of the community they research. nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the romanticization of our work as researchers or an inability to seize power dynamics is not unique to an ethnographic model of research and could appear in empirical cases closer to home. while i recognize that the research-guiding principles i propose would not have fixed the perhaps more fundamental issues regarding the research design of my fieldwork, foregrounding these may have helped to prevent certain methodological hazards that occurred. deference alone would not have allowed me to grapple with the ongoing power relations that structured this research. as researchers, we often idealize the work we do and tend to be oblivious to the underlying power dynamics. however, to truly research in solidarity, we must use robust guidelines that require us to pause and consider the underlying power dynamics. moreover, given that philosophy is a discipline central to the foundation of many other disciplines, philosophers may be even more likely to ignore the problematic power relations created through research. rather than discourage political theorists and philosophers from carrying out solidaristic research, i urge my fellow philosophers to consider the research principles i sketch if they intend to carry a philosophical reflection in an engaged and solidaristic vein. by not laying out clear guidelines for this type of philosophy, we risk repeating mistakes that have been extensively discussed in adjacent disciplines. by offering insights about the ethical and methodological guidelines for this research, i hope we are better able to design meaningful and respectful research in the context of significant power inequalities. in contributing to the strand of political philosophy that brings theoretical frameworks closer to empirical concerns, i have suggested an understanding of political philosophy as being fundamentally political. acknowledgements i would like to first thank the people that helped me in senegal in fall 2019, whether by directing me to certain resources or by participating in my research. for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript, i would like to thank samantha brennan, morten byskov, monique deveaux, polly galis, michael goodhart, valérie grand’maison, candace johnson, dallas jokic, lori keleher and her students, mary king, serene j. khader, katarina pitasse fragoso, gus skorburg, renée sylvain, and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 theresa tobin. 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methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 2nd ed. london: zed books. lemay – engaged solidaristic research published by scholarship@western, 2023 27 spezio, michael, gregory peterson, and robert c. roberts. 2019. “humility as openness to others: interactive humility in the context of l’arche.” journal of moral education 48 (1): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2018.1444 982. táíwò, olúfẹḿi o. 2022. elite capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else). chicago: haymarket books. thiem, yannik, kris f. sealey, amy e. ferrer, adriel m. trott, and rebecca kennison. 2019. “just ideas? the status and future of publication ethics in philosophy: a white paper.” publication ethics, may 5, 2019. http://publication-ethics.org/ white-paper/. tobin, theresa weynand, and alison m. jaggar. 2013. “naturalizing moral justification: rethinking the method of moral epistemology.” metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 (july): 409–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12050. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. 2014. “r-words: refusing research.” in humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, edited by django paris and maisha t. winn, 223–47. los angeles: sage publications. vanner, catherine. 2015. “positionality at the center: constructing an epistemological and methodological approach for a western feminist doctoral candidate conducting research in the postcolonial.” international journal of qualitative methods 14, no. 4 (november): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940691561 8094. weir, allison. 2013. identities and freedom: feminist theory between power and connection. studies in feminist philosophy. oxford: oxford university press. wolff, jonathan. 2019. “method in philosophy and public policy: applied philosophy versus engaged philosophy.” in the routledge handbook of ethics and public policy, edited by annabelle lever and andrei poama, 13–24, london: routledge. woodly, deva r. 2021. reckoning: black lives matter and the democratic necessity of social movements. transgressing boundaries: studies in black politics and black communities. oxford: oxford university press. yap, audrey. 2021. “hidden costs of inquiry: exploitation, world-travelling and marginalized lives.” kennedy institute of ethics journal 31, no. 2 (june): 153– 73. https://doi.org/10.1353/ken.2021.0010. zacka, bernardo, brooke ackerly, jakob elster, signy gutnick allen, humeira iqtidar, matthew longo, and paul sagar. 2021. “political theory with an ethnographic sensibility.” contemporary political theory 20, no. 2 (june): 385–418. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00433-1. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2023 28 zheng, robin. 2018. “precarity is a feminist issue: gender and contingent labor in the academy.” hypatia 33, no. 2 (spring): 235–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa .12401. marie-pier lemay is an instructor in the philosophy department of carleton university, ottawa. previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar, funded by the social sciences and humanities research council and the fonds de recherche du québecsociété et culture, at the university of pittsburgh, working in the department of political science, alongside the global studies center and the gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program. she completed her phd in philosophy and international development studies at the university of guelph, ontario. her research revolves around the challenges of practicing solidarity in contexts of pronounced power inequalities and resistance to gender-based violence. 15004 lemay title page 15004 lemay final format affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 8 recommended citation villa, katherine. 2024. “affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 8. 2024 affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation katherine villa university of miami kcuvilla@gmail.com villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation katherine villa abstract in this paper, i argue that the social norms that underlie our emotion regulation practices can result in further oppression of girls and women under conditions of patriarchy. one aspect of this oppression is the disproportionate responsibility for emotions that is taken on by girls and women in the wake of emotional distress caused by misogynistic aggression. i show that although emotionregulation techniques are understood as ideal tools for enhancing agency and subjective well-being, and emotional labor is not necessarily oppressive, they may not only enable a perpetrator’s ability to evade accountability but also, by outsourcing emotional regulation, allow the perpetrator to fail to cultivate emotional intelligence, which leads to a vicious cycle. in these cases, girls and women also face a double bind. if certain emotion-regulation practices succeed in aligning emotions with dominant social norms, we face emotional labor that not only benefits the regulator but feeds the cycle described above, and we face alienation from our apt feelings. if we fail to regulate our emotions by accepted standards and patriarchal entitlements, we may be outcast, pathologized, or otherwise marginalized. i argue that the consequences of this double bind constitute a site of affective injustice and expose asymmetrical relations of moral accountability in evaluations of the fittingness of emotions. keywords: emotion regulation, moral responsibility, oppression, social norms, affective injustice 1. introduction in down girl: the logic of misogyny, kate manne (2017, 132) argues that women are seen as human “givers” rather than human beings. when girls and women fail to provide attention, care, and other female-coded services men believe they are entitled to, misogyny functions as a policing mechanism that punishes those who violate patriarchal norms and expectations (63–64, 114).1 when we are perceived by men as trespassing patriarchal norms by failing to fulfill what men believe they are 1 references to girls and women in this paper should be understood as inclusive, referring to both cis and trans girls and women. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 entitled to, girls and women may be punished through shaming, degrading, and other abuse (68). in response to misogynistic acts, girls and women must constantly engage in emotion-regulation practices and negotiate between feeling and expressing apt emotions or regulating them for prudential reasons. we may regulate emotions both for our own benefit and for the benefit of others, and often the two overlap. in order to relieve emotional distress, we might manage situations by avoiding certain places or people that tend to provoke emotional distress or by reframing how we think about interactions that made us feel bad. regulation strategies also dominate popular modes of discourse, such as through the culture of self-help and self-development, which is often replete with contradiction. lisa blackman (2004, 225) argues that within this discourse, the ideal “self-made woman” is encouraged to exercise agency by cultivating emotional detachment as a means to attain better intimate relationships, which are marked by emotional dependence. women and girls must participate in often complex, cyclic, and taxing emotion-regulation practices to cope with living in a world shaped by norms, including emotion norms, that perpetuate a patriarchal dominant order. within this social framework, emotion-regulation practices generate a double bind for women and girls. michelle ciurria (2020b) alerts us to a flaw in our system of moral responsibility that often results in cases of “missing perpetrators.” for example, ciurria describes how “disappearance narratives make it difficult for epistemic minorities to elicit uptake from the majority when they testify against (e.g., blame) privileged perpetrators who contribute to hierarchies of power that benefit them” (2). when feeling provoked by misogynistic aggression, it is practically difficult to achieve uptake when blaming men who commit brief, quotidian, and anonymous acts like catcalling or online trolling because they are conceived as simply part of a nebulous, inevitable “rape culture.” instead, others feel unhappy or uncomfortable when a woman, depressed, anxious, or angered by the incident, turns down an invitation to go out or says something equally vulgar back at a harasser in public. the disapproval of her reactions results in her being blamed for being overly sensitive or hysterical.2 she is made to feel bad about letting life get to her when “being happy is the best revenge.” when the victim takes full responsibility for regulating her emotions in the aftermath of the harassment, the perpetrators of misogynistic aggression that triggered the emotional distress in the first place are, for the most part, written out of the story. 2 of course, it is often right to take responsibility for our emotions and their effects on others. a recent article by nabina liebow and trip glazer (2023) offers an important account of cases where white individuals failed to regulate their emotional reactions to being called out on racist language and attitudes and how their interpersonal relations were damaged because of this. villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 the process that results in the oppressive double bind unfolds in the following way: girls and women are found guilty and punished through the mechanics of misogynistic policing, which, according to manne, takes the form of harassment, trolling, belittling, and so on. as affective beings, we experience emotional distress in response to these misogynistic incidents. however, instead of the perpetrators of the harassment and aggression being sanctioned, they disappear, while women and girls become fully and disproportionately responsible for ensuring our own twisted version of restorative justice. in other words, through emotion-regulation practices and the norms that underly these practices, we tend to assume full responsibility for avoiding further sanctioning by not upsetting others through exposure to expressions of emotional distress, and part of this involves assuming responsibility for reintegrating ourselves back into the world to function socially again, which, for many, is a daily struggle. this process can also be explained using valérie de courville nicol’s (2011, 88) concept of “responsibilization” where “individuals are made responsible for problems that used to be taken care of by the collectivity.” our perceived sense of danger converts into a self-fear; therefore, we take individual responsibility for anything bad that happens, even if the actual cause of the setback or painful experience is provoked by a force beyond our control (90). we increasingly fear our individual capacities to transgress moral norms, and this has a civilizing effect of emotional regulation on the object of fear—that is, our own subjectivity (92, 97). women and girls take responsibility for the external forces of misogyny, and in the aftermath, our focus turns inwards, scrutinizing our own reactions to it, determining if the reactions were appropriate, exaggerated, provocative, or problematic in some other sense. from these determinations, emotion regulation is implemented. when women and girls do not or cannot diffuse strong emotional expressions, we are further at risk of marginalization by being pathologized if we suffer from chronic emotion dysregulation, phobias, anxiety, or depression. the expectation to jump back into the fray after a confrontation with misogyny is framed in terms of consequences. bouncing back from the incident benefits the victim, thus making it her responsibility to produce a positive outcome, while dwelling on negative emotional reactions or letting them have some influence on her future decisions is regarded as erroneous. this belief serves to protect the emotional well-being of the people around her who avoid witnessing her “offensive” emotions, and the victim’s social status and interpersonal relations are kept intact. however, this latter consequence of emotion regulation can be understood as a further injustice. within the patriarchal normative landscape, girls and women, the “human givers,” assume responsibility for globalized extrinsic management of men’s emotions by upholding conditions favorable to their subjective well-being, sometimes at the expense of their own. we are responsible for maintaining men’s contentment and keeping them from being set off. women might display performative resilience or an “unbothered” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 attitude, change our appearances, or pretend to be flattered by catcalling. we may simply confine ourselves to domains where we are less likely to encounter distressing situations, thus severely narrowing our spatial movement in the world. the strategy of avoidance has been theorized as a form of resistance to a hostile world, or what susan bordo (1989, 20) calls a “protest and retreat in the same gesture,” but this interpretation is contested. either path leads to further oppression of girls and women. my plan for this paper is to first present an example of this problematic process of “responsibilization” through the common case of street harassment, a practice of misogyny that is experienced by the majority of women. in these cases, a “disappearance narrative” (ciurria 2020b) diverts moral responsibility onto victims while deflecting blame away from the misogynist aggressors. i then define emotionregulation practices and offer examples of how each technique can be used in circumstances similar to those discussed in the first section. in the next section, i argue that these practices are influenced by emotion norms of appropriateness derived from the values of dominant groups who are protected from emotional discomfort. since the success of emotion regulation practiced by girls and women is evaluated based on its effects, i argue that unfair emotion-regulation norms reveal a double bind. when girls and women engage in certain kinds of emotion regulation, they often assume a disproportionate amount of emotional labor. the injustice of this unequal distribution of labor derives from the fact that blame is diverted from perpetrators, which exploits the moral vulnerability of girls and women in these cases.3 yet “failure” to regulate emotions may result in marginalization through medicalized interventions or in enabling dependency by encouraging women to stay at home or go out in public only with a companion. using recent work on affective injustice, i argue that this double bind constitutes a case where affective goods are wrongly withheld. i conclude by discussing the concept of moral vulnerability and question how emotion regulation can be agency-enhancing in contexts where accountability relations are imbalanced. 3 the concept of moral vulnerability comes from walker (2013, 112): “by moral vulnerability, i mean a vulnerability that inheres in our assumption that we possess a certain moral status as full participants in reciprocal accountability relations. all of us who see ourselves as possessing this status anticipate that we are rightly able to call others to account even as we ourselves are rightly liable to be called to account by others. the vulnerability in question is the potential for being exposed to the insult and additional injury, when we perceive ourselves wronged, of having our standing to call others to account denied, dismissed, or ignored in ways that call our very status as full participants into question.” villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 2. missing perpetrators in cases of catcalling and street harassment most girls and women are subjected to sexually motivated street harassment at some point in their lives, whether being catcalled on the street, targeted by explicit public displays, subjected to crude comments about body parts or facial expressions, or photographed without consent. hawley fogg-davis (2006, 63) states, “most girls first experience street harassment by boys and men at or even before puberty, and thus learn to see their bodies as sources of sexual danger; their sexual vulnerability to boys and men becomes an inescapable and constant condition of being female, a liability to be managed privately rather than discussed and remedied publicly.” the experience of harassment is disturbing, disgusting, and embarrassing, but the distinctly affective aftermath can be equally difficult to cope with, especially because, as fogg-davis notes, victims must deal with it in silence. in living a feminist life, sara ahmed (2017, 23) describes a violation she experienced while jogging. she recalls: a man whirled passed [sic] on a bike and put his hand up the back of my shorts. he did not stop; he just carried on cycling as if nothing had happened, as if he had not done anything. i stopped, shaking. i felt so sick; invaded, confused, upset, angry. i was the only witness to this event; my body its memory. she then goes on to describe how things changed for her after the incident: i began jogging again, but it was different: i was different. i was much more nervous. every time someone came up behind me, i was ready, tense, waiting. i felt differently in my body, which was a different way of encountering the world. experiences like this: they seem to accumulate over time, gathering like things in a bag, but the bag is your body, so that you feel like you are carrying more and more weight. the past becomes heavy. we all have different biographies of violence, entangled as they are with so many aspects of ourselves: things that happen because of how we are seen; and how we are not seen. (23) while the male perpetrator ahmed describes rode away as if nothing happened, she is left with the practical impossibility of holding him accountable. he quite literally disappeared. yet, there is another way that perpetrators evade, or rather, displace, responsibility. girls and women who are victims of harassment and aggression are often left with chronic emotional distress that accumulates, which ahmed describes as a heaviness in the mind and body, which we alone are left to deal with. although ahmed resumed her routine of jogging outside, thus resisting the total restriction of feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 spatial movement such an experience could provoke, “it was different,” she says. her perspective was permanently altered and imbued with difficult emotions. as i will later describe in terms of affective injustice, the emotional labor she had to undertake to resume her activities was unjustly augmented in these circumstances. to illustrate how common and widespread street harassment experiences are, artist noa jansma posted over twenty selfies taken with catcallers over the course of one month in 2017. her project, called “dearcatcallers,” gained three hundred thousand followers and commentators on twitter. there have been other similar public artworks that highlight the ubiquity of street harassment. silvia schultermandl (2022, 188) notes, “[these] projects document instances of verbal abuse, but it is important to emphasize that verbal harassment is never just verbal: it is also somatic and visceral, linked to feelings of vulnerability and—in some cases—the anticipation of physical harm.” racial and gender stereotypes also impact the experiences of street harassment and the dynamics of power that underly both their occurrences and consequences. fogg-davis (2006, 63) warns of the acute and often discounted danger posed by the street harassment and other forms of “sexual terrorism” experienced by black lesbian women who do not fit the heterosexual mold. highlighting the case of sakia gunn’s murder in 2003, she describes the generational, psychological effects of damaging stereotypes: confronted with the relentless onslaught of messages that depict them as natural prostitutes and "breeders," many black women adopt the defensive stereotype of the "strongblackwoman" (morgan 2000) or "bullet-proof diva" (jones 1997), which prevents them from seeing street harassment as a pressing political issue that harms them. quoting veronica chambers, kimberly springer "likens black women to magicians, 'masters of emotional sleight of hand. the closer you get, the less you can see. it was true of my mother. it is also true of me'" (springer 2002, 1070). (fogg-davis 2006, 73) acts of street harassment are omnipresent yet hidden in plain sight. because much of the damage incurred is emotional, emotion-regulation practices mask its effects and facilitates perpetrators evasion of accountability. sandra bartky conceptualizes catcalling in femininity and domination as a “ritual of subjugation.” she describes the phenomenon in the following way: it is a fine spring day, and with an utter lack of self-consciousness, i am bouncing down the street. suddenly, i hear men’s voices. catcalls and whistles fill the air. these noises are clearly sexual in intent and they are meant for me; they come from across the street. i freeze. as sartre villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 would say, i am petrified by the gaze of the other. my face flushes and my motions become stiff and self-conscious. the body which only a moment before i inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. i have been made into an object. while it is true that for these men i am nothing but, let us say “a nice piece of ass,” there is more involved in this encounter than their fragmented perception of me. they could, after all, have enjoyed me in silence. blissfully unaware, breasts bouncing, eyes on the birds in the trees, i could have passed by without having turned to stone. but i must be made to know that i am a “nice piece of ass”: i must be made to see myself as they see me. (bartky 1990, 27) on the other hand, manne theorizes catcalling in terms of male entitlement rather than purely sexual objectification. according to her, it is a male bid for women’s attention, which she is held to owe him (falsely). and he may also evince his sense of (again, illicit) entitlement to openly rank her in terms of her attractiveness and thus social statusconferring value. in other cases, this bid for her attention is more focused on her mind not being allowed to be (a) turned inward (such that she is thinking her own thoughts), (b) withheld from him via her putting up emotional “walls” (which tends to garner an epithet in the “bitch” family—is my anecdotal impression), or (c) averse to the attention that he foists on her boisterously and sometimes aggressively or threateningly. (manne 2017, 115) both bartky’s and manne’s accounts highlight how catcalling involves dominating and policing the mental lives of girls and women. bartky says, “i must be made to know that i am a nice piece of ass” and manne states that “her mind is not allowed to be turned inward” and she can’t have “emotional walls” between her and the entitled male subject. it doesn’t always matter what she is wearing, as the objective of street harassment seems to be to gratuitously shock girls and women, to diminish their worlds by showing them that they exist to provide men with moments of sexual and emotional gratification and to strip away the possibility to walk and simply be, undisturbed. the damage arises from the aggressor's ability to channel the violation to the more recalcitrant and subjective sphere of the victim’s mind, which in turn can limit her physical movement and spatiality. this inward turn is key to the process of “responsibilization” because the emotions become the source of danger rather than the uncontrollable, external force. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 bianca fileborn and jess hardley’s (2023, 333) investigations corroborate bartky’s description, finding that “such experiences often result in young women engaging in restrictive safety work, with the body becoming a site of ‘risk’ to be managed, rather than a source of agency and freedom.” a young woman might selfconsciously try to take up less space in her movement, feel tense and nervous where she once was at ease, or avoid public transportation and sites where she has been harassed, foregoing convenience or access to other goods. this is the paradigm picture of oppression as restriction of freedom according to marilyn frye’s (1983, 4) definition in the politics of reality, which says, “the experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.” the psychological effects of catcalling can result in physically confining women to spaces where they are unlikely to encounter or be seen by strange men, or in building protective psychological barriers, which has reverberating effects on their mental lives. adrienne rich describes the psychological impact on women’s experiences in universities: more subtle, more daily than rape is the verbal abuse experienced by the woman student on many campuses—rutgers, for example— where, traversing a street lined with fraternity houses, she must run a gauntlet of male commentary and verbal assault. the undermining of self, of a woman's sense of her right to occupy space and walk freely in the world, is deeply relevant to education. the capacity to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves mentally, is inseparable from our physical way of being in the world, our feelings of personal integrity. if it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because i am a woman and can be raped, how self-possessed, how exuberant can i feel as i sit working in that library? how much of my working energy is drained by the subliminal knowledge that, as a woman, i test my physical right to exist each time i go out alone? (rich 1979, 242; emphasis in the original)4 rich uses this example to show that despite the concept of “coeducation,” the education of men and women is not equal, due to, among other factors, the continual reminder of her embodiment and the danger it entails (241). this constitutes an unjust psychological burden to regulate emotionally, siphoning energy away from the pursuit of other life projects such as reading and learning. 4 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the inclusion of this passage. villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 ciurria (2020b, 2) argues that “these myths create asymmetries of power in our ‘responsibility system’ by protecting the privileged from culpability, accountability, and liability; and they unfairly inculpate the oppressed through familiar, identity-based processes of victim-blaming and scapegoating. that is, these myths both exonerate privileged perpetrators and illicitly blame members of marginalized groups.” as ciurria describes in the example of the cdc guidelines for women and alcohol consumption, men can’t be blamed for physical injuries or unplanned pregnancy if women are the ones who took all the risks, by drinking. another example of this occurs, barbara applebaum (2017, 865) argues, in cases where “white tears” deflect responsibility away from a racist act, from the perpetrator to the victim: “when white discomfort is comforted, white women are relieved from all accountability. in other words, white comforting becomes the mechanism by which white women can avoid confronting their complicity in racism and whereby power inequities in the organization can be maintained." likewise, in the case of emotion regulation, men who provoke emotional distress can’t be held responsible if the interaction is framed as “overly emotional” women letting themselves get upset and allowing their actions to be influenced by their emotional states. in other words, the stereotype that girls and women are too sensitive and emotional facilitates this particular “disappearance narrative,” which, as i will show, connects it to a broader system of identity-based oppression. these stereotypes come into play when girls and women seemingly fail or refuse to regulate their emotions through suppression, reappraisal, or other techniques, which i will expand on in the next section, and are sanctioned for allowing their distress to seep into their interpersonal interactions. 3. road to regulation: social norms, aptness, and appropriateness regulation is an inextricable component of experiencing emotions, and developing these techniques is essential to emotional and mental health. however, below the surface, our ability to regulate and the effects of regulation are interconnected with a host of other elements. for example, what sociocultural context enables an unequal burden of emotional labor to be shifted onto the target of misogynist aggression through emotion regulation while the perpetrator disappears from the story? we can identify two modes of deliberation that drive emotion-regulation strategies—that is, how and why we regulate emotions. one is the evaluation of an emotion itself for aptness—in other words, whether the emotion fits the reality of the situation. the other has to do not with aptness but, rather, with a fittingness condition tinged with moral value—specifically, patriarchal values. this mode of evaluation is best defined in terms of appropriateness and reflects dominant social norms. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 first, i offer a more detailed account of the kinds of emotion-regulation techniques women and girls are socialized to perform when dealing with emotional distress. i then identify the dominant social norms that evaluations of appropriateness of emotions are based on to argue that even practices that produce beneficial adaptive effects rather than maladaptive outcomes are problematic and unjust because they function to reinforce the status and well-being of dominant groups, thus generating a perpetual cycle of unrecognized emotional labor. 3.a. emotion-regulation techniques a process model of emotion regulation developed by emily butler and james gross (2004, 103) posits, “an emotion begins with an evaluation of emotion cues which, if attended to and evaluated in emotional terms, can trigger a coordinated set of experiential, behavioral, and physiological response tendencies.” additionally, “according to the process model (gross, 2015), the er cycle begins with a discrepancy between someone’s goal state (i.e., the emotional state they desire) and the actual (or projected) state” (mcrae and gross 2020, 2). butler and gross (2004, 103) also state that the process model includes two categories of response tendencies: antecedent-focused strategies, which involve framing a future experience prior to being exposed to emotion cues, and response-focused strategies, which are “things we do once an emotion is already underway,” such as “expressive suppression.” we can see that the emotion regulation that girls and women engage in involves both of these categories. for example, women engage in “safety-work” to go out into public, an often-hostile landscape, and afterward process emotions that may have arisen from confrontations. situation selection and modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation are all “families of [emotion-regulation] strategies” (mcrae and gross 2020, 3). in response to street harassment, a woman might avoid taking public transportation alone, which is the regulation strategy “avoidance” within the situation selection family. or she might modify the situation by asking someone to accompany her. in terms of attentional deployment, she could distract herself by wearing noise-cancelling headphones and watching a video on her phone or getting up and moving to a different part of the train after receiving unwanted attention. cognitive-change strategies could look like reframing the situation in her mind, thinking, for example, “he was saying that to me because he probably had a repressed childhood and i feel sorry for him.” finally, a common member of the “response modulation” family is the strategy of expressive suppression. this simply entails an action like holding back tears or maintaining a neutral facial expression despite having the desire to scowl. ahmed in living a feminist life, paints a picture of how many girls and women cope by engaging intrinsic emotion-regulation practices, including situation selection, villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 attention redirection, and cognitive-reappraisal techniques, as well as responses considered by psychologists to be maladaptive such as rumination and suppression: not to be assaulted: maybe you might try to close yourself off, to withdraw from proximity, from proximity to a potential. or perhaps you try to deal with this violence by numbing your own sensations, by learning not to be affected or to be less affected. perhaps you try to forget what happened. you might be ashamed. you might stay silent. you might not tell anyone, say anything, and burn with the sensation of a secret. it becomes another burden: that which is not revealed. maybe you adopt for yourself a certain kind of fatalism: these things happen; what happens will happen; whatever will be, will be. (ahmed 2017, 23–24) as many feminist theorists have observed, under conditions of patriarchy, the norms that favor the subjective well-being of dominant groups align with those that expect girls and women to be caring, nonconfrontational, and flattered by unwanted attention, which results in exploitation.5 to respond to these expectations that many have been acculturated in to maintain social relations, girls and women must regulate their emotions accordingly in the ways detailed above. dominant social norms that privilege the well-being of certain individuals are resistant to change when they are reinforced in a justificatory role and are used to measure when emotion regulation has met or failed to meet the standard of appropriateness. under a normative context where the feelings of dominant groups were not protected at the cost of oppressed individuals, emotion-regulation practices may take a different form—for instance, emotional distress would be less likely to be suppressed; and if social sharing of emotional experiences was more widely available, rumination would be a less frequently utilized practice since it arises from suppression.6 on the flip side of this, some members of dominant groups benefit from having their emotions regulated by 5 ciurria discusses the example of exploitation in cases of moral dialogue, where women and people of color are expected to “improve” and “educate” ignorant others; however, at the same time they are more susceptible to slurs and dialogic aggressions and thus find themselves on uneven ground and have more to lose in any given exchange. (see ciurria 2020a, ch. 4, esp. 101–2. 6 “emotion suppression has, for example, been linked with higher levels of depression (berenbaum et al., 1999). further, because the emotional experience is not openly attended to, it may well resurface, causing rumination (thomsen, tønnesvang, schnieber, & olesen, 2011)” (roth, vansteenkiste, and ryan 2019, 947). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 others; so their emotional dysregulation, most always the propellor of misogynistic incidents, is left unchecked, and they fail to develop emotional intelligence. 3.b. emotion norms how are the emotion norms that structure emotion-regulation practices, whether consciously or otherwise, developed? in the first place, emotions must be understood as morally evaluable. tom roberts (2015, 491) argues that, “insofar as emotions are capable of reflecting a subject’s perspective qua moral agent, though, and insofar as she is a reasonable target for calls to justify her evaluative judgements, a person’s emotional states are open to moral, as well as rational, criticism.”7 from there an interconnectedness between moral and social norms is required. for example, chad van schoelandt (2018) argues that when social norms seem mutually beneficial, have remained stable over long periods of time, and have been revised and internalized, this produces justification for using the norm to measure standards of behavior and hold people accountable for their actions. he says, “insofar as members of the population value tradition, conformity, the way the norm reflects group membership, group expectations, or the like, these provide additional reasons to endorse these entrenched norms regardless of their particular content” (228). the problem is, as charlie kurth (2022, 19) notes, “our emotion norms are often unfair: they embed assumptions that subject marginalized individuals to different standards of assessment, and that single them out for harsher treatment when their feelings are deemed inappropriate.” an injustice can aptly correspond to a strong emotional reaction, but actual practices of assigning consequences for emotions are often based on related but distinct concepts of appropriateness—namely, appropriateness under dominant social (i.e., patriarchal) conditions. concerns for how others will react to the 7 some philosophers have distinguished between different meanings of “fittingness” when it comes to assessing emotions. one mode of assessment is aptness, and the other is appropriateness; the latter mode has a distinctly moral flavor (d’arms and jacobsen 2000). aptness refers to a set of conditions that determine whether an emotion aligns with the facts of a situation—i.e., you were actually wronged and are therefore justifiably angered. srinivasan (2018) develops a set of aptness conditions for anger. but appropriateness regards whether anger should be felt considering, as many do, that it is an essentially retributive emotion. i will assume that the emotion norms that influence emotion-regulation practices i discuss often track appropriateness in the latter, moralistic sense, whereas the feelings of women and girls can be assessed separately as meeting aptness conditions. with two sets of emotion norms in use, the latter sense may problematically take precedence in deliberations regarding regulating her emotions. villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 expression of our emotions, especially if standards are unequal, become a central factor in how we decide to diffuse or regulate an emotion. for instance, kelly oliver (2004, 93) frames the idea of social norms as a “punishing superego” that is internalized by oppressed individuals whose negatively valanced emotional responses to oppression are then used as evidence of their “lack of reason.” one lesson i took from amia srinivasan’s (2018) the aptness of anger is that what is at stake for minoritized individuals’ expressions of emotions is not aptness in the sense that emotions fit the world by clearly appreciating salient characteristics of it, like racial injustice; rather, assessments of aptness are replaced with assessments of the consequences of the emotions—namely, whether they disrupt the dominant order of the world. if they disturb or expose an oppressive reality within which emotion norms are developed and adopted, then emotions trespass the norms, and they become targets for further sanctioning. this evaluative process is what we see being applied to girls and women who feel emotional distress due to harassment. her emotions may fit the world, but within patriarchal conditions they trespass dominant social norms and are thus deemed inappropriate and subject to resentment and regulation.8 dominant social values are enforced through applications of appropriateness norms to recalcitrant negative emotions, but do aptness conditions for whether an emotion really fits its object also perpetuate inequality of emotional labor? it would be problematic to judge as inapt the intense feelings of nervousness while jogging down the street or experiences of dread at having to take public transportation considering the fact that a misogynist incident took place only one time out of many. fear doesn’t fit the situation and is in some sense irrational. in this case, an emotion would be not only inapt but also damaging to one’s interests. however, assessing emotions for aptness here would further alienate a victim from her reality and constitute a sort of gaslighting.9 the object of her fear is not a known object but a potential for pain, emotional or physical. feminist philosophers who are concerned about the injustices arising from applications of unfair emotion norms have proposed ways to resist norms that reinforce asymmetrical power relations and benefit already privileged groups. one recourse that has been suggested is through “burden shifting” (kurth 2022, 7). rather than accepting norms that encourage minoritized individuals to adjust their emotions for the benefit of members of dominant groups, we would instead call on privileged individuals to control the unpleasant feelings they may experience when confronted by their own racist or sexist biases. consider a starbucks employee that mistakenly 8 thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this distinction. 9 this is not to say that we have “rights to feel,” full stop, for as gallegos (2022, 196) notes, having our emotions challenged and corrected is “a central dimension of our affective education, necessary for achieving a desirable or excellent emotional life.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 misgenders someone by calling them “sir” instead of their preferred gender pronoun. the misgendered person might express frustration or anger at being called “sir,” and that in turn offends the employee. under dominant emotion norms it becomes the trans person’s sole responsibility to protect the feelings of a cisgender heteronormative individual of a socially privileged group who misgendered them. to avoid backlash, the misgendered person suppresses their emotion by ignoring the incident or by implementing another regulation strategy. however, if we apply the “shifting burden” approach to counter unfair emotional norms, then the starbucks worker should be the one to prevent anger at being criticized in front of his coworkers for misgendering a customer from provoking transphobic beliefs down the road. myisha cherry’s (2019) argument that we should develop feminist emotional intelligence to avoid perpetuating racial and gender biases when asking someone to regulate their emotions is an example of “burden shifting.” she states: feminist emotional intelligence, thus, is measured both by what we can do (i.e., recognize power and apply social knowledge) and what we resist doing (i.e., reinscribing racism and patriarchal norms). and the skills such as perceptual accuracy and emotional understanding are informed and strengthened by other skills such as social recognition and attunement of different kinds; social knowledge applicability; the ability to revise one’s thoughts and actions; and the resistance of destructive social norms and the social behaviors that are informed by them. (cherry 2019, 108) the efficacy of efforts to remediate emotion norms has not been left unquestioned. kurth (2022) argues that cognitive science research challenges the plausibility of the burden shifting approach. he argues that a realistic view of motivation makes it unlikely that an emotionally fragile individual, like the starbucks employee in the above example, will be able to successfully gain and retain emotionregulation skills if he chooses to make the effort to do so at all, which is also unlikely considering people naturally do their best to avoid experiencing unpleasant feelings (8). another worry that kurth has for previously proposed efforts to ameliorate unfair emotional norms is that the distinct functional roles that norms play will make them resistant to change or replacement, as will the fact that certain kinds of norms are deeply enculturated in us and we default to acting on them despite best intentions to change (12). not only is human psychology a barrier to successfully challenging emotion norms, but power dynamics also reinforce resistance to changing a system that appears to function smoothly since it benefits them particularly. kurth’s worry, that motivation to challenge unfair social norms is thwarted by our instinctual drive to avoid discomfort, demonstrates yet another facet of unfairness. this is because villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 those with greater power are the ones who influence the placement of the boundaries that structure feelings of ease of staying within them and feelings of discomfort or fear of trying to cross them and the expectation of pain from doing so. this should make us quite weary of accepting motivation as merely a natural, psychological, and unavoidable influence on our behavior and therefore a reason to reject or doubt efforts to change social norms. 4. consequences of emotion regulation the idea that emotion-regulation practices are burdensome and oppressive under conditions of patriarchy seems to clash with the fact that the effects of emotion regulation can be beneficial in a variety of ways both for the individual regulator and for their interpersonal relationships. developing emotion-regulation skills, particularly those within the “cognitive change” family of strategies, can have longterm beneficial effects, including greater physical health (appleton, buka, loucks, gilman, & kubzansky, 2013; appleton, loucks, buka, & kubzansky, 2014), higher academic achievement (davis & levine, 2013; ivcevic & brackett, 2014), more positive social outcomes (english, john, srivastava, & gross, 2012), greater psychological well-being, (gross & john, 2003), and fewer symptoms of psychopathology. (mcrae and gross 2020, 3) on the other hand, suppression techniques, although productive in certain circumstances, can produce the opposite effects and lesser well-being (mcrae and gross 2020, 3–4). butler and gross (2004, 105) note that “experimental evidence suggests that expressive suppression does not reduce, and may even increase, negative emotional experiences like disgust, anger, sadness and embarrassment.” additionally, researchers have found that “meeting emotions with attempts at avoidance or control can both contribute to, and be symptomatic of, a variety of mental health issues (vansteenkiste & ryan, 2013)” (roth, vansteenkiste, and ryan 2019, 946). although expressive suppression is commonly used to deal with emotional distress, anecdotal evidence from many girls and women reveals that a variety of strategies are utilized in response to confrontations with misogyny, not solely suppression. another counterpoint is the idea that not all emotional labor is exploitative. olúfẹ́mi táíwò (2020) argues that feminists often draw attention to the fact that a disproportionate amount of emotional labor is assigned to women to soothe, nurture, and express emotions on behalf of others. however, he offers an analysis of a form of prosocial emotional labor, “emotional compression” that derives from stoic principles (5). emotional compression is a form of emotional labor that is also readily available feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 to men, who are often socialized to suppress emotions in an unhealthy manner. instead, they can achieve mastery over how one’s emotions are communicated to others. he illustrates this point with the example of a “boxer who knows and respects his fear, yet not only stands his ground and keeps punching but does so without letting on that he is intimidated” (6). emotional compression is also compatible with feminist aims toward a more equal distribution of emotional labor. táíwò uses shiloh whitney’s concept of “byproductive labor,”10 which involves “metabolizing” the negative emotions of others, to argue that emotional compression is prosocial because by constraining one’s emotion, an individual may induce the “right” state of mind or “affective tone” in others and can mitigate “emotional contagion” of negatively valanced emotions like anger, which can impede our ability to reason (táíwò 2020, 11–14). this all suggests that the effort regulating emotions often requires of us is itself not oppressive or harmful and serves an important role for psychological health and subjective well-being, both individually and collectively. yet considering the many potentially positive outcomes emotion regulation can bring about, what is it that makes many cases of emotion regulation oppressive? importantly, the beneficial consequences of emotional regulation for the individual regulator may often be inseparable from the benefits that emotion regulator offers to others when regulation is warranted by emotions produced by a social encounter. in the case of misogynist aggressions like street harassment, the secondary beneficiary of the regulation strategy deployed by the victim to diffuse her emotional distress is the perpetrator. this undermines the agency-enhancing characteristic of regulation when the regulator does not desire that the benefits extend to the perpetrator. this suggests that the beneficial consequences of emotional work for the regulator alone do not tell the whole story. it is important to take into account the process itself, which, under the circumstances illustrated in the second section, may provoke an internal conflict that systematically undermines emotion regulation as fully autonomous action. as adrienne rich says, “how much of my working energy is drained by the subliminal knowledge that, as a woman, i test my physical right to exist each time i go out alone?” while emotion regulation is agency-enhancing when we assert control over our emotional reactions to situations, girls and women are nevertheless faced with a sisyphean burden: while the emotion regulation helps the regulator in the longterm to reintegrate herself into her life and build resilience to future confrontations, the conditions under which regulation is necessitated are doomed to repeat due to 10 whitney (2018, 643) understands emotional labor as “not only the work of producing affects for others to consume, nor the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains life and labor power, but also the work of metabolizing unwanted affects and affective byproducts.” villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 the vanishing perpetrator and because it is also made psychologically taxing by the fact that it is largely done to regulate or balance the emotions of others in public. in the next section, i offer an account of the double bind that emerges despite the potentially beneficial outcomes of emotion regulation. i argue that due to appropriateness norms that underly internal and self-imposed judgments of when and how to regulate emotions, and because apt emotions are not always supported by social norms, girls and women face a distinctively “affective” injustice. 5. a double bind and affective injustice alfred archer and georgina mills (2019, 76) argue that oppressed individuals who use intrinsic emotion-regulation strategies to deal with negative emotions engendered by prejudice are hurting their interests regardless of what they do. for example, when women or minoritized individuals are confronted by sexism or racism, they may find ways to draw their attention away and ignore it or to avoid situations where they would encounter it, such as by staying away from work-related gatherings hosted by sexist colleagues or by not residing in neighborhoods where minoritized groups stand out, which then perpetuates the marginalization of those groups by limiting certain opportunities. this argument helps to illustrate what sukaina hirji (2021, 654) shows constitutes the oppressive nature of double binds: when an agent is a member of an oppressed group, the two goods at stake in their choice—their prudential good and their resistance to oppression—are bound up together. if they cooperate, they reinforce the very oppressive norm that in the long run controls their access to security and power. if they resist, they are likely to face immediate harm or sanction for stepping out of line, and in general to be put into a position where their long-term ability to resist oppression is undermined. on either option, they are forced to act against themselves, becoming a tool or mechanism in their own oppression. in the cases i described earlier, girls and women do become inadvertently involved in their own oppression. whether they regulate their emotions in response to routine misogynistic aggressions in the socially appropriate way or not, they face further oppression and restriction. if a woman adheres to dominant emotion norms, she must undergo extensive emotional labor that, while potentially benefitting herself, also extrinsically manages negative emotions of others including perpetrators and therefore facilitates a “disappearance narrative” (ciurria 2020b). however, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 “failing” to regulate emotions based on dominant social norms may result in her being pathologized or marginalized.11 when girls and women regulate their emotions in such a way that does not suppress or recast them, such as through the regulative technique of sharing of emotions publicly, her efforts may fail to benefit perpetrators or even expose them to negative moral judgment. according to the policing mechanism of misogyny, she will be met with a range of undesirable consequences to then discredit her. the stereotype that women are overly emotional, sensitive, and hysterical may be applied to her. this stereotype can contribute to justifications for further marginalization. as agneta fischer and coauthors note in their study of motives for emotion regulation: “being too frightened, too angry, or too sad is a problem not so much for our biological system, but rather for our social system. . . . individuals who do not respond emotionally in an adequate manner may survive physically, but [they] will become social outcasts” (fischer et al. 2004, 188). medicalization and dependency constitute marginalization in that they grant, as iris marion young (1990, 54) states, “a sufficient warrant to suspend basic rights to privacy, respect, and individual choice.” and, as bartky (1990, 30) notes, oppression involves regarding oneself as “uniquely unable to satisfy a normal criteria of psychological health or moral adequacy.” this is not to deny that emotion dysregulation and maladaptive practices can lead someone’s life to go less well and it may be in their interest to seek resources and therapies; however, when dysregulated, or simply expressing a negative emotion, sometimes girls and women are more readily pathologized and sanctioned due to oppressive gender norms rather than supported or validated. failures to engage in emotion regulation, particularly in ways that suppress emotion, may trigger in others what ciurria (2023, 40) defines as the “dehumanizing attitudes” that stem from strawson’s idea of “‘the objective attitude,’ a stance that treats its targets as objects of ‘treatment,’ ‘management,’ ‘training,’ or ‘precautionary’ accounting, not proper moral regard”; and “in asymmetrically structured societies, the objective attitude excludes and dehumanizes oppressed people.” these attitudes can also, even more problematically, be triggered within ourselves since many of the emotions such as disgust and embarrassment that arise from being harassed are associated with the repressive superego and are therefore self-punishing. using francisco gallegos’s (2022, 196) understanding of cases of affective injustice as “deprivations of the subsidiary goods that enable a person to pursue and attain subjective well-being and emotional aptness”—subsidiary goods being 11 these norms may also disadvantage neurodiverse individuals who read and respond to social cues differently and practice distinct forms of expression and communication. in other words, these norms are also ableist. thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this insight. villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 “affective freedoms, affective resources, affective opportunities, and forms of affective recognition”—i argue that this double bind constitutes an affective injustice in several ways. the first face of the double bind is marked by the transfer of a disproportionate amount of responsibility for emotional distress to girls and women. while it may seem beneficial to alleviate emotional distress or build resilience to future encounters, the fact remains that her emotional labor extends to benefit perpetrators of harassment and discourages the development of emotional intelligence in those who take advantage of outsourcing their emotional labor to her. this cycle unjustly deprives girls and women of freedom from negative emotions. the second face of the double bind represents the deprivation of affective recognition. denial of affective recognition, according to gallegos (2022, 191), may be constituted by “being ignored, silenced, or sanctioned when expressing one’s emotions and emotional needs.” we see this occur when emotion norms that developed in conjunction with dominant social values make certain emotional responses to injustice appear “inapt” or, more precisely, inappropriate. girls and women are unfairly sanctioned for emotional responses to oppression such as anger. céline leboeuf argues that “anger can protect members of oppressed groups from the havoc created by a dominant other’s gaze” by helping the oppressed person overcome the “body alienation” produced by the other’s scrutiny (leboeuf 2018, 24, 18), if we recall bartky’s description of catcalling, under the objectifying male gaze, her body stiffened and instinctively developed a protective stance, becoming painfully aware of the body and how it is perceived by others; in other words, she experienced body alienation. the denial or reconfiguration of anger, its feeling or expression, results in the failure to utilize the psychological recourse that, leboeuf argues, anger provides oppressed individuals to overcome alienation from their bodies. additionally, laura silva (2021) argues against an understanding of anger as essentially retributive but rather reconceives of anger as a desire for perpetrators to recognize the wrongs they have committed. for example, using a woman’s apt anger as evidence of a pathology rather than the other’s wrongdoing unjustly precludes the possibility of obtaining this recognition and therefore exposes a further face of affective injustice. 6. conclusion while emotion regulation is a tool available to enhance the psychological wellbeing of oneself and others, the fact that emotion-regulation practices are often solicited by experiences of misogyny and other forms of domination, as well as influenced by problematic moralistic norms, creates a site of affective injustice. when regulators have been socialized to replace a negative emotion with a positive or pleasant one, they are unable to examine and experience negative emotions that may give them valuable insight into their situations and help others recognize wrongs feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 8 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 being done. emotion influences what we focus on within a given situation (jaggar 1989, 160). it is possible that regulating certain emotions shifts our attention away from important details. along these lines, archer and mills (2019, 83) argue that suppressing apt anger by rerouting one’s attention elsewhere can prevent the acquisition of “vital epistemic resources to understand, challenge and survive one’s oppression.” it can be psychologically taxing to attend to these details, even if doing so is ultimately empowering. however, failure to recognize the unequal distribution of emotional labor in taking responsibility for regulating painful emotions, and everything that entails, reveals a weakness in our system of moral responsibility. many emotion-regulation strategies are understood as idealized tools for control over our emotions and environments. in other words, they are conceived of as agencyenhancing deliberative practices. that being said, we open ourselves to judgement for our emotional reactions and expressions, based on emotion norms, yet those judgments rarely involve others taking accountability for creating the conditions that require emotion regulation in the first place. this reveals the moral vulnerability of those whose emotional expressions (or lack thereof) are under assessment. the concept of moral vulnerability, developed by margaret urban walker (2013), describes how victims must come to terms with the realization that they do not possess equal standing with the wrongdoers to demand accountability for the wrong committed. she says, “the vulnerability in question is the potential for being exposed to the insult and additional injury, when we perceive ourselves wronged, of having our standing to call others to account denied, dismissed, or ignored in ways that call our very status as full participants into question” (walker 2013, 112). we have seen that in cases of emotional distress caused by misogyny, an imbalance in accountability for emotions emerges. emotions do not form in a vacuum, and our experiences of them “reflect prevailing forms of social life” (jaggar 1989, 157). while emotion regulation exposes our moral vulnerability, in that we may be judged for our emotions while being denied the chance to call for the accountability of others involved, emotion regulation is also an essential capability for self-determination and subjective well-being (roth, vansteenkiste, and ryan 2019, 945). figuring out how to regulate emotions involves negotiating between processing our emotions and maintaining interpersonal cooperation with others, but it is imperative to understand that situated in nonideal contexts, the process of emotion regulation can become a means to perpetuate injustice. acknowledgments i would like to especially thank dr. aleksandra hernandez for her feedback and support as i worked on this paper. i also wish to acknowledge the helpful comments villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 from two anonymous reviewers. finally, many thanks to mich ciurria and the feminist philosophy quarterly editorial team for 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https://doi.org/10.1007 /s11229-022-03619-9. leboeuf, céline. 2018. “anger as a political emotion: a phenomenological perspective.” in the moral psychology of anger, edited by myisha cherry and owen flanagan, 15–30. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. liebow, nabina, and trip glazer. 2023. “white tears: emotion regulation and white fragility.” inquiry 66 (1): 122–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174x.2019.16 10048. manne, kate. 2017. down girl: the logic of misogyny. oxford: oxford university press. mcrae, kateri, and james j. gross. 2020. “emotion regulation.” in “fundamental questions in emotion regulation,” special issue, emotion (washington, dc)20, no. 1 (february): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000703. oliver, kelly. 2004. “the affects of oppression.” in the colonization of psychic space: a psychoanalytic social theory of oppression, 87–100. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. villa – affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 rich, adrienne. 1979. “taking women students seriously.” in on lies, secrets, and silence: selected prose, 1966–1978, 237–46. new york: w. w. norton. roberts, tom. 2015. “emotional regulation and responsibility.” ethical theory and moral practice 18, no. 3 (june): 487–500. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677014-9535-7. roth, guy, maarten vansteenkiste, and richard m. ryan. 2019. “integrative emotion regulation: process and development from a self-determination theory perspective.” in “emotion dysregulation and emerging psychopathology,” special issue, development and psychopathology 31, no. 3 (august): 945–56. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954579419000403. schultermandl, silvia. 2022. “quick media feminisms and the affective worldmaking of hashtag activism.” in affective worldmaking: narrative counterpublics of gender and sexuality, edited by silvia schultermandl, jana aresin, si sophie pages whybrew, and dijana simić, 185–200. bielefeld, germany: transcript verlag. silva, laura. 2021. “anger and its desires.” european journal of philosophy 29, no. 4 (december): 1115–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12628. srinivasan, amia. 2018. “the aptness of anger.” journal of political philosophy 26, no. 2 (june): 123–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12130. táíwò, olúfẹ́mi o. 2020. “stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor.” feminist philosophy quarterly 6, no. 2. article 4. https://doi.org/10.5206/fpq /2020.2.8217. van schoelandt, chad. 2018. “moral accountability and social norms.” social philosophy & policy 35, no. 1 (summer): 217–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/s02 65052518000067. walker, margaret urban. 2013. “moral vulnerability and the task of reparations.” in vulnerability: new essays in ethics and feminist philosophy, edited by catriona mackenzie, wendy rogers and, susan dodds, 110–33. oxford: oxford university press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199316649.003.0005. whitney, shiloh. 2018. “byproductive labor: a feminist theory of affective labor beyond the productive–reproductive distinction.” philosophy & social criticism 44, no. 6 (july): 637–60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453717741934. young, iris marion. 1990. “five faces of oppression.” in justice and the politics of difference, 39–65. princeton, nj: princeton university press. katherine villa (she/her) is a phd candidate in philosophy at the university of miami and an arts, humanities and social sciences librarian at the university of california-davis. her research interests are in feminist philosophy and moral psychology, with current work focusing on affective injustice, psychological oppression, and moral responsibility. 101208 villa title page 101208 villa final format gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 2 article 4 recommended citation cohn, bobbi. 2025. “gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (2). article 4. 2025 gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good bobbi cohn austin community college shevacohn@gmail.com cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good bobbi cohn abstract gaslighters make their targets feel defective for possessing mental states to which they are entitled. this kind of deceptive manipulation is universally condemned as wrongful and destructive by philosophers and psychologists, as it destroys its target’s epistemic agency and psychological well-being and can be epistemically unjust. but these issues apply to gaslighting that is downward-facing—where the powerful gaslight the vulnerable—and gaslighting is not always like this. when the traditional power dynamic is reversed and a vulnerable agent gaslights her powerful oppressor to defend herself from being wronged, i call it gaslighting-up and argue that such behavior is morally permissible and epistemically valuable. it enables abuse victims to avoid harm and to resist the very epistemic domination that is caused by abusive gaslighting, enables marginalized agents to safely protest bigotry and avoid the kind of testimonial injustice that they would face from traditional epistemic gaslighting, and even epistemically benefits its dogmatic targets by giving them a healthy dose of epistemic humility. so, rather than condemning gaslighting as intrinsically, universally bad, we should take a nuanced view and consider it in the context of real-world power dynamics and the role it plays in reinforcing and destabilizing these. keywords: social epistemology, epistemic injustice, abuse, oppression, protest, epistemic humility, gaslighting 1. introduction1 you’re crazy. i would never do anything to hurt you—i love you! don’t get so worked up over nothing. he didn’t mean it. i’m sure you just forgot again. you can be careless with these things. 1 i am grateful to my referees for their valuable feedback, to jeanine rosen and geoffrey weiss for reading multiple drafts, and to jennifer lehmann for her engagement and help from the very inception of this project. and i am especially grateful to julia markovits and kate manne for their insightful, consistent support. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 gaslighting has a bad reputation, and for good reason. successful gaslighting imposes such significant self-doubt in its target that it undermines her status as a knower2—a grave epistemic wrong. it is also used as an emotionally abusive tool to reinforce misogyny and other forms of oppression and domination; so naturally it is universally condemned by feminist philosophers and psychologists who write on it. in a radical departure from this literature, i argue that at least one kind of gaslighting can be good. when oppressed agents gaslight their oppressors, the gaslighting functions as a strategic defense against being wronged. i call this phenomenon gaslighting-up and here defend its moral and epistemic value. after some brief background on gaslighting, i explain the basics of how gaslighting-up works in section 3. in section 4, i argue that gaslighting-up can help abuse victims defend themselves against physical harm and against the very psychological and epistemic harms that gaslighting tends to cause. further, because gaslighting-up is a way to resist being undermined as a knower, it is in accordance with a duty of self-respect, and it can even exhibit virtues of care when it is done in defense of others. in section 5, i suggest that gaslighting-up can also be good in cases of social oppression, for two particularly surprising reasons. first, instead of undermining its target as a knower, as gaslighting usually does, i argue that gaslighting-up in these cases actually treats its targets as knowers who are capable of epistemic virtue. second, although gaslighting is often rightly condemned as a testimonial injustice, gaslighting-up can be a strategy that members of marginalized groups use to preserve their credibility and avoid testimonial injustice. finally, in section 6, i address the worry that even if gaslighting-up confers all the benefits that i discuss, the costs of gaslighting-up for the gaslighter are still too high for the behavior to be valuable. if my arguments are correct, the larger point is that not all gaslighting is bad, and rather than condemning all gaslighting, we should take a more nuanced view and consider it in the context of real-world power dynamics and the role it can play in reinforcing and destabilizing these dynamics. 2. gaslighting gaslighting is a particular way of deceiving someone by manipulating her into doubting herself. on kate manne’s (2023, 137) definition, it occurs when the target is “made to feel defective in certain fundamental ways—either morally or rationally— for harboring mental states to which they are entitled. these include warranted 2 when speaking generally, i follow the convention of using gendered language to refer to victims and perpetrators of gaslighting and abuse, which reflects the. but gaslighting and abuse are perpetrated and experienced by people of all genders, as i will emphasize. cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 beliefs and perceptions, valid desires and intentions, fitting feelings and attitudes, and so on.” i adopt manne’s position and define successful gaslighting with reference to these two features, where gaslighters (1) reference flaws in their targets (either real or imagined) in ways that make their targets feel radically defective (2) for having mental states to which they are entitled. notably, all that is required in this context for one to be entitled to certain beliefs is that they are “capable of being supported by the evidence,” as cynthia stark (2019, 233n19) says. one of the advantages of manne’s account is that it is broad enough to accommodate a wide range of commonsense cases and to explain what unifies the disparate kinds of gaslighting that other theorists discuss as gaslighting, rather than leaving them as unconnected manipulative tactics.3 for instance, some gaslighting is rightly condemned as a pattern of sustained abuse, and theorists who focus on this sort tend to characterize it by its having certain destructive aims (abramson 2014) or manipulative intentions (stark 2019; pohlhaus 2020; sodoma 2022), which can either be conscious or unconscious. other gaslighting is rightly condemned as a pernicious form of testimonial injustice, to use miranda fricker’s (2007) term,4 and theorists tend to characterize it not by particular aims or intentions but by its mechanisms (ivy 2017; berenstain 2020; podosky 2021; engelhardt 2023). despite their differences, many, if not all, of these accounts of gaslighting do meet manne’s two basic conditions, and many philosophers working in both traditions also state outright that they do not take themselves to be characterizing gaslighting generally, just a particular kind of it (e.g., ivy 2017, 168; stark 2019, 222; pohlhaus 2020, 674–75; engelhardt 2023, 2–3). as a result, we may think of manne’s account as explaining the broader nature of gaslighting, and as a base on which various rich accounts about particular kinds of gaslighting can be fit. the particular kind of gaslighting that i am introducing — gaslighting-up—also fits manne’s broad model, so although gaslighting-up can be very 3 this breadth is not an accident: part of manne’s aim in her paper is to give an account of gaslighting broad enough to capture what she calls epistemic gaslighting and moral gaslighting—i.e., to capture both gaslighting that locates rational defects and gaslighting that locates character defects. the examples listed at the start of this paper are classic examples of epistemic gaslighting, and moral gaslighting occurs, for example, when someone is made to feel ashamed or like a “bitch” for being unforgiving, even though she is entitled to withhold forgiveness (see manne 2023, 124n2, 142–43). 4 testimonial injustice occurs when “a speaker receives an unfair deficit of credibility from a hearer owing to prejudice on the hearer's part” (fricker 2007, online abstract). of course, one’s testimony can be denied credibility in many ways (like merely being ignored), but undermining testimony through gaslighting often involves a deep betrayal of trust (ivy 2017; spear 2023). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 different from established forms of gaslighting, it is still fundamentally the same kind of phenomenon. whichever definition of gaslighting one adopts, it is clear that there are multiple ways for an agent to phrase his gaslighting. many instances of gaslighting take the form of what i will call outright rejections. outright rejections occur when the gaslighter denies that the target’s warranted mental states have any basis in reality and instead attributes her testimony to some defect in her (see stark 2019, 227). examples include, “no, that didn’t happen. you were too drunk to remember,” and “he would never say that. you must have misheard him!” gaslighting can also occur as what i will call interpretive rejections, where the gaslighter rejects the target’s interpretation of events, rather than outright rejecting the existence of the events themselves—saying, for example, “i know he said that, but it was just a joke. don’t be so sensitive.” outright rejections and interpretive rejections often occur separately, but they are not mutually exclusive. they come together in assertions such as: “he never said that, but honestly, that would have been funny. don’t take yourself so seriously.” one of the reasons gaslighting is condemned by psychologists and philosophers alike is because of the particular harm that it causes (stern 2007; abramson 2014; stark 2019). when it is fully successful, the target suffers considerable psychological and epistemic harm from internalizing the accusations of her gaslighter, as she comes to believe that she is fundamentally defective somehow—that she is “crazy,” paranoid, humorless, and so on. internalizing these accusations involves not just doubting things about the world but doubting one’s abilities to accurately perceive the world—and often, doubting not just one’s interpretive ability but the accuracy of one’s concepts altogether (podosky 2021). internalizing such radical kinds of self-doubt means doubting that one can be a genuine source of knowledge or engage in epistemic practices—such as disagreement and the sharing of testimony—as rational knowers do. generally, though, we are rational knowers who can so engage, and having a sense of oneself as such is an important part of our self-esteem and well-being. thus gaslighting epistemically wrongs its target, even when it is not a testimonial injustice, because it undermines its target’s status as a knower (abramson 2014; podosky 2021; engelhardt 2023; manne 2023). the way gaslighting functions to fundamentally undermine its target sets it apart as an especially harmful and disrespectful form of both deception and manipulation. when run-of-the-mill liars—as opposed to gaslighters—deceive and manipulate, they do this by appearing to reason with their targets in respectful, normal ways. this is, of course, not what gaslighters do. in cases of gaslighting, the targets are not treated like knowers to be (deceptively) reasoned with, but are instead deceived by being fundamentally undermined. additionally, where manipulation cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 functions merely to impact its target’s behavior, gaslighting functions to impact its target fundamentally by undermining her very thoughts and feelings (stark 2019; manne 2023, 143n24). undermining someone this way is a psychological and emotional form of abuse, partly because its basic function is to control its target’s thoughts and feelings, and partly because there are some significant psychological harms associated with being undermined as a knower, including disorientation, depression, feelings of inadequacy, isolation, and self-hate (stark 2019, 230; stern 2007). gaslighting is also a misogynistic form of abuse when it relies on sexist tropes—ones that connect irrationality, weakness, and hypersensitivity to femininity—and when it is used to punish and control women. this in turn further normalizes and perpetuates these misogynistic practices and sexist beliefs, particularly when the gaslighting is fully successful and the targets internalize the sexist beliefs, norms, and so on (stark 2019; manne 2023). overall, gaslighting as manne and others describe it is prima facie distinct from (and worse than) other forms of manipulation and deception in at least three ways: (1) gaslighting wrongs and disrespects agents by treating them as fundamentally defective and irrational, which (2) tends to cause real harm to the target’s well-being and sense of self, and (3) is a form of misogynistic emotional abuse. while i agree that (1), (2), and (3) are true most of the time, in the following limited defense i introduce a kind of gaslighting that can be viewed more positively: as a permissible, even praiseworthy, tool of defense and protest that vulnerable agents—the quintessential victims of gaslighting—can use against their abusers, gaslighters, and oppressors. 3. gaslighting-up to defend gaslighting, the first step is to emphasize that there can be nuance in the gaslighting power dynamic. the gaslighter is not always powerful, and the target is not always powerless. yes, successful gaslighting requires “a power differential between the gaslighter and his target. . . . a gaslighter, qua manipulator, cannot undermine one’s confidence in one’s judgments unless one is in some way invested in what the manipulator believes,” as stark argues (2019, 223). but while it is true that gaslighters must be granted some minimal credibility and standing in order to successfully gaslight, calling the sway that gaslighters have with their targets a power differential can be misleading, especially when done alongside arguments that detail the misogynistic, abusive elements of gaslighting, or alongside arguments that detail the social power imbalance inherent in gaslighting that is testimonial injustice. the emphasis of these elements together can suggest that gaslighters generally have considerable power over their target, but in reality we often attribute credibility in some narrow domains while withholding it in others: i trust my doctor to do the doctoring, and my shoemaker to do the shoemaking, but not the other way around. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 in fact, even when a relationship is vastly unequal in its power dynamic, the more vulnerable party is often granted some limited standing and credibility in narrow domains. as a result, under the right circumstances, a child can gaslight an adult and a woman can gaslight a violently misogynistic, domineering man. in the latter case, this kind of man is likely to grant credibility—even a credibility excess, as emmalon davis (2016) argues—to women in the severely restricted, typecast sphere of “feminine domains,” which may include cooking, housekeeping, and so on. the wife of such a man can gaslight him in those matters, because of the (perhaps undue) standing afforded to her in a gender-based way. while technically the wife has some power or credibility in these domains, it is only granted to her insofar as it is a limited, precarious standing—she is expected to know only in accordance with sexist stereotypes. not only is the credibility granted in narrow domains not indicative of the overall power dynamic in the relationship, this husband-wife case shows that granting credibility in severely limited and prejudicial ways can be indicative of a dynamic where the person granting the credibility is the one with the power, all things considered. when the oppressed gaslight their oppressors, i call it gaslighting-up. its characteristic function is to defend vulnerable agents from genuine wronging—to defend or promote their agency or dignity. many instances of gaslighting-up can look exactly the same as instances of abusive gaslighting, on paper, isolated from broader features concerning the relevant power dynamics and context. for example, we can imagine both an abuser and an abuse victim using the quintessential gaslighting phrases listed at the start of this paper: “you’re crazy. i would never do anything to hurt you—i love you!”; “don’t get so worked up over nothing. he didn’t mean it”; and “i’m sure you just forgot again. you can be careless with these things.” despite the superficial similarities, these two kinds of gaslighting are very different, and they can be distinguished by looking at the power dynamic and the relational context under which the gaslighting occurs. abusers often gaslight in a destructive pattern of consolidating power and control over their target (abramson 2014, 19), but when victims gaslight-up abusers, they are using their limited credibility to disrupt this control. as punching-up is a tool to subvert and thus resist unjust power dynamics through humor (schwartz 2016), gaslighting-up is a tool to subvert and resist unjust dynamics through deception. 4. defense two guiding literary cases, both concerning abusive parents and their children, will help showcase how gaslighting-up can be morally good. the first case, from mark twain’s adventures of huckleberry finn, is an example of how gaslighting-up acts as a defense against physical violence. the other, from roald dahl’s matilda, illustrates cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 two surprising benefits of gaslighting-up: it can improve the behavior of abusers and it can epistemically empower abuse victims. 4.a. defending against physical violence here is the relevant incident from huck finn: “git up! what you ’bout?” i opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where i was. it was after sun-up, and i had been sound asleep. pap was standing over me looking sour and sick, too. he says: “what you doin’ with this gun?” i judged he didn’t know nothing about what he had been doing, so i says: “somebody tried to get in, so i was laying for him.” “why didn’t you roust me out?” “well, i tried to, but i couldn’t; i couldn’t budge you.” “well, all right. don’t stand there palavering all day, but out with you and see if there’s a fish on the lines for breakfast. i’ll be along in a minute.” (twain 1885, ch. 7) in this passage, huck is using deception to strategically protect himself from being violently attacked—to defend and maintain his physical agency. he does this by taking advantage of the fact that his abusive, alcoholic father, pap, does not remember what occurred the night before: namely, pap threatening to kill huck in a deeply frightening way, such that huck grabbed a gun to protect himself after pap eventually passed out drunk. huck did aim the gun at pap, and intended to shoot if attacked again, so if pap is suspicious and angry that he was just in danger, those mental states are justified. to undermine these justified mental states, huck tells a story about a stranger and indicates that pap’s heavy sleeping—and by implication, his heavy drinking—is the defect at the root of pap’s current confusion. even if huck is undermining pap’s justified mental states, one might worry that it is still just a common lie that does not pick out a significant rational or moral defect. but referencing intoxication, even indirectly, is a way to deny credibility. gaslighters may insist their targets cannot really remember their experiences or insist that they are not in their right minds and cannot understand what is currently happening to them. britney spears, frances farmer, and judy garland are just a few famous targets of this behavior.5 we can also see that huck’s deception is gaslighting because it is 5 such gaslighting also occurs in literature, including one flew over the cuckoo's nest (kesey 1962) and the girl on the train (hawkins 2015). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 done via the classic gaslighting structure of an interpretive rejection. huck does not deny that he took the gun, but he insists on a false interpretation of the situation by locating a relevant defect. these features together make this behavior an attempt at gaslighting, and in huck’s case the gaslighting is successful, for it instills enough doubt in pap that he decides not to assault huck. in huck’s case, we see how gaslighting-up can defend against an immediate threat of physical abuse, and this is often how gaslighting is used by real abuse victims. in fact, gaslighting-up is an overlooked but crucial form of what researchers on abuse call safety planning. any element of an abuse victim’s practical, personal plan to prepare for and protect against abuse counts as her safety planning, and it can occur while she is living with her abuser, or after she has escaped (wood, glass, and decker 2021; mcfarlane et al. 2004; sabri et al. 2021). safety-planning behaviors include removing weapons from the home and gathering money, clothing, extra keys, and important documents (mcfarlane et al. 2004, 41–42). generally, safety planning includes all sorts of “strategies that increase women’s safety by increasing situational awareness of ipv [intimate partner violence]-related risks and empowering women with necessary skills to enhance safety” (sabri et al. 2021, 1730), and this means that “both overt and covert resistance strategies can be used . . . to minimize harm and gain control over the situation” (wood, glass, and decker 2021, 69). gaslighting-up is a covert resistance strategy that victims of abuse use to avoid harm and gain some control in a dangerous situation, as evidenced in huck finn, so gaslighting-up should be considered a legitimate form of safety planning. not only is gaslighting-up its own kind of safety planning, but if any long-term safety planning is to succeed, it will likely be because the abuse victim deceives her abuser, often through gaslighting. ideally, safety planning will proceed unnoticed by the abuser, but if any safety-planning behaviors—gathering clothing, keys, documents, and so on—make an abuser suspicious, the victim should, for her own safety, try to convince him that his (correct) suspicion is wrong, that she has not made plans to leave him even though she has begun that process. she may say: “i donated those clothes last spring. you’re busy with more important things though, so i can understand why you don’t remember”; “i don’t know why the passports aren’t in that cabinet. are you sure you put them there?6 i love you but you do have a habit of leaving things about”; or “please don’t be so paranoid. i just made an extra key for the babysitter.” i imagine that this kind of gaslighting-up is incredibly common in contexts of domestic abuse, and i hope that instead of vilifying victims’ behavior because it 6 this example also illustrates how gaslighting-up can co-occur with other kinds of deceptive resistance to oppression—in this case, alison bailey’s (2007) strategic ignorance. i discuss some of these strategies’ similarities in section 6. cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 appears to be problematic gaslighting, we understand it as a form of safety planning— as a desperate attempt by victims to keep themselves safe while in abusive relationships and while they are trying to exit them.7 4.b. defending against gaslighting when gaslighting-up is used for defense and safety planning, it also comes with another, subtler benefit: gaslighting-up helps abuse victims maintain their epistemic agency and thus psychologically defend against abusive gaslighting. i will use dahl’s character matilda to show this, as she engages in gaslighting-up that explicitly serves this function: “oh my gawd!” yelled the father, staring into the little mirror. “what’s happened to me! . . . how did it happen?” he stared round the room, first at the mother, then at the son, then at matilda. “how could it have happened?” he yelled. “i imagine, daddy,” matilda said quietly, “that you weren’t looking very hard and you simply took mummy’s bottle of hair stuff off the shelf instead of your own.” “of course that’s what happened!” the mother cried. “well really, harry, how stupid can you get? why didn’t you read the label before you started splashing the stuff all over you!” (dahl 1988, 75–76) in this passage, matilda’s abusive father, harry wormwood, realizes that his naturally dark hair is now blonde, and his (correct) instinct is that he could never have done this to himself. matilda then gaslights her father by making him and others believe that this is the result of his own carelessness—a rational defect—instead of revealing what really occurred: matilda herself poured peroxide into her father’s hair tonic bottle. in fact, matilda systematically gaslights both her abusive parents throughout the book, and we are told why by dahl: she resented being told constantly that she was ignorant and stupid when she knew she wasn’t. the anger inside her went on boiling and boiling, and as she lay in bed that night she made a decision. she decided that every time her father or her mother was beastly to her, she would get her own back in some way or another. a small victory or two would help her tolerate their idiocies and would stop her from 7 for instance, i take gaslighting-up to have been vilified and used against an abuse victim in the way that the public responded to the depp v. heard trials, where reactive violence, generally, was viewed as abusive violence. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 going crazy. you must remember that she was still hardly five years old and it is not easy for somebody as small as that to score points against an all-powerful grown-up. even so, she was determined to have a go. (dahl 1988, 25; my emphasis) in this passage, we see that matilda’s deception “stop[s] her from going crazy” from her parents’ abusive gaslighting toward her—such as them constantly telling matilda that she’s ignorant and stupid. while the wormwoods’ manipulative gaslighting is unsuccessful insofar as they have not manipulated matilda into believing that she is unintelligent, it is successful insofar as they have already caused matilda to experience some of the associated psychological and emotional harms of being gaslit, including feeling helpless, frustrated, isolated, and at least in some sense, like she is “going crazy.”8 that matilda is psychologically harmed by gaslighting, even if it has not yet radically undermined her sense of being a knower, reflects how abusive, manipulative gaslighting is often a pattern of behavior over time that slowly breaks down its victim’s sense of self (stark 2019, 231). in response to the abusive gaslighting, matilda herself begins to engage in a pattern of behavior similar to jack manningham’s in patrick hamilton’s (1939) play gas light. in hamilton’s play, jack consistently tries to undermine his wife bella’s sense of being a knower. one way that he does this, in the case that originated the term gaslight, is by denying that the gas-run lamps in their home dim in the evenings, despite bella witnessing them dim. alongside this outright rejection, jack systematically changes things around their home and pins these changes on bella, even going so far as to hurt their dog and say that she did it. he gaslights bella about these changes by means of an interpretive rejection, as jack does not reject the fact that items are moved or broken but does reject bella’s (correct) view regarding that fact, that she really had nothing to do with these changes. this, and the imposition of jack’s own (false) interpretation of events, is what makes bella feel confused in these cases and like she cannot trust herself and her memory (hamilton 1939, 33–34). jack has a convoluted reason for his behavior, but as manne says, “the cruelty is partly the point for him” (2023, 126; citing serwer 2018). all this is similar to what we see from matilda: she systematically changes the environment around her family’s home in confusing, startling ways, then gaslights her parents about these changes, usually through interpretive rejections. after all, she does not deny that her father’s hair has changed, but she does reject his instinct that he would never make such a mistake. by attributing defects to her parents and suggesting (false) interpretations of their 8 there is also much to say on the ableist dimension of gaslighting and the ableism of the term “crazy,” and i am developing an account of this ableism in a separate project (also see manne 2020, ch. 8; 2023, 124n1; bailey 2020). cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 experiences, matilda repeatedly convinces her parents that their (warranted) confusion is unwarranted, and she undoubtedly takes great pleasure in the epistemic unmooring that her gaslighting causes. the satisfaction that matilda derives from her deception reflects how gaslighting can promote the deceiver's self confidence in her epistemic abilities. like so many other strategies of manipulation or deception, gaslighting involves controlling epistemic goods and narratives, and this brings its own sense of power and satisfaction for the deceiver, sometimes called “duping delight” (see, for instance, ekman 1985; spidel et al. 2011; gunderson et al. 2022). but unlike other manipulative and deceptive acts—such as strategic ignorance (bailey 2007) and deception by omission—gaslighting itself occurs through insisting upon one’s epistemic abilities and maintaining one’s credibility or expertise—it is constituted by acting like a knower through interpretive rejections or outright rejections. when someone gaslights and labels some feature in her target as a defect and successfully pushes her perspective, she is practicing maintaining her independent epistemic standpoint and showing herself that she is capable of that, and this means gaslighting can boost the confidence of the gaslighter. this confidence boost is usually bad, but not in cases of gaslighting-up. in traditional cases of gaslighting (gaslighting-down), the positive feelings that gaslighters receive from controlling epistemic goods and narratives are problematic because they further entrench the gaslighter’s unjust sense of entitlement and tendency to privilege their own perspectives (ivy 2017, 169). but when abuse victims gaslight-up, the visceral reinforcement of their core abilities is a good thing, as it shows them that they are capable of acting independently and resisting epistemic domination from their abusers. this is a crucial benefit: such empowerment and self-confidence are exactly what the clinical literature advises real victims of abuse and gaslighting to aim for in their recovery. for instance, psychologist amanda avera encourages victims of gaslighting to “trust yourself and think of your strengths and positive qualities often. this will help to remind you that you are strong and capable. no one can control your thoughts and behaviors unless you let them” (avera 2023; see also stern 2007; fuchsman, 2019; herman 1998). when an abuse victim gaslights her abuser, she is doing just what avera recommends: trusting herself and proving to herself that she can think and act independently of her abuser—that she is epistemically strong and capable. this is true even for abuse victims like huck, who are not consciously aiming to psychologically benefit when they gaslight-up. all successful instances of gaslighting-up one’s abusive gaslighter defend the abuse victim's epistemic agency and help them psychologically endure through their abuse. matilda’s gaslighting-up also impacts the behavior of its targets, subtly and temporarily improving her abusive family’s treatment of her: feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 [matilda’s] safety-valve, the thing that prevented her from going round the bend, was the fun of devising and dishing out these splendid punishments, and the lovely thing was that they seemed to work, at any rate for short periods. the father in particular became less cocky and unbearable for several days after receiving a dose of matilda’s magic medicine. the parrot-in-the-chimney affair quite definitely cooled both parents down a lot and for over a week they were comparatively civil to their small daughter. (dahl 1988, 45) matilda’s deception makes her parents behave better because their abusive behavior, like all abuse, is partly the result of an entrenched sense of entitlement and selfimportance within the abuser (manne 2020). gaslighting-up can help reduce abusive behavior because being troubled by self-doubt (i.e., being successfully gaslit) necessarily dampens one’s confidence in one’s worldview and self-conception. after all, it is difficult to act entitled, tyrannical, self-important, and, as dahl says, “cocky and unbearable” when one is actually disoriented and brimming with self-doubt. in other words, abusers who are shaken from their entrenched sense of self-importance become less inclined to treat in bad faith, exploit, or run roughshod over those under their power, since those behaviors stem from self-importance and entitlement.9 this result of gaslighting-up is practically significant: even if the improvement is subtle, temporary, or limited to narrow domains, every slight reprieve from abuse matters for the health and safety of the victim. empirical work supports this; for example, in a 2021 study, shannon wood and coauthors link intimate partner violence to a broad range of health issues in victims and suggest that “mitigating repeat injuries and minimizing the impact of chronic stress should be a top priority for prevention and response programs” (wood, glass, and decker 2021, 68; see also hulley et al. 2023). when matilda gaslights-up, it helps her minimize her chronic stress and mitigate repeat offenses and injuries; so her gaslighting-up, like huck’s, is a useful form of safety planning. it may seem that gaslighting-up would be a better defense, a more useful form of safety planning, if it characteristically caused lasting improvements in abusive situations. practically this may be true, but one reason that gaslighting-up should be distinguished from other forms of gaslighting is that it does not tend to lead to prolonged or universal self-doubt in its targets. gaslighting-up avoids this because 9 of course, many abusers do have low levels of self-esteem—e.g., those with covert narcissism or borderline personality disorder. my point holds though, because low self-esteem often coexists with a high sense of self-importance (kandola and gepp 2023). cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 abusers qua abusers already have such deeply entrenched habits of dogmatically centering themselves and dominating others that the impacts of subtle gaslightingup are not likely to last long enough or make a deep enough or broad enough impression that would stably or universally change abusers’ characters and behavior. this is what we see with matilda’s parents: her pattern of gaslighting-up boosts her self-confidence and affords her temporary respite from her parents’ abuse and neglect, but it does not implant the kind of longstanding, pernicious psychological distress and self-doubt that systematic gaslighting is usually thought to implant in its target. while this means gaslighting-up may not be a realistic way to permanently or universally transform the character and behavior of an abuser, it also means gaslighting-up an abuser is typically minimally harmful to its target, with little, if any, lasting psychological damage. 4.c. defending others gaslighting-up can also be done in defense of others. this can happen when a victimized parent protects her child from the abusive parent, or when older siblings protect younger siblings. for instance, if a child honestly tells his abusive father that he hates him, the mother might attempt to diffuse the abuser’s anger and protect her son from harm by making the abuser doubt his justified belief that the child meant what he said. to do this, she may say, “don’t take it seriously; that’s just how angsty kids are! of course junior loves you. we’re so grateful for everything you do for us.” when gaslighting-up is done in defense of others like this, it is particularly valuable. it is still an accessible tool for vulnerable agents to defend or reclaim justified agency and dignity, and it is still minimally harmful to its target; but additionally it exhibits selflessness and care, as it is done in an attempt to shield others who are vulnerable to harm when they cannot shield themselves, even though that attempt increases one’s own risk of serious harm. when gaslighting-up in defense of others reflects these virtues, it is not just permissible but admirable and praiseworthy. it takes a minimal commitment to care for oneself in order to stand in one’s own rightful defense, too. specifically, gaslighting-up in self-defense exhibits virtuous self-respect because it enables a victim of abusive gaslighting to maintain a proper sense of herself as a rational agent, and, as rae langton puts it, “respect her own person . . . abjuring the vice of servility” (2012, 385; on self-regarding virtue, see also taylor and wolfram 1968; massey 1983; bloomfield 2011). this again highlights that while successful gaslighting generally functions to make its targets servile, successful gaslighting-up functions to help gaslit and oppressed agents resist and shed servility. given this, even neo-kantians may agree that gaslighting-up in self-defense is good (hill 1973; langton 2012; terlazzo 2020). so far, i have argued that it is morally good and practically valuable for abuse victims to gaslight their abusers. it is an effective form of safety planning against feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 potentially grave physical harm and against cumulative epistemic and psychological harm, where it rebuilds abuse victims’ confidence in their epistemic abilities. what’s more, gaslighting-up can even exhibit virtues of self-respect and care. 5. protest i suggest in this section that gaslighting-up can also be valuable and good when it is used to protest social prejudice and injustice. in this kind of gaslighting-up, like the kind used to combat abuse, the gaslighter is a victim of oppression, and the target is a perpetrator. in these cases, though, the gaslighter is a vulnerable, marginalized agent—a victim of systemic oppression because of her identity—and the oppressive agent or dominant group that she is gaslighting has power over her insofar as they facilitate or perpetuate her oppressed status. additionally, the agent who gaslights-up in protest is protesting not just because she is looking for a way to reject the true assertions, justified beliefs, accurate perceptions, or other mental states to which her target is entitled, but also because she sees that her target is making his assertions and forming his perceptual judgments in bad faith or with bad intentions. as a result, the gaslighter refuses to engage in a good faith, honest conversation. she already knows it would go nowhere. the following “gaydar” case serves as a guiding example of this kind of gaslighting-up. a homophobe attends a pride parade in bad faith, with the intent to harass the parade-goers and stoke her own bigotry; while there, she sees a man dressed in revealing clothing and infers from this perception that he is queer. her inference is correct in this case: the man is queer. further, he had dressed in a visibly queer style with the intention of telegraphing that he is queer to others in the community, hoping to make positive connections, express pride in his identity, and so on. this means that when the bigot forms her belief that the man is queer, she has a justified and true belief—arguably even knowledge. the man she is observing is queer, and his intentionally telegraphed indications of that are not being misread by the bigot in this instance. next, the bigot acts on her belief. she shouts at the man, “you queers should have the decency to dress decently in public at least.” the target then responds by denying the truth of the bigot’s (true) assertion that he is queer, and treating the bigot’s inferential abilities in this domain with contemptuous skepticism and derision by saying, “you’re insane. you think you can read my sexuality off how i’m dressed? at a pride event, no less? please. for your information, i’m actually a straight father of three. and there’s nothing indecent about what i’m wearing. get a grip.” cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 we can tell this case is an instance of gaslighting, as the agent attempts to undermine the bigot’s justified belief (that he is queer)10 by locating a rational defect in her (calling her insane), and combining an outright rejection (the denial that he is queer) with an interpretive rejection (the denial that his clothing should be interpreted as inappropriate). 5.a. educational benefit notably, while the defensive gaslighting-up discussed in section 3 does not require a radically destructive aim where the gaslighter genuinely aims for the target to take themselves to be crazy,11 the gaslighting-up at issue here does involve this destructive aim, at least to an extent. the point of the queer agent in the “gaydar” example engaging in a gaslighting response is not merely to make the bigot think that her gaydar is unreliable, but to make her feel ridiculous for thinking she could rely on it. put another way, this gaslighting-up makes the bigot doubt both her interpretive abilities and the accuracy of her concepts (podosky 2021). undermining bigots like this is actually a good thing for them. concerning phenomena such as someone else’s sexuality or gender, people are benefited epistemically and morally when they are discouraged from thinking of themselves as competent knowers. despite the stereotypes, these statuses are often invisible, private, and knowable only through the first-person perspective or testimony. someone who puts her faith in stereotypes will thus tend to have undue confidence in her beliefs about how to read others. when bad actors are overly confident concerning the private statuses and first-person perspectives of others—even when they are correct in a particular instance—what they need is a healthy dose of epistemic humility, which is “both a disposition to embrace others as partners in cognitive activity and an awareness of our own ignorance and limitations,” as scholar nicolas bommarito (2018, sec. 4.3) says. possessing epistemic humility about private statuses is particularly good for us, in a socratic sense, as it paves the way for a richer understanding of these statuses (see de brasi and boeri 2023) and reduces one’s reliance on stereotypes. in turn, this reduces the quantity of one’s bad, prejudiced inferences and reduces one’s unwarranted confidence in those kinds of inferences. so, ideally the homophobe will come away from the conversation with the realization that she cannot infer someone’s sexuality from how they immediately present themselves. she will think, “maybe it really is crazy to believe i have a gaydar. i guess i just can’t understand this new generation.” when the bigot loses confidence like this, she comes to understand sexuality better than before—at least, she 10 the homophobe’s belief is “justified” in that it is supported by the evidence (stark 2019, 233n19). 11 matilda has a version of this aim, but huck does not. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 understands that she cannot perceive it and that it is foolish to think that she can. it is good for her to believe this even if her “gaydar” is mostly accurate and, in this particular instance, is reflecting reality and is rationally justified, because the bigot’s broad tendency to be confident in her prejudiced inferences stands in her way of a better, more fine-grained understanding of both sexuality and fashion. for instance, she won't be led to the false judgment that all the skater boys with long hair and painted nails are queer.12 moreover, this person owes it to others not to make stereotypical and offensive assumptions about their sexuality, and she certainly owes it to them not to make morally inexcusable inferences and be grossly disrespectful on the basis of said traits (whether real or imaginary) (basu 2019). still, there is a mean: the gaslighting-up in the gaydar example is not meant to be universal, where it would make the bigot doubt her epistemic abilities overall, such as her ability to perceive a joke or a slight, or infer appropriately in other domains. instead, it aims to undermine radically but locally. we naturally grant credibility in some domains and not others, so this may seem like an uninteresting, mild aim.13 recall from section 2, though, that this is also the aim in some cases of abuse, where perpetrators want their victims to be competent in some domains but want to undermine them fundamentally in others (davis 2016). in contrast to both the insignificant and the problematic cases, this aim, of radically but narrowly undermining one’s target, is praiseworthy when applied to a case of gaslighting-up as protest, because the local self-doubt that is instilled in bigots is an instrumental epistemic harm, done in part so that those bigots can achieve the greater epistemic good of domain-specific epistemic humility. because gaslighting-up bigots fosters epistemic humility, it is ultimately a way of treating its target as a knower. producing a better epistemic state in one’s target need not be a conscious aim in the mind of the gaslighter; it is a feature of gaslightingup that it functions to radically humble and undermine its target in some narrow domain—or, put more positively, that it treats its targets as knowers capable of achieving epistemic virtue. 5.b. testimonial benefit perhaps the most important benefit of gaslighting-up as protest is that it preserves and promotes the standing of marginalized agents, as sometimes it is only possible for marginalized agents to be treated as knowers by those around them when they conceal their identity. being honest would just result in being stripped of 12 i’m grateful to nicholas silins for this example of fashion trends that may signal queerness in some social contexts (such as pride events) but not in others (skate parks). 13 recall the doctor and shoemaker example from section 3 that illustrates this. cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 their credibility. for example, we can imagine that the homophobe would write off the queer agent’s testimony if she thought that he was queer when he was rebuking her. this is not just because confirming the homophobe’s inference by being honest further entrenches the homophobe’s confidence in that kind of inference, but because the queer agent’s testimony will simply not be taken seriously once the homophobe learns that he is queer, in a classic case of testimonial injustice. because gaslighting-up in protest maintains the vulnerable agent’s credibility in the eyes of the bigot, it is one way that vulnerable agents can safely plant epistemic flags, stand their ground as knowers, engage in the world as knowers do, and thus maintain their dignity and credibility in their own eyes as epistemic agents. gaslighting-up is one of several strategies of epistemic flag-planting for marginalized agents to resist oppression,14 and when used this way, it helps marginalized agents to maintain their credibility and avoid the testimonial injustice that they would otherwise be subject to through behaviors like epistemic gaslighting (ivy 2017; berenstain 2020; pohlhaus 2020; podosky 2021; engelhardt 2023). all this is to say that gaslighting-up in protest functions simultaneously to defend against bigots, to open a space for them to doubt themselves and improve themselves as epistemic agents, and to preserve—perhaps even promote—the credibility of the oppressed gaslighter.15 what’s more, gaslighting-up can be used by oppressed agents to benefit those who are in an even worse position, similar to how gaslighting-up can be used to defend third parties in situations of interpersonal abuse. but in the context of social prejudice, this kind of gaslighting-up exhibits solidarity in shared vulnerability and oppression, and it exhibits valuable allyship toward the most vulnerable, as it requires that the gaslighting agents recognize they have been granted something that not all oppressed agents have: limited credibility and standing in the eyes of their oppressors.16 so although “allies” do tend to behave badly when they gaslight (ivy 2017), they behave well when they gaslight-up. 14 as i discuss in section 6, which strategy (if any) is appropriate in any given circumstance will depend on the details of those circumstances and agents. 15 thanks to reviewer 2 for the suggestion to emphasize this discussion. 16 for instance, this kind of gaslighting-up can happen when women at a bar say that they’re friends with an extremely intoxicated young woman (who is in fact a stranger to them) so that she is not taken into a car by a creepy guy who was insisting that he would drive her home. for example, see this untitled mobile-phone video, posted october 21, 2024, by “delululittlepsycho,” to tiktok, (1 min., 55 sec.): https://www.tik tok.com/t/zt2fw3gce/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 6. objections even if gaslighting-up can do all i have said, it may still come with costs to the gaslighters. the two i address here are the psychological costs associated with gaslighting-up as a strategy for protesting bigotry, and the vices associated with it as a kind of safety planning. 6.a. psychological costs we should not be flippant about how psychologically harmful it can be to deny a personal status that one possesses. deceptive strategies of survival and resistance will all involve such risks, though. whether the particular strategy is code-switching (haugen 1956; see also young 2009), strategic ignorance (bailey 2007), gaslightingup, or some other kind of deception, there is a risk that it will foster a negative selfconception and double consciousness. such deceptive strategies all require marginalized agents to present “themselves as they are not in order to protect other aspects of themselves that are important,” which inevitably comes with risks of selfalienation (bailey 2007, 89). but until marginalized agents do not need to protect important aspects of themselves, they must continue to make this cost-benefit analysis and decide which parts of themselves to protect and prioritize. gaslightingup in protest involves a version of this trade off, where it helps marginalized agents preserve an important aspect of themselves—their standing and credibility as knowers—even though preserving this aspect is done by denying their marginalized identity. still, it is important that the deception in service of gaslighting-up bigots tends to be temporally limited and for a specific purpose. it does not characteristically require a prolonged suppression of one’s statuses or identities,17 so it is less likely to foster alienation and its associated psychological harms, such as shame or a sense of 17 however, one real-life case of extended gaslighting-up bigots may be the case of ron stallworth, a black police officer in colorado springs who led a successful investigation into the ku klux klan for several months in 1978 and “made a fool of david duke” (stallworth 2018) by gaining official membership to the klan, and even “befriending” the klan’s grand wizard at the time, the neo-nazi david duke, with whom stallworth would have phone calls multiple times a week. stallworth managed all this by posing as a racist and anti-semitic white man on the phone with duke, and having a white officer play his role at physical events. this situation is also an example of gaslighting-up being employed alongside other deceptive strategies to maintain one’s credibility and engage with bigots, as in this case, stallworth sometimes gaslitup in order to maintain his cover if his code-switching over the phone ever faltered. this behavior is depicted in spike lee’s (2018) film blackkklansman, which is based on stallworth’s experiences. cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 isolation, than deceptive strategies that persist over long periods of time, like a pattern of code-switching in one’s school and place of work (young 2009). additionally, agents who gaslight-up can simultaneously maintain an active, positive inner dialogue about their identities that will reduce the psychological risks associated with gaslighting-up. for instance, the queer agent from may gaslight the homophobe while simultaneously stressing to himself that there is nothing shameful about being queer or dressing in a way that telegraphs this. the point here is that individuals who engage in active reflection when they gaslight-up are in a good position to defend against the potential psychological harms they could face from the gaslighting-up. if engaging in this sort of reflection seems too demanding, remember this is the demand for all action: good deliberation generally requires that we can accurately perceive situations and their salient features. this includes being aware of what actions, out of our options, can cause us significant harm, and how to avoid that harm (see archer 2022). 6.b. character costs one might worry that abuse victims cultivate vices by gaslighting-up—that they become manipulative and deceptive people. i take this worry to reflect a more general risk of abuse: that victims become abusive themselves, as in cases of intergenerational trauma cycles (zuravin et al. 1996; pears and capaldi 2001). but resisting oppression can still be genuinely good and praiseworthy, even if it can morally limit and burden the resistant agent. such behavior exhibits what lisa tessman calls burdened virtues, which are character traits that “make a contribution to human flourishing—if they succeed in doing so at all—only because they enable survival of or resistance to oppression (it is in this that their nobility lies), while in other ways they detract from their bearer's well-being” (tessman 2005, 95). the “vices” habituated by gaslighting-up—dishonesty, machiavellianism, hypervigilance, and so on—are burdensome in this way, because while they do detract from an agent’s well-being, in contexts of oppression they also become tools to of resistance and survival. instead of thinking that the existence of these long-term risks influences whether gaslighting-up is good in instances when it is done well, we should remember that nearly any coping mechanism or defensive behavior inhibits flourishing when it is prolonged or used outside of its intended contexts.18 even when children like huck and matilda must rely on gaslighting-up for years to deal with parental abuse, we hope that they are able to escape those toxic environments at some point and begin to heal and cultivate greater well-being, rather than just defend themselves against 18 of course, whether some instances of gaslighting-up lead to more harm than good for the abuse victim is ultimately an empirical matter. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 total destruction—either physical or psychological and epistemic. for all i have said, gaslighting-up may never be a good permanent coping strategy; however, that is still compatible with it being permissible and even laudable in the short and medium term, as i have argued. 7. conclusion my project here has been to explore an overlooked type of gaslighting, one we should view more positively than we might expect, given the universal censure of gaslighting in the philosophical and psychological literature. this is what i call gaslighting-up, where an oppressed, otherwise powerless agent gaslights her oppressor to defend herself against being wronged—and particularly to preserve her agency and dignity. i first argued that gaslighting-up is a valuable defense for victims of abuse. it can help them avoid abuse while also helping them heal from the psychological harms of abuse—and of abusive gaslighting in particular. the huck finn and matilda examples are cases in point: huck gaslights his abusive father to avoid potentially grave physical harm, and matilda gaslights her abusive parents to counteract the psychological harm that she experiences as the target of their gaslighting. i then argued, using the gaydar case, that gaslighting-up can also be good when it is used as a tool for oppressed agents to protest social oppression and prejudice. one main reason for this is that it allows marginalized agents to maintain standing and credibility that they otherwise would have been denied. used this way, gaslighting is not a testimonial injustice but a tool to help marginalized agents avoid testimonial injustice. what’s more, such gaslighting-up can protest the behavior and inferences of its bigoted target without aiming to epistemically destroy them, as gaslighting is usually thought to do. instead, gaslighting-up bigots ultimately treats that target as a rational agent, capable of reflection and epistemic virtue. these conclusions may initially seem counterintuitive, but my arguments reveal how gaslighting can have a bright side. so if you are not convinced that gaslighting can be good by this point, you must be crazy. references abramson, kate. 2014. “turning up the lights on gaslighting.” philosophical perspectives 28 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12046. archer, sophie, ed. 2022. salience: a philosophical inquiry. london: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351202114. avera, amanda l. chase. 2023. “gaslighting: what is it and how do we fight 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new york: routledge. lee, spike, dir. 2018. blackkklansman. written by charlie wachtel, david rabinowitz, kevin wilmott, and spike lee. produced by qc entertainment, blumhouse productions, monkeypaw productions, and 40 acres & a mule filmworks. distributed by focus features. 135 min. manne, kate. 2020. entitled: how male privilege hurts women. new york: penguin random house. ————. 2023. “moral gaslighting.” aristotelian society supplementary volume 97 (1): 122–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akad006. massey, stephen j. 1983. “is self-respect a moral or a psychological concept?” ethics 93 (2): 246–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/292432. mcfarlane, judith, ann malecha, julia gist, kathy watson, elizabeth batten, iva hall, and sheila smith. 2004. “increasing the safetypromoting behaviors of abused women.” american journal of nursing 104 (3): 40–50. https://doi.org/10.1097 /00000446-200403000-00019. ivy, veronica (writing as rachel mckinnon). 2017. “allies behaving badly: gaslighting as epistemic injustice.” in the routledge handbook of epistemic injustice, edited by ian james kidd, josé medina, and gaile pohlhaus jr., 167–74. new york: routledge. cohn – gaslighting-up: when gaslighting is good published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 pears, katherine c., and deborah m. capaldi. 2001. “intergenerational transmission of abuse: a two-generational prospective study of an at-risk sample.” child abuse & neglect 25 (11): 1439–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0145-2134(01)0 0286-1. podosky, paul-mikhail catapang. 2021. “gaslighting, firstand second-order.” hypatia 36 (1): 207–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.54. pohlhaus, gaile, jr. 2020. “gaslighting and echoing, or why collective epistemic resistance is not a ‘witch hunt.’” hypatia 35 (4): 674–86. https://doi.org/10 .1017/hyp.2020.29. sabri, bushra, saraniya tharmarajah, veronica p. s. njie-carr, jill t. messing, em loerzel, joyell arscott, and jacquelyn c. campbell. 2021. “safety planning with marginalized survivors of intimate partner violence: challenges of conducting safety planning intervention research with marginalized women.” trauma violence & abuse 23 (5): 1728–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211013 136. schwartz, ben. 2016. “knock yourselves out: ‘punching up’ in american comedy.” baffler 31: 134–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43958952. serwer, adam. 2018. “the cruelty is the point.” atlantic, october 3. https://www.the atlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/. sodoma, katharina anna. 2022. “emotional gaslighting and affective empathy.” international journal of philosophical studies 30 (3): 320–38. https://doi.org /10.1080/09672559.2022.2121894. spear, andrew d. 2023. “epistemic dimensions of gaslighting: peer-disagreement, self-trust, and epistemic injustice.” inquiry 66 (1): 68–91. https://doi.org/10 .1080/0020174x.2019.1610051. spidel, alicia, hugues hervé, caroline greaves, john c. yuille. 2011. “wasn’t me!” a field study of the relationship between deceptive motivations and psychopathic traits in young offenders.” legal and criminological psychology 16 (2): 335–47. https://doi.org/10.1348/135532510x518722. stallworth, ron. 2018. “the true story behind blackkklansman, according to the man who inspired the movie.” interview by olivia b. waxman. time, august 9. https://time.com/5357789/the-true-story-behind-blackkklansman-according -to-the-man-who-inspired-the-movie/. stark, cynthia a. 2019. “gaslighting, misogyny, and psychological oppression.” monist 102 (2): 221–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onz007. stern, robin. 2007. the gaslight effect: how to spot and survive the hidden manipulations other people use to control your life. new york: harmony books. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 taylor, gabriele, and sybil wolfram. 1968. “the self-regarding and other-regarding virtues.” philosophical quarterly 18 (72): 238–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/22 18561. terlazzo, rosa. 2020. “(when) do victims have duties to resist oppression?” social theory and practice 46 (2): 391–416. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45302457. tessman, lisa. 2005. burdened virtues: virtue ethics for liberatory struggles. oxford: oxford university press. twain, mark. 1885. adventures of huckleberry finn. new york: charles l. webster. project gutenberg e-book produced by david widger, 2004. https://www.gut enberg.org/ebooks/76. wood, shannon n., nancy glass, and michele r. decker. 2021. “an integrative review of safety strategies for women experiencing intimate partner violence in lowand middle-income countries.” trauma, violence, and abuse 22 (1): 68–82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838018823270. young, vershawn ashanti. 2009. “‘nah, we straight’: an argument against code switching.” journal of advanced composition 29 (1/2): 49–76. https://www.jst or.org/stable/20866886. zuravin, susan, curtis mcmillen, diane depanfilis, and christina risley-curtiss. 1996. “the intergenerational cycle of child maltreatment: continuity versus discontinuity.” journal of interpersonal violence 11 (3): 315–34. https://doi.or g/10.1177/088626096011003001. bobbi cohn is a phd candidate in the sage school of philosophy at cornell university and an adjunct faculty member at corning community college. she will begin as an associate professor at austin community college in august, 2025. her research is in feminist theory, ethics, and several areas of applied ethics, including philosophy of disability, philosophy of education, and family ethics. she also recently contributed a chapter, “rewriting pedagogy,” to the second edition of the art of teaching philosophy: reflective values and concrete practices, edited by brynn f. welch, forthcoming in 2026 from bloomsbury press. when she is not philosophizing or gaslighting, she’s with her cats, theory and practice. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45302457 20166 cohn title page 20166 cohn final format autonomy and gendering in childhood feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 2 article 3 recommended citation ryan, nanette. 2025. “autonomy and gendering in childhood.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (2). article 3. 2025 autonomy and gendering in childhood nanette ryan centre for biomedical ethics at the national university of singapore nryan@nus.edu.sg ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 autonomy and gendering in childhood nanette ryan abstract supporting the development of children’s autonomy is widely recognized as a fundamental good. despite this, social practices that reflect and reinforce patriarchal gender norms are ubiquitous. these norms, however, curtail the development and exercise of children’s autonomy by constraining their opportunities along gendered lines and promoting falsehoods about “natural” identity expression. in recognition of these limitations, many parents across the political spectrum are pushing back against patriarchal gender norms in their parenting approaches. one particular model that aims to fully embrace a progressive parenting methodology is the “gender-open” model of parenting (gop). broadly, the gop methodology involves withholding disclosure of a child’s biological sex as assigned at birth from public knowledge. with the necessary support, this approach aims to encourage children to choose their own gender in their own time. advocates of this model claim that adopting the gop ensures a child’s autonomy in self-expression. but despite these claims, none of the advocates clearly articulates how the model promotes children’s autonomy. my aim in this paper is to demonstrate how the gop protects and promotes children’s autonomy in robust ways, making a strong case for its adoption. keywords: childhood, gender, identity, autonomy, agency, parenting 1. introduction supporting the development of children’s autonomy is widely recognized as a fundamental good. despite this being the case, social practices that reflect and reinforce patriarchal gender norms are ubiquitous; they are deeply embedded and reflected in our societal conventions, codified in our legal frameworks, and perpetuated through a process of inculcation that begins even before a child’s birth. these norms, however, curtail the development and exercise of children’s autonomy by constraining children’s opportunities along gendered lines, and by promoting falsehoods about “natural” identity expression. in recognition of some of these limitations, many parents are pushing back in varying degrees against patriarchal gender norms in the ways that they raise their children (rees and saguy 2024). one model of parenting in particular that aims to fully feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 embrace a progressive methodology is “gender-open” parenting (gop). in broad strokes, the gop methodology involves withholding the disclosure of a child's biological sex as assigned at birth from public knowledge and, with the necessary supports, aims to encourage children to “choose their own gender in their own time” (rahilly 2022, 264). elizabeth rahilly (2022, 277) claims that, in doing so, parents “work to protect their kids’ gender self-determination” and that “not only does this ensure the child’s autonomy in self-expression, it also leaves open the possibility that the child may never claim a fixed gender at all.” this model of parenting, and versions thereof, have been gaining popularity among many progressive parents.1 as one gop parent, kate, remarks “well, duh, that’s how you raise a kid!” and another parent says, “i think it pretty much immediately made sense. it was almost like, that was the answer i didn’t know existed to some question i had, which was, how to resolve gender, how to treat it as a parent” (rahilly 2022, 269). some commentators, however—including those who fall in the more progressive camp—have expressed reservations about adopting the model, citing concerns that pushing back against the patriarchal status quo to this degree puts children in danger of backlash and violence (friedman and green 2013, 16).2 other, more conservative perspectives argue also against this model on a range of grounds, including the claim that the gop somehow “goes against human nature.” dr. eugene beresin, director of training in child and adolescent psychiatry at massachusetts general hospital, for example, claimed that the gop is a dangerous psychological experiment: “to raise a child not as a boy or a girl is creating, in some sense, a freak” (abc news 2011). parents who have adopted the model, such as canadian parents kathy witterick and david stocker, have also been criticized as poor, reckless parents engaging in a “damaging social experiment” (witterick 2013, 46). supporting children’s autonomy is, as i have said, a widely recognized fundamental good, and a duty that most recognize that parents have to their children.3 if a model of parenting did protect and promote children’s autonomy, this would provide a strong prima facie reason in its favor—one that may outweigh the risks associated with rebuking the status quo and even potentially generate a moral obligation for its implementation. despite advocates of the gop arguing that this model promotes children’s autonomy, however, none clearly articulate how the model does so. this is problematic as it leaves arguments in its favor based on 1 this model is also part of what jake pyne (2014,1) refers to as a boarder “paradigm shift” in approaches to raising gender nonconforming children. 2 anecdotally, this was also a common attitude expressed in conversation with academic and nonacademic parents alike. 3 see, for example, hannan (2019, 112), feinberg (1980) clayton (2006), mullin (2014), and bou-habib and olsaretti (2014). ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 autonomy severely lacking and, i contend, does a disservice to the robust ways in which the gop can in fact promote and protect children’s autonomy, in childhood and for the future adults that they will become. my aim in this paper, then, is to show how the gop protects and promotes children’s autonomy in these robust ways. to begin, i give a brief overview of how children are typically inculcated into hegemonic patriarchal gender norms, as well as how such norms have limiting and harmful consequences for children and adults. i then give an overview of gop methodology and articulate how this methodology protects and promotes autonomy in childhood and adulthood. 2. parenting for the patriarchy since at least the second wave of the 1960s and ’70s, many feminists, academics and others have recognized patriarchal gender norms as problematic. from a feminist perspective, they are problematic, among other reasons, because they reflect a fraught ideology that prioritizes and reinforces the power of men in society over others (especially women) based on outdated “facts” about natural biology that result in real-world limitations, inequalities, and harm. despite these long-acknowledged harms, there is a wealth of evidence that patriarchal gender norms, and parenting practices that encourage them, remain prevalent—even by those who explicitly disavow them (kane 2012, 11). genderreveal parties exemplifying gender-stereotypical iconography, for example, are commonplace in many communities. in hospitals, babies assigned “male” gender at birth continue to be wrapped in blue, and those assigned “female” are wrapped in pink. clothing and toy companies still advertise and successfully sell clothes “for boys” and “for girls” in ways that reflect stereotypical norms (“daddy’s little princess,” “mummy’s little superhero”). schools, bathrooms, children’s sports, and other curricular activities also continue to be segregated along gendered lines. the list goes on. there is also a wealth of evidence that patriarchal gender norms remain not only prevalent but also harmful and limiting for persons of all genders throughout life resulting in inequality and violence. today, for example, girls are still expected to perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid care and domestic duties compared to boys.4 when they grow up, they will continue to have access to fewer positions of power than men because “people still tend to perceive women as less effective at leadership” (brescoll 2016). boys in schools are still more likely to be shamed for showing emotion and will often face harsher punishments than girls (connell 2000, 158). and while bearing the benefits of the patriarchal dividend, men will be 3.5 times 4 according to unicef, girls perform 160 million more hours daily across the globe (busch 2024). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 more likely to commit suicide than women—a likelihood associated with men’s reluctance to seek mental health care due to hegemonic gender norms promoting stoicism and independence (sagar-ouriaghli et al. 2019). nonbinary children and those who are part of the lgbtqi+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more) community also continue to face routine discrimination and violence for not conforming to hegemonic gender norms. in 2022, 540 antitrans bills were introduced across the united states aiming to ban trans adults and children from using bathrooms, engaging in sports, and having legal documentation (e.g., birth certificates and passports) that accord with their gender identity, as well as having access to gender-affirming care (reed 2023). transgender youth are also significantly more likely to experience violence, bullying, and discrimination than cis-gendered youth.5 and this continues into adulthood. a human rights campaign foundation (2023) report found that 500 gender identity-motivated hate crimes were recorded in the united states in 2022 alone. the factors that lead to inequality and violence are, of course, multifaceted and intersectional. patriarchal gender norms are only one part of a wider oppressive arrangement that privileges men over women, white people over people of color, able-bodied people over disabled people, the ruling class over the working class, young over old, and heterosexuality over any other form of sexuality. the cause of the disparity among genders and those that fall outside of the cis-het binary, then, is not singular, nor is it solely an issue of gender. patriarchal gender norms and parenting in ways that reinforce them, do, however, play a key role in the disparity, as well as in the maintenance of the wider oppressive social arrangement. 3. parenting trends: pushing back against patriarchal norms in recognition of the harms and limitations that patriarchal gender norms support, many parents, as i have said, are modifying how they are raising their children. in mallory rees and abigail saguy’s (2024, 7) study on parental attitudes with respect to gender, for example, they found that both right-wing and progressive parents claimed to endorse the view that “we should avoid gender stereotyping when raising children.” for conservatives, this included tolerating children’s cross-gendered toy play (e.g., girls playing with traditionally coded “boy’s toys”) and allowing girls to pursue traditionally male-dominated pursuits. conservative parents, however, “were unlikely to speak of encouraging children, especially boys, to resist gender stereotypes” and sometimes actively rejecting it: “no, a boy can’t wear a dress” (rees and saguy 2024, 7–8). for progressives, pushing back against patriarchal norms included intentionally seeking to “create a lot of space in terms of [gendered] 5 see, for example, ryan and rivers (2003), clark et al. (2014), earnshaw et al. (2016), and sares-jäske et al. (2023). ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 options,” letting children “choose which [options] they’re into” and “following the child’s lead” as to their own gender identity and expression (rees and saguy 2024, 9). parenting models that push back against patriarchal gender norms or offer more expansive models of gender are not new. many non-western cultures have long-established gender-inclusive traditions, exemplified by the recognition of nonbinary identities such as the hijra in south asia and the irawhiti among the māori. even within western cultures, parents have been pushing back against patriarchal norms since at least the second-wave feminist movement, with the introduction of gender-neutral parenting, and continue to do so especially within queer and other progressive communities. the gender-open model of parenting (gop) is one relatively new approach that fully embraces a progressive parenting methodology. what makes this method new, at least within western communities, is that unlike many parenting approaches, the gop does not assign a gender to a child from birth. rather, it aims to create space and provide resources for children to determine their own gender in their own time. 3.1. the gender-open model of parenting like many socially embedded practices, there is no one way to practice the gop, but there are three methods that are common to many approaches. they are nondisclosure, the cultivation of gender-inclusive environments, and direct and adjacent education. nondisclosure: many parents practicing the gop adopt a practice of nondisclosure of a child’s assigned biological sex at birth. by rejecting the practice of disclosure, parents aim to interrupt the process of gender anticipation. gender anticipation is the disposition one adopts with respect to a future child, and it includes the assumptions and expectations about a future child’s attributes and behaviors, as well as the kinds of relationships parents and others hope to form with the future child based on the child’s assigned sex (kane 2012, 31). these expectations typically begin before birth with assigned sex disclosure, and they continue to shape how a child is treated and what is expected of them in childhood and throughout their life. by interrupting this process, gop parents aim to provide their child space to determine and announce their own gender in their own time. alex morris (2018) describes one parent of a child raised on the gender-open model as believing that “if no one knew her child’s sex, then no one could treat the baby like a boy or a girl, molding that child to fit into the stereotypes.” cultivation of environments: the second method of the gop is to cultivate and select for environments that are conducive to freedom of gender expression. many social environments are arranged in ways that reflect a patriarchal and stereotypical binary through colors, iconography, and other forms of segregation (e.g., children’s birthday parties, clothing and toy stores, bathrooms, etc.). gop parents aim to raise feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 their children “in an environment where colors and objects and activities are not slotted into the arbitrary and binary categories of ‘girl’ and ‘boy,’ and the concepts of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ are not set up in opposition to each other” (morris 2018). to do so, parents aim to provide children with a range of options without tying them to gender (“for boys,” “for girls”), so that children can try out a range of options to see what resonates with them independent of stereotypical gendered expectations. in addition to cultivating their own spaces, parents also actively seek out other supportive environments, including education and medical institutions, and supportive social communities. education: the third method of many gop parents is to engage in direct education—of their children and those who interact with their children—on gender theory and the gender-open model of parenting. some parents refer to this activity as cultivating “gender literacy” (pyne 2013, 200). here, parents aim to emphasize the existence of a variety of gendered identities that persons can choose from independently of their biology and the socially idealized forms of masculinity and femininity. as one mother describes, “instead of teaching [our child] that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, we just say most boys have penises and most girls have vaginas, and so that teaches [them] a general pattern while allowing for exceptions” (pyne 2013, 201). rahilly (2022, 274) recounts another parent, dani, describing encouraging gender literacy by holding “run-of-the-mill ‘coffee-table conversation’ in their household,” which they described “as ‘5000-level gender deconstruction theory, just for fun,’ where they/them pronouns are a naturalized part of the lexicon.” the purpose of direct education is to better inform children about the nature of gender within the context of social norms and about the nature of social norms themselves—to understand in particular that gender expectations are social norms, and that social norms are constructed, can be deconstructed, and are the kinds of things that change and evolve over time; rather than, for example, being immutable facts stemming from biology. in doing so, parents hope that their children, and the adults they become, will be better able to navigate their own gender expression and the gender expression of others in ways that are well informed and autonomous. this final method is not adopted by all gop parents. some parents actively avoid the education method over concerns about placing too much significance on gender as a concept or providing children with grounds for stereotype threat—that is, the distress one feels about the risk of conforming to stereotypes about their social group. some parents—both progressive and conservative—are also concerned that education about the nature of gender norms may encourage a devaluation of those activities and preferences traditionally seen as feminine (caring roles, the color pink, open emotional expression, etc.). these may be valid concerns. but education, as i will come to demonstrate shortly, is considered to be pivotal to the development and exercise of autonomy. if autonomy is itself a fundamental good, then the benefits of ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 education may outweigh the risks. moreover, if an aim of the gop is to advance feminist aims of dismantling the harms of patriarchal ideology and making space for autonomous expression, there is reason to think that providing and cultivating supportive environments and engaging in nondisclosure will not be enough to achieve this aim. the hijra within south asia, for example, while illustrative of expansive gender roles, are situated within a largely patriarchal society where traditional roles for men and women are still enforced.6 if the harms of patriarchal ideology are to be addressed, and spaces made more conducive to children’s autonomy, this would suggest then that education that supports gender literacy and opposes patriarchal ideology should be part of the gop approach. 4. the gender-open model of parenting and autonomy while advocates of the gop aim to push back against the harms and limitations supported by patriarchal ideology, they do not claim that the gop can address all or even most of them. what advocates of this model do claim, however, is that the gop can protect and promote children’s autonomy—specifically their gender self-determination and autonomy in self-expression (rahilly 2022, 277). some advocates also argue that the gop can make children better autonomous citizens insofar as they are better informed about the nature of social norms and diverse ways of being and are more practiced at “thinking for themselves,” rather than submitting unquestioningly to the status quo and to authority (witterick 2013, 26). despite advocates appealing to autonomy, none clearly articulate how the gop achieves these ends. this may not be an issue if it were the case that the nature of autonomy and those conditions that support it were obvious or intuitive. unfortunately, however, this is far from the case. my aim now is to outline two broad accounts of autonomy that are widely endorsed within the philosophical literature: end-state theories and gradualist theories. i focus on concepts in the philosophical literature because this literature provides rich conceptual terrain from which to anchor the discussion. after i have articulated end-state theories and gradualist theories, i will show how the gop protects and promotes both forms of autonomy in robust ways. 4.1. kinds of autonomy: gradualist and end-state perspectives the concept of autonomy is one of the most widely discussed and contested concepts within moral and political philosophical literature. as such, there are many proposed variations with different constitutional, procedural, and normative requirements. across the varying accounts there are two predominant categories that many accounts of autonomy broadly align with. they are “end-state” accounts of 6 thank you to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this to my attention. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 autonomy and “gradualist” accounts of autonomy. end-state accounts cast autonomy as an end-state to be achieved. gradualist accounts, on the other hand, cast autonomy as something that is acquired gradually—often with persons achieving different kinds of autonomy over time or across different domains with experience and guidance. a number of end-state theories follow in the kantian tradition requiring agents to cultivate and act from what christine korsgaard (2009, 22–24) refers to as an “established practical identity.” an established practical identity is a conception of the self that is coherent and sustained over time and reflects what we consider to be ineliminable aspects of ourselves. according to marina oshana (2005, 84), for example, “being autonomous requires first and foremost that a person have the capacity and the disposition to know her will and know which of her beliefs, desires, affective states, relationships, and so on are distinctive of and essential to her selfconception.” on such accounts of autonomy, an established practical identity is the evaluative framework from which a person issues authoritative autonomous decisions.7 in addition to an established practical identity, many end-state theorists hold that in order to be autonomous, persons require sufficiently developed cognitive maturity, developed capacities for critical reflection to reason well with respect to their decisions and actions and, in some cases, to form and act in ways that cohere with their own practical identities.8 it is important to note for purposes here that a number of end-state views exclude children, and especially young children, from the domain of autonomy. this is because many children typically do not have well-developed or stable views of who they are as a practical identity calls for. as samantha brennan (2002, 61) aptly describes, “the child who loves skating today may hate it tomorrow; the child who will only wear purple today will tomorrow only wear pink.” moreover, many children have not yet developed sufficient executive functioning to evaluate higher-order beliefs, desires, and the like from which to then act on, nor experience from which to form an established practical identity (levinson 1999; ross 1998). these limitations are relevant for considering the merits of the gop with respect to autonomy because advocates of the gop are typically concerned, at least in part, with the protection and promotion of children’s autonomy as children, and not only for the adults that they become. if, however, children cannot be autonomous in childhood then this argument in its favor will be false. 7 this view is also held by tamar schapiro (1999), and the absence of a practical identity is cited as a reason why children cannot be considered autonomous. 8 see, for example feinberg (1980), levinson (1999), ross (1998), schapiro (1999) and oshana (2005). ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 in contrast to the views of end-state theorists, gradualist accounts of autonomy often hold that children can have autonomy—or, more precisely, particular kinds of autonomy—in childhood. amy mullin (2019, 231), for example, argues that while there are many contested accounts of autonomy in the literature, different conceptions share a common core idea: that “autonomy involves self-governance in accordance with personally meaningful goals and commitments.” it is mullin’s view that when children act in ways that are reflective of their “volitional self,” they are self-governing and so are acting autonomously. a volitional self is “the part of the self that seeks to govern its own actions to accord with what it values, cares about, wants to accomplish” (mullin 2007, 537). unlike an established practical identity, the features that constitute a volitional self need not be subject to or the product of critical reflection. as mullin explains, what we care most about can be revealed to us in a number of ways that do not require higher-order critical reflection, such as direct emotional experience. children, mullin explains, do care a great deal about some things, and they do so in a way that renders them features of their volitional self. in particular, children have the capacity to stably love others and, by the age of three, can typically engage sufficient impulse control to manage goals (of care, for example) with respect to those that they love. mullin refers to the kind of autonomy that she claims children can have as “local autonomy rather than “global autonomy.” local autonomy refers to autonomy in action, in the particular choices and actions that one makes from day to day. global autonomy is “a trait characterizing a substantial period of one’s life and all significant domains within it” (mullin 2019, 231). it is mullin’s view that while children typically do not have global autonomy due to developmental limitations, even young children can have local autonomy in some areas.9 robert noggle (2002) also offers another gradualist perspective arguing that while children often lack full autonomy, children—especially in adolescence—often do have agentic capacities that rival some autonomous adults. it is noggle’s view that most children lack full autonomy, however, because they do not have a sufficiently developed moral agency that he takes to be constitutive of fully fledged autonomy. to reach full autonomy—and eschew parents’ right to paternalism—children need both capacities for self-governing means-end reasoning and a sufficiently developed moral framework from which to guide one’s actions. in addition to end-state and gradualist perspectives, many theorists (including mullin and me) endorse a hybrid view where end-state and gradualist perspectives 9 a similar gradualist perspective is also endorsed by paul bou-habib and serena olsaretti (2014, 27) who claim that “even fairly young children . . . possess some degree of autonomy, understood as the effective ability to act in line with one’s commitments.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 are both taken to be integral parts of the “autonomous journey,” where one begins to gradually exercise local autonomy in some domains, which eventually reach global levels as an (albeit evolving) end-state. for the purposes of this paper, determining which side to fall on with respect to the gradualist/end-state/hybrid divide is not necessary. this is because, as i will aim to show now, whichever perspective one does take, there is good reason to think that the gop can protect and promote children’s autonomy—both for the children they are now and for the future adults that they will become as end-state autonomous agents. 4.2. protecting and promoting autonomy there are at least three fundamental ways in which the gop better protects and promotes autonomy than conservative approaches to parenting, all of which are relevant for a gradualist and end-state perspective. the first is by providing children with knowledge to facilitate successful means-end reasoning. the second is by providing space and resources to explore valuable ends. and the third is by modeling moral integrity as a key component of autonomy. 4.2.1. supporting means-end reasoning both gradualist and end-state forms of autonomy engage in means-end reasoning as constitutive requirements of autonomy. in the case of mullin’s local volitional account, for example, it is basic reasoning to achieve one’s goals with respect to the things one cares about. on end-state views it is often to pursue one’s higher-order goals or to act in ways that reflect one’s personal commitments. in order for means-end reasoning to be successful—insofar as success is to achieve one’s ends—persons require knowledge about the ends that they are aiming to achieve.10 of course, not all knowledge promotes autonomy—sometimes, in fact, too much knowledge can hinder decision-making insofar as it may overwhelm the decision maker, or it may be irrelevant to the decisions a person needs to make. the nature of gender and the nature of social norms themselves, however, are fundamental to the way the social world is arranged, and often play a key role in how persons navigate the world and conceive of themselves. as such, knowledge about social norms is paramount. the first way that the gop supports autonomy then is by providing children, and the adults that they will become, with accurate and pertinent information about the world—specifically, that is, about gender (including gender variation) and social norms to facilitate successful means-end reasoning. 10 similarly, linda zagzebski (2004) argues that accurate information, or knowledge, is required to effectively exercise one's autonomy and to act well with respect to the things one cares about. ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 many parents, including conservative parents, also teach their children about traditional gender norms so that children understand “how they fit into society,” which they take to be an important element in “setting their kids up for success” (rees and saguy 2024, 623). this knowledge may also promote children’s autonomy because if children know what is expected of them, this knowledge can be used to inform means-end reasoning for success. there are, however, important distinctions between this approach and the gop’s approach to knowledge that makes the gop’s methodology with respect to knowledge and autonomy favorable. first, the conservative approach, and approaches that take the status quo for granted, for example, teach children what society generally expects from them given their assigned sex, how to conform to those expectations, and takes conforming as a natural given in descriptive and prescriptive senses (e.g., “this is just what girls/boys like”; “this is what girls/boys should like”). the gop on the other hand, if done in the spirit of a “5000-level gender deconstruction” class, as rahilly described, will teach children what society expects of them given their assigned sex, and it will also teach children the history and malleability of these expectations, as well as the alternative ways of being and expressing their gender. these differences make the gop’s methodology with respect to knowledge and autonomy the more favorable approach in at least two ways: first, because it provides children with both more and more accurate information about gender, and second, because it better meets the negative moral duties parents have with respect to their children’s autonomy. if we follow bou-habib and olsaretti (2014, 30), among the moral duties parents have to their children is the duty not to deceive or mislead: “in so far as a child already has the capacity to understand x, it is wrong to deceive [them] about the facts and mislead them about [x].” according to this view parents should also “provide children with the information and the explanations which children are capable of understanding and appreciating” and should not instill in them beliefs that they are too young to understand the reasons for (bou-habib and olsaretti 2014, 30). to do otherwise, according to bou-habib and olsaretti, is to fail to respect the autonomous capacities of children. many conservative parents and parents who accept the status quo will not intentionally mislead their children. but for many children with the capacity to understand gender and gender norms, the conservative approach that teaches or takes gender-essentialism for granted will be a misrepresentation of fact and so is misleading. as emily kane (2012, 14) explains, while “certainly a number of fundamental biological variations are linked to physiology and reproductive capacities . . . the extent and manner of their importance to the social understanding of gender have varied over time and place in ways that are inconsistent with the claim that biology completely determines biological outcomes. against a range of natural variation among individuals, social discourse constructs only two distinct and internally homogeneous categories.” so, while all feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 approaches may provide children with valuable information to support their autonomy, only the gop does so in a way that does not simultaneously limit children’s autonomy by misleading children regarding the true nature of gender. rather than explicitly or implicitly endorsing patriarchal norms as facts about the world, some conservative parents may take a different approach. they may, for example, present patriarchal norms as ideals to strive toward—perhaps as a matter of taste. these parents will not mislead their children about facts about the world, thereby compromising their means-end reasoning. they will, however, still compromise their children’s autonomy in ways that i will describe below. there is also reason to think that such parents also fail other parental duties that they have toward their children. many theorists argue that there can be good reasons to allow parents to impart their own values onto their children. noggle (2002, 113), for example, argues that “in order to progress from merely biological, impulse-driven, simple agency, and to develop genuinely human reflective moral agency, the child must develop a value system that encompasses more than just biological drives” and that “since there is no getting around the need for some initial set of values, we might just as well let the parents instil theirs, at least within certain limits.” importantly, however, parents cannot impart just any collection of values onto their children. as noggle (2002, 114) claims, “nothing gives the parent any right to give [their] child a morally indecent value system or world-view.” the rationale, noggle (2002, 115) says, “for letting parents offer children their own beliefs and values does not apply to unreasonable, intolerant, and morally indecent value systems or world-views. beliefs and values of that sort hinder one’s participation in the moral community of a diverse, pluralistic society: from the point of view of the child’s own interests and the interests of the moral community, such values and beliefs are pernicious.” moreover, noggle (2002, 115) says, “nothing gives the parent a right to make the child closed-minded with regard to other value systems or world-views, or to try to make her unable to reflect upon her own as she grows into a full-fledged moral agent.” patriarchal norms, whether understood as facts about the world or ideals to strive for, perpetuate harmful forms of gender inequality and reinforce other systems of oppression. as such, they are at odds with a respectful moral community. insofar as parents have moral obligations to their children not to impose such worldviews, doing otherwise fails that duty. 4.2.2. supporting space creation let’s return now to autonomy. in addition to supporting children’s autonomy by teaching children about the nature of social norms, gender, and alternative ways of being and expressing their gender, the gop also provides children with the space and resources for the exploration of their own identity and ends; spaces where children are permitted to “try on” ways of being. according to end-state accounts that ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 situates the creation of one’s own practical identity as constitutive of autonomy, this feature of the model is fundamental. tamar schapiro (1999, 732) refers to this kind of exploration as “play” and says that it is “a strategy—perhaps the strategy—for working through the predicament of childhood” to full autonomy. by engaging in play, schapiro (1999, 732) claims that children more or less deliberately “try on” selves to be and worlds to be in. it is her view that, in doing so, children “become themselves,” where that eventually becomes an authoritative self. part of what seems important to the process of open exploration, however, is that, in trying on selves, children do not just feel what it is like to speak with authority as a “self,” as schapiro suggests. rather it seems to be that children also experience and figure out what resonates with them, and that gives content to their identity. in creating space and resources to try on ways of being, then, the gop also helps children to cultivate their own practical identities. another way in which space and resources for exploration supports end-state accounts is by keeping children’s futures open. joel feinberg (1980) and matthew clayton (2006), for example, argue that the development of children’s agentic capacities must be supported so that they “reach maturity with as many open options, opportunities and advantages as possible” (feinberg 1980, 130) to maximize chances for the child’s self-fulfillment.11 at this stage, in adulthood, persons should be able to exercise the autonomy they now have to choose for themselves among ends—ends that have been kept open by those who have the duty to keep children’s autonomy rights in trust. the gop keeps possible futures open then, insofar as it presents children with space to explore and later realize a wider collection of possible ways of being and possible futures.12 11 feinberg’s position with respect to open futures has been criticized for being overly demanding, specifically with respect to requiring “as many open options, opportunities and advantages as possible” (lotz 2006, 539; quoting feinberg 1980, 130). clayton’s (2006, 90) own position is that there should be only “an adequate range of options from which to choose from.” 12 interestingly, the open futures argument has been used by others, such as jorgensen, athéa, and masson (2024), to argue against gender-affirming care for transgender children. one reason that jorgensen, athéa, and masson (2024, 1945) appeal to is the “cascading process” of gender-affirming care. they explain that “in medicine, the term ‘cascade’ refers to a process whereby an initiating factor is followed by a stepwise series of events that proceed with increasing momentum to a seemingly inevitable conclusion” (1945). cascading is problematic on their view, in part, because it makes discontinuation challenging and so closes children’s future “options, opportunities and advantages” in problematic ways. if jorgensen et al. are correct, the gop may work to mitigate this harm by providing children with more feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 from a gradualist perspective, exploratory spaces and resources are also valuable because they allow children to try on and discover what is valuable to them as children, and to similarly pursue ends that resonate with them. according to mullin, children have autonomy when they have goals that matter to them and can pursue those goals. mullin does not discuss the importance of how children come to value the ends that they do, but there is good reason to think that a child’s autonomy is supported when the ends that they come to value are ends of their own; ends that they have, for example, tried and endorsed, rather than those they come to hold through forces such as direct control, coercion, or misdirection. if this is correct, then the creation of space and the provision of resources also supports autonomy in childhood. children brought up in conservative environments, and even in more progressive environments that do not adopt the gop, also most certainly engage in play and will try on ways of being as schapiro describes. the primary difference here seems to turn on the breadth of options and justification for restrictions. in conservative environments that restrict the toys children are allowed to play with, limit what they can wear, and promote a patriarchal ideology—either as representative of facts about the world or as personal ideals—for example, children will only be able to “try on” a restricted set of ways of being. in some sense all children will be presented with a restricted set of options due to economic limitations, environment, and the availability of other resources. so, restriction itself is not a unique or obvious problem. what is problematic, however, is if the restrictions are unjustified. restrictions may be unjustified for a host of reasons. restrictions placed on children may be unjustified if, for example, they are based on false beliefs or problematic ideals. if a child is not permitted gender-diverse toys because they are considered “unnatural," for example, this restriction would be unjustified. restrictions placed on the ends children can pursue may also be unjustified if those restrictions hamper children’s autonomy in ways that are not justified by “a larger good connected to a child’s well[-]being” (mullin 2014, 419). merely restricting a child’s access to gender-diverse toys and forms of expression simply because it is the preference of the parent, for example, would not be a larger good to justify restricting the child’s autonomy. the best choice in terms of promoting a child’s well-being will vary across children given their individual circumstances and disposition. but it is far space to explore their own gender identity so that they and their families can make more informed decisions when pursuing gender-affirming care. of course, this will not entirely remove the worry that requires structural attention to promote children’s autonomy as children and as the adults that they will become. what is not obvious is that limiting gender-affirming care achieves this aim. ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 from clear that restricting a child’s exploration and autonomy in these ways could be in the best interest of a child in most cases. there is also ample evidence that reinforcing patriarchal gender norms is harmful for children—and especially for gender nonconforming children who find themselves in unsupportive environments. as teresa surace et al. (2021, 1147) explain, rates of depression, isolation, suicidal ideation, and self-harm are higher in gender nonconforming children. these harms, however, are not ended by forced conformity and restricted options. rather it is support and a rejection of stigma that support children’s well-being. here then, too, the gop seems to be the favorable model, not just for autonomy but also for wellbeing. 4.2.3. supporting moral agency as i described earlier, some theorists such as noggle hold that fully fledged autonomy requires moral agency or “moral autonomy.” on noggle’s (2002, 102) view, “a moral agent . . . has what we might call moral autonomy, for she has the capacity to transcend mere desire and act according to prudence and to personal and moral values.” carolyn mcleod (2005, 110) also calls this kind of moral autonomy “integrity,” which she describes as being “self-governing in a way that reflects one’s own moral commitments.” parents who adopt the gop often do so because they believe that patriarchal gender norms are harmful and so take action to stand up for those values by refusing, to the extent that it is possible, to impose those norms onto their children. in doing so, parents push back against the status quo and display a strong commitment to their own moral autonomy, and they also model that commitment for their children. in addition, parents often model great courage. as cheshire calhoun (1995, 259) describes, the courageous provide spectacular displays of integrity by withstanding social incredulity, ostracism, contempt, and physical assault when most of us would be inclined to give in, compromise, or retreat into silence. social circumstances that erect powerful deterrents to speaking and acting on one’s own best judgment undermine the possibilities for deliberating about what is worth doing. we thus have reason to be thankful when persons of integrity refuse to be cowed. when one’s values align with the gop and one engages in this model of parenting, then they demonstrate to children how to act with integrity. insofar as integrity is a feature of fully formed autonomy, this is yet another way that the model protects and promotes children’s autonomy. in addition, given the social conditions under which integrity is enacted, parents also model courage. this demonstrates to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 children not only how to exercise autonomy but how to do so in the face of challenge, which is valuable for children as children and into adulthood. parent’s actions also fight for space for children to do so insofar as they push back against forces that undermine those capacities needed to exercise autonomy: deliberating about what is worth doing, what kind of life one wants to have, what one does and can care about, and what one can conceive of as possible. more conservative models of parenting may also model integrity insofar as they reflect parental values. so far, i have referred to “conservative parents” broadly. there are, however, many forms of conservative parenting with respect to gender. some parents, for example, may endorse gender-conservatism in ways that are reflective of the status quo. others may endorse a more radical form of genderconservatism (e.g., “tradwives”).13 when parents endorse gender-conservatism in ways that are reflective of the status quo, they will not model courage against the status quo in a way that makes space for children to be more free to pursue their own ends with respect to gender. status quo conservative parents, of course, may model courage in other domains. given how important gender is to identity formation, however, modeling courage (or a lack thereof) will be significant in terms of promoting and protecting children’s autonomy. when parents endorse genderconservatism in ways that are not reflective of the status quo, like the gop, they may also model courage for their children in ways that challenge widely endorsed gender practices—albeit in the opposite direction of the gop. this courage, however, will include courage to oppress. if we think that moral courage is incompatible with oppressive value systems, as i think we should, then even conservative parents who model courage will fail to model moral courage. 5. a moral obligation to adopt the gop? at the beginning of this paper, i claimed that if a model of parenting did protect and promote children’s autonomy, this would provide a strong prima facie reason in its favor—even potentially a moral duty on behalf of parents. when determining which moral duties parents have to their children, there are many factors to consider, with autonomy being but one, albeit very important, factor in that determination. what i have hoped to show here is that the gop does in fact protect and promote children’s autonomy in fundamental ways that provide good reason to take this model of parenting seriously. whether or not this is sufficient to generate a moral obligation in parents, at least under some conditions, is an important question that needs addressing. there are also many other important questions remaining, including what moral obligations other persons and institutions, such as schools and medical services, have with respect to promoting children’s gender autonomy. 13 on tradwives, see proctor (2022) and love (2020). ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 unfortunately, i do not have the space to do such questions justice here. in what remains, my aim is not to settle these questions. instead, i present one important objection to the gop that i refer to as the “futility objection.” i also consider three reasons for thinking that parents are not morally obligated under all conditions to adopt the gop. those reasons pertain to considerations of privilege, violence, and parental autonomy. 5.1. the futility objection when considering if there is a parental obligation to adopt the gop, one must keep in mind that children typically declare their preferred gender at three to four years of age (mayo clinic. 2022). as soon as a child declares their own preferred gender, they will very likely be subject to the same kind of gendered expectations that are initiated with earlier gender disclosure and anticipation. these gender expectations work to undermine parental efforts at protection insofar as they are communicative to children, and as they signal to others how to respond to children in patriarchal ways. moreover, it is unlikely that, even during this short window, nondisclosure could shelter a child from the influence of patriarchal ideology. even with supportive environments, parents cannot fully control for other’s behavior, nor for the systemic messages that are pervasive and, to an extent, unavoidable within western culture. parents also cannot shelter their children from the fact that parents are also products of a society based on patriarchal ideology—situated within, influenced by, and produced from the same gendered environment. as such, even more progressive parents—parents who “sincerely believe that boys and girls deserve to be free to develop their own interests and to become rounded individuals”—often at the same time “channel and craft their children’s ‘gender performances’” to conform with hegemonic gender ideology (fine 2010, 204). given these limitations, where then, one might ask, really lies the value of the gop for autonomy? and how could parents have a moral obligation to comply with a model of parenting when the proposed goods do not really seem possible to deliver on? the conditions under which parents are raising children are indeed nonideal. the very obstacles that the gender-open model seeks to challenge are themselves challenges to the efficacy of the model; challenges to the status quo are, of course, challenged by the power of the status quo. it is worth emphasizing, however, that the aim of those adopting the gop is not an unrealistic, unfettered freedom from patriarchal ideology—although this is the ideal. rather, it is a project of education and space-creation. parents aim to create gender-open supportive spaces with resources and conversation that support a more gender-inclusive and accurate worldview. nondisclosure, while not sheltering children from patriarchal ideology, is an important part of that education and an important part of the project of undermining misdirection. nondisclosure is, in some ways, a strong “embodied” commitment to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 an education about gender norms and social norms more widely—teaching that one can reject pervasive social practice and the status quo, that one does not have to conform to dominant ideals, and that other ways of engaging socially and as a gendered being are possible. these practices aim at undermining misdirection and direct control, promote autonomy, and are valuable in these terms, even if their achievement is met with limitations. they are also, as i argued above, expressions of parental integrity and courage that model for children the virtues necessary for autonomy. a project of creating a childhood unfettered by the constraints of patriarchy would be, at least in current times, mostly futile. a project creating a childhood that promotes gender-inclusivity, education, integrity, and autonomy in the way the gop aims, however, is not. 5.2. the argument from privilege while adoption of the gop is not futile in the ways described above, there is still good reason to think that some parents are not morally obligated to adopt the gop under all conditions. the first of those reasons pertains to considerations of privilege. to support a child’s autonomy in the ways the gop prescribes requires a collection of resources and opportunities. parents, for example, require a sufficiently liberal education—where this includes an appreciation for the nature of patriarchal gender norms, as well as wider social norms and structures of power—to impart that knowledge onto their children. parents also require time and resources to share that knowledge and to have access to communities that support that education and provide safe space for gender-exploration. access to these resources and opportunities, however, often comes at a premium cost and constitutes a significant privilege—a privilege that is unavailable to many, and especially to those who already occupy marginalized social positions. 14 the ability to adopt the gop then is itself a significant privilege inaccessible to many. if the moral obligations one has are those obligations that one can meet, then it will necessarily be the case that some parents are not obligated to adopt the gop. 5.3. the argument from violence the second reason for thinking that some parents may not be obligated to adopt the gop pertains to considerations of violence. as witterick (2013, 26–27) aptly explains, “we live in a society that sees the expression of difference as ‘going too far’ and responds punitively or—too often—with violence. even by preschool, peers express ‘distinctly cooler responses’ to children who play in ‘gender-inappropriate ways.’” furthermore, she explains, there is also “a one-in-ten risk of abuse 14 as morris (2018) explains, “when it comes to preschool and day care, many of the most progressive places are also the most expensive.” ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 ‘perpetrated by parents or other adults in the home’ . . . against children expressing themselves outside what is expected from their biological sex” as well as “a ‘lasting impact on health’ associated with the elevated risk for post-traumatic stress syndrome (ptss) in nonconformers” (witterick 2013, 27; quoting roberts et al. 2012, and findlay 2012). witterick’s (2013, 27) response, and one that mirrors many gop parents, is to highlight that while conforming to traditional gender-norms may protect a child from non-conforming-based violence, “conformity to the gender binary will not protect them” from patriarchal gender-based violence. gender-based violence and gender nonconforming violence both occur at high rates in patriarchal societies and are, as explained earlier, compounded by factors such as race and class. rates of risk will vary depending on one’s particular circumstances, including the climate of one’s community—be it supportive, intolerant, or so forth.15 we typically think that parents have a moral duty not only to promote their children’s autonomy but also to protect them from violence. if the threat of violence is so great then, even with the agentic benefits of the gop, this threat may be sufficient reason not to adopt the gop—at least with respect to the elements of public display that may put one’s child at an intolerable risk of harm. importantly, like all decisions that pertain to the autonomy and well-being of children—especially when compromises need to be made—this decision should be made carefully. when making this decision, it is also important to note that many harms that children face as nonconformers are those associated with a lack of support. as explained earlier, rates of depression, isolation, suicidal ideation, and selfharm are higher in gender nonconforming children (surace et al. 2021). these harms, however—as we have seen throughout history with the disasters of “conversion therapies”—are not ended by forced conformity and restricted options. it is for this reason that surace et al. (2021, 1147) call for “educational interventions directed to parents, teachers, mental health professionals and general community . . . to struggle against stigma and social isolation,” rather than forced conformity and restricted options. 5.4. the argument from parental autonomy one final reason for thinking that parents may not be morally obligated to adopt the gop pertains to parental autonomy. as i claimed earlier, many theorists argue that there can be good reasons to allow parents to impart their own values to their children. one reason, as articulated by noggle, is that it provides children with a value framework to move from simple agency to reflective moral agency. other reasons cited include claims that shared values can promote familial bonds and can 15 for gender-based violence rates in australia, see, for example, campbell et al. (2024). for violence against lgbtqi+ in australia, see hill et al. (2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 be an important mode of sustaining cultural heritage.16 i also explained, however, that if we follow noggle (2002, 115), parents are not morally justified in imparting values to their child that are “unreasonable, intolerant, and morally indecent value systems or world-views.” given that patriarchal norms perpetuate harmful forms of gender inequality and reinforce other systems of oppression, i argued that parents have a moral obligation to their children not to impart such world views. the gop, however, is not the only model of parenting that aims to reject patriarchal norms and ideology. some parents, for example, will raise their children as “boys” or “girls” (insofar as they declare a child’s assigned sex at birth) but will also provide their children with education on the nature of gender norms and support gender expansive exploration. parents may even model such exploration for their children in their own expression. many people who have not been raised according to the gop (including, presumably, many feminist and gop-practicing parents) have come to have a robust appreciation for the nature of gender norms, their flexibility, and the need for social change. so, while imparting intolerant beliefs and values onto one’s children—like those reflected in patriarchal ideology—is impermissible, there are arguably other permissible ways to raise children, including ways that reject patriarchal ideology and embrace an expanded conception of gender that does not entail adopting the gop. given that this is the case, one might think that it is both reasonable and permissible for parents to exercise discretion with respect to the model that they adopt and the value they place on nondisclosure within the limits of decency. while i am sympathetic to this view, whether this is indeed the case warrants further discussion pertaining to the value of alternative models of parenting for children’s autonomy and other important goods—particularly if we think that a base limit of decency does not capture all there is to say about morally permissible methods of parenting. there also needs to be further discussion about the extent of parental obligations with respect to children’s autonomy (is it, for example, a maximizing duty, or a threshold duty?), how the promotion of a child’s autonomy should be weighed against other valuable goods, and what duties other individuals, groups, and institutions have to children with respect to their autonomy that may impact the scope of parental duties. these are all complex questions that are worth pursuing if we want to promote methods of parenting that give adequate respect to children’s agency as well as other morally valuable goods. 16 for arguments in favor of these values, see noggle (2002, 113), brighouse and swift (2014), and galston (2011). ryan – autonomy and gendering in childhood published 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“lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth: victimization and its correlates in the usa and uk.” culture, health & sexuality 5 (2): 103–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369105011000012883. sagar-ouriaghli, ilyas, emma godfrey, livia bridge, laura meade, and june s. l. brown. 2019. “improving mental health service utilization among men: a systematic review and synthesis of behavior change techniques within interventions targeting help-seeking.” american journal of men’s health 13 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988319857009. sares-jäske, laura, mercedesz czimbalmos, satu majlander, reetta siukola, reija klemetti, pauliina luopa, and jukka lehtonen. 2023. “gendered differences in experiences of bullying and mental health among transgender and cisgender youth.” journal of youth and adolescence 52 (8): 1531–48. https://doi.org/10 .1007/s10964-023-01786-7. schapiro, tamar. 1999. “what is a child?” ethics 109 (4):715–38. https://doi.org/10 .1086/233943. surace, teresa, laura fusar-poli, 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“self-respect & childhood” (2023) published in the journal of ethics. 21623 ryan title page 21632 ryan final format reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 6 recommended citation ranganathan, shyam. 2024. “reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 6. 2024 reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis shyam ranganathan york university shyamr@yorku.ca ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis shyam ranganathan abstract white supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. it first consists of conflating the geography of the west (where black, indigenous, and people of color—bipoc—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient greek thought—call this tradition the west. secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the romans it brands as religion. the political function of this marginalization of bipoc philosophy is to shield western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. the mechanism of colonialism is interpretation— explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. not only is this a basic commitment of the western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (lat), the south asian moral philosophy of yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. in contrast, yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the earth). this paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the west of philosophy in the game of publish or perish. shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication. keywords: explication, interpretation, quine, publish or perish, principle of charity feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 1. introduction1 the view in the literature is that south asians lacked any tradition of moral philosophy (ranganathan 2017c, 52–77). this is a carefully curated story to tell about a colonized tradition but also an artifact of colonization. if the only people who seem to care about moral responsibility and moral philosophy are the people from the colonizing tradition, then colonizers seem to be doing the colonized a paternal favor by taking over. and if one can simply erase moral philosophy from traditions that were averse to engaging in colonization—traditions that were colonized, like those of south asia—one erases views on responsibility that are anticolonial. not only is this a colonial imposition on south asia; it is also an affront to philosophy that prevents us from learning about anticolonial moral and political philosophy. colonialism is often imagined as an event, with obvious actors, engaging obviously in an oppressive activity. that is to ignore the mechanism of colonialism. it is the imposition of the perspective of the colonizer on the colonized (see lamonica 2011; butt 2013). the methodology of colonialism, like colonialism itself, is ordinary. it is interpretation: explanation in terms of one’s propositional attitudes, like belief (the attitude that a thought p is true). when the colonizer imposes their view on others, they impose their propositional attitudes on others as though that is the appropriate explanation of the colonial encounter. the process of colonization is complete when there is no resistance to this imposition, either because the victims have been exterminated or because the colonized internalize the interpretation foisted on them as their self-understanding. in the case of the absent moral philosophy of colonized traditions, evidence that we’ve been colonized is that we believe moral philosophy doesn’t exist there—and that we engage in moral philosophy as though all the good ideas come from the colonizing tradition. the tradition of colonialism that has reached all corners of our globe originates geographically in the west. the west is a huge geographic region including black and indigenous peoples in africa and the americas. the common talk of the “west” as though that only refers to europe and its political descendants is an artifact of this tradition’s colonialism, which wipes out diversity and sets itself up as the single standard. i call this colonizing tradition, originating from ancient greek thought, the west: this is the slanted, overbearing “w” that leans on the “est.” as this is a tradition of white people that sets itself up as the standard against which everything else is adjudicated, it is a tradition of white supremacy. white supremacy can be imagined as requiring theatrical performance, like burning crosses or wearing white hoods. but as the global version of colonialism, it is simply normalized. its genetic marker is that it sets itself up as the default secular tradition and hence the default content of public 1 i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback, which allowed me to clarify important points in this paper. ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 life, and anything from outside of this (any black, indigenous or person of color— bipoc—tradition) is religion or spirituality—something that is to be understood not in terms of its contribution to philosophical controversy but measured against the western tradition: the more it deviates (the less ethnically western), the more spiritual and religious. long before racial taxonomies were employed to justify western colonialism and normalize white supremacy (for an exploration of this history and the literature, see zack [2018]), religion was created. the idea of religion (religio) was itself invented by the romans to label traditions it would tolerate within its colonial bureaucracy (see beard, north, and price 1998; gordon 2008), and as it spreads, it merely becomes the term for bipoc traditions. hence all world religions (judaism, christianity, islam, zoroastrianism, hinduism, buddhism, shintoism, etc.) have extra-western, bipoc origins. call this secularism2: the secular is the western, and everything else is religious. this is a slow process, and it takes centuries—and over a millennium to crystalize. however, it is clear when we study the correlative impact of western colonialism and the creation of religious identity in newly colonized regions (masuzawa 2005; ranganathan 2018b). the evidence for this process includes the simple observation that south asians had to wait for british colonialism before being informed that their entire history of philosophical controversy covering the full range of issues (across metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, logic), characterizable by no shared position and only the disagreements of philosophy, was a comprehensive religion, hinduism, while various other traditions simultaneously gained their religious identity (such as buddhism, jainism, or sikhism) as opt-out positions—opting out of the supposed comprehensive commitments of hinduism. under secularism2, the same position can be articulated by western and bipoc sources: whether it is religion depends on its racial origins. when plato talks about god, the soul, and the afterlife, that is secular philosophy. said by someone from the middle east, it’s religion. the idea that reality is an evolution of matter, with mind and computational capacities as emergent properties, with no god creating or guiding the process, when said by someone of european descent is secular materialism. said by īśvarakṛṣṇa from south asia, in sanskrit, two thousand years ago: that’s religious, as it’s an orthodox position in hinduism. when bentham claims we ought to be reducing suffering, that’s moral philosophy. said by the buddha, that’s religion. secularism1, free philosophical thinking, where there is no official position one has to endorse to engage in public philosophy, was the default mode of social engagement in south asia prior to colonization. the british used a persian word, “hindu,” for india (madan 2003, xii) to rebrand the entire indigenous south asian tradition (distinct from islam) a religion: hinduism (gottschalk 2012). what was simply a remarkable, extended debate on all topics of philosophy with a diversity of positions is erased by this colonial rebranding (for a review of the literature on this history and feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 the colonial impact, see ranganathan [2018b]). as south asians were colonized by the british, they internalized this external view and began confabulating about their (supposed) shared religion: hinduism (ranganathan 2022a). no doubt part of the confusion is that “hindu” has a referent, fixed by its baptismal colonial event that is ancient (for an account of how naming fixes reference, see kripke [1980]). the south asian tradition of philosophy is one of three ancient traditions of philosophy (in addition to the european and chinese traditions). everyone is correct for noting the referential antiquity of hinduism. yet what the british managed to do was rebrand philosophy, with a masala twist, into a religion, with a mode of presentation consisting in shared rituals and values. if the idea of religion is itself an artifact of western colonialism, then it is a form of white supremacist, colonial trauma, which amounts to a disruption in people’s access to their own secular1 philosophical history. in so far as jurisdictions everywhere draw a distinction between the secular and the religious in accordance with secularism2, white supremacy has been internalized around the globe. india and china, themselves modern heirs of two of three ancient philosophical traditions, also operates with this model: their own indigenous traditions are treated as religious. china uses the western philosophy of marxism as a means of legitimizing its secularism and treats bipoc religious movements (falun gong, the islam of the uighurs, buddhism of tibetans) as a threat to public order requiring a harsh, genocidal, response (hrw 2019; ai 2000; fidh 2013). india explicitly wrote into its constitution (as we shall see) that it’s traditions of moral philosophical reflection are religious and have no place in secular life. what is the political advantage of western colonialism creating the category of religion to contain bipoc traditions? to make sure that sophisticated moral philosophy from colonized traditions cannot enter public discourse and pose a threat to its hegemony. with this ruse, white supremacy redefines itself as the content of public reason while depicting bipoc thought as not in the interest of public order. in the next section, after a brief review of some ancient positions on moral responsibly we turn to the problem of studying south asian moral philosophy. patañjali’s yoga (patañjali 2008), one option from south asia, is most helpful as it begins by contrasting interpretation as the root of moral irresponsibility with an alternative foundation of responsibility, the explicatory methodology of yoga. if we interpret from a western vantage, we can derive the usual skeptical conclusions about south asian moral philosophy in the literature and secularism2. interpretation also forms the infrastructure for oppression by facilitating various isms, like speciesism, racism, sexism. the explicatory practices of yoga in contrast allow for research, decolonization, and healing from trauma. also, importantly, the two methods have historical impact and implications that account for the transition from the precolonial secularism1 of south asia to the colonized, white supremacy of secularism2. ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 in the third section i consider how the moral irresponsibility of interpretation is a signature element of the western tradition that turns it into a global colonizing tradition of white supremacy. this has to do with its ancient, interpretive, linguistic account of thought (lat). in the fourth section i consider how the antilogical, irresponsibility of interpretation, which changes a metaethical choice into an epistemic failure, becomes normalized. 2. moral philosophy and colonialism the ancient south asians, as we learn about them from the earliest surviving sources, such as the vedas, operated against the backdrop of a naturalistic world view, according to which reality is primarily a rule-governed relationship of natural forces, sometimes conceptualized as elevated persons (devas) themselves. it is against this backdrop that the question of the possibility of freedom (mokṣa) arises (for an exploration of this history, see ranganathan [2018d]). if everything is causally determined by natural forces, what room is there for moral responsibility? some concluded that on the basis of the natural origins of the universe, choice is a ruse and experiences of choosing and responsibility are simply epiphenomenal (sāṅkhya). others held that freedom and responsibility are possible by disengaging from the natural world (jainism). others adopted a compatibilist position and held that we as parts of the causally determined universe contribute to future causal states and these contributions are our choice and responsibility (buddhism). against the backdrop of these naturalistic positions, yoga develops as a radical alternative. yoga is unique among most systematic philosophical positions as it begins with an ethical choice between two mutually incompatible methodologies for data processing. yoga, the methodology, consists of ordering epistemic content in a way that reveals its implications and conclusions. the processor hence is able to understand many different explanations, which preserves their autonomy as knowers and choosers (ys i.2–3). call this yogic approach to the data explication: this is to render explicit the logic of options. the opposite approach consists in buying experiences, observations, propositions, as the content of explanation. then the individual interprets: they explain via their propositional attitudes. unlike explication, interpretation ties the agent to an outlook (the content of their propositional attitudes) and then undermines the freedom for choice as it only permits the outlook endorsed by the interpreter (ys i.4). the idea that the universe is causally determined with no room for choice or responsibility is, on the yoga account, an interpretation, at worst, and just one possible explanation, at best. interpretation is widely acclaimed in the twentieth-century analytic and continental literature. authors as diverse as w. v. o. quine (1960, 59), early donald davidson (2001, 101; 1986, 316), martin heidegger (2010), and hans-georg gadamer (1990, 1996) stress the importance of interpretation, often employing the term itself feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 (quine, davidson) or an analogue such as “hermeneutics” (gadamer) or “auslegung” (heidegger) that are readily paraphrased or translated as “interpretation.” it continues in the widely influential idea that reflection is about arriving at an equilibrium of considered judgments (rawls 1971, 20). specifically: • to interpret some package p is for the interpreting subject s to use s’s beliefs b in the explanation of p. explication broadly conceived is about understanding options in terms of inferential support. it includes the application of logical validity to the task of deriving explanations. logical validity is the property of good deductive arguments such that if the premises of the argument are true, the conclusion has to be true. a logically valid argument can be comprised entirely of false premises that one does not believe, and an argument comprised entirely of true propositions, or propositions one believes, can be invalid. to explicate includes employing logical validity to derive from a perspective p a theory that entails its controversial claims about t. the concept t is what theories of t are disagreeing about. we can spell out the process in greater detail. to explicate a perspective p—augustly called a “philosophy”—about topic t, is to e: • discern the reasons of p that constitute p, which entail p’s use of “t,” and to arrive at a systematization of p’s reasons that entails the uses of “t.” the systematization of p’s reasons that entails p’s tclaims is p’s theory of t. the reasons of p may be what p explicitly says, or what is entailed by p. then there is the second step: • compare theories of t: what they converge on while they disagree is the concept t. we shall shortly examine the political and epistemic impact of these two differing approaches. in the western tradition, a lot is made of truth. frege (1988, 36), for instance, defines propositions as the things that can be true or false. but propositions also have another property: inferential support. inferential support allows us to evaluate various forms of reason, whether deduction, induction, or abduction, in terms of success criteria that are distinct from whether the propositions in question are true or the data is accurate or reliable. inferential support explains how modus ponens (if ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 p, then q. p. therefore, q.) is valid even though, as variables, p and q are neither true nor false. as inferential support is the essence of reasoning, interpretation as a methodology is a formal logical fallacy. inferential support concerns the relationship between propositions, or data sets, and interpretation focuses on the psychological affirmation of a proposition or data point as though that counts as an explanation. good deductive arguments, logically valid arguments, can be comprised of propositions one does not believe, and arguments comprised of propositions that one believes can be invalid. by focusing on belief, or any propositional attitude, interpretation allows us to disregard the guardrails of reason. if by virtue of merely interpreting one were to produce an argument that passes logical muster, it would be a fluke. w. v. o. quine (1956) correctly noted that propositional attitudes of an agent like beliefs are inferential duds as any inferential properties they have are mediated by the agent’s psychology. and yet when it came to understanding cultural and linguistic aliens, he argued that we have to use the principle of charity, which is to interpret foreigners by our beliefs (quine 1960, 59, fn.2). this is in effect to reserve one’s illogicality for understanding foreigners. how western. this ends up being an influential approach to the study of alien philosophy (see adamson 2016)—and even when it is criticized, it is also defended (lockard 2023). applying the distinction drawing a distinction between explication and interpretation allows us to see how south asian philosophy has been interpreted in the western-dominated academy and how it can and should be studied via explication. if we interpret south asian discussions of “dharma,” we would explain every use of the word in accordance with our beliefs (within a world of western colonialism), and the result is that each use of the word would be answerable to its own doxastic fund in our outlook. and the result? we would have to conclude that “dharma is a concept difficult to define because it disowns—or transcends—distinctions that seem essential to us” (lingat 1973, 3), that it is used in a “bewildering variety of ways” (larson 1972, 146), and that “it stands for nature, intrinsic [ontological] quality, civil and moral law, justice, virtue, merit, duty and morality,” to name a few (rangaswami aiyangar 1952, 63). in the indian constitution, it is also the term that has been conscripted to stand for religion in its self-description as a secular state: dharmanirapekṣa rājya—“it is a state with no dharma” (india language experts conference, 1949). such interpretive approaches to dharma are the rule and not the exception in a westernized world. it serves to repackage what is indigenous moral (dharma) philosophy as a strange, gap-ridden, and mystical discourse that is rather evidence of the religiosity of the tradition—with the term “dharma” itself being redeployed as the south asian word for the west’s “religion” (for a survey of such claims, see feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 ranganathan 2017b, 52–55). this serves to banish indigenous moral philosophy in the secular2 india as not relevant to secular discussions of moral and political issues. this might be fine except that interpretation violates ockham’s razor by multiplying meanings of “dharma” in accordance with the outlook of the interpreter. if we explicated philosophies, what we would do is employ logical validity to derive from each philosophy that discusses “dharma” a theory that entails all of its uses of dharma, and then we would understand the concept, dharma, as what these theories of dharma are disagreeing about, which we would discover is the right or the good. if we explicated discussions of ethics or moral philosophy in the western tradition, we would find that they are dissenting about the same topic. similarly, we could explicate chinese philosophical discourse about the tao, and we would find that it is also the same concept that theories of the tao are disagreeing about. when we explicate dharma/tao/moral philosophy, we find there is only one basic concept at play—the right or the good—and philosophers in all three traditions are contributing to the same area of research: moral philosophy. what this shows us is that precolonially, south asians didn’t have religious identities: they had moral— dharma—philosophical identities. explication is not only parsimonious; it allows us to understand the contributions of alien philosophers to topics of controversy without having to use our outlook as a gatekeeping criterion. and this reveals four basic ethical theories at play. the first three theories of dharma are familiar in the western tradition: • virtue ethics: the good (character, constitution) conditions or produces the right (choice, action). (vaiśeṣika, madhva’s dvaita vedānta, jainism) • consequentialism: the good (end) justifies the right (choice, action). (nyāya, kāśmīra śaivism, cārvākā, buddhism) • deontology: the right (procedure) justifies the good (actions, called duties, or omissions, called rights). (bhagavad gītā ’s karma yoga, pūrva mīmāṃsā) interpreters are likely to define these options differently, deferring to their beliefs about them. however, explication reveals the ways in which basic ethical theories are themselves different positions one can take on the right or the good. while there are too many examples of the above ethical theories in the south asian tradition to name, and as that explicatory work is beyond the scope of this essay (for a closer overview of this history of south asian moral philosophy, as something explicated, see ranganathan [2017a]), the above nonitalicized parenthetical examples are within what is conventionally thought of as hinduism (for a closer look, see ranganathan ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 [2019a]). importantly, disagreements about dharma reveal a historically significant fourth option: • bhakti/yoga: the right (devotion to the procedural ideal, īśvara, sovereignty) conditions or produces the good. we have already reviewed yoga’s metanormative, metaethical choice between two competing methods for data sorting: the explication/interpretation distinction (ys i.2– 4). yoga’s normative ethics is an entailment of yoga as a metaethical, explicatory practice: in explicating and organizing data, we are unconstrained by past data (tapas, unconservatism) while determining our own practice according to explicitly chosen norms and values (svādhyāya, self-governance) (ys ii.1). these two practices of unconservatism and self-governance are the two parts of the procedural ideal of sovereignty, according to yoga (ys i.23–24). in practicing devotion to this procedural ideal, we engage in the practice of being sovereign, and the resulting good is our own autonomy. “person” (“puruṣa”) is the label given to whatever would thrive—be autonomous—given its own unconservatism and self-governance, the essential traits of sovereignty. this includes nonhuman animals and celestial objects, like the earth. yoga provides a nonableist account of ethics and responsibility for two reasons. first, the right on this account is defined not by a success criterion but rather by devotion to the procedure of the right. one can hence engage in yoga, correctly, before being able to do anything further. secondly, it defines persons not in terms of an ability to engage in this devotional practice but rather in terms of an interest in sovereignty. hence, ability, or the lack thereof, does not factor into whether someone should be treated as a person with an interest in their own independence. to be devoted to sovereignty is hence to be devoted to the essential interests of individual people and, to this extent, is a state of solidarity with people. part of this theory might seem familiar. john stuart mill’s comprehensive liberalism, according to which agents ought to be free to experiment and determine their own conception of the good, is a teleological retelling of yoga. in yoga, experimentation (tapas) and determining one’s own values (svādhyāya) produces no extra outcome: it is a procedural reclaiming of one’s own autonomy and part of one’s devotion to sovereignty. hence, the end of yoga is called kaivalya—isolation (ys iv.34). for mill, as a utilitarian, the point is to maximize happiness. this entails nothing about the distribution of utility (see rawls 1971, 22–27), and hence, it is consistent with conservatism and oppression. mill exemplifies these trends. on his account, the moral freedom to experiment and self-determine is really only for racially mature people (like his people). others, like south asians, would be better off with a despot like akbar—india’s famous mogul emperor (on liberty i.10). mill’s day job was in the british east india company (zastoupil 1994): he was a professional colonizer who had feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 a familiarity with south asia. mill’s appropriation of yoga is widely unknown because south asian moral philosophy is widely unknown due to the colonizing practice of interpretation. in addition to being racist, mill’s theory was also speciesist: in utilitarianism, he claims that human happiness is more important than nonhuman happiness. yoga, in contrast, is not concerned with maximizing happiness but is rather concerned with the autonomy of persons, who come in a diversity of shapes, forms, and species. yoga involves a criticism of conventional morality, concerned with good persons (virtue ethics), good outcomes (consequentialism), and good practices (deontology). the problem with conventional ethics, according to yoga, is that it renders the conventionally ethical vulnerable to the oppression of the moral parasite (colonizer) who wants others to be good so they can be taken advantage of. to throw off the parasite, one may have to do what good people wouldn’t fathom: diminish utility (by way of activism), break with good practices—and criticize their own complicity in oppression by a concern for their own virtue ethical purity (see ranganathan 2019b). according to this criticism, good people concerned with good outcomes and good rules will tolerate evil because putting an end to it involves departing from goodness. all the while, moral parasites diminish the expected utility of the conventionally moral via their oppression. the isms and trauma yoga entails that responsibly relating to oneself and others is about appreciating and exploring the normative space of personhood, delimited by the practice of devotion to sovereignty. this is a practical space that consists in unconservatism and self-governance. irresponsibility, in contrast, arises from being devoted to propositional attitudes: interpretation. this results in conservatively hitching oneself to an outlook, while simultaneously being governed (and not selfgoverned) by that outlook. when people are devoted to propositional attitudes about paradigm cases of persons (say the western example of the able, human, white, heterosexual, cisgender, man, who is a member of a specific community), they use these propositional attitudes as measures. any candidate person who deviates from this measure will appear deficient in proportion to their deviation, and then it will appear appropriate to marginalize such candidate people in proportion to their deviation: call this interpretive marginalization. and if the order of the listed traits matters to the belief about what makes something a paradigm example of a person, then the severity of marginalization will follow suit. oppression, such as speciesism, racism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, and sexism, is hence made possible by interpretive marginalization. the yoga sūtra contains an account of the crisis psychology of the interpreter that gives rise to oppression. the interpreter begins in ignorance by abandoning a ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 responsible approach to the data. this is a false sense of self called egotism (asmitā), which consists in conflating the power of knowing with the world view—propositional attitudes—of the agent (ys ii.3). then the agent uses their own agency to protect this outlook: they are happy when life is in accordance with it and alarmed when it is not. and this constitutes trauma or affliction (ys ii.6). trauma is not a function of the character of the experience. it is an outcome of internalizing experience. even advantageous experiences can be the source of trauma. consider the excellent example that grant silva (2019) describes in his paper “racism as self-love.” this is the example of a white person in the united states. the us has a history of institutional racism that spared white people. that is an advantageous position for white people to be in. nevertheless, a white person in this climate might identify with the political structure of white supremacy they experience, which places them at the top of a racial hierarchy. silva suggests that this is the source of racism as self-love. such a white supremacist will feel alarmed when they are on equal footing with a black person: this equality is a threat to the political structure they identify with. the yoga analysis of this adds that this is not a real self. it is a fake self, generated by the internalization of the experience of white supremacy. but once it is treated as the self, the agent treats the perspective as something that they must fight for as a matter of self-preservation. racism in this case is borne out of this misplaced sense of self-defense, brought on by the fake self of egotism. correlatively, people can survive horrific experiences and leave trauma behind because personhood is not reducible to a set of experiences. persons are things that have an essential interest in their own sovereignty. hence choosing devotion to this procedural ideal allows people to recover their agency by engaging in practices of unconservatism and self-governance. what this looks like will vary greatly depending upon a person’s past and the political challenges they face, but the recovery process will be alike in so far as it moves toward the autonomy of the agent (for more about yoga and its therapeutic applications, see ranganathan [2022b]; sullivan et al. [2018]). and, importantly, the recovery is political and involves altering public space to accommodate the autonomous individual. this analysis of the crisis psychology of the interpreter explains how systemic harm and oppression operate. it is a process lacking intelligence and rooted in the overlap of agents internalizing the same oppressive structures. if one adopts interpretation, one becomes a cell of the sociological regularities of one’s beliefs. and as one’s own agency is set upon reifying these regularities, one perceives any opposition to the project as a personal threat, to which violence is directed as a matter of a confused sense of self-defense. each one of us disrupts the systematic nature of oppression by abandoning egotism as a sense of self. our own personal practice of devotion to sovereignty is hence political. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 patañjali’s yoga sūtra—in addition to specifying the metaethical choice between interpreting and explicating, and the normative ethical substance of this activity (devotion to sovereignty by practicing one’s own unconservatism and selfgovernance)—specifies a nonideal political, remedial practice (upāya). this is called the eight limbs of yoga, and the first limb consists in a famous universal moral prescription, which in turn begins with ahiṃsā. ahiṃsā literally means “nonharm.” teleologists like jains take this to mean not breaking things (for more on jain ethics, see soni [2017]). in yoga, ahiṃsā is procedural and consists in disrupting systemic harm. the result are social facts (satya), with people’s requirements intact (asteya), personal boundaries respected (brahmacarya), and no one appropriating (aparigrahā). in effect, our entry into public life, and the condition of any further practice, is anticolonial activism. this is an extremely influential maxim. m. k. gandhi, in his collected works, extensively credits patañjali, the yoga sūtra’s author, for the origins of his political practice of direct action (it is set out at ys ii.30–35). gandhi was influential in inspiring the activism of martin luther king (n.d.). now the procedural approach to nonharm is part of progressive practice the world over. white supremacy, via interpretation from a western vantage, makes it seem like all the good moral and political philosophy came from white people. what this hides is the bipoc origins of important features of progressive moral and political philosophy—namely, yoga. from yoga we derive a progressive approach to personhood that entails recognizing anything as a person if they can benefit from their own unconservatism and self-governance and recognizing the politics of direct action as the foundation of further social interaction. politics, trauma and reason to further flesh out the distinction between yoga and anti-yoga, between explication and interpretation, between unconservatism and self-governance, and the conservative lack of self-governance, consider the case of the 2020 us presidential election. as the election was being finalized, donald trump claimed that he had in fact won the election. many of his followers, who are interpreters, not only believed donald trump’s claim that he won the election but used this belief as a measure of what transpired. call these people “trumpies.” in cases where trump caried a state or district, trumpies found no grounds for complaint. in districts and states where trump lost, trumpies explained the evidence in terms of their belief. in such cases, ordinary paraphernalia and procedures of voting and counting votes were interpreted as evidence of corruption. in this case trumpies as interpreters had no way to assess the evidence independently of their beliefs. with respect to trauma, it is remarkable how unnerved, and untrusting, the trumpy interpreter is. the project of the trumpy culminated in a violent insurrection, aimed at interfering with ordinary democratic procedure in the us, under the pretense that it was the trumpy that was wronged by ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 the state. their endeavor exemplifies the crisis psychology of egotism, where anything out of step with expectations is treated as a threat. one telling trait of the trumpy as an interpreter is their lack of independence from their belief that trump won the election and their inability not to be influenced by that belief to extraordinary measures. on the other hand, poll workers were explicators. each ballot was a perspective about who should win various races, and the poll workers organized, collated, and rendered explicit these choices to deductively derive conclusions about races, which were only intelligible in light of the controversy of who should win those various races. for the explicator, dissent and controversy are not toxic: they are our means of finding answers to questions. a main difference between the explicatory poll worker and the interpreter trumpy is that the explicator (yogi) has a way to arrive at prima facie truth independently of their beliefs. it’s not that poll workers don’t have beliefs about who should win various races: it is that those beliefs are not premises for their conclusion about the winner of various races. so the explicator, given inputs that are independent of their beliefs but also gathered through procedural channels, can process the data and arrive at conclusions. this processing of data via procedural channels is the essence of research. the conclusions so reached are not set in stone: they can be revised if new information turns up. if the inputs are gathered by procedural channels, and the data is processed responsibly, the conclusions are prima facie true. in contrast, as the interpreter has no way to arrive at the truth independently of their propositional attitudes that form the basis for their identity, they will act as though they are the victim, when things do not conform to their outlook, and engage in violence accordingly. 3. the western origins of global colonialism the argument for yoga interpreters tend to miss arguments as they are assessing everything by way of their propositional attitudes. so as to be extra transparent for their benefit, and to put arguments in standard form, here is the argument for yoga/explication. (1) p or q: either we can take an organizational, yogic, explicatory, approach to understand the options, or we can interpret the options via our propositional attitudes. (2) not q: (interpretation will not allow us to appreciate the logic of the disjunct or the validity of this argument, so) we must reject interpretation. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 (3) therefore, p: we ought to engage in the explicatory activity of yoga to understand the options. sūtra texts like the yoga sūtra are comprised of dense aphorisms, relying upon polysemous words to compress arguments. this explicates the implicit disjunctive syllogism in the opening of the yoga sūtra (ys i.1–4), not in terms of facts, or beliefs, but rather in terms of what is procedurally required to understand the argument. most importantly, an argument is comprised of propositions, not propositional attitudes, and hence, interpretation is not up to the challenge of understanding arguments. this argument can be flipped to create an error theory: (1) p or q: either an organizational, explicatory (yogic) approach to thought leads to irresponsibility, or interpretation leads to irresponsibility. (2) not p: (an explicatory approach to thought leads to understanding the options, prevented by irresponsibility, so) we must reject the explicatory explanation of irresponsibility. (3) therefore, q: interpretation is the explanation of irresponsibility. we can also rewrite this as an argument about colonialism: (1) p or q: either an organizational, explicatory (yogic) approach to thought leads to colonialism, or interpretation leads to colonialism. (2) not p: (an explicatory approach to thought allows for an open exploration of dissenting positions, which is disallowed by colonialism, so) we must reject the explicatory explanation of colonialism. (3) therefore, q: interpretation is the explanation of colonialism. the two options of yoga and anti-yoga, of explanation and interpretation, constitute an inference to the best explanation (abduction)—depending upon what we want to understand. if we want to understand how things go well—responsibly, decolonially—they go well because of yoga, as this makes clear options. if we want to understand how things go badly—irresponsibly, colonially—they go by way of interpretation, as this limits options. these are metaethical and meta-explanatory choices that constrain how we enumerate options. if we explicate, we can render explicit any number of dissenting options for our abduction, but we will have already chosen the explicatory option as the best option to understand the options. if we adopt interpretation, we can only ever acknowledge what we agree to. these two ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 metaoptions are exhaustive for an abduction in so far as they bound the continuum from unlimited options to limited options. lat, colonialism, and the west if one were to interpret the western tradition as westerners do, one would use what one believes on the basis of this tradition to explain this tradition. if we explicate, we look to foundational theses and commitments that give rise to its historical trajectory as entailments. if we adopt this strategy, we find that the west in its earliest form was deeply committed to interpretation owing to an ancient commitment that survives to this day. what connects the contemporary tradition in the form of analytic and continental philosophy and its ancient origins in greek philosophy and thought is lat, codified in the idea of logos (for a historical exploration, see derrida [1998]): one word for speech, thought, and reason. this concept conflates what one would say, what one can think, and reason. reasoning allows one to contemplate arguments comprised of propositions that one would not say. so actual reasoning pulls these ideas of speaking, thinking, and reasoning apart. but in logos, these get conflated, and then the reasonable is depicted as what one would say. and what is it that one would say? we commonly communicate our various propositional attitudes in speech: our beliefs, hopes, and fears. as tarski’s (1944, 1983) work teaches us, merely asserting p is biconditionally (pragmatically) equivalent to the metalinguistic claim that “p is true”—which is an articulation of the belief that p. in other words, when we speak, there’s no audible difference between articulating a proposition p and articulating our belief in p. hence, if by way of speech we conflate a thought and its belief, then by way of speech explanations by way of thought will also be explanations by way of belief: interpretation. logos as the basis of the western tradition hence creates a tradition that expands by explaining everything in terms of what it would say. but there are other ways to see how lat institutionalizes interpretation. consider a thought experiment called planet ethics/dharma (ranganathan 2018c). let us assume for the sake of argument the orthodox account of literal meaning as the systematic or basic role of an expression in a language. the literal meaning is hence what allows us to make sense of various uses of a word (see davidson 1978). next consider the case of a historical linguistic community that over time separates and migrates to differing geographic locations. their languages remain mutually interintelligible on the surface. but, in time, each community adopts a distinct ethical theory as their national identity. and hence, in time, their usage of the term “ethical” starts to reflect their national ethical identity. so, in time, each community’s word “ethical” would have a distinct systematic and basic roll—a distinct literal meaning— that represents the community’s governing ethical theory. and this would happen because as the usage of the term shifts in deference to the national ethical theory, so feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 to what is basic to the usage shifts (for a classic discussion of reference shifting, see evans [1996]). if we assumed the linguistic account of thought, when each person in each differing linguistic community says the sentence form “agents should respect ethical considerations,” they express different propositions. when a speaker from nation kant says this, they mean “agents should respect the categorical imperative.” when speakers from nation mill say this, they mean “agents should respect the greatest happiness principle.” what has happened in this case is that the ethical beliefs of prior generations are in time encoded linguistically as the literal meaning of “ethical.” and in so far as the literal meaning of an expression is responsive to shifts in usage, and these are themselves brought about by doxastic change, linguistic meaning as thought is a way to encode beliefs of formative generations as thought. and hence, on the basis of lat, all explanation by way of thought is explanation by way of beliefs of the formative generations of the language: interpretation. first, if interpretation is the basis of colonialism (and it is, as colonialism is the imposition of an interpretation), then lat leads to colonialism as it cements interpretation. second, as this model of thought is based on a shared communal resource of language, as determined historically by formative beliefs that are reflected in linguistic meaning, moral questions of the right or the good will be communitarian in nature against the backdrop of lat. third, as language is a peculiarly human artefact, the human constraints on language and its inflation in importance by lat entails a metaethical anthropocentrism, where the conditions of moral theory and thought are depicted as peculiarly human. so traditions based on lat, in addition to being colonizing, will tend to be anthropocentric and communitarian. they give priority to humans in one’s own community, secondarily to other humans in proportion to their deviation, and no importance to nonhuman persons (except perhaps if this is a legacy commitment that survives colonization). this of course fits the western tradition as developing and engaging communitarian and anthropocentric ethical theories, starting with plato and aristotle. even socrates, who was being executed by the state, found his whole identity bound up with the laws of athens (as narrated in the crito). we find this emphasis on community echoed in subsequent moral and political thought in the west, whether form hume, kant, hegel, or mill. when bentham breaks with the anthropocentrism of the western tradition, in the introduction to the principles of morals and legislation (chap. 17, section 1), by affirming that anatomy is not morally basic but rather that whether something can suffer is morally basic, he frames the moral standing of animals in terms of their membership in the moral community, which is a communitarian model for moral standing. both communitarianism and anthropocentrism are forms of interpretive marginalization, where the human in a particular community (or kind of community) is treated as the paradigm person. ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 the interpretive foundations of the west, steeped in lat, a fundamentally ethical choice (on the yoga analysis), will also be normalized in discussions of knowledge in interpretive traditions, making it seem like a value-neutral, epistemic foundation and not a moral choice. knowledge in the west is hence modeled as a belief (gettier 1963) or some other variety of propositional attitude (williamson 2002). reason itself is often modeled after strongly held beliefs in the west, based on lat. we find this in descartes, who is famously anthropocentric (newman 2001) but also regarded as a “rationalist.” after a series of skeptical thought experiments in the meditations, he makes use of his cogito, “i think, therefore i am,” as the proposition he cannot doubt, to get him out of trouble. this is not an act of reasoning: it’s a propositional attitude. rebranding this as reasoning is itself an outcome of interpretation. fourth, internally, members of these linguistic communities have no capacity for dissent: their moral culture’s moral outlook is literally encoded in their language. to deny the national ethical theory would be to say something that is analytically false. hence, such traditions will develop an intolerance for philosophers and those critical of received moral convictions. so whereas in south asia, which lacked lat, being countercultural and a philosopher was cool and widely tolerated (see for instance the samaññaphala sutta), in the western tradition that starts out with lat, being a philosopher and countercultural is dangerous. the west hence begins with a series of executions of public intellectuals, starting with socrates. correlatively, robustly interpretive traditions based on lat will conflate thinking and speaking, and insist on free speech only for beliefs encoded in their idiolect. connected to this intolerance to criticism is the incapacity to appreciate crosscultural moral disagreement. for speakers of the different languages to disagree about ethics, they have to share an ethical proposition that one group endorses and the other rejects. however, if we assume lat, on planet ethics, the ethical propositions are in each society indexed to their national ethical theory. so in this case, there can be no way to understand the moral disagreement across cultures, as each culture will express moral propositions that cannot be expressed in other moral cultures, even if only to disagree. this gives rise to the impression that people in other cultures simply don’t have any views about ethics, for to have such views would be to work with the ethical claims in one’s own language. the view in the literature about the lack of moral philosophy in colonized traditions is an outcome of this feature of lat. absurdly, the very problem of cross-cultural communication that interpretation—and lat—creates makes it seem, to the interpreter, that colonialism is the solution. hence, colonization often involves supplanting local languages in favor of that of the colonizer. residential schools are one formalized effort to impose the colonizer’s language on the colonized (hanson, gamez, and manuel 2020). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 all of these absurdities are avoidable by adopting a yoga-inspired approach to thought that underwrites successful practice in translation studies (ranganathan 2018a). accordingly, the extension of a thought contains the semiotic devices (sentences, barks, chirps) that share a disciplinary use, and the intension of the thought is the common disciplinary use. on planet ethics, with this yogic approach to thought, everyone could use their sentence of the form “agents should respect ethical considerations” to straightforwardly translate alien claims with the same sentence form as the thought would be the shared philosophical purpose of the claims, which is to make a claim about the right or the good (ranganathan 2018c). without this yogic deflationary tweak, • the apparent anthropocentrism of lat makes it difficult to understand not only how nonhuman, nonlanguage users could think but also how humans in other cultures that lack our vocabulary could think. anti-semitism in the west is also something brought into relief by this analysis. jews are peoples who often had two linguistic identities: the linguistic identity of the community they live in within the western diaspora, and hebrew. the west, grounded in lat, where identity is linguistic, depicts jews as people who have one foot in a western community they live in and one foot out. and if moral practice is grounded on communitarian considerations reducible to linguistic practices, they will seem like double agents. various anti-semitic tropes ensue. in south asia, which lacked lat, the bene israel had existed, according to them, for nearly two millennia with no known anti-semitism. their “return” to the state of israel, which represents in many ways the continuation of a western approach to statehood based on linguistic identity (hebrew) and not the previous, millennia old diasporic life (elazar 1997), was sadly not easy (see kuikman 2014). china and india in the chinese tradition, we find lat affirmed by confucius in the analects, in his famous doctrine of the rectification of names (analects 12.11 and 13.3). the theory here is that the proper meaning of nouns is their propositional content, and truthful, clear usage must conform to these meanings. given this commitment to lat, confucian ethics in the analects exemplifies many communitarian and anthropocentric features. chinese colonialism would hence be a function of this commitment to lat, in so far as this is bound up with interpretation, which is the mechanism of colonialism. for the chinese, linguistic identity is orthographic and not reducible to a spoken language. many different spoken languages (like mandarin or cantonese) are chinese in so far as they can be expressed in the shared chinese ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 orthography. the trouble for communities like the uighurs or the tibetans who exist in what china regards as their boundaries is that they do not buy chinese as a linguistic identity, and hence these groups are marked for extinction in china. correlatively, if they were to employ chinese as their linguistic identity, they would thereby be normalized within china’s colonial frame. following this analysis, the reason that china did not become a global colonizing tradition like the west is that while the west only has lat, china also has a tradition of philosophy that is highly critical of lat: taoism, which, especially in the tao te ching, rejects communitarian and anthropocentric considerations and recommends adopting a disposition of flexibility to the extra-anthropocentric norm of the way (tao). the chinese model of adopting a unitary orthography for various spoken languages satisfies both the taoist requirement of being open to external norms and also lat. but this receptivity to the outside norms would also account for how china was receptive first to buddhism and then to the western colonialism occurring outside, and to adopting its secularism2 as part of its ethos. in south asia, many philosophers acknowledged the political nature of language and culture by recognizing conventional truth (which we make up)—saṁvṛti or vyāvahārika satya—as something distinguishable from the actual facts: ultimate truth—paramārtha satya. philosophical inquiry was in general treated as something that concerns the facts, not conventions based on the politics of belief (ranganathan 2021). moral (dharma) philosophy in south asia is virtually unrecognizable to the westerner as in south asia, typically, it is disruptive, destabilizing to social conventions, and seeks to bring our behavior in line with the ultimate truth (and each philosophy would have its own story about what that is). philosophy would hence be tasked with helping us get past treating the contingencies of upbringing, culture, and language as a constraint on understanding (for an overview, see ranganathan [2017a]; for in-depth school-by-school review, see ranganathan [2016]). lacking lat, the indigenous south asian philosophical tradition was neither anthropocentric nor communitarian. yoga exemplifies this very south asian approach to philosophy as something that concerns the autonomy of the individual, as something distinct from species and community. things changed under colonialism when the british introduced the idea of hinduism as the indigenous south asian religion in contrast to islam. then, as part of its colonial imposition of western standards of thought, south asians started to buy lat. absurdly, this led to the creation of a muslim language and a hindu language out of the same spoken language: hindustani. the difference? the muslim language of urdu is written with arabic script and the hindu language of hindi is written with devanagari, a south asian script also used to write sanskrit (c. r. king 1994). spoken: same language. written: different languages. but once these linguistic identities were feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 invented, they formed the basis for nationalist movements. urdu became the foundation of the islamic republic of pakistan. hindu nationalism becomes possible with the invention of a “hindu” language. this nationalism exemplifies the crisis psychology of interpretation: everything in accordance with the shared worldview is acceptable, and what diverges is a threat (sharma 2011). but what most do not notice is that this creature, which claims to represent the interests of indigenous south asians, is a continuation of western colonialism. it requires several innovations that are created by the colonizing tradition, the west—like hindu religious and linguistic identity—that are departures from the secularism1 of south asia. go back far enough, before colonization, and no south asian would have any clue what you were talking about if you asked about religion—or india! overview in this section i considered the argument for yoga, and how it can be inverted as an error theory, which accounts for irresponsibility and colonialism. moral irresponsibility and colonialism are both made possible by the methodology of interpretation, as interpretation reduces our appreciation of the options and colonialism is this heavy-handed imposition of a lack of options. lat, which gives rise to interpretation, can be found in china, but it was controversial there. ancient south asian philosophers were critical of positions like lat that sought to ground the facts in social artifacts like language. but lat is assumed and acclaimed in the western tradition, giving it a historical head start in colonialism. in so far as there were noncolonial traditions everywhere else, western colonialism suppressed these as it expanded. what we find in these previously colonized jurisdictions, such as india, is a continuation of the west’s colonialism (such as secularism2) and the adoption of lat. 4. the recalcitrance of colonialism the disjunction between adopting an explicatory versus interpretive approach to the data is fundamentally a metaethical choice, which has practical consequences. if we choose the yogic, explicatory approach, we process data responsibly, make room for ourselves as individuals, and engage in a politics of being pro-person. however, in choosing badly, interpreters create epistemic problems for everyone. having no way to approach the truth independently of their propositional attitudes, interpreters create an ersatz reality of egotism, which they then enforce via violence. those who deviate from beliefs about paradigm cases are in proportion to this deviation marginalized from ethical consideration. the social world that results from this is a construction out of the beliefs employed in interpretation. whether one is an explicator or an interpreter will determine how one treats any tradition. if one is an explicator, one renders explicit basic assumptions of ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 21 competing traditions, and their respective entailments, which constitute historical predictions that have empirical import. the west is hence not the frame of explanation but an object of explanation. if one interprets, one uses the doxographic resources one inherits as the content of explanation. typically, in a world of western colonialism, this entails treating the west as though it is a default frame of explanation for every other tradition. choosing interpretation assumes and entails a willful ignorance (avidya), in so far as all explanation has to be routed through the contingencies of one’s psychology. this creates several immune responses that insulate the interpreter from having to contend with criticism. i will list only a few here. ignorance is bliss: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. as interpretation is an emotional or emotive approach to explanation, which consists in the interpreter only tolerating what they are willing to endorse, an interpreter will only tolerate what they choose to endorse. so paradoxically, if you point out the problematic outcomes of interpretation, which the interpreter themselves rejects, they will ensure that the criticism does not see the light of day, as it involves what they do not want to endorse. begging the question. as interpreters prefer believing to thinking, which makes reasoning difficult, when pressed to justify their beliefs, they will usually fall back on that belief. this is to beg the question. when pressed to assess an argument, they will measure it against what they believe. so nothing critical can ever see the light of day for the question-begging interpreter. research for the interpreter is hence a matter of saying what they believe, and hence they assess whether research is compelling or persuasive in terms of whether it resonates with their outlook. bad reasoning. while interpreters are unwilling to use reason as explicators do as a means of research, they can use reason to dress up the propositions they believe into arguments. but often, they will just fail at reasoning. first, in believing that the reasonable is the same as what they believe, they place too much weight on their refutations. 1. if the author is correct (p), then the west is a tradition of interpretation (q). 2. it is not the case that the west is a tradition of interpretation (not q). 3. therefore, the author is incorrect (not p). the interpreter fancies themselves clever for providing the second premise, which is the negation of the consequent, thereby delivering a concluding refutation of the antecedent. but they incorrectly take themselves to have proven something: the validity of the argument is independent of the truth of any of the propositions in the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 22 argument. not q may be false, and still the argument goes through. but often, they don’t even manage to produce a valid argument: 1. if the author of this paper is correct about lat and the west (p), then it follows that belief and thought are conflated in the western tradition (q). 2. western thinkers do not believe that belief and thought are the same. 3. therefore, the author of this paper is incorrect about lat and the west (~p). the problem here is that this is not modus tollens as the second premise is not a rejection of the consequent of the first premise. it rather code switches to a propositional attitude. this confusion between propositions and propositional attitudes is a signature feature of the west, grounded on lat that confuses the two and gives rise to interpretation. it allows participants in this tradition to perpetually whitewash the history of the west by self-servingly explaining the west in terms of what it believes about itself (as opposed to what is entailed by it), and it constitutes an ahistorical approach to the data. the charge is not that the west doesn’t believe in distinguishing between thought and belief: rather, it typically does not, and this criticism is a case in point. gatekeeping: publish/conform or perish. strategies of interpretation to avoid dealing with criticism are weaponized by the game of conform or perish—the academic version is publish or perish. this model brings to fore a dynamic of gatekeeping that predates the current pressure-cooker approach to academic activity. it is also a dynamic that is independent of academia. it captures the pressure that people experience under colonization to adopt the colonizer’s narrative to survive games of public participation. but the pressure-cooker academic dynamic of publish or perish crystalizes the problem. to simplify this model, let us assume that, at the start, the authors who are contributing writing for consideration for publication are split between interpreters and explicators. further, let us assume that the reviewers are also split between interpreters and explicators. given an explication of the origins of interpretation as closely tied to the western tradition, and a historical awareness of the impact of interpretation with the background beliefs of the west to produce a globalizing tradition of western colonialism that made its way (via secularism2) into competing traditions like that of china and india, we know that the doxastic commitments of the interpreter contributors and reviewers (in our world) will be western. further, as a simplifying assumption, let us assume that though interpreters make the metaethical choice not to reason as a methodology, they have, by way of their parasitism, learned to arrange the propositions they believe into valid ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 23 arguments—as interpreters, they can tolerate these arguments but not an argument that relies on thoughts they do not believe. the explicators will find no reason to reject the interpreter’s own arguments for want of logic. and let us further assume that half of the explicators in any round of the game accidentally share the doxastic commitments of the interpreters, so on interpretive grounds, their papers can be accepted. finally, to survive the game requires acceptance from both reviewers: # of authors explicator reviewer acceptance interpreter reviewer acceptance survivors explicator authors 100 100 50 50 interpreter authors 100 100 100 100 if this game is played recursively, where the survivors of one round of publish or perish are the only ones allowed to play the next round, then after the second round only twenty-five explicating authors survived. after seven rounds, they are completely eliminated. the interpreters survive every round. if interpreters are allowed to peer review academic work, then how can one survive recursive games of publish or perish? even if the population of reviewers was split fifty-fifty between interpreters and explicators, and the choice between the two reviewers assigned to one’s submission was determined by a coin toss, then there would be a one in four chance of two explicators adjudicating. so if one’s hopes for survival rested on having only explicating judges, the chances for survival are bad. in effect, the decolonial explicator has to play the long game, and find some way of staying afloat while interpreters overtake them by publish or perish. as reviewers are recruited from the stock of winners of rounds of publish or perish, there will be very few explicators in the pool, as they are weeded out. the only way to game the system would be to simply acquire the dominant beliefs of the interpreters as what one wrote on and argued for, but that would be to give up on explication as a strategy. as long as interpreters are treated as though they are competent reviewers of research, interpretation will normalize a violence that gets rid of explicators. this game is the academic version of what goes on in ordinary cases of adjudication in work and in various other settings, such as colonial administration of colonized people, which we might call conform or perish. given the importance of publish or perish to gaining prestigious book contracts with prestigious publishers, which in turn are required to be hired for prestigious academic positions, prestigious institutions and prestigious publications feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 24 will be stacked with interpreters, who use interpretive considerations for everything. this further drives the number of explicators to near zero. to succeed at publish or perish, one has to share the doxastic resources of the western tradition, for it is from there that we get both interpretation as a model of explanation and the beliefs that are employed in interpretation. this amounts to an unreasonable advantage for typical white persons. the typical white person inherits the western tradition as part of their cultural heritage, and they are hence supplied by upbringing with the beliefs and the interpretive practices to succeed at publish or perish, or its wider application, conform or perish. and this advantage is unreasonable as interpretation is unreasonable. this unreasonable advantage for white persons facilitated by publish or perish suggests that they will tend to get hired for jobs for south asian (or other bipoc) philosophy over bipoc scholars. a moral philosopher doing the kind of work we are doing here will appear too out of step with the western doxography to be competitive for positions in south asian philosophy. and correlatively, they wouldn’t get a job with a specialization in moral philosophy either, for that would be reserved for someone writing on a western figure, like kant or aristotle. south asians and others could win in this game for academic recognition, but that would involve acquiring the doxographic identity of the westerner. all the ordinary forms of interpretive marginalization that assume a westernparadigm person will be in effect. this explains not only a preferential treatment in proportion to conforming to western paradigm expectations but also an existential toll on those who do not. western departments with affirmative action policies that rely upon publish or perish would be thrilled to hire bipoc philosophers (who conform as much as possible to western paradigm expectations—conventionally attractive, able-bodied) who produce literature in the western hagiographical tradition, celebrating western authors. but bipoc folks who acquire a western doxography would also be convinced that their ancestral traditions are religious and not philosophical, and they would hence not be disposed for a job that specialized in the philosophies of their tradition. given publish/conform or perish, the mere tokenizing push for diversity in contributors or staffing will simply reproduce western colonialism and white supremacy as these are the gatekeepers of advancement—so long as interpreters are allowed to adjudicate. finally, all of this also explains why the efforts of westerners—including white feminists—to diversify their syllabi or their publications, and to teach bipoc philosophy or write on it, is a horror show. instead of explicating the options and allowing the western tradition to be brought into relief, western authors interpret bipoc philosophy according to their western doxography: white supremacy 2.0. ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 25 it ought to be obvious from these preceding considerations that interpretation on the basis of the western tradition is not racially determined. it is rather a metaethical choice that is morally irresponsible. and moreover, these considerations do not entail that bipoc people are individuals who do not engage in interpretation. rather, conform or perish and the gatekeeping considerations it brings to fore entail that bipoc people have to interpret to maintain a competitive standing and to not be weeded out of public participation in events that are policed by gatekeeping that permits interpretive adjudication. but bipoc people can only maintain this competitive standing against the backdrop of a historical, globalized tradition of western colonialism if they adopt the doxography of the western tradition as their own. this is how colonization becomes localized by indigenous peoples. and as noted, this is harder for bipoc folks. it involves accepting a marginalized understanding of their own intellectual history as religious, spiritual, and not philosophical. it also involves adopting beliefs from the western tradition that are alien to their own marginalized bipoc upbringing. if they attempt to interpret everything on the basis of beliefs that they derive from their indigenous traditions, they will be weeded out of rounds of publish or perish and gatekeeping games in general as these beliefs are outside of the sanctioned doxastic content of the colonizing tradition. in a westernized world where many regret colonialism, many will valorize attempts of bipoc people to interpret on the basis of their traditions: the injustice of western colonialism will be depicted as the injustice of restricting interpretation to the western tradition. this results in the expectation that everyone should be given an opportunity to share their opinions on the basis of their respective traditions. the problem is not that bipoc folks do not get to engage publicly with their own indigenous interpretations. the problem is interpretation. it survives not because it is reasonable or rigorous. it survives because it is violent. and given the head start the western tradition has in interpreting on the basis of its tradition, it creates a morally irresponsible, constructed reality where people who inherit the western tradition as their own ethnic tradition (for the most part, white people) have an absurd, epistemically irrelevant advantage in iterations of gatekeeping exemplified in publish or perish—including and especially in academic discussions on bipoc traditions. people who wish to be allies to bipoc folks and against this white supremacy would have to abandon interpretation and take up the yoga activity of explication. this would be reasonable and morally responsible. but for most people accustomed to the white privilege of being able to successfully engage in games such as publish or perish on the basis of their ethnic heritage, this involves a departure from their conventional moral expectations that creates the context for moral parasitism. and yes, there will be a loss of expected utility that comes along with this activism. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 6 published by scholarship@western, 2024 26 5. conclusion in this paper i contrasted two metaethical choices. interpretation, an antilogical method, is of the essence of moral irresponsibility, as it limits our appreciation of the options. given its foundations in lat, the ancient western model of thought, it gives rise to a global, colonizing tradition of anthropocentrism, communitarianism, and secular2 white supremacy. it is sustained by the psychological fragility of the interpreter, who confuses their propositional attitudes for a sense of self and then defends this as a matter of misguided self-defense. the methodology of interpretation not only makes possible oppression by way of interpretive marginalization; it makes it impossible for interpreters to learn. when they deploy interpretation, they destroy what they set out to understand. while philosophy ought to be a discipline of explication, instead, in the west, it is remodeled as an exercise of eurocentric autoethnography, where westerners reflect on their beliefs in light of their tradition and further remake proposals on the basis of those beliefs, adjudicated by people who use beliefs derived from the same tradition. the oppressive structures of academic philosophy that are observed in games like publish or perish are not indigenous to philosophy but rather the expression of white supremacist colonization, via interpretation. the far right, which makes use of racial and religious identities, themselves artifacts of western colonization, to violently interpret, is just a more flavorful expression of the west—not an aberration. what is indigenous to philosophy is explication. learning that we have a choice, at the metaethical level, between explication and interpretation is aided by explicating yoga as a fourth basic position on the right or the good. then, the west does not have to be the frame of explanation but rather the object of investigation. we rather participate in the moral responsibility of rendering options explicit. this amounts to a position of solidarity with persons who share an interest in unconservatism and self-governance—a moral interest that transcends arbitrary natural differences. references adamson, 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palgrave macmillan. zastoupil, lynn. 1994. john stuart mill and india. stanford, ca: stanford university press. ranganathan – reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility published by scholarship@western, 2024 31 shyam ranganathan (he/him/they) is translator of patañjali’s yoga sūtra (penguin 2008), editor of the bloomsbury research handbook of indian ethics (2017), author of yoga—anticolonial philosophy (singing dragon 2024) and the forthcoming moral philosophy and decolonialism: the irrationality of oppression (bloomsbury 2025). he is a member of the department of philosophy and york center for asian research, york university toronto. 101206 ranganathan title page 101206 ranganathan final format early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 4 article 2 recommended citation forbes, allauren samantha. 2025. “early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (4). article 2. 2025 early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm allauren samantha forbes mcmaster university forbeas@mcmaster.ca forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm allauren samantha forbes abstract in this article i explore how three early modern european feminists—marie de gournay, margaret cavendish, and mary astell—discuss wooing in surprisingly similar ways. independently and without the benefit of a personal or intellectual relationship, all three highlight how wooing is characterized by deception, insincere flattery, and occasional coercion to secure consent to marriage; they problematize how wooing tricks women into consenting to their own subordination. this is a feminist social epistemological project: gournay, cavendish, and astell recognize wooing as a gendered socio-epistemic harm, for wooing undermines women’s abilities to exercise their epistemic agency over making what was often the single most consequential choice in their lives—who to accept as husband. i argue that for gournay, cavendish, and astell, wooing not only is a gendered socio-epistemic harm but also manifests an epistemic injustice, hermeneutical obscuring, which was deployed by wooers in service of maintaining patriarchal power hierarchies. for gournay, cavendish, and astell, the social practice of wooing manifests patriarchal control via a kind of gendered epistemic tyranny. successful wooing frustrates epistemic capacities, entrenches gender hierarchies, and traps women in the epistemically and politically subordinating relation of marriage. keywords: wooing, marriage, gournay, cavendish, astell, epistemic injustice, early modern philosophy 1. introduction early modern european women philosophers were engaged in a difficult and protracted battle to be taken seriously. until recently, few were remembered as philosophers at all.1 contemporary scholars have been working to ameliorate this historical injustice over the last few decades, thinking through canons and syllabi, examining significant debates, and discovering early modern feminist critiques of 1 see, for example, hutton 2015; bergès 2015. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 structures, practices, and values.2 some scholars have flagged the interrogation of marriage in early modern feminist philosophers’ writings as advancing philosophical projects: laura brace (2000), deborah boyle (2013), jacqueline broad (2014), and kelin emmett (2022) have all published careful accounts of the function of marriage in mary wollstonecraft, margaret cavendish, mary astell, and moderata fonte’s works. but few contemporary philosophers working on early modern european women have attended to the wooing that precedes marriage. this is unfortunate; as a practice designed to secure a woman’s consent to marry, wooing is importantly connected to the ills of marriage. in this article, i explore how three early modern feminists—marie de gournay, margaret cavendish, and mary astell—discuss wooing in surprisingly similar ways. independently and without the benefit of a personal or intellectual relationship, all three highlight how wooing is characterized by deception, insincere flattery, and occasional coercion to secure consent to marriage; they problematize how wooing tricks women into consenting to their own subordination. this is a feminist socialepistemological project: gournay, cavendish, and astell recognize wooing as a gendered socio-epistemic harm, for wooing undermines women’s abilities to exercise their epistemic agency over making what was often the single most consequential choice in their lives—who to accept as husband. as such, i will argue that for gournay, cavendish, and astell, wooing not only is a gendered socio-epistemic harm but also manifests an epistemic injustice, hermeneutical obscuring, which was deployed by wooers in service of maintaining patriarchal power hierarchies. gournay, cavendish, and astell all recognized, independently of one another, that early modern patriarchy has an epistemic dimension and that wooing instantiates this. they are thus engaged in a sophisticated feminist project. to make my case, i begin in section 2 with a brief overview of how gournay, cavendish, and astell each discuss wooing, highlighting their shared concerns about three socio-epistemic components of wooing—namely, deception, coercion, and flattery. in section 3, i argue that given their similar problematization of these socioepistemic elements, gournay, cavendish, and astell should be understood as offering not only an account of wooing as a gendered socio-epistemic harm but one that constitutes a form of epistemic injustice: wooing frustrates women’s epistemic agency—as a practice, it manifests patriarchal control via a kind of gendered epistemic tyranny. i turn, in section 4, to the suggestion that gournay, cavendish, and astell’s analysis of wooing as a kind of epistemic injustice hints at a larger feminist project: the problematization of an epistemic dimension of early modern patriarchal power. i then consider a class of objections to which gournay, cavendish, and astell might be 2 see, for example, boyle 2018; broad 2015; deslauriers 2008; detlefsen 2016; green 2013; lascano 2023; shapiro 2016; sipowicz 2021. forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 vulnerable—specifically, that they were uncharitable to wooers as victims of patriarchy. 2. accounts of wooing though they are writing in different places, times, and genres, gournay, cavendish, and astell all understand wooing to be the social process by which a man secures a woman’s consent to his marriage proposal. here, marriage is used as a proxy for securing sexual access and confirming traditional gender hierarchies. interestingly, wooing is always presented in the context of marrying for love—that is, by the woman’s consent rather than her family’s: it is directed at the woman rather than her family. in gournay’s (2002c) the promenade of monsieur de montaigne, a romantic tragedy that foregrounds wooing, all of the wooing takes place outside of the patriarch’s influence; similarly, cavendish’s the public wooing and the convent of pleasure begin with the heroine being orphaned (cavendish 1662, 1999). astell (1996), in some reflections upon marriage, is concerned with husbands and wives’ true reasons for marrying. thus, gournay, cavendish, and astell take on wooing as a proxy not for a cultural and class-specific activity but for the gendered power dynamics of early modern patriarchal society. in what follows, i discuss how gournay, cavendish, and astell understand wooing to operate as a social practice fraught with epistemic asymmetries. 2.1. gournay gournay’s the promenade of monsieur montaigne is ostensibly a romantic tragedy. it is also explicitly concerned with the ways in which wooing instantiates control over what women are able to know and thus how they are able to choose and what they are able to do; the plot unfolds with various interjections from gournay to montaigne concerning the narrative and the lessons therein. the plot concerns princess alinda’s doomed romantic life. she is first coerced into consenting to an arranged marriage to benefit her father and nation, but before her wedding, handsome leontin woos her. he affirms her unhappiness and her fears, arguing that he understands her and her plight, and that he values her deeply (gournay 2002c, 38– 40). leontin thus woos alinda with flattery and disingenuous kind speech, such that “she failed to observe that leontin was pitying her troubles only so as to multiply them, and was making her swallow the poison of love in the cup of adulation”; as such, leontin “had too much art and intelligence for the simpleness of that young woman” (gournay 2002c, 40). leontin’s wooing did not come from a place of genuine sympathy and understanding. he desired to have her as his own from the moment he first saw her (37). unfortunately, leontin was successful: gournay expresses pity for alinda and observes feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 the monstrous design that he effected with alinda. suffice it to say that, within fifteen days, . . . he so skillfully hunted down a naïve soul that he reduced her to agreeing to follow him, as her new husband, wherever he might wish to leader her. (gournay 2002c, 41; emphasis added) leontin’s wooing was relentless and eventually came to fruition. since she has married in violation of her duties, alinda and leontin flee as new spouses but are shipwrecked in a strange land. a local nobleman, othalcus, generously takes them in. like leontin, however, othalcus is determined to possess alinda for himself. he propositions her, and she declines, given her marriage to leontin. so othalcus sends his sister ortalde to seduce leontin. having grown tired of alinda’s distress and bored of dismissing her claims of othalcus’s pursuit, leontin is all too happy to have amorous relations with a new woman. once alinda is sufficiently vulnerable—worn down, ignored by her husband—othalcus escalates his efforts. unfortunately for him, this coincides with alinda learning of leontin’s betrayal and, after writing a letter to excoriate his character, she kills herself. gournay highlights two important features of wooing through this narrative: first, the means by which wooers gain power over women—namely, deception and insincere flattery; and second, the role of consent in authorizing that power. alinda is beset by men who are not honest about who they are and what they want from her. they deceive and flatter her, undermining what she can know about her circumstances and thus how she makes her choices and what she is subsequently able to accomplish. gournay indicates that deception is a fundamental problem within wooing. leontin illustrates this with abundance. he speaks sweet words to alinda, persuading her to throw over her duties to her father and her nation to run off and marry him. this speech is deceptive: he does not really care for alinda—he does not even truly know her, for his wooing takes place within a fortnight—and the reader knows this not only because gournay tells them so but also because leontin abandons her almost immediately. for gournay, there are two sorts of deception to be aware of when it comes to wooing and the promises of wooers: therefore, ladies are quite wrong to accuse men generally of deceit, when they find their promises of love broken. indeed, there are some who promise like cheaters, having no desire to keep faith, but there are still more of those who promise like fools, without, i say, being aware to what degree the weakness of their minds is incapable of that great virtue of constancy. (gournay 2002c, 47) did leontin never intend to be faithful, as some of the possessive, desirous language concerning their first meaning might suggest, or was he simply too weak-willed to forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 resist ortalde’s advances? this does not matter from alinda’s perspective: a man who promises to love and cherish is deceptive if he falls short, whatever the reason. even so, gournay hints that leontin’s failure is the former: he lacks loyalty and constancy, he convinces alinda that her arranged marriage is doomed, and he exploits her fear and vulnerability (gournay 2002c, 46, 47, 39, 40). perhaps most damning is that when ortalde pursues him, he does not immediately rebuff her as alinda does to othalcus— someone who is weak but had good intentions would surely take steps to address their weakness. alinda clearly identifies leontin as a culpable, intentional deceiver. she rues that her “youthful simplicity was easy to deceive” (gournay 2002c, 51) and adds, from now on, let no woman believe a man when he swears; let none hope that the words of a man are trustworthy. while the desiring spirit is keen to get something, they do not shrink from vows or spare their promises. but as soon as the hunger of passion is satiated, they cannot be bothered to hold in awe their words or their perjuries. (gournay 2002c, 52) alinda is crushed by leontin’s betrayal. it is especially hurtful given his supposed deep understanding and appreciation of her as conveyed in his flattering speech during his wooing of her—itself an instance of deception. though gournay does not say much about flattery in promenade, in her later work, apology for the woman writing, she suggests that flatterers have no interest in providing meaningful support to their targets (gournay 2002a, 118). rather, flatterers are like mercenaries: they give praise because the target’s warmth toward them is beneficial, all while clothing this exchange in the veneer of genuine respect and care (118). flattery is thus itself deceptive; it is an effort to control what a target knows. flatterers may seem to prostrate themselves before their target, but this voluntary subordination is disingenuous; it indicates a “diseased” state of morality and an inadequate intellect (119). leontin deliberately and disingenuously cultivated alinda’s warm feelings toward him, alternately praising her and sympathizing with her plight as an intended bride. he cast himself as her champion and means of escape, when in fact, he was just another cage. leontin controlled what alinda could know—about him, as her wouldbe rescuer, but also about herself: she thinks herself cared for, valued, and superior in a way that simply is not true. i take it that gournay is issuing advice to her reader: wooing is, by its very nature, a deceptive practice: a wooer speaks of a future together when in fact he is concerned only with the moment of consent to his proposal and persuading his target so as to cross that threshold. the wooer’s intentions evaporate once his passion is satisfied. as such, women are deceived by wooers who are disinclined to uphold their vows when it is no longer pleasant to do so. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 as gournay shows, there is an epistemic problem with wooing; specifically, there is an epistemic asymmetry between the wooer and the wooed that is disproportionately disadvantageous for women. alinda comes to believe things about leontin that are untrue: neither his intentions nor his flattering speech are borne out by his actions. this is troubling, for intentions and esteem cannot be known except as communicated by the person possessing them. the problem is that alinda and other wooed women must nevertheless make important choices based on the misleading, false, or incomplete information—deception and flattering speech—presented to them in wooing. if leontin had been honest with alinda that he was very interested in the short term and less so in the ever-after, she could have made a different choice. his deception and flattery robbed her of that and. eventually, cost alinda her life. the problem is more than just nonideal decision-making conditions, however, given the gender structures in place. gournay communicates the severity of this through alinda’s circumstances. while not all wooed women are princesses who must flee their homes after marrying the wrong man, alinda knows that she cannot return home, having disgraced herself and her family through her marriage to leontin, and so her only option is to die. this is a dramatic version of the stakes for more common women, too—picking the wrong man is a life sentence; wooing, insofar as it is a process that encourages men to secure consent rather than share honest statements of intention or engage in careful self-examination about what those intentions really are, makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for women to be able to choose the right man for them. importantly, however, gournay does not fault the deceived; their epistemic capacities are operating as they usually do. the problem lies squarely in those who deceive to secure access to women without care for what that will mean for those women. gournay warns her reader that men are essentially untrustworthy when it comes to wooing: “ladies, in the final analysis, will discover in books that whoever knows men better distrusts them more” (gournay 2002c, 53). presumably, gournay is advising to believe wooers at your peril, for wooing is inherently deceptive. moreover, as gournay illustrates throughout promenade, wooing is explicitly aimed at securing consent. this is puzzling: not only is consent under such conditions not morally valid, but it also suggests that wooing is not about brute power over (and base sexual access to) women. leontin did not simply kidnap alinda, and othalcus did not assault her, though both actions were within their power. why does consent matter to wooers? one answer gournay suggests is that there is something erotic for men in getting women to agree to that which places them in a man’s power. consider othalcus’s pursuit of alinda. othalcus wants alinda for himself and woos her—seeking her consent—to marry her. this is already a difficult circumstance because she and leontin are stranded foreigners dependent on othalcus’s generosity, so his pursuit of her (a married woman) feels coercive. alinda is aware of their precarious position: she “faced the dilemma, not of deciding between yes and no for her answer, but of seeking forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 some form of refusal calculated to flow gently from her, so as not to offend one who had them wholly in his power” (gournay 2002c, 44). alinda sees this as a matter of survival; while this echoes women’s conditions in cases where marriage is a means of subsistence, the dynamic is even worse than it first appears. not only is othalcus unconcerned with coerced consent; alinda’s distressed refusal increases his desire for her. as gournay writes, yet it must be acknowledged that neither [alinda’s] weeping nor this difficulty [of her refusal] made othalcus despair of the conquest so much as they made it appear more glorious and desirable to him, and he at once withdrew without otherwise pressing it, because he had proposed to gain it by gentle means, so as not to lose the pleasure of acquiescence, in which consisted, he firmly believed, the tenderest of love’s delights. (gournay 2002c, 45; emphasis added) othalcus is not seeking consent because he respects alinda, her will, or her desires. he does not seek to become desirable to her. instead, he elects to undermine her ability to refuse on structural grounds so that he can gain the pleasure of her passive agreement. this is not genuine consent. othalcus, like many wooers, is not concerned with what his target wants. nor is what he claims to want, marriage qua relationship, what he is actually pursuing—like leontin, albeit more nakedly, othalcus is concerned with gaining unfettered sexual access to alinda. thus, the mere appearance of consent, acquiescence, itself has erotic value for him: it is a promise of sexual conquest to come. here, gournay illustrates that for wooers, the value of consent is not that it represents a real, nondeceptive, noncoercive choice, but rather that it is seen to authorize sexual activity. it represents a woman, alinda, placing herself in the sexual power of a man, othalcus. it is a moment that transitions a woman from being another man’s property—her father, her first husband’s—to his to do with as he wishes. if this is what consent is for, then it need not require the ability to do otherwise or full knowledge of to what one agrees. as gournay demonstrates, wooing is a socioepistemic practice characterized by deception in ways that solicit consent so as to give the appearance of authorizing control over women’s bodies. 2.2. cavendish cavendish similarly critiques wooing in her plays the public wooing and the convent of pleasure. in public wooing, lady prudence forces all her would-be suitors to present themselves and their vows for the marriage that would follow in public, in front of all. she eventually agrees to marry a man who seems poor and physically undesirable but demonstrates a thoughtful, wise, and fair character. at their wedding, he reveals himself to be young, handsome, and wealthy, having disguised himself so feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 as not to overpromise what she would be receiving. in convent, lady happy inherits a great deal of money and eschews marriage, for “men are the only troublers of women; . . . they cause their pains, but not their pleasures” (cavendish 1999, 220). so, she opens the convent—a separatist community for women to enjoy life’s pleasures. soon, a princess from a far-off land joins the convent; she and lady happy fall in love. near the play’s end, it is revealed that the princess was a prince in disguise;3 he and lady happy marry, and the convent closes. like gournay, cavendish is troubled by the deception, coercion, and flattery that characterize wooing and function as the means of securing women’s consent to marriage. cavendish’s main concern, however, is the means by which wooing itself makes it difficult, if not impossible, for women to appreciate the reality they inhabit; wooing fundamentally unsettles women’s capacity to know with whom they are interacting and thus to whom they are granting their futures. though identifying the troubling socioepistemic structure, content, and results of wooing, cavendish highlights the ways in which wooing constitutes a gendered epistemic harm. cavendish is explicit that there is something wrong with the structure of wooing itself. the main plot of public wooing is an implicit critique thereof; knowing that wooers misrepresent themselves with impunity when wooing takes place in private, lady prudence uses publicity as a metaphorical antiseptic. in forcing her wooers to say only what they would be publicly accountable for, she makes the practice work for her rather than against her. convent, however, approaches the structure of wooing in a more roundabout way. the main plot, the happenings within the convent’s walls, are interspersed with vignettes from would-be wooers. they desire to possess lady happy’s beauty and wealth; they have never even met her or been interested in so doing until she becomes a vulnerable and rich potential target (cavendish 1999, 217, 221–22). when they discover she is cloistered, they consider appealing to the state to force the convent to close, setting the convent on fire and seizing the fleeing women, and dressing as serving women to infiltrate the convent (cavendish 1999, 223, 226, 227, 228). while some of this is likely for comedic effect, cavendish is also laying bare the true structure of wooing and the true intentions of wooers. it might begin as a display of submission and interest, but it is ultimately motivated by entitlement to women and violence when that entitlement is frustrated—something lady prudence and lady happy both try to get ahead of, albeit in their own ways. the wooers’ strategies run the gamut from flattery, to coercion, to deception. cavendish is showing her readers that one may be up against a host of attacks on what one thinks one knows—conversations, safety, and community. 3 it is possible that the princess is a trans character and that she is her true self as the princess even if this is not her social identity outside the convent. while i find this reading attractive, there is insufficient textual evidence to defend it. forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 lady prudence and lady happy are both successfully wooed, though to different effects, and in both cases the wooing is characterized by an extreme degree of deception such that who they thought they were marrying is not who they in fact married. lady prudence thinks she is marrying a man of good character, which seems to bear out, but while he may not have been deceptive about what kind of man he was, he was deceptive about his identity: her wooer turns out to be a prince who is young, handsome, and wealthy. while this is obviously intended to be satirical—a wooer’s deception working out to the bride’s advantage is clearly intended as comedic irony—as it stands, it does not change the fact that lady prudence was misled. moreover, it hints that perhaps the prince was not as decent as he first appeared; this was an attempt to test lady prudence’s virtue (cavendish 1662, v.xxxxii). lady happy is similarly misled in being wooed by the princess. the princess claims to join the convent to escape “a court of troubles” and seeks to play the part of lady happy’s lover in a “masculine-habit” (cavendish 1999, 228, 229). lady happy and the princess play the part of a lady and her male lover across various scenes, one of which culminates in an amorous verse, with the two agreeing to marry then dancing around the may pole as queen and king. lady happy falls in love with the princess, but this confuses and distresses her. she laments, “my name is happy, and so was my condition, before i saw this princess; but now i am like to be the most unhappy maid alive: but why may not i love a woman with the same affection i could a man?” (cavendish 1999, 234). lady happy finds their kissing and embracing confusing (234). it is a tragic moment of frustrated queer love, but lady happy can take comfort in knowing that this love can never betray her by leading her into a subordinating marriage. soon afterward, the princess’s—now prince’s—deception is revealed. he declares his intent to marry her; if his councillors do not permit it, he “will have her by force of arms” (244). this wooing was an extended deception. though the would-be wooers had rejected the possibility of using drag to infiltrate the convent, the prince was successful. as the princess, he entered their community knowing who he was, but he denied that knowledge to the women, thus undermining what they could know. his deception taints the romance that develops between him and lady happy. would lady happy have taken him as a courtly lover, engaged in embraces and kisses, and agreed to marry him had she known that marriage was a live possibility? this is especially striking since he does not, as the prince, ask lady happy to marry him and in fact threatens to take her by force—not if she fails to agree, but if his advisors disapprove. he secures lady happy by way of clandestine wooing capped by consent given under spurious conditions and a threat of coercive force. indeed, given her critiques of marriage throughout the play, lady happy would seemingly have to be deceived to agree to it. cavendish highlights a rich and multilayered deception: feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 deception about the person, their relationship with lady happy, and securing her consent. lady happy claims that women who have the means to support themselves “were mad to live with men, who make the female sex their slaves; but i will not be so inslaved, but will live retired from their company. . . . my cloister shall not be a cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom” (cavendish 1999, 220). marriage traps women in a relation of unfreedom, and wooing is the prelude; lady happy values her freedom too greatly to marry. at the convent, lady happy has the women put on a play about women being harmed by men and marriage, highlighting the risks of childbirth, domestic violence, and wooing done under threat of rape;4 its epilogue states that marriage is a cross-class curse for women (cavendish 1999, 233). if it is madness to choose marriage, why does lady happy marry? one answer is the combination of deception and coercion. lady happy was deceived into falling for the princess, so presumably had residual positive feelings toward the prince, and she was also coerced with the implied threat of violence. there is a further, less obvious threat here: now that people know that a man was running amok within the convent with lady happy, she will be treated as lacking sexual virtue, a concern that made her want to avoid wooing altogether (220). the prince has hijacked her reasoning and put her in a no-win situation. through the wooing of lady prudence and lady happy, cavendish illustrates the ways in which wooing constitutes a gendered socio-epistemic harm. both princes say and do what they must to get access to the objects of their desire; in misrepresenting themselves in important ways, the princes were determined to circumvent women’s genuine decision-making by way of undermining what and how they can know. this is a kind of gaslighting. when the deception is revealed in public wooing, the prince says that he did not want to overpromise his bride, but in fact he was testing her virtue (cavendish 1662, v.xxxx, v.xxxxii). consider also the princess’s response to the play within a play. as ten scenes of patriarchal horror close, she says, “my sweet mistress, i cannot in conscience approve of it; for though some few be unhappy in marriage, yet there are many more that are so happy as they would not change their condition” (cavendish 1999, 233). this is particularly strange if it is a princess saying it; but once we learn that she is a prince, this takes on a different meaning: it is a rejection of women’s experiences of a major social and political relation as being representative of the truth, perhaps offered so that lady happy is primed to accept a different reality—one where she marries the prince. in both plays, cavendish seems to be saying that men know wooing puts women on the defensive. thus, their strategies have evolved: one may not even know when those efforts are 4 “you had best consent; for, otherwise he will have you against your will” (cavendish 1999, 233). forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 underway or who is making them, nor will women’s stated experiences—when contrary to wooers’ aims—be taken seriously. women are not seen as knowers when it comes to wooing; they cannot be, else wooing might be ineffective at securing women’s agreement to marry. 2.3. astell like gournay and cavendish, astell thinks there is something fundamentally wrong with wooing insofar as it is characterized by deception, coercion, and flattery. just as gournay noted that the process of wooing is itself deceptive, and cavendish flagged that, given its deceptive structure, wooing undermines women’s capacity to know their own reality—the truth of the conversations, safety, and community in which they stand—astell observes that wooing is so deceptive and coercive that it not only undermines what women know about the wooer but also what they are able to know about themselves. women agree to marry wooers they ought to reject because the very practice of wooing undermines women’s epistemic capacities—their ability to know, to choose, and thus to consent as a result of that knowledge. on astell’s view, wooing largely occurs through deceptive flattery. in some reflections upon marriage, astell excoriates wooers qua flatterers. as she notes, “it were endless to reckon up the divers stratagems men use to catch their prey, their different ways of insinuating which vary with circumstances and the ladies temper. but how unfairly, how basely soever they proceed, when the prey is once caught it passes for lawful prize.” (astell 1996, 69). indeed, flattery is a snare, a design, an artifice to turn women into a prize or possession (astell 1996, 69, 71, 70). astell identifies two problems with wooers’ flattery: insofar as it is deceptive, it undermines women’s abilities to know themselves and to know their wooers. for astell, this operates as a one-two punch: in unsettling women’s self-understandings, they are vulnerable, and insofar as wooing misrepresents the wooers’ intentions, wooers are able to capitalize on this vulnerability. first, wooers use flattery to undermine women’s self-knowledge by corrupting their self-esteem. as andreas blank has shown, astell is attentive to how wooers use manipulative flattery to deliberately cultivate a favorable attitude in their targets (blank 2015, 53–54). this operates in a gender-asymmetrical way: flattery can be used by someone in a superordinate position to condition the subordinate party toward preferred traits or behaviors, making them think highly of themselves for possessing valuable qualities, even if those qualities turn out to be disadvantageous to the subordinate party (blank 2015, 55). wooers want women to value themselves incorrectly—to think themselves great, but for the wrong reasons. in serious proposal, astell points out that men deliberately cultivate the so-called feminine vices of pride and vanity: feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 when a poor young lady is taught to value her self on nothing but her cloaths, and to think she’s very fine when well accoutred. when she hears say that ‘tis wisdom enough for her to know how to dress her self, that she may become amiable in his eyes; to whom it appertains to be knowing and learned; who can blame her if she lay out her industry and money on such accomplishments. (astell 2002, 69) women who busily cultivate their physical appearances because this is supposedly what matters about them are focusing their efforts on the wrong thing—on their looks rather than their ability to see through wooers’ stratagems. given the lack of education available to women, “she who is kept ignorant of the matter, will take up with such objects as first offer themselves, and bear any plausible resemblance to what she desires. . . . her inbred self-esteem and desire of good, which are degenerated into pride and mistaken self-love” (astell 2002, 62–63). this is further entrenched insofar as men are taken to be superior as knowers, given women’s supposed natural inferiority (astell 1996, 9). these background conditions of epistemic inequality explain how flattery works: as blank (2015, 57) points out, “flatteries make use of both the high esteem for the flatterer and the high self-esteem for the qualities that attract male attention.” in a world where men are socially superior to women, their word carries more weight: if wooers—flatterers— continually praise women for their looks, then women will continue to invest in their physical appearances. this creates an opportunity for wooers: women are less able to withstand their approach, given their incentive structures, and indeed, they do not even understand that this is flattery designed to control rather than praise. as william kolbrener (2003, 10–11) observes, for astell, flattery is a deliberate strategy to puff women up only so as to further exploit them for the flatterers’ ends; it is humorous that women are “vain enough to snatch at the bait i throw; there’s no danger of your finding out my meaning, or disappointing me of my ends” (astell 1996, 44). as such, part of the problem that astell identifies in the flattery characteristic of wooing is that it exploits both a knowledge and credibility asymmetry: women do not know what is really valuable about themselves, and men are taken more seriously when they praise that which is to their—but not women’s—advantage. for astell, flattery is ultimately about hierarchical power and control: control of what is known to be good and one’s self-knowledge. flattery undermines women’s capacities to value rightly. the other part of the problem of flattery in wooing for astell is that it instantiates deep deception about not only the wooers’ intentions but the actual patriarchal power hierarchy that structures the relationship between wooer and wooed. as astell says, forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 nothing is in truth a greater outrage than flattery and feign’d submissions, the plain english of which is this, ‘i have a very mean opinion both of your understanding and vertue, you are weak enough to be impos’d on. . . . we who make the idols, are the greater deities; and as we set you up, so it is in our power to reduce you to your first obscurity, or to somewhat worse, to contempt. (astell 1996, 44–45). male flatterers may seem to submit to women, but this performance is an inversion of the actual power structure at work (see kolbrener 2003). “the flatterer not only instrumentalizes the erroneous self-images of women; but the very act of flattery contributes to defining the criteria at work in such self-images. it is part of a strategy that poses as obsequious but in fact expresses a superior hierarchical position of the male flatterer”; thus, this manipulation of female self-esteem through flattery is a form of male domination (blank 2015, 60). like blank and kolbrener, alice sowaal makes a similar point: astell recognizes that flattery manipulates women who have been rendered prideful into thinking they must be merciful to the prostrated courter (sowaal 2016, 69). in truth, wooers’ aims could not be further from servitude. it is not just that wooers are flattering women, building up their feminine vanity so as to make them better targets for manipulation, but also that having persuaded women that they are superior to men, they profess to seek submission to their lady loves when in fact what they intend, and what they will use marital power dynamics to obtain, is domination over their wives. a wooer wants one to manage his family, an house-keeper, a necessary evil, one whose interest it will be not to wrong him . . . . one who may breed his children, taking all the care and trouble of their education . . . . one whose beauty, wit, or good humour and agreeable conversation, will entertain him at home when he has been contradicted and disappointed abroad . . . sooth his pride and flatter his vanity. . . . in a word, one whom he can intirely govern. (astell 1996, 50–51) wooers use flattery to make women vulnerable in order to later rule over them. this is the opposite of what wooers claim: the wooer promises a pleasant dynamic, and then once she is entrapped in having consented to marriage, he reveals his true face. it should be no surprise that this is so, astell suggests, for who can believe a man, proud and vain as he is, will lay his boasted authority, the dignity and prerogative of his sex, one moment at her feet, but in prospect of taking it up again to more advantage; he may call himself her slave for a few days, but it is only in order to make her his all the rest of his life. (astell 1996, 44; emphasis added) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 why would someone with so much power give it up, if not as a pretense to secure future, permanent control? the successful wooer persuades her to agree to marry on certain terms, but as husband, he then has total authority over her. he will ‘persuade’ her “willingly, to give up what she did vainly hope to obtain, and what she thought had been made sure to her. . . . for covenants betwixt husband and wife, like laws in an arbitrary government, are of little force, the will of the sovereign is all in all” (astell 1996, 52). the wooer-cum-husband knows he just needs to secure her agreement into marriage, for he will have absolute power afterward. this is a deliberate deception, a willful misrepresentation of what appears to be a negotiation. flattery is manipulative, and most women were not financially independent; even if they were, bad custom taught that marriage was the chief end of a woman’s life (e.g., astell 1996, 45, 60; see also forbes 2019). so, why make a pretense of subordinating oneself before a potential bride? flattery in wooing is about “the hope of being lord and master, [who in courtship] appears with all the modesty and submission of an humble an unpretending admirer” (astell 1996, 66; see also sowaal 2016). flattery and wooing are about exerting epistemic control over one’s target in order to secure practical, political control over her, as one’s wife, forever after. indeed, astell is more explicit than gournay and cavendish that at least some men, wooers, engage in these epistemic manipulations knowingly and therefore viciously. for astell notes that, in wooing, if a woman is not amenable to incentives, some wooers turn to threats—if deceptive flattery does not work, then wooers may turn to coercion. sometimes a woman is cajol’d, and sometimes hector’d, she is seduc’d to love a man, or aw’d into a fear of him: he defends her honour against another, or assumes the power of blasting it himself . . . . he might be admitted at first to be her jest, but he carries on the humour so far till he makes her his. (astell 1996, 69–70) the above threat to her honor is particularly dangerous, for if a woman acquires a reputation as lacking honor (i.e., sexual virtue), this might permanently undo her standing. if one renders a woman unmarriageable, she will have no choice but to accept one’s proposal. perhaps this is why astell (1996, 51) describes courtship as violent. for astell, marriage is a state of unfreedom.5 in agreeing to marry, a woman places herself wholly in the power of her husband: “the domestic sovereign is without dispute elected” (astell 1996, 17). it is through women’s assent to marriage 5 broad (2014) argues that astell saw marriage as lockean (not chattel) slavery—that women were subject to the absolute, arbitrary will of their husbands. i put aside the question of marriage as slavery here as that is beyond the scope of this article. forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 that the wooer-cum-husband is imbued with absolute, tyrannical rule over her: women’s consent to marriage is seen to legitimize the tyrannical structure of the relationship (17). this makes the stakes of wooing clearer. it is not just a deceptive practice, depriving women of knowledge; it is an extended manipulation designed to undermine what women know about themselves, their wooers, their very reality— what they can expect for the rest of their lives. as astell says, when it comes to marriage, “a woman indeed can’t properly be said to choose, all that is allow’d her, is to refuse or accept what is offer’d” (astell 1996, 43). presumably, this is because wooing undermines women’s capacity to exercise epistemic agency. as such, if wooing through deceptive flattery is aimed at securing marriage, and flattery is a chosen, knowing practice, then astell conceives of it as a practice of overriding women’s intellectual capacities to make them willingly unfree. for astell, wooing undermines women’s epistemic capacities in a variety of ways. in flattering speech, wooers puff women up through methods that disincentivize intellectual development and that are ripe for further exploitation, thus undermining women’s abilities to know themselves and their true value. so too does wooers’ flattery, rendered possible through women’s corrupted, inflated self-esteem, constitute a significant deception that undermines women’s potential to know the true intentions of their wooers—that is, domination—but also the true power hierarchies at play. women might know that husbands can rule wives, but if a man grovels before you, seeking your hand, it is hard to imagine that he would exploit that patriarchal system to his benefit. the choices that women make are not only limited— acceptance or refusal—but predicated on flattering, deceptive, and potentially coercive lies; wooing frustrates women’s epistemic capacities in knowing and understanding themselves, their wooers, and their futures. 3. wooing as epistemic injustice though gournay, cavendish, and astell were thinking and writing about wooing in different times, places, and genres, their views have much in common. all three problematize wooing as deceptive: it interferes with what women can know about their wooers, themselves, and their circumstances. when deception fails, some wooers turn to coercion. women are rendered unable to know, to understand, and to choose—to judge—because wooing undermines women’s grasp on their social and political realities. insofar as wooing is a gendered practice, it seems clear from the accounts above that wooing is a gendered epistemic harm. in this section, i argue that gournay, cavendish, and astell should be understood as offering not only an account of wooing as a gendered epistemic harm but a view of wooing that constitutes an epistemic injustice. wooing is a systematic unspooling of women’s epistemic agency to render and keep them under patriarchal control; it manifests a gendered epistemic tyranny. i approach this argument in two parts: first, to discharge concerns about feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 anachronism, i demonstrate that epistemic injustice is, as a concept, already present in gournay, cavendish, and astell’s writings. i then turn to a consideration of what sort of epistemic injustice wooing might be, canvassing some recent options in the literature. while there are important similarities with concepts already in use, i suggest that wooing manifests a distinct epistemic injustice that i refer to as hermeneutical obscuring. 3.1. background conditions gournay, cavendish, and astell were aware of women’s impoverished epistemic conditions. a common way of drawing the reader’s attention to this element is to point out women’s lack of formal education and so their lack of access to epistemic goods.6 as gournay says, “if, therefore, women attain less often than men to the heights of excellence, it is a marvel that the lack of good education—indeed, the abundance of outright and blatantly bad education—does not do worse and prevent them from doing so entirely” (gournay 2002b, 81). likewise, astell is well-known for her arguments in a serious proposal to the ladies about the need for a women’s college where women can “expel that cloud of ignorance, which custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge.” (astell 2002, 77). and, as scholars such as karen detlefsen (2012) and erin lang bonin (2000) have pointed out, cavendish persistently associates education and reason with freedom—and women’s lack of education with their truncated intellectual and political liberty—in her nonfiction, fiction, and letters). gournay, cavendish, and astell also note epistemic injustices emerging from women’s impoverished epistemic conditions. gournay identifies herself as experiencing epistemic injustice in not being taken seriously as a knower in conversations. in ladies’ complaint, she notes, if women possessed the arguments and thoughts of carneades, there is no man, no matter how puny he may be, who would not put them in their place with the approval of most of the company, when, with merely a smile or a slight nod of the head, his silent eloquence would communicate, “it’s only a woman speaking.” (gournay 2013, 74) this is a straightforward case of testimonial injustice where an identity prejudice about the speaker prevents the hearer from taking her seriously as a knower (fricker 2007, 20). gournay notes two manifestations of this: first, a man who refuses to engage with women at all, and second, one who, even if he accepts women as intellectually capable of debate, refuses to engage with any specific woman “because he borrows 6 see, for example, detlefsen 2012, 2016. forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 his understanding of propriety from what is commonly believed—which is to despise women in this respect” (gournay 2013, 75). in the former case, he thinks it impossible for a woman to be a knower, and in the latter, he is sufficiently prejudiced such that no specific woman can clear the bar. in either case, the man further insults a woman’s intellectual capacities by refusing to meaningfully engage with them, thus making a mockery of her and the debate itself. worse yet, “this vulgar man, uttering many silly remarks, will always win the contest either because he has a beard or displays a proud simulated ability that her and his companions measure according to what is fashionable or useful” (gournay 2013, 75). the audience is simply not equipped to perceive women as interlocutors because they share that same prejudice against women as knowers. these “displays of gallantry” extend to the printed page, too: men do not read women’s writings seriously. this makes gournay (2013, 76) “suspect that, even when they read men’s writings, they perceive the shape of their authors’ beards better than the structure of their arguments.” in such a world, gender-based testimonial injustice is endemic. cavendish shared gournay’s frustrations. in her “to the two universities” preface to philosophical and physical opinions, cavendish requests only that her work not be automatically rejected for inclusion in their libraries just because a woman wrote it. there must be at least nominal acknowledgement of women’s capacities for intellectual endeavors—which they would grant by accepting her books—because women are already subject to the carelesse neglects, and despisements of the masculine sex to the effeminate, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgment, as if we had not rational souls as well as men . . . we are shut out of all power, and authority by reason we are never imployed either in civil nor marshall affaires, our counsels are despised, and laught at, the best of our actions are troden down with scorn, by the over-weaning conceit men have of themselves and through a dispisement of us. (cavendish 1655) karen detlefsen (2022) argues that in identifying the preemptive rejection of women as knowers, cavendish is articulating a kind of testimonial injustice with which she and other women had to contend. like gournay, cavendish lays bare the larger socioepistemic conditions that shaped her world. women’s views are treated as contemptible, ridiculous, obscene. cavendish casts this as being in part related to men’s high esteem for themselves, an esteem partially predicated on women’s inferiority. this concern is a central motivating feature of astell’s works, too, especially in the context of her discussion of what alice sowaal (2007, 231) has called the women’s feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 defective nature prejudice—the common view that claims women are naturally both morally and intellectually inferior to men. astell discusses bad custom as the persistent social and political practices and beliefs that convey and perpetuate this prejudice. bad custom is a cloud of ignorance that traps women into believing their own inferiority; bad custom is a tyrant and a disease that controls and infects women’s minds (astell 2002, 67, 72). this is troublesome for astell because, as i have argued elsewhere, women come to internalize this conception of themselves as nonknowers, and this instantiates a kind of epistemic injustice called epistemic internalization injustice (forbes 2019). clearly, gournay, cavendish, and astell were familiar with gendered epistemic asymmetries generally and at least some specific forms of epistemic injustice. as all three noted, there is a deep pattern of epistemic disregard for women in the early modern period. one of the central battles of the querelle des femmes—a longstanding dispute about the supposedly inferior nature and status of women— concerned women’s education and, specifically, whether it was even worth trying to educate them at all (kelly 1982). in a world where even accomplished women like gournay, cavendish, and astell are not taken seriously as knowers, where much of society thinks education would be wasted on women, it is easy to see how bad epistemic practices like deceptive flattery in wooing would become ubiquitous and accepted. i take it that gournay, cavendish, and astell highlight the epistemic features of wooing partly because they are trying to draw attention to wooing as a gendered epistemic harm. 3.2. wooing as epistemic injustice wooing appears in a social context rife with gendered epistemic asymmetries and epistemic injustice. it is not only an epistemic harm, as discussed above, but also a manifestation of epistemic injustice. wooing, a widespread and gendered social practice aimed at soliciting a woman’s consent to marriage, is an affront to women’s epistemic agency that occurs on a social systemic level; as such, it seems to meet the criteria miranda fricker (2007) identifies as the core components of epistemic injustice. moreover, wooing is a practice that wooers engage in knowingly; as gournay, cavendish, and astell all note, wooers deliberately capitalize on gendered epistemic asymmetries to gain a wife over whom they will have absolute control. but even though it seems plausible, at least prima facie, that wooing manifests epistemic injustice, what sort of epistemic injustice might it be? given gournay’s and cavendish’s familiarity with testimonial injustice, and some recent scholarship on astell, perhaps wooing instantiates epistemic internalization injustice. this occurs beneath a woman’s notice, where the persistence of bad custom and prejudices about women’s deficient moral and epistemic natures persuade her into assigning herself an inappropriately low level of credibility in forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 interpreting or understanding her own experiences. given bad socio-epistemic practices, perhaps wooed women come to think of themselves as unreliable narrators when they think that their wooers are too good to be true. if he says that he will be her loving servant, even though she knows that early modern marriages are famously gender unequal, she thinks that she is the foolish one for having doubts at all. while that might be happening, it is not helpfully explanatory of what is going wrong in wooing as gournay, cavendish, and astell discuss it. wooing is very clearly something that is being done, epistemically and practically, to women; epistemic internalization of injustice occurs at the level of custom or social norms and is thus a more passive, background injustice than wooing. moreover, in wooing, the wooer takes on deceptions and insincere flattery, is manipulated and perhaps even coerced; it is not that she dismisses her own claims of knowledge, but that what she thinks she knows is a misrepresentation of her socio-epistemic reality. the wooer has provided the mere appearance of knowledge about the woman, his intentions, and the relation between them. were the wooed not to take themselves seriously, as is the case in epistemic internalization injustice, flattery and deception simply wouldn’t be as important as they are for wooing. perhaps, then, given the disruptions to one’s knowledge of one’s socioepistemic reality, the epistemic injustice manifested in wooing is gaslighting, which is the intentional misleading of someone about the nature of their experience for one’s own ends: “no, you did not see the gas lights dim. you must be mad” (see abramson 2014). as veronica ivy (2017, 167) discusses it, gaslighting is a form of testimonial injustice insofar as it is a failure to take seriously the claims of a speaker due to an identity prejudice about the speaker. one might be inclined to suggest that something more insidious is happening here. a gaslighter does not merely deny that something happened; they suggest that there is something epistemically wrong with their target—that they are mad or paranoid and thus incapable of seeing things as they really are. the gaslighter denies reality and supplies their own to serve their interests—namely, to ensure that their target does not come to know something disadvantageous to them.7 wooers do seem to be gaslighting insofar as they are supplying a version of reality more amenable to their aims. gournay explicitly notes that alinda was gaslit 7 compelling accounts of gaslighting can be found in both nora berenstain’s (2020) and elena ruíz’s (2020) accounts, though they focus on gaslighting as a structural phenomenon—as an injustice committed not necessarily by an individual but by a group or class—such as white feminists failing to take black, indigenous, and racialized women seriously as knowers. i leave a discussion of this out because even though wooing is a social practice and thus was engaged in men and aimed at women, it is not wooers/men as a class that gaslight the wooed/women. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 20 about othalcus’s relentless romantic pursuit of her, and the princess seems to gaslight lady happy about the true circumstances that follow from marriage after the play within the play. wooers are aware of and are exploiting an epistemic asymmetry; not only does their target not have crucial pieces of knowledge (the wooer’s intentions, for example, as gournay, cavendish, and astell all show), but the wooer is actively obscuring that knowledge, perhaps doing damage to their target’s ability to exercise their capacity of judgment along the way. both the gaslighter and the wooer engage in this behavior knowingly and deliberately for their own ends. thus, there seems to be a solid case for wooing as gaslighting. while gaslighting is closer to wooing than was epistemic internalization injustice insofar as gaslighting is something that one individual does to another, it still falls short for two reasons. first, gaslighting is a response to a claim about what is going on, while wooing ensures that the target does not, cannot, see what is really going on. to put this another way, i cannot be gaslit until i make a claim about the world. i must first claim to see the gaslights dimming inexplicably for you to gaslight me by saying that i am mad. similarly, in ivy’s central case, victoria’s colleague cannot gaslight her about being mispronounced until victoria tells her colleague that she was just mispronounced by a supposed ally to the trans community. wooing does not involve the wooed party making any claims at all, so it cannot be an unspooling of her social reality in so explicit a manner. second, gaslighting functions to undermine someone’s sanity. the woman seeing the gaslights dim is mad! the trans woman being mis-pronoun-ed is hysterical! (see abramson 2014; ivy 2017). wooing cannot, and does not function to, render its target mad, for wooing is successful only when it culminates in consent to marry, and the consent of a madwoman to marriage would not authorize the transfer of power to a husband. the point is that women must have the veneer of epistemic authority, knowledge, and choice in wooing—no matter that it is, in fact, a farce. the appearance of correct epistemic function is crucial. as such, wooing does something more subtle, though no less evil, than gaslighting. given gournay and cavendish’s apparent familiarity with testimonial injustice, perhaps wooing manifests a kind of hermeneutical injustice, an injustice that occurs “when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (fricker 2007, 1). fricker’s paradigm case of this concerns the term sexual harassment: women who were subjected to sexual harassment before the term existed experienced hermeneutical injustice on top of the harassment in lacking this term—their experiences had not been taken seriously, so they were not able to be the subject of social understanding or even to fully understand their own experience (fricker 2007, forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 21 150–51).8 developing the term sexual harassment was a crucial move in part because until then, available terms—such as flirting—were being misapplied, and this further distorted the problem. a sexual harasser is not a flirt: flirting is sensitive to social cues from the other and is not inflected by power dynamics.9 real flirting, as lucy mcdonald (2022) has illustrated, is a reciprocal game of push-pull moves; when one’s boss won’t stop touching one’s lower back or saying sexually inappropriate things, this is all push and no pull. perhaps, then, wooing is a hermeneutical injustice akin to “flirting” or, rather, the behavior now known as sexual harassment—something for which we do not have an adequate linguistic identifier and thus something that people cannot properly understand. there are some structural similarities between this misapplication of flirting— that is, “flirting,” aka sexual harassment—and wooing. both “flirting” and wooing involve leveraging gendered sociopolitical dynamics along a gendered asymmetry: one party knows that he is up to no good, and the other is being willfully misled about the nature of their interaction. consider this: an employer sexually harasses his women employees but, when pressed, dismisses his actions as harmless flirting. he knows that we live in a world where men’s claims are taken more seriously, especially when the women on the other side of the exchange can be painted as overly sensitive, frigid, bitches, and so on. he also knows that he should not be propositioning his employees,10 but part of the sexual harasser’s pleasure is the (mis)use of power dynamics. similarly, the wooer knows that he has a gendered epistemic advantage. wooers crystallize what is already a bad epistemic circumstance into a precise and deadly instrument against the epistemic agency of their targets. like the “flirt,” a wooer knows what he wants—to secure a woman’s hand in marriage—will be much more advantageous to him than it will be for her; marriage, for women, is a kind of unfreedom, as gournay, cavendish, and astell all observe. thus, the wooer conceals his true intent in flowery language and false fronts. this is even more insidious insofar as it impersonates epistemic authority. women think they are experiencing a 8 some scholars, such as nora berenstain (2020), have recently argued that there are grievous moral and structural errors with fricker’s articulation of hermeneutical injustice—most centrally, that it fails to ascribe epistemic agency to women of color and their epistemic resistance; this is white feminist gaslighting. i use this case as a starting point because what happened prior to having the term sexual harassment is usefully illustrative of the epistemic injustice in wooing. 9 i take as a background assumption that flirting is not sexual harassment, even if they can sometimes look alike. sexual harassment is only about securing/deriving sexual pleasure from exercising one’s sexual agency over and against another, contrary to their comfort/ability to decline without consequence. 10 even if he truly did not know, it would be a culpable ignorance. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 22 particular kind of hierarchical relation through the deception and insincere flattery that characterize wooing, and they think they are judging and choosing to marry based on genuine knowledge, but they are not. the wooers know this and facilitate this illusion. the wooer obscures the genuine epistemic features of their interaction; as astell says, he pretends she has power over him to secure her subordination to him. and yet, despite these similarities between “flirting” and wooing, wooing cannot be an instance of hermeneutical injustice as fricker defines it. hermeneutical injustice obtains when the resources to understand the experience do not exist because some folks were left out of the process of meaning-making. this cannot be the epistemic injustice instantiated in wooing because this behavior is already labelled—namely, as wooing. moreover, the resources to understand it exist, and folks like gournay, cavendish, and astell were trying to communicate them to a wider audience through their works. so, it is not a matter of a missing concept so much as an asymmetric understanding of how a concept operates. wooing clearly instantiates an epistemic injustice: it undermines what women can know about themselves, their wooers, and their socio-epistemic realities. unlike nearby candidate forms of epistemic injustice, wooing tricks women into thinking of themselves as knowers, as reliable judges of their own socio-epistemic and political circumstances, and it both requires and encourages a false veneer of epistemic authority in its targets, even as it undermines the proper functioning of their judgment and understanding. wooing concerns knowledge and knowing and it undermines the successful exercise of women’s epistemic agency so as to get women to agree to marriage in a world where wives are unfree. as such, i want to suggest that wooing instantiates a distinct form of epistemic injustice that i will call hermeneutical obscuring. in hermeneutical obscuring, the perpetrator of the epistemic injustice simultaneously props up his target’s apparent knowledge—making deceptive claims and engaging in deceptive flattery, ensuring that she has the veneer of epistemic authority—so as to supplant his target’s grasp of her social reality with his own while evading her notice. it is deliberate refashioning of a familiar concept—the social practice of securing a woman’s hand in marriage—in a way that obscures the epistemically and politically deleterious effects afoot. like the hermeneutical injustice in “flirting,” the description and the reality of what he is doing do not match in order to maintain his power over her, and like in gaslighting, the true social reality is deliberately obscured from the target’s view in order to control what she knows and what she does with that knowledge, all to the wooer’s advantage. 4. wooing, patriarchy, and what about the men? i suggest that the collective view of wooing as hermeneutical obscuring that emerges from gournay, cavendish, and astell’s concerns is best understood as part of a much larger feminist project; namely, a problematization of an epistemic dimension forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 23 of early modern patriarchal power—specifically, that the epistemic dimension of patriarchal power to which early modern european women were subject is a kind of epistemic tyranny. viewing patriarchal power as a form of tyranny might strike one as an insight more at home in contemporary feminisms than in early modern writings, but this need not be the case. as marguerite deslauriers (2019) has argued, at least three italian women philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries— moderata fonte, lucrezia marinella, and arcangela tarabotti—offered just such an analysis. as deslauriers (2019, 733) illustrates, what has gone wrong in patriarchal relations is that men, particularly fathers and husbands, “exercise power over women in ways that conform to the motives and practices of tyrants.” this is unjust and tyrannical because women have free will and rational capacities—they can and must rule themselves (733). gournay, cavendish, and astell would agree with their italian contemporaries that women are rational and free, and certainly all are critical of structures and individuals that regard women as less than this. moreover, deborah boyle (2013) and penny weiss (2016) have noted the ways in which cavendish and astell objected to patriarchal power as unjust. the sense of patriarchal power in operation here is, as deslauriers discusses, male power; that is, power wielded by men in virtue of structural, gendered advantages they possess over women and to women’s disadvantage. shortly before her death, alinda recognizes her enslavement to the whims of leontin and othalcus (gournay 2002c, 64); lady happy notes that men make women their slaves through marriage (cavendish 1999, 220); and astell famously notes that women are born slaves subject “to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of men” who, especially as husbands, seize on “a tyrannous domination which nature never meant” (astell 1996, 18, 31). women’s subjection to men is nearly complete. but while true, marriage being a state of unfreedom in the seventeenth century is unsurprising and uncontentious. so, though gournay, cavendish, and astell are explicit that marriage is tyrannical, one might think that wooing, as a distinct activity prior to marriage, is free from association with this tyranny. wooing does not literally enslave women; however, when it is successful—when women are tricked into consenting to marriage—they have been epistemically ensnared. wooing is an activity specifically in service of securing a wife by way of changing a woman’s knowledge and disposition toward the wooer—how she sees herself in relation to him—in order to secure her permanent subordination by securing her consent to marry. wooing is a process of epistemic ensnarement in service of formalizing political and practical unfreedom via marriage. gournay, cavendish, and astell’s discussion of wooing as a kind of epistemic injustice that leads to political unfreedom suggests that their understanding of patriarchal, tyrannical power is not limited to the public political domain but includes the underlying epistemic domain too. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 24 despite social and political norms that made marriage nearly inevitable for seventeenth-century women, wooers pretend that consent matters. they flatter, deceive, and coerce to secure that consent. some wooers, like othalcus, find acquiescence itself erotic. assuming that most wooers do not share othalcus’s sentiment, one must wonder: what is the function of trying to secure consent through wooing? for consent cannot genuinely matter, or else wooing would not be rife with deception and deceptive flattery. the function of wooing as a practice that obtains consent to marriage is to create the veneer of women’s complicity in their subordination to tyrannical, patriarchal power. it does this by making women think that it is a true choice, while their wooers know that what appears to be a choice is the result of deliberate and coordinated epistemic injustice: women do not appreciate what their agreement is because they are rendered incapable of understanding what their relation to the wooer is and because they are subjected to hermeneutical obscuring. in short, it seems that if agreement to marriage truly authorizes husbands’ supreme power over the shape of women’s lives, if astell is correct that wives elect a tyrant for life, then women must be choosing it for themselves. but they would not and could not make this choice. so, hermeneutical obscuring allows wooers to manipulate women into a facsimile of choice. wooing, as hermeneutical obscuring, is a pretense of civility that disguises the abject unfreedom awaiting new wives. it is a willful misrepresentation of the central epistemic features of an exchange in order to make women unfree. it is epistemic tyranny—control over what should be, and naturally is, free. thus, hermeneutical obscuring is a crucial element of patriarchal power: in changing the apparent terms of the engagement, one side of the exchange can stack the deck in their favor and solidify their hierarchical standing through the sociopolitical institution of marriage. were women aware of what was really going on—if they knew that wooers were untrustworthy and deceptive—more would find ways to do without marriage, as did gournay and astell. for, as astell points out, the hermeneutical obscuring is all the more dangerous because the false inversion of the gender hierarchy incites men to a greater injustice: “she will not find him less a governor because she was once his superior, on the contrary, the scum of the people are most tyrannical when they get the power” (astell 1996, 51). wooing is thus a means of further entrenching patriarchal power. gournay, cavendish, and astell suggest that there is something wrong not only with marriage but so too with what comes before. one might worry that gournay, cavendish, and astell—and, by extension, i— have been uncharitable to wooers and men more generally. insofar as patriarchy is a pervasive social, epistemic, and political miasma, surely it also shapes men. i turn now to a question that may form the basis of a series of objections to my argument: what about the men? this worry takes two forms: first, that men may not be willfully forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 25 misrepresenting their intentions. second, men may be acting out of benevolent paternalism—acting in women’s best interests even if women cannot see it for themselves. if true, men are not malicious in the way that gournay, cavendish, and astell have suggested. indeed, they may also be victims of sexist norms and practices, albeit less so than women. if there are background conditions of epistemic injustice, then obviously women are at a significant epistemic disadvantage. but one might think, charitably, that this extends to men. if, as in astell’s case, women are subjected to bad custom, why would men not also be in its thrall? perhaps men have been conditioned to act unreflectively in the context of wooing, as this is simply what it is to be a man of a certain age and class, or this is a game by which one acquires a wife. perhaps gournay, cavendish, and astell ascribe an unfair degree of self-knowledge to men also embroiled in epistemically deficient social conditions. this challenge seems plausible. we know, for example, that well-intentioned white people can still uphold white supremacy and that men can enforce patriarchal norms even as those norms undermine their own flourishing. gournay, cavendish, and astell do not discuss how men think about themselves or the demands of masculinity. by their lights, at least some men are engaging in wooing with self-knowledge and accountability. why might this be? one answer comes from astell. if men are ignorant about what it is that they are up to—if they really are not deliberate in how they are systematically making use of asymmetries and are accidentally obscuring the genuine epistemic features of an interaction—then this is a culpable ignorance. they could know what is really going on, since men may be subject to bad custom insofar as it dictates how women (and men’s relations to them) are understood, and yet men are not barred from formal education and the means by which one could see through bad custom; wooers choose not to know because it is easier.11 and yet, astell might point out that at some point it is no longer an accident of fate that one has the social-hierarchical perspective one has; eventually, it becomes a deliberate unseeing to preserve one’s favorable selfunderstanding. grant silva (2019) has argued that one way to understand racism is not as hatred or implicit bias but as a corrupted form of amour propre, love of the particular, socially hierarchical self that one is. such a response seems at the heart of astell’s (and gournay’s and cavendish’s) worries about men’s malice toward women. not all wooers are villains, but all value themselves as social and political superiors to women: they must, given how they treat women; but moreover, they fail to attend to clear, salient moral facts about women as epistemic agents, and so wooing is deliberate and can be described as malicious. 11 this preference for easy ignorance is akin to charles mills’s (2007) discussion of white ignorance. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 26 the second aspect of this worry is the possibility that men may be deliberately engaged in hermeneutical obscuring but may be doing so with benevolent, paternalist intentions. perhaps wooers think they are acting in women’s best interests, even if women would not think so—hence the deception. this also seems plausible. after all, bad custom casts women as vicious nonknowers and, so, as needing to be saved. marriage is one way to do this, and if women cannot be reasoned with, then perhaps it is best to simply trick them into it. wooers are still epistemically unjust, but with good intentions. it seems unlikely that this answer would satisfy gournay, cavendish, and astell. even with the best intentions, wooers are still deliberately undermining the proper function of women’s intellectual and moral faculties in a way that exaggerates the already bad circumstances this objection acknowledges—women’s socio-structurally subordinate epistemic position. furthermore, if men had good intentions, why would they engage in hermeneutical obscuring rather than appeal to women’s vicious interests (such as wealth)? making a show of prostrating oneself only to turn that dynamic on its head once the marital ink is dry cannot easily be interpreted as a wellintentioned if poorly executed strategy for women’s improvement. disguising oneself and undermining meaningful choice rather than appreciate a woman’s well-being within the convent is not the act of someone committed to another’s flourishing. to be clear, gournay, cavendish, and astell would agree that patriarchal bad custom is bad for men too, but men are not their focus except insofar as wooers deliberately, maliciously co-opt bad socio-epistemic circumstances to secure what they desire from women. this need not include every instance of wooing, but it is their assumption that it will capture the majority. 5. conclusion: a better account of wooing although wooing has largely been overlooked in favor of the more obviously unjust relation of marriage, the collective account of wooing as drawn from the independent though mutually supporting discussions of gournay, cavendish, and astell illustrates that wooing is not only a gendered epistemic harm but also a manifestation of the epistemic injustice of hermeneutical obscuring. as such, wooing is an important iteration of and means of upholding epistemic tyranny, an epistemic dimension of early modern patriarchal power. though men may also be victims of patriarchy, that fact is not a reason to suppose that the ills of wooing are any less bad, nor that the wooers themselves are not rightly held accountable for their deceptive manipulations of women’s socio-epistemic realities. gournay, cavendish, and astell were, independent of one another, engaged in the same sophisticated feminist socialepistemological project. forbes – early modern feminists on wooing as a gendered epistemic harm published by scholarship@western, 2025 27 acknowledgements this article benefitted from the insightful input of many philosophers, including louise daoust, charlotte sabourin, michaela manson, and simona vucu. participants of both the 2021 québec-ontario seminar in early modern philosophy and the 2022 new voices: women in the history of philosophy conference at paderborn university provided guidance on earlier drafts of this article. i am grateful to all these folks, and to the editors and two anonymous referees here at feminist philosophy quarterly, for 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conway: monism, vitalism, and self-motion. new york: oxford university press. mcdonald, lucy. 2022. “flirting.” in the routledge handbook on philosophy of sex and sexuality, edited by brian d. earp, clare chambers, and lori watson, 207–17. new york: routledge. mills, charles w. 2007. “white ignorance.” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by shannon sullivan and nancy tuana, 13–38. albany: state university of new york press. ruíz, elena. 2020. “cultural gaslighting.” hypatia 35 (4): 687–713. https://doi.org/10 .1017/hyp.2020.33. shapiro, lisa. 2016. “revisiting the early modern philosophical canon.” journal of the american philosophical association 2 (3): 365–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/ap a.2016.27. silva, grant j. 2019. “racism as self-love.” radical philosophy review 22 (1): 85–112. https://doi.org/10.5840/radphilrev201913193. sipowicz, maks. 2021. “mary astell on the social nature of the cartesian passions.” studia z historii filozofii 12 (3): 37–59. sowaal, alice. 2007. “mary astell’s serious proposal: mind, method, and custom.” philosophy compass 2 (2): 227–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007 .00071.x. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 4, article 2 published by scholarship@western, 2025 30 ————. 2016. “mary astell and the development of vice: pride, courtship, and the woman’s human nature question.” in feminist interpretations of mary astell, edited by alice sowaal and penny a. weiss, 57–73. university park: pennsylvania state university press. weiss, penny a. 2016. “‘from the throne to every private family’: mary astell as analyst of power.” in feminist interpretations of mary astell, edited by alice sowaal and penny a. weiss, 128–52. university park: pennsylvania state university press. allauren samantha forbes is an associate professor in the department of philosophy and the gender and social justice program at mcmaster university. her research is located at the intersection of early modern european and feminist philosophy; she focuses on sociopolitical relations like custom, education, and marriage as a means of moral, epistemic, and political transformation. fpq 18657 forbes title page fpq 18657 forbes final format confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects feminist philosophy quarterly volume 11 | issue 2 article 5 recommended citation bogin, emily n. 2025. “confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects.” feminist philosophy quarterly 11 (2). article 5. 2025 confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects emily n. bogin boston university ebogin@bu.edu bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 1 confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects1 emily n. bogin abstract judith butler’s model of confession maintains agency in both the doing of the deed and the admission of that deed in speech, but victim testimony works differently. in acts of victim testimony, when one describes the injustices one has suffered, the admission of the deed connotes a certain agency at odds with the lack of agency to which one testifies. this structure undermines the credibility of victim testimony. leveraging kate manne’s theory of victimhood, i bring victim testimony into a conversation that often imagines confession as the paradigmatic speech act that forms the subject. by critically investigating the differences between confession and testimony and their frequent confusions, i attend to the social locations in which these speech acts are uttered and the gendered bodies that utter them. i suggest that we consider how subjects are formed not only in confession but also when pressed to answer the questions “what happened to you?” or “what did he do to you?” keywords: confession, testimony, victimhood, subject formation, butler, manne, antigone “but on the ‘we live on the hellmouth’ side, these kids may have really seen a monster.”2 1. introduction judith butler’s (2000, 2004a) sustained engagement with sophocles’s antigone shows, among other things, that the confessional act is conditioned by activity outside the confessor’s room or psychoanalyst’s office. butler deconstructs confession, showing how antinomian urges structure both the speech act and the 1 i wish to thank sierra wallace, suzanna walters, participants from the boston university department of religion colloquium, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of feminist philosophy quarterly for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions. 2 willow rosenberg to rupert giles in buffy the vampire slayer (deshotel and batali 1998). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 2 deed confessed in it. guilt gives rise to criminal actions; the one who confesses was always already guilty. i leverage kate manne’s discussion of victimhood to draw out this analysis further. while butler’s confession is defined by an agency in both the doing of the deed and the admission of that deed in speech, victim testimony works differently.3 in acts of victim testimony, when one describes the injustices one has suffered, the admission of the deed connotes a certain agency that may be at odds with the lack of agency to which one testifies. this structure undermines the credibility of victim testimony. in this paper, i think with testimony in order to expand on the kind of subject that butler makes visible through their work on confession. i first draw on butler’s (2004a) essay “bodily confessions,” in which they address the speech act of confession vis-à-vis antigone and her uncle creon. they analyze antigone’s confessional act with michel foucault’s christian model of confession in mind, arguing that confession exposes an “obscure guilt” that precedes and proceeds from the deed one confesses (2004a, 171). in doing so, butler argues that antigone’s confession was always inevitable. in order to rehabilitate the subject from this inevitable guilt, butler advises that the confessor “decline the honor” (2004a, 171). that is, their resolution to the problem of confession depends on the contingent mercy of a confessor. butler’s creative suggestion stops short of the questions with which this essay tries to grapple: how might social and political power determine who can lay claim to the status of perpetrator or victim, and what kind of guilt is available to each? butler (1997) had already exposed challenges to the stability of confession, showing slippage between acts of confession and testimony in their analysis of anita hill’s testimony in clarence thomas’s 1991 senate confirmation hearings for his nomination to the us supreme court. there, it appears that societal expectations determine the meaning of a speech act: butler shows that hill’s testimony was received as a kind of guilty confession, while clarence thomas’s was taken as innocent testimony. when women’s testimony transforms unjustly into confession, but perpetrators’ words remain understood as “testimony,” we must then investigate the structure of testimony. no longer can we rely on the confessor to decline the honor. i suggest that we consider how subjects are formed not only when confessing but also when pressed to answer the questions “what happened to you?” or “what did he do to you?”4 drawing on kate manne’s (2017) work on victimhood in down 3 within butler’s identification of the “agency” of confession also lies a paradoxical limit to agency. on the origins and limits of agency in speech acts, see butler (2005, 3–40). 4 for butler, the subject has the opportunity for recognition most clearly when she is asked to give an account of herself. confession is one scene of address in which this recognition can take place, and the self is structured by the response one gives a bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 3 girl, i show how women’s testimony is often treated as confession on account of the subject position of the testifier. manne shows how misogyny works on speech to conflate testimony and confession especially when the person giving testimony is a woman. in cases of women’s testimony, always already being guilty becomes a source not just of the everyday guilt that attends confession but of grave injustice. so, while butler’s account of confession in “bodily confessions” shows that guilt precedes the subject who transgresses the law and constitutes the subject, manne’s account of testimony shows that guilt also often attends the victim of the crime. butler’s confessor alone cannot determine or diminish the guilt that always already attends to the speaking female subject. instead of relying entirely upon the confessor to deny the subject (or object) her confession, we should look to the social world, and the misogyny therein, as the location in which to intervene. 2. butler’s confession butler (2004a) uses sophocles’s antigone to flesh out how guilt is not just the consequence of confession, but somehow constitutes it. butler shows how antigone herself becomes the author of a “bodily confession” in which the confession— embodied in speech and in the body that produces it—becomes both location and fulfillment of her earlier crime. they show how antigone’s confession recasts her as a victim even as she admits to the agency with which she undertook her crime. for butler, the guilt that structures antigone’s actions is not unique to the ancient drama; it is the same guilt that accompanies anyone who authors a confession, and it is specifically the guilt of the patient who confesses her inner thoughts to her analyst. to make these claims, butler follows foucault’s theory of confession in its christian inflection. in this section, i identify the foucauldian strands that inform both butler’s analysis of antigone as well as their approach to the analyst’s role in the therapeutic relationship. i suggest that the text of antigone raises questions about the expediency of butler’s directive to the analyst. butler (2004a) begins their introduction to confession with a brief overview of the first volume of foucault’s (1988) history of sexuality, in which confession is taken as a precursor to psychoanalysis. foucault writes that confession is no longer simply used in the “practice of penance” but, through secularization, works outside of its original ritualistic and religious location (foucault 1988, 63). butler follows this move. confession (and therefore, for their purposes, psychoanalysis) is the location in which the self is not revealed but rather elaborated. thus, butler finds that the self is judge, a confessor, an analyst, or a public after being asked the question “who are you?” (butler 2005). in this paper, testimony offers itself as a kind of speech act that is sometimes transformed into confession, but other times remains something distinct. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 4 constituted both by and before one’s confession: confession is the fulfillment of the deed’s doing. in other words, the expectation of confession structures the deed. butler’s “call to action” is for confessors and analysts to use their position to undo the guilt that allows confession to obtain. this argument draws on foucault’s (1993) two models of confession: the “classical model,” whose exemplar is the roman stoic philosopher seneca the younger, and the christian model, which butler favors. in the classical model, guilt does not structure confession. butler describes classical confession as an operation “by which the self constitutes itself in discourse with the assistance of another’s presence and speech” (2004a, 163). the self is not revealed or discovered by the confessor, but rather emerges through conversation between the subject and his master. this kind of confessional practice has affinities with the ancient practice of philosophy, which, for seneca and many of his predecessors, takes a dialogic form. 5 foucault marks out two examples of classical confession, both coming from seneca’s writings. in the first, seneca recounts how, every evening, he takes stock of his own soul. through this inquest, he acts more as an administer of himself than as a judge of his past: rather than punish, he “takes stock of things, and sees if everything has been done correctly” (foucault 1993, 207). through this administration, seneca comes to see errors in his ways that he then has the privilege of correcting. judgement may take place, but guilt does not factor into the indictment—only the possibility of correction. in another example, a fictional interlocutor named serenus gives seneca an account of his actions, not to seek pardon but rather to seek some sort of internal coherence. seneca and his interlocutor both give accounts of confession as something that can make them better through reason. foucault (1993, 209) states that this kind of confession “remains within the framework of what the greeks for a long time called the gnomé . . . [which] designates the unity of will and knowledge.” in this first model of classical confession, confession is a method by which one comes to know oneself. but strangely, butler favors foucault’s christian model of confession over the classical model in their analysis of antigone. in this christian model, the speech act elaborates the subject as someone who is always already guilty—a kind of original sin. here, confession remains a technology of the self, but the self that is disclosed through confession is one that kills off the positive conception of the classical model; in foucault’s (1993, 222) words, “no truth about the self without a sacrifice of the self.” this confession “makes appear, in a certain sense, by its own mechanics, the truth, the reality of what has happened” (1993, 219). in confession, as verbalization “brings to the external light the deep movement of the thought, it leads also and by the same process the human soul from the reign of satan to the law of god” (1993, 220). in leading the soul away from satan and a world in which one was attached to 5 on subject formation in ancient philosophical practice, see hadot (1995). bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 5 oneself, one necessarily sacrifices the self. thus, confession illustrates that there is no self that can be verbalized, as it is through verbalization that the self is sacrificed. this approach has much in common with butler’s intervention in another essay where they write that “‘we’ who are relational do not stand apart from those relations and cannot think of ourselves outside of the decentering effects that relationality entails” (2004b, 151). the self only reaches an understanding of itself after it has been split; or, in the terminology of “bodily confessions” (butler 2004a), the self only becomes apparent after it has been verbalized, and this verbalization, a kind of self-death. foucault’s twofold schema of confession suggests that the subject could be otherwise. if classical confession does not construct the guilty subject, then guilt is not inherent to every subject, only to every subject read under a christian framework. foucault takes a step back from the vertiginous pursuits of subject formation to suggest that the historically situated pursuit of selfhood is always contingent, and that subjects can therefore pursue new and better technologies of the self to pursue a kinder, less guilt-ridden world. he writes: maybe the problem of the self is not to discover what it is in its positivity, maybe the problem is not to discover a positive self or the positive foundation of the self. maybe our problem is now to discover that the self is nothing else than the historical correlation of the technology built in our history. maybe the problem is to change those technologies. (foucault 1993, 227) butler’s decision to deconstruct confession vis-à-vis antigone is strange given antigone’s standing as both literature and tragedy. antigone is considered tragedy par excellence precisely because it could not have been otherwise; part of what defines tragedy, at least according to aristotle—who holds sophocles as his preferred model—is its inevitability, with the plot unified into one complete action.6 antigone’s literary confession, then, participates in a technology of the self that could not be otherwise without ceasing to be antigone. stranger still, butler’s use of antigone is at odds with foucault’s historical account of the speech act, which would lead the reader to expect antigone to be classified under a classical, not christian, framework for confession. these strange moves lay the foundation for my critique of butler’s solution to the problem of the guilty subject, modeled on antigone herself, whose guilt butler wishes to deny. 6 aristotle, poetics 1452a. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 6 3. confessing makes the victim in their analysis of antigone, butler deconstructs the confessional act as one that reinforces antigone’s guilt, a guilt that butler shows both precedes and determines antigone’s crime, and a guilt that structures her sense of self. antigone has buried her brother, polyneices, in accordance with divine law but against the law of her city and its leader, creon. when she confesses to this mortal crime (“i say i did it and i don’t deny it” [sophocles, antigone 443;7 quoted in butler 2004a, 167]), butler wonders if antigone’s confession exacerbates her guilt: although she uses language to claim her deed, to assert a ‘manly’ and defiant autonomy, she can perform that act only through embodying the norms of power she opposes. indeed, what gives these verbal acts their power is the normative operation of power that they embody without quite becoming. (2004a, 167) antigone can suffer under the law or break the law, but unlike creon, she is not the law itself.8 when antigone asserts manly autonomy, she speaks in the language of the very law that condemns her—for antigone, law is that which she breaks, not something she controls. antinomianism, it seems, always invigorates the power of the nomos. antigone’s autopsia—the moment in which she sees herself with her own eyes and allows herself to be so seen by her oppressor—restructures herself through the very law that she attempts to repudiate: “she assumes the voice of the law in committing the act against the law,” and in her confession, she submits herself finally to the authority of the law even as she seems to defy it (butler 2004a, 168). it appears that there is no way out of this language game: just as peeking under the blindfold is as much a part of pin the tail on the donkey as is fumbling blindly, transgressing the law is always written into the law’s horizon. butler’s antigone is trapped by a game that she cannot fail to play, even as she breaks the rules. butler shows how antigone’s confession structures her transgression. antigone places a frame of language around her deed; she says, “yes, i confess it” or “i say i did it” rather than simply saying “i did it.” butler writes, “to say, ‘yes, i say i did it,’ is to claim the act, but it is also to commit another deed in the very claiming, the act of publishing one’s deed, a new criminal venture that redoubles and takes place of the old” (2004a, 167). like foucault’s confession, it is the saying, not the doing, of the deed that finalizes it, that identifies what the doing was in the first place. 7 sophocles, antigone, ed. and trans. hugh lloyd-jones, loeb classical library vol. 21 (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1994). 8 creon’s word becomes law; as tyrant of thebes, he is law (see, e.g., sophocles, antigone 26–30). bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 7 in this way, the publication of the deed in speech marks the fulfillment of the deed, but the publication of the deed also creates a new location of a new deed, one in which “the vocalizing larynx and mouth become the part of the body that stages the drama of the whole” (2004b, 173). the confession is not just made in speech but in the body which speaks. butler then shows us something about confession: that it is the location of both the fulfillment and the prophecy of the signs one makes, that it structures the past just as it marks a new present that will structure the future. antigone’s guilt makes her a victim—not only of creon’s injustice and the inevitability of greek tragedy, but of the linguistic force of confession, which underscores and confirms the guilt she apparently had always carried. confessing makes the victim: it both suggests an agency that belongs to the transgressor and reveals that one’s guilt and subsequent confession was determined by the construction of the polis and its laws all along.9 beneath the premise of confession is the premise of a guilt that “preexists its deed and its confession,” meaning, in turn, that confession is often “borne of that obscure guilt” that butler wishes were otherwise (2004a, 171). would that antigone did not feel guilty! butler suggests that the confession that structures antigone’s sin is necessary for antigone’s transgression to fully obtain, but they also simultaneously suggest that her confession is overdetermined, that “although it reads as guiltless defiance, it seems in fact to be a suicidal act propelled by an obscure sense of guilt” (2004a, 170). and while butler reads antigone as demonstrating the unjust but linguistically necessary admission of guilt through her defiance of the law, they make the case that the world could nevertheless be otherwise. “all the more reason that the analyst finds him or herself as confessor, or, indeed, as creon, must decline the honor, and take that speech as a solicitation to help undo the curse whose fatal consequences sometimes seem so sure” (2004a, 171; emphasis mine). here, butler seems to want to have their cake and eat it too: to structure confession as part and parcel of deed, to structure transgression as part of law, to structure guilt as inherent to subjecthood, and nevertheless to imagine a world in which the judge or confessor could say: no, you confess that which need not be confessed. while butler offers new ways to recognize and affirm the other, their use of antigone has its challenges. it seems unlikely that the analyst herself could act in such a way as to recognize the analysand and allow her to flourish without approaching the laws under which the analysand suffers. just as the tragedy of antigone is found in the web of laws that hold antigone fast and condemn her to death, the tragedy of the analysand is found in the outside world, not within the analyst’s office. butler 9 the polis is not exactly the location in which laws are meaningful; given creon’s tyranny, the polis, too, reveals that the justness of laws stands on the ground of the sovereign who makes himself exception to law. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 8 suggests that victims are always guilty because their speech acts only obtain when structured according to the law that they simultaneously break. they try to get around this with the idea of “declining the honor,” but they hope that the confessor working on an interpersonal level can undo the hermeneutic of the self that analysand, analyst, and world participate in. when we bring in a feminist account of structural misogyny, we see that guilt is produced not just by the entangled relationship between the antinomian and the nomos but by the social location of she who confesses—or of she who gives testimony. sometimes, giving testimony to admit that one was the object of another’s transgression is read as a confession of guilt! butler’s case study of anita hill operates along similar theoretical lines as their analysis of antigone, but readers may be surprised that even when the kind of speech act changes, guilt may still be written into its structure. i argue in the following sections that this guilt is not only located in certain kinds of speech acts (such as confession) but is found in the gendered (and raced) identity of she who speaks—even if she did not intend to confess. 4. when testimony becomes confession while “declining the honor” suggests that the interpersonal relationship between analyst and analysand can relieve the guilt that otherwise constructs the subject, butler’s earlier work on speech identifies additional challenges to this solution.10 in some cases, she who confesses did not mean to confess and bears no guilt of her own, but guilt is unjustly attributed to her. to decline this honor would respond to the wrong sin: not that of inherent guilt, but of misattributed guilt. in butler’s (1997, 82–95) analysis of clarence thomas’s senate confirmation hearings, anita hill’s testimony is read as a confession of guilt. the committee chamber becomes a site of self-constitution and self-incrimination, where testimony, like confession, functions as a speech act that both presupposes and produces guilt. when anita hill offered an account of what happened to her, the senators watching attributed guilt to her, as if she had confessed rather than testified. butler explains that during thomas’ senate judiciary committee hearing, hill was always already sexualized by a public that could only understand speech as agency and agency as guilt. they write that the law “requires and facilitates a conceptualization of injury in relation to a culpable subject, resurrecting ‘the subject’ (which could just as well be a corporate or group entity as an individual) in response to the demand to seek accountability for injury” (butler 1997, 78). the law, like antigone’s guilt, brings the subject into being as it brings the crime to light; the subject is always constructed in the shadow and expectation of the injury. 10 on butler’s theory of performativity, see gender trouble (butler 1990) and excitable speech (butler 1997). bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 9 the structure of testimony, for butler, must therefore assume guilt. they say, “the very act by which anita hill gave testimony, one intended to establish that an injury was done to her, was taken up by the senate hearings—itself a pornographic scene—as a confession of her shame and, hence, her guilt” (1997, 82). victim testimony—a kind of speech act in which someone voices an experience she has suffered that might otherwise be left unexpressed—transforms into confession, where the testifier is made guilty and therefore appears to have confessed. the very act of making speech is fraught: one’s testimony is enacted in a such a way that it no longer belongs just to the speaker but rather is shaped by the force of the room in which one speaks. butler (1997, 83) explains, “in that reappropriative reception by which testimony is taken as confession, the speaker’s words are no longer taken as communicating or performing what they appear to be doing (exemplifying the illocutionary force of utterance); they are, rather, a display or enactment of sexual guilt.” the hearing transforms testimony of what one has suffered through loss of her own agency into an admission of agency and therefore of guilt. testimony has become a mode of confession. anita hill is no antigone figure: antigone confesses a confession; hill testified to sexual harassment that she suffered at the hands of clarence thomas. while butler shows how antigone’s confession revealed her to be victim to the unjust laws that she wittingly transgressed, hill’s victim testimony transformed her from a victim to a transgressor. the structure of the setting works similarly on them both: confession simply and testimony-cum-confession recontextualize the speech one gives into what the public hears as admission of guilt. both speech acts function, according to butler, as a kind of confession. and in this confession, the words one utters exceed their meanings and are formed and recontextualized through the locations and under the matrix of laws under which they are uttered. antigone’s primordial guilt transforms into confession and flows into guilty acceptance, but hill’s testimony was transformed into guilt through what butler calls a performative contradiction—that is, “an act of speech that in its very acting produces a meaning that undercuts the one it purports to make” (1997, 84). butler argues that to the extent that someone speaks, she displays agency, as that speech is taken as a sign of agency. this agency undermines her victim status: if she can speak, then she must have wanted it. to survive—to speak—claims an agency that the violation should have nullified. the confession that binds antigone to the law operates similarly to hill’s testimony, linking her to a crime committed against her for which she is compelled to assume responsibility. butler’s account of hill’s testimony may make sense along their framework of performative contradiction and excitable speech, but not all victim testimony creates this performative contradiction. both hill and thomas vied for the status of victimhood: hill as a victim of sexual harassment, and thomas as a victim of hill’s accusation. but when thomas cast himself as a victim of the hearing, he was taken to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 10 be one. although readers of this essay may view thomas as someone who transgressed both laws and norms in his treatment of hill, thomas identified himself as a victim of her testimony, and his performance of victimhood was felicitous to his senatorial jury. when thomas testified, his testimony was deemed credible. his testimony did not excitably become confession, as hill’s did—it remained testimony. in butler’s reading, the “pornographic space” of the hearing should have taken thomas’s testimony as a display of guilt rather than simply communicating or performing the words he spoke—but thomas and hill were treated very differently by their cross examiners. for example, when hill spoke of stomach pain that landed her in the hospital for five days, which she took as a symptom of stress from work and the harassment that she faced there, she was characterized as pathological, but when thomas spoke of losing weight his “somatic response was viewed as normal” (phelan 1997, 97). in an essay on the psychoanalytic dimensions of the hearing, peggy phelan writes in a butlerian key that hill’s testimony is both a “performative and transformative speech act” (phelan 1997, 103) insofar as the public account of her private victimization “attempts to repudiate—in the very public and politicized form of its telling—her position as ‘victim’” (104). victimhood appears to be structured as a zero-sum game, and if hill attempts to repudiate her status as victim, then the seat is opened up for thomas to take, which phelan argues he does vis-à-vis his protest that he was victim of “high-tech lynching” (104). phelan, like butler, recognizes the transformative powers of speech, but phelan opens up the possibility that this arrangement of victimhood is structured not just in the pornographic scene of the hearing but also in the society that brings the hearing into existence. drawing on kimberlé crenshaw, phelan suggests that by bringing up lynching, thomas simultaneously de-raced hill and accused the senators of racism: these senators in turn decided that they would rather have “the blood of the ‘de-raced’ black woman on their hands than the blood of a black man who denounced them as a lynch mob” (105). to restore their own innocence these senators had to confirm thomas and reject hill’s testimony. 5. effects of misogyny on speech acts in the previous section i offered anita hill as a case study to show how victim testimony can be misread as admission of guilt or complicity to the very crime one has suffered. there, butler showed how the “excitable” location of the hearing was responsible for transforming hill’s testimony into confession. but not all testimony becomes confession: when thomas testified in his own hearing, he was deemed both credible and innocent. kate manne’s (2017) down girl offers an account of misogyny that shows why some speech is taken in its illocutionary sense and other speech becomes transformed through the context and recontextualization it works in and bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 11 through. this account explains why some speech transforms into victim testimony, and why some (but not all) victim testimony is taken as an admission of guilt. with this additional diagnosis, we can begin to offer more meaningful solutions to the concern butler’s wishful thinking brings up: when a confession arises, we must not look beyond the confessor or the analyst who could “decline the honor” of letting the confession obtain, but rather look to the social and political sphere in order to change the laws that structure these seemingly ahistorical but nevertheless practically contingent harms of selfhood. 5.1. recognizing women before i give an account of manne’s theory of victimhood and its relationship to misogyny, confession, and testimony, it is worthwhile to emphasize that manne does not write directly about subject formation. she is occupied not with the elaboration of the self through psychoanalytical tools such as confession but with the behavior of others toward that self. manne is also interested not in an abstract subject but in a gendered one—the subject that manne investigates belongs to or hails a woman. her interest is empirical: what are the forces that account for systematic mistreatment of women? as a result, she comes to elaborate on a more phenomenological problem: not who is a woman, nor how does a woman come to be, but what it is like to be a woman, and what accounts for and structures the violence she faces. manne never gives an account of subject formation qua subject formation because her book looks more to the systems of values that produce violence against women than to questions around recognition of the subject. questions of the “self” and the possibilities of its recognition are nevertheless found in her chapter “humanizing hatred” (manne 2017, 133–68). the chapter argues against a common cultural belief that women would be treated better if only their aggressors saw them as “fully human” (137). this position assumes that recognizing others as fellow humans generally demands certain expectations of those people, such that they have similar qualities and potentialities as those who are interacting with them. manne demonstrates that aggressors terrorize women not because they believe women to be “inhuman” or “subhuman” but because they imagine women as “all too human” (135). manne shows that often it is by virtue of recognizing women as certain kinds of humans that they are treated badly. aggressors believe women to be “human,” not only along the lines that make a given human “an intelligible parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague” but also along those that make one “an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, betrayer” (147). when men hold women to owe them certain goods—such as care, love, goodwill, attention, and so on—and these men find themselves without those goods, they may hold those women responsible as enemies, rivals, and make feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 12 them pay, as manne writes that elliot rodger did, the ultimate price.11 the human subject is always situated in the world: she is not, just as he is not, just a rational animal or a spouse or child, but someone who is embedded in community and expected to either give or receive certain goods from those around her. this idea of recognition takes a different path from butler’s elaboration of the concept, which butler invokes most forcefully in their essay “longing for recognition.” there, the primary encounter with the other takes place when “whatever the self is” loses itself in the other. butler (2004b, 147) writes, “[consciousness, or, the self,] by virtue of the external status of the reflection, will continue to lose itself.” this kind of recognition is concerned with the formation of the subject through the subject’s own loss, but manne’s interest in recognition and in the subject looks beyond the interpersonal to the structural. recognition and selves are not the sites of her inquiry but assumed quantities that are affected by the structures of misogyny that surround them and pose the problems of violence. 5.2. claiming the victim manne (2017, 233) suggests that misogyny provides an explanation for why women have less credibility than men when they try to “claim victimhood.” women’s testimony is fraught not only because testimony itself is fraught, but because of social factors that specifically affect women. identifying oneself saliently as a victim takes place in a network of relations: identifying oneself as a victim often implies that another was the transgressor, or that one is subject to unjust circumstances. in either case, it appears that something happens to the victim that common sense would indicate should not or need not have happened. but when certain people are not believed to be owed certain goods and are then denied those goods, they have difficulty in being perceived as having suffered unduly. manne draws on p. f. strawson’s account of reactive emotions to explore who is authorized to claim victim identity. these reactive emotions, such as resentment or indignation, are often attributed to victims and are grounded in expectations of mutual goodwill and regard among individuals. the ability to claim the victim role hinges on these expectations of goodwill being acknowledged by others. one’s reaction to another, say, stepping on one’s foot, will be different in a case in which the foot was stepped on accidentally in an effort to help one get up than in a case where another acted in “contemptuous disregard” for one’s digits (strawson 1993, 11 manne brings up elliot rodger, the isla vista shooter, throughout her book, quoting his manifesto my twisted world, where he writes: “when i think about the amazing and blissful life i could have lived if only females were sexually attracted to me, my entire being burns with hatred. they denied me a happy life, and in return i will take away all of their lives. it is only fair” (quoted in manne 2017, 174). bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 13 49). in the case of contemptuous disregard, one may feel morally indignant— victimized, even—but not so in the case of the former. strawson (1993, 50) shows, for example, a path to forgiveness by identifying ameliorative markers to the aggressor: maybe “he didn’t mean to” or “he didn’t know.” but those who are not traditionally seen as entitled to certain privileges have difficulty in being granted goodwill. indeed, they will likely be resented for the privileges they ask for or take. when women claim to be disadvantaged or testify to harm caused either by certain men or a system of oppression (e.g., rape, or making only eighty-four cents to a man’s dollar), 12 the response is often one of moral indignation: she is withholding goodwill that he is accustomed to receiving. drawing on virginia woolf’s a room of one’s own, manne (2017, xix) asks her reader to imagine what it would be like to step on the hands or toes of another—what if you “have trespassed on verboten territory, or on his turf?” woolf (1931, 9) recounts walking around oxford across a green quad when a man intercepts her, expressing “horror and indignation.” she writes, “he was a beadle, i was a woman. this was the turf; there was the path. only the fellows and scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me” (woolf 1931, 9). for strawson, the indignation shown by the beadle could be ameliorated only if he imagined that his transgressor was morally incompetent—someone who, on account of miseducation or psychosis, imagined she had equal access to the turf reserved only for elite men. strawson’s beadle would be able to soothe himself only by accepting a certain “strain of involvement,” a strain that strawson (1993, 53) thinks is not always possible. the goodwill strawson describes assumes a world free from systems of domination and disadvantage: a world without gender, among other markers of difference. manne (2017, xviii) argues that this formulation of goodwill lays a “terrible trap” for women. she defines misogyny as the belief that “part of what women like you (e.g., me) owe men in such positions of (in this case, rather petty) moral authority is good will of the kind strawson says is so important to receive from one’s fellow human beings” (2017, xviii). misogyny, for manne, is “primarily a property of social environments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to enforcement and policing of patriarchal norms and expectations—often, though not exclusively, insofar as they violate patriarchal law and order” (2017, 19). in other words, when women identify harms that they suffer under patriarchy or demand goods that they ought to receive but do not on account of patriarchy, misogyny is the policing arm that enforces women’s subordination to male power. if misogyny polices resistance to patriarchal norms, then testifying as a victim of male aggression would seem to be exactly the kind of speech act that would be 12 on the complicated history of the wage gap, and the shortcomings of its calculation, see sielska (2023). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 14 policed and excitably transformed. victims of sexual violence, for example, who identify themselves through testimony, would not likely be given credibility or sympathy if their injury were caused by a man who otherwise expected to be entitled to certain goods from women. manne (2017, 223) writes that the paradigmatic case of being a victim involves being “morally wronged at the hands of another agent— and being injured, humiliated, or otherwise wounded by it.” with this in mind, the beadle whose turf has been stepped on can understand himself as a victim—as can, of course, virginia woolf. anyone, it seems, can cast themselves as a victim, and indeed, in cases of sexual harassment and rape, we often see perpetrators looking for sympathy, issuing resentment toward their prey. manne shows how a conception of a victim as someone who is owed sympathy sheds light on why depicting oneself as a victim can be fraught. she writes, “for claiming victimhood effectively involves placing oneself at the center of the story. . . . it is liable to be perceived as at once self-dramatizing and self-important, and at the same time, wan or maudlin” (2017, 225). victims are most salient to their audiences when they are taken as people who have been denied certain rights and entitlements that they are owed. manne shows that disenfranchised groups, such as women, who are historically assumed to be entitled to less, have difficulty in claiming victimhood: if you claim victimhood, more or less explicitly, chances are (a) that you’re not automatically being given what you need, in terms of sympathy and redress for moral injuries; and (b) you’re claiming to be entitled to the same, in ways that will be more salient for those not deemed to be so entitled, historically, but rather obligated to ensure that others’ entitlements are satisfied. (manne 2017, 230) by her account, the speech of the victim acts as testimony against her. like antigone’s confession to creon, the speech act always reifies the norm or the nomos under which one lives. if she speaks, she has an agency that victims cannot claim; if she speaks, then she is seeking to center her injuries when common sense would prefer her to sympathize with the injuries of the man who harmed her.13 paradoxically, this expectation of sympathy depends on a view of women as significantly agential and potentially threatening the social order. she who should 13antigone rejects “victim status” when she asserts her “manly autonomy” and so becomes read as believable. her credibility is coterminous with her ultimate (self)condemnation and death. “claiming the victim” would be impossible for antigone, but with her “manly autonomy” she can at least be heard—even as this hearing hurls her to her death. bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 15 have been more resilient or more forgiving was withholding the very goodwill that someone like strawson (or, in a different key, rodger) would expect as the basis of civil society. miranda fricker introduces the concept “testimonial injustice” in order to show why woman’s testimony is so often infelicitous—as if this infelicity, too, could be improved with goodwill.14 for fricker, testimonial injustice arises when a group, often to some extent historically and unjustly considered inferior, is taken to be less credible when they make certain claims. manne (2017, 218) modifies this account, writing that not only are women taken to be guilty in cases of misogynistic violence out of a lack of goodwill, but socially and politically expedient biases are at play in evaluating their credibility. drawing on philosopher josé medina,15 she argues that the lack of credibility of one group depends on the imagined credibility of the other: “surplus credibility enjoyed by the dominant group members results in testimonial injustice for the subordinate group members, given the comparative and contrastive—as well as temporally extended—nature of epistemic assessment” (manne 2017, 190). manne explains that a credibility deficit is politically necessary to uphold an order of male dominance to which women must defer.16 these credibility deficits “serve the function of buttressing dominant group members’ current social position, and protecting them from downfall in the existing social hierarchy: by being, for example, accused, impugned, convicted, corrected, diminished or, alternatively, simply outperformed” (2017, 194). manne’s account of testimonial injustice allows us to see the structural forces that presented hill with credibility deficits and thomas with victim status. thomas’s story did not make logical sense: calling himself a victim of “high-tech lynching” deraces hill by eliding gendered dynamics in lynching histories. in these histories, black men have been killed under the fantasy and fear of black male access to white women, a history in which sexual violence against black women does not enter clearly and, if and when it does, enters in the form of black women experiencing violence at 14 fricker’s formulation of “testimonial injustice” can be found in her “epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege” (fricker 1999) and epistemic injustice (fricker 2007). while fricker is often credited with bringing “testimonial injustice” to analytic philosophy, her work builds off of the work of others, including, for example, lugones (1987) and collins (1990). 15 for more on how credibility cuts across raced and gendered difference, see medina (2012). 16 manne’s insistence on the political expediency of testimonial injustice is in conversation with the political expediency of epistemology itself. dotson (berenstain et al. 2022, 291) explains, “epistemologies often outline steps for the sake of an expected (and acceptable) range of results. in addition, they are often used to assess steps taken for the ends they achieve.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 16 the hands of the same lynch mob or vis-à-vis their losses that come from the murders of their friends and family (crenshaw 1996, 833). but de-racing hill was more expedient for the senators at the hearing than taking hill’s victim testimony seriously and considering her a victim in her own right. hill was not entitled to the same kind of goodwill that thomas received. manne’s account of victimhood shows that juries as much as analysts and confessors believe the stories that they are comfortable believing. crenshaw (1996, 829) writes, for example, that the “continuous focus on [hill’s] failure to resign after the harassment began to fit into a narrative that presented her as a woman who did not meet the utmost-resistance standard because she was apparently unwilling to exchange her career for her ‘honor’; she was thus unworthy to make the claim.” senators, fitting with manne’s model, criticized hill for placing herself at the center of the story: a real victim would not be so bold as to claim her injury. thomas, instead, claimed victimhood and was entitled to it on account of his victim story lining up with systems of power. victimhood is written into our social world, and trying to claim it for oneself works best if the larger narrative is sympathetic to one’s plight. in a world fraught with misogyny, we can see how hill’s victim status was structurally less available than thomas’s. turning back to butler’s original request that the confessor “decline the honor,” we ought to remember that the confessor is not the only person who is asked to condemn the confessed. senators, juries, and the public are also constantly asked to judge victims of violence and those who have broken the law. of course those senators failed to decline the honor. 6. concluding remarks a feminist account of subject formation that takes confession as its model cannot avoid the social and political location in which a speech act is uttered. this location goes beyond the “excitable” location of the courtroom or the analyst’s office but implicates the whole world in which the speech act is uttered. in a world where certain groups suffer credibility deficits and are historically assumed to be entitled to less, the game of testimony and confession is rigged. a theory of subject formation that accounts for these social and political realities is left wanting: we do not know what it would be like for a woman to either confess or testify in a world that grants her as much credibility and goodwill as men. manne’s disinterest in subject formation as an avenue of inquiry makes sense: by her account, this inquiry may not yet be possible. butler’s account of subject formation, alternatively, leaves us with a model that we are not yet equipped to use. thinking through antigone with manne produces a richer understanding of what was at stake in antigone’s confession. there were no speech acts available to antigone that could have redeemed her, just as there were no actions she could have taken that would not have condemned her life to a tragic end. manne enables us to bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 17 begin to theorize the female subject in antigone, even as the project of subjectmaking remains proleptically out of reach for women whose worlds confine them to structures of confession. the characters in antigone are tragic because they do not see multiple possibilities in their identities and responsibilities but imagine those identities and responsibilities as fixed. antigone falls into the tragic structure of a life that is overdetermined by vengeance and laws that produce transgressions and vengeance in turn; her life and her death are determined by her commitment to honoring men’s bodies over her own. antigone is characterized as a tragedy par excellence precisely because it could not have been otherwise. butler’s analysis of antigone’s confession suggests that creon could have acted otherwise, but this is no truer of creon than of the senators of hill’s hearing. the “otherwise” glance butler asks us to cast toward antigone is not one we can easily make sense of in a tragedy that takes its force from its own inevitability. but inevitability found in one story does not mean that guilt or confession is ahistorical and thus inevitable. by setting up manne’s more socially situated theory against butler’s ahistorical, confessional self, we may be able to gesture toward a world in which the analyst finally may “decline the honor.”17 this contemporary approach to confession must imagine a world in which confession is not coterminous (just) with guilt but in fact becomes an indictment of the world that has condemned the subject to carry that guilt. the structural misogyny that women face must be dealt with in order for the analyst to decline the honor. in this way, we must reenvision confession as a speech act that holds significance outside of the analyst’s office. rather than hope that analysts decline the honor that the speech act requests of them, we might see the speech act as a force that acts upon the analyst and the world. when this speech act is uttered, we ought to look more carefully and see how confession is not simply an indictment of oneself but of the world that structures one’s transgression. pace seneca, the possibility of unity between truth and will—of internal coherence—is not possible in a misogynistic world. indeed, in striving for a self that seeks internal coherence, one must seek to unite not only truth and will but also world. the classical model of confession, like butler’s, must be rectified such that it is not merely 17 recall, here, the classical model of confession that butler largely ignores. through dialogue with seneca, serenus attempts to produce a new way of understanding himself vis-à-vis reason—the force that will unite will and self-understanding to produce him as a better subject and citizen. but what if the best self must look beyond will and understanding into the world that shaped the will in the first place? seneca’s model, by foucault’s (1993) telling, is sealed off from the possibility that the world, not the will, needs changing. but a model that begins here may be more compatible with manne than the christian account of confession. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2025, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 5 published by scholarship@western, 2025 18 dialogical, armed with reason alone, but instead demands social and political change. one cannot just know thyself until political actions are taken such that one’s self can be known. references berenstain, nora, kristie dotson, julieta paredes, elena ruíz, and noenoe k. silva. 2022. “epistemic oppression, resistance, and resurgence.” contemporary political theory 21 (2): 283–314. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00483-z. butler, judith. 1990. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge. ————. 1997. excitable speech: a politics of the performative. new york: routledge. ————. 2000. antigone's claim: kinship between life and death. new york: columbia university press. ————. 2004a. “bodily confessions.” in undoing gender. new york: routledge, 161– 73. ————. 2004b. “longing for recognition.” in undoing gender. new york: routledge, 131–51. ————. 2005. giving an account of oneself. new york: fordham university press. collins, patricia hill. 1990. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. boston: unwin hyman. crenshaw, kimberlé. 1996. “whose story is it, anyway? feminist and antiracist appropriations of anita hill.” in applications of feminist legal theory to women’s lives: sex, violence, work, and reproduction, edited by d. kelly weisberg, 826–44. philadelphia: temple university press. deshotel, rob, and dean batali, writers. 1998. buffy the vampire slayer. season 2, episode 18, “killed by death.” directed by deran sarafian. aired march 3, 1998, on the wb. foucault, michel. 1988. the history of sexuality. vol. 1, an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. ————. 1993. “about the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self: two lectures at dartmouth.” edited by mark blasius and thomas keenan. political theory 21 (2): 198–227. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591793021002004. fricker, miranda. 1999. “epistemic oppression and epistemic privilege.” canadian journal of philosophy 29, supplementary volume 25: 191–210. https://doi.org /10.1080/00455091.1999.10716836. ————. 2007. epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. oxford: oxford university press. bogin – confessing victims and victim testimony: misogyny’s role in the structuring of subjects published by scholarship@western, 2025 19 hadot, pierre. 1995. philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from socrates to foucault. edited by arnold i davidson. translated by michael chase. oxford: blackwell. lugones, maría. 1987. “playfulness, ‘world’-travelling, and loving perception.” hypatia 2 (2): 3–19. manne, kate. 2017. down girl: the logic of misogyny. new york: oxford university press. medina, josé. 2012. epistemology of resistance: gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. oxford: oxford university press. phelan, peggy. 1997. mourning sex: performing public memories. london: routledge. sielska, alicja. 2023. explaining the gender wage gap: the missing aspects of discrimination. cheltenham, uk: edward elgar publishing. strawson, p. f. 1993. “freedom and resentment.” in perspectives on moral responsibility, edited by john martin fischer and mark ravizza, 45–66. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. woolf, virginia. 1931. a room of one’s own. london: hogarth press. emily. n. bogin is a phd candidate in religious studies at boston university. she studies the philosophical and theological resonances of women’s life-writing, especially in the jewish diaspora. 20989 bogin title page 20989 bogin final format self-improvement in astellian friendship feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 4 article 4 recommended citation lennie, tyra. 2023. “self-improvement in astellian friendship.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (4). article 4. 2023 self-improvement in astellian friendship tyra lennie mcmaster university lenniet@mcmaster.ca lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 self-improvement in astellian friendship1 tyra lennie abstract in this article, i argue that existing literature discounts the role of selfimprovement in astellian friendship. to make this element central, i show how an epicurean analysis of astellian friendship brings self-improvement clearly into focus. on the way to centering self-improvement, i show how extant accounts imply selfimprovement without explicitly setting up the architecture to explain this element of astellian friendship. self-improvement is centralized by way of three shared themes between the epicurean garden and the astellian religious retirement: the motivation to enter, the project inside, and the manner of friendship. keywords: mary astell, early modern philosophy, epicurus, self-improvement, friendship introduction the theory of friendship that mary astell (1666–1731) puts forth in a serious proposal to the ladies (astell 2002) has been characterized as aristotelean (broad 2009), christian-platonist (kendrick 2018), and a hybrid theory that anticipates aspects of relational autonomy (forbes 2020). all of these views capture something essential about astellian friendship, which is at once transformative and spiritual. this article highlights how these existing characterizations overlook a primary feature of astell’s description of friendship as a self-improvement project that can only be 1 i am indebted to the wonderful community who works on mary astell. thank you to the audiences at the tempo (traveling early modern philosophy organization) 2021 conference, the second annual rackham interdisciplinary workshop in ancient philosophy, and the friends of mary astell: workshop on astell’s social philosophy for helping me think through early versions of this article. thank you to timothy yenter, marie jayasekera, and corey mckibbin for reading drafts of this work and providing thorough comments. thank you to the incredible reviewers and editors at fpq for their insightful and directive comments. finally, thank you to my mentor and committee member, allauren forbes, for introducing me to mary astell’s writings and reading every single version of this article. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 achieved by an agent who is immersed in a strong community. to properly support this interpretation and make self-improvement central, i describe how astellian friendship can be self-sacrificing but also focus on self-improvement and suggest we look to the function and structure of epicurean friendship.2 this comparison helps bring self-improvement to the fore and situates the role of benevolence in astellian friendship. self-improvement comes further into focus by way of three shared themes between the epicurean garden, a piece of secluded property on the outskirts of athens where epicurus and his followers practiced philosophy, and the astellian religious retirement, astell’s proposed retreat in service of ladies’ education in proposal. the motivation to enter, the project inside, and the style of friendship are similar between these two communities. in particular, the reasons for ladies or epicureans to respectively join the religious retirement or garden are aligned.3 a similar project is taken up in these institutions—namely, a community-based pursuit of education paired with a simple life. finally, a very specific type of friendship is central on both accounts: one focused on improving the self and gaining security through a community of like-minded individuals.4 ultimately, examining these shared 2 jacqueline broad mentions connections between astell’s writing and epicurean philosophy in her 2015 book, the philosophy of mary astell: an early modern theory of virtue. in the introduction, broad (2015, 8–9) notes that astell articulates an epicurean picture of happiness, given that “she holds that the greatest pleasure in life is a certain ‘tranquility of the mind,’ or freedom from mental anxiety and perturbation, as well as freedom from bodily pain.” broad explains this further in chapter 5, while discussing astell’s picture of happiness in detail. although broad makes mention of epicurean influence in astell’s work, this article provides a more thorough treatment of this connection. 3 throughout this article, i often use “ladies” instead of “women” in line with how astell writes about the attendees of the retirement. although “women” may be far more conventional now, astell had specific types of women in mind as attendees: these attendees would be “ladies” more strictly in terms of their class and position in society. when i write about the retirement, and the particular educational program there, i will use “ladies.” when i describe astell’s comments on bad custom, i will speak to how she sees this impacting “women” more generally. this labelling tracks how astell speaks of women more broadly when referring to capacities and ladies when describing the retirement, which is concerned with class. 4 of course, similarities can also be drawn between the religious retirement and religious convents. however, comparing the retirement to a convent does not bring forward self-improvement—a comparison to the epicurean garden brings this into focus in a more straightforward sense. it is also worth noting that comparing the religious retirement merely to a convent seems to ignore something important about lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 themes advances the primary claim of this article, that self-improvement is a central pillar of astellian friendship. in the first section, i describe the conditions of the retirement. in the second section, i outline the elements of the astellian self. in the third section, i briefly lay out three extant accounts of astellian friendship by nancy kendrick, jacqueline broad, and allauren forbes. there, i demonstrate the need for a new interpretive lens that explicitly highlights self-improvement and illustrate how these accounts identify important aspects of astellian friendship but overlook the centrality of selfimprovement. broad’s, kendrick’s, and forbes’s accounts all imply self-improvement without explicitly setting up the architecture to explain this element of astellian friendship. in the fourth section, i show how an epicurean analysis of astellian friendship brings self-improvement clearly into focus. similar commitments to education, self-improvement, friendship, and the rejection of unnecessary and unnatural desires exist at the cores of both systems. examining epicurean friendship helps solidify the centrality of self-improvement for astellian friendship. 1. proposal and the religious retirement in this first section, i examine the major themes in proposal before describing the astellian self in the following section. the goal here is to set up the conditions of the retirement—what kind of project exists at its core, and what societal issues does it aim to address? here we also start to see what kind of self the object of selfimprovement is—one that is socially situated and benefits from relations with others. setting the stage in this way allows me to highlight self-improvement further in the final sections of this article. in proposal, astell highlights four major themes that, in turn, illuminate the centrality of self-improvement in the religious retirement. throughout proposal, astell encourages ladies to enter a religious retirement that improves the souls of its members through (1) distance from bad custom, (2) proper education, (3) space for religious devotion, and (4) female friendship. self-improvement is intertwined with these four elements and provides a solution for ladies who are subject to bad custom. if ladies can engage in education, religious devotion, and friendship, they can appropriately focus on the self-improvement of their souls. this project involves engaging in a type of intellectual self-improvement. ladies can diminish the influence astell’s proposal. the retirement offers up an alternative to the existing options at the time—marriage or a convent. although the retirement contains elements of religious education and a focus on connection with god, this is a third option, not a retelling of an option that already existed. for this reason, a comparison to a convent does not capture the project astell seems to have in mind and attempts to classify the retirement in a way that simplifies astell’s goals. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 of bad custom and poor education by improving their minds—a specific kind of selfimprovement. proposal contains both argumentative and practical elements—it contains an elaborate proof of ladies’ moral and intellectual potential and functions as a practical handbook that encourages the reader to actualize this potential by entering a religious retirement for ladies. astell emphasizes throughout proposal the way in which women’s current subordination is a matter of custom, not nature.5 god has given both women and men intelligent souls, but custom has not encouraged women to improve their intellect (astell 2002, 80). at a time when women were not afforded the same opportunities as men, astell notes how women are “nurs’d up in the ignorance and vanity” and taught to value their beauty above the betterment of their souls (61). given the current state of custom, astell urges her reader not to wonder why most women are not wise but instead to marvel at the fact that any are wise. if men’s souls were neglected in the same way, they too would “sink into the greatest stupidity and brutality” (57). astell encourages women to “dare to break the enchanted circle that custom has plac’d us in” (55). so-called bad custom makes the project of selfimprovement necessary for women in the first place for deep political, spiritual, and personal reasons.6 without an avenue for improvement, women’s subordination is inescapable. astell suggests that women can break free from bad custom by engaging in, amongst other things, educational pursuits.7 by engaging in education, women can “expel that cloud of ignorance which custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge, that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorn’d and neglected things” (astell 2002, 77). astell identifies education as both a potential site of improvement and the place where defects in the soul originate. since education plays such a formative role, a lack of education or poor education can spread “ill influence” throughout a person’s entire life (60). to avoid this error, women must ideally be provided with educational opportunities from infancy to develop their intellectual abilities correctly (60). however, astell is writing a proposal for a nonideal world where ladies enter the retirement in adulthood. nonetheless, an opportunity 5 here, i use “women” rather than “ladies” because astell is concerned with how women, in full, lack opportunities for improvement of the mind and are subject to bad custom. when i turn to speak about the retirement more specifically, i refer to “ladies.” 6 karen detlefsen (2016) describes how astell speaks of good and bad custom. i adopt this distinction here to discuss how astell speaks poorly of the type of custom she sees destroying the souls of women. 7 for more on the importance of acknowledging and rejecting bad custom in astell’s work, see forbes (2019) and sowaal (2007). lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 for amelioration exists; ladies can escape from bad custom and instead adorn their minds with knowledge, albeit far past the age astell would prefer. withdrawal allows ladies to develop their minds away from the noise of the world (68). in terms of a specific educational program, astell calls for ladies to meditate (75), engross themselves in philosophical texts, notably the work of descartes,8 and reflect on the nature of religion and god. astell’s description of the function of education emphasizes how ladies in the retreat can take up this pursuit of self-improvement. the ladies that astell addresses in proposal are stuck in the enchanted circle of custom and deprived of all opportunities for self-improvement. the retreat provides an incentive to enter—ladies who attend will be given the resources and material conditions needed to focus on their souls. self-improvement through education is the answer to astell’s more general worry about how bad custom leads to the deterioration of women’s souls. education is not synonymous with self-improvement but rather provides the means for women to improve their minds—education is a key tool on the path towards self-improvement. along with suitable education, the members of the retirement also require an outlet for religious devotion. the retirement, in part, acts as preparation for heaven, encouraging ladies to focus their attention on what they will take with them to the next world (astell 2002, 80–81). such a focus goes against the traditional insistence for ladies to focus on beauty, marriage, and worldly possessions. rather, ladies should appreciate that “’tis virtue only which can make [them] truly happy in the world as well as in the next” (80–81). the retirement provides an outlet wherein ladies can magnify their love of god and interpret scripture away from external influences such as specific churches or religious authorities. the more personal and less institutional relationship between god and ladies in the retirement is justified by astell’s assertion in christian religion that, when possible, we should judge matters for ourselves with our god-given liberty and reason (astell 2013, 49–50). further, astell’s focus on descartes’s work gives her a way to teach ladies about the value of their immortal and immaterial souls. this teaching should motivate ladies to primarily aim at god and the self-improvement of their souls above worldly or bodily pursuits since only their souls will accompany them to the next world. astell’s educational and religious self-improvement project is best pursued within a community of friends. astell speaks highly of friendship between women as “a vertue which comprehends all the rest; none being fit for this, who is not adorn’d with every other vertue” (2002, 98). ladies within the retreat will love each other in a way where they come to think “nothing within the bounds of power and duty, too much to do or suffer for its beloved; and [make] no distinction betwixt its friend and 8 astell (2002, 82–83) notes that since most ladies know the “french tongue,” they should read descartes and malebranche rather than novels and romances. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 its self” (99). friendship is concerned with “disinteress’d benevolence” rather than any sort of personal gain (99). an integral part of being a good friend, for astell, involves mutual admonishment and the correction of intellectual faults.9 friends must work to correct each other’s souls for mutual benefit to “remove all the stumbling blocks” obstructing their friends’ way to heaven (astell 2013, 166). despite a focus on how we can correct each other’s souls, an element of mutual self-improvement comes out here. admonishment and the duties of being a friend are reciprocal, involving benefit that flows both ways.10 as christians, the entire community of the retreat exists as members of a unified body, wherein their individual goods are not separate from each other (2013, 153). friendship, then, is “nothing else but charity contracted” (astell 2002, 98). true friends love each other without distinction, admonish, protect one another’s souls, and seek self-improvement on intentionally mutual terms (astell 2013, 169). 9 thank you to an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that this description of friendship, which involves helping another to receive a disposition well-suited to salvation, is closely in line with the christian ideal of loving one’s neighbour. here, the right way to love one’s neighbour involves extending help without expectation of return. 10 timothy yenter raised an objection to my view: that one can be interested in selfimprovement solely for the sake of others. however, the way in which astell sees all selves as socially situated remedies this issue. all selves, as part of a larger whole, benefit from engagement in community. self-improvement taken up by socially situated individuals is not egoistic, problematic, or atomistic. when a socially situated individual engages in self-improvement, this activity benefits others as well. being a socially situated self involves acknowledging the esteem and care we all deserve. selfimprovement is an important part of the entire social apparatus astell subscribes to theologically. without self-improvement, no member of the social web properly esteems themselves. in the retirement, ladies engage in self-improvement to improve their souls and minds—an activity that cultivates an environment wherein the community at large can flourish. even if some ladies engage in self-improvement for primarily external reasons, such as the salvation of their friends, they will nonetheless receive personal benefit, and therefore self-improvement, through this activity. regardless, i argue that it seems that ladies in the retirement intentionally engage in reciprocal activity: the mutuality of self-improvement is built into the retirement in a nonaccidental manner. self-improvement in the retirement is intentional and nonaccidental given the goals that astell has in mind. the motivation to enter, as will be discussed in later sections, pulls strongly at ladies who are interested in improving their souls through education and religious devotion. entering for the sake of this goal makes self-improvement intentional from the start as a primary goal for ladies. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 taken together, these four themes establish that ladies in the retirement should aim to (1) escape bad custom in a space dedicated to (2) proper education and (3) religious devotion, which are taken up within (4) a community of like-minded friends. self-improvement is bound to all of the goals of the retirement: ladies stand to benefit from an arrangement that removes the influence of bad custom and encourages the pursuit of education, religious devotion, and female friendship. ultimately, the religious retirement gives the unified body of ladies the opportunity to focus on a mutual project of self-improvement. these four elements establish the centrality of self-improvement within the retirement in a thematic sense. still, there are also moments in the text where astell herself gestures at self-improvement more concretely. first, we can see how astell describes the retirement as a place to “attend the great business they came into the world about, the service of god and improvement of their own minds” (2002, 73). astell similarly describes the retirement as a type of heaven where “your employment will be as there, to magnify god, to love one another, and to communicate that useful knowledge, which by the due improvement of your time in study and contemplation you will obtain” (76). further, we can look to how astell notes, “one great end of this institution, shall be to expel that cloud of ignorance, which custom has involv’d us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge, that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorn’d and neglected things” (77). here, astell concretely outlines how ladies can improve their minds and avoid the current neglect created by bad custom. this theme of what astell calls “the improvement of our intellectuals” shows the kind of self-improvement she has in mind—one that focuses on a strict educational and religious program (81). when it comes to how self-improvement is propped up by friendship, astell reminds us that “nothing is more likely to improve us in vertue, and advance us to the very highest pitch of goodness than unfeigned friendship, which is the most beneficial, as well as the most pleasant thing in the world” (100). throughout proposal, self-improvement is a shared thread underlying astell’s commitments to education, religious devotion, and friendship, which, when taken together, provide the proper solution to bad custom. 2. the astellian self the object of self-improvement within the retirement is the astellian self. astell’s understanding of the self is highly indebted to cartesian dualism.11 descartes considers the body and mind to be separate; he notes in meditation iv that “i have on the one hand a clear and distinct idea of myself insofar as i am a thinking, non 11 descartes’s view cannot be explored in more detail here. for a more thorough discussion of descartes on the soul, see chamberlain (2020). to see more about astell’s theory of mind, see sowaal (2007). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 extended thing and, on the other hand, i have a distinct idea of the body insofar as it is merely an extended, non-thinking thing” (descartes 1998, 71–72). since these two substances can be grasped as distinct ideas, descartes is certain that his mind is distinct from his body. despite being distinct, the mind and body are merged to such an extent that a union is formed. in meditation vi, descartes cites the existence of sensations like hunger and thirst as a result of the intermingling of mind and body, wherein bodily sensations are perceived in the mind. astell similarly holds that the self is a union of two substances, the soul and the body. astell maintains in christian religion that the two substances are distinct (2013, 181–83). her argument rests on the assertion that the soul is an immaterial and immortal thing that is primarily concerned with thinking, whereas the body is a material and mortal thing that is primarily concerned with extension. since we can have a complete idea of either of these two substances without dependence on the other, they are distinct (183–84). beyond describing the astellian self, it is essential to note the way in which astell considers all individual selves to be a part of a larger whole.12 astell asserts that when it comes to neighbourly love, christians are particularly connected as they are “under a further and higher obligation, the duty they owe to one another being founded on their mutual relation to christ their head” (2013, 151). however, nonchristians still participate in this neighbourly love, albeit for a different reason, since they “partake in the same nature” despite not being related through the christian faith (151). given our duties to our neighbours, astell considers each self “as a part of one great whole, in the welfare of which [their] own happiness is included” (152). acting within this larger whole involves choosing those actions that are the most public, universal, and concerned with the greatest good (152). so then, the self that astell is interested in is socially situated: being an individual and engaging in moral improvement involves relations with others.13 selfhood and self-improvement do not only depend on the individual but also should be considered in relation to the social apparatus that connects persons to one another. when we consider ourselves as part of a large whole, self-improvement is not insulated; mutual transformation can occur through social relations. with a picture of the aims of the retirement and the astellian self in focus, i will move on to describe the overlooked centrality of self-improvement in the religious retirement. throughout my interpretation, it becomes clear how the self stands to benefit from living in a community of like-minded ladies. 12 for the cartesian connection here, see descartes’s correspondence with elisabeth, princess of bohemia (descartes 2015, 1–118). 13 allauren s. forbes (2020) makes such a suggestion and illustrates how astell’s theory of friendship anticipated aspects of relational autonomy. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 3. extant accounts of astellian friendship by way of astell’s discussion of friendship, the importance of selfimprovement comes most into view. astell’s high praise of friendship between christian ladies is not without complications. the description of friendship as “disinteress’d benevolence” and “charity contracted” is most at odds with the element of mutuality between friends (astell 2002, 98–99). extant accounts of astellian friendship tend to emphasize the former element of disinterested benevolence. this section describes three accounts of astellian friendship. although these accounts are vibrant and highlight essential aspects of astellian friendship, they fail to appreciate the centrality of self-improvement, suggesting the need for a different type of analysis to bring out this element.14 i show how this element is overlooked despite the fact we might see implications of it within broad’s, kendrick’s, and forbes’s accounts. nancy kendrick offers a christian-platonist interpretation of astellian friendship. kendrick (2018, 48) argues that astellian friendship involves a rejection of the criteria of reciprocity and partiality. christians extend goodwill to enemies in a nonreciprocal manner, and to the vicious, in a nonpartial way, for these people can bring us closer to god (52). we might prefer the company of a friend who brings us closer to god through admonishment,15 but we can also gain something from enemies who challenge us (60). kendrick insists that astellian friendship is grounded in the love of benevolence, which is entirely disinterested, expecting nothing in return (55). the love of benevolence is directed to the divine good. ladies who form friendships can do so because they all direct their love towards god. through this love, a friendship that expects nothing in return is established. friendship is spiritual, then, because “it is the bond created between persons by means of each person’s participation in the divine good” (58). such a connection does not stamp out the possibility of reciprocity, for friends can assist each other in directing their love towards god (58). given this, kendrick concludes that astell “argues that a wicked person or an enemy is a friend” (59). kendrick’s account cannot be used to highlight the self-improvement project at the core of the astellian religious retreat. kendrick’s insistence that the love of benevolence is completely disinterested de-emphasizes how ladies aim to utilize 14 this article does not aim to reject existing interpretations in a wholesale manner, as both kendrick and broad offer ways to account for various elements of astellian friendship. this section only aims to show how existing accounts have limitations when it comes to describing self-improvement, the focus of this project. by doing so, the importance of a new lens—the epicurean lens—will be highlighted. 15 for more on admonishment in the context of astellian friendship, see jen nguyen (2022). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 friendship as a way towards moral progress. ladies in the retreat expect something in return to help them better their own souls. kendrick’s description of enemies as friends seems to overextend a christian argument about patience to the context of friendship. indeed, christians should be patient and extend goodwill to their enemies and those who challenge them. however, this does not imply that christians are friends with everyone. to suggest this appears to misrepresent the fact that astell describes friendship as “a vertue which comprehends all the rest; none being fit for this, who is not adorn’d with every other vertue” (2002, 98). astell’s point here seems at odds with kendrick’s insistence that “astell is determined to extend her conception of friendship to include enemies and the wicked” (59). further, it is worth noting how my comments can still mesh with the distinction between a love of desire and a love of benevolence in astell’s correspondence with john norris (letters).16 self-improvement can coexist with the essential distinction between the different sorts of love that astell identifies and their proper objects.17 as noted in kendrick’s theory of astellian friendship, there is a strong sentiment in letters shared by john norris and astell that the correct type of love for our neighbours is a benevolent love.18 by benevolent love, astell means the kind of love that one extends without expectation of return. this kind of love is extended on its own terms and not for any future benefits.19 if this is the case, the project of mutual 16 thank you to the audience at the tempo (travelling early modern philosophy organization) 2021 conference and to timothy yenter, in particular, for raising this line of questioning. 17 although it would be worthwhile and fascinating, providing a complete taxonomy of love in astell’s work is outside the scope of this article. here, i will keep with describing the kinds of love most relevant to this article—love of benevolence being the most pressing. to read more about love in astell, see jacqueline broad’s (2015) the philosophy of mary astell: an early modern theory of virtue. as well, astell’s correspondences with john norris may be of particular interest to those wishing to explore this topic in more detail. 18 as an important side note, this discussion of letters aligns with the selection of primary text from astell that kendrick employs to describe astellian friendship as christian-platonist. kendrick pulls from proposal, some reflections upon marriage, the christian religion, and letters. this means that here i am not merely pointing to somewhere outside of kendrick’s range of sources where there is textual evidence about the different sorts of love. rather, i aim to show how part of kendrick’s view does not account for textual elements in letters, a source that kendrick considers in her work. 19 thank you to an anonymous reviewer who aptly pointed out that any benefits that flow from love or friendship exist even when someone aims to love benevolently. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 self-improvement that i describe may conflict with this assertion, for ladies in the retirement should not expect a return when they engage in relationships. without dismissing the importance of this distinction, i will note that there is textual evidence that supports the possibility that astell is thinking about the function of friendship and the appropriate sorts of love, such as benevolent love, in varying ways. consider this passage from letters: there is yet another indecency that would be prevented were our love only benevolent; and that is, that strong antipathy which usually succeeds affection whenever it comes to a rupture, as ’tis odds but it may, considering the great weakness of humane nature, and how seldom a man is in every stage of his life consistent with himself, for a rightly constituted friendship will incline us by all the arts of sweetness and endearment to win upon the offender, who has so much the greater need of our benevolence, by how much he does the less deserve it. our kindness when he no longer returns it is the more excellent and generous, because more free: and though it can’t be called friendship when the bond is broke on one side, yet there may be a most refined and exalted benevolence on the other. (taylor and new 2017, 102) astell begins with the observation that directing a love of desire at the creature20 can subject one to the possibility of disappointment in the case of a “rupture” on one side. here, astell identifies a practical worry about relying on the creature instead of god when it comes to desire—such a strategy can leave one disappointed. if our love is benevolent, this practical worry is remedied since our kindness is free, without the expectation of return. however, astell closes out the passage by importantly noting that “it can’t be called friendship when the bond is broke on one side, yet there may be a most refined and exalted benevolence on the other” (taylor and new 2017, 102). astell clearly states that a relationship that is broken on one side and lacks mutuality cannot be called friendship. in a reciprocal relationship like friendship, intentional mutuality flows both ways. in a nonreciprocal relationship, there may be benevolent love, but that does not necessarily mean there will be friendship. despite her insistence that we should direct a love of benevolence to the creature, astell suggests what matters here is that someone extends benevolent love without expectation of return, even if they end up benefitting in some material way. this point explains why, for astell, there are different motives for extending benevolent love and entering into a friendship. 20 a human object rather than god. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 that friendship is a mutual and reciprocal endeavour.21 this suggestion indicates that the motives for extending benevolent love and friendship may differ, meaning that for ladies in the retirement, something beyond the benevolent love that kendrick highlights is extended when entering into friendships. jacqueline broad suggests that functional similarities can be drawn between aristotelean and astellian friendship. broad (2009, 71) argues that aristotelean character friendship, wherein friendship is “based upon mutual recognition of the other’s moral goodness or excellence of character,” aligns neatly with astellian female friendship. in such a relationship, a friend promotes their friend’s good for her own sake and not for personal or selfish reasons (71). after some time spent sharing their lives and interests, people become character friends (71). astell’s recommendation to love our friends based on who they are at the core, and not based on accidental properties like appearance or wealth, fits here (72). character friendship must occur between virtuous persons only and involves a nonselfish promotion of a friend’s good. broad’s description of astellian friendship has certain merits above a christian-platonist interpretation when it comes to accounting for self-improvement. in particular, broad clearly describes how ladies can work together for the sake of reciprocal moral progress. however, broad’s interpretation has complications when applied to the situation of ladies who are subject to bad custom.22 as broad (2009, 72) notes, “astell also follows the classical tradition by allowing that only virtuous agents can become character friends.” broad is careful to note that ladies need not be perfectly virtuous to become friends in the first place, but some level of virtue is still required. in short, “while a virtuous friend must possess the virtues (in part or to some degree), she does not have to be fully or perfectly virtuous herself in order to become a friend in the first place” (73). although broad acknowledges perfect virtue is not a requirement to progress towards character friendship, it remains an open 21 although i do not have space for a complete treatment of this line of discussion, this passage suggests something more complex about the connection between the different types of love astell identifies and the function of friendship than most accounts imply. more work is needed to demystify astell’s comments in letters. 22 astell describes the current state, where women lack educational opportunities and the ability to improve their souls, as a sort of “custom. women are not afforded the same opportunities as men, and this creates an imbalance—women cannot improve their own state unless they break free from this cycle. see astell’s description of custom in proposal (2002, 55), editor patricia springborg’s related footnote (55n2), and allauren forbes’s (2019) interesting comments on the specific kind of “bad” custom i refer to in their work, “mary astell on bad custom and epistemic injustice.” here, forbes describes bad custom as the kind of thing that exercises epistemic power over women “in a way that limits their intellectual capacities” (777). lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 question if ladies leaving the grips of bad custom will have the minimum requisite level of virtue for this task. astell describes ladies as “nurs’d up in ignorance and vanity” due to bad custom and poor educational practices (2002, 61). from infancy, women lack the opportunities for moral improvement that men are afforded. for this reason, it is not clear that women entering the retirement will be set up in the right way to pursue the classical progression of character friendship, given their environmental influences and social positioning. we may want to describe the conditions of entering friendship in a different way for ladies embroiled in bad custom. in a related sense, it is not clear that the core reason to become friends, for astell, is to appreciate one another’s excellence. the central role of correcting intellectual faults has been understated here. so, until ladies spend enough time together and away from bad custom, can they be called character friends? broad’s account seems unable to adequately capture astell’s view that friendship involves a project of mutual self-improvement. a brand of friendship in which friends are meant to pursue each other’s good with no selfish intent seems not as well-suited to address the fact that the retirement contains a self-improvement project. in sum, these first two views emphasize elements of astellian friendship that discount the significance of self-improvement in astell’s work. the christian-platonist interpretation of astellian friendship falls short since kendrick insists that astellian friendship is entirely disinterested. an interpretation that describes friends as expecting nothing in return is in fundamental tension with the sort of mutuality central to astellian friendship. broad’s account gets closer to describing mutual selfimprovement but is complicated by the influence of bad custom. further, it seems that an aristotelian brand of astellian friendship focuses on virtue above moral progress. in astell’s work, progress through self-improvement plays a more prominent role than broad’s account suggests. given the shortcomings of the two previous accounts in terms of providing an interpretation of astellian friendship that sets up the right architecture to describe self-improvement, i will now examine a promising stepping stone, allauren forbes’s (2020) work, that describes the kind of relational autonomy that emerges from astellian friendship. forbes’s account is a fitting springboard here since it “incorporates aspects of both broad and kendrick’s views” to make sense of the way that astell can anticipate a concept that “was not formally theorized until hundreds of years later” (2020, 487). forbes takes a core part of astellian friendship to be its ability to correct for bad custom, which improperly shapes women. given this corrective element, “it is clear that friendship and improvement have some kind of reciprocal causal relationship” on this account (488). friendship allows one to achieve virtue and guide their friends towards this as well. because of this characterization, forbes describes friendship as instrumentally valuable and “productive of virtue” (489). forbes argues that astell advises that we extend common charity to all, but not feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 in a way that makes this friendship. she classifies astellian friendship as an intense and deep relation that can only be extended to a select few (489). forbes identifies tension in broad and kendrick’s accounts that make it challenging to describe astellian friendship fully. although forbes finds the functional similarities between aristotelian character friendship and astellian friendship helpful and compelling, this structure does not explain how astell describes friendship as a “crowning virtue” (492). kendrick’s account is problematic because it rejects the strong sense of character friendship present and seems to suggest that, for astell, just about anyone can be proper friends (492). given this tension, forbes interprets astellian friendship as involving “virtue-facilitating friendship” that is morally transformative and “postvirtue friendship,” a true friendship that exists after transformation (492). in this description of friendship as either general or true, a “pre-theoretical” version of relational autonomy emerges. astell’s theory of friendship identifies how social relations shape identity in a way that aligns with recent literature on autonomy (494). it is here that we start to see hints of how we might move towards self-improvement most clearly, with forbes noting that astell casts knowledge as a communal good to which all have a right; we are all parts of the same whole and by improving ourselves we make it possible to fulfill our obligation to serve others by helping them improve, too—much as one does in the mutual moral transformation of general friendship. (2020, 495) as parts of the same whole, ladies in the retreat work to improve one another in a mutual sense. in doing so, ladies become autonomous by way of their social relationships. building one another up through friendship, and becoming autonomous along the way, allows women to adjust for bad custom and “social relations that block autonomy at every turn” (500). forbes argues that general friendship allows ladies in the retreat to build up aspects of relational autonomy such as self-determination and self-governance. self-determination requires conditions in which ladies are “able to choose who to be, including gaining the opportunity to put those choices into practice” (496). in contrast, self-governance involves intellectual skills, like the ability to reason and identify one’s choices as one’s own (496). general friends in astell’s retirement “work together to develop their rational capacities” and build one another up (496). true friends continue to build up relational autonomy through selfauthorization. this element allows ladies to think they are self-governing and selfdetermining. forbes points out how this comes out in astell’s picture of true friendship, which contains “self-respect, self-trust, and self-esteem” (497). a true astellian friend respects, trusts, and esteems others in a way that promotes relational autonomy (497). lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 forbes’s account helps to describe the self-improvement in astellian friendship. importantly, forbes identifies how a unified body of ladies might use friendship as a way to morally progress and address bad custom. here, selfimprovement is not explicitly described but fits in neatly. this interpretation, and the broader conversation on relational autonomy, gets us the closest to describing selfimprovement but needs further elaboration. it seems that forbes’s account gets us on the right track in describing how ladies come to properly value one another through friendship. however, forbes is focused on how mutual respect, trust, and esteem might allow ladies to nurture relational autonomy and properly value one another. an explicit picture of how mutual self-improvement allows the unified body of ladies to pursue a general goal is missing. to explicitly point out self-improvement, forbes’s account would need to describe how self-improvement is propped up and supported by the generation of relational autonomy. we might think of ways to sketch out this connection, but they are absent in forbes’s account. in short, despite how we can see forbes’s work implying the centrality of self-improvement, the exact architecture needed to bring this element to the fore is absent. given that this link is missing, i adopt a new interpretive lens in the following sections to highlight selfimprovement. this lens will not be aristotelian, christian-platonist, or focused on relational autonomy. rather, i look at conceptual resonances between astellian and epicurean friendship to further my interpretation. examining these conceptual resonances allows me to bring an understudied element to the fore. 4. conceptual resonances: the religious retirement and epicurean garden i have argued that the previous accounts do not explicitly describe the selfimprovement project at the core of astellian friendship. indeed, self-improvement is obscured under an aristotelian or christian-platonist interpretation of astellian friendship. forbes’s account is useful for the aim of this article but still lacks the explicit architecture needed to motivate the centrality of self-improvement. an epicurean analysis of astellian friendship brings self-improvement into focus and works to accomplish the primary goal of this article—to make self-improvement central. in this section, i begin by briefly describing a historical epicurean community, the garden. this discussion will explain the main commitments of epicurean philosophy and illustrate how the epicurean community functioned as a web of mutual trust. following this, i will forward three valuable conceptual resonances between the religious retirement and the epicurean garden. before highlighting these themes, it is worth emphasizing that this article does not set out to prove that astell was an epicurean or that all elements of astell’s work are aligned with epicurean feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 philosophy.23 instead, this article shows how certain similarities between the astellian retirement and the epicurean garden help bring to the fore the conception of selfimprovement that i have argued is central to astell’s account of friendship.24 4.1. the epicurean garden the epicurean garden was a private and secluded property situated on the outskirts of athens where epicurus and his followers lived and studied philosophy (morrison, n.d.). in this community, epicurean friends pursued the common goal of living pleasantly with inner tranquility (ataraxia), a state with no pain or mental disturbance (epicurus 1994, 30–31 [letter to menoeceus, 131]). living away from 23 there is evidence that astell read and was familiar with epicurus. astell mentions epicureanism on multiple occasions in proposal and christian religion. in proposal, astell remarkably asserts that there is “the highest epicurism exalting our pleasures by refining them; keeping our appetities in that due regularity which not only grace, but even nature and reason require” (2002, 86). here, it is clear that astell understands that we should refine our pleasures for religious reasons and to do what is natural. this assertion appears to confirm that astell is familiar with the epicurean classification of desire. in christian religion, astell stops herself, noting, “i only fear there is too much epicurism in it,” after she states that we should aim to “keep the body in good tune, to avoid pain, and to always be easy” (2013, 233–34). once again, astell seems familiar with the main tenants of epicurean philosophy. astell was also an avid reader of descartes’s works, which contain mentions of epicurean philosophy. although it is not clear which exact figures astell may have engaged with, through primary texts or through her reading of figures like descartes, her passing comments show a general familiarity with epicureanism. for more about astell’s personal library, see magdalene college’s discovery of forty-seven books and pamphlets owned by astell: “library discovery reveals a science student way ahead of her time,” magdalene college website, march 8, 2021, https://www.magd.cam.ac.uk/news/li brary-discovery-reveals-science-student-way-ahead-her-time. 24 epicurus and astell are not the only thinkers who have imagined or created an ideal community centered around self-improvement and comradery, as pointed out by an anonymous reviewer. i have chosen to compare epicurean and astellian pictures of the community, and friendship more specifically, despite other available avenues of comparison. as will be shown in the following sections, the specific similarities between the two systems of friendship help highlight self-improvement in astell’s picture of friendship. of course, this is not the only source of interpretation when it comes to unravelling astell’s thoughts, but it is a source that presents an interesting lens for us to look through when it comes to the goals of this article. other avenues may present fruitful opportunities for picking out other elements of astell’s work. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 others for tranquility and security is cited in the epicurean model of social progress as the reason people originally entered communities. before this time, individuals were subject to external threats such as attacks from nonhuman animals or harm from extreme weather (christensen 2020, 307). joining a community diminishes these threats and establishes security. however, living in a community opens one to other threats, such as harm at the hands of fellow citizens and stress from politics, traditional education, and the threat of punishment under the law (307–8). living in a traditional community is not a perfect solution, as it generates fear and anxiety, which impacts tranquility. epicurus encouraged his followers to instead “free themselves from the prison of general education and politics” (epicurus 1994, 39 [the vatican collection of epicurean sayings (sv) 58]) and live in a community of likeminded persons. this sort of arrangement protects individuals from external threats and the threats of living within a traditional society. epicurean communities rely on two factors for stability. first, an epicurean community enjoys security because all members pursue the common goal of living pleasantly. the pursuit of this common goal results in a stable community because, as epicurus notes, “it is impossible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honourably, and justly and impossible to live prudently, honourably, and justly without living pleasantly” (1994, 32 [the principal doctrines (kd) v]). second, the pursuit of the common goal of tranquility grounds the epicurean community in a web of mutual trust. a life without friends is full of traps, so one should acquire friends for security and tranquility. but security does not only go one way—an epicurean wants friends, as seneca describes, not just so that he might have someone to attend to him when sick, and to help him when he is thrown into prison or is impoverished, but so that he might have someone whom he might himself attend to when that person is sick and whom he might free from imprisonment by his enemies. (epicurus 1994, 81 [ig 54]) in this way, friendship is a mutual benefit rather than a pursuit concerned merely with self-improvement. a short example will show how this guarantee contains mutuality. in an epicurean community, if chantalle wrongs her friend rachel, this will undoubtedly hurt their relationship. this harm goes further, though, since now chantalle’s friends megan, jess, and matt will be suspicious of her. because a community is connected in a web of mutual trust, any wrongdoing in a single relationship leaks into the community. to maintain tranquility and the security that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 her friends will help her, chantalle must be a good friend to all. otherwise, she risks jeopardizing all of her relationships in the community.25 epicurean friendship is rooted in mutual benefit rather than egoistic pursuits. this becomes clearer once one examines the epicurean writings on utility in friendship. one might worry that epicurean friendship is too focused on utility, about what one can get from their friend rather than friendship itself. however, that worry dissolves when we consider that epicureans assert that they “do not need utility from our friends so much as we need confidence concerning that utility” (epicurus 1994, 38 [sv 34]; emphasis added). confidence about utility generates tranquility and a sense of security. as noted throughout the article, this guarantee is mutual and not a matter of mere self-improvement: friendship is neither solely based on utility nor void of utility. 4.2. reasons to enter happy retreat! which will be the introducing you into such a paradise as your mother eve forfeited, where you shall feast on pleasures, that do not like those of the world, disappoint your expectations, pall your appetities, and by the disgust they give you, put you on the fruitless search after new delights, which when obtain’d are as empty as the former; but such as will make you truly happy now, and prepare you to be perfectly so hereafter. here are no serpents to deceive you, whilst you entertain your selves in these delicious gardens. (astell 2002, 74) this first shared feature is the epicurean and astellian emphasis on withdrawing from the “noise” of society, which is aligned in the respective primary texts. epicurus maintains that “the purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many” (1994, 33 [kd xiv]), and astell describes the “hurry and noise of the world which does generally so busy and pre-ingage us” (2002, 68) as a reason to enter the religious retirement. for astell and epicurus, leaving traditional society calls for one to “break the enchanted circle that custom has plac’d us in” (astell 2002, 55) and “free themselves from the prison of general education and politics” (epicurus 1994, 39 [sv 58]). the reason to enter either the retirement or the garden exists on two levels. in one sense, withdrawing allows one to break free from bad custom, poor education, and the stressors of traditional society.26 in a second 25 this example is adapted from eric brown’s (2009) “politics and society.” 26 it is worth noting the way in which both communities exist apart from traditional society in a qualified manner. both communities had to interact with a nearby state for the sake of property laws, food, and military protection. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 way, entering the retirement or garden gives one a positive benefit, allowing for greater security, tranquility, and space for proper self-improvement. at both levels, attendees stand to benefit from an arrangement that allocates the resources and space to better the soul. the religious retirement and the epicurean garden provided a place for women to engage in educational pursuits, despite a lack of other such outlets at the respective times. membership in the epicurean garden was more accepting than greek society, which only gave citizenship to free male citizens. the garden allowed enslaved people, women,27 and non-greeks to attend since individuals in these groups could pursue the epicurean goal—tranquility (christensen 2020, 315). similarly, astell’s religious retreat provided ladies an option other than marriage or a strictly religious convent. both institutions offered ladies a way to break free from custom rather than play out the limited roles expected of them.28 4.3. the project inside in other activities, the rewards come only when people have become, with great difficulty, complete [masters of the activity]; but in philosophy the pleasure accompanies the knowledge. for the enjoyment does not come after the learning but the learning and the enjoyment are simultaneous. (epicurus 1994, 37 [sv 27]) the projects inside the retirement and the garden also focused on analogous goals. in both places, a thorough and regular philosophical education was central to the lives of the attendees. epicurus describes philosophy as an activity that is both enjoyable in its result and throughout the process of learning (1994, 37 [sv 27]). astell similarly argues that studying philosophy, especially the works of french philosophers 27 in the introduction of the epicurus reader: selected writing and testimonia, d. s. hutchinson notes that because the epicurean garden allowed women to attend, rumours were spread that the garden only allowed membership to women to host orgies and parties (epicurus 1994, xi–xii). this rumour was spread due to the existence of female epicureans and the caricature of epicureans as only concerned with bodily pleasures. 28 astell and epicurus have been accused of a sort of political quietism. the astellian retreat and epicurean garden pose a puzzle, for each community seems to withdraw from traditional politics and focus on the personal instead. although exploring this topic is outside the scope of this article, this is yet another place where the projects appear aligned. the retirement and garden present as societies that largely disengage with conventional politics. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 at the time, is better suited for ladies than are novels and romances (2002, 81–82). ladies and epicureans are expected to spend the bulk of their time engaged in reflection and contemplation. attendees of both institutions engage in selfimprovement for the betterment of their souls and their intellect. this part of the retreat contains an element of self-improvement; individuals are motivated in their educational pursuits by the possibility of intellectual improvement and tranquility.29 the educational pursuit taken up by epicureans and ladies is paired with a simple life and an emphasis on necessary physical desires. a hedonistic misreading of epicurean philosophy as the pursuit of mere pleasure would put astell and epicurus at odds on this topic. however, examining the primary epicurean texts clarifies that the pursuit of physical and mental pleasure need not involve sin and temptation. for epicureans, it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men’s souls. (1994, 31 [letter to menoeceus, 132]) on the epicurean view, pleasure is not simple sensory hedonism. instead, pleasure is taken to consist of tranquility and a lack of pain rather than the enjoyment of specific positive pleasures. astell paints a surprisingly similar picture, arguing that although the gospel condemns a life of sensual pleasure, it does not follow that the life of a christian is not a life of pleasure in reality and in a true sense. so far is christianity from depriving us of anything desirable, that it affords us the only solid, satisfying, and durable pleasures. for our creator is too good to give us appetites and desires merely to torture us, and having planted in our nature a desire of pleasure, he designs without doubt to satisfy it. but then having given us reason and liberty, and set before us great variety of pleasures, he expects we should choose the best; and by forbearing the other, exercise our virtue and so prepare ourselves in this short time of trial, for pleasures infinite and eternal. (astell 2013, 231) 29 in the case of astellian ladies, intellectual pursuits are also sought after for a further reason, to ascertain the nature of god. this focus on god, however, does not negate the existence of a personal project of self-improvement. lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 astell’s choice of words here is significant; the christian life is a life of pleasure in reality and in a true sense. astell speaks similarly in other passages, describing the christian life as one “abound with self-satisfaction,” the only way to “enjoy that tranquility of the mind,” and consisting of “religion [as our] pleasure” (2013, 198–99). astell’s religious devotion and the epicurean pursuit of pleasure are not in fundamental tension. instead, both acknowledge that pleasure is brought about by intellectual and psychological betterment for tranquility, not just mere physical pleasure.30 however, this is not to say that astell and epicurus reject bodily pleasures in a wholesale way. astell notes that the christian religion only renounces worldly pleasures “as much as the necessities of life permit” (2013, 230). this assertion aligns with the epicurean distinction between the different kinds of desires. epicurus encourages his followers to pursue those desires that are both natural and necessary—such as drinking when thirsty or eating when hungry (1994, 34–35 [kd xxvi and xxix–xxx]). epicureans “spit upon the pleasures of extravagance” (1994, 82 [ig 59]), which are natural and unnecessary desires, such as fancy food and excessive drink, or those empty desires like political power and wealth, which do not truly bring about pleasure and tranquility. empty desires are not natural, for they bring about no pain when left unfilled (epicurus 1994, 34–35 [kd xxvi and xxx]). further, empty desires tend to bring about trouble and anxiety that exceed the initial pleasure (epicurus 1994, 32 [kd viii]). so, when it comes to physical desire for both astell and epicurus, one should focus on fulfilling only those natural and necessary desires that are easily fulfilled. doing so will allow us to achieve “tranquility of mind, which is the heaven of this world” (astell 2013, 243). 4.4. friendship and mutual benefit friendship dances around the world announcing to all of us that we must wake up to blessedness. (epicurus 1994, 38 [sv 52]) 30 one might worry that christianity and epicureanism are too theologically opposed. first, i will note that despite accusations, epicureans were not atheists. further, epicurus and astell both argue for the existence of god(s) by pointing to the clear knowledge we have of such entities. despite this description of god’s existence as clear and obvious, there are apparent theological differences between epicurus and astell. these differences seem unsurprising given the historical and religious contexts of the texts. for this reason, i can accept that this part of the comparison is less aligned. the difference does not render this article unable to describe the selfimprovement project that exists at the cores of both communities and appears inconsequential for that reason. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 22 the epicurean and astellian pursuit of a simple and educational life is best fulfilled in a community of like-minded friends. the epicurean web of mutual trust sheds light on how members of the astellian retreat can engage in self-improvement in a way that does not conflict with astell’s belief that friendship is “a love that thinks nothing within the bounds of power and duty, too much to do or suffer for its beloved” (2002, 99). due to a commitment to upholding mutual benefit and security, epicureans “rejoice at [their] friends’ joys just as much as [their] own” (epicurus 1994, 63–64 [fin. i.67]). further, an epicurean “feels no more pain when he is tortured than when his friend is tortured, and will die on his behalf” (epicurus 1994, 39 [sv 56–57]). both astellian and epicurean friendships involve a willingness to sacrifice everything for a friend since “benefitting [others] is pleasanter than receiving benefits” (1994, 104 [ig 157]). the goods acquired through friendship, such as security, selfimprovement, and love, flow reciprocally. no one is expected to engage in this relationship for mere self-improvement or with no hope of mutual benefit, “for the former makes gratitude a matter for commercial transaction, while the latter kills off good hope for the future” (epicurus 1994, 38 [sv 39]). epicurean and astellian friendship contain a balance of care for oneself and others through reciprocal benefit. additionally, epicurus and astell both acknowledge how friends can admonish each other and correct intellectual faults. astell takes friendship “to consist in advising, admonishing, and reproving as there is occasion, and in watching over each other’s souls for their mutual good” (2013, 169). philodemus, an epicurean, notes a similar function of friendship in on frank criticism, where he holds that we should avoid false modesty “for he will not consider a slanderer one who desires that this friend obtain correction, when he is not such [i.e., a slanderer], but rather one who is a friend to his friend” (philodemus 1998, 61 [fr. 50]). part of being an epicurean friend involves listening to what a friend says and correcting them (philodemus 1998, 45 [fr. 28]). the need for admonishment amongst ladies and epicureans maps onto the fact that both communities are set on improving the intellect and souls of attendees. as well, correcting one’s friends helps them cast out false beliefs that may cause fear and anxiety (christensen 2020, 315). astellian and epicurean friendship involve reciprocal self-improvement, which comes about through philosophical dialogue and reflection. conclusion in this article, i have argued that a central element of astellian friendship is a mutually beneficial self-improvement project. my analysis clarifies an essential part of astellian friendship that is not fully captured by extant accounts. while examining the role of education and admonishment through friendship, it becomes clear how self-improvement is not at odds with astell’s description of friendship as charity contracted and benevolent in nature. self-improvement within a community of likeminded persons is astell’s solution to the bad custom and poor educational practices lennie – self-improvement in astellian friendship published by scholarship@western, 2023 23 that she identifies as the primary factors that deteriorate women’s souls. examining astellian friendship reveals how self-improvement shows up between ladies in the retirement. by adopting a novel lens not taken up by other accounts, this article has suggested another layer of influence that can help unravel astell’s complex and vibrant picture of female friendship—an influence that has been largely overlooked. although epicureanism is undoubtedly not the only source that is in harmony with astellian friendship, this lens helps show how astellian friendship contains a central element of mutual self-improvement. references astell, mary. 2002. a serious proposal to the ladies. parts 1 and 2. edited by patricia springborg. peterborough, on: broadview. first published 1694 and 1697. ———. 2013. christian religion, as professed by a daughter of the church of england. edited by jacqueline broad. toronto: centre for reformation and renaissance studies. first published 1705. broad, jacqueline. 2009. “mary astell on virtuous friendship.” in “friendship in early modern philosophy and science,” edited by vanessa smith and richard yeo, special issue, parergon 26 (2): 65–86. ———. 2015. the philosophy of mary astell: an early modern theory of virtue. oxford: oxford university press. brown, eric. 2009. “politics and society.” in the cambridge companion to epicureanism, edited by james warren, 179–96. cambridge: cambridge university press. chamberlain, colin. 2020. “what am i? descartes’s various ways of considering the self.” journal of modern philosophy 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.32881/jomp.30. christensen, anna. 2020. “epicureans on friendship, politics and community.” in the routledge handbook of hellenistic philosophy, edited by kelly arenson, 307– 17. new york: routledge. descartes, rené. 1998. meditations and other metaphysical texts. translated by desmond m. clarke. new york: penguin books. ———. 2015. the passions of the soul and other late philosophical writings. translated by michael moriarty. oxford: oxford university press. detlefsen, karen. 2016. “custom, freedom, and equality: mary astell on marriage and women's education” in feminist interpretations of mary astell, edited by alice sowaal and penny weiss, 74–92. university park: pennsylvania state university press. epicurus. 1994. the epicurus reader: selected writings and testimonia. translated by brad inwood and l. p. gerson. indianapolis: hackett. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 4, article 4 published by scholarship@western, 2023 24 forbes, allauren samantha. 2019. “mary astell on bad custom and epistemic injustice.” hypatia 34, no. 4 (fall): 777–801. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12 495. ———. 2020. “astell, friendship, and relational autonomy.” european journal of philosophy 29, no. 2 (june): 487–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12578. kendrick, nancy. 2018. “mary astell’s theory of spiritual friendship.” british journal for the history of philosophy 26 (1): 46–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788 .2017.1347869. morrison, william. n.d. “the garden of epicurus.” internet encyclopedia of philosophy. accessed september 5, 2023. https://iep.utm.edu/garden/. nguyen, jen. 2022. “a true friend stabs you in the front: astell’s admonisher conception of a friend.” journal of modern philosophy 4 (16). https://doi.org /10.32881/jomp.218. philodemus. 1998. on frank criticism. edited and translated by david konstan, diskin clay, clarence e. glad, johan c. thom, and james ware. atlanta: scholars press. sowaal, alice. 2007. “mary astell’s serious proposal: mind, method, and custom.” philosophy compass 2, no. 2 (march) 227–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17479991.2007.00071.x. taylor, e. derek, and melvyn new, eds. 2017. mary astell and john norris: letters concerning the love of god. london: routledge. tyra lennie is a doctoral candidate at mcmaster university in hamilton, ontario, where her work is funded by a sshrc (social sciences and humanities research council) doctoral fellowship. her research into early modern women philosophers focuses on mary astell’s theory of friendship, margaret cavendish’s plays, and lucrezia marinella’s work on beauty. 15569 lennie title page 15569 lennie final format artificial knowing otherwise feminist philosophy quarterly volume 8 | issue 3/4 article 12 recommended citation keyes, os, and kathleen a. creel. 2022. “artificial knowing otherwise.” feminist philosophy quarterly 8 (3/4). article 12. 2022 artificial knowing otherwise os keyes university of washington okeyes@uw.edu kathleen a. creel northeastern university k.creel@northeastern.edu keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 1 artificial knowing otherwise os keyes and kathleen a. creel1 abstract while feminist critiques of ai are increasingly common in the scholarly literature, they are by no means new. alison adam’s artificial knowing (1998) brought a feminist social and epistemological stance to the analysis of ai, critiquing the symbolic ai systems of her day and proposing constructive alternatives. in this paper, we seek to revisit and renew adam’s arguments and methodology, exploring their resonances with current feminist concerns and their relevance to contemporary machine learning. like adam, we ask how new ai methods could be adapted for feminist purposes and what role new technologies might play in addressing concerns raised by feminist epistemologists and theorists about algorithmic systems. in particular, we highlight distributed and federated learning as providing partial solutions to the power-oriented concerns that have stymied efforts to make machine learning systems more representative and pluralist. keywords: feminist epistemology, machine learning, sociotechnical systems, distributed learning, federated learning, alison adam, artificial intelligence 1. introduction in the early 1980s, renewed optimism about artificial intelligence fueled efforts to expand the reasoning abilities of artificial systems beyond logic to include common sense. at the core of one such ai system, named cyc, was a vast knowledge base built fact by fact by human “ontologists” or knowledge engineers. the engineers encoded propositions ranging from the relationship between meters and kilometers to “common knowledge” such as “you are not likely to get a speeding ticket in mid or late-twentieth century america if you’re driving less than 5 m.p.h. over the speed limit” (adam 1998, 88; citing lenat and guha 1990, 284). the latter claim was internally tagged as “knowledge” rather than “belief,” a designation reflecting the designers’ contention that it was uncontroversial (adam 1998, 88). as feminist philosopher alison adam argued at the time, this and many other similarly tagged facts only appear to be uncontroversial from the perspective of the 1 equal contributors. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 2 builders. cyc’s knowledge base purported to represent a universal perspective, a “view from nowhere” (nagel 1989), while in fact it presented the perspectives of the predominantly white, middle class, male mathematicians who built it (adam 1998; code 2012). it hid the fact of its situatedness—the fact that its knowledge base represented, as its builders acknowledged, “theworldasthebuildersofcycbelieveittobe” (adam 1998, 88). if gender, age, race, and type of car all affect how likely one is to receive a speeding ticket, mph over the limit is not enough to determine the likelihood of ticketing (adam 1998, 89). context affects the perceived truth of the claim. this claim may have been common knowledge, but it was not uncontroversial. claims of universality were common in “symbolic ai,” the research program that sought to understand intelligence and human reason by building artificial systems to manipulate symbols using logic or procedural rules. in part due to critiques of symbolic ai’s ontological model, most prominently by hubert dreyfus (1992), and the apparent validation of those critiques when the symbolic program stalled, the broader landscape of artificial intelligence has changed since the 1990s. although the cyc project itself remains active (knight 2016), most contemporary ai does not rely on vast knowledge bases of propositional claims. instead, machine learning distills statistical patterns from existing data without explicit guidance from human knowledge engineers. yet despite regular claims that “this time, it is different” (wajcman 2017), to feminist scholars the political tendencies of conventional machine learning look familiar. although data are no longer manually typed into knowledge bases by engineers, biases that favor socially dominant groups still creep into both data and models, as has been demonstrated by noble (2018), benjamin (2019), and others. contemporary machine learning still makes claims to objectivity: it still is described as neutral, still inhabits the “view from nowhere” while in fact representing views of socially dominant groups. although the particular “political orders” resulting from the incorporation of machine learning systems into political life are new (amoore 2022), feminist concerns with the epistemology of machine learning are not. critiquing and redesigning algorithmic systems to better represent a plurality of views remains the work of feminist critics of artificial intelligence. feminist scholars have examined the biased outcomes of algorithmic systems (noble 2018; hutson et al. 2018), highlighted the narrow range of knowers and ways of knowing involved in models (keyes 2018; stark 2018; sadowski 2019), and drawn attention to the broader political economy in which widely used models are designed and deployed (gray and suri 2019; bucher 2018). but feminist critiques of ai often focus on the disassembly of existing systems rather than the assembly of new ones. even scholarship that highlights the need for creation, such as “data feminism” and the “feminist data keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 3 manifest-no,” which involves a “commitment to new data futures” (cifor et al. 2019), rarely focuses on imagining or building feminist algorithmic systems.2 feminist scholarship that focuses on responding to prominent and consequential examples of algorithmic systems causing harm is essential.3 but to focus exclusively on existing systems causing harm would be to miss the opportunity to imagine what machine learning might be. we believe it is essential to engage in creative experimentation with alternatives to the models we critique, lest our map of critique tacitly become our sense of the territory. such positive engagements would ideally take the form of what phillip e. agre referred to as a “critical technical practice,” a way of working for change that involves “a split identity—one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique” (agre 2014, 155). such a practice would allow us to both reshape the epistemic frames in which algorithmic systems are developed, and practically test and implement feminist theories of epistemic justice and moral relation. one feminist scholar of ai who has done just that is alison adam. her work features not only adroit disassembly of the systems she was engaging with but also prototyping and exploration of “feminist ai projects.” since her work twenty years ago, the technologies and ontological approaches underlying ai have shifted dramatically. but we believe that both her concerns and her recuperative impulse— her desire to not only critique but engage in “the more difficult task of thinking through the ways in which ai research could be informed by feminist theory” (adam 1998, 156)—remain not only relevant but also under-explored subsequent to her work. in this paper, we revisit adam’s arguments and projects, exploring how they resonate with current feminist concerns about artificial intelligence methods. like adam, we also ask how new ai methods could be adapted for feminist purposes and what role newer technologies might play in ameliorating or addressing some of the concerns raised by feminist epistemologists and theorists about algorithmic systems. focusing in particular on distributed and federated machine learning, we argue that they provide a partial solution to some of the power-oriented concerns that have stymied efforts to increase the representationality and plurality of machine learning systems’ underlying “knowers.” 2 exceptions include hancox-li and kumar’s (2021) proposal for the use of feminist epistemology in algorithmic development and lilly irani’s “turkopticon” intervention (irani and silberman 2013). 3 in other work, we share the focus on critique of existing systems (keyes 2020; rincón, keyes, and cath 2022) feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 4 adam hoped that her proposals might chart “a course between the scylla of a ‘nothing changes’ pessimism and the charybdis of a gushingly unrealistic ‘fabulous feminist future’ of artificial intelligence (adam 1998, 156). in this paper, we aim to chart a similar course in proposing to repurpose current machine learning techniques to support an understanding of situated multiplicity. 2. whose knowledge? 2.1. knowledge in cyc and soar a central question in alison adam’s investigation of ai systems—one that has long motivated feminist epistemologists more generally—is that of whose knowledge is represented in systems’ models of the world. for adam, as for many other feminist philosophers, this question is entangled with the question of what forms of knowledge are taken seriously. but aspects of the “who” can be disentangled from the “what”: the knowers taken seriously are clear even when the forms of knowledge require more analysis. adam’s inquiry into the “who” of ai’s knowledge focuses on two large symbolic ai projects, cyc and soar. douglas lenat founded cyc in 1984 on the premise that building an enormous knowledge base of commonsense facts was the only way to train an intelligent machine. he hoped that cyc’s performance would surpass thencommon “expert systems,” symbolic ai systems combining a “knowledge base” of facts about medicine or law with rules-based inference engines that answered questions or added to the knowledge base. previous expert systems built deep knowledge in their domains of focus. however, due to the narrowness of their expertise, they were prone to breaking unpredictably at the margins of their knowledge. for example, a medical expert system trained to recommend dosages of pain medication might lack “commonsense” knowledge about what might differentiate the injuries caused by falling off a roof from those resulting from a car crash. in order to overcome the “brittleness” of traditional expert systems, cyc’s founders hoped to build a margin-less system (adam 1998, 81). due to the scope of its ambition, cyc was first deemed ready to put into commercial use in 2016 (knight 2016). soar, founded by allen newell, operates on the problem-solving model of its original acronym: state, operator, and result (adam 1998, 91). soar searches its problem states for a solution that matches its goal. its strategies are based on careful study of human problem solvers. however, its only test subjects were young male undergraduate students at the carnegie institute of technology (adam 1998, 93). in her investigations into both systems, adam finds models of the ideal knower implicit in the design of the system. in the case of cyc, the premise of the system is to articulate a “consensus reality, or the millions of things that we assume that everyone else knows” (adam 1998, 83). as adam emphasizes, this idea of a singular keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 5 “consensus” is impossible in practice; developers base their evaluation of what constitutes part of that reality on their own understandings of “the human” and of what propositions count as knowledge. it is those developers who are taken to have “an epistemologically authoritative ‘non-weird’ perspective on true knowledge of the world” (adam 1998, 88), resulting in a situation where it is “middle-class, male, professional knowledge [that] informs theworldasthebuildersofcycbelieveittobe” (adam 1998, 90).4 soar, despite positioning itself as a response and alternative to cyc, produces similar problems. although it claims to be built on the basis of an empirically tested model of problem-solving and cognition, adam notes that the developers treated the subjects of that empirical testing as irrelevant to the generalizability of their theory, raising the question of whose forms of thinking and problem-solving are seen as universal. while the resulting knowledge base does go further than simply extrapolating from the beliefs of the developers alone, the result is still a model of knowledge “based on the behaviour of a few technically educated, young, male, probably middle-class, probably white, college students working on a set of rather unnatural tasks in a us university in the late 1960s and early 1970s” (adam 1998, 94).5 the question of knowledge ascription returns in adam’s proposals for “feminist ai projects.” its indirect presence can be found in her first example: a legal expert system designed to advise people on the law concerning an injury they have suffered. at that time, the most common model for expert legal systems was to evaluate whether a case would succeed. taking into account both the structural misogyny of the legal system and the way this undercuts the self-trust and confidence of women encountering it, adam’s system instead provides “examples of past cases which bear some resemblance to the present case [and so] leaves the question of whether or not to proceed open to the users, rather than making a decision for them” (adam 1998, 160). while adam’s concern here is primarily trust and agency, it is notable that her method of pursuing it implicitly brings the (woman) user into frame as a knower: as someone whose knowledge and judgment contributes to the evaluation of her case’s success. more directly linked to representation is adam’s second example, that of a natural language processing system explicitly modeled on what she sees as women’s forms of speech and “conversational repair.”6 as this suggests, her proposal is not 4 sherron (2000) also critiques cyc’s project of “constructing common sense” from a feminist perspective. 5 the fact that all but one of the participants was college-educated is just one illustration of the unrepresentative nature of the sample. 6 adam is cognizant that there is no universal gendered form of speech and that “the model described here is a white, middle-class, anglo-american english one, which feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 6 only explicitly cognizant of the cultural constraints it represents, but it is designed to incorporate knowledge and perspectives that fall outside conventional linguistic understandings of conversation that were predominantly premised on the practices of (white) men. in both cases, as different as they are, we find adam seeking to develop systems that explicitly attend to the breadth of the knowledge they incorporate and the breadth of the claims they can make as a result. 2.2. “whose knowledge?” in the present the models of knowledge adam analyses—monolithic ontologies of everything designed to underpin expert systems—may appear outmoded today, originating as they did in a different epistemology than today’s flexible and adaptive machine learning systems.7 but the issues she raises regarding whose knowledge underpins ai systems are, if anything, more pressing given the increasing prevalence of ai itself. researchers continue to highlight the narrow range of perspectives that the datasets underlying machine learning systems represent (noble 2018; keyes 2018). machine learning’s reliance on free, large-scale resources (some prominent examples include flickr content for facial and object recognition, wikipedia for text analysis and image classification, and commoncrawl for web pages) means that systems often represent only the knowledge and knowers recognized by existing infrastructures, each with their own partial cultural frame (ford and wajcman 2017). further, even when trained with putatively “neutral” data, the problems ai is designed to address and the framings of those problems are deeply entangled with existing hierarchies of power (mager 2014; keyes 2020; browne 2015; stevens and keyes 2021; introna and nissenbaum 2000). the result is ongoing disconnects between systems’ representation of the world as their developers “believeittobe” and representations of the world as others believe it to be. a concerned reader may be tempted to resolve such examples by ensuring greater representation of marginalized knowledge and knowers. many machine learning practitioners have advocated just that. notwithstanding questions of essentialism and stereotyping—of whether these efforts risk fixing in place “foundational” ideas of dynamic identities and lives—work focused on representation alone cannot fully address the broader, structural aspects of ai (soon 2021). we live not only in a world of increasing automation but also in a world where the terms of that automation and the choice of data underlying it are controlled by probably does not even fit, for example, new york jewish speech” (adam 1998, 163), much less forms of speech any further afield from adam’s own perspective. 7 in fact, monolithic ontologies are still common, as discussed in vrandečić and krötzsch (2014). keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 7 organizations that sit largely outside democratic mechanisms of accountability, control, and consent. even absent biases in data, the cultural milieu in which software and ai development take place can produce and reinforce disparities (allhutter 2019). under such circumstances, calls for representation without other changes risk reinforcing these structures and approaches. far from torpedoing the project of facial recognition, concerns about bias in facial recognition software have instead been recuperated by the technology companies developing these systems to justify folding further, more diverse populations into their surveillance network (merler et al. 2019). treating incorporation and representation as the only solution ignores the fact that there may be very good reasons to not make data available—not only in the case of surveillance systems but also in cases where continuing epistemic injustices make inclusion its own form of harm (christen 2012). these difficulties with representation are increasingly recognized, including by catherine d’ignazio and lauren klein. in their recent book data feminism, d’ignazio and klein (2020) warn against simplistic, representation-oriented “fixes” and describe projects that broaden the knowledge and knowers involved in datalogical thinking. examples range from collaborative projects to map femicides to community-driven mapping programs. but none of these community-scale projects require machine learning to implement. machine learning (ml) typically relies on big data, and gathering data of sufficient size can be challenging for small groups hoping to stage critical technical interventions using ai. the question becomes, then, whether there are plausible ways to build ml systems (such as adam’s language project) that do not fall into the trap of transferring power to and endorsing the form of these wider structures. 2.3. localization and distribution: critical technical practices we believe there are plausible ways to build ml systems that do not fall into that trap, and that efforts to create such systems can build on recent developments in machine learning itself. such efforts will also be founded on the premise that the issues to be addressed are sociotechnical and are best addressed with entangled technological and social approaches. machine learning systems alone, while not agnostic, can be adapted to diverse purposes. this includes our own proposals, which should not be taken in isolation. our concern is the development of machine learning systems that learn from a more diverse range of knowers without concentrating data and power. in this section, we hope to offer a model that would allow for the representation of diverse knowers in a pluralistic machine learning system while simultaneously shielding those included from some of the risks of being data subjects incorporated into algorithmic systems. we propose an examination of multitask federated learning. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 8 many conventional forms of machine learning—found in both popular discourse and the practices of developers—imagine a centralizing algorithmicdevelopment process. data streams into a central hub where a single party develops and controls a single model. the model demands that data be “handed over” to a single, authoritative algorithmic interpreter to be analyzed on that interpreter’s terms. a return to adam’s proposed language model, an effort to develop a system based on “feminine” forms of interpretation and conversational repair, suggests the concerns with this centralizing model. using conventional machine learning, building adam’s system based on “feminine” linguistic patterns would require first collecting and standardizing a vast array of examples of feminine speech, centralizing it, and using that centralized corpus to produce a single model capable of re-presenting the language patterns it has been exposed to. such an approach raises concerns around accumulation of power, data extraction, and control that would heavily limit our willingness to call it feminist. likewise, many existing technical fixes for problems like violations of privacy improve on the status quo, decreasing the violation of privacy without significantly shifting the balance or distribution of power. consider the case of privacy in large datasets, such as medical records, health information, or reviewer profiles. as latanya sweeney (2000) showed, 87 percent of the population of the united states in 1997 was uniquely identifiable in purportedly “anonymized” data that included records of zip codes, birthdays, and sex. sweeney famously illustrated this by finding massachusetts governor william weld’s data in the supposedly anonymized records of state employees released to health researchers by the massachusetts group insurance commission.8 formal measures of privacy such as k-anonymity and differential privacy aim to solve this problem of reidentification. k-anonymity, for example, solves the aforementioned problem by ensuring that for each set of identifying features in the dataset, there are at least a certain number of people, identified with the variable k, who share those identifiers. for example, if there are at least three people in a standard anonymized medical dataset who share the same birthday and zip code, then k = 3 in that dataset. differential privacy solves the same problem by intentionally making minor modifications to the data, such as changing the day in a date of birth, in order to decrease the likelihood of uniquely identifying individuals in the data. in doing so, differential privacy “addresses concerns that any participant might have about the leakage of her personal information: even if the participant removed her data from 8 such reidentifications are more difficult now due to the 2003 hipaa privacy rule; see barth-jones (2012) for discussion. keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 9 the data set, no outputs . . . would become significantly more or less likely” (dwork 2008, 2). k-anonymity and differential privacy can protect individuals from accidental exposure when anonymized data is intentionally released. but as philip rogaway (2015) argues, these metrics imagine a world in which the threat to privacy comes exclusively from the person querying the database—the “adversary” interested in piecing together scraps of data to expose the privacy of individuals. the greatest threats to privacy may instead come from a source that formal metrics do not address: the compiling and indefinite maintenance of large databases that are perpetually at risk of being leaked in their entirety in a data breach,9 being queried by inside actors, or being surveilled by state agencies (rogaway 2015, 20–21). formal privacy measures like differential privacy do not measure the size of the dataset created, the number of people exposed if the data were to leak, or the concentration of access to the database. as such, formal privacy temporarily protects individual privacy without changing the fundamental risks and power imbalances of the system. while it may help some knowers to be represented in the system without exposing them to extractive data use, it does not otherwise change whose knowledge is represented or whose questions can be answered. consider, by contrast, a distributed learning paradigm. rather than the standard centralized model of machine learning, in which data is collected so that a model can learn from it all together, distributed learning sends a naive machine learning model out into the world to learn from all the data it meets and to update its model on each stop of its digital journey. for example, distributed learning can be used on a network of phones, each of which have a local machine learning model used for auto-complete suggestions. instead of requiring each phone to send private data such as text messages or emails to a central location for centralized learning and storage, a machine learning model can be passed directly from phone to phone. the traveling model is updated directly from the local model, without touching the local data, and the local model may also learn from the traveling model. differential privacy or other formal privacy measures may then be applied to ensure that the most recent learned update has not exposed the individual who contributed data, using techniques such as secure aggregation (bonawitz et al. 2017). distributed learning addresses the problem of the leaky data lake, the problem of data and power concentration, and the problem of exclusive ownership of the trained machine learning model. however, distributed learning is still a hierarchical system, the aims of which are set at the top. it does not give its diverse users the ability to form their own aims, or to build coalitions with one another to solve learning 9 for the purposes of this section, imagine the metaphorical “data lake” not as a peaceful reservoir but as a toxic tailings pond prone to catastrophic rupture. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 10 problems of mutual interest. the objective of the model and the goals of its learning are set by the person or entity that designs the architecture of the machine learning model and sets it traveling. in order to imagine a more pluralistic set of tasks, we must add the ability for distributed agents to set more than one learning goal simultaneously—namely, multitask federating learning (caruana 1997). federated learning is characterized by data that remains local and by a model development process that is distributed. rather than streaming raw data towards a central site for interpretation, data remains on the user’s device and model development occurs either (depending on the extent of the federation) on that device, or in a central location based only on the formatted, anonymized, and alreadyminimized data collected from the user. because the raw data remains with the user, the user is both less tied into and less dependent on the centralized model and thereby transfers less control to the system’s developers (kairouz et al. 2021). this process can, if implemented properly, allow representation with fewer risks of exploitation. however, while control over the workings and answers remain with the user, the problem to be solved is often determined centrally (kairouz et al. 2021). multitask federated learning improves on this model by allowing each person not only to maintain access to their data and to choose what learning to allow but also to contribute to learning goals of their own or others’ devising (kairouz et al. 2021). in doing so, it affords the possibility of pluralist machine learning systems. multitask federated learning on its own is not a “fix” to the issue of who, and whose knowledge, counts. it does nothing to address the generation of data or the social valuation of knowers. nevertheless, for researchers interested in forming a critical technical practice by hybridizing feminist theory and machine learning, this model provides one way to address some of the pragmatic concerns around power that stymie efforts to imagine feminist ml premised on a more conventional, centralized structure of ai. 3. which knowledge? 3.1. eliding difference in cyc and soar when alison adam analyzed cyc, she found a knowledge system shaped by the perspectives of the middle-class, white, male engineers who built it. cyc’s knowledge representations were not entirely univocal: the system did include the capacity to represent multiple competing models of the world. however, this capacity was reserved for cases of conflict between scientific theories “judged to be of similar intellectual status,” such as competing theories within economics or current scientific theories, and superseded theories still used for teaching, such as newtonian physics (adam 1998, 85). what cyc did not model was the existence of multiple, observer-relative perspectives of the same event or the interplay between such perspectives, as in keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 11 sandra harding’s (1992) strong objectivity. when cyc stores multiple conflicting theories or models, at least one must be coded as mere “belief” rather than “knowledge” unless the engineers believe the domain itself to be “inexact,” as with economics (adam 1998, 87). typically, the lower status “beliefs” represent minority opinions (adam 1998, 88). a person who disagreed with cyc’s judgements, or whose commonsense beliefs about the world were framed in a different way, would have little foothold from which to contest it. soar, without an extensive knowledge corpus, homogenized its problemsolving methodology instead. it sought to derive general problem-solving principles from newell and simon’s studies of male college students and model them in an artificial system. newell and simon believed that the goal-directed motivation, individual approach, and biological “normality” the undergraduates displayed constituted preconditions for rational problem-solving (adam 1998, 96). however, their study did not seek to study other forms of human problem-solving or model them within soar. in what follows, we will bring adam’s critiques of cyc and soar into the pluralistic present and propose contemporary models that embrace rather than elide multiplicity. 3.2. pluralism in the present machine learning systems in public life have two basic modes: universalizing and personalizing. systems typically aim either to universalize, to distill statistical patterns that reflect what “most people” do, or to personalize, learning information about each individual in order to better accord with their preferences. some systems, such as biometric systems that seek to identify the individual through purportedly universal criteria, can do both (van der ploeg 2011). machine learning’s universalizing mode is the one critiqued by adam for representing the perspective of majoritarian or socially dominant groups as the universal or default perspective. the personalizing mode has been critiqued as leading to polarization and to the creation of partisan “echo chambers.”10 these basic models each encourage different relations to perspective-taking and to knowledge. the universalizing model encourages users to recognize and orient themselves around an outside perspective—but it is that of a generalized, idealized version of a socially dominant group. the personalized mode re-presents one’s own perspective, eliding the existence of difference and the possibility of the “world-travelling” or “role-taking” that underpins much feminist theorizing about the nature of social relations and politics (lugones 1987; weir 2013). search engines, for example, assume that most people want one thing. when they type “feminist philosophy quarterly” into a search engine, they want to find the 10 as described in the work of nguyen (2020), although the empirical studies of political polarization attribute different causes. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 12 website of the journal feminist philosophy quarterly.11 the desires of the remaining people are multifold. many want to find individual articles within fpq or authors who frequent its pages; some want to find submission instructions; some want to find hypatia’s website; some want to find articles critiquing feminist philosophy quarterly; still others are disappointed to find that the name they picked out for their next journal is already in use. but all see models based on the same underlying criteria of relevance. the singular ontological viewpoint a universal ranking represents often leads to the gaze of the majority trumping the needs of any particular individual and the reproduction of injustices ignored by majoritarian gazes. safiya noble (2018) presents a host of examples of search’s prioritization of white and male searchers over black and female searchers: image searches for “business attire” that return only white men in suits; searches for “black girls” that return only erotica. in addition to their bias, these results represent a single perspective on what typifies “business attire” or “black girls.” the search engine’s “view from nowhere” turns out to be a view from the perspective of dominant social groups, as adam predicted would be the case. the route to abandoning the single perspective and its biased universalism often wends through personalization. in a personalized model of search, each searcher would be shown “business attire” considered to be appropriate to them— or to how the search platform sees them. but in both cases, the ideal is treated as optimizing results to the user’s most immediate needs, be they the user’s actual needs or the needs of a fictional default. in neither situation, then, is there an effort to make the “road not taken,” or the contingent and situated nature of the results offered, visible. while we use search as an example, the dichotomy of universalized versus personalized data processing and interpretation is ubiquitous, and in many cases desirable. a medical diagnosis system that intentionally does not recommend the most likely condition would be rightly abandoned.12 but when systems bound and shape our senses of the social world and of each other, revealing the multiplicitous worlds and perspectives that are present is vital. 3.3. machine learning from multiplicity: critical technical practices intentionally revealing multiplicity and contingency in automated systems is an idea gaining momentum. ochigame (2021) proposed “‘divergent search,’ which 11 perhaps the journal’s open access treasures have hitherto been hidden from them, but not from you, at https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq. 12 that said, medical recommendations made by automated diagnostic systems can benefit from displaying choices between values and choices guided by tolerance for risk that shape decisions made based on probabilities. for an example, see birch et al. (2022). keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 13 seeks to facilitate exposure to divergent perspectives across linguistic and geographic barriers.” for example, ochigame uses “divergent shuffle” to reorder search results so that the top ten listings include results from at least four regions, rather than nine out of ten results being from north america and western europe. ochigame and ye (2021) extend this work to build a divergent “search atlas.” hancox-li and kumar also imagine a pluralistic machine learning in the context of feature choice when they say, given the uncertain relationships between those numbers [indicating importance of features] and the actual features in the data, visualizing [feature importance numbers] as though they are certain and have unambiguous importance values is misleading. for example, one can imagine an interface that includes multiple explanatory accounts of a model and helps users see the differences between them. in contrast, we currently have multiple, discrete explanation methods that each present their own seemingly authoritative accounts, hiding the uncertainty that is inherent in each of them. (hancox-li and kumar 2021, 823–24) building machine learning systems with multiplicity renders visible different ranges of possibility and the perspectives they represent. extending ochigame & ye’s and hancox-li & kumar’s work, we propose automating these processes across a broader range of machine learning in public life, showcasing a multiplicity of perspectives and their contextual adaptation, using multitask learning, ensemble learning, and other multi-model learning methods. the aim of showcasing multiple divergent perspectives can be accomplished using different degrees of “ontological” difference in the machine learning model’s internal representations. consider, for example, different ways of implementing ochigame’s divergent shuffle. the method closest to the status quo would be to maintain the same ranking of all papers, using the same criteria of relevance and the same learning task, but then to choose from that ranking papers to display based on additional optimization criteria. in the example ochigame (2021) describes, a current search for scientific papers on “climate change” returns mostly papers from north america and western europe (na) and one from latin america (la). assume that the best paper from each region is labeled 1, the second best 2, and so on. thus the current top ten search results are, in order, na1, na2, na3, na4, na5, la1, na6, na7, na8, na9. divergent shuffle could draw from the same overall ranking of papers but instead show the searcher the following “shuffled” list, including papers from africa (af), asia (as), and eastern europe (ee): la1, ee1, af1, as1, na1, as2, ee2, af2, na2, la2. in order to implement this strategy, no additional machine learning techniques feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 14 are needed—it is only necessary to add an additional constraint on the results shown to the searcher. a second step away from the status quo would be to train the machine learning model itself to optimize for multiple goals. multitask learning, for example, allows different optimization tasks but maintains a shared internal representation (caruana 1997). the different tasks in a pluralistic search would be providing the most “relevant” links to different people based on different criteria of relevance. ranked lists could then be “shuffled” together, as in ochigame’s divergent shuffle, so that more than one perspective is visible within one search. the previous two methods rely on shared internal representations, data labels, and a shared (implicit or explicit) ontology. in order to present a more pluralistic pluralism, however, it may be necessary to allow different models that each rely on different data, data classified in different ways, or different learning methods. federated learning, described in section 2.3, can be used to create multiple, heterogeneous models that can be synthesized into a global one (diao, ding, and tarokh 2021). but a global model is not always necessary. ensemble learning is a suite of techniques that uses multiple, distinct machine learning models to perform the same task, then aggregates their results (dietterich 2000). ensemble learning often delivers better results than one model alone could, especially for complex decision landscapes in which a single model is likely to get stuck in a local maximum (kairouz et al. 2021). nina grgić-hlača and her coauthors (grgićhlača et al. 2017), however, propose forgoing the aggregation step common to ensemble learning and instead choosing randomly between the results of the models for each token-decision instance. this preserves a diversity of results and a diversity of methods, albeit at the potential cost of giving up some “performance” on any single task. machine learning need not be a “one-world world” (law 2015). ensemble methods are mature and well developed. they can be purposed to serve pluralism rather than to increase performance on a single task. 4. what knowledge? 4.1. autonomy and interdependence in cyc and soar in addition to asking who knows and what they know, adam questions the autonomy of knowers themselves. our epistemic reliance on others begins in childhood. years of dependency on others creates our “second” personhood, our self that is constituted in relationship to others (baier 1985). even as adults, much of our knowledge is from testimony or is deeply relational. as members of teams and partnerships, we rely on collective knowledge to perform tasks none of us could do individually. thus the perceived tradeoff between interdependence and autonomy is keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 15 often illusory: interdependence expands our capacities whether we realize it or not (code 1991, 79) drawing on annette baier (1985) and lorraine code (1991), adam argues that as human persons are “second persons” whose knowledge is relational, they are not (nor should they be) fully autonomous epistemic agents. given this, artificial systems modeled on human intelligence should neither assume that humans are fully autonomous nor strive for autonomous self-reliance themselves. their goals should not include complying with the normative ideal of autonomy. the symbolic systems that adam critiqued strove for autonomy. soar was modeled after humans who solved problems entirely on their own in the artificially isolated test setting of the laboratory (adam 1998, 97). the undergraduates studied were not allowed to rely on connected knowing (belenky et al. 1986), and so neither did soar. cyc and soar’s self-sufficiency are also a poor basis for the attribution of responsibility. as adam argues, many disasters lack a single author (adam 1998, 97– 98). a system has failed when an oil spill destroys a coastline. rather than resolving reasonable disagreement about who is to blame, adam argues that members of the system should take collective responsibility. 4.2. autonomy in the present the widespread deployment of ai systems has brought concerns about autonomy to a wider audience. in addition to promoting the normative ideal of autonomy highlighted by adam, the political economy of automation has long incentivized the development of these technologies because of their promises to strip human discretion and decision-making from processes (wajcman 2017; feenberg 1991). that these promises are false—that these technologies are “humans all the way down” (keyes 2018; neyland 2019; keyes 2020; muller et al. 2021)—does not change the impact that both promises and technologies had and have. autonomy-oriented critiques of algorithmic systems usually examine one or both of two domains: the cultural imaginary of algorithms and what we might call their everyday life. inquiries into cultural imaginaries are inquiries into narratives that “describe attainable futures and prescribe the images of futures that should be attained” (felt et al. 2016, 754). such narratives “condition not only the perception of technology within the public but also ‘the professional culture of those who have produced the technical innovations and helped their development’” (natale and ballatore, 2020, 6; quoting ortoleva, 2009, 2). such cultural imaginaries play a strong role in how we engage with and interpret events and each other (babbitt 2018; lindemann nelson 2001). feminist scholars highlight the cultural imaginaries of ai to emphasize the ways in which algorithmic systems, regardless of their actual, material state or level feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 16 of integration may constrain our autonomy by constraining our range of imagined possibility. in a culture in which algorithms are portrayed as better than humans at decision-making or evaluation—seen as capable of inferring truths undetectable to humans—people are reluctant to challenge them. an algorithmic decision is less likely to be challenged than a human decision—not because it cannot be but because the algorithm is afforded a particular epistemic authority (beer 2017). this is particularly worrisome with the increasing integration of ai into the production of cultural imaginaries and into the generation of “truths” around identity, legitimacy, or importance (keyes, hitzig, and blell 2021). theorists also critique the everyday lives of algorithms: the day-to-day practices of their development and use (neyland 2019). this work highlights both the increasing nonautonomous deployments of algorithmic systems, particularly in workplaces (watkins 2021; stark and pais 2020), and the structuring of these systems in such a way as to exclude human agency and knowledge from informing their decision-making (rubel, castro, and pham 2020). designing ai systems to be central to decision-making reduces the autonomy of those interacting with such systems. beyond the question of imaginaries, much algorithmic development and use still follows the pattern highlighted and critiqued by adam—that of a monolithic system that simply provides “the answer,” without possibilities for user interrogation or involvement. 4.3. relational knowledge in the loop: critical technical practices in contrast to monolithic systems, adam sketched a vision of an artificial decision aid that leaves the decision open, a legal expert system flexible enough to advise by analogy. this vision of a process in which ai advises and humans decide can be seen in a model more broadly applicable to ai: the human-in-the-loop. human-inthe-loop is a term used for a variety of human-machine collaborative decisionmaking: machine learning that relies on humans to label unlabeled data, identify edge cases that stumped the learning algorithm, and otherwise facilitate learning, but also automated decision-making that pauses at critical moments to allow the human to decide. (looney and tacker 1990; falcone and castelfranchi 2001; enarsson, enqvist, and naarttijärvi 2022) being a human-in-the-loop is itself educational. those who see the capacities and limitations of an algorithmic system learn to place appropriate trust in the system, learning when to rely on the system and when to rely on their own capacities (abdelkarim et al. 2020). such systems therefore have the potential to undercut the cultural mythology that elevates the capacities of ai above human capacities and to increase human confidence in disputing algorithmic systems. indeed, being a human-in-the-loop often lowers trust in the system, a fact that is sometimes seen as a reason to shield humans from the loop (honeycutt, nourani, keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 17 and ragan 2020). this reasoning assumes that trust is an unquestioned good, an assumption that many feminist and political philosophers would question. warranted trust is certainly beneficial—but trust that is unwarranted can lead to overreliance on the other party and to harm when that trust is violated. further, active distrust is often seen as a foundational part of rendering systems accountable, be they social or sociotechnical. an attitude of distrust—an attitude in which we approach situations with a degree of suspicion—reveals flaws and encourages the desire to improve (rosanvallon 2008). rather than simply seeking to increase user trust in automated systems, a better goal for system designers would be to allow users to appropriately calibrate trust to the capacities and limitations of the system. if users begin with an unrealistically high trust in the system, its capacities and objectivity, observing the system’s inevitable stumbles will decrease their trust. but this is epistemically appropriate. seeing the brittle edges of automated knowledge allows humans-in-theloop to increase their comparative trust in themselves. what might critical technical practices around trust, autonomy and secondpersons look like, then? we would argue that a vital part of demystification is exposure to and involvement with feminist ai and its potential to render visible the mechanisms of algorithmic systems. we point to the ongoing work to create feminist makerspaces and hackathons—sites of deliberate, collaborative making and learning about technologies (fox, silva, and rosner 2018; houston et al. 2016). these environments are hardly perfect; they have their own dynamics of power around gender, race, and class. but they constitute a starting point for moving beyond monolithic imaginaries of ai. similar proposals are made by d’ignazio and klein (2020), who highlight feminist data mapping projects in their work on data feminism. these activities are vital, but still leave “the algorithm” itself unquestioned. we urge practitioners to go beyond mapping alone and instead build spaces for the creation and deployment of models. such spaces offer the possibility of deep experience with the fragility and multiplicity of algorithmic systems, and so they offer an alternative vision of the world—one in which epistemic deference to ai is weaker and trust is given when warranted. in addition to developing warranted trust, critical technical practices can also respond to—or preclude—trust’s violation. leigh star’s famous description of infrastructure as “invisible until breakdown” (star and ruhleder 1996, 113) carries with it a corollary: infrastructure is visible (and seemingly not “infrastructure” at all) to those inside the practices that make the infrastructure function. louise amoore argues that a certain amount of unknowability-of-outcomes is inevitable—not just within ai, but in interaction and relation more generally (amoore 2020). correspondingly, there will always be unforeseen violations of trust. our feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 18 response should not be to mandate full transparency (which is, as she argues, impossible) but instead to develop a “cloud ethics”: an ethicopolitical approach that includes denaturalizing the choices that have led to a particular algorithm, problem, or solution being the one actively developed by “dwell[ing] for some time with the aperture of the algorithm, the point where the vast multiplicity of parameters and hidden layers becomes reduced and condensed to the thing of interest” (amoore 2020, 162). purposefully embedding human agents in an algorithmic system gives them an inherently partial and reactive epistemic access to its functioning; people respond to systems as much as the other way around. but this embedding carries the potential to make those apertures, for the people embedded, visible; to enable precisely the kind of dwelling for which amoore advocates, and through that, to enable new ways to preclude or respond to algorithmic harms.13 5. conclusion despite changes in the systems and technical capacities of ai and machine learning in the last thirty years, feminist philosophy’s critiques remain relevant. a world in which algorithmic knowledge is pluralistic and localized (when appropriate), in which humans trust in and question algorithmic systems to the degree warranted, and in which neither humans nor machines are viewed as autonomous epistemic agents has been imaginable for a long time. and this history in itself can be a source of hope. like adam (1998, 181), we are “telling one more version of an old story,” and with the same aim: to show that although neither our projects nor our problems are new, by “continuing to build on the practical projects just begun, and through women’s refusal to give up ground made in relation to technology, we gain a glimpse, however small, of how things could be different” (181). acknowledgments the authors would like to thank claire and margaret hopkins, margaret wander, and shannon hackett for their support; liam kofi bright, 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the materialization of identity.” interdisciplinary science reviews 46 (1–2): 158–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840224. knight, will. 2016. “an ai with 30 years’ worth of knowledge finally goes to work. mit technology review, march 14, 2016. https://www.technologyreview.com /2016/03/14/108873/an-ai-with-30-years-worth-of-knowledge-finally-goesto-work. keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 23 law, john. 2015. “what's wrong with a one-world world?” distinktion: scandinavian journal of social theory 16 (1): 126–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x .2015.1020066. lenat, douglas b., and r. v. guha. 1990. building large knowledge-based systems: representation and inference in the cyc project. reading, ma: addisonwesley. lindemann nelson, hilde. 2001. damaged identities, narrative repair. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. looney, carl g., and edgar c. tacker. 1990. “human-in-the-loop control with majority vote neural networks.” in 1990 ieee international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics conference proceedings, 224–26. los angeles: ieee. https://doi.org/10.1109/icsmc.1990.142097. lugones, maría. 1987. “playfulness, ‘world’-travelling, and loving perception.” hypatia 2, no. 2 (summer): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987 .tb01062.x. mager, astrid. 2014. “defining algorithmic ideology: using ideology critique to scrutinize corporate search engines.” triplec: communication, capitalism & critique. open access journal for a global sustainable information society 12 (1): 28–39. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v12i1.439. merler, michele, nalini ratha, rogerio s. feris, and john r. smith. 2019. “diversity in faces.” arxiv preprint, arxiv:1901.10436 [cs.cv]. https://doi.org/10.48550 /arxiv.1901.10436. muller, michael, christine t. wolf, josh andres, michael desmond, narendra nath joshi, zahra ashktorab, aabhas sharma et al. 2021. “designing ground truth and the social life of labels.” in chi ’21: 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and social research. https://book.affecting-technologies.org/preview/. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2022, vol. 8, iss. 3/4, article 12 published by scholarship@western, 2022 24 ochigame, rodrigo, and katherine ye. 2021. search atlas: visualizing divergent search results across geopolitical borders. in dis ’21: designing interactive systems conference 2021, edited by wendy ju, lora oehlberg, sean follmer, sarah fox, and stacey kuznetsov, 1970–83. new york: association for computing machinery. https://doi.org10.1145/3461778.3462032. ortoleva, peppino. 2009. “modern mythologies, the media and the social presence of technology.” observatorio (obs) journal 3 (1): 1–12. https://obs.obercom .pt/index.php/obs/article/view/163. rincón, cami, os keyes, and corinne cath. 2021. “speaking from experience: trans/non-binary requirements for voice-activated ai.” proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction 5, no. cscw1 (april): article no. 132, 1– 27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449206. rogaway, phillip. 2015. “the moral character of cryptographic work.” unpublished manuscript. rosanvallon, pierre. 2008. counter-democracy: politics in an age of distrust. translated by arthur goldhammer. cambridge: cambridge university press. rubel, alan, clinton castro, and adam pham. 2020. “algorithms, agency, and respect for persons.” social theory and practice 46, no. 3 (july): 547–72. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract202062497. sadowski, jathan. 2019. “when data is capital: datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” big data & society 6, no. 1 (january): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.11 77/2053951718820549. sherron, catherine. 2000. “constructing common sense.” in women, work and computerization: charting a course to the future, edited by ellen balka and richard smith, 111–18. boston: springer. soon, valerie. 2021. “social structural explanation.” philosophy compass 16, no. 10 (october): e12782. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12782. star, susan leigh, and karen ruhleder. 1996, “steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: design and access for large information spaces.” information systems research 7, no. 1 (march): 111–34. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.7.1.111. stark, david, and ivana pais. 2020. “algorithmic management in the platform economy.” sociologica 14 (3): 47–72. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.19718853/12221. stark, luke. 2018. “facial recognition, emotion and race in animated social media.” first monday 23, no. 9 (september). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9406. stevens, nikki, and os keyes. 2021. “seeing infrastructure: race, facial recognition and the politics of data.” cultural studies 35 (4–5): 833–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895252. sweeney, latanya. 2000. “simple demographics often identify people uniquely.” data privacy working paper, no. 3: carnegie mellon university. keyes and creel – artificial knowing otherwise published by scholarship@western, 2022 25 van der ploeg, irma. 2011. “normative assumptions in biometrics: on bodily differences and automated classifications.” in innovating government: normative, policy and technological dimensions of modern government, edited by simone van der hof and marga m. groothius, 29–40. the hague: t. m. c. asser press. vrandečić, denny, and markus krötzsch. 2014. “wikidata: a free collaborative knowledgebase.” communications of the acm 57, no. 10 (october): 78–85. https://doi.org/10.1145/2629489. wajcman, judy. 2017. “automation: is it really different this time?” british journal of sociology 68, no. 1 (march): 119–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446 .12239. watkins, elizabeth anne. 2021. “the polysemia of recognition: facial recognition in algorithmic management.” phd diss., columbia university. weir, allison. 2013. identities and freedom: feminist theory between power and connection. oxford: oxford university press. os keyes is a phd candidate at the university of washington, where they study ai and biomedicine at the intersect of trans studies, philosophy, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. they are an inaugural recipient of the ada lovelace fellowship. kathleen creel is an assistant professor at northeastern university, crossappointed between the department of philosophy and religion and khoury college of computer sciences. she was previously an embedded ethics fellow at stanford university. her research interests include philosophy of science, ethics and epistemology of machine learning, and early modern philosophy. 14313 keyes and creel title page 14313 keyes & creel final format revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 introduction recommended citation ciurria, mich. 2024. “revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). introduction. 2024 revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives mich ciurria washington university in st. louis mich.ciurria@gmail.com ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives mich ciurria 1. introduction this special issue convenes philosophers from various intersections of feminist theory to analyze, critique, and transform the practice and analysis of moral responsibility.1 while philosophers have historically been interested in conceptual analysis, feminism is and has always been committed to political resistance and revolutionary change. therefore, feminists will seek not only to interpret the world of responsibility but also to change it. a common theme in this volume is the need for transformative change in the “moral ecology of responsibility”: the conditions that define, discipline, and “scaffold” responsibility. this is a departure from earlier theories that attempted to preserve the core of responsibility as we know it. such theories missed responsibility’s embeddedness in structurally unjust conditions— conditions that impose double binds and punishments on oppressed groups. one of responsibility’s main functions, on feminist scrutiny, is to preserve systems of oppression such as heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and ableism. responsibility, in other words, tends to operate as a disciplinary apparatus in the experiences of oppressed people. when activists resist oppression, responsibility is there to “put them in their place.” the omission of this critical perspective on the policing role of responsibility can be seen as a form of epistemic oppression. this introduction will weave the featured articles into a comprehensive overview and critique of dominant discourses on responsibility. it will ask three questions: how did we get here, where are we going, and how can we get to our destination? first, i will offer a brief genealogy of moral responsibility, focusing on the shift from metaphysical concerns to social concerns to, as of late, a more political orientation. i call these transitions the social turn and the political turn. then, i will outline three features of the political turn as they appear in this issue: ableist, colonial, and heteropatriarchal patterns of responsibility-holding. these critiques explore the systematic use of responsibility to blame, patronize, vilify, control, silence, dispossess, gaslight, and otherwise punish or control members of oppressed groups, while at the 1 i will use the terms “practice of responsibility,” “moral ecology of responsibility,” and “world of responsibility” interchangeably to denote the social circumstances and systems that influence (support, scaffold, discipline, control) the exercise and attribution of moral responsibility. the “practice of responsibility,” in short, is the system in which we hold others and ourselves responsible for moral wrongs, rights, virtues, vices, and other moral conduct. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 same time projecting a mystique of innocence and benevolence onto the privileged. finally, i will offer some transformative solutions to these injustices, such as conceptually reengineering responsibility, committing to persistent struggle against the odds, refusing to accept the flimsy excuses of oppressors, and foregrounding the critical testimony of oppressed people. all authors cited in this introduction appear in this issue except for p. f. strawson and harry frankfurt, who serve as foils to the critical approach. i have organized the papers by theme in an effort to construct a coherent narrative about responsibility’s past, present, and potential future. 2. the social turn like all social practices, responsibility has a history shaped by specific sociopolitical circumstances, which can be excavated with genealogical analysis. a pressing question for contemporary philosophers is, why has responsibility theory been divorced from revolutionary politics for so long? why has it been so politically conservative and resistant to change? historically, philosophers were, as shelley tremain (2024, 2) puts it, “preoccupied with debates about freedom and determinism in the context of individual agency,” in abstraction from the politics of power and domination. if responsibility depends on free will, and free will is a question of indeterminism (i.e., freedom from the past and the laws of nature), then politics drops out of the picture. “control” sufficient for responsibility becomes a question of freedom from prior causes rather than one of freedom from oppression. whereas feminists have traditionally understood control as a political relation (e.g., patriarchy as a gendered system of control), indeterminists defined it as a metaphysical state of affairs, above and impervious to the social (i.e., control as freedom from determinism). the metaphysics of responsibility, then, is orthogonal to feminist theory, which is concerned with the politics of liberation and equality. the tide began to turn in 1962 when strawson published “freedom and resentment,” which rebuked metaphysical arguments as “over-intellectualize[d]” abstractions that divorced responsibility from “the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings” within which we hold each other responsible (1962, 208). this marked what jules holroyd refers to as the “social turn” in responsibility theory, shifting the focus from the metaphysics of free will to the ethics of interpersonal relationships. yet strawson’s social account of responsibility remained stubbornly insulated from revolutionary politics. as holroyd explains, strawson admitted that “some aspects of our practices may demonstrate . . . a ‘seamy side,’ which might make us ‘rightly mistrustful’ of the relationships and attitudes that he takes as fundamental to our responsibility practices”; but “these troubling manifestations, strawson submits, are ‘a factor of comparatively minor importance,’” and should not make us ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 question the fundamentals of our interpersonal relationships (holroyd 2024, 3; quoting strawson 1962]. and yet the “seamy side” of responsibility, including the structural injustices that strawson neglected, “in fact have greater significance than strawson was willing to countenance” (holroyd, 3). asymmetrical power relations may, in fact, justify a great deal of mistrust, particularly toward political elites who benefit from structural injustices. while strawson drew attention to the interpersonal, then, he was too sanguine, too idealistic, about how interpersonal practices are structured, as well as how they relate to political inequality, if at all. tellingly, strawson never wrote about the explosive political activism spreading across the us, the uk, and elsewhere throughout the 1960s, wherein activists sought to reverse the currents of responsibility, holding oppressors responsible for structural injustices while seizing responsibility for their own liberation. strawson did not seem to notice (or care) that these revolutionary currents are part of interpersonal life— that is, to paraphrase second-wave feminists, that “the interpersonal is political.” from a feminist perspective, strawson could be charged with reifying the classic private/public distinction that separates the “loving” sphere of the private from the messy world of politics, thereby depoliticizing the domestic. where are the political dimensions—often violent—in strawson’s picture of interpersonal life? feminists from strawson’s own era were arguing that no sphere is immune from the violence of imperialism and that private arrangements are often more imperialistic than public ones due to a lack of public and theoretical scrutiny (e.g., the widespread acceptance of marital rape). it is this political critique that is missing from strawson’s optimistic impression of interpersonal practices. around the same time, frankfurt was writing about the social dimensions of responsibility from the same politically detached standpoint. one of his most famous papers concerned whether addicts are responsible agents or moral patients (frankfurt 1971). this began a long-standing debate about whether addiction should be viewed through the lens of (involuntary) disease or (willful) deviance. are addicts pitiable or punishable, apt for hospitalization or incarceration? t. virgil murthy (2024, 19) underscores that this dichotomy creates a double bind for addicts (insane or criminal?) and engenders a “carceral-clinical seesaw” designed to segregate addicts from socalled civil society. the theoretical question of addict responsibility serves to obscure the reality of addict oppression. post-strawsonians continue to marginalize the role of the political in the practice of responsibility. holroyd notes that “conventionalist” strawsonians tend to assume that we can learn about what it truly means to be responsible by studying our conventional responsibility practices, which are supposed to be relatively smooth and “seamless.” any glitches in the system are of “minor importance,” and therefore any “recalibrations” should be relatively “conservative” (holroyd, 17). in other words, we’re pretty good at attributing responsibility, and we should continue building on the feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 received wisdom. this view from above erases structural injustices in the system of responsibility, leaving no room for critiques of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other systemic inequalities. by the same token, conventionalism depicts revolutionary politics as unseemly, disproportionate, and unreasonable (why disrupt a system that’s working well?), which in turn justifies ongoing carceral violence and epistemic oppression. as tremain puts it, the dominant discourse on responsibility exemplifies philosophy’s broader culture of ableist “structural gaslighting,” which “obscures the political character . . . of the apparatus of disability” (14–15) and conceals “eugenic violence” (8), among other injustices. gorman (2024, 7) similarly describes conventionalism as part of a culture of “pervasive epistemic injustice” that marginalizes neurodivergent people. shyam ranganathan, shelbi nahwilet meissner, and andrew frederick smith identify the conventional approach as part of a colonial tradition that racializes, excludes, and discredits non-western philosophies, including decolonial theories of responsibility. katherine villa, katie peters, marianna leventi, ross patrizio, penelope haulotte, and jill b. delston explain how conventionalism also epistemically oppresses girls, women, and gender minorities. a common theme of this volume is the gaslighting of oppressed groups via conventional narratives of responsibility that discredit, discount, and overwrite their testimony. 3. the political turn this volume marks a political turn in responsibility theory, moving from the (merely) social to the (overtly) political, consistent with the aims and assumptions of revolutionary feminism(s). it emphasizes that moral responsibility is situated, enforced, and disciplined in asymmetrical social conditions, in which some people have more power and privilege than others. hence, responsibility has an inescapable political dimension. the papers that follow can be categorized into three overarching themes: (1) ableism and addict oppression, (2) colonialism, and (3) heteropatriarchy. these divisions are artificial in that there are myriad intersections between each oppression, which will be discussed in the included papers, but each author tends to focus on a specific locus of oppression, drawing on personal and cultural insights. collectively, these critiques illuminate responsibility’s relationship to overlapping injustices. 3.a. ableism one of the most enduring legacies of the strawsonian tradition is the notion that responsibility is a capacity of neurotypical adults. that is, nonneurotypicality (or cognitive disability) is a marker of impaired responsibility. this so-called commonsense intuition is reflected in strawson’s argument that “people who are ‘neurotic,’ ‘warped or deranged,’ ‘schizophrenic,’ ‘compulsive,’ ‘insane,’ or ‘delusional’ ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 are not members of the moral community, that is, should not be regarded as moral agents who participate in the relationships that characterize responsibility practices” (tremain, 5; citing strawson 1962). a wide variety of nonneurotypicals, then, should be excluded from the “general structure . . . of human attitudes and emotions” (strawson 1962, 208) and relegated to a situation that strawson himself described as one of unbearable “human isolation” (1962, 197)—a situation that is very close to what many nonneurotypical people in fact endure as a result of ableism, which deprives disabled people of social support. tremain (7) argues that strawson’s description of nonneurotypicality contributes to the “naturalization and materialization” of disability as a “universally disadvantageous personal characteristic,” rather than a “social, value-laden, and contingent state of affairs.” (put simply, strawson endorsed the medical model, which equates disability with impairment and tragedy). this pathologizing lens, furthermore, contributes to a broader context of ableist oppression, including discrimination against disabled people and their critical standpoints in the profession. the strawsonian orthodoxy, and the prevalence of the medical model in general, may help to explain why disabled people are severely underrepresented in professional philosophy, especially at the upper ranks. (if disabled people are regarded as presumptively nonresponsible, they will not be seen as the best candidates for the job). august gorman (2) affirms that the strawsonian tradition has left an ableist legacy. even today, philosophers tend to “assume that there is such a thing as a ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ agent with a standard set of capacities and assume that variations are forms of defective agency.” in responsibility theory, the standard assumption is that nonneurotypicality indicates nonresponsibility. although there is no consensus on precisely which neurological differences “impair” responsibility, there is general agreement that nonresponsible people lack neurotypical abilities, and this deficit makes them proper objects of pity, sympathy, treatment, and social training. when nonneurotypicals break the rules, neurotypicals don’t blame them—they feel bad for them, and they may even offer them “help” in the form of therapy and reeducation. this neuronormative paradigm falls short in many ways. first, it assumes that neuronormative rules are universally binding and in the best interests of everyone; therefore, when nonneurotypical people break the rules, they must be morally impaired or deviant. there is no option to interpret nonneurotypical behavior as a form of self-expression, survival, resistance, or civil disobedience. second, this paradigm assumes that nonneurotypicality is nothing more or less than impairment, as per the medical model. this schema “flatten[s] the way we perceive [the] complex landscape” of neurodiversity, eliminating the “messy complexity of agential diversity” that exists in real life (gorman, 6). third, the paradigmatic assumption that disabled people deserve sympathy, pity, and treatment may seem like a humane response, but it is, in fact, “horribly patronizing” and “dehumanizing” (gorman, 11). offering to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 “scaffold” and “responsibilize” neurodivergent people into a more neuronormative way of life affirms neurotypical supremacy and entitlement. it sends the message that nonneurotypical people need to be cured, fixed, and trained. one could flip the script and ask, how can we scaffold poor neurotypicals into a better understanding of their own privilege? how can we help them cultivate a more open-minded, humble, and creative perspective on neurological difference? jules holroyd and hannah mchugh point out that ableist praise is just as harmful as ableist blame, if not more so. celebrating disabled people as “heroes” and “inspirational figures” can “express low expectations for disabled lives” and “entrench stereotypes of disabled people as ‘helpless, hopeless, nonfunctioning and noncontributing members of society’” (holroyd, 9; quoting evan kemp jr.). these socalled compliments interpret disability through a medical lens, leading to ontological flattening, elitism, and paternalism. similarly, praising someone for “bravely” overcoming an illness entrenches “oppressive ableist wellness norms,” which signal that recovery is both a moral imperative and a personal responsibility (holroyd, 11). chronically ill people are, on this assumption, chronic failures. these insights reveal that praise can easily be weaponized against disabled people, although philosophers tend to assume that it is relatively benign. as mchugh (2024, 1) points out, “philosophers have too often assumed that praise does not require justification in the way that blame might, as it is ostensibly a nonharmful and nonpunitive practice.” what could be wrong with giving someone too much praise? as this collection shows, the harm is the perpetuation of stereotypical double binds, like the inspirational “supercrip” who triumphs over disability, in contrast to the “sadcrip” who fails to overcome. contra the conventional assumption, praise does not reliably track “moral qualities or moral regard,” but instead tends to express “stereotype-informed expectations” that enforce and entrench ableism (holroyd, 10, 8). murthy explores how oppressive double binds are also imposed on addicts. post-frankfurtians tend to view addiction through two opposing lenses: disease or choice. on the “disease model,” addicts are pitiable victims of ego-dystonic urges, whereas on the “choice model,” addicts are agents of destruction, wrecking families, negligently and willfully shattering lives. either way, addicts are menaces to society who should be disciplined and controlled for the sake of responsible, law-abiding citizens. disease modelists tend to favor hospitalization—the “humane” and “sympathetic” response—whereas choice modelists lean toward incarceration—the “tough but fair” response. murthy (4) says that this “is a distinction without a difference,” since rehabilitation and imprisonment are simply two sides of the same coin: addict segregation. in fact, many states allow addicts to be “civilly committed to rehabilitation programs in prisons,” where they are subject to carceral abuse (murthy, 19). while disease modelists may have good intentions, they disregard the rehabilitation-industrial complex’s pivotal role in western imperialism. historically, sociurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 called rehabilitative institutions, like state schools, residential schools, and mental hospitals, were far more abusive than many prions, and today, “rehabilitation” is one of the main justifications for mass incarceration and family separation. the rhetoric of “caring rehabilitation” flies in the face of generations of rehabilitative violence. this gap between theory and reality is unsurprising given that the literature on addiction is controlled by nonaddicts who have no first-hand experience with addiction-management systems. to nonaddict theorists, addiction is either an object of intellectual curiosity or a problem to be solved (by nonaddicts), not a lived experience, social position, or identity. it is either a disease or a choice, not a condition of subjugation. the disease/choice dichotomy erases the political reality of addiction as a situation of oppression, struggle, and liberation. rarely do philosophers write about the plight of addicts as victims of carceral violence, economic exploitation, sterilization, family separation, and other forms of oppression. nor do they typically investigate the intersections between addiction, ableism, racism, and other injustices, which make certain social groups especially susceptible to addict oppression. in general, the politics of addict oppression are missing from scholarly accounts of addict responsibility, indebted to frankfurt’s abstract case studies of “willing” and “unwilling” addicts. murthy is pessimistic about the possibility of revolutionizing responsibility. if responsibility is part of a system of “reactive attitudes,” as strawson believed, then it is politically inert. kind thoughts and well-meaning prayers do not change the world— political uprisings do. addict allies tend to agree that we should be kinder to addicts, but kindness alone will not improve addicts’ material circumstances. “the attitude of a prison guard can make the difference between a happy and an unhappy prisoner. but i do not want addicts to be happy prisoners. i want us to be free” (murthy, 17). the philosophical preoccupation with internal states has distracted from the urgency of political oppression and the responsibility to change the material reality. 3.b. colonialism another lasting effect of strawsonian conventionalism is cultural imperialism. ranganathan explains how western philosophy defines everything outside of its remit as nonphilosophy. a salient example is the classification of south asian philosophy, including ranganathan’s specialization of yoga philosophy, as “religion” or “spirituality,” in contrast to the west’s “secular” tradition—a tradition (allegedly) based on logic and reason rather than faith and intuition. on this taxonomy, plato’s disquisitions on god and the afterlife are part of western secularism, whereas īśvarakṛṣṇa’s naturalistic cosmology belongs to religious hinduism. likewise, bentham’s hedonism is “secular,” but buddha’s call to alleviate suffering is “religious.” this dichotomy automatically relegates south asian theories of responsibility to the category of “religion”—that is, not philosophy, not logical, and not reasonfeminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 based. hence, philosophers can learn nothing about (secular) responsibility from (“hindu”) south asian philosophy. the religification of south asian philosophy is simultaneously a form of racialization that “others” south asians. this helps to explain why south asian accounts of responsibility are, as far as i know, completely absent from the literature on responsibility, except when they are appropriated and sanitized by western thinkers. for instance, john stuart mill, who worked for the british east india company, seemingly incorporated ideas from south asian philosophy into his utilitarian theory but omitted the origins of these ideas along with their most radical aspects (ranganathan 2024, 9–10). one of these omitted ideas is the notion that responsibility is not restricted to a specific species, let alone a specific rank of that species (privileged europeans), but is widely shared across the web of life. somewhat ironically, the trenchant anthropocentrism of western philosophy has become an article of faith, something more akin to religious dogma than evidence-based belief. and this uncritical anthropocentrism lends itself to other hierarchies—ableism, ageism, racism, cissexism, and so on. meissner and smith, too, rebuke the settler-colonial belief that responsibility is a property of human beings exclusively, and a property of individual human beings rather than collectives. in indigenous environmental feminisms, responsibility is a function of “extended more-than-human kinship arrangements” comprised of “organizations of humans, other-than-human beings, spiritual and abiotic entities, and landscapes” (meissner and smith 2024, 10, 13). as such, climate change is a leading colonial threat to (relational) responsibility in that it destroys these “life-enhancing and life-affirming networks” that support responsibility (14). yet colonial scripts deny this connection by presenting climate change as an emergent, unprecedented threat rather than an ongoing colonial process that has displaced indigenous communities from their lands and subjected them to generations of insecurity and instability. as meissner and smith (1) put it, the “default climate crisis motif,” to which most philosophers subscribe, depicts climate change as “unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind.” this motif portrays climate change “in terms of emerging threats to colonizers,” rather than as a form of “‘intensified colonialism,’” with a long, violent history, “dating back to the arrival of columbus” (meissner and smith, 8, 9, 10; quoting kyle p. whyte). such historical revisionism perpetuates the mystique of “settler innocent” in a variety of ways. it “mask[s] the role of colonial power in the very creation and perpetuation of climate crisis,” absolving settlers of guilt; it “conceals that whiteness as a racial designation embodies entitlement to pillage,” giving settlers permission to continue pillaging; it frames “climate change [as] the great equalizer,” allowing settlers “to wipe the moral slate clean, to abdicate any responsibility for climate injustice” (meissner and smith, 9–10). these narratives both excuse colonizers of ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 blame for past climate injustices, and absolve them of the responsibility to change their way of life in the future. these decolonial critiques show that in colonial societies, blame and praise function as “tools of the master’s house,” used to scaffold white supremacy and imperialism. colonizers are absolved of blame for past and present climate injustices that continue to damage kinship responsibility networks. racialized minorities are blamed for “taking risks” like participating in a protest or simply existing in whitedominant spaces (see leventi). meanwhile, whiteness is used as a shield to deflect blame. white settlers can depend on stereotypes of settler innocence and purity to protect their way of life. white women can invoke the stereotype of “white feminine innocence” to evade responsibility for racism. “white women’s tears” are a powerful bulwark against blame and liability, though they reinforce the patriarchal script that white women are in need of white male protection, especially against black male “predators” (see peters). colonial conceptions of responsibility, risk, blame, and liability all weigh in favor of white supremacy. 3.c. heteropatriarchy the strawsonian orthodoxy has also contributed to a heteropatriarchal slant in moral philosophy. if the rules of responsibility are relatively fair and seamless, then we should expect people to follow them. in heteropatriarchal contexts, this expectation punishes women and gender minorities. feminist and trans activists are blamed for “unruly” behavior, while self-effacing and submissive behavior in the same groups is praised and scaffolded. this is because one of responsibility’s main functions in heteropatriarchal contexts is to police sex/gender roles. this is exemplified in the gendered division of emotional labor. villa (2024, 3) notes that in patriarchal societies, women are seen as natural “givers,” responsible for managing “men’s emotions by upholding conditions favorable to their subjective wellbeing, sometimes at the expense of their own.” women who violate the “giving” script are blamed and punished. misogynistic patterns of responsibility also have a “responsibiliz[ing]” effect. they seek to “scaffold” and enforce women’s responsibility for managing men’s emotions and submitting to patriarchal roles. by the same token, these patterns discourage men from developing “emotional intelligence” and selfregulation. when women take on patriarchal responsibilities, they participate in their own oppression, but when they refuse these responsibilities, they face misogynistic harassment and aggression. one of the disciplinary functions of patriarchal responsibility is to enforce a hierarchy of sex/gender relations, shifting the burden of emotional labor onto women. notably, misogynistic scripts differ for different women. “many black women adopt the defensive stereotype of the ‘strongblackwoman’ or ‘bullet-proof diva,’” which creates a heightened burden of emotional self-control (hawley fogg-davis; feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 quoted in villa 2024, 6). (white women’s tears are more socially acceptable). trans women, too, are expected to tolerate more harassment than cisgender women on balance. the mechanics of patriarchal “responsibilization” will differ from one woman to the next, but in each case, they aim to discipline and police the target’s emotions. while misogynistic societies burden some women with extra responsibilities, they allow others to escape responsibility altogether. a striking example of this dynamic is the rhetoric around white women’s participation in far-right extremist groups. peters (2024, 2) notes that “in the united states, white women have historically been excused from responsibility for many things that women (and men) of color are often held to higher standards for.” this includes far-right women’s participation in extremist movements. the press will sometimes downplay a white woman’s paramilitary extremism by describing her as “the girlfriend” of a male white supremacist, even if she is a leading figure in the movement in her own right. this exculpating narrative is supported by the stereotype of white femininity as “innocent” and “childlike”—scripts that do not apply equally to racialized and queer women. cisgender white women can and often do recruit these scripts to deflect blame and liability for racist transgressions, even when doing so reinforces the narrative that women need and benefit from “white male paternalism” (peters 2024, 13). far-right women, nonetheless, are willing to trade their own liberation for the right to be racist. patriarchal scripts also excuse (especially privileged) men of responsibility for patriarchal oppression. patrizio (2024, 2) notes that men’s responsibility for patriarchal violence is shifted onto women through victim-blaming scripts such as, “don’t walk home alone, and, if you must, keep your keys between your knuckles.” leventi (2024, 2) corroborates that “victims of sexual assault are often questioned about their choice of clothing during the assault” and are held responsible for other so-called unjustified risks. today, many people accept that “unfriendly men,” such as “rapists and enablers,” bear responsibility for patriarchal rape culture, but there is less certainty over whether “friendly men,” “the kinds of people who openly denounce rape culture, and even congregate in their free time to discuss the perils of toxic masculinity” (patrizio, 2), share in this responsibility. patrizio argues that friendly men do participate in the responsibility for patriarchal violence, “through and in virtue of [their] social role” as men (17), where “man” designates a specific role in a gender hierarchy. this argument helps to vindicate the increasingly popular sentiment that “men, as a matter of fact, are well positioned, socially and politically, to do something more than mere performative gestures against the culture of rape. that is . . . men enjoy a social position that renders them capable of meaningful change in this domain and are thereby responsible for doing so” (patrizio, 11). being a “friendly man,” then, is not sufficient to discharge the responsibility to address the culture of patriarchal violence. nor can any individual man fulfil this responsibility, since no individual can ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 change society. men must collectively change the social meaning of the term “man” and its role in the gender matrix. this will be difficult, however, because patriarchal societies (and their responsibility practices) punish people for violating dominant “schemes of mandatory sexed and/or gendered positions,” as haulotte (2024, 5) puts it. within the cispatriarchal gender matrix, trans people are expected to “meet others’ preconceptions of cis-womanhood [and manhood]” (5). those who do not “successfully” assimilate into a designated sex/gender role are subject to a range of punishments, “from ‘clocking,’ to exclusion, to sexual assault, rape, and murder,” because their “very existence” poses a threat to “a core matrix of cisgender society” (14). these punishments signal that to refuse gender assimilation is to be responsible for a core moral violation, a crime against civil society. while nonbinary people are obvious targets of cissexism, “even binary trans people are destined to be ‘pretenders’ in the case that they do not socially ‘pass’ as their gender identification, or ‘deceivers’ if they do” (haulotte, 14). that is, all trans people, no matter how “binary,” are doomed to be subjugated to alienating cisgender norms and perpetually blamed for noncompliance with them. this is part of a system of cisnormative double binds: “where cisgender society has recognized trans people in history, it has interpreted them primarily as criminals to be punished and secondarily as medical curiosities to be examined” (14), whether trans people are “willful criminals” or “involuntary dysphoric patients,” they are framed as a problem to be solved by cisgender authorities. by the same stroke, trans people are denied the right to claim responsibility for anti-cisnormative resistance due to a cisnormative vocabulary that translates “resistance” into “deviancy” and “alienation” into “pathology.” haulotte notes that “alienation from cisgender forms of life,” unlike “gender dysphoria,” is an affective basis for political mobilization and resistance, and thus a source of collective responsibility for trans liberation. but cisgender scripts deny trans people the right to claim responsibility as activists. these critiques collectively show that the strawsonian orthodoxy has overlooked the pivotal role that responsibility has played as a disciplinary apparatus in the experiences of oppressed people. oppressive responsibility practices send members of disenfranchised groups to prisons and psychiatric hospitals against their wills. they reward complacency and obedience to authority while punishing unruliness and resistance. they individualize and decontextualize responsibility, funneling responsibility for structural injustice away from oppressors and onto the oppressed. this critical standpoint is missing from the dominant discourses on responsibility, which come from the elite ranks of the ivory tower. if the literature has negated the problem of structural injustice in the moral ecology of responsibility, then it lacks the resources to offer a solution or path forward. what would a solution to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 oppressive responsibility practices look like? while there is no simple answer, the critiques in this volume offer a patchwork of suggestions and strategies. 4. reclaiming responsibility: solutions to oppression whereas strawsonian conventionalists aim to preserve the core of our conventional moral practices, the papers in this issue do the opposite. they call for revolutionary change and transformational justice. but they are not overly optimistic about the prospect of change. rather, the authors herein tend to emphasize both the urgent need for radical change and the revolutionary pessimism that comes from generations of political struggle with no end in sight. tremain and gorman show that responsibility theory has been detached from the revolutionary politics of critical disability theory for far too long. the medical conception of disability that prevails in the literature is ontologically, conceptually, and ethically inadequate. to rectify this shortcoming, tremain (23) calls for “a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers understand the metaphysics of disability and how they research, write, and teach about the elements claimed to constitute the ontology and ontological status of disability.” philosophers, she believes, should adopt a more politized, genealogical, and antifoundationalist approach to disability. gorman (1) similarly calls on philosophers to engage with the politics of neurodiversity and attempt “to radically reconceptualize the way we handle human difference in a wide range of domains.” murthy doesn’t trust nonaddict philosophers to handle the topic of addiction and merely asks them to stop writing about addict responsibility as an abstract case study. ranganathan, meissner, and smith seek to decolonize moral philosophy by challenging the conventional view of responsibility as the exclusive prerogative and dominion of white settlers. the settler framework excludes and racializes most of the living beings on the planet, marking them as property with economic value rather than kin with intersecting rights and responsibilities. meissner and smith emphasize that decolonial change will not come easily: “it would be naïve to expect or even hope for a sustained, broad-based geopolitical initiative on behalf of relational repair to emerge anytime soon” (19). for settlers, envisioning decolonization “may be akin to visualizing their own death,” (19) something too painful to countenance. therefore, optimism about radical change would be naïve, and yet “the struggle itself has meaning” (20). haulotte (17) echoes that “there is a kind of hopelessness associated with being transgender,” in the sense that trans people cannot assimilate seamlessly into cispatriarchal society even if they try their hardest, since the cisgender matrix is designed to exclude their very existence. but haulotte believes that this hopelessness “is revolutionary,” because it positions trans people as eternal resisters. “what trans people share with one another and with those who love them is a certain kind of freedom struggle” (haulotte, 17). like meissner and smith, haulotte thinks that there ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 is virtue to political struggle even if it does not lead to liberation in the foreseeable future, or at all. patrizio, peters, and villa show that members of privileged groups can avoid self-reflection and change by recruiting scripts about their essential innocence and benevolence. so-called feminist allies often “pay lip service to the cause for a few weeks, and then return the issue to the back burner” (patrizio, 2). such “performative gesture[s] of allyship” might garner praise in some circles, but they do not lead to meaningful change. likewise, privileged white women can use “performative vulnerability” to evade blame for racist acts ranging from racial slurs to extremist violence. in general, privileged groups can leverage excuses more easily than others. they can, for instance, invoke the classic strawsonian excuses that they “weren’t themselves,” “didn’t know better,” or “were under great strain” to get off the hook for oppressive practices. these examples of “weaponized incompetence” shift the burden of responsibility from the privileged onto the oppressed. instead of taking responsibility for themselves, privileged people can ask why oppressed people are so sensitive, uptight, or unwilling to take the time to teach them how to be more responsible. these complaints count on oppressed people to be “givers” with neverending patience for their own oppressors’ intolerance, fragility, and unwillingness to educate themselves about their own privileges. one of the aims of this issue is to send the message that we can no longer accept the self-serving excuses of privileged people, we must no longer protect their fragile egos, and we should no longer allow them to control the discourse on responsibility. privileged people’s social advantages permit them to resist, deflect, deny, and evade responsibility when it suits their interests. this makes it all the more important to hold them responsible whether they like it or not. 5. no more excuses! this mandate applies to professional philosophy, the historic sinecure of privileged white men, as much as any other profession, and it applies to responsibility theory more than any other branch of philosophy. who, after all, is going to hold people responsible for ableism, racism, sexism, and other structural injustices, if not responsibility theorists, the people whose one job it is to tell us how responsibility works, how it ought to work, and who is responsible for what? responsibility theorists, of all people, should be holding the profession to the highest possible standard of responsibility, which means refusing to accept flimsy excuses, giving uptake to oppressed people’s testimony, and embracing revolutionary change. however, this is not at all what responsibility theorists have been doing over the last sixty years, as evidenced in the persistent lack of diversity in the field, the dearth of critiques of the profession itself, and the scarcity of revolutionary ambitions in the literature. in fact, some responsibility theorists have stated that they do not have revolutionary feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 ambitions, do not want to transform the moral ecology, and aim to preserve the received wisdom of iconic philosophers, making only minor revisions. indeed, the general impression one gets from the literature is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. rather than holding the profession responsible for creating (what many authors in this volume describe as) an inaccessible, exclusionary, and oppressive culture, conventionalists have been committed to laundering the profession’s reputation and justifying its elitist biases. one example of this trend is philosophers’ enthusiasm for excusing oppressors. when philosophers aren’t ignoring oppression, they are often seen arguing that colonizers are simply the products of their time, rapists are merely doing what they’ve been taught to do, and murderous tyrants are simply following in the footsteps of their fathers, unable to do otherwise. these exonerating narratives ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the oppressor, an unfortunate victim of “epistemic and circumstantial bad luck.” to do this, we must discount the narratives and interests of the victims, ignore the long history of abolitionist and feminist activism, and discount the ruling elite’s efforts to whitewash the historical record to protect their own image. the academic bias in favor of the elite is a form of structural gaslighting that removes oppressed people’s experiential knowledge from the “hermetical resources” of their time. it paints oppressed people as passive victims rather than knowledge-producers with critical perspectives and subcultural knowledges, including privileged standpoints on responsibility for oppression. the tendency to excuse historic wrongdoers also lets modern-day oppressors off the hook whenever their transgressions aren’t epic. after all, if colonizers weren’t responsible for genocide, then how can we hope to hold contemporary philosophers responsible for comparatively minor offenses such as hiring discrimination or workplace harassment, let alone collective harms like participation in colonialism and patriarchal violence? the bar has been set so low that modern-day elites can get away with almost anything. this is the upshot of generations of exclusionary hiring, misplaced sympathy, historical revisionism, and hero worship. meanwhile, oppressed people are offered the gift of condescending pity and paternalistic care. the stubborn paternalism of moral philosophy is an inevitable result of the lack of diversity in the field. privileged people are consistently trying to solve the (supposed) problems of oppressed people on their behalf. this leads to savior complexes, bad advice, victim blaming, gaslighting, and other affronts. philosophy will continue to produce conservative, reductive, and stigmatizing narratives about oppressed people’s responsibility (or lack thereof) until philosophers commit to meaningful change. lip service, performative allyship, and other hollow gestures of solidarity will not suffice. oppressed people must be respected as the authors of our own narratives and trusted with the responsibility of testifying to our own experiences. in short, the principle of “nothing about us without us” should prevail in ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 responsibility theory. any claims about oppressed people’s responsibility should come from us. this volume is a call to action to hold philosophers to a higher standard, to move the profession away from conventionalism toward revolutionary politics, and to promote justice and universal accessibility. responsibility theory is the perfect place to begin this transformation, as the practice of responsibility is also the practice of demanding answers, accountability, and change. if you believe in this project, please share this issue widely and connect with me and the included authors to build a broader network of intersectional solidarity and liberation. article breakdown: 1. jules holroyd: the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practicedependent theories of moral responsibility holroyd argues that practice-dependent theories of responsibility, which appeal to our real-world responsibility practices to justify the conditions of holding each other responsible, must grapple with the problem of structural injustices in our responsibility practices (e.g., ableism, fatphobia, toxic positivity). therefore, the typical advice to recalibrate our practices in light of new evidence will not suffice. we should also adopt two “supplementary norms”: (1) attending to the existence of oppressive norms in our social practices, and (2) avoiding and resisting those norms. whereas responsibility theorists have traditionally focused on blame, holroyd examines praise, particularly its role in expressing stereotypical expectations that entrench oppression. 2. hannah mchugh: a taxonomy of oppressive praise mchugh, too, analyzes the role of praise in producing and reproducing oppressive structures. she notes that praise has been overlooked and undertheorized in philosophy, and this omission has allowed philosophers to ignore the oppressive dimensions of praise, including both the overattribution and the underattribution of praise in ways that entrench systems of oppression. for example, billionaires are sometimes praised for giving a small fraction of their wealth to charity, whereas an oppressed person may be denied praise for a lifetime of hard work. mchugh offers insight into the many ways that praise can “misfire” in oppressive contexts. 3. shelley tremain: when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability tremain argues that responsibility theorists, including feminists, have reified disability as a natural and deleterious characteristic of individuals in their framing of responsibility as a personal capacity, against which nonresponsibility emerges as a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 personal deficiency or pathology. this naturalizing lens is at odds with tremain’s critical analysis of disability as an apparatus of power that advances a range of eugenic goals, including the exclusion of disabled people from the profession of philosophy. the ableist dimensions of the responsibility system have been obfuscated by the prevailing medical conception of nonresponsibility as impairment. 4. august gorman: against neuronormativity in moral responsibility gorman similarly argues that the literature on responsibility relies on a theoretical ideal of “normal” or “archetypal” agency, against which nonresponsibility is defined as nonneurotypicality. this neuronormative lens stigmatizes neurodivergent people, who are positioned as archetypal cases of nonresponsible agents, in need of treatment and management. unsolicited offers of “help” from neurotypical people may seem compassionate, but they are, in fact, horribly patronizing. the theoretical and practical errors in the literature are due to a general dismissal of the neurodiversity movement. 5. t. virgil murthy: against arguing about addict agency murthy observes that philosophers tend to view addiction through two competing lenses: either addiction is a choice for which one is responsible, or it is a disease over which one has no control. these theoretical questions about addict agency divert attention from the reality of addict oppression. they also foreclose the possibility of meaningful change. disease modelists tend to favor rehabilitation for addicts, whereas choice modelists lean toward incarceration; but this is a distinction without a difference, insofar as rehabilitation can be, and often is, as punitive as imprisonment and sometimes takes place in prison. murthy doubts that nonaddict philosophers can address addiction with the requisite sensitivity and insight, and merely asks that they stop speculating about addiction on the basis of abstract case studies and thought experiments. 6. shyam ranganathan: reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis ranganathan highlights that south asian perspectives on responsibility have been erased from the literature by a colonialist taxonomy that defines “philosophy” as western secularism while labeling south asian thought as “religious hinduism,”— that is, not philosophy. on this taxonomy, plato’s theological arguments are “philosophy” whereas īśvarakṛṣṇa’s naturalistic cosmology is “religion.” this distinction makes it impossible to see south asian thought as relevant to the philosophy of responsibility (except when it has been appropriated and anglicized by western philosophers). ranganathan explains that in his specialization of yoga philosophy, responsibility is drawn much more broadly than in the western tradition, ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 extending beyond human beings to encompass more-than-human animals, interspecies relationships, and celestial objects like the earth. 7. shelbi nahwilet meissner and andrew frederick smith: climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse meissner and smith, too, contest the settler-colonial demarcation of responsibility as a capacity of (certain) human beings exclusively and of isolated individuals rather than interconnected networks. in indigenous environmental feminisms, responsibility emerges from “richly interweaving networks . . . composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements” (1). responsibility, then, is relational and extended. on this decolonial framework, climate injustice is a leading colonial threat to (the extended kinship networks of) responsibility, and this crisis will persist as long as settlers continue to view responsibility in anthropocentric, individualistic, and presentist (historically detached) terms. meissner and smith are not optimistic about the prospect of radical change, but they believe that anticolonial struggle has value in its own right. 8. katherine villa: affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation villa disputes the popular thesis that emotion regulation is an ideal tool for enhancing and scaffolding responsible agency. she argues that the norms governing emotion regulation do not reliably enhance agency since they often function to entrench misogynistic relations. for example, women are encouraged to take responsibility for the “duty” of controlling their emotions in response to misogynistic harassment, as well as reevaluating their beliefs, taking fewer “risks,” and so on. in other words, women are “responsibilized” into a submissive demeanor. these same emotion-regulation norms allow men to avoid the responsibility of self-reflection and change. hence, the idealistic view of emotion regulation as a tool of self-help and selfactualization facilitates an unfair distribution of emotional labor in heteropatriarchal cultures. 9. katie peters: not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization peters uses an intersectional black feminist lens to explore how white women enlist narratives of victimhood and innocence to evade blame and liability, with a focus on far-right extremists. one popular narrative says that white women can’t be held responsible for far-right extremism because they are themselves victims of (patriarchal) oppression. another popular narrative says that white women can’t be held responsible for far-right extremism because they are under the control of men, not their own agency. both narratives let white women off the hook for racist violence feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 while entrenching white masculine paternalism. peters argues that holding white women responsible for their racism can be a feminist response that underscores the social dimensions of power relations and distributes the benefits and burdens of responsibility more fairly. 10. marianna leventi: victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims leventi explains that victim blaming is a pervasive phenomenon that entrenches oppression. traditionally, philosophers have been preoccupied with questions of moral luck, competence, and control in abstraction from the structural conditions that support victim blaming. in unequal societies, oppressed people are blamed for the consequences of structural injustices like financial crises, racial incarceration, and sexual assault. often, victim-blaming narratives accuse the victim of taking “undue risks,” such as “being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (a black activist might be blamed for participating in a protest; a woman night my blamed for walking through a park at night). leventi argues that not only are these “risky” activities not blameworthy, but they may be praiseworthy insofar as they challenge oppressive norms. notably, philosophers have applauded risk-taking in celebrities like (the notoriously problematic artist) paul gauguin while ignoring the mundane risktaking of ordinary folks. 11. ross patrizio: “friendly” men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape patrizio defends andrea dworkin’s famous claim that the only way to abolish patriarchal rape culture is for men to take responsibility for their roles in that culture. while most people would agree that “unfriendly men,” such as rapists and enablers, share in the responsibility for rape culture, there is less agreement over what responsibility, if any, “friendly men” should shoulder. patrizio argues that friendly men do share in the responsibility for patriarchal rape culture in virtue of their social role as “men,” a “mega” social role that inflects more local social roles (e.g., parent, worker) and which occupies a privileged place in the heteropatriarchal gender matrix. men in essence, then, share a collective responsibility to change the meaning of the term “man” and its relationship to systems of heteropatriarchal oppression, and they cannot appeal to empty gestures of allyship (like posting feminist memes online) to discharge this responsibility. 12. penelope haulotte: gender dysphoria for critical theory haulotte illuminates the cisnormative aspects of the responsibility system. she notes that the diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” frames trans existence as a personal problem that needs to be cured and managed. this lens erases the political reality of cisnormative oppression and its impact on trans subjects, including (in marxist terms) ciurria – revolutionizing responsibility: intersecting feminist perspectives published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 alienation due to cisgender domination. the medical model holds trans people responsible to “successfully transition” into the “right body” and “correct mindset.” this leaves no room to take responsibility for resisting cisnormaitve oppression through one’s choices, actions, and very existence as a social misfit. the medical gaze, as such, imposes a responsibility of assimilation onto trans people. at the same time, cisnormativity society makes “successful” assimilation impossible given that cisnormativity is essentially antitrans. this creates an impossible double bind for trans people. 13. jill b. delston: do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics delston argues that virtue ethics is ill-equipped to enhance responsible character (and virtue in general) because its “scaffolding” methods are not empirically supported. while caregivers often give children virtue-ethical advice such as “be nice” and “be good,” there is evidence that these recommendations are harmful because they decrease motivation, persistence, self-worth, and other virtues. character appraisals (e.g., “sally is nice”) are especially detrimental to girls, who are less likely to be praised for masculine-coded traits like “genius” and “intelligence,” and more likely to receive whole-person praise and blame in general. neglecting the gendered dimensions of virtue-ethical advice allows gender disparities to continue. delston recommends that we abandon character appraisals in favor of behavior appraisals that reward good deeds. this shift would produce a more equitable, less sexist system of responsibilization and responsibility-holding. references delston, j. b. 2024. “do virtue ethicists parent poorly? the threat of developmental psychology for moral education and responsibility in virtue ethics.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 13. frankfurt, harry g. 1971. “freedom of the will and the concept of a person.” journal of philosophy 68, no. 1 (january 14): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024717. gorman, august. 2024. “against neuronormativity in moral responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 4. haulotte, penelope. 2024. “gender dysphoria for critical theory.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 12. holroyd, jules. 2024. “the distortions of oppressive praise: challenges for practicedependent theories of moral responsibility.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 1. leventi, marianna. 2024. “victim blaming, justified risks, and imperfect victims.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 10. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, introduction published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 mchugh, hannah. 2024. “a taxonomy of oppressive praise.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 2. meissner, shelbi nahwilet, and andrew frederick smith. 2024. “climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 7. murthy, t. virgil. 2024. “against arguing about addict agency.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 5. patrizio, ross. 2024. “‘friendly’ men and social roles: collective responsibility for a culture of rape.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 11. peters, katie. 2024. “not my fault: far-right women and the exculpatory narratives of misogyny and infantilization.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 9. ranganathan, shyam. 2024. “reason and solidarity with persons against white supremacy and irresponsibility: a south asian analysis.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 6. strawson, p. f. 1962. “freedom and resentment.” proceedings of the british academy 48:187–211. tremain, shelley lynn. 2024. “when moral responsibility theory met my philosophy of disability.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 3. villa, katherine. 2024. “affective injustice and responsibility for emotion regulation.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 8. mich ciurria (she/they) is a queer, gender-variant, disabled philosopher who works on marxist feminist philosophy and critical disability theory. she completed her phd at york university in toronto and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at washington university in st. louis and the university of new south wales, sydney. they are the author of an intersectional feminist theory of moral responsibility (routledge, 2019) and a regular contributor to biopolitical philosophy. they have published in such venues as the bloomsbury guide to philosophy of disability, the journal of applied philosophy, and feminist philosophy quarterly. 101200 ciurria title page 101200 ciurria final format climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse feminist philosophy quarterly volume 10 | issue 1/2 article 7 recommended citation meissner, shelbi nahwilet, and andrew frederick smith. 2024. “climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse.” feminist philosophy quarterly 10 (1/2). article 7. 2024 climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse shelbi nahwilet meissner university of maryland snmeiss@umd.edu andrew frederick smith drexel university afs52@drexel.edu meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 1 climate crisis as relational crisis: centering indigenous feminist conceptions of responsibility in environmental discourse shelbi nahwilet meissner, andrew frederick smith abstract it is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. the threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. in this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. by centering indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-thanhuman kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of indigenous lands and lives. more pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change. keywords: climate change, environmental philosophy, kinship, indigenous feminisms, relationality feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 2 “what must be understood then is that the aboriginal request to have our sovereignty respected is really a request to be responsible. i do not know of anywhere else in history where a group of people have to fight so hard just to be responsible.” —patricia monture-angus (1999) “how do we relate well in this place without that inherently eliminatory dreaming?” —kim tallbear (2019) 1. introduction both in scholarly and public environmental discourse, climate change is typically cast as a newly emergent, anomalous enemy. for the sake of advanced civilization and cherished modern institutions, each of us must join the ranks of those mobilizing against it. exemption is not an option, for all of us are bound to be adversely affected by potentially catastrophic conditions. but what if climate change is no enemy? imagine instead, as zoe todd does with respect to fossil fuels, that even damaging climatological events “are a paradoxical kind of kin” (2017, 104).1 imagine that these events are the expected and deeply tragic outcome of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against indigenous lands and lives. imagine, finally, that the crisis climate change embodies is widely misrepresented by what we call the default climate crisis motif. extended more-than-human kinship arrangements—sustained by richly interweaving networks of life-enhancing and life-affirming responsibilities that promote trust, respect, and reciprocity—are not peripheral. their disruption is at its root. climate crisis is relational crisis. it is a consequence of the abdication among colonizers of these responsibilities and ongoing colonial attempts to eliminate and debilitate indigenous communities devoted to living responsibly. this is our central claim. to develop our argument in support of this claim, we first clarify what we mean when we refer to the default climate crisis motif. the default motif currently dominates scholarly research on and public discussion of climate change. ultimately, we will see, it perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that reinforce accelerating climate change and attending 1 ancient peat bogs form the basis for coal. oil and natural gas come from ancient phytoplankton. todd notes that “these oily materials are not, in and of themselves, violent or dangerous. rather, the ways that they are weaponised through petrocapitalist extraction and production turn them into settler-colonial-industrialcapitalist contaminants and pollutants” (2017, 107). this also is the case for climactic phenomena. meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 3 injustices. it supports neither just nor practicable survival strategies, not only for those most harmed by climate change but for anyone. by centering indigenous feminist environmental discourses, the deeply and radically relational roots of climate crisis emerge into sharp view, as do transformative visions for the resurgence of indigenized networks of responsibilities. these visions draw attention to the critical need to dismantle what esme murdock calls the terrortories that embody and enable colonialism, particularly settler colonialism. terrortories are destructive of the “lands, bodies, and psyches” of indigenous peoples (murdock 2022b, 123), but they do not and cannot spare colonizers either. indeed, as a matter of both justice and prudence, colonizers do well, in julia gibson’s words, to “give way” (2020, 216) in scholarship and beyond to discursive infrastructures that foreground caregiving and responsible relations among human and other-thanhuman relatives. that which proponents of the default motif too often see as beside the point for addressing climate crisis is instead essential. 2. the default climate crisis motif surveying recent publications and popular media coverage of contemporary climate issues, we have developed the following synopsis of the default motif. this synopsis reflects the common threads we see in english-language public discourse regarding climate issues. taxonomically, the default motif specifies four distinct but overlapping threats, four core characteristics that span these threats, and three noteworthy interventions to address the core characteristics and thereby minimize the threats. 2.1. the four threats the four threats infrequently appear within the scope of any single text. they instead are better regarded as specifiable tiles of a singular mosaic comprising the default motif. broadly construed, the most prominent threat is elemental in orientation. typically, those who explicate and defend the elemental threat attend primarily to the damaging socioecological effects of carbon dioxide emissions. namely, economic actors the world over are quickly depleting the “global carbon budget” (friedlingstein et al. 2022) that serves as the ultimate baseline for determining the juncture at which time has run out to avert the worst effects of climate change. this is often specified as the juncture at which a global increase of 2°c beyond preindustrial temperature levels is expected to be reached. as we proceed inexorably toward this limit, we face a stark “emissions gap” (unep 2021) between current global carbon outputs and the reduction in and sequestration of outputs, perhaps as much as a gigaton (flannery 2015), required to effectively mitigate the “compounding and cascading disasters, from wildfires to floods to uncontrolled migrations, droughts and the spread of more deadly diseases. one feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 4 mega-crisis is difficult enough, but serial crises on this scale will challenge the coping abilities of even the wealthiest and most resilient societies,” states bryan williston (2021, 3). add the accelerating rate of habitat destruction; massive biodiversity loss and the impending collapse of marine and terrestrial food webs; widespread soil salinization and erosion; the global dependence on nonrenewable fuels; the loss of fresh, potable water; toxic chemical proliferation; and the devastation of ecosystems by invasive species and the situation appears dire indeed. each phenomenon represents a ticking time bomb all its own, but they all are occurring at once with climate change representing a dangerous threat multiplier. “these crises are not ‘possible’ or ‘impending’—they are well underway and will continue to worsen,” aric mcbay emphasizes. “the only uncertainty is how fast, and thus how long our window for action is” (2011, 49). the second threat highlighted within the default motif addresses the loss of the specifiable form of socioeconomic organization commonly referred to as civilization. ross gelbspan forecasts that the magnitude of the disruptions resulting from climate crisis “would mean that everything our civilization has accomplished to this point would become basically meaningless” (1998, 173). williston contends that the vast expansion of the human population, emergence of hierarchically organized social structures, rise of complex religions and governmental institutions, and “exponential growth” of agricultural and military technologies were all possible “because by and large humanity could, finally, forget about the damn weather!” (2021, 55). all are now at risk. addressing climate crisis is hereby indispensable to “rescue our civilization,” al gore declares (2009, 15; see also biden 2021). thom hartmann (2021) adds that “even fossil fuel billionaires and their paid shills can no longer deny” that the prevailing questions we now face are how bad “our current climate emergency” will become and “whether we’ll let modern human civilization as we know it continue or disintegrate.” naomi klein laments in turn that “we are seeing the beginnings of the era of climate barbarism” (quoted in hanman 2019). “all of us need to act on the climate emergency,” she proclaims (quoted in atherton 2021). the supposed storms of our grandchildren or our children are occurring now, which surely does affect both current and future options for establishing socioeconomic (and political) conditions favorable to adaptation and mitigation. third is the existential threat. related to the expectation of loss of conditions we hold dear, climate crisis generates crippling melancholy, disorientation, anxiety, grief, and despair (filocamo 2020; ojala et al. 2021). we are losing the only home we have ever known, earth of the holocene epoch (mckibben 2010). we are bewildered by “the mess we have made” (williston 2021, 7). even the threat of human extirpation looms as we enter a sixth mass extinction event. things cannot and must not continue meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 5 as they are, but we nevertheless struggle to grasp the new realities climate crisis has introduced. the final threat of the default motif is moral in character. material, socioeconomic, and existential qualities of climate crisis are accompanied by a crisis of values. for williston (2021, 58), the prospects for ongoing moral progress are at stake. extreme resource scarcity, for example, is bound to strain to the breaking point “broadly liberal-democratic” norms, including toleration, compassion, justice, and open-mindedness. paul hawken (2021, 23) specifies that while multiple forms of extractivism—taking, damming, enslaving, fracking, drilling, poisoning, burning, cutting, killing—are the proximate causes of the climate crisis, its ultimate cause is social injustice that ongoing extractivism will only exacerbate. sally weintrobe (2021, 1) portends a disruption of a “rigid psychological mindset” that underlies an ethos of human exceptionalism reinforced by the great acceleration. weintrobe (2021, 4) is adamant that this mindset must go, but she doubts its loss heralds better times ahead as climate change is well and truly taking hold. 2.2. the core characteristics the four threats share an underlying set of core characteristics. although the conceptual lineage of the default motif dates back much further, these characteristics coalesced after world war ii as environmental discourses were reshaped within western scholarship by the risk of nuclear aggression and increasing worries of global social collapse resulting from exponential population growth, resource exhaustion, and ecological overshoot (cassegård and thörn 2018). but it is not until quite recently that the language of climate change morphed definitively into that of climate crisis. linguistic experts suggest that coinciding journalistic terminological choices are at least partially the result of formerly failing to accurately convey the magnitude of the threat humanity faces with respect to climactic disruptions (visram 2021). from this vantage point, the default motif is intended to be both epistemically and strategically potent. according to its proponents, both scholarly and journalistic, it gets right what we are experiencing. it also galvanizes people’s attention and triggers swifter shifts in both policy and practice (carrington 2019; zak 2019). both scholars and journalists thus intend to help their audiences to recognize and normalize the four most prominent characteristics of climate crisis: the unprecedentedness of the global threat and the demand for urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that limit or even erase the future of all humankind. each of these characteristics has received sustained scholarly attention. the material we highlight here is intended to be illustrative rather than comprehensive. global climate change is regarded as a wholly new sort of crisis facing humanity, one with almost unimaginably dire consequences of unprecedented scale and scope. “we are living in an era of unprecedented anthropogenic change,” states feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 6 benjamin lowe. “never before has a single species wielded so much power to shape the world and affect all forms of life” (2019, 479).2 having hit anthrohistorically extreme atmospheric carbon and methane concentrations that threaten to raise global temperatures beyond what large mammals and many other life forms can sustain (spratt and dunlop 2018), we have arrived at a point “unlike any other in all of human history,” gore (2009, 16) declares. with both airborne and marine oxygen levels in steep decline, williston (2021, 28) insists that not a single “generation has ever had to deal with anything like it.” witnessing precipitating levels of biodepletion and crop yield decline, both of which herald the imminent collapse of both marine and terrestrial food webs, we have reached “the end of our tether, and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break,” james lovelock (2006, 146) concludes. ted stolze delineates what he calls the urgency argument as follows: one should urgently act to halt any grave threat posing serious harm to others. crossing any of nine large-scale planetary tipping points would be a grave threat posing serious harm to others.3 dangerous climate change will result from crossing at least one of the nine planetary boundaries. since dangerous climate change is caused by releasing excessive greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere ( 350 ppm co2), humanity should urgently act decisively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the earth’s atmosphere to a safe target (<350 ppm co2) (stolze 2014, 137–38). the already narrow window of opportunity to adhere to the urgency argument is quickly growing narrower (gillespie 2019, 4). the fact that climate crisis is unfolding faster than most high-profile scientific projections has only “added shrillness to pleas of urgency,” notes eileen crist (2007, 31). “the evidence coming in from the watchers around the world brings news of an imminent shift in climate towards one that can easily be described as hell,” lovelock (2006, 147) warns, “so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.” this is apocalyptic thinking in perhaps its most crystalized form. crist (2007, 47) indicates that such thinking combines three nested narratives pertaining to the timing, nature, and consequences of the unabated continuation of carbon dioxide emissions: (1) a global-level nearto medium-term 2 this claim is false on its face. we can thank the work of cyanobacteria beginning some 2.5 billion years ago for triggering the development of the oxygen-rich atmosphere that sustains each of us and billions of fellow organisms today. 3 the nine planetary tipping points include (1) destruction of the amazon rainforest; (2) loss of arctic sea ice and related albedo; (3) slowing of atlantic meridional overturning circulation; (4) decline of boreal forests; (5) coral reef die-off; (6) thawing permafrost; and the erosion of the (7) greenland ice sheet, (8) west antarctic ice sheet, and (9) wilkes basin ice in east antarctica. meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 7 catastrophe (2) involving interconnected socioecological breakdowns that are bound adversely to affect everyone (3) with an increasing chance of untold and unequaled death and suffering (see also methmann and rothe 2012; cafaro and primack 2014). audra mitchell (2016) makes note of accumulating references to the proposition that climate crisis may well lead to human extinction within a matter of generations. these ideas have filtered not just throughout academic scholarship but also into mainstream media coverage and consciousness (jamail 2013). strategically, these considerations underscore the importance for all humanity together to prioritize pulling back from the brink—avoiding, or at least averting the worst effects of, apocalypse. but apocalyptic thinking also tends to coincide with doomism, or emotional and political disengagement resulting from the presumed strong possibility of the planet’s nearto medium-term demise as a goldilocks zone for humans and countless fellow species (wallace-wells 2017). some doomists perpetuate the notion that apocalypse portends an end to the future of all humankind. others hint that all is not inevitably lost, even if we must acknowledge how little we have done to address the magnitude of the risk humanity faces—particularly given the continued pursuit of economic growth through unbridled extractivism and fossil fuel burning. “our negligence has catapulted climate change from an existential challenge to the dire crisis it is now,” christina figueres and tom rivett-carnac (2020, xvii) proclaim. being in a position not merely to shape our future but to have a future demands “a maturation of humanity” (2020, xxi). we are very late to the game, but that does not excuse our continued inaction (flannery 2015). all of us are, and must be, in this together. williston acknowledges concerns with the widespread use of the universal we. yet he focuses solely on arguments by critics who worry that proponents of anthropocene discourses, which overlap substantially with the default motif, seemingly assign equal blame across all humanity for the climate crisis. this is not so, williston contends. he adds that the universal we has the benefit of focusing our collective attention “on the challenges of the species as a whole.” this highlights that “nobody will be able to sidestep the issue altogether. . . . most people generally appreciate both the generality of the threat and the pressures it will put on our most important values” (2021, 66). we, all of us, compose “homo crisis” (2021, 52–57) and it is high time we recognize and counteract this. 2.3. the default interventions williston’s preferred response to climate crisis, or at least the prerequisite he identifies for effectively responding to it, is to embrace bewilderment. particularly if evoked on a large scale, such an approach can facilitate “a form of existential therapy and a path to moral clarity” (2021, 15) that can jolt us out of our collective lethargy. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 8 climate crisis thus offers an opportunity to unseat ingrained thought patterns and institutional rigidities (gillespie 2019, 20). a more commonly proposed intervention is to engage in emergency management. proponents of this approach focus on the overwhelming importance of protecting a safe climate space within which humans (and other beings, notably including our sources of food) can continue securely and comfortably to live (rockström et al. 2009; kummu et al. 2021). julia gibson (2021) highlights in a critique that this entails striving not merely to pull back from the brink but actively to reinstate environmental conditions that roughly mirror those of the past. most immediately, this requires an all-hands-on-deck effort to prevent surpassing the critical threshold of 2°c average global heating (steffen et al. 2018). over the longer term, it necessitates strict political and economic proscription of extractivist and consumerist activities that push against the nine planetary boundaries. sustainable development, or what is perhaps more fittingly called sustainable industrialism, has a key role to play if we are to “construct a holocene-like world—minus the fossil fuels, of course— even as the sun sets on that epoch,” states williston. “such furious and conscientious building guarantees us nothing, but, as far as i can see, there is no more morally defensible way forward” (2021, 59). yet if there can be no return to past environmental conditions, if climate crisis calls for prioritizing adaptation along with mitigation, it is critical to mobilize for resilience. for proponents of this response, we already are imperceptibly in end times (kareiva and marvier 2012; vogel 2015). surpassing 2°c average global warming is all but inevitable, so we must deemphasize restoration in favor pursuing functional integrity of socioecological systems under increasingly harsh environmental conditions (light 2012; sandler 2012). beyond bewilderment, this entails embracing uncertainty in a weirding world (chandler 2019). it also requires prioritizing adaptation within vulnerable regions worldwide—in part by moving away from an institutionally centralized response to climate crisis and toward prioritizing local knowledges, notably including indigenous ecological knowledges (ipcc 2022). such a move is optimal for resilience given that indigenous peoples have a demonstrated track records for resourcefulness and ecological sensitivity (chandler and reid 2018; lindroth and sinevaara-niskanen 2018). 3. indigenous feminist critiques of the default motif: the role of responsibility properly contextualized, each intervention offered within the default motif has some merit. we are not dismissing them out of hand. wittingly or not, though, the default motif frames climate crisis within a selective history that disregards the experiences and futurities of indigenous peoples. climate crisis is treated almost exclusively in terms of emerging threats to colonizers—and those who have benefitted from legacies of colonization—that long ago were forced on indigenous meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 9 peoples (davis and todd 2017; fishel and wilcox 2017; rothe 2020).4 indigenous scholars and activists stress instead that climate change and ecological devastation are directly linked to colonialism and its socioeconomic reverberations, including the emergence of the settler-colonial state, capitalism, and industrialism (agathangelou 2017; vergès 2017; pulido 2018). framed as such, climate crisis as it is experienced by indigenous communities today is a manifestation of what kyle whyte calls “intensified colonialism” (2017a, 154; see also watt-cloutier 2015). it is déjà vu: the repetition, if nevertheless accentuated in global scope and scale, of what indigenous communities long have endured. this includes drastic relocation-based climate disruptions, economic collapse, loss of relatives both human and other-than-human, and cultural disintegration (whyte 2018, 226). 3.1. criticisms of the core characteristics recall that, as framed within the default motif, the core characteristics of climate crisis constitute the unprecedented character of the threat, which calls for urgent action to avert or at least lessen the effects of apocalyptic conditions that will limit or altogether erase the future of all humankind. carl cassegård and håkan thörn (2017) assert that cop 15 in 2009 marked something of a watershed among indigenous scholars and activists in their responses to unprecedentedness. indigenous peoples worldwide, allied with communities from across the global south, mobilized against the colonial and north-centric focus of climate crisis. with climate-related disasters already routinely occurring throughout the global south and with indigenous communities worldwide experiencing these very disasters beginning centuries ago, indigenous scholars and activists became increasingly vocal in their demands for justice for already unfolding catastrophes that they had been resisting since the dawn of colonialism. it was high time to end the commonplace, singleminded fixation on fears regarding emerging disasters within the global north—with considerations of responsibility focusing principally on maintaining north-centric material infrastructures and economies (pulido 2012; chatterton, featherstone, and routledge 2013; swyngedouw 2013). these considerations dovetail with whyte’s concerns about how urgency is framed within the default motif. for while harmful consequences to the lives and lifeways of those who already are sacrificed may be viewed as unfortunate, these 4 the 2022 ipcc report may seem at first glance to be a notable exception, given its call to prioritize local knowledges. but even here colonization is treated as an afterthought, mentioned as a driver of vulnerability to climate change—rather than a driver of climate change—only in passing in a single footnote. as such, it too risks being read as suggesting that the central importance of local knowledges is their use by colonizers to promote their own survival of evolving environmental conditions. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 10 consequences nevertheless routinely are treated as acceptable. urgency hereby is leveraged to advance colonial power, even as those who benefit claim to act with the best of intentions. as with unprecedentedness, appeals to urgency mask the role of colonial power in the very creation and perpetuation of climate crisis. stressing urgency sanctions methods for addressing climate crisis that suspend or ignore concerns about climate justice, including “devastating impacts on indigenous peoples across ancestral, living, and emerging generations” (whyte 2021a, 52). it “serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice,” states tema okun (2022). even as they voice concerns about equity and inclusion, it is not uncommon for renewable energy firms and the state actors that support them to silence indigenous communities by failing to garner or even seek free, prior, and informed consent (howe 2019; callison 2021; barragan-contreras 2022). urgency so construed thus underpins indexing responsibility foremost to protecting colonizers’ bottom line, once again at the expense of extended more-than-human kinship arrangements and the indigenous communities that fight to sustain and protect them. it serves as a red herring that obscures the root causes of climate injustice. with respect to apocalypse, indigenous critiques of the default motif accentuate that climate crisis is a historical phenomenon that continues to unfold. it is neither an impending event nor an event that only recently has been underway. there is no pulling indigenous worlds back from the brink (gibson and whyte 2022; see also gross 2002, 2014). it is too late. none has escaped profound disruptions compared to how indigenous ancestors lived prior to colonization. through determined resistance and resurgence, existing indigenous communities may be surviving catastrophe. but whyte (2017b, 2018) aptly describes current conditions as nothing less than an ancestral dystopia, underscoring that indigenous peoples today endure postapocalyptic colonial realities dating back to the arrival of columbus (see also dillon 2012; baldy 2014; todd 2016). settler colonialism in particular is apocalyptic insofar as it attempts to supplant and permanently destroy indigenous worlds by colonizing indigenous lands and bodies (murdock 2022b, 106). robin kimmerer describes the displacement of her potawatomi ancestors from the great lakes region in the 1830s itself as constitutive of climate crisis. being severed from numerous long-standing relationships with species and ecosystems and having to build them anew in unfamiliar climate zones, first in kansas and then in oklahoma, placed her ancestors “in a situation of forced climate change adaptation” (kimmerer 2014; see also maldonado et al. 2013). such experiences are routinely written out of existence within colonizer culture (o’brien 2010; rifkin 2017). this frame disrupts the eschatological arc of what april anson (2017) calls “settler apocalypticism.” the adverse effects of climate change do not begin—and they do not gain world-historical significance—only when they affect colonizers. within a racialized framework, apocalypticism is the expression of white dread of meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 11 facing that which black, brown, and indigenous communities already routinely experience: dispossession, displacement, compromised security, world collapse. wittingly or not, apocalypticism likewise conceals that whiteness as a racial designation embodies entitlement to pillage (or to benefit from the pillage of) others’ lives and lands. particularly if climate crisis is “the great equalizer” (gibson 2020, 211; see also hsu and yazell 2019), if we are all in this together, it would not do to dwell on the ways in which the privileged are culpable for and continue to benefit from structures of domination. conveniently for colonizers, this serves to wipe the moral slate clean, to abdicate any responsibility for climate injustice (gergan, smith, and vasudevan 2020). these experiences, and the default motif more generally, are thus products of a logic of erasure. this logic is reflected in countless institutions that support a sort of “collective amnesia” (sullivan and tuana 2007, 4) among colonizers, which promotes obliviousness to the worlds of indigenous communities—and to structures that (sometimes) subtly but (always) substantively privilege colonizers’ lives and lifeways. the outsized vulnerability of many indigenous communities to climate threats itself is the result of colonizers’ intent to eliminate these communities’ living legacies of resistance and resilience (whyte, talley, and gibson 2019; whyte 2021a). the worlds that already have unraveled, the brinks that already have been transgressed, and the ancestral dystopias that persist are erased: each is supplanted in turn by means of a logic associated with the doctrine of discovery, which legitimizes treating colonizers’ narratives alone as authoritative and as accurate depictions of reality. this is yet another instance of colonizers’ dread becoming emblematic of the human experience. unacknowledged is that the antecedents for these experiences are better understood as “reverberations” among colonizers of the “seismic shockwave” resulting from the colonial violence unleashed by their own ancestors (davis and todd 2017, 774). again, current climatological phenomena are nothing other than an expected outcome, a rebound effect, of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against indigenous lands and lives. we return, lastly, to the problems of scope that arise from the presumption of a universal human temporality. if the claims made by proponents of the default motif are to be believed, conditions humanity writ large faced in the past were sufficiently stable to try our best to sustain or recover. they also were sufficiently just, or at least harbored structural bases to support the pursuit of justice in response to past environmental harms (coulthard 2014; murdock 2022a). this narrative exemplifies what eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012) describe as the settler move to innocence. it also is a function, states gibson (2021, 6), of “the limited histories and futurities” around which the default motif is oriented. to characterize climate crisis in this manner “overlooks the reality that the current state of affairs is not, in fact, a temporal punctuation outside of the norm” (gibson 2021, 13). understanding climate feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 12 change instead as intensified colonialism highlights that the default motif “succeeds in collapsing time, humanity, and the environment in ways that many have argued underlie and further colonial lifeways” (gibson 2021, 12; see also yusoff 2018).5 “when humanity wears a problematically narrow range of faces, so too do the denizens of future worlds,” assert gibson and whyte (2022, 480). the same applies to the denizens of worlds present and past. what we are responsible for sustaining and protecting is assumed, not discussed. what we must transform, let alone jettison, gets scant attention except to the extent that it supports stepping back from an impending brink, preventing an imminent temporal rupture from which there can be no turning back. 3.2. relationality, responsibility, and the default motif’s four threats still, climate crisis is unfolding, even if at root it is not of the character proponents of the default motif portray. for many indigenous peoples, climate crisis is principally relational. with respect to the four threats, what colonizers identify as elemental, associated with unchecked carbon dioxide emissions, more basically reflects a multidimensional breakdown of both genealogical and emergent kinship arrangements typified by trust, respect, and reciprocity. it is these arrangements that permit communities ably to respond and adapt to constant, ongoing change—both expected and unexpected. those concerned for the fate of civilization fail to recognize that the concept today serves as a referent for the colonial structures and institutions that drive climate change and attending injustices. murdock (2022b, 113) observes, for example, that native “populations” traditionally have been equated by purported civilizers with flora and fauna and “ordered in the same way the natural world is.” all are to be subject to rigorous “civilizing improvement” with scant contemplation of “the apocalypse of life/lives it wreaks” (2022b,113). those who give voice to the existential threat also often focus less on addressing and rectifying climate injustice than on amplifying forms of racialized climate anxiety that are “just code for white people wishing to hold onto their way of life or get ‘back to normal,’ to the comforts of their privilege,” states sarah jaquette ray (2021). as a result, proponents of the default motif fail morally to countenance the innumerable “relational tipping points” (whyte 2020) with respect to lands and lives, both human and other-than-human, that long ago were passed. 5 delf rothe (2020) observes that the presumption that we together are at the brink of catastrophe also indicates that this universal temporality is linear. it offers a shared anthropogenic eschatological orientation, overlooking that indigenous communities often conceptualize time quite differently—often privileging circularity rather than linearity (fixico 2003). meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 13 these adumbrations of the four threats—unacknowledged and conveniently unseen forms of colonial erasure or discounting of indigenous experiences—help to reveal a key conceptual prerequisite for the default motif. making this prerequisite explicit helps to motivate reframing climate crisis as relational crisis. environmental degradation, ecological devastation, species extinction, biodiversity loss, even climate change: each term in its own way represents a sterilized ontology. each decontextualizes what deborah mcgregor (2021) identifies as the genocide of relatives across the planet. each fails to appreciate, let alone acknowledge, indigenous people’s living histories of witnessing the disruption and destruction of kinship arrangements under colonization (mitchell 2016). indigenous cosmopolitical regimes, with their expansive temporalities, geographies, and narrative histories, disappear “within a colonizing universal ontology” (gibson 2021, 13) that effectively channels all attention to a very narrow slice of human experience. consider this illuminating example. colleen fox and colleagues (fox et al. 2017) observe that while scientists and the media acknowledge that indigenous communities routinely play a leading role in river restoration, the sociocultural and spiritual dimensions of restoration are dramatically underreported. they cite the work of māori and anishinaabe communities, for whom rivers are simultaneously living relatives and very old ancestors. community members note time and again that rivers have intrinsic moral standing, which can serve as a basis for being rights-bearing entities (venne 1998). more so, rivers are relatives with deep cross-cultural interdependencies, and these interdependencies are the basis for intricate systems of responsibilities. human responsibilities involve supporting long-standing relations of care (whyte and cuomo 2016). upholding these responsibilities to rivers is necessary for them to fulfill responsibilities of their own, both within and across communities as they intermingle with a global network of waterways (mcgregor 2014). viewed as such, river restoration has the potential to become a transformative project (salmond, tadaki, and gregory 2014, 50). it facilitates the repair of human relationships with rivers and with fellow human and other-than-human users of rivers. furthermore, it supports coresistance to colonizing dynamics that ruptured human–river relations in the first place (sepulveda 2018). restoration has its technical and policy-oriented components. at least as important, though, are its sociocultural and spiritual dimensions, for they give meaning and context to restorative practices. they make these practices quite literally a responsibility-laden family affair, which highlights how critical it is locally and globally to center not just indigenous feminist environmental discourses but also corresponding modes of action—from activism to ceremony to hands-on dirt time. indigenous feminist ontologies are hereby actively (re)vitalizing, including of connections to traditional lifeways and ancestral lands. again, kinship is key. to be kin feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 14 is to be interdependent with respect to an assemblage of beings, to have lives that intertwine. more pointedly, kin are beings who compose one’s ecology. within this context, ecologies are organizations of humans, other-than-human beings, spiritual and abiotic entities, and landscapes who together share a network of responsibilities based on both care and what daniel wildcat calls “multigenerational deep spatial knowledges” (2009, 16; see also watts 2013; whyte, caldwell, and schaefer 2018; styres 2019). neither are these responsibilities confined strictly to human relationships, nor does how they are exhibited necessarily center on the human (todd 2017). kinship arrangements are continually shifting and reconfiguring, including with members relocating and with the arrival of newborns and ancestors walking on. but multigenerational spatial knowledge—which embodies an abiding sense of the material, embodied connectedness to both ancestors and those to whom one will be an ancestor—supports spatiotemporally extended collective memories (tallbear 2019, 25ff.). as a result, the network of responsibilities that sustain kinship arrangements is continually reshaped yet nevertheless enduring. so long as relatives can remain responsive to changes in a manner that prioritizes mutual safety, agency, and well-being, kinship ably serves adaptability. under such conditions, ecologies are tolerant of and resilient in response to both acute and chronic forms of adversity. emotionally and physically, they are sources of continuing support in an everchanging world. to the extent that kinship arrangements are reflected in social and political infrastructures, they are among the critical bases of societal longevity (whyte 2021b). these considerations help to clarify what makes climate crisis, at root, relational. seen through a long lens like that offered by indigenous communities’ collective memories, climate change as intensified colonialism is a byproduct of military aggression by colonizers, corporate exploitation of resources, anti-indigenous territorial dominance by settler-industrial nation-states, and widespread degradation of landscapes. each of these phenomena is designed to destroy ecologies via both containment of mobility traditions, including seasonal rounds, and attacks on kinship arrangements. the erosion of ecologies, of extended kinship arrangements, has increased indigenous communities’ susceptibility to climate-related dangers. colonizers’ histories of aggression and irresponsibility—centuries of violations of trust, respect, and reciprocity—greatly inhibit mitigation and adaptation efforts both within and across communities. more fundamentally, climate disruptions arguably are kinship disruptions, invidious disturbances to life-enhancing and life-affirming networks of responsibilities to human and more-than-human others. in line with todd’s considerations regarding fossil fuels noted in the introduction, thomas norton-smith (2010, 77) observes that it is not uncommon among indigenous peoples for the meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 15 elements and physical forces (and the cardinal directions and celestial entities) to be regarded as relatives. the increased weirding of ecologies—altering abruptly, palpably becoming more fragile, losing predictable forms of cohesiveness, damaging spheres of responsibility—just is climate change in its most immediate experiential form. the destruction of mobility traditions plays its own role. ecologies are disassembled as their members are torn even further apart, in crist’s words, by cities, suburbs, rural settlements, agro-industrial landscapes, fences, highways and roads, airports, malls, and other constructed environments. as species attempt to track needed climate regimes by moving—the trend scientists are seeing today—there are fewer places for them to go and no shortage of obstacles on their paths. such is the synergy of climate change in a world of converted and fragmented landscapes. (crist 2007, 41–42) the ongoing injustices of the containment and relocation of indigenous communities are now multiplied as kin become climate refugees whose pathways to refuge are deeply compromised. 4. spider’s web of relations: rerelating and cocreating just futures at the heart of the default motif lies a tragic irony. to the extent that its proponents remain fixated on pulling back from the brink to maintain the cultural and material conditions that undergird colonialism, they commit not to avoiding apocalypse but to continuing it. they refuse, assert gibson and whyte (2022, 481), “to contemplate a world in which the communities, values, technologies, and lifeways responsible for the cataclysm do not survive unchanged or at all.” it is unclear that such an eventuality is even recognized as a possibility, except in the vague sense of disquiet reflected in worries over the loss of civilizing institutions, the very existence of which depends on erasing indigenous worlds, lands, and lives. responding to climate crisis as relational crisis requires emphasizing that, properly understood, pulling back from the brink is neither a just nor a practicable survival strategy—not for anyone. the world to be saved by the default motif is a world that must be left behind, which requires new strategies for assessing and taking up responsibility for rerelating and cocreating just futures. to borrow and slightly modify an image from kim tallbear (2018, 2019), the “spider’s web of relations” is a good representation of the networks of responsibilities depicted by indigenous feminists across turtle island. “a relational web as spatial metaphor requires us to pay attention to our relations and obligations here and now. it is a narrative that can help us resist those dreams of progress toward a neverfeminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 16 arriving future of tolerance and good that paradoxically requires ongoing genocidal and anti-black violence, as well as violence toward many de-animated bodies” (tallbear 2019, 25). these webs are woven, maintained, and cared for by indigenous peoples. although colonizers rarely recognize or accept their own embeddedness in these webs, they nonetheless exist within and wreak havoc upon them. colonizers are well trained to conceive of responsibility not as a web at all but rather as a funnel whereby the whole of earth must be channeled into perpetuating and normalizing colonialism—particularly to serve the interests of those materially at the pinnacle of the funnel. 4.1. dismantling terrortories the scaffolding of colonialism, its basic structure, is fashioned from “the murdered worlds of the colonized,” esme murdock (2022b, 106) declares. settler colonialism in particular then “forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which i call terrortories” (2022b, 106). these landscapes have been terraformed (or terrorformed) to wage unending war on indigenous bodies, psyches, and ecologies. for terrortories destroy indigenous lives and lifeways, pathologize resistance, naturalize resulting trauma, and create structures and institutions that make a virtue of or simply deny the murder—the ecocide—carried out for the sake of colonization. “terrortory captures both the normalization of rampant violence and the almost totalizing effect of that violence in the terror and lack of consent imposed upon and experienced by indigenous peoples and communities by settler colonial powers,” murdock (2022b, 109) states. the systematic foreclosure of “the possibility of experiencing or narrating the world differently” is never not there (2022b, 116). evidence of apocalypse “is everywhere, all the time,” dina gilio-whitaker (2019, 129) confirms. but because the murderous bases of colonization are either justified or disappeared, resulting trauma among the colonized is itself weaponized by colonizers (tuck 2009; meissner 2018). indigenous peoples and persons are depicted as constitutionally wounded and in need of “humanitarian management,” dian million quips, or what amounts to “group death that poses as care” (2020, 393). notwithstanding the earnest interest humanitarian agencies may express in indigenous well-being, million observes that they routinely fail to appreciate the extent to which it is tied to sovereignty and self-determination. indigenous wellbeing—that is, the manner in which well-being is broadly described within indigenous discourses—requires ecological well-being. it is coextensive with vital ecologies, with robust kinship arrangements, with precisely the conditions required for adaptability and responsiveness to an ever-changing world. and the role of place, and responsibility to and from place, is key, million (2020, 394) contends: “place is of paramount importance if we talk about ‘health’ in an indigenous sense. ‘land’ is not meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 17 ‘territory’ or ‘property’ as in an object; instead, place denotes dense, reciprocal, lifeaffirming relations that peoples form and have formed over millennia.” terrortories are incompatible with ecological well-being. they also are directly at odds with the renewal of social and political conditions that facilitate adaptability and responsiveness, hence the capacity to address climate crisis. drawing on fanon, murdock contends that this endangers everyone, not just the colonized. it accentuates the vital importance of dismantling terrortories (murdock 2022b, 114; see also jaffee and john 2018; opperman 2019). yet recovery from the damage induced by terrortories may begin prior to the demise of settler colonialism. bringing together fanon’s research on psychiatry and politics, nigel gibson and roberto beneduce (2017, 238) assert that recovery is initiated through “the development of political consciousness and the assumption of moral responsibility.” among other steps, this entails acknowledging that concerns voiced by indigenous communities are not concerns only about indigenous communities. even demands for tribal sovereignty have wider societal implications. engaging in ceremonies designed for ecological renewal, resistance, and resurgence are not only timely but long past due. so is building robust cross-cultural coalitions that go well beyond current calls for reconciliation. particularly when led by black, brown, and indigenous communities already well versed in exercising political consciousness and moral responsibility, coalitions serve to demystify the pathology of overtly anticolonial practices. they also challenge the foreclosure of the possibility of experiencing or narrating the world differently, notably including understanding climate crisis as relational crisis. to treat climate crisis as relational crisis hereby entails that the form of rerelating and cocreating to address climate change must be both radical and deep. radical relationality, state melanie yazzie and cutcha risling baldy (2018), foregrounds intersectional and collective responsibilities premised on collectivist, interdependent, reciprocal political coordination. deep relationality, proposes shelbi nahwilet meissner (2022), accounts forthrightly for the fact that the trauma of settler colonialism endures within the bodies and communities of colonized human and other-than-human relatives. anticolonial actions thus require sensitivity to and care for how this trauma inevitably persists, specifically as networks of responsibilities are mended and trust, respect, and reciprocity are rebuilt—including those animated by indigenous–non-indigenous coalitions.6 6 such coalitions are rarely free of incommensurable interests and points of focus (dotson 2018). but coalitions among members of black, brown, and indigenous communities—embodied, for example, by ongoing solidarity between the movement for black lives and standing rock water protectors and also by developers of the red, feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 18 4.2. giving way but for indigenous futurities to flourish, colonizers themselves must not merely forego the usual reassurances that colonial forms of life should persist. they must “give way,” julia gibson (2020, 216) maintains. gibson has in mind here centering indigenous environmental discourses not just within the scholarly and fictional work on which her research focuses but also beyond the page. the sovereignty and self-determination of indigenous communities are not a so-called “native problem” (keefer 2010). they foreground a common need for responsible relations, both radical and deep, among human and other-than-human relatives on a “thoroughly devastated” planet (red nation 2021, 8). combatting extractivism matters. so does justly converting to renewable energy sources. indigenous communities are heavily engaged in both activities (laduke 2020). but embedding these activities within a multidimensional relational context is essential. the prospect of giving way thus flips the script. it adumbrates the pathology of colonial cultural and material conditions, which are not merely world destroying but carceral, including for most colonizers. to get by, colonizers are compelled by countless formal and informal structures to engage in behaviors that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to themselves personally (smith 2022). this is part and parcel of life within what riane eisler (2007, 97) calls domination systems, which naturalize rigid top-down control, stark socioeconomic inequality, high levels of abuse and violence, and the supremacy of heteropatriarchy. within domination systems, trust, respect, and reciprocity are scarce. domination systems also are hostile to autonomy, community, and humanity, observes bruce levine (2001). no wonder he maintains that institutionalization, or the proliferation of “large, bland, standardized, hierarchical, bureaucratic, authoritarian, coercive, manipulative, expansionistic, and impersonal entities,” is their standard fare (2001, 6). “in many ways,” states murdock (2022b, 117) with respect to indigenous communities, “sanity is understood in settler colonial contexts as resignation to and compliance with the foreverness of settler occupation.” levine makes the same case, if obliquely, with respect to colonizer communities. indeed, he contends, colonizers already widely reject their carcerality in deed if not in word. for just as in indigenous communities, anxiety, depression, addiction, and other such conditions are widespread. and just as in indigenous communities, among colonizers they are not best understood as illnesses or diseases or disorders. rather, they are neurocorporeal forms of rebellion, refusals to resign oneself to and comply with subjection to institutionalization. they are, at least in part, rejections of systemic cultural and material deformities. black, and green new deal—have considerable potential to build constellations of coresistance (simpson 2017, 228). meissner and smith – climate crisis as relational crisis published by scholarship@western, 2024 19 fanon insists that colonialism and settler colonialism must give way, murdock (2022b, 124) notes, because “they are the source, cause, and foundation of so many ills of our collective existence.” the terrortories they create are destructive of indigenous and non-indigenous lands, bodies, and psyches alike—albeit not in the same way or to the same degree, respectively. “as long as we inhabit, move through, and normalize the veritable apocalypses and assaults on all life coloniality creates, we will just be modifying and adjusting to a more palatable apocalypse,” murdock (2022b, 124) concludes.7 this is a fitting byline for the default motif. 5. conclusion within a relational framework, among the central strategies to address climate change is to foster ecologies. ecologies “have high standards of responsibility, with special attention to relationships of care, reciprocity, and consent, among others,” whyte maintains (2021a, 59; see also whyte 2020). given the extent of their disruption within indigenous communities and more so between indigenous and nonindigenous communities, the rerelations and cocreations needed to form ecologies embody a long-term enterprise. it can be expected to take numerous generations. there are no quick fixes, no shortcuts, no tradeoffs that may satisfy the urge to grasp for a technological or political deus ex machina, and certainly no guarantees of sufficient relational repair to forestall exceeding any number of key planetary boundaries. it cannot be otherwise, of course, if climatological phenomena themselves are components of extended more-than-human kinship arrangements. and the matter is complicated further by expected socioeconomic strains resulting from increasing resource scarcity as the pace and severity of climate change accelerate (wallace, struthers, and bauman 2010). it would be naïve to expect or even hope for a sustained, broad-based geopolitical initiative on behalf of relational repair to emerge anytime soon. questions may remain regarding the commitment to such an enterprise even by recovering colonizers (as we may call them) who seek partnerships in struggle with indigenous communities. albert memmi (1965, 40ff.) makes note of the great and perhaps unsurpassable imaginative chasm between what recovering colonizers can envision about the end of their world and their capacity fully to digest how it would affect their own situation. for “kinless conquerors,” as brian burkhart (2018, 47) aptly calls colonizers, this may be akin to visualizing their own death, despite the beneficial 7 in the same vein, kim tallbear (2019, 38) calls for “settler ontocide,” which “does not, of course, mean literal killing. it means ridding ourselves of the category of the settler along with its discourse of white supremacy and assertions of an inherent right to these lands and waters.” feminist philosophy quarterly, 2024, vol.10, iss. 1/2, article 7 published by scholarship@western, 2024 20 prospects associated with being reborn beyond carcerality. such worries make recovering colonizers “dangerously deceptive,” memmi (1965, 41) concludes. learning in solidarity surely is possible. reframing climate crisis as relational crisis and treating it as the common threat it is to safety, agency, and well-being is possible too. still, we conclude with fitting considerations from ta-nehisi coates offered in between the world and me, a long-form letter to his son samori. “we are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of america” (2015, 146): the dreamers, those who believe themselves to be white, who need to be white, who cling with such desperation to domination systems that will be “the deathbed of us all” (151). actors in black, brown, and indigenous liberation movements may strive to awaken the dreamers, but coates implores samori not to arrange his life around “the small chance of the dreamers coming into consciousness. our moment is too brief. our bodies are too precious. and you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home” (146–47). “i do not believe we can stop them, samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. and still i urge you to struggle,” coates (2015, 151) continues. because the struggle itself has meaning. and because, like his son’s namesake samori touré, coates and his son may die in captivity, “but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp” (68). references agathangelou, anna m. 2017. “real leaps in the times of the anthropocene: failure and denial and ‘global thought.’” protosociology 33: 58–92. https://doi.org 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minnesota press. zak, dan. 2019. “how should we talk about what’s happening to our planet?” washington post, august 27. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/sty le/how-should-we-talk-about-whats-happening-to-our-planet/2019/08/26 /d28c4bcc-b213-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html. shelbi nahwilet meissner (luiseño & cupeño; she/her) is an indigenous feminist philosopher who researches, teaches, and consults on indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, indigenous epistemologies, indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the la jolla band of luiseño indians and is of both luiseño (payómkawichum) and cupeño (kupangaxwichem) descent. she is an assistant professor in the harriet tubman department of women, gender, and sexuality studies at university of maryland, college park and the founding director of the indigenous futures lab, a hub of indigenous feminist research and evaluation. andrew frederick smith (he/him) is head of the biodiversity, earth and environmental science department and professor of philosophy and environmental studies at drexel university. his recent work is at the intersection of environmental philosophy and indigenous philosophy. his latest book is the threefold struggle (suny press, 2022). recent articles have appeared in environmental ethics, journal of philosophy of disability, environmental philosophy, hypatia, apa studies on native american and indigenous philosophy, and journal of human development and capabilities. 101207 meissner & smith title page 101207 meissner & smith final format concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts feminist philosophy quarterly volume 9 | issue 2 article 1 recommended citation kohpeiß, henrike. 2023. “concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts.” feminist philosophy quarterly 9 (2). article 1. 2023 concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts henrike kohpeiß free university berlin henrike.kohpeiss@fu-berlin.de kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 1 concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts henrike kohpeiß abstract eve tuck’s reflection on a “breakup with deleuze” and her critical feminist relationship toward deleuze’s philosophical position leads to my exploration of a feminist approach to a theory of concepts. i argue that in order to be applicable and useful for feminist philosophical scholarship, concepts assume a sheltering function for experiences that have lacked adequate forms of representation in the past. feminist thinkers like sara ahmed and lauren berlant support the idea of concepts as shelter through their methodological employment of affect as a resource of knowledge. gayatri spivak and bell hooks reckon with the structural necessity for sheltering concepts through their respective notions of the subaltern and homemaking. finally, eve meltzer’s study of the relevance of affect for conceptual art underscores the general importance of thinking through the connections between these seemingly opposed categories in order to arrive at a better understanding of what philosophical concepts can do. keywords: theory of concepts, affect, feminist philosophy, deleuze, affect theory, continental philosophy, sara ahmed 1. introduction when eve tuck, an unangax̂ scholar of critical race theory and indigenous studies, “breaks up with deleuze,” she has a story to tell. it is a story about misrecognition, institutional power, and the affective dimensions of theory. her theoretical relationship with deleuze brought her joy while it lasted, as well as tools to develop her research practice. nevertheless, the relationship had to end (tuck 2010a). deleuze failed to recognize tuck’s desire, because his own concept of desire overlooks subjective relations and personal experience.1 tuck however, regards 1 tuck is one of the proponents of desire-based-research, which opposes the trend of damage-centered-research within anthropology (tuck 2009). her approach includes trying to understand the desires of a particular community, by which she means wishes and self-determined goals. these desires are supposed to serve as a basis for institutional policies and replace the stigmatizing practice that focuses on lack and loss in order to claim reparations and support from a pitiful position. tuck has feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 2 desire as productive, knowledgeable, and wise. from this standpoint, tuck addresses the deleuzoguattarian vocabulary with which she had grown familiar during the course of her graduate studies. deviating from deleuze, she wants desire to be understood as “enjoying some/a lot of self-determination, even as its lines of flight ‘flee in every direction.’” for tuck, desire accumulates “wisdom […], self-understanding and world-understanding along the way of a life.” it is through desire that accumulated knowledge travels between people and across generations and connects a person to their past and future (tuck 2010a, 645). i take eve tuck’s feminist transformation of the concept of desire as an occasion to sketch a theory of concepts that accounts for what tuck finds lacking in her reading of deleuze and his writing partner guattari. in the following, i will take a closer look at philosophical concepts that clearly have affective content and are relationally embedded in political struggles. the open approach to concepts outlined in deleuze and guattari’s what is philosophy? serves as a blueprint for how concepts can be understood in their specific use for feminist scholarship. i put the abstract character of deleuze and guattari’s writing into perspective and suggest a feminist counter position in which concepts serve as shelter for subjects, threatened realities, and political struggles. this article attempts to describe and solidify conceptual movements that are most apparent but by no means exclusive to feminist scholarship. in part 2, i briefly walk through the aspects of deleuze and guattari’s work on concepts relevant to feminist theorizing. the notion of concepts as shelter itself has precedents in the works of sara ahmed, gayatri spivak, and lauren berlant, among others. in parts 3, 4, and 5, i outline how conceptual practice begins with a particularity for all three thinkers. concepts work because their agents are attached to them. these agents extend their own agency by means of the concepts’ stable position in the discursive world. concepts have near mystical traits when entangled with a subject that embodies their substance. this means that concepts do not reveal their content in a transparent manner. finally, concepts convey affective power by being attractive, supportive, and relatable. 2. affects regarding concepts eve tuck investigates an issue of philosophical work that is rarely addressed: by portraying her conflict with deleuze as a breakup, she highlights that desire is part conducted empirical research in indigenous communities, primarily on the topic of education (tuck and yang 2018; smith, tuck, and yang 2018; gorlewski and tuck 2019) and has broadly criticized qualitative research methods (tuck 2009; tuck 2010b; tuck and yang 2014a, 2014b). through this research she learned about the ways in which knowledge and wisdom are transported from one generation to the next through desire (tuck 2009). kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 3 of conceptual creation in a different sense than assumed by deleuze and guattari. tuck suggests that we should understand desire as affective sensitivity that takes into account lived experience. i want to trace the locus and influence of that affective faculty within philosophical thought. a focus on sensitivity will allow me to show why certain concepts have an appeal that is difficult to explain by means of their propositional content alone. it is important to note the idiosyncratic relationship between affects and concepts: affects adhering to concepts do not clearly direct thinking toward a specific point. instead, they show themselves in the form of diffuse aversions, attractions, or sympathies. these affective impulses never serve as the only means to create a philosophical thought. yet they may provide an occasion to embark on a process of creating—especially when the feeling in question appears repeatedly and has no established equivalent in language. concepts as shelter provide such an equivalent. a lack of language might also arise when an experience is characterized by negativity. when an experience is disorienting, painful, and unspeakable at first, a concept can provide temporary accommodation for it and make space for a linguistic unfolding in the future. the idea of a shelter highlights the disruptive intentions of conceptual creation. a concept offers the possibility of making something that has not been thought about extensively before into an object of elaborate thought. in so doing, concepts tread a path toward the intellectually unexplored. the motivation for this conceptual exploration stems from a lack experienced by the thinking subject. concepts are invented in order to fill a linguistic gap that opens between the subject and the world. this is how concepts provide space for more than one experience. concepts are never individual matters but are established by making sense to more minds than just one. situated, embodied conceptual practice urges one to make particular experiences count by endowing them with a lively abstraction that can defend their existence in the discursive struggle. this practice is about insisting on the particular, holding fast to what others tend to discard or gloss over prematurely. bell hooks’s idea of homemaking allows me to understand this dimension of situatedness and to develop a materialist layer to the notion of concepts as shelter. in part 4, i consider trauma as a conceptual example by looking at the case of christine blasey ford’s explicit use of the term in her testimony against brett kavanaugh in 2018. her doing so, i argue, turned the concept of trauma into a shelter for herself. finally, i conclude with a “note on real shelter” to situate my work in a materialist manner. unlike deleuze and guattari, feminist thinkers like ahmed, spivak, and berlant have made their conceptual inspiration explicit. these feminist thinkers have not disguised their motives for critiquing established concepts or for devising new ones. my understanding of concepts as shelter builds on the notion that conceptual work— that is, the creation of a concept—always includes a subjective motive and relates to feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 4 specific circumstances, even if its gesture is a universal one. consider, for example, emancipatory claims such as the demand for reproductive rights, which are most meaningful in relation to the speaker’s experience of having a childbearing body. positionality and motive are indispensable ingredients of a concept and a crucial condition for it to gain traction in discourse. this does not mean that these concepts change the linguistic world they refer to.2 rather, such concepts express the negative implications of that world. they point toward oppression and unseen suffering. i engage with philosophical positions that contribute to this methodological discourse by practicing conceptual work that takes into consideration affects and feelings. moving through these positions allows me to assemble elements toward a theory of concepts that extends deleuze and guattari’s suggestion in what is philosophy?, while also criticizing its disregard for concrete experiences. i position concepts as shelters that protect experiences from being erased. concepts can be pictured as mobile homes that help subjects to move through the world and orient themselves in it, while insisting on the validity of their experiences. 3. deleuze and guattari’s theory of concepts according to deleuze and guattari (1994), philosophy is the creation of concepts. for the purpose of this article, i will briefly elaborate what their theory of concepts has to offer for feminist theorizing, and i will leave aside a broader discussion of the different qualities their conceptual account speaks to (bell 2009; patton 2003; schmidgen 2015; schönher 2020; stengers 2005) as well as a general discussion of the feminist value of their work (braidotti 2002; buchanan and colebrook 2022; grosz 1994; olkowski 1999; stark 2017). deleuze and guattari present a very open notion of concepts in their last collaboration what is philosophy? in the framework of spinozist immanence-thinking, they refer to concepts as “multiplicities,” consisting of different components. concepts are articulations, differentiated from chaos, and they can be seen as a result of “cutting and cross-cutting” (deleuze and guattari 1994, 16) reality into chunks of meaning. deleuze and guattari avoid limiting the idea of a concept and instead emphasize, first, the plurality of significance a concept contains and, second, the movement of expansion and change as an integral part of concepts. this openness of conceptual creation is a valuable quality for feminist theoretical work because this work often requires articulating topics and issues that are not part of canonized discourse yet. hannah stark (2017, 2) locates the importance of conceptual work for 2 such has been proposed in debates around conceptual engineering: “if conceptual engineering succeeds in a particular case, it will change how people think, talk, and act on the (non-conceptual and non-linguistic) world.” (burgess, cappelen, and plunkett 2020, 12) kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 5 feminism in the fact that “concepts offer us new ways to address the world.” she argues that deleuze and guattari’s work is particularly helpful if we consider emancipatory theory as a creative endeavor to affirm and develop “a speculative register in which to imagine new ways to think, to create and to live” (ibid.). deleuze and guattari support the idea that concepts do not only depend on historical depth and rigorous definition but are inspired by and consist of different components, some of which are related to experiences (deleuze and guattari 1994, 17). and although i will come to criticize their idea of experience as too abstract, i do think that the malleability of their conceptual model is a promising vantage point from which to think about concepts from a feminist perspective. i will further qualify the two core qualities of deleuze and guattari’s account of concepts mentioned above: multiplicity and expansion. concepts are reactions to “the event” or an attempt to manifest the event in language. regardless of the complicated position the notion of the event has in deleuze’s philosophy, it is important to remark that concepts articulate an often intransparent accumulation of aspects, which, in their multiplicity, constitute a problem. the concept’s function is to grasp that problem (deleuze and guattari 1994, 16). for the problem to be adequately grasped, the concept has to adjust in relation to its surroundings and in relation to infinity (deleuze and guattari 1994, 19). concepts are in a movement of striving, because thought is a dynamic activity: “the concept is an act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed” (deleuze and guattari 1994, 21). in this complex characterization of concepts provided by deleuze and guattari, the relevant points for my purpose are that concepts operate in a dynamic, everevolving field of meaning and that they are driven by a movement that goes beyond them. it is eve tuck’s intention to clarify the force behind the speed of conceptual consolidation in order to avoid a purely abstract play of significance. and although “desire” is not a central term in what is philosophy?, tuck (2010a, 635) seeks to “interrogate, expand, and extend” deleuze’s concept of desire in such a way that shows desire to be an affective aspect of thought production itself. tuck employs a concept of desire grounded in concrete lived experience to understand how conceptual meaning is being generated. one of feminism’s most profound claims states that the organization of meaning is connected to and dependent on such experience and that it is therefore never innocent or apolitical. this must be considered for a feminist theory of concepts. 4. sara ahmed’s sweaty concepts sara ahmed’s understanding of “sweaty concepts” is indebted to audre lorde (ahmed 2017, 12). lorde’s work provides an archive of experience of sexism and racism and simultaneously describes the failure of public discourse to acknowledge these (lorde 1988, 2008, 2009). ahmed (2017, 12) describes sweaty concepts as a feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 6 “lifeline” thrown out to her on reading lorde’s work and recognizes her own, notoriously underrepresented experience in it. the moment in which ahmed catches the line initiates her connection to a mind that, although not burdened with exactly the same type of suffering, nevertheless finds itself in a similar position that is excluded from the hegemonic discourse about feelings and worldviews. according to ahmed, the sweaty concept in question can save the person that discovers it from the isolating and harmful effects of that exclusion. all concepts are sweaty insofar as they stem from the viewpoint of someone who has no sense of feeling at home in the world. she particularly points out that contrary to a common cliché in philosophy, concepts are not created in solitude but as reactions to lived and often social situations (ahmed 2017, 13). this means that concepts are being established through the social and one’s recognition of shared locations in it; therefore, they are always already intersubjective. ahmed positions concepts as descriptive rather than normative entities. she suggests that the process of concept creation might be banal in its operation and still broad in its effects. description serves as a theoretical tool in this regard, and it is not only to be understood as the counterpart to the normative. ahmed problematizes the philosophical distinction of descriptive versus normative. when our theorizing includes terms that do little more than describe a situation, we highlight the fact that this situation has not yet been considered in the very way we propose and thus cannot be adequately grasped by established theoretical vocabulary. in such a case, a description itself amounts to an objection of normative weight. sweaty concepts bring reality into view by describing its (inter-)subjective and social specificity. doing so lends these concepts new facets, while establishing them in the theoretical realm. ahmed’s proposition resonates with deleuze and guattari’s formulation of concepts being instruments “speak[ing] the event” (deleuze and guattari 1994, 21) but opposes it in the same instance.3 unlike deleuze and guattari’s rather formal notion of the event, which aims to capture the temporal dimension of truth, ahmed advocates for a more direct relationship between experience and theory. this means that in her view, the event must be understood as subject-related in order to be spoken. according to ahmed, the force of description lies in its capacity to offer a different orientation toward the world rather than a new world to work toward. she notes that “concepts are in the worlds we are in” (ahmed 2017, 13).4 in that 3 “the concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing—pure event, a hecceity, an entity” (deleuze and guattari 1994, 21). “events are what catch you out and catch you up” (ahmed 2010, 85). 4 “by using the idea of sweaty concepts, i am also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. a concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. more specifically, a kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 7 statement, the concept’s novelty lies in what a body that is “not at home in the world” (13) can—by mere description—add to the discourse. in particular, racialized and feminized bodies that experience alienation in the public sphere can serve as a starting point for finding language that does not ignore or harmonize that experience but that instead points toward the situation that sustains that experience, and thus toward an analysis of the mechanisms that produce it (ahmed 2010, 41). for example, ahmed (2010, ch. 1) is interested in happiness as a social ideal whose content is often better described by unhappiness when brought in touch with certain subjects. this highlights how reorientation is both the aim and the result of conceptual work. giving legitimacy to a deviating experience of a certain event not only opens up a different perspective, and thereby a broader framework, but creates a different world. ahmed (2020, ch. 1) uses the example of the wedding day, which is expected to evoke a happy experience. questioning this affective expectation means opening up a world to explore beyond this specific idea of happiness. considering its potentially forceful aspects changes the event’s unfolding. through a description of what happens, the concept unleashes what could be described as a “counteractualization” as deleuze (2004, 150) calls it.5 when we draw the event close to ourselves and engage in the relations we can create with it, we change its meaning and open up a position from which to grasp that event differently. sweaty concepts provide counter-actualizations on the conceptual level. they establish a different and irreconcilable understanding of a given situation. the not-at-home body generates the concept by introducing a way of being into language that extends beyond available vocabulary. yet this leads to the question, what can a concept do for a body? in answer to this question, i want to suggest that concepts can serve as a discursive substitute for a home in the world. to make my case, i follow sara ahmed as well as gayatri spivak’s concept of the subaltern. i argue that this notion of home is apparent in ahmed’s analysis of novels in which female characters provide escapes for women who struggle with their assigned social role. concepts hold a similar sweaty concept is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. by this i mean description as angle or point of view: a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it.” (ahmed 2017, 13) 5 in logic of sense, deleuze uses “counter-actualization” to describe the struggle that can be unleashed by the unconditional affirmation of the event: “thus, the actor delimits the original, disengages from it an abstract line, and keeps from the event only its contour and its splendor, becoming thereby the actor of one’s own events— a counter-actualization” (deleuze 2004, 150). deleuze describes counter-actualization as a way of appropriating what happens to us by action. i will come back to that further below. feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 8 surplus potential. they mark a space in theoretical thought where troubled subject positions can find shelter and a starting point for shifting the world according to how they inhabit it. ahmed’s account of descriptive conceptual practice opposes that idea by insisting on the possibilities that lie in telling-as-it-is. departing from ahmed, i suggest that telling it as it is can be quite a hard task. concepts allow one to make a claim about the world, even though they might not be fully accurate in a detached descriptive or theoretical sense. their doing so provides some space in which all the underlying conditions of their initial claim can now be uttered. this is why a concept can shelter a body that has not found a place to settle in the discursive field. but the concept is more than just a shield in the battle. it also changes the battle itself. this means that concepts do more than fix certain discursive positions that might otherwise be overlooked. they intervene into the production of meaning as such and claim authority in the battle over how to interpret reality. furthermore, the speculative part of a concept anticipates the gap between language and reality.6 5. reactive concepts: allowing withdrawal and making space to appear7 in gayatri spivak’s (1988) text can the subaltern speak?, the “subaltern” fulfills the function of a conceptual parenthesis whose content refuses proper definition. it works like a conceptual placeholder. spivak seeks to determine a subject position that is excluded from discourse by the corresponding subject being oppressed in different ways. she borrows the term “subaltern” from antonio gramsci (1971) but shifts its meaning by interrogating who is meant by that term. for spivak, 6 theodor adorno (2006, 26) circumscribed this constitutive gap of conceptual production with the term “nonidentical.” he argued that what slips through language falls into this gap, and that historical suffering is preserved there (adorno 2006). suffering can therefore never establish an exact relation to language but is rather concealed by it. in negative dialectics, the concept’s task is to linger as close as possible to the site of historical suffering and suffering’s urgency to be articulated— without ever revealing the totality of its content (adorno 2006, 149): “a historicity abstracted from historic existence glosses over the painful antithesis of nature and history; an antithesis which equally defies ontologization. there too the new ontology is crypto-idealistic, once more requiring identity of the nonidentical, removing by supposition of the concept, of historicity as history’s carrier rather than as history, whatever would resist the concept” (adorno 2006, 359). 7 the term “reactive concept” is also used by david braddon-mitchell (2020, 80) for a similar purpose in the ce-context. for him, a reactive concept is one that is built as a direct response to desire: “they [reactive representations] are partially representational states which are reactive inasmuch as they bypass interaction with distinct desires to directly motivate behaviour.” kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 9 the subaltern aptly describes the female lower classes of the indian population, who have no voice in public discourse and, at the time of her writing, were not properly included by postcolonial theorizing. through a demonstration of failed attempts at making the subaltern subject seen, spivak creates a concept characterized by the withdrawal of its content. in so doing, she helps to articulate a systematic problem of abstraction: the impossibility of adequate representation. spivak enters a process of deconstruction to analyze the relations of representation used in a conversation between deleuze and michel foucault (1977). referring to deleuze’s claim that “there is no more representation; there is nothing but action,” she points to such a statement’s failure at offering shelter (spivak 1988, 275; quoting foucault 1977, 206–07, translation modified by spivak). deleuze’s conflation of two different meanings of representation produces a blind spot within his theory. on the one hand, “representation can be understood as ‘speaking for’” (275). this is the sense of representation used in politics. on the other hand there is “representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as used in art or philosophy” (275). the problem spivak identifies in that conflation is that deleuze declares all representation to have ended. this claim follows the general dissolution of the subject in poststructuralist thought of the twentieth century. by positioning theory on the same ontological level as all action, deleuze makes the subject position of the one who theorizes seem irrelevant. spivak problematizes this theoretical move by pointing out that this conflation means to accept that “the subject is not seen as a representative consciousness (one re-presenting reality adequately)”; on the other hand, the conflation also privileges the subject by centering the idea that everything the subject does, whether thinking, speaking, or acting, should be understood as action (spivak 1988, 275). this form of subject-privileging results from the claim that subjectivity as representative consciousness has been overcome and, therefore, no longer needs to be regarded. spivak shows how the conflation of theory and action is designed to disguise the subject who makes the equation. but instead of dissolving subjectivity for good, this refusal of representation creates a seemingly universal position for the speaker. the question of how to speak about oppressed groups remains a difficult one, and deleuze’s suggestion that it does not matter should be considered as a shortcoming relevant to his and guattari’s theory of concepts. in the process of dissolving a consciousness that accepts responsibility for its representational function, something else gets lost: namely, the possibility for a representation to be inadequate. spivak reveals how the claim of “theory as action” works as a means to shield theoretical thought from legitimate criticism. if you deny that an objects exists, it also cannot be criticized. when theory is declared action, the position of the intellectual is held to be a “transparent multiplicity” (see spivak 1988, 275; this is my term for a combination of her concepts) through which the voice of the oppressed feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 10 can be mediated. refusing representation leads to misrecognition in this case.8 and it might lead to a misrecognition of the connection between meaningful conceptual creation and concrete subjective and social experience. spivak’s critique of foucault and deleuze is most relevant for my purpose in her problematization of representation. spivak sees inadequacy as a constitutive part of theorizing. yet she nevertheless holds on to the representational function of concepts. while she agrees with poststructuralism’s general criticism of representation, she does not seek to overcome it as a whole. instead, she calls upon philosophers to reckon with the trouble that representation entails. spivak’s point supports eve tuck’s project of reintroducing a subject position into the concept of desire. they both render a subject position, which is not present in what is philosophy?, necessary in order to allocate accountability for why a concept is being crafted and what it does. spivak’s concept of the subaltern deals with these problems in an interesting way. she does not seek to prove deleuze and foucault wrong by clearly applying the concept to a specific group of individuals who stand to gain representational substance by its creation. instead, the concept of the subaltern remains a placeholder for what it is not. spivak builds this concept from an accumulation of its possible failures. this is how it becomes a shelter. the concept’s political function is to shelter both subjects and their struggles from appearing as theoretical figures in western thought. a concept that refuses proper definition exposes the possibility that there is more to say about a subject position than its theoretical figuration allows us to see. this invisible surplus entails a class interest while also measuring the silences produced. when “the consciousness of the subaltern” is the object of study, “the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important” (spivak 1988, 287). spivak asks how “insurgency,” social upheaval, can be transmitted through text when its receiver is not predetermined (spivak 1988, 287). what she describes as the transformation of insurgency into a “text for knowledge” can be considered as conceptual work leading to the creation of a philosophical concept, even when it is done by a historian. the process of preparing a social deviation to become theoretical content entails a translation of experience 8 “because ‘the person who speaks and acts… is always a multiplicity,’ no ‘theorizing intellectual… [or] party or… union’ can represent ‘those who act and struggle’ (fd, 206). are those who act and struggle mute, as opposed to those who act and speak (fd, 206)? […] the critique of ideological subject-constitution within state formations and systems of political economy can now be effaced, as can the active theoretical practice of the ‘transformation of consciousness.’ the banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent” (spivak 1988, 275; quoting foucault 2017, translation modified by spivak; bracketed ellipsis mine). kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 11 into theory. extending the question of translation into the context of concept formation draws attention to the concept’s internal space. how can a concept host insurgency without predetermining any political consequences, either for itself or for the upheaval? how does a concept responsibly grasp social upheaval—which is the signifier of experience in this case—and contain it at a more abstract level, without erasing its uncomfortable parts? the subaltern is a reactive concept. it does not so much position itself as new but rather as a corrective to what has gone wrong and who has been misrepresented in the past. while spivak offers a positive definition of the concept (“the demographic difference between the total indian population and all those whom we have described as the ‘elite’”), she by no means conveys the full theoretical and practical impact of the concept’s unfolding (spivak 1988, 284). naming the subaltern without revealing that category’s exact content can be read as a theoretical defense strategy and, hence, as a withdrawal.9 the subaltern is solely being defined by a social position of misrecognition experienced by many indian women, and it is important for the concept’s political purpose that the negativity of not being seen as something different than that is not being reconciled. this humble way of introducing a theoretical point will most certainly not create a power position. yet withdrawing visibly will also prevent the community in question from being misrecognized over and over again. spivak uses the concept of the subaltern as a hideout for those who are problematically considered “at best native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the other” (spivak 1988, 284). in doing so, she presents an alternative knowledge-formation to western philosophy. her essay addresses the danger of theoretical work overshooting its mark. the subaltern avoids and corrects this tendency and, in so doing, opens a different set of questions about conceptual work: how can we foresee, imply, and deal responsibly with the political implications of theorizing? how can we think about subject positions that we cannot know? 6. theory as homemaking: concepts as shelter when conceptual work refers to an object only determined by the conditions that constitute it, like in the case of the subaltern, the concept appears in its relational embeddedness.10 conceptual work which articulates experiences helps to make space 9 for the importance of defensiveness to black feminism, see nash (2019). 10 such an approach can be read as pushing against common approaches to conceptual engineering (cappelen 2018; burgess, cappelen, and plunkett 2020). i argue that concepts are not merely functional, since we do not always use concepts in predetermined ways. in ce, the main task is seen as “assessing and improving our representational devices” (cappelen 2018, 3), such as concepts, whereas my feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 12 in language where before there was none.11 concepts function as sheltering entities for overlooked and hard-to-name experiences and the subjects who have them. experience in a world that does not make enough effort to host all bodies, but only some, necessarily produces suffering and discomfort that cannot be met by established terms. suffering from structural violence often means suffering without being able to explain why and without a prospect for cure. this also means enduring a lot of confusion because of the feeling of contingency evoked by social inequality. for example, before public discourse shifted attention toward the role of women in public spaces, being overruled in discussions and constantly having to fight for opportunities to speak evoked that feeling for women. a sheltering concept— patriarchy, in this case—situates itself amid the confusing conditions by which a subject feels surrounded and holds space for that subject to conceive of its situation. a concept also opens up space to take a rest from confusion. lauren berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” provides shelter for the double bind of experience. its conceptual gist lies in its acknowledgement that experiences are shaped by ideology and in a criticism of that problematic shaping. berlant describes how subjects get used to suffering and lose the ability to end it because they are attached to its ideological implications. berlant’s (2011, 28) example is the notion of the american dream: people across classes believe in the possibility of social advancement despite all evidence that speaks against that expectation. the suffering engendered by structural oppression, in the forms of poverty, sickness, and racism, is mitigated by belief in an ideal that, if achieved, would make all these troubles disappear. the belief is sustained despite its distance from lived reality and its questionable rationality in the long run. this belief reduces the feeling of contingency that often accompanies states of suffering, and thus it serves as an “orientation” in sara ahmed’s (2010) sense. what is being sheltered here is a subject position that—unable to find a solution to this dilemma elsewhere—finds a position in the middle of it. berlant’s concept of cruel optimism is thus an analytical tool for understanding a complex ideological event. it seeks not only to unveil the ideological construction of the american dream but also to recognize the lived optimism that this dream can produce. berlant’s concept renounces a clear moral positioning or a strict marxist criticism. instead, it aims to describe how meaning is produced, which is to say how a subject orients itself in the world. understanding the concept as shelter emphasizes formulation is rather concerned with the creation, expansion, and idiosyncratic quality of concepts. 11 deleuze and guattari (1994, 21) call this “speak[ing] the event.” “hosting the event” generally refers to their ontological idea of events as origins for meaning production (deleuze 2004, 2008). kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 13 how patterns of orientation are structured by idiosyncratic ways of managing lived experience, more so than by rationality and control. conceptual takes on sociality stress these kinds of strategies, images, and action patterns. cruel optimism combines a sympathetic with a critical element in order to offer an adequate perspective. the optimism one can feel about the american dream is as real as the cruelty that only unveils itself when one dares to take a critical look at things. this tension is not a contradiction to be solved but a mess that constitutes experience. in berlant’s terms, survival is at least as important as a realistic account of the reality one inhabits. if the existence of an ideological construct is relevant for the subject’s survival, theoreticians have to deal with its problematic implications in creative ways that do more than merely suspend the construct as a whole. cruel optimism allows for the simultaneous articulation of individually experienced and structurally relevant layers of meaning. concepts like this one stem from the paradoxical quality of experience itself—when suffering happens simultaneously with striving and optimism is cruel—and contain a critical perspective without foregoing the material usefulness of a particular ideology at a given moment. these concepts are shelters because they manage to grapple with contradictions. cruel optimism makes the reader realize that a contradiction is never adequately dealt with just by naming it. instead, because it is specific, the contradictory relation plays out in different shapes and with different consequences. cruel optimism does not become a productive term simply because optimism is disqualified as cruel, but because of the space it provides to learn about forms of life that endure this tension. there is no way for this contradiction to be resolved toward one or the other direction. a sheltering concept allows us to recognize endurance and can make the tension feel less brutal. cruel optimism is a marker that points toward an ongoing struggle. it recognizes that struggle without resolving or ending it. instead, it supports the efforts invested into a life constrained by inequality, and it looks at the kinds of suffering those constraints entail. the creation of a concept often means putting parentheses around the material and ideological relation in order to render it recognizable. the concept partitions a specifically problematic piece of lived experience and brings it into view. it stabilizes a problem by naming it and might assure those burdened with it that the problem will not be neglected. for sheltering words to become proper concepts, they have to be relatable, and relation is best built by gestures of generosity. the concepts i have been discussing become the best versions of themselves when the receiver allows them a certain credit, without judging too harshly. one of the virtues implicitly proposed by deleuze and guattari is to replace judgement with affirmation, and to read with the most charitable attitude. this is how energy is invested in the continuation of a thread feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 14 of thought, and this is how a concept can become a theoretical accommodation for the thinker. concepts can remain shelters if readers contribute to their equipment and interior. to remain vital, concepts must continuously be furnished with references, examples, and related concepts. deleuze and guattari warn us not to treat a concept like an old skeleton that must be rescued from natural decay and instead encourage us “to play it again on a new stage” (deleuze and guattari 1994, 83). concepts are living spinal columns (deleuze and guattari 1994, 36) in need of vital resources, and they must be fed with current articulations of lived experience in order to be up to date and to defend the objects they protect in appropriate ways. through this dynamic form, concepts become a home for meaning and subjectivity. drawing on bell hooks, i want to propose the term “theoretical homemaking” to emphasize the political potential of concept creation.12 as mentioned above, i understand concepts in terms of their multiple functionalities. they not only host specific political agendas and ideologies but also allow subjects to negotiate their position in the world. concepts work as mobile homes—they need not be renewed when the subject or the world is changing.13 but they make space for that change to be grasped within the concept’s processual dimension. this malleability is being described by deleuze and guattari in terms of adjustments a concept has to undergo as a result of the “infinite speed” of thought (deleuze and guattari 1994, 36). concepts are the most abstract articulation of problems (deleuze and guattari 1994, 28), and they can be improved or shifted according to how these problems appear in the world. concepts, like homes, live and give life to thought. the notion of home is meant to emphasize the affective aspects of discursive undertakings, which regularly slip from view in the context of methodological questions. in what follows, i discuss the extent to which theory production is accommodating for subjects. it does not contradict or challenge existing theories of concepts to think specifically about accommodation. rather, this view extends them toward the points of contact that make them matter. this endeavor of connection-making 12 home is an important and often emancipatory term within the black intellectual tradition even beyond bell hooks’s writing (lorde 2009, 119; hill collins 2014) and also resonates in white feminism in debates around reproductive labor and the commons (federici 2012). 13 with reference to fanon and audre lorde, lewis e. gordon (2016, 13) mentions the homemaking function of thought: “fanon thus responds to the dialectics of recognition not by asking to be seen but by seeking to go beyond the dialectic itself. focusing on dismantling the master’s home will still leave the problem of being homeless, but focusing on building another home could achieve the important task of rendering the master’s home irrelevant without which his mastery loses its force. we could read this as a case for an important role for thought.” kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 15 becomes apparent in three regards, all of which touch upon the notion of experience. first, when we articulate a certain perspective through a concept, we can open the uniqueness of that perspective to the participation and inscription of others and create intersubjectivity. bell hooks’s idea of “homeplace” (2015) and the corresponding notion of “homemaking” (2009, 165) exemplify that opening: homemaking is by no means a singular practice, but its naming allows for a different view on what might have seemed self-evident, banal, or even unimportant before. accordingly, concepts allow for experiences to be understood as collective instead of singular ones. second, concepts can bear and put forward political demands that have been posed in different historical situations to gain greater traction. this point is specifically relevant for feminist theorizing, as sara ahmed’s work on sweaty concepts has shown. a case in point is the push to call domestic activities “reproductive labor” and to insist on their relevance for marx’s critique of political economy (federici 2004, 2012). establishing “reproductive labor” on a conceptual level fosters the global struggle for women’s rights while encouraging a sheltered discourse around the various demands claimed by different groups of women. here, concepts function as tools for political struggles. third, creating a concept is a way of articulating a kind of negativity that is unacknowledged suffering, which has no presence in political discourse or emotional life because it cannot be used as a resource for either of them. this negativity is difficult to share in its specificity and is not being eliminated by being named. in effect, conceptual work contains negative experience in its own right—that is, the experience of suffering. the term “trauma” does more in this respect than point to a specific form of psychological injury. trauma also circulates around the void of the unspeakable that is psychological injury. in so doing, the concept prevents that injury from being erased. to address individual(ized) experience that is both singular and subjective, yet structurally shared, we must begin outside of the theoretical sphere. bell hooks’s concept of homemaking does not primarily gain its substance through thought but rather emerges from practice. it arises in observing a structure in life that has not been appreciated or even noticed for very long as an object worthy of consideration. homemaking merely describes the protective function of a home to offer a relatively safe space for black families during and after enslavement. in her theoretical work, bell hooks emphasizes the humanizing function of that space, which resists the dehumanizing forces of racist society.14 when the consequence of oppression is 14 “black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (hooks 2015, 42). feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 16 control and isolation, homemaking becomes an activity of resistance that endows life when death is foreseeable. bearing witness to her mother’s repetitive insistence on a home and the importance of laughter, hooks creates the concept of homemaking as a theoretical equivalent to her lived experience. thus her concept offers one answer to the question of black survival in racist societies in a way that is not limited to the singularity of one practice (hooks 2015, 42). homemaking gains conceptual substance because it accommodates not only hooks’s memory and experience but also the lived and shared history of enslavement that is life under constant threat. homemaking transforms her mother rosa bells’s practice to an abstract form that accumulates knowledge about survival and, thereby, constitutes a theory of survival. its bedrock lies in the continuity of its use, and this is why the concept has stability. homemaking demonstrates how concepts need lived experience, refer to shared subject-positions, and exist as abstractions. the process of crafting concepts can work both ways: from abstraction to application or from lived experience to theory. finally, “trauma” is a good example of how a concept bears potential for containing and preserving the negative. since sigmund freud, the use of the word trauma has far exceeded the medical and psychological realm. in the humanities as well as in its everyday use, trauma refers to occurrences on very different scales (bond and craps 2020). its broad use has been criticized by those who stress its medical origin (leys 2000). the term “trauma” is placed within language when the event in question cannot be further described. when i describe an experience as traumatic, i typically refer to a matter i struggle to deal with, to put in the right order, to fully comprehend. thus, when trauma is used as a medical term, it shelters the various uncertainties unleashed by an overwhelming event and makes space for the negotiation of a possible reaction. the generic appeal of the term may be due to this double directedness: trauma is at once a diagnostic term, as well as a word for psychological pain of unidentified origin that has found its way into common sense and speech (leys 2000). its lack of medical specificity opens possibilities for unscientific yet helpful appropriation, so that the term trauma can be used to lend urgency to the repetition of an uncontrollable emotional state. it thus allows individuals to make their suffering heard without being forced to explain it. but using the term in discourse requires precision in order to be as appropriate as possible in relation to an experience that is difficult or even impossible to describe. the concept’s task in that regard is to hold the tension between the unspeakable and the necessity to speak (herman 1992, 1). the conceptual offer of “trauma” is to keep the void open for more language to be added and for the intelligibility of suffering to be successively increased. a very concrete application of that concept could be observed in the us senate in 2018, during the senate judiciary committee's confirmation hearings for brett kavanaugh’s appointment to the supreme court. christine blasey ford testified kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 17 against him with allegations of sexual assault. as she described how kavanaugh had assaulted her, she struggled visibly to handle the recollections, grappling with her trauma before the eyes of the world. she was aware that her injury from the abuse would never be healed through that testimony, but rather renewed. her words would become the object of disbelief, and her person would be demeaned. nevertheless, she testified, and while visibly struggling with the experience of trauma, she referred to the science of trauma to defend herself against anticipated pushbacks and to bring into view the conditions of the lawsuit she found herself in. with the help of that concept, of which neuroscience is one component, ford created a space for herself which allowed her to acknowledge her memory gaps without them discrediting her testimony—which is to be expected if a witness appears unable to fully remember what happened. ford’s testimony drew on neurological explanations of traumatic events to explain how the incident in question had gotten stuck in her memory, as well as how parts of it were unavailable to her. she could remember the event and some of its details, but she could not tell the time and place where it happened. in this case, calling ford’s state and experience “trauma,” especially with all the scientific implications she could explain, helps to create space and acceptance for the pain and suffering that is the concept’s content and that remains hard to reconcile with the language of law. when asked how she could be so certain she recognized her perpetrator, ford, who is a professor of psychology, specifically referenced the neurological details of traumatic memory, explaining that “just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that as you know, that neurotransmitter that encodes memories into the hippocampus, and so the traumarelated experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift” (global news 2018, 1:29:40). ford strengthened her credibility in the hearing by establishing the scientific coherence of her memory gaps in the very moment when they appeared. viewing the recoding of ford’s testimony evokes the impression that the use of scientific language increased the attention for her words in what must have felt like a hostile environment to her. moreover, i would argue that the trauma concept itself supported her as a subject who had suffered but was unable to give a full account of the circumstances of her suffering. the relation to herself as someone who cannot remember what happened to her is stabilized by the concept of trauma. the concept can protect subjects from assuming that they are indeed insane by referring to an injury they could not have prevented as the cause of their suffering. mentioning the term trauma might also have protected ford from further invasive questioning and from heightened pressure to reveal more details about the horrific incident she had described in her opening statement. the presence of the word and the shared understanding of its meaning, its psychological consequences, and the obscurity it feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 18 entails, create a little bit of space for christine blasey ford to take a position in hindsight about her pain, without being reduced to that pain. as a concept, trauma makes space for the inconsistencies of the mind that pain can inflict. it allows a subject to insist on the damage experienced and the neurobiological consequences of that damage, even when there is no memory of it. 7. being attracted—affective concepts in her study on conceptual art practices of the ’60s and ’70s, the art historian eve meltzer (2013, 8) gives an account of the affective occupation of systems, concepts, and other forms of abstraction. meltzer turns to these practices in order to trace the meaning of the word “conceptual,” which marks a shift in how things are read. it includes a movement away from the focus on human emotional states and toward an interest in the “antihumanist” qualities of “the grid” (meltzer 2013, 65), which means patterns and formulas. this shift in reception accompanies a theoretical shift toward structuralism and poststructuralism. thus, as conceptual art develops in the twentieth century, these shifts are performed by the dissolving of human subjects in “structure” (9). against that reading of conceptual art and structuralist theory, meltzer is looking for affective human traces within artworks that are generally considered as purely conceptual. this is how she forms a theory of affective sedimentation that rejects the simple claim that conceptual art remains free of feeling. meltzer helps us understand concepts as aesthetic constructions that become meaningful through the affects they carry. one feels attracted to a concept because of that affective quality. meltzer challenges the view that conceptual art is sufficiently characterized by saying that it is playing with “pure” information. instead, she observes that many systems created in the artistic context of conceptual and “information” art are inhabited by the contents of (human) life. she even thinks that the artworks in question operate through their engagement with affective questions (meltzer 2013, 19, 22). her aim is to clarify how affect pervades all levels of human activity. meltzer’s first example is mary kelly’s “post-partum document,” in which the artist documents the first weeks, months, and years of her child’s life through “scientistic discourses and diagrammatic aesthetics” (meltzer 2013, 12). meltzer notes that the artwork falls squarely within the classical conceptual canon of a disengaged and antisensational aesthetics. she observes that the collection of information kelly put together “seems disaffected, dry, and intellectually distant, especially given that the artist’s son is the subject of her work” (12). yet meltzer argues that despite the dryness of forms, the artist’s relationship with this information is one of attachment. the numbers and figures are to be read not as a distant objectification of her postpartum years but as proof of an affective obsession kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 19 with them. through this appropriation of data, meltzer sees kelly becoming a “mother (as well as father) of the discourses as well as to her child” (12). by this statement, meltzer suggests that the choice of data and its figures and diagrams will always be made carefully and responsibly when the object they refer to is affectively charged or, in this case of a baby, simply loved. here, the a priori notion of objective and clear articulation as a result of distance collapses. instead, conceptual precision appears as a result of proximity to the object that is being described. meltzer (2013, 65) describes the idea of conceptual purity as a “dream of the information world,” which is “a fantasy about being in and of the grid.” she further characterizes this abstractionist, cartesian “dream” by attributes such as the conformity to laws: “self-restriction; arbitrariness; that disciplined autonomous, device-like quality of being both ‘run’ and ‘followed’ at once; the proposition of an absolute visibility that defies the very conditions of the phenomenal world; the very unquestionability of the laws that govern the system; and the proposition that ‘if law is anywhere, it is everywhere’—these are the conditions of the grid” (65) and finally, she states that this “dream” is directly opposed to the confusing quality of affective states i mentioned above. instead, it promotes the idea of absolute transparency through a “scientistic claim to reason, and its peculiar notion of visibility as all-seeing, immune to opacity, and powered by, to repeat descartes’s formulation, the ‘inward vision of [the] mind’” (65). meltzer is interested in the query, how subjectivity can be sketched anew between the dream of dissolving subjectivity into signs and patterns on one hand and the unquestionable love and affection for objects and human beings on the other. mary kelly’s work suggests the coexistence of both through her exploration of her own body and the child that it has born. meltzer’s investment in the term “antihumanist” gives an account of subjectivity as an expansion into the material world rather than a rejection of that world. kelly’s “disclosure of her own captivation with the dream of an information world” (meltzer 2013, 21) performs an expansion of an intimate and affective relationship into seemingly dry signs and patterns. through that process, the signs and patterns themselves gain affective qualities. concepts as shelter are nurtured by the same contradiction: they are not mere formulas, nor are they simply containers for subjective needs and projections. i make use of eve meltzer’s treatment of the term “systems” in the title of her book systems we have loved in order to further calibrate the affective dimensions of theory. one such calibration is noting that not only do the contents of theory provoke affective responses, but theory itself becomes an object we feel attached to. meltzer argues that it is precisely this attachment—in her case, to systems, such as the signs and patterns mentioned above—that allows for a reconfiguration of attachment itself. allowing for bonds of feeling to evolve in relation with abstraction opens the possibility to let go of subjectivity as we know it (meltzer 2013, 26). the idea that feminist philosophy quarterly, 2023, vol.9, iss. 2, article 1 published by scholarship@western, 2023 20 affective attachments occur in other than human relations is a key proposition in contemporary affect studies that turns out to be the case for methodological questions as well (kahl 2019; slaby, mühlhoff, and wüschner 2019a, 2019b; slaby and von scheve 2019). affect research must reckon with its own weights and effects, including the difficulties of methodology when it considers the affective preoccupations of the researcher who applies it. this is less a problem than an opportunity to appreciate what is being brought to a question or a concept through the researcher who poses it, something which might otherwise slip from view. eve meltzer’s perspective on conceptual art and its affective layers provides an understanding of how abstraction becomes meaningful beyond discourse. for the creation and use of concepts, this dimension is not to be neglected. the support a concept gains by means of a person’s attachment is certainly one of the forces that keeps it in use and that actualizes its validity according to the changes of popular discourse. this might be seen as the irrational part of conceptual work: at some point, the choice of a concept is no longer primarily a result of thorough consideration but also the result of familiarity and prior attachment. the affective life of a concept is its history of material significance. this history reveals why the concept has been instantiated in the first place and, at the same time, offers connecting points that might seem unrelated at first glance. i use the term “attraction” to describe the promiscuous quality of concepts. their uses and limitations are not predetermined but can be repurposed by anyone who encounters them. being attracted to a concept means strongly hoping that it will be able to explain what one wants it to explain. in eve tuck’s case, her familiarity with deleuze’s concept of desire renewed this hope over and over again. it continued to do so until a painful goodbye had to be performed in order to avoid further damage to the experience that was at stake. 8. conclusion we have seen that concepts provide accommodation, a home for real-life issues: it is precisely when individual(ized) experience, political struggles, or suffering escape description or naming that they can then be sheltered by concepts. feelings, failures, and negative experiences settle into the concepts and give them meaning. sara ahmed and lauren berlant have provided elements to craft a theory of concepts which gives an account of them being situated in felt experience. i have used the examples of homemaking and trauma to demonstrate the affective dimension of concepts. i have argued that concepts can bear political implications and that these implications matter for their validity. my understanding of concepts as shelter is based on deleuze and guattari’s theory of concepts and aims to make space for the meaningful aspects of concept creation, which eve meltzer has shown in the context of conceptual art, that might be erased by a notion of concepts primarily focusing on transparency and precision. gayatri spivak’s use of the concept of the subaltern kohpeiß – concepts as shelter: toward a feminist theory of philosophical concepts published by scholarship@western, 2023 21 shows how, in that case, the lack of exact equivalence shelters the concept’s most important aspect. 9. epilogue: a note on real shelter shelter is not just needed in the form of concepts. shelter is needed anywhere because the survival of the most vulnerable is at stake. shelter is a still-unrealized human right. shelter is necessary for safety, for the ability to move securely without danger of getting infected, of falling victim to a catastrophe, or of being shot, imprisoned, or killed in one’s own home. shelter is more than housing, because oftentimes, it is mobile. sheltering refugees, for example, includes evacuating the refugee camps in lesbos, greece. it means allowing those who are stuck there to move where they want and providing what they need to do so, rather than perpetuating the threat of holding them in place. shelter that moves with people must be provided not only by the state but also by the social and material environment of those in movement. for example, the covid crisis has taught us that we can enact shelter by social 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“r-words: refusing research” in humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, edited by django paris and maisha t. winn, ch. 12. london: sage publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611. ———. 2014b. “unbecoming claims: pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research.” qualitative inquiry 20, no. 6 (july): 811–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800 414530265. ———, eds. 2018. toward what justice?: describing diverse dreams of justice in education. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351240932. henrike kohpeiß is a philosopher, working as a postdoctoral researcher at the crc “affective societies” at free university berlin, research division, and teaching on topics within critical theory, black studies, feminist philosophy, and affect theory. her first monograph, bourgeois coldness, was published in 2023. occasionally, she’s part of artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer. 14738 kohpeiß title page 14738 henrike kohpeiß final format